skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I like this article, and can definitely resonate with it—like just a night ago when my phone was out of battery while attending a dance night, and instead of texting on my phone when I was standing on the sidelines, I instead observed the styles and techniques of others on the floor.

But this isn't the entire story. We have to look at what's really behind our desire to become attached to technology. It's not the devices themselves that we're attached to, it seems like—more like what they do.

The guy that has his laptop propped up in the driver seat probably detests his boring commute and how annoying radio ads are, and is looking for more entertainment in his daily commute. The lunch party friends are texting because even though they're meeting with their friends in person—there are others that they'd like to improve their relationship with, or just generally enjoy talking with.

Has technology's enabling of making us more connected with each other—that everyone's but a text message or email away using a block of plastic and metal in our pocket with an improvised lightbulb on it—really improved our friendships and our connections with each other? That's the real question we have to answer before writing off technology as something that's simply disrupting our personal relations. In real life, yes, it is a disruption, but is the value of being connected worth it?
I'm afraid I must mention that while that example does indeed demonstrate how different phrasing can avoid placing blame, it's not a use of the passive voice. The verb 'to have' is just as active as the verb 'to make'. A passive construction would be, 'a typo was made in the shipping address.'
I'm surprised that as a researcher you have not had notification or training about Bayh-Dole (someone mentioned they are in your lab so I assume you're funded). Universities have to report that they have notified researchers about the act. Here, all grad students have to sign an acknowledgement form indicating that fact during orientation. Flaunting the act has serious implications for the university's federal funding. It's government research privatization indoctrination 101 since the Regan revolution.

It's funny because the public (like you) demands access to the research because they paid for it, but the politicians view you as an economic investment and demand that you monetize and produce returns (e.g. tax revenue, employment from startups). The public doesn't write the rules.
I agree, strongly. It is the same story in languages, too -- the difference between a "translator" and a "international business consultant" is a better suit and about, oh, $200~300 an hour.
No, it would drastically underrepresent non-programmers. That only works if every single person that visits HN this month will see this poll and will take the trouble of voting (possibly having to create an account to do it) if they are a non-programmer. It also requires the uniques/month number to be accurate.

I'd guess that you would get an answer 2 orders of magnitude too small doing it that way, and that might be a generous estimate.
It all depends on your familiarity.

I recently started a job working with a Java + JBoss + Struts application, having written about 1000 lines of Java total in my life. I can easily waste an hours figuring out how to get a local application server running properly or rewriting the build file to suit my needs, and yes I've done both.

Think of every time you have to "figure something out" and then think about how much faster your code would be if you already knew the answer. That is what experience gives you.
I don't knw what edw does, but there are a lot of small businesses that need small one-off desktop apps, for which VB is perfect.
The book has been updated but with a different title that I currently forget. :)
This is utter gibberish.
You're saying there's no such thing as an objectively good product, simply because people disagree on the matter of which products are good and which are bad. But disagreement isn't any sign that there's no fact to the matter--people disagree about matters of fact all the time.

A good product might not be sufficient or necessary to make a good stock, but it seems like a major influence--and I would be very reluctant to invest in a company which pathologically produces poor products (GM, Microsoft, Dell, HP). Of course there are other factors to consider, and investing in individual stocks is a fool's errand anyway.
Well, I guess so, as I do write code on a regular basis. But again no, because part of me thinks "programmer" should describe someone whose job it is to produce software, and my code is not the purpose of my work. I'm a scientist: my job is to translate experimental data into meaningful statements about the systems I study. It just so happens that this requires a lot of new software! :)

Which makes me wonder how many HNers who code are what might be described as "professional software developers"? And how many write code, but only because they need to in order to accomplish the rest of their job?

(this might also be a poor framing of the question, but I don't have a better one in my head right now)
*sigh I would hope people would understand the title of hacker on this website. Hint it has nothing to do with security
Spoiler: It's not really the fastest, just the highest-clocked (5.2 GHz).
A time capsule into the mind of a 'legacy system' programmer. He's bemoaning Apple finally dropping the last vaporous attempts to keep Hypercard relevant, but the market had moved on years earlier.

