skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Does anyone know what textbook he's referring to as the one he used as a base for his original lectures? Sounds like 'Weidner and Selz', supposedly out of print?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwslBPj8GgI#t=22m53s
I still prefer Python/Django, personally. Unless you need to do Comet you're just dealing with normal request/response cycles and I still think pre-fork single-threaded webservers work just fine for that purpose. Until I'm totally fluent in one of the others (and until their libraries catch up with Python) I don't think I could choose one and feel pragmatic.
States with the highest taxes also rank as the unhappiest?
How outrageous that women should feel empowered to sleep with people of whom you disapprove. If only they had the sense to ask your opinion first!
I suppose now it becomes more of a test of whether a prominent blogger's post is enough to prompt these firms to look for his submission and respond. Certainly not representative of the average person. And the fact that the companies aren't named puts no pressure on them to follow through.

But then this begs the question, why do the VC firms' web sites offer the ability to submit in the first place? How about an Amazon Mechanical Turk task to have people screen the proposals for them? Have the Turkers write a bullet point summary and give a thumbs up or down.
From the article:

> Of course, there is a place for mutable, imperative programming. The fellow who wrote the blog post to which I linked above appears to work on games, one of the few places where one could unapologetically use an imperative programming language with mutable state.

Comtrast http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/1277 where the authors of Unreal point out that functional programs will be the future of game programming.
TSA subpoena, seize computer of blogger who publishes their security directives
Russia Plans to Save Earth From Rogue Asteroid
Coding Guidelines for Prolog
Also frob is dependent on the (mutable) definitions of foo and bar. Functions can be redefined in e.g. Python and Scheme. (And functions are variables, too.)
Can you do higher-order functions in Max?
I need to find the source, but when top GM brass was given a new model to demonstrate, they were given a ringer -- the whole car gone over with a fine toothed comb to iron out the slightest defect (source: http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/inside-gm-mystery-of-crap-i...).

So not only were they less aware of what they were competing against, they had a false idea of what they were competing with.
GHC is written in Haskell. Darcs may also be useful. You can also look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haskell_(programming_language)#... for some examples. It's hard to escape functional style in Haskell.
I used to believe that too, but I've changed my mind.

Now, I'll always prefer clean organized code, even if it doesn't work. I can always hire someone or jump in myself and make the changes that are necessary.

It is safer to assume that all code is broken in some way. E.g. If someone says that code "works", what they usually mean is that the software is broken in ways that they doesn't understand. When someone says a system is "secure", it means that it contains vulnerabilities that they haven't yet discovered.

A pessimistic attitude, but it has served me well.
For comet you always have Orbited. I am not fluent in any (Have written small programs in a few of them), but I want to develop in a functional language. The think I am most interested in a powerful language with a web framework/library which could take care of most of the mundane stuff related to web programming. Also features like ORM etc would be really helpful
Which license is it under? GPL I hope?
What mile stones do you have in your startup?
I wonder if there is a criminal management consulting service that exists.
Use coffee and a special environment like Pavlov’s Dog to trigger you to work.

Put together a customized workspace for yourself. It doesn’t have to be big, just outside the regular house living space somewhere. Somewhere like the garage or basement (even a big closet). Somewhere you can be alone and not bothered by anyone but is not a bedroom.

Set yourself up with a desk/table and proper office chair like you can get from Office Depot. Hook up the internet for yourself and a put in a good light source, also buy a small 1-man coffee maker from Walmart or somewhere cheap and buy some strong coffee. Keep the coffee maker and coffee in your workspace and drink coffee when you are there while focusing on getting down to work. Don’t play games there or do anything but work in there and drink coffee.

Since you are in high school here are a couple of links about Pavlov’s dog in case you don’t know about him. (ps. teachers always seem to like reports about things like Pavlov’s dog for extra credit.)

http://nobelprize.org/educational_games/medicine/pavlov/read...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Pavlov
Interesting. Reminds me of Zope Page Templates. I wish more platforms used it.

http://www.zope.org/Documentation/Books/ZopeBook/2_6Edition/...
This guy has it in for Adobe in general and has bashed their other products in the past. I think he just is being provocative to get traffic.
The linked piece by Gruber was written in October in response to a different post by Atwood (http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001306.html).
we graph the data too. Like cohorts. We graph cohorts by date of install, by build number, and eventually by other metrics that can effect retention.
Sorry, I meant mutable state.
Happiest States Revealed by New Research
Xbox 360 Natal Half-Life 2 Video Leaked?
"The behaviour of every function in a mutable, imperative environment is dependent upon the state of all of the other (variables|attributes|bindings|whatever) in your program at the time the function is invoked."

