skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You can also handle a variable number of positional arguments in PHP instead of making the client send in a literal array.

function search() { $arg_list = func_get_args(); ... }
Speaking as a New Yorker contemplating a move to California, I'd say the article is somewhat accurate about the prestige of working in finance, but staggeringly wrong on a few other points.

First of all, cafes are plentiful. All he could come up with is the Tea Lounge in Park Slope? There are dozens of small, non-corporate coffee shops in the Village, dozens more in Williamsburg. And that's just the two neighborhoods where I usually spend time.

Second, New Yorkers don't cook? I think the author spent too much time with the wrong crowd. Plenty of people shop at green markets, including the huge one at Union Square precisely because they like local produce and like to use it.
This is why the American Dream is out of reach
You were most assuredly playing against below average players. Most of the early part of a chess game is spent trying to establish an 'opening line' and can transform several times depending on what moves both players make. So, you as white could set out trying to play the English and find your self ending up with the QGD.

If you don't learn the theory behind the openings (whether by reading or by observation) you will remain a below average player for a long time
For a gentle start, it's worth looking at LyX -- http://www.lyx.org/ -- a structured document processor that generates LaTeX output. Available for *IX/Mac/Windows, with more features than you can shake a stick at -- and it's open source, so you can try it for free.
To be totally honest, given the crappy Wall Street life, I spent 80% of my time south of Maiden Lane, in fact.

I don't think my experience is terribly different than many New Yorkers though. The trendy neighborhoods of the moment....Soho, the Villages, LES, Tribeca, are all down south. I felt almost like a tourist on the UWS.
> sorely lacking

I think you forgot about android.
I always think its a mistake when unnecessary physical metaphors are copied directly into software. The page flip, and pages around the content, are all completely unnecessary for eReaders to work. If the Kindle has proven anything, its that people don't need to see pages and page flips to understand how to go to the next screen.
NYC is an Art and Design capital. Probably the best in our hemisphere.

In hardware design we could easily compete with most other cities, and do so regularly.

Also, many start ups have come out of NYC.

Personally I think the guy just has a bit of bitter old man syndrome.
Brooklyn reminds me a lot of Boston, tech-scene wise. There's a plenty of computer programmers around and a fair number of of young entrepreneurs, not to mention a startups located there. I know a few bars frequented by coders and there are coffeeshops galore. Not having spent time in SF I'd still say it's probably a more arts/entertainment oriented than tech oriented crowd, but the recently gentrified areas of Brooklyn are lightyears away from old-money Manhattan.
Fortunately, there is an "l" between the f and the i:
fleaf-l-icker

It's a particular play of deception in American football.
The latex mode in TextMate is really awesome :)
fleaficker was a typo for fleaflicker.
Maybe you're right. I grew up in NYC (the Bronx, and I currently live in Brooklyn) so my experience is far from typical.
People need to learn to refer the people that write these letters to Arkell v Pressdram

http://www.nasw.org/users/nbauman/arkell.htm

(and I say this, as a trainee lawyer)
You have to be more specific of your definition of Brooklyn. It sounds like you're implying Williamsburg, and Carroll Gardens, which frankly isn't representative of Brooklyn. Williamsburg in particular is essentially an extension of Manhattan, due to the transportation options and cost of living.
Thank goodness! We just signed up for Google Business mail and I have been trying to juggle around two separate Gmail addresses for weeks now. This saves so much hassle.

Didn't know about the incognito trick until today though... I suppose that would have helped quite bit as well.
As I understand it, it is the venture capitalists who are worried that startups can go from the garage to Google acquisition with just angel money without needing venture capital. So some of that criticism comes from feeling threatened.

Michael Arrington, on the other hand, seems to take issue with the fact that some startups are aiming at Google from the start instead of aiming at greatness and landing at Google.

