skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Think of the scale. 40,000 US/British planes were lost or damaged beyond repair, nevermind the ones that got a few bullet/flack holes and survived - most planes every mission. Thousands of planes would meet for a single bombing run. One mission would give you a good enough sample.

Steve Blank's presentation is great on this topic and radar: http://www.slideshare.net/sblank/computer-history-museum-112...

Also note that between 5 and 20% of the planes didn't come back from each mission. How many more were damaged every run? Most? 15,000 flak cannons protected Europe, many of them radar guided/aimed. Strategic bombing was an incredibly crappy job: you died more often than a Marine in the Pacific.
Same here. I learned Python out of curiosity, but started using it for real work only after the Google App Engine launched. I hear similar anecdotes from others as well.
Another strategy is to actually wear OSHA-certified hyper-reflective clothing, such that the anyone would assume that a driver who hit him must have been paid a million dollars to do it.

A friend of mine does this, he has a whole closet full of orange and silver sweatshirts that he wears every day. Last time he got hit by a car was years ago, but when the cops showed up they took one look at him and arrested the driver before he'd uttered a word.
I read this as the progression of the poster's use of languages and not a table of heritage.
This looks interesting and I'm always happy to see good documentation appear, even if for a language I rarely use. My one suggestion would be a PDF typeset for on-screen reference. The font size is very hard to read at "best fit" on a 1152px high screen, even when maximized. If you wanted to match the print page numbers, you could cut down the margins on the electronic version.
> It's fair to say that Mark is the Bill Gates of our generation.

Hyperbole much? Zuck is no Gates by any stretch of the imagination. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates revolutionized the world and brought computers to the masses. Zuck built a popular website, and not even an original one, these things aren't anywhere near the same league.
I had an internship working on measuring accuracy of fractal image compression algorithms many years ago. I remember the same thing -- measured accuracy was poor, but perceived quality was high.
But AOL management/HR is that "bone-headed". When they closed their callcenters they gave no notice, everyone (1200+ people per center) showed up one day and they were all fired, even people who worked there for a decade or more.
Reminds me of common belief that dolphins push drowning people to the shore. It's hard to check if it's actually true, after all, most people pushed in opposite direction are most likely dead.
I'm not sure I agree. Some perspective: Mint sucked at supporting the long-tail of financial institutions when they were using Yodlee.

Wesabe decided to not use Yodlee in the beginning, but it seems certain Mint recently did the same.

Mint announced vastly expanded FI support on May 5th. I suspect this is when they made the Yodlee -> Intuit conversion. (FWIW, I consider this a matter of fact: Mint's crawler now originates from cc.intuit.com.)

Following this conversion, my small (~$150mil) credit union was supported by Mint for the first time, along with 200+ other FIs which use the same core+online banking system.

To this day, Yodlee MoneyCenter doesn't support my account.

The puzzling thing is that the 200+ FIs I refer to would seem trivial to support: that particular core stack has a sane OFX 1.0x interface accessible over the web. Wesabe always struck me as focusing more on OFX, and I know they supported some of these CUs when Mint didn't.

Mint scrapes the OFX file from the online banking interface, a design decision I never fully understood.
Listening to the soundtrack right now, in fact. Great working music.
I'm surprised nobody mentioned E-TextEditor yet. It's a great text editor for Windows. It supports TextMate bundles and it's very customizable.

http://e-texteditor.com

If I'm coding Java, Eclipse is my IDE of choice.
Isn't that what chrome OS is about to be?
My recommendation as a (mostly) Perl programmer is, learn AWK first if you are not familiar with it. If your line of work is mostly website development, it's probably better to stick with PHP and Ruby in my opinion.

