skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
phpEd is excellent, Zend's PHP IDE is great too. Both have code completion and search through project and other great features that's not available on Notepad++ or other text editors.
yeah, I'll wait until a more reliable source starts quoting him before I consider this anything more than sensationalism.
"Could VC be a Casualty of the Recession"

No, the War in Iraq is.
News flash: Some applications aren't suited for the public cloud
Ask HN:  Value of Technical/Programming certifications?
My company is CONSIDERING, and by that I mean, asking for opinions about, certifications. Specifically, what certifications if any should be considered for employees. These could be business/domain related, or purely technical.

My company's business is writing software for "large institutions"; which industry isn't relevant for what I'm asking here.

I'm curious as to anyone's thoughts about programming certifications. Are they worthwhile to pursue for existing employees, worthwhile to consider when looking to hire, contra-indicative, something else? All opinions welcome.

A priori thanks.
There's a difference. When a small company gets acquired by IBM, the IBM people stay in charge. The little fish gets swallowed.

Here, the startup is suddenly in charge of the behemoth. So there's no real reason to assume everything is going to change for the worse.
Interesting results, wrong conclusions. Plus they didn't separate cause and effect.

"He demonstrated tht [sic] the number of years since a society made the transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture is highly correlated to the level of income in the country today. That is, the earlier the agriculture development, the higher the income."

Or exactly the other way around - the better the person is at producing, the earlier they managed to switch to agriculture. Or in less politically correct terms, the smarter the people, the more they make today, and the earlier they managed to figure out agriculture.

"Second, the influence of population origins suggests that there is something that human families and communities transmit from generation to generation — perhaps a form of economic culture, a set of attitudes or beliefs, or informally transmitted capabilities — that is of at least similar importance to economic success as are more widely recognized factors like quantities of physical capital and even human capital in the narrower sense of formal schooling. If we understand which culturally transmitted factors are important and what contributes to their emergence and propagation, we might be able to design policy interventions that could help less successful groups and countries to close their developmental gaps."

Uh hu. Or maybe they are just smarter, and intelligence is heritable.

But they can't say that since it basically means that there is nothing poor counties can do, except encourage immigration and intermarriage. So they make a fluff feel-good conclusion.
This is just a fun project. There are a ton of things I want to do with it still, but tell me what you think if you give it a look.
Importance of Finding a Canvas Printing Company That Offers Good Customer Support
It can be tough to find a canvas printing company that you like. You need one that will work with what you need to have printed to canvas and one that will do it quickly and with out errors. You need one that will not charge an arm and a leg. In short you need a quick, quality, low cost canvas printing company that you can trust. So you search, you ask friends and family who they trust, you look on the internet. You read reviews and maybe go to chat rooms, bulletin boards or forums to get all the information that you can before you select a company to do the work you want. You choose the company that has the most to offer and you expect to get what you pay for right? So what happens if you don’t get that? What do you do if there is an error in billing? What should you do if there is a problem with getting your work completed by the scheduled date? And heaven forbid, what do you do if you get your print and it is nothing like what you ordered?
Exercises to get rid of man boobs
Man boobs exercises - Follow these exercises to get rid of man boobs. Excellent man boobs exercise.
Embargoes are stupid and unbloglike
IMHO, I would consider none of them to be relevant. While, in some cases, they provide minimal assurance that someone knows a very specific set of skills to a degree that allows them to pass a test, it is not indicative of the kind of person I would want to hire (I wouldn't say it is contra-indicative, though seeing the Microsoft certifications on a resume might make me throw up in my mouth a little). I want to work with people who love what they do. Certifications indicate mere competence. I'm looking for more than competence.

And, I've been involved in hiring decisions in the past (mostly my replacements), and I don't believe certifications have ever played a big role on the resume of anyone who impressed me. But, I would rarely hire an employee (rather than a contractor performing one task) for a specific skill, and that's all a certification shows you.
Things I don’t like about Google Chrome
Nothing new - Bush had very young speechwriters too: http://209.85.129.132/search?q=cache:-EuLK3eajXIJ:americasfu...

