skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hadoop, There It Isn’t – A Startup Bucks The Big Data Consensus
No. The Internet's six sigma compliant. 99.99966% of everything is crud.
- Figure out where and how you want to work. Let's assume you're going to stay in the DFW area and that you want to get hired on somewhere (as opposed to consulting[1] or working on your own startup).

- Look for local job openings on non-crappy job sites for Python web developers.

- Do some napkin statistics gathering on who's looking for what, and how many outfits are looking for what (eg. what are people looking for in your area? Django? Flask? Google App Engine? Learn the top of the list.

- Bone up on HTML/CSS/JS/jQuery, how WSGI works, and more Django.

- Come June, apply for jobs. Don't undersell yourself. Bust your ass on-the-job to prove yourself.

Good luck and keep us updated. I am contemplating a similarly-risky move and I have nothing but respect for you and confidence that you'll succeed. You certainly sound like you have your stuff in order.

1 I wouldn't hire you as a consultant because you have no industry experience. Mom and pop shops might, though, but I suspect you wouldn't be able to live off of it full-time.
Because it's a truly distributed SQL database. I presume you mean having a master-master setup? ActorDB does not limit you to the capabilities of a single machine. Master-master still means your dataset and query load needs to fit into 1 or 2 servers.
I don't subscribe now. So a price hike will simply further my unwillingness to subscribe.
I'm on Android, but you point seems to mesh with what I've come to like about Facebook's mobile strategy lately. Instead of trying to jam every single feature into a single Facebook App, FB is releasing different apps the serve niche functions, and allowing users to use the products (and, with Paper, the interface) that work for them.

Personally, I don't have the Facebook app on my phone. The only FB app I use regularly is Messenger, which works well because everyone I know is on it. I also use Facebook for finding reading material and following the News, and so Paper looks really nice and I'm eagerly anticipating its arrival on Android.

A lot of people deride Facebook for over-complicating their app strategy, but I really don't see the problem. Facebook is allowing users pick and choose the functions that matter to them. I wish other companies would take this approach.
> they are comfortable not knowing because they are beginners

I disliked web frameworks when I was a "beginner".

> It's fun to think that completionists exist, fun like believing in the tooth fairy or the little rat.

That's a bit nonsensical. Plenty of engineers feel strongly about having a solid understanding of the systems they work with.
A company (w/which I am not affiliated) taking an interesting approach is Gild, which is attempting to use ML to find "good devs in the rough," as I understand it.
Ask HN: How much of an impact do you expect from Fed tapering? 
How much of an impact do you expect the ongoing Fed tapering to have on money investment in new startups? So far financial markets aren't taking it well.

But here's what I think will happen:

1) Interest rates will increase steering investors away from risky startup investments and into high IR financial instruments

2) Investment money will dry up in the short term leading to a rough landscape and a tough environment for those needing to raise cash

3) Seemingly good startups (even by toughest critics) won't be able to raise money unless they have a solid business plan

What do you think? Are you worried?
It's listed as "Paper – stories from Facebook" on the App Store.
I wonder how many people interested in Bitcoin use WP..

How many downloads have you got so far?
I agree that the "thrush macro" is not such a good example to show the greatness of the Lisp family of language. IMHO it's a nice syntactic sugar but it doesn't bring something fundamentally new. Still IMHO, a more suited example of the power of the macros would be how to write a memoize macro that enables to cache the results of some function.
Search for "Paper" in the App Store? Problem solved.
"Facebook" is also pretty generic, but when you have enough well paid lawyers these things matter less.

Also, it is very unlikely that Facebook is attempting to benefit from 53's brand. Facebook wanted to call their product something descriptive, and the names collided. Compare this to any name involving "Facebook", which likely is attempting to benefit. Outside of a directly competing service, it's unlikely that the name of a product would include the word "Facebook". This makes "Facebook" less generic and more enforceable than "Paper".
Is there not a large, wide spectrum between "being lonely" and "fitting in"? In fact, I would imagine that there are so many alternatives that the phrase "spectrum" is simply too one-dimensional.

