skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thank you for the links and the advice, but it is misplaced. I know and use Perl. I also dread having to do so. These two statements are related.

"There's more than one way to do it" is, for me, a negative, at least in the Perl implementation of it; while there are cases where multiple ways to do the same thing is great (for example, C#'s foreach versus the IEnumerable extension method that takes a delegate/lambda), I don't think that's the case here. The pathological decisions toward terseness are, in my experience, the root cause of one guy's Perl being unreadable to the next; this may be a cynical statement, but (said with tongue firmly in cheek) when you give a programming language capable of expressing significant logic with one character, the guy who uses vim will do so, and damn the next guy who has to pick it up and work with it later.

Say what you will about something like Java--and oh man, have I said all of it--but the language does tend toward readability (at the cost of boilerplate); it's relatively hard to write correct code that will elicit WTFs from the next guy who has to maintain it. In my experience, WTFs are somewhat par for the course with inherited Perl.

(I find Python to generally encourage the Right Thing as well, though it's easier to write monstrosities in that, too, than I would really like. C#, for me, hits the sweet spot, but doesn't exactly work so well as a scripting language.)

None of this should be construed to say that you cannot write clean Perl. Surely you can, and I've certainly encountered some of it. But I think "there's more than one way to do it" is more of a crutch for "write byte vomit, it'll just work" than you'd like to admit.
> As a quick example, how else would you do an upsert (update or create) with a single trip to the database server?

I use MySql and use UPDATE ON DUPLICATE KEY ... or REPLACE INTO.
Because Google spins things better.

Google has a nerd-friendly message, and produces things that are building dependence and are genuinely useful (like, say, gMail). So, people are less scared of it, and after some time denial kicks in.

Also, I'm bitter because Google is the one software company that I'm scared of more than of Facebook :-D
Learning about novel/different languages is totally different from learning new languages, which I thought the original remark was about. The former can often be done in a few hours and will pay itself back fairly soon; the latter takes weeks, and after that, you will still be at risk of, months into a project, having to discover that there is no good library to do X yet, or that library Y wasn't the best choice after all, or having to learn some neat trick that makes debugging way easier.

So, yes, I agree that learning about languages is something one should do often, but I do not think one should try to become fluent in a new language (and its libaries) too often.

And yes, IMO that does apply to Haskell, too.
I can't blame them even a little bit. High-quality typefaces are extraordinarily difficult to design, trivial to misappropriate (I've done it accidentally several times), virtually impossible to track, and depend totally on a business model that charges big companies huge amounts of money for para-exclusive access to those faces (in part to allow those companies to use them as signaling mechanisms for their brands).

Nerds will never, ever get it through their heads that typefaces aren't cheap. They're expensive. That's a problem for nerds, because bits are very very cheap, and naturally anything that can be represented in bits and put on a web page should be cheap-as-free. It also doesn't help that most nerds can't appreciate the difference between what's on Google Fonts and what's in Typekit's portfolio, which only reinforces the notion that fonts should be cheap... after all, good fonts appear to be free! Silly designers!

