skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It doesn't generate much more client-side code than others. All frameworks are filled with javascript. At least 2 frameworks are almost JS only.

But regarding complicated things I dont get what you mean. You can easily generate whatever HTML you want using multiple ways. And complicated tasks is what Erlang is all about.
> But it's not just that... I find that the relationships between people are genuinely a bit better in Italy than in the US. ... I have several friends in Italy I've known for 13 years, but barely anyone in the US I've known for that long. I've heard some people say this is also true of small towns in the US, but I've never lived in one so I don't know how to compare it to Italy.

Is your living in the US experience comparable to your living in Italy experience?

Lots of folks in the US don't move for jobs, etc,

Also, it seems somewhat odd to compare Italy to the parts of the US that it isn't much like. The US isn't the coasts/urban areas any more than Italy is Europe. Italy is, perhaps, like Minnesota (except smaller and warmer).
You can continue your kneejerk conservatism when you get fired for not flushing twice.

No, really, I'm not joking.

Though it is sad to see what happens when people take advantage of job security and get paid to do hardly anything.
Startup Scene in New Delhi
What is the startup scene in delhi? Any hackers around here from delhi? Are there regular hacker meetups or conferences?
lens in this sense means "Do my SEO for me"
A friend who worked at one of the large investment banks said you knew you were fired if you couldn't log into your computer. When you went to the IT office to ask why you couldn't log in, security guards would be waiting to escort you back to your office.
I'd argue it's the ONLY thing that matters
This is one of many incidents that makes me lose confidence in whoever's running the iPhone App vetting. Someone needs to go to that department and the one running the App Store get some people straightened out. The user experience is not up to the level of quality I expect from Apple.
I don't see a thing: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1865 and subscribe to "easy list"
"A majority of British voters cast votes for Gordon Brown..."

Gordon Brown became Prime Minister after Tony Blair resigned - he hasn't called a General Election yet.
It might be a defense of complex financial derivatives if you're willing to work through the jargon, but otherwise it just looks like a bunch of technical blah blah being thrown around without much in the way of actual "defense of complex financial derivatives". Either he's aiming for the few who understand what he's saying (which seems odd - presumably they're able to form their own opinions, due to their knowledge of it), or he's unable/unwilling to put together a pursuasive argument in English, which makes it sort of a waste of time.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=364901

another contender for this suspect behaviour, for reference
Because a lot of us either (a) want what RubyGems offers (multiple version side-by-side installations), (b) work on operating systems that don't have packaging systems and aren't willing to compromise the use of our language just because of <platform> bigotry, or (c) want something newer faster than <platform> can provide it without having to install from source and without breaking our existing apps (see point a again).

Unless and until Debian supports the concept of multiple version side-by-side installations which is IMO mandatory, I don't see this particular problem being resolved.
I've discovered in vim, that colorschemes in itself doesn't help me with programming. I need to have every type of keyword, parameter's highlighted to a different color. Basically, I need things highly customized, which is why I really love Eclipse.
The 4 Types Of Exits: M&A
I attended a lecture several years ago by a photographer who has climbed Mt. Everest several times. He said his usual workout was a long session on a stair climber machine, set to maximum difficulty.
That's easily solved with a portable wireless printer:

http://www.provantage.com/oneil-200070-001~7ONEP009.htm

Here's one with a card swiper built in as well:

http://www.aircharge.com/ourProducts/airCharge/airBlue.asp
I worked very briefly as a consultant at a company that let you know you were axed when your key card no longer worked. You had to buzz the admin, who carried your box of belongings to the door and handed you your paperwork.
Google falls off "most trusted companies" list
There are already bluetooth card swipers and printers designed for use with smartphones:

http://www.aircharge.com/ourProducts/airCharge/airBlue.asp
In a job situation (where you have fulltime HR folks and a relatively small pool of applicants), this works greak.

