skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've worked on an awful lot of teams and projects over the years. This discussion and the avoidance or embracing of the process flavor of the month, is not new. Agile has been around since people stopped drinking the RUP cool aid and came up with XP (a process that keeps meetings short by standing on your feet!). RUP lost its own gravity when Rational then IBM acquired the IP and turned it into another legendary white whale, from the origins of humble Objectory.

The one great thing I learned from RUP, a cocktail napkin makes a great realization document. Especially when originally served under a cool drink.

Communication and being clear on what the tree-swing looks like and needs to do is all that matters. Your companies will develop culture as they grow based on their pain points and their experiences.

I take the approach of "automate, automate, automate". I also enforce regular activities in intervals of by day of the week. I insist on profiling. I insist on peer code review; which can be done in the IDE or with a cocktail napkin, but I like my developers to be able to communicate what they've just written in case they get hit by a bus.

As a leader, not just the coder, you DO have to be concerned that you're writing something that can hold a the weight of a business on top of it. Would I worry about TDD or BDD before my Series A? No. But I would go back and reiterate and reinforce everything written prior, shortly after.
My guess is that we're seeing the results of the tech blogger echo chamber. These self proclaimed experts need methods to legitimize their existence and quantify their awesomeness. What better way than a big fat number on the one end-all-be-all site? See also: Scoble was biggest contributor on Quora.

Of course, it's all ridiculous (for now). Most people in the real world have better things to do than troll around on Q&A sites hoping for karma. Until someone figures out how to convert karma into a competitive paycheck, this is all nonsense.
Actually, I think StackExchange is doing just fine.

Going for the vertical communities (which have some overlap, no doubt) is a very clever strategy - it works.

Pray tell exactly what Quora is achieving with its strategy. Right now it looks like an over-hyped version of Stack Exchange - Startups.
What about the comments that are on 1 point and you mean to upvote them but then misclick and they go to zero? At the early stages of discussion that kind of thing can have a huge impact.
I think online reputations work and matter a lot in Silicon Valley and the startup world, but anywhere else, not that much.

Also, the attack on the "other" SE sites is lame. I regularly visit and am active on the Physics SE, and Quora's got nothing on it.
Helsinki's Underground City
Hugunin made his farewell to Microsoft.

http://hugunin.net/microsoft_farewell.html
Communities that are so large they require webs of trust to be managed hardly deserve to be called communities. No matter what you call them, they don't offer what I'm looking for.
Finding aligned proper names is a nice way of coming up with humorous cross-cultural analogies. Two I recently ran across reading Danish newspapers were: "Jyllands-Posten" translates to "CNN", and "brøndbyfans" translates to "red sox fans".
Take 1000 mg Metformin twice a day. Walk 30 minutes every day. You'll be fine.
Project Demo that made me go Crazy
Interesting project Demo
While the table in the ad does not say which carrier for the 3G plan, the ad does contain a Verizon logo.
I think you have to consider journalists as well as "people looking to sell books".

I don't have anything constructive to add about the number of professional journalists, but I think they belong in this discussion as well as the "trying to sell books" crowd.
Pylint (or maybe it was pep8) has told me not to make dicts default arguments when running it against my code, but didn't explain why. Thanks for the post.
Ohhh poor baby, isn't he posting his name on every possible forum on the Internet talking about how he, the biggest "hacker" of all time hacked the PS3 anymore? Not funny anymore eh? I think he deserves what he got, that's what happens when you're young, stupid and looking for fame.
The Man Who Conned The Pentagon w/ Vaporware
Email works just fine because mail uses an MX record (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MX_record). (Sort of related: You can also CNAME the records that MX records point too.)
I don't think I have to point out that this is yet another ad hominem.

But, be that as it may, I'll just say that yesterday was the first day I've even heard of techrights, when I found their site through a google search.

And, honestly, I don't even care much about Mono. I'm just very suspicious of anything originating from Microsoft, and the techrights and FSF articles support these (well founded) suspicions.
Show HN: My weekend project, written on Friday and Today
No. Work on commission. Publish in serial format. If you're popular, you can demand an advance or a retainer.

Lest we forget, many great authors (Dostoyevsky and Dickens) published their novels in serial form.
it's a gotcha but it makes perfect sense once you understand why it works that way - i.e. the difference between evaluating a function definition and calling it.
Yes, but not often.
That would make that the only place in which Python has referential transparency, though. It may be a quirky side-effect of consistency, but it is consistent.
Use These Android App to Keep Track Of The Cricket World Cup
I wasn't the previous poster.

There are two or three coffee stands in the town I am from. These are 20 square feet. There are also McDonald's drive throughs. (McDonald's has won nearly every blind taste test.)

By going to a shop I am choosing ambiance in addition to conveniece. They offer little else over any other method of getting coffee (which all generally offer just convenience).

