skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Antonio - good find. I read this article earlier this morning and it spoke directly to the disconnect I've noticed as well. Logistically, what do you think leaders on the Street and in business can do to curb these short-termist, corrupted practices?
You're not considering the worst-case scenario:
"they" don't enforce it for a while, just so the public outcry wears out, then "they" start to threaten some ISPs...
Are you kidding? This thing is miles across, operates at temperatures colder than space, and is intended to cope with energy equivalent to two aircraft carriers ramming into each other at flank speed. If there's a problem, they can dump all that energy and contain it safely within a few seconds or less.

You'll never have a system this powerful that can't be fouled up somehow...whether it's birds with bread or rats chewing the wires or just plain bad luck. But these guys have made the system safe and built it so they can go from "emergency shutdown" to "normal operations" in only three days.

The LHC is an amazing piece of engineering with fantastically good fault tolerance.
This is where I disagree.

Trying to be industrial strength for a proof of concept or an experiment is typically a junior's mistake.
Lispers, I found this interesting, from 1:30:

-- "Do you miss laziness, from Haskell?"
-- "Yes. Absolutely. I have macros in Erlang to simulate it, and I used them all the time."

Are Lisp's macros more popular for transforming code, or for introducing laziness?
Sure, but

ttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttdddddddd

Startups have areal risk of running out of money, just before they complete enough d. However with

ttd,

I have a shot at cashflow with that d, which I can invest back into more (nt +nd)

Established companies dont have that risk so they can do

ttttttttttttttdddddddddddd

While for startups it makes sense to do

ttddttddttddttddttddttdd... etc.
"Though it is thoughtful of trade negotiators to spare us the ugly sight of the horse-trading and chicanery that makes up every law-making process"

This sentence relates point of view is so misaligned with my own that I'm not sure I can take the rest of the article seriously, if at all.
Not sure about the apps, but that is one beautifully designed site.
For many terms as well they're featuring Youtube at the top . So not only are they getting users to ignore organic SEO results. They're driving traffic to their properties.
Interesting that it uses the zxing library [1] which doesn't support EAN/UPC yet (on iPhone) and they have written EAN/UPC scanning and haven't been kind enough to donate the code back to zxing. I guess that would remove their developer license revenue stream [2].

I assume they use Amazon to get EAN->item mapping which is against the amazon TOS. If they don't I love to know what they do use.

[1] - http://code.google.com/p/zxing/

[2] - http://redlaser.com/SDK.aspx
The Next Big Thing in Game Development: Unreal Development Kit released
Inventors' high-flying kites harness wind power
First off, I am not anonymous. My HN profile is public and contains links and my email address.

Second, yeah, my response was a bit short, as I did not have enough time.

Third, I hope as you study more, you'll abandon your tunnel vision with respect to marketing. At the moment "to a person with a hammer, every problem looks like a nail" comes to mind.

I have nothing against people writing interesting articles for marketing, that is, marketing essentially paying for those articles. That doesn't imply I have to like EVERYTHING that is done in the name of marketing. For Hacker News there is a certain expectation. I don't think "save 20$ on groceries with this cool voucher" would be welcome here, for example. The expectation is that the articles posted have some relation to "hacking" (in a certain wider sense), that is, enables me to learn stuff.

That is why I mentioned spam, because if you pour marketing content into a channel where it isn't welcome, it is spam - that is the analogy I saw, even though it is a grey area. I just wanted to refute your argument that marketing is always OK. Some people might subscribe to a "the best free offers" list, and they would welcome news about vouchers.

Since this MacHeist stuff got a lot of upvotes, obviously opinions in this community also differ. I am just surprised, that is all - I think it is an Apple effect... Because I don't see the big difference to a groceries voucher.

Perhaps one could argue that the MacHeist way of selling stuff is in itself an interesting hack (a marketing hack). They sold a frigging 4 millions pieces of software people wouldn't probably have bought otherwise. I would be interested in discussion on how they pulled it off...

Edit: to make it clear, if the news had been something like "new version of ShoveBox is out", I would have felt differently. It would have been new technology that is available. "ShoveBox now costs 20$ less" is just a voucher.
Actively encourage? There are only a handful of libraries that actively monkey patch the core classes. ActiveSupport, RubyGems, extlib, and uhm.... I don't know anything else. If anything most of the Ruby blog posts on monkey patching always warn programmers that it should be done with care.

