skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In my opinion, Python, Ruby or Perl are all good choices. You can get things done quickly in PHP, but I would recommend staying away from it as a first language.

Honestly, if you care about speed as much as you say you do, you should be looking into Java. (Or Lisp, if you're not worried about hiring any time soon).
Smaller Than a Laptop, but Bigger Than a Phone
Salad Days for the Internet
Hollywood’s Snakes and Assassins Squeeze Into a Video Game Console
But it does filter out people who don't have that tenacity. Those people who do have that kind of tenacity would already have learned about pointers and O notation.
Helping hand for start-ups in UK.
Study: .gov web sites should focus on RSS, XML—not redesigns
PLEASE DONT MAKE THIS REDDIT V2
I think Gladwell has a good point that trying to do a job is probably the best predictor of who will be good at it, and as a general principle moving that point up, via apprenticeships, internships, coop programs, and so on would probably be useful.

What troubles me is he seems to say that because people do a bad job of objectively identifying predictors of future success, that those predictors simply don't exist, or at least aren't strong enough to be useful. Did the "exhaustive survey" of law graduates he mentioned really find no correlations between something that could be measured before a career starts and eventual success at that career? Perhaps there are no good predictors in various fields, but I think I'd like to see some much stronger evidence before I buy that.
It's hard to see how you can be a great coder without understanding big-O. The better example to use is logic puzzles.
No one has any comments? I just called everyone here language snobs! Sigh.
I love those little intel boards. They actually have 1.33Ghz Celeron D cpus on them. The whole system with a hdd clocks in at about 48watts. About 8 watts while sleeping.

There is even a fanless version. Its nearly a complete working computer for $70. I often use a 4 gig CF card with an adapter instead of a hdd as well. One less power hungry moving part. They beat all but the fastest VIA mini-itx hands down at many 3x less the cost.

One sidenote. I had trouble getting Xorg/XFree86 to run accelerated at higher resolutions (than 1024x768) with this board. As of a month or two ago, they were still having driver issues. Windows XP worked like a champ.

Also their popularity has caught up with them. Everyone seems sold out lately. I've had trouble finding on the last few times I've looked
It might not identify the best hackers (who can agree how to measure that, anyway) but it at least identifies a kind of hacker.
> I used to work at a startup where everyone was always baked and we also had serious quality control problems.

Problems with the quality of the software, or the pot? ;)
Fading JavaScript Tooltips 2kb
Not quite. If you're dispatching based on a sequence of opcodes, that's indirect threading. Direct threading uses a sequence of pointers to the opcode implementations, and jumps directly to them. Also, one of the key benefits of threaded interpreters is that each opcode implementation ends by decoding the next instruction and jumping to its implementation. This duplication of code gives the processor more context for branch prediction, and can lead to fewer pipeline stalls. With a switch statement, the decoding and branching all happens at the top of the loop.
Understanding scope in object oriented JavaScript
Ajax For Evil:  Spyjax
Intro to Google Charts and gchartrb
Artlog Brings Artists And Art Aficionados Together
Facebook Starts Using a Friend Recommendations Engine
Underpants gnomes business plan
Re: ConfigParser, do you guys have any idea where it could be more interesting to use a conf file instead of a regular "settings.py" file, where you could set your parameters?

The only case I can think of is one where your configuration may be used by a non-Python application.
SnapCasa: Quick, Free Website Screenshots
It was one of those daze.. this makes me laugh out loud.
;-D
1) Alaska is a helluva trip if you can manage it. There's an inside passage ferry that you can camp on.

2) Sublets! Great deals, oftentimes. Craigslist.

5) If you need Seattle/Alaska advice, email me.
I appreciate your research. This is approximately correct, although I had definitely studied the issue before getting mugged.
re [1] - the actual statement from the book is:
-- By age 17, the average test scores for minority students are no higher than the average scores for white 13-year-olds.

Note that the book is written about, and the comment refers to, <em>schools in large cities</em>.
Alex, I do not see how the content of the links you posted addresses Malcolm Gladwell's contention that good teachers could close the Black-White gap. To refute that idea one would have to get contradictory data on a scale at least as large as Gladwell's.
Fortunately we have the Paul Gnome method.

