skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm starting to feel like a broken record here, but whenever anyone wants to pick in "str" I find myself compelled to point out:

>>> type(str)
<type 'type'>

That is to say, str isn't a magical function, it's a type, and "str()" is how you call that type's constructor. How is this not somehow object oriented?

Of course, even if str was a function and not a constructor, it would be an object factory which delegates to its argument via a well defined interface (the __str__ method). OOP doesn't have to mean everything-is-an-object.
Heck, I could do it in a day -- as long as I get to define done!
I've never signed up for facebook, but it seems like everyone around me has. And recently, they have all been complaining that their parents have recently signed up.

All we need is a couple of infamous outages and facebook will have 'jumped the shark'.
You don't have to sign your comments like that, you know.
I know that's what it does under the covers, but is there any reason not to think of it as assignment in your head? That's the mental construct I use in my extremely limited Haskell coding, anyway.
I'm not convinced the community has become so big that subdivisions are necessary.
The mere fact they include it would make me really question their taste and ideals.
How big should be the server to run this site (with all its traffic), if it could be ported from ark to Clojure? =)
I'm not too scared. Google made 21 billion over the whole of 2008 on advertising, both on their own site and in the 'channel'.

To be taken with a grain of salt:

http://alexa.com/siteinfo/facebook.com+google.com

So, at a daily reach of 2/3rd of googles they have managed to score about 10% of googles income.

I don't see facebook getting several times the size of google and I don't see how they could possibly get close to the clickrates / cpms that google is getting for their traffic.

It doesn't get much more targeted than search traffic, facebooks citizens revolt whenever the company tries to pull in a direction where they can monetize the traffic better.

'Facebooks' come and go, geocities, myspace and so on...

To my feeling they're already over their top, but then again I could be mistaken, which will cost $100 :)

For FB to make that 2 billion (that's a lot of dough) on their users they'd have to become roughly 10 times their current size at the same conversion rates, so they'd have to have a reach of 200%, which is impossible.

I think they'll top out somewhere in the 600 to 800 million range and then they'll either stay there or they'll be upstaged by someone with a better idea.
Pairs of Celebrities Born/Died on the Same Day
Those arguments remind me of the OnStar "MY BABY! SAVE MY BABY!" sort of arguments.

Somehow I don't think an RFID chip can do many of the things you list there.
Favorite part: "What is the probability that three of the US presidents died the same day? Prob=1 since they did."
Remotely debugging your iPhone Scheme apps with a REPL
Good thing those chips are in no way spoofable from a distance.

Oh wait...

http://www.engadget.com/2009/02/02/video-hacker-war-drives-s...
Sometimes even when I define what done means before I start a project, I embarrass myself with my underestimates of complexity. Software is just plain fickle. Proof of concept on most any web app? Weekend. Something that satisfies anyone but me? At least two weekends :)
Well then, MacGyver.
But it's the concrete knowledge that your prototype just needs polish that makes the "weekend hack" valuable. Given the choice between two developers with proposals, one of whom spent last weekend banging out a prototype but with no plan, and the other with an elaborate plan and documentation but no code, which would you pick?

That's why the "weekend" meme persists. It's not about being "done" (software is never "done" anyway), it's about getting it to a point where "done" has meaning.

The little stuff can always be done. But my fear is that the people who insist on mocking the weekend hackers are the people who refuse to start on the big thing for fear that they'll take too long.
My personal path has been Friendster, MySpace, Facebook.
I am already seeing the end of Facebook. Perhaps I need to go Ning?
While his specific point is true, it is also true that delusion can be a valuable tool of progress (aka if we knew what having children is really like, the humankind may have died out). Obviously, you can't hash out a full-fledged system in a weekend, but you can get enough of a start that it pulls you in and makes you work on it after the weekend is done. Also, sometimes you can actually build a pretty sophisticated project if you have done enough of the pieces in the past. Of course, all of the above applies only to self-inflicted work; "managerial pressure" should be resisted :)
Yes. I agree.

