skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes - I had no ruby experience, read why's ruby book, and started writing business intelligence rails apps inside a big media company. Funny now, looking back on it.
FWIW i work with c# now, could never find another ruby job that paid well...
Yeah, my whole website design is shit. I've learnt a lot about web design recently though, especially from articles posted here on HN, and am currently redesigning it. Here's my current front page under development: http://dev.grepular.com/
But you can't really enable those warnings if you want to use -Werr, right?

And I've always found the "always true/false due to limited range of data type" to be counterproductive. Something like

int i;
...
assert(i <= SSIZE_MAX);
f(i);

can make sense, but will cause gcc to complain if int and ssize_t happen to be the same size.
My project for a new form of money:

http://ripple-project.org/

Everyone issues their own personal currency, but you only accept the currency of people you trust to make good on their obligations to you personally. For those you don't trust, the system finds intermediaries to exchange the buyer's obligations for those acceptable to the seller.

Lots of work needs to be done to make this useful, but I've had a system operating for several years now at http://ripplepay.com. Comments always welcome.
And stop working out of your kitchen as a result!
I know that but what is in that cookie?
P.S: I use PHP
That would be to completely underestimate Oracle. It's not just about databases any more.

They now own two major database platforms, a major software deployment ecosystem, a decent OS or two and a decent hardware platform. You can bet that they'll be integrating and up-selling the rest of the stack like crazy into any customer of any single part of it. It just doesn't make sense to have bought them otherwise.

The comparison shouldn't be with DB2. It should be with IBM.
There is demonstration of flight in formation with regular planes, so he has at least some control.
Those brackets were not for Lisp!
God! They are also used for English.
Now, when you say "discuss projects and ask questions" are you thinking wiki interface for discussions, maybe a sort of GetSatisfaction type idea for discussions, maybe with voting?

Even Github lacks some neat discussion systems that might be nice to see somewhere.
I don't think there was much demonstrated in the aftermath, just a lot of mudslinging on both sides. While I thought the parody was hilarious, the "serious" followup, in Sokal and Bricmont's book, is not that great. It mostly boils down to: some random critical theorists make too much use of crappy or stretched mathematical/scientific metaphors. That point was demonstrated much more penetratingly in the parody.

The book, though, feels like a literary scholar-pedant finding a metaphorical reference to Faust in a physics paper and launching into a longwinded critique about how the physicist has clearly misunderstood Faust. Well, maybe, and if that were common it'd be an annoying writing style, but errors in interpretation of Faust aren't really the point if it's a physics paper!

And to make matters worse, they don't even go after most of the big names--- there are no chapters in the book on Derrida, Foucault, Althusser, Barthes, etc., because they couldn't find any material to critique.
It's not about the idea dude. No matter how much you believe otherwise.
It's about solving a problem and solving it well.
And making money while doing it.

Best will be to work with a startup, colleges are no good when it comes to WebDev/Design.
Ask Doug Bowman: http://stopdesign.com/archive/2009/03/20/goodbye-google.html

And [that] data eventually becomes a crutch for every
decision, paralyzing the company and preventing it from
making any daring design decisions.
> distract me from...

Funny: I do so much research on Amz that I am accustomed to zeroing in on just info I really want - with the result that I can browse for months without noting new features (treasure chest buttons, etc).
They even solved a bug with the datastore quota not being properly updated after a massive delete of entities.

Kudos to the team, and I, too, hope that the latency will remain this low forever and ever…
OK, I understand why creating specific handlers might warrant a heads up.

I suppose I'm unsympathetic since every authenticated web app I've done in the last 10 years has been SSL only. But that was too 'enterprisey' perhaps :). Also I imagine that this is such an obvious thing, it wasn't a case of being unaware of the issue, just taking a conscious risk-reward decision on being SSL-only. Particularly for the really smart developers at github. One could argue that since nothing bad (that we know of) happened before firesheep, it was a valid decision.

