skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think the distinction isn't whether one changes the world and the other doesn't, it is whether one changes people and the other doesn't. Jake didn't change his customers. He predicted what they would do next. The demand for his product would exist whether it was him or someone else who was providing it. If no one else imported the new brand of water, the demand for Frank's product wouldn't exist. They'd be fine with their inferior quality bottled water. Frank experienced such resistance because he had to change his customers instead of anticipating what his customers would do anyways.

Saying that the change from tap to bottled water at home doesn't change the world seems kind of silly since it means that municipal water becomes less profitable. All the empty bottles which are thrown out and which go to landfills have an affect on the world outside of people. Whether people by brand A or brand B doesn't have much of an affect on the outside world. If anything, the post should be "Do change the world, don't change people".
Python Web Frameworks – Development Server
I missed the "Funding" details....
How will the textbook writers get paid?

One-up contract? Write me a book for $100k (one year's worth of work) and keep it updated every year for $20k with typo fixes and new exercises?

This would create the right incentives, since 100k is probably more than any textbook publisher will give you -- even if you make it big, and your book is used in many universities.
I think they simply cut out the unnecessary details. What's a religion, from a political and sociological point of view? It's an ethics from which you think laws, reputation, behavior, social organization ought to proceed; this view is normally shared by a statistically significant, and generally structured, group of people.

Whether people chose a given ethics because an invisible friend in the sky told them so matters for themselves, but not for anyone else. AFAIK, Buddhists don't have any proper imaginary friend in the sky, yet they're acknowledged as a religion.

I think there's a bunch or people, who might want structure themselves, who share a sense of ethics, of Good and Evil, a view on what's an ideal society... every politically relevant feature of an organised religion. I'm OK with them calling themselves Kopimistsm they need some label anyway. In a country where you have to publicly state your religious affiliation, such as Sweden, it ought to be a valid choice.

Pastafarianism is a satyre, because it says "So we need an imaginary friend, if we want our ethics to be recognized as legitimate? And we have do silly stuff to please Him? Here's an imaginary friend, and here are a couple of silly stuff He likes". Kopimism is respectful, by not mocking this implicit imaginary friend requirement. Up to their opponents to make an ass of themselves by explicitly demanding the imaginary friend, in which case I'd expect the response to be Pastafarian indeed.
Class-based views in Django 1.3
His point is that the ones that made the disruptive change like Netscape are not necessarily the ones that made the most money for the least effort. The people that saw the trend and momentum and went with it had an easier time and made more money more efficiently then the ones that actually changed the world. So even though there are counter examples you can't say they had an easy time of it or took the simplest path to success.

All that said, I don't find the kinds of startups he is encouraging as interesting.
> But what should a person who wants to take a break and get some broader experience [...] do?

What kind of broader experience are you looking for?
glad I'm not in the market
Thanks for the kind words!

CLV is a big part of our platform - we run a lot of analysis on the individual customer level. We use probability modeling to calculate accurate CLV numbers, and we do a lot individual-level analysis to detect when high-value customers start fading away.
Interestingly works with latest Webkit Nightly Build, so apparently they are doing the right thing and using feature detection.
PyCon 2011: Writing great documentation
ck12.org
"... nobody seems to think that I'm anything more than a code monkey"

Are you talking to the wrong people?

I realized something similar when going through tech interviews with a company (in a field I knew well) and none of the dev managers could tell me anything about their products competitive landscape... The team leads were completely unfamiliar with their competitor's features.
It was copying more, or for some reason expending from ints to Integers -- it multiplied the required memory by 12.

I don't have access to that source code anymore, and I don't remember what exactly I used, but -- given that I had to implement my own data structure over mmap -- it was an array of int, which needed sorting through a comparator class I supplied. That comparator looked up the structs corresponding to ints, and compared them. Perhaps it was just crazily instantiating the comparator class or something.
Google doesn't ask these questions!
It's a fiction that is probably perpetuated because the topic is SEO linkbait.

Again:
Google doesn't ask these questions!
Sewing Success with Fabric
Follow the advice in this post if you're looking for short-term profits and long-term mediocrity.

If you're in business just for the money, then the points in this post are valid. But, then you should probably also be concentrating your efforts somewhere else entirely. Give up software and become a loan shark or a banker or something.