Now, I'd be fascinated to hear why speechwriters tend to be young. Because, unlike other political roles, it doesn't require decades' work building up contacts? Because younger writers are somehow fresher or more energetic?

It's certainly an odd, interesting phenomenon. But it's Washington as a whole, not just Obama.
I took the Java Programmer Certification back in the day, and I remember thinking that it was not even that bad. I think if every programmer in that particular company I had been working for had taken the certification, it might have brought some improvements. At least you got to know some ins and outs of Java. It was very cheap, too, or so I remember (maybe 100€, could that be right)? I studied from a book, don't think taking expensive seminars for it would be necessary.

That said, I certainly wouldn't expect any advantages from putting the certification on my resume, and I wouldn't use it to judge the quality of programmers (as SwellJoe says in his comment). But for an existing team that does not consist of Rockstars, why not?
You underestimate institutional momentum. Try watching 'Yes, Minister', which is a far-too-believable take on how the bureaucrats keep politicians in line.
One Of The Coolest iPhone Apps Gets Even Better
Office already had a pretty poor interface, so maybe it's more to do with that?

I was pretty disappointed they didn't try anything different, but I guess the aim of that was to attract people who actually like Office in the first place.
I like it, very easy to get into. Obj-C and Cocoa are a killer combination. Definitely get Aaron Hillegass' "Cocoa for Programming for Mac OS X" now in 3rd edition.
Serving websites from svn checkout considered harmful
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/productivity

shouldn't take more than 3 weeks to read thru 187 threads!

Like ev'body else, skim/read David Allen's "Get Things DONe", my favorite tactics(not neces. from book) are daily priority lists, turning off productivity devices (email, cell phone, pager, and you don't have to read snail mail every day), controlled work environment (ambient lighting, noise-reducing headphones, good laptops, external keyboard/mouse)
Qt Creator IDE Beta Released (under GPL)
Native Client - early research release
Winter medical myths 'debunked'
http://far33d.tumblr.com/post/30017717/on-the-polar-express-...

I guess I should write more frequently and more in depth.
Retyred is on to something here. Outside of web startups I think the trend may have actually gone the opposite way over the past 20 years or so. Companies are getting bigger, not smaller. Here are a few:

Retail: just went through a mass-consolidation. The more dynamic firms, the "places to be" if you wanted to do something interesting in retail, were the ones doing the consolidating. Think Wal-Mart, Home-Depot, Walgreens, Best-Buy etc... While it may not be interesting to the crowd here, innovation in things like supply-chain has been stunning.

Consumer Goods: P&G has been unstoppable, and that's where most people in that business want to go because that's where the interesting things were happening.

Consumer Electronics: Dell, Apple, Sony etc... have crushed everyone.

Banking: Ditto. Where did all the ambitious young financial engineers want to go? Easy: Goldman-Sachs. Not that innovation here was a good thing... but that's another story.

Agriculture: ADM, Monsanto and the agri-business giants have almost completely taken over. Small farms are near-extinct.

This list could go on for a while, but I'll stop. I think you see a similar winner-take-all pattern playing out in most industries. It'd be interesting to see the demographics of all this: the percentages of people employed by institutions of different sizes.

Perhaps pg is right that it's starting to happen though. Maybe the web world is at the vanguard of what will be a broad counter-trend. I suspect that won't be as strong a force as he thinks though - the advantages of being big are still too great in too many fields.

