skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sure it seems like he is intentionally gaming HN, but I don't really see anything really bad in this case.

Sure, I guess the post about his initial observations on the Iphone SDK didn't say a lot, but I don't really think it was linkbait. I personally am not really interested in the Iphone SDK because I'm not doing any programming on the Iphone right now, and I probably won't start soon.

But he was interested enough in why the article did well to do some research and write an article he thought filled a need. I didn't realize that the Iphone was missing a basic tutorial, so if I wanted to start programming on the Iphone, I probably would have wasted some time looking for a good intro. Now I know where to find one.

So if he keeps writing informative and interesting articles like the Iphone programming introduction, I'll be happy. Even if he is writing the articles partially because he wants to figure out what will do well on HN.
Heroku is hiring a Support Programmer
The Invisible Hook: the Hidden Economics of Pirates
I use Twitter, but I find myself increasingly uncomfortable with it.

There's no revenue stream for Twitter, except for hitting up investors. Those investors expect a return. What is Twitter going to do to try to pay them back? Targeted ads (cool)? Detailed user demographics (not cool)?

Why try to kick the feet out from under the people actually building an ecosystem around their product? I can understand trying to keep a clear separation between Twitter and that ecosystem for branding purposes, but I think this goes beyond that need.
I think this post was a experiment in recursion -

"will an article work, that talks about what makes a article work"? hmmmm - now how about 3x an article about this article that is of course about his 2 other articles. Fun.
> Even better would be simply ignoring spaces

Oh god no. Then you could have blocks that line up visually but execute in different scopes
I think it's a reference to how Apple routinely claims things as new or revolutionary during their keynotes, even when they've been available from other manufacturers for some time.
That is correct. Academic journal article peer review has always been unpaid.
http://www.google.com/search?rlz=1C1GGLS_enUS322US322&so...

shows only 2,100 results (which means its bogus) guessing the language ruined it, my apologies.
How did you build it in the first place?

I second the comment below. Release it, and hope that somebody likes it enough to take you to the next level.

Ideas are not worth much-- all that matters is execution (your predicament is a case-in-point). If all you bring to the table is the idea, then you should give it away to somebody that can do something with it. Anybody capable of stealing your idea and making it a reality without your help is already working on something else.

A piece of advice I hear often: "if you are not embarrassed by your first release, you have released too late." Post a link to the app, it's your only hope.
Very funny ... I resembled that remark! :)

About the imitation, I was more or less poking some good-natured fun at Cal-Tech, not actually calling them out. However, the Rose Bowl stuff in particular is derivative of the tradition of MIT hacks at the Harvard-Yale games that has been going on since at least 1948.
Wake me when they can give me surgery to make me smarter.
Be careful not to confuse uniques with impressions.

Assuming 10 impressions per unique, that's still a very respectable CPM of $15.
In my experience in hiring, this is the opposite: we don't get may cover letters (if any), and never require one. There are not too many reason a candidate wants the job: more money, bad work environment at the previous/current company, or unemployed (or soon to be).
You can do ", ".join(x) on any x that you can do "for y in x" on. If join were a method of the list (or sequence, or iterator, ...) then it would need to be defined over and over again.
That is the point of the article. A good cover letter will do more for you than a resume alone. If you aren't getting cover letters that means candidates will benefit from writing one.
Is it just me or is the search button blurry? It's making me feel drunk, which, when browsing for open source software really isn't a great way to feel.

http://img198.imageshack.us/img198/3953/blurrysf.jpg
It looks like one of those popular shareware sites.
No, it's still missing floats, mixins, reflection, etc. Not to mention integration with existing libs like databases, xml parsing, etc.
No, considering how important SF is, it's pretty terrible.
Yeah, I have heard of the Harvard-Yale game hacks. I have also heard of the tradition of putting stuff on top of the great dome. I like this Star Wars hack:

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/1999/r2d2.html

Nonetheless, the coolest hack MIT has ever pulled off was to steal the Fleming Cannon from Caltech in 2006, imho.
Ah, Richard Posner. I have never understood why he's so well thought-of among a lot of politically-inclined geeks. I can only guess it was the public hate-on he had for MS back during the anti-trust trial.

