skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Templating tends to break down because it forces you to treat code and markup as two different and fundamentally incompatible things.

Well of course code and markup are two different things, but incompatible? Not really.

We use HTML templates simply to let the designers play with the templates without our interference. It also makes changes easier to integrate. Otherwise we could use a DSL and transform the syntax tree in valid xhtml (which many people are already doing).

> Rather than poking holes in HTML to insert code, we should simply treat HTML as code.

Actually that means poking holes in your code to insert HTML. And it's worse IMO.

While I like some of the articles Jeff has published on his blog, but I've long since deleted the blog's feed from my list because the signal to noise ration is really awful.
Good advice from the person above. Since the grader was anonymous, then you must appeal to your professor. Don't go in angry. Learn to work within the system (greatest hack of all) and let your professor know this.
Shutter the bad and mediocre colleges, law schools, and business programs. These diploma mills border on fraud. Most people who think they went to "college" didn't. They were expensively babysat for four years because the job market couldn't figure out what to do with them (and, alas, still can't). The upper-middle tier schools (respectable but not distinguished state schools) shall stay in business but should be half of their current size.

This problem is even more obvious in law school. "California Western School of Law" is not going to provide access to the level of means that most people associate with being a lawyer. These are the schools that law students call TTTs-- third tier toilets-- and the job prospects they provide don't offset the ridiculous debt one takes in order to attend them. A law program loses accreditation if less than 50% of its students fail the bar exam. There are many shitty law schools out there that take on mediocre, doomed students (like, 140 LSAT) and fail many of them in their first year, in order to improve their bar pass rate.

I think it's time to go to an "elitist" European-style system where only qualified students get to go to university and into professional programs, at least with the public schools. Only 5-15% of the population should be getting an academic college education, but it should be free (or very low-cost) for them. No student loans, no parents losing their retirement funds to tuition payments. The other ~85% can go to a private college if they can afford it, as in Europe, but it's not viewed as a universal right.
I hate to say it -- the idea is the easy thing.
Execution is what really counts!
Haskell vs Java job applicants
That's a problem at TCNJ, too. It's one of the reasons I'd like to get out and work on a real problem for a little while. However, now that my second semester's begun, I'm in an environment with people who're much more interested in actually learning. Not the classwork so much as just things. My roommate and I are going through a work-out program, I might try and record an album with a kid on my floor, we have tons of debates about game design and writing and all sorts of stuff. And the college environment is useful for a lot of that, for finding people who like learning.

The other thing to remember is that chances are you're in the very slim minority of students who enter college with some sort of focus. As much as I'd like to rail against people who don't know what they want to do by the age of 18, it's pretty common. My friend is entering MIT, and he's extremely bright and I'm sure he'll get a lot out of being in a place with other bright people, but if I were in college with him I'd be just as frustrated at him as I am at the people around me who aren't working towards some great goal.

The problem of finding ultrafocused people is a tough one. I was in a program that assembled artists together for a month, and it was absolutely the greatest month of my life and I'm looking for a system that creates the same focus elsewhere. Dunno if other programs like that exist, sadly. Perhaps that's a problem worth solving as well.
I disagree. I don't know if you have kids, but mainly, they find nudity very funny.

I'd much rather my kids see a pair of boobs, than see a guy shooting another guy with a gun, which for some reason seems to be totally acceptable.
Ok, I stand corrected. The meta-discussions were the _start_ of the death of digg.
I doubt many people on the internet will be swayed not to use godaddy by some christians TBH.
I would not pay because the content on HN isn't so specialized that I cannot find the community elsewhere. Furthermore, trolls are easily identified and ignored, like SPAM.

However if there were a subscription, I think you need to think about the value of this community. Charging just posters would unleash a backlash by the most active members of this community. Their thought would be, "why would I PAY to participate in a community when everyone else can obtain the value of my knowledge for FREE?" Using the email analogy again, if everyone who wanted to email me had to pay $5/year, I would probably receive no spam, but more importantly no emails at all -- not even from my mother who would just use a cheaper substitute (phone).
Take the lottery, for example.

The economy hasn't routed around that, and it clearly does not add value to the economy or society. Yet it "fulfills a need" in the sense that people willingly seek it out, and in fact seek out illegal "numbers game" lotteries were no official one is allowed.
There was a time when I felt that way. But somewhere along the line I married a woman who's got a degree in History and Literature. I can see your eyes rolling already. It gets worse: she never even (gasp!) took Calculus.

But the fact is that she's smart. Crazy smart. Quoted by the Supreme Court smart.

And she sees the world through glasses that are very, very different than my own. Our discussions are not about whether X > Y, but whether Y is even a measurable, meaningful value; whether this is the right question to be asking; what X means in a legal sense; what that implies for the how we build policy; and whether we can help people get understand Y.