1. Make something users want
2. ??????
3. Profit!

The similarity between the product-now/revenue-later startup model and the underpants gnomes plan is disconcerting at first glance. The point is that your Step 2 materializes based on focusing on a proper Step 1.

Also, for S&G, this is the dot-bomb business model.

1. Put something useless on the Web
2. ??????
3. Cash out before the investors get wise.
4. (optional) Repeat.
I suspect that most OSS projects will begin to migrate soon if they haven't already.

Git makes migration from SVN so easy there is very little reason not to do it, and with free web-based collaboration points. Given git-svn, you can still have SVN be a central storage point and still use git locally, so there is basically no downside to using it. It's hard to imagine how it wouldn't take over the OSS software world.
Hmm.. yeah. Except the site doesn't seem to pick up a lot of postings even though they have addresses. And those it does pickup is quite often outdated. I've also had a problem of Bay Area ads showing up in BC. So sure, but know it's lacking in coverage.
HUGE file upload with Ruby On Rails and Adobe FLEX
Webvelocity: New Smalltalk - Seaside Based application framework
Common REST Design Pattern
The Death of Software Development (in North America at least)
Agreed on downtown San Diego. But there are tons of other good areas in San Diego. Old Town has great places to eat like Casa de Pico and La Pinata. Hillcrest has lots of culture and I'd recommend the Park House Eatery. Pacific Beach has some great crusty hang outs and bars. La Jolla is beautiful. And you have to go to the big tourist attractions at least once like the San Diego Zoo and Sea World.
Nice site. I did spot an XSS bug:

http://facestat.com/faces?message=%3Cscript%3Ealert(%22test%22)%3C/script%3E

How much money did the ads bring in?
The impression that I always got was that your best shot at using a domain to SEO (shudders) is to have a one or two word name that people would punch into a search engine as one or two words. thus the example given in the article (ten spaces => tenspaces)
We stayed at a hotel south of the park with Internet access, but it was crazy expensive. They have Internet access (for pay) in some of the lodges in the park. Plus there's a library with networked computers, but they limit the amount of time you can spend on those.

It would be wonderful to spend a week or more at the park, because it's so relaxing. But the best bet is probably just to spend a few days there without the computer.
Almost everything he says needs a [citation needed] tag at the end of it. I guess that's one problem with public speaking--it's pretty hard to take apart in that manner. One of his comments highlights his overall problem,

...that ineffible, illusive gift, "Being a good teacher"

...in other words, he seems to think that teaching ability is "ineffable" and that therefore the best way to find the good ones is to (???) hire a large number, find the best ones, and fire the rest. Or something like that. One way or the other, objective measures are to be thrown away. That's his overall point, but that is pretty impractical. Ultimately, you have to measure people in some manner. You can't hire uncredentialled people on the chance that they might be good--it just wouldn't work that way.

I don't know why he went on about sports for so long. The "combines" that he talks about are actually the last measure used to weed out prospective hires. The sports agents actually do their most important work watching the kids perform athletics at a high school and college level. Likewise, smart employers of programmers will look at past projects and jobs, and only then subject them to brain-teasers and white-board coding. That's always how it's been.

ADDENDUM: Does it seem like Gladwell waxes a little too long about the physical beauty of the Russian hockey player at the beginning:

http://blogs.msg.com/photos/uncategorized/2007/07/02/cherepa...

...I mean, I may not talk with an aural swish in my voice, but I think I can tell (for instance) a George Clooney from a Slavic Lummox.
You're being skeptical for the wrong side. We humans have a long, inglorious history of inventing objective metrics that absolutely fail to be useful at predicting the things we want to predict. From the IQ tests to the NHL combine, we're traditionally quite awful at inventing predictive tests of performance.

Which is to say: if you're being intellectually honest, you should be far more skeptical that a test does what it claims to do, than you should be of the opposite argument.
I found this article informative not for the information about the computers but rather for the glimpse at how clueless the analysts were.

