skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think PHP is good for some stuff definitely, and if you know it then by all means use it.

> Yes I can learn a new language basics pretty easily, but am I gonna be able to write a complete app in say RoR with very few google searches or even looking at the manual as fast as I can in PHP

That's debatable. I saw someone finish and sell a property management web app in Rails, without knowing Ruby and next to no knowledge of Rails. I wouldn't recommend it. Rails just gives you a lot of things for free. This is getting to much into a framework vs language thing, which I don't like.

I was just making a case for Ruby as opposed to PHP, especially if your job involves more then just web stuff.

As far as PHP frameworks copying Rails, I'm pretty sure that's just accepted as fact. If you don't use frameworks then that's cool.
Maybe we should stop pronouncing things like this as un-American as it is seems to be very American in any sort of recent history and I don't mean only in the past 10 years.
That's funny. Just yesterday I needed that and used pythex and a bunch of other similar 'testers' to make sure my regular expression was good. It was, but it somehow didn't work on the Mozilla Add-On Builder.

After asking a question on the #jetpack channel, members have spotted the mistake: The regex was correct, but it needed to "match the exact string" as mentioned on the doc. I've read it, but didn't understand that point. There was a missing "." at the beginning and the end. So /.regex.*/

Thanks for putting this.
http://rubular.com/ is also really great! I use it often when programming ruby regular expressions. Fill in a batch of test strings into the box, then run your regular expression against it, and instantly see (visually) what is happening. This is a BIG plus coming from perl regex 10 years ago ;) This is not a dig a perl regex, but I just remember it was a trial and error loop, where I would continually be iterating the script to see if it worked, where as with this webpage, you just iterate, more quickly.

They also have a great example:

test string:
Today's date is: 9/28/2013.

regex:
(?<month>\d{1,2})\/(?<day>\d{1,2})\/(?<year>\d{4})

result:
month	9
day	28
year	2013

Screenshot here: http://i.imgur.com/ixyHRde.png
Interestingly, the first 14 "members," or at least images, are male. I'm not immediately familiar with the early development team of Facebook, but it appears that they didn't start sharing with their female friends immediately.
THE IPCC AND GEOENGINEERING
I wonder if those who are "making much" about the large dropout rate are similarly upset if someone doesn't finish reading a book?
Legitimate businesses. We had a great conversation the other day at this Virtual Currency Talk: http://cr.perkinscoie.com/rff/ff00120bf2ac2fdfe524c63378439a... about the reputational risk of Bitcoin. There is a need to legimatize Bitcoin with governments or use a virtual currency that is able to establish legitimacy, so that large businesses which only have a marginal gain from incorporating Bitcoin will actually have an incentive to do so.

Furthermore, there was a very strong consensus among all parties, most especially by Patrick Murck (President, Bitcoin Foundation) that Bitcoin is not an anonymous or "private" currency, and that many people who believe it can be made anonymous are most likely in store for a rude awakening when government scrutiny and regulation catches up with the pace of the technology.
Interesting point. It seems like not everyone has it, but it is not connected to the version. I have the stable relase of chrome, but for me the standard app page is gone. have a look here at the Chromium blog: http://blog.chromium.org/2013/08/another-step-toward-faster-...
Site Canteen - A marketplace for PHP webapps
Hey guys. I just launched this site and would love to know what you think. Not so much about the site itself, but about the idea in general and the market potential...
Good luck - MOOCs have a steep upward climb to replace college credentials in many established white-collar professions (not so much - anywhere you make or create stuff for a living).

A long time ago a HN commenter talked about a famous case which effectively eliminated intelligence-based testing to filter job candidates. This led to the 4-yr college degree as the defacto standard [1]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power_Co.

http://www.naacpldf.org/case/griggs-v-duke-power-co
> At some point you will hate it when someone uses romaji since kana is so much easier to read.

I'm currently reading The Structure of the Japanese Language, and that is indeed the case (the book doesn't use kana, maybe it was difficult to typeset at that time). And I'm not at all proficient with the language at this point, nor have I studied kana specifically. I've struggled a lot with it initially, but consistently refused to read or write romaji, which may have helped.

(Having just recently returned to the RTK deck after a break, I feel it's not enough and I probably should be working through words or sentences already, maybe in parallel. Thank you for describing the various aspects of your workflow in this thread!)
This article is crap. Here's a good rule of thumb - if you could write this entire article (a "1 min read") without having ever built a startup before, and not having the apparent authority someone like Ev Williams has, then it's bullshit. Similar to math and science, real advice shouldn't be obvious to the uninitiated without experience.

Giving people advice like "focus", and "don't put up with egocentric personalities and downers" is just rephrasing the problem with a shiny veneer. It's not wisdom, it's just stupid and unproductive.

