skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
not an apt analogy. It's more like, I went to the store to buy a bike wheel and what I got was a bike wheel building kit that let me choose between plastic spokes, metal spokes, number of spokes, width of the rim, type of tire. But I had to figure out the magic incantation that produced the combo I wanted, which took almost as long as it would have taken me to build one wheel.
Show them this study and tell them the solution is to flex in a mirror while you work. The goal is to get all of your coworkers doing this. Then you'll really have something.
Does Posterous Have an Ego Problem?
"solutions tab" - that's almost an anti-pattern right there
Accessing Google’s RESTful APIs from Google Apps Script
What is it about the way computing is currently done that inhibits women outside of social norms?

I wonder If programming syntax as it is designed might have some influence. There is some evidence that men and women use language differently, is it possible that common computing syntax designed mostly by men to actualize their thought process is biased towards the gender?
yeah, great idea, but big cons: that's probably the fastest way to not see my kids grow, and loose my wife.
In my opinion this is the kind of thing you'd do at the launch of a new iPhone generation, not just a few weeks afterward.

Absolutely not. If a deal with Verizon were announced at the launch, it would have completely overshadowed all of the engineering effort put into the phone. It would be known as the "Verizon iPhone". This way, out of the spotlight, it leaves the iPhone brand unharmed.
Most of these refactorings required human intervention, even for simple refactorings like "Rename". When the IDE doesn't have types, some refactorings are simply impossible to perform automatically.

For more details and examples:

http://beust.com/weblog/2006/10/01/dynamic-language-refactor...
Really? And what about the years of experimenting with different variations of plastic polymers?
A gift certificate isn't the same as giving something away for free. The latter devaluates the product in the eye of the consumer.
Ok, now they're over doing it.
How to be an Indispensable Programmer
Droid X actually self-destructs if you try to mod it
As an Android advocate/fan this _really_ rubs me the wrong way.
Old people don't like Twitter, young people do. Surprise!
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Online executive MBA is the most sought out course now a days. Young professionals who lag behind for the simple reason of not having an MBA degree can now easily earn a one year executive MBA.
And how many reception bars could he chuck, if he could chuck bars?
Anybody know how will the performance be w.r.t large binary assets?
Git and Mercurial are notoriously handicapped there.
Found it. http://codeascraft.etsy.com/2010/05/20/quantum-of-deployment...
I'm confused, are you suggesting that Rails 3 architecture is influence by Perl and Python frameworks? Or are just talking about modularity in general?

Because I was just talking about Rails 3 getting out in the wild and people getting to actually start using it with heavy customization to shake out some of the bugs. The re-archtecting to this point is quite impressive, but it's still living in a bit of a vacuum.
I've tried to fetch this podcast, but it seems to be somehow unavailable or defunct...
I misread the title as "Apple to hold how to hold the iPhone 4 press conference...". Telling.

In all honesty, this has been blown out of proportion; though hell if it's a great problem to have.
And linux kernel 2.4 is just a patch away from being 2.6, and os9 is just a patch away from being osX. Just because we like discussions here doesn't mean we have to argue for the sake of arguing.
Similarly, we're not really making chip diagrams any more so much as designing them with the aid of computers. Unless there's some giant EE-geek slave trade which uses thousands of people to draw the billions of transistors out, and double check them.
Set::Object was certainly not around when I was learning Perl. I think this is good thing though. Not learning all these new Perl routines and functions probably slows down my program. But since we are probably dealing with 5 milliseconds or less, I'm not overly concerned.

I agree that defining the hash the "old fashion way" may be wordy but what I like about wordy things is they are usually easier to understand. Those looking at the wordy code will have one less thing to learn, which will translate into faster learning.

Another thing that I like about wordy is it tends to make porting to other languages a lot easier. For example, one of the tools that I had written in Perl was translated to Javascript with fair ease because I stucked with the basics.

I personally find that being wordy is a good thing instead of a bad thing. Obviously there is a point where not accepting change or wanting to learn a new trick is just being ignorant though.
Meet 'Milo': Microsoft's creepy virtual human
Imagine if they get a camera like this to fly to where it's needed. And peck at random, invisible bits of food. All the crazy people saying the birds were watching them would have to be re-evaluated.
Testing an application, infrastructure and a service
Car Mirror Fail
This may well be true. I don't have any corporate Java experience.

However I do believe from my limited Java experience that it's nearly impossible for a bug to occur that the average programmer can not trace back to it's source using more less standard methods (race conditions and other concurrency nastiness notwithstanding). In Ruby on the other hand, real head scratchers can and do occur on a regular basis that require a higher level of debugging skill than some mass-educated code monkeys are capable of.
The GMail editor feels a LOT faster than the demo provided. Any specific reason?
Toolduino (Arduino prototyping aid)
Just hold it differently this time.
Tell HN: We released our first web service
Weird, weird list. Smile? Be a friend? Eh? Is this a social club?

