skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It might be worth noting that Perl is simply stronger than it appears. The community has very easy ways to communicate information, since Perl has a very good infrastructure.

CPAN is easy and doesn't distinguish between rank or other privileges; there's RSS feeds for about everything and you can get a large crowd simply by releasing; Many forms of bugs that are dependent on architecture/environment can be caught by automated testing, or by community members reporting their installation logs through their CPAN client; We still use mailing lists (some of which are closed) because they're easy to manage and are well suited for long big-traffic discussions; we use IRC because of its advantages, and many early developments happen on irc.perl.org, separated from the rest of the IRC world (this isn't bad, just a simple reason);

We didn't do forums and online communities that well in the past, but it's starting. There is PerlMonks, but it was always very Perl-specific. Blogging has been adopted by the community a lot, and you can feel its impact when you see more and more people asking about the projects the community enjoys the most at the time (Moose, Catalyst, Dist-Zilla & Co).

I heard "Yea, we still make heavy use of Perl in our company, but we didn't follow the community, because isn't Perl on a decline?" many times at CeBit this year. So it's kind of a chicken-and-egg problem. Overcoming it isn't an easy task, but we're heading in the right direction and there's a couple of very smart people working on it.
And it shouldn't impede you as an adult. Everyone does stupid stuff as kids and a lot do even more stupid stuff while in college as young adults.

I've never known a job to DQ people because of something they did at a young age that could be considered stupid kid stuff. Even government jobs don't care as long as you're up front about it.
Ask your student peers about what gets on their nerves.
An interesting read that attempts to convey the reason the P vs NP problem is important to those that do not have knowledge of complexity theory.

As a side note, one part that Lipton does not make completely clear, although with further reading should be obvious, is that his example umbrella statement Q is equivalent to the statement that P != NP.
Preparing for a 60 second pitch on This Week In Startups
I've done consulting for MINI, Ford, Pepsi, and talked with CNN, ABC, NBC, Fox, Discover, major music festivals (Bonnaroo) and museums (Tate Modern). My SaaS is used by several large companies and quite a few major educational institutions.

Let me tell you about working with bigco's.

You are never important to them. So, if you have XYZ as a customer, chances are, it's some dude or dudette in one department who uses it for their specific team for their specific thing. It's not as if XYZ USES YOU EXCLUSIVELY!

That's the kind of thing you'd look to charge thousands for. But they don't use you that way. Not unless you're very, very lucky -- or, as I'd look at it, unlucky.

You'd also be surprised at the paltry budgets these bigco's have on offer - because, of course, they're bigco's! Think of the prestige! The esteem! The fact that every major TV network wanted to put something specially crafted by me on millions of television screens, to show they're serious about social media but, uh… the $20k minimum project made them ALL stop calling. Which is why I always brought it up early so they'd stop wasting my time.

Selling to bigco's is crap. Unless it's a nice friction-free couplea hundred a month.
No, there's no problem with a non-US resident owning a US corporation.

18 months on we still don't have visas as we haven't found it necessary to be based in the US - or not important enough to subject ourselves to the expense and distraction of the visa application process. We come and go from time to time on VWP. Only now the company's becoming more solid will we look at obtaining visas.
How did it die in the first place? Is there conclusive evidence that it was the vaccination and not just due to a cumulative effect of better hygiene, better diet and better living conditions? And when and how did it resurrect itself? These questions need to be answered, because if there was an incorrect assumption in any of the previous answers, the current solution may not be as good as we'd hope...
Doesn't help when your idiot friends tag you with your real name because they are your idiot friends.
Great point. Yeah, just like with Dropbox you can always bring your own file-level encryption.
"But there is immense value in an open source-friendly yet commercially backed platform upon which to build our projects. Anybody functioning within the four walls of a company knows that, when it comes to big decisions, the executives tend to want to invest in a platform that isn't going anywhere -- and that means, backed by a big bad company."

Not going anywhere? So does that mean that Python or Perl because it isn't backed by a big company is going somewhere? That Linux would go away before Solaris?

If there is a company backing it, it will go away when they no longer find value in supporting it. If a community backs it, it will go away when the community no longer finds value in it.

I have never understood the security that people find in technologies backed by a single company.
Or as danah boyd says, "I have a funny feeling that social technology is back to developing software based on disorders and instigating new ones in people." http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2004/05/03/social_... http://www.danah.org/papers/Supernova2004.html
> We value travel and figured it was cheaper to run our startup in most parts of the world than it was in our origin city.

Has this assumption proved true so far? How true? What was your origin city, and where have you been? I'm quite interested in this strategy, it would be so nice to pair low-cost living with travel.
Rate My Startup: Moki.TV
Moki.TV allows people to rate TV episodes and discuss them with friends. We also provide show information, links to streaming episodes online, relevant news/gossip, and recommendations for new shows.

