skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Avoiding using/IDisposable is taste thing; I'm not saying that anyone else should do it.

If called from the `foreach` statement, the code in a finally block of an iterator is guaranteed to execute even if the loop exits early due to a `break` or exception. The compiler will also generate a call to Dispose() as well.

Also, it's not really an abuse. When dealing with an unmanaged resource, you're almost always either pulling a stream of data out or pushing a stream of data in. That's precisely the use case of IEnumerable and its dual, IObservable (SqlCommandEx is an example of IEnumerable and FileEx is a loose example of IObservable).

P.S. Now there might be a thus far undiscovered bug in my SqlCommandEx code to which I linked (e.g. the compiler only generates calls to Dispose() on IEnumerator<T> which might not work for dynamic types, I haven't checked) but it's possible to do what I described in principle.
That thought occurred to me too. There are a bunch already working on it and are all listed in the sidebar of the kindle subreddit. But I imagine whoever perfects it is looking at a quick buyout from one of them, or maybe even Amazon. It's definitely a real pain point for an otherwise brilliant product.
Yes that was what I was thinking of i was always struck by the fact the book (in 1980) had the line "a personal computer would be useful"

Ironically Elite was a rip off of the basic starship combat rules in Traveller and i did try and write a game on our PDP 11/03 / VT55 using Traveler as a base.
Just like Mint does I'm sure. Their site has a ton of credit card offers to lower interest rates, balance transfers, etc. I'm sure those companies give Credit Karma a sum of money for every credit card offer someone takes up.
http://www.creditkarma.com/about/faq#charge
Rails 3.2.0.rc2 has been released
sweet little hack
> Why are you blogging about upgrading to Rails 3.0.x when the current stable Rails has been 3.1.x for over 4 months?

They switched to 3.0 quite some time ago:

> Our production instances made the final switch in the week leading up to Thanksgiving

Writing this blog post probably wasn't very high priority.

> How did this happen?

Maybe they were busy creating a great product instead of obsessing about perfect architecture and optimising prematurely?
Geez. It's time for me to retire.

I've written 100,000s lines of code and released 9 different commercial products over the last 15 years, and Newton's method is far from being in my working memory.

Now, if you ask about best practices in shipping software...
Interesting application of genetic algorithms. The weird thing about GA though, and any optimiser, is that you need an "error function" that you will us to determine when one solution is better than another. Presumably he designed an error function for "fun", and his GA system finds local minima within it. But this is what I mean by "weird thing": you have to come up with a quantification of what makes a game fun, and _this_ is ultimately what will determine what kinds of solutions you come up with. Regardless of how the optimiser works, the error function is what the programmer is designing, and therefore the programmer is designing the space in which solutions will exist, so I would argue that any specific games are attributed to the programmer (or whoever designed the error function), and any specific game just happens to be one choice within the available search space.

Unless you want to manually try every iteration and rate it from 1 to 10, this implies that it's possible to come up with a "funness" model of human game playing. That in itself is sort of a interesting thing, falling somewhere between philosophy and psychology, rather than computer science.
Twitter deems certain users "Anti-Social," filters them from search results
Tinkering with evolution: Ecological implications of modular software networks
For 1200 users, many entrepreneurs would cut out and sell their kidneys.

Congratulations on shipping your project! I'd like to check it out, but seems down for the moment...

EDIT: It's live actually. Looks like a problem on my end.
I don't really mind it as much since the intention was not wrong, infact on the contrary there were more discussion on the way we, me and Mike Elgan shared the story then as originally shared but Jon, I did mention his name on it though I WAS not sure about the fact if he WAS on Google+. I usually avoid links because not all users would want to get out of Google plus to read articles, I mean I as a user
never click on shared links on social site, that's just a behaviour pattern.
Where is the hell is Oregon trail? I could have sworn that was Apple 2 maybe it was 2e.
Thanks for filling out the survey! Keep 'em coming. I'm not about to begin roasting and selling coffee, but looking to build a platform for craft roasters to get a presence/shopping cart online; and to also help those who enjoy good coffee find good coffee.

Before I head down this path, I'm curious - would/do people order coffee online?

Like some, I have at least 4 local roasters 10 minutes from me. Part of me thinks, "people would just buy local coffee." I also think, "No one limits themselves to just local beer."

I think the biggest hurdle, and this is more for the merchants, is shipping.

Thoughts? Suggestions?
Supercomputing: Watering the flops
But it doesn't really make sense for the Starbucks management team to be speculating on coffee prices. To run Starbucks successfully you need a lot of management skills related to operating and marketing a large chain of coffee houses.

