skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It sounds like all these jobs are things we can and should be doing ourselves. It sounds like a full time person once the product is "done" AND there's an opportunity for much larger growth if we were more widely known, THEN it might make sense to bring someone on.
Thanks for the feedback. I think giving more examples of using the data produced is a good idea.
The Facebook Lawsuit: Everybody Calm Down and Remember Your 1L Contracts Class
Bisness free tips exclusively for you.
Wow, that was so much better than the 7 page article, thanks! I understand what the article was about now. I kept getting lost in the side stories.

How is it that people can predict when the ETFs need to roll their contracts? And how do they make money from knowing this?
You stayed for 4 months that's a vary different situation. If you go to NY for a 2 days to 2 weeks you are much more likely to be on vacation and out to party. There are also plenty of other reasons but it's a numbers game and there have been a lot of complaints from people living next door to such property's.
For some reason your comment on city planning being complicated reminds me of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kowloon_Walled_City
So it sounds like these ETFs aren't a good investment. Do you guys have any recommendations for good investments that also offer reasonable protection from inflation?

It's a shame about these oil ETFs being no good. It seems like the perfect investment as I can't imagine the price of oil ever going down in the long term.
Wow, thanks for the thoughts, everyone! This might totally change how our company goes about its business – rather than three coders who try to think about market on the side, we'll be two coders being driven by someone actively interacting with the market and learning from it. I'll let you know how it goes 3 months out or so...
Harder to type fast on, but then again in many situations it makes typing easier because setting up a full-size keyboard wouldn't be practical. People forget that sometimes.
Your site says nothing of how the system actually works. How does it identify individuals across sites? How is reputation calculated?

If you did this the obvious way (HN or Reddit-style karma keyed to email addresses), you're going to run into a couple problems. First: if your startup takes off, users with a grudge will have a way to hurt another user's reputation across a large chunk of the Internet. This is obviously an issue with existing reputation systems, but there the damage is contained.

Second: trolls are accustomed to creating new addresses for each campaign on a troll-hostile site. The users you really need to worry about wouldn't have negative karma, they'd have a blank slate.
Ask HN: Decent software for making Gantt charts?
Has anyone found or written any decent software for making Gantt charts? Something shiny perhaps? An alternative to Project?
Are you on Mac? I LOVE OmniPlan.
Frink is awesome. What's even better, is that I see it's finally been ported to Android!!
Here are Steps to Writing a Good Essay
Essays are used to evaluate the students’ knowledge on the topic, language and reasoning skills and their ability to follow the set norms. This article explains characteristics of a good essay and how to use them to write a good essay that will be the best in the class.
I first learned programming using Hypercard. This was back in the mid 90s. It was huge fun. HyperTalk was close to English and was the easiest programming language I've ever encountered. From HyperTalk I branched out to other script languages - AppleScript, PHP, Perl. I did all kinds of programming for 10 years, before I began learning "real" languages like Java.

In general, script languages make it easier for people to get started with programming, but HyperCard was an environment that simplified a great deal. It was even easier to learn that your average script language. It made assumptions for you, to help you get started. Yet it was amazing how much you could do with it.

I think HyperCard got flattened by the Web. I do not think it is coming back. Nowadays if people want an easy-to-learn environment that allows them to build a wide range of software, there is the web.

If there is a market niche to be filled, it might be a package that tames the Web somewhat. The web is a little too wide open, and the beginner is confronted with a lot of choices before they have the knowledge to make those choices. HyperCard reduced the number of decisions that you had to make up front. Yes, there are packages like Dreamweaver and Flash that help with web and multimedia production, but they do not hold your hand like HyperCard did. Both of them are for professionals, they are scary if you are first learning. A package that makes a lot of assumptions for you, to get you started, might find a niche, even now. And even more so for something like the iPhone, where it is a little easier to make starting assumptions.

For me, the story of HyperCard is one of missed opportunities. In 1995 I went to the big tech/photo expo at the Javitts Center in New York City. At the time, interactive multi-media CD ROMs were suppose to be the next big thing (there is a scene in Jurassic Park, which came out in 1994, where the young girl expresses excitement over "an interactive CD ROM". After the web took off, it was hard to remember why CD ROMs were suppose to be a big deal). Macromedia was there, promoting Director. I looked at Director, but I was sure that this niche was going to end up being owned by HyperCard. I felt that anything so easy to learn was going to get a huge following, and then a lot of those people would evolve in serious professionals who would use the tool they were familiar with to keep building stuff (which is what made PHP successful, just a few years later).

Macromedia adjusted quickly to the Web. They took Director and stripped it down and came out with a simple product called Flash. Which eventually grew up to take over the space in exactly the way that I thought HyperCard was going to do.

