skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
good story lallysingh. I've been amazed at how many leaders in their fields are willing to give their time and input, especially if you respect their time.

Two quick stories:

1. Once emailed a prominent venture capitalist/technologist a question. It was maybe 15 words long. He responded in 5 minutes with a one word answer that truly answered my question and helped tremendously.

2. Another time I was taking a data mining class while working and I asked my professor a question. It was regarding a situation at work and a solution that I proposed. After not hearing back from my first email, I sent him a follow up email asking if he had received it. He finally replied and said that if I wanted the answer, I would have to hire him at $250/hr, his going rate. Sure, I can understand his stance in that just b/c I paying for his class and instruction does not mean that I can get free consulting. But, why couldn’t he tell me that with a reply to the first email? Why couldn’t he just tell me if my proposed solution was in the ball park or not? Here’s the zinger, I wrote the same email to the author of the book we were using in this class. He responds in 24 hours with sincere and honest feedback regarding my proposal as well as a PDF of 4 pages of the upcoming edition that covered this topic. My respect for the author sky rocketed (and now I cannot recommend his services and books fast enough). Not so much for the professor.
There's also BitC: http://www.bitc-lang.org/

Quote from their website: BitC is a new systems programming language. It seeks to combine the flexibility, safety, and richness of Standard ML or Haskell with the low-level expressiveness of C.
Dickens wrote 'A Christmas Carol' in six weeks while reducing his publisher to his printer
Yeah, I did't get it either so I asked Biz: http://twitter.com/gsiener/status/1058765109
Do it again.

Once is luck. Twice is skill.
Why isn't this post appearing at the top of his blogmaverick homepage?
Amarok 2.0 released
I doubt that's true. Pulling a fire alarm like that is illegal. Committing a crime in order to insult 100s of people, while those same people witness the crime, is not the best idea.
I dont understand, why does -5 to -15 destroy new hampshire infrastructure?? It's bloody -35 in calgary right now. (and around -5 on the northwest coast) I wonder why it's so cold this winter.
> Seriously, nobody needs a fucking web-based photoshop. What for? Collaborative red eye removal?

Maybe so that their images are available from whatever computer they happen to be sitting at. That's what I use Google Docs for.
I'm really impressed with Seadragon on the iPhone. It's quite slick and feels a bit like the right kind of platform for Seadragon.
I have to ask: Why was this resubmitted? Didn't like the original submitter's choice of title?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=398205
You will beat the "average" value of the market.

EX: While buying 100$ in stock at 10$/share and 100$ in stock at 20$/share means the average price was 15$ you have 15 shares for 200$ which is 13.33$ / share.
My history of mobile devices from 1998 - today
An iPhone nano at Macworld? No
3. Before the designers grafted in objects, PHP was definitively not Java. It had one data structure, the array(). (I won't go so far as to call it a simple data structure, because its semantics are kind of nutty, but it's a lot simpler than the Java class system.) You can go very far in PHP without having to know what a class is.

Now that every schooled developer has been exposed to Java ad nauseum we're all blind to the fact that OO is not at all intuitive. You've got to keep a bunch of abstract hierarchies in your head simultaneously. (Classes can inherit from other classes; objects are instances of classes; objects can contain other objects.) You've got to learn a bunch of odd semantics. (Constructors look like functions but are called by the new operator. Destructors never get explicitly called at all. There's static members and public members and private members.) Then you've got to know how to use objects properly or you'll just make a mess; that involves learning a moderate amount of OO theory or reading one of those doorstopper-sized patterns books. As every DailyWTF reader knows, even a lot of ostensibly-trained professional developers do not actually understand this. It's a lot to ask of a person who just wants to learn how to rearrange the widgets on their Wordpress blog.

