skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My apologies, "functionality" isn't a very precise word in this case. I meant it in terms of what functionality is in the language's syntax. For instance, Lisp has macros whilst PHP does not. And whilst later versions of PHP do support things like first class functions, they do so in an unwieldy and verbose fashion that negates a lot of their advantages:

#(* n %)

(* n _)

(* n)

function($x) use ($n) { return $n * $x; }

One of these things is not like the others :)
I hope you haven't deployed any matching software.
So points = number of tweets of a link? If so, it is HN/Reddit without the voting.
According to Hernando de Soto (among others), copyright is the reason for pretty much everything good that happened to the western countries in the last couple of hundred years. And he makes a very convincing case about it, too.

The issue is a bit more complicated. The last part of the article was the most interesting. If they can put into law something against commercial lobbying (not a ban of course, but a damper) that could mean changes that are more profound and long term. And might be for the best, too.
> access to code created on non-typed programming languages such as Python and Ruby

For me, that killed it.
Nothing about it in the Terms of Service:

http://code.google.com/appengine/terms.html
another piece not included are all the contractors and service providers we pay every month. There are 18 non-founder employees at Xobni , but then we have at least 2 FTEs in contractors, a part-time CFO, a part-time bookkeeper, and stretching things a bit, a legal bill i don't want to mention (contract attorney, corporate attorney, IP attorney),

there is probably 20-30% of our workforce that isn't counted as employees

it always surprises me to see how many people's lives we touch (and i'm talking outside of all the users)
Um, don't Kindles come with lifetime of wireless access? Factor that in and they're reasonably priced.
"Germany" [1] did expand quite successfully eastwards during the Ostsiedlung (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostsiedlung) in the middle-ages.

Modern Germany is dense, yes. But guess what: People are migrating en masse from states like Saxony-Anhalt (118 inhabitants/km²) to Baden-Württemberg (301 inhabitants/km²).

[1] In quotation marks, because there was no state called Germany back then.
Also, nothing in the Program Policies. It just mentions no SPAM.

http://code.google.com/appengine/program_policies.html
I debated myself over this. If someone tweets a link isn't an implicit vote (similar to voting on HN). I guess I should make it auto-voted up so you can't get double points (one for tweeting and one for voting up)
An old school BOFH archive
Are there even any color e-ink type displays in the lab?
I tend to think in terms of language design, so by "functionality", I meant it in terms of syntax, rather than external libraries. Sorry, I should have been more clear.
Poll: Do you smoke?
I'm not ordinarily a big fan of polls, but I was intrigued by my own curiosity. I wondered how prevelant smoking is among hackers.

On one hand, I would think that Hackers would smoke less because they might be more realistic about avoiding the long term effects of smoking than a non-hacker would be. On the other hand, all Hackers are indeed human and there are a lot of them that do make choices that aren't that great for their physical health (e.g. sitting in front of a computer for 18 hours a day!)

Do you smoke (cigarettes)?
It sure beats stopping to find and then read the list of stations and fares printed in 8 point type on a sticker that is attached to a random spot on the front of the machine. Great work, but I'm not hopeful about it getting past the lardass bureaucrat brigade.
Are those startups lobbying for higher H-1B quotas?

This article, and the one in the thread you linked to, are talking about large corporations, not startups. There will always be a shortage at the high end. That's what makes it the high end.

Incidentally, the article you indirectly linked to quotes a Duke professor whose opinion largely agrees with the opinion of the UC Davis professor. Last I checked, Duke was a pretty well-regarded university, so I guess that means he's right. Or is there a flaw in that logic?
I do my own because I wrote software to handle it. Whenever I discover a new piece of tax code/legislation or reporting requirements, I encode it in software so I don't have to do it manually ever again.
To be fair to Hulu, the restrictions on content distribution are from the networks, not Hulu. To explain: a television show is created by a network or a third party and then that show is licensed for distribution within a country by that network or third party. So, Disney makes Scrubs and runs it on ABC in the US (although it had licensed it to NBC for a while) and, if there is a market for it in other countries, licenses it to a network in those countries for distribution in that market.

