skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I would suggest you give one such opportunity a try: promotion is a strong tool, and while it usually costs more than you can immediately count as income from it, in the long run, it can be beneficial.

However, that's not always the case, especially if you need to travel far and often.

In any case, trying is - in my opinion - something you should do. Perhaps not right now, but within half a year or so - and see how it goes.

Perhaps you'll decide it's not worth it, and then you won't feel bad for not pursuing the opportunity. Perhaps it will turn out to be a good investment, and then you'll be glad you pursued it.
Ask HN: How can big businesses use Twitter better, if at all?
I work for a big bank and unbelievably (I think) they have not got a twitter account.

I have seen that Dell, Strarbucks and others (admittedly retail based) have used Twitter successfully. I wondered if a bank could use Twitter and how could they use it in an innovative way?
I agree that the end bit might have come out a bit too personal. I wrote this after reading the excellent linked article and then seeing the first comment on HN which was

"Why not transition to a different language over time? One that more great programmers want to use?" which just isn't something you'd realistically do.

And then I thought about the fun we have here in the office and I thought about the nearly two hours of discussion I had with a fellow coworker about race- and lock free storage and merging of shopping baskets and it hurt me to think that people would throw all that away just because they don't like the language even though it was the only viable option when all of this started.

I might have been carried away.

So: Sorry. I didn't mean to insult anybody. I just think it's really shortsighted to judge a project, a team and a company based on the choice of language that might have been used at one time.
He never said “you are holding it wrong.” Do your own research instead of spreading FUD.
I don't think ability to run Windows natively is something that Apple considers crucial. Sure it is nice, but not a dealbreaker.

I believe the main reason Apple migrated away from PowerPC was unreliability(delays, heat, speed etc.) from the supplier and progression not compatibility with x86.
I wonder if there are some financial regulation rules which prevent banks from using these tools ? I personally don't see a problem though if they are just promoting themselves and potentially some financial products - however i'm not legal bod around financial rules
Juan Williams saga:Fox News Gives Juan Williams $2 Mill (npr)ion Contract(
I listen to NPR every day. Do you think Juan deserved to fired for stating " seeing fellow airline passengers dressed in Muslim garb makes him nervous"? This statement seems to be at the border of freedom of speech?
I wouldn't call C a worse "language" than PHP by far.
The Zune's a fine device, but in the end it's just another mp3 player. The Amiga was something special
"beauty of threading? shudder"

Indeed, this whole thread's reminding me of:

"Combining the sanity of threads with the robustness of web development" http://wearehugh.com/public/2010/08/html5-web-workers/
Then hand out the ed editor to all your engineers who should be programming in assembly. If they're great they'll be just as good with all that, right?

Or maybe they'll bitch up to high heaven because doing that makes them slower. Engineers don't bitch about using shitty languages to be whiny Prima Donnas. They bitch because using shitty languages makes them slower.

People like to feel like they're getting things done. If they're using a language that looks like it was put together from newspaper clippings every step takes much longer than it does with proper tools. And that makes people mad. In fact, I would go so far as to say the ones who don't bitch are the absolutely terrible engineers because they must be doing it just for the billable hours.

Go find the most genius engineer you can in any other field and make him work with the crappiest tools you can find that he can still eventually get his work done with and see how well your assertion holds.
How to write cross-platform code
And AFAIK specs are made for "write once run everywhere."

Yes, my understanding was that the MS implementation did not pass all the compatibility requirements. Adding extra functionality is entirely orthogonal to that point.

IBM's, Azure's and all the J2ME implementations come with proprietary extensions and are blessed by Sun/Oracle. I don't follow your argument.
because PHP provides practically NO means for async I/O whereas the other languages do.

One of the reasons for this is because PHP was designed to quickly handle single HTTP requests. The scaling is ment to be done on the app-server side and that single request that your script is serving at a given time will take as long as it will take anyways.

So you don't really need the async I/O (in theory).

