skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> They ask "Where are you staying?" on the form, but I didn't know.

Note: as you might have suspected, if the situation was reversed you wouldn't get away so easily. Suppose your girlfriend is not American and she visits in you US. She must answer that question. Otherwise she might have to go thru some hassle or even be denied entry.
Do not quit school. What looks expensive (in terms of time, money, and effort) now will look incredibly cheap later.

"Lots of people have done great without a degree," is crap. Lots of people make $1m+ / yr dunking basketballs, too.
Nice use of jQuery to Rotate Ads in ASP.NET AdRotator w/o Page Refresh
Think of PHP as a really amazing shell scripting language. Just as shell scripts can be glue for all the powerful UNIX utilities, PHP gives you APIs for just about any useful library you might need for web work. You won't be able to use your fancy Python chops for things like generators or itertools, but with luck instead you'll be running a bunch of powerful well-designed existing C code with a few function calls. Of course, a significant project will require a bunch of data & logic in PHP...

Also, the PHP source code is quite readable, for those times when the good online reference manual doesn't help.
Aladdin: A Whole New World lyrics
I'm a business guy, and it's about time I learned to code
Thanks again for passing on that idea for the 6 player deck. The concept that a repeating deck can be easily found was what helped find most of the higher order decks.

edit: I'm not sure if brute force is the correct term (though I may be wrong), it's kind of simulated annealing. The difference being I'm not checking all possible decks, only the ones that appear promising.
Don't major in minor things.
Your definition of what is "good for them" is different than mine. Efficiency is less important to me than feeling good, though those items are often related.
I remember trying it out as an intern, but don't recall it being called "minty". Is this a new development?
Ask HN: Are companies blowing off the terms of the AGPL?
I've been perplexed for a while about this. It seems like many people are either unaware of how restrictive this license is, or are choosing to disregard it. For example, I find it hard to believe that all the projects leveraging MongoDB I see posted to HN are GPL-ing their code or buying a commercial license.

What am I missing? I sincerely don't understand.
It's par for the course in most of the world that an alien loudly mouthing off about politics will be run out of town. There are probably less than ten countries where that's not the case.

The War Nerd is hit and miss. The article on carriers from a couple years ago is so stupid and uninformed I'm not sure how seriously to take anything else.
Writing a BF Compiler for .NET
I'm not a Yahoo! Mail user
Not eating your own dog food eh? I don't blame you. I'm a gmail user, mainly for the better interface, spam filter, and easy integration with other Google products I use (Calendar, Maps, Voice, Android). We use Yahoo Small Business mail at work and it's painful to use. I end up just checking mail on my phone instead of the web interface. Things are counter-intuitive on Yahoo, such as having to actively enable saving sent email instead of having it on by default.
Just put "Ask HN:" in the title
Portland has been good to me, see this thread for inspiration: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=888065

The Portland economy is very bad right now. I recommend securing a job before you move here. There's a surplus of talent in this city, and not enough work available.
Not, actually. Apparently the journalist is a bit woo-y and got the facts wrong.

The blogger Orac, a doctor, has a response at http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2010/09/cbs_news_resident_...

More at http://leftbrainrightbrain.co.uk/2010/09/sharyl-attkisson-bl...
It might be if Verizon gets the iPhone by the end of this year or early next year.
Keep in mind the existence of immune-compromised people, who are more susceptible due to illness, or as a result of treatment (anti-rejection drugs, chemo, etc).
I'll be back on campus next Saturday if you'd like to meet up for lunch.

Love to. Always up to make new friends. I'm moving in on Friday. Gimme an email (in my profile).

I'm moving out to San Francisco. Do you have similar plans?

