skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I assume the problem with the quote is that saying "we don't know how cellphones cause brain cancer" -- though technically true -- carries the implicit message that "cellphones cause brain cancer"... even though we don't know that, either.

For example: "I don't watch reality television," said Dr. Gupta, "While there is no known mechanism for reality television to cause cancer, that doesn't mean it doesn't exist."
Never IM'ing is gold. My favorite stat is that the average RT user alt-tabs to an IM window 77 times PER DAY. Think what that does to people's flow!

Kudos on the focus. If you ever do try an experimental run with RT, I'd love to hear about it. I can ALMOST promise that you'll be surprised by your data. :-)
There is life beyond SV.

There is success beyond SV.

There is funding beyond SV.

Ship it.

Figure out if you need to "open a US subsidiary" later.

And besides, "opening a US subsidiary" sounds a whole lot better to the visa-issuing folks and the funding folks and to the folks in whichever US region you might want to move to than does a business in its bootstrap stages.
+1 to the above. Also, who are you selling to? If your primary market is based in the EU, sounds like you should work on getting positive cashflow (i.e. getting out there and selling among your current network) and then think about SV.
Bond Insurer News Spooks Wall Street; Stocks Trade Mixed
Don't miss the smaller places like Santa Barbara.
A Smart Debt Solution
try here: http://pre.plt-scheme.org/docs/html/
TechCrunch Launching "Elevator Pitches" Today
There is no correlation between reality television and cancer, but there is with cell phone use.
Can anyone explain why this comment was downmodded?

Is it because I syndicated something that was posted elsewhere?

I feel like what I wrote here brought a lot of context to this story, especially given my background as a musician and record label manager.

TIA for any insight
You are comparing apples to oranges. Django is a framework built on Python. Python doesn't provide anything to escape strings. I'm sure there are also PHP frameworks and templating languages which make this very easy.

I realize I'm playing devil's advocate because I love Python, but you shouldn't put blame nor give credit where it isn't due.
Verizon Reportedly Negotiating To Buy Alltel
Heh. I'm in Seattle, too. Ever make the local startup meetups?

IMO, Seattle beats SV/SF as a place to live, but I'm moderately outdoorsy (sailing, kayaking, etc) and travel a lot during the wet winter. I only lived in SV for 3 months (for YC) but I really didn't care for it. I like Austin, but 95 in the summer is murder.
after a first reading I am really impressed. Most of the published material on these topics is academic and heavily mathematical.

To each his own - I thought this book could easly be condensed into a list of mathematical theorems - a page worth of links to wikipedia.

1) The examples are real python code

Really crappy python code... definitely not the kind of code one should be looked at as example.

He doesn't just test algorithms on standard datasets like MNIST or MovieLens - He gives programming examples for how to extract your own datasets e.g. by showing how to use the eBay api to download prices from eBay, or how to use the facebook api.

He combines math theory with code and API's? What's the point of that?

If you want to learn how to code python, read a python book. If you want to learn math, read a math book. If you want to learn API's, read the API docs. If you want to learn all three, read all three, but don't think that you know any of them if you see a bunch of badly coded examples of the results of knowing them.
I rather like the Laguna Beach area.
Economy Handling Oil Shock Better Than In '70s: Bernanke
Who is inflating the oil bubble?
1) if you really have the time, if i were you, i'd go across to the grand canyon, north to yellowstone, and up to vancouver for your adventure. sounds like you're going big, and those two places are must-sees if you've not seen them.

2) yeah, you can rent vacation condos on the cheap. i spent two weeks in south beach for less than half the cost of a hotel in a fully furnished large apartment. check out http://www.vrbo.com/ -- you can negotiate with the owners on price, especially if you're taking up a huge hole in their calendar.

3) i have no experience for you.

4) sounds like you've got it covered, and you can always buy stuff on the way. car charger for the cell, maybe.

5) i'd worry less about the cities. you can find out the must-see stuff in a city with a quick google search. a substantial amount of the best stuff on your trip will probably be in between bigger cities. especially on the way to the west coast.

