skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I used to work a lot with Perl 5, maintaining a 20000 LOC program. Nowadays I work a lot with Ruby. Compared to Perl I much prefer Ruby. Ruby has most of Perl's powerful constructs but it's much easier to write maintainable software in Ruby. Perl allows me to do things about as quick as Ruby, but thanks to many language... features... your programs turn into a mess quickly until you're being very strict to yourself.

A few things in Perl that really don't help:

- Variables don't have to be declared and are global unless specified otherwise. You can 'use strict' to turn off this "feature".

- Strange syntax for working nested structures. Basically nested structures are a hack because Perl <= 4 didn't support them. Hashtables only support scalar values so to put an array in a hashtable you need to store a reference. Dereferencing has rather strange syntax if you're not used to it; even if you're used to it it's still easy to get confused. @{$foo{bar}->baz}...

- OOP feels like a hack because, as you guessed it, earlier Perl versions didn't support it. You have modules; this works as expected. Classes are implemented on top of modules: to instantiate an object, you make a hash, array or scalar value, and "bless" it with a package name, which is like assigning a type to the thing. The thing that was blessed is your instance, and you store your instance variables in it. You then return a reference to that thing and that is your object. The whole syntax is nuts.

- Even function arguments feel like a hack. That's because there is no syntax for them. Every function has an arguments array, called @_. That's not a smiley, that's the actual variable. To get your arguments, you have to extract them from @_, so every function would start off like: my ($arg1, $arg2, $arg3) = @_;

- Threads... oh you mean usable threads? Forget about it. Threads in Perl do not share state by default. You have to explicitly mark variables as 'shared'. If your app is well-architected (not relying a lot on global variables), this isn't much of a problem, but unfortunately Perl also copies all AST nodes upon thread creation. If you have a moderately sized program, like mine (eats 25 MB of RAM) then it 5 years ago it took 15 seconds to create a thread while Perl is making a copy of all the AST nodes. Yikes.

Perl works great as a sed replacement, but for anything larger than, say, 50 lines I would recommend Ruby over Perl. Like Perl, Ruby has builtin regex support.
It's nothing close to that video, but I use VLC's "playback speed" settings to watch TV at around 160%. It is definitely something you adapt to...I used to have trouble at 130%, and now that seems slow.

(If you do this, you also learn to appreciate good enunciation. Stephen Colbert is completely listen-to-able at 200%. His guests, not so much.)
Those two are not the same thing at all; a 27" 2560x1440 like the one you link to is ~108dpi.
I'm actually thinking more of his bazillions of well-chosen targeted landing pages (e.g. "Dolch sight words bingo"), his ability to rank highly enough in search engines for the right words that interested visitors flow into his site (you can't be profitable with 40 uniques a day) — that sort of thing. In essence, yes, you need to pay attention to what is working, but first you need to find something that works in order to pay attention to it.

> There is a super power at play here, but it doesn't take a radioactive spider to get it. People who can simultaneously speak "customer service" and "technology" are rare. Many of the world's most successful software businesses have noticed that and achieved billions just by arbitraging a trivially corrected ineptitude common to programmers.

I agree, this is one thing that really benefits him. But from the standpoint of someone starting out with nothing, I'd say shoddy customer service is a pretty good problem to have — it means you have customers who need serving! If you can't do customer acquisition, customer retention becomes a moot point. Dutifully serving two people who each pay $20 a month will not make you billions of anything.

