skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Cool idea, I've always wished there was something like this when shopping in a category. My process always breaks down into cross-referencing several items on cnet, amazon, ign, etc and a vote would give me a quick top 3 to narrow down my choices and save me some time.

Feedback:

1) Is there a way to cross-post an item to multiple lists? There are many categories that are simply subsets of others, ie HP Pavilion 1234 might be in "Computers", "Desktop Computers", and "Gaming Machines." It would be nice to collate votes and comments from many sources too.

2) I agree with AlexMuir on the color scheme, and you already have an alternate color available on the home page in the orange. You've worked this color in on other pages but not on the homepage. I'd suggest using an orange-scheme for the list links since those are something you'd probably want to draw attention to anyway.

3) On the comments page, I tried to click the up/down arrows before realizing they were just symbols of how a user voted instead of a vote itself. To make it more clear, I'd suggest using a +1 or -1 icon there instead of a different colored arrow.

4) You may be able to fill in some blank lists and items by reading through Amazon metadata or the like. It takes alot less inertia to upvote something than it does to enter a list or item, so I think that makes it more likely to get user involvement.
Queen takes axe to IT spending
Well, you probably want your coders to create and maintain an environment that makes it easy to write good code in. PHP has no place in such an environment.

Moreover it's highly unlikely that a good coder would apply for a PHP job in first place.
Is Programming "epistemologically challenged"
I was reading this item from HN:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1489867

which refers to this article:

http://www.info.ucl.ac.be/~pvr/decon.html

entitled:

How to Deconstruct Almost Anything --
My Postmodern Adventure

I found it an interesting read, although I concede that many would not.

However, I found in it this statement:

The Pseudo Politically Correct term that I would
use to describe the mind set of postmodernism is
"epistemologically challenged": a constitutional
inability to adopt a reasonable way to tell the
good stuff from the bad stuff.

That made me think.

In programming we often talk about "Good Code" and "Bad Code". Even code that works can be described as "Bad Code" when it's, well, when it's what, exactly? What is "Bad Code"?

I'm assuming for the moment that we're only talking about working code - code that performs a task and does so correctly. I'm even assuming we're talking about relatively efficient code, so that precludes, for example, the bogosort.

There is code that despite working, and despite being efficient, practising programmers would call "Bad Code". But how do we know?

"Good Code" should be clear as to its purpose, clear as to its operation, clear that it does what it's supposed to, and maintainable. But how do we assess these things? How does a novice gain the expertise to glance at code and either nod approvingly, or shudder.

What is "Good Code".

How can you tell?
I know you aren't arguing against Steam. I just wanted to expand/respond to a part of your comment.

Steam does require giving up certain rights you'd have if you had purchased the game from a store, true. However, it also provides you rights you wouldn't otherwise have. For example, I can reinstall games without having to worry about finding that CD/CD Key. If I lose the game DVD, I can't play it anymore. With Steam, I now have that right.

Steam might take away rights, but in doing so, it rewards me with other rights that are if not equally as valuable, are more valuable then the rights they are removing.
Links:

+ http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1489867

+ http://www.info.ucl.ac.be/~pvr/decon.html
Is there an equivalent or similar metric for non-subscription commerce sites? I operate one, and I'm struggling to find good references on the best way to determine I've 'lost' a customer.
Logo example #2 contains an MSPaint-style stick figure. Hrm.
Well thanks for the compliment all the same! I'm not an economist, but I do have a keen interest in history, particularly WWII.

Here's a link if you would like to read more about the Tiger: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiger_I#Combat_examples

"Nah, the USA hasn't been laissez-faire in money for a long time. " - I only meant more laisse faire in comparison to Europe, and in a historical sense. I should've been more specific. Note I said slightly more laissez-faire ;-) It's moving further and further in the opposite direction now of course, with the crash of 2008 and ensuring economic upheaval, Obama administration's economic approach vs, Bushs' , Greenspan gone, TARP, bank bailouts etc.

