skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I know nothing about you in particular, but your post in whole suggests that you weren't raised by drug addicts and foster parents.

My bigger point though, is to be very careful of people who say "I grew up in BFE, Kentucky" and then clarify that to say "really, on a farm, BFE was just the nearest town." Because the whole context changes when you find out they grew up on a Kentucky racehorse breeding farm.

In healthcare and the military, you find out that this whole thing about "moving" implies realizing that's an option. You're off in the toolshed telling your friends how other people would be better off shoveling snow with a sand shovel instead of a snow shovel. Meanwhile, our ancestors drawing animals in caves shepherded those genes to us through countless winters without ever knowing about the entire class called shovels. Never mind that shovels aren't very good for a lot hunting problems, berry-gathering problems, etc.

I understand that moving is legitimate way to recast your social network, but it's a long way from optimal for a lot of people.
Tech's Richest Founders [infographic]
Software engineering, which is a largely unrelated discipline.
Craig,
Is there a reason you went with an external poll rather than a news.yc one?

Unless your passing the link elsewhere or promoting a site you have a stake in (both of which are perfectly fine to me) I would think you'd get more votes with a regular HN poll.

P.S. However I am having fun going through the polls on the right side of the page.
Sure. If application of your code a) demonstrably makes a business more money at the margin and b) you are sophisticated about extracting that value, the amount of money transferred from the business to you will not be judged against the programmer pay yardstick, it will be judged against ROI on strategic initiatives yardstick. You really want to be paid according to that second one.

There are many examples of this. Quants. People who do risk pricing for Citibank. The kind of people who work on credit score algorithms. There are comparative peons in Google/Facebook/Zynga who will make millions upon millions because they are really good at twirling a few knobs which are attached to a faucet that spits out money.

Last March I wrote server-side logic, some Javascript, some HTML/CSS, a bit of Ruby goo, and some documentation justifying my choices. For that my employers paid me $3,000. This May I wrote server-side logic, some Javascript, some HTML/CSS, a bit of Ruby goo, and some documentation justifying my choices. I made a wee bit more than $3,000 this time, largely because the punch line was "Project partly successful, sales up N%."
it's not so black and white. it's not like you should never use anyone else's api ever for your for profit stuff; it's simply a question of risk versus benefit.

in the case of apis, the risk is that there is some probability that the api will go down. the benefit is that you don't have to write your own stuff, and in some cases, the benefit is the entire value proposition of your application. for example, should you use the google translate api? there is some probability that the api will go down. whatever you estimate this probability to be, that's how you have to weigh your benefit. you probably can't recreate google translate, so the benefit is whatever benefit your application provides, or the marginal benefit that google translate provides to your application.

also, consider the fact that all apis will go down, but you can always create value in the interim. no api is going to be around forever, but will html even be around forever? how long is your application going to be useful? maybe the chance that the api will go down in the medium term is low, so that's an acceptable lifetime for your application.
What science often does is that it responds to a "why" question by an analysis of the phenomenon and presenting its causes in some lower-level terms. But, from a certain viewpoint, that is not a satisfactory answer.

Take physics, for example. It can tell you why some objects behave the way they do by telling you there are certain particles, interacting forces, etc.. In this way you can explain, say, the photoelectric effect.

But it isn't really an answer to the "why" question, is it? It just pushes the question one level lower. Why are there such and such particles and forces? Why the constants? The very nature of these answers is descriptive. It is a description of how the world works, not why it works that way.

Maybe asking "why" in this ultimate manner is an ill-posed question - but that's not the deal here. It just doesn't seem that science in its current form, unlike religion or philosophy, could ever even attempt to answer it.

Don't get me wrong, I'm strongly atheistic myself, but there are some inherent limitations of scientific exploration and clarification with respect to the answers it can provide.
It's not a bug though, it's how references work. The code is exactly right. You might not expect the output but that doesn't mean it's logically incorrect.
And dating, oh god, dating.