So, when a network gives online distribution rights to Hulu for content, it's only for the US. In order to make sure that they keep getting content, Hulu really has to prove that they won't be hacked - that Hulu can effectively serve ads that won't be easily blocked, that Hulu can control distribution, etc.

It sucks. However, the behavior is more network/hollywood related than Hulu related. I'm sure the Hulu folks would love to be an open free-for-all, but they also realize that by playing ball they're able to offer something that, frankly, I find more entertaining and a much better experience while also having a much greater potential for profit.

Who knows? Maybe someday show creators will simply license their material for online distribution, completely bypassing networks and borders. In the meantime, Hulu is trying to make sure they don't piss off their benefactors and have content yanked because they can't control distribution. Is it good? No. But I'd blame the networks before leveling my anger at Hulu.
Some languages/frameworks etc scale better than others. Making that choice is very important. $75-$150/mo is quite a lot really unless you're getting lots of traffic.

I can see the case for this sort of scalability if your traffic is wildly unpredictable - eg 1 visit one day, 100,000 visits the next - but I think that's rare.
20% of U.S Homes Now Use Just Cell Phone
That's one thing I like about the parliament system - most people would surely agree that the Pirate party isn't the best party in every situation, but an awful lot of people agree with what they have to say - and now that's gonna get official representation, even if it's just on a small scale in government.
Magic sucks, Django Rocks
Why is this important to you?
I doubt if Hulu had the bargaining power, they would be spending their time playing "police officer". Unfortunately, its the same hand giving them the content, that is pushing them to plug these minor leaks.

The only alternative I can see would be an HBO-style online retailer willing to pay to produce high-quality content, cutting off the studio entirely. For whatever reason, they don't exist yet.
Predictions via regressions should always have confidence bounds. I am skeptical of the conclusions given that he has prediction for 1980. In order to estimate predictions he probably ran his model on 1970 - 1979 data. The confidence in that prediction is a lot worse that the 1999 prediction and should impact all future predictions. I know it is an Esquire article, but I rarely see his posts go into these important details.
Ask HN: What would you be doing different if copyright/patent law didn't exist?
Would anything change for you or would it stay the same?
They're often incomprehensible out of context. Like this one.
Not to mention the need to add 5c to your ticket if you want it back at the end of the journey - say for expense or tax deduction purposes if you are making occasional but expensive long-distance trips for work assignments. I've spent >$300 on BART fares for a month-long project before, and if you exit the station with the exact fare on your ticket, there goes your receipt.
That is not a problem with kindle, but with author's contracts. As far as I know, most of the time they are paid in advance, and the 0.5 cents are just extra.

What would be really cool is if Amazon would let authors publish through them directly on kindle. This will probably happen at some point, when the market in e-readers becomes substantial, though it may not be Amazon who does it. But for the time being that would upset the publishers too much to be worth it (for Amazon at least). And when it does happen, be prepared to witness RIAA vs Napster all over again. They will do anything to keep this from happening, including banning for life any authors who publish directly on an e-medium. Just remember the recent "read-out-loud" incident with Kindle...
Everything would be running on Berkeley Unix.
Paying people to make long XKCD-ripoff cartoons.
I'm interesting in finding out too. I regard nicotine and caffeine, along with emacs, to be essential for a hacking session. Yet of the people I know, smokers vs. nonsmokers seems to be half-and-half.
"and yet many people are unfamiliar with it."

I think we could do an accurate emulator. If Jeff Raskin is not was^H^H^Hinvesting his time here, someone should invite him.

Of course, that would require him to be alive, which is not the case...

