skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm curious about the possible impact of author identification via text analysis in this context. I've been working on a personal project that, in initial testing has a fairly high degree of speed and accuracy when testing a large number (~1000) of possible authors against a sample. The accuracy probably won't ever be good enough to be admissible in court, but in many situations it might not matter.

I'm wondering about the... ethics isn't quite the right word. I can't decide if releasing such a thing in to the world would be good.
Contextualizing the copyright debate: reward vs. creativity
SharePoint 2010 Ribbon Customization - Adding FlyoutAnchor control
Chris Eppstein isn't writing Reddit linkbait. He's the author of Compass, which shrunk my huge Rails app's templating code by at least 30% and massively, epically improved our stylesheets, allowing us to standardize a sprawling rusty UI on a sane Blueprint grid inside of a week.

I don't like his title either, but he gets to write whatever he wants about Haml.
Canadian Competition Bureau takes on MLS
On Twitter, someone gave an alternate explanation that I'll pass along without agreeing or disagreeing. They suggested the title was a honeytrap to get Haml haters to read the post and then be surreptitiously educated on why that argument against Haml is invalid.

Update... That was Chris' explanation!
Oh, for sure. But I wasn't even talking about any business ventures (those are rare in astrophysics...) but more about keeping your code under wraps to prevent others from benefiting from your hard work. Especially, when (as I said in another post), code development is not especially beneficial for your career.

Though it's hard to find a situation where people don't have a (short-term) incentive to make their work look good. One can hope it will catch up with them in the long run, but more likely by then they have a new job (and, in academics, tenure) that will never hear about their past shoddy work.
No. And even when you have lots and lots of concurrent I/Os going in a blocking server design, CPU becomes a different kind of constraint: it governs how fast the kernel can context switch.
It is only not cutting it because people don't use it.

I have yet to run across anything better for keeping complex conversations going. (And nothing I'm experiencing in email today is as hard to keep track of as an active Usenet group 15 years ago.)
I think the answer would depend more on the nature of your particular application than whether or not you're using GWT. Was there anything about GWT that leads you to suspect otherwise?
Not to nitpick but I think the title of engineer is being abused quite a bit by software folks. I'm a software developer and would never consider myself an engineer. We build things, great. But one has to be professionally licensed by an accreditation board. While the other just has to have a few successful projects under their belt.

One of my friends just got his PE license. 7 frikkin' years after we both graduated. Could you imagine if it took 7 years before you were legally allowed to run your own company? (I believe 7 years is the average amount of time to get a PE). Anyone calling themselves an engineer without that little piece of sheepskin might as well call themself an MD without the years of med school.

But this is America (assuming the majority of HN subscribers) so call yourself whatever you would like.
I'm curious. What does it cost $4k? Plane tickets? A year ago I looked to apartments for rent there and the prices were about 30€ per day. BTW, Canary Islands are in the Atlantic Ocean in the Africa coast. Balear Islands (Ibiza, Mallorca, Menorca...) are in the Mediterranean.
We love xkcd
Note that as soon as someone points out the possibility of an asset sale (e.g. some of that land owned by the government out west), he moves the goal posts.

Based on this and the article previously submitted to HN (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1109325, and heck, the title of his blog!) I'm afraid that he's at best an Eeyore.
That's quite a leap you made there, the businesses I run have been profitable from day 1 and also provide value to people. Making money is one of the best ways to know that are providing value, if people will pay for your app on a monthly basis then you know they find it valuable and are using it.

These recent posts, this one included, are about making money through shady tactics (there is a reason they have to create adsense accounts every two weeks).
I agree that the problems HAML creates for collaboration between programmers and designers - who, as you say will never learn HAML - is the key limitation of HAML - a limitation also discussed by James Britt in his excellent post on the topic: http://www.jamesbritt.com/2009/4/29/thoughts-on-haml.
Larry Ellison gets 3rd crack at America's Cup
>> I don't think the little > is cutting it anymore.

Of course it is, coderdude!

EDIT: too subtle?
For instance, SMS only really took off with the Obama campaign, while the rest of the world became addicted to it years ago.

Anyone happen to have stats to support that, I find it very hard to believe based on (admittedly anecdotal) evidence.
So, he's basically saying that the net worth of the U.S. is negative, which, of course, is a very bad thing. Which means it's impossible to pay it off right at this moment, of course. I'm not sure why that implies it can never be paid off, though. Not that that makes the situation much better, though.
There is plenty of information out there from great companies who are making money from day 1 while providing value, it seems like it's pretty damn simple actually. Create a product that does something useful, charge people for it.
Does Haml allow you to control how the actual markup is produced? Some browsers are dependent on a lack of whitespace between nodes in order to render properly without adding some extra padding (IE for instance). For me, the main issue is control over my markup. Exact and precise control, which is necessary.
As silly as the explanation was, there is actually a good reason to re-implement. And that is that if nobody does, then any bug in the original code will survive to cause problems with nobody knows how many results before anyone catches the bug.

