skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't get why people so want to abstract around Javascript itself - it's a great language. It supports OOP and functional programming (although, admittedly, the prototype object system does take some getting used to) and it's dynamically typed. You even get a REPL! (e.g., via firebug). I would argue the js is far better than Objective-C and Java, and at least on par with python.

Now, some of the DOM manipulation stuff is just annoying, but that's what jQuery is for :-D

What do you like better about Java's object system than JS's? I prefer JS's because it isn't as constraining - it doesn't force you to use it the way its creators imagined. It's possible to write good JS code, it just takes some self-constraint.
While it is possible to "think in pictures", language is required to form complex thoughts.

A long time ago, people who were born deaf were called dumb. This is because, being deaf, they were never able to learn a language, and therefore could not form complex thoughts.
If you want to make an actual living, then write 15-20 midlist books (or 5 bestsellers) and revise them regularly (the real money is in the revisions, not the first editions). You can drop a note to an acquisitions editor to see if any authors have refused their right to revise.

Even if you lose money writing a book (you probably will--that's why editors rarely quit to become authors), you can still impress at contractor interviews by showing up with your published book. Or use the book to raise your speaking fees, etc.
From the article:

"Its algorithms may be picking up on Google's robots that crawl and grab content from the Web, for instance."

Translation: they're not cleaning up their traffic data for the biggest source of traffic out of Google's HQ. They should just stop spweing BS and Forbes should get better reporters.
Writing Lisp without an even more IDE-like feature, macro-expansion, would be almost as painful.
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Yes, it's an address list.
How about recommendation #7 of http://paulgraham.com/head.html ?
I'll see if I can make it and tell you!
So what's the story behind this site? Has anyone tried it yet?

Partially answering my own question:

http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/python/python/696912
Have you spoken to him about it? Explain to him how your time and in turn your startup's money both of which are precious at this point are being wasted. If he still didn't get you are in the wrong boat my friend, quit.
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A buddy -- Craig -- of mine ported Tetris to X while at MIT.

Another buddy -- Randy -- wrote Tetrimatic, which intercepted the X events to figure out the board state and was, effectively, a robot that played Tetris.

For a while Tetrimatic was tearing up the high scores board.

If I remember right, Craig kept himself off the board, because in play testing, he'd gotten very, very good. And it didn't seem fair. He compiled a hacked version for himself that played at the highest level, but doubled the speed. It was crazy watching him play.

What I don't remember was if Craig decided to top the Tetrimatic robot on the high scores board.

Now I'm missing college...
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1. Make a best effort to reach a mutual understanding. Don't assume you are right; question both sides.

2. (Prepare to) Move on. If your boss is truly holding things back, staying will increase your frustration while limiting your development. Been there, done that.
Thanks for this article Paul. Now i really know the why behind the what i observed working for a big company

http://computinglife.wordpress.com/2008/11/14/hands-free-or-...
So maybe call them reaction classes/types? For what it's worth, the applet didn't quite do it for me. But I'm not a chem guy so I don't know about your target audience. Check with them about usability.
Ask YC: Anyone have any subscription service tips/experience?
I've developed a tool that I think could be valuable to a select audience, and may be a nice niche/lifestyle business.
Wasn't Inuit snow words story just an urban legend?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eskimo_words_for_snow
The article was dead in the water when it called X11 an operating system.
As a potential customer, I'd like to see a little more professional site.

While I'm a fellow hacker that prefers txt whenever possible, the currently minimalistic and texty website brings memories of DSL and cheap beige box PC servers running Fedora/Gentoo.
Definitely charge people extra for making intranet sites IE 6 compatible because they have control over that and they should upgrade. Otherwise you can consider a small surcharge for IE6 on internet sites but it's kind of unfair to punish your clients for the browsers their customers use because they can't really do much about it. On your own site more ads are okay along with copious upgrade links and links to Firefox/Opera.

Funny story: I've been working on a project for the past 2 weeks and I basically finished it in Safari and I was getting ready to do a long day or two of debugging for IE6 when I opened it up in IE6 and lo and behold it was (nearly) perfect! I was so happy, tears nearly ran down my face.
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Dr. Seuss' "Green Eggs And Ham" Should Be Required Reading For All MBA's
my comment wasn't meant to be too insightful. Just pointing out that "buying" isn't always better than "crafting". Sometimes its a straight rip of an album. Sometimes its a live show she attended during the year (some bands do allow legal live recordings). Sometimes its a mix.

