skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> "Why modify your expectations when there isn't much you can do about it?"

That's precisely backwards. Parents expectations are the only thing you can 'do'. And it's the one thing that studies consistently re-affirm as the most important component. Demand more. Help more. Impart a love for learning and exploring. An appreciate for work.

Yes, if the school sucks, maybe you have to work harder with your kid. And if the community sucks, maybe you have to work even harder still. But that work will bear fruit.

As opposed to signing your kid up at the school across town and staying just as disinterested as before. Thinking that 'shopping' schools is helping is precisely the wrong approach.

> "no matter what you put in, you get the same output."

And that's demonstrably false. The families that put in more, get more. The students that put in more, get more. Parent interest and effort and child interest and effort are the most important factors; more important than economic stability, more important than school quality or teacher quality.
I think ...

For each iteration there are 20 individuals. Each gets a score according to how far they get. The horizontal line is the generation. The black line shows the best in each generation, and green line shows the average over the 20 individuals in that generation.

The black line is always above the green, but sometimes crashes way down. The green line doesn't change dramatically, and generally climbs.
Looks like it got cut off starting at the embedded http:// (possibly due to news.arc?). The full URL: http://web.archive.org/web/20071020051936/http://iq.org/
Incredible Portable Office
You can take your office anywhere you go. It is made of foam plastic and it looks nice, practical and contemporary.
Not a whole lot, conceptually, it seems. The syntax feels very Nemerle-like to me, though, which is nice. Definitely something to play around with, if nothing else.
Libgit2: a Git Linkable Library - GitHub
Jason Fried: Why Work Doesn’t Happen at Work
PaaS for startups: Read the fine print
Please let me be played by Christopher Walken.
The problem I have with the arguments posted in the article is that every single one could also be applied to hiring coders full-time. You're not going to build rapprochement with your coders simply by signing their paychecks. There's no guarantee that the code your in-house people write will be better than code written by outsiders. Finally, I don't think any programmer, in house or outsourced, is looking to make you, the business owner, rich. They're looking to make a living doing what they like to do. Making you rich is a not even a tertiary consideration.
"On the other hand we can do amazing feats of balance that no robot can do" yet.

I think it's just a matter of time - a few years maybe.
. . . or MiniLight: http://www.hxa.name/minilight/ is an alternative: it is larger -- averaging 650 lines -- but it is available in 9 different languages -- and is a more complete renderer that you can put your own scenes into.

(I am working on the Scheme translation at the moment)
Hi user24,

As the author of the post, I'd like to respond.

When I wrote the code for this example, my main point was simply to illustrate how to extract certain useful bits of data from Google's referrer URL, and explain what they mean.

I was not intending it to be production-ready code -- that's why there's no error handling.

Indeed, as one other commenter noted, the storing of the values in a database could have been left off entirely.

What's the point of the submission, you ask? Well, Google's referrer URL uses variables that are not very intuitive. Who would know, just by looking at it, that the "cd" value represented the position at which a link appears on the Google search results page?

So I wrote this post for people who might see this referrer in their logs and want to know what it means. And while Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools do provide essentially the same information (and more!) there may be limited cases in which a person might want to use the information contained in the referrer URL within their script, e.g. "Hey, you searched for such-and-such. Here are some other posts you might like."
Ask HN: Advice on how to start an online store?
My business partner and I are working on an idea of building an online store to sell computer components, accessories, and systems. I've looked at shopify.com to setup the store.

The problem is that neither of us have worked in the industry, so we don't have any experience building relationships with companies to sell their products.

We understand that there are fulfillment centers and other businesses we could partner with to limit the amount of inventory we'd have to maintain ourselves.

We're looking at selling components like computer cases, motherboards, CPUs, RAM, accessories like wireless keyboards, barebones systems, and possibly other gadgets like media players.

Does anyone have any advice on how we can build relationships to be able to sell these types of products?

Who can we work with to sell products while maintaining as small an inventory as possible?
The point is that it's a variable cost, and that, depending on the total quantity of talent (i.e., project scope multiplied by various specialty skills required), it can make more sense to rent than to employ that talent.

Most outsourcing is not about hiring cheap, low quality foreign talent. It's about hiring highly skilled teams to fill specific functions for specific projects, which can be much more reasonable than employing all the necessary talent.

If you are renting talent and it is cheaper per hour than what it would cost to hire qualified talent as an FTE, and the product that they are making is a core competency for your company, you may be treading on thin ice. If you don't have the technical skills to judge the work produced (for example, I don't), you may be in the process of falling through the ice.
One Entree Restaurants
Challenge/response emails have largely been dropped. If you implement such a system you end up on blacklists for generating backscatter. If SPF/DKIM ever become ubiquitous then we'll be able to look at using those sorts of systems again.
Quick suggestion about the API endpoints, versioning is really important as it allows you to add/remove/update features without breaking any application using your API. You should add it before anyone starts building on top of your API.
Free Office Suite From IBM
I have NO background as a basis for this, but I've idly speculated about the following:

1) Put the markets (the trading boards) on a stepped clock, with relatively large intervals with respect to processing speed.

