skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The success of the iTunes music store is huge impediment for Apple in video, tv, and books. Content owners look at the way Apple dominates the music retail business, and resolve to do anything rather than let another Apple service achieve near-monopoly status. The problem is that the results have been sucky and patchwork, with piracy the defacto winner.
It's actually really easy to do simple 2d graphics, you can probably learn how to draw 2d rects/circles/etc on the screen in 10 minutes.
What's up with this being an introductory course to Python? Shouldn't the experts be giving expert level instruction?

I understand the desire of programmers to start from ground zero, but come on. The internet is full of easy beginner tutorials. Bookstores are full of intermediate materials.

But there is a shortage of expert advice from experienced professionals. Let's see some of that!
Eric Schmidt: Forget Apple, Facebook, Bing's Our Biggest Problem
I wish I was amused. This is what you get when you conscript unwilling programmers into video advertising.

In programming, the difference between

5.times { say 'pizza' }

and

200.times { say 'pizza' }

is, what, an order of magnitude or so off. What's the big deal? Fix the bug later.

In advertising, the difference is astronomical. I'd say this is nearly unwatchable, and I'm a fan of quirky humor.
Where Realtime Worlds went wrong (3 part series)
Ok, so from the link faramarz posted - Try putting this into the text box & hitting "Save":

(1) Hello, world!
[Go Home](2)
[Go Elsewhere](3)
(2) You went home!
(3) You went elsewhere!

I've also found it'll take html links, though I haven't tried anything more complex.

It looks like the QR Code contains the whole script. The docs mention using it for step-by-step troubleshooting, etc - basically a self-contained instruction set for mobile devices. Not sure where the actual app for the phone is, though...
Because I have more HN karma than I need anyhow...

First, no. I'm not suggesting that he do that. I'm suggesting that it's an option on the table.

Different strokes for different folks. My primary income requires that I be able to secure large amounts of non-recourse debt, for example. A guy might have a wife who expects to be able to buy a house in the near future. Some may not care that the lawyer they hired worked 10-12 hours without getting paid. Others will. For some people $17k may take two years to pay back. Others, not so much. Some people just want to make good on their commitments if at all possible.

Not everyone takes the by-the-numbers view of debt (legitimate though it may be). Those who don't will consider you a deadbeat for walking. What's the cost of that? The answer is different for everyone, and counseling someone to consider the aftermath is just plain sensible.

And a serious question: Where can you get a merchant account for a new business that does not require a personal guarantee? I'd love to know.
And, by implication, Perl is not the hottest girl in the room?

(which I'd certainly agree with)
"Generate all" and "efficient" seems doomed at some level. Considering /[01]+/, there are clearly an exponential number of matches given some given max length.

The expression itself provides a nice summary of the generative space it implies. Perhaps for a particular application you could apply a kind of lazy generation. Say, given /[01]+/ it would first expand it into the subspaces of /0/, /1/, /0[01]+/, and /1[01]+/. One of these branches could be expanded next depending on what was actually needed in the next step.
Ideas, some already mentioned:

- Android/iPhone app indeed seems like a must, maybe not even so much for ease (tho that would help), but for branding of Eat.ly as a legit product in the consumer's eyes.

- I wouldn't be into the health aspect personally, but I would be into the food porn aspect. It seems too complicated guessing calories etc. BUT maybe you can have two "modes". Turn on "Food Porn" and that is what you get, switch to "Health Porn" and that's what you get. I probably would peek at both.

- This is probably not doable, but if you could integrate menus (like menupages) and calorie counts from restaurants, people could take the picture, pick the food (like on foursquare you pick the venue) and post. Food numbers would come along.

- Single player mode would work better in health mode than food porn mode. You could have numbers to strive for, but then why would you post pictures really? You could just post food.

- Multi player mode could work for sexiest looking food, or for "I'd Eat That!" points. Maybe unlock a badge swarm style.

