skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I just searched your list of threads, through the first couple pages, and didn't see any such posts. While I did that, I did see a very interesting comment by btilly in a thread I hadn't visited previously, but I didn't see any comments by anyone with karma scores below -4. Does someone have a current link to anyone's recent comment with such a low score?
JSON as a Universal DB Model DSL
Looks internal, but it also looks like they're hiring marketing folk, not engineers. I think that's more likely the reason that it sounds like gibberish. If a marketing person saw an ad looking for someone with experience in T-SQL in Perl (or whatever), it would probably sound equally bizarre.
Article says 5500 average per year fall into current estate tax. Estates taxed at 45% beyond the $3.5 million threshold (2009).

2010, tax is 15% of all assets without further action by Congress (or retroactive action).

In 2011, 55% tax beyond $1 million. Which impacts significantly more (cite?) than 5500 estates. $1 million includes property, fixtures, assets, cash.

Shame that tax code will (no doubt) impact decisions of quite a few terminal patients.
It doesn't. It is a wild exaggeration. It usually isn't the 300+ variables, just a few obscured by multiple levels of indirection that can cause unexpected inconsistencies. (It gets even worse when you drag in inheritance...)

Each function only depends on the arguments passed in, and variables outside of its scope which are referenced. However, the same is true of every function called inside the function, and the dependency is transitive, so the impact of changes to variables that aren't explicitly threaded through leaks outside to functions that never mention them. That's the problem. Hidden state.

It's also the kind of issue that usually looks incredibly contrived in small (say blog-post-sized) code samples, but isn't funny anymore when you have to deal with big lumps of spaghetti code. Global variables make reasoning about dataflow hard. Real problem, poor description.
Super Simple Way To Use Google Maps API Geocoding Service
It is an exaggeration; but only a wild one if you are doing very simple examples.

Imagine you have a 'mutable' program and I have a line that says something like this.

(defun frob (a b)
(+ (foo a) (bar b)))

Not only is frob dependent on the definitions of foo and bar, it is also dependent on the the definitions of any mutable globals that are within foo and bar.

If you imagine your program as a directed cyclic graph of functions,
and pretend that mutable globals are really functions that set or get a position in memory, you can see that adding more globals to your program (and using them) increases the complexity of your graph mostly by adding cycles to it. (As well horizontal jumps across the entire graph).

It is true that sometimes you need these cycles to write a program (vs. a program that causes your computer to heat up and do nothing), but it is not wildly inaccurate to say that using them all the time makes your program more complex.

I'm not even sure that I'm on board with the supposition that global variables shouldn't be in the language; (saying 'shouldn't' exist at all to a language feature is entirely non-pragmatic).

I think it is more accurate to say that they should be in the language, but they should have a cost greater than locals, and it should be best practice to use them as little as is reasonably possible.
A great research tool for verifying degrees of new hires that we use is: http://www.nslc.org/

There's a nominal fee for each lookup, but considering the money to be saved in avoiding a bad hire, it's proven itself extremely worthwhile when doing final candidate vetting.
One wealthy, terminally ill real-estate entrepreneur has told his doctors he is determined to live until the law changes.

"Whenever he wakes up," says his lawyer, "He says: 'What day is it? Is it Jan. 1 yet?'"...

I've never felt so comfortable calling a dying man an asshole.

His only concern is whether he can hand off a cozy life to his spoiled progeny. Amazing. May he live into 2011.
Kentico CMS 5.0 offers enterprise level functionality
> if so many people can do so many important jobs with nobody noticing they never went to a university, what's their "education" good for?

I think you're asking the wrong question. I think the better question is "are those jobs really that challenging and/or important that they require a university education?"

When nothing goes wrong, even the head of FEMA can have absolutely no background in emergency response.
>What's of note here is not just the business about marketing programs and changing perceptions, but the fact that a key part of this “Linux and Open Office Compete Lead” position is “engaging with Open Source communities and organizations”. This confirms what many of us have been warning about for some time: that Microsoft's new-found eagerness to “engage” with open source has nothing to do with a real desire to reach a pacific accommodation with free software, but is simply a way for it to fight against it from close up, and armed with inside knowledge.

I'm not seeing how A confirms B here.
My key takeaway: he did a careful analysis of what he should go after, using good insight and careful risk/benefit analysis.

This guy concluded that silverware was the sweet spot. It was quite valuable, easily transportable, unlikely to be hidden, and likely to be located in obvious places downstairs, where there was less risk of waking up the residents.

We should not steal. But we should note the benefits of good cost/benefit analysis.
The problem with the estate tax is that it was passed in the name of getting back at plutocrats but has worked over the years mostly to make it difficult to keep family businesses intact when the founder dies.

