skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hi there

Most of the discussion on here is about web-based apps. We create both web and desktop based software. One of our products (SourceGuardian.com) provides encryption for PHP source code. Our experience was to create something that we wanted to use ourselves, as the competition at the time was charging $6000 a license, and then we turned that into a product. We have created several other applications and are working on some backup software which links with Amazon EC2/S3 and is due for launch in Jan 2009. For this, and for the other software under this brand we'll be looking primarily at a reseller model. Finally we are also working on hybrid apps, that take the power of the internet/servers/cloud and use that for processing, bringing the data back to a desktop app/widget as well as iphone. The latest one is competitive intelligence online and my own feeling is that desktop apps still have the edge for usability right now. Why not tell us what you're working on and I'm sure some people on here will provide you with help in terms of what you are looking for.
Yeah, I don't know that oDesk trends is a good indicator. Plus, I have a weird feeling that people who post jobs on there aren't really tech savvy and know so far as BUZZWORD1 BUZZWORD2, etc
posted as a gist with real formatting
http://gist.github.com/37177
demonstrated entrepreneurial excellence

Could have been in a non-profit.

Or I'd argue that failing miserably starting a company could still be construed as excellent.
I made a shareware app once that received a grand total of 1 sale lol, but it was an interesting learning experience.

- I used e-junkie.com for sales and distribution, it works really well, plugs in with paypal and automates everything

- I offered a 4 day demo trial, 1 in 300 people that downloaded the demo went on to purchase, although my product wasnt very good the numbers for others ive read are still very low.. tons of people just download apps just to try with no real intention of buying, this makes adwords advertising hard to make economical unless you convert REALLY well or price really high

- download sites never sent me very much traffic, but I was in a very crowded niche ( typing teacher programs )

- if you are developing for msft, make sure you test your program an various versions of windows.

- Really polish your software, I made the mistake of throwing something that wasn't very good out there. Your software has to be VERY GOOD to get people to pull out their credit cards. You really need to be the best in your niche. You cant think that 'oh photoshop makes 100 million a year, I just need to make a photoshop clone that has 1% of the features and is 1% as good, then I'll be a millionaire' It doesn't work like that.
The thing about smoking marijuana is that it's not incompatible with heightened creativity. Some would even say that it helps.

http://www.marijuana-uses.com/essays/002.html

I suspect that WoW can be conducive to creativity, but for hard-core players this is often focused entirely on goals in-game. So in the case of hard-core players, the chances are that an employer will only lose out from decreased productivity. (Lack of sleep.)

Contrast this with interests in music, art, or sports, where employers can often stand to gain indirectly from even an employee's avid participation. Sometimes they gain directly, as in Shigeru Miyamoto.

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sect...
Case Western also did an interview http://www.case.edu/magazine/fallwinter2008/craignewmark.htm...
I would also like to show my support for Kohana, Notepad++, and XAMPP.
The Recession: My Facebook, My Therapist
I just bought my first direct stock (non-index, non-mutual fund). A whopping five shares of AAPL. I think this is non-threatening news for the company and they are priced pretty well, currently, for holding longer than a year. Wish me luck. Anyone else just grab some?
See also:

http://regex.powertoy.org

It isn't python-specific, and doesn't do named groups, but it does offer animated highlighting in your browser, with no traffic to a faraway server.

(It uses a hidden Java applet to support regex syntax and step functionality beyond Javascript.)
Brands, social, clutter and the sundae
Top 10 most useful webapps of 2008 (Posterous, Disqus, Anyvite)
#haml - better ruby templating
Blame PG, he started it all.
The worst thing about PHP is how easy it is to leave SQL and HTML all over your code.

Install Doctrine (ORM) and Smarty (Templating engine) or friends and use it religiously. If you do, you can use PHP for what it's best at: Cranking out business logic at high speed.

http://www.doctrine-project.org/

http://www.smarty.net/
CakePHP. The documentation is great. Performance is great. The learning curve isn't too bad. It's a framework that will take care of you.

