skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Erik Naggum on XML vs. S-Expressions:

"They are not identical. The aspects you are willing to ignore are more important than the aspects you are willing to accept. Robbery is not just another way of making a living, rape is not just another way of satisfying basic human needs, torture is not just another way of interrogation. And XML is not just another way of writing S-exps. There are some things in life that you do not do if you want to be a moral being and feel proud of what you have accomplished."

(http://www.schnada.de/grapt/eriknaggum-xmlrant.html)
I think his choice of Monads to explain this phenomenon was a good one, speaking as someone who does not understand Monads but occasionally glances at tutorials about them.

My thought process about those tutorials is always "explain to me why I should care." I get that the problem that Monads try to solve is that functional programming demands that a function always return the same value given the same arguments, and that makes I/O impossible, but you can't write real programs without I/O. So Monads are an attempt to find a loophole.

Well, what if the answer is just that functional programming is just not a good way to write programs in the first place? Sure, functional programming has lots of properties that are appealing, but if you need to do intense mental gymnastics just to get "print 'Hello World'" is it actually worth it?

To me, that is the point from which a "Monad tutorial" should begin, and then provide concrete examples showing that with Monads, sticking with functional programming is better than just giving up and using Python.
Tweet by Snail Mail
The intro physics class at Harvard is graded something like:

k * homework_score + (1 - k * homework_score) * (final_score^extra_credit)

So you can do no homework and no extra credit as long as you ace the final.
Sort of reminds of project management software: it's just there to keep the project manager busy.
useful for startup sites
Science 2.0: New online tools may revolutionize research
I've done this before. If you're the sole owner of something, and especially if there will never be a designer in the mix, I think it makes sense to stick with what you are (and more importantly will be) familiar with. I once used python string substitution as a poor man's template system, because I knew that when I came back to that code months/years later, I'd still know how string formatting works w/o having to refer back to documentation.
Pitching 101: Say What You Do
Anecdotes are not evidence.

There has been some research showing a correlation between digit ratio and homosexuality:
https://www.msu.edu/~breedsm/pdf/breedlove2000.pdf

..but nothing that would justify saying that you're gay if you have a high digit ratio.
Frameworks - used properly - can be INCREDIBLY helpful.

Why develop my own routing code when there's already a robust, well-tested version available? Or validation code? Or payment authorization code?

Though it needs to be said that the number one thing a good framework does is GET OUT OF YOUR WAY. I've seen some Java frameworks that take an hour to put together a simple Hello World and that's just nonsense.

Currently I'm using Kohana, which is nice because it's really very simple and easy to extend. So far I've been able to spend so much more of my time actually writing business logic instead of routing logic and the like.
i like blackboard for the simple reason that chalk never lies
I think the issue is, a spice rack from IKEA may work, but it's not going to look great, or last long.

Any flat pack spice rack, will be shoddy quality, and probably break.

You don't get good furniture by mass producing it like that. Same with software.

What if I want a custom spice rack, with some secret compartment, in solid oak.
First year physics is mostly review for a lot of incoming freshmen, especially if they did one or more AP classes in high school. I'm not suprised that some would do great even skipping the lectures.

When did they put freshmen on grades? When I was at Caltech years ago, first year was pass/fail.

Back then, Goodstein taught phys 1a. Fine lectures, unless you had read the chapter in advance. Then you noticed that his lecture was almost identical to the text, which made it hard to stay awake. Oh, and the retch session were taught by full profs, not grad students, so a lot of learning happened outside of lecture.
"Most parents want their children to be far left in their early years"
Abby and I made this last night in a few minutes. You know, as a backup to http://tipjoy.com
After months/years of not getting nearly enough sleep, how long until you get back to your "normal" mental capacity? (That is, if you go back to getting a reasonable amount of sleep.)
The world's biggest gadget show
It was convincingly argued to me that happiness is a dynamic relationship within ourselves. Something that needs to be renewed or something that can be depleted. The argument continued (take this with a grain of salt!) but because happiness is short-term - we don't only eat once, only have sex once, etc. and then wither away.
I can't comment on the other sites you mentioned, but at EveryBlock, we've heard very positive things from publishers regarding the traffic we send to them. One local news outlet (not a blog) gets 20% of its traffic via referrers from EveryBlock. (I'm not sure whether that says more about EveryBlock or about that site, but still.) For at least three sites I can think of off the top of my head, we're the #1 referer -- i.e., we send them more people than any other site does.

