skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So, I'm a business guy and currently doing my Masters in Strategy and International Management, then I will go on to take my MBA in Singapore. So much about how I got to know a lot of business guys, so now how do you recognize good ones:

1. There is a lot of arrogance among business people. They (probably as engineers) think that they know things, that others don't. If you meet someone with an arrogant attitude I would steer away from him. And even if it is only because it will e hard to work with them.

2. Smart. Really good business people are truly smart, but how do you recognize a smart business guy? I have found, that people who have mastered their subject can explain it in very simple terms. They can teach people the reasons behind their decisions and why they are doing something the way they do. And most of the time that explanation (at least in business) will be very straight forward and seem like something that is obvious, but it wouldn't have occurred to many other people and it had to be spotted. it's almost like good business ideas, the best ones often are obvious and can be understood by almost anyone.

3. Good business guys are curious. They are broadly interested and fascinated with a lot of stuff. In the article that spun off this thread the Blogger mentions curiosity and self teaching as important in a good programmer. And I would reiterate that point here. A good or even great business guy probably isn't into business because of business but because of other interests he wants to connect / advance. I for example study business because I am very interested in Technology (IT and classical engineering), Biology, Chemistry and Physics. My interest in business lead me to pick up that for my studies because it makes it possible for myself to later connect my areas of interest through my work. Am I a good business guy? I don't know, but I hope to be one day. But I have seen a lot of good business folk who shared that trait. They start learning about e.g. programming and they will probably never be as good as the experts in such a field but they will start to understand a field and can contribute a sense for business and the business perspective to the field.

4. A good business guy understands the field he works in.
Ohhh Boy!
Upvoted for the possibilities.

It's a (almost confusingly) controversial topic, but there is a lot of good that could come out decriminalization. I've never done any drugs myself, but I can think of a number of business opportunities not only in legal narcotics trade, but also supporting industries. If the objective, empirical evidence suggests that it does not present society with an immediate nor a long-term health threat, then the economic and cultural benefits would be exciting.

That said, it will be a considerably long time before metaphors like "The war on drugs" are dropped in the US. People are passionate about it here.
Borlaug was mentioned on Penn & Teller's show:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIvNopv9Pa8
You are telling Perforce to force-merge files without you having a say in it,and you are complaining that some of them didn't go right? Sorry, but you won't get better results from anything else if you have that policy.
There is an open source filesystem-based version control system: vesta (http://www.vestasys.org/). That's probably the sort of thing you need for this kind of work. It was developed by DEC and then Intel for chip development, and those guys check in binary blobs.

Vesta is a cool piece of technology in many ways. It has a pure functional build language, completely parallelisable builds with accurate caching between builds, etc. The guy who maintains it at Intel is a bit bitter because he can't understand why less capable version control or build systems are more popular. Which is really because vesta's advantages show up best in quite large projects, but once your project is that large, it's very hard to switch.

The web page looks moribund, but in fact it's still actively developed, and the developers hang out on IRC.
Yunduan, Application Virtualization Store for Windows
World Series 2009 Tickets
World Series 2009 Tickets - Action Seating is the leading provider of discount tickets for all major events – Wrestling and Boxing, Masters Golf, Super Bowl, and World Series for 2009.
For those who confused by auto-translate:

Yunduan(Softcloud) is a virtualization layer for applications on Windows. Basically, it is a shadow system but have a projection in real system which enables that the software managed by Yunduan can interact with software managed by real system.

This kind design make the software installed by Yunduan highly portable. You can hide/activate/uninstall/reinstall with one click and almost instant. However, the software installed by Yunduan have to downloaded from Yuduan manager throw P2P method (like an app store).
Self-deprecation is a survival mechanism in Australia, what with the tall-poppy syndrome. But you're right -- very different in the US.
Irrespective of whether you agree with all the points here--and there are many thoughtful ones--let's all take a moment to agree the writing here is excellent.
"Pathetic"? Really? The guy seems to be making the best of a bad situation and doing what he can to get noticed. I can only imagine that 10 months of searching for a job can be pretty rough.
Clojure's object system: http://clojure.org/runtime_polymorphism
Or, you know, accept the transactional interpretation (which has a perfectly good intuitive explanation) and get on with life.
Anyone else believed drug consumption, possession, trading and the like were legal in portugal after reading this article?

Well it is not. Only consumption and possession of small amounts is. And that is the case in a lot of European countries.

Badly written article for leaving out important facts. Author obviously biased.

http://www.encod.org/info/PORTUGAL.html
In Internet Age, Foreign Correspondents Have Local Audiences
If a guy who couldnt write a line of code or build an html page was able to get a startup up and running, raise funds, create one of the top destination site on the net, changed the way we consume news, and be worth millions only a few months after having an idea...then Bravo to him. You got paid, and noone had a gun to your head to do the work.

