skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Very nice post, and the dashboards look great, but one thing seems to be missing: the actionable metrics. Metrics for metrics' sake can be dangerous and not necessarily all that helpful. You shouldn't guess why the conversion rate went up, you should know because you a/b tested it...

More detail about this argument here: http://swombat.com/2011/1/13/dashboard-evolution-vanity-metr...
I wish my degree had more emphasis on working with an existing codebase instead of a constant stream of greenfield applications. I wrote plenty of programs in the n-thousand lines of code range, but never had to worry about interoperability or maintenance at all. In my life after formal education, those have been FAR more problematic than the things I learned.
My point was that majority of that answer was completely offtopic. I'm not disagreeing that it catches the mistakes - but that this reminded me of the attitude described in the post above. tchrist might be a known perl person... but this comment was confusing at best - only one line actually relates to the question - "use autodie;". You must be also full of yourself to actually write something like "If you had begun with the standard boilerplate" - where "standard boilerplate" is actually "something I use" - and expect anyone else to actually use it.
Yes and no. We won the award based around the same concept, but a totally different product. We spent our first year and 100K of bootstrapped cash on R&D for a hardware dongle that exchanged cards through RFID. End of 2009 we dropped this and focused on our mobile apps and Cardcloud, and just launched E as you see it today.
Find My Friends coming to iOS
Tried this last year, couldn't get through to the site until it was all over. Or rather, couldn't get through the purchase part until it was all over.
On desktops, falling back to flash for H.264 decoding is a pretty good strategy.

On mobiles, though, Google's change has a bigger effect. Flash is abysmal (if existent) on Android devices--and now there is no clear solution that doesn't involve serving multiple encodings.

Before this change, you could be comfortable that your H.264 HTML5 video would play on the majority of smartphones; the flash fallback was only necessary for desktop browsers.
Your Most Awesomely Bad Hacks?
I first learned about serious Perl development working for eToys.com. The web application scaled to a cluster of hundreds of machines and saw extremely high traffic. We had a large team working on it without any problem. The European warehouse management system was also written in Perl and was my baby.

After seeing what Perl can do in terms of development speed, maintainability and speed of execution I've never looked back. I've worked on a ton of great projects since then and today I run my own startup with a tiny team, a tiny cluster and we serve over 600 application requests per second all from modperl, nginx, apache and mysql.

I've seen languages come and go over the years and here's what I've thought:

Java: In the late 90's I wrote a few java apps thought it was a cool language. But I didn't like that it was proprietary. I also had the opportunity to ask Steve Balmer about the Visual J/Sun lawsuit while I was at Credit Suisse. The whole thing just turned me off and I moved on. Thankfully I did, because today it's still dog slow to develop and to execute and now it' belongs to Oracle.

PHP: Embedding your code in your HTML seemed like a bad idea and still does.

C: I've seriously considered switching to C for web apps over the years, but the performance gains haven't justified the increased complexity and added time to code or prototype.

Ruby: I first dabbled in Ruby in 2005 but realized it was Perl in the early 90's and that startups are risky enough. I still eye it keenly, but it just can't touch ModPerl's performance and stability and more importantly, it's availability of libraries. It will one day though and then I may just drop everything and join the party.

Javascript on Node.js: This is the most exciting development and web languages since Perl simply because you can write asynchronous apps (single thread that handles 1000000's of clients concurrently) in a high level language. I'm already using Node and am REALLY looking forward to more libraries being available and to them being more stable. Things like db drivers, crypt libs, date, html and text manipulation libs. Node is the way of the future.
Ask HN: Calendar Permutation Uses?
I'm thinking about making a calendar permutation web app that helps students plan their classes. It'd work like this:

- Student enters filters (days and hours he doesn't want class).
- Student enters classes needed.
- student can flip thru the various permutations of the resulting class schedule. (Permutations happen because each class has many different times.)

