skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No, what you really want is for BeautifulSoup to do the sane thing and return an empty collection instead of None. It makes no sense to special-case the empty resultset case to return None.
DK: "Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things."

Most of the time I like to be on top of things and I use email, IM, the web. Its not a distraction, because it is important for me to see whats happening around me.

So, horses for courses :-)
Interns and apprenticeships don't exist anywhere in the US? It's essentially the same thing.
There are gray areas, but on the last point, nonprofits are treated differently than for-profit corporations for labor-law purposes. In particular, nonprofits have a lot more leeway for soliciting volunteers than for-profit corporations do.
The editorializing in the title is unnecessary. Please reflect the article's title only next time.
But that tuition is unrelated to your military work...

Not so! When the military does this with MDs, they expect them to work, for the military, as that kind of MD. Therefore the tuition is being paid so that you can do the job you were hired for.

The parallel is very good. The military wants to hire you. They want you to do a job you don't have skills to do. While employed by the military you undergo training that is approved by the military. If you serve the military long enough, they will pay off that training, else you are liable for the cost of the training.

The important differences are that in the military case the training is received at an organization that is clearly separate from the military, the degree received is generally recognized as being very valuable, and the candidate has input into what kind of training they wish (within limits) to receive.

For a similar example, lots of private companies provide employer tuition reimbursement as a benefit. For instance they may pay for an employee's MBA, with the condition that the employee work for the employer for a fixed period of time. And typically companies that do this try to use the employees in ways that match the skills the employee is gaining. This is both legal and common in the USA.
I think thats an individual choice dependent on how you allocate scarce and valuable resources. For some open source is a moral imperative that must be upheld at any cost. For others it's a nice to have.

It's a bit like self-reliance, for some it's important to sacrifice more wealth to increase their self-reliance, in the end it's really what aspect(s) of your life you want to maximize.

The issue with wiring diagrams is that most don't have a chip fab in their basement so the benefit they receive from having wiring diagrams is mostly intangible. I think for most people it's far more important to have a CPU that executes a popular ISA (ie. x86) than to have wiring diagrams. Similarly, most users receive intangible benefits from having access to the kernel source, as they will never modify it.

I suppose if you had access to a chip fab and needed to modify your CPU design frequently it would be important.
Might as well just write by post
RMS probably could have patented it and won.
Even if you have no clue who Ryuichi Sakamoto is, the lessons learned listed at the end are really universal:

- being in the middle of things increases your chances for opportunities
- everything great that happens in your career starts with someone you know
- when you hear of an opportunity you want, you have to go for it completely, over-the-top, not casual, and work your ass of to get it
- the tiniest detail can derail everything
They don't have any money to pay the interns (http://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/c7vdo/call_for_interns...) , but have money for 2 offices and money to hire a lawyer to check if their internships are legal.
how many ex-Googlers would want to be acquired back by Google? this is getting ridiculous :)
Can those of us who don't use Twitter have a short abstract of your work?
LuaJIT is still 3 to 30 times faster than PyPy 1.2
The only reason I'm still a Comcast customer is because there's no other broadband alternative in my area.

No, 128 kbps is not broadband. So, I'm stuck.
I'm of the opinion that Apple made the right choice in keeping their brand clean from all the privacy issues with those free ad-supported services, opting instead for classical b2c relationships (service to client in exchange for money) with the implied privacy protection of typically confidential business to customer relationships.

It seems like Apple could retain these benefits by including a MobileMe subscription with every iDevice, but not making it outright "free". Once 90% of iCustomers have MobileMe accounts, Apple would be motivated to improve it and add more Google-like cloud syncing.
RTT (Round Trip Time): Aka – Why bandwidth doesn’t matter
The Founders 2010 Episode 1: The Question is Why
From a "Scott" in the comments: "an excited man on a pile of cash that is not innovating is a death-spell".

Sooner or later....
> by that logic, minimum wage

Minimum wage laws hurt people sometimes. They're not just benevolent laws that increase pay. It means that some low margin businesses won't be operated, and some low skilled people who aren't capable of doing work worth the minimum wage won't be able to find jobs.

> and child labor laws should be illegal. If a child wants to work...who are you to stop them?

What's a "child"? Is someone 14 years old and mature, disciplined, and learned a child? Should they be allowed to work if they want to? How about an extremely bright 12 year old? No dice, no matter what?

