skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
cool. that's what @acroll and I are all about. We want to help startups succeed. you can reach us anytime on twitter (i'm @seanpower).

Talk soon :)
Technically, as a minor he could just say "Whoops, my bad" and the contract would probably be voided, but practically speaking simply refusing to respond to someone on another continent leaves them pretty much screwed, even without taking any step to resolve the situation legally.

"Pay me."

"..."

"Pay me or I'll spend several hundred thousand dollars on a lawyer to recover my $30k!"

"..."

"Pay me please?"

"..."
You've got about 15 of those as a young adult. How much are they worth?

Most people have a shitty time their whole lives. Most people in history would dream of spending a year the way adult Americans do/did. My plan is to enjoy college and then dive into a startup.
http://gizmodo.com/5286694/herman-miller-setu-chair-is-a-poo...
Is this the course that used to be taught in scheme?
I usually would not up vote a comment like this... but you're actually correct here.
This is why I want to pay cash for my house.
"In Soviet Russia, Programmer's day is a holiday"
Related work is motivation. It's part of the story.

It depends on the paper -- in many cases, I think that a paper can be adequately motivated in the introduction, without explicitly enumerating all the potential related work. Given that most people stop reading quite early into a paper, I think there's a lot to be said for getting to the "Good Stuff" quickly -- and the related work is rarely the "Good Stuff".

Perhaps related work is more important for incremental, technical results: "problem A is important, B and C tried to solve it but their solutions were imperfect for reasons D and E, and therefore we propose F." But when you're, say, describing a new piece of systems software, the related work is less likely to be an essential part of the motivation for the paper.
I like to add automated tests for any application I write. These are mostly to prevent regression and to maintain sanity. Python makes this easy (as do the popular Python web frameworks such as Django). Do correct me if I am wrong, but I do not see the same importance given to automated unit testing in the PHP world. This leaves those who do want to automate tests with fewer choices of tools and accessories.
rms wouldn't approve (http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.os.openbsd.misc/134252/focus=1...).

;-)
I started to read the article and it sounded like a very short version of the book. I read the book (on a recommendation from HN) and took a lot from it. In particular I found the dynamic between the programmer who made the technology and himself (who did the business development) interesting. He made the programmer what I thought was a fair deal, worked his ass off selling, and things grew fast. The programmer got really pissed and created all kinds of headaches. Reading this gave me a chance to evaluate any future business relationships I might have as a programmer.

Overall the book isn't on my must read list but I still thought it was pretty good. I
There are two points that surprised me here:
1. Rods and pins are used instead of classic nuts and bolts;
2. Crane's extension.
It's amazing how self-sufficient a construction crane setup is.
Botanist Natalie Tapson says the plant is a genetic freak that can only reproduce by cloning itself.

She says it's under threat from the introduced phytophera fungus...

Sexual reproduction is a big sacrifice, instead of passing on 100% of genes, you only pass on 50% at a time. But on the upside, your offspring is more likely to survive new diseases.
Accidentally bad math or intentionally bad math? I recall the great article posted here, written by the self identified godfather of the software to slice and repackage risk. And I always wondered, did he understand the difference between correlated and uncorrelated probabilities?
I am surprised by the load bearing power of steel, the total height of a crane made of steel + the counter weight + the weight of what it's lifting, that's a lot of force at the bottom of the steel tower.
I don't see a catch-22, I just see freelance workers having more difficulty than salaried workers. That is, I see no circular dependency (you want to do A, but A requires B, and you can't do B because B requires A).
I wonder why they had to clone it in the first place. Most plants can be "reproduced" by taking a cutting and dipping the end in rooting compound. Perhaps this "oldest living organism" isn't that sophisticated though.

Still, a cloned plant doesn't seem like much of an achievement compared with a cloned animal.

However, that said, if this plant has really survived for 43000 years then that is pretty impressive. It must have been doing an awfully fine job on its own. That makes human efforts seem a little puny in comparison.
Is this a first linux botnet or a first web server botnet? The article makes it slightly difficult to figure out which it is.

