skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When I was learning Rails last year, one of my favorite podcasts were Railscasts http://railscasts.com/

Also - a friend taught a StuCo (student-taught course) at CMU about programming, which included Rails. He still has the slides and assignments up, those might be useful too: http://www.cmurpg.com/
javascript: don't start doing it, without learning it.
If you're a server-side programmer like me, javascript is a language you learn just to get by on. However, in my case, I never took the time to fundamentally learn the language. I would pick it up along the way to because i needed to, or because i was forced to used it.

Then of course jquery came long, which made using javascript a whole lot easier. However, whenever it came to writing raw js code, (instead of copying and pasting snippets off another site.) i was lost. Especially when it came to writing proper oop, or using closures. - these problems also slowed down my productivity time, as well, leaving a frustrating experience in memory.

The youtube link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQVTIJBZook is Doug Crockford talking about misconception about javascript.

He also wrote a book called: "Javascript: The Good Parts" - which many JS coders are probably be already familiar with

I would also recommend (which is recommended by many other programmers): JavaScript - The Definitive Guide
I remember what I was doing on the day this happened. And it was just over twenty years ago and all.

A book released after the event, The Hacker Crackdown, gave a blow-by-blow account of the whole farrago. I could not put it down back then. I still own that book. In the light of this last few weeks' nonsense, I'll go and dust it down and read it again.
Most cases for whom? There are plenty of fields in which being cpu-bound is the norm rather than the exception. There are a whole load of assumptions that go into any general advice like this, consider making fewer of them today!
How to Clean Up Your Mac's "Open With" Contextual Menu
If you are talking about what a lawyer should say when writing up a complaint to file a law suit, you are correct.

However, generally when we speak here, we are speaking English, not Legalese, and "steal" is acceptable.

The theoretical justification for IP law from an economic point of view is to correct the inability of the free market to efficiently allocate resources for the production of IP. The free market fails in this because IP is not appropriable and not indivisible. The IP law solution is to give, by force of law, those attributes to IP, making them behave legally like physical goods.
Another option is to have the schema creation/upgrade as scripts (either hand made or autogenerated ) , then check them into source control.

And resist the temptation of hacking the schema directly in your servers, it ends being a larger effort :)
Why We Play Games: Four Keys to More Emotion Without Story
You're right, of course, but I suspect a lot of us here have had to plead (sometimes unsuccessfully) with "management" to buy a license for software a lot cheaper than Photoshop.
At that age, he can teach himself just like you did (same with me). I was 9 when I learnt BASIC out of the ZX Spectrum+ user manual. It all started when I typed in the first example program in the book and realised that I could change the example text to my name. Ego programming does wonders to boost interest.
Social Media Christmas
Ask HN: Questions to ask candidates in a job interview?
I'm conducting my first interview today on the hiring side of the table. Do you have good questions you recommend asking prospects? Thanks.
I actually would not be totally against this (although of course having a paid user would be better). Would you rather have someone use/pirate your product and later possibly buy it (when they can't live without it/have more money/etc), or use a competitors product (or an open source product) and never look back?
The process as a whole would be sane if there was messaging, education, and reliable enforcement. As it stands, it's really just an inverse lottery that you don't find out about until you lose/win.
Good idea. thanks
مسلسل وادي الذئاب 5 الحلقة 19
Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if Dropbox became the first YC company to hit IPO.
It seems too easy to interpret these statements to mean that Google would rather buy a company than build a new product.

From reading the actual quotes, seems like the executive was speaking very specifically about entering into a whole new line of business like acquiring Groupon would have represented.
Turbo Pascal 5.5 With Objects was the first version to support OOP, IIRC. It was the version I started on, when I was 11 in 1991.

