skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yeah, Perl 5 pays the bills. I code in it every day. I am most fluent in Perl. My point is that the long-delay of Perl 6 and the large volumes of crusty CGI code around has created an image problem.
Using Facebook for B2B and Industrial Internet Marketing
Yes, please email me the results (contact info in profile).
I just checked my atlas - I remembered correctly - the northern hemisphere has significantly larger temperature variation than the southern. It's probably the difference in land versus water areas more than offsetting the tiny effects of solar distance.
We do monetize our users directly, 99% of them don't come from US. And I have to tell you the truth: it's incredibly difficult to sell to ppl in US. If you cannot provide $10 support for every dollar you take from your US customer he/she will not buy it and will request immediate refund. With such an attitude, we do prefer to reject payments made using US credit cards/paypal accounts to save our time and money. C'est la vie.
Sometimes I just have to make a small link change or replace a word. Text editor opens up fast and just gets the job done.
Yahoo first search engine was google embedded into yahoo. Before that, yahoo was just a searchable directory of websites. Later yahoo switched to their own search engine ouverture.
A Kuro5hin classic about the subject:
http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2006/4/30/91945/8971
exactly.

or, stuff like config file editing. why would i ever open up an IDE for that?
You could open up the dataset by assigning every word an id, and giving an anonymous dataset of applications in code.
You'll forgive my hyperbole, but I was trying to make a point.

What I'm trying to get at is the reason the people in charge of most companies are "clueless about technology" is that some technical people aren't capable of speaking to them in their language. The people in charge are going to be more concerned with how these issues affect their bottom line, if you can't communicate in those terms you'll rarely be effective.

Zed goes on forever about how his solution was technically better in every manner possible, but he was unable to convince the powers that be that he was right. This is a communication issue likely brought about by his "I'm a genius, and you aren't smart enough to understand" attitude. This isn't because business people are arrogant, pig headed assholes (though some certainly are). No, they don't get the tech, but I for one am willing to take the time to help them understand why these things matter and why they should give a shit. Yes, it sucks, but I feel that not doing so would be doing my employer a disservice. What I dislike about that talk is that Zed basically abdicates responsibility for having to communicate with non-technical people because they'll never be smart enough to understand, when it's really his failing that they don't understand in the first place.

Further, Zed's attitude towards others is beyond condescending. He may pay lip service to the people in charge and say "they're just clueless about technology", but it's so abundantly clear how little he values them, and the jobs they provide. "Working hard and doing a good job", but doing something that you know is both wrong and dumb is phoning it in. It's doing what you're supposed to because you couldn't give a shit about the company, or what becomes of it.

It just rubs me the wrong way.
1.2 Billion+ servings (8oz) of Coke are sold daily.

That is a staggering volume, and apparently there is a very sizable population of individuals who are heavy users.
Things have improved in the Pennsylvania stretch of the Appalachians. Young women now wait til 17 to have their first child.
Are you just not getting any interested candidates, or are the candidates you find proving unqualified?
Contenture has made it very simple for a site to install and use their service — it’s just a small snippet of JavaScript that can turn on or off features based on if a user visiting the site has a Contenture account.

Disabling features with Javascript? I bet it's easy to write a Greasemonkey script that'll give you the paid features on all these sites.
It depends on what your goal is.

If you want a well paid job in business area, then C# and/or Java.

If you want to broaden your CS knowledge, then Lisp, Smalltalk, Eiffel.

If you want to work on shrink-wrap software then C++.

It's worth pointing out that Bjarne Stroustrup, creator of C++, is critical of it.
Paypal is a back-end company.

They haven't been able to (a) build a user experience that users really feel confident with. (b) find and fix all sorts of other problems their users might have.

I think b, while not a problem is the real issue. Missed opportunity. Online banking, managing your personal finances, investing, budgeting as well as paying & accepting payments online. All these things are still difficult and as such, most people don't do any more then the minimum to solve a very big problem.

They might use online banking to access accounts or pay a bill when the bank forces them.

The possibilities they missed out on by achieving so little in the past 10 years are enormous. From the creation of an alternative, underground economy that they talked about in early days to the creation of a platform where you manage all your money. They could have shaken up the industry become a bank focusing on transaction/small savings accounts and the rest of the small retail stuff that banks hate doing. They could have become the front end for banks.

* A lot of the dispute resolution, customers service issues and such that make up the bulk of comments here are a problem. But they are (I think) caused by a combination of regulation, oligopoly & problematic incentives.
Hey now, my beloved World of Warcraft is not a "lightning bolt! lightning bolt!" LARP.
IDEs baby new programmers in such a way that they will become crutches. Text editors (in theory) only modify the source code. All compilation and backend work is done by the programmer with external tools. IDEs will usually hide that work away in some button or drop down menu, so the new programmer will be less inclined to learn how everything is run.

