skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sent mine:

I would encourage you to reduce or eliminate the use of "Software Patents".

I am a talented computer programmer, of the sort whom one might expect
would be the beneficiary of such patents. Instead, they are a
disincentive for me to do any work in the field. I do not believe it
is possible to release any significant piece of software in this
country without exposing myself to undue legal liability through
patent infringement.

This is not because my ideas are not original, but because too many
unduly broad patents patents have already been issued. If properly
challenged, many of these patents would fall due to obviousness or
evidence of prior art. But lacking the resources to mount such a
defense, I simply avoid making creations that would otherwise be of
benefit to society.

I do not believe this is the intended effect of patents. I and the
country would benefit from a better law.
So the failure of the toxic bonds was historically necessary and thus unavoidable.

Why? There were lots of people on the other side of the transaction, too. The money paid to the collectors of the CDSes did not come out of thin air, after all.
There's also azzip at 1:21, takes you to the entire ad run backwards.
Now that you mention it, that sounds right. Apparently my memories are getting mixed up; it's been many years since I watched that film.
Did Israel hack Iran's Nuclear Program?
Perl is competitive in more areas, but many of them are not traditionally high paying or high status areas for programmers, e.g. sysadministration or data munging. Combine an aging Perl workforce with lower paying positions and you end up with unfilled positions. Banks are willing to pay good money to either train someone or hire an experienced engineer to work on their mainframe.
I think you're right. Based on your opinion and the others here, I starting to think structuring it will be more hassle and cost (time and money) than it will be worth.

Might consider just a billable rate to get some cash reserves and build the relationship, but may just pass and cite bad timing. Thanks for your input!
Same. I took my current job and the Perl code did not look too different from mine. If anything, they tried a lot harder to make it look nice than I do.

I work on a lot of open source Perl, and it all looks the same. Sure, I can tell mst's code apart from nothingmuch's, but I never have any trouble understanding what it's doing. The community has decided on a style, and everyone gets on just fine. It's so pervasive that even people that don't hack on the code every day pick up the style; like I said before, code written by never-contributed-to-open-source don't-even-know-what-github-is coworkers does not look too different from what I'd expect. People wrote bad Perl in 1995, and I've seen it, but this problem is largely solved. (The same cannot be said about Python. I wasted two days last week debugging the XML parser included in the core! That is some legacy code...)

The reason we can't find Perl programmers is because everyone likes their job. When you jump ship as a Perl programmer, it's from one bank to another, or one small web shop to another. If you're a Python programmer, on the other hand, you get to do something exciting like go from no-name-consulting-company to Google. Google, that site you visit every day and that has a ball pit and pool in their offices!! Google!!

The kinds of places that do Perl tend to be boring. I may work for a bigger company than Google and affect more people, but I don't get a ball pit, I don't get free food, and I don't get to say, "oh, you know Google Reader? I added a new feature on that today." When talking to non-programmers, I try not to even mention my work, because it sounds that boring. When you work for Google, everyone thinks it's exciting. This makes it easy to find people that want to work on your language, just because there is a general feeling of coolness about it. If you're not working for Google today, then you're working to attract their attention or something.

Extrapolate this anecdote to the rest of the community... and you have a hard time finding people to hire. (My employer has trouble hiring people because they try to be cheap. "Oh, well we can only guarantee you a 6 month contract, no insurance, and you have to pay to move across the country". Not a lot of people take this offer.)
I could be wrong, but it looks like it's used to create mini-sites, so being able to use Javascript seems more like a feature than an xss vulnerability.
That's like what Flickr do by letting you browse the last 200 photos unless you get a pro account.
Looks like no o e mentioned Adobe Air. Quite easy to pick up and allows you to go cross platform with much less hassle than java, for instance (the runtime is smaller/easier to autoinstall, etc)
Indeed Operations Research is a bit more than just Constraint Programming, but this is interesting (I'm an OR guy). A much larger framework with open-source software for OR is Coin-OR:

http://www.coin-or.org/
A little more information on it would be helpful. Like, a description. Or anything except acknowledgement of its existence, for which merely noting that https://code.google.com/p/or-tools/ does not return a 404 is wholly sufficient.

