skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Beware of having lucky people trying to rationalize their luck into repeatable process postfact."

Quote of the week. Thanks!
I didn't think about the poetry aspect, that's a good point. Maybe it could be a toggle in user preferences.
You're basically asking what if a namespace were a class.

> Namespaces in Java, C++, C#, or whatever else is in this family, are simply too dumb. Their sole purpose is to avoid name clashes.

That statement is just completely ridiculous. Classes are for inheritance, abstraction and polymorphism. You're saying you think of classes as inheritance and polymorphism without encapsulation, but encapsulation is the key trait for decoupling.

It's been awhile since I worked with SML, but if I recall, the modules you say are cool and special, are cool and special because they give you the three important traits of OOP.
The issue is not the size of the text (which is small but still legible) but the line length -- that is, how wide the lines are. If lines are too long, then reading becomes an exhausting experience as you sweep your eyes back and forth across the page like a lighthouse.

It's not really possible to enforce line-length with a user stylesheet (increasing the point size doesn't solve the problem, it just balloons the letters up to goofy proportions). This page just needs max-width set somewhere on the text container.
I read it in Zed Shaw's voice, doing a Samuel L. Jackson impression.
I've noticed the reverse with Firefox, closing an instance with 20 tabs takes quite some time. However I've yet to notice Chrome take any time in opening 20 tabs.
Two Gunshots On a Summer Night
How many questions would you need to differentiate between identical twins, particularly if they live and work together? Take identical twin sons of a subsistence farmer - they live together, work together on the same things, know the same people, have the same genetic makeup, and whichever was the first twin born may not have been recorded. You could ask their names, but that's not a yes/no question.

Or even twins who are still babies, no work required? Some cultures wouldn't even have named them yet.
I actually really like the graph in the article because I think it portrays the value of engineers. They're expensive up front, but if they use good programming practices, the work keeps paying dividends again and again over time without a whole lot of additional investment.
When viewing from the UK [BBC, you srs?]

BBC Worldwide (International Site)
We're sorry but this site is not accessible from the UK as it is part of our international service and is not funded by the licence fee. It is run commercially by BBC Worldwide, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the BBC, the profits made from it go back to BBC programme-makers to help fund great new BBC programmes. You can find out more about BBC Worldwide and its digital activities at www.bbcworldwide.com.
It's not really significant, because there aren't many people involved in this bubble. If the startup scene in SV gets cut in half, it's going to hurt locally, but the broader economy won't go into recession. In addition, should some VC funds go bust, it won't trickle much to the average consumer.

The problem with the dotcom bubble and the housing bubble was that laypeople were very much involved (everything was IPOing and everyone was jumping in), and so were their retirement funds and their debt levels. The US economy lives and dies by the consumer.
Codearcade.co | Play games, learn to code.
Ultimately, the old rules always apply -- companies without revenue, that continue to spend at a deficit, cannot go on forever, it's as simple as that in the long run. So, given that there are a lot of companies that fit that, either they must figure out how to monitize effectively or they'll eventually fail. I'm not sure where the controversy is in that. Now, the second issue is whether the valuations are correct -- and, again, I'd say that the old economic rules still apply. It doesn't matter what your company does, valuation comes from how much it can grow real equity through real earnings. Anything else is just overzealous investment.

So, yes, there's a bubble. But the more interesting question is, how much will it hurt when it bursts or deflates? That's the better question, IMHO, and that's one I don't see being quite so cut and dried.
It just works.

Btw.: Here is a very popular blog, that has always had this style: http://blog.fefe.de/ [german]
I think the insight is that each formalism is defined by/equivalent to the input language that it is able to parse;

State machines can do regular expressions, but they can't parse matching brackets,

Stack machines can do BNF grammars - but they don't have counters; also Stack machines are more general than state machines; each regular expression can be expressed by an equivalent BNF grammar.

Turing machines can parse Perl - that means any language that depends on the context; this is because Turing machines have counters/memory. Also Turing machines are more general than stack machines; each BNF grammar can also be parsed by a Turing machine.

All this business of deterministic/non deterministic machines is about efficiency of the parser; nice to know.
I love it. The original idea of the web was, like gopher, to detach content from presentation and universalize it. Custom design especially flash has gotten away from that.

Then again, it was also fun to play with.

http://www.anus.com/etc/prozakhistan/autoexec.htm
Ask HN: Georgia Tech OMSCS Application Status?
The deadline for acceptance into the Georgia Tech OMSCS program is only a week away! Has anyone received an acceptance letter yet?

My application status is still "to dept for review". I am curious to see how many people are in the same boat!
"This site doesn't care if you're on an iMac or a motherfucking Tamagotchi."

