skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Dan Ariely's Predictably Irrational is really good and the very first chapter discusses this exact phenomenon and some of the subtleties surrounding it.

He also mentions it in one of his excellent TED talks:

http://www.ted.com/speakers/dan_ariely.html
Yes, I completely agree but it's kind of like kids reading comic books over literature. At least they are reading.

Having a health book at the top of New York Times bestseller list is never a bad thing (unless it's something unhealthy like Atkins).

It's a good read and it's not as unorthodox as you think. There is some over the top stuff that he doesn't suggest that you do in there but it's mostly just good living tips that would help almost anyone.
Building a category/tag feature for 7bks.com using the Amazon BrowseNodes API
Microsoft is Dead
Would like to know if PG's stance on MS has changed
I don't get it; when the Perl folk thought they had to reach the masses, instead of making Perl 5 more accessible to newbies, instead of covering Perl events (a comment on the blog mentions some specialized hardware for doing so - lol), instead of actively pushing Perl projects, they decided to come up with Perl 6!

Yet Perl 6, except from some blog posts describing its utter dominance over Perl 5 performance, still hasn't seen the coverage/promotion it deserves (I'm assuming here, because I'm not using it).

Maybe there are some lessons to be learned here.
No point in having a super expert physics researcher tenured professor who hates teaching and can't teach worth shit teaching a bunch of students

Some of the best physics professors I ever had were super expert physics researcher tenured professors who hated teaching. They weren't quite as good as the super experts who liked teaching, but they were better than the ones loved teaching but didn't have nearly enough knowledge to go far beyond the coursework. And certainly a lot better than a video of the same material.
I used to be a huge Perl advocate; I loooved perlmonks back in the day. (Just tried to log back into it after probably over 10 years but the forgot password link doesn't work) I read the Camel book cover-to-cover and giggled at the footnotes.

While I loved the language, I can't imagine going back to it. Now perl programs look like cat typing to me. It was way too expressive. The TIMTOWDI mentality meant that I could never read code I didn't write myself, and even some that I did. It was terse and dense like poetry and hard to understand - like poetry. To really "know" the language meant knowing a huge surface area full of exceptions and special conditions.

Sure, you could limit yourself to certain best-practices and styles but it was like being handing the keys to the porsche and told to only drive 35. At every turn, the language was begging you to flex that newly acquired knowledge of special syntax. The obfuscation contests, the perl poetry, the quines… Many languages have this failing in my opinion and it certainly matters more when you're working in a large team (hence, rigid boring old Java) but Perl taught me what it was like to go too far down that path.

It is what I would call a write-only language.
> The strange thing about python is it is almost TOO easy. I have worked with developers who preferred python because basically they were not great developers.

I don't know what you're talking about.

Python requires some command line interaction. You have to edit text files, read online docs, have a mental model of lists, dictionaries, and strings. It doesn't come with a visual IDE, and it feels awfully foreign in a windows environment. Why would a less-than-average developer even bother with such a technology? It doesn't even come from Microsoft.
Witchcraft declared legal profession in Romania
The specialization of CS related PHd's were truly more hurtful then helpful (on the whole, not as a 100% "rule") when I recruited $120-$150k programmers (mostly finance / eCommerce giants). From the VP's (paraphrased) "They tend to be too narrowly focused on their field of study, and many times have a hard time adapting to our ___

Sounds like they were looking for programmers to do the kind of boring work that CS PhDs would get sick of really quick. Other companies would love to have exactly the same CS PhDs you were rejecting.
Aw, why doesn't he mention Racket (formerly PLT Scheme)? I've been playing around with it since I saw it on HN a few weeks ago and it's a nifty implementation. DrRacket is a great environment, and it seems like it has good library support - both lots of things available, and easy to drop in to your code, with (require ...).
Steve Jobs vs. Fake Steve Jobs
Did anyone notice the mailing list? It's one dedicated to the author. Interesting alternative for a blog.
This was a good thing my university did in first-year physics -- we had one hour a week of problem sessions where we were forced to work through a bunch of questions in groups of four. This made sure everybody was basically on the same page vis a vis the basics.

