skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That may have been true prior to 1987, however since then Perl has largely superseded sed and awk.
Scala effectively has these kinds of type declarations on every function. This article itself proves the point. Take out the :static and type decls and see.
Key takeaways from Mixergy Interview with RunKeeper's founder Jason Jacobs
Got 4880 points for blowing up current HN new links.
Maybe write the many to many relations in a background job/queue, and push the result back to the user when they're synced. Granted, long polling will take a number of connections, but the socket server won't take down your front facing service.

Great to see that MongoDB turned out to be a quick solution, but it seems that the writes could have just been timed more effectively.

Thanks for the insight!
Advanced Rails Documentation
I'm looking for expressions of interest in advanced documentation for Ruby on Rails.

There's a plethora of information for beginners-intermediates, but a desolate wasteland for those who are tending more towards the advanced stages.

What would you like to see documented?
Competing aggressively on price, more often than not, attracts a certain type of client. If you're taking the cheap option now, you'll often fight over every cent going forward and be pretty miserable to work with.

If someone is desperate for work, they might need to make sacrifices to keep busy. I'm not, so I try not to.
It's actually worse than that. If you know the URL of the photo you can regenerate the url of the page it is on (and possibly see the gallery it is in) and the url of the profile it came from.
I think the best move by FB was buying FriendFeed in Aug '09 a few years after knocking back Yahoo and making Bret Taylor CTO and having Paul Bucheit cultivate an engineering culture. I was surprised by this, because Taylor originally stated he wanted FF to grow into a self-sustaining company. If FB didn't have the pockets to do this, FB wouldn't be nearly as successful as it is today. Today FB is impressively fast, were Tornado + HipHop the keys for this to happen?

If Twitter fixed its UI and fail whales a few years ago, it'd be much bigger today. PG a year or two ago spoke of Twitter as a protocol: yet still I think this hasn't manifested as it's still only used at the presentation layer. It should have or should still look into this path.

Increasingly I'm seeing outcomes determined by the smarts of the CEO who end up having to think for themselves, because eventually they get surrounded by Yes-people. I see a deficit at Google with Eric Schmidt, although I can't say I've met him, Google needs a Jobs at this point. FB just need to put in a search engine (Bing?,) to stop losing users to Google.

If I may continue, the FF acquisition basically allowed FB to compete with Twitter (and not lose users to it.) It was Twitter that undermined Digg, because sharing with people you know is more fun than with sharing people you don't know.

The lessons in strategy here with Digg, Facebook, (and also Yahoo's non-acquisition by MS) is that if a potential acquirer comes to you having in mind that your business be acquired to spearhead or enable massive growth of their own, you say no. Or rather, if they're more (or even less) excited about your business than you are, sell unless you can obtain that excitement somehow, perhaps by acquiring yourself.
As someone familiar with Java/Scala but not Clojure, what exactly do those type hints do? Just prevent it from autoboxing the primitives? Avoid excessive reflection? Can this be done for other types or just int/long/float/etc?
I read and swim (or get some exercise in general).
Thanks for this suggestion, I will be building something similar :)
Accounting for time dilation if we can get up to 0.999c(hey i dont know if we can ) it should take less than a year. http://www.1728.com/reltivty.htm
Or, as smoody pointed out below, force someone to do it at gunpoint.
Facebook is definitely this generation's Mircosoft. Another great white shark in the ocean of the web.
Yeah that's it exactly. You never show

python script.py only two_args

Just the traceback. It might be confusing to a newbie.
My poor old laptop won't run 7; it has a hard enough time keeping up with XP. And it's behind a careful firewall at my router - well, except when I travel.