If you're so afraid of incompetent developers money patching things so that they break, why aren't you afraid that they write Java* code that spawns 2 million threads, crashing the system? Or code that deletes the hard drive? There are plenty of easy ways to break a program besides monkey patching.

* With "Java" I mean whatever your favorite language is that you think will prevent incompetent developers from doing stupid things.
Wow, AdBlock makes Google better. I didn't know this was going on.
In terms of money, those acai products have made millions. It's a feeding frenzy probably bigger than ringtones.

I'm amazed that it "works" in that Google allows this to show up. Putting a different display domain than the desitnation is a clear violation of policy. It's also amazing that CNN hasn't found them and shut them down.

I guess what I see with the Zynga thing is a bit of selective outrage. It's been happening EVERYWHERE with the biggest players in the game for years.

Speaking of CNN, even they run ads for fake blogs and "advertorials" with what look like scam offers. Where's the TechCrunch article about them?
Ask HN: How do you explain closures?
In the past year or two, I've had to explain closures--what they are and why they are interesting--several times. Usually, at the end of my explanation, the person doesn't get it, and they go back to doing whatever they are familiar with.

So, I ask HN to put yourselves in this scenario and tell me what your answer would be:

Joe is a talented but inexperienced developer. He's got a year or two of experience, maybe as much as 5, but he programs for a job, not for fun. Also, for whatever reason he's never encountered closures--most likely he's only worked in languages that don't really support them.

You want to explain to him (a) what they are and (b) why he would want to use them. You have about 10 seconds to get his interest before he starts thinking about his WoW raid tonight, and about 5 minutes for the whole explanation.

What do you say?
That particular example was hilariously sad. Almost reminded me of late 90s.

Good news is, if Google gets too aggressive with their ads, Bing(or someone else) will be happy to take over.

Incidentally, I do not get the same polluted results Aaron got, when using simple search from Firefox. I just get Google Map thing, single side Adword on the side and the rest are organic results. Most likely reason is that I am too far from San Francisco right now...
Yup. Ian Bicking talked specifically about this at pycon last year.
Probably the same reason everyone else seems to - it runs completely counter to our intuitions about how the world works. As far as I know (and my knowledge of QM can charitably be described as 'nonexistant') if you ignore intuitions and simply resolve the math, the Everett interpretation is what pops out of the equations.
I think the title should be "How Enterprise Experienced developers can Handicap a Lean Startup". This is really just limited experience. I once saw a very simple project list used by 20 people turn into an enterprise nightmare with 29 tables and a 3-month development cycle.

Wouldn't it seem to be a mismatch from the very beginning?
It's still a useful number as long as it's measured consistently. It may not be a verbatim reflection of worker to full employment, for example, since it doesn't count "under employed" or the people that want to work more hours, but can't. However, if we know that the 10% it represents is more than triple what we might consider normal then it can be a telling gauge.
Judging unemployment via the unemployment rate is a bit like judging your website's popularity via Alexa. The question becomes: is lousy data better or worse than no data?
For a minute there I thought you were going to do

tddtddtdd
That's still a very long shot from "[Improving] Ruby 1.9 Performance By Up To 63%", which sounds like a global average improvement of 63% for all Ruby 1.9 programs...
If you don't mind me chiming in, I think the lesson is that there really is nothing that can be done to curb it.

Why? Two reasons.

First, every time we create legislation, laws and other governing to something, the problem either gets worse or creates a whole new set of issues. The problem becomes a snowball -- you can look at the examples there to see some of this.

Second, the saying that goes something like "locks keep out the curious, not thieves" is very true. Those who want to scam will always find a way and there is nothing to stop them, only try and catch them and prosecute them.

