skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I loved and openly defended Perl for years. Contrary to popular belief, I still believe that you can write large, maintainable systems in Perl. It's just that I think that you could write those same systems better in other languages.

I no longer recommend Perl as a first language to learn: I think Ruby and Python are better choices.

I no longer recommend Perl to experienced programmers: Clojure and Erlang have more to offer to the Java or C++ expert.

Perl was very important and useful for a while, but at it's root, it's a kludgy, annoying language, full of bad design choices.

I believe Perl has had it's day.
Here you go: http://gigaom.com/2010/05/26/facebooks-new-privacy-settings-...
Five Easy Steps to Shed Off Extra Pounds and Keeping it Off
Where are the Red Adairs of the 21st century?
http://www.redadair.com/
> Ok. I never even used the word teach in the original piece though...

But you misinterpreted my use of it, so what's your point?

I see that I'm getting downmodded on top of having to waste my time on this, so that'll teach me how to help people with their English next time.
Then what, no porn on Dropbox? Agreed that they should not.
Sure. But people drink bottled water to avoid things like chlorine. You may call them misguided, but the article naievely neglected this population of consumers.
Traveling Without a Laptop (but with an iPad)
So he could actually make convincing arguments and not be ignored.
Getting bought out could go either way for Dropbox's users. Getting bought out by Apple, however, would not be a good thing for us. The key feature that most people use Dropbox for is syncing across all their computers, and I simply don't see an Apple-owned brand doing anything remotely like that.
Carl Schramm, President and CEO of the Kauffman Foundation, was interviewed on Charlie Rose last night. Had some interesting statistics and thoughts on the relationship between politics, culture and entrepreneurship:

http://www.charlierose.com/guest/view/6897
Haha, thanks.
Another Foxconn employee commits suicide
Or, you can make something for your own amusement like Steve Wozniak, and spend the next two decades helping the entire planet come around to discovering how useful it is.

Minds take time to change.
Any chance you'd make iPhone apps out of these?
I was amazed when he said "we lost, they won" with no sense of rancor, nor of defeat of self. Very growthful and in-reality. Say what you will about Jobs, he's not dogmatic; he's far from an apple fanboy.

He's doing what a recent article on disruption (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1375141) reminded me of: don't confront entrenched competition, it will "invoke a competitive response" and they'll win (or "never attack a fortified hill", from crossing the chasm). Instead, do something else.
> Open letters are good for joe public to reach the town mayor or Ty Coon when all other avenues of trying to reach them have been exhausted.

> They're not exactly the best avenue to contact the people that run a competing open source project about a possible collaboration.

Agreed.

> I think it matters how long they've been at it because that is how they describe other projects, as having 'too little steam' behind them. I can't really tell the difference between those other projects with too little steam behind them and this one.

Well, "steam" in this regard can - IMO - come and go. You can start a project, do little or nothing to publicize it, tinker on it for a while, drop it, then restart it and you haven't really lost anything... if you step in two years later and start working on the project, committing code, doing releases, and publicizing it, I don't know that anybody will care about the "lost years." Or maybe I'm wrong, who knows?
STOP bugging me about my email address! When I signed up, it wasn't part of the deal. The same goes for you, Reddit.
In fairness, central nervous systems didn't crop up until circa half a billion years ago. But, yes.
Prohibition of a substance people wants leads to illegal distribution. Illegal distributors can not use private property protection normally used by those who distribute legal goods. So bootleggers, crack dealers etc. kill each other to enforce contracts, take markets and steal each others stuff. This is why prohibition causes crime. You will have a very hard time finding any informed participant in the debate over legalization contesting this fact.
Looks like Search and Share gives all proceeds to charity, which GoodSearch gives 50%?
I'm sorry it was bad form and I apologize, I would remove it but I can't edit the original message anymore. However, my point was still legitimate, even if the link was not.
What the market predicts:
http://www.intrade.com/jsp/intrade/common/c_cd.jsp?conDetail...
As I learn more about running a startup, I can see what a great plan the EnergySavvy guys have in terms of generating leads for greentech contractors using their excellent software tools. I think it's something other entrepreneurs in any category can learn from.
Ask HN: Long notification period normal?
Hi there,