I don't know if it would work once you got beyond first year and into the more difficult material.
Maybe I'm missing something, but what about this is interesting? Is it that Redis is the backend? I'm not trying to bash it; I'm genuinely curious.
The case against the Consumer Electronics Show
The Most Worthless Week in Tech
RTS often use that approach combined with check sums. They then resend world state when they don't match. However, FPS that use a little state prediction become much more complicated.

Ideally, FPS would run two versions of the game world, what happened, and what the players see, with more information being sent about what happened close to the player helping the version that players see be more accurate. And continuous updating of the version players see based on predictions from the "real" version of the game world. But, getting that working would be extremely demanding and reduce the games ability to do physics in real time etc.

PS: Game developers may be smart, but as a rule they have less experience than you might think. Short burn out cycles keep the industry from evolving.
CPAN (and the arguably failed attempts to copy it by other language communities)

I haven't used perl, but I do use ruby and I'm learning haskell. What does CPAN do that make rubygems and cabal failures? They both work really well from what I can see (especially cabal), but since I don't know perl, my POV is obviously limited. What am I missing out on?
http://padmapper.com was entirely built by one man, Eric DeMenthon. He must be dealing with the new wave of traffic after Ashton Kutcher posted the link to my video.
Wish him luck, he has done a hell of a hacking job to put that site together.
Good thing you can turn off those unit tests
Nice idea, but what tends to happen is this:

-- User1235 has joined #perl --
user1235> PERL SUCKS 111!!!11!!1!!11!!
-- Chanserv set mode +o mst --
-- user1235 was kicked ( troll ) --

The people who are honestly interested tend not to need the door shown to them, and people who aren't interested can't be convinced by such tactics.
Except ... Patton did exactly that ("survived the politics and bureaucracy of a peacetime military"), from before the Mexican expedition or whatever it's called through the post-WWI period. Heck, one of his officer evaluations said something to the effect that he was a real pain in peacetime "but would be invaluable in time of war".

Granted, in today's "zero defects" system that wouldn't have happened, but at least prior to WWII we weren't that insane. On the other hand, in peacetime prior to the Cold War the military was generally on starvation rations and retaining capable men was a major objective, sometimes to the detriment wartime effectiveness. E.g. the IJN frequently cleaned our clock in night time action, even when we had an advantage in RADAR, since our Navy hadn't seriously exercised at night prior to the war.

The latter is based on my current study of the WWII US Navy in the Pacific and specifically a couple of biographies of two of our best Admirals in it, Mark Mitscher and especially the more detailed one on Arleigh Burke.
Vodafone customer security breach, online details available for a price
> Main difference: it does not degrade gracefully.

Who cares, really? The percentage of people who purposefully break their browsers isn't worth catering to.
OK- so you don't need one to protect yourself, only if you want to sue in retaliation. Am I understanding that right? Seems if you can invalidate a patent by showing prior art that would be a powerful deterrent to someone wanting to sue you.
They do this with a lot of websites, whatever they think is hot at the moment?
I liked the detailed look at what your values are and how that ties into your goals. After talking with some friends recently, I went through this exercise and it helped me come up with a logical set of short-term goals that will get me to where I want to be.
Am I the only one who initially thought this was about Scala, the language? :)

"Scalaculation" is a weird word.
Although it should be noted that it is pretty ironic that Joel wrote that post in response to Java being taught so pervasively at schools, because Hadoop is implemented primarily in ... yup, Java.
In Defense Of The PhD
Launch of open-source VoIP system - A one-month recap
When I worked at Subway a 32oz soda cost the store around 10 cents total for the soda and the cup. We sold them for $1.45 each. (Approximate, this was 4 years ago)

I would imagine plain coffee has similar margins but there is a fair amount of overhead to run a store which is why the markup is so high.
Gui for locate and find
Well....

