skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Oh crap I am on the leaderboard now.

Time to turn on noprocrast.
If there's enough value in the pre-walled off content, I say post it and let the community decide.
Apache Open Source Software for Financial Services
"For every 1 day estimates of a task, there’s a simpler version of that you can do in 3 hours, and an even simpler still you can do in 30 minutes. Back yourself into a corner and these versions will vividly appear before your eye. You can always do less."

I wonder if this was the reasoning behind 37s' storing passwords in plaintext instead of taking an extra 10 minutes to write the code to encrypt them?
and that's where higher price comes in as well.

why not make collapsible metal container? (if it's needed at all)
Watch reviews - Seiko citizen Casio watches
They forgot to add that it costs not insignificant amount to collapse and rebuild these things as well.
Ah. Thanks for the clarification. I don't know what I misread to get to that conclusion, but I am admittedly only 12 pages into the Edwards book.
> "Bring up ageism and out comes it comes -- it's the one insult that's considered socially acceptable."

> That and politics

and weight, and attractiveness, and "white trash" / rednecks, and ...

Not to mention that there's still an awful lot of racism and sexism around. Just look at how much TV comedy is built almost entirely on gender stereotypes.
Is there any suggestion that this is PDF wide? Everything I've seen points to an Adobe Acrobat problem.

At the risk of juggling the title even more, s/PDF/Adobe Acrobat/
That's probably another idea: to create containers from some material that makes it easy to reuse them as something else (if only burning for heat). That would safe a lot of shipping costs, too.

Just for laughs, maybe one could even create throwaway ships.

It's not completely unthinkable: I think a lot of floats worked that way, like shipping stuff down rivers (where it wouldn't make sense to tow the floats upstream again).

Why can't the containers ship themselves anyway? If they were autonomous robots with a GSM receiver, could become cost effective?

Edit: this last idea excites me, actually. I would love to work on autonomous robot containers roaming the sea. Pirates might be the worst problem?
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1052508
ATI Video Shows Monkey Upgrading Radeon Video Card
I should note that someone did indeed post this article, 3 days ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1045231

None of the (few) commenters registered objections to the fact that the content was paywalled.
LW (I have LW6) is really great system, for coding, experimenting, and the CAPI user interface is platform-independent (almost, there are some differences, but you can handle them).

I do use MSVC all the time at work, XCode occasionally at home, and have used Delphi quite a lot before my current work.

But I also bought Lispworks Mac/Win32 versions, and I feel much more productive there. Why? Because I have listener, I can quickly recompile the current buffer (Ctrl+Shift+B), or the current enclosing function (Ctrl+Shift+C), or if I'm at the end of expression evaluate it (Alt+X E).

I can keep recompiling the buffer, and all variables declared with defvar would retain their values, I can change object definitions on the fly.

It's just easier to experiment.

Weaknesses - I'm so much used to the MSVC debugging (I Actually used to be Turbo Debugger junkie in the past), that I miss that - it's simply not easy to debug in LW (or EMACS + slime + any other lisp).

But do I need to debug that much more? No - I don't, but that could be because I'm yet at the amateur level.
Only if all the founders browse HN.
I could be totally off base with this, but sometimes I think Neal Stephenson is at fault here for putting so much emphasis on the idea of fiduciary responsibility and lawsuits resulting from perceived neglect of that responsibility. I remember he made a big deal out of that in Cryptonomicon, and I think it's become kind of a meme. My impression is that it's not such a large concern in most cases, especially for a large company with different voting rights for different classes of shares like Google.

Maybe grellas wants to weigh in here?
JQuery 1.4 iPhone reference app
iPhone link: http://www.mrspeaker.net/dev/jq/ref/
But our clients use XML-RPC

Touché.

Client: But your design is in Latin, which I don't speak...

Engineer: Yes, but Twitter is written in Latin...

Client: You're fired.

