skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I added lightweight path expressions to LOX (Lightweight Objects for XML). It's a modern XML object model, that's easy to inspect, with built in support for xpath-like expressions (globbing, really), without all the suckage.

http://code.google.com/p/lox/

Here's some example of path expressions.

http://code.google.com/p/lox/source/browse/trunk/test/lox/te...

Works fantastically. I use LOX for all my own XML work.

My ARON project doesn't support path expressions in the same way. ARON's grammar only supports drill down dot notation, like "parent.child.grandchild". And, thus far, I've only used ARON to loft Java object graphs, so I haven't needed an object model with path expressions.

I'd love to see a high level, statically typed language with built-in path expression. Groovy's GPath is closest to the mark that I've seen.

(I really need to polish these open source side projects. And publicize them.)
Yes, we have support for wildcard records. Example:

https://github.com/luadns/zones/blob/master/example.net.lua
I find it hard to imagine RIM dying entirely with the new move to use android applications. BBM is incredibly popular in large parts of Canada and it's hard to say what they'll look like if they finally get a halfway decent OS out. RIM will probably start manufacturing under android entirely if their next OS fails probably converting BBM and some of the nice features of that platform into applications with model restrictions (to all models made by blackberry) that come native on the phone. There are lots of business models under which they survive well. Yes, they're in a bad spot and their market share will erode for some time but I see them being able to become part of the many manufacturers on Android.
I think it depends on the framework.

A full-stack framework such as Rails or Django isn't going to help with learning because it 'magics' too much of the underlying structure of building a web app away. You end up using so many proprietary pieces, all of which "just work" (and don't worry how, just know that it does) together.

Conversely, micro-frameworks such as Sinatra and web.py (the structure of which inspired App Engine's webapp, and Friendfeed's Tornado) get rid of just enough of the underlying complexity of getting Ruby/Python to talk to a browser to, as is often said, let you feel as if you are writing a Python (or Ruby) web app, rather than a Django (or Rails) web app.

Perhaps the middle ground for your students is frameworks such as Flask and Pyramid, which start as a micro framework, but which offer the full-stack batteries included features as and when you need them.
In Which They Build an iTunes for Open Source Content...
EVE Online has been affectionately called "Spreadsheets in Spaaaace!"
Salman Khan takes over Kamalistan Studio
Salman Khan takes over Kamalistan Studio. Also Check out what else is under Ayush Agrawal's Blog
Does anyone know why the Go runtime is written in C? The FAQ says it is to get around bootstrapping, but that does not seem obvious, as the Go compiler (6g) is written in C, so why cant the runtime be written in Go and compiled with the rest of the Go library?

Also, is the incompatibility between Go and C just due to the segmented stacks in Go? What about function call conventions? Anything else?
Understanding Marketing Performance Across Multiple Channels
It would be more accurate to say that wealth was generated for the many, so that Carnegie and Rockefeller could be insanely rich. Meanwhile Google could be the company that ushers in the age of the electric car, making us all wealthier still. Taxing them isn't going to help that much.

Also, in a civilisation where the richest tend to own law-abiding corporations succeeding on the back of innovative products/services, it is frankly to be expected that the rich will get ever more exorbitantly richer. Only in a despotic regime do the elite have a hard limit on how rich they can really be (because there's only so much wealth you can suck from starving subjects).
Repair language learning with us. Verbling's hiring.
Students Endlessly E-Mail Professors for Help. New Service to Organize Answers
Best way to send updates to YC for S12?
We recently applied to YC S12. Since then, we have a few updates we would like to notify YC about. What is the most effective way to do this?
That really isn't fair to what this is doing. If a bayesian wanted to lower bound the distribution, they would be using exactly the same formula, but with an explicit prior. The typical bayesian solution to this of the dirichlet prior has a significantly different convergence rate, 1/n vs 1/sqrt(n) so the resulting ordering is substantially different as well, and I would argue worse for this application. The method of setting a pessimistic prior cares much less about the number of votes for a popular item than does the method of lower bounding the distribution.
A four paragraph website outlining the vision coupled with a simple way for customers to engage directly with the CEO of the company.

Notch understands "Minimum Viable Product"
Why digital-native media will (almost) always win
PostGIS 2.0.0 released
You're preaching to the choir, believe me (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3794092). And "eschew" is a perfectly good word. It's different from "avoid" and "shun", etc., and when it's the right word, it's just right.

"Obfuscation" is too, for that matter, but I don't want to ask for too much here :)
One thing that seems to be missed here is that text formats tend to be self documenting. That is, if I'm handed a blob of text vs a blob of binary, I am quite a bit more likely to be able to hack the text than the binary. This is usually couched in terms of being able to process the text form using standard tools, but it goes way, way beyond that. It matters most in the situation outlined above -- when third parties need to get at the format without having to rely on some provided tool.