Anyone who'd suggest "Expanding copyright law to bar...linking to or paraphrasing copyrighted materials without the copyright holder's consent", especially to prop up newspapers' websites, should be reviled by geeks.
If you're handing your resume to an HR person, cover letters are good to differentiate yourself from everyone else. If it's a tech person, cover letters can be good if they talk about amazing stuff you've done that doesn't fit into a Resume. (I want to work for your company because your line of software is similar to many of my projects [list])
You wanna buy a sweet business?
If some specific company's hiring process isn't set up to extract useful info from a cover letter, though, the value will be muted at best.
Another great TED talk on the subject titled life lessons through tinkering

http://www.ted.com/talks/gever_tulley_s_tinkering_school_in_...
Definancialisation, Deglobalisation, Relocalisation
Ask HN: Firefox extension for real-time notifications. Where do I start?
Hey, thought I'd ask the HN community because this seems like a question others may be interested in.

I'd like to build a Firefox extension for my website that pushes an alert to a user when one of their friends does something on my site.

I imagine the easiest (but less scalable) method would be to have the extension poll my site for updates, but that's going to hurt performance if this thing takes off.

Would it make sense to setup a jabber server for this? Say 1,000 people have this extension installed and are currently online, how resource intensive would this be (would I need a bunch of jabber servers to handle all these connections)?

It would be awesome if there was a real-time notification APIs that would allow me to do something like this without running the jabber network myself.. even if it cost money.

Thanks!
Looking back, I used to peruse lots of sourceforge pages. Not any more: the music [I care about] has moved on to github, or.cz, and custom pages.
Reviewing code quality of Apache Sling using Sonar
Raise money to buy bikes from me.
http://www.organicengines.com
hacker news of academic papers?

edit: actually, this sounds awesome. Is it out there? You'd have to change the rules somewhat for more persistence and maybe moderate the submissions (for general quality). Grouping them would also be good.

edit again: Does anyone want to do this?
This makes me feel old because I can honestly not remember whether SF has always been the steaming pile of sht it is today (before and after the redesign) or whether there was a brief period back in 200? where it was genuinely usable.

I do remember that at some point in history the downloads worked as expected with curl and wget. Then they invented the idiotic spoiler page with microscopic download links and for a long time the URLs were not working with wget (this has been fixed about a year ago, iirc - the idiotic spoiler page is still there, though).

I also remember that the mailing list archives and bugtrackers have always been as unusable as they still seem to be.

All I can say is: Die sourceforge, please just die. The days when "free CVS" was an argument are over. For as long as I can remember I have cringed in agony whenever I stumbled into yet another sourceforge download page. They are the plague. The new lipstick doesn't help at all. It just happens that the site that always felt like those shareware scams now also looks like one.

It's 2009, we have github, launchpad, google code and a dozen other OSS hosting providers. All of them beat SF hands down. Please don't use sourceforge. Thanks.
In my experience the resume has been more of a formality than anything else. I've always been able to get jobs by being referred by a mutual friend/work associate.
If users are going to have you webpage open in a tab anyway, I might suggest you take a look at Yip.

http://abcdefu.wordpress.com/2009/06/09/introducing-yip-an-u...

Rather than requiring a dedicated plugin, Yip uses the methods already in place for sending updates via Fluid or Prism.

If you want it to live entirely in the browser's chrome, you may need to do a full extension.

I can't speak to the resources needed- It depends on how heavy your backend is.. But if you have 1000 users all updating once few seconds, a single nginx box very well could cover your needs.

Serving static html takes substantially fewer resources than people suspect.
Some reviews of this book:

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2008/05/11/...

