skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
These three arguments against the use of gas street lights in 1878 demonstrate why change is so difficult, even today:

1) Theological: It is an intervention in God's order, which makes nights dark...

2) Medical: It will be easier for people to be in the streets at night, afflicting them with colds...

3) Philosophical-moral: Morality deteriorates through street lighting. Artificial lighting drives out fear of the dark, which keeps the weak from sinning...
If we all knew the answer to this one ...we wouldnt be on y combinator now would we....lots of great links here thanks
broadly I agree with this approach...

I'm not 100% happy with the metaphor of pushing bottlenecks around, but I do like the conceptualization of chasing bottlenecks. It's certainly possible to do this, for example if the parse/analysis code were fairly inefficient but the previous bottleneck was IO, then it's not so much that the bottleneck shifted, it's like you widened one bottleneck and discovered another one.

I model all the bottlenecks as already being there and it's just that sometimes some hide the others. The specific case where you "blindly" optimize code without running it through a profiler first are those cases when the code is still so rough you can just identify bottlenecks by inspection.
It doesn't mean that either!

It's anticipatory action to deal with a known future event.
In some ways, yes, I think it is a good thing. Channeling people into vocations at 18 [US system] or 10-13 [German system] isn't consistent with what is known about human development in general, and brain development in particular [http://hrweb.mit.edu/worklife/youngadult/changes.html] - and that's the scientific part of your question. The human cost of such channeling may be seen even here on HN [http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2238225] where fortunately for the poster he has access to the US educational system.

Who should pay for what is a political question - but in general the US system is pay to play and most students are not subsidized by with public funds (even though their loans may be Federally guaranteed).
GPL-like licenses are still 'open' by OSI standards as well. So yeah, the permissive-license v. copyleft argument isn't the same one as the Free v. Open argument, though perhaps there's some correlation between what views people have on each one.
While I agree that the apps market is a huge new thing, I really don't think it is going to continue to take off with no end in sight. We are in unprecedented times, and I think looking at any prior history really doesn't do it justice. But the notion that apps are taking over the internet is somewhat backwards, internet adoption as a whole is up as well, and fervently increasing.

The big change here is that more and more people are adopting smart phones, and smart phones happen to be app focused. Once the web on the phone is even better, e.g. when companies can build 1:1 web:app experiences, you will see less apps.

On a side note, the whole iOS explosion is going to tail off, there are only so many people that buy apps, and it is not a majority that push that market. I think when you compare iOS to Android app purchase rates, you find iOS in a screaming lead if all things else were equal. There are a lot of reasons for this, but I feel it is more related to who the people buying the devices are. The people buying Androids (the massive amounts now) aren't nerds/geeks like everyone seems to think. No, they are regular people that would have got a feature phone but jumped into the Android platform. Where as iOS users are usually people that have been using smartphones for a while, or even iPod Touches that upgraded to the phone experience.
Origin of the phrase "The Dismal Science"
Late Night Comics Have Sport With Watson
Before my most recent job search (~4 mo. ago) I finally invested the time and effort to break free of Word docs and switch to LaTeX.

Honestly, I spent about a week relearning the basic syntax (it's been years) and learning how to do much more advanced formatting than I had done before.

The effort I put in was worth every single minute. I started with a fairly advanced template and tweaked the hell out of it until I was satisfied with the end result. I now have a resume that is:

1) version controlled in git as text/code (don't underestimate how cool this is)

2) very simple to update or add sections to without worrying about breaking Word's formatting

3) looks stunning, imho

4) got me callbacks from nearly every place I applied to. I feel like the eye-catching resume was a huge part of this

You write code all day long.. formatting a document with it just makes so much more sense once you make the initial time investment.

If a recruiter or job site can't handle the PDF, I don't want to work with them anyway.
I'm 50 years old, and I get confused by "its" vs "it's" from time to time. So one of my bookmarked pages is: http://garyes.stormloader.com/its.html
There you go: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_air_vehicle
I don't understand the appeal. Every single LaTeX-based CV looks exactly the same. The same mediocre serif fonts, the same structure, the same basic layout in every way. I guess there is something to be said for the 'classic' way of doing things -- i'm not saying it's bad per se -- but i certainly don't find it novel or particularly 'gorgeous'.

As far as the ease of use and the typography functions, i find Pages (from the iWork suite) to be more than adequate. The layout that he did would have taken me only moments to re-create in Pages, and although LaTeX has some advanced typography features that Pages and OS X don't, the latter seems sufficient to me for just about anyone's CV.
So mathematics is not even adequate to describe the universe? “Adequate” doesn’t imply ”perfect“ for me.
"In my own time there have been inventions of this sort, transparent windows, tubes for diffusing warmth equally through all parts of a building, short-hand which has been carried to such a pitch of perfection that a writer can keep pace with the most rapid speaker. But the inventing of such things is drudgery for the lowest slaves; philosophy lies deeper...
- Roman poet Lucius Annaeus Seneca (4 B.C.E.-65 C.E.)"