All in all, I think Firesheep has done a big favour to the web as a whole.

PS. this thread has degenerated to using github as an example, I should probably point out that I love and respect github. really.
Thats not a joke its an import mathematical identity.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euler%27s_identity
If I were thinking of something to call "edupunk", I don't think this weird flash-mob-based, social-media-tinged approach to education would be it. What about the methods of education punk culture has actually promoted for decades? Stuff like: disseminate information to let people do things themselves (the DIY ethos), free courses, free or low-cost zines, volunteer-taught skills workshops, etc.
I think your point of view is compelling, it's just that I'm choosing to be optimistic, for all that's worth.

I hope that the nature of the coalition makes them think through some better thought-out economic policies by virtue of having to work together. I have my fingers-crossed but I can understand that this could also end up terribly.

I also totally agree with your point about sharing a different point on things. Your reply certainly has got me thinking.
There's more to it than piloting experience. You need to have a lot of experience controlling your body in air. In skydiving circles, it's usually a requirement of a few hundred jumps before you can start learning to fly a wingsuit. (http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=wingsuit)
Yes. Consider streetview.

" I don't recall asking Google to build a fleet of androids to drive around my neighborhood taking pictures of me and my neighbors' houses, but they did so anyway."

You have misread what google does. Legally, Google does not need your permission. Your implication that google collects personal data with streetview pictures would make sense if they take pictures of the _inside_ of your house.

Google and Facebook run businesses. They need to make money. The question is how they do it. And, on that question, I am on google's side because it is a better place for me and my data.

You set up strawmen ("Would you rather Facebook gave the information away to anybody who asked?") and it does not do much good to your argument.
Considering that I think IBM employs more people in China and India than the US -- I find this very very hard to believe.

Maybe for a given office? I can see HQ having more Attorneys. But overall? Stop trolling.
I don't understand what you are proposing - what is the outcome you want/hope for from mentioning this to us? I don't see a suggestion in your comments or any indication of what sort of dialogue you want/expect.
If you know what you know your priorities, constraints and "what are trying to do" (goals), then, is there such a thing as a best software environment?
Hi,

there is some advice out there for (successfully) attending academic conferences:

- http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/mernst/advice/conference-...
(Michael Ernst's homepage has other excellent information, too)

- http://www.cs.indiana.edu/how.2b/how.2b.community.html#confe...

All in all, I think this complements some of the already mentioned comments. However, some advice in here is clearly geared towards non-acacdemic venues (for example, I never saw anyone at an academic venue speaking about business ventures and/or monetary issues--aside of ill-fated research policies.)
This is how much of a pilot you need to be:

- Swiss Air Force pilot

- Captain with Swiss International Air Lines on commercial flights on Boeing and Airbus airliners

- All free time dedicated to flight and experimentation

- 5 years of rigorous training and practice with a working prototype
The problem is, universities are verticals, selling both knowledge and assessment. Like IBM, Sun, and HP selling the OS and hardware. The knowledge is already a commodity, but the unis still want to bundle it with their exams.
Can someone explain this one?
Help a Reporter Out (news pitching website)
It is/was interesting which surprised me - I thought the title was just awful.
Hackers v defenders in pan-Euro cyber security exercise
The Real Cost of Free - Cory Doctorow
As someone who spent 5 years working for an agency that was supposed to connect educators with technology, I feel quite qualified to say:

HA HA HA HA!

I read quotes like:

In a bow to the “Edupunks,” Sullivan explained that Virginia is incorporating student habits into its pedagogy. For example, the university is experimenting with “flash seminars.” Just as “flash mobs” summon young people to engage in some simultaneous bizarre act in a specified place at a specified time, the “flash seminars” alert students to an edgy topic -- no examples of how edgy -- that will be discussed in a professor's living room. To raise the hype level, only the first 25 students who show up are allowed to participate in this non-credit-bearing activity.

and I think of the endless papers I've seen on how social networking/ipads/location based services/mobile computing/cloud computing/whatever was hot in the tech sphere six months ago is going to revolutionize education. I'm continually reminded of cargo cults (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult: A cargo cult is a religious practice that has appeared in many traditional tribal societies in the wake of interaction with technologically advanced cultures.)