6) everything is more expensive. especially compared to clemson.

7) take the time to stretch your legs and experience the stuff in between your destinations if you can spare it.

i'd have some beers before you leave, i'm also in SC :)
Am I the only one who doesn't really mind Firefox using up a ton of RAM? I mean, there is more than enough RAM in my machine, and then some...
Versions: a gui Mac subversion client
I personally think PHP it blurs the line between a language and framework. The "framework" part is the 20,000 builtin functions and the mechanism it provides for executing code as part of a dynamic web request.

In any case, my intent wasn't to compare Django to PHP, it was to point out that PHP's default way of outputting things really does make it inconvenient to write secure code - hence answering the parent post that argued that poor security had nothing to do with the language used.
More Cuts as United Grounds Low-Cost Carrier
See my reply here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=209259
2 years ago, I had a client that required me to be available by IM between 8 and 5. I was actually stunned after watching their employees IMing all day long. It was one of the best examples of work prevention I'd ever seen. I told them I could IM or I could work, but not both. Needless to say, they didn't last long.

You have me 95% convinced to try the One Week RescueTime trial. Maybe next week...
Productivity Up; Wage Pressures Ease
Market Openings for Sears | ServiceLive Blog
Cellphone Tracking Study Shows We’re Creatures of Habit
"Publicity stunt if you ask me."

For sure, but isn't everything on Digg a publicity stunt?
700,000 k at times for me.

It's at 400k now.
Getting Started with Merb: Routing and Controllers
Part 2 of an on-going series on Merb basics, this episode features an introduction to setting up routes and writing controllers, with a focus on providing responses in multiple formats using 'provides' and 'display' (equivalent to Rails' respond_to functionality).
Good point. Now that I think of it, I've seen at least 4 diff websites that had video annotations and I've never seen even a single video that had annotations that were valuable. They're more annoying than valuable (think ads).

As for flickr... some of them are useful. Facebook's people annotation, for example, is super-useful and it adds a lot of value.
Okay. Does that mean I'm wrong? Or does it mean that I'm right but you're upset about it? If you can make a factual argument, I'd like to hear it. If all you can do is call me names, that's fine -- I'm okay with being vilified but not contradicted.
guess and check is a surprisingly good skill to learn and one that many people cannot master without years of doing it. employees with guess and check skills will help in fringe cases of development where one or more of the senior developers does not have any experience, instead of reading docs the tend to take a sledgehammer to the problem and can tend to bang a working version out very quickly in any given environment. guess and check hackers that are truly good will be the fastest to adapt to any changing situation in a faster paced development schedule and you might see them flounder in boredom in larger well outlined projects where they can't find problems to try and fix

this isn't to say that you, mdasen, doesn't find good guess and check hack artists, but just to put a positive spin on what otherwise looks like a negative comment to developers that don't have their language of choice memorized.
Here you go:

function o($name) {
echo htmlspecialchars($name);
}

o($name);
Would you rather they optimize for ram, which is cheap, or for time, which is expensive?

Assuming an hourly rate of $30 and 100 web pages visited a day it would take approx ~40 days to recover the cost of 1gb of ram if loading speed was increased by just 1 second per site.
NASA and Google Announce Lease at Ames Research Center
Comcast targets bandwidth hogs in test
Fun out of the box thinking exercise
New report identifies dangerous Web domains
Comcast Confirms New Throttling Tests
Ambac Defends Claims Paying Resources Against Moody's Review
Is there? I've seen very little that is conclusive.

A few studies here and there show some, but that's to be expected: a 5% confidence interval means 1/20 otherwise good studies will get it wrong.

Interaction between weak radiation and matter is very well understood (1). Unless the currently known laws of physics are completely wrong, the interaction between cell phone radiation and your brain is so small as to be irrelevant.