Adrian
DRM-Free iTunes tracks embed your email address in them
or even their end of the /explicit/ bargain.
I had a prof fail me, after announcing that the final grade would be the class grade.
I never went to class, so he felt justified in ignoring my A-/B+... took me awhile to get over that slight.
The power of doing the right thing in programming
S-Expressions are OK to work with as a human if you have a decent editor that helps you indent and balance parens.
IPhone Nano Coming in June, But Not to United States?
I lived in a cube for a good long while but have had an office for the past ten years. An office is nice but I really miss the camaraderie of being the 14th cube in the 8th row after the water cooler. Maybe it was a unique situation but I was surrounded by interesting people with cool hobbies that told great stories. There was always a group that was heading our for lunch and plenty of people to informally work on problems with. As for illness, I don't need co-workers to get me sick... I've outsourced that responsibility to my kids.
"Only when you dip down into the mediocre masses do you need this help."

And what is wrong with that? Some of us aren't the programming gods you are. If it helps people why get so high and mighty about it? I know with your superior intellect us philistines might seem dumb to you, but maybe you should stop writing about how smart you are when you can't even spell "programmers" right.
Pretty strong words for such a trifle.
Um yeah, and telling other people how to live their lives makes you appear SO intelligent and mature!
Things from IKEA are not end products. However all the cutting, planing, and much of the other work has already been done, in the same way that the method of talking to the database and the webserver have been done in the framework.
This does make sense, our brains are hard-coded to perform acts of altruism and without doing it then we're not satisfying a need of our body. I suppose this depends largely on the person, some people get cranky with low blood sugar so I wonder if some people get cranky when they don't do nice things.

Another interesting thing I've learnt on happiness is that you can make yourself happy (especially when you're sad) by simply smiling. I've heard numerous explanations as to why (the best is that performing the physical action causes the nerves to activate that cause you to smile when you are happy and in turn actually begin to make you happy) but I just know that it works.
Funny craigslist "job": create a dating site in 4 hours
Things from IKEA are flat-packed end-products.
"essentially by building your own framework"

Why build your own framework when there's one already there? Already well-used, well-tested, well-extended?

Sure it may be easy enough to do, but is it really worth it?

I, for one, would much prefer to be spending my coding time writing application logic than Yet Another Validation Library.
blackboards are much better:

* easier to erase

* easier to clean board and erasers

* chalk is cleaner, cheaper, more expressive, less wasteful (no plastic), and there are generally more colors available

* chalk stays at full "marking capacity" until it runs out. Dry-erase markers make you write at less than full contrast for a long while until you toss them.

* chalk dust is no problem if you have windows you can open a little

* sounds better when you use it. :)

* nicer light-on-dark contrast (IMO)

But whiteboard gets chosen by non-experts b/c it supposedly makes less dust for electronics/projectors. Unfortunate.
Many times, and I can't for the life of me understand why anyone would struggle at it.

IKEA provides flat-packed products. You never buy a wardrobe at IKEA and then turn it into a couch instead. It will always be a wardrobe, and nothing else.

