skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My impression of the Ruby community, especially the OSS part of it, was that they were explicitly more about tinkering than enterprise. Certainly characters like _why were in that camp.

I don't entirely disagree with the larger sentiments, but I worry about the tone of the word 'tinker'. That is, the Ruby world is full of playful characters, and often displays a spirit that is far from corporate. However, many Ruby (and RoR) apps are also serious businesses at this point. There are also many libraries that don't charge money, do exhibit that playful or exuberant spirit, but also provide hard-core real-world functionality (e.g., Nokogiri).

tl;dr The word 'tinker' is a bit trivializing (perhaps unintentionally on Martelli's part). The division between 'tinker' and 'enterprise' doesn't fully or properly cut up the problem space. It's a binary view of a multi-faceted world.

(For whatever it's worth, this is my view as someone on the outside of this whole situation. I use Ruby and Perl about equally, primarily for systems administration and personal projects.)
But would you say it them in person?
Very cool. That seemed to work better than I'd have expected.

The explanation of the 'naive' part of Naive Bayes isn't quite right, though. Throwing out the possibility of the animal being human based on the datapoint "four legs" is orthogonal to naivety. A more sophisticated Naive Bayes system could reject classifying an animal as human based on having four legs, and conversely a non-naive system i.e. one that used joint probabilities of the features, might not be more likely to.

I guess the most rational way to do that would be to express and calculate the conditional probabilities with some statistical distance, like the # of standard deviations. So 100k examples of humans without a single one having the "four legs" feature would make that a very strong indicator of being non-human. And that'd work just as well with a naive algorithm as any other.

Is there a name for this?
You Know You're In Design Hell When You See...
There seems to be this unspoken assumption that you can't do business if you're not nice.

This is definitely not true. If I were Jobs (which I'm arguably not, so it is possible that you can't 'get there' by being nice) I would have seen quite a few possibilities achieving the same without coming off as a jerk.

Maybe we disagree on that, but I don't think you need to be like that in order to succeed. Some of the wealthiest people that I have known would never think of treating another person that way, business or not, and I find it surprising that Jobs would do this. It's just my personal take on this, don't make it in to an absolute.
There's a grammatical error, I think, that slightly changes the meaning of part of the article.

Second, the Brazilian way of farming is more likely to do good in the poorest countries of Africa and Asia.

I think that the writer actually means "do well" where he says it will "do good". My correction says that there's a good chance that it will be successful elsewhere -- which would also imply his wording, that it would deliver positive results in those regions.
I think it does, and this even extends to programming languages!

I've noticed that C++ developers think differently than Lisp developers, and same with Java and Python developers.

Languages have subtle biases that totally effect the way you look at things.
I'm not sure if this helps in your particular case, but I believe some of Exposé's functions are mapped to four-fingered multitouch swipe gestures on the touchpad (up and down).
Facebook to kill IE6 chat support.Maybe now corporations will stop using it:)
As you can imagine, your average IE-only user typically only has one tab open at a time - so there's no reason to provide an entire tab row for them.

My hope would be that the "tab bar" would act like any toolbar that IE has today - easily dragged down to its own row. Heck, it might have been dragged UP by whomever took that screenshot.
To me it's really nice UI + convenience/simplicity of use + all the command line goodness. I use it for a couple of reasons:

- simplicity and reliability (I'm on mac since 2006) - it just works, for everything I do actually

- an ecosystem of tools that are decently priced and very simple and reliable (such as 1password, knox, deskshade...)

- interop with our (i)phones

- the UI is really pleasant to my eye (fonts)

- I'm still in love with TextMate after all those years (Allan if you read this, take your time)

But then everyone is free to use what they like, no need for the neighbours to use the very same platform :)
Why aren't U.S. engineers politicians? Does it matter?
Hu Jintao, the president of China was a civil engineer. As are many senior government officials.

The former president of India from 2002-2007, Dr. A. P. J. Abdul Kalam was an aeronautical engineer.

So is Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, from Iran.

