skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You're proving his point, which is that people's intuition is often dangerously wrong. The sample size is actually often nowhere near as important as your sampling method. For an extreme example, I can conduct a billion coin flips with a weighted coin, but it's going to tell me jack about the general behavior of coin flips. Avoiding sample bias is a hard problem, far harder than most people appreciate.

To complicate matters further, "accuracy" is an extremely tricky concept in statistical analysis because error rates work very differently than they do in, say, physics. In physics, when you measure something you can be sure that your results are accurate, so long as you stay outside your instrument's range of error. In stats, your confidence interval just tells you how likely it is that your results are completely wrong, or even worse, wrong by a completely unknown amount. Every statistical inference you make has a chance of completely blowing up on you. That chance can be defined and reduced, but it can never be eliminated. There's also things like frequentist vs Bayesian statistics, where the interpretation of the same data can be completely different.

Zed may be a jerk sometimes, but on this topic he's dead right. Most programmers are far more confident about this stuff than they should be.
Are social networks destroying knowledge?
Better incentives can improve online advertising
But rather than outsource, took it upon myself to learn how to code

You're not a "business guy" any more. You're a hacker.
Thanks for posting this. I went from despising Shaw (based on his writings) to kind of liking him.
My wife works in the medical field, and she deals with many diabetic patients. Until recently, I underestimated how horrible this disease can actually be. I knew it could be serious, but I mainly just thought about people having to watch what they eat and having to monitor their blood sugar levels.

Seeing the photos of the huge, oozing wounds that never heal and hearing the stories about renal failure, blindness, and amputations have certainly made me more aware of my diet. Eating one large, high GI meal per day (as I used to do) is basically a ticket to diabetes (and probably Alzheimers, which many researchers are arguing is essentially just another type of diabetes.) I now eat 5-6 smaller meals per day, and I try to balance them and monitor the GI load. There are new studies that indicate that you can do permanent damage to your brain by eating large, sugary meals even BEFORE you have any indication that you are doing so. Some people have damaged their brains even before they register as pre-diabetic on blood tests.
It's not the grammar that's in your face, ime, it's the minimal semantics. In C I'm more conscious of low-level details that I don't need to think about: planning where to put things, stack, heap, static area or even, gasp, registers is not a good way to implement higher level data structures and algorithms.

I prefer to focus on lists, graphs, queues, objects, events, continuations/control-semantics, and communication messages. I prefer to code in a high-level languages that allows me to get lower and lower as my needs for performance arise, and C is not it; in C I would need to build up my language to the higher semantic level my applications usually require, before I can even see it work. It puts the performance cart before the usefulness horse.
Jesus! Someone should really get out of the cave sometimes.

A small fraction of that money can buy hundreds of thousands of records of credit card details, ssn, drivers licence scans, bank accounts, passwords to all kinds of services.

Please, get real.
Love this concept -- been discussing variants of it for years now, great to see it finally being done.

But, it needs a catchier name. This needs to be something subscribers are proud of paying for -- something they can easily blog and talk about. 'Contenture' is a tricky -- and tricky-sounding -- word.

And it could benefit from more readable and understandable entry pages -- plus different ones for publishers and subscribers. (I'm seeing tiny faint grey text, and neither 'Learn More' nor 'Register Now' really answers the questions I need to take the next step.)

And it would really help to have one or more named participating publishers at launch.
Political speech in the time of Lincoln assumed of the audience a long attention span, ability to parse arguments and complex sentences, and up-to-date knowledge of current events.

