skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I understand what you're saying, but I think most people feel (correctly) like companies who ask for the credit card info up-front are banking on people just being too lazy or forgetful to cancel. While that might result in some decent short-term cashflow, we don't feel that it's a smart move long-term, as that's not really the kind of relationship we want to have with our customers.
A PhD, even in the hard sciences, is rarely worth while monetarily. Most people driven/smart enough to successfully complete a PhD at a top school would also excel in the corporate world (or law/business/med school). Financially, it probably isn't a good investment.

But, if you love your field, it does qualify you to do more interesting work and could still make the rest of your career more fun for you.
I'm personally of the idea to leave kids out of your own profession. If they're curious and ask questions, sure, show them things and help them satisfy their interest, but don't push it beyond that. That should hold true for anything they're curious about, though.

Too early for my daughter in any case; right now in terms of computer interaction she's limited to watching videos of babies and animals on Youtube, and attempting to grab and drool on the microphone when we talk with her grandparents via Skype.
Lyris HQ's Clicktracks Analytics solution has something in place, but it's hard to implement.
Second Life... Linden Scripting Language gets compiled down to bytecode now, and you can use other .Net languages.
This is already being discussed here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=444682

The link there points to a blog writing about the article linked here.
We'll definitely look into that error. Thanks for the feedback!

(Note to self: check site in Google Chrome next time!)
Handling Very Large CSV and XML Files in Python
One reason I think it should be required is to do vetting up front. That is, say you are offering something ISP/colo-like through your SaaS, something along the lines of a web proxy service. Not good to have people on free trials doing illegal things and having no way to identify them.

I understand credit cards are not great vetting but it's better than nothing in these situations. I wish there were a way around this (which is mostly why I'm posting this comment, perhaps someone can relieve me of any ignorance).

"Fax me a copy of your license" is out of the question ... the only thing I've come up with is to have a pretty crippled free demo that at least gets you a chance to see half of it in action.
Github Part III
Why Python should adopt the mono runtime
My favorite quote:

"Nothing will work unless you do."

Maya Angelou.

Works on many levels - you have to keep your nose to the grind stone, take ownership of all the problems you have, especially as an entrepreneur.

At the same time take care of yourself, because if you burn yourself out no one can replace you - which is bad for you and your business.
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If you work in a team where there is a difference between the programmers and the architects, GET OUT! In a healthy environments programmers get to help shape the direction of the product and everyone should be able to voice their opinions or concerns so that the best decisions can be made.
I live in Southern New England. We get more than our share of rain in the Winter. We also get temperatures rising just above freezing each day so that snow melts and ice forms each evening - wonderful for commutes. At present, my snow pile is level with our 6 foot fence. I have no place to put new snow fall. Only having rain through the Winter, with temperatures well above freezing, would be a blessing.
For all we know, many of the layoffs are non-developers. Plus, there are developers that are sub-par at any firm of Microsoft's size so maybe they're trimming them as well.

Hopefully it isn't as bad as it sounds.
I have the impression that, if anything, corporate America has the opposite problem: too many corporations being forcefully taken over, loaded up with debt to pay high officer salaries and give dividends, then left to flounder and lay people off because of a short-term strategy design to get a few people rich.
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MetroPacific Bank is what Orange County individuals and businesses use for checking and commercial loans in Irvine, CA.
Definitely a cleaner design than BlueSwarm. Nice work.
I would say that, at first, most people do NOT know that greyed-out boxes can't be changed. They only know after attempting to click on it a few times.

The key is to make it not look like an edit box, then people won't think they can interact with it. You can see it in practice here at HN: edit a submission and you can see that the URL is not in a text-box, so the text can appear like any other text on the page.

In general, making things harder to read can't be good, and should never become a standard.
Its a great resource for anyone who (like me) learns by doing rather than browsing through on-line documentation.
There is a large company I used to work for that we all use everyday and most of their services are free, but before I left they were discussing using credit cards as a means to defend against abuse in a free service. (The specific service being discussed hasn't been released yet) While it would cut back greatly on abuse, it'd probably significantly reduce adoption. I was always against the move... but in the start up I'm working on now, I feel it'd be more convenient for both sides to just take care of the credit card stuff up front. The big difference, to me at least, is that what I'm working on is a paid service.
I think it is time to regulate market capitalization (not more than 2 times quarterly revenue) of all listed companies.

It would 'enhance entrepreneurship' if a software company had the same price/sales ratio as a steel company?
Do you not think the competitors are going to have to reduce heads too?

There is some denial amongst the startup community at the moment - this recession will be very long, very painful and few will be exempt - those that cut early and cut deep may survive okay - if they have revenue.
HN is read by people with an interest in and understanding of computers. Many of them are either looking to employ people or to be employed. There's a natural match-up there.

