skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
O'Reilly Media enters partnership with Microsoft Press.
Jedi ejected from Tesco for wearing hood
I have very little tolerance (or desire to use) visual programming environments, or "CASE tools", or very dynamic languages that permit "rapid prototyping".

Someone give this guy a "quick application delivery tool" that isn't a dynamic language, or a prototyping tool, or a CASE tool, and make sure it's strapped to the back of a baby unicorn.

Why do otherwise good programmers insist on being ..

He is an MLer, you can't accuse this guy of being stupid, short sighted or trendy. Yet, he is going out of his way to handicap himself. ML is a big-picture programming language: you understand everything, then you type it out. Dynamic languages are better suited for exploratory programming; you start with your algorithms solving the simplest case, then you make things more sophisticated as you go. There is nothing "prototyping" about them; the difference between my prototypes and my production code is that my production code listens on a privileged port and has a cron job watching over it.
It seems pretty good. After I checked your site and your linkedin profile. I can't help ask this question: Do you think your training in M.D. help your working in Physician Software?

I always feel there will be a lot of improvement in software for physicians and lawyers and other professionals. But I dont' have background there and I don't have a clear understanding of the problem domain. Will an education background in those area help a software developer?
It's merely like replacing the engine in the Titanic from where I'm sitting.
Ask HN: Would you use (contribute to) a Yellow Page-like API?
Would you use an API that gives you data about businesses (location, type, revenue, employees etc...) around a provided location?
Wronged customers prefer apologies to cash
Hey, if you're 70 - who cares about looking cool?
Pretty Django Error Pages
Not if you're driving hits to your own blog posting.
Fun with nuclear game theory
The problem with sites like LinkedIn is that they own your name and can sell it back to you. When you use them they own your contacts as well and will stop you from contacting your peers when you don't pay (LinkedIn competitor Xing already did that to some users).

Before we reach the age of data portability or proper ownership of data you have to limit the power of third parties over your name. You have to use those services or someone else might do for you unofficially but you have to keep your name and contacts to yourself.

So basically you need a good SEO and CRM strategy where you own your name and contacts yourself independently of services like LinkedIn or Facebook.
Investors Pile Into Twitter’s Funding Round, Reportedly close to $100 Million
It is not just the "artwork" of a map that is protected, or else you would see people turning online map databases into collections of lines and points. The entire collection, as a whole, can be subject to a compilation copyright. This is why mapmakers put in little bits of fake data, so that if their fake data turns up in your map they can nail you for copyright infringement.
Now please refrain from telling us again how useless Twitter is. By now we know that some people don't actually like or use it.
I did too, and tried to get a discussion going again nine ours later, believing you had failed because of the time at posting, but no one upvoted mine either. It makes me think: worse than the constant discussion of the shape of HN is too much apathy to even discuss it.
So those are Keynes’ prescriptions for a successful economy: low interest rates, government investment, and redistribution to the poor. And, for a time — from around the 1940s to the 1970s — that’s kind of what we did. The results were magical: the economy grew strongly, inequality fell away, everyone had jobs.

Retribution and government investment may or may not be good ideas, but they are orthogonal to the problem of the business cycle.

For some reason, Keynes missed the entirely obvious fact that the fall in aggregate demand originates in collapsing credit bubbles. The credit bubbles happen for a very specific reason - a bug in the Anglo-American tradition of banking in which banks do not match their maturities. When the credit bubbles collapse, and people's bank accounts are wiped out, they stop spending. The supply/demand curve for luxuries and durables goes vertical as people cut expenses in a futile attempt to fix their balance sheets. When they stop buying cars, Detroit lays off workers.

The economy was more stable from the 40's through the 70's because the creation of FDIC insurance de facto turned banking into 100% reserve, maturity matched system (de facto, even though it still had a veneer of the old system). Effectively, with an FDIC insured bank, the individual deposits their money with the government, and then the government gives banks a separate license to print money to make loans. This broke down when the shadow banking sector grew up, and started maturity mismatching without the formal backing of the government.

In summary - the business cycle is really misnamed. It's the "banking cycle". To stop cyclical unemployment, fix the banks.
No its not in the CONUS, but many moons ago I was at Fort Greely, Alaska. When I was done with my tour and if conversation turned to the topic of my past travels, people would ask the whereabouts of Ft Greely. I say it was 100 miles south of Fairbanks. I usually get a small nod. When I then followed up with "and 90 miles from the nearest McDonalds" their eyes usually got bigger.
Whenever I have to use Perl, I get to a point when I want a nested data structure. Then I remember that I have to use a completely different syntax to do so, and my head explodes. Who thought explicit and non-automatic references were a good idea?

Nowadays I use Ruby if I have a choice: most of the best bits of Perl, less of the worst bits. The language actually feels like it was designed, rather than accreted over time.

