skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm pretty happy with Wing IDE for now. More tools better, though, I guess :)
How I Learned The Hard Way To Give A Good Pitch To Investors
Raganworld's markdown rendered blog @ github http://github.com/raganwald/homoiconic has convinced me that while eye-candy and design is great, it is the content of the blog post itself that is of more value to me as a reader.
The buffalo sentence may be grammatically valid, but it's not "valid" by any real test of human understanding.

Chomsky-esque generative grammar can't tell the whole story about human language.
Clearing House Based Networks - Online Payments for Developers Part 2
I could be wrong. But let me say it anyway. Is it arrogance? The arrogance could come from the fact that you have clarity of thought. It's the same feeling I get when I see DHH, PG, Linus and a few more very bright people I idolize. Their arrogance doesn't unhelpful. They are some of the most resourceful people I have seen. Otherwise we wouldn't have known them and their work. But then again I haven't seen too much of Rich and Antirez. So I can't comment on them.
I don't know about the bay area, but there are definitely devs in NYC making over 200k.
Unless you have a community really focused on good discussion with readers who treat each other with respect it's pointless to solicit comments on the web these days. It just drags down the quality content. I think it's difficult for writers to not be influenced by this small vocal minority who use web comments as an outlet for their mental health problems. Most of these comment trolls are no different than a crazy homeless person ranting & raving on the street. They just want an outlet.
Thanks guys. Last time he came to Mixergy he gave some numbers, but not as many as I tried to get.

This time, I'll work a little harder to convince him.
Oooh! I want to play!

Backer News Backers Back Backer News Backers' Backs
Racker News Rackers Rack Racker News Rackers' Racks
Stacker News Stackers Stack Stacker News Stackers' Stacks
Isn't this similar to crunchbase?
A review of Barrelfish, a multikernel OS
A Glock will certainly fire with the slide immobilized. If the slide cannot move with respect to the frame the current round will not be ejected and the next round will not be chambered, but it will certainly fire the chambered round. It is not clear from "grab the whole barrel" what you were doing. Glock is like many (most?) semiautos in that the trigger cannot be pulled when the slide is not all the way forward, is that what you meant? That you could yank the slide out of battery and hold it there, thus preventing the trigger from being pulled?

If you intend to replicate your experiments in the future, you can explicitly seat a snap cap in the chamber and leave the magazine out (no mag safety on the Glock). That way you are still violating rules 2-4, but possibly not rule 1.
Yep. Originally I wanted to sell CDBaby and keep HostBaby but there was no clean way to do it. So I sold *baby - including the right to have another business with "baby" in the name. :-)
Ah, I see. So what you are tying to say is that the non-stop bashing of Perl, PHP and Ruby from Python developers should be interpreted as just a friendly "if [you don't like python], no worries."

After all, one would have to be a "Rube (that's what [Ruby developers are] called, right?)" to think that Python developers aren't friendly to people who don't worship Python.
> Why on earth should someone have to change companies to get paid what they're worth?

"paid what you're worth" is incomplete the the point of being meaningless.

You get paid what you're worth to the company where you work.
First, they didn't call the PHP standard library: the poster of the root comment we are replying to has stated they didn't use the Zend runtime or code.

The PHP standard library has a huge number of functions that are mostly useless permutations of one another. As opposed to, say, Erlang's meager but usable lists and string module, PHP has such high-level meta-randomness as stristr() (case-insensitive search), str_word_count(), and str_shuffle(). So if you were going to convert that directly to C++, there wouldn't necessarily be a direct replacement in strings.h. Therefore I'd guess they either have to reimplement all of those in PHP, and compile that to C++, or write them in C++. Furthermore, some of these functions have unusual quirks, so some kind of framework would be required I think.
I'm sorry having dabbled in Ruby and having actively coded in Python and Lisp (Scheme, Clojure) you and the OP are laying the FUD on thick. I would argue Lisp has been able to stay relevant for so long because it's syntax assumes nothing about what domain you might be modeling. On the other hand, so little syntax means less "landmarks" and lot of programmers are put off by that.