That's not true in general, but the problematic truth is that you don't know when it is true and when it is not true in any particular situation. That is, there are no formal guarantees that tell the caller of a function that the function does not depend on each and every mutable state in the program.

The second issue is the fact that methods in object oriented code tend to depend on too much state held in the instance variables of their containing class. This is mostly due to bad design. But there must be something else if even the best programmers out there feel the need to make this design mistake over and over again when using OO languages.

I am sympathetic to functional programming but for some of the code I write I have to carefully optimize the memory layout of my data structures. Adding an immutability requirement to very stringent memory usage and performance requirements is just not feasible in these situations.
I think that's a case of "the grass is greener on the other side"

You can just as easily come up with fun stories, things you've done, etc. as a programmer as a doctor.

- Next time you're on facebook try pressing up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, b, a, enter and see what happens. No I won't tell you but it's fun. If you can't remember it here's my number so you can text me and ask

- Yeah today I've had more than half a million people come through computers I run. Without me they would be in serious trouble. Pretty wild huh?

- I've helped so many kids with computers you wouldn't believe it.

A little thick maybe, but you get the point :-)
Mobile Phones Reduce Kidnapping
Writing it in C makes it too easy. You can just store the comment in a struct before the airline so that a long comment overwrites the airline number and luggage gets missed. Store the airline number as text and add a validation routine in case numbers are input badly, and any long comment with a number at the end will reroute your luggage to the new airline.

I'm sure the winning entry will be cleverer than that. But all of the entries would have to be better if they insisted on a garbage collected language with safe string handling.

You know, like Java, PHP, Visual Basic, C#, Python, JavaScript, Perl, Ruby, etc. (I got that list by reading off the top 10 on the TIOBE index then removing C and C++ because by default they are not garbage collected and offer unsafe string handling.)
I'll never forget when I was interviewing a candidate for a junior C# programming position and the conversation went as follows:

me: Can you tell me what a delegate is?
candidate: <text-book perfect definition, absolutely flawless>
me: Great! Can you tell me when you would ever want to use one?
candidate: <silence for about 15 seconds> I don't know.

It was so bizarre and I still don't fully understand how you can understand the absolutely perfect theoretical definition with having no, literally not one, idea what you're learning.
Having worked for some large companies, the public perception of the organization is thought to be subject to various PR and marketing efforts. What MS has always excelled at, is the PR angle, relying less on advertising. That is the #2 element you quote there.

Part of the reality of MS is that they have a very healthy cash flow from the products that are sold in an institutional fashion, that is, to the enterprise and preloaded on consumer devices. Any organization in that successful situation can't innovate like we have come to expect small companies to do--serious changes in their "reality" will threaten territories that are bringing home the bacon.

And it has to be a difficult proposition to continue to convince people to pay you money for software that, to a first order of approximation, costs nothing.
Sounds like something's gone wrong if you're not being productive when using the space. How often do you go there? It might have to do with the frequency of seeing others. There's going to be a certain amount of showing off when you see someone you haven't seen in a while and hasn't seen this cool new thing you've been working on. But that wears off after meeting up for a few days in a row.

Today I coded a new feature for my latest startup, gave a tour of the space to some people, learned about Chef and how I can use it for my fleet of servers, fixed some major bugs for clients, did some estimates for potential customers, installed a few Drupal modules. And I've only been here since noon.

It's all in how you use the space.
Uninteresting hobbies and professions are not what's truly at fault here. As the article suggests, people with higher IQs probably spend much more time realizing their ambition than they do trying to have sex. And it doesn't really matter how smart you are -- if you aren't a practiced socializer, you're going to have trouble competing with people who are.

Also, it seems that intelligent people place quite a high value on, well, intelligence. I doubt most people working on startups, research, ground-breaking products, etc want a mate who doesn't understand or care for any of it.
> It's probably the only school in the world that uses 100% Socratic method for all courses

nice

> each no larger than 17 people

good

> with no electives all 4 years

wait, wtf?

I guess if their curriculum works for your kids, great, but one-size-fits-all isn't a straitjacket I would have been interested in post-high school.
Marissa Meyer doesn't strike me as particularly androgynous

http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&q=marissa%20mayer&...

:-)
Google One-letter Suggestions
The attitutde that men are interchangeable accessories like shoes, rather than human beings. The attitude that it's okay to date scumbags you'd never introduce to your parents. The attitude that a guy who's in his 20s and hasn't nailed at least 10 girls is a loser.

Men probably have just as many shitty attitudes, but I don't encounter them directly in my dating life (only indirectly, because most women I know have been with some awful men).
> both men and women tend to be more androgynous as intelligence increases

Do they? I can't say I've ever noticed.
I see what you mean about the targeting, and I do agree with you on that. And I agree with your general argument that their techniques might put them into the driver's seat generally.