Now, would this idea work in any other fields? For instance, might this be useful to conference attendees planning their schedules? Any other uses?
Definitely. We're currently in the process of developing business and conference specific offerings.

And email? Because that's the common denominator on all paper cards that accepts (html) emails with attachments (vcard).
It's worth pointing out that MPEG-LA also doesn't offer patent indemnification on H.264 or any of its other formats.

I can't find where I originally read this, but EETimes mentions it at the end of this article: http://www.eetimes.com/design/other/4012977/MPEG-licensing-b...

"Also, MPEG LA does not offer any indemnification guaranteeing that its patents do not infringe someone else's patent rights."
How much power can USB Provide?
> I don't recall anything about actually moving to the US

It's right there in the title and in this sentence (last sentence of paragraph 2): the team decided they would pack their bags and move across the Atlantic for good

I don't understand much about visa rules; from a distance it seems the rules are very strict and complex, but enforced unevenly; I would love to read a comprehensive article on this subject.
I am not a big fan of Tim Ferriss - he argues for a 4 hour work week, but in one sample day of his I saw, he worked 4 hours on one article for the Economist alone.

That said, this article is surprisingly interesting/useful.
The linchpin of tablets replacing netbooks, for me and the people I talk to at least, will be the USB port (or lack thereof). Being able to connect my existing media and peripherals, the most important of which being a hardware keyboard for long typing sessions (like programming), is ultimately my deciding factor. With that and a terminal I could completely replace my netbook with a tablet.

Google's already taken that initiative with the devices we saw at CES. Hopefully Apple follows suit with the iPad 2.
And with talk of a "meeting", possibly robbery or moider.
So why can't we just envision ourselves embracing H.264 and picture what it'll be like in 10 years?

You mean imagine when we're 2 or 3 years from the last of the H.264 patents expiring? At that time I would expect it to only be ditched for something that offers substantially better quality/bitrate.
The Security Threat of Forged Law-Enforcement Credentials
You should add one other point: don't do this if you're not already an established HN user. "Review my startup" posts from new accounts are usually killed. Otherwise anyone could use this format to promote any site, a fact spammers started to notice a few months ago.
Yes, we will most definitely solve this asap!
What does owning a video codec even mean if you make it royalty-free? Is there a concern that if webm becomes widely used Google will use its control of the code to harm competitors? In that case, you should know that the webm project is in fact run as a separate project from Google[1].

[1]http://www.webmproject.org/about/supporters/
I think malloc implementations that zero memory should be required to switch to 0xa110ca7ed0 instead. Imagine a debugging session where you wonder, "is this memory allocated?" and then you type "x 5" and you get "a1 10 ca 7e d0". "Yes," you will be able to reply to yourself, "it is allocated."
If the post is good (which is to say if your product is interesting), it will stay on the front page long enough that it doesn't matter when you post. One caveat, avoid the weekend since most popular news sites like HN slow down during that time period.
This is doubly funny because both _The Angel's Game_ and _The Shadow of the Wind_ take place in or around Sempere and Sons, a small bookshop in early 20th C Barcelona. The proprietor is always a "Senor Sempere" who is integrated with the neighborhood and understands its needs; much of the appeal of the shop is, of course, the books, but it's the Sempere(s) working there who make it different. Words like "integrated with the community" have been so debased by politicians and others that they barely mean anything, but if they still did, they would apply here.

The depictions of Sempere and Sons are certainly romanticized, but they still point to a desire for knowing someone who really, deeply knows books. If Borders once had that desire or those kinds of people on staff (even in corporate), the OP in the Atlantic indicates they no longer do.
> And no, $60K is pretty tight for a family of four anywhere in the US.

That's... not true. I came from a family of eight who never had more than $50k income (no health insurance), and I don't remember ever even having to think about it. We had multiple cars, a large-ish house, etc.

