skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I dont like the implication that techcrunch and last.fm are both equally innocent victims in this.

techcrunch's traffic no doubt rose well above average during the whole affair, they have a few detractors questioning their legitimacy, but where are they? techcrunch deleted every comment that wasnt calling for the death of last.fm from each post.

whereas last.fm, they may have had some extra traffic, but they have had quite a few people deleting accounts, 3 posts on the worlds largest(?) tech blog along with threads on slashdot and a long list of people in their own forum worrying about being sued for using last.fm.

combine that with the ridiculous practice of posting these attacks on friday nights and the fact that techcrunch were the only people to hear from this tipster, its hard to pass off techcrunch as the innocent victim.
CVS is Robert Downey, Jr. before he kicked the drugs. Subversion is Robert Downey, Jr. sober.

DVCSes are networks of pirate utopias, non-D VCSes are the United Nations.

CVS is Hannibal Lector, svk is Buffalo Bill.

You're right, it's fun, easy, and a complete waste of time.
Oh come on, it was funny.

You need to lighten up a bit. He gives points on both sides. I do only Ruby and I get what he means.
Actually, you only need one instruction for Turing completeness: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_instruction_set_computer
It is fairly easy to avoid symbol soup in ruby.

First, don't use global variables. I'm perfectly OK with global variables sticking out and looking ugly.

Second, use the English module packaged with Ruby if you find yourself using Perl-like special global variables a lot. I very rarely use them and so never need to use the module.

Finally, use accessor methods to work with instance variables instead of accessing them directly. This also makes it easier to add logic to handle your instance variables without having to rewrite or break any code.

If you follow these three steps alone, you will have about the same amount of symbol soup as you would in python, which is almost none.

(By the way, I am also a fan of both python and ruby and think they are both great languages).
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It sounds like somebody needs to create a micropayment service.

I don't have the coding chops, but I know a lot of the people around here do.

You put $10 into a micropayment account that can then be used across websites like facebook or blogger, or whatever else service decides to do this.

I could even see ISPs rolling this into part of your payment plan for internet...$50 a month for access, $10 a month that gets picked at by people that use micropayments.

If anybody does this, will you buy me an Ariel Atom?
2 big points im not sure he addressed.

- TC originally explicitly accused Last of handing over the data. Which everyone agrees now didnt happen. So probably Last's original "TC are full of shit" response could be considered partially fair?

- This "source" has just disappeared? That's interesting... not wanting to sound like I am accusing TC but it's more than a tad suspicious. Has someome been leading them along? Sounds a bit like it to me!

Otherwise good article :D
The Ultimate Exam
Android has had this for a while and it rocks.
As a pythonista who likes ruby, I think your "Perl's ugly sister" comments were a shot in the foot and detracted from the rest of your argument, which concentrates on rails and has little to do with Ruby itself.
"While the theft of the lunar and martian geological samples had made headlines last summer, the missing clothbound journals, the work of NASA Senior Scientist Everett K. Gibson Jr. on the origins of the universe, were unknown publicly until the trial."
http://www.collectspace.com/news/news-072202a.html#04

...What? You honestly want me to believe that NASA had secret research on the origins of the universe squirreled away in one of the most secure locations on Earth? That's borderline conspiracy theory territory.

What made that file worth hiding in the same vault as the lunar and Martian samples?
http://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~harry/Relay/index.html
What and start using Bing and Hotmail? get real...
Ask HN: Econometrics, Bioinformatics, Game Theory. Python or R?
Come next October I'll be studying Econometrics, and that seems as good a reason as any to finally take the plunge and learn to programme.

Python or R?

I'm under the impression that Python is a lot easier for a total novice to get into, and since its designed to be a general programming language rather than a statistical package that's Turing complete I'd be able to move to simulating games with the greatest of ease.

Also, IAUTI that bioinformatics really, really likes NumPy and SciPy and if I can grok the statistics behind econometrics it'd be a sane amount of work to learn another area I'm really interested in.

Recommendations, tutorials, books please.
I don't see a product like Alpha succeeding all by itself. As he says alpha is made to answer questions that involve all kinds of 'primitive' calculations (I call them primitive because it can only use data that it already has in its DB). And out of the many queries that I use Google for every day how many are such? Close to 0.

Its still a nice product but its not much more useful than Mathematica right now. In my opinion their biggest competitor, True Knowledge, is moving in the right direction. They have a new Firefox addon which will add data obtained from True Knowledge to the results page of your Google searches. Thats whats going to succeed. A hybrid of a search engine and an answer engine. And maybe one day once answer engines get smart (not any time soon- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Question_answering#Issues ) we will be able to replace most of our Google searches with Alpha queries.
There is so much crap in this article that I don't even know where to start...

