skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
curious as to why the date shows as Oct 1? Is something to do with the mag?
I was that same .NET dev... only I was making $110K. Why did I give it up? The fact that I was forced to work on CRAP every single day. I died a little bit inside every single time I looked at my work and realized it was basically fucking bullshit. I am much happier now as an entrepreneur... and in the end, isn't that all that matters?
Their sign up page required me to watch a video in order to get the security code. While the code came up a couple of seconds into the video, I still dislike the thought of having to watch and wait for ads to somehow contribute to a website (be it through comments, sign ups, etc).
A site called Voped (still exists, just seems to be doing platform sales now) tried something very similar a few years ago. Videos were longer, and not strictly focused on opinions, but very similar.
If you sleep 8 hours/day, that leaves you with 112 waking hours/week. After work, 1-2 hours of sports a day, you've still got about 50 hours/week.

You can't devote even 2% of that time to building a portfolio and helping possible future employers to evaluate your skills?
Any change one can get to see the source? I am not really happy installing stuff from random locations on the internet and give it my password (no offence, just a rule of tomb).
After a few false starts with emacs as an IDE I finally learned it via other uses.

I recommend using Emacs for a more simple task. I started reading my mail via Wanderlust (wl-beta package on debian) and using ERC to connect to freenode (Now running rcirc.)

I know how irc works so my attention wasn't split too much and I was able to pick up the emacs stuff quickly. Now I've expanded it to be my python IDE.
I'm usually happy to help out friends with one-off requests, but it depends on the nature of it... or rather I should say, if I'm doing it for free / on the cheap, how much of an inconvenience is it?

I won't ask much of anything for quick requests or advice. If I'm at a good friend's place helping them on their machine, I might just want their company to shoot the breeze or have a beer with while waiting for Spybot et. al. to finish. Usually dinner's good enough since it means I don't have to expend any money or effort for it, and redirect it toward something relatively simple for me.

I have one neighbor who, under normal circumstances, I would have a hard time agreeing to help for free, but given that he and his construction company helped build our house(along with the fact that we trade wine / honey, and he helps us with other favors), it's something I'm more than willing to deal with. It helps that he generally listens to my advice too(i.e. back up stuff, don't use IE, etc.).

On the other hand, I have a friend who I'm just about through with trying to help, though. He has frequently has numerous problems with spyware that infects his machine, and will ignore my advice despite discussing it at length for 30 minutes or more, only to have the same problems arise again several months later. I've even suggested(and even gave a burned copy of) Ubuntu 9 for his mother who "only goes on the internet and uses MS Office" but declined to use it because "he didn't know how to install it"-he didn't care that I could've walked him through it or that it was even easier than Windows... "nope, not Windows, won't do it."
Gigantic spider's web discovered in Madagascar
> Imagine a TV show about your favorite hobby, no matter if that is cooking, cars, technology or whatever. You wouldn't watch that show unless it had a lot of humans in it, preferably attractive ones, showing their faces.

Except I love "how it's made" type of show, and don't really care about the people involved. Put halloween masks on them all, and I'd still watch.
Other peoples' software will always be "crap" while software you wrote yourself will seem better. Joel Spolsky: "There's a subtle reason that programmers always want to throw away the code and start over. The reason is that they think the old code is a mess. And here is the interesting observation: they are probably wrong. The reason that they think the old code is a mess is because of a cardinal, fundamental law of programming: It’s harder to read code than to write it."

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html

(I do understand, though, that some software may legitimately be crap.)
And the unemployment rate for that group is 2% lower than the overall rate. This story hams up the emotional manipulation, but the statistics it presents make it look like this group is better off.
Even better would be to hook into the system's already existing Share intents, so that any app already on the phone set up to share information could be used to handle this. Eg, the Hard Copy app (excellent Instapaper app written by an HN member) hooks into that list, so I can save links to Instapaper from email, browser, etc.
As we are now discussing my current employer and boss's decisions third party -- and given the accessibility and permanency of the web -- all I am comfortable saying is that, in the long run, having stronger developers that throughly know their code-base can be a huge win.
Cool idea, but how does it work against spambots? That's the whole point of CAPTCHA. It's not supposed to be a place to add marketing copy. It's supposed to ensure actual humans are using your service. This seems like it's going to be incredibly simple to hack given that the letters are crisp and easily read. I do see that the example CAPTCHA "ads" differ from company to company, but there are still basically 3-4 plain text words in the graphic. If I were making a spambot, I would need to try submitting it 3-4 times until I find the word that works. Too easy...
> We don't have decades to wait and see how a language feature "plays out"

I think the difference of perspective comes from the different nature of the work Lisp is being used for.

If your job is to create the next version of Lisp, it makes sense to watch how that new feature of Clojure plays out.

