skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For me, it depends on what I'm trying to accomplish with the communications hit, as both methods have their pluses and minuses.

I find email is much better if I have a complex/multi-step idea that I'm trying to convey. The act of writing it out allows me more time to concentrate on a clear way to get the point across, gives me time to revise the communication to make sure I got it right, and allowed the receiver to re-read parts to make sure they have understood the idea properly. It also (obviously) makes it possible to include charts, numbers, maps, pictures - really any multimedia product that helps explain your point.

Email is also clearly better for CYA purposes/situations where you need to have an unambiguous and easily-transferable record of who made what decision. Sure, you could record and then save the phone conversation - but that's pretty awkward.

Phone conversations, on the other hand, I find are much better for information acquisition. They allow you to try and establish a rapport/make small talk with the person you're talking to, which often leads to information you wouldn't get otherwise. I can't count the number of times that a digression or a little small-talk on the phone has given me some information that I wouldn't have gotten if I'd simply sent an email listing the facts I needed to know. The small "relationship" that you can build through a few phone calls also tends to come in handy later if and when you meet the person in-the-flesh, moreso I find than n email conversation can.

Yes, note-taking sucks - but I've gotten into the routine of speaking to someone on the phone, and then while on the phone with them asking for things to be emailed to me (generally the type of things I'm after they have on their computer anyways).

The other issue, of course, is timing. Even when you're in a situation where you know the people you're communicating with are at their computers, I find it's almost always faster to call someone to get an answer to a question, as opposed to emailing them. This, in turn, influences the way I communicate with them. If the issue isn't that pressing, I'll often email - it allows the recipient to deal with it at their leisure, which I respect as much as I can. If I need the information reasonably soon, I'll send a follow-up email as a reminder, to bring the issue back to the top of their mental/actual inbox and remind them that I'm waiting for this. But if it's urgent, I'm going to end up ignoring the scheduling-habits of the person I'm dealing with and will pick up the phone. I may be interrupting whomever I'm calling, but they'll have had plenty of time to respond at their leisure by that point, and their time is up.

Bottom line, for me, is that it depends. What's the interaction for? Who's it with? What's our relationship? And when do I need that information?
Could you elaborate a little about his misuse of OO and functions? I ask as a CS student whose code doesn't get read very often. I want to be able to spot this sort of thing but don't see much wrong with his method of enqueuing function calls.

However, two things do jump out at me as improvements:

* Enqueue the function object and arguments rather than a lambda of the function (his version not actually being a "great hack as the comments claim"). Or perhaps use functools.partial().
* CONFORM TO PEP8 FOR THE LOVE OF JOHN CLEESE
I am pretty certain in this situation that git diff claims that the submodule directory itself has somehow been modified from the previous commit hash to the new one. Please recognize that the case here is a merge conflict between two people advancing the commit the submodule points to to different revisions of the subproject, not merge conflicts inside of the subproject (which really should not be happening).
A nitpick: People in English departments would probably call this a "rhetorical analysis," since "literary analysis" usually refers to fiction.

I would say that Graham tends to have the modernist tendency to cut anything superfluous; to quote Milan Kundera in _Encounter_, "Almost all great modern artists mean to do away with 'filler,' do away with whatever comes from habit, whatever keeps them from getting directly and exclusively at the essential (the essential: the thing the artist himself, and only he, is able to say)." Kundera, like Graham, is very good at doing this in his nonfiction; his essays on the novel contain more in 200 broadly spaced pages than most tomes about literary theory that I've read.

One other thing: is very, very good at not repeating himself and not having ideas with an extreme amount of overlap. I think that's one reason he tends to say things like, "I'm not saying X" as clarification -- to avoid misreadings that might result from his terseness.

This tendency towards minimalism, by the way, is one of the same things that John Sculley talks about Steve Jobs having in terms of industrial design: http://www.cultofmac.com/john-sculley-on-steve-jobs-the-full... . Graham does it in nonfiction writing. Elmore Leonard does it in fiction; he's incredibly skilled at compacting a lot of action into a very small space. If you're looking for fiction that's as "dense" (for lack of a better term) as nonfiction, try Leonard. His subject—capers of a vaguely criminal and usually underworld nature—might not appeal to you, but the man has style.

In addition, Graham is very good at using metaphors and comparisons with history. There isn't really a good way to analyze metaphor that I know of. Some of the better attempts include Lakoff and Johnson's _Metaphors We Live By_ and Steven Pinker's _The Stuff of Thought_. But, as far as I know, no one has a complete theory of why we think associatively and metaphorically. Good writers, however, will tend to exploit the tendency to view one thing in term of another.

