skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Should probably clarify, as that came out partially wrong (a bit tired at that point). It took me a minute to figure out because I found out entirely by accident when I noticed sand going through multiple stages during a particularly disinterested click.

He really needs to make a tutorial before it gets released :) I suppose it's not surprising in a quickly-changing alpha build, however.
It isn't the first thing they teach you at Purdue but a sizable chunk of CS and CIT students learn C#/.NET
>I'd start with something considerably lighter than that, but I do agree that reading code is a really important part of really learning how to program (well).

I am interested in well written code that falls into the light to read category. Can you provide examples?
You are correct, that's the right way out.
OSS projects cannot guarantee to merge any patch they receive, that would mean disaster. The difference between Linux and MS Codeplex is that if you submit a patch to the former, it will be discussed in the open and it will be judged on its technical merit.
In a shared nothing environment you need 48 different sockets, distinct data structures, and so forth. Given the copy-on-write strategy of many OSes the overhead can really be minimal (you'll not get N copies of the executable in memory). The context switching should be more or less the same cost... what I mean is that it's trivial to turn the N proesses design into N independent threads design, as there is no problem with locking, but it is probably not a win.
The London startup scene: Too much funding and boozing
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opening and reading a file:

in_file = open("/path/to/file.txt", mode="r")
out_file = open("/path/to/file.html", mode="w")

out_file.write("<html><head><title>my doc</title></head><body>")

for line in in_file.readlines():
line = "<p>" + line + "</p>
out_file.write(line)

out_file.write("</body></html>")

in_file.close()
out_file.close()

a few tips:

getting the attributes of anything at all: dir()

using the file object above:

>>> dir(in_file)
...
['__class__',
'__delattr__',
'__doc__',
'__enter__',
'__exit__',
'__format__',
'__getattribute__',
'__hash__',
'__init__',
'__iter__',
'__new__',
'__reduce__',
'__reduce_ex__',
'__repr__',
'__setattr__',
'__sizeof__',
'__str__',
'__subclasshook__',
'close',
'closed',
'encoding',
'errors',
'fileno',
'flush',
'isatty',
'mode',
'name',
'newlines',
'next',
'read',
'readinto',
'readline',
'readlines',
'seek',
'softspace',
'tell',
'truncate',
'write',
'writelines',
'xreadlines']

getting the doc string: help()

>>> help(in_file.write)
... Help on built-in function write:

write(...)
write(str) -> None. Write string str to file.

Note that due to buffering, flush() or close() may be needed before
the file on disk reflects the data written.
I've always loved cperciva's comments on this site. If he's involved, I can't believe it won't be a valuable session. I'd go if I was in Vancouver.
I don't disagree. :) That was why I quit it, in the first place.
Compiling Little Languages in Python (1998)
IronRuby is dead and not because the "people seem to have convinced themselves that MS is an enterprise-only shop".
Microsoft killed it.
MINI Scooter E Concept (video)
I don't mind the reference, but it seems like the title is often just "Gmail Creator" and not a mention of his name until the end of the first or second paragraph.
Please apologize for your stupidity.

I wish I had the gall to say this to people
Oni Apollo: Stratified JavaScript library
Do you want to know this? I mean, spoiler-wise?
For the uninitiated, the TLB is the thing that keeps your MMU hardware from having to trawl through the page directory in memory every time it accesses a virtual address; it's a cache, and you generally want to avoid flushing it.
Many feel the same way about the 'my shit doesn't smell' attitude coming from 37Signals, the _creators_ of RoR, not just a random user like in this case.
in the very early PHP3 days (around 1998), on the official german PHP mailing list, somebody once was comparing the ASP (no .NET back then) and PHP communities.

He said that if he needs help in PHP, somebody will explain the issue and solve it with them. If he needs help in ASP, he'll get back a price list.

It feels like this hasn't changed over the years.