This was of course not in a city, but it's not the cheapest place in the states either.
(After a bit more googling, I may have to retract that last statement. If it's not the cheapest place in the US, it's awfully close.)
I'm waiting for a tablet that has a physical keyboard with a hinge so I can type fast, with two hands, and with an uptilted screen for readability. As soon as tablets can do that, goodbye netbook!
Did you get this impression after looking at the homepage?
In real life you easily can, because of incompatibilities with the existing software. Eg. Chrome and Android are technically open-source but their direction and development are completely governed by Google.

If you make changes and are unable to convince Google to incorporate them, the video generated by your software will be incompatible with all the millions of WebM decoders out there.
Like GCC or WebKit or Java?
Being open source does not mean nobody owns it.
Straight out of How to Win Friends and Influence People.
You clearly haven't read the article. Flash is a sandboxed plugin running alongside the browser. It's not the internals of a new and heatedly debated HTML tag, which ultimately has to be an open standard and format, and supported until HTML6 comes around in another decade. Choosing to drop experimental support for a closed, proprietary, and royalty-encumbered codec in a tag's specification that hasn't even been finalized by the W3C yet isn't even in the same universe as dropping support for an external plugin.
The real life tooth fairy who helped stop atomic testing
Point taken. We aim to be as unobtrusive as possible to the user as a brand, certainly when it comes to product. Business cards are about the brands/identities of the people that carry them - we follow the same philosophy here.
Um, that's mostly because there's no real need to substitute 'a' with '4', because 'a' is a valid hex digit. Same goes for 'e' and '3'.

If you look, 'dead', 'cafe', 'beef', and even '1ee7' are in the list.
Thanks for the advice.

I've recently restarted on anti-depressants. I was on them previously and didn't realise they were helping because the effect was quite passive, I came off them suddenly when I moved house and the next few months went... badly. Luckily I don't suffer any bad side-effects from the one I'm on, so I don't have a problem with trying it long-term.

I'm interested in mindfullness and CBT because I want more constructive thought patterns to allow me to stop it getting so bad again in the future.

Will take a look at those videos.
These kind of discussions is a symptom. Too few programmers have a clear mental picture of what goes on below their programming language.
the language design itself strongly pushes you toward writing elegant, readable code.

The language design itself strongly pushes you toward indenting the way Guido indents. The rest (effective decomposition, good naming, testing, intelligent default behaviors, algorithm choice, comments and documentation) is on the programmer's shoulder, as it is in every language.
This is pretty handy, I can see the need for this tool for quite a few use cases. Good job, haven't seen anything like it before either.
> How about a Google monopoly? At least h.264 is owned by a number of different companies.

It's amazing to me. In the 90s Microsoft's overt policy was "embrace, extend, extinguish," and it called the GPL a "cancer," the MPAA was launching war against DeCSS, and Amazon.com was flexing its one-click patent against competitors. Open source developers had no powerful allies.

Now you have a powerful company like Google that releases millions of lines of open source, sponsors college students to work on open source, fights for openness standards in wireless spectrum auctions, fights for open standards like HTML5, open sources its entire mobile operating system, and in its latest move, buys a video codec company for $106 million and promptly pledges all of the patents for use by anybody.

And yet some people would prefer the codec whose rights are effectively owned by a known patent troll (MPEG-LA) because "at least [it] is owned by a number of different companies."

It goes to show that you can never please everyone.
> As opposed to the US where everybody over the age of 30 is afraid to quit their jobs to start their own company because they'll lose their health insurance?

I've paid health insurance out of pocket and it's no big deal (compared to rent and other expenses). Considering that I'm over 50....

And before you write "pre-existing conditions", "remember" that if you don't go without coverage, you can switch with no waiting period. (I suppose folks without pre-existing conditions can be excused for not knowing that, but if they're going to make arguments about pre-existing conditions ....)
Also, just thought of something really cool. You could make it sort of like Google Webmaster Tools where a user can "verify" that they own the site. Then you can open it up so they can see who's maybe "tagged" their site and that allows the members to open up dialog with each other and communicate on the site.

Could turn it into a neat webmaster community where people can work together easier.