Patrick actually mentioned this on his blog some years back: He had a tiny customer base and knew he needed to find a way to grow it. The conclusion of the story was something along the lines of "I did marketing and then it was OK." That's where a lot of people's stories would have gone differently.
Here is the profiling output:
https://gist.github.com/4478737

The input is RawProtocol, which simply splits on tab. But after that, mrjob defaults to using JSON internally, and this is causing a lot of slowdown.
I'm amazed that anybody thinks the dude behind the desk is sitting around perusing people's statements, but if that's your concern, just get a credit card from a bank in another state.
Ford Debuts In-Car Voice Commands for Amazon’s Cloud Music
Recommendation: go niche if you have trouble building a critical mass of employers and prospective employees. Be known as the "go to" place for getting jobs in obscure but important technology/programming language <X> (for example). Brand appropriately, and manually reach out to companies and developers that use those technologies and try to kickstart the process. Get on the first page for "X jobs" in google. Then build out from there.
CES: Worse Products Through Software
He's conflating an industry with a geographic location.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metonymy
The golang website supports other versions; to see the docs for tip go to http://tip.golang.org/
didn't know this hotkey existed.. nice
Mercury and Venus aren't tidally locked.
There are a few things I dislike about recruiters that we aim to fix:

* They nearly all are technically incompetent, e.g. thinking Java is the cool word for Javascript and such. We know the difference between interfaces and inheritance, being developers ourselves, we are better at understanding the needs of companies and matching that to the desires of developers.

* Recruiters hide information, almost always. We're fully transparent with each pitch and include details about salary, team, etc upfront.

* Recruiters are about quick turn and will place you at any role that matches their keywords. We're more interested in long term relationships. In Pitchbox, this manifests itself in many ways...for example, just because you signed up today, doesn't mean you'll start getting job pitches tomorrow...instead we focus on relevancy and quality over quantity so you hear from us only when we think its particularly suited for you.

* The recruiting experience is horrible for companies too. The recruiter typically spams that hiring manager with resumes forcing the company to sift through it all. We provide simple useful tools for the companies connecting with Pitchbox members.

* If you liked our homepage for its simplicity and design, then you'll be happy to know we have built our entire product with similar focus. Interacting with it should be easy, purposeful, and enjoyable - pretty much the opposite of every interaction I've had with recruiters.

(BTW - Thanks for the kind words about our design)
Some people like to work in the office, other want to work at home. In both cases it would be nice to have a checkbox to indicate our preference.
Your site has all these nice human names in the page text, why not just put them in the URL?
Slightly off topic, but anyone know if anything is happening in terms of Linux/X11 and HiDPI? Or will we need to wait a few years?
Ignore details early on
Why Can’t Johnny Design? - Part 3: Doing the Math
Assuming this a complaint against the iOS Google+ app? The Android Google+ app is very spiffy.
I don't buy it. The internet isn't the steam engine. The internet is electricity. And we haven't even seen the end of the that revolution yet.

The key point is that the author is comparing decades in other industries to years in this industry. Which we're apt to accept because we see things moving so much faster now. But some things don't move that fast. The reason we see such rapid innovation in this industry is that the low barriers to entry facilitate massive parallelism: There are a million teams implementing a million ideas all at once.

But parallelism doesn't resolve dependencies. You can't invent something until its time has come, all the prerequisites have to be there first. And the big things tend to have a lot of dependencies -- because otherwise they would have been done twenty years ago. This party is just getting started.
So you can't even define what it is people are "implicitly" asking of you, and yet you're convinced it's "inherently accusatory", would "violate your own sense of fairness and morality", would "violate your boundaries", and the asker is being sanctimonious.

Pardon me if I do not take your Real Important Concerns seriously.
But, as the article alludes to, a key part of the attraction of these courses is providing super low barriers to entry and access to those who couldn't otherwise pay.

Asking for donations solves this problem in a simple, frictionless way and may even be more effective than upfront payment. I think you're irrationally opposed on moral and ideological grounds rather than effectiveness, which is ultimately what matters.
The title of the post & the underlying SO article discuss URLs. A data: URI is not a URL, but a URI.

People get confused about this all the time, but a URI is not necessarily a URL. A URL is always a URI. A URN is also a URI and might be a URL as well.[0]

Interesting side note is how, in 1997, with the original uuid: draft[1] I goofed and didn't recognize uuid: was really a URN. This was corrected in RFC 4122 in 2005[2].

