skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is something I run into with perl/php/python/ruby/etc too. Perhaps I've just gotten used to outsourcing some of my brain to the compiler, but I really like to lean on it to get good results. Run-time blow-ups suck, and I've always preferred using a compiler to writing all these test cases to catch run-time type errors.

I really like using a dynamic language for some tasks. I almost never use C, C++, or Java for any task I hope to start and complete within a day. Those jobs are small enough it's easy to keep track of what you are passing around.

I spent 6 months writing all of my utilities in Python. I tried very hard to like it, but it just didn't tickle my fancy. I do like perl and ruby for a dynamic language. I think perhaps the issue is, if you are like me and you don't like using dynamic languages for large programs, the extra clarity of python isn't enough of a added bonus.
Gmail's interface is unique in that the rendering is being done by a Javascript Controller in a hidden iframe. Gmail itself only requests raw data over the wire.

If you just want the look and feel of Gmail, there are plenty of frameworks referenced in the comments (Cappucinno, YUI2, Sencha, etc) that can give you the basic layout. But if you want the mimic the speed/functionality, it'll require getting dirty with Javascript controller design in the browser.
>"If you're going to want to run your iOS apps on actual devices (not just the built-in simulator), you'll need a $99/year iPhone Developer membership from Apple..."

Which is a good reason to get acclimated to Objective-C/Cocoa by writing desktop Mac OS X software _first_. You'd need a Mac in both cases, and there are no barriers to deployment.
Great quote:

"Startups are primarly competing against indifference, lack of awareness, and lack of understanding — not other startups."

Couldn't agree more.
Ask HN: I really want to start a startup but I don't know what to do.
I need some advice:

I really want to start a startup but I don't know what to do.

I worked at friend's startup for over a year but it wasn't my startup, and it wasn't my dream. I feel I'm capable of learning or using any technology I might need - that's not my barrier.

My barrier is that I'm just not exactly sure what I would do. Sometimes the options seem so numerous that it's overwhelming. I have many interests which makes it hard to narrow my focus.

Ideally, I will be building a product or service that I can charge for, e.g. not an ad-based service.

Any ideas on how I can overcome this hump?

Thanks,
~Henry
For anyone interested in words...
+1 for the job site suggestion.

Just contact some startup job sites and offer them a deal. Don't go with freelance project listing sites. Most people know that it's tough competition on those type of sites.

Link with sites that just serve job listings. ex: startuply and others.

On another note, allow those who make paid screencasts to advertise on your site. integrate some kind of reddit-type self serve ads that show up on specific screencast's pages. Would be cool.

ex: I make ActiveRecord screencasts so i choose some pages on your site which display activerecord screencasts and choose to display my ads only on those pages :) this way you show related content too :)
Has Apple failed on its design promise
Best Sources To Find Killer Blog Posts Ideas
Killer posts can drive huge amount of traffic on your blog,even compelling content can be linked back by other bloggers and social media junkies.
Even disregarding schema validation, I like that it defines standard JSON representations for vCards, events, addresses, etc.
Check here. It's a rating of what people consider the best JavaScript books:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/74884/good-javascript-boo...

But personally, I like Crockford's book the good parts. The Oreilly definitive guide isn't bad either.
Exactly! My personal programming mantra is: "If you can come back to code you wrote two months later and like it, you're a bad programmer."