I'm not sure yet. I'm planning to finish the 5 year BS/MS program in CS in 4 years at the moment, but I'm also entertaining offers from a couple software companies, some in the Bay Area, some in Redmond. I was born in San Francisco and hold some startup interests, however, so SF has a certain appeal.
I think it's a noble pursuit for a business guy to learn about coding, but I doubt he'll learn enough to be able to build anything useful. That sounds like a record exec suddenly trying to learn how to play guitar after years of sitting behind a desk. Instead of learning how to code, he should learn enough about the process to know what goes into finding a competent programmer or outsourcing partner.
That's backwards.

Both facebook and craigslist have rights to block what they want. In facebook's case they wanted to block. In craigslist's case they don't want to block. Free speech is about letting fb or cl decide what they want to block or allow in their site and it is not contradictory to support both: fb's right to block and cl's right to allow.
I was possibly in the same situation, sick of working full time too to pay to hang out with a bunch of kids who are spoilt and complain about too many things.

A few reasons I gave myself to dropout(defer) were I don't think I want to work for people who thought a degree was essential and only smart people had them.

I wanted to work for myself quite a bit. I also wanted to have a go at a startup which was impossible when trying to do time wasting uni assignments.

I knew I could go back if I had to, a year break would be a fair amount of time to see if there were limitations with no degree.

I know that I still have an advantage over uni students whereas they only learn when their force to by lecturers. Where as I like learning and do it daily at my own free will.

I've been off for a year and had a great time and not having a degree hasn't stopped me from doing what I wanted to do.

Keep us posted
I disagree. I'm a CpE major who, on account of being denied a double major, is cherry picking the upper level math classes (Abstract Algebra, Number Theory and Group Theory). Abstract algebra teaches methods of problem solving that you can't really learn somewhere else. Reducing a problem to rings or groups let's you simplify it drastically. While most problems aren't exactly a direct ring or group, similar approaches can be taken. Assumptions can be dropped and more "friendly" operators can be used instead.

At the same time, I do have to agree. If you don't get math, it's not going to do much good.
That is good advice, but what will PHP teach someone exactly? I don't believe it has anything interesting to offer someone who has learnt a number of languages.

All it has going for it is that it has low barrier to entry and is a commodity in terms of it's developer and low-end hosting. I consider these as good selling points for PHP but that is all I think it has going for it.

I think the social ecosystem of a language is very important, and I think there's more information and quality libraries in Ruby at the moment, so the popularity vote for PHP is a bit moot nowadays for web application development.

I try not to be a snob, I try to use 'the best tool for the job' but I don't think PHP is a very good tool. And I'm sorry but as someone who uses these tools all day I do not consider it a good tool.
Well at least for MongoDB the reason is quite clear. From their licensing page (http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Licensing):

Note however that it is never required that applications using mongo be published.
The copyleft applies only to the mongod and mongos database programs. This is why
Mongo DB drivers are all licensed under an Apache license. Your application, even
though it talks to the database, is a separate program and “work”.
Pretty sweet!
I was asleep, because I worked the night shift at the time. My wife came home to wake me up, tell me about everything, and kiss me. We watched the news reports together and she cried, telling me she was so glad I had changed careers...
Sorry, my bad. I interpreted "I'm not a Yahoo! Mail user" as "not Yahoo! employee." :|
Read the article. FB did not want to block and Arrington was arguing that they must.
Repost http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1681480
Actually... I think they may be right. Though I have my own theories as to why:

More results = more time reading results, = more ad impressions. If you hit two letters and it seems to have decent results, you're probably going to look to see if it is what you wanted, rather than finishing your search term. Good for Google's income.

In addition, on the other side of the equation: if you don't know exactly what you're finding, more results more quickly means you're more likely to find exactly what you were looking for... which is good for Google, because you'll come back, and good for you, because you found what you wanted.

More time is more time, but I typically visit Google for all of 5 seconds. Having it take 10 seconds to find better results (and in a few wide-ranging searches, I definitely got better results due to the immediate feedback) is worth it to me.
Beware of Greeks Bearing Bonds - why "every man for himself" never pays out
This is a poor choice of links. Here's an actual story with some details:

http://www.bnet.com/blog/technology-business/patent-office-a...
I argue that twisted is better for most practical uses of comet.

