skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I tried fiverr twice, first time got a crappy logo, second time never got a reply.
Duplicate of http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1950695 that already has 63 comments.
> This isn't too terribly dissimilar than what you are suggesting.

Is Chrome in any way critical or considered a competitive advantage for Apple?
Free pizza. Never fails.
Classical Rhetoric 101: A Brief History
Interesting. Ecuador's current government is quite leftist, and very friendly with Chavez, despite close ties to the US. There used to be a huge US naval base in Manta, although it was closed when I was there this summer.

While Internet coverage is spotty enough to disuade permanent residence for someone like Assange, I could see him trying to get some support in South American countries. He's helped by two things: The Internet culture there is still very Wild West, 1998-style, and they absolutely despise the US (with good reason). In fact, the one constant in South America is how much they hate the US, although attitudes toward individual Americans varied.
From the goverments point of view, he is a terrorist at worse and a thief and criminal at best.
Instead of calling an argument tired and hollow, why don't you explain why the argument is tired and hollow?

I'm not trying to score some cheap political points off you - I'd love a response that makes me think a bit, because when I hear someone say 'teachers unions are bad for education', my gut reaction is 'well, that's obvious', since any system where pay is based on seniority and poor-performers are difficult to fire has got to create perverse incentives. What am I missing?
Concerns about Ruby's refinements proposal by Charles Nutter
Just sharing what I learned. As they say "your mileage may vary."
I used it to get a postcard from japan sent to my japanophile sister.

Every time I see this website I can't help but think about the fact that they made the classical mistake of having a decriptive name for their product and are now forever stuck with a five dollar price tag.
Open Data: How Not To Cock It Up
Multiple cities, and you're looking at a small deal. For instance, the recent GAP deal for $25 - sold 20,000. At $12.50 (50% margin), that's over $200k for one day.
On the other hand, when faced with a blank text box, some more technical users will type in Markdown out of habit. Adding basic Markdown support while also having a couple buttons for bold/italics/link is an easy way to support both audiences.
If you have seen the movie "Waiting for Superman" you'll understand why the union is taking some of the blame. They certainly make a case for it being part of the problem.

Also, would it be possible to provide some evidence for your claims about education? It might help us have a better discussion.
Yes but he'll need a heck lot of protection.
Ruby is already the slowest widely-used programming language, by a fairly significant margin. Ruby 1.8.7 routinely runs a 1/200th the speed of C code. For comparison, other dynamic languages run at 1/2th to 1/60th the speed of C. This is better in Ruby 1.9 (getting up into the 1/60th range). But Ruby is still a painfully slow language. Some unscientific benchmark plots here (note the log scale!):

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/which-programming-lang...

JRuby and Rubinius have been working to improve Ruby performance. In theory, it might possible for Ruby to run at 1/2th to 1/10th the speed of C using an aggressive tracing and optimizing compiler similar to LuaJIT.

But this proposed feature really makes me cringe: If refinements require frequently invalidating method caches, Ruby performance will always be horrible. I'd rather sacrifice a tiny amount of expressiveness and have my code run 50x faster, thank you. :-)

EDIT: Note that there are some very cheap ways to implement a similar feature, including the way Common LISP supports package-scoped symbols.
Groovy is a dynamic language. This is what it has to do behind the curtains, and even then only for backwards compatibility.

Your own favorite dynamic language is most likely doing worse things deep inside the runtime code where you can't see it.
Yeah, it kind of is intentionally somewhat disorganized. That's what is part of the charm of the event I think.
It's important to think, but sonetimes it better to move, especially when I just think to think.
"Don't think, but feel." -- BL
"It is same as rest, for fool to think." -- japanese common quote
From Microsoft Lay-Off to TechStars Acceptance…in One Day
So basically you're saying that if you make your sample size small enough, you can prove your point? :-)
Google bidding up to $6B for Groupon
I cannot believe that in the age of multi-core and distributed computing on the cloud, programming languages are still being designed with for-loops and iteration as the basic construct?!? Good luck parallelizing that!
and at providing the service.
It would be interesting to know how Dropbox is doing. http://dropbox.com/ shows nothing but their logo, a big play button (with “Watch a Video” as a caption) and a big blue “Download Dropbox” button.

No explanation beyond the video (more than two minutes runtime), not even a hint at what Dropbox is doing on that page. You have to click if you want to know what Dropbox is. Did they test that? Does it work because it is hard to concisely describe all the strengths of Dropbox? Maybe it works because the main vector for the recruitment of users are invitation emails which do include a short description of Dropbox?
I think the basic question is whether "vertical search" (products, maps, ...) is a different product from generic web search. If that's the case, then Google is clearly using its dominating position in generic search to push forward its vertical search products.

