skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This isn't an app criticism, but you might want to have someone edit or at least proofread your website documents. There are many errors in the copy which makes it look unprofessional. Some examples:

"Start by adding tasks to GED from you mind"
"Do you know who many undone tasks you have on your list"

There are many, many more. There is quite a bit of awkward phrasing as well. I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that you are not a native English speaker based on how some of your sentences are constructed.

The application itself seems like a good idea, I'll post a review once I've had more of a chance to play around with it.
Kitty's bag needed to go through the x-ray machine. Kitty came through the metal detector with me. I was worried he was going to be nervous and leap out of my arms, but he was scared and holding on for dear life at that point, and jumped straight back in to his bag as soon as it emerged from the machine.

Actually he travels pretty well, as long as you stay next to him and he knows you're around. If you want away from him he gets plenty upset though.
Health worker fired for hockey flu shots | My Complaint
Actually, Slashdot's quality of moderation and posts is very, very good, not to mention having maintained a consistent quality over the years. In comparison, every other "upvote/downvote" system has succumbed to the Digg phenomena sooner or later.

It's still one of the rare sites where, years later, I go back and see the same quality of posts (which honestly isn't that bad), and the caliber is kept high enough that my brain doesn't bleed internally.
http://www.catalystsites.org/
what was this submission in question?
It definitely matters in the short-term though.
Perhaps I was too terse, and it appeared I was trying to make a (meta) joke. I was not. If you ever find yourself thinking "It's just a joke!" you have to consider that the problem is with you, not the reader. Most people amuse themselves, but few people are actually funny. Your jokes will generally not be appreciated by others, particularly when you go for the obvious, aggressively ironic one-liners.

Such things get downvoted as part of the noise.
Every time you call bar, x gets evaluated again. If x was a global variable, the same thing would happen.

Closures don't change the scope of any existing thing. What they do is force the program to keep scopes around because something still refers to them. Those scopes become a place to stick private data. If you create multiple functions in that scope, they can communicate through that private data. Here is a simple example in JavaScript.

function closure_demo (x) {
return {
set: function (s) {x = s}
, get: function () {return x}
};
}

var foo = closure_demo("hello");
var bar = closure_demo("world");

alert("Bar is " + bar.get());
alert("Foo is " + foo.get());

foo.set("goodbye");
bar.set("earthlings");

alert("Bar is now " + bar.get());
alert("Foo is now " + foo.get());

What is happening here? Each function call has a scope. We return an object with 2 functions that can access this scope. Each time you call the function you get a separate scope, so if you call it twice you get different closures. The scope must exist as long as those functions exist.
move to california ;)
We pay an hourly equivalent that is about 40-50% of what a starting full-time salary would be at the same position, and have never had problems with enough (quality) applicants.

However:
- We are in the midwest, without much competition.
- We are in a college town where there is mandatory internships as part of the CS program.

So YMMV.
From Zazzing Your Product Design to Business Plan "YES"
He made an ASCII art graph that was worth 1000 words. Worth an upvote.
"Yes, proprietary software is on the decline" - hum, I'd actually say it is on the increase with all these hosted services.
Build Applications The Way Google Does: Closure Tools
Times are tight, so while more unemployed folks are desparately tearing revenue out of their businesses, the business growth is seeing less of the capital fired back in as growth.

Suspect YC comments will be more optimistic with perceived wealth increasing and folks spending more of their hard earned $$

I'm optimistic, but I have food in my belly at this moment, and a warm place to sleep tonight. That combination falls under the "rich" category at the moment.
- http://www.takkle.com/college_recruiting/athletes

- http://duckduckgo.com/

- http://www.yellowbot.com/

- http://osx.iusethis.com/

- http://www.thumb-rate.com/

- http://hiveminder.com/splash/

many more here: http://www.catalystsites.org/
feedback definitely welcome on this forum :)
App Store Hypocrisy Update: Mein Kampf Complete With Nazi Logo Approved
I'll be the outlier and talk about the new _voice_ capabilities on the phone -- you know, the high utility part?

Google Voice will supplant voice plans (data only please, Verizon) and Apple will launch their mumble mumble project to do the same.

I ranted about it here: http://igmus.org/2009/10/our-stalled-phone-innovation
i'm convinced that direct voting is a bad approach. I've made one social site without them (it uses implicit signals to "rate" posts, comments are just comments) and it helped a bit. People are still assholes when they feel anonymous, but at least you don't get 10 down votes for expressing an opinion about something like politics. That has a strong psychological effect which some people have a hard time understanding or admitting.
At blekko we're building a web-scale search engine in perl. It includes a distributed platform (kind of like bigtable) currently running on ~200 machines (soon to be 700). The total datastore, containing several n-billion page crawls and associated indexes on our cluster is about 350tb.