Ha ha, best quote imho :)
Prozakhistan (an early hypertext experiment)
You Can Easily Learn 100 TED Talks Lessons In 5 Minutes
No, PageRank was not heavy lifting.

I like to use Google search as an example since I was involved in building a competing search engine roughly at the same time as Google, so I happen to know a thing or two about the difficulty of that task.

Everyone and their dog thinks Google won solely because of PageRank, but anyone who has ever worked on web scale search engine can tell you that long before you can start worrying about ranking, you have to solve a bunch of problems that are really hard. Like copying a sufficiently large portion of the web onto your servers and processing that copy. Or even removing all the duplicates you will get (which is certainly much harder than I had imagined when I was tasked with this problem).

Google did all of these things as well as, or better than the competition. And on top of that they put together a cocktail of ranking methods that they were able to apply to information amounts for which there was effectively no practically oriented literature to turn to for advice. (Sure you could find lots of neat algorithms for this and that, but very few people had any experience with these at web scale).

Oh, and Google were not alone in having PageRank, or algorithms similar to PageRank. All web search engines I have any inside knowledge of (2-3) had this within six months of Google popularizing the idea.

Ask any one of the dozen or so web search engine companies that did web search if any of this was "easy".

What Google did in the late 90s was indeed heavy lifting. What pointcast did was relatively trivial and easy to copy in a few months.

edit: fixed typo
Please recommend a book on getting started in PCI-DSS compliance
One of the problems people may experience when trying out something like ZODB is trying to use it as they would use a relational database management system rather than as they would manage a normal object structure inside their program. Things like list comprehensions and careful design of the structure of the objects can improve things a lot, but I will agree that sometimes the fact that you can't as easily run ad hoc queries is sad. Also very often you simply won't need to use an index, and for a very large range of problems the graph nature of ZODB (compared with the tabular nature of the RDBMS, where you'll need indices to avoid full-table scans) is liberating.

Certainly there are some types of problems which ZODB won't work well with, but overall I quite enjoyed the experimental project I made early this year in Pyramid with ZODB. Combine it with traversal-based URL generation and you get very interesting results.

I think it's the sort of tool that I'd recommend people at least try; once they've broadened their horizons, then they can go back to using their RDBMS when they wish to. (In this it's just like Pyramid's traversal; many developers have forgotten that pattern matching is not the only good way of routing URLs.)
Facebook’s $3B offer for Snapchat explained in one image
If you're just treating a object as a map of keys to values, then it can be fairly transparent, but unless you're using a language like Javascript, where maps and objects are synonymous, objects are much more difficult to work with. It's hard to transverse them, or to merge them, or often even to look up a list of keys.

I'd suggest that a better solution would be to just use maps, at least in languages with good support for raw data structures.
I mean 25€, which is slightly higher than the $25 the article is about.
I'm distinguishing it from investments that pay a dividend or interest coupon at time of purchase, or which have a commodity value independent of price (eg gold and oil are commodities that you can speculate in or take delivery of for actual consumption).

You might well get rich from speculating in bitcoin, but if if doesn't pan out then your assets could end up having no value whatsoever - you won't even be able to burn them to keep warm during the zombie apocalypse ;)

I'm not trying to comment on the viability of BTC here, just pointing out that it not the same as many other asset classes.
IMO, most critics of FP or OOP do so because they lack a full understanding of one or the other. Either paradigm can be applied incorrectly and cause plenty of problems. Both have their merits and strong points. Each fits a different type of project better than the other. Also different people tend to grasp or appreciate one or the other better naturally depending on how their brains are wired. More logical, abstract thinkers tend toward OOP while more right brained people tend toward FP. There is nothing wrong with this. There is also nothing wrong with learning the benefits of the "other side". If fact it is quite beneficial.

some language designers see and fully appreciate the benefits of both. They start putting class synonymous structures in FP languages or FP functionality in OOP languages. This is the future of the mainstream (Ex: EcmaScript 6 has classes/types, C# has Linq, closures, lambdas ETC).
How would one know in advance whether a site can handle high traffic?

And did I really have to spell this out?
Don't you think the "fluff" is helpful to people who have no experience?

I purposely presented a narrow path so that readers are not overwhelmed by options. It's hard to know where to start with no guidance, so I directed beginners to the easiest entry point. When I tried taking a class in C++ it was intimidating to start with something so opaque.

I eliminated "hardcore" haha clearly the word didn't go over well.
"Load this motherfucker in IE6. I fucking dare you."