Either way, I doubt this firefox tool hurts amazon sales. and if it does... ehhh... Bezos and Sony will live ;)
Any niche where you can generate affiliate sales or leads is better than one where you have to resort to Adsense or banner/link sales.
I've dealt with such a guy during a freelance project. Heck my situation was worse. The boss and his whole team of 6 members were like an expired drug who couldn't even read the docs of a framework or language and would get excited and choose a framework in an (unstable) ver 0.1 for production env. Everytime I had to tell/explain the right way of doing things I had to explain to boss+6 guys. So I hit upon two options.

Let him run/test the web app or QUIT

Option-1: LET HIM RUN/test the webapp. When errors pop he'll surely come to you. Then explain the right way to him and don't tell him anything more than what he needs to know about the error. This is peaceful and will make your boss more happy that he has a guy who's capable of doing stuff. Days later you'll be called the hero who could do things the right way (yeah like Hancock coming thru the door and not breaking a wall to get in). I chose this. So now whenever there's anything wrong they call me for help even to this day long after the project is over.

Option-2: QUIT. There's no way you can work with these guys if you can't convince them.

I would suggest choosing the first option. Means a lot professionally.
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My fault for not confirming the veracity of that story in particular, but I was using it as an illustration of accessibility to concepts in different language, independent of its truth. I just supposed that this story is widely known, but I could have (perhaps should have) easily used another example. There are several words in Chinese that describe taste without direct English translations that I know of (it is harder to sustain these ideas nowadays, given the quickness of word-borrowing like "umami"). One of them is "fish stink," which really isn't fish stink. A strong S-W will say the concept is inaccessible to the non-Chinese speaker, and, of course, that isn't true.

In fact you don't even need to cross language boundaries to see the same effect: layman versus technical terminology reveals analogous differences in "perception." Me not knowing the name of industry colors does not mean I cannot perceive these colors (let's assume a single-sex population), but I will gladly group together large groups of colors into single words.
That's my favorite solution. I don't really care if someone else is writing code that makes me vomit as long as the interface I have to it is good enough and that it works reliably.
Book Publishers: Are They Car Companies or Banks?
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Can you give some examples of patterns that show up in your bosses code that you disagree with? Let us judge them too.

How many other developers are on this team with you and your boss? Maybe you can get them to stand up and say something too.

Maybe you can get together with your team and do peer reviews once a week. Try reaching out to your boss about a function/module you have written that you know needs improvement and seek his opinions on what could be done. You have to start thinking of him as a peer who is trying to help create a successful business and not as an antagonist to beautiful code.

Your code might be pretty, but if beautifying code takes the place of bug fixing and adding features needed to sell a product or service, it doesn't matter.
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The way we were: engineers and computers, 1940s - 1990s
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Oh, I don't for a second dispute that JavaScript is a much more elegant language than Java, and I would also put it on par with Python. Remember, jQuery is always my first choice.

I only assert that once your (well, my) code base grows beyond a certain size---for me, a few thousand lines, but probably an individual threshold---JS can start to become unwieldy. That "unwieldy-ness" is a problem that Java/GWT does solve. In these cases I prefer Java precisely because it is more constraining.
Alright, what about a child who sees cars everyday, but has never been told what a car is.

If a child can see cars but there's no one there to name them for the child, the child is being neglected... and perhaps even in physical danger.

And haven't you observed children name things ad hoc by the sounds they make?

So I don't buy the idea that a child "can still manipulate the car concept as easily as if he knew the word for it".

Also, yes, people with "very small vocabularies... because they have been exposed to a small number of words"
do have their cognitive skills affected, usually for the worse.
(Off-topic) By the way, I love your Otis game. It's great during a layover in the airport, just waiting for your plane to arrive. Keep up the good work.
Also, some MLMs sell decent products (I like Pampered Chef) which makes it far from a scam.
Twittypic finds recently popular images people are mentioning on Twitter.

I'm a regular user of a site called irc-urls.net (sporadically NSFW), which finds images mentioned on IRC. I tried to think of some other sources of images, and Twitter came to mind. I created some scripts to automatically scan Twitter for images, and if an image is mentioned often enough, it gets added to the site. There is also an unrestricted raw feed.

I'm handling images based on a fingerprint taken from the pixel data itself, so an image with a different filename or even a sligthly different file are still regarded as the same image. Another fun feature from admin point of view is that it can guess a title for images based on the longest common substring of tweets about that image.