I dunno I'd assume that an organization the size of Starbucks can probably afford to have a few folks dedicated to their supply chain economics separate from the coffee house operations and marketing folks.
Until the competitors realize that people are loyal to the branding of blue shirts and red hats, and start wearing their own indistinguishable blue shirts and red hats to draw in users (how many 'Famous Original Ray's Pizza' joints are there in NYC?). For a company created solely on the premise of convenience, it's going to be difficult to convince new customers to spend the time to figure out that you're somehow the 'real deal' instead of the identical-looking dude standing next to you.
"Our salespeople all estimated that they were spending about 20% of their time just keeping track of what money was due them. There was constant horse trading."

I had to laugh at this. How is this that difficult? An excel spreadsheet with a few columns might only take a 20-30 minutes per day (if that). If it's based on a percentage, excel can automatically calculate that based on a column. I am a re-seller for a few products online and this is exactly how I calculate it. I have another sheet that tallies all of my monthly revenue. I can't imagine it being much different when selling services or products for a company like Fog Creek. You could also keep track of all names/companies, etc. here.

I'm going to offer another perspective: Fog creek basically just gave themselves a pay raise. Rather than giving salespeople a cut of the sales, they now are paying them a flat-fee.

Some people may like this because now they have consistent income. However, it's much less than what they could potentially earn. If I was a salesperson there, I would quit. I would like to see the results of this in 1 year (or 5 years). I suspect they will switch back to a commission-based system within that time-frame.

It reminds me of my brother's job. He used to work as a bike builder at a local shop here in PA. He used to get paid $10/bike and he would build many bikes per night. They switched it over one day to $11/hour and he then had no incentive to build as many bikes (and he admits didn't doesn't work as hard..because he was going to get paid the same regardless). Most people are like this.

In a way, it's like converting from free-market capitalism (you have no limit to your success) to communism (everyone is now equal).

They do this to developers all the time. Every job I've ever had has been based on salary. This sounds great, until you realize that the employer now has no incentive to keep you within 40 hours/week.

At one company, the new COO came in and announced that new working hours were an hour earlier and half-an-hour later. Everyone working there was on salary, so we essentially all got a pay-cut.
As far as pop-culture goes, I think Clarissa still holds the cake for female programmer characters. Acid burn (from Hackers) is a close second...
If someone wants to dress as shitty as I do, more power to them. And if you don't mind being cloned, then that's fine, too. I just want to make sure you're not drawing an imaginary line somewhere.
* Commissions are typically paid on a contract, not on the lifetime value of the customer. *

If I give my sales people a cut of the lifetime value of a customer instead of the immediate contract, would that be better or worse?
You pay once to sign up, this fee increases with the ammount of users.
From the domain name, is it safe for me to eagerly await a port of an Ascii Express software to Linux so we can once again enjoy the pleasures of extremely low tech but completely anonymous communication, via telnet this time instead of 1200 baud modems?

Plus I desperately miss ASCII art..
Well he never demanded me to work more. I spent those 1-2 months barely working because we had serious issues. When we resolved them, and I decided to just think of him, as I said, as lucky early investor, I started working again. The thing is, I DO love the company and I think it can be very big.
A handful of weekend and side projects:

* http://www.coachulous.com, a web app for triathlon coaches

* http://loanarranger.heroku.com, a visualization tool for mortgage/car/student loans

* Aspect Ratio Converter (http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/aspect-ratio-converter/id4776...), a calculator for resizing images, embedded video, and flash objects without screwing up the aspect ratio

* http://www.receiptparty.com, a service that stores and organizes your digital receipts

* http://realpersonreminders.com, telephone reminders from a real person
As a bootstrapped Internet company, we didn't invest any more money than to pay servers. And actually, a close person to me invested a certain amount of money (because I asked), and he spent most of it on things I didn't agree on (neither did I know of, since I didn't have access to the bank account at that moment). We gave it back to the investor once we made it back, but that's another experience that shows me this is not a guy I feel comfortable sharing a business with.
Now, it's entirely possible that I shouldn't work wherever you work but I think this is a terrible question to ask. The experience of 'flopping around without a clue' during an interview is both unpleasant and massively distracting. My experience so far as both interviewer and interviewee is that seeing how someone responds when freaked out is only useful if the job involves being in that state most of the time.
Very good and articulate. Good job!
I can also read this article as a reason why Uber should be regulated more like cabs so folks don't get stuck with a $67 dollar cab ride for going less then a mile.

In fact in Uber's unregulated market there were still too few cars on the road and it lead to artificially high prices it seems like this article is arguing for regulation.
I have a mobile phone that I bought for 10 bucks, and it doesn't have an alarm clock. Thanks to this awesome website, I get a phone call every morning at 7am. The great thing is, If I switch to a new phone, I'll not need to set my alarm clock again.

This is great. I think ifttt would be turned to a next generation marketplace for web apps. It has a huge potential.
Revenge of the nerd: Yahoo swings to Bartz’s opposite with new CEO
From what I understand, the convention in the rails community has been to upgrade from 2.x -> 3.0 -> 3.1.x than to go full bore 2.3 -> 3.0.