Every negative criticism about CakePHP is about two years old and no longer relevant.
Our last big desktop project was free, so I can't comment on anything regarding sales, but distribution was a pain in the ass because it was a Windows product.

About 20% of those who downloaded were not able to install it due to the following reasons:

* Could not find "where did it go?" after downloading (not joking)

* Were running some kind of "security suite" which was crippling our installer or didn't let our product connect to the internet and users couldn't figure out which program performed the function of a firewall, let alone configure it.

* Their computers were heavily modified by other installed Windows software (non-standard DLLs in /windows/system), missing/modified registry entries, rootkits+spyware+malware+adware. Windows allows this kind of thing.

Technically the product was nothing fancy, an Internet Explorer plugin, but it surely knows how it feels to be a domesticated cat dropped from a comfy helicopter into amazonian jungle. [dev. machine -> an average user's machine]

I spent most of my career developing Windows libraries for other developers (ActiveX controls, signal processing, industrial automation, that kind of thing) and never faced a "6-pack Joe" as a customer. Once I've tried, I got rid of all my Windows computers, forced myself to open a whole new UNIX world and yes, switched to mostly Web development, which I find extremely trivial and boring (HTMLization of DB schemas), but I'm glad I don't have to deal with "Where did it go?" anymore.
Sports Stats + Twitter
I bought 10, for mostly the same reasons. If you don't mind divulging, what broker did you use?
I found the linux that came with my acer aspire one totally unusable, but I instantly swapped it to ubuntu 8.10 which whips windows ass any day.

The problem is that they install totally worthless versions of linux on these machines because they are incompetent. Also the linux was modded to look like windows which would be confusing for anyone.
What is there for C++ besides CppCMS?

http://art-blog.no-ip.info/cppcms/blog
I think they're implying causation where correlation exists. I'm guessing most WoW addicts (and there are lots of casual players, who can be fine employees) are simply obsessive types who would be attacking some other hobby full force if not for WoW. D&D, building a robot in their garage, whatever.
The other advice here is excellent, I'd just like to throw out a vote for the editor Textpad (http://www.textpad.com/).

It's much lighter than eclipse, but still has tons of features (regular expression search & replace is a favorite).

Small download, so it's at least worth checking out.
I don't hire people that "don't hire Xs".
I'm looking forward to this. I plan on giving a talk at work about frameworks and would love to know more about Recess. Routing looks good so far.
Neat idea. Here's one way on OS X:

open "http://google.com/search?q="$*"\&btnI="

Or if you want to specify a non-default browser:

open -a "Safari.app" "http://google.com/search?q="$*"\&btnI="
What does cloning some website have to do with computer science?
Honestly, isn't this identical to YCombinator, just without him taking 5-7% of the company? YCombinator gives like $10,000 to a single developer---not a huge amount of money, but enough to get started. $2500 is the same idea---you give a small amount of money for someone to create a project. I think it's an amazing idea.

disclaimer: I'm Ramit's brother and I'm not qualified to apply :(
Code has become a commodity.

Coding in general is now a commodity. Coding combined with specialized domain knowledge is not.
I estimate playing WoW is more addictive and harmful to your productivity than smoking marijuana...

Depends on what you're smoking. See: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=238579
Blog Advertising Programs A-Z
I don't know about #8, everything Nintendo pumps out is amazing.
The Uncanny Valley of user interface design
Let's hope they code better than they dance...
Some dude named Scott. He doesn't drip, but he comes highly recommended for the non-professional who wants to go long.
The trade off between wasted processing and elegance is not high enough for most people. I could see it being nice if you are giving access to "non-developers" to modify the views/templates of your system and want to make sure they only have access to a given subset of functionality.
I'm not the poster but the last time I looked into Cake it's internal code was just an utter mess. A lot of the mess is from it's continued support of PHP4 and PHP5 which have a lot of incompatibilities in their object models.