Client needs as an afterthought are why engineers are considered by most to be professionals, while programmers are considered fodder for outsourcing to low-wage countries.
Four possible explanations for Google’s big China move
Fixed link:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB126092289275692825.html
I startup founder be from Nigeria. Have found intellectual property for crunchpad mega-tablet in prison. If 100,000 of your dollars send me, can free and make us million. CEO you can be.
You can write web apps in C; I wrote CGI "scripts" in C as recently as 2004.
It depends on your demographic. I use Amazon FPS:

- because my customers will probably have an amazon account w/ CC info in it, and will probably not have a paypal account.

- to avoid having to deal with storing CC info on my end.

- to avoid having to buy a HTTPS cert entirely.

That being said, I am not huge on the fact that they leave my site to go pay -- though, I'm hoping users are used to this by now (a la paypal).
JQuery 1.4 Resources For Developers
"There's a reason people are more comfortable about insulting people based on age: everyone either has been or will be a member of the class they're criticizing. "

Just the opposite: most people can't really see themselves as old, and like to think that as they age they'll still somehow stay cool and hip and up-to-date, not like those creepy Readers Digest AARP people.

I've yet to meet anyone who didn't say, Wow I can't believe I'm(40|50|60|...).

You realize, intellectually, that it will happen, but it never seems quite real until you are there.
Myth: The No-Fly list includes an 8-year-old boy.

Buster: No 8-year-old is on a T.S.A. watch list.

No, the boy is not on the list. It's that other suspicious adult who's "on the list."

Which is disingenuous, because anyone who shares a name with anyone on the list is treated as if they were on the list.

Any govt official who says an eight year old boy, or a 90 year old lady, or a US Senator is not on the list should be slapped by his junior high school composition teacher. And then searched.

Everyone is a criminal. Everyone is on the list.
Other sites like Hacker News?
Hi all - I love Hacker News, but it would be great if you could share other interesting sites for me as well. Especially some goods ones about usability, web design, and European start-ups.

thanks, tom
I like how XML-RPC support is built into Python. If a server supports XML-RPC, I can get an instant command-line interface that feels like using an ordinary library. The data structures that XML-RPC supports are mostly the same as JSON: arrays, hashes, integers, floats, and strings. There are also date/time values, which are automatically deserialized as Python datetime objects, and binary values which are transparently base64-encoded. Being able to use native types is a plus over dealing with XML trees. The lack of object types, in contrast with SOAP, is a feature in my opinion, since it keeps the interface portable across many languages.

XML-RPC uses XML and HTTP, but it hides both from the programmer. I think it is a mistake to criticize XML-RPC for not integrating deeply with HTTP, because HTTP is not really the point of XML-RPC. It's just an implementation detail. It happens that HTTP and XML libraries are everywhere, so XML-RPC lets you tunnel a simple RPC protocol through an infrastructure that is common across many programming languages.

Every REST interface I have tried to integrate with uses HTTP error codes differently, treats the GET/POST/PUT/DELETE commands in its own peculiar way, and has unique requirements for authentication. I am not at all sure that deep HTTP integration is appropriate for APIs. Regardless of the protocol (or "architectural style", if you insist), documentation of data structures, calling conventions, and error codes is essential, and just saying "we use HTTP" is insufficient to communicate these details.

Disclaimer: I wrote the xmlrpc-light library for OCaml. http://code.google.com/p/xmlrpc-light/
a) Java is such an example. It does not offer fast development. Contrast it to so-called RAD (Rapid development) tools or rapid prototyping environments, ... Java is a mostly a batch language with a long edit/compile cycle.

b) Right. There are several of those.

c) For dynamic languages there are fewer excellent compilers. If you check the usual benchmarks, Lisp compilers are among the best in that category.

d) That's true. But the reality is different. GCs have bugs. More complex GCs have even more bugs. The FFI may introduce possibilities for errors. I have seen Java guys struggle with obscure heisenbugs. In theory all is mature, in practice it took quite some time to get Java mature and if you read the SUN notes for some of their garbage collectors (the concurrent one, for example), they tell you that they are not stable enough for production. For example the release notes at some point said: "Garbage First (G1) garbage collector
Improved reliability and performance
Available as 'early access' software. Usage of G1 in production settings without a Java SE for Business support contract is not recommended."

