skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Perhaps I was misguided by the insinuation that Microsoft is behind some imperative language conspiracy. In any case, 99% of the code that runs this world was written in an imperative language and most universities (I believe MIT is an exception with Scheme?) will teach an imperative language before any other. It may not be the easiest (I'm biased, my mind mapped instantly) or best to start with, but it certainly is the one most commonly started with and most commonly used.

I'm pretty sure Microsoft's motivations are simply to make the best development environment they can because at the end of the day that's what developers will use meaning more server licence purchases. This is evidenced by the relative freedom their dev techs get and by the insane amount of programming genius they have hired in this area.
Will Apple's lawsuit against HTC kill Android momentum?
It appears Apple is going after Android manufacturers, starting with HTC. It could get messy. Will this scare off other manufacturers and damper the momentum that Android currently has? Or will Google and Android find a way to overcome the lawsuit implications and continue to grow the Android platform?
Hey,

I'd love to take a few of these off you if you don't mind shipping to LA. Of course I'll cover shipping. Specifically (8, 11, 17, 19).

My email's in my profile,

Thanks!
Yes, it's a terrible page.

I have no idea how it got to the front page.

Half the debt figures are future projected values and we know how dubious those are.

Even more, the time scale isn't consistent. It starts with ten year jumps and then shifts to one jumps and then goes into the future.

One interesting thing is showed was that China seemed to hold no more than about 5% of US debt - but since it only gave visual illustration, the figure is sadly inexact.
System (system object) out (output stream of the system object) println (method of the output stream object of the system object that prints a string to the output stream followed by a newline character). How is that not OOP?
I would probably only use this application if I was traveling to some place where I am not familiar with the surroundings. I don't live in a metro area either so I know everything in town already. If you could clean up and simplify how I order food/movie tickets into one screen, I might be interested in checking this app out again.
The Unlikely Connection Between Open Source Hardware and Silk Wall Paper
What is it like to be a bat?
Yet another 'software patents are bad' piece without a single fact. Many disagreed to the point of retaliative downvoting with my blog post the other day ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1167926 ), but it was trying to make a fact-based case pro-patents; can't we at least try to argue from facts rather than hearsay on HN?
If you had a replicator that could produce anything, why would you need money at all?

Even if manufacturing becomes effectively free, resources won't. You'll still need energy and raw materials.

There wouldn't even be markets as we know them today where an inventor could command really high fees.

Just like the internet made the market for copyrighted information go away, right?
Sounds good. Just sent you an email.
Blah. There's a prevalence of bad visualizations like this that we eat up just because it looks pretty and it has gradients.

In the first bar graph, the increases in year aren't consistent even though the spacing between the bars and widths of bars are consistent. That makes it deceptive to the eye about the overall trend of the national debt.

Not only that, a downward pointing bar graph with the color red usually indicates some sort of negative number or amount in opposition to the the graph pointing upward and colored blue. But it ends up that they're both debt, but measured in different ways, and not at all in opposition to each other!

Visualizations are basically summaries of data. To have to fill in those spaces in time with my mind mentally is work that I shouldn't be doing.
If you had a replicator that could produce anything, why would you need money at all? There wouldn't even be markets as we know them today where an inventor could command really high fees. And without needing money, you wouldn't need the government enforced monopoly that is patents to allow restricted exploitation of an idea.

The only market that might be left, assuming the replicator machine is duplicated enough, is the commodity and energy market, or the sale of extremely rare and exotic materials.

In anycase, people still make money off open hardware these day.

Besides, stupid people would think they'd be being smart by have their 3D printers print money, there by making money worthless.

It would mean that form of money is inferior. If there are still markets left, it would still mean that the phenomena of money will still arise.

In this thought experiment, I want to be part of and explore the sharing/open community, because I don't think a community that hides its best (and only assets), it's ideas, when production costs don't exist won't be able to grow as fast as a community that shares. When the key resources, and those that provide the basic necessities, are unlimited, there's no reason not to share.

Indeed, this is the superior choice for those who wish for economic progress and greater wealth in general. It would seem that today, my thought experiment seem fail in many way to demonstrate what I proposed to demonstrate, because I jump around making too many assumptions and leaps.

My argument would stick more if I use present day maker communities, open source hardware and their manufacturer and firms.
Agreed. Mechanical turk is a waste of time for someone tech-savvy enough to ask HN.
You cannot just "rig" it; if you've looked closely at the law (I have), there's a whole checklist of items that prevents you from doing exactly just that. For starters, the company that employs you has to show a track record of profitability, and they need to show that they are paying you the market rate. So you can't just start a company tomorrow that profits $1 a month and say you're taking a $1 salary. If your title in the company is "web developer", then the USCIS will find out what the average salary for a web dev is in SF and say you need to pay that much. And you cannot say you're the company's official janitor either - the job has to require at least a bachelor's degree. You (the immigrant) definitely cannot start your own company and hire yourself.