I miss Germany.

Why, are German women like: "Yes, all required attributes check out. How far is your apartment?"
They seem to have fixed it now, but for months on end any link to an article with a hashbang in the URL would instead bring you to the frontpage of any gawkmedia site. The way they fixed it? Ditch the hashbang.

Incompetence anywhere will break things, but when the only clear case in favour of hashbangs (that I've heard of) is infinite scrolling, it's time to look at better ways of doing it. You would hope that Google would have finally figured out by now that they should be making urls prettier, not googlier.
OpenCV 2.1 Python Tutorial
I don't understand why anybody should be surprised about this.

True story, degrees are a meaningless measure for skill or ability in a specific field.
Can we please kill that stupid “X has no word for Y!” snowclone? Please? (Or at least get people to do some basic research before they say something stupid like that.)

As some light googling will reveal (or thinking for a few seconds, if you are, like me, a native German speaker), German does indeed have a word for small talk. There is „Plausch” (that’s the noun) and “plaudern” (and the verb). I suspect that there are also a few other words in regional dialects. („Schwätzchen”, maybe.) There is also „Tratsch“ but that’s more along the lines of gossip and usually between two people who know each other.

I do suspect that small talk is rarer in Germany but I would like to see a quantitative study confirming that, not (what seems like) idle speculation from a Professor who doesn’t even know that her own language has a word for small talk.
Why NYC Will Win Out Over The Valley
Technical aspects of Maniac Mansion on Commodore 64
I don't think "API" is used in the same sense as what you are using it in. The author is talking about not building your business around an API offered by external service provider (eg: Google Translate, or Twitter for example) where your business is dependent upon the the external party continuing to offer that API.

The article is not about APIs of libraries.
Honestly i'm more interested to see how they draw in more minor labels and indies. Myspace could have been the biggest indie music promotion engine in the world (and in a way it kind of was), so when someone finally gets a popular service to link people up with local music in a way where they can find stuff they actually like, somebody's becoming a billionaire.
But short term has its benefits i.e. Tweetdeck
Google Preps Chrome For IPv6 Test Day
'Thanks', and 'please', are used in Dutch only when there is much to thank for (saving someones life, or at least possessions or the like). While in English they are part of almost any question or exchange, no matter how trivial.

The Vietnamese have a similar attitude. The "Thank You" on your electric bill? The Vietnamese attitude is WTF?
Ask HN: How you focus on one idea/concept?
Interesting article. Have you done this successfully?
Tax dollars fund shrimp on treadmills, Jell-O wrestling in Antarctica
"No one, as far as I know, argues that humans actually solve differential equations in their head when they catch a ball."

I would argue that we actually find approximate solutions to differential equations with what is likely best described as an analog computer.

So essentially, humans and computers as they are currently programmed do it the same way. The only difference is that computers do it better.
The infographic lost its credibility in my eyes with its Digg valuation.
I can understand being unhappy because they've decided to deprecate a free API. I disagree with the rage of the OP.

This was a free service and they're no longer going to offer it, and they're shutting it down in an orderly manner. That's not selfish.

This is more like someone giving you a birthday present every year, and then when they fail to send you one, you write a nasty post about how greedy and selfish they are.
Dunno where you got that idea. I used to work in an fMRI lab at MIT. We would put people in a brain scanner and have them do some tasks. After, we had a timeseries of very high resolution 3-D blood flow images in the brain (these are basically matrices with a number for the value in each voxel). Then we ran data analysis. I'm talking a multi-stage data analysis using different statistical techniques for motion correction, normalization, modeling the haemodynamic response function, slice timing correction and lining all this up with the time data for the tasks, then doing whole group analysis. This generally ran on a 12 node Linux cluster we had in house and typical analysis could take hours or days. Up until recently, MATLAB dominated the research in this field, but now everyone is moving to Python, or wrapping existing programs in Python.

