skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There is a false dichotomy between balancing for cheap labor and demoralizing the Average American Joe. First, I don't want to hire cheap labor. My first boss did just that (especially with the foreign kind) and his company is now under water. Cheap labor doesn't work for programming.

My last job, the company's still doing quite well, beat Q1 expectations by 50%, and we did something like fifty to a hundred phone screens a month for an average of 1 hire a quarter. That's up to three hundred phone calls for ONE goddamn programmer. Do you know how frustrating that is?

What I don't buy about the argument of the Average Joe becoming cynical is that I just don't see a lot of hard work. Binary search is something that you should have learned in freshman year of college, and yet it's still a staple of programming interviews because people regularly fail it.

There are bad apples all around and the situation remains the same with foreign programmers. There are actually very few good foreign-born programmers, just as there are very few good American-born programmers. The catch is that they've all been spoon-fed all the algorithms knowledge so you have to pose your questions in other ways, see if they can creatively apply their knowledge to real world tasks like flipping through a phone book, etc.

In all, I think the problem is more one of PR. We need to get the word out that if you are good, there Will Indeed be a job for you out there. If you love doing it, then stop being so scared of the hordes from India.
Couldn't you just click on your username and change your password which would allow you to directly log in?
Because I believe Amazon is losing money on each ebook sold. They want people to move to their platform so badly that they're willing to accept a loss on each ebook and make it up with the hardware costs.
I would argue that PHP and the LAMP stack have more functionality than any other language by an order of magnitude when you're talking about web development tasks. For anything else, PHP is pretty much irrelevant, but when you're doing web development, it's definitely the swiss army knife.

Without a single import or require, you can send emails, query a database, download a web page, handle session data, get post variables, etc.

You've also got file access, date and time functions, regular expressions, the list goes on.

What more functionality could you need for a web app?
198 people
The 2nd half of this talk is excellent. Ignore the first half.

> My work experience wasn't what got me the job. I'm sure my cover letter had something to do with it, but my short lived career in trucking logistics was less than glamorous. I really only had one thing to show GameSpot - Spyc. My code was freely available, had been used in production, and worked. They could download it and play with it, or check it out online. Regardless of whether or not they thought it was good, they could tell it was clean and well thought out. Well, maybe not, but I had a website and 70 downloads.

> Code talks.

If you don't have any projects going right now, you should spend some time here starting something new. Something you've been meaning to do but haven't got around to. An idea that's been floating around.
I think it's just too difficult a problem to distill down into a single metric. I did CS and Math for my undergrad and I was in the PhD program for CS but left with my MSc. My focus was on design and analysis of algorithms and based on that training, in my 3 years of professional activity (2 at a NASA contractor) I've run into very few problems that compared to the kind of work I did in my thesis. I think lines of code is one metric - but a really high number could actually be a sign of a really bad programmer! So, it's an inherently noisy signal. I think you have to look at successful projects completed and individual roles in those projects and judge that way.
From that article:

> Every action should be undoable, even after a document or application has been closed and reopened.

At first, this sounded ridiculous. Undo after a save? But then I realized I do that now & then myself, using a version control system. So here I am editing a DVCS-managed document. Pre-save undo is handled by the editor, while post-save undo is handled by the DVCS (which is nice, but I usually have to look up how to do it).

All this underscores what crappy interfaces we really have, and how we get used to them, and so overlook their serious flaws.
That is quite true. Even when using frameworks, PHP code is more verbose.

Also PHP has a proliferation of frameworks, so you may come across different frameworks in different projects reducing your efficieny. Since Django and RoR dominate in python and ruby respectively, the issue doesn't arise as much
I use App Engine because of its simplicity and ease of deployment. I include Django trunk in my sources, so I am not really missing anything for regular web apps.
I would like to see the trend of this number over time
Let's focus more on code and less on talk.

bash-3.2$ wc -w ./rubyrant.txt
4759 ./rubyrant.txt
Talking about college students spending $500 for this is radically premature. There's no way that by August that a significant number of universities will be all-digital on the book front, and they aren't going to switch for the spring term, either.

