skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I ask for theirs and it's mainly Facebook-for-that with 'that' being a random value, or it's impossible / huge for me. No, my problem isn't ideas, I have plenty of them myself. My problem is motivation. I usually give up after building a working prototype because I lose interest and enthusiasm, because I was the only one who cared. I was hoping that by posting this issue here, I see it as a commitment. When someone expects something from me I would put more effort in, rather than building something that I came up with and perhaps noone really cares. +1 for original advice though :)
Inflammatory title. Come on, seriously? The vast majority of people don't own iOS devices, but access the web through a variety of other OSs. Given that Android is outpacing iOS and that both are extremely popular, the Web is the obvious way to target both.

The Web is important because you can use it without regard for what type of computer you're using.
I disagree with the conclusion that the return distribution is bimodal. My own analysis* is that it is instead lognormal. This shape makes sense to me - a lognormal distribution is the result of the product of random variables (whereas a normal dist is the sum of randomly distributed variables). The success factors in a startup tend to be multiplicative, not additive (e.g. great market, great product, customer adoption, great strategic partners, etc).

* based on observed portfolio performance which is unfortunately not public information, but also on published data from mckinsey
Not really, since anyone working at the school in 1969 has long retired or moved on to other things, mostly forgotten by now. A lot changes in forty years. I wrote a thing about why UCSB even ended up as the third node: http://jeweledplatypus.org/cgi-bin/blosxom.cgi/text/ucsbnet.... - they pretty much just happened to have the budget for it and a person working on interesting related stuff.
Title makes me not bother clicking. I hate people who love to declare that things are dead. Fundamentally it's much easier to talk shit about someone's creation than it is to actually create something.
It's not even clear that she is talking to anyone. She could just be reacting to something.
I believe the cause of this may be the use of student evaluations

I would posit that evaluations aren't the problem, per se. The real problem is one of incentives: professors are hired and fired (otherwise called "denied tenure") based almost entirely on publication at most big public universities. Teaching plays a nominal role in hiring and promotion decisions. This gives professors an enormous incentive to optimize what they're going to be judged on -- research.

Evals are a problem because they only look at what students think of the prof. A more useful measure than just what students think would be a graph of what students think versus the class's average/median grade, plotted against others teaching similar courses. Then you could correct for "easy graders" and "hard graders."

standardize exams and evaluate professor quality based on VAM instead of student opinion.

A lot of disciplines don't have standardized content, especially in the humanities and social sciences. A lot of profs emphasize different topics and ways of doing things, even in science and math. This might create problems worse than the problem it's trying to solve without solving the incentive issue.

Those of you waiting for a proposed solution from me are going to be disappointed: the only solution I can see is "incorporate teaching into hiring and tenure decisions," but I don't see a way to get universities to do that.

The New York Times Magazine wrote a very good article about prof evals: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/21/magazine/21wwln-evaluation... .

I'm a grad student, and I'd like to say that I grade as fairly as I would if I didn't know that evals correlate to grades. But...
GPA is a measure of how well you do in school. The question is whether doing well in school correlates with job performance; obviously, you'd measure that by correlating GPA with some measurement of job performance (open question what that measurement would be).
Judgment Day -- On How University Evaluations Work (2008)
I have to question the value of CS educations

Many people have no interest in being computer scientists. They want to learn enough software engineering to get something done using a computer. Outside of CS, programming is only a means to an end.

Higher level languages ought not to expose the user/programmer to this sort of thing, even at the expense of performance; for every 'why is it that...' question, there are probably several more buggy programs being used in production environments. Also, it's a confusing distraction for kids trying to learn programming, who may not be able to wrap their heads around the theory of FP implementation, although they may be quite competent to handle the task they're trying to implement in software.

I used to work with a Motorola 56k series DSP, so named because it offers up to 56 bits of integer precision. Dealing with data that's usually represented as gloating point involves a normalization conversion as you describe for the currency unit which soon becomes second nature. But for newcomers to the platform, that step at first seems like an inefficient limitation, adding complexity to an otherwise simple algorithm. Not everybody wants or needs to know how the underlying hardware works, often they just want to implement some fairly trivial math or logic without worrying about accuracy.

I can't bring myself to correct that spelling error :)
Adobe makes money with tools, not with Flash. If Adobe makes good HTML5/JavaScript tools, and keeps making Photoshop, they'll be fine.
Does it however strategically affect WP7's strategic future?

Look, the way I see it, WP7 is barely months (weeks?) old. To expect HTML5 support when 'HTML5' is in still flux is silly. MS are still working on their desktop support for goodness sake.

Lack of copy-and-paste demonstrates clearly that MS couldn't get everything in to v1.0. And to impute strategic motives is reaching.
Being a student isn't easy, it requires actual work
The skills section of a resume tells about what "self-assessed skills" a candidate have. It's never meant to tell how good a candidate is.