The beautiful part of this is that you can always go ahead and give us a new way to share news. Digg just scratched the surface.
BASIS ELEKTRICITEIT
> but I can think of a number of business opportunities not only in legal narcotics trade, but also supporting industries

Like making children addicted and profiting afterwards? Legalizing drugs like heroin, crack or coke is just sick. Just have a look at what meth has done.

> I've never done any drugs myself,

Talk to one who has, then. It's going to alter your thoughts.
The article never actually says why Perforce is more scalable, except that you have "an IT department taking care of it."
Is turning our problems into technical problems unscientific and antiintellectual?
"What appears to be a sensible idea to turn our problems into purely technical ones is, on the contrary, profoundly unscientific and, more generally, anti-intellectual."
You can use the same car, map on any of them as the functions operate on a sequence interface not on cons lists.

Whereas in CL these functions are defined directly on the implementation (cons lists) so map can't map over a vector you need to make a special vector only map and so on.
Positive Weekly Roundup
Of course we all understand (or are forced to use) structures now, but back then GOTOs were evil. We did not have the structural classics we have now. We had to build them. (and use them).

Naked GOTOs were indeed evil and led to endless loops and sleepless nights. There was no structure to them.

Pascal was our savior.
Looks very nice. The fact that you got it up just using the standard tools rather than reinventing the wheel shows remarkable restraint for a coder (wish I could stop reinventing wheels :( ).

Must look into blueprint, CSS frameworks seem to be the way to go.

Well done
No, Ham grabbed "Greeting.com" not "Greetings.com".
Memory leaks are easy to find
Contrary to popular belief, finding memory leaks (in Java) is easy, if you use the right approach
I remember being somewhat underwhelmed when interviewing at a Hedge Fund where they had leather seats decorating a beautiful inlaid wooden table, and not a white board on the whole floor - reminded me of Feynmans comparison of Princeton versus CalTech..

Apparently at Caltech they had a cheap accelerator, but they got great results, because the physicists knew it inside out and tinkered on a daily basis.

I did spend a year doing what Id describe as 'guerrilla white-board driven architecture' where we basically argued hammer and tong for three hours a day, putting ideas up and tearing them down. So every module and code interface was nutted out in detail and usually simplified. It seemed to keep a team of 12 developers focussed on building the same thing. A smaller wb was used to keep a simple list of what the teams working on. Backed up by an open Plone intranet this brought us to delivery. Probably more suited to medium size teams as in game dev. Part of the success was having done a prototype beforehand.

Whenever I see a w/b covered in those cute little pink and green post-it notes, my reaction is that they are embracing agile too rigidly - that the focus is 'process' not action. Its not a white board if theres nowhere to write, right?

So I think the main benefit is simply that the board, being blank, beckons you to draw whatever idea is bouncing around, which you then have to explain...
G-20, the continuing story
Cool site. Did you spend all your time on it, or was this something you made on nights and weekends?

It looks nice.
Pretty cool. I'm curious, did you use the Flickr API to process the flickr url and get the thumbnail? or did you scrape it?
I think my post was neither, and I'm confused at the reactions. You summarized it perfectly.
Webscraping with Python and BeautifulSoup
In this tutorial, the author shows how to scrape a website with the 3rd party html-parsing module BeautifulSoup in a practical example. He will search the translation engine dict.cc, which holds the key to over 700k translations from English to German and vice versa.
please consider adding categories
But I've tried Haskell, and I do like it!

"X has nothing on Y" means X is not superior to Y. Not "X couldn't tie Y's shoelaces."
> average better programmers than people who claim to be programmers who don't have those degrees.

I doubt that. Further more a person with a degree has on the average a higher intelligence than a person without. Also, most degrees have language requirements and subjects that at least ensures that the person has a basic grasp of grammar and spelling.

> Typing seems even odder. Doubly so where I live as they don't teach folks in school here to touch-type.

You should at least check if a person can type. There are a lot of so called "programmers" that can not even type properly.

> Really, if your hiring requirements are "a guy with a degree that types quickly" you're going to find yourself pretty quickly up shit creek.

You constructed a straw man – no where did I suggest you should only use these metrics – my suggestion was that it made sense to hire/contract a programmer to help you make the hiring decision.
You're right: I wasn't precise enough in communicating what I meant.

What I was trying to get at was not "wouldn't alcohol cause fewer problems if it was illegal?" but rather "won't legalization of a niche* drug be guaranteed to massively amplify the social ills it causes?".

I have no experience with cannabis, so I'm asking because I'm interested: how do you know that the massive increase in participation which would follow legalization will not cause cannabis to become more of a problem drug than alcohol?

* let's face it, cannabis use is niche compared to alcohol and tobacco
It can't be fixed without making them no longer great source control systems.