(1) Look up Fermi's golden rule in Landau/Lifshitz, here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi's_golden_rule or elsewhere. Also look up multiphoton ionization; if you've got a university library, look up Phys. Rev. A 42, 3090 - 3106 (1990).
I don't care what else you do, but you should find out more about each of them, and take the information down. You will be surprised how valuable that list will be down the road, and how hard the list is to develop on your own.
Still a bit off. "[going] into the bad part of town" would imply he went on some devious message board and there released the information with a flashy heading.
In more closed source languages like .NET you won't have the copy-paste problem nearly as much. In my time learning C# I found a great lack of freely available online resources with code snippets that worked in all situations as with PHP. Picking up PHP and making a site work was much much easier with the wealth of reference material that was around without costs associated with them. I would suggest that the copy-paste pitfall you mentioned depends largely on the language or platform that is being interviewed for.

Writing code without being in front of a computer is different in that you don't expect your napkin application to run and you won't list include files or even real functions in outlining a potential plan, does this detract from the usefulness of the napkin? No I wouldn't think so as it gives your brain a predetermined map to try and follow when finding the real functions to use or loops to create when solving an outlined problem.
The Retirement Crunch
Excuse YOU? "give out sex" huh? Like it's a commodity they can run out of? were you raised by religious people or something? I'd classify that under emotional problems. If two people meet and like each other, why would they wait longer than a few weeks to have sex?
methinks someone has a romanticized and/or puritanical notion of sex. This is 2008, we have birth control and STD prevention. Sex is just sex. Time for social values to catch up. On the female side in particular, I get pretty damn tired of guys who don't get laid spreading rumors about girls because said girls won't sleep with them. Every girl I've encountered who has been called a slut has been for this reason.
It's the most disgusting to watch in high school aged kids. Assholes really screw up these girls self esteem at the most important part of their emotional development and then they can't enjoy sex as adults. Sometimes takes years to get over. And we wonder why most women in their twenties act so neurotic?

sorry, i'll stop ranting. I just want women to be able to screw whomever they want without consequences. :)
restarting firefox: 15 sec

1GB ram at newegg: $30

posting atypical results as FUD: priceless
The Professionals
Wow, this seems very trollish to me. The author doesn't account for the various types of memory usage (shared memory, VSS/BSS/RSS, file swap, disk pages)... This is an extremely naive measurement of "memory usage" being presented here. Firefox now has an impressive test and instrumentation suite for measuring memory usage. There are some highly tuned allocation algorithms and garbage collection in use here. The poster doesn't present any evidence to support his assertion but rather only vague suppositions and some hand-waving.

The article clearly displays the author's lack of understanding of how modern "memory usage" works.
The importance of visual communication and UI design: "My application had gone from useful to cool"
I, personally, prefer Ruby because it thinks the same way I do (if that makes sense). So that's what I'd pick. But Python would do you just as well, if you like the way it reads, etc. better. They key, I think, is to not be too worried about speed up front. Get your thing working in Python, say, and then do testing (another comment mentioned this) and rewrite what's slowest in C. I guess I'm warning against premature optimization.
Do Vancouver; nice startup scene (see e.g. http://www.launchpartyhq.com/), AMAZING scenery, and either way only 2.5hrs from Seattle.

The downside is that $1200/month here is a little on the low side unless you don't mind living well out of town. I'd say $1500 for a monthly (more if you rent per-week) in downtown. Check out: http://vancouver.en.craigslist.ca/sub/ and know that you want the following neighbourhoods: Downtown, Kitsilano (aka Kits), West-End, around West 10th, Commercial Drive (cheaper) or Coal Harbour (with the juppies..)

If you decide to come here, definitely let's hook up for a beer or three: einar.vollset@gmail.com. (which goes for anyone else around here too btw)

Finally, I'd swap the pickup for a Golf TDI if you're gonna drive that far... :-)

Cheers,

Einar
I was thinking that too, but perhaps he means 'execution' in the more generic sense of creating a product quickly?