Then again, maybe the mass-consolidation was artificial. Maybe all the M&As owe as much to artificially cheap money as to natural advantages of scale. I guess we'll see.
I'd pretty much settled on JsUnit as the best of what was available (although there are a lot of things that could be better), but... whoa. Resig is a good example of a superhacker.
The icon: algorithms aren't beautiful
The Perfect Desktop - Linux Mint 6 (Felicia)
GoDaddy To Shut Down Standard Tactics, LLC
The clearest description of what CS researchers talk about when they talk about "intelligence" (see http://www.vetta.org/definitions-of-intelligence/) is probably a production function from economics.
Tech videos - Slinkset
Adobe AIR Now Available For Linux
I installed Ubuntu on my eeePC and the wireless works fine on my WPA2 network. Though I don't recall having a problem with the default Linux OS, either.
I was originally an economics major, but I've managed to switch out into a major in math and a minor in CS (the study of AI was just too seductive). One area of CS theory that is pretty straightforward to pick up for an economist is algorithmic game theory: (http://www.amazon.com/Algorithmic-Game-Theory-Noam-Nisan/dp/...). There are also some strong connections to reinforcement learning and multi-agent systems (indeed much new research in computational economics is focused on multi-agent systems).
But having now played with it a little... I have mixed reactions. I really like the Firebug integration, but it makes it hard to run the tests outside Mozilla. And I'm not sure I like the whole firebug.ok(...) approach -- seems like the calls need to be at the top level for Firebug to pick them up, and that makes it painful to do something like run through a loop making assertions. There are obviously work-arounds (build lists, assert they are equivalent), but I'm not sure I see the win.

But, Resig's track record is good enough to make this a project worth monitoring...
I'm definitely considering a 'FireUnitLite' type project which would have the same functionality but in a little JavaScript file that you could include in your site.

I'm not sure what you mean by this, though: "seems like the calls need to be at the top level for Firebug to pick them up". Did you mean fireunit.ok?
That was a good read. He says: "We want to charge the maximum amount that our customers are willing to pay." At the risk of being pedantic, the more precisely correct answer is to charge each customer how much that customer is willing to pay. All other things being equal, that would be optimal pricing. All other things, of course, aren't equal.

That is why versioning exists. It lets you better approximate getting each person to pay how much they'd be willing to pay without all the hassle. He has that much right.

The part he neglects to mention is why three versions is a magic number. He hints at the reason but it should be stated more often. People do not like complexity so having -too- many choices becomes overwhelming. Three lies in a sweet spot where people tend not to be overwhelmed (small, medium, large).

There is a more important reason, though, and that is the aversion to extremes. People are averse to choosing any extreme without good cause. Three is the minimum number to take advantage of this. If you had just two versions, the best way to force people to upgrade to the better and more expensive version is by simply introducing a new super-expensive third option. This causes angst in people who might otherwise buy the cheapest.

Hence why everything comes in small/medium/large, etc. This is also why the "default" position is always the middle, and you have to ask for the others specifically. Use words for the lowest like "basic" or "starter" etc. In general, versioning in threes is done to force "most" people into the middle option and let you profit more on your "power users" in the high-end (for example, I am a known "power-user" at Wendy's).
Fed makes sweeping changes in reg's for credit card lenders
I posted this as a follow up because of the lively discussion two days ago on Credit Card lending here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=399365
Dump the ads until you get traffic. They're the first thing you see.
Objective-C, the language: it's a nice, thin object-oriented layer on top of vanilla C.

It's super-easy to use to make object-oriented wrappers around vanilla-C libraries, compared to C++, and b/c Objective-C is conceptually simpler than C++ there's fewer ways to shoot yourself in the foot.

There's not much point using it for new development unless your project is very self-contained or you're targeting Mac OS X or the iphone; moreover, Apple's pushed out Objective-C 2.0 recently, and are in the driver's seat for the language's future.

Personally, I prefer Java for the kinds of products Objective-C is supposed to be used for (desktop/mobile software). The tradeoffs:

- objective-c is lighter-weight and very simple to code in; Java is a lot clunkier and tedious to write; winner: obj-c

- java has a huge set of support infrastructure and tooling; obj-c has xcode (which is ok, but not great); winner: java

- java has generics that're mostly type-safe; obj-c doesn't really have any equivalent. I like type-safety when I can get it, so winner is java.