I'm an immigrant, I've been looking closely at these laws specifically for startup founders, and what you said makes it a lot simple than it sounds - and I can assure you that as of today, it is simply not. From the immigration front there's no clear cut answers.

Advice on getting a job at a big company makes sense, because they can easily pay you market rate, and show a track record of profitability.

The trouble is, also because of the laws - most big co's are incentivized to hire locals, since it's so difficult to bring an immigrant to work in the US. Also, immigrants who are already physically in the US (from another job, or just fresh from a US university) has a better chance than an immigrant still outside of the country (can you imagine the cost the company has to pay for just a face-to-face interview?) But if you're a superstar and can convince them to want you that much - then you're golden. As in, you can get in the US and live and work here.

Then the next challenge begins, once you're already here. How do you start a company? Because permission to work for someone else != permission to start a company & work for yourself. But that's a whole different topic. One step at a time.

The US has a different relationship with every country, you said you're British. Look up to see if there is any special exceptions to the law (they call them "treaties" between the two countries). I know Singapore, and Canada has them, not sure about the UK. Perhaps, just do you homework - its all on the Web.

But immigrant to immigrant I understand the draw to the valley - best of luck!
Assegnati gli Shorty Awards per Twitter
From time to time I see this as a real market need and wonder how to generalize and scale such a service oriented business. Seems like you could throw a lot of tech at it but still need a lot of feet on the ground at the end of the day.
From what you said you can do, I can easily give you some tasks for 400$/month (or more depends on how much you want to do), you can contact me at pm -squiggly sign- gom-jabbar.org
A Poisson distribution with a mean of 1.84 results in about 45% of children being first born. In fact, the best you can do with any distribution is 54%. For example, if there are 10k couples, then there will be 18.4k children born, at most 10k of which can be first born; and 10/18.4 = 54%.

In fact, the only thing that matters for the distribution (once you know the mean) is the number of childless families, since they could have had a first born but didn't.

I haven't been able to figure out where 74% comes from. Is there some way to sample on a per-family basis to come up with this?

edit: spelling
Hmmm, interesting questions. I don't think I implied people only deserve money if they have a good command of language. I think I made that comment more to point to how his lack of education was apparent from his manner of speech.

I would expect a good correlation between charisma and entrepreneurial success, of which being well-spoken can be a large component. People here often look to succeed by use of technical acumen, which is another trait that can serve you well, but don't overlook having someone around that is able to connect with people on a more basic level.
Just like the internet made the market for copyrighted information go away, right?

Most people are afraid to experiment without copyright and does not have a business model to exploit a non-copyright paradigm.

However it does not mean that a non-copyright or at least copyright without much competitive deterrent would not thrive.

Indeed, the open source software industry is one huge example. RedHat, for example effectively does not deter competitors from making copies of their distribution and selling it. However they still make lot of money.

Arduino, an open source hardware platform, is another example. Chinese manufacturers copied their design, but the firm behind arduino still manages to sell a boatload of them.
I think the choice should be up to the reader. Especially in texts with figures, tables and illustrations, there's a better chance of being able to see an illustration and the text describing it on the same screen if scrolling is an option, whereas if the text/illustration are separated by a page break and your only option is page flips, you're SOL.
I had to laugh about the comment and then I read your user name. ;-) Good luck, I hope you have a good experience and learn a lot.
It's pretty unusual to see salary laid out in a job ad
"We made the mistake of assuming that everyone who is blocking ads at Ars is doing so with malice."

How'd they do that? Ads are annoying, and many people I know never click on internet ads. For us (perhaps a minority, I don't know) ad-blocking leads to a better internet. We're probably the ones referred to in the article who are happy to help a website out if they ask for it in another way.

On a different note: Maybe car windshields could someday block billboards...
For stochastic algorithms you will probably use the same trick as with monadic I/O --- you can make the description of the algorithm purely functional, but not its execution.

Certainly possible, but how well this works depends on how, and to what extent, referential transparency is enforced by the language.

For instance, in Haskell, there really isn't a satisfying solution that I'm aware of. Threading a PRNG (as with the state monad) keeps the code "pure", but enforces a strict sequencing on use of the structure, wrecking laziness. On the other hand, any nondeterminism without threading a PRNG probably requires unsafePerformIO.
Youtube New UI?
I'd say ignore the evil/not issue and just assume that Google, like any company, ultimately serve their own interests. If you plan to compete with them on search/ads/maps/gmail/etc, you might not want to be too vulnerable. If it's on a less critical part of their business, the damaged reputation to GAE is probably not worth it to them.

