skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You don't say whether you are talking about people whom you know or happened to have come across in a forum, or some such.

If you e-mail people you don't know (well) with questions then you run the risk of the RTFM / Just Google It! reaction. For CS questions, might be an idea to have a look at StackOverflow and/or ServerFault and if not already answered, raise the question there. The more knowledgeable people are also the more time-poor and more likely to be irritated by people asking questions without having a go at finding the answer.

As for people whom you do know well, well you can always ask them.

My general response to people asking why I didn't respond to their e-mail quickly (and that's a subjective thing) I just say "If it's urgent, pick up the %#@&* phone".
3 Steps to Satisfaction, enjoy the short ebook HN
Another commenter already posted but UUIDs (most platforms) and GUIDs (Microsoft platforms) are the best unique key and no need to hash them. Most larger web products use them at least as a stamp or reference but many distributed systems (especially for sync) use them for simplicity but also globally uniqueness across many database domains.

http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4122.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universally_Unique_Identifier
Processing! http://processing.org/

(Not general purpose, admittedly, but very very satisfying.)
I've been looking into what helper I should use for App Engine + Django. I've been trying to decide between google-app-engine-django (what this tutorial uses) and the app-engine-patch.

http://code.google.com/p/google-app-engine-django/

http://code.google.com/p/app-engine-patch/

Anyone have an comparisons or recommendations?
Ruby + Heroku + Git + Sinatra + Markaby

That combo makes it crazy easy to maintain a bunch of web apps and explore/publish different ideas.

Long-term, I want to drop Ruby and go to Factor (http://factorcode.org/). You can do some amazing cool stuff in Factor that is next-to-impossible in Ruby/Python/Java/etc. It's hard to find a blog post or a screencast that shows you stuff like parsing functions and macros that let you mold the language to your needs. (The documentation on them is pretty straightforward after you learn the basics.)

Then there's the postfix notation. Most people think that's Satan's love child. It takes some time to get used to.

In Ruby:

loop { print( eval( read ) ) }

In Factor:

[ read eval print ] loop
Hulu Desktop vs. Hulu in Browser vs. Nexflix (Flash vs. Silverlight?)
No you didn't.
smalltalk. specifically, Digitalk's Smalltalk/V (DOS, Windows, OS/2, Mac) and their final version Visual Smalltalk Enterprise. I have never been more productive than with that environment. Squeak doesn't do it for me.

[EDIT] earlier today I cleaned out several bookshelves. I tossed about 100 old tech manuals...I kept all the Smalltalk/V books ;)
You were willing to work for nothing because of what you might learn. For one thine, you didn't know that you had skills that were worth money. Now you see that you do. You probably learned a lot of other things too. I also think that an internship should always be a two way street, with each party doing something to help the other. I would certainly expect the person in your position to make a contribution. The other guys are spending time on you, and taking a little bit of a risk.

You already wrote off the summer and the paycheck. Do what you can and see how it plays out. You could be pleasantly surprised. The probability of that certainly goes up when you do something of value.
A data point for discussion "Static vs. dynamic typing: on using compiler to find bugs":

Static analysis has not proven to be helpful in finding bugs. We cannot call to mind a single problem in SQLite that was detected by static analysis that was not first seen by one of the other testing methods described above. On the other hand, we have on occasion introduced new bugs in our efforts to get SQLite to compile without warnings. </quote>
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With friends/acquantainces/family, I know who is likely to approach me with certain types of ideas/questions/concerns. Similarly, as I go through life, and problems come up, I know who to go to with different situations.

Here, I come to learn. It is more like adventurous travel. I don't come here to learn specific things, although I'll frequently use searchyc to track something down.

In other words, it isn't that people here are different from people that I know personally in X and Y ways, it is that the nature of the interaction is fundamentally very different.
>Two out of every three United States corporations paid no >federal income taxes from 1998 through 2005

Does this count my LLC (me consulting) with no retained earnings?
I think what's most terrifying is they raised roughly $100,000,000 USD in funding, from folks like Larry Ellison at that.

It was a glorified loyalty reward program. They did however manage a partnership with MasterCard that allowed members to credit beenz to their account, and they allowed some other online reward point sites to convert their currency to beenz as well.

If I remember right, they dealt with a lot of scrutiny from governments since their end-game plan was to have beenz be a commonly accepted currency, and for members to convert real money to beenz. They even employed a few economists to orchestrate the buying/selling of beenz from/to partnering merchants, making their margin on the spread.
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Seven Fascinating Stories About Human Nature
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Oops. Here's the right one. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=630828
It certainly doesn't matter to your customers, of whom 99.999999999999% will never notice an id in a url.