So, the soonest case where any fraction of college students might be Kindle-only is August-ish, 2010. Any guesses on what this will cost by then? Probably ~$200 or less, for something a generation or two more advanced. (Perhaps not color by then, but higher res, I bet.)

And frankly, even in 2010 the colleges that have an all-digital option will still be the exception. I would expect it'd be at least 2012 before a student might reasonably choose this option.

The real question is "will anybody buy it today and subsidize further development?" And the Kindle 1 sales seem to say yes. I don't really know because AFAIK Amazon has not released sales numbers, but they are certainly acting as if these things are selling fast.
OK, It's hosting, with a fast upgrade/downgrade/deployment cycle.
As stated a few places. I think this may work well for students that need to carry around many large/heavy textbooks. Since it would still fit nicely in a book bag. However, the price tag is a bit high for students, unless the textbooks are already included :)
I'm really good at surfing the internet.
Ingenious hybrid map design
I do my own accounting, for the same reason I rewired my own house. Because I'm interested in doing it.
...or else the bunny gets it!
Why don't they just make their own? Seems like keeping that data 'in house' would be wise.
Install an opcode cache and you get the pre-compilation for free. Check out APC, x-cache, etc.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PHP_accelerator
EngineYard (kind of cloud... well if linode is, so's EngineYard)
Authentic Value Creation: Why Tech Entrepreneurship Rocks
...which is why we call it something different. Sure, "cloud" is an overhyped buzzword, but you've gotta' choose your battles.
But how much do the PDF versions of the technical books cost ? And where do you get them? I am also trying to calculate the costs and see if I can throw the bookshelf away.
Agreed. And if they did roll their own, they could do nice things like hover over a short url and it'll show you the destination url. That sort of thing is easier when you're running both parts of the system.
That makes no sense - the more books they sell, the more money they lose. No business should sell below their marginal cost for any length of time unless they're really desperate for market share. What's more common is selling the hardware at a loss, and reaping the profits on the e-books.
That ignores the tax implications. If you earn $100 as a freelancer, you might get $60 after tax, which means you'd have to work one hour and forty minutes to pay your accountant $100 (edit: no. As aaronblohowiak notes, you would have to work the same hour, because accountants are tax-deductible). And there are frictional costs -- I can hire myself as an accountant for free, but I have to at least get referrals, make phone calls, sign contracts, and write checks for my accountant.

So it's a little more complicated than that. Maybe "Would you pay an untrained accountant $60 (edit: $100) per hour, with zero transaction cost, no agent-principal conflicts, and instant availability?" Maybe not a good deal, but still a better deal.
Yeah, there's a certain conservative movement growing which is strongly nationalistic, anti-European, against strange cultures and against what is called "The Church of the Left" (progressive, urban, and socialistic political parties). Highly annoying since _everything_ becomes adversarial because of them.
"Bit.LY is a portfolio company of Betaworks, which is also an investor in Twitter"

From the perspective of the investors, they are keeping it "in house" By pairing work of two investments, they make both a little stronger (well, bitly a lot stronger).
I highly recommend O'Reilly's Head First HTML with CSS & XHTML.

It's written for learning instead of reference, and focuses on modern best practices. It anticipates and answers most questions a beginner might have.

http://headfirstlabs.com/books/hfhtml/
To me, that's the killer feature that it's missing. For a small reader, it doesn't matter, but for the large one, I want to be able to take notes, sketch out ideas in the margin, and so on.
You know, if this wasn't iPod white, I'd swear I'd seen something just like it on TV before...

http://www.slipperybrick.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/01/stpd...
They also forgot to mention, Global Warming ≠ Science

Not to say there isn't science being done on it, or that its completely baseless, but the current craze is 99% political. They bring out the "all scientists agree 100% and debate is over" when they feel like shutting down the argument and pretending they win.
God I hate phpclasses.org

The code is great, but the site is awful, just awful. Mirrors? What is this 1999? How much bandwidth can downloading ZIPPED php scripts use?

