skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This idea is one of those perennials that makes for interesting discussion yet hasn't been done much with. It's come up on HN a few times (I remember touching on it here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=236704). The closest thing to it that I've seen get widely adopted is the "fluent interface" or "chaining" style that has caught on in OO over the last few years; particularly, from what I've seen, in Java and JS.

The APL/J/K languages are built around a construct very similar to this, so the OP's reference to APL is apt. You really should check out J or K if you haven't yet. J comes with a marvelous set of tutorials. K comes with nothing. :)

(But K is a work of genius, in my opinion. A pinnacle.)
Apparently HN is running -O0.
Not a very exciting product and you really can’t calculate prices like that.

What you want is a unlocked iPhone and providers which offer some sort of prepaid SIM. And that very likely won’t happen.
I tend to judge people by what they have accomplished. With that said, I tend to favor consistency over a big grand accomplishment. It just show that you have sustaining skills.

It's the knowledge that you've retained from your work at Microsoft that is of importance. Focus on that. Better yet provide some guidance in your domain of knowledge to the hacker community.
I'm not very far through the game yet, but as far as I can tell they are exactly DFAs. Maybe it changes later, with new components?
You shouldn't get offended when someone calls you immoral when you don't think you are. It just means your moral systems don't match.

Also, calling "strict ideology" the moral system Stallman is trying to spread is a stretch. His moral system really is quite reasonable. You probably know the propaganda by heart, but anyway…

Unlike your stuff, software is abundant. Give it to charity, and you still have it. Such a fundamental difference calls for a fundamentally different moral system. Stallman found a suitable one: it is applied to scientific research: results should be public knowledge, so everyone can benefit from them. Under such moral system, it is indeed immoral to make proprietary software.
Doesn't seem like a guy who want other people writing emails on his behalf.
The Zuckerberg email was at least mildly interesting.
>After money has changed hands, here in Ontario at least, it is a violation of the consumer Protection Act to withhold the goods and renegotiate the price and a company is legally liable up to $250,000 for each infraction in punitive damages.

You're absolutely wrong.

There is a strong protection here in Ontario against liability for technical errors, and it has come into effect multiple times (always with entitled people thinking they won the lottery writing angry letters to the editor decrying their grievous injury). So long as they reverse any charges, neither party is out anything and no one has any entitlement to the result of a mistake.
As someone who has worked at startups and big companies, and has hired and fired, the best advice I can give you if you are looking for a new job is to try to find a good, fun company to work for, even if it's not the ideal job for you. Be enthusiastic in the interview (first impression really is a one-shot deal), and make sure you are genuinely excited about what the company does (even if the job itself is not totally awesome). If you don't believe in what the company does, then you'll end up back where you are now.

Also: being happy at work is usually more related to your work environment and your co-workers than it is to the actual work you do (you may be different though). So try to meet the people you'd be working with, if that's a possibility, when you are interviewing.

There's nothing stopping you from still working on your own projects once you are at your new job, and if your day job is enjoyable, you will have more energy and motivation to put into your side projects too as a result.
electromagnetic contends that the "basic consumer rights offered under law" include the obligation for the seller to have an infinite number of any item in stock and ready to ship at whatever price the website happens to say, even if it's an obvious mistake.
1. Idea

2. Sketch interfaces on paper

3. Code html/css interfaces in Rails

4. Extract DB schema from interface

5. Create models in Rails

6. Connect models to the interface with controllers

edit: formatting
Work on your CV, then apply for more jobs.
Thanks for the advice; will definitely take it on board.

It's true that the language project itself is unlikely to be monetisable (especially since the chances of it ever being used let alone popular are close to 0), but I wondered whether I could develop something along a similar vein, say a code analysis tool or some such, which could find application of language-related techniques and keep me in an area I find especially interesting.

I guess I just want to be happy as a coder; whether that requires me to be independent or can be achieved working for someone else is something I'm not yet sure about. I agree I need to leave the negative situation, I guess part of what I'm asking is how best to improve myself such that I can get a job somewhere decent.
Yes, but word of mouth is incredibly hard to measure. (twitter and social media helps a bit in this regard) What you can measure is broad media exposure, so this is what you look at as a measure.
You like the boots, jrockway? You are my newest hero/hera.
I think the answer is to apply to more positions. You say that you have tried for one and did not get it. Apply for several and see what happens.

Also it sounds like you are trying to hop from internal IT to software/language development (is that correct?), if you have no previous official "programming experience" at a job, the open source projects might be your best bet. That way you can have programming on your resume that they can relate to. Personal projects are good but if the project is bigger than yourself it will carry more weight - and the world needs more open source programmers.
Are Zappos based in Ontario

No. They are based near Las Vegas.
Haskell does. Roughly the author's example using monads:

[[10..20], [50..100]] >>= id >>= classify

The only thing you can't directly do with monads is the fold, since the fold breaks you out of the monad. Also, you could use arrows:

myCounter = ( concat >>> (map classify) >>> (foldr getCounts (0,0,0)) )

Then myCounter [ [10..20], [50..60]] is the function you want.
In what ways do you find AJAX brittle?

