skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I think I am saying something non-trivial about academics and their perspective on language.

I became convinced that there is a strain of thought, one that is especially pervasive in the academia, which believes that knowledge/meaning is something irreducible and almost mystical. It probably has to do with the fact that people who fetishize knowledge as something incredibly worthwhile for its own sake end up being overrepresented in the academia. Those who are a bit more cynical/nihilistic tend to go into finance or start their own companies.

The old advice "do not make any gods to be alongside me" is still relevant except for the "alongside me" part, which probably only has any meaning if you consider yourself religious. I have a feeling that many academicians, especially the old-school ones, idolize knowledge to the extent of ascribing to it god-like powers even if said knowledge has little relevance for anything practical.
Er....Haskell User's Operating System and Environment.

Shouldn't that be HUOSE? :\
Most of the APIs are going to be up for 3 more years, the only one you can possibly complain about is the Translate API.
Cloning VMs with JavaScript and Node
The difference is that those APIs are "non-cloud". The code necessary to run those APIs is spread far and wide and no one can just centrally "turn off" .NET or POSIX. Perhaps over time the programs written for unmaintained APIs will fail on newer platforms, but you will always have the means to go back to the old system and run your dependent programs there. In Google's web-based system, Google is the only one with the keys necessary to keep that engine running, and if they take their ball and go home, all of that API's users are screwed.
The person making 1.2 million isn't just a programmer, but he/she also understands the business well. More so, he/she is an integral part of the business.
I agree, something strange is definitely going on internally at Google.

I actually attribute it to starting with the shutdown of Wave and the floundering about with Buzz and other products since then.

One thing that Google has been excellent at doing is building up the perception that they have near limitless computing power at their disposal. These kinds of shutdowns, and the reasons given, are doing immense harm to that cultivated image.
Any product which tends to disrupt your behavioral patterns is written off by experts. If we had believed the experts, the iPod should have been a big failure, right?
A startup that provides a Translate API... hmmm..

http://mygengo.com/services/api/

Works, no? It's human-based translation, though; a tad bit slower, but generally higher quality overall. ;)

Full Disclosure: I currently work with this company.

People should also definitely (at least) be aware of the Microsoft Translate APIs.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff512423.aspx
First result on my search turned up "We want to start with contractor as 2-5 $ per hour". If I'm going to have to filter out all the crap like this I probably won't come back. I did notice after you can set a minbudget but my first impression 'here we go again!'. Unless you expect to cater to the low, low end maybe a sensible default filter level would be a good idea? If you really want to get $2/hr then you can override.

Answers:

1. As with other people here, pickiness, constantly changing specs, ridiculous demands (the classic Facebook for $500 - which even innocuous postings can turn out to be)

2. I've stopped completely now as I no longer have time to weigh through 100 pages of crap for the one good job. I found most "joy" with vworker, but my last 2 hour job beat my 4 month earnings from there.

3. Some. Though I'm afraid I can't think of way you could improve this right now.
Also I confirmed with Google:

"Because of the propensity of shared hosting providers, the recycling of IP addresses by cloud services, and the ease at which IP addresses can be changed, we never use IP address as a factor for assigning a penalty to a website. In certain instances where malware is hosted on a site, we may display the "this site may be harmful" warning against all results on an IP address. The rules for when this happens are not my expertise, but from the prospective of search, your site will never receive a penalty for sharing an IP with a blocked, banned, or delisted site."
You make a good point.

I imagine (very much a guess on my part) that Google would prefer to have eyeballs on their own impressions of adsense than those on other sites though -- because there would be no payout in those cases.