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_resource_identifier
[1] http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-kindel-uuid-uri-00
[2] http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4122.txt
Hm, can you start at the end of file without reading the entire file with less? Use case is tailing large logs.
New Smartphone Keyboard Promises Accurate Predictions Even For The Blind
Here's a sound guide: http://www.booksatoz.com/witsend/tea/orwell.htm
Angry bird's install base definitely gives them a leg up on cross-app promotion. With so many users they can push them to each of their new apps. And they have a ton of revenue to re-invest in advertising/app development.

However, I wouldn't say "Angry Birds" is going to remain king. Another game can very well dethrone them. Nothing's a guarantee when Apple can change the rules of the game for the App Store.
Icelandic Glacial Water Introduces Innovative Home-Delivery Program
I concur; definitely got the right minds to work on this.
It is USD.

Right now we are only hiring for US companies and a few in London.
Is Bitpay the "Paypal for Bitcoin" only from a merchant point of view, or from a user's point of view, too? I haven't looked at it much, but I think their web page was more oriented towards merchants not users, while Coinbase seems to be more oriented towards users, and sending money to each other and whatnot.
Development Process at LinkedIn
If you are legally able to work for a US company then we have several teams that are hiring for 100% telecommute roles. Just mention that in your Goals on signup.
Sans Serif Fonts: Most Popular Typefaces, Best for Webfonts
Sans Serif Fonts continues to grow, and probably, new value will be found in creating and transforming existing forms to create new ones.
Roundup: Literate CoffeeScript, JavaScript Amiga Emulator, Gnuplot.js and More
This reminds me a lot of Developer Auction (http://www.developerauction.com/).
Why do you think it's risky? In principle, is it that different than using Facebook credits? I don't think Bitcoin is illegal in US.
The discussion here is where the gold is.
One thing I am curious about is what screen sizes you use. As a sighted developer having as much visible at once is most productive. I use two large screens and the only reason I don't have a third is lack of desk space.

The laptop being used in one of the Youtube links on the page looks to be at least 14 inches.

Does screen size affect your productivity? Do you care about resolution? Do you get the smallest screen size phones and laptops?
I think the current smartphone wars are a great example of how hard it is for companies to expand their products outside of their "core competencies".*

Watching Apple try to tackle web services, most handset makers try to tackle software and pretty much anyone other than a web company trying to tackle social (even Google seems to have real trouble here) leads me to believe that most companies optimize in hiring and organization for a limited skillset that makes it almost impossible for them to succeed in most other domains. I'd be willing to bet everything I can buy, steal or mortgage against even one traditional television hardware vendor managing to create a successful software platform, much less more than one.

*I'm so sorry that I wrote that phrase. Please forgive me
Yes, several of the teams we are hiring for have 100% telecommute roles if you are able to legally work for a US based company. Just let us know in the Goals of this when signing up.
Ask HN: Review my product researchbroker.com
ResearchBroker is a site designed to connect researchers with real world research projects.

Existing job sites, such as Indeed.com, monster.com or researchgate.net, are not designed to showcase researcher's areas of expertise and interest, nor do these sites accommodate a researcher’s ability to conduct several research projects with multiple companies throughout a year -- even while they are still in school. These tools also do not help companies and organizations find talented researchers with whom they can collaborate on their research ideas. Unlike these sites, ResearchBroker does not neglect to communicate parameters about a project that are important to researchers. Therefore, through ResearchBroker, researchers can be in control of their schedules, the level of research involvement, and even the use of research for their academic pursuits.

ResearchBroker is a minimally viable product. Most of the research projects on the site are from startups. And most of the researchers are graduate students.

I am looking to understand whether the home page communicates the value of the product and if the site is user friendly. Also, I would like some feedback on how to bring this product to more students and companies. Also, does anyone know of any other startups, companies or organizations who might be interested in this product.

Site URL: http://researchbroker.tc.columbia.edu/
> less. Overkill, but SO MUCH BETTER THAN tail -f. Seriously.