And if you're about to IPO, just multiply all ids by 5 where customers might see them. You're not lying about how many customers you are getting if some analyst sees that, but you might get a few extra bucks per share.
I haven't used it, but _why's "Shoes" is supposed to recapture some of that early programming magic.

http://shoooes.net/
You're only thinking about social apps. Think about something like Basecamp.
>>> exit
Use exit() or Ctrl-D (i.e. EOF) to exit

Enough said. If you bloody well knew what I typed, just exit FFS.

Python's design is full of shortsighted, dogmatic decisions like this - don't even get me started with functions versus methods and __len__-esque line noise, argggg! And there should only be one obvious way to do something? Give us a break - that's just not how life, mathematics, or anything should work.
New VC fund ($300-million) targets Canadian tech firms
I suppose you think that maths is no science, then?

After all, there's no empirical proof that any mathematical statement is true. Even simple statements like, for example, C/r = Pi cannot be verified empirically. Following your argument, maths is just "pseudo science".

But, of course, you would not say that, would you?

However, if you accept maths to be a science, why not any other field that uses deductive logic? For biological evolution -- at least, the part you seem to find disgusting -- basically uses deductive logic: It makes a few basic assumptions, and then deduces its conclusions, using logical arguments. There's quite a lot of game theory in evolutionary biology.

Your argument, on the other hand, is based on a false assumption. Namely, that there are no empirical proofs for statements in evolutionary biology.

Because there is, sometimes.

Yes, we cannot make experiments with humans, especially not with ones we consider extinct.

We can, however, argue "by analogy". And guess what? Arguments by analogy are made all the time in empirical science. Whenever you use a bridge, you bet your life that the mathematical model of the bridge correctly reflected all the important attributes of the real bridge. All sciences using mathematical models are based on the argument by analogy.

You complain about "pseudo science". Your comment, however, lacks signs of quality as well. You seem to be ignorant about scientific reasoning and yet you dare to judge someone else's article. Why not start by fixing your own ignorance, first?
This was somewhat buried in the article, and it deserves repetition:

"In many countries, math has long been recognized as a tough subject that can be mastered through hard work, said Tom Loveless, a scholar at the Brookings Institution who analyzes international math test results and cultural differences. Efforts to make math more fun or dress up textbooks are not the answer, he said."

It's absolutely shocking to me how many educators I've encountered (even and especially at the undergraduate and postgraduate levels) who dismiss a lack of basic mathematical proficiency by saying "Well, I was never good at math either!" If this article is an accurate representation of where American math education is headed, then for once I might feel optimistic about it.
"Avi is a Jewish name, and I haven't met many Indian Jews."

there is a small Indian jew community. Over the years, most of them have emigrated to Israel but I think there are a few left.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_India
I've recently started using Clojure. Writing Clojure in Emacs (using Slime) is a joy. The integration is just fantastic; write code, send it to the repl, then occasionally switch over directly to run commands.

(Writing SBCL instead of clojure was also nice, but ultimately the cruft of common lisp made it difficult to continue.)

Paredit mode makes it even prettier. Paredit mode makes sure that a) the buffer contents are always a balanced sexp and b) you can mostly use the same keystrokes as normal editing.
Ruby. The language was designed specifically for this.
I think there are many high-level languages that are fun to use -- various Lisps, Python, Ruby, even JavaScript.But if you are finding RoR tiresome to keep up with, I suspect it is more a question of the pace of change than the language itself.

In an ideal world, what kind of programming would you want to do? That might point you in a direction.
I find it hilarious that I am in the process of re-creating pages of notes when I know full well that an exact replica of these same notes sit somewhere in my mother's basement. fifteen years is just about the right amount of time where I have a sense of intense familiarity as I wander about solving the puzzles, but is long enough ago that I don't remember the solutions instantly.
Don't get too excited about some recent brighter economic news
Yay Paredit. I can't live without it now. Someone told me it's based on the old Interlisp s-expression editor, which is kind of neat.

the cruft of common lisp made it difficult to continue

What, specifically? Perhaps I've simply adapted to not noticing it, because apart from its relative verbosity (for a Lisp) I find CL quite nice.
Just learned about Factor from the HN story a couple of days ago, I've enjoyed playing with it quite a bit. But then, Forth was my main programming language for a few years back in the 80s.
> In which modern language/environment/framework is programming a joy?

