skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: What's the most widely used contact management solution?
Hello,

My application needs an address book to operate and I need to build some import tools. I'd like to target the most popular tool for storing contacts info for small businesses, at least in the first release.
Should I just target Outlook CSV?
What about LDAP and Active Directory ?
Thanks!
Top 40 Amazing Firefox plug-in, add-ons and extensions..
Use that year to get a jump start on everyone else?
Zope: http://zope.org

Although I am also currently experimenting with App Engine: http://www.webappwednesday.com
Laissez-faire capitalism is not capable of consistently rewarding people for doing what they love. It does not care about self-actualization.

The fact that you do care about that is refreshing.
http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?SpecializationIsForInsects
In conclusion, I really don't understand what the problem is here.

I think it's just that this:

(setf (gethash "foo" *hash*) "OH HAI")

is verbose and funny-looking compared to:

hash["foo"] = "OH HAI"
any arduino starter kit with Ethernet ???
You're right, it's like a creative person calling themselves creative. Or the glaring problem with the everyone is special mentality.

"If you define your personality as creative, it only means you understand what is perceived to be creative by the world at large, so you're really just following a rote creative template. That's the opposite of creativity. Everybody is wrong about everything, just about all the time." - Chuck Klosterman
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=gg%20no%20re
FWIW, technical books in Kindle's native format (DRMd mobi) are quite readable because Amazon's custom conversion process takes care of the fonts. For example, Dive Into Python is available on the Kindle, and all the code fragments are just as they would appear on screen. But they seem to be images, because a search for a keyword does not show the relevant code fragment in the results. The good part is that you can download a sample of any book from the Kindle store before you buy it, so you know in advance if it works for you.

Disclaimer: I haven't bought a single book from the Kindle store since I've bought the device (around 6 months). The primary reason I got it was to reduce eye-strain. Most of what I read on the Kindle is technical PDFs converted using Mobipocket's free software. But it doesn't produce the same results. The Sony Reader can display native PDFs, but because most PDFs aren't built for a small screen, it's almost as inconvenient.
Why did the associate damage his thumb?
Because his thumb got caught in the conveyor.

Why did his thumb get caught in the conveyor?
Because he was chasing his bag, which was on a running conveyor.

Why did he chase his bag?
Because he placed his bag on the conveyor, but it then turned-on by surprise

Why didn't he hit the off button on the conveyor instead of chasing it?
Because he wans't near the off button?

Why don't we have multiple off buttons so you're never far from one?
That's expensive, let's buy some tables instead.
You're in a rut, but not a hole. You'll be okay! :-)

First step... start looking for a new job! Second step, look for jobs that require SAP experience, but at employers that will give you room to grow as a developer beyond a strict SAP admin/dev role. (For what's it's worth, I think Lego is an SAP shop. :-)

I was in a similar spot about 8 years ago when I was a consultant at PeopleSoft. (It, too, was my first job out of college.) I got to a point 2 years in where I wanted to work a bit more "closer to the metal" with web development tools and -- like you -- I felt that only knowing PS technologies was a bit too "sharecropper" for me. I made the switch away from PS by going "in house" and becoming a PeopleSoft admin at a software development house in Chicago. (It should be easy enough for you to find SAP customers in the city you want to live in.) At my new employer, over time I took on more projects and roles (in addition to using my PS skills), until I officially could "let go" of my PS role and do custom software development full time. I was able to then develop "pure" Python and JavaScript dev skills in my new role and I've been having fun every since -- including a tour of duty at Google and cofounding my own startup last summer.
It depends on what your goal is.

I'm a backend guy who runs an IT department for a top 100 e-commerce site in my day job. Knowing HTML/CSS doesn't do me any practical good there.

For my side projects, I know just enough HTML/CSS to be dangerous. (http://www.almamatersports.com is all programmed by me in a couple hundred hours this year, but has obvious visual bugs on several different browsers, some layout issues, etc, but that didn't stop it from pleasing the guy paying the bills.) For those kinds of things, knowing more at the start of the project would have saved me tons of time and gotten a better looking end result, but wouldn't have changed the clients satisfaction all that much. Then again, the gameplay is so much better this year than last for him that it's not a fair comparison, since for most sites that level of visual bugs would be unacceptable.

When I think about my day job (which is what really pays the bills), in my experience it's much harder to find top-notch back-end developers than it is to find top-notch front end guys. Yes, the very cream of both crops is hard to find, but there's a much larger number of A players in the front-end space, so I'd recommend concentrating and developing your skills on the back-end and just getting a (relatively) tiny bit of exposure to front-end development issues and hiring that expertise out.
Galactic Assassin 1.0 | Kosmosa shuters | iPhone Pasaule
Stripping Illegal Characters from XML in Python
This is something that is going to happen very quickly:

You have a forest full of plants. These plants have insects living in their roots which are feeding on them. At some point in time, insects arrive and settle on the leaves of the plants. They start feeding, and the plants die on or two weeks later. So these insects move to other plants nearby - soon, all the plants in the field are dead, and then all the insects in the field are dead.

