skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As my boss used to say, "the best people I've worked with have all been self taught." I've found this to be true myself. A college degree (especially (?) in CS) is not the cause of, nor (in my experience) even correlated with, great programming. I think even being aware of and caring about the issues that have been mentioned makes one above average, even if you don't (yet) have the experience to solve it all.
You can't even get two spaces to display in HTML without forcing one of them (with &nbsp;).
As a rank newbie, and with no assistance?
A few weeks ago I was helping my wife apply to medical school. One school in particular had an online application with a form to answer all the questions. Each essay question had strict character limits.

After spending hours writing, proofing, spell checking, and character couting the essays, my wife tried to copy/paste them into the online form. No dice - over the character limit. She called me in to help. I tried Word => SciTE => form, Word => Notepad => form, and a few others. Nothing worked.

Finally, I pulled up Firebug and did a little digging. Turns out this application was using a rich text editor that was converting any two spaces to a space + &nbsp; thus counting two spaces as 7 characters.

Needless to say, I did a find/replace for two spaces to one space and her application went through fine. We haven't used two spaces since.
Thank you! transpose-sentences also depends on this. I never put two spaces after a sentence (never knew you were supposed to do that) and when I tried transpose-sentences for the first time a few days ago it didn't work. It was one of those things that's puzzling, but not enough so that I wanted to take the time to figure it out. I'm glad I know now.
Suggesting that rails is a kick-ass tool made of balsa.
Dieting cavemen on twitter
@electromagnetic: kinda off topic, but there is an interesting debate on the roots of Autism - some psychologist believe that it has evolved out of a male coping strategy for stress. As in, it gives the male mind access to the ability to sweep emotional data aside and operate in a utilitarian mode
My biggest problem with frameworks is that, although they save you a lot of time upfront, you need to spend a lot of energy learning concepts that may not be necessary for your application. So, the time you save coding is partly spent in learning things you may or may not need.
If you do everything by yourself initially, at least you will know when it makes sense to use the framework. This is my approach with web development: Try to do whatever I need without the help of a framework. Then, I will know where a framework can help or not, and use it the next time I need a specific functionality.
Hell, programming languages (typically) aren't optimized to your use case. You modify them to make them so.

Good frameworks are the same way. I've already extended the hell out of Kohana to make it more useful to me. This is work I would have had to have done if I weren't using it, sure, but all the basic stuff is there all the same.
Dominos Pizza Tracking in Real-time using Python
I prefer this one "Imagine a school with children that can read and write, but with teachers who cannot, and you have a metaphor of the Information Age in which we live."
"Next, you'll be suggesting that people write their own web server instead of using Apache?"

If the webserver is a key component in your success, then definitely. Write a webserver. It was for me, which is why I wrote my own (After I found others lacking).

If it really matters, and the existing stuff isn't good enough for your use-case, write it yourself.
The article is pretty accurate, though I do not agree with the use of the term “stupidity”. Following is how I view the evolution of a student:

1.	BS: This is the time when students read pre-digested information.
2.	MS: They continue to read pre-digested information. In addition, they also start reading information directly from the source (papers). Also, get a brief taste of what it means to contribute to the field of knowledge
3.	PhD: Students should read solely from the source (only papers). Further, it is payback time. After having benefitted from all the knowledge that others created, they are now required to produce knowledge.

The reason it takes research 5-7 years has nothing to do with how long it takes to answer the thesis statement. Instead it has to do with how long it takes for a student to become “mature in research”. In other words for them to understand that their job is:
•	Identify problems, solutions to which are relevant and challenging (the solutions can serve a purpose or can simply possess aesthetic appeal).
•	Create solutions and document them for everyone else to benefit from (papers and more papers)
•	Mentor young students to embrace research
•	Teach digested information with a hint of the appeal of science and research

Confronting a significant problem (not an incremental addition) is daunting, I would not say it makes a student look stupid. I would say it shows the opportunity and need that a field exhibits.
RFE: Since snail mail is unpredictable, would be nice to be able to schedule a time and/or date for the tweet to be posted, instead of just the FIFO system it seems to employ.

