skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Defensive much? I think it's laughable to try and compare the morals of a lot of shady affiliate mechanisms (rebill, anyone?) to the morals of taking investor cash.

For one thing, nobody has promised a huge payout. Investors have evaluated the risk of your company before making their investment, and unless you do something stupid with the money (e.g., send everyone on vacation) there's really no ethical issue with it. If you gave it your all and fail, there's no way you can twist this into some sort of ethical issue. Doing so IMHO is dishonest and self-deluding.

The "jobs and economy" defense is also pretty flimsy. Spam also creates jobs, value for their clients, and contributes to the economy, are we going to start defending that now?

There's no question that a large portion of affiliate marketing falls on the wrong side of morals/ethics, if not the law. The bulk of what I've seen out of that corner of the intertubes is scams that prey on unsuspecting consumers... to compare this with legitimate web startups is really puzzling.

This isn't just holier-than-thou posturing, honestly. I've done shady things in the past for a quick buck, but at least I've never deluded myself into thinking what I was doing was good.

[edit] Poster below has a point, saying "bulk of" to describe the entire affiliate industry is unfair.
Opening the source for research software is absolutely vital to the concept of reproduceability. However, this fact of the level of programming training for most scientists is a major issue. A lot of novice programmers tend to fall into a trap of "it runs without error, it must be right." Even expert programmers struggle with verifying that their results are correct; technically, program verification is a mathematical impossibility. So it's a daunting task to start with, reproducing results of software-based research.

This is only compounded by the fact that reading source code sucks. Source code is an end result of multiple processes that occur in feedback loops. With just the source code, you never see how the code got that way. It's like showing someone a maze with the start and end points marked but the middle of the map blocked out.

Different programmer's conceptions of what constitutes good code varies widely. One man's golden code is another's garbage. Just because the source code is available doesn't mean anyone is going to understand it or be able to work with it effectively.

Compounding this all is the fact that few people are going to want to read the source code. Analyzing source code is dull work, maybe the worst job a programmer can take while still doing programming. Most programmers are far happier to discard old code and start from scratch. This is often a bad idea and doesn't lead to a better product, but at least you don't want to kill yourself while you're doing it.

When it comes to reproducing algorithmic results, I would prefer having a description of the algorithm, a set of inputs, and a set of outputs. I would then write the actual code myself and see if I get the same results. This, I think, is much closer to the concept of reproducing lab results in the physical sciences. You wouldn't use the same exact particle accelerators if you were verifying the results from a paper on nuclear physics. I'm afraid having access to the raw source code will be used as a crutch where logic errors are missed from reusing portions of code without much thought about the consequences. Take, for instance, the subtle differences in implementations of the modulo operator across programming languages: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modulo_operator#Common_pitfalls

It would be great if scientific software were open. Unfortunately, it won't matter a lick if it is.
And that stuff actually works. I started out in life as someone on the borders of what would now be called an "autism spectrum disorder" -- I didn't "get" people, had trouble recognising them and distinguishing faces, and certainly couldn't make anything like a strong connection. When I was young, learning everything there was to learn about stuff was a decent substitute for life. Luckily (and here I use a meaning of that word that may be unfamiliar to most) I went through a grossly self-destructive phase involving poorly-planned and unreproducible chemistry experiments (even if you make the world suit your needs, you can make it go away for a while). The upshot of that phase was that I had to learn to be human as an adult after a period of being something completely other (the details of that period are beyond the scope of this discussion).

It took longer than I wanted, but I was able to learn to read faces, to associate body language and vocal modulations with various degrees and states of distress and "happiness" in others, making finer distinctions as time progressed, and after years of practice I found that I was no longer approaching the exercise from the viewpoint of clinical (but interested) anthropology -- the process had been internalised to the point where it was indistinguishable from empathy. What's more, I seemed to actually care, and my own emotional spectrum seemed to have more colours than "this sux" and "this rulez". It may be nothing more than an elaborate simulation running just below the horizon of observability, but it'll do nicely.

These days I'm not so good at technical matters -- a couple of strokes and the effects of Lewy Body Dementia have effectively removed me from that realm, though I still come to places like this to slow the rot -- but I've become the go-to guy for emotional support for a surprisingly large number of people who are emulating liking me in a very convincing fashion. And I'm emulating being happy with that, and can't tell it from the real thing.
> The PHP interpreter is also quite memory hungry, as interpreters go. Any PHP value in your program uses 68 bytes of overhead [6]. An array of a million values takes over 68 MB.