Apple had something important in their hands in 1995. But they made bad decisions. Really, it is remarkable how many bad decisions they made in the mid 90s.
I don't have a cell phone and really wonder what I could do with one. This wasn't true when I was in college but now ... y day is bike to work, and come back. I have a phone at work and one at home, amazing !
What are some better titles career-wise (in the US)?
This is much less than I expected. Bingo card creator is a niche. I was hoping for things similar to that.
I think you're better off focusing on the views (HTML/CSS/JS parts) for now and outsourcing the backend stuff to someone else. Perhaps you can take over the development after you have a good handle over programming (and/or writing rails apps).
"It will be months or even years before you are a productive Rails programmer."

Doesn't that fly in the face of the definition of Rails?
Why is this interesting? Here's Python code which will take longer than your code:

i = 0
while i < 9999**9999:
i += 1
print range(10)

Assuming 10 billion loops per second that's about 10^40000 years before it finishes. Want longer? Put some extra digits on the exponent.
Go to a meetup for your language/area of expertise. I've found that having a network of other people with similar skills can often lead to people passing on job offers they don't have time for, which is a job for you!

Also, set up an RSS feed on a Craigslist search (check out the bottom right hand corner of the screen), and pounce pounce pounce.
You obviously know your stuff, but for selling business software, and by that I don't mean a <$500 shareware, it really doesn't make sense to waste money on peripheral advertising when you can go for the jugular and sell to your firms directly. For HR software, go to Monster and Indeed and build a list of companies advertising more than 5 jobs and not using a recruiter. There. Done. Now sit down from 9AM to 2PM and call them, one by one. 2PM - 5PM you do emails and follow ups.

Incoming links and pagerank do jack squat for you if your clients have a habit of purchasing software solely through trusted vendors and relationships. You really are better off offering a 40% commission to mid-sized computer support companies and focusing on one city each month, instead of getting 100 blog articles written about you. At least then you can develop a training/certification program and allow support companies to call themselves "Licensed $FOO Vendor"; your buyers wont worry about support, since the guys in their neighborhood can help them with the HR product, and you might even get link-backs from the support companies themselves.

Btw, I really urge you to blog about your marketing experience. My ex-employer's budget was $4k/daily, and I don't think they got much out of it (it kept the business solvent, and they made the money back, but not by much.)
There are other questions one asks with a language dubbed "experimental".

Will it remain stable?
Will it remain supported?
Will more people write things in it so that it develops a community of users?
Hi,

Those 3 chart types are the only data visualizations I recommend using. I should have left out the pie chart, since I don't use those.

I wasted many years of my life at Compete obsessed about "data visualizations" only to learn that no one except me and my statistical team cared about them. Please don't waste as much time as I did playing with exotic visualizations.

;dc
He is painting the Fourier components of the image from longest to shortest wavelength.
(12.5 kilotons of TNT) / (6 years + 9 months) in horsepower

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%2812.5+kilotons+of+TNT...

329.5 HP
Thanks for the kind words and for giving Performable a try. Let me know if I can be helpful.

;dc
I want to be able to go to http://www.perl.org/get.html and see two links: download Perl 5.10.xxx, download Perl 6.x.
So would moving the floating point value into an integer register, shifting, incrementing, ORing, etc. ever be faster than a full FP addition? I imagine that modern desktop CPUs have effectively-single-cycle multiply, but what about something like ARM with VFP but no Neon?
Playdom CEO John Pleasants: Why social gaming will become the norm
I got a full scholarship to study at high school in another country when I was fifteen. Total paradigm shift after that. Second paradigm shift came when I worked for a startup for the first time when I was nineteen, even before knowing that there was this thing called "startups."
If one of you owns SEO and the other takes over in-application metrics, there's no reason all three of you shouldn't be market-facing.
Mine was spending four days straight building a MS Windows style environment in x86 assembler. The assignment was Conway's Game of Life so I went a little overboard. It lead to a research job on parallel computers, access to amazing computer labs, a project for The Rolling Stones, and probably my first programming job. Thanks to friends that brought me food during the effort.

A close second was when my dad brought home an XT computer and Pascal books.
you can find lots of business and professional opportunities

We (Python Ireland user group members) recently held our own PyCon and I got chatting to a recruiter who confirmed what I was already thinking: that the "recession" hasn't really affected software devlopment jobs. Apparently there are loads of development jobs out there that pay above average.