Also, can you add an auto-GPS location (on request, checkbox?) based on the postmark?
BENQ-SIEMENS EL71 (UNLOCKED)
Benq Siemens EL71 Unlocked look of this beautiful phone is exquisite. It is powerful, attractive to look at and technologically advanced. The phone is here to provide you best of mobile communication features and an extremely attractive built.
Not "is a," but rather, "may be." This is because I never personally experienced the problems noted in the link I posted, but they are coming from what appears to be a credible source. You mistook a suggestion of problems for a personal conviction.
Student Designs Portable Fridge for the Developing World
What a dope Dvorak is.

His theory that the mortgage crisis was caused by spreadsheets making bad decisions is just a little stupid. Management has the company spreadsheets designed to make decisions based on the rules they set down for giving a loan. Those rules are the same whether it's a spreadsheet filling in the numbers or whether people are calculating the numbers manually.

Mr. Dvorak doesn't seem to grasp the concept of automation. Automation simply takes a process and lets the computer do the parts it's capable of. It does not invent a new process. So the loans being given would be the same no matter what.
I was wondering if there was a difference for company or individual developers?

We registered as a company and just getting the legal department to allow us to submit took 4 weeks. After that the review of the application "Stay Tonight" took only about 2 weeks, but it did not show in a AppStore search for 2 more weeks. In fact we had to report an incident for it to show up in a search. Then the date of availability was left to the approval date and not the discoverability date, so we never showed in the new app section. So it took about 8 weeks, not too bad.
Simply Ridiculous: 36 Things To Expect From Internship
Sorry to hear that you don't like Hibernate. I'm using it for a project right now, and I greatly prefer it to ActiveRecord. The trick is to use a framework (yes, a framework!) like Grails to autogenerate a lot of the configuration crap for you.

I suspect that your large project was built by "Java Engineers" who tried to stuff way too much into the ORM layer. That's an abuse of the tool, not an indictment of the tool itself.
Use this (maybe in your .emacs) and you can transpose sentences with only 1 space:

(setq sentence-end-double-space nil)
(setq sentence-end "[.?!][]\"')]\\($\\|\t\\| \\)[ \t\n]")
I didn't see any microsoft software that actually "making it easier for average users to take photos from their digital cameras and post them directly to Facebook".

But, the new ilife 09 has exactly this feature. IMO, microsoft has to find a way to make its "advanced" technology useful to people.
There is a trade-off to using a Framework. For me, it depends on the complexity of the problem, and the difficulty of learning the framework.

Suppose someone is familiar with Java Servlets and JSP, basic JDBC and SQL, and the tomcat container (with connection pooling). If I have a simple database driven application, I can choose to hand code some of my application logic, or use a framework.

So I'm choosing between, say:

No framework: container managed security, hand coding my ORM layer, writing my own server side form validation, writing my own MVC (or just not bothering, if it is just a few pages).

Framework: Spring Security, Struts for form building and validation, Spring for the MVC tier, JPA and Hibernate for ORM.

These are slightly extreme - you don't have to use all those tools, of course.

But let's say we do get something out of the framework. The code really is easier to maintain and understand, provided someone has read a 300 page book on spring, another 300 page book on hibernate, and a 150 subsection of a book on Struts, along with doing all the exercises.

Even if the framework based code is better, that's not enough to justify the complexity. I need to justify taking an application out of the realm of someone who understands the basic servlet spec and putting it into the realm of only those who have read and digested an additional 600+ pages of Framework complexity.

Thing is, I like frameworks. You can read and digest 100 pages about Rails and really get going. So the bar for justifying the "added complexity" of a framework in the Ruby world is much lower than it is in the Java world. I don't use Python, but I'd imagine it's a similar situation - it's much easier to justify Django than the Java framework stack.
Learning Makes Itself Invisible
But the real question, which Dvorak misses, is whether management types would trust that type of intuition. Loans are big business so I don't see a company like BofA trusting the intution of individual loan agents. Sad but true.