But let's say there is a single insect underground that feeds in such a way that the chemical composition of the plant is mildly changed from the standard plant. The above ground insects will avoid this plant, because it smells a bit different, and so this plant will be one of the last to die. As a result, it will be the dominant plan in the next generation of plants. In the next generation, the plant that emphasizes this trait will continue to win, and in a few generations, the evolution will occur.

This ties in with my theory that evolution can only occur under very high pressure, and it happens very suddenly. This slow evolution theory that is common now is wrong, in my opinion. I believe that mutation is common, but singificant changes happen only under immense pressure.

That's why humans are no longer evolving. That's why women still have to suffer at childbirth - midwives have removed the pressure.
Actually that article has an update from thedeal.com saying that $100 million of the offer was cash. It's right at the top.
I think that this is great.
www.maturskiradovi.net
Wow, well done.
You can't ignore growth though. In many cases it's much more important than current active users. A product with 1mil active users and a 10x growth rate is much more valuable than a product with 5mil users and a 2x growth rate. The same calculation applies to stock valuations. A stock isn't priced by current earnings, but by expected future earnings.
> With a lot less effort, you can get a kickass job earning two hundred grand a year.

This is exactly why you can succeed. Instead of making someone else a lot of money and them giving you a $200k cut you can do their job as well and collect all the money generated by your effort.

Being the next Zuckerberg might be a lot like being the next Bruce Willis, but creating a small web software business with the ambition of making a few million over the course of years is not. And the big payout for most small businesses is when they sell to someone who already has money but wants a proven business (to add to their existing business usually).
2% of India is the same as ~60% in France. A % is not really a good idea here, though you are comparing what % of a nation's populace can get onto the net.
I'm thinking of moving my home base to Austin. And yes, Houston is definitely designed for driving. Even "the cool shops near the university" district near Rice U is essentially just a mall with streets running through it. Things are way too spread out.
It's worth noting that Clojure has native support for hashes via the {} syntax. (http://clojure.org)
Its to become a paralegal. All employers in Ontario require you to go through the process, but from what we've asked people the first year is completely and utterly useless (thank the ontario government!) and the second year is break-your-back hard because you basically have to learn everything in one year.

This whole thing is caused by the government allowing all forms of office administration (Medical, Legal, Realty, etc.) to group their first year together. This means everyone who takes any of these courses has to pay thousands of dollars and the colleges group multiple courses into one to save money.

The ironic thing is that legal offices are desperate for workers, my wife already has a job offer from one of our family friend's place. The starting wage there for a paralegal is like $70,000 because they have such a shortage.

edit: Basically the course isn't useless, it's just the ontario government allows colleges to rip you off in the first year. This is after the government of Canada allowed the Teachers Union to get so much control they control everything they even have their own credit union, plus if you work in any college or university in ontario your children get everything (except books) for free, kindly paid for by everyone else.
Hitokiri82 needs to take a more quantitative approach to accouning than simply saying "a lot of money". For example, there is something of a trade-off in consultancy that you can get more money for more esoteric skills, but you will get fewer billable hours per year. If a narrow speciallity pays twice as well, but you only get half the work, you will not be taking home any more money, and that extra spare time? You might need more than 100% of it to prepare for when the speciality narrows to nothing.

Hitokiri's key problem is to settle on his accounting treatment of his Plan B. At some point in the future the SAP gig will turn sour. Perhaps in five years, perhaps Hitokiri will need two years money in the bank to maintain his standard of living while he rebuilds his career. If that is the assessment, then Hitokiri has to save 40% less inventment returns. That makes it look a lot less lucrative.

The key point is that the extra pay has to cover both Plan B and compensate for any special unpleasantness in the work. You have to be very careful to avoid double counting the extra salary.
http://archive.org ?
my recommendations (for neural networks) would be as follows:

- parallel distributed processing (PDP group vol 1 & 2)
- simon haykin (Neural Networks and Learning Machines)
- christopher bishop (Neural Networks for Pattern Recognition)
Perhaps there would be mileage in an app (or browser plugin or Evernote mashup etc) that created backups of your Facebook data in some way.

Impetus / further example:
A friend of mine took the decision to remove himself from social networks for privacy reasons. While I respect his decision and motivation, the loss of comments on our holiday photos from his albums was a real shame.

Further application:
1. Access to historical data/ versioning of your own and others pages (ahem, all sorts privacy issues there).
2. Those popular map-the-people-i-know graphics could be created as videos showing growth over time.
3. Generating a Lulu book from the collected data (I think we all know at least one Facebook addict who would love this).