It's amazing that someone whose only job is to know an industry inside and out can be so out of touch with its customers.
The INI format lets you group your options with less syntax, if you need more than just the top level. (It's still much less flexible than YAML, though.) Other than that, yeah, mainly legacy config files and programs that weren't written in Python.
That argument makes no sense. We have to measure people? Really? Why? If his claims are correct, then Gladwell is right -- we're doing worse by screening people according to criteria that are useless, because we're essentially randomly filtering out a large percentage of the people who are good at the job.

You can attack the evidence for his claims, but if the evidence holds, then the conclusion Gladwell reaches is a logical consequence.
What's next, "suggested wall posts"? We think this is what you want to comment on this photo - click OK to make the comment.

I'm fine with (and actually like) the "People we think you may know" on LinkedIn, because it actually gives me a fair number of people I know. Facebook just hasn't gotten it right - I don't know any of those people!
Wait until GWT has its breakthrough year.
Programming is neither harder nor easier than mathematics: like mathematics, the difficulty is in the problems attacked. In both, the big advances come from asking new questions, and finding the right abstraction to deal with the new question. (Many people would say that programming <em>is</em> mathematics, albeit a new and in many ways distinct branch of mathematics).
I'm sympathetic to his claims, as I went to a crap school and got a crap GPA. Okay. I'd love it if people had judged me based upon my winning personality, my good looks, or my tendency to point out everyone's foibles, but I'm not sure those are a superior measure of coding skill... Even if they were, they could be subjected to analysis and so become objective measures themselves.

The practical reality is that lots of jobs have 1000s of aspirants. How many kids want to play in the NBA? MILLIONS. You need something to divide them up, and if one objective measure is genuinely bad, it needs to be replaced by a better objective measure.
Thanks. I am working on it. :)
one of the commenters on the article brings up a good point. What are the statistics like for "apache", "spring framework", and "orm"?
GLAT - Google Labs Aptitude Test
New Way to Measure Blog ROI (An interesting real-life story)
I'm interesting in seeing how aggressive they are at preventing spammers (and similar) from using their program. If they're not willing to turn away revenue generated by spammers that could be some pretty ugly PR.
How about 127.0.0.1?
Thank you. That's the sort of answer to the question I was looking for.
Xobni reviewed by PC World, given "Superior" ranking
Ya, I thought that too until I visited and then moved here for grad school. There's plenty of vacuous stuff going on, but it's only part of the overall scene. LA is incredibly diverse.

There's a reason millions of people live here and the real estate is retardedly expensive. It's effing awesome.

(Especially for someone who's clearly as open to new experiences as you are; I think you'll love it if you find the right scene)
Sorry, but most MMORPGs are just like resort casinos. There's a glitzy surface with great art-direction, but it's really not much deeper than a stage set. It's just a pretty background to distract you while you're subverted using variable schedules of reward in a Skinner box. Variable Schedules of Reward are inherently addicting. You can get a rat in a Skinner Box to expend so much effort pulling a lever for a food-pellet reward, that it starves to death because the energy it takes to pull the lever exceeds the amount it gets in food pellets. This is exactly what happens to people who play slots and other games in casinos, and what happens to you when you start "farming" for experience points or gold. Invariably you seek out places where you get the rare but extremely valuable "drop."

I'm sorry, but using this power of addiction to try to solve social ills could result in more evils. The fact thats this isn't addressed directly in this talk concerns me.

In any case, I know how to create an online world that doesn't insult the intelligence of smart people. I know how to create an online world that isn't just a stage-set background for a skinner-box addiction, because it has real depth through emergent complexity.