The value is that I imagine (no data here, just conjecture) that many people could be much happier and freer to focus on other pursuits (that I feel are more worthy but I realize that this is entirely subjective) and not be so worried about "what do they think?". Because humans will be humans (as you've pointed out) I don't expect to change any minds here, but this is the way that I think. If nothing else, I'm simply giving away some food for thought.
I like OSM and have also contributed to it. However, I would be wary of using OSM for navigation. It's very easy for someone to mis-edit (accidentally or maliciously). Also, it is difficult to revert a mis-edit because, unlike Wikipedia, the data is not chunked into pages and there are no simple textual diffs which a non-geek can review.
The article briefly mentions it, but I think the comments here are underestimating how much teenagers like to shop online. The growth of Nasty Gal may be one example of this.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/25/technology/nasty-gal-an-on...
"want to be web-dev by June"

Don't look at it this way. You can never be <xyz> by <date>. You just get started. The question to ask will be "Will someone hire me to do web dev work if I can present abc skills and blah experience/portfolio ?". Something like that. Don't wory about June/July whatever.

- What python specific technologies have you learned ? You say webapp2+Jinja2 whch is a great start. Take a look at other popular frameworks (Django,Flask etc). I personally recommend Flask. It is a good balance in my opinion between too much abstraction (Django) vs nothing (barebone WSGI) to pick up python web development.

- Do you/Are you building a portfolio to show your work ? Github etc ? The best thing to do is to build sample apps and show people.

Things like these will help.
By "lists", you mean "linked lists as implemented with pairs"? What's the practical difference between lists and the seq abstraction (immutability aside)? It's true that Clojure provides a lot of data types, but none that would be unfamiliar to a CL programmer. And you can handle all of them more or less like lists, and as a bonus you can use the same set of functions to do so.

I would think that the immutability of these data structures would be a bigger difference, both conceptually and in the difficulty of porting CL code into Clojure.
This is the best thing I've seen on HN in ages. And love that they're actively seeking submissions and additions through GitHub. And lovely design, too. Kudos all around!
So it becomes an AOT model with good jit support? Neat! I look forward to seeing how the design crystallizes.
To be fair to Fortran, you can easily choose whatever indexing you want. 1 is just the default.
I don't see how they'll be benefiting from the release of Paper. Two things can happen:
1. Takes off and gets rid of regular FB app user base? Advertising is relatively in existent on Paper? Mobile profits go down for the next quarter.
2. The app becomes another flop like Poke or Home.
I do see that FB is breaking apart to a more service like architecture instead of a behemoth.
> You personally might believe that a resume so perfectly captures the qualities of a person, that the person's gender is no longer relevant once you have seen the rest of the resume. But that is just your opinion.

Which part of this are you not getting? THE EXACT SAME RESUME WAS PRESENTED, ONLY THE NAME WAS CHANGED. Consequently, the test subject's responses measured sexism, nothing else.

> I'm guessing it is illegal but in my opinion those laws are wrong anyway.

At this point anyone can see what is wrong -- you don't understand the topic of discussion.
This is a de facto trade barrier. If you live in a country that can't sell apps, consider asking your country to apply diplomatic pressure through WTO or EU.
The Humility Imperative: CEOs, Keep Your Arrogance in Check (2011)
A slightly related anecdote: Yesterday I saw grafitti that said "resistance is fertile". A good twist, I thought, especially for potential startups that could go the way of "let's make another photo app" vs. "let's solve something important".
Note sure what to link towards, every publicly available source have been removed.

EDIT: Found a blog http://sam3.se/archives/782
Not a very useful story. Odds that the 16-yo cousin thought Phil was joking about the plaque: 100%

(Odds that Phil was actually joking about the plaque: unknown)
I do have read it and as I said there's really nothing that sets it apart from Medium. First of all Medium provides collections, secondly a blog is intrinsically a follow/follower medium. And finally boundaries are not important, there's an article of late last year regarding long form content which applies here too:

"Reader, do you feel enticed to plunge into a story by the distinction that it is long? Or does your heart sink just a little? Would you feel drawn to a movie or a book simply because it is long? (“Oooh—you should really read Moby-Dick—it’s super long.”)"

