skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What I'd like to see is innovation in the UI field. Trying new, interesting ideas. Maybe even doing away with some of the old ideas - like the way KDE got rid of the desktop as a file-storage place. (Instead, allowing a widget to display any folder)
Well I'm only on my fifth year with it (at work) so maybe I have not been given as much a chance to get disillusioned.

It's not my choice "as a language": I can't stand using Java with just a text editor whereas that's very nice with Python for example. I'm talking more about the platform. Spring (the small focused parts of it like IoC and AOP), Hibernate, Terracotta, Lucene, Jetty, YourKit, Clover, and many of the OSGI/JMX deployment solutions are all just polished, productive and out of the way to me with very nice integrations into my IDE. Yeah, IntelliJ -- that's probably a big part of my ability to like Java, to be honest.

I'm with you on the abstractions thing, I've avoided J2EE etc.
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Yes I see that - but if people who don't want to read a novel on screen, yet who code at the moment, could use a new display that they would read a novel on happily - would that also bring any improvements to their coding?
That's true about the nested structures. I was wondering if it is worthwhile to make lexing and parsing first class and changeable at runtime, and whether regexps would be a good way of doing this. The problem with relying on an external program is that making syntax conversion first class gets much more convoluted.

But, it isn't clear to me whether it is a good idea to make everything about LOP first class. I do like that feature of Lisp though.
I'd be surprised if the average McDonald's franchiser is making anything close to $100,000 per year. I'd guess that it's around $60,000 in a good location and year. McDonalds is known to be especially bad at fleecing franchise owners.

I worked at a chain grocery store one summer and had observations pretty similar to Barbara Ehrenreich's in Nickel and Dimed. "Four digits" (per week) was considered to be rarefied compensation. The #3 man in the store was making around $50k, and this was a huge store with about 150 employees.
Is something like WSGI compatible with Lua, or is there something equivalent that can be used?
I thought pg was thinking this way with arc. I remember reading something where he was planning to add some kind of syntax definition capability to arc, but haven't been able to find the article since.
Would you? Down here (Australia) it takes $0.5m-$1.5m to start one. I'd expect more thent 100k
I wonder why Google isn't offering a DOM Storage implementation of this. Versions of Firefox 2 and later offer built-in support for WHATWG's DOM Storage API, which would (theoretically) allow users to have this functionality without installing the Gears extension.

My best guess is that Gears is more robust and probably easier to implement things with than DOM Storage, but I'd appreciate if anyone with experience using both could confirm this.
Hehe, no-one. But KDE are probably right to show a Vista knockoff. People like you and me already know its customisable, but people who use Vista might see it as a slightly nicer looking version of what they've got and be more tempted to try it.
This guy's trying to write one in Movitz:

http://www.emmett.ca/~sabetts/
Ubuntu/Gnome user here:

You know, I really love the idea of KDE, their philosophy and recent developments and progress they've made... but I've tried KDE 4.1 and I can't make myself use it. Its superficial but I think its their visual style that I find somewhat off-putting.

I wish I had the time/drive and visual design skills to build a complete KDE 4.x theme, something far visually smaller, simpler and more minimalistic than what they have. I really like Google Chrome's motto ("Content not Chrome"), but haven't found a KDE look to satisfy that. The default ubuntu theme is also bad from this perspective, but it can be brought under control with this: http://martin.ankerl.com/2007/11/04/clearlooks-compact-gnome...
Aren't sport-touring motorcycles generally pretty quiet? Only 35 of the 4,727 motorcycle drivers killed in 2007 were driving sport-touring motorcycles. http://www.iihs.org/research/fatality_facts_2007/motorcycles...

http://www.google.com/search?q=quiet+motorcycle+%22sport+tou...

I own a sport-touring bike (super quiet) and a cruiser with cobra pipes. [...]

was amazed at how quiet, refined and responsive the BMW was in comparison. ...
I'm sorry, but it isn't "de rigueur" here to play grammar and spelling nazi to headlines. Yes, people who post while abiding by the standard rules of English are generally better regarded here than people who do not.

If you really feel you must point out the failings of someone's grammar or capitalization, then perhaps you should find another avenue to point it out than overplayed vim-isms.

Palish has set a good example if you must: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=436458
I did read the majority of the article, though I admit I did quickly skim sections. Must have missed it.
Does anyone know if FPS is like paypal or google checkout? I'm wondering if it means customers need to use their amazon user id to use it.
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I'm assuming that the OP is smart and reasonably motivated. If so, he's not likely to be one of the fast grad-school washouts.

