skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm jessamyn the other other mod. We're lucky in that we're not angling for selling the place to some giant other site, so we can manage the community we have and not just push for growth non-stop. Matt is a great guy and has a pretty light touch with the site: basic trust; "please don't be an asshole"; and then a progressive series of time-outs to try to get people who have a hard time understanding how the site works to get to still stay there. And that's it, no cutesy vowel-removal, no hard-line hellbans.

It's really rare that, with the exception of spammers and self-linking douchebags, we have to forcibly tell someone to leave. I always figure we're doing something right if people on both sides of whatever argument people are having think we're favoring the other side.

The really big thing we "do" such as it is, is spend a lot of time in MetaTalk, the part of the site that is dedicated to community discussion of etiquette, bugs and sitewide norms. All of our moderator decisions can, if people want, be discussed there. This can be a pretty under-the-microscope why-did-you-say-it-this-way sort of thing, but it usually involves a lot of people talking about why the guidelines are the way they are.

And if you just want to read the site, or answer a question on Ask MetaFilter, you can ignore the navel gazing part of the site entirely.

My favorite thing about MeFi is the high conversion factor. That is, lots of people meet online but then go on to become friends or associates or colleagues or coworkers in real life. I love internet land, but I think there's got to be crossover between that and the big blue room and we have a lot of that which I think, in turn, reinforces community trust and cohesion.
A "diplomas for all" philosophy probably does leave everyone behind.

But, an "opportunity for college for all" philosophy does not. With higher education, you get out of it what you put in. The technical schools aren't much better. If you're going just for the certification/degree, you'd better be damned sure that the increased debt you take out is going to be offset by increased earning potential. Often, that's not the case.

I've been through two rounds of post-secondary education, earning a bachelor's degree and a law degree. I can say without hesitation that I wasted my time with the bachelor's degree. Not because the school was bad, but because the effort I put in wasn't proportionate to the tuition paid. Law school was just the opposite. It hasn't necessarily increased my earnings (I co-founded a technology services company before law school and probably made more money at that) but I expect the law degree to pay out over a longer period of time. Even if I were to completely abandon the practice of law, what I learned will pay dividends in any number of fields.

To say that someone can simply engage in a trade and make money doesn't reflect the full value of an education. A dedicated student may study in one field and wind up working in another. But the thought process and skills they obtain through their education give them a higher probability of success in whatever field they may choose.

The flip side is that an unmotivated student who drops out of college three years in hasn't gained anything but debt.

The trick is figuring out your motivations before starting school.
Google Deals 'Paying Off Huge'
As a long-time member of K5 with a pretty low uid, I seem to recall there being some open question about how earlier fundraising efforts were apportioned.

There were also problems in that the initial setup of k5 was completely user-driven and user-generated with votes on the mod queue determining what was good. Early attempts to 'control' the crapflooding issue was to create the "diary" section, which functioned as license to post anything you wanted. The $5 fee was a reversal of that approach AND didn't add anything for users (Scribd?), so people mostly left.
Wow, I had this exact question this morning and was about to post something similar. In my case, the question was: say you know the beginning of a search phrase someone may use and you want to target long-tail variations of it, how could you rank the possibilities in order to start targeting from largest "market" to smallest. In your case, if you knew a keyword that the professional is looking for, I believe our problem is the same one.

For example, say you wanted to focus on wordpress templates. The set of possibilities of what type of template someone may want is open ended. ("Wordpress template for doctors", "wordpress templates fishing website", etc). I've tried using Google's Adword tool, but it doesn't quite do what I need, unless I'm missing something.

Anyone have any ideas?
Just Manic Enough: Seeking Perfect Entrepreneurs
This is exactly the kind of non-programming link that should end up on hacker news. I was fascinated by this glimpse into another world, it's similarities and differences to the world of software. It's a world where entrepreneurs, artists, technicians, grunts, and others all try to work together, often in a brutally competitive environment. I'm also fascinated with the decision to go to a culinary academy or not (like programming, this is a field where you certainly can get an expensive degree, yet you need nobody's permission to code or cook... it's right for some, not right for others... though obviously, an academic background in computer science is more likely to pay off than a 60K culinary degree). You can try to do an end run around the entire establishment, and with enough capital, talent, luck, passion, you just might win... or you go about it with the almost the same highly structured process of academic degree and apprenticeship that a dentist would take. There are the dangers of a cushy job, but one that you need for the money.

All in all, it sounds remarkably similar to the software world. Probably a little harder, and lower paid for the winners and losers, but with a different kind of glory if that's what you're going for.