I have no interest in sitting in a bookstore. There cannot be a 20 square foot bookstore that offers only convenience. So yes, I buy my books online. (Actually on a Kindle.)

Bookstores are going out of business because the ambiance they are selling to compete with coffee shops comes with much greater costs. Guys like the first poster are not putting them out of business. The internet already has.
"a natural outcropping of python's late binding, "names are references" variable model, and closure mechanisms, which provide a consistency to the language that is often crufted up in others"

hm... that's debatable. The implementation could have just as easily chosen to evaluate the default arguments each time the function is invoked and that decision wouldn't have broken any of the existing mental models of variable binding/closures.
Bye Bye Facebook
It's not about beauty, it's about the ramp-up speed. When Perl was invented, it was really easy to get up to speed if you were already coding a lot in `sh` and `awk` and `make`. You sort of already know the meanings of the punctuations. These days, the most widely recognized punctuations students and other new programmer know are math symbols, so learning a new language that reuse these are far easier than learning Perl. After all, it's far easier to learn and remember French grammar and spellings if you are an English speaker, than to learn Chinese. For this reason alone, I stay clear from languages with a lot of punctuation symbol abuse, i.e. Ruby, Perl, Scala.

Don't get me wrong I don't dismiss the continuing importance of Perl, that's why I was very careful in my wording (minus a spelling mistake). I don't think there's even 1 metric we can agree on when measuring language popularity (Python is ranked 4th on TIOBE and 6th on StackOverflow and there's exactly 0 job posting for it in Hong Kong), so never-mind 1 that tells me definitively that Perl is coming back. After all, for it to come back, it must have gone away before. Ever thought of why? Even if it is coming back, what's the significance? We've had other viable choices for a very long time now. Python, PHP are all doing a very good job that Perl was traditionally good at. Hell, I'd even throw in Ruby as another viable choice too.

Arguing success stories is kind of pointless too, theoretically I can write anything in any Turing-Complete language, so for all I care I could have written Blekko and DuckDuckGo in assembly.
My advice would be to be very clear in your writing (e-mail exchange, cover letter) what the value is that you're going to bring the company. In this case, it seems like you want to sell yourself as a junior dev - someone who can do the coding that is busywork for the other devs - and you really want to stress that you'll be low maintenance for them.

If you can prove that you bring more value than you'll take, they should give you the internship.
I went through a semi-hostile management buyout a few years ago. Many, many people offered assistance. Some came in a presented themselves as potential management associates, and saying they'd require a salary that was about the same as my unpaid back-pay from the previous 8 months.

Without exception, all the people who insisted on paperwork were a complete waste of oxygen.

Without exception, all the people who were worth working with did business on a handshake.
So when you say "minimize the latency of validating features" do you mean that you want to reduce the time between building something and getting feedback from your users? Can you elaborate on this point? What is latency-oriented engineering?
I think if you follow thru on the article and read the associate links (8 alternatives) you'll see that i do more than say "skip college".

For me, its about how one lives a good life. People forget that there are three basic ideas:
A) how to find happiness
B) how to eradicate unhappiness
C) how to have a smooth, daily existence

What I try to show in this article (and the articles I link to) is that the above can be (not WILL BE but CAN BE) achieved without going to college. And, btw, since I was able to achieve some degree of happiness through entrepreneurship I have some expertise in saying this.
Dumb question: I went to http://www.quora.com and it's asking me to sign up. I know that the actual questions and answers are publicly viewable but is there any obvious way to get to them from the home page?
Google is really an engineering company. SO they dont emphasize design as much as you might. Which is good because they have some cool projects but bad in that theyre applications tend to be really ugly.
As noted in the comments, DON'T use

stuff = stuff or []

because if you pass an empty list, you'll get a new one rather than mutating the one you passed.

stuff = stuff if stuff is not None else []

is wordy, but at least it's correct.
Node.js Bittorrent client in 401 sloc
I've been interested in doing collaborative music production in the browser for a while, and this looks to be a solution for the server and transport role. Where I see a problem is in building the client for creating music in the browser.
Currently apps like these are being built in Flash[0], as Javascript lacks a reliable method for playing audio in a strictly timed manner, in the browser. Chrome's Web Audio API[1] and Firefox's Audio Data API[2] will hopefully remedy this, but a stable, unified standard looks to be a while off.

[0] Audiotool: http://audiotool.com/app

[1] http://chromium.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/samples/audio/speci...

[2] https://wiki.mozilla.org/Audio_Data_API
It’s not a good idea in Python. There are legitimate reasons to pass falsy objects as function arguments.
I was going to make a similar comment :-)
I wrote this tool after seeing a number of beginner Facebook developers complaining about how difficult it is to set up test users. The plan is to keep on adding more helper tasks (e.g. banning users from apps - and I'm open to other ideas!) as time goes on.