2) For each interval, randomize the processing of queued work items (i.e. orders).

I suppose regulations, or something, would be needed to bridle potentially competitive trading opportunities (meaning, environments, including private, off-board transactions).
Many teachers...grading...for compliance - not for mastering course material
I thought it required '='[^1-9] ?
Because real 'password' = 'bogus crap' would turn into 0 which would then be compared to a string starting with something else than 1-9 which gets turned into a 0 as well.
Well, at least that was properly political.

Now, it's become "someone who makes us in the media look bad for doing such a terrible job of investigative reporting the last 25 years".
I am not so sure of that. There is lots of code that is not so much developed as it is evolved from a Q&D n-liner (n<20). Such code can easily have some left-over opportunities for SQL injection attacks.
Is that better or worse than not teaching anything because your student couldn't pick out the 10 lines of actual functionality among the 100 lines of paranoiaplate in each example?
In the US, people who break into houses with unlocked doors are felons, and are routinely prosecuted as such. My block in Chicago is across a street from one of the worst neighborhoods in the city --- if ever there was a place where the police would be too busy to prosecute crimes like this, it's the Austin neighborhood of Chicago --- and my neighbors have had breakins through unlocked doors. Lo and behold, the police tracked down the people doing it. And (I checked), our homeowners insurance doesn't give a shit if you accidentally left your door open. A B&E is a B&E.

Of course, in the real world, "unlocked door" is as moot a point as "properly encrypted data". The people you really worry in the city about just take a cinderblock to your doors and windows (our car and garage doors are never locked for exactly that reason), and the people you really worry about online don't care what you did to encrypt your data, because they already own your kernel.
I tried this once. It was rather a bit of effort, and it took some additional work to come up with a style-sheet that looked sufficiently "mock-uppy" and not meant to be taken as a final design.

I think the point - that an image editor is not what you want to use - is quite right, though. So far, Pencil and particularly Balsamiq have hit my sweet-spot for sketching things out with a degree of structure.
Review My App: In That Box for iOS -- Organize your storage containers
JSP taglibs? wtf are you talking about. I'm in no way defending the idiocy of 'enterprise java'.

and your other points don't really make any sense at all. There is no such thing as 'fozen solid code'. Unless you're interfacing to external libraries etc and have agreed on a specific API, which is unlikely to include "yeah just reference 'bar' directly" unless you're insane.
Hi HNers,

In That Box is a side project I've been working on, partially as a way to learn more about iOS development.

Last week I released the latest version which adds a number of new features and brings it past MVP status. I'd love to hear what you think about the app. I've included some promo codes below -- if you like the app I'd really appreciate a review on the app store.

Thanks,
Matt

Please comment when you use a code so people know which are used!

Promo codes (US only):

3EANWPMAEFJ6
RK69X6HHY9MH
FY9JLX9PR6H6
YLRTHM6337AR
W7LFWTH4TK79
6E673PM3NTAH
P4JY73X996ME
X7NALYPM4ENN
If I were a programmer, I'd just send resumes to the range of answers to "{number of unique paths}" rather than solving it.
Note: not trying to editorialize in the title. In my opinion, the first sentence of the 5'th paragraph summarizes the article better than the actual title.
tl;dr

#1 stop thinking start building

#2 don't listen to the haters -- just build it

#3 just build it

#4 just build it

#5 hire people who are passionate about it

#6 don't listen to the haters -- just build it
Having seen early versions of Rust (I work at Mozilla) I can tell you that the syntax is the last thing they're even considering (though that may have changed over the past few months). Seems like Graydon wants to get the guts right first.
School Leaders: Making and Breaking Education
Ask HN: How much do you PPL (if at all)?
Just curious about how many startups do a lot of PPL advertising? If so how much do you pay for each new user?

In addition I'm curious about how active users are that come through this channel are as opposed to organic traffic.

Insights would be great :)
But it seems like more of a risk to think a social news site (of all things) will be a successful business. Without Condé Nast to be the "greater fool" (in the sense of the "greater fool theory" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_fool_theory) it's really questionable even today whether Reddit could have been profitable.

Something that actual businesses can use to sell things to people? Sure, there are risks, but at least it can make money.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but there are several reasons to join the military? You don't think money for college, or job prospects factor into anyone's decision?

Edit: And again, correct me if I'm wrong here, but I'm pretty sure there are lots of different kinds of people in the military. Your family has a culture of serving, and lots of outside opportunities it sounds like, and that's great. But there are lots of people who join up who didn't have the same opportunities they had.