I think people with a level of maturity and understanding should be allowed to make voluntary transactions, yes. I won't stop them. In fact, I think anyone who would stop two consenting adults from making a voluntary transaction, no matter how well intentioned, is doing a bad thing.
If they are then the laws aren't being enforced very often.

Here's Reddit's response to these accusations: http://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/c7vdo/call_for_interns...
I wonder what are the potential problems.

I've a Linux system as a NAT firewall in front of everything else. It's also running an email server and a couple websites (via a dynamic IP provider). Behind it there's a couple laptops, two desktops, game consoles, iPhones, etc.

I wonder what's going to stop working if I switch to IPv6 for my frontend.
Everybody has a different threshold, and I am thankful that some people have a very high one.
People will actually pay money for Vogue's unpaid internships.
>I don't see why anyone would share care about the details of internship contract, unless they personally involved.

Depresses pay. Tilts the workforce towards those who come from wealthy parents. Raises barriers to entry to career switching which decrease economic flexibility
I thought it was pretty obvious he was referring to 2 sound-minded adults making a voluntary exchange.
Any standard library is a collection of libraries. While I get your point, mine is that different languages have different ways of handling libraries, with different tradeoffs. Perl's way is to make it really easy to get libraries over the network, instead of trying to ship a large collection of them with the core.

A standard library, I think. Is what you go look for when you need a module to solve your problem. With Java that's [1], with Python that's [2]. With PHP (until somewhat recently) that was using one of the ~1200 built-in functions.

With Perl, the place to go for libraries is the CPAN. I look at http://search.cpan.org, not `perldoc perlmodlib` if I need a library to do X.

There are cases where this is painful, such as offline machines. But in those cases you can pack all of CPAN on a CD (with minicpan), or produce a self-contained Perl program + libraries with local::lib and/or PAR.

1. http://java.sun.com/javase/6/docs/api/
2. http://docs.python.org/library/
3. http://perldoc.perl.org/perlmodlib.html
Is java dead for startups?
It seems that RoR, PHP & scala are the "hot" languages for startups. I know that java is old, but it lends itself to better engineering
IMO. Especially in NYC, where there is a robust market for high-
paying java jobs at investment banks, it is hard to find lean
startupers.

Are there theoretical or practical reasons to avoid java in lean
startups? Any ideas where to find folks at the intersection of java +
lean startups + NYC or is it hopeless?

Many thanks!

Cheers,
Mike

PS Here is the job description. Applicants and feedback on the
description are welcome too:
http://www.socialfeet.com/2010/05/got-java-chops/
If you go to his site's home page at http://www.t4f.org/index.php it will display a message about the service provider having problems (he also provides an alternate GMail address, since he can't get to his t4f.org e-mail). However, from the home page, you can click on the Projects link at the top of that page to get to the pages for the business card project, and others (the home page comes up in Español, just click on the British Union Jack icon in the upper right corner of any page to switch to Ingles from that point forward).

For those who think this is just a USB memory stick (e.g., the FlashBay memory card referenced earlier), it's not - he's showing his skill at integrating a PIC microcontroller that has a number of features for digital/analog data/signal acquisition (see the specs paragraph on his page). His resume and contact info are stored in the flash memory of the PIC controller (only 24KB) - but, he also provides solder pads for an optional 8-pin SPI (or I2C) flash memory chip (up to 32MB).

Of course, Homeland Security, the TSA, etc., won't understand any of that, and he could wind up in Gitmo or whatever hell-hole is being filled, now, except that he speaks Spanish, not Arabic, Persian, Erdu, or other Muslim-dominated languages (they still might not realize that for way too long, though).
It also discriminates towards people of means. If I had rich parents, I could afford to work there for nothing. As a person who paid for myself, I'd be unable to have done that at the start of my career
Exactly.

Welcome to publishing, guys! If you want to work for a magazine, that means working for free for years for most people.
Get JIRA for $10 only
Ask HN: Rate my product idea
In my first job, many moons ago, at a large life assurance company, I had to (as I was new) have my emails to external clients QA'd by a senior team member before having them sent. Later in life, as a dev/support in banking, I've had to check new supprt staff's emails before they send them (to see if they have used the correct tone, spelling etc).

At the time, I remember this being a hassle as it would result in a flurry of emails back and forth, with the new starter sending the email to the senior, who mails it back with corrections, which then gets sent back, confirmed as OK, then emailed out again by the new team member.