Anyway, it's not only engineers that use MATLAB. It is quite popular in the sciences, and not just for plotting.
Yanked all scripts off the page and it's solved. Going to go through them one by one when I have a moment to figure out which it was.

Thanks again!!
And he has "noindex, nofollow" for his site. Kind of humble tumbledryer.
Excellent questions! That I hope someone will investigate. But brockf seemed skeptical that it was even possible for there to be an evolutionary process that produced humans with a statistical-learning-engine in their brains for language. Which I find curious, since - and this is my point - the same can be said for everything that is a result of evolutionary processes. That is, his complaint has nothing to do with language and statistical processoes. The same complaint could be lobbed at eyes.
I also need advise on this, i am technically good. Working on multiple ideas. New ideas keep poping and i am also in dilemma now which one i should pick first so confused, looking forward to get advise and hear experiences of others
The sad thing is that this is very true. The worst part is that no-one believes you until the provider of the API goes under or they break it.
That's a lot of work for $2,000, and the hard part is the blogging and marketing, which has nothing to do with programming.
Thanks for the correction. Totally misunderstood the article.

I still find it incredible and hard to believe that 89.60% of Wikipedia articles end up at Modern Philosophy.
Even for a new employee at Google, Facebook, etc. bonuses and stock make up a significant percentage of pay

eta: new as in "unproven and fresh out of school." The statement because trivially obvious when you're talking about VPs acquired from PayPal, etc.
His post didn't mention the US...

Last I checked, English is the language spoken in the US.
Yes this is my site and yes the discussion is occurring outside of Hacker News as well. Thanks for the feedback! :) The next poll takes up most the CPU on the site since it's pre-calculated two steps ahead. Glad you like it!
I never liked IT anyway. Shit has to be designed and stuff.

Why can't we all be friends and blossom like flowers in the fields?
Post a link to a site that you created following this that is making $2k a month.
So, basically, create a demand-media site but without even paying writers the $3/hour to create crap articles? Just scrape them from the government? :-)

I'm all for the lifestyle business thing, but there are more fulfilling ways to make $2k/month, imho... As the cost of creating businesses drops, the number of viable niches literally explodes.
kgermino,

I use Wepolls too. The benefit of the social polling on Wepolls is they can be shared anywhere, and also people on their network vote on them.

But I voted yes.
Tell that to Airbus: http://www.astree.ens.fr/
Yes, starting in 2004 with census.gov data. Then friends repro'd it in 2005-2006. Repro'd again in 2008. About to repro again in 2011. Current site launched 4 months ago on new domain that had never been registered before. Now passing 1000 uniques per day with 300,000 pages indexed and 3 million to go - and expect to easily hit the short-term traffic target in 2 to 3 months.

The site is non-spam, genuinely useful and solves a real problem. The current (soon to be previous) top ranking site for the category is awful. It's filled with ads to make it unusable and functionality sucks. It was acquired a long time ago, the core dev team has probably left and the entire category needs a refresh and I'm happy to help.

I should have added to the blog entry to look for categories where the competition is stale and has been acquired by a large publisher looking to cut costs and aggressively monetize.
Book publishers in denial on Amazon's e-book sales
None of those are examples of vendor lock-in. Linux, sql, and python all come from many different vendors. If you were using, say, Debian, SQLite, and IronPython, and they all exploded, you could switch to alternatives pretty easily, I think.
How about 'interest testing' instead.

And, BTW people have been doing this for years. Write up some google ads for nonexistent products and then watch and wait to see what value props and features matter to your test market.
Hmm, I always assumed you could earn way more with spam.
Hacker News polls can be shared anywhere as well. Wepolls just has a little broader audience which has its pros & cons. :)
We’ve spent years trying to clean up our URLs and make them semantic by managing mod_rewrite, readable slugs, and date formatting. Now, we take a step backward, forcing the average internet user to learn another obscure set of symbols that make URLs harder for them to parse.

