skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> If it was database driven, he could use a gui tool such as phpmyadmin to edit the magazine regulation rules.

This is great, but it's also worthwhile keeping in mind testability.

Now, your code is more robust, so that helps counter this a little - but by increasing the number of data points/variables you introduce more boundary cases. You don't want the magazine owner modifying something basic with an unexpected consequence.

I've worked recently on a lot of projects that use Business Rules Engines - similar concept - externalise your logic into tables of data/rules. End users can modify these rules to change the way the system operates.

The lesson I learned is that the causal downstream user isn't as cognizant of change control than someone who's been in the development cycle. This led to a lot of unexpected conflicts - for example, a certain threshold was lowered considerably as part of a campaign. This made 90% of submissions eligible for automatic (Straight-Through) processing as opposed to 10% before... Unfortunately the downstream systems weren't prepared for a 9x increase in the amount of load. So it fell on it's face.

Not to say this isn't a good idea - but something to keep in mind.
I wish that had said:

"Prepositions are okay to end sentences with."
You'd be surprised by the breadth of social classifications which scare the US Army. We still use "Fag" as a generalized insult. TIME WARP, BABY!
They much prefer the alternatives: Mastercard, Discover, and American Express.
Whereas with Apple, if you ask "why should I upgrade from Tiger to Leopard" the answer is simply, "Time Machine". Or with Sun, why should I upgrade from Sol8 to 10, the answer is "dtrace and zones". MS really needs a snappy comeback like that.

The most complex single document I've ever worked on was my MSc dissertation, 30,000 words, lots of cross-references, figures, footnotes, etc etc. I can't remember if I used Word 97 or 2000, but it was more than sufficient for the task. I could have done it in Word 6 or Word 5.1, even. It truly baffles me why people (even within MS itself) want to keep upgrading it.
Really. This should be on the onion.

"Terrorists known to wear clothes to aid with their terrorism - Clothes are known to keep terrorists warm, helping them to kill innocent civilians. We should think very carefully about banning clothes all together"

While we're at it, on a recent flight to the US I was asked "Where are you staying. You need to provide an address etc" (Security reasons apparently - I guess terrorists slip up there and reply "Oh I won't actually be landing... oops!"). I didn't have a clue of the address, I only know how to drive there. The guy checking me in just said "Ah don't worry, I'll put 'holiday inn, SFO'.

Either security like that is important, or it's not. If it's not, get rid of it!
Stop Home Foreclosure
Microsoft Surface pricier than anticipated
If these projections are even close, its the best news I've read in a decade!! Here is a video with the researcher's own words http://newsoffice.techtv.mit.edu/file/1243/
Stanford has a weekly speaker seminar class called Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders that has a free podcast. (You can't see the video unless you log in as a student, but hopefully that will change in the near future.)

Not all of them are great, but there's enough that you're bound to find a topic/speaker that you're interested in:

http://ecorner.stanford.edu/podcasts.html

(Past speakers you might be interested in: Marissa Mayer, Reid Hoffman, Mitchell Baker, Mitch Kapor, Ron Conway, Sue Decker, Larry Brilliant, Vinod Khosla, William McDonough, Mark Zuckerberg, et. al)

(Also, I highly recommend David Rothkopf's talk if you're interested in policy/current affairs/the world.)

edit: I guess I should add that I help out with the class, but I'd have posted this either way :)
All your compilers are programs for us!!
I work near stanford, maybe I will check out the series in person. Thanks!
Ability to generate a two word domain with first word fixed and a second generated with markovian process would be really nice. All short domains are taken anyway :(
Wedding Snafu
When weddings go wrong, the exploration of Wedding disasters and how to prevent them
It should be much faster now.
It's an interesting idea but it would be much more useful if the system didn't just vary individual letters without regard to word boundaries.

For example, if I enter "integration" the suggestions include "integoration", "integormation", etc. That's not very useful. I think you need to have some kind of dictionary to generate better suggestions.