If you do this on my servers, I am going to find you, and then I am going to kill... um... your process.

less with SHIFT-F takes a whole CPU core to run on a busy log file. tail -f takes almost nothing to run. Now combine that information with the reality of a whole bunch of devs who don't know it or don't care about it. :(
Why the "Series A Crunch" Might Be Good For Unsexy Seattle Startups
I second this, I also find myself impulsively smashing enter multiple times sometimes between commands, if I am typing in a series of commands, its just so my brain can catch up with what I want to do.
So mrjob isn't slower at all! You just chose to use JSON for your intermediate steps in the mrjob example, instead of the delimiter format you used in the raw Python example. I believe the mrjob docs do say what the defaults are. RawProtocol can be used for intermediate steps just fine.

Please either mention this difference in your post or update the code and conclusions. If there's a place in the documentation where we should mention optimizations or details like this, I'd be interested to know.

I should have thought of this before. Oh well.
multitail[1] is also really nice for following multiple log files. It can do highlighting of lines based on regex's, and has built-in highlighting of a wide variety of log formats

[1] http://www.vanheusden.com/multitail/features.php
You could always respond to reference calls by saying, "I'd love to tell you all about him, but don't want to open myself up to litigation." That sends a clear message without you having to say anything.
Fail Fast Fool: Failure Plan
If you use tmux (or screen) you want to use byobu!

https://launchpad.net/byobu

https://www.google.de/search?q=byobu+tmux&tbm=isch

It's a fancy statusbar that shows CPU speed, IP-address, hostname, ...
Yes, the kaizen and just-in-time revolutions were centred in the post-'60s automobile industry, were they not?
How Intermittent Fasting Might Help You Live A Longer And Healthier Life
Contrary to most comments here I think it's a pretty interesting article, much better than the usual VC/blogger whining pieces we've been lately. There are some real parallels there.

I think where these analogies break down is the fact that computing has much wider applications even than something as fundamental as transportation. Well, necessarily so because computing can be applied to transportation and everything else. What "Silicon Valley" does is applicable everywhere for the foreseeable future. I mean software is certainly not a solved problem and it really won't be until the singularity is achieved.
Satellite Internet: 15Mbps, no matter where you live in the US
Looks fine (antialiased) on my browser. Firefox on Windows by the way.
Frankly, that's an absurd comparison. Has anyone ever asserted that the iPad is on par with sanitation, running water and indoor toilets? Why not throw in the wheel for good measure?
Somebody is already doing just that: http://www.tit4bit.com/ (NSFW obviously). He or she posts on reddit as "Geekbauchery".
http://www.getworkdonemusic.com/ mostly
An iPad is currently £330. We'll be generous and assume Apple gave the school a 50% discount (which is huge and probably unlikely as I'd imagine even Apple aren't charging 100% markup). So £165 per iPad * 840 students (according to the video) = £138,600.

They've spent more than double what they saved on photocopying, not to mention that 840 iPads take a lot more maintenance than five or six photocopiers.
Yes. It is CPU intensive (see auntie post above).
They're quite close to it. Mercury takes two of its own years to have one day, and Venus's year is less than two of its days.
No worries, I knew using the buggy whip analogy was a bad example but just went with it for arguments sake.

To better analogize, hollywood right now has a bunch of screen related guilds that have contracts that stipulate for example that a production can only use workers from that guild/etc... What I'm arguing or positing is that as technology improves, the need for as many as there are will decrease just like manufacturing. That or more independent filmmakers will start brokering deals with unaffiliated professionals. The overall market will get bigger most likely, but the monolithic employment in the current market is unlikely to survive.

Sorry for conveying that hollywood would be obsolete, that isn't quite what I was intending though I worded it poorly.

My only worry is the current copyright regime is seeming to be ignoring the rather stark changes in overall cost of "copying" digital files. A lot of our current law rests upon copying itself being a prohibitive process and only possible by a limited few. Until we address that fundamental difference I don't see much point in debating the conflict between technology versus current producers. There is blame enough to go around on both sides, but that isn't productive. I really don't want producers to go out of business but adapting current copyright to the digital era seems misguided unless you establish that it makes sense to do so.

