skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You could try Think Python: How to Think Like a Computer Scientist by Allen B. Downey.

http://www.greenteapress.com/thinkpython/thinkpython.html

It is due to be published by Cambridge University Press under the title Python for Software Design. The link above is for the same content, available for free.
Honestly, I read through this a few times and I have no idea what in the hell it does. Maybe I just missed the ball, but I have no idea what your product would do. Buzzwords galore.
Do it in spare time and see how it goes :)
incentives to try and help build the community.
AAAAGGHHHH MY BROWSER
Why don't you make your editor to paint them white and indent them?
Dive into Python was one of the first Python books I read. It's filled with small (and Pythonic) tricks, has excellent examples and great explanations. I especially like the simple way it's written. It made Python click for me.

I am looking forward for the successor.
I always recommend Dive Into Python to people who already know some programming (if they're interested in Python).
In this thread:

http://markmail.org/message/axarlob7wwmnm2xe#query:clojure%2...

Rich Hickey claims that the PermGen issue alleged in this article doesn't actually exist. A new class is created every time a (fn) is compiled, but only a new instance of that class is created each time it is invoked.

The only thing that generates a new class each time it is called is (eval), which as we all remember from reading our PG, is generally regarded as suspect when used in production code. Obviously you can see this effect at the Clojure REPL, however.
From the TOC, it looks like DIP3 is going to be even more fun to write and read than the original.
Swordfish did have a cool monitor setup, but he built a virus using some sort of graphical tool! I suppose that's a bit more exciting for most people than vi or something.

And, of course, there was the "break into this system in 60 seconds while I hold a gun to your head and some woman gives you a blowjob" scene. Hollywood...
Wow, there are about 197 companies that are going to end up seriously disappointed...
Incentives like giving early adopters a better chance to become administrators?
Follow This 7-Step Approach to Good Writing.
Not a movie but "The Adventures of Brisco County Jr." is great fun, and is available on DVD. There's something kind of hackerish about it.
Hilarity. I got such a kick out of this. Adobe truly is crapping all over the place with their UI. I'm pretty sure it's still Carbon based on OS X. Why can't someone like Adobe with so many apps on Win and OS X spend some time to build a really strong -- or even adopt -- front-end framework. CS4 is utter crap, thankfully I didn't purchase it. CS3 was enough of a let down, and I paid quite a few hundred dollars for that.
Amusingly Microsoft was forced to implement this in IE due to a patent infringement case: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eolas

And it turns out some people want this as a feature.
There was a sort of 'unofficial' 'hackers 2' with Skeet Ulrich playing Kevin ("My kung-fu better than you kung-fu!") Mitnick in Takedown (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0159784/) - the story following the book of the same name by Tsutomu Shimonura. Also, I think they recently screened 'Wargames 2 : the dead code' (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0865957/) over here in the UK. Don't forget Tron! Ah.. just hearing the sounds of the video arcade at the beginning...
Don't talk like a Californian eh?... Unless his interviews involve people telling him, a "dude", how the surf is "up" and how "radical" their new product is, I'm not really sure what he's talking about.
5th Element, I think is the ultimate guy/hacker movie. Disutopian reality, future, flying cars, spaceships, tech and gadgets, weapons, awesome soundtrack, action, funny, love story, and hot chicks...

What do you want more from a movie?
In the Shadow of the Moon

http://www.metacritic.com/film/titles/shadowofthemoon
Could you be a little more condescending? It's possible to state your opinion without questioning the competence of the person with the opposing view.

If you're going to claim that H1B employees are critical for making companies better at producing their products, it would be nice if you were to back up that assertion with something other than ideology and theory. I used only one counter-example (one of the largest H1B employers in the nation, not to mention the subject of the article), but it directly refutes the theory that cheap employees make products cheaper and better.