In a way it only makes sense for bots to take over webservers as that gives them a better gateway to hundreds of other clients. I'm surprised we haven't heard of botnets like this years ago. Maybe they were just too well hidden before.
If you ask me why Python -- and Rails, for that matter -- aren't trouncing PHP, it's because Python ignores Windows, and doesn't focus on the web.

Hold the flame throwers for a second.

Everyone on this site knows you shouldn't be deploying websites on Windows. And I agree. WAMP is not a sensible production environment. But it's a great learning environment.

Because what the Python hackers of the world seem to forget is that 95% of all the computers in the world are running Windows. And for very large numbers of the owners of those computers "buy a second box and put Linux on it" is not an available option, and "run a virtual machine with Linux on it" is really complicated. They don't want to learn a new operating system, they want to learn a language to build websites in. In fact, all they want to do is _build websites_, and the language is the means to an end. They will take the path of least resistance, not the path that is most elegant.

You want to build a website in Python on Windows? Good luck. Sure, Python has a great Windows installer -- but then what? Django? Some other web framework? Have you tried installing Django on Windows? It is a gigantic pain in the ass. Oh, and the MySQL libraries aren't included. Oh, and they don't work with Python 2.6 unless you find a super-secret download mentioned only on a mailing list. And then you have to learn Python, and then Django, and then you have to work out how to deploy it to your host's web server.

Here's how you do the same thing in PHP. You go somewhere like here:
http://www.wampserver.com/
You download one file, run one installer, and it gives you Apache, PHP, and a MySQL server, all at the same time. You put some .php files in there and web pages start turning up in your browser. It's not pretty, it's not elegant, it doesn't scale, but it's your first web page ever and it's ready in 10 minutes. Ready to deploy? Copy your three PHP files to your web host via FTP, and presto, they work just like they did on your home machine.

Later, you discover frameworks. You learn about encapsulation, and MVC, and loose coupling and scalability. You work out that Windows is not exactly like your web host, which is running Linux. You might get around to installing Linux at that point, but you don't really have to because the differences are pretty minor. But whatever happens, at that point, you already know PHP. You're not going to switch languages.

Until Ruby and Python hackers swallow their pride and accept that welcoming newbies to the language means not forcing them to switch operating systems, PHP will continue to monopolize the market for beginner web developers, and hence the market for the professional developers that they turn into.
"Quantitative analysis has been getting more common in the past 10 years. We had a major crash recently. Therefore Quants caused the crash."

This is a very popular sentiment, yet utterly false. The companies that failed hardest- Lehman, Sterns, Fannie/Freddie, rating agencies- are (were) notoriously non quantitative. They are frequently made fun of in Quant circles in fact. Were any of these companies run by Math Wizards? No. Most of them have (once again, had) zero Quants in their upper management. You cannot blame the failure of such institutions on Quants.
A friend of mine is part of the team at groupon.com, which is a great group buying site. They've been extremely successful because they've managed to know and target their prime demograpic perfectly. Also, they localize their deals to a city, so that you're buying things like teeth whitening sessions and dinners at fondue restaurants.

But the key to their success has been their customer / market validation, and the singleminded pursuit of their target demographic (which is itself interesting, as they're targeting 25-40 y.o. females in a high socioeconomic class).
Ignoratio elenchi. I'm not suggesting that you do nothing with your life, just that you have to weigh the alternatives carefully.