On the other hand, if you buy a set of tools and environment (aka framework) to build furniture, you can use it to build whatever furniture you want/can.
For ObjC objects.
not necessarily true. it's much harder to "bother" someone who is visually and audibly giving cues he doesn't want to be bothered, than with someone whom you simply skype in with once a day. maybe you can "communicate" more frequently with the former, but the interactions may in fact be less productive than an open atmosphere.

open plan offices may actually make people more defensive about distractions and hurt team interactions.
40 hours. good luck.
+1

Install linux on it and in ten years you'll get a kernel hacker (yes, growing hackers actually takes ten years)
Looks eminently useful.

I would like to try this with experimental pages + mturk workers.
Code bureaucracy? A friend of mine managed an Extreme Programming project for the Department of Defense. When he first started out, the paper bureaucracy required to create a new class amounted to two full business days! He got that whittled down to two hours.
I've been reading Stanford's Engineering Everywhere lectures, and the thing I'm most impressed about is how much support there is for students:

Course-specific computer labs with course-specific lab assistants to help you walk you through problems as you're coming up against them in learning to code!

Sections with section leaders who grade your code in front of you and discuss the strengths and weaknesses of your coding style!

There is no advantage to a huge lecture hall over a podcast. But in-person mentoring, one-on-one human interaction is the best way to learn if you can afford it.
It's not like salt is an expensive luxury item to begin with. What are you going to do with 4 pounds of salt? You shouldn't be consuming more than about half a gram of raw salt a day anyways.
Competition looks like crazyegg.com and also usertesting.com to some extent.
PHP is the new BASIC.
That's exactly what I did -- I'm currently at a hedge fund (the place that said they'd put me on quantitative stuff/research, but ended putting me on UI).

Maybe I just got unlucky? =\
I did interview at another hedge fund too, though, and throughout my interviews stressed that I was interested in quant positions. But when I spoke to the hiring manager at the end of the day, he told me they'd brought me in for the interviews for a software position. (Even though I'd also indicated my quant interest when I applied.)
Cloning Tetris is a good start: It's easy and you know when you are finished. PyGame works well for that.
Hpricot vs. Hpricot
Best job in world
Yes. And one of the versioning systems.
> touch type (10 fingers + numbers)

While you're at it: Use Colemak or Dvorak or any other sane layout.
I think this is a result of us (developers) making claims of building whole sites in 4 hours. Doesn't surprise me in the least to see people looking for it to be done in real world scenarios. Someone somewhere will answer that ad, get hired to do it, fail miserably and that will perpetuate the myth that software can never be done right.
curve?
Wow, he started in December and he's on chapter 4 already!

I would be happy to finish SICP in one year.

[edit: Now I am reading his blog more closely and he only started posting his answers in December. He started reading SICP in July]
As a school, we would like to know how to make all students more resilient, how to turn depressing thoughts into positive ones.

The article really seems to treat depressive, angry, and other emotions as "negative", when in fact these emotions are really just neutral.

It is completely positive and OK to be depressed when someone dies or angry when you've been hurt, and treating them as 100% "negative" emotions is one of the reasons people can get stuck in the cyclical downward thinking:

1. "I'm experiencing depressive emotions"

2. "Oh no! These are negative and bad emotions. Therefore I'm not happy!"

(Brain releases more depressive feelings based on these thoughts)

3. Start at step 1.

Instead of fearing oneself, it's much easier to understand that all feelings are simply feelings, in the same way that all thoughts are simply thoughts. This ties in very closely to mindfulness and not just reacting to your mind, but engaging it and choosing what to do with thoughts and feelings.

Edit: Just to clarify, this is not to say depressive thoughts are always positive, but to encourage others to be aware and engage their feelings from a neutral perspective, then decide what to do with them. That is the point of mindfulness.
Hmm, I got along with SICP in self-study nicely. And my mind lacks at least some points to the 180.
It depends. A startup can move into a big open loft, buy $50 folding tables from Staples which are 2" too high and cause intense pain when you type, and spend nothing.