While I agree that it's nice (and necessary) to be paid for your work, if the prevalent attitude is to not help unless in the form of paid consulting or a closed-source software component, a community can't grow because at that point it gets more advantageous to not share information, but sell it (and forbid the recipient from sharing it).

That's one of the big points the OP was lamenting and I agree.
Your numbers must be pretty outdated for Rails people (or maybe you don't recruit into well-paying gigs) if you think those figures are well above what we're making. I'd say most salaries are comparable to that.

And I think you're probably right for PHP and Java. The talent pool is saturated, so there's little "demand" for that sort of employee. "Oh you want $70k? Sorry, we've got 10 candidates who will take $40k. Bye!"

But outside of the markets you specify, I think the same situation exists for .NET developers. I know a good number of .NET devs who work in government contracting work and make about half what you say they should make. I know a few who work for product companies in towns other than the ones you mentioned that make about half also.

It's probably different markets, business models, but let's not act like .NET is some magical cornucopia of money that will shower you with many monetary blessings if you just sell out to it (this coming from someone who worked in .NET from its beta until right after 2.x came out).
Yes, if you want your corporate productivity app to be Office certified. The UI guidelines are pretty clear about how it should look and behave. First MS pushed the new CommonControls from IE on us, then there was an Office update, then XP came out with new UI elements, like rebars.

With every new release of Windows, Office or IE, the UI got tweaked. Pretty quickly you couldn't even use vanilla C++ anymore to embed the bulk of widgets/controls from Office to do basic stuff like showing spreadsheets in your app. You had to use COM.

I was a sole developer hoping to differentiate myself from other shareware authors by being on MS's good graces. Good grief! I didn't get peace of mind until I dropped them.
Of course. Drop me a line. I'd love to talk to you. We love talking to HN people.
Myopic viewpoints about code longevity tend to be driven by people that never worked on a project for more than 2 years. Few companies have business models that allow them to avoid the mess. It's not a problem for throw away projects or startups though.
This blog post was a waste of time to read, and it seems he should not be a developer. He can't seem to handle the job.

He's also ignorant. MVC2 is out. Use it over MVC. http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2010/03/11/asp-net-mv...

These types of developers should be administrators, not developers.
Ask HN: Review our appointment scheduling app, OpenCal.com
Hi HN,

Our small team (2 designers, 1 dev) have been in a thought bubble for the past 1.5 years. Looking for some outside perspective on our recently launched, bootstrapped online appointment scheduling app:

http://opencal.com/

Basically it's like OpenTable for businesses that sell their time.

There's a free plan you can test out. Any marketing tips or feedback would be appreciated!
I used to do industrial controls, so let me give the unfamiliar a little background on these systems.

You have PLC's, (programmable logic controllers) often redundant sets of them for critical systems, that run the code that controls the facility. They are networked together via proprietary data networks with no internet involved. These units do not run windows, or any operating system usually. They have no USB ports, hard drives, or monitors. They are hardened against temperature, dust, and power fluctuations. Once the facility is running properly, the PLC's do everything. No human's need to make any decisions about facility operation.

However, sometimes, humans want to tweak a setpoint or override a safety interlock because they know a sensor is bad, or they want to run a certain automatic operation in manual, because something has changed in their process. For this, they have windows based graphics interfaces with pretty animated pictures of valves and motors and pumps and fans and reactors and pipes and ductwork, all of which change their state based on the status of the actual valve or motor or pump or fan. To do that, these windows based PC's are networked to the PLC's, to query them for state information. So nobody is "running a factory on windows". Think of these as terminals into your webserver. If you lose the terminal the webserver keeps on trucking. Also, just like terminals, you can have as many windows PC's as you want tied into the PLC network, so if you lose a couple, you still have others, in case there's something that you really don't want to lose visibility of.

