skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The funny thing is, I encouraged him to learn Python first, precisely because of its efficiency and flexibility, etc. I pointed him toward "Learning Python", the absolutely massive book from O'Rielly, and Learn Code The Hard Way for Python.

I have no Ruby or Python experience, but my friend claims Java is easier to learn... At least from his perspective.

Basically, I tried to convince him to learn Python before compromising on Ruby. If you could make a convincing case for him to learn Python instead of either Ruby or Java, I'd be much obliged.

Note: I suggested he learn Python or Ruby because I think he's going to end up in the startup scene, where those are the de rigueur languages (alongside the HTML5 family of markup/programming languages).
Engineering school is taught by people who were good at Engineering school. ITs a tight, closed loop with high gain. That's not an argument about what Engineering school Should Be.

Of course mathematics is important. But the initial design is done, I would say ALWAYS done, by intuition. The math is then applied.

Do you know how many gifted math students in my Engineering college could not begin to imagine the layout of a circuit, or a piece of software, or even a bridge, without looking it up in a book? I was a grader for 2 years, and it was shocking how lacking most folks are in this way.
yep totally agree, definitely not the awful layouts, automatic music playing, blinking animated gifs everywhere that caused MySpace to stagnate. Definitively it was the backend code that caused people to not want to visit MySpace again...
"Why wouldn't the current three implementations be angled for real-world use?"

Because going to perl.org -> Download says "We recommend that you always run the latest stable version, currently 5.14.2." [1] and doesn't even mention Perl 6.

And when you do find a page that has Perl 6, it says "If you are looking for production ready code please use Perl 5" [2]

[1] http://www.perl.org/get.html

[2]http://dev.perl.org/perl6/
Sype
Android 4.0 update is a joke
The other side of this token is every single person I've seen complain about getting passed over for a gig because they didn't want to relocate (there's a lot of them on Twitter) is only interested in putting in their hours and doing a job. Arguably there's nothing wrong with that. But when building a company, I want people to care more about than just lines of code. Actually, I want people to do that in general (I have worked at bigger companies too).
This is an awesome list. I'd complement it with The Ultimate Indie Game Developer Resource List[1]

[1] http://www.mangatutorials.com/forum/showthread.php?742-The-U...
5.5. Using wrong tools - CEH - Saher Team
social skills = competence

If you haven't got 'em, I don't care how competent you are. One bad apple can poison an entire team. Developing software is a team sport.
... yes, that's what I'm saying.
Show HN: My Weekend Project, Satismetrics. What makes you happy?
I initially started Satismetrics to solve a problem I had, and I’d like to find out if others could also benefit from a product/service like this:

http://satismetrics.com

Short Version: send your happiness as a score by email (comments optional) whenever you like, data collected for you to analyse.

Long Version (with background):

My happiness fluctuates massively week-by-week; sometimes it’s silly little things that can make me unhappy for days, and sometimes when I get in the office and I’m happy, I forget what made me happy in the first place!

I started writing down what made me happy, or unhappy, and when. Happy things for me include motivational songs coming on the radio, a compliment from a colleague, excitement about seeing an old friend later on, etc. Unhappy things for me often include unrealistic deadlines being set, team members being lamented for no good reason, some bad news on TV, etc.

My aim in writing these things down was to be able to become happy again when I get sad. From my ratings, I can quickly find out what song to play or what inspirational article to re-read or video to re-watch, and it does work! I’m magically happy again. I think lots of people do this already, but they probably have a better memory than me!

It’s all about aiming to prevent/avoid things which previously made me unhappy, and do more of the things that previously made me feel happy. I can also identify if I need to make a change in my life. By tracking my happiness every day (sometimes multiple times per day) I’ve been able to make some pretty big decisions such as changing city and job, moving nearer to my old friends. Not only do I reckon I feel happier overall, but I can now see it as a metric and justify my decisions on paper.

I’d love to get some feedback from the HN community, to find out if anyone else shares my problem and would be interested in joining my private beta in January.