On the other hand, if you compare the cost of a typical, Class-A cubicle installation to a typical Class-A private office instalation, they're about the same. In both cases you give workers about 100 square feet of personal space; the main difference is whether you build drywall partitions, which is relatively cheap, or buy fancy cubicle systems, which is actually more expensive. The cubicle systems are supposed to be a bargain "in the long run" because you can move or reconfigure them, something which literally never happens in the real world.
if this post were written tongue-in-cheek, i'd call it "funny". since it seems like the poster put a lot of effort into the posting, i'd say it's more "ignorant" or "sad" or even "a perfect example of the disconnect between the stereotypical mba types and the programmers who must put up with them." personally, i read it in amazement.

eh, maybe "funny" is the right word.
Test for Dwindling Retail Jobs Spawns a Culture of Cheating
Lets see I can use Rails and build something or I can spend my time building something like Rails from scratch. Not a tough choice. The top ten percent probably don't reinvent the wheel when they don't have to. Do you write all your own libraries too? Maybe your situation doesn't fit the mold but your claims about efficiency and programming prowess are a bit absurd.
For some reason, this reminds me of the Fedex commercial or movie where they basically deliver a package internationally and all it has inside is a countdown timer.
See, I like this article partially because it invites the reader to reflect on these thoughts, rather than provide an explicit, pre-packaged way of approaching life.

I agree because I think this is another way of searching for authenticity in all our decisions: "complacency" is another way to say you're not re-evaluating the choices you've made.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authenticity_(philosophy)
New York court dismisses Amazon's objections to paying state taxes
Cast Away
You could read this research, or just have read Peopleware from, what, 15 years ago? DeMarco and Lister nail everything you've ever thought about working in an office.

If you haven't read this you should have! http://www.amazon.com/Peopleware-Productive-Projects-Teams-S... I think Joel just cribs articles directly from it some days ;)
The movie / fedex commercial was Cast Away.
New Prius: 50 mpg, optional solar roof, bigger engine, better drag coeff, EV Mode, etc
Though less through programming directly, but more by supporting activities like hanging out in IRC (and playing Nethack).
Ask YC: Review my startup, exocloud.com
Hi,

A few friends and I have been hard at work creating a set of products that help companies take advantage of cloud computing. The first of these products is a SaaS Cloud Management Console. This console allows you to quickly provision, manage, and monitor your virtual cloud resources across both Amazon EC2 and GoGrid.

We would love it if you could check it out and give us some feedback. Our plans are to offer the Management Console as a free service while in BETA and then move it to a Freemium model sometime in the future.

To use the ExoCloud Management Console you will need to already have an existing account with Amazon EC2 or GoGrid. After you signup for ExoCloud, you will be prompted for your cloud provider's credentials. Once you enter those we will go off and sync all of your information down into our system, including any currently running instances that you may have.

If you would like to contact me directly you can do so at kylef@exocloud.com

We would love any feedback you may have.

Thanks
Yeah but the point here is that CI is charging for a quality service for which evidently there isn't an equally good free or cheaper option.
Mobile Payments Getting Traction On Social Networks, But Fees Are Sky High
I'd advise against using any framework. Maybe use it to start with, realize why it completely sucks, and write your own.
ChadBrady.com
Chad Brady is face book which is been fascinated with the American West and Western Art School. It gives people the power to share & makes the world more open & connected.
<i>There can be great value in personal interaction. I agree that big lectures like described should and will die off. However, the fastest way to learn anything is to have a series of conversations with an expert. (I guess that could still be reproduced by videochat or something...) I understand this has long been the model in many UK schools.</i>

The long conversations with an expert are purely an Oxbridge thing, it costs waaay too much to do that for it to be worthwhile for students with less potential/no tradition of doing so.
I actually agree with almost everything Arrington says here. Our app is monetizing, and the page we do it on had SMS for a while. The fees were over 50%. At that rate, you almost have to remove them, because if 50% of the people who use SMS would have used PayPal (which is still easier, if you have it) or Credit Card instead, you lose money. Conversion rates have to be significantly higher to recoup what they cannibalize. (And for us they were nearly nonexistent anyway, so we removed it).