How about Django, Evently, Moustache, CLOS, Hackage, Sinatra, Merb, OMQ as acronyms? ;) (None of it Perl..)

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.

Which is something what many languages (some still don't) have these days one way or another but really nothing compared to CPAN in number, service, search, testing facility and so on. You plainly _never_ have to bother searching your ass off to find some library you might need.

Moose is Perl's OO system - as with JavaScript you can do different OO styles with Perl and Moose is a framework to do a role/trait based (please see Smalltalk for details or Perl 6's spec) OO with a heavy twist on metaprogramming.

Perl is for writing things like Amazon or the IMDB and keep it running for 12 years in a row or for creating Nagios and SpamAssassin to watch over half of the Internet. Thanks to Perl, everybody can easily imagine what push, pop, shift, unshift on Arrays/Lists does and thanks to Perl everybody has very shiny Regex these days. That's why Vim has a magic/nomagic flag and what the P in PCRE stands for. The Ruby world gladly thanks Perl's DBI after which it modeled its own database interface.

That's what Perl is about. Sharing shiny features and establishing a culture of "getting things done who run really fast".
Nice work.

After waiting 10 minutes for an opponent, I opened a second tab and played against myself. Until your application becomes immensely popular, and this issue goes away, it would be nice to have an estimate of wait time.

Just keep track of recent "new opponent" events (keeping times of the most recent 10 events is sufficient) such as new visitor arriving, game ending, or server starting up (the last one just handles the edge case when you are the first player to load the application). Time elapsed since the earliest event (including only the 10 most recent events) divided by the number of events (again, this is at most 10) yields a reasonable estimate of wait time.

Alternatively, you could pair someone with a computer player if they've been waiting for more than a minute. https://github.com/ericlavigne/tic-tac-toe/blob/master/src/t...
emacs? Stop talking in acronyms and obscure names. Same for vim, frankly. Most people younger than me don't get it when you name-check vim. What does that stand for?

:P
And note that Navy (or Coast Guard) Captain is understandability a much higher rank than in the other services, O-6, Colonel elsewhere, the last rank before flag AKA General or Admiral. I can see an unofficial requirement for reaching O-6 before 40 for then being in the running for flag rank.
Hackage, rubygems, PyPi - are all modeled after CPAN
>>Just tried to log back into [Perlmonks] after probably over 10 years

>>It is what I would call a write-only language.

I get a bit of vertigo, here...

You really left about a decade ago -- and don't seem to know much about what has happened since. But you have opinions?!

(If you wonder what is wrong with that quote, check the Best Practices book. [Edit: And as someone noted, chromatic's "Modern Perl" is good.] And so on.)

But the real joke here, are the upvotes. wtf?

Edit: For the third time... :-) "Write only language" is just trolling. PBP by Conway is the standard work on layout, variable naming etc etc. It is from 2005...
Microsoft still matter: they control Internet Explorer and they control Windows. If they were to add SNI support to Windows XP, for example, https sites could be hosted more cheaply.

But Microsoft is not the monopolist it used to be. PG used "dead" to mean "is not scary any more", not "is slowly going bankrupt". So I think his conclusion still holds.
The interesting things are in my opinion that Redis is the sole backend, the code is simple, and no Redis operation was "forced" to do something that was not the natural goal. In practice this example shows how the Redis data model is a natural way to model complex needs without a line of SQL and without any need to setup indexes or things like that. I think this is a pretty important point.

Another interesting technical detail is that the whole site uses only an HTML template and everything else is done via javascript using jquery.
I have always been surprised by the relatively low rate of twitter referrers, 13k out of 6 million is like 0.2%, which a similar number to what I have observed, to get noticeable traffic you really need a few big twitter users to mention it and a constant stream of follow on / retweets.

its surprising since I follow a relatively small amount of people and check out most of what they recommend, I guess I am not indicative of the average twitter user
Sadly the author is just defending teachers' unions without proposing anything better.