None of them.

http://www.loper-os.org/?p=16

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/64g7p/old_basic...

The disease is systemic. It pervades all modern computing systems. The name of the disease is ratcheting accidental complexity. The only cure is a from-bare-silicon reboot of all of computing.

> On the contrary, programming seems to become more frustrating as it advances

This is because it is not actually advancing. Incompetently and half-heartedly cribbing feature after feature from Common Lisp is not advancement.

> Am I missing something that can bring back my early joy or discovery

What you are missing is (was?) very real. There once was a time when computer technology was actually advancing in meaningful, qualitative ways. And when the future seemed alive with infinite possibilities. Don't let anyone convince you that all of it never existed.
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Marketing Vs. Advertising 
When you have something that you want to promote, the most important thing that you can do is provide yourself with a way to get that information out there into the public.
And how, then, do you explain Apple? Microsoft used to put their name, prominently, on everything.
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Why not? Aside from violating (unconstitutional) legal tender laws, Beenz would have had no less intrinsic value than the fiat currency used to buy them. They were never a real threat to the Fed.

Now, someone comes up with a gold backed electronic currency, THAT is a real threat to the Fed, and they are shut down rather quickly. Why? Because, unlike Fed notes, a gold backed electronic currency would have real intrinsic value.
For what it's worth, Aristotle was the first to make this division of the three 'modes of persuasion' or pisteis, at Rhetoric 1.2:

http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text.jsp?doc=Aristot.+Rh...

Or at least, this passage is the earliest attested formulation of this sort. Aristotle may have been codifying a system developed by others.
Lua. Minimalistic elegance.
That's not to say that static analysis didn't find any problems at all. Just that the other, more extensive, methods found them first. Which speaks well for their tests. If anything, I would say that this speaks more for good static analysis, since they clearly put an enormous amount of effort into developing these tests. Most commercial software can't justify anything close to that. (kind of ironic, really)
Like Marshall Brain's story: http://marshallbrain.com/robotic-nation.htm
Hulu Desktop is just Flash with a bit more system integration (like the Apple remote). Why would anyone expect it to have any better video that Hulu in a browser?

My only reason for using it is that I can run it independently of my browser. Too many times I have quit Firefox on one screen, forgetting that Hulu was running in Firefox on my other screen.
I supposed quadratic equation walking calculator count as mastery of mathematics!

Maybe just maybe, that 30 questions or dressed up word problems doesn't teach anything beyond how to follow steps to solve problem?
this guy has apparently been doing just that since 1996: http://www.e-gold.com/
> Firearms can't be overwhelming combat weapons until U.S. civil war

Right, Napoleonic wars were fought with bows and spears :/
the problem is, modern tools are too complex. they are trying to be smarter than the user

i like dumb, old power tools that don't get in my way -> unix+vim+lisp
This was one of the most fun ones. Need to try squeak.
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Hmm, isn't their example in 7.0 wrong? The opposite of "a>b" (in C, anyway, AFAIK) isn't "a<=b", because if a==b==NaN both expressions are false (right?).

Just goes to show how hard testing all cases is! How many cases do you need to get full branch coverage on "a>b && c!=25"? I'm thinking 5, but I'm not very sure of that.
> In this post-scarcity future, socialism/welfare/etc is cheap. You want 2% of my income to prevent 100 people from starving? Eh, go ahead, I don't really care.

They won't be satisfied with 2% because 0.02%/person of your income is a huge income disparity.
I'm betting that "two out of three" figure includes pass-through entities like partnerships and S-corps, and corporations that don't have any profits because everything is re-invested in the company (as would be the case in some startups and other organizations bootstrapping themselves from retained earnings). In other words, it's almost certainly misleading.
Can anyone give me some basic cost estimates for running a blog like this? Obviously it fluctuates depending on usage, but even a ball park would help.

Currently I'm planning on doing my blog off of webfaction with Django, but I'm not sure how they'd compare?
Orthogonal is an appropriate synonym for complementary in a lot of cases. It wasn't an appropriate usage here though. Features complement each other by not overlapping, hence being orthogonal, which is probably the only usage that most programmers hear and the source of the confusion.
I do agree with you. But what is the solution? Even if I can't change a global trend, what can I do to side step it and still keep it enjoyable to myself?
According to the post, the desktop version actually played worse than the browser version.
PLT Scheme is hands down the most powerful programming environment in existence. It's sort of like the McLaren F1...those who know, know. And those who don't mistake it for a Mazda Miata.
Which one?

