skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Mutations inplace are often done /necessary to make things performant with the JVM, viz clojure transients. For those playing along at home, the tapir book ("Purity Inside vs. Outside) and staircase book ("What makes an object stateful? p 357) are good little summaries.

http://programming-scala.labs.oreilly.com/ch08.html#PurityIn...
Bukowski's gravestone reads "don't try". Which doesn't necessarily mean "forget about it, you'll never succeed", but rather, "don't try, do".

http://bukowski.net/dont_try.php
Would you fill a long web form?
Hello everyone.

Would you fill a long web form just to inform others on something specific? Like 30 questions and like a poll. Many of the form elements consist of radio boxes so it's just clicking. There will only be 5 text areas and no inputs as well.

These are questions for you to share your experience with others for something specific and this is the only way to access others' experiences.

As the idea doesn't belong to me, I cannot explain the full start-up idea, so excuse me for "something" :)
'Good enough' is largely a political problem. I don't think the FSF would have gone into politics if it were possible to rewrite the world in the style of Emacs. That's a political goal, that's not a technical one.

I think we're sort of in a pre-literate society in a lot of ways, and people (or whatever) will look back on this century as sort of like the beginnings of language. And like natural language, I think computer languages and their use are going to eventually have much more interesting political implications. Especially once the concept of IP dies and we start looking at code as a conversation.
Good Morning America an Outstanding Program
headshot! (commiserations, had to say)
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Sorry, you might have "paying customers" and they might think it's amazing but I'm going to have to disagree with you on your perception of good. I don't quite understand what your product is, does or what problem it's solving or who it's even for and there's no immediate wow-I-get-it-ness to it. Custom Software App builder? Why do I need it? Is it even that? Are you building apps for people? Judging by the language on your site the level of sophistication needed to use your product, the person should be able build it themselves.

I highly doubt that anyone would give you money and why $250,000? how will that accomplish anything? It just seems like a finger in a wind number. Refine your idea then refine it some more. You're getting high on your own idea.

Your website is really off-center when browsed in chrome, try looking at it at 1024 screen.
Screen scraping means: you write a web crawler which loads up the web page (in this case, takes your bank login user name and password, puts them in the login form on the bank website, pretends to be you and loads up the relevant web pages). Then you write an html parser which grabs the relevant bits from the bank's web page (account balance, number, name, etc.) and stores those bits somewhere useful in the local database.
> One of your problems is that you are judging yourself by your natural abilities.

This is really a huge point. It reminds me of this piece:

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/10/29/are-kids-getting-to...

"The concern is that by focusing on self-esteem and confidence building, parents and teachers may be giving real goals and achievement short shrift. The article cites a recent study in which eighth graders in Korea and the United States were asked whether they were good at math. Among the American students, 39 percent said they were excellent at math, compared to just 6 percent of the Korean eighth graders. But the reality was somewhat different. The Korean kids scored far better in math than the over-confident American students."

And this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect

I wonder if they are all linked? If I'm told my entire life I'm bright and talented, won't I assume that to be true? Learning something, the hard work required, means lots and lots and lots of failure. Failure is an excellent teacher if you are listening. Staying in your comfort zone, where you receive constant praise may create an environment of false input. You may be the best at something in your immediate family, or in your peer group, but there's always somebody who's better at that same thing. And they usually got there through blood sweat and tears.
This article appeared over at Reddit about a half day earlier: http://www.reddit.com/r/lisp/comments/cs94g/on_preferring_li...
Windows x64 Explained
I found the reddit response to this to be more interesting:

http://www.reddit.com/r/lisp/comments/cs94g/on_preferring_li...

Most programmers who achieve mastery in a fringe language find themselves having to justify their choice of tool to others. I think that poster did a good job in that regard.

Btw, Lisp vs Haskell debates can either lead to intellectually stimulating discussions, or they can devolve into a bum-fight. The decision that leads to the choice of either language over something more "popular" is the same: a quest for beauty and profound insight.
See the answers under screen scraping; basically they load the web pages up, login as you, and parse the html to find what they need...
Ten Tips to Keep Your Business Plan Simple
At the Geo Loco event there was a panel specifically discussing whether location startups are businesses or features. So far they are coupon companies. Nothing wrong with that.
Idea de trading con el futuro de la soja a corto plazo
Yes, I've found that it is possible to change the 'top idea' in my mind, just by noticing that I am thinking of it, and choosing to not think, or think of something else in that moment. This seems to cause thinking about it to occur less frequently.
Unless I'm mistaken, it's only a decal and not a real band-aid.
4 Golden Rules for Social Media Marketing Success | Joanna Ciolek
It's the old interplay between science and engineering. One of the things HN is great for is creating a productive space for this type of cognitive transfer to happen in a useful and non-destructive way. It's actually pretty rare, I've seen many places that attempt to transition science into engineering and fail miserably.
In the 9th paragraph:

"Try to get yourself into situations where the most urgent problems are ones you want think about."

