skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I understand that this was the mentality in "The Art of UNIX programming", and it is really powerful. The problem is that UNIX never provided a good way to compose programs that need to exchange more than text.

As a result, the outputs of a UNIX-like system are great for programmers but terrible to use by everyone else. For example, if you need an interface that display a nice button to execute a function, you're out of luck with UNIX. The more detailed the interface, the more complicated it becomes. That's why OO has become the de facto way to create user friendly UIs.
Logging in Clojure / JVM – Part 1
Its a document portal - shepherddocs.com. I had several requests to build a simple client portal for accountants/financial advisors so decided to build out a SaaS vs. do it per client. They're happy with it so I would like to gradually get the word out.

Its a saturated market but I feel if I can capture a sliver of the need - that would be enough to liberate some of this coder's free time. Also - a lot of solutions are 'heavy' - these fellas just wanted a simple app that they can customize and 'bolt' on to their web site.

Thanks for the curiosity.
> Every if and every switch should be viewed as a lost opportunity for dynamic polymorphism.

The truly sad thing about OOP is people not embracing the duality between if-statement dispatching (pattern matching) and oop-style dynamic dispatching.

In situations where you have a fixed set of types its better to use switch statements and even in other cases, sometimes its better to still use if statements to avoid scatering your code all over the place (specially if you compiler warns you if you forget to handle on of the cases when updating things)

http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?ExpressionProblem
Baffling; your ethical concern is that they did not sue her for more money. "If they were really serious, and not just using the legal system to bully people", you seem to suggest, "they'd set out to ruin her completely and give no quarter until they actually accomplished that".
Linux for a business traveller
Petr is no longer ranked #1 on popular competitive programming sites such as Topcoder [1] and Codesforce [2]. 18-year-old Gennady Korotkevich [3] from Belarus ranks better on both, and has also won the most medals in the International Olympiad in Informatics ever, he was awarded his first silver medal when he was 11.

Nonetheless, Petr is a legend in this field.

[1]: http://community.topcoder.com/tc?module=AlgoRank

[2]: http://codeforces.com/ratings

[3]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gennady_Korotkevich
And .com completely gone? In an hour? I would say there was a human intervention. Although Bing points to .org as well...
...Surely, you realize the irony of your position, no? One could easily replace "IDE" with "Programming paradigm [X]" and you'd suddenly be the exact person you were railing against in your original post..

How about this.. both have their merits..? Static typed languages do benefit from a good IDE. That said, I personally prefer the cleanness of Sublime Text over a proper IDE -- even at the expense of having to write my own getters and setters! Doesn't mean the other is antithetical to productivity.

Let's end this senseless arguing and just agree that PHP is terrible.
"As of November 13th, MySpace has approximately 3.8 Monthly Active Users." Sounds about right.
"MySpace has approximately 3.8 Monthly Active Users", you might be underestimating this :D
I don't know how "genius" this is, but if you want to spend some money to "look more like a real startup" you are definitely going down the wrong path.
Inferring a user's location based on IP4 address is cancer. Don't encourage cancer.
We listened to our users and found what was important to them: faster syncing. We have hopefully found a way to provide that but still make sure the folks who really get value can pay like normal. As usual, this is always a fine line.

Another thing we introduced for users wanting a little more on the free plan is referrals (and other bonuses). You can check that out here: https://zapier.com/referral/ Hopefully we can open source the Django app that drives this mechanism (its really cool!).
Don't forget Gnuplot! www.gnuplot.info . Fast, easy to learn, and flexible. Will do limited curvefitting, but it's not an analysis tool.

I use it for quick and for final plots. Any intermediate analysis gets done in Octave (which has abandoned the gset commands for MATLAB compatibility).
I have loved Teavana ever since they opened a store in the mall near me. I hope they start using the teas that Teavana has to beef up the selection in Starbucks stores. Tazo is decent but the variety is lacking and they miss out on the complexities of flavor and aroma that specialty teas have.