So I have to believe the process of giving a loan would be based on the same rules even if there were no spreadsheets.
This is a great question. I assume PayPal is not the answer in this space even though Apple uses them on the iTunes store.
Two spaces are a convention that arose when monospaced fonts were the norm. Now that proportional fonts are the norm, it's just an artifact. CMOS deals with professional publishing, where one space was always the norm.
The author states there is no metric of quality, "other than not mixed with dirt and glass shards", but then goes on to state that sea salt lacking iodine is a reason to choose one over the other.
Does anyone else have an issue with that?
You can find prices for carbon credits (US) on CCX here http://www.chicagoclimatex.com/market/data/summary.jsf (currently trades around $2 per metric ton). CO2 stats is buying wind energy credits which are different than CFI traded on CCX so they could be paying a different price, but it's unlikely to be materially different (because CFI is basically a listed version of wind credits, bio fuels, land fill gas to energy, etc.). So if they have enough volume, this is the price CO2stats should be able to buy offsets.

In terms of the price at which they sell, it varies on a per ton basis because of their fixed monthly fee structure. http://www.co2stats.com/signup.php $10 per month gets you 100K page views. Based on the stats from my blog, CO2stats equates 100K page views to approximately 500 kilos of CO2. So the cheapest they sell at is $20 per ton but the reality is that it is much higher because most clients wouldn't have 100K page views. For example, if your site gets 10K page views, then you'd be looking at $200 per ton.
From my .emacs:

;Sets sentence end to be .?!, but with 1-space after sentence terminator rather than 2.
;I have no idea why 2 spaces is the default.
(setq sentence-end "[.?!][]\"')}]*\\($\\| $\\|	\\| \\)[	]*")
I think we'll just scan the note and post it as a twitpic or on flickr. We have a few days to decide :)

If you follow http://twitter.com/SnailMailTweet you'll see it in your http://twitter.com/replies
The screenshots are too small to see anything. Maybe a video tour of all the features is better.
By the way, I work in the US and get three weeks of combined sick time/vacation. My company calls it "flexible time off."
What you can get me for Christmas next year...
Sigh... I'm getting to be an old fart.

I suppose things might have changed since I learned touch typing on my Dad's Compaq Chameleon: http://www.ubertechworld.com/museum/images/Compaq_PortableI/...
Your comparison is an apt one. Both recipes and music are things we think of as infinite, but are not (Proof: you can encode all music/recipes/whatever as a finite series of 0's and 1's. Hence, there is a finite (and easily calculated) upper bound on the number of recipes shorter than a certain length.)

Now, these representations are fairly long (and furthermore, music can't be made much shorter), so there are a fair number of variations.

In conclusion: Yes, they will run out someday. However, this may be after the heat-death of the universe. A bigger risk to their business model is humanity changing to not need food.
The real problem is that we don't have effective screens for employees. What is an hour-long interview going to tell you? Little. And you're going to have to do many of them. If you interview as few as 10 people at an hour a piece, that's $250 at $10/hr salary rates. Most likely, the person doing your hiring is getting more than that and so it could easily be in the $500-1000 range. And that doesn't even count the time used reviewing resumes. If you're in a labor intensive industry, you'd like to lessen the screening process if at all possible.

I think these tests are stupid. Unions hand out answer sheets to anyone that asks them, answers are available online, and it's not that hard to guess that a company wouldn't want to hire someone who thought that failures were always someone else's fault or that they usually quit doing things in the middle. We need a lot of good research in this area. It's very difficult to tell good workers from bad workers and that causes both businesses and good workers harm as the business can't tell who to hire and compensate at good levels. Anyone have any ideas?
> I think we'll just scan the note

http://www.earthclassmail.com/
I think his point is that spreadsheets allow people to produce convincing models (even convincing themselves) without necessarily understanding them. It's like a chainsaw could trim your hedge in no time, provided you managed not to saw through your own legs in the process.

