skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The 'problem' with Perl's type indicators are that it's slightly unintuitive to, say, create a hash using %, but to access a hash (and return a variable) you use $, so the punctuation indicates the return type rather than the type you are accessing and might not make sense without context. Whatsmore, it requires you to remember two things - the type of brackets required and the return type, one of which is largely redundant.

Incidentally, I'm pretty sure they're changing this with Perl 6 and making it to that the symbol indicates the type you are accessing. I'm split as to whether this is a good idea or not, especially as they're retaining the still largely redundant curly brackets when ordinary brackets will now do.
Goog secret
Is Linking to News a form of Journalism?
If it's because you're on a Mac, I recommend http://www.finkproject.org/ -- but I hear MacPorts is good too: http://www.macports.org/

Either one gets you a modern GNU Units.
Social networking goes to war
When information is freely shared, good ideas can stunt innovation by distracting from better ideas
The day the Internet died
Most games nowadays use a two-tiered architecture: they write the graphics, rendering, collision-detection, and other processor-intensive parts as C libraries, and then do the game mechanics, AI, physics, and other highly-changeable parts in an interpreted scripting language. That way, they get the maintenance advantages of a high-level language without paying the speed penalty.

Also, many people don't realize just how much faster computers are now than they were 10 years ago. As part of the prototyping for my startup, I wrote a couple games in JavaScript, which is roughly 1000 times slower than C. They were generally quite playable, except on Firefox/X-windows where an odd Canvas bug seems to be adding a lot of latency without pegging the CPU. I'd still use Flash if I were doing a production game (JavaScript's timing is inconsistent, with occasional long pauses presumably for garbage collection), but as long as you stick to 2D it's quite feasible to do games entirely in interpreted languages.
RIAA's 'making available' theory falls
Notes From a Meeting with Warren Buffett
Feb. 26, 1935: Radar, the Invention That Saved Britain
Bank group takes Linux migration a step at a time
Six Steps to Speeding up Trains
Git - Linus is a designer
And how does this apply to UI design? (What is the optimal number of ways to do something, 1, many, or something in between?)
I would say that JavaScript is not exactly the best language to learn for creating games. Aside from the Canvas tag there is no good way to do graphics with JavaScript (at least no simple way that isn't a bunch of arcane HTML tricks which wouldn't make any sense to a beginner).

And, if you're using the Canvas tag you're excluding IE users. If you're only going to reach a limited audience anyway, why not use Flash and reach a much bigger limited audience?

On the other hand, I guess Canvas teaches you about drawing to buffers, while Flash teaches you about more abstract things.
The charts were awesome.
I think the choice is to give as few as possible. Not only will that help minimize development time, but you can always add based on what users demand.
All right... owners are rewarded for their capital risk running the factories and creating the product. John doesn't get paid if he doesn't sell since he's working on commission. He sells at the risk of wasting his time (but not capital), makes bank and now he's fired. Where is the injustice of him losing everything? Did he have to give back his commission? His risk was rewarded. There's a definite hint of an agenda here.
Google and the Undersea Cable
I'm not so sure it matters TBH.

What can you do in a native app that you can't do with some javascript and a pretty webapp these days :/

The days of native apps is ending. On the desktop, on mobile phones, everywhere.
Come for brunch. Bring billions.
or you can do 3 milliseconds * c
pygame obviously has better coverage (10-to-1 hits on google)... this is the first time I saw pyglet. What's better about it?
Do you have an idea of how much renenue you can do for an average game on that kind of websites?
reality is that iphone is a tiny tiny proportion of all mobile handsets - there's a much bigger market out there called the mobile internet
That experiment sounds too funny - I think I would panic, too, if doors suddenly started shrinking away.
At my present day job, I don't have to hold my ideas back because they are only tangentially related, if at all, to my employer's line of business. I give my day job only as much energy and enthusiasm as I need to get the work done well and in a timely manner. As far as personal habits go, keeping motivated while working more or less piecemeal on my pet project is difficult, but I've managed to work through worse.
Opportunity cost? Terrible argument. If you even let yourself think about this, you'd never do anything.
I think that was pretty early in the life of Rails though
Why the most important innovations are often those that appear to be fatally flawed
Probably no better time to get into CS if you find a good program.
Does anyone experienced online CS degree?
I see a startup kind of like the movie 300... but without the 0's where the speed, mobility and adaptiveness of (around) 3 allow them to out-smart, out-maneuver and out-bootstrap a larger, more established company. Madness? This is startup!
Why Small Software Teams Grow Large
BricaBox Content Platform Launches Into Public Beta
Save energy? IMHO it matters a lot!