I will be a happy customer when I can go get a Himalayan young black tea with the same ease I can get a bag of Colombian dark roast beans.
The Ten Year Decline of Sony
they should really step up their game.
$10,000 dollars for a domain seems a bit much by itself. When you add the factor that you should have right to it and it was basically stolen.. there's no way they should pay that.
We're cracking up at the office realizing this typo. Fixed. >_<
Human potential wasted by communism.
Starbucks to acquire Teavana - Nov. 14, 2012
I don't see where we are disagreeing here - Vazirani/Dasgupta is not as detailed/rigorous as CLRS and that is precisely the point. The detail of CLRS comes at the cost of readability.

I'm not denying that I enjoyed learning from CLRS - but I recollect having to take more effort to parse its detailed pseudo-code than what a higher level of abstraction would've taken.

This is where a book with less detail like Vazirani can help. I would never recommend relying on a single text for studying anything - least of all Algorithms. Each of these complement the others in a nice way and being able to look at the same concept from the perspective of different authors always help.

> The Vazirani/Dasgupta book does not go into as much detail. You don't believe me that this book is bad? Read some of the Amazon reviews: http://www.amazon.com/Algorithms-Sanjoy-Dasgupta/product-rev....

You've pointed to the 3 one-star reviews instead of the 17 five-star reviews of the book. Was that a mistake? Joking aside, those reviews seem to be from people who've tried to use Vazirani as their sole Algorithms text. Having seen CLRS first, I've always approached Vazirani as a complement to CLRS and that worked.
Author of the post here, happy to answer any questions. I'm pretty confident in our findings here, and some of the behavior is just bizarre.
Ouch, elsewhere on the internet it seems like people are actually getting hit by this. Hopefully damage won't be too bad. Good research, PRX!
You make an excellent point, but when working in Python there are advantages to tying in to tools that are also written in Python. They will tend to be easier to integrate into your project than non-Python code[1] and more than that will generally be easier for you to extend or tweak[2] if you run into a case where you have to "look under the hoos" for some reason.[3]

[1] Python works well with other languages of course, and is often used as a "glue" between other components.

[2] This assumes that you know Python better than whatever language it was made in, but for many cases that will be true.

[3] I often like to look at libraries just to understand how they work, but that is different. There are often cases, especially where the tool uses some abstraction that can leak, where you need to look under the hood just to get things working.
Ask HN: What's the standard approach to IP clauses in employment contracts?
As one of the many students starting to consider offers for after graduation, I have some questions about the industry standards regarding certain clauses I've seen in a few contracts. (I'm considering various consulting positions, but am also an active developer on multiple open-source projects.)

These IP clauses usually say something to the effect of "Any and all writings, inventions, improvements, processes, procedures, and/or techniques which I may make, conceive, discover or develop, during the term of employment with <firm> ... shall be the sole and exclusive property of <firm>."

Is this normal / Do people normally submit to this? The projects I'm involved in are GPL (which should mean tough-luck for the employer), but I don't want to give up any ideas/projects I might have in the near future.<p>Can anyone give me some insight?
I'm not a designer by any stretch, but for me there is something so gratifying about putting pencil to paper. I've always found it to be the best way to (at least initially) bring ideas out of my head and into the world.
It's a reasonable question to ask why you should trust us given several changes in the past, however considering this move makes Hyperic invested in a VMware supported database, I think the likelihood of it changing again any time soon is dramatically lower. Also, since this is a "eating your own dogfood" kind of move, I would actually deem this a very good thing for the product in the long term for scalability and general performance.
I've tried sketching in photoshop/illustrator and the paper and pencil method. I get way more iterations per hour done on paper, but that's just personal preference.
Companies want protection. Companies want to demonstrate that they are not negligent. Companies want clear rules that state "doing it THIS way is good and safe and in the event that it all goes wrong will leave you blameless because you totally followed the rules". The big rulemaker in any society is government. You could have worked this out on your own.
Well, they don't want to allow just any human in.
The information you guys provide could be a good starting point. However, in my experience, having good metrics (number of sales etc., ) is not the only means to gauge the quality of a realtor. There are a lot of intangibles (not pushy, comfort level, knowledgeable, empathy to your buying/selling criteria etc.) are very important as well. If you simply go by sales numbers etc, the data will get heavily skewed in favor of big realtors, who can afford to hire a team of other people to work for them and thereby work on and close more deals.
Open letter from a group of cosmologists.
Is there any movement for educational reform coursing through Russian politics? If so, which party takes this stance?
Congrats on the launch guys :)
That's sad. I've had nothing but positive experiences working with Russians (both in the US and working with some remotely).