If you want advice, look for information that isn't vague and easily codifiable. It you're building a startup in the health insurance industry, read about actual problems in that domain, and actual solutions.
You can work the shops easily enough with the quick buy button, but there's no way in hell I'm taking my eyes off the screen when in a fight to look down at my controller so I can target someone. Neither would I like people to be able to auto-target in some way and get a competitive advantage over me.
It's definitely harder than your average library, since greenlet (the library gevent is based on) involves such direct manipulation of the call stack / other CPython internals. I'd love to see it, but I don't think it's coming any time soon :(
Sure, but when you talk about "apps" as people know them on today's smartphones, i.e., the ones people actually pay for from the App stores, Handango was the main place to go back then.
Depends on your definition of bootstrapping.

Joel started both SO & Trello bootstrapped off of the revenues of FogCreek, if I am not mistaken.

So don't see why he would disagree with seeing bootstrapping as viable.
How Far Can One Travel From Earth?
> As a counterpoint, before the iPhone came out, it was standard practice to wipe the PDA Phone (usually Windows Mobile) when doing a software upgrade.

While you make a valid point of the state of OS upgrades at that time, I'm not sure this is a counterpoint to where and how people got apps.
What are the hoops you think you have to jump through to get a subsidy? The way I understand it is that the exchange website where you shop for plans already has your 2013 income tax return's MAGI figure and will automatically present you with the subsidy based on that. You can tweak it if you predict your 2014 income will differ significantly, and when you file your 2014 tax return there will be a true up if you actual income is really different from the prediction your subsidy was based on.
Wizzywig (wizzywig.io) was created at the LAUNCH hackathon earlier this year and was accepted by YC.

Also Zaarly, Docracy, and Banjo.
How to make 150.000 Euros per month
How to make 150.000 Euros per month
I have an SSH client on my Nokia featurephone, I also downloaded the SDK for this phone, before this I wrote some applications for PalmOS. I think that what Apple got right with the iPhone was more complicated than just that you could use it as a computer.
>The other challenge with something like "consulting" - is that you don't get a lot of opportunity to scale - you are limited by the number of hours a day you can work (as opposed to conferences, where you are limited to the size of the venues you can book/fill)

Ideally, you do both. One fills in the gaps for the other depending on the cycle of product/service you are in.

I did what you outlined in the first paragraph in a niche market. I have huge foothold, though it took me 4-5 years to get here, and there's a lot of upward mobility to still be had.

I travel a lot during the fall/winter for conferences and large group projects, and do a lot of consulting during the spring/summer. That tends to be how my industry cycles.

IMO, you want to have a broad service offering behind a veil of a major product. For example: Giving talks and conferences is my main product, fueled by a book/DVD set. Profit margins are highest there and scale well. However, this just doesn't work for certain segments of the population, so doing high-priced consulting to pay the light bills is always good - or my current strategy: Doing consulting for a discounted rate while taping the conference for later use in products.
I completely agree.

Apple contributed to the death of the up-front paid app by disallowing this. It's ridiculous.
Any chance you could build a 2013-ready (flat?) version of timezonepicker.com ?
Thanks! Our approach supports both discrete and continuous values. It is mainly optimized for the use case where you want to aggregate continuous variables over discrete filters.
Thanks for the response. I was half-expecting you were using localStorage, and I sympathize with your AppCache trouble. It's a pain when it does work, let alone when it doesn't.

One other idea I had, which I'm not sure if you guys are working on, is making the images able to autoupdate so you could have live-tile-like functionality (not necessarily the design, just the live info). Before the update, I used Currently, which gave me weather and time on the new tab page, which I really liked.

I'll see about posting that and my previous suggestions to uservoice.
Calling them unamerican professes a standard American ideal which these events don't meet. If we all just sort of shrug our shoulders and say that's just what America does then what's the point of getting upset about it? The point is that, yes, blacklists and secret courts and all-pervasive surveillance is not what America is supposed to be about.
Elon Musk: Unicorns Dancing in Flame Duct before spacecraft from Blue Origin
Smugmug -- started 2002

Freshbooks -- started 2004

37Signals -- started 1999, basecamp in 2004

FogBugz -- started 2000

Point being, these are "old" business. If you are starting something today with all the hundreds of thousands of free apps and freemium based models, the same lessons would not apply.
This looks awesome at first glance. I might try it out for my next JS game.
How do you put a price on your source code?
A friend of a friend payed for college by doing kidnappings like this.

Basically, people would come to him wanting to be kidnapped, to feel a rush of adrenaline that comes with a life threatening experience.

Paying his rates for kidnapping -- 10K and up -- was not something a rational person would do. His clients were similar to those of the high-end dominatrix; rich, successful, people (usually men), with deep-seated complexes. Maybe the meaning had left their lives. Maybe a past trauma had gotten them addicted to adrenaline and violence. Maybe they saw themselves a big kidnapping targets, and the faux kidnappings were just training for the real thing.

