skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
True, but what is the alternative? To be at the receiving end of all the mud-slinging? (Kind of like Obama and the Democrats in the USA ;) )

At least you would end up with people despising the think-tanks and not the scientist. :) Too optimistic? Of course in an ideal world journalist would start doing proper research and fact checking, but now we are talking sci-fi. ;)
Yes, cups and KDE came a long way, too.
Ok, this is kind of old shoe, but let's discuss the Windows usability a bit.

I have to endure some amount of XP and 7 on a regular basis, so I have some understanding on how to work with them (well, mostly how to set up or correct things).

Those that say that Windows 7 is so much better.. well, in some sense. I admittedly has better optics. And it crashes less.

Administrative tasks got more tiresome though, compared to XP you have to wade through more windows to get to a specific configuration point. That gets very irksome if you want to perform some configuration for a dozen PC's. (Enough to make it very repetitive, too little that automation would make much sense, especially considering the abysmal automation tools Windows comes with coughshellcough). Other critical points are software management systems (lack of) and general disability in the usability sector.

Granted, learning to cope with a Linux system is somewhat more challenging, but once you are into it, it's really much less bother to do things, no matter the scale.

Microsoft still has a long way to go just to reach the current status. Maybe they will manage, as they seem to be very apt at keeping the stranglehold on the market.

And I will keep avoiding them as much as I can.
My thoughts... coming from someone who has been working with Perl for basically a decade at various companies, and have had the pleasure of working with Perl experts like Tim Bunce (author of DBI) and Randall Schwartz (author of various Perl books, including the camel book).

a) Perl was used for EVERYTHING web-related in the early 2000s, but other languages and tools have come around to supplant it.

Several commenters have already said, "oh man I had to deal with this legacy perl code and it was awful," and yeah, that's a common experience and makes them think, "Perl is a terrible legacy language, I can't wait to trash it on my Ruby mailing list tonight." The negativity propagates and then people like you wonder, "is Perl dead?"

b) Web frameworks are one of those tools where frameworks like Rails and Django have all the hype. If you want to whip up your startup idea into a minimum viable web application, the trendy choice is Rails or Django. I've used Perl web frameworks like Catalyst and I'll be the first to admit banging out your "It's like Facebook... But For Cats!" startup idea is a lot faster in Rails or Django.

c) As Steve Yegge said in one of his blog posts:

'As I've done for a great many other programming languages, I've bashed on Perl's technical weaknesses at length in the past. To my continued amazement, the Perl folks are the only ones who never get upset. They just say "Haha, yeah, boy, you're right, it sure is ugly. Heh. Yeah, so, um, anyway, I'm going to get back to work now..." It's awesome. I've gained so much respect for them. It's almost enough to make me go back to programming in Perl.'

In my experience (which of course is just as anecdotal at Steve's), this is very true. Zed Shaw writes yet another blog post blasting whatever technology crawled up his ass and died, and we just smirk and update our modules on CPAN. But while that means we're not getting caught up in the "narcissism of small differences" (to refer to an earlier commenter), it also means we're not part of the noise on the web. There will probably never be a "Perl is a Ghetto" blog post written, and while that's obviously a good thing, it can also lead to the perception that, "man, nobody's talking about Perl, nobody's even bashing Perl, is it dead?"

d) That said, in my opinion these languages don't hold a candle to Perl when it comes to back-end engineering. We love talking about startups here at HN and thus, we talk a lot about startup problems and their solutions. But if your startup actually grows into a real company, you're going to encounter problems like, "we need a system to allow our analysts to manage our SEM campaigns and reconcile our cost and revenue" or "this partner doesn't have an API so we need to spider their interface to get the daily data and import it into our data warehouse." And any company that dismisses Perl as an option for those problems just because of (a) (b) and (c) is doing their company a disservice.

TL;DR -- Perl's strengths don't match the trendy topics on communities like HN, but it still has real value for real business problems.
Totally depends on:
a) what kind of product/service you are offering.
b) who your target market is.

Some things I like to pay one-off for. Others I go monthly. I find the monthly services tend to update and add features more often than the one-offs. I also tend to see that the monthly subscription services provide ever increasing value to me. Maybe that is because they are "works in progress" in constant competition and know that should they fail they will start bleeding customers to the competition. Also, with one-offs I often find that the cost is high enough to make me seriously consider a purchase and I spend more time seeking out the competition.

Some examples: Microsoft Office vs OpenOffice or Google Docs. Outlook vs Thunderbird. Vimeo vs Youtube.