There are, of course, a few other languages that don't impose OO on people at time zero, so this is hardly a unique feature of PHP. But it is a feature. Or it was, anyway... PHP now has a tacked-on object system that is vaguely reminiscent of Java.
brilliant. reminds me of the missive: if you are the type of person who would stop working once you obtained a fortune, then you are never going to get a fortune...
Yes. I intentionally resubmitted it with a different title, not to karma whore, but as I thought that the other title didn't do any justice. The other submitter was most likely just using the Reddit title.
It wasn't the temperature, it was the combination of 4 inches of rain on Friday + just-below-freezing temperatures and wind. That combination caused crap-loads of ice to form on trees, wires, and even telephone poles (some poles fell over from the weight of the ice). There were seemingly healthy 18" trees that just fell over from the weight of all the ice, blocking roads and pulling down power lines with them.

My parents live in NH, at the end of a dead-end dirt road and they're probably going to be without power until Wednesday. I spent most of the weekend trying to keep their generator working for them (my hands still smell of gas). All the Home Depot's in the area are price gouging, selling the generators as they come off the truck for $200 more than they're normally priced (and only allowing one per-customer). I even heard that people were driving truck-loads of generators up from further South and selling them off the back of their trucks.

(I attempted to write something creative about all this on my blog if you're bored at work: http://tinyurl.com/5uyu6n)
Two TwitterBots Are Better Than One
Ask YC: PHP Coding Standards?
Do you guys follow any coding standards with PHP? I'm pushing my office to adopt some more than just the basic understood baseline of variables at the top of functions, etc.

PEAR? Or some other set?

Thanks guys!
You can generally pick which gen ed class you want - it just needs to cover a certain topic ("Science with a Lab" for example). Which actually means anything from Physics or Chem to Astronomy or Intro to Computational Sciences.

Gen Ed doesn't mean there's one set class that people have to take. It's just a general area requirement that's needed.
That statement works equally well in its negation :)
You separate testers from coders because many bugs relate to the developer misunderstanding the goal. I have no problem with developers suggesting additional tests or writing their own test scrips, but you need someone else to look things over and say "that works".

PS: You can also have developers testing other developers code, but IMO that's just semantics.
The case of the disappearing iTunes ringtones
I had this same realization over the summer when I spent some time learning about interpreted languages, VMs and the like. Once I realized what a compiler does, I couldn't believe how simple the basic idea is. Obviously the devil is in the details, but its surprising nonetheless how simple a compiler can be.
In fact, when I went hunting for SC, not knowing the name, I first found BitC -- which I agree sounds quite interesting, but seems very heavyweight. I had heard the description "It's just C, written in S-expressions.", and BitC is decidedly not that.
Shouldn't a good business analyst be able to do this? Given a business with no information system, shouldn't policy be consistent anyway?
Am I the only one who gets the feeling that an "Alternative colostomy" would be more pleasant than an "Alternative MBA program"?
I imagine it's supposed to be an introduction to NSPrefPaneUtils; just showing how much stuff NSPrefPaneUtils really covers. It's basically a list of three random .prefPanes that can possibly exist and be used on a Mac and how they get used. Doesn't quite fit in with the article title though, so I can understand the confusion.
Isn't relevance defined by context?

If he was doing an image search he wanted images, not text.

What about Ads for products or Stock photography or Celeb sites with more photos?
BitC's syntax probably isn't going to remain s-exp based. They used it originally because they were familiar with it and didn't want to worry about syntax while defining the core language.
here's what i did: I spent half an hour downloading and playing around with about 20 themes only to return to the theme I was using before I started... But I guess now I appreciate it more

Does anyone know any theme that uses the colors from gnome-terminal's Tango colorscheme? (I already found the tango colorscheme for vim - it isn't the same)
That IBM article was really informative; thanks for the recommendation! I'm going to have to run without a unit testing framework, as (to my knowledge) the platform I'm using doesn't support it. Doesn't seem like one is required, though. I'll pick up a unit testing book and start reading.
Knowing when to quit is also a skill. Especially applicable to professional sports.
Jason Calacanis: Why we built Mahalo Answers
The CPI and GDP deflator already dramatically understate inflation. You think they won't do whatever the hell they want with the index when they have little choice financially?
My evolution is like this:

Pascal (object oriented) -> C++ -> C# - > PHP

Despite a reasonably strong background in developoing software, I've found it way too easy to build crappy code in PHP. But, I think it's as much me as it is PHP.