This morning we argued about Robert Reich's premise of restructuring the economy and whether you could blame stagnant wages at the feet of Microsoft.

Every day that I talk to her I see nuances where I hadn't before. I get smarter.

I'd even go as far as to say I get smarter at a faster rate than I have talking to vast majority of the technical people I've ever interacted with.
Clearly it's subjective. Hitmen fulfill a need too.

My main point was that the HN community should look on the financial industry's shrinkage as a positive thing, b/c they didn't provide value commensurate with their size, and they were doomed to crash, unlike other industries, like say, e-education that would provide tremendous value to our civilization.
I love how they compare YouTube 5,600 at 28 times Hulu size on the same graph. I like the economist but it seems to be going down hill lately.
Then out of curiosity, why do Christians go to church on Sundays? I genuinely have never understood what led up to the day switch - I was born and raised Jewish.
Data is the Public Good. Data is the Infrastructure. Data is the Stimulus.
VERY good point!
Google Books for your smartphone
Will Android, the iPhone, and others edge out products like the Kindle or Sony Reader?
I think you must be thinking of some other experiment.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment
Things a web designer would never tell you
Just want to note: that was already happening even without the orange. At a certain karmic critical mass, my comments started getting voted up more often. But I'm just as much of an asshole now as I was 9 months ago.

I agree the orange makes it worse; it's a step in the wrong direction. On the other hand, it's not introducing a new problem. And we're all way to obsessed with this silly number.
Cool, added to RSS.

I wanted to say: the uservoice feedback thing on the left makes it slow to scroll and maybe even more annoyingly gives unsmooth/unpredictable scroll time which means I can't ignore it.

I've noticed this in many sites recently that have persistent buttons/sidebars off to the sides. Don't know if it's a problem specific to Firefox or what... makes CPUs jump into the ~20%s which is more than youtube videos etc.

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.0.5) Gecko/2009010220 Gentoo Firefox/3.0.5
Larry Ellison Buys Another Company
Damn, my edit disappeared. Apologies for the double post.

The other problem with that is that I wouldn't know where to begin finding a job. I'm not satisfied with much. If I'm not working on my ideas, creating them as I see fit, I'm not happy. So I can't think of many jobs I could take that really would make it worth not going to college.
Already posted: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=459846
Yes it's a lot of money, but it also leaves them with a lot of money left every month. I don't know exactly what your net income in CA on 200k is (and if they filed jointly, etc), but they should take home at least 10k a month.

They still have 7k a month to live on. I don't see the problem.
Your quote from the article highlights yet another fallacy - that if you are educated you will make more money. This is marketing at its worst.

It's because of this reasoning I'm surrounded by people who studied CS as a major and learned Java because it was projected to pay well (hint hint about the age level of developers I'm working with lately). The result is that I fix the mistakes of people who possess coding skills that I wouldn't even qualify as AP high school level. My point here is to highlight the idea of choosing an education that compels you to develop yourself into a "somebody" instead of being an "anybody".

Education is polish for the mind. It's best used towards developing yourself as an individual. Unfortunately it has devolved into a tool to charm money out of the system.
Here are some other ports:

JavaScript: http://code.google.com/p/clojure-contrib/source/browse/#svn/...

Flash: http://wiki.github.com/aemoncannon/las3r

.NET: http://bitbucket.org/stefanrusek/xronos/wiki/Home
Ugh, but the complete lack of margin was painful.
Google Chrome Will Have Extensions by May
Academic Earth - Video lectures from the world's top scholars
Great feedback - thanks! I've added all these as uservoice items so the non-HN crowd can look and vote. I'll definitely be implementing some of these over the weekend though.

I'm looking forward to reading Google Analytics in the morning.
I think netflix, audible and itunes are different in that they provide tangible "taste-able" content in that you get real something out of it.

The bigger question here is does anyone pay for news, informational content?

My answer would be no. I only pay to have my content managed- backpackit, flickr, animoto
Finally this gets to the front page. My very first post was exactly the same: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=439399
I live in CA and am struggling at just under 6 figures. Childcare and Mortgage on an (average 500K) home is the majority of my salary. Here is the problem. With over 80% of my net going to living expenses, there is no extra 2800 to go to school loans.

Thank heavens I have no loans, just have to pay my wife's off....
You'd think DHH would run his JS past Sam Stephenson (the creator of Prototype, who works at 37s) before posting it on the company blog.
or maybe just a war on "war on"
It cant be too bad if they are pulling in 200K a year....
My girlfriend has some student loans that made me inhale sharply through my teeth when she described them to me.

Her and her family are not good at finance or math, and they got swept into the popular way of looking at college in America: Get into school, take loans, finish school, pay off loans.