The efficiency, mastery and attitude of a candidate will be determined in the technical exam and personal interview not by a detailed resume or the "unix permissions" metaphor.

That is exactly why we have a "hiring process" in the first place.
I suggest that all tickets are made public and viewable by users.

No. Don't do that. If I pay for the service I do expect confidentiality of my support request.
Plus the maintainers is awesome, I was having suboptimal performance and he made adjustments within a few hours many times, making ShedSkin (and my program) much faster each time.
As I mention in my article, what you say is true, but hasn't stopped iOS apps from taking off. Yes, many people won't be able to use Mac OS App Store apps because they don't have Macs, but that won't be a problem to the web developers who switch to Mac, because they'll be willing to make the trade-off based on the hype and numbers that the Mac Store achieves.

Not everyone has a Mac, but enough people have one to make it worthwhile. And those Mac owners actually buy apps, unlike the vast majority of windows computer owners.
Work-to-rule strike
Many iPhone Apps embed the kit web browser to provide core functionality in the app.
We had that happen the other day and they emailed us. A good alternative would be: mark this as private request. Depends on the company, service, issue,etc.
Just because something is unethical, doesn't mean it is also illegal.

The reverse obviously is also true, and arguably applies in this situation. (I'm not arguing that it does, but but the OP is).

Ethics are subject to opinion, one man's gray area is another mans A-Ok, and another's "big fat red zone".
For a click to register with the ad, the touch must both start and end within the ad banner. A swipe from the bottom up, even if it ends on the banner, will not trigger a click.
I look forward to Cython supporting annotations in 3, making python effectively optionally statically typed (three adverbs in a row, top that)!
I should point out that these numbers are aggregate across quite a few of our free applications, both on iOS and Android.
It will, they just focused on UI and development ecosystem first and I'm sure the updated mobile IE will be a derivative of IE9 which isn't complete yet.
The most important step in the sales process is not the closing of a sales deal
1) Just to take an example, no desktop GUI, much less a pure web toolkit does image manipulation, drawing, filters and geometry at pixel-accuracy like Flash does, at such small footprint, speed, and pleasant language. It's just 1 part of Flash.

2) Flash is ActionScript, and ActionScript is for all intents and purposes "EcmaScript-NG". JavaScript is becoming ActionScript. Adobe got all the predictions right, and EcmaScript is headed that way (I see type-annotations in your js-future :-) and because ActionScript ~= JavaScript, it would be very easy for them to convert to "HTML5", whatever that might become. This is such a trivial exercise, it's done several times a day, js ports of flax libraries.

3) We have already seen CSS3 "IDEs", and you have GWT, Aptana, etc. It's the "HTML5" scene that's going the old Flash way, by integrating development and tools, projectifying scripts, and becoming more organized.
Seems to be word-for-word identical to the item submitted earlier:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1843296
I think the accessibility of steampunk is what makes it so popular. Popular like say a fantasy novel of orcs, elves, and fairies.

Charles seems to lump steampunk in with science fiction the way Starwars fans seem to think that Starwars has anything to do with science.

The reality is that there is very little 'steampunk' that actually has anything remotely to do with science. 'Steampunk' like the 'Diamond Age' is not really even about steam, unless you consider 'clouds' steam, and then consider that nanopunk is cloudpunk, and then cloudpunk is somehow steampunk. 'Diamond Age' in contrast to your typical steampunk adventures is very much so about the ubiquity of technology, about the ubiquity of information, and the ubiquity of how connected we are. it actually has nothing to do with the notion of using steam to power a mechanical device, and more looks at how cloud services and nano tech will effect our lives.

I think steampunk really is becoming a more modern place for fairy tales, a place where the modern age can look back and go look how quaint that story of the knight in shining Armour is ( or rather that inventor who used technology to save us ). If you look at steampunk as a modernization of the fairy tale and the fable into something closer to modern day, then you can see why it has so much power.

I mean how many of us can really relate to castles and forests? How many of us can relate to zeppelins and trains?

If you look at steampunk as the modernization of culture it's amazing to watch. I am sure at some point the tales of the primitive hunt were modernized into those of knights and kings.

What will the fairy tales of 200 years from now be about? what realities will we do away with? which ones will we latch onto?
HTML 5 is still in a draft state.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML5
Looks like it will be in IE9.
So whats all this about Microsoft not adopting open standards?
Their kind of a big company isn't it okay for them to support both?
You need a more complete history of Microsoft to know the full story.