Perhaps Perl 6 will be better, but I'm guessing scripts and apps written in Perl 5 will be around for a long, long while yet.
Fair enough, then. In that case you are exactly the kind of person I'm suggesting wouldn't be swayed. Are you going to switch to Windows just for this? Are you going to drop Rails because Microsoft has decided to grace us with a non-prohibitively-priced copy of their tools? For me, the answer is a massive 'no'. I could be wrong about you, of course :)
Same then as now: a mass transit vehicle. Pulled by horses back then, though. And usually a private business.
Basically he is describing an advanced REPL. But he doens't want a dynamic language.
How your application becomes enterprisey
This is awesome! I have it in my wish list ready to buy as soon as It's out. I'll also make sure to be in the next Fringe DC meeting.
I had this fun idea of registering an email address with an username being a common noun. Although I found it strange that the address was still available, but I didn't care too much about it, I was happy to have the account. (You know, new inbox smell).

And then emails started to arrive to the address. Of course, lots of them were spam-spam-spam-spam. But there were also some personal letters. For a while I thought it was some mistake, and replied nicely to them pointing it out, and tried to inquire about what could be the reason behind the confusion, but never really figured out.

The mails kept coming, and I realized that they weren't even addressed to the same person. Up to now I have at least 30 alteregos, giving out my email address to their friends, relatives, and using it in an attempt to register on web sites. Most of them seem to be female, so I get many mails trying to hit on "me" after that talk on im or seeing my profile on some website, etc. Also pictures of nieces, invitations to bbqs, and questions about my iron and if I can bring it to "the club" next Tuesday.

I just hope I won't get sued one day.
This reminds me of the Wall-E movie where everyone is fully emersed in their personal digital device and totally oblivious to the world around them.

Instead of staring at a screen while walking down the street I'd rather ask someone for directions. But who knows in the future they may be too busy with their own augmented reality app to notice...
Here's hoping HTML 5 will deliver and this platform will be irrelevant. Zero-footprint! Silverlight looks too much like embrace and extend to me.
Years of caste system in India restrict genetic variablity
Webcredibility.org seems to be down for a year but make sure to check out the archive.org version of their guidelines:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=841711
> I think a lot of the 'economic disparity' between developing LAMP apps and developing Microsoft apps is imagined and I think $999 a year for three team members is actually a pretty good deal.

Keep telling yourself that.
"People are suckers" because there are things they care about more than money? That's probably the stupidest conclusion I've ever read in my life.
Original Nature article
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v461/n7263/full/nature0...
"better data can beat better algorithms" well said.

Scribd is another good case study of how to present data to rank high in searches. Could this be that the view of documents is different to a crawler than one presented to a normal browser?
Last time I said that GMail is unreliable and thus you should not use it for crucial communications I was downvoted by at least a 12 people. I wonder if those people believe it when CNN tells you it's repeatedly broken.

Unless of course many HN readers work at Google ;-)
In this case they're suing google to acquire the users identity, and google has said they're willing to give the user the chance to oppose the order.

As far as I know ownership of email hasn't been contested in court, but the email was addressed to the accidental recipient, which even under mail tampering laws wouldn't mean he had done anything wrong. The laws for mail are to prevent me mail-box diving my neighbour or opening accidentally delivered mail, however if the mail was mis-addressed to me then it's legally mine through and through.

This email was mis-addressed, which wasn't the fault of the recipient. I highly doubt the Judge will rule in the companies favour and risk setting a precedent against federal mail laws for email, it would seem kind of absurd.
This is not brief. It's not one of the better things I've red on Keynes. It doesn't treat alternative economic theories seriously. And lastly and most important of all, economics discussions on hacker sites are as bad if not worse then political and religious discussions.
Django gaining or Rails waning?
This is so great. If only it had more granularity, a longer tail of obscure occupations. There's a lot to be observed here about terminology, too: compare 'constable' and 'police*'.
A paper from 8 years ago? Seriously?
There has to be some sort of precedent for this with physical mail.

On the other hand, I don't think that the bank is being unreasonable when you consider that Google said, "Sorry, no, you'll have to file a suit about this and proceed through legal channels."
Damn. Lisp and HTML5 in the same book. Who woulda thought... :-p
China doesn't own them all - it can just produce them the cheapest (like it does everything else). From the 2nd page of the article:

'"So there really is no shortage in rare elements, and in fact, there are enough deposits out there to easily fill demand, but at a price," he said.

At least until now, rare-earth production was not very economical, but if prices stay high, we will see many new mines outside of China, he said.'
This is not good news. IE is going to stick around a lot longer now -- sigh!
Registration Rights: Participating In An IPO
Being a hacker and being an entrepreneur are both creative activities (even that is contrary to common wisdom).