We don't live in a free market. Any theory predicated on that assumption is wrong.
lol, tell me about it, I was just offering to partner up, he helps me build an app from which we could potentially both benefit and he gets the experience he is looking for along the way.
This article is mere speculation. However, It would help if someone from Google said something about Grandcentral's future considering the service has gone nowhere in a long time.
When I say "slow down" I don't mean quit my day job, but rather put it off for a couple of years. Quitting my day-job feels like a bad move, but if things start working out I might take a day off every week to work on my stuff.
Slightly off topic, but a good hacker TV show is "Big Bang Theory" on Monday nights on ABC. It's about 4 physics PhD students at Cal Tech.

The best part is that they don't water down the physics at all. One guy got dumped by his girlfriend because of their differing opinions on string theory.

I just got the season 1 DVD and it's great.
http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2009/01/hack_lets_you_look_...
Misleading title: it should say, "Richard Stallman sells gnu to Microsoft for CAD$105" :~)
I love how the company wouldn't cooperate with the interview: "Why should I help you if this information will hurt my company?".

Here's a hint: if you're doing something that you're ashamed of, perhaps the right solution isn't to try (and fail) to keep it secret; perhaps the right solution is to NOT DO IT.
depends on how the site works and how you want it to work, as well as its goals.

simple bribery works wonders, sometimes, if your intent is to build quick content, such as entering in the top, as defined by you, X users into some sort of drawing for a prize.
I think this is an interesting idea.

I decided to throw together a quick-and-dirty webapp for this purpose, inspired by an HN post (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=426127). I'm taking a little detour & learning Python & Django along the way. I'll submit it here when I have a reasonable prototype ready, maybe in a week or two.
This one seems to be the real deal, I'm downloading it now, and I saw Robert X. Cringely in the preview.
"Lambdas are not garbage collected.

Yes. That means lambdas can be the cause of memory leaks.

As described by Charles Nutter, each lambda in Clojure is an anonymous class in Java. The problem is that classes are never garbage collected. They reside in a special place called the PermGen."

I know very little about Clojure, but that seems like a huge problem for Clojure, and other functional-ish JVM languages. Is it?

I've used Rhino (JavaScript on JVM) extensively, and I don't think it suffers from this.
Microsoft has done a lot of things wrong in terms of its various software offerings. Visual Studio is one of the things that they have done a pretty good job on though.

Asp.net is also very attractive to the legions of .Net developers who may not have much exposure to the web way. It mostly abstracts web interactions away, so that it's not a huge leap to go from client/server applications to web apps.

Sure, there is a lot of code in the final result, but the IDE helps automate a lot of that, and in combination with ReSharper, it's not a bad environment to work in.
It's also very much a product of the Reagan era: the bad guys are the scientists, academia and the EPA.
Ask HN: iPhones are mundane. What's the new grail?
I'm writing a comedy about startups, and I need to invent a feasible portable technology that could appear in a couple of years. But the iPhone made such a qualitative change to what people could do while standing on a sidewalk, all I can think of is a hands-free voice-activated search device. And that seems more like a ten-years-out technology.

To be honest, I'm probably gonna go with the above idea, but now I'm wondering: is there any handheld/wearable device that's so close we can taste it?
Web Trend Tracking Tools
"As of r1232, lambdas created in eval can be GCed."

- Comment from cgrand at the bottom of the article.
I still recall a guy 2 rows in front of me in the cinema stood up and shouted, somewhat uncontrollable, "YEAH!" when he saw the Trinity (actual) hack in the Matrix reloaded (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/05/16/matrix_sequel_has_ha...). LOL.
Second above, plus - you are a web developer coding in RoR, you've studied comp sci, you went to a prestigious college and have numerous connections to venture capital, yet you are looking for a more solid CTO? Something just doesn't compute :)
Yes.

http://tinyurl.com/ct3xyb

http://www.dwheeler.com/readable/
Innovate Like Chris Rock
Is there something about flash+FF that makes my MacBook go crazy?
New Zealander buys used MP3 player, finds classified US Army files in like-new condition
Think we could collaborate on this? I thought about doing this we either Django or Drupal, but as you seem to favor Django, that'd be fine with me! Anyway I wasn't planning on doing this as a startup (ie. profit driven), but rather as a community project.