But! But! But! I anticipate the multi-paragraph responses from HN's vast army of copyfighters and respond only with "well that's why we get to choose between Adobe's service and the crappy fonts on Google Fonts, and Trebuchet and Arial". Thanks, copyfighters!
Newer is not always better.
AngelHack is an accelerated start-up incubator, bringing together top engineers, designers, and product people in the Bay Area to build an idea from concept to investable start-up in 3 days!
Node-fib: Fast non-blocking fibonacci server
BofA website malfunctioning again
See: http://hackermonthly.com/
Playing To Your Strengths - Bootstrapped Startup 50
No strategy here. I though facebook is pretty much ubiquitous. May be I can provide a way to login through twitter as well. I am just asking for basic level of access for FBConnect.
Maybe if the chorus rises loud enough, Adobe management will get a clue and not ruin Typekit.
And still they wonder why some young people are very averse to moving out from their parents' homes (I'm not referencing hikikomoris, that's a whole another matter).
Who hacked BofA? There are way too many suspects
I guess they would use some embedded systems/instrumentation stuff to run the equipment.
Interesting, I do this too. The self-help audiobooks are a good way to keep fresh motivational material coming your way. Also, working out for at least an hour each day to get yourself out of the house (or office) and onto something else. I make it a habit and a thing that I essentially have to do so I am not tempted to stay in and keep working.
Just a few what? Black students? Disruptive students? Disruptive black students?
great combination of electrical engineering, core physics (classical and if you want it - GPS does touch SR and GR), programming (at app and VSDL levels). Such projects should be a regular part of lab curriculum for any engineering student (including programmers).
I kind of saw this coming when I got an email from Ryan that he is cutting down on moderators for Railscasts. I was one of the lazy ones :(

Anyways, I'm going to subscribe not just for future episodes but for all those episodes from which I've gained immense knowledge.
1-5 hours a week is like one piston at best. And one pistons engines aren't fast.
Interesting. It already exists! Thanks for the heads up.
I would disagree with my tone, too. Sorry for that. But I really can't understand that how possible is it to clone an early version of delicious, try selling it to the people who abandon their delicious account and criticizing the delicious? This is what bullshit means.
I guess I'm just trying to understand why Abobe went the route of turning DOM elements into 3D rendering contexts, instead of just giving developers a way to get textures from DOM elements, and decide how to use those textures themselves. The latter would be much more useful in my mind (and yes I've written a lot in WebGL). Adobe's approach doesn't stop any cross domain security issues either, and it just limits the flexibility the animations programmer has.

It makes me suspicious that Adobe is just trying to get something that they see as useful for themselves incorporated into Webkit, even though it doesn't fit the WebGL work flow.
IBM rises again as its stock passes a declining Microsoft
Sounds like NYC.
When all you have is a hammer, all the problems you encounter end up looking like nails.
Facebook Re-Enables Controversial Tracking Cookie
May be I can provide a way to login through twitter as well

No, that doesn't solve the problem at all. I really doubt it's any harder to use OpenID than it is to use twitter if you're really hung up on not storing usernames and passwords yourself (which really isn't that hard!).
It's amazing that a format with a formal specification can be so poorly thought out.
In my experience it's usually because the DBAs end up "owning" all database development, both because the DBAs consider it their domain, and developers don't feel comfortable with PL/pgSQL and they don't want to anger the DBAs. It shouldn't have to be this way, though.
I agree. I just signed up for a paid account on Saturday for one project I didn't want public. Time to reassess my options.
Odd that it doesn't work in FF 9.0. There aren't any ads. Shouldn't be any JS errors either.

The technology behind the scenes is pretty simple.
PHP + MySQL + Redis. Front-end is MooTools and I use Sass to generate my CSS.
I have some cron's running to migrate newly added content to AWS/CloudFront. Certain data is cached via Redis and soon, almost all of it will be in the cache.
Criticize The Better Business Bureau... And They'll Pull Your Accreditation
Note to self: Starting immediately, all raganwald projects will have a “Is it any good?” section in the readme, and the answer shall be “yes."
"I disrespect him because he started disrespecting me."

That is very immature.

"Why assume the non-tech founder is always the bad guy?"

Because in most cases this is true. And when you write a post titled "My programmer is a dick..." what do you think people are going to assume?

You demonstrate a lack of maturity and understanding of how to successfully engage with others. You came here asking for advice, don't be so defensive.
Wow, this really made me laugh.
How is that different from "let potential consumers of my service/app pay me"? Do you have to ask?

