skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A Great Invoicing Application for Designers and Freelancers
Delivery of invoices (bills) and related information by a company to its customers via electronically is known as Electronic Billing. For online billing, there are billing software’s. Billing Software is software that assists companies in billing their customers, for example, through online orders and invoices.
Do you think the large gap between Python and Ruby on this is due to the Mac (I.e non-FOSS) bent that is in the Ruby community? It seems like Python guys are more OS neutral IMO.
You are crazy if you think there is a middle class of 300+ million in China right now. 1/3 of their population is not buying houses and cars. There is nowhere near 300 million cars in China to begin with.

I have been there - and haven't seen anyone buying cars, designer clothes and apartments except expats and a few rich locals kids. Beijing is putting 1000 new cars on streets that are already in gridlock.

One party rule sounds like it could accomplish a lot in 'the best long term interest of many'. I am not sure there is evidence of this working. They have completely rebuilt entire cities like Beijing and Shanghai - but at the cost of other regions. Have they put a modern hospital in every region of the country?
This is a discussion about India and China, not the West and either.

So should India keep allowing expansion of their peasant classes / caste? Should the "untouchables" (lowest caste / class) continue to be allowed to have 7 or 8 kids in India? Is creating huge numbers of more poverty stricken people in the lowest caste, the best for India? Will they make it even up one caste level (let alone "middle class")?

Both countries are far from perfect, my point is that China has the upper hand over India.
Nah, I'm pretty sure I'm ugly alright, and even if I wasn't there are several data points that make it kinda obvious: First, girls have repeatedly told me so. But just to make sure, I conducted an experiment by creating two accounts on a dating site: one using my real photos, the other using pics from a normal-looking (not overly attractive) man off the web. The "normal guy" got tons of winks and responses, while the real me got nothing as usual. Well, nothing is not quite true, I got a response from a girl who was apparently offended because I thought I was in her league... This pattern didn't change when I made the normal looking guy sound like a total douche on his profile.

So, yes, I think this site is a great idea!
Mac App Store: MacRuby or webapp-wrapped-in-webview-container allowed?
After reading the Mac App Store guidelines it's still unclear to me whether apps developed using Macruby or apps using the Cocoa WebView object as the sole UI surface are allowed.

I would like to know if it is allowed since it might speed up the development of some apps that have modest UI and OS integration requirements.

Clause 6.3 ("Apps that do not use system provided items, such as buttons and icons, correctly and as described in the Apple Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines will be rejected.") comes closest to not allowing a webapp-wrapped-in-webview, although "do not use [...] correctly" is a vague statement.

I found the Mac App Store requirements in this pastie: http://pastie.org/1236378 via this article (The Register): http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/11/01/mac_app_store/
I disagree. All friends aren't created equal, and I don't want certain people hearing certain statements I make. Not that I distrust them, its just where our relationship is. I find it incredibly annoying to see older family "liking" status comments I make on pages of people they don't even know. After I delete the link to the comment on my page. fb facilitates this with their "so and so did so and so" in the feed. Too invasive.
Which is better: a butter knife or a machete?

If you're cutting butter, than using a machete would be over-kill.

If you're cutting a large branch or stick, a butter knife might work but will take a lot longer.
Legalising doesn't mean the end of anti-... campaigns. You can still see a lot of "don't drink too much" / "don't drink and drive" / "drinking kills families" kind of stuff, even though drinking is perfectly legal.
Taken with the recent http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1843491, I'm a bit concerned.

As time moves forward, shouldn't we be setting the bar higher, not continually dropping it lower and lower? Why, in so many areas, are standards sliding rather than getting stronger (not just in education, but in government and some industries, too)?

What's happening to personal responsibility and a clear set of rules by which to play the game? Am I wrong in seeing things this way?
The problem is, it's marketed almost exclusively to people who have no problem getting the same articles for free.

