skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You write several hundred lines of code per hour? Excluding comments, no doubt. What language?
This isn't your father's Array. Sigh.
Feedback for http://couponize.me
Hi all, I've found that the opinions of those who regular this site have been valuable to me in the past, especially given the range of expertise present here.

It is with this in mind that I was hoping to get some feedback on my latest side-project, http://couponize.me. The site is a very simple to use printable coupon creator.

I'm particularly looking for feedback as to: whether everything works, confusing UI elements, and what features you'd like to see the site have.

Thanks for anyone who takes the time to look or respond.
At my former job, a programmer is the guy who transforms this instruction into Java code: "The 16th digit in the CSV is a field with 1 representing that the student is excused from the English speaking exam. Such students are to have their English written exam score proportionately increased such that it makes up 100% of the point allocation for the English subject, but it is not to be altered in reports showing sub-subject scores." A software engineer wrote that instruction. My company hired me as a software engineer, not a programmer (to the extent we had any of those, they worked in low-wage countries).

I do not call myself a programmer around consulting clients because I charge much more money than my programming skills can justify. Most of them do not need a title to understand my skill set, since they asked for me in the first place, and to the extent I have one it is as "the guy doing X for us" (X is usually a combination of programming and marketing).

"Founder" isn't too big in Japan, so I usually introduce myself as some variant of "Owner of a company." It is ridiculously superior to "programmer" in terms of social status and sets me up for an automatic conversation topic (given my age and pallor, "How the heck did that happen!?" is a common one).
Just give-up now. You're hopeless. "Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom."

God says...
greatness represent embrace enters Redeemer partaker hiddest
reads crept perversion warning dissipated derides alternates
pour eminently unseemly ceased carry censers resting kindred

The author is an arrogant buffoon. Anybody who's arrogant is a buffoon, inevitably. He talks patronizingly. Trust me, dude, God exists... do you now realize you're a buffoon.

God says...
usury over announced stone That bespotted forgave corruption
redemption pricked owed warranted regarding energy oh
ere fruitfulness figuratively intended feigned Continency
Trillion singing
Unlucky Thief Steals IPhone Used in GPS Tracking Tests
Love that quote and this one too, from your link:

"He is also often asked why he writes such terrifying stories and he answers with another question "Why do you assume I have a choice?""

Many of us probably feel the same way about programming. :)
If you read the paper linked above, rather than the wikipedia article, it becomes pretty clear that they are very explicitly talking about free will and that the result of the theorem is directly related to the quantum mechanical science behind the thought experiment. So saying 'there's no scientifically good reason for it' is off the mark.

It's also not specifically saying there is free will, it's only saying, if an experimenter has free will in deciding how to do an experiment, then the subatomic particles have the exact same kind of free will in the result that is shown from the measurement.

If by some other method we conclude that an experimenter does not actually have this 'free will' thing, then the theorem doesn't really say anything about that.

But the whole point of the theorem is directly related to the concept of free will, and naming it the Free Will Theorem is perfectly accurate.
> My computer is my lab and my bed or sofa is my lab prep.

Reminds me of programming in 1972. Think about the problem on your sofa, then buy an hour on the mainframe terminal to test out a solution. Science of all sorts seems to be done most rigorously (and thus successfully) when it's expensive to do the actual experiments.
Have you noticed any desire to program more since you started coming here?
This also illustrates the important point of only ever investing in stuff if you understand them and how they're packaged.
For me, it's the NYT's habit of referencing noise that they helped to create (the "soap opera") as if they were a completely impartial 3rd party; it's like they're blind to their own influence. Reminds me of a Tom Tomorrow cartoon (which I'm too lazy to find).
A: The average broker does not care if you make money.
It does not have anything to do with contango.

In a paper called "Facts and Fantasies about Commodity Futures" (Yale, 2004), Gorton and Rouwenhorst came to the following conclusion after studying 45 years of data on a wide array of commodities:

- "commodities that have been more backwardated (by the second definition) have not earned larger historical returns"

- "During our sample period, this commodity futures risk premium has been equal in size to the historical risk premium of stocks (the equity premium), and has exceeded the risk premium of bonds."

George Rahal wrote a paper recently that also showed that contango/backwardation did not have any affect on commoditiy returns:
http://www.hardassetsinvestor.com/features-and-interviews/1/...

"The other thing is, commodities are an artifact of futures, so they appear to have more volatility in the front month than in the back. Volatility is not the friend of a long-term index-type investor. So an index that avoids the front month is ideal."

