skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>Maybe it's because all of my projects are small and I don't have to program defensively, but I've never been bitten by a type error that took anywhere near as long to fix than I would have spent using a static type system.

One of my projects for school turned into a 9k LOC Ruby project. I had precisely zero errors during the entire development cycle that static typing would've detected. Meanwhile, attempting a bit of dynamic code in VB.Net recently resulted in easily a couple hours worth of total waste dodging types while not going totally type-less. And then there's the crappy lambdas and total lack of anonymous or inner functions, so you end up polluting your namespace massively in many cases. (stuck in 3.5 + VS 2008, 2010 adds those) Gah!

I do occasionally miss IDE hinting, which is drop-dead easy in statically-typed languages. But dynamically typed languages allow such ridiculously simple APIs I find it's rarely necessary.
The police are completely off basis. There's a big difference between passively observing a vehicle's location and covertly attaching a tracking device. The fact that one could visually observer a vehicle's location doesn't allow the attachment of a tracking device.
SEC ABS comment on Python, request for editing before I submit to the SEC
That's fair enough. Thanks for your help.
I have trouble finishing things and this would be a great way to get rid of this bad habit. Can you give examples of small things which you built this way?
I fully recommend The Pragmatic Programmer. Its a book that I feel will ease transition from spoon fed grad to experienced coder such that you can pick up new languages and technologies as and when they fit the problem faced.
These discussions seemed too short lived for my taste. I know that many people come up with insightful observations after they think about an issue for a day or two. By then the story is off the front page and what is the use in making the comment?

We really need to solve this. People have a tendency to comment only on things which are on front page. This is in part the fault of being karma centric and also the sheer volume of traffic.
In my experience, no matter how sophisticated a static type system is, at some point it ends up getting in my way. This goes double for languages with very simplistic type systems, such as C#, as they have all of the disadvantages of a static type system with few of its advantages.

Statically typed languages tend to lack good REPLs, a tool I consider indispensable. I'm unaware of any statically typed language that has something as complete and integrated as SLIME, for instance. Even a properly setup IRB or IPython don't seem to have anything that matches them in the statically typed world.

Another problem is that statically typed languages can have long compile cycles. One C# project I worked on made heavy use of PostSharp, the use of which slowed the compile time to nearly a minute. Additionally, whilst Visual Studio updated the ASP templates in real time, there didn't seem to be a way to reload new DLLs without restarting the development server.

Conversely, when I'm hacking in Clojure, updating the entire system can be done without restarting the server, and takes a fraction of a second.

Macros, too, I guess are easier with dynamic typing. When I write a macro in Clojure, it seems a lot easier than when I was using Template Haskell a few years back. Perhaps there's a better system for macros in a statically typed language, but I haven't run across anything like that yet.
They're an anycast dns provider- basically the only kind of third-party DNS service that's worth anything at all. They have some neat domains-related tools that hook into their infrastructure that's kindof a pain to do yourself (even if you've got your own anycast-capable network)
I think it varies from person to person, and subject to subject. I find that if I can write the code in a two digit number of lines, I'm better off doing it myself. Not making stupid concatenated long lines, of course. I used to write for OS390 and got used to the 80 char limit to lines, anyway.

If it feels like it'll take X time to write, it'll be twice as long, due to unforeseen stuff, and then X time again to make it work, debug, etc. If it takes a thousand lines of code, it's worth it to look around. If it's between a hundred and a thousand, it's fuzzy.

None of this negates the value of off-the-shelf solutions. It's a matter of time spent making my own, versus learning someone else's stuff. I can learn anything thoroughly; it's a matter of time and motivation.
> If you're bringing in a 3rd party library, make sure it's for something big and complicated that you just don't want to deal with.