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/12/against-...

The same applies to short content.
"LISP proponents have a historical condescension"

I think this is a recent phenomena, which probably developed after the late '80s AI Winter et. al. crash. When Lisp was ascendant in the early '80s, the attitude, at least in the MIT community, was that everyone could and if they so desired should learn Lisp.

Bernie Greenberg, among many other things the author of Multics Emacs, which used Maclisp as one of its implementation languages and of course as its extension language, was immensely proud about MIT secretaries using it to turn keyboard macros into real extensions.

Although, he was a major evangelist at the time, author of a great intro I've been trying to find a copy of, the guy who said "Cons is an object which cares. It cares about its car and cdr", etc. etc. But he was fully supported by everyone I knew in the MIT Lisp community.

And I think Scheme escaped some of this, or at least it didn't suffer like CL did since it retained its place as a teaching language for quite some time, only falling in this century (e.g. MIT panicked after the dot com crash resulted in EECS enrollment dropping more than by half, Berkeley recently retired its SICP class when professor Brian Harvey retired, etc.) ADDED: and unless things have changed very recently, has retained its place in computer language development. Heck, while not the same thing, Javascript is basically a Scheme with a prototype-based object system and C style syntax.

Clojure as far as I can tell has escaped this, then again it's being quite successful currently and per my guess above that would help a lot.

As for the "people are stupid" thesis, our host has interesting commentary in that direction with his Blub language hypothesis: http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html

BTW, as I understand it, FORTRAN, the first computer language (Lisp is the 2nd oldest survivor) still is very big in number crunching.
No, you don't own the word Paper.
Are you making a case here that Matlab and R should never be used?
Well articulated!

I'm actually working on related prototyping then deploy tools myself for numerical computing. Albeit using ghc Haskell as the substrate so I'm making a different set of tradeoffs than julia.
Let me translate for you. I suspect he's saying, as a teacher, that he wants to be hire-able as a web programmer by the end of his school year (aka job cycle).

But aside from that, this is just basic goal setting, and I find nothing wrong with setting goals of "i want to be x by y". There may be setbacks and failures, but the goals can be recalibrated based on those failures.
The app icon doesn't really look Facebook-like and the second screenshot look like a photoshop disaster. If I had never heard of the app, I wouldn't think it's an official Facebook product.
It was distributed by ADA. You think they shipped thousands of promo CDs/mailouts to radio stations and record stores across the world all on their own? These artist-run labels are usually just shell companies.

But yes, this track is maybe not the best example for the point I'm making. Just replace "record companies spending millions of dollars" with "ADA spending some other very large amount of money and macklemore spending hundreds of man hours" and the point is the same.
Twitter wouldn't be Twitter without strict content boundaries.
I don't know what you mean there is "Paper – stories from Facebook" and "Paper by FiftyThree". You know what I don't see them complaining about? "Paper" by misoft (an identical product by the way) and 100 other apps with paper in the title. Considering misoft got "paper" and fifty three had to use "Papaer by FiftyThree" it kind of makes me wonder if this isn't a case of the pot calling the kettle black.

This seems much more like manufactured controversy for free press than anything else.
Powerful red on your website! Just wanted to mention the white text looks great in Safari, but really faint in Chrome.
(Note: I haven't tried Julia yet)

This would save so many man hours... At my shop, for every MATLAB engineer (mostly older guys) you need a C++ guru (mostly younger guys) to translate his stuff into something that will run fast.

On the other hand having seen the code the MATLAB folks write... I'd be worried. It's possible to write MATLAB in a way that is clean and makes the core algorithm presentable but that's rarely a priority. The real advantage of MATLAB is the quick development cycle. With the right packages you can make C++ look comparable... sorta.