Also, could you explain (I think it's css/ruby/REST/psuedo code for an unordered list comprised of the foos - but how is that for a feature?):

%ul#foos // - @foos.each do |foo|
Ask HN: Geek Pride Day on Tuesday - What should HN do?
Geek/Nerd Pride Day is on Tuesday. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nerd_Pride_Day

Suggest ideas and vote on them for how the Hacker News Community should celebrate.
Australian Newspaper sells out first 3 months of ads for iPad edition
iPad + iPhone = iPon. That will go over well.
I was a management accountant prior to starting my company - as non-tech as you could get.

I co-founded with an engineer, so it was always a clear cut - I did sales, marketing, finance, he did engineering, we both did product.

No huge issues, I rely on engineering, but I now rely on sales and marketing, and all the other functions.

I considered learning to code at the start, but really you need divide the tasks and stick with what you are good at.
The announcement will be they've decided to allow 3rd party platforms again.

Except Flash.
I hit a BIG slump the other day, and I've been on a cleaning rampage.

I've never been much of a cleaner, so maybe that makes it worse.

I do find it cathartic for some reason.
Hopefully cathartic enough.
AutoCAD is used for more than just architecture.
I tried buying a PSP kit that was mis-priced around Christmas time. They cancelled it and didn't give me so much as an apology or regret, citing their terms of service policy.

Also, what with the downvotes...
Isn't natrius' point that we have no way of knowing if they're faked? At least that's how I read it.
J was one of the people behind DHCP. His name is on the RFC http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2131.html
I want a commitment to the Mac and OS X as a first class platform, rather than focusing almost exclusively on iDevices. I expect to be disappointed.
There are lots of little things I dislike:

-- The icons are confusing. They all look the same. After 6 months of using the HTC Hero I still have to just guess what most icons do

-- The media player is terrible (doesn't play video, does a poor job showing music, very slow if you happen to have more than a few albums)

-- To search your contacts in the dialer app you have to type the name using a T9 keyboard. This is ridiculous.

-- The contacts app is very slow. Could be the hardware but it takes at least 15 seconds to show my contacts and scrolling is not smooth.

Unfortunately these instructions did not work on my HTC Hero. It just relaunches Sense when I hit home.
I had just shared this video with my social network and had pulled the same quote. It struck me, too.
yes, I want to switch from internal to a software company. I definitely feel like open source is really critical; I don't feel like I'm working in an environment where code quality matters to anybody, the only way I'm going to get to work on a decent code base with people who care (and will improve me) before moving job is by working on open source.
Twanslator: create multilingual versions of your Tweets automatically
Get a degree in computer science. Go at night and on weekends if you must.
I can't believe UK has only two companies (the Royal Non-Software Company and the Royal Software Company?). Apply for other positions in other software companies. Even non-software companies with strong IT departments have nice jobs, technically speaking. Specially the very large non-software companies, who also tend to look beyond your specific degree - a large company usually can afford a hiring process that will allow them to understand your abilities (regardless of your nominal college degree).
Well I've just been skimming the books on my law shelf (Google was completely unhelpful) and they seem to back up what we've been saying so far; there is no provision under current consumer law to force the retailer into honouring it (actually there is sort of one but it's wording basically says "unless the retailer says otherwise..." etc.)

IANAL so that's just how I read it.
what are your top programming languages? you should have put an outline of your CV in this, you sound awesome.
Indonesia Furniture Handicraft Wholesale Marketplace Go To Promote
(jacquesm beat me to it, but I'm sure you can use more than one reply.)

Given your relationship to programming as you describe it, I am quite sure that you can break out of this job. So please don't feel depressed! Just steel yourself to work damn hard on other stuff, no matter how tired or bummed you are from work, and don't stop until you get somewhere you want to be.

Working on open-source projects is a great way to develop credibility. A huge advantage of this approach is that you build credibility with the right crowd - the ones who find the same things cool and interesting that you do. If I were you I'd work backwards from the kinds of companies I'd like to hire me and try to make substantial contributions to open-source software that such companies use. Either that or I'd make cool new library on top of one.