But if there was a HN jobs forum it might soon become dominated by people not like us ("us" meaning HN readers/posters). This would seriously devalue it as a place to find high quality jobs and high quality workers.

So how could thisd possibility be countered? One way might be to have a "secret" that people who post to HN typically know or could easily find out.

For example there was a Usenet newsgroup (I forget which one -- alt.sysadmin.recovery perhaps) where the only way to post on it was to forge an approval header, and disclosing this secret was disapproved of. Of conser a recent job posting to getacoder which involved solving the Halting Problem ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=376238 ). There could be something like that on the system and anyone who takes it seriously reveals themself to be clueless and doesn't get let in.

Or maybe you could have a forum that has tow levels of membership, one for the clueful (who can post jobs for free) and another for the clueless (who must pay). People looking for jobs get to see which jobs are posted by the clueful and which are not, only if they themselves are clueful. And how to become a clueful member is a secret that (i) only True Hackers can work out for themselves, and (ii) it is forbidden to communicate with others.
Like what? Flipping burgers?

That "better use" may be elusive for some.
Very cool :)

The guy that wrote this hangs out at irc://irc.freenode.net/googleajaxapis which is also a great place to ask questions on any of the APIs :D
How can I be off? I didn't draw any conclusions; I merely explained that the author's statement translates into one of two possibilities, and asked which they meant.

It seems to me you're saying it's the latter case: that new Lisps will get an advantage from being built on existing VMs that new "mainstream" languages don't need. Maybe. But in that case, let's follow the thread further: what is it about Lisp dialects that makes them need this extra crutch?

Not the semantics, surely. I'm sure if you gave ordinary schmoes a language that looked familiar, they wouldn't balk at it because it happened to have clean semantics. Is it merely the name "Lisp?" You could solve that problem by refusing to call it a Lisp. So all that's left is syntax. You're saying, in effect, that a language with s-expression syntax needs the extra boost of being on a popular VM to make it.

I don't know if that's true or not. It might be. But it is interesting to know that this is what the argument reduces to.
they have/had plenty of cash in the bank to hire experts from other fields.
Dead wood must be hacked from the tree.

It's what Ballmer should have really said, but couldn't.
With a name like MightyBrand, while I think you've got a solid design already, it just doesn't come across to me as something bold enough to sport the name 'MightyBrand'. I'd look to add bold, heavy, red coloring rather than orange. The white feels clean, but it also feels a bit too open.

Also, in terms of conversions, placing the icons with links to the social sites themselves will drive some traffic away. Instead, create case studies for each one with very bold and obvious calls to action on the pages inviting the user to get involved.

The screenshot is good, but the border is bigger around the screenshot than the 'Free 30-day Trial' button. I'd sugegst either making the button 'louder' or simply increase the border's size, or decrease that of the screenshot.

Internally, one thing I notice is very wide columns for your content. This makes the text a burden to read. Make them more narrow. it looks like the line-height is good, but it may need to be bigger. A lot of the text is bold when it shouldn't be. You want a larger contrast between the content and the headers.

The Pricing page is a good start, but it's too bland right now. Spice it up by adding short descriptions of each benefit under the price chart. Add background colors to the chart items themselves. make the most important item larger and in the center. The little blurb underneath could do with some shortening I think. "Special Request? Contact us." As it is, it's too much text for something so simple. You can have more text on the contact page if need be.
The 25th Anniversary Of Apple's "1984"
RabbitMQ: Capability-based security for messaging
Spam is a problem in all systems. You'll have to deal with it somehow.

Also try Drupal and modules.
Nokias Profit Drops 69%
Ottawa boy's invisible invention warns birds about deadly windows
to quote Gruber:
> Helps put context around Apple’s results.
The Printed Blog, a Chicago start-up, plans to reprint blog posts on regular paper
Awesome, yes, but I'm not really sure I'd consider this "hacking." We're about to have thousands of 13-year-olds running around changing road signs to references to bodily functions.
Pyevolve: Python frameowrk for genetic algorithms
I don't disagree with this, but I will say that the argument has lost a lot of its punch since all the air went out of the investment banks and the real estate agencies, and their former employees were reduced to wandering the landscape carrying signs: WILL INFLATE BUBBLES FOR FOOD.

A hard science Ph.D. is a bad financial investment. But, as bad investments go, you could do much, much worse.