This quote is in a way a direct refutation of the work done by many here in programming, and this perspective has its merits and flaws. But I don't see exactly how its a prediction of anything.
A few people have stopped by the mailing list wondering how much work it would be to add a python generator. You could send a few motivating words in their direction to increase the chances of it being worked on.
Because they get to keep that money and the 0.001 less people are also okay with the agreement.

Life isn't fair.
I've been warned on many occasions that the LGPL is not trusted to cover dynamic languages like Python very well since its verbiage is specific to C linkers and compilers.
> it can't beat what a skilled programmer can do to optimize a parser.

What sorts of clever things does Ry's parser do that Ragel can't figure out?
This fool wishes to reverse the entire science of astronomy; but the sacred scripture tells us [Joshua 10:13] that Joshua commanded the sun to stand still, not the earth.

Whenever I see that quote I picture Martin Luther as the "Get A BRAIN! MORANS" guy.
منتديات ملتقئ العرب
ملتقئ, العرب, كتب,برامج,العاب,كتورنيات,اسلاميات,علوم,ترفيه,ندوات,برمجة,تسالي,تسلية,نقاشات,حوارات,لغات,تعليم
Strange immigration procedures. Long list of banned items (don't even think about bringing a magazine with women in it), and the feeling that they could kick you out in a moment if you looked at them funny.

Nice place, and I loved being there, but I was always nervous going in and out.
It may not be normal, but the startup I was involved in never had to raise money. Were we all founders? Is anyone they continue to hire a founder?
its usually observers that keep such nationalistic score cards; participants just see people and markets.
> amazing how one can abuse the word "free" or "open" in
> either case to mean two very different things

It seems to happen a lot in technology and the naming of bills in congress. It has got to the point where I start to ignore the words.

"Net Neutrality" is the latest phrase that has a lot of meanings depending on who you talk to, but has no actual technical or judicial meaning. I could accept a technical definition that has a meaning, but not this two word label that doesn't. For example, if I said "I was against port blocking or banning protocols except by the end user", it has some meaning.

My definition of these weasel words (tis a shame open and free are among them) is if someone says the phrase "I support X" and it gives me no real knowledge of their actual beliefs.
Agreed.
The cool thing about being the copyright holder is you are free to release things under as few or as many different terms as you want.

I personally prefer to release software under the GPL initially, and then release under other licenses if I want to allow usage in those ways the GPL doesn't permit. Maybe that's a commercial deal with someone, maybe it's just changing the license to bsd, or maybe just making it public domain.

What I can't stand are holy wars about licenses and this whole church of "GPL means you have to give back"... or anyone talking about the "spirit" of these projects. Copyright is copyright, and licenses are licenses, and if someone wants to do a project with multiple developers and not take care of handling copyright assignment issues (in other words, make a mess, or just let hte project become a GPL free-ride) then that's their choice....
There is quite a lot of Haskell dialects... the last one listed here was Atomo (http://atomo-lang.org/) and now another contender. Or simply put Haskell the language is also good at hosting dialects.
Unfortunately, "Open Source" is easier to market than "Free Software". The real benefits of true free software evidence themselves in the end and that's what counts, not what you call it.

Edit: It is however important to distinguish between free software and thinly veiled proprietary software marketed as Open Source.
Or, you could just use "tree":

http://mama.indstate.edu/users/ice/tree/
Nokia continues to hire Qt developers
At some point your startup put a fair market value on its stock. That means equity for new hires had a dollar value when they joined.
To be fair (and tease a bit), one can argue that Apple didn't make a decent /phone/ until this verizon deal :-P
no, but the founders founded something. The emploees just got a job. btw A job that didnt exist before the founders did their thing.
Free software offers the end user benefits that the end user only rarely understands or appreciates.

Open source offers developers benefits that lots of developers understand and appreciate.

Therefore open source is a much better marketing tactic. (Which is exactly what it was designed to be.)
As a class, the rich do not want Joe Average investing in startups. It creates more competition and dilutes the power of their capital. So the rich conspire with Congress to create laws that block Joe Average from these markets.

Most "progressive" regulations treat adult citizens as children and are really designed to lock-in the status quo.
I just made one of these in Python: https://github.com/bradjasper/sprite/blob/master/sprite

Currently it only does fixed-width sprites, but handles the generation of CSS for you.
>"In an ideal world, the user and the developer are one in the same."