Does it matter that I'd be hard pressed to see an engineer rise to the president in the U.S.? (Then again I would have said that about a black president in 2005)

Is there any useful information to extract from the oBservations that China and India have a significant amount of powerful leaders as former engineers?
Economists have no problems talking about economic efficiency when a few benefit at the cost of many.

I'm not sure you got his point. If the government imposed a tax that cost 1 million people $1K each and gave Bill Gates $1 billion, that policy would have neutral efficiency. In terms of efficiency, there is no rational basis for objecting to that policy. So economists who justify their normative claims by talking about efficiency do have a serious problem talking about policies whereby a few benefit at the cost of many when those policies have small or zero deadweight losses.
Just to see this man mentioned in a list that includes, among other gems "The Kraken" makes me wince.
Google Code: Web Application Exploits and Defenses
"...in the context of cryptography, computation, and deep open research problems."
"Hello soon to be WakeMaters,"

I don't believe their first line of copy.
Gizmodo Gives Lots of Free Publicity to Patent Troll
I'd had some experience with Perl and quite a bit of experience (had built a couple large-ish apps) in PHP.

The reason I referenced Rails and Django as motivators in finding those languages is because after having built and then forced to maintain an enterprise-class application in PHP, I REALLY liked the notion of an MVC framework, and things like Cake and Symfony weren't out (or at least I didn't know about them) yet.

So, yeah, I wasn't a programming newbie altogether, but I wasn't as comfortable in just picking up new languages either.
You already know that winning depends in no small part on hiring people better than yourself. If you are a youngish entrepreneur or boss, that will entail hiring older and more experienced people, especially in top roles for your organization.

How many YC companies subscribe to this? It seems few and far between are the company bio pages with anyone over 35.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Hoover
Mozilla Fennec Alpha Released for Android and Nokia N900
> Only Firefox (and Opera) has decided not to support AVC.

And Chromium. Because Google's h.264 license only covers the Chrome they distribute themselves, which leads us to...

> To me Firefox sounds like they want things their way and they can't compromise in any form.

They don't have the money to pay for it, and even if they did the money would only cover Firefox distributed by the Mozilla Foundation themselves in binary form. Which means for instance that no unice out there would be covered (neither linux nor BSD) as they pretty much all repackage upstream and each of them would have to pay for its own license. So that option is dumb, to start with.

As to the OS stuff, as I said above that implies the capabilities of firefox would be widely different depending on the OS and its precise configuration. Not to mention most of the Firefox userbase is still on Windows XP, which doesn't get Microsoft's built-in h.264 support.
Why would it change what's accepted? I could simply provide more access to those social applications that are already accepted/would have been accepted anyway.
The small ways in which Colonial newspapers anticipated the Web.
The "magic methods" wrapped in in double-underscores are special because other parts of the language's syntax rely on them always meaning the same thing. (Some room for programmer misbehavior here.)

Example: If __len__ is defined on an object x, and __nonzero__ (Py2) or __bool__ (Py3) is not defined, then "not x" will test if x.__len__() == 0.

Similarly, __contains__ interacts with "foo in x", and __eq__ and __hash__ are expected to play well together for hashable objects (e.g. unique members of a set).

The double underscores are a useful code smell that indicates you're changing how an object interacts with Python's syntax.
Great article about requiring a break-up fee in case a buyer walks away after the company has spent lots of time and money on lawyers for nothing.

The title made me think of a funny situation where every service sends an e-mail to their users whenever an acquisition fails:

Dear customer,

We regret to inform you that our company has almost been acquired. Your accounts will continue to work throughout this period of non-transition. Upon such a time we find a buyer, you will then have 30 days from the date of announcement to find an alternative.

