skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes. The sections I feel expert on or had direct experience with beforehand were well done. For example, in the chapter on gaining muscle, I was thinking, "I bet he doesn't know about the GOMAD diet." On my hard-gainer frame and with my hard-gainer appetite I'd recently gained 20 lbs of lean mass in two weeks on it, which was sort of like gaining super powers given my history. Surprise, surprise, he covers it. When, in one paragraph, you learn about a diet that's more effective than steroids for bodies that haven't significantly tapped into their hypertrophy potential, you've made up the price of admission already.

Or, when he talks about the unique challenges facing women in body shaping, his thinking mirrored my own in some subtle ways that I'd never heard anyone else talk about before (possibly because it might seem sexist).

Given that, I tended to trust that the other material would at least be thought provoking. Basically, he's just really committed to self-improvement--which I know a lot of folks around here are--and looks anywhere to find tools and techniques to aid in his quest. There's an emphasis on science, but he's willing to try anything if research hasn't solved the problem yet.

It covers the right things and was fun.
Agreed. I'd love to see what's behind Canvas.
I think DPP has a fundamentally flawed argument: He seems to be assuming that all those Java developers that fail to learn Scala are using Java successfully.

Sure, their projects may compile, they may even be deployed and used on a daily basis. But are they maintainable? Are they able to function when load increases? Are there hidden race conditions that go unnoticed for years? If a user inputs bad data will the application suddenly throw NPEs? Will moving to a different hardware platform with more cores expose a fatal deadlock?

Scala's "weakness" is not that it is harder than Java, it's that it exposes the difficulty and complications of software engineering to developers at an earlier point in the development cycle.

If your standard of success is compiling and deploying a product, than yes, I'll admit Scala makes it 'harder' than java. However, if you define success as writing defect free, performant software, than I'd argue that Scala is actually easier than Java.
I wonder if Yahoo! needs old Jerry Yang (the one with fire in his belly in his early days) back as Twitter did with Jack Dorsey.
I don't see the significance of this article. CEO reads email on a tablet? Sends a note immediately to confirm it?
Articles like this make me happy I run ad blocking software. The last thing I'd want to do is give a monetary reward to amateur-hour reporting link-bait like this.
So I think it is clear this was a defensive response to valid criticism. The initial "Virginia" post claimed that if you don't program Scala like he does then your doing it wrong and its too hard for you. He still makes the claim that Scala is too hard for most people and should be reserved for use by the talented and/or motivated developers.

My criticism of this was that you don't need to program like him to have a great Scala experience. You can still program in a OO manner and get plenty of benefit out of Scala. As you get more familiar with it you will pick up some nice features that it gives you that Java doesn't. Everyone comes at things at a different level and I think its quite pretentious to claim that most people aren't smart enough to use your tools and they need to stick with simpler tools. If you give someone the tools they will learn to use it. The real problem is when you need to be an expert to use the tools at all. thankfully Scala isn't like that you can jump in with a hour or two of instruction and write perfectly good Java++ code. then as you learn how to use the tool you will pick up the nuances of the language and really unlock its power.

I would say this post like the last overlooks some of the broader issue and really does the community a disservice.
Google+ business pages coming soon
Okay, I'll take the bait.

When I ssh into our Solaris server, it drops me into csh by default. That makes me think someone out there believes it's good enough.
Great point, and if I may say ideas are almost worthless. They're floating all over, they're everywhere. Bad ones, good ones, done ones... I believe what makes it worth is the execution, the effort of making an app running and selling.

I believe `Angry Birds` is a good example of it. It's success did not come from the idea at all. A simple game with a good execution and good marketing made it so popular.

Agreeing with the article; I just want to add that hearing people's ideas also put you into an awkward position. They give you responsibility of either not doing that application without that person's consent or sharing a revenue.

You usually don't need neither, because as a developer you're already putting more mental work on how to come up with better apps than some friend's mother of yours.

And hearing people like they invented the wheel all the time really is boring.
Asking questions is good. Showing initiative is good. Getting perceptive is good. These are the qualities you want to see in people. Embrace them. Encourage it.

There are so many different paths you could take when you set out on this quest that without a little guidance, you could waste a lot of time. Save learning to be an independent hacker for lesson two.
Many of the differences aren't typoes (classified by edit distance) but sound-alikes.
What would Google gain from acquiring Yahoo? Yahoo has little search technology of its own and many services that overlap with existing Google services.

I think Yahoo's properties (and users) might be a better fit with Facebook.
You comments on Lift are spot on. I think as a precursor to reading this post one needs to go write something in Lift. I better understand where this guy is coming from and understand why he gets his conclusions. That being said he is still wrong and your observation about the difficulty of the language are great counterpoints.
The only odd thing was it's hard to link directly to images without having to see the original and then have the page snap down to the image. Also if you share a pic in facebook it shows the original not the modified one you want to link to. It would also be nice if I could log in with my facebook account rather than remembering my username/pass.