This is possibly both racist (nationalist/) and anecdotal, but I've noticed that russian programmers think more like their US counterparts than some other ethnic groups that were educated in their home countries...
$3 CPM is far more expensive that generic Facebook adverts (known for being very cheap in terms of CPM), and it's a fairly typical price for digital advertising. Obviously it depends on the industry, the audience, etc. etc. but $3 is fairly common.

The reason it feels like such a terrible deal here is that you aren't paying $3 CPM to reach a new audience, you are paying $3 CPM to reach your audience. Sure, Facebook can argue "it's the most targeted audience possible, they're Mavericks fans!" but the counter to that is "of course they are, it's my brand that put this audience together".

Brands use Facebook because it's far more user-friendly than trying to collect your fans together on your own website, and therefore it's a better solution - easier for your fans means more will do it, so you have more people to market to. However the comparison is that they're people who have chosen to subscribe to you, and therefore the pricing comparison is not to digital advertising, but to writing to fans on a website, or a blog, or through email newsletters. This is why it feels like, and arguably is, a rip off.

As to the argument that it's needed from a user's point of view and that Facebook happens to be able to monetise to help their users (e.g. jeffwidman's comment: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4785852) I'm not really sure. It's probably a valid point. I'm not a Facebook user myself (but my marketing work occasionally covers Facebook), my personal feeling is that if I follow a brand it's because I want to see their updates. All of their updates. In my head, it's the same as signing up to a newsletter, or subscribing to an RSS feed, just through a convenient third party. But as I don't do it myself, I'm happy to consider myself wrong, or in the minority, maybe if I was an active user following many brands that I care about I would find that getting 100% of their messages would ruin my Facebook experience.
Amusingly for a "Chrome Experiment" it refuses to run on my chrome (Chrome 23 on Fedora 17 with Ivy Bridge graphics).

Firefox on the same machine works flawlessly.
Although pure python seems great for some apps, for a piece of software I'd like to be highly optimized, it seems to hit the wrong sweet spot -- it means a larger memory footprint and less robust multi-threading than other pure language implementations. When things need to work fast and tight in python, most implementations duck down to C, like numpy and scipy. Or maybe I've been out of touch with improvements to CPython?
Thank you. I've seen that book actually, as Professor Sedgewick has a Coursera Algorithms course. Would you say it's appropriate for a second course (following Intro to CS)?
1-2 seconds? Hardly - Humans start noticing at about a tenth of a second in lag, and it's unusable at beyond a half second. When you're videoconferencing, all of your latency is eaten by the speed of light - You've got no time for buffering, you've barely got time for pre- and post-processing.
Thanks. My confusion stemmed from not actually taking Data Structures yet, along with the fact that some colleges call their second course 'Algorithms', while including a junior-senior year 'Algorithms' course as well.
I'm not sure what's not to like about it. It's straightforward but it's for early adopters.