The best time to define done is when the time period has expired. Just take what you've done, list that as your acceptance criteria, and viola! You're batting 100%.

(And yes, I did that on purpose)
While this isn't exactly related to your Visual Resume, it seems the majority of your interests lay within the business/entrepreneurial realm, however you are a Computer Science major. Having coding as the lowest of your desired careers, yet majoring in CS is a bit confounding to say the least...
An exercise in riddle-solving
Fair enough. What I mean is that F# (and Haskell) can be useful without knowing about Workflows (and Monads). By the time you find yourself needing them you'd either invent them (fairly easily) or find them... It's not much harder than INNER JOIN in SQL which I also think most people would eventually invent if the language didn't have it.
Heh, it wouldn't even let me submit the form. Note the error message in the top left. That's when I got nasty and took the screenshot.
Journey by Indian Railway's a unique experience
The weirdest pair of celebrity deaths is Mother Teresa and Princess Diana.

On any other day Mother Teresa's death would have been the news item, as it was it was barely a footnote.

Isn't there some variation of the birthday paradox hidden in here somewhere ?
Actually, the BMI suggestions are profoundly out of step with cardiovascular risk and mortality risk data. So-called "overweight" BMI ranges are associated with the lowest risks.

http://scienceblogs.com/purepedantry/2006/08/bmi_is_not_a_go...

"We found 40 studies with 250,152 patients that had a mean follow-up of 3·8 years. Patients with a low body-mass index (BMI) (ie, <20) had an increased relative risk (RR) for total mortality (RR=1.37 [95% CI 1.32-1.43), and cardiovascular mortality (1.45 [1.16-1.81]), overweight (BMI 25-29.9) had the lowest risk for total mortality (0.87 [0.81-0.94]) and cardiovascular mortality (0.88 [0.75-1.02]) compared with those for people with a normal BMI. Obese patients (BMI 30-35) had no increased risk for total mortality (0.93 [0.85-1.03]) or cardiovascular mortality (0.97 [0.82-1.15]). Patients with severe obesity (>35) did not have increased total mortality (1.10 [0.87-1.41]) but they had the highest risk for cardiovascular mortality (1.88 [1.05-3.34])."
I too did something like HN on a lazy weekend
Either one obviously can be used for a great deal of things, that's not what I'm questioning. Mine is more a question of how the theoretical limits of Scala actually impact its real world usage and in what situations.

BTW, in terms of noting points, high end phone systems having N nines uptime is definitely a point for Erlang:-)
I wouldn't bet either way, but remember that profit isn't a linear progression. Right now, Facebook's not making much money per user. If they figure out a way to convince its average user to pay for something, suddenly they'll be in for a shitload of cash.

I dunno if they'll find something like that, but it's not something to be instantly ruled out.
I have a project I think I'll be able to do in a year, what unit should I use?
Frankly, hiring managers and recruiters have little time to decipher the resume. Standard formats improve the speed of cognitive processing. Even if you're the candidate of their dreams, they'll curse you for making them spend more time understanding that. And "remembering the candidate" is not necessarily a good thing: I still remember the resume from 1999 whose objective read: "Want to become the expert in Peoplesoft in 5 years", but not for flattering reasons, of course.
I am the inverse... don't like windows but like silverlight and WPF! obviously I rather prefer an open standard, but like I prefer to use python [natively] instead of javascript in the browser.
Ok, that makes more sense.
This makes no sense. You should instill good writing, yes, but good linking should respect the original title. I come across the same articles from different sources; it would be nice to be able to quickly understand that it's the same article (because of the identical title).
Firefox, Safari, Opera, and Chrome, four of the top five browsers, now support the video tag. Despite the codec war, it can be argued that most browsers today do in fact support HTML5 enough to support the parent's comment.
Sounds like a two-decade job, my friend.

I'm writing a book on the method -- as soon as I figure out how to stretch one sentence into 400 pages.
AB testing is a great tool to make your site perform better, if you're not doing it yet you probably should!
I think you want the unit I always round up to: sitting-in-your-source-code-folder-unviewed-for-a-year-with-all-intentions-of-finishing-it-though-really-just-avoiding-it-because-you-know-it-is-way-too-large-to-really-finish-to-the-degree-of-polish-you-initially-envisioned.