There are some commodity ETFs that are not suitable for long term investors though. UNG, which tracks US Natural Gas, generally have bad returns. This is mostly due to the frequent turnover, since it holds the front month futures.
You already have three full-time marketers. </Seth Godin>

To elaborate a little: there isn't a huge distinction between much of what you're doing right now and the really crucial marketing stuff for small startups. You're already making decisions with SEO implications, for example, and that is highly likely to be an important channel for you. If you don't feel comfortable making those decisions, rather than getting a dedicated SEO Guy I'd strongly suggest that one or all of you start reading/doing/measuring/testing. Ditto on copywriting, etc.

Don't even get me started on the degree to which building the product or talking about building the product is marketing.
I don't think it was profound but it totally changed the course of my life. Quitting college a week before it started to take a Web development job (in 1998). I was off to take law and math, so most likely would have gone to university and done "other things" had I not been lured away by the dot com era. I couldn't say whether it was for the better or not, though, especially as I'm now finally heading back to do a math degree..
It was a publicity stunt.
I think the easiest way to get to Rails or Django or other similar framework is to start by learning HTML, then CSS, then Javascript, then PHP + MySQL, then Rails/Django/etc.

HTML will teach you basic web markup. CSS will teach you basic design. Javascript, basic interactive functions in the browser. PHP, server-side knowledge and how to create dynamic pages. MySQL, for how databases work and how to use them in CRUD situations, or more elaborate ones.
That's fine, except that quantum mechanics messes with the idea of determinate physical causation, and the Free Will Theorem (as well as the KS Paradox that it extends) is based on a particular proof that certain things (in this case, the measurement of the spin of a particle under certain circumstances) do not follow physical causation.

What the FW Theorem shows is that if you take a situation in which we assume humans have free will, then the result is that subatomic particles also have that exact same kind of free will.
Probably looking at demographics on HN, to get a feel for the community.
Except that the whole point of this theorem is that a free-willed human implies a non fully deterministic world.
I've held GSG for a year or so and wondered why it wasn't gaining while gold, oil, and everything else was going up. Is there any way to invest in oil using a standard brokerage account? Doesn't seem like it.
Online Research Driving Purchasing Decisions
Before deciding to buy recommended products or services, the majority (81%) of Americans will go online to verify recommendations, specifically through researching product/service information (61%), reading user reviews (55%) or searching ratings websites (43%), according to a new report by marketing firm Cone.
Collaborative Filtering Plugin for Rails
Yeah, I'm not sure what the exactly correct formulation is. Your formulation may retain the spirit, but be more technically correct.

I guess the important point is that I like to define free will as "the ability to make a decision faster than any available entity can predict the result of the decision." A computer running a some program doesn't have free will, because I can beat it to its own decision with more or faster computers. Also, I can force it to solve problems to which I already know the answer. Interestingly, I may have free will today, but "lose" it tomorrow, when a sufficiently advanced simulation of my mind is released.
* It has to be built-in, not optional, core to the language.*

This begs the question, what's core? Python's regex could go either way, for example.
I really don't understand what could make it illegal above-and-beyond regular pornography. Sure, it's disgusting, but a lot of things are disgusting.
I'll get downvoted for this, but what the heck.

Comedian Louis CK on Bill Gates:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=95fNgx8aCS8

"You know what you could do with 85 billion dollars? You could buy every baseball team and have them all wear dresses for only like 3 billion. How do you not do that? I would do that everyday. One day I would go out and buy all the pants in the world and just burn them. Start over with making pants. They're all gone."
Tim's current position is something any professional developer should reflect upon. Even if the tools or language one currently uses are popular (and growing more so) at the moment, there's a good chance that they will eventually enter into long-term decline, like Perl has. Ruby users may now feel on top of the world, since despite its flaws the Ruby community is vibrant, exciting, and lucrative, but one day we too may be protesting that "Ruby isn't dying", despite all evidence to the contrary.

Being honestly aware of the strengths and weaknesses of the tools one uses, and being willing and able to move to other tools if necessary, are attributes that will probably help one have a much happier career.
'Invisible' tree house opens in Sweden
That's just one step away from the same problem. You use them in a mock up... you succeed with a mock up... then you are stuck with building out that mock up of images that need an attribution, or you have to find substitutes.
I'm working on an open source html5 web interface to mongodb http://github.com/ryanfitz/pergola It uses padrino (ruby web framework), jquery, haml, and compass. I'm planning on turning the data viewer/editor into a jquery plugin that could work with any json datastore. I could use some help with that and would definitely love UI improvements.
Pretty simple ... what proportion of this sites readers are programmers. (it doesn't really matter what you call yourself)... a snapshot of HN's reader base.
That's pretty observant. I always enjoy the media criticism in HN comments. Folks here are always looking behind the curtain. Yeah, the NY times has always had its own slant (as every source does), which is determined in large part by still having the pick of Ivy League grads who want to pursue journalism (look up the resume of this journalist, for example).
This is all really helpful, thank you.