Right now, it asks for the Offline Access permission purely because managing access token expiry dates is a low priority - I want to see if anyone will use it first :) Once a few people do, I'll sit down and write the session management properly :)
X-Ray Vision for Hotwire Deals: BidGoggles
Your post is implicitly based on the premise that languages have some sort of ordained-by-Nature sunset process and that Perl's continued insistence on living is some sort of affront against the Natural Order. That's an awfully large premise to slip into a post without justifying it; one could plausibly claim it to be outright begging the question. If a language continues to evolve and clean itself up (and not merely grow without bound), who's to say it can't live for a very long time?
Up-voting and down-voting are an unnecessary and in fact harmful ornament to reasoned agreement and disagreement.

I'm not talking specifically about up/down voting or even about karma, really. Karma systems are just the closest existing thing to what I'm thinking of, so far. (That and maybe Twitter.)

If you're posting under your real name in a community of your professional peers, all the external incentives are already aligned for you to make a positive contribution. Karma is a paltry substitute.

Agreed. The trade-off is that you've limited the pool of members. Jacques is wondering, in part, if there was a way to get the benefits of private communities with less of this trade-off. What if there was a way to somewhat merge similar small groups where, "external incentives are already aligned for you to make a positive contribution?" It seems like there must be a way to attract such groups or have them emerge from a larger population, then find similarities between such groups and flow information between them.

Another important feature of a private community is that you can share the kind of information that is normally only divulged over beers. This cannot be overestimated.

Again, agreed, but what is going on with, "information that is normally only divulged over beers?" What are the dynamics here, and is that compatible with a "Black Sun" sort of forum? By compatible, I don't mean that the forum has to have all of the same dynamics. (How could it, absent actual beer?) Could a site with the qualities I described become a useful form of offline communication for such associates? Evidently yes, since similar offline communication is already implemented in the form of your private forum.
The road to Quantum Computers 
Unlike conventional computers which by their nature perform one task at a time, quantum computers’ strong ace will be that they will be able to perform an unimaginable large amount of computational tasks in parallel at each time cycle of their operation; this technological knack is to be made possible by quantum mechanics’ strange laws which govern each and every element of our subatomic world.
An iPad is not a significant prize. A professional developer earns an ipad every day or two at their day job, and that is guaranteed even for the fourth best work product of the day.
When foundry co-designs your ASIC, typical effect on pricing is that IP licensing costs actually go down.
Mathoverflow is awesome. I don't know if the stack exchange guys run it (it certainly uses their software), but it is already professionally relevant for practicing mathematicians.
No of course, but those are research projects. I assume you're talking about a business, which implies commercial. Is the govt going to fund your business like they (directly or indirectly) fund these research projects, or will there be paying clients/customers? Who will need to crack encryption keys (or whatever..) often enough to pay you instead of setting up their own cluster? Ads make money because they make the advertisers money. Is searching for gravitational waves, or ET going to make someone money?
How did the rewrite go? That always scares the crap out of me.
Ask HN: What can hackers do about the massacre in Libya.
If your opinion does a 180 within 60 seconds, though, it's probably for the better that your old one doesn't count.
I'm also a college junior and have been looking to gain development experience. I recently just had success emailing a startup in my area using their jobs@startup.com address. I listed some of my skills, gave a link to a project that I did, and told them why I was passionate about what they were doing. The CEO ended up emailing me back the same day.

If anyone else is in this position I'd recommend trying this first since it's very good way to express interest in a possible job opportunity with a company.
I beg to differ.

http://tauday.com/
the core business of the university, education

Bzz, wrong. Education is a college's job. A university's core business is research. Education is just a part-time money making scheme to keep the university alive.
Damn... If only I'd seen this yesterday..
(Old) How to Induce Gamification in Your Productivity System
Cloud Business News Roundup: February 14 - 20, 2011
Click one of the links down the bottom, the other pages have their infamous search/ask/etc input.
Bloggers, publishers and the Apple lockdown | Monday Note
The best approach I can see is using a solution like: https://github.com/scottschiller/SoundManager2, which will give you the highest level audio API available in the browser environment, and gracefully degrade to a flash fallback for older environments.

Also, if you are running a local instance of the loop, you can just use node.js to play audio with almost no latency.
FWIW, Perl 6 implicitly treats default values as closures, and calls them when no argument is passed that could bind to the optional argument.

