skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> which JavaScript/Ajax framework is the best

Well, personally I do plenty of Javascript (DOM manipulations, in-page logic and interactions...) but barely any "Ajax", and prefer jQuery. But isn't that in the end always the answer: "which one do you prefer"?
The Design behind Barack Obama's Presidential Campaign
The German tax system is said to be complicated, but if you keep your business simple, it's usually not that much of a problem. The tax that will most interest you is the income tax (as a natural person). There's a difference between the tax rate and the effective tax you pay. You can see this at this image (pink = effective): http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/de/a/ac/EStTarif.PNG
If you run your business as a freelancer, you will most often have no trouble with the tax stuff.

If you want to incorporate we just got a reformed company law that gives us the "Unternehmergesellschaft." It's like a LLC oder Ltd., you can start it with 1 EUR and it's made esp. for startups. You have to accumulate 25% of your profits until you reach 25,000 EUR and become a "real" limited liability comp. (here GmbH). Foreigners can incorporate, too. Taxation is the "Koerperschaftssteuer" (corporation tax) which is flat 15%, then you have the local "Gewerbesteuer" (business tax) which (in Berlin) costs you also around 15%. Dividends are taxed flat with 25%.
If you don't have good advisors you pay a bit more taxes with a company than as a natural person alone, but you have the limited liability, you can more easily hand out shares to investors, have more possibilities with financing, a.s.o.

Some more info there: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_in_Germany
Slightly is an understatement.
omg, this question is painful.

HTML and CSS are skills that are worth your /time/. Forget the money. You can improve your /own/ life with HTML and CSS.

The more you know, the more powerful you are!

Have you ever been approached by someone from the front end who said, "Man, it's hard to build this page the way I want it because the backend doesn't do XYZ?" and you look at them like, "figure it out!"

You only do that because you can't relate to them. You don't know how hard it is to do a three column layout in CSS so you blow them off and think, "It's been done before go do it."

But that's not the right approach. The right approach is to understand /why/ it's hard from the front-end so you can make your back-end more suitable to the front.

Building complex systems is a conversation between layers. Data comes from the database, goes through the "backend" then gets displayed. At each of these levels, the more one knows about the other, the easier the dialog between the layers.

So, OF COURSE it is worth a back-end developer's time to learn more about the front-end. It's also worth a front-end developers time to learn more about the backend.

YES.
GG. I never thought what his initials would be, but those seem good ones.
http://glendix.org
That's really exciting!

Congratulations Paul and Jessica.

Take some time off :-D
Low Power Amdahl Blades for Data Intensive Computing
Yes, it is worth, specially since you're making a website, even if you're going to hire someone. You can at least glance if they're doing correctly, as far as you will know.

HTML/CSS isn't hard. And you need to consider if what you're doing will work on multiple browsers, including mobiles. Knowledge about this will mean more visitors, and thus more money.

Now, creative... that's another question. A good design, in the strict aesthetics sense of the word, is very hard. In fact, for some people, it's a whole career :)

Also, while I don't recommend going for the aesthetics route, there's much more involved in webdesign. SEO, usability, accessibility. You should be able to take a pretty PSD from a designer, and develop with ul/li for menus instead of using Flash, for example.
Why the SEC is Probing Steve Jobs
No, he thinks that they aren't competent because of the problems they have with their API, and because of all the previous Fail Whale downtime.
Tailin' Ruby
Although Python has been leaping down the slippery slope as well, I think calling Ruby's syntax simple is a bit of a stretch. Ruby has many--intentionally--more ways to do everything, and some of those more ways have small gotchas built in.
I'd say learn html/css and along with that concentrate more on usability of the website. To be really good at creating graphics and flash for websites could take some time. So I'd say definitely learn HTML/CSS also learn the usability aspect of web design and out source the graphics part. May be for this project you might want to outsource the html/css also.
His point was that a lot of companies paid their CEOs well and that a lot of company stock has been plunging recently.
I am often in the same boat as you are in. I would say for this current project, hire a Web Designer to complete the project. However, also try to learn HTML/CSS so you can follow the HTML/CSS written by the outsourced programmer.
I did back end for a long time. But in last two year I have to get into the front end because I couldn't find good front end guys for the project. It helps me to be better in looking at whole pictures and prevent some mistakes that front end developers made for the the back end and vice versa.