On the other hand, if your job is to deliver a nice application to users who need it, you don't really care about how that feature will look 20 years from now - you use it if it makes your problem simpler to solve.

That said, I wish application developers were less susceptible to language/library/framework fashion. I dread to support (and enhance) Java apps that rely on a stack of frameworks like the developers were playing some buzzword bingo game with the product.
Captchas like these make me wonder if I'm a robot...

I was a big fan of this new captcha idea until the video.
Anybody that posits an idea as 'brilliant' should go and implement it themselves.
Sure, it makes sense if you are interested in that stuff. There is a wealth of material. More than a person can read in a lifetime. But it may be more important to hack the new stuff, otherwise you get sucked into that Lisp thing. Like me.
gist: replace
Entrepreneurialism In The Workplace
How to be effective if you're an creative spirit with an entrepreneurial mindset, but in the daily grind.
I... guess we disagree? I don't see what you're reading into the article, at all. As I read it he's clearly referring to long-named, psychoactive substances with every single use of "chemical". Anyway, not much point in arguing about that.

Your bringing up tryptophan is the classic example of what I'm talking about. Someone notices that turkey has tryptophan in it, tryptophan is psychoactive on paper, and suddenly the reason eating a big dinner makes you sleepy is because it's drugged. (Never mind that turkey doesn't have significantly more tryptophan than any other meat.)

The point is, as you note, there isn't a binary distinction. The difference is in dosage— is the amount of this thing that you actually encounter in your life enough to cause noticeable effects? If not, it may as well be inert. And nutmeg is a good example: the one chemical that the article does provide dosing on, and it turns out that it's basically impossible to get an actual psychoactive effect from it. I wonder what information about the actual concentrations of these "psychoactive chemicals" would reveal?
I don't think 9 out of 10 are doomed. I mean, yes may be 9 out of 10 startups fail but the founders do not. They add so much to their skills that they are easily hired by good companies (or may be successful startups) for good work.
For founders I believe it is a win-win situation !!!
One problem with this is that we don't want to see beautiful people giving their opinion on stuff - we want to see beautiful people who are doing stupid things (so that we can feel better about ourself) and/or who are of the attractive sex and dressed in as little as possible.
BSD license you code. Put a BSD header in all files in the common library. So long as the license precedes the date of the contract it cannot be argues that this code is their property as it existed before the contract and is already bound by the terms of a license that supersedes the contract.

Remember that BSD gives them rights to do as they please with that code though, they can distribute it sell it, etc. But it is a good license for this type of work, as they have no real (in business terms) restrictions.

You cannot however add to this library of code while on their engagement unless expressly permitted by the contract. It is a good idea to lay out what is in that library in the contract and the kind of items that can be added to the library while on engagement (e.g just bug fixes or generic routines).
IE = Browse safer? I don't think so. Anyway, I am not going to leave comments on sites, which wants to turn my attention on useless junk like ads.
Thanks! Nifty idea.
Impossible that @ChrisBrogan and I are BOTH right, so don't listen to us
I concede defeat. gluegadget's app is better than mine:
http://ifdefined.com/blog/post/A-Hacker-News-app-for-Android...
Yes, I agree, it can be. It very much depends on the circumstances though, for most companies rolling your own ORM, framework, javascript libraries, database and so on are simply not an option, they'll be hard pressed to keep up with the demands of running their business.

Great stuff can come from that though, for instance, Django.
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Too bad the founders owned less than 3%.
Do you change job every week?
Really? Almost everything I have read indicates that moderate consumption of alcohol (both beer and wine, dunno about spirits) has positive health effects. Heart disease, brain function, blood pressure, etc. all seem to benefit.
Sorry I don't mean to be cheeky, I seriously want to know what the application of this might be, can't see a real-world example.
The problem with evolution in general is that it doesn't select the best approaches, it selects the most popular ones. So if you ignore the current 'mutations', you're basically trust that the community will "do the right thing". Which I regard as rather optimistic (as is the assumption that it always did this in the past).
That's because only CL can go to 11 all the other Lisp can only go to 10. Unless you defmacro 10 to be 11

EDIT: I guess I have terrible humor ;p Moving it to reddit
Damn, that is both smart and evil (because the user can't ignore these kind of ads).

What can we do to make sure this product doesn't catch on?
Would be a fun community-driven open source project.
care to elaborate how it compares to other js templating frameworks? (ie. features, speed)
:(

It was a great source of inspiration though, thanks!
I'm proposing a form of help which is fairly cheap (some of the work is stuff the govt would pay for anyway) and has good incentives [1]. For this reason, basic jobs would be a great substitute for unemployment, welfare, etc.

Just because I generally want the government to do less doesn't mean that I don't want them to do things efficiently and with as few unwanted side effects as possible.

