skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One of my companies works with sports franchises--not Fortune 500, but pretty substantial operations. This really hit home for me:

"You’ll be a bitch – whether you end up getting paid a lot or a little from a big company, you’ll be their bitch. They’ll expect a lot from you, and in most cases you’ll end up doing more work than what was listed out in your contract."

Now, if you stand up for yourself from the get-go, you can avoid that last part most of the time. But certainly, you can be treated differently than larger operations. They get the benefit of dealing with decision-makers (me) instead of some lackey, and they will often take advantage of that.

(But...not only YMMV, but MyMMV. I've got clients who try to make me their bitch, and I've got clients who worship the ground I walk on.)
I appreciate your response and voted it up. But I disagree that there is no benefit to actually testing his hypothesis. The mathematics don't need to be 'tested', but perhaps the priors do? For example, how certain are you of the assumption that the questions that we need to flip the coin for are evenly distributed between true and false?

It seems plausible that a test might have a bias whereby the harder questions are predominately one answer or the other. How large would this effect have to be to overwhelm the 2% probability? Would you trust your grade on the presumption that this effect can be ignored? What about your life?

For the record, I agree with Yvain's advice. I did just fine on the SAT's, partly because I followed the mathematically correct advice that one should guess if one can eliminate at least one of the 4 choices. But I wouldn't proclaim that this strategy needs no testing just because the mathematics are correct.
I like web.py's approach to templates. A few simple uses of $, if I remember correctly. A minimalist aesthetic. A typical Python framework's templating system is contrived and looks ugly by comparison.
This headline is confusing, to me anyway. In my mind, Wikipedia already has a layer of "editing", but what they mean is a layer of editorial, which to my mind is very different.
Since you are someone investing there, and investing normally being something that you do carefully, how come everybody is falling over each other to park their money there ?

You'd think they had a very positive track record wrt to ROI, but I only find evidence to the contrary.

It's almost as if lenders are lining up and they have a hard time finding people to borrow to, in 'the real world' you'd expect it the other way around.
"The change is part of a growing realization on the part of Wikipedia’s leaders that as the site grows more influential, they must transform its embrace-the-chaos culture into something more mature and predictable."

This seems like flawed logic to me.
Indeed.

http://www.answers.com/ethnic%20cleansing

I have a feeling that he was just using an inflammatory term in order to preclude rational discussion and win the argument.
That's the problem with most frameworks. The Auth looks nice but is a pain to implement just right...Profiles are painful enough in Django. I've noticed that in the end you usually have to rewrite the core components, so it's better to choose software that anticipates this. Django is great for run-of-the-mill sites, just like Rails -- I love generic views. I'm more likely to use Drupal for that class of website though.
The other important point to note is that the new/current Prosper has the agreements structured such that they, not the lenders, own the notes.

The original risks were that borrowers wouldn't pay and that Prosper wouldn't live up to their agreement (the effects of both of which are reflected in the graphs at http://fred93blog.blogspot.com/2009/08/prospercom-080109-lat...). Now a lender contends with a third risk, which is Prosper's own insolvency, a highly likely outcome, considering the lawsuits they face.
Unless I'm badly misunderstanding http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Flagged_protection_an... the article is misleading (and the title given here, which is not the same as the one currently appearing at the top of the NYT article, even worse).

1. The NYT title has "some articles" where the title here has "articles". The title here gives the impression that WP is about to start imposing extra restrictions everywhere, which it certainly isn't. The pages targeted by this measure are biographies of living people.

2. The page I linked to above, unless I'm all confused, says that what's actually going to be done is to allow BLP pages to be protected from vandalism using the flagged-revisions mechanism instead of the (already existing, already frequently used) protection/semi-protection mechanism. So even BLP pages won't be affected by default, but only when an admin specifically takes action.
From what I can see, the idea makes sense. They already have levels of protection that can be applied to pages when they feel it's necessary, and this seems to be an extension of that. The only big difference is that it still allows contributions from untrusted users if someone is willing to verify it.

That said, it seems like there is some sentiment that this ought to be something that is put in place over a widespread portion of the site. I don't know what the actual numbers are, but I have a hard time believing that there are enough volunteers for that without stagnating the site. As I said before, this seems like an extension of the protection system, and it ought to be applied in a similar manner.
there's a 'HNSearch' icon at the bottom-right of your screen :o)
Well, the New York Times uses the journalistic sense of the word "edit" whereas you use the sense popular among programmers.
Thanks for pointing that out. It's not a long article; I'm surprised that I missed that part.
A true counterexample would show that the monetary prize gave a faster or better result than no prize. Without a control, you haven't shown anything.

