skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
@bshep: A bit offtopic, but how has your experience been with PayPal so far?

I'm investigating payment gateways for a SAAS offering (I'm based in Canada), and despite all the negativity surrounding PayPal, it seems to be the easiest way to go. I can't afford to go with Braintree, and I'm not quite sure they even deal with Canadian companies.
Ask HN: Android or iPhone Os, where do you think the money is for developers?
I've opted for Android to make some cash, and from what I see, the android market keeps growing but for some reasons, android users seems to not care much about apps, or at least spending money for apps, at the other hand iphone users spend a lot. Android will shortly probably have the biggest market share, but iphone users will keep spending money, as Business men (not developper, we are talking about money, not the ToS of apple), where do you think the most money will be? Care to share your views?
Thanks for the down votes. I feel like sites like mog.com (I'm just a happy customer) are really much better than any alternatives. They have all of the songs I want, I don't have to download anything, and I don't have to pay per track. So, if I don't like a song, I don't feel bad about it. Add social features on top of that and the experience is even better.

As a customer, I don't feel cheated with subscription services. I think they are a real way to stop piracy and make people want to pay for music again.
I was trying to make a subtle point that callahad kinda outed.

It's a fine line between helping each other and speaking a language that posers don't understand. So I just did ascii, thinking that any real programmer would immediately understand. I forgot the code for "space", so I skipped it, wondering if anyone would notice. tome did.

Just having a little fun on an otherwise mundane Tuesday.
I split my work about 40/60 between:

1) sitting down at my home office (nice wood furniture and decor the whole works)

2) standing at my work office (ugly but very functional perma-temporary standing desk)

... and don't have any problems at all. I type as long as needed, etc. However, I never stand still for more than a few seconds. (This seems to be a built-in feature of me, rather than anything I do intentionally.)
This is awesome, adding herbs/spices would be what makes me use it.
Gaming Company Sues Forum for Trademark Violations Function or Something
haha not just me using 90210. Think I've been entering that as my zip code for US offers for a very long time :)

I guess you could do something with lat,long from GeoKit (on Rails) to avoid asking for zip code specifically.
Congratulations on getting things going. I have forwarded your link to a couple friends that I think would find your startup interesting/useful.

Cheers.
I find it interesting the developer has to worry about the parallelization. Shouldn't the data persistence layer (be it a relational database or some other data engine) deal with that (and use parallelization whenever possible)?
I'm not sure if you find it easier to read, but this is analogous:

var developerNames = from emp in employees.AsParallel().AsOrdered()
where emp.Role == Role.Developer
orderby emp.LastName
select emp.FullName;
Save $60 a Year on Your Internet
Reddit's spam filter is completely and totally broken (or at least was about a month ago). The moderators effectively get to pick and choose what stories even hit the queue. I had a user there (same handle as here) that had something like 3000 link karma and something in the tens of thousands of comment karma.

Every story I posted would get flagged as "spam", meaning I had to message a moderator. Typically, the responses I would get would be things like "sorry, I don't really like the article. Post it somewhere else.".

Granted, these were typically opinion articles that I had written, so I could understand where they were coming from to a small degree. The problem with this was that the ones that did get accepted usually made the front page.

Don't get me wrong, I still use reddit to a degree, but it isn't really a technology site anymore. People will say things like "subscribe to better subreddits!", and I do, but none of them really see much traffic. A lot of times, I'll load the page and it will say "there is nothing here". The pics section has some funny things (although the majority of them seem to be tagged with 4gifs.com, which I assume means they all came from 4chan), and so does the "ask" section. There is still some entertainment value to the site, but it isn't really a list of democratically chosen articles anymore.
But that's because you already know perl. For new people... I don't see a reason to go there. Perl smells funny - there are better alternatives that don't require you to spend time learning (for example) what can be referenced, what cannot, when is \ not taking a reference, why I cannot have lists-inside-lists, and how is that different from arrays anyway, etc. And that's only one source of that funny smell... For beginners, there are loads of languages which offer consistent behaviour and once they learn that, perl will be the odd one you don't really want to touch.

