skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Most of the users that use that site don't care about ease of use. As long as they can find matches, for free, they're happy.
> Plentyoffish needs to hire a designer.

I'd say he knows his target audience well enough to make that decision himself. There is indeed such a thing as being too polished. The reason late-night TV commercials are cheesy and loud is not because the director lacks the skills but rather because it suits the target market. If POF redesigned their site to look like a glamor magazine website, he might indeed lose a lot of users because they might be intimidated by the design.
HN: Hacker News Reader for iPad (Now Open Source, Do Contribute)
In my opinion, a piece of code can advance further with the help of a community than with the efforts of a single developer. The Hacker News community is one that I respect greatly and would love to give back to, and on that note, am making the recently published "Hacker News Reader" for iPad free (might take a day or two to propagate to AppStore servers) and open source. Though selling a product may bring more materialistic wealth and, perhaps, instant gratification, the feeling one gets from sharing code and furthering a project as a community is, I have come to understand, far more rewarding.

My blog: http://markfayngersh.com
My email: phunny.phacts@gmail.com

Project repo: http://github.com/gmaster1440/Hacker-News-Reader-for-iPad

Now, for the greater good of Hacker News and its users, let us make a killer iPad client!

Cheers,

Mark Fayngersh
No bullshit policy
Doesn't it seem mean-spirited for a well known individual to jump to a conclusion in a public forum that a person suffers from mental illness due to their behavior, all descriptions of which likely only comes from blogs and newspapers?

Without knowing the person in question, what else is there to go off of beyond news and blogs? Seems to me he was stating his opinion based off those sources and I came to the same conclusion.
Four senators ask Facebook to make privacy fixes
see http://videolectures.net/mlss09uk_schoelkopf_km/ - kernel methods in general, not limited to SVM
another waterlooer! really like how the engineering page turned out.
As I said before:
>It's not me I'm worried about it coming off as patronizing to.

I know Zed's history. I'm not going to have issues using the book. But random non-programmers don't. And those are the people I'd hand the book to. I've got a thicker skin than some of them, and wouldn't care about the tone of the tome even if he directly insulted me. But THEY would. That's the issue.
You could try reflection and/or dynamic. The latter requires .Net 4.
Technology moves fast, art slower.
You could use Reflection to search for types based on structure. But there is no syntax for it.

Actually Linq + Reflection is some of the most entertaining code to write C#. Example: http://github.com/ecoffey/Bebop/blob/master/Bebop/BebopAppli...

we're saying there "Give me all the types out of a specific assembly that implement IResource".
Pair programming never worked (overall) for my partner and I. Generally, I found both participants have to be extremely focused, have roughly the same skill level, and the code should be worked out on paper before "iterating." Otherwise, we ended up arguing over trivialities or bird walks over to youtube in the moments where we both were stumped (more my partner--I'm not a big fan). Long story short, we use pair cowboy programming now with more success. I guess it's all dependent on the cohesion between partners' attitudes towards work; if partners' ethics are different use logical cohesion on a project else use functional cohesion (which is definitely preferred but not always an option). Hope that makes sense, just my limited take on the topic. Does anyone have any success stories with pair programming--I could use the tips!
My experience is that the more successful i18n is the more people stay in their ghetto and nationalism, Internet of 10 years ago was way more international and boundary shattering than it is today.
That is an excellent quote, although it's given me a few more things to strive for in my life. (butcher a hog, set a bone, write a sonnet, die gallantly)
Stop using server frameworks to do web development, there is no need anymore, it is useless overcomplexity that is not needed. If you are doing Java use JAX-RS and stand up some RESTful services (Netbeans will generate them off of a JPA annotated class). Then build your web front end with W3C compliant technologies (HTML, Javascript, CSS). When you have the epiphany to go mobile or IVR you don't have to rewire a bunch of config files (get sick of the headaches and rewrite separate classes for mobile) to display in a new medium. you just build a front end for that technology and call the business logic that sits behind your service architecture.