The Internet didn't reach me until about 1995 ...
I don't actually have to go to my bookshelf. Bruce Sterling, the author of The Hacker Crackdown, released the text onto the web here:- http://www.mit.edu/hacker/hacker.html
Baby's genome can be deduced from mothers blood
Sufficiently Smart Compiler(tm) should be able to optimize `case` that switches only on a known set of symbols pretty well. Certainly not necessary to do hash-lookup.
HN, I will make your psd into html/css and even javascript for $200.
Ron Paul vs. TSA: Enough is Enough
The best problems, in my experience (as an interviewee), are ones that are based on your own experience. e.g. "Last week I was trying to do ___ because ___. How would you have done it"

It's important to realize that the candidate has had much less time to think about it (and is in a more stressful position), but I think that questions like these should tell you a lot more than generic "reverse a linked list" type questions.
Thanks for the ideas and advice.
+1 for Lego Mindstorm, maybe a book about Processing when he is a bit older and if he likes the stuff
Oh, django-south, how I love you.
From http://wikileaks.ch/mirrors:

Wikileaks is currently mirrored on 1289 sites (updated 2010-12-08 19:07 GMT)

Does the world really need a 1290th mirror site?
Don't Be An Ass About Airport Security
not sure why there's downvotes, maybe I worded the above too strongly.

He clearly mentions how he discusses how he routed around browser editing/DOM manipulation to Google, and then a similar approach was taken by Google later in their product.
Yes, This is what we usually did in a previous job. The only benefit of storing in the database is that the code can check schema version if that's a necessary component. I could see some value there.

Nowadays I'm primarly working with non-relational datastores where this seems to be much less of an issue. There we version the entities that we store instead of a schema and that is done entirely in source control as well.
This should also be a lesson about using engineering notebooks and other such legal documents in programming a new product, especially with new ideas such as the DOM manipulation indicated in this blog.
Consistent ordering even if two developers happen to add migrations starting from the same source version.
WebSocket disabled in Firefox 4
Some of the Cappuccino apps I've seen are very nice but the language really seems like a step in the wrong direction from Javascript. JS has its warts, to be sure, but I still find it a lot more readable than Obj-J.
KeptCollections: Distributed Java Collections for ZooKeeper
Say Yes to Internet Censorship
Indeed, a crazy idea. Considering any decent design would take at least 3 hours of work, you'd be making $5/hour.

To make it worthwhile for you, you'd have to spend at most 1h per design, in which case it wouldn't be worth the $15 for the client, or a spot on your portfolio.
Actually, my takeaway from this paper was exactly the opposite: if you understand how floats work, you can trust the results of floating-point calculation.
What position are you interviewing for? What level of seniority? What do you need this person to be able to do for you?
Dear jmillikin
Let me make a helpful suggestion that is purely intended to be for your benefit (and if you work for a company, it would significantly help them too): contact an attorney who is familiar with Open Source legalities to get clarity on the obligations associated with distributing derivative works that use GPL. I just checked to make sure that you don't work in my company, 'cuz if you did I'd be very motivated to meet with you ASAP and help you understand some of the issues that GPL poses.

I don't mean to be condescending in my tone. Seriously. But Open Source licensing confuses many people -- and many form their opinions based on blogs (which are probably not very admissible in court), and not on the license text. Many people want and wish that the licenses work in the way they think it ought to. But that's not the way the legal system works.

Much like lawyers can't grok why a misplaced semicolon can cause a computer program to crash, developers don't seem to understand how contract language is interpreted by the legal system. In both cases though, the "interpreter" is very literal and does not heed to the authors intent as much as we might hope.
Show HN: The blip.tv HTML5 Player JavaScript API
In the most dramatic Fall Classic of all time.
It probably is. But it's probably not compatible with the engineering culture at Google.
It also says something about the randomness of the startup scene. You can have just the right product at just the right time and still lose.
We've been working on our HTML5 player seriously for a little while now and have plans to completely abandon Flash in the next year (crossing our fingers). One of the great parts about doing things in HTML5/JavaScript is that exposing API methods is much easier. I figured HN would like to see what we've been up to.