I see what you mean about not getting a response quickly too. That's not a problem anymore from what I see, but of course you're right about bootstrapping at the beginning.

However, the response from our users has been that their questions at startups.com just don't get useful answers, whereas the ones on answers.onstartups.com get really good, detailed, useful answers.

Again, I think you and we have different definitions of what's "successful." It sounds like you're still thinking about it in terms of #users, #traffic, and revenue, but that's NOT OUR GOAL.

Our goal is to create a genuinely wonderful community of entrepreneurs who get quality answers to questions from real people whom they trust. Those take time to grow and by definition it means not getting 100k users overnight.

For us, one person who gets one insightful answer to an important question is better than 100 people with 100 crappy answers.

But that's just us!
Explore and try things. I have found listening to my favorite music is a hindrance, for example. I instead have found that listening to drum'n'bass or jazz helps a lot. I normally wouldn't listen to them, but they are more nondescript and fill the background space nicely, allowing me to concentrate.

I'm there to work, not enjoy my music, so I am perfectly OK with this change.
The Cynic: or, more likely, you'll end up drifting in space endlessly.

I actually agree with the sentiment though, it'd just be nice to have a saying that's a little bit more scientifically valid.
You could just move to Northern Europe....
True, but you're essentially arguing for a "nanny" language model that doesn't let you do things that someone decided is "unsafe" or "bad design." While I'd agree that writing a program in an imperative language where everything depends on hidden global state is a very poor choice, I'd rather use a language that trusts me to design my application as I see fit.
Follow up to "Functional Programming Doesn't Work"
Cute idea. I had a different idea of "nomad" before I RTFA. I was thinking nomad as in travelling around the country/world as you work. That would be really cool.
If you're super strapped for cash, just get an MSDN subscription, and use it for everything. It's not legal, but Microsoft knows there's more money to be made by letting you become successful (at which point you pay real money for licensing) than there is in going after your initial few counts of infringement.

I must disagree with this one point. I cannot see a justification for taking software illicitly like that. In my opinion, VS and SQL Server are well worth their price, but if you disagree the answer is to use open source software not take it like that.

Aside from that, I think you have some very good points. I am primarily a SQL Server DBA and I think that for many applications it is the best RDBMS available. I am also a fan of Visual Studio for certain types of projects (though I also make use of Python).
Crowdsourcing a real-time solution to air terrorism
Great, thanks for doing this!

A while ago, I wrote a little Python script to read from xlsx Excel files. It's nice that these Microsoft Office XML files can be processed in pure Python.

http://github.com/brendano/tsvutils/blob/master/xlsx2tsv
What's your BHAG?
What's your Big Hairy Audacious Goal for 2010 and beyond?

http://blog.theascendancegroup.org/post/whats-your-bhag/
According to The Reckoning by David Halberstam, it was sort of worse than that--may still be. Executives' cars were put into the service bay as soon as they drove into work, and readjusted as needed. Daily.

A more non-dogfood arrangement is hard to imagine.

Additionally, he tells a story of someone bringing a speaker to an executive meeting who had deep knowledge of the Japanese auto market. They were allowed to speak, so long as they did not talk about Japanese autos or the Japanese auto industry.

I don't see MS as being in that sort of situation. However, as a very large successful organization (whose early genius builders have moved on), there are cultural perspectives that are hard to shake.
Want to bet whether their heirs benefit from those "charities"?
> Now in the future when a blue or heavy thing comes along, I'd like the machine to try to predict whether he'll like it or not.

There seems to be two separate steps. First you need to classify the thing a person rates. I'm guessing for each item, its not going to be a simple "blue" classification because this is user generated data so it might have for example 40% "blue" and 60% "heavy". Bayesian theory will do those classifications.

p (tag given thing) = p (thing given tag) * p(guess tag)

Then you just set a threshold and anything above it is the class for that item.

Second, to do recommendations, you're taking into account the user preferences or whether they say they like something or not. You can do this a number of ways, but perhaps the one that is the easiest is just to calculate the similarities between items. For example you would find maybe "blue" and "red" things are highly similar, so you'd recommend "red" items to the user that loved the "blue" items. You can use Pearson Correlation to do that.

Check out Collective Intelligence. It's got lots of (python) code and gives a great practical, introductory explanation to these algorithms.
Video captcha - waiting for implementation
Why NYC is not ready for the iPhone
A recent thread (currently near the top of the main page) suggests that it might be useful to have an optional hat tip field on new submitted articles. Sometimes the submitter learned about the article from another source, or another HN participant, and just wants to get out of the starting block to post the article, while also acknowledging the source of the suggestion that the article is good.
That clearly doesn't scale.

