skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If I had to choose between going through life provincial, delusional or cynical, I would definitely choose some blend of delusional and cynical.
http://www.google.com/search?q=F%23%20better%20performance%2...
Everywhere I look, when new programmers ask what language to learn first, they are most often told to learn Python.

C is too low-level, Perl's too old and crufty, Ruby's too trendy, Scheme is too esoteric, Haskell's too difficult, Lua doesn't have enough libraries, Java's too verbose and corporate, ... the list of reasons not to go with other languages is a mile long. Note: PHP is usually never even mentioned.

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.

So, in most corners of the programming world, many experienced programmers are recommending Python.

You know how to get "everyone else" to use Python for web development? You make it easy to deploy -- just like PHP.
What do you mean, missing pieces? It's all right in there!

I didn’t know how to program, but realized that advertisers would need a way to track visits online. I thought I could buy software to help me, and found a guy in London who had technology that he offered me for $30,000.

See? It's as easy as ABC. Identify problem, find a programmer who has the shrinkwrapped solution sitting on his harddrive, convince him to give it to you for the promise of paying $big_sum later (as we know most programmers are slightly retarded anyways, he'll do it), launch, cash out, write book, buy rolex, make douchebag stock photo, done.

If that's not a guide on how to launch a successful startup then I don't know what is.
Amarok has similar functionality. With the added benefit of song queueing. So if I want to listen to a particular song without killing my playlist it's easy. And queuing a particular song to be next can influence the dynamic playlist allowing me to have one playlist that changes throughout the day to match my current mood/desires. Itunes doesn't have this feature and doesn't seem likely to anytime in the future.
The animation is stupid. You are listening to an audio clip of Bach being played forward and backwards simultaneously. You could do this with any song played in key.

A mobius strip has one side so it would be read like on paper. The twist is the result of representing a two-dimensional object in three-dimensional space.
I think the most common technique is to ask ourselves, "What is the most likely outcome?", and if that outcome is good, then we do it.

For those thinking logically, yes.

Many others (not hn readers, or course) ask themselves, "What is everyone else doing?"

Marge: What on earth possessed you to get an earring?
Bart: Milhouse has one.
Marge: If Milhouse jumped off a cliff...
Bart: Milhouse jumped off a cliff? I'm there.

[EDIT: Oops, I forgot the </sarcasm> tag. I keep doing that. Obviously, we all make many decisions by following the crowd. Those of us who pride ourselves in being logical would rather not admit it except for the most minor decisions.]
ClickAgents! I remember them! I still have an uncashed cheque from them from 1999 or something. Somehow my personal website managed to make USD$40 or something. It would have cost me $30 to cash in Australia so I just kept it as a momento of times gone by.
Just today I was tinkering with dreamscheme and its SDL hooks, thinking about writing a pong clone, wondering if it would gain any attention after Haskell pong has.
If it's more for the entertainment, I wonder whom they envision paying for this service ?
I do get that point, but to that end, perhaps they made their decision, in part, based upon the same type of thought process.

This is progress, and as a result, the Twisted people, if they're listening, have gotten valuable feedback out of the process from many people other than myself as a result.

There has also been much more about Twisted on places like Hacker News than I've seen, relatively speaking. With Dustin porting the meat of Tornado on top of Twisted's IO handler, there is much more interesting things to come out of it all.

It is in no way a negative thing for Twisted for there to be competition in an area of cross-over such as this.
Yeah, people don't actually make decisions logically for the most part, but to the extent that there is any about of reasoning (or rationalizing), there is some technique to it.

I updated the post :)
http://github.com/dustin/tornado
Yes, Dustin forked it on github. You can read about it here:
http://dustin.github.com/2009/09/12/tornado.html

tornado.twister here:
http://github.com/dustin/tornado/blob/205a13b3c0afac843abdeb...
Obviously, your reference frame is different from a 10-year-old's.