Reimplementing from scratch then comparing with the original gives an opportunity to find such bugs.
Hs-gchart - Haskell wrapper for the Google Chart API
That is a good point. I guess what I'm really trying to say is that if this is a problem, it's systemic. It's nothing specific to computers. That it applies to computers is not significant, per se, because it applies to everything.
Have you ever tried to sell a diamond?
Brod estimates that a half-carat diamond ring, which might cost $2,000 at a retail jewelry store, could be sold for only $600 at Empire.
Not stupid at all, I'm wondering too. It does look self similar to some extent, but then again fractal is a word that's thrown around way too lightly.
The article could be replaced by the sentence: "Make sure you know about filters before using haml for content."

Filters aren't a "workaround," they are the part of the language for handling content.

http://haml-lang.com/docs/yardoc/file.HAML_REFERENCE.html#fi...
Help a noob - Are these helpful at all for building CMS based sites - like on wordpress or shopify? Or are they mostly just for making standalone sites?
The solution is to make peer reviewed code produced for a paper be considered equivalent to a paper in tenure decisions. And for all papers in peer reviewed journals that do computer analysis to be backed up by peer reviewed, published code.

That makes code development beneficial for your career, gives an incentive to not keep it under wraps, improves quality, and is likely to reduce the number of published incorrect results.

Of course that is a pipe dream at this point, but what's wrong with dreaming?
@prakash Hyderabad afaik. Could be wrong though.
I'm happy with linode. Decent prices, good service.
Is wishing I could stop hearing about it the same as rooting for its downfall? The only feelings of negativity I have towards it is related to the resurgence in url shorteners, which is a view outside the mainstream.
Lisp can do it in two:

(with-sufficient-macrology
(make-generic-star :type 'death))
Any phone's browser(s) should be capable of displaying the regular non-mobile site. I assume the author is referring to the iPhone specific/enhanced sites out there.
> And really, thinking in terms of your own attitude is not really the right way to do it, whether your attitude is "I'm an American and entitled to speak English anywhere" or "I'm quite proud of not being a self-entitled douche, and pardon me while I demonstrate that fact using this charming gentleman from the audience, I mean, the native culture." Aren't you supposed to think about what behavior will make the other person feel comfortable and respected, instead of thinking about what behavior would best reflect an admirable attitude on your part?

I'm not sure I understand how being polite, and being self-aware of your own actions are mutually exclusive?

> Second, lack of regard for social rank is part of the popular image of Americans (at least the positive popular image of Americans,) so people tend to understand inappropriately equal behavior as a reflection of Americanness instead of intentional rudeness. It turns out understanding and tolerance go both ways.

I can agree with this whole heartedly. Even in places with dense collections of small ceremonies acting as the marker of social politeness (say Japan for sake of argument), making an effort does not necessarily equal being polite from their perspective, since you may not be acting in a way congruent with the local concepts of politeness (where to put your chopsticks, how low to bow, etc.) But I've found most people understand that, though you are an outsider, you're at least making an effort, which is generally appreciated.

Usually, if you spend enough time there, you'll get helpful pointers from people who want to help you be polite. They wouldn't bother with this if they didn't see that you were at least attempting -- i.e. politeness is important to you, so it's worth their time and effort to tutor you.
C++ is more appropriate for JITing than C, especially if you do a lot of stuff with virtual methods. That said, the cost of a virtual method call is a lot less than a typical dynamic method invocation in a dynamic language, so the cost savings aren't as huge, except maybe in inner loops.

However, these days new C/C++ apps seem restricted to domains like embedded systems, real-time, and game development, where memory usage (no virtual memory) and performance consistency is very important. So a JIT doesn't make a lot of sense, as it introduces a lot of variability into the application.
Search isn't a general replacement for folders. If you're using folders to try and find things, then yes, search is better for finding than you doing classification yourself.

But filtering things into folders is very useful for other basic forms of categorization, such as by identity (if you have multiple email addresses), or by mailing list (mental context switching is hard) or by priority (I do mine by three categories - the actual inbox, which I empty regularly, emails that will need replies after something else has been done, and everything else).
Warning: This was written by someone who does not actually understand the banking system.