Unless of course you have an app that can survive of the (relative) tiny amount of people who use Bitcoin. You might, but you'd have to admit that you're an outlier :)
Sprint to 'Bet the Company' on iPhone
it's your choice. I'd pick the honest one.
Adobe is acquiring Nitobi. PhoneGap (the project) is being submitted for acceptance as an Apache Software Foundation project: Here's the Google Groups discussion:

http://groups.google.com/group/phonegap-dev/browse_thread/th...
> How is running 40 instances of node processes different from running 40 instances of a single threaded web server?

40 Instances of a single threaded webserver can block for I/O. If your webserver is 50% CPU bound this means that your CPU utilization is lower than in the case of a perfectly async system. You will serve fewer requests per second than an async framework. This is where the rule of thumb "no of threads = 2X no of cores" originates. Of course this rule wont work well for heavily I/O bound servers with high latency I/O. With node.js latency/IO percentage etc won't matter.

> If you had a choice would you not rather have light-weight processes (threads) rather than actual processes because of lighter memory requirements?

It would be great to have a multithreaded async framework. However a multithreaded environment eventually ends up introducing several blocking I/O functions which Dahl wanted to avoid. Hence the choice of Javascript.

node.js is one of a 100 possible solutions. Nobody insists that you use it. In fact I haven't even written a single line of node code. However I have done enough systems work to know the benefits of async programming.

> Threads are too hard to program to? Try STM?

STM can only handle scenarios that do not involve I/O. One of my colleagues was in the group at Microsoft tried STM with I/O that fell hard on their faces. Sure there are plenty of approaches - threads, actors, STM. Async programming is one such approach. If you want to write an async web server, right now node.js is the only solution. I think it might be possible to do a pure async web server in Haskell, as any IO gets captured in the type signature but I don't know of any async Haskell webserver framework.

> I'm not buying the notion that node's event model has any advantage over anything whatsoever.

You are basically asserting that async programming has no advantage over any other approach whatsoever. Having dug into hard disk device drivers, filesystems and caching for the Windows CE kernel, I would have killed to have a proper async I/O framework in CE from the ground up. We had a gazillion locks in the kernel modules, for gazillion data structures when all we really wanted to do was perform I/O without grabbing a lock. The Linux epoll, BSD kqueue and Windows IO completion ports are all async APIs added for high performance systems. These APIs are, strictly speaking, not required if you have threads but when you get into sufficiently advanced systems programming you cannot live without these. Trying to say that async programming is useless is equivalent to claiming that APIs such as epoll/kqueues are useless.
Have you ever seen a project succeed or fail where anyone involved said "You know, if we had used a better programming language it would have all worked out"? I have seen projects succeed or fail based on those three things Norvig calls out, I have never once seen a project succeed or fail because of the language used. Is it important that we have moved beyond hand coded assembly? Unequivocally, yes it is. Are you going to fail because of your language selection? Maybe if you pick Assembly, beyond that language selection isn't even a rounding error on probability of success.

You can certainly develop rapidly in C++ if you have the right process and people. In fact that is where that quote came from, Norvig noting that devs at google where not hampered by their choice of Java and C++.
>"We have our life savings in this."

Look, I get the stress of the situation, but using emotional guilt is a terrible way to try to manage people. If he's not doing the work, let him go, and make sure you set clearer expectations for your next hire. His response doesn't strike me as any more inappropriate than you dropping the life savings bombshell on him.
No, it is not. I have not tried proving it, but I would think the winning strategy is not "to avoid detection", but to "make it as hard as possible to detect your smallest ships".

I tend to place the large ships as close together as rules allow, in order to leave as much freedom to place the smaller ships. Something like (if ships can lie along a border; periods are squares where no ship can lie):

#####.####
..........
###.###..
........
That's 8400 calls per day. What are you trying to do with your own data that requires more calls than that?
How important is the video component in the application process?
This is sort of random, but my single biggest gripe with many of the tech events that I've been to in DC is the lack of preparedness around the AV setup.

Have two AV inputs, one for the live presenter, and one 'standby' that's just hooked up to a monitor right next to the podium or something, and some kind of easy way to switch them over. That way while Presenter 1 is going, Presenter two can plug in / set resolution / restart a laptop 3 times, etc. If any presenter is playing a video, make sure the sound works and reaches to the back of the room.