Perhaps PHP brings out the evil that is lurking inside of us as programmers?
we used the Turk service to basically do OCR on about 3k images - http://shout.setfive.com/2008/11/20/artificial-artificial-in...
Maybe I'd found a zoo.
40 Ways to deliver killer blog content in 2009
1. I'll spend time learning well. My current disjointed knowledge frustrates me. [math, physics and computer science]

2. I'll work on creating beautiful, useful, innovative products.

3. Backpacking, flying paper planes, watching cartoons, video games, reading fiction by the fireplace, writing, etc

4. I'll fund cool projects using the YC model.

[I do these things now on a smaller scale. If I'm rich, I'll be able to do much more of these, which would be awesome.]
invest your money in social causes, if possible your time into it as well. OR spend more time on working what you did to be rich on the first place, so you can spend even more on social causes BUT do take out time to relax and enjoy with loved ones as well.
I agree, coding in PHP is far less enjoyable now that the language is, in my opinion, polluted with Java-esque object orientation. Most new code that I come across nowadays feels horribly overengineered. Objects are a good thing when used sparingly, but PHP never needed design patterns to be viable. Drupal is a perfect example of robust, modular software that doesn't need verbose object syntax.
So what if it was luck? I'm not trying to prove anything. I just want a lot more money so I can do what I please with my time.

Sure, that'd probably mean spending most of my time doing another startup, but not to prove it wasn't luck the first time.
Different jobs might require different mindset.

Also, Google is desperately trying to hire away as many testers as they can - many testers I know at Microsoft were bombarded with Google's invitations for interview.
Time to change the world.
PHP's main flaw from my point of view is its ugliness. It's almost impossible to distinguish bad code from good code. All of it looks equally bad (well, some of it looks even worse).

The downside of that is that you don't get the automatic "bad feeling" when you put in a hack. It just doesn't stand out like a sore thumb (like it would in Ruby), so it's very easy to ignore the hack. Since PHP is an extremely hack-friendly language, where it is very easy to take damaging shortcuts, and it lacks the feedback mechanism to make you aware of when you've taken a bad shortcut, every large PHP project seems to eventually end up the same: a monstrous pile of hacks, one uglier than the other.

I don't have that problem with Ruby at all, for the record. Ruby is very hack-friendly too (even more so than PHP), but because of its natural elegance, whenever you do something plain bad it is immediately visible and remains so until you clean after yourself.

I could talk about all the cruft in the global namespace, the lack of consistency in the API, the appalling OO implementation, the lack of a super-successful framework like Rails... but ultimately, what bothers me is the result of all those problems: ugly code that keeps getting uglier.

Why did ugly code bother me with my first start-up? Because it is hard to care for ugly code. Once your beautiful start-up's code turns into a pile of spaghetti, you start to wish you were doing something else. And that's a pretty bad place to be when you are the sole maintainer of your start-up's code. It won't stop you from ploughing on - but it will slow you down a lot, and you don't need that when you're a start-up.
I agree, plus he gained a skill of knowing how to write iPhone apps + Objective C. It made him more marketable for future jobs/offers. (I am assuming he did in evenings and weekends)
Jakob Nielsen: Interaction Elasticity
So apparently by the very act of applying to his program, that fact alone makes me amazing. Not even close to buying it.

I think today I learned a lot more about this character than reading all his books.

I think anyone rejected from his program really dodged a bullet. Can you imagine a daily dose of this guy up close?
As a personal achievement or as a product?
I don't follow, can you rephrase the question?
Yes, but not to the level of detail required to make software.
That is a simple function of storage. There is no need to push tons of code around only to share a freaking document. Microsoft could have built a "cloud collaboration" tool into MS Word if they wanted to. In fact they have, but AFAIK it works only on Intranets and only if you purchase their proprietary server-side BS
Define work?