So yes - some people will still write perl, but it will be an obscure language one day (hopefully).
Why isn't Digi-Key in the vendor list? That would help. Otherwise, very very nice site. Will use more often!
You know what? That's Apple's fault, too. They went with AT&T. AT&T is what Apple wanted, and AT&T is a part of the iPhone experience. Everyone says how Apple works really hard to make sure every aspect of the experience is rock solid, etc. Fine. AT&T is apart of that. Apple said "The AT&T experience is how we want to be represented in the mobile world." If AT&T's service isn't good, this reflect directly on the iPhone, and Apple. The iPhone is Apple's product, not AT&T's.
True for LINQ to SQL, not so much for LINQ to Objects as evaluated in the benchmarks. Of course, one toy benchmark over 1k objects doesn't fully characterize its performance, but at least we don't have to worry about the database latency free variable.
The myth of [online] privacy, or how facebook is becoming more realistic
The addressees of an open letter are seldom the intended recipients.
>The thing with Reddit is that it seems biased against new users and accusations of linkspam are far too prevalent.

It isn't just new users. My user there was 2 years old and had plenty of karma, yet almost all of my submissions got tagged as spam.
clever - this is the marketing thread that could be very valuable - as a marketing guy I think this is brilliant
judging by your list, late 2000s were the most stable market we had in decades...
See also: http://www.taxfoundation.org/news/show/1126.html

There are plenty of stupid governmental policies, but few as maliciously stupid as lotteries, where the government spends hundreds of millions of dollars buying advertising to encourage poor people to lose their money.
you're neglecting the huge amount of Perl used in text processing, system administration, automation, even the sciences

Are you saying that perl usage had started to fall off in these areas before it lost its crown as the lingua franca of the web? Possible, but again that is not how I remember it rolling out.
I really like your qualifications. In my own experience, e.g. with regard to "networking" advice that is promulgated, they are too often ignored. No wonder the advice feels awkward to someone who is sensitive to exactly these issues/concerns.
accessing database data over a connection with non-trivial latency. ... But the toy benchmark doesn't address it

I disagree entirely. I know when I'm using LINQ to SQL, and when I'm using LINQ to objects. My experience is that LINQ to objects is more common and very useful. He's using larger data volumes than I generally am, so there's absolutely nothing "toy" about it.
I'm disappointed that the exchanges have decided to nullify the trades conducted during this period. If hedge funds and quants are going to put semi-autonomous trading programs into the market, they need to have accountability for their actions. Eliminating the consequences for this kind of out-of-control trading creates moral hazard, in the same way as bailing out housing speculators who now can't pay their mortgage. If we declare a re-do every time the computer trading systems create an automated melt-down, then there's no real incentive to put buffers in place to prevent recurrence.
Getting PHP framework CodeIgniter to play with Facebook
Yea. Rah. Rah. iPad.
I wish I remembered where I heard this concept, as it helped make the tendency to purchase lottery tickets by low-income individuals more understandable:

Buying lottery tickets is buying 'hope insurance'

From my own perspective, there are a few different ways in which I could become fabulously wealthy, or at least much more financially secure than I am now. I could create or work for a hugely successful company. I could make a killing in real estate. I could win second place in a beauty contest. Lots of different things.

I try my best not to be materialistic, but there are times when I see beautiful homes or fancy cars or $650 Prada shoes and I think "I could so totally enjoy that someday". There's at least a little bit of hope that I could, someday.

There are lots of people out there who, without the ability to buy lottery tickets, would feel they have no possible way to become fabulously wealthy (even if that feeling isn't strictly correct). For these people, there's no sense of hope for breaking out of where they are, and the absence of hope is very painful. Spending a few dollars a week on lottery tickets to keep that hope alive becomes a sort of rational purchase. People aren't actuarial robots.