Oops... those examples all point towards free alternatives. Hope your product has some killer advantage that can overcome any existing competition that goes freemium. Else you better try the freemium model yourself. We live in an age where everyone wants everything for free.
i definitely have to add country codes for localization. the reason i'm using pictures is because everyone some of the challenges are from photos, but i grabbed a bunch of royalty-free clipart for the seed data. a few of my early testers did upload photos, and they work fine too.
Posterous is hiring Rails Engineers and Infrastructure Engineers - San Francisco

We're a YC-funded startup that's working on posting the world's information. We're just 7 engineers and looking to hire people who love the consumer web, believe in simplicity, and want to work on a website that can be used by billions of people.

On the infrastructure side, we're growing to one of the largest Rails sites in the world. There's a ton we do every day to keep a complex environment humming since Posterous does so much (media transcode of video, audio, photos, autoposting to millions of sites, and more, geo, importing, embed expansion, etc). Every day is a new challenge.

http://posterous.com/jobs

We're open to telecommute but haven't done it before.
"On the other hand, things like climate science seem (to me at least) to rely much more on the argument from authority for gaining lay support."

Have you looked at any of the actual research? It sounds more like you're criticizing the very pseudo-science that the climate science community is battling.

The actual researchers are using a combination of meteorological models, telemetry (if you've seen the film "Twister" you've seen a Hollywood-ized version of an actual piece of science in their flock of birds), and empirical observational evidence (e.g. presented in "Planet Ice").

A lot of organizations that fund a lot of the climate research, including NOAA, have been going to great lengths to stifle it and obfuscate the actual message that they send out to the public.
it is a very disturbing trend - the carriers, be it for example Craigslist or Rackspace are more and more expected (and they actually [self/forced to] obey the expectation to the ever increasing degree) to perform censorship of their users' information flows. Once you cross that line, for all the good intentions, say fighting prostitution or internet phishing/scam, the difference between for example adult services posts, doubtfully looking surveys or political speech is just a mere technicality.
Of course the biggest shortcoming of all is that breeding will quickly outpace the food supply and many cats will starve to death or die of other causes without having reproduced.
Well I can't explain for anyone else and I'm sure I haven't reached such extremes but currently I personally have about 50+ tabs open in 7 browser windows (6 firefox and 1 chromium) spread accross 5 virtual desktops. I won't say what they are except they are clusters of tabs on research topics, things related to work I just did, procastination aids like HN. Some tabs haven't been touched in a couple days so it's not as bad as it seems. Some people bookmark-all-open-tabs and read later, I leave them open because otherwise things just get forgotten. Hope that helps.

EDIT: I should maybe point out that I haven't any stability issues here though Firefox from time to time decides that it needs to become laggy(not Flash related).
>they're coming from someone who doesn't care to do iPad development.

I honestly do not care if I'm doing iPad or iPhone or iPhone 4 development, all pay well enough and all have interesting challenges. I don't think the iPad is a magic producing device of infinite wonder, but the thing is pretty neat and for certain projects (processing power or display space based ones) it can actually be a less expensive platform to develop for.

However, people are not willing to shoulder the extra costs from the differences I covered in my post, so do not make as many iPad apps, as they can make a fantastic iPhone app for the same price as an okay iPad app or somewhat featureless hybrid app .

It is a more rigorous approval standard for a smaller market. Why is that so hard to fathom it would have fewer people participating in it?

As for Facebook, what is an app going to bring the website doesn't? You can't take pictures on the device, so that's out (and one of the main points of the iPhone app). You can do pretty much everything else via the website. It works just fine from the iPad web browser.
Personally I don't like synaptic, but if you open up the ubuntu software centre and then click on 'installed software', you will see a list of every application that is installed on your system.

Dependencies are automatically installed for all applications and are automatically removed when there are no packages left that need them, so don't worry about those!

If you're more a command line guy, you can do the same using aptitude (aptitude remove package-name). Packages under aptitude will be listed as (a)utomatically installed if they were installed as a requirement for another package, so you shouldn't have to remove those by hand.
You need to know the basic vocabulary. When someone says that two genomes are 95% identical, that has a very precise meaning. You need to know genomes are made of chromosomes, containing long strings built with four letters, that amino-acids are made of groups of three of these letters, and that the possible mutations include deletions and insertions as well as substitutions. Once you know this, the claim is a mathematical statement, and you can test it in many ways.
ZeroMQ is quickly becoming an even bigger hammer in the premature optimization planet of Newbo-Thumbia.

Edit:

1) It's a networking library; no admin tools or other soft handle-bars, like user-space utilities.

2) It uses a binary protocol. Good luck debugging that with syslog.

It's a very powerful tool in the hands of a capable systems architect, who actually needs it. For the rest, it's pretty much like an adult male tiger; excellent to watch in its natural habitat from a safe distance, terrible pet idea for you and your fiancee (and not because you live in a studio apartment.)
We've seen a few of these sorts of services pop up lately. Do any of them (including this one) fall back to XHR long-polling, etc. when WebSockets aren't available? I'd like to see data for all my visitors, or at least most of them.
Half expected to see it replaced with:

"At Google we recognize that revenue is important."

edit: Aw, come on!