If that's not the case, i.e., products search is so close to generic web search that a distinction doesn't make sense, then Google is not abusing its monopoly but just enhancing its product.

I remember a blog post from the creator of "sushikartan.se" complaining about Google Maps entries being displayed on a search for "sushi stockholm" above his own website. That caused him a major loss in traffic, and he quite convincingly argues that his own search results and reviews are much better than Google's, so Google was (at least in that case) not really working in the user's best interest.

http://www.tedvalentin.com/2010/05/google-content-producer.h...

I personally think its legitimate behaviour from Google. They are not pushing some entirely unrelated product of theirs (e.g. GMail) but really trying to enhance their product (not always successfully, see sushikartan example above). And I'd be very surprised if they manually modified rankings of competitors like ciao on purpose. But I think it's a valid question to raise.
i built exactly this last year, over a weekend ... it's at http://reduce.li

Though i dont maintain it anymore, there's basic visitor tracking by adding a + to the generated url, just like bit.ly.

Very soon, online pharmacy bots started spamming me!

In retrospect, looking at all the positive feedback here, I feel that where I went wrong was adding bloat like picture uploading/url shortening etc...
Why We Can't Stop Playing
Of course I don't mind. Let me know if he gets back to you ;-)
In Order to Complete an Excellent Research Paper
If unfamiliar with writing a research paper and in need of information on how to do so, research paper guidelines will provide students the information required. With the research paper guidelines, students will be able to complete an excellent research paper.
Google ORM insurance - pay to protect your online rep (concept)
This confused me too. If I ran a website "ZoFreX's top 10 websites", and (for some reason) 80% of the internet populace used it, would I no longer be able to decide the order of the sites (or which sites appeared) myself? I don't understand why so many companies think Google is obligated to not manipulate the search results.
> In fact, the one constant in South America is how much they hate the US

I am not sure where you have been or what you have experienced, but I wouldn't call it a constant. I never noticed this widespread hatred towards the US you mention in Brazil, Argentina or Chile. I understand most of the northern Latin America may harbor strong negative feelings towards the US, but I can tell you Brazilians really don't care that much.

Besides that, it's really childish to hate a country.
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I got Code, from Charles Petzold, Code Complete (finally!), and Gamestorming.

I prefer to get my fix on specific tecnologies online.
I'll preface this by saying that I am no fan of unions, although I recognize their utility in some sectors and will go so far as to say that they have done an incredible amount of historic good for the middle class.

Blaming teachers for failing educational standards has long been a tactic of those who wish to see public education marginalized. What they fail to point out, however, is that those countries with the best education systems also have strong teachers unions. I'm not implying causality between the two, merely correlation. It's certainly true that the structure of a union is not one that tends to reward or punish based upon performance, but those who hold unions to be the downfall of any organization place far too much weight on the idea of monetary incentives.

Take Microsoft, for instance. Here's a company that has tried to implement performance-based monetary incentives, and, by most accounts, failed widely. It's not that people aren't incentivized by money, but rather that those who are really good at what they do care much more about their impact than their paycheque. They care more about doing something great and earning the respect of peers they respect than a 5%/year raise.

The education system in America is shameful, something that it seems almost everyone can agree on. The fact is, however, teacher unions are by no means the major culprit. As I said earlier, chronic severe underfunding and a drive toward standardization that values passing meaningless tests over education is the true culprit.

As a member of HN, I think I can go out on a limb and say you're either fairly technical, entrepreneurial, or both. Let me ask you: would you want to work for a failing organization that had a terrible product, didn't invest enough in development, and had ridiculous rules governing what qualified as success? The trouble with finding great teachers who take charge of their students' education is not the union, it's the system itself. The union may play a role in that, but it's simply not a primary one.
There are other sites more suited for this task: reddit.com , reddit.com/r/programming , digg.com and others. As stated in http://ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html , "The worst thing to post or upvote is something that's intensely but shallowly interesting"
An essay written by Kathy Sierra a couple of years ago cites some research along those lines:

http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2006/0...

Every time I get despondent about new skills (which obviously are long term plans) I re-read that and say, yes, time to practice, and time to practice deliberately! Sometimes I wonder that if you can't enjoy the work to get to the end goal then what's the point, so I try to find ways to enjoy the practice, and usually do.
Upvoting is not for agreement. Upvote if you feel that the comment is well thought out, puts forward interesting points, or is otherwise worthy of the attention of fellow HNers. "Upvote" == "I want to see more comments like this".

Do not upvote just because you agree. I agree with the comment nominally, but I downvoted it, because it is a waste of space.