Tornado mastered only the "have lots of suspended connections" thing. Many of the examples involve blocking for processing one of those connections. What's the point of having 20k connections terminated on an http comet connection if you completely block the entire event loop to service a single one while you make another network connection (e.g. memcached, mysql, etc...).

In this regard, most real life comet apps are doing more than http. To be fair, tornado did ship with a yet another python http client, so you can at least use it with a database that speaks http without blocking, though without chainable deferreds, it's hard to do the exact right continuations required to chain these events together without locking the event loop.
So you don't think I'll learn enough to be able to build anything useful BECAUSE I'm a business guy? Or is there another reason you think I'll never be able to build anything useful?

Fuel to the fire, thank you.
(Just to be clear, I'm not talking about established Google policy, only about my own experience. Go ask an official person if you want an official answer.)

In theory, it's supposed to be both user satisfaction and user productivity. In practice, it's quite a bit easier to measure user productivity than user satisfaction, so I'd guess that our metrics (and our decisions) tend to slant that way.
I have to second this. I have gotten out of a ticket every time I've been pulled over (~10 times).

The first thing I say is "I'm sorry officer. I know I was why I got pulled over. I just excuse for it"

Has worked every time.
True, but I suspect there is a lot that could be done by baking something like the feedsync protocol together with knockout.js style view binding, node.js and a websocket connection.
Well, in fairness the thread did go on long enough to satisfy Goodwin's law.
Amazing (and awesome) to see that several HNers are Exile fans. I always viewed their paper as a kind of startup, except the goal being to piss off the establishment rather than make money.
If they're trying to compete with Gmail here... when do they plan to allow IMAP for free? That's a complete deal-maker for me, because I have a couple machines, some with multiple OSes, and no mail client happily reads + writes with another OS's version of itself (if I can even safely writable-mount the other drive's format), much less an entirely different application.
Why doesn't the EFF publish a voter's guide?

Screw republican v democrat, these are the kind of issues that matter to me but I'm too lazy to look up if my state's AG is one of the 17 that shookdown Craigslist. Even if I did I don't know when that election is, and if it's 2 or 4 years from now I'll probably forget this issue. And there are other issues and other candidates that I might care about but don't know about.

So I need an organization that I trust, like the EFF, to come out with a guide each election telling me who I need to vote for or against.
Ask HN: Opportunities for foreigners in Europe
The problem starts simple: How would you build an temporary escape hatch out of the Silicon Valley bubble chamber? The next logical question? Where in the world can you replicate one particular, critical part of the Silicon Valley ecosystem?

Look around the valley and take a look at how many companies were started by foreigners, people who don't have the right color skin or birthplace. Does this ever happen anywhere in Europe? This is the ultimate question asked by three of my friends, one Swiss, one Turkish, and one Indian. All asserted that pedigree (or bullshit) matters more than ability in Europe. They pointed to a number of large European companies and noted that not one of them have a foreign-born national in their upper management.

It is damning. I won't even bother with Europe if they can't respect that I appointed an Indian as my CTO. The UK seems to be the most promising but the Indian buddy who'd worked in the UK didn't seem to think so. Have things changed at all?

The ultimate question? How many examples of foreign-born executives are there at the head of UK companies? Danish companies? Swedish companies? This is closely tied to the whole alternatives to Silicon Valley question, and I'd like to opt-in or shut-out Europe for good. France and Germany are already out.
The law referenced in the article, from the complaint, regarding the "right" to build cellular towers:

The [Telecommunications] Act contains five enumerated limitations to State and
local zoning authority. See 47 U.S.C. § 332(c)(7). Among other things, "[i]f a
[municipal] decision is not supported by substantial evidence, § 332(c)(7)(B)
(iii), or if it effectively prohibits the provision of wireless service,
§ 332(c)(7)(B)(i)(II), then under the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution,
local law is pre-empted in order to effectuate the Act's national policy
goals." Second Generation Props. L.P. v. Town of Pelham, 313 F.3d 620, 627
(1st Cir. 2002).

