skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Very thin limb you're sitting on. Very thin.
Perl is the syntax, CPAN is the language. So no.
Google interview questions - fun brain teasers
Are you a lawyer?

Is this legal advice?
please don't play the "modern language" game.

if we're going to do that, we get to rule out, say, lisp. Which I'd rather write over most "modern" languages any day.

And so far as I can tell, you're basically saying "I think the perl standard library should have more stuff in it and because it doesn't have the stuff -I- want in it, CPAN is pointless".

Well, sure. Except that not having all this stuff in core means I can update, say, my rich text processing stuff or a configuration parser on its own, and only re-QA that component rather than having to wait for an entire language point release.

And "wading" is a nicely loaded description as well. Here's what I did when I installed angerwhale:

tar xzf <tarball>
cd <unpacked dir>
perl Makefile.PL
make installdeps

and lo, from CPAN did the 50 or so modules that I didn't already have installed for something else that was -also- reusing that same code snap straight onto my system while I went for a coffee break.

perl is just syntax. CPAN is the language.

And by that standard all this -is- built in. It's just optional :)
I was going to say much of what mechanical_fish said. Your project is a real product.

I'll definitely give you $20 if you can effectively teach me Icelandic.
Biggest Regret: Waiting too long.

Examples: I wish I learned to program sooner. I wish I started playing basketball sooner. Etc...

I still find myself doing this, although less now than before.
NIH Syndrome?
I think that online office tools (Google docs, zoho) are slow and extremely tedious. They are pretty looking, but usability is worse (slower) than the 1987 versions of word processors on PCs.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=211015
Who needs to secure against local users? If you have untrusted users on your production server you have much bigger problems than this anyway.
Because they're the ones that have the ability to fix it. FeedBurner can't determine the real subscriber number from the one NetVibes gives them, so it's up to NetVibes to report an accurate number.
I encourage you to work on one or more of your ideas sooner rather than later, even while working full-time.

You seem to be at the stage in your life where you could pursue the YCombinator program (or similar programs). This is one way to fund your ideas without going the self-funded route.

You seem to have the skills that you'll always be able to get jobs at Yahoo or elsewhere. You don't really have much to lose.
Net Vibes (and most other web-based feed readers) does not request the feed every time it is requested, they request the feed periodically if any of their members have subscribed to the feed. In that request they include the number of subscribers they are requesting for.

Net Vibes has implemented it slightly wrong and are sending the number of "boxes" that contain the feed, not the number of users who have at least one box with the feed.

So when Feedburner sees a GET on their feed with metadata from Net Vibes saying how many subscribers there are, they can either ignore it (since it can be gamed) or use it. I find it valuable that they use it so I hope that Net Vibes fixes it.

Feedburner could ignore huge jumps from Net Vibes but the attack would work with slower growth, leading to distorted statistics.
OK, you agree SSL does protect savvy users from MITM attacks.

You're talking about users who can be tricked into what are essentially non-SSL or degraded SSL (certificates from untrustworthy authorities) sessions, because they misread the URL bar or ignore warnings. That's a legitimate concern, most users are easily tricked, but that's not a vulnerability of SSL itself.
Kismet...I think Jeff was expressing much the same sentiment in his last Coding Horror piece: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001160.html
It could influence new viewers initial opinions. The site having 5K subscribers instead of a handful...
Overstock.com CEO continues hedge fund assault: "I'm not vindictive"
At the time of this posting, your post is 43 minutes old.

Do you still not know who Mitch Kapor is?
I totally agree, and this is exactly what I do an the method/micro level. Generally I can get something working in just a few minutes but then I spend another 5-10 really polishing it up in 5+ small iterations on it (all test driven, so I know my changes still work).

Hoff's point was well above that, at the design/macro level. For that I alternate releases between adding features and house cleaning (bug fixes, refactorings, etc). With a sufficiently short iteration time, you can appease both the client/users with new features and the developers by keeping things clean and happy.
My advice is: try doing something on the side first, something that people can actually use, share it with friend and see how you feel about feedbacks.

Well, what I've found is that most of my side projects don't get very far, because I invariably end up pulling a bunch of long nights at my main paying gig, and that saps the motivation considerably.

Also, maybe I need ruder friends, but I've found much better results sharing stuff with strangers. They're more honest. Friends are biased by their desire to make you feel good.
Android ListView and custom adapter
You don't really have much to lose.

Thanks. But that non-trivial pile of RSUs is really very non-trivial :)
GetReligion.org has a take on the press coverage of Solzhenitsyn and the rocky relationship he had with Western elites because of his faith and general distrust of Modernity:

http://www.getreligion.org/?p=3779
Actually, according to Aweber, it does (at least for email subscriptions, displaying a chiclet with subscriber numbers increases opt-in).