(In all fairness, the speaker emphasizes the motivational power of social aspects of online gaming. But collaboration is a capability granted by the network, not by MMO games in particular.)
We should be skeptical that any particular metric does what it claims to do, especially ones which are ad-hoc or based on intuition instead of evidence. I'm not suggesting that Gladwell is wrong about any of the examples he gave being 'mismatches', or that there are many of them, and exposing the misuse of metrics is certainly valuable. However, he seems to go further, suggesting that we can't find good predictors at all, which is a claim which I think deserves just as much skepticism. I doubt he would seriously make such a claim, and it is probably just an artifact of an early talk which won't be present in his book, but I have plenty of skepticism to go around, so I'm perfectly happy to deploy it wherever it is warranted at all.
Your experience is atypical. I've never used a phone (unlocked or carrier-issued) that enabled all the J2ME capabilities for an unsigned application. I've used SE 610, SE T637, SE K750, SE K790, Samsung D900, Nokia 6300. All of these phones are were well above average in capabilities (J2ME and otherwise) at the time I purchased them. But, the vast majority of the J2ME applications I tried to download were unusable for a variety of reasons.
If you go to Vancouver, I'd recommend staying downtown and experiencing that lifestyle. You might not need to use your car for weeks. Go to Cafe Artigiano or JJ Bean for great coffee. Too many great places to eat but I'll mention Guu (http://www.guu-izakaya.com/) and Hapa Izakaya (http://www.hapaizakaya.com/).
Slide Seeks to Justify Huge Valuation
Joel Spolsky's interview in Founders at work mentions that fogcreek spent time on building out an affiliates program that didn't amount to much.

6 to 12 months from now I would like to know what % of sales for 37 signals comes from this program, and if it was actually worth their time building it.
My Favourite Things
When you've got music from The Sound of Music stuck in your head, and you dont know why - you expand upon it. This is what I came up with, what can you come up with?

(To the tune of "My Favourite Things")

Webapps and music and playing with gizmos,
Caffeine and tech news and scifi on Tivo,
Coding at midnight and hot spicey wings,
These are a few of my favourite things.
2.) There are month-to-month furnished apartment, e.g. Oakwood has furnished apartments in Mountain View:

http://www.oakwood.com/

Be careful, because a lot of apartment managers use your security deposit to replace the carpet and repaint the apartment when you leave. Also, most apartment managers wait the full 3 weeks to return your deposit in CA.

3.) You can try this for wireless internet:

https://www.ipassconnect.com/main

4.) iphone 2.0 is supposed to come with GPS and sell for $200. Maybe you'll want that instead of Garmin GPS.

7.) Bathroom finder:

http://www.imodium.com/page.jhtml?id=/imodium/include/3_5.in...
LinkedIn Architecture
Italy:-)

http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&q=dolomites&um...

If you wanted, you could even live in places like that - maybe not quite so spectacular, but nothing to sneeze at, either.
Mascara: ECMAScript 4 → Classic Javascript translator
"hire a large number, find the best ones, and fire the rest"

Actually, in many cases this is the only way to find the best candidates. The near impossibility of firing teachers is the biggest impediment to improving teaching quality in the United States.
Search Engine Marketing Services: Customers Calling
As far as Internet marketing is concerned, search is important. People are searching for various items. And if a website becomes available to them then it is due to the search engine marketing services.
Next version of Mac OS X:  Snow Leopard
If you like messing around with songs, take a look at these: http://www.jgc.org/blog/2008/03/bouts-complete-song-parodies...
What a week we’ve had!
We've got huge file uploads on our startup working fine with Flex and RoR using the already existing Attachment-fu. This plugin seems a bit redundant. FYI, we support up to 500M - and that's only because we had to set a limit somewhere!
> When you walk through Palo Alto in the evening, you see nothing but the blue glow of TVs.

Perhaps the blue glow of monitors instead?

> So far the complete list of messages I've picked up from cities is: wealth, style, hipness, physical attractiveness, fame, political power, economic power, intelligence, social class, and quality of life.

Interesting to see that "you should be more religious" is not on the list. That's closer to the message of Berkeley and SF: be more progressive, more virtuous, destroy those close minded right wingers.

> It's in fields like the arts or writing or technology that the larger environment matters. In these the best practitioners aren't conveniently collected in a few top university departments and research labs—partly because talent is harder to judge

Methinks that MIT and Stanford do a pretty good job of assembling the best technologists.
Sorry I could not follow you completely. Probably it is still too early in the morning for me.

Refuting the theory of a random commentor on HN is just strawman argumentation, though (sorry martythemaniak).