I'm not saying that I think that buying lottery tickets are a good idea, or that government-run lotteries aren't a form of abusive regressive taxation, but the conclusion of the linked article that people are still poor because they keep on buying lottery tickets is naive and condescending.
I know this is wishful thinking, but here's a solution: Stop worrying about pixel-perfect websites across browsers?

As developers, we degrade gracefully if JavaScript is disabled. How about, instead, we degrade gracefully if the visitor is using IE6?

If a visitor using IE6 views my site and they see boxy divs versus others who see rounded corners, does it take away anything from the IE6 visitor? They're still seeing the content (which, hopefully, is the main purpose of their visit!)

Obviously, this isn't a solution for everyone (and seriously, wishful thinking, hah!)

So for my actual response: You're absolutely right. I'm not arguing we start implementing a CSS3 solution along with a JS solution today. This demo (along with other css3 articles) isn't about today. It's about tomorrow and the future of the web.

However, if we keep catering to older browsers, what's their incentive to upgrade?? Sure, we could throw a JS hack together to get all browsers to function the same, but why? (sorry, wishful thinking again!)

I do commend you on degrading gracefully. Many developers simply don't. And just to point out, I completely understand where you're coming from. Good day!
Which trends are making testing via the cloud more popular?
Lotteries are a sad story of Government policy gone awry. They prey on the poor, uneducated. It seems they could be just a devious plot to get back the tax refund the poor (as in sad) people get every year.
Why can't you blame the original author since you know it was likely his first larger program?

I know that Perl's defaults (mainly lack of strict and warnings) can make it easy to write code that easily breaks or has bugs or is harder to maintain, but it is the first time I hear the argument that it make it any easier or encourage someone to write 4k lines when he could have written 500 lines.

I would guess that guy would have created a 4k monstrosity in Python if that's what he had to use without having enough experience.

Or maybe I am not being imaginative enough?
Can you give examples from the program you rewrote where Perl encourage beginners to write "huge monstrosities" while Python would have encouraged them to write succinct code ?
Platform debates aside, I think the easy answer is to follow the money.

iPhone users have a track record of spending money - the iTunes App store is a huge success. I have seen more stories of iPhone developers making scads of money than I have for Android. Having said that, that is a catch-22. The successes represent around 1% of all of the apps in the store.

The one emerging problem with the iTunes App store, however, is discoverability. It is damned hard to get discovered within the iTunes App store. Clearly to be successful, you have to get a lot of good buzz outside of the App store.
I disagree with your implication that Perl is suitable for newbs but should be discarded for "better languages" by people who are interested in learning.

In fact I would invert your statement: I think Perl is not a good choice for people without good programming habits, but for those who know how to use it, it offers more power of expression than most of its peers.

(Also, datum: count me in as an "older person" preferring Perl for most tasks despite knowing Ruby, Python, JS and half a dozen other languages.)
It is very true. Intelligence Agencies are always wondering how to view the data better. I know for one example, we have 150 TB's of video data coming in every day from Iraq and Afghanistan and we are trying to find ways to view it.

One number my boss says a lot is the CIA wishes they had 14,300 Analysts to view through all this information at once. These of course would be 14,300 people looking at video 24/7... Its a huge problem that doesn't have a solution at all yet.
I don't want to be "this guy", but if you have an idea capable of producing revenue and the execution and marketing skills to put it into peoples hands; there's no reason you shouldn't be able to release it to both platforms.

It sounds like your after "code a weekend and get paid millions". Which is a statistically non-existent market on either of the platforms.
I really like this! And, congrats on the startup! It looks like you're off to a great start.

I live in a fairly unique climate in the US (maritime, like England), and as a gardener, I'd say your planting picks are reasonable for my area.

A few general thoughts:

People have said it here already, but container gardening+++. It's how a lot of people get started gardening, and therefore is a compelling product for your market niche, inexperienced gardeners. Pick a great product and sell it, I think the 'insta-garden' pitch is likely to be a big seller for you.