Business wise, it is not good. But for a better understanding of the whole system. I think it is worthy. It is especially good for DIY projects for bootstrap and experiments.
Is it autonomous? If not, is it really a robot or just a remote-controlled car with Spiderman aspirations?
"What I really hate is mandatory: "you must cover 90% of your code with unit tests" type of orders by CTO/VP engineering types."

Amen, brother.

The only experience I have with TDD is for my own projects, working solo. Nobody will truly understand it if they don't come to it of their own choice.
In the ASP.NET community, we catch a lot of flak for the terrible sites that some developers have created with ASP.NET WebForms. That embarrassment is due exactly to developers choosing to hide behind the (leaky) WebForms abstraction and remain ignorant of the markup that their server-side code produces. I'd advise against emulating that failure case.

If you're working on any code that's within one tier of the HTML/CSS, you should have a basic understanding of the HTML/CSS.

That general rule applies to most things. The more understanding you have of adjacent concerns, the better you will be at your own task.
Parenting advice:

http://curi.us/archives/list_category/61

http://www.takingchildrenseriously.com/
ESP is just a program for teaching middle and high school students on weekends and similar things, anyone can participate
https://esp.mit.edu/teach/index.html
IMO & Experience I felt that the 3-5 years experience is a 'filter' for the recruiter to get less resumes and pick from them. I in fact sent my resumes fresh after college to a lot of companies that needed 5+ yrs of experience and they did contact me. So, I'd recommend create some simple projects in C++/Ruby/Python and put them in your Blog/Web so you can point it to them on your cover letter/resume.

Good Luck
A game to help you achieve business goals
Refreshing to see others attempting to help the public achieve their goals. You have to give props to people looking to help you. This is like personal business coaching, but for free! Awesome!
Perhaps we should hold some sort of HN internship fair, as I doubt that speek is the only student looking for an internship this summer.
The fact that s/he got 4 upvotes suggests that few people here think he is right. Or few people here even saw his comment. But it has little bearing on whether he actually is.
This is not a rags to riches stories. This is the story of how a guy with a silver spoon rose to get a golden spoon.

I'm not saying it's bad, but it's just not too helpful to those who did not start off with such good cards.
Asking this here is fairly pointless. When you ask this sort of question people tend to just go on subjective rants in favor of what they like, and flame people who disagree with their tastes.

The best thing you can do is put the time into reasearching the two until you are convinced for your own reasons to learn one, both, or neither.

Either way, both are good, important languages with quality frameworks and potential for job offers. So really you can't lose.
I would use whatever seems to suit best for your task at hand.

Need to build a site quickly that is mostly information based such as a blog or some kind of editorial site. I'd choose python with django. The automatic admin section is great for this type of task.

Need to build something with a lot of popular features (twitter, mash ups, simple shopping carts, etc..) and don't have time to really learn every little detail. Ruby using Rails might be a good solution as there are thousands of demo and live applications out there to borrow from. Should reduce your development time.

If you are looking for a new hobby language. I would choose python as it doesn't have quite as large or fanatic following as ruby. It also has a lot of room for growth. There are many libraries and verticals in the python market which could use some help.

End of the day though. It's up to you and the problem you are solving.
The question is wrong. The correct question is not "ruby or python?", but "python or ruby?" :D Either one will do actually.
From my experience I would suggest learning html/css coding but finding a creative person to do the actual design (colors, logo, white space, typography etc etc). I really doubt that it's possible to be good at everything - but html/css is 'just' coding - design however is a completely different story.
They should teach him Lojban first!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sapir-Whorf_Hypothesis
I'm an agile coach, so I'm supposed to support TDD.