In Bart's mind: the most likely outcome of jumping off a cliff is that I'm with my best friend, and personal injury at my age heals really easily.
Pseudonyms as the future's essential privacy curtain
I see no point to this at all, but seems some people like it. When I listen to music I'm appreciating the creative output of the artist; there's no need for it to be dolled up by animated web pages and visualisers and what not. In fact I find that kind of thing distracting and usually annoying, like those DVDs which have some half-ass custom menu effect meant to "put you in the mood" or something; I wish I could just skip it.

Still, glad (and somewhat surprised) to see it's not an encrypted, proprietary black box. Kudos to Apple for that and a great advertisement for the excellent Webkit.
I agree.

Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

It's not intellectually curious, is vaguely a "crime" story, and it's exactly the sort of story they bring up on TV news editorials.

Personally, I'd only want to see social science, crime, or general news stories here if they have just a smidgen of specific relevance to hackers, programmers, techies, whatever. This story is prime time news all over. The fact that it's gotten voted up quite a bit says a lot, however, but many stories that are relevant to techies have been voted up and then killed nonetheless.. so I don't see any consistency here.
> What good is that when show up in Japan and can't read any of the signs around you?

Anyone have an idea of how difficult it would be to do an augmented reality iPhone app that would translate these signs, etc., on the fly for you? If I were traveling, I would probably buy an iPhone just for that app.

A quick Google search turned up this NYT article [1] from 2002 about the idea. Does this exist in a retail app already?

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/14/technology/what-s-next-poi...
Many others (not hn readers, or course) ask themselves, "What is everyone else doing?"

Are you seriously saying that HN readers aren't prone to jumping on bandwagons? To the extent that the HN readership is a microcosm of the silicon valley startup culture, this seems profoundly inaccurate -- I can't think of any group more prone to imitation than silicon valley startups.

(Obviously there are some exceptions -- and the exceptions are the successful companies which we all hear about.)
ever use conkeror?
It's odd that an economist wouldn't mention transaction costs in his model at all. If the cost of time travel is extremely high, it wouldn't be worth it to travel back in time for economic purposes.

It's also possible that those with time travel ability choose not to alter the past for any of a number of reasons.

Further, by the point at which time travel is developed, money may not have any importance.

Yet another possibility is that our future may include a point of complete economic collapse in which all current banks cease to exist.

There are plenty of good arguments against time travel, but Graboyes's isn't as successful as he would like it to be.
I don't agree with the first point about anniversary stories; there should be more follow-up in journalism, not less.
This information and advice should also be directly applied to anyone using Google Adwords to get visitors to their websites.
The majority of Loopt's backend is written in C# and runs on windows.
I think there is a typo, you should have written STandard, thus also forming a paradox :D (have in mind that language is a sort of de facto standard, otherwise communication would be impossible)

I'll assume you are serious. Capitalizing the second letter you can still be sarcastic without people noticing it (see #3), you are stating that you are sarcastic so you are a loser (see #4), and you are a nerd for committing to a "standard" made by "supernerds".

Sarcasm has existed since the human being exists, probably before, fortunately we all have now the standard we needed from the very beginning.

See? No paradox here.
Seconded. However, in Google AdWords, you have the luxury of sending your soon-to-be-customer to a landing page. You can change anything about that landing page without impacting the experience of your site for "normal" users.

With TechCrunch, they're likely going to be sending folks straight to the front page. Which means optimizing for the 100,000 ADHD squirrels hopped up on crystal meth means pessimizing for all those forgotten sobs paying you money.
hey pdcan. We try to be as agnostic as possible in the book (Complete Web Monitoring) - the idea is that you can apply a total web monitoring strategy (which includes how to just .. "be" on the web) to just about everything.

anyhow, glad you're enjoying it!

