skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You asked a bunch of questions about it in IRC which were met with generous answers from a veteran player?

I fail to see your point?
Ask HN: How to get started in web programming?
Hi all,

A little bit of introduction: I'm a programmer, with appr. 8 years of experience writing desktop application (CAD, in C++), and game programming in the last 3 years. The working experience regarding the programming languages is just bare C, some assembler, and C++ (in C-with-classes mode mainly).

Since I and my partner decided to go for a web startup (the application idea is still quite vague as expected), I've decided to do a research about how to get started in web programming as a beginner (in web programming) but as an experienced developer as a whole.
Here is my current plan as a result from my research for learning of the necessary languages and technologies in order to make a prototype for out web application while still holding my day job:

Front-end development: my research concluded that for the beginning front-end development HTML, CSS, XHTML, and JavaScript are the classic bunch of technologies to learn. These are the books that I plan to read:

* "Head First HTML with CSS & XHTML" (O'Reilly) (Alternative: "Web Design in a Nutshell: A Desktop Quick Reference" (O'Reilly))

* "Head First JavaScript" (O'Reilly)

Back-end development: here I don't have a clue how to get started. I've familiarized with most of the current (I hope) widely used languages and frameworks, but just the names. I'm still searching for a book that clearly conveys the message that it is whole package for back-end development and at the same time showing the big picture. Maybe the multitude of technologies make the research and the choice quite hard, maybe just the inexperience, maybe both, but I'm struggling to decide with which programming language + framework combo to start, and which first book on the subject to buy and read. My personal preferences are towards Python since I've read 2 of most recommended introductory books and I've wrote some simple examples, so generally I've liked it, but this is quite biased and subjective...it's the only programming language from the common back-end choices to which I've been exposed.

Thanks in advance
Tools for Assessing Cloud Performance
Google Maps makes life easier for bikers Gooycle (Google+Cycle)
Dambisa Moyo has given talks and written a book about how aid is harming Africa in a big way. I hightly recommend people check it out. Here's a short version of her talk: http://bigthink.com/ideas/21626

She does a good job of distinguishing between emergency aid (think Katrina or the Indian Ocean Tsunami) which she supports and permanent aid which she says supports corrupt governments and creates a culture of dependency.
The Day I stopped writing The Day Series
I believe she also drew a large distinction between NGOs and government, to make clear that she was not talking about NGOs.
Good idea! Why should foreigners be the only ones to mooch off the Chilean taxpayers?
Worth reading Tyler Cowan's take on this:

http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2010/08...

* It's going to be hard to properly price all that parking, and if you do it wrong, you wind up shifting the problem around (from K-Mart's parking lot to neighborhood streets).

* The same externality might be addressed better with a lump-sum tax (Tyler Cowan is not exactly a tax fanatic, by the way).

* If urban congestion and land use are the problems, you can address them with satellite lots on the outskirts and mass transit.

* The effect on "poor people" is probably salubrious: many of them don't own cars to begin with, and without parking lots vying for land, land prices will go down).
>It's his job to come up with nice designs and it's my job to make them work on a computer screen. Obviously we discuss things so he doesn't design stuff that are completely impossible to do in HTML/CSS or simply infeasible for some reason, but I try to give him as much artistic freedom as possible while shielding him from technical constraints.

IMO you are the web designer he is acting like an apprentice. I can see how you might want to insulate from the technical constraints in effort to push the boundaries, but if the design is not considering the user's interactions, accessibility, browser limitations, SEO as well as things like calls to action and the design goals (profit or throughput or whatever) then they're not doing web design.

I'd say from your description you're a web designer employing a graphic artist.

Just 'shop-ing a design and transforming it to markup and styles tends to be print design that is put online rather than web design.
Nanny Mcphee Returns Movie Trailer
Software patents in general are bad, but far worse when the software is a development tool (e.g. Java/JVM/some core dev tool).

A patent issue on an app I write can be easily resolved (pay the fine, royalties, etc.) and re-write that code. But when the underlying bits that I've built on are in question, I'm screwed.

I think that sums it up for Google. They picked the wrong platform for the right reason (lot's of Java devs) and they hoped Sun would continue to be nice about it. Sun is gone now and all bets are off.

As developers, if we want our apps to have futures or to at least have some control over our own future, then we must use entirely free foundational tools (ISO standard programming languages with public domain/GPL/BSD/ licensed compilers and libraries) or be willing to face the consequences.