Whatever the reason, people paid him to do it.
Fixed the $HOME directory dependency issue! Thanks again for the feedback.
Yeah...

No, you're right, you're totally significant.
I used it as my main phone for many months. The battery life was indeed bad. It had many features, such as a web browser. However, like most phones of the day, they weren't quite usable. I never used anything other than th main phone function. When Apple put a full featured browser in the phone, along with a usable map app, it was quite the revelation to me.
This is a Computerphile video. You can find the rest here: http://www.youtube.com/user/Computerphile/videos

Really fascinating interviews with luminaries.
Gwern, how long does it take to put together a comprehensive document like this? Also, what motivates you the most in compiling the information? Is it a rabbit hole of fascinating discovery which you joyfully explore until your knowledge is satiated or does something else compel you?
That's not the only mobile use case, though. My favorite times to watch MOOC lectures is when I'm on exercising on my stationary bike, for instance; it's either that or finding something on Netflix or YouTube to watch, but with absolutely nothing else to occupy my brain, it's a great time to watch lectures. My tablet is indispensable for this, but some platforms work better than others at providing a seamless experience.

Also, the final paragraph in the article makes a good counterpoint to this:

> Michael S. Roth, the president of Wesleyan University, is teaching a course in European intellectual history on Coursera. "People have to get over the idea of signing up for a course and not finishing it," he said. "We all have to get over feeling guilty. There is no right way or wrong way to use an online class. This is a great platform for lifelong learning."
I have used tarsnap for a while now and id be willing to bet this hacker news post will get him more business than a well designed logo. Have you seen the site? It looks like ass. Didnt stop me from trying it great service btw.
For me that would have meant avoiding getting the degrees I wanted to get. Bad option.
didn't work when a major uk job site (no names no pack drill) stuffed up its canonicals on all its job category pages cost them 1/2 a mill in less than a week.
24ct Gold Plated Pimp my Scooter Gold Plating Asia YouTube
$500 is quite a bit of money if you live someplace relatively cheap. That could be Eastern Europe, somewhere in the midwestern US, the Philippines, or elsewhere. Granted, there may be more transaction costs working with people in those places, but in some situations, that may be worth it for the savings.
I agree. More of a parallel - getting apps now is on device OTA - before it required a tether to a desktop. Pure mobile is cloud + identity + device.
Will you ever make the tarsnap server available?
For Startups: How to Choose Board Members
Mind Trick
What # did you pick?
Are you young, with no history of health problems? Under the ACA, older people pay less and younger people pay more (because "old people" premiums are limited to 3x "young people" premiums), and people with a poor health pay less and people with good health pay more (because health history is no longer considered in premiums).

If not, do you have a very high deductible and max out-of-pocket? The ACA puts limits on the maximum out-of-pocket.

If not, are you on a group plan of some sort? Individual rates tend to be more expensive than group rates.

If not, can you sign me up? 'Cause I'd love to cut my healthcare premiums by 3x. :-D
There are a lot of situations where you have to know a lot of facts and there's no way around rote memorization. Critical thinking isn't enough - you need a corpus of information. For example, if you're in a medical field, you'll have to memorize tons of facts about anatomy, physiology, disease states, drugs and other treatments, treatment algorithms, etc. Same with a language - you have to memorize thousands of words, lots of idioms, thousands of characters if it's Japanese or Chinese.
Udacity's model is to provide self-paced classes with absolutely no deadlines or time windows, as opposed to Coursera and edX's more traditional approach. I can see the argument that some people would prefer having more structure; that might help with motivation. I think the ideal platform would allow, like Udacity, the ability to start a class at any time, but provide options to tweak time constraints and deadlines for people who would like to include them. If sufficiently powerful and flexible, that might provide the best of both worlds.
http://iruntheinternet.com/lulzdump/images/gifs/waynes-world...
I would go even further and say that this model is a special case of the more general advertising/marketing model of "Give Valuable Stuff Away For Free". As an example at a smaller scale, content marketing (in terms of blog posts, videos, pdfs, and other informational content [1]) is a great way for businesses to get eyeballs on their page and establish themselves as authority in a particular subject.

This even works on an individual level. I would say that contributing to open-source development on Github is a great way for individual developers to "Give Away Valuable Stuff" and in term become more visible and attractive to respected software businesses who may want to hire them (as full-time employees or freelancers).

[1] Brendan Dunn and Eric Davis have a great podcast about this which provides an excellent definition of content marketing: http://brennandunn.com/episode-006-the-sales-pipeline/
The Page-Fault Weird Machine: Lessons in Instruction-less Computation
DARPA has a thing where they feed multiple images to people and monitor their brains for signs of subconscious recognition. This would pair well with super recognizers. Policing precrime will likely be a thing that catches on. Having this capability is also good for
counterinsurgence, which many states seem to be investing in these days.
ghshephard gave a good answer to the question "why do many people consider in-app purchases evil".