The site won't cure cancer, but hopefully provides another good source of fresh stuff to add to peoples' RSS feeds.
First, day say that intelligent men have better sperm then stoopidos.

Is this actually false? I thought that adoption and twin studies were pretty clear on the matter.

A few more articles and they'll be explaining why euthanasia for poor and stupid is a good thing.

There is actually a pretty huge gap between, e.g. "People inherit traits from their parents, including intelligence," and "All people with trait x must be killed." Maybe if you didn't immediately make that logical leap to a policy conclusion, you'd be more comfortable considering the facts.
Could we keep reason.com, mises.org, Krugman, Stiglitz, all titles with Obama, and all that on other sites? Please?
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I find, in your own words, recognition of several reasons JavaScript fails for building complex systems.

"It's possible to write good JS code" implies that it's not easy or obvious, and "it just takes some self-constraint" implies that in fact you have to be damn good to understand what you're doing.

That's fine, but mere mortals need a programming language too. Fact is that most large projects are not made of up entirely A+ developers (nor should they have to be).
sleeping at work
How can you claim that Jesus doesn't exist, when he clearly is in the Bible!?
This is a great list. It had my blood boiling all over again from MySQL's "quirks".
For my own work I'm planning to do it this way:

- Incorporate the -3 check with the usual unit tests and pylint run for checking a module as I work on it.

- Stay compatible with Py2.X and these additional checks, and when curiousity strikes, run 2to3 to see what happens. The codebase will probably grow some different idioms needed to clear up 2-vs-3 ambiguities; that's OK. I'll learn how to avoid these ambiguities as I go.

- When the community seems to be ready for 3.X (in particular, when Debian switches), most of the migration work will have already been done and the 2to3 script should work more or less perfectly for creating a new 3.X branch.
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Start-ups tend to flourish following a downturn
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Sounds like the time to go get VC funding for an angel investor company.
If the DOM is annoying, jQuery is no better. It's DOM++, at best. jQuery is still the DOM, just slightly prettier. If you really believe the DOM is annoying, why not just get rid of it?

People embrace the DOM because its there, but that isn't necessarily a good reason. If jQuery is the C to DOM's assembly (not a particularly apt analogy), why shouldn't we want to branch out to a higher level language? That's one of the reasons we built Cappuccino.

Cappuccino is built on top of the DOM, because its the only thing that makes sense right now in the browser world. But we do our best to make sure developers don't need to worry about the DOM. Of course, as Spolsky would tell us, all abstractions leak and ours is no exception. But, Objective-J is just JavaScript. All the DOM is still there for you to poke at if you must. And the point of Spolsky's article was not that abstractions are bad, just that you should learn what you're abstracting, then use it. Abstractions do save us time, even when they leak.

As far as Objective-J itself is concerned, there were clear motivations for building it. JavaScript lacks dynamic message sending. It lacks classical inheritance. It lacks an import mechanism. We looked at what we felt was missing, and what the best way to fix it was. Turns out, Objective-C was created with exactly these same goals. It was a natural fit for what we needed, right down to implementation level details.

It's important, then, to realize that Objective-J is not about being Objective-C in the browser. It's a better JavaScript. It's a strict superset, so if you just want to use JavaScript, go ahead. If you want to benefit from our hard work and new features, like dynamic code importing, then you can use Objective-J. It even has a REPL: http://tlrobinson.net/misc/console_bookmarklet.html (and a command line version, objj)

Objective-J is also far different in its implementation than Pyjamas or GWT. It's nothing but a preprocessor and a dynamic runtime. It is not a compiler. This means that, in general, the post processed code looks like a slightly uglier version of what you really wrote.

[object message]

is just

objj_msgSend(object, "message");

In that small syntactic change, you're actually conveying a great deal of meaning, and enabling some really powerful features. All with effectively no run-time performance cost, and with no need to compile since the Objective-J preprocessor runs in the browser.
Several disruptive innovations will soon make life harder for health care’s established giants
This is the part of the post where you give out a few free beta accounts to hacker news readers and ask them politely to judge your product/ask for recommendations about pricing and business model.
So he doesn't like coding, but he does like producing things that people want, and that ultimately is what matters.
Use CodeIgniter? Ease your deployment process by using Capistrano.
PG writes that having a good mechanism for state management was a significant advantage for Viaweb over it's competition.
Ask YC: That Step Before Profit.
I've been looking around at options for collecting payment from customers, and the number of options is staggering. PayPal, Amazon, Google Checkout, various payment gateways, dedicated merchant accounts, thugs armed with baseball bats, and so on.