It should also imo be one that appears to have a decent track record of active maintenance. If it doesn't, sooner or later you're going to be the one maintaining it, which might not turn out to be much easier than having rolled your own. I've seen more than one project that eventually did roll their own once their unmaintained 3rd-party library bit-rotted so much that it wasn't worth saving.
what many people don't realize about an MBA is the fact that it's a gateway into certain big-company jobs (e.g., those in select Wall Street firms) ... the degree and school name are what people pay for. obviously, they can always learn the technical material from books or even online.

this post is basically like one that's claiming "I'll save you the time of getting a driver's license" and simply telling you the local driving rules ... the LICENSE itself is what people need to get if they want to legally drive. an MBA is a 'license' to work in certain types of firms (probably those that HNers probably don't want to work at)
Early adoption was due to it being an extension to the IM Away messages. After that, especially after users started to use @x as a form of addressing, it basically became IRC 2.0, without the problems of installing IRC clients, having netsplits, being kicked, etc, etc.

-- MV
Brésil, j'en suis sûr.
No, I'd largely finished my Vietnam War studies by the end of the '70s.

I do credit Robert Strange for a whole lot (e.g. the adoption of the atrocity known as the M16), but when you come down to it the buck stops at the Oval Office. JFK installed him as the head of the DoD and LBJ kept him there for far too long.

And then made him the head of the World Bank, where he proceeded to destroy a lot of 3rd World agriculture from what I've read in less detail.
Sonam Kapoor's Maxim Magazine Hottest Photoshoot August Scans
NYT, Oprah and various celebrities did play a significant role in marketing Twitter in their later stages of high growth.
A Lot of people feel a need to say something and many feel a need to be heard. Twitter was a good solution, because it limited how much one can say. I doubt it was planned, But it seemed to have satisfied some psychological needs.
Suggestion for betting on the union between social / interest graphs and search
Every article is a potential unsuspecting victim of an edit war.
i don't see why everyone is downvoting this guy ... many of his claims are just as arbitrary and unsubstantiated as others posted on this thread
Apparently they were going a year before that: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blog
If anyone were to do a cost/benefit analysis for the credit card companies, I dare say they should be paying merchants to accept their card, because I strongly suspect that the companies make far more off of interest than they lose on defaulted accounts, and the profits, on interest alone, absolutely dwarf whatever income they receive from merchant fees.
Chrome @ Mac

http://i.imgur.com/TqZJR.png
Great idea. I tried something similar a couple of years ago: http://blog.hystry.com/post/20252078/my-favorite-commenters-...

But it wasn't designed from the ground up for following people.
A lot of people understand SMS. Twitter is SMS on the web.

The other thing I think has made twitter more popular than it normally would have been is that it has been based in the positive. I can mark stuff as favorite, and I can follow people. I can't down-vote some tweet into oblivion. Harassing people is a little harder (you can block a person, but it is not listed publicly and it only affects your vision). Public categorization was not in the original design.

Now, we have lists. Most people are using them to make reading easier, but some are making lists with "less than kind" names and assigning people they don't like to them. I do wonder if that would have changed things if introduced earlier.
Maybe this is because me and friends hosted a decent percentage of the games we played, but through thousands of rounds of Footmen Frenzy I've never seen a penis map. Starcraft I had a good deal of "sexy pics" maps, however I don't think I ever ended up in some unintentionally ;)
Feedback on weekend hack together project - feed rewriter
Hey all, last weekend finished hacking together a side project. This week, has been in testing to make sure, it's all working ok.

The story: I noticed how much unneeded information my feed reader was downloading, so I thought I should do something about it. After watching the pipes intro video, I thought the process was a bit complex. So I decided to code up a simpler version of yahoo pipes. Aka: http://www.feedrewriter.com/

Thanks for reading and thanks for any feedback

nldr: feedback on http://www.feedrewriter.com/
It's just a great movie, is all.
1) Everyone wanted to blog, nobody took the time to read everyone's blogs, few invested the time to write blogs.

2) Absolutely. I would argue that most gigantic successes come out of having an inkling of what people want vs. being the outcome of a gigantic time R&D investment.