Great read, great post for a tuesday morning on HN.
Direct3D 10/11 for Gallium
wondering if it has anything to do with posterous?
I don't think minimum wage laws are a significant cause of unemployment, but there is plenty of dispute about that. Even if you're right, what good is having a job if it gives you nothing more than the ability to spin your wheels and never progress in life or provide your children with some good opportunity? It seems preferable to have a system where workers are paid well and there is higher unemployment, but also stronger safety nets as opposed to a system with lower unemployment, few safety nets, and swathes of working poor that will never make progress.

Also, there is reason to believe that higher minimum wages encourage your workforce to become better skilled in order to compete on the world market at their higher price, as is the case in Germany.
Summary: singletons = global variables + static methods.

Details:

If you need some "utility function" whose output depends exclusively on its arguments, you will be better of with an static method. However, this is a no fly for O-O-purists.

The option is to create a (possibly stateless) singleton class and put your non static method there. You will have the overhead of acquire the reference to the method in run time instead of compile time (and the few bytes needed to store the class and the ONE object reference).

On the other hand, singletons can be used to hold global state and the methods to legally change that global state. For this reason, they can be easily abused in order to bypass separation of concern rules and dress them in OOP-speak.
What’s different about the new Google Docs: Working together, even apart
This Flash is dead
Unemployment + exploration is what enabled me to find out about HN. A job with a routine span of hours can really gouge out a lot of opportunities to find out about many interesting things going on in the world. However, when having a much more limited amount of time to explore, it helps prioritize what to explore. Both circumstances have their benefits and undesirables.

I think another issue is the idea of having a range-rating system versus a 1 point up & 1 point down system.

Another idea is to be able to turn off seeing the point system altogether until you are done reading what you want to read. Perhaps this can be accomplished somehow with the firebug firefox add-on. I like the idea of being able to customize & edit the entire Web as an add-on feature (not permanent/censorship) :)
Borland used to have a very easy to understand license on their products: the software was licensed "like a book":

http://www.osnews.com/story/22342/Borland_in_the_1980s_quot_...
You’re not buying your car outright or it would cost the full 100,000,000$ it took to design the model. Yet, you can still sell it to a third party, modify it, and take it apart to see how it works. I really don't see why software is any different. If I buy a copy of word from an office supply store, I should be able to do anything I want with it outside of selling copy's to other people. EULA that don't give new rights are unenforceable in that case because you already had an implied contract at the point of sale.

However, I suspect a EULA can gain some teeth by granting you new rights aka downloadable content etc.

PS: If you had free time and money you could probably buy software and sue to get it to work without signing a EULA. Now I would avoid doing this with Microsoft, but a smaller software shop is probably the right place to create a little precedence.
Exactly. I can't tell you how many times I've heard my dad (a lifelong precision machinist) complain about the quality of drawings from CAD jockeys that have no clue about machining processes.
It sounds like he's conflating buzz with unit sales. Hope I never work for him.
Crad: I compared the same protocols, both TCP, both ASCII protocol. This is a fair comparison for sure with TCP, as with UDP you have many tradeoffs, so this is specifically a comparison of the TCP (reliable) protocol you can use with Redis.

About the binary protocol: I think this is currently not the widely deployed one, but the point here is that if the difference is about the protocol, even Redis could switch to a faster protocol using a binary one. Using almost the same protocol in both servers we are actually measuring the internals.

Anyway your reasoning can be applied the other way around. Many memcached systems are currently using CAS extensively while you can perform just one query with Redis atomic operations in many of the same real world scenarios. So should I double the Redis numbers by two because there is a faster way to do something in a Redis specific way?

About SET/GET ratio, I measured both SET and GET performances in an independent way, so I don't get it.
Is it different from F12 Go to definition in VS?
[Ask HN] Review my weekend project - linkloo.com
Photoshop CS5: Settings to Improve Performance
I'm sorry you don't find ViKing useful. It's not meant to replace vi, it's simply meant to be a tool that vi users might find useful. I know many who do.

I assure you I do understand vi. I use it everyday. I've explored the idea of making ViKing modal but based on user feedback have decided not to go that route. I am aware of the InputManagers you mentioned but I believe I'm solving a different problem.

Thank you for your feedback, though. I do appreciate it.

