skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Good enough" is a curious notion. I'm an advocate of "good enough" is good enough, but sometimes it can be quite tricky to decide when something is good enough. And if. Sometimes, you figure it out down the road; and you'll be in deep trouble if you find out it wasn't!

Anyhow, there have been many "good enough" languages — mostly, it depends on cultural factors. Latin is still present in today's traditional sciences (biology, medicine,) French is the language in arts and cuisine, Italian is dominant in music theory, Greek infests philosophy and logics, as does German, which also has a strong foothold in engineering and mathematics. And what do we learn from that? There is no one language. There cannot be one. At least, we haven't figured out a way.

Over time, dominant languages rise and fade. That's why I loved Firefly for incorporating Chinese :-D English will fade (most probably.) Also most probably, it will stay in the computing sector, just like Italian did in the music sector.

> there are more students taking SATs in China in ENGLISH than in the US+Britain

Yeah, that's like saying more Indians write Java code than Americans. What does it mean? Java is "good enough?" For some tasks, but not for all.

That Rome to WWW line of yours is quite eurocentric. Can't put my finger on it, but "American web pages" look different in Asia than they do in the West. The cultural values of ancient Rome had no real influence there — except you mean to imply Babbage influenced C#.

My knowledge of LISP doesn't go beyond programming-book examples. I somehow never got into it — I blame Haskell!. But you're certainly mistaken that language recognition is sequential. For all we know, it most likely isn't. And for Chinese, for example, it really definitely isn't. Reading a Chinese poem is reading backwards, across, down, and up at the same time in order to get the full meaning.

I don't get how LISP is closer to natural languages than to programming languages?

Anyhow, my take on the situation of the OP: if he stays in the sector he's in and doesn't move out before retirement, he's found his last language. Otherwise, different tasks and developments are going to force him to adapt. There is no one best language. We've been trying to find it for thousands of years, and it's been rather fruitless so far.
Nice to see trends. It would have been better if they had more numbers like gross per city or total number of users.

Its funny Fremont tops the list "Highest Spending Cities in the U.S" I can only think that there are more users from Fremont than there are in other cities.

Interesting trend which makes sense: In Fremont, Costco ranks at the top vs in San Fran, top 3 are restaurants.
Just signed up, impressive. The fact you can generate an entire list just by text + return key is great design.

I've been using notepad for this kind of thing previously because I just want a simple think of it / dump it / get back to it later type catchall. This suits the function perfectly.
Things I remember being blown away by..

Frontpage 2000. When I was a youngerster and playing with what I had on my computer, this program opened a lot to me. I loved being able to switch back and forth between the coded mode and the viewable mode. I did learn some bad practices at first... the <br> tag was new to me later as I'd copied FrontPage's insistence on <p>nbsp;</p> instead, for instance. But it was what set me off to look at anything relating to hacking.. ;)

Netscape 6. It sucks as we see it now, but the integrated suite was so much nicer than the older versions of Netscape and the AOL-based thing I'd used. The mail client was phenominal to me, having used Outlook before, the web browser feeled so much nicer and more modern, and so on.

SuSE Linux 9.3. The first Linux distro that became my main OS instead of just a plaything. It perfectly supported all of my desktop's hardware and made me fall in love with Linux and especially KDE 3.x.

Amarok. This was the first media player that I really loved. Unfortunately it's been messed up badly with the release of KDE 4 in my opinion.. I've yet to try the backports. But after playing with stuff like Musicmatch and Media Player on Windows and then JuK and the like on Linux, Amarok seemed just incredible.
It partly depends on your definition of startup. But sure, you can start up your web app on the side and hope to gain traction. But problem is just that you are at a disadvantage since you don't have full time to devote to the project. That means you can't add features, respond to user requests, market, expand as quickly as your competitors who are full time.
Depends on the type of code, for GUI related I visualize the interface as if it was in my IDEs GUI builder, where I mentally can double click a component to be switched to the relevant section of code.

