skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> "My education is software engineering (I have a masters degree) and when I was fresh out of school (which I was 10 years ago) I used to spend a lot of time drawing class diagrams and object interaction flows and lots of other paper stuff that didn’t take me anywhere closer to a working program."

i have a master's, too, and i can relate to the progression from wanting "well designed code" to wanting "products that work and look pretty."

i don't see the goals as mutually exclusive. writing diagrams, and indeed doing all sorts of on-paper design work, is often necessary for either better programming or better teamwork.

i've worked with people who can keep crazy data structures and algorithms in their head. that's cool. maybe i'm all modest and unhackerly, but i can clearly see limitations in my mental space. i love loading problems and solutions into my head, but the real problems and solutions are often bigger than my head (elegance and the desire for simplicity aside...they'are awesome, too).

the point is that it's impossible to work with non-writers, unless the "collaboration" is entirely modular. sometimes you need to hire a person to write a library for you. seldom do you need to spend a day reading and poking crazy code in order to understand the datastructures for a small tweak. look, i love open source and i've gotten pretty damn good and groking code. it doesn't matter. pictures can still display relationships better than code. it's faster. diagrams as documentation rocks. just don't go overboard. do exactly as much as is useful. just like simplifying, right?

for me, i'm a better programmer when i write things down. after a few months, i'm happy when i can go back to an old section of code and see immediately what's going on. it means my friction for getting started is close to 0. i write down object models for all my databases because seeing a bunch of boxes and arrows in a single glance is a lot faster than scrolling through code.

i wrote my own python script for converting django models into omnigraffle diagrams, and vice versa. sometimes i need the diagrams before i even write code, as i'm figuring things out. sometimes i need the diagrams later, when i'm adding features.

i also used http://www.websequencediagrams.com for the first time a few weeks ago to quickly draft up the complex interactions between a firefox extension, server and Amazon's FPS. looking at that diagram i know i have the logic right.

the code is almost boring to write once i have a diagram.

writing the correct code faster is a big win for me. i think some folks are afraid to admit that because it seems "unhackerly" or "unbrilliant." forget about that. being smart means doing exactly what you need to do to get the job done right, whatever the constraints on right are.
Here's the Skinny on Why Wal-Mart Is So Evil
An interesting thing to me is that E. coli will be killed if the meat is cooked all the way through.

Anyone that gets infected by this strain (or any other) hasn't been cooking their meat properly. Or the hamburger chain hasn't.

Rare steak is a different matter. Pathogenic bacteria will only be present on the surface of the meat. Cooking the surface of the meat kills the bacteria. But in the case of minced beef, the bacteria is mixed through the whole of the meat.
Maybe most people are disappointed with it because it doesn't fit into the self-help mold of, "here's what you should do." Rather, you have to think and reflect on your own unique situation and come up with your own solution. Just a guess from someone who hasn't actually read the book.
Start today: http://arclanguage.org/
Unfortunately, all too true. I have seen a lot of female dominated (numbers-wise) lists where some man is the center of attention and power, apparently largely because he is male. And should some woman be so uppity as to stand up to him, all hell will break loose -- not just because he won't stand for it but because of the gaggle of women who will try to ensure that no one speaks to him without being appropriately obeisant.

Huge sore point for me. This is probably not the place to get into it.
He seems to argue the problem with BBMs is their success. Their success, that is, at working alone. So much so that they seldom want to work with others, for when you work alone you are not forced to yield to oft highly unpleasant real-life situations, which dilute the purity and elegance of your original solution.

And more or less refusal to exposure your system to real-life situations--PC hardware via Lisp machines, the wants of the masses, etc--means you don't get the critical mass of acceptance needed for mainstream success. Without this mainstream success you don't get the cash, industry support or new developers needed for growth.

Nice theory.
I call bullshit on this. Do you know how many fields exist for aspiring writers? It's not all people writing novel manuscripts. If you total up all the people making a living with words, you've got a pretty impressive sum.
I liked that MIT removed the extracurricular pressure. This I don't like so much. As a recent applicant, I hold that the two useful parts of my application were the portfolio and the essay. They're the best way to gauge somebody's genuine ability without them being able to lie much about it.
I am reminded of this oldie but goodie ...

http://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/susan/joke/essay.htm
Since when does a politician's blurb, and Bill Clinton's at that, add any credibility to anything?

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/International_War_Crimes/C...

The blurbs often benefit their utters more than the books they're affixed to: looking at the list of people and institutions who gave feedback on the book, I can say a good chunk of them are karma-whoring themselves on the author's good standing.
Google's Scott Huffman: Many More Search Features Coming
Images Can Be Deceptive, Life Never Stands Still
Very good article.