In any case, outside the ORM your code can be plain Django, portable to non-GAE hosts.
I like this ad a lot. It's not overblown and avoids obnoxious cliches (ninja, pirate, whatever). It's succinct, to the point and honest.
Ads are annoying, and many people I know never click on internet ads.

Addressed at the start of the second paragraph:
"There is an oft-stated misconception that if a user never clicks on ads, then blocking them won't hurt a site financially. This is wrong. Most sites, at least sites the size of ours, are paid on a per view basis."
Amen. There's no such thing as a free lunch.
I don't know how much hate has been conveyed in here, but you are telling this in a weird way. He dropped out of high school because he was already making a lot of cash.

I personally have qualms about the guys ethics. He got his start by lying about his capabilities, which isn't the worst thing I ever heard but he got lucky on not getting caught. Then, he hired someone with money that he didn't have. I'm sure many people would be irate about this no matter the outcome in the end.

I think many people would be doing much better if they had 10% of the luck this guy had.
Do you have a degree related to your profession? If so, find a job and get an H-1B. Working "on the side" isn't technically legal but if you kept it low level to start with, it might work out.

No degree? If so, I hope you're famous or rich and can get an O-1 (alien of extraordinary ability) to work someplace else, E-2 (treaty investor into a business - $100k bare minimum), or E-5B (wider scope of investments but at a higher level - $500k/$1m).

If you have an existing company with staff and potential for expanding to the US (guessing you don't!), the various L-* visas could also be useful.

Alternatively, and not entirely legal, go and study in the US (on an F-1 visa) and then do your startup on the side. Be prepared to show that you have money to support your living for this time though (or a source of external money).

Want a story to read about the E-2 process? Well, TechCrunch ran one a year ago :-) http://techcrunch.com/2008/05/02/coming-to-america-getting-v...
Sanjoy's got a book coming out soon on this called Street-Fighting Mathematics
The very best in most cases would be for the designer to make the 'right' choice for the content... in other words, the best is for the user is to not have a choice but never want one in the first place. It's a joy to use something that's had that level of care put into it. Of course, when that doesn't happen, you need options.
I block ads because I'm tethering an iPhone over my eee. My bandwidth cap is 5GB and Im not going to count my quota over ads that I will not click on.

Instead if I want to buy something, I will do a search on products that I want to buy. Then, I will take recommendations.
I have many ad servers blocked at DNS mostly because of cross-domain tracking. Browsers (by default) allow third-party cookies, and while I don't mind if a site runs ads, I do think cross-site tracking and profiling has to be more controllable by users.

The firefox extension "requestpolicy" http://www.requestpolicy.com/ is a fascinating view of the web. It's too strict to use every day, but is much more an "opt-in" view that everyone should try for a day.
Camouflage Your Face Shape Using Makeup your face to make it appear
You will probably want to use Quickbooks. A lot of CPA's understand it. Do not use spreadsheets because spreadsheets do not have an audit trail.

Talk to a CPA that has experiance in our industry and follow that persons advice.
On a slightly different but related topic: I've never been able to downvote anything, neither posts nor comments. Why is that?
But doesn't that reflect a broken model then? If you really and truly never click on ads, what value does the advertiser get from the view (vs a click)?
I guess a good compromise would be to not block the ads but hide them after loading (I think thats how the AdBlock extension for chrome works)?

I agree that educating users is a good plan here. Users should have adblockers active because ads sour our online experience and a large majority of sites show ads that distract from the content (Not to mention that we have lots of sites completely dedicated to spam). On the other hand, if a site has been giving you great content for years, it makes sense to support them. But of course, lots of big tech sites have sponsorship deals so its not like they're posting great content out of their love for us...
The most important thing to sustain an ad-supported business model, above and beyond anything else, is the quality of the ads. Ads that pay well but drive your userbase to block them or leave will no longer pay when the impressions drop, but ads that look nice, aren't intrusive, and are relevant to your audience will keep people coming back.

Look at sites on The Deck's network. They each have one ad, targeted to creative and tech professionals. The ads tend to look more like something the Iconfactory would put together than the average "1 rule 2 a flat belly" dreck. They give both the site and the ad an ethos of premium quality.
> Browsers (by default) allow third-party cookies

Internet Explorer and Safari do not. If you have Flash installed, supercookies can still be used anyways.
I signed up with Pipex (a good business ISP), but they became Tiscali, then they became TalkTalk (a trashy - IMHO - consumer ISP). They seem to not-so-transparently proxy HTTP so badly that large swathes of the Web wobble in and out of working.
Sounds like there's a market for modified ad blockers that download but don't display the ad---anyone game to try?
OK, that's an interesting question. I guess it depends on the audience. When your audience is scientifically minded, they will know how to interpret your axes and understand why you made a certain choice. They might criticize you for it, but you know such a choice will be scrutinized, so you won't try to deceive them. When your audience consists of less numerically literate folks, you have to be careful with your axes, as you make something appear more interesting that it actually is. If I take a graph from a scientific presentation and use it in an article for lay people, I'm not trying to trick them, but it may appear as such. I guess it's a fine line between making the interesting bits stand out and making bits stand out to make them seem interesting.
Consider the fact that if you intersect the US's population with its per capita income

you get #10:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomin...