Still, I would think that serving ad impressions on 3rd party sites is likely a large part of their current business. Maybe those are just eyeballs they rent as appose to own then. ;)
Google Analytics has a delay. Mixpanel is real-time and specifically aimed at certain events that you specify. So when someone clicks your sign up button, it fires an AJAX call and you see them do it in real-time, instantly.
I've said it before but I'll say it again: the highest paid programmers don't call themselves programmers. There are a lot of things you can do which involve slinging code that pay rather substantially more than the equivalent amount of undifferentiated code slinging.
Lodsys targets Android dev over in-app purchase
Until the government demands a back-door into it and thereby undoes any security benefits we had gained.
I was really disheartened to read this story, but now you point out it’s a non-issue and essentially that the article is misleading to the point of libel. Flagged this story.
I wonder how much work it would be for Google to build a "Translation appliance" people could buy? I'd wager they'd do $100million in government sales alone the first year.
I'm curious when Patrick changed his mind or what the nuances of this strategy are.

http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?biz.5.463855.7
How a band got into Y Combinator: The Earbits story (YC W11)
Then you're talking more usability than design. In that regard emacs doesn't exactly rate well.
I really wish "ghetto" -- as a stand-in for ill-conceived, poorly executed, low quality, substandard etc. -- would die.

IMO when people use it, they are introducing the suggestion that these "ghetto" things are what poor blacks or Latinos would do/use. We also have in America (and elsewhere?) the concept of "white trash" which I view as the poor white American analog of "ghetto". It also needs to go.

(Bracing for downvotes)
Bye Matlab, hello Python, thanks Sage https://vnoel.wordpress.com/2008/05/03/bye-matlab-hello-pyth...

10 Reasons Python Rocks for Research (And a Few Reasons it Doesn’t) http://www.stat.washington.edu/~hoytak/blog/whypython.html

Should i switch to Python? http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5063037/should-i-switch-t...
Robust Watermarking Using K-Means in Matlab
This omits bonuses, and other out-of your salary payments, that programmers usually take. I've heard about minimum 15% bonus at google for example. (and 15% meaning not very good performance)
My submissions:

8 points: The Viral Me (gq.com) http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1976306

6 points: The Problem with Microsoft (cnn.com) http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2383169

5 points: Wall Street Firm Uses Algorithms to Make Sports Betting Like Stock Trading (wired.com) http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1935406

3 points: The Billionaire [Yuri Milner] Who Friended the Web (forbes.com) http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2311844

2 points: Interview with Ron Conway [55 min video] (youtube.com) http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2449350
This isn't useful at all and doesn't even make sense, ironically since "sense" is the first listing.

Title is also completely wrong. It isn't 93.4 % of pages, it is 93.4 % of pages in certain categories (primarily dealing w/ philosophy)

Beyond that, are "sense" or "Perception" the name of a category of pages and the percentage the percentage of pages in that category that lead back to "philosophy" or are they individual pages?

If they are individual pages, you shouldn't have a percentage, you should simply have a yes/no. If they are categories, how could the percentages possibly be the same for different categories? And how could this large number of pages all form a loop?
Wave of Superfluous New Startups Is Surest Sign We're in a Bubble
Look at active database research from the 90's. They all had event languages like this. My PhD research was in developing a domain independent event query language (EQL) that was very similar. This was 12 years ago.
I keep hearing about hypothetical for-profit products and people's weekend hobby projects being affected by this change, but does anyone have any example of an actual business that will be affected by this change?

Note that most of these APIs have 3 year deprecation policies and so will continue to be around; only the translate api is going away (and that's in December).

I have serious doubts that almost anyone would actually pay per translate (and if you would, it's likely you could work out a license deal independent of a public API anyway). It seems like the reaction to this has more to do with annoyance that another cool free service is going away and remaining anger over app engine pricing changes.
Doesn't work for 'porn', ends in a loop.
Startup Fever - The Board Game
Doubtlessly. I hate being in the thrall of a company in such a way too. It's dangerous to be dependent upon someone else's their API. But is the chance of great success lower than for with other businesses? Probably better to start a Twitter client than a to-do list site or something.
Particle Code does the dance of multiple platforms
I filed that bug 7 years ago and they wouldn't fix it: http://bugs.php.net/29992