The problem with these kinds of generalizations is that they're very hard to make concrete. You might notice that I don't cite a lot of examples from Graham's writing because it''s harder to prove the absence of perceived filler than it is to identify filler when you see it.
I haven't found that their package philosophy "simply doesn't work." It's worked pretty great for me. Maybe we're doing different things, though.
>> Or even "angels"?

...Wait a minute, they're NOT supernatural beings?

That awesome observation made me laugh out loud :)
What do online advertisers think they know about you?
6 trillion by kids under age 18
"Supercomputers" here we come... :)
Need Partner to Raise Capital
The history taught in our schools is mostly a mix of propaganda and mythology, so there is nothing in our national identity that allows us to make sense of the 50 year decline that America is heading into. Consider that we now live in a society where:

- It's basically impossible for most intelligent, hard working people to make a decent living.

- Everyone is a criminal and is subject to arrest at any time.

- The world has changed enormously but there have been basically zero major legislative changes in the 25+ years I've been alive.

I think we're going to see a lot of frustration vented via everything from street violence to assassinations.
Duplicated of this one I sent hours ago, but didn't get much love:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1807614
My two cents would be that it's almost always somewhere in between the two extremes you describe.

Certainly having experience with OO in one language will be an advantage when it comes to picking up another OO language but yeah, you're not 100% there. I would posit that you're more than 50% there, though (with this particular example). Understanding the OO concept is more important than the syntax.

You know what I find onerous when I think about learning a new language? It's not so much picking up the new syntax because a lot of the time I find that I can do that pretty quickly (at least if the paradigm between old and new language is not too disparate). It's picking up the ecosystem around the language:

How do I deploy an application written in language X?
How do I package code written in language X (e.g. Ruby gems, Python eggs or whatever)?
Which unit testing frameworks do I learn?
What IDEs or text editors are usually used with language X?
Documentation conventions and related software (e.g. rdoc)?
What community resources are valuable, trustworthy and stable? etc.

When I first started learning Ruby (along with Rails, some years ago now) my web development experience mostly consisted of LAMP and ASP.Net. Deploying Rails apps seemed like such a massive hassle compared to PHP. Part of this was that Ruby as a web dev language was much newer than PHP and was still settling in, parts of it really were a hassle. But I came to realise that a big reason for the difference was that the two communities were conceptually coming at the issue of deployment from very different perspectives and a lot of the differences I was seeing were no accident, and not so difficult to grok when you understand the motivation behind them.

A lot of non-programmers don't get that there is usually a fair amount of transferable knowledge when it comes to picking up a new language that utilises similar concepts to one you already know. But I can also understand that some (probably most) employers want their staff to "hit the ground running" and may be looking for people with a very specific skill set.

Putting myself in the position of an employer and knowing what I do, I'd rather hire Person A that's obviously enthusiastic about learning new stuff, who's maybe contributed to something open source that can be reviewed, and who surely has some background knowledge that they can build on but who may not necessarily have language X listed on their resume, over Person B who does have language X on his resume but that's all they've really got. It would be good if more recruitment firms and HR departments started to realise that having the right acronym/keyword listed on your resume doesn't actually mean much on its own.
I'm not sure how Jim Balsilie is ever, ever allowed to make a public statement of any kind, or why PR representatives around him don't reign him in a bit.

Anyone who follows hockey news has probably seen him in action in the same light, rubbing a lot of people the wrong way, and I honestly can't understand why those around him don't protect him from himself a bit.

(edit: spelling)
My experience with an unusual resume:

Fed up with the way that Monster forced candidates to break down their resumes into tiny text boxes (this was back in 2000), I wrote a narrative that could fit into those boxes. Eventually I strung it together properly and created a resume-sized PDF (see http://www.scribd.com/doc/39705569?secret_password=1jlyubhcy...).

Results? One guy hired me on the spot -- a marketing consultant who was working on his own. Since that one job, I've sent it out many, many times, and have received maybe 1 or 2 responses out of hundreds.

I think it's well-written, but I can see it rubbing people the wrong way because of its attitude and because it's not easily scannable like a regular resume.

That said, since I was looking for work in marketing and tech, I'm surprised more people weren't interested in following up.

* I am employed now, so this isn't a resume-spamming post. :)
Wow, that was great. I think every entrepreneur even thinking about raising money should read this whole article. Twice.

This distills the current situation (as I've spent months piecing together through various means) as well as could be desired.

If you're at all concerned about raising money in the near future, get the scoop here and then spend your time building a great company instead of trying to figure out what the deal is with fundraising at the moment.
8. Profit!
You're absolutely right. Refer to his comments on Apple's Q3 quarterly earnings conference yesterday.

