skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
First, I saw that you said that you have read Alan Kay, but I'm speaking to the general discussion audience. And, ok, you know what you're talking about; I'm used to reading people who think that all OO systems necessarily suffer from the same problems as e.g. C++'s, and, not knowing
your programming history, had few impressions to the contrary based strictly on what you said. Nothing personal. Be civil, have your coffee.

> What matters is how it works on complex problems.

Agreed. I don't believe pure-OO (or pure-FP, pure-declarative, etc.) is an ideal approach for anything. OOP is a technique that works well for some problems, and is best understood so you can use it when it is a good fit.

I think that the best way to learn OO is via studying Smalltalk. I think the best way to learn FP is via either Haskell or ML, etc. I do real work in OCaml, Lisp, and Python (though I am coming to prefer Lua over Python), but use a multi-paradigm approach based on what I've learned in other languages.
How the Srizbi botnet escaped destruction to spam again
Foreigners finding creative ways to make a living in Tokyo
Because most people can recognize when something looks good, but they cannot actually create something that looks good.
Once you feel like you can do other things, any other things, without feeling that you're taking a risk in doing what you feel like.
My friends and I have been looking into textiles lately to make our own designs for simple striped shirts. From what I've gathered, you need to first find a place that will make your fabric design, and then send the fabric to a place along with a pattern to have it turned into a shirt or whatever. I imagine the hardest part of clothing design is in finding cheap, quality suppliers and keeping a reliable relationship with them.
This definitely shows the potential of artificial intelligence to run real life simulations. Perhaps current gaming companies will eventually make large portions of their income through these sort of tailor made simulations.
interesting. But id have thought such tools would have already been used by managers and teams to evaluate several combinations. The only reason I can think of for depending on these games to give you an advantage is that the tools (if any) dont have a lot of these "combination" features. Or is this just more marketing?
Dear Amazon, here’s how to sell even more Kindles
KPSS Tercihleri
Pupils of today struggle with science questions of the 60s
It would be cool to learn more about how you budget it, assuming you pay for some kind of housing. My rent is more than $15k/year.
I'd say that is pretty accurate. We need a new version of "wow, he's a millionaire".
It's even funnier that it's set to rap music. Hah.
A picture of a baby and... "an entrepreneur can only be successful if his partner supports his plans"?

I hate to be the PC nazi, but this strikes me a bit crude...
Awesome, you are in a good place if you love your work. And because you love it, it'll continue to pay dividends for you.
Even in the case of the fast food worker, PG gets it wrong. When it gets slow in a restaurant, you end up cleaning the grease traps or other unpleasant jobs. I'd take the adrenaline rush of juggling a dozen orders on the grill any time.
you are right.. but who said anything about not doing anything?? id travel, spend more time with my family (actually may be have a family first :D), focus a lot more time on my violin...
Most of existing on-demand stores for books, shoes etc. offer you only few choices. You can't really decide every detail of the product. The process of designing in a restriction free system can't be done by checking boxes and insering measurements. It has to be either a dialog between the designer and the producer or a detailed sewing pattern, together with drawings etc.

I think this idea is only limited scaleable - I presume it is not much cheaper to produce one unique item or 1000.

On the other hand, I could see something like threadless emerge for designs in general: They'd partner with "real" designers and produce small series of each piece and sell it until it's gone. Something in between etsy and threadless.
I've waited a year to launch something. Then I quit.
I haven't. How exactly does that book approach the issue?
"Upper middle class" then. The thing is that I know many families with a leased 100k car who aren't "rich"...
Aside from the obvious stupidity of the 'established players', i have to say, that is one hell of a bootstraping technique.
Are the EA games really that realistic?

Weird example of life imitating art, I guess.
In this case, you'd also have to pay relocation/visa fees...
Seeking feedback: embed a how-to guide on your blog or site
Hi folks - we're currently working on a "how-to guide" widget for blogs and websites. It lets evangelists/experts package their advice into an easy-to-view, actionable list. Users can then choose to track the completion of each task in our web app.