Of course the irony is that Facebook would likely have ban you for using anything that mined your account at any sort of interval. To avoid suspicion it would need to be "watching" (or mimicking) your regular access and saving the juicy bits rather than logging in for you and crawling.
I'm not sure how well TDD works in the large, but for one man on small projects it's great. It's not substituting for design or anything. It's keeping me from getting stuck in a rut. But it's possible it's not so much TDD as just the process of managing stories. If that helps understand where I'm coming from.
"Unfortunately, this brief little piece in the NY Times tells us little of it."

I actually got a lot of value out of this stand-alone piece. I think it makes some points that entrepreneurs forget too often.
Import from CSV, most contact management tools have an "export to CSV" option.
It's they took PGs advice...weird.

http://www.paulgraham.com/start.html

"[5] A friend who started a company in Germany told me they do care about the paperwork there, and that there's more of it. Which helps explain why there are not more startups in Germany."
I worked at AmateurMatch.com until June of 08.

http://siteanalytics.compete.com/amateurmatch.com+twitter.co...
Google provide an API for the UK that basically gives you a lot of the 'clever' stuff that Maps provides in terms of finding an address which can be quite useful. Not sure if this is available in other countries...
that and itll be hard to justify the interest lost on a loan to a college student...someone that loans $100k to a student and doesn't get paid back for 8 years is losing all the interest s/he would have earned if they had kept that money in a CD or some other low interest earning instrument...thats almost $40k? it would have to be set up so that students can take small aggregate loans that are then "bundled" and paid back...it wont be easy but they have a good idea
Oh dear, my personal website isn't up yet because I'm waiting for a graphic designer to get back to me. What will I do!?
Competitive? I said that they aren't competent enough.
"We have basically designed the robot for corporate use"
I could just see it now. You arrive at work on layoff day and there's one of these standing next to your cube.
Because fundamentally, you're questioning the value of education. The intellectual doesn't pursue knowledge with a particular goal in mind. From that perspective, complaining about the "value" of a class on (for example) philosophy or English literature doesn't make any sense.
Ah, the misery of looking for burritos in Boston. I moved here from the Bay Area a couple of years ago. It's the best place I've ever lived, for all the reasons you mention--but no burritos. And yeah, then people add insult to injury by bringing up Anna's.

The most adequate burrito I've found around here was at Super Burrito in Everett. Know of anything better?
I don't know how fun I am to be around [hmmm...bad indicator] but I actually do what I love...and that's capitalism. And honestly, I'd do it for free. I follow the stock market even though I'm not invested in it. Trading is fun. Working is fun. Learning is fun.

But I agree with you, I can't stand the people that want money for the status or what have you...such philistines.
I liked Palo Alto enough when I lived out there (well, technically right next door in Mountain View), but I could never justify paying a mortgage out there -- unless I was very, very rich (which I'm not--- yet). I moved back to Chicago we're I can get double the house for half the price. The Chicago tech scene is not as huge as Silicon Valley but it's big enough for my needs.
Twitter meetup spawns global charity event
Small edit: do what you love, and do it with a decent business plan.

Then, your love will lead to enough hard work to make the business plan succeed.
It is a very well written commentary. In my view, each of us has a decision: quality vs. reward. You won't get to quality by constantly thinking about the reward.

I disagree that you can't get to the reward if that's all you want. Sales is all about the reward as is investment.

I agree on the article's main point: Entrepeneurship (as opposed to sales or investing) should be about the quality of the business. The employees, the customers, and the talented investors all know that the surest path to success is well-targeted quality.
There are many great things about London - cheap public transport is definitely not one of them. The TfL network is certainly quite expansive, but is also rather expensive.

There's also the generally high cost-of-living, the shitty broadband connectivity (as in the companies are crap, expensive, and bandwidth-limited), and a near-universal hatred of bicycles. Also, it's cold and gray 95% of the year.
Pretty large. Those guys are in a rather select minority, and one could reasonably argue that their original intent was not to pursue practical knowledge. It just happened that they were amongst the lucky few academics whose work was valuable in its time. It does happen, occasionally, but it isn't the driving force behind most scientific/mathematical research.
I had the exact same thoughts. I also found it interesting that YC even invested in the company at that stage - it wasn't exactly a "seed" round, financially. I guess the existing investors figured (in hindsight: correctly) that YC would boost the company sufficiently to make it worth what I can only assume must have been a lower valuation. 4% at $20k would put the whole company at $500k, and ~$350k had already been invested! (GBP:USD was near 2:1 in 2007 [1])

[1] http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=GBPUSD=X&t=5y&l=on&#...
Agreed about angel/vc, but not legal/accounting (Chicago is a legal and accounting hub!). To compensate for being in Chicago, you do have to be creative finding VCs and angels. I'm doing a startup here in Chicago anyway. But I compensate for the lack of Chi-VC by having 3 other co-founders who live in San Francisco, and making trips out to the West Coast about once a month. :-)
I second that, plus importing with CSV is incredibly easy for most applications.