I had more laughs per pic than browsing an imgur feed, if that means anything. I think I'm going to spend more time here!
Assuming lines of code is a valid argument, all the more reason to make sure those lines are doing as much as possible.
"Who really cares when something airs nowadays, especially in the case of streaming content?"

Quite a few people.

I think you're confusing what day/time a show is on with the premiere date of a show. People care a lot less about the former, but a lot of people still tune into a show the first time it comes out and talk about it the next day. This is the first time (of a large show) that a premiere occurred online before it was ever seen on TV.
...the secret weakness of Agile was that one
sociopath could ruin an entire project.

One sociopath can ruin any project, no matter what the methodology. The most important decisions are hiring decisions.
What omnipresent Google TV?
Most people don't realize this, but The New York Times is a big corporation like AOL (with sometimes similarish market caps).

- The New York Times has invested in technology companies like AdKeeper, Automattic, Ongo, Brightcove, Federated Media, and funds like Betaworks (which is in dozens of startups in all kinds of fields). Have their reporters ever received tips and information about upcoming companies and tech launches because of these connections? Do they get written about more often than your average startup? You better believe it. If you look through their coverage of these companies they imperfectly acknowledge their involvement (even the ones they've invested in directly).

Federated Media (2 years after an investment by New York Times): http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/30/technology/30online.html?s...

BrightCove article that was published without due diligence and later corrected eight days later: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/23/business/23corner.html?sq=...

GroupMe article where they mention that the company has taken $12 million but neglect to mention they were part of the round through Betaworks: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/08/21/skype-plans-to-buy-...

These were just three examples I pulled quickly (I sincerely apologize for using these companies as examples since this has nothing to do with them). Do your own search for any New York Times invested or Betaworks company on nytimes.com and you'll see what I mean. Does this change their coverage of other competing tech companies?

Funnily enough, the best resource to follow these connections is Crunchbase: http://www.crunchbase.com/company/newyorktimes

- The New York Times has their own internal division that develops software products and services that other publishing companies and media companies buy. Does this change their coverage on competing technologies and competitors?

- The New York Times owns a diverse set of businesses in competition with Aol's current strategy including about.com. They also own a chunk of the Boston Red Sox.

I'm going to be blunt. I don't think the New York Times is shady enough to let this change their coverage despite their obvious conflicts of interest (in the BrightCove article in their 8 day later correction stresses that "The New York Times Company owns a small stake of less than five percent in Brightcove". I doubt Michael Arrington owns 5% of any startup he's written about). And since TechCrunch has had (if anything) a policy of more transparency and disclosure than the Times has had, I can't for the life of me see what all the ruckus is about.

My disclosure: I am tangentially connected to most of these companies by investment, friendship, or business relationships and I think the world of them. OwnLocal also works with all kinds of newspapers and publishers as a matter of course.
The accompanying image looks like something off 4chan. What's the deal?
They would be insane to buy a whole stack of premium video content and not tie it into YouTube at all. The idea of watching a TV show with someone on Google Plus strikes me as... kind of awful. Maybe that's just me.
ad hominem rhetoric

Yikes! I seem to have struck a chord with Mr. Pollack. The problem is that I'm not sure that the gap between what he said and what I said is very large. I certainly wasn't attacking him in my post, although I did link to his article. Additionally, I would never question his Scala credentials, but I tend to question those who say that Scala is complicated based on type signatures and syntax oddities. However, I will say in that with his latest post I think the gap between our opinions has widened. His comes off as cynical, but I have to think that I'm misreading the post. I do however find it odd that "ad hominem" would be used by someone who bases a dev's programming potential on the number of hours they choose to work during the day and their familiarity with Zed Shaw.
Revenue is also cash - before expenses [they are collecting this amount]. I'm not suggesting that Groupon's 'operations activities' aren't responsible for pulling/keeping them in the red.

However, investors like Warren Buffet look for high-earning and unprofitable companies quite frequently to get involved with - companies like Groupon. Reason being, with some direction by a strong [/new] board of directors (majority shareholders; highly-successful business leaders; wiki: 'See's Candies', 'Washington Post', 'Berkshire Hathaway'), a company can re-divert [i.e. 'pivot'] resources, slash out unprofitbale segments, etc., and successfully revive a titan.