Education systems have huge budgets, but they are always run by such second rate people that the money is never used as a lever to get what they need. Education systems are quite happy to spend millions of dollars on consultancies and studies, but because the focus is on risk avoidance they never actually achieve anything.

(And yes, there are a few exceptions. Having destroyed myself trying to achieve anything in that sector I applaud all the more for those who have managed it.)

For anyone considering doing a company in this space, read all the warnings you hear about doing enterprise software, and then take away the fact the most enterprises are at least rational (if slow). Then also remove the fact that enterprises pay people well, so they are usually a few decent people who you can deal with. Then add in politics, the election cycle, unions, teachers, lectures, "duty of care" considerations. If you are still considering that sector, then good luck!!
The quintessential would be "All of your base are belong to us"

it's the coolest you can possibly be with geeks.
Watch Liverpool vs Chelsea live stream free online
WSJ: "Hurd leaked secret details of HP deal"
Why Apple can’t beat Android
Similar:

An infinite number of mathematicins walk into a bar. The first one orders a beer. The second orders half a beer. The third, a third of a beer. The bartender says, "what do you think I am, an idiot?" and kicks them all out.

An infinite number of mathematicians walk into a bar. The first one orders a beer. The second orders two beers. The third, three beers. The bartender says, "you guys owe me a twelfth of a beer."

(Explanation of that last one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%2B2%2B3%2B4%2B... )
Upgrade to support can be a revenue stream for a small startup but in the long run obviously you can't rely on that.

Hardest bit about fremium model is where to draw the line.
On #2, there is a significant contingent if you replace C# with Lisp. ;-)
Take things with a pinch of salt.There's a local saying here which, loosly translated, is as follows:

That which you see is false; That which you hear is false, only that which is well researched is true.

As a person who started a software product organization in 1995, i can tell you that pre-conceived notions are just that. Preconceived.
So? He's still technically correct, which is the best kind of correct.
Hence why this would be a graceful degradation and not the primary interface. You could then change the warning text from:

"This is one of those crazy web2.0 things, so you'll need to enable javascript. Sorry."

To:

"We cater for non JavaScript users, but results will be returned much more quickly if you enable JavaScript"

A much more friendly message.
The India of today is not the india of the 80s.

That would be like comparing communist china of Chairman Mao's era to the china of today.

The whole process of dis-mantling the license raj was started by the current Prime Minister in 1991 when he was appointed the finance minister of india. He has continued to push his economic agenda on modern india and the results are plain to see. A GDP growth rate among the highest in the world for the last 15-20 years. Among the world's leaders, i doubt if anyone has half his knowledge of world or indian economy or his educational qualifications.

There is a realization within the entire beurucratic and political framework about the importance of openness and integration with the global economy. Which is one of the reasons why so many IT and BPO organizations have sprung up all over india.
I chose C# for a reason ;)
They also just bought ATG, an enterprise commerce company: http://www.atg.com/oracle/index.jsp
You could store an encrypted username and password, or a session id if you don't want to store the username and password locally. Storing the password locally is not the best idea, but it's easier than tracking a session id.

http://fishbowl.pastiche.org/2004/01/19/persistent_login_coo...