We could brainstorm a bit about it, perhaps have others join us in doing so.
FYI IE 8 is already in Windows 7.
If I'm not already excited to join the site, would I be excited about volunteering for it?
I'm spread a bit too thin to be a technical genius, like some others I've met here and there. Besides, I like the people side of the business and would like to spend more time on that end.
Thanks a lot for the comments.

As I read through some of the comments, I see that my arch-nemesis "time management" probably is one the reasons I'm sweating over this. Using the right amount of spare time effectively and letting it take it's time is probably key, but oh so hard to do.

You've given me good food for thought, thanks!
Exactly, too many fancy words, not enough action words.

One sentence, WTF do you intend to do?
When I've presented this privately I've used a lot of diagrams and often had folks sign non disclosure agreements. I'm not sure I can describe the group dynamics I am hoping to capture without that.

Have you read E.O. Wilson? It is something like how ants come together, except humans. Hence, more complicated.
Po Bronson's book "The Nudist on the Late Shift" says that CitySearch cold-called all kinds of businesses in every city it launched in. Have you read enough articles about Yelp to see if they did the same?

Incidentally, how do you plan to win people over when they're already on Yelp? I'm confused about what value you add that they don't.
From that article, all I can gather is that it accelerates lock-in.
no wonder the netflix prize is such a hard problem.
Build a new usenet with a social networking backend, where each group exists semi-independently and has its own mechanism for data filtration.
When I've presented this privately I've used a lot of diagrams

I would find your presentation appealing, then. I like to think about structures of organizations or systems visually.
Make an editor which will randomly color-code each set of parentheses such that they or their background is in a set of colors which don't appear as other keywords (like function defs or strings or whatever) so as not to add confusion. You now have a way of more easily seeing every matching pair of parens without having to hover over each one. However, now you have to deal with a strange assortment of colors on your screen.

Oh wait, you can just use a gradient of colors instead of random ones, with the more-nested paren pairs having colors farther in on the gradient. Silly me.
More sci-fi than pure tech, I just saw:
"The man from earth", http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0756683/

Highly recommended.
"it just works": Asus EEE PC

However, unless you are a kernel developer, if you are recompiling the kernel or sound drivers, you are working against the system and making life harder on yourself.

There's a small glitch in newer versions of X.org that (until recently) didn't allow proper dual-screens on Radeon cards. I didn't remove the debian package, download the newest X.org CVS, and compile my own version. I just reverted the package and pinned it until I felt like upgrading it. Hell, there wasn't any reason to upgrade in the first place, so that was the first mistake.

If you ever have to compile something you are either not using a modern distro (Debian, Ubuntu, and, I presume, Fedora) or are using the same techniques that were required in the 1990s but are just bad habits today (I learned this the hard way).
I'm generally opposed to the bailout in its current (and previous) form- but if you look at the facts, this MIGHT actually end up saving the company some money...

Sure, they get a new jet out of it and that leaves a bitter taste in everyone's mouth- and sure, it might not be "right" or "fair" in everyone's minds - but it's simple math.

Buy one jet for 50mil, sell 2 older jets for 27mil - make a small profit of 4 million and only carry the maintenance/fuel/crew costs of one jet instead of two.

Personally, I think they could probably do without ANY corporate jets, or probably COULD just sell one old jet and keep the other...
Not all are hacker movies per se, but these have great general geek appeal:

Existenz http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0120907/

Cube http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0123755/

The Nines http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0810988/

The World's Fastest Indian http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0412080/

October Sky http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0132477/

Three Days of the Condor http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0073802/
ASP.NET annoys me so much with leaky abstractions BUT ASP.NET MVC is the best thing since PHP.
OLED screens that either fold, or roll up, could free us from the tiny-screen limitations of current mobile devices. These are supposedly very close to reality. The next step is lasers that just draw the image directly on the retina, but that's a bit further down the road.
If you can filter out trolls, sign me up.

