skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you want funding, it's helpful to show that at least one other person believes in you and will drink the Kool Aid.

If you're bootstrapping, it's helpful to have someone else to talk ideas over with, share the workload with and keep each other motivated and focused.

Some of would also be a factor of your personal skills and motivation and the scope of the project. It is certainly possible with the frameworks and hosting options we have today to get a project off the ground entirely on your own. But for larger things or building a "company" instead of a "lifestyle app", you'll generally end up needing multiple people to pull it off.
While I do share your disdain for drama news like this taking up valuable space on the homepage of HN, instead of us commenting on this story, why aren't we all merely flagging it and letting the tools in place run their course? I understand the need to have discussion on the matter of what HN should consider 'good news', but having it inside of an article that most of us could care less about and does not make our lives better gives false credence to a pissing contest between two individuals.

I fully understand the irony in me posting this, btw. :)
I've seen obvious OCR errors too.
Hype aside, one of the key pieces of American technology development is a very simple one.

Bankruptcy.

The legal ability for an individual or a business to fail.

Seriously.

If I don't get buried in a mountain of business debt from a (legitimate) business failure, then I am free to try again with a different business idea or different business model, and to pivot and to hone my business skills, and to see what else might work with the customers and with the investors.

Countries and regions with punitive laws around business failures and particularly around the legal exposures and debt incurred by legitimate businesses will inherently operate at a competitive disadvantage.

Carefully balancing the societal benefits and costs of non-putative bankruptcies (and of non-putative layoffs, for that matter) is critical in encouraging new business ventures.
Are you referring to some specific event in the 70s regarding the legalization of marijuana in America (Federal Controlled Substance Act in 1970)?

I was not alive during that time, and any clarification would be appreciated.
Or perhaps a [:white, :grey, :black].sort_by{rand}.first hat attack vector list? Penetration testers love this stuff, as do I. At my job, I educate developers by documenting things like this. It helps them be aware of what crazy stuff is out there.
Python rocks, but Python + R + bash rocks way harder for research
Symbian's share seems suspiciously small. Maybe it's US only or something like that.
California state law is not an advocacy platform.
Lucky 13: Using a MacBook Air as a Primary Mac
"I feel we are now living in the era of the slowest technological progress in the past few hundred years"

Can someone point out an impressive list of technological advancements that occurred throughout the 1700s that would be unmatched by a list of technological advancements that occurred throughout the last 70 years?
Don't forget 2.3 is about to be released. How many of those existing handsets will be upgraded?
I did not upvote the story, and I posted my comment to try to convince others to ignore it as well. As I understand it, this is what HN comments are for: discussion, exchange of ideas and convincing.

I do hope that by discussing it here I will convince fellow hackers not to upvote similarly shallow stories in the future.
A gentle introduction to python metaclasses (oldie but goodie)
You want the answer? Start adding some of those people to the main project. If they're writing the proper tests and the code is solid, add them. If they botch a release, remove them and roll back.

There are two scenarios:

1) You aren't responding to pull requests in a timely fashion
2) Your original code isn't meeting the needs of the users

If there are that many active forks, consider inviting the most active contributers to IRC and finding out why they aren't making pull requests. If they are and you aren't responding then the blame lies soley with the master repo maintainer.
Wanna know what kind of photo data loss really makes me angry? Timestamps.

Big, yellow, irremovable timestamps covering a chunk of the photo.

All the time data you could possibly want is already embedded in the file. Want to print it? Ok then, go ahead and put a timestamp on the corner if you really want to. But please don't destroy the original.
Thanks for the offer but I agree with others in thinking people should earn the right to have the community review their work. What level of participation justifies that right is the real question. Any thoughts?
Thanks! Am (already) beginning to read it
After all the thought and consideration, I honestly think I'm going to go with a unique domain and do separate sections off this. I'm trying to do something totally different than my main site, eventually hoping for some synergy between the two, but for now, I think this will be better. Somehow it just doesn't seem right doing mysite.com/somethingelse when the second section is totally different.

So, plan from here: get a new domain, something that I can use with multiple sites. I'm thinking something about "one a day" or "something per day" ... any ideas? Then, I'll have apps.newsite.com, whatever_niche.newsite.com, etc.

Thoughts?

And by the way, I'll still be taking the advice on sub-sites ... just those will be with more similar content. At least that's what I'm thinking now. Thank you so much everyone for your help ... HN is awesome!
> There are an awful lot of languages that provide ...

Still, how many of them have a fast interactive interpreter ("command line") with a decent usability? How many of those provide good libraries for numerical as well as symbolic math? With an API that is easy to write, to understand and to extend?

Python may not be the only language with those qualities, but there aren't many languages (and ecosystems around them) which can compete on all those areas.