Not that I have a problem with them charging whatever they like - I'm just saying, I would hesitate to pay so much for something that is so easily accessible for free.
Being able to limit your search results to e.g. "/liberal" is one of those powers I really don't trust people to use responsibly. Not that it's doing anything 99% of human brains don't do automatically, but still.
"Your votes came down nearly exactly the same as last year, with C++ in second place"
Well, that certainly makes the winner feel less honored... :-)
No doubt, for years I've called quantization errors round off errors. But there's no rounding, it's an approximation error.
Review my prototype for Bucket of Cloud
This is a good story.

Manybooks has it in a variety of ebook formats (http://manybooks.net/titles/forstereother07machine_stops.htm...).

Librivox has produced an audiobook version as well (http://www.archive.org/details/machine_stops_librivox).
Hard liquors decreased and beer increased (hard liquors are easier to smuggle). There could be a similar correlation between heroin and lighter drugs.
The economics of gaining attention
Agreed -- honestly this is a topic of constant debate with regards to China and I think most can agree that things have improved significantly in the past decade. Sure 700 million peasants, but it was even more and as China continues its rapid industrialization, more will leave the farms for the cities. In fact that's already happening, so much so that the issue is primarily how to deal with population influx.

I mean if you look into American history it's a lot of repetition. Packingtown / chinese sweatshops. It's the same thing over again! Leaving the farm for the industrialized city...yeesh.

A choice between "ignorant peasants" or "smart people looking after everyone's interests" is simply irrelevant / nonexistent. The problem right now is developing infrastructure to modernize a country.
On this website, is everybody considered to be in the same league? At-least that way, one needn't fear offending anybody...I'm sure the female that you mentioned has low self esteem.
Even if this turns into a big flop and appears to be a waste, I have worked so hard, learned an incredible amount of useful information, and truly had a lot of fun. Why didn't I try to make something sooner in life??
I've played with Compass/Less/Sass before and got turned off by the preprocessors. They all just gave me a bit more than I bargained for. But I hadn't realized that the plugin/mixin support had grown so much.

I'll keep this in mind while working on my next few projects.
He seems to be a philosopher, which I encourage, although his method is a bit extreme. But I do something similar. Any time I have an insight that seems worth keeping, I type it into a text file. As I am prone to thinking about philosophical issues, this typically happens several times a day. If it's a particularly good one and meets other criteria (such as appropriateness), I write it into Twitter. I've been doing this for a long time and have many such files. I promote comparable behaviors as I believe most people live their lives without adequately philosophizing.
Comic Sans, the worlds most famous typeface
A very long time ago, I wrote an article (in Portuguese) about it.

http://www.dieblinkenlights.com/artigos_pt/quem-paga-a-conta...

The Google-provided translation is... survivable:

http://translate.google.com/translate?js=n&prev=_t&h...
Don't be fooled by thinking salvia is just a "legal high". It can cause profound ego-loss for upwards of ten minutes. The history is that it is what native american shamans used to chew on to see visions.

A common experience is one in which people say "I forgot that I was something, then I realized I was something but I wasn't sure what that was." They then had to figure out the world again as the drug wore off. I think it's foolish to group something this psychologically powerful within the same group as something that "just gets you high" like alcohol or pot.

http://www.erowid.org/plants/salvia/salvia.shtml
I'm the same way. Anxiety makes me draw blanks and stutter. No amount of mental effort or preparedness seems to make it go away. Funny how age changes you; I used to be pretty good at exams and tests in school.

Personally I'd hate to go through the university process and make it all the way to PhD only to choke on the exam and be denied the qualification. That's a lot of time, money, and effort lost on such an archaic practice.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1853842

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1853529
Guide to Website Wireframing and Tools
Is it just me or that one doesn't seem much aesthetically challenged http://www.whitelabeldating.com/ubb/random/2.jpeg
> On this website, is everybody considered to be in the same league?

I have no idea, but at the very least I'd expect the people there to not be so focused on optics. Despite it all, my own self esteem isn't actually low, I'm just aware of a few shortcomings...