Back in the early DirectX days (1996), Microsoft was working on a technology called Chrome Effects that was intended to compete with VRML as the world's ultimate "Networkable Graphics" format. This history is covered in books such as <em>Renegades of the Empire</em>. This was stuff from back when Michael Abrash worked at Microsoft!
It also means that WinPhone7 users won't have access to a rapidly growing library of HTML5 content. That's quite a disadvantage for a nascent mobile platform, especially now that HTML5 = mobile web thanks to widespread support from Android and iDevices, among others.
Lisp macros manipulate Lisp code once it has been read (parsed and tokenized into lists) and sometime before it is executed. That has nothing to do with grammars. Common Lisp also offers a facility to augment or replace the parsing and tokenizing mechanism in an unrestricted fashion.
Why? On the intranet you're likely dictating the browser/technology used anyways. Why not simply use what's best for the specific job. If it's Flash, Silverlight, HTML5, rich client app, virtual machine, etc...
I wonder how much these changes correlate to funding.
And what did you put in Terms of Service.
Up to you, but I'd say let that kind of thing slide. The ideal is that if someone disagrees, they'll explain themselves. Downvoting is supposed to be a mechanism for voting on whether a point adds to the discussion or not.

So either (a) your point did not add to the discussion, in which case further discussion about your point just adds to the noise without contributing signal, or (b) the person or persons downvoting disagree with you but are too lazy to contribute to the discussion by explaining their perspective. In which case, why worry about them?

Responses--whether positive or negative--are discussion gold. Downvotes aren't worth the worry.
How about just doing it regardless?
Using curl to access AWS is kind of a pain, since you have to hash the body and your keys into a header. For others, you have to set the token in a header, and it (should) change periodically.

Compare to:

curl --anyauth --user login:password https://example.com/
This is where the work history and various other sections of the resume come in. Explain some of the most significant projects you've worked on and describe the nature of your contributions. If you describe 10 years of experience in web development environments using PHP, when you put C in your skills section it will be clear that C is not one of your core skills. You're probably trying to make the point that you can read and understand C if you have to, and if that's important to the employer they should follow up.
Protovis pretty much covers everything, from what I can see. What you're looking for (I think) is an implementation on some specific data you have, mapped to hyperlinks from Wikipedia or similar? Please correct me if I didn't understand correctly or elaborate a bit.
Yes thats a good caching scheme for a harddrive.

But my point remains. I have say 1Gb of ram, I need more memory, so I turn on swap, swap is slow so I go out and buy a super-expensive SSD hard drive instead of just buying more ram.
My comment was in reply to gshannon's thought that most companies own all work/ideas. Your reply to my comment made no sense. Thanks for clarifying though. I didn't think you had a point.
This is very interesting, but I don't think comparing it to paste is valid. Paste is more meant as a development server, is it not?
Grade inflation is problematic, but is GPA of any use outside of academia (except for entry-level jobs perhaps)?

Perhaps the inflation is a sign that the currency is worthless.
you misunderstood. they didnt want to make the issue public, so they emailed us. they didnt post, thinking it was private and it was public.
Or for that matter, applying for grants/other incubators?
Why the constiutional challenge to healthcare reform is largely moot
Would the amount invested strengthen the chance of a good outcome?
I've read some pitch for electronic document exchange system estimating 500 accounts per one full time support person. An account meant to be one middle size company.
Sure, develop only for iOS devices if you feel like only targeting 6% of the PC and 14% of the mobile markets.

Or you can continue to develop web apps and hit 100% of internet-enabled devices.
Most (only) interesting thing mentioned was 3to2 http://www.startcodon.com/wordpress/?p=373
Thanks, I replaced it with what I intended, 'era'. I think my fingers are much more used to typing 'error' then 'era'. :)
Whatever happened to the GNU HURD?
I doubt it - Steve never budged on this with AT&T and he's spent 3 years not budging on it with Verizon. My guess is that Verizon saw the $$ AT&T has been making hand over fist and decided they couldn't miss out on the market.
PC Outline, a brilliant little DOS-based outliner my manager gave me in 1987. He said, "Here, you're organised - you'll like this" and I really did. I use it for everything - prioritised todo lists, packing lists, pseudo code, shopping lists. If you don't have DOS or Windows available, run it in DOSBox. The outliner is available from
http://www.developer-resource.com/free-download/Text-Utiliti...
Ask HN: what is our startup missing? | moodocity.com
Hi, I am the technical co-founder and sole programmer/ "Graphic Designer" for moodocity.com this is a side project for both of us, for now.

Our goal is mapping the mood of the world while giving users the ability to track their emotional health and express themselves to other users.

I know the site is missing a graphical indignant, but I can't see it. As in I have a very limited ability to know what it is that's missing graphically, but I know when it isn't there.

I would love some constructive feedback.

Is it colors or specific graphical elements? Where can I hire out a reputable/reasonably priced person or service?