>>You’re looking at it wrong. You’re looking at it as a hardware person in a fragmented world. You’re looking at it as a hardware manufacturer that doesn’t really know much about software, who doesn’t think about an integrated product but assumes the software will somehow take care of itself. And you’re sitting around saying, well, how can we make this cheaper? Well, we can put a smaller screen on it, and a slower processor, and less memory, and you assume that the software will somehow just come alive on this product that you’re dreaming up, but it won’t. Because these app developers have taken advantage of the products that came before, with faster processors, with larger screens, with more capabilities that they can take advantage of to make better apps for customers. And they’re not… it’s a hard one, because it throws you right back into the beginning of that chicken-and-egg problem again, to change all the assumptions on these developers. Most of them will not follow you. Most of them will say, “I’m sorry, but I’m not going to write down a watered-down version of my app just because you’ve got this phone that you can sell for $50 less, and you’re begging me to write software for it.”<<

http://www.macworld.com/article/154980/2010/10/jobs_transcri...
The fine structure constant is special for completely different reasons than the mathematical curiosities discussed in the rest of the post.
It looks like a mod killed his account by mistake. I unfortunately see a LOT of dead comments that are perfectly fine. Usually they are preceded by a single bad comment, which at least explain why their account was killed, but I see nothing in gxs's comment history.

There isn't really any way to ask for reinstatement except to email pg - that's if the person even realizes their account killed, since the system conceals this from them.
For those who haven't read pg's realated essay:

http://www.paulgraham.com/stuff.html
Job: SugarCRM customization for a client.
Own: building a website for file administration and sharing, to learn Rails 3
China - The Mother Of All Grey Swans
So can't we just say they have weapons of mass destruction and then go and 'liberate' them (and their minerals) ?
Seems like a great way to run a hacker specific news site.. that way only people who understand things like git and github would be able to submit stories :)
Oh. Thanks for the explanation. Sorry for any bother.
WebOS 2.0 (p)review
There's a term for the kind of rephrasing used by Apple: "fear, uncertainty, and doubt"

There's another term: "propaganda"

I could probably rephrase the matter endlessly if I really wanted to.
Good. Someone had to step up and do this eventually.
RIM's fake-ass promo video for their upcoming tablet, the Playbook, might also be considered distortion of the reality of that product.
We use something along these lines...

http://gist.github.com/624773
"Dangerously close"? I think he just did.

Well, in fairness, he might've told me to buy the new Samsung tablet or a Palm Pre 2.

Just...not a BlackBerry.
I noticed the paid app was sold at varying times for $2.99, $1.99, and $0.99. Anyone have more information about the physiology/performance/trade-offs of those different prices?

Do $0.99 apps sell way more than other priced apps?
There's still a problem. Most users would just click "Yes" whenever a web site asked for access. Chrome addons routinely request access to "all files on your computer" and very few users complain about it. Fast-forward, and it's ActiveX all over again.

Do people know better these days? I'm not sure.
DRM isn't exactly compatible with open-source...
Or the carriers can simply choose not to preinstall Gingerbread on the new phones.
Google Releases Chrome 7 Stable Version
Antimov: this robot will self destruct in 5 seconds. on [Technabob]
1. Do you think that the form of a government does not affect its tendency toward corruption?

2. Note that I was talking about Smith's influence on early US government. The nation has obviously strayed from that quite a lot since then -- and has economically gone downhill quite a lot, as well.
i really liked brian chesky's talk on airbnb. very unique story that teaches you to never give up and get close with your customers. 3rd video down from the top
If you're making (sweeping!) generalizations about static typing, but don't even address languages that do it well, it's a rather weak argument. That's like dismissing dynamic typing as a whole because of bugs caused by string / number coercion in PHP. (Or dismissing jugglers with two arms because they're cheating.)

On the other hand, if someone seriously proficient in OCaml were to criticize static typing (in general, not just implementation details in some given language), I'd be all ears.

Loud ignorance + linkbait title? Flagged. Python is a fine language, it's too bad some of its buzz is so ignorant.
can u give an idea what reasonably inexpensive means?
Improvements to my app http://TheWikiGame.com, making more "game types" like "Speed Race", "Least Clicks", "5 Clicks to Jesus", etc. After that, iPhone/Android apps for the game.
Working on my next Android game, hopefully it will come out this week - maybe Thursday ;)

Then going back to do some updates to my other games.