Would it be possible to round up whoever was involved in the Cat hardware design?
Little-known fact: BART has been using 8-track technology for its ticketing since the system was created in the 1970's. You can see this when the kiosks need repairs.
Salesforce.com SOAP API Gotchas Part 1
The crew at Basketball Prospectus know their stuff. What I saw from this was that nobody knows how to quantify effort yet, so here are a few first guesses that don't really work.
Oops! I told you I didn't know the area!
Pot, socially
Another thing you need to take into consideration is the person's age. The younger people grew up during the anti-smoking health scare, so they aren't as likely to be smoking
Don't lawyers (i.e. our friends with the J.D.) get to refer to themselves as esquire? i.e. Bob Jones, esq or something like that.
> What did you figure you'd do when you turn 35?

Something other than writing code. Discrimination is Reality with a capital R. I expect it will happen to me and that's why I'm trying to advance my career to the point where I'm not being told what to do by some asshole younger than me when I'm 35.
Noone else will say it, but I'm sure the piracy will pick up if it gets popular enough.
Domain addiction… stay focused
Note that this is not likely to help with media files (mp3, mpeg, jpeg).
Ugh, not to be nit picky but it drives me crazy when people use i.e. incorrectly. What you actually wanted to use here is e.g. Here is a link that discusses the differences and how to use them both correctly: http://ancienthistory.about.com/od/abbreviations/f/ievseg.ht...
Linode.com thumbs up
If I was running Hulu, I would do the exact same thing.

A user costs Hulu 'x' amount of dollars in terms of bandwidth and Hulu makes 'y' dollars off that user via ads. In the US, x < y.

In developing countries, x > y. Two reasons - one, they're eating up more bandwidth ('x' goes up) and two, they're much harder to monetize ('y' goes down).

It's hard enough to monetize viewers from the US. Compared to them, it's practically impossible to monetize viewers from other countries. As a for-profit company, Hulu is doing the right thing. Otherwise, they'd be bleeding all over the place like youtube.
Mahalo Answers Is Hijacking Twitter Questions From IMshopping
Oh heavens... I know the difference, it was just an honest mistake. Simmer, bro! :)
Welcome to CO.

I've always found it amazing how people put up with rush hour traffic commutes. To waste a solid hour (or more), 5 days a week, doing something thoroughly unpleasant seems insane to me. I'd be willing to trade off a lot in life to avoid doing that.

Commuting on public transport is OK as long as I can read. Bikes are OK since they're fun.
The large pic stuff works great now. Still getting the "too much text causes the floats to misalign" problem sometimes:
http://pics.gd/2009-05-06_1719.png
It would be very detrimental for me to smoke because of the fact that I have asthma.
I agree, using it on the internet I kept clicking on the "screen" instead of using the buttons.

Though, I do find myself occasionally futilely poking at ATM and gas-station screens that were made years before touch-screens became common.
64 bit binaries consume dramatically more memory, thus, unless you have more than 4GB of available RAM, running a 64 bit system is simply stupid.
That's simply not true. Compared to any other country people in the US give far more.

"Gaudiani said Americans give twice as much as the next most charitable country, according to a November 2006 comparison done by the Charities Aid Foundation. In philanthropic giving as a percentage of gross domestic product, the U.S. ranked first at 1.7 percent. No. 2 Britain gave 0.73 percent, while France, with a 0.14 percent rate, trailed such countries as South Africa, Singapore, Turkey and Germany."
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19409188/
yes but not cigs and I prefer the vaporizer
Nice video. It's funny you posted that because I am actually a newspaper designer. And he's right, to some extent. Obviously, I believe that design can play a major role in newspapers, and really great design can be done. But it takes an amazing amount of coordination and manpower to pull of those designs. Several papers in the U.S. have been reknowned for this well-thought-out very highly designed content, including the Hartford Courant and the Virgina Pilot (and both have been named best-designed by SND at some point I believe), but it hasn't helped them as far as I'm aware.

There is a market for newspapers. I believe there probably always will be. But the market for 7-day-a-week local papers is dying fast. My headline was meant to be a bit snarky. My point really is: It's the INTERNET. No piece of hardware is going to change that.
See, I think there is value in self-identification esp since not having a college degree makes you somewhat of a pariah in some circles.

