skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Agreed, the trick with a local ARGV and the null filehandle is too clever. Don't copy code you don't understand! I think opening the file is much clearer.

open( my $fh, '<', $file ) or die "cannot open $file\n";
my $text = do { local( $/ ) ; <$fh> } ;

http://perldoc.perl.org/perlopentut.html
http://perldoc.perl.org/functions/do.html
http://perldoc.perl.org/functions/local.html
http://perldoc.perl.org/perlop.html#I%2fO-Operators
Simple in theory, but hard enough in practice that companies like Microsoft screw it up from time to time.

Try saving a text file in Windows XP Notepad with the words "Bush hid the facts" and nothing else. Close it and open the file again. WTF Chinese characters! Conspiracy!
The first part is still entertaining, though.
The value appears to be the output of the NSStringFromRect() Foundation function, which has the corresponding NSRectFromString() to go the other way.
> is there a big difference in salary afterwards?

Yes, if you're good and that's what you want to do. I know someone who knows someone who went to UC Irvine (not one of the top 10) and got a $40,000 signing bonus, which on average wipes out a UC Irvine MBA's outstanding debt.
RoBitBot - Like TiVo for Torrents
RoBitBot finds and downloads all of your favorite TV shows and movies.
No need to analyze it to death, now! I didn't make it very far through this article... tl;dr.

Though from my POV: I've read at least one other parable on the blog (a rather more obvious one about free office space), and so didn't really entertain the idea that this might be real; but I imagine it could be more confusing for readers without that context.

Because in relative isolation -- it could be real. Among the technically proficient, at least, the internet is a great equalizer, and there's no particular reason why an until-recently White House tech czar (or whatever the purported position was) couldn't be posting their thoughts on a Posterous blog. Not quite the same thing, but isn't Seth Godin's blog still on typepad, just because he started it there however many years ago, and the momentum of accumulated linkage is too powerful for him to move it now? Just because someone is appointed to a high government post (especially a technical one!) doesn't mean their past online life disappears.

And even on HN you can see comments from very wealthy & successful folk mixed in with those from high-school nerds, right? So perhaps in this case a disclaimer at the bottom of the post (so as not to completely ruin the effect...) might be advisable.
Good point. I'd also add something from George Orwell's Politics and the English Language: http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm , where he has a bunch of rules like the ones in this thread: "(vi) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous."

Rules aren't really rules—they're principles. Part of knowing how to write is knowing when and how to bend or break those principles.
I'm pretty sure they're not trying to this for sustaining/profit reasons – they're donating the money made to charity.

It's more of a promotion/marketing approach, and depending on the response, then they'll decide where to go next.
Yes- The TV station in question has a -team- working on an established product with an established methodology (whether it all works well together is another topic). It's unrealistic to expect quick, large-scale change in any big operation that's driven by a large team... no matter how great the new ideas are. It can happen, but it takes time.

A skilled developer can single-handedly shake up the paradigm and drive things in a new direction. The real challenge for the organization that grows up around that game-changing idea is to avoid behaving like the one it replaces.
In Russia it isn't available, at least in search results. Whats up with that.
At the risk of answering incorrectly on the OP's behalf, I would say they primarily covered the latter (Ruby + RoR). The timeframe involved is insufficient for a meaningful overview of software engineering.

However, I would also posit that what they covered is enough to get them in the door. The rest can (and, for those passionate and determined) will follow.
Jason has a point:

You can maximize revenue by focusing on delivering higher value features to more lucrative customers.

But, you need to be careful when following his advice. Blindly following the principals of "revenue maximizing resource allocation" makes you susceptible to disruption.

If you focus too much on high-end customers you can either:

1. Make the product in-accessible to a large audience.

2. End up overserving many of your customers.

That opens up the opportunity for new entrants to provide less-good products at the lower end of the market, which you would be happy to ignore (you can just write a $80 book next time, targeted at fewer folks), while the new entrant follows you up market, until you have no business left.

It's not clear it applies here, as neither author has a structural advantage over the other. However, just because you can earn more profits by charging a higher fee to fewer customers, doesn't mean you should. It could kill your business in the long run.

Take Windows PCs vs the iPad as a good example.
At my last company one of the biggest complaints against postgreSQL (when being compared to oracle) was that it "could only scale to 20 cores", which made it unsuitable for "enterprise use". Nice to see that non-issue removed.

Hey Rosser! Didn't know you hung out here.
I think I understand and if I do I agree. What I'm hearing is that you think the bill needs some reworking and the idea is actually a good one that w shouldn't write off just because it's poorly written. Fair enough. I can get on board with that. Sometimes it's easy to get into mob mode and not see the forest for the trees.
It was the AskHN on posts getting marked as dead that started me on this specific line of thinking, eg http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3788902.