What was actually hot 12 years ago: Java applets, Macromedia Flash, early dynamic HTML browsers, web scripting languages (ASP/Perl/etc), dot.com stocks. People did understand where the future lay.
if you program with jquery and want to work on http://infusedindustries.com then send me an email! we're hiring. brian@infusedindustries.com
BESEN - An ES5 Implementation in Object Pascal
Long story short: make a Facebook profile for a fake young female security expert (photo: http://j.mp/as3O85), send incessant friend requests, and --- shockingly enough --- many people will accept those requests. Fame follows.
Why is he picking a fight with the Kindle? Isn't reading when we'd otherwise be completely idle a good thing?
This is because we become managers :)
Social networks and statehood: The future is another country
even if you can program you'll generally earn more money and respect if you call yourself something else, like manager or entrepreneur or software engineer or architect. unfortunate but often true.
That more or less nails one major class of attacks. We should try not to feed the trolls (the NYTimes, in this example), so I won't address any points specifically.

There are some common patterns though, and these are worth thinking about because they come straight out of drama and literature. Poise the character as a charismatic, ambitious person. Then start whittling him down. The common themes here are his moments of naivete, the femme fatale, the awful reality of the situation, what others now think of him.

Note that none of these plot elements actually have much (if anything) to do with the economic viability of Tesla, and as such, the title is inappropriate. It does however, make for great rhetoric. Great narratives are rarely, if ever, the bare truth of such specific situations.
Some actually try to remove lines of code on purpose. :)
This is my nominee for the worst article in this week's issue of The Economist. The core idea is reasonably sound, but most of the actual writing is gibberish.
> C+

One of my coworkers used the term for a program consisting of a core that was a C library and a GUI that was in C++/MFC.

The author of a book I started reading (http://www.amazon.com/Tricks-Programming-Gurus-Advanced-Grap... ) used it to describe his style of writing mostly C but using a C++ compiler and taking advantage of some of things like stricter type checking, new/delete syntactic sugar, etc.

But I'm guessing it was a typo.
But wouldn't it be nice if some script kiddie misunderstood and got hooked? A sample IRC log might look like this:

SC1: yo dog, long time
SC1: still haxoring Wordpress modules?
HNer: naah man, WP is gey
HNer: I am busy hacking Supply and Demand
SC1: wtf? the economic model?
HNer: yeah, making something people want
-- SC1 has quit IRC (Quit: Leaving.)
you made need a sales or biz dev person more than a marketing person. some use these terms interchangeably, but I don't believe they're equivalent.
Rate my startup: community reputation system.
I'm participating in Lean Startup Machine (a 54-hour startup weekend dedicated to learning and implementing Lean Startup principles). My team is working on building a simple out-of-the-box reputation system.

The tool helps busy bloggers and community managers better manage trolls, spammers and inappropriate content. It also helps encourage participation on blogs.

Would love some feedback on the concept: whether it addresses an issue you've had, and whether the any of you community manager types would be willing to pay for this tool that can deliver productivity gains.

http://www.ReputAPI.com

Thanks in advance!
-Jonathan
Ask HN: Review my Startup CustomerCradle: Analytics for non Internet businesses
Hi,

My partner and I have just released the subscription website service CustomerCradle.

There is a 2 minute video

http://www.customercradle.com

We think of it as google analytics for real world businesses eg. travel agents, gyms, real estate agents etc.

It lets people easily record and report on their customer interactions, so they can know how effective advertising is, and how effectively staff are converting potential customers into paying customers.<p>Love to hear your feedback on :

- Does the homepage make it clear what CC is ?

- How should we market CC ? (currently we are concentrating on travel and fitness, we are blogging, emailing people and cold calling)

- Any other feedback appreciated.