Just a thought.
Eternal Sunshine for Chrome - Hide people on Facebook without unfriending them
Should E-Mail and Letters Have Equal Legal Protection?
Can't drop something you didn't have in the first place.

As many have argued, it's disingenuous to treat Flash and the H.264 as being equal in this argument. One of these would be implemented into the browser rather than a plugin. One of these would incur a royalty cost. One of these has viable alternatives.
Google will happily take your money: https://www.google.com/accounts/PurchaseStorage
Fuck antidepressants. I was on 'em, and I went off 'em of my own volition because I knew they didn't bloody work (and made me tired besides).

Wanna cure your depression? There are two ways.

1) Change how you think. Most of the time it requires conscious effort on your part, sustained over months or years; although if being poor has you depressed and you win the Powerball, that can give you an instantaneous new outlook. Cognitive behavioral therapy has proven vastly more effective than any drug.

2) The route Bill Zeller took. For some people that's their only way out of misery and suffering, and the rest of us need to learn how to respect their choice on an individual and societal level.
Touch is superior for a lot of use cases - but not all, not even close. It will continue to gain more widespread use, sometimes at the expense of traditionally mouse-driven devices, but the mouse is alive and well and isn't going anywhere anytime soon.

The helicopters vs. airplanes thing is not a judgment on which is superior - you missed the point; the idea is that when helicopters came around, a lot of new possibilities opened up in flight, some of which were traditionally served by fixed-wings... but in the end both have their uses, and neither killed each other.
There will be licensing and royalty issues.

When a big company in Redmond says stuff like this, its called FUD. This is FUD, plain and simple.

What technologies have patents, fees and/or licensing around them?

H264, MP3, Flash, USB, Java, HDMI, CDMA, GSM, LTE, WiMax, Firewire, CD, DVD, BluRay, MP3, AMOLED, and many more.

To argue that computing is going to collapse with the existence of all these is pure FUD. Its FUD when MS does it. It's FUD when Google or the Google camp does it.

UPDATE: And I forgot a biggie, MPEG-2.
Hard for me to imagine why HNHI wasn't mentioned by name as the penny 50 was manipulating unless the author of the article is long it as well.
It assumes that people already on the team have the same ability as the potential hire.

The people on the team have a great advantage over a new hire: they know more about the business and the codebase.
Why are IT people notoriously condescending? 
"Why are IT people notoriously condescending?"

It just seems that most people I've met in IT come off as very condescending, I have even been known to come off this way and I'm trying to be more aware of this.
Even better--they have "fuck" at the top but "#f*ckyeah" in the copy below.
If it's difficult to find great Perl developers, that's because [fewer] great developers flock to Perl.

I would like to see non-anecdotal evidence for this.

Heck, even the humble Javascript allows you to perform mind-bending dynamic feats.

It's also borrowing features Perl has had for years. Hm.

Other languages offer multiplatform support (native, Java, .NET) which Perl lacks.

That definition of "multiplatform" differs from mine. Perl 5 runs on more platforms than the CLR and JVM do.
Water water everywhere and not a drop to drink: Myth of the NYC eng. shortage
I thought that would be funny but it seems I'm the only one, so gonna change that into something more meaningful.
Sorry if you were offended by it :/
I think this advice will be counterproductive for most web entrepreneurs, as I detail here:

http://ourdoings.com/ourdoings-startup/2011-01-13

Summary: In the 2.70 contest, everyone was watching and agreed what the goal was. On the web, the people you want to reach might not be watching, and might rely on authorities who have a different idea of what the goal is. Thinking outside the box may make it harder for people to see that you've solved their problem better.
Google is putting its foot down to ensure that web video isn't hijacked by [h.264]

What on earth do you mean by "hijacked"? Web video has been dominated by h.264 since it was added to Flash, and Google itself is among the most prominent pushers. It didn't sneak in through the back door, it reached it's current status the same way anything else on the web has: by being useful.

