skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Goos point! I changed it so that if an email address is not given it will just do a search on the current deals in the index.

Thanks for the feedback.
How NYTimes gained 100,000 Twitter followers in 1 month
The copy on the Adobe site is written for a target audience. Those folks ask: "Yeah, but do customers of my clients have installed Flash?", "Uh, they proposed a solution working with Flash, can we do that?" or "Can we use Flash?". And the answer is clear: Yes, you can! Everyone who doesn't live on the other side of the moon uses Flash!

Note to my fellow programmers: normal people read numbers like words. Depending on the context, a number represents a word to them like "Totally!" or "You must!" or "Everyone!" or "Just Now!" and so on. I know, it's irrational, but that's why the advertisers use those numbers. (Use humor in life, it's better that way :-))
Working From Home Is Becoming Commonplace In The Corporate World
After MySpace And Facebook, Oodle To Power Brand New AOL Classifieds
I have some experience building enterprise software and I'd have to say the problem was that it is mind numbingly boring to do. A lot of it sucks, so to speak, because people can't stay motivated to give a damn.

It's pretty soul crushing to spend all of your working time building systems for inventory management, or AP/AR, or whatever mundane (but incredibly important) business function you're working on. This is why people make startups I suppose.

I agree that, if you have the mental toughness for it, enterprise software is a GREAT way to make money. During my days of having a real job, we were selling our software for $250,000 an install.
Irresponsible journalism? No such thing!
Nick Denton: "The Dream Of Micropublishing Is Dead"
AOL launches Lifestream Platform
Tim O'Reilly: Why Kindle Should Be An Open Book
This is a waste of good talent. There are so many areas to innovate in that require talented programmers such as:

- parallel computing

- robotics

- AI

- Balancing, Control algorithms

- Speech processing

- Vision processing

and so much more. If you're good enough to do all that, they why go start all over from the front instead of just building on top of what we already have and trying to solve the hard problems?

Your systems programming knowledge combined with some hardware good give us some impressive things. An OS without any networking support and that comes delivered with adverts is not innovate, and it is not going to be particularly useful for us.

There will always be stamp collectors, but it would have been sad if Einstein devoted his talents solely towards collecting stamps.

Sorry for saying it the way I see it, but if everybody always tries to be nice, you'll never hear the truth.
His mother had emotional issues and he took some verbal abuse as a child. This led Buffett to go out of his way to be liked by others and avoid confrontation at all costs.
To my limited understanding, financial types on Wall St are not the ones providing the valuable services to which you are referring. It appears to the innocent bystander (if such a thing exists) that the Wall St Types (WSTs) are effectively trading in shares and futures for the purpose of making money primarily for their institutions. They then appear to get vast sums of money for being better, or luckier.

Yes, this is related to how well my investments do. Except that it isn't. I invest in companies that actually make things.

What I personally object to is people who confuse the word "bonus" with the word "entitlement". Bonuses should be awarded for people making things better for everyone.

But we all know the problems with measurements affecting processes. Perhaps the WSTs need to learn that lesson.
I convinced the company I work for to switch their applicant-tracking system from CBIZ to CATS (catsone.com). Using something that was built by people who care has made a huge difference -- now it's a tool instead of a chore.
Computer components shrinking faster than predicted
While I breathe, I cherish the hope that enterprise development will eventually be forced to change.

http://weblog.raganwald.com/2007/09/we-have-lost-control-of-...
I'd say it is an accurate observation of contemporary US politics.

Groups describe themselves with "who we are" just as much as "who we are NOT." Lately the "who we are NOT" has been drowning out "who we are" to the point where the process inside political parties has been to reject potential candidates that are "too close to the enemy." That's why terms like RINO or DINO ($PARTY In Name Only) as epithets/attacks to denounce candidates (and elected officials) as too similar to the $ENEMY.

To give one example, many Republicans (at the party level) would rather lose an election than "dilute their brand" by aiming for bipartisanship.

disclaimer/weasel words: I ran for election last November. It was for a "non partisan" office, so I was able to dodge the political catfighting and backstabbery.
Facebook uses the Aurigma Image Uploader, which is implemented both in Java and as an ActiveX control.
Orion Nebula: The Hubble View (Image)
It is an article of faith for the Democrats to think that. And the Administration may tell the car manufacturers to produce fewer SUVs as a condition of their bailout. But as another poster has already pointed out, the average American wants an SUV.

This will lead to problems.

