skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Am I the only one that smiled at "Notice that 2 iPhone devices cannot conduct a video call with each other, due to the lack of front-end camera on the device"? :)
Sorry, but how is getting the percentage of the Netherlands below sea level wrong an error about rising sea levels? Sea levels are independent from the height of the Netherlands for practical purposes (I suppose the Netherlands swallowing less water would actually imply higher sea levels, in case the Netherlands were flooded).

This is not an error that affects climate research.
I think it was actually a really good. It was pushing poltically correct ideas to the extreme.

Comics like this are meant to shock and disgust us with what they say if nothing else to throw our own thoughts into perspective.
Pragmatic Programmer has this covered: Select Isn’t Broken

"It is rare to find a bug in the OS or the compiler, or even a third-party product or library. The bug is most likely in the application."

http://www.pragprog.com/the-pragmatic-programmer/extracts/ti...
I end up having an if-by-whiskey argument with myself about this, especially regarding the "n-word."

If by saying the n-word casually, you mean removing the hatred and power behind a word which has divided our people for centuries by giving it a new and friendly connotation, then of course I am for it.

If by saying the n-word casually, you mean flippantly dismissing decades of institutionalized enslavement and murder, and a constant reminder that for all our progress we are still very much two nations, then I despise it.

Its clear to me though that the n-word still causes a great deal of pain to many of my brothers and sisters, and I want no part of that. So even though I hope that someday the n-word will lose this meaning, you're not going to hear it coming out of my mouth.
How could the height of the Netherlands possibly have an effect on climate and actual sea levels? The Netherlands are very small.

I guess if you want to be really nitpicky, you could demand quotes for every single word in every scientific publications. They[1] would[2] then[3] become[4] completely[5] unreadable[6], which[7] would[8] hardly[9] be[10] conductive[11].

[1] you

[2] get

[3] the

[4] idea

...
Repost, but great job. I really like how crud-free it is compared to the javascript versions of the same scripts.
We're trying to be pretty careful about keeping the compiled JS debuggable. To that end:

* The compiled output is pretty-printed instead of minified.

* Comments are passed through in-place to JavaScript.

* All functions are named functions, so instead of a stacktrace full of "anonymous", you can situate yourself.

* There's a "no special functions" rule -- CoffeeScript translates directly into JS without a standard library, which means that theres a one-to-one correspondence between your source code and its JavaScript equivalent, so it's not too hard to untangle.

That said, the temporary variable that we need to generate for some features are a little ugly, and sometimes we need to generate extra safety checks because we don't know certain things at compile time (such as, for example if a range counts upwards or down). Any suggestions for how to make the compiled JS more easily readable would be warmly welcomed.
I prefer PJ Eby's discussion on 'winners' and 'losers': http://thinkingthingsdone.com/signup/Chapter1-Preview.pdf

"""People in the naturally successful orientation have a bizarre knack for turning everything they touch into a success [..] and believe that traditional catchphrases like “no pain, no gain”, and “when the going gets tough, the tough get going”, actually carry some sort of deep wisdom.

People in the naturally struggling orientation, on the other hand, seem to have the knack for turning everything they do into a struggle, [..] And, if you’re in the naturally struggling orientation, then the very same catchphrases and slogans that spur naturally successful people to new heights of achievement, will just make you feel inadequate.
Consider this: when you tell yourself to “just do it”, does it make you want to get started right away?

If so, then you’re probably a naturally successful person. But if it just makes you feel miserable... then you’re definitely naturally struggling.

Which brings me to a very important point:

Naturally successful and naturally struggling people don’t even speak the same language."""
If you put quotation marks around the "quote", the number of results drops from 1.7 million to 16,000.
Some things actually take 2 weeks... perhaps this should be adapted to understand how someone is making an estimate, do they know what they are talking about and/or do they come with good references you trust?
I think a lot of the comments in this discussion, yours included, seem to be misunderstanding what business school is about.

Business schools are teaching management, which by definition is about reducing risk and optimizing existing operations in a running business, hence the emphasis on accounting, finance, etc. The idea is that looking at the whole picture, an MBA is able to more efficiently manage an existing corporation. The comments made about MBAs seeing people as "tools" is spot on and in recent years the organization behavior subject has made a lot of progress in reversing this damaging trend, started during the industrial revolution.