Another interesting European policy decision arising out of the ashes of WWII is the European attitude to privacy of the individual, which is quite different to the American model. The European Data Protection Directive is interesting, in that specific protections are laid in place, versus the American approach which "relies on a combination of legislation, regulation, and self-regulation, rather than overarching governmental regulations" - Wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Protection_Directive

It goes onto explain that because individual's personal information was used by Nazi Germany to put people on cattle cars and ship them to concentration camps, Europe was always going to be more concerned about personal privacy than America, which had never gone through such a horrific experience. How could they possibly understand such an attitude, having never lived through the Holocaust? Fascinating stuff, in my opinion.
Ask HN: Experiences with running Mono for ASP.NET?
Hi everyone. I'm thinking of opening a web hosting account with Ubiquity Hosting, chiefly because they support Mono for ASP.NET.

This way, I could run my own stuff written in ASP.NET/C# as well as other people's PHP gizmos on the same server.

Has anyone here had any experiences running ASP.NET on Mono, would like to share their thoughts, please?

(Or perhaps the fact I can't find much discussion online means that it works so well that no-one comments.)

Many thanks.
http://www.woot.com/Blog/
The four levels of scientific thought, by cousin_it:

1. This is true

2. This works

3. This sounds true

4. This sounds neat

With all due respect, the example of Derrida's deconstruction that you give ("pharmakos" and all that) doesn't seem to rise above level 4.
Adobe: Critical Security Vulnerability
Love Mad Men? Awesome Facebook Integration...
Dup: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1489875

Many comments already there.
I like Radiohead. I don't much like the Spice Girls. Any criteria I could give you for why this is true, for me, is ultimately subjective.
Although Russia definitely did want Japan's conquered territory in China and the rest of mainland Asia - the main lasting effect of the Atomic Bombs on the geo-political outcomes of the war was giving the Americans the ability to force the surrender before Russia began its invasion of Manchuria.

This is why the Japanese attempts to negotiate a measured surrender through the Soviets were ultimately futile - it was actually in Stalin's interests to not pass on the Japanese proposals to the US, as an early peace deal would kill his opportunity to land grab in Asia.
As the article says, you can draw other people to the company as soon as you can afford it. There you can demonstrate that you are a team player (and a team leader).
I'm puzzled why you would question the motivation of porting erlang to run atop the JVM.

Just because you don't like erlang syntax and would prefer to have ruby on top of BEAM, doesn't mean that others should not undertake this port.

Rather than question erjang, why not start your ruby/BEAM port?

Edit: better grammar.
The following story says that the U.S. are rejecting Dutch technology that can clean most of the oil out of the water. The reason: the cleaned water is not pure enough. Perfection is the enemy of the good:

http://www.financialpost.com/m/story.html?id=3203808

Excerpt: "The voracious Dutch vessels, for example, continuously suck up vast quantities of oily water, extract most of the oil and then spit overboard vast quantities of nearly oil-free water. Nearly oil-free isn't good enough for the U.S. regulators, who have a standard of 15 parts per million -- if water isn't at least 99.9985% pure, it may not be returned to the Gulf of Mexico."

The science of extracting oil from water is advancing all the time. Check out this little device for cleaning bilge water:

http://forsoilrecovery.com/
Balancing Bricks and Balloons
You need a separate website for advertising your product/service and another one for the actual service
Prediction: market forces will collide. As electric cars become more widespread, and lithium-ion batteries get cheaper, we'll get to the point when it will be profitable to run such subs entirely on batteries. Such subs wouldn't be disposable, but they could be exceedingly hard to detect.
I think it probably is more likely that most people don't bother.

I do know the Mojo Portal project runs on mono - some of the contributors only run mono. http://www.mojoportal.com/

edit: Sent too soon - what I meant to add with this is that that group there might have more people who can speak directly to the question.
Good point! Anyone can email me at cpj1357@gmail.com

As far as skills, my current site is built in ASP.NET/SQL Server, but we may be looking to convert to PHP in the future, anyone interested should have knowledge of both.

