skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Just as a point of discussion, history indicates that within a war zone, professionally trained soldiers tend to do better than those relying on BASIC instinct.
Licensing Your Technology to the Government - Mistakes people make
legal river's blog - goes into the ins and outs of working with the government as a client- good but not great
At 04:36 in the video: "Just fuckin', once you get on 'em just open 'em up."

They did not have a proper visual and just randomly started shooting at a guy with what looked like an RPG but was a camera. Now this is a war zone, agreed. But these guys were not under fire in their helicopter, they just started shooting at hard-to-make-out images.
I was just writing a bit of code in javascript (http://github.com/dsimard/jskataUndo/blob/master/jskataUndo....) when I saw this post on HN. I was wondering "should I make some functions private?" and the answer is "NO". Why would I do this? Is this because I don't trust programmers? Why should I care if someone messes up with my "private" things? It's his problem after all. If you look at the source, you'll see that I have a private section at the end but it means "you don't need to use this to make it work".

(note : there are some ways to make things private in javascript as I wrote there : http://www.javascriptkata.com/2009/09/23/how-to-create-an-ob...)
I've been using VWO, and highly recommend it.
Matt Cutts from Google doesn't want an iPad
as a computer scientist, he's a good car salesman.
Correct. And I follow this "strategy" since some years when it comes to services and specialized products (not mass products, which I make as cheap as possible). Low prices usually attract nasty clients with inappropriate expectations.

And from my side as a client: E.g., I don't look at clothes that are cheap. They usually don't look good, have low quality, wearing them feels unpleasant and--very important--send wrong signals to those who know good clothes (and believe me, many important people spot the quality of your clothes). Going for long-lasting quality usually has its price. I'm not necessarily buying expensive stuff because it's expensive, but it gets my attention at least.
That's a good point. I suppose we could man some phone banks, and provide digital services as well (although this poses a challenge of learning the host customer's language, instead of expecting everything to be English). However, I still think the majority of services would be in the hospitality industry.
I stopped reading at the eReaders point. Ganz falsch.
And you can already run OpenSolaris on EC2.
I've heard Google doesn't assign new hires to a team right away, so the hiring process might just be a big talent search, where teams then interview newly acquired talent for a position on their team, after they are in-house.
OpenSolaris already works on EC2. Have you considered that?
Had you seen the video at that point? No.

Look at 04:50 onwards. It was obvious there was no RPG, the group of men started dispersing, yet they started shooting and kept shooting.

Edit: Look at 10:15. They just killed people who were trying to rescue one wounded guy. No weapons to be seen anywhere.
Stop writing plans
Reading out of curiosity. I really like how it's very practical and not condescending.
Well, a lot of people would happily tell you that war in general is murder, but killing people who aren't obviously and convincingly an immediate threat to you is certainly "more murderous" than killing enemy soldiers.

If the guys in the helicopter weren't soldiers, or if they were somewhere else and not Iraq, then it would legally be murder, so personally I have a hard time understanding why this is morally different. It's true that they're under a ton of pressure, and certainly they aren't totally to blame for murdering people, but it doesn't make their morally addled actions any more right. It's a shame that there is nobody who will ever answer for most such tragedies.
There already is a project, Reia http://wiki.reia-lang.org/wiki/Reia_Programming_Language, which implements a Ruby like language on the Erlang VM.
Ruby was the first language I learned closures in. While all scripting languages have them, Ruby's standard library uses them pervasively and standard ruby style encourages their use. It's a great procedural language to learn closures in.
Now all they need to do is call you (because you're logged in and have an associated Android phone in your pocket) and automatically connect you to the hotline.
Besides knowing someone who will recommend you, how exactly do you even get an interview?
Denial of expertise
Saying java's "more relevant than [we] think" is sort of a straw man. It's relevant, it's just many developers don't like java: its syntax, its limitations, the java "culture" that surrounds it, the fact that many of us must know and use it to be relevant in the marketplace.

