skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
it isn't irrational to do either.

reading reviews isn't about the power of the dollar you're spending, its about ensuring the purchase you're making is the one you want. you can spend money and be assured that you're buying something worth the money. but the question is whether you actually want that thing that is worth the money you're spending.

comparing prices is getting less worthwhile, especially if you take a lot of time to do so. but it can be worthwhile depending on the case.
I believe this was said about django (and a few other frameworks) when you write a site with django you are writing it in django and not python. well, that was the gist of it anyway. I didn't like django myself, I found it fragile, and I don't want my app to break unless I start dropping tables, or deleting code. a insert into should not break my app.
Offtopic. I'm curious: Why is the comment by ltbarcly dead? Doesn't seem particularily offensive.
Keycard? Seriously?

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html

Here we come.
You’re Never Too Old To Become an Entrepreneur
If you believe that the market has zero friction (and I don't think you'll find any economists who believe that) then there is no point comparing prices.

Reading reviews is worth doing for non-commodities -- which is to say, reading reviews is worth doing whenever reviews exist. You won't find reviews comparing bricks of 99.9999% pure gold with each other; there would be no point. But you certainly do find reviews of computers: The best computer for one person is not necessarily the best for someone else -- computers are not commodities.
Unfortunately, Nietzsche is dead.
Do you mean this?

> we're adding checksums to proactively detect corruption of system state messages

I dobut that means they're actually adding them together, they're adding checksums to the process to ensure data corruption has no effect. Or am I misunderstanding you?
Eyeball hacking
Intel: Human and computer intelligence will merge in 40 years
The thing about football quickness and reaction time, is that it is nearly all physical reaction speed. You rarely think at all. You've just repeated in practice what you need to do so many times that once you're on the field it becomes automatic. Running backs and receivers for the most part just need to be able to get downfield really, really fast. The offensive line needs to memorize more plays and formations, so a few points higher on the Wonderlic might help them in that regard. But once you're on the field, you aren't "thinking" in the sense that most people use the term. I don't think the Wonderlic scores even figure very highly into what makes a great football player. If anything, the scores are used by the coaches and trainers as a metric for figuring out the best approaches to teach the players what to do.

note: I played tight end throughout high school. I'm a bit distraught that this infographic suggests that the offensive tackles might have been smarter than me.
So I have an idea that I could develop myself but I do IT consulting fulltime.

I'm not sure how Ycombinator views it, but I think you should get some skin in the game. I know it can be tough to jump ship and work on your startup full or even half time, but you can't give yourself any excuses. (Like working IT consulting full time).

That said, outsourcing your development is a fairly common practice.

There are a number of boilerplate "work for hire" and "intellectual property agreement" forms available, but if you're serious about this idea, you could not spend your first $500-$1000 any better than getting a competant attorney to write you one.

You might be able to rely on oDesk or E-lance to provide you with protection. The people who outsource through those platforms are required to agree to the standard "work for hire" terms and conditions.

I'd go the lawyer route, though. If your idea gets traction, you'll eventually need one anyway.
I'm a big fan of the "build a framework that you'll never use" philosophy. That isn't a joke. You aren't going to be able to match the quality of the thousands upon thousands of hours that have gone into something like Django, but making a framework will make you a better framework user. It makes you understand the flow, what building hooks is like, etc. It also means that you'll be more ready to dive into some of the framework code than someone who just uses a framework.

But that's just my opinion from seeing so many people not understand how frameworks work and try to use them.
Surely there is a technological solution to this. Perhaps a thought purifier?
There's a fine line between madness and genius, and as far as I can tell, this seems to be exactly on the line. I think I might have to download the source...
Now I'm no Erlang master, but why not do:

X1 = baz(bar(foo(X))).

Or, if you want to be fancy:

X1 = lists:foldl(fun (F, A) -> F(A) end, X, [fun foo/1, fun bar/1, fun baz/1]).

Obviously the fun thing about the second way is you could have code make up any arbitrary list of one argument functions to apply in succession. If you know what functions you are going to use ahead of time, then the first way is much clearer.
iPhone has the App Store, through iTunes, and is already demonstrating that people will pay money to install those apps on their phones. Facebook apps plan to make money how exactly?
Right now - we're working on it!
This is why book publishers are so excited about textbooks being distributed on the Kindle (or similar device). It virtually eliminates the used book market. Of course, if the book is just static content, it's much easier to pirate in electronic form than paper form.
While I'm not a big fan of PHP in general, the fact that you feel/felt comfortable with ExpressionEngine could mean that a related PHP framework would be a good choice. CodeIgniter (http://codeigniter.com) is similar to what EE is built on, and EllisLab is going to have the next version of EE built directly on CI. It's a really slim framework that doesn't force much on you, so you would get acquainted with PHP in general as well.