Also, if you're really interested in safety you may not realize that safety ratings only compare cars in the same class. More weight is generally more safety. And if you don't drink and always wear your seatbelts, the rollover fatality risk of SUVs goes down 90%, making them very safe. In my Southwestern home state, where everybody drives either a pickup or an SUV, I didn't think for a second about getting a small car. When that drunk from the reservation inevitably runs into me, I don't want my tiny SmartCar to crumple under his F350.
Great article, but the problem that I have with marketing is that it can blur what would otherwise be a more logical situation. It isn't that marketing can be used for good or evil, but that marketing makes it hard to distinguish between the two. Good marketing of a good product will often look the same as good marketing of a bad product. Take Enzyte as an example. Their ads are slick and have the polish and convincing ability of ads for good products. Yet, they're selling nothing real. In fact, the company's owner was convicted of 93 counts of conspiracy, fraud and money laundering connected to Enzyte.

And this is a $500M company! It's not like they had small sales to a few gullible individuals. People saw the ads, they were professional, had the same look/feel as legit ads and bought into it based on the image. Marketing obscures our ability to differentiate between good and bad. It's not that people are convincing us to do bad things, it's that they're impairing our ability to figure out what is good and bad. That's what makes marketing evil. Whether we end up making a good decision or not becomes more random than without marketing because we are less able to differentiate.

Conning people into doing something good is still conning them into doing it. Wouldn't it be better for people to make decisions based off of evidence than marketing?
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The Devil speaking in the 1967 film Bedazzled: "There was a time when I used to get lots of ideas... I thought up the Seven Deadly Sins in one afternoon. The only thing I've come up with recently is advertising."
When speaking of expertise numbers matter. You can assume that the author is more knowledgeable than PG when it comes to encrypted data backup. As he says, he has sent a good 3 years working on his startups.

On the other hand, PG has also spent the past 3 years funding different startups and must have some decent idea about what is more likely to help a startup.

Same goes for you. I would assume that you are more experience in Bingo software then other programmers even if they are better programmers than you are. But in the field of Bingo, you would probably crush several highly talented developers.

Why?

"Weight of incomparable circumstances" probably.
Finland to subsidise wind farm next to new Google data centre
Computer programming quotes
Just ask them one simple question: "Is that the best you can do?"

http://www.popswallet.com/2009/02/is-that-the-best-you-can-d...
something clever that involves a capacity for abstraction in design that few people have

Anyone smart enough to use C++ professionally is smart enough to use any language.

Remember that people once built enormously complex systems in assembly language. Academics have always vastly underestimated the intelligence of commercial programmers.
Adobe is it's own worst enemy.

Turns out, to install CS3 you have to uninstall Flash. Their own products hate each other.
Telonu’s layoff widget brings bad news to your website
And the libraries are full of side effects.
100 Best English Nonfiction Books of Twentieth Century
Whn I interviewed at Facebook I was kind of thrown back by the lack of engineering discipline. If I remember the quote accurately (this was about 1.5 years ago), they averaged 1 hour of downtime per subdomain (i.e. <college>.facebook.com) per week, which may or may not effect all users associated with that domain. To make scaling issues easier, race conditions are also all over. There is no data integrity of any sort. Some/all of these design decisions I could see being justified, because it is afterall just social profiles... but I was a little surprised. The weird thing is they release some really cool open source stuff and have some pretty great engineers there, so I'm not sure where this stems from.
This has nothing whatsoever to do with intelligent design, though you don't seem to know what that is either. David Stove is an atheist who believes in evolution. He's saying most people who think they believe in Darwinism don't know what they believe or how implausible it is.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Stove#Darwinism

You show how knee jerk reactionaries Darwinists are. If you don't consider yourself one, why react the way you did?
Indeed, but the versions of XP and Linux that you get from netbook vendors ARE limited to 1 GB.
They CAN support that much RAM. Negotiations with and contractual obligations to Microsoft make sure that they don't.
But it seems that men in their early 20s are trying harder to get laid. Thus the agressivness of the "weak"bidders..
Boffins to unveil gesture-controlled 3D TV
Who Was I Again?
You sir, are an idiot..
This is pretty link-baitey even for Techcrunch let alone Hacker News

Ford's current CEO Alan Mulally is actually pretty good - I met him when he was still director of engineering for the 777 - under him Ford has made some good moves, such as building a large capital base just before the credit crunch hit.

Ford also already makes some good cars, they just don't sell them in the US - they need to pull some EU models over to the states
Did your previous patents bring you enough to make it worth your while ?

Personally I'm against all patents, especially software patents. If a competitor would come up with a copy of your service would you sue based on your belief that they must infringe your patent ? Would you consent to being sued in case it turns out you are infringing someone elses software patent ?

Don't you think the copyright on your software provides you with adequate protection ?

I understand there may be a financial incentive to do this, and there is the angle 'if I won't do it someone else may do it', but especially in the field of software I think that patents are best avoided. Personally I've given every so called patent holder the finger (there was that outfit that claimed I was infringing on their patent to send video over the internet, then another one that claimed I was infringing on a patent to rank video based on popularity and some more that I've forgotten about). In all of those cases the so called 'patent holder' (I think patent troll is more appropriate) called it a day when I refused to budge.
On the other hand, the amount of software using a language and the decision to use a language is mutually reinforcing, and both are only loosely correlated with the quality of the language.