(ps, I'm @seanpower, the co-author of the post and book)
I used to jump on bandwagons, but then I changed and started thinking all decisions through on my own, because I noticed that's what everybody else on hn was doing.
Scientists Clone Oldest Living Organism
First Botnet of Linux Web Servers Discovered
Zach's Journal - Stealing identities on Hacker News
I agree. The flexibility of renting is highly attractive. Houses are only winning investments if you stay in them for several years, and may be losers altogether if they discourage you from pursuing certain jobs.
Book Titles, If They Were Written Today
I think about outcomes rationally, but these days, I tend to think about opportunity cost a lot more intently. Sure, if you tank a startup, you likely lose only your investment, and you'll probably learn a lot. Problem is, you've also just spent N years of your life doing little but working like crazy.

If you're lucky, you've got about 80 years to enjoy on this planet. You've got about 15 of those as a young adult. How much are they worth?

(And just to pre-empt the obvious reply: yes, you might enjoy working more than anything else. If so, more power to you. I'm only saying that you've got to take opportunity cost into account.)
But taking a 30K risk when you're 16 is pretty impressive, especially considering how poor his family was.

He would have been, practically and legally speaking, able to walk away from that deal totally without consequence. Remind me who was taking the risk again?
I would think certain cases might have far higher click throughs in fact. For instance, if I'm searching for $FOOD near $LOCATION on my mobile phone, I would be incredibly likely to click an appropriate ad.
Hubble Telescope Pictures
"But in addition to running an Apache webserver to dish up benign content, they've also been hacked to run a second webserver known as nginx, which serves malware."

This poor writing, especially the use of the non-restrictive relative clause ("which", not "that"), suggests that nginx is designed to serve malware almost exclusively.
I can see if this is poorly done it will become annoying like a repeating DVD intro for sure. But as an artist, this also gives an opportunity to be not just musical but visual and even interactive. If it's based on webkit, sky's the limit for what you can embed. A listener chatter box? Why not? These could totally hook up to a server for interactive elements and ongoing content updates. You could tell a whole story in one of these.

I love vinyl LPs because the larger visual format is more immersive and I take the time out to enjoy the experience. On the computer, I find all music becomes background music, which is a shame. So I'm really looking forward to what artists (myself included, hopefully :) will do with this. I hope it lives up to that experience and becomes the new standard "LP" that other players adopt too.
Bing advertising on Google?
Especially since they were crazy times, but not because of crazy revenue. Those were the days of big cash outs, not big revenues.
I wish I could find info for artists on creating these. So much potential for creativity here, and I hope that's opened up to indies sooner than later and not just the majors.
You can very roughly divide techies into a few groups: people who would rather work for a salary, people who are ambivalent about a salary job and starting a startup, and people who have made it their mission to start a startup.

For the first, there is probably some satisfaction in helping people's XML-based loan transactions reach the bank, etc. Y Combinator is perfect for the second group -- they can give it a shot and if they fail, hey, they'll probably have a great story to tell their interviewer. The last group probably realizes the odds are against them, but with enough attempts they think they'll make it (and if not they loved doing it anyway).

I'm definitely in the third group. The way I evaluate risk and opportunity is I imagine what kind of a life I could live: As an employee I could have a positive effect on thousands of people who need the utilities I'm building for them. As a researcher I might accomplish something on the order of curing Polio.

But I have too many things I want to do and it requires capital to get them all started. Otherwise, it would take many lifetimes to do them without capital. I want to experiment with creating projects that have a positive impact on society. So for me the risk is minimal considering if I don't try to create a successful startup, I'll be miserable. I'm just not the type of person who can settle for a job. Sometimes I wish I were, but I'm not.
Two people is news to me — their website lead me to believe otherwise:
http://twistedmatrix.com/trac/wiki/TwistedMatrixLaboratories
> They decided to mildly sedate the next mouse they levitated, which seemed content with floating.