My desktop runs 7 and I love it, but it's a much newer machine.
It avoids reflection, and instanceof checks.
I keep bees. No, really. I play computer games, I go camping, and I keep bees.
Web Site Design and Development for Lawyers
BizLegal, a division of Businessentials, Inc., is a leader in website design and development for the legal industry.
Desktop dictatorship: Corporate Australia still prefers Internet Explorer
A Simple Swipe on a Phone, and You’re Paid
Actually, I don't think those are the primary reasons, as I believe corporations pay taxes where their HQ is and other operations are, not where they incorporated (or they would just incorporate in one of the states with no corporate income tax). I think Delaware is popular because the laws are friendly to corporations and there's a lot of case law for precedent, so it's lower risk for possible litigation in the future.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delaware_General_Corporation_La...
run (although this amps you up, not winds you down)
play guitar (this could go either way)
Seth Roberts on Arithmetic and Butter
Cascadia Ruby Conf: Ruby Without Borders, Summer 2011
>most successful big-budget games earn orders of magnitude more.

They also cost orders of magnitude more to create. Also, at this rate it could possibly get to be a 100 million dollar title over its lifetime.
Given the ease of implementation of many of the feature requests I see on the django lists and the (seemingly) critical nature or large inconvenience described by the requestees there is an annoying lack of patches.

This is a problem that most OSS projects suffer from and I think the change in tack goes some way to addressing this problem. Certainly I am going to go and finish off my patches and start trying to get them accepted. I feel more confident that putting the work in is going to be worth my time as the processes are being improved to get them committed and I won't have to go on maintaining a fork forever and ever.
Usually I read a book or play StarCraft II/Civilization V/Halo Reach. Depends on whether I’ve come to hate technology that day or not. Cleaning stuff also helps me relax, but sometimes it just ends up becoming busy work.

Closing Colloquy and Skype helps too.
It's not that he made one of the best investments in history.

It's that he has one of the best investment processes.
5 Productive things geeks (or anyone) can do while commuting
My take away from this is to plan for traffic spikes from the start. You just never know when (if) you will suddenly get mentioned on a big blog or something.
To the extent that's actually true (and I'm not convinced it is, because Java can mean a few different things) that's largely because there's not a whole lot that's interesting or new in the Java Language compared to many others, and Java does not lend itself well to "cure heart disease in 20 lines of Python" style blog entries.

But the JVM is an important platform and Java is the native language. There are lots of interesting applications written in Java.
Oops, yep, 8 eggs. They say "unlimited" tilapia but I imagine the limit there is how much of it they're willing to eat!

The aquaculture idea is that wastes from the fish, and in this case the chickens, puts lots of plant nutrients in the water. Maybe not as much as pig waste water, I don't know.

200W doesn't sound like that much power...solar panels on the roof, where you can't grow crops anyway, and/or wind turbines could provide that. Those are local resources you can't otherwise use to produce food, sort of like exploiting another ecological niche.

Potatoes are certainly convenient and productive, though I wouldn't want to subsist on them alone. Some people are growing them in tall boxes for easy extraction, and I was startled to see how much they claimed to produce.

Re: 6000 lbs/year, that must be why they sell their stuff instead of eating it.

This has been very interesting.
Of course it matters, and the only person it matters to is Zuckerberg. I don't understand why anyone should tell an entrepreneur when they should sell and where the threshold is. Off the top of my head, I can't think of any huge, super-successful companies that sold early and became huge after the fact. I'm sure there are, but I can only think of the Googles, Microsofts, IBMs, Apples, etc. I'm sure there are examples, but when I think of super-huge companies, the founders didn't sell out early.
why are pageviews more important than visits, unique visitors or revenue?
Another way to think of it is that neither digg nor reddit are actually worth that much -- lots of traffic, yes, but no way to monetize it. Conde Nast might just be doing things right, financially, with regards to reddit.
Potentially Habitable Planet Discovered
Idiomatic Clojure tends to use Clojure's persistent data structures - you don't often create custom types, all of the core functions on those data structures are already pretty much as fast as possible. No need for ^:static or type decls.

The article also doesn't get into deftype/defrecord/protocols. In those cases you always get the fastest path of the platform. Again you can build things that have the same perf of the core data structures w/o resorting to ^:static or type decls.