Thanks
Sam Howley
(I'm in a similar situation) I've learned bits of PHP and Java in the past, but I wouldn't call it being a programmer.

Thanks to HN, I've decided to properly learn to program.

I'm buying a book on Python (http://amzn.to/bUMPCP), and I'm taking C++ in the upcoming semester.
I write HTML and CSS. So, no.
An effective, easy to implement policy that has made me happier is the no cell phone rule when eating, period. It's nice when I'm eating solo and even nicer when I'm eating with someone else.

Fun Fact: My mother clipped this article out and snail mailed it to me from east coast -> SF. I received it 3 days ago. Maybe being connected doesn't put you ahead of the curve.
is there a video link to the presentation?
They couldn't remember the fastest CPU in the world, this is just a tribute.
I am a dishwasher but like this community as well.
I can easily agree that people shouldn't be talking on the phone while driving or watching a dvd while in traffic, but only because it is dangerous and reckless, but I could care less that it is dangerous and reckless to the driver; I care because I am a driver and those kind of people are endangering others on the road like ME. I personally love both technologies and only dislike the people that use them. I don't find this to be a technological problem, but a people problem; certainly not a “technology controlling society” problem neither.

“Twittering, tweeting — whatever it is, it sounds like a nervous disorder.” The clear fallacy, which is meant to distract, takes away from what is really going on. I hang out with people I like, and I like them because of who they are. Having a cell phone on the table and texting/tweeting does not change who they are as people, and if it has, I guess I like that changed person more.

This 'busy' life the author is complaining about where the tv set is cluttered by unrelated information and multitasking is now known as a wonderful skill.....is the life I wish to live, and I find it awesome. I enjoy commercials and laugh at the obvious marketing techniques ect. It even has become something to do with friends when we have a television show we both enjoy. “We need to slow down and take a deep breath.” No, we don't! You do! Time to adapt, for you can't make others adapt.

“spend a little time just being ourselves.” imho, I already made it clear I judge people on who they are, not if they have the newest cell phone or not. I like people who are themselves? Those people who 'are not' themselves will find themselves eventually. I don't even know if people who are not themselves exist-

imho, this piece was negligent/shallow rant on technology. I can't agree with it on a whole and when I do agree- I agree for different reasons.
I'm a grad student in the sciences, so most of my code is developed to analyze and visualize experimental data. (mostly various types of 3D image data) Since I often don't understand what my data is trying to tell me at first glance, the majority of my "development" time is spent in front of a whiteboard doing math, or pacing and scribbling on paper while I try to work out a step-by-step for the analysis I want to perform.

While actually coding: I tend to measure my output in terms of functions which implement the various "steps" of my analysis. On a good day I might write three or five of these, maybe a total of 200-300 lines of code, and debug them using test data.

The next day they typically produce really funky results when run on the real data set, and I realize I actually want to do something completely different. But such is life. :-)
That thread is incredibly scary. I get tired of this "for the children" mantra that's used to justify every last pissy tirade of every self-righteous parent on the face of the Earth. If the mother actually cared, she'd have not turned her kid loose on the Internet in the first place (what, you mean random strangers won't raise my kid for me?). Also, let's just ignore the fact that the kid is 14 years old.
You were on the 24, weren't you.
Clickable link: http://www.customercradle.com
assuming you're serious.... why that mix? why BASIC today in a world where Python exists, Java, Ruby, Lisps, C, etc.?
An algorithmically reversible personal URL shortener
It is possible for the reverse of contango to happen (called backwardian) where the etf would actually go up in the short term while the commodity stays flat.

Ultimately though, the reason why contango has to win in the long run is that there is a real cost associated with holding oil. Contango should be a lot cheaper with gold, since it's cheaper to store gold.

The amount you might lose to contango in an ETF is probably a lot cheaper than if you tried to horde a bunch of oil in a tank on your property anyway, so it's not really a terrible investment.

