skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I am the first to preach that there is no danger in entering a saturated market, but when it comes to social I have to admit that I don't see myself switching from Facebook in any near future. I am way too locked in to bother, even if a different product has better features - and I suspect that many of my friends feel so even more.

To be a threat, it has to be a different product altogether.
What you said above is misleading. Mutability is not inherently tied to OOP. You can have immutable objects just as much as you can have functions that manipulate mutable state that they hide. I have heard that some people have even proposed in the past that one be allowed to access the variables a closure has a reference to outside of the body of the closure itself. How's that for mutable functional programming?

To me, the biggest advantages of OOP are composition and sub-typing. Check out PLT-Racket's concept of an iterable versus that of most OO languages (http://docs.racket-lang.org/reference/sequences.html#%28def....). In PLT-Racket you have to bundle together a list of functions, essentially rolling your own v-table from scratch. In an OO language you have this nice packaged concept of an Iterable interface, which is much easier to understand conceptually.

Underneath the hood, both are doing the same thing; both are performing operations according to a specified interface for some underlying data that the consumer knows nothing about. This is encapsulated message passing, which is at the heart of the OO. The same sort of thing can be done with immutable objects like functional data structures (http://code.google.com/p/pcollections/). OOP and functional programming need not contradict one another or be mutually exclusive.

As a final note, no one codes in lambda calculus any more than anyone codes in Turing machines. Real functional languages have mutable variables, and Haskell is the only language that I am aware of that tries to hide this fact as much as possible.
I find that Google is a great way to access the information on Stack Overflow, even as a participating member of the community. When I'm looking for an answer to a question, often a Google search will return the Stack Overflow post most relevant - helpful when there are many similar posts on a given topic.
I'd like to be answering questions there to provide a service, but I'd also like to receive recognition for it. But it seems like that's no longer possible, at least not at a level of tradeoff that's acceptable to me.

For one thing, I always try to provide a tested answer, but doing so means that someone frequently jumps in front of me, scoring the reputation. In many of these cases I can see that the answer provided might be conceptually correct, but wasn't actually tested, because there are typos in the code. Thus, it appears that the incentives are skewed away from providing the highest-quality answers.

I pretty much quit about two weeks ago. I spent time formulating an answer [1] that was entirely correct, so by the time I posted it there were three other answers there, but they relied on special cases rather than being generally correct. One person upvoted my answer, but almost immediately, someone else downvoted it. The only thing I can imagine is that one of the "competing" answerers wanted to ensure that his mostly-correct answer was listed above my completely correct one, so he could score points from readers that hadn't yet seen my reply that explained why special care was needed.

If my diligent work is going to be devalued like that, then I don't see the point in investing more time in it.

[1] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2975588/selecting-a-range...
Are you using the site for reputation or to spread knowledge? If its the former then you're welcome to leave, if its the latter then why do you care about reputation?
Followup here: http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2010/6/29/880185/-More-on-...
That's because support for concurrency is one of the most relevant strengths of functional programming. It's a buzzword right now, and a lot of the advice for how to do it well points toward functional programming practices, so they see that and say, "Hey, we should let people know that we already have all this stuff!"
Your conclusion that bluehost was hacked smells of confirmation bias.

Suppose I wrote a password-guessing bot to spread my malware on PHP-based websites. To increase the effectiveness of my bot, I want to target websites where I'm more likely to be able to guess passwords, and where I'll need only a few methods of inserting my code, optimally just one. If I can figure out the username generating scheme of a large host, that helps make my bot more effective. If that host hosts only or primarily PHP sites (and not asp.net or cf or whatever), then that makes my code insertion easier.

Your evidence so far afaict:
1) you found a number of blue host sites newly affected
2) you did not find comparable numbers of sites on other hosts affected around the same time
3) the affected sites all had similar code inserted in a similar way
4) there was no single application being run on all the compromised sites

Your evidence supports the hypothesis that bluehost was hacked reasonably well, but it supports my supposition just as well. What kind of tests would actually give you reasons for preferring the bluehost hacked hypothesis? Well, if we found that a large percentage of domains hosted on a single physical server were affected, or a large percentage of consecutive customer ids, then it would look a lot more like bluehost data or systems having been compromised. But if there are no bluehost boxes with a large percentage of hacked sites (we probably can't check on customer ids), then it looks more like bluehost customers were targeted one by one by a password guessing bot. I wouldn't call that bluehost being hacked (if you do, I can see why bluehost disagree), and from what I see you don't have enough evidence to claim that bluehost has been hacked.
This happens all the time at my alma mater. It's very frustrating to see almost one third of the tenured faculty positions in a department held by guys that retired years ago while new PhD grads are fighting 100-to-1 odds to get a tenure track job. It really cripples innovation and steers good people out of academia.
Completely agree.

