skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Memo to designers of statistical programming languages: You may say “What about tuples, lambda functions, generator objects?” No, shut up. People don’t use that crap. But they do want pivot tables, graphs, and to be able to read in and parse data.

>> And those people aren't Statisticians or Computer Scientists!!!
>> Stick to Excel or SAS or whatever shiny toy you have.
>> Real statisticians need everything from tuples to generators!
>> This is a good example of linkbait (Dropbox is not at all related) article written by a complete noob.
>> This is like telling Amazon to design their S3 API like dropbox.
Yes - this is exactly what we need. I was advisor to a company called TimZon (now snapengage.com) that originally had this idea (and even had threaded discussion), but they pivoted in an entirely different direction. I still need this. Signed up, ready to go when you are!
Tyrannosaurs, you are very right that I got quite lucky taking note of the lawyer speaking before me. I also got lucky that the officer unfortunately was not prepared for traffic court with proper details about his training and calibration for his radar gun.

Flemlord, You nailed it about him not wanting to get into a bigger mess by making a decision based on GPS information. Here's a ArsTechnica article about the ongoing debate between GPS and Radar Guns - http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2008/07/nabbed-for-speed...
Census estimates show 1 in 4 US counties are dying
I'd have to disagree, I did HOP GSOC awhile ago, and It had no discernible impact when I was searching for employment, Most people ask what it is, but are largely uninterested.
William Arthur - Young Electronics Hobbyist and Inventor
EEWeb Interview with William Arthur
Daily Drop Cap
When I was at Google I remember seeing an email on one of the lists from Steve Yegge about GWT. Steve was talking to one of his buddies whose team was using GWT. I don't remember the exact phrasing, but it went something like this:

stevey: I hear you guys are using GWT, how's that working out for you?

buddy: It's kind of like programming while wearing mittens.

stevey: Mittens are good, right?

buddy: Not if you're trying to type.

Make of this what you will.
Good to hear! Thanks for all those clarifications.
This hits home. I was brought into a company to work on a product together with an other new hire, and the company decided that we would go and do a rewrite – for this decision I was partially to blame. Six months later we were stuck with a failing ‘classic’ site that had barely been maintained, angry customers and nothing to show for it. Lessons learnt.
If Libyan unrest spreads, gas could reach $5
It's really about sustainability. Technical debt isn't sustainable. Getting into a situation where you're afraid to fix the old thing because of opportunity costs isn't sustainable. Most often, this is because the cost of testing is too high and/or the cost of the bugs that would probably happen/escape testing would be too high. Quick fixes that get you through the next month at the cost of more technical debt going forward aren't sustainable.

Sustainable practices are smart practices.
Fannie, Freddie bailout: $153 billion ... and counting
Indent by four spaces to get typewriter style

like this.
As a now country-side based programmer, I will definitely use your site :) Thanks!
Boxee Box is running v1.xxx of Boxee software while the downloadable version you can put on your own computer is still at 0.9xxx

The 1.xxx versions have an updated interface.
I no longer have the smart phone I used when I got caught, but my HTC EVO is actually quite accurate. I've pulled up my current speed while in a car (not at the wheel). It was spot on with the number from the car's dashboard.

On that note, my father has a BlackBerry smart phone and his Endomondo GPS tracking app states all sorts of weird things. He went for a few mile long hike and it thought he traveled a few hundred miles across the San Francisco Bay Area. (And yes across the bay.)
Stock 2.2. Not rooted. Settings > Applications > [checked] Unknown sources.
I prefer the term "technical baggage," over "technical debt."

Yes, but sometimes, this stuff actually compounds!
I think you were very smart but I think it was you being smart rather than the GPS that made the difference

What I'm not clear about is why you think the GPS was significant he the judge expressly said it wasn't and gave a perfectly clear rationale for his ruling which didn't include it.
I see this cash discounting frequently, and it makes sense, as it's easier (faster, more certain) for the doctor to take the cash than to deal with billing the insurance company.
Erlang TDD hands on project – WorkerNet part 1
Ask HN: A modern web development workflow?
Hi HN,

I'm embarrassed when looking at my web development work flow, that basically hasn't changed ever since I started programming as a hobby ten years ago. I have never moved beyond writing my code, testing it locally with a standard version of WAMP and then dragging my files into an FTP client, uploading them to some unspectacular web hosting service, as if it was just another folder on my computer.