We’ve created a few invites for HNers, just go to this url to create an account: https://moki.tv/a/hackernews

We’re making a lot of changes every day, but we’d really appreciate your feedback on what we’ve got so far. Thanks.
Clickable Link:
https://moki.tv/a/hackernews
Tcpcrypt
I think there is a bit of a difference between Wolfram and your average perpetuum-mobile constructing quack.

Wolfram has an amazing amount of good work behind him and messed up (in the eyes of most, but not of all) on one thing, which I think is mostly linked to naming his book 'a new kind of science' without having the grace to wait for others to make that decision for him and by most likely being wrong about it.

If he had called it 500 interesting things to do with cellular automata there would have been no problem and his reputation would be unblemished.

It probably wouldn't have sold as many copies though.
Building a startup team, sustaining it and driving more sales: inside Scoop St.
Looks really nice, but as helpful as the four-paned image is, I think it would be really useful if you had a link somewhere to a (semi-)technical overview of what's actually going on.

Like a page of screenshots of the actual service UI and some details as to how everything is set up (for example, I initially thought that the uploader would also need a dropbox acount. After looking again, I'm pretty sure that's not the case).

It just seems rather jarring that the only thing you can do from the home page is give airdropper access to your dropbox.

That said, it looks like an awesome service; I'm sure I'll be using it.
A large part of the problem is people only see the skills for compiler design being useful for compilers. If they would start with something simple they could avoid the compiler design class and write better code by using things like ANTLR from the start. The next time your program consumes text input try writing a grammar for it and processing the AST instead of half baking it with a regex.
something cool which can be developed FAST. brainstorm with some buddies for specific ideas. you wanna be able to take something to market ASAP so you can get feedback and learn. but be aware that for better or for worse, the payoff will be disproportionate to the amount of work. a lot of people work really hard and make nothing. whereas others can work work equally has hard and make millions.... for steady predictable income... job.
It's not quite what you describe, but bank vaults are actually quite cheap. The computer expert firm I work for has two large vaults (something like 8 cu. ft. each) at a KeyBank where we store scores of hard drives. We make a trip every Friday to rotate our set of backup RAIDs. It's a very simple, straightforward process, and I think our cost is something like $40/month for both vaults. You could probably get a vault big enough for a 2 TB external drive for something like $5-10/month.
StackExchange is working on that last part already.

http://gamedev.stackexchange.com/
I am student at Sacramento University finishing my MBA. I will volunteer 2-3 days at local shelter for women and children (http://www.stjohnsshelter.org/) teaching them computer and business skills.
Sergei O. - svetmiru@yahoo.com
I guess in a blog post announcing new fonts I would expect to see the system in action. If performance is an issue then I won't want to buy your product, right? All I'm saying is I'm surprised you're not using your own product on a product announcement blog post :-).

On the other hand, I suppose most websites only embed one or two unique fonts.
Can't wait for one big mesh (802.11s) to come standard on all devices - imagine a world where banning wifi and google/verizon cronyism are impossible (at least in metro areas).
Do you mind sending me a screenshot at inquiries@gruntverk.com ? You're not the first to comment on the typeface. Just trying to see if we're failing on taste or tech. :)
(shameless plug)
PpcSoft iKnow is a "personal wiki" with the following features:

- standalone desktop application for Windows
- WYSIWYG editing
- all "pages" (or notes) are stored in a single Unicode text file
- all "pages" are automatically connected to each other (no "funny" syntax)
- automatic semi-backup of changed pages (one week back)

For FULL version control, you can use any 3rd party version control system as all the pages are stored in a single text file.

However, it does not have any time tracking or task/project/TD functionality.

For more information:

- http://ppcsoft.com/iknow-features.asp

(/shameless plug)
I'm not really looking for a new technology or idea, more of a tried-and-true business model that fits well on a college campus/in a college town. My school has around 14,000 students and I'm sure there must be some service I can provide them that they would pay for, but I can't think of what exactly.
does your employer offer any tuition benefits? maybe you could pick up a night class on their dime :)
Ha. Yes, obviously. I wasn't looking to name it that, I was just trying to research how they came up with that name

;-)
pretty interesting community - I like the recommendations I can get from friends.
If you've learned them, shouldn't you be able to breeze through the memorization tests?

Do you think that they're having you memorize irrelevant information? Do you think that memorization is not an important part of learning?
check out appnowgo.com
Our company is a supporter of Utah PRIDE, a non-profit organization committed to standing up for the rights of Gay, Lesbian, Bi-sexual, and Transgender citizens of our great state. UP maintains a small office where we donate our software to ensuring that their systems are secure, and continually operating.