There seems to be an epidemic on most code hosting sites that prevents people from fleshing out information on their project. Is it just less fun than coding? Do they really not know what a good description / use case would be? Or is it just that most things are one-off attempts which will never be visited again, adding to the pollution of non-maintained code projects out there?
Doug McIlroy wrote an article on that: http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~doug/nfa.ps.gz

Code: http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~doug/nfa.hs
I graded assignments in a class that used Perl. Absolute nightmare. By the time I got to the end of the stack each week I couldn't tell the difference between brilliance and stupidity.
we should be talking about how to build the federated social web as the solution, not just bitching about the problem
I had a very similar experience. Video games were not allowed in my house, but my neighborhood friend had 4 different consoles and tons of games. Many an evening was spent playing nintendo; my parents joked about my friend's family adopting me because I was over there constantly. I turned out just fine, and said friend scored a perfect 1600 on his SATs.
As someone who hires in LA, and moved to LA to take a job here, your perception is either outdated or simply incorrect. There are a good number of shops here in LA, including Google, Amazon, Hulu, Sony and Yahoo that pay well above the median for good talent. A good dev or PM is going to make as much here as in New York, Seattle or San Francisco, although admittedly there are fewer positions overall than those cities. Additionally, most if not all of those major tech employers regularly pay relocation costs to move people here from other tech centers - it's just not practical to run a dev team here and not do it, given the smaller number of engineering grads.

Additionally, while having a car is a requirement (as it is in all but a handful of US cities), cost of living is lower than in New York or SF, which are the two most likely alternatives. Rent is lower (my rent here is half of what it would be in those cities) and most of your weekend activities are either free (beach, mountains, etc) or cheaper than SF or NY. And there's more of them too: there aren't many places in the US where you can ski on Saturday and go play volleyball on the beach on Sunday, which is why much of our team are Seattle or San Fran weather refugees.

As for Perl, I'd argue that because the tech / web media industry here in LA is newer, there aren't as many folks around who date back to the years when Perl was the dominant platform. When I started developing for the web, it was one of the few practical options; now I'm sure I'd be starting with Ruby or Python. What we do is hire engineers who are smart enough to work in any language, and then let them pick up a book and learn Perl, rather than filter first for that specific language.
Using python with the re.X flag?

I can tell because it's doesn't understand scoped flags or atomic groupings.
Stealth Y Combinator Opzi Gets Serious Angel Attention
It's also a case of a good problem to have, but a real problem nonetheless.

This is where people must be able to come up with a solution.

It requires getting comfortable with tags and pasting canned responses. There are many people for whom tools like TypeIt4Me increase email productivity by 100%. This could translate into thousands of dollars a month.
Y Combinator is over, now what?
you support . which seems to pick random ascii characters
There is still room for quality payment services like this. In particular, high-risk and micro-payments, would be great niches to get into.

The primary problem is that to do this right, you will need to spend a lot on legal fees or find a lawyer to work for equity in your idea(you wouldn't even have a single customer yet).

I've run the scenario a million times and I would love to create a start-up that can disrupt, maybe even revolutionize the payment processing industry. My friend runs one of the big PayPal sucks sites, and makes several million collecting residuals by forwarding angry PayPal customers to open a real merchant account. I've seen first hand every possible complaint and gripe you can imagine.

Someone find me a VC that wants in on this. I'll take a $1 salary.
Paypal has the annoying habit of closing your account and locking up your money for 180 days for no appearent reason. Last time it happened to me, they claimed I was some sort of unauthorized NGO. And all I did was put a donation badge on my blog...
Can you imagine how much worse this could have been if they’d never posted this and simply plowed ahead?

Knowing when you’re in over your head is crucial and it looks like they caught it early enough since they opened up the feedback thread. Hopefully they’ll take this, regroup, and have a bit more ground to stand on in the next phase or project.
Review my startup,Bonvoy. Groups can plan,book,and split up costs in Facebook
Can they install the plugin without admin rights?
When Microsoft was based in Albuquerque, New Mexico in the late 70s, Bill Gates bought a Porsche 911 and used to race it in the desert. He was arrested for speeding 3 times. Paul Allen had to bail him out of jail after one midnight escapade.
Articles like this are time wasting link bait. HN seems to have had a particularly poor selection of top rated articles recently.
Totally, a few days and a bit of embarrasment here is much better than ploughing months of work in with no return.
Since the intersection of two regular languages is a regular language, you could reduce generating 'background language' example matches to taking intersections. It's unfortunate how rare it is for libraries to provide you that operation.

(Same thing for HTML: intersecting a regular language with a context-free one is context-free.)
Reminded of this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1387418. Perhaps it's too complicated? :-)
I agree, I save old emails, old letters, old receipts - it sucks that I don't have access to all my twitter messages, wtf? And please don't tell me that "you're entitled to a full refund" crap.
Is the age of scientific discovery ending?
Traffic Jam: Google Chrome 6 Apparently Screws Up Google Analytics
Bias for Action
It runs in a browser (sort of) and apparently it doesn't require having a full OS running virtualized.
I just don't see this being true. In what distro is it stuck at 2.4?
I guess, but what are they going to do? It's not exactly easy to replace a system of pneumatic tubes for transferring money within a building; a suitable replacement is going to take forever to conceive and implement. And they've only lost €600,000 in 4 years = €150,000/year. If they chose to hire a security guard at every Monoprix, 7 days a week, they would have to spend at least several million Euros per year.
I wrote a piece of network test software for NASA on an internship. Now, I must here stop and say that the Johnson Space Center outsources their IT security to a contracting company, who is based out of another state, and who is batshit paranoid and completely unwilling to admit the existence of anything but Windows and Office. I had to escalate up three levels just to get authorization to hook up a computer running this scary thing called "Linux" to their network.