Most protocols and file formats are not documented sufficiently. Encoding data in binary (unnecessarily) is unfriendly because there is a huge difference between "ACK" and 0x06 when you're a third party looking at the data with no reference. Sure, you can probably figure it out given enough time, trail and error. Or perhaps beg the developer for specs, but it's not particularly efficient. Most developers don't have time or the inclination to publish a public spec for all binary formats used in their product.

You can make illegible text formats, of course, but I'd argue that then you're simply making a binary format that's confined to the range of 7-bit ASCII. Similarly, when the goal is to obfuscate (e.g. algorithm IP), binary formats work well to dissuade casual investigations.
How to Solve the World Overpopulation Problem
I think it best not to make decisions solely based on monetary risk/reward. There are many free resources out there...agreed. However, I have developed my own tight community of junior developers, many who will go on to be intermediate and eventually senior level developers. I have an entire network of mentors who are already senior developers. I'm taking interviews for junior dev jobs. I just learned how to code 2 months ago. Good luck spending 300+ hours in front of a computer in 2 months AND building up a network this large. I don't know what monetary value to put on that...it will vary from person to person.

Devbootcamp doesn't make sense for everybody. It made sense for me. I would rather learn how to program with a pair or several pairs than sitting in my room learning from a book and the internet. I've tried that already. It's not for me.
DECK Monitoring (deckmonitoring.com) is looking for senior developers and a sys admin.

Skills & Requirements
---------------------
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* You have tackled tough problems and developed large, highly-available applications.
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* Strong SQL skills.
* Best practices are in your bones. You write unit tests, pair code, peer review and strive to create beautiful code.

Bonus points if you have experience wih:

* Rails, RSpec, Cucumber, Sinatra, Git, Lua, R, Redis, Resque, JavaScript, HTML5/CSS
* Math and Statistics
* Energy monitoring
* Scrum/agile methodologies

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* Conferences, books and other perks
* Choice of Linux or Mac, editor, etc
* Offices downtown Eugene and Portland

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Send a paragraph about yourself with relevant links to recent code and a plain-text or pdf resume to careers[at]deckmonitoring.com
He tweeted this picture while debugging the CPU a couple weeks ago:

http://i.imgur.com/DhmFp.png

Sounds like fun.
Funny. "This will probably get downvoted into oblivion" is my pet peeve. There's just something that irks me about a person who is putting up their opinion voluntarily seemingly knowing that it will not be reciprocated by others but provide a pretext hoping to fish guilt from others who may disagree. If you have an opinion stand behind it; take whatever berating you're about to receive in full confidence because what really matters if the community as a whole doesn't share the same outlook?
Icon fonts is a cool idea, but they are not "> images".

They don't save additional requests (if you use spritesheets), are not smaller (2 color gif vs. full vector font), and most importantly, and why no decent designer would ever use them in small sizes, is that they absolutely lack any sharpness! Look at the QR code icon on their demo. It's a mess.
One-Third of U.S. High School Students Now Own an iPhone
Whenever I see "This", I picture a caveman pointing and barking.
"we know that a higher rating is better."

Typically, you do not know that, especially if you are comparing across reviewers. Some will only score zero and 5 stars, other will have 10% two stars, 80% three stars, and 10% four stars, yet others will have 10% three stars, 80% four stars, and 10% five stars.

If you have sufficient data (rare), it may be possible to (somewhat) correct for that. IIRC, this was something that helped in winning the Netflix challenge.

For example, http://www.netflixprize.com/assets/GrandPrize2009_BPC_Pragma... models the assignment of stars as two parts:

- modeling the user's appreciation of the movie
- modeling how the user translates his appreciation to a star rating

"where we know that a higher rating is better but assume nothing beyond that"

Problem with that is that you throw away information with that assumption. You do know that 2 star scores are very unlikely to be about very good items.
> I know nothing about the implementation of early web browsers/gopher/etc, but I doubt there ever was anything on the web that used ASCII.

All headers, HTTP, email, or otherwise, are 99% or more ASCII. HTML markup is over 99% ASCII for most documents, especially the complex ones.

ASCII is the only text encoding you can guarantee everything on the Web (and the Internet in general, really) knows how to speak. Finally, guess what all valid UTF-8 codepoints in the range U+00 to U+7F inclusive are compatible with: ASCII.
info@ycombinator.com is the email address for this kind of thing. I probably wouldn't bug them unless the updates are substantial.
I have cousins that work at help desks in the Philippines, and their work schedules are designed to match US time zones. After work, they hang out at bars with happy hours designed for them - I believe around ten in the morning. They hang out, then go home to sleep for the rest of the day.

Globalisation at work.
I didn't want to associate my main account to the comment because it was candid, negative and I don't work with the CloudStack anymore.