The link provides an initial example of what it would look like in action. Would love to hear what everyone thinks of this idea.
That's my point. You don't need to have a separate special construct for objects, or any kind of support for them, when you have first-class functions.

As for state information, you could just put a 'let' inside there with your variables, and call mutators on them from inside the "object"'s functions.

Hmm, I think all these Scheme-centric classes I've taken have warped my mind. I should seek therapy.
i thought this was mainly an issue of demand and economies of scale...

out of ignorance, how high is the demand for custom clothing?? and i have a feeling marketing efforts would be directed at keeping this demand low so that manufacturers can take advantage of their economies of scale to mass produce clothing..
Method Invocation Formatting Styles in Objective-C
you have a good point. It's hard to find a co-lo that doesn't have excessive fees for 'not knowing exactly what you will need for the next two years' - I myself have gotten in trouble with bandwidth contracts.

My point is just that at $700 for 4 cores/15G, you are better off paying for a server if you need at least two and stay more than two months. (I pay under $2500 for 8 cores/32G ram) Even if you buy a dell and have to pay for the more expensive 4GB modules ('cause all the dells I know of only have 8 ram slots) and pay for the 'sales guy tax' I imagine you aren't more than twice that, unless you get silly on the CPUs, so even then you are talking only 4 months to make your investment back.

You do need to be careful about co-lo contracts, though, they are professionals (by which I mean they are really good at screwing you.) so watch out, and always assume the worst of any document you sign.

There are places that let you go month-to-month, especially on the low end. He.net usually lets you get full racks on a month to month basis, with a reasonable ($500) setup fee... I know lots of smaller providers that give you month-to-month on a per-U basis. (see rippleweb.net - I host my backup servers there. Something like $80 per U/month, but that includes 1TB data transfer, and they let you host one of the aforementioned 8 core monsters without charging extra, and they let you go month to month.)
Rails is five years old and based on proven patterns that are much older. I can't believe posts like this still get written.
BMW Using Microsoft Surface for Product Navigator
I think you could get something almost as good by convincing Google to take traffic data into account when finding the least-cost route between two points. I know that in Chicago the freeways have speed sensors spaced pretty closely together, so it is possible to look at that data and immediately know how long you are going to spend on the freeway. If you use that data to determine your route, then you should avoid traffic jams.

Obviously conditions can change pretty quickly, but most of the time they don't. So this could be a good 90% solution without requiring people to broadcast their location to you.
For me this is all about "Mental Poisons".

Mental Poisons are ideas that harm people, life and the universe. They are remarkably common.

Paul expresses this one very well. There's a lot more out there too.

Fossilised heirarchies and thought-free-rule-driven organisations are great for the student of poisons.
SimplyHappyNews.com Just what it says on the URI
Just a quick offbeat submission that I thought readers may appreciate in their RSS feed. Enough with all the doom and gloom :)
what about privacy? will the location data that is uploaded by the iPhone be stored on the server side? Can guarantees on privacy be provided? Clearly the govt can get access to this info with warrants (or may be even without depending on where you are)...
and watch southpark
oh yeah. we had a terrible time with their support. I use softlayer (and ec2 for not so critical sites or with multiple servers). works for me.
Businesshackers? who are they?? what the??
The Biggest Web Site Usability Mistakes You Can Make
The worst mistake you will make as a web site owner is to ask someone to “look” at your web site. It’s like the dreaded, “Do I look fat?” question.
I've always wanted a service where I could submit my measurements and preferences and just have a whole wardrobe generated for me. In particular, I hate buying long sleeve shirts because if the sleeves are the right length, then the torso isn't! Medium? Large? What ever happened to centimeters?

I think if you took a Netflix sort of approach, you could actually have a wide selection of sizes and styles. Manufacturing a wide variety is expensive, but those processes are already accustom to changing (with the style trends). The real issue is retail space.
I'll definitely write about this later on the TicketStumbler new stuff blog.