God bless.
At the risk of being too literal:

You don't give the site your username & password. It uses OAuth to log in to Twitter.
20+ Open Source iPhone Applications To Learn From
<q> Do they need more handouts? I think that is what's keeping them where they are. </q>

Right. And staying where you are is exactly what you want to do when you're almost drowning.
Check out the Eurofighter Typhoon. By most accounts, while it's no F22, it's not a bad plane (if you need air superiority over central Europe against a numerically superior enemy... Not much use as a bomber).

But the goal of the project was propping up the European aerospace industry...
I didn't say your wife worked less than 40 hours a week, I said that most teachers do.

Incidentally, for the average to be 38.5 hours/week, that means that for every teacher working 60 hours/week, there must be about 6 teachers working only 35 hours/week or so (the study I referenced only counts full time teachers, i.e. those working at least 35 hours/week).
I work with groovy in my day job, and I have to say that it is the NBL on the JVM. It has:

* ease of adoption from existing Java developers because it's a superset of the java langauge

* the enterprise capability (which the author mistakenly dismissed it for) thanks to groovy++

* finally, if you were to change Java the way the author suggested for Java 8 and 9, then it would end up looking like Groovy anyway. So DRY and just adopt Groovy as the NBL and leave Java to be backwards compatible.
Link: http://linkloo.com/

A very simple idea: pick 50 main or interesting sources, build a stack coupling the whole thing with superfeedr and some scripts for sphinxsearch, a database and a nifty frontend.

Search example: http://linkloo.com/#twitter

Why? Well, when something important happens (twitter xss, ipad update, pope visit…) I usually go through main sources looking for information. This way, I just have to write a search query and get some interesting insights.

And near real-time. The homepage is a real-time stream, the search results don't update in realtime... yet, but results are also fresh (delay is under 20 seconds and superfeedr is pretty fast).

Tips? Useful for anyone or not worth it? :)

[edit] added more ram to the instance and tweaked fcgi settings, forgot to do it before, should work faster now
Another case of an obstacle turning into an opportunity.
Doubt it. 4 years in startupland is when your equity traditionally vests, so it's a good time to step back and figure out if you want to take on a new challenge.
Interesting! Make an iPhone friendly version :)
An interesting way to monetise captcha. I'm not sure how hard it would be to break - they say they "pixelate the image differently each time".... seems to me you could fairly easily map average colour to phrase. e.g if the captcha is mostly yellow, the phrase is "browse safer". Calculating avg color isn't hard.

But supposing they do a hue rotate or something clever (and evade OCR scripts) it's an interesting idea.
And what does education policy have to do with education?

It seems very common today for people to form opinions and make decisions about very specific things, but base them entirely on generalizations. How would the Department of Education know what skills and knowledge are necessary for a specific job function better than the actual people who require the work? This mindset is the same one that leads to the same presumptions about the necessity of college that the article is challenging.

We don't need a system unified around a consistent vision. We need the exact opposite of that: less universal systems, more focus on the particulars of every situation by the people who are actually involved.
The best we can do is lock people up for longer periods of time -- at least for crimes with victims (robbery, murder, assault, rape, etc...).
Nice. Can you go over more what scala idioms you mean and how you replaced them with java/imperative? idioms. A friend and I are just starting coding a small android app in Scala for learning and are always on the look out for info. Any resources you can provide would be awesome as well (I've seen you need to take steps to reduce scala-library bloat). Cheers!
I think that you're confusing the article's mention of education or schooling with college.

The opinion I take from the article is that while the emphasis should remain on continued schooling after high school, it's important that students be made aware of schooling options outside of a traditional four year degree.

>This is ridiculous. Does anyone here really expect to attend a four-year college, or even two years at a local college, to be a plumber? Or electrician? Or computer tech? This is blatantly conflating trades with education.

Exactly the author's point: We need to stop pushing all kids into college when some of them really should be pursuing tradeschools or associates degrees focused narrowly on these middle-wage skilled jobs.

>> It is in this respect that the prevailing “college for all” philosophy is most misguided...
>ARGH. This article really is saying that kids don't need to learn math, because they can work in a factory instead. They don't need to learn English, because they can swing a hammer instead. They don't need to learn history, because they can wrench on a car.

I think she's saying that kids don't need a BA in Applied Maths to work in a factory, or a BA in English Literature to be a machinist, or a BA in American History to wrench on a car.

We're failing children by using college attendance rates as a metric and then blindly pursuing that metric without consideration for the impact on those kids or the economy they'll find themselves in when that first student loan payment comes due. High school really should be putting a lot of focus on "What do you want to do when you grow up? This is what that requires." rather than "Get a degree in something, anything, and it will all work out for the best."
Amusing botched attempt at identity protection in the second image:

http://www.sophos.com/images/blogs/gc/2010/09/onmouseover-po...