I had it a little wrong in the initial report, but it was cleared up in the comments. The reluctance to fix stuff like this because "people might use this for some weird reason" is one of the reasons I'm glad I don't write much PHP anymore.
If Microsoft stopped all .NET support today, my .NET apps will still keep running. Big difference.
Yeah, but it will work great for arbitrary censorship! Like how searching 5 year olds at the airport doesn't fight terrorism. It's apparent that these methods don't fit the alleged purposes, so my assumption is that the real goals are unspoken.
I like what MixPanel is doing, but I don't think it's fair to say that GA has a 24 hour delay. It's nothing close to real-time, but you can get results from the past few hours.
* > Any Java programmer knows ins and out of Tomcat, any ASP programmer is MSSQL expert?*

I'd hope they are experts, or at least have no trouble learning quickly. If they can't manage MSSQL or Tomcat, how do they set up their local development environment, implement automated integration tests, etc?
Google Prediction API helps apps to adapt and learn
Missed one:

foobar() is the same as FOOBAR()
$foobar is completely separate from $FOOBAR
See

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/google-appengine/ob-...

Clarifies that you will be paying per instance hour, instead of cpu.

Nothing is in concrete yet, if there is enough outrage amongst users maybe they will change their tune.
Last I checked, and this was 6 months ago, there isn't really a comparable ad service to AdSense in terms of quality. Nothing else I've seen manages to serve such targeted, high quality ads.

That said, you can make good money from other approaches like affiliate marketing, products, and so on.
Facebook is one of the most egregious patent and trademark trolls of late. The article has no insight into what the potential ramifications are if they lose this suit, but I think a company that trolls around suing every company with the word 'book' in their name deserves a major kick in the ass. Google on the other hand seems to encounter more than their share of software patent nonsense.
Or just search harder:
http://www.t-mobile.com/shop/plans/flexpayplans.aspx?direct=...

(Yes, I know that these are FlexPay as well, but the prices are the same)
I wrote a script to use Wikipedia:Random to check as many trails as possible (still data logging with it now!).

http://github.com/basicxman/extended-mind
Zach Hoeken Smith - Co-Founder, MakerBot Industries
If Chrome eats too much of the Firefox userbase it will prevent Mozilla from being in a position to push the changes that they want to see.
I case anyone else is interested, Kevin Bacon is 20 steps from Philosophy.
"Never explain with stupidity what can be explained with economic self interest."

Nasmorn's Law
Security and Due Diligence
On the plus side, I now understand why every critical system in every Sci-Fi movie has a self-destruct button. It was probably legislated in.
Firefox 6 is now on the Aurora channel, with new developer tools
MS definitely has the leverage for sure. If they can think of buying Nokia, they are surely capable of making HTC go exclusively WP. They just have to make an offer they can't refuse, right.
'Fusion' chip on rise as Netbooks become un-Netbooks
Intel exec throws fuel on the "Intel to fab Apple chips" rumor fire
You would prefer, when encountering an incorrectly used double colon operator, PHP said "Syntax error"? Even when I'm directed to look only at the surrounds of the double colon, it has been difficult to understand the problem in some cases... it looks like valid syntax. Now, you might say that this is a problem with PHP's syntax, and I have no defense against that, but rolling this into "invalid syntax" with no further explanation would cause no end of trouble for those new to OO in PHP.
The Real Cost of Social Media Infographic
The highest-paid programmers usually become rich via:
1) Founding a business or startup.
2) Becoming an early employee of an averagely successful startup, or a per-IPO employee of hugely successful startups (Facebook, Google).
3) Becoming an IT manager or quants/traders at IB or Hedge funds
4) Becoming world-leader in open-source technologies (e.g. Scala, Hadoop, JQuery).
5) Writing books, giving lectures: teaching others how to become great programmers.
Feldman's last year was my first year there. He had a great legacy, but in his final years he wasn't too popular among the students, and I think not too many people were sad to see him go at that point.