3) Simplicity - and this is the same reason that Wave didn't. If people are able to go from "I have no idea what this is" to "I know how to use this" in a weekend, as Leo Laporte often talks about, it won't die on the vine. You can go from rookie to I'm able to use this (note: this is different than "I get why I want to use this") on Twitter in under an hour - and enabling people's ADD is the best way to traction.
The real takeaway is:

- Don't write this stuff on your own.

- Use someone else's mutex, and someone else's non-blocking datastructure.

- Really, don't write your own.

Threading is not that hard unless you insist on leaving the safety off and aiming it at your foot.
You are right. Its highly local but the scene is changing slowly as the local market is fairly saturated.
Cool stuff. I'm thinking of getting the book. Is it sufficient to get just the book itself (going to do it via my Kindla app) or should I spring for the DVD?
thanks! i use drupal,the security is quitengood.in the db,a hash is stored,the only clear pass is in the mail.i ll try to change that,you are right.
I think it's three things:

First, it's a lot easier to quickly figure out what a function does when it has a type signature. It's strongly self-documenting.

Second, it's easier to figure out what kinds of datastructures are used in a program, because you can see the types of the variables and functions you're working with. For me understanding the underlying datatypes is a big help in getting to grips with a codebase.

Third, the compiler catches a lot of dumb mistakes early. It's no substitute for testing, but a quick compile cycle will rule out a common class of errors and helps me make changes with more confidence.

It's not all roses and there is a price to be paid but I do thing there's a strong benefit.
Check the local listings in Bundang and Gangnam as the startup scene is very concentrated in those areas
I was a young teenager when I read it, and had not yet read Plato, Aristotle, or any Zen, so it was a nice eye-opener, but quickly superseded.

I'm guessing "The Matrix" played a similar role for a more recent generation. If you haven't been previously exposed to Philosophy 101, I'm sure it seems pretty profound.
Jack Dorsey: The 3 Keys to Twitter's Success
http://the99percent.com/videos/6528/jack-dorsey-the-3-keys-t...
"In any compromise between good and evil, only evil benefits."

Which is why the government grows and grows and society gets more and more disfunctional.
Whoa, I never noticed it was a year old! It just started doing well on Reddit today and seemed HN relevant so I posted it here too. I should pay more attention ;-)
thanks for sharing you thougts.all of that is on my todo list.the thing is,i made that this afternoon in 2 hours..i didnt expect such a success ;)
Honestly, I find I'm a lot happier if I act like there's no politics, even if I know deep down there probably is some of that happening.

You've alluded in other comments to being the kind of person who enjoys the game of politics. I'm just not like that myself - I find that kind of thing really quite dull. If HN ever became more about the personalities than the content, I wouldn't bother "checking up on who people are" or seeing if what they say is shaped by some weird agenda. I'd just leave.
> * Your SSL certificate will be considerably more expensive for a wildcard

Very good point. Went with DigiCert for a wildcard a few years ago and it was in the $400-range compared to ~$100 for a standard cert.
A hack to monitor your natural gas meter by Beerware license creator
I'm not sure this is actually going to be a useful explanation, but I'll give it a go.

One problem has to do with rotational symmetry. The selection of a juggling pin is perhaps not the best example, but let us assume for now that the juggling pin has a dot somewhere on its surface that ensures it is not rotationally symmetric about any axis. If you are only concerned with the with orienting a body subject to symmetry you can sometimes do better (for example, a perfectly uniform sphere would only require three components), but the general case requires six components.

Your approach of pinning two atoms in the pin effectively specifies an axis. Yes, it would accurately position and constrain two points on the pin. Those two points form a line. Consider what happens if I now rotate the rest of the atoms in the pin around that line. I have not changed the representation in your coordinate system, because I've kept the two atoms you specified fixed, but I have changed the orientation of the pin for an external observer. If, on the other hand, you constrained another atom that was not colinear with the first two, I would no longer be allowed this freedom of rotation. The system would be said to be fully constrained.