It is a much faster development approach because in the end when you deliver to new platforms the logical work flow changes due to screen size constrains or the fact that it is a voice activated system.
A. Actually we don't really change seats that much, but we do change 'drivers' so each of us takes turns to type in stuff, but again this isn't based on any specific guideline.

B. Yes, it is slightly more taxing than working solo, but the advantage is that you feel more productive and better about yourself because you've completed a lot of stuff in a day.

Just to illustrate this - we've done four sprints of one-week each so far, and in every sprint we've achieved more than we had planned to do (even though are targets are quite ambitious).
I wish I was better at design. On the other hand there's this wonderful principle called division of labor, and while I might spend 10 hours designing a mediocre website, a good designer will design a great one in half the time. This has actually happened to me. After spending a weekend building out some pages that I thought looked pretty good, my designer friend sent me a photoshop mockup that made me decide to totally scrap what I had made, and go with her design instead.

The most productive I've ever been has been while working in tandem with a good designer, because it frees me up to do what I do best, and that's write code.

Now, I will say that it's important for any web developer to understand principles of design, because understanding what your users actually want is crucial for both backend and frontend work, thinking about user interaction, your data model, etc.
You could say the same about myspace, but it's still alive.
I always found this somewhat inelegant. I suppose given all the constraints, its OK, but it feels like such a feature (such as the collection initializers) should be based on language constructs, not compiler special cases.
One common theme, at least for the programmers growing up in the 80s, was that all the BASICs had graphics support.

Like you, I didn't learn logic and control structures to print out tables of numbers, I learned it so I could make an object move on the screen and to draw pretty pictures. I learned all the print capabilities to make a pretty looking layout on the screen and to get some random information "just so".

The reason I say this is that I like the idea behind this text, a lot, for people who want to learn from nothing, but I don't think it will hold people's interest for that long. I keep wondering if they'll just burn out if you're doing nothing but printing out the textual results of logic puzzles.

I'm not asking for a video game, in fact, I'm not sure exactly what I'm asking for, but there's got to be a way to light a fire in someone's head the same way it lit in mine when I typed in "line 32,32 to 32,64" from the BASIC manual and a red line appeared on the screen... and I realized I could do anything on that screen with the right sequence of commands... anything.

(Well, I found out otherwise later... but that's how it felt)

(And yeah, I realize getting graphics set up in python sucks for rank beginners... part of the reason I'm not sure exactly what should be done...)
Works - i had to add

#!/usr/bin/env ruby

require 'rubygems'
require 'cinch'

to it though...
I'm curious about how common this is with big corporations?

Do they really think someone will be fooled by their demands which have no force behind them?
Nice concept. I dont have a site ready to use for a beta so don't need to sign up for that. Is there a Twitter feed or email list to stay updated on the progress?
Its doesn't even need to look like a glamor magazine website (none of the dating websites do). Even if he doesn't need to make the site look half decent, the design itself is broken. Thumbnails doesn't seem to be properly scaled, they seemed compressed in to a smaller version (I could be wrong but the thumbnails are screwed up for some reason) and what is this in ever profile? http://i.imgur.com/Knicz.png

Its less than 5 minutes worth of work to fix that.
That'd probably result in things getting ruined quicker.
I got a free moto droid from Google for Google IO.

I have been using a Blackberry 8900 for the past year and a half or so.

Even in Blackberry OS 4.2 there are a lot of things that seem simple and elegant compared to Android. The Moto Droid GPS is mega slow to get a signal and crashed hard twice, killing the phone's battery.

I don't think Blackberry should be counted out just yet. If I could pinch/zoom a webkit browser (even on the tiny screen of my 8900) I think I'd actually use the web from it not just as a browser of last resort.
Watching this in mute can make you convinced it's Cramer from Mad Money.
I definitely recommend keeping sketchpads, graph paper, and a chalk/whiteboard around. It gives us a new mode of thinking in addition to plain old code.
SCIgen - An Automatic CS Paper Generator
Oi! I'm meeting & dating some wonderful women through these things! You just have to know the game and play along.