I'm not saying that only dictionary words should be used, but variations of letters have very different value depending on where inside a dictionary word they occur.
The SICP videos are awesome.

http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.001/abelson-sussma...
I spoke with someone at Zuora a couple weeks ago. They said it was a minimum $1,000 US / month to use their system, and I think it was around 2% as a transaction fee beyond that minimum. A bit pricey for most bootstrapped or self-funded startups I'd say. I guess they're after the big boys first...
As to intellectual property, I would have an offshore entity (Cyamans, BVI) hold everything until an investor makes you restructure it into something else. Then a simple piece of paper signed by all people developing the IP assigns ownership to this offshore entity. For onshore operating, you simply license the IP to your U.S. entity for a small fee. You can get away with this approach for quite a bit.

There is no good answer for how you maintain visas once you quit you day jobs. This part sucks. One "straightforward" option may be to strike a partnership with an IT outsourcing company that manages employees in the U.S. from India and give them a small piece of the company for handling your employment. You may find that such a partnership would work well as such an entity is an automatic HR and accounting department for your growing entity. You focus on creating a great product and your partner focuses on the housekeeping.
"... What's scary is most of the people I know haven't even heard of this and what it will mean for freedom of information ..."

I've been aware of this idea kicking around in Parliament for a while (listener of Parliamentary debates) but the technical details have been bouncing around the ISP & sysadmin arena for a while on the Whirlpool forums. I got a brief of the technical implementation problems at the Software Freedom Day in Melbourne, Sep20 ~ http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/sets/72157607387630079... You can get some more details here ~ http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/2871574175/in/set-7215... Some technical explanations are detailed here ~ http://www.efa.org.au/censorship/mandatory-isp-blocking/
To be honest, I don't understand your point fully. Are you able to expand on your points a bit more?

Are you saying you believe you need some OO elements of polymorphism on car and cdr? Not sure you need these - there are loop constructs that let for "for each do X". With macros you could make this do almost any type of iteration.

I might be missing your point though, as I'm not sure how Objects help in this scenario.

Why can't you iterate on hash tables in Arc? ...or another related question, what do you mean by iterate in the context of a hash table?

Similarly... Isn't a dynamic array just a list? Or it is specifically the performance of this that you're concerned about - surely this is just an optimisation step rather than a hole in the language?... Either way, I'll agree that they're convenient for hacking programs together :)
Free Coloring Pages The Cheetah Girls
"... As a Australian, how can I protest this? ..."

I'm not really the protesting type but pointing out in writing why the technical details will fail is one. A mate of mine did this as a senate submission for the last round of digital copyright laws. Even with a PhD in a related field I don't think the powers that be took any notice. But that shouldn't deter you. Pestering your local member might be one option.

I'm of the opinion that this is an "idealogical war" and all arguments are going to be ignored. The argument(s) against the "Clean feed" are framed in such a way that you may appear to support the very "Internet nasties" this ideology is attempting to eradicate. So be forewarned. I'm interested in 2 things:

- what Australians are not required to be filtered? Surely some Gov. departments and citizens are going to get raw feeds. Who watches them?

- if you opt of the clean feed are you being put on a "watch list"? A new form of unacknowledged surveillance.

There is a sinister outcome in that new legislation will be drafted
You can still purchase these domains from the owner.
http://www.efa.org.au/support/donations/
Memories are supposedly interconnected. Interesting what would happen to related memories.
You can integrate your system with Quickbooks. They have an API. I don't know if you want to deal with their software, though.
"You will feel like every time, it's a new toy"

I hope he meant "the mouse will feel like every time, it's a new toy".

I hope I haven't written this before. If so, my apologies, but I couldn't remember.
I enjoy listening to the audio podcasts from SXSW and FOWA, they are both available in the iTunes store.
and http://www.nocleanfeed.com
Sounds like a great opportunity for someone to fly underneath them....
Then it becomes, as is so often the case, a question of proper marketing, and managing expectations. You seem to have acquired a group of users/interested onlookers expecting something they're not getting. Or at least a few loud ones:-)

I'm actually fascinated by these 'social science' (i.e. not really a science) aspects of programming languages. If you think about it, programming languages are all about people, how they interact with computers, and how they interact with one another to solve complex problems.
Anecdotal evidence of teaching Scheme as a first language in a French university shows that it's rather easy to learn, provided that there isn't too much to be unlearned by the audience. Mind you, on 2nd semester they had to learn some Visual Basic and found it gratuitously complicated.