The bigger problem that afflicts a lot of Ph.Ds -- especially the ones in this article -- is not so much financial as spiritual: They have a gauzy vision of the Intellectual Lifestyle that they just can't let go of. I'm fortunate in that I didn't emerge from grad school expecting to be raptured into the Academy. Studying engineering was a very helpful dose of reality, as was the emerging Internet, which made it possible to sit at a desk deep inside the university and still experience the words of people who had non-academic jobs and were enthusiastic about them, like Greenspun and, later, Spolsky and PG.
It took me a while to get to that decision.
Ah, now we know that programming is an art! Nice discovery!
Yet another reason why this company is a complete business failure. Techcrunch wrote some ridiculous sap piece about how Tesla "deserved" some of the Auto bailout money. It doesn't sound like anyone at that company knows anything besides engineering.

I'm not sure why anyone would bother investing in a company that gets it's production cost estimates off by more than 50%.
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As creations become digital they tend to become shared, ownerless goods. We can turn this around and say that in this realm of bits, property itself becomes a more social endeavor.

This is very true. It's really remarkable how the distribution of goods that can be efficiently digitized has really changed the landscape of industry.
Pricing really seems to be the most troubling point. I really think there should be some free scaled back option. The question is where to draw the line of what you can give away for free and what people absolutely must pay for. I guess you could draw the line at "things you can't do with a Google Alert" so things like responding directly, monitoring multiple brands, filtering, etc. But at least let me see buzz about 1 brand for free. Then I'll sign up and I'll consider paying for premium services.
Yeah...we're not designers, and it shows :) Really appreciate you taking the time to put together so much feedback in that area. We've had some guidance from the designer who did our logo and helped us with the layout, but we're still working on cleaning things up. I'll add your items to the list :)
I agree. A more appropriate title for this article: "A script kiddies guide to cracking programmable road signs"
save thread
I've met several startup founders who say the best candidates are the ones who get into top technical Ph.D. programs and then drop out to join startups. Even in technical fields, it seems that the value of the Ph.D. is sometimes not in the specific knowledge gained, but in their value as an indication of merit... i.e. few Ph.D. grads go on to work on their thesis.

I also second the comment about Ph.D's in the humanities -- for the most part, they are a set up for a job in academia.
Polaroid rescued
Is there a shortcut for "Run"?
The Mini-Microsoft blog comments are a good place to read Microsoft employee reactions to this: https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=7555958&postID=...
Good point. Hey, aren't Lisp s-expressions just a less powerful form of XML nested structures? I think Lisp should be re-written in XML. So this:

(defun factorial (n)
(return (if (< n 2) 1
(factorial (-1 n)))))

Would become:

<!DOCTYPE xmllisp>
<program>
<function name="factorial">
<parameters>n</parameters>
<return>
<if><condition>n &lt 2</condition>
<iftrue>1</iftrue>
<iffalse>
<functionCall name="factorial">n - 1</functionCall>
</iffalse>
</if>
</return>
</function>
</program>

Which I think we can all agree makes much more sense.
JS3 = CouchDB + Helma + JQuery
Do Consumers Care About Carbon Footprints?
This is a good opportunity / excuse to get rid of some of the severely under performing people.
surely the "support" staff of the whitehouse remain?
Glad I could help! You can find me easily if you need any more input.
5% really isn't that many. Sounds like a good excuse to cut the chafe.
A real life Onion article.
If you can borrow anything you needed without possessing it, you gain the same benefits with fewer disadvantages. If this was a magic rental store, where most of the gear was stored "downstairs" in a virtual basement, then whenever you summoned an item or service it would appear at your command.

To a large extent, the super rich already live in exactly this manner. I would not be at all surprised to learn that Donald Trump doesn't own a car, but you can bet that when "The Donald" summons a car, one appears.
Do Naked Singularities Break the Rules of Physics?
There's only so much to reinvest it in. Once you have ample cash reserves, it's usually best to issue dividends, which is what they've done.

I think it is time to regulate market capitalization (not more than 2 times quarterly revenue) of all listed companies.

You have to be trolling. What about growth companies and growth rates? What about companies that issue dividends vs. ones that don't? What about _profit margins_?
Relics of the good old days
No one ever completed the C-like (or JavaScript-like) lisp syntax, which I suspect could be implemented via reader macros. The question would then be, why would someone write JavaScript for execution in a lisp VM? Which would make an excellent context in which to point out that JavaScript is getting very popular, and while Rhino get some use, there is no clear winner in the non-browser JavaScript runtime.
Need to stop kidding yourself that you are learning on HN - it's entertainment.
Agreed. I don't understand why more large companies understand this method...

The best way to build the best X, is to build 5 of them.. by the 5th you're pretty awesome at building X.
Seems like too many people believe instead, in meticulous up front design analysis etc etc.

The other point is that in my experience, the rewrites take less and less time to write, as you know more and more.
"Microsoft announced today that it will be laying off up to 5,000 people over the next 18 months... Microsoft also says that it will continue to hire..."

