skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Even if the H1-B visa program did have some negative result on the average programmers' income, it doesn't affect any of us. The average programmers' income is only relevant to the mediocre among us. Just be the best so you don't have to worry about averages.

I don't care where my competitors were born; I want to get job offers and win contracts based on my merits, not based on my mother's geography. If there's a guy in Thailand or India that is better for a position than I am, then he deserves the job and I want him to have it.

Literally everybody I know that has a H1-B visa is making this country better. If I had to make a prioritized list of people to throw out of the country, most of the people on the list would be American citizens. If I got to choose 10 things to change about this country to increase my net income, the H1-B visa program wouldn't even be a consideration--it doesn't make sense to complain about an speculation of a 6% cut due to the H1-B program when the government is taking 6% (sales tax) + 6% (state income tax) + 40% (federal income tax) + 2% (property tax) and when we are paying a huge percentage of our income to insurers who turn around and rip us off when we make claims.
There's nothing special about Brazilians that makes them fear government authority any less.
It works if you use a comma, like the comment you replied to.

Python 2.6 introduces string interpolation like Ruby/Perl. (Older versions used printf-style format strings.)

print "x: {x}".format(x=1234) # New in 2.6

print "x: %d" % x # Old

http://docs.python.org/tutorial/inputoutput.html#fancier-out...
Fun question: Is it illegal for anti-viruses to detect and prevent this?
During the 1973-74 academic year, Hawking was a visiting professor at Caltech, and I was a junior in the physics program. The first signs something was up were the wheelchair ramps that appeared around Bridge Laboratory, the older physics building. Hawking made his debut by giving the weekly physics colloquium talk in the large lecture room. At that time, he could still speak well enough to give a lecture in his own voice (with a microphone), and he started into some brand new, mind boggling stuff about black holes evaporating. The entire physics faculty was there, and I sensed he had zoomed over most their heads. Most, but not all. Feynman was sitting in the front row, and half way through, he asks a question. It was the kind of question that reveals he was following along just fine. The two titans proceeded to have a back and forth exchange for a few minutes in front of the assembled masses, and then Hawking continued with his talk. It was awesome and humbling to witness that, and my friends and I, sitting way up in the back rows, just shook our heads.
Let's wait and see if he actually makes any money before we call it "golden".
This also works:

>>> "X: %(x)s" % {"x":10}
'X: 10'
Not to mention linking to a comment about the original article instead of the original article - http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewA...
Twitter and Posterous
Cool! I'll be there. There is also the OHH at Mission Creek Cafe from 8am to 6pm every Wednesday. http://www.archivd.com/open-hacker-house
I could have written this article and I know nothing of the goings-on at Facebook, Google, and Microsoft. It is all speculation and rumor.
I guess auspicious in terms of he turned out to be a great physicist - and therefore the date became pertinent.

Had he been, for example, a ballet dancer it wouldnt have been quite so interesting.

Also, whilst there are 365 days to be born on how many great physicists are there? And how many are born on the centenary of a previous great physicists death? The odds for that is a lot higher than 1/365 :)
Thanks. YEurope was listed as being in Vienna, Italy -- and that just hurt to look at.
Ugh, just seen this on Twitter.

http://twitter.com/SaveTheGuns/status/1567102622

I dont see why people feel they have to get their shots in when someone is too ill to respond :( (not that it would affect him anyway - but the principle! the principle!)
I went to a focus group in SF that turned out to be organized by Facebook (the last question was "what could Facebook tell you to convince you to work there?"-- it wasn't possible to tell up till then, surprisingly) and of the dozen CS students/alumni from Stanford/Berkeley there, none of them put Facebook as their first choice from a list of tech companies (all the large ones + Palantir, Twitter, FB).