In unrelated news, NASA is now attaching astronauts to an IV drip of what they will only label as "happy juice".
Augmented Reality App for Translating Chinese Characters [2002]
BuzzInTown.com is an example of digital traction in a highly analog ecosys/geo. In combo w/ say CitySense (iPhone & B'berry app) that implicitly offers interest-based segmentation along spatio-temporal lines and an intelligent calendar app like LuckyCal, we may be on our way to an elegant, albeit cobbled-together solution.
There's also a link at the end of the page to a similar list of OS X commands on the same site: http://ss64.com/osx/.
Ugh, the code is ugly :/
I think the "IF" part from "If I'm comfortable with the worst-case outcome, then I can move without fear and focus my attention on the opportunity" is the most important part.(Assuming I have clearly evaluated the risks) People probably take it for granted that they are comfortable or focus more on avoiding the worst-case outcome than focusing more on the opportunity.
Completely agreed, providing the system works. I'm not a native En, I mean self-taught teacher? Sorry.
I miss liner notes. I still rarely buy individual tracks, being much more partial to the album and musicians/bands who can record albums. I've heard enough people think this is backward. Me, I might actually buy some music on iTunes finally (currently either rip CDs or use Amazon MP3)
Someone please tell me "there's an app for that" on current retail hardware:

Now, Dr. Haritaoglu has come up with a wireless solution to these translation blues: a cellphone or palmtop containing a color digital camera that takes a snapshot of the mysterious text and sends it along to a server. Software on the server identifies and translates the text, sends the English words back, and superimposes them on the screen.

So Dr. Haritaoglu can point and click with his hand-held device at a sign in a grocery store window containing the Chinese characters for ginseng, shark fin and herbs, as he did recently in San Francisco's Chinatown, and, 10 or 15 seconds later, see the words in English on the screen.
Applies to sysadmins too. Don't patch/upgrade the server the evening before you leave on vacation.....
Wall Street’s Math Wizards Forgot a Few Variables
Sent now.
Python based MIT 6.00 | Intro to Computer Science and Programming
I use these things at work and I'm getting pretty good at it but frankly the whole non-open source thing kills me and I wouldn't use it on personal projects.

That being said webforms suck man you can use MVC and still have the nice tools.
Heh, from stevey's http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/04/xemacs-is-dead-long-... :

"If Emacs can't find a way to evolve into (or merge with) Firefox, then Firefox or some other extensible browser is
going to eclipse Emacs. It's just a matter of time. This
wouldn't be a bad thing, per se, but there's a good
chance it would be done poorly, take forever, and wind up being less satisfying than if Emacs were to sprout
browser-like facilities."

Round one to Emacs, then.
This is your human lint:"its," not "it's." Second paragraph, '20 percent of it's value.'

/me goes back to reading.

Edit: okay, finished. Great observations.

> "[...] These things all raise the expected value (in my mind at least), so if they are mostly true, and I'm excited about the best-case outcome, and I'm comfortable with the worst-case outcome, then it's probably a good gamble."

'If I'm excited about the best-case outcome ...'

This can be a big problem for some people.

I like difficult things, but I'm excited by freedom, and the "best-case" outcomes for a lot of my really 'ambitious' ideas just don't sweep me off my feet. If the best outcome is lots of money for lots of work, for instance ... well, I do lots of work for no money at all right now, but is it worth shouldering that "moral weight" that I hear doing an ambitious startup entails?

A best-case outcome for me is one that I produced without committing myself to do so. Maybe I'm just a coward, or maybe I've just been burned by committing myself too rapidly in the past.

I'm doing a startup, but it's really just a small business with some friends that happens to run custom software. Maybe it'll turn into something more, but I'm not committing to that!

;)
Is uzbl windows-friendly or is it unix only? There are people that use Emacs outside of a unix/linux environment you know :p I wonder if something like this would be possible with Firefox.
He's a little contradictory about it. A followup story is a great way of correcting errors (#4) and describing what isn't known (#3).

#1 is also undermined by #6: crusades, even when you think you have the facts on your side, are of a piece with commentary.

So I'd replace his #1 with "no fluff pieces masquerading as news" and call the list good as far as it goes.