On the other hand, it's a better world when people behave sexually in a manner that is consistent with their public morality. That means that they don't sleep with people they wouldn't be proud to be seen with by their parents, family, and friends and to call a boyfriend or girlfriend.
I wrote the following python script to read xlsx. It's extremely basic, but works very well for me.

http://github.com/brendano/tsvutils/blob/master/xlsx2tsv

I've never tried it on a 20,000 row file. I suspect it would work. A really large file might need to switch to a streaming XML parser, but probably Excel itself wouldn't handle that use case too well.
That is not actually the case. It turns out there is a fundamental physical limitation on destructive computation; any irreversible operation must produce a small amount of heat. Wikipedia has more at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reversible_computing and the current state of the art last I looked at it (probably in 2003/2004) was that there were a handful of very experimental processor architectures that do this; the one I looked at the most was Vieri's Pendulum. Programming in a reversible fashion is very strange; in his PhD thesis, Vieri's demonstration Fibonacci program turns out to be incomplete and I had to debug and fix it, and it was one of the stranger paradigm shifts I've experienced.
I think hight traffic means income certainly, if you have good blogs you can generate income through Affiliate marketing, advertising, and adsense as well, but you just require to familiarize yourself with those areas and you will make good income out of it, even be able to quit your job in the couple of months.
Time For A Slow-Word Movement
> Surely that's the problem?

That may be "the problem", but the solution is subtle.

It's either a waste of time or dishonest to argue for "hitting the super wealthy". It's a waste because they have the resources to evade. It's dishonest if you know that but use "the wealthy" as an excuse to hit other people, which is what always happens.
Judging from their performance in the marketplace, it sounds like their internal jargon describes a model of the competitive landscape that's pretty successful. Just like in programming, any model complicated enough is best expressed in terms of a DSL.
I'm guessing that "going without" involuntarily is what caused those problems. That element of it wasn't your fault; you were being ignored because girls were chasing (trying to "tame") unemployed sociopaths and badboys in lieu of men like you.

If it'd been voluntary, you'd have been fine. You'd be surprised by what people can do without.
As Oriental philosophy said "Stupid questions bring stupid answers". I propose new questions:

Why do so many terrorist have black or brown hair?.
Why do so many terrorist are men?
Why do so many terrorist are young?
Why do so many terrorist are raised out of USA?.

Extracting conclusions from over generalizations is not only usefulness, it's dangerous.

HN is becoming more and more like reddit this days.
Personally, I simply cannot _recall_ anything unless I understand it at least superficially. I may be able to _remember_ if prompted, but my memory is simply organized around my own definitions and understanding.

Maybe us engineering types are hardwired this way. I suspect, however, that non-engineering types aren't wired this way due to poor parenting, weak schools, and fundamentally broken reward and punishment systems.
The idle draw of the processor was already a major source of power consumption when I went through undergrad VLSI 5 years ago. It was my understanding that it might not be more than 50% in actual production processors, but only because they were already using lots of tricks as compared to a naive design.
> Let me review your logic here. You got $100K from your example based on your theoretical auction and then you're arguing that $100K is too much and no company in their right mind would pay that much.

Not at all. I showed that the auction would raise the threshold at which companies would choose H1Bs. The amount clearly depends on what the auction price turns out to be.

And, yes, we could restrict the number of H1Bs being auctioned so the price ends up around $100k. Or, we could set the number so the price is $100.

> From that you conclude that my proposal is bad.

Not at all. I merely accurately explained how things would work.
This whole referral process with VC's seems terribly broken to me. The argument that "If you aren't smart enough or dedicated enough to work all possible network connections to get referred to our firm, you probably aren't smart enough or dedicated enough for us to fund you" appears to be born out of laziness or lack of manpower, not because it's the best process.

Surely there are entrepreneurs that don't have connections on Sand hill (almost all European startups for instance) that have a compelling offer a VC would want to have a look at.
UK Conservative Party Offers £1 Million Prize for crowdsourcing platform
I really can't take seriously someone who posts flash banner ads at the top of their personal blog. It skewed my whole perception of his article.
Fun with MacRuby: Detecting The Language of a String
I don't see why you can't have both. The thing I found with SE, is that your users break down into 3 categories.

1. People who answer questions..these are your biggest fans, who love the site. These are the guys who you build the community around.

2. People who come to the site through Google, these are your drive byers, they just want to see the answer. 90% never go past the landing page.

3. People who encounter a problem in their life. Need a solution, can't find anything on Google, and remember that your site exists.

#1 is where you grow your community. #2 is where you get your money and potential new users, and #3 is where you spend your money in order to build up your brand identity.

Why would the 100 people get 100 crappy answers? They'll find the same results through Google, as they do by going to your site directly.
There's more to it than that unfortunately.