Unwashed masses have accepted to learned very complex frameworks and metaprogramming tools around Java; those stuff are not simpler than, say, Common Lisp. They learned it because the consensus (among their peers) was that these were professional tools, useful for one's career. If a Lisp ever gained that fashionability, it would no doubt be learned very quickly by those "unwashed" masses, even if most of them wouldn't ever reach the guru status.
How India flew to the moon economy class
The reason I hate seeing politics here is that it's usually not up to the usual standards of discourse about hacking and startups.

To use your post as an example, in a few brief lines, you sum up something where there is a glimmer of truth, but there is so much more to be said on the subject that what you have written is basically inaccurate. There are, in reality, three broad models in 'Europe'. The 'southern' model: Spain, and Italy (which I know quite well) don't give you a lot of government unemployment benefits, but it's very difficult to fire someone. France and Germany give you lots of benefits if you're fired, and it's also difficult. In Denmark, it's easier to fire people, but the obligation to care for fired employees is viewed as a collective one, payed for with taxes, rather than a burden that falls exclusively on the employer in question.
What an insanely great idea! Saves hours of brainstorming for startups who normally would spend hours brainstorming to come up with all variants of a noun or verb for a domain name and doing dns lookups.

I tried 'guitars' and it instantly reported that 'gitarious' was available. I would however consider starting to search automatically after the user has typed to or more characters.
typeface.js -- Rendering text with Javascript, canvas, and VML
Microsoft's message from the PDC2008 in a few Wordles
Anonymous Function in PHP
i use Simple Invoices - http://www.simpleinvoices.org to bill my clients for freelance work

cheers

justin
Ok, ok, I'm going to break down and talk politics for once:

Here's the difference, for me, in a nutshell.

Smart Democrats, like Krugman (and Bill Clinton for that matter), can be reasoned with and see the light about things like free trade, and can discuss economic freedoms with regards to their philosophical vision for society. You may not always agree with that vision, but generally if you find someone bright, you can argue with them and get them to consider your point of view, and maybe even change their position. On the other hand, the current Republican party is dominated by Sarah Palin types. They are convinced that God has told them a variety of things, such as evolution is wrong, that we were right to invade Iraq in her case, that torture is ok because we're the good guys, and so on. You can't argue with that kind of mentality - there is no room for it, because it is in no way connected to logic.

It's that anti-reason, anti-science, anti-intellectual, "god told me so" approach to the world that I think is absolutely poisonous.

Really though, can we just 'flag' these sorts of articles and avoid the subject entirely? We'd waste less time doing something unproductive.
I think you're right, that it's simply US vs. British spelling, but I've always felt that the usage is slightly different (and that therefore maybe they are actually different words...).

An asshole seems to be someone you are angry with (legitimately or not). It's about behaviour (or perception thereof); but to call someone an arsehole is a darker, earthier insult, and is closer to what they intrinsically are. It seems more literal to me.

Maybe this is because I've mostly heard "asshole" on sanitized TV; but I've heard "arsehole" in uncensored RL.

PS: Firefox then spellchecked in a way that was almost but not quite entirely unlike British English.
Well, there's a plant in Japan that's apparently blogging. And the Swiss have recognized some set of plant rights. By that measure, vegetarians might be no better than murderers. In fact, their relentless focus on the exploitation of flora might even be viewed as a form of terrorism.
It seems like there's a Google Tech Talk for just about everything.

YUI Theater also has some good web stuff, not just YUI related: http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/theater/
i think he's trying to say that iphone apps will save america
"... "Where are you staying. You need to provide an address etc" (Security reasons apparently - I guess terrorists slip up there and reply "Oh I won't actually be landing... oops!") ..."