I haven't used Symphony in ages, but it was originally a fork of a project called Mojavi (which I used to work on). It was designed as a pure PHP5 MVC framework with a heavy emphasis on being easy to override or modify any of the components. I don't know how true it's held to that these days, but the original code base was pretty slick.

That said. I don't use either, I've got a little 300 line OOP MVC wrapper I wrote that serves my purposes. But if I were going to look at a framework today it would be Zend or Symphony.
Thanks for clarifying and the code bit. This is very close to what's actually going on. The 'overhead' I mentioned is minimal, and exactly what you described.

The names are important in mapping so...
/ !Route GET, $last/$first */
function foo($first, $last) {...}
Maps $first to $first properly, etc.

Indeed the hope is that this will be easier to understand and use.
We only need 0.01% of the population to make changes, and not very fast, and they will eventually transform the world to the point it's hard for others to ignore.
How do you vet them? I've run into a lot of people who would do that then purposely default.
Death To The Embargo
So you'd just be doing what these folks are, but with (hopefully) a more lucrative sub-population?

http://join.lendingclub.com/borrowing.php?ppc=60209
That does not contradict. By the way, lambda calculus and post's correspondence system underlie..
We're working with very different models, I must say!
Startups are stressed. But, they are enjoying them!

stress != unhappiness
Is it really silly? Almost all the code I write day to day is either multi-threaded or event-driven, so the above difference means a very real improvement in my quality of life. The code is simpler, more compact, and easier to understand at a glance months later.

This isn't the only difference, either. C# is never going to be as terse as a scripting language, but with each release they are examining common workflows and streamlining them. Java may be adding in a lot of new features, but the syntactic integration seems awkward at best.

The little things count for a lot.
"Haskell would be Taoism - It is so different from other languages [...]"

I do not get it. Haskell is very similar to other languages, take Clean for example.
Looking at ads is social? Only on HN, I suppose. :)
I'll save myself some re-typing if you don't mind - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=322929

(edit) actually that whole discussion is relevant - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=322630
Atheism is something like a religion Perhaps agnosticism is the none-religion.
I agree, but my example was that both sexual activity and changing gender are private activities that don't need to be discussed here.
Terse programs are a worthy goal.
I started with assembly, moved to C, dabbled in C++ and some of the microsoft solutions (c#, VB), then moved to ruby for web stuff...

Cant say I would want to learn in a different order, but I do wish I would have moved out of my assembly language stage faster...
There's a toolbox for Matlab that encapsulates a lot of digital image processing algorithms.

Here's the text we used in my computer vision class, probably the classic in the field:

http://www.amazon.com/Digital-Image-Processing-Rafael-Gonzal...

Learning the specific feature space of digital images is no big deal. You might explore wavelet transformation and different image formats (BMP, JPEG, JPEG2000). Pixel intensity, color, edge detection, high and low pass filtering, connectivity between objects, pattern recognition... there are a lot of topics.

And then there are disciplines built on top of image processing, like face detection, watermarking, image retrieval/search, editing/transformation (think Photoshop)... and of course video is another can of worms, adding time-series data.

There are strong connections between higher-level image processing and statistical AI and data mining, so you might consider exploring those topics too.
Computers are so good at simulating numbers, they sometimes fool us into believing that they are made of the stuff.
Behind Steve Jobs’ Macworld exit
Hm, JavaScript is in fact a nice little Scheme with a cute little object system originating from Self with an ugly, ugly, ugly C-like/Javaish syntax and some dark, horrible secrets (like an asymmetric, atransitive `=='). Moreover, a lot of people use it, but not so many understand it...

My guess is that JavaScript is Zensunni: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zensunni#Zensunni.
How would this handle backwards engineering?