But I just don't get it. I think you should unit test as you code, sure (for big things), but testing as a design strategy? As a way of "getting into the zone"?

I'm glad this guy seems excited about it. I'm trying to collect examples of people who actually use it out of their own choice. I think this is number 4 from the last six months.

Nobody wants to be behind the curve -- maybe TDD is the next evolution in programming styles. Or maybe it's just a reaction against heavy-handed, overdone design by architects. Or maybe a little of each.

The jury is still out with me.
(2) housing prices skyrocketed due to competition from the banker douches, meaning that standards of living declined substantially for the lawyers, doctors, etc.

I don't think it's fair to complain that "banker douches" raised house prices. There were plenty of non-bankers getting in on the housing price bubble. There were enough people that this TV show (http://www.aetv.com/flipthishouse/) was viable.

Incidentally, academia is solidly middle class and successful academics can easily buy a home. Tenured professors have almost no risk of default or prepayment and banks give them great loan terms as a result.

Another point of comparison: my Ph.D. adviser attracts plenty of golddiggers.

By the way, why all the hostility ("banker douches", "under-cultured jackasses") towards people who chose a different career path than you?
I like the Information Design site at http://interface.fh-potsdam.de/infodesignpatterns/patterns.p...

Click on the "Patterns" tab and select the categories on the left.

patternbrowser.org is a bit too busy for my taste, too hard to structure my thinking about how to best chart information.
Do what you love and the money will follow.

If the money doesn't follow, you'll still be doing what you love and that's worth more than money. People like being around people who are doing what they love.

But not a lot of people like being around people with a lot of money. Who cares about the money. I give most of mine away because my life is better without it.

If you have a lot of money, people wonder who you screwed to get it. There's a real bias against people with money in the world. They're greedy. They cause the collapse of the world economy. They force the people to enact laws that limit their own freedoms.

People who are motivated by money aren't that fun to be around.

People who want to succeed or accomplish something or make the world a better place or have a grand vision and work hard to implement it -- those are the people /I/ want to be around.

I know a lot of people with a lot of money and a lot of them are pretty boring. They hate their jobs. They complain a lot. They're actually kind of lazy to be honest. You don't have to work hard to make $70k a year and $70k a year is a /lot/ of money, don't scoff. There are people in many parts of America who don't know where their next meal is coming from. They could do a lot with $70k/yr.

Those motivated by new experiences and love of life. Those people are happy, because well.. they love their lives. They make people smile. They laugh. They make the world better.

One of my favorite VP superiors told me a story once, her mother-in-law was born without a dollar to her name and died without a dollar to her name and /still/ has a library named after her.

Do what you love. Forget the money, you'll have more of it than you'll know what to do with. If you love what you do, you won't have time to spend it anyway...
Market Yourself With Ziggs
Another Great social network for professionals
TDD is a brute-force method for evading the need to understand side-effects. I consider situations in which TDD applies to be warning signs, not opportunities.
> I still do look down, reflexively, upon any "profession" connected to real estate. I can honestly say I'd never marry a woman who worked in RE, and only a woman from a real estate family if she had been purified through an elite college, a filter I otherwise don't care about in the slightest.

Because Ghod knows that folks who build buildings are the lowest of the low.

> I'm surprised that upper-middle-class UK families don't have an even stronger blue-blooded prejudice against "working on the exchange". Growing up, I always understood being an intellectual (academics at the pinnacle) as the epitome of preftige, and investment banking as the thing you did when your family lost its money/standing and you needed to buy it back by sacrificing ten years of your life to something unpreftigious but lucrative.

In other words, the blue-bloods and the wannabees are essentially parasites and that's a good thing.