Here's the email if anyone is curious:

Howdy Early Adopter,

We're asking for your help to spread the word about the new Referly iPhone app "Recommend It", which is now live in the App Store. Here's how you can help:

1. Download the app (it comes up if you search Referly): https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/recommend-it/id578025271#

2. Rate it and write a review in iTunes if you have time

3. Share it with friends and encourage them to rate it as well

4. Tweet about it: http://refer.ly/a2IY

5. Share on Facebook - please share this Referly post with your own take on the app and a call to action for friends to try it too: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=499084413464473&set=a.442107465828835.103460.358619204177662&type=1&relevant_count=1

We really need your help to get this app launched, and thank you so much for taking a few minutes to spread the word. Thank you so much from all of us!

With Love,
Team Referly = Danielle, Kevin, Al, Ronald, and Brett

P.S. Check out screenshots and more details on how it works: http://refer.ly/iphone
Tazo teas don't have the reputation of being high-end enough to fetch the prices teavana teas do. I drink some of them, but boy, they ain't cheap.

I mean Teavana, but in hindsight that same comment applies to Starbucks as well.
Adobe breach spills easy-to-crack password hashes
Nigeria's BlackBerry addiction offers hope for Research in Motion
Well, this is a very serious review, which is what you'd expect from an SV industry insider. If you'd rather read a funnier one, take a look at "I’m Not Here To Make Friendster" - http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/television/2012/11/tech_b...
Participation involves gardening to clean up entries such as this and to add entries that are missing. Comparisons such as these are only as good as the data, and much of this data is...eww.

Upvotes to you if you clean up that example.
Husband and wife team built this for their kids
My wife Sara and I decided to start a small company in order to pay for our kids' college educations.

We're shipping out our first order of books today - we'd really appreciate any and all feedback you can give.

Thanks!
It is a fairly simple process, you do it while seated so the water falls into the toilet.
ah yes, it's been awhile and it looks like some of the JS is broken.

thanks
No, sorry. You are wrong.

Every phone is a horrible special case, and those #ifdefs do not simply map forward from one version of the OS to another, unlike on a PC where a single set of drivers will get most computers to a basic working state.

More importantly, how do you suggest they debug? When a phone OS is incorrectly configured, the most likely behaviour is simply hanging with a black screen. Distributing such releases would be worse than useless. If you want to put in the work to make CM work on your device, there are plenty of people who would help you.
I think you are on to something, but I don't think the root of the issue is OOP but rather a "C-like" syntax and all the baggage that seems to come along with that.

C is great (I absolutely adore it) but despite the numerous reasons that C++ did it I think we would be in a better position today if the fad of making new languages "C-like", even if just superficially, never took off. At each step, it is hard to point the finger at any one person (even in retrospect, it is hard to really fault Stroustrup), but I feel nevertheless too many prior advances were ignored along the way to modern Java for far too long.

A terribly superficial but I think potent example of how "C-like" has done harm is that languages have keep using it's abusive declaration syntax for so long. It is so clearly absurd and unnecessary that it is a wonder that people haven't started dropping it sooner. Instead, such as in the case of Java, it seems they have just redefined what is idiomatic in order to avoid the harsher cases seen in idiomatic C. At least Go strays from the example set by C, though it still falls a bit short I think.

Basically I see the primary driving force of many trends in programming, including to some limited degree OOP, to be pain inherited from C.
When you're any public figure, especially the head of the CIA, it's wise to follow Seneca's advice: live in a such a way that you could tell your enemies anything you could tell your friends.
there's high density of post-Soviet block people in TopCoder ranking - out of TOP10 7 are from Russia, Belarus and Poland.

Primary and secondary mathematics education has been strong in Russia before, during, and after the Soviet period. Some of the neighboring countries that were part of either the Russian empire or the Soviet Union (also China since the P.R.C. regime began) share some of the same cultural influences on educational practice.