"recently", I have applied for an internship at IBM Research and Microsoft Research. In fact, almost two months have already passed without any notification whatsoever; one of the jobs I applied for has been taken off the available jobs platform, and I am not sure what to make of it. Since there are many other PhD students on HN, I thought I'd ask people here about their experience with application procedures for those labs. Is this kind of behavior normal, or should I start looking somewhere else?

Many thanks for any information!
Ask HN: Where do you look to find large consulting jobs?
1. Company A finds out about a large consulting job
2. Company A puts an ad out for someone to build it
3. Small company B (or a couple freelancers) puts in a proposal to Company A for $x.
4. Company A puts in a proposal for $x + $y

Now, the smaller guys are getting work and there is certainly nothing wrong with that. But small company B would like to put in their own proposal. Basically, how is Company A finding these jobs? Is it all referral based?
So basically, the print version is the advertising-supported version. Because there are still a lot of print advertisers who they need to please by keeping their circulation numbers up. It's a weird digital/physical arbitrage.

Normally the digital version of something costs less but people's perceived value is far lower. Now we have a digital version of a magazine with a higher perceived value that costs significantly more. Well, if that was going to happen, it's fitting that it should be Wired who brings that to market.
Good question. We're playing around with all kinds of options. Right now:

- the bar on the left is the average of all sites tested in the previous week.

- the bar on the right is the site you're checking.

Each bar is broken down into the slowest, fastest, and average response times. You want to keep an eye out for large differences between each of these.
Mh, yes, now that i think of it... my first thought was "woah, i'll have to pay 10 times as much for one apple share", but in reality i'd just say "in invest 1000$ in whatever company, regardless of how many shares".. if the share goes up 10% it doesn't matter how many shares.. well.. my bad, as i said, i've no real interest in that stuff :P

So, all in all, this means that Apple is seen as much worth as MS (and not 10 times more). That's a point of view i didn't consider..

Still, i would really like to see the income sources of both and how much income is generated where, that'd be interesting.
"The problem people had with MSFT is their use of market dominance to kill off competition."

Isn't that just doing business?
But he's not saying "Because that's what it's doing now", he's saying "because that's what it's always done".

Human / animal muscles are also the product of billions of years of experimentation, and a few decades of steam power research trounced them with ease. Just because it's old doesn't mean it's inherently incredibly good and hard to replicate.
What's stopping you from emailing them or, better yet in this case, just calling them?
I don't know why I'm not allowed to vote up or down, but I do see both arrows.

If someone's not allowed to vote, how about a little courtesy of not wasting their time on voting?
Why didn't he call it Howard's End?!

Oh wait, was there more to the article? cough
Well, are those bottled water vendors telling their customers "No chlorine but with all the bugs it kills!" ?

Or "It's great stuff, but be sure to treat it with a rolling boil for 20 minutes before drinking"?

I don't view most of them as misguided so much as misinformed; they're making assumptions that this nicely packaged stuff is clean ... when it often isn't.
"It's only worth what the next guy will pay for it."

"Win fights with your brain, not your fists."

"I'm still 18 inside."
"Too bad most of Wired's content is so resoundingly meh..."

Guess I know where they should really spend their time and money!
I just moved from New York to Minneapolis. In my experience, people were extremely wary of "relo's" (relocations), the common concern being that they interview me and then I change my mind. Explaining that I had just bought a house and am most certainly moving did not help. Once I moved, it was easy - I quickly landed interviews with several top companies and had a job within a week.