A little experience with queuing models and Petri nets also helps.
What matters to you may not matter to other people.

A lot of people have been saying that Craigslist should have better design, more search options, etc but the site is still popular.
Yeah but Superman's better than Tony Stark and he can't design anything, so this argument is entirely invalidated.
yeah, goal oriented teaching is where it's at IMO.

I still remember C64 and I typed in (I still remember it):

POKE 53280,0 : POKE 53281,0

and voila, black 1337 haxor screen like "big" computers had! Then curiosity kicked in and I learned what POKE was and what it does and what are those addresses etc.

Also one vital thing about my specific path is that I asked for a computer (my first one was ZX-80) when I read about some computer game (I think it was called valhalla or something) where there was this whole world you could explore and my first reaction was not "cool I'd like to explore it" but was more like "cool I can make my own world with this computer thing"!
It's sublime to read about Chomsky (in his) Normal Form ;-)
Are you going to help with PCI compliance, say, by letting us use JS to post card data direct to your site, and only returning an ID code?
I suspect the reason this works this way is because `foreach` is a language construct - not a part of the .NET Framework Class Library.
On the other hand, `IEnumerable` is an interface defined in the class library that ships as part of the .NET runtime. Having the foreach construct require implementing IEnumerable will tie the compiler to a specific class definition. So instead, it only looks for a method with that name, which happens to be formalized in the class library in the form of an interface called IEnumerable.

Edit: hm.. but I note that this doesn't work for the using(){} construct.

This requires the object to implement an interface that is convertable to IDisposable instead of just looking for a `Dispose` method.
Also Batman's outfit looks like it was designed by Lenovo but it never stopped him from wrecking bad guys.
I'm a 29 year old sucker for nostalgia.
Anyone knows what the situation is with exception handling on windows?
Needs more blue ribbon.
That's an actual pattern match. Might as well use matchure ;)

(use 'matchure)
(defn-match factorial
([0] 1)
([?x] (* x (factorial (dec x)))))
Clearly one of those people who have every window maximised to take up the whole screen. Like people who wear white sneakers, do not trust them.
It is indeed possible to use PayPal as a gateway. I believe the product you want is Website Payments Pro (what used to be Verisign), but their offerings are completely indecipherable and I suggest just giving them a call. This also has the benefit of getting you to a person to help guide you through the set up process.
I was expecting more neon green and marquee banners leading my ISP to transition to 56k dialup followed by my exploding laptop
Twitter uses API examples as job advertisements
What would you suggest it do?

Reformat the text to fit the iPad's screen completely.

Doesn't seem like too much of a hassle. Some titles are really long and scaling the size would create very small fonts.

Its not much of a hassle. But, its still a hassle. And an unnecessary one. UILabel has a numberOfLines property. Please use it; the iPad has a nice, big screen.

Does it hurt?

Does it help? Many of the best iPhone and iPad UI's are about removing extraneous content. Just because you can have something on screen doesn't mean that it needs to be on there.

Fair enough, removed pricing and will post source code up on github.

No, no, no! Open source doesn't mean it has to be free! You can be open source and still charge for the application. I work on Mobile Colloquy; our source is available under a BSD license, yet on the App Store for $2.

FWIW, I bought a copy of the app. And I'll be taking a look at the source and have a few (probably small as I'm slightly busy with finals) patches in a fork at some point this weekend, at latest! :)
Ironically?
I've been hanging out with the WePay guys since shortly after they moved to Silicon Valley. They are really great guys. I also happened to meet Rasmus at WePay's launch party, and he impressed the socks off me with how laid back and unassuming he was. We talked for about half an hour about the history of PHP. I learned a bunch and wanted to hang out with the guy a lot more.

I've been using WePay to manage the payment of sponsorships at the http://HackersandFounders.com meetups, and I'm also using it to transfer money between members of my family.

