skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The footnote at the end and urban legend status [1] make this less funny to me, though it would be nice try and enforce the letter.

[1] http://www.snopes.com/business/bank/takethat.asp
So this is a meta meta source. A summary about a book about a 2 year degree.

Still worth a quick read.
> In C, an extremely unfortunate representation of octalness was selected: Leading zero. So in C, 0100 means 64, not 100, and 08 is an error, not 8. Even more unfortunately, this anachronism has been copied into nearly all modern languages, including JavaScript, where it is only used to create errors.

I've never tripped on 0100 != 100 (and never heard of anyone who did — every programmer I've talked to knew leading zero has special meaning), but this "anachronism" allowed me to conveniently write `fs.chmod(path, 0640, cb);`. Thank you, ECMA, for pointless runtime calculations with `parseInt("0640", 8)`.
I'd say it's a stretch to say "sucks" but yes, spam needs to be filtered.
Yes, if I had devout followers and full financial support and security myself, not to mention hollywood friends, I would not have much stress too...
Oh please. It’s been shown over and over that modern Perl is a very pleasant ecosystem to work in, can we spare such childish comments for other websites?
True. I can't see why anyone learning a new language would choose Perl over Ruby or Python. And yes, I know all about the wonders of CPAN, awesome text manipulation features and all those things that come up whenever people try to defend Perl.
Perl is great for programming, it ranks high on creativity, expressiveness, conciseness, and general language coolness.

Perl is horrible (relative to other choices) for development, it ranks low on readability, refactorability, consistency, dependency evolution.
I got the sarcasm. <smiles> I am a Brit </smiles>.

I just did not realise not drinking coffee had become cool. Perhaps my age has proofed me from such things.

I don't measure my productivity, I just know I feel better about working when not on coffee and thus work becomes easier. It might be less productive, though I doubt it.
Verizon iPhone: What 1/3 of iPhone Users and The Daily Show Want
Who said that? Memoirs from survivors suggest that (as one would expect) the experience left them scarred for the rest of their lives.
I actually tweak everything around me all of the time. It's a big part of what I am as a person.

I do drive-by tweaking like this as well. Gangsta tweaking.
It should be noted that the difference is much more extreme for ants than it can be for mammals due to a genetic quirk where a female ant shares 50% of her genes with her children and 75% with her sisters. (Therefore having more sisters is better than having children.)
Victor Frankl - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man%27s_Search_for_Meaning

(thank you tomedme for the URL correction)
got it. I don't play checkers but perhaps I should learn it. and yes it has to scale and chess will take months at move a day. I now plan to develop it alongside instead of it being an either/or. Thank you for your suggestion
I need to get out of this nasty little country...

(No that is not fishing for job offers.)
Always always pencil and paper. Even if it's a wireframe, and that's all you "design" (meaning no graphics, etc). Even on a personal project, don't waste time! Do the process right.
This may be true today, but there is a cadre of developers who will never find out. Perl was our bread and butter 10 years ago, but we moved on when Python and Ruby came to the forefront, and have never looked back. To get people interested in it again Perl can't just be 'pleasant' -- it needs to be better in the way Python and Ruby were better back then.
It really depends on the scope of the project. Simple projects I just hack through, which acts like a design process.

In 2004 I built a personal delicious clone, which I pretty much hacked together in a week. Overtime I added more and more features. Now, I'm contemplating rewriting it in a framework. It has grown past a weekend hack so now I'm mapping it out.

It's best to know how you work. For me its better to have a working prototype that I can tinker with, even if I know I'll rebuild it eventually.
I switched from AltaVista because Google.com was faster and less full of spam. I still think that is the case compared to other search engines for common searches.

That being said, more and more searches are using ever increasing numbers of search term words, and that can get spammy.

Google make no secret of investing in search and the presence here of Matt Cutts is testament to the fact that we(?) are listening, with very frequent algorithmic tweaks and responses.

I don't feel it's useful comparing Facebook's "like" system with a search engine. Whilst it is useful to know what friends think of things, this can also be gamed by smart marketers.