Granted, it would have been better to provide some prove as to why it is notable that I personally do not have a college degree, but being here at HN counts for something.

But yeah, I have probably taught myself 6 programming languages (PHP, Ruby, Java, Python, Javascript, Perl, and some software specific programming tools like Lawson Process Flow, TSQL, etc). I have over 10 years of tech / business experience, own 2 retail clothing stores, took statzen.com to TechCrunch50 DemoPit last year, am about to launch http://gpsaAssassins.com, yada yada.

I was going to go back and finish my BS, but something better keeps coming along. Now I am at a point where it doesn't seem worth it. So I am thinking I may one day clep out of a much of stuff and go get my MBA. Of course, by the time I have the time to go back to school the MBA probably won't seem worth it either.

So, hopefully that adds a little more to the conversation. (Better late than never)
And glucose. I smoke & drink Coke (Mexican Coke, the US coke is useless). Emacs: of course!
I don't think I was being hostile, just trying to inform. Down mod away though...
I realize this is a bit obvious, but you have to find a way to expand the project beyond twitter. Otherwise they change the api and you're smoked.
The Problem with the Stock Market
oldgregg: Get back to me after you've spent a carless winter in Boulder. (And I love Boulder.)
"I can’t seem to get anything done in Rails because before I can work with it I have to understand it."

That's about how I feel now. I'm a relative newbie to Ruby and really like the language, even while aware of its warts and headaches as recent posts here illustrate.

I'm trying out Rails so that I understand it better from my own experience, rather than relying on other opinions. It is really quick to get from point 0 to point 1, but then after that, I find I have to dig in to the various parts because my intuition does not lead me to how Rails works, so I have to first understand the "Rails way" of a particular aspect, and then start digging into the source code to see how it works.

But one thing I'm really happy about with my experience learning Rails is getting a much better understanding of Representational State Transfer (REST). I ran into some roadblocks in figuring out routes, which led me to realize I didn't understand REST well enough, so I've been reading Roy Fielding's dissertation (focusing on the REST parts, but more I read, the more I'm inclined to consider it essential reading for web developers, or at least for me).

So I still want to get proficient at Rails and use it for my current web project, but I'm now more interested in trying out Django too, even if just for perspective.
I have never been able to figure out what would possess a person to put something that smells like cigarette smoke in their mouth. Beyond that, most people I know who have tried smoking found the initial experience physically unpleasant (smoke burns the throat and lungs). The only explanation I'm aware of for people continuing to smoke after the first time is social pressure. From what I've observed, hackers tend to resist social pressure more than most people.
Have you tried Red Bull Cola or Pepsi Throwback?
my strategy would have to been to highlight the rows in excel and then do "insert bar chart"
If the submissions were quality I would definitely upvote them.

I use PHP as well.
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: The Unix Legacy (by Rob Pike)
Ask HN: Why don't CPAN equivalents exist for every language/framework?
Hi,

I came across this blog post today : http://joose-js.blogspot.com/2009/02/cpan-for-javascript.html

He says, "While there have been attempts to create a CPAN (comprehensive module directory) for JavaScript it has failed just as this has failed for pretty much every language but Perl."

Is this too broad a statement? Has this really failed in every language but Perl? I know because I tried to build a "Comprehensive Module Directory" for cakePHP and pretty much failed for various reasons (lack of community support, inconsistencies in standards, etc etc)

Any thoughts on this? Any published theories on why this is hard? How do you go about starting a directory for your favourite language or framework? Does the answer lie in the fact that frameworks might be the new "module directory"? Am I being stupid? :)
Smoking cigarettes gives you a buzz...
I live in Mexico City, so I have no problem in getting Mexican Coke.
> To be fair to Hulu, the restrictions on content distribution are from the networks, not Hulu.