Fair enough. A counterexample: "the paycheck." :)
Definite meme potential here if you can flesh this out to the length of the /. spam solution form.
Anyway, the actual replacement of one group with another is not an overnight thing. Rather, neighborhoods, then cities, then regions, then states, one by one by one are overrun. Only then, when reversal is impossible is the actual country gone.

What the hell are you talking about? Did I just step into some kind of apartheid racist agenda? "Only then, when reversal is impossible is the actual country gone." Who says the country is gone? First, I generally don't like to use terms like "overrun" when I speak about humans from different ethnicities moving into various geographical regions because I don't think of it as an "invasion." Secondly, the United States is not defined by its whiteness. Being white is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition to being an American. As I said in my parent post, I see no problem with the growing number of Hispanics in the population. I feel that it doesn't matter which ethnic group has a plurality or majority in the United States and it certainly doesn't make the country any less the United States.
HN automatically redirects you to the page if the link was already submitted. This works most of the time. If you really want to be certain you can try searching in searchyc.com.
Only if you've never had to debug a program!

Life is more like recursive debugging. You poke around until you find a bug, fix it, introduce a couple of more, rinse and repeat ! When you think you're done, the requirements change.
Drupal is a total pain to upgrade though. That is, if you can do it. Plenty of times you find that going from one major release to the next you might as well rewrite the whole thing.
The "flagged revisions" UI was utterly horrendous the last time I used it, way beyond the knowledge of the average user. I hope they've tidied it up since then.
Solving the touch screen scroll problem
The choices you make for you and your app are yours alone, and each must be weighed against your other needs. I didn't mean to imply that exporting your customer's data was an easy or priority job.

However, you don't operate your business in a sandbox. We're moving, ever so slowly into a world where ownership of data is becoming a very real concern for many of your would be customers. You will run the risk that either a new customer finds your terms unacceptable, or even worse, that your competitor does this extremely expensive task for you.

There are many situations and each deserves it's own investigation. I'm merely stating a design principle that is good to practice.
"To lock in your users data may be in your terms of service but that does not mean it will stand up in court. Portability is pretty much a given..."

It is a given in terms of best practices in various regards, but not in law (at least not in the US or other jurisdictions with similar IP frameworks).
Did something new ("Hacker News") happen with web.py?

...

Ah, no. Hmm. Well, I've proposed this before(http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=750998), but what do you guys think about the adoption of this rule:

"If you're posting to inform us of the existence of something, assume we already know."

Details and examples in the post linked above.

Assume that we know about web.py, especially since its creator is from the first set of YC startups.
Your original post implies that this is a barrier to entry.

It is a barrier to entry. I provided one example, there are many others. Try participating in the OpenJDK development process. At every turn, you'll find that administering copyright assignment is, bluntly, a gigantic pain in the ass.

As you already noted, it's nearly impossible to put the cat back in the bag, if you fail to do this to begin with.

So you're suggesting that I can't sell support/services for my 'law firm software' because the paralegal/lawyers that are actually using it on their company desktops will not be paying out of pocket for services? Huh?

No. I'm saying that consumers won't buy services for consumer software. If you're selling enterprise support services, you're not selling consumer software to consumers.

No one is forcing you to. I'm not being 'Pro-GPL' here I'm just poking holes in your argument.

A standard argument for the GPL is that you can (should?) sell services, not software.

In your original post you seem to be applying that to all software that someone might choose to make GPL.

If you write software within a narrow band (enterprise, requires support, sold to non-technical organizations) you might be able to make the GPL work for you. Like I said originally: "lots of silly caveats".
Barnes & Noble, Irex team up against Amazon's Kindle
Five years in muay thai (MTA in North Hollywood) and blue belt in brasilian jiu jitsu. Lots of concussions, broken hands, messed up hips and tendons ;)

Seems like hackers are more into martial arts rather than MMA or muay thai or boxing, BUT I've met some guys that are engineers and programmers.

Fighting takes a couple years to get good at and keeps you goal oriented and focused under extreme stress and failure.

The first round is all hype, but when the third bell rings you feel like shit getting ready to go out there. That's when doubt creeps in. Killing that doubt in your mind or staying attacking even when you're losing is what makes a fighter a special breed of person. Lessons are learned the hard way, but they stick with you.
Facebook misued.
No, you can do realtime graphics just fine with fixed point arithmetic.

You can do nice matrix and vector math entirely in 16.16 fixed point. It's not as fast as having a co-processor, but there was a time that those were not standard items.
NOD32 login update 25/08/09
I found him non-trivially annoying, but nowhere near as douchechill-inducing as David Pogue.
I'll have more on basic game theory, including a post that will explain a relatively painless and fun way to learn the basics. Stay tuned.
Writing great unit tests: best and worst practices
Maybe we could just define "zero = 123456789" or something like that while we're at it. If we're going to break math we may as well go whole hog.
My all-time favorite pointing device was an optical trackball from Microsoft (I forget the model name). I haven't found one of those since the last I had one was stolen (yes, really) back in 2003ish.