Short answer: we live in a spacious dumpy place a 15 min walk away from Davis Sq (Boston area), have shitty health insurance, rarely use a car, keep the temperature low (read: cold) in the winter, don't go out to eat much and cook our own healthy food from the grocery/bakery. Despite all this, we still live like relative kings.

It's sort of cheating though because in terms of clothes & tech I came to Boston with everything I need so I spend literally no money on them now.
25 tips to selling in a recession
What's the best How-To site?
Now it’s time to vote for your favorite How-To site in the first of two voting rounds. You can vote for one company per day until midnight on November 30th (Today!).
Using the Web to Save on Holiday Gifts
What's on your wish list for Cyber Tuesday? A new compiler?
yet another general usability site... i find these are inspirational but when it comes to applying it to your product its a lot more work than you realise... But atleast knowing about it is the first step.
There's an assumption here that you use EC2 even though you don't trust Amazon. What is the cost of this assumption?

It would be interesting to separate these rules into universal ones and EC2 ones. I suspect that in many cases, following all these rules would add enough cost to offset any savings of using EC2.
> Aside from the obvious stupidity of the 'established players'

Surely it's a short-term solution at best? As soon as one bot network is killed like this then another will emerge with more complex (and costly to patch) security measures - ?

Wouldn't it be easier to attack it at the DNS management level itself? Model: have a provision for creating a kill list for domain names that extends from ICANN down to the registrars. Would allow ICANN to blacklist certain names.
Reproducible experiments & falsifiable theories lead to overwhelming support. Supposedly, imperfectly and in the long term.

I'm not saying take it at face value. I am saying that in the absence of a personal ability to test & verify & delve into the research, your best bet is a bit of meta research.
all the points there seemed obvious but the first one was a bit dodgy - "select presentations based on speaker, not topic". Even for networking purposes, if you were not interested in the topic (or atleast if it was not your highest priority), how would the speaker be of benefit to you? And wouldnt this imply a fake interest in the topic just to approach the speaker? And wouldnt this fake interest show sooner than later?
Doesn't matter. People always think that their own designs are good.
Project Euh is an old thing, but I still love some of its things. It's quite clever, and most of the Internet isn't built to care about clever.
Magic/Replace - Data Cleanup for Everyone from Dabble DB
Retrieving delicious tags and bookmarks for a given url
It's two things: population density and transience. If you live where there are maybe 20 people per acre and most people are born somewhere different (cough Miami, Atlanta, Phoenix cough) it can be very lonely because there are few institutions that gather people together, and also there are fewer opportunities to bump into your neighbors.

In low-density, low-transient places like rural towns the biggest problem isn't loneliness -- it's how to get people out of your hair.

If you live where everyone is from everywhere but they are packed so tightly you have to get along, it's much easier to make friends. People also tend to spend more time outside their homes because they are so small.
Even harder than The Hardest Logic Puzzle Ever
Really, where is the real innovation? Sure they have "big" products like .NET (if you can call that innovative), IE, Silverlight. But apart from their core OS and Office products what other products have they come up with that werent in face of competition? .NET from the whole Java kerfuffle. Silverlight in competition to Flash. Where is the originality?

i suppose what MS could want online is "A computer on every desk and in every home, running MS software and internet explorer eternally pointing to msn.com"!
mate can we please not have articles which require me to register into a site. Sure it is free but it is a pain. Sorry about the whinging mate. Having said that I guess I need to "class up" eventually!
Whatever level the nevessary action needed to be performed on, it needed the big boys (and girls) to get involved. And the chance has been lost for this round it seems.