Hopefully I'll get to the point where I can live comfortably off the wealth generated by work I've already completed. If I do, at that point, I won't stop using the computer. I won't stop writing software. I will stop setting the alarm clock though, and I'll stop saying "I have to work" to my wife when I'd rather be spending time with her, and I'll stop working with hard deadlines.

I won't sit on a beach all day, but a few hours a day would be very nice!
Improve the world: start a charitable foundation; support amazing candidates for public office; invest in social services for developing nations.

Improve yourself: go back to school and get a degree in history, or music, or art; travel to another continent and live somewhere new long enough to learn the language; write a book, and read a lot of other peoples'.

Improve others: get your teaching certificate (usually <1 year of school) and teach math to middle-school students; tutor kids at a local library or after-school program in computers; adopt.
Wouldn't it be a better idea to make developers understand the goal better, then?

It sounds backward to add another person to a team because the other people on it don't completely understand what they're doing?
• Move to the SF area
• Attend loads of cool conferences
• Splash out on some new gear — a new Mac for starters
• Be able to spend a lot more time on personal projects
• Start a new startup; its not work if you enjoy doing it. ;)
It would be free and open source -- whether that counts as a product depends on your perspective, I guess.
I didn't directly say you should save all of your money, I said you shouldn't spend all of your excess money. You should be saving for an emergency fund, retirement, kids college, things you want to buy in cash rather than putting everything on credit. American are horrible at this, they live right at the edge of, or above their means rather than below it as they should.
"Smart Crash Reports" Tool for Mac OS X
In short: "Please stop recommending books to others that you haven't read yourself."

I've really wondered how many people have actually read TAOCP, in particular. I haven't. I'm still trying to finish SICP (which is fantastic, IMHO, as is CTM), among others. It's too easy to just start reading yet another book, but the real value comes when you get past the first chapter or two - that's usually just rehashed intro material, anyway.

For discussion's sake, what are some programming books people consider worth reading that aren't Big Highly-Regarded Tomes?

I'm really fond of _The Little MLer_ (for understanding types), _Thinking Forth_ (a lot of good ideas about refactoring and general program design), and _Programming in Lua_ (as concise and well-written as K&R, lucidly covers material like coroutines and prototype-based OO). Any of them could also be mostly read in a weekend. Also, _Peopleware_, though it's more about the industry, project management, working in teams, etc.
You could always try this greasemonkey script which always substitutes your own Amazon affiliate id so you can sponsor yourself.

http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/3468
Not to worry, with all the global warming this should blow over any minute now.
Even if we accept that it is a worthy goal to eliminate the need for programmers, I don’t think it’s possible. That’s because programmers have skills and abilities other than just their knowledge of programming languages.

Then shouldn't the goal be to create an environment with those skills and abilities built-in instead of worrying about what to eliminate?
I've found this tool to be very useful. It allows Mac application developers to automatically receive anonymous crash reports from any users who have also installed this extension. It has a nice way of "plugging in" to the default Apple UI for crashes, which makes it extremely easy for users to see what information is sent (and to whom).
Examine my life with more attention.

(see http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/24198.html )
Goof off for a while. Then do it again. Because goofing off is only fun for a while.
Let's make something clear - if the thought of being laid off is frightening you have already lost.

You lost control of your destiny and the bosses can boss you around. The right way to live is to tighten the belt and have enough surplus to hold you over for a reasonable period of time. Of course hardly anyone does it, but following the crowd is not wise in this regard.
Live between Mexico, LA and NYC. Spend my days dallying.

Share the wealth with my family.
After I took a compilers class (or an operating systems class for that matter) the thing that really stood out is how much stuff is dictated simply by convention or remains a "black art" where only a few people really understand how it works.