But, like you said, few of them have "programmer" job titles.
I'm a "Developer"... and only Developers knows the difference between a Programmer and a Developer ;)
I'm kidding... nevermind... :)
That is a huge part of my problem, as well. Sometimes when showing the code to an advisor/colleague I have to bring up an interpreter and type over 10 differend commands before something starts to work (and don't even get me started on the fact that half of my bookkeeping, logging, and plotting is done by made-at-the-time emacs macros).
I'm one of the other participants. It is true that the site does not have much content at all, we're just throwing something out there to get feedback from potential customers as quickly as possible. The idea is to let implementors/sites choose whether they will keep the reputation-system scoped to their site only, to a collection of sites (usually in the same space), or globally.

Our algorithm for calculationg reputation is an improved upon version of the attack-resiliant trust metrics of http://advogato.org.
Yep, I plan on a freemium model that I actually want to roll out ASAP to make this "real" in my own mind. Basically, they'll be able to "manage" their notary business for free. If they want to use us to invoice their customers and track payments, they'll pay. If they want to build teams of signing agents and manage them, they'll pay more. My key action item is to get a pricing page up immediately - thanks for that.

Nope, just Twitter. This weekend I've begun compiling a list of contacts from my wife and mom - I'll start cold calling next week.
This is also very true.

And I think a part of the reason why this is worse with research code is that the meaty part of the code tends to be (at least in ML/NLP) a few equations from the paper, in a hacky and convoluted way, and unless you're a world-class expert on keeping track of indexes and one-greek-letter variable names, there's very little to get from the code to a well-written paper. I make an exception for tuning parameters, constants, tweaks, etc, but these shouldn't matter much anyway.
The assumption is the energy released from farting = 280HP and MPH has nothing to do with it. Also a 280HP engine is measuring the output, thermal energy is easily 3x that.

So a better way to think about it is BTU / seconds * (time) = BTU of an A bomb. If you assume at it's peak a high end fart releases 10x the daily average per second you come to vary different numbers. Basically divide his number by (10 * 60 * 60 * 24) and you get a little over 2 years.

PS: His "average" fart has the energy equivalent of ~9% methane but it's moving a lot faster than 30MPH and it's at more than 1atm (speed without pressure is meaningless).
The other ones that came to my mind:

dotProject: http://www.dotproject.net/

Redmine: http://www.redmine.org/

qdPM: http://qdpm.net/

I ended up pointing to Project Management software, but they all do Gantts...
I don't know about others but I have a tendency to end up making something close to comment type 3,ie. obvious comments. Or comments explaining what and not why.

Although it may seem that I'm describing why and not what, a couple of weeks later I would be looking at that piece of code and wondering what's the purpose of that piece of code. :|

This happens quite a bit when pseudo-coding in the code and these comments get left behind. However, sometimes these green comments are good to quickly scan through blocks of code.
If you need highly complicated ones Primavera is the de facto standard. However, read what Tufte has to say about them first:

Most of the Gantt charts are analytically thin, too simple, and lack substantive detail. The charts should be more intense. At a minimum, the charts should be annotated--for example, with to-do lists at particular points on the grid. About half the charts show their thin data in heavy grid prisons. For these charts the main visual statement is the administrative grid prison, not the actual tasks contained by the grid.

See the discussion at Tufte http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0...

I do mine using LaTeXe!
I second that. It also has excellent export support for html. Check it out - http://www.omnigroup.com/products/omniplan/features/
What Really Motivates us at Work
I would see myself ordering a bunch of Ubuntu systems from someone like Dell if I were a large business issuing them to my employees. Since I'm small, I always roll my own. I see the reasoning behind their decision, though I don't have to like it.

IMO the best way to get Linux in the hands of the masses is through devices that almost replace PCs, but aren't PCs themselves, like phones, tablets, home media servers, etc.
I vaguely remember that after the concorde was in service a few years some engineer said that there was no way it could be repeated. He was asked, "Because of the technology?" and replied, "No, there are so many regulations now it would be impossible to complete a design."
I think a lot of it has to do with the language, when written very idiomatically, tends to rapidly become hard to maintain. Part of this perhaps is the history of Perl as a fantastic one-off tool language (I'm not a developer for my company, I have other responsibilities, but when we need a fast one-off tool for some data processing, the C++, C, Java, Python and Ruby guys all come to me to hack off something to just get the job done because I can do it in a few minutes vs their half a day).

I've looked back at some of those one-offs, and for the life of me I can't tell what they are supposed to do.

On the other hand, I have written some largish projects in Perl, and when I constrained myself to a very explicit dialect of the language (almost Javaish in verbosenss), I found it to run fast, and be highly maintainable. I cracked the code open to a 20k line project I wrote 4 years ago and was able to jump right in.