But learning from the past, I am already afraid of seeing lots of articles on the HN front page devoted to discussing the BBM...
Cleese comes across as more the artisan than certain of his old partners. He was the first to leave Monty Python, because the skits weren't at the level of wit he wanted, and because others were complaining about his need to endlessly revise lines till they gleamed. He then went on to make Fawlty Towers, which is easily one of the three best things to come out of Python grads.
I read his book a while ago (it was on clearance). I feel it's a really nice coffee-table book to open at random and read one of the profiles.

The real answer of WSIDWML is that it's a very personal question. And reading about others candidly talking about their hopes, frustrations, and regrets helps give a third-party but first-person perspective in life. Bear in mind though, as someone wiser than me said: "to compare is to despair" (This is a major reason I refuse to join Facebook)

I've come to the conclusion that happiness is short-term and we must sustain the happiness by doing something that we like and/or challenges us and/or that we fear nearly every single day. A great hobby is sometimes a sustainable source of happiness, and it's good to diversify. I'm pretty sure I'm a maker-type - that's what makes me happy. The people I know with enough money to build a virtual moat around themselves still have problems - they're just not directly financial.

My favorite profile was the one of the toner sales executive; she had to lobby Po Bronson to be included in the book.
You'd be surprised. The pirating scene on IRC has a far greater selection than Amazon.
I believe more publicly traded open source companies are possible when SEC regulates market capitalization.
So you never saw any evidence of this DDOS yourself? I'm somewhat skeptical of this explanation. It seems to me with shared infrastructure it'd be difficult to saturate just one customer's connection. It also doesn't make sense to me that this could be done without the traffic ever reaching your server. You used the phrases "our bandwidth" and "our connection" do things really work this way on the AWS cloud?

Anyway, I'm really sorry you guys had to go through all of this, and I hope whatever it is that caused it is fixed.
I had two thoughts:

a) Changing 'schemas' is supported by document, or advanced key-value, stores like Couch or Cassandra. You end up thinking of your objects more as hashes and program accordingly; everything else is just a mapreduce task (ie, you've updated your schema. If you coded well, nothing should break because of that, but you'd like to update all of the old objects. So write a mapreduce task, like a migration, that does that).

b) DataMapper, for ruby, is used mostly as an ORM; however, the "R" is pretty optional, as people have written data adapters for other architectures -- from CouchDB to the SalesForce API.

Those are just some associated thoughts. I'm playing around with Cassandra and Couch on my server at the moment (grr, when I have a moment).
but not as rampant as in Software Industry.
But he encountered exactly zero people who pulled it off.

Then he didn't talk to enough people. I know plenty who have pulled it off.

In fact, when it comes to starting a business, prior domain experience is a huge plus. We like to romanticize the legend of 2 young people starting the next big thing in their dorm room.

But a more likely scenario would be a few people with 10 years experience sick and tired of conventional industry practices who have figured out a better way to satisfy the market. It's so hard to do it from within that they go out on their own.
AFAIK and IANAL, cduan has it right: in USA, providing subtitles is considered to be a derivative work; we would need to get permission. If we accept user generated subtitles and remove infringing materials when copyright owner complains, then we get some DMCA protection. (I say "we" because 1) I'm assuming you want to provide subtitles, and 2) so do I =)
http://isbn.nu
I say "sue doo"
It already is. E-books are pirated within minutes of staring their major distribution.
Ah! Had always wondered about the origin of that. Unfortunately it would now need to be chopped in half :)
Yeah, it's easy enough to find pretty much any book if you know what to search for. It's been that way for years.
How about instead of ignorantly spouting that line of BS you realize that throughout most of history and civilizations marriage has been mostly about business, family relations, and politics?

Marriage is a legal status. The meaning behind it is irrelevant.
Well, that's certainly a snotty, elitist rant full of guilt by association and name calling. This bit: "But would [Walmart] have become such a powerhouse if inequality had not grown so dramatically or if conservatives had not so demonized government, often with coded racial messages?" is maybe two steps removed from conspiracy theory territory.
aka http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Principle
This is nothing but a horrible happening. I've lost a friend the same way myself, and the entire situation stirs up painful memories.

My sincerest condolences to all of his family and friends.
Using SBCL, emacs. No web stuff here, save for a few internal reports. It is working very nicely. (ex c++, C, Python, Bliss, asm programmer)
Interesting things that you learn about computers in the movies...
Please send me an email (or gchat me) to alexandre (dot) rijo (at) gmail (dot) com so we can chat over a cofee!
Reluctant upvote. Drupal's what I learned in high school. It gives you pretty unparalleled control over your site. Conceptually it's a league above any of its competitors: You can do some incredible things with it without knowing any coding.

It's also ugly and hostile and maintained by some of the least friendly people I've ever had to deal with on a project. There's an insane arrogance in the community.