I don't think it sucks - but there are use cases and perhaps for certain users where the experience indeed sucks. I for one have been using the 'spam flag' extension for Chrome and feel that something can be done with the results. Perhaps this will help?

(my opinions are my own and not necessarily that of my employer).
HN: Place to run a competition for developers?
Does anybody know of a site where I could run a competition for developers?

The general idea is to spur interest in an API by offering prize incentives to people who build new apps and services.

Rather than building a resource for this myself I thought it would be neat if I could find a place already set up for it. Any ideas?
Systems that are used to carry out trades of foreign currencies and related securities. These markets are extremely liquid and a delay of a few milliseconds can mean that you don't get the deal at the price you want. Therefore the banks need to make sure that they can execute the transactions as quickly as possible to ensure they have a competitive advantage over their competitors.

Here is basic overview : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_latency_%28capital_markets%...
Much of the mathematics of finance is actually as new as the internet. It has yet to be automated...

Also, the mathematics of finance is still very, very much under development. Volatility of volatility model, anybody?
What Went Wrong at Borders
Thats what Im thinking as well.
> All I ask is this. Try going without caffeine for a month. And when you have, then write to me and tell me if it did or didn't work.

Didn't. I do it for about a month every year, and for me it doesn't make any difference.
Google dropping a highly patented codec from Chrome is a step backwards for openness

Even the title doesn't make sense. They could say "step backwards for easy of use" or "step backwards for MPEG LA", but saying "step backwards for openness" is ridiculous.

If it's encumbered with patents, it's not open, no matter how many free software implementations it has. Open means, open to anyone, not only open to those who pay for it.
Instead of reading the notes I would scroll to the bottom of the page and click the "AwesomenessReminders" ad (Zack's idea that has been discussed on HN before) and let that idea kick you in the butt. When crazy ideas like that work, that is what I call learning something powerful.
>Can't these people write a contract and police it?

No.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/01/21/work_pensions_it_bud...

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/03/03/doh_it_budget_oversh...

I could post all the examples but I would get banned for flooding.
I gave up coffee a while ago, it was fantastic. I always thought that it never affected my sleep, but the difference in how I sleep then and now is incredible. And yeah, I no longer have the after lunch down.

What I really couldn't kick was the habit of actually drinking the stuff. So I drink decaf now. Think it tastes different? I demand a double blind test. It tastes fine.
How much of Google returning better results than AltaVista, though, came down to Google being able to expand its index with new pages faster? What I remember is exactly what the article claims: that competing search engines couldn't "keep up" with Google's increasing scale.
The licenses fees don't kick in until you ship something like 10,000 units, then it is something like $0.25 per unit for decoders. (numbers from memory, consult mpeg-la for accuracy).

So anyone is free to tinker with x264 as much as they like. The people who have trouble are the free OS distribution folks, e.g. Debian, who ship enough to trip the license… and google chrome.

Maybe they just got tired of paying a quarter for each download.
zoul, I don't think that was a value judgment or a criticism. I think strick's point is that a new programmer is far more likely to pick up Ruby or Python than Perl these days - (s)he's more likely to learn it in school, more likely to learn it for a popular MVC framework, etc.
Presumably if your objective is to save money and you have some self control then it should not be too big an issue.
Object-Oriented isn't the only way to code. Never having done OO doesn't make someone a bad programmer.

Unit-testing is a bit less forgiveable.
Lucky you. Some people are more effected by caffeine than others. My eldest daughter reports similar ups and downs as I do, my other daughter reports no large effects.

Must be genetic, then.
SocialGrapes.com
Venture Capital Deal Buzz: Scvngr
When I installed Windows 95, it was off of 14 floppy disks, feels good man.
DB2 University goes live (Free database courses)
You can’t have a better tomorrow if you are thinking about yesterday all the time.

- Charles F. Kettering

http://startupquote.com/post/2728902054
If I had all those things, I would still stress. Primarily due to a feeling that I don't deserve what I have.