Well, that is obscene.
When it comes to engineers being licensed, that is America. No such thing exists in Sweden, at least. "Civilingenjör" is an university degree in applied science, roughly equivalent to an MS.
The fact that there is no license in widespread use does not mean that there is no argument for creating one. See http://www.stevemcconnell.com/psd.htm for part of Steve McConnell's argument that we need to create, respect, and for certain kinds of projects require true software engineers sign off on the plans.
All good advice, especially #7

Also, keep in mind that most lawyers that deal with startups are open to a deferred compensation upon successful funding type deal. (and they might even become your angels, or connect you to other investors).
Haml does allow for finer-grained control over whitespace, but even if that's not enough, when needed you can still "embed" plain-old html directly inside of your Haml files.

I guess I fail to see how html has any advantage over haml. The absolute worst case is that you're still writing html in 90+% of the cases (which you'd be doing anyway without haml), and in the best case, your markup becomes much more DRY and readable.
Ask HN: Review my friend's app (launched today)
Enough with the false melodrama, please. Aside from the fact that your comment is content-free and inane, scientists have been discussing this subject since computer simulation first became a part of science. A lot of scientists do share their code (I'm one of them, and I believe in sharing code). But there are good arguments on the other side. Among them:

1) Papers describe methods in enough detail to reproduce them. If they don't, there's a serious problem.

2) Independent lines of verification. If simulation code becomes a reference, it's inevitable that the same bugs/bad assumptions will contaminate an entire field. Independent re-implementation of the same algorithms is a strong hedge against this phenomenon (even if it means that there are more bugs overall).

3) Money. A lot of scientists fund their research in part through licensing of implementations of their algorithms. I don't like it, but until someone gets around to repealing Bayh-Dole (a real scientific travesty, IMO), this is going to continue to be a problem.

In short, what you really meant to say was that finally someone wrote a newspaper article about this subject. It's not a new discussion.
-are not- available, mea culpa!
Lawdiscuss.com - Stack Exchange site for legal advice
"There's no question that the bulk of affiliate marketing falls on the wrong side of morals/ethics"

I'll question it. Do you have any sources or statistics to back that up?

Amazon claims they run "the most popular and successful" affiliate program on the web, for example, and they're about as clean as you can get.
You can use the alligator operators to trim surrounding and internal whitespace. E.g.

.foo> This has no whitespace outside the foo div.
.foo< This has no whitespace just inside the foo div.
.foo>< This has no whitespace outside or inside.

http://haml-lang.com/docs/yardoc/file.HAML_REFERENCE.html#wh...
Having read the article in my RSS feed first and then seeing this headline here, the soundbiteification is a little painful. Dvorak himself would have a hard time coming up with a troll title that good.
I personally agree that there should be one, but right now, there really isn't much of anything that requires it. A few organizations have dabbled with licensing software developers, but not much has come of it.

I work on software for avionics systems. We have reams of requirements based upon industry standards, plethoras of verification procedures, and seemingly endless rounds of peer reviews, followed by formal flight testing. It can take hours of paperwork to change one line of code, to ensure quality and meet certification guidelines. In my opinion, this sort of work is about as "engineering" as software development can get.

I suspect work like this would benefit from having developers who are seriously licensed to do "engineering" work... the whole mindset is a lot different from doing a web startup, and I reckon most software people recently out of college are more in tune with the startup way of thinking than the sort of work that goes on with avionics.

Of course, not everyone wants to work with avionics. Maybe a license shouldn't be needed for doing web startups.
I enjoyed "An Amazon clone in 14 lines of Clojure" -- that would be something to see.
Techcrunch moves from Rackspace to Wordpress Hosting
I'd prefer to see software developers, programmers, etc drop the claim on the title "engineer", though for different reasons than the ones you listed. I don't think the public associates "engineer" with PEs the way it associates JD with lawyers or MD with physicians/surgeons. I think the public thinks of an "engineer" as someone who does something confusing and technical - for instance, people don't really expect a "sound engineer" to have PE. I also don't think that PE's have a strong historical claim to exclusive use of the word engineer, which most people initially think of as the person who drives the train. Lastly, so many branches of engineering have little to no use for licensing, but does this mean they shouldn't be considered engineering anymore? Do they need to invent new terms for their practitioners?

That said, I never describe myself as an engineer (though I do have a MS in industrial engineering), because I don't want the PE people to start thinking they have a claim on software. Like a lot of people on this board (where an economic liberalism seems to prevail), I'm very suspicious of the professional associations, which are immensely cartel-like in their behavior. I also don't consider software development to be necessarily "easier" than engineering. I just think it's very different, and that we should assert and insist on our own identity, and rigorously resist attempts to form cartels and restrict the right to practice, especially from PE folks, who in my opinion have no business regulating software (if they want to regulate software related to civil engineering, they should do that as civil engineers, not by making up some software engineer title and using scope creep to form a cartel, which is typical of professional associations).
I reviewed MongoDB and really loved the feature set but the following seem like big problems to me:

Keys in the document values are stored in the document. Big keys = more space required.