I would personally recommend you resell earthboxes, they're fabulous and have good online marketing if people care to learn about them. Partner up with local organic soil and fertiliser providers, and get them to do the shipping for you if you're worried about logistics. Earthbox might cross promote you if you got in touch, your site is cute and cool.

Second, I think you should find a better source for gardening advice than google lucky searches. There are a lot of possibilities here, and eventually crowdsourcing _local_ tips would be awesome -- as you know, gardening is always a really local activity -- but you might just hire a well-'spoken' vegetable gardener to write up instructions, or look for a gardening book writer who wants to cross promote on your site.

That is all, and good luck!

Also, your site is overloaded and Heroku is complaining sometimes. Congrats.
many of the "old school" also knew their way out of all kinds of bag and choose perl. Nobody needs to know (pick your language) but knowing perl has really helped me out in my long career in programming. You seem to be of the kind that does not like perl so are looking for the future where no one uses it .
If you think COBOL is only used in legacy code bases, every time you search for a hotel or Air tickets you are most probably interacting with a main frame system
There is a new generation of tablets upon us, expect to hear about them (from many manufacturers) a lot in the coming months.
The Real Estate Collapse has taken a lot of players to the sidelines along with their empty pockets. Note that Buffett has been very busy lately.

NOTE:

- I could not find specific dates for the California Real Estate Crash (coupled to DoD funding cutbacks, maybe early 90's?). I remember finding entire high-end strip malls empty in La Jolla, CA.

- Also forgot to mention the Texas Oil and Real Estate Bust - mid 80's (I met a realor from TX who was doing foreclosures back then that told me in 2005 that it wasn't going to happen again: http://books.google.com/books?id=http://books.google.com/boo...)

- Enron Scandal of 2001 (tied to Dot Com collapse, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enron_scandal)
Short term definitely the iPhone, longer term probably the android.
Compilation is translation.
but I find the following even easier to understand

Entirely subjective. To me, "#(= (:" is pure line noise.
Scroogle shall be sorely missed.

I've now switched to using ixquick instead:

https://us2.ixquick.com/

Does anyone know of any other privacy-respecting search engines that can be used over SSL ?
I also agree that clicking download should let me download the file.
I don't mean to be pedantic (and I certainly don't mean to defend this article), but the author doesn't claim that the engineer was fired; they say, "Apple may yet fire the engineer". Which is true, I suppose - Apple may yet fire any of their employees. Nevertheless, it is still a ridiculously speculative thing to write in a "news story".
It seems like the best thing to do would be to get names for an e-mail list, and ask for country and locale so that he can decide if/when to go international. This particular business does not scale well internationally, though. Food, climate, local restrictions, plant import laws all make this a tough go.
> It sounds like your after "code a weekend and get paid millions".

What gave you that impression? Or has the submission been edited?
If you want to keep it really simple why don't you just give a jar-file directly? Why do you deal with all that native packaging?
I see it sort of like the free support at the Genius Bar--it helps keep Mac users being Mac users. Plus tying their future platform to iTunes is unsustainable in a world where everyone else will be cloud based.
Contributing to Wikipedia as a non-editor

Do you mean "contributing to Wikipedia as someone without a user account"? I just started doing Wikipedia edits, having first set up a Wikipedia account, when I declared a vacation from Facebook. I like to contribute good content to the Interwebs. On Facebook, I was mostly contributing links to articles about Facebook privacy issues. While I was taking a break from Facebook, another HN participant linked to a Wikipedia article in an HN thread, and I saw an edit I could do there that would change the close-enough-for-government work word into the exactly correct word. So I made the edit. Later I made a more substantive edit and added a recent reference to a more visited and more controversial article--on a subject much discussed here on HN. Over time, I will check how well my edits are accepted. Someday I'll try posting a whole new article, when I have a sense of what is missing and have reference materials at hand. I'll evaluate my experience by how other Wikipedians respond to my edits.
The advantage of doing it in CSS is that browsers can implement animation themselves.