Just because the message comes from someone in a position of authority, it doesn't make it any less valid.
"Skip the water" is a must, especially in sales - it means that you first reach the economic buyers who have the budget and can influence the purchasing decision, and skip / avoid the "See More" type of people who are only obsessive w/ product features!
"The vast majority of users are no longer clicking through pages of Google results" -> That doesn't sound right.
Chris Dixon on ReVisioning Venture PtII [podcast]
I agree with your first line. Totally disagree with your second line. Most of the second line is on the programmers shoulder.
You could make it up because it's been going on for years and years with no consequences to anyone involved.

The digital age is good for a lot of things, but it was a lot harder to carry a filing cabinet, and thus harder to steal records.
Google Acquires EBook Technologies
I liked the article.

But do mediocre Perl programmers really not use Test::More? (-: Hell, even I do! :-)

Testing has been central in Perl for most of a decade. I browsed "Intermediate Perl" recently (I'm outsourced and will train a few newbies the coming weeks), and already that beginners' book did a good overview of testing (mocking objects, etc).

Let me note that the author isn't exaggerating when he claims "Modern Perl" is really good. :-)

Edit: Grammar.
Similar reactions to me. I sleep better too, no longer fidget and turn over violently in bed.

I drink water or weak black tea as my substitute.
I've yet to have a coffee since the new year, and I find it does in fact help with keeping focus.
Sorry, but that's wildly anachronistic too. The term "open standard" was in widespread use long before "open source" was coined in 1998, and certainly before the ITU-T definition in 2005: http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=open+standard&...

A term does not need to have a formal definition in order to have a meaning.
Worst Jedi Ever
That language war comment (w/out a reference) was voted to 8 in fifteen minutes... :-)

Edit: 17 after an hour. Try writing a language flame without references to studies or anything about e.g. Python in a Python discussion -- and see how the votes go...
I remember Google mostly for having good results, yes, but more for being FAST. It was just soo fast, when all other search engines took up to seconds to show results.
> So, why didn't we see any action by the MPEG-LA and only ominous threats and some innuendo?

Because if we did see action, we'd find out once for and for all whether their innuendo has anything solid behind it. It's the standard patent FUD process, aided by everyone who says "it's probably patent encumbered", "we don't know whether it's unencumbered".

It's much better to imply they can crush you rather than actually try to crush you and risk failure. And the best part is that by implying they can crush you but not actually doing so, they can appear to be exercising benevolent goodwill while the FUD does most of the crushing for them, risk-free.
Seems to work just fine on my iPad(I just got one)
more and more searches are using ever increasing numbers of search term words, and that can get spammy

Why is that? I thought more words would give more focussed, less spammy results.

On another point it seems to me that Google would have to tread carefully here if the set of spammers has a large intersection with the set of folks who buy advertising from Google. I would (however naively) suspect this might be the case.
I have no idea whether it makes any difference for my productivity, but I simply like coffee. No way I'll give it up. There's so many habits you are advised to give up these days in the name of health and productivity... I wonder when asceticism will become 'hip' again.
Extreme Lean Startup Case Study
I had a BBS.
In addition to Kirsch's book, I'd also recommend Anatomy of an Epidemic. It does a really good job explaining the biological reasons why SSRI's can't work. (Plus it also outlines all of the different reasons why the science behind them is fraudulent, same as Kirsch.)
To be fair, however, the OSNews post is questioning Gruber's post, which is at least equally if not more (and, IMO, it is more) misinformed, illogic, and ignorant.
And a direct result of that - if you have to hack on some recent application, it's much more likely to be written in something else than perl, so you rarely get the chance to learn more. The only one I run into in the last couple of years was octopussy... and that one's definitely not a work of art...
Slightly disappointed - TripIt is one of the few web products released in the past five years that made me say "WOW. I need to tell everyone about this."