If you have anything you'd like to see in the API or any critiques, let us know!

Sorry about the authentication. Make sure you read the dialog!
Why We Get Fat
I was in Berlin, age 6, also at the fall of the wall. Father was in military intelligence for US.
I think at that time I was getting games to run on our computer using MS-DOS.
How To Convert a SIM to a MicroSIM with a Meat Cleaver
It's Ted Dziuba of Uncov fame.
please pardon me but I still confused: why can't you do this with the standard lucene?
It kind of seems like what solr does with function queries[0]. Is the difference in what the variables are?

http://wiki.apache.org/solr/FunctionQuery
Ask HN: Cognitive Science vs Computer Science
I have been debating changing my major from Computer Science to Cog Sci with a specialization in human computer interaction.

I feel that the traditional computer science education stifles creativity and ignores important emerging areas such as web and mobile application development.

The question is would you hire a web developer out of college who did not major in computer science but had real world experience including internships at major companies.
And while that's an unfortunate waste of most people's time, and self-defeating attempt at 'optimization', "justify it" is a very different policy than "pirate it".
I'm usually more interested in the person's passion and drive, and their interest in continual self-development, than I am in what they know right-this-minute. So I tend to less stuff about specific API calls, or design patterns, or programming language syntax, etc. and more towards things like:

Why did you get into development? How many technical books did you read in the past year? What was your favorite technical book in the past year? What did you learn from it? What websites do you read regularly, related to development? Do you maintain any open-source projects? Do you code in your spare-time? Do you love programming, or do you do it for the money? Have you accomplished anything important in your career yet? Do you want to? What would make you feel that you have done something important? Can you hack a Gibson? etc, etc.

I also like a few questions that probe whether or not the person actively thinks about the various aspects of what they're doing and how they do it. So, things like:

What's your favorite programming language? Why? If you could add one feature to your favorite language, what would it be? Why? If you could remove one feature from it, what would it be? Why?

... and a similar set of questions on operating systems, editors, app servers, etc. There are no right or wrong answers, it's just about them having a position and being able to defend it. I mean, I hate vim, but if you rattle off a dozen reasons why vim rules, and can explain what it's pros can cons are, I take that as a Good Thing, regardless of my like or dislike for the tool.
yeh, splitting the site up into a few pages is definitely a good idea. i looked at some top competitor's backlinks and they were all off their own site.

for the record, i didn't do the design.
I've been fascinated by Io ever since reading _why's two introductory posts on it:

* http://web.archive.org/web/20080212010904/http://hackety.org...

* http://web.archive.org/web/20080430135919/http://hackety.org...

See also Ioke, a JVM- and CLR-based language heavily inspired by Io, being developed by JRuby developer Ola Bini:

http://ioke.org/
Many of the included apps (like NYTimes, Amazon, etc.) have Chrome Web Store apps that are separate from their regular websites. (Of course, it's debatable whether these app versions are preferable to their standard website counterparts.) The Web Store team emphasized to us the discovery aspect of the store. They also seem to be pushing Chrome Web Store payments as a way to increase paid conversions through one-click purchases from users who need only enter their CC details once.
Anyone have a epub or Mobi format? I just got a kindle and the converter for it ruins code samples if you take it from PDF.
The problem with this line of reasoning is that it is not a democratic response. The size of your wallet determines the size of your vote, which gives the millionaires and the multinationals all the votes.
It's much older, as I've been hearing it for years.
I have no interest in a religious war over languages either, so no worry about that. I just don't like to see Alioth's one small data point extrapolated into a trend.

The benchmark tests are toy programs that solve a small set of problems under constraints that create a known bias in favor of languages like C++. They are an objective measure of something, but that something is not language performance and compactness is real-world, non-toy programs that solve problems unlike the ones in the game.

