skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Python is currently in a perfect storm for experienced users to want to move away. If it was just itertools it wouldn't be the case.

Point the first: Python 2.x to Python 3.x if you already have to make a transition, there is more impetus to make a transition to something that suits how you actually work.

Point the second: itertools is partly a catalyst, partly an indicator. Once you get fluent with it, it illuminates pain points.

Point the third: There is a new batch of functional languages that support the style that is a pain point, as well as fixing other issues that hurt in python.

Lastly, not all python programmers will want to make the shift. But the ones fluent with itertools are more likely to be the subset that will.
Everything is hard to play on a touch screen. Touch screens are horrible for gaming.
Enterprise search. But I have a degree in Economics.

Think of it this way. Look at a company's overall profit margins - the profit they are making off of your labor / work should fall within this ballpark. If it's not, you're being ripped off, because that means other employees (or shareholders) in the firm are capturing a larger share of the value you create than you are, compared to the average.

This is really, really, REALLY simple math, folks.
Let's not forget that this is also the NSA's area of expertise. Making awesome search engines and ad services are very different practices than conducting cyber warfare. Not only that, they have access all the most important players in a way that no company ever could.
I usually agree. One game that isn't a pain to play with it: MotoX Mayhem.
All true, but he'd talking about temp-to-hire (which I've done with success (well, I wasn't the owner, just the direct report of the employee). And the author of the article pretty clearly doesn't want to try to play the Permatemp game.
> 4. Would it really work for mailing lists where conversations naturally fork into many branches?

I agree with this. The idea that messages must be accessed by conversation is a bit much. Support for conversation group could be nice, but ignoring that feature would have to be allowed so that clients could implement their own views.

For example, the following structure would be crappy to force on clients:

Label
`-> conversation 1
`-> msg0
`-> msg1
`-> conversation 2
`-> msg0
`-> msg1

Needing to iterate through every conversation to pull tease out the full list of messages (in order to use a different conversation-grouping method) would be ridiculous. Not to mention the question of whether or not conversations should span labels and how that should work.
If your business is not profitable, then it's time to do something else...

Yes, the best thing for the economy right now would be if all marginally profitable businesses tanked and their workers become unemployed. That'll fix things right up.
I've gotten paid to work on a lot more Haskell than Ruby or Python. The languages you see depends on the languages you want to see.

Haskell is really quite adequate for real work these days. It has the libraries you'd expect, and it's a nice language with a nice runtime.

It's also worth noting that blog-popular languages are blog-popular for a reason. The people that blog about programming are the ones that need tools that give them a bit more productivity between the occasional nap or meal; the people that use the more esoteric languages want to solve so many programming problems that a sharper tool is essential to their survival. (There is only finite time, after all, and programming languages are easier to build than time machines.)

In contrast, the "popular" languages are mostly used by people whose goal is to warm their chair for 8 hours and receive a paycheck. There are a lot more people that want money than that want creative time with a cold, unloving machine, so it follows that the languages where you can get paid and not care are going to be most popular.

But if you are the second type of person, there is little advantage in worrying about what is "popular" in "the real world". You don't want to be in the real world.
Normal and digital meters can only be read by physically visiting the property. Sometimes you don't have to physically look at Digital meters because they have a RF signal.

Smart meters transmit their power data through the power lines somewhat like ADSL over the phone lines. At the substation, they connect that to a normal network and can read your meter without visiting. In some cases smart meters work through the mobile phone network with GPRS or SMS messages.

Even smarter meters can download instructions from the power company to turn off AC or change the cost of your electricity at different times of day. This would replace the current ripple controllers that do similar things with more limitations.

Really cool meters have some sort of communications network within the house so the homeowner can purchase smart displays that talk to the meter and use it as a source of interesting information.
I have trouble believing your story (assuming it takes place in the states ...) - do you have any more details?

It's (thankfully) really hard to win an unfair dismissal suit since we're all 'at will' employees by default. You can fire someone because you don't like their shoes, don't like that they smoke, or even no reason at all (the handful of exceptions are 'protected categories', like race/religion).
Probably was the case, and in some countries, still is the case. But workplace rule-makers know this and have been long trying to bring a contractor under a long term arrangement to be seen as an employee. The employers don't want it, the contractors don't want it, but the rule makers do, because they see this type of free-association employment as a way around the rules, rather than as a contract people willingly enter into.
When you are a public company there is just one thing that count: REVENUE REVENUE REVENUE!

