skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
IOS 4.3 Developer Build Reveals “Find My Friends” Feature and More
Reminds me of getting an answer from Tom Christiansen on stackoverflow. Most of his answers follow one of the two typical patterns:

1. an extended regex to do what you want in every encoding known to man, extended to use cases you never mentioned, taking 10+ lines to replace one character with another (with occasional angry remark about random other language where "it's impossible to do that")

2. "it doesn't work, because you're not using my standard boilerplate" - followed by 20+ line boilerplate setting a lot of different things where most of them are not even remotely related to the question... because everyone should be using his boilerplate...
Agreed. Have a much larger selection of books, and offer a 'discount for delivery' if the customer is prepared to wait.
I am not convinced this is a good point against hiring someone who lacks depth in your language. It assumes that people already on the team have the same ability as the potential hire. This does not reflect reality. Different people learn at different rates. I have seen new people pick things up very quickly and surpass those who have been programming in that specific language for years. I am one, myself, with my present job. It is true there is a ramp-up time, but it varies with the person.

For some people, different paradigms do not present challenges; they are just different approaches to the same problems. It might be easier for people who dabble around in multiple paradigms to adapt to the new language.
Great comment, rtperson! Probably the most succinct description of the importance of domain knowledge I have read. I especially like

Your fashion guy knows who his customers are, who they talk to, what they read, and what motivates them to open their wallets.

Bulletin board material.
I also like the current design better. The larger headers in the redesign make it harder to scan. Your eyes have to 'scan' more.

And Helvetica (Arial) is used mostly for large signs. And this is not without reason. Verdana on the other hand was design for readability on screens.

Don't underestimate simple designs. They can contain a lot of tweaking.
I've never really had a problem with reCAPTCHA, I think it's one of the best out there (I hate websites with home-made text captchas that are crazy impossible to read).
Also, there's a nice "refresh" button right next to it if you find it too hard to read.
Minimum viable mobile app
Yeah - A "hoo-haw" is good. The quicker issues are brought to attention and resolved the better.
I've known a few good perl programmers, and a few ok ones, and I know for certain that a lot of perl programmers came out of the dot-bomb days and back then testing just wasn't part of the culture.

Not misunderstand me, writing tests for published modules was expected, but with everything from scripting to websites unit testing wasn't that common at all.

It wasn't a big problem either, because when the perl shop got serious, it ramped up the QA, and even possibly had a less buggy product than today, because QA can be brutal, and unit testing can be LAZY and misguided.

Testing fanboys flame me all you want, but I was there, this was common, we walked to work both ways uphill, but built the foundations of the web you see around you.
Depending on the nature of the job, yes, it is definitely low. If we're talking freelance, remember that you've got to account for your own self-employment tax and health insurance out of that.

The last time I did any serious freelance software work, five or six years ago, I started out charging $80/hr, and was still selling myself short.
The most critical words are genuinely and disingenuous. You may be able to put something over on us every once in a while, but for the most part, this is a crowd that doesn't respond too well to posers and B.S. Be sincere and we'll tell you the truth. Be phony and we'll probably send you packing. Nice post, swombat.
This argument is invalid because it should hold also for PHP and there's no shortage of awsome PHP programmers. There are additional causes why it's hard to find great Perl programmers.
I feel the same, B&N sucks royally for anything but best sellers. The borders next to the school where I went always had an pretty good computer, math and science selection. Their weekly coupons were awesome. 30% on any books. But I just went back (I moved about a year ago) and they don't seem to be receiving a large amount of new stuff. The shelf were all screwed up ( I feel odd saying this but I help keep that computer section in order ;p Python stuff next to oracle crap is a mistake ;p).