So what exactly do you mean again by arbitrary code? Perhaps you meant numeric code - there ^:static and type decls help plenty. Perhaps you mean Java interop? Again sure.

Personally I think Clojure is really taking the dynamic, generic, and fast thing to a whole new level, w/o type-hinting of any kind.

EDIT: This isn't too say Clojure performance can't continue to improve. Scala's ability to use Java arrays of primitives in higher order operations is something I really, really want to see (and the the above is a big chunk of the work in that direction)
Also, I don't think QNX is the platform. For them QNX is the OS layer. But not the platform that you develop against. This is why the dev options are HTML5 and Flash. I bet the third API will be Java based. Like we are used to from RIM.
Ask HN: What bounce rate should my e-commerce site expect from organic search?
I have a straightforward niche e-commerce site selling multiple products.

As the number of visitors I get from search engines has increased, so has my bounce rate. I've worked for myself and others on various content-oriented sites, so I expected this, the more visitors I have the less qualified they are likely to be.

What I didn't expect is how high the bounce rate has climbed, it's currently in the 75 to 80% range, dipping down to 65% to 75% on a good day or good page.

I'm able to influence that slightly with various A/B tests and I'm pursuing that line of analysis, but this bounce rate is much higher than the bounce rate at the other sites I've worked with, both small and large. But I've never really operated a strict e-commerce site before.

What kind of bounce rate should I be expecting from organic search results? What's high? What's low?
Qwiki wins Techcrunch Disrupt SF
Exercise, cook, read (I read a lot), play Halo Reach, sex, meditate, spend time with friends, and read on-line material (what used to be called "surfing the web").
Umm, hello? Modest Mouse? Meth?

// nostalgic Portland ex-pat
Between the 3 kids and helping my wife with the housework I'm lucky to get any "me" time at all.

When I do I typically read, exercise, or play some minecraft or maybe something on kongregate.
This doesn't make any sense.

If you want your founder to swing for a long ball, you have to free him to do so. A partial payout means his utility curve looks a lot more like yours, which is a good thing.
His write up is far more suitable for the HN audience, has plenty of science, grains of salt and uses the very scientific word "probably" a lot (that isn't a joke).
Read.

Do it right though. Sit down in a comfortable chair. Turn off your computer so you're not constantly getting up and checking your email. Maybe turn on some music. Allocate a sufficient block of time, so you can become truly engrossed in your book.

Good fiction has a way of taking your mind elsewhere that no other medium can match. It's the most satisfying and fulfilling way to relax that I know of.

edit: minor grammar correction
Strangely, I like to code to relax. When I get stressed out working on something, I just switch to working on something more fun.
A lot of this scam-bait stuff is going way too far, and I can't help but wonder about the ire on behalf of all those 'innocent victims' out there.

In the classic 419 scam (and yes, there are other variants that don't imply quit the same level of corruption in the scammed): the offer is clearly drawn from money that some dictator has supposedly stolen from his own country. Trying to take part in this theft doesn't make you 'innocent', it makes you a smaller-scale, dumber, would-be crook.
EFF, Apache Software Foundation & MSFT Urge Supreme Court to Revise Patent Law
The most satisfying way I've found to relax and wind down is doing something completely unrelated to work that involves focus, and even better, a practiced skill. Watching a movie or reading a book can mostly take my mind off work, but it feels much better to do something where you can get in the zone. For me this is skateboarding, rock climbing, racquetball, or cooking. I imagine playing a musical instrument falls into this category as well.
It's not all that aggressive. If your intention is to effectively price out technology X (IE6), I can almost always beat your price by a good mile, and I'll make a point of it.

With that said, I don't do web development :-)
Walk in the woods.
Watch TV in a foreign language. There are lots of ways that this could be entertaining, and if done correctly you can pick up a language in your leisure time.
These days, I really enjoy removing the skins from chick peas. You soak them overnight, boil them for two hours, and then you can squeeze them out of their skins.