You can say whatever to your community... But if you are public you need to increase your revenue and enter in every market that can satisfy this need for the investors. "Don't be evil" and things like that are BS, if you are not evil into the markets, someone will take yours.
I would gladly take such a position so long as the system seemed fair (e.g., seeing several long-term non-owner/management employees working there). The terms are spelled out clearly, and I'd rather work somewhere that I add value. If I can't make serious contributions in a couple months, then it's a bad deal for both me and the employer.

However, you might have trouble getting people with families to take the job, especially if they're relocating.
It's also a nice touch that the very serious error message is reported as (ignored), which would be impossible if such an error had really occurred.
As it is now, there is you, your company/project and a developer (albeit a talented one) who lives in Europe.

I think you have yet to find a "co-founder," sir.
> we're all 'at will' employees by default

IIANM this depends on your state in the USA.
I agree. If I were ever to get to a point where I'd want more hours in the day that badly, I generally approach the problem by either (1) prioritizing my goals and letting some less important things drop or (2) trying some creative problem solving in order to increase productivity (i.e., accomplish all of my goals in less time).
Your recent average (discarding the two extremes) needs to be above 2.

You can check yours here http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=flashingpumpkin
The entropy force: a new direction for gravity
IMHO, the solution is a full employment economy, with government(s) acting as the employer of last resort: http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2009/09/13/...

While it smacks of communism to some, intuitively it makes more sense to pay the unemployed to do something, particularly if it builds infrastructure or trains workers in new skills.
It seems that only industrial power users have a serious need for power monitoring. Various people talk about how the home market is the holy grail, but most home-owners simply don't use enough power and they think they have a good idea where it is going.

Gridspy in a typical business will pay for itself within a year, as most businesses use in excess of $1000 a month. All it takes is the opportunity to educate the employees to turn off PCs at night and to identify the expensive lights in the building and the power usage goes down by 10%.

I'll soon have some nice case studies to back up this widely held belief in the power of live monitoring.
A Note on the Recent GitHub Outages
Your recent average (discarding the two extremes) needs to be above 2.

You can check yours here http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=flashingpumpkin

Your "26 point" comment would be discarded as an extreme. There's also a delay (a day?) til averages are recalculated, so your present "5 point" comment wouldn't be included yet.
On the other hand, the Danes have a system where the workforce is extremely mobile, precisely because every worker is guaranteed up to four years of unemployment benefits. Employers are under no obligation to retain employees, because there's a great safety net.

If we're going to talk about unintended consequences, we need to consider all sides: what is the unintended consequence of a system that provides no assurances to workers during economic downturns? I suspect the downside is quite harsh.
Exactly. The trick is in realizing that gravity affects everything, including light, and not just physical objects as intuition might suggest. See also: The Museum of Unworkable Devices [ http://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/museum/unwork.htm ] for exercises.
> grossing $65k-$75k

That's my fucking point! Remember bartenders get paid in cash. And they're free to spend that tax-free cash with a MASSIVE homie discount when they go out to bars and restaurants and clubs and other establishments in the same city they work in because hospitality industry people give each other discounts.

How much do you think a developer who charges $50/hr is grossing after taxes? Not EVEN $75k, especially not if they apply the same confidence to their Schedule C deductions that some people on this forum have applied to their careers.

Highly skilled people like competent UNIX engineers should be making a LEAST 2-3x a bartender.

Naive, naive, naive.
No, it is not in the USA. I can't post any more details because I doubt the particular business would appreciate it being discussed online. However, I can assure you that it is very much true, right down to the employee being fired after the christmas break. The workplace in question closes down for two weeks after Christmas and the employee was kept on full pay, and dismissed upon their return to work. This was because nobody wants to fire someone just before Christmas, when their chances of getting a new job are slim.

In this country, you can't fire an employee for any reason other than non-performance of written job duties, and only after three written warnings, and a whole pile of other paperwork. It's easy to get this wrong, and then open yourself up to unfair dismissal actions. The union representatives actively look for these types of cases to prosecute.
If you are actually experienced in functional programming, you'll realize that it is, in all definitions, code. Python is more like english and thus, the appeal will always be there.

I disagree. Functional programming is about as far away from the machine as you get. When I write functional code, I feel like I am describing the problem I want to solve in great detail, just as I would if I were writing about it. (And despite being "far away from the machine", the code still runs quickly. There is something to be said for describing a solution to your problem instead of telling the CPU which bits of main memory to flip.)

As you go down the spectrum from FP to OOP, your code becomes more code-like. Create object. Call method. Save return value. Pass value to another object. Get result. This is still pretty abstract, though, and a fine way to code.

Then you get to procedural programming (C), and then your code truly is code. Allocate memory. Move bits from register to memory. Set interrupt. It's hard to even see an algorithm in there, there's just so much code.