Personally, I wouldn't mind creating a "dipshit company" that sells for $25 million

Would you rather come up with a great idea you are passionate about and see it through to completion, or build something that you know Google (or similiar) will snap up for $25 million?
Is it what it's all about? Hmmm. Did you take anything away from reading it that will help you in the future?

If so, context doesn't matter much, but you gained something positive, no matter how small.

Maybe you realized that everyone has hard times, and you don't feel it merits public discussion. However, it got you to read the post and not only that, but to comment on it as well. It's undeniable the post impacted you in some way. You will take something new away from that post, be it good, bad, or indifferent. Either way, in an ever so small way, you have been changed. What you do with that change is up to you, but in most cases I find it leads to positive change.
Gotta love how he's described as having "absolutely no chance of STDs".
Making the Best of a Tech Education
I suppose it depends on what you mean by "problems". I don't think org-mode is coming up short in some fashion.

Org-mode is great for structural editing and tables, and simplifies some aspects of LaTeX (images, for sure). I still find myself "dropping down" into LaTeX. I don't think it's an inherent weakness in org-mode, it's just that now I keep track of org-mode and LaTeX commands.
Good suggestion. Also, the quotes aren't necessary on the keys of the keyword arguments:

collection = Transaction.search(
order_id__starts_with='a2d',
customer_website__ends_with='.com',
billing__first_name__exact='John',
status__in=[
Transaction.Status.Authorized,
Transaction.Status.Settled
],
amount__between=("10.00", "20.00")
)
#1, Pick what you love to do, so you are passionate everyday of life instead of hating what you do and being miserable.

From a personal story. I got my degree in Computer Engineering Technology, because I had fallen in love with robotics and computer hardware in high school robotics club. We did the FIRST robotics competition, and that was the best memory I have of high school.

However, after graduation, I've taken a job in the IT sector as a systems admin, and computer hardware has taken a back burner position as a hobby and possibly a side startup skill. I've only been graduated for alittle over a year.
Although I haven't landed a job doing hardware like I love, I do have a positive attitude to learn and enjoy the IT side of things. In that view, I have networked with co-workers, employers and peers who have years and years of experience and are sharing it with me. In a matter of a few hours I learned more about software engineering and web programming than college ever taught me.

I wish I was more organized on these thoughts, but I basically have to say, find what you love to do, diversify your knowledge, and be very damn proactive in college, because nobody is going to hold your hand. Get involved in clubs, events, etc. to meet people and network, and find new opportunities. Always talk to your professors about projects you could help with or start up. Do not become a hobbit in your room with world of warcraft or any video games, unless you're passion is to just play video games. Personally we used to hack the games in college and host private servers for downtime after studies.

As far as computer hardware, imaging, robotics, that sort. Computer Science theory plays a huge roll in that for logic analysis. Ultimately I think what you should do, is try talking to advisors, professors, and maybe even try searching for employers and asking them what they look for to prepare you for the industry.

warning, you may think you know what you're doing now, but college opens doors and you will have so many ideas and options, that your dreams may change.
Yup! Just moved from San Francisco to Willamsburg. Must say, it's almost the exact feel I got living in the Mission ( was there for 3 years). The other unsung secret here: Many bars have wifi, bad coffee, tables at which to work...and beer.
This is a very narrow perspective about NYC, but he's certainly right the tech scene is smaller and always will be.
Don't you think leaving out all the other boroughs (BK in particular), as well as all the parts of Manhattan that don't fit the banker narrative you've described, makes the comparison a bit unfair?
My point was that your substitution changes the meaning too. Special interest is a well understood term, and Nation in this context is defined. While its true in this scenario some special interests could end up being nations, nations are a superset of special interest nations. The difference I perceive in this terminology is between "special interest groups" and "interest groups". AARP is an interest group (and more, while they are a powerful lobbying group, that is only one of their stated purposes, just as a labor union's only function is not political lobbying). The tea part is an interest group filled with crazy people. Marijuana legalization groups, pro-life/pro-choice groups, and the american corn farming lobbying group are special interest groups. Interest groups have a wide swath of generally shared interests and views. Most old people share certain interests and AARP caters to those. In other interest areas old people's views/concerns are as disparate as the general population's. The AARP does not in general pay attention to those. By contrast a special interest group has a single or narrowly defined set of issues they care about, and they care a great deal about that tiny part of life.