Along with that, I think it is a good idea to play with a number of languages and frameworks. To me, the best test is building a simple application in them, a todo list or the like. Try things like Django, Rails, Merb, CodeIgniter, Cake, and others to see what feels most natural and fun to you.

Be sure to also think of what else matters to you about a language/framework. Check out communities, plugins and modules, and the documentation.
If you want to go the Erlang route (highly recommended, but be prepared for a bit of a learning curve if you are not familiar with functional programming) then you would do well to look at the Scalaris project (fault-tolerant, distributed, eventually consistent key-value store that can use paxos for consistent transactions) or the Kai project (similar scope and goals.)

You can also probably get pretty far with the built-in mnesia database.
I agree with you on this, but only if you already know how to write good code. If you're learning how to develop first (or re-learning) I think that it's a road that's going to be paved with frustration.
So essentially, what they're saying is, Erlang doesn't let you program in C? So much for that language, eh? Psh.

-

I don't have any real Erlang experience, but in every functional language I've ever touched, doing that would involve function composition, not manually stuffing the value thus far into a box. (Wasn't Erlang at some point based on Prolog, btw?)
I recommend open sourced textbooks. They are often of a much higher quality, they are written by people who have a true passion for the subject, and most of all they are free.

Check out textbookrevolution.org.
Equinix went through a 32:1 reverse stock split. The founders pretty much got wiped out of its stock.

http://sec.edgar-online.com/2003/05/15/0001012870-03-002591/...

In his own words:

"Well, to clarify, I still provide consulting to Equinix. As for the money I made from that venture, suffice to say the reverse split nuked my founder's wealth for morbid. There was enough to secure my kids' college education (if they need money from me, who knows), and enough to buy me a new minivan. Anything left is for my parents who deserve every penny. I never said I had a desire to be a VC..."

http://blog.adelson.org/2006/09/im_going_to_try.html
Cyber-nationalism: The brave new world of e-hatred
It's possible you're right in general, but as a counterexample note that the working code you and I are using to post these comments was written by someone whose attitude toward existing Lisp dialects was critical enough to make him want to write his own.
"The problem is that the average textbook sells a small run of copies, and doesn't benefit from economies of scale"

WHAT??? for example, stewart's calculus book has been used for twenty+ years all over the english speaking world. you find me a ny times bestseller that has had that kind of run
After months of work, the new Delicious is almost ready to come out of the oven.
Where does the 'drive' come from?
I agree.

However, anyone could make a digg like algorithm trivially. The value to digg is the userbase.
its amusing how harvard stanford and princeton with endowments of like forty quadrillion dollars shake and quiver in the face of a thirty person publishing firm.

the big schools could trivially "nationalize" textbooks with online material. it would be cheaper just to buy a new laptops for students who don't have the means to access the data
What?

a) Django is a framework in Python. If you are writing a site in django, you are writing it in python. I don't understand what you mean about 'writing it in django'.

b) How is django 'fragile' and how does your app break when you insert?
"And you might say that it's their loss, and I'd probably agree with you."

Indeed I would say that. But there's another side. When a language allows for slippage in conceptual integrity for the sake of familiarity, everyone loses.

For example, I'm a big fan of Ruby, but there a number of places where consistency in language axioms was dropped so as to supposedly make it more intuitive. It does so at the cost of everyone having to remember both the fundamental concepts (e.g., "the last expression evaluated in a method is the return value") and the exceptions ("except when the method name ends with '=').

Lazy people like me think that's just extra work. :)

I don't know Erlang, but I suspect that if some form of "multiple assignment that isn't really the multiple assignment you're used to" were allowed, people would still have problems with it, but they would be harder to understand and resolve based on core language principals.
canada's immigrants tend to be more educated. this isn't much of a stretch, the people crossing the border at arizona in 110 degree heat tend to be some of the most disadvantaged from their own society
It seems like there are two aspects to the proposed scenario when there might not need be. The fact that a web based list is always up to date, and the idea that it is publicly readable. These obviously do not go hand in hand, so it seems like a good medium would be controlling access to the digitally managed list.

To answer the question of public ACLs, it really just depends on the situation. In a purely physical setting, it may not be as big of an issue, although it does open the possibility for impersonation and forgery. In a digital setting, it can be a very bad idea in cases where brute forcing and the like are a possibility.