If you sample 100 households and take median income, it falls further.

If you factor in health care and university costs, it drops further. You're making an emotional response to a fairly clinical fact.

I won't bring up current account and debt. You get the idea. You're making my original point for me.
Alternate title: "Business Model Based on Ad Views Is Devastating to the Sites You Like."
Know what's worse than online ads? Guilt trips. No Firefox plugin to filter those.
Branding. Ars Technica is respected among a certain subset of the population and IBM, ScienceNews and GQ want their products associated with that brand.

There's far more to marketing than just informing customers about your products.
Did you like OS concepts? I'm not really sure I'd recommend it. I think it's OK but a little too theoretical. Personally, I'm a huge fan of Stevens' books (including Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment). TAOCP is pretty much a must-read for some parts (the kernel memory manager comes to mind). All in all: free is nice but some things are just worth the money.
Doesn't matter really. How you sell it and what's in it is far more important than the length. You need to nail the sales process and the content - everything else is of very minor importance.

This attitude is more obvious with screencasts. Even 30 minute screencasts can sell OK at $9.. and the amount of effort to put that together is far less than even a, say, 25 page e-book. You just need to hit the right stuff.

All that said, my basic investigations show that in the general programming world, books of < 100 pages tend to go around $9, books of over 200 pages tend to be > $20. But this is all very arm-wavey.
I used to worry that if I got to the point first, I wouldn't be able to give enough detail or nuance to do justice to the subject. I had it exactly backwards. By giving a quick, direct answer, I set myself up to follow it with the necessary detail and nuance and I set the other party up to want it.

If I go into detail without giving the big-picture answer, I find the other person ignores the detail as they wait for the big-picture answer, but if I give the big-picture answer and immediately follow it up with detail, they very often become interested in how the detail affects the big picture.

"Will this work?" "blah blah blah blah, so probably" is the wrong approach. "Will this work?" "yes. To do it, we may need to blah, blah, blah" is much more direct, and it gives the listener a reason to care about the details.
The Olympics is completely lost on this one. They are trying to control 'conversations', and that just can't be done.

Can you imagine if Coke became an official supplier of the Haiti Earthquake relief, and therefore attempted to ban anybody who didn't pay the Earthquake Relief from talking about it.

The WSJ is now writing about the Olympics and the athletes, and WSJ is a brand. Do they pay the Olympics to have the right to cover the sports? Should they have to?
Brand recall (just like an ad on TV)
Indeed, and networking with like-minded people.
I'm sure I'll get buried for this, but I have a hard time believing I'm not right. Before I start, I don't know Leah and I'm not judging her character or her coding abilities.

Leah gets a lot of attention for the one obvious reason that doesn't need to be restated. That is why these articles are posted. This blog post doesn't contain any unique information that is presented any better than you could find elsewhere. She has not been involved in that many projects and few of them have gone very far. Pownce was probably her peak.

So I'm not trying to be negative or a nitpicker or anything else like that. I just can't stand that people post the most minute things she does. I remember Techcrunch posted an article the other day because she joined some other company and left SixApart.

There are so many developers and designers that are switching around every day and we barely hear about it aside from the big league players. The fact that Ms. Culver gets her own slice of attention for doing almost nothing of noteworthiness starts to wear on my patience is all.
Tell HN: Ottawa Server-Side JavaScript (SSJS) Meetup
I think I'd like 12 (and maybe 16, not sure yet). Email is in my profile also. Thanks!
Plus, at least for me lately, the Deck's ads have been showing up even w/ ABP. Which I don't mind a bit.
Do you disable adblock when you're not tethering? If AT&T had no bandwidth cap, would you disable adblock?

I don't think bandwidth limitations are your true reason for blocking ads. Ads are typically a tiny fraction of bandwidth usage. You would have to be very close to your 5GB cap each month for blocking them to make a difference.
Ask HN: Where should I work? Facebook or Google Search?
I'm having a tough time making a decision, so why not try to crowdsource it:

I'm a software engineer. Both offers are about the same in $$$ (at current prices) and the jobs at both are flexible as to what I could work on.

Which would you go to and why?

Vote up either one of my choices and reply under it if you want to comment.

Thanks!
I don't have a degree related to Web Development, I started doing one while I was working at a web development company. My knowledge was way higher than the teachers (which was very disappointing!) so I left quickly.