At no point is this network tied to the internet, for obvious reasons. Usually, the drives are locked out on these systems using physical locks, so only engineering staff can load anything on them. USB is trickier, as I can imagine people hooking up legitimate devices such as sirens and flashing lights and even just speakers for audible alarms, all via USB, which exposes the USB ports to the operators.
Ask HN: Accepting credit cards as an intermediary
We're a European startup working on an online service selling coworking or flexible office space. We accept a payment from the person booking the workplace, and pass the money on (minus our cut) to the owner of the workplace. As users are mostly (small) businesses, we want to also accept credit cards (we have other debit options already in place). Because we have no control over the workplaces/desks, our terms of service dictate that we are not liable for damages due to things like missing services.

When applying for credit card processing the processor however wasn't too happy to see that we don't carry the liability on the service being sold, only in being an intermediary.

The main question here being: does anybody have examples of sites that do charge a credit card, yet are just an intermediary. Or does anybody have tips/suggestions?
This assumes that PCRE doesn't still contain memory corruption flaws, despite not being heavily tested, and being in effect a programming language interpreter. Tavis Ormandy found a couple serious problems a few years ago.

I'd just scrub the hell out of strings before passing them to a regex engine.
"There are probably a lot of 9-5ers who could have that switch flipped and go from code monkey to craftsmen, but they are stuck doing WebForms and have never really got bitten by the curiosity bug"

That's disingenuous bullshit. Hackers start a lot earlier than "fresh out of college". Disinterested coders aren't lost souls led astray by the ways of .Net, they're disinterested coders; they'd write Ruby with just as little interest.

"in the face of the stale joyless Microsoft platform."

Thanks for making it worse. The .Net community does labor under the illness/weight of the 9-5 couldn't-care-less crowd, but to turn a community problem into a gross stereotype of the framework only serves to demonstrate your unfamiliarity with .Net.
.Net is a rock solid, cool as hell and dynamic/evolving platform.

.Net is steered with a much heavier hand than most frameworks, but it makes huge, deliberate moves of evolution (Linq, var/dynamic, PLinq, IronPython/IronRuby/F#, constantly-evolving-C#-syntax).
Quite the contrary. Provided they have the right attitude, the programmers at Dispora just learned more on their first project than they ever would have if they hadn't shown it to anyone. That's one of the primary benefits of participating in open source software.
Yeah, Google, for the most part. You are not using an agile language, you are using some of the technology Google relies on, aren't you? ;-)

Google, and beyond it. You could easily have a case for Python: Nokia has made it available for Symbian, Microsoft endorses it via ActiveState, and so on.

My friends, if we want to be effective entrepreneurs, we must learn how to repackage things in a way customers will find attractive. A language can be just a technology, a framework, an application, and so on... whatever concerns your customers. There is no point in being strict about terminology, unless you are selling to savvy techies.
Sadly, a few issues:

- Requires iOS 4.1. For those of us who jailbreak, that's a showstopper (for now).

- No iPad support. See above. :)

- Requires an additional license on the ASA side. So, the "free" on the app listing is a bit misleading.
Facebook is the new homepage for a large number of people, and growing. What happens if Facebook sticks a web search box on it?
Similac Formula
When I learned about their "no service unless you sign this NDA" policy plus their attempts to blame their customers ("your machine room's environment isn't good enough") for this problem of their own making (see my other comment in this thread: they cut costs by omitting parity/ECC) I knew they were never going to make it in Big Iron. Sun's predecessors had defined an informal SLA or social contract that Sun just didn't recognize or was able to implement.

When I learned that their internal sales force total focus on big contracts made it literally impossible for most startups to buy medium levels of Sun kit (by and large no more than could be put on credit cards (Sun's "VARs" were supposed to handle this business but few did, clearly Joyent found an exception)) and that people were buying less desirable Dell servers simply because Dell would actually sell and deliver them (HP's sales function was also totally screwed up at this time) it became clear that no small company that was going to become big was going to do it on Sun hardware (SPARC or x86).

