skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The title of the post confused me at first. I don't think I've ever seen "OK" used as a measure of difficulty.

The "Here's how" gave it away, but I originally thought the article was an argument against people feeling bad that they do development work on the side.

I've clearly been spending too much time reading English.SE...
Am I the only one who thinks it looks like a high-tech baby stroller?
Spotify asked SpotifyOnTheWeb to shut down
Came here to say this. This guy is complaining because Google is shutting down a service that started to become more of a burden on them to provide than a benefit to the actual developers using it. They're not the goddamned Red Cross, they're a business. A very cool, developer-friendly business, yes, but still.
have you tried migrating to Python 3.0 yet?
In Front Of Its IPO, Kayak Reports Growth In Revenue But Income Down
Pippa Middleton teases Prince Harry, the romance in the air
Pippa Middleton and Prince Harry, they can become a gorgeous couple since the sources say that Prince Harry is trying to woo her these days. And we have also learnt that Pippa considers Harry more than a friend.
Yeah, I understand the cause. Just because those steps make logical sense doesn't mean it's not a bug.

My real point was about the WONTFIX tendencies of the PHP dev team at the time (I've been gone a while; maybe it's better now). It's absolutely the thing I miss least about that community. I mean, when I filed that bug PHP 5 -- the first version to support foreach with references -- was less than 2 months old. The "people might be relying on it" argument doesn't hold much weight with me today, but it certainly didn't hold any for a 2-month-old feature.
Yeah, opening mail for you is an additional service. You can have them do it for everything or just what you want to look at. It is done by machine, but you are relying upon their system being honest. Of course, if its ever shown that its not, they'll lose quite a bit of business.

Is it a federal offense to look at mail someone has authorized you to open? Not sure about that. So, can't say that the level of trust is as high as it would be with the post office.

Of course, the post office is much more likely to give your mail to the wrong people, so may not be as save anyway.
Perl recognises that it is a bad practice.

perl -we ' print "true\n" if "12" == "12php"'
Argument "12php" isn't numeric in numeric eq (==) at -e line 1.
true

perl -w -e 'my $foo = "12php"; $foo = $foo + 1; print $foo, "\n";'
Argument "12php" isn't numeric in addition (+) at -e line 1.
13

(an exception seems to be made for $foo++ though... that's Perl for you).
By actually I meant solve them in the same way that you and I solve them; analytically, using our formalisms. Rather, I'm proposing that our brains are using some statistical model that gives results pretty damn close to what the analytical answers would be. And that something similar is true for syntax and grammar.
Agreed, I guess that when we have build smarter compilers a Centaur approach would work best (like in chess). The computer can do a whole lot by bruteforce and smart algorithms and the human uses his knowledge of the context to steer it in the right direction.

Unfortunately we're not their yet.
Et Tu Bedier? Why PayPal Is Suing Google, Execs
I second this. If you get people on a list, you also don't want to disappoint them by not coming out with your product.
Ask HN: How not to multitask
When people say that multitasking is bad for productivity, I understand the arguments - but I think the real question is not whether it's bad, but to what extent it's bad.

There's downtime in most things:

- Waiting for software to be installed
- Waiting for a process to finish
- Waiting for a slow website to load
- A client puts our phone call hold for a few minutes
- Waiting for pasta to cook
- Waiting for a document to finish printing

Obviously NO multitasking in some situations, like software being installed (when you know it's going to take half an hour), is less productive than "multitasking" (filling that hour with something else).

Most multitasking articles seem to be arguments for why multitasking is bad in general, rather than a detailed discussion of what's productive multitasking and what isn't. I'd like to see some articles on for what sized waiting blocks a human brain should context-switch, or how we can fill this waiting blocks with activities that aren't too distracting from the original task. References? Thoughts?
How  to Persuade your Target Audiences
What privacy concerns? That they came to a site and stood around for 4 minutes and read some article?