Simple test: if there were more comments like this, would HN be a better place? If yes, upvote. If no, downvote. If indifferent/not sure, move on to next comment.
Very funny movies :)
The Incredible Stupidity Of Investigating Google For Acting Like A Search Engine
Alright, I'll give it a shot. A couple of definitions will be helpful here:

A turing machine is a theoretical device invented by Alan Turing. It consists of a tape (data) and a fixed table of rules (the program). The machine has a head which reads or writes one piece of data at a time. The logic in the table tells the head what to do next (move, read, write etc).

That's great, but it only gives you one (fixed) program at a time. So what if you encode the program and the data on the tape, and set up your table of rules such that it can execute any program. Then you have what's called a Universal Turing Machine.

That idea is basically the theory behind iterative programming languages. The equivalent theory for functional programming languages is the Alonzo Church's lambda calculus. The two worked together to create the Church-Turing thesis, which states that anything computable can be computed by a turing machine (or expressed using lambda calculus).

So you can essentially translate "Turing complete" as meaning "able to compute anything". Since there is nothing that can compute more than a Turing machine, that means all Turing-complete languages are equivalent. (Well, the Church-Turing thesis isn't actually provable, since "computable" is a bit hand-wavy, but it's generally considered to be true).

A non-rigourous litmus test is that something is turing complete if it has conditions, looping and memory access, or recursive functions. You can also prove something is Turing-complete by using it to write an interpreter for a Turing-complete language.

Examples of things that aren't turing complete: regular expressions, (standard) SQL, markup languages (HTML, XML, etc), some templating languages.

Interesting things that are turing complete: basically every iterative or functional programming language, Conway's Game of Life, Minecraft.
By the way, civil servants (that includes teachers) have no right to strike in Germany.
Mobile Development Toolkit
Waiting for Superman has been criticized for its somewhat less-than-honest depiction of reality. Take a look at this piece from a professor of education at USF:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rick-ayers-/an-inconvenient-su...

Some more reading:

http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Education/2010/0924/Waiting-for...

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/the_big_picture/2010/09/how-...

http://www.villagevoice.com/2010-09-22/film/ignoring-the-inc...
I don't think K-12 is the problem here. Usually the problems I'm teaching are trivially small (find max of a list, etc). The only other CS class we offer is the AP class, and it's taught to the test - but it's an algorithms and data structures class, not a software engineering class.

It seems to me like the problem is at the college level. My school offered just one software engineering class, which taught one monolithic method of developing software. A couple of semesters developing different types of software using different methods of development would have been nice.
Or what about the businesses? Certainly not all programmers can be amazing at smashing out good enough work and others can be good at some deeper long-lasting design.

I think there is an expectation that a 'seasoned' developer can be good at all types, but often that's not the case.

We certainly need a mix of both, and they absolutely need to get along (to some degree).
I have to agree.

As a long time device driver and embedded systems programmer, I've found that thinking about the solution only gets you so far. Almost always, intelligent prototyping will make progress quickly. Especially when working with poorly documented hardware, or a system that will never be fully characterized (imagine a complex electromechanical device where the output lags the software commands by many seconds or milliseconds and not in an immediately obvious way), a quick experimental script is often the only way forward.
Linus on branching
Or this:

say -v cello foobarfoobarfoobarfo foobarfoofoobarfi
مسلسل العشق الممنوع الحلقة 118
It's a nice app but please, please hire a real icon designer, it looks like a joke.
I don't know the original poster's reasons, but there are definitely some benefits to teacher's unions.

My wife, a special education teacher, teaches at a pretty low income middle school. The school has a lot of problems, particularly with students not getting the attention that they need. The obvious solution is to hire more teachers and/or more paraprofessional assistants. Since there isn't funding to hire more people, the administration has turned to "alternative" solutions - namely to just make the teachers work much harder for the same amount of money. It is in their contracts that during two periods of the day, they are supposed to have non-instructional time to focus on the myriad of paperwork and other things necessary for teachers (lots of people forget that this stuff exists, when probably 50% or more of a teacher's time commitment is outside of actual instruction). The administration has already taken one of these two periods away universally, and attempted to take the other one as well recently. Thanks to a unionized workforce, they were unsuccessful.

These types of things are common. You can't really fault the administration - their job is to get things as best as they can for the students, and when they have a limited budget that means entering into some gray area about what is best. In this case, the union pushing back means, that this course of action (work harder, work longer, no more pay) is not possible, which I think is a big reason that unions were started. Hopefully, this will work up the chain of command until better funding (or some other alternative) can be achieved.

As you say, unions also have their bad side, like making it difficult to fire some people.