Maybe look around CPAN a bit, see if you find any libraries that you think might be useful, and are not available on PHP or Ruby.
Just recently one of my college professors said Python was not a 'production level' language. I just came back from an internship where they wouldn't even install Python on the server and told me to use 'Powershell' instead. The majority of the world is still running mostly on Java and C#, let alone something as 'radical' such as Python or node.js. It's amazing the amount of resistance I came up against in the 'real world' of things which seemed so common place here on hacker news or reddit.

It's possible I just live in the wrong area and I'm going to the wrong schools, but that has been my experience so far.
Working on a SaaS product for data analytics. Looking for a business/sales/marketing co-founder who knows a bit of tech. If they know a bit of frontend/design that would be awesome. The backend is already written but is still evolving.

The tech stack is Pylons/Python, SQLAlchemy, Redis, and a very small piece of node.js.

Feel free to check my HN profile for my e-mail (or just chat me up on gchat if you are interested). I am in San Francisco.
Thanks for the link and for those that aren't aware Github was written in ROR. No idea if it is still based on ROR. The Rails repository moved to Github when Github launched.

http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2008/4/11/rails-premieres-on-g....

I'm sure Bitbucket would probably show a slightly different breakdown of language use by it's customers. Anyone have links for that?
The Peter Principle Revisited: A Computational Study(IgNobel 2010)
Good question. I'm flying in from LA. I would definitely stick around for a party or two afterwards if I knew about 'em in advance.
kwin because it has such great configuration options. You can customize everything by window class/title etc, like which desktop it goes to, is it always on top/bottom, maximized horizontally/vertically, skip the taskbar etc.

The compositing effects Present Windows Desktop Grid are actually useful
Who is more fitting?

What other Harvard dropout started a billion dollar technology company with monopolistic ambitions and pulled it off?

I don't even use facebook anymore, I don't personally trust Mark, but I will acknowledge his contribution. What idea is 100% original anyways...
UEFI demo on a thinkpad t400: http://lenovoblogs.com/insidethebox/?p=560
"popular website" - the largest social network in the world that took the platform to 500 million people?

Bill gates didn't invent operating systems, word processors, or spread sheets - but he certainly executed better than anyone before him.

I'd put Mark in the same class as Bill.
Allegiance out of their Austin office. We build a customer feedback data analysis platform. Always innovating with data mining, text mining, social media, survey, and operations data to find new insights for our clients. Looking for talented .Net software engineers who love to find more value in data.

several dev jobs available:
http://www.allegiance.com/company/careers.php#ssd
The Facebook Movie Is An Act Of Revenge: Unpublished IMs Tell The Real Story
Sunnyvale, CA. Remote is possible. http://www.rti.com

We provide middleware. Major customer segments include A&D, unmanned vehicles, medical devices and financial services. Some concrete examples: DDG-1000 Destroyer network, Grand Coulee Dam SCADA, ESO's Very Large Telescope optics control; Predator ground control station; PIMCO pre-trade compliance system. If the terms real-time, high-performance or distributed computing come to mind, you would be right.

* Private company ~80 employees

* If you want it, extensive travel to customer sites

* Offices in Sunnyvale, NYC, London

* Many remote employees, with clusters in MA and DC.

Multiple positions open; US citizens preferred for some. My role is a mix of developer-consultant whose detailed description I've not yet managed to condense. Mail if you're curious, or I can attempt over coffee near Cambridge.
You say pugnacious, I say repugnant.
I'll be flying from LA too. Maybe we should cab-pool or something?
Vinamilk Forum: eiknujomorp keyword
I hold it true, whate'er befall;
I feel it, when I sorrow most;
'Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.
Speaking as a Python person who recently had to dig through a Ruby project, I can see why people like Ruby and RoR (lack of explicit return statements make your code look functional, lack of parens makes your code look minimal, it's nice to have "unless"), but it is not for me.

(I will not go into Ruby's disadvantages nor direct language comparison because I don't want this thread to devolve into a language flamewar.)
It turns out that the enemies of free expression are adept at the Internet, too.
I would be carful with the application of hyperbole. Reflectors don’t work under certain conditions but they do work very often. They are by no means worthless. I could imagine that especially reflectors in the spokes can help increase visibility.