(But as an aside, even today a huge percentage of the world's population lives in squalor. If this is your true concern, then I assume that you're going to address it with your startup? Otherwise, your argument is simply a justification for martyrdom. Noble perhaps, but not necessarily useful.)
This is the home buyer's own little perk of "mark to market" behavior. "Your making $X today? OK, we can safely assume that will be the same tomorrow.". Sometime bad accounting practices work in your favor. Congrats on getting in while you could/wanted to.
Are you quoting? Because that is not true. It's just a webserver, general purpose use.
In python, 30 lines: http://billmill.org/pong.html

(edit: I just mean to offer for comparison to this program, not in some sort of macho programming-language pissing contest sense.)
Good call. There is plenty of blame to go around. The models the quants used served their purpose of recording "profits" "right now". I think being short sighted was intentional or at least "unconsciously intentional".
Stealing Identities on Hacker News
The Wired Way
How Wired Magazine might hold the key to saving paper-based publications.
that jumped out at me too. to any lay-reader it sounds like ngnix is a web-server specifically designed for 'serving malware'.

thankfully they have libel laws in the UK.
It's unnecessarily ugly.

There's a lot of unnecessary state, where refs are initialized to nil, then only updated to a fixed value. There's side effects in transactions (mostly around the Timer). Not one function is defined with parameters, which ought to raise alarms. The flow resembles Java code rewritten in Clojure, rather than a functional Clojure program.

Besides that, much of the code is either non-idiomatic or primitive: the 'ns' macro should be used instead of 'import'; 'alter' can be better than 'ref-set'; 'when' is better than 'if' without an else form; the proxy identation is wrong.

The AWT/Swing interaction is excusable, as is the poor readability given the brevity constraint for this exercise, but there are still some elementary problems.
I took my inspiration from here:
http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/9a5l7/xml_is_a_...

Yes, I'm aware... I use nginx every day at work. Great little webserver :)
How Facebook could replace Twitter – Friend or Follow
That course was called 6.001, and it used SICP as the text. This course plus 6.01 (approximately) replace it.

Damn shame that politics forced the department to abandon Scheme. Now half the classes are taught in Python and the other half in Java.

From http://ai6034.mit.edu/fall09/index.php :
"The official language of 6.034 is Python for a variety of reasons having little to do with the strengths and weaknesses of the language." Politics. Yech.
You could easily replace "MacBooks" with "Windows" in that sentence and it would still be true.
lol, intrigued me about his daily usage and found (http://www.stallman.org/stallman-computing.html)
Citation not needed, because this is a conversation, not an encyclopedia article, and he gave a rough order of magnitude estimate which happens to be reasonably correct.

http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/06/the-cost-of...

http://childfindofamerica.org/Information.htm
I try to think about the best case, the worst case, and the most likely case, and also how easily each of those cases are avoidable.

For example, the worst case for starting a startup isn't that you learn a lot. It's that you continue the startup well past the point where you're learning anything, chasing a dream that was impossible to begin with, passing up other opportunities that would be far more productive.

But this outcome is fairly easy to avoid, and entirely under your control. You just have to take stock periodically and have the courage to call it quits if it becomes obvious that you're on a fool's errand. Basically, re-evaluate risk and opportunity at each step along the way to see if your upside is still the upside you thought it was, and if any further risks have accumulated to the downside.
Very cool, now where is the video on how a compiler is written?
Write Your Own Regular Expression Parser
Actually, yes. I know of a few.
CodeKata: How to become a better developer
I think this mostly proves that while HR people may not be idiots as big as we feared, they're bigger idiots than we hoped.
I have been looking for some structured exercises to work through. These look fairly promising.
So true. I guess titles are like RSS titles now; gotta tell enough to make the person curious.
> "The" screencast? Maybe in 2004 there was The One Rails Screencast, but their numbers are now legion. Referring to a screencast that's four or more years old so as to knock something today is dopey. It would be like complaining today about PHP3 speed and syntax.

Visit Ruby On Rails' homepage (http://rubyonrails.org/) and click "Screencasts" on the top menu bar. Click the first one, "Creating a weblog in 15 minutes with Rails 2". Watch. That's what I'm referring to, but it's not much different than the original screencast you're referring to.
One non-profit that works in this space estimates that 78% of the "family member or parent" abductions are due to a non-custodial parent. That would put the total around 159k, which puts the parent poster in the right order of magnitude.

http://childfindofamerica.org/Information.htm
I actually find things a lot more enjoyable when there are a large number of well enumerated steps: It's easier to track progress and it doesn't make me worry that I'm doing something wrong.