Good programmers always see room for improvement. Bad ones don't know that their code is bad (and everyone's code is bad. Apart from maybe Knuth.)
Very nice idea, again. I will investigate both, thank you!
Do you know that for a fact? Just because something's not publically available doesn't mean it's not in the back-end.
The problem is that many people aren't given the time and circumstance needed for them to write code as well as they can. When a feature needs to be demoed on Friday morning for the large contract to be closed you do what needs to be done to get something that runs and promise yourself you'll fix it when you have time (yet knowing that that time may never come). You know what you did is objectively bad, but you know that to do it objectively better would take longer (probably because it would require you to fix some other rushed part of the code produced under similar circumstances).
How to Write To Kill a Mockingbird Essay
In order to write an essay based on a text it is a good idea to read and understand the text before beginning the writing process. If the text has a theatre production this makes it better. Examination of the overall plot and theme of the story is required when writing the To Kill a Mocking Bird essay.
Top Magento extensions that are extremely useful for every store owner (Part 1)
Easy language to read, write, and maintain. Big standard library and lots of tools. Win.
Naming things 'new-' something is not IT developer specific. New College, Oxford was founded in 1379.
It's also a great way of specifying why I love it. Having been bitten on the ass one too many times by typing problems in a Python project, the feeling of confidence I get from doing the Java bureaucracy (to some extent mitigated now I do Scala instead) is something I have really come to love.

It's like a security blanket for me.
You should start making your own screencasts and sell them alongside the others. Your brand is already established, you'll have seen enough screencasts to know what works and you can identify gaps in the market. If you put an open poll on there you can get feedback from people visiting the site about what they want to buy, but isn't there. And you can share that with other screencasts producers. If nobody else steps up, you can make and sell the most popular suggestions.

You don't even have to make the screencasts, you can pay others and you just sell them.
I've never heard of a school whose abbreviation is csun; thus, this list probably has a bunch of errors. Not worth the read.
I used to be that way, but now I just don't worry about it. $10 to buy someone some food at Taco Bell isn't going to break me, and there's a chance it will help someone, so why lose sleep over it?
...or not unit tested, which would have often provided an extra layer of documentation that may have helped.
... Rails Billy from "The Change" ?
It should be possible for the software to prefix "Ask HN" automatically. (if none exists..) But yeah, it just requires little effort from those posting the story. :)
US interested in Aussie zombie code
I don't know whether or not they are in Google's data center somewhere; but to the best of my knowledge, they cannot be extracted from that data center, which means it's largely irrelevant as far as spam is concerned.
Are any startups in SF (city primarily) interviewing? (RoR)
I'm spending this upcoming entire week in San Francisco and would love to speak to startups that are looking to hire for a Rails Engineer position.

To briefly summarize my experience - I've developed two Rails sites (personal projects) from the ground up, their design (CSS/xHTML), look, implementation (RoR,jQuery,pgSQL), and deployment(nginx/mongrel_cluster). I absolutely enjoy getting my feet wet in all aspects of web dev and wearing as many hats as humanly possible. I would rate myself as an Intermediate-level Rails developer who gets things done. If I don't know something, I love spending the time learning it. I've been doing RoR all in my spare time for the past 1.5+ years.

In my day job, I've been building large-scale, distributed software systems in C for 5+ years. It's pretty cool stuff that I have loved doing but want to switch to more consumer-facing, web applications development now.

Not sure if such posts are frowned upon but not being from the bay area, it is difficult to get startups to interview you. My email is in my bio page and I'd be happy to mail you my resume.
Craig Hockenberry's Missing Manual book on iPhone development is excellent, and I recommend it to everyone who's interested in learning iOS development. http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596809775
(With the IP owners permission...)

Convert the screencasts into a standard format via Hey!Watch or Encoding.com, make them available for offline content on mobile devices. Charge for that, give a kickback to the IP owner.
The Newest and CutestExotic Baby Animals from Zoos
I don't assume a slower localized advancement in medicine. There is a global market for medical technology, and it will be sold wherever it is profitable enough to do so. The fact remains: the further the price of health care is forced down by insurers who comprise the bulk of their respective insurance markets (usually governments), the less money will be available to incentivize people to produce medical technology.

Americans will be covered rain or shine once the healthcare reform bill kicks in. If you can afford it, you have to by insurance. If you can't, it will be subsidized so you can afford it. That's the goal, anyway.

Markets require choice to function properly. I think the American approach is less likely to result in unintended consequences.
Well, that's $0.01 an email. You should probably be evaluating your conversion rates and ROI, because that's a pretty good rate.