Our current goal is to start adding features based on the customer feedback we have gathered over a couple of months and create a better landing page. We also have several other apps we would like to build out at some point.

Feel free to shoot me an email with you qualifications, examples of work, hrly rate, ect and we can talk in further detail.

Thanks!
Your argument only holds if all poor people would switch to selling drugs. You're saying there is no alternative to selling drugs, which there obviously is, as demonstrated by the hundreds of millions of people worldwide who are poor yet do not sell drugs. If drugs are not illegal, those who are now selling drugs will simple have to do like the other poos people now.
It can also vary a lot within a type of service depending on the target market. At Braintree our churn rate is higher for the start-ups that we work with (because they sometimes go out of business) than it is for companies that have been around longer and are profitable.
The problem with too much granularity is that you will miss more tasks. This is, of course, offset by each task being easier to estimate. The general rule I use is that the more detailed the requirements/spec and the more static they are, the more granular you make the task list. The more vague everything is, the less granular you make the task list.
Ask HN: Is Buxfer.com being actively maintained?
I have been using Buxfer for a while now, but off late it seems the site developers are not active and also not responding to messages/mails. Ominous sign for a sick web app.<p>I have 3 years worth of data with them, and don't want to lose it.
Review my automated product review and comparison website startup
Amrapali Leisure Park- 9999748000
Hotmail now allows changing email address
It would probably help if your karma was not 1 and if the web site that is trying to sell cheap web design, did not look so cheap.
ok, then yes, it may have been a better idea to link to http://www.woot.com/Blog/ViewEntry.aspx?Id=13420
I just wrote this in the Terminal when my girlfriend was there :

say "I love you"

She was impressed :)
I used LogoTournament instead of 99designs -- similar approach. I'm generally happy with the result, BUT yeah, it was 300+ bucks, and I was not comfortable with the way that some other designers (including one who went through multiple revisions) kinda got screwed when I had to choose one.

BTW, though, I started out with a self-designed logo:
http://forum.emusictheory.com/templates/emusictheory/images/...

Here is the new one: http://www.emusictheory.com/images/layout/logo.jpg

For you to choose what route to take -- well, can you say more about the kind of site you're building? If you're selling to (enterprise?) customers who'll really need to know that you'll be offering professional support, long-term presence, etc. then the craigslist approach won't work for you (and you need more spit & polish right from the start). If it's something like wrttn (reviewed earlier today on HN) then you'd be wasting your money; just go with clean & minimal for the site, and use a nice clear font for a lettered "logo".
Will Python 2 ever end ?
From one response:

Github offers hosting of closed source projects, while Gitorious is all FOSS

Seems like a no-brainer to me. How many people develop absolutely nothing but open source projects that share 100% of their code from day zero? It stands to reason that a lot of programmers don't fall into that category.

(And even if I were paid to develop nothing but open-source software, I would occasionally want private repositories. I don't want to continuously display 100% of my prerelease code to the whole world. Looks like Gitorious has finally started to figure this out, years late: http://www.mail-archive.com/gitorious@googlegroups.com/msg01...)

And who wants to set up two Git hosts when one will do? (Even if Git does make it really easy to use more than one?)
But right now the guy is bootstrapping. He doesn't have money for brand design. He shouldn't even be worried about brand design. Having a decent looking logo so he looks professional to the 99.999999% of us who aren't brand designers is the key. Doing it at as low a cost as possible is important. This may tweak you and other brand designers out there, but the reality is he doesn't need anything more than eye candy right now.
For those that feel a visceral need to disagree with the article, be careful to not let your own personal preferences overshadow the needs of the group.