What I don't like is something that requires lots of details but where the required details are ill defined.
That viewpoint seems quite narrow to me.

The documentation of Twisted attempts to introduce several event-driven programming patterns. Most people have a 'wtf' moment or two when they come across design patterns that approach things seemingly backwards.

The further I got into my Twisted app, the more I found myself reaching for things and finding that were already there for me. It was a great experience. You should try it!
Using math to choose a mate
A Turing Test for Computer Game Bots: Better AI for Games
The latter, if either. Linux botnets have existed for eons... I remember seeing one in 2004, and I'm sure they existed much earlier than that.
That must've been posted after my comment, but who cares, it works. Thanks!
Books were rarities in ancient/old times and writers didn't name their book keeping promotion in mind. Today it's all different: there are lots of books out there and it's vital that a book has a title that sells.
The title suggests parody (see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=537000), but the domain confirms corporate earnestness.
Interestingly, the original as written in zero lines of code (It was 'programmed' as a ttl logic circuit)
"Everywhere I look ... they are most often told to learn Python ... in most corners of the programming world ... recommending Python"

Combined with

"Ruby's too trendy"

There's that cognitive dissonance again.
as PCs? you mean as Windows. Anyway isn't there a IE5 version or something for mac? That thing should could easily be classified as malware for mac written by microsoft.
When I saw that horrible hand-drying contraption, my first thought was "am I required to put my hands above shoulder-level to get them dry?" My second was "will it amputate my hands at the wrist?"

Tornado sorta makes me feel better about development, mainly because Twisted is phenomenally intimidating, like a black monolith.
Company culture: it's actually pretty important.
Download Counter Strike 1.6 Game [Full Version of CS 1.6]
The actual plant lives approximately 300 years, however all copies are identical hence all the wild plants stemming from this parent are considered as one living organism.

Another interesting plant is Welwitschia that can be found in Namimbia and Angola. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welwitschia).

Although under threat of extinction the plants living in Angola are better protected than the plants in Namibia, owing to the relatively high concentration of landmines in Angola, which keep collectors away!
Do any of the analytics tools like mixpanel offer build in management tools and reporting on processes as outlined in this tutorial?
I agree that there probably aren't any top-down things at a societal level that can be done, but I'm not convinced that this information wouldn't be useful for parents who want their kids to be independent, but to take the proper precautions. For example, were the children lured or were they forcibly taken? Were they alone? How old were they? If there is info on failed attempts, how did the child get away?

If I had children, I wouldn't want them to live a sheltered life and, obviously, there are a lot of common-sense precautions, but I still think that analysis of this information could be useful to the public.
... but if you want to do that, why not just have a website so everyone can look at it? You don't need to tie it to people who bought the album on iTunes.

I understand your point about music moving into the background when you're at a computer, and agree to some extent, but I think that's more to do with the fact you are sitting in front of an entertaining multi-function device rather than on a couch in front of a dedicated stereo system. It is possible to set up the latter even with a computer, and you'll still be distracted by all the possible activities with your computer even if you have a bundled web site to look at.

I agree that it's good to have something album-related to look at, to allow you to concentrate on the music more. Personally I think computers are the worst possible device to fulfil this role but don't have any other solutions.
Popular Search Engines in the 90’s: Then and Now
Maybe they don't? Felton's a professional graphic designer who makes money as-is. Not every web service needs a business model.
Reminds me of Bespin...
Interesting idea.

"But if we did that, who would drink Coors and drive forklift for Walmart and not complain about it?"