You're right that there are a few of those in every class, but the average smart person takes much longer to figure out that a PhD is a soul-sucking waste of youth and vitality.
Jeez, finally. Took them long enough to combine two products in an incredibly obvious way.
Why don't they charge for this?
Took a glance at some numbers. It appears that I'm wrong. I had management and franchisee ownership compensation conflated in my mind for some reason.
That's actually really interesting. How much traffic does the site get anyways?
I still have this issue about perfectionism. I am constantly reading, trying to perfect my knowledge of the framework I am using, CSS guidelines to ensure that the UI is perfect, patterns book and software development books to make sure I know a code smell, always trying to write the perfect code or pick the perfect color ...

I think there are a lot more people struggling with this problem that any of us realise. Particularly, it would seem, in areas where technical knowledge intersects with endevours that would traditionally be classed at "art".

Personally, I think this has got to be one of the most useful articles I've read in months. This kind of stuff is why I keep coming here.
Incubators May Benefit Federal Incubation
its possible that the 35 people represent an equally high or higher percent relative to the number of drivers in the category

Yes. More data is needed. In addition, the typical sport-touring rider is a different kind of person (tends to be older and more mature; more likely to wear a helmet; etc.; see IIHS link above for data) and does a different kind of riding.

However, the 35 figure represents less than 1% of the total - a suspiciously low percentage, in my opinion, given the quietness of that type of motorcycle.
This may be true from the producer perspective. It's difficult to get your message to millions of people at one time using the Internet.

From the consumer perspective, however -- the internet is the clear winner, if you must choose one. There are millions of streams available at any one time. That's the beauty of it. That's why Internet video will win in the long run or at least be a viable option for the individual over television. If you are willing to sacrifice mainstream content, ditch the TV and go all Internet. I haven't had a TV in over 6 years.

But Mr. Cuban is right, TV will be around for a long time. It will remain the winner for mainstream content, but the Internet isn't about mainstream content it's about access to content that isn't popular enough to warrant distributing to the main streams via traditional wireless routes.

Anyone here also TV free? How many years?
Very good point, I stand corrected. I will also post it to HN, if you don't mind. Mainly to save it for myself.
About.com[1] says a soda contains 23 grams of HFCS, and a there are about 226 grams of soda in an 8-oz can[2], so HFCS makes up about 10% of a soda (wow!).

From the worst of the tested sources, in this survey, a soda could contain .06ppm mercury, more than an order of magnitude smaller than what the government considers dangerous in seafood.

It's interesting to read about Jeremy Pivens' mercury toxicity[3]. In order to reach a point where it affected his ability to live life normally, he had to eat sushi twice a day, every day. Furthermore, his doctors said that a few months of treatment would solve his problem.

It seems likely to me that the amount of HFCS you'd need to eat in the very unlikely worst case to get actual mercury poisoning is going to give you diabetes before the mercury affects you.

Which is not to say that we shouldn't stop allowing people to sell mercury laden HFCS! If 9/20 studied samples contain no mercury, they all should, it's clearly a public health problem. What I mean to say is just that this is likely only to be a serious problem for a very few very heavy HFCS consumers, if any, and that people shouldn't take it to mean "I can't eat HFCS because I'll get mercury in me", because they probably won't get clinical amounts of mercury.

There's plenty of good reasons to avoid HFCS, I advocate that to everyone, but I don't think that the fear of the mercury found by this study is one of them.

[1] http://www.answers.com/topic/high-fructose-corn-syrup-1#cite...

[2] http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_much_does_a_can_of_soda_pop_we...

[3] http://www.webmd.com/news/20081218/jeremy-pivens-high-mercur...
"Now, it is true that getting a professorship could take you a very long time, and that you therefore want to start as young as possible so that you still have some youthful vigor left to find a new career after you can't secure a tenured position."

Ha!

I'll add the following quote, which I think is brilliant:

"Two years in [to a PhD program], and quitting will be like gnawing your own leg off."

(from: http://www.swarthmore.edu/SocSci/tburke1/gradschool.html, which is one of the better interweb answers to the "should I go to grad school?" question.)
Retweet statistics: what does it take to get popular on Twitter?
Yeah, I think that's a good reading.
It's also available from Gutenburg. http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/769
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What's most hilarious about this is that Bugzilla already underwent a pointless rewrite from TCL to perl before it was open-sourced -- because "perl was more popular" (though ironically after perl had peaked in popularity)
PhD or Startup
There is also the option on segmenting your market into two groups:

1) Customers with whom you trade value for money.

2) Customers with whom you trade value for value.