I probably spent 30% of my student loans on books at borders because I'd have a hard time waiting to get home and buying from amazon. Plus like you said the 30% coupons made buying from amazon a waste of time. They changed that for borders bucks which I think was a major mistake. Bring back the coupons.
Non-issue: The prison is 300 miles from his home, a tactic sometimes used to prevent visits from families, but in this case, that does appear to be the closest, federal, low security facility.
Sheer size counts for a lot as far as bookstores go, at least in the pre-Amazon era. Your typical local bookstore of the pre-Borders era was generally pretty small and/or poorly laid out.

Personally I still do most of my book shopping at Borders and B&N, because once I decide I want to read something I'd rather pay the extra few dollars to read it now rather than wait for it to arrive in the mail. Though they both aggravate me with the unskippable script which their checkout chicks are forced to go through... no, I don't have one of your loyalty cards.... no, I don't want one of your loyalty cards... no, I don't care what great benefits it may give me.
I wrote a longer reply, but the more I write the more I realize how ignorant I am. I'm out of my depth. Beats me.

I think we can agree that if it is true that 25% of all searches are completely new to Google, it's not like they could have been gamed. Can't game a search that has never existed before. Right?
That right there is exactly the sort of reasoning I object to.

A poorly defined prediction is made: "Teleportation will be possible".
Now, everyone who reads this probably imagines 'beam me up, scotty'.

Subsequently, teleportation is defined to include things like 'quantum teleportation', which, while it does have 'teleportation' in the name, does not instantly move mass, from one place to another, and, fundamentally, is not theorised to enable the Star Trek-esque people 'beaming' around the place.

I'm not saying which definition of the word 'teleportation' is best - just that the initial statement, if we allow it to be subsequently satisfied by either of those things, in a way it wasn't intended, is not very interesting.
I love these competitions, and have been captivated by them since I was a kid after seeing a PBS special on MIT's Woody Flowers, who organized them.

And in high school, I designed a project for a state-wide King of the Hill type contest by ignoring the "goal" and focusing on the tie-breaking rules.

The idea was to design a car (using a strict list of household items) to run up a two-sided hill and rotate a long, hanging metal bar against a sensor multiple times. Your opponent also had a bar on the opposite side of the hill. You'd get a point for each time the bar hit the sensor.

Most people spent a significant amount trying to figure out how to rotate the bar. Most points won, after all.

Except that, if nobody scored, the tie breaker was distance; if you made it up the hill further or even made it to the opponent's side of the hill, and nobody "scored", you'd win.

My "car" used the maximum allowed number of mouse traps in an attempt to sling itself over the hill as fast as possible and flip the other car or device over, or at least disrupt the opponent's operation enough so that nobody would score, and I'd win on distance.

Turns out that the scoring objective was so difficult that this was the winning strategy. Still have the car and the t-shirt, but not the $1000 savings bond. And as popular as sports are in the U.S., I did make more competing in nerd competitions than I did on the track team. :-)
Mobile devices (which I guess you are hinting at) usually only support the Baseline profile

Is that true for smartphones? I know that the iPhone 4, iPod Touch, and iPad (at least) support "H.264 video up to 720p, 30 frames per second, Main Profile level 3.1"

I don't know about Android devices.
I agree and click on a lot of them just to give feedback and see what others are working on.

In my Hacker Newsletter I collect and share a lot of them each week, but the odd thing is they tend to have very low click through rates - which I haven't been able to figure out why yet.
Frankl is the canonical example. But also telling is the portion of Spiegelman's "Maus" which tells of his release from Auschwitz, entitled "And now my troubles began..."
Perl does not have the sex appeal of Ruby or Python right now.

That's a shame, but that's the way it is.
Borders has no competitive advantage if the book isn't in stock. The minute it has to be ordered Amazon becomes the better solution.
You forgot to add that Perl is also pretty fast, in terms of execution: http://roboprogs.com/devel/2009.12.html

For small tasks, Perl is my language of choice. Of course, there are no small Java programs - every data structure requiring a separate class, and every class (in some shops) requiring a separate source file, etc.