Pretty standard questions to check to see if you are really doing what you say you are doing. Visiting? Business or holiday? Where are you staying? Got enough cash to cover that stay? The best thing to do is pre-book, take a print-out of where you are staying on your itinerary. Just doing their job - looking for travelers not sticking to their plan.
Vegetarians or vegetation?
The high price of internet filtering
There are some nice ones on InfoQ. I just watched this one today:

http://www.infoq.com/presentations/gosling-jvm-lang-summit-k...

Gosling talking about how the JVM came about. Great stuff.
Set your title as Chief Design Engineer on your incorporation documents. In practice, no one will probably bother to check, and even if they do, they'll go by what the title is on paper. The reality is, you'll be doing mostly programming work in your company and you have EAD, so you're set. This sounds like a good setup from how understand it, but double check with an attorney. If you need referral to a good immigration attorney, drop me a line.
I found this article thought-provoking (which is the best kind): it's about how we see.

Our point of view is affected by where we are; and the lens through which we see is affected by the people around us, what aspect they pay attention to, and their values. Because the way we see is so fundamental to verification, changes in it can be insidious - and changes to values are often virtually undetectable.
I would very much appreciate talks with written transcription. They're very valuable for us struggling with spoken English.
this is really useful, thanks
Ahhh, I see. Like telling a joke in the first person because it just works better.

Well, that's definitely good to know. It does read as if you were forced to discover the concept independently, though, which might be a tad confusing for those familiar with the technique. Maybe it's just me.

At any rate, I do like the clear description of the situation and discussion that led to putting a gateway cache in place. It helps make things click.
Failed at being a hundred year language. Arc programs are shorter, but only by a constant factor due to small syntax enhancements. It doesn't provide interesting new abstractions like Lisp did.
The last Future of Web Apps conference in London now has most of the talks available online:

http://events.carsonified.com/fowa/2008/london/content
I think that if people don't call fb engineers first rate then they have to refrain from using that label for many very good engineers (I used Google as an example in my last comment).

Maybe we are using "meaningful contributions as a metric". Here is a page of some of their contributions: http://developers.facebook.com/opensource.php

I am just reluctant to say that engineers at fb are not first-rate. Are we saying that they are second rate?

I agree that fb is the toy analog in the web app world but does that mean that the engineers who banged out the PS3/XBox 360/Wii are second-rate?
Agreed. The possibilities are tremendous though I am cautiously optimistic because it seems too good to be true.
I like that, the 100 year language is an idea, not an implementation.
Re your question 2, it's even worse: There isn't a clean feed, just a more censored one (kid safe) and a less censored one (no illegal material).
PHP: \ as namespace separator. What were they thinking?
More links:

- http://wiki.php.net/rfc/namespaceseparator

- http://news.php.net/php.internals/41374

- http://loveandtheft.org/2008/10/26/set-sail-for-fail-php-nam...
Have a look at http://videolectures.net/
For less than half the price of a new Boeing 787. I'm boggled.
He makes it seem as if I said libraries are a bad thing. To do that he conveniently truncates the quote just before

I'm not saying that languages *shouldn't* have
powerful libraries, btw, just that they may not
be 100% upside.

If he'd included that, it would have been clear to
everyone that there was no counter in this counterpoint.
http://videolectures.net/

Supposedly on every topic, but the machine learning selection is especially good.
ITunes glitch censors song titles
Texts tackle HIV in South Africa
They should have stuck with Paamayim Nekudotayim for the namespace and either 1) returned an error for ambiguities or 2) used some prefix for namespaces like !Foo::bar().

1) is less desirable because unlike C++ PHP is not compiled. I could imagine some random included file that you disabled for testing causing an ambiguity error.

2) could work if you choose a representation that is human readable and easily parsable. The exclamation point seems to fit that description.
If past PHP trends are any indication..

PHP 6: "\" is an awesome new feature that makes web development more approachable.