The choice quote is:

"To be honest, I wasn’t familiar with the professor’s research methods whatsoever. Instead, I said I was interested because if I didn’t do this low-paying job the professor wouldn’t give me the position of assistant research fellow and then I wouldn’t have the money for school tuition."

The guy wasn't interested in research, just in money, and his professor (rightly) called him out. The PhD process is one of passion: if you don't have the passion for the subject you are studying, you are wasting everyone's time and money, not just your own.
I'm pretty sure the announcement will be release dates of Volumes 4a, 4b, and 4c of "The Art of Computer Programming."
Is "Google Me" a fake rumor?
If there's one rule of new york city real estate, it's that this is always the last apartment in the building, and I always have someone else coming by to sign for it in an hour, but if you sign right now..
APIs and the Growing Influence of Developers
I guarantee he's not related in anyway. Did you read the whole thing? There are quite a few criticisms of it's operational model, limitations of SQL, limitations of using stored procedures only. What did you consider to be excessive sucking?
Well, try living with me. I live in Ashbury Heights in SF. Our next door neighbor runs a possibly illegal short stay hotel. It sucks ass -- this is a quiet residential neighborhood and he rents to either redneck trash that think it's appropriate to open their car windows, blast country music as loud as their stereos will go, and drink cheap beer on the sidewalk at 2 in the morning or to eurotrash who at least have their loud parties in the house, but tend to party much later. I've had to repeatedly call the police, and finally settled the problem, for the most part, by setting my alarm for 4 AM and ringing the doorbell of the owners / using an air horn to wake the owners up. I made him understand that when I don't sleep, his family doesn't sleep, and he finally cracked down on it.

I still have his drunk assholes peeing on our garden once a month.
This is an elegant solution to a common problem I didn't even realize I had. You'd think the number of times I've cd'ed to the same directory or misspelled 'emacs' as 'enacs' or 'emac s...' would have prompted me to alias them to something useful, but at least now I can figure out what I've been missing!
Bluehost is a Mormon-owned and run web hosting operation, which I first discovered when I tracerouted a site they host for a copyright issue and noticed the servers were based in Salt Lake City (odd place for a colo, I thought, so I did some digging).

Now, there's nothing wrong per se with a business owned by people of any faith, creed or beliefs. But they are known to police and uphold their TOS based on their beliefs - lax on some sites and harsh on others depending on the constitution of the site - and to me that feels wrong and inappropriate in a business environment.

It's long, but you can read more at http://news.lavenderliberal.com/2009/07/17/bluehost-vs-the-l... or just google bluehost + mormon.

It's certainly fair to say that they don't operate from a neutral perspective like I would expect all other web hosts to behave. I think they deserve to be called out for it.

The point is, by hosting your stuff with a Mormon-operated outfit you have a higher chance of being a target for hacking compared to a 'secular' (I want to say 'normal' but that might be misconstrued as I'm not saying Mormons are not normal) hosting company because there are many people out there who have issues with the Mormon movement (like spending resource from their base in Utah to push Prop 8 through here in California http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jonathan-kim/rethink-review-em...).

Plus they host a lot of pro-mormon controversial stuff (see the first link) which is going to upset a lot of people.

I would argue that most hackers who are not motivated by financial gain have some bone or issue with the people they are attacking. I know, cos I used to be one.

Back to hosting... if I was running a site, I think I'd just want to host with a webhost that treated all of its clients normally and didn't bring religion/politics/etc into it's business practices and thus make myself a target by association.
It would be rather convenient if they did, though - ITA is in Cambridge, MA and Kayak has an R&D center about 20 minutes away in Concord, MA.
Starring Gists
Yeah, just like how nobody uses illegal drugs anymore.
I've used SO from time to time but have only participated when I came across a question I thought I could add value to with my perspective. I've never really kept up with the point system.

The author says "There's a plateau you hit there where you either have to devote way too much time to help other people do their work, or you just fall out of it." Do your points devalue over time somehow? Is there inflation in the user permissions you get with rep? Or is it just that you have to jump the shark to get the first answers in as they are far more valuable than later answers/editing answers?
Beautiful site - I want to click through to a demo and start playing with it right away though.
Can't it be both?

Gaining reputation points is a wonderful short-term incentive for contributing. Otherwise why waist time instead of working on something fun? (and good answers take a lot to write)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palm_Islands
Dell's decline from being too cheap
A minor but really useful feature: I've forked gists I will never edit for exactly this reason. Now I don't have to.