If you're learning objective-c to do Cocoa or UIKit development, you will spend much more time learning your way around Cocoa and/or UIKit than learning Objective-C; objective-c is like a week at the absolute longest, but Cocoa takes months to learn.

The first commandment of Cocoa: always respect convention; there's lots of semi-documented conventions (in terms of naming methods and arguments and ivars and so forth), and you should follow any conventions you see unless you understand what you give up by not following that particular convention.

There are two golden rules for Cocoa:

rule 1: if you're coding up something that seems like something any realistic application would have to include, you should take another look @ the docs b/c apple probably gave it to you already.

rule 2: a lot of functionality you'd expect to be in utility classes is buried in base classes (like NSObject, NSArray, NSDate, etc.).
The beginning of the end for the Apple iMac?
HN can be better than funny.
Well, when I hear that something is a mix of a bunch of other things, I tend to picture the best about those things.

So if Ruby had:

* The clarity of Python
* As well as the batteries-includedness of Python
* With the flexibility of Perl
* As well as a library managed as well as CPAN
* With the tooling of Smalltalk
* But without the weird VM business

Then Ruby would be much more attractive to me. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with Ruby, it's a fine language. I'm just saying that I hear those three things and I picture some sort of uber-language.
I finally understand MVC! Cocoa makes really good use of Controllers. Even in a lot of the Smalltalks, controllers languish a bit.

The syntax for calling methods is from Smalltalk, BTW. It's just different. It makes the method names document the arguments.
1. I mean being able to support foo 2.1 and 2.1.3 simultaneously.

Like every Linux distro shipped GCC296 and GCC29x for years?

It seems the Ruby community (and the Python community to a lesser extent) have a Not Invented Here syndrome.

2. Even if what RubyGems does is supported by dpkg et al., this does nothing to help the language or programs written in the language support this

Yes it does. Dpkg and RPM provide a standard mechanism to query if software is installed (foo), including optionally what verion is installed (foo >= 2.1).

3. I think the greater bigotry exists in assuming that Ruby is somehow special, and deserves to write unsigned binaries all over systems although all other software does not. Python, Java, and other languages all make the effort to integrate into their environments rather than forcing a whole new mechanism of querying, fetching, downloading, verifying, and signature checking upon users.
Branding social networks the Japanese way: Put 'em on juice bottles and noodle cups
I went to a small panel led by Tim Train of Big Huge Games, with showings by Firaxis and a few smaller companies. For any position, they said the ONE thing they wanted from people trying to break in was finished, polished demos. To quote Time directly: "Polish, polish, polish."
He doesn't have a cane; he's got a walker, you insensitive clod!
Please use http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=398460 instead.
Can we live 1000 years?
It seems whenever something doesn't go right for Arrington a huge story comes out of it, 40 blogs write about it, and we hear about it for an entire week.

All I can say is: Yawn.
Or,
just postulating here,
maybe the capital that is transmitted is just that. Capital.
That and tribalism/nepotism could explain these results as well.
I dunno, maybe they should look into if maybe Europe invading the rest of the world and killing off various percentages of the populations could be a factor?
The best advice I have ever received: charge more. Whatever your first impression is, it is not enough.

You do not have enough confidence in your application. You see how much of a hack it is. You worry that someone could duplicate it all in a Jolt-fueled frenzy. And you're wrong.

2.5 years ago I was terrified of the prospect of taking money and asked for some folks opinions on whether my software was worth $15, $20, or $25. In my heart of hearts, I was sure it would not sell even at $15. Someone convinced me to charge $25, at the least. I wish I remember who -- the decision has made me over ten thousand bucks.

And I'll be raising prices one of these days. People will pay them -- that is all I need to know to justify a price increase.
This is actually pretty cool, but I'm genuinely curious why it's advantageous to write the routes in the controller files instead of one central place that's easily maintained?

CakePHP, (http://book.cakephp.org/view/46/Routes-Configuration) for example, can do all of what this does out of the box without the need for an application to monitor your routes.