I've been to two (otherwise great) 'A big batch of startups get two minutes each to pitch' events in the past month where we've burned half an hour of awkward DJ time in between the 'quickfire' presentations because presenters were getting the projector to play nice, which would've been avoided easily if they'd have done a dry-run the night before. I know these are tough and usually using borrowed resources, but why risk ruining your event to save a few hours of work in the week before the event?
Why Bismarck Loved Lincoln
Google would most likely require them to put their Market on the devices. Amazon prefers to sell from their own App Store.
The author writes: Usually side projects help you learn something new that you can incorporate back into your start-up.

How true is this! I'm on the side learning Django (because I want to use its admin feature to do a lot of CRUD) and on another side stint I'm dabbling in MongoDB, which also can come in very handy for my main projects.
They might be awesome, but unless you scroll down to the very bottom and notice a small note, you would think this a free service. I felt like being deceived and immediately closed the website after signup confirmation, when asked to enter credit card details.

I may have paid if I knew it upfront, but this kind of approach is so annoying, that I would prefer not to pay just because of that.
Do you subscribe? What do you think about the idea of personalized magazines from online blogs more generally - for example if it was available in many topic areas.
Ruby-Doc.org has been updated
From what I've read over the years, very. It's an opportunity for the reviewers to get a feel of your team's overall personality, how well you seem fit together, and another view of your product.
> what actually gets approved is longer lasting pecker perkers and yet another blood pressure medication

That's a problem with the industry and the government, not so much with the research. But I'd love to see improvements there.

Also, there are some fun tricks with augmented reality and chemistry.

teaching:

http://www.hitl.washington.edu/projects/scripps/

drug prototyping:

http://boingboing.net/2011/09/26/chemistry-of-the-future-3d-...

> there has been some progress in the lab that seems to have led to not much practical.

MEMS has only been a thing for about a decade. Fancy sensors for your cell phone are more profitable, so they get industrial support and make it out of the lab faster.

It's not easy to get adequate funding for academic research, and it's a million times easier (more, really) to MVP a SaaS startup than it is to get innovative tech out of the lab. Industry is often 10-20 years behind academic research, sometimes more. Just look at the state of nuclear power plants.
Thanks! I will definitely check out some the motivating talks before I retire to bed later. (Its 2.14am in Singapore now) My problem has been really amplfied a big deal because of the asian culture here. The talented developers already secured great job offers from banks, or Facebook, or Microsoft. In fact, the asian concept has had many great people conform to "find a great job and your future is secured". Which is really annoying because it is so hard to convince people based on the prospects of probable success! Then there is the funding part, I am working my ass off and I refuse to talk to anyone until I know exactly what I am going to do and something to show first. I'm getting there. But money is getting really tight now.

As for my startup, I am working on a platform that allows users to save and share worthy experiences one encounters everyday which I'd like to call them Checkpoints. I have some pixel mockups here that I am using as a wireframe for my development process. http://imgur.com/LGDtO

I am going to do something crazy soon and start doing things no entrepreneurs have done before here just so I can get my word out that I am looking for great people! Until then, I have to fantasize a little bit about success just so I can chirp along the next day :)
Stop Already With the F*cking "Infographics"
I wish I could upvote this several times over. This is hacker news a thousand times over, and makes up for all the dotcom, and ruby rubbish you have to wade through on this site.

Well done sir.
Patent Troll: Anyone Using WiFi Infringes; Won't Sue Individuals 'At This Stage'
Income? What's income? Appreciation we understand, capital gains... sure. But income? Surely, you jest.
Text feature extraction (tf-idf) - Part II
hopefully the prices won't go up...
Comprehend (YC W11) is hiring to help bring new cures and treatments to market
We're writing next-generation reporting and visualization software to help bring new treatments and cures get onto the market faster. Not only will you help get drugs into the hands of the patients who need them, but we need to solve a lot of hard problems on the way and we're looking for top programmers.