But, I suspect he has the same problem PG has. Rejection doesn't mean that something went wrong. And, in a high-volume scenario like this, he sure as hell doesn't have time to give people thorough responses.
Why did you expect "the world’s largest educational and scientific computing society" to welcome your "entrepreneurship" ?

That's just not what they're about.
hey - thanks for all the tips - although it's always easier said than done. Weird how writing code always seems to be the real work - and all this other stuff just - well... you know. Gotta turn it on its head.
And: especially like #4 - never thought of that, great idea.
CNN/SAI: Sony PlayStation 3 a "sinking ship"
Every industry buys ideas. It is just a matter of selling it properly. One proven selling technique is to find companies that are lacking in some space and share with them a full blown idea on how a piece of software (or your idea) could fix that problem. I got a few contracts this way in the past. The response rate is much higher than applying for contracts through Craigslist or Odesk.
Agreed. But he didnt have to patronise them with a response like that..... :)
The actual rejection is buried halfway through. Rejection or acceptance should be in the first sentence, and the tone of how that sentence starts should make it obvious which one it is.
uhg, awesome but 11 pages.

/saves for later
It is often referred to as an "internship." There is no way this can possibly be comparable to an actual MBA, but I am biased.
Annual lobbying spending and number of lobbyists
err same page?
updated - sorry, I'm an ass
Sounds like the company handled this just about as badly as I can imagine, with the proviso that it handled it in a way unlikely to land it in court.

Yet, it's the legal system and employment laws that have encouraged companies to be less than friendly when it comes to layoffs..
Screencast on writing a ray tracer in Common Lisp
Google Blog Search loses its bearings
OK, torrent client + thepiratebay/mininova/etc. I've never really had any problems with finding what I need, assuming it existed. It would seem some people do, though.
You may be right...until we see more details about how G intends to set their access up we may not be able to get the analogy quite right.
It's too bad the iPhone's camera is too crappy to do barcode reading. You could make the iPhone a full blown Point of Sale device. Snap pictures of the barcode, and your item gets rung up.

Of course, for really small vendors, a drop-down list of your items is probably better.
100 Best Web tools to Teach Yourself a New Language
There are a vast number of learning tools online, including games that introduce you to new languages, alphabets and glossaries for practicing the basics, and even widgets and toolbars that keep you learning new words everyday. Here are just 100 of those.
I guess I also have to put myself in the mindset of 2001/2002. Nowadays, I see less compelling reasons for iTunes over bittorrent.
Oh, I don't think that's true. My dad worked as an EE for the Navy for 35 years, and he got to do cutting edge stuff with sonar, oversee computer installations on submarines, etc. And then he retired at 61.5.
I bet he's doing better with his government pension than he would be with a 401k right now.
This is quite shocking. I thought better of Amazon.
Palmone Treo 750v (Unlocked)
Palm Treo 750 smartphone goes where you go. It combines a GSM world phone, with wireless email and web access2, mobile wireless broadband speeds3, and Windows Mobile 6, all with the ease you can only get from Palm.
I wonder if that article has been written by a Markov Chain.
Here's what I would have responded in Seth's shoes (note: I'm a big Godin fan and think this is a killer opportunity but did not apply):

"Hi!

[this is a form letter- Given that I preach honesty in marketing, I figure I owe you that!]

I reviewed your app and am declining you for this opportunity. Overall, I was _incredibly_ impressed with the quality (and volume) of the applications. Unfortunately, because I am just one guy, I had to read through them quickly and go a lot on "gut feeling". I had to pass over some fabulous applications in favor of some slightly-more-fabulous ones. I'm sure I declined some great people. I'm sure I'll be interviewing some duds.

Due to the volume of apps, I can't send any personalized feedback on your application. I really wish I had the time to, but a guy's gotta sleep. Thanks again!"
Did you work for NUWC? I think they use BBN for most of their contract needs, and BBN is pretty quality conscious.
There's no way that identifying it as an "anti pattern" is going to kill the practice of requesting credentials for other sites. For one thing, it's being done on the majority of social networking sites out there, including all of the most reputable ones, and for another thing it's something that a lot of people find very convenient.