Moral of the story: don't invest in instruments you don't understand.
Dell drops Ubuntu PCs from website... for now
Charlie Munger (Warren Buffett's partner at Berkshire Hathaway) has a phenomenal essay on this as it relates to business and life: http://vinvesting.com/docs/munger/art_stockpicking.html
Yes, Americans had the decency to slowly wipe out the indigenous people...
Thanks for adding that.
A formula for managing ongoing change
It would be wonderful. But my point on not calling myself a hacker is not because I don't "hack supply and demand," but I don't "hack" stuff in general. Hack can be used correctly in two totally different contexts (not mistaken with crack), and that is the good helpful kind of hack.
The problem: As an "enthusiast/advanced user", why would I buy a Dell laptop pre-installed with Ubuntu when I can get a Windows license and install Ubuntu whenever I want?
Not really. I've had a slight interest in programming for years, but I'm more interested in design.

I'd like to develop an iPhone game, but I don't think I have enough motivation or focus to make it up the steep learning curve. I made a Pong clone in Actionscript, that was as far as I got. The only project idea I have right now is pretty complex; I think I'd need a more modest goal to start with.
and the peculiar thing was, the CPU that was released, it didn't perform anything like this CPU
The Kopp-Etchells Effect
New Zealand’s Robot Legs Let Paraplegics Walk….for $150,000 (video)
Cool, hope your journey goes well.
I live on a boat, and sometimes I sail out, throw an anchor somewhere and just enjoy the silence for a few days. No phone, no television, no Internet. Nothing.

It's absolutely wonderful. There's time to think through problems, time to reflect on life and time to think about new ideas. I can also drink my morning coffee not caring how I look or sound.

When I come back I'm refreshed and have an inner peace that's somewhat hard to describe. But getting totally away from everything every once in a while is recommendable.
I thought the LGPL required you to allow the user to update the library to a newer version (usually accomplished by making it a dynamically linked shared library). Near as I can tell, Android doesn't yet support user installed shared libraries. Does this mean the engine is only usable from GPL and LGPL Android apps?
This sounds like awesome advice. We should be able to cover all these roles – in particular, the CEO should be doing the PM role as his main gig. Some of the engineers are already starting to get into the science behind the SEO/AdWords stuff, so I imagine that we'll be inclined to keep some MBA's hands off of it :). PR feels like it will be easy for us – we've gotten some press attention already, and in our space as long as something is an awesome product, then it can get at least some attention.

Thanks tptacek! You might have just saved us a lot of money/time/disconnectedness from our users...
Let's say you're not really a developer and you have 6 months to write a functioning Rails app or you're homeless. Now what's the best roadmap for learning Rails?
Not really all that impressive, actually underwhelming and anti-climactic.

The interconnects are where you see that Intel and AMD are catching up with them ... 60GB/sec interconnects? HyperTransport 3 can do 25.6GB/sec per CPU, and you can put up to 8 of them in a 3U or 4U box, and still use less power than just one of the IBM CPUs.

5.2Ghz, when they had all sorts of fancy water-cooling and other tricks available in what is essentially a cost-no-object CPU package? Yawn...
I've done that many times. It's not hard if you're "in the zone": you know exactly what you want to do and how, the language nuances and the application structure/state are all fresh in your mind, no interruptions, etc.
We've already got the front-end guy on our team getting a little SEO obsessed, so hurray! I think the big question was if it was worthwhile to have someone not completely mired in the coding who was working full time on customer acquisition/evaluation; it looks like based on what everyone is saying, that IS the CEO's job. Hey, good news for us – we like trying to do everything ourselves!
Agreed here; I've seen that a lot with in-house stuff. At my wife's former employer, almost all of the internally-developed stuff that she supported was a mashup of VB, Access, PowerShell, and third-party tools that they glued together.
Internet café are no safer
Good shops practice keeping audit trails in the source code.