Surprisingly, even though everyone had completely different career goals and rankings of companies, everybody had the same answer to the last question: "Tell me where you're headed and how you're going to get there."
I wonder how much influence oracle would have on java with java being open sourced now.
I am jealous. That must have been a fantastic exchange to witness! I have always enjoyed the ease with which Hawking talks about these complex theories - he does it so well.
I get 42% but I see your point. Though it only processes when the picture actually changes and even then only for a second or less. If you set a reasonable delay I don't think the processor load would stop you from using it.
Sad day for Java, IMHO. But am hoping this would turn out to be a blessing for Ruby/Python.
Imagine what it would do to the average user's CPU. This is a great example of "flashy" technology that looks and works great for the developer, but epically fails for normal user experience.
Changed original comment based on 1. Upvoted your comment too. Still disagree on rest. People will figure out. Also not going to comment on HN ever. All this flame about beliefs isn't worth the time.

Twitter is religion :) Thou shalt not try to convert.

Last question: is there a way to delete HN account?
Successfully monetized then. We can play semantics all day, but Facebook has lost a shit ton of money and has no plan to make a shit ton + X(billion) in the near future .
David Simon: Newspapers could emulate HBO and charge for content
I would hope that Stephen Hawking would have better things to do than respond on Twitter.
I like how ZDNet decided to combine the worst parts of a lightbox and a gallery to make this a torturous exercise in page loading and mouse dodging.

What a half-assed fail.
Yeah, I had a similar thought thinking how Hacker News was distracting me from the work I should be focusing on.
Mark Zuckerberg is great for media PR, because he reminds the old guard of the '90s, when a talented but generally unimpressive 2x-year-old could sell a money-losing company for billions. He's a massive liability for recruiting PR, though, because only a masochist would want him as a boss.
Oracle has owned InnoDB for quite a while -- the transactional storage engine used by MySQL. They could have easily killed it off and thus left MySQL with very few alternatives for anyone wanting something that could do sub-table-level locking, etc. but they didn't.
I'm curious to know that too. Sun was pushing VirtualBox(with more features and killer performance improvements) in order to sell more machines and promote virtualization as the way to the future.

I am not sure if Oracle would actually be interested in this.
If you really want to increase software engineer wages, put a legal cap on the number of CS degrees that can be handed out every year, like med school! I can't say what this will do for the health of the US software industry, but I'm sure it will drive wages up.
That line of conservation disappeared b/c it was essentially attention-bait for people predisposed to believe it; upon any real inquiry (eg: reading the actual text of the CRA, understanding what it did and didn't do, and the total size of CRA-associated lending programs, not just reading an editorial or two) it falls apart as anything like a causal explanation; much like speculators in the financial markets opinion columnists -- speculators in both senses of the word -- rush to jump on a meme once it's climbing and rush to jump off once it's on the way down, often leaving a confused bagholders in their wake, wondering where all that strum und drang got to (like you, in this case)...didn't you get the memo?

If you want to point at past interventions that're more-directly responsible for triggering today's problems you might start by mapping out the intersection between:

(i) pension funds, the size of their assets under management, the legal restrictions on what they can invest in, and the performance window they need to hit

(ii) how fed interest rate policies can impact bond yields across the broader bond market

(iii) how securitization works, including some comparison (before securitization/after securitization) of attributes like yield and 'ratings', and in particular paying attention to drawing connections here with point (i)

That's a lot more work and it's still almost certainly not "the whole story", but there's a definite story there that (in fact) adds a lot of color to the picture, even if it's a lot less pithy than the CRA.
How Not To Conduct an Online Poll
Well, television (particularly ad-supported television) is actively trying over and over to grab your attention, so it's not terribly surprising. I have a hard time focusing when there's a tv in line-of-sight, too, and it gets worse when I haven't watched broadcast tv for a while.

I remember hearing somebody (Douglas Rushkoff, I think) suggest that ADD-like behaviors might be an adaptation to a childhood in which one is inundated with aggressive, flashy advertising. Adapting to reflexively ignoring things that are designed to steal your focus probably affects your brain in the long term, much like meditating regularly can.
> "all I see when I look at Twitter are outdated limitations and people going to great pains to work around them"

Personally, I feel like the 140 character limit helps in one crucial way - it gets people to think twice before they hit the "Update" button.
Trackers do not "know" if the content they are tracking is "illegal". They only have a hash over the content. Not even one ore more filenames.

