skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>>What don't you get?

To quote myself, re "write-only language":

>>If you wonder what is wrong with that quote, check the Best Practices book.

Was that really so hard? (I might add that PBP isn't directly new... Then we have Moose, which is the best OO system among the scripting languages, etc...)

Edit: I might comment on this part, that "po" added afterwards:

>>Also, of course I have opinions just like you.

Well, I don't go and write standard troll comments from ten years ago in language discussions...
Assuming you could get the costs down to $200 a month by migrating elsewhere, over 12 months that is $6K. Is it worth it to rewrite it at that point?
I live in Romania. This news was "news" back in November, when "the witchcraft law" was automatically passed by the Parliament without even discussing it because the time limit was reached (it was proposed 6 months before).

Everybody here laughed at it and I don't think people take it seriously.
Anyways. CPAN _is_ the killer app. It's a HUGE, extremely easy to install module/library archive. Perl's modules aren't spread around everywhere but neatly and nicely collected there and you just do a "cpan Foobar" and get Foobar with all possible dependencies included.

Sounds like Ruby's Gems: http://rubygems.org/ or even python's PyPi: http://pypi.python.org/pypi ...
I came to comment just the same. I used to work with Perl for about 4+ years, and now I'm on my way to exit a PHP work after 2 years. My next project will be in Ruby and this presentation helped me to rationalize the guts I had for Ruby (I've been playing a little bit with it).

The idea of making tools that are joyful to use to the programmers (wether it's the programming language, the editor, the SCM...) is something that appeals a lot to me, and it's something that (unfortunately) Perl lacks, basically due to it's syntax.

The community around the languages also affects, both have a great community around with hundreds of incredibly smart people with it's own quirkinesses, but the Ruby quirkinesses are more appealing to me (think DHH or _why) than Perl's (think Larry Wall or all the JAPH/golf...).
This is just because now the "witches" need to pay taxes.
> In search engines, it's more valuable for your users to not have to learn how your algorithm works in order to craft a search query that will satisfy their needs.

Well, yes. But in this case it's not an algorithm. You just ask it for documents containing your search terms. It's about as straightforward as it gets. It's not computer programming, it's not even doing long divisions or whatever.

You can't seriously assume that method of searching is going to completely stump anyone.

> It's valuable to be able to use natural language to search.

Maybe you're forgetting here that not the entire world speaks English. Unless your natural language search engine is able to understand nearly every language in the world, you're still forcing the users to formulate a query in English.

And I'm willing to argue that for, say, your average middle-aged German, formulating a query in English is going to pose a much bigger problem than doing a conjunctive term search, as the latter carries transparently to most languages in the world. (not all of them--I should check which ones btw--but even in those cases it's not nearly as difficult to find a fix for that than it would be to somehow port your brilliant semantic context analysis engine to be able to speak yet another completely different language).

Give it a couple of decades, maybe we'll have usable NLP then, but before that time, I am convinced that even for the layman, searching for documents to contain certain terms is a lot more straightforward, likely to yield desired results and in quite a few ways actually easier to use than what has to pass for NLP currently.
Lispter would be fitting, albeit a little difficult to say.
Ask HN: Can I use Linkedin profile instead of resume for my job applications?
I believe most things employers want to see is already on my Linkedin profile. Except stuff like relevant courses or GPA (I am a student obviously). Can I do this?
This confirms my experience as well. Twitter brings very little traffic, even when you get retweeted plenty of times. At most, I saw 2,000 people come over from Twitter. Conversely, I have had 30K+ people come to my blog from a single mention on Reddit.
Firefox collection for VA / PT
A collection of firefox plugin's with an aim of converting firefox to a penetration testing / vulnerability assessment environment.
brings up a good idea for a mini feature, is there a service that will make a list of links people you follow on twitter have posted (possibly a nice ui for images/videos etc as well)

would probably take a few hours to code, if I cant find one then I think I will give it a shot
Remember IBM? From 1960 through ~1985, IBM was the only answer for enterprise computing. And there really wasn't any other kind of computing then. IBM Research did everything from semiconductor research to databases to virtual machines. IBM was the hottest stock in the market in the 1960s, passing $600/share. (That's about $4,000 in today's money.) They eventually faded, as their customers moved to a combination of desktop PCs and servers and other companies' servers.

IBM is still with us. They're having to reinvent themselves regularly, because the only concept they own is still "Mainframe", and they failed to hold on to "PC". But they're still a huge company selling systems and professional services.

I expect Microsoft to go the same way. There will be significant but dwindling demand for Windows for 30 more years. (But probably not Azure, Windows Mobile, or XBox.) They will stay alive, and even prosper moderately, on that business.
Five Green Trends for 2011
I've been seeing this all over the place lately, and I've no idea why it's news. If people are paying you money for something, then of course the government should tax it accordingly. Doesn't matter how bizarre or ineffective the service is
I remember reading somewhere that IBM makes something like $8bn per year still from mainframe computer sales. If IBM are doing that - two major computer architecture iterations along the line - (client-server and now cloud coming along), then that bodes well for Microsoft's survival, but perhaps not their relevance.