On the topic of anniversary stories, I think timelines are badly underused in hard-news stories. A clear and thorough chronology, in chart format to make different threads clear, helps explain complicated scenarios. But newspapers seem to think of graphics as a way of dumbing things down, not as legitimate tools. If I ran a newspaper, it would be full of complex visual analysis. (Complex as opposed to the stupid three-bar graphs you sometimes see in margins.)
This is why we have continuous integration.
So if linux and macs got malware and viruses as often as PCs who would be out front? Microsoft should hire people to start writing mac viruses.
Learn to Identify Diabetes Symptoms in As Soon As a Few Minutes
I was under the impression that he would have to pay in 90 days.

Otherwise, it's one hell of a deal.
This article focuses on the exact wrong reason you want to pick a lightweight framework: file size. Does it really make any difference whether your framework is 300kb vs. 3MB? Unless you're hosting off a floppy drive, no. Total size of all the files in a framework does not really say anything about its speed, scalability, ease of use, etc.

If you're going to compare frameworks to find one that's smaller/lighter and therefore faster and/or more scalable, that's interesting and please show me the benchmarks, but listing a few features and the file sizes of each framework tells me absolutely nothing useful.
"nginx is a specialized second webserver that can serve any kind of malware"
thanks for the informative article. Find it very useful.
Some nuggets of knowledge to be taken away for all kind of startups.
@yanphun
Facebook Releases Real-time Web Server Tech dubbed "Tornado"
I wonder how this affects programmers, who ostensibly think of things in a series of steps. When I explain programming to someone who doesn't know what it is, I liken it to instructing someone to do something they don't know how to do, e.g., make a sandwich. You have to tell them to walk to the fridge, gather the ingredients, place them down, work with them one at a time, etc. If programmers spend all day thinking like this, I wonder if that doesn't do something to their world view. I know that I personally find a lot of everyday activities very tedious, but maybe that's because they really are.
Exactly my thought too. Hell, if there aint an app for that on the App store, the person who creates it can probably pocket quite a decent sum. It doesn't even require AR to do the job. Perhaps, I'll work on it sometime.
As a minor was the agreement legally binding?
"...[E]ven if you're ok with dying, that outcome may cause unacceptable harm to other people in your life."
It could be cleaned up some, but due to all the awt interaction, it needs to be that way.
If it's an ad for the book it's acceptable. But it's unclear exactly what it is - it doesn't even mention that there's a book. It sure isn't much of an article.
When are you collecting too much data?
I'd suggest that you go through settings of any software that you use regularly, and try out stuff.
Technically, yes he would've had to pay. But he had no money and neither did his family. If he didn't pay there was no one and nothing to go after, he'd simply declare bankruptcy.
That's very true, but I believe sales would have been much better this year if last years games weren't still priced the same as the new games of this year.

I have a serious problem when buying games, because I worked as a reviewer so I'm used to recommending 'buy this one now, buy this one later, and just don't even think about it' and I happen to agree. There hasn't been a single game that I had to buy this year. EVE Online has been winning my interest with the new expansion, and I usually detest MMO's. The games always held my attention, but I've never been able to justify the monthly payments, yet the lack of decent games this year and the fact that their expansions add a lot to the game without costing you more (I'd never play WoW because they charge you multiple times, for buying the original game, the expansions and monthly, and it never felt fun to play).

I've heard no mention of MMO sales, but I've admittedly not paid attention to that sector. So I would be interested to see if there has been a boom or bust. Have people been cancelling subscriptions or have people switched from buying a new game every month at $70 to a low monthly fee? I may have to look it up
Exactly. You captured the jist of the article perfectly, @patio11. You've got a chance to learn from your users that are likely to bounce. you've got to simply the page, and you've got to find a way to get as many potential qualified leads to opt-in to you reaching out to them later somehow.

Well said.
That corner is the largest, and is only going to get bigger. Python can ignore it at its own peril.