My feeling is that the networks really don't want to become credit card companies, which is why they make the fee so high. You can loan money out to anyone if you're charging the vendor a 50% service fee. You'll never get an amount of defaults that high. Charge 2% like Visa and suddenly you have to be wary who you extend credit to.
Because frameworks aren't optimized to your use case.
in-person mentoring, one-on-one human interaction is the best way to learn if you can afford it.

Is it possible to tell the difference between in-person presence and immersive telepresence?
If only happiness were the same as contentedness, the problems of the world would be solved.
Could you elaborate on the 'hackable'? Thanks!
This also makes unit testing extremely diffcult since you have the joy of creating mock objects for your Context, ConnectionFactory and Connection. I have all but given up writing test code at work. The various j2ee frameworks I have to use make it almost impossible.
The Hackers Manifesto
So, the popular theorem is that programmers who have been working for any amount of time already have the makings of their own frameworks. They've already written code to connect to or abstract a database. They've already written their authentication pieces. They've already written (or are using) something like Smarty for 'views' or display data.

For many developers who toil in the same language all the time, or who have spent many hours in whatever language they're currently in, that's the case.

For me, I avoid Rails because it makes me feel like a failure. ActiveRecord, for one reason or another, hates me. I like Rails, and I like the Framework concept (however limiting it might be) -- because I feel that it gets you started more quickly. At the end of any significant project, I feel like you will have likely massaged enough elements of the framework to make it work for you that it's hardly recognizable, but it still got you something to show people that much faster.

That said, ActiveRecord is the showstopper for me in Rails. It seems like I've either never properly wrapped my head around it, or there are fairly low limits to what you can do, or I'm doing everything wrong. What that's always meant for me is that instead of using ActiveRecord to its fullest, I'm building SQL queries manually. And if I'm deviating from the framework's toolset, why am I using this framework in the first place.

This is NOT a knock on Rails, I'm probably just doing it wrong. Rails and I can still be friends... just not in that way.

I've always liked the 'middle ground' that Zend offers, in that it abstracts away the connection and handle, and gives me a convenient place to start building the model code. It's not 100%, but it doesn't make me feel guilty in the morning either.
Amen. If the goal of programming is to liberate humanity from tedium, what's with this kind of elitism? Many of us live happy lives as programmers with zero formal training but relentless curiosity; having never cracked SICP or taken an electronics course but producing solid work -- often with the help of high level languages and frameworks. I mean shit, isn't that the whole point? To let anyone make something effective?
"You give but little when you give of your possessions.

It is when you give of yourself that you truly give.

For what are your possessions but things you keep and guard for fear you may need them tomorrow?"

from "The Prophet" by Kahlil Gibran
Interesting. Though I think the 80%-95% range was made up.
What about Microsoft Cloud? You guys working on that?
I don't know if I am completely back to normal yet. But I sleep in as much as I can. Few years ago they had to put me on IV drips coz I was throwing up all day due to a week long self-inflicted sleep deprivation. Doctors added something to the drip that put me out for several hours. Thats when I understood that I'll be way better off in the long run with a good sleep schedule.

I used to boast about my ability to code through the night. I was a fool.
Thanks (to both of you) - My Google foo was unfocused today. I wonder what would have happened to him in the movie had he not been marooned with an ice skate.
"(I guess that could still be reproduced by videochat or something...)"

Even if it is delivered as videochat, the attention of the instructor is still a limited resource. And this is the value proposition of a 21st century university. I think this change to the MIT lecture format reflects an understanding of this. Now that MIT has made much of its content available as Podcasts, etc., they are looking for ways they can provide more value to the people on campus.
I stopped reading after "In the process, I'm evaluating a bunch of J2EE portlet-enabled JSR-compliant MVC role-based CMS web service application container frameworks."