"AGW advocates like martythemaniak delight in comparing themselves to Darwinists and their critics to creationists."

Um, that is kind of turning it on the head: all this is in reply to an article that tries to defame AGW people as advocates of eugenics. It's as if you say "AGWs are like Creationists", then AGWs reply "no we are not" and you claim victory by saying "see, AGWs think their opponents are creationists".

I myself am simply no expert on climate change. Some knowledge from my area of expertise spills over to climate research, though: the so called "no free lunch theorem". There is no such thing as a free lunch - maybe it has not been universally proven in a mathemacially rigorous sense, but in general it seems to hold.

Hence I personally consider it very likely that human activity influences the climate. There are also countless examples of nature being destroyed for good by human actions.

As for the details of CO2, it would be great if we could just trust expert and politicians to sort it out. Apparently it is not so. I am interested enough to ask for more information. What are good sources to read, that are not opinionated?
Don’t listen to your community
Gates Bids Adieu to Developers
Adobe still can't create a 64-bit Flash Player
How do you get "The Sound of Music" music stuck in your head?
Yahoo Releases Their Address Book API
when in Portland, Oregon, don't miss the Bend-Crater lake area. Also from Seattle I would strongly (very) recommend taking the scenic US101 instead of the interstate (I5)....lot of beautiful small towns with nice hotels/ restaurants along the pacific coast.
Email checklist - do no evil
jQuery is designed to work unobtrusively - it's easy to write applications using jQuery that still work with JavaScript disabled.

GWT is a JavaScript black-hole. You simply can't create unobtrusive applications with it - your only option is to write two versions of your site, one using regular HTML and another using GWT.

Also, some of us prefer writing JavaScript to writing Java. Crazy, I know.
New Laptop With Built-In Projector
Why It’s Taken 10 Years from Carbon to Snow Leopard
CSRF attacks are strong. I can write an attack that tries dozens of different potential combinations of URL and table names just as easily as I can attack one.

Not to mention that many people use their web host's one-click install tool which always puts scripts like phpMyAdmin in the same place.
The reason CSRF is scary is that it works against those defences.
Do you use FriendFeed?
Are you using FriendFeed? I admit that I follow a few users here at HN and I am very interested in their opinions, ideas....HN is where we submit the most interesting items we find on the net, some other items we do not because we may feel as if it may not appeal to the crowd for whatever reason. I am interested in reading the other items that fall in your RSS feed and that you are not posting here. FriendFeed is a good place to do so. So if you are using FF, and you do not mind sharing your feed, please do. Thank you all.
Again, CSRF defeats those defences.
I don't think he implied that. He just said that many of the metrics we use are wrong. He didn't say those metrics don't exist at all.
And of course, as usual, most economists are wrong.

Take the case of the average American wage slave, living from paycheck to paycheck.

Raise his taxes.

What happens?

He (or she) needs more money to pay his bills. He has to get a second job, perhaps even start a side business.

Thus, in many cases, raising taxes will increase GDP, perhaps even leading to substantial wealth creation.
Renting Twitter: Path to Profitability?
It's pretty easy to stick with 199 through Grants Pass, and in reality, the coast route is probably less likely to get snow than I5, which has a number of reasonably high passes near the Oregon border. The road those guys took was just asking for trouble at that time of year:-/
Sorry to burst your bubble, but I'll add that a large proportion of bankers, traders, and other high-powered executives that make a lot of money (some of them make $15m a year) are on drugs a lot of the time. They don't talk about it and it's usually not weed (more like peruvian marching powder), but it's there.
Interesting article. I like the optparse example, I've always implemented these (Object oriented wrappers for getopt/Getopt::Opt) by hand in Perl (and re-wrote the code every time I went to a different company).

I find it much easier to use YAML (a superset of JSON) files for configuration, however, with the only draw back being tab sensitivity (which can be made easier to deal with by placing vim/emacs instructions as comments, e.g. "vim: ft=yaml ts=4 sw=4 et") . Additionally, there must be some equivalent of XML::Simple out there for Python.
Scan Uncovers Thousands of Copycat Scientific Articles
Happy birthday, x86! An industry standard turns 30