In functional programming, things are often so abstract that you define functions in terms of other functions without even mentioning the data you are processing. Let's face it; that's not "code".
I don't think my mom knows what an iPad is, yet, but if getting her one makes her stop calling me with computer issues then I'm sold!
but on HN you actually have to get *nix to get the joke.
> polygamous arrangements--i.e. polyamory--are necessarily sexist, either.

What if people want to have multiple marriage partners? Wouldn't it be polygamy then?
There's a couple of things I'm willing to assign 100% probability to, in particular something along the lines of "for some reasonably recognizable definition of 'exist', something I can reasonably call 'myself' exists", on the grounds that if I do not in fact exist there's no "my Bayesian probability" to be arguing about in the first place. (It's not quite tautological in the strictest sense, for reasons too long to get into here, but it certainly is close.) So I can't quite go to "impossible". You can't very far on 100%, though; "impossible" is a reasonable approximation.

Oh, and part of my point is that common usage is wrong, on the grounds that the "common usage" is incoherent, meaningless, and information-free. (I basically take it as axiomatic that the worth of the definition of a word can be measured along those axes; I'm generally a descriptive grammarian but that doesn't mean I have to throw all standards out.) Use something more like my definition and you get meaning again.
Ah, so you completely ignored my post beyond that question. Fair enough, I'll return the favor:

"people who are going to complain about something should offer some practical alternative"

Meh. When the overwhelming majority of the public does not believe that things like the war on drugs are destructive programs that should be stopped, why waste time on trying to satisfy the rare person who says he already agrees, but demands we all have a presentation on a detailed decriminalization/legalization scheme decades before it's even worth talking about?
This is fantastically good, it explains with convincing specifics why Flash is a bad idea on the iPhone OS ecosystem (and less so for Java, but that's much less of an issue).

Also points out how the insanity of Blueray DRM plus Apple's installed base of hardware makes Blueray a non-starter for them.

See also this invaluable essay on Vista and DRM: http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html; it's what convinced me that Microsoft had turned against the users of its operating system.
The Museum of Unworkable Devices
Rails 3.0.0 Beta Released
The beta release of Rails 3 has been pushed to Gemcutter.org. Plugin/gem developers.. time to get to work.
While the rest of the article is certainly true, the Russian press talks about a lot crazy things, like the "scandal" mysterious suicide of the woman who filed a rape lawsuit agains Bush: http://english.pravda.ru/world/20/91/368/11257_scandal.html

And the Iraq war is over: http://english.pravda.ru/world/americas/29-01-2010/111925-wa...
Being curious, I looked it up: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At-will_employment#Specific_sta...
Did Apple just ban location based ads? Foursquare/Gowalla in trouble?
I was imprecise (maybe incorrect) in my wonderings. What I meant to say was, "Given the array of mental exercises that might or might not cause you to change your behavior, is this one more effective than no additional effort at a statistically significantly level."
A perpetual motion machine is pretty useless until someone hitches a harness to it. That would probably kill it before anything tricky.
On making people feel like idiots... do we still need KatMouse* on Windows 7?

* http://ehiti.de/katmouse/
I'd like to have the option to hide all karma at least for one's own comments (and total karma).

As much as I hate to admit, it affects the things I say and I don't want to see it anymore.
I've had the opposite experience with C#. MS' adding of lambdas and deferred list operations in 3.5 has delayed my switching to F# for all of my heavy number crunching work (For those who have yet to try ruby, python, scala, c# et al-- being able to switch between imperative and functional style on a per task basis is a wonderful way to work).

In the real world, suffering a few weeks of diminished output due to learning new syntax, idioms and best practices is not always (dare I say, rarely) feasible so making an existing language more powerful through the addition of functional constructs can only extend their productive life.
I think the problem is that most of the people on HN are of a relatively high quality. People who's votes don't count and people who's votes do count, all voting on something, doesn't necessarily lead to diminished results in the quality of what gets upvoted.

The problem is that the special few who get disenfranchised have no idea such a thing has happened, and apparently it's not happening because they are trolls or expressing some other type of undesirable behavior, it's happening purely based off of some arbitrary calculation of the week that's otherwise completely hidden from the users -- so in the end there's no reason at all for it to be part of the system.
This post makes no sense. From Illinios State site http://www.ides.state.il.us/employer/uitax.asp Rates for 2010 are max 7.250% min 0.650% base $12,520 (you don't pay into unemployment insurance for wages over $12520/yr)

The rate you pay is based on past claims not to exceed 7.250%. How does he get $20000?
If you're in Montreal, I know someone you can talk to. Send me an email.

delano (@solutious.com)
IANAL but I think their claim is weak. "Site" + "Google"? OK, where did the "z" come from?