Thinking about your solution a bit more though, and it does sound good at first, what happens when the black list starts approaching a material percentage of the total of usable domain names? are we eventually going to blaclist the entire domain-space? This is just another reason why DNS is very, very broken.
It would take a few weeks to compile a list like this, but a few things that would definitely be up there:

1) The idea behind the book All Marketers Are Liars

2) His idea that ideas that inspire people to talk about them are the ideas that spread. This idea is spread out across three books (Purple Cow, Free Prize Inside, and The Big Moo).

3) His collection of ideas about what is and isn't worth measuring. C.f. his blog post on Clean Firetrucks, his blog post on holding the sides of the treadmill, etc.
OsCommerce: A Lesson in Unmaintainable Code?
man took me a few reads (like 20) to understand that heading. even then I was not quite sure what it meant till I went through the whole article.

Firstly, it was not "completely" proven that Google had used undocumented/secret apis.

Secondly, as noble as this article makes Google look, could there simply not be a possibility that Apple would make an exception with this rule with someone as big and "beneficial" as Google (who did provide one of the earlier maps apps for the iPhone). Some call it colluding. "so what?", retorts the mighty Jobs, ruler of the Appledom.
Top 100 Blogs for Developers
Billionaire is the new millionaire.
I don't think it's a very good article, but I agree with its premise. Gladwell is not scientifically rigid. His books are interesting and make me think, but I would not take any statistic he gave me as anything other than an interesting fiction. He's too selective about data.
Really interesting stuff!

I dunno if the (fully) loaded margins are really 15-40%... The client is essentially heaping all of the risk on you. A good sales guy deserves a base salary, expenses paid for, and a "draw" (essentially, a non-refundable advance on future commissions). Your business was essentially a salesguy who was ONLY getting paid commission.

It's no surprise that you were able to sell a service like this. If you keep on it, I'd make darn sure that any client you take shares some minimal risk (i.e. your costs are covered if they bail, you get profit if they stay).

Seems like plenty of lead gen efforts (from yellow pages, to adwords, to salesguys) share the risk with both sides.
yup. I was just about to suggest etsy.
i particularly recommend <a href="http://www.etsy.com/shop.php?user_id=5400084">stormcloudbringrainbows</a>. i know the guy, and he meets with people regularly to take measurements. he'll work with you on the design if you're interested, but as far as i know not many people actually are other than vague ideas.

i started sewing my own clothing a year or two ago. i recently got past patching and hacking on recycled clothing, and i'm definitely still learning. it's a great way to express oneself, but you have to take the long view. at first it's crap.

i can see why someone would want an intimate process with a real designer and sewer to make quality clothes sooner. i applaud that instinct. consumerism is taking people's souls and craftmanship.
TV is a "two bird stone" in that regard. Videogames as well.
the linux company it should be. if the IBM field office you're dealing with isn't even waving the carrot of "but you'll be able to work on linux/python later" in front of you, don't bother.
http://planet.intertwingly.net/ is a solid aggregation of various tech blogs, you can milk the blogroll there for some good links.
A lot of these rules apply to more than just Amazon's cloud. If you're deploying to any one of the major hosting providers out there, it's critical to understand where you should be encrypting network traffic, etc. This is especially true as most of the affordable service providers don't provide any real DMZ-type support for the machines you rent.
This can be a a slippery slope: you put the 6K back on and you borrow more than 6K again. For folks who are in debt it's a safer habit to switch to pay as you go.

As to taking out a new loan when he doesn't have a steady source of income and no assets to offer as collateral it can be difficult to be entirely candid on the application and still get the loan. In hindsight your creative writing may be construed as fraud.
24 ways: Easing The Path from Design to Development
I'm sorry, I can't believe that most iPhone users don't know it can access the Internet
To some extent, yes, this is short sighted. Languages are all much of a muchness. A decade ago, Perl was the flavour of the month. All the hot new sites used it. Today the same niche is filled by Ruby, and Perl is something of a pariah amongst scripting languages (though still my first choice for anything that needs prototyping.) Whatever flavour of the month you happen to like today will inevitably describe the same arc. That's just the nature of the business.