In my personal experiences in the Android market, the more polish I put on my games, the more they sell. Hoping to keep the ball rolling.
One can conduct business in violation of the law anywhere. When it's done intelligently, we call the result "black marketeering". When it's done stupidly, we call the result "jail time".
Applying for U.S. Citizenship? Be Careful Who You "Friend"
I like the personal experience tip... i should have added that to the question.. what are you working on and share an insight from it.
Yep that's correct, but that's how it is now. I can submit a story with any title I want. If you really want to submit a story that has been buried by a lousy title, there are ways to do so (as I did with this story a couple of hours ago)
Sorry, no. That was hyperbole. You're not in jail in a traditional sense, but there are a laundry list of bad things that will happen, making it seem like you are. I'm talking things like wage garnishment and draining bank accounts. It's difficult to live a life based on cash (as in green paper), so at some point, the banks will catch up with you and drain your accounts. It's next to impossible to lead a normal life when you can't even save up enough money to pay cash for a $5000 car. The impact of wage garnishment on employment are significant as well. How motivated would you feel to show up to work, knowing that you'll never see the majority of your wages. This drives a lot of people to do stupid things like commit fraud, which can result in jail time if you repeatedly break the law.

You literally end up on the run from your debt. That's not a life you want to live.
No kidding. I submitted this post on a whim and my karma went from 30 this morning to 473 and is still rising.
Who wants to listen to a party pooper like that?

Yes, yes, yes! The exact correct point.

Mandlebrot's finance papers, in published in the 1960's, refute Black and Schole's Nobel Prize winning theories of the 1990's. Who wants to hear that?

Does Mandlebrot rate a Nobel himself? Why of course not...

Mandlebrot pointed the way to "another country", one which marketing can not describe...
Send an email to ryandavies@gmail.com and I'd be happy to talk with you.
Interesting, I'll have to go over your code fairly carefully, as I'm not familiar with every technique you're using here for performance.

I've since learned a good deal about Clojure and implemented an idiomatic (but probably less performant) version, for anyone interested in how short this can be:

http://gist.github.com/635674
Best part of the article:

Write less code

The more code you have, the more likely it is that you’ve got the Beast of Technical Debt lurking about. Conversely, the smaller your codebase, the easier it is to keep your technical debt in check. In other words, writing only the code you need helps reduce your technical debt over time.
A WPF application desktop search engine/launcher. A little like Quicksilver/Ubiquity but with a new kind of interface and scope.
Great response. Thanks for taking the time to explain.

How'd you come to the conclusion about writing-optimized typography? Is this something you considered using your background in IA, or user/beta testing, or what?
I find the only time I wish the iPad were smaller would be for reading, though I think I would rather have a separate device like a Kindle than a smaller iPad.

I find that I more often wish it were a little larger so that art+sound apps could have more tools onscreen at once.
I disagree; Clojure on Google App Engine is a pretty solid platform for web development,and by now there's a lot of online help to get you started.

But your first sentence says it all - depends on what you're looking for. If you're outside of the cloud (by choice or necessity) Ruby/Rails, Python/Django, or even Groovy/Grails are all tough to beat.
I think that an active HN member "asking for the sale" at the end of a post is clever and responsible marketing.

More so than many blogs' gratuitously inflammatory titles or even having widgets to submit every post to Reddit or Digg or every other site under the sun.
This is typical of the sort of free-loading piracy that Google promotes.

Have they even tried to contact the authors? Don't they and their families deserve some of the royalties?

Has Sonny Bono been told?
Joe should stick to developing..

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3077289/facebook-android-...
A couple of hours ago I made a comment here about the importance of giving a good article a good title so it does get read in here. In comparison at this moment the original post went from 6 to 25 points (thanks to this post), this post and it's 'better headline' had 90 points, the post I resubmitted has 104 and is second on the home page right now.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1809051

The new post completely won over thanks to a better title. Food for though.
Working on startup http://www.estate3d.com, a place where anyone can have their physical building/premises created in 3D for the Google Earth 3D buildings layer and/or embedded on their site.
HN: Anyone looking for a technical co-founder?
I am interested in finding a co-founder to chase my endeavors with. Specifically I am looking for someone who is highly technical, and has a deep understanding of low-level computing (Can code in C, knows x86 Asm, so on and so forth).

I am aiming to build creative products that solve difficult, more low-level problems associated with computers. I am not so much interested in doing gimmicky web startups (although if a great idea is out there I will dive into a web solution as well)

Obviously I am looking for a naturally motivated person, someone who loves to hack, innovate, brain-storm, and have fun with new ideas. Also someone with persistence and patience.

If anyone out there has these qualities and is looking to partner up with myself, who has very similar attributes to the ones described above, please feel free to shoot me an e-mail to talk!

jdefr89@gmail.com

Thanks!