My vision of utopia does not include helping my mother debug her cell phone - explaining gmail is bad enough.
Well, if the choice is nothing versus something, then there is a lot of value in the person who took nothing and turned it into something. Employees wouldn't have made anything from the venture without the founders.
Or the child will be obsessed with living up to the high opinion everyone has of him and avoid anything that might make him look dumb.
I was just thinking the other day that you could use a space-filling curve to order a table of geographical locations in a relational database. I decided that I was unlikely to have a problem that would ever justify such an approach. It's nice to know that there's some literature out there already if I do.
I don't think it's about the cost of paperwork. I assume they get to keep the money, and the point with this requirement is that something's actually going to happen in the Stiftung with this kind of money. Wikipedia has more information about the topic[1]. They seem to say there that the 50k€ isn't a strict requirement, but more like a recommendation.

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stiftung#Germany
If I threw together a quick Android/iPhone app that allowed for user contributed geek/hacker/internets quotes that we could all contribute to, would anyone care? There are a couple out there but I'd prefer one community based which had entires that didn't suck. Free of course.
I've never worked in .Net, but I know that in Java there is a huge performance difference when building a long string incrementally. If there are n pieces, using stringbuilder is O(n) while concatenation is O(n * n).

When you're building a large web page, the difference is worth paying attention to.
China’s Largest Social-Network Site Said to Plan IPO
How exactly does someone who takes on very little risk being rewarded with 100k translate into them getting 'fucked?'
What is the best font for blog posts?
Thanks. I mostly posted my last message as a way to get informative responses, which I think this is :) I sometimes like to learn more about a subject matter I'm interested in, while discussing it, so it was late at night and I decided that was a good way to learn a little more -- by overstating my case in my ignorance and getting different viewpoints.

Although I do want to ask one thing ... to answer whether there are treatments to ANYmajor disease that are not monetizable as drugs, you said that besides drugs, there are also vaccines. But aren't vaccines developed the same way -- basically patented by pharma companies? Also, is there a list somewhere of cures developed in the last 30 years? I just have this impression that the pharma company is a big "sponsor" of medicine and that alternative treatments or cures don't really take hold in the mainstream medical community (i.e. when you go to a doctor) ... and that there is very little "official" information about them. So it's hard to figure out what works and what doesn't when you have a disease that may be cured using alternative methods, like some forms of cancer etc.
French universities are a disaster:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/12/world/europe/12france.html
Two Cheers for the Maligned Slacker Dude
You've taken that quote out of context, as the next sentence dispels your fear of having to help your mother debug her cell phone. But, to answer that particular argument:

It can't help the previous generation in any notable way. That ship has sailed.

But, the next generation can be more capable than the current one, assuming we pass on the tools they need and a culture of learning and sharing discoveries. So, don't bother teaching your mother to code, unless she actually wants to learn. Teach your kids and give them the tools they need (which includes a huge variety of source to learn from).
When I was a kid my mom would complain about how the world was out to get her. She didn't frame it that way, but that's essentially what she was saying. One time she was complaining about lawyers because she was charged $300/hr or something like that. I asked her, "why don't you become a lawyer?"

It made sense to me as a 12 year old and still does.
I wasn't aware that progress was being made; nothing would please me more than device APIs in JavaScript. I don't know of any working implementations in the field, though.
Almost certainly a probability. You could probably prove that it's not worse than a certain amount, because it won't jump the farthest distance every time in anything but a truly trivial graph, but a value like that is unlikely to be an actual limit.

A reason for my reasoning: they visit things in a certain order. It's therefore possible to design a path that falls directly on non-optimal points along a certain order of that curve; I'd guess you could get multiple times the shortest length, instead of just 25% greater. But you can get a new path by simply increasing / decreasing the order of the curve, so running through a few iterations could probably get you an exceptionally-good result for the sort of speed it provides.
Does "You are what you eat" apply to developing?
I thought Haskell was a strict dialect of Haskell.
If they only called it Liberating Software, they wouldn't have had this happen. After all, open source software is also free (as in, costs nothing). But liberating software sounds like it confers freedom on the person -- actually liberating them.

Remember, branding is important.
This isn't about who is more valuable, this about who took the risk.

Employees take little or no risk in 99% of cases. You are not taking a risk making 75% of your max pay at Google/Facebook/Zynga/Twitter by going to a startup. You are taking a 25% haircut to be part of something new/small/etc.

However, starting something from scratch, incorporating and putting your reputation on the line is a major risk. If you are the creator you carry the lifetime risk/reward of your startup.

The founder(s) of Friendster, PointCast and Webvan will always be remembered a certain way. As will the founders of Twitter, Groupon, Yahoo and Google.

The employees that come after them do not carry this personal risk/reward issue. They can always say "I joined Freindster and it was a great learning experience."

The founder of Friendster will have to explain for all time why they were first and failed so horribly. How they missed the opportunity to be MySpace, LinkedIn or Facebook.