Working on a personal language is less likely, I think, to be externally impressive. Most people's reaction to that will be "yawn", unless you're able to demonstrate something fundamentally new about it, and even then there is a high barrier to convincing anybody. You'd be better off finding open-source implementations of some known language to work on. (I'm talking, strictly, about using it as a bridge to paid work. Obviously you feel passionately enough to make it worth doing in its own right, but that's a separate question.)
I have definitely been reticent on the jobsearching front. I guess a combination of inertia/laziness and fear have got in the way; also I suppose I am worried that if I apply to jobs before I am 'ready' (well practised in the algo stuff typically asked at decent job interviews, etc.) I will end up blowing my chances at these places then later when I come to apply with more experience in this area they won't want to hear from me. Is that a stupid approach?
I think my problem was tied to an underlying flaw in the Java runtime, because I had several new problems after installing the C2P thing - starting Chrome would ask for admin permission every time, apps couldn't be enabled and so on. New JRE + uninstall and reinstall of Chrome and everything's fine now. Gotta love browser sync.

Now that it's working, it's pretty fast and effective; I look forward to seeing what else can be done with it. For example, it could be very handy for trip planning and so forth.
> do not invite police into your house.

Sorry, just made me laugh: can they cross running water? Do they reflect in mirrors?

The TL;DR seems like good advice in general.
Why Borders Will Go Out Of Business
Business of Books - Panel Discussion: "The Book on Google"
I used to think 'Nethack' was multiplayer over the Internet - the 'Net' bit - but it doesn't appear it is. Is it?
Xerox PARC's Tool for Dealing with Twitter's "Information Overload"
They're definitely not Turing machines, but they are Turing complete, they use tapes, and you can write to the tape. Some of the later puzzles ask you to solve problems that are impossible for a DFA (such as accept X blues followed by X reds (though a PDA could also do this)). Once you do the bottom branch you get the ability to read/write green and yellow, which largely increases what you can do.
I'm sorry, but I really don't see the benefit for having made this thing-- the tweets it puts out are useless!

Are we just playing around in how to program Markov text generation? Because who cares; they figured that out ages ago.
Sadly, this result isn't typical, even if you're smart and motivated.

Just so expectations aren't raised too high...
I almost always consider it a strong positive, because Microsoft has a strong selection process (everyone who works there went through a day of interviewing).

That said, the way that Microsoft has been dealing with its extreme uncoolness lately has been by paying salaries that are far above market. With very few exceptions, every time I've tried to recruit a Microsoft veteran to a startup, they've started to pull out the spreadsheets and given me complicated sob stories about how they can make $1m in the next three years if they stay at Microsoft, whereas I'm only offering them, eh, a few % of a hot startup.

The bottom line is that spending a lot of time at Microsoft could very well ruin you for startups.

Even though I did it that way, there are two different ways of thinking about your career, and if you're REALLY a startup person, you're not going to be hedging bets by serving out your 5 year Microsoft prison sentence. If you're telling yourself that as soon as you're fully vested you'll leave, you have failed to take into account the new incentives that Microsoft will put in front of you by the end of the fifth year. And eventually you're going to be stuck in the $300,000/year treadmill at a life-sucking anonymous job with no chance of ever hitting it big (or making an impact on the world).
I ignore posts like this for exactly that reason. Its sad they get as many votes as they do.
Really excited to see this. Do you think it has legs?

I'm currently working on the same exact problem: http://slipstre.am/
Do you have any money? If I lived in Europe I'd go rent a flat in Barcelona for 3 months and put together a code portfolio on github. (I actually wouldn't do exactly that... I'd go to work on an iphone app)

If you like compilers I'd just do that. Life's too short. You might have to move somewhere far away if you want to be a professional compiler artist, though.
Where are you based (roughly)? What is your skillset? What wage are you after?

I may have a job/project for you - and we can definitely work out something to accommodate your side projects/business. If it's any use to you drop me a line and we'll talk (always happy to help fellow HNers)

We are not a software company; we actually do security/forensics (which is super interesting) but we have a little software project that should be pretty lucrative.

If you'd prefer not to post such info you can drop me an email, it's in my profile)

Otherwise; pretty much I agree with what the others are saying. Put the programming language to one side for the moment and concentrate on FOSS projects if you can.
"For this many to get posted online, there have to be even more that don't"

That seems unlikely. I would expect that pretty much 100% of the emails Jobs answers get posted.
I did a double take when I saw this thread - I finish 5 years at Microsoft to the day today :)
This seemingly minor feature is a big deal for app developers that work on both web apps and mobile apps. We develop a content library for the education market, and one of the most frequent questions we get is, "How can I view the mobile version of this content from here." Where "here" is the website loaded in a browser on a desktop/laptop computer. Our standard response was to use SMS or a third-party app. This solves that problem very gracefully.
Depends on your type of product and buzz you can generate imo. I mean, if your doing something new, and its practical that you have a limited amount of users, then a beta is great and make sense.