The IBM Model M [1] (and certain imitators), the Das Keyboard [2], the HP Wireless Elite [3], and even the keyboards on Thinkpads [4] are among my all-time top-five favorite keyboards. The original run of Microsoft Natural keyboards [5] (back before they became bulbous "multimedia" train wrecks of UI design [6][7]) were a very distant fifth place, though.

1: http://sob.apotheon.org/?p=61

2: http://sob.apotheon.org/?p=1193

3: http://sob.apotheon.org/?p=865

4: http://media.laptoplogic.com/data/reviews/images/73/keyboard...

5: http://images.tigerdirect.com/skuimages/large/M17-1806-main....

6: http://www.pctechguide.com/images/51NaturalKeyboard.jpg

7: http://tinyurl.com/na5pos
pylons?
Many people would argue that's a good thing.
I like Neil, but there was no reason to use "fuck" when "forget" would work just as well.
Mandriva 2010 beta: Screenshots
I said I'd like to know without having to submit it -- in short, without a submission showing up if it doesn't already exist on HN. Sometimes, I just want to know if something has already been submitted, and am not trying to submit it.
Does it somehow allow me to search by target URL for the headline link?
Django's template system is the sexiest I've seen (mostly because of the simple syntax and inheritance). I've been meaning to check out web.py for a while now, will have to see how web.py templating compares.
I'm guessing it depends on the kind of diet. If you want to loose weight short term and you watch what you eat or you follow a program, then the calorie gain from drinking diet sodas is great. Even more, you can have the occasional sweet thing without ruining the diet.

If you want a long term, mostly maintaining diet, then yes, the side-effects can become important.

And to answer your willpower question: yes, it comes from the brain. But we have many "brains". And the one you use in a strict, short-term weight loss diet has very little in common with the every day "I feel like having a snack and it's ok" brain.
I dislike the fact that they chose the term "flagged", which, in a lot of other contexts, implies "flagged for review". On wikipedia, instead, an article revision is flagged because it's been reviewed.

This annoys me about as much as the fact that Ctrl + Mouse Scroll Wheel works backwards in Firefox versus every other browser out there (Ctrl + Scroll Up actually makes the text smaller, which is completely unintuitive. Up means taller, bigger, stronger! Who screwed that up?)

Also, they drive on the wrong side of the road in Britain! The first two problems are worth fixing... I guess the third one can't be helped.
One step up would be CherryPy.
I figured if the url was posted before the dupe filter would catch it, apologies.

Also, and this is something that keeps coming up here, we did not all sign up to HN on the same day, so we do not all know what has gone before.

Lastly, what is not useful to you may be useful to someone else, I think that if people here would apply your "If you're posting to inform us of the existence of something, assume we already know." rule that a lot of very interesting content would not make the cut.
I listen to psychologists on this because they're the people who have done rigorous studies on the issue. Seems like a good reason to listen to them. Why are you railing against this? The data are against you.
I'm sorry, I must have missed something. With these game mechanics, why exactly can't new people make a bunch of spam accounts to flood the site?
Web.py reminds me greatly of Sinatra http://www.sinatrarb.com/, a minimalistic very agile ruby web framework.

These sort of frameworks are ideal for developing APIs or stand alone (RESTFUL) services, anything that does not rely heavily on forms or a proper UI experience. Sinatra for example can only have one controller, so any app you develop will naturally do one thing (and do it well).

They're also perfect for prototyping ideas!
Web Analytics Books
If you had to pick two or three books on web analytics, which would you select and why?
Great interview. It's amazing that they built all of this during the past couple of months. Awesome work guys!
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=limit+of+x+-+(x+-+1)+as...

Also, http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=infinity+-+(infinity+-+...

If nothing else, Wolfram Alpha is useful for math. I'm impressed that it understood my syntax for limits that I made up on the spot, first try.
You could probably build a gadget that does this, yes?
> It is a barrier to entry. I provided one example, there are many others. Try participating in the OpenJDK development process. At every turn, you'll find that administering copyright assignment is, bluntly, a gigantic pain in the ass.

IIRC, Samba requires you to assign over rights to contribute. Maybe take a look at their process.

While I will admit that I have no experience with large projects like OpenJDK, I'll venture a guess that the larger a project gets (and/or the more submissions it gets) that harder it is to manage.

GPL is not always realistic with out side effects, but that doesn't mean it's never realistic either (or that it can't be done if you accept the side effects).
Sorry; when I see those

{% %} {{ }}

I feel nauseated.