Plus, setting up and maintaining a non-blacklisted, high deliverability mail server is nearly a full time job, so in my opinion $400 is a steal
I find the Ruby version clearer because it proceeds from left to right like a shell pipeline.

This is an excellent point. Ruby code can be some of the cleanest, most readable functional code there is. I have these kinds of chained pipelines in my Ruby code all over the place and they're much easier for me to follow than similar expressions in Lisp or Haskell and than Python's comprehensions.
Inverse for me. When I'm writing code, I'm never happy with it. I need to get a job done now and can barely spare the time to make it minimally presentable. It's always an embarrassment that I'm happy to abstract away as soon as I'm sure it's correct.

But then, I don't spend a lot of time writing code. I spend most of my time reading other people's code, and most of it is . . . well, let's charitably call it mediocre. But occasionally, I'll come across a piece of code and think, "Hey, that's actually pretty good! Who wrote that?"

Usually? It was me.

Put another way, code that I write under duress to get a job done, I hate at the time. But later I am quite fond of it. Code that I write at a leisurely pace and to my satisfaction, I am proud of at the time. But later it looks naive and foolish.
I really like Lulu.com. I have published 2 books on Lulu (and 15 through conventional publishers). Lulu is perfect for projects with limited market potential that authors want to write anyway. I use Lulu for things I want to give away free as PDFs and give people the option of getting a print book.
Hmm. Don't know if there is an option completely outside of an app store. U can use the app store that Tom Tom plans to enable on it's new gps device.

See http://www.electronista.com/articles/10/04/29/tomtom.to.use....
Your argument is logically fallacious, therefore this list has no errors.
I'm a big fan of throwing things against the wall until something sticks. Success is not about having THE great idea; it's about being persistent and determined. Don't think too much about HOW to start, just START! Then never give up, and success will come (probably sooner rather than later).
The 2nd book (Green Mars) starts with kids doing stuff like 'kissing ears'. It's all pretty dodgy stuff.
Rock the red, white, and blue. In binary.
Eyewitness: BP oil spill
I've been using Python since around 1996. Back then I had used, or was still using, C, C++, Turbo Pascal, Delphi, BASIC (groan) and assembler.

Python was so much more high-level than all these other languages that it was staggering. It was pretty weird to use it at first. Where are all the declarations? What are these "lists" and "dictionaries"? You mean I can just stick any old thing in an object or even a class? Etc.

Soon it became obvious how much more powerful this new language was, and I enjoyed replacing reams of Pascal/C code with a few lines of Python. I tried to use it at work too, but failed because it was considered "unmaintainable" by the powers that were (this was around 1999-2000). Of course, this just fueled the feeling of having an obscure but superior language rebelling against the big evil statically typed empire. :-)

Anyway, this used to be some of the appeal of Python. I suppose it still applies to some extent, although since then, Python has been passed left and right by languages that are more powerful, more flexible, more functional, more "fun", and whatnot. Nowadays there seems to be a meme going around claiming that e.g. Ruby is fun and flexible, while by contrast Python is boring and conservative. It wasn't always like that. I distinctly recall people discovering Python and exclaiming that "programming is FUN again!".

Then again, all of these things are in the eye of the beholder, mostly. If you don't like Python, no big deal, especially if you have both lower-level (C, C++) and higher-level (Lisp) languages at your disposal. (Personally, I used to think that Ruby was butt-ugly and uninteresting... these days, I have taken more of a liking to the spirit of the Ruby community, which (perhaps ironically) reminds me of Python's in the 1990s.)
I also needed a 64bit VPS earlier this year to run AllegroGraph 4 (only available as a 64bit app) and I swapped an existing 32bit RimuHosting VPS to for a 64bit VPS. I have heard good things about Linode but my experience for years has been using RimuHosting (good for very good service and admin) and EC2.