EDIT: That said, the last thing I expected to see scanning the HN headlines today was something from gwu.edu :-P
Congrats guys. Raising money and scaling, especially at the same time, is a lot like I imagine prison would feel like. Glad you guys made it through.
Amy Poehler’s Harvard Speech
Ghetto is a portion of the city where minorities live (wikipedia). Nothing about poor, no particular race. So as a euphemism for substandard, I agree it doesn't seem appropriate. A WASP ghetto in New Hampshire might have high standards I suppose.

Your guess about what people are suggesting may also be off the mark. Nothing in the definition regarding race or even Americanism.

On the other hand, if you are right, then what is the problem? You want to reserve the word for other purposes? You have observed a higher standard for public works in ghettos, and believe the appelation is inaccurate?
This breaks the back-button for me, despite the author claiming otherwise.

Steps to replicate:
1. Visit article
2. Click on logo to go to the home page
3. Scroll down until more content gets loaded
4. Click back button

Expected behaviour: Get moved back to the article page
Encountered behaviour: Still at front page, scrolled to the middle.

Using Safari 5.0.5, OS X 10.6.7
Is this an example of the German directness we're all talking about here?
Somehow I doubt that's the abuse they are concerned about.
I noticed that on Chrome in Snow Leopard, too. Guess it needs a little more tweaking!
I would say only 1) and 2) would actually make you "rich". the others would just pay very well (though for many that's rich enough, I guess)
The cost in goodwill (and perhaps even real money) of using translate to fill hundreds/thousands of google ad-filled spam sites in hundreds of different languages may be much higher than they could ever conceivably recoup in charging for the API.

Once you charge more than any legitimate user would be willing to pay for the API, you are effectively shutting down the API anyway.
Most of my emacs customizations are pretty simple. M-x [ and M-x ] start and end macros. f5 runs a macro instead of C-M-x e. f6 copies the entire current line. f7 is line-goto. f9 is replace-string, f10 is replace-regexp. M-x g is whole-buffer-copy. I have a bunch of functions that insert standard shebangs and other script boilerplate, which are easily mapped to function keys if I need them.

I've got some other more complex customizations that I don't use very often, for example a set of functions that let me cycle through various background/text color schemes. For awhile I had that mapped to f8. I've also effectively used hotkeys that generate documentation/comment templates. But those tend to come and go, and when I'm not using them they don't interfere at all.

Beyond a few fundamental things, emacs is only as complex as it needs to be. Yes, it's a fairly large base install compared to vi, or a simple text editor, but so far it's never been big enough to get in my way.
Has Google given up on PowerMeter? Shuts down API
Reiterating The Vision And Mentality of Microsoft
I think a development team needs to ask itself if the api is stable and has a stable team behind it. Example Java libraries. If so, use it. If it has a company like Google or a small open source team, then protect your self by isolating the use of the api. Create a library that maps from your own internal api to the outside api. Even if it is a direct one-to-one mapping, you have only one place to make changes if the outside api becomes an orphan.
Recap and Thoughts on Facebook Deploy/Push Process
I'm looking at Google Analytics right now for my web site, but all I can see is yesterday's data. Is there somewhere to see the data collected today?

Edit: I use both Analytics and Mixpanel, they're both great services. Google has its strengths, but I don't think event tracking and immediate feedback is one of them, which is where Mixpanel comes in.
Google seems to be really good at starting projects and really bad at stopping them.
Thus is probably something more like top management than a "programmer/developer" - and would probably be described as such. Good point.
Even when there is a competition, the web mostly have been a winner take all medium. Google being the prime example. It's not even about the usage but all about the technological leadership. If usage was accounted for, IE6 would be a very impressive product.
Right. And this same argument means you should not rely on, for example, gmail, for your email. This is good advice for people in general, although perhaps not something google wants to hear, as they generally market themselves as someone you can trust. Obviously, google will let you down in exactly the same way that, say, apple or microsoft or facebook will. The pain for some people might be greater in this case, simply because the expectations were higher. I often wonder if they regret adopting that "don't be evil" motto.
Who exactly is "our FOSS software patent FUDster", and why should he/she STFU? Shouldn't we as a community discuss these things, rather than dismissing them out of hand?
I've been looking for a post that I saw on HN, but I haven't been able to find since. I'm pretty diligent at bookmarking, now.