Is this experience unusual or fairly common? Could an Outlook addin that simplified this workflow be a successful product?
Well, to make the analogy a little more accurate, suppose they weren't making as much profit on the hamburger as they are by serving the turkey...

Facebook and Twitter both have the problem that they have to justify the amount of investment they raised, and both are doing things that are unpopular with their community (users for Facebook, developers for Twitter) to make a bigger business than the original things that got them popular can sustain.
Are you sure you weren't experiencing this bug?
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=487638
The funny part of the whole thread is that ports are not installed by the OpenBSD installer. You actually have to install it yourself. I wonder how many people would be taken to be trollin' if not for their previous reputation.
And it also has nothing to do with it from an architectural point of view. LuaJIT's code is not generally reusable. It's highly optimized, often platform specific C and assembler code. PyPy is an experimental (in the good way) and successful attempt at using a subset of python to make a faster python interpreter than the native C interpreter, while in the process creating a platform to create other optimized dynamic languages interpreters. It's code is highly general and readable, especially compared to something as specific and low level than LuaJIT. In the process, the devs have created a new language, rpython, that is as fast as C while being much more expressive.

Lua is also a much simpler language than python, and therefore a much better target to fine tuned optimizations.

You could almost say that LuaJIT is a pragmatic project, and pypy an idealistic one. And they're both succeeding. But they don't have the same goals at all.Please dont compare them without giving a bit of background. It's very misleading.
I was surprised how far down I had to scroll for Ruby... I expected more people to have a love-hate relationship with it than apparently do.

I also totally disagree that blocks should be passed as regular parameters, but that's neither here nor there.
I couldn't easily find out how to search based on city + age. When you click on search you end up in "All Twitter Users Nearby" and since I didn't see that tab, I couldn't understand why I wasn't seeing any age information nearby and why it was showing me guys! Then I discovered the other tab and found out how to make a real search but really, why is the default tab the one that isn't really "search"? It's confusing to click on search and you don't see any place to enter search criterias. Other than that, I really like the design and how easy it is to sign up! Keep up the good work
HylaFax on CentOS
Weird, that just happened to me, too. No history, no cookies, and won't populate them, either (eg., no "most visited thumbnails" in the home page).
I'd like to see them split up the various features of .me, and allow you to buy only the ones you want, similar to what they're doing with iWork on the iPad. I'd buy email for $20-25/yr, maybe idisk for another $20, and Find My Phone for [$5 per incident or $15/yr] (which I'd hopefully never have to buy, but would be more than happy to fork over for should the need arise). The rest of the stuff, they can keep.

[edit]Changed suggested price of Find My Phone from $10/incident before someone had replied to it, but then I noticed my edit made his reply not make sense, hence this note.[/edit]
It doesn't really, the peak water argument was a busted flush when people realised there's constant water trade going on at rock bottom prices all around the world.

A few years ago it was fashionable to predict water wars. And then they didn't happen and people realised that when you buy any food from any other country, you import water. D'oh.

Given that the US is apparently a net exporter of food, seems to me they have plenty of water. All it might mean is that if water becomes scarcer in America, water intensive crops will become more expensive, thus their exports will drop.

On a side note, there are already many countries that are way past their own sustainable water use, but they buy food from countries which have excess water, so no ill ever comes of it.
The Massachusetts Statehouse would be under different laws since it's either owned by the government or a non-profit.
They use the word "enterprise" and don't disclose any prices at all, which has "get locked into something you can't afford" written all over it. Which is a shame because it could be cool.
So we add a bunch of oregano and call it the great gulf salad dressing?
Good point, thanks.

I've considered making the city + age search the default "Search" page, so your feedback may have helped me reach the tipping point. :)
5 Excellent iPad Apps to Learn About the Human Body
I don't see the relevance.
Twitter’s Annotations Explorer
Douglas Adams on the Internet
Java the language is stagnating, but the JVM ecosystem is stronger than ever. Attract some smart folk with Scala or Clojure, chances are good that they know Java as well.
Looks like a bug. The maximum value of a 32-bit signed integer in 2's complement is 2,147,483,647. http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=2^31%20-%201
And hopefully will be fixed with definitive enforcement, turning these internships into jobs.
Thanks. I just can't imagine enough people being so incompetent to not test the obvious three cases that this is an issue.
Whenever I read a story on RMS, something he said or done, it's always about something beyond the comfort level I can imagine.