It's very repetitive and boring, and lets my mind drift. Plus you get smoother hummus if you remove the chick pea skins first.
I think it's fundamental. We don't go through our lives recursively. We do one thing, then we do another. When I was first starting writing ML, I found it convenient to assume my program already works, and then do the next step. I don't think this is something people are naturally very comfortable with doing.
Ask HN: WizeHive Gmail Breakthrough?
"We are pleased to share with you that if you are using GMail and using Google's Chrome Browser (Firefox version coming very soon), you can now manage your todo list and add new tasks to your todo list without ever leaving Gmail."

Has anyone used this? Any comments?
The 'unsinkable' Facebook. The Rise and The Fall.
This site is actually pretty sweet. That ripple effect is actually done with canvas. Pretty slick.

Type "derezzed" to hear another sound clip :)
Potentially habitable planets that have less mass than Earth does are inherently more difficult to detect, am I right?
The Testing Mindset
type-hinting Java objects to avoid reflection has been possible for some time now. What wasn't possible was for fns to take or return primitives w/o boxing. ^:static lets you do that. ^:static also allows the JVM to apply the most aggressive optimizations to your code - ^:static tells the JVM the code won't change - so callers of ^:static fns won't get the latest version if you redef them. The benefit being that with numeric code you'll often see an order of magnitude performance jump.

So a general strategy is to write your code as you normally would - def'ing redef'ing fns at will. Then when it works - declare the critical paths ^:static, and adding primitive type hints ^long, ^double if the code is numeric.
PDX Ignite, PDX Hack-a-thon, OSBridge, OSCon, etc

Not to mention all of the bicycling stuff that goes on. Being a vegan, there is an awesome vegan community here, with a potluck almost every weekend.

For example:

1. Portland Vegan Iron Chef, for example, went from an idea to an event with a venue that was too small for the number of people that wanted to attend within a matter of a couple of months. SupremeMasterTV even showed up to film it -- not that they are 'mainstream' or anything, but it wasn't just a couple of random people in their garage either.

2. Vegan Convergence went from just an idea that someone was kicking around (the idea that there were a ton of vegans in Portland that he didn't even know -- 'convergence' as in bringing all of the different groups together to expand social circles) to an event in the part w/ 150+ people responding as attending on Facebook (dunno how many actually showed up; there were a lot of people, but people tend to come and go at various times at these types of events).

I guess it just depends on the circles that you are in... I'm sure there are some people that describe <insert name of city> as 'sitting in the garage, drinkin some beer' because that's all they do.
Draw. Its nice when the refresh rate of what I'm looking at is how often I blink.
Read.

I do the same.
I would suggest you to read fiction books. It will relax your mind.

BUT, if you have friends, family or kids, I would suggest you to hang out with them, play with them.

It will make you more productive next day at work.

Try it for a month. It works. :)
100% agree with fiction book point.
How Long Will Your Solar Panels Produce Electricity?
As @DanielMahal wrote below, he plans to release the code tomorrow.. I can't wait to see what you guys can come up with! :)
A user’s guide to websites, part 1: If it wasn’t broken why fix it?
Taking a screenshot, then cropping it, is a fundamentally different process.

As one of the other commentors mentioned, the static url was a good way for him to share with his other mates, via chat, pictures of pretty girls.

Taking a screenshot, cropping it, saving it locally, then uploading it to some host, and then finally emailing or IMing the link. That is not a really easy process to share with his mates.

For clarification, my previous comment was directed at statictype's reply to djhworld:

"No amount of privacy code on FB's servers are going to be able to prevent that."

statictype referring to "that" as "They could just copy the photo and email that you."

By displaying the image in Flash, it eliminates the possibility of simply sending a URL, and instead, requires the process mentioned above.