Nothing compares to the rug being jerked out from under you. Except for when they jerk the foundation that the rug sits on out from under you. Google will learn this lesson the hard way. I hope they have a serious plan B.
Thanks, was waiting for it.
Why does economists make more money than engineers?
Engineering I would say is a lot harder. Tougher to study, hardeer jobs. But economists seem to be paid better. Why is this? Tougher competition for engineering jobs? Why? More engineers are educated or is it because an engineer costs 2-3$/hour in China?
Not entirely true. She has been as critical as many NGO interventions - "The types of aid that I’m talking about, I’m not talking about humanitarian or emergency aid, sort of the aid that goes for tsunami, for example. Nor am I talking about NGO or charitable aid which is relatively small beer. I myself sit on the board of a number of charities. But I think it’s important where charities are concerned to understand what they can and cannot do. So they can provide Band-Aid solutions. So we can send a girl to school for example, but they cannot deliver long-term economic development growth and growth or alleviate poverty on the level that we want to see across the continent." (http://www.kendallharmon.net/t19/index.php/t19/article/21352...)
Java was always a restricted platform. Sun's lawsuit with Microsoft established that.

How? Even RMS/FSF don't think so

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/java-trap.html

and if we went by their stringent definitions, most of us shouldn't be (ethically, by their terms) using computers.

Both the Microsoft and Oracle lawsuits and associated ickiness are about implementing things you call Java or run Java. I can't think of a case of anyone running into a legal restriction merely for using one of the many Java implementations however they please. I do remember the JDK license telling you not to use Java to control a nuclear reactor, is that what you have in mind?
Google prepares for battle with Facebook (more acquisitions, Google Me)
I built a variant of this style a couple years back http://code.activestate.com/recipes/440563-yet-another-reinv... . I used it to generate static content in advance, but it could have easily been used for dynamic content.

In my experience, when working as the only person on a project (all of the backend and frontend work), reducing context switch time in the form of removing languages can be a benefit. That can be augmented by knowing a templating language well enough (I personally got to that point with Cheetah and Spitfire), but then there is still javascript. Using Python syntax as html syntax is convenient as hell, but it isn't really all that maintainable once you go beyond the basics.

When your team moves from one person to multiple people, and you've actually got a frontend person who is really good at some templating language, productivity explodes, as the frontend person will be spending most of their time in that language. Also, you're not going to be finding someone with any experience in this new language you've written. The best new languages are ones that are evolving from previous languages, addressing the weakpoints in the former (django -> jinja, cheetah -> spitfire, etc.).

Finally, and this cannot be overstated, the insertion of business logic into templates is the worst cardinal sin of modern web development. Back in the wild-west days of the 90's through around 2002 or so, the use of ColdFusion, PHP, etc., was all understandable: we didn't know any better. But then we started getting usable templating languages in pretty much all programming languages, and they evolved. And the building of application logic into separate layers became not only possible, but became a time saver. Your backend guys build the logic to pass data into the template, your frontend guys format/handle that data into web pages. Business logic is in exactly one place. In the context of this language that you have written, while that isn't necessary, because your html templating is in Python, you will be tempted to introduce business logic into your template.

Otherwise, it is nifty :) Welcome to the world of templating.
It seems Kevin Rose mentioned Google Me about a month ago but nothing else shows up. Just found this vid: http://vimeo.com/13033498
Apple ipad censorship
Apple patent for "smart bike"/iPod integration
This was a seriously crass comment. What was I thinking?
My apologies fir trivializing the original inquiry of the thread.
What lice have to say about human evolution
I just went and found that too. Required a lot of clicking. It's a shame the people posting these blog posts don't dereference the intermediate pointers for us.
Thanks for the link, some good resources on a variety of topics, many of which are free. This is why I read HN!
Ask PG: Why do you think Africa cannot produce global scale start ups?
Hi PG. As a Nigerian Internet start up founder, I was quite disheartened to read Leila Janah, post (http://tcrn.ch/aE4UqK) where you were quoted as saying you would "rather fund an incubator for less glamorous businesses, like gas stations and plumbers." than start a Y combinator in Kenya.

A continent with 1 billion people and, 110 million connected online (growing in triple digits) I would like to believe we can produce companies that can have product market fit before deciding to scale up and probably open offices in the west. .e.g US.

When I wrote my blog post "A cure for Nigerian Internet Scams (http://bit.ly/ayCTUX), I counted you as one of the people that we would seek support from to become relevant in the world of startups.

So hearing that you think there is no hope for us, is quite deflating.

So my question is, why do you believe Africa cannot produce global scale startups?
I'd vote against the name Weby because I don't want to live in a world where there is a web.py, web2py and weby/weby.py. Too much name similarity confusion.
Two questions:

1) Is there any process for investing in a company already incorporated in Canada? Could we apply with the assumption we would move it over to the US if accepted?