Syntax is human and syntax is ergonomics. That's why languages with good syntax are so popular and deservedly so.

At the same time I think the number one reason languages eventually die off is because of syntax. A particular syntax was designed for solving specific kinds of problems. Then people realize there are deeper or different problems that the syntax cannot adequately address. Since the language is not a Lisp it cannot be repaired.

I think Python and Ruby are cool and useful tools, but I don't think their design will last another 50 years as Lisp probably will.
I think that's the point, actually. The fact that a sentence can be grammatically correct but not logically correct, or be both, but still not "make sense," is interesting in itself. It shows how difficult it is to determine whether a sentence is "valid" for speakers of that language.

(Chomsky's classic example of "grammatical but not logical" was "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.")
The other side of the argument: why support anonymous functions, but restrict them to one line? That seems highly arbitrary.
Bet the poor HP workers end up paying for this mess tehir bosses got them into
From a learner perspective I can't think of any better first language than NXC-Not eXactly C, a C-like language for the Lego Mindstorms platform.

It is simple, powerfull and has a cool factor several orders of magnitude bigger than any web & desktop based thingie.

It is on Lego Mindstorms! What other programming language allows you to build a robot to chase the cat?
30/high school drop-out/systems administrator (with 18 years experience)
Who needs color graphics to comprehend percentages? If they were pie charts instead of fancy squares, they'd be obviously redundant.
Eh... It only seems that way in hindsight. AFTER you've read the book, you can read cliffnotes/highlights like this, and it brings back the memories of what you learned when you read the book.

But if you try to just read the notes for a book you haven't read yet, I think you'll find the lessons don't really stick without all the supporting stories.

(Imagine skipping all the world's great stories, and just reading a list of "the moral of the story is..." for each book. None would stick.)
Suppose Gmail was actually made by Apple, and that it was Apple that had concluded that the "Conversations" interface worked best for e-mail. Do you think Apple would have added a "Normal e-mail view" for people who didn't like it? I don't.
Actually Jessica is trying to post more stories about YC funded startups in the YC blog lately. And I'm working on a portfolio page for our site.
Think of it like this: Chomsky was testing the brain's language parser by handing it weird things and seeing how it reacts. Like you might do with a new programming language: what happens if I try to add strings, or divide them? Is zero true? Is the string "nil" true? Is == different from ===? Can I pass a function into a function?

The brain's language center is undocumented, so we try throwing potential sentences at it and see what works or doesn't, then try to reverse engineer what it's doing. The buffalo sentence conforms to the rules we know about word order, and can be logically explained, but somehow it fails. Finding out why is part of the reverse engineering process.
As a participant in the previous edition, I can only recommend going through this experience!
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For Every iPhone User in NY, A Conspiracy Theory
An interesting post, but...

Should we always use a power drill for everything... even when a regular old fashioned screwdriver might suffice? And what of a hammer?! A jigsaw?

This is not like the situation with the HTML5/Silverlight/Flash/Apple battle for developer mind share.

- Information is more important than physical things, because information lasts forever and is often unique.

- Locking information up in such a way that it permanently has a gate keeper or cannot be accessed by everyone is not a good thing.

- Through the choices developers make they directly select which technologies succeed.

- The technologies that succeed will change what information is available and to who. (For example, if Silverlight wins, Linux users stop being able to watch Internet video. If Apple wins then everyone has to fork over money for a H.264 license. If Flash carries on winning then that's hardly perfect either.)

None of these outcomes are going to be a particular roadblock to affluent westerners (particularly Americans and/or people who aren't rigid idealists), but the impact on the developing world and also the startup environment will be pretty big.