On the other hand, entrepreneurship is all about taking an invention and turning it into an innovation and a sustainable company, and in the process mitigating various business risks (e.g. is there anyone to buy the product, how to make the product, what product to make, etc.). The two (startups vs. companies) are fundamentally different (I elaborate on this here: http://www.deyanvitanov.com/entrepreneurship-foundations/sta...). Very few business schools make the claim to be catering to the entrepreneurial crowd, and even fewer do it well - I can speak only for Stanford GSB, although I have heard similar for Berkeley and Babson, among others I am sure.

So the comment about talking the talk and walking the walk sounds nice, but the assumptions behind it simply fall flat.

FYI, I have an MBA from Stanford and I am basing my comment on my experience there. At the same time, I came to business school specifically to start a new company, so I am hardly the typical MBA I think.
She makes light of everything. The things that make you cringe are her favorite topics. You can get a sense from her movie, 'Sarah Silverman: Jesus is Magic', or Comedy Central TV series, 'The Sarah Silverman Program'.

If TED organizers didn't expect as much, their planning was performed in an intellectually-disabled manner. (Is that phrasing R-Word-campaign-approved?)
UChicago teaches business differently that basically every business school in the country, so take this anecdote with a grain of salt. The have a quantitative/scientific focus that many other schools lack. Your example shows this perfectly, as the professor presented real data to you instead of fictional data.

On the whole, there is still a large problem with undergraduate degrees in business.
Alright, just pushed a quick update to the documentation page that includes the self-compiler. You can try compiling CoffeeScript expressions in the browser right here:

http://jashkenas.github.com/coffee-script/#try_coffee
That doesn't run well on my platform of choice. Evince does though, and is also fast and lightweight. Still, I find PDF links a bit annoying, and am glad to have the scribd option.
What's subversive about it is that if she'd not used the word "retarded" her routine would not have had impact.

There is a sense in which PC language suppresses the real struggle that comes with difficult social issues, sterilizes them for us, and makes them into abstract problems that everyone can claim to care about but do nothing about.

Silverman's insight was that by breaking out of the PC mold she was able to shine the spotlight on a difficult social issue.

Is it the highest level of subversive comedy? Probably not, but it's certainly a courageous form of activism.
State of delaware state of emergency
While I have great respect and awe for Warren Buffet as a businessman and investor, I often feel like he publicly says little anecdotal things like this that are blatantly misleading and people just assume the validity of his premises in an ad hominem fashion. ‘Well, he is Warren Buffet!’

Wikipedia says [1] that the top 0.1% of gross earners pay out almost 20% of total federal revenue, the top 1% almost 40%, and the top 5% almost 60%! The bottom 50% of earners pay 3.3%.

So while Buffet may be paying a smaller percentage than his secretary, it’s fifth grade mathematical knowledge that percentages are normalized values. When you look at the total magnitude of taxes paid, the rich are paying a massively disproportionate share. The Wikipedia article says that when the percentage of revenue from each bracket is compared with the wealth distribution rate, it lines up very closely. That is, the top 5% pay 57.1% of the taxes and have 57.2% of the wealth. Lining the two curves up in such a way would seem, to me, a reasonable approach to taxation.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_in_the_United_States#T...
the idea is that instead of documenting your project list to be at /projects/ and individual projects to be at /projects/PROJECT_ID you should have a SINGLE entry point into your API which should have LINKS to your various services.

so you will have something like

<api>
<projects>http://../projects/</projects>
</users>http://../users</users>
</api>

or even this:

<service>
<name>projects</name>
<href>http://.../projects/</href>
</service>
...

and then your project list should not just return you projects ids to construct a url with, instead it should provide you full urls to access the relevant resources.

The rule of thumb is: with a PROPER REST API you should never do any "url generation", you should get ALL your urls (except for the SINGLE entry one) form the API.

check out this link for some more info: http://www.theamazingrando.com/blog/?p=107
While I agree with the headline, the word "brilliant" isn't used in the article.
TL;DR summary: A writer compares a proper peer-reviewed scientific study vs. asking her friends what they thought.
Writing blog posts is an even easier way to procrastinate than programming.
Sorry about posting it early :) I must have missed the original story and when I discovered it today I thought it merited sharing with HN.
If you can judge a man by the shine on his shoe, you can judge a developer by the syntax on is screen.

php is a 100 pound chain on the productivity of the entire industry. Companies that have embraced php also happen to be examples of companies that achieved way below their potential (yahoo and facebook).

It's funny that as we slay the beasts of perl and j2ee, we bring up another terrifying goul. It's probably why real engineers snicker when we call ourselves software 'engineers'.
As long as they don't change the link to the original PDF, it seems fair to me (if you accept scribd as fair in principle - they simply gobble up all PDFs they can get, I suppose). Meaning I think it is just a helper to include a viewer in a link to a PDF.
Startup Visa Story
To anyone who down-voted, I'm curious to know why. There have been at least 5 down-votes, but no replies.
They haven't been doing something wrong before? Like their policy on china and everything else?
I seem to be the only one here who doesn't agree with him.