Why? Is there some deep architectural reason why Git can't perform like Perforce on large binary files? Something so deep it cannot ever be fixed? I've read through this whole thread and see no such reason yet, only hints that it exists.
The meaning is much closer to the latter in my experience.
"A good businessman can't do anything without outside help."

Not true. The vast majority of reasonably to highly profitable businesses either don't have a product at all, or else have a product that involves no new technology. Businesses that require a hacker or an engineer are by far the exception. To the extent that the philosophy of Hacker News is wrong, it's mostly because it ignores that fact that for 98% of the people reading this site it would be more profitable for them to open a Korean grocery than to do a website.
[PPT]
Are you using Redis in a high traffic and/or production environment?
Great writeup. I have a whiteboard in my bedroom so I can visualize ideas. There's something about putting it on the white space that makes them easier to edit and play with.
I have an idea about (more) persistent storage. I am not sure this is technically possible but anyway. How about setting up a cron job and running a backup script which get and save to disk the live content of the db at that moment? The format of this backup file may be CSV, SQL or native Redis one. What do you say?
This is great, but why Canvas? SVG/VML would be a more natural choice - JavaScript fits better with a DOM-based API where you don't have to repaint everything.
Why is it a scam? This guy is selling an ebook, with a money back guarantee.

Just because you think the book is crappy doesn't mean its a scam. Who cares if Nancy Roberts or whoever doesn't exist, he's just realised that parrot owners from middle America aren't likely to buy a book from a guy called Manupek Chandajee.
These are good points, and I don't disagree. My localism is driven by more than simply C02 math, however--it's about community and supporting people I can know.
What's your super power?
Watch Wanted Dead Or Alive,movie,online free,wallpapers,Wanted Dead
Salman Khan All girls dream man did a hearth breaking scene For his upcoming action movie, Wanted Dead or Alive, performed sequence at top of a building terrace in Mumbai. A unit member told, "There was an action scene being shot on a specially erected set on a building terrace near Mumbai's Mahalaxmi Race Course. The small set is actually shown as Salman's character's home in the film. Wanted dead or alive starcast is speak or himself the hot and bold salman khan and sexy Aysya takia for the first time people can see salman khan and Aysya takia in a movie and the movie named Wanted dead or alive as name speaks Wanted dead or alive its going to be a hell of a movie for salman fans who seen salman in action for quite some time, Salman khan did a action role in Garv And after Garv he is playing the action role again Posing as a goon, Salman's role is of an undercover cop out to destroy a mafia don's empire in this Hindi remake of Telugu super hit Pokkiri. The action sequence had a rival gang’s members attacking Salman in his house."
Swiss to end secret bank accounts
Hi, I'm Alex, and I've seen everything on the Internet.
Ask YC: Game programming in Lisp - is it possible?
Dear HN,

I have been programming small games in Java for the past 3 years or so and would like to expand my horizons by learning functional programming.

Is it possible to make games using something like Lisp (or another functional language)? Would there be any benefits as opposed to OOP?

For instance: say I want to make a pacman game. In java, you just have a bunch of objects that keep their state and thus globally keep the state of the game. Then you check for collisions etc. But in Lisp, you don't have state - so would that be possible to make pacman purely functionally? If so, how? And would there be any benefits?
And it is scientifically proven that it works. It is called direct marketing and works since the 1920s. No big deal.
It's interesting that there is no BUY IT NOW type link at the top of the page. Nothing. No call to action to buy the book at all, apart from the small link at the bottom. I cant believe this actually works. Will old women who have parrots realize that there is something all the way at the bottom of the page to click? Will they even realize there is a product to purchase?
Nice...i like the simple design and functionality.

But, a serious question in regards to how you implemented it. Isn't that how you would usually go about implementing something?

As in, the rule of thumb is: think of the least functionality needed to launch a first version, use a CSS framework to avoid writing your own, use a JS framework to avoid writing your own, start up with a simple design, use some kind of code framework to avoid re-implementing common functionality such as authentication and caching..., and so on....

After testing the water with that, you can start replacing stuff if needed, hiring a designer for a more fancy look and the like...
Can you change the captcha implementation? I tried a few times and could not get it right. The text is not clear. Believe me, i'm a human :)
Couldn't your domain name be a problem in the future? I always thought trademark owners need to fight other people using their trademark in order to keep it.

So Yahoo will have to ask you to change your domain to something else, right?
Krzyview: Free and Affordable Business Solutions.
1) I have completed some. I have started many more than I completed. More of my energy goes into making sure I complete projects I am actually getting payed for. Also, I could say that it was complete any time I wanted, but what fun would that be?

2) Good point.

3) If someone pushes me rudely then I am going to get mad at them and they will know it because I am human and I have every right to get angry. I don't like to put up a front. This is why I'm a programmer and not a salesperson, executive, or someone who's job it is to be two-faced. Does that mean I won't continue to try to help a rude person that genuinely needs help and that is not just trying to manipulate me? No, but that's a different situation.