Therefore picking sides in this particular technology struggle seems totally justified to me.
Using FullCalendar jQuery component with ASP.NET MVC
What's wrong with Stock Grants? Why not just go to Vegas then, the odds might be better. Stock options or grants are just another form of gambling. Stock options at a startup are a joke, and for the most part have been a worthless tool that induces slavery for the past 10 years. As for grants, no corporation with stock of any value is giving significant grants. Google gives employees grants of 200 shares nowadays.
yea it's going to be tough to compete with crunchbase and/or tracked.com
MySQL web site has always been horrible for navigation and community version download purposes. This is nothing new -- the site and the steps to download look pretty much the same as before Oracle.
"The Chaos" poem catalogues English word irregularities. Can you read all of it?
Two thing about this rebbutal:

The difference between crime and anonymity on the internet is that we can have a substantial influence on crime. If someone wants to commit a crime, he will likely be caught. If someone wants to be anonymous on the internet for a while, however, there is nothing anyone can do. "Never worry about what you can't control."[1] By that principle, security problems caused by the internet have to be solved by other means (or not at all, if the costs are too high).

About his suggestion to implement identification mechanisms in the network itself, I strongly disagree. Currently, the internet is a "dumb" network on which "intelligent" machines plug in and exchange information. If we add some intelligence to the network, it will be disastrous for civil liberties (selective filtering, browsing logs… all in very few places). Plus, such centralization will require the collaboration of most countries. If one ever get rogue, the "intelligent" network is doomed.

[1] Tom ripley: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Ripley
Not one line, one statement.
Neat Market Newswire Hack
main feed: http://twitter.com/empirasign_eq
We have others as well:
Forex, rates and commodities: @empirasign_fx
Asia/Pacific Equities: @empirasign_ap
Eurozone/London Equities @empiraisign_eu

All feeds run via bots scanning live market prices for interesting events and then post to twitter. Some examples are detailed below:

New trading highs and lows:
http://twitter.com/empirasign_eq/status/8595406960

Trend breaking moves:
http://twitter.com/empirasign_fx/status/8593969121

Breaching of support/resitance levels (pattern recognition):
http://twitter.com/empirasign_eq/status/8592410800

Programming:
Data crunching, pattern recognition coding, chart generation: R
Twitter API, Natural Language Generation, market data manipulation: Perl (yes, unexciting, we are aware, but great glue language and a library for everything under the sun)

To do:
Make charts dynamic and annotatable to increase social aspect of market news
Create our own landing pages for new High/Low market events instead of bouncing to Yahoo or Google Finance
New url shorterner via new domain name empirasign.com/l prefix is too long
Raise funds to hire professional developers
Listen to comments from the Hacker News Community
Chill out man. I'm just pointing out this stuff has been around in commercial products for a very long time.

> AFAIK Redis is one of the first DBs exposing basic computer science data structures as abstract types

With something like ObjectStore you've had persistent storage of arbitrary templatized data structures for ages. You want a hash of hashes ultimately pointing to a void* value? Easy.
Smalltalk is even better. Advanced Smalltalk is morphing Smalltalk into a DSL. You can even write your own domain specific if-then-else analogues, and it looks 1st class like the Standard conditional logic. Yet the implementation is just a plain vanilla method.
The interesting thing to me is that the buffalo sentence is not just grammatically correct, but semantically correct as well.
Top 7 Best Linux Distros for You
IFreeTablet Arriving from Spain
I think so; ideally you (the teacher) would know a fair number of languages well so that you could match one of those with the student(s) and goals.

CS: Scheme and SICP or a less intense book.

WWW: Javascript (well, after I brushed up). mikeryan has the right idea here, and it probably would be a great match for a bunch of high school and even younger students.