Some quick things to point out:
1) I’ve only just found a similar site by Googling a few keywords, but it looks more like a research project.
2) I’m not crazy about the name.
3) At this point I’m simply aiming to validate an idea, and I'd love your feedback, good and bad.

Thanks in advance!
I think you're behind the technology curve here. The giveaway was 'even with phone or video conversations"

No remote team need be use phones - there are now headset collaboration tools that are lightyears more effective for erasing the distance bias and making remote teams work almost as if they were in the same office.

In fact, they can be better. In my home office I can take off my headset when I need an hour of concentration.
Steve Jobs Was The Modern-Day John Galt
The idea that management exists to perpetuate the things on the left is as cynical and generally wrong as the idea that coders exist to increase complexity and guarantee their own necessity. It is true only of the worst of either group of people. The best work hard to make themselves unnecessary.
I always question the use of Skype. It's great for video chat, but it requires somebody to call and somebody to host, and it gets real nasty when you need to get work done and just want to talk for like two minutes. I recommend getting up a Mumble server. It's voice chat, but anybody can join in at anytime, or go to a private "room" to talk amongst themselves.
its never like that, somebody doesn't just decide to flip the evil switch, and from that day forward everything is horrible.

Its a long process of acclimatization, don't believe me? Take a look at android, which in most respects is far more locked down than any desktop operating system, yet is hailed as "open".
Can anyone suggest an exisiting tool to achieve the following--what I want isn't quite a message queue, but has similarities.

-Queue paths that clients can subscribe to for pub/sub.

-Queues that, upon reconnect, replay their history to date.

-Api for listing listeners and their IP's

-Fast

-Scalable

-Heartbeating or presence

-Status-queues (a queue that sends the same message on first connect, and only re-broadcasts when the status changes)

-API that lets you view messages non-destructively

-API that lets you list clients

-Queues that broadcast a message to all

-Round-robin queues

Do I need to roll my own, or have I missed some existing tool?
I look forward for when techies "get it." IRC and iChat are poor replacements for real human interaction. You can certainly work with them and even be successful with them. But rarely do you approach the same team cohesion you get with in-person facetime.

I think some mix is good. In the office 2-3 days a week and remote the rest of the time. You get a good social balance and then the freedom to work from home.

Incidentally, everyone I've come across that refuses to meet that balance takes on a weird sense of entitlement, illustrating they'd probably be a poor fit anyway. I'm sure there are mitigating circumstances for that, but it is off-putting to the whole idea.
Yes, this is a very common practice.
I see. The word "assumption" confused me, as in context it would generally mean something that isn't necessarily true.
Its available on netflix instant http://movies.netflix.com/WiMovie/Objectified/70114976
The example doesn't blow up at all, it just doesn't happen to behave in exactly the same way as a different compiler.
There could be cheaper data plans (with lower bandwidth, capped amount of transfers, whatever). I'm always astonished to hear how much plans cost in the US.
Well, Microsoft is locking down Windows 8 pretty hard, too. First with UEFI, then with the Windows 8 store where they'll only let you install apps from the market in "tile mode" and they'll even be able to remove apps from your PC. I know they still allow you to do everything in the non-tile mode now, but what happens when they remove that mode in the future?

How long will it be until RIAA tells Congress that "Microsoft is not doing enough to stop piracy (even though they have the capability)", just like they are doing now with Google, and then gets them to remove "unlicensed" songs from your PC?

I think stores are fine. They are a pretty good way to show you the best apps for the platform, and they also help a bit with safety, but they should still allow you to download and install whatever you want from the Internet if you choose to.

Android has a pretty good model here. They have the Market, and then if you really want to, you can get apps from other sources, too. Although, I don't think they should even ask you if you want to "enable 3rd party sources" in Settings. It should be enabled by default, and maybe just give you a warning whenever you want to download a 3rd party app, just like they do in Chrome.