It's a form of social proof.
"Modern language" --- you're right. I'm looking for a word that means "Python, Ruby, Scala, etc" but not Tcl and Perl. I'm fumbling trying to find it. Sorry.

The rest of your reply kind of misses my point. If the 50-or-so modules you get from CPAN have built-in analogues in Python, why do I care about CPAN? Can I get a raytracer straight out of CPAN? Sure. So? What's a profoundly useful library in CPAN that isn't easily matched in Python?

I bet you have an answer, and I'd like to hear it.
As if he hailed from the planet Zog, one of the bankers said: "I have absolutely no idea how my taxes are spent and therefore I do not trust the system at all."

Another banker asserted that there is "little accountability and measurability in the way that tax is actually used".

They might be on to something. With all the stories of outrageous misspending and corruption around I think the world would benefit from big doses of transparency.
15 Year-Old Entrepreneur Launches "Teens in Tech"
Thanks, hopefully we will begin to see more post. Once developers stop fearing the NDA.
Human competitive genetic programming results
Mashable in Boston tomorrow night, tix still available.
How in the world is this remotely related to HN-style news?
Fair enough.

Rails still looks hopelessly monolithic to a perl dev though - we can't quite see why you'd want to ship a DB library in core when, hey, web apps don't -all- talk to SQL databases.

As for the quality of said DB library, well, many smart ruby developers have torn it to pieces quite adequately so I'll just say "google is your friend" and not bother with a half-informed opinion of my own.
You have a point, although there again, it could be that what you are seeing is a wave of technological change which enhances the earning power of the rich first and then diffuses out to the rest of society.

I do think that the hypothesis that wealth disparities in the US are a product of massive corruption is not one to be dismissed lightly given the ongoing socialization of the costs of bailing out failing banks...
Venture Capital Database
Feasibility of my startup idea
Hi Guys,

I am working on an idea for startup and I would like to know your opinion on that.
Essentially I am developing an ADOBE AIR based application(s) which I want to run without installation on client computer.
As per my understanding, it is not legal to execute adobe air based application without installation. What do you think
the implication of building a business model with such an assumption?

Silent installation is recently allowed for licensed distributors but I really want to run anonymously.

I am at early POC stage of my startup. Am I worried about too much at this early stage?
Should I be working on POC before worrying about legalities?

I know that several startups start with in grey areas of law but what do you think about it?
My assertion is that you can't just use SSL and leave it at that. In that case, you're only going to protect savvy users, and not even all of those.
Isn't that a bit like saying "C is the syntax, and all of computing is the language"?
That may or may not be true, but what is certain is that additional mucking around with salts, Javascript crypto, and protocols isn't going to improve the story you get with HTTPS.
I know what he's referring to.

You're a coder. I'm a coder. James is certainly a coder's coder. But stop thinking like a coder for just a moment, though.

Having (functional) product out the door (faster) beats having (better) code in the market (later). Every time.

Do I defend this? Yes and no.

Have I experienced this? Yes.

Wearing my manager hat, the product ships. Code refactoring is extremely difficult to justify.

Wearing my coder hat, I refactor and re-comment and rework and update the test cases while I still remember what I was doing with the particular routines. Then I move on.

This is the age-old conflict between better and faster; elegance and schedule. It's why managers and coders are so often in conflict, too.
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The Yahoo Boss Q&A Service Gives Pretty Decent Results
Not sure if this helps you or relieves you of some concern but:

1) I doubt Angerwhale itself includes 200+ modules. The core Makefile lists about 62 modules. It's likely the number quoted was counting both the modules used by Angerwhale and the dependencies of those modules and so forth.

2) Current best practices for developing a Perl application say that you should build the application itself as a CPAN module, even if you don't plan to release on CPAN, since that way you can take advantage of all the work that's gone into CPAN testing and deployment tools. However, if you follow that best practice correctly, it will mean you will take great care to list all your dependencies and their minimum workable versions. You will do this even with a dependency that is part of a core Perl installation. For example, one of the dependencies listed in Angerwhale is 'File::Find', actually comes with a base install of Perl. You don't have to do anything for the application to work. However, for strong audit and good programming practice, you really should list what you application needs. That just makes it easier to install and to troubleshoot installation issues. Also, in the future it is likely that Perl core will be smaller, so that we can have the flexibility to target Perl more carefully to different needs (like say to people using Perl for system administration, versus those in a very constrained embedded market). So this is just a good practice to future proof your application.

3) The number of required modules is nothing to be afraid of. When you install a CPAN module, like by using the commandline 'cpan' application, it will automatically follow, download, run tests, and install, any required dependencies. All you really need to do is something like:

cpan Angerwhale

And the build tool do the rest for you. This is also a good way to develop your application, so that you can use Makefile as a build and a deployment tool. This is just part of the standard, best practices for Perl development.