Oh yeah, and there's registration required and big, ugly, flashing banner ads.

If someone knows of a site with the same contents, please, please let me know :)
Which obviously prompts this inevatible question: does the move signal Twitter paving the way for an outright acquisition of the URL shortening service provider?

Or they could just buy a domain name.
Why is that a fail? Porn doesn't go on Facebook, and it could be quite cool to build some epic nudity detection system. It's not an evil job!
The article is interesting, but the website, which the article mentions but doesn't link to, is better.
http://www.thespaceexplorers.com/
For the lambda calculus and the combinatory logic see Hindley and Seldin's "Lambda Calculus and Combinators", published this year, I think. Hindley and Selding have been doing LC since goodness knows when, and you will see their names all over papers and texts. The book I have in mind is very recent and has orange dark red/orange cover.

For partial evaluation get "Partial Evaluation and Automatic Program Generation." Jones, Gomard and Sestoft. Freely available online somewhere.

If you wanna dip into semantics, there is no better text than Nielson and Nielson "Semantics with Applications", also online on the authors' website. The undergraduate "appetizer" edition is new and I can't vouch for it, but the older one is a gem of a tiny little book. This text introduces all major three semantic theories (axiomatic, operational and denotational; the last one is the one you will brush against the most when you're studying lambda calculus. If you find yourself study Category theory you have gone too far. Operational semantics, specially small-step OS will make you a better virtual machine designer, imo; axiomatic semantics .. just predicate logic, nothing sophisticated, might introduce you to Communicating Sequential Processes if you wanna reason about parallel programs, but generally it's used mostly in 80s algol texts where half-page functions are analyzed to death and reasoned about.)

(there was a great repo of Free programming languages and compiler books but it got shutdown over a year ago after the owner left the university -- if someone is interested in reviving the project, I have a directory listing they can pick and choose texts from.)
I wonder what the effect of earwax buildup is on this. Without actually knowing anything about OAE, I'd imagine earwax delta could cause greater change in OAE than switching between people with similar ears.

This sounds cool, so hopefully someone can explain why I'm wrong.
PHP sucks, that much is clear to anyone who's ever used Python or Ruby or whatever. But...

1. It's on every server.

2. It works consistently.

3. There's a lot of it already written.

4. It's easy to find people who know it.

5. Who will work for reasonable pay.

#4 and #5 are usually overlooked by people for various reasons which I won't get into here.

You really have to go back to the days of Perl SSI, cgi-bin scripts, and stdout shell scripts to really understand why PHP became popular in the first place. The whole inline code paradigm grew directly out of Apache SSI and how much it sucked.
I do not have a facebook account (and no twitter, myspace, any of that...). if those ever got merged into firefox, the next thing to do for me would be to compare chrome, safari, and ie to figure out what my next default browser is.
Who exactly is the article written for? I don't think anyone claims that global warming = Al Gore.
You're kidding right? You're claiming that Lisp has more 'functionality' than PHP. By functionality, do you mean standard library? Or do you mean core language?

Elegance != more functionality.
This is interesting, and I'm a big fan of the Kindle, but I think the statistic somewhat overstates things, because there's a bias in the data: when someone has a Kindle, they're going to purchase ALL of their kindle material from the 200,000 items that are available for the kindle. When someone doesn't have a kindle, they draw their reading material from the long tail.

Imagine that there were just 10 titles available for the Kindle - I bet that 70 to 90% of all copies sold of those titles would be kindle titles.
I strongly disagree.

Maybe for a few classes of web apps, but if you know the LAMP stack well, you can create any type of web app you want in a flash.

RoR locks you down to building conventional CRUD sites.
Hoping some of the hype of twitter might rub off on bit.ly I'd say if I was skeptical. Still amazing bit.ly got funded.
Why do you need a framework? LAMP is a framework.