Taking this into the context of the proposed nations. Some people care about a single issue enough to be single issue voters and join a special interest nation. The majority of people could find a community that shares their views on a wide swath of issues of varying priority to them.

I don't really think this idea would actually get the desired effect of having general interest groups be effective in counteracting special interest groups if they aren't already passionately concerned with the issue, but effectiveness is not an argument for/against underlying motives.

edit: oh, and I have seen AARP literature trying to inform members about political issues, as well as informing them of benefits of being a member. AARP shouldn't be trying to sell its members on any view, AARP is supposed to find out what its members care about and what can benefit them and lobby the government for those things.
Your point is very valid, and I would imagine that prevents really high-quality and groundbreaking applications to be built. However that would not explain why a majority of applications are sub-par quality.

If I was a developer and wanted to make a lot of money, I would either go ahead and build a perfect, innovative app and market it well, or basically churn out app-after-app, which is cheap, redundant and has very little difference between each one.

I haven't personally used the app store much, but from what I saw, a lot of the newly produced applications were merely a bunch of titillating pictures, or a glorified unit converter.

I've seen and read about people make huge amounts of money from applications and websites which offer little or no content, but capitalize on knowledge of what people are looking for - and by doing this in very large and persistent quantities.
I'm confused. If your city doesn't "equal Silicon Valley" then it is a "tech backwater"?

As far as I know, nobody has claimed that NYC will eclipse the Bay Area - they're just saying that the tech scene in NYC is growing and maybe that NYC is poaching the "#2" spot from Boston.

Or am I missing something?
The VC culture is probably closer to banker culture, so you're right about that. I've never gotten to meet with a VC without an intro. But I was talking more about the culture at large. You've kind of got it with your last sentence.

The larger culture in Boston is a lot more "who you know" / "where did you go to school" than in California. Basically if you didn't go to an Ivy League school then you're kind of in a lower social caste. You get looked down on (in a very subtile and "polite" way) if you are not Ivy League or if you are from the "flyover country."

The other (related) problem with Boston is that it's not extroverted. Boston is bookish and introverted and quiet. It's sort of impolite in Boston to have a fun personality, and it's very hard to make friends. Bostonians don't have friends, they have colleagues. (A bit of an exaggeration, but you get the idea.) Laughing, making jokes, and having any kind of personality sort of marks you as lower class.

It reminds me of a more classist version of the famed "Seattle chill":

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/pacificnw/2005/0213/cover.h...

Basically Boston is very classist, bookish, and introverted. Boston has tons and tons of brains, but they're <sniff sniff> intellectuals, not revolutionaries or innovators.

Boston may actually have more raw IQ-power than the valley though. Put LSD in the drinking water here and you might rival the valley in a few years.

But like I said there's a bright side too. The Bostonian politeness thing is a double edged sword. On one hand it's stuffy, but on the other hand it can be quite noble. Bostonians will help you out. They will quietly come to your aid. They will close ranks to defend you if you're wronged (provided you're "in" with them), and they will quietly and gradually mentor you. You can drop your wallet in downtown Boston (population almost 1 million) and someone will drive to your house to bring you your wallet with everything still in it. (This has happened to me, and to two people I know.)

So the upside is that Boston is very civilized in a positive way, but the downside is that it's very "civilized" in a negative way. Oh, and you don't have to own a car. Having to sit in a dinosaur burner huffing fumes for three hours every day is one of my least favorite things about California.
Heroku has Node.js support. http://blog.heroku.com/archives/2010/4/28/node_js_support_ex...
One of the biggest security weaknesses on the Internet is in browser UI (something Aza Raskin should be shouting from the rooftops).