Ten years ago, there were almost no successful projects using Lua, but now there are many, and the language has barely changed at all -- likewise for Erlang. D is newer than either of these and occupies a niche in which other languages are deeply entrenched. I'd give it more time before writing it off.
How many truly gifted c/c++ programmers are there as a fraction of all who professionally use these languages?
For those interested in this sort of thing, I recently completed a mastermind-style game implemented with Core Animation. There isn't any external documentation, but if you want it, you can grab it here:

Binary: http://harpastum.googlepages.com/Enigmata.zip

Source: http://harpastum.googlepages.com/EnigmataSOURCE.zip

If you have any questions, just direct them to my email address (in my profile).
> Amazon's Kindle file format doesn't provide support for tables or for so-called monospaced fonts, two formatting features that we use heavily in our line of technical books

Wow... and I was considering getting one for technical books. No thanks.
I'd like to offer a reason for this - you're selling to the wrong person.

With apps like Google, facebook, or any number of other startups, building a good product is in line with what your customers desire. Facebook was cleaner and more usable than Myspace, and customers responded in droves. Google produced better results and was easier to use than the competition, and customers responded...

Enterprise software doesn't work like this. You're not selling to random data entry guy #21243 who will actually be using your big fancy enterprise package - you're selling to a PHB who couldn't care less how great and cutting-edge your product is. Someone told him to implement some system, he wrote up a RFP, and here you are. All he wants you to do is jot down a bunch of bullet points, make some big promises, and offer to take responsibility if it all goes down the toilet. He's not interested in your superior usability - there's no demand from up top for more productivity from the data entry monkeys, and it's not as if he will have to deal with this software every day...

There's no room for innovation there, because those who pay for the product do not desire it, and will not reward it.
Ask YC/HN: Where/How Do You Find Your Consulting Contracts/Gigs?
So I'm currently working a full time job, a part-time job, and side projects. I've decided that I'm moving from Chicago to San Fran in April, no matter what.my situation is.

I already have a part-time gig lined up (contract essentially), so it seems natural to find one or two more and do consulting/contract work - I can do my work from practically anywhere, it gives me a chance to work on side projects, and I have more autonomy, even if it ends up being more work.

So what websites do you visit/what do you usually do for contracts and consulting? I have a large network, but have yet to tell them this is the direction I'm going in.

Thanks.
I disagree. SQL, by definition, is natively nonfunctional. The concept of a database requires state. However, you can write functional-esque (monadic) layers on top of SQL.

Excel is basically a wrapper around spaghetti code. It's great for small presentations, but using it for real programming is incredibly risky. There are an enormous number of stories floating out there about business apps written in Excel that turned out to have subtle but sometimes disastrous bugs due to random human errors as well as poor maintenance when the "program" changed hands.
"Internet-enabled devices in mature markets" doesn't include mobile, and as far as I can tell doesn't pretend to. So this article is essentially arguing against a claim Adobe never makes. Seems like sort of a made up gripe to me.
This was one of the reasons why we started frogmetrics. :)
Test your Web IQ
Reminds me of those headlines you see like "10 year, 30k person study concludes that kissing people induces pleasurable endorphins."
I found this article helpful (see sections 4 and 5)
http://web.mac.com/jimbokun/iWeb/Site/Blog/AB35C167-7755-411...

Have you checked/asked on Stack Overflow? It tends to be good on this kind of question.

Basically, I think functional programming is a particularly good match for some problems (e.g. tree transformation) and for proving theorems. So, like every technique, it's good to have in your toolbox if it's not too expensive for you to acquire. Apart from that, it's a matter of taste/religion.

For issues like global variables, it's considered good practice to avoid them in imperative languages too. For example, Java/C++ have private/public/protected access modifiers to help you manage this.

I too read Armstrong's book, and concluded same: Erlang's concurrency power is due to pure-message passing, not due to it being functional. The processes could be written imperatively, and provided the communication was pure-message passing (and you tuned the implementation as the Erlang team did), you'd get the same benefits.

BTW: I like to think of Guy Steele, who co-invented Scheme (used in SICP), and also co-wrote the Java Language Specification.
I agree with checklist. This list is perfect for most startups but launch quick is not good enough. We need to launch and need to get good feedback so we can fix those issues. Sometime it is hard to get feedback. In that case we need someone who can market our product or who has good contacts to get the word out. Technical people like me has hard time to sell the product or idea. So for me (14) Hire or find co-founder with marketing skills.
Internet taking piece of cable TV business
It's been a while since I read his explanation, but an economist -- I believe it was Tim Harford in _The Undercover Economist_, but it may have been Tyler Cowan -- has already solved this, and with a very different answer.