- Not to mix day job with side project, but it could be pretty sweet to integrate the Eat.ly app (if there will be one) with a "post to foursquare" option so that if you check in your foursquare status can have an eat.ly link to a picture.
The Marketing Challenge for Startups
There are two questions here: What's the situation with LA and What's the situation with Perl.

It's challenging to get people to move to LA. People who like LA are in LA. People outside of LA have a hard time seeing its charms given the lack of transportation structure other than giant freeway traffic jams and busses that come a few times a day and can take a half day to travel a few miles. The cost of living in a decent neighborhood is very high, yet most positions offer mid west style salary. Most developers will take a huge hit to their standard of living by accepting an LA job, so LA employers mostly try to recruit locally and even when they do recruit from out of town, few are willing to attend to basic hygiene issues such as paying for relocation costs.

On the Perl issue, I use Perl for a lot of things because it is very fast to code in and to execute. I find both C and assembler easier to understand than trying to read a complex regular expression in perl or decipher data structures in perl that use pointers due to a syntax that is still unintuitive after a decade of use. Regular expressions probably can't be simplified since they are their own very dense language, but the pointer syntax could be improved a lot. Perl code that creates classes and objects is quite hard.

Coding in Perl can be a challenge and Perl is so large that all of us are expert at different things which means that almost every single piece of new perl code I see is like having to learn a new language.

I have just "dealt with it" all this time, but it's possible, given this post about LA, that fewer developers are willing to deal with the overhead of learning Perl given that for simple sites PHP can be more efficient for them, and for system scripts things like python have gotten more traction.
I don't quite understand this. Can't Python 2.5 and 2.6 run scripts that were written for 2.4?
sigh... yeah I need to take that project back to life. The iPhone app is still alive but the site was put on hold because we didn't have enough resources.
Simply click the live preview (http://codecanyon.net/item/fototag/full_screen_preview/12303...)
I guess last time I checked they had problems with the favorites
The Romantic Scholar: A New Approach to Student Life
I suspect you're referring more to visual design, correct? If you mean design in the broader sense then comparing "Professional" design with "Non-Professional" is like asking if you can test the difference between a product made by someone who knows how to build a product versus someone who doesn't. Anyone building a product is, in fact, designing. Whether they are good at it is another thing entirely. Design is combination of "how things work" and "how things look" (and I'd even argue the latter is still a child of the former).

Visual design as decoration is probably less effective, and I think you'll get a lot of that with "Unprofessional" designers. Visual design as a way to amplify/enhance existing well-designed interactions is definitely effective (i.e. strong button affordance, good use of color to convey meaning, etc). This is the type of output you'll get with a "Professional" designer.

Philosophy aside, I think you'd probably do better with qualitative testing. Do people tend to complete tasks easier if the action being tested "looks" easier? Does the brand identity match the audience you're targeting? Are your design patterns consistent across the site? Etc, etc. It's certainly a bit more nebulous but I think with the right questions you could certainly use A/B testing to answer some of these things.
I thought the complaint was that he didn't free what he malloced. On second look, yes, that's not the kind of code I want to see anywhere, pedagogical or not.
One advantage to outsourcing is that it forces your to compartmentalize different portions of the project. For example. Having one group develop the server side software of your application and another group develop the frontend, you are forced to provide a solid black box (possibly through a REST api or something of the sort) to your frontend team. That means documentation (in some form) and it forces your to stick to good coding practices.
"I know exactly why I read newspapers"

Then I assume you read Japanese newspapers, which makes me curious, which one(s)?

Asked because I never quite got to the level of Japanese newspaper reading, I'm curious about which Japanese papers are any good, and wonder how they're different from American papers.
The grandparent comment links version 0.1 of the book, get the current version (0.5 as of now) from the book's website at http://learnpythonthehardway.org/

(I found that out in the process of attempting to report an error in version 0.1 - it's already fixed in 0.5, and 0.5 is 4x longer.)
Not a bad mix!
Well it's very clean and easy to use. Are you planning to enable different tag colours?
Bill Gates, Hero.
The biggest issue I see in all honesty, is that as of now, itunes fails completely in terms of user experience when you try to find and buy anything.

itunes is rife with things that make it HARD to buy anything.