Prior to Javascript and DHTML VB might have been a good choice for the same reason (I'm assuming the edit-compile-run cycle was fast). VB prior to VB.NET wasn't that ugly.
Nope - not arbitrary, it is because of the indentation scoping rules. Try coming up with a syntax for statement based lambdas that isn't ugly as heck.
i believe that when mahalo launched it was meant to be a competitor (alternative to google). However, they have now revised their model and leverage google to drive traffic. So when cuban invested he may have seen it as a different play than it now is
Yes... the interesting question is whether it fails because of a "rule" we're not aware of, or because it's simply too complex. The human mind is recursive, but is it simply that it only have a "stack depth" of 3 or 4 and can't parse more deeply than that?
Funny. :D But assignment is the other way around. Simply announcing that the 1.1.1.0/24 and 1.2.3.0/24 IP blocks were routable opened a 50mbit flood of UDP traffic, random pings, etc.
That's why we really need to make a stand against software patents.

Waiting until you are personally inconvenienced is the patent equivalent of going through the sequence that ends on 'and when they came for me there was nobody left to stand up for me'.

Software patents are bad, period.

The very few cases where there was merit to a software patent are outweighed massively by the downsides.
I think Rails (or 37signals) taught developers that a little marketing savvy isn't a bad thing, and that thinking has in turn permeated the ruby community and shows itself in projects like Homebrew. Not smarmy marketing, it's just hackers asking themselves "how can I most simply show how powerful this is", more or less.
Top 5 richest Pakistani's.
Divided Attention
Why are you publishing the IP addresses of people who update their listings?

"Updated 6m ago by 196.210.182.81"
apple's mail.app has a threaded view which is basically what gmail's conversations are, and it can certainly be turned off.
The downloads are at http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/mysql/5.1.html
You can license H.264, for the purpose of encoding video, for free or cheap, if your volume is modest. [1]

Whoever handles the video distribution (you or your customers) also needs to license the codec. This too is free or cheap. It could all change in the future, but who knows if that will happen.

Personally, I'd be more worried about other parts of the encoding chain. What format are you using? MP4 requires a license. What audio codec? Both AAC and MP3 require a license, and they're more expensive out of the gate. And what about decoding inputs? You need to license decoders for whatever input you accept.

[1] http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/AVC/Documents/AVC_TermsS...
Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.
Well, it's good to know Buffalo NY has _something_ going for it.
PragPub, February 2010
I've sent you an email with some suggestions.
it's a wiki :)
Article summary:

Bitch bitch moan whine can't use Flash on iPad bitch whine moan misunderstand how application development works bitch whine moan I don't know that many languages have C FFIs or even what an FFI is whine whine moan I make all of my money working on Flash sites and am afraid of a world where Flash is irrelevant because I have no confidence in my abilities to program outside of this one limited environment where all of my experience is moan whine moan Apple sucks the iPad should run OS X.
What about rewards for other types of applications? Do people see an advantage to FourSquare and StackOverflow's badge system even if there is no "real world" reward? It seems like there is a good confluence here of "behavior generated content" and micro rewards systems - one that can have real impacts on a business' bottom line.
I think a big reason why it comes up so often is that it's rarely worth the mental real-estate to become proficient in both since they are so similar in design and problem domain.

There is significant diminished utility in learning python after knowing ruby or vice versa. You're better of learning something totally different (like haskell!) since you already have a flexible modern scripting language with a great web-framework in your toolkit.

However since each language has its trade offs, people have to keep convincing themselves (loudly and publicly, usually) that they made the right decision.

So basically, it's contentious and will always be that way for the same reasons that people still debate vim vs emacs after twenty years.
Apple's Blu-ray fiasco: the iTunes conflict
No, it is not the same as gmail's conversations. The biggest difference is that gmail shows your replies in the same view.
not currently. probably there will never be. There is a patrol page I keep an eye on to check whats been updated and make sure nothing bad is posted.
Not all of us strive to be consumer whores. I personally have never set foot in a wal-mart or a target, and have not owned nor watched a television in over a decade, and hope to continue this trend in perpetuity.
It depends on the person. Failing in a project is a lot worse for me than losing my job because of company failure not connected to the technical side of things I'm responsible for.