In any case, I'd venture to say writing a simple compiler should be pretty easy these days with tools like LLVM - http://llvm.org/ - and the slew of lexers/parsers available for different platforms.
DPkg indeed already supports multiple side by side versions, as does RPM. I'm not sure why you think they don't.

I'm also unsure why wanting an app to install its files to the same standard directories that other apps do, and not require separate updating tools, constitutes bigotry. Can you explain?
Philip Greenspun has some thoughts:

http://philip.greenspun.com/non-profit/

http://philip.greenspun.com/materialism/early-retirement/
News You Can Lose
To be rich means a lot of things. You can be named rich if you have either $10M or $10bn in the bank.

Let's say, realistically, that I have $10M.

First of all I'd cut all unnecessary costs, rent a smaller flat and spend a year thinking about my life, studying something just to clean my mind, collecting startup ideas. It is important not to freak out.

Then, I can either go back to the university or start another company. I think it depends on my thoughts during this gap year.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=79057 for reference.
Lawrence Lessig: The made-up dramas of the Wall Street Journal
Depending on HOW wealthy I am:

- Clean up all friends/family student loans and credit
- Build a new house, buy anything I want
- Start a college fund for my nephew
- Do it again
No more need of VC to do the things I want to do.
"One factor, other than talent, that distinguished The Flock and The Beatles was the characteristics of their respective Core Team members. The Beatles’ encompassed the traits found in successful teams of all kinds. In contrast, The Flock’s Core Team was weak, which resulted in their career taking on the trajectory of a bottle rocket."

Did the author learn all about the The Flock from watching VH1? This seems to be begging the question. They failed, and failure comes from weak core teams, so they must have been a weak core team.
Having worked with Seth on Squidoo, I can tell you that he is a pretty genuine guy. That is just his writing style.
Here is the coding standard I've written for my open source project (http://artisansystem.com):

http://docs.artisansystem.com/index.php/Coding_Standard

They can be a little verbose at first, but they make for better readability.
Requesting some advice from hackers
I work for a big multi national software company as a tech lead.I have about 7 years of IT Experience.I tried a couple of years ago to move to project management , mainly motivated by the power/prestige factor plus in a big company the technical work especially in services is so boring.But I found that option too boring - eternally dealing with incompetent programmers who could never stick to a deadline.Then I decided technical line was maybe better and took an onsite assignment in US as a tech lead for a web app.It is the same old technical work which is boring now but to add to it now I see a lot of my peers going ahead of me in the rat race who pursued project management.This has kind of taken the enthusiasm out of my work
Ideally I like to have everything - the power/presitge, love challenging technical work too.:-)
What would be the advice from people on HN?I am guessing some of you may have also gone through this phase
Some iPhone apps should not be written in Cocoa
One thing about a lot of Unit Test frameworks, is that there's hardly anything to them! SUnit, which is literally the granddaddy of a lot of the unit test frameworks basically consists of:

- two exception handlers
- a superclass that you can subclass to have a place to
park your test code
- a reflective thingy that looks on those test classes
for methods that start with "test" and executes them.

The above was probably less than 40 lines of code. If you're competent, you should be able to roll your own.
and a lot of existing code/libraries/applications (of varying quality) that you can use

My question was what qualities PHP has on its own, as a language, which would merit keeping it around if the language were to be cleaned up and break compatibility with that existing code.

easy to deploy

I also wouldn't say ease of deployment in PHP is in any way unique or easier than deploying for instance perl or python. Heck, even super enterprisey Asp.net can do with the same simple deployment procedure as PHP has.
Nah. One chick, one duck.
PowerShell ABC's - B is for begin
Admirable goals...none of which require we be rich...and many with which riches will interfere.
You can do all of this without being rich super rich.
Thanks! I'll take a look at it. Any specific things you want to highlight as a strength for the system?
Yes. This is way I put the 'technically' in there.
Apple releases Mac OS X 10.5.6 Update with lots of bug fixes