Generally I've been wanting to have a link-sharing/discussion website where a user could choose their own algorithms - for example choosing to "upvote" (ie make more visible in their personal view) things that specific users have upvoted or from established users or with particular keywords or other characteristics like maybe upvote rate or upvote acceleration or upvote:view ratio or more complex statistical indicators. One might even be able to chose the most popular algo, or for hipsters (!) the most promising new algo or ... well you get the idea.
I would remove the Mastering Node link from the resources. It is pretty far out of date and a lot has changed in the 9 months since it has been updated.

Specifically it does not mention the binaries for installing node, includes old, unusable ways of requiring modules, uses the sys module (which is now util), and probably more things that are wrong to do now in node.
In the binary case the usual treatment in statistics is to use the logistic function (and logit) to work with real numbers, then transform back into probability space as the last step.

This is a little flakey for ordinal numbers, and the usual treatment is to use a learning algorithm to find a mapping from real numbers to ordinal values, either explicitly (if you need a "score") or implicitly. Support vector machines, radial basis functions and neural networks are typically used.
Maybe I'm stupid, because he's always seemed exceptionally clever to me.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6u-WFlvZ2o
Music: Soundcloud FTW!
http://soundcloud.com/dj-robert-rankin & http://soundcloud.com/mungoshifi

Talk: www.youtube.com/show/thisweekinstartups
StartupPlays - Cutting Edge Strategic Plans for Startups
As a thank you to the HN community that made Hacker Fair (for the Hacker Dojo) so great, I'm giving $5 off... which means it's $10 for an open bar on Cinco De Mayo.

Use HackerNewsLovesBeer (not case sensitive)
How do people react to fake buttons? I'd suppose it makes them more annoyed. Isn't that counter-productive? Or is it worth the risk?
On the one hand it makes sense, but on the other hand isn't it agreed that cursing brings a certain context or atmosphere? How would the advice here apply to, say, a Quentin Tarantino movie?
Cool write up!
I think it's because they take everything personally. A bad patch isn't just bad coding, it's a personal insult to them!
I'd probably ignore the mail specifically because of the marketing effort for the blog at the bottom (and would have already been a bit hackle-raised at the attempt to define exceptional as top-10%. One, that's wrong. Two, it's patronizing.)

There is something reasonable related to this, though. Let people recommend with different weightings. Say, a way to say "no, this person is a bozo" without directly saying it.

It's like you could come up with a simple web UI to do this. Assign -1 to "this person is a bozo, avoid", 0 to "I am only doing this out of social obligation", 1 to "weak rec", 2 to "good, competent", 3 to "indeed, far better than average", and 4 to "you are an utter moron if you don't hit this."

Maybe add a comment field at the bottom.

The key is to give the recommender a social out -- they can tell the candidate "yes, I recommended you", even if it was a 0 or 1 (or, in some cases, a -1).

Facebook and Google do "recommend" (no-op) vs. "strongly recommend" (actually significant), but adding more levels is good.
Albert: i like some of the subtleties in the app like picture flip and smart scrolling. I think you guys can find a better way to display the comment/share buttons that improves the UI and keeps the focus on the image.

In general, I like that this isn't just another photo-sharing app - its a fun game that everyone can play and will result in people taking great pictures.

I participated in #Nice Kicks challenge :)
Ruby on Rails: EPIC fail in Debian
Dumping the Fear of Failure
I reached out to a couple designers whose visual style I liked. Further along the conversation asked them to do a simple design exercise (to make a wireframe for a page based on specs and goals, and pay them for their time), at which point they ran away.
In this case it makes sense because these people already do consulting for a living, so this is just another way to get clients. And further, the person calling is going to be looking for expertise about a specific topic rather than looking to talk with a specific individual because of their accomplishments or whatever, so it's much less socially awkward.

I do still think there is an opportunity though to get celebrities who wouldn't normally do this to do it, it's just that none of the ways that have been tried so far have been suitable.
I have chronic nerve pain in my entire upper body. I used to be a patient of a world class university pain clinic. I left there for an individual pain doctor because... I saw 4 doctors in 4 visits, none of whom knew my diagnosis, read my file, etc.

If this flow chart was on the door of the patient room, my quality of care would have been MUCH better.
you mean it's too intuitive? would actually work? offers a sense of familiarity? wouldn't want that on android... nooo sir.
Yes, it is the company's fault. The law regarding parental/maternity leave varies by jurisdiction, but raganwald is in Canada, and parental leave, complete with job protection, is a legal right. It's not madness nor parasitic -- it just shows your moral compass is not entirely compatible with employment laws in Canada. ;)

Extended paid vacation is a different story -- employers are not obligated to approve your vacation request. Also, many companies have policies on how (paid) vacation days are incurred, especially during the first year. Having said that, most people I know would disclose any previously planned extended travel plans with the potential employer, both out of courtesy to the employer and as a condition of accepting the job.
10 great Linux commands you may need to know
Hmm.. never heard of mtr, I will have to aptitude install that one for some testing.
That's a bug having to do with uncertain encoding (which is what I called "the more ambitious task"), not uncertain byte order.
Why did Yahoo think they can attack facebook without facebook countersuing?