Python and Javascript (and to some degree ruby) rely on their own web servers implemented in their own language, in many cases with no or bad (GIL) concurrency at which point it gets more interesting to move into an event based model where it becomes imperative that operations don't block.

There async I/O becomes important.

So: PHP: concurrency by firing off another apache/fastcgi process or thread. Don't worry about blocking on I/O.

node.js and some python/ruby frameworks: concurrency by using an event based system. Because one operation blocks the whole server, they need to be quick. async I/O becomes important.

Of course the evented model has huge advantages too: You worry much less about races, you get huge performance with a simple architecture and you can potentially handle much more concurrency (because each thread/process consumes resources that your one evented process does only once).

Both paradigms are interesting, but having first-class functions certainly makes an evented model more convenient to work with.
Thanks for the reply! We have so many things in common right from the commute (I use a bike too) to the sleep schedule (I wake up at 5 though ;) But there's where it ends - Unlike you, I waste a lot of my time. It seems that you work only 1 or 2 hours on your side project- Is it all that's needed? (sorry for omitting your server app!)

To avoid the burnout, I made up some rules: no work in the evenings, so when I go home from work and I'm tired I don't have the pressure on myself and I can spend those 2 hours after dinner relaxing. On friday I dance tango, on weekends I usually go to parties or out with friends. I go running for one hour every weekend. This gives me a quite satisfactory life, so I don't burn out.

Thank you very much for sharing this gem!
What? Lack of maturity? You only live once. I'm not going to spend my formidable years toiling away with tools that make my miserable any more than I would work for a manager who thought yelling/bullying was a valid management technique.
Top Ten Reviews Presents Invoicera with Silver Award
This online billing service is one of the best services we have reviewed: it is easy to use, has tons of flexibility, and customer support answers their emails in a timely manner. Invoicera continues to update their product and adds new features based on subscriber feedback. We would not be surprised to see this service give FreshBooks a run for their money soon
I'm a programmer. I use machines for math :p

sorry. corrected.

the cynical part in my brain now compels me to write something along the lines of "so this is the only thing you took away from that posting?".

So I'm writing it and I'll immediately regret it.

But whatever.
In this day and age the only real reasons to use php is because you're either stuck with it and changing the code base makes no sense since you already have a product built, because you're new and don't know any better, or because you've been doing it for such a long time that you're so used to it you don't see the languages faults anymore.

One of the applications I maintain is a convoluted machine made of half java half php on top of Quercus, and if freaking drives me crazy. I think the only thing I hate more than that is working in ASP.
The last time I had an architecture issue was with a SNES emulator that had pieces hard coded in 32bit Asm.

Pretty rare these days. Maybe things like VirtualBox too.
It doesn't cost them anything to transfer some amount of data, but it does cost them in the total amount of bandwidth they have left to sell to other customers.

At some level transfer quantity and rate are the same thing. A bit sent for customer A takes up space on the wire that can not be used for customer B, no matter how it's measured.

It's also unclear which line would be measured for purposes of Netflix's transfer rate. That's one of the beauties of the cloud... specific line transfer rates are abstracted away into an aggregate quantity of data.

If you're selling lines, you charge by rate. If you're selling transfer, you sell by bits.
Apple are the arch facists
Isn't the quality of UX less a problem of the platform and more a problem of the producing company not focusing on the experience their software should deliver? It's not as if it's impossible to create bad software for the Mac OS simply because it uses the native L&F.
Yes, it does, thank you
Couchdb Hack Night in Boston 28 Oct
Happened to me, too, blame the 10x10 pixel icons.
I'm just passing this along as it came through my inbox. Unfortunately, I'm elsewhere that night.
Deployment issues? Are we back in 2008? Don't tell me that Ruby doesn't scale or that developing in Python on a Mac is impossible because of the default version that ships with OSX.
Ask HN: Likely demand for a big monitor extension for a small laptop?
An idea has been stirring in my grey mash for a while, got no way I can follow it up. But, I was wondering what you would think of it:

A large monitor(extension) for a small laptop.