http://jaspan.com/improved_persistent_login_cookie_best_prac...
ℝ² is the Cartesian plane; it is a reference to the movie "Snakes On A Plane".
For most consumer-facing sites, I think paid support is a non-option, and might even drive people away. The users tend to treat these services like they would a utility company, albeit, a free one. They just expect it to always work, all the time, and if anything goes wrong it's your responsibility to drop everything you're doing and fix it immediately.
...so how long now before Oracle makes a bid for Red Hat?
I'm fascinated by your comment. Would you mind going into more detail about your comment - "Having destroyed myself trying to achieve anything in that sector" - I'm on my way into that sector and would love hearing how you "got destroyed", and for what reasons?
Excellent analysis here. The cost of the free users really made me cringe. For what I'm doing, cost for free and premium is pretty much the same (a couple database rows), so I can afford to carry a lot of freeloaders. I can't say I planned that, though. I got lucky.
Agreed - I only clicked on it because I was in one of those time wasting moods and had clicked through everything that looked interesting.

It's considerations like those discussed in the article which make me think that, while companies like facebook aren't going away... and while the web will indeed continue to be more social - the actual value proposition of being able to connect in more and more ways to people that I have met continues to reduce in my eye.

They talk about how it's social recommendations that you really trust the most, so they see this great marketing opportunity. But it's becoming increasingly obvious to me that most of my friends provide pretty woeful information compared to what I can get through some skilled use of google and what the author describes in this article. That's increasingly going to be the way of things because by necessity - one's social group can only store and compare a tiny amount of information. As more people realise this, so too will the value of a social recommendation decline.

Tools that allow you to find better quality of information will win on the web. I think social is a red-herring in that respect.
Articles you upvote get automatically "saved" under news.ycombinator.com/saved?id=your_uid_here (there's a link from your profile page).

I think not separating "upvote" and "save" is on purpose, to try to encourage people to only upvote stuff they'd actually want to save also, but I may be reading too much into that.
Obscene Losses: The porn business is in trouble (2007)
And foxnews.com made the most sense, right? Good hacker friendly site. :D
Whatever they would normally type to login, take it all and hash it together. So, for example, hash together their username and password, then store that in a cookie on the users machine.

When they connect, retrieve that cookie (if it exists) and map it to their account.
People not liking open source (and it's not Oracle)
The article is true in every aspect. The job opportunities here are so unsatisfactory, that I do not even consider local companies when applying for internship. Startup scene is nonexistent, as the number of VCs and angels is next to void. At least there is a handful of good universities.

Fortunately, everything seems to be gradually getting better. It was only 20 years ago, when we were ruled by communists, which brought our economy to ruin. This is amazing that it took so short to recover.
State of Scala Summer 2010 Poll/Survey
Just a quick FYI - once one goes to the blog (either the blog link or the "more info" on the homepage) many of the bottom nav ("Other Clicks") links do not work because they are relative paths (they all map to blog URLs).
I agree, although to be completely free either you'll be next big thing (or fairly big) like delicious in this case or you'll have a premium version.
The V4Z80P - A Z80 Based Laptop
I'd find the number intersting how many users would pay, if there were no free option available - my take is that it would be much more than the one percent of users that seem to be the rule in the freemium model. Of course a free plan attracts more potential users in the first place, which means the cake is smaller, so it's hard to evaluate what yields more paying users...

The more important factor to me, though, is cost and that usually not only involves storing some data as in the case of historious, but also support requests and scaling costs - when you have a paying user base scaling just won't be that much of pain point.

So, I'll go with a free 30 Day trial period after which the user has to decide, whether he'd like to sign up and pay. That way I can easily handle a couple of thousand users on one server and have more time left to spend on development instead of suporting nonpaying customers.

Free or Freemium only makes sense to me, if the presence of more users provides value to paying users, e.g. okcupid, Skype, and other network-effect businesses.
Type classes may come to OCaml one day. That would solve it.
Set the userid in the cookie, and set the lifetime to be 10 years (or whatever) into the future. In your app you then check if that cookie exists, and if it does look up the user id and log them in automatically.