When I learned java, I broke away from the IDE I was given to use in class and switched to a text editor. I read about command line tools and what a classpath is. I doubt that I would have known about how programming works behind-the-scenes if I hadn't broken away. Many (not all) of my classmates haven't; they rely on the almighty 'Compile' button, don't question it, and won't bother to learn otherwise.
You could probably extract a good deal of information from this by examining word frequency and sentence structure. Or at least, the attempt would be too much for me to resist.
My umbrella insurance policy includes coverage for defamation-related suits, and it seems to be standard for the insurance company's customers (i.e., I did not have to request it). It's not like I am going out of my way to provoke such suits, but it's nice to have.
How to Lie with Statistics (http://www.amazon.com/How-Lie-Statistics-Darrell-Huff/dp/039...) is a short, enjoyable read. It doesn't tell you how to do statistics, but it gives some warning about common problems.
It's in the FAQ: http://contenture.com/help/#technical

"Only a very, very small minority of users would ever attempt to do something like this, and worrying about these users is a waste of your time and your money. There will always be those people who will do literally anything they can to get around paying for something."
The problem is more nuanced that that.

She is having to present herself as something she is not for the sake of getting whatever company to buy the product she is selling. She isn't lying as such, but she is electing to not tell certain truths that can get her potential employer rather irked if they find out later on she was just culling her resume to appear like a good fit. This is especially true if she does what most employers worry overqualified candidates will do, and she jumps rather swiftly to a more senior position elsewhere. Then it will be pretty obvious what happened, and she'll have a bad reputation with at least one firm.
CGI is filthy, sure. But being able to run your filthy hack of a config file parser on an unpatched HPUX box from circa 30,000 BC with no changes?

That's cool. Maybe not cool on the same axis as Rails and Twitter but cool nonetheless.
Movies and music stream very well already, unless you have full TV seasons that you want to give away, I don't think you'll get much traction there.

The one place that this could work well is games. If Steam had a setting that would automatically download and install demos for the hottest new games, I bet a lot of people would try them out. I haven't used it in the last few months, but I remember seeing demos available for that I would be happy to play if I could do it right then instead of having to download, install, and (half an hour later) finally play.
Oops, s/qualified/classified/...
came across all the features provided in IDEs

Maybe merely having a lot of features is not necessarily the most valuable thing when writing software. I suspect most truly great developers (I'm not one of those, but I've worked in the field long enough to know them when I see them work) just want the tools to get the hell out of their way. Stability, speed, predictability, consistency, generality; those are probably the most important features for a great developer. I like those features, too, and it's why I use vim.

Also note that I use vim for everything. I don't have to context switch when I go from Perl, to Python, to C, to bash, to sh, to configuration files, to HTML, to CSS, to JavaScript, to RPM spec files, to deb control/rules files, etc. It's always the same in vim (and vim has syntax highlighting for all of them). This is where generality has value. I don't have to think about how to copy/paste, how to find the end of a block, or how to perform a search/replace across the whole file or just a segment of it. It's always the same.

The greatest Java IDE in the world, whatever that is, is definitely not the right tool for editing files on a remote server. So, I would have to switch mental modes to use it. That would slow me down. I can use vim or emacs for that, no problem.

And, of course, as I mentioned, there is probably no feature in any IDE for which there isn't a parallel in vim or emacs. It is probably optional, it is probably not pretty, and it probably requires you to learn some new key sequences. But, it almost certainly exists, whatever it is. But, after spending a few years with a good editor, you'll probably find that simpler but more general solutions are superior to special purpose tools.

Which was when I became curious as to why I see a lot more chatter about text editors like vim/emacs instead of the other way around.

Age has it privileges. emacs and vi have been around for a long time. Assuming something is good and continues to get better, the longer it exists, the more users it will have. emacs and vi (in the form of vim) are both excellent and continue to get better. Thus they have a very large, very dedicated following. Which leads to faster improvement (though in directions that might not be immediately apparent if big IDE-style feature lists are what you think of as "improvement"), more third party tools and support, and more docs and examples.

You'll never hear any long-time practicioner of software development or systems management say that learning one of the two major editors is a waste of time. Knowing vim or emacs will very likely serve you well for the rest of your career. Knowing an IDE might make working in one language in one environment a little bit more awesome for year or two or three that you work in that language in that environment.
They do seem to have an API that's server-side accessible, but otherwise I wouldn't trust reassurances from the same company that is trying to sell me the product. At least, not without some valid data.
For new users, I suggest Python v3 as the starting point. It cleans up some mistakes from earlier versions.