Startups aren't going to go after highly conservative organisations like banks who won't risk changing from mainframes for no obvious gain. So there will be a market for Microsoft technologies (their OS and Office in particular) for a long, long time; long after consumers are mainly using Android/Linux/Macintosh-based tablets or other portable devices to do their personal computing.
quora instant?
First off, I'm a huge fan of unit testing. I can't conceive of going back to not having them.

However, trying to force them on a company ends up in exactly the situation above. Either the tests are really poorly done, or the API/logic/etc is still changing drastically. Over 10% of the tests failed! Insane.

The real problem here isn't with the "planned dev" but with whoever instituted these unit tests without getting the company on board.
PoTATo and PotATO with CouchDB
Entrepreneurs Tap Social Networks For Funds
I feel dirty up voting this one.
well, duh. asking for medium is like saying "stop asking me questions, and just give me the damn coffee". I doubt relabelling does you any more good than just raising the markup on your (genuinely) medium coffee. Repeat customers will figure out what size they like, and one-off visitors will, if anything, just feel jerked around.
Clearly, the intended use is to power Mr. Fusion...
Err.. yeah - what do you think after whom gems etc. are modeled? :)

Haskell's system is called "hackage" for example and "R" has its "CRAN" and so on.

Though it's really no fair comparison as CPAN contains what.. 89033 modules? http://search.cpan.org/
I think even admittedly premature improvements of scalability are seldom a waste of time. People saying so are at least making premature generalizations.

Bombarding your app with of millions of simulated users and tweaking it to handle it well can be loads of fun. It might even provide the inspiration needed to finish the app in the first place.

Great graphic designers are at times known to indulge in pointless experiments in typography or color. Why can't great hackers indulge in pointless experiments in scalability without suffering the ridicule of their peers?

Developers acting on their own accord must be allowed to be inspired by their hopes and dreams and not always take the straightest path to the goal.

If time should always be spent in the wisest manner without indulging in your own fancy, developers should also stop write complaining blog posts about other peoples code and instead improve their own apps.
There's a format lock-in in place. Microsoft's greatest asset is the fact that it controls the file formats used by business (.doc/.xml, and the new xml based ones aren't better or more open).

This creates a de-facto requirement to buy microsoft software - in many cases you need a copy of MS Office to render or interact with a document in a way they're used to, and all the documents in a company already are in that format, so the path of least resistance is to buy another copy of MS Office.

The web avoids the issue as it embraces non-proprietary formats (or ones that are well understood). Once people get their data in a better place, that's the beginning of the end for MS.
If people didn't really want the extra coffee (and it seems unlikely they did), how exactly is this different from "We wanted to make more money, so we raised our prices" ?
Flipboard.
While 50 Cent is a pretty impressive businessman, he still needs to learn the SEC rules about pump and dump schemes: https://twitter.com/#!/50cent/status/23980498174877697
The differences I see here are that

a) emacs vs. vim has been a holy war that has gone on since both were conceived and is a debate which is often older than the programmers discussing it. To be ignorant of recent language developments or internal acronyms is excusable, to be ignorant of vim/emacs is less so.

b) emacs and vim are not specific to any one language. Dropping acronyms that are non-specific to the topic (perl vs ruby, python, whatever) doesn't have some domain specific knowledge attached to it. If you're on either side of the debate, vim can be equally familiar or obscure.
- E-mail/calendar/docs: Google Apps standard edition

- Hosting: Linode

- Invoicing: Zoho invoice

- Analytics: Google Analytics

- Project management: GQueues/Yast

- File-sharing: Dropbox/OpenVPN

- Version control: Git

- Backups: Crash Plan

- Instant messaging: Skype/GTalk
I will say one thing, a blog would have trouble surviving since 1998: http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-hacks/
that looks nice, probably not worth the £800 price mark though :)
"Nowadays, I imagine they ask that question about Google or Facebook."

Does anyone really think Facebook or Google will really crush them, unless you are targeting their vertical directly or you get unlucky and they move into your niche before you gain a proper foothold? I know YC's Kiko got crushed by Google a few years back, but that seems an exception rather than the rule. It seems those companies are more likely to buy you, if what you are doing would add to their existing services.
> Who cares, really? The percentage of people who purposefully break their browsers isn't worth catering to.

Accessibility. Is there really any reason why a questions/answer site with voting can't provide noscript tags?

Refactoring ours to deal with that, so not trying to throw stones.