No more sending your mate URLs of pretty girls.
I will make my standing recommendation for "The Trigger Point Therapy Workbook" now: http://www.amazon.com/Trigger-Point-Therapy-Workbook-Self-Tr...
It should be noted that they announced it at DevCon. Apart from keeping investors happy, the idea was to let the developers know that such a product is coming and to let them know the tools that they can use to develop for it. Its only slightly different from the WP7 announcement. I believe RIM is releasing (or has released) the SDK. The SDK definitely needed to be announced and provided to developers 5-6 months before product hits shelves so I dont see why other people have a problem with it.
I vividly remember this. I grew up in Lynchburg and one of my best friends' fathers was a professor at Lynchburg College. At the time this happened I was in my senior year of high school and completely immersed in the school's new computer lab (Wordperfect 5, Mosaic, Matlab, Pascal -- woohoo!). I went to hear Dr Nicely speak about the flaw and thought it was super-cool that this was happening in my [really boring] hometown -- thanks for dredging up history. :)
Not sure why you are hating on ideas to mitigate this from occuring.
Upvoted... for reminding me what it was like the time we blanched raw almonds and had to skin them. Totally boring, but immersive.
this is epic. I think you could make a business of this and sell these wood artifacts on ebay.
I remember this mostly because my boss at the time referred to Pentiums in the plural as "Pentia". "Pentia". Let that one sink in. He also was a chain smoker who would carry his ashtray and smokes into the machine room and then wonder why the big Power Challenge had mysterious SCSI bus problems. Good times.
That is surprisingly fun and addictive given that it's so simple...
Booze and board games (Dominion or Settlers mostly) with buddies.
Soak with a zip of lemon juice or vinegar and cook with a snip of Kombu seaweed and it'll take less time.
I would venture that if (as someone else suggested - I have no idea if its true) this developer will end up paying for healthcare as a fixed percentage of his income his healthcare would actually be substantially cheaper in the US.

Of course that doesn't necessarily extend to less successful developers.
The absolute best ideas are simple ones.

Complexity is often a mask for bullshit. Value from simplicity is huge – easy to pitch to anyone from investors to press to new hires to your family. It also makes the success conditions clear – "Am I accomplishing the simple thing I set out to do? No? Let's fix that."

The ultimate merit of simplicity means that roles are very, very clear and you don't need many people to make magic happen. The more people you add to a system, the larger the chance for complexity to creep in and ruin everything.

Which, incidentally, is what seems to have struck Digg.

If they'd stayed small and nimble, the size Kevin liked, they'd not be stuck in quicksand right now.
Read. a lot

Also, I picked up a musical instrument, I find my playing to be very relaxing, my girlfriend does not. :-p
One of the downsides, for me, is that I can end up 'out of it' until I actually finish the story, yet other times, I'll stop reading at a lull in the story, and never pick the book back up again, because I didn't stop at a point that was engrossing enough to pull me back into the storyline (e.g. Diamond Age).
Great questions.

Success is best explained by product x market. So you can have great novels that languish, and massive movies that are rubbish.

The idea of "what can be easily changed" is significant, and is the basis of Parnas' influential paper on information hiding: you hide the decisions that are likely to change, so when they are changed, their impact is isolated from the rest of the system. Decisions that are expected to change together are grouped together in modules: http://www.cs.umd.edu/class/spring2003/cmsc838p/Design/crite...
This is perhaps the most influential comp sci paper, and it's an interesting read; no maths IIRC, and pretty straightforward.

I think "raw materials vs. tools" is not as helpful as "what can be easily changed", because the materials/tools distinction can always be made arbitrary. eg: compiler vs. interpreter for the same language. One is a "tool", the other "raw material". A difference in performance (usually); but equal difficulty in changing them (you have to rewrite your code.)

A related question is: once you have modules, with fixed interfaces between them, what if you got it wrong (different decisions need to change) and you have to change the interfaces and modules? Because "what you think will change" is a prediction. It's a hunch, or if you like, guessing. Your hunches improve with experience, both in a specific domain, and in general; but you will always be guessing. Or you should be; because if you know the answer, you should have automated it, bought/reused a tool that automates it, or made a tool that automates it and started selling it/giving it away.

As I said: great questions. For learning, they really are more important than great answers.