I suppose this was all discussed to death around the rollout of NewTwitter, but it bears repeating.
How to make an extra $10,000 per month:

Find 12 people who conduct significant business online, tell them this story, and set your bill rate accordingly.
Jeesh,

It could be nice to have a non-snark explanation to avoid confusion.

The infinite page method given is programming technique. It is neither computer science nor software engineering in the way that a technique for holding a hammer is neither part of architecture nor mechanical engineering.

"[Software Engineering] is a 'systematic approach to the analysis, design, assessment, implementation, test, maintenance and reengineering of software, that is, the application of engineering to software.'"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_engineering

Software engineering is a part of applied computer science.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_science
The ??? part of his profit formula—the blogging and marketing—is a part-time job on its own.

Regardless, 150,000 hits per month is unrealistic.
Hm... we're happy users of both and they have almost nothing in common. Mixpanel is more like a flexible general purpose database which gives you real time "views" of your data. You can chart it yourself or Mixpanel will do it for you.

We (http://mailgun.net) built our email analytics on top if it in a very short period of time and it's much nicer that anything we could have made in-house (and keeps getting nicer).
Chevy Volt: 90 Percent Electric Driving
Are these APIs really so unique that they can't code for some other provider's replacement? Is it just that a for-pay translation API, for instance, is too expensive for a product without a solid business plan to use?
This is nothing new and Google is well aware of this tactic.

Years ago I use to buy pre-populated databases (such as all the veterinarians in the US) and create SEO-perfect websites with one piece of information on each page. It was highly crawlable and did well. I threw adsense on it and made good money for a while. A lot of other people figured it out and Google started dinging sites like this. I don't think this would work anymore.
Dentist Board Exam Result June 2009
I agree.

I guess I am a bit concerned about disputes where you don't have a hard copy of the bill they actually sent you or gave you at the point of purchase.

But as I think about it, there are already third parties who keep records involved in transmitting things already and not many disputes of the type I was imagining.

One can imagine how things might be abused, but where the legal system is functioning, there shouldn't be a problem. And if its not functioning, there are much bigger problems.

So you're correct.
FYI, it's the other Firefox guy, Ben Goodger, who now leads the Chrome team at Google[1]. Blake Ross is apparently doing things unrelated to browser development, at Facebook[2].

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Goodger

2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blake_Ross
It shouldn't be ok to write code that is known to throw an error, and handle it by suppressing that error. Silently failing code is just a bug waiting to happen.

It's also making the interpreter do unnecessary error handling work when a simple "if ($_GET['foobar'])" would suffice.
Sorry, what does "repro'd" mean?
I've done my time in Cold Fusion hell, I know what I need to know.

Perhaps I've got a negative attitude about the intelligence of developers because I've been a maintenance programmer for too long. I've seen so many apps that almost work in ColdFusion because some guy didn't know if he was using a session scope or an application scope or request variable in CF.

I worked at a place where there was a ColdFusionMafia that existed just to bamboozle management into shelling out $8000 for server licenses. They'd go blah blah blah about how Cold Fusion was a great force multiplier but most of them couldn't code their way out of a paper bag they just knew a bunch of tricks that almost worked but couldn't be bothered to get HTML and SQL escaping right.

To be fair you can write pretty decent code in CF if you know how to code but if you knew how to code why would you be coding in CF?

The ColdFusionMafia ultimately got the organization to spend upwards of $500k worth of software licenses and people's time to implement a commercial CMS product that was ultimately abandoned. They pulled me off a project that was really worthwhile and it ended up in a project failure that caused my whole group and everybody above it all the way to the top of the organization to get fired.

