skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My background and current project are PC-centric, but there are some folks here who came from console development who have that style too.

And yeah, the instance where there are two lines of this are actually lines of slashes, the line of = is just one of several versions.

I do remember some old IDE (Metroworks on Mac? I barely used it) would recognize a particular comment style like this and create a kind of table of contents dropdown list, using these to break the list into sections. But putting them between every function would have removed the value in that too.
> It's easy to forget that in many ways a 30 year old only has twice the experience of a 15 year old.

At walking and eating, sure, but for many other things, the 30 year old has more than 2x as much experience. It depends on when they start.

For example, if someone learns math at 5, that someone can have 10 years of experience at 15 and 25 years at 30.

If said someone doesn't start doing something until 10, the numbers are 5 and 20.
Review My Wknd Project: Televite: Send Automated Phone Messages
This is my first time posting so I'm not sure if I'm doing this right. I submitted my link before but it didn't work. Anyways, I have been working on creating a small project that lets you send fun automated phone messages. You can use it to send holiday greetings to your friends/relatives. I would really appreciate it if you can comment on what you think about this.

http://televite.totalengage.com
Emacs Fill Prefix in Vim
Great company and a great business success story. I guess Amazon doesn't fear Diapers.Com Anymore! Excellent story over at Businessweek on the company: http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/10_42/b41990627...
I had a startup email me out of the blue offering me an interview because they liked my HN comments. Sadly I'm in the UK and they're in the USA, but it was nice of them to reach out.

Other than opportunities like that (which aren't really to do with the karma score as such anyway), it's a meaningless number.
I'll admit that my formulation of the fourth statement was a bit ambiguous, but you missed the point. For what its worth, I agree it should be rephrased, if only to avoid such confusion.

If you attempt to read it with the (perhaps generous) assumption that I'm not proposing a tautology, than you might see what I mean.

A Keynesian ideology provides justification for the use of state power that differing economic ideologies do not. It would seem rational (warning: assumption of self-interest) that, holding everything else constant, politicians have a tendency to endorse Keynesian thought.
That does become harder to follow, then.

And, woops...
I'd be really interested in seeing how much equity the founders have left in the business.

It's definitely not capital light, so I can imagine that they had to raise quite a bit of money to get it off the ground and running.
I'm surprised, diapers.com should be pretty well known to anyone interested in business or entrepreneurship.
Ship code. Most developers get that CS isn't programming. Programming is much more of a vocational skill, w/o the negative connotations that go along with it. It's really a lot more dependent on what's hot right now and a lot less concerned about first principles.

Your average computer scientist doesn't really care about refactoring, or design patterns, or dependency management (unless you happen to research that field -- and notice that everything I listed is in the software engineering subdiscipline -- pretty much every other subdiscipline in CS is completley uninterested in the programming flavors of the month).

For most professional dev shops knowing a particular technology well (patterns and such included) is more important than being well versed on most aspects of computer science (whether theory, algorithms, ai, programming languages, architecture, compilers, discrete math, etc...).

So learn something well enough that you can ship/deploy/launch a good product based on it, and do it.
Have these guy ever applied to YC?
I heard of Diapers.com from HN, and I've seen several articles about it on here, so I don't think it's an unreasonable assumption to make. Diapers.com is a big competitor for Amazon.com on the baby stuff, so it's a good acquisition for them.
Why do you think those are mutually exclusive?
To the extent that Clojure's heath depends on the Java ecosystem, that's true.

To the extent that Clojure is the next big Lisp as many are predicting, not so. The development of Clojure-in-Clojure will make it relatively easy to do more specific platform backends (e.g. x86_64 POSIX); some of us with no love of Java (or of OOP or in extreme need of existing Java libraries) are looking forward to that day.

And while this won't appeal to many, Clojure was originally targeted to the CLR as well as the JVM. Rich Hickey punted his CLR efforts when he decided he'd prefer developing the language at twice the rate, but others have resurrected it.
Maybe different philosophies apply to newer languages, but I've heard it said that in C your main functions should be more than just a list of function calls, and a function should only be extracted if it's either impossible to read otherwise, or used more than once. Maybe that's less important now that function call overhead is minimal compared to everything else.

I will note, however, that function call overhead still adds up. Qt4 on GNOME is significantly slower delivering events than it needs to be, as every single call stack is over 50 methods deep.
I agree it's fun to read and has some good points, but it's obvious it's meant only for really imperative-styled C that you'd expect to find in the kernel. e.g.:

> ... if you need more than 3 levels of indentation, you're screwed anyway, and should fix your program.

class A:
def foo(self):
while cond:
if othercond:
bar()

Uh oh, four indentation levels!
> indirect contributions via the Google Summer of Code program.