There's good evidence that value-added modeling works. Half the problems noted in the link are addressed directly by the modeling (the author is ignorant or misleading) and the other half of the problems noted aren't actually problems (the data being noisy, for instance, is not a real problem).

> On the surface, the logic of VAM and using student scores to evaluate teachers seems like common sense: The more effective a teacher, the better his or her students should do on standardized tests.

Au contraire, the logic of VAM is that the more effective a teacher, the more GAINS a student should make, year-over-year. The actual performance level of a student is unimportant and is factored out. That the author doesn't even grasp this point suggests that his criticism is not based on a particularly good understanding.
I don't know why you were modded down. To me Python will always be a "scripting" language rather than a programming language, and claiming to be a Python programmer is a bit like claiming to be a mechanic who only does carwashes.

I switch back and forth between Python for small stuff and C++ for stuff where performance is an issue, and writing Python feels like no effort at all.
Ask HN: What software do you use for your startup?
I'll start with mine (feel free to add categories):

- E-mail/calendar/docs: Google Apps standard edition

- Hosting: Slicehost

- Invoicing: Freshbooks

- Analytics: Google Analytics

- Project management: Ta-da list (seriously)

- File-sharing: Dropbox

- Version control: Git

- Backups: rsync + home server

- Instant messaging: Skype
Möbel geschmackvoll - Startseite
Free access to Node.js hosting on the cloud today
"In the end, people getting screwed up are the users..."

Thank you for that insight. I just wish you guys had thought of that before filing copyright infringements.
Do tears really turn men off?
fully agreed, its very similiar to the days when people used to complain about not being able to login to sites when they disabled their cookies.
I don't get where this question shows he's trying to "show off his expertise". I can see that some people might be sensitive to the situation having been through the type of interview you describe. But I think its going too far assuming thats his motivation for this question.

I think the best types of questions are the ones where you don't know the answer ahead of time. This is where you really get to see how someone thinks. The bloom filter is rare enough that its likely people won't have any exposure to it at all. This gives you a very objective look at how quickly people can grasp new concepts and then apply them. This is exactly what an interview should hope to discover about a candidate.

What I see in the responses to this question are people who aren't very interested in the science side of computer science and thus immediately get suspicious when a question heads in that direction. Perhaps unfortunately, questions like these are going to be biased towards someone who does have a high interest in it.
the mob follow the whims of the star, like kitties following a laser pointer

…except if the laser pointer keeps pointing at things the kitties don't like, they slowly stop following it which makes the pointer sad. So in that way, the pointer is being led around by the kitties in a feedback loop.
While writing YAQL I accidentally discovered Lisp
Also keep in mind that most people don't read every tweet. Even people with relatively few follows will let tweets flow by for days or weeks without reading them and just pick up again whenever.
To put it in perspective, there is now a line out the door of experienced lawyers for public defenders jobs.

A friend of mine is in the top 20% of a top 20 law school and is hoping to hear back from American Samoa and rural Georgia districts. No one in his third year classes have jobs. Law school is a horrifying investment if you're not in the top 30% or so at a top 5 school.

Non-dischargeable student debt is a nightmare.
I'm just going to assume you've never tried to use StackOverflow without having JavaScript enabled.
I left perlmonks a decade ago. I would also say I left the active community. Doesn't mean I haven't kept up with the language. Doesn't mean I haven't programmed perl in the meantime. What don't you get? You're making an attack on me about my own impression of the language because I haven't logged into a website for 10 years. Seems like if you disagreed with the substance of the post, you could have just explained it.