My list is a lot shorter: (a) write lots of good code out of personal inclination (rather than being forced by code reviews or because you are being nagged or whatever) and (b) be able to troubleshoot your way out of a paper bag.

I really don't care if you smile at me or not.
I tried to register http://deadpanic.com/blog/ , but apparently didn't make the cut. Any suggestions for improvement, or insight into the criteria you use?
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Citadel Estates has established itself as one of the most successful privately owned property development and investment companies in North West England specialising in Houses to rent carlisle. We have the in-house expertise to evaluate all types of land and property, be it brownfield or greenfield, large or small, urban or rural.
I love them, mainly because they're a really fun parody of the ridiculousness that their competitors often run (I'm looking at you Axe). They built a character that all at once oozes likability while at the same time pointing out just how stupid the whole idea that using a body-wash will get you laid is.
Demo about mixing HTML5, CSS3, WebGL
Not to take anything away from those microframeworks (they are awesome), but are you sure you're giving Rails 3 a chance?

After all, they brought the merb devs into Rails core and radically re-architected the whole framework to support modularity and customization down to a very low level. From the extraction of ActiveModel, to the inclusion of Thor for generators, the decoupling of Prototype and an ambitious attempt at unobtrustive javascript, and the declaration of a publicly support API upon which even the framework itself is built, Rails 3 the biggest overhaul Rails has ever had.

Have they succeeded in making it truly modular? I dunno, it's not released yet for one thing, but to say it's a crap shoot is a bit premature IMO.
> the US-Australia free trade agreement ensures US copyright law applies to and overrides Australian copyright law).

Can you elaborate on this? I understood treaties to have no legal force in Australia until domestic laws were passed to give them force. I know there are exceptions to this rule (like Teoh) but AFAIK they don't involve overriding domestic law
Haven't seen the interview but I'll give my $0.02 here.

I use WordPress and just started using Thesis, I think it's a well designed product, albeit a bit simple, but does that it supposed to do really well. It's a nice theme, and very easy to configure either from the WP UI or via the filters/actions. It definitely extends WordPress nicely. It's by far my favorite theme and I plan on using it on my projects (and I must've tried a million themes).

Now, if Thesis becomes open source, you can forget about quality, premium themes. Without monetary incentive, people won't rise up to create a good theme, and believe me, I checked WP themes, and most them are just crap.

Second, what's the fuss? Thesis is part of the WP eco-system, and its a mutual relationship. The more Thesis grows, the more WP grows. I'm sure he has his moral views, etc, but if someone wants to create a premium product (not using WP's code) and charge for it, let them do it.
I think this thing is ridiculous. My iPhone 4 so far has better reception of all the previous models for me (I owned all of them)
Statistically founding a tech startup is at the intersection of two things which are primarily male-dominated at the moment: founding companies and IT. It's really only when they're multiplied together that it becomes so starkly biased towards males.

My long standing theory on the tech front has been that the hook in the 80s and early 90s for kids getting into technology was computer games, which were largely marketed to boys.

My little sister, however, was born in 1988, and by the time she was using a computer the primary hook was the internet, which (as I recall) young girls spend more time on than young boys.

Like I had, she learned to program at a young age, knew HTML when she was 11, Java when she was 14, and so on. However, also like me, she had a lot of aptitude for music.

I was fiercely discouraged from music. My parents saw it as a waste of time. Becoming a software engineer was respectable. Heck, I started college in 1997 when it seemed like about the best thing in the universe that a kid could go into.

Now, my sister was encouraged in music. My mom moved 90 miles away so that she could go to a magnet high school for performing arts, my parents bought her a $3000 flute and drove her around the country to top conservatories for auditions when the time came. But even up to her senior year in high school she was considering a double major in physics and music, but the interest in physics was largely downplayed by my parents.

Now, what happened there? Two kids, both good at mathematical stuff and music, same parents, wildly different parenting approaches. I don't think my parents in the meantime considered music any more useful – it was simply acceptable that she do something useless, while I had to do something useful. I think you see where this is going.

In college I noticed this again – the computer science department was about 95% male, while the math department was only 50% male. The difference obviously wasn't in analytical abilities – I think anybody that could get through a math degree could get through a CS degree. No, the difference was that almost all of the girls were minoring in education and intending to become math teachers.

I don't think that everything in the gap is nurture; there's probably some truth to chest-beating nature of starting a company, but the scales certainly are tipped heavily in the direction of boys by our upbringing.
Verizon (26% of smartphone market) gaining on AT&T (market share dropped to 40%)
23 hours per week vs 11 hours per week? I call this a warning sign because it screams of post-hoc analysis. Unless they then used these as pre-specified cutoffs for later studies, I would be very cautious not to overinterpret.