REST also seems very well implemented : http://book.cakephp.org/view/476/REST

Am I missing something? Can someone explain the benefits?
Everybody sure seems to have a passionately held expert opinion about Apple ---reminds me of Christianity blogs.
Can enterprises trust the cloud?
Native Client: Google's craziest idea yet
Google Searches for Ad Dollars in Social Networks
Is Google undermining net neutrality?
Don't forget idioms, such a book should also include programming idioms, so you don't end up writing Java code in Python, etc.
IT leaders share green predictions for 2009
U.S. should spend $44 billion on broadband
Perhaps the person who submitted it did. Criticize the right person.
Yes. But I have since realized why -- the Firebug pain is only showing the results of running then. Doh.More coffee time.
Behind Lisp, Obj-C/Cocoa is the most fun I have had programming.
Wake Up Your Mac Faster
I didn't sell my first unit until I raised the price.
Definitely not a fan of automated tweeting. The first time I saw somebody using this, they thanked 7 people in a row for following them and it was like, "WTH?!" And as more followers came in, that's how it was. I unfollowed them ultimately.
How to Crack Windows XP and Vista Login Passwords | TechJaws
Ask YC: Auction-based pricing?
We are organizing a coworking office space in Sofia, Bulgaria. One of our biggest problems is finding the right price to ask for rent, as the difference in income for freelancers here can be as big as 15 times.

Therefore, we are leaning towards auctioning off the 30 office spaces one by one. (Technically, the 30 best bids will win, with the minimal bid being the cost of electricity and water for the person.)

Pros:

- Maximal usage of office space. We better have 1 person pay $5/mo instead of leaving the workspace empty.

- If this is a blind auction, the best bid could be as much as twice the average.

- We can accommodate people from different levels of income (e.g., underpaid artists).

Cons:

- Confusion on behalf of people wanting to sign up.

- If the auction is open (everyone can see the bids) we won't get such a good price, because we don't think there will be more than 100 people bidding for the 30 places.

- Winner's curse. People may feel tricked if they pay more than their peers.

- We won't require a contract from renters, so at the end of each newly open space will be auctioned off. People that pay a price too high could leave and immediately make a lower bid for next month.

- Cartels. Given the relatively small number of people bidding, we can have groups of people agreeing not to outbid each other and thus driving our average price down.

- If the average price falls under our total expenses we are in for cash flow problems. However, this could also happen with a fixed price - if 1/3 of the people leave we are screwed.

Thoughts? Ideas? Should we go with a blind auction?
Damn. I wish I went to a university that Google takes seriously.
I'm indifferent on whether we should want/attempt to live longer than natural life spans. Either way sounds good and bad.
Fingerprints Can Reveal Drug Use, Medical History
100 top sites for the year ahead
I'd be happy with any radical advance in anti-aging (even extra 50 years would be significant). Alas, I fear the breakthrough may not come within our lifetimes. The article does nothing to dispel my pessimistic notions.
I don't know, but I hope we get space colonization first, or it's going to get awfully crowded and competitive around here.
Certifications are contra-indicative in my experience, unless you are hiring someone to take multiple-choice tests (the answers to which are all over the web on "braindump" sites). I've often interviewed candidates with lots of certifications but when asked, so when did you use this feature/language/technology "for real"?, they come up blank. And of course, people who have been there and done that don't need to bother with certificates.
PHP Parallel Web Scraper
It would slow down technical innovation.

People grow accustomed to their surroundings and find newer technology suspicious and unneeded. That's why leaps in innovation are most easily embraced by the generations born with them (ie., current teenagers using computers for communication where their parents use phones).

If people can live 1000 years, that would cause overcrowding of the Earth. So if we don't expand to other planets, there would need to be some kind of very serious birth control.

This would increase the average age of Earth's population and, as discussed before, make them less interested in innovative products.
Uhh, dude, if you read your history then pretty much everywhere has invaded everywhere else at some point, and populations that aren't being invaded are just as often killing each other.

So while it happens, it's not a data point here.
Singapore would disprove that theory.