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/brainiac/2009/06/pir...

The book's author, Peter Leeson, wrote a paper which provides an interesting overview of this topic:

"An-arrgh-chy: The Law and Economics of Pirate Organization"

http://www.peterleeson.com/An-arrgh-chy.pdf
My thoughts on starting up my independent game studio
So after almost a year of deliberation I finally decided to quit my job and attempt to follow my dreams by starting up an independent game development studio.

I wanted to mark the occasion and record my thoughts so I wrote a blog post. I posted it here because I thought it might be of interest to Hacker News readers and in particular people who are considering taking more risks or starting up something.

http://www.crystalpearlstudios.com/the-start-of-the-journey/

:)
Ian Hickson removes codec recommendation entirely from HTML5 [video] tags
shrug You certainly could! Though judging any group of people by my comments would certainly do a disservice to that group.
Well put.

I would add that there are more similarities between a master mechanic and a skilled applications/systems programmer than people usually recognize.

Both professions require similar amounts of schooling (Two years at a tech/vocational school versus four at a university, but I would argue that there are only about two years worth of CS classes that are really necessary for programming success), and both deal with large, similarly complex systems that need to be known equally well for success.

I would even go so far as to argue that the same "type" of mind gravitates to both professions - differing socioeconomic pressures just nudge people in different directions.
len(list) is actually a shortcut for calling list.__len__() , any object that implements the __len__ method is therefore compatible with it. So in practice, len is in fact a method call. Almost every python function that operates on objects is just a similar shorthand.
Michael Jackson's Design Legacy: Patented Anti-Gravity Shoes
While I agree with you about cover letters and HR people, I think most amazing stuff should fit in a resume. I’ve definitely included relevant academic projects in my resume and have gotten great traction from them.

Generally speaking, if it’s important and relevant to your career, and you can express the subject in a concise bullet-point way, I say put it in.

You still have to remember to keep the resume short, but including unconventional yet amazing stuff isn’t half bad.
_why is like the Willy Wonka of the programming world. Absolutely genious, and barking mad to boot.

I've been playing a little with Shoes, I love it.
SQL: time to retire?
Cover letters are really only useful when you're acquainted with the company well enough to actually want to work with them (but not well enough to just call up and say hi). It's more commonly just fluff:

> I want to work for Acme Corp because RocketSled 2.0 is exciting...

Blah, blah, blah. If you're hiring for acme corp, just accept the acme resumes. If you're hiring for somewhere neat, then why not dig into your network and make the cover letter AND the resume unnecessary?
Because some database designs can be vastly simplified if they don't need to contain tables to map to every possible type of XML document your system handles. You can extract some of the data into a tables and store the whole document in a column to refer to later.

MS SQL Server, since version 2005, has had the ability to do XPath queries on columns containing XML data. In an optimised manner. That's very handy in the average enterprise system that contains mounds of XML data in different schemas - you'd have an explosion of tables if you tried to store all that using conventional RDBMS design.
Yes, I was going to apologise, I commented generally and did not even read the article :P, but the judge apparently blogs so am proven wrong. My lecturer is a judge also, albeit he does crime rather than copyrights. He clearly knows how to use a computer, he is quite advanced with office words, but then he does crime :P he can't afford a secretary ha.

My point is that these people might not actually know how the internet works and it is the fault of the court clerk not the judge if they arrive at a wrong decision. However, in defence of this judge, I think the article exaggerates a bit. The judge is speaking about a specific circumstance, not banning all linking.
No, GTK+ is not the "real problem."

GTK+ has a very fine C++ binding, gtkmm. It even has a pretty nice java binding: java-gnome. People just really, really like GTK#, the Mono/C#/CLR binding.

The author even cites gnote, a C++ GTK app that uses gtkmm, as an example. He completely lost me at that point.