The fact that the USSR did it doesn't make it bad policy - that's the reverse Mussolini fallacy. It would also not be a bad thing to make the trains run on time.

[1] For comparison, unemployment insurance creates bad incentives. Rather than looking for work, the woman described in this article went on vacation while collecting unemployment. Replacing unemployment with a "basic jobs" program would prevent this.
Because the secure jobs are going to go away.

Customs officer? Governments will be facing increasing deficits in the future and will be looking for anything they can cut.

Manager in a bank? Automation is eating the jobs of bank tellers, and will also eat the jobs of people who manage bank tellers, and the jobs of people who manage them.

As for the $90k-salaried .NET developer, his company is about to be a victim of the recession, and the next job he gets is going to be $50k a year, no health insurance.

Pensions have disappeared for private sector workers in the past 30 years, and there's serious thinking about how to make them disappear for public sectors. And if anybody thinks they're going to retire comfortably on a defined-contribution plan, they've got a hole in their head.
And better in a major way than my http://ihackernews.com and http://api.ihackernews.com, in that authentication is done locally on the device.

Good work gluegadget!
I'm surprised the pathetic Toronto TTC subway made its way to the list. For a city of its size it could really enjoy a more intricate subway system. There are buses and trams here indeed but they get stuck the traffic just like every other vehicle during the rush hour.
Yes, Java-Batteries -- and all the cognitive dissonance that implies.
Just left the front page: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1706030
After 20 years working as an office flunky for Boeing, I'd take a vacation, too...
Valid concern.

I'll release the code as soon as I found sometime cleaning up the code, and commenting it.
agree with you ryanmcgreal but i liked the core message of the article--thought it had value--most hbr articles read similar
another vote for tarsnap - can't complain really. i knocked up a simple Haskell app to manage the process (I'm learning Haskell, so comments and suggestions welcome) if you're interested @ http://github.com/irv/tarsnap-backup
Perl, Python and Ruby all have outstanding communities.

Would you care to argue that the Lisp community is better than any of these?
It's a free upgrade from warm standby, whereas SR requires a little more configuration. A good SR cluster also requires that log archiving (warm/hot standby) be set up in case the stream gets behind, otherwise you're at the mercy of whatever happens to be in the master's xlog.
> If you want to be a non-awkward geek, you can even be that :)

That's very important. You don't have to be socially inept to be a real geek. You can be both smart and comfortable with people.
Ask HN: What's Your Story?
How did you become interested in computers/technology?

For some of us, it was very early, possibly so early that it may be difficult to remember. For others, including myself, it was a more recent development.

I didn't become interested in computers until high school, when at that time I was so computer illiterate it was almost comical. In fact, it was a specific point in time, I remember, that my older brother made fun of me because I was constantly asking for his help. I decided to make a change and begin teaching myself about these amazing machines and all the power that they possess. After learning the general basics, I quickly picked up a book on C programming and worked my way through it. I now continue to personally develop my knowledge every day, using tools such as iTunesU and MIT OpenCourseWare to supplement my education.

I am now an undergraduate student studying computer science and enjoying every minute of it. So much so, that I wish I had decided to study electrical and/or computer engineering/physics so that I could have a more robust understanding of how these machines work at the hardware level.

The point of my question is to discover others' personal history regarding their venture into the constantly changing world of technology.

Please share.
I like it a lot also. I agree with getting it integrated with Google Apps. Let me get to it with one click from my gmail (without having to log in again) and I'm sold.
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> never attribute to insanity what can be explained by malice.

That's the point. Sociopaths are not insane: they are evil. They are smart and know what they are doing and what the consequences will be. They just don't care as long as they can get away with it and will do whatever it takes to get away with it. In their minds, they have a right to do it.

I am not sure about Ellison. He comes through as slightly more balanced than Gates=. But only slightly.
Worldmapper: The world as you've never seen it before
Well, I'm just going to wait and see how that entire new fangled computing thingy plays out over the coming centuries. If it's any good, it will become part of evolution and our genes will use it eventually ;-)
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I think it's analogous to property rental vs. ownership.
If you don't want to deal with all the hassle and risk of owning or if you don't have the capital to get started, rent.
Spoken as a homeowning employee.
We're detractors because we care...

I like Clojure, I've used it for a number of projects.
I've given money to rhickey. I think it is very promising.

It has a lot of good ideas and it is very refreshing to see people tackling current issues in a dialect of lisp. It is also nice to see a lisp with market traction.

That said, there are a lot of things that are 'unproven' about it.

It isn't clear that shared state immutability and transactions are 'the way' to tackle concurrency.

It isn't clear that Clojure's macros are really better than Common Lisp's macros.

It isn't clear that we really want to be tied to the JVM/NET architecture.