If you're in business because the idea of doing anything else is boring and distasteful, if you admire people who set out to write a page of human history and accomplished it, then there is nothing of value at all in this blog post.
You can also use git stash for that.
Twitter sentiment analysis using Python and NLTK
“It seems to me that the popularity of activism and protesting do little to affect change…”

What makes you think that? Most major shifts begin with activism and protests. These are the ways that the populace makes their voice heard in large masses, much like lobbying is typically the way corporations have theirs heard. Sometimes protests go unheeded, and sometimes this leads to revolutions. Other times, the protesters disband without having achieved anything. The protester was named person of the year for 2011 because of the clear effects that protesters did have in 2011—from the Middle East to Europe. The true effects have even been felt here, in the form of the Tea Party, though that was before 2011. Occupy has had less success in achieving concrete change, but plenty of success in achieving shifts in the media narrative.

Moreover, what is immature about this? A temper tantrum? What makes you call this a temper tantrum? Temper tantrums are, by definition, uncontrolled. This is an extremely controlled and planned response. This is law we're talking about. A law that threatens these businesses, and, through them, their customers. But most of their customers have no idea this law is even in the works, or don't really get how it could affect them. What better way is there of telling them the effect beyond... Well... Telling them?

In a functioning representative democracy, there can be no more effective means to defeating a law than informing the public and getting the public to contact their representatives and inform them that there is a problem en masse. This is a means to achieve that.
Reading on the web is not the future.
If Custora guys are here, it seems like when I submit the form, the form just reloads. It's either not working or you're missing a confirmation msg.

Really want to give it a ride!
I'm guessing that one month feels like a vacation while six months is just enough time to become bored and want to get back to work.
I've been in your situation.

What worked for me is I just hacked on fun personal projects. Like "hmm, that's a new API, let's try it out". I did it for fun, not to achieve a larger goal.

And gradually ideas would pop up, like "now that works, I wonder what if I also combined it with this..." and after a few months larger ideas started coalescing.

Given that you've had some success, you probably should look for something that resonates more strongly as "you're passionate about it" vs. "it can make money".

And once you have an idea that could develop into a real product, all your experience starting a company becomes highly valuable. Don't just be a code monkey for someone else :)
I've seen some culturally literate Architecture grads move to Shanghai from the US after the completion of an Architecture program. This may change as the economic growth slows there over the coming years, but there are so many building projects being undertaken that it is far easier to have a bigger role in bigger projects at a younger age there.
Good news for designers: LayerVault just moved to Unlimited Storage.
Quel est le meilleur RPG de l’année 2011?
which Google has in spades

I would argue that they don't and I believe that it is due to their hiring process. Now I do believe that they have very talented individuals but there organization reflects their interviewing bias as such so does their product portfolio. There is a reason that they have to acquire new products for their portfolio and that reason is that they are not recruiting the kind of people that generate new products. As such their hiring process should be suspect.
Does http://netcolation.com look fishy to anyone? It has no formal list of members, but instead claims to "represent" Google and others without elaborating as to what this means. It also looks like a part-time operation run by a pair of lawyers.

I am all for a coalition, but this looks odd at best and may easily backfire. If they are assigning themselves to be Google's representatives on the matter, then Google will have no choice but to distantiate from this entity, and this will inevitably be picked up by the media as "Google breaks away from anti-SOPA coalition."
The Garden Gates Adds New Members in Bella Notte Linens and Bedding Collection
Beowulf cluster? ASCI RED (sort of)?
Our first app: One month on the iOS App Store
Exactly. Basically everyone else in my entire family has no clue about SOPA, or if they've heard of it, what it really could mean for sites they visit every day.

If web giants -- those that are used most by those unaware or uneducated about SOPA -- were to post a page about SOPA in place of their services, people would have no choice but to take notice and learn what "this SOPA" is all about.
Sorry about that -- things seem to be working over here, maybe a browser issue?

Can you contact me directly at jon at custora? I'll make sure we received your request, and figure out what's causing the issue.
How I built a neural network controlled self-driving (RC) car
High quality tightly coupled code tends to need less testing because it's tiny in comparison. I have seen plenty of cases where throw away code was less than 10 lines be replaced with 10-100x as much "reusable" code that without adding any end user related flexibility or improving performance in any way.

PS: I once wrote a 4 line hack in under 30 minutes for another team. They re-factored it into 12 classes over the course of a month and zero functionality was added. So, sure it was ugly and hard to write test cases for but they still put it into production to fix a major bug.
According to this guy, Internet access is not a human right.
I'm jealous:) sounds like a lot of fun. When they came out, I used the ITA puzzles to shake the rust of my lisp skills and even considered sending some of the solutions in and applying, but that would have been a major career change.

In any case, kudos and thanks to you - those puzzles were a lot of fun, and I always wondered where they came from.
I think they know. They've seen America as a bearer of democracy for a long time, and now it's losing that role model position, or worse yet, it keeps the role model position, but it's just not a very democratic position anymore, and everyone else starts following that or gets pressured into doing it. That's what they fear.