The user flow goes something like:

-Wait for itunes to load

-type in your password

-tell it you don't want to turn on feature x or y

-click itunes store

-type something in the search box

-wait while the store freezes for 5-10 seconds

-click on what you wanted

-click on the season you wanted

-find the episode, realize you don't want the HD version

-hunt for the small link to the SD version because itunes
decieds for you that you must want to pay more and get the HD version

-re-find the SD version, click 'buy'

-re login in because for some reason it asks you twice

-click the 'yes I really want to buy this popup'

-get hit with a new terms of service that you must agree to

-realize that your download hasn't actually resumed now
that you've agreed to the TOS

-re-find the episode and click buy once again

-re-click the 'yes I want to buy this' button

-hunt up the 'downloads' link on the left

-find the item that you want to watch, get hit with another
popup talking about how downloaded items will show up here or there when they are done downloading.

-Double click the item you want to see

-hunt for the hidden-till-you-mouse-over-it button to expand the show to full screen

Don't get me wrong I love Apple, I sing praises for them all the time, but I know they can do way better than this.

Compare this to the zune market on xbox:

-Load the market
-search
-click buy
-click play
For the most part yes, but there are minor incompatibilities. New keywords have been introduced, and if you used those keywords as names in your app...
humans are hierarchical creatures, but that doesn't mean that rankism is acceptable. "might is not right".
Whatever he was arrested for looks like it was worth it.
To me Bing sounds too much like "bling". Does anyone else have that silly word association stuck in their head?
More generally it's been my experience that Python is more broadly used than Perl in the tech-heavy industries around LA.

Python is used heavily in the animation and post-production houses around Hollywood/Burbank (e.g., Dreamworks, Sony) and NumPy is popular in finance.
The same thing could be said of COBOL. ;)
Apparently, it was for driving under the influence of a flowery shirt.
If you'd like to read an excellent Harlan Ellison story, I would suggest http://www.esquire.com/features/ESQ1003-OCT_SINATRA_rev_
i would actually like the analogy continued.. i'm mobile and i find it to be informative about various US cities.
On a whim I tried psd2html because I was under a crunch, and guess what? The quality of the markup was fantastic, so now I use them often.
It's true. The difference is Perl is still technically competitive (or better) than the existing alternatives. It's just not considered cool anymore.
Seriously ? Too much free time ?
Curious: you think it's better to crash attempting to use a NULL pointer? If so, why is that better than checking for the NULL?
Legacy Admissions: Affirmative Action for the Rich?
There are also recent versions for iOS, Xbox 360 and Windows.
Best article ever? I bet if someone mass produced those glasses...I have my first YCombinator idea!
How did he respond?
We're reworking our GUI tools in it.

Once it is really stable, we plan on provide a pile of canned triggers (email notification of commits, other workflow stuff) as part of our commercial product.

And we have some plans for future products where L will be the glue that holds them together. An example would be a generic importer $SCM => BitKeeper written in L and shipped as source so that if you have some oddball SCM that we don't understand you can do your own importer.

But the main point is to redo our guis. We're still playing around but this is an example - not polished yet but not as sucky as some stuff we've done in the past: http://bitmover.com/lm/explorer-l.gif
Jade Templates Introspection
I think my oldest was reading George R. R. Martin by age twelve (but I could be a year or two off), on the recommendation of a friend who is somewhat younger, and my second son, who is only just now a teenager, has read some of those books. I have not read anything by him.