Do you think it's dishonorable for them to serve in part because they didn't have access to money for college, or a good job?
The argument is premised on the idea that AdWords pays publishers "close to nothing" when they show ads for Google's own services.

Does anyone have data or personal experience that backs this up?
Dude, stfu and get back to work. I mean really, who tells someone else how to run their business? If it works for him, it works for him, and that's that.
Its not a false dichotomy at all. Don Knuth hasn't made a successful product, the original stated goal of TeX (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TeX) was never achieved and most folk who require typesetting neither use the product or know of its existence. Knuth's knowledge of algorithms is excellent, but try and submit a usability bug for TeX like it was a real product. Academics focus on very specific areas of computing, sometimes at the expense of broader knowledge. If I had a web app to make, I'd hire the rails guy that had made a successful app before I'd hire Knuth.

> Nobody is suggesting that it's better to not make something than to make something.

Certainly. But they do focus on optimization as the core of programming. It isn't - turning logical problems into code - aka, making programs - is.
Perhaps the "mood detector" isn't the most intuitive example. But imagine it's some sort of computer peripheral that several applications make use of. The problem seems simple until multiple agents start to mess with it. So you start out with steve's simple model, and you too will progress to what he ended up with eventually.

on/off seems easy, but it's hard in complex systems. Like how complex can it be to turn windows vista on and off, right?
Finally a way to mark your Github project as abandoned
In some alternate HN that existed 10 years ago someone posted "4 letters: LTCM" :)
.. and what happens if it falls on a passer-by?
Djangy app showcase - Guitar tabs as they should be
In a lot of cases, "GA" just seems to be a fancy name for randomized search. Even when it does use elements from the evolutionary metaphor (crossover operators, etc.), you can often get equivalent results with a non-GA randomized-optimization method.

The interesting part here IMO is how to pose the problem as an optimization problem, and what representation they used for the candidate solutions. The details of how you optimize once you have those two things aren't as exciting, and on a lot of problems don't matter that much, so it's a bit of a shame that they always get emphasized (admittedly, the "genetic" and "evolutionary" metaphors make for nice PR, whereas a lot of randomized-optimization algorithms are really boring sounding).
Whenever teachers unions come up, I like to throw this out there. According to those who target unions and suggest "school choice" as a remedy for education problems, Finland should be a cesspool of failure and illiteracy.

What Makes Finnish Kids So Smart?
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120425355065601997.html
Subjects of Leaks Condemn Release - but often not the American diplomatic corps
Scheme/Lisp compilers already allocate variables on the stack when it's safe to do so. It isn't always safe to do so. The part about "lambda-blocks w/o heap allocation" describes a missing feature, not an innovation in concurrency or efficiency.
Wikileaks evades DDOS attack with shift to Amazon EC2
You don't know enough people in the military then. I've met plenty and usually they are from south east or middle america where the unemployment rate is double or triple that of the coastal cities. Where the choice after graduating highschool is working some low end job or not working at all.

Most people I know in the military joined because it was the best option available, school, housing, and clothing is taken care of. And with signing bonuses and hazard pay they have plenty of money to send home to help family out.

Don't kid yourself for a second if you think the military doesn't recruit heavily in middle America for those reasons. They do very well in places like detroit, south Philly, small towns throughout the bible belt.
wwortiz, that's a good point. Posterous supports themes, so we should use those to make it easier to find our product.
>But it's not "natural". I can guarantee you that Lisp showed to a novice isn't "natural".

How do you define a language as "natural"?

I can't say I find any language to be 'natural', there are just some that I know the rules to more implicitly than others.

(Including natural languages like English or Spanish).
> Look, the A B and C bit shouldn't be taken too seriously, just some kind of law against firing 'em for random, arbitrary and capricious reasons while still making it easy for them to be fired for doing a bad job.

Why?

If you're being paid by tax dollars, taxpayers should be able to fire you for any reason that they please. If you don't like those conditions, work for someone else who offers the conditions that you'd like.

Yes, your fellow tax payers may well disagree with you about how to spend tax money. That's how democracy works. If you don't want "those people" to decide how to spend "your" money, perhaps you should carefully consider when you pay directly vs via govt.
Versioning should really be done with an "Accepts" HTTP header as opposed to changing a resource's URL.

http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1566460
Not entirely sure what distinguishes them, but I'd rather have some competition in the niche than avoid defaulting to the first language that addresses the niche.
Why the hell would you want a recyclable subway car? I can understand bottles or shopping bags - lots of which get thrown in the garbage daily. But subway cars? Are they supposed to like break and be replaced after a week of use? WTF?
Ask HN: Feedback on a newsletter concept
I am starting a free weekly newsletter called NoSQL Weekly, which will feature curated news, articles, new releases etc related to NoSQL. It will also occasionally include new event, book, and job announcements. The goal is to keep the e-mail reasonably brief and useful.