Edit- left out a word
Unlike prior shifts in national economies, coding--good coding at least--does not lend itself to the application of mass labor unlike manufacturing. In the prior mentioned shifts, hunter/gatherer --> agrarian and agrarian --> industrial, you could teach someone to do one or two repetitive jobs without consequence to the rest of the system. Every night at 5, shovel hay from loft to stall or every time a piece from machine A emerges, screw this knobby on and insert into machine B at a 45 degree angle. I would posit that coding requires far more awareness of the greater system as a whole. Changes made in one branch of the code will have a rippling effect throughout the system.
New Super-Realistic Steve Jobs "Action Figure"
I'm sure they can afford it. But do you really expect Starbuck's coffee speculators to beat the speculators at Renaissance and GS?
after reading the other responses, my guess is that there could be something to this if the ear's response is non-linear in some way that makes non-audible frequencies affect audible ones.

that might sound crazy, so let me give an example. cheap active speakers (the kind you plug into a computer) will often pick up radio transmissions from passing emergency vehicles. the speaker cable acts like an antenna and picks up the radio signal. now the radio signal is, of course, at radio frequencies, but there's some non-linearity in the amp that results in an audio signal (an understandable one) coming out of the speaker.

that's a fairly extreme example, but here's another more biologically believable one. perhaps there are frequencies which are high enough to be inaudible, but which influence the ear in how it responds to audible frequencies. for example, perhaps the ultra-high frequency signal stimulates the ear in some way that makes it more sensitive to audible higher frequencies. then you would hear a brighter tonal balance when listening live than when listening to a band-limited recording.

i am not saying this must happen; i am saying this may be the (physically reasonable) basis for some belief / rumour / knowledge in the audio business.

[also, note that the non-linearity must be in the ear; if it's in the surroundings then the mic will pick it up too. and it must be influenced by frequencies that are outside the recording bandwidth otherwise you'd hear it on playback.]
Long term for web apps is JavaScript and REST because it gives you a common service back end for mobile and other consumers of your services. Take a look at Require.js, Backbone.js and jQuery build a webapp with them that communicates with some REST services. For content based sites, the Python web projects are coming on strong and ROR has a lot of mind-share.
I think you are spot on. I think they are pushing towards CRM. The question is how many users do they need to pull off a local merchant CRM tool that is big enough to justify the amount of funding they have received.
Amazon has a terrible reputation which may distort who shows up. I have done conducted plenty of interviews for a few company's and having a solid reputation drastically improves the quality of candidates show up.

EX: Microsoft has middle of the road reputation and I know people that would literary consider with them at 120k to be a better option than 140k at Amazon.
I agree, and also I'd like to add something. While it's not really an attractive job to many people, it's also relatively difficult for most people. Farming is different in that it's easy for anyone to do (it's just manual labor). Realistically, you can't expect a large portion of the population to be capable of programming.
Actually, plastering their home page with ads would most likely cost Google revenue right now, because they will get a far higher conversion rate on their ads once they actually know what it is you're looking for. And once you've searched, you might notice that the page is indeed plastered with ads.

More importantly, we're talking about salespeople hired to scale up a proven business model, not entrepreneurs exploring different ways to make money.

Focusing on the "right now" as an entrepreneur can cause all sorts of issues, but if you hire a salesperson to sell your known product to a known target market based on a known process, they better fucking well be focused on closing the sales right now. It obviously depends on the industry, but I'd say that in most cases in B2B, without the drive of a salesperson trying to close the deal right now, every deal will take twice as long and half the deals will probably never close at all.
This is of course assuming that programming in the future is exactly what programming today is. I find that hard to believe.

I'm sure that the edge of the programming will still have a similar feeling. However the vast majority of applications are pretty simple. I wouldn't be surprised if we see the process of creating those applications become dead simple, any person with a high school education can do it, and will do it. In fact it will probably become a part of the educational process... the way my education involved creating powerpoint slides, my kids will learn to make simple db queries (not necessarily in code) that can be accessed by a simple user interface made in a vb like environment.
Nice idea and impressive implementation. Me and a friend of mine are currently working on something comparable to this demo. We focus on UX and interoperability; our goal is to show it to HN before the end of January.
The Fractal Dimension of ZIP Codes | Wired Science | Wired.com
Thanks! Live TV is nerve-wracking.
That's funny because in the real world I think it's more like the other way around, 1 year of work experience is like 4 years of a degree. (Note: I'm currently studying cs)
Dynamic face substitution
Of course! It's gonna be THE profession. I imaging in the future more and more things will be doable in 'software'. For example, manufacturing factories will be so automated and full of robots, that you can actually start building assembly lines in pure code. Subway & Railroad systems will drive completely by them self, controlled by code. Container ships & harbours might operate someday purely driven by software. Bottom line: Demand for coders is gonna explode and someday all we need is just coders.
I think the shortage of software development skills really has to do with the lack of there being enough people who get impassioned with this kind of stuff. When I step out of my bubble I realize that its really difficult to find cultural-personality fits for what building software requires. Most people are just not like 'us' for better or worse. Most people don't get giddy over implementing a new algorithm or building an elegant framework, etc. etc. and probably never will.