I think of perl as a replacement for C. We're using it as a system language, doing things like running epoll event loops, sending/receiving udp packets, mmapping files, etc.

IMO perl, python and ruby are all great choices for a project. Perl seems to be unfashionable these days, but we picked it because it came out the fastest on the benchmarks for what we're doing, and being the oldest is has some of the deepest library support through CPAN. The pragmatic-vs-idealistic attitude of the community is also a plus for us.
Oh come on. Why is it that every 3 months there is a new article defending Perl's vitality? I don't hear many people claiming Perl is dead. Does anyone who likes and uses Perl care, and I mean really care, if Perl maybe be deemed "dead" by non-Perl users? I understand public perception is important and a growing active community is important. All that's well and good, but as a non-Perl user I've never had anything but the impression that the Perl community is alive and well. If people started telling me Python is dead I would probably ask them if they meant their pet snake, and then I'd get right back to writing all my double underscore methods happily. I certainly wouldn't write blog posts claiming Python is not dead. Maybe this is just my take but it seems like constantly claiming Perl isn't dead sure is a good way to push the language in that direction.
Well, I guess maybe an explanation would help, too.

When I see a post about education, I expect tokenadult to have a well sourced and reasonable comment on the topic. When I see a post about security, I expect some intelligent and experienced discourse from you, cperciva, or dfranke. patio11 is consistently arguing from experience about things he knows, like uISV, Rails, and A/B testing, with real-world examples to back it up. These are really valuable posts.

Something like http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=924045 isn't entirely valuable, but it's not a bad thing.

However, something like http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=876726 misses the point entirely and becomes harmful in its Ludditism. To go straw: Do we really need a "product" like plumbing to replace our evolved mutually beneficial practice of shitting wherever we happen to be? Do we really need any of this so-called "medicine" to "hack" nature without consequences?

It's a shy step from vaccine frenzy and represents a titanic reputational blow that- in the absence of proven, public results or credentials- limits the ability to take people seriously. When the quack-science spouting is utterly indistinguishable from what might actually be an experienced person talking from an educated viewpoint, the whole signal is poisoned. No one ever wants to ask the random oracle more than one question.
I loved Perl, and I still use it for quick hacks, but there are multiple types of languages for different tasks. One of the tasks is to create a client side application as an enterprise solution. Perl is not necessarily best suited for this even if people try to make it so. The next is for web development. I originally started with Perl for this, but PHP came along and made things so much easier. Using Perl before PHP resulted in me knowing PHP the same day I started using it. The general concepts were already there. However, PHP is ugly in the way that the attributes to functions are inconsistent. I still use PHP for web development, but for my next project, I am going to take a look at a higher level language based on Ruby. Ruby looks very easy. While I enjoy complexity in programming, I enjoy productivity during the creation process just as much and products such as Rails look like they are the next step in such development. Lastly, there is the quick hack. I still grab Perl for such solutions, but this is code I would never show anyone else. So, yes, Perl is not dead for me and maybe never will be, but it has had one foot in the grave for a while. Perhaps a web development kit on top of an existing Perl architecture to better separate the HTML, data, and functions would be the cure, but it may be too late for that.
I'm not trying to defend the current setup of the Federal Reserve as it stands... I think there is a lot of room to make it more transparent and to erect barriers such that Goldman executives (or any other bank) can't make a career of moving back and forth between the company, the Federal Reserve, and the White House.

As you put it, the government has the ability to debase a currency (I'm not arguing it's fine to do so, but I agree that it has the ability). Would you prefer to give this ability to private entities (corporations and individuals) as well? That is what commodity-based money gives you. Whoever produces or purchases that commodity has an effect on the money supply.

As an alternative way to think about it, would you want a money supply based on oil? It is also non-renewable, malleable (yay liquids), portable, and hard to counterfeit. How about money based on copper?

I'm sure the folks in the middle east and Chile (respectively) would love to be able to affect our money supply. Also, the cost of driving a car or building a house would go up needlessly, just like the cost of gold for electronics and medical uses is needlessly high because of gold's status as a speculative commodity.

So yeah, if there was a way to have a perfect money supply not subject to manipulation, I'd be all for it... but a commodity-backed system is just as bad (or worse) than a fiat one.
A sentence a piece for 3 peaks and 3 troughs could cover 100, and the unspoken explanation of the hot air graph generation technique for the other 900?