With a simple ORM class and a class for handling forms and inputs, PHP gives you wings.
Or better yet, don't use a password at all: Use a client-side SSL certificate.

Set your password to something random, and use a client-side SSL certificate to authenticate yourself to your OpenID provider. You can use the password reset feature if you lose your SSL certificate.

I've got instructions on how to do this on my website here: http://joel.franusic.com/How-to-set-up-a-client-side-SSL-cer...
Do NBA Players Try Harder in the Playoffs?
I don't really understand this. Einstein was a patent clerk before getting a PhD. Honestly, if you think PhDs don't make any money, frankly I don't think you know what you're talking about. Perhaps this is the case in the arts and humanities but in science, particularly computer science, this isn't the case at all. I always here people say this and usually they recommend people go get stuck in some 60,000 a year job, because supposedly that's more than any PhD will make ... lol. It's a naive view that CS PhDs don't or unlikely to make much money. Sure, most PhDs aren't millionairies several times over but neither are code monkeys. I'm just trying to be honest about it.
Behind The Business Plan Of Pirates Inc.
Yes, because the idiotic actions of crazy individuals are totally the responsibility of all people in a society.

Have you repented for the murder of JFK, Lincoln and some school personnel in San Diego (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brenda_Ann_Spencer) yet?
Not even that-- it was always a bit uncertain, and these people have simply restated the same old evidence that was always there. How this is news, I'll never know.
Well, I didn't want to get into the details here, but yes, that's part of it. :-) He's also been criticized for not actually telling jokes when it is his material, being/attracting the worst sort of humanity, etc.
A little off subject, but this reminded my of one of my original advisors, Rich Lundgren, whose love of group theory was contagious. Also a great bridge player. I fondly remember playing for 4 hours while discussing the life of Galois in the back of his VW bus on the way to a math convention.

Here he is now:

http://math.ucdenver.edu/~rlundgre/

Thanks for the memories.
"I don't recall Larry learning anything from doing a PhD itself, as opposed to doing the work independently."

Seeing as one major focus of a PhD is to learn to do independent research, this statement is essentially vacuous. It also disregards the influence on his thinking process from his advisor (Winograd) and fellow graduate students.
FWIW, I've already paid for my Kindle 1.0 in terms of book $$ saved, and the bookshelf I didn't have to buy.

The convenience of having dozens of books to read in my backpack is a cool bonus :-)
To see something that does not exist (and then create it) is surely out of touch with reality, and a form of psychosis.

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. George Bernard Shaw
Paul Buchheit has a blog post on this. The summary of his blog post is this: "Using a salted-hash such as MD5 or SHA-1 isn't much better. Use bcrypt."

http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2007/09/quick-read-this-if-...
What is more significant is that these are 198 highly skilled jobs.
The truth is that this is Hacker News. No matter how appropriate PHP may be as a tool for many web programming jobs, no one wants to admit to their cool 'Hacker' friends that they use it. Just like you won't hear many people talk about how they're using ASP.Net or C# for their startups. It's not that these are in some way inferior or bad; it's just that you don't get any hacker cred for using or talking about them.
>>I don't quite understand what he meant, as "working on a doctorate" isn't an answer to "why aren't the big boys already doing it?"

It was a response to my assertion that his argument would have been wrong if I were Larry and it were 10 years ago. Essentially he was saying: "You can't compare you and Larry because he's smarter than you." That may be true, but people dumber than me have created successful companies...I think.

>>However, Larry Page got enormous benefits from his PhD

True, but that wasn't the point he was making.

>>BTW: I had a very critical advisor like that, and it was really unpleasant. Not everything he said was helpful or relevant - but some were. And at the end, I was rightfully grateful - and also rightfully annoyed.

I responded to his (slightly drunken) derision very positively and always had a fantastic comeback, except for the "and...?" response. I was actually very appreciative of his criticism and challenging posture because most people just shine you on when they hear your pitch and tell you everything sounds fantastic. In the end, I won him over and he said he would help me as long as I got a few other influential people on board.