Javascript-based apps are bad enough on desktop, I don't want to have them in my mobile device.
Academic Science Isn't That Bad
It looks to me like "open search results" platform. While cool, I think deeper access would be far more beneficial to both third parties and Y!. But it's certainly a step in the right direction.
The Ancient Greeks had something similar:
http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/socrates/gr...
See "The Trial" section

I wish we had something like this in place today.
On Escalating Communication
Ask YC: What is the best lighting source for a room with no windows?
We moved to our new offices, and they are great, except for the fact that I now work in a room with no windows. There is only an overhead fluorescent light.

I usually program for 10-12 hours a day, and have now noticed that my eyes hurt, and I am getting bags under them.

What is the best way to light the room so that my eyes are happy again?
Ask YC: How do you deal with account downgrades?
Tons of web services use progressively higher account limits based on a pay scale. Take Basecamp, for instance: http://www.basecamphq.com/signup

My question is: how does your company deal with users downgrading their accounts to a level that they are already over?

For example: someone has a Basecamp Premium account with 60 active users and 5 GB stored on the servers, and then decides to downgrade to a Plus account.
So good, it has been posted before:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=103725

I do this because I found the comments in the other one useful, not to be a dick. It is a dick-move, though, but at least I'm honest.
We are using prototype and scriptaculous currently. We don't have any religion about a particular library (except, perhaps, YUI which is heavyweight).
“If at first, the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it”

- Albert Einstein
Interesting. I'm a white guy and my wife isn't "white". We live in Maine, the whitest state in the union. When our daughter sees a picture of a non-white woman she always says that she "looks a little like mama". However, the same doesn't apply to me when she sees a picture of a white guy.

Must be the effect of living in such a white state! Even though she's with her mother all the time, she clearly sees Caucasians as being the norm.
They make floor lamps that point up to the ceiling and reflect light off of it... I personally like those the best. They're inexpensive and usually have 3 settings.
Bill Gates endorses e-mail add-on created by PSU graduate
A bit of truly ridiculous java geekery
Photobucket Exec Departs to Run New Startup
Full spectrum lighting, used to treat Seasonal Affective Disorder, is a decent sunlight replacement, though it's sort of expensive.
But I would argue that at a job, the worst you can do is lose years of your life, go deeply into debt, lose the respect of your peers, burn out, and get pidgeonholed into a career-path that makes getting a job at the level you would want in a different career-path very difficult.

I'm not saying a startup is risk-free, but I wish people would quit treating employment as risk-free too. It just seems like you have a lot more control over your situation (picking your cofounders, picking your investors) than you do as an employee (who can be fired on a whim). You can work has as an employee and not have anything to show for it. If you work hard as a founder, customers are much less likely to 'fire' you at random.
These are awesome, but be careful and place them strategically. Lighting affects mood, and if you place them around a lot of plants, you'll end up casting a lot of distracting shadows and productivity goes kaput.

On that same token, if you opt for these kinds of lights, it's best to place them in a room with brightly colored walls that wont absorb the light, and you'll only end up wasting money both on the lights, and on your energy bills just trying to keep your office bright.