They can't really claim dibs on any name that happens to end in "oogle" and your firm does not seem to have anything to do with web search. Domino Sugar once tried to claim that Dominos Pizza was infringing on their name, a claim which they ultimately lost.

They've surely got the pockets to harass you and sadly you're going to need an attorney to respond to their complaint.
> A solution to piling on, if it persists, may simply be placing a hard limit on the maximum score a comment can garner. Slashdot and Kuro5hin both max out comments (Slashdot at 5, Kuro5hin used to max out at 5 but that was later changed to 3).

The problem being that sometimes there are posts that deserve well above the limit for their insight/knowledge. A logarithmic scale might be better. Up to 5 points there is a 1-vote-to-1-point correlation, after that it takes an increasing number of actual votes to increment the comment to the next point (i.e. 10 votes to get from 5 to 6 points, 15 more votes to get to 7 point, etc)

That way a comment that is able to get a massive amount of votes gets 'rewarded' for it above a comment that is only able to get 5 votes.
This release is intended to allow gem and plugin developers to test their libraries against the new code base before the RC's are pushed. If you find that you still have to monkey patch Rails for your library to properly work, we did something wrong and report it as a bug! Also, it is your feedback that will define the official plugin API for Rails 3.
I would love to know what the terms on this look like. There is no mention of how much equity they want for their investment.
A thornier problem, which seems to be overlooked: can a corporation really choose its point of view, or is its point of view dictated to it by laws and obligations? What happens if a corporation endorses a candidate who enacts policies which decrease shareholder value?

Ultimately, I think we'll end up with a body of case law which eliminates any idea of "freedom" from the process and either forbids corporations from endorsing candidates (since it's too risky trying to predict the result) or forcing them to endorse only candidates who adopt specific positions.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v427/n6972/full/427297a...
How one intuitive physicist rescued a team from fruitless research.

Quote from Freeman Dyson:

In desperation I asked Fermi whether he was not impressed by the agreement between our calculated numbers and his measured numbers. He replied, “How many arbitrary parameters did you use for your calculations?” I thought for a moment about our cut-off procedures and said, “Four.” He said, “I remember my friend Johnny von Neumann used to say, with four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk.
This reminds me of one time in one of our school's labs we somehow rebooted all of the SUN machines and some weird things happened and the log-in screen's wallpaper picture was of a young lady on a beach in a bikini. My first thought, as well as the other sysprogs was that we had been hacked and we ran around for a good hour trying to get to the bottom of things.

The machines ship like that as it turns out as a default wallpaper.
But that's not the proposition I posed, it was one with two offers from two different companies, only the starting terms were different. I noted in another reply that I'd done this as the direct report of an employee---and for that matter, for the one we hired that didn't work out at all (wanted to try to solve a programming problem by reinstalling NT!!!) it worked out very well (I hate firing people).

And, yeah, I'd forgotten about relocation, that makes it a non-starter for a lot of people and types of jobs.
If you agree that much wealth is created by attitude, ideas and effort - and I think most of us will agree on that - then the outcomes of children will most certainly be similar to their parents. Parents teach us our attitude, behaviour pattern and even tend to install our 'social class' into us. This would not be a negligible factor. If parents are absent (more common in poorer people) then these factors are learnt from peers, who are probably in the same income group.

If you want to escape being poor, you have to think differently to other poor people.

There are many examples of where children from poor families group up to be rich, and do so because they do not want to be like their parents. In these cases the parents low wealth is a catalyst for building great wealth in the child.

If low wealth was a cause, then how does one explain the high number of immigrants that go on to create great wealth? Newly arrived immigrants are some of the poorest people around.

You don't need a lot of money to get rich. You just need the right knowledge, the right attitude and the right drive to succeed. Most people achieve the wealth level they set out to acheive. For the majority, it's that they only set out to acheive a modest level of wealth - they may think they want to be rich, but they aren't actually doing anything towards it.
I hate that all the baseball player I grew up a watching have turned out to be dopers. Nearly every baseball player I loved as a kid has an asterisk next to their records. Also, I was pretty bummed about Floyd Landis losing his TdF title.

But on the flip side I think its pretty cool. I don't really understand why, maybe just because they are able to push what is possible.

What do HNr's think of athletes doping?
As much as it sucks when Github goes down, there's a sense in which I look forward to it happening. It's yet another chance for me to get a peek at their architecture. As a high school student it's pretty disappointing to me how hard it is to find fully laid out architectural plans for large websites. So I appreciate sites like Github and Ravelry being open with that information.