The good news is that all these skills are transferable. Becoming a better Java programmer automatically makes you a better Python programmer, and vice versa.

What isn't transferable is domain knowledge. If you want to make something of yourself in this industry, you need to specialise in something. Learn everything there is to know about something, be it networking, writing compilers/virtual machines, security or operating system design, etc. If you don't, you're essentially doomed to a career of moving bytes from a to b, applying some trivial transform to them on the way. Which, incidentally, describes neatly the vast majority of web development.
Yes, this is an old post but one thing that strikes me about the semantic web vs. brute force approach is that the semantic web approach is (assuming it works) much cheaper for startups, whereas the brute force practically dictates having tons of cash and an existing infrastructure.

Taken from this perspective, it's easy to see why the big players favor the brute force approach.
Thanks, the best one I could think of off hand was him advising giving something away free to lock in upsell merchandise...was it a book? It was posted here not too long ago. He seems to have some good ideas so I need to read some of his books.

[EDIT: found a link for All Marketers: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6909078385965257294 ]
Our situations and goals may be totally different; nonehtless, here is another approach:

1. find recycled clothes at dollar-a-pound thrift-esque stores or simply ask your friends for their old goods.

2. reverse engineer existing clothes into patterns by de-stiching them, or make your own patterns through trial and error.

essentially: you can learn to sew if you want, it just takes time to get good (like any skill). it's quite fun. the biggest expense is the initial sewing machine, though reuse and craigslist and community centers can solve that, too.

My advice is to take the long view and keep your expectations reasonable.

Start small: add pockets to pants, patch knee holes, add a hood to a jacket, add dinosaur plates to a hood.

Hack clothes together: sew together squares of fabric to make pant legs or a shirt. recycle a pants top that already fits your waste so you don't have to muck with zippers and crotches yet. you can use pants tops to make the tops of shirts with. my last project was weaving together two pairs of jeans that I'd cut into horizontal and vertical strips.

Finally, make clothes from (recycled) scratch. my husband made my wedding dress from recycled jeans--it's the best formal wear I've ever had. I'm still working up to this level of skill, and he's still working to get to the next level. He's making a long winter coat now.

If I turn these into instructables soon I'll post back. Good luck and have fun expressing yourself.
It may not be creative, but there is nigh-infinite demand in IT here for bilingual people. (And by bilingual, I don't necessarily mean drop-dead-fluent but I also do not mean "I was in the anime club in high school, does that count?")

Technically, what you do depends on what your company does. Its all the usual suspects: finance, manufacturing, logistics, LOTS of integrated software/hardware for appliances/cars in this neck of the woods, etc. If you've seen in done anywhere, we do it here, too.

Downside: The hours are long and, at least in my part of the country, the pay is low. (I'm paid Kansas wages to work in Chicago, essentially -- of course, excellent rail transportation means I can afford to live in the local equivalent of Normal Illinois and commute every day.)

It was a great incentive for me to start doing my own thing in the nights and weekends. That is one of the benefits of my day job: the bosses know about my company-on-the-side and they encourage it -- "It is cheaper than paying for your continuing education AND keeps you happy. Go for it! Oh, if you learn any tricks we can use, please present them." And I do.
You can use a dataflow graph to do distributed programming. Kamaelia is useful for more than just distributed programming, I agree, but I think programming concurrent/distributed systems is one of their main goals, as I understand it.
OMG you guys are idiots. I used the word "twat".

Go ahead, take away the rest of my karma. My e-penis is going to shrink! OMG!!!! I'm a girl by the way.

LOL. Again you guys are nancies. Total nancies. LOL.

I continue laughing:
http://crazyontap.com/topic.php?TopicId=42993

P.S. Are you idiots RELIGIOUS, too? LOL.
Simple MVC PHP Framework
This article details the specifics of a simple PHP based web application framework. There are many different architectural patterns that one can use to develop a web application framework, and for this framework I’ve chosen the Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern.
Guiding Your Business Through the Recession