Really the point is to keep yourself honest and realize that things tend to take a lot longer than you'd expect.

Also, if you are scoping a project out in terms of years you probably want to break it down into smaller features and implement them one-by-one.
As I'm sure you know, functional programming is a style and you can use it for any of the languages you mentioned (yes, including Java - objects are a poor man's closure but closure's are a poor man's object) [1]. One thing that might help is to try using functional idioms in the languages you know. Then you'll appreciate the syntatic help that "real" functional provide for that style.

[1]http://people.csail.mit.edu/gregs/ll1-discuss-archive-html/m...
I monitor the World News RSS feed from guardian.co.uk - just to remind myself there is a world out there. They also have a very nice iPhone interface to their website, and the real website is very light on ads.

Otherwise it's HN and Ars Technica.
Your first mistake was thinking "done" has a fixed definition.
I've decided that when I resign from my position, I'm writing my resignation letter on a cake.
Whether or not I smear said cake all over my employer's face, or share it with him at the table is a different matter; decided by how well s/he treated the people beneath them, including me.
I think its important to differentiate between the things that the people above your boss are forcing him to do and the things hes doing that you don't like that he's NOT being told directly to do.
For example, at my work, my boss has to come around every so often to make sure I'm working up to speed, and this is required by his superiors. What ISN'T required by the higher-ups is that he nit-pick what I'm doing, ^especially^ when I'm my speeds are above average. When I quit, I intend to make that clear on my cake, lol. I intend to lay out, "I don't like that corporate requires this this and this of X (my boss) because it is counter productive, and I don't like the way X, my boss, does this this and this without a reason to do so because it is an obstruction to the work flow."
I think communication is a big part of it, but for some reason it seems like now-a-days outgoing interviews are a thing of the past. You know, where they interview you about your experience with the company as your going out the door. Then again, if I actually felt my employer was at all listening to my suggestions to begin with I probably wouldn't have resigned to begin with, so I guess that explains that.
Ask HN: Why would someone want to borrow my site?
I really don't know of a better term to describe what's happening than "borrowing our site", but basically here's the situation:

My company has a private-label version of our site for which we charge a subscription fee. We arrange with our clients that they can direct a domain of their choosing to our site, and we catch the request and template it accordingly.

Recently, I noticed some traffic to our site from a new URL, which has no such account with us. Now, because we don't recognize the URL as a registered client, our site applies the generic DEMO template when this URL is accessed.

I plan on contacting the person with whom this domain is registered, as well as putting in the appropriate filters to prevent this from happening again, but I thought I'd leave it be long enough to ask the question... What does this person have to gain from doing this, assuming it's not just a simple mistake on their part? Is there some security threat I'm missing? All they are doing is sending more traffic to our site from their own domain. Obviously it doesn't help us with search indexing or anything (and it may even hurt as far as duplicate content is concerned), but I wouldn't think it helps them in any way either.

The URL in question by the way is http://travelinafrica.co.uk
I think I need to install this on my workstation.
:)
I'm fresh to JavaScript this year, but am keeping at it, and adding JQuery to the mix, this summer.
This sets a configuration register in a chipset.

Changing bios options usually involves changing the nvram or flash data the bios maintains its settings in, that's a different thing altogether.
I like to read Heise Online (http://www.heise.de). I have to mention that Heise Online is written in german and an english version exists at http://www.heise.de/english/. But the official english version of Heise Online is called The H (which belongs to Heise Media UK Ltd.): http://www.h-online.com/ .

I especially like (and recommend) the security section of Heise Online (http://www.heise.de/security/), which is also available on The H for english readers: http://www.h-online.com/security/ .

now, the other sites I read on a regular base are:

http://reddit.com/r/programming (I know you saw that one coming)

http://reddit.com/r/haskell

http://reddit.com/r/ruby

... and some other subreddits.