This and that post about the russians and Facebook only show that these guys don't live in the real world. It seems they graduated from Michael Arrington's School of Crap.
I don't disagree that a name is important, but it's not what makes or breaks a product or company. The reason people think the search results labeled Google are better is because of the brand behind it, not because of the letters G O O G L E.
This has been discussed before in many other sources. The cause of the bubble is probably the way tuition and financial aid are used by many colleges. Perhaps the most in-depth analysis was by The Atlantic.

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200511/financial-aid-leveragi...

If this hypothesis is correct, then it has interesting implications for how a pop in the education bubble might play out. Since a fair portion of college budgets are propped up by moms and pops taking Mortgage Equity Withdrawals to finance their kid's education (who may or may not actually be deserving to go the college of their choice, but probably not) then we can expect (1) the tuition portion of institutions' income to drop precipitously and (2) that there will be fewer sort-of-rich-kids going to elite schools.

This doesn't seem all bad in my opinion. Maybe academia should return to humbler roots. Do the top schools really need Olympic sized swimming pools, or gyms that would require a $100 a month membership in any big city?
But what about the synergies? I remember when AOL and Time Warner joined. They definitely promised me some sort of convergence of old media and new, and it was going to revolutionize everything. I feel cheated.
Sorry Pythonistas, but whenever you say that having "only one way" to do something is a good point (and many have said this), you sound like religious nutjobs.

There's more than one good and obvious way to do anything worth doing, be it giving birth, building a bridge, adding two numbers together, or developing algorithms in a programming language.

I like Python on many levels - particularly the indentation - but the religious-ness of the philosophy and language design is off-putting in so many other ways.
this is what facebook should've gone for. specially them, due to the social network that they have.

the other contender would be linkedin due to the professional atitude they have towards social networking.
This was funny when I first saw it in the 1980's in dead-tree form. This version is missing the extra credit question:

Define Universe. Give three examples.
If you interpret the word "myth" in the title to refer to the content of the article it suddenly makes sense....
Frankly, I'm quite used to see this kind of trolling spam about Perl.

You could answer by asking after specific problems with "Perl Best Practices" or what can top e.g. Moose, but language wars (+)? I AM able to grow a beard....

This group of scripting languages seems really similar in functionality and usability today (so if I change environment, I'd probably go functional). The large difference seems to be in the cultures around them...

(+) I'm all for editor wars, of course! :-)
I read it last night thinking the name was a joke.
What does he mean then?

I've looked at quite a bit of Python and Ruby source code and Python uses square brackets, periods, mathematical symbols, parentheses, and colons in similar ways. Indeed, a method definition in Ruby uses fewer symbols (no need for the colon on the end, or even the parentheses, although that's against common Ruby style). Python even makes nonsense like using double underscores in method names obligatory. Or how about Python's obligatory parentheses on all method calls?

How is Ruby really more "line noise" than Python? Seriously. Sure, Ruby allows you to be more lax than Python and write poor, "line noisy" code, but good Ruby is no more "line noise" than good Python.
Just joined. Good call on getting this started
The traits referred to in this log are primarily things that Perl has inherited from Ruby, rather than things Ruby took from Perl in the first place (which, to be fair, was rather little).
Not even the GPL is viral in the way he defines it. He says that if you use GPL code it makes all code linked to it viral - not true: if you do not GPL the linked code and you distribute it then you are breaching the copyright on the GPL code - it does not affect the copyright on your own code.
How Much Is YouTube’s One Minute Worth?
So maybe WA will be Google's next big acquisition.
Very bad article.

I will not point out every innacuracies and witless points in it, but this one really shocked me :

"Imagine telling doctors to open source their skills or attorneys to open source their skills."

Wrong. They do. Now, imagine the contrary. Imagine lawyers not open-sourcing their knowledge (because we're much more talking about knowledge here), or way worse, doctors not open-sourcing their knowledge... That would be a good world for sure !

Not everything is meant to be open-source. But opensource exists for a purpose. Every creative mind wants to share a bit of what he knows and learnt, and if the whole,combined with work of others, makes a working system it's even better. I don't want to live in a world where this isn't true.
You wouldn't say anything if they were white.
Why? You can say whatever you like if you can back it up with analysis. Not to do so is pointless political correctness.

Car insurance companies believe that young male drivers are a bigger risk than older female drivers. They have statistics to back this up. Saying that young, male drivers are worse drivers is not ageist or sexist. This sentence is not judging individuals but a demographic group (i.e. it would be wrong for me to say you are a worse driver than someone else, if I had no proof).