What exactly are you saying? I honestly can't decipher the meaning of your words.
Something that bothers me whenever something like this comes up is that children are assumed to be one dimensional beings. I know for sure that at some level, be it proprioception or some difference in processing information, male and female brains are different. However, the catch is that those differences may not actually be that profound.

Children as young as 3 can pick up gender cues from the environment and base their behavior on that. I know that I did. I just knew that I couldn't play with dolls. I knew I couldn't talk about babies and things like that. I knew I was expected to pick fights with other kids. I knew what my parents expected from me, and in order to seek their approval I did precisely that.

There are so many subtle societal cues which govern behavior. You tend to only notice them when you are carefully paying attention constantly. They are undertones in conversations. It is how people look at you. It is what they first talk about. It is in their facial expressions, and somehow unconsciously we internalize them all.

What is even more interesting is what happens when a child is gender variant. Societies response to such a child happens to be quite telling, and unfortunately for a child, at least, such things matter. It mattered to me and it matters for any child. At that age approval is everything.

So is it surprising that more women don't go into tech?

In the coming years when this generation grows up in an environment of different expectations and viewpoints. I think that there will be more women in tech, and they will wonder why women earlier didn't choose it as a career.

The point is that kids must be respected and loved not confined as beings who have to grow into pre-defined roles. Only then can such things change.
I'm afraid you use the post hoc fallacy incorrectly. The post hoc fallacy is drawing conclusions based on statistically insignificant data sets, normally anecdotes of size 1, at least in every day life. Now assuming this study was done by half way competent statisticians they would have followed the tried and true methods of establishing statistical significance. Sure they could have made mistakes on the way, the entire study could be completely invalidated by a detail or two. But even in that case it isn't a post hoc ergo propter hoc.

Your thinking could stem from an affliction brought on by high schools teaching of science. They really only teach one of the scientific methods, that of hypothesis, experimentation, observation and conclusion in that order. However depending on the field of science and the subject at hand that isn't necessarily the order thing are done in. Science isn't a simple linear process like we are lead to believe in high school.
"Your website has been suspended!"

Hacker News effect? :-)

Still in Google's cache http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?client=ubuntu&#...
Governtment now seizing link aggregator domain, but fail tvshack.net  tvshack.cc
New York News,Traffic,Sports,Weather,Photos,Entertainment,and Gossip
I have my own theory to explain the differences between the way that fashion models look (esp the "elite" NewYork/Paris ones) versus the sorts of models you see on the covers of men's magazines. My primary theory is that the former are chosen mostly by women and gay men. Whereas the latter are chosen mostly by straight men. Notice how much more boy-ish, angular and bulimic fashion models look compared to the women you see in Maxim or Playboy. The former are chosen more to show off clothing whereas the latter are chosen to show off themselves.

So big differences both in purpose and in the controlling audience.
There is of course a paradox (albeit not a true one) when a sales person tries to act like an expert advisor. Prospective customers know he/she is a salesperson, so acting like an expert advisor may come across as phony.

> "Your opening proposition in the introduction should be a broad strategic interpretation of your more detailed product offer"

Right. It's exactly what makes you think, Huh? What on earth is their product? I see websites like that every day and I get annoyed. They show you a very general strategic message on the home page even though they are a one product company. I'm so grateful that startups do not follow this dated trick.
The '123n'==123 conversion is the cause for at least 8 very nasty bugs in validating user input in that application I was referring to.

And the fact that when comparing integer to strings, PHP prefers to convert the string to compare instead of converting the number (which would be lossless)
I wish this were actually about cold calling techniques--i.e., how to honestly approach someone and maximize the importance of the information you transfer to them--instead of how awesome cold calling is.

excuse me, how awesome 'good' cold calling is. god. "why it's good that cold calling is so difficult for most sales people"

because that makes it more exclusive. bleh. hacker news was made less worthwhile with this link.
Yup, simply put they gotta leave you hungering more. It's that hunger that makes you go buy the product.
One example - at a "nerd" event a couple weeks ago, one of the speakers said something to the effect of "it's really great to see all of you and your girlfriends at this event." Usually it's small assumptions like this. Another thing I've noticed, though without specific examples, is that people seem to assume girls at a hacker meetup aren't coders or will tend to give more attention to guys when discussions get technical. But of course this doesn't apply to everyone.
You may do Bingo Card Software brilliantly, A/B test everything down to the core, but in the end, no matter how brilliant it is, it's still just Bingo Card Software, and the market is limited.