> I'm sure the female that you mentioned has low self esteem.

Probably, but it also taught me something important that I hadn't thought about before, because I hadn't even considered that getting a message from me would maybe confirm the doubts a person has about her own looks.
Also, alcohol generally isn't that dangerous, unless people are driving and/or concentrating it via distillation.

In the case of alcohol, besides what others have said, it also causes (IMHO) much more severe social problems than cannabis and mdma do: a lot of people die from alcohol related causes every year (accidents, overdose, etc), a lot of people are injured every year because of alcohol (street fights, domestic violence, accidents, etc), a lot of property damage is caused by drunk people.. Alcohol is, in my opinion, much more damaging than at least cannabis and E.

I personally know one person who died because of long-term alcohol abuse. A friend of my brothers died of alcohol poisoning not that long ago. An old school friend almost died of pneumonia a few years ago because he passed out on the street after drinking. Countless people I or my family knew have died in alcohol-related car accidents over the years. I've seen more than a handful of peoples family or work lives be destroyed because of alcohol. I'm sorry, but I cannot agree that alcohol generally isn't that dangerous. For the record, I also know or have known people who regularly abuse or did abuse both cannabis and mdma and not one of them or their families have suffered any lasting negative effects due to it. In my opinion (and I won't hold it against you if you disagree, but theres no way I'll change my mind), alcohol is much worse than thc and mdma. (I don't mean to say that they're not bad, just that alcohol, which is legal, is much worse).
Pretty sure "HyperText-style" was already fairly widely used on the web in 2004 ;)
Another day, another mobile device input method :-)

Looks interesting, I'll give it a try when it goes live.
Control Fraud
I liked the presentation, but as another commenter said it made me a little sad as some of the features are quite ill-supported (in the latest betas) and so realistically I think we're looking at several years until they can be used (unless MS suddenly decide to push IE updates hard or someone makes an IE-specific virus that takes out a few high-profile companies).

@Lea Verou: I also liked the backgrounds and was thinking about mimicking the darker wood one, then noticed it in the credits. But then the DA page says CC-BY-NC-ND and I wondered if you personally knew the artist or had just emailed them to get the extra derivative and commercial use permissions?

One other comment - I had to look at the filename to find out what your company was called looks a lot like "fresiset" in the logo.
So by your one trip there probably some years ago, you have an all knowingness about their economy?

It is acknowledged that somewhere around 25% of the population is now middle class.

"A McKinsey report, Preparing for China’s Urban Billion, predicts that China’s urban population will expand from 604 million in 2008 to 926 million in 2025, and hit the one billion mark (out of a total population of 1.5 billion) by 2030. By 2025, China’s urban economy will generate over 90 percent of its GDP, over 200 of China’s cities will have more than one million residents, and approximately 70 percent of its urban population will be middle class."

and

"While China's middle class right now consists of only a quarter of the population, they are set to grow to nearly half the total population by 2020, according to Euromonitor. That means that 700 million out of the estimated 1.45 billion people of 2020 will have an income of roughly between 80,000RMB (11,800USD) to 120,000RMB (17,700USD) a year."
Did you interview for the software engineering position, or a general web development one?
Ask HN:  Successful pivot stories
I have a few websites that are pretty stagnant and in need of a new direction. Before making a decision, it would be interesting to learn about successful pivots made by other websites or startups.
You're right that it's much more powerful than alcohol/pot but the truth is that it is legal in most countries and states. The "upside" is that its effects totally wear off after ~15 minutes and there are no known long term or addictive effects.
NLTK (a python library) comes with a tutorial / text book on natural language processing.
I have no use for alarm clocks. Surprisingly, this work rather well.

I was never late yet.
Tin tức
No Business Plan Survives First Contact With A Customer
But this thing is customizable, albeit not very easily. An example on how I use Facebook: I created a list of friends that are able to see my wall. It is a sort of a whitelist. If you ask me for friendship and I grant it to you, you just see some albums and the generic info page. I have to put you explicitly in the whitelist to let you see my wall.