That's indirect?!? It's basically a strait up $5 million a year investment in open source.
There are Android tablets. Why is it unfair to compare the Android OS to the iOS?
Did Scientists Overclock Human Brain Using Electricity?
Regardless of who he's replacing, promoting Adams would make things worse for them, because they'd be seen to still be promoting white men. They created the problem by discriminating, so they are required to discriminate differently until the problem is resolved. This is going to take a long time, because they are also not expanding their management ranks, so it only proceeds at the pace of turnover.

I'm sure Adams' contention would be they can't fire incompetents because it takes someone competent and powerful to identify them.
Okay, this sounds a bit harsh... so I'll explain more.

As others have stated, employment in California really is at-will. For example, I know someone who has been fired for getting too drunk at a company party!

So yeah, companies in California can fire you for any reason, or no reason at all. In this case I see the negative effects of keeping the person employed (such as the loss of potential employees and damage to the company reputation) outweighing their value as an employee.
Insider buying is almost always a sign that the company is undervalued in the market.

Do you have data to back this up? I ask because the standard wisdom was that stock buybacks were a sign that the stock was undervalued. But it turns out, looking at historical data, that it was no better predictor of the stock price in the future than random chance.
I had the same question. Also, I'm having trouble guessing what the Polluted Eastern Marshes would be here… IBM (New York)? Judging from the rest I wouldn't guess that IBM was too into C when it was written, but it's hard to tell. So … Japan? Nah…
Wow. The strident comments actually turned my OFF on the whole discussion. I resolve to continue not caring about the subject.
I'd say that the concept of our economy as a glorified hedge fund is going a bit too far. Ireland is a glorified hedge fund due to it's tax policies and financial investments. Britain is able to trade on it's asset base which is actually pretty large compared to the likes of Ireland. The manufacturing of which you speak has gone downhill, but given the country's history as the manufacturing powerhouse of the world initially, followed by the dissolution, renaissance and redissolution of it's base I don't see that as a huge problem. The British economy these days is largely a value-add services-driven economy. We don't manufacture because it's cheaper to get other countries to manufacture then develop services on top and make money through arbitrage on the difference. I'm not suggesting this is sustainable but it's the only thing we can do for now to remain competitive.
That depends on what you mean by "linked".

If the binary you compiled contains third-party content, or anything derived from thus, then it's subject to that content's license. There's three common ways this happens for C libraries: static linking, inlining, and copy-paste. Other languages might have more (C++, Haskell) or fewer (Python, Ruby) ways, depending on implementation.

If the binary doesn't contain anything derived from third-party code, then it's not covered by third-party licenses, and you can do whatever you want with it. If there's no binary at all, then unless you've copied someone else's work into your source code, there's also no infringement.

For example, lets say you write a Python script which uses GNU Readline (which is GPL'd). Your script is under the BSD 4-clause license, which is not GPL-compatible. Distributing the script is perfectly legal, because the only license covering it is BSD4. However, if you (or anybody else) copied GPL'd code into the script itself, distributing it would be illegal. Additionally, if you used something like py2exe to bundle your script (and all its dependencies) into a single binary, then the result is illegal to distribute (because GPL + BSD4 = :( ).

Some people have, understandably, gotten a bit confused by this; the confusion is not helped by cranks (on both sides) claiming that the GPL is "infections", "viral", or otherwise acts like some sort of legal contagion. The GPL is a copyright license; it can only grant rights, not take them away.

The actual case of MySQL is a bit murkier; they've put forward some truly bizarre claims in the past, such as that the MySQL protocol itself is copyrighted and any reimplementation is illegal. Probably no court would uphold this view, but Oracle has much much more money than most individuals. They don't have to win, they just have to bury you in lawyer's fees until you go bankrupt.
Yes It's doable. does the charge have to be on demand..while the call is being made? or can it be pre-paid? Do you want the caller to be charged directly on their phone bill or can they pay somewhere else? Those questions would need to be answered I'd guess. But contact me and I can help you with this.
I think it's exactly clear cut - if Google accessed some other sites data but didn't provide a reciprocal arrangement, then I would be equally harsh on Google.

'Open' doesn't win if others don't come to the party - Google is playing hardball to force Facebook to gives users control of their data. Yes they have ulterior motives but in this situation I believe the end does justify the means.