I almost visualize flying through the GUI components to see code revealed underneath. I don't actually see lines of code (I guess my mental-visual resolution is too low) instead I sort of sense whats needed. I can 'feel' the code. What event listeners will be notified, what classes are needed, how the code flows, how it will mesh together.

But thats for when I am in design mode, when incurring technical debt and pushing towards a deadline my thinking is extremely non-visual, more auditory in nature as I verbally think though the problems in my head.
I met some interesting people at the HN meetup a couple of months ago. I believe there's one every month. Have a look at http://www.meetup.com/HNLondon/. There are also regular iphone, ruby and python dev meetups.

What are you working on at the moment?
Ramen May Lead to Chronic Illness Study Says
Well... the answer to that question really depends upon what set of technologies the applicant is approaching the position with. One question, however, that seems to always tell a lot about the person being interviewed is: "You are asked to mentor a new developer, fresh out of school. What habits/best-practices, language-specific and general, have you learned through your years of working that you feel should be offered to the new hire?"
If you want to do some digging yourself, here are some suggestions to get started.

How and Why to Sniff Smartphone Network Traffic
http://www.messagingnews.com/onmessage/ben-gross/how-and-why...
UML has influenced me into thinking of methods and objects as black boxes and focusing on the relationships between them as opposed to their implementation.
A slightly abstracted view gives some much needed perspective and keeps it clean(er).
Actually, this could be done if the program didn't use any print or input commands. In general, it still cannot be done.
I'm only 18 with nothing to bring to the table besides my charming smile. Am I still eligible?
Using the Cython Compiler to write fast Python code
There are a lot of good comments here and many with different take-away messages. Speaking from experience from a similar situation, my own take-away is a conglomeration of @mcargian, @jellicle, and @RiderOfGiraffes: $550 for 30 hours is a flag, and if you think a contract is going to ensure a quality and timely delivery, you should probably focus on deliverables and milestones in the contract with a 50% up-front, 50% on-delivery pay-out.

I certainly don't want to belittle $550, as it sounds like it took you a significant amount of time to accrue, but there is a deeper lesson than simply "hire an attorney".

Pro-tip: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1845648 followed by "... but it's most important that you learn."

P.S. Best of luck and shoot me an email if you are looking for designers. I happen to know several.
> Pok Pok is expensive, but I have never in my life had better buffalo wings. I am salivating just thinking of them.

$11 for the plate of wings is actually not bad. It is pretty big. And they are really delicious. If you get cocktails and go all out it is gets expensive. No doubt. The cocktails are killer too
If people doubt that Microsoft still has smart hackers working there, you just need to follow Eric Lippert's blog. Even if you have no interest in C#, he has a lot of genuinely interesting thoughts on programming and related topics.
Along the same lines: http://blog.figuringshitout.com/nov-5th-day-23-three-types-o...
London Hackpace
http://london.hackspace.org.uk/

Its near the Hoxton railway station.

Am an InfoSec student, so if your looking for any potential employees do call me.
best way to start is to scratch your own itches, if you pick some arbitrary problem it's much more difficult to maintain steam and actually complete the project (ie learn the skills you want to)
Bootstrapped, Profitable, & Proud: Admoda
Would cloud farms be practical if your assets lived on the cloud as well? That could solve the bandwidth problem both with the render cycle and collaboration with other shops.

Or would getting the assets there in the first place be impractical?
"Persons are classified as unemployed if they do not have a job, have actively looked for work in the prior 4 weeks, and are currently available for work."

More details: http://www.bls.gov/cps/cps_htgm.htm

By the way, didn't mean to sound hostile in my last post. I think I came across a little stronger than I meant.
All in all, the problem is that it requires instant latency. You have to schedule a call, and be ready then.
Is everyone's suggestion really just bars and restaurants?
Wow, that looks fun!
Looks alright. I'll try it out sometime.