He suggests that the amount of US debt greater than the money supply which seems like a problem, but: It has been suggested that the same dollar can be used to pay off debt over and over - this is theoretically true as long as the dollar remains in the system.

PS: When you almost understand the banking system it's easy to think it's going to collapse at any second. However, it's actually a vary stable system where the money you spend is actually someones debt which creates demand when they need to pay that debt back. (Simplified but surprisingly accurate.)
HN User's company, AppMakr.com, profiled in two WSJ articles
Our company, PointAbout, had its www.AppMakr.com app making service profiled in two WSJ articles today.
its creepy that hes 66 and looks like hes 45
Thank you, I didn't even know there was an established term for this.
"Ask HN: Does my startup need to make common sense?"
This is not a new or innovative algorithm. This person is performing one step of the conversion of a CFG to Chomsky Normal Form. Please see Sipser’s “Theory of Computation,” page 107.
Yes, but such arguments apply at different levels of abstraction.

I doubt one would rewrite the OS, compiler or runtime libraries because they couldn't be trusted; though all these can also have bugs.
Aside from the interesting technical details, the interesting part of this article is how much difference a brand name makes. He had difficulty getting people interested in PHP compilers, then Facebook announces one, and it's the new hotness.

This is a problem many startups have. Because people use brands as a shortcut to determine whether something is of sufficient quality to be worth taking the time to investigate, being a new unknown is a bit of a hurdle to overcome.
This quote does not make much sense at all. Looks like ppk is so blinded by iPhone hate that he did not even bother to find out how these thing work.

iPhone was the first mobile phone which made ordinary web usable on mobile device for me—and that's for sites without no optimization whatsoever.
On the other hand most of optimization which makes web experience even more enjoyable on iPhone can be very simple (as simple as META element without any browser sniffing involved) and unobtrusive in the sense, that it does not affect other browsers.

If your mobile browser cannot render simple website no UA faking will help it. And I lay the blame solely on those browsers, not the webdevs who gave up trying to make sense of them.

What about calling mobile browser vendors to step up their game, instead of calling developers morons and wanting them to design to the lowest common denominator?
A nice discussion of the paper:

http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2005/09...
Steve has earlier advocated, at length and with good arguments, that a founder should be in touch with customers for a startup to survive. You can certainly dispute that premise but in that case we expect more from you than a snarky dismissal.
Well, given that Nokia S60v3 browser _is_ webkit, I don't think that the results with your suggested stylesheet would be satisfactory. Would you accept it on your iphone?
"with efficiency of the east"

What efficiency would this be? Why should ideas be "Western" and "efficiency" Eastern?
Couldn't agree more. I think the problem stems from the fact that most engineers don't have anything distinguishing in their title (ie doctors with MD or lawyers with JD, etc) to show that they have gone through a long and technical process. Most people falsely assume if you graduate with an engineering degree you are an engineer.
Amazing, simply amazing. I've had some success doing Affiliate Marketing myself, but this is at a scale I could never imagine. Great, now you guys have depleted all my weekend hours....
How FarmVille Scales to Harvest 75 Million Players a Month
The impending (ebook) war: functionality and experience, not price
That wasn't meant to be a personal attack, I apologize if it looked like one.

It's more an attack on the general sense here on HN that people are spending lots of time and money building things they have no idea how to monetize.

Absolutely, the best way to create value for investors is to create value for customers by selling them something they want.

In the affiliate's case, the customers are the merchants that pay for leads or sales, NOT the end users of the product, and there is nothing shady about that relationship.

As an affiliate, I always create compliant and legitimate landing pages and ads. Ultimately, it is the merchant's responsibility to adequately disclose billing and allow for easy and timely cancellation. I try to work with compliant merchants, but their billing practices are beyond my control.
They are, but mainly because banks are revoking merchant accounts of those who use rebills and have high chargeback levels. The FTC, banks, and Google are all cracking down on shady affiliate stuff right now. As you said, the next few years should be interesting.
I wish there was more data offered!

Request-response, XHR, long-polling, "COMET" (blarg, I hate that moniker) when talking to the backend?
I'm fortunate that my wife is the same way. She told me she didn't want a diamond for engagement. I wrote an iPhone app for her instead. ;) We've been happily married for six months now!
Basketball boxscores in HD
> It's like you cant win with a french person.

And there's your problem. Try working with them instead.
What software engineering licensure do you propose one obtain?

And why would folks bother to obtain it, if it is almost entirely, if not entirely, not required to do "software engineering" work?
This guy is economically illiterate. Where does he think the "dollars" (I think he means currency, rather than money) that's "in the bank", spent on paying off the debt, actually "goes"? It seems like he thinks debt is a kind of negative currency, whereby currency and debt cancel one another out and disappear.