This was a an issue I wrestled when I bought my last laptop. I loved the small laptops but hated their small monitor size. I like the low weight, but am addicted to screen space. Not having enough monitor space just brings down my productivity and its just so tiring toggling between windows.

So, I thought, why can't be there be a light and thin portable monitor? something that has a monitor cable for getting the display info and a usb cable for the power supply. Something that can be either just clipped over the original laptop monitor or be propped up to the side of the laptop, to enable the use of both monitors at the same time.

I don't think its impossible to make a 15" portable monitor that is not more than 5mm to 8 mm thick, with a stiff enough case to safely carry it around.

But, the big question - would there be a market for such a product?

Any thoughts?
How is the Mac app store any different from Ubuntu's? With both platforms, you can install other programs not in the store. Both of them automate the install and update process for applications. Both of them (now) allow you to pay for apps.

I'm confused by people being upset with the mac app store when FOSS has been doing the same thing for years with package management software. Heck, Cydia is even based off of a *nix package manager.

I don't want to call it fanboyism because I know you have other reasons for disliking their new app store but after seeing how well it works in Ubuntu, why could this possibly be a bad idea?
PHP is pretty much considered web-only. Sure you can use it on the command line (never seen it myself) and yes you can do Gtk stuff with it but that doesn't change the perception of it even if you can argue differently.

EDIT: I don't hold that view because of the things I mentioned but I am pretty sure a lot of programmers do.
I work in Ireland for a company whose primary market is the US which, as far as builds go, is the best you could ask for!

I do builds around 9-10am GMT after a good night's sleep when I'm nice and alert (and have had a cup or two of coffee). All the while, (most of) our target market is fast asleep in the US.
I tossed Ubuntu (with ext4) on my 2005 laptop, and it's proving to be a formidable word processor and web browsing machine. I think a lot of people are just realizing that they don't need another core or a chip built with a smaller process to play flash games and write e-mail.

Though I'm a little concerned about what the smaller number of hardware sales will do to development in the server market. Can they maintain R&D budgets?
lots of the code produced by the community out there is full of FactoryFactoryFactories and other typing intensive, mind-bending and ultimately useless abstractions (most of them not DRY at all either

So what? Why does the code produced by others in "the community" affect your perception of the language and/or tools, if you aren't using their code?
Hackers can crash a JET
The oldest thing we've ever seen
Ask HN: Simple little business - what should I call it?
I'm normally OK at this, but I'm struggling here! Anyone got any original ideas?

I deliver empty boxes to people's homes, they fill them up with their unwanted goods (small electricals etc.), I then collect, list and sell everything on eBay and pay them the proceeds (less commission) straight into their Paypal.

I'd eventually like to be able to sell direct on my own site, avoiding ebay.

It ideally needs to be a common TLD as the customers are unlikely to be tech-savvy.

Update: I didn't expect much attention from this so I kept it brief. Here's some more info since people seem interested in the business itself.

I'm not started yet - I just used the present tense for brevity above. I'm going to test the market over the next couple of weeks with a sample dropoff to 100 houses. I founded a student storage business [www.thebigspace.co.uk] 7 years ago and so I've got a good grasp of the logistics of collecting and moving boxes. I also have lots of empty boxes and storage space. Any thoughts on the viability of the business are also welcome...
What is it about your personal definition of the word "hacker" that leads you to believe that all such people would arrive at the same opinion about this? This is a popular, growing, and interesting platform. It has APIs, languages, and tools. It's Unix and has a CLI. There is money in them thar hills...why wouldn't there be room for more than one hackerly opinion on the matter?
I don't think PHP is a beautiful language. But that's beside the point. Sometimes you need a hammer, sometimes a screwdriver. You don't dismiss a tool because it's not pretty.
I intentionally left it out -- it would have made the email too long. The fact that it's valuable, I think, is obvious (450 tanks versus 1400). How valuable? Not as important.