If Facebook wants to open their data at their own pace, then don't reap the benefits of 'openness', if you aren't prepared to contribute. Facebook is effectively the big selfish kid at school who only takes, but doesn't give anything back (in terms of openness).
Doesn't ook like he got to far, nothing of substance in the google code he setup for the project.
Also, if you have root, don't use .htacess files in production and you'll get a performance boost. Set 'AllowOveride none' in the main config & put your .htaccess in a <directory> block included in the main config at launch.
I am quite surprised to see the final Kinect depth-sensing technology utilized two camera. The company Microsoft acquired (if I remembered correctly) is known as maker of cheap 3D depth-sensing camera which itself is a very interesting piece of technology (from what I understand, the technology uses an active camera which emit infra-red and detect it at the same time, thus, you can construct depth information from the structured infra-red reflection). I am interested to know what obstacle they have encountered with that technology.
The Lazy Way To Download Journal Articles
I actually read an article on how Diapers.com got started. It was a couple folks in a garage. P&G and the other diaper manufacturers wouldn't talk to someone so small, so they got warehouse club memberships and just bought mass quantities to mail out.

At times, they apparently bought out the BJs and Sams Clubs within a 100 mile radius. They were doing it all on credit cards in their own cars and rented U-Hauls.

Here's the article:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-10-07/diapers-com-takes-o...
Should it? Why? I have no kids and am in the UK. Is it a famous business case study? Even if it is, I'm a computer scientist not a business guy.

The headline makes it sound like they bought the domain name for that figure, which is sensationalist and inaccurate.
I'd be surprised if anyone thought building Twitter with similar scalability would be easy. Sure while you cold fit it into 1 mySQL DB it would be easy to get the basic features down with a much simpler UI and no API. Past that though they would be vastly underestimating the work.
How embarrassing, I fail at reading comprehension. I thought the question was "I don't understand why tomerico was downvoted", and that was what I attempted to answer. The source of my confusion was that aw3c2 had net positive votes, and tomerico had net negative.
I think I will be working on this then.

It is certainly something I could use as well. It's so hard to figure out what to write OS-wise (That's the number one question during interviews: Have you ever contributed to open source, and I always say I don't know what to do or haven't found one to work with).

I have to figure out a name, but for now I will start doing some development, and mockups and see what I can come up with.
By "any metric"? How about, "lines of open source contributed per engineer-year"? Google is 10 times larger than Facebook, and has been around for twice as long. You would expect it to have a longer list of open source contributions no matter what.
Attention to detail. Do the little things well and be consistent. Just remember, talk is cheap, build stuff.

Also, keep learning. There's always more to learn.

This coming from a guy who was a Physics major, took a few beginning CS classes in college, and then just jumped in. If you want to be good, you'll get there.
Assuming that the anatomy here is not so vague in itself and poorly researched that it dies by it's own sword, so to speak...

But it's hard to think of a way to write highly detailed and technical work that even the best and brightest here are going to read. They're simply too busy.

So - like any good marketing copy, an article must have a hook, and then it must follow through on some/ more of these basic principles outlined in the anatomy. Really, all these can just be boiled down to ensuring that the reader will clearly see the benefits to them from reading the article in the first line or two.

For myself - I try to spend a bit of time on the new page voting up more of the technical articles - particularly Python related ones, because that's what I'm interested in.
I would respectfully disagree. As someone who also works across a lot of industries I can tell you that retail has been through various forms of dead for the past two years, banking is recovering from the prior shocks but is pretending it's still ongoing to maximise profits (while in other parts of banking it still is ongoing - e.g. RBS) and the defence industry is about to go south (no falklands reference intended). Anything that sells to government is going to see a big reduction in revenues over the next few years, anything that sells B2C is going to face price pressures too. There's rising unemployment, rising costs despite the massaged inflation figures and credit interest rates are creeping up while saving interests remain locked at rates that destroy wealth.

I think your point about the ruling parties is fine, except there's a bigger problem. We booted the Labour party out, but there's now no opposition. So when the two parties in power apportion blame, there's a very real risk that labour may come back in. If they do I would hope that they are able to put ideologies partly aside and work for the best interests of the country's future, but I'm not convinced they will.

Thanks for your comment though, I appreciate seeing another view of the world on a site like this, where intelligent people can engage in intelligent debate. Thanks for showing me your view of things - we may not agree but I respect your opinion.
Excel is probably the right answer because it is cheap, universal, and good enough. You certainly can do multidimenional analysis.

Another tool to consider, although I haven't used it personally is Tableau Desktop (http://www.tableausoftware.com/). It is especially good at helping you understand your data if you are more of a visual person.
That said, this is exactly why mobile is winning now. It's so much simpler.

For the user, maybe. Even though I knew it ahead of time, it was still a bit weird the first time I opened a debug terminal to my Android phone and found myself at a shell prompt. Putting Unix on a telephone is not my idea of making things simpler :-)

I can't say I find it complicated to do things on my PC though. I just don't want to cart it around all the time, or need to do all that stuff on the bus or in the park.
You're probably talking about COMPANIES buying back their stock, not directors or founders.