If you pick something else with a much larger upper bound (like a game or so), when you spend all the time optimizing, you'll expand and expand your audience, and make more and more money.
International moving companies
The Freight Summit is the only event that is truly open to all independent forwarders in the world. From alliance-dependent forwarders to completely independent forwarders that can manage to strive in the industry alone.
I know I'm not supposed to say this because my account is less than a year old but this thread is definitely like being on Reddit. I actually like Reddit, I'm just not used to seeing these types of comments being upvoted so high on Hacker News.
Agreed. If I watched the video and then had to explain it to someone else...I would never even think to use the phrase "social network"...even if you made me talk for 10 minutes.
Apple’s Dream run with a Hiccup
It's satisfying to know that I've avoided wasting my time at the gym.

Instead, I go through life accepting the fact that I'll be dead by 80. I find it both motivating and relaxing. Instead of literally wasting 20% of my time at the gym, I can instead waste it in much more interesting ways: on games, programming, TV shows. I believe this will result in an overall healthier mental lifestyle. And since my body maintains a constant weight of ~215 pounds, and since I have no use for physical stamina or strong muscles, I literally have no use for the gym.
Thesis and the GPL
I am sorry, but the translation is just too dreadful. Can someone please post a quick tl;dr.
... and patent application filed. thanks!
How to access block sites
I love this.

I'm really really glad that HTML5 and CSS3 (inkl. svg) is on their way out of the development status and is becoming popular. This will change everything on web.
The article notes an unexpected by-product of the U.S. Supreme Court's Bilski decision: apparently, it has caused examiners to become more aggressive in rejecting software patents that represent purely abstract ideas. Of course, the line between what constitutes patentable "method" and unpatentable "idea" is murky. Nonetheless, before Bilski, the governing rule was pretty much that any method can be patented if it leads to a "useful, concrete, and tangible result," a highly liberal standard first adopted by the Federal Circuit in its State Street decision in 1998. State Street had opened the floodgates to unprecedented grants of software patents, both in number and in looseness of quality. It was precisely this idiotic outpouring of dubious patents that the Federal Circuit court itself tried to stem when it adopted the highly arbitrary "machine or transformation" test that was ultimately rejected by the Supreme Court on further appeal in Bilski. Though the Supreme Court rejected the machine-or-transformation test as a definitive standard for patentability of methods and also specifically affirmed the patentability of methods, it pointedly rejected the ultra-loose State Street test while stating that machine-or-transformation can be used to provide an important "clue" to patentability, thus signaling that the USPTO and the courts were to be much stricter in evaluating method patents in the future. In addition, four justices (in dissent) would have struck down method patents altogether. Taken all together, then, the Bilski case has begun to rein in the worst abuses in this area, even if the rejections now rest on calling out a method as being a mere abstract idea.

This all may be cold comfort to those who despise the effects of software patents but it is a significant step forward in reality to help prevent abuses. And, of course, the ultimate corrective in this area for all the mistakes made since State Street is that such patents will in time enter into the prior art. This does not help anyone today, or for the near future, but it does mean that between a stricter standard going forward and the eventual lapse of the more frivolous patents previously granted, sanity is likely to be restored to this area over time.

Of course, for the short term, the abuses will remain as a carryover from the last 12 years and there is not much that can be done about this short of congressional action redefining what constitutes patentable subject matter. Since such action is nowhere near occurring, the U.S. will likely remain a treacherous terrain for companies in the software patent area for some years to come (and that would include New Zealand companies trying to ship their products here).
We won't run it in production yet. YMMV.
Is this a social club?

No, but I would prefer not to work with a douche-bag.

However, if you're only referring to the strict subset of traits that make you a good programmer (and nothing else), then yes I agree.
Maintenance is an important and necessary job. However if you are a talented developer than you shouldn't accept a job that is only maintenance. Sure there are some exceptions like if you really believe in and want to help the organization, and if you're really appreciated it goes a long way.

But generally if you are good at what you do then you shouldn't have to suffer this. There are simply too many opportunities out there to relegate yourself to a stagnant role. There are plenty of borderline incompetent programmers out there who will do a lot better debugging and maintaining an existing codebase than writing new systems from scratch.

Any self-respecting programmer with a passion for their craft owes it to themselves to at least try to find a job where they are learning and progressing even if it's not perfect.
If you care about numbers in your application, wouldn't the very first test in validating user input would be an is_numeric() call?

In my opinion, you have to be doing a lot of other things incorrectly for this to be a real problem.
You're actually misinformed about American electoral politics. The Iowa caucuses (and caucuses in general) are only involved at the primary level (i.e., they select which candidate will get to run for each party). Since Obama is a sitting president, it would be highly unusual for anybody to even run against him for the Democratic nomination, let alone have any chance at getting it.