Otherwise, they are awesome fixtures.
10 list-of-ten articles on news.yc:

1. 10 reasons you should start a startup before turning 25
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=123078

2. 10 less-than-great personality traits of entrepreneurs
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=123193

3. The Next Disruptors (10 game-changing startups)
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=123788

4. 10 quotes against work
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=121984

5. The top 10 lies of entrepreneurs
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=121502

6. Learn Git 10 Different Ways
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=121937

7. Press for Startups: 10 tips
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=120128

8. 10 Overrated Business Books (and What to Read Instead)
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=54324

9. 10 Signs Your Startup Might Be On The Rocks
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=100064

10. 10 Most Amazing Google Search Tricks
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=111768
Interesting, when I looked at this comment yesterday it was at -1. Now it's at 10.
Great fun! Definitely captured my attention!
Ten Steps to Angel Financing
Thank you! I always say that they have one of the most profitable products in the history of the world. By definition, there aren't many "most profitable products in the history of the world", so trying to duplicate their product is a waste of time. So many things went perfectly, both in execution and timing (for instance, they could afford to hire everyone that got laid off after the bust).
Jesus, this is so weird. I've been spending the last few weeks trying to articulate a theory about the illusion of choice being used as a framework for power (can you tell by that statement I haven't quite figured it out just yet?).

The discussion yesterday (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=123081) about how to break out of paradigms and the Paradox of Choice are closely tied together with the idea I'm working on.
Network Solutions sued for domain tasting
Why ten??? Can't you make it 9, or 8, for a change? Or maybe 11?
Gather GPS information and mash it up with google maps? I hope there will be browser APIs for that kind of thing.
The only thing you can really glean from this study regarding UI design will be that users can and will panic and reach for their back/undo buttons when options that were available to them previously are stripped away.
Ask YC: Learning Web Development, were should I start?
Here's my problem, I know, HTML, CSS, and I'm already learning JavaScript.
The thing is that I want to learn about server side programming, Python, Ruby, etc. But I also need to know DB like SQL.
So where do I start?
Something like Django or Ruby on Rails would be a good platform. "Unfortunately" it hides a lot from you so you won't get to see what's actually going on. Maybe try writing a few CGI's just to see what's physically happening to get a feel for that aspect of things.
Silicon Valley entrepreneurs gather for Founders Brunch
Ask YC :which are top ten inventions of 2007
in software or the internet?
There is a startup equivalent to destroying your retreat options (from "How not to die"):

I wish every startup we funded could appear in a Newsweek article describing them as the next generation of billionaires, because then none of them would be able to give up. The success rate would be 90%. I'm not kidding.
Happy Birthday to Tim Berners-Lee's WorldWideWeb - The first web browser (1991)
+1 both for sarcasm and usefulness!
A good example to start would be BreakOut. You have a grid of tiles. Some are bricks. Some are spaces. This you can implement as an HTML <table>. The bat and the ball can be implemented as floating <div>s. You can detect the x position of the pointer and use this to control the position of the bat. When the ball hits a brick, you want the brick to disappear. If you label each tile in your grid then JavaScript can replace any tile with any other image.
See also (where I got the more descriptive phrase in the title):
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/93
http://www.amazon.com/Paradox-Choice-Why-More-Less/dp/006000...

To me, it also ties in with embodiment theory (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=123243). We think we'd rather have the buffet, especially on first sight and with an empty stomach. But after gorging ourselves we realize we would have much rather had one really good dish than twenty mediocre ones.
Rope, a python refactoring library ...
Honestly, to me it's perfectly explained by embodiment theory. A disappearing door would seem to literally lock you in. Probably where their paradigm needs more testing. Would the results hold if instead giftboxes were shrinking away?
“The Connection Has Been Reset”
I know a guy who's very good at JS and AJAX. He doesn't do web design though (I do that part). He's mostly into EXT, and I like jquery/prototype/mootools depending on my mood. We're teaming on a project together.