Some recruiter called me the other day wanting to know if I want to code ColdFusion in Ohio and I'm like I'd rather be shuffling punched cards....
I can't see what either of these "tricks" have to do with bash, they would work in csh, tcsh, zsh, sh etc.
Seems like a good consulting business opportunity to audit large companies web presence to get a list of all publicly accessible sites and then gather current info from IT and management on what is authorized and what's not.
And what of open-source projects that rely on such APIs? Are they expected to figure out a way to switch to for-pay APIs as well? Example: https://github.com/Marak/translate.js
What are the addresses for those sites?
"500 Internal Server Error"
having the url bar always visible had the added benefit of not promoting dumb thins like vignete cms url schema.

plus I more copy from urls than type then in
in
Check out http://www.microsofttranslator.com/dev/ - I find the translations aren't always as good with idiomatic phrases, but it does a pretty good job and the API is complete and easy to use.
Create a landing page describing the idea "Beta available soon - signup for early access" and get feedback, this will validate your idea and then start working on the with most response, this will keep you focused cause you know people want it.
For background:

- I've seen the Python (2.x) way (separate `unicode' and `str' type and no way to set own conversion defaults per whole process -_-') and found it unwieldy. Lotsa boilerplate to keep around I/O.

- I've seen the GNU way (messy pile depending on LC_* environment vars and files in /usr/, with hierarchy of precedence) and disliked it.

- I've seen the Plan 9 way (char * / char[] for UTF-8 and Rune * / Rune[] for UTF-32) and it fits me. I see and use (non-PHP) software built on that, works reliably. I'm happy :)

implode() and explode() work with UTF-8. I hope you know the techicalities of why -- UTF-8's been designed that way and the functions take complete string as the glue/separator. No idea about about UTF-7, -16 or -32 (nor the April Fool's -18 and -36); guess some of those would break terribly. I don't care at this moment. My sites run polish, english, russian and in near future czech language based on UTF-8.

Your point is just strtok(). You are right. I lost. PHP lost. Have a nice day -- and kudos for bringing up that cool function :-)

EDIT: now that I think about it, it seems I've abused explode() for that job -- the output array, with empty strings removed, is equivalent of calling strtok() repeatedly till it returns FALSE. Seems a bit brute-force-ish.

AS for that warning against, and undefined behavior, I'll assume you're refering to the following passage:

It is not recommended to use the function overloading option in the per-directory context, because it's not confirmed yet to be stable enough in a production environment and may lead to undefined behaviour.

Reading comprehension: don't re-configure it per directory (in this case, of your project, not whole server). Having that minded, you get reliable site.
I somewhat do this, but with crossword puzzle data. I'm sure there are more spammy ways to do it, but there is money to be made if you can genuinely provide data people are actively looking for and can't find.
La reina del sur capitulo 62
la reina del sur capitulo 62
Mendoza and circumstances of the less innocent young life just changed effective and feared the Lord
Google and Facebook did not lose the case, they just failed to have the complaint dismissed outright. It will still go to trial (or settlement) but the only thing this ruling states is the the judge overseeing the case believes that there is sufficient evidence to take the case to trial and that adjudicating it is not a complete waste of the court's time.
Who knows how much they will make on Nokia Windows phones, but right now they're making $0 from them since there aren't any yet.
yes but you can take an app from the 80s and still run it on Windows 7 today
Exactly. A website like this won't just start getting a ton of search traffic overnight. It takes a lot of effort building links before the site will see any traffic. This is definitely not a part-time gig.
Well then that's bad intended behaviour. The back button should reverse the loading of a new page after clicking a link. It should not interfere with scrolling at all.
...some of them are willing to pay at least $1.2 million per year to programmers who can code them better than anyone else.

Correction: some of them are willing to pay at least $1.2 million/yr to a programmer who can bring them source code representing the cumulative effort of a team from one of the most 'respected' firms in the industry.
A very relevant application of this concept: the lean startup!
Relying on a service hosted by a third party is fundamentally different. Nobody, not even Torvalds or van Rossum, could throw a switch and shut down your Linux boxes or your Python interpreter, so any needed migration to an incompatible system can happen at your convenience.