The "Batteries Included" philosophy means that in most cases there already is a module / library available for tasks at hand, e.g. graphing, PDF generation, number crunching, stats analysis, etc. python.org is a fantastic resource, even for experienced pythonistas.
There are "anti-SLAPP" laws to deal with people filing frivolous lawsuits whose sole purpose is to bankrupt or silence you (or your business)
Statistics and probability is a major course of study - far more than could be usefully taught in a blog. What he tries to do is to motivate people to learn it - which is the first major step to actually learning it.
Do you have any specific topics in mind?
Finding a soulmate at 19 is not necessary for happiness, but the dating position of a 19-year-old male sucks, and that's one way of getting out of having to go through that. Most women his age either want older men, or frat-boy douchebags whose IQs are the square root of mine or yours.
The point I liked the best was 6. Don’t break the system. I know people loved the see all tweets option, but 97% of us had it turned off for a reason. Adding a character to the front of a tweet (which thankfully seems to be stopping) just inconveniences your followers because you're trying to make a point. I don't appreciate that.
Any new micropayments venture must (to me) justify in detail in the first sentence how their idea solves the fundamental problems surrounding micropayments. Otherwise, I'm inclined to think it's just another gimmick.

Micropayments suddenly turn your casual users into customers, even for 2 cents, and the nature of the relationship drastically changes. Keep casual readers is one thing, retaining customers is a much larger problem. I have yet to see a micropayments scheme that addresses this.
Many people value their own worth based on how much loot they have amassed. If you lose it all, then you're worth nothing.

BTW, the german guy was an old tosser just waiting to see what kind of cancer would kill him. Not much of a loss to mankind, I'd dare to say...
When you're analyzing billions and billions of results and can produce a lot of data and can draw verifiable conclusions based on that data, I think it's safe to call it a science.

A search engine meant for use by billions of people is not a trivial thing.
Agreed.

The headhunters aren't the only ones to blame though. They operate off of the notion, often correct, that people who fill positions they are totally capable of doing with extra time left over, they will encounter perpetual resistance to the progress they want to motivate. Eventually, they will get fed up and move somewhere else that either isn't averse to change, or where they don't have time to think about progressive ideas.

The headhunter is just playing the averages, since she'll probably collect the same fee regardless. She won't be rewarded differently for that one overqualified hire who turns out to be a major catalyst for progress at a company, but she'll be penalized the same for all of the overqualified hires which hit the brick wall of bureaucracy and leave.
So you want to learn Python?
Rich Hickey on Clojure's Features and Implementation
When I'm on laptop battery I switch to "LispIDE", which despite the name is an ultra-lightweight Lisp text editor for Windows. It has the absolute bare minimum; runs a lisp process, highlights syntax, indents code, and is able to evaluate code in the editor buffer.

I get so much done in the 2-3 hours I'm at the coffee shop, I also take copious notes in notepad, by the time I come back home I can fire up Emacs and cut and paste tiny little independently developed routines and classes, and orchestrate them to a good chunky module.

I only wish I could get more mileage out of this little brain of mine for more than 4 hours a day. I have to stimulate myself with hackish sub-projects and chase "performance" red-herrings just to keep going.
They do aggregation.
This idea only made sense when people had limited bandwidth and downloads took forever.

If you start to push TV shows you're going to have to monitor if the connection is idle too (not just for the current computer but also for the entire house).
Free-wheeling travel is the realm of younger people (well, at least those who don't have families or obligations that are hard to break, like mortgages and military duty).

I traveled a lot when I was in my 20s and lived overseas for more than eight years. A great experience for personal and work reasons, and one that I could not consider doing now that I have a family and a home.

Give yourself a year, by a cheap return flight to somewhere interesting with lots of opportunities for travel to other places (i.e, Bankgkok, Athens) and go ...

Good luck!
It's not a rap video, it's a social critique. Made me sit up and lean forward.