At best, it'll become like opening zips and exe files. Users will have to become aware of the potential dangers, but the practice of providing the files will remain.
Paraphrased (ignoring some of the jargon):
QSF (the quantitative techniques for finance) aren't inherently bad, just run into issues when they are tied to the actual markets. In addition, he claims that the results were probably overemphasized (like most new tech, it seems that people thought it could do more, and that it was more rigorous than it was).

In short, the defense is this: We were doing it wrong, we should do it better.
Why? What about the underlying model? Procedural, OO, or functional? Availability of libraries? Culture of the community? Efficiency of the compiler/VM? Ease or difficulty of application deployment? Size of the minimum memory footprint? Concepts for dealing with concurrency?

Why don't these matter?
Whoever pays for working hours normally, too.

And yes, it delays the problem. It is only a statistical trick.
I expect just about anyone linking a list of books on Amazon to be using affiliate links.
Summary: PHP is cluttered, people like to bitch about it but use it anyway, sometimes frameworks are good. The 'yet' is merely a weak thread through the vague, obvious noise. I want my 10 minutes back.
Please, please, someone just tell me, why are so many people convinced that taxes are outright theft? I can understand anger over how it's all spent, but I don't understand the concept that every year some guy with a badge mugs us and takes one third of our income.
Yes but surely there are some legal issues abound here? these social networking sites are facilitating the data trawling applied by phishers and identity fraudsters.

I'm currently researching the PCI DSS for my employer, and I'm seeing this as the next potential milestone in security compliance. It's not just a matter of the general public becoming aware of the risks, like they have with credit card info, the users of the data must set in place secure standards to deal with identity data.
Scaling MySQL on a 256-way T5440 server using Solaris ZFS and Java 1.7
Great that you got your mom squared away and all, but no.
Some months ago I tried to set up a project to transcribe Alexander Shulgin's Lab books but Mturk wasn't available outside US.

http://www.erowid.org/library/books_online/shulgin_labbooks/
There are people out there who think we should untie these things from 'actual markets', so that seems like an odd thing to be saying.
The Case for Higher Gas Taxes (and Lower Income Taxes)
After reading the original blog it seems to me that he indeed built it himself (except of paying $1000 to a designer). The "issue" is, that he decided that 40 days of him coding the application is equivalent to spending US $10,850...but that aren't real expenses, IMHO. So overall, I think that his app is doing quite well with relatively modest upfront expenses.
LShift is terrified by asynchronous libraries performance
BlueLock:

http://bluelock.com/solutions/hosting/sharedhosting.html

They are in Indianapolis and Salt Lake City.

Cheers
Is there a way to automatically convert color schemes from Emacs <-> Vim <-> TextMate <-> etc.? If not, there should be. It seems like it wouldn't be terribly hard to make and could really be useful.
As an insider, it’s actually funny to see endless discussions on newsgroups or the latest PHP-bashing entry on the Slashdot-of-the-day web site where people who aren’t familiar with our platform disdain its ludicrous awkwardness while marveling at its popularity.

I'm very familiar with PHP. I built my first start-up on it, and it was a costly mistake. I know PHP very well and loathe it for many good reasons.

I think the author should try giving up on PHP now. He may well find that the world seems like a better place after that step.
Twitter Joins The Google Friend Connect Party
Making a record is just one way a band can make money
SQL is not procedural/OO and IMO is a great introduction into the functional model. I think replacing most 200 level data structures courses with a detailed understanding of SQL would be far more useful and a great foundation for understanding the point of data structures. EX: Indexes and Explain are a great example of cost benefit analysis that has little to do with procedural coding.
SC, an s-expression based front end to C
Ask HN: How to implement a custom rating system (with a declining date relevance)?
I'm working on a site similar to digg in the respect that users can submit "stories".