On my part, I read the nonfiction book Treblinka by Jean-Francois Steiner

http://www.amazon.com/Treblinka-Jean-Francois-Steiner/dp/045...

by no older than age ten, and no one would describe that as children's literature. (I reread parts of it a few years ago just to check if what I remembered about how graphic the violence in it is was accurate--yes, that is a true book with very grim details about a Nazi death camp.) Children deal with book content on their own terms. I didn't finish Orwell's 1984, which my dad had in the house, until my third attempt (thirteen-going-on-fourteen), because I found that very disturbing, and I still found 1984 disturbing when I reread it last year. Some great literature just isn't child-friendly, fiction or nonfiction, but some of it is well worth reading even during childhood.
Don't Think Too Much, Just Run
I seem to vaguely remember Pirates of Silicon Valley portraying it as a large speeding offense in a really expensive sports car. But they probably sexed it up quite a bit from the truth...
Don't laugh. Consist Software in Germany is training new people on COBOL because they still have a solid demand for maintenance. Those billions of lines ain't going away any time before the last trump sounds.
Kaspersky: Stuxnet is a new weapon that will lead to a cyber arms race.
I'm repeating myself, but Planet Money's podcast is genuinely very good. It was spun out as it's own entity after an episode of This American Life about the financial crisis got really good feedback.

They explain some fairly complicated financial stuff in an easy to understand way, without dumbing it down. They have lots of good, heavy-hitting guests on.

Go subscribe to the podcast. It's free:

http://www.npr.org/rss/podcast/podcast_detail.php?siteId=944...
"Rock that Body" by the Black Eyed Peas.
Listen for clear, intelligible lyrics over the powerful, persistent bass beat.

Good luck with that, no matter how expensive your setup is.
Yes, back when they were using an RDBMS they said that once they had moved over fully to Cassandra, the 3,200 limit was going to be lifted. Someone I know that works at Twitter now was always going on about Twitter archiving and had written Python scripts for backing tweets up... So there might be some hope.

Keep on banging on at Twitter about it as users. It is your data, so demand it back from Twitter!
In general, economics tells us that if a commodity is not being sold, its price point is incorrect. An unfilled job is a job that is being priced too low.
I also started looking at functional languages recently. I started with lisp (the free book) then moved to clojure (since it is lispy and probably may a better future (just a guess - i am no expert on functional languages - so no flames please.)

Just curious what is so nice / difficult about Haskell?
One of my clients is government-funded and can get into trouble if they have licensing issues with their software. Their employees, meanwhile, have a tendency to not fully review the EULAs for software they download. For that and other reasons, we're about to revoke admin privileges on their workstations.

This would pretty much circumvent that.

So, yeah. I can see how IT managers might not be looking forward to this. (But, that's their job.)
Go for it. Just keep it very clean: absolutely no joke about "I could get you the specs of the next product."

Be ready for the word to get out and for your current employer to eventually find out that you talked.
Actually I would argue than in the niche of batch record processing on mainframes COBOL still very technically competitive. Unfortunately, unlike Perl, batch record processing on mainframes is essentially the only niche COBOL is suited for...
The software it targets:

SIMATIC WinCC SCADA

http://www.automation.siemens.com/mcms/human-machine-interfa...
Yeah, Python is my Blub. I know I should learn stuff like Haskell and Clojure, but I just haven't come across any cases where it's more than a minor inconvenience to make Python do what I need.
That's an interesting point. Here we are on "Hacker News" after all. I wonder if this site's name draws in the dishonest.
it's not practical to get the consent of all the shareholders

Well, you get that when they buy the security. "By signing, you agree to accept..."

Except unlike for DVDs, this sort of thing is actually legally binding. Part of the whole subprime crisis was that nobody actually read these things, and they were caught by surprise when conditions changed. ("If 3 people default on their loans, your 50 billion investment is worthless." That's kind of bad when it's your own money, but really bad when you borrowed those 50 billion from someone else. Hence, a recession.)
In the case of Firefox, I don't even want an installer. I like the OS X install process for Firefox (and many other apps): copy Firefox.app to /Applications. That's it.
I highly recommend getting in touch with HN user skmurphy for this if you want to gather information from specific clients. It's one of his company's specialties, and his rates are quite fair.
http://github.com/scrod/nv/blob/master/License.txt

You wanted a mac client and you wanted tags.