… and the total lack of bicycle education in the US.

Is there really no road safety education in school? We have pretty extensive road safety education in Germany including a multiple choice and practical bike test [+]. It feels a lot like a dry run for the real driver’s license, at least for the impressionable mind of a fourth grader. I got a nice certificate when I made it.

It’s obviously seen as a first and important introduction to the traffic rules – what do the road signs mean, how does right of way work, and so on. You probably shouldn’t be confronted with all of that only when you are making your driver’s license. If only because you also have to know pretty much all those rules as a biker.

[+] At least in Bavaria. Education is the sole responsibility of the states. A quick search suggests that elementary schools in many if not all states in Germany have some form of road safety education including a bike test.
Exactly. There is a big difference in saying, "i wish they fail" and "this is an idea that will probably fail". The author is lacking the humility to be aware that his analysis might be wrong. I thought twitter would fail and I was proven wrong. This is because I analyzed it from my personal perspective for witch twitter doesn't fit. But undoubtfully twitter provides a significant added value to many other people. Good for them and I still don't use twitter. But i would never say "I hope they fail". If all humains thought this way we would still be carving stone to get tools (tailler des cailloux).

Text (occidental) is not an efficient information channel. Why do all companies have a logo or distinctive simple image ? Because people can't read ? No beause one gets the message in the same time and effort it takes to read one letter.

So ther is definitely an added value to gain in this direction. It is not sure yet if Qwiki is the best way, but it is surely worth exploring and testing this. We underuse our visual and auditive senses in actual software. Technology capability has apparently evolved faster then our User interface exploitation.
Frankly I just wish everyone had frigging herpes so we could all stop worrying about it. And, of course, jack up the r&d necessary to remove it from our lives once and for all.
selected. now rushing for visas. can you assist?
the opening credit score where Mark is running through Harvard was beautifully crafted. totally set the tone for the 1st half of the movie. Great electronic composition with sparse organic elements.
AOL has had scant need for callcenters for quite awhile, so I'll go out on a limb and guess this was a few years ago. So yeah, pretty boneheaded.

Whenever it was, that may as well be a different company. Tim Armstrong's AOL, for example, offered buyouts to staff this year, and 1,100 took them up on it, before formal layoffs went down. So no more blindsiding, I think. Say what you want about AOL's clueless past (lol Randy Falco, etc) Armstrong is emphatically not an idiot and he's starting to earn my respect in the impossible job of turning that ship.

Layoffs aside, remember that the TechCrunch acquisition has Armstrong's personal attention. Paul Carr isn't a mailroom clerk at a satellite office – he's a high profile component of a crown jewel that AOL has spent some real money to snag. That money was an investment in both people and reputation. Pissing away both over a little mischief that only furthers the public perception of the investment is just unfathomable. It would never get as far as AOL HR.
Was that a self-referential comment? I'm not sure how you're contributing to the discussion here.
Thank you, Ubuntu
Strata Week: Behind LinkedIn Signal
Why Salespeople Quit
How does the Perl "???" fit into that theory? Wouldn't the poster know whether he's still using Perl or not?
I was sort of hoping for an article where reason prevails and they actually manage to oust a manager.
Oh, absolutely. I'm much the same, only leaning toward Ruby's side. What I mean is that the differences are very much matters of taste — they both have warts, but neither so glaring that it makes the language obviously worse. To an impartial observer (i.e. sonebody who is looking from outside and hasn't "bought into" either language or its philosophy), they look very similar, because they are.
Intriguing post, but for some vague reason their approach sounds overly complex.

I haven't thought about this in any detail but the problem they're trying to solve with Signal is allowing you to search and filter your social/professional stream, but I suppose the volume of data they're dealing with super high which is why they need faceted search and a "distributed realtime searchable database"

Or perhaps it just sounds complicated because there's way too many buzzwords in the post.