After reading about Neil's offer, I realized that we could go a couple of steps further and actually go into their organization and give them free training and ongoing support in securing their computers.

We've attended the BoS '08 and '09 conferences and loved them, but our sales have taken a very dramatic decline in the past 14 months, and the decision was made in early spring to opt out of this years conference. It was purely economical.
I understand where you're coming from, but the anti-vaccine people I've met tend not to be tea-party types. They're hippies. Very liberal, and often convinced that the "medical establishment" is out to get them.
Higher Education's Tech Dilemmas
Signing, Singing, Speaking: How Language Evolved
(2007) should be added to the submission title.
Well Germany right now has no big unemployment problem. The statistics now are better than in 2005. I understand it's costly, and even more it's a hard step, but don't think everything is harder elsewhere. I think Americans in Europe can be pretty successful, I have seen a few ones making their way here. In every case good luck in your job search or startup creation!
Primal: The Semantically Driven Search Assistant.
You can reach me at tmbuckheroux -at- gmail -dot- com
http://www.weliveonaboat.com/

I used to read Steve Roberts digital nomad site for some time and I found links to familes living on sailboats and travelling but it seems those links are gone. The above was the first one I found on google.
That's only useful if you happen to get the academic name of the problem when you're trying to solve it. What if it just turns out that the problem you're solving resolves to the knapsack or travelling salesman problems? You're not going to be able to Google TSP unless you already know what TSP is.
Great idea. Yeah, we definitely need to make more obvious that the sender doesn't need a Dropbox account. That's a big value point.

Sceenshots and maybe a screencast is a great idea. I think we'll start with a FAQ since the implementation cost is so much cheaper and go from there.

Thanks for the feedback!
Not really minimalists... they depend on others for things they need. If they were truly minimalists, they would live in one of those micro-shacks, hacking basic on an Apple I replica that is powered by solar power, while watching the tomatoes ripen.
This is true, but Rdio still lacks the synchronized playback to the followers of a list, unlike what we're used to while listening to a real 'Rdio'. I believe this is what makes paulgb's idea proposal unique and all the more attractive to me that something out there would allow me to "listen to the music at the same time" while collaborating on what gets played next.

Examples: http://hackermusic.com,
http://tunez.sourceforge.net/
A Mint.com for managing your frequent flier miles instead of money. It alerts you to deals, expiring miles, and ties-in with the infinite affiliate programs for travel in order to generate revenue. (Credit to my mom on that idea.)
Solaris still sorta open, but OpenSolaris distro is dead
They taught us about Dogpile in school.

Dogpile taught me one thing: every result I liked always came from Google.

Goodbye Dogpile.
Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria Moving From South Asia to U.S.
Yep, Cod Liver Oil.
This brought myself into a grand realization.

I've always anticipated that the right thing for myself would be to pass any opportunity to contribute to any patent applications should I ever "invent" anything potentially "worth" patenting. I have seen that patents greatly harm the software ecosystem and I don't think I would ever want to take part in any of that.

However, now that I think about it I will never even consider. I'll just say "No" right out of the way, and walk away from the opportunity as quickly as I can.

I announce that, as of today if my current, at any time, employer happened to be patent-unfriendly, only file defensive patents, never litigate anyone, and perhaps win some patent trolls because of their accumulated defensive intellectual "property" I will still say "No" to getting myself involved in any patent application. Even if I was offered a bonus for that. Or a job.

This whole Sun vs. Oracle thing made me realize that software patents are categorically undesirable.

Patents are like guns. Maybe so because I'm a pacifist. Now: sure, you can buy a cabinet full of rifles, shotguns and pistols to defend your house on the prairie should the evil gansters arrive. However, if they do and succeed in taking over your house, then they have the guns. This is exactly what has happened here. And with companies desperate for money, it's probably easier than robbing a house.

Thus, there's no such thing as a defensive patent: patents are all offensive, even if most of them (software patents) are bogus. While a good-spirited company or person might choose to not exercise the monopoly granted by patent law, it only postpones the inevitable unless the patent expires before that.

Similarly, there are no defensive guns. All guns are designed to wound or kill people. All patents are designed to take away other hackers' freedom to make the world better. I'll reconsider my stance when I see the first useful software patent and when all the useless ones are revoked.
His part about rails made laugh out loud.

I get the feeling Steve is teasing us with his magical vaporware just for laughs.
... And now I understand why my doctor gave me a tetanus booster last month without even asking if I had had one in the last ten years. (I think I have, but I'm not sure, and I never turn down free tetanus boosters if the doctor offers one.)
5 Rules of Thumb for A/B Split Testing
We once escaped an infestation by storing all of our worldly possessions in a POD outside in the middle of the summer in Arizona for three days. Then we moved to Chicago.