2) Would YC consider applications for a team with an existing early-stage product on the market?
This is done using Steganography. The bytes in a binary file are change to store the hidden message. Though not very secure, it serves as a very simple tool to fool human eyes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography
Here's a great guide for getting started with Ruby on Rails. It takes you through all the stuff you need to learn to really understand how the whole RoR stack works, in addition to some front-end knowledge. Links to resources are included.

http://techiferous.com/2010/07/roadmap-for-learning-rails/
Some reasons I can think of: it's definitely an advantage to be able to compile the code on the client-side, which sibilant should be able to do; I don't know if Parenscript can bootstrap itself the same way. Some people, like me, prefer lisp-1 to lisp-2. Being less like Common Lisp and more like Javascript can be an advantage; sibilant seems to support foo.bar notation for accessing JS properties, which I think is the right choice in this context (I would also like to see JS/JSON literal syntax supported).

All of the docs on Parenscript seem to assume you're using it to render bits of JS and HTML from a Common Lisp server. It would be useful if there were a tutorial that showed how to use Parenscript for this use case, simply to compile lisp-like code into standalone JS files for use with whatever arbitrary backend.
I have exactly the same stance on DSLs as you. Well said.
Maybe it's the cafeteria food.
You could determine all of that information with regards to the MAC address by examining the packets from the user.

But form the video it appears that he mostly leverages lazy network admins, and the fact that routers are all configured with forms.
1) If you feel the need to brush up on python, try writing more than few simple examples. A great Intro to Python course, all online, all problem-set based where you actually write a bunch of stuff: http://cs.northwestern.edu/~akuzma/classes/EECS110-s10/

Otherwise just jump into Django right NOW.

1) Do the tutorial on the site: http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/intro/tutorial01/

2) Get a copy of "Django 1.0 Web Site Development" by Ayman Houriyeh. I think this is hands down the best Django book you can get. Why? Because it has a basic intro to jQuery as well and goes through integrating jQuery with your Django site. Don't worry about it being 1.0, it's still the book most worth your time.

3) Download South and do the tutorial at http://south.aeracode.org/ . Never start a Django project without South now that you know it exists.

4) Don't get any other books, Just Build It. Consult the docs, mailing-list, and #django-users as needed.

You probably won't need an IDE for your first site as you'll probably be looking up functions in the Docs manually to see the examples, but if you need one later do ECLIPSE+pyDev.

edit: as for struggling with language to choose, if you need any reasons to stick with Python:

-Underlying implementation is getting faster and faster: http://codespeak.net/pypy/dist/pypy/doc/

-It has reached critical mass in a variety of fields in addition to web development. The SEC is even considering requiring companies to submit executable Python source code instead of certain documents.

-You have experience in C\C++ programmer and it is easy to run C from Python. You might find Python experience speeds up desktop application development as well.

-You probably already know enough Python to get started with Django, learning another language will slow down your momentum, you've already made a good-enough-decision that's not worth the resources optimizing more than just trying to launch.

ALSO: get the FireBug plugin for firefox asap and start pressing F12 on every site you visit.
Are HN entrepreneurs really so willing to mooch off of the unwilling capital of the Chilean taxpayers?
I'd actually like someone to give just one example of a software patent that improved the world through its existence. Maybe some company that couldn't have existed otherwise, or something like that. I'd like to at least get some visibility into the upside of patents if there is one, because I definitely don't have any now.
Another anti-vaccination movement? Oh dear.
Even more so than the program itself which provides nominal funding is the message this sends. Here is a country that welcomes entrepreneurs and will go out of their way to make their country a good place to do business. Their goals are also reasonable - they expect the company to do $100,000US in sales once running. They are not expecting $20 million US out of the gate like the fanciful schemes of other similar programs where those in power are subsequently disappointed and embark on a program of confiscation.
Oh yay more electro-sensitivity BS. Completely unverifiable claims of people who think electronics hurt them. Here's a blog post I saw on the matter: http://depletedcranium.com/interesting-new-electrosenstivity...
Surely this one is better:

Well what doctor has been schooled about the rate of microwave infections?
I don't know how you're getting any of that out of the proposal. All the proposal is saying is that if it's legal, the ISP can't block it. Nothing compels them to block illegal content, nor gives them any more right to do so than they already have.
It's near Vancouver. For whatever reason, software salaries are just not that high here.

Seeing people discuss rates in the SV area just blows me away sometimes.
The situation is more complex. All bad stories mentioned in the article are described pretty accurately. On the other hand, there are big businesses that feel OK to be in Russia.
The trick is to be in coalition with government/law enforcement. Unlike US you can not operate keeping full independence.
"2.6x" is hardly what I would call "immensely".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_system...