I keep track of how many "votes" and "similar adds" each item got. Similar adds are defined as two users adding the same "link".

Here is part of the algorithm (essentially the most important):

y = day number
sy = number of adds on day y

∑ y[1:10] sy / y

So basically calculate the number of "similar adds" on a specified day and divide by the number of seconds since the content was posted originally. Do this for the past 10 days (as an example).

However, I'm not sure how I would go about implementing this with sql.

The only way I can think of implementing this is by calculating the number of adds for the past 10 days for each item submitted, which will take forever. (so a sql command with a group by date, where date >= current_date - 9 and then a sum of that).

Even if I keep a table that I update once a day (and run the above sql in the background), that will still be ridiculously slow once the database gets large. Plus the rating will be "outdated" since it's not live (e.g. breaking news "items" will never reach the top).

Does anyone have any experience of how to go about doing this?

Thanks.

(I posted on stack overflow first, but reposted here since thought you guys might have more experience with this topic... http://stackoverflow.com/questions/368369/how-to-implement-a-custom-rating-system-with-a-declining-date-relevance )
While that all makes sense, it also seems possible that deaths happen on the descent simply because it takes that long above 8,000 feet for cerebral edema to kill you. It seems like, if those were the main issues, the descent below 8,000 feet would not have shown significantly fewer deaths than above.
This is why workers need unions.
>> It reads like a load of over-dramatized crap.

All of Godin's work is over-dramatized crap. That's his shtick.
I dunno about this. Of the books under "books most programmers have actually read," the only one I've read is the C programming language (K&R). But I think I'm probably more likely to read the GoF design patterns book or the rest of my college algorithms book ( http://www.amazon.com/Algorithm-Design-Jon-Kleinberg/dp/0321... ) than Programming Pearls or Effective Java.
Ask HN: Single Programmer Testing
I really need to find a better test method than I have currently, which amounts to "list potential disasters on paper and prevent them".

My problem is that most of the testing methodologies I've seen have been based around a team. I'm the only developer at a help desk consulting company, managing their Service-Now instance. I don't have any users I can reliably get assistance from, so I need something that works well for a single developer.

Could I get some recommendations for what I should research? Anything to narrow the field of possibilities would be awesome.
I am very glad that we do not have those bogus Gen-Ed classes at university in Germany.
If there were a product statement for PHP, it’d probably be something like "only a drunken Martian could come up with this."

I know I'm pretty much stating the obvious, but this is the problem that will keep PHP cemented in its current state for years and years.

Like everyone knows, and like stated in the post, PHP is riddled with inconsistent naming-convetions for functions, inconsistent parameter-order and inconsistent functional behaviour. Let's also not forget how 99% of the functions in PHP are "binary safe", like treating text like binary data is a good thing. There is code out there working on binary data and relying on string-operations to work properly.

Let us for a second assume the PHP developers are actually capable of making good and thought trough decisions and just ignore that whole backslashed namespaces incident.

If the PHP developers were to address the inconsistencies of the language and actually standardize on something, even with some decent refactoring-tools, this would still be a rather big undertaking and would no doubt lead to more bugs in the core framework until all the itches get sorted out.

And for what? PHP is well known for causing applications to break between releases, but intentionally breaking and crippling all PHP code in existence? They might as well give it a new name and release it as something different than PHP all together.

But why would anyone actually bother to do that? Does PHP as a language have any qualities not found in other languages? Does PHP, besides existing codebase which in this case would be a moot point, offer anything which isn't already offered everywhere else?

For PHP to solve its problems they would have to abandon the only thing which support it as a platform. I postulate that PHP, in its current shaky state, is the way PHP will remain for as long as it is considered relevant.
> That being said, they have much better and much cheaper health care. That saves each person the equivalent of thousands of USD per year.