As for the argument that it's worth it because it's just not that complicated so you can explain it to a ten year old in an elevator... is that really what we're supposed to aim for? Do we really want to give java a 3rd grade gold star because it's in that sweet spot between assembly (hurts brain) and scala (hurts brain).

I don't know. I sort of like to go for the epiphany that comes with finally getting scala (like really getting it) or Lisp macros or monads or etc. You're right that the "cool kid" mentality that attaches itself to the new shiny language is annoying, but I'll take it over the very average mentality that attaches itself to java in that article.
Yes, but rarely, in my experience. That kind of behavior is ultimately self-defeating.
Apple should provide something like this. They could use code from the emulator and post this as a website. Barring that, this might be an opportunity for a business. Someone could develop the infrastructure to automatically create an album of the presentation of any web site on the top 15 mobile browsers. Virtualization technology is perfect for this.

One could do freemium with this easily.
Does the nonlocal keyword fix the problems resulting from Python lacking lexical scope? The other issue, if I recall correctly, is that multi-line anonymous function syntax doesn't work because of Python's significant whitespace.

"...as you rarely need deeply nested scopes in Python because of the other things it supports."

This encapsulates pretty well the relative philosophical differences between Scheme and Python, I think. Scheme focuses on giving you fairly simple yet powerful syntax and semantics as building blocks from which you can build the sophisticated structures and control flow you need. Python focuses on building sophisticated structures and control flow directly into the language, so you need not be as concerned about the building blocks of the language. [Example: list comprehensions]

Is that fair?
youtube link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=is9sxRfU-ik
Please note that I said "PC and OS manufacturer". As awesome as I think Linux is, it's not mainstream on the desktop yet. Of all the laptops/desktops that have a likelihood of reaching the kinds of people we're talking about here, Apple is the only one that is hacker friendly.
>The capital-gains tax is a reason not to get into short-term trading

In the same way taxes are a reason to not get into money making ventures.

Short term trading encompasses a lot of ideas. Some are good some aren't. Many "short term" trading strategies have significantly higher sharpe ratio's than Fool style investing. Fool investing is great. I learned a LOT from that site. But I also want returns in shorter time spans, so I'm willing to pay that capital gains tax.

Motley fool is a GREAT source for long term investing knowledge for anyone interested in that. A lot of other great classic investment texts are getting thrown around in this comment thread (Intelligent Investor, for one).

Recommended book for those interested in "Motley Fool"/Benjamin Graham/Warren Buffet type investing, I'd also recommend
http://www.amazon.com/Little-Beats-Market-Books-Profits/dp/0...

Its sort of in the same vein, but slightly shorter term, backed up by a lot of statistics. Basic principle: Choose the best 20 companies every year. Define "best" as top PE or some other really simple metric. You can tweak it a little as well based on your personal risk profile, desired industry exposure. Consistently outperforms the market.

The motleyfool is a site that looks amazingly like spam and reminds you of all the "earn 50 bazillion percent every hour using options!" emails you get, but is actually chock full of great information.

Greenblatt's book sounds shady as hell, but its a quick, easy read and quite informative, backed by just enough logic to make you want to try it.
I don't understand your downvotes. That's correct, the iPad offers a nice window into the internets, but it's a small window that only lets you see certain things. Large swaths of the internet are inaccessible to the iPads of the world. No longer to site authors have to check user-agents to restrict Apple users from seeing the site, all they have to do is put in a bit of flash.
I think that you are thinking of 'service' very narrowly. Every time someone in .Germany searches google or reads HN, the US has exported a very tiny service.
Focus on distribution
Really? He definitely looks slighter these days but he looks plenty vital in these snapshots.
How the heck are they able to tell which guy is which? At 5:12 you see a guy running and they pinpoint who it is, even though there's been all this smoke and you surely could not keep track of people between the moving of the camera and with all the sand and dirt in the air.
Computer Science rarely happens on blogs. It's a discipline with conference proceedings and journals. You can read those instead of some random person's blog.
> Especially for debugging caching and whatnot, using curl -D - -o /dev/null http://example.net/ makes it extremely simple to see the headers the server is sending for a certain file.