So IMHO Trackers are not "at fault".
More on http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=570910
Foreground versus background processes probably makes a better metaphor. It is possible to truly multitask, beyond just franticly switching focus -- we do it when we drive or play sports -- but only one task actually has focus. The rest runs in the background. Learning to control that ability is a great way to manage your time and attention.

I'm pretty helpless with group conversations, too. I guess conversation uses a lot of different aspects of attention, so you can't just fire off background tasks for listening to music and each conversation.

As for the people who can do concurrent conversations -- I think they're very good at filling in the gaps of each conversation that they miss. If each conversation is mostly small talk and little stories, you can lose a few words from each sentence and still follow along, especially if you can pick up on voice inflection and body language in your background tasks (as our more socially adept girlfriends and sisters seem to).
A grant of equity or control, however, is irreversible.
What a great man. He survived 40+ years with a supposedly terminal condition... here's hoping that he can pull through again.
John Sculley: Don't Be Afraid to Make Tough Decisions

No matter how stupid they are?

Seriously, Inc, you want us to take business advice from the guy who fired Steve Jobs?
There are a few major problems with this article.

First, the authors say: "In this paper, we simply sought to dispel the myth that globalization generates no losers." In my experience, If you start out seeking to confirm your biases, you generally will.

Second, all their evidence is correlation not causation. I'm sure the correlations are strong, but there is no way to prove that H-1B workers actually caused wages to go down. There are too many external factors.

Finally, unless there is some relation shown between the companies' profitability and the wages they're paying, you can't rule out the possibility that the less expensive H-1B workers and lower wages for American workers didn't actually save the American worker's jobs by keeping costs down and their employers in business. Lower wages and more H-1B workers could just mean that the company is doing what it has to do to stay afloat. Less pay is better than no job at all. That's just one of many possible scenarios.

The paper isn't out yet, but as of now, their argument seems pretty weak.
I'm certain google caches copyrighted content, making them an explicit distributor of the content. That's something no tracker does.

Either way, the pirate bay trial is a symptom of a bigger disease. I think this helps highlight that.
3 Easy steps to get out of debt really fast
Don't let it get to you man :)
If you want Python to "be smart enough to cast x automatically", then you want a weakly typed language. Weakly typed languages are difficult to reason about.

For example, should "3" == 3? Should 3 automatically be converted to "3" in that instance, or vice-versa?

Anyway, a better solution is:
print "x: %s" % x
How Twitter accelerates the damage-control cycle
There is a huge difference between a -$300M run rate and a shrinking -$150M run rate. Monetization isn't always about turning on one big switch, but about turning on lots of little switches.

Remember, Facebook makes -tens of millions- of dollars on people sending a picture of flowers to their friends. There are plenty of other opportunities for Facebook to make money, they're just making sure to do it right. MySpace is profitable - then again, who is on MySpace anymore?
The Hexadecimal Equivalent Chart
Web Color Basics
haha the amusing thing is that he himself likely only looked up the newton-raphson method ten minutes before phoning you. sadly that is the case for many of these mensa-test mental masturbation questions...if you had asked your interviewer the day before, they too would have drawn a blank.

you would think it would suffice to just tell him, yeah, i am aware that the newton-raphson method exists, and what it is supposed to do.
I try to get on my treadmill for at least 30 minutes three times/week. If I have the time I do more and I also do weights, but that's my desired minimum and I can usually make it. Now that it's finally warming up (can't believe it snowed yesterday!), I'll probably be taking the running outside.