The point is I don't want to lose any of the freedoms of what I can do with my computer, just for the sake of having a store that streamlines app discovery and makes me safer when I use it. I should have both.
For one, I'm not excusing the crime, I'm merely stating that the punishment should fit. Secondly, you sound pretty adamant in your declaration. You know, having had my share of experience with the human element, I'm sometimes curious with the attitude of the morally superior people who can't see shades of gray and are so willing to cast the first stone. I wonder what we would uncover if we were to put their own lives under the magnifier.
I updated my G+ profile after adding myself to the HN list. Updated profile does not reflect on the HN G+ page.
Your travel examples are indeed more difficult, but I travel much less than I coordinate times across time zones, and I suspect most other people do as well, even if it's something as simple as calling family in another state.

For someone who travels a lot, a single time zone may well be more inconvenient, hard to say.

Times relative to now would work well but could be unwieldy. How do you do it if you're e-mailing or texting? If you want to meet next Monday afternoon, do you say "in 2 days and 5 hours"?
I don't know if something like this exists, but if you do roll your own I would recommend using Redis as the backend - either have your clients connect to Redis directly and have a "tender" process keeping track of the keys, or just use Redis "behind" the queue server.
Me and my Co-Founder decided that since we don't like to be in offices, everyone that works for us (Ripe Apps Inc.) don't have to either.

We've let go of the the physical space, we collaborate by Skype, IRC, e-Mail, Google Docs, DropBox, once every week or two over burgers/lunch, and if we need to convey something that is not coming trough the line with contractors we meet at a cafe for an afternoon.

We also don't hire manager, we only deal with people who can self manage.
I compiled this into an actual shared circle.

https://plus.google.com/116347431032639424492/posts/BGk6DaqU...

I scraped the site with

[].slice.call(document.querySelectorAll('a[href^="/track"]'),0).map(function(e){return e.href.replace(/.*\//g,'')})

and then I use

var src = ["104448221006262595331", "102308414709447205951",...]; /*insert urls from above here*/
var blah = src.map(function(e){return [["",null,e],"",[]]});
var x = new XMLHttpRequest();x.open('post','https://plus.google.com/_/socialgraph/mutate/modifymemberships/?_reqid=333888252&rt=j,true);x.setRequestHeader('content-type',"application/x-www-form-urlencoded");x.send('m=['+JSON.stringify(blah)+']&a=[[["REDACTED"]]]&r=[[]]&at=REDACTED&')

To update the circle.

Edit: Updated the script to reflect site changes

Edit: It looks like sharing a circle doesn't include future changes.

Edit: you can skip the first step and instead use http://hngp.axxim.net/home/json
Outsourcing Via The Crowd
I don't have much experience with managers because I freelance now and I've never worked at a company with more than about 80 or 100 people.

So this is a real question and not snark... Assuming large companies continue to exist, how do you run one without managers?

If your company is 1000 people do have 10 executives and 990 engineers, customer support, etc. and no managers at all? How does everyone communicate? How do the executives delegate?

Do you need some managers? How many per worker is optimal?

It seems like every large corporation in existence has managers. I can't think of any exceptions. So I'm not sure what an alternative would even look like. Perhaps rotating temporary management structured like jury duty?

I'll probably be downvoted because bashing management is a time honored hacker pastime... But I really am curious. Is it possible to do away with management? Is it desirable?
Yeah you're wrong, spatial intellect is not the primary thing that makes Athletes successful. Their greater muscle memory, and the fact that their bodies often do the right physical act without thinking (limbic system). Look up any interview with a great athlete talking about what it's like being in the "zone" while playing. Most athletes constantly reiterate that they don't contemplate every move, their bodies are that advanced.
Strange that the author doesn't mention Howard Gardner [1], who pioneered the theory of multiple intelligences [2] which lists spatial intelligence as one of the intelligence form.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Gardner

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_multiple_intelligence...
(I'm the author of the original blog post/algorithm)

For Google, this makes sense, although I see now it's a weird idiosyncrasy outside of the Googleplex :)

Google has changes all year round, so "now" always represents a day of some changes. The algorithm is run on the entire code base, so now is a perfectly normal spot to go with. It didn't occur to me that really what now represents is "last time of changes". This is a good spot, and I'll put it in the paper I'm writing! Thanks!