A great example of one that I (and apparently everyone else) forked: http://gist.github.com/255948
From what I understand ITA doesn't provide services to Expedia. Expedia has its own flight search engine that may be opened up to compete with ITA: "Best Fare Search"

http://www.tnooz.com/2010/05/10/news/if-google-reins-in-ita-...
The US will 'Politely Default' on its Debt"
GitHub adds Organizations
I think is only going to happen more and more across the country. I understand AirBnB is disruptive to some degree, but you have to consider:

- Cities that rely on tourism generate revenue from hotel "bed taxes" which are often higher or in addition to sales tax

- People who are making money on AirBnB by renting out rooms probably aren't paying income tax on it (call it a hunch)

- All the sublease/short-term laws that exist already. For example, in Shell Beach, CA (near where I'm at) you cannot rent a house/room for less than 1 month. People on VRBO are already sketchy about this when you call.

- I still see significant liability issues for both sides. Seriously, what happens if you rent out a room illegally and the guy/gal slips and falls in your shower? What if your dog bites them?

I want AirBnB to do well, but could enough local/state government regulations threaten their growth/existence?
Sort of. Optical channel routers already exist. (I think they are even commercially available from companies like Infinera.) This work appears to address management protocols that rapidly redirect optical channels based on network traffic needs.

I am suspicious of the touted throughput increase, at least for personal applications. The public Internet tends to be dominated by ad hoc video and audio loads, which are fairly predictable in aggregate. There probably are some commercial users (like TV networks) who have bursty 100+ Gbps loads that could benefit, but most of them will want to purchase dedicated links.
Reputation and other points systems are designed to attract people because it's like a game - in fact, this very site uses it!

Obviously there's the problem of people "gaming the system" to earn more reputation and you do whatever is possible to prevent that, but there's no reason why people can't be there for both the reputation points game AND to spread knowledge. The problem now for Stack Overflow (as I see it) is that it's reached a level of saturation where it's difficult to do either.
R5RS is a pretty light read.
For me Buzz is the tweets of about a dozen people I already follow on Twitter.
Another reason why I have to work alone, from home. I really just have to pace around and talk out loud to myself sometimes. Sometimes I conduct all-hands meetings this way - which is easy because I'm the only person in my company.
Hulu announces monthly subscription, support for iPhone/iPad, still ad supported
Good grief. I guarantee you that if anybody contacted me every week asking if I have an unadvertised job for them, I'd file them in the "stalker" folder.
If that doesn't work out, I know Canonical/Ubuntu used to have a similar deal, and it looks like they still do:

http://webapps.ubuntu.com/employment/canonical_ISDFWD/
The plateau doesn't have to do with the points, but rather the content. If you're going to give an answer that's worthwhile, it would be nice to recognition for it. If you want recognition, you have to go after questions that haven't been answered. A lot of those are basically doing other people's work, and not really question-answering.
The problem with StackOverflow is that it doesn't allow discussions, and as long as that will be the case I only see it working for general, domain-agnostic questions. If you have questions about the dark corners of C++/C#/Java, or how to best apply a design pattern, then chances are SO has something for you. As we level up as developers we gravitate relatively quickly towards specific domains. And a community of domain experts will not last long if it explicitly forbids extended discussions. The best online programming communities (e.g. gamedev, ltu, ompf, and the gold standard, flipcode (r.i.p.) ) are home to domain experts who enjoy discussing, debating and basically shooting the breeze with each other. This is what ultimately makes people stick around.
Followers / readers is one metric that contributes to their level of influence, see klout.com regarding this. But I was speaking of Influencer Marketing in more general terms. see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influencer_marketing
NUnit is a MUST. I wonder why you say unfortunately. I realize it's not the most popular thing on the HN block but if you're not proud of your codebase, it's never going to work.

Since you have NO automated tests, start this way:
1) Every single time someone fixes a bug or adds a new feature, they MUST have at least one automated test that "proves" this functionality is correct
2) In your "spare" time, you can also write automated tests to test the code execution paths covered in your manual tests that I assume you run

As for what to skip, at the beginning: nothing. Try testing -everything- you touch. You need all you can to get some real regression testing in. Eventually when you are at 50-70% code coverage you will be in a position to know what are the high-value things to cover and maybe pick and choose (although probably not).
The fact that points on SO actually unlock admin and moderation features on the site gives them real value. I don't care at all about my Reddit karma, but if it meant I could eventually retitle misleading posts I would.
I did notice in the last weeks through friends I heard hthat LinkedIn has hire at much higher rate software engineers. My assumption is that they will integrate and add more features and try capitalize on it.
My SO pet peeve was authors who answer nearly all questions in their field with "I discuss this in Chapter 5 of Volume 4 of my Everything You Need to Know About Everything series. In stores now."
Every program is either a compiler, or an interpreter.

Great insight. Thanks for teaching me about this.
To compile fine is one level, the other is to run fine without recompiling - it's easy to break binary compatibility - http://techbase.kde.org/Policies/Binary_Compatibility_Issues...
No such thing as unique, really. Every idea is stolen.
totally unrelated, but when I clicked this link, the colors/layout made me think it was digg. If anyone in charge of the site sees this, something really should be done about it. Digg is really a terrible thing to be associated with.
Great point. We should provide both ways to learn about the product, through screenshots and text for people who hate videos or through video for people who don't feel like reading right then.