Python seems to be one one the few "best fits" for scientific applications.
Retirees don't vote.
I only scanned the article very briefly, but my impression is that the important comparison is vs. Matlab. The other players aren't really in the author's game. It's a question of the use case and the community and the library support.

In theory, .Net could displace Matlab or Python as the canonical platform for scientific researchers. And in theory Python could displace PHP as the canonical platform for classic CRUD web apps. In practice neither is likely to happen, no matter how much we might or might not wish it to.
Given the fact that my 6 year old desktop I never use would serve me just as adequately as "the future of notebooks" for things I need to do, I've always found that attitude to be a useful hedge against needless spending.
"this law could have allowed people to lawfully drive under the influence"

Considering that marijuana impairs driving ability less than driving at the legal limit for alcohol, does it really matter? We as a society have already decided that the level of risk that driving stoned poses is acceptable.
The Secret Company That's Profiting From Every Hybrid On The Road
This sort of misses the point. Pricing is generally driven by one thing - profit maximisation. That's very different to maximising volume sales.

Even if you can go and buy a paperback for $1, there are evidently enough people buying the $10 version (or they wouldn't sell it at that point).

If they price the eBook based on the competition from used paperbacks, they're going to risk people who would have paid $10 buying the cheap eBook instead. That may increase volume sales but given their age and the likely number you could shift even selling them for a $1 (after all there are plenty sat unsold in the second handbook shops, it's not like they're flying off the shelves even at that price) the total profit would be lower.

So you may not think it's not worth $10 but they know that most people think that and they don't really care. They'd rather sell to 100 people at $10 than 500 at $1 and if you're one of the 400 not buying at the higher price they're not fussed.

The other point is that I think people massively over estimate the cost of the physical medium for books. In the UK you can buy a printed copy of War and Peace (nearly 1000 pages) for £1 and at that price it's profitable. The paper is pretty low quality but it's 1000 pages, printed and shipped and profitable for both the publisher and the retailer. Given that I don't think we should expect massive differences between the cost of physical and eBooks.
I'm curious to see if this guy will get a letter from Facebook's legal department, like Pete Warden did.
I watched a ted talk recently and while I don't recall it containing any data about the long term effects I was very impressed by the method/process used.

http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_meyer_math_curriculum_makeover....

Hopefully that will help to get some wheels spinning?
Do they all have equivalent libraries to python's scipy and matplotlib? I think that is why the author could move to python as these provide a pretty large subset of what matlab has and makes the transition less problematic.

Java probably does and .NET may have something like this but I don't know of them or their amount of documentation.
If Apple's Click2Flash is really letting 1x1 apps through, that kind of kill Safari as a reasonable Firefox alternative in my book.
Newbie? Account created 356 days ago? Interesting ...
Playing Zork on a typewriter
I wish they took in consideration in the first chart the percentage of users of those platforms who actually surf the web with their phone.
I like the idea. I would not consider users that don't contribute enough to hn but want to get feedback equal to spammers. May be such egoistic approach is not so good for community but this is not spamming.

If Luke wants to donate his time, risk his karma and review few RMS submission from news users I would only support him. At least he could find some gems and it's good for community.
Actually I think most research shows that the number one influence in the formative years is the state of the household, and by that I mean the family dynamics and the quality of the home and neighbourhood that the child spends his/her time.

All else is secondary.
I am a user of open source, as such I have created my resume in HTML and PDF.

HTML is the most popular when people visit my website to view my resume and PDF is most popular when people ask me to email my resume to them.
It would be nice if you provided a lot more detail. I like recommending people books, but when all you say about your preferences is "I like Foundation and Hitchhiker's Guide" (like every other nerd in the universe) there's not really much space for figuring out what you would enjoy and what you wouldn't.
Yup, created and forgotten about until a few weeks ago.
"Union agreements and seniority-based schedule assignments lead to reduced safety for passengers, as the least experienced workers are pushed the hardest and get the least amount of rest. "

The reason junior officers get paid 16k a year is because there are people willing to do the job for 16k a year. Without the unions airlines could probably get volunteers (much like Greenspun who is certainly not doing it for the money) to fly their planes. But then we would have every pilot inexperienced, overworked, and underpaid.

Yes, the airlines are a mess, but he provided no evidence for his arguments. Southwest has been consistently profitable. Why haven't the pilots eaten up all their profits?
OverStock.com will pay $5K for s/w developer referrals (java).
Not really. PT Barnum and all.
Nokia teams with China Mobile on apps
In the end, it's all about the ecosystem. Perl wins for bioinformatics because there are boatloads of scientists already using it, with all the neat libraries and resources that brings. Equally, Python wins for, say, prototyping in robotics because of libraries, support and so on.

There's nothing intrinsically science-apt about Python/Perl, but Ruby and friends can't compete when it comes to the programming environment; that's what counts.
R is definitely powerful and a good part of any scientific data analysis toolkit.