Nah, downvote me, you're right.
The Many Iterations of William Shatner
Why do you need a business co-founder and a technical co-founder? I guess I'm just wondering what your role in the company is?
Thanks very much for the links!
That's great. But, this was Bill Gates using the product from the company that he founded and ran. Familiarity should seriously not enter into it.

"They've done it different, and people who know the system can use it very effectively, but those of us who don't know the incantations are still out in the cold."

Agreed, but seriously, I've never had to go through such steps to do anything in Linux unless it was, for example, a brand new piece of hardware that didn't have kernel module. This was Microsoft Windows user trying to install Microsoft Moviemaker software by Microsoft. And, it took all that.
Senior Full-stack Rails Developer - Hollywood, CA, USA

Music professionals are stuck with horribly archaic and kludgy ways of managing their music and collaborating. We're trying to fix this at Gobbler - building a downloadable, networked application that solves these problems for people who create and work with music. Think Dropbox + Yousendit + Source control - all tailored to work with multi-gigabyte music projects.

We're in closed Beta, but are getting ready for a public launch in the next 6 weeks. All of our work has been done on the downloadable application and the backend, so the actual website is pretty ugly (did I mention we're also looking for a Designer?). But we're using a lot of cool technologies, like MongoDB, Node.js, Redis, etc. And you get to work with a small team of very smart people. Plus, we're very well connected to the music industry - it's pretty amusing getting feedback directly from some of the biggest names in music.
"Oooooh, a head-bag, those are chock full of... heady goodness!"
Citrix IOS? Seriously?
Anyone looking for someone that can do iPhone/iPad/Android application & game development freelance work?
Forgot to mention - the jobs website is http://www.mediagobbler.com/about/jobs
WebSockets are only used for the admin panel, and there is a Flash-based fallback in case the browser doesn't support them.

Visitors send most data using simple GET requests (and use long-polling for the chat). This works with all major browsers. So there is no need to worry.
That explanation is a common one, and very clear. It still doesn't solve the "Man in the Middle" problem.
About your second point, sure I can program is a textbox but I am going to make mistakes that I would not normally do and I don't want a potential employer to see that, because he will subconsciously think that it is bad even though he should know (and properly does) that that sort of things happen.

And at a job interview I am not going to let something like that count against me. Same reason I am going to go there in appropriate clothing, even though it shouldn't make any difference it does.
Luck is important, no doubt. But a)first you must follow your heart; b)you must do great work; and c)then you probably deserve some luck, too, and/or create your own luck.
My advice is to be selective with your advertising partners. It still seems like an odd place to have ads, but if they were more tasteful or I had a say in what they were, I might be more inclined to use it. That said, it strikes me as a very odd revenue stream. If it were me, I would concentrate on making this the captcha of choice and then focus on monetization. The ads seem like they might kill off any chance of this happening.
I've heard "joymaker", from an even older SF novel, suggested.
From the looks of it, he wants to clone Balsamiq not because he thinks he can do the concept better, or because he has a different take on it, or because he's inspired by that sort of functionality, but because they say they make a lot of money.

That's all.

He basically wants to ride on their coattails, and presumably sell a cheaper knockoff.

Which is, I think, rather sleazy.
I've heard a different variation of the metaphor: I have box with two keys. When I use the first key to lock the box, it can only be opened with the second key, and vice versa. I keep the first key hidden, but publish details of how to make a box and the second key for all world to see. This means that anyone can send me a secure message by simply making a box to my specifications and locking it with the publically available key. Only I can unlock it. This is asymmetric key encryption.

Asymmetric key encryption is slow, and symmetric is fast, so we use the former to set up the conditions necessary for the latter: If we both have a box and keypair like this, then you can send me your secret phrase using mine and I can send you my secret phrase using yours. Now that we each know both secret phrases and nobody else knows either, we can combine the secret phrases and switch to symmetric. That's how SSL is set up.
My favorite quote: "It’s now William Shatner’s universe — we’re just living in it."
Those short titles are coming from youtube. That is, the original youtube page for those videos has the 'truncated' titles. TalkMiner isn't truncating them.
Observe the vague handwavy terms I used: I'm about 18 months out of date as I made the switch to Python around the start of 09.

At the time, Catalyst was very unfriendly (a quick google - it still is) and nowhere near as rapid-accessible as Django, just because of the amount of head-twisting you have to do to get things up and running. It may have changed, but frankly I have little interest in investigating it, and I expect most other people who drifted away from Perl are in a similar boat.