I conceive of this as primarily a project to increase the aggregate intelligence of the world

I can introduce you to a very valuable network of participants for that who have already been talking to me about forming new online communities. If you'd like to seed your project with a bunch of people who meet that goal, contact me through my HN profile.
Marketing software through affiliates
Send me an email and I can send you some simple diagrams.
Ha, I agree with you, really. Reality is crufty and getting things done involves compromise.

Still, I think there is value in studying other ways of doing things. For example, my studies of Plan 9 introduced me to CSP, erlang style concurrency, which is a great way to structure some types of programs.

And don't forget that some problems can only be solved by introducing simplicity at some level. For example, google achieved high levels of reliability and scalability by using a simpler computational model: map-reduce.
Depends what I'm working on. Often I enter the flow and become engrossed in what I'm doing and at that point, the surroundings become totally unimportant.

Then, of course, there's the other times when I play a flash-game 2 hours straight..
Uh, hello? Venkman: "Back off, man! We're scientists!"

Also, didn't they give props to a Dem mayor of NYC?
We're not building another review.
It's a customer service site where you can leave a question, suggestion, discussion, praise, or issue for the small business.
The small business owner can sort by these posts and reply to the thread.

We even mail your feedback on postcards for unclaimed businesses on FeedbackJar.

Think of us as Getsatisfaction.com for small businesses.
An economist's reply to this might be that if there really are a lot of workplaces that are so full of invidious discrimination that they don't value talented employees, then other workplaces will gain a comparative advantage by hiring the disfavored kind of people.

On my part, I'd certainly rather work in a diverse workplace where I meet a lot of varied people than work through anonymized telecommuting in which I never meet co-workers in real life.
A good illustration of the distinction between high production values and good design.
You have your work cut out for you. There's a massive competitive market for getting customers opinions. The usual method is to pay them.

"Get paid to fill out surveys, try product samples, etc etc" is big business.

I'd start with a handy feedback widget that small businesses can put on their websites. (If you haven't already got that setup)
Yelp hires community leaders in each city to spread the word about Yelp and educate businesses about how to use it.
Try the veal!
Just how much is Twitter’s burn rate?
Talk to every small business in your city or neighborhood. Give them an X-day free trial and a sign/sticker that tells customers what to do.

Give customers an incentive to give suggestions if they're not doing it on their own. Pay out of your pocket (IIRC Yelp did something like this, paying for reviews) or helping vendors subsidize things at their store, e.g., give a review get 5% off your next purchase.

That's what I'd do, anyhow.
> So, Why would anyone go for asp.net?

The .NET development environment.

Visual Studio is dead simple to install and use. Add-ins have been easy to install, too. (I'm looking at you, Eclipse!) The .NET Framework has great breadth and depth. It integrates well with MS SQL Server. There are plenty of quality 3rd party tools/libraries that work with the stack. API documentation is easy to get to. Building install packages is a snap. Visual designers can make building/understanding components or the database schema easier. Code generation from the designers can fill in boiler-plate stuff yet still leave it visible if you need to dig around in there by hand.

As for ASP.NET WebForms (which is the sample you've given), it was meant to make it easier for Windows Forms developers to do web page design. WebForms imitates the WinForms structure and calling conventions, so you can make a working web page act more like a desktop app in terms of the programming model. Obviously, you run into limitations rather quickly because the WebForms abstraction is very leaky.

ASP.NET MVC would be a good pick for new projects if you are already an experienced web developer. You get all the benefits of the .NET stack without the limitations of WebForms. You get control over the markup that gets generated and it does a good job with separation of concerns. I recommend.
"web 2.1" : 109,000
"web 2.2" : 28,30
"web 3.1" : 24,800
....
Love it. Downloading now.
1. Open up requirements from the last project.
2. Rejig them a bit.
3. Send them off and get back to building things.