I've been using Idiorm - http://github.com/j4mie/idiorm (used it on Weekis - http://weekis.com). It works really well for small-medium scale apps.

I can't be bothered with the bloat of some of the PHP Frameworks out there.
The last time my Alma Mater called me, I asked them how they got my number, what right they had to bother me at work, and to take me off their list.

You want money? Talk to the state about more funding, or raise tuition.
I'd be tempted to barter. "If I'm the only thing standing between you and $100,000, I think it only makes sense to give me a thousand dollars."
We are all benefited by not having poor people, young and old, dying in our streets.

I don't want to see people dying on the streets, you don't, presumably, and almost everyone I have had this discussion with has the same concern. Isn't it reasonable to assume that the more educated and productive members of society would be willing to bear this burden without having it squeezed out of them by threat of jail? You hear "I want to make the world a better place" so often it has become cliché.

I donate to charities under our current system; I would be more inclined to do so if I weren't deprived of 40 or 50% of my income by the state. Moreover, private charity would be far more accountable than welfare programs since "customers" could take their money elsewhere. Clearly there is a demand for efficient charity services, and it could be readily met on the free market by entrepreneurs. We've seen remarkable generosity this past week on HN. I think it tends to come to the surface when people are interacting in free and voluntary circumstances.

A completely free society is not something I expect to see in my life time, but that doesn't mean it is unattainable by future generations. Many Western values we take for granted today would have seemed Utopian just a century or two ago -- the abolition of slavery, women and children's rights, the general decline of racism, and so on.

You accuse me of over simplifying, but it's unlikely the abolitionists would have made the progress they did without an unequivocal denunciation of slavery. In response they heard something along the lines of "[you have] distilled a very complex issue into two different polarizing viewpoints".
It's nice imagery, but it's totally unfair to that profession, and it's about as accurate as saying that software people have to like precise finger movements.
I just found this out when I had an occasion to use PM on a small project. I found Huddle, which I think is a nice alternative, with a much better price point.
Winkey, the windows hotkey mapper has postponed carpal tunnel syndrome a few years.
Dropbox.
Simple concept well executed.
wow, this looks very much inspired by F#'s async expressions. I'm really looking forward to being able to use this.
As evidence that the costs are worth the benefits I submit the fact that you (perhaps not you in particular but any citizen of a country who makes this claim) haven't renounced your citizenship for that of another, better cost-benefit ratio, country.

A country and its government are not the same thing. The cost-benefit balance can be made positive by benefits that are independent of government, such as cultural attitudes or proximity to specific private institutions.
I'm on my third day of traffic so far. Waiting for analytics to arrive. I had about 50 visitors yesterday and think I might be approaching 1000 for today :)

I've upgraded to adding TAGS & Categories for links - but am still stuck with numbers on the games codes. I think you might be right though, in terms of SEO that will improve value.

Unfortunately, at the moment, I'm populating the game page via ajax so google won't really know what pages I've got on there until after I follow up with those recommendations of yours.

I think it's good advice though.
Drumbeat by Elemental Software

The first time I used this program, I was amazed. I had just started coding and here was a WYSIWG editor for data driven pages.

The program was buggy as hell and it was almost like learning another language the way I had to learn all the quirks of this program. But it gave me my start and I probably wouldn't have learned to code better if it had created halfway decent code.
You forgot Vista, although Microsoft relatively quickly turned it around with Windows 7, which is selling at the fastest rate in the history of operating systems.
Logo changed. I just dropped the bevel as advised.
Better?

Ratings and comments "incoming" - on the list. There's a lot of feedback on here so It's going to take me a few days to prioritize everything.

Facebook comments are quick though. I've done that before.
Timberland Boots | Womens Roll-Top Timberland Boots
I'd highly recommend to not "immerse yourself in learning a language" (highly paraphrased). What makes you think the language-du-jour will be relevant in 2 years? 5 years? 10 years?