EDIT: I understand mythz's comment about being a play project. i'm just responding to the 'why break your browser' sentiment.
The Photoshop Etiquette Manifesto for Web Designers
Right, modeled after, but I'm wondering why they would be considered failures. Rubygems and cabal both work really well for me, and cabal is both the nicest package management system and the nicest build system I've ever used. I'd love to know why somebody would call it a failure.
I agree. This seems to be a classic example of why people sometimes get turned off by unit tests. Frankly devs should have written the tests -- QA probably shouldn't be in the business of writing unit tests. They should be writing integration, automation, and harnesses.
Each person has his own way of learning. You seem to be forcing your perspective on others.

Bitboxer is dead on with his facts. IMHO there's a lot more fun in getting something working quickly without much setup/learning. And there are people who like it that way (I belong to that group for sure).

It's like asking why use Heroku or AppEngine when you can maintain your own VPS. Because it's easier. Doesn't mean skipping using your own VPS will do you bad.
This is bascially what I was talking about.

Though the Ruby community managed somehow to drive off _why and someone like Zed Shaw if I remember correctly. If that really appeals to you...
btw, a similar SO clone: http://shapado.com/
Office is low growth with respect to percentage growth. It makes massive money now, and needs massive new revenue to grow quickly. With that said, their growth in absolute dollars is money that every other company would love to have, including Apple, Google, and Facebook.
I think it's more rewarding to have a little success right at the beginning. Going through tons of concepts at first demotivates very fast. Especially if you want to teach this stuff to kids :) . Concepts can be learned after the first success and slowly you know everything.
As I wrote when this was on Reddit a while back:

"If I was on a build team and the dev team pushed 94 failing tests through, I would rewrite the production scripts to stop testing. If the devs don't care, why should I?
The only excuse for this is if all 793 tests pass in development. In that case, there's some work to be done finding out why the test don't behave the same way in both environments."
There are some real gems on the list, too:

"Smalltalk Performance and Moore's Law" http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-tol/2007-March/0...

"OCaml vs. SBCL, and various other interpreters" http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-tol/2007-March/0...

"what affects programming language adoption?" http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-tol/2006-Novembe...

(kragen is also kragen here)
I don't see a very compelling argument. He is worse at using computers than his son. He says "I’m sure people are working on it." about Facebook's limited lifetime and the company extending it. The one rational thought I see is that he did not invest in Facebook directly, but rather into Goldman, who is likely to make out while others lose. But I am not at all compelled to try to get Facebook stock after the IPO, based on this interview.
""be prolific, then ruthlessly filter your output""

Great advice! We learn a lot even from failed experiments.
I've pondered if writing your entire website in canvas/svg (a la Raphael) is the only way have it (100%) consistent across IE6-8, Chrome, and Firefox. That way you throw the html renderer of the browser out of the window and you're drawing your own vectors.

But even so, you'll probably hit some weirdness in IE6's jscript implementation.

However, excanvas was quite slow though, at least last I tried it.
I feel so conventional!

Windows Server 2008, Sql Server IIS
Visual Studio
Quickbooks & Indinero
Authorize.net
Google Apps for mail
Actually the climate has fundamentally changed in a way that is even bigger than the article.

Nowadays people no longer generally fear companies at all. In the 80s companies were much more prone to just crush you outright. Now companies "seem" more likely to buy you out. There is a lot more positioning now for acquisition. When I talk to founders they aren't worried about Google or Facebook crushing them, but are more focused on acquisition, even when attacking core businesses like search.

Ppl are no longer not afraid of MS because of something inherent in MS, but because the world has changed.
How is this any different from being any kind of religious leader? We accept those without any problems.
It's back on again. The developer is pretty responsive on twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/padmapper
Bring Back the News
If you're going to junk the notebook anyway, you can remove the pages by cutting the spine and then use a standard scanner with a document feeder attachment.
Point taken, I didn't mean to deride the average person, but my issue was with employers only wanting passionate or above average programmers. Exceptional opportunities want exceptional people. But my point was that most opportunities in our field are not exceptional and that it doesn't take much academic effort or ability to successfully meet their requirements. The student who has a firm grasp of OO concepts and can write a little SQL can handle 90% of the jobs you'll find on Dice/Monster/Craigslist/etc. Business requirements programming just isn't that academically demanding.
It's an ajax site that uses static html/js for speed, i.e. there are no .aspx .jsp pages to generate dynamic html on the server. If this were a real app there would be.
Seriously, why do you keep using "You guys"?

I've explained to you many times, that "You guys" doesn't mean anything and that one developer did complain alone. And that noone can control all developers in a non-copyright assignment project...

Your attitude is really annoying, and very aggressive around the whole thread...
I added this from David's Sling to the December Rationality Quotes thread on Less Wrong (http://lesswrong.com/lw/37k/rationality_quotes_december_2010...):

In the Information Age, the first step to sanity is FILTERING. Filter the information; extract the knowledge.