Also, it's bizarre to use a language (Python) that uses indentation instead of endif's, closing braces, etc., and then turn around and require endif's and endfor's in your templating system. web.py's templates get that right: just use the Python style.
Their thesis, that it increases cravings in certain ways, is reasonable. The implication that people behave like rats with absolutely no ability to reflect upon or control those cravings, however, is not.

I'm also one of those people that lost weight (a small amount in my case, but I didn't have that much to lose) by switching to drinking diet soda. It allowed me to satisfy a certain type of craving (to drink something with taste other than water and to satisfy some need for something sweet) without adding calories to my diet; it's possible it instilled other cravings in me for sweet things, but I've found those far easier to ignore.

Not all cravings/desires/impulses are created equally.
I took out a small loan with prosper 3 years ago and it's definitely a quick and easy way to get cash if you have good credit.
Rebol 2:

>> 999999999999999 - 999999999999997
== 2.0

Rebol 3:

>> 999999999999999 - 999999999999997
== 2
Better solution is to post fake data
It's primarily about spreading the risk out to many more customers, so even if this happens in a few customers, it doesn't affect your core cash flow.
That link you put up doesn't mention any DFW articles.
Ahhh, Internet time -- a hoary old tradition, skewing our perceptions of newness since 1993.
I don't really have an opinion to state on the actual discussion at hand, but I figured I'd toss in an old link which contains what some of "those" might be:

http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-tol/2007-March/0...

Javier Kragen Sitaker's article/mail "My Evolution as a Programmer", recounts one coder's his growth as a programmer, career, and exposure to a variety of books throughout. It's really an excellent read, and contains some comparisons between a few good books - particularly Code Complete and The Pracice of Programming. I quote,

During this time, I read "The Practice of Programming", which is a lot like "Code Complete", but shorter and much higher in quality. I had read the same authors' "The Elements of Programming Style" back in 1995, on much the same subjects, but that book is nearly unreadable today --- it's written in PL/1 and FORTRAN IV. TPoP, aside from being written with modern programming languages, also contains insights from several decades more of the authors' experience.

-- The author in question is Brian Kernighan. Anyrate, I leave any interested person to go check the article out, if you haven't seen it already.
It's a syllable shorter and places emphasis on the statement?

"Forget that" versus "Fuck that", beyond adding a swear, adds some energy to the sentence, which isn't a bad thing. Mind you, this was stated more eloquently (and in 2005) by 37signals, who this post is rather paraphrasing, who put it as:

"Who cares about the Fortune 500? It’s time to care about the Fortune 5,000,000."

http://37signals.com/svn/archives2/sidebusiness_software_the...

Nicer, also, because it doesn't use the obnoxious phrase "all about".
And what's wrong with bare wires pushed into the socket with matches?
If he really wanted to disappear, he would delete his Flickr account, shut down his email address, and not say a word about where he is to anybody enough of an attention whore to pass the news along to Wired.
I was going to use twilio for our nagios alerts but ended up going with tringme.com since they allow for international calls.
Like Ruby.
[ I should preface this all with a giant In My Humble Opinion. I think that this rule has the potential to be a hack that solves a problem, so I'm arguing for it -- it's not a rule that's been adopted, just something that seems promising to me. This should in no way be construed as criticism of the poster, particularly since web.py is very hackerly. ]

Your objection is not only valid, but correct! "A lot of very interesting content would not make the cut."

I think that's a feature, not a bug.

That's the point of HN! It's Hacker News, not Hacker Stuff.

For instance: did someone write an interesting article talking about their experience with actually using web.py, in a way that is likely to be benefit other python hackers?

Then that would be news, and it would qualify! And much more so if they were your own experiences.

But to inform us of the existence of things that are not new -- no offense, but we could all just noodle around in Wikipedia and post interesting, hackerly content until the sun went cold.
That's how real engineers do it.
Serious question: Why would a scam group require a 500-page application? Wouldn't they want to maximize the number of suckers prepared to pay the $5,000?
Finally.. miles per GGE isn't a new concept, especially for those of us who've had alternative fuel vehicles for years.
Not hard to get a page indexed with only 700 other competing pages. lol
I'll certainly try to remember to use priming more often.

Good read, thanks for the link.
From the guidelines:

"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."

I fail to spot the word 'news' in there.

Also, and this is as pointed as I'll make this I find it a little disconcerting to see a guy who has posted exactly one 'Ask HN' in approximately three years here tell others what they should / should not post.
Newly discovered carnivorous jungle plant eats rats whole
nice thought! I'll add it in the next version! thanks
Poll Everywhere (YC S08) is Hiring Ruby/Rails Engineers
Not only endifs and endfors but also tons of braces...
One Crime Solved Per 1,000 London CCTV Cameras
Serial Anti-Spam Lawsuit Filer Loses Appeal... And His Possessions
But what do you actually rewrite? Module upgrades, if done properly, are straightforward, and the phptemplate API is stable (themes).