The problem with judging programmers in this way is that it's hard to empirically measure results or to even agree what metrics are good or bad.
I think I heard someone say whitelisting, but I lost the reference.
I think part of the point of the article in the Chronicle is that the top schools will be fine and do not need cut back. While this only applies to the very top schools, they will still have people willing to pay the tuition and endowments large enough to cover any student they want to admit that cannot cover the tuition themselves.

It is the small and mid grade schools that may need to carefully look at their models.

Personally, I think a bigger question is what will it do to families trying to help their children climb into a higher income bracket if there is a major shake up in the higher education market?
Get rid of the ads - you'll make the majority of your money from affiliate fees when your site visitors sign-up for the apps you review, so why clutter the site with ads too?
The Guardian is a good source and certainly understand tech the best of UK newspapers (they have an api, post the raw data used in articles, host barcamps/hackdays, etc).

Carr on the other hand is know for bitter opinion pieces, such as this one about the Le Web conference http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/dec/10/startups-in...
Wow. This looks incredibly useful. I might go ahead and try to convert the word generation libraries into C# so I can use this in one of my upcoming projects. Thanks for this!
"The proponents of OSS thought, or think, it'll make the world a better place, but has it? I don't know."

Uh, what does he know, then?
Unless things have improved since I tried it a while back, this isn't comparable. The Android thing was a straight port of the 2.5D sprites-on-raycasting engine. And it works well enough, but the G1 trackball isn't nearly sensitive enough to actually be fun.

Carmack's port is using the 3D hardware to do filtering, and he at least claims to be worrying about gameplay and frame rate consistency, something that's a real problem in the Android application.
No

also consider http://www.google.com/search?q=phpmyadmin+exploit
The name and logo is weak branding so far. But,I think that Google built their service not by marketing but by functionality. So they have a chance. However Googling something and Binging it is much different in verbiage.

I think that digg or (dig) is actually a great name for a search engine. I think for the branding after the fact it has to be something that works in a verb. Bing it! is better than live or MSN search it but still, bing?... Cannot help but think of Chandler Bing and it isn't as mathematically cool as Google is.

But I guess Bing does mean these, as to which it will become is yet to be determined.

- Bing is a Unix program which is essentially a ping with added network throughput measurements.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bing_(program)

- Bing is a Chinese term used to describe dough-based Chinese flatbreads, pancakes, unleavened dough foods, or indeed any food item with a flat disk ...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bing_(Chinese_flatbread)

- A slag heap (also called bing, Boney piles, culm, waste coal, Terekons (Russian), gob piles, or slate dumps) is a pile built of accumulated tailings, which are by-products of mining. ...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bing_(mining)

- Prison solitary confinement, a term used by inmates; A heap or pile, such as a slag heap
en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bing
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What made that file worth hiding in the same vault as the lunar and Martian samples?

Maybe a boring scientific reason like the vault was environmentally controlled so the clothbound journals were better stored there?
Doesn't really matter. I'll just steal your commercial software if a good open source alternative doesn't exist. End result to you? Same deal.
> You could make the same observation about the fact that
> people use Kleenex and not Kimberly-Clark Wipes.

Unless you work in a wet lab, then you definitely use Kim Wipes.
That or healthcare.
Well, if you're going to try to reinvent email you've got a better chance at making whitelists useful.

Even if your inbox (or whatever the wave equivalent is) could divide incoming waves based on whether they were from whitelisted contacts or from unknown contacts, it gets a lot more useful if people whitelist each other by default.
How would this effect mailing lists?
Market Research Tip for Startups: Use Mechanical Turks
An SQL Query goes into a bar, walks up to two tables and says "can I join you?"
Post your fav geeky jokes
I too like the differences between email and instant messaging. I don't want convergence. I want people to choose an appropriate channel for communicating with me. I want phone calls to interrupt me (unless I'm ignoring them), texts to interrupt me in a lightweight, ignorable way, IMs to interrupt me in a less-ignorable way when I'm logged in, and email to be ignorable until I check my email. Colleagues know I check my work email pretty consistently when I'm working and not at all otherwise. My friends have a rough idea when I check my personal email, but they know I'm inconsistent.

I like that each mode of communication has a different flavor. You can't unify chat and email because the etiquette and expectations are different. An email means something different from an IM that contains the same content.
I doubt very much that TC deliberately posted their stories on friday night. Those guys don't distinguish between days, and I think they forget that anyone else does.
> I like Python on many levels - particularly the indentation - but the religious-ness of the philosophy and language design is off-putting in so many other ways.

I think you're overgeneralizing from a single misquotation. I've rarely encountered dogmatism from pythonistas, as most of them are too busy getting stuff done.
I haven't watched the keynote yet - is Gmail -> Google Wave something they announced?
Django vs Rails is like Old Navy vs the GAP.