Also, of course I have opinions just like you. I told my story. And some people liked it and upvoted. I don't get why that deserves a "wtf" other than trying to rally people to downvote me.
Detail isn't the problem, it's that it's needlessly complex to just say "stop sending me email". I shouldn't have to click 20 checkboxes so I can stop being spammed--just make me choose one.
[GIT PULL] scheduler changes for v2.6.38
Would you like a Quora invite?
TechCrunch has lost its mojo.
PadMapper site is down...a real shame to miss this opportunity.
This could vary by institution, but at my former school (and the ones on MIT open courseware), students rarely ask questions. There's some embarrassment factor, but I suspect it's mostly because it takes time to formulate your confusion into a question AND there's simply not enough time for everybody's questions, and every student feels that.
Reddit/HN clone in Clojure
I think another issue is smart phones. This is the type of site that I wouldn't even try to use with a phone...I would want my laptop to view it. Most people get their tweets on their phone, so they are less likely to follow this kind of link when they see it, and they are very unlikely to look back when they are on their computer.
What about communication? Are they taught English? Or do they communicate in Tamil (or some other local language)?
Opinions on Yahoo Pipes
Is Yahoo Pipes (and similar services) a good thing? Seems ripe for abuse. Issues I see with it:

* Taking content from multiple sites (out of context) and putting them together in a mashup. The content is copyrighted material. Is taking it and using it w/o consent legal?

* Emulating other sites for phishing purposes or a knock off of a popular site (with ads of course that do not appear on the real site).

* It's just annoying to see your content on other sites. In the least, it strikes me as rude.

What does HN think? I started blocking it, do others?
1) Yes, it still holds.

2) Don't editorialise the headline. It gives a distinctly Reddit-like feel to the place. The correct way to post this would have been to do an Ask HN and include the link in the body.

3) "How many...?" is obviously a poll question, so create a poll.
There are two Microsofts:

- The one that does interesting, innovative stuff but a failure/modest success in the marketplace (online, xbox, sync interface for cars, zune, windows phone 7)

- The "legacy" one that makes windows, office, and server apps, which makes a ton on licensing.

Nobody likes "legacy" microsoft, and it's the most vulnerable, but also has the most momentum behind them. People develop on or support the dominant platform to earn a paycheck, thus the dominant platform stays in place.

Until the PC goes away, and there's a huge shift to do real work off our phones/tablets/other non-legacy devices, MS will most likely be dominant in terms of market share.
Absolutely.

I think the key point of the article was this phrase: No one is even afraid of Microsoft anymore. They still make a lot of money—so does IBM, for that matter. But they're not dangerous.

And I think that's still true, even with the popularity of their latest hand-waving thing. Back in the day, almost everybody writing a business plan had to answer the question: "What will you do if Microsoft decides to crush you?" Nowadays, I imagine they ask that question about Google or Facebook.
I've recently started using CSS3PIE (http://www.css3pie.com) in production and can only recommend it. It enables you to use CSS3 declarations such as box-shadow and border-radius in Internet Explorer, even under version 6!

It's trivial to use and much faster than IE7.js since it relies on the browser engine to do most of the work parsing selectors etc. The author Jason Johnston is very responsive in the forums as well. Even better, the upcoming version 0.11 of Compass (http://beta.compass-style.org) includes a mixin for PIE which makes adding cross-browser rounded corners a matter of two lines.

Didn't think I'd see this happen in my lifetime...
Ask HN: reading source code on an e-reader?
I'd like to review some source code without staring at a monitor. Does anyone know of a tool that will convert C/C++ source code to EPUB for use in an e-reader?
If it is a legal profession, then can the government require certification that witches are competent, and can actually carry out what they claim to be able to do?
i thought it would be about Scala as well.
rofl XD
Interesting... Are people using Python 3, now?

(Hint: I don't think the grandfather comment was about Python 3.)

And different languages doesn't say much. :-)

Perl 6, compared to e.g. Python 2/3, is a really ambitious undertaking. But OK, with the backporting going on, Perl 5 might end up being similar to Perl 6... :-)
I like your analysis, but this statement is self-contradictory: "it's the most vulnerable, but also has the most momentum behind them". I think that Windows, Office... is the least vulnerable part of Microsoft, but it's also low-growth.