Working on web stuff, I'd needed to see server headers many times, and I have always used the HEAD command, that is part of the libwww-perl package on ubuntu. It's just: HEAD http://example.com.

The libwww-perl package also comes with GET (which is similar to curl in that it sends the retrieved content to standard output) and POST (which sends a POST request to a server) commands which are very handy too.
The reason it's not there is because WebMynd (a YC company) supposedly does the same thing. Ofcourse you could get searchYC on HN using this greasemonkey script: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/25039
It supports flash. FAIL
Ask HN: Possible to learn to develop iPhone apps with no coding experience?
Really keen to build an iPhone/iPad app but I've never coded before. Possible? Where do I start? Many thanks.
One difference between objects and closures is that objects require explicitly passing state into them, while closures can capture state from their context. This is powerful because it lets you explore different abstractions cheaply with closures. Programming in Lisp I frequently stumble upon abstractions that I would not have noticed if I was programming in Java or some other closure-less language. For example, a button is just a closure. It supports exactly one operation: click.
"would you pull the trigger or would you wait to see if someone else is gonna pull the trigger first."

If i was in an Apache attack helicopter loaded with weapons and armor hundreds of feet in the air, and the folks on the ground had what the soldiers suspected were AK-47s, and polos on, Yes, I'd probably wait for them to fire first.
"See How Your Website Looks in your current browser with an iPad frame around it"
See above thread.

My POV = trading is zero sum (or worse, because transactions take money, and brokers are a guaranteed to win 3rd party in every transaction)

However, I don't think thats the right analogy.

Every trade in trading is like the credit card transaction you make towards Dropbox every month. That transaction is zero sum (with Amex skimming 1.7% and Spreedly taking some too, just like brokers). I buy a stock, for an agreed upon price.

Dropbox gets nothing if they don't provide value to the marketplace. You don't get customers in trading if you don't provide value to the marketplace. Every dropbox competitor takes dollars out of dropbox's pocket (so in that sense is zero sum across strategies). Every trade I take from Citadel is a trade they don't make.

There's lots of money flying around, its a big pie, I just want some crumbs.

Basically, startups get paid because they fill a market need.

Traders get paid because they fill a market need. If I create a strategy that nobody wants to trade against, I'll have no customers, make no trades, and will never get paid.

I'm not saying there aren't sketchy strategies (true in finance and web startups). I'm not on top of the whole flash orders story, and I think some people take advantage of weaknesses in the system. Thats true in every industry though.
This fits comfortably in the slot between insanely dumb and amazingly cool.
But the iPad isn’t for me. I want the ability to run arbitrary programs without paying extra money or getting permission from the computer manufacturer... I think the world needs more makers, which is why I don’t intend to buy an iPad. That said, I think the typical consumer will love the iPad.

There's nothing about the hardware which is anti-maker, other than anything which specifically supports DRM, which I believe is minimal. It's almost all in the software.

What if Apple came out with the modern day version of Hypercard running in a sandbox, with capability-based gating of important facilities like dialing? HyperCard supported lots of do it yourself tinkering. For those makers who want to go to the next step, the App Store itself and the SDK are a worthwhile target.
Harvard Guide to RSI Prevention
I feel like we have a bunch of trigger-happy teenagers viewing the world through a video-game-like HUD with a joystick, just itching to light something up.

Nobody should support this.

Also, imagine being a child with an Apache circling your town waiting to dispense this sort of justice. You'd probably become a terrorist, wouldn't you?
In the course of this conversation, I am the only one who has been attacked. If you can tell me a way I can interpret that comment that is not insulting, I'd be happy to hear it.