A small amount of Perl can get much done. I like being able to write small functions with clearly defined inputs and outputs, even if a routine has multiple outputs (suck on that, java!). Contrast with the 500 line java subroutine with 100 separate variables blendered around (no clear data flow) written by some apathetic slob.

I have only had one project large enough in Perl to justify OOP techniques, years ago. I've given up trying to persuade The Management to use Perl. It's just too much easier to find java work, especially here in the wilderness (Sacramento area).
Because if they do, but they are still depressed then that's clear evidence that the forced swim test is worthless.

Worthless for measuring antidepressants, maybe. But I'm sure you could find sponsors for a drug that causes someone to irrationally keep fighting, even if it has no effect on mood.
I don't think this is sexist in any case. Sexism implies that the author suggests through the post that one sex is inferior to the other. I don't understand what could have possibly provoked such an interpretation.
There are some improvements to Unicode handling 3.0 that clean things up a bit, which I'd appreciate after fighting with it recently.
Some Puzzles about Entrepreneurship and Entrepreneurial Capitalism
I don't have a lot of practical day-to-day use for standard deviation and possess a vague understanding of it. Like the author, I resort to Wikipedia periodically and go away with no stronger an intuitive sense than when I began. I think the author offers a great explanation for the advantages of a more intuitive understanding. This article and its simple graphics definitely provided a more intuitive sense of the concept.

I'll wait a while for the statistics experts to weigh in here before I write it to my cognitive hard disk. :)
Why would anyone in this industry care what Timothy Ferriss thinks?

Have all the VCs, angels, entrepreneurs, programmers, and software PMs died?
Why Social IPOs Could Be Troublesome |
IMDb Pro : David Burlison: Main Details
tl;dr;

Advert for his new 'self help' book.

An advert for Sarah Palins book would be more relevant to HN IMHO.
Awesome wallpapers site
Not a very interesting article in general - I say that as someone who hates Tim Feriss, but this part was genuinely interesting and novel at least to me:

He uses A/B testing for finding the best book title (and subtitle) and cover.

“Ferriss famously used Google AdWords and in-store A/B testing to come up with the title to his first book [Full title: "The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich"].

His experimentation didn’t stop there, he decided to test various covers by printing them on high quality paper and placing them on existing similar sized books in the new non-fiction rack at Borders, Palo Alto. He sat with a coffee and observed, learning which cover really was most appealing.”
IANAL, but my understanding is that this would give Amazon a 'retail presence' in most US states, thus requiring them to charge sales tax on online transactions.
The flip side to "I want my e-mail treated like normal mail" is that the same penalties will need to be levied. Private citizens can get in a lot of trouble for tampering with regular mail.
A lot of the decisions are driven by internal Yahoo! needs. For instance, the new Yahoo! Mail really needed Rich Text Editor, but they could build their own chrome around it, so we have a really basic RTE that works, if you can build the chrome for it.

Data Table is one thing that many people have been asking for on the forums and in IRC for a long time, but it's also really complex. My suspicion is that it was waiting on DataSource to reach a certain level of maturity before pushing forward to release.

The focus on YUI3 from the team has been on the Core, and it's a really good core. Really, this is the first release that they've really been able to focus on Widgets, as most of the core widgets prior to 3.3.0 seemed to be more proof of concept.
Cover-out can also be the sign of a bookstore lacking inventory to fill the shelves. I've seen it happen to a bunch, some of them which had ambitions & were anything but mass-market.

Borders was a revelation when it opened. I'll miss it if it disappears.
Open standard had a very distinct and widely used definition well before the term "open source" was invented.
I just found it and really amazed me. Its the best site on this topic I have seen in a long time. Makes interfacelift.com look useless.
This seems to be a common misconception, but it's still very much a part of the corporate and business landscape. Do some keyword searches on a job search engine - you'll see what I mean...
they don't make 'em like they used to. the games on this site are some of my favorites.
I was at Inktomi in the late 90s/early 2000s. We were trying to keep up with Google in terms of scale, and we could do everything they could do in terms of link analysis, relevance, etc. Objectively, our results were as good as theirs. They took over in terms of index size because they could add cheap Linux machines easily. We were tied to our expensive Sun hardware, it took us three years to switch to Linux (long story) and then it was too late.

tl,dr: relevance doesn't matter if you don't have the result the user wants.
It probably depends on how far the language is from the developer's experience.