In my opinion, the point of a CompSci degree is to understand computer science. I love CompSci because I get to solve problems that are only possible via a computer or 1,000 computers; knowing a language doesn't solve the problem all by itself.

As to where to start, I suggest that you dabble in everything -- find a couple different types of simple web apps (blog, to-do list, game); try to create them with whatever tool (i.e., language) is best for the job; and think critically about why that tool is the best for that particular job.
English is and will be the de facto language of globalization. All of the world's elites speak it in every country. People will speak their local language, AND English. I think this is a given. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ftF8sXzoWk

English will certainly outlast Chinese. The constitution of India is written in English and India will soon far eclipse China in terms of population. I think it's a given, is assumed by most people, and not overly worth arguing

> But you're certainly mistaken that language recognition is sequential.

The initial input and output of [spoken] language is sequential by definition and structure of the ear and voicebox. I simply meant that you can not speak two words or hear two words at the same time in the manner that you can see two words at the same time. You can see indentation in a text document\program, but you have to add extra syntax in spoken language to convey this.

Internal language recognition\parsing is incredibly LISP like. I'll try to add a more detailed explanation of what I mean by this in the future when I have more time.

[ basically when the human brain processes information, there are limited resources, right. The working memory buffer for the human brain can only hold 5-7 "chunks" at the same time. You have to resort to the phenomena of "chunking" to process more information. You should find this article very interesting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chunking_(psychology) So basically we use "operators" to chunk things together. We could have a "phrase" operator that chunks a noun, verb, and object together. What's great or genius is that this "phrase", or function, is ALSO a chunk. and you can combine those chunks together in the same manner even if they are functions. This is like LISP: functions are data and data are functions. This is the "big deal" about LISP. It's similar to in the human brain, where everything is a "chunk". As long as you have processed sub-ideas into a chunk and have given a name for that chunk, you can start wielding bigger ideas. ]

[ Spoken languages are all GOOD and reflective of human thought. Anyone is GOOD ENOUGH. The differences between spoken languages are small. The differences between LISP programming languages and non-LISP programming languages are vast. LISP is to thought as Python is to English. LISP is the most similar to an evolutionarily evolved structure (human thought). Therefore a LISP implementation could also share high survivability. And could survive longer than a human lifespan. ]
Oh, of course. I meant people who wouldn't think of hacking the url ;^). So it looks like the old plans are there but they just don't want to make it easy to get to them.
But the assumption is that you're more likely to find something of utmost worthiness to spend your money on than before.

I don't have a particular schedule for my Groupon purchases, but if I see something convenient (that I would have bought anyway) or cool (that I wouldn't have bought except for the Groupon -- window purchases, basically,) I buy them.

This means that in the past month or so, I bought a Groupon for Baltimore Coffee & Tea, which means I got my $34.95 a pound Kona coffee for roughly $17, and flying lessons, which is something I've pondered before, but never pulled the trigger on.

Half off is a fine motivator.

I'd be happy to spend more money with Groupon if there were more interesting offers being presented, and upping the quantity of those offers is likely to increase the odds of that happening.
Being responsible and watching your balance, and paying a scheduled monthly fee is not difficult to manage. Banks allow for scheduled payments as well, its a one time setup. I think the being responsible and holding people accountable to being responsible, is something that maybe you are working on , and hope that it works. Best of luck.
I don't, really. Its just in my head, and comes out when it needs to. If that makes any sense.