Impressions are admittedly not the best way to gauge such things, but they're better than relying on a test that does not make any attempt to address the question at hand.

My personal heuristic is to assume Alioth is roughly right with a largish margin of error, and then look for anecdotal evidence of specific areas that the game does a particularly poor job of reflecting. For Lisps, code size appears to be a large blind spot based on everything I have seen. Lisp's ability to create mini-languages and very high-level abstractions — a large source of its brevity — is pretty much useless on the scale of the Benchmarks Game.
How Clustrix does distributed SQL (It's impressive)
it sounds like if you use the racket 5.1, it is fixed! (in that you don't need to deal with that restriction).

That being said, that certainly is still an obstacle if you're preferred lang isn't scheme/racket. Perhaps their wrapper code could be factored out as a new abstraction layer for these gui tool kits?
I used to have this problem too, and then I read the linked article and now remember the relationship between ln and cp and never got it wrong since.

Also I wonder how many people can say the same thing as the article and still get upvoted.
Actually it depends what classes you take. To learn web and mobile application development you mainly have to teach yourself. What I would do is try to go to a mobile / web user group and still get your cs degree. Note I am a student.
Sometimes. I actually posted it because I had exactly that problem in the past with an artist delivering me .psd's while I'm using The Gimp for everything.
That's funny, I do too. I always thought it was just me...
2010 Pictures of the Year - LIFE
Again, it needs to be pointed out that there is nothing revolutionary there. Any surprise at these items serves to demonstrate your naivete more than any groundbreaking insight into the lives of the rich and powerful.
PPC advertising on said search pages fixes the analogy. As do link directories and, erm, front pages of link sharing sites such as HN (if submitted within the proper timeframe)
New Simplegeo Products: Introducing Context & Places
Checking the schema and upgrade scripts into source control is extremely important, and this is how I have managed it in the past. (names like table.alter.12.sql). I regret not setting this type of versioning table up from the beginning, though - when you have multiple environments (dev, QA, staging, etc) it can get very confusing in a hurry as to which schema changes have been applied to which databases. With a versioning table and maybe even some deployment time scripts to sanity check versions between the release and the DB, mismatches become immediately apparent.
This is apt. I just started the io chapter in Seven Languages in Seven Weeks. I can't imagine putting anything in production with it, but I guess I just don't completely understand what io excels at yet.
Ask HN: Change revenue model for big customer?
We're creating a marketplace type offering (i.e. two sided market) where suppliers of services will generally pay us a percentage of revenue for making a sale on their behalf. The model is similar to Amazon (i.e. Amazon keeps a transaction fee for items sold on its platform by vendors). Our policy all along has been that 'we make money only when you (supplier) make money'.

Recently, however, we've garnered a lot of interest from a large supplier that is interested in using our platform as a marketing vehicle but is not interested in paying us any revenue share. They would instead want to pay on a CPM basis (cost per impression). Gaining this supplier of services would be a big win for us but I wondered if we should deviate from our traditional revenue model and add more complexity to our business just for this large supplier? Any advice is appreciated..thanks.
Unless he's selling his skills for $15...which basically primes the pump itself. According to his website, he's already got more customers than he can handle for a week. Come back in a week and he'll probably have 5-10 items in that portfolio.
Ask HN: Small Business Loan VS Angel/VC
I am looking for some capital to allow me to quit my 9-5 job, and work on my startup full time.

I know most tech startups these days are going with angels, super-angels, and VC funding. It kinda-seems like every tech startup these days is drinking the angel/VC koolaid. The financing option I never hear about in technology and on YC, is a traditional bank small business loan.

On first inspection is seems like a great option; I don't have to give away any ownership of my company. Once approved, the bank gives me money, and basically says do whatever you want with it, just pay us back.

The downside is of course the interest, but assuming I can become profitable in the short term, interest is negligible.