Lisp web development is haute couture; sure, we might need to travel to the ends of the world to fetch silk, velvet, safron and red dyes, feathers of griffins, and we might need to raise our own albino beavers and translucent-neon chimps to harvest for leather, but the end result is a gallant style fit for a high princely court. (It might also involve a slight invasion of neighboring states to capture their sartorial secrets.)
What an enormous waste -- why bother distributing a desktop app if you're going to stick with Flash? Taking the browser out of the mix doesn't solve anything except direct access to a remote control.

The video rendering would be a full order of magnitude more efficient if it wasn't blitted through Adobe's craptacular runtime firs, all just to get some measly overlays.
saas?
Thanks for your help :-)

What I meant wasn't "I have to check all these pages separately instead of checking iGoogle or FriendFeed". What I meant was "this could potentially be yet another communications channel for people to reach my eyeballs, and I'm sick of new communications channels".
http://groups.google.com/group/perl.perl5.porters/msg/651b72... is a version of the article with the character encoding done correctly, not by monkeys. I dunno what that originally was supposed to be but perl.org's NNTP gateway horked it into some unholy mix of UTF-8 and 8859-1.

Good article, tho.
>Django's routing is really verbose. You have to specify each route you want. Rails has a bunch of shortcuts for common cases (REST as well as :controller/:action/:id). In a way, this is just the explicit vs. implicit thing. Django makes you explicitly state your URLs while Rails will let you state them, but you don't have to should you like the defaults. The Django folk say that it takes very little time to write routes (true) and that one should be thoughtful when making URLs (also true). But sometimes it just feels tedious. Really, it's just a matter of preference.

Don't forget globs. They're freaking awesome.
True, but my point is it's more tokens if you write it as several lines. a = b = c 2; vs b = c 2; a = b;

So token count is still not really what we want to measure even if it's better than line count.
Does this mean that someone at Pandora/Music Genome Project have to listen to every single song they have in their library? Or do they now have automatic classifiers to identify the "genes" of a song?
It seems to be acting like a lot of communication tools at once. If there's some way to partition the usage up somehow then it's like a combination of several quality tools in the one place with the option to let the borders blur.

It'd be nice to be able to set the communication mode for instance - "this is asynchronous, like an email", and then you don't have to worry about the person you're writing to coming online while you're drafting something you want to word carefully. It sounds like they have something like that but I don't know what the granularity is like.

If it can do that you can have your cake and eat it to, and I'd be pretty keen to give it a go.

Hell, I'd be happy with email/chat/feed reader/blog interface as separate apps in the same page, just so I could get status info from everything in the same place that I do stuff. Being able to drag and drop things between them all has a fair bit of appeal as well.

It's probably a fine line between good integration and a huge shiny mess though.
I love the print_r function I found this because I was searching specifically for that.

On the other hand, I do not need the curmudgeonly array functions. Why anyone would want to recreate the frustrating hell of having to know which array functions are (needle, stack) and which are (stack, needle) is beyond me.
I would recommend Python as a first language. There are tons of users (which is very nice when you run into problems), and it's useful for all sorts of problem domains.

http://diveintopython.org/ is a good place to start.

(Or, if you aren't going to start learning in the immediate future, this is looking pretty promising:

http://diveintopython3.org/ )

O'Reilly's "Learning Python" seems pretty decent too: http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596513986/
This was the biggest takeaway for me too. It's a way of easily moving data from just about any communication system to just about any other communication system.
Michael Lewis on Warren Buffet
Excellent reasonable answer. But isn't this space very valuable?

Its not only climate controlled, but protected by a variety of security measures. All of these are expensive. So you would assume that whatever goes into the vault would have to be worth these expenses.

Then again, people are people, and tend to shove things where they'll fit. Another interesting point: NASA listed the journals as stolen, but Roberts denies he ever had them.
""If you open source your software your monetization options become limited."

True. But I don't see the point of this argument--you can open source software that you don't intend to sell, or use open source software, without having to open source the software you're trying to sell. That goes without saying."

Not to mention things like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_License and
ruby uses < (less than) for inheritance; also regular expressions start & end with / (slash). you have %W, %w for arrays and %q, %Q for string. things like "class << self ..." looks weird to those new to ruby. also stuff like "a ||= ...". and of course pre-pending '@' for instance variables and '@@' for class variables.

also when i use regexps in ruby i then say "/re(g)ex/ =~ 'string' && $1". in python that would be multiple statements: "m = re.match('re(g)ex', 'string'); m.group(1)"

in python existing syntax (or more familiar syntax) is used to accomplish all the above.