While I may quibble with a few details, I believe the author is generally correct. Over last 20+ years, I have worked with a variety of teams: co-located, remote and mixed. From what I've seen, when co-located teams mesh well, they tend to perform the best. I'm not saying remote or mixed teams can't work well -- they often do. I'm just saying that co-located teams have the potential to work better and over a longer period of time (because of the whole culture thing).
I have no experience with AirBnB, but my roommate has been a Couch Surfing (http://www.couchsurfing.org/) host and has never had a problem. Most of the time it's not actually people looking to party, or at least not party in their rooms. It's mostly people traveling on small budgets leaving small footprints.
> Well, you probably want your coders to create and maintain an environment that makes it easy to write good code in. PHP has no place in such an environment.

I agree with the second part, but I think the first part is wrong.

I think he wants coders to create and maintain software that the company will use on a daily basis, in which case, PHP is perfect for that.
I mostly use Clojure these days, but I'm really happy that other languages have implementations on top of the JVM. The JVM is a mature beast with hundreds of man-years of effort put into its development. The more languages use it, the better.
You have to think what would have happened if Japan went on with their negotiations with Soviet Russia.

You know, the ones the US tried so hard to stop with those bombs.
I've been creating sites for a number of years now and have used php since the days of putting perl scripts in your cgi-bin. I'm just now starting to learn python. Here's mho.

If you use php, check out symfony. Codeignighter is crap once you get to know you way around symfony. Php is something I feel comfortable using and know my way around. I use it for all my web sites.

The reason I am learning python is to use the app engine. It looks like a cleaner language then php and seems to be slightly more powerful.

I think it would come down to 1) does your developer know php, python, or both? Let him develop in whatever language they choose. 2) where are you gonna do with it? I think there's a time and place to use php and to use python.
Ask HN: Stock options and sign-on bonus from startup?
I recently got an offer from a startup (it has less than ten people and has raised a couple of million so far).

The offer has stock options and not stocks. Is this normal for a starup? I assumed that at this stage, the first few employees actually get some equity (stocks) instead of options.

Also, the offer has no sign-on bonus. I'm not sure what to make of this, due to the economy and due to the nature of startups. Do startups these days offer sign-on bonuses?

FYI, the job is not for an entry level position, but a bit higher up the chain.

Any comments/feedback would be welcome.
The Curse of Plenty
The difference being?

Genius in one field doesn't translate to another.

And, the real strawman is Chomsky's claim that he can't understand Continental Philosophy. I guarantee that if he put in, say, 10-15 hours a week of study for, say, 2 years, he'd have a decent competence without any problem.
Reddit.com: help translate
They were actively engaged in negotiations with Russia before the US dropped the bombs: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrender_of_Japan#Attempts_to_...
More features dilute the value of your program
The next wave of programming languages
BigThink Interview (video) with Clay Shirky
How about: "If she wasn't good enough for the other people, she won't be good enough for me."
Well, since I can't comment on that convoluted site, a quick gotcha with 'pbpaste' and 'pbcopy': they don't work with screen.

EDIT: This issue no longer exists. Kindly ignore my comment.
His belief that the Allies would go through so much trouble to stop a group of people who had killed relatively few people over a 30 year period is what makes him dumb.

What troop movements was he observing? What logistics was he disrupting? How effective could he possibly be gathering intelligence if he couldn't even report his findings to his superiors? Even if the war was still going, his contribution to the war effort was minimal compared to the effort the Allies appeared to be putting forth to "capture" him.
ha, something I did got on hacker news. thanks for the feedback folks.
Yes, higher order functions (especially foldr (resp. reduce)) are the way to go.
As someone who has actually studies Continental Philosophy, I can tell you that it's not nonsense.

Your "looks like a duck, walks like a duck" test would just as easily apply to nuclear physics or non-Euclidean geometry, if you are not already familiar with the terms of art of those fields.

And the pressure for greater clarity and simpler exposition is admirable, so far as it goes-- but (as many mathematics texts demonstrate) notation matters. Things should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler-- and this latter part is often difficult.
KnockoutJS - an observer-based JavaScript library for building UI's
And the very concept of strack traces does not even make too much sense in e.g. Haskell. (Though it can be made to work, with some cleverness.)
Agreed! I have so many favorite career moments, but that definitely tops the list. The second being coming up with the entire concept of their site because they don't know what they want.
I always use screen and I use pbcopy/pbpaste all the time. What about them doesn't work?
First of all: who called it "scientific thought"?