However, there is no doubt that "evil" approaches are more profitable than the doing the right thing.

Techniques such as the ones described in http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/RaminShokrizade/20130626/1949... are very effective, and developers who do use them are likely to make more money. But that doesn't mean that any means necessary to make it into the top 10 grossing apps list must be considered ethical.
Ask HN: What level of Python knowledge is required to move on to Django
I'm currently learning python and it is my first language.

So far, I believe I am comfortable enough to say I have a solid "beginners' fundamentals" of the language.

But the truth is the only reason I'm learning python is to be able to build webapps with Django.

On several occasions I have read the advice of "don't move into Frameworks too early".
So at what point can I safely move into frameworks without being too early?

At the moment I can read most python codes and understand what is going on, I've played around with a couple of APIs and have written an adventure text game.

Any advice is greatly appreciated.

Thanks
The logical next step in MOOCs is going to start in January, too, when the Georgia Tech OMSCS program starts its pilot program, in collaboration with Udacity. An actual, credentialed degree from a well-known university, entirely using the MOOC format, could be a huge disruption in higher education if it catches on.

http://www.omscs.gatech.edu/
Actually, I'm OK with that, as long as I don't have to "support the troops", stand for "The Star-Spangled Banner" or say the Pledge of Allegiance, and all copies of Lee Greenwood's "Proud to be an American" are relegated to the trash. Oh, and the Republican's "American Exceptionalism" is laughed out of existance. There's probably some other things that would seem ridiculous, maybe all the pious preaching on July 4th, I dunno.
If I have to penalized for smoking the occasional pipe of tobacco, then I want people to be penalized for buying groceries from Wal-Mart, eating GMOs, anything with high fructose corn syrup in it, and not taking the elevator instead of the stairs for a few flights.

It's not ethical to let yourself be gouged by unethical rules.
The quote from ripplescam.org just says what we all know, we all have to agree on a blockchain (in the case of Bitcoin) or a ledger (in the case of Ripple) or the system breaks. Part of it is false though, you can connect to servers not run by us. So long as they're also trying to agree with us (or those who are trying to agree with us), it will work. Ripple uses a distributed agreement protocol to order transactions. You have to try to agree with other people who are trying to agree. The group of people trying to agree that includes us defines the dominant transaction ordering (at the moment). But this is equally true of anyone else in the group we are in. It's the group that matters.

I don't see why minimizing the number of validators is attractive. We want as many as possible precisely because that ensures that administrative control can't be seized. It's just like mining in Bitcoin -- you want it distributed into the hands of as many people as possible as evenly as possible. We are working on making this happen now. Obviously, open sourcing the server was a necessary stop to broadening the validators.
Perpetual Adolescence: The Fullbright Company’s “Gone Home” by Ian Bogost
See my answer below.
Hush. Their ego is trying to feel important.

[Old Adjective] [Old Noun] = New Thing We Can Be Experts At Before Everybody Else!

"DJ'ing is powerful because it maximizes sound combinations in the presence of finite source material."
https://www.dropcam.com/cameras/featured

== lollipop cam
From what I've read plus anecdotal evidence (people I know with radically different experiences quitting smoking), there's a large genetic component to how addicted you get, and how easy it is to quit.

Unfortunately most people have an extremely hard time (and most of the attempts to quit that I've observed have involved a lot of misery followed by a return to smoking).
I hate console and touch games. They are simplistic and designed for people who don't like 'real' games. Yes, I am a PC gaming snob. Unfortunately, I work on a computer all day and it's very hard to find time to game on the PC since I like to see the sunlight occasionally. I think there a lot of people like me who grew up playing CS, TF2, UT, Quake, WC3, SC who would jump at a good controller that let them play 'real' games on the couch after being at a desk all day.

Furthermore, Valve is claiming that the controller works well for RTS etc. They demoed it with the newest Civilization to select people. None of us will know until they try it though.
I mean, I would argue that any solutions have to be found in restructuring things to be much more localized and decentralized.

A return to city-states, for instance, would deal with the problem of global super powers that can spy on huge swathes of the population, because it would require many independent groups who all have their own self-interests to collaborate in a way that lessens their individual power.

To some degree, the kind of spying we see now is only possible because the balance between the federal government and the states swung in favor of the federal government - something the citizens can influence directly (if they opt to do so).
I thought the new tab page was really making Chrome slow so found this trick on CNET.
http://www.regexper.com is also awesome to visualize regular expressions.
You can't really express it, but you still have an idea of what the problem is. . ."solving it". . .you have an "it" in your mind. Also, in many cases, when you are working on a "less technical" feature, there are others who can help express what the problem is. . .user, designer, architect, etc. It's often really tough for a developer to express what the problem is in a vacuum.