Certainly if Joe Spreadsheet User doesn't understand concepts like numerical stability, he really shouldn't be allowed to make decisions with other people's money.
I think the problem is there is no great answer to your question. Here are a few possibilities though:

TipJoy (http://tipjoy.com/) is making a play as a micropayment platform I believe. I think they're a YC company as well.

Amazon Flexible Payment Service (http://aws.amazon.com/fps/) is also one to scope out.
The History of Python
Python is 19 years old and Guido Van Rossum is starting a new blog on the history of the language. Here is the from his regular blog that announces it. http://neopythonic.blogspot.com/2009/01/history-of-python-introduction.html
I'm not worried about knowing when to see the replies... My thought was having something posted that was not accurate.

Like, if I know I'm going to go grocery shopping next Sunday afternoon, I could mail you a postcard with the tweet "At the grocery store. The produce looks icky". Well, you might get that on Friday and post it then, and it wouldn't be accurate, and that just seems wrong.
Or American pilots joining the RAF in WW2.
So are affiliates different from advertising?
If I print an ad in a newspaper and include a coupon is that a presence in the state?
I hope new York isn't home to any publishing or advertising companies - this could be really bad news for them.
Was anyone else put off by "And, if you want to kill your ex-girlfriend, there's really no substitute for a ball-peen hammer"?

I get it's a joke, but violence against women, when used in a semi-professional context in a community of software engineers is one of those things that keeps more women out of the field in the long run.

I'm not trying to be PC intentionally -- it just struck a raw nerve for me.
well, depends on what you want to do. you could aggregate like tipjoy does, if that fits your model.

there's also http://aws.amazon.com/fps/

there's also one other good one out there, but i can't recall the name since i don't use it. will edit/reply later if i can remember or find it.
My comment about locking things down doesn't apply to systems where it's necessary to agree on an interface. Obviously that's sometimes necessary and good. It's not the same thing as mandating a standard-for-how-all-interfaces-shall-be-defined-and-all-grammars-declared. Interfaces that actually work, in my experience, are worked out on a point-to-point basis. For the rest one needs simplicity and malleability - that makes it possible to do what one needs.

I worked with one of these industry-specific XML formats on another project. A bunch of oil companies took years to define it. Do you know what happened? First, the overwhelming majority of projects still use the old ASCII format which is much easier to work with. Second, those of us who tried out the new format soon found that the different vendors' implementation of this "standard" were incompatible with each other, and we had to write just as much vendor-specific code as before, only now the format was bloated and rigid and made it harder.

The whole approach just hasn't worked in practice, and if it were going to, it would have by now.
I was hoping for advice about specific issues. For example, don't have a picture of an iPhone in your logo (or anything else Apple trademarked). Any other specific issues people have run into?
How to dress like Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook)
Is Obama’s Blackberry Secure?
Because of security threats Obama’s Blackberry may be in peril. He told CNBC, “They’re going to pry it out of my hands.” Though it looks like he may not have to . . .
Ask HN: Review my startup txtful - get stuff done on the web by sending a text
http://www.txtful.com/

We're a small bootstrapped team based in Chicago who've built a platform that anyone can easily use to take a bit of functionality on the web and make it accessible via text message, IM, email, Twitter, etc.

We've learned lots from reading other people's submissions and comments here on HN, but we now would like to open it up to the community and get some direct feedback about what's good and what can be improved.

The beta is still private so that we can manage the demand, but the first 100 people who use this Invite Code get in:

HACKERNEWS

After that I promise we'll get invite codes out to everyone else who is interested ASAP.

Thanks in advance for all your help!

Ted Homatas
No kidding. J2EE is an abomination, and is almost single-handedly responsible for destroying Java's reputation with a lot of programmers. Spring is a giant leap forward.