[Web development was never priority for me (I studied design and I work as a designer now), but I both enjoy working on small project on the side and also believe that it is my duty as a good designer to understand what it means to implement the things that I come up with.]

If I ever wanted to develop something that is more than just a little personal experiment on the side, I would miserably fail, because my knowledge of a serious workflow is just non existent.

So this is where I'm asking for your help: It's hard to learn about something that you hardly know anything about. I don't even know where to start. I would greatly appreciate to get your opinions on a good, not too complex (keep in mind that I'm not exactly trying to build the next big thing here), modern and professional workflow that shows me a more serious side of web development than Notepad and Filezilla.
What are the keywords I can use to start learning about this? What are the programs and technologies that you use yourself and that you would recommend? What are the absolute nonos, that expose an absolute amateur?

Thanks!
charging before you have mass adoption is a recipe for disaster...you should wait until you have mass adoption then make a premium listing and charge for that.

As it stands now, you'll have a dozen or so jobs, interest will fade, and employers will stop posting when they get few resumes
I can definitely do that. As of 2 hours after the post, we've had a good number of referrals and 3 applicants. Jobvite's system does a good job of storing lots of interesting data, so hopefully I can share metrics in a follow-up.

That might go on our dev blog (rather than the main blog) - http://devblog.seomoz.org/
Dear Rand, if you get a software engineer from this submission, I expect a check for $12k at my doorstep. Your friend, Ross.

Seriously, though, good luck. The SEO (and hopefully Hacker News) community wishes you success in this recruitment.
This is the oldest bias there is. Singling out technology is a bit myopic, because as far as I can see, every field is obsessed with what's next. The sciences are an obvious example, the whole point is to discover something new and present it to your peers. Fashion is another easy example, no one cares what happened last year, they want to see this year's collection. Art was the first example I thought of: I once visited a museum in New Zealand filled with beautiful paintings by people no one has ever heard of. The main reason why? Their styles were not original. In each painting you could plainly see which master the artist took after.

Next is exciting and last is boring. That is how it will always be. Hoping that you are going to be written up in a NEWs paper for making your five year old product a little faster and more stable is wishful thinking.

This is not to belittle the importance of incremental improvements to existing products at all. Fixing small bugs and making your software more stable is incredibly important work that will make your customers happy, and make your software great. But it is not the New, so don't be surprised when most people don't care.
There have been lots of players in the pay-per-play streaming business for some time. Netflix was the first one to emerge with a good subscription service.
Perhaps that's because I'm a programmer, and Python is a general purpose programming language.

Exactly. You shouldn't have to be a programmer to do statistics. Just like you shouldn't have to be a network engineer to share files. What if DropBox had stuff in there about http, ports, levels of service, bandwidth, etc... You'd probably say, "Great! I always wnated to specify that DropBox use SSL4.7 draft B over CDMA EvoX.1 -- who wouldn't?"

When you're doing a DSL make it is as simple as possible. And if you have time, in v2, give it hooks to just break out and do crazy stuff... but the 90% case should be simple as pi.
For some of the products we did this and rewriting was a huge success. For some others we did not and the rewrite turned out to be just as terrible as the original version. Then we rewrote it again and it was still a mess.

Assume you're going to get it wrong, and leave yourself an out.

Often the cost of refactoring is much less than the cost of a rewrite. If this isn't the case, then I suggest you look at your language/toolset/coding standards.

Is it possible to get yourself to the point where you no longer have to pay the cost of a complete rewrite? It might even be possible and worth doing a rewrite for the purpose of avoiding future rewrites. (And if you say this is like "a war to end wars," I'll just say that's cute, but wrong.)