In any case, even with a slow scripting language like Ruby, if the speed of the language is a concern, perhaps that part of the application should just be farmed out to a library in C (or a separate process in whatever language). Need more info, though.
Do you paint with crayons?

You need a better metaphor. I cannot imagine a painter who, when handed a crayon and told to draw something, couldn't at least produce a simple sketch. I just can't think of a single example.
Do lazy loading. Although it doesn't speed up loading really, it helps to create a smooth user experience.
Location Based Service Panel at Columbia U. -- Great Opportunity for Mobile Entreprenuers
The problem seems to be that people will occasionally reflexively use the upmod arrow on an article just to say "hooray for the sentiment expressed in the headline" rather than after carefully thinking about whether it's worthwhile.

Examples include this article (I'm guessing that most of the upmodders were Obama supporters), the "congrats to pg on getting married" thread the other day, and the "happy birthday somebodyorother" thread a few weeks ago.
avoid sacramento at all costs. there is nothing to see.

one option, at least in the bay area, would be to use couchsurfing.com.

in the bay area you wont need mobile broadband. there is unprotected wireless everywhere, and every coffee shop will have free wireless.

while in the bay area use yelp from pretty much everything. we use it a lot down here and pretty much every business has a lot of reviews.

also, be sure to check out santa cruz while you're in the bay. a fun little town.

some google fodder:
-big sur
-big basin
-the saturn cafe, santa cruz
-gourmet ghetto, berkeley
-the berkeley bowl
-berkeley in general
-california farmer's markets
-the red vic
-china town, sf
-ucsc's campus, very pretty

again, dont go to sacramento.
Tracking iPhone Buzz on Twitter, Facebook, Google & Techmeme
Here is the answer: don't look for PHP programmers! Look for good software developer (Web experience will be a bonus), and this guy will easilly handle all these tasks and even more :)
I thought the title of the article should read "How I cracked Digg". Go away cracker!
I think in an idealized HN, even the outcome of the Presidential Election wouldn't get upvoted, although I'm sure that in the real HN it probably will.
I agree it was a pretty bad reply. It doesn't take a couple of seconds to go to google, see who you're dealing, and notice that they could be potentially useful to you as a business..

However, maybe it was a stressful day and they had a heap of spam or irritating emails trying to sell them stuff.
If you want speed, why not Common Lisp? Nice, high-level, a pleasure to work in, fast and compiled out of the box, with the ability to optimize the hell out of specific critical parts of your code (using, e.g., optional type declarations, speed and safety settings, inlining declarations, etc.). Hunchentoot is a nice web server, Postmodern is a nice library for working with Postgres.
Django is a framework, but it also has a language for writing templates, which is what the example above is written in.
The bad he may be referring to, with respect to Global Warming, would be world governments adopting policies to significantly cut Co2 which would force great reductions in economic output and be bad for a great number of people.
1) definitely go to the grand canyon if you haven't been.
2) i hope there is, because I'd like to do the same thing soon.
3) i have a tethered modem plan on my blackberry with Verizon. It provides EVDO for only $10 a month on top of my voice plan. Pretty sure its unlimited(but I also thought SMS were unlimited for $10/month, and its actually only 500, so don't take my word for it).
4) Maybe you can wait on the new blackberry or iPhone? GPS, EvDO, camera--all in one package.
I am pretty damn sure the corrupt leaders in countries like Nigeria and Kenya (where I was born and raised) will not be swayed by an online petition! Rather than use this forum as a petition, you might consider leveraging the intelligence and experience of this group to discuss the issue of the digital divide and possibly offer suggestions as to how we could bridge it.

For example, as hackers and entrepreneurs we could work to develop an open online app that could make it easier to introduce kids in developing countries to CS and provide mentorship in some way. At MIT there was an program called AITI (Africa Internet Technology Initiative) that sent students to Kenya, Ghana and Ethiopia over the summer to teach programming to high school kids there. What about a project that would provide some seed money to local African entrepreneurs to setup educational internet cafes in communities there?

It is a huge problem and would be really interesting to discuss the issue further here.