It depends on where you go though. I do open source and Minneapolis is a market where most companies are still on Microsoft stack so there wasn't as much demand for my skillset. Moving into a larger market such as New York or San Francisco could be completely different.
This doesn't really change much for me. I'm very happy to have given up my Facebook account. It's more a matter of trust for me, and Facebook ruined that. Their brand is forever tarnished in my eyes.
Already did, always getting non-informational answers, or none at all.
So, are you saying that instant personalization was adding no value to their revenues? Making status updates public was in no-way an answer to twitter and generate a real-time news source? Linking interests to direct pages otherwise blank pages was making them no money? I know you work for FB, and it seems a lot of fb employees are following this thread and trying to generate a positive vibe. I am not against FB, but the way they have done things lately, it is almost impossible for me to believe that they wont do it again. I was one of those people who used to post things without thinking much on fb, and now I have completely stopped. Hopefully, every user will understand and would start treating it as a public forum.
What's in common between JavaScript and virtual sex
no, they should be asking why mobileme can't learn from dropbox.
Ok, Apple does have music selling through itunes,
hardware (very low market share here!) and the mobile
app sales.

You should research what share of profits they have with that very low market share in both computers and smartphones markets.
YC Founders at Work Series: Reddit interview tomorrow at 1:00pm PDT
But yet the digital version is still loaded with ads.
MobileMe does exactly that.
This is seriously sick, IMO.
Research positions are like VCs: It's hard to get a firm "no" out of them. If you haven't heard back after two months, assume that they're not interested and move on.
This headline needs [1997]
The Dropbox team has a lot more creativity left as far as the product is concerned, I'd hate to see them stripped from that to focus solely on Apple's goals.

On the same token, I've argued that Apple should buy Dropbox for two reasons:

1) iDisk is embarrassingly bad.

2) The iPhone/iPad works on both Windows and OSX; universal file portability is important.

Regardless, I'll continue paying for premium Dropbox service if they remain independent. And I think I speak for a lot of people.
Also - for some of us - the change hasn't been rolled out yet.. I can only see the old privacy page.
I wonder how much increased startup activity is a result of increased unemployment. I would speculate that startup activity peaks in the best of times (when people have strong financial resources and high degree of certainty that they can find another job is their startup fails) and in the worst of times (when you get laid off and don't have job prospects, you have no choice but to dust off the business plan that's been sitting on your desk waiting to be acted on).
I used to play alot of games but my problem is that I can't get into it casually. Competed as a 'pro gamer' for a few years then led a few high end guilds and ever since then, if I pick up a game it _HAS_ to be for 3-4 hours at a time or else I don't have fun :(

This makes it very difficult to play anything beyond Plants vs. Zombies as every other more complex game saps my productivity and just makes me feel like i'm not accomplishing anything.
From their white-paper apparently DBMS systems spend 35% of their time doing buffer management, 17% doing logging, another 19% doing latching and finally 21% doing locking. This leaves only 7% for "useful work". In comparison, VoltDB has 95% capacity for useful work.

Reads even more like marketing blogspam!
yeah lets remember that next time apple fanboys want to post an article saying AAPL is worht more than MS
This is a bit of a late reply, but the reason it's committing everything that your colleague changed is that it's the definition of a merge commit.

I find that it's desirable to avoid merges to reduce the number of overall commits. To do this, do git pull --rebase instead of just git pull when your commit is rejected.
> Great political ideas

are rarely the point.

Take manufacturing. The assembly line is a "great" idea that is useless without many tiny good ideas.
Or this: http://www.allfacebook.com/2010/05/facebook-privacy-must-kno...
>Also it turned out that learning to read when you already know how to speak (and can read other languages, I suppose) is actually quite easy. By now I can read novels etc. in Spanish without too much effort.

Spanish is likely an outlier here as it is spelled phonetically. French is more difficult, but not terribly so. However languages that are written with a different script, or in a completely different system like Chinese offer a much larger hurdle. Chinese literacy, in particular, is orders of magnitude harder.
I wonder what would have been if Microsoft hadn't invested in Apple...
I like the idea and the tool but yeah, the results made me go "Huh?":

- "solutious averages" means nothing to me.