Just a week and a half ago the zipper in my winter jacket broke, it is fucking cold here so I was mildly annoyed but since I had saved my previous jackets it was no problem. If I had thrown it out I would have had to spend a day chasing down a new decent one (I am really short, so getting clothing around here is a bit of an issue).
They have never run businesses, so how can they teach you how to run one? If they could build or run a multimillion dollar businesses would they be teaching?

Several of the better teachers at my university had consulting gigs on the side where they worked on real world projects that interested them. A few had worked many years in industry and now wanted to do something different. Some genuinely preferred the more theoretical and research aspect of the field and felt that a university was the best place to foster that. And yes a few where useless, could probably never cut in industry and just hung around because for some reason no one had fired them yet.

Conversely, having running a business will teach you many things, but there are other things you can only learn by having studied and carefully analysed and compared hundreds of businesses and the people who work there. So just because you have never run a business yourself doesn't mean you have nothing to teach, and just because you happened to be in charge of a business that happened to successful doesn't mean you know all there is about all aspects of running a company.
The script syntax is less intuitive than javascript and doesn't save that many lines, so I'm not sure it's something I'd ever use.
This is making me think twice about taking out student loans to go back and get a BS next spring. I truly doubt that I would be able to, cognitively, work and study at the same time - one of the two would suffer.
but that doesn't mean that esr retracted his BS.
Gabe is the founder of Techmeme and, from what I've read of his, both heavy on the sarcasm and a little anti-Valley. I'm sure that was how this was intended.
I really disagree with your reading of that quote - other example uses of the verb to have without connotations of helplessness: "I am having a bowl of cereal", "I have a web site", "I wasn't having fun".
Best line in article: "The world needs to take many things seriously and many things less seriously. The world needs to get its sense of humor back. It needs to allow people to express themselves without feeling the overwhelming pressures of society bearing down and being a social pariah."
its a simple fact that esr is the author of the article in-question.
Refactoring is very similar to picking up house or cleaning out my closet to me. I love the feeling of throwing things away, of knowing everything fits properly. That's great for a Saturday morning. With refactoring, though, you're combining that feeling with the idea that you're "working on your business," and that is a crippling combination. You don't even realize you're procrastinating.

This article is fantastic. I just realized two days ago that programming isn't the challenge to me that it once was. Oh, sure, there are plenty of things I don't know how to do, and I'll spend the rest of my life improving at my craft. But I have a confidence that I can figure out how to do anything I need to do.

I don't have that confidence when it comes to running a business. And that's how I know it's time to make running a business my full-time focus, and only program when I must to reach my business goals. Not because running a business is easy, but because it's hard.
I think it's both.
(crickets)
How do you know Zappos is great? When it has become an alternative to having sex with your girlfriend.
> “Freaks, geeks, and rebels have got a very, very strange advantage,” Bloom says. “In most things we’re sort of disadvantaged, but society needs us very badly—we’re its eyes and ears, we’re its antenna, we’re the way it stretches out and finds new things.”
Not 'less intuitive', it is 'less familiar'. These sorts of comments are largely subjective. See also C family programmers looking at Lisp or ML family languages.
7 Ways To Become More Productive With Firefox Tabs
Visualize your own twitter graph
You're confusing languages with programmers.

programmers make good code. Not languages.

Would shakespeare be worse had he written it in French? Do we spend ages moaning about how needlessly verbose it is in English?
I would largely agree that a business education doesn't prepare you for entrepreneurship. But it isn't exactly valueless. Here's some of the courses and concepts I liked about MY business education:

- Case studies: in accounting/biz analysis class, we learned by studying fictional and real case studies, from jewelery startups started by 2 former students to mid-sized soda manufacturing companies. You get a background about the founders, some key market factors, relevant prices and financial figures, etc. You then come up with your own conclusions and rationalize why, and present your findings under a Socratic teaching environment.

Strategy course + game simulation: The strategy game was a lot of fun, you get together with your group and try to take over the shoe business by building factories in 4 continents, setting prices, budgets, R&D, etc. It also based its currencies against real world currencies. Every week, you got your results and tried to out-compete other groups.

Operations: My ops prof worked in consulting and bragged to clients that if he couldn't find a way to save you money in 20 mins, he'd consult for free. He dives straight into the books and starts crossing out inventory. Why? Inventory takes storage space, heat, security, insurance. Ops is largely inapplicable to web startups because it deals with tangibles. But I still liked learning about it.