You can go here, http://www.nosqlweekly.com/ to subscribe to NoSQL Weekly - it's a one click process. If at any time you're not happy with your subscription, you can easily unsubscribe.

I would appreciate feedback from HN community about the concept. What else would you like to see in this newsletter?
> it seems like a reach to call this a Lisp compiler without lambda.

I think that's a running gag when implementing "lisp." I can recall seeing some "lisp in javascript" library a while back that also neglected to implement that "minor detail."
To me, a candidate who has a tech-oriented blog (and has maintained it for some time) gets a big bonus. One who has a GOOD tech-oriented blog is a whole other story -- that puts you in the category of people who can skip the normal evaluation process. But GOOD blogs are rare enough that I've never seen this come up. Even poor blogs are a very good sign.
I wanted to write a high-level API on top on multiprocessing, but it seems that this project has already done this. However, it is unclear if this has been used/tested much with python 2.6.

If you have used this package, please share your comments.
It's not that hard to parse most answers into the common categories of male and female. For those whose answers can't be easily sorted, they were the ones who didn't want to be classified in that dichotomy anyway.

And if you choose to answer "yes, please," then you get what you get.
Diaspora's ability to provide gender options beyond the binary is a terrible reason to drop Diaspora.

For all it's problems, this is something I'd definitely defend the spirit of what they were trying to achieve, if not the exact implementation (should have provided some common options instead of just a blank text field), but when I clicked this link, I expected to see a critique of Diaspora's efficiency, security, platform decisions, protocol specification, etc.

Not a rant against "identity politics."

(Repost from the last link, don't know what happened to it)

(PS Why do these entries keep getting deleted?)
on the wiki page it says "oscillations"
Actually, Brendan discussed that very topic recently:

http://www.aminutewithbrendan.com/pages/20101122
used 3EANWPMAEFJ6.

Seems good so far. Will have to play around a bit more. will leave a review on app store after using it for longer.
Maybe because this guy is passionate about making a new systems language, instead of solving the problem you want solved?

I never understand people who complain that free project X exists, when those people could be working on Y which is obviously more important. As if production and enthusiasm were both zero-sum and fungible.

Also, as someone who works with systems languages every day, I can tell you that there's a need for this work. I'm not saying Rust is it, but the systems language space is pretty dead, which is scary in a world where processors are threatening to become parallel on scales we don't know how to deal with with traditional tools.
You're closing the site because the text field isn't to your liking?
Clickable: http://www.nosqlweekly.com/
Hey,

I didn't mean to offend. And I've also been guilty of releasing non-production-ready code.

And if you'd just included that kind of disclaimer clearly up front I don't think I'd have felt so compelled to comment on this.

As far as the point of the submission. Yes, I found it interesting to learn about Google's referers, but I think I'd rather have just read about that, rather than seeing the code too. It was unclear whether the article was "Hey lets deconstruct google referers" or "Hey lets play with some PHP". The former is interesting, the latter not.

Thanks for the reply.
I read this article as "Wah wah wah, I have to do string compares to see if automated titles (Mr Mrs, etc) code works because they're respecting the trans-gendered community".
Wow, I saved every referrer for each visitor to BitBuffet.com, I had no idea that it contains the rank! Very neat, now I will peruse my database...
And yet the Macintosh was created under precisely these conditions. This is often how amazing things are created. It's not the only way, but it definitely can work.
You never try to stop people from publishing fake information that allows you to track down a leak. That's the whole point of the fake information, after all.

So if you claim that you're doing that, it's an obvious bluff.
Also, I posted this comment to the blog entry, but it hasn't been approved yet:

"For the record, Appleseed will also allow the user to choose a gender outside of the binary.

"This is not absurd identity politics, this is a recognization of the diversity of human experience.

"Social networking is as much a social and philosophical project as it is a technical one."
I disagree that not everyone needs work/life balance. If you're a leader at a company, your employees count on you to make good decisions regarding their future. I don't think you can make reasonable decisions here if you spend all of your time working and thus lose the perspective one gains from an outside life.

Let's say that I'm an employee of yours and I have a pregnant wife. I wish to take off at 3 PM once a week to accompany her to the doctor. I make this pitch to you, my 21 year old CEO who lives at the office. If you're buried in the business all day, every day, could you comprehend how important something like this would be to me? Even if you did say yes, what would you think of my commitment to the company? Would you factor my behavior into your decisions about my future?

You may find great meaning within your work, but others will have much different priorities in their lives. I think you lose your ability to realize that with this sort of workload.
linkable: http://www.guitaryst.com
I don't believe accessing any of it is legal. The rights to the data would be a separate line item to be sold. I believe the relevant law in the US would be trade secret law. Copyright law might also apply if company A was going to sell copies.