Was there ever a "Five Whys" asked about the rewrite?
Lee's Sandwiches.

As for the Burritos, meh. Nobody in the bay area serves a proper breakfast burrito (Eggs, Potato, meat, cheese, and some kind of salsa but not pico, and no beans or rice). Almost nobody serves burritos enchilada style, and green chile is conspicuously absent from almost everything.

That said, the burritos can still be tasty, but they can't hold a candle to anything served in New Mexico. It's like Pepsi vs. Coke... they don't have that special kick.

I'd almost suggest skipping PA, especially the corner of Emerson and Channing, unless you enjoy crammed traffic of people trying to get in/out of Whole Foods.

The really remarkable thing about Palo Alto is how unremarkable it feels.
I don't think acceleration is a torsor, quite, but if you understand a torsor, you understand how acceleration can be absolute even if velocity is not: http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/torsors.html
Let me get this right. Due to convergent needs, dozens of Fabric users post various ideas to the issue tracker and mailing lists. And over the years, some people hack together personal branches solving some of these issues and, despite the incredible amount of time that's passed, they fail to get their work into the mainline branch.

Eventually, one hacker comes along — who, having been a Fabric user for a long time, has independently experienced similar needs and finding no decent solution, decides to take on the task of implementing the various features himself — making sure that it's clean, backwards compatible and fully documented. And your response is to accuse him of trying to take credit for other people's work?!

I can understand your frustrations with the pace of Fabric development, but accusing another hacker of taking credit for other people's work simply beggars belief. Even more incredible is that so many people decided to upvote you! For the record, I'm not taking credit for anyone else's work. I came up with the various ideas myself and you can look at the code to see that it's not based on anyone else's work. Thank you.
Yes, I like the Python also, but you have missed the point. For MBA-types, business types, and scientists the programming concepts are too much to learn. Why should they have to learn programming when their needs are simple? It is not just "keep it simple", it is "keep it simple" for non-programmers.
2,000 Pages of Regulations That Business Hates
Note to other linux users, their video player works brilliantly in linux despite being flash. Waaay better than youtube's fullscreen even. After fullscreening it, I can't even tell it's not mplayer. Very obviously an improvement from the shit netflix situation ;)

Of course your milage may vary, but you can test it out with a free clip first.
Does anybody know how it works with video sites that only have a web interface & flash player? I'm thinking of Tai Seng (http://mytv.taiseng.com/, a Cantonese movie site my wife watches that's based on the same tech as Crunchroll).
Sorry, I respectfully disagree. If the market will bear it, you can charge for a service before "mass adoption"
I live in NYC, I can walk from on side to the other. I have the worst service I have ever had in any state! The public trans is pretty amazing though.
Really nice site. Any chance of EU-based jobs on there in the future, or is it strictly USA?
Oh? Where are you? Would love to chat about Ruby nerdery sometime when we may be in the same place.
I know that's the point, but it's wrong - nobody knew what the USSR was going to do in 1989. I know, I was living in Germany and marrying a Hungarian wife that year, and when the border guards in Hungary said to each other one fine summer day that it wasn't their job to keep vacationing East Germans bottled up away from Western Europe, and that if East Germany had a problem with that they could just come over here and say that, neener neener - none of that had anything to do with the USSR.

And aside from Romania, there weren't any dictators in the story. Hungary had had something like a Brezhnev figure in the 70's, but he was long gone by 1989 and there was just a Parliament. Same with East Germany - there was a Heimatssicherheitsamt (just a little joke there) but there was certainly no dictator.

And the crucial point is this - nobody knew that the USSR was going to wither up and blow away. This caused the USSR to wither up and blow away - it could very well have happened that the tanks would have rolled in by Christmas, but instead, the trucks rolled out and east.

In 1956, things worked exactly in this same manner - the people revolted, and only after a couple of months did the tanks roll in. (My mother-in-law was 10. She told me some stories. It will fry your American brain to realize your mother-in-law was playing next to stacked bodies one winter).