I last looked at it in December and they might've worked every issue out by now. That said, you're welcome to investigate every single claim I made, as of then at least, each concern I listed was still present. Marketplace traction or acquisitions are not going to change the fact that what you're dealing with is 200K lines of code with 5-7% test coverage.
"We are going to emulate all computers and physics even when players aren't logged in."

I built a prototype trying to do something similar, inspired by a text-based RTS/MMO that kept running while you were asleep. For me this was an unrealistic goal, if the simulations are complex enough you can't operate at a price point users will pay for. Even if you can, because the game is now CPU bound, far less players fit on a single instance -- you now need incredibly clever partitioning and load distributing facilities to keep the world appearing seamless. Even AAA titles haven't solved that problem, a look at world PVP lag in EVE or WoW will tell you as much.
I hope this will be like EVE Online but actually fun.

When I played EVE, I always thought that a programmable ship would be fun. Although there is a risk that programmers will get an unfair advantage.

On the other hand it may get more people interested in programming.

I wonder if this will ship with an interpreter/compiler for any language or whether you will have to write ASM?

Surely won't be long before there is a LISP for it.

I can also imagine a lot of people getting pissed of because they keep getting killed accidentally by someone else's buggy software.
This isn't exactly idiomatic Perl and fails completely in environments that don't have cat (Windows).

For one-time uses there's not a problem. However, if you find yourself writing what amount to shell scripts in Perl, you might be better off just writing shell scripts.
I was a developer for the ill-fated Perpetual Entertainment's Star Trek Online MMO (which was later sold and successfully launched by Cryptic Studios).

Star Trek Online's #1 most common feature request from beta testers was "ship interiors." Players didn't want to play "WoW in Spaaaace" game. They wanted to play "The Sims meet Star Trek" and relive their favorite Star Trek TV episodes. That sounds like a pretty cool game (for a small, but dedicated niche), but Perpetual's game designers scoffed and (having worked at Blizzard) proceeded to create "WoW in Space."
Will he fight the conversion of ingame currency to real-world currency, or will he take the Second Life route? So exciting!
If I remember correctly, Scrolls is Mojang's next game, but Notch was uninvolved in its developement (aside from hiring everyone).
Prismatic Hopes to Create a New Category of Social News
I always believed "system programming" meant "programming operating system components or the whole operating system" and Wikipedia seems to agree:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_programming

Last time I looked, inside of the Go libraries which had to do some tricky things there was some C code, meaning that even Go authors weren't able to write everything in Go. So Go can't be a substitute for C, and as long as most of the system programming is done in C, no go for Go.
Some interesting insights here. There might well be a lot more the developer could do to target his audience better. The pricing is not well explained and the model doesn't seem to make a lot of sense to me. One would think it would be easier to go after recurring revenue, perhaps even arrange a deal with instapaper to sell subscriptions on a percentage of revenue model. It seems a lot less awkward than "buy this account from someone else with recurring payments" then pay an upfront flat fee for an application.
Thanks for the WAL pointer; it does sound like concurrency is better now. Benchmarking concurrency against MyISAM is a bit like benchmarking reliability against MongoDB though ;-)
Awesome, this whole issue has been a bugaboo for me a long time.

Make sure you create a embeddable widget that people can plaster on blog posts, articles, "maker" sites, Knol(lol, but I think something like this would have given that service more legs and actual buzz), etc. For tech people especially, if your widget lists their high price point, a widget could actually add further legitimacy to their expertise as they write. Win win.

One thing to keep in mind, some experts (depends entirely on their emotional relationship to money, brilliant people do this too) may tend to lower their level of engagement over time since there can be a reluctance to "increase price" when they start getting bored and feel your service is a burden at the income level provided, you should definitely have a mechanism to auto increment their list price as their involvement or acceptance rates decrease (or you can just add more experts, but ideally you do both, to organically implement tiered expertise).

As an example, Sean Hannity is an extremely busy guy (you used to be able to get him for 35k) and really doesn't like doing live one off events, his daily radio show is an insane time obligation, and he would rather be book touring, but you can still get him on the east coast for 100K and a private jet :-)
Now just have to wait for the llvm and gcc support :)
I look forward to new languages which only compile to this cpu.
On the other hand, image icons can't change color on the fly or be dynamically upscaled, both of which are requirements when you are building a framework that is meant to be themed by users.
Print view is best way to read it and save to evernote
I really hope that code is auto-generated. Because that coding style is ATROCIOUS.
http://hbr.org/2012/04/the-real-leadership-lessons-of-steve-...
Dropbox referrals are now twice as nice
As a recent daily user, prismatic is awesome.

The way they leverage twitter is pretty interesting, mixing in "endorsements" to articles from both people close to you, famous people, and random people, in a way that keeps it interesting.