Did management gone bonker?
You don't see a lot of books flying around, do you :)
Charles Darwin on the analytical mindset
I'm all for that but not so such an extreme. I have to admit that cyber bullying is a real phenomenon that really does hurt kids. That said, it's not the Internet that needs to be legislated. Harassment laws are already on the books. We simply have to make sure they apply to the web instead of creating totally new laws for Internet specific harassment. When you legislate online harassment separately from other forms of harassment you create two separate worlds with potentially two different sets of rules. Harassment is harassment no matter the medium and separating it like that opens the door to terrible things like censorship. Laws governing harassment offline generally aren't so broad that they restrict free speech but somehow when it comes to the web people have this weird cognitive disconnect like somehow your rights online are different than those offline. Maybe it's the anonymity of the web that allows legislators to think of Internet users as somehow not human. I don't know.
This is actually really simple in perl. The idiomatic way to do it would be:

open(my $fh, "<", "file.txt") or die "wft?"
my @lines = <$fh>;

lines is now an array of lines, you can join them into a single string if you want.
This is fascinating -- I'm Reading Imagine: How Creativity Works [1] by Jonah Lehrer right now, and it's about the science behind this exact principle. Essentially, Lehrer explores the conditions leading up to and surrounding insights, and investigates how certain environments and conditions contribute to creative breakthroughs. Really useful stuff for anyone working in a creative field.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0547386079/ref=as_li_ss_tl?...

Yep, it's an affiliate link. Go ahead, help me buy 1/10 of a cup of coffee.
First Impressions of an iPad from an Android User
Transparency is key in apologizing, unless you're not well-intentioned.
Motorola Xoom WiFi now seeing Android 4.0.4 update over-the-air
Ada wants to catch as much as it can before runtime. To that end, it is one strict beast when you're used to all the willy nilly (and unsafe) constructs that we can beat C into doing. Ada absolutely is harder; it's built for hard problems. I don't intend to turn away from the topic of TFA, but Ada is on quite a different plane than C for a number of reasons--reasons that I think are compelling. C is wonderful for creating a foundation for low-level software as it has demonstrated for what seems like an eternity, but beyond that--and I think the crazy things we've done over time to make it a little easier to use reflect this--something with more high-level, safe, readable, yada, yada, yada is desirable if not absolutely needed.

Dynamic allocations in Ada are a cinch by the way. We use the "new" reserved word.

subtype Hacker_News_Article_ID is Natural; -- Numbers 0 .. Integer'Last;

type Article_Handle is access all Hacker_News_Article_ID; -- "all" reserved word used allows access to variables on the stack.

Favorite_Article : aliased Hacker_New_Article_ID := 3793716; -- "aliased" so we can point to this stack variable.

Article_Pointer : Article_Handle := Favorite_Article'Access; -- A sensible default perhaps.

later on...

Article_Pointer := new Hacker_News_Article_ID (Whatever);

Good luck!
Not sure, but to play devil's advocate, most people here have put far more than 5 years into technical talent. The problem is that the real world runs on connections, not capability. I don't think it's unreasonable to dedicate 5 years to networking and become more "well-rounded". The open question is whether those connections are going to be worth anything in a decade, or whether it will be better to be "connected" to some other set of people. Completely unpredictable.

I don't think you learn how to run startups in an MBA program, but top MBAs are the only way to get into top VC firms under 30, and that will help you a lot in the fundraising process. People are less likely to throw multiple liquidation preferences at people they personally know and consider "one of us".

What I will say is that it's probably not worth into pursue an MBA at a non-top school. You know law school's "top 14"? For MBA programs, there are 3 or 4. If their graduates aren't getting into top venture capital firms, don't apply.
The number of places that run e.g. 4U $10,000 HP servers with 4 socket, 16 core Opteron servers is reasonably low I think.
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What if Alice didn't know she was pregnant -- or wasn't even pregnant -- at the time of the interview? The process of hiring can drag on for weeks and months for many industries and companies.