I wish there was something just as flexible but better. As it is, the choice is between stiff and ugly.
Boston software startups snap up discount office space
Ask HN: Where do you go for adhoc/freelance design resource?
Hi all

We're hitting a stage in our product development where we're looking for some design work to be done (layouts, icons etc) and I was just wondering if anyone has any recommended design/ux specific sites (like elance.com for example) that they have used to get bits and pieces done??

TIA
The real answer of WSIDWML is that it's a very personal question.

I third this from my own experience. From the "Quarter Life Crisis" thread. (what I'm doing http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=680218)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=680263

The what to do part is the most personal part of escaping,
and the part that determines if it'll be an episode or a part
of your life going forward. So it shouldn't be surprising if
there's very little transference between people. ;)
Two current employees said the flow of carcasses keeps up its torrid pace even when trimmers get reassigned, which increases pressure on workers.

What the hell is this, 1906? Sounds like not much has changed since Upton Sinclair wrote "The Jungle".
I notice that they didn't compare ebooks to movies. I'm sure the MPAA would have issued the same scary stats, but the film industry is rolling in cash despite entire criminal industries dedicated to stealing content.

That would have for a pretty boring article, though.
California (and New York, Texas, Illinois, Florida, etc) would be fine without subsidizing other states. In fact, they would probably be better off. When places become difficult to live in, people tend to move to better places. We spend money trying to make unproductive places viable places to live when that money would be used more efficiently in states with better infrastructure, both human and physical. The more people who move away from subsidized places, the more money they will make on average, and the more iPods will be sold.

Humans agglomerate because it makes us more productive. By subsidizing dying towns in the middle of nowhere (and Michigan), we're paying people to be less productive. I don't care where people choose to live, but I shouldn't have to pay for their choices.

Even if it were in the self-interest of productive places to subsidize non-productive places, our current method of doing so isn't the best approach. There are greater gains in productivity to be had for less money in Mexico, which would create wealthier neighbors for us to sell things to. This is simply another case of the tendency of majorities (which in the US may only be electoral, not real majorities) in democracies to take what they can from the minorities.
In fact I have friends that are gays: You are just trolling here, right? I mean, no one actually expects that line to be taken seriously any more. Do they?
"Working" by Studs Terkel is a great book on the same subject.
C−−: a portable assembly language designed by Simon Peyton Jones et al.
One idea: Illegal immigrants contribute to the problem by creating social conditions that are unfavorable for optimal living conditions, causing the people with money (big taxpayers), to move, leaving behind cities with an unskilled workforce and a high reproduction rate. Anybody capable of moving away from areas and cities with huge illegal immigration populations will move. Once they are gone and the businesses move with them, what you have left is an area that consumes taxes at a high rate and contributes very little back.

Is it racism that causes people to move? It could be, but there are valid reasons to flee such areas. There are huge gang problems and schools start to under perform. Hispanic students are some of the worst performing students in the country, often not even finishing high school. Now you have unskilled people competing for unskilled jobs, which few exist anymore.
I'm living in Bucharest, Romania, and I can confirm this part. A few years ago I used to live in a somewhat less respectable part of the city (not a ghetto by any means, the communists made sure we don't have those, just closer to the periphery and poorer). For some reason it use to be a stop point in girl trafficking - lots of young girls worked at the corner of the street for a few weeks at a time. Many of them from Moldavia, and I presume going further west. At one time I was actually offered a woman for around $200.

A few points:

- Most girls were not slaves per se, kidnapped and hold by force. All, as far as I can tell, were driven to this by poverty, lack of any prospects in the village of birth or both.

- I am not against prostitution as a job, especially since I've seen it done successfully and with quite a bit of entrepreneurial spirit. But in some conditions it can be worst then anything you can imagine. I am especially suspicious of anything that looks organized. I'd guess this is a direct consequence of it being illegal - Amsterdam seems to have managed to make it both organized and civilized.

- I'd have liked to make some comments about corruption, politicians and the way things seem to be "settling in" in the last years, but it's all speculation so I'll abstain.
EBay will receive a great challenge from Facebook of online payment business
How about you're dying in the hospital, and your gay partner is denied seeing you because it's 'family only' and the family nor the hospital want to make an exception?
Privatepr | BetterNetworker.com
Le web à Toulouse
What could easily have been "more of the obvious" is actually pretty good. What sets this post apart is the variety of contributors and the fact that they've been there. Thanks, RiderOfGiraffes.

My favorite: "Your Cashflow Is More Important Than Your Mother". My mother would agree (as long as I was buying).
This 100+ comments thread filled with anecdotes of ways that fallentimes helped this or that person or was remarkable in this or that way, says more plainly and eloquently than any single post, that this is a tragic loss not only on an individual level, but also for the community.