Fundamentally the problem with MATLAB engineers is that they don't understand how to optimize code b/c they don't understand what's going on under the hood and they don't understand how to organize code b/c they don't have a concept of object oriented development, writing to interfaces, design patterns etc. etc.

EDIT: Just to clarify, I don't mean to denigrate MATLAB engineers. I'm just saying that in the current system you have two groups that specialize in different things. One focuses on algorithm development, and one on programming. I'm just speculating that maybe there is a good reason for it, and it may be unreasonable to ask one person to do both.
Wouldn't it be easier to just gain access to the datacenters where the data is stored, presumably unencrypted?
PlanGrid (YC W12) is looking for senior Android engineers
Want to own a product that’s transforming the construction industry?

Our users are building some of the most amazing construction projects in the world, and our android app is used everyday in the field.

As a senior android engineer, you will tackle some very difficult and interesting challenges. Things like:

- Marking up construction drawings with sophisticated annotations

- Pushing the capabilities of tablets with demanding data requirements

- Making very powerful tools that are easy and intuitive enough for construction professionals to pick up and use

PlanGrid is a small team of construction engineers, software engineers, and ex-rocket scientists, building intuitive, beautiful tablet apps for construction. We’re reinventing the way builders access information and are looking for an amazing engineer that wants to take the lead role on an app used by over 200,000 construction professionals.

We've been around for two years and we're growing fast. Unlike a lot of early stage startups, we measure our growth in revenue, not users, and it's been exponential since the day we launched. We’re a team of 8 women and 9 men that loves to build great tools for for the people that build the world. We care deeply for our customers and work hard everyday to make their lives easier and more productive.

We’re located in the Mission district in San Francisco (5 blocks from BART).

Perks:

-Unlimited vacation

-Health/dental/vision insurance with zero contributions

-Whatever gear you want (most engineers have a retina MBPs and Apple Thunderbolt displays)

-Work from home Wednesdays

-Free transit pass

-Construction site tours of cool SF projects using PlanGrid (past tours: Github’s new HQ, Square’s new HQ, 101 Van Ness)

-Tahoe trips

-Annual company workcation (last year: 3 weeks on the beach in cancun)

Interested? Send your info to: jobs@plangrid.com
Google Now Arrives In Chrome Beta For Desktop
Wow guys! This is just cool! And the site is beautiful! Congrats!
Whats more, Wacom also has an app called Paper, which does something very similar to 53 paper. Not sure which one was there first, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was Wacom.
Windows, Apple, etc are all trademarked, pls stop being an arm chair lawyer and recognize there is a huge amount of precedent in using common english words to trademark things other than their common usage.

MS can trademark Windows in conjunction with computer interfaces, but not if they decide to make windows that go in houses. That's where the common usage trademark issue arises. Also, if like kerosene the word becomes common usage then the trademark can be revoked.

The law is nuanced, there is no blanket ban on trademarking words in common usage.
Insofar as FiftyThree is merely making a polite request as a matter of professional courtesy rather than threatening legal action, then I don't think your criticism applies. They didn't get nasty about it, they didn't cite some bizarre legal arguments where they claimed to forever own the word Paper. They just made a cordial request. I think that's entirely reasonable and makes them come across very good in this situation.
Which Apple? it worked out okay for the company that came along and took the name later. Apple Corp has essentially lost their name at this point though
Asian Girl Kung Fu
Solving a Regular Expression Crossword with Haskell, Part 1
Ask HN: How to promote an API to developers?
Hello everybody.

Anybody willing to share some advice on how to market an API to developers?

Until now I had to drag nearly every user by hand into my service[0], so I was wondering how other people do it.

Since I am experimenting a bit with google adwords, I would be happy if somebody could share his API-project and how many clicks they have to pay until they get a signup.

Do you monitor web forums to see if problems occur that you can fix? How do you tell those users then without being spammy?