I use python, ipython, matplotlib, numpy and R. I call my R scripts directly from python using rpy.
The hardware-isn't-the-same fragmentation problem still exists in an all 2.2 ecosystem. The is-this-API-call-supported problem does not. Problem 2 is a bigger problem, but solving it does not fix problem 1.
Actually, Kasparov is doing somewhere around 200 trillion operations in his head every moment, not merely 100 billion. His brain isn't single-purpose, though, as Deep Blue is. The brain, as Montague points out, does all sorts of things consciously and subconsciously that Deep Blue has no chance of doing with only 100 billion operations/second. It's much more omni-purpose than Deep Blue's processors.

And, while it's interesting that Deep Blue can be produced with relatively low energy cost, it's interesting in the way a fly can be produced with low cost compared to a human. The fly is designed for a very specific type of life, and it does a nice job with it. But a fly is not nearly as adaptable as a human, and neither, ultimately, is Deep Blue. Our long setup period allows us to do some incredible tasks that we are still decades from understanding well.
I know this article isn't about the content of your resume, but is your experience as a BSA camp counselor relevant programming or design work?

Very few employers will understand that being Nature Director likely meant you were an Environmental Science counselor and that that badge was one of the more difficult interesting ones likely offered at the camp. Are there benefits to signaling that you are part of a large organization like Scouting or a similar (generally) well regarded national organization like this? is it worth mentioning on the off chance your employer was also a Boy Scout?

What do other people think, is there a good general rule for where to stop including older work experience?

If you're putting one resume online and you can't tailor it to one job you're applying for, do you tailor it for the job you wish you had? What do you do differently for your general resume?
Does anyone know if everyone that applied receives a response (rejection or invite to interview)? My profile is populated with an email address, but I never received a response.
Not to take away from the cause, but I'm guessing if you emailed PG during a quiet period and offered to buy him a $500 lunch he'd take you up on the offer :-)
Bad headline: the 'high-risk' defects include resource leaks and other problems that could cause crashes or data loss but are not necessarily exploitable.

And, of course, this is assuming either Coverity manually checked and confirmed each of these problems (possible, but not mentioned in the article) or that Coverity's scanner has a 0% false positive rate (highly unlikely to the point of patently absurd; my experience with static analyzers is false positives being 50 to 80% of the total though it's been a couple of years since I used Coverity specifically).
hehe, Comic Sans...
It's fungible (according to the Court).
Pandoc [1] does a pretty good job. The issue with HTML is of course that by design it doesn't deal with presentation: that's the job of the presentation layer (i.e. CSS) and the user agent (usually a web browser). PDFs, by contrast, state just how they're meant to look.

[1] http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/
RiderOfGiraffes also suggested Snow Crash; both would be excellent choices. I'd add to this Cryptonomicon, which is an interesting story, interesting thematic matter (relevant to software folks, and presented intelligently), and just full of different ways of looking at things (the scene that describes the Hindenburg disaster, or eating Captain Crunch cereal, were both perfectly clear, yet told in ways that took me some time to sync with what they were actually referring to.

Also consider most anything from Vernor Vinge. Some of my favorites from him are A Deepness in the Sky, Rainbows End, and A Fire Upon the Deep. Since he's a Comp Sci professor, he handles technology issues (and especially computer-related stuff) very realistically.

And if you're looking back into the classics, consider Larry Niven's "Known Space" books, particularly Ringworld.
... with an added emphasis on "Cryptonomicon". :)
I've been a Matlab user for 10 yrs, recently switched to python because of the increased flexibility. never going back to Matlab ever again. Python math and science libs can be a little rough around the edges, but the flexibility more than makes up for it for me.
"Anathem" by Neal Stephenson is the best book I've read in years. The first 50 pages or so are a slog, but after that I couldn't put it down.

"What is the What" by Dave Eggers is also phenomenal.
How to Virtualize Your Computer
maybe some on HN can donate their services to fix it for him?
May I suggest Roger Zelazny's classic "Nine Princes in Amber"? Short easy read and very well written.

Otherwise, when you can affort more than a "short attention span" come back for more recommendations.
What if people aren't interested in the funding, but instead are interested in all the other intangible benefits that comes with being funded by PG&Co?
Collapsible comments for Hacker News
There's a large volume that contains all of Arthur C. Clarke's science fiction short stories. They're great because they are indeed short, and while not all of them are good, a number of them fill me with the same sort of wonder I get from reading the first Foundation book.

If you're on an Asimov kick, The Caves of Steel is also pretty good, and has a Foundation-style twist at the end.
One and two letter .co.uk, .net.uk, .org.uk, .me.uk domains to be made available
The First Baltimore Hackathon
As a language I prefer Ruby but the Python ecosystem for this kind of thing is definitely a huge advantage. You can actually do quite a bit with Ruby + GSL but it's still not really competitive.
I struggled with high school calculus. I just couldn't wrap my head around the concept. My teacher kept making noises about "rate of change" but it made no sense. Luckily for me, I was taking physics at the same time, and we ran an experiment to calculate acceleration due to gravity.