I seriously doubt that the French plan is significantly better and cheaper than the boring Kaiser+dental+eyes plan that costs around $350/month for folks in their 50s.
Godin's company is Squidoo. It's an odd little web page builder thing. A "Lens" is what he calls a "page". Because if he called it a page, then no one would care. Now almost no one does.
"As you can see, we were able to reach a peak of more than 79,000 SQL queries per second on a single 4 RU server." - Yeah, the whole 1GB database is cached in memory of a 80.000 USD server system. Nice though :-)
Sorry, but I still don't get what it means.

Does this mean they've found a business model? Or a potential one? Why is this important?
the disabilities act (the law that governs things like what should happen if you are unable to work, what kind of accomodations your employer must make if you should become disabled, et cetera._

i feel you on the bad habit thing, 20 days is all it takes to have a new habit, though.
In the background, he plays the Beastie Boys.

Sabotage?
Mod_Security Author Calls It Quits
Morale important even after you have millions of dollars
Whaa? Compilers was the single best CS course I ever took. It was the superset of everything else: to write a compiler, you need to know data structures, machine architecture, discrete math, etc.

It was also the only class where we wrote a really serious program. Every other class had some toy-seeming final project, but here we wrote a complete compiler, from scratch. (Final day: they give you some source code, you compile it with your compiler, link it with some native libs, and run it.)

You mention source control. Good luck writing a compiler without that! Writing a compiler forces you to learn all the glue pieces they don't explicitly teach.

I learned more taking compilers than the whole other 3.5 years of CS classes I took. It was by far the most fun/hard/useful college class I took. Amazingly, it was optional. So if I had one piece of advice for CS freshmen, it would be: take the compilers course!
Great article and well worth the read.

It's amazing what someone with enough dedication can accomplish, in spite of a lack of formal education. I found all the ways he reverse engineered the design out of old photos of a closed box, and other seemingly useless artifacts, fascinating.
Click on the:
"Download presentation in PDF format" link on the landing page (http://www.demarcken.org/carl/papers/ITA-software-travel-com...)
From what I can tell you spend 6 months with him, don't get paid, primarily work on his projects, learn buzzwords and "get" to work on your own personal projects in your spare time. Am I missing something?
Buffett was famous for criticizing biz types that used private jets until just before he acquired said company and started using one himself.
OTOH, if the last mile is congested then router prioritization would really benefit Google, but with edge caching their packets still have to fight it out with all the others.
there are lots of vague statements here. Would have like to know what their "rock and a hard place" looked like? what the primary challenges where? and what they've learned for next time? never easy to talk about failures but hugely valuable for the founder and this community.
Akamai and Highwinds have been doing the same thing for quite some time.

Edit: Oops wmf noted the same thing below.
There are books that nobody reads because they don't contain good ideas, and there are books that nobody reads because they're too dense. The second category contains some of the most valuable books out there.

I'd put the gang of four design patterns book into the second category. Often, a book or journal article is there to be cited as a breakthrough work on a subject, but very few people read it - instead, they read the thousands of other, more easily accessible books and articles on the subject.

This is why "Head First Design Patterns" is in the "books I've read list", and "GOF" is in the books nobody reads list. GOF is on my shelf, and I've browsed through it, but I go to other sources to understand and implement design patterns.
PHP definitely has its flaws and lack of conventions but for me that is what makes it beautiful. It's a language which has allowed me to grow as a developer over the years. If I look back at how I structured and wrote my code when I first started it's nothing close to how I code now. Since PHP allows so many different variations I didnt have to conform to one style but instead developed my own. If I would have chosen a different language to start with I am quite sure I would have given up on programming quickly. PHP has allowed me to learn from my own mistakes and create my own unique way of solving problems.

Besides how I feel about it; it's been great for all the projects I've worked on and now for the first time I'm using a framework (Codeigniter) for my startup and it's proving to be even more solid and progressing my style even more.

I believe PHP code is as good as its developer. Like mentioned in the article; you can paint a mess or a masterwork, all the colours and brushes are there.
My Netbook Took Me Back To Windows
Mother Nature takes out the Northeast