At that point it became crystal clear Sun was doomed; final straws included Sun cost cutting or otherwise screwing up their servers (details on request, but e.g. Joyent stopped buying Sun hardware while they continue to use Solaris).

If I want to get nasty, I'd have to wonder about how much Sun's recent (post Java 6) stewardship of Java made Oracle want retain Gosling and his peers.
LEAK: The HP Slate Running On Windows Hits YouTube
I hear this often, but I don't buy it. The implications [seems] to be that most startups either succeed or fail within 3 years.

Does anyone have proof of this?

My personal observation is that most companies will still be around and they'll neither be millionaires nor broke. In such a situation, the bizspark bait-n-switch can be significant.

Picking technology today on the basis that you'll either crash and burn or be hugely successful in 3 years seems like the sales pitch of a man who lends you free software for 3 years.
Unfortunately not, splice requires that one of the fds is a file. I want to forward data from a socket to another.
"The key issue is whether or not it's appropriate to publically air unsubstantiated, barside allegations of such a damaging nature without further evidence to back it up."

Well it is a tough call, I think most people cringed when they read the story and not in a bad way, more in a 'I can't believe I am reading this' sort of way.

This story, by its very nature, is difficult to verify further - unless he can get one of the VC's on the record I think it will remain the way it is now, that is, a strong allegation and a series of denials.

I was hoping for an update today from Arrington to keep this story rolling - right now it seems to be in a state of limbo.

If I was keeping score, I think it is a tie except for McClure losing a few points with his response (and I am familiar with his writing style, I just think his response jumped around the issue a lot)
When Gamers Grow Up To Be Programmers: Happy Birthday Nintendo
Doesn't HR list frameworks along with languages? Is JDK knowledge alone enough to be employed anywhere?
Thanks!
I figured out the open problem.. which was some sort of unicode issue where I had the file saved in c:\Users\.. and I guess when it hit the \U it generated an escape. that's a pretty weird function. So, moved the file and renamed and fixed that issue.

So, on my own, I had gotten as far as starting the for loop and I was unaware that 'line' actually gave me a workable string. What I was working on was this:

for line in in_file:
tx = in_file.readlines()

because my output needs to be pieces of the line instead of the whole line at a time-- so something like this:

for line in in_file:
tx = in_file.readlines()
out_file.write("<tr bgcolor="006699">"
out_file.write("<td>" + tx[1,10] + "</td>")
out_file.write("<td>" + tx[12, 23] + "</td>")

and so on.
Tecca, Best Buy’s Secret Weapon Against Competition
OT, but here:

http://clgtk2.wordpress.com/2010/09/16/related-project-sbcl-...
LinkedIn Makes It Second Acquisition: Business Reviews Company ChoiceVendor
HP Slate prototype caught in the wild, booted to Windows 7
If shit hits the fan in the .NET stack for a big enough corporate project, someone in the office can phone/email MS and get support for their problem.

That's the canard, but it has seldom worked out that way for me. Whenever I've encountered a problem that can be traced to a flaw in their products, the suggestion of calling for support is usually met with riotous laughter. (In other words, everybody says it's a selling-point of their stack, but nobody believes it.) Maybe none of our corporate projects have been "big enough". How big, exactly, does one have to be?

Edit: come to think of it, most of the problems I have seen have been things that would go against their lock-in strategies, and maybe that's where the laughter comes from. The solution is always something like waiting for hackers to reverse engineer something like NTLM, or Samba, or WINS, or exchange integration...
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How Craig Newmark Built A 20 Billion Pageview Behemoth
You're right that we don't know, but as I mentioned above it was McClure's post that tipped me because it confirmed most of what happen (McClure even said 'it's not that your post is wrong').

I can imagine a scenario where the VCs discussed agreeing not to out-bid each other in deals and to work together without actively knowing that what they were doing could be seen as a problem by others. In the TC article, the issue at the core here only came up because on of the VC's "started feeling uncomftable".