Napoleon was defeated by the "nation of shop-keepers", not the professional poets. The blue-bloods marched working men into machine gun fire, kicking soccer balls and talking about their halcyon days at Eton. The mechanics and engineers invented tanks.
Star wars meets art (via photoshop)
The interview rehashes the founder narrative and nothing on the really interesting things:

1) How were you able to convince Evan Williams to be an adviser initially?

2) Why was it that you were able to raise 180,000 pounds (about US$240k) but it was a YC seed round that got you to come to Silicon Valley?

3) What were your strategies in wooing the likes of Paul Buchheit and Chris Sacca?
You're right about that.

The point is that living costs are lower in Boston than Silicon Valley. I suspect that most hackers don't care about money directly, but they do care about not having to worry about whether they can pay rent.
I know many people here in Seattle who don't have cars (and others with Zipcar, if you only need it on occasion). I have a car, but I only drive it every couple weeks, at most, and I would certainly get along fine without it.
Short Term Rentals in Jerusalem
AthomeinIsrael.com offers luxury guest apartments in premier neighborhoods to meet your leisure, business, and personal accommodation needs
Why especially Facebook? Because of the code leak (and abysmal code quality) a while back?
I heard that Amazon is coming out with a version aimed at students that will be geared more towards reading textbooks. If that's true, maybe that version will fix these problems.
Least squares polynomial fitting in Python, written so I can understand it
"He's now trying to do to aids, polio and malaria what he did to Netscape."

Ouch, not even attempting to cure AIDs will go without mention of his past.

But it probably took about 10 coders at Microsoft to build IE and then package it with Windows. The problems he's trying to tackle around the world is much more challenging.
Pixelfreund
Getting rid of the sweatshops would do fine, thanks.
I second that. Learning CSS/HTML is easy for a developer, not a problem. But don't think you can draw, pick color or balance objects on a page in pleasant way. Artistic style can't be taught the same way you learn a language.

If you are like the average geek, you can spend years reading many books on good design and you still will only create ugly, flat, boring sites. Just be aware of your limitations.
I decided to give Helma a go because I like the idea of being able to re-use server side code within the browser and also because it should make it easier for others to extend the web application with plugins without having to learn a new scripting language.

I've been using Helma NG, rather than the stable Helma 1, so my comments are specific to that.

The dynamic nature of the language makes a huge difference. Both Helma and Grails (which you mentioned) feel like a breath of fresh air after working in Java with frameworks such as JSF. It's much faster to get things done, but I do miss the debugger and IDE integration.

Helma NG takes a new approach to managing scopes and I've found it easy to organize code into modules like in Python.

Helma NG is still work in progress, so parts of it keep changing, which I've found to be a bit of a problem. However, since most of it is in JavaScript and the framework is very lightweight, it is easy to wrap around the parts of a module you want to remain fixed.

I prefer Grails' GSP tag syntax to Helma macros, so might try to add support for that at some stage.

I'm using CouchDB for persistence and have been writing my own abstraction layer on top of that, so can't really comment on the SQL/Hibernate module.

Performance seems good, but I haven't run any benchmarks.

The community is relatively small, but very responsive. The documentation is there, but there are few examples. However, most of the code is self-explanatory.

So, to summarize: Helma NG is perfect for what I'm doing, but isn't yet stable enough to be used in place of Grails for a more traditional webapp. Helma 1 might be more appropriate for that.

What have your experiences with Grails been like?
So, you are a MC Rails guy without the V. IMO, you really have to learn how to design a simple website with CSS and HTML.

One thing that definitely can help you is to screen shot or bookmark every website that you think that is simple and nice. From those example websites, you can start designing your website.
What is a FluidDB domain? Sorry, but you’ll have to wait to find out the answer to this. We can tell you though that FluidDB domains will have many uses, and that they wont all be free.

Anyone got some insider info?
My gut reaction is that people like Scoble with "5000 friends" are abusing the service, and that when they combine that abuse with mass messaging, it's easy to see why Facebook would react.
> I said "nearly all sequence functions are destructive",

Actually, you said "nearly all of the standard list functions".