ATT really has the right to judicial review of the Council's decision, which may result in the Cambridge City Council's decision being overturned on the basis given above.
Citibank's advice to female employees: grow a pair
First thought: The opening tag line,

You can make great applications with PHP.

Is relatively underwhelming. It's like saying 'you can make great cakes with sugar.' - true, but not really saying a lot.
It's not just poor formatting, the person who wrote this simply doesn't speak English well. For example:

And this majority has never been able to fathom or accept the loner a mentally sound individual with non-aligned sensibilities,who,for reasons genetic and/or nurtured,simply views the world differently,and correspondingly resides in it unlike the rest.Know man is an island,too.
As with about 98% of all business advice, this falls into the category of true-but-useless.

It would be impossible to find a person who actually disagreed with any of those points, or who would be able to pull anything of practical value out of them. As with most things, the devil is in the details.
Lady Gaga and the death of sex
I've heard this before, and each time I'm consistently confused.

I am an engineering PhD student. I receive very modest compensation for my "work", but take great pleasure in the meandering pursuit of knowledge at this stage in life. True, by some metrics it is not the best "return on investment": grad student salaries are meager at best; you forego 4-6 years of earnings potential / job experience; and some post-graduate opportunities are just not commensurate with one's level of training.

However, the whole analysis depends on a specific set of values; grad school is just another form of "real life" and there is plenty to learn: the focus required to fixate on a single dissertation topic for many years, navigating nebulous political relationships, establishing life-long friendships, developing highly-targeted skill sets, and interacting with some of the smartest people on the planet. A pretty good gig by my standards.

There is no single mold... To each his own.
Blackberry Spy: Features and Usefulness
A Blackberry spy can be of much use to employers, parents or spouses of cheating partners. One of the disadvantages of the latest technologies is that it is also equally fuelling fraud, lies and concealing of facts, for personal motives.
Highlights parallelism performance in an entertaining way
Any Orwell other than Animal Farm is too much Orwell.

Orwell's fundamental problem was that he didn't understand how organizations function, and how the whole differs from the sum of its parts. He saw only the trees and not the forest. He understood what motivated individuals well, and just extrapolated that out, which led to erroneous thinking.

Aldous Huxley was quite the opposite, which is why his vision of government and society has in many ways materialized but his vision of the individual has not. There was a great post here a couple weeks back about the two that illustrated it.
I type "New", it shows me 3 cities on the map (New York one of them). I then continue " York" and it doesn't do anything.

I think Google's phone call might delayed a bit.
Russia Uses Microsoft to Suppress Dissent
I'm a Pythonista who had to deal with a client's legacy PHP codebase earlier this year. One tactic I used was to try to write all new stuff, where I could, in Python. Tasks that could be separate processes from their existing PHP stuff. For example, command-line tools, automation, supplementary web apps, etc.
Furniture Store Online
The cheapest online furniture store in the UK - FurnitureinFashion .
This mentality doesn't seem to apply if you want to study anything that requires any sort of advanced (aka expensive) resources. Computer Science is generally cheap and easy to learn for the same reasons that a web start-up is easy to launch. But mechanical engineering requires expensive industry software and equipment. Biologists need wet labs. Anything in the Science or Engineering departments is going to require expensive equipment.

Otherwise, as a stand up comedian at my school said "I'm currently writing a series of passionate essays on topics I couldn't care less about. It's called college."
I've seen a lot of this lately and I think it's an admirable idea. Even if you don't become a rockstar coder yourself overnight it'll earn you a lot more respect among coders, and you'll have better conversations (provided they're not 'so why isn't my code compiling?').

We all have to start somewhere.