I can imagine it will take a developer only familiar with ruby, python & js quite a while to become productive in assembly language.

However, a good developer that knows e.g. python, php & c really well (moreso if he generally know *NIX really well) will probably not take an inordinate amount of time to become productive in perl.
Tim Ferriss meets 37 Signals, creating a perfect storm of self promotion.

"Hi Tim. Some folks doubt that you're as awesome as you say you are, because they can't believe anyone can be so awesome. However, we're also that awesome, so we can totally believe it ourselves."
Latency is 1 hour, but to get bandwidth you need to divide not by 1 hour but by the time between successive station wagon departures. For example if you only have one station wagon and driving back after copying the tapes takes a further 30 minutes, then the denominator is 5400 seconds and so the system bandwidth is 50% less than the number quoted.
> I did this as I was eating too many cakes and buns with my coffee and was finding the down from the coffee-high was too soul-destroying in a boring desk-job.

I think his problem is more related to the sugar highs and lows than the coffee itself.
What if your theoretical candidate on senior web Perl programming position knows about formlets, for example, and used them successfully?

Formlets: http://hackage.haskell.org/package/formlets and then http://groups.inf.ed.ac.uk/links/formlets/

Does he still need to be proficient in OO?

What if your candidate knows much about your current problem domain? Do you still prefer someone who doesn't know a bit but proficient in OO?
It can't get more old-school than that, you win :)
HN has a function whereby reply links don't appear immediately, there's a time delay (I think a few minutes) until they appear. The idea is to prevent people replying rashly to a comment that strikes a nerve, and to encourage rational discussion.
Udi Manber has said that in a number of his presentations
Exactly. These are simply memes. Not to be taken seriously :)
It's SparkFun free day (servers are down)
How to share a bucket on S3
Wait you can barcode books into an Amazon cart!?
I wonder what's happened since then? You'd think we'd really jump on this kind of science. I wonder why all this stuff is so slow.
My Facebook Interview Experience
Is it really at a great cost to themselves? How do we know that total cost of license fees per copy of Chrome plus license fees per copy of Android is less than the cost of buying On2?
Amazing to think that this was the closest you could get to porn on a computer back then.
QA is a not-automated repetitive (usually acceptance) testing. It doesn't have much to do with unittests and they're definitely not interchangeable. If you compare QA and unittesting... the argument is pretty much misguided.

Ideally, you should have both. And then some more automation. And quick feedback from automated tests.
Don't forget the part where he pays lip service to 37signals by speaking against feature creep.

Ferris gets to use 37signals as a (completely uncritical) sales platform, and in return he gives them a back rub. Quid pro quo I guess.
Yes, the title of the video seemed suspect, so I didn't use it.
Sounds like at least one college bookstore I've seen.
Call me cynical, but I have a hard time reading any piece on Tim without thinking of it as a lure to buy something. It's not that he isn't good, it's that he's either selling something, or not talking at all, and I don't trust his intent.
If OneFatPig is bringing Amazon revenue, why would they try to kill it off? I mean, certainly there's ways to make someone mad at you, but from a business sense if OneFatPig "plays nice" I don't see why Amazon would arbitrarily do that.
In the article: "..their feedback is valuable. It's often thorough, honest, qualified, and sometimes unpleasant."

I think many people here will act upon "if you don't have anything nice to say, say nothing."