That way you get a fresh array each time, and you can even use defaults that depend on previous arguments:

sub integrate(&integrand, $from, $to, $step = ($to - $from) / 100) { ... }
Point 5 is especially important: "The least acceptable part of Apple subscription policy is the impossibility for a publisher to propose a cheaper subscription elsewhere. This is probably the most legally challengeable aspect of the newer terms of service"
It's always difficult to know exactly what people do with the software once it's out there "in the wild". Many of my projects are just curiosities with no other contributors, but a few have had many improvements submitted - some of them quite substantial. My guess is that if the GPL projects used BSD this would not make a big difference, but it might limit the ability to combine my own code with other GPL'd algorithms. The predominance of GPL as a FOSS license means that adopting it basically maximises the potential usefulness of the code, and since IANAL I'm not really qualified to judge compatibility between different sorts of licenses.
I'm unaware of any hash table implementations which successfully insert elements in absolute constant time in the event of collisions.
A) I did read the link on "8 alternatives", which also didn't really talk about becoming a better entrepreneur through skipping college. I stand by my assertion that the title you chose for promoting your website here on HN is misleading.

B) I have cystic fibrosis and so does my 23 year old son. I have figured out how to get us well so I think I have some expertise for talking about stuff like that. So far, it's gotten me accused of being a liar, charlatan, and snake oil salesman and gotten me thrown off of at least one CF list. So good luck with claiming "I'm an entrepreneur and I'm happy" as a credential. (A college degree generally carries more weight than that. Yes, I think it bites...)

PS, rather than continue to argue with me, you would have been better served by changing the title on HN to something more representative of the actual content. You might want to step lightly. Getting flagged and possibly ultimately banned here won't achieve your obvious goal of promoting your site (and upcoming book).
You're right, thanks.

I'm giving my nod (for whatever that's worth) to the Stack* sites for putting questions right on the home page
Yes, it's an interesting set of problems. It makes sense to discuss them on a startup-oriented community website like Hacker News.

My humble suggestion is to step back and look at simpler, non-scaleable ways of building communities that are proven to work. Not everything has to scale, technologically or sociologically. I'm not trying to quell discussion but to offer an alternative point of view.
You're a little harsher than I would be but you make a good point. The problem with online reputation on this type of system is most people won't verify the answers before they upvote them. At the same time an insular community creates a competition for status. So you get people who try to find and answer questions as quickly as possible regardless of whether the answer is right or not.

As someone who goes to Stack Overflow regularly I see this situation all the time. It goes like this...

1. Person asks a question (e.g. "I need to build a service that will serve school districts in Los Angeles County. How do I go about doing that?")

2. Someone comes along and answers the question with something that seems right (e.g. "Here are a bunch of links on building REST services...")

3. That answer gets upvoted and the answerer gets his reputation boosted

4. Later someone comes along with the right answer (e.g. LA Unified requires all services to be WSDL discoverable so you need to look at SOAP"). But it's too late because the question's already scrolled into the abyss.

So the guy who gave the wrong answer gets a better reputation and the guy who got the right one gets nothing (and the person who asked the question likely took the upvoted answer and didn't check back so they waist untold hours on the wrong thing)
Being physically active is a state of mind, and you can see opportunity where ever you live to do that. You don't have to take time out for planned exercise or pay big bucks for a personal trainer to be active.

For example:

- Automatically take the stairs instead of the elevator when going up, even to climb 5 floors. Or perhaps, if you have to go 20 floors up, climb 5 floors by stairs, and then take the elevator. Use the elevator only for going down, to save your knees (gotta protect those knees).

- Walk to the store when possible. If you have to visit two stores that are a ten minute walk apart, leave the car at the first store, walk to the second one, and walk back.

- Take detours, on foot, on purpose. Take walks around nice neighborhoods if you happen to find yourself in one (perhaps visiting a relative?) and have fifteen minutes to spare.

- Buy only the big items in bulk and go shopping for fresh produce every two days on the way home from work with a carry bag. Carry your groceries on your arm inside the store instead of pushing them around in a cart. Fresh fruit and vegetables are expensive, but if that's all you buy on a daily basis (buying everything else the cheap way), it's affordable for most people in most places.

- If you don't have the time or skills to cook fresh food, get smaller, cheaper ready-made meals and offset them with large fresh fruit desserts (anyone can peel an orange), and regular fruit and vegetable snacks. Anyone can find healthy foods they like eating, and most people can find ones that fit in their budget.

- Involve friends and relatives. Find active things to do instead of just meeting up at bars or homes. I heard earlier today of two friends, a stand-up comedian and a lawyer, who take lakeside jogs on sunday afternoon to discuss politics with each other.

Anyway, maybe none of those things apply to your personal situation, and I respect that. But I do think that opportunity finds the opportunistic. I'm sure that everyone, literally everyone, can find ways to be more active and healthier than they already are. Even if it's something small and ridiculous (like carrying groceries instead of pushing them), it's still better than nothing.
Commercial opportunities include protein structure prediction for drug design, brute-force attacks for breaking security, and various simulations (geophysics, finance).