Thank you!
in particular, CLR on the client -> much less painful development
Is NASA Building a 100-Year Starship?
A few problems with basic auth:

* Browser specific UI, which leads to:

* No place to put password recovery links

* No place to put explanatory text

* No mechanism for logout
One problem with releasing your code as open source is it can get used in ways that you don't approve of, eg weapon systems by the military or crapware by the carriers.
No, not at all. Well, people do use it for development, but it's pretty much the recommended deployment option for several Python web frameworks, including Pylons.
I went to one of the public schools where this data was gathered from. My experience with grade inflation is that it's mostly about money. If a class is deemed hard, students don't want to take it. If students don't take the class, the department can't make any money, and therefore can't pay the bills.

That, and a lot of professors just don't care anymore. They don't want to be bothered with teaching, so they just pass everyone without a second thought.
Agreed, that would be interesting to see.

If nobody else does it, I'll try to crank something out this weekend.
One of the benefits that web development offers that the App Store doesn't is that the code you write runs on any machine that has a web browser. Certainly dealing with IE is a headache - but to completely discount that fact that it doesn't run on Windows and ignore the majority of potential paying customers seems silly to me.

Certainly people can and will make money selling software in the App Store - there are some good reasons why listed in the article - but I disagree that web developers being acquainted with Mac OS tools is going "to put a final nail in the web-coffin". Web development seems alive and well. It is not dying - it is still in it's awkward adolescent years.
It's a "1 line of Python" pain, true, but it's also significantly more secure. From a cost/benefit perspective, it's an API, a building block of a software development project, and optimizing it for curl-ability doesn't seem like a major win.

But my point is just: HTTP Auth is not the best-practices answer to non-browser web services auth. Both API-key and signed URLs are both competitive (and probably better) options.
If you were to generate the HMAC over the entire request, would that help with ensuring authenticity?
Sorry about the title, folks. A rushed (and incorrect) decision, clearly. Will try and make keep it saner for the next one. Mea culpa.
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App stores could imply the dead of applications like Google Docs the office suite: there's actually no need to put your data on the web, except for the fact that the app requires it.

But for other applications, especially those that require a central database for all users (classic client/server setup), web applications still make the most sense.
I would disagree - I'd say that NoSQL is an exploration into disassembling the component parts of a RDBMS in order to get performance gains in exchange for losing features that aren't needed for your particular engineering problem.
If you have to ask then why even bother moving to python3 at this point? If you don't want a python3 feature bad enough to keep up with the library releases you depend on then chances are the major version of python you are running is inconsequential.

When the time comes, say Debian stable defaulting to python3, or RHEL (haha) then you can deal with porting.

Otherwise as an end user Python2.X is quite alright.
There is an interesting chapter in _Excellence Without a Soul_ by Harry Lewis, suggesting that garde inflation is less a problem that widely believed. You could look it up.
Because then you're not hostage to any company's particular technologies.
isn't it abit too late?
I've worked at Backflip for the last year. The company was started by a few friends of mine from a previous startup here in the Boulder area, and since then it has grown from 6 fulltime employees to 10. We're growing at a good rate and are still looking for great engineers (hint hint).

The amount of money we spend making a game for iOS or Android varies a lot depending on the scope of the project. A game like Paper Toss or Strike Knight is primarily art bound, so if you have a great in-house artist or two (we do) then you can figure out the cost based on 1-2 months of dev time for one engineer, 1 month for art, a few weeks for sound, and a few weeks for random QA/marketing/etc at whatever pay rate is applicable to your area. If you need to replace any of those components with contractors, your cost will definitely increase.
The majority of my day is spent working on projects on Google App Engine, so I'm forced to use 2.5.

I have a couple of toy projects in 3.x, but I'm stuck until GAE changes.
Well, there's 2 questions here (posting again to give whatever horribly lacking-in-perspective fanboys are out there another chance to downmod a discussion of frickin storage layers):

1) Are RDBMS useful at all, ever? Sure. If I don't have an extreme scaling need, I'm the first one to say throw MySQL on that box and call it a day, it's tested, it works, gives you a bunch of functionality for 5 minutes of installation, developers are used to it, easy.

2) Should you be putting application logic in the database? I argue no. I understand that this isn't unanimous, but you're sacrificing long term flexibility and scalability for some short-term convienence that isn't even that convenient. I mean, PL/SQL sucks. I'm not saying you shouldn't ever do a join in the database, or shouldn't ever normalize your data, but if you're writing a lot of PL/SQL code, it's probably gonna come back to bite you if you ever need to scale or change architectures.

RE: that query from the 70s -- that query from the 70s that will actually run across different implementations contains exactly the subset of SQL that I consider acceptable and worth using (minus limit and a couple other small fry, I guess). If it's more complicated than that, it should be app code IMO.
‘The Walking Dead’ Unleashes Zombies on AMC
not 0, which visually exaggerates the differences

This is one of the most overused, and INCORRECT, memes on HN. You don't include 0 on a graph where data doesn't naturally include 0!