For the same reason, I also left out that the Allies used the same mathematical tools to estimate supply lines. If you're seeing a "rate of production" in Berlin of 100 units/mo, and for the same unit type, only 25 units/mo in Paris, that's probably evidence that it's taking a really long time for that unit to get to Paris.
got back from giant, diet cream soda and diet lemon lime soda
getting livestream up
This seems like a perfect chance to take advantage of the law of unintended consequences. What I mean is, even though you may not see the direct and immediate benefit from a speaking engagement, there may be indirect benefits that make it very worthwhile.

Possible examples of this:

1. A speaking engagement is most likely a networking event. You arrive at this event with a high level of credibility already established - you are a speaker.

2. Preparing to speak to a group often forces you to clarify your priorities in a way that you haven't been forced to before. It can force you to separate what's essential from what's inessential in your business by virtue of what you feel is most beneficial to your audience.

3. There is often free food.

The one big caveat I see is that you don't want to do a speaking engagement half-assed, especially if you haven't done it before. So you should probably pass unless you can devote an adequate amount of time and attention to it to feel well prepared.
EASTL benchmarked
It seems that you work only 1 or 2 hours on your side project- Is it all that's needed?

Of course I would like to have more time to spend on this, but that's all I can afford for now. That's why I try to squeeze all the time I can out of my life.

There are also the weekends, do not forget it. Usually I manage to work at least one of the two days if I do not go on a trip, so there are a lot of hours in it too.

We put our deadline on april 2011 though. The technical part will be ready sooner probably, but there is a lot of work to do on the creative side too. Writing a comic is really difficult, my friend has a job too and it involves other people too (drawers, colorists, translators, etc.)
do you think you'd have been better off with a statically typed language though?
Are you talking about C++ perhaps? ;)

There's php.ini-recommended in the distribution and it's well-commented.

Not using variable-variables, undeclared variables, globals, unsanitised variables in paths, SQL without prepared statements, etc. is common sense and applies to other languages too. PHP might just bite harder if you lack that common sense.
That's still a tough sell; you subset off the awful bits and are left with nothing but a "decent OO language"?

What's the upside? Conservation of intellectual momentum?
The slot car track to end all slot car tracks.
World of Warcraft has prepaid cards.

I think even Ultima Online had prepaid cards. That's 1996.
alexcart.com - it's available, go get it.
Introduction to OAuth
I get beach balls all the time on pretty much everything I do on my mac - terminal, macvim, ical, itunes, mail, firefox, safari, chrome, pages, keynote, screenflow, eclipse, numbers, openoffice and more. They all get slow, lock up, freeze, etc. at some point or another, and it's almost always related to the fact that I'm multitasking. (true, yeah, i'm lame, and it's only a core 2 duo 2.1ghz with 2.5 gigs of RAM - I don't know why I expect to be able to run 3 programs at the same time).
Oracle actually maintains it's own Java cross platform application that many of my coworkers use all day, every day (I use it periodically for some very handy features) - SQL Developer. It's actually quite responsive and usable considering.

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/developer-tools/sql-develo...
Autoincrement is good sometimes: we had some problems with slow inserts in a production SQL server.

It turned out that the problem was that the primary key was set up as a clustered index, and we were doing inserts in a non sequential way, so the server had to rearrange the B-tree every time a row was inserted.

So yes, sorting your index sequentially can have important performance benefits (at least for Microsoft SQL Server and clustered indexes, and a table with lots of inserts).

Edit: read the above link, it only says not to use an URL with identifiers (I can agree with that), and that MySQL with InnoDB has some problems with clustered indexes. The title is very misleading.
Have you tried wordoid.com? (not as a name, but as a source of names).
www.box-away.com is available.

If you want to avoid the hyphen, you can go with

www.MagicBoxAway.com, or use colored boxes, and go for
www.BlueBoxAway.com (or GreenBoxAway, or YellowBoxAway, etc.)
For the record, the actual quote was "Just avoid holding it that way."