...we also use backpack
He means the compiled code of a lambda can't be GC'ed. He was creating new functions inside of an eval.

The individual closures created as code executes are GC'ed like everything else.

Since eval is rather specialized, and everyone recommends it be avoided in "normal" code, this is not a major problem.

Plus, it is fixed.
For certain cases in IT this may be feasible, but too many interactions in business today are still done face-to-face that would render this suggestion impossible.
Simply making offensive statements doesn't count as social commentary.
Same here - although I have paved path and some stairs as well as the yard. Its nice - don't miss any commute. And I go in to an office in the city about once a week - I find it hard to actually work in an office though - I am naturally to chatty and social.
Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. I saw it during a company outing to the cinema when it first came out. Lots of fun. Not a hacker movie per ce, but very cool animation, set in the future,etc. Also my first introduction to "gaia theory" which was interesting though actually I am on the reductionist, "selfish gene" side of that debate myself.
Definitely try to incentivize the business owners to update their listings. I think you will find if you can provide them a login to view some form of stats then word of mouth would carry a lot of weight here
That's what he says, but they lack the skepticism of actual scientists. I love the movie - and the quote - but Venkman is clearly calling himself a scientist because it's convenient at the moment.
That's fine by me. An American doesn't deserve a job more than anyone else.
I could set up a company that would, in exchange for buying $3000 of my plastic toys, hire someone and let them resign a month later.

There are ways to prevent that. For example, the government could require that (a) the employer sponsoring a new immigrant has to pay six months of the immigrant's unemployment insurance in advance (perhaps put into an escrow account), and (b) if the immigrant is neither employed nor collecting unemployment insurance for more than, say, two months, then the visa is terminated.

Another possibility I've seen floated is that the government make only a fixed number of work visas available, but auction them off. Then the immigrants let in would be the ones who are likely to add the most value to their employers.
The best you can come up with is how tangled the code in a hand-written lexer looks? I may have skimmed a bit towards the end, but, did you actually find a bug?
In practice it's very different to the tune of big government and using faith as a license to ignore reason.
how can you download it?
In some ways you have to accept the boundary is blurred, and try to enjoy that.

I have a separate physical office on the property, and at night I take a laptop into the house, but never work long enough that the battery runs out.
Just wanted to say that I think the argument for "needing" corporate jets was that the time spent traveling on commercial airlines was detrimental to the company. Supposedly those private jets are used to get the executives from one place to another in a quick way so they could do more business or keep doing business and not be interrupted.

Like everyone else though, I'd like to see some scientific proof of that.
Since its practically the entire contents of the file, its hard to do better.

As to the presence of a bug, impossible to tell. Which is the point.
the floppy dot. it just floats: http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=JILWKaQgUC0
First, I've reread both your and my posts and I have absolutely no earthly idea how you decided _I_ was the one with the condescending tone.

Second, you've created a "counter-point" which doesn't even prove what you claim. You think your Microsoft example is "proof" of something and you are indignantly stamping your feet around making demands of others on some self-appointed perch of the intellectual high ground. Companies, markets, and economics are gigantically complicated things and trying to "prove" that H1B employees don't make better or worse companies by using a single example over some non-trivial period of time is ridiculous. Completely ridiculous. Absurd, even.

Maybe the reason none of us are citing examples is because examples are altogether meaningless. Unless you want to actually do the statistical analysis, control for all the proper variables, and try to make a statistically significant statement at the end, all you'd be doing is talking out of your ass. So, to that end, for the purposes of internet discussion between anonymous people, -theory- is about as good as we are going to do.

So excuse me for trying to correct your theoretical mistake while altogether ignoring your anecdotal evidence.
Time to Apply to Inc 500/5000
Anyone from HN going to apply? I know most startups are to young but a few might qualify.