That was all true for a long time, but interest rates have risen sharply for loans in the last 5 years, and the value of a degree (especially a liberal arts degree) has fallen.

I'm not making excuses for them, I'm just offering a data point. My feeling is that we're about to see a shift in the popular view of college, but these views always lag the reality. Because of this lag, newly graduating students are going to have it worst of all.
Hulu is fantastic. I canceled my cable TV when I realized all the shows I watch are on there. With the money I saved I bought a mini computer just for my HDTV.
After reading this I'm going to be so much more happy that my car starts in the morning... I wonder how much of that code is 'critical', in other words, if it should fail that it would lead to loss of a vehicle or plane (including the occupants and/or bystanders).

I do wonder about those line counts though, that seems suspiciously high, especially given the fact that automotive processors are usually not very powerful. The majority is in the 'pic/atmel/name your flavour of embedded cpu' range.
If you're friends with Bill, I'm sure he'll find the time for free.
I also managed to drop the ly of the end of deliberately, that's why my name isn't in orange.
Business of Software 2009: Speakers include Paul Graham, Joel Spolsky & Geoffrey Moore
Like you, I tend to pay for tools. Version Tracker, Animoto, Flickr.

I wonder if anyone pays for any content, news or otherwise.
I'd do it.
Last year was meant to be exceptionally great. Any YC users going?
I do not regularly pay for any online service. Why? Because there are an enormity of free and open source alternatives. Granted, some "free alternatives" aren't entirely legal, however they're alternatives nonetheless, just with an associated risk.

For movies and music, I use torrents. For applications, I go open source or free -- I can hardly think of any non-entertainment media whose function couldn't be replicated by a readily available free alternative. For storage, there are plenty of sites which offer gigabytes of online storage, gratis.
Well, that was fixed very quickly. Thanks!
Neat stuff. I'm wrapping up writing a custom rails app that will talk to the iPhone, and because I don't have to support other platforms I've designed my XML to be optimized for parsing on the client side.

The simplest optimization is to have NOTHING in text between tags. If you want to associate values with a specific element, then add a set of attributes to the element instead. Much simpler to do a bunch of if/else statements inside parser:didStartElement than to keep track of text, last element name, and all sorts of potential depth issues.
just noticed this on pg's biography:

> In 1995 he developed with Robert Morris the first web-based application, Viaweb, which was acquired by Yahoo in 1998

really?
casual games mostly.. peggle, world of goo, etc.

if hacker news is content, then basecamp & fixx probably also count (team & product news, respectively).

apart from that, i would pay for some TED talks, for high quality game reviews (http://tinyurl.com/cn5guu), and for most of Andrew Chen's blog (http://andrewchenblog.com/).
Isaacson’s pitch for micropayments
Do you think you know web2py? Try again (version 1.56 is out)
Lots of new features... runs on Jython and IronPython. Includes Role Based Access Control and RESTful CRUD. Runs on Google App Engine.
FAA Releases Flight 1549 Tapes
Guerrilla Marketing: How Twitter Changed The Way We Will Approach Tradeshows
I've been a long-time HN lurker, but we recently returned from a trade show experiment I thought I'd share with the rest of the small startups here: what happens when you drop the $20k booth, and pick up Twitter as the main marketing tool instead?

As startups, we're often forced to be ultra-conservative about where we spend our money. Last October my co-founder, Rian Gauvreau, and I launched Clio, a web-based practice management tool designed specifically for solos and small firm lawyers. We've been building buzz about it using word-of-mouth marketing, but wanted to step things up at a tradeshow and try to get the word out in the mainstream legal press and blogs.

The legal industry's biggest tradeshow, LegalTech New York, was the obvious place to do this - it just wrapped up yesterday. We wanted to attend the show and raise the visibility of Clio, which traditionally would be done by buying a booth, flying out 2-3 people to staff it up, buying some giveaways, etc. Renting the space for the booth alone would be $10k (just for a 10x10 booth), while buying a booth can easily be another $5-10k.

Looking at a $20k+ tab to have a booth at this show, we decided we should look at an alternative: just showing up at the conference with a laptop for demos, setting up meetings beforehand with e-mail, and leveraging Twitter to connect with existing and potential clients at the meeting (lawyers have a surprisingly vibrant presence on twitter - http://www.lextweet.com/).

The response? We spent 2 solid days answering DM's to set up meetings, even connected with giants in the field like Bob Ambrogi (@bobambrogi) via Twitter. It was easily the most positive and exciting tradeshow experience I've had, and we didn't spend a penny on the traditional booth, shwag and rental expenses.

For any other HN startups out there: think twice before shelling out for an expensive booth to get the message out: you might be surprised at how effective Twitter can be as a marketing tool.

We're at http://twitter.com/goclio.
How to Tweak Your Brain With Colors
For a huge company, I'd say TDD/pair programming etc is also to ensure some productivity from bad programmers.