You do know that CL has sequences that are not lists, right?
Facebook isn't perfect, but it's not a sucky site. It's streamlined and efficient, it runs very quickly (especially compared to MySpace or Bebo or Hi5), and it's got a surprisingly slim history of messing things up for people. Yeah, it gets in trouble, but Facebook deals with hundreds of millions of accounts, and it does a pretty damn good job at all of that. Compare to MySpace, which has had incidents of murders, suicides, massive spam, site breakages, page breakages, and a week-long removal of "gay" statuses from their websites, and Facebook's track record is incredible. They've got an impressive team.

I've also written to a person who works at Facebook, and he says it's a pretty good job with some brilliant co-workers.

I'd be willing to bet that Facebook reinstates this account, similar to the way they reinstated Scoble's. And this is a way way edge case: most people don't write to 900 not-friends. I'm sure Facebook's spam filter picked that up, but I'm just as sure that in a week's time this account will be back and running.
I think you may be introducing some bias to your conclusions. The article could also be seen as concluding that giving someone abstract tasks is less efficient then giving someone a concrete task...the former leaves a lot open to decide, the latter makes your problem space much smaller so I'm not sure if they are fair to compare ( the former does actually involve quite a but more work ). It's like sitting down with someone and you say "Write a ten page story." instead of "Write a ten page story about a green monster living at the top of a snowy mountain." People given the second choice will almost always start writing immediately, and those given the former will sit around and think for hours about what to write. And when you look at the conclusions of the article like this, you can make a strong counter-point against TDD and that is simply that you can't get much more abstract then by being asked to write tests for code and functionality that doesn't even exist yet. (Note: I'm a fan of TDD, but for the million other reasons)
I second Boulder. Yes, its certainly not a big city, but its got more than its share of good restaurants and bars considering its relatively small population. Beautiful weather for most of the year, nestled right into the mountains. The startup community is stellar in my opinion. And yes, you can ride your bike almost all the time and when you can't, the buses are easy to use.
The code must not be that abysmal, considering how much it handles. When you make a separate load request just to poke somebody, when Chat is constantly making requests, then you've got to have code that's handling itself pretty well. And the end results are gorgeous compared to most any other site.

Perhaps especially Facebook because of that silly "Facebook is run by the CIA" video a while back?
The Evolution of the Cell Phone
10 Lan Party Tips | TechJaws
"Microsoft spent over $100 million a year[1] in the late 1990s, with over 1,000 people working on IE by 1999.[2]" (wikipedia)

I think the IE7 team was less than a dozen people. IE8 is probably a bit more.
I posted one, the NASA link: which is research into exaclty what we were talking about.

CU Spaceflight is launching a new test flight later this year: I was told (by an ex-team member actually) that it was intended to pave the way for orbital launches.

As to what I was referring to: I meant the off hand dismissal of every piece of work towards launching from Balloons... I agree sounding rockets (yes I know what they are thanks ;)) are not orbital devices - but it proves the groundwork and paves the way to more exciting stuff.. surely.. dismissing such data offhand seems a little unhackerish and uninspired :(

To clarify my point... (as it seems to have got lost in the noise)
- There have been no orbital launches from balloons to date
- There HAVE been sub orbital launches to date
- NASA (and possible CU) are looking into launching orbital devices from balloons
- NASA have plans for a Balloon which will be able to carry a ton of equipment up to a "launchable" height.
- My conclusion from this is that far from being impossible it is perfectly within possibility, probably with our current technology.

@all Sorry to feed the trolling.. now that my point is clear I shall move on ;) :D
You said, "Do what you love and the money will follow."

What if you do what you love and money never follows? Will you stop doing it? Will you stop loving it?

I think money should never be part of the equation. This citation needs be to rewritten to "Do what you love and something will follow". You'll never know what will follow and that's the interesting part of the adventure.