Filter first for substance. Filter second for significance. These filters protect against advertising.

Filter third for reliability. This filter protects against politicians.

Filter fourth for completeness. This filter protects from the media.

-- Marc Stielger, David's Sling
haskell, erlang, clojure, forth, google go, scala, F#, ocaml, racket, sbcl reasonably widely recognized as PL's.

The relatively new paradoxers are things like epigram, Agda, coq, ATS; mozart/oz, mercury, factor, io, D, newspeak, imho.

Probably others from emLangCamp:

http://www.oscon.com/oscon2010/public/schedule/stype/Emergin...

note hedge words, reasonably, relatively..
Our list:

http://blog-en.cloudsafe.com/post/1115843272/web-startup-too...
Agreeing with you 100% don't it feel humorous just to say the title "Witchcraft declared legal profession in Romania."

IMO this is what makes it a news.
Here is a bookmarklet I made to uncheck all those boxes automatically :)

http://cantuse.it/2010/09/how-to-disable-all-emails-from-fac...
Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior
I think this applies to Microsoft these days as well. With hindsight, it seems like a lot of the anti-Microsoft sentiment that bubbled up in the 90's and persists to this day coincided with their highly predatory business practices.

It always seemed a bit odd when you heard another story of them rifiling through a small startup in "due diligence" only to drop the offer and duplicate in house. In most of those cases the purchase price would have been peanuts to them. I'd say it had more to do with a culture at Microsoft than it did with good business practice. It seems like they realized this and toned down the jackassery.

I'm sure someone can point to some counter examples (every megacorp has to have some) but it's undeniable that things have changed.
Why not just make your own site? LinkedIn has a terrible user experience.

Obviously whether foregoing a paper resume is okay depends on the company.
And your physical actions - Your attitudes and general outlook tends to follow your physical actions as much or more than the other way around. So act how you want to feel, then you will become more like you act. I actually learned this trick back in the eighties from a book Self-Creation by George Weinberg.
As a seasoned Python programmer,I think PyPI doesn't even come close to CPAN.

CPAN is the only reason that I've kept my Camel book around since 2000, hoping that "someday" I'll learn Perl.
No; you need a resume document that can be forwarded through email.

You can argue about this, but the original poster asked a question, and this is the Real Response to that question. If a prospective employer asks for a resume, send them a resume.
Not really. But do provide a link to your LinkedIn profile, it shows confidence on your part.

As a hiring manager, I need a piece of paper in my hand that I can look at, print and carry with me to your interview. Have you tried to print a LinkedIn profile yet?

So I'm afraid you'll have to keep generating a nice-looking PDF. The content may be 99% identical to what's on your LinkedIn page, that's fine. Understand that your job is to make my life as easy as possible, so I can focus on figuring out who you are.

PS: also, please never send Word documents, I hate opening Word documents, use PDF instead
- E-mail/calendar/docs: Google Apps standard edition

- Hosting: Linode, Slicehost

- Invoicing: Crunch (http://www.crunch.co.uk/)

- Analytics: Google Analytics

- Project management: Pivotal Tracker
(http://pivotaltracker.com/)

- File-sharing: Dropbox

- Version control: SVN, Mercurial

- Backups: rsync

- Instant messaging: Skype
There's a bunch of good Arduino tutorials here with nice pics too http://itp.nyu.edu/physcomp/Tutorials/Tutorials
Hardly conventional! This is what we use too. Except IIS and Sql Server are on Windows Azure.
LinkedIn seems a bit spammy to me, with all the mediocre programmers I've ever encountered professionally wanting to link with me. So I don't use it, and if you use LinkedIn instead of a resume, then I will not be able to consider you for jobs at my company.
"If you think something's supposed to hurt, you're less likely to notice if you're doing it wrong. That about sums up my experience of graduate school."

--Paul Graham from http://www.paulgraham.com/love.html
Here is what I do (admittedly I'm not receiving job offers left and right, so use at your own risk): Employers who are interested in you will start doing their research after receiving your resume. If they aren't interested in you yet, it's unreasonable to ask them to visit your LinkedIn profile, Facebook page, or even your personal portfolio without giving them something first.

My resume lists my relevant qualifications, experience, and then educational background, and if a recruiter decides after seeing this to do further research, I've included links to more information about me (LI, FB, and my personal site). The reasoning here is to decrease any friction on the employer's end. Make things easy for them when they are initially screening you by providing them with a 1-page resume, and make things easy for them when they want to do more research by providing the information to them.

Don't be lazy about it (recruiters can smell laziness from miles away), but LinkedIn does provide a resume printout pdf of your work experience, recommendations, and education. I would not recommend submitting this, but you can use LinkedIn as I do as sort of a 'Master Resume'. From there, I can pull the work experiences and recommendations that an employer would like to see the most.