And actually in 1848 it was a similar situation.

Here, the expectation is that America's tanks will roll in - or at least their bombers will scream by overhead. They're not going to, though - and in that point, this wave is very, very much like 1989/90 in Europe. Each individual country has its own story. Some had people with their backs up against the wall, others just ... merged with their cousins.

To your second point - our own Revolution sparked off a few, France being one of them. And the European empires in Africa all fell within a few years of one another. When it happens, it changes maps.
Looks cool. RSS feeds would be nice.
Definitely makes sense if you're already using Redis for something else.
That's a really interesting point. Our concern with free listings was a flood of poor content, which would hide the good ones.
You are aware the Apache + mod_wsgi is the recommended way for deploying Django apps, right?
Agreed, the design is gorgeous.

As said above though, the pricing might be a bit high for a brand new site without a large userbase.
We'll look into it. I believe our job posting editor and credit card info form may prevent it right now.

Good feature request. Thanks!
would love to see an answer to this as well.
Great feature request. We're on it.
Sure, that's a reasonable objection, but look at what our society has accomplished over the past 32 years of my lifetime:

1. The Internet, computers, and everything that comes with
2. DNA Mapping
3. Treatments and cures for hundreds of diseases and other maladies.
4. Private space travel
5. Sending a robot to Mars
6. Taming the elements to provide real natural energy

These are just a few things that get me excited, but the list could go on and on. I just can't think of another time in history when so much happened so fast.
as someone said in a previous "who is hiring" thread, there's a reason why people post their job opportunities on hacker news and not on the dozens of job board websites (hint: it's not because they don't want to pay $75).
not when the service suffers from a chicken and egg problem.

Why would someone pay money to list their job on a site with no traffic?

Why would someone go to a site like that if you only have a dozen jobs?

This can be something good...but they are shooting it in the leg by being greedy
Site looks nice. Right now there aren't a lot of jobs, so a good feature to attract seekers is some way to track jobs as they come in - email/sms/mobile updates, or even a simple RSS feed of jobs. This works well for other infrequent job sites like Top Ruby Jobs.
Export 3D Models as SVG
That was the formalization. Hungarian independence in 1848 was the catalyst (and is still celebrated today; I'm pretty sure that's March 17, but there are so damn many significant dates in 1000 years of Hungarian history that I frankly can't remember half of them).

The Hungarian independence of 1848 was really pretty damned cool, actually. It would have changed the world had it survived.
Whomever makes an iTunes for movies but especially shows that I can pay for and download as soon as they are available on cable and view on my computer is going to get my money.

Unfortunately iTunes in Denmark only has music, so thats a no go (and I don't care to be 2 seasons behind on my favorite shows anyway).

I am happy to put money where my mouth is, but nobody is willing to sell to me on these terms.
Apple looks towards music files that surpass CD quality
Thus hacktivists learn the downside of co-opting a name.

I'm torn between seeing the letter as someone honestly deluded by the Anonymous myth who really thought people would unite behind it or someone cynically parodying the hacktivist-Anonymous attempts to distance itself from the Internet Hate Machine-Anonymous. Both are vastly more plausible than "Westboro did it."
QapTcha create a hidden input name="iQapTcha" filled with a random password. (...) The aim of the drop is to empty this input when the drop is finished. With PHP, just check if the iQapTcha input is empty or not.

Isn't it trivial to defeat? Check if iQapTcha is loaded with the page, and then just empty the hidden inputs filled before your bot writes anything.
Okay, but what's the reason then? ISPs are sitting on their heels?
“The commas in writing S-expressions may be omitted. This is an accident.”

I'm grateful for this accident. The absence of commas is one of the key features that led me to see s-expressions as mapping very nicely into web templates.
Agreed... interesting exploit but actually having it used on me when I chose to be invisible would be a very good reason to just remove someone from my friends list entirely.
We're all over adding RSS.