To put this into concrete terms with our pin, let's assume the two atoms I picked were the center of the top and the center of the bottom. Because the pin is symmetric about this axis, with five numbers I can specify the orientation of the pin sufficiently to juggle it, but what about the dot I mentioned before? By rotating the pin about this principal axis I could change the position of the dot without changing the coordinates of the pin.

Stated more simply: if I tell you the position of the center of the earth and my location in terms of latitude and longitude, you can locate me precisely, but you can't tell whether I'm looking north or south.

Also, you can only encode a (countably infinite) subset of the reals by interleaving digits. Consider the set of irrational numbers. Any scheme you provide that tries to reduce the dimension of a vector of n reals into n-1 will face the same problem: you cannot project from a space who's components are made up of members uncountably infinite sets into a space of lower dimension without losing information.
Perhaps, then, the statement needs to be brought up to date. Something like.. if it's your core function, implement it yourself or know the code you're using as well as if you did!
thanks for commenting. well,I'll trynto fit that in my todolist!thanks for the idea.
Smoking reduces the risk of Parkinson's disease... that's more brain-healthy than not smoking :p.
Sounds a lot like http://www.amazon.com/Four-Steps-Epiphany-Steven-Blank/dp/09..., or am I wrong?
Yes, but in the context of the original question, which was

Is MBA important for a programmer to start a Tech Company?

the value of an MBA as a gateway to a Big Company job is not particularly helpful :)
Given any thought to putting this on GitHub? I'd love to see OpenID support rolled in, but people posting "I want this" could put their money where their mouth is - by adding it themselves!

PS: Did we just talk recently about LinkUp.com?
sure,I plan to have it.I am an avid reader of SDot!have you registered?that way you would receive email updates on improvepents!
+1 for RSS, or better yet PubSubHubbub!
unclosed title tag/string makes it unreadable
Fuck that! I was totally going to use mongrel2 to write my distributed internet operating system / facebook replacement / iPad app ( I'm this close to getting a post on Techcrunch about it, which means $FUNDING$!! ) .

Unfortunately, I occasionally disagree with your opinions, therefore your technology is suspect.

Maybe you would program better if you blogged about stuff I agreed with or evangelized my tech pick du jour. Or maybe if you wrote a monad tutorial, I hear thats what all the ninja rockstars are doing these days.

Also, swears make baby steve jobs cry. C'mon, this is the internet, you can't just say anything you want!
Hardware update « Wakeblog
I'll save you the time of reading that comment: due-diligence.

But seriously, an MBA is a little different from those couple paragraphs (though they do contain valuable advice). An MBA is often a way to get your foot in the door for Fortune 500 companies, or, in my case, as sweet way to get a cushy, low-involvement TA/GA/RA position while I work on my own startups and build a resume. That comment does not accomplish the same thing (clearly).
Killer Tips for Marketing a Startup
Can I ask another question:

Is twitter profitable yet? Has it a roadmap to profitability?
It’s Futurists Versus Consumers As The Death Of The Book Is Prophesied
US Underemployment 28.4% for young people, 18.4% in all Age Groups
Some economists argue that this would be a good idea. See:

http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2009/05/boldrin_on_inte.htm...
Sure, but it's much more succinct.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1426429
I'm wondering what the implications of DDOS are for website owners. What if you're on EC2 for example, will you be charged for the 300 TB of traffic? If so that would be an easy way to bankrupt a startup.
Evidence of Everything Exploding
Paranoid/conspiracy art game using documents from historical sources for platform design.
1) Good startup with a big idea 2) Anointed by The Tech Elite

Either one wouldn't have been enough.
This may signal that return rates for iPhone 4 have exceeded expectations and that iPhone 5 development will have to be accelerated. I can't see this happening if the antenna situation hadn't had a significant financial impact as manifestation of customer dissatisfaction.