When debugging an application someone else has written, generally I'll be given a problem - and I want to find out all the code behind whatever is broken or needs looked into. So you start from a URL, go to your centralised dispatcher router whether that be your Zend bootstrapper, a mod_rewrite rule in a .htaccess file, your django URLs file or.. whatever. From there you'll be able to work out which controller and action you need to look at. In this case I'm looking through a whole bunch of controllers and then their doccomments to see which route matches. Not pleasant.

As someone said, this is pretty clever, but I'm not convinced it leads to maintainable code. Which is the entire point of frameworks and the MVC pattern. There are other ways to implement DRY in a dispatcher without resorting to inlining a pattern into a comment. For example, you could delegate a base pattern to another URLs conf like you do in django.. or use nested routes like the Perl Mojolicious framework:

http://search.cpan.org/~sri/Mojo-0.9/lib/Mojo/Manual/Mojolic...
More Games To iPhone: Metal Gear Solid, Dance Dance Revolution, Frogger
Yes, Haskell may be Platonism where ideas are more real than the messy world we live in.
Ah, one issue from the SHJT list is that they weight more recent awards more heavily. Cambridge was a preeminent force in science and engineering in the earliest half of the century, but seems now to have diminished somewhat relative to others.
A Guide to Resistors
For anyone as fascinated as I am by the orange-box-on-blue-background phenomenon in #4, I really recommend Josef Albers's Interaction of Colour. http://www.amazon.com/Interaction-Color-Expanded-Josef-Alber...

It's educational and illuminating, but compared to most colour theory books it's more poetic than academic in tone, and more emotional than theoretical in its insights.
Resistors are the most used passive electronics components. Even if they are the most common and cheap components in the market, they are not known enough for their peculiarities and for their role in the electronic area.
Bah Humbug Microsoft | TechJaws
Yes. I agree.

(Edit: I have read the linked article. The debit card system is somewhat different in Germany, where debit cards are much more widespread that credit cards. In fact credit cards are still somewhat of a rarity while everyone seems to have a debit card.)
Petrus, and I don't think so, although it has been a LONG time since I checked.

Last I checked most of the fastest were still using fridrich based methods. The most common modifications being, double insertion in the F2L stage (solving two corner-edge pairs with one look) and orienting the last-layer edges while solving the last corner-edge pair of the first two layers, this increases the chances of a "one-look" last layer ( there are only 270 unique positions at that stage ).

Some of the fastest are using petrus based methods, but I would say they're strongly outnumbered by fridrich users.
I tried this. It hurt...I don't want to go into detail, but it hurt.
BoxOfficeMojo.com Acquired
Evolution of the WordPress interface from 2003-2008
Eliezer, do you think AI is likely to be built, or emergent? I was thinking the other day that the internet (and the services and people who interact with it) are collectively gaining towards sentience: it has memory (archive.org), recall (search), self-awareness (various part of the internet inspecting the internet is like introspection), even something that you might call emotion, or motivation. It seems like an AI is as likely to emerge by accident, as an entity interacting and viewing it's environment (on the internet) as it is likely to be built from the ground up.
right on the money. the best game developers i've worked with were mostly self-taught (from indies to internal ea studios).
This is where it really lives. It requires a free registration (I know) to download. I've never had a problem, and I let the occasional email from code project just go to a secondary email account that I use for such registrations.

http://www.codeproject.com/KB/applications/todolist2.aspx
And New Scientist!
Top Ten Astronomy Pictures of 2008
I'm working on desktop software for a financial services vertical. Data consolidation is one of the problems we're addressing and web apps have too many limitations for us to build a good data management tool. We're using an SOA layer so the app should work well for remote users. Think iTunes.

We're using WPF and this is the operations tool which will eventually be complemented by a browser app. It's our hope that we'll be able to force enough of the WPF code into Silverlight to make it the front-end for the browser app. We're also going to try using WPF in the browser but I think the installation headaches will be too much for us.
What amazes me is how accurate and detailed this book is, given that it was intended for children. It reads like it was written by a computer expert helped by a children's writer, rather than the other way around.