I'm probably not the only person here who has had to spend a dizzying amount of time in researching payment and billing options, so methinks it might be time to ask all the other business-minded people here at Hacker News: What methods have you used for that crucial step of 'Getting money from the customer'?
There is more than one way to do it. Design patterns, basic principles of style, all of these are only soft recommendations, don't mistify them. Try to cope with the existing code, probably you will learn from the old fart.
The title of this item is not the title of the actual article - and the title here doesn't summarize the article very well at all :( Only the last few paragraphs talk about startups.

It'll be interesting to see if this time is different. The drop in securities right now is significantly sharper than in 2002, so these "older workers" are less likely to take flagrant risks this time around.
There was a similar challenge in the Ruby world recently for the game Battleship: http://sparring.rubyforge.org/battleship/index.html
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Chiseled in stone old. But a great ad.
This is one of the single best examples of "make something people want" I've seen in a while. A problem real people have, that they are willing to pay money to make it go away. It doesn't get any simpler than that (not that it was simple to build it and make it simple for your users, but that it is simple for them).

Good work!
I think the author was targetting the analogy at the people who are complaining about the changes: they don't want things to break, even if it means a subpar implementation, because that's the way it has always been.
I strongly disagree with your point #1.

I understand you want to emphasize business value and short-term returns but barring refactoring is taking it too far. Smart refactoring will pay off immediately by giving you faster turnaround for new features. And fast turnaround is a startup's edge.

I don't refactor for refactoring's sake but I do refactor every time I would benefit right away from the change. It also makes programming more interesting. Once lousy code is refactored, I can go back to solving the right problems and stop fighting with it.
Thank you for this. I've had some experience as a noob being thrown into a web app project and it really is a massive headache keeping three languages under control at once.

There needs to be some kind of complete language solution for these types of things. HTML has run it's course.
That's probably why the Python community was able to pull this off.
I'd like to hear your boss' point of view before jumping to judgement.

... and I think you could probably do with hearing his point of view too.
I tend to just CMD-Click on the icon in the toolbar to see the path. (Works in most other apps too)
I don't see how you can be a libertarian these days while addressing the current financial crisis without presenting some kind of rebuttal to the commonly held view that it was the do nothing (aka libertarian) government that was responsible for prolonging the Great Depression. Also, the lack of regulation coming into the current crisis allowed banks to take on much more risk then they should have. Overall, it is not clear what solution this article is proposing.
Ask HN: Micro-payments
I was wondering if anyone has experience with trying to setup a payment system that would allow me to accept very small amounts of money, but still be feasible with regards to fees payable to the transaction provider. Many thanks.
Someone who picked Rails doesn't sound like he's that far in the past, so yeah, maybe helping him try and get it, and compromising on when to nitpick and when not to in order to keep productivity high. Best of all, show him some rewritten code that's dramatically shorter and explain that this will make both further work maintenance easier and cheaper.
Here is his article about why not to use emacs:

http://al3x.net/2008/10/22/on-flight-to-old-text-editors.htm...

Wow. My faith in the human race has just decreased significantly. I wonder if people writing blogs realize that when they just make stuff up, it makes them look stupid.
"If you believe Al Gore" being the key phrase :-P
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Some of that sounds very impressive. Truth be told, I haven't played with Cappuccino much yet - but your post just inspired me to go take a closer look at it. Thanks.
When thinking about numbers and music, it's primarily colors and shapes. Every tone and digit has a different color-shape. "Blue notes" really are blue, flats are brown, harmony is a slurry-grey pattern that's hard to describe. :)

I think primarily in English or Spanish words, then pictures when I am ramping up into a problem. I'll start talking then stop, and my hands reach for a pad & pen of their own accord.

Once I'm "in", my thinking is not really words and not really pictures. It's... I don't know. There is a saying: when you want to find a lost horse, you have to think like the horse. Ideally I identify with whatever it is and I "think like the horse". Afterwards I discover/rationalize explanations for it.
Unlocked Android G1 for developers - $399
The $399 unlocked phone is listed as a "Android Dev Phone 1" not as an Android G1. That doesn't mean it's not a G1, but it doesn't say it is. Does anyone know for sure?
I can't stop laughing.
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Yeah, misleading title, but still a good article. I especially liked the heading "Hire Yourself" before the startup portion of it.
Is it B to B or B to C ?
What type of biz is your site ?
Do you have beta testers ?
Berkeley researchers find brain differences between rich and poor kids
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