My wife managed bookings and travel for public speakers - TripIt probably saved her and her clients hundreds of hours last year. Given the amount of information they have about people's travel preferences and the high margins of online travel businesses, I'm surprised they were sold for so little.
> Being able to realize that those scenarios are just creations of your mind and snapping out of the obsessive loop of thoughts it's one of the most important things you can learn in life.

Great. I'd like to add that even the person/individual or "I" is a creation of the mind, that upon observation melts away. This in my experience has been the single most important "event" in "my" life (the "my" itself not having any tangible meaning).

The key: mindfulness, or coming back to the present moment over and over again till silence becomes natural.
I don't think the ability to regenerate means that losing a limb doesn't hurt...
Simple really.

I think I was looking for magic bullets (talismans) and hit on coffee only by noticing that no matter what I did, what productivity thingy I used, it was the mood swings that were my worst habit.
Bonfire of the Vanities reference?

"
The story centers on Sherman McCoy, a white, millionaire, New York City bond trader with a wife and young daughter. His life as a self-regarded "Master of The Universe" on Wall Street is destroyed when he and his mistress, Maria Ruskin, accidentally enter the Bronx at night while they are driving to Manhattan from Kennedy Airport.
"
6 or seven years ago I had a conversation with a guy at a meeting of rubyists in rome, and while I was telling him how bad it is in italy and bla bla he replied to me "well, it means there is a lot of space to do things better, it is a great market opportunity".

The same guy later went on to found his own company, which is doing cool stuff, with great people, and with more work than they can handle, still in that same country.
ADHD is often resolved paradoxically with stimulants. For me, caffeine is a natural alternative to ADHD medication. A small amount of coffee, twice a day, allows me to focus intensely.

Folks with ADHD aside...optimizing caffeine intake seems to be the key to avoiding the nasty side-effects.
"Some people get jumpy after drinking a single cup of coffee, while others can gulp down a Venti Americano without feeling a thing. Part of that variability is due to the development of tolerance by regular coffee drinkers; but there are genetic differences in how people metabolize caffeine as well.
"

https://www.23andme.com/health/Caffeine-Metabolism/

---

"Coffee, CYP1A2 Genotype, and Risk of Myocardial Infarction"

http://jama.ama-assn.org/content/295/10/1135.long
I still like coffee too. I prefer dark roast espressos with almond croissants. Mmmm...

Occasionally I have a treat in a coffee shop, but only at the weekend.

You might be one of the lucky ones who are not too effected by caffeine mood swings. However, you'll never know, unless you try it.
The problem is that the clueless people are literally leading the country and that makes everything difficult. When I say that I wish a nuke I am obviously exhagerating, but I am not when I say that I wish a civil revolution.

The job market is a mess because the job market regulation is a mess. Finances are a mess because tax regulations is a mess: 50% for some people and 0% for others (tax fraud is easy peasy for certain professions). Culturally we are sinking since universities are regulated like in a third word country and most academics never even published a paper in all their lifes.

Technically, if you had private money you could start an Italian Ycombinator and get return because it's full of talents. Yet, your return will be better if you were to do the same in most other countries so why bother?
There are Perl programmers who don't use CPAN? Why in God's name would they fail to use CPAN? I worship at the altar of CPAN; CPAN is my life and my oxygen. CPAN is the reason I will stick with Perl until the stars go out and the works of man crumble to dust - except for CPAN, for CPAN is eternal.
> Why is that? I thought more words would give more focussed, less spammy results.

I've noticed that if you use too many words, you more often end up with keyword-stuffed or aggregated/scraped pages, because they just happen to use all the words in your search query on the same page. Sometimes this is because there aren't actually any real results for the particular narrow niche you wanted, but sometimes it's just because none of the real results use all of the keywords you tried verbatim, and Google wasn't able to figure out that those non-verbatim matches were more relevant than the exact-match-but-crap pages (admittedly a hard problem).
True, OO is not the only way to code. But if you don't have any experience with it, how can you make an informed decision?

edit: also it depends on what type of programming you're supposed to do. This particular case was for web development, and in that world I would say OO is quite a fundamental concept.
Fascinating point.