But, so far, I have been considering the understanding of the question manifested by the framers of the original Constitution. In and by the original instrument, a mode was provided for amending it; and, as I have already stated, the present frame of "the Government under which we live" consists of that original, and twelve amendatory articles framed and adopted since. Those who now insist that federal control of slavery in federal territories violates the Constitution, point us to the provisions which they suppose it thus violates; and, as I understand, that all fix upon provisions in these amendatory articles, and not in the original instrument. The Supreme Court, in the Dred Scott case, plant themselves upon the fifth amendment, which provides that no person shall be deprived of "life, liberty or property without due process of law;" while Senator Douglas and his peculiar adherents plant themselves upon the tenth amendment, providing that "the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution" "are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

Can you imagine 10 percent of the populace following Lincoln on this today? It's like a legal deposition. To a far less educated electorate.

Some of the rhetoric of that age has a level of thought-density that is nonexistent in modern speech. I always thought that was due to the selection bias of the speakers back then (you had to be extraordinary to even register in the public consciousness, but there were several counterexamples to this).

[EDIT: added snippet of Lincoln speech.]
jQuery's own code is not so developer friendly, sure, but that doesn't change the fact that it has revolutionized JavaScript development in the browser for a lot of people. Before you criticize it, it also helps to understand jQuery's design goals: to be small, to be fast, to get out of your way and just "do what you mean".

A lot of its own code is hard to read exactly because it makes the code that uses it ridiculously compact and easy to read (e.g. liberal use of function overloading). In order to keep the library small, some of this code is not as clear and verbose as it should probably be.

However, jQuery is made by people who live and breathe JavaScript code. They use patterns that can look utterly foreign to people used to more conventional imperative languages (like logical operator short circuiting), but which are actually more readable if you know what it's doing.

As for performance, he points out a lot of things like "creating tons of functions on the fly" and "instantiating new objects for everything", but he doesn't actually prove that any of these points cause performance issues. It should be as simple as rewriting the code to get rid of these 'obvious' deficiencies and then benchmarking it. Which this person has not done.

I'll trust John Resig, the guy who is being paid by Mozilla to work on JavaScript full time, over some random internet dude with a chip on his shoulder.
yes...yes i am. hooray!
whoda thunk id become a hacker...
Asus Slaps Linux In The Face
The Art of Commit Messages
Agreed on every point, but I have to add a few things.

- No real metaprogramming is a big problem for me. I want decorators to be able to manipulate the AST (I'm playing around with a way to do this: http://pastie.org/490836 ) at the very least, and preferably real macros that can add new syntax.

- Anonymous functions. I want real anonymous functions in Python, not lambda or anything like it. After a long time of hacking Nemerle code, I go back to Python and cry when I write lambdas.

- Tail call recursion. Another functional programming thing that I'd absolutely love to see, just because it's so incredibly useful.

Sadly, I know none of these will likely be implemented, as they're just not the Python way, but it doesn't change the fact that I love Python and would love to see these changes.
Seven questions about Microsoft's Zune HD, now that it's official
Yeah I've been studying Mandarin for the past year and the thing I love about it is that the grammar is really really simple. Compared to French or English it's an absolute dream. There are no irregular verbs because there's NO freaking conjugation whatsoever. No masculine and feminine nouns. Not even singular and plural! The sentence structure is similar to English - but more rigid (i.e. predictable) - in that you generally have to express things in the order that they exist in the real world. "I can tomorrow at the library meet you" but I can't "meet you at the library tomorrow" (since the library is where we're meeting, we have to be there before the meeting can take place).

Of course the tones are challenging in the beginning since we just don't have the ears for it, but it's not that hard.

Reading and writing Chinese, however, can be difficult even for many Chinese people who were born and raised in China. Just try looking something up in a Chinese dictionary. If you haven't grown up with it, it's pretty much impossible.
My in-laws drink Diet Rite and Vernor's Ginger Ale. Unfortunately, Splenda is not as safe as they make it out to be...it has chlorine in it. Chlorine is a carcinogen.
One thing I notice again & again. How those stats turn in to a normal distribution by time.

First the tech people came & looked for python, lisp Google etc then the average guys came & looked for boobs, sex & fuck. (I don't say that tech guys didn't look for boobs).