I have no skin in their game aside from really liking the guys. If you're interested in working for a great startup that has amazing potential, you should really send WePay your resume.
nodebox is pretty good for graphics, python and beginners. only works on macs, though..

http://nodebox.net/code/index.php/Home

if you don't care about python, processing is a great way to teach programming with instant graphic feedback and is cross platform.
I think I read that he actually mis-scales the images on purpose because of a higher click-thru rate.
> Match than demands that we enter into a confidential agreement where we show them how we are able to generate more relationships and dates than they do, and how we got so much bigger along with a lot of other things they want to know.

If you read the letter Match.com sent to him, you will see that he is misrepresenting it here. All they ask him for is proof that the claims he is making are true.

From Match.com:
> We demand that you immediately cease and desist from making these false claims. If your position is that these claims are substantiated, please promptly provide me with substantiation for each of these claims...If disclosing the substantiation data concerns you, Match.com is open to entering into a confidentiality agreement.

I don't know why Match.com would be the people to follow up on a possible false advertising claim like this. I assume they could sue plentyoffish if they don't provide Match with evidence? As plentyoffish points out, it is likely that Match.com (also?) makes false claims, so this could definitely be bluster. But they definitely don't ask for plentyoffish to reveal their processes.
Which social network is best for you?
This please. It doesn't have to be JS, if I can just POST my form to their server, and have the user redirected back with a token that'll work just as well.

Braintree does this, but they're rather pricey.

I've wanted this feature bad enough I've considered launching my own service to do it. Surely there are a decent number of sites out there that want to retain control of their payment form, but want to seriously reduce PCI scope.
I've been an advocate of low, or at least "lower" carbs for a while, but will still indulge in tacos on occasion. I've been trying something new lately by adding whey protein alongside most meals. It's been very mild on my digestion - always a good thing - and it really helps reduce the cravings for other stuff.
I seem to recall reading an interview where this question was asked, and the answer was basically, don't mess with what works....the idea being that, if you're constantly improving, eventually you'll screw something up. He knows it's bad, but he doesn't want to screw things up.

But I agree with you, the design is painful to look at, and usability could be improved a lot. Why he doesn't clean things up a bit is beyond me.

But then, compared to the competitors, POF may not look so pretty, but functionally it is quite good.
This Is How EU Air Space Reboots
I have had (like many people) quite a rollercoaster over the past few years, and after making more money than I needed, and then having the rug pulled out from under me, I remember telling my brother "I just can't wait to get back to an equilibrium" and once I got back to that point, I appreciated it so much more and came to understand that blowing any surplus income (or even worse, money we don't have) is the equivalent of flushing years of your life down the toilet. I love your perspective on money as a form of freedom and couldn't agree more.
Good luck to Match.com - not. Any company could try and use this as justification to find out things about their competitors. For example, 37signals claims: "Over 3 million people use our web-based apps to get things done the simple way." Sending them a letter saying that you don't believe them and that they must substantiate the claim by return mail would, I suspect, be met with much laughter.
Plentyoffish needs to hire a designer. Assuming the number he claims is true, how many users is he loosing because of the site layout?

As many as Craigslist is "loosing," I suspect.
When you're talking about a profession though, engineer means something very specific. It means that you're trained and licensed and can be held legally responsible if whatever you're building should malfunction. Referring to your profession as an engineer when you don't meet those criteria is a bit disingenuous. It's akin to the difference between calling yourself a doctor because you went to medical school, and calling yourself a doctor because you got a PhD in english lit.
http://www.inc.com/magazine/20090101/and-the-money-comes-rol...