Also, not terribly important, but on the last point regarding physically accessible servers: They are never really secure.
I have a problem with the assumption that "publish or perish" is killing the universities. The assumption is that one has to publish a lot of material. That is not true. Gauss had an excellent quote that applies here, "few but ripe." This point behind the quote is publish a little, but let what you publish be truly brilliant. Do you honestly think Harvard's math department would not want the person who manages to prove the Riemann hypothesis if that person also only had two other published papers? The answer is resounding, "hell no." Academia is about quality, not quantity.
Useful tip: depending on your major, buying international editions of books from, e.g., http://firstandsecond.com/ can save you literally thousands of dollars over a 4-year program. Subject to local laws and regulations, yada yada.
I have no idea. That's what I would've done.

The only thing I can think of is that the article's author doesn't want to have to move between the parentheses. His initial complaint was that adding a function 'fab' in between foo and bar means you have to rename everything. If you chain the functions in one long expression, you need to navigate to between bar and foo, type 'fab(', then add a separate parentheses onto the end.

It also gets really ugly when foo, bar, and baz are instead line-long expressions, which they often are:

X1 = big_long_expression_containing_some_stuff_and_baz(
big_long_expression_containing_some_stuffand_bar(
big_long_expression_containing_some_stuff_and_foo(X))).

While if you have a sane linebreaking policy (as both Haskell and Eve do), you can do:

X = big_long_expression_containing_some_stuff_and_baz
. big_long_expression_containing_some_stuff_and_bar
. big_long_expression_containing_some_stuff_and_foo
$ x
Second Mac clone maker set to sell systems
I'm actually sort-of impressed by the wide variety of different types of "extremism" that article identified. Normally, it's just "a few hillbillies wearing wifebeaters, nothing to see here, move along..."

As usual, however, the point is missed entirely.

There are people out there who genuinely hate human sub-groups because of membership differences. Such people are rightly marginalized--literal hatred is an ignoble, dangerous quality. But the vast, vast bulk of what is described as "hate" is simply ordinary human inclinations that happen to deviate from the beliefs of international elitists.

Take Tibet. The Tibetan movement (which I don't follow closely, so correct me if I'm wrong) is essentially a nationalist movement. Do we call it a "nationalist" movement? Not usually. Liberals are collectively enamored of Tibet, for some reason. If the good people of South Carolina try to secede from the union, that's a tremendous sin...and blood will have to flow. Yet...it's the same impulse. People who are just trying to govern themselves, rather than be governed. That's the heart of nationalism.

When the Chinese government moves to keep their country in one piece THAT is called nationalism. Okay, whatever. It's actually imperialism, but...whatever. Any lie will do, if it works.
Thanks for replying to my comment. I was a bit surprised that no one did for a little while.

Although I said "weakness in logic," I didn't mean to say that logic is weak or flawed. I really meant that it is insufficient to use logic in the absence of shared assumptions. As you point out, sharing of assumptions can come through communicated and shared experiences.

I think that your description of how learning comes about in science is a powerful one. I believe that some aspects of it should apply to religion.

In my particular religion, the process of gaining faith, and then of moving from faith to knowledge is framed almost as a science experiment. You apply particular principles and see what the outcomes are. As you see the outcomes your faith grows. (See Alma 32:26-36 in the Book of Mormon--available online through LDS.org.) Faith is a word for something less than knowledge that becomes knowledge only through experience. You might look at it from a Bayesian perspective and say that with more data uncertainty grows smaller.

"How do I render a religious experience for myself?" This question strikes me as a little bit odd, and that may be because of a weakness in the metaphor between science and religion. Science studies things. Religion studies the Divine. What I mean is that religious experience may be more of a conversation than a solitary experience. Conversations happen by mutual agreement. However, it is still a good question because it shows progress from worrying about a tool that processes information to worrying about how to seek new information.

Here is a simple religious experiment: pray to God and ask if He can hear you. Document your frame of mind when you prayed. Did you actually want an answer? Were you willing to accept the possibility of no answer? Document any answer or lack of answer you experience.

In science, we generally come to knowledge only slowly, over time--although sometimes things progress more quickly than other times. It is the same in religion. The most likely answer to such a prayer is a gradual one, something spoken quietly to the heart. Such an answer is partial, at best. Maybe you manufactured it mentally. Maybe you didn't even hear anything. It was so quiet. Was anything really there? But something was there. At least enough to follow up on. And you move forward from there, performing experiments, seeking answers, asking questions and listening and acting. Just like a signal, over time, can appear out of noise, so religious truth, over time, arises out of uncertainty. You talk with others and compare notes. But in the end, for something this important, you really want to know for yourself. You have to perform the experiments, you have to have the experiences, you have to gain the knowledge for yourself. Besides, it's not like physics. With religion, everybody seems to be saying different things than everybody else. So it becomes up to you.