The reality is that currency is just a means of transferring wealth from one place to another, over time or space. If we had a hypothetical infinitely fast and efficient transactional system, we could get by with only a single "dollar" in the whole world. Currency is just the stuff in the transactional pipes joining different entities.
I certainly don't understand macroeconomics very well, but I'm inherently suspicious of a system that demands exponential growth, ie unless the GDP grows every year, people start predicting ruin. If this implies that the system is unable to stably exist in a static scenario, it seems to me that there is some sort of perpetual borrowing from the future to sustain the present going on, and that reminds me of a another system that only functions during exponential growth: a pyramid scheme. Can someone more knowledgeable comment on this?
Well I got caught in that honeytrap, so the title does work.
"Rich 50 is middle class 38."
A little off topic for HN, but I'm been working to make the standard basketball boxscore more visually appealing and information rich. Appreciate any feedback.
So the IE6 comparison is definitely the right way to sting developers into action. Nobody wants to end up being That Guy from 2001 again.

There's a few differences though. IE6 did a few things better (their box-sizing model is still more sane than the standard, box heights were nicer if unpredictable). But many things it just did differently, for no very sensible reason.

Mobile Safari isn't like that -- it's pretty damn standards compliant (tried a second ago, it passes most but not all of ACID2). That means anything you write that is completely standards-compliant will work, without modification, on any other similarly compliant browser, mobile or otherwise.

What is does do is a bunch of mobile-specific enhancement -- the viewport sizing, css gradients, etc. are all highly useful for the unusual constraints of mobile web development.

So, as PPK suggests, build the website in another browser first. Then enhance it for Safari using their extensions -- not the other way around.
Coming soon: day-long MongoDB training sessions in SF and NYC
I agree that status can be important in many respects, but status achieved from one's own accomplishments and intellect (as an entrepreneur, for example) is completely different than status created by owning an overpriced shiny rock or expensive clothing. While there is certainly societal pressure on women to display status through material means, they also have a choice as to what kind of status they value and thus what type of people will value them.
Probably to searchyc.com

http://searchyc.com/%2522ask+hn%2522+vps

I like Linode FWIW. Bandwidth pooling, good API, good resources, mostly-idle (hand-waving) quad-cores, 5 data centers, a very responsive IRC channel and forums, ability to grow/resize a linode at any time, etc.
>First time I heard Quirksmode curse like a sailor.

You must not follow him on twitter: http://twitter.com/ppk
That's true, but it's also a play on words.

Haml (the syntax) sucks for content. This is a fact.

Haml (the project) provides ample facilities for working around the syntactic limitations.
Yeah, his problem begins with this statement:

If the U.S. government went out today and took every single penny from every single American bank, business and taxpayer, they still would not be able to pay off the national debt. And if they did that, obviously American society would stop functioning because nobody would have any money to buy or sell anything.

Nobody? In this whole exercise, money is neither created nor destroyed... just moved. So, we still have the same exact amount of money in the system... it's just been redistributed to the debtholders. And lots of people hold US government debt.
It troubles me slightly that he suggests "emulating" empathy. That sounds mildly like using people. I think it'd be better to "develop" empathy. The same techniques are applicable, except that the end result is to care about people, not appear to care.
Read again the article. He never was a founder. In all the firms he worked at he was a hired employee. No startup whatsoever.
Your post script is probably the best simple explanation for why our banking system isn't going to fall apart tomorrow. Thank you. Furthermore, this article ignores basic principles of inflation and the idea that the government operates on a very long-term time horizon (hundreds of years), versus individuals who have a physically limited lifespan. While this is no excuse for reckless financial policy, the idea that it's all going to fall apart tomorrow because of this notion that the government has more debt than money supply is foolish.
This post completely misses the difference between money and wealth.

National debt is payed with the wealth of a nation, actual money is only a representation of that wealth.

PG explained it better here: http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html
Tmn
Read this through earlier today. Ryan's done a good job covering the contents of the book, and it sounds like Mark has done a bang-up job of describing Python 3.

I'm not the target market for this book at the moment, but if I find myself heading back to Python, I'll be diving in with this book.
I hate this type of article.

"Here is a distinction I just made up. We'll make it sound somewhat reasonable, put all of the positive characteristics on this side, the negative on that, and now which do YOU want to be?"

What if I think your distinction is half-baked and your description is somewhere between useless and wrong? Sorry, but I'm not buying into your world view today. There are a lot of variations of "darned good programmer" out there, and your oversimplification didn't even begin to capture what is involved.
I disagree. I should be held to the same standards as everyone else.