That's the real difference in my mind: personal reputation risk.
Running On Empty: The Failure to Teach K–12 Computer Science in the Digital Age
Reading the comments, it looks like the "hacker" part is spooking some bean counters. I wouldn't worry about it.
It doesn't; rather, it's the weird result of people transposing value judgments on purely economic phenomena.
This is the key. For founders who are not intrinsically fundable, an incredible amount of risk is removed between the time of initial founding and when a third-party assigns a value to the company. 1000x seems reasonable.
The human brain requires less energy than a light bulb
I'm of the opinion that the argument that we shouldn't optimize without measuring is only true to a degree.

Most of my experience is with building engineering software/tools using C++, so the considerations may differ with different types of development, but sometimes I've found that the "don't prematurely optimize" philosophy can turn into "don't think about performance considerations when writing the code".

I would prefer that my developers use their judgement to assess what approach provides a good balance of performance and maintainability (even if that judgement can sometimes be wrong) and then possibly circle back to profile/optimize their code using more objective measures. The problem is that in practice, there's often not time to circle back and perform proper profiling. In those cases, I'd rather have the developer's imperfect judgement-based performance tweaks in place than none at all.
A sure-fire way to beat a Ragel parser is to look ahead several characters and test the limited possibilities that are present when a language has literal strings like GET and POST. You can essentially fall back to extremely fast string searching algorithms in certain places.

Ragel assumes character-by-character parsing and it's difficult to generate fast code that looks ahead without running into buffer block boundaries. It could be done though.

You can also use character classes to reduce the number of tests. Ragel doesn't try to figure those out.
This is true, but I would also like to point out how many people became web developers because they could look at the source code being fed to the browser -- through its View Source menu item. That menu item alone made website code basically open source (very few websites obfuscated it). You could see HTML, CSS and Javascript out in the open.

Certainly, free software is a grand revolution in the principles that guide innovation, and protect people's use of the software. But the game is won often by making better tools to actually make the open source happen. Look at git and github. Look at the practical system set up by linux developers before git. Look at wikipedia and the wiki. I could go on.

I have a big respect for the ability of better tools to change people's behavior patterns and habits, and over time change the world.
Of course it's fair: it was determined by the market, no?
It doesn't matter. Your most dedicated readers are reading you in their feed readers, so they won't see the effects of your stylesheet.

Oh, ok, it depends. What image are you trying to get across? What feelings are you trying to evoke?
In my experience, tramp was even more reliable than sshfs. Both need work before they are truly effective solutions.

Though the latency of my satellite connection outweighs the shortcomings of sshfs. The thing about tramp is that where sshfs hangs up directory listing and file loading, tramp regularly hangs up the editor. (And tramp should really turn off autosave by default.)
Ask HN: What do you use for web meetings?
Whether for clients or with team members what web software do you use for meetings?
This is boneheaded and will never happen. No startup will make "comprehensive government wiretap ability" one of their first product priorities.

If they are forced to then it'll result in companies moving to countries that don't have silly restrictions like this.
The article only deals with equity, which isn't the only way to compensate people. In equity terms, the founders are worth whatever they choose because they created the company: 100% of the equity is theirs to give away on the terms they decide.
Continuation-Passing Style in Clojure
Lemonade has actually been rolled into compass in the beta. It is highly recommended to use the compass beta over the lemonade gem now.
This pattern is more common than you realize. Anytime the government introduces a subsidy, from farm bills to mortgage deductions to limits on the number of doctors, it hugely benefits those with an existing stake in that market. The value of the subsidy is quickly capitalized into the market-- farmland prices escalate with the subsidies, for example. As a result, new entrants get none of the benefit of the subsidy, but instead get to pay higher, distorted prices to enter the market to provide or buy that good or service. Government subsidies not only cheat the public at large, but even in a specific industry they reward the current stakeholders and punish the next generation of stakeholders.
"Valuable" isn't the right word - because the article is being used for current compensation and equity comparisons but the justification is past events. In the present, it is quite possible that a founder could be detrimental to a company (negative value) while an employee could be nearly irreplaceable (I've even read rumors of such situations here on HN).

The question is one of compensation - which is a fool's game, e.g. are founders really 2000x more valuable than 3rd grade teachers?
As he admits, "Open source is a development methodology; free software is a social movement." A comparison of the two is apples-to-oranges.
I think that in the future, I wouldn't expect everyone's kids to be know enough to provide patches for software they use. Rather, there has to be a responsive community of developers around the product, with a good TOOL (like a bug tracker) which the kids could use to report a bug and anther TOOL to capture the bug in the app and send the extra info.

While everyone would have the freedom to contribute patches, most people aren't going to be educated along this line, or know the product very well. It is the tools that we must improve, although the principles of software freedom enforced in the GPL help protect people.