He has been shouting it from the rooftops. Tabnapping, which got on Reuters: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1376075

And an older trick, now fixed in Firefox: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=201912
"Every yuppie I knew in New York worked as either a Wall Street guy, a lawyer, or an agent of some sort. Basically, there were all subtly screwing someone else for a living."

This is exactly how I feel about London. It feels like the city takes much more from the world than it produces.
This is what I do, but it breaks down when legitimate email ends up in the spam folder in account B. You have to periodically log in to both accounts to make sure you don't lose important emails.
Yeah, I know the "rules". Point is, everything at big think is a video.

Funny how I had 21 karma points before I posted that comment, which got 4 down votes and another comment got 3 upvotes, but now I have 15 karma points.

How does 21 - 4 + 3 = 15?
After checking out that PUA stuff, it appears to me that the goals you call "questionable" are not grounded in rationality at all - it's all about not meeting the emotional needs of the women involved, and they mostly smell like men whose emotional needs have not been met by the prior women in their life (maybe even starting with their first woman, their mother). Lots of "popular" PUAs just seem vengeful to me, and I take that as a sign that it's their emotions that ultimately motivate them.
Wasn't that an Andy Rooney sound bite? I.e. a comedian's opinion on the world.
One thing that worries me, and I'd love to hear other people's opinions, is that as baby boomers retire they will be removing their retirements from the stock market. Whether they move their money to other non-stock investments or whatever. But don't you think the transfer of money out of stock-related investments by such a large percentage of people is going to cause some problems for those of us who still have money in stocks in the market?
Expected to be offended and confrontational, but ended up really enjoying it. Spot on.
> They had a notion that the bomb was incredibly expensive to make and were gambling that the US couldn't make another.

Is there any evidence of that? Any official communication inside the Japanese government?
It depends on the bar and the crowd; hanging out around NYU or Columbia is much different than hanging out around Wall Street or the Upper East Side.

NYC doesn't have the same kind of start up culture that the Valley has, but there are plenty of start ups here. I've consulted with two start ups that are pretty successful in their respective niches.

I've never lived in Silicon Valley, but I lived in SoCal and I've been to SF a number of times. There is certainly a different vibe on the West Coast. NYC will never be the next Silicon Valley. We have our own culture here and the diversity it provides is a good thing.
I will give you an idea. I'm sure you have tons of data on small/medium businesses income and expenses. Anonymize it and publish juicy reports and then promote that data (pretty much like OKCupid).
Yeah, but the whole point is really repeating local variables vs capturing self:

# This wouldn't work because it binds the block to Foo, and the @bar
# would lookup inside Foo instead of the proper context:
Foo.search { bar == @bar }

# This works fine though:
Foo.search { |s| s.bar == @bar }

Besides, if you're setting accessor, it can get a little weird:

# Explicit and nice:
Foo.search { |s| s.foo = 123 }

# This actually sets a local variable:
Foo.search { foo = 123 }

# In order to fix it, we're back to the explicit one:
Foo.search { self.foo = 123 }

There is no silver bullet here, and I believe the best way is to provide both techniques and let the user decide.
As a Brooklynite, I am obviously biased here but a lot of these points are downright silly and the author seems astonishingly uninformed.

The first thing that struck me was how much this guy was paying in rent. I do agree that certain things about NYC get expensive but paying ~$2500 for a one bedroom is downright dumb if you're concerned about money. I have two roommates and pay $700 for a great place. Part of being a New Yorker is being savvy. Many people leave because they are not. They can't make rent, they can't save money, etc. Maybe they all move to California?