But IMHO, the biggest bang for the buck is simply to move around Don't be one of those people who drives around the parking lot for half an hour looking for a closer spot to avoid walking an extra 20 feet to the door. I get in the parking lot and PARK. If I have to walk 200 yards to get in the store, it won't kill me and the exercise is good for me. The only exceptions are heavy rain, subzero temperatures, or carrying a baby or toddler (which I haven't had to do for years).

Just get off the couch and do something and your health will automatically improve. Humans are built to walk, we just don't do enough of it.
I don't see the difference between Posterous and Tumblr. The latter also has an email address that you can send anything to and a great bookmarklet. Is it simply that Posterous sells themselves differently?
5 Things You’ll Miss by Not Working In An Office
The idea is that The Pirate Bay merely points its users to where certain information can be found.

A torrent file is basically just a list of pieces, consisting of hashes and filenames and other very basic metadata that is in no way whatsoever copyrightable, and a tracker is just a thing that tells you who to contact to grab those pieces.

The only difference here is that Google sends this all at once in a static HTML file -- a big list of things related to your search, which almost always includes copyrighted content; and Google is worse than TPB, because Google keeps significant copies of copyrighted material server-side, whereas TPB and other torrent sites as a rule keep none.
What are unsecured consolidation loans
Who do I need to listen to, and where do I need to be, to have this sort of story 30 years from now?
a grant to a VC is not reversible... you cannot fire your VC. A grant to an employee, however, is reversible.
Bruce Sterling seems to have confused his concepts of "Rich" and "Old"
Old people dislike connections, hide in private gardens. There are plenty of "Rich" people who live to sip from the firehose that is the internet...
Also, illegal content is (I presume) a large part of thepiratebay's searchable content, while it's a very small part of Googles searchable content. Legaly I believe that makes a big difference.
Ask HN: If your startup ever goes public, what stock symbol would you use?
Would you use one that somehow spelled out your company name(Google - GOOG) or would pick one that spelled out your product(SUN - JAVA) or would you pick one that spelled out your niche(AVIS - CAR) or something completely random?
'Beginner's luck' may lay trail to Cleopatra tomb
You haven't work with that many languages, have you :)

>>> x = 3 + "7"

What type should be x now: int or str ?

Also: "10" is lesser than "2" but 10 is greater 2.

Should (3 + "7") > 2 return true ?

Such automatic conversions forces you to remember many arbitrary rules, and when you forget it, you have bug that shows later.

It's easier to just write that str() (or use operator %).
hehe I know :P
I disagree that the iPhone is about design first, utility second. I think it is more the case that the iPhone has been well designed for utility. I think part of its success is that its design is amazingly utilitarian. You can really use it.

I agree that, right now, silly eye-candy is winning in the app store. I think that is a function of the immaturity of the entire market. However, one thing that will come as a result when it finally changes, is that the useful apps will, much like the iPhone itself, have useful design that enhances the utility.
>> The average programmers' income is only relevant to the mediocre among us. Just be the best so you don't have to worry about averages.

I hear Lake Wobegon is nice this time of year.
Dear author: Please stop misusing 'less'. It should be _fewer_ disks, _fewer_ books. Fewer is for discrete things, less is for continuous. As in: fewer dollars, less money. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fewer/less
another option - http://buildinternet.com/live/boxes
You can also use binary search to approximate the square root of a number.
With IBM it was a forgone conclusion that Solaris would have vanished

IBM currently sells OS/390, OS/400 and AIX while also pushing Linux and only recently stopped selling OS/2. I think it's quite likely that Solaris would have just joined the list.
The Unintended Consequences of Startups - Docstoc CEO
Whoever said there wasn't? And if they did say that should you take them seriously?
PowerShell: condemned to reinvent
Here is a link to the Google Tech Talk by Steve Blank: http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&oi=video_r...
Is it just me or is there nothing really fancy about this script? Look at the example page of <insert-your-fav-js-framework-here> and you'll be even more surprised...?
get out of debt in three steps:
1- don't go into debt
2- spend less money
3- earn more money

No? Really?
Detroit became entirely dependent on a centralized system powered by a few massive companies. Silicon Valley has some of that, but for the most part is highly distributed. The thousands of startups that feed off the big auto companies can't exist without them. Silicon Valley doesn't die if Google and Yahoo fail to innovate.