Are my users concerned to go out too, and of their dress, and is that privacy also?

How would they like it if the first greeting in a shop was, Hello, we are watching you, we are here to serve you, and take as much money as we can from you.

Why do they not go after the people who actually do the tracking? Why do they not impose a legal obligation on google and ad agencies to not track, or on facebook or whatever. Why go after thousands of people. Not everyone is a programmer. Many website owners have no clue what a cookie is, which one is essential or otherwise, how to not store cookies, or delete them, etc.

The end effect is then that the web stops being free from all. The cooperation, with the resources to abide to such laws, once again take control. The man on the street can not any more simply get a template from some website and put some ads on it. He needs to pay some programmer which he probably can not afford.

What user has been hurt? What privacy has been infringed? What have we found out about anyone which was previously secret?

This is about control. Nothing else. As such, the people will do what they do best when met with ridiculous and far reaching laws, ignore them. Let them arrest us all!
Thank you. That was a fantastic story. The key here was to design a better -- design/build/test/verify/iterate -- system.

Once MacCready figured that out, creating the mylar + aluminum place becomes almost intuitive. However the best part of the story for me was the fact that this took place a full 18 years after the challenge had been issued. And we worry about missing an opportunity to address the challenges by weeks or months. Instead, let's remember that a solution twice as good will catch any front runner.
this statement is exactly the attitude described by romaniv.
Yabla seems very interesting. Care to share more details? How is it doing, who and where from are the largest user groups, how did you end up with the idea, etc.
Ask HN:Why there's no Regular Expression search for web?
What's keeping Google/other search engines from implementing Regular expression search in particular?
Amazon Wants to Hire Game Designer to Create Mobile Social Games
No, The Volt Does Not Encourage Gas Use
The best thing to do would be for them to disrupt themselves. Apple does that.

When has Apple done that? Apple has never had a market until the iPod that was large enough to be cannibalized. But they've never actually cannibalized the iPod/iPhone/iPad market.

Now pushing webapps over their appstore would be cannibalizing iOS. But simply shipping improved products isn't cannibalizing.
I used to work at WorldLingo (http://www.worldlingo.com), who offers a translation API service. They're one of the few machine translation API services that are publicly available at reasonable costs. I'm happy to answer questions about the translation industry as a whole, shoot me an email if you're interested.
> Of those articles that don't follow the pattern, the vast majority get stuck in loops.

Are there any articles that don't follow the pattern and don't get stuck in loops? The only way I can see that happening is if the article has no links at all.
In principle it can work, maybe not as well as it used to if the site is too generic but it can in theory be done. But there is one black hole in this plan:

"Tell the right people about your site and tell them regularly via great blog entries, insightful tweets, and networking in your site’s category."

That being only a single line item in this plan underplays how difficult it can be to get good targeted traffic.
I used to think I cared a lot about major labels, but there's nothing good coming out on major labels anymore.

Just use what.cd to download the entire catalog of old artists you might like (or rip your CDs, or iTunes, or whatever), and use earbits for discovery of new music.

(Similarly, about 2 years ago, I realized I'd prefer to give up all broadcast TV/movies than Youtube...)

I would prefer if earbits did a little more fine-grained curation of channels; the programmatic "stations" from Pandora are a great idea.

The one thing I like about Pandora is how well it categorizes music I already have, but the licensing terms (limited-skip) even for Pandora One, make it kind of painful if you listen long enough.
google should hire you as PR.
On HN the bulk of the downvoting is done by users with karma over 500, not moderators.
How Might 3D Chat, Driverless Cars and Cheap Solar Influence Cities?
Oops, I think I misread you. I thought you were talking about how hashbangs break the sharability of links, but you were really speaking about how Gawkmedia broke it. I'm not terribly familiar with their site.

...when the only clear case in favour of hashbangs (that I've heard of) is infinite scrolling

That's the first time I've heard them associated with infinite scrolling, but perhaps I've missed something.