(In June 2010, Windows 7's market share was only 2.6 times larger than Mac OS X's, when considering the market of "web clients", which is composed mostly of personal computers)
They'll probably want to ban cordless phones as well..
Zero. Microwaves are non-ionising.
Add Menuet, the OS written in assembly, to that list too:

http://www.menuetos.net/
Do they? I've found that my econ major friends bifurcated into two camps. Roughly the top 25% of the class found jobs on Wall Street, working at hedge funds, I-banks, and proprietary trading desks. They make much than engineers, often in the high six figures or even seven figures.

But the bottom 75% of the econ class - or even people in the top 25% who don't know how to schmooze and interview well - ended up in typical liberal-artsy jobs. They're working for government agencies and taking a public-servant salary. Or they're working as a bank teller instead of a bank trader. Or they're working as a tax preparer. Or they're working as a high school teacher or SAT tutor. Or they went back to grad school and are struggling to find any job at all.

These people make a lot less than a typical engineer. Heck, many of them don't make all that much more than someone who never went to college.

I think your question is really "Why do people in finance make so much more than those in software?" And the reason is that there's so much money floating around there that companies can afford to pay high amounts. I have a friend who works in reporting at one of the big hedge funds. His day job is to create pretty charts with Excel and correct typographical errors. His base salary is about $100K.

But if you're trying to decide between an engineering or hard science degree vs. an economics degree in college, your average expected payoff is way higher with a hard science degree, particularly since many of those people end up as quants on Wall Street anyway.
This is an example where everyone needs a fundamental lesson is statistics: Correlation does not imply causation.
lisp.js will be a lisp-2 (like Common Lisp and unlike Clojure and Scheme)

Can you talk more about this decision?
in exactly the same way yc companies "mooch off" ycombinator, of course they are.

what is the basis of the "unwilling", has there been a backlash to this program?
Yep, that's your good old corruption. Just like the title says.
> Take a walk.

I hacked my feet with shoes so I can walk for longer on rougher terrains.
I like the general structure of what you have created but I will offer up one small thought. I grabbed the sample code from your blog page and did a rough character count excluding indenting. You have 444 characters of template to generate 270 characters of output HTML. I know this generalization of course doesn't encompass all the other advantages of templating documents but I would give a thought to improving the compactness of the syntax.
@exline: Appreciate your response. Am replying a little late, but was deep in the jungles of India [seriously] for the past few days.
Quality of Code:I have found the best guys possible, within my means. I will trust them. Nothing further is possible.
Development vs Sales/Marketing: Thanks for flagging this up. Being an architect, project manager and designer, I hear you on the create vs evangelize challenge. We are on to it. Lots of user-feedback and testing based on UI's and interaction demo's [knocking stuff together as flash presentations and pptx files (it is low, I know)], some cryptic splash pages, a few fire-hose twitter accounts that are trying to create some buzz [but only bot-followers till date, etc.
And friends. Lots of priceless friends and well-wishers.
Within all this, a tech co-founder would have been ideal, but the heroes currently writing the code have their own startup dreams to chase, kids to send to school, and mortgages to pay.
Nothing is perfect, I guess.
Soundtracks - Hans Zimmer, Philip Glass, Howard Shore, James Horner etc.. I tend to find them motivational for things like coding.. especially when I'm coding for my own startup.
The parents complain they can't get the Simcoe County school board or anyone else to take their concerns seriously, even though the children's symptoms all disappear on weekends when they aren't in school.

Somebody please tell me this was intended as a punchline. If so, it is beautifully arch.
And time. Sometimes that's what the FU money would bring to the table.
I believe a significant chunk of the damage done in our society can be chalked up to people who are ignorant thinking that their opinions are facts.

You just gave two examples.
I have an account with http://www.chinesepod.com

I definitely notice that I can speak better when I do the lessons regularly. I try to listen to each lesson three times to really get it.

I have also studied at university and bought the Pimsleur course for Mandarin. Pimsleur is good but only if you are just starting out. I like how it focuses on repetition and gets you speaking which is the most important part.
Chile seems like a really nice place in terms of geography. They have deserts, mountains, glaciers, and a Mediterranean climate zone.
I'm not a scientist, but doesn't arxiv.org try to provide such a network? (okay, not distributed, but still readily available and no page count)
I see, this is some sort of a popularity / "all the cool kids hate apple technologies" thing rather than an issue based on programming.

Cause if you think those are a list of problems, you don't know how to write software.
Who needs schooling? Everyone knows that a microwave infection can be cleared up in a few days with an over-the-counter ointment.
Those figures might be true only for the US/North America, but worldwide Symbian has almost 45%, RIM a little under 20%, iPhone just over 15%, and Android just under 10%.

(As of Q1, 2010, pre-iPhone 4, source: http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1372013)

No one seems to mind their MP3 player monopoly because the iPod was so much better than the alternatives.