Even if you are in the whitelist, I still can select what you see: I have a list of people from work, close friends, people who speak a particular language and so on. Everytime I post something to my wall I can decide to which lists it's visible and to which it's not. It takes a little to set up but after that it's easy to manage.
Why you benefit from using UTF-8 Unicode everywhere in your web applications
Two come to mind in recent memory--AdaptiveBlue (GetGlue) and Hashable
These two books are really recommended:

- Speech and Language Processing, Jurafsky and Martin

- Foundations of Statistical Natural Language Processing, Chris Manning and Hinrich Schütze

Together they provide a very good overview of the field, from tokenization to robust parsing.

I cannot really recommend one library. The last two years, I have been working on a parsing/generation system that was developed in our research group (Alpino). We use very little external software (only for maximum entropy model parameter estimation and building finite state automata). We use Prolog, because it is ideal for writing unification grammars and C/C++ for components that Prolog is not well-fit for (part of speech tagger for lexical restriction, finite state automata, term compression, language models, etc.).

This system is amongst others used for extracting syntactic structure for question answering (based on e.g. Wikipedia data and newspaper texts).
"Ugly" needs to broken out by category: ugly on the outside? Ugly personality? Ugly mental illness? Ugly by car accident or Ugly by DNA? Ugly not intelligent?

The dating game in this country is broken, as evidence I point at the 50%+ divorce rate.

I propose a better solution. One where a dating website has "ground rules" that if you break, you get three strikes and your out. Rules like you have to respond to the suitor with a reason why you are incompatible. Rules like if you are chronically offending other people, you get restricted rights. If you are beautiful and get hundreds of messages and don't respond to any, you get removed from search. If a suitor comes up, fitting all your criteria for a date, and you don't like them, and can't quote a reason why you don't like them, you get a emblem on your profile that says: "Profile criteria inaccurate, this person doesn't have any idea what they want". Which would encourage one to actually put down what they want in the mate, instead of the fluff that women/men actually put down.

This article describes many of the failings of the current dating website methodology and how it could be improved:
Hi, I want to meet 17.6% of you:
http://interviews.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/02/19/14192...
The list seems to be more "web app homepage designs", and doesn't really offer any evaluation (or commentary) on the actual design of the apps.
nope. we have standards and requirements for very good reasons. but we don't want anyone to ever experience a negative feeling.
Is it this ? http://www.nltk.org/book

I just bought the paper book.
I agree, in particular with your second point. But the problem is: where do you draw the line? Is it only test anxiety, what about people struck by procrastination that don't manage to finish a thesis? Why is that not a valid medical condition? Is being lazy maybe also a medical condition? And being not all that smart?

But more importantly, how do you make sure such excuses are not exploited by people simply failing the standards?
Meebo - we're kicking butt so hard it hurts! Ping me at marcus@meebo-inc.com and check out meebo.com/jobs.

Offices in CA, NY, and elsewhere.
Python can be used to write procedural, functional or OOP. It's a multi-paradigm language which means it's up to you to give the code the structure you think is best for the problem.

For instance wikipedia has an example of the same problem written in python as functional or imperative style:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_programming#Coding_s...

If you're an absolute beginner to programming you should study a bit:

http://learnpythonthehardway.org/

If you've done some programming in the past, you should still study the fundamentals of the language you're using. Buy or borrow a python reference book and read through it. It looks to me like you're getting frustrated with not knowing what return types you're getting out of methods and functions. A reference book will help with that. You should also understand python's way of using duck typing:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_typing#In_Python
I'm categorizing distilled alcohol (i.e., liquor) differently than beer and wine, as I think the former is significantly more dangerous. I could be wrong, though - I wonder where it would end up on that scale if the different forms were rated distinctly.
I just had to Google that after reading this comment and WOW, this concept blows my mind.