The hash-bang idea is just about making ajax-y navigation URLs crawlable by spiders.

It's just an extension of the standard hash (without the bang) where the "url fragment" (everything after the hash) is used in AJAX applications to preserve the user's ability to bookmark and use the back & forth button on their browser.
Unfortunately it's just how the system works.
I've had the same experience with my Incredible. The fact that CyanogenMod 7 is Android 2.3 based, while there isn't an official Gingerbread ROM for the phone, is probably also a factor.
Sometimes, a really simple statement is a Tabula Rasa. We read into it what we believe, or what we think others might believe. Nothing exceptionally wrong with that, and so we ask the author: "Did you mean such-and-such?" If they didn't, they clarify their intent and we move along.

I have spent more time thinking about the nature of programming languages than editors, so I will perhaps ruin a perfectly good neutral statement by talking about my own beliefs. I think there is such a thing as a power continuum in languages. I have no idea whether Haskell is more powerful than Clojure, but I am comfortable describing Java as far down the continuum from Scheme.

I also think there is such a thing as design in programming languages, and I think it has value. So while Python may be less powerful than some other languages in an absolute sense, I understand why many people choose it. It is well-designed in exactly the same way that the original iPod (No Wireless. Less Space Than A Nomad. Lame.) was well-designed. And by well-designed, I don't mean "Has all the features, " I mean, "Has a carefully selected set of features that complement each other."

Given my beliefs, I understand people who prefer to work with more powerful languages and why they might argue that you never need to step down the power continuum. Makes sense. I also understand people who argue a certain tool that is less powerful in an absolute sense but has a design that suits them in some fundamental way. I even understand people who argue that certain languages are more powerful and well-designed, like Haskell.

I honestly don't have a strong feeling that either person is wrong, and I'm fairly comfortable saying that we haven't done enough research to settle the matter empirically.

So no, I am certainly not ridiculing Lisp users who claim that there is no need to step down the power continuum. They may be right, and we don't have enough solid evidence to disprove their claims, just what amounts to folklore about readability and design patterns and significant whitespace and monkey-patching.

Likewise, I cannot really argue with an emacs evangelist. Who can say that such an argument is anything except Blub? I value certain well-designed text editors--I have been enjoying Byword lately--but can I prove that I'm more efficient with Byword than I would be if I spent two weeks or a month or a few years becoming an emacs guru?

So anyways, no I was not being derisive, but I don't fault anybody for wondering if I had something on my mind considering that I tried very hard to say nothing about whether Emacs is or isn't superior to Byword, or whether Ruby is or isn't an acceptable Lisp.
"Big data" and "data analysis" are the new buzzwords in Silicon Valley.

Everybody's trying to find the golden egg hidden in big data. However, I'm not saying that it isn't valuable.
One problem is that there's no easy way to build a regular expression index for the web. In the general case the only way to do regex search is to scan the entire content.

It might be practical to do a hybrid search -- a conventional word or phrased based search to return a limited set of documents that can then be brute-force searched using a regular expression. This could be especially handy for programmers searching for code samples, a position I often find myself in.
Except that they provided a replacement and a migration path.
It's the second time in a week some one gives numbers like that. Is it true you can do four figures with just 150.000 page views?

Two orders of magnitude better than I do!
isn't staff engineer a manager?
Have an easy, quick outlet for new ideas coming in.

This will free your mind so you can focus on the one idea that matters. The last thing you want is to shut your mind off completely to new ideas (that's murder).