The Management
Thank FSM! I LOVE my Backblaze! It's the perfect backup solution, no-foolin'.
view-source: loading four js libraries just to show one line of text?
Here are four more very recent articles promoting IV: http://gizmodo.com/5621899/why-we-need-more-inventions-lots-... http://gizmodo.com/5621869/why-ideas-are-expensive http://gizmodo.com/5621679/how-intellectual-ventures-wants-t.... http://gizmodo.com/5621607/iv-gallery/gallery/
Using Social Networking to Find a Lost Child (Please Help)
> How are they doing now with Flash? Any record of users complaining with Firefox for a Flash bug?

Uh yes? Users complain about the browser when Flash crashes it, why do you think Firefox finally moved Flash to an external process, following the lead of Chrome and Safari (and MSIE?). Sure Flash having no 64b support plays a role, but it's not like most users realize it when Flash is involved in making their browser burst in flames or crawl to a halt.
Evidently someone at Microsoft noticed the disparity:

http://www.webmonkey.com/2010/08/leaked-screenshot-shows-a-c...
But are crackers who are stupid enough to hit 'send' representative of crackers in general? I'd guess not.
Follow-up on the children: http://wgordon.web.wesleyan.edu/kamikaze/writings/kuno/index...

His wife was pregnant with a second daughter. All three went on to raise their own families in a now prosperous nation that no longer believes in war. I would think that their father would be happy with that outcome.
Adventures of an imperative programmer in the land of fp
> just blacklisting a few of the larger and more egregious content farms seems like a decent band-aid.

The real band aid would be to enable users to blacklist sites that they don't want to see. I often search for things and come across the same spam sites that I do not want, over and over.

After that a distributed trust model should be built so that users can share blacklists of spam sites.
US still favors family based immigration system . So "highest" doest count in this context when compared to points ( skill) based system in other countries like UK.
We are hoping that if we can get this viral in Georgia and California then somebody might recognize her and help her get home. We have a support base in Georgia right now, but if anybody in the California area is willing to help broadcast this along then I and perhaps her family might be eternally grateful.
Yes, I mean highest in absolute numbers. I don't even know what a rate you speak of since you need an X and Y to have a rate. Is that there are more people applying now than last year or do you mean more immigrants as a percentage of the population?
That's one of the best bits of advice I've read on here.

I know a few people who are really good at negotiating - the difference between what they can achieve and what an "amateur" (like me) will get in a similar situation is astounding.
It's interesting that you mention the magic mouse. I switched to a Mac about 2 months ago and can't believe how uncomfortable the magic mouse is. Apple understand aesthetics but obviously haven't a clue about ergonomics. I've reverted to my 10 year old Logitech trackball although I do miss the fast smooth scrolling of the magic mouse.

Any suggestions for a better trackball or did all innovation cease 10 years ago?
Angel Liquidity
Not disagreeing with you. In fact, the first example is one reason why "print" was changed from a keyword to a function in Python 3:

myfunc <- lambda x: (print x) or x*x # SyntaxError

myfunc <- lambda x: print(x) or x*x # OK in Py3
non residents can open company in most if not all states. once entity is created - anyone can fund it. you just can't be hired by this company and be US resident in the same time. But you can be on US territory to sign contracts, or you can work for company while being out of US land.

but after going through work visa i can say it's doable, but really complex if you are not from "good" country, like canada, australia, etc. =)
The first time there is an exploit in system-provided video decoder (any decoder, not just H.264), you can be sure, who will get blamed for that - the browser, of course.

Is this really the case? Aren't there security flaws in platform code all the time that affect browsers along with other apps on the platform? Are those blamed on a specific browser? If both Firefox and Safari use Mac OS X's built-in h.264 and there's a hole in it, is there going to be significant widespread outrage against Firefox?
What is the point of that? I'm not into the whole social network thing but isn't the point of Diaspora to be able to control your own "private" information? If you post to Facebook from Diaspora wouldn't you be giving up the only real reason to switch?
In the sentence, "good" is a noun. You can say "deliver ..." or "achieve positive results", but why use the longer latinate words? It just makes you look like you're trying to look smarter than you are.
Some points (from a "farmer")

- Brazil is a third world country.

- labor is dirt cheap

- on visits to Brazil, the level of human labor in agriculture is stunning. (Not possible in US at current wages). Compare Japanese automated factories to Chinese factories.