Of course, my first thought was "How in the hell does that even work" but it turns out there are identifying symbols in the paper so I guess they just have to store a mapping of PAPER POSITION -> TIME INDEX to make it work.

Still a brilliant idea and execution.
Hey. Capitalism and real-world economics saved China, yes. But they were and are still under one-party rule when it happened. Their meritocracy, as corrupt as it can be, is just another approach to solving the problem of government and imho is as valid as any western approach. You cannot overlook the efficiencies of their system in comparison to western governments. There are both pros and cons but it's kind of narrow-minded to say it's all negative.

Also I find your generalizations about Chinatown a bit offensive. "Chinatowns exist because of a failure for chinese immigrants to integrate." Isn't this true of every cluster of immigrants? You make it sound like it's easy to integrate or something. "In every Chinatown I have been to it is always, always the rich chinese exploiting the ignorant immigrants. This will be the diner that pays staff less than minimum wage, landlords subdividing apartments, and others extracting a royalty for getting you a job. And lets not get started on how local gangs have infused themselves into Chinatown." How many chinatowns have you been to, and I'm sure you know all the landlords and people helping each other out.

I think you're giving immigrants less credit than they deserve. It's hella hard just to decide to stick around here. You can also look up Asian-american bias -- integration isn't just about Asians wanting to integrate. There is a fair amount of anti-asian sentiment in the US. "So they turn to an insular community that can provide resources that they are reluctant to ask of their native neighbors." << This kind of generalization implies that an immigrant has a relationship with their "native neighbors" which is hardly the case when you've just arrived.

Thinking about it the other way around: if you didn't speak Chinese very well and moved to China, wouldn't you also tend toward other english speakers? It's damn hard not to rely on someone you can talk to, when you can barely communicate with your plumber.
Googling Africa
> The dating game in this country is broken, as evidence I point at the 50%+ divorce rate.

Dating? I'd rather say, marriage.
Additionally, people tend to hold the marijuana smoke in a lot longer than they do tobacco, so (while I don't have any evidence), I imagine that also makes it more dangerous.
A VC: Employee Equity: The Option Strike Price
Reminded me of the movie called "Crazy People":

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_ArDB7AJAI
You could integrate the Internet fax service into your web interface and manage it as you like. There are no sending limits, more information is available on: http://www.popfax.com/index.php?action=partners_new
What Would It Take to Move Rapidly Toward Beneficial Human-Level AGI?
The 5.2 billion dollar mistake.
I phrased that poorly. The 'unless' in the last sentence was originally 'until'; I meant that distilling alcohol (liquor) makes it significantly more dangerous than non-distilled (beer, wine, etc.).

I encountered a lot of drunk street people while working at a public library for several years, including a guy who had to have his stomach pumped because he (initially, discreetly) drank way too much vodka on a bench outside. I know that hard liquor can be very destructive, both in the short and long term.

(My main point was how difficult it is to control alcohol production, that was just an aside.)
Serendipity cost
wouldn't these be 2nd gen MBAs?
Charlotte, VT EatingWell Media Group.
www.eatingwell.com

No remote, sorry.

Seeking Developer / Sysadmin to maintain www.eatingwell.com and develop internal and external facing software.

Our flagship site is Drupal/PHP with most of our new tools rolling out in Python.

Compensation is competitive for the area, we are a dog friendly office, the test kitchen has a constant stream of goodies flowing out of it, and we are in beautiful, rural Vermont, just 30 or so minutes to Burlington, a very hip little city.

There is quite a bit of room for growth here as our side of the business is growing rapidly and there is not a lot of experience in tech in the higher ups in the company.

This is both good and bad, as I am constantly fighting against naive decisions/ideas from upper management, but good because I am often winning.

A smart, relaxed, outdoor loving hacker with some degree of people skills will be very very happy here.

Please add a 'g' to front of my user name and an 'f' to the end, @eatingwell.com