Should be:

"Try to get yourself into situations where the most urgent problems are ones you want to think about."

Right?
Stunning Theoretical Manufacturing Venture 
Engineering is the discipline, art and profession of acquiring and applying technical, scientific, and mathematical knowledge to design and implement materials, structures, machines, devices, systems, and processes that safely realize a desired objective or invention
ironically you can just grep it:)

curl -d "username=foo&password=bar" https://yourbank.com | grep balance
The code itself would only be one portion of the project price. You may look at code that might only take 1 week to produce, but it may have taken 5 weeks and 4 iterations to get to that point, specifically because the committees in charge did not know how to express their needs.

That's not to say I don't think open sourcing code is a good idea - in general I do. But don't use the code as the sole data point when judging whether it was worth what was paid.

I have done some work for the state of NC, and I took over a project a few years ago that was in a total mess. I had asked to rebuild it, and was told 'no' initially. So the first year dealing with it was basically patching and rewriting and learning how that system was built. It took far longer to understand spaghetti PHP than it would have to just ask what they needed and rebuild it, but there was no trust in me at that point (given what they'd been delivered at that point, I suspect they didn't trust anyone to deliver something moderately decent and usable!) Someone looking at what I'd 'delivered' for $x just looking at the code would have been horrified, but it was not solely my decision.

It might not lead to cost savings directly, but possibly over the long term. Other gov't entities might be able to reuse it and get their own savings, but the original entity might not see any direct savings initially.

I've also been involved using data from a fairly high dollar value NC-based project, and I'm rather appalled at how bad the data I'm given is curated. The entire project has taken years, run well in to the 8 figures, and from the few data points I've interacted with it on, plain shoddy. But... independents and small businesses basically would never be given a chance to work on 'mission critical' stuff, so those projects go to the big consulting houses and shops, who get to milk the taxpayers for years delivering substandard results which few ever even see directly, and fewer would know how to fix. That's what's so frustrating.

That said, open sourcing more govt code is a good idea.
I'd pay ~$20 for one of these. Make it waterproof so I can dive with it and I'd pay ~$30-$35.
I find that F#'s (close to OCaml) type system helps me think through problems and lets me get correct programs faster, that somehow just seem to work correctly the first time.

Usually when writing a program in F# I usually write out the types of the functions I need first, before worrying about how the functions work. Because the type system is so descriptive I can validate that a plan to solve a problem is going to work before I start writing code.

Because the type system is powerful, when I need to make a change, it is simple to determine where my assumptions are broken and make the correct fixes.
I spend more time browsing HN than any other site.. I guess this means byebye HN? :'(
Agree - What were they thinking with the news page, it's went from one of my first check general news aggregators to near last check?
Their redesigned image search is awesome though!
The effect of genetic drift is larger in small populations, and smaller in large populations.
i feel like shit for 15 or so seconds, and then an overwhelming sense of motivation pours over me and makes me want to go out and make something that I too can proudly share on HN
Citibank's dirty spamming ways
Reminds me a bit of the Yongsan electronics market in Seoul. I've never been in a building before with a hundred different stores selling nothing but PC power supply fans.

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

I've never been to Akihabara, but I've heard that the experience is similar.
You load the contents of a web page into a string and use a regex to grab the data.

HA! Just kidding about the regex.
Would you please share some code samples or favorite blog posts on how you're using phpQuery as part of a scrape app? What set of tools/libraries are you using?

I'd really like to hear more about the current state of the art (without you telling any company secrets). I have quite a lot of experience scraping utility and government websites (no javascript) in perl + LWP... but I'm getting a little tired of perl and am looking to give a new toolset a try. Perferably one that can handle a broader range of modern websites.
What signs do you think you will see?

I think we are hitting a new reality where people are having a hard time adding value. Over time, I think computers and robots will be able to automate and out perform most human tasks.

Much effort is put on retraining people for new jobs. The problem is that there will come a point where no human will beat the automated systems and no amount of training will fix that. On the top end of the scale, we have brilliant people that are forced to accept low wage research jobs or jobs that have nothing to do with their specialty.

Have you seen the diapers.com automated warehouse video? How long do you think it will take before every non-unionized retail chain has automated the restocking of their stores. How many net jobs do you think that will create?