I would say business schools aren't really for the hacker/entrepreneur mindset. They are generally for people who want careers in management.
It doesn't take long to realise that truly random is not what you want - you want somewhat filtered so people who are being disgusting / absurd can do it in their own space.
Dear Fastmail,

I hate Gmail and desperately want to find another email/webmail service. I want to switch to something that feels more secure, something that does email well without any of the extra junk they have been adding to my Gmail account. I don't seem to be alone.

I consulted several friends with more "tech cred" than me, and they pointed me to a few Gmail alternatives, with Fastmail at the top of the list.

I went to your website and after browsing for about a minute, I wanted to scratch Fastmail off my list. Your website came across as clunky, cold, and BLAH. It seemed like the website was designed about five years ago, and it didn't really instill confidence that your service would be a user-friendly experience or something that I could transition to without a huge amount of effort.

I decided to check out another Gmail alternative on my list called "Roundcube". The Roundcube site was simple but elegantly designed. More importantly, it didn't feel like it was trying to put me to sleep. The site laid out its features via simple navigation structure, basic colors, a nice screenshot, and a non-cluttered layout. I wanted to hug it. It gave the vibe that they offered an email service that would make the transition away from Gmail extremely painless and straightforward.

I relayed my thoughts to a techie friend, and he reiterated that your service is far superior to Roundcube. I trust my friend, and I will probably sign up for an account with you.

But seriously... There are so many people out there right now who desperately want to break free of their Gmail shackles. The moment is ridiculously ripe for another service to step into that vacuum and offer a refuge to all of these people.

Your email service might be truly awesome, but your website is total cryptonite for people who are ready to make the switch.

Welcome us with open arms, and we will come in droves!!

Sincerely yours,

Volto Libro
What I meant was that there was nothing to the workings of Craigslist--it really is that simple--and not to Wyman's argument, which I agree with, though I realize now that it wasn't clear. Thanks for the link, though!
OK, I'm wondering if jgrahamc is sure of why that value is being overwritten in his example... According to this document (http://developer.apple.com/mac/library/DOCUMENTATION/Develop... )
there are 4 registers pushed onto the stack - ESI, EDI, EBX, and EBP - during a function call. Which means the attempt to write to ar[20] is actually blowing away a register saved on the stack by the function prolog, not an array allocated on the stack.

Of course, I've never disassembled MacOSX code, so maybe I'm forgetting something important. If anyone can correct me, I'd be very grateful!
I just put Evince on all my Windows machines and I am very happy about it. I was able to remove all the Adobe Air bonus arterial sclerosis.

I tried Foxit and was not very impressed. I thought it was interesting that the Evince windows port was made since the last time I looked for an Acrobat replacement about a year ago.
@raganwald: you make me want to print out your comment and staple it to my wall.
My guess, no one thinks she was making fun of retarded people and everyone knows she was making fun of Sarah Palin and her campaign to neuter the english language.
You have simultaneously missed the point of the article and demonstrated it.

From the descriptions, there is no question that Sarah used the word 'retard' in the technically correct context, and NOT as a derogatory term. Sarah's brand of humour is based on shock and blatant unabashed selfishness. It clearly shows the difference between using a 'politically incorrect' word a few times and being genuinely offensive.

Using the word 'retard' as an insult (the way you just did) doesn't just insult the person being referred to - it implies that people who are actually retarded have something to be ashamed of.

I understand why the audience may have been outraged by the jokes (i.e. adopting a vulnerable child for self-aggrandisement). YOU have also managed to be offensive.
> Maybe the porn just opened their eyes to what was possible.

I think the point is less about the mechanics of sexual contact (which is what your more talking about I think) as the interaction and emotional experience.

I watch a lot of pornography in my job; not in a sexual context but in a more abstract have to see the content way. It's quite an eye opener to see so much in an objective way.

In most porn the woman is highly submissive and either pleading for more pleasure or eager to provide sexual favours to the men. I find it hard to disagree with people that say pornography shows people (mostly, but not exclusively, the women) as objects - I do disagree with the conclusions they ultimately draw from that; but if people are emulating what they see as pornography in real life it's not the basis for a healthy relationship.
I think that she was making fun of both people like Sarah Palin and retarded people. See this quote: "The only problem with adopting a retarded child is that the retarded child, when you are 80 is well, still retarded"
A monad non-tutorial ...or why you shouldn't ask what a monad is
I love the syntax for lambdas and existence checking.