Grails is basically Spring MVC, wrapped in dynamic language goodness. I'm using it for a project right now, and it's shockingly terse and clean. It's also a lot of fun, which is something I never thought I'd say about a Java "Enterprise Framework".
Maybe :) but most of the fun is straying from the often walked tracks.
I didn't know that iTunes uses PayPal for credit card charges. Do you have a source on this?
Exceptions are welcome :) But why are you doing this? Just curious.

Actually, in my current project we use JSON to encode parse trees. It's no s-expressions, but it works pretty well.
Sure, it just depends. Quite often, I've found that modifying someone elses code takes orders of magnitude longer, than just writing it yourself.
if your sentence ends in an acronymn, it helps. i vote for the additional spacing.
I'm with you. I get razzed by a copywriting friend of mine all the time. I learned 2 spaces in typing class and nobody ever told me the rule changed. It's such a habit now that I have to think about using just one space.
On the flip side the good thing about software is that it is quick to contruct.

If I have an idea for an app I can whip up a prototype in a weekend. I can turn it into a business and full working app with users.

With a building I can't have an idea for an awesome skyscraper then knock it together in my back garden by myself.
I 
free love pict
Wow. Flashback to 9th grade.

Glad I'm not there anymore.
Thanks much -

Has anyone used Amazon FPS vs. PayPal vs. Regular processor?
Take a look at your payment options in your user account preferences. You'll see a paypal option.

I assumed they only offer PayPal in hopes of bringing PayPal's customers even at the sake of margin.
Your numbers suggest very little, one way or the other. People who make bad marriage choices are more likely to get divorced. Bayes rule implies that divorcees are therefore more likely to be the type of people who make bad marriage choices, and second/third marriages are more likely to fail.

I'll give a simple numerical example. I assume some people marry badly, and have an intrinsically higher probability of divorce. I assume the probability of divorce does not change after the first marriage.

Let MB = Marries Badly, and D = Divorce. Assume P(MB)=0.5, P(D|MB)=0.9 and P(D|!MB)=0.1. Then:

P(MB | D) = P(D | MB) P(MB) / P(D) = 0.9 x 0.5 / 0.5 = 0.9.

So 90% of divorcees marry badly. Therefore, a person who has gotten one divorce has a probability of getting divorced on their second marriage of:

P(D | MB) x 0.9 + P(D | !MB) x 0.1 = 0.82

Therefore, in this model, 50% of first marriages and 82% of second marriages will end in divorce.
Cute idea, but I don't want to over-engineer... just add a date/time note somewhere on the letter and I can accommodate.
See also Guido's introductory announcement for this post. http://neopythonic.blogspot.com/2009/01/history-of-python-in...
If an affiliate claims residency (as a individual or business) in NY and AMZN gives them money, then there's NY taxes involved.
I saw a wonderful documentary about Buckminster Fuller that included a story of how his kindergarten teacher was perplexed one day. She gave the children blocks to play with and told them to make a house, and he kept making his with triangles! If I remember correctly, she was so concerned something might be wrong with him that she spoke to his parents.

Some people are just born that way.
Not necessarily. The company I work for is considered one of the best web development in my country and virtually none of our clients come from the front page. We have much more important things to work on than to spend time and money on something that is frankly just there for the sake of being there.

What I'm wondering right now is what do people mean when they say "x doesn't get the web" in the context of companies. There are far more companies out there with not-so-spectacular e-retail websites than there are Googles and Facebooks, but they are all part of the web-as-an-economic-vehicle.

I think that the number of cosmetic bugs on a site is merely a measure of technical competency for whoever coded / qa'ed the site before it went live. Extrapolating this measurement to all Microsoft operations might be a nice excuse for Microsoft-bashing(tm), but I've been finding this sort of articles counter-productive especially when people start talking about such non-scientific measurements such as "getting the web", instead of focusing on things like current research and interesting acquisitions done by Microsoft recently.
Except the assembly-line environment worked great in its context.