Without those useful 900 words, the post is just "Yeah, I think there are some roughly seasonal peaks and troughs and it peaked in summer '08. btw it's winter '09, rough times lol."
I've noticed it. Especially the anti-37signals comments. I got -4 for saying I agreed with DHH about something.
I also like the frugal and simplistic layout. It's easy on the eyes and doesn't distract. Luckily there are no sidebars, blinking flash ads, 'next page' links, etc.
I have seen Perl slurp and parse a 200MB text file in seconds. (It is really a remarkable language for practical extraction and reports after all.) I have also used it for its search capabilities. If PHP did not have preg functions (Perl Compatible Regex), I would not be using PHP. Perl is known for its speed. My only concerns with Perl stem from my inability to develop applications quickly with the language, but that is due more to my inexperience with it. However, after using it for years, you would think I would know everything there is to know about it.
:) every single point of this paper is like description of my company (and we don't do medical systems).
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=920110 <-

I wouldn't mind subscribing to your whitelist.
"A new version, Perl 6, is on its way but still under development."

Terrible article, it ignores so many of the issues that have directly led to Perl's downturn in popularity and just hand-waves that Perl is still alive and kicking. The phantom of Perl 6 has been a weight around the community's neck for years, and the incremental 5.x releases with unrealized promises of 6 have probably driven away many developers to newer, sexier languages, that can deliver a major release in under a decade.
Bit.ly affiliate cookie exploit
A laser-powered space elevator? Seattle team leads NASA contest
edw519 is a pretty reasonable guy. You could just mail him that comment, and he'd probably give you a thoughtful response. I've never tried doing that with him, but I have with other people and other people mail me.
I must be slow. You're headline says "Try it in 30 seconds!" How? Are you implying that it will only take me 30 seconds to register? I was expecting a link in that headline that would take me to a demo page.
They ought to look at a lot more than web sites (although I've written plenty of Perl CGI, and can understand why people would still use Perl).

Perl 5 is used extensively to automate tasks at companies; for example, in the semiconductor industry. I've found that most of the engineers working in design are basically fluent in Perl, and choose it for anything serious. I've also seen TCL used, but that's mostly because so many tools support only TCL APIs. Python has caught on in some places, but it is still mostly appealing to pure software developers.
> I don't know of any major sites written in perl today.

Did you read the linked article?

> i am convinced that perl will die when parrot breaks module compatibility with cpan, because noone will port modules, yet care for the new perl.

Look into projects such as Plumage, Blizkost, and Perl 6 proto.
I want it to be a shining example of how to build, maintain and deploy an open source .NET library.

I'm interested in the end result but also how he resolves the issues he brought up on running the project (handling documentation, builds, code signing, etc.). This should be fun to watch.
> ... newer, sexier languages, that can deliver a major release in under a decade.

Did you know that Guido switched jobs in spring 2000 (not a typo) to work, in part, on Python 3000? Python 3 is older than Perl 6, and it's a much less modest project. Compare Perl 6 rules and grammars to anything Python 3000 invented, for example.
What do you mean by direct voting, and what are the implicit signals to "rate" posts? It sounds very interesting, and I would like to hear more. I am going to be creating a rating system soon, and any suggestions to prevent abuse or to accurately increase quality would be appreciated.
Agreed.
I think people spend too much time arguing about "capitalism the ideal" when what we should be talking about is "capitalism the implementation."
Yeah, I have noticed that. Is there some rule against riding bicycles on the road in Tokyo, or do people just prefer the sidewalk. (It is illegal to ride on the sidewalk in Chicago, for example, but people do it anyway for some reason.)
@jd - Thanks for pointing out the support link. We've fixed the link on the site.
I smell a GraphJammer.
I find this phenomenon to be most interesting. Digg is constantly worried about becoming 4chan, reddit is paranoid towards becoming digg, and HN is speculates about becoming reddit. The question i'm ultimately asking is where is this place that fears degradation into HN? finally which social media portal is so elite, so stealthy that they have no fears at all?
Technology doesn't isolate people: U.S. study
Peronsalized search and different data centers depending on location make a difference. I received the same result as you.
The majority of the english speaking net is in the northern hemisphere anyway - with notable examples of southern hemisphere mostly being limited to australia and brasil, sure there are other net users south of the equator, but those are the two countries with the most presence online...

The reason why brasil's huge online population doesn't really count in these kind of things is because they largely keep to their own communities, often portugese-speaking.

So it being seasonal in appearance isn't really much of a surprise.

I'd also argue that geek-types (which most of us are) seem to be more prone to SAD.
How Every Brain Is Hardwired for Math
Many of us 'newbies' came here because reddit has gotten near unbearable recently...

I suppose you can blame us for any recent decline in quality, although some of us do try not to pull the place down.
Google wasn't the first to do that.
I disagree, the recent 'my pastor abused me...' posts on reddit proved just how dangerous reddit can be - they found his personal info and called and harassed him, he (possibly) committed suicide a couple of days later.
It seems like there are two kinds of experience.

One is learning to do the same thing over-and-over again, getting somewhat better at it. This often results in being more rigid.

The other is learning the purpose and strategy behind what you do and being able to alter your behavior accordingly. The often results in being more flexible.