But most startups can't even generate the kind of buzz needed for a private beta, where it becomes worthwhile to build an invite/beta key system. If your product were to go public tomorrow, would your servers be killed in a traffic frenzy? If the answer is no, then you probably don't need a private beta.
I just think that Froyo has taken care of the last problems that Sense used to solve. I used to like Sense for the browser multi-touch and the phone icon at the bottom of the home screen at all times. That's no longer an issue, so what's the point? Plus, the stock Android keyboard doesn't look like a Christmas tree
I agree that it was a bad move but I think your conclusion is too harsh. Many companies screw up majorly from time to time. Will Facebook go out of business just because it thinks user's privacy isn't worth much? I don't think so.
Sorry. I meant // as a line break. %whatever is a Haml tag that generates <whatever>. - @foos.each do |foo| is "foreach foo in @foos".

I don't find Ajax brittle, I find my own designs when I set out from the beginning to make everything Ajaxy brittle. Brittle here meaning:

* Navigation is always funky

* I wind up with tangled messes of jQ callbacks

* I wind up with Sinatra methods that are laser-targeted for specific jQ interactions instead of general things I can use in multiple ways

Generally, the app just doesn't work as well. I think that's because it's slightly but deceptively harder to get a site driven mostly with JS working as well as a plain-ol-webapp.
hmm. I can't tell the difference between that and any other twitter feed. Mindless gibberish brain-hand-grenades that take 45 minutes to decipher and turn out to be about a television series I've never seen.
> if you're good and can reliably delver great code

I think that's the part that's not typical, not (just) the pay. In an efficient market, you get paid what you're worth.
thank you very much! I think you are perhaps being somewhat overly kind! I care about and love programming, though I do tend to feel like I somewhat suck at it. I guess right now I just want to find a way of actually getting somewhere where I can improve my coding chops.

I mainly program in C#, though I code in scheme (what a lovely language), F# which is a .net ocaml near-enough, and I am learning ometa which, though not a language, allows you to experiment with languages quite nicely in other languages.

As far as stuff I've done, I've mainly played around with stuff; outside of work I've been on-and-off working on the language idea for a while, at work I've done a bunch of internal stuff much of which sucks :'-(. I try to do as good a job as I can, though it's difficult to stay motivated when in such a negative environment. Am rather depressed about it all at the moment to be honest!

I feel like I have a lot more to improve on. a lot more. In fact I have a terrible fear that if I was to apply for jobs now my suckiness would screw my chances at some of the cooler places blowing my chance to apply at them later. Argh.
No college and you got a jo at M. at 22? This was in the early eighties? Serious; the fact that they hired you at all implies you got some gift that any tech. company probably would value.
FWIW, here's an article with a tiny bit of context and background, and the expected response from an MPEG-LA attorney: http://www.law.com/jsp/cc/PubArticleCC.jsp?id=1202458503025&...
BYO Linux router to Australia's national broadband network
Today I lacquered a shed. It's around 30ft x 25ft x 20ft in size. Took all day.

Best part was being outside. I need to get myself a laptop to enjoy hacking in the sun.
Startups exploits battles of Giants
Maybe it's just me, but it seems like I would do better if 1's and 0's were used instead of red and blue.
Yes. Crikey. There are thousands of companies in the UK that hire programmers. How many of them can you possibly blow? Besides, the more jobs you apply for, the more practice you'll have applying.
Be sure to ask yourself - is it the type of work you don't like doing or is it the company or manager that you're currently subjecting yourself to?

After spending a few years of my life contracting exclusively at non-software companies, I can definitely say that the culture can vary greatly from shop to shop so far as how well it caters to people who are there to hone their craft vs those who just show up for the paycheck.

Also, don't forget - jobs at software companies can suck too! :-)
But actually getting a document store on the client? A lightweight document store that supports complex object graphs?
There's multiple point of entries! Just do it!

Define/Pick ONE core feature of your web application.
Make that feature work, no one cares how you do it.
Once you are finished with that core feature, use it as a base for all other new features.

An analogy, to create a sculpture of a head. First shape your clay into a ball, now you got your base feature.

Go get them Tiger!
No. There are eight. Just finished reading.

Mark Bedau
Professor of philosophy and humanities, Reed College, Oregon

George Church
Geneticist, Harvard Medical School

Steen Rasmussen
Professor of physics, University of Southern Denmark

Arthur Caplan
Professor of bioethics, University of Pennsylvania

Steven Benner
Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution, Gainesville, Florida

Martin Fussenegger
Professor of biotechnology and bioengineering, ETH Zurich, Basel

Jim Collins
Professor of biomedical engineering, Boston University

David Deamer
Professor of biomolecular engineering, University of California, Santa Cruz

---------

It is interesting to read such diverse view on the subject. While no one is claiming that it is not a significant step, a lot of them are downplaying the significance.
I disagree (and I have a CS degree) - the time spent getting another academic qualification would be far better spent on the more practical suggestions given elsewhere on this page.