-Always looking out for the PRC when I design.
I thought it was neat at the time, but I also remember discontinuing use really quickly. I used it to watch stock market data and other stuff, but found it was more useful for me to just browse to my Datek page (this was long, long ago before Datek was acquired and eventually became TD Ameritrade) or the Motley Fool (back before the Fool started sucking and became yet another big finance media channel), and dig down into the research.
Usually a good indication of an actual bubble is that nobody believes it's a bubble. When you have the average man on the street thinking this is the new wave and we're all guaranteed to get rich off software companies, then it may be a bubble. Right now it seems like there's a healthy skepticism in the general public.
This is one case where it would be nice to see the number of votes on a comment--I upvoted you because I agree immensely, and even though I also upvoted the submission there is no way for the community to know why things are getting up voted so we have to write follow-on comments like this one.

Many thanks to OP for an excellent write-up and I, too, would like to see more of this quality content on HN!
I like working in the same room as the rest of my team. It means I can ask them questions, they can ask me, we can quickly discuss little things without getting out of our chair.

I can imagine private office might be preferable if you really work on your own. But I work in a team, and I prefer working in the same room as them.

Though the stories about noise suggest that some people are sharing a room with a hundred people, and that's just ridiculous. 6, 12, or even 20 programmers in a room don't make a lot of noise. The occasional question or discussion really isn't that distracting (though nerf-gun battles certainly are).

Just keep it sane. Put people in a room with the people they need to be in a room with. Don't make them hide from their team. Don't put them in a crowd of noisy strangers.

There's good and bad ways to do this.
Not relevant but I almost thought this is one of those Mother Effing websites :) http://mothereff.in/
I was genuinely upset that the post was not about lifting.
yes, using Module primarily. here's one way you might make a basic object-like thing (though i would generally advise against OO stuff in Mathematica. part of the power of the language is due to how it keeps everything straightforwardly manipulable):

makeObj[] := Module[{obj, i = 0},
obj["inc"] := ++i;
obj["dec"] := --i;
obj[] := i;
obj];

precisely speaking, however, Module simply renames symbols to make them unique. the effect is the same as a closure, but it isn't a "pure" closure like you would find in other functional languages, because you can do for example Names["i*"] and find that the supposedly-private 'i' has the name i$2656 and you can alter its value that way

another point is that you could, if you wanted to, create your own version of Module and other scoping stuff, since it's a matter of making a macro by using the HoldAll atttribute [1] and using 'ReplaceAll' to replace specific variables or arbitrary structures

[1] http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/ref/HoldAll.html
The definition of OOP rather depends on who you ask, but I suspect Alan Kay would disagree with you there :)
Eric Schmidt's 900 word guide for switching from iPhone to Android
You've lowered the bar a bit there, don't you think? Now I have to claim it's an "entirely" secular political viewpoint?

The reality is both sides of any political question are made up of different viewpoints. Sure, there were people on my side who were coming from a religious viewpoint. But there were also a lot of people who thought the husband's position is hopelessly compromised by his own interests, and since her parents were still alive they should have been allowed to take custody of their daughter.

People on the left have this idea that religious conservatives somehow control the Republican party or set the agenda. It's a mistake to think that.
Anonymize headers in postfix
hmmm that's true. The issue is I'm a "Front-End Developer" but front-end in this case means... anything above DSL. So I work on Java / model building tools / deployment scripts / js / css / html. In lots of dev circles the annoying-ass recruiters seem to think if you work on front-end or UI it means you can't code. I used to be a full-stack RoR dev so now the notion that I might get pigeon-holed is scary to say the least, since I've only been doing increasingly more technical work every step of my career.

My workplace (I'm a "consultant" at an international corp) is politically complicated enough that I think it may just best to just try to explain it when the time comes lol.
So, then is there some vocabulary that is lacking to describe the difference between these two ideas, but seem to use the same words?
Multiple births would be bad enough, and then you have people with dementia who can't remember the answer to most of the questions, and people in a coma who can't answer questions at all. The chance of succeeding with this exercise is approximately zero.
When writing scripts don't use the shortened flags, use the long version.

For example, the deploy script from a simple php app I wrote:

rsync --recursive --links --verbose --rsh=ssh --exclude-from ./exclude_from_deploy.txt --delete ./ kazan:/srv/simple-paste/
I've had very good experiences with anything from 5 up to 20.
Did Bitcoin creator 'Satoshi Nakamoto' invest in Silk Road?
if something really _does_ "look like a pile of shit", then
it's not "criticism" to say it; it's just the honest truth.

"looks like a pile of shit" implies "make it look better"
as the "constructive way the creator can improve upon it".

and if that's still too vague, then "find something that
looks better, and then copy it" is a very good beginning.

since the intent here seems to be to offer an annotation capability, i'd suggest "medium.com" as a thing to emulate.

but since this developer, in one of the f.a.q., indicates
a familiarity with medium already, that'd be unnecessary.

but i can go farther, if you like. try these on for size:

1. don't overlap the pictures; it defeats the purpose.

2. eliminate the project gutenberg legalese. it's ugly.

3. the headings should be formatted as headings.