There are a lot of businesses which end up doing this by default (by doing a free trial model aimed at separating #1 from non-converting users) but I think you get much better ROI on the effort if you explicitly take into account those #2 customers in your design stages.

For example, in the traditional shareware model, the two major events in the sales cycle are download conversions and purchase conversions. Downloaders convert to purchases fairly infrequently -- the number most people give is 1% but what they really mean is "we don't know a number but it is low".

The traditional model largely sees the non-converters as a) not differentiated from purchasers except by their decision not to purchase and b) a cost-center: they tie you up with support inquiries and cost bandwidth, but you don't make anything off of them.

But what if you knew, a-priori, something about your market such that you could predict who the purchasers would be? The traditional shareware model might say "Great, avoid exposing yourself to the rest and you'll save time and money". But rather than excluding them, you could instead use them -- they've got blogs, they've got contacts in your group of core purchasers, etc. Instead of thinking of them as a cost, you can think of them as customers who are bartering things of value instead of money for your software/service/etc.

One example of a business which does this pretty well is github: they use free-for-OSS pricing to get them exposed to people who will request their boss to purchase paid-for-commercial services.

You can use the same basic concept with free trials, free plans, free content, etc. Its the basic core insight that I use to organize my content publication and limited free trial strategies for my downloadable software. Still working on my blog article about that that I mentioned here earlier. The ROI is wonderful if you get it right (remember, the traditional shareware model is assumed to leak 98%+ of prospects as muda [1], so capturing any fraction of that is powerful stuff).

[1] Muda is a Japanese word you'll hear a lot in certain management circles because Toyota is institutionally obsessed with eliminating it. The closest literal translation is "waste", but it relates to all sorts of process inefficiency. I find it is a helpful frame of mind to have in the toolbox when optimizing for conversions -- it sometimes is worthwhile to say not "Why did Bob buy this?" but "What prevented Suzy from buying this?"
Using compact s/// notation to recommend changes isn't 'nazi', it's hacker.

It's the reader's choice to interpret it as brusque rather than just efficient. Choose well!
I want to call out Terracotta especially.
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Rather them than any other company in my opinion.
Because the more Gmail competes with regular mail clients and offers the same features, the more likely users use Gmail. More users of Gmail, means more data and targeted ads.
Thank you. I don't mind. I believe weekday mornings are the best times to post (the times when posts are most likely to make it to the front page and stick). I'm not sure of the sweet spot, but I think it's ~4-8 AM Pacific time. (I wonder if anyone has come up with HN posting-time statistics yet.)
Go for a PhD, the older you get the harder it is to pick up the books again. You know, family, kids, and once you taste money you will want more and more, spending less time in other activities.

If you don't do it now, you will never do it.
This is why the terms should have been decided before, rather than after these loans were given.
Florida firm stakes out Microsoft, offering jobs to worried workers
My understanding after reading the whole thing was that he wanted to rewrite Bugzilla in Java so that they could get a bug tracking system for governmental use - although what specifically for (given he was referencing library of congress) is anyones guess.

But since I would assume that the bug tracking would be an internal thing, most likely on some internal network - why would not allowing Perl be a concern? Especially since he was talking about devices that don't run Perl.

I'm still at a loss what devices couldn't run Perl that would be governmental that could warrant such a big job for a bug tracking system.

The whole thing was highly confusing. I hope the guy makes a million bucks, but I'm sure he was trying to create a complex solution rather than an elegant solution.
I agree 100%, but supposedly the sky would have fallen if these companies would have gone bankrupt? (I have yet to be convinced of this)
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Ask HN: What's a fair policy for employee-generated IP?
My cofounder and I have long agreed that most big company IP agreements suck (we've written about it at http://devver.net/blog/2008/08/looking-for-your-first-cs-job-be-sure-to-own-your-ideas/). Many of them state that employee IP, no matter when it's created, is owned by the company (whether or not that's enforceable is another state-specific question).

Now we're hiring (http://devver.net/jobs) and are trying to figure out a reasonable agreement for the IP employees generate in their free time.

On the one hand, we want to encourage our employees to work on what they want outside of work. They'll be happier, they'll increase their breadth of knowledge, and we want to support open source.

On the other hand, we do want to make sure we own the IP that directly relates our business (no matter when it's created). And since we want to hire full-time employees who are free to work from home, there won't always be a clear distinction between "company time" and "personal time."

Have any of you founders come up with an agreement that both encourages outside work yet protects your company adequately (and doesn't completely freak out investors)? I'd love to what different companies are doing in this regard.
Yeah, but the "point" was illegal. Gawker wrote an article about this that made a pretty good point: "Make something somebody wants" is only a valid tactic if you can legally provide that thing.