Noticed this happening on Twitter & I hope this is at least starting to happen to HN.

PS: And I shamelessly did a vanity search first :)

And duckduckgo seemed worth adding to Firefox. The simple interface will be a lot helpful for less techy/experienced crowd.
Digg dumps Shouts for Facebook, Twitter and email
give this some time and the valuation will come in line with reality. I say reality since there is not a lot of evidence that they can generate revenue from their model, and more so make a profit and generate free cash flow.
Don't expect the law to reflect a consistent logical system any time soon.
It's like with Coke. People prefer Pepsi-flavored brown carbonated sugar liquid to Coke-flavored brown carbonated sugar liquid, but Coke to Pepsi.
I'm still wondering why any site capable of making the sale of Contenture would put it on their site. (It makes more sense for sites which can't make the sale. Pennies from heaven, what is not to like.)

Step #1: Convince my user to pay $6 a month forever to use my website (and by the way a bunch of other sites which are not relevant to them).

Step #2: Receive $1, once, from Contenture, plus a fraction of $4.80, assuming I keep them coming back to my site.

I have an alternative freemium model proposal:

#1: Convince users to pay $6 a month for my site.

#2: I receive, hmm, $5.50 a month or so, depending on my credit card processor.
Awful headline, fantastic article! You can just see it in his eyes-- he's a hacker at heart.
This reminds me of Evite. It's one of the websites geeks like to reinvent, but it's such just an uphill climb.
You see, if I were someone else, I might have pointed out all three points you list here, except I don't like all three of them :)

I can see the argument for tail recursion - except that people who really love tail recursion seem to over use it (all good things in moderation). Still, I might like to see it in core; as for the other two, well - I don't even like lambdas, even as implemented in python (I think it might be a taste thing) and metaprogramming in the wrong hands is painful at best.
The article espouses a nice theory, but I can think of some pretty big holes, especially relating to differing cultures and indeed our own historical experience. Musicians were not always the revered gods they are today. Back in 16th century England, I can't imagine the neighbourhood bard being more of a chick-puller than, say, the rich merchant.

Culture plays a huge part too. I was speaking to one of my Chinese friends the other day and was struck by something she said about the popular boys in her school. I asked what made the boys popular - she replied that, amongst other desirable traits, they got good grades. Needless to say this does not apply in any western society I've been a member of. Rather the opposite, in fact.

In a society edging towards post-scarcity, perhaps the desirability of conspicuous displays of wasted energy, like being "cool" or whatever, move to the fore. But in a society still climbing the developmental ladder, I just don't see it. Not to say that the theory lacks any merit at all - the conspicuous waste thing could well be a big factor, like how people buy ridiculously expensive watches just to show they can. But I don't see how it "evolved" when even the west has been like this for only half a century or so.

A more likely explanation for the sexual allure of popular musicians is their perceived wealth, exciting and interesting lives, boasting rights over ones' friends, and over society in general. The same thing can be seen, mapped into a different context, in the Chinese experience - good grades at school = good university = good job = all of the above benefits. I would posit this is a more likely explanation than the "evolved waste" theory.
i think we'll have a huge shortage of programmers shortly
A better title would have been: "Bring back PointCast!"
Netbeans for PHP gets an enthusiastically positive review
vi and emacs (I prefer emacs) are consistent and have been around for years. IDEs come and go with passing of languages, trends, etc. With vi/emacs you have consistency and a bug-free editor.

As a side note: I once saw UltraEdit eat a text file my co-worker was editing; once saved as UTF-8 it blew the file away and crashed. Another reason not to use closed-source junk.
I'm not sure the thought-density is as high as the lexical density. Translating and abridging it to commonspeak:

"My opponents say that federal control of slavery is unconstitutional. While the supreme court previously referenced the 5th amendment's protection of property, Douglas and his adherents point to the 10th, which grants powers to the states whenever not granted to the federal government."