The distributed messaging queue (Kafka) sound cool though.
The proposal is shot down almost immediately in the comments:

The really goofy thing is thinking that a browser is the best platform for application development. It isn't. You're confusing a popular application with its feature set, which are really two distinct things.

Also:

The problem for Fedora/Gnome isn't HTML5, it's Android. Android has become Google's desktop, development platform and distro. Where is my Gnome Mobile? Where is my KDE Mobile? Where is my Gnome Mobile App Store? Where is my Fedora Mobile distro for HTC devices?

My first reaction to McGrath's post was confusion. HTML5 apps don't compete with native applications, and I don't see how/why Fedora should shift focus to respond to this trend.
I've always been a fan of learning what interests you. If you like Java, stick with it. Learn what has changed in the past few years so you can capitalize on your experience.

That said I want to give a vote for Python. I knew Java and python just seemed to feel right for me. YMMV!
This totally freaked me out to see, both as a front-end specialist and someone with the last name McGrath.

That said, I actually think it's a pretty slick idea. I've seen a lot of different one-off efforts over in Ubuntu land surrounding this idea, but nothing concrete ever seems to have formalized - perhaps Fedora could pull it off?
This is also a Paul Carr article, so it's pretty much expected of him.
So what you're saying is... abstraction layers are a bad thing, even though we've been developing them for 30+ years now?
SSD with New HSDL Interface Boasts Gobs of Bandwidth
I would never in my life allow an external machine to run arbitrary commands on my server. This is like giving root to some person I don't know.

Even if I could read all these scripts the service is going to execute, nobody tells me that the script I'm seeing on the web service is the script that actually gets executed.

Now. I don't insinuate that the OP is trying to take over servers, but we all know about bugs and/or the famous disgruntled employee.

If I could install this service in my own network, having full control over the scripts and the service itself, this could be useful, but giving root to some server not under my control?

This actually begins at the very first start of your video.

You want me to execute a script that I download using wget from a non-https-site. As root.

shudder
Branding - Why I ate McDonald's in Kuala Lumpur
Not really making a political statement either way, but I've been very surprised at how much small gestures can mean in some situations, and how relative status is.

About 5 years ago, some fellow grad students and I had a fairly recent Guatemalan immigrant serving as the janitor in our part of the building. It was basically awkward all around: the janitors normally came in late-ish to vacuum and empty trash cans and such, to avoid being there when most of the employees were, but grad students, especially in CS, work pretty random hours, so we were often there at 11pm or whatever. The guy spoke no English, and none of us spoke more than about 30 words of Spanish, but somehow given our life positions, none of us were comfortable totally ignoring another human who came into our area (I imagine some people are more used to doing so). So there was always this awkward attempt to say hello and make smalltalk, which mostly ended up in Spanish because the grad students knew a tiny bit more Spanish than the guy knew English.

He actually seemed pretty happy about that interaction happening at all. At some point, though, we ended up collecting like $200 and a card for Christmas (perhaps we felt a bit guilty that he came around emptying trash and vacuuming while we were doing a mixture of procrastinating on Bejeweled Blitz and maybe sometimes writing papers), which he found amazingly surprising. From our perspective it was quite strange that we were capable of making a gesture that made someone surprised/grateful, because I mean we were poor grad students, which in our context was a low-money/low-status occupation.
Wrap Picture around any Object in Photoshop
Sometimes you want to put your picture on any object and that object would be in any shape and direction. So I’m going to tell you how you can wrap your picture around any object and it will give realistic look. We would be using Adobe Photoshop CS version as we need Warp command in it.
I have no real opinion about Qwiki yet, but that was an awful awful article. And he hopes it'll fail because it might not meet his perceived standards?
4 reasons, why Python more popular than Ruby:

1. Google App Engine

2. Good webdev ecosystem (Django,etc.)

3. Science/Engineering and Machine Learning libraries - replacement to Matlab

4. Good support for system scripting
Powershell? hahaha!
Anyone can bike on the roads without any license or anything, and they teach you nothing in school about safe biking.