LDS missionaries seek to guide one person at a time through experiences that lead to enough personal knowledge of the gospel to warrant baptism. As far as I know, this is the only way that they can be effective.
its not rational to take any action thats based solely on an unproven hypothesis.
he beats us over the head with the fact that gcc uses ssa yet seems to think that this fact makes general mutability desirable at the language level. the compiler is not a magic wand. hey why not make everything a string too? works for tcl!!!!
Oh good god. When I saw the original of that on techmeme, I thought that they needed to improve their loony filter. After reading "Howard Lindzon has run a hedge fund for 11 years and is a partner in Biltmore Ventures." I almost come to the conclusion that the entire world needs to improve their loony filter.

Thankfully there's no mention of Howard Lindzon on http://www.biltmoreventures.com/bios.php and probably anyone can say they ran a hedge fund for eleven years. So it's just SAI that doesn't check references.
NYT book review comes with the Sunday edition but is delivered to homes and published online with the Saturday edition.
I've read some of them, and I followed his spat with Gladwell. I also didn't vote down his comment. My point was more that Steve Sailer in general has never struck me as the model of intellectual integrity.
Where is the REPL?
Oh yeah I'm reading, up until a site does something stupid like require registration.

I also stop am forced to stop reading sometimes when a site converts a pdf to a scribd link and crashes my whole computer =)
Python Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow
Some great comments here, but I gotta jump off track for a second.

I kind of want to know who or what the lead was for this article. No way the NY Times just goes through TPB looking for the most piquant torrent and write a tilted article about it. Seriously....revenge?

College students are frugal people. Between work and school it's not easy making a living to put food in your belly and pay the costs of student housing month after month. They want to save money, books cost astronomically more to purchase than they do to produce, and this columnist reduces all of this down to "revenge"?

I've got to admit, this is one tilted article if I've ever read one; quotes from publishing companies, none from TPB who if this writer had done PROPER research instead of stating oversimplifications would have seen are happy to talk with the press rather candidly about their operations.

No quotes from students, no quotes from TPB directly about the issues, and Randall Stross has the capacity to call this whole thing "revenge"? The best mention of TPB was on user statistics, what the eff

Pardon my language, but for the NyTimes, this is bullshit.
I'd like a new model for academic publishing. Normally, two of the most important roles of a publisher are quality control (hopefully), and marketing. In academics, mechanisms are probably already in place to take care of both of these functions. In any case, distribution should no longer be an important part of the services a publisher provides. For academic publishing, then, the most important function of a publisher may be to provide the actual physical form of the book.

This is the new model: let the authors compete on the quality of their content, and let the publishers compete on the physical quality and price of the books they publish. Let the authors keep the rights to the books, but let them then allow many different publishers to compete with different form factors and prices for the books. Maybe then we would get much lower prices for higher quality physical books.
The proof of Proebsting's Law seems kind of silly because running a compiler with optimizations turned off wouldn't actually disable all the years of advancements of compiler technology. It seems quite reasonable that many compiler advancements have to be added at the same time as hardware support. That doesn't make them purely hardware contributions.

Also, the proof skips more than a few critical steps when it says "Let's assume that this ratio is about 4X" and then uses that number as a multiplier in the answer.
If you're doing web development for money, then you should go with whatever is the most expedient solution that produces reasonably attractive results. The danger here of course is that in the long run what's expedient now may lead to problems down the road - such as when you hit a problem the pre-built solution can't handle, or if it causes you to do more work than you would if you only had a better understanding of the underlying technology.

With that said, if you're doing this to try and learn something, then you will be doing yourself a disservice if you don't at least try to roll your own version of everything you will want to do with the web. Even if you start out with your own stuff and decide to swap in freely available components (open source, etc.), at least then you'll understand the infrastructure you're working with at a level you would otherwise not.
I second this notion.

Also, unless if you really, really think it is good for production use, regard the last part as well. Don't use it. I built a framework that was pretty decent, learned a lot about not just the language but also the framework and the MVC pattern, used it in production and it bit me in the ass later. Why? It wasn't good enough. If you're going go use it, make sure the framework you build isn't decent but excellent, and I'm only saying this because there are people who have written great frameworks before. The problem is that you might get caught up in your own "but I built this so it must kick ass" like I kind of did. Doing so is like using a software package from a sketchy vendor (no offense) and you wouldn't do that, would you?
I didn't go so far as to read the article behind the wall, but the upshot is this:

1) On the Internet, people read selectively, to pick out the information that they want.

2)If people find communication to be more efficient by using language differently, people will read that language differently.

This is all fairly obvious, and is not news.