- subsidies (perhaps) not needed because some inputs (labor) is so cheap

- This is fantastic for Brazil.

I can't defend subsidies, and I don't know very many who can. However, it's part of the game now in the US, so you'd be a fool not to take advantage of them.

- corn prices (adjusted for inflation) are half of what they were in the 70's (http://inflationdata.com/inflation/inflation_Articles/Corn_I...), while oil (a huge input to agriculture) is 3x as expensive (http://inflationdata.com/inflation/inflation_rate/historical...)

- Dry land agriculture is going to explode.

- drought resistance corn is going to increase the area of arable land in the US. (The west is relatively dry, we have a lot of "less productive" range land that could be used for agriculture. (Our land is right in that margin, all land is currently in soybeans and it is no-till.) Previous years (80's/90's) it was a mix of corn, oats, barley, sunflowers, wheat, sorghum, flax and some soybeans.
- The last few years have seen record harvests. A combination of good weather and excellent crop varieties is probably the cause.

- Ag Input prices have soared recently.

- Improvements in chemicals have made no-till a viable option.

- The main problem is weed control. Canada Thistle, etc, roundup ready crops are an amazing feat of engineering.

On being green.

- Our farm hasn't seen so much wildlife since the 70's/80's.

- Verdant fields support way more wildlife than native prairie. However, there is still plenty of land that for other reasons, terrain, etc is used for grazing, hay production.

- We had our land in the conversation reserve program (http://www.nrcs.usda.gov/programs/crp/) for quite some time. Now, crop prices make that ridiculous.

- Suburban chemical runoff is a faster growing problem then farm runoff. Chemicals are extremely expensive, so with new high tech methods, each part of the field gets the precise amount of chemical needed. Contrast this to urban/suburban runoff: http://www.chesapeakebay.net/landuse_urbansuburban.aspx?menu... "Unlike many farmers using nutrient management plans, suburban residents often over-apply fertilizer to their lawns and gardens."
Athletes in Their College Dorm
It’s back to school time!
So far, I prefer the Chrome approach of a unified address+search bar to the Mozilla approach of 2 separate boxes. 1 keyboard shortcut to access either is far better than 2 .. if you type a search term in the firefox address bar as well, it'll search it for you ..
HTML5 Family: CSS3 Ads Versus Flash Ads
> zero problems

Because they haven't been caught, or because what they're doing is legitimate?
Initializing default max values on a Ruby on Rails model, automagically
That probably means that some of them are going to go with the open source software and some of them are going to pay. Yes, fewer people are using my software, but I'm getting more money so who cares?

Network effects, more code contribution, and the like. That's important for open source software. For me, it's opportunities to get paid more. If I can expand my market, than I could raise my price or get money somewhere else.

Beside, it does not mean that some customers will buy your software. The advertising effect of piracy may increase sales. The only way to find out is that if people magically respect copyright.

Pirating software is very similar to not respecting open source licenses, for example closing down a modification of GPL'ed code. Why?

I was referring to less restrictive alternatives not whether or not if somebody broke the law.

> work on the problem space of making money in the assumption of infinitely copied software
Yeah, I'd like to work on solving nuclear fission too. This is just not feasible with certain kinds of software.

It is certainly feasible to run small experiments on a small portion of your business. You do not have to risk your entire business operation to learn the truth about what work or not.

An accurate belief is more important in business than who win debates in hypothetical business models on Hacker News, no?
Err - which was stated ;)
I think this has more to do with GNU/Unix design philosophy rather than being an explicit part of FLOSS ideology.

Also, you need to remember that GNU/Linux projects do have a certain amount of control over upstream, seeing as the source is publicly available and can be forked/modified. On the other hand, if Firefox relied on proprietary software, they would be completely at the mercy of decisions made upstream.
How we Doubled our Conversion Rate in 2 Days
I couldn't agree more. One company I was involved with veered into the public space, and there's nothing the press loves to rip apart more than anything associated with state government (never mind that that the product hadn't launched yet, nor had anyone writing about it actually used it). It was a learning experience.
Yeah that's actually exactly it. People are evolutionarily wired to try to stand out/take risks at that age.