Also, having developed an OO backend for a site running in Perl, I never wish to do so again. Your definition of 'better OO system' clearly differs from mine.
Ping is a kind of Steam, Xbox Live or PSN, I think that people that thinks that it will compete with Facebook are misunderstanding the situation (I did before trying to use it).
On the internet, facts just don't matter.
FWIW the share balloon shows correctly in firefox.
> It isn't "dead" anymore than the Norwegian language is "dead".

It's just pining for the fjords?

Kidding aside, it still does well here:

http://www.langpop.com/

Although if you put Ohloh and Freshmeat at 0, it does significantly worse.
Thanks so much for the links. Following up with you via email right now.
I really liked the blog post... but I'm not so sure I'd have liked it without readability. I generally hate giving out design advice, because it's not my forte and if it works well then I'm OK with it, but you've got to lose the Comic Sans, and white-on-green is a killer when you leave the page.
Ask HN: What would you like to see in a students resume
I've decided to join my college's co-op program and I'm going to start applying for jobs probably in October.

I'm a bit unsure as to what I'm supposed to include in the "technical skills" section of my resume. I was told that since I lack experience, I should use a combination (highlight skills and education rather than experience) format resume. Unfortunately, I've been coding for only two years and I don't have cool or huge projects to show my potential employer. What I have built are small tools (command line and GUI) that I use personally. I know only a bit about lots of things (Linux, Windows, Java, C, Python, SQL, git) because when I discovered my passion for programming, I started reading and learning as much as I could.

My question now is, how would you like me to present these skills in my resume? Am I supposed to include as many buzzwords as possible? Would you like me to talk about those small tools that I've made? Or would it be better if I emphasize what I've learned in school?
Videos from DevOps Day 2010 panels
It is working for me. Which browser are you using? If it's broken, please send me a screenshot to hello@oyolive.com
http://talkminer.com/searcher.jsp?q=author:%22tedtalksdirect...
It's supposed to be a fantastic game according to the review:

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation...
Google's new privacy policy. Will be in effect from October 3, 2010
I'd bet there is kind of a snowball effect:

Tick: a person will load links in background tabs while they are reading because the pages don't load faster than the person thinks/reads

Tock: a person sees performance decrease and this reinforces the perception that loading in background tabs is a good idea
Clojure conj registration open
dupe: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1660405
I think telemarketers are helping with this, especially when you start getting automated calls on your cell. When I know there's the automated calling going on, I won't answer a call unless the person is in my contacts (I don't want caller ID on my cell as it makes filtering much easier)
This e-mail has been going around for years now. It's old news.
That's their rationalization, at least. I think that for the average programmer, having to keep track of the stack is just added mental overhead that gets in the way of making their program do something useful.
I'm not sure how open it is when they have my credit card. I get the feeling a ban on iTunes might not be a happy thing.
I have my tabs all down the left side of my window, so they stack nicely. I use a compact theme and a large monitor so I can get 30-50 tabs per window. And I have multiple browser windows (about three) open for different tasks. I've got one for general browsing, and one for each concurrent project.
It says we shouldn't deify guys like him and Feynman, but I think that stating they're at or near the upper boundary of human awesomeness is still okay.
Ruby Summer of Code Wrap Up
Swarmation: AKA "You IDIOTS, move over HERE!"

Not that it isn't fun. :)
Office 95 bundled Excel along with Word, Access and Powerpoint.

When people make choices they also look at convenience and price ... having these products packaged and nicely integrated with each-other was genius.
The problem is that it doesn't tell me it's going to let me have that option.

Windows too often decides to do an update that will give me X extra stuff that I don't trust signing up for something like windows live just to get an included free movie player
This looks very nice. Is there any way to play back recordings of user activities? I generally don't have time to watch my users in real-time, and sometimes there might not be anyone online.
Thomas, really nice job. Looks the resolution for mouse tracking isn't as precise as I'd like it to be. I'm not using the chat feature, but see this as a great way to do remote usability testing.

It's critical that it not slow down our site, so I'll keep an eye out for performance issues.

Feel free to hit me up directly for more feedback. avand at avandamiri dot com.
Although amusing, this is an example of poor management IMO.

It comes across as the sort of email you would write while criticizing/mocking a competitors product that you were powerless to change.

There's no demand for improvement, or accountability for making that happen. No wondering if this small experience is indicative of other problems. He's just "disappointed".
I agree, but I believe it helps for Apple's employees to know they won't get away with a user experience like that under Jobs. They've got smart people, the ability to get things done, and they know what specific areas cannot be compromised.
I mostly agree with you but one small caveat - most companies do a relatively poor job of extracting economic value from their products on a global basis. So in this case if the OP is willing to work the Chinese local market much harder than Balsamiq can then the whole endeavour might actually be worthwhile. In short you dont have to beat the global maxima of product providers, just the local maxima.
Pretty sure they're "mainstream". :)
Someone should tell the iTunes Connect team about it ... that web interface is really driving me crazy ;)