From the article itself: "Currently, the tax applies to about 5,500 taxpayers a year." (Emphasis mine.)

5500. We're not talking about upper-middle-class family business owners. We're talking about people who are seriously rich.

Still a highly unsatisfactory situation for the public, and one that has the politicians squirming as well, especially since the estate tax (speaking in relative terms only) does not really raise that much in revenue for the federal government.

This is because the estate tax threshold has been getting higher in every year since 2001. If Bush had left it alone, this would not be the case. Also, there are good reasons for an inheritance tax aside from revenue generation.
you know what its right wt you were saying but i have my reason i don't wanna be stupid in a gathering of Romanian husbands friends and i would be like an outsider you know how it feels its horrible that's why i need this language even if i don't like it at all .
I think you misunderstand the article. The problem wasn't "What are the jobs to which the tool is suited?" It was "What are the work environments that will let us use the tool that is suited to the job?"

One of those was a day job where they understood the politics well enough to work around institutional bias against non-Blub languages. Later it was their own company where they could make technical decisions without having to justify them to non-technical people.

Bear in mind that the article was written by a product evangelist for a Smalltalk vendor. It's not surprising it has the perspective of assuming the tool and looking for the application.
The books category is especially ridiculous. You might have read some books in each one of those levels, and they're not exactly prerequisites to one another.

I also use Git exclusively, that doesn't mean I'm proficient with SVN.

Et cetera.
Warehouse Space in Kansas City | SubTropolis - Warehouse Space
SubTropolis is a secure underground real estate development for warehouse space and other uses in Kansas City...the world's largest underground business complex.
It may be possible to script the negotiations. "Hi my name is X. My friend pointer out that <provider with a good deal> offers <good deal on a detail of the contract>, can you offer anything to reward my loyalty to your brand?"

The phone operators at the other end would most likely be equally unskilled, with set concessions they can make to customers.
In South Korea, the University of Maryland is very well known due to their education agreement with the U.S. Military (http://www.umuc.edu/mil/mil_home.shtml). Thus many Koreans immigrate to the U.S. and want to go to that school because it has strong brand recognition back home for them while arguably better schools are completely unknown there (not saying UM is a bad school, it's a fine school!)
24 Real-Life Job Interview Questions You Don't Want To Be Asked
This is one of those evil taxes - you pay a life time of taxes and accumulate stuff, and then when you die, it gets dinged another 55%.
A quick hack for if you need .doc not .docx format: generate .rtf and rename it to .doc :)

PS, .eml and .mht are actually the same format.
I had a professor in college that used to say A+ is for me, A is reserved for God, A- for the head of the department, and the grades B+ and below are for you...

So by that line of reasoning I assume that O(1) is reserved for the author.
welcome to visit:

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HTTP://WWW.WOWHOTSALE.COM

http://www.wowhotsale.com/productlist.asp?id=s81 (Hoody)

http://www.wowhotsale.com/productlist.asp?id=s17 (Shox)

http://www.wowhotsale.com/productlist.asp?id=n516 (AF jacket)

http://www.wowhotsale.com/productlist.asp?id=s32 (women boot)

http://www.wowhotsale.com/productlist.asp?id=s74 (Tshirt)

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1) I don't routinely use IM clients, because either I'm working or I'm with the people I hope would be IMing me.

2) I suppose I could do that, but I like minimizing the number of externally visible services on general principles, and Nginx is like a Russian-built tank.
but failing tests alerts you to unexpected failures in edge cases: That should be "alerts you to some unexpected failures". That is, your new code could cause a side effect that is not caught by the test.
From John Mayer's 'Vultures'

".....How do I stop myself from
Being just a number
How will I hold my head
To keep from going under.........."
Why it's smart to publish Realtime RSS now
There is an interesting thread here (including my detailed post outlining some of the history on this issue) on whether inheritance should even be allowed (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1009053).

You may find the relevant figures for the estate tax in 2001 here (http://gift-estate.com/article/tax2001.html). At that time, the exemption was $675,000 and everything beyond that basically got taxed at significant rates, obviously affecting a lot of middle class people. If the tax is allowed to revert to the old rates in 2011, there will likewise be a significant impact on middle class people. That is why the politicians are squirming and why the exemption amount will likely be increased for 2011 and beyond to something that excludes many such people from the impact of the tax.

By the way, I have worked as a business lawyer with family businesses since 1984 and am pretty familiar with their concerns in this area (for example, in almost desperately trying to use vehicles such as family limited partnerships as a way of trying to avoid or minimize this tax and thereby preserve their businesses for their kids on death). Those concerns are real and they do not apply simply to the ultra-rich (who, by the way, have ample mechanisms available to them - e.g., foundations - to bypass the estate tax altogether).
From the article itself ... about 5,500

At 2,426,264 deaths in the US per year, the top 0.2%.
The phone operators at the other end aren't interested in giving concessions unless they believe that they're going to lose the customer if they don't.