Mozilla and Google are fighting for your and my right to produce fully compliant browsers without having to pay somebody else.

This is what gets me scratching my head, because it's Mozilla and Google who are the ones trying to make browsers, not me. Mozilla and Google are acting in their own interests (which is fine, don't get me wrong) but they keep telling me that it's for my sake even though, if asked, I would tell them not to do what they're doing. It feels more like an ideological bludgeoning than a favor.

Also, I take issue with your saying "fully compliant". Codec support hasn't been a standards compliance issue since Ogg was (rightfully) pulled from the spec.

If anything, the fact that the spec is codec-agnostic suggests that the most "spiritually" compliant position would be for the implementation to be, as well. But that's not what we get from Mozilla or Google. For that kind of openness we have to turn to...Microsoft and Apple? Weird.
That's actually a good point. From the reaction of Gruber/Ars Technica, Google may have been better off without using the word "open" at all. They were already speaking to mostly technical people anyway, so it's not like they're going to lose their audience when they speak about wanting a "patent and fee unencumbered format" and what that means rather than a vague "open" format.

Edit: I think it's harder to argue against those points than it is to point to their hypocrisy in using both open and Flash (although I think that argument ignores the fact that they have to pick their battles, and Flash would not be one they could win). The "patent unencumbered" part seems to only be answered with vague accusations about possible patent infringement. The only real analysis on that is one blog post by a codec engineer, and as people here have pointed out, it makes more sense to trust that Google's patent lawyers looked at a multimillion dollar acquisition a lot harder than that analysis. The fee part was answered pretty weakly in the Ars article. Fees would cripple open source projects, and they just tried to gloss over that by pointing to Google.
Attitudes like this are why I did CompE instead of CS. Yes you do learn OO in early CS classes, however you can use procedural programming in the real world to get excellent results. It is "bad code", but a lot of coders are interested in results more than "the current landscape of programming".
Ubuntu 11.10 To Be Called Oscillating Ocelot?
Weird. It's pass by ref for objects and pass by value for primitives. Why the flame war?
I'm not sure if you support this or not, but it might be a good idea to include support for multiple cards per account. Something like a day job card and a startup card.

But I'm not sure how to support it on the backend.
The VC distribution system is broken
I thought about it, and eventually bought this book because of PJ Eby's recommendation; if I'd known the author had average HN karma over 4 I would've bought it about a week sooner.
In the absence of information I can freely speculate about your job vacancy.

Your proposed salary was low, your offering uninteresting, etc.

Myself, I crossed Perl and Python (and Ruby, and Smalltalk, and Lisp and many others) from list of languages to discriminate good programmer from not so good one a long time ago. They just did not get used in anything I consider interesting or important (but I still prefer domain knowledge - so lisper with relevant past is still interesting).

Right now I would use Haskell (or even stronger typed language like Coq or Agda) as a requirement, and my proposal would include DSeL for problem domain with Perl backend (if Perl is that necessary).

I will get much less resumes initially, those resumes will be of higher quality and my employee will produce a tool that allow me (us as a team, actually) to retarget our product to another backend quickly if we need to do so.
Apple Obtains Patent For Solar-Powered Devices
He's an investor in Twitter, Digg, and StumbleUpon. That alone seems to be a measure of success well beyond "writing books about success".
d34dc0de is my favourite one, not on this list =(
We support this. We don't support creating new cards on the phone yet, but once you login to your Cardcloud in the browser you can create multiple cards with different contact info, social networks, etc!
The author of the blog post is pushing a good agenda (promoting modern Perl) but doing so with tactics that end up adding more harmful FUD to Perl's already shaky reputation.

How so?

If Perl can't survive the honest admission that a lot of people writing Perl aren't great programmers, that the design of the language encourages people to be able to write baby Perl and still get their work done, and that the existing core Perl community needs to find these people and encourage them to improve their skills, then Perl doesn't deserve to survive.
This looks pretty neat, especially while we have to wait for Strict Mode to be supported in all the major browsers.