At the core, our technology is a database that works across multiple, disparate datasources. Our frontend is an easy-to-use but powerful web application. We're looking to hire both frontend and backend programmers.

About you:

- You love computers and programming. You started programming as a hobby, and you still have that enthusiasm today. Also, you can pickup new technologies quickly.

- You will be joining a small team, we currently have 4 developers. You will be a big part of this team, and you'll help us shape this product.

- You will be engaging with customers and potential customers at trade shows and through customer support.

- You're comfortable learning new technologies, and have solid experience in either Java, C++, C, or C#.

About us:

- We offer significant equity, health and dental benefits, a gym membership, lunch and dinner, and you'll have the computer setup of your choice (*nix, osx, windows).

- We're targeting a huge opportunity, and are going to create a several billion dollar company.

- We're based in Palo Alto, one block from University Caltrain. We're willing to relocate you if necessary.

Please send your resume to careers@comprehend.com, or check out our website at www.comprehend.com.

- Comprehend Systems. Palo Alto, CA
If one looks at the latest FB and Google surveys one will find that one of the biggest untapped markets is India. Unfortunately, all these startups that really want to grow big aren't seeing the big picture - and I don't mean just the ones that have started recently. There are many that have been around for a really long time and haven't even tried capturing the upcoming markets.
There is some good information in this article if your ignore the Oracle marketing message. It is basically a synopsis of the past 3 years of NoSQL discussion.

What it doesn't mention is that everyone who picks NoSQL generally acknowledges these downsides. So it doesn't do a good job explaining why people still pick NoSQL.

TCO is probably the biggest factor I would have in picking NoSQL. As a (Microsoft) SQL Server customer, we (developers) all hate the cost of scaling SQL Server for each customer. Each customer needs their own resource governance. This means either separate servers or a virtual machine, both tied to a SAN. Virtualization MSSQL licensing costs are large without much material benefit due to odd licensing strategies that negate most if not all financial benefit to virtualization for small IT shops like us. By comparison, the better we understand why customers use our product and the more engineering decisions we can make (get away with?) then the cheaper technologies we will be able to use (NoSQL, etc.).
As with many things, all the suggested reasons apply, in different proportions for different people. The caffeine may help with vasodilation-related symptoms. It also may help with any other caffeine-withdrawal symptoms, if present. And it may create a slight new dependence – as with the other painkiller ingredients, which can contribute to 'rebound headaches' with persistent use. Adding an addictive yet legal substance to your product is rarely bad for repeat business.
I debated responding to you. But I will, because I'm trying to truly resolve this situation with my dev.

I don't know the first thing about you and I won't assume. I'm asking for comments on what to do next. Sorry if I called a "person" a dick, and sorry if that person happened to be a fellow "programmer".

Would you have replied to this post had I posted "I'm having difficulty with my programmer meeting deadlines"
Get on AllthingsD: Email: no. Friendly follow-up email: no. Write a ballad: Yes.
I would guess Ryan used https://stripe.com to set up reoccurring billing for Pro.

So will we be seeing an episode or maybe an advanced episode on how Ryan set up reoccurring billing for Railscasts?
Sprint scores iPhone 5 exclusive thanks to $20 billion deal with Apple?
No.

The ratio of articles on the internet which are awesome and useful to me to those which are terrible or simply useless to me is very small. Paying for 100 articles, even carefully selected ones, likely means paying for at least 80 articles I don't care about.

I don't subscribe to print magazines or newspapers (or TV or satellite radio, etc) either.
NOOOOOOOOOOO..... (as if thousands of linux and webos users suddenly cried for help)
What's funnier is that upload is twice that of download. You usually don't see the ratio's flipped like that!
Patent Troll suing coffee shops, restaurants or hotels for offering Wifi