An EC2 is out for running a low cost server because the small instances are not 64bit.
92 slides is a bit long for the points the author is making, although it's hard to say without hearing the talk.

Basically the author prefers GIT and mercurial over subversion because of easier branching, and argues for having multiple versions of the backend running in order to switch between them with with configs in your code (eg. cfg["use_new_awesome_backend"] = 1) in multiple variations (eg. if (rand(0,99)<10) cfg[".."]=1, etc).
Hands Across the Sand
Vim does pretty well. On starts of blocks (when I hit : followed by return) I get an indent. At the usual places that would end a block (return, raising an exception, break or continue) I get a dedent automatically.
I'm willing to forgive the creators of Python if they didn't optimize their syntax for copying-and-pasting code.

Hotfixing is a naturally perilous process regardless of language. I've spent hours tracking down untested hotfixes in Java.

You're also probably less likely to come across a badly formatted block of python code because that would generally result in a bug. Much like misplaced brackets in Java/C/C++ would result in a bug.

It doesn't make the code magically better. It makes it less redundant. Indentation should already be there, why do you need curly brackets?
I don't much like it either.

Came from C++, learned Perl, got a job writing Fortran, learned Lisp. When hating on Perl came into vogue on the internet, I said to myself, okay, I will learn Python as a Perl replacement. It is a decent Perl replacement, what with all the libraries and the fact that it is shebang-able.

Now that I've dispensed with background, what I don't like about Python:

1. Assignments don't return values. I hate this. An example. I would like to write:

if (m = re.match("woo, regular expression")):
do some stuff with match object

Instead

m = re.match("woo, regular expression")
if m:
do some stuff with match object

This obscures the fact that I only care about this match object if it evaluates to true.

2. List comprehensions kind of suck. [(a, b) for a in as for b in bs] is a cartesian product and not a zip? Really?

3. Loops don't help this either: There's no equivalent of the Lisp (loop for x in xs for y in ys do (stuff x y)). I have to explicitly loop over the index. This pisses me off.

4. I feel that I am generally shoehorned into creating and assigning more objects than I would like.

Honestly it seems kinda crippled in comparison to Lisp, which, by the way, runs faster.

I would go back to Perl if multidimensional arrays were not so godawful. Perhaps I should try Ruby.
Urgh, I learned Java in school and recently had to use Java at work to do some stuff with a bad XML schema (think lots of "<parent><child><grandchild_1 /><grandchild_2 /><grandchild_3 /></child></parent>" wtf is element "child" for??). I used XStream for it, and started off trying to write the objects the "right" way, i.e. with private members for child nodes and getters and setters for them. However, having drank deep of the Python well, I got about 20 minutes into it before I realised that my time was better spent writing the actual logic of the app and did a :s/private/public/g. The pain from my ulcer faded almost immediately. :)

*I realise that pro Java coders use Eclipse to generate their getters and setters, but I have also drank deeply of the vim kool-aid and find myself going to ridiculous lengths sometimes to avoid other editors or IDEs. I keep trying to navigate with the wrong keys and trying to save with :w and using :sp to open other files when I use them.
What in your life would you pay for, that does not exist?

What do you know others will pay for, that does not exist?

What is your unique intersection of talents, interests and experiences, that might allow you to find a new angle on something?

Don't start with the idea of "a startup". Look for a way you can make life sufficiently better for a sufficient number of people/companies with sufficient ability and willingness to pay. The startup is the vehicle by which you trade your solution for money.
I do this too, and despite what other replies here suggest, anecdotally it does seem to work.

My approach is a little more convoluted than simply document.write or something like that, so maybe that matters. I get crawled by bad bots all the time, but these addresses never seem to get spammed. The same is not true for addresses displayed in plain-text somewhere.