I'm not saying the "Singularity" is approaching. But I do wonder what the signs would be and if these are some of them.
Freelance web developer conference
I'm organizing a conference for freelance web professionals - developer, designer, and whatever's in between. Although this might be seen as a bit of a sales pitch, given the time, location (Raleigh, NC) and price, most readers here won't be attending (and that's fine - we wouldn't have room for you all anyway!)

However, what I'm also interested in is session topics/ideas. I've got about half of the sessions fleshed out, and am soliciting input for other sessions. Certainly you're welcome to submit a proposal for a session yourself, but in general, what sorts of sessions would you expect to see (or like to see) at a conference like this?

As to those who might suggest a total 'community driven' topic selection process, as is the style these days, we may migrate to that if the demand for this conference is there in the future. Because this is the first one, I wanted to line up a certain number of speakers and topics I thought would be a good starting point to help set the tone and expectations.

EDIT: Argh - I can't seem to take the link off the URL, nor can I remove the topic altogether. Sorry - was hoping for a link to discuss right here, rather than just a link to the site. :/
Wow Ilove this stuf, I can already see Apple apologist lining up to show how this is "Just Works" or "magical Design" and how Chrome is evil since google is transffering data over their seceret wi-fi internet which fills the whole world.

I also see an idiot commenting about his mother in law, sadly theses people never understand concerns for privacy since being apple fanboi they already have hardly anything to hide.
It's the reality distortion field? :-)

It'd be tacky if Microsoft was requiring or even pressuring employees to buy Windows 7 phones. Giving them away seems like a pretty nice perk for employess, and a good opportunity for MS to "eat their own dog food". If every employee has one, campus gossip should give you a pretty good idea what stuff users really like and what stuff they don't.
Beta Launch: Drupal Gardens. Free Hosted Drupal Sites by Acquia.
YC wanted to invest in new kind of CRM. Something like this?
An ex-colleague of mine, and I imagine many people, misunderstand privacy in the way espoused by Eric Schmidt's comment: "Internet users shouldn't worry about privacy unless they have something to hide."
Wow Ilove this stuf, I can already see Apple apologist lining up to show how this is "Just Works" or "magical Design" and how Chrome is evil since google is transffering data over their seceret wi-fi internet which fills the whole world.

I also see an idiot commenting about his mother in law, sadly theses people never understand concerns for privacy.
These are good points ryanelkins, especially about the distinction between "having wide appeal" and having customers that know other customers in the market. This was definitely a problem we faced early on. Essentially we thought we'd be selling to students and instead we've done most of our business with non-students.

Regarding the rewards, we did offer both the customer and the person being referred free time on the site as a reward, but either we didn't do a good job making that clear (very possible) or it wasn't compelling enough. To be honest, we're still not sure which it was.
nice stuff, handed to my dev colleagues :)
The odd thing, is that getting a list of all profiles correctly doesn't wor. If you go to Google's robots.txt and scroll to the bottom to find the profiles sitemap is located at:

http://www.gstatic.com/s2/sitemaps/profiles-sitemap.xml

Which 404s.

Luckily, it's quite easy to reverse engineer. Start with:

http://www.gstatic.com/s2/sitemaps/sitemap-000.txt

and increment 000 till you 404. From quick testing, it's less than 3500 but more than 3200.
Yeah, I've been waiting for them to copy Bing's design for image search for a while now. Bing's was so much better, it had to happen some time. I'm just glad it didn't take longer.
This is cool, have you used it?
And how is this news? Google has been trying to be too many things at once and failing in many of them for at least 4 years now. Also it was a very shallow blog post, an itemized list of what the author dislikes about the current status of Google services would do; he didn't care to elaborate any of them anyway.
Priceline succeeded despite hyped name-your-own-price model, not because of it
Wow, you're catching some flak for saying that. As someone who's actually worked for several startups, and was hire #3 (and now senior employee) at the one I work at now, I'd have to say I agree with you on this one, especially the first sentance. A lot of it is down to the - shall we say, "quirky" personalities and decision making process of the entrepeneurs running the place. A small, fast moving outfit like a startup is disproportionately affected by the actions of it's founders. If they decide that they're going to shoot from the hip and make it up as they go along - and invariably, they do - then as the person who actually has to make the product, you're going to be in for some serious misery. Larger companies, as much as they suck, tend to smooth out that kind of noise through sheer bulk alone.