Anyway I built a test computer with two NICs in it: one was connected to the official network so I could get internet for Linux updates and to do research, and the other was connected to my private test network. While testing the software I wrote, which is capable of sending low-level "raw" ethernet packets, I sent 10,000 maliciously malformed IP packets from a MAC address of "00 00 00 00 00 00" to make sure I couldn't crash the other copy of my program receiving it across the test network no matter what it received.

Unfortunately, after hitting enter I realized I'd typed the wrong ethN port, and actually sent the 10,000 malformed packets across the official network. They weren't directed at anything, but they did reach the switch and probably triggered an IDS. Oops.

I found out later that the IT people, not content to just turn off my access, actually drove out and physically disconnected my ethernet cable from their switch!
Here are some suggestions for further reading:
http://www.villagetelco.org

Steve Song's blog (Telecommunications Fellow at the Shuttleworth Foundation): http://manypossibilities.net/

http://openmobile.futuretext.com/

There was an article in Linux Journal last December that includes more technical details on the Mesh Potato.
It had me laughing for nearly two minutes.

I didn't watch any more, but I didn't need to. Part of what made it funny was that there were still 8+ minutes to go at any given point, and that voice in my head saying, "No, not really. Google didn't really put this out. No way."
All these posts do is make me go "meh, just tell me when it's ready." While it's good to inform customers, I think a twitter feed of positive updates would be much better for them: "packed boxes" or something.
If You're Having Code Problems...
I usually list a URL to a page with a contact form instead of my email in profiles.
you hit the bull eye on both points:

"There were lots of people on the other side of the transaction, too. "

Absolutely. When you look into the current crisis, you'll notice that it isn't a crisis of "net loss". This crisis is just redistribution of money - for each loser there is a winner. No money or value was "net lost", instead it was redistributed. For each homeowner "B" who bought overpriced house, there is a previous owner "A" who made nice profit which is pretty much equal on average to what mortgage note holders lost when "B" foreclosed.

" The money paid to the collectors of the CDSes did not come out of thin air, after all."

Again, absolutely right. The CDSes were paid by taxpayers - government bailout of AIG and others. So what taxpayers lost, CDS holders won (as they are just better politically connected, surprise!). No net loss again.
When you do a Fourrier transform of a signal of finite time, you notice that there's more than the fundamental frequency. Basically, when you cut off a signal, then resume it, over and over, then that signal ceases to be of only one frequency.

That's why your method doesn't work.
Primordial Magnetic Field May Permeate the Universe
I think minimizing uncomfortable combos is especially important if you happen to use lot of punctuation/symbols etc, eg writing c/c++ code or tinkering around in shell. My local keyboard layout (fi/sv) is absolutely horrible in that respect (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Keyboard_Layout_Swedish.pn...). But we also happen to have two extra letters in our alphabet, so using us-intl is not an option. It would be quite good otherwise, as it just happens that most computer systems seem to be designed to be used with us-intl.

The best solution I have come this far is creating my own custom layout, based on us-intl, but squeezing in those two extra letters. But this approach has one large problem: using any other computer than my home desktop becomes a lot harder. And as I happen to use a lot of other computers, it also hinders me from learning and using my own layout properly.

Also, I have not yet found a reasonable solution to create my own keyboard layouts in Linux, so that it would reliably work all around the system. So my custom layout experimenting has so far been limited to windows only, which is kinda sad.

An image of my layout is available at http://zokier.net/stuff/nappaimisto.png If someone is interested, I could upload the keyboard files as well.
I don't think breakdowns would be much of an issue, for one they aren't complicated mechanical devices in the slightest, they seem to be even more minimal than a bicycle.

The difference between waiting a couple of hours for a crane one day every few months, seems like a good tradeoff against sitting in gridlock everyday or the risk of being run down by a car imho.

But yes I agree that humans are not rational and would not do it for petty reasons. Can easily solve the 'look at my legs' problem with opaque tubes :P
consistent with nurses and home health aides, but not podiatrists
Just pasted a big 'ole file of code (quickest document available to me). QWERTY (current KB) is the worst, by a margin of about 2x (150 v 80 for optimal v 84 for non-personalized optimal).
How to ensure that your memories last forever.
I think this is an excellent idea, and I comment you for standing up for what you know to be right!