Just make sure you have matching fields, for example a first, middle and last name instead of just first/last so it plays well with Outlook.
Building an Inverted Index with Hadoop and Pig
This is especially good advice if you are in the Java world. Configuration, deployment, and all round administration skills are part of the tool kit that you need even if none of this is your primary responsibility.

I would also add JavaScript and Ajax to the necessary skill set. If you are a freelancer or job hunting, JS, HTML, and CSS increase the number of gigs that you can tackle. Even when the backend is your primary responsibility, you will often be called upon to do a quick fix in the other areas.

Farming out design is good advice, but often the HTML and CSS is not really usable, so you will need to know enough to make it work on your site.
Failure: The Secret to Success [video]
One of the guys that trimmed my maple tree this fall used to be a garbage man, and he said the hours were terrible and the pay wasn't very good.

This surprised me because I also thought garbage men made pretty good money. We do have competing trash services here, perhaps that makes a difference.

Just a data point.
The problem is not the complexity of the api but how verbose it is. Having to type

(setf (gethash "foo" *hash*) "OH HAI")

just for something as trivial as "hash['foo'] = "OH HAI"" is really too much work and a significant disincentive to using hash tables.
From what I can see (and I've read up a bit and worked with some of the big guys in the field) TDD is a "small shop" kind of philosophy. I would think it would work best in teams of 1-4 developers. 4 or over, however, and it seems like it would fall apart. People factor out code in different ways -- for instance, some naturally lean towards functional code while others lean toward imperative code. In modern languages, you can use both. Some folks love interfaces while others won't stand for a public variable. How code "smells" (and I hate that term) looks to me like it can vary a whole lot depending on the programmer. So in larger teams, you can't have 10 different versions of code re-factoring. You have to expect some consistency. There is a place for group decisions. Some team-level thinking ahead makes sense.

But on a 1 or 2 person team? That looks like a completely different animal.

What we're finding, however (as consultants), is that companies are getting sold on lightweight technologies that work great at the small team level and then don't work so hot with fifty thousand developers. It's complex.

Thanks for the feedback. HappyTDDCoderCount++
Poorly.

With many assumptions and the ignoring of many variables combined with one (or more) of these business valuation methods:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valuation_(finance)
I didn't notice that. He went to a good school and got a good job, but I don't think he inherited either.

And in a sense, it's more inspiring, since he's giving up a six-figure job to start something new, while most of us would be giving up significantly less.
i came from houston.

austin wins hands down. the bus system's a lot better. the houston rail line is mostly useless unless you work in the medical center.

besides it's possible to bike in austin.
Sadly, it sounds like Live Current was not the right company to sell to (or taking their stock was not the right way to sell to them):

http://finance.google.com/finance?q=live+current

I wonder how many startups succeed even if they're attached to a sinking parent company.
This is a great idea. I'd love to see a language that was somehow compatible with mod_php yet was redesigned with sound principles in mind. PHP is handicapped in that it started as more or less of a tool for counters, and also because its inner workings don't seem to change very much.

It is because of this that major new features seem to be dirtily patched on: Namespace separators require a completely new syntax, anonymous functions that inherently can't behave like closures. Also, the language just seems like a meddle of things that have to be forcibly patched together to work together. For example:

array(1,2,3)[0]

(new FooObject())->some_method();

Neither of those work, yet the equivalent works in other languages. Personally, I like the idea of a language where new features emerge out of smaller bits bit put together in different ways. This is clearly not how it works in PHP.
Yes, I was surprised that it got no mention in the article. Still, it isn't a great idea to rely too much on any one source for all of this information. I do think that there is a very real problem caused by the lack of hard copies for most of our data. A lot of what we know about history comes to us in the form of written records, especially things such as letters or private journals. Computer communication works great at the time of use, but I do think that the general public needs to be more aware of the need to create permanent hard copies of anything that they might want to be saved for the future.
I'd be fine hearing some subjective rants in favor...
> So, once again the question, how can bottom up programming work without some level of top down design?

Ever heard of something called... LINUX!?
Title should be "Perceived problems with hash-tables in Common Lisp"...

It's true that it would be interesting to have native syntax for hash-tables so you could read and dump them like you can lists and arrays and other stuff. Surprisingly the article doesn't even mention that which is the only real problem with CL's hashtables, aside from the inability to define arbitrary lookup mechanisms beyond eq, eql, equal and equalp...
What kinds of complaints have you heard about them?