PHP 7: "\" is an awful idea, avoided by the clueful and widely denounced. You can disable it in php.ini, but that's not the default. 80% of practicing developers know none of this.

PHP 8: The php.ini default changes. Gang wars erupt in the shared hosting ghetto. You can force it on or off at the code level, and a comment thread in the PHP manual contains 23 different slightly-broken copy-and-paste snippets.

PHP 9: "\" doesn't exist anymore. Everyone ignores PHP 9 until three weeks before PHP 8 is EOL'd.
Encoding an image to sound
This decision, and all the crap surrounding it - the decision making process, the reasons given for deciding on '\', etc - sum up very well why I do not like working with PHP.

It's not that I can't get stuff done with it. It's that it is designed and maintained by people who don't know very much about language design, coupled with the fact that PHP is in position to have some people that are experienced with such things come in and re-do it.

I mean, I'm far from being versed in the ways of writing programming languages, but I can write a parser that can handle one token being used for different things if I need to. I would think that it's a pretty common thing (and is probably in the class of things where you'd rarely be writing one from scratch, but I digress).

Every time I use it, I end up feeling like I'm beating my face against the language. That's not quite accurate - I end up feeling like I'm beating my face against years of poorly thought out design decisions with little to no effort made to remove them.

Perhaps I'm missing out on some things that make this a lot harder for PHP, especially considering that I'm not part of the PHP community (and considering that I avoid it when possible) - but it really seems to me that most of PHPs problems, from a language perspective, are solved problems.
heh, I also liked how the tacitly link 'human rights groups' to 'anarchists'.
How about we don't "give" money to anybody? Maybe let them keep more of the money they've already earned?

Since when did the entire economic output of the country become ours to decide how to allocate? Did I miss the revolution?
Launching a Startup is easy myth - From one to one million users thanks to networking
For Braintree, what are the fees like? I can't seem to find them posted anywhere. It would be nice to know to help the shopping before diving into a particular company.
Christmas - What Makes it More Exciting
Christmas is a special occasion that gives lots of happiness to us. Let’s celebrate this festival in a different manner to make it more exciting and full of fun.
> I tried 'guitars' and it instantly reported that 'gitarious' was available.

Not anymore, it's not :)
7 Ways To Be A Healthier Programmer
I downvoted you because I know you (and the Economist) are wrong. I'm in Paris, and I've seen downsizing at a startup. They've fired dozens of people with a week's notice, and 2 or 3 months severance pay, AS PER their contracts.

It's NOT THE LAW that imposes this (the law imposes nil severance), but the contracts - they had this clause. Furthermore, severance pay is only due for termination that is outside the employee's control. That is, if the employer downsizes.

If you don't come to work or hit you boss, you can be fired INSTANTLY with NO severence pay - like anywhere in the world. This is rare however, I've seen it only once for supposedly sub-par performance.
Alright. Keep your eyes open near the end of the week for the completed work.
Very interesting.

We always hear of standard benefits for workers in France, like extended yearly vacation time.

How does that work? Is it possible that by working for a startup under a contract that your experience is different than the rest of your countrymen?

Just trying to figure out the discrepancies.
Lets say bar() returns false. Are the following two lines the same?

true == !false
true == !Foo::bar()

Paamayim Nekudotayim is the best option, you could even use it as a prefix in case of ambiguity:

true == ::Foo::bar()
The Web Browser is the New Laptop
If that were true, Kawa and SISC (good Scheme compiler and interpreter for the JVM, respectively) would already have grabbed that attention.
I don't mean quality strictly in the sense of workmanship I mean the the sense of the value it provides to the company, including things like efficiency, productivity, etc.... I also disagree that judging on quality would make the jobs more susceptible to outsourcing. Presumable oppisite is judging on chair sitting ability and since I'm 100% sure the one thing that cheap over seas labor has me beat on is their chair sitting skillz I choose to compete in all the other categories.
Magic quotes... [shudder]
Rehash of: http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/07/reverse-fuel-ce.h... ?