So we ran the experiment with a weight and a ticker tape and a little hole punch tool and we got these data sets measuring the distance between each consecutive hole on the tape. Plotting distance against time on a graph, we produced a curve somewhat reminiscent of a y = x^2 function.

Then, given d2, d1, t2 and t1, we were able to calculate a set of velocities between each point. Plotting velocity against time on a graph, we produced a sloped line somewhat reminiscent of a y = 2x function.

And then, of course, given v2, v1, t2 and t1, we were able to calculate a set of acceleration rates between each point. Plotting acceleration against time on a graph, we produced a horizontal line somewhat reminiscent of a y = 2 function.

Then it hit me. Looking at the three graphs, in a flash I suddenly understood exactly what "rate of change" meant. I understood why d(x^2) = 2x, and why d(2x) = 2. Calculus made perfect sense, and I plowed through all the exercises that had plagued me since the start of the year.

So when I clicked on the first video in this OCW set [1] and watched Professor Strang put distance/speed and height/slope side by side as his two canonical examples, a big smile spread across my face.

[1] http://ocw.mit.edu/resources/res-18-005-highlights-of-calcul...
Dune is the best science fiction book ever written.
But, this isn't the iPhone, you can sell apps outside of the Market, though the market for non-Market software is admittedly smaller.
The best camera is on you have in your hand at the time. I don't see a problem with letting people use whatever they have -- the technology will presumably get better if it is what is demanded by the market.
And the corollary: Why do researchers never respect the PEP8 when they write python code?

Yes I am a bit overreacting since the blog post is very well written and I actually agree 100% with the content. But please people: respect the PEP8 [1]. It makes your readers feel at home while reading your code. It is very important if you want to get new contributors to your project. See [2] for instance.

[1] http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/
[2] http://www.dataists.com/2010/10/whats-the-use-of-sharing-cod...
Caltech Art of Science 2010 Exhibition
Ones I've read recently all seem to have wei-rd hyphenation pro-blems.
This fixes a few issues with the script by Alexander Kirk [1], like collapsed child comments expanding when the parent is expanded. In addition to these this script will work in the threads page of hacker news. Also this bookmarklet will load faster than the script by Alexander since there is no call to any external JS file from my server. The only file you have to load is the latest jQuery from the jQuery website and chances are good that the file is already present in your browser cache. (The downside is that you will not be able to get the latest version when I update the code).

[1] http://alexander.kirk.at/2010/02/16/collapsible-threads-for-...
Starting a Venture Capital Firm
Considering History Research Paper Topics
15 minutes? I have to arrive up to 2 hours earlier now. The security scan itself doesn't take so long but rather everything leading up to it.
This is going to be an awesome event!
There are Ocaml, F# and Clojure with some combination of great tools, speed (clojure addressed this recently I think but i only have visual experience with clojure), light syntax, books and documentation, repl,excellent platform, wide libarary choice and or decent interop with C. Also F# is doing some really cool stuff to do with datasets awareness in the language.

Haskell seems a perfect fit for mathematical use and while I haven't used it in a couple years, I would hesitate to suggest it due to a lack of mature library options, difficulty of FFI and perhaps a steep initial curve.

Scala is a good language for an entire application but provides too much scaffolding for scientific applications.

R is fairly widely used but is also itself very quirky.
Yep, same with me. I do prefer Ruby, but it's just not feasible at the moment. Languages that get behind in a certain area enter a terribly vicious circle: There's no scientific community backing Ruby, so why would I develop something that'd make Ruby more competitive?
How is this better than Dropbox other than being simple and easy for file sharing? I'm sure what you're describing can be done using Dropbox. So what should users switch?
مسلسل العشق الممنوع الحلقة 99
Some errors could be deliberate to detect copyright infringement:

http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2010/10/trap-rooms.html
"(Though this example is a bit contrived, since some would argue that Wodehouse wrote about a society that never existed.) "

Just think of the Drones club as a bunch of bun-tossing elves.
During the latest keynote Jobs said that this is not going to happen. It is kind of obvious too, just do the following experiment: Pretend your laptop or desktop screen is multitouch and start touching and "moving" things just for 1 minute (time yourself). It is exhausting.
"Pricing is generally driven by one thing - short-term profit maximisation."

There, fixed that for you. His argument is that they're trading short term gain for long term pain by turning customers into pirates or shudder library patrons.

Of course, it may be argued that they're maximizing long term gain at the expense of short term gain by "convincing" users that $10 is an appropriate price for off-list books.

I agree with the author, but there is merit to the other argument.
Permutation City by Greg Egan