An experienced developer probably has a combination of these two ingredients. Thus there's no guarantee that an old timer will be more flexible or less flexible than a beginner. It's more a question of whether a developer has kept their learning and understanding to be at a high level.

I mean, it's important to realize that the purpose of a full ACID database is to maintain the integrity of enterprise data - key data that is used and re-used by multiple departments. Of course, in a start-up, the ACID requirement can be modified depending on whatever decreased need there is for the properties of ACID. An experienced developer looking from a high level doesn't just recite ACID requirement or glibly toss them out the window but looks at the actual requirements and modifies things accordingly.
No people aren't actually always looking for Youtube videos. Do you know how many times a big viral video hits and Youtube has to remove it due to copyright and ownership issues? Now you have worthless Youtube video results when you just want the actual video. This is just one example of when Google will put their product in your face without regard to what you want.
Every article's comment threads are visited by those interested in the article. So how is it any different for this article as opposed to others? I mean geesh, every internet discussion is only going to have people participating that are interested in the discussion, right?

After all, we wouldn't confuse a random topic on the internet with a scientific survey, would we? (rhetorical question)
If the proportion of negative comments is growing and if this is a symptom of karma lust, it's a pretty interesting event. The assertion being that as karma wealth grew, the system has became more volatile. There are some complaints about swarming in up-votes, but this thread deals with increasing down-votes. The question now becomes will a higher frequency of down-votes bring about smarter comments so as to avoid down-votes, or will the system become unhinged?

..I wonder if any systems act similarly? ;)
A fair point... I still think it's more likely for stuff to break when you're tinkering it with than when you're not.
Anyone know what Google uses this for?
Interesting... the application of twitter and gMaps mashups to politics is something I'm keeping a close eye on for my future races. I especially liked this map that the Corzine people rolled out in NJ: http://www.joncorzine09.com/main.cfm?actionId=globalShowStat...

The follow-up thought that a friend of a friend who started to run for a delegate seat in MD was to design a system where someone could put in a small ~30 sec video clip of why you were supporting a candidate. You could use these map-clip mashups to generate neighborhood meetings, organize precinct meetings, and probably lots more.
One thing I find interesting is that people will read posts on discussion groups, read articles on blogs and web pages, watch television, listen to music, and over time, they will begin to connect with the person with whom they believe they are interacting. The truth is that the other person that is providing the content for the lurker has no idea who that person is. However, the lurker feels like he knows the poster, the community, the musician, or the actor because he has been involved in a one-way interaction for such a long time. So, the poster may make a small joke that he believes to be harmless because he believes he understands the other person; however, he comes across as a stranger simply telling a negative joke. I have encountered this issue may times. I feel like I have some kind of connection, but that connection does not truly exist unless you actively engage with the target of your interest.
It's just an emotional thing I guess, but still: I bought WriteRoom months ago - I very rarely buy software, because I neither need much nor feel there is enough original value in most of the stuff that gets published. But I liked the minimalistic idea. Now there's a kind of sour aftertaste: I don't have a lot of money as a grad student, so I'm not going to spend it on another software which may be given away for free some time soon.
Don't get me wrong: I love your product; but I specifically wanted to support you with the payment. Also, it might make strategic sense for you to give it away etc. There's still some kind of aftertaste though for users who recently bought it.
You can click on a username then on submissions to see it (if you see dead submissions; you can change this in your profile). Otherwise, it was this story about Gödel, Einstein, and Morgenstern (not my blog): http://blog.plover.com//law/Godel-dictatorship-3.html

I don't really want to bring this into the discussion though; just saying I thought the way it was shot down was rather rude compared to what I was used to from HN, and I've seen similar posts in other people's threads.
There are definitely areas where Perl is still alive. I work in a bioinformatics lab and we use Perl for the majority the analysis software we write. Mostly because of Perl's strengths of handling files compared to languages like Java.
So what about metafilter and specifically ask.metafilter? Are they heading that way? Very honest question as I agree with what you wrote.
Create Your Own Anti-IE6 Plugin for Wordpress
Excellent example of a Clojure web app
From his most recent blog post:

There’s a good chance the site will crash if this blog post
hits the nerd sites, so just ignore Fret War until it’s stable.
I know that this is incorrect, but the promise of Perl 6 has kept me away from Perl for years. I haven't touched a line of Perl since 1995, and I keep wanting to pick it back up; but then my inner curmudgeon reminds me that Perl 6 is coming "Real Soon Now" and I move on to something else. I'm sure I can't be the only one who does this.

Again, I know that this isn't a valid argument, but it's enough for me to focus on other languages when I'm toying around with ideas.
Thanks for the comment. It's definitely not you.

I was trying to imply that you can sign up and try KartMe really, really quickly.

perhaps sub header should just focus on free.

"Just click a button to organize favorites in lists. Start KartMe to try for free!"

i need to start a/b testing asap!
Hopefully it's driven.