Response note: I garnered my figure of $1.6 billion based on a Dartmouth article here: http://www.tuck.dartmouth.edu/cds-uploads/case-studies/pdf/G... -- see bottom of page two, second-to-last paragraph in the section titled, "The Fastest-Growing Business in History."
Yang already had his shot at a Jobs-like return and he botched it miserably. Worst of all, he messed up Yahoo's chance for an acquisition, which at this point seems like the only way it can actually generate some value.
Yang already tried the CEO role a couple of times. He was generally regarded as ineffective. He also sat on the board of Alibaba when the Alipay scandal went down. I don't honestly think he's where to look for the future of Yahoo. I'm not sure that he has a real vision for Yahoo.

Yahoo's issue is that they have no overall direction. They have some great assets in terms of employees as well as online properties. But what exactly does Yahoo do? They aren't a search engine. They aren't really a news site. They talk a lot about mobile, but don't seem to have a meaningful presence. They talk about local, but I'm not even sure what that means, and in any case they don't actually seem to be doing anything meaningful there. (You can't claim to be "local" and have such broken maps.) They seem mostly to be an advertising company, but they don't really identify as such.

They need to figure out what it is that they do, or at least what they want to do, and pursue that aggressively. Otherwise I fear they'll continue on their aimless path.
I think the standard of success is profitability. By that metric many of these buggy java apps are profitable.
Minecraft is one of those games which is, first and foremost, a bucket of legos.
Those developers are, largely, still employed at companies that are still not bankrupt. If Scala changes either of those, it will encounter resistance, no matter how bad the original code was.
But they are not confident. Which is why they took money off the table. In hindsight Mason is probably kicking himself for not taking more out. Leftkowsky seems to be all set though.
If you search for "britney speers" Google does suggest "britney spears" but also shows that there are ~92K results with that misspelling. See http://i.imgur.com/CNEfC.png
"My extension sends MD5(url), which makes it nearly impossible for me to track someones browsing behavior."

You're kidding, right? In order to tell if there is a HN thread about the page, you also MD5(url) all HN threads. If you find a match, you send the thread to the user. Therefore, you know the user is visiting the url the HN thread is about!

Let's not even talk about how cheap it is to test for MD5 collisions against popular urls, or the how easy it is to determine if the user has visited an arbitrary url.
I would say in many places it is, but the numbers are often misleading. I'm not completely familiar with how we count it, but I believe when we count ELOCs (Effective Lines of Code) not only is the time people spend writing code counted, or even all the time spent by people who write code, but all the time by people spend on the "software engineering" portion of the project. That can include managers, requirements development, configuration managers, system administrators, QA, the people who collect metrics, etc.

So the number is really more reflective of how much an organization lumps under "software engineering" and how much general overhead its processes incur than it is of the productivity of individual programmers.
Dog Training Shock Collar
> youtube > 4chan
i think they did a pretty good job increasing the monthly page views to 1.6 billion..
For one, Yahoo would obtain significant talent. And they would gain an enormous amount of users that use Yahoo's services.

I'm curious, why do you think Yahoo's properties would be a better fit with Facebook?
Know off-hand why "britnay" and "briteny" come up as edit distance 6? Compare "britanny" at 2.
Yes, please send me email. I find this project very interesting and you've done a great job documenting it. I'm going to order some Hall effect sensors and see what results I get with them. I'll let you know what I find out.

Also, be careful with the epoxy. You need to get some specific kind (that is non-conductive), and I'm not sure what that is. There are all sorts of effects materials have on electronics; the epoxy could add resistance, capacitance, inductance, and any of those could adversely affect your circuit. Hopefully you can get specific advice from someone more qualified than I am.
Amazon is the real Apple competitor
>>There is still a way out if a Google or maybe an Amazon wanted to take a shot at a bid right now. Groupon for $4 billion Anyone? Anyone?

As if. That ship is going down fast and hard.
Yet if it were a startup just out of the gates with some funding, I'm sure we'd be hearing about it having a mythical valuation in the high tens of billions.
Don't forget – Jerry Yang actually returned to Yahoo! for a period. And completely fucked the dog, screwing up a potential acquisition and being replaced by Bartz. Say what we will about Valleywag, they covered this period pretty well:

BSing the troops:

http://gawker.com/valleywag/tech/yahoo/jerry-yangs-fireside-...