You settled on a web interface "replacement".

Somehow I think the itch will return soon.

When it does, you can just fork Notational Velocity, add books/tags/whatever, make it sync with a web app, and get back in business!
Congrats on supporting back-references :)

Hint: Try using "1(0+)1\1" or "([a-zA-Z]+)\1" for some nifty examples of things that technically aren't possible with true regular expressions, but are supported by enhanced regex engines like Perl/PCRE.

Edit: too bad it only works with one back reference, eg, adding \2 apparently breaks everything, returning no matches and no code.

Edit2: after more playing, it seems that using \3 works as a backref for the second matching group... try "(a+)(b+)\1\3"...
although everyone writes beautiful maintainable Perl code, everyone else's Perl code is horrific.

I do not buy this. I've maintained plenty of good Perl written by plenty of other programmers. I've seen bad Perl as well, but I've generally believed that the same developers would have produced bad code in other languages. I believe that the experienced developers I've worked with would generally say the same. From what they've said, they've categorized more of mine on the good side than the bad.

I admit that there are occasionally cases where very good code is very difficult to read. Those cases are very rare, but not entirely non-existent. On those occasions I've been glad that Perl gave me the rope to hang myself. However if you find yourself in this position on a routine basis, you should ask what you are doing wrong. Because that shouldn't happen. Really.

(Note, I'm not a Perl developer at the moment, but I was for 11 years. I've never considered myself a Perl zealot.)
I seem to recall a race with large construction vehicles.
Colbert Testimony Before Congress (House Subcommittee)
This submission is borderline not hacker newsworthy, but in the end I believe that the vast majority of HNers would derive some sort of utility from watching this video.

HN: If you feel it oversteps the boundary of what should and should not go on this website then please delete.
i believe you just described https://irccloud.com/
This submission is borderline not hacker newsworthy, but I thought that enough HNers would derive some sort of utility from watching this video for it to at least give it a shot.

HN: If you feel it oversteps the boundary of what should and should not go on this website then please delete. I'm relatively new to the community and could use a warning if that is indeed the case.
"The problem is that Java open source upstream projects do not really release code"

Wait what... If projects do not release source which you can modify, build and repackage, does it really deserve to be called open source project?

And I thought also that integrating different projects was distributions main task. Isn't that exactly what he is talking about? Distros like Debian already backport massive amounts of code in a lifetime of a relase to get all stuff working with their specific versions. Does Java really differ that much?
I2P doesn't work very well as outproxy to surf the regular Internet. There's just one outproxy as far as I know.

Tor (http://tor.eff.org) is built to work mainly as an outproxy, but depending of what outproxy you land in, you might hit a wall: the Great Chinese Firewall, the censorship in Australia, etc.

A better alternative seems to be a VPN from IPREDator (https://www.ipredator.se/?lang=en), by The Pirate Bay folks, so your traffic gets routed to Sweeden, where there is no censorship (yet). IPREDator costs €5 a month.
Bookmarked. I had an immediate use for this, and your application filled it beautifully.
I've been there: my first job out of university in 1996 was re-writing a COBOL program that was originally written in 1972, and I'd bet it hasn't changed much since then. 24 four years between re-writes sounds about right on the COBOL timescale.
Digg (and it's traffic) May be Down but it's not Out
A month ago, popular news aggregator Digg underwent a redesign that many describe as disastrous. Now, despite bad press, site bugs, and a traffic collapse, the company is trying to put a good face on its current state. It sent letters to publishers this week in an attempt to calm them during what many say is a drop in referral traffic.
Facebook is the cancer of the Internet
As the great warrior-poet Jay-Z once said: "on to the next one, on to the next."
IMDb.com (a subsidiary of Amazon.com) has an office in Sherman Oaks and we are definitely looking for experienced Perl developers. If you are interested please send us an email at careers@imdb.com
WakeMate: Boxes & Bugs
That's what I remember from a biography or autobiography I read, but it has been a while...