There are lots of hackerpreneurs. How to make them more successful? Maybe getting across that it is more than just a great app. It is scratching an itch.
Well see, the right way to do it is to have a single original document that represents a single version so that the annotation only applies to it. Of course this requires changing the whole web because there's no such thing as version control on it :)
Sorry, I don't want to explain the financial crisis to you but in short it was something like this: The financial system broke down, banks either went bankrupt or had to be rescued by tax payer money.

As a result of the financial crisis many people lost their homes. Maybe that was too complex for you to understand the connection and you still trust your bank. That's OK for you, it's your choice. Still many people don't trust banks anymore with good reason.
no, this is somewhat good news. IE was going to stick around for a long time anyways, because its the default windows browser and there will always be people who don't know better than to use the default.

this will just hasten the migration away. its probably not a huge win for anyone with respect to directly converting it into migrations to another browser, because the people who were clueless about switching probably still will be.

its just a really nice selling point when you have the ear of someone, trying to convert them.
Gmail Down | Gtalk Down - Blank Contact list in Gtalk
The Duct Tape Programmer (Response from Uncle Bob Martin)
This seems like alot to pay for a company that's raised funding twice before and still isn't anything resembling profitable.
Did you follow the link? It starts/ends with a story about a guy who bought a home with a p2p credit.
Heck, I'm not even there yet, and _I_ want one...
If I had to rank-order the various humiliations I've seen, this comes near the top.

Microsoft: "here's our best stab at what a great browser looks like - and it took us 14 years to get here".

Google: "we've been working on a codebase for 2 years. We decided to release it as a patch to your browser. Our brief foray into this area has improved your best effort by 10x".

Ouch!
It would be great if there was an API such as this. I was looking into doing a Google Maps mash-up a few years ago for UK schools, hospitals, shops etc. But decided against it because getting all the data would have been difficult and would probably have cost me a large sum of cash. So yes, I would certainly be interested in using such an an API.

How would you expect people to contribute?
The ability to raise $100m doesn't mean something is useful or will be a good business. It just means some people with money to invest think it will.
People believing Keynes is the reason we're in this mess now, and why 'noone' (the Keynesians) didn't see it coming.

Try this on for size: http://mises.org/etexts/austrian.asp
what is a "parser combinator library" ?
Using Moore's law does that mean Google's development is approximately 6 years ahead of MS?

(8 times faster code doubles the speed once, doubles the speed twice, and doubles the speed a third time.)
C++ = ++C
I don't know who funded the study but I'd much rather trust the Pwn2Own contest. Its all very well to say a browser is safe, but in real life when you have security and hacking experts at work on it, that's when you find out if the browser is secure or not.

I find it interesting that Chrome actually survived day one of the Pwn2Own contest. I would have thought Firefox would be the winner.
Perl is very influenced by the Unix command line. I can remember years ago (when other mini computer operating systems around and everyone was mad on pascal) my college lecturers disdain for the design C and Unix.

If the same thing happens again terseness, power and flexibility win against ridged ideas of how programs/command-lines should be written.

Perl exploded with the web, however before the web it was widely used. It might not be the web programming language of choice but it it's still great at manipulating information, processing large files and general administration.
In the President's Secret Service
Every half-baked, low-quality, ill-designed language has defenders somewhere on the web.

Why is this news?

In my professional career I've used C, C++, Perl, and Ruby.

I come with no preexisting biases.

...but after having written several programs in Perl until they became unmaintainable (despite my good coding style), and then rewritten them in Ruby in something like 1/10th to 1/20th the lines... I've got no particular interest in spending time reading about how Perl is wonderful.

I've been there.

I gathered my own data.

See Paul's thoughts on blub programmers and blub languages.

http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html
If the attacker wasn't stupid, it would double it.

If he has an exploit for chrome, he is going to add the magic tag and let ChromeFrame render the code thus the browser is vulnerable.

If he has an exploit for IE, he isn't going to add the magic tag, IE's engine is going to handle the rendering and the browser is vulnerable.

The key is that the attacker can choose what browser the victim is using, thus he can target either browser.
Oh!
What would moblin work on, arch-wise?
Facebook | Welcome to Facebook
Sony Walkmans have used AAC by default, and they actually have the option of converting all MP3's to AAC's to improve storage space (mine roughly doubled the storage space using AAC's over MP3's for the same song). Creative Zen's also play AAC and sandisk's whatever, same with many Nokia Phones, even the DSi plays AAC's.

Considering the considerable lack of choice when it comes to MP3 players, you're not exactly backed into the corner. You either have dirt cheap MP3 players that play solely MP3's or you buy an iPod/Walkman/Zune/Zen
I'm actually in this situation now. I run a small consultancy organized as a single member LLC.

Does anyone know if filing taxes as an S-corp and giving myself a salary gets around this at all?
Personally I would propose that it would halve the attack surface area. When you have two browser's worth of security at work then something that slips through IE might get caught by Chrome.