It intrigues me, though, that pretty much everyone I've seen come from a non-coding background who wants to enter this inner sanctum has chosen an entirely different platform and language. I know of people trying this via RoR, Processing, PHP, Python, C++, jQuery and now Java. Good reasons for all, bad reasons for some, and mostly down to who they know and what advice they gave.

I can't help but wonder if there is a Better Way. Even as a coder I find some languages/platforms require a lot of banging your head against incomprehensible documentation and Simon Says tutorials. I've been totally nostalgic lately for the BBC BASIC days, when stuff was so easy to just see working straight away without a day-long installation headache and platform wrangling and the doubt you picked the wrong one to learn. I'd love to bring this feeling of magic back.
I think the reason for the reduced output is that they were never able to truly monetize the internet version of the paper, aside from publishing a few books. Ames does freelance journalism now, and Taibbi writes for Rolling Stone, so it seems like they decided to just make a living rather than try and revive what they did in the past.
YouTube Instant. The last two days…
Tips on How to Write Less Badly
After my first job out of Uni, I never needed my degree. Until 7 years later when I wanted to move to Japan. Alot of countries won't let you get a visa without a degree, or at least will make it very difficult.

Even if I never need to use it for work again, allowing me to make this move makes sitting through horrible, boring and outdated lectures infinitely worth it.
Wholesale canned Soda
Google gets paid for clicks, not impressions. As long as the same percentage of searches terminate in clicks on ads their revenue will remain unaffected.

The only conceivable impact on ads is that traffic will shift from long-tail to shorter keywords as people find what they need earlier in the search process. The exact impact this will have on click prices is unclear.
I, too, was an avid reader of the Exile while it lasted. I caught the tail end of it when I and my wife came to Russia in 2006. I thought it was still ruthless and unapologetic at the time. Thankfully there is always plenty of stuff to be ruthless and unapologetic about in Russia, be it the 90s or the 00s.

My thoughts reading the paper were always "how could they not shoot this down?" The pressure on journalists has grown tremendously under Putin, and the authorities were clamping down on anything remotely resembling subversion. Even if the authorities did not exert direct pressure, most publications would self-censor in the fear that the security services would go after them next.

How the Exile was allowed to continue is beyond me? But judging from my wife's magazine's intrepid reporting (published in Russia under the auspices of Ria Novosti - the State news beast), the English language publications generally pass under radar. She's never felt any pressure direct or otherwise to pull or amend critical stories.

It's important to keep in mind that English language publications are a drop in a bucket in Russia where I would say less 5% of the population can read and understand English. It simply has zero impact on the public opinion domestically, but it does wonders "exposing" the truth to the west, while showing how unfettered the press is in Russia. It's just not the mainstream press we are talking about here.
Ask HN: Non-technical entrepreneurs, why don't you learn to code?
It seems like the best-case scenario (as opposed to finding a technical co-founder on whom you will perpetually be dependent). What is so overwhelming or infeasible about learning to code that quite a number of "business people" avoid it like the plague?
It feels a little bit lower-level than Python, in terms of the runtime, rather than the language. It also struck me as being lower quality in terms of their runtime, and their docs, than Python and several other languages I've used in recent years. Closest to amateur hour of all the languages in widespread use on the web, in my judgment.
How is greplin better than CloudMagic?
Well, for one, some of the most brilliant coders I've ever spoken to have been in Russia.

A lot of incredible web technology we in the startup scene don't hear about comes from Russia. Unfortunately, most of it is used for spam/fraud.
Ask HN: How would you approach a disruptive new technology?
Hypothetical Scenario:

Your stealth startup has developed a radical technology that makes a wide range of other technologies obsolete almost overnight.

A large number of companies could be out of business within 5 years.

Do you:

A) release it as open-source for maximum impact

B) sell it at a high profit margin for slow adoption rate

C) shop the technology around (goog,aapl,msft) before public release

I would've made this a vote but don't know how.
So many frameworks to choose from; why pick yours? Give me a single sentence mind-changer.