If your negotiator is just a script, then that isn't negotiating. The phone company won't be worried about losing the contract.

Think about it this way: if it's just a script, then why do you need a negotiator at all?
Quick question. CL, Clojure, Erlang, Haskell. Which one to choose for Web dev
Which functional programming language to choose for Web development?
And joel weighs in with an analysis: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2009/12/30.html
I'm using C# and .Net 4.0 at the moment. I'm using SQL Server 2008 Express for the fairly light database load I have (it's an installable product not a public web app). I'm using Linq to interact with it. It's been a great experience for me so far. The Linq integration with SQL Server has saved me a ton of time. I've had to write a few stored procedures so far and that's it.

I know C# better than any other language so it was an obvious choice for me. The option of at least offering a Linux product on Mono has crossed my mind a few times so that's a plus too.
How Prices Compare on Different App Stores
Ask HN: My app images are displayed for another app review.
In less than two weeks I'm going on a cruise on Royal Caribbean's Oasis of the Seas. I thought it'd be fun to make a companion app for the iPhone so that's what I did. Yesterday I found a review of Royal Caribbean's iPhone app but it is showing screen shots from my app in the review. You can find it here:
http://bit.ly/5h9nfZ
I sent an email and posted a comment explaining the mix-up and asking for a correction post but haven't had a response and the comment is still pending review.
I'm not too concerned about it, just want to set it straight. Any suggestions?
This one is now back down to -4
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1021131

It's been -5 at least twice since posting it.
I don't disagree with the comments about the triteness of this page and other articles like it. That doesn't mean it's entirely without value though. Think of it as like a financial budget: you know you're not going to hit it completely and some of the items you've budgeted for will turn out to be unnecessary or wasteful. At the end of the budget period, though, it gives you something to measure actual performance against.
STM, agents/actors, et al. are not "mutable global variables" -- they are all ways of working with state within the bounds of defined semantics. Huge difference, and largely irrelevant to the current discussion.

Who said anything about mutating global state in random ways? All you need is to have some state mutated in some way that you aren't aware of to make life hell in an imperative environment. Considering that that happens all the time, especially given the modern conveniences of large frameworks and libraries...

> But, again, a combination of passing things conservatively,
> naming functions well, and making heavy use of
> const/final/sealed/what have you to lock things down makes
> this problem largely absent in practice.

This is flatly wrong, and equivalent to saying that you can write concurrent code in an imperative environment without a problem as long as you use locks just right.
"Bear in mind that the article was written by a product evangelist for a Smalltalk vendor."

Indeed. From the post,

"They have two good Smalltalkers with a couple of laptops. They use available WiFi and open source code, and they deploy on cheap, hosted Linux boxes. [ed. I'll interject at this point - you could use commercial software all the way down, like Cincom Smalltalk, and not pay a dime until large amounts of revenue arrives]."

and then pay a percentage of your annual revenue forever (http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/userblogs/cincom/blogView?con...). I believe Franz Lisp works on this model as well.
my boss deletes text by highlighting it and hitting space. it irritates me to no end.
Completely aside from this flamequest: I am sure at some point OS authors will start putting some promises about how they'll conduct their projects. Not because it's their duty - but because it can make the code more useful.
The lesson I am taking from all this is to promise less and deliver more.
Nope. The tax may apply to a small number of people, but it isn't the top x-percent. There are a lot of strategies for getting around the estate tax, and the people who pay it are not the richest people but instead are upper middle class people who (for whatever reason) don't employ the strategies.

The it-only-hits-a-few people argument also has at least two other issues. One is that these things morph over time: the AMT was created to apply to just several dozen people, and now Congress passes a patch every year to make it apply to hundreds of thousands of people instead of millions of people.

And anyhow, how can a tax be fair because it only applies to a handful of people? Isn't that the same thing as the tyrannical many taking from the few? I would prefer to have a tax system where everyone pays enough in taxes such that they want to keep the overall system as small as possible.
Have you tried ASP.Net MVC? It's fairly decent and it isn't as heavy has webforms.
It seems like one of the least evil taxes to me. $3.5 million or more worth of assets are absolutely irrelevant to a corpse. So the great evil is that the descendants of someone who amassed a great fortune only get $1.5+ million that they did absolutely nothing to earn, after presumably having every conceivable advantage growing up? To me that seems much less evil than taking a fraction of what a living person actually worked to earn and might still need.

Of course, I usually reserve the word "evil" for killing, raping, arson, dragons, Satan and that kind of thing. Taxes seem to have a much less dramatic effect on their victims.
Thanks! I've had to deal with docx files from time to time. I'm going to try this out.