...which is a pity. Sometimes somebody posts a webapp with very crappy design or the 100th clone of a mediocre idea. Yet most people will tell him how great it is. This is not helpful. Sometimes I wish people were a little bit more critical. Are they afraid about getting voted down? They shouldn't.
Ad hominem aside, it's been well documented that wealth and success don't make people happy, but there's a lot of evidence (and more coming out every day) that mindfulness and self-awareness actually do.

Your cynicism does you a disservice here.
Nicolas Sarkozy to use G8 presidency to promote net regulation
"Maybe I just use my search engine differently than most"

You definitely do. The majority of consumers tend to ask very broad questions.
FWIW I think it was an absolute edge case bordering on silliness.

if there is a crappy silly caching proxy, an attacker can use websocket to get it to cache things it shouldn't.

I think the fact Chrome hasn't done anything about it, (especially since they can auto update and turn off support tomorrow if they wish), is telling.
I also would say it is the best one out there. It is easily readable most often for me, and the 'generate new captcha' button responds instantaneously anyway.
The Terminator Scenario: Are We Giving Our Military Machines Too Much Power?
Swappa's results using Reddit self-serve advertising (pleased)
Swu said it best:

"Google lacks a feature that it should have added year ago:

A search user who is logged in should have the ability to block entire domains from all future results.

The benefits of this are many. The cost is very low.

Why is this option not already available?
Google - we depend on you. Do it."
Ahh the sugar high!

I think this is a bit of a myth. See this:

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2747/does-giving-sw...

Seems like one early study made the link but the following studies cannot make the link.
Now that's marketing!

Servers aint down anymore btw.
So troll any other language discussion then, without any support? :-)
Wow, not what I was expecting at all.

First, hating your job is not better than merely tolerating it.

Yes, it'll spur you to change... Just enough to bring it to mediocrity. Hating your job never turns into a job that is awesome.

If you have the energy to make it from hate to love, you have more than enough energy to make it from mediocrity to love and sustain it.

From the title, I was hoping for an article about getting things done, even if they aren't the best way. Aim for perfection, but don't insist on it. Get it working and start earning money, and then make it better.

Oh well.
12px Verdana measures 'squinty' on a high-rez display, like that of a new MacBook Air. I always had trouble reading those tiny drug inlays, because they are printed with what looks like ants. And if you blow the page up, it don't look so great -- it was optimized for screen and small sizes.
This is great advice.

When I created http://sleepyti.me, the first place I posted it was here to HN for feedback. Using that feedback, I was able to make signficant improvements and bug fixes. Reddit's /r/web_design subreddit helped me out with the look of the page, and now my site--albeit not a startup--is earning almost enough money to pay my rent. It's not a $200M Heroku buyout, but it's not bad for a small, simple web app.

As others have said in this thread, the most important part is to genuinely want help, feedback and discussion. Don't post to HN to argue with participants, or to try to spam your link enough to get noticed. The value of the HN homepage isn't necessarily the traffic, but the feedback.
I second Highrise. Way better than the CRMs I've used in the corporate world, and cheaper too.
It is very low as a contractor/freelancer (I can get $100/hour, and I am not an extraordinarily good programmer, nor do I live in a high-paying city).
Random dude claims he co-created my app
FeeFighters Raises $1.6 Million To Be The BillShrink For Business Services
I love the Borders experience; is there some way "books + cafe" can work with some other business model? Maybe... an internet cafe, but with Kindles plus a book-binding machine?

Would there be any benefit to a virtual bookstore, where you can first-person-browse the shelves? Sounds silly, but you get some of that serendipitous discovery. It would probably need ridiculously high resolution for book spines to be readable from the distance one normally browses at.

Of course, all that could be done from home if you have an espresso machine.
It looks awesome but is really slow. Speed is King for the success of a site like this. See Reddit, HN, Facebook...
The career pessimists in US should read the comments here. Many in america dont understand how good the system in US is and that is the problem. BTB, i am saying this as a outsider (indian) living in US.
Apple Creates Customizable Access to the App Store for Enterprise