Other suggestions I've had are "excel" and Behance's "Action Method".
Clickable link: http://couponize.me
I code slowly in general but do type very fast when needed to crank out some functions; however, I "copy and paste" very fast so the end result is fast. What, copy and paste? Abomination! Most people would say refactor, use class inheritance/delegation/template, or use library to stride to share codes. Those work fine for small scope of code and functionality. When the sharing is the whole app, copy and paste works the best. I have shell apps developed over the years that I can copy and paste into a new app very fast. Also I have a large set of util functions/classes in a common library for general common functionality. Between those two, I can crank out apps very fast.
A few points:

"Title" should probably be called 'offer'.

Make the printable 'coupon' be multiple on a page. It's rather wasteful to just do one to a sheet - 2 or 4 would be better imo.
Interesting. At my job, a programmer (well, software engineer, but there's not all that much of a distinction) is someone who translates this instruction into some combination of C++, Python, Sawzall, JavaScript, and various custom languages:

"Make users happy."
This is a weird list. To me, "Jobs" is not a niche (along with many other things on this post). It's an industry/market. "Police and Law Enforcement Jobs" would be a niche.
It might be tacky, but it would work well-enough to just rephrase it as "How many non-programmers read HN?" and have a single voting option. We can assume that HN's uniqs/month, minus that number, are the number of programmers.
That is why you do a keyword search for "jobs" to then see the applicable niches.
This may be a philosophical point, but unless you're a game designer, that sentence has to end with "...by increasing the odds that, and the ease with which, they will succeed in their goals." You can make people happy by just giving them opiates :)
It also doesn't seem to address intravenous administration of vitamin C which was Linus Pauling's strongly held belief.

Early clinical studies showed that high-dose vitamin C, given by intravenous and oral routes, may improve symptoms and prolong life in patients with terminal cancer. Double-blind placebo-controlled studies of oral vitamin C therapy showed no benefit. Recent evidence shows that oral administration of the maximum tolerated dose of vitamin C (18 g/d) produces peak plasma concentrations of only 220 µmol/L, whereas intravenous administration of the same dose produces plasma concentrations about 25-fold higher

http://www.cmaj.ca/cgi/content/full/174/7/937
I also credit HyperCard for really getting me started. Yeah, I learned a little BASIC, but I could write real programs in HyperCard. It was amazing and breathtaking. HyperCard was to the Mac as Applesoft BASIC was to the Apple II.

Since most stacks were interpreted, not compiled, you could just look at the source. HyperTalk is why I learned how to read code. I still remember when I finally realized what HyperCard meant when it said 'too much recursion'. It was like a flashbulb going off in my brain.

The modern equivalent, in terms of 'wow, how do I do that?' is obviously Javascript, but HyperTalk was just easier to read and get started with.

A minor happy note: iOS autocorrects the capitalization in HyperTalk and HyperCard. That just made me very happy.
What exactly is a model if not a belief system?
FTA: "Languages, of course, are human creations, tools we invent and hone to suit our needs. Simply showing that speakers of different languages think differently doesn't tell us whether it's language that shapes thought or the other way around."

Umm.... I disagree. English was around well before I was, and I haven't known anything but it, so to say that I am effecting the language more than it is effecting me seem inherently incorrect.
Is testing too unstable/rolling for your tastes? If you don't care about stability, try unstable ('bleeding edge' packages, supposed to be fine for desktops)
The next versions will be dog fight enabled. This one looks slow and clunky, but there will be some designed to seek and destroy the recon drones.
Putin pledges bright future to former spies in U.S
I would recommend you read "Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco"

It's an eye-opening book about just how removed upper management of a public company can be. Although I don't have much anecdotal experience to back it up, I think people who start their own companies and grow them are much more likely to be honorable than employees who worked their way up to become CEO. Being upper management of a large corporation is generally a golden ticket. Even if you do a horrible job, you will probably still receive millions in pay and stock options. In fact, because the organization is so large, it will probably take a couple years for people to figure out if you are doing poorly. By that time, you already have your money.

Because of the incentives, I would think that people trying to get into these types of positions would be much more ruthless than people who generated their wealth through their own means.

Like I said, I don't have much experience with this but it is how I imagine things are.
Alvin Toffler on Education
That's actually a good but controversial point. My employer has recently made a number of changes that measurably increased the odds and ease with which users achieved their goals, but were met with widespread user unhappiness. Similarly, there was one recent feature I was involved in that was universally lauded as being a fun little easter egg, yet wasted several million hours of productivity worldwide. It's an interesting balancing act between giving people what they want and giving them what they need, and while we tend to err on the side of giving them what they need, it can sometimes be hard to do so when they hate us for it.
Here's the link to the lady who started it:
http://www.mumsnet.com/Talk/child_internet_safety/1003998-Ne...

While I do agree they probably shouldn't have had that done, the response of the moms in the forum is pretty funny as some of them want to have facebook shut down and get the cops involved.