Not sure if I should give out his name... you can contact me though if you want more info. hopewithoutwings@yahoo.com
Write a toy web server. It'll get you up to par with how the requests actually happen which is a good base for understanding CGI and the more complex systems.
> Perl is horrible, ugly, unclean, unmaintainable in the general case, inelegant

Depends on the coder. To me "maintainable code" == "readable code" == "self-documenting code" and that's very easy to achieve with Perl. Unfortunately most of the Perl found on the web and in Perl books set bad examples for those learning Perl such as abusing the default variable $_, abusing regex for simple string operations, using procedural code where an OO model would be more clear, abbreviating names of variables and functions to just a single letter, using Perl's obscure built-in parameters without explanation, and using all of the above to create obfuscated one-liners to perform complex tasks. All of these bad habits have spread like a virus into the habits of Perl coders and it takes time to break these habits.

Unfortunately some shops think the answer to sloppy Perl code is to replace all Perl code with <my pet language> as if that will make everything better but instead the new code is just as unreadable because it encourages different kinds of bad habits. And I'm sorry to all you LISP fans here, and this may even get me banned from this web site, but hooray for you because you can emulate Google PageRank with 5 bytes of LISP code that throws the LISP interpreter into some obscure self-awareness mode that transcends human understanding but is that readable? Is that maintainable? Is that self-documenting? I don't think so. Yeah, that's cool you can do that but I'll stick with Perl, thanks.
ECMA Script v4 Milestone 2 released
ZipCar has been around for almost 10 years. They've had decent success, but I don't see them disrupting the whole car rental biz. If anything, they've carved out a little niche for themselves.
Join to some opensource project at sourceforge.net
Find an on-line tutorial that walks you through every step (including installing the software). Don't worry so much about which technology; you can always change. To get an idea of what I mean, here's one (you can google many others):

http://www.php-mysql-tutorial.com/

Here's another oldie, but goodie:

http://webmonkey.com/webmonkey/programming/php/tutorials/tut...

You didn't say which platform you're on, but you could save yourself a lot of trouble by installing an "all in one" LAMP distro, even on Windows.
Lesson learned: creating a profitable, repeatable business process is more valuable than being an excellent piece of that process. That's something every startup founder should always remember. Google is more than its engineers, Goldman Sachs is more than its IBankers, Hollywood is more than its stars, etc.

Companies are engines that turn money into more money - everything else is just a part in that engine. Maybe you can make more money being a part in a big engine than owning your own small engine, but don't complain if the owner of big engine swaps you out.
I agree with you. What I'm more interested in however, is who really gets to say what dishes are on the buffet? The cooks? The consumers? My gut tells me the consumers have a lot less choice than it appears.
Any arguments for/against the following?

Quote: the "build it and they will come" mentality is a fallacy. You need to build something great and have distribution in order to succeed. And distribution is hard to get.
Pylons and CakePHP are also quite good frameworks, if you're into that kind of thing, but I'd also suggest writing something simple in PHP (which is pretty much still the webdev language these days),
Unit Testing Resources
I think there is an improper use of the term "disruptive" in this article. Case in point:

THE DISRUPTOR: Zink

THE DISRUPTION: Inkless printing

THE DISRUPTED: Desktop printers, ink cartridge resellers, and photo services

The reason why this is inapplicable is because there are perhaps more compelling reasons to use regular paper in an office setting instead of "special" paper. Furthermore, the headache of "toner low" messages are not as much of an annoyance as "oops I'm using the special paper to scratch some notes on! I better get the 'normal' paper before I get busted!". Also, it seems to me that having to retool for the sake of avoiding "toner low" messages to be replaced by "need more special paper - NOT THE PAPER YOU USED IN THE PAST!!!" is not much of a disruption.

I also fail to see how BlinkX, Expensr (any name with a consonant followed by 'r' fails to resonate with me anymore and I just think that the founders are riding the coat tails of a 4 year old phenomenon), and PatientsLikeMe qualify as "disruptive".

The others seem to be quite interesting.
I couldn't use pygame on os x because it required a dependancy that wouldn't compile, I'm not sure which dependancy is was.