Then does that mean that being more focused without coffee means I am low on the ADHD spectrum?
> Google does not need to bake Flash into Chrome

Might I inquire where I can find Google Flash in Chrome? I only have Adobe Flash. Until you can show me a Google developed Flash, it's merely Google shipping an Adobe plugin, which is not the same as actively supporting H.264.
What is WCF? World Coffee Foundation? Wee C Functions? We Crave Freedom?
The link doesn't work for me. Maybe the server is overloaded but from the title of your post it seems that maybe the author doesn't understand the fallacy of the false appeal to authority. There is nothing wrong in quoting experts or quoting articles in which experts are quoted. This is not a logical fallacy.

There is something wrong with an argument in which Person A makes a claim. Person B then voices suspicion or doubt as to the veracity of the claim. Person A claims expertise in area C. Area C is not all related to the claim.
Also, the author fails to note that you can't hire great Perl programmers because the going rate for Perl programmers seems to be about $30/hour, and who can do that? I'll continue to earn my bread and butter in the non-programming trades in order to make sure my daughter's teeth are straight, thanks.
it is better than they are now, let alone how they were back then :)
I'm in the same pattern. After I have given up coffee for a few months, one coffee is enough to get me addicted again. It's so much more potent.

It's worth quitting just to go back to it. I seriously love falling off the wagon.
OT, but what latest news about debt?
Still there are mammals that live eusocial. The naked mole rat comes to mind.
Especially all those "robo-signed" foreclosure documents.

http://www.businessinsider.com/dead-womans-name-robo-signing...
I used to drink a couple cups of coffee a day, but felt jittery and then had some pretty intense lows that made it hard to focus and enjoy work. I replaced that with a couple cups of green or oolong tea a day and it's done wonders for me in terms of jitters and lows. No long do I feel like I'm going to jump out of my skin or like I just want to take a nap while trying to concentrate on what I'm doing.

I highly recommend trying some tea if this sounds familiar. Green and oolong tea have significantly less caffeine in them than coffee, and it's just as fun, if not more, picking out good teas as it is picking out good coffee.
I think that was a statement of historical fact, not a value judgement.
A SQL query goes into a bar, walks up to two tables and asks, "Can I join you?", "yes naturally".
I had a situation present itself that though it wasn't perfectly controlled could pass off for a double blind test. I was with friends and one went to get some coffee for both her and myself. The moment she put both coffees on the table she excused herself and took her phone out of the pocket to answer it.

I didn't know which was which (as I drink decaf because of genetic marker rs762551 that says I'm not metabolizing caffeine properly). So I thought how great this would be to test the difference between the two.

Both were Arabica and I was able to differentiate between the two with or without milk and sugar. The decaf version (I asked afterwards) was decaffeinated using the swiss process.

I cannot guarantee that both beans were the same even if they were both Arabica so it might just be that the beans were different.

My conclusion was that one of the two tasted sharper and more bitter. When she came back she told me which coffee was decaf and it was the one that didn't have the sharpness to it (or at least much less of it)

When I went home I googled to learn the taste of caffeine itself and the first hit I got was a site describing it as a sharp bitter taste.
5 Common Mistakes Rookie Founders, CEOs and Managers Make...
They also don't have a designer which makes the usability bad.

I've heard this repeated a number of times, and I completely disagree with it. Reddit may not be the prettiest site on the block, but it's damn functional. There is very little unnecessary stuff on the screen, and I quite like it that way. I tend to turn off custom subreddit styles because they takae away from the minimal, functional interface. I've heard people talk about "improving reddit and HN's design", but I've never seen any clear examples of where they think it's bad.

I still count 4chan as an underground site, but maybe they are the third player. They're niche though, so let's say there's still room even then.

4chan's an entirely different category. They're less about linksharing, and more about...well, whatever the hell they are. I don't think I'd put them anywhere near Digg or Reddit except for the fact that they both have memes. That's pretty much the only comparison.