Robots? If the education system elevated more of the population, there would be a shortage of blue-collar workers, more pressure for system automation, and more well-educated minds to develop the robots. Of course, there would be no shortage of immigrants to fill the blue-collar positions, but perhaps in the long term, a "better" equilibrium would be reached.
Well. I run emacs for my text editor (and everything else). The stuff I do in the CLI is usually sort of basic shell scripting and pushing code.

I use the Windows' offline files feature to access my features over a samba share as well.

(That being said, in general if I'm on my laptop, I do have good connectivity...)
my immediate reaction to your comment was "wow good point." it's so easy to think our current values and trends are ubiquitous.

so then i got to thinking...maybe our current values and trends, in this case promotion, were the same, but the culture and language were different. we have to judge the book titles in the context of their times to know whether they had promotion in mind.

incidentally, company names seem to be getting shorter and shorter.
Can't upvote you enough.

I mostly write desktop apps. I really want to write my own web apps, just as a fun exercise. So far, PHP looks like the only programming language that will let me write web apps without spending eight hours trying to set up a friggin' web server.

I compile an entire OS from source every week (the Haiku trunk), but getting Python with Apache set up on OSX Leopard is something I always shy away from.

(Also, why is it so hard to not have to use a framework to write your webapp in the Python world? All I want is a 'Hello World', not friggin' Facebook.)
"Then the new programmer asks what language they should use for web programming. At this point, everyone looks at the floor, scratches the back of their neck, clears their throat a bit, and says that, well, you should probably use PHP because that's what everyone else is using."

wow! This is some seriously fucked up advice. if someone were to ask me what language he should learn first, the answer is Python. When "Then the new programmer asks what language they should use for web programming" the answer is still Python - use Django with its awesome documentation and uber friendly community- (and PostGres as a database).

This steers them clear of two terrible (but popular) pieces of software, PHP and MySQL.
What it's like seeing time
I remember him from the show, "Secret Millionaire," where millionaires dress as poor people for a week, then give away money to citizens that helped them out.

While I respected him for doing the show, I remember thinking at the time that he was way too into himself. He'd wear v-neck, designer shirts even though he was supposed to look homeless.

Then he'd cry a lot, and say, "And I normally never cry, but this has gotten me so emotional.." Which means he probably cries all the time to make himself look sensitive.

And he spread out his giveaway, which made the episode boring. Where other millionaires gave $100,000 per person, he'd give multiple people, $10,000.

All around bad episode. Now I'm mad..
On Designing and Deploying  Internet-Scale Services
Gödel, Escher, Bach OCW lectures
'Seinfeld' On Curb Your Enthusiasm
This is going to be awesome.
yes, the article was a written form of ADHD.
> But this outcome is fairly easy to avoid... You just have to take stock periodically and have the courage to call it quits if it becomes obvious that you're on a fool's errand

It's only "easy" in the same sense that it's easy to make money on the stock market; you just buy low and sell high.
Noreaga Says Don't Buy S.O.R.E. LP | Hip Hop MVP
I've found that this paper is very helpful in documenting what it takes to design and deploy an Internet service, both from the software engineering, QA/testing and an operations perspective.
I've done plenty of work with Twisted. My complaint was not that it lacked functionality, my complaint was that the culture of the project favors 'flexibility' over everything else. It's like the C++ of networking libraries. I'm sure there are plenty of times and places where its approach is exactly what you need, but it's just rarely a good fit for what I need.
Take my penknife, my good man!

Ok. I'm done now.
Well, the first two actually did have longer titles:

-Walden; or, Life in the Woods

-An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
Good news for Microsoft
They have a $4/mo pricing for premium accounts. That is what I was referring to.
I don't read much. My childhood was a childhood of literature: For me, there's more joy in undiscovered mediums than there is in one that I mined. So I'm more frequently following RSS feeds while listening to new music, or I'm watching movies.
Well, consider me a data point in the other direction, Tim. And everyone else on my block (it was block party night) --- we're all worried about cars. Sex maniacs not so much.
It's foreword, dammit.
There was, but it was discontinued by Microsoft in 2005 when Safari was released.