I would also find a like-minded friend to share ideas with. A smart person can push, prod and alter your ideas for the better - thus helping develop your creative mind.
Refinery CMS 1.0 Released
Research has also proven that a relatively very small group of contributors actually make most of the changes on Wikipedia, believe it's in the order of about 100 people (can't find the link at the moment). It's well possible that it's a conspiracy, or there's a secret style guide we don't know about.
Ha, that's an awesome slam. Hadn't seen it before:

"The UNIX-HATERS Handbook contains an extremely funny 'Anti-Foreword' by Dennis Ritchie:

'I do write you off as envious malcontents and romantic keepers of memories.'

and

'The systems you remember so fondly are not just out to pasture, they are fertilizing it from below...'"
You can always use func_get_args() if you truly want it that way.
You're correct; it would either have to get stuck in a loop or end in an article that had no links. The latter is highly unlikely, except perhaps for some small stub articles that link to another stub. Of the articles that don't link to Philosophy, I'd guess 99.9% would get stuck in loops or have no links to begin with.
Yep. That's the walled garden bit people are pissed off about.

You'd have to create a pretty nasty hack to get around it and you'd probably be shutdown anyway.
It is obviously a risk/reward scenario. Of course, you can use the APIs and you can succeed, but I don't want to hear people bitching about how the rug is pulled out from under them when that was the arrangement all along.
actionbrandon@gmail.com
Thanks, I am technically good and passionate to work but when i start on one , i feel this new concept is awesome and i get diverted from main stream for some time.

But if you think this formula works then definitely, i will try this.
A latex character recognition in a web browser
Sure, they are actually "shell tricks". I think he just happens to use bash, that's all, no slight to the other shells.
The IPhone disrupts the IPod and the IPad disrupts the Mac business.

The IPad is not just an "improved product". It's disruptive.
$foo++ isn't an exception. It has documented behavior on strings. That is sometimes very useful.
I still think Inovator's Dilemma is the most insightful business book ever written. If you truly understand what he's talking about in that book you'll get insights in technology that it's hard otherwise to understand because they feel very counter-intuitive in the beginning. This book should be on the desk of every CEO, especially in large corporations, but it's also very useful for startups to shape their products into something with a high potential for success.

Blue Ocean Strategy is also a similar and great book, and the Chasm books series (Crossing the Chasm, Inside the Tornado, Chasm Companion) are very good complementary books to Innovator's Dilemma (and Innovator's Solution).
Paid apps find success much easier on Apple's iPhone than Google Android
Putting aside the fact that I don't agree with software patents in general I still don't like what Microsoft is doing. I think that it's not right for Microsoft to force companies using linux into these licensing agreements without making it entirely clear what patents are being infringed on. If they shared this information then the infringing code could potentially be removed and replaced with code that doesn't infringe. What they're doing basically amounts to extortion in my mind.

This is my opinion but I didn't vote in your poll because the wording for "no" is too specific for me. I want to say no without simultaneously expressing an opinion on the quality of any products that Microsoft has produced.
Sure, but people manage to do it all the time. Like this girl on reddit today:
http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/hlgtb/iama_24_yo_girl_...

Btw, I lost 20 pounds in the last 6 months, so I know what it's like. That said, once you make it a habit, it's not that bad. The hardest thing with food is avoiding "just one cigarette". Just takes a few days of crappy eating / not exercising for your old habits to take over again. You really have to watch out for that.
Actually, I kind of like the feeling that I'm building a golem when working on webapps.
You mean I have to install and licence it on every system that i use? No thanks, i prefer python that I can use everywhere, even in remote clusters overseas. FYI Numpy + Matplotlib have a very intuitive syntax for matlab users. http://mathesaurus.sourceforge.net/matlab-numpy.html
It's not a bug because it's not a bug. How would you propose they fix this non-bug anyway?

At the end of the first loop, $item contains a reference to the last item in the array. Just as $item would contain the value of the last item in the array if you weren't using references. In the next loop, $item still contains that reference so now you're overwriting the value of that reference. You can't assume the second loop knows anything about the first loop.