[0] http://template2pdf.com/
Are you calling "Facebook" a common English word? Because it's not.
A room full of Julia users
The problem stems from "Forbes Contributor" system

"It’s a simple deal: there is a flat monthly fee, a bonus for hitting certain unique visitor targets, and a fee per unique user after bonus targets are achieved. For paid contributors, the arrangement requires a certain number of posts per month and a specified level of audience engagement through our commenting system."

With a setup like that, of course it's ideal to push sensationalist articles that will stir up controversy/comments even if it's fabricated. We saw a ton of this in eSports with a particular Forbes contributor milking the communities "OMG WE'RE ON FORBES" attitude for 30+ articles.

They're not the only major outlet using a similar content farming system, and I can't really blame anyone for their moves in this situation. Sensationalist Misinformation > Meaningful Editorial Content online and it's been that way for a long time.
And, once again,

"And that’s the most coherent argument I can find; there are dozens of other arguments for zero-indexing involving 'natural numbers' or 'elegance'[2] or some other unresearched hippie voodoo nonsense that are either wrong or too dumb to rise to the level of wrong."

I still believe this is the only time EWD's work has ever been referred to as "unresearched hippie voodoo nonsense".

Is this the same Mike Hoye who hacks Zelda?[potato]

[potato] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/16/mike-hoye-hacks-zel...

[2] http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD08xx/EW...
My understanding is Macklemore (a man, not a band) is pretty wealthy, so I suspect it was mostly his dollars behind the track, including for distribution.

That leads to the other interesting part- if he's already wealthy, does he care if the track makes a lot of money or not?

But, yes, for most any other hit pop song you'd be right.
One of my favorite tutorials from John Resig: http://ejohn.org/apps/learn/
We do not need population control. The fears of overpopulation have been vastly overhyped. The global population is expected to peak at around 9-10 billion.
nitpick: Here is the link that describes why Clojure's threading macro is not really a pure thrush operator.

http://blog.fogus.me/2010/09/28/thrush-in-clojure-redux/
A self-hosted alternative to disqus:

https://github.com/skx/e-comments/

Its cool because communication is fun.

(I will continue to plug my console email client to http://lumail.org/ because email is cool, and scripting email with lua is even cooler still!)
The only feature I'm missing so far is the ability to view all stories, not just top posts.
I am going to build a real time, location based, social messaging application that's based on connection graphs and utilize the latest Flash video technology. Oh and it's going to be ephemeral.

And I am going to name it SnapYouTwitFace.
Sovereign immunity protects the state, as a sovereign entity, from suit. It doesn't protect individual agents of the government. Public officials generally enjoy immunity from civil suits for monetary damages to the extent that they are acting in their public capacity and not violating clearly established law. They are not immune from criminal liability.

The "clearly established law" part is usually the catch. I'll use Obamacare as an example. Say Obamacare had been found unconstitutional. Could businesses have sued Kathleen Sebelius for the money they spent in preparation for implementing this unconstitutional law? There are probably a number of reasons why not, but one of them is that she is protected by immunity because the question of whether Obamacare was a valid exercise of Congressional power was not "clearly established." Sovereign immunity would not protect her, because she is an agent of the government, not the government itself. In the context of NSA spying, there's quite a bit of debate on the legality of various programs, so that would not be considered "clearly established" either.
Yes, I just did earlier this morning -- for some reason it never occurred to me to try until I saw this article.
> But thanks for reminding me, another example: the US liberated Afghanistan from the Taliban.

Yes, only after it aided the Taliban in the takeover of Afghanistan

As a side note: is very funny to watch Rambo III and see the taliban portrayed as well meaning freedom fighters
A Man Storms At Super Bowl MVP Press Conference and Yells “Investigate 9/11″
There's 2 issues with persona.

1) users don't already have a personna account setup. They're used to hit their "login with FB/Google" account instead. They don't know that persona is better privacy-wise. So for many, it's just friction.

2) persona login sometimes appears slightly slower