I can recommend you to search for other technical subreddits at http://www.reddit.com/reddits/ that match your interests.
BIG-IP ASM v.10 Application Ready Security Policy Templates
I know a management consultant that has a surefire method of stretching a sentence into a book. He is also good at stretching the truth. I believe he helped Tim Ferris out with the four hour workweek
Heh! - easy - just the other 90% left.
Both brands can go much, much further. We can't predict much about the web 10 years down the road but it's pretty safe to say that more and more buying and selling will be occurring on the web. If I was in charge of ebay, I would slightly rebrand to form an online commerce umbrella.
Spikes (in the agile nomenclature) are great fun. You just try to figure out what the shortest point from where you are to minimal functionality is, then get there.

Regarding a HN clone:

Sorting? Just do it by date.
Logins? Just a basic login, perhaps with tons of security vulnerabilities.
Flagging? Later
Comments? Not yet.

Once you have that, which is usually just a weekend job, then you can start to see what's going to be necessary and what isn't and start to see some of the edge cases and features you didn't even know you would need.
Except in the case where they're much more expensive, which is the case currently. Smartphones can generally do custom ringtones, right?
I agree about his tone, but he does have a point about the API complexity.

On the surface, FPS is quite simple, but when researching all the ways to use the marketplace API, it seemed like, more often than not, the only way to figure out if the API could do what I wanted was to ask in the forum and hope the FPS people answered me. Thankfully, they often do, so at least we know they care.

(The last time I seriously looked at this was almost a year ago, so take my anecdote with a fist-full of salt.)
It's not about whether Flash is good or bad; or whether at some point in the future it's going to be outmoded. It's about the _fact_ that there are plenty of websites out there that do use Flash right now, and it would be, I don't know, kind of nice to be able to use them.
UI, hardware limitations doom Nokia's latest attempt to hurt the iPhone
We're on! I'm easy to find. I don't expect it will be close (either way), but if it's a hard-to-interpret result (like we're still working with varying outside estimates of a private company or division of a larger company), we can use an HN poll to settle it. :)
I'm surprised that approach was taken. It's easier to rewrite the function as a state machine, where gotos just go to the proper state.
I have always wondered if brokers are allowed to trade stocks of their own firm.
Redeye VC: http://redeye.firstround.com/

Jetplane Journal: http://www.jetplanejournal.com/

Emergent Chaos: http://www.emergentchaos.com/
> If it were the usual programming languages (PHP, Ruby, Python etc), making a choice is relatively easy.

What do you mean by that? Is it just that you know this field better and thus feel better informed, or are you hinting at something else, that I didn't get?
IIRC, a while ago there used to be an analysis system that you'd place in the appropriate location in your network, and it would sniff packets and piece together its own log files. I don't recall what the advantages were supposed to be... perhaps that you could get some information on speed/latency.
Javascript has a lot of Scheme legacy. I'd definitely call it a functional language.
Maybe The Palm Pre Isn’t Selling So Well, After All
The Longevity Experiment
From National Geographic, Dan Buettner's search for the fountain of youth among the longest-lifespan cultures of the world.
Thanks to everyone for the critique. It sure helps me in the direction I want to go towards improving this. As for some of the comments, I do plan to have this with a traditional resume so that those who are not interested can go to what they are comfortable.
Thanks a lot Sean. Wow. You sure did put a lot of time on this. It was indeed the most helpful one of the lot and I agree with most of your observations if not all. The next one should look better.
That's substantially different from declaring up front what your biases are. No part of that sentence indicates to me that you stand to gain from convincing me your points are valid.
According to the NYSE's program trading report:

http://www.nyse.com/pdfs/PT06.15.09.pdf

Program (or quant) trading accounted for 40.4% of all NYSE trading volume during the week of 6/15 - 6/19. Goldman's program accounted for the more of this than any other firm, almost 1.2 billion shares, or 20.6% of all program trades. Ostensibly, this guy made off with the algos responsible for (.206 * .404 =) 8.3% of all NYSE trades. It's quite possible this is the world's most valuable source code. There are lots of people claiming that the code is useless without their infrastructure, but knowing exactly how GS makes their trading decisions allows anyone who holds the information to engage in front-running, or set traps for them by pushing stock prices one way or the other in order to trigger their system to buy or sell.