Animation in JavaScript is a bit of a hack - run a loop with setInterval, change the value of various CSS values for each frame, dynamically adjust the frame rate based on the amount of time left, implement your own easing...

If an animation is described to the browser directly (fade from this value to this value taking this much time) the browser can implement all of the above itself, in a standard way. With access to APIs like Core Animation, the browser can even take advantage of hardware acceleration.

I argue that it makes sense for browsers to provide an animation API. The only remaining question is what form that API should take. It can either be exposed as CSS syntax, or as part of the DOM APIs exposed to JavaScript (document.animateElement(el, ...) for example).

CSS is meant to handle presentation logic, so if you define animation as part of the presentation layer of your site then putting it there isn't really that crazy.
Out of curiosity, what kind of topics are you writing about when you submit well-cited articles that are later deleted?
R.I.P. Frank Frazetta (1928 - 2010)
The poverty essay
When you are trying to work on a good poverty essay, the first thing that poses a challenge is the selection of a topic. It is therefore important to understand that without a good topic,
I have to agree with you there. I'm certain that the iPhone's ties to AT&T only has to be a drag on iPhone sales. Not everyone is willing/able to switch to AT&T.

For myself personally, I love my N1, but I probably never would have got to know that if the iPhone had been available on other carriers. I wanted to by an iPhone since back when they first came out, but AT&T get's completely crappy reception in my neighborhood. :-( If there'd been a TMobile iPhone I would have bought one a loooong time ago.

(I realize you can run a jailbroken iPhone on Tmo, but that just never seemed worth it. You lose 3G, and I'm not excited about ruining the warranty right out of the box on something as expensive as an iPhone.)
This is a repost of http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1304234
It would look that way if you don't know Clojure's quick and dirty function literal syntax. Another way to write it is:

(fn [x] (= (:role x) 'developer))
Interview with Sean Ellis on "How to Bring Your Product to Market"
An hour ago it said "Apple fired the engineer who ...."

So we've learned that, when IW prints incorrect information, it will silently update the story without making an explicit correction.
There's also a really cool library if you need a core dump, but don't want to actually stop the application: http://code.google.com/p/google-coredumper/ - it needs one line only:

WriteCoreDump('filename');
Excellent article really nailing the root of things.
I am fairly sure that is a rewrite from when I read it. I reacted on how they claimed the engineer was fired in no uncertain terms.
My Startup: A Different Take on UML - What do you think?
Yeah, if the article had made that argument it would have a lot more validity.
Right now I'd say that by many metrics, Apple is beating Microsoft. Its products are much hotter in the marketplace, its stock is doing better, and its products are considered better by most.
DHH vs Eric Ries at leanca.mp in London 
David Heinemeier Hansson (in London) takes on Eric Ries (via Skype from California) in their first public appearance together, at Leancamp London (http://leanca.mp) on 10 May 2010. They entertainingly disagree on approaches to venture-funded startups, revenue generation and more... (and of course they agree on a lot too!)
Yeah no doubt. And maybe this is really the best way to get things started. It definitely isn't enough though. Anymore than The Gimp guys asking the CEO of Adobe to make Photoshop save files in XCF format.
In the This American Life episode #329, there's a great interview with a person who buys up lottery winners' annuities for (discounted) lump sums. After seeing what happens to the lives of so many "instant millionaire" lottery winners, he starts seeing winning the lottery as a horrible curse instead of as a wonderful blessing.

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/329/N...

The interviewee, Ed Ugel, wrote a book on the subject:
http://www.edwardugel.com/money-for-nothing.html
Then I'd rather logout than install some mysterious stuff. I wouldn't mind a chrome or firefox extension that interferes with this process, though. It should be not too difficult to implement.
Duct Tape Marketing's Dirty Little Marketing Research Secret