A reasonable/desirable modification is probably for now to be changed to represent the last change, just like the first change is when the normalization window begins. (0 = time of first change, 1 = time of last change).

HTH.
Indeed I also quite liked his RSAnimate talk on http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U
Liu Xiaobo’s Plea for the Human Spirit
Data point: Last I checked, Verizon only offered 4 phones that do not require a data plan. Everything else they offer is Android, BB, iOS, and maybe WinPhone. Even their semismart Samsung phones require some $15 data plan.

At least when walking into a Verizon store, your perceived choice was android or android; everything else is plopped into a corner. I wonder if they will be successful in converting the remaining feature phone customers by simply removing that option in the future.

Is the same thing happening on other carriers?
The Big Bang Theory TV
The Big Bang Theory TV
The Big Bang Theory TV One of the most controversial theories in the history of mankind could be the Large Boom principle
Oops! Just changed the URL format for the profile to http://hngp.axxim.net/track/116007950197156995894 sorry!

I've also updated the site to include this circle.

Added a public list of the GID's http://hngp.axxim.net/home/json
These "appliance-like" computers are a new category, and the ongoing topic of their ease-of-use vs. flexibility is not black and white.

As long as I also have a proper computer, I welcome the simplicity of the tablet. If it looks like I will no longer have the option of buying or owning a proper computer, I'll join you with the pitchforks.
You should read some Rands in Repose about the point of the manager job role.
I’m first and foremost worried about laws, not companies selling products.
It’s worth watching the talk (linked in the article, but special pointing out seems appropriate): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUEvRyemKSg

I like to call it the secret keynote of 28C3.
For http://lanyrd.com/ we treat Solr as a denormalisation layer for our MySQL database - there are plenty of queries that are pretty gnarly in SQL which Solr handles with ease.

Aa good example is our http://lanyrd.com/calendar/ page which shows events your Twitter contacts are attending in the future - this was horrible as a SQL query but works great as a Solr search, especially as scaling Solr read-slaves horizontally is pretty simple.

Holding denormalised data in a separate data store entirely also makes it easier to spot bugs where denormalised data isn't being correctly updated.
There are two ways current hardware makers are beating piracy, increasing hardware complexity and value-added services. A lot of people are complaining about the Vita's proprietary memory cards, but I wouldn't be surprised if that move was 100% solely made to prevent 3rd party execution. I'd imagine that more anti-consumer features would be coming in the next generation of console hardware too.

The flip-side is rewarding good customers. By not having a hacked console, you can use online services (such as Xbox LIVE).

Although amusingly, I think the answer may actually be in free-to-play games. 2011, in my opinion, was the year F2P changed from evil Zynga social games and last-ditch MMO fallback to a serious triple digit growth area with games like League of Legends and Team Fortress 2. Expect to see F2P on Sony consoles soon. (Sony is more liberal with their online policy, which is why I'm predicting the first popular F2P on their systems. Microsoft is very domineering of Xbox LIVE and how their online play works, and Nintendo's online strategy is somewhere in the pre-fire stoneage.)
I've found this to be completely false for every one of our remote workers. Nobody at 37signals fits that description and as mentions in the article, the majority works remotely.
is this copyright infringement claim posted anywhere? It'd be interesting to read. I've seen other vector-based tank games on iOS.
Will cashiers continue to exist?
I don't find Doctorow 'less offensive' because I honestly didn't consider talks by RMS to be offensive at all, rather they were just a bit eccentric because he would go off on tangents about what might happen if we didn't align with his views, it felt a bit like an arrogant begrudged rant.