I spoke to Dan numerous times on #startups. I am shocked and saddened to hear this news. My deepest condolences to Tom and to Dan's family and friends.
It's very classy and has good production value. Really reminds me of the Caltech letter of admission.
I can't agree with you more. I recently finished a pretty big project in Drupal that featured some custom functionality that we had to write ourselves. Not only was it a tremendous hassle to get everything to work nicely with all the other modules but the codebase is just ugly and as the article states has a very high learning-curve.

As you say it gives awesome flexibility, but it most definitely comes at a price.
microcentury please read this (1) and listen to this (2)

(1) http://www.elizabethgilbert.com/writing.htm

(2) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hidvElQ0xE
There Is A Difference Between Evil And Just Absurdly Profitable
A better idea would be to eliminate the tax benefits of marriage. Every tax benefit given to straight couples is paid for by single people and possibly gays (depending on the future legality of gay marriage).

This is regressive taxation. Married people are better off than the single; they have lower living expenses and are presumably happier. Marriage subsidies are taxing the poor to pay the rich.
I think that it contradicts the main principle of pair programming that is, you have to be physically near the other programmer.
I live in Sweden, now (from Washington, DC, where I made these http://tr.im/ADXe after Bush's "re-election"). I'm just trying to stir the pot from here :) -Chris PS: "Mad as hell" speech from "Network": http://tr.im/madashellvideo (YouTube)
Drupal sucks in the same way that Democracy is the worst form of government.
Soon-Shiong believes he's found an on/off switch that makes cancer spread
Work Less, Get More Done: Analytics For Maximizing Productivity
It sucks in the way "US democracy" sucks. The idea is good, but there're a lot of flaws in the system that could be fixed if the system wasn't so dead-set on maintaining status quo.
I am very impressed with this project. In my opinion this is even better than Google Maps, which relies on hand modeled structures. I'd like to see Google implement Flickr reconstructions so that even if no one has hand modeled buildings there will still be 3D structures there when you zoom in.

Naturally not every place will have such a high photo density but there must be a lot of cities and tourist sites that can be reconstructed in a similar manner.
This was inspired by a recent post to HN about how "Working Harder Is The Only Alternative". I respectfully, but strongly, disagree.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=858679
In the article they mentioned treating fatty meat with ammonia to kill bacteria then adding it to hamburgers. Disgusting. That did remind me a lot of "The Jungle". If I remember correctly in "The Jungle" they also treated rotten meat scraps with some sort of chemical blend to make them edible, then used them in sausages.

News like this makes me want to be vegetarian.
Google Ajax API Code Playground
US govt IT spending dashboard
Clearly he doesn't have the millions of dollars and high class lawyers and lobbyists that the meat companies have. Individuals can do little to combat such huge companies.

What can he, or any one of us, do? We might start a website condemning the companies for their practices, we might write senators or try to get laws passed, but American government is not a true democracy, and it is not really ruled by the people.

The businesses have far too much power for individuals to fight effectively.

Of course this is my own pessimistic view, but I believe it is realistic.
This probably helps kids with ADD.
Okay, I'll take your challenge.

Social Definition should be: A Union between a Man and a Woman.

Justification:
Marriage between a man and a woman is ordained of God. Marriage between man and woman is essential to His Eternal Plan. (Source: http://www.lds.org/library/display/0,4945,161-1-11-1,00.html)

Now, that is my view, based on careful study and thoughtful inquiry and seeking after truth. I recognize that others may not understand this the same way. I value their individual perspectives and respect and love them still the same.

I also recognize that there is a difference between Eternal Marriage covenants and earthly contracts which have no sway in the eternities.

Therefore when it comes to the discussion of legal matters, we must look deeper into what benefits legal recognition of marriage has to society. I put forth that civil marriage is based on the importance of gender as an aspect of ones identity and personal attributes and that a union between a man and a woman allows for great synergy and creates the appropriate corner stone for families- and the raising of children. The synergy between male and female is essential to the benefit of marriage to society and the appropriate rearing of children.

I love and respect those who are attracted to the same sex, and I support their legal right to choose their own lifestyle. However, I cannot support a change in the legal structure of the family to cater to their individual tastes and desires, nor can I personally condone action that is inconsistent with the commandments of the Almighty God of Israel.
Drupal sucks, America sucks, C++ sucks, life sucks. Basically anything big, complicated and interesting sucks because it's so damn hard. Why is there such a steep learning curve for my life? I've been around for decades and I STILL haven't figured it out?? What's up with that? What's hilarious is the author complains about the extensive history of Drupal vulnerabilities and then advises the reader to go out and write their own. Dude! The history of vulnerabilities is only because a whole pile of people are scanning the Drupal code day in and day out LOOKING for this shit, bringing it into daylight and FIXING it. That's a GOOD THING. That's how open source is supposed to work. You think you'll get better security by writing your own CMS from scratch with noone looking over your shoulder? In your dreams, my friend. In your dreams.