There's also fairly heavy machine learning going on behind the scenes, in a way that is non intrusive. Congratulations to those guys.
Wow, thank you for posting about that. I'm really glad there are people doing really original work in the indie gaming world, it gives me hope that we haven't seen the last of the xcoms and fallouts (the original, scrappy versions of these, not the recent AAA incarnations)
This looks great, and it's evident from Notch's success with Minecraft that he really knows how to provide a great product and interact with his fans. Looking forward to trying it out.
Excuse me? Who are you to determine what is and isn't "idiomatic"? And that you would try this kind of thing about perl of all languages is just shocking. What's saddest is that it's the lack of this kind of absurdist pursuit of robustness and purity is one of the things that has always best defined the perl community.

Broadly, your argument seems to be that spawning processes in the external environment[1] (which, admittedly, is inherently nonportable) is a Bad Thing in perl, and that we shouldn't do it. When I rephrase it like that, does it sound as poo-flinging crazy to you as it does to me?

[1] Let's be honest: a working "cat" is pretty much the single most portable thing you can put between the backticks. If you won't allow this, what will you permit?
There seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding about what "beginner" means for Rails.

I've been a .NET developer for over 10 years. I'm a Rails "beginner". I'd say I'm comfortable with web technology, and yet Rails was an absolute nightmare for me to get started with.

If the Rails community wants people like me to stop doing what they were doing and use Rails instead, it MUST be easier to get started with.
I'm very happy to see this productized. You're probably going to make money hats (certainly for your customers, ideally for you, too).

n.b. A lot of savvy software companies hire, er, high-priced consultants to build this sort of thing out of duct tape and bailing wire, and/or handroll it in-house. If I can hypothetically give a suggestion, a) customer education on how to use it is a large part of the value add (see MailChimp's copious writing on how to use regular ol' email in pursuit of business objectives) and b) this spins straw into gold, charge appropriately.
yes if you "need" to vet people there are procedures (and quite expensive ones) to do that. However 99% of companies don't "need" to vet any employees.
Thank you for the explanation. I believe that is already available in some email marketing services, although they are part of bigger systems, probably too bloated and pricey for a start-up environment or a specific project. Something more straightforward is certainly welcome.
That is why we're trying to figure out ways to test key functions that does not require integration. We are currently focusing on user experience and logic workflow.
“It takes a lot of hard work,” he said, “to make something simple, to truly understand the underlying challenges and come up with elegant solutions."

To me this is probably the most important lesson in the document (together with the implication that this is one of the places where the hard work is well worth doing).

There are many good ones, and the author is right that many who right about Jobs portray many wrong lessons to focused on personality.
How Location-Based Apps Can Stave Off the ‘Creepy Factor’
> In order to read it, you need to pipe it through a decoder (gunzip) - why not use a sensible binary protocol, and pipe it through the decoder for that?

I don't have your decoder. I have gunzip.

gunzip is not threatened by a patent. gunzip doesn't cause a Drama Meltdown. gunzip won't be a proven attack vector for remote execution exploits. gunzip does not require a contract in my hand or money in my bank. While your decoder is being debugged, gunzip will be live.

(To the tune of "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised")
Why?

It's just a big switch/case over the instruction set by the looks of it. Those things can get pretty damn large if your are implementing anything close to a proper CPU.

It's just very condensed, I imagine so he can change a bunch of values and re-test quickly.
Your comparison of data vs. messages is interesting, although I think what you really should contrast is messages/data vs. markup.

HTML and LaTeX are clearly markup languages (or "code"). It's entirely reasonable to expect somebody to edit HTML and LaTeX in a plain old text editor. Totally agree with you on this.

Where I disagree, however: The OmniGraffle file in the article, isn't code - it's a serialization of an internal data structure. The primary method for editing this data is not a text editor, nor should it be. While it's cool (I guess) that the author was able to hack around inside it, I don't think XML is a good choice here, for the reasons I described earlier. Nor do I think it's a good choice for most object serializations (including both transient messages, and persistent data).

Now, the OmniGraffle file in question is pretty simple, so you could argue that maybe XML isn't so terrible. But, consider cases like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COLLADA . Storing 3d object vertex data in XML is, if you ask me, insane. If you have an object with tens of thousands of vertices, you will never edit this file by hand. What is XML gaining anybody here? Yay - you can use an off-the-shelf XML parser! But you then have to copy XML's graph into your own vertex structures in order to do anything useful! So, you really haven't gained anything except vastly increased memory and CPU usage.

See http://collada.org/public_forum/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=25&... for some discussion on this.
His TED talk on the subject: http://www.ted.com/talks/christopher_mcdougall_are_we_born_t...
Wrk - a modern HTTP benchmarking tool
Layer Cake by MacRabbit
Yeah, most merchants only really want to participate in rating schemes when it puts them above their competitors.
Not an expert in this but can't many physics calculations now be offloaded to modern GPUs which are designed to parallelize much more neatly?
Zero-risk consulting