Example of what? His overall hypothesis seems to have been that GTK+ is so bad, people are driven to very high level languages like C#, and gnote sorta flies in the face of that.
There was a hacker news for papers, although it didn't take off. The papers were usually ones that were already published though.

(The server seems to have been taken down, but here is the description page
http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~ad/academic-hacker-news.html )
Defunct adware purveyor Zango loses suit against Kaspersky. Karmic justice
I am from Brazil and probably the whole process is different, but here are some of my experiences.

- Most of the times a gov doesn't "buy" things directly. They open a bidding, auction, whatever is the english term. They'll put a set of requirements, and let companies bid anonymously...

- There's a certain threshold for this "bidding" to be required. In Brazil a couple years ago, cities couldn't buy anything above R$ 750.00 without the whole bidding process. So, vendors priced their stuff at R$ 749.99;

- Another method to manipulate the bidding is that the buyers will agree with the vendor(s) to make a certain set of requirements that only the vendor(s) can satisfy;

- There's the chance that in four years, the next administration, they'll kick you out;

- You'll get many, many leads. A new mayor is elected, he puts his people on charge. They're from party X, and party X also controls other cities, and they'll recommend you;

- Some politicians will try to pay with influence, that is, instead of money, they'll talk about the wonders they can do to you or your company in different spheres of the administration. This is different of straight corruption where money exchange hands, it's sold more like a friendship, one hand washing the other. It's like having friends in the police or lawyers. How easier your life will be;

Other than that, the whole politics thing, it's like any normal commercial transaction. You sell something, gives support, and life goes on. I worked during 6 years making software for law firms, and law-related parts of the government. I wasn't directly involved in the whole politics things, I was just the programmer and my boss was the marketing/salesman guy, but I would get lots of hints here and there.

There's also the issue of legacy applications, worse than on the enterprise. Govs don't have the financial incentive to change stuff, to make things run more smoothly. You'll deal with a lot of old stuff, or crap things made by family members and their relatives.
You're right - Perez Hilton is making an absolute killing:

http://web.blogads.com/adspotsfolder/ba_adspotsfolder_revisi...

http://web.blogads.com/adspotsfolder/ba_adspotsfolder_revisi...

And there's multiple occurrences of those ads. 40k-75k PER week isn't that far of a stretch
Have you ever noticed that everything is always urgent if it has the option to be?
US to launch Flash-based IT spending tracker
I'm referring to something more like hacker news in spirit (good papers get upvoted) but much more constrained. Give voting to qualified academics (maybe fractional votes to grad students as well?) with more persistence and multiple categories/tags.
Why would you apply to a company you didn't know well enough to want to work at? You should have some reason you're applying to the company. Think about it this way: if you're already an employee of the company and someone applies who doesn't really want to work there, and HR lets them through, would you want to work with them? I wouldn't.

But even if you can't write a good "I want to work and Foobar Inc." paragraph, the cover letter gives you a chance to talk about all the stuff you do on the side, to show how much you love making software.

Personally, I would much rather work for a company that hires people who love working there than one that hires people just because they know a guy who knows a guy.
When you say "predictable", do you mean "repeatable?" Or do you really mean "predictable?"

In the latter case, well, if you want predictable numbers you shouldn't be calling a RNG at all. And in the former, it's not good, it's broken, PRNGs are supposed to produce the same sequence, given the same seed....
I have a table that stores xml documents. The document schema has evolved over time, and is a representation of a print-on-demand(able) brochure.

In my documents table, I have a field called "title". I have an after save hook in my application code to update this field.

If I had an XML-aware database, I could:

"SELECT id, //node[@type='title'] AS title, /@version AS version FROM documents WHERE version=2;"

This is more elegant than creating extra columns and hooks to support future queries, and mutilating your table with tens of extra columns.
I'll start the bidding at 5k as long as your balance sheet is positive.
I thought a cover letter was a prerequisite. Anyone can put a CV together and email it to 1000 companies, but to write a cover letter for each company just shows you actually know what you are applying for to start with.
Maybe this implies that the current state of the Indian market is temporary.
Take a look at any trade magazine or other specialty publication. In general the ads you'll find there have very low production values.