4. give the paragraphs some decent formatting.

5. the all-uppercase words are supposed to be italicized.

6. improve the formatting of the text-annotations.

7. give incoming users an explanation of the purpose.

all of those should have been very obvious, and thus
completely unnecessary, as well, but you asked for it.

-bowerbird
Lovely work. Thank you.
ZODB is kind of neat, but how does it fare with non-python client libraries? I note the phrase "you can store anything that is pickleable" so I am thinking not?
That's a bit much.

There's something satisfying about pushing your limits in all areas of life. I hope you reconsider your viewpoint and give fitness an honest try. It doesn't need to be about vanity, though that is a common trap that people fall into.
Have you ever seen that scene in "Team America: World Police" where the protagonist puppet barfs in the street? The first few times are funny. The next few times are tedious. Then, right when you're thinking to yourself, "I get it, you can make a marionette hurl in the street, please stop", they double down and have that damn puppet puke its guts out like it's going to barf up a lung. And that's when you break down, doubled over with laughter, splitting your sides over a puking puppet.

One fuck is startling. Four fucks is tedious. Thirty-three fucks is art.
Unrelated to content: please, please, please do not add on select-actions like the tweet button that appears after selecting text. I habitually select text as I'm reading, and I know there is a significant group of people like me who do the same. Having a button appear on selecting text is sincerely annoying.
> Yes, this is fucking satire, you fuck

No. Not it isn't. I don't think you know what satire is. Satire would be if took a jab at the ridiculous 80MB TeehanLax page by making an 800MB one and pretending it was a serious endeavor.

> Yes, this is fucking satire, you fuck

Whatever it was, you ruined it by trying to explain it.
Exactly!

"A recent Bloomberg survey of Wall Street investors, analysts and traders who use the company’s financial data terminals found that the majority thought Internet and social media stocks were at or near unsustainable levels.
Roughly half said that the bubble was here or soon would be."
On that first graph, for year one the percent of revenue spent on the team (using the means) exceeds 100%...? The mean for R&D is ~50%; for S&M it's 90%. How does that work? Is this due to fundraising?
'The ideal line length for text layout is based on the physiology of the human eye [...] At normal reading distance the arc of the visual field is only a few inches – about the width of a well-designed column of text, or about 12 words per line. Research shows that reading slows and retention rates fall as line length begins to exceed the ideal width, because the reader then needs to use the muscles of the eye and neck to track from the end of one line to the beginning of the next line. If the eye must traverse great distances on the page, the reader is easily lost and must hunt for the beginning of the next line. Quantitative studies show that moderate line lengths significantly increase the legibility of text.'

Web Style Guide – Basic Design Principles for Creating Website
Patrick J. Lynch and Sarah Horton
2nd edition, page 97.
Hallmarks of good performance evaluations
That helps it make some more sense. I keep thinking it's something that looks useful, but I can't find a use case for what I do.
Why do you say right brained people tend toward FP? To me, FP has many abstractions that must be learned as well.
Yeah that was incredibly annoying.
Well, movie theaters don't really force you to commit to the film; my friend and I walked out of the Tree of Life, for example.

That said, and for all the love I have for computers and even for my Nexus tablet, I fear I'll become an anti-smartphones curmudgeon soon. I already feel uncomfortable when everyone takes theirs out right after lunch, killing any possibility of a conversation.
Motivation behind Definition of Matrix Multiplication
Most web designers assume you are browsing full screen. Dumbasses.
You need to go beyond just storing input, you have to process things as a team. That's hard to do well.

Try something like this:

1. Store feedback in a ticket system (or some other system). Try to store the detailed feedback/data, not your interpretation of it. In other words, don't write: "We need feature X for client Y", but write: "Client Y told me usecase Q and Z." Get the data. This is a different format than most bugs require. Try to get the story.

2. Plan roadmap sessions. They could last multiple days. Get multi-disciplinary teams in them. During the sessions, first, go over ALL feedback you got, write it down on sticky notes, and put things on the wall. (The wall part is important.) Then, discuss, review, prioritize, organize, and discuss some more.

Out of this, a roadmap will gell that's based on actual customer needs.

(Note: you will gather a mountain of data. That's good. Then use the process to go through it and make decisions based on data.)

(P.S.: look up "grounded theory" and "contextual inquiry" (the analysis part of it) for more ideas.)

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grounded_theory
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contextual_inquiry
Journal Of Failure - Crowdsourcing failed experiments.
Thanks, that is very helpful, and I've never seen that reference card until now!
Nice information, but what would be more useful is to add a line showing gross profit. We would amuse that profit would be low in the first few years and then increase as the years pass, showing the decline in the money spent on engineers and sales staff. Although it would be interesting to see if gross margin is falling 20+ years in, as sales staff focus is increased.