I don't know what percentage of those are developers, but my guess is that it will include a significant percentage. Does anyone else see a problem with this approach to hiring? To me, it seems to reflect a lot of the negative aspects of the "career" software engineer. After a few years on the payrolls of mega-corp, you get replaced by someone younger, cheaper and with more recent knowledge. Perhaps it's inevitable with a competitive labor market... just kinda sucks if you ask me.
Microsoft just doesn't get the web.

Their servers crash from the expectable load when windows 7 is released for download, they can't seem to streamline or synergise any of their web properties, and frankly most of it is simply bad or broken. Just yesterday I sent an application to them and got a server fault after having spent 30 minutes filling in a badly designed form. I sent them a mail and haven't heard anything back. Not that I expected to.

Even their main site, microsoft.com, is broken. The menu is off by a few pixels. Even in IE.
Why is everyone just congratulating PG? Livingston is the one who has to carry it around for 9 months and give birth.

Kidding kidding, but congrats to Jessica too!
I don't know why people are putting this sort of work on GitHub instead of dotfiles. GitHub takes a while to load, and there are two wasted clicks here (the file in question, then "Raw"). At the very least he could have linked directly to the raw file.

I keep my Vim stuff on FreeHg, but that's because we're talking about possibly hundreds of files when you consider the color schemes, doc files, plugins, etc. More importantly, it's awesome to be able to quickly pull in all of my vim stuff onto any machine with Hg and I needed this setup to easily sync between work, the server, and home.
I think your missing the point. We already have form generates so filling out a from specification is what the programmer is doing. At some point there is nothing left to abstract and you need to specify what's happening. Doing that is programming and it's boring. For any complex system it becomes repetitive in novel ways such as: What's the best layout for the form? What data are we willing to take? etc. And once that's done you are always going to need to fine tune it which is boring.

PS: The logical next step would be to hand the customer your form generating software and get them to solve their problem, but that just ends up with someone debugging a horrible Access database. (Or whatever system you build.)

In summery: Specifying a specific form specification to collect or show useful information is programming. (Say that 3 times fast.)
In spite of being textual, I think most flaming really happens at an emotional level. The best flamebait pushes people's buttons (perhaps unintentionally).
And more than $5,000!
I'll give you my own perspective with cars. I have owned some great cars and currently own a Jaguar XK8. Often it ties up capital and these cars can depreciate at an alarming rate. I got 'buyers blues' spending that kind of money and the novelty factor soon wears off. Contrast this with joining a supercar club - I joined one in the UK called Vitesse (www.vitessesupercars.com) and they have a range of vehicles that are there on a kind of timeshare basis. It sounds expensive, but in reality there's MORE fun driving them without the worry of expensive servicing, depreciation and the benefit of having different vehicles to choose from. Since I joined over a year ago I have less need to actually 'possess' and my life is more about the experiences now
We're on it.
Browsershots : Test your website in different browsers
Don't ever work for a place that doesn't have fun things to code?
Tesla's problem is that they are a low volume maker. When you only need 100 transmissions, you have to pretty much pay msrp.

So while a transmission for Honda costs them $500, a transmission for Tesla costs $10,000. Same with all other parts.

The Tesla sedan might help here....although now that the gas is back down to less than $1.50 I don't see it selling in high enough volume(10-20,000+ units) to offset the costs.
Because the dotfiles homepage says "Latest files uploaded" and lists dates that are three years old. If it's not dead, it's apparently working to give that impression.
Maybe they should call it JXML. Though this name is a bit bland and could be spiced up with a liberal sprinkling of exclamation marks: J!XML!

When Microsoft bring out their implementation it will be called "Visual Studio Active Team System IronXML# Server Pro Ultimate".
awesome... not a great solution, but this will definitely help. Thanks for the tip.
Wordpress Plugin Admin Page Bling
I thought it took ages to get an application published on the App store and Apple has to review each app?
Almost OT, but I hate literature with the criticism at the front. I find it almost impossible to skip without reading a few words and there are always spoilers (this happened to me on Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary, and The Pearl, and some Stephen King stuff). But if they were an afterword instead, no one would read them...

I hate soundtrack previews for the DVD I'm about to watch for exactly the same reason.
Do you have a source for this? I'm genuinely curious, since I thought the "crypto == munitions" policies all died off years ago.

As far as maintaining proper records of who has which device, I say "bravo!" Just like stolen and lost laptops fueled much of the last 5-6 years' ID theft fears, I think mis-appropriated mobile devices will cause a whole lot of people a whole lot of stress as more and more critical information finds its way into pockets and purses.