(Posted earlier here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=208030 but recommenting since the submission is now getting some traction)
You still need to do this:

<?php o($name); ?>

I've used this exact function in my own code, though I call it "h". Really sucks that we have to do this - not to mention that PHP's global namespace for functions means it's better to have long names that are more likely not to clash with third party code.
Highly recommend the National Parks in Utah (Bryce, Zion, Capital Reef, etc.) as well as Monument Valley.
Which brings up the obvious question underlying this whole article: Which kind of talented software developer is easy to find in Cyprus?

Cyprus is only slightly more populous than Vermont, where I'm told it's also very difficult to find development talent, despite the fact that it's a lot closer to a startup hub.
Maybe it's a bit like asking a cook to write down step-by-step, the recipe and directions for a meal they've never cooked before. Without access to their learned abilities to improvise with given ingredients, smelling/tasting the mixture, comparing notes with similar recipes they have, etc.
Sam, are you seriously going to go to Sacramento BUT NOT LOS ANGELES???

LA is an incredible place with loads of amazing places to stay for week or month-long intervals (lots of "creatives" running around subletting their apartment)

i can probably set you up somewhere if you want to drop a line.

i recommend venice as a beach area (also marina del rey, which is cheaper)...silver lake for an inland area that's really cool and beautiful...can't go wrong with west hollywood or the hollywood hills for sheer, um, hollyweirdness.

there's also pasadena and hoity toity areas like pacific palisades or topanga that would be fun.

keep in mind that LA is freaking HUGE (roughly 30miles by 30 miles).

and also that it's optimal to be here october-april (although the beach areas are temperate year round...it can get hot once you're >10 miles inland in the summer).

The people in Orange County are basically how they are portrayed on MTV, but Laguna Beach is really beautiful and has great beaches. You could probably find a spot there in the off-season that you'd love.

I found this service to be pretty useful for finding apartments in specific areas:

kexter.com

holler if you'd like some help!

ethanbauley // gmail

(Virginia transplant)

(PS you really need to post up in Big Sur or somewhere similar on the north side of SF. Sonoma/Napa is incredible, too).

Just saw your budget, you will be set up with INCREDIBLE studio/1 bedroom places in LA w/ that budget. You could do it for less.

I might think about losing the pickup truck for this trip...but I'd have to crunch the numbers ;-)
Arches Nat'l park, too!
That sense of entitlement on the part of TechCrunch and the people associated with it is why it's losing value so rapidly.

The balloon has popped, the shark has been jumped, the welcome has been overstayed;
Bits: Google Plans Major Expansion in Its Backyard
Let me provide a counterexample. Recently, I needed to do a rather complicated SQL query (via an ORM, so not as painful as it sounds). Anyway, I didn't know how to solve the problem, so I wrote a test case and tested various versions of the query. I had no idea what I was doing, really, and it took me a day to get the query to work. Then I realized that the test case was wrong (!) and I was back to square one. I read up on some more relational theory, thought about my problem a bit more, and then had the answer in an hour.

To make a long story short, writing code that you don't understand is a bad idea. It may appear to work, but it's probably broken and you just don't have the understanding to know why. If you don't understand code when you write it, what's the chance that you'll ever be able to maintain it?
Will eBay Go Shopping?
Wow, a picture of someone's tweet talking about pot. This is what Hacker News has come to?
I myself am a strong proponent of Java. There are enough tools out there that take much of the tediousness of all the common functionality (basic CRUD, form handling, workflow, etc).

The real strength of Java presents itself after you've moved to production; I almost always am able to hand somebody an .ear or .war file and completely offload deployment/operations to somebody else.

As a plug for EJBs (a lot of the negativity around EJBs are carryoversr from EJB 2.1 and earlier), EJB-based application can be easily scaled by putting a request into operations for an additional app server and administratively changing the number of "processors" (session beans). App server failover and recovery is also fairly transparent as well.

Just my $0.02..
Should Google Buy Salesforce.com?