Also, how do they not realize that their 14 year old installed the program of their own will?
Ouch. That sounds like a painful project. Once I understand the problem to that level of detail, I can generally write the code faster than I could explain it to somebody else. Of course, I use terse and expressive programming languages.

Don Knuth's title is "Professor Emeritus of the Art of Computer Programming". If "programmer" is good enough for Knuth, then after two decades of writing software, I aspire to be worthy of the title.
The average developer only produces about 500 lines of code per month, although LOC is such a bad metric that nobody is researching this anymore.
Shouldn't breast feeding in public also be illegal then? How many kids could potentially see that?
Two words.

Hacker Dojo.
An interesting read in light of the lively discussion around HyperCard. HyperCard used HyperTalk, which also used an English-like language, although I recall it is being dramatically easier than AppleScript yet more difficult than JavaScript.
woah, where are you using BASIC? excuse the naivety but I’m not sure I’ve heard anyone use that professionaly in... ever.
This tallies with my pet hypothesis about programmer career paths. It is commonly observed that programming is a young person's game: there are lots of teenage and twenty something programmers but fewer and fewer as you look at older and older age groups. This is sometimes blamed on age discrimination, and sometimes on the idea that programming is an exceptionally terrible career.

My hypothesis is that the "problem" with programming is that it has too much upside potential: If you learn to program, have a couple more skills than just programming and can keep your wits about you, you can find lots of business and professional opportunities... most of which carry job titles other than "programmer". You move up to "software engineer", and then you become "manager of X" or "founder of Y" or maybe you're just "the guy who does Z" where Z is something that makes money for the company, like marketing or strategic research or manufacturing operations.

The most significant piece of code I ever wrote was written when my official job title was "product engineer", which kind of means "troubleshooter". My job title and description had nothing to do with software; software just happened to be what I did all day, every day, (not to mention a fair number of nights) in order to help make the company millions of dollars by finding manufacturing bugs more quickly.
> Similarly, there was one recent feature I was involved in that was universally lauded as being a fun little easter egg, yet wasted several million hours of productivity worldwide.

Pac-man?
There are two basic reasons an expedited process can create unhappiness: either

1. You're providing too many knobs and dials at each step in a workflow (see the TED talk[1]; solving this is basically where UX design and game design merge into one field),

2. Or there is a certain minimum level of strategic thought required for your business process, and you've removed all the "ruminance gaps" that allow users to have those strategic thoughts while believing that they are working. Instead, they have to just sit there and look unproductive while they ruminate, which creates stress. (You can also cynically call this the "users don't really want to do their jobs, so the more bureaucracy, the better" problem—but it still applies even to the most dedicated workers.)

You can solve the first problem with a re-design, but the second problem is actually a social one, related to how people are perceived, and how they perceive themselves, while working, and needs to be solved at the company-policy level.

As for easter eggs—I would say that it isn't your job to entertain your employees. You shouldn't be paid for releasing features which don't contribute to overall productivity (though, of course, you can do it anyway, on off hours; and keep in mind that increased morale has the same sort of effect on productivity that advertising has on brand-building.) But, on the other hand, it's also not your job to make sure that your users aren't entertained. Instead of releasing easter-egg features, perhaps just install some good games (not Minesweeper) on their workstations, and let them relax that way. Again, company-policy issue.

[1] http://www.ted.com/talks/barry_schwartz_on_the_paradox_of_ch...
Sex at Dawn -- evolutionary biology misused
Ask HN: How to add multilanguage support to a flash webapp?
I'd been developing this flash application (http://apps.facebook.com/captionmashup/) and now the beta version is out.

I'm planning to add multilanguage support but I really don't have any ideas about how to implement multilanguage library for user interface.

Should I embed and hardcode all dictionary definitions into different classes?

Should I create text files and import and create language files dynamically at runtime?

I'd appreciate if you can give me some tips.
Clever, but sometimes you don't want to go in reverse.
New supersonic passenger jet being designed
If I'm not mistaken, there are quite a few futures-backed ETFs that roll continuously -- VXX perhaps? So it's not like it's not possible. It's baffling to me that fund managers are either oblivious to how much they're moving the market, or that they don't care.
Or try this

var i = a.length;
while (i--){
console.log(a[i]);
}
I've realized that I need to sit back in silence more - just with the music alone, I'm killing my ability to think hard and long in silence. And the best thoughts seem to come out of those opportunity's that I seldom take.
Useful part of social life, perhaps. Essential, I disagree. Furthermore, someone could get these experiences elsewhere. Finally, the poster didn't state that they didn't have ANY degree, just that they didn't have a CS degree.

Of course, your post might be satirical; in that case, just ignore me ;-)
If it were that easy, It would not be profitable.