No, "good shops" keep this level of detail in the source control system, something it was designed for.
We're considering a build vs. buy decision for our site http://gamersunite.coolchaser.com. So, I'll say minimally we have such a need.
I think we really have two options: find someone like this, or have one of our team become that person. This sounds like a good starting recipe if one of us wants to become that person themselves – Sean Ellis seems pretty awesome!
Adbrite is great, costs 1/4th of Google. I spend about $500 a month on Adbrite and about $14,000 a month on Google Adwords for the company that I work for. Will I ever spend more on Adbrite then Google, of course not but sales are made from Adbrite ads and at the end of the day money talks.

The poster mentioned being in a competitive marketplace. You have to pull out all of the stops if you want to come up high in the same searches as long established competitors

Am I saying don't sponsor some event? Sure go sponsor an event. But what you need is the phrase you want to come up highest in the link text that people are linking to your site on, it is really the best way to displace other links.

Since 1996 I have done a lot of different things for marketing but really when you are in a pinch tightly focusing on just the things that will raise your actual ranking quickest is best then go back and underpin that rise in rank with more long term items.

Also, I love Amazon Mechanical Turk. I have spent about $800 on tasks at .05 to .10 cents each and it is huge. I have nailed number one rankings so hard I am pretty sure they will never go down.
I still like perl despite the disdain heaped onto it. I have yet to see a good python or ruby way of doing the following:

for $line (@array) {
print $line unless $seen{$line}++;
}

So, IMO perl still has pretty useful and unique bits. It's still up to the programmer to write beautiful or ugly code (I'm not claiming I write beautiful code at all).
Sounds like a CRM, at least in terms of how your users are likely to perceive it. This strikes me as likely to be difficult to sell.

I would focus less on data and more on the concrete, meaningful results that people are going to get by acting on the data that you collect and present.

Less text, more whitespace, better visual presentation, more niche focus, etc.
Possibly not, any more - banks are supposed to provide economic liquidity by moving capital around the economy to where it's needed and buffering shortfalls (never mind what they've actually been getting up to of late, that's what their economic functions is).

I would imagine that you could do that peer-to-peer, possibly on a largely micro-lending basis, using the internet, creating a newer, distributed mechanism for keeping the economy liquid and shifting capital to where it's needed. I would imagine that you could engineer a significantly more fluid system this way - and as a bonus, no element would be 'to big to fail'.

Not sure how you'd get there though; bit boil the oceans really. Maybe just keep doing more micro-financing and see what happens.
When I was about 8 I got a Commadore 64 and learned how to program with the trade magazines that came with it. I hacked around on computers until about 12 or 13, at which point I cut that hobby out and tried to learn how to become "cool," whatever that meant.

About 10 years later I found Hacker News after watching a talk by Jessica Livingston and then reading Founders at Work. A few years into getting my news everyday from HN, I have learned Java, built a few programs in VB, and built a couple scripts in Ruby, and am starting to dive into Rails for a startup that I'm doing some initial modeling/planning for.

When I am with "business people," I become the "tech guy." When I'm with a bunch of alpha-geeks, like at Founders and Hackers the other week, I am suddenly a "business guy." Seems I wear a different hat depending on the crowd.

I think I enjoy the challenge of both startup marketing, sales, etc., but also really like spending time finding programming solutions to the business problems we have. Like the other day I wrote a Ruby script to help automate a process that they were doing manually where I work. It saved the team hours and hours of busy-work every month, and felt really good to build. So it was trivial to many here, but solved a problem and forced me to learn more about Ruby. And I liked it.

Anyway, I guess I'm saying that I see business in general as a big exercise in problem-solving, and I enjoy that process immensely. Whether I happen to be using a Ruby script or my background in sales/marketing to do it, I don't care. I like the creativity and stimulation that come with both.
Also, be sure to checkout Mahout: a scalable, machine learning library built on top of Hadoop - http://mahout.apache.org/

Of course, if you really wanna scale it up and mess around with Hadoop, Cloudera's got some nifty resources as well - http://www.cloudera.com/hadoop/