I have been quite civil, I have presented two sources and could procure more, but I am done with this thread. I know that my opinions on such things are unpopular here, and I do not expect to be lauded or reach consensus.

"Confirmation bias can be a real hindrance in seeing the truth."
If you want to think that's what this is, that I'm a lone woman with a chip on my shoulder, if that makes you feel better, then please disregard the sources I posted earlier.
I agree, however it could be easily claimed that this is negligent homicide.
Change "break the law" to "go against the wishes of the copyright holder", and the answer is yes.

When you buy the device, it's yours.

The perception that copyright allows the copyright holder to dictate everything you do with a device or piece of content is spurious, and the more people realize that, the better.

http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/02/apple-says-jailbreaking...

kb
The best way I know is to work on something innovative that gets some press.
On his blog he has shown tremendous skill with a/b testing. He wrote an excellent Ruby library for it that beats Google's own product in certain areas.
Thank you Xerox (for not Patenting the GUI)
You are right. Agreed. I take blogger's bait far too often. However, I continue to hope that this particular forum will attract more engineers, and fewer bloggers.
You are right. A lot of people forget about the Aeronautics part of National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
One problem I've noticed with a very closure-heavy style is that debugging is a pain — you have a closure with a bunch of local state and no way to print or otherwise access it (from the repl, say). So then you end up writing special cases of the function for when the first argument is :debug... any better ways to do this?
Gene Munster Explains How He Blew The iPad Sales Estimates
Why location based advertising won't work in its current form
Ask HN: What was a time you hacked a (non-computer) system to your advantage?
This question is originally from the YCombinator application and I think it's really interesting. The title is a bit chopped down, the original question reads: "Tell us about the time you most successfully hacked some (non-computer) system to your advantage."
Oh and he says 'luuuuuuurve', but remember, he's not writing on HN so he doesn't have to adhere to the local standard of blandness in writing.

One man's lack of blandness is another man's low grade school level mocking.
It never was exponential.

The correct name of a growth curve with limited resources is a Sigmoid.
http://www.metablake.com/m/home.html is the home of Blake Shaw who did this analysis; good papers on how to analyze spatiotemporal data... like this taxicab data.
I'm not quite sure what this whole openness hate is on the iPad.

Let's say google comes out with the heralded ChromeOS tablet, featuring a webkit browser that is really fast and can run all kinds of different HTML5 apps. Hooray for Openness!

...but doesn't the iPad have a very fast webkit browser that can run all kinds of different HTML5 apps too, plus this added feature called the "app store" that lets you make all kinds of other neat stuff. Isn't:

(web browser + app store) > web browser?

If not, how is it any less open than ChromeOS?
Maybe not so much with the “optimization”
More the JVM and libraries than the language.
Ridicule is often one's best defense against the ridiculous.
This can also be a bad thing. If you explicitly pass in parameters to something, it's much easier to tell where certain pieces of data are coming from.
Great job on Shapado! A question: how long did this take you in development-hours and over how many months?
It's true that I tend to take a narrow economic view of exported 'service', but that's because the kinds of people displaced by this recession, and the ones likely left out of finding work in a transformed economy would not be the ones that are highly skilled/technically inclined.
Whoever was shooting lived through this once in real-time. Everyone else gets to view it again and again, stop the action, if they please, back up...
Quite honestly the subject of "Replacing Java with Ruby/Python/..." is so complex I think it's a minefield to argue either for or against it in less than an essay.

Which organization? Product or internal app? Consulting gig or internal development? Telephone book of specs or stakeholders iteratively refining requirements? &c. &c.

It's true that I'm not writing Java any more, but the Java apps I used to write are still there making money for their owners, and none of them have called me up to say they want to do all new development in Ruby.

It's more a case of there being new kinds of opportunities afforded by a different style of development. And this is perfectly in accordance with the theory of disruptive technology put forth in "The Innovator's Dilemma."