No async client drivers (still true? The last time I surveyed was in November)

"It doesn't support rollback or anything like that, so you'd have to do that yourself."

Smaller problems or non-problems:

It is not durable (writes every N seconds). Granted, most "NOSQL" experiments are not strictly durable (e.g. Redis, Tokyo Cabinet, etc.)

4MB limit / document (I don't have values this large anyway)

32-bit host limits MongoDB DBs to 2GB total size (so use 64-bit)

Auto-sharding is in alpha, and I'm glad to see it coming. But, things like this scare me: "If a shard is down, the query will return an error." Compare that feature to something like Riak wherein multiple copies of values are stored (Riak's W, DW parameters). MongoDB with auto-sharding does not seem fault tolerant. Am I missing something on this?

Please let me know your thoughts as I do like MongoDB for its speed and query operators but the above concerns me.
As features accumulate over time, I find this is harder and harder to maintain. But it heavily depends on the situation (abstractions don't always hold as well as originally hoped). I guess I just remember more the times it goes wrong than the times it went right.
slicehost
My Three And A Half Month Facebook Job Interview
Site Reliability Engineering at Facebook
See also, "preliminary step a of part 2 of my senior compiler project."

Aren't compilers classes common in undergraduate CS programs? Don't they all do this?

E: In case you were curious, "part 2" of the project was implementing a LL(1) recursive descent parser, so you had to juggle the grammar to work with that kind of parser.
+1 on the fact that investors weighed risks.

But, as I see it, many customers sign up for rebill trial offers because they think they can a) game the system and get something for free or b) are truy gaming the system, signing up for offers to get cash as part of so-called "incentivized traffic"

I'm sure there are some unsuspecting consumers who just want to try something and shouldn't have a hard time cancelling.

The problem here isn't the affiliate networks, or the affiliates. It's the advertisers. They are the companies responsible for customer service and providing an ethical experience.
Well, for starters, I don't know the first thing about Lisp or Haskell - I bought the domains because (a) we do training on technology, and (b) it was during a time in which we were having separate domains/websites for each technology (now we just have learnitfirst.com). So I wouldn't be able to do anything with it from a content-perspective. In the end the amount of time I think I would have to spend on it to make it not suck would not be worth the amount it would make!

I'd rather these go to someone who would be active in the community who could help others.
Care to share the name of the bank?
huh? I said male parts won't help. a non-technical person, male or female, running a tech company would be like me running a company that, say, relies on sales to enterprises.

you can't just "know business" - to run a company, you need to understand what that company does.
DC Gov Builds Amazing Open Gov Dashboard
I agree right up to the comment about RIM: if you look at their recent efforts they are clearly holding their own in the teenage / budget smartphone market for families that want the email/txt capabilities of iPhones at a lower price point (or don't want to be on ATT.) I don't think RIM does a great job of serving this market but their price point is still well below Apple's and they're on more networks, and hopefully they will eventually get their act together in the browser area (although that will not help all the old units they have out there.)
Figured this was one to (read comments && read article)
Opps, my last comment/code got cut off :(

Here goes again....

And going into sub prototype sublime you can also do:

sub then (&@) { @_ }
sub elsedo (&@) { @_ }

my $x = 2;

my_if_else $x < 0,
then { say "$x is lower than zero" }
elsedo { say "$x is greater or equal to zero" };

But yes, I do get your point about proc/sub. There is only so far you could (and should!) stretch the parsers syntax.

There is always macros (see Devel::Declare in Perl) if you're mad enough to want cosmetic purity :)
The letter spacing on that text makes it very difficult to read for me. When letter spacing is increased, word spacing should be increased accordingly. In this case, it probably makes sense to simply remove the 1px letter spacing.
There's probably a lot more affiliate marketing out there than you realize, it's just the obvious (and scammy) ones that you and most others view as being "affiliate marketing". There's plenty of legitimate affiliate marketing out there, though. How many blogs have you seen with an Amazon widget? Chances are, if a reader buys something from Amazon after clicking that widget, they get a percentage kickback from that. It's just performance based advertising rather than click or view based.

Then on the other side of the spectrum, you have the people making shell sites with sales pitches and shady offers crowding up the Google results, and forums of people trying to figure out how to make a quick buck without adding anything of value. But you get that with adsense and other types of advertising as well.
Totally agree. If we were all concerned about material status symbols, then good programmers would have to dress up in suits for work.
The Future of Content - Cheap and Plentiful
Apple Already Talking About Cutting Prices On The iPad
When I'm reading something it helps me find my place again if I get interrupted or need to look up something in a different browser tab. It also makes text more readable when sites do odd things like put medium gray text on a light gray background (for instance HN comments with a score < 1).
If you need backups by the company themselves that can be used to deploy more instances I would go with slicehost, otherwise linode. Slicehost has more features like a handy iphone app, but linode is cheaper and at least in my limited testing, performs better.
This is just a rehash of a bunch of posts from two years that compared the iPhone to IE4.

http://www.webmonkey.com/blog/The_IPhone_Is_Internet_Explore...

http://www.joehewitt.com/blog/iphone_is_ie4_a.php

http://www.martingordon.org/blog/2007/08/20/on-the-iphone-no...
Koch said the iPhone is the new IE6 of 2000. As in, really great and popular.