(Or that the concessions made to do so are reasonable... stack traces, tco).

I think I could go on if I wanted to.

A large number of features implemented in Clojure are still research topics...

It grates me when proponents of Clojure tout it as 'a modern dialect of lisp,' implicitly asserting that other lisps are in some way decrepit, aging relics from the 80s.

The truth is that Clojure is modern compared to almost ANY programming language, calling it 'a modern dialect of lisp,' while potentially true, is doing a disservice to Clojure, as well as to other lisps which are under active development.
Tell HN NYC: Hackers & Founders NYC Meetup #16, This Thursday (9/23)
I bought my safety razor at a yard sale for one dollar, then ordered 100 blades from Amazon for $17. I get a great shave in the shower using an ordinary bar of Ivory soap. I'll go weeks on one blade, so I consider it an amazing investment compared to the poor value of buying disposables.
IIRC that happier people tend to (unrealistically) personalize successes and externalize failures. I.e. if it worked it was because I did it, if it didn't work then everything else conspired against it.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depressive_realism
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I've met plenty of people who have to work two (sometimes, even three) jobs just to make ends meet. They work non-stop, exposed to the elements, doing manual labor - all to make ends meet.

The guy sits in front of his computer all day, blasting music.

As a developer, I realize sitting in front of a computer IS work. But, it's not hard work...
Oh, thanks for clarifying that, I thought ParallelArray was part of it.
And for posterity, Mach-O http://www.osxbook.com/blog/2009/03/15/crafting-a-tiny-mach-...
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I come from an entrepreneurial family: my mother, father, stepfather, and stepmother all run businesses of some kind, and their parents before them.

The recurring thread I see is this: its not about money, its about competing and winning. Money is just a side effect that comes from that level of competitiveness.

I have the same gift/curse. I expect to be rich, but I also don't really care about money. Its about the competition.
Well, I think the humor was appropriate. This isn't a corporate board meeting, it's supposed to be a community of developers and entrepreneurs. All communities need inside jokes (among other things) to help create a sense of cohesion.
There are things that guy could do with his money that would give him tax breaks - like using that excess wealth to create jobs, donate to charities, etc.

If his burn rate is $500k a year then he's not financially any different from anyone else who's burning theorugh their paycheck - he's just got different hobbies - he's not contributing more meaningfully to society or anything like that - so why not higher taxes?
> But the fact is that despite its lack of mature tools, Clojure is more newbie-friendly than CL.

As a newbie, I have to disagree. Clojure has a ton of syntax to get used to, and to make it useful, you have to learn all the neat Java libraries on top of it. I found more resources and nice explanations for aspects of CL, and when I compare it against Clojure, I find I miss a lot of the nice functions and tools for CL.

Here is a fun newbie point on it: In the first hour of playing with CL, I learned how to debug it. Not so with Clojure. Trace? Step? Maybe I should be using harder-to-find online tutorials for Clojure?

Anyway, it boils down to opinion as to what is "easier". I was looking for something with batteries included that would compile to a distributable executable and be super flexible; CL fit the bill with the sbcl implementation. It successfully pulled me away from other fun languages, like Erlang.
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Native English speaker tip -- 'stellar' means 'good' rather than 'high,' despite the star connotation.
If you don't want them to catch on, refuse to sign up to any service that uses them. Simple.
I know HN discourages these kinds of meta-discussions, and not to denigrate Sirupsen's post in any way, but how did this get so many upvotes? (Currently 16 in 45 minutes, with only one comment.)

This post basically says: Bash, VIM, Dropbox. Not a bad set of recommendations, but I'm surprised this falls under the heading of "anything good hackers would find interesting".
Is it more 'newbie' friendly? The tools are bare bones. Make a syntax error and you get a Java error. On error you are thrown to the top level. Open the debugger and you see Java internals. On Emacs it reuses CL's SLIME, which is not known to be newbie friendly. Otherwise one has to use a Java IDE, which are not known for their interactivity.

What does it make Newbie friendly? I was just seeing a video of Robert C Martin explaining Clojure - he looks like a Lisp newbie to me. Half of the time he was spending in a primitive REPL in a Terminal. Is that Newbie friendly? Maybe because one does not get distracted with slightly better REPLs, a SLIME REPL or even one of the other advanced REPLs? Then he was using Intellij. Is that more Newbie friendly? Perhaps to developers coming from Java?

I wonder how many of you are using Clojure like a Lisp (with its interactive development tools), and how many are using it like typical scripting language?

Anyway, I expect Clojure to improve on that front over time. But, as time goes by and the compiler is written in Clojure, the REPL gets improved, it has some better error handling, it gets real error messages, etc etc. ... it then will no longer be the sexy small Lisp which you have seen grow up. It will be a Lisp implementation like many others with all its complexity.