I still think it's unbelievable how disproportionately dangerous the content industry is to the rights of everyone in the world. I mean even if the US Government itself set out to try to convince other countries to just be more dictatorial so they can control their own people, they probably wouldn't be as successful. But the content industry itself, with some manipulation of the US Government, is managing to do that on what seems to be like a global scale.

And they even have the nerve to say that we should be more like Iran and China regarding our Internet. They say that publicly and almost get away with it, as they list the "benefits" of such a more authoritarian outcome.
Information retrieval/IR models: comparison/timeline
I don't like 'Monopoly' because most people don't recognize that as a fundamental problem. In fact in the case of media, monopoly is assumed as necessary to provide you with what you want (hundred million dollar blockbuster films).

The key thing to focus on is the imbalance of power SOPA creates and how that will end up getting in the way of Uncle Art's evening entertainment. So far the shoplifting shutting down the store analogy is the most pointed I've heard, but still not a catch phrase.
In 1996, many websites turned black to protest the community decency act. It was passed but invalidated by the supreme court. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_World_Wide_Web_protest. Far fewer people were on the internet then, so today, something like that would have a far bigger impact.
The Death of the MVP (Minimum Viable Product) in Competitive Markets
It seems you like you still hire based on puzzle as a first filter (based on on your careers page). Just wondering, what is the ratio of people who apply with only a resume vs those who solve the puzzle (I understand you probably can't reveal). And, more importantly, are those on the puzzles side show to be more successful on the interview?
I'm going to have to remember that "disgraphia" word. It's a lot easier to be excused for something that sounds like a medical condition, rather than just saying my handwriting sucks.
Relativistic Programming
None of those are really germane. Few even have to do with getting special rights just by virtue of being a religion, and those that do are hardly carte blanche to violate other people's rights. In general, religions are afforded a little bit of leeway within the law, but if a religious practice is illegal, it's illegal. (IANAL, but I have studied this topic for some time as a matter of personal interest.)
If you're going to be creating log messages all over the place, that createLogMessage method is actually really useful. Not only does it enforce having the machine name and date (and date in a certain format), but calling it saves looking up what the argument to date has to be to get the format you want (which I nearly always have to do). It seems like an excellent case of hiding the fiddly details.
My quick litmus test is to have someone write simple "map" and "reduce" functions in JavaScript.
I especially like the graph that shows the daily variation in temperature compared to the likely rise in global average temperature, as if that comparison is at all relevant.

He also doesn't note that, if we end up with "sea levels hundreds of feet higher and in general, GREEN from pole to pole" that a significant number of the world's cities would need to be moved or surrounded by monumental dikes because of the ~200' rise in sea level that would accompany the melting of the Antarctic and Greenland ice shelves. BILLIONS of people would be displaced.

Oh, and he ignores the sea becoming more acidic, causing the likely extinction of most higher sea life as the food chain collapses. Corals are already on the brink worldwide. At least there will still be jellyfish.
Gamers against SOPA
The Entertainment Software Association (cousin to the MPAA and RIAA) has thrown its support behind SOPA, which means that 34 of the largest publishers also support it (though some have since come out to say they don't). We need to gather information on contacting these companies and their management and make it known that we do not support SOPA as gamers, bloggers, or indie game developers.
A point I make again and again is: how will Groupon compete against copycats, large players and niche-specific versions of it's service?

So far the only thing I've heard is crickets... Groupon as a service is a great idea, as a stock, GRPN is overpriced.
Yes, and at that point it can become an election issue, and then it can be defeated.
People see you as a coder because they're hiring a coder. They're not prepared to see anything except what they're focusing on. If you don't want to be seen as a coder, don't go to those interviews.

Take some time off. You'll come up with ideas about your work and life that would never happen if you were head down leading a specific life and working on a specific thing. Let your mind wander. We have ideas overnight and in the shower because our brains are wired to take advantage of that.
The Best Growl Theme Out There
j3, your email isn't in your profile, could you drop me a line at david at loggly.com? Have a couple questions, a friend that I've mentored is applying to the program.
Keywords 101
Mental Tagging -- How To Remember Things When You Can't Write Them Down
Reuse is one thing, but no code should be unmaintainable. If code is written in an unmaintainable style it is also hard and error-prone to develop in the first place.