I have a separate issue with pay based on seniority for teachers. While this system is obviously not ideal, most people don't understand that for teachers there is no chance for a pay raise any other way. This is contrary to many other professions, where working hard, and doing well for many years at a company will get you a promotion. The only promotion available for teachers is to become administrators, and that is such a different job that most teachers don't actually want it (it often requires a different degree anyway). That means that without pay increases for seniority there would be no pay increases at all. Start at $25k, stay at $25k. An ideal solution would be to give teachers raises when and if they earn them, but again, this is hard to judge. I see a lot of people claiming that standardized testing is the answer, but in these types of schools, students who don't like their teacher (and they hate school in general, so they hate all their teachers) will happily throw a test to get their teachers fired. Teachers will run screaming from the jobs where we need good teachers, leading to a further separation between the quality of education in low-income areas and high-income areas.

Unions have pros and cons, so arguing that "unions are bad" simply because unions can be bad is tired and hollow. In the case of teachers unions, I think the system is currently better with them than without them, but a revamped system could do away with them.
I know it's selfish, I just thought it was a direction of thought worth exploring. Personally I wouldn't post insecure code without a lot more warnings, closer to (or commented in) the code itself. At the same time I would have absolutely no sympathy for a "programmer" that would copy paste code without even reading the entire blog post it's from, let alone make an effort to understand it. They don't deserve their job.

Your point on 'first approach' security holes accidentally being persisted is a good one, and I can certainly think of a few bits of code I wrote that were never meant to be secure, but could potentially be used in a larger, web-facing project at some point. Some food for thought there on perhaps never writing insecure code, even if it's just a test.

Tangential addendum: If security is Done Right, then there shouldn't be a choice between "easy to write, read and follow" and "secure".
Google claim that their algorithms provide a 'fair' ranking system.

People use Google with an assumption that it's providing a realistic and balanced picture of the web. There's a degree of trust involved.

If Google chooses to manipulate results to provide commercial advantage to itself, then it's not meeting the assumptions of its users and can be accused of acting dishonestly.

ZoFreX's top 10 websites is at most going to affect the prosperity of 10 companies; Google is able to influence the success or failure of millions. When an organisation holds that much power, it has to act responsibly for the good of society. Government should help create conditions to ensure that companies have to act responsibly (so society can function well).
It amazes me when I go to conferences and I see how many people are still using 1.8 rather than 1.9 or JRuby, which may not be comparable to LuaJIT but offer much more respectable performance.

I also really sympathize with the notion of sacrificing some degree of expressiveness for performance. If this feature is to be added, it needs to be done in such a way that it does not set back the hard-earned performance improvements of the last few years.

Then again, expressiveness is Ruby's niche, and DHH's famous quote about "sacrificing CPU cycles in favor of developer cycles" is quite valid, IMHO. If you need raw performance you should look to another language because I don't think that will ever be too high a priority for Ruby.

Github uses Node and (IIRC) Erlang for some stuff, and Twitter uses Scala - if you're lucky enough to have the kinds of problems those guys have, then the best bet is usually to use Ruby where it gets you a developer speedup and another language for the parts of your app where performance is absolutely critical.
My guess at the reason for the upvotes is that amichael's question was not at all novel, and most people have already decided which way they stand on it; so they upvoted to express agreement.
Newton and the Pshooter Gang: Newtonian physics in ~50 pages
Google offers $5.3B for Groupon
$ ./tidypub -t "How about this?" < tidypub
http://tidypub.org/doHLm

This is a python script I just wrote. Unfortunately, the white space gets lost. Try https://gist.github.com/721676
Y Combinator And Yodlee Team Up To Give Startups Access To Financial Data
Well my family members joined for reasons in this order

1) I live in New York, our house overlooks what was the smoldering ruins of the WTC. That was about 4 of them right there

2) Our family has been in the military for generations

3) One wanted to be a medic, not sure why but it was his calling? I guess he can be an EMT after but he has been in for 10 years so I don't think he is leaving the military until they kick him out.

Money was never really an issue for any of them. They make the least by far of anyone in the family, they certainly would have made more if they did like the rest of us and didn't go.

Although I might be biased because I heavily considered the military and decided not to specifically because it didn't pay well enough.

I'm sure some do for money, but I think that is overblown by people who simply don't understand why someone would want to serve. I can also tell you that most of the people in it for money are in and out, but the people who stay long term have reasons other than money.
I wonder why didn't the author use Google Docs or maybe a blog post.
Have you tried lifting weights? That could be the physical exertion you need.
WireFan
Rant article, poorly reasoned points, simply makes assumptions without backing them up.

OpenID login can make logins possible with two clicks, and it is possible to use a hybrid approach.
Distance makes the heart grow fonder
Unfair promotion isn't the only form of anticompetitive behaviour.