The first two sentences are completely unnecessary.
Amazon Connect coming soon?
> Can you imagine 10 percent of the populace following Lincoln on this today?

No. Not sure I can imagine 10 percent of the populace in 1860 following Lincoln either. Of course, with 60-70% of the adult population excluded from voting, narrowing your appeal wasn't such a huge problem.
Because Unix IS an IDE already, with text editors like emacs or vim fitting in nicely with scripting, make, etc, etc.
Elite schools have renowned faculty, great facilities, lots of money, and a focus on research. Consequently, the curricula are better; the research opportunities more numerous and varied; the expectations greater. These institutions have the capacity to engage and challenge their best students. And they have the reputations to attract the top students from around the world, where they meet, compete, and collaborate. I think this environment enhances the likelihood of innovation through sudden insight.

Another possible mechanism for innovation is through gradual refinement leading to a breakthrough. Well-funded, research-oriented institutions are in the best position to fund this kind of incremental research.
The noisy bar test is a great indicator. I moved to English-speaking Vancouver two years ago from Belgium (native Dutch speaker), and even though I was already proficient/fluent in English, I could not follow noisy bar conversations, even when native speakers around me had no problem hearing them. I used to think that maybe something was wrong with my ears.

Eventually though, it got better. Constant, daily use of spoken English around me has given me the pattern recognition skills to turn drunken, barely audible slurs into clear words, even over pumping club music ;).
Ghostery - Over a million installs
IDEs are big, slow, rigid. Text editors are lightweight and fast. You'd have to weigh what you get from the IDE vs. what you're giving up.

As for your other question, yes, there are ruby and python plugins for IntelliJ. The python one seems new and immature. The ruby one should be better. They (Jetbrains) actually just came out with a standalone Ruby IDE as well. I think it's meant for people not already using IntelliJ, because it wouldn't be worth paying for both products since the Ruby plugin works well enough.
I have come to deeply loathe all extant programming systems. And in practice, this means that I deeply loathe all programming.
Yes, I think you are wrong, Perl is not dying.

Do I know young Perl devs, personally? No, but that is also true for every other language (I don't know any other programmer personally, odd no?). But what would that prove anyway? It's too small of a sample size to reach any conclusion.

And, as jrockway said, there are lots of young Perl coders out there, they just don't happen to be my neighbors.
C115, C117 Not Charging Problem | repairmobiles.saaqi
The author makes the assertion that flat is better than nested, and indeed it's one of the rules in "import this", but I just don't see it. I spend about half my time in python, and about half in erlang. Erlang makes python look pretty deeply nested, since it pretty much lacks support for any namespace nesting, but honestly, I prefer Java's namespaces. If I were to write a library in Java (god forbid), I'd start it in net.tsuraan.whatever. I'd know that I'm not going to have namespace clashes with the standard library, apache, nor anybody else that is half-way sane. In python, the root namespace is pretty crowded, and you need to step carefully to avoid namespace clashes. In erlang, it's even harder. Why do people like flat namespaces, as opposed to reasonably nested ones?
Python as a language is so good that it becomes difficult to concisely describe why one wants metaprogramming. Generally speaking the reason one wants metaprogramming is to make the language of the domain you are thinking in and the language of the program as close as possible. So in banking we talk of accounts and transactions, not rows in a database. The need for this is so acute in Java it makes my teeth ache. Python is much more flexible; so much so that this becomes a difficult to explain urge, but it is still there.

An example may be worthwhile. Consider SCons. Know anybody who uses it? There were a number of issues going on there (one of which was the general lameness of the Cons infrastructure--I'm sorry, I use the fact that make is a dependency computation engine, all the damned time, and ant and Cons and every other lame-ass "make replacement" that doesn't do this drives me up the wall) but IMHO the decision to make the syntax raw, executable Python code did not help.