e) The 50 MB program usually will not touch all the code all the time - for example LispWorks can include the function compiler in the delivered application - it is likely not called very often. The 50 MB can also consist of a lot of Lisp data, not only code.
Changed it again. But, no it seems to be Acrobat only. Funny coincidence this is coming on the tail- end of an another Adobe worry for me. I found out you can't install Adobe Acrobat Reader for Internet Explorer without installing both Adobe Download Manager and Adobe AIR. Then I tried Firefox on Windows and found out it refuses to install the plugin without admin rights, even though Firefox had been installed by a user (without admin rights).
Interview with HootSuite CEO who raised $1.9M for their social media dashboard
SOAP an its ilk seem the easiest solution at first glance. Say I've got a server that can blat a frobnitz, what could be simpler than supplying a pair of functions?

int[] GetBlattableFrobnitzIDs();
void BlatFrobnitz(int frobnitzId);

Two functions that just magically appear when you point your IDE at a server and tell it to automatically generate a proxy class. Simple!

What's the REST alternative? Getting the list of IDs is okay, but how do you give a "blat" instruction? Until you've experienced REST in anger, its not obvious what you need to do.

Go beyond superficial uses and REST shines, but a beginner used to calling library functions might not see it.
Shortest path from one point to another in a graph is polynomial. Shortest path to all nodes is NP complete.
Obama will outline bail for Texreforms
Don't Trust Anyone Who Doesn't Drink
So if history tells us that some countries have reneged on loans through war, that's what the operating manual says countries should do today?

Countries have been pillaging, raping and committing genocide for eons - that means this is how countries are expected to act now?
No, he could not have (short of bootstraping a Lisp system from C++). I, for one, have much more C++ experience than Ocaml experience. I am far more efficient with Ocaml: typically, my Ocaml programs are 3 to 5 times shorter, takes half the time to program, and almost no time to debug.
http://answers.onstartups.com is a good one I've been paying a lot more attention to for the past month.

TechCrunch UK has been replaced by TechCrunch Europe, but still plenty of news there, and you could always filter it through Pipes for just the UK stories: http://eu.techcrunch.com/ -- The number of comments is fewer than TechCrunch main, but the quality is higher.

It's unfortunate that there's not a StackOverflow.com for usability / design / UX topics yet, but maybe someone reading this will create one. :-)
FOPA makes it illegal to arrest a person for carrying a firearm while traveling through a jurisdiction. It is not a defense after-the-fact, it is a complete defense.

If you are arrested, that is a violation of FOPA, which means a constitutional violation of your due process rights accorded under FOPA. This means not just an automatic dismissal of the case, but significant moola for the violation of rights.
I write a blog post and submit it to HN and Reddit.

... of course, I'm HN's resident champion at poor marketing, so you'll probably want to find some other options rather than following my example. :-)
Hey Darius,

I'm leading a trip to Haiti Feb 19-23... care to join :)

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?v=photos&gid=283915983...

-P
theres been several attempts along the road, but nothing has stuck.
The problem is that this looks good when written but bad when you have to follow it. If you look at 37 Signals products over the years they relentlessly add more and more and more while preaching less and less and less.

See disconnect? The truth is that you must always add more otherwise product goes stale. They know it but "do less" as a story sells better...
There aren't any complex shipping chains.
Goods go china -> Europe/US the only thing that goes back is waste.

I can't see this helping.
It costs more in a very price sensitive industry.
Rollup doors means it isn't going to be used for shipping anything valuable or anything which then needs further onward shipping at the destination - are you going to have a truck full of DVD players going down the highway with canvas doors!