- What does the size of the bars mean, I get lots of blue, is that good?

- It says "SD 0.00" several times, what?

I do like that it simulates multiple users and requests and worked so smoothly. Will we be able to tune the number of tests run?

The summary results on the left should be the first thing you see with details later. The funny graph was what drew my eye first.
Pretty interesting is the TIOBE language index.. scroll down to the graph to see some decline over the last years.
http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index....

Perl was overtaken by C# and Python in the last 2 years, for example.

I think it will be around for a lot of years, but in the end.. "it's dying" describes the trend pretty much.
Ada, Cobol, etc. are all still used and you can earn quite some money when you know them, but i really wouldn't call them "alive".

A lot of programs and scripts are written in perl, and even new scripts (if i look at my company). But slowly all those handy scripts will be overtaken by the "new" programmers that didn't start with perl but with ruby, python, php and such.

From personal experience: Many employees at my company still use perl, basically because they don't want to learn a new language and started with perl, but all the new employees (like me) avoid it where they can and try to "migrate" the company to other languages. The perl scripts written today will probably be around for the next 5 years, but the next time they'll be in another language.

At least i look forward for those scripts dying, because they regularly give me major headaches when trying to fix scripts written by someone else 2-5 years ago. From all i do (that includes a lot of scripts) touching those perl scripts is easily the most painful thing to do. I've wasted countless hours on those "things" where i should've been productive.
My guts tell me the same, but what the heck? A little bit of honesty would be very much appreciated...
Speechless...
There was a mistake, but it wasn't the one you think. The derivative was incorrectly stated as N-2ap instead of N-2ap+ac.

I've corrected it now. I'd appreciate another detailed check of the revised calculations.
> If it becomes legalized, it becomes commoditized and pushes the small basement operations out because it is no longer profitable. In the end, prices are lower, crime is reduced

The small basement operations aren't part of the crime problem (ignoring the illegality of marijuana itself).
The blood that greases the gears of Technophilia
> Why not? It is a solution to the cannabis-crime factor.

I think that you're missing the point. Like was said before, most of the people committing crimes related to cannabis will just move on to commit the same crimes, but related to another drug or illegal substance. The effect on overall crime will probably be negligible.

On the other hand, it would reduce the 'crime' related to things like possession. I guess it really comes down to which stats you are using to look at 'crime'...
Unfortunately, there is no solid evidence to support it,
not five years ago, not four years ago, and not today

Yeah, all cool startups choose perl as their language of choice (it has CGI.pm, not to mention the whole CPAN), PragProgs are releasing a ton of Perl books each year and bored hackers implement Perl in JS, just because.
Of course Perl is not going anywhere anytime soon. But it is not interesting, attractive and sexy any more — just another legacy language with huge amount of code written.
As good as dead.
How many other startups/companies that MS has invested have given the same rates of return? MS did not lose anything by investing in Apple.

Their gain was two fold

0. escape anti trust scrutiny (the main motivation for the investment)

1. very good return on investment.
Russia Takes a Big Step Into Technology - DealBook Blog
I've ordered this but am quite annoyed at the long pre-order time. I think I placed my order about a month ago and still have a bit of a wait :(
I hope too. Just got my iPad yesterday, and I have an iPhone too. There's so much I can do with the screen real estate on an iPad. Want to get my Android to a Pro version first. Working on the verb conjugator now.
Everyone always assumes it'll be the tobacco companies that'll take over once pot becomes legalized, but why? Why not the beer and liquor companies? Personally, I think it'd be a riot to see some Budweiser Bud. :-)
Euler's identity encoded in a crop circle
Fault line of IT - Professionals and Industry
What if Adobe had invested back then?
I had the same problem.. unsure about how to interpret the data. Otherwise it's great :)

I actually used it, so that's a start!