Wanted to get insight from the YC community though on thoughts about small business loans.
As someone who always had that problem, I think it's because I always mentally picture a command as saying "do <action> from <arg0> to <arg1>", ie, "copy this file to that file". But this construct doesn't hold up for linking, so I just have to remember it arbitrarily by remembering cp. function(src, dest) just generally seems to be the unofficial "right way" of ordering things.
Then you initiate it from the McDonald's parking lot, silly! Isn't free wireless grand?
That same approach has been taken by a number of people, including Zenter. Most ideas of that sort aren't novel, just difficult.
Oh, there wasn't much of a disagreement on my part; I was just pointing out the essential differences more explicitly.
Well I think:

- The mouseover effect should be removed as soon as possible.

- The layout looks very random and seems to lack structure, I get that it can be printed on two sides of a paper, but doesn't really look good for a website imho

- Also I think it's pretty hardcore to achieve a diploma while working at the same time, quitting is like giving up.(highly subjective)
I happen to be German: `We' in German and `Vae' may be an approximate English rendering.
FWIW, Pixar uses Io in production. It's used as an embeded scripting language for their IT (Image Processing) application and for some build systems. It's edge is simplicity and flexibility, though this is (as usual) traded off for some performance.

BTW, I was just doing Oia as a low priority fun project. If folks are interested enough, I'll try to get a proper working release out.
Google Earth Engine Allows Scientists To Track Environmental Changes
Assuming he has a computer and an internet connection, send him this link: http://inventwithpython.com/chapters/

The author has done a fantastic job of capturing the feeling of the Basic Computer Games book where you can just type in the code and fun stuff happens. I've got my 7 year old daughter started on it and she's having a ball.
Yeah it seems backwards to me as well. I always thought it was the only one.
Things to Ask Your SaaS Vendor Before Entering the Cloud
As a joke, I have always asked interviewed admins this:
vi or emacs?

Interestingly most of them had something insightful to say in a defense of their choice, some clue on their personality.
The annoying thing is that the mklink command in Windows uses the opposite order, so you have to do

mklink link_to link_from

EDIT: formatting.
If Private companies, all in concert, deny a party the ability to publish for whatever reason, is that different from government censorship?

I think not. It is of course if it is only one private company, because the individual has a choice, but if all private companies deny it, then the individual has no choice, thus it is no different than the government itself having denied it.

This that we are seeing, I believe, is the connection between corporations and government in action, the business-government complex if you like. Private companies should not have the right to discriminate based on other's beliefs or opinions.
The future is everyone in NYC has bedbugs.
My natural tendency would be towards patience, I think, so I would be in danger of letting things slide. Realizing that, though, I'd be in a position to do something about it. If the goal is to keep your name on the radar, it seems like you just need to get something into the contact's inbox. What about a note detailing new features or improvements you'd implemented in the past week or two? It could be a way to indicate continued interest without feeling like you're badgering. Hopefully the contact would reply and provide some insight into the progress. If not, a more direct approach would probably be warranted.
Do you think Assange (WikiLeaks) is a CIA plant?
This WikiLeaks farce that's being played out on CNN & FoxNews is getting a little ridiculous. From a legal perspective, he's not even culpable as he is neither a US citizen nor did he actually "steal" the documents in question, etc...

He gets brought in on what we all know are BS rape charges that took place a year ago fortuitously just after the leaks? This all feels like a CIA limited hangout, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limited_hangout, to me. Just curious if others had thoughts on this.
My god, this thing always keeps biting me. It seems so obvious now with that cp-mnemonic. But it makes me wonder, why does everyone do it wrong in the first place?
Ditto. I just remember that it's the reverse of tar, but the cp trick is better.
Throw the WikiBook at them
Do violations of wage and hour laws count?
Some frameworks take care of this automatically. Mango has an excellent library called South that does exactly this. It keep tracks of migrations and it can automatically detect nearly all migrations. It's much easier than doing it all by hand.
Posted yesterday:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1980963