The sweeping generalizations here also make it very difficult to take this article seriously:

"New York has no comparable sources of intellectual firepower" - ITP, Courant, Columbia

"...most New Yorkers couldn’t fry an egg if their lives depended on it..." - http://brooklyngrangefarm.com/

"Manhattan didn’t get a Home Depot, or any sort of proper hardware store, until 2004" - ACE hardware
There's more to New York than old money on the Upper West Side. I just moved to Brooklyn from the Mission (in SF) and I must say they are very similar. The art isn't as burning man oriented but the hipsters still carry iPhones and I get dragged into just as many conversations about making 'apps'.
Very nicely done and I've been looking for something like that for a long time!

Couple of immediate remarks:
1. Allow sign-in using e-mail in addition to user name. I am using firtsnamelastname or FLastname or sometimes something else (depending on availability) and need to remember each time my username. Remembering e-mail address is much easier
2. Unless you want to limit your addressable market to US, Liberia and Myanmar, add a possibility to specify my height and width in metric units (cms and kgs)
> "Women: Does society screw them up or is there just something weird with their brains (on average of course, let's be PC here)?"

Actually, generally it's men who are the weird ones. Males have higher variance on pretty much all measures. This means that e.g. there are more mentally retarded males than females and more genius males than females. Dismissing potential biological influences out-of-hand is the same as dismissing empiricism altogether.
He's the wind beneath my wings.
Thanks for the suggestions. I am not a fan of the tagline either, but I may be over simplifying by saying we do "bookkeeping", we have a lot more than that.
"A requirement for JS3 (along with hygienic macros)"

Did anything ever come of hygienic macros for JavaScript? (first time I heard that)
I think http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeons_Law is pretty applicable here.
The open question is if gen-Y will be even worse than the baby boomers. I don't think they can be, if only due to numbers.
I broadly agree with DHH, but the "warehouse of shit" argument is a bad one, and has been whenever anyone has tried to make it. The argument basically goes like this:

- Apple restricts what languages can be used to increase the quality
of apps in the App Store.
- But the App Store is full of crap.
- Therefore, the restriction does no good, and should be abandoned.

The problem is that the conclusion doesn't follow from the premises. The restriction is undoubtedly effective at preventing even more crap from entering the App Store. Just because the store isn't over 50% gold doesn't mean it isn't fulfilling its purpose.

From Apple's perspective, the restriction is a particularly efficient one, because it prevents a lot of crap from entering, not just the App Store, but the review process. Because violating the language restriction can be easily and objectively determined, hardly anyone will try to get away with it. Imposing higher standards for app quality, by comparison, requires lots of subjective judgments, which are far less effective at deterrence and generate far more controversy. The existing standards and their enforcement are frustrating and arbitrary enough as it is.

To his credit, DHH emphasizes letting the marketplace work things out over the "warehouse of shit" argument, which I consider more persuasive. It's just too bad the latter is getting the attention.
I like your "benefit" proposition. I will definitely keep this in mind on my next foray into marketing.
Will Intel Lose the Mobile Market?
Intel is too late in the market this time with good enough chips for the mobile market and it will be impossible to beat ARM, when it already dominates the market.
thanks, it is a really fun project to work on :)

At the moment I can return colour names and faces.

Example:

input: http://cm1.theinsider.com/media/0/91/63/mini-kim-kardashian-...

output: face, yellow, blue, black.

So just colours and faces at the moment. You're right that arbitrary images are ridiculously complicated, I'm hoping to start off on a smaller domain and build up :)

(edit: obviously I can return the coords of the face too, as well as coords of empty parts of the image etc, but tagging is really what I'm focusing on at the moment)
Startup Insights From The Grateful Dead
> Once I create a LaTeX document I can easily convert it to any format I am interested in, including XHTML and Microsoft Word Document.

Am I the only one who finds it impossible to convert a LaTeX document into a Word document without it looking like total crap? What am I missing? I build my resume with LaTeX, and have tried multiple times to get a proper Word document for all those idiots that don't like PDFs, and every time it looks like such crap that I break down and send them a plain text version instead...
Give our customers incentive to refer their friends?