Wether that is a good thing or not is largely a matter of taste, I suppose. But having worked for several startups now, I have to say I wouldn't do it again if I had a real choice
I upvoted this, but only because it proves that even Lispers can be as closed-minded as anyone else. Lisp is often shown as an example of how "enlighten" you'll get when you understand it, but clearly that doesn't necessarily mean you're open for different types of enlightenment.
MiniPAK, a handheld fuel cell charger
Founder’s Block – Symptoms and Treatments
Thanks for the comment patio! Our conversation about referral programs is what actually prompted me to write this. If it had just been us, I would have assumed that we were just doing it wrong, but when someone with a lot more experience and skill tried it with similar results I thought "huh, I wonder if there isn't a pattern there."
sitemap-3278 is the upper limit, so there appear to be roughly 16.4 million profiles available. I would be interested to see how many of these have public information (name, address, etc.).
I'm really looking forward to maintaining your code.
Isn't it way too early to tell what the effects of the campaign are?

I for one had never heard of Old Spice before, still haven't actually seen their product (not so prevalent here), but I do look out for it when I go to buy deodarant, since I want to try it out.
No, that only lets you jump out - not e.g. jump between several suspended computations.
Could you perhaps explain what it is they misunderstand about the word. I don't understand what you mean.
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Why do location based services still suck for businesses?
I remember one place where one guy - who was very experienced and a generally awesome developer had a rather unpleasant (i.e. plain rude) manner when asked worked questions even though he was generally quite pleasant about non-work topics.

He eventually admitted he did it on purpose so that people would explore every other solution to a problem before giving up and asking him (inevitably he would almost instantly know the answer - he was that kind of guy).
That's one of the drivers, certainly, but there's many more forces. Check out Dan Pink's "Free Agent Nation" for more. It's a few years old by now, but still the best view of the overall trend.
Don't bank user T&Cs specifically disallow sharing of your username and passwords though? Why would the bank be happy with a third party interrogating their systems in this way and allow the massive flow of traffic to a [successful] companies IP addresses? Surely there has to be some oversight from the bank?

I think this would be illegal in the UK under Computer Misuse Act, or somesuch, as it's unauthorised access to a computer system; the user doesn't have the authority to grant others access.
Ask HN: Rate my startup SoftwareSuggest (www.softwaresuggest.com)
Started this about 18 months ago. It was born from realizing the people were always asking myself and my business partner for suggestions on software. Example: "What should I use for virus software, picture editing, open zip files".

The original idea was to make a community driven review site of categorized web apps, mobile apps and software. We were sick of hearing people getting lost and misled on download.com and other software directories that are covered with advertising and 'sponsored links'. We also recognized that the app store and android marketplace were limited in search and suffered from ratings bias. The five star rating system wasn't as measurable as a count of 'likes' or votes.

We created an application directory of about 700 apps and associated each app with a verb/noun combination. We also attempted to categorize the 'tasks' that could be accomplished with each item.

This is what you'll find when you 'Browse Software'

Later we came up with an idea of 'Solutions' or an itinerary of goals around a central theme "e.g. Protect My Computer: Backup my files and documents | Keep spam out of my inbox | Keep viruses out of my computer". We were able to 'remix' our application directory into a playlist based on how each app was categorized.

The technology and the concepts behind it are pretty neat. It was built on appengine, and incorporates facebook, twitter feeds. The application categorization system is unique as well.

We lost steam along the way. We met with several local business incubators who expressed some interest and gave some great feedback on the struggles to monetize. At the end of the day, I think we were hoping for a quick hit, awesome idea. We then realized that this would turn into a long slog to build a community, gain visitors, and take a few years after launch to even determine if it would be profitable. We were naive when we started. At least we know now some of what we don't know. We realize now that the 'slog' is much more typical of building a business.

One of our major struggles was identifying our core user. At first we had hoped to appeal to the mass market to solve their problems. We quickly realized that the majority of people (we polled at least) aren't particularly interested in finding software/apps. They typically learn from word of mouth and aren't researchers like myself and my business partner. I speculate that the 'researcher' would be more of a technical user and so our target should be more technical 'super users'.

We kicked around the following ways to monetize:
1. Advertising
2. Affiliate fees
3. Concierge service (e.g. pay $10 to have someone remotely solve your problem)
4. Ask questions for a fee

Anyhow, the site has been sitting dormant for four months as we decide what to do with it. Does it have potential or just another idea that was poorly executed?
Those profile lists aren't complete. For more discussion, see the Google Buzz list where, until the Buzz team released their own firehose, any of us who wanted a firehose had to build our own. Also noteworthy, it's easier to just download and parse those XML files -- why use a search engine for that to begin with when it's already aggregated for you?
Or easier..
http://www.google.com/#q=site%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fgoogle.com%2Fpr...
I may be a little daft but how is this a big deal other than these files showing up in G's index?
As of this comment it's exactly 3278. I wonder why you didn't bother doing 3-4 more trials before writing the comment :)
http://www.gstatic.com/s2/sitemaps/sitemap-3278.txt
Flagged whiny blog post.