Does anyone know of a good way to read xlsx files with Python? I think I tried one library and it didn't quite work for this 20,000 row file, and I wound up using OpenOffice to convert it to csv. If not, hopefully this can be used as a starting point for developing a nice xlsx library.
True, if it was new enough to a sufficient number of people, I guess there is not much to prevent it. I was just surprised.
Ask HN: Where Should Europe's Silicon Valley Be?
I was just having a conversation with a friend about given a large amount of money, where in Europe would I try and start their own version of Silicon Valley. Based off PG's 'Can you buy a silicon valley? maybe' article. Where would you choose and why?
Great site. Well done! I like it just the way it is.
Simplicity is strength, not weakness.

There are already more complex, deeper games on Facebook, but they are orders of magnitude less popular than these simple Zynga games.

If you go deeper, you go niche.

BTW it's similar for game themes (independently of game mechanics) - more mainstream you go, more potential players you can get.

Just check Facebook games charts. They are dominated by down-to-earth topics - farms, restaurants, aquariums, pets, etc.
"I like the idea as well but I can imagine that $10/hr employees are not trained/educated/{whatever adjective you pick} enough to do the negotiations. The proof is there: they are working for $10/hr. If they had quality skills like that, they wouldn't be making $10/hr in a call center."

Some truth here, but there are other reasons to work in a call center besides low skill set. Working part time while in college at a schedule that is good for the employee would be one.
> Moving on, where did you ever get a $100K figure from?

It came from the example.... As to whether it's reasonable, it came from an auction, which is the premise of the whole discussion. The number of H1B slots to be auctioned is a decision. We could set that number low enough such that only those companies that are willing to pay a lot to hire H1Bs will be able to.

Yes, the employee may stay longer than a year. Or not.

Your arithmetic doesn't make sense. If the employee stays 4 years, that's $25k/year. It's a $120k job, so the employer won't be willing to pay more than $95k. Now we're getting into the range where someone might be willing to take it, but there's a lot of employer risk in that number.
These things are heuristics, not things that actually make you good. Look at "has tried bzr/hg/git". That's probably true of the best programmers. But trying git for one day is not going to make you one of the best programmers.
I'm building two startups on .NET. Mine is http://snapleague.com a freemium recreational sports league web site builder. For my day job I'm working on http://screenfeed.com which is all .NET on the backend (the main APIs are ASP.NET MVC). I've got another product in the works that's ASP.NET MVC as well.

I ended up here starting back when I got VB3 for a birthday present in high school (actually if you go back further, I started programming with BASIC on an Apple in middle school). When the web came around that translated in to ASP/VBScript and then around the time .NET 2.0 came out I switched to C# and haven't really looked back. So far, the framework hasn't limited what I want to accomplish. That may not always be the case, but for now I'm satisfied with it.

I'll echo what nkohari said about licensing. BizSpark helps a lot, and you can easily use MySql and the like if you don't want to pay for MS SQL Server. SQL Azure might relieve some of the pricing pressure for SQL too.

Speaking of Azure, I really like it. It's completely intuitive if you've done any ASP.NET development. The only problem is that it is trailing about 6-12 months behind the other cloud app hosting options in features. And since SQL Azure was announced there's been far less emphasis on Azure Table Storage which is a shame. The querying capabilities for table storage are ABYSMAL. It needs to be on par with SimpleDB before I could see myself using it (and I really, really want to use it).

I was contemplating jumping ship before ASP.NET MVC came out since the previous versions of ASP.NET (known as Webforms) really hindered more complex web app development. MVC is awesome though. Almost every part of the framework is swappable so if you have a specific need, you can quickly swap in your own or an OSS implementation. ASP.NET MVC + Spark View Engine is pure hotness.

There's been a shift going on inside Microsoft's DevDiv too. ASP.NET MVC is open source, jQuery is shipped with Visual Studio, MS employees are active bloggers and twitterers, etc. And speaking of Twitter, there's a strong .NET community there.
It's stupid. He's comparing low-level Win32 API to a high-level wrapper called Qt.

Notice how in his Qt example he lost control of the window style, icon, brush, cursor, styling of the message box, and a dozen of other little things that you can do with low level win32 api.
Yes, You Should Eliminate Your Vacation Policy
This seems to be missing the point. Yes, it's true that the functional programming equivalent of functions with side effects is functions with lots of extra arguments to capture the equivalent state.

Which is kind of the point: in an imperative language, you can capture all that complexity -- all 316 arguments, even -- with a few quick hacks to the side effect behavior of your functions. And that's a feature. It makes things simpler sometimes (obviously it can hurt, too -- tools can't substitute for taste). And it just can't be expressed in functional terms.