Award-winning ads and creative branding are necessary when trying to sell highly undifferentiated, commoditized products (e.g., potato chips). But if you have a product that is obviously differentiated from the competition (a laptop with 100 hour battery life, an electric sports car, etc.), informing consumers of your existence is often enough.
All four answers are just numbers.
This is not my mind's definition of true value.

True value would be if students wanted to pay for it themselves, employees themselves, people themselves. Price something correctly (not cost prohibitive) and if you really have a true value building product then people should be willing to purchase it.

If you had a better version of Excel, you could sell it to companies for lots... or sell it to the workers. I'd say you had a better product if you had a product capable of selling to the workers. And while this may not be as much of a cash cow as large corporations, I'd think this was closer to True Value.

But even that is not "true value." I'd think true value is something where you are generating a win-win. An example that came to my mind was Mint.com. Their business model (along with more retail advertising) involves giving money saving suggestions (credit card offers, better mortgage offers) and then charging the financial institution less than what it is charging them to generate a new referral. A "true value" is a win-win... not something like, "well I guess I could use a male enhancement pill, Google... I'll click your ad."
I am still asking myself why on earth people should need Mono, .NET, C# or similar stuff. I am starting to think that while more and more people are starting to code, the overall coding skills are getting lower and lower. Maybe it’s just me being too strict in using almost always C/C++, but I remain extremely confident in the fact that if you don’t know how/don’t want to manage memory, you should be doing something else.

I think opinions like this are a significant impediment to the advancement of the programming profession in general. The entire point of using a computer is to automate difficult, repetitive problems. Resource management is a problem ideally suited for automation. There are literally dozens of working, proven, high-quality garbage collection and reference counting implementations, and deciding to re-use one is not a sign of weakness nor ignorance. If anything, I think true ignorance is beginning new projects in a legacy language such as C or C++. If more programmers wrote in high-level languages such as LISP, OCaml, Haskell, or even mid-level languages like C# or Java, program crashes and corruptions would be much rarer events.

I don’t want to spend more time talking about this: you can verify what I’m telling you is true by looking at the percentage of KDE code written in languages different from C++. And we have some great bindings.

Here's where the author lost me. The reason KDE applications favor C++ isn't due to any inherent benefits of using C++, it's because they are trapped and cannot escape! Qt has terrible bindings, in large part because C++ is so difficult to interact with. The only mature, widely used binding I'm aware of is to Python -- contrast this to Gtk+, which has bindings to nearly any popular language you can think of; C#, Java, Python, Perl, Ruby, D, LISP, Haskell, OCaml, (ry. And if you ask anybody that uses PyQt regularly, they'll tell you how "alien" it feels -- signals and slots are implemented by embedding C++ declarations into Python string literals!

So this is the point, on which you are free to flame me until death: the problem is GTK. Consider the amount of programs recently written in GTK. A huge percentage of them is in Python or Mono.

[...]

We have PyQt and Qyoto. Yet they are not so widespread and planetkde is filled with new C++/Qt apps. So where is the problem? Probably people are no longer comfortable in programming with GTK/C. I did it a while ago, and it was quite a pain to me actually, and it made me want to look into python, damn my laziness.

And here is the crux of it. In this paragraph, the author states that using C is difficult, and then blames himself! Is this Stockholm syndrome at work? I think the average HN reader would have been overjoyed at being able to use a high-level language instead of groveling through a morass of C/C++, but the author's sentence reads as if he wants to punish himself for infidelity!

Gentlemen, languages and libraries are not wives; they do not deserve loyalty. Do not be like this author, turning your back on advances in the craft due to a misplaced macho attitude or stubbornness.