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ytech_gadg/ytech_gadg_tc2844
Since when are there pointers in PHP?
personally, I prefer the dynamically typed languages.

but I hate. No. HATE PHP's type conversions with its == operator.

0 == 'foobar'

but

true == 'foobar' && 0 == false

so

true == false ?

eek.

Yeah. I know === exists. But if you have to compare strings and numbers, why is the default conversion method you do the lossy one? If you compare a number to a string, why can't you convert the number into a string and compare the two strings? Why convert the string into a number which will be lossy in most cases?
I think so too. I started looking at Jython right when he jumped off the team and then it pretty much languished and I lost interest as well.
Isn't it kind of unfair to compare xargs parallelizing, which as far as I know all happens on the same machine, with cloud-scaled parallelizing through various services?

Sure, it's awesome to use a ready-made tool to get that kind of scalability, but is it really apples/apples?
wow...from the heart.
> I’d assume the goal in web development is the end product or service and not the means to it.

I don't think I agree. The end product's possibility to be exist at all depends on the mental health of your employees, how efficient they are, and what tools they use. Someone who is unmotivated due to using a language or a tool that is horrible will work only on work morale as a resource for motivation, and it's only a matter of time before that resource runs out, and they'll start feeling miserable and perform sub-optimally.

I don't have an opinion on PHP, although I've made a few cool things with it and enjoyed coding in it, so I don't think it's necessarily that bad.
USB powered may be a problem: 2.5W doesn't get you far.
According to doing bussiness you shouldn't move at all: http://www.doingbusiness.org/Rankings

Maybe New Zealand but I don't know anything about hackers culture there. I guess Australia might be better choice here (at least I know one Australian hacker while I live in Eastern Europe).

You can estimate other proposals by looking at "doing bussiness" list. Estonia (24th in list) most probably is good choice as well but it is really cold there. Here in Lithuania (26th in list) winters are cold sometimes and Estonia is north from us.
How to avoid annoying a referee (of an academic article)
Because of me, accidentally.

I found out about the story via Twitter. Someone I follow (cited in the original post here) mentioned it as an aside in a blog post of his.

I write a free daily email newsletter of interesting things I come across -- that's at http://dlewis.net/nik. The original post here is the issue from, I believe, Tuesday, but it's been a long week :)

I submitted the link to reddit (http://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/dstpi/til_tha... -- please pardon my misuse of "reverse engineered") and it went over very well, hitting either the front page or the second page. So a lot of people noticed it. I'm not surprised there are other submissions. I've seen pickup across a number of sites.

The title and timing?

Well, the title was straightforward -- I just took the one that worked so well on reddit and whittled it down to 80 characters.

The timing was accidental. I was queuing up today's issue late last night my time, and I was crediting the guy behind http://hackernewsletter.com for tipping me off to the story. Then I had an "a ha" moment and figured, hey, this would be welcome on HN, too. So I submitted it.
I was really surprised at how much of a bump I got from a 1.8ghz Core 2 Duo with 2GB of memory to a 2.53ghz i5 with 4GB. My poor Macbook used to choke if I was running more than a handful of programs, or if I was running Flash with anything. Now I can run a bunch of fairly processor-intensive programs (video, VOIP, Flash games, browser with 2 dozen tabs, etc) simultaneously and it rarely chokes.

Since I got such a big productivity gain from this change, I'm looking for other things I can do. I'll be due for an upgrade in another 4-6 months and I think I'll get an SSD.
Online privacy: what’s at stake
Perhaps something to use an iPad as a second screen?
On a New Road : James Gosling on Apple and Java
PHP is not supposed to have persistent process of any sort. It's stateless (if you shard/share sessions well, it's super easy to scale).
I know lots of PhDs at Google who aren't doing research, but it's because they don't want to be doing research.
You can still install it yourself... both Windows and Linux don't come with it already installed. I think that that is Jobs's point - if they bundled it, it was out of date by ship-time.