None of the existing handling systems is going to be able to deal with them, so you will need special cranes to load the collapsed ones - unless you load them inside regular containers.
Evidence?
Surgeon stationed in Antarctica removes his own appendix (1961)
You don't understand how FOPA works. FOPA is not merely a procedural defense. It is a due process protection against being arrested for mere firearm possession by local authorities.

In that situation, FOPA provides for automatic dismissal; the burden is on the local jurisdiction to prove that FOPA does not apply.

TSA stops are not arrests; the TSA is a federal agency, and so FOPA does not bar the TSA from detaining persons for firearm possession.
1. Shortest Path is NP complete?
2. Who says this is in N time?
I would agree with hackermom. Of course, there are tools that may adhere to some standard better than others, but who is to say that adhering to a particular standard is the right move every time? And to what degree should a tool adhere to said standard before it becomes magically "good"?

Without context of the given problem at hand, the timeframe to complete the project, and the skillset of those involved, it's naive to make a blanket statement saying there are just plain bad tools.

In my humble opinion, tools should enable you to get your job done faster and at a higher quality than had you not used the tools. The more skilled a programmer is, the more variation there is in leveraging a tool for the end goal. This goes for any framework and any language.

Seems like people are forgetting that there are a lot of very handy functions built into PHP5 that make life simple for the web developer. Yes, some args are inconsistently ordered, and naming conventions are not the most consistent. Still, the fact of the matter that there are several high-quality frameworks available for PHP5 that are as strict or loose as you like speaks to me that PHP--like Ruby or Python or Perl--is a platform that at allows people to get things done. Isn't that the point, after all?
a) The Java I'm familiar with includes hash tables, string-operators, and memory management.

Java may or may not enable fast development, but the reasons actually given for why Lisp development is fast certainly apply equally to Java.
I've honestly see people directly state the bias when filtering resumes: Old engineers are usually BAD. The company I heard that at was only 4 people so the age discrimination law probably doesn't even apply, but I was flabbergasted to see someone literally say something like that.
I loathe SOAP, but it may just be because Python doesn't support it well. In your example it seems like the obvious thing would be to make a POST request to /blat-frobnitz.
Spawn Labs?
I would put the frobnitz ID into the blat queue:

PUT http://my-fake-server.com/blat_q/2452352
I'm consistently getting a message saying "Viewing in simple list mode due to high traffic to this document" so whatever that limit is, we hit it. I guess I'll have to wait before I can add my info. Bummer.
They are made from a material that is easy to reuse - steel.
In fact you can't make modern furnace steel without adding scrap steel to the blast furnace to control the temperature.

The problem is that the floors of the containers are wood and to protect the farmers they are impregnated with some of the nastiest pesticides you can imagine - so no foreign bug can hitch a lift.

Used containers are basically toxic waste, if you are reusing them for housing/storage/etc you are supposed to remove the floor, sandblast the inside and repaint everything in an EPA approved paint - which costs several times as much as the container.
Ask HN:  How to best handle accusation of plagiarism/copyright?
This bothered me a few years ago, but I did not have the right forum to ask, but now that I caught the startup/hacking bug again, it's fresh in my mind.

A few years ago, I wrote a simple Facebook game based on a public domain game, let's call it Tic-Tac-Toe. (it wasn't, but it was in PD) It was created in fun over a weekend, at some friends' insistence, with minimal UI. (Facebook colouring and style) It's not super popular, but grew to a few thousand, without any of the spammy techniques. At some point I was contacted by another developer of the same public domain game, saying I ripped off the concept, UI, and all sorts of things. I checked it out and his game has over a million users.

I was distraught and basically gave up on the app, though it's still up now, without much change, though a few heated words were exchanged.