If one bad programmer writes the unit tests, and another bad programmer writes the code, then you might end up with a mediocre outcome, instead of a bad outcome. Same with pair programming.

Likewise, if you get a good programmer to write the unit tests, then give the programming work to a terrible programmer, given enough time, he'll write a working solution.
Already posted: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=439440
It just doesn't seem prudent to publicly disparage my best advertiser.
Take your time and do your homework written on paper. Say what you want about it being the "same thing." It isn't, and you should get prepared for the tests using the methods you will have available then - and that isn't MATLAB (or Python, or whatever you used).
Wouldn't you say that a large part of a mortgage payment is actually an investment? If you were faced with large student loan payments, you could just decide to rent rather than take on a huge investment.

Again, I don't see the problem.
Assume they're living in a house and they have one child. Then:

$2800 for loans.

$3500 for mortage and escrow.

$1300 for child care (both work).

$1000 for food and day-to-day living expenses.

$1000 for utilities, Internet, services and recurring expenses --- parking, commute, health care copay and (with most employers) dependent coverage, etc.

I get $9600. Survivable? Of course. You can clearly survive in America with a $2800/mo student loan burden offset by a $200k/yr income. But:

* It's not "comfortable"; for instance, they aren't putting away money to put their kid in college.

* It's not resilient; they're fucked as soon as one of them loses their job.

* It's not flexible; for instance, they might literally not be able to afford to have a second kid.

Now, they don't have kids, I get that. But the moral of the story was, their student loan debt load was so high they couldn't stay married. They're smart enough to make 200k/yr, they're smart enough to do this math.
I just realized what'd make a great feature, in my opinion: Add a "recommend alternate" option. For instance, if I see a command I know is suboptimal or there exist other tools that do the job better, I can submit an alternate way to perform the same action.

For instance, I see something like:

find $PWD -type f -exec grep pattern {} \;

I can suggest an alternate to be:

grep -r . pattern
3G Tower In Your Home
Sure I will. Where do I send the money? California or Boston?
Tip: learn to write well. Don't do it for this class, do it for yourself.

My handwriting use to be atrociously bad. I worked on it a little and it got to the point where what I write is legible (though, not neat).

It's a useful skill to have, writing on paper.

In the short term, just talk to the professor.... what's hard about this? Also, DO NOT "appeal to a higher power". The prof will find out about it, and the higher power will say "talk to your damn professor". Now you ARE the troublemaker.
If it isn't worth pursuing on his own time, it's certainly not worth someone investing in it.
Sorry about that. Deleted my post.
I do not want my domains to expire by default -- the principal of "least harm" in defaults certainly applies. One accidental lapsing could cause more pain than a hundred accidental renewals.
You did that? Cool - I'd be interested in hearing about your experience - please consider blogging about it.
Hacker Dojo: Mid-Peninsula Hacker Community
I'm wondering if you had a straight face on when you said "a large part of the mortgage payment is an investment". Either way: if they want to build a family, the rent vs. mortgage decision isn't going to change the equation much. Again, assume they have a kid. They have to factor in:

* Commute distance, which will determine how often they actually see their children.

* Lease security; it is extremely traumatic to move a school-age child to a new school district, or even just a new school.

* School quality: the places with the best rental stock are not necessarily places with acceptable public school, or accessible child care.

Again: the article's claim isn't that a couple can't survive on 200k. It's that they couldn't stay married. I can see reasons why.
I first ran into this issue several years ago, while I was using PERL (blargh).

PERL has packages that allow you to put your HTML inside your code, or allow you to put your code inside templates.

It soon became clear to me that neither is the win - the only real difference is "if I don't escape (via a quote character or a <? or a <%), what is a character considered - HTML or code?".

The problem is that code is there are two different conceptual trees - the HTML tree with nested elements, and the code tree with nested logic, and these trees do not have a 1:1 correspondence.

This is not a simple problem, and there are not simple answers.

Programming in Ruby and Rails for the last few years, I've become a fan of partials, but the tradeoff that you get is that for greater ability to read one file, you lose locality of reference ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locality_of_reference ) - you might have a table row in one file, and the data data in another file entirely.

In general, I am a huge fan of straight text based editing, and always raise a dubious eyebrow at proposals for graphical editors and strange new editing tools.

...but I seriously wonder if there's some solution off in the space of a different kind of editor that lets you switch back and forth between viewing the code tree and the presentation tree...
But I'm just as much of an asshole now as I was 9 months ago.

But you're an asshole we all know. You're our asshole.
The choice isn't between college and McDonalds. For instance, I don't have a degree.

Education is valuable, but it's far from proven that college is.
Many jobs can be summed up as exchanging time for money. Also, to make back the money you lose, you have to use time.