Here is an exercise... flip the table and think if our industry was going away and you needed to find a job in a completely new industry/job role. Personally for me about 95% of the things I can think of make me want to immediately throw up... sales, medicine, advertising, law etc. - no thanks they are just not me. I've known people who have transitioned into tech from other industries chasing the money here... they are usually gone within a year or 2.

The other problem is despite all the crap about "I learned to code in 2 months" it is a really long haul to become good. Probably similar to becoming a good author or painter.

Lastly, it is quite well known that some people in software can have a lot of economic problems as they get older not to mention some of the cultural problems in tech in certain places that have been well covered here. I guess the point being that I think its really really difficult to do software development if your not genuinely excited about doing the day-to-day stuff.
that's a rather weak answer that suggests that it comes down to altruism. i suspect it is incomplete.
Relevancy.js - sorting and weighting strings by relevancy with javascript
If taking away commissions didn't hurt sales, why would reinstating them fix some hypothetical sales problem? This makes no sense.

Because the reason why sales didn't drop might be because of wider factors that outweighed the removal of commissions. Once/if the "water level drops" and management start panicking, they might consider reversing their position on sales commissions, at least to see if it makes a difference for the better.

Seems like a pretty obvious line of thinking to me.
Time is money. It costs me $2 to take the bus to bart, then $15 for a round trip bart ticket... but bart to SFO doesnt run until after 8AM on sundays and my flights are typically 7:35AM.

(I fly to Seattle once a month on the Sunday 7:35AM virgin flight)

Yes, you can say public is cheaper because it is shared transport, but what i am saying is that the cost for non-shared transport is ridiculous:

Lets look at the cost/value of a trip to SFO from my house - $65.00

During the times I go to SFO and from SFO, there is no traffic - so i wont factor that in.

The cabby picks me up and it takes 25 minutes to get to SFO. It is 13.7 miles from my house.

This means that the cabby is making the equivalent of ~$4.75 per mile - OR ~$156 per hour.

Gas costs the cabby $3.50 per gallon, he also needs to pay 20% to Uber. (I know independant Uber drivers, so Ill assume he is not sharing that remaining 80% with a parent company, for ease at this point)

The car gets ~19 MPG, so at 13.7 miles, lets just round up and assume it costs one gallon to SFO, and 1 gallon back to wherever he was before my fare.

The last Uber Driver I had had just bought 3 new towncars. He said the cars were $25K a piece and last to 300K miles. Lets assume one driver with one car:

If he has a car that costs 25K over 60 months, that works out to .57 cents per hour for the car, we will round up to $1.00 to cover insurance.

So, for 50 minutes of work (lets go ahead and assume he doesn't get a customer back from SFO), with $7 gas, $1 car cost and 20% of the fare to uber, that leaves the driver $44.

SO, what I am saying is that at $44 to the driver, after expenses - that is the equivalent of $88,000 per year, assuming he were to have a fare 100% of the time. Which obviously he doesn't -- but for the time that I am in his car, I am paying him the equivalent salary of $88K for the use of his services.

This, to me, is WAY too much money to pay someone who is simply driving me to the airport.
Dad? I need our german Apple ][ clone from the attic right now! Remember when earlier today (seriously, we did, what a coincedence!) we talked about how in the German Democratic Republic they had programming lectures on the radio and were transferring the code over the air like this? Well, someone made a website where you can play the sounds of some games like that.
Hey, 20y old programmer here. I feel like I could never pass an interview with these brain teasers.

Also, I've never really had an interview. And I've had some pretty good jobs, but I never got them for solving math problems.

Seems to me it requires a person that falls in one of these categories:

- having a job that includes solving math problems
- I'm web/mobile
- motivated enough to prepare for it (I could believe that)
- I would probably do this if I wanted the job
- people who are so freakishly smart they can solve it right away
- This is my idea of Google engineers, but it's not me
- people who have fun solving math problems
- I love to see things working, so not me

What do you think is the best strategy to increase my chances if I ever get to do an interview like that?
Yes, exactly. I wonder if they will be able to though. Very interesting challenge. Trouble if it is not crossed.
Ask HN: How much can website make?
How much can website make if it has 100.000 Unique visitors per month.
Average time on site around 5 minutes. And every user check few(4-6) pages before leaving?

What are other factors for website profit? I'm asking for ads revenue informations.
I apologize, I accidentally downvoted you instead of upvoting.