So it could turn out that they thought they were innocently discussing some of these points and were so caught up in themselves that nobody took a step back and analyzed the situation (which is why I think it was McClure - a relatively new 'vc' - was the person who tipped Arrington off and was the person who felt uncomfortable).
This is completely true and exactly the place I am stuck at. I have a product with major parts in RoR, that the business end user loves but the IT just won't let through. I have to now learn asp.net mvc and port everything over to it. I dread going through that.
Buy the printed book off amazon for 20 bucks. Personally, I'm not sold on the ebook experience for a number of reasons.
This is actually a very good rant because it is a huge problem. CMS skills are very tied to platform implementation. So if you are a Java guy you chose a Java CMS, if you are a PHP guy you chose a PHP CMS. Templates are done in proprietary formats when they could be done in HTML snippets.

I want a simple CMS that templates together static HTML (headers, footers, articles) and pushes them out as static HTML files on a web server. I overlay all of my dynamic content with a client side toolkit calling REST services, so I don't need a CMS to try to do dynamic content for me.

I don't care what language a CMS is implemented in but I should not have to use that language to put out a templated HTML site.

I currently use Alfresco a Java CMS because it allows me to compile the templates and to do a static export of HTML files, to my web server, but we still have to be diligent to not get any Java web ick (jsp, taglibs) that the CMS provided in our content.

What I really want is a server language independent CMS that puts together the static content for modern browser based applications. I don't want run-time dependencey that rely on my CMS being in production, I already have an application server, a database server and a web server, I don't need yet another point of failure in production and definitely one that tries to reproduce my application server poorly.
A local tech training company asked my boss to come in and be a part of a panel at a little conference they were holding. He came back with the impression that they teach a lot of how to code, maintain servers, etc, but nothing about version control, refactoring, test driven development, etc.

At my last job I sat in on a few interviews and we always asked them to do a few simple programming tasks, just to give us an idea of whether or not they knew anything at all. I felt kinda silly asking them to do really easy stuff, but the ones who could do it didn't mind at all, and the ones that couldn't...well I'm glad I asked.

When I interviewed for my current job the lead developer had me come in for a second interview and sit down for an hour or so and write a quick little Django application. Basic stuff, create an app with a login, file upload, list entries, etc. It gave me confidence knowing that I would be working with people who expected that I already know this.
Care = passion.
And passion is well known as one of the, if not the most important attribute for entrepeneurs. Or anyone wanting to do anything really.
You have to compare that to the other options.

Protomold starts at $1500, they have a different business but somewhat comparable.

Makerbot has some options for cheap, but you are still paying in the thousands.

Commercial rapid prototyping machines are tens of thousands and up.

Online CNC places charge roughly the same price as Shapeways for much simplier parts that I can make on a mill in a half hour.

So for net shape parts with fine detail in low quantities, shapeway has my business.

For larger quantities, I'm going to protomold.

I am unfamiliar with the details of Shapeways offerings, but it might be cheap enough that a company would not buy a rapid prototyping machine and prefer to just buy things through Shapeway and have them overnighted. If you don't do it that often, it might be worth it.
Are you participating in BizSpark to get the tools?
This. Right now, as a .NET developer myself, it is impossible to keep up with all the new frameworks that Microsoft are releasing.
The rest are probably working on Bing, seems like Microsoft has a really talent team there, given the relatively small inroads they have made into market share shows just how hard it is to compete.
Microsoft: "Blu-ray is Going To Be Passed By As a Format"
Meh, the three articles that interested me (bottom 3) are behind a paywall.
San Francisco was prevented for several years from making any bicycle-related improvements to any streets because of a lawsuit filed by Rob Anderson. The injunction has finally been lifted and the city is now working through the backlog of long-planned bike projects.
Part of me wants to accept the challenge as I have a simple game sketched-out but another part of knows that I'll end up with the ability to post an app to the app store and $25 poorer and no game to show for it.
I thought we established this a long time ago?

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000043.html