So what was my point again? Oh yes, I agree from time to time there is talk of replacing Java, but it is a little more complex than a wholesale project-for-project replacement with all other factors remaining fixed.

If I were pitching it, I would pitch the benefits of a new way of developing software, and only when that point is made would I point out that Ruby and Javascript are tools that suit the new way more than Java.

I'd rather do that than pitch the languages and spring the "gotcha" that you'll have to change the way you develop software to be successful with the new languages.
Smalltalk showed us that the future of programming may be dominated for decades by the ideas in language with only modest success today.

That idea all by itself is worth a blog post.
For selectors I have this order:
- display
- z-index
- width
- height
- margin
- padding
- border
- font/text
- background

Reasoning: I first want to define where and why an element is displaced at a certain position. I than work from the outside to the inside for styling. Lastly I define the background.

I tried to have some logic but keep it a little easy to use to. ( I dont put the border in between margin and padding)
Binary File to Base64 Encoder / Translator
Bash fu?
alias qwer='curl -o'
Save time with Vim Macros
I ignored those labels, I tried to not let myself distract by anything that added by the editors. I pretty much only trusted the labels at the very beginning when all the people were pretty clearly recognizable. Doesn’t change much, though.
When invoked as sh, Bash enters POSIX mode after reading the startup files.
I can't see how you've been attacked, unless you're a feminist. I don't know if it's insulting in general or insulting to you. It wouldn't be insulting to you if it wasn't insulting to you.

That last part is a straw man because you did not provide evidence for your claim that "HN, and the wider hacker culture, is often unwelcoming to women" at the time you made that claim. Also you should clarify if you mean "all women", "some women" or "one woman" by "women".

In any case I strongly suspect you have not closely examined my name.
Were they designed to replace something, they would fail.

C# and .NET were designed to replace Java. The result is that it's mostly confined to Windows.

What Ruby did is to beget Rails. Rails does replace Java (and PHP, and .NET) in a lot of scenarios with many advantages.

Ruby was not designed to replace Java the same way Java was not designed to replace COBOL.
The article answers that question. In one word: Exports.
The video can prove grave incompetency. If you can't distinguish between standard photo lens [1] and a full-blown rocket-propelled grenade [2] you shouldn't be engaging in combat.

[1] - http://collateralmurder.com/file/photos/5dwlens.jpg.html
[2] - http://collateralmurder.com/file/photos/terrorist_pg7c.jpg.h...
That video was incredibly eye-opening. Everyone needs to see it just to know what war is like in the 21st century. You can't just ignore this shit.

As for the itching part, I felt at first he was threatened, and I could sense a bit of fear in his voice that the RPG was going to be aimed at him (not sure what the chances are of that hitting the copter though), and I felt like I could understand that reaction were I in a similar position...but then it was pretty clear he just wanted to light it up.

I guess my take on all of this is that these kids are over there in a war zone. Their friends die. The enemy is real and they have been ordered to kill him. You can't blame the kids, but it's so hard to hear their voices knowing they were once living a life like you are, away from danger and war. To most of us, this is just a capture of a video game. It's crazy shit.
> If not, how is it any less open than ChromeOS?

You're setting up an artificial comparison with ChromeOS. I think most people are comparing the iPad to a Mac or PC. There's no question that it's far less open than either.
Yes and no.

I would say that most Googlers would genuinely prefer that the candidate succeed. And Google has interview training that is supposed to help the interviewer put the candidate at ease, and get a fair result.

But as you say, it's human nature.

People who are defensive about their Googlerhood, or just lazy about interviewing, usually ask unfair questions. Ridiculous 'aha' puzzlers, for example. And my personal pet peeve, asking the candidate to solve a problem that you just solved a couple of days ago (perhaps after several days of collaboration and research).
You can write FORTRAN code in just about any language.

It just happens the Java version will have twice as many lines.
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