He's just advocating we don't make the same mistake we made in 2000 (only developing for one platform).
Right... The world is full of engineers without certifications. Did the guy who designed the circuitry of my TV have a PE? How about the guy designing the intake manifold of my car? What did your friend do in those seven years before he got his PE? Probably engineering. Software developers are engineers. Whether we do it well or poorly is
besides the point. As far as I know the cert only affects legal
responsibility when signing of on a design. So uner that PE there are
probably a number of other engineers without PE's doing the grunt work.
submission required a brief description of proposed applications, which Amazon said they would review. I don't get it - does that mean that they'll wade through all of the ideas and pick the ones that sound good? Or was it just a soft filter to make sure developers have an idea?
was this already available? ...or is this the SDK everyone's waiting for?
The title here needs an exclamation point, because is not "a rule", as in a noun, but rule, as in a verb, in the slang sense.
One would probably not rewrite them. However people both can and do take their software and run it on a different operating system, compiled with a different compiler, linked with different run-time libraries, on a different type of hardware. And yes, I've seen bad software assumptions flushed out by doing so. (Don't use floating point for complex financial calculations please. OK??)
Dunkin Donuts Wants Us To Create Their Next Donut
A software key-logger can also typically snoop the contents of the clipboard.
I agree that there are some offers/advertisers that are scams that have no place in the industry.

But a continuity offer that clearly discloses its terms (think Netflix) is really not unethical in any way, and your blanket dismissal of affiliate marketing is ridiculous.

I've seen people say on here that ALL advertising is shady and unethical because it makes people spend money on things they don't need. Statements like this are the reason you aren't making any money online.
I agree that the bulk of fault lies with the advertisers themselves, but that's also the same argument spammers make - don't shoot the messenger and the such.

The reality is that it's plainly obvious to the marketer if their offers are legitimate or scams, and when this awareness is so clear it's hard to ride the moral high ground and claim innocence.

It's like giving someone a bag of candy where you know a large portion is poisonous - sure, you didn't poison the candies yourself, but to say that you're faultless IMHO is disingenuous.
If you're doing PPC type things, then generally you have to pay your advertising bill reasonably quickly. But you may have to wait months for revenue from affiliate networks.

Also it's not unknown of for leads/sales to be disputed later on, or be reversed, or advertisers to go under, or affiliate networks to go under.

Also if you're paying for traffic in the hope of directing it to affiliate links, those affiliate links may be down/broken/messed up in other ways. So you have to be pretty sure everything is working exactly as it should be, especially if you're spending a lot on traffic.
Looks like it has some growing pains. Most of the links at the top jsut link back to the main page. Alot of people have the "Tumbleweed" badge - "Asked a questions with no answers, no comments, and low views for a week".

It's an interesting idea but I'm not sure how many lawyers who normally charge hundreds of dollars an hour to answer stuff like this will really decide they want to do it for free. I'd like to see it take off but I think it may have a tough time.
Benefits to Short Intense Workouts and Top Reasons of SIW
All true, but shiny stones are used by many as indirect evidence of status. If you're of such a high status you can afford to deck yourself out in jewelry; jewelry and other status symbols act as shortcuts and status messaging.

It's definitely true, however, than many people loose the forest (status) for the trees (jewelry).
I suggest you look for what's right and can be used to improve your lot, rather than looking for what's wrong and can be used to dismiss an article or a person with righteous indignation. The latter never serves any useful purpose.
I love the insane ones.

"Ask HN: Am I crazy to program the secrets of toast?"

"Ask HN: Can someone tell me how to steal common sense?"
Successful tech companies often need to do much more than just technology to be successful. There's no reason such a company shouldn't have at least one non-technical founder. I agree that it would be a mistake if all the founders were non-technical, or if the non-technical person were running the technical side of the show. But nothing suggests that's true here.
Of course the Markov-chain approach would also be worth trying.
The .mil domains were especially bad, you'd end up with monstrosities like:

col.so-on.and.so-forth@afc.dcmc4.west.army.mil
I haven't released source for either of the projects I've released so far in graduate school because they are attack projects that demonstrate security flaws. It is not so clear that there is "no excuse" not to release them.

Another reason not to release source code is that there might be obvious follow-on work and you want to publish that paper too, rather than help someone else scoop you by giving them your tools.