Well done.
As far as I can tell, the point of the grandparent is that "professional and amateur sports organizations" (as mentioned in the article) have money to lobby against online gambling, but LARPers don't have money to lobby against WoW(?)
You can keep programming, there are many specific disciplines inside software development / programming that are intellectually deep. Getting into them is hard, but the reward is infinite.
I like Kevin Kelly but this piece was sadly misguided. Like trying to fit Cinderella's slipper on a line backer.
I wish there was a low/no calorie sweetener that was actually safe to use. Aspartame is a carcinogen, as are most other artificial sweeteners...even Splenda contains chlorine. Aspartame also gives me migraines, so I generally stick with cane sugar or honey. Stevia, xylitol, and erythyritol have many positives, but they're pricey and often have a bad aftertaste and/or laxative effect. I'm addicted to sweet tea, but I'm trying to reduce my sugar consumption. White and green tea and fruit spritzers are the only alternatives I've found that work for me...black tea just makes me crave sugar.
My usual development environment for is a Macbook Pro with six terminal windows open. The first one (Command-1 shortcut key) is a connection to the database, the second (command-2) is Vim with program code, the third (command-3) is library code or test scripts or whatever and the next three (smaller, with blue backgrounds) might be showing tail -f of Apache error or access logs or something like that. If I need to edit an image I command-tab to the GIMP, to view a web page, command-tab to Firefox or whatever. I can connect those windows to one or more remote boxes with ssh and not even have to think about what machine I'm working on. It's easy to reuse those windows for other things, close one with command-w or open new ones with command-n. Vim does syntax highlighting and will even auto-complete if I wanted to turn it on.

What would an IDE give me that this setup won't? To me, the setup I use IS an integrated development environment.

I have used Visual Studio, XCode, Eclipse, etc. but whenever I do I feel slow and inhibited because of the necessity of mouse movements (unless I want to learn a completely different set of key shortcuts that will only work in the IDE and not the OS) and the annoying tendency of IDEs to reformat my code or complete blocks I'm not ready to complete.

Also, OS X and Ubuntu both allow great control over terminal window transparencies and color schemes. I'm not aware of any other IDE that does. I like to keep my main editing windows at 70-80% transparent so I can watch logfiles/test scripts run in the background while I'm editing.
i did a lot of matrix analysis during my grad study, from statistics (general linear model, projection, pseudo inverse, design of experiment, etc) to dynamic system (control, state space, etc) using matlab -- i even used it to generate random distribution from uniform for simulations

the closest thing to matlab is python+numaray+matplotlib (maybe it changes name to scipy?)

i think she will face matrix calculation ... so, use python (matlab is easier, but less flexible) ... i didn't go too far with R but from my experience it's less flexible than python

NB: i did those 5 years ago so don't trust my words too much
Ask HN: business guy tries to build a website - qrisper.com
Hi folks, business guy here (meaning no techology background outside of what I learned at the job). Found myself with a lot of free time recently (same ol story). Took this opportunity to work on an idea that I had to aggregate opinions and generate top ten lists. But rather than outsource, took it upon myself to learn how to code (cuz I always wanted to know how).

Would love to get feedback from the HN community. Curious to hear whether or not folks feel qrisper provides a useful service. Tips/comments/suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Jung
http://qrisper.com
ahh..the old "motivation by calling people stupid" trick ;)
Ma Kiz e Moe
Yes, we have a backend API for people concerned about this. The tracking code that you copy/paste also contains inline javascript directly on the site that detects if the tracking code has been blocked, so sites can program in logic for that as well.

We really do think worrying about these users is a waste of your time though. Just like blocking ads, if you want to try to get something for nothing, you can.

Lastly, sites don't even have to enable any of the premium features. They are optional. Contenture is as much about users supporting sites that they enjoy as it is about enabling premium features on your site. Because everyone knows ads don't even pay the hosting bill. If you don't want to pay - that's your decision.
To us, the fundamental problem with micropayments is that they're a pain in the ass. Your flow is interrupted every time you have to authorize a 5 cent charge to view a piece of content. This doesn't work, never will.

Contenture's system is fully automated. You pay a small monthly fee of 5.99 (which the sites get 80% of), and we automatically distribute that money to the sites you visit based on how often you visit them. While there are drawbacks to this sytem, certainly, we feel the advantage of a fully automated system vastly outweights any of that.
Using WiMAX to replace a phone?[-]
I've decided to explore the possibility of using a netbook/MID as a phone while eschewing the services of a cellphone provider. Now that Atlanta (where I live) has WiMAX from Clear, I ought to be connected everywhere within the city to the internet (once I sign up). Theoretically, this should mean that I will be able to use my netbook as a cell phone. Of course, there are some very real issues to overcome and I am simply putting this experiment together to see if it is something that is realistically possible. This could possibly extend to uncapped 3G connections (if they exist anymore) as well. Are there any obvious problems you would foresee? Is there anything I have missed or any other questions I should attempt to answer in this 'experiment' of mine? A major issue is, of course, the fact that my pseudo-netbook has to be carried everywhere and left always on. If the experment is somewhat succesful, it seems as if using your netbook/MID as a phone might require a relatively customized OS which could possibly be a 'remix' of a suitable Linux distro. Something like Maemo, but not as hardware specific. Thoughts, suggestions?"