What is the best course of action in a situation like this?

tl;dr Another dev accused me of ripping off his app, I got upset and gave up.
Giles definitely gets posted on HN far too often, but ignoring that, checking your stats on affiliate programs is hardly an improvement. I know a guy who has to check his stats every hour, and it's just as debilitating as any social site. Why not try and avoid addictive behavior, rather than seeking to replace it with one that's just as bad?
The acid gradient provides extra information, which changes the complexity of the problem.
That logo is awful in so many ways that I wonder whether the designer tried to make it look bad intentionally, or if it's just a result of 'design by committee'.
Hmm, could this be exploited in some way to find the longest path?
How to Get Started with Nokogiri (by creator Aaron Patterson)
https://fedorahosted.org/suds/ Suds is the only decent Python module for SOAP that I've seen. I've never been able to get ZSI or others to work very well.
Just in case there's some confusion: that's exactly my point. Not the part about engineers vs. programmers, but the "client needs trump personal preference" bit. In our case, in order to be players in the industry, we have to support XML-RPC/SOAP.

(edit: typos)
Read again what he writes: 'everything ... is automatically included - there is nothing that is not included'.

LispWorks comes a huge image that contains all the necessary features, from graphics, networking, memory management, ...
Actually you have to REMOVE things to make it smaller (for example using a so-called tree-shaker during 'delivery').
In Java you need to tell which classes/etc. to use. In LispWorks you just call the functions are instantiate the classes - every language feature/library. that he needed for his application, is already included.

In LispWorks you start the image and type to the listener. For his task all the functionality was available then.
Regarding containers that ship themselves, aside from the piracy issue, and making sure that the full container plus accessories was still buoyant, I suspect there are economies of scale that make it more fuel-efficient to gather thousands of containers on a single boat. (Now, a robotic sailboat... hmmm.)

Some architects have designed houses made from recycled shipping containers: http://www.thedailygreen.com/green-homes/latest/shipping-con...
Why Subversion Still Beats Git (via abcphp.com)
Python 2.4.3 (#1,...)
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import xmlrpclib
>>> server = xmlrpclib.ServerProxy("http://www.something.invalid/xmlrpc")
>>> server.namespace.function(True, ["A", "B"], {"q": [1, 2, 3]})
{'A': 8, 'B': ['hello', 8]}

"REST" can't match that. "REST + some other stuff I layer on top" can, but you have to bring more to the party; for instance, you can decide that everything will be JSON coming back, but you had to decide that, so you had to do the work. On the other hand as is so often the case with this increased responsibility you get more power; XML-RPC has no decent binary capabilities, for instance, which is easy with REST.

That doesn't mean the work isn't worthwhile. My personal feeling is that if XML-RPC meets your needs, you should probably use it, but if it doesn't, don't hesitate to move on. RPC is a crazy and cruel world, though; here there be dragons. REST is better than starting from scratch in most ways but you can still end up down the rabbit hole surprisingly quickly. For instance, REST tempts you into considering caching in a layer designed for caching human document accesses; this may or may not actually have the semantics you are interested in and it can get subtle.
I hope you enjoy not ever interacting with anybody else, because as soon as you start up relations with some other person you are creating some form of social order. Add a few more people and soon you'll be electing a mayor.
I thought your point was valid and on-topic. The statement "If You Have Something You Don't Want Anyone To Know, Maybe You Shouldn't Be Doing It" ( http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/12/07/google-ceo-on-priva... ) was fairly extreme.
There is a de-facto standard for that: system.listMethods to list supported methods, system.methodSignature to get the parameter and return types for a method, and system.methodHelp to get its documentation. It's not an ideal solution, since method signatures are shallow and not every server implements these methods the same way (or at all), but they are enough to do basic code generation for statically-typed languages. Here's an example of that for OCaml: http://code.google.com/p/xmlrpc-light/source/browse/trunk/ex...
I think no discussion is waste of time.

There are many people that find clarifications on those discussions when deciding which language to choose.
Trying to reorganize the locations in a useful way. Started by country but this raises the problem that Canada - Pacific - Vancouver isn't close to US - Pacific - Seattle in the list. Other ideas?
If I'm operating a Frobnitz service and my documentation doesn't indicate how to Blat a given Frobnitz, then the failing isn't my communication layer, it's my documentation.
anyone on here interested in a company that does hardware mixed with software based upon ubuntu?