I wonder if he refuses to drive because of the closed source on-board computer. I wonder how he feels about the flight control system of the Boeing when he's flying.

I deeply respect him for his dedication but find him lunaticly extreme in almost all the cases.
I use Java primarily in my day job, but usually RoR in my side projects (unless I'm using something else just to pick up the language/skill).

I think the reason you don't see Java in startups as much anymore is that it's neither rapid nor enjoyable to code in. It's also more difficult to deploy in production and more expensive (it requires more RAM to run well in my experience). Continuous deployment is more difficult with Java. Ruby and PHP you can just push code and restart the server almost instantly, Java takes longer.

Java is getting better, but not fast enough, and it's still not a fun language to write in. If I'm going to spend 12 hours coding, I'd like to enjoy it. I can think faster than I can write Java. I'm just able to get more done with other languages.
IPv6 is more like "solar power" in your analogy. We're going to run out of oil/IPv4 someday and have to replace it with something, but not necessarily IPv6.

Actually IPv6 is probably more like "atomic fusion" - some utopian grand project that will fix everything but nobody quite knows how we're going to get it to work.
While true, lua is more directed towards another audience, namely a small, embeddable scripting language with as little overhead as possible (IMO). This is not meant degrading, but i guess it has some implications. Lua is great for embedded scripting though.
I think a lot of us have forgotten that once upon a time, computers were considered thinking machines, not just glorified internet teletypes. Computers were world-changing machines long before we joined them all together.

Given what RMS does all day and what seems to matter to him, this seems perfectly rational to me. Consider how old the GNU tools are, or how long some of them go between revisions. I don't think Stallman needs or wants to keep up with things in real time. I think Stallman is like Tolkien's Ents - he isn't slow, he's just operating on a different timescale to the rest of us.

It's the same sort of logic behind Tim Ferriss not answering his phone or Don Knuth doing his email in six-month batches - if you create enough latency in your connection to the world, you bring everyone else to your pace and avoid having to worry about minutiae. It's amazing how many problems resolve themselves when given sufficient neglect.
I love Derek, but I would not say a costume is a tiny detail. I would say that even a super-important thing can be overlooked - but what are you to gain from that? The most abstract lesson I think you could get from that part would be make sure your gig clothes are covered beforehand.
I found this response relevant: http://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/c7vdo/call_for_interns...
Agree that the JVM has a huge future.
I use Find my iPhone all the time; not just when I've left my phone at the diner (I never have), but when I can't find my phone in my apartment also. A roommate once used it to find her phone, which turned out to be in the fridge for some reason.
PRINT "HELLO WORLD"
At some point in the thread RMS moves on to say that he would support it if openbsd did not link to getting the ports tree and did not host it with the rest of their things, but when you read the whole thing it seems that RMS likes to change his opinion as he receives more information.

Such as his comment that started an entire outrage was that openbsd contained non-free software, then his opening argument about non-free firmware blobs, and then onto the ports tree urls.

Edit: from Theo de Raadt http://article.gmane.org/gmane.os.openbsd.misc/134986
I'm here to confirm : it was a joke!
I think part of the problem is with that word, "voluntary" - and more specifically how it relates to another word, "desperate".
Thanks for all those emails!

A few hours ago I didn't know if you were legit. Now I see how considerate you are.

So glad I met you on HN.
Null References: The Billion Dollar Mistake
One of the best landing pages I've seen launch here in a good long while. Nice job.
Not sure if it is a contributing factor, but it was also posted on Reddit a day ago. But title probably helps if you want to catch eyes :)
I turned noprocrast on, on a lark. I was obsessively distracting myself from a project that was too important to me to start and I figured it couldn't hurt. (Can't do poorly if you don't do at all.) Its been on for about 2 weeks now and I love it, most of the time I had taken to reading HN when I wanted to be doing other stuff. Now I read HN when I want to read HN (chrome's privacy mode is an easy work around) instead of when I'm avoiding other stuff.
I just made this same move a couple months ago. I got a job out here. So my girlfriend and I sold most everything, including my car and drove over with 2 cats. While I can't recommend driving across the country with two cats, I can say that I am glad we got rid of everything. Purging yourself of all your things and starting over is an interesting experience. I have never been one to acquire lots of stuff but I had my share. Getting rid of it all helps you realize how small you can live and still be happy.
I'd dare say that if a financial institution ever had a situation where an attacker could see any part of their database, they'd have far bigger problems to deal with.