I'm sorry that my one-paragraph summary of Derrida's reading of the Phaedrus was not up to your high standards. Perhaps you would like to offer a one-paragraph summary of some other reading of the Phaedrus that you think rises above level 4?
You do not need special db adapters for tornado/twisted. The one that comes out of the box for tornado is a thin wrapper over the mysqldb library, and I've seen mysqldb used in twisted applications.
> (In fact the latest version of PHP (5.3) can, but for years PHP has been lacking this, so the point stands.)

Actually, it's been able to do that for a LONG time. Pretty sure (99.9% sure here) you could do that in PHP 4, and probably in PHP 3 as well (but really, it's been so long, forgive me for not remembering). Different syntax, of course, but yeah, you could do that.

PHP 5.3 essentially just made it more explicit.

Edit: When I say different syntax, I mean slightly different syntax, obvious, because it's Python being reference. The end result, however, is the same.

And, if I may be so bold, the PHP way prior to PHP 5.3 (though still supported), encouraged a cleaner implementation then the 'Cook' example demonstrated in the link above.
Ask HN: One time fee for web application
Many shareware developers charge one time fee for their software. Is it a good idea to charge one time fee for a not too complex web application?
Consider dropping out of school.
I think you need to keep ironing out your solution first. A logo is not as important as a great product. Once you can afford (from your project's profit?) a designer, hire them to help you solidify your presence. Good luck!
The solution is multicore
Handbags trends 2010
Website of the design company (Leader Creative): http://www.leadercreative.com
A new record peak luminosity for the LHC - CERN Bulletin
Maybe. Though it is relatively easy to implement an ancient BASIC in Haskell. The other way around is harder.
He's not commenting on the lack of available tutors; he's observing that masters of e.g. topology and quantum physics are capable of rendering their fields comprehensible, because of an internal structure, consistency, truth, etc that postmodernism might lack.
Before you go ahead and order the Bennington, let me ask you a question: have you read much in the broader philosophical tradition? In other words, are you relatively up to speed on, say, Plato and Descartes and Kant, for example?

If not, the Bennington isn't going to be of much use.

Derrida situates himself within a particular tradition; it's (necessarily) hard to read him in isolation.
X-Ray Laser Resurrects a Laboratory No Longer in the Vanguard
The problem isn't with PDF itself, but more PDF viewers/creators are such a super-vast-minority behind a single company's product [...] But hopefully GNU PDF can change that

I don't see how. They are behind all the other free software PDF implementations. GhostScript even has a new renderer (mupdf) that is ahead of GNU PDF.
Re jargons: I don't think all jargons are created equal.

I'd say that it's possible, and worthwhile, to investigate and make some attempt at classifying jargons with respect to properties like:

* To what extent do layers of jargon correspond to layers of depth of ideas in the field which they describe
* How precisely-defined are they, and how well-founded are the definitions
* Are there clear externally-verifiable criteria which can be used to distinguish valid use from misuse or dishonest, empty, bullshitty use of the jargon.
I think the point is that certain core aspects of erlang are not a 1:1 port between the 2 VMs. BUT THAT DOES NOT MEAN that erlang cannot be implemented on the jvm, you just trade off one set of tricks for another. As long as the language is not compromised.

Notice how its written that in Erjang you just use shared variables to pass messages between two processes VS copying messages. There you go. If the VM handles thread safety for you, then what do you care that the variable is shared vs not shared or mutable vs not mutable (in the underlying vm)? Shared just means better performance. Wasent the whole point of erlang to let your VM handle sharing vs copying and isolating processes; while you code multi-processing, erlang uses whatever it wants for efficiency.
That is an ugly permalink. Why aren't they running WordPress with more SEO friendly permalinks?
The Perils Of Opinionated Software (like Rails)