But now we see bills like SOPA and ProtectIP, and now we already have computers that you can't run any program you want on it, and all these other stories hinting that there are companies out there as sinister as RMS suggested. I find RMS less and less eccentric with each of these things that comes to light.
I think there are at least 2 big areas for innovation around app discoverability: social + location-based. Social refers to being able to easily find out what apps your friends or people you trust are using. As with most other behaviors, social has a big influence on what apps we may want to use. On the iOS, at least, innovation is partly blocked by iOS API that don't allow an app to enumerate all the apps that are currently installed.

For location-based discovery, imagine you go into Home Depot, and the app that lets you self scan in products and self check out automatically gets pushed down to you (or notifies you to be available). That sort of thing doesn't happen yet, and there is certainly opportunities for innovation.
Mind Blowing Book Sculptures by Guy Laramee
When we developed Basecamp, I had only met Jason and Ryan once. We met zero times during the development phase.

I agree that face-to-face is great, but I also believe that it's vastly overrated as a necessity for "magic" to appear.

Tons of remote teams crank out magic all the time.
He's not popular with some people for what might be an abuse of power.[1] He's had a reputation of intervening in architecture projects that don't fit his ideal vision (ie. they're not traditional, Georgian style), leading to them being cancelled outright even at the late stages of planning.

[1] http://goo.gl/hA78K
Fairly idiomatic code. Just minor nitpick.

To traverse directories use fad:walk-directory from CL-FAD. It takes a starting directory and a single-argument function, then traversing that directory recursively calling the function with each child as an argument.

I wrote this earlier to count what languages I've used in 2011, because I didn't trust my cursory examination with ls(1).

(let ((start-2011 (encode-universal-time 1 0 0 1 1 2011))
(lang-stat (make-hash-table :test #'equalp)))
(fad:walk-directory #p"~/hack"
(lambda (f)
(when (>= (file-write-date f) start-2011)
(when-let (type (string-trim "~" (pathname-type f)))
(incf (gethash type lang-stat 0))))))
(loop for k in (sort (hash-table-keys lang-stat) #'string-lessp)
do (format t "~a~10t~a~%" k (gethash k lang-stat 0))))
It's a great setup. We get remote workers to come into the Chicago every once in a while for a few days or a week. Good boost of energy, but doesn't need to happen more often than once every few months.
If it's completely made up of HTML5 and CSS3, then it's amazing! Really, I am impressed by what HTML5 can do.
It's pushed and promoted as what you need to do in order to get investment because VCs feel there's less risk that way.

I guess the alternative is you don't get your product built.
Stanford archives open window into Apple origins
Instead of surfing the net when I have a low I look around to find someone in a similar position and make them tell me stuff about what they are doing. It can help us both. :)
Well, we had those with Arrington, but fortunately he seems to have "vanished" from the HN mind...
From my point of view there are three basic mathematical skills, logical reasoning, spatial reasoning and visualization, and calculation ability which is related to memory.

I agree that to excel in sciences you will need more than spatial reasoning alone.

Also, spatial intelligence has many dimensions. For instance, I cannot visualalize something complex like a human face but have little problem rotating simple shapes or moving chess pieces in my head, which makes me think my spatial reasoning is stronger than my spatial memory or pure visualization ability.
> They always stick around way longer than they should...

But isn't that true for all 'terrible' code? Most of the elegant and well-formed code I write ends up getting butchered for the sake of 'features,' while the quick hacks that 'just work' stick around forever.
We do the same as well wrt denormalization, though it was not the original intent of the refactor. Nearly every item on our job sites started life at the beginning of the project's lifecycle as a "pretty gnarly" SQL query, but now lives on as a highly performant Solr query.

(Admittedly we don't have nearly as many widgets going on as you do!)
"real world" means different things for different people.

At this point how many companies do you know of that use perl6 to solve their business problem (may be as simple as a web app) ?. Has there been any job posting anywhere which are looking for perl6 devs?
We have Paychex handle everyone in the US and everyone outside the US work as contractors. You have to observe the local rules about who can be a contractor, but it works well for people with self-directed work, like programmers, designers, ops people. Less so for, say, assistants.

It's not nearly as hard as it appears.