I'll miss it. But the new one's gorgeous.
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The managers (2nd tear) may be in the $60k range but the owner would be on the 'Board of Dealers' while all the employees make minimum wage.
"... raw HTTP processing and a shell which wraps that inner core and ... the compliance shell... this compliance shell can wrap our internal corporate version, the Google Servlet Engine, ..."

Something wraps something that wraps something else. Sounds familiar from what I've seen in my office. Coincidentally, most developers in my workplace swears by Java.
Wow, you're right:

Brandon Watson ... is a board member of the Family Online Safety Institute and a former Microsoft manager.

I have been hacking away in Python for a couple years, but now that I am in the Developer Platform Marketing division at Microsoft...

That's a banning!

Brandon founded IMSafer in 2006 in response to the growing threat of online predators and the lack of effective tools for parents.

He's an opportunistic ass, evangelizing about the imminent paedogeddon...

IMSafer uses an advance language analysis engine to decipher the cryptic language used in IM conversations and on MySpace message boards, scanning for language that is dangerous, threatening or sexual in nature. In addition, IMSafer monitors MySpace accounts and reports changes made to any age, name or location disclosed.

...and a snake oil salesman too!
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Thanks Peldi. It doesn't matter if it's a hack as long as I can get things done :)
Why can't you ask if someone is a US citizen? I thought certain jobs (e.g., DoD contractor needing security clearance) required citizenship? Or are you only allowed to ask about that in specific circumstances?
Sounds like your attitude is pretty healthy.

As a perfectionist myself, let me say that the key is being able to continue working on v1 even when you anticipate the potential for a problem with the finished v1. The perfectionist failure mode is to restart the iteration every single time a potential problem is perceived. The perfectionist cannot stand the idea that anything, even v1, might fail in a way that was remotely preventable. The perfectionist iterates, but the iteration is a very tight loop that is not large enough to collect good feedback. In pathological cases the iteration never leaves the mind.

The obvious problem is that these "mistakes" are far too small to learn anything useful from. It does no good to tell the perfectionist that they have to iterate and learn from failure, because that is exactly what the perfectionist is doing. The problem is that it is more complicated than that - one also has to have the right kind of failures. A person with a healthy attitude towards failure won't even think about it and will naturally tend to let the problem dictate the optimal size of the iteration loop, but the perfectionist will usually always keep their loop too tight to be efficient, or to get anything useful done at all.

Being able to let go of that requires the ability to ignore or accept a certain kind of imperfection. Perfection in the limit requires the acceptance and embrace of permanent lack of perfection everywhere else, but especially in the builder. That is what is so hard for the perfectionist to do.
When I first saw the title, the lie that lept to mind was: "People want to stream." They don't. Streaming sucks and is a hack around content producers pathological belief that streams are somehow safer than normal downloads because they can't be captured. Or something. (It doesn't make any sense when you get down to it.)

They do in some cases want their video "now" (not in all cases), but they'd be just as happy if the "stream" stuck around in some form for a while rather than evaporating immediately.

Of course, I read the article, and at first it seems I was wrong. But... if you dig deeper, there's still an interesting aspect to my initial reaction. Delivering live streams to 10,000 users? Yeah, you're in for a world of hurt. But one hour of 1mbps video as a simple file is ~450 megabytes of data, and delivering that to 10,000 people an hour average is more feasible; there's more tricks you can play if you're just distributing a file and not a stream, not the least of which is torrenting. Some people might not get it in an hour, but it's a lesser problem to come close to an hour download time than to get everything necessary for the stream to work.

If you're not trying to stream, the problem is significantly reduced back to something manageable.

Whether this actually helps, I don't know exactly. But I certainly don't think it's as dire.

Interestingly, I observe that the big video sites seem to not stream anymore, they all let loading run ahead if possible. Maybe this is the reason?
It would be recurring assuming he gets a certain amount of signups each month. But in month 2, he no longer gets that money from the customers - that goes straight to the other company.

He may get a one-off payout of $100 or so per signup, but if he had his own service he would continue to make money from the original signups while gaining new ones each month.

Recurring payments > One-time payment.
Only a Microsoft person would stoop so low. When your browser and stock price is losing market share and value like crazy, you have to resort to dirty tricks to save your job.
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Hidden third option: building space rockets and driving Ferraris.
It seems like it might be a hail mary for him, considering this quote from his blog:

Now that I have been working in the Developer and Platform Tools marketing group at Microsoft for close to a year, I have decided that it’s probably a good idea for me to be technically proficient in our own technologies.
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