Maybe a blob of unformatted information, if I had to pick something.
Let's Jam
ContactJam is social networking aimed to create meaningful connections between people. By meaningful, we mean connections with people who you truly interact with, bump with, and share interests with everyday. To make this happen, we have built not only a website, but a mobile app too for Android. ContactJam Mobile allows you and your friends to bump phones and exchange contact details with each other. In the web, you can see and track your connection history, so you'll know when you "bumped" with a friend or a new friend. There are also buttons that work much like girl scouts and boy scouts do when they earn certain achievements. You get a button by, for example, reaching 10 connections, or making friends outside of the country, or even for being techie or sporty. You can also see yourself in relation with your friends through the leaderboard, letting you know where you are in your own social network.
Graphics Gems.
http://www.graphicsgems.org
www.microsoft.com/cloud/

Microsoft might be a little behind, but they are definitely serious about "cloud". Plus, Windows Phone 7 does not look too bad. It might not be as complete as its competitors in features, but it is definitely a strong ground work.

Let's just sit and watch how those folks in Redmond will monetize better from the cloud.
Ask HN: Conflict of interest?
My company is shopping around for a software package. They've had a hard time finding what they want, in fact they've turned down a few packages, for various reasons.

Would it be a conflict of interest by making what they want and trying to sell it to them? I have a good idea of their budget.

if it's not a conflict, how should I approach my employer?
Do I have to have a working permit in the US to apply? I am Norwegian (currently staying at an airbnb apartment in Tokyo :)
I'm looking for something like this to build on for image driven searching. If anyone knows of anything, please email me at ahmed.nat ATSIGN gmail.com
Science-Fiction influenced Grunge Rock about the Singularity
Can you name the European company that makes the same thing as Authorize.net ? I've been looking for one forever.
This might help: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/evidence/
That anyone would be shocked that packaged crap like Ramen has health risks is sad. This is not food. Of course it's going to kill you.

I always hope that when startups say "eating ramen" that they mean it symbolically, in that they are being frugal. Eating crap like this is just dumb.
Ask HN: support time / cost per user
If you're willing to share, how much time does your company spend per client per month on customer service or technical support? How much does that cost you, compared to how much that user is paying?
Nothing in the article says anything about Pixar using Azure other than a proof of concept and gives no answer to the leading question.

Pixar is founded by George Lucas then bought and nurtured by Steve Jobs though :)
white flour, poor quality fat, sodium, and a massive wallop of MSG. practically no protein.

my partner was busy last night, so I fed the family. I cooked whole-wheat cous-cous, mixed it with fried peppers and onions, and steamed a package of frozen "Italian Vegetables" (cauliflower, broccoli, carrots and more.) I put this into bowls, half of each of the kind of stuff, and flavored with a dash of salt, pepper and earth balance natural margarine.

i didn't want a lot of protein in that meal because we cooked a chicken last night and i've been eating mass quantities of whey protein powder.
A recruiter learns about EC2
Awful. I spent two years on that site, met 2 people in person, sent literally 100s upon 100s of messages. Giant waste of time - I'm thoroughly convinced online dating does not work. Have you seen the movie Catfish? Its kind of like that, no one is who they appear to be on the internet. Sorry if I'm ranting. OKCupid is "free", but it took away many, many hours that I'll never get back.

I met a girl one time who said "You get a good relationship when you need it the least." I think that is the crux of why it doesn't work or can't work. It's like when you find something you've lost, but only after you stop searching for it.
Someone Who Wants To Kill Your Company Worked Harder Than You Did Today
UGG Women's Tasmina Sandals | Black UGG 1647 Tasmina Sandals On Sale
Ask HN: How is Git on Windows today?
I have heard that git on Windows has been shaky in the past, but I am wondering if things are better today?

I will need to setup git on a Windows server, and then I am wondering what the best way for developers to use it on their Windows boxes would be?

Note: while you may think command line is the best way to use git, the people around me would prefer a Visual Studio plugin or something along those lines.

Also: how common is it to install git on a Windows server? Is it probably just best to stick with something like SVN?
Self-employment is anything but the dream
Typo: when I searched for Walmart, the page said: "No business __mached__ walmart. Please try another search."

No Walmart.. really? :)
Japanese Garden is great. Worth the $8. It's in Washington Park which is accessible via public transit. Forest Park is adjacent. Good hiking, as long as you don't mind a little mud.