4) If they become angry or annoyed because you were deliberately rude like you suggested above, then it doesn't make sense to eliminate them for that reason. If you were polite and human and ordinary conversation angered them, then that is a red flag that no one needs you to point out.

5) I have a feeling if I interviewed with you for more than thirty seconds I would come off as another one of your angry programmers, because I would be at that point.

6) Respectful drilling of technical matters: i.e. programming languages and API pop-quizzes? "Respectful" drilling? What does a verbal pop-quiz have to do with programming? What about this part: do your existing programmers and managers like the person?

What is your name so I can avoid ever working for you?
I don't believe these discussions are very useful, or in general appropriate for HN; but I'll quickly disagree with your statement that drugs should continue to be illegal. If someone wants to do drugs that is their choice, there is no reason that people below a certain age are prohibited much like alcohol and tobacco.
Best way I've found to do joint versioning of code with large datasets (whether binary or tab-delimited text):

1. Check in symbolic links to git. You can include the SHA-1 or MD5 in the file name.

2. Have those symbolic links point to your large out-of-tree directory of binary files.

3. rsync the out-of-tree directory when you need to do work off the server

4. Have a git hook check to see whether those files are present on your machine when you pull, and to update the SHA-1s in the symbolic link filenames when you push

By using symbolic links, at least you have the dependencies encoded within git, even if the big files themselves aren't there.
First off lisp does have state. It isn't a pure language. That aside there are several approaches. The easiest is to thread state that is have a function that looks like
update Worldstate = do userinput <- getUserinput;
Worldstate' <- updateworldstate userinput worldstate;
drawworldstate worldstate';
update worldstate';
WPP boss Martin Sorrell shares his views (on the future of advertising)
The assumption most people seem to base their conclusions on is that making drugs illegal reduces consumption. All empirical evidence so far - even from less biased sources than the wildly free-market Cato institute - shows that this is not the case. In countries where more drugs are legal, consumption actually goes down.

Drug use is a facet of human existence that needs to be managed, not a virus to be exterminated...
Using ATA Over Ethernet (AoE) On Debian Lenny (Initiator And Target)
Sounds like you want to read this: http://prog21.dadgum.com/23.html
I'm a different person from jrockway, but my position is while git alone does not scale when tracking with very large binaries, it's an easily solved problem, as it is intentionally designed to work with other tools better suited to such tasks. Git + rysnc solves that problem for me in full, and should scale fine.

Git doesn't include a source code editor, profiler, or web browser, either. The Unix way of design involves the creation of independent programs that intercommunicate via files and/or pipes. The individual programs themselves can be small and simple due to not trying to solve several different problems at once, and since they communicate via buffered pipes, you get Erlang-style message-passing parallelism for free at the OS level.

Like I said, if you track the binary metadata (checksums and paths to fetch them from) in git but not the files themselves, your scaling problem goes away completely. If you have a personal problem with using more than one program jointly, that has nothing to do with git.
Satriani and Friends to Release Chickenfoot | TechJaws
Recently, he wrote a very complex threading patch that dealt with all sorts of race conditions for a program that, while part of our business, he had never touched before.

Sorry, but that kind of super-hero is a very, very rare breed. When did he learn about multithreaded programming? You don't just pick that up along the way anyhow.

Honestly your story sounds more like a Hacker who turned business-guy a while ago than a business-guy who magically accumulated hacker skills.
Interesting... and yet, on the other hand, listing your "superpowers" as part of your introduction might well appear extremely arrogant.

How do you phrase your "superpowers" in a way that doesn't automatically give you the additional implicit superpower of being an arrogant prick?
The thing that everyone seems to forget about exponential growth is that it starts out very slowly.
Holy smokes!

I had a similar idea around a year back - to create a directory with links to blogs and public pages of guys "who have done it" (internet celebs and entrepreneurs).

WeFollow is cool.
Like most Seth Godin pieces its a little more on the touchy-feely big-thinking than it is on the specifics.

Here's what I'd say: have an elevator pitch for yourself, as opposed to just having one for your startup. Here's mine, which has worked pretty decently the last few years for me:

Japan and America trade about $200 billion a year with each other. Roughly half of that is technology which didn't exist in 1950. Less than one American engineer in 10,000 speaks Japanese. You're looking at one of them. Were you happy with how your last US/Japan programming project turned out?

I wouldn't call it a superpower -- just enough to get people to remember why they have my business card in their folder. They're almost always asking right after they come to a pain point for lack of a bilingual engineer and the great thing about the pitch is it means I've got excellent odds of being the only responsive hit in their business card book.

(Sidenote: business cards. They're like the uniform for you super power, I guess. Because he wouldn't be Superman without the big S on his chest telling everyone "Yep, that's right, this guy is Superman".)