It's also why we're offering free coupon codes to the first few people who email me (see below).
Generates buzz for your startup, costs less and doesn't involve recruiters. Sounds like a lot of positive. I'd also like to hear about SEOmoz's experience after they fill the positions.

I don't claim to fully understand the challenges of a startup hiring the right folks, but recruiters just leave a bad taste in my mouth. Often they use questionable tactics and you know they are costing the startup a lot of money.

In a vacum ignorant of the realities of the real world, I wish there was a way to rate engineers and startups on all the key factors. For a startup: compensation, prestige, work environment, meeting/working with great people and for engineers: quality of work, ability to get things done, working well with others, etc. The problem of course is that getting a truthful and accurate value for each these factors is almost impossible.
that's a good problem to have...that means you are actually popular enough for people to exploit....then you can introduce the paid pricing.

for now you can easily moderate postings yourself.
Zed Shaw has some guidelines about that http://learnpythonthehardway.org. You'll learn some basic programming in a very good and versatile language. I learned web programming a few years ago. In my opinion, I gained about a 3 weeks head-start in productivity by choosing PHP, but I ended up making up for it for the next 3 years. There are other commendable books geared towards beginner programmers, but only a few that also target web enabled languages come to mind.

JavaScript: http://eloquentjavascript.net/ (I recommend the interactive HTML version).
Ruby: http://mislav.uniqpath.com/poignant-guide/

If I were to begin programming with the goal of working in the web today, I would love that someone pointed me to any of these 3 resources.

Like I said there are other beginner books and online tutorials using languages that aren't usual for the web like The Little Schemer (Scheme). It's always a plus.

You'll need to learn to use a good text editor or an IDE. I'm biased toward Vim, it takes time, but it's a good investment.

You'll need to learn HTML and some CSS. There are countless lists of recommendations out there for best books on x. Just checkout StackOverflow with similar queries for JavaScript, CSS and HTML. e.g. http://blog.reybango.com/2010/12/15/what-to-read-to-get-up-t...

You'll need to learn to interact with databases. You'll need to learn some SQL. However, I've been doing this for quite some time and I've only recently been playing with document oriented databases (aka NoSQL), it is my opinion that there are very few situations where they might not be suitable. Seeing that nothing prevents you from mixing solutions (SQL + NoSQL), I would frankly recommend to a beginner to invest in NoSQL first. Redis, MongoDB, CouchDB are the NoSQL DBs I've played with and would recommend.
I'm in a rural area in west of France :) http://bit.ly/fEjBxk
Love your work guys!
Yes you did in your comments.

http://www.jongales.com/blog/2011/02/14/list-of-content-farm...

user> mail-archive? are you crazy? that site has been around forever & I’ve found more answers there than I can count.

you> What mailing lists are you finding useful on mail-archive that aren’t available elsewhere? Do you ever visit mail-archive directly? I’ve only seen mail-archive clutter up SERP pages, often with the question I have going unanswered. I see no point in duplicating content on Google Groups, only with a significantly worse UI.

The point is, they are all doing the same. mail-archive, osdir, markmail archive mail, place ads next to them. Some provide more features on top but the main idea is archive public content and make money out of it.

You can always use gmane to search apache archives, at least it is ad free.
Then maybe your solution is one that ensures the good ones rise to the top?
I bought a Boxee over the Christmas holidays and have loved every minute of it.

Over the years I've built tons of HTPC's (dating back to 1999) and have had to put up with all of the strengths and weaknesses related to the variety of solutions.

I've loved the array of options in regards to small boxes that make HTPC's mostly irrelevant.

The D-Link Boxee Box is the best overall solution I've used to date. Does it have some problems? Yep -- but they're never really in the way of me doing what I want to do with the device.

It has also had an excellent WAF.

I seriously recommend .. especially if you consume lots of divx/mkv/x264 media.
Reliably Erasing Data From Flash-Based Solid State Drives
To be clear, greed certainly isn't our intent. As Dave (djbrowning) wrote, we're concerned about the quality of the content on the site.

We're also giving away coupon codes right now (see my post below) to drive job posters to the site.