Several factors are operating. First, due to a higher death rate among males, the number of women begins to exceed the number of men (of a given age) starting at age 23. Next, there are about 10 times as many men in prison as women. Also, there seem to be rather more gay men than lesbian women. There are far more women in large US cities, where articles like this are written, than men (who are disproportionately rural). then, women like to "marry up", whereas men are willing to marry down.

Now comes the key point. Even a rather small discrepancy between supply and demand in an auction market can quickly drive prices thru the roof, or the floor. Great example: recent oil prices. Back when the economy was going well prices could shoot up rapidly as oil fields became exhausted and development of new ones was blocked. When the economy talked and demand dropped just a few percent, prices collapsed from $147 to $39, or some such. I read his account too quickly to fully follow it, and I'm sorry I can't remember it, but small-supply-imbalances-can-produce-huge-price-swings was the gist of it. Sorry, I don't have the book available to check it.

>> This is how you come to the Eligible-Bachelor Paradox, which is no longer so paradoxical. The pool of appealing men shrinks as many are married off and taken out of the game, leaving a disproportionate number of men who are notably imperfect (perhaps they are short, socially awkward, underemployed).
LaidOffCamp tries to fuel ambition
Google/Yahoo  support rel="canonical"
How the two lists on the submitted link were compiled:

http://www.randomhouse.com/modernlibrary/100best.html
SQL is much more like map/reduce than it is for/next.
> don't waste precious life

Funny, but this is how I feel about my 11 year career spent with 3 huge corporations - that it has been largely a waste of 40-50 hours of my life every week. I've made 6 figures most of my career, and I've had plenty of time for my family. I'd trade the salary and benefits for something I was passionate about if I felt I could do it without being irresponsible to my wife and child.

I suppose the grass is always greener on the other side.

My sentiment is that it's worth trying when you're young because you might not get a shot when you're older.
Nobody was wondering. If you're going to advertise your company, just be transparent about it.
Should one not study the geometry of Euclid, despite it being a "waste of good talent?" I mean, learning 2000 year old mathematics will not innovate or contribute to modern mathematics, right? People will do and learn things for their intrinsic value, and dismissing the act of learning because it doesn't benefit the rest of a field misses the point of gaining knowledge.
That's not my rationalization though it's certainly true. I'm part of a system that allows artists and venues to have nice clean financials by guaranteeing sell-outs. It is certainly not good for fans. As someone who goes to a lot of shows, I would be happy to see the system change.
I don't think she's unattractive or has aged badly. I find Michelle Obama to be more attractive and an overall more compelling First Lady, but that's largely a matter of personal taste.

What I never understood was the attraction to The Wicked Witch of the Northwest, aka Sarah Palin. She did nothing for me. Moreover, her husband was a secessionist.
I've been thinking the same thing but I find that consulting is really based on personal connections and so, that's where I've always got mine. Which makes it harder in leaner times to get anything done.

I've also found that your personal network are usually supportive and wholly useful when it comes to generating business, because the work they can get you is usually not within your realm of expertise or isn't needed when need the money.

But if you have a part-time gig already lined up when you go, that'd be a good step. Curious to hear what others think on this subject...
Another reason they suck, is that many corporate CTOs fear open source. I contracted for an enterprise software dev company, conceptualizing product and producing prototypes.

Our protos were quick and simple affairs using jquery. The CTO refused to integrate jquery into the application itself, and rewrote everything custom, which worked half as well as our simple protos and took months longer to develop, had they built the front end with jquery.

The CTO lost his job recently due to cost overruns.
High-concept pitches are not your friend
To all the fellow FP fans - why spend so much time trying to convince nay-sayers that FP is great, that it makes code shorter, simpler, safer, more robust, more fun? They will not get it anyway, until they try it. And sadly, they won't try it. Let's just use FP to our advantage and crush the competition!
This list is somewhat dated. After looking through the editor's top 100, many of these are indeed very good. However, a cursory glance through the 'Readers' list reveals some strange/unexpected list members, that might suggest strange/skewed sample population.

Things that immediately stood out as different:

- 3 Rand books in the top 6? Really?

- 2 Scientology / Anti Psychology books near the top (#2, #11)

A look at the fiction list reveals the same bias:

Top 10 from the 'Novels List'

ATLAS SHRUGGED by Ayn Rand
THE FOUNTAINHEAD by Ayn Rand
BATTLEFIELD EARTH by L. Ron Hubbard
THE LORD OF THE RINGS by J.R.R. Tolkien
TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD by Harper Lee
1984 by George Orwell
ANTHEM by Ayn Rand
WE THE LIVING by Ayn Rand
MISSION EARTH by L. Ron Hubbard
FEAR by L. Ron Hubbard

There are still gems in these lists, I'm just surprised that many of these made the list, especially some of the high ranking ones. Something seems off.