The relationship is basically broken at that point. The employer is looking to replace you and you're quite willing to leave. (Nope, they're not going to fix what made you want to leave.)
Try Mathematica. Currently it is the only programming environment I find tolerable.
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The only cure is a from-bare-silicon reboot of all of computing.

I don't think that can practically happen. If you're using some not-too-powerful language to do it, it will take too long and you'll never catch up. If you're using a language powerful enough to actually accomplish it, you'll never develop a community or a culture of libraries, because the number of people who feel they can just build what they need faster than learning and using someone else's library will be high enough that libraries never get enough attention, and you'll end up with an archipelago instead of a continent of libraries. That's pretty much what happened to the lisps.
And it's a haven for money-laundering and other very illegal activities.
Clojure is pretty joyous, but I hated the error messages the last time I was using it. They were rarely useful. Has anything changed recently?
really sad that they only provide a cname and you can;t associate Elastic IP to it. You can;t point it to your root domain....
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One of the most enjoyable experiences I've had recently was with Arduino. It's amazingly easy to build cool shit with it. It's both rewarding and fun.

An example (since I haven't recorded any of my projects yet; also sorry it's in Portuguese): http://blog.bsoares.com.br/processing/controlling-rgb-led-wi...
Another good example:

forM_ [1..9] $ \i -> do
this i
that
other
I think Javascript is great but the tooling needs some work for development to be a joy. I haven't found a decent Emacs mode for it yet and while I enjoy the repl that Chrome and Firebug offer, it can be a pain to jump back and forth. Here's hoping the future offers a little more integration.
Perhaps, was. E-Gold has now bent to US financial regulation (which I believe ggp post may have been alluding to):

http://stakeventures.com/articles/2008/07/22/the-man-finally...
Well, here is the thing: no, there does not have to be a reason.

Nearly all of the problems "accepting" or understanding evolution stem from the mistaken assumption that evolution has "goals", or "reasons" or even that it is the "survival of the fittest." Essentially, from conceptualising it as an active force.

Mutations happen. Some will cause fewer offspring in the same genetic line, some will cause relatively more. Some just stick around because they are not actively harmful.

Your question has many facets: at its simplest, it could be asserted that the benefit outweighs the hazards. You are already making one assumption, though: that they are external because they need to be cooler than body temperature -- but that relationship could be inverse (and in my opinion actually makes more sense if it is.) And so on and so on.
If Research Papers had a Comment Section
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On the other hand: http://venturebeat.com/2009/03/19/the-worlds-most-lucrative-...
I was going to say the same thing. Open floor plans are too distracting for me.
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Some responses to various parts of the article:

"No easy_UNinstall" - I'm one of the lucky few who has access to an extensive and sensible archive of easily installable and uninstallable Python library packages; I call it "Ubuntu". From what I can see, distutils is a good metadata format that helps real packagers like Debian and Ubuntu create real packages - but trying to write a cross-platform installer is just asking for trouble. Just unpack the package somewhere and set $PYTHONPATH in your startup scripts; that's what your startup scripts are for, anyway.

"rm -rf" - my understanding is that the contents of the "os" stdlib package are a thin wrapper around POSIX, and rmdir(2) won't remove a non-empty directory either (although Zed says Python's rmdir will remove a directory with subdirectories, but not files... that's odd). "shutil.rmtree" isn't in POSIX, so it isn't in "os" either.

"Time Converstion" - Zed says "If all they did was give me the exact same POSIX C API I’d be happy.", but so far as I can tell, the 'time' stdlib module basically is the POSIX C API, with braindead awkwardness fully intact. I'll grant that "calendar" is stupid and "datetime" is crippled, although the third-party "dateutil" module fills a lot of the holes in "datetime". (also, for as long as I've known of it, mx.DateTime has been freely available)

"API Documentation Generation" - It's not in the standard library, but I've been quite happy with the third-party tool "epydoc" for Python API doc generation, and it pretty much is as easy as "epydoc path/to/package" (and predates Sphinx and a lot of the other tools).

I have to agree with the rest of his examples, though - Python's had a long, rocky road from "procedural Unix scripting language" to "Object-oriented, Internet service-providing language", and although Python 3.0 has cleaned up a lot of the cruft there's still some oddness that remains (like the len function, or the del keyword). A lot of the standard-library crud has come from people saying 'here, I've found/written an 80% solution to this particular problem, let's put it in the standard library since it's better than the solution that's in there at the moment' rather than 'here's a problem, let's design a 90% or 95% solution for the standard library'.