It really depends on the type of people they hire, and they have very strong ideas about that.
From the Aptera website's FAQ:
"The Aptera 2 Series vehicle (electric and hybrid) will range in price from $25,000-$40,000 depending on options and powertrain."

But whether or not that fits one's definition of 'affordable', I couldn't say.
Not sure what he means about python not having an educational infrastructure yet? I hear about universities teaching python all the time, sounds like it has a solid infrastructure already.
I'm interested in finding out more about what kind of incentives drive people and what kinds of returns businesses can get from them. Does anyone else have any good examples of this kind of behavior in action?
Although I don't know Farsi one of the instructors at my college said it was one of the easiest languages to learn. She said many of her students were writing Farsi poetry by the end of the semester.
The aim is still to document it though - if it was a startup in recent years chuck it on.

The benefits are a) you get to see what people like YC funded in the past and b) you can see a list of the projects different people worked on.

In 5 years time this Alexis' page [1] (for example) could list all sorts of things :)

1. http://www.startupwiki.co.uk/founders/alexis_ohanian
I'll move to an IDE after they pry my emacs from my cold, dead fingers.
A Krav Maga gun disarm involves twisting the body while redirecting the shot. Grabbing the gun isn't supposed to prevent the gun from firing, it's supposed to prevent the shot from killing you. In a real life situation when someone's got a gun to your head you probably don't have time to think about the gun's mechanics.
Am I the only one suprised to hear about 150k-200k salaries as software developer ? Most people I know are in the 50-100k range

These only seem to be possible in Silicon Valley or NYC-Manhattan
H.264 is a far superior codec to Theora. For a large site, distributing video in Theora would significantly increase bandwidth costs, and would hurt user experience. I've seen the articles that claim that the two are basically the same, but it just isn't true - you can cherry-pick cases that look close, but those cases are a minority.

That said, the world needs an open-source video codec, and I'm glad that Mozilla is taking a stand here. MPEG-LA is much more likely to offer favorable licensing terms if it doesn't have a monopoly on web video.
I'm mostly surprised that your 'bootleg edition' is cheaper than the regular edition.

Sure, it doesn't have a box... but it has a lot of rights granted to it, and it has some cachet.
Very interesting to see that list, thanks :)
It's only a fun side project; if Crunchbase is missing something useful (one suggestion was already made today) then I probably will add it - so there might be a use.
If you read Greg's blog, linked in the article, you can see that this isn't just about the drivers.

Android has introduced big new pieces of code into the Kernel including a security model called OpenBinder, a power management system called "wake locks" and a new framebuffer system. The trouble is Linux already had a security model, power management APIs and framebuffers before Android came along. So, it is alot of work to get all of this code into a shape that will mesh with what already exists in Kernel.org.

It is a fork of the Kernel at a very core level.

Getting the drivers in is just a small part of the work since it is nearly pointless getting drivers without merging in all of the things above that make Android, well, Android.

But, Google hasn't shown much resolve in fixing up its code and working with upstream.
One of the cons of iPad from their own link is that it doesn't support Flash. It's unclear if iFreeTablet will support Flash. The specs. and the price does look impressive.

I think the real test would be the interface and how user friendly it is.
The assumptions of Flash UI wouldn't work on the iPad. That is plenty of reason not to include it, all sinister corporate motives aside.

(edit: perhaps I was too brief, no mouse pointer has severe implications for Flash—think it through)
Yes, had I had the hindsight gained after a year at the megacorp when I accepted the offer. But thanks for the sincere and insightful question.
The falling price of coal and the economics of cleantech
H.264 will remain royalty-free until 2016 for free Internet content [pdf]
Naming and shaming the AGW fraudsters
For all of it's issues, Rubymine is my favorite IDE and editor for ruby projects. The Python community is in for a treat.