Now, granted, I consider myself a Lisp hacker, so maybe you'll just write this off entirely. But the key thing I have with Python, the key complaint I have, is that there are fundamental domain assumptions baked into the language that are sometimes appropriate (numpy is an enormous success, for example) and sometimes aren't (SCons, HTML template system du jour, configuration files, etc.), and I can't change them.

Edit: an example came to me as I thought about this. So how's this as an explanation: in Java and Python, you can have as many nouns as you want. You can have as many verbs as you like. Adverbs are hard. Pronouns are almost impossible. And syntax? Forget it. It makes for an interesting contrast with mathematical notation, which takes time to learn and is inconsistent and only governed by social constraints but, at its best, is so good at communicating information that it fades into the background, just as = or 0 do.
High-Level CPU Challenge
Blogola: The FTC Takes On Paid Posts
Well for one your background color choice is just horrible
The key here is including the depreciation of the audience. Bad advertisements (to the viewer) turn people away from a particular channel, so those advertisers should pay the cost of the lost audience in addition to the standard rates, while 'good' advertisements should get a discount for being relevant/interesting to the audience, and therefor retaining them. (Of course the actual quality of an ad might be subjective, though I'm sure clever media companies will learn how many viewers leave at each ad.)
clickable link - http://qrisper.com

And I suggest you adding OpenID, Facebook connect, Google friend connect etc. There's a similar service from twitter I guess.
You're right what you've just outline are features that the community as a whole show so much aversion to. I guess they believe functional programming does not help with code readability. But I do hope that Python's metaprogramming features get more attention and multi-line lambdas would be nice but not necessary. I can live without TCO as well.
I think he can fix it with help of http://www.colourlovers.com/
Ha! Was wondering how long it'd take for that feedback to come out. I tried a number of different colors...just like the muted yellow for some reason.

Will definitely add a design editor so users can change the bg color.
Topsy: New, Twitter Inspired Search Engine Debuts
"Eventually, they will get fed up and move somewhere else..."

This has nothing to do with the fact that they were bigger than the job. They knew that going in.

It has everything to do with the fact that their talents have been wasted and a great opportunity has been squandered by their management, who also knew that going in.
You like someone for being a double-faced troll? IMO, I like him less now because he actually doesn't believe in what he says online.
Actually had Google Connect...didn't really see the value just yet so I took it out. Added Facebook Connect via Disqus for comments. Still learning OpenID...

The thing with Twitter...you ask for best sushi restaurant in NY, followers will respond. but that information isnt aggregated for future use...theyre one-offs.

I figured, provide a way for people to answer commonly asked questions and collate the data into easily digestible top ten lists.
Well, it did say this in the article:

> But in this study, three of the four rooks spontaneously created the hook in their first trial.

Boggles the mind a bit.
Well, look... I love Perl. I can't help it. Its like a bad lover I can't leave.

I just get frustrated that its not popular with the startup crowd :(
You know what kind of accounting is glamorous? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forensic_accounting
noooo, I wasn't making that assertion - I was saying the argument against my gripe about nesting bits of the stdlib deeper would be responded with "flat is better than nested". The "flat" crowd always whips that one out when someone suggests nesting it a bit more. I am a fan of nesting it just a little bit deeper than what it is today.
Yes, I suspect you would find that many within the community do find functional programming constructs do not assist in readability of the code. That group would also include me, while I might use some FP things every so often, I tend to shy away from them for that express reason.
They're team killing, energy sucking, wastes.

You do realize that this could have been written by Zed?
"Now, granted, I consider myself a Lisp hacker, so maybe you'll just write this off entirely." Now why would I write you off? :) I would like to see examples of what you're talking about however.
Of Luddites, Learning, and Life
I think the point is that you can probably convince your heavy users to buy contenture, i.e. the ones who get $6 of value from your site every month.

But what about users who get only $0.50 of value from it for a month or two? You'll never get them to pull out a cc for $0.50. However, if they already signed up for contenture, you still get your $0.50.