People might actually be relying on this behavior but not in the way that you're expressing here. References are not just assigned in foreach loops.
http://code.google.com/apis/predict/docs/terms.html ?
There are two kinds of APIs: the ones which are deprecated and the ones which don't exist or work yet.
Regex capable code search: http://google.com/codesearch
With DOS emulator.
There is no problem to run DOS app from 80s on Linux/MacOS/whatever with dosbox. By the way, dosbox is far better for some apps than DOS emulator from Windows XP/Vista/7.
Just so you know, twitter's search only goes back a limited amount of time because its targeted at real-time results, not historical. Google with site:twitter.com might get better results.
OR, it's just because they used the English wikipedia for it
Ask HN: Where are the great scientific theories of our lifetime?
It seems to me that all the GREAT theories and discoveries happened
before we were born:

Evolution, Big Bang, special relativity, general relativity, quantum
mechanics, Godel's incompleteness theorem, continental drift, asteroid
death of dinosaurs (K-T extinction event), fission/fusion, germ theory,
etc.

All of those theories and discoveries are at least 50 years old.

You'd think that with scientific knowledge supposedly doubling
every 7 years that we'd have many new really important discoveries
and truly groundbreaking theories. But we don't. Why not?
Irrelevant to the grandparent's point because your Python 2.x interpreter isn't going to stop working at the whim of an outside party.
LPs Want More Info on Management Teams, Value People Over Track Record
CNAME on a domain root does work, and it isn't evil
Secret G8 memo reveals outbreak of Internet harmony
I'm the author of that clone. I'm making progress, and it's building up to a fairly nice subset of org-mode, but it's not something that would satisfy any truly hardcore org-mode power user. At least not any time in the near future.

The previous poster complained that none of the Vim plugins that try to mimic or clone org-mode "seem complete". That is definitely the wrong way to look at things. Org-mode is a huge app that's been heavily developed for six or seven years now. In some ways org-mode is probably like Microsoft Word: probably 75% of its users access only about 25% of its features, although many of them access a different 25%.

Why try to develop an org-mode clone in Vim, then? Mostly as a personal project I started for fun. I tried switching to Emacs just so I could use org-mode. Even with Viper and Vimpulse add-ons Emacs felt too clunky to me. I had previously worked on a Vim outliner and I knew that part wouldn't be too hard to replicate in Vim. I decided not to stop there and I've gone on to a lot of other features, although it's a fledgling project. In particular, I need to get some decent documentation done. There are a ton of features in my clone that users have no idea are even there. I think so far most of them (like most org-mode users?) use it mostly for simple outlining.

The Vim clone uses a file format compatible with org-mode and actually calls out to an Emacs server to have org-mode do exports to LaTeX/PDF, HTML, etc. So pure document authoring (as opposed to PIM/task management stuff), is one task that the Vim clone probably can do a decent job of now. Adding footnote support is on the list (there's already a Vim footnote plugin that I plan to modify to work with the org-clone).
Web development minutiae.
If implemented correctly using the hash bang method can increase the amount of articles people read per visit. For every article a user reads they also get more advertising. It's a clear win for gawker if people read more content.

Faster because each article the browser has to load after the first one is smaller then a whole page load.

Unfortunately, gawker failed at the technical implementation in spectacular fashion. Though, they do seem to be turning the ship around.
Reminds me of a reddit "Ask Me Anything" thread from someone making made-for-AdSense sites: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/a74ba/not_an_adsense_m... (This was pre Google's content farm algorithm changes, however.)

It's an insightful read regarding the amount of work required and it seems the person was actually producing/aggregating useful content.
Thanks, I'll take that into consideration when creating future polls. If you really felt inclined, you could create a poll option you like more. Then other people can vote on it as well.

Also, thanks for your feedback. I started this site three months ago and quit my job last month to work on it full time. My apologies if things are a bit unpolished.
Go Mountaineers!

Are there currently any decent developer jobs in WV? I would love to move to the Greebrier County area.

Montani Semper Liberi
On one hand, I want to say you should read the thread before posting, on the other hand, if someone reaches the same conclusions independently from the rest, it decreases the likelihood that we're all insane.