On page 4 it discusses exactly that.
The Problem with Facebook Like
We have two 2x8 ft dry-erase boards actually. They have helped immensely during past meets. Surprisingly, Google Wave has helped us organize our collaborative coding a lot; Wave even has a brainstorm app (digital sketchpad) built into the client now.
I did not see it in the post: who wrote this? It's in the first person, but I don't see any attribution.
There's a law firm across the street from my office that has a "no dickheads" recruitment policy - http://www.hyneslawyers.com.au/why-hynes-lawyers-.html

Not dissimilar to 'Do No Evil', these are nice mantras that can garner media attention; just have to be sure they are actually implemented culturally in your company because otherwise you set yourself up for ridicule.
Warning: Sunglasses may be required when viewing this site in combination with others that use lighter backgrounds...
A closer look at Chernobyl, 24 years later
More Bad English, Please
I personally wish they would go and buy a Mac and leave the desktop as it is.
Queuing models and Petri nets? You must be having success.
Fennec on Android
TWiT: It's Leo
if your product was good, it wouldn't need funding after it launched.

Simplified example:

You have a customer acquisition cost of $10, and lifetime customer value is roughly $50. Average customer duration is 18 months. You expect this situation to last for 5 years. Your addressable target market has a population of approximately 20m individuals.

Ignoring all other factors, would you rather have:

a) 100% equity, and a $100k marketing budget?

b) 50% equity, and a $1m marketing budget?

c) 20% equity, and a $5m marketing budget?
Google confirms Android 2.2 will support Flash
The Most Optimistic Man in the World on Global Hunger
I was refuting his assertion that running a fast food joint pays as well as programming. Not that making more money by programming will make you happier.
Same, we were building a maze :]

It's amazing to see social interactions popping up with such limited communication. The lack of a chat feature is actually good imo, makes the whole experience more friendly and imprevisible.
Excellent - thanks!
Exactly! Now, will history repeat itself? Will Match try to acquire PlentyOfFish?
37 signals line is genuinely horseshit though. They're quite clearly counting people who signup as "people who use our web-based apps". That's a truly false and misleading claim. It's beneath them.
Strategic misappropriation, yes. Raging lunatic who has reached his "Falling Down" point, no.
"In three years, he says, you won’t think about Walmart, Target and Amazon when you think about ecommerce. You’ll think about this whole new wave of companies doing flash marketing."

Three years is a very short time to see such a change. I'm skeptical.

Still, Gilt is doing impressive things. I interviewed there a year or so ago and had it worked out I would have taken the job without hesitation. Seemed like they had interesting technical requirements ranging from scaling/performance down to supply chain integration. The financial reward upside seemed pretty huge, too, considering their revenue growth rate and IPO possibility.
I can't see how Match.com could possibly defend their case in court if they tried to sue. They'd essentially be asking a competing firm to reveal their trade secrets.
Jack Crenshaw's book Let's Build a Compiler http://compilers.iecc.com/crenshaw/ is probably too far to the pragmatic end; it essentially walks you through the process of writing a recursive-descent compiler in Pascal for a Pascal-like language that generates code for the m68k. No separate parser and lexer as such, but he does teach you how to turn those kinds of ideas (regexes and EBNF equations) into code more-or-less directly in your head. In short, it was just about perfect for someone who wanted to whip up a nice little compiler for a foogol on a late-1980s DOS box without paying for or finding any tools beyond Turbo Pascal.

It's entirely possible to use the techniques in the book to, say, whip up a compiler in Ruby that turns an inconvenient data format into JSON. The real utility of doing this by hand in 2010 is, however, debatable.
I was holding it okay until "Wonderwall" started playing.
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Yeah, Bacteria Tower Defense is along the lines of what I was thinking of. Simulations are good too, but video games can combine screwing around with actually learning something.

If you did it during a residency I guess I have no excuse.
Fred Hoiberg the Vice President Of Basketball Operations
I have written multiple crawlers for sites like facebook with them.

import urllib2;urllib2.urlopen("http://learnpythonthehardway.com/login).read()

Since you only want basic protection, you could avoid the visual captcha all together and have the "Fill out captcha" button auto-submit.
Chinese Tycoon Donates a Billion Dollars to Charity