Too many books for children are written by a specialist in writing childrens' books, rather than someone who knows what they are writing about. The writer gets a half baked idea of what the book is about, and then even that gets dumbed down in the name of accessability.
For me, this is another reason why I feel like TC is dying. Posts seem to be getting more and more negative (lay-offs, this, etc), less about start-ups, and simply turning into a personal rant platform. Not sure if this is the reason, but something is causing traffic to slip over the past few months.

http://siteanalytics.compete.com/techcrunch.com/?metric=uv

Anyway, if I were to launch something, I would not prefer to have my product story nestled between a piece about Yahoo layoffs, and a rant about PR (sorry AllFacebook, in this case).
> I don't know if taking a vitamin D supplement would have any noticeable effect on your sense of well-being

Yeah, that was totally unexpected and is purely anecdotal.
Its certainly annoying, but telling a spammer to stop spamming is unlikely to work.
I wouldn't say TC is dying. It's blogs like it that are replacing dying newspapers.
Python. I actually wanted to learn it in earnest around 2001-02, but never really pushed myself.

Given that I'm now attempting to make it my primary language, especially since django came out, I would love to have had 6-7 years of experience behind me.
I think RTS games are less addictive because they are broken up into discrete games and are much more intense in terms of mental energy and frantic clicking. Whenever I play a good game of StarCraft or WarCraft III, I usually feel really drained and don't feel at all like playing another game.
Firefox Halting 2.x security patching/support, urges users to upgrade to 3.0 or get pwned
fractional reserve banking makes the assumption that you can predict what the loan market will look like if you need to sell off any assets. relying on your ability to predict the future is not sound finance.
True, newspapers are having a hard time. However, I would still rather give my "exclusive" to the new york times.

I guess I'm just trying to say that TC is doing something wrong, and hypothesizing it is articles like this. If I was TC and saw this graph, I would be worried!

http://siteanalytics.compete.com/mashable.com+techcrunch.com...
bank loans do not come from deposits. I don't why this myth is so persistent.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional-reserve_banking#Mone...
The Interface of Restaurant Receipts
I envision a YC like diligence process. More intensive than normal loans. But people do it for the low rates.
They have a process where only about one in five of the games they start makes it out the door. They cull ruthlessly.
The case for teaching everyone programming.
10 mistakes new Windows administrators make
Apple 'Netbooks', Eh?
I've been annoyed by TC lately, but this step is something I applaud. Cutting out bullshit is always good in my book.

I remember CNet doing a story an year ago, complaining how they were screwed by blogs that didn't honor embargoes. Big news outlets break those, too (ABC did, for example). And nobody really wins from an embargo (except PR companies), so I don't see the hurt.
PowerShell ABC's - D is for Debugging
Proof: Group-think a Dominant VC Trait
This is blog trend, not TC thing.
http://siteanalytics.compete.com/techcrunch.com+readwriteweb...
I have used Mint in the past, and it has not always been completely accurate in reporting through email the amount of money I have in my bank accounts. Though it is handy in keeping track of where money goes, this is a bit of a deal breaker for me.
Thanks for replying Ramit. There are many things one could do, but you're at least trying one thing, so I salute you.

I still think "I will teach you to be rich" is an odd domain name and motto, but I'll pass that off as part of the mysterious finance culture that doesn't often leak into my penniless programming world :-) Though I'm starting to see that when you say rich you might not mean $$.
I knew a French guy in High School named 'Michelle'. He was like a walking sociology experiment. It was highly enlightening.
Comedy is all about the flow
Smarty is simply obfusication. As the other reply suggests it adds no ease for non programmers to make changes. It doesn't add human readability.

Ultimatley PHP short syntax is just simpler (especially if your using an MVC framework or similar).
He seems to have built a set of tools to handle this problem.

From the very brief sneak peek we got at that it looks like a killer toolset for something lie what you describe. Knowing where to head to BEFORE even opening a controller file is a big bonus :)