But I agree about YAGNI, and SOLID principles are not always appropriate.
Former astronaut to lead starship effort
I think the whole CONCEPT of a "textbook" needs to change:

1. It should be open-source or available on your nearest "App Store" for a REASONABLE price

2. It should be interactive. If I have a history textbook describing a battle, I want to be able to watch the battle unfold (even if it's just a diagram). If I am reading a chemistry textbook, let me play with the molecule. When I need to learn about the D3 group in Abstract Algebra, show me a triangle rotating and flipping as the group operations fade in and then drop to the bottom in a chain illustrating a composition. Let me swipe over to the Cayley table and touch a composition cell and watch the triangle dance. Whatever.

3. Textbooks should share a common ontology that can be extended for each book. But if I have two textbooks on my device and each has registered its ontology, I should then be able to cross reference concepts from one book to the other, or to appropriate entries in Wikipedia, for example.

4. All Chapters, headings, subheadings, and definitions should link to global, school, and class-level discussion forums about the topic where everyone can ask questions and have good answers upvoted in a stackexchange-like manner. These discussion nodes should be linked to the ontology, rather than the brand of book. That way ANY textbook with a section on "Limit Points in Rn" or "The Three Branches of US Government" would link to the same discussion node.

5. When appropriate, texts should be constantly updated, classes should always use the "latest stable version", and that update should be free after initial purchase (like an App).
"What's the dividing line?"

Probably sources of campaign financing, and/or makeup of companies and industries doing business in one's represented state.

This isn't a partisan issue, so much as a "who butters my bread?" issue.
5G WiFi chip achieves 1.3Gbps
Amen. The only reason why I ask people to bring code is to discuss it. It doesn't even really matter if it's their own code, or if it's good code. Being able to reason about code and discuss it with others is a much better indicator of a developers ability and potential.

There's always the probation period to see if they can actually write code and solve real world puzzles. I've never met the mythical applicant that could bullshit their way through a technical interview.
Scraping websites: Having fun with node.js and jQuery
hmmm...interesting points
This sounds like what happens when you give students problem sets...
Which could easily be explained by the fact that Android stole a whole lot of iPhone's OS, and Samsung (the biggest Android seller) steals a lot of Apple's hardware design.

Face it, if Androids selling today looked like they did in 2007 (which is to say, a lot like a Palm, Blackberry or Nokia smartphone) they would NOT be doing so well.
Wow, a study conducted by a college finds that going to college leads to a more successful life? Shocking.
The real issue here is that there are (at least) two ways to go about starting a startup. You can go for changing the world, and in that case you must face the fact that you could fail and end up with a niche business. You can also go for maximizing profits. The latter may not result in a world change, or it may. It simply changes your focus. Failure is still out there—both of these approaches can lead a completely nuked business. Hell, both can lead to a niche business if you don't do them right.
You should add their phone numbers next to their Protect Stance.

Here is the list:
http://www.contactingthecongress.org/cgi-bin/newseek.cgi
So basically we arrive at the same point that Apple did in the mid 90s. Will there be a lazarus like comeback in a couple of years or will the cloners eat the rest of RIMs already half consumed lunch ?
Skepticism is necessary, but dismissal sounds like a knee-jerk reaction.

The reason I, or anyone else for that matter, might be interested in what he (or a non-climatologist) has to say is an attempt at avoiding any hoopla stemming from scientists trying to earn a paycheck. Global climatology is no where near the black and white science that cardiology or electrical engineering is.
It's nice to be able to use jquery selectors on the server side!
Here's my advice. You don't have to have a new gig lined up immediately after you leave your current one. Take a little bit of time off. You probably need a little relaxation and little time to think and be creative again. I promise you new ideas will come in due time. If people are looking for a developer, and you have developer skills, they are going to hit you from that point and ignore the rest. In due time you will gain that same passion you had before but for a new idea and you'll be right back where you were only with a bunch more experience than you had before so things can only get better.
The variant (and converse?) I prefer (though not mine):

After so many failed Google interviews, I found it easier to build a company and sell it to them, instead.
> repository for textbook content,
> a platform for mixing and matching
> content to meet the curriculum

This would be awesome indeed, but there are some problems.
From the things that i have seen so far, (ex: cnx.org), the content is predominantly of low quality. Simply put, ask the average person to explain something to you and he/she won't do a very good job.
The other thing is that modularization completely brakes the flow of narration, and narration is a big thing to keep the reader engaged (story telling instinct).

In my work, I try to have two kinds of "nodes" -- one is generic lesson node where the explanation of some concept happens and the other are linker nodes where narration happens. Despite being a single author, and using
space-age tools (dokuwiki with the include plugin;), I still find it hard to make things modular and easily composable.

I would venture to say that a small number of authors would be better at writing a book rather than a whole collective.

For corrections/feedback/exercises... BRING ON THE CROWD!