In that respect it's a bit like C++ in that you can write code to be unreadable or you can write it to be readable if you constrain yourself to a non-idiomatic subset of the language. But unfortunately, the Perl community tried to embrace and open attitude towards this (there's more than one way to do things) that ultimately ended up embracing the "get it done now and in as few lines as possible" idiomatic unreadable code style.

I think other than that, OO is an important factor, Perl's OO system was so hard to do right, and other languages OO just seemed to embedded and clean to work with, but also Perl has not really found itself (for some reason) in many embedded systems, in GUI programming, on client-side systems (e.g. Javascript), etc. all places where it could have done well, but for whatever reason just never found a good comfort zone the way it does for sysadmin type tasks (and a few very small domains like computational linguistics). The Perl community seems to have spent a decade endlessly spinning around the drain of supporting backend work, and never approached the more sexy applications of the language.
That actually looks pretty cool, but you might want to add a summary of what it is in your comment. Not everyone is willing to click through and read your entire manifesto.
IMO what's interesting is the 94MB of L4 cache shared among 80 usable cores at 5.2Ghz. Latency is really just a question of the speed of light and there are workloads where this could be 20+ times as fast as that 8 CPU cluster in a 3U box. The value is "GPU with cache" not a fast x86.
This refutation of a book I've never heard of is not particularly interesting to me.
I'm not sure I agree. In most NLP papers I've read the real meat of the paper is not in the code, but in a couple of equations that, with a lot of mostly-mechanical wrapping around, implementing, debugging, and plugging into well-understood parts should make sense and be a contribution in and of themselves.

And for these other things, it might be good to see code a couple of times, but mostly at first, and to get up to speed in an area.

I think a problem is that, if you force all papers to include source code, due to the fact that science builds upon itself, you'd find that the average paper length for an area should climb a bit (going back down when a paradigm shift happens, because then the tricks stop working, but climbing all over again), and most of it would just be repeats of what's already there. Comparing to maths, it's like asking every paper proving a theorem to prove their lemmas, even very basic ones: sure, it'd help a novice understand what's going on, but it'll hinder progress more often than it'd help it. There's a place for introductory writing and a place for stand-in-the-shoulders-of-giants writing, and papers are mostly of the last sort.

For example, a couple of decades ago every paper that used a naive bayes classifier would derive the equations, describe feature selection, weighting, etc; today, most just say "I use a naive bayes classifier for this, that, and that" and move on. Likewise for SVMs---you don't want to see the full code for most papers that use that, since it's a mess of kernel caches and dual variables that mean nothing whatsoever to the problem at hand (but the algorithm won't work without it).
edw is obviously a smart guy and I too have not heard of BASIC used in production or for anything recently for that matter, so I find myself very curious and would love to know more about how you're using it.

I'm a Perl developer btw and many here consider that on a par with BASIC and might ask the same question of me.
Yup, they create potential for abuse of power. They also erode trust in legislating bodies and the law in general.

See also:
http://www.amazon.com/Three-Felonies-Day-Target-Innocent/dp/...
This may not address all the issues, but it certainly allows a more concise syntax. rb-appscript allows you to utilize apple scripting / apple events from Ruby.

The instructions on this page for building and testing worked fine for me.

http://oreilly.com/pub/a/mac/2007/02/27/replacing-applescrip...
On a related topic "Your Brain on Computers
Hooked on Gadgets, and Paying a Mental Price" http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/07/technology/07brain.html is a very interesting read.
1) Learn python with these two resources: a.This is for absolute beginners http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-comput....

b.Do these exercises for some extra oomp - http://code.google.com/edu/languages/google-python-class/exe.... there are some video lectures if required

They're much more better and practical than any ole paperback.
Too bad you lifted this directly from SEOBook (http://community.seobook.com/business-development/11259-hand...).
Behind a paywall, but since I started that thread, I can safely attest that you lifted most of it.
I really have to agree with this. The Python community has really embraced clarity of code and style as a core principle of the language, while Perl has embraced a more..."do it how you want" philosophy.

It's a bit like the subtle philosophical differences between two dialects of the same language, say Received English and an inner-city slang.
I like the algorithmic reversibility, but this seems to depend on a specific site layout. Would something like this be possible for abitrary URLs without actually making them longer?

Simply converting to base 60 or 64 wouldn't work, but since most URLs have characters that are close to each other, what about storing the differences between characters and/or using Huffman coding (or something similar) to give shorter symbols to the most common characters/differences? Maybe a preshared dictionary of common URL components?
Highly recommend Omniplan for Mac.
What Minimalist Really Means
A completely minimalist design would have the highest possible SIGNAL-TO-NOISE ratio. The SIGNAL is the information that's communicated, the NOISE is any extraneous information that dilutes the signal. The goal in minimalist design is to have maximum signal and minimum noise.