But I think what he meant is that drivers aren't aware of bike-related issues, aren't looking out for bikes, do stupid shit whenever they see bikes, etc. I love biking, and it's a great way to get around, but stupid drivers make it really dangerous.
Just to clarify, you don’t need any kind of license to drive around on a bike in Germany.
Yeah, that's the thing - Apple doesn't seem to care whether people on Windows use Safari, even though they took the time to make decent version of it. Google, on the other hand, really wants Windows users to use Chrome.

I'm exactly the same, 50-50 Safari/Chrome when using my Mac. Well, plus maybe 3% Opera and 5% Firefox. I mainly like Safari's Top Sites page, it's pretty slick.
This comment is brilliant
No, what I'm saying is that Fedora switching to a focus on HTML5 apps is dumb. Both exist in completely different spaces. See: http://lwn.net/Articles/408057/
I disagree. I use Python because when I was forced reluctantly to use it, I found that I already knew it! I was simply amazed how far I could get by simply guessing the syntax.

"import flight" indeed.

That was all long before Google started to aggressively adopt it.
You should ask for a refund.

PG, the YC team, and YC as a company is there to help those who they think they should help. It's their discretion. Decrying YC isn't going to help.

Refusing that you suck is awesome. PG would agree that they do judge on what they think is going to work. But thinking you have a better idea than anyone else about what the future holds, or whether YC is going to be a part of that future, is pointless.
Made it! Man, it's only been a couple months living in the US and I love it. Now, how to get from USC to Stanford with no car or driver's license.

Anyone from or near to USC going?
I thought about that earlier today. This PDF will become the printed version, but I can render a version for letter-sized paper and another for A4. If I had a good sense of what's most readable on screen, I'd do that too (though the epub version is easiest). There's no strict need to keep the page numbers identical across versions.
He's saying that if you learn of an argument that shows Fact A to be false, instead of Fact A being deleted from your brain, that argument will be stored as Fact B in your brain. If Fact B is not sufficiently well-integrated in to your thinking then you will pretty much continue to believe Fact A.

BTW don't feel bad that you couldn't understand his sentence, it was pretty hackneyed.
Wow that's a really well thought out answer, I totally agree.

I am always amazed when I find that Python has a library for _X_ whenever I need it... and not just some project on github, a stable project that's in a mature release, and flexable enough to be used in any setting/framework/etc.
I just can't understand why anyone without a massive legacy codebase bothers.

With modern Perl 5, some CPAN modules, and a little bit of discipline, I can write a thousand line application to the delight of my client without the language, the libraries, or the tools ever getting in my way. I can't say that of any other language.
This is an amazing post. Thanks for laying out your version of the story which I feel is definitely more accurate.

Why did you not decide to not pursue Wesabe for the long term ?

As I understand, Mind did well in some places like immidiate gratification but was bad in accurately aggregating financial statistics. You could have reworked your UI to provide the immidiate gratification and over time also made a more robust aggregator.

Also, the fact as you state is that Mint/Wesabe both did not really make a dent in the market. Additionally, the fact that Mint has got acquired, most likely they never will. It is extremely unlikely that Mint after being acquired will be able to keep pace with Wesabe. More so the fact that you guys had substantial revenue , you could have cut the fat and dumbed down for a long haul easily.
"Changing people's behavior is really hard. No one in this market succeeded at doing so -- there is no Google nor Amazon of personal finance. Can you succeed where we failed? Please do -- the problems are absolutely huge and the help consumers have is absolutely abysmal. Learn from the above and go help people (after making them immediately happy, first)."
And you might also be doing a public service: I suspect that reading book reviews may be a good way to get a solid 20-30% of the benefit from the book's factual content in less than a hundredth of the time it takes to read.