All programming languages come with extended and standard libraries. To be efficient in any language requires that you learn to 'wade through' as you say, those libraries, their documentation and test examples. There is no doubt the CPAN model has some challenges. CPAN is widely distributed, varying in quality, and lives in the complex negotiation of needs and desires which is a hallmark of the Internet. Like the rest of the Internet it can be wildly anarchic and is often brutally merit based. There have definitely been times when I have cursed it. However I do believe it is a wonderful testament to the viability of open source, distributed development.
Source of confusion: bcrypt is also the name for a utility using Blowfish. bcrypt-ruby looks pretty cool.
"Modern language" --- you're right. I'm looking for a word that means "Python, Ruby, Scala, etc" but not Tcl and Perl. I'm fumbling trying to find it. Sorry.

What modern features is Perl missing? I hate to break it to you, but Python and Ruby have basically the same featureset as Perl.

What's a profoundly useful library in CPAN that isn't easily matched in Python?

A single profoundly useful library is not the point of CPAN. It's finding that random library that you need in some corner of an obscure internal application where CPAN really shines. Every language has their super-great web framework. The depth and breadth of module available on the CPAN is Perl's strength.

If I had to pick a single CPAN module I couldn't be without, though, it would be Moose; followed closely by Catalyst and DBIx::Class.
Tell us, what are your reasons for doing this? Are they valid? If its just because you want to trick someone into doing something, then yeah, probably not a good enough reason, and a bad idea. If its because you think you'll have greater acceptance (i.e. another way of saying trick someone), then probably also a bad idea. I'm not really sure why you would want to start your business up screaming malware/lack of trust right from the get go.

If its a technical problem you're trying to get around, a better idea might be to post here and say "I'm trying to do X but without doing an installation" and get help finding your way around it. But starting off on the wrong foot just because you feel like it is not good business sense.
The Nature of Domain Specific Languages
It was a "trap" because the data is still available in memory either way? Are you serious? Oh, and if anybody has any clever retorts to this comment, I'm actually laying traps right now expecting you to say just that. Be warned
The FCC (and to some extent, Congress) has been making overtures towards granting itself power to regulate content on the private Cable networks for some years now. I'm wary of any censorship, so it's one of the things I have to bring up when looking at the FCC's new rulings here.
I envy you my friend.
Implied Copyright Infringement and File Sharing Protocols
The Urban Bike is the One
Not necessarily. What I don't like about the "programming is about gluing libraries together" approach is that you have to deal with a plethora of hidden costs:

1. Finding the available libraries for the job. There might not even be one if you're doing something somewhat novel. Or there could be a huge number of them, most of them crap.

2. Evaluating the libraries found in step 1. You might find that no library is a superset of the others, that for example there's 3 of them that each tackles 1/3 of the problem in exactly the way you want but you have to compromise and choose only one of them.

3. Dealing with the library's bugs, limitations, misfeatures, incompatibility with your usual programming style. To fix those problems you either have to dig deep into a codebase that's not even your own (if you even can), or you take the passive approach and contact the vendor to ask them to please fix the bug or implement the feature and then wait 2 weeks or 2 months or 2 years or foverer until it gets done.

Whereas with the "I have a strong NIH syndrome and will do everything myself" I have lots of up-front costs but at least I know pretty much exactly what they are and the problems that come up are fun things like: "oh, I need to master this super powerful technique", not boring ones like: "oh, I need to get in touch with the maintainer of this library to implement a new feature I need if he so chooses".
Virgin Galactic WhiteKnightTwo
And BTW the answer to the question is: yes it counts as fire because using electricity causes a fire in the power plant to be increased. But the electricity itself is not fire.

Orthodox Jews for nuclear power!!
I think the best quote in the article is: "[A] polar bear makes a great bodyguard, until it decides to eat you."
That's nothing, sometimes I don't even want to trust myself!
SuccessFactors plugs Google Apps into HCM
"Modern language" --- I just agreed with you. And apologized.

Moose --- doesn't Moose just make Perl's metaclass programming as simple as Python and Ruby's already is?

Catalyst is an web MVC framework. DBIx::Class is an ORM. Clearly we can get those libraries elsewhere. Is there something really amazing in CPAN that I can't get in a gem in Ruby? I get that a lot of gems are crappy (Ruby's a younger community), so I'm not going to come back at you with some random -0.1alpha svn trunk thing.
Actually, my reading was he (like me) was well past the stage of life where YC funding would be helpful. Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but a first round YC bet is something like "cost of living for two college students for a summer". To an established professional with a stable job, this is noise: most of us could fund such a company for three months right out of our bank accounts.