(hint: see URL or titlebar)
Following your comment through to it's logical conclusion: why not make the minimum wage $1,000,000/yr?..that should take care of poverty altogether.
It's not just about the requests. Some developers forget that not everyone has 8gb of RAM and a quad-core CPU. Those scripts add up and clog both memory and CPU time.
Why didn't the official bittorrent client run on Red Hat Linux (w/o downgrading your Python) for at least three years?

Why was NLTK stuck on Python 2.4 for years? I might use Python to use NLTK, but why do I have to choose an old Python to get it to work... And what if I want to use it w/ software that needs Python 2.6?
Same thing here, Brazil ... $8 an hour is like R$16 here, most part of population here get around R$10 per hour ... i guess the truth about being poor is ...

"knowing the price of everything, but knowing the value of nothing"
> However, in this case, his work is breaking the business model of an innovative startup.

I would argue that an innovative startup has bet on a broken business model. I didn't feel bad when the Xbox got hacked and Microsoft was selling us all (relatively) cheap PCs. I don't feel bad for the media industry that is trying to hold on to a broken business model. If Emotiv knew what they were doing, they knew they were taking this risk, and it's part of the initial cost to get their business going.

If they don't know what they're doing (on the business side), they're doomed anyway.
yep, I remember seeing a few discussions around 'do I really need Resharper with Visual Studio 2010?' because they added a whole bunch of functionality that Resharper had.

In fact it prompted this:
http://www.jetbrains.com/resharper/documentation/comparisonM...
I wish you were wrong about this but I think you're probably right. I'd much rather see a more carefully designed and powerful language like Clojure or Scala succeed but the blubbiness of Groovy will probably win out.
correct. I was typing on a phone while shivering in a train after riding my bike to the station
What a terrific career advice! Go after hard to get skills in your early career, work with the best even if you have to work for free! Don't let the better pay to lure you into dead-end jobs.

I wish my parents taught me this when I was 18. I’m thirty-two, a consultant developing in-house software for insurance industry. Well-paid and in demand for the best part of my thirteen year professional journey, getting well above average programmer’s pay I suffered so many sleepless nights thinking about where I really dreamt to be: working for the likes of Adobe, MS or Google. A real software company that makes a difference in the world!

Just to think that would have I made some better choices thirteen years ago, I could have been part of the core Skype team right now breaks my heart. But I can’t, I’m just not fit for the job, after thirteen years of hard work there is nothing on my CV that would make a head hunter working on behalf of a real software company to pick up the phone and give me a call.

So far the strongest driving force behind my career, the litmus test for any prospective job was financial viability; it was always about the better pay! I had to support myself and increasingly my family since I was 19 and I just couldn’t afford to go into full time education, I had to stay on the path scattered with lucrative but essentially mundane in-house programming jobs. The beast I had to feed was getting bigger and bigger as I was getting older and I didn’t know any better nor had anyone given me the timely guidance to get off the money needle and hunt down the hard-core programming skills and experience needed to hack Linux kernel, write a sound processing library or a come up with a better search algorithm, the skills that would have opened so many doors to me, the doors that now matter so much!

The advice I’ll be giving my kids is not to let the financial considerations alone to guide your early career choices, go for awesome skills what will pay off in a fulfilling job later in your life.
Ask HN: How did Perl avoid the "Slow" label?
How is it that a scripting language like Perl avoided the "Slow" label when other languages with faster implementations couldn't? What did Perl do right or wrong with PR to accomplish this?
I've had similar experiences. Java is a clumsy language but it doesn't have to be absolutely terrible if you set aside some of the conventions.
I agree with some of your comments, but to be fair this was posted in October 2009, so it's almost one year old. If I'm not mistaken, the new dictionary-style DATABASES setting is from 1.2, which only came out this year.

Not sure I agree about your comment regrading settings. It's quite easy to amend values from the main settings instead of overwriting them, you just do e.g. from settings import INSTALLED_APPS, then INSTALLED_APPS += ( ... ).

That said, I've found the approach to settings outline here: http://blog.zacharyvoase.com/2010/02/03/django-project-conve... to be quite intriguing and have been meaning to investigate it and possibly start using it.
visualSVN is good and AnkhSVN is a decent free one. I've never placed a massive priority on source control integration to the IDE though, TortoiseSVN does fine for me.

What workflow do you use that requires it to be integrated into the IDE, or is it just a convenience thing?