Pyglet has no dependencies and I just found it a lot simpler than pygame to get started with.
Ummm, normally you wouldn't let a user downgrade until they remove enough data that they fall under the lower limit. Doesn't seem that difficult...
Spend some time on intro cs theory/topics - freelance PHP 'scripters' whose understanding of structured logic is abysmal are everywhere and they tend to start with HTML and go horribly astray.
Definitely a cool thing. I wish I didn't stop with my Scheme programming 3 years after my SICP class! It would have helped dive into all this LISP code...

...now if only PG would share with us how to grow an online community of thinkers...
You may be interested in The Paradox Of Choice - Why Less Is More ( http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6127548813950043200&... ).
If it's your restaurant, you do! Now, if you want to stay in business better to offer a few dishes (not a buffet) that people would kill to eat delivered by cooks who love great, simple food.

(And yes, we can run with this line of thought all day. Mmmmmmm, embodiment.)
There's nothing wrong with being just coder, although they seem to be scientists too. To me their approach to data demonstrates that scientific method has become a viable way of doing business. The recent bestseller Super Crunchers seems to try to establish this as a trend:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=...
Try to structure your service with monthly allotments. So instead of a total of 5GBs, allow 1GB per month.

Also, from an implementation perspective; make sure that to run an upgrade/downgrade all you need to do is change some database field values. You do NOT want to be running code that has to go through and change a bunch of stuff.

For users... keep them around; just disable their login. We're going to be implementing multiple users in our application and we are going to handle downgrades by simply maintaing an "ordered list" of users. So you have 20 users on your account w/ 20 max in that plan. If you downgrade to a 10 user plan, we "gray out" and "disable" the "bottom 10" users. The administrator can rearrange the disabled users towards the top of the list, which will "re-enable" them.

This raises another important point with our approach; we keep all of the users data so that when they downgrade, they can see that all of their shit is there but some of it might be disabled (don't hold your users data hostage or they will get PISSED! Note how for our users approach we don't just disable users willy nilly. The admin/user has control). If they can see their data is there, just not "usable" w/o an upgrade... they might be tempted to upgrade again.

Good luck implementing all of this! It truly is a pain in the ass. Just keep it all data driven and your life will be much easier.
Alexa Web Search is a little deeper, but it also doesn't give you an API to the inverted index itself.
Some arguments I have seen for dynamic typing:

- Code is shorter and potentially easier to read.

- While static typing can identify some bugs at compile time, these are usually the easiest bugs to find regardless of the language you use. The hard bugs -- the ones not caught by the compiler -- only become obvious through testing. So if you have a good suite of tests, you will find both classes of bugs, whether or not you use a statically typed language.

- In a dynamically typed language, you spend less time wrestling with the typing system -- instead of casting in C or Java, doing long template-related declarations in C++, or convincing ML or Haskell that your program should be allowed to run.

- And, more theoretically, a statically typed language limits the space of programs that you can write. While most of the programs disallowed by static typing are buggy, some are useful, and a statically typed program with the identical useful functionality is longer.

Of course, static typing has its benefits as well. It's the reason our fastest languages are as fast as they are, and it's a comforting safety net, especially in large projects.
Right, that's the obvious solution. I'm still curious to see if anyone has come up with a different way of doing things, though.
Most of the time you can't downgrade if you're over a limit. You would have to delete users, files, whatever, and then downgrade.

Or, you're charged an overage fee until you've cleaned out the excess bits.
Ruby on Rails. I recommend following a screencast tutorial, like the ones at lynda.com http://movielibrary.lynda.com/html/modPage.asp?ID=324

Sure rails hides a lot but it'll introduce you to some best practices, like the concept of MVC etc.
I think this is a really smart move. This could make Yahoo search something more enjoyable to use than Google. I personally like the added 'widgets; of Ask search but their results aren't as good. I think Yahoo is much closer in quality to Google so something like this could really help them.