"The tendency [to take risks] probably affects one in five people, mostly young males, and declines with age. It may ensure our survival, even spur our evolution as individuals and as a species. Risk taking probably bestowed a crucial evolutionary advantage."

http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/200910/risk
OS X and Windows have accelerated H.264 decoders that are available to programmers. Firefox is an application on each of these platforms. Firefox can use the native decoders like every other developer. They are already using a third-party's H.264 license (Adobe with Flash) to play this sort of video on many sites. I have a hard time seeing why using Flash is any different than using the built in.

For platforms that haven't paid the license, leave a plug-in way to do it and let others fill it just like they are letting Adobe do now.
I am not sure about that. If you are a golfer and you have an opportunity to play with Tiger Woods, would you let it go? The mitigating factor is that you may be betting your life on it, still, I wouldn't avoid it just because it's Jobs. Maybe I am too cavalier.
OMAP4, the next gen powerful mobile phone and tablet CPU in detail
More immigrants as a percentage of the population.
This does not only apply to "hackers". Say you are developing the next show stopping desktop application and you somehow crash something. If you send the error report you are also sending MicroSoft any "trade secrets".

Now is Microsoft going to steal your code? I dunno, probably not, but it is something to think about.
Brazil doesn't have to subsidize their farmers, the US takes care of that:
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1978963,00.ht...

Unbelievable.
Chances are when you work on a very small team you probably don't have a sysadmin at all. At the startup I work at, I do both and the more I work without a sysadmin the more I appreciate the work they do!

When we do have a dedicated sysadmin, at the very least he will be very appreciated by me, because I know he will be improving all the stuff I have done out of sysadmin ignorance.
I think you'd see a lot more upvotes if you gave an explicit description of how "everyone can come to US, register a company and work for it", instead of making this empty (and to the best knowledge of most people that had to deal with the US immigration, incorrect) statement.
Soon we'll start hearing about a "tiger gap"
Ask HN: User Location Data in Google Code
I am looking to find all the projects hosted on Google Code that are managed by people from a specific place.

Does anybody know how to do this?
Is there more evidence to it than one case? My parents applied for the lottery and had no problems getting tourist visas afterwards even though we have a lot of relatives living there. And Google does not seem to know about this problem either.
Depends on how you look at it. With "family" based immigration, someone has basically vouched for your character. In the US, family means you are financially responsible for this person being let in this country. If they can't fend for themself, you shelter, clothe, and feed them. They are really serious about it and it requires you meet income, savings, and property thresholds.

The UK sort of has both, family and skills can get you in. Recently, they have started to de-emphasize the family visas.

With points, you are at the mercy of the market of the host country. The UK has, recently, restricted the high-tech industry in some areas, but hairdressers are still in demand under the points system. So someone with a BSc may actually be less qualified than someone that went to beautician's school under this scheme.
It's a shame Backblaze don't have a Linux version, it looks like a pretty neat offering.
You don't give up do you :) ?
The Bidding War For 3PAR Continues; HP Offers $2 Billion In Cash
It's the same post on a non-blocked domain. The content is good and relevant. What do you think?
There's also LaunchBar. http://www.obdev.at/products/launchbar/index.html
Charles River Ventures' Izhar Armony Busts Some Micro-VC Myths
Yes, few years ago, there was 'Haha, so Firefox is not so secure after all' bug in Windows 'shell:' protocol handler:

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Security/Mozilla-Flaw-Lets-Links-Ru...
In his defense, it is great post. Also, there were some great comments in the old version :) http://www.appsumo.com/blog/how-we-doubled-our-conversion-ra...
It’s 2010 and Canadians pay the highest cell phone bills in the world
Apart from the suspiciously high number of upvotes in the first two minutes I think it's fine. So did you get an answer?