Even though I think he's a bit narrow minded, I liked his no-bullshit attitude and honesty. As I said, I genuinely thanked him for challenging me and giving me the opportunity to change his mind rather than just blow me off.
"Surely you admit the possibility of the existence of both types of relationships?"

Yes, congratulations on finding my point.

By definition, if you are a net wealth suck because you are being exploitative, then you are not a wealth producer. You're trying to have it both ways to make a bad point. Being a net wealth increaser can't "justify" being a net wealth sink because you can't be both at once. This smells like weak thinking.
The Do’s & Don’ts of Modern Web Design
Why does Twitter need URL shorteners at all?
PG Starts a Blog For YC
> makes it sound like Americans have some special individuality gene, while the Dutch are all genetically predisposed to socialism.

It's called culture -- not genetics. Would you agree that there are several important distinctions between Dutch and American culture?
Usually people talk about Lisp's superior expressiveness. The ability to "draw down" (or up) a language to the concepts you're working with directly is a powerful thing, and very few languages do that as well as lisp.

Maybe that's what he meant? "Functionality" of a language is kind of a vague term.
iRex Iliad - http://www.irextechnologies.com/products/iliad ... a bit pricey though, 599 Euros
It's making me fucking sleepy. I can't procrastinate well enough now.
It's a talk; that's what he's supposed to do. He also released a lot of code he wrote, so he isn't exactly being a hypocrite.
This is embarrassing, but I had no idea that 0 == "string1" would return true. I had to write a test script to verify it.
A worse insult would be calling it the 'Carlos Mencia of frameworks'.
(retailers must love you ;-)

iRex Digital Reader 1000S, 699 EUR; https://www.irexshop.com/

10.2 Inch (diagonal) electronic paper display
1024 x 1280 pixel resolution at 160 pixels per inch
16-level grey scale
Mini-USB connector
Wacom® penabled® touch sensor input with Stylus
...

More data and opinions over at http://mobileread.com, etc.

P.S. I tossed this in because iRex is not using the same screens as most everybody else: http://www.eink.com/products/matrix/High_Res.html (found via MobileRead). I had nearly forgotten that.
I'd expect this to suffer from extreme 'youtube effect' - having complete idiots post at each other at high velocity and hurting the spirit of your site. Any reasons why it wouldn't?
I think what you actually want is:

PASS column = HMAC(plaintext_pass, salt)

I might be wrong? As I understand it there are issues with MD5(MD5(password) + salt) that HMAC avoids. I'm still not 100% sure I understand the difference, but I think that is what the wikipedia article on HMAC is saying: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMAC#Design_principles
Where Zope Leads, Python Follows
However, it seems like doing science requires at least as much creativity as writing or painting.
>A novice programmer was once assigned to code a simple financial package.

>The novice worked furiously for many days, but when his master reviewed his program, he discovered that it contained a screen editor, a set of generalized graphics routines, an artificial intelligence interface, but not the slightest mention of anything financial.

>When the master asked about this, the novice became indignant. ``Don't be so impatient,'' he said, ``I'll put in the financial stuff eventually.''

I love this one because it took me many many years to "get" this lesson: it's not about the code. It's about the Program.

EDIT: Minor edits
seconded: Im sure there is LOADS of great stuff on there. But I just cant face finding it :)
That's the first thing I thought of too. The -C flag is there specifically for this very scenario.

Also, would "j" have worked better than "z" in the tar line? bzip2 is much slower than gzip, but does a better job.
Well, there's an argument to be made for them, when including the full URL in a message would cause it to exceed the SMS character limit.

However, there's no reason to use one (and lots of reasons not to) when the URL doesn't break the 140-character limit, or when the message isn't going out via the SMS gateway.

I'm not holding my breath for Twitter to implement such logic, though; they seem to have a truly unhealthy fascination with URL shorteners.