Also, congrats on making something!!!
What I don't have to assume is that FaceBook has repeatedly made big privacy-impacting changes without consulting its users. This is the third major overreach/retreat. Three incidents is enough to realize that taking privacy seriously is not part of the company's DNA.
Simple biological systems like bones/muscles evolved long ago and have mostly just been refined since then. Human-like intelligence is a much more recent and much more difficult development.

A lot of people seem to think that if you build a machine of sufficient raw horsepower that intelligence will magically emerge. Maybe, but I suspect it's not nearly so easy.
I learned French almost entirely by helping raise my (now ex) girlfriend's 6 year old son. Best teacher I could have asked for, and he wasn't even trying to teach me :)

She was also very helpful as she was a native French speaker, but fluent in English.
In the UK and Australia, "Sunday week" would be taken to mean one week after the Sunday after today. Also phrased as "a week on Sunday."

I have use for the library, but cannot use Java. It's nice to know that such a solution exists, and perhaps I can push towards an equivalent for my contexts.

Thanks for your response.
Though you claim that saying AAPL is worth more then MSFT is a sign of fanboy-ism, it can also be used as proof that AAPL is no longer the 'under-dog' that some fanboys still like to portray them as. (i.e. AAPL is now the '800lb Gorilla')

[Nit: Microsoft's NASDAQ symbol is MSFT, not MS. It looks wildly inconsistent to refer to Apple by AAPL, but then drop to MS for Microsoft. ]
Ask HN: Databases, Scraping, and Copyright Question
Hope you guys can settle an argument I am having with another HNer. I'm going to make up a hypothetical question because I don't want to discuss the real one in detail.

Let's say I have a site that is all about politics and stocks. I list the stock and the board of directors, and site members can submit their political opinions about how they think the corporate officers are acting. In addition, I write a program to go out and find the FaceBook, Twitter, etc accounts for these officers and I list them with the stocks.

Not wanting to do a lot of data entry, I find a database on an ftp site somewhere that has stocks and the corporate officers that are related to them. It is part of some huge system dedicated to do something completely different, like a brokerage system or a system for investing. Although they provide the data openly, on each dump there is a notice about how you can't use the information for commercial purposes (but you are free to use for personal purposes and/or download, copy, and give to friends) Their price is $50K. For that amount of money, you might be able to use part of the data, depending on what your actual needs are (translated: we want to know how much we can get out of you, so we're not committing to anything)

Do I have to physically type in each stock and the directors? And then update it all the time? When there are multiple sources of publicly-available information that gives me the same thing? That sounds crazy.

I was speaking with another HNer just now. He said if I downloaded the database tables I needed directly that was bad. But if I crawled a site created from the database from the static information located on each stock's page, then that was different. I say that matters of fact -- which people are officers for which company -- cannot be copyrighted. It would be different if I were pulling down big hunks of the database and reusing/re-purposing them, but I'm only asking a simple question about information that is very widely distributed.

So who is more right here? If you were trying out an idea for a website, what would you do?
I fail to see how the examples you provide have any parallels with the "opt in" by default settings in a social application.

Having everything by default is the very reason people chose to use this application in the first place. That's the product people bought into--with their data and attention--and now that product is getting changed, in many cases, without their knowledge and/or without their understanding of what's at stake.
If it's the political process of that party, they may very well require joining them.
If APPL, MSFT or GOOG disappeared tomorrow. Which one would cause the least damage? Which one could we live without?
Yes, we need common sense more than great ideas.
My email is in my profile -- send me a note!

Got any mentors in the LA area?
GOOG is now selling at about its mid 2005 price while APPL is about 350% above its mid 2005 price.
Good points. We certainly have some work to do yet!

- I need to think more about what would make sense in just a couple words.

- Ya, lots of blue is good; lots of red is bad. This is a work in progress.

- SD == standard deviation. Lower is better.

Ya, you'll definitely be able to play around with the test parameters yourself. We included them in an earlier prototype but took them out b/c they introduced some non-trivial UI/UX challenges.