That's unfortunate because many of us are awaiting the latest OSX iteration, and Apple is a company that doesn't really focus on more than one major product release at a time, based on personnel limitations and so on.
For the most part, overly serious psychological inquiry into this question misses the point. At the end of the day, this kind of anecdotal testament is the most valuable insight of all.
Sending text messages to a group is not a real problem, and Twitter doesn't easily let you do that either (unless everyone has a twitter account).
Whilst most CPUs do imply a data dependency barrier on the read when a memory access depends on a read, not all do, so it may not be relied on.

That and the Alpha having a split cache where one half can be more up-to-date than the other, really sound like a lot of fun.
- programming in boring languages (Java);

It's not the language IMHO, but for me rather the problem that Java programming involves using libs and configuring stuff (which is rather dumb and boring) rather then designing algorithm and understanding how stuff really works..
Although this is true, I think it is missing the point. What was the problem text messages was trying to solve?

A quick, semi-personal connection between two people across a distance. This can further be boiled down as humans interest in connection and conversation.

It turns out that Twitter, due to the social network (both existing and being one sided) solves this problem better then text messaging. So really it evolved text messaging.

This is much like the quote by Henry Ford "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses." Ford was not "solving a real problem" -- the problem of transportation had already been solved since the dawn of time. He was evolving the solution to a faster, more convenient method.
I wouldn't say that it has _nothing_ to do with monkey patching. Monkey patching is the ability to update classes members dynamically. Duck typing is the ability to update an object's members dynamically. Since the overall point is to dynamically create a new member of some object, I think the previous poster can be forgiven.
Its not very difficult for foreigners as the government is slowly encouraging the startup scene.

Transportation is very good and cabs are very cheap ($3.00 min). Housing is pretty expensive where the concept of rent is thrown out. You pay the owner $200K and forget paying rent for 2 years. After 2 years you get your $200K back.
Everyone wants to be a blogger but most people are too stupid/lazy/without free time/uncreative to write long blog posts or to read them. In comes twitter and allows anyone to say stuff to the world with one sentence and terrible spelling and grammar. And it is not your fault that your spelling and grammar are terrible, it is practically a platform requirement.

In hind sight it is obvious why it is so popular. But it is one of these things that only make sense in hindsight. I am sure even the Twitter executives had no idea where it would lead.
The reason Twitter succeeded is because of the simplicity of the idea and design. It's simplicity allows it to be whatever the user needs it to be.

It can replace your RSS feed aggregator, your bookmarks, your facebook, your contacts on your cell-phone, etc., etc.

Features get added over time, but they're much more opt-in then opt-out. Meaning, you actively have to seek them out and use them; they're not forced on you. This means that the base product is still the same as it has always been; they're not, as 37 Signals would put it, dying with their user base.

In summary, Twitter serves many purposes and it does it in a fashion that it doesn't get in your way.
Twitter (and the Facebook stream) are both a convenient way to casually follow updates from your friends. To understand the need they fill think of what would be the alternative if they didn't exist. Email, chat, and RSS don't really fill that gap.

And yes, this is probably not the kind of thing that you plan. They probably came across it in the course of trying many different things and then realized how powerful it was. A lot of inventions happen that way. That's why I think Google's concept of lettings engineers use 20% of their time to experiment is brilliant.

Twitter grew big because they had two key components. Something that people wanted, and a really good growth channel which is when bloggers started promoting them on their blogs to get more followers. The third component they need to really succeed is a good business model.
A Net Game for Google?
This has been posted before. And no it wont end poverty, it is essentially a plan to sell licenses for private dictatorships.
Chimpanzee hack (video)
Separate processes works fine as long as the constant overhead of your harness is much smaller than the amount of data used by your worker. But I find that this is often not the case at my workplace, and the immutable data, including the program code itself, is much larger than the work unit input data. In a situation like this, threads (or fork) are basically the only way to make use of the additional cores without wasting the remainder of the RAM on the machine.
Wait, what? iTunes is a "failure", and YouTube is the "go-to platform" for "listening to music?" Citation needed.