I mentioned it above, but our old video was outdated and low production quality so I decided to shelve it until we could get something better. I'll get on it, thanks.
You shouldn't deny your curiosities, because you never know what they'll lead to.

Steve Jobs once dropped in on a Calligraphy class, and fell in love with beautiful typography. It had no practical purpose to him at the time, but later in life, when he was building the Mac, he built that beautiful typography into it, changing computers into a design tool.*

Taking time to play the piano will help you relax and think more creatively. Additionally, as your mind makes connections between notes and identifies patterns, it will find parallels in the challenges you face in your startup.

*Story from Jobs's Stanford Commencement Address: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1R-jKKp3NA
He cares about incentivizing people to ask great questions, and some people see reputation as an incentive. Therefore he cares about reputation.

edit: to clarify, I mean he cares about how reputation is handled, not necessarily about his own reputation.
VistaFilm founder on how to get his iphone app on top 25 in app store
>I still have his drunk assholes peeing on our garden once a month.

Get a dog.
The problem I have with this approach is that I don't know from the start what my needs are.

For example if I'm building a web app in my free time ... I'm starting with Mysql, and an ORM client like Django's, and I'm doing data-modelling that fits these tools.

Then if I would want to switch to MongoDB, if the need arises, I end up throwing away a lot of code / rewriting lots of logic. This means waisted hours and my free time for working on such stuff is very limited.

In lots of scenarios it's easier for me to just do sharding where I need it on top of MySql.

And that's what RDBMSs are good for ... they come with lots of crap you don't need, but that you may eventually which makes them fit most problems, unless you have extreme scalability needs, and even then you've got workarounds to turn to.

How do you know if / where you'll have scalability problems? And how do you know what to choose when you're doing exploratory programming?
Pretty much every startup/company is suffering from not having enough people to do development time, but I have seen this before. As odd as it sounds, getting things done is NOT a priority at these places. Sometimes it's more about politics or positioning or business-ey things but it's not real. It's hard for people who like to be productive to understand, but it's true.

I agree with Tom to get the heck out. If you want to make a last ditch effort, find the highest ranking person who will talk to you and make it 100% clear that you have NOTHING to do. Then if it's still all talk, get out.
> Does e run on the same mechanisms as the SSRIs?

No. MDMA causes the forcible release of neurotransmitters, especially serotonin. SSRIs simply prolong the action of serotonin that is spontaneously released, so they tend to be much milder.
Is there inflation in the user permissions you get with rep?

Yes. http://stackoverflow.com/faq#reputation
Your link is hosed. try http://asable.com/2010/06/asable-com-interview-of-josh-korno...
For more on pixels, a talk and a paper by Dick Lyon:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5655850487750051532...

http://www.dicklyon.com/tech/Photography/Pixel-SPIE06-Lyon.p...
While you make an incredibly interesting point (especially considering ALL of my freelanced clients are on Bluehost as it was cheap and fit their PHP needs perfectly), I would be hesitant to pull the religion card on this one.

Not because its not possible that a disgruntled anti-Mormon hacker targeted them for an attack (you've made a good argument for that), but that once you play that card, its difficult to take it back.

Ancillary Note: I doubt the one-off nature of the attack, and because of the way Bluehost handled it I will no longer be using Bluehost, or its subsidiary - Hostmonster.com, in the future.

If you guys are reading this - you just lost a lot of future customers.
Reread the paragraph before the one you reference: "Vary your message. Sometimes ask advice. Sometimes give advice. But always make it clear how much you want to work there."

Reread two paragraphs previous to that: "Ideally, you could be more specific, telling them ways you could improve one of their projects, services, or products."

In other words, don't be a stalker, but do be persistent, helpful, and interesting.
I have an agreement with my thesis advisor in which I will send him many emails as I think through an issue, and he doesn't have to read them carefully (or at all). I will clearly mark the parts that he needs to answer (like the time of the next meeting or other silly things), and if I do need an answer to a question I might send an email just with it.

Then, when it is time for us to meet, all that writing has helped the ideas solidify in my head enough for it to be very easy to explain to him what I'm trying to doand how, and then his comments can be very useful. Before we arranged this I'd block for days without managing to think some detail through, but now I just start writing him an email about the issue and by the end of the email I usually have an idea as to how can I solve it.
You have a "stalker" folder?
always make time for physical and mental health. make sure you exercise, socialize and spend some time on hobbies, even if you're specifically scheduling this time. you're most productive when you're happy, healthy, and able to focus.
Emacs gets Google Maps support.
NewsLabs (YC W10) folds months after launch, regrets big promises to journalists