I always thought that Hulu ARE the networks. Founded by Fox/NBC. ABC/Disney recently acquired a 30% stake. This kind of thing never surprises me, because Hulu/The networks are the same thing. Sure, Hulu is run by a bunch of cool guys who're trying to do the right thing, but their bosses have never gotten the online side of things.
You could prototype that as a Firefox-extension. Seems worth a try.
I smoke on and off - tend to quit for awhile then start again. Back when I was doing full-time office-style programming gigs, I found it a good excuse to go outside and walk around if I was stuck on some particular problem, and it always worked wonders in that regard.

That being said, It's a nasty/expensive habit and I don't recommend it to anyone. Anecdotal evidence: of the 600 or so people at the last startup school, I saw maybe 4 people light up, so it can't be very prevalent among good hackers.
This advice is definitely applicable beyond code, the core point he's making seems to be: get known, and participate.

Whether you're a blogger or wannabe games designer, this is definitely the way to get ahead, and I totally regret the fact that some of the more fun projects I've done have had nowt to show for it. I should've got involved in open source earlier, and more obviously.
Cool system. As someone else pointed out, the station select map should have some sort of "you are here" indication showing which station you're at.

I suppose one (potentially minor) ongoing expense with this setup would be that every kiosk would need to be in a its particular location's "mode"... currently every kiosk runs exactly the same way -- location agnostic.
Is Web 2.0 a step backwards for humanity?
Most people after all have nothing interesting to contribute to the world. So why give them the opportunity?

One could argue that the end result will probably be random and not particularly compelling in terms of advancing humanity along various dimensions.

It's sort of like having a democracy where referendums would be held to decide every issue.
I have sort of the opposite take. I have smoked maybe 10 cigarettes in my life, but I think smoking is enjoyable. I don't do it because of the adverse health effects, but otherwise I'd love to have an occasional smoke while programming.
">People who are really good at their jobs obsess about their tools- artists obsess over their paint, carpenters obsess over their power tools, cooks obsess over their knives.

Most people do this about things they seriously care about. Runners debate intricacies of running shoes or the perfect in race meal."

And yet one of the most grueling races in the sport of running, the 100 mile, 10000ft altitude Leadville 100 has been won more than once by a man not wearing true shoes at all.

This isn't an isolated example, either. Many masters of many fields focus on their skills rather than their equipment. Often those with the most expensive golf clubs, are those trying to compensate for a lack of skill. The same is true of photographers an their cameras. Miyamoto Musashi even went so far as to regularly arrive at duels with a wooden sword.

Tools can give someone an edge, but IMHO they aren't the right place to focus one's obsession.
maybe because we now live in the google era -- easier/faster to just google it
Every time I've used BART, in addition to emitting a ticket, the machine emits a receipt out of the same orifice.
I think he already told us: "If Mosso gave OpenSolaris as an option, I would switch to it."

I'm surprised to see it, since the majority of folks prefer Linux by some margin (certainly the userland is better on Linux). But Solaris has some killer features in the cloud space, and Joyent are doing a great job taking advantage of them. Solaris Zones are quite a bit more efficient than Xen, and quite a bit more stable than OpenVZ/Virtuozzo and vservers (which use roughly the same model as Solaris Zones).
I think you're misreading de Soto's work. His argument is about real property rights (land, etc.) rather than intellectual property.
Later not smoking cigarettes gives you cravings.
i'm not sure that this is a matter of "getting it" or not. it seems like a contractual reality that may change over time, but as of now, it prevents them from distributing everything to everyone, so i am hard pressed to blame the networks for this particular problem.
slicehost, prgmr, linode (currently evaluating prgmr and linode)
really not a fan of these 'rails is like a ferrari, django is like an aston martin' type of similes, they mean nothing to me. the article itself is pretty light on content; not much here except a baitish title.
Summary of the article: What caused the last two bubbles? Financial engineers and also some long term investors (people buying houses). I believe the government should therefore penalize financial engineers vs investors.

Not really worth reading...