The other way to do it is to use the existing session support. If the 'remember me' box is checked, you change the session so that instead of it expiring at the end of the browser session, it expires way into the future.

ie. your login script probably looks like this:

session_start();
$username = filter_func($_POST['username']);
$password = filter_func($_POST['password']);
$user = $db->query('select userid from users where username = ? and password = ?', $username, $password);
if($user) {
//user is logged in
$_SESSION['loggedin'] = true;
} else {
// show login page with error
}

you need to change it to:

$username = filter_func($_POST['username']);
$password = filter_func($_POST['password']);
$remember = (bool) $_POST['rememberme'];
$user = $db->query('select userid from users where username = ? and password = ?', $username, $password);
if($user) {
//user is logged in
if($remember) {
$lifetime = 10 * 365 * 24 * 60 * 60;
session_set_cookie_params(time() + $lifetime);
}
session_start();
$_SESSION['loggedin'] = true;
} else {
// show login page with error
}

the key function is session_set_cookie_params() which will let you alter the cookie that the session store uses prior to seeting it:

http://php.net/session_set_cookie_params

note: that you need to call it before you call session_start(). $lifetime just calculates the number of seconds in 10 years, and the time set is time() (ie. now) plus the number of seconds in 10 years.

note: filter_func is a function that you write that will filter input variables, and $db is whatever your db class or access method is.

note: you also need to filter $_SESSION. most devs have a class that they wrap $_SESSION in rather than using it directly.
You don't cook? I'm surprised tptacek doesn't bug you every day about starting.
That seems to be the worst of all words.
Words cannot begin to convey the depth of my agreement with the warning here.
I'd prefer map and filter. But then, I don't like list-comprehensions in Haskell.
Dealing with the Pain of Giving Up IE6
yeah, it was just a toy example. I also don't name variables 'foo' and have functions called 'performBar' :P
Thanks for asking to clarify.
I was just giving another established measure of performance. One that is currently used in academia.
It basically indicates the consistency that someone produces quality posts.
If for example some body has only 50 posts with more than 50 votes,
he has served the community more than somebody that has 2500 vote from 2500 posts. Since he has not polluted the wall with many crappy and indifferent posts.

I was mainly sharing that index, with the hope that karma based site will find interesting.
Haskell also would solve it, by outlawing the occurence of strings at compile time.
That would seriously hurt Google.
Dear rwl,

Wow. A clone of me floating in cyberspace. You know I used to get funny looks from my philosophy classmates when I answered their question, "so what's your other subject?" (you take two subjects at degree level where I'm from). Nearly everybody combines philosophy and literature or philosophy and sociology or philosophy psychology, you get the idea. But math? What has philosophy go to do with math? I dunno, ask Bertrand Russel. Ask Frege. Ask Descartes. Ask Leibniz. :) And then I'd tell them that I used to work in IT as a software tester and developer and they'd look at me as if I had two heads. In some parts of the world this is considered a lot stranger than other parts. In Spain (where I've had the good fortune to have lived) people think you are _really strange_ if you study one discipline and work at something else. You get less funny looks in northern Europe.

I wonder what your PhD program is? I'm pursuing a Master (in Digital Culture as I mentioned elsewhere here) at the moment. For my thesis I'm combining my love of IT and math and philosophy by researching open source (free software I mean) mathematical tools. Like Richard Stallman I see free software as an ethical issue, which is how I rope philosophy into it :) For my Bachelor's degree I wrote a paper on the philosophy of the infinitesimal calculus and intuitionism! So I always manage to draw together the various intellectual pieces that make up the puzzle of ... whatever the puzzle is. Right now what gets me very excited is intuitionistic type theory and the Curry-Howard correspondence because again this area of logic/epistemology can be looked at through comp-sci glasses, philosophical glasses and mathematical glasses.

I realize all this is totally unrelated to my original question - apologies to all for that but it's not everyday one meets one's clone in cyberspace.
Fine, but who are they designing for here? A sizable fraction of their visitors will be using IE, so it has to look great in IE.

It's fine to be harsh if you're being logical.
Few achieve <noun>man. It's inspiring.