If anybody remembers a django projector creator web app that let you choose from a ton of different apps, please let me know. It seemed very handy. Thanks!
And so then Mozilla has to compete with Chrome which will eventually make Firefox better and in the end the web wins.
Are spammers going to be willing to pay x cents/call just to fill spam pages with translations? We must make x high enough that spammers will not make enough profit to justify the expense but legitimate businesses that depend on the API will still be able to pay for it.

Spam is all about maximum distribution and massiveness, so I don't think the pricing would have to be very high to take the profitability out of the spam operations.
This seems like intended behavior. You back button is not broken. Clicking back brings you back to the previous page... that page just happens to seem to be part of the current page.

For you, it would seem best to remove the previous page content when adding the new content. That way pressing "back" will be super fast, page loading will be fast, and the web will still be happy.
Click the date select stuff, you can choose today and it'll give you whatever data it's processed for today, but by default it only shows up to yesterday.
It would be relative to where you signed the agreement wouldn't it?
programmers at high frequency trading firms can make well into the six figures and still spend most of the day coding. firms like these usually don't have much in the way of management tiers. though I wouldn't expect a programmer to make money like that unless they were closely involved in developing the trading strategies themselves.
Your assumption is that when people use it, they are strictly applying the dictionary definition, and not referencing an unwritten but well-understood cultural context; I would disagree with this basis. Indeed, in order to accept that a dictionary definition is even relevant here, we would have to believe that words never change their meaning once defined, or that they only change their meaning when that new definition appears in the dictionary and not apart from that event.

There is, in my opinion, a racial undercurrent to the word and that it is not (merely) a reference to the quality of roads or sidewalks in the ghetto, but to those who live there. That these qualities apply to the people who live there too.

BTW, from Wikipedia's page on "Ghetto":

"A ghetto is a section of a city occupied by a group who live there especially because of social, economic, or legal pressure."

Emphasis mine. Economic pressure, e.g., they can't afford to live elsewhere.
That's not really a counterpoint, is it? The comment you're replying to advised people not to build for-profit enterprises off Google's free APIs. It didn't weasel an excuse for maybe just using the APIs anyways because it probably would work out in the long run; it said, rightly, "don't".

Guessing Google has bigger fish to fry than making the world nicer for people who want to build apps on translation APIs.
Yes. I hire many translators. We use google translate, and license professional dictionaries to speedup the process. I estimate that Google translate saves us $20k/year. I personally would be willing to pay a lot for continued access to the translate API. (I'll probably just end up using some sort of iframe hackery when the translate API goes away)

The actual business is http://www.yabla.com/
Security theater. It's just a simulation of safety.
JetBlue vs. Continental: Battle of the Airline Web Sites
You missed the point: they are talking about people who do not know those aspects of the LAMP stack, not the ones who can afford delegating them to DBAs and sysadmins. The first group are indeed glorified web page editors.
You can use the @ symbol to suppress errors when you're aware that the variable may be empty and you've considered the possible effects. When I used to write PHP, I'd often write something like

do_something(@$_GET['foobar']);

There are ways to suppress PHP notices without just turning off the E_NOTICE output.
I imagine some of the top level programmers at Microsoft, Google, Facebook, etc probably earn in the mid six figures.

But just like executive pay, there's a point where the bonuses and profit sharing make up the vast majority of your compensation. Base salary stats don't really apply then.
Agreed. This is a great opportunity for a startup to swoop in, clone the Google API so the only change necessary is authentication tokens and URI, and get everyone to switch to their (paid) platform.
4) and 5) definitely don't make you rich.
This is very unfortunate and demonstrates how easy it is to kill a relatively inexpensive program that has enormous potential upside when its constituency is diffuse and dividends from it may only be realized in the future.