Of course companies act for the well being of the company itself, while directors only for theirs, so yeah, insider buying by a company or a director is totally different.
I suppose so; but not in the sense I was thinking of: a Collection<Firetruck> is not a subclass of Collection<IVehicle> (and it is impossible for you to create your own generic class where this type of relationship would be true).
People seem to love buying office coffee and diapers from amazon: http://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/grocery
Patch Adams Speaks about Health Care - Mayo Clinic 2010
You gotta have nerves of steel to start an Internet business with your own money where you ship stuff out and lose money on each thing you ship. Or maybe you have to have a lot of money.
The original article isn't about open source. It's about data portability and openness vs walled gardens.

Producing open source stuff is cool 'n all, but it doesn't really matter as much as being open vs closed in terms of what you can do with your own data.

Personally, I don't particularly care if a company decides to be totally closed source and not participate in open source contributions, as long as they don't start putting up walled gardens and trying to lock in user data.
Cool.

bbommarito - I had the idea that you might want to work on one of my sites for a convertible note or straight equity. Ping me if interested (or anyone else) - at least you'd be standing on something already there. It hasn't launched but once it does, it really needs another piece to give it something that could gain decent traction. It uses Django.

I can also help with this idea too if you like (inc. mockups) - an idea which really comes about from this situation I find myself. For a domain, you could use hackerbrain .com which I can give.
Trust your gut until it lets you down.
Safe to say the cow is out of the barn here; if Google wanted to have an impact they'd have done this two years ago. How many people in industrialized countries don't yet have Facebook accounts? Like four?
Cutting the Cord, American Snipping Cable - Half a Million Cut  in Q3 Alone
Not only are our friends at NewTeeVee reporting the ax wound with US cable bleeding, 500K+ Subscribers Lost In Q3 - but Steve Rubel, VP of the world's largest PR firm Edelman - also quoted some interesting analyses recently showing that Big Cable is in Big Trouble. With some 13% of Americans intending to pull out the scissors to cut the cord in the next 12 months, according to a report from Strategy Analytics - a market research firm. ABC is also reporting similar dire symptoms. And the tanking US economy is not helping according to the NYTs. Cable is not cheap.
Also I think that Apple's focus is really just the smarter thing to do. Basic R&D rarely ever seems to benefit those doing the research.

And as you note, in the computer industry cutting edge products are effectively cutting edge research projects. This isn't like the hammer industry where you can ship a 20 year old hammer design. And this shows at academic conferences where industry presentations on shipping products are often the best attended talks.
Right. More impressive for a CEO to say that the company's customers are excited about their products, and to give examples of who those customers are.
I'm from the UK where we often use imperial.
I get that their different, but does the data back up insider buying translates to undervalued stock? I used stock buybacks as an example where people used similar logic to justify a stock being undervalued, but the data didn't bear it out.

My question is does the data bear it out (presumably the data exists) or is it just an assumption based on the idea that insiders _should_ have a pretty good idea of the value of the company.
This is far from universal. I know that when I studied journalism, I had to unlearn that habit - I think the official style guide for the industry mandates one space.
As the owner of one, I get your point - sometimes it could be a little les computer like. OTOH I was using a mac book the other day and kept wondering a) why the arrow keys don't move the cursor or page view in text editing fields and b) why on earth it wouldn't let me just copy the files from the SD card in the camera connected to it.

It wanted to import them into iPhoto but couldn't do it, because iPhoto didn't recognize some files that used RAW format. I didn't mind that, but all I wanted to do was see the contents of the card in a finder window and move them myself. Eventually I had to borrow a USB card reader and stick the SD card into that.

I kept imagining Clippy for Mac: It looks like you know what you're doing. Do you think I'm going to let you put me out of a job?
Thanks to the government response to the financial crash, large companies are sitting on mountains of cash they can use for stock buybacks to offset the dilution from issuing options. Not to mention that the stock market is still depressed. It's an ideal time for top insiders at large public companies to use their options.
Well, yes. But the style guide was written for plain C, in which the program logic starts at the first indentation in functions.

In Python you have very different characteristics, and have to adapt styles.

You should not get deeper than 3 logic indentations on function level there either, though.

And from my experience, 8 character tabs (with the article you cited actually starts with) are still workable in Python, at least for me.
"Sorry but your browser is not supported. Please use firefox to use this application"

You need a better pitch to convince me to switch to a different browser.

I'm on Chrome btw.
Whitman and Fiorina, Candidacies That Did Not Compute
Yep. First letter of a sentence, or title, or any other proper noun. So... how can your program tell which it is? The correct algorithm approaches AI in complexity.