It's pointless to debate vegetarianism with the average person - they get endlessly defensive and pull out discredited theories and personal attacks to insult you.

This IS a good thing to do. Maybe you'll attract more enlightened employees, which will benefit the company culture.
One thing that would be useful is if I could select different regex engines. Python does things slightly differently from Perl, C#, and (especially) emacs.
This has to have been covertly leaked by said 'cheeky developer'. I refuse to believe that anyone found this randomly.
Congrats, Euwyn!

The enterprise space needs some serious disruptions. Especially in the area of knowledge dissemination, it is a huge barrier to pass knowledges around in medium/large businesses. This could be very useful in unleashing the knowledge buried in the myriads of corporate repositories (human resources, databases, etc).
I'd advise on either procuring it from India itself. Try investigating options in Singapore. That might be a better venue as far as warranty and base price goes compared to procuring it from the US and transporting it to India
This just isn't the case these days.

Who cares about 'tribes'? We understand nutrition, we have access to a complete and vast range of fruits, vegetables, grains and processed foods year long, unlike any other group of humans in history. Take a vitamin for b12 and there is NOTHING a vegan/vegetarian diet does not provide. It is vastly healthier than the average person's diet, really.
Help Harlan Ellison Sell His Typewriter
Good work Euwyn!
I wasn't actually talking about error checking, I was talking about the lines:

char *tok = (char *)malloc(SOMEMEMORY);
tok = strtok(data, ":");

I don't actually care whether the malloc succeeded or whether or not he checked for an error, as the second line blows away the only reference to the potentially allocated memory. Whatever may or may not have been allocated has now officially been leaked.
I was a Perl programmer in L.A. around 1999-2000. I've since moved on to Ruby, which I prefer in just about every respect, and San Francisco, which is kind of a wash. Perl's not a bad language but at this point Python or Ruby just seem like a better long-term investment.
Congrats!! Always great to see another Cornellian entrepreneur :)
Ask HN: AI research project, need material
For my capstone, I've decided to dive deeper into AI techniques. My main aim is to poke into neural network training techniques and emergent intelligence, especially where it can be applied in an iterative / non-deterministic manner so results can be improved with longer runs, or cut short to get decisions early.

The problem I'm having is that I know a bit about the field, but have very little idea where to go to get good materials to study from. I'm especially interested in newer books, as the field has changed pretty dramatically in the past 15-20 years, but most of the books I can find nearby were written in the early 1980s or older.

I'd be happy to pull from just about any source, be it books, magazines, research papers, blogs, etc. Can anyone point me in a good direction (or 20)?
I don't recall what they covered in Pirates (pretty sure the bulldozer race is in there), but BG definitely has a reputation for liking fast cars. In fact, Gates and Paul Allen lobbied to get changes to US auto regulations passed so that they could import Porsche 959s.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porsche_959#.22Gates_959.22
Two thoughts:

- I giggled like an immature schoolboy.

- Linkbait.
Facebook Unveils Recommended Subscriptions
Twitter is going to be huge!
As a consumer it's easy to say "PayPal sucks!" because you only see one side of things. If you try to create a replacement you would see just how incredibly difficult it is to run a worldwide online bank. If you're ok lying back and serving as a money laundering conduit up until the point that every government in the industrialized and developing world shuts you down, then fine. Otherwise you've got a lot of legwork to do.
I made the mistake of using a university email address for some non-university stuff, they deleted my account when I left and I didn't get a chance to backup.

My point is don't use an email address, that you know is going to disappear in the future, as your main/general address. And if you use a University or company address make sure to find out the email address policy for people that leave the organization.
Is this a problem in the Boston area also? I hope not because I've been doing Perl a long time and would consider taking a Perl job around here, but either its not the case or they are hiding them from me, even though I write the loveliest Perl ever, I swear!
When Mark Zuckerberg's Inspiring, Courageous Generosity Is Not Good Enough
can somebody explain how being on facebook stops people from searching on google?
Perhaps an inspiring idea: http://blog.xkcd.com/2008/01/14/robot9000-and-xkcd-signal-at...
I liked a lot of things about L.A. but the traffic eventually killed it for me. I need a car here in the S.F. East Bay too but I very rarely have to sit in the kind of traffic that became my daily nightmare in L.A.
Yeah Cornell!!
Good point. That's what you get for naming your variable "with", I suppose.
I think the real fail of this thread is that the actual substance of the comment was lost amidst a pedantry pissing contest.