That English speaking "niche" currently represents the vast majority the potential revenue. It's a lot harder to innovate than it is to internationalize your software, which virtually every successful company does.

The idea that the value of Twitter or Facebook is in the 5,000 lines of Ruby or PHP that it took to create them is seriously mistaken. Anyone (Chinese or not) can easily clone Twiter or Facebook. Just like almost any competent artist can clone a great painting. That's not the hard part.
To be quite honest, I don't think Twitter and Posterous are comparable, but I do think both of them have tapped into two huge modes of human communication.

Prior to Twitter, there was no method to capturing stream of consciousness. Sure, there was AIM, but those chats are really transient. Twitter allows me to broadcast the funny youtube video I just found, or a frustration I may be experiencing with a company, and to have friends ride the stream with me. Not only that, we get to look into the streams of celebrities, something completely new. I didn't get Twitter for a time, too, but have realized its value and the 140 character limit, in my opinion, allows messages to retain their stream of consciousness type characteristic.

Posterous, on the other hand, is a more structured, more effort-in-your-post version of Twitter. But it's also an interesting middle-ground between both Twitter and conventional blogging, which I think is another form of human communication no one has yet explored. Blogging is for me to write a well thought out essay. Twitter is for saying 'omg check out this discounted laptop.' Posterous gives me a place to post things of importance with ease, in a nice structured manner. I don't want to throw up pictures of my friends at the beach on Twitter, or write a blog post about it, I want to put it on Posterous. However, I don't want to litter my Posterous with random links and thoughts. In those respects, I think Posterous and Twitter really aren't competitors. They both serve two different purposes, to me at least, and there is room for both to thrive.
Thinking of starting a service provider in this space. Huhtenberg, if you're still reading, feel free to give me a ping.
For other services, posting by email is an afterthought. it's poorly implemented, severely limited.

With Posterous, you can send us anything by email and we'll handle it. Multiple images, video, audio, other documents all in a single message. That message can also have full html and we'll publish it all.

We autopost to Twitter (tumblr does this now) but also to Flickr, Facebook, Tumblr, and all the major blog platforms. So you can email us once, we'll handle all the rich media, and then update all the websites you use.

We also have a great bookmarklet. You should try it out.
The obvious area is in films -- much of the Pixar film work is ray traced as are most of the final high-quality visual effects done in Hollywood.

This is a common assumption, but it turns out to be less true than you'd expect. People associate raytracing with ultra-realistic graphics, so they assume that realistic graphics must be raytraced. But the reality is that graphics creators go out of their way to avoid raytracing because it is slow and harder to tweak for artistic effect. Pixar didn't add raytracing to their main renderer until "Cars". (http://graphics.pixar.com/library/indexAuthorBatali.html)
I see a possibility of companies marketing drugs such as Ritalin and Provigil as "cognitive enhancers." I mean, caffeine is powerful CNS stimulant as it is and it's completely unregulated. So what's to stop a drug company from making an analogue to Ritalin, or a lighter dose of Ritalin and marketing it as a brain booster? Selling it OTC? Given that the FDA is already having enough trouble regulating areas such as the energy drink/supplement market - all the different concoctions of caffeine, ginseng, ginkgo (and tons of other herbal supplements) are readily available to 12 year olds. I'm curious and a bit concerned at the prospects.
Next time, just walk up to people and introduce yourself. Why wear a color when the point of the event is to meet people? Would you really feel that bad if your introduced yourself to someone who wasn't a "hacker?"

I know if feels awkward at first, but talking to strangers gets easier over time.
He converted to string before he attempted the add so it isn't a strong type vs weak type issue. It is a they haven't overloaded the + operator to perform string append. Which may or may not be logical.