In my mind having two browsers would be an advantage security wise.
Investing during a recession, Recession-Proof Investing
Most people think that during a recession, the best thing you can do is stop spending, and cut back as much as they can. This is sound advice because recessions often lead to layoffs, and to tough times.
Reminds me of the Ashkenazi. It's amazing how far humans will take the us vs them meme.
The power of mobile money
Muchas bloody gracias. That took a lot of effort, mate.
In the commercial software development world, it's an amazingly good deal. It comes with a four-CPU license for both your web and DB servers, full copies of Visual Studio Professional, and a small pile of other tools that would easily breech the $333/year/developer mark... if you used Microsoft technologies.

I agree with the parent poster -- the wording and intent of this 'deal' are very, very different, and a bit insulting. But if you're already a Microsoft developer, it's still a hell of a deal.

Sure, it locks you in to their software stack in the future, but if you were an ASP.NET developer before WebSpark, it's not like this will change anything there.

What this does do, if you're a Microsoft developer, is let you take a chance at building a new company using your existing knowledge. Without having to shell out more than $100 to get all the software you might need. And I think that's a smart move for Microsoft.
This is misleading. Webkit, the core component of Chrome, has been worked on for far more than 2 years.
> The only way to effectively do this is to make the alternative, leaving control of the page to Squidoo, a bad idea for the brandholder.

If you assume evil, don't be surprised if that turn out to be the conclusion.

> this is a protection racket. You pay, or you lose something valuable

Well, any sale can be spun that way, with the something valuable being the good on sale.

What isn't demonstrated is the intent that not controlling your brands -in-focus page is damaging, rather than the neutral option.

The premise of this product is that the discussion is already happening, and than such a page can be somehow used to control it. That indicates that not buying would be neutral.

Granted, I can't see what I'd use such a page for, but then again, I'm not a brand manager.

> Just like GetSatisfaction

As I recall the GetSatisfaction debacle, they were essentially passing themselves of as agents of the brand. This is not an issue here.
SML, OCaml, and Haskell are all statically-typed languages with advanced REPLs, just not with the features he wants. It sounds like he want a constraint solver, among other things.
Maybe some people throw away $100m but nonetheless I'm tired of some HN users bashing Twitter each time a twitter VC story likes this comes up.
On one hand, I think this is pretty funny.

On the other, I think it's a stunning display of just how much muscle Google really has to flex (and perhaps more importantly, how much they're willing to flex).

It will be interesting to see how Google continues to treat companies it considers competitors over the next few years. The big guys like Microsoft will be able to handle it; but the smaller guys might have to start getting a little worried.
Believe me, you don't want to be ridiculed by spontaneous mobs when you're 70.
Okay, I'm just going to wait for a segway style face plant of an OAP.
All the owner of that blog would have to do would be to change his post to look like a normal robots.txt file and he could happily ban Google (or Yahoo, or whoever) from crawling any page on bit.ly.

No crawler I know of accepts a redirected robots.txt from an alternate domain for rules about the original domain.
Except they only benchmarked javascript performance. V8 is only about 2 years old.
Twitter Will Raise Another $100 Million in VC Funding Today
Maybe, but don't forget that there is also rubyonrails.com that you have to add on top (both are valid).

Also, rails.com is not as much a destination page as django.com. Most rails programmers rely on books to learn it and use API docs that are hosted on third party pages.
Speed up Internet Explorer(IE) using Chrome Frame
Hi folks, I'm working with Conrad on editing this book. If you're interested, you can keep your eye on the Land of Lisp page at the No Starch Press website:

http://nostarch.com/lisp.htm

We'll have an updated table of contents up fairly soon, and you'll be able to pre-order it as it gets closer to release. We'll also probably post some advanced samples as we move forward, so be sure to check back every once in a while.

Conrad's doing a great job, and it's going to be a really fun book!

Keith Fancher, No Starch Press
Another excellent article from mises.org: http://mises.org/story/2066

And in case you're wondering: yes, I'm being sarcastic.
I'm sure it will. I'm generally only installing fairly small packages, with bigger stuff the stow method would probably get tiresome.
They've got time before they have to worry about profit. Something as large as Twitter is almost definitely monetizable, so it makes sense for people to invest now on the incredibly high chance that one day it makes insane amounts of money for its owners.
Just because many people agree with you doesn't mean you are right. It's often opportunism. M$ will surely try block it, either technically or by law. For the uninitiated M$ is the short version for Microsoft.

I may be childish, but it has been the unofficial acronym for at least a decade so obviously whole generations of children use it.

Last but not least: Voting everything down you don't agree with is childish. I argue with people and don't vote them down like some bury brigade just because I disagree.
Cool, then once I get sick of programming I can change couriers and become a Web2.0 goon.