We kept our mattress sealed up in plastic for over a year because they can live without food for that long (seriously).

Edit: business idea -- bedbug insurance for apartment building owners.
The Method of Loci sounds very interesting (as well as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis).

But if we're still presuming that speech is inherently linear, I think we're mistaking how the brain abstracts those sequences of texts. I haven't read the literature at all really, but I read On Intelligence (Jeff Hawkins), and my sense was that this lexing pass that happens when we greet language is happening very much in isolation before we start adding semantic meaning with 'hierarchies' or tree structures, etc. So the 'give off' from that linear feeding of word after word is pretty minimal.

Imho, the Method of Loci would apply greatly to how Greek language and literature works. There is a lot more investment of ideas into spatially separate, almost physical objects (Love is very much a physical god, etc.). This perhaps has the advantage of engaging the participant with those ideas more -- by activating the methods we use in our spatial reasoning. Similarly, in language, the flexibility of the word order really requires that you stack words in different locations, flexibly.

We read the Socratic dialogues linearly -- and Socrates leads us on what seems like a preordained line. But really there are lots of stacks and queues involved. It's a pretty dynamic process of finally finding a linear coherent structure that we're comfortable with. So in my mind it's still very dynamic.

But you make interesting points... Perhaps the best way to evoke the most information with language is to be aware of the distinction between the sequential and dynamic -- and to maximize the good parts of both. They're really yin and yang with each other -- great essay writing is a linear product, made of dynamic error-checking at each step, etc.
Netbook maker reduces shipments due to success of Apple's iPad
> It’s like being able to sign a ‘personal belief exemption’ saying you don’t believe in fire codes in order to exempt your house from them.

More like exempting your office building from them.
Everyone should be vaccinated against stupidity, a.k.a. that thing called education.
Helping people move.
If you interpret it as a joke, it is amusing.

It's not that I don't like Perl. In fact, I use Perl and have NEVER used Python.
Wiki lists 10 and more senses in human body. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sense

Without the tech power of the net, I would have no clue we have so many senses.
Because I don't need a salesperson, I need an administrator. And what needs administrating is something that can be done easily by some software... so why demean someone by making them do a highly repetitive and dull task?
If you can hustle up a few beefy guys, start a moving service. A friend of mine started school in EE, but left school with the moving company supporting him full-time. He started it around his second year as well.

Edit: We went to school in DC, so having several universities around definitely did help him.
I pledge to take what I learn at Business of Software 2010 to and pay it forward to the product manager community in Austin,TX in a session titled "Top five things I learned at BoS 2010 that can improve the Austin software community." I will give this session at ProductCamp Austin in January of 2011.

I am a software product marketing consultant - I left corporate employment two years ago to work independantly, helping software companies and entrepreneurs connect more effectively with their customers. Although I have been working steadily since the launch of my business, I am not yet at the point where I am able to afford to send myself to Business of Software.
> wrap our houses in faraday cages

Hmm... I am concerned that the big solar flare might come one day and usher the world into a new dark age... or at least a victorian period of about 20 to 30 years.
I've been thinking about a compiler for Lisp/ML like functional languages. If we take the source program, convert it to continuation passing style, then lambda lift, we have an intermediate form where no closures appear, every call is a tail call and where the stack is represented as data structures explicitly. The next step is to convert every call site

f(x)

into

if(f == FUNCTION1) FUNCTION1(x)
else if(f == FUNCTION2) FUNCTION2(x)
...

The reason for doing this is that now all function calls are to known functions (there are no calls to function pointers anymore). Because all calls are tail calls we can then convert every call to a jump instruction.

(note that this could cause code blowup with a lot of different functions and call sites, so it would probably be better to do this transformation lazily as you analyse what values f could take, and only actually do this transformation if you know that f can take at most 10 different values)

What we have now is one giant control flow graph (state machine) representing the entire program. All functions have been eliminated. The only thing left is primitive operations and jumps.

Why do I think that such a representation is interesting for a compiler? Because many things that previously had to be coded separately are now one analysis/transformation. Because there are no functions left all analysis and transformations automatically become interprocedural. And for example (loop) unrolling and inlining become the same transformation. So this could possibly make the compiler much simpler.

Could something like this work?
These are nice, but I still find that Zurb's example's are still the best out there.

http://www.zurb.com/article/266/super-awesome-buttons-with-c...

I use them on nearly all of my projects.
If you think that is scary, this is what I think is scary:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/12/world/asia/12bug.html

More and more bacteria are finding the route to antibiotic resistance, MRSA is already quite a problem in some areas causing patients transferred from one hospital to another to be quarantined on the off chance they might be carrier.

The whooping cough is a serious risk to infants but mortality for adults is quite low.