The employer made what you've described as a coin flip choice and have to stand by that decision. Life is never "fair" in the way you're defining fairness in this case.
More node games:

http://touchtonetanks.com/

http://dtrejo.no.de/

And a node-using music download link site:

http://downsound.jit.su
Agreed -- I use the news:yc app, but if you add voting/commenting, this would totally replace that as my go-to.
It's neither. The parent comment implied that Diamond's book was a leftist polemic on how the environment is important. I didn't think it was very leftist or very alarmist. That's all I meant. I was actually disappointed when Diamond mentioned neighboring nations as a reason for collapse...how utterly unsurprising and dull. He spent a lot of time talking about it, too.
I guess it might have been better to say there's a Venn diagram of "probability" and "discrete structures" and there's plenty of non-overlap in both directions.

But, it's important to appreciate that, even for probabilities on finite or countable sets, you get pulled into continuous math. I don't think we disagree here, but maybe some examples would be worthwhile, just for definiteness.

Expectations (means, variances) of discrete variables will be real-valued. There are continuous processes that are intimately connected to what you thought were purely discrete outcomes (e.g., the relationship between Poisson counts and exponential waiting times). There will be limiting processes of discrete structures that bring in continuous probabilities (the Binomial -> normal limit, and all its generalizations) and provide considerable insight. The Stirling formula, which is key to insight about factorials, comes from calculus.

Finally, generating functions are one of the main tools for solving the discrete summations you mention, and these are continuous, and pull you straight into complex analysis. ("Who changed the subject here? I was just trying to add some binomial coefficients and now we're talking about derivatives of analytic functions at zero?")

Or, as my edition of Concrete Mathematics says (sec 5.4): "We come now to the most important idea in this whole book, the notion of a generating function."
regardless of who it was aimed at, it ended up on the front page of reddit. and we all know how reddit is about believing stuff, and then how they react when they find out they've been 'lied' to.

i'm sure at least a few people have threatened to kill raganwald's cats by now.
What It’ll Take For Tablets to Replace PCs
I'm going to assume that it's because you're new here that you have a chip on your shoulder. Understandable.

But, simply by looking at how long it took her to get to that revenue number, why would you think her program is "get rich quick"? Years is not quick, in Internet, Business, Internet Business or any other metric of time.
Nor it is been stable. Win8 for example changes this interface.
That's awesome. I have to admit I have always know Postgres is great and toyed with it but never used it in a real project, due to the availability of MySQL or client preference. I'll try to put it into the current project. Client wants Oracle since they already have Oracle license, but I will change the requirement to support Postgres as well.
Being the preferred investor
Easy Internationalization for Your Rails App with BDD, Part IV » RubySource
Anatomy of a MyBB Forum Hack
IMvHO: Curly braces are like punctuation marks in a language, in that they very clearly mark the beginning, end and so and so forth.
But, yes, it is a very style issue, but to me code without curly braces feels very naked.
... and patent law continues to be nothing more than an employment program for lawyers, and to impede innovation.
> But what I never understood was why doesn't PostgreSQL see better adoption from the big player (Google, Amazon, Facebook, etc.)?

An interesting selection of companies given that all three are known for their use of home-grown databases (BigTable, Dynamo, Cassandra) for their primary offerings that are not of the SQL variety at all.

Though I think it is still a good question. It may have something to do with the ease of setting up MySQL when you are a young startup trying to get something working as quickly as possible, leaving it often hard to justify a change after you've hit the big leagues.
IANAL, but I suppose that, since patent claims are extremely subjective to one judge's personal opinion. That objectivity is of very little concern, the results are very unpredictable. There's very little precedence to most software patent suits. So even something that seem objectively ridiculous, could turn out to be a profitable attempt if you get lucky.

So in short, they know they can get lucky, measure costs and potential benefits, and assume the risk is worth it. Maybe if it seem unlikely to win. A dying company doesn't have much to lose. And in the odd occasion that luck is in their favor. They could win a huge load of money.
I totally agree. Some people understood it, who cares? Their lives were not negatively affected by that in any way. Let them misunderstand. The letter would have been much less compelling with a disclaimer on it.
Gist: Backbone 'soft' models, which are neither loud nor silent
Strangely, the amount of anger people feel when their beliefs are revealed to be false is proportional to the leap of faith they had to make to believe them in the first place.

Think of that leap of faith as being personal investment.
The assumption here is that there's no legitimate reason for supporting a gay marriage ban. Obviously A LOT of people disagree with that fundamental assumption, otherwise the potential ban wouldn't exist.

Personally, you have to address why the government is involved in marriage at all. From my understanding, it is for the purpose of encouraging the family unit and the perpetuation of society through offspring. Gay people can't have offspring unless you count lesbians and artificial insemination, but that takes the conversation down a whole other tangent.

My main point simply being, there are non-human-rights justifications for not endorsing / encouraging gay marriage, so judgment is premature.
This is why we have stuff like "All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental." in a book about starships and aliens in a far-off galaxy. Not everything needs to be labeled for the lowest common denominator.
Josh Kopelman's 53651 is now a bigger problem than ever
Searching Facebook the aweSome WaY