The benefit to doing the YC thing is the exposure to sources for later funding rounds, and the networking that comes with being part of the community. The money isn't the draw for anyone but a brand new graduate. It's just there to make sure no one starves while working on the project.
Thanks for your quick reply. Obviously I don't want to trick some one to run my code.
It is just that I want my application to be like "take them where ever you want" just like portableapps.com
The problem is that, in the US, political will often dies with the stopgap solution.
I don't get questions like "How many golf balls can fit in a school bus?" or "How many piano tuners are there in the entire world?". What is the point of that? To see if you're good at estimating ridiculously large numbers?
All these applications/services rely on the intrinsic scalability of Erlang as a platform.

I have to take issue with this assertion; I've seen a similar sentiment expressed here. Certainly, Erlang lets you naturally express concurrency in your application, but that doesn't automatically mean it will scale.

People have been writing high performance, message passing programs for a long time using libraries like MPI. The programming model used for creating distributed MPI applications is basically that of Erlang. The difference - and it is a big one - is that Erlang lets you do everything at a higher level with language constructs. This is a huge win.

But parallel applications don't automatically scale; scalability is a runtime behavior that depends on the problem you're solving and design decisions you made to solve that problem. How well a concurrent application will scale is usually not obvious.

There's no free lunch. You can't expect to start using Erlang and automatically get scalability. Like we've always done, you'll have to think carefully about issues such as data distribution (who has to know what when?), granularity (what's the smallest amount of work that should be parallel?) and synchronization overhead (does doing this concurrently actually cost more than sequentially?).
That's true, but in that case our alternative is to have a monopolistic broandband provider in each area with the ability to discriminate against traffic/websites.

The stopgap solution, even if left in place permanently with no further progress, is far better than that.
Ruby ridge incident.

Also, the people involved in these armed resistance instances don't have to personally come out on top. They affect enforcement; make the powers that be nervous and careful. I'm pretty sure some politicians thought extra hard before abusing poor people's property rights after the Carl Drega incident, even though he was killed. Not that I know Carl Drega was clearly in the right, but you get the point.
And there's nothing that politicians like more than a captive monopoly that relies on favorable regulations to continue to prosper.

In 10 years: We can't deregulate the Internet industry because then they'd stop donating to our campaigns since we wouldn't have control over them.
"Is there something really amazing in CPAN that I can't get in a gem in Ruby?"

No. (this is coming from an old PERL programmer)
Talking about regrets and mistakes s a funny thing. There is an implied hypothetical there -- like, "If I had made a different choice, I would be a in a better place."

Take, for example, my (admittedly foolish) decision to drop out of the University after a year and go to community college part-time for a year. It should have been a bust, but I ended up meeting my wife (who was working on her generals) there. I met another great friend on my second run at the University. Now my wife and this friend are my co-founders for my startup... both of whom I possibly would've never known if I hadn't gone to the community college.

Now, I'm not saying that there is no such thing as bad choices, or that I have no regrets about things I've done -- I think it's natural for us to regret things that we perceive as mistakes. But I'm pretty happy right now in spite of any problems that I might have, and as far as choices contribute to our happiness, mine have worked out well. It's hard for me to describe choices that have made me happy as "mistakes".
Plenty of people use shared hosting.

The unix security model isn't amazing, but it does a reasonable job of protecting you from users other than root -- putting cleartext passwords in command line arguments is one way of throwing that away.

Then again, as you seem to be saying, manipulating cleartext passwords are usually a bad idea in the first place
I know what you mean. There's a lot of philosophy going on, and the pressure to publish causes even idiots to write big books and papers. But I think you should judge a field by its most ambitious members and ignore the shadow-world of crappy scholars, journals, and departments that prop each other up for the sake of mutual image-boosting. At good departments, philosophers are expected to be in close contact with fields that their work touches, i.e. if you work on philosophy of physics or law or cognitive science, you should be educated in the field and conversant with its practitioners. But apply that 'judge-by-the-most-ambitious' standard to medieval philosophy and you get angels on pinheads. I think the interdisciplinary people make for more interesting philosophers anyway, even when they aren't using that dual law degree, viz. http://books.google.com/books?id=ZcdIsXrmcPwC&pg=PA33...
I just modded you up, but as I think about it more, I realize that had I been more promiscuous, I may have passed over (or slept with but not stayed with) the girl I am with now in a long-term (long-distance, unfortunately) relationship and I feel that I can spend the rest of my life with her.
Markus Frind might be the Michael Jordan of entrepreneurship: the example of a one-man ad-supported multimillionaire has led a lot of people to follow a difficult path, as Jordan's example led millions of kids to make playing pro basketball the focus of their life. It gets a lot easier when you have a cofounder and you do something that people want to pay you for, so keep that in mind when you're making your plans.