My explanation has always been that there are so many plain-text addresses on the web that it isn't necessary to add JavaScript parsing logic to most harvesters. Much like car alarms or door locks--you don't need to make them unbreakable, simple harder to get at than the one next door. Someday we may need to start displaying email addresses as (or behind) captchas.
Hey, I'm pretty badass. I'd like to send you a few examples of my work and way of working. You'll be impressed. Mail me at hajrice@gmail.com.

Oh and btw, you might want to add a way of having people contact you via hn; just for future reference.
good point. forgot the fun part. but it can sometimes be both more fun and mo' faster. :)
مشاهدة مباراة غانا و امريكا
مشاهدة مباراة غانا و امريكا
What Does HN Recommend for Presentation Slide Creation
I'm going to be making a presentation at the next LA HN meetup, and I just realized that I haven't had to make slides in ages. What software do my fellow coders recommend? I run Ubuntu, but would prefer something web based if at all possible.
I'll see about moving the ads. I'll think about the results in a new page thing. Thanks for the feedback :)
I kept being asked how to easily look up java documentation and so made this to fulfil the need.
Awesome! It'd be great to see this ported to RDP (I'm getting a book on canvas, maybe I can try it...).
>That is an unfair charge

No, it's completely fair. We have objective criteria for evaluating "best", and expert opinion is Grade C evidence (different groups use different lettering conventions, but suffice it to say that expert opinion is not regarded highly since it is, in fact, not evidence).

>Citation?

Looking at only those without CVD at time of enrollment, see http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/pubmed (70,000 participants in that meta-analysis alone).

LDL is not VLDL. LDL-C is different from VLDL measures. Since this isn't that popularly known, let me explain a bit: people rarely measure LDL-C directly. Instead, they assume that virtually all serum TG is carried by VLDL; they measure HDL; and then they infer LDL-C. It turns out that this inferred LDL-C correlates well enough with directly measured LDL-C for the vast majority of people that it hasn't been worth the cost of implementing a direct test except for research purposes (Canadians will differ on this).

I'm not exactly sure where you are going with the VLDL vs LDL discussion, however, since VLDL is the precursor to LDL. It is always a formal possibility that a confounder is modifying or even inverting the relationship between X and Y, but typically one would expect some evidence in support of that. The LDL-MI association holds up in every population tested - so unless this postulated confounder is present in every population, it's not likely. Plus, most people expect that both VLDL and LDL will correlate with MI risk, though the best studied one is LDL.

>You did not address the Agatston score point, which iirc was the main rebuttal I'd made to your earlier comment. As this discussion is threatening to run off on another tangent, I will end here.

My point isn't that the Agatston score is bad; it's that you're rejecting the intermediate endpoint with the best evidence (LDL-C, which has prospective randomized trials supporting it) and then endorsing an intermediate endpoint that's far less accepted (coronary calcification). I rebutted your Agatston score comment in a couple of ways previously and without actual evidence supporting its importance in the causal chain for MI, I see it merely as a biomarker (unlike LDL-C, which is causal).

>Perhaps GCBC may itself be compelling?

No. Since the GCBC is a book that expresses its author's expert opinion, I do not find it to be evidence. When I hear "evidence," I expect data, not opinion.
What I implied was that it was not immediately obvious what the class was.

def foo (self, stream):
What is stream here?

void foo (std::ostream &out) {
out << "bar" << endl;
}

Hope you get the point.
> Sure, we could build pyramids - better pyramids even than the original ones - but they wouldn’t be terribly useful.

There are innumerable Discovery Channel-esque documentaries explaining that we can barely build a small scale reproduction of the Pyramids, at least using the knowledge they had available then.
also, http://ukijs.org is as powerful and much less code
I don't think per-dollar outcomes are a good metric to optimize for. That will get you high quality care at low prices today, but the future quality of health care will be lower than it would've been otherwise.

If there's too much surgery going on, that can be fixed without a single-payer system. My point about the value we place on health care is that even if we fixed all the problems with health care in America, we'd end up paying more than countries with single-payer systems because those systems force the price down below what people would be willing to pay on their own. That is a bad thing.