Another Hacker News participant told us all about a very interesting discussion of mathematics education in Russia

http://www.de.ufpe.br/~toom/travel/sweden05/WP-SWEDEN-NEW.pd...

by a Russian mathematician who has since taught in the United States and in Brazil.
YaCy - The Peer to Peer Search Engine
Revolet Perl 5 Platform needs beta testers
wow, they got a lot of locations!

http://www.teavana.com/retail/united-states

http://www.teavana.com/retail/canada
I entered Santa Cruz CA in the main search bar and when I click Find Realtor, nothing happens. Horrible first impression to a real user. Some sort or message or verification would make me think the site isn't "broken". Mac, Chrome Version 23.0.1271.64

Best of luck!
Regarding prudishness, there is actually some stuff up thread about how Americans are less shy about bodily noises.
Does 6.0.1 fix it?
Still wouldn't have helped for the recruiter who redialed me 6 times while I was attempting to read a 400-page PDF manual (incoming calls dump you out of the Adobe PDF reader and you've got to re-find your place in the document), while attempting to recover a melted down server in the colo (hadn't anticipated this, laptop was at the office).

Solution: tell the recruiting firm never, ever, ever to contact me again.

Second solution: take off and nuke Adobe from orbit.

Third solution: ePub for docs, people. It's multi-form-factor fungible, and the readers are vastly, vastly more functional than anything built for PDF.
Wait, Chrome DevTools could do THAT? (video)
Etherpad 1.2 released
Show HN: 'SET' game - a visual perception game
Weird. Or really, the exact opposite of weird.

There is a Teavana in a mall near me. I've enjoyed their teas, and bought bags to brew at home, as well as a rather nice iron kettle.

Every time I walk in there I say to myself "This place is like the Starbucks of Tea."

I like premium Tea from Teavana much more than Starbuck's coffee though. As I should for the prices they charge...
Ten minutes a day on the toilet is 60 hours each year. Over 80 years, that's 200 days of your life.
The article says that the problem appears to be fixed in 6.0.1, at least for wifi.
I bet these guys (http://www.argotea.com/) had something to do with Starbucks decision to gobble up another tea company.
What the author of the article fails to understand is nothing lasts forever on the internet.

Facebook can become insignificant 1 year from now just because a new service propose better features at a lower price, or just because people get bored...

People used to have email accounts at yahoo , yet , people now prefer gmail because it is easier to use and is less "spammy".

People used to have myspace accounts , and guess what, moved to facebook...

But it's also true that nothing's free on the internet. Twitter is not free , neither is facebook , and as a business they need to generate revenue.
My interest is in the digression -- playing sound without a user click to initiate -- rather than the Mini-detection. So still interested in a clarification/example of where this is possible.
They're doing in-home coffee, merch, etc. and now a big chain of pure retail locations. Starbucks is really starting to open up alternative revenue streams. Good for them.
That may be right. Maybe the Portuguese brought them over after being influenced by France.
It's public via whois.
Just read this:
"Understanding Like-gate"
http://daltoncaldwell.com/understanding-likegate
Ask HN: What do you do when your cubicle is next to somplace noisy?
Your a programmer. Your company is cheap.

Your cubicle next to sales/lunch room where the people next to you are loud, noisy, and talk about nothing related to what your doing.

What do you do next if moving your cubicle to someplace quieter is not an option?
I was even more impressed by the original WWW documents posted by Tim Berners-Lee that hit HN a few months back.

The pages had no rendering or layout, just strictly semantic markup.

They were an absolute joy to read.

The present-day Web is climbing a tower of Babel and reaching baroque levels of ostentation. I see a great re-settling, quite likely as the Web bifurcates into a documentation platform, for information, and an application platform. Most of the Web is still really just static docs.

And kudos for ContrastRebellion mention.
SDK to force update your apps
How ‘Gamification’ Can Make Your Customer Service Worse
Businesses run based on numbers. If a Facebook ad converts at a profitable ROI, then many businesses will buy the ads no matter how poorly they have been treated.

Users are different. If they feel slighted, they will disappear. Facebook is right to focus on the user experience at the expense of antagonizing advertisers.

Whether Facebook could have implemented this without pissing off so many people, now that is a different story.
Samsung refuses to settle patent lawsuits with Apple