Even stranger, the report for the following week:

http://www.nyse.com/pdfs/PT06.22-06.26.pdf

shows an incredible increase in quant trading share, making up 48.6% of all NYSE trades, but Goldman isn't even on the list (after leading it the previous week). NYSE claims this is an error:

http://zerohedge.blogspot.com/2009/07/new-york-stock-exchang...

Surprisingly, GS is up 2% on the day.

http://www.google.com/finance?q=GS

Something majorly fishy is going on.
A couple more:

Zoli's blog: http://www.zoliblog.com/

Information aesthetics: http://infosthetics.com/
From what I've seen, it's mostly down to decision makers having good people instincts

I would argue that that is a sign that it's been figured out. Putting candidates before interviewers with good people skills is an excellent filter. Interviewer training definitely helps (at least it helped me get better at conducting interviews and seeing past the happy face candidates put on), but good instincts are a powerful tool.
What a waste of a wonderful domainname
> Well, you know why they still do business here? The answer is M O N E Y

I thought this was quite insightful. No matter how bad the conditions, there will be companies willing to make a profit there. After all, the choices are enter the market and make some money, or don't enter the market and make none. And Russia is a _big_ market, therefore a potential profit hard to dismiss.

This all means the system there will not run out of fuel very soon. It is less productive though, but their natural resources will probably make up for it. The biggest loser is the population. I read recently in a study of happiness per country Russia is very near the bottom. But as long as there are enough money to move the wheels, the system will go on.
Merged - yes. That makes sense. Is that not what is being done already?
I would like to see just one example where a real goto is needed.

Just one...
"1997: Founded CD Baby as a favor to friends ... "

http://sivers.org/about

Whee.
'Facebooks' come and go, geocities, myspace and so on...

True, but at one point that was true of search engines, too. Sometimes the music stops and a winner plants their seat in the most profitable position.

Many of the entrants so far have been happy to follow the strategy Mark Cuban recently outlined in his anti-freemium post. "More importantly, when you see your BlackSwan company appear and you know they will kick your ass, rather than ramping up to try to compete, get out. Sell." There's much to recommend that strategy, especially if you'd rather own an NBA franchise than a web company.

But Facebook has plenty of Nth generation advisors and investors who want to escape the flame-out/sell-out cycle and go for the Google-sized enduring win -- Andreesen among them. That changes the questions:

Is there a niche for a universal, well-tended social/identity network platform? (I think yes.)

Will one gorilla dominate that market? (I think yes, it has many of the same network-effects and natural-monopoly aspects as search or operating systems.)

Can the Facebook team avoid the nightclub-like fad boom-and-bust cycle? (I think probably; they're certainly wise to the problem and building defenses like crazy.)

Will being the de facto monopolist in this market involve massive new revenue streams (beyond advertising) that can now only be imagined? (I also think yes. Distrust and fraud are the biggest drains on internet value creation; a trust-network anchored in real-world relationships is the ultimate countermeasure.)
Russian spacecraft landed on moon hours before Americans
A previously unheard recording of a Russian spacecraft attempting to beat NASA's Apollo 11 in 1969's race to the moon has been released. The recordings from Jodrell's Lovell radio telescope, which were hidden in archives until researchers found them, show the Russian craft orbited the Moon and crash-landed onto its surface at 15:50 on July 21 – just a few hours before the Americans lifted.
Good story and read, but he blows his role out of proportion at times in comparison to what it really was. I mean he described himself as: "They just thought I would be a
great guy to have around. We kind of had to figure out what my role was." And then goes on to talk like he was mini-Steve Jobs.
I'd start with a problem you could solve in something you know, and write it in Python, researching as you go. I always find tutorials with non-practical problems much less effective than actually implementing something myself.
Indeed - but flipping the "DCA on" switch in the BIOS sets the bits in these registers.

So it is different, but it does the same thing.