I'm just rambling now with wild abandon and i'll shut-up, hopefully I conveyed things a bit better, back to work for moi.
The salary ranges seem very high from my experience. I've been developing for a few years, and I know a handful of excellent developers working for big-name companies...and I know they're not making the numbers listed here.

I want to believe $180k is doable for a software engineer, but I've yet to meet a salaried programmer over $110k. Am I keeping the wrong company?

I should note I don't live in a major city, but even amongst devs I know in San Francisco, $180k would be very high. It seems most of the programmer salary estimates I see online are similar. Are these numbers real? Or are the numbers I see coming from software fantasy land?
Any good implementations of Scheme that take the minimalist approach, implementing only RNRS for some sensible value of N? For my purposes, I need a version of Scheme for which the language implementation (as opposed to the libraries) will remain unchanged for a very long time.

Right now, I've played with husk-scheme quite a bit, and I like its interface from the Haskell side, but I don't have a lot of confidence in its standards-conformance.
Dementia bluffs live memory analysis
It's misleading to make it sound like this is somehow a victory for Linux.

This is a win for web apps. This is proof that traditional desktop apps are dying.
Hey @arscan, thanks for the feedback - totally agree. We did this at first and was able to build relationships connecting developers and companies around ruby/python/js roles. With this we HN post we wanted to guage the appetite of the broader tech community.
Potential risks using Mint.com
Isn't that why Starbucks has done so well with their frozen drinks? They're basically milkshakes, but people feel ok about drinking them early in the morning because they're "coffee based".
If you can work from outside of the US (technically), what sort of requirements for working legally for a US based company are? As far as I understand, you can just send them an invoice as a contractor and be happy, no?
Facebook, Apple, and GitHub are the only sites I've seen that seem to support the retina display with their images. Even then, Facebook misses some images.
Even though it's still in development, has anyone done anything more substantial in this? Is Meteor all that it is made up to be?
Ask HN: The Ethics of Quid Pro Quo
Discussions among freelancers and contractors often end up being focused on collecting payments from clients and the methods used. Your typical arrangement for best results is to require payment prior to releasing your work on the back end, ensuring that you don't give away your leverage in the payment process. In this example, "this for that" is perfectly acceptable and often expected from both parties.

The "tit for tat" situation becomes interesting when you try and apply this scenario to other related situations. For example, you're a contractor with a year-long contract to deliver a project by meeting periodic goals. Let's say that your client is late with last period's payment - is it ethical to drag your feet in project participation until you are paid? Same give and take, but here you've given more than you've taken, creating and imbalance. Is it ethical to stall your progress until this balance is restored? Should balance exist throughout the life of the project, or is the end all that matters? In this situation your client may see your non-participation as hostile and detrimental to the project, causing bad blood rather than righting the imbalance. It seems like tit for tat is acceptable when building trust or for one-off scenarios, but frowned upon in longer term or ongoing situations.

So the big question; is quid pro quo always ethical and to what extent should or could it be used?
Surely (almost) anyone in the world can legally work for a US based company if they are offshore (maybe not Cubans).
Airbnb a popular alternative to hotels, but is it legal in NYC?
Show HN: What If 2013 - Set resolutions and challenge yourself
I'm not trying to be a jerk, but how is it possible that you've had an HN account for 172 days with 229 karma and you "have no idea what 37signals does."?
Interestingly enough this website doesn't have:

1) Custom 404 page

2) robots.txt

3) PICS label

4) viewport meta-tag

5) Google Rich Snippets

6) Fails the recommended CSS validator
Home Removals in Rotherhithe
Migrating a production couchdb database with joyent and stud
Web portals are dead, but the IPO for China’s Xinhua has propaganda going for it
Email Client Popularity (Yahoo Mail is more popular than GMail)