Ballmer writing a polite letter killing the acquisition prospects:

http://gawker.com/386898/

"Hey guys, uh, Ballmer's very public proclamations notwithstanding, Microsoft didn't actually want to buy us:"

http://uk.gawker.com/5020835/yahoo-ceo-tries-to-convince-sha...
It's all James's own artwork. Frankly, I love it.
Perhaps he doesn't care that they are using Java unsuccessfully -- he is saying that he prefers they not have or have fewer failed projects in Scala...
So, could you write a (restricted) interpreter that converts a string to a series of reflect method calls?
That'd be pretty cool.
I don't see a mechanism for calling basic operators or converting, so it looks like it might be _really_ restricted..
What Self can teach us about the future of JavaScript
You know what's fun? Game Development is fun.
Ah, yes. The guy who doesn't understand the difference between market cap and cash on hand. It'd be awesome to have him as your boss, so you could witness first hand what it looks like when incompetent leadership takes a company from $12.50 per share to $0.
Really? - 2 grittney spears
Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers has this story and others of that generation of computer billionaires.
Zoning and unsafe tend to go hand in hand. From Scoble's pic they converted the space illegally to office space with no plumbing, electrical, fire etc. inspections done. Essentially the whole thing could be a fire trap with bare electrical cables running over gas lines. Or it could be bullshit, point being it seems that no one can prove that anything in there is up to code. Someone fucked up the conversion pretty hard.
Your recruitment system maybe losing you paying customers
A/B Test your copywriting: do it before you submit a post to HN
Pleased I'm not the only one who had trouble parsing the title...
You Just Shared a Link. How Long Will People Pay Attention?
Activist Fund Calls for Breakup of BlackBerry Maker
Updated Facebook iPhone app (v3.5)
Spot on. Of course a provider is at a competitive advantage if they don't have an iPhone. But it isn't an either/or proposition; I mean, you don't see Sprint offering to go Apple exclusive and ditch Android...
API marketplace Mashape raises $1.5M seed from NEA, Index, Jeff Bezos and more
theoretically one could account for this as edit distance in phoneme space...
Sprint Faces Daunting Challenges
> Basically what was there previously was a restaurant or something and they converted it to office space without getting the proper permits from San Francisco.

Translated: The proper bribes were not paid to city officials.
That's the stated goal, but it never works that way, at least in the rhetorical sense.

If a woman makes a conscious decision to choose a career path or take time out of her career to raise children, for example, that is often perceived by some feminists as an example of the influence of a patriarchal society on women.
g is above b on my keygoard.
Supra Muska Skytops Women
Relevant [dead] comment:

fogus 20 minutes ago | link [dead]

ad hominem rhetoric

Yikes! I seem to have struck a chord with Mr. Pollack. The problem is that I'm not sure that the gap between what he said and what I said is very large. I certainly wasn't attacking him in my post, although I did link to his article. Additionally, I would never question his Scala credentials, but I tend to question those who say that Scala is complicated based on type signatures and syntax oddities. However, I will say in that with his latest post I think the gap between our opinions has widened. His comes off as cynical, but I have to think that I'm misreading the post. I do however find it odd that "ad hominem" would be used by someone who bases a dev's programming potential on the number of hours they choose to work during the day and their familiarity with Zed Shaw.
The TechCrunch-CrunchFund fracas - a blow-by-blow summary
Well, I've called Warren Buffett a thief and a liar, and called separation of markup and code a sham, so I figured I'd complete the hacker news karma holocaust trifecta.
I doubt the correlation is as high as the correlation with ... needing money.

And while one might say there are always college students needing money, my impression is skyrocketing tuitions combined with an ethos of "sell anything you can to succeed" makes this site very much "of the now"...
For the best results, reply to an administrator in a comment thread. I think that has the best response rate.
This seems like one of those ideas that sounds really good until you start to think about it.
Actually, I find development in general to be fun. It doesn't have to be games... But you do get to play the games. :)
And I recall that that is something like the definition Karl Marx used...
Re zoning and unsafe going hand in hand- that may be true in general, but typically a property like this that looks on the up and up is probably structurally sound.

I have done a few significant conversions / redevelopments, and zoning issues I've faced had absolutely nothing to do with actual problems with the property. They are more often a way for city employees and the city to make some money, and often the city architects/building inspectors are in on the game. It is the only form of outright bribery I've seen firsthand in this country, but for my contractor friends it is a part of everyday life. Typically you pay some fee for the city to look at drawings before you do anything and then if you want the building inspector to actually show up and rate it well you might be asked to grease the wheels to speed up the process. It's pretty unfortunate and I didn't think these types of things happened but they definitely do.

My properties are in Chicago and Pittsburgh and that is certainly the case in those cities (much worse in Chicago), not sure if it's the case in SF, but I would be willing to guess that it is.
Many high-school students are told that you have to have a college degree to get any job above subsistence level, so student loans look like the only option.
Netflix Now Limits To One Stream At A Time
Perfect response. My thoughts exactly. The only thing I would add is if its reusuable, document the method! If this is part of the apps "framework", document it! I can't count how many times I've run into basic app helpers with undocumented option hashes. Want your code to be reused? Make using it easier than rewriting it.
Cue flash of someone pitching "A daily deal site for investors"
That article is focused on writing scripts, rather than interactive use.