I could go on with a very lengthy post about this and sound very studious, but I think those two points in their simpler form make a lot of sense. What do you think?
In addition to the cultural shift it brought to the web community, Rails' is due a debt of gratitude for its technical innovations as well. Django, Merb, Pylons and others are all iterations on the Rails approach to web development. Django, it seems, is like a teenage boy nearing the end of his adolescence and realizes that just maybe his parents aren't as stupid as he once thought.
it's also worth noting that the rate is slowing down and as predicted by many economists, this rate (unemployment) will further increase
That's the point at which you know it works. :)

I wrote a port of QuickCheck for Lua, and it caught a fencepost error in its own random value generation code. (The documentation is still pretty crappy, though - I need to rewrite that first.)
The Funded.com's Founder Institute: Expanding to NYC
There's still a problem: when the unemployment rate starts to fall six months or a year after it spikes, that in itself tells you nothing about whether people are exiting unemployment because they've found jobs or because they've given up looking.
This is also how cars were stored in the Will Smith iRobot movie.

Oh yeah, and there's a real one managed by Unitronics Hoboken New Jersey. It's notorious for breakdowns: http://www.nj.com/hobokennow/index.ssf/2009/05/another_dropp...
A very good point that I was going to include in my comment on this article and left out in an effort to stay on my topic about the flaws of the calculation.

To support your point, I think it is more well known after this last year that "recession indicators" are lagging and we are typically in a recession a good 3-6 months before it is declared and the reverse is true for when we get out of it.

Thanks for bringing this up.
In the Event That You Have Accidentally Swallowed the Higgs Boson
I am sure there's going to be a parody of this sooner or later
Focusing Interaction Design with Design Strategy
Large Hadron Collider stalled again by a chunk of baguette
I have nothing against marketing in itself, if it is win-win. That is for example if people realize they have to create insightful articles to attract hackers as readers, it is a win-win.

I am sorry, I just don't see the MacHeist thing in the same category as those other articles you mention. There is no information or news in the MacHeist thing. Obviously a lot of readers here disagree, so whatever...
Generally overconfidence in our present abilities isn't conducive to stimulating new research.

I mean: I give you as much workup on the brain of an unknown individual as you care to have (fMRI, scans, dissection, whatever you want).

Can you detect which languages, if any, the person speaks (or spoke), with any robustness?

Can you detect if the person ever saw an ocelot in person?

Can you detect which sports team, if any, they like or liked to root for, or which instruments, if any, they played?

For most sections of the brain the level-of-detail at which functionality is decoded is still very primitive and coarse-grained. The reason god-of-the-gaps arguments have so much traction is b/c the gaps are still so very large.
It should also be pointed out that this person is a partner at an intellectual property law firm. Forgive me if I'm not persuaded by the placations of an IP lawyer on this particular matter.
FORT HOOD GUNMAN US ARMY MAJOR MALIK NADAL HASSAN IS ALIVE
An interesting demonstration of why closures are useful is to start from a hypothetical language that supports closures but not objects and then implement a (simple!) object/class system. For me, it was extremely clarifying to have something in my mind click and go "Oh, OOP doesn't need to be a language feature ... there's this much more powerful concept available as a building block."
When Julie Aigner-Clark founded Baby Einstein and started shooting her edutainment videos in her basement, she never worried about licensing the Einstein name. She just went ahead and did it. Many years later, they settled the name licensing dispute with Albert Einstein's estate, paying them considerable royalties.

True entrepreneurship involves risk taking. You can't plan for everything and you can't wait.
No, it's not orthogonal. I can see it in things like the complaints about how foreign keys "caused problems" in the migrations. Generally, that means one of two things: The foreign keys were actually preventing bugs in your migrations (which even in a startup context is a Good Thing(TM), as "buggy migration" is effectively slower than "correct migration" no matter how fast the buggy migration is), or the developer was not experienced enough with foreign-keyed databases to really know how to migrate this.

Bear in mind that if you screw up hard enough there's no guarantee you can recover. Anybody hanging around this site for long enough has read at least a couple of stories about the technical error that brought the whole startup down because there weren't enough resources to recover, and "botched database upgrade" (combined with "failure to backup", which of course occurred because there was no time, we're going too fast and we're too awesome!!! to do the backup) is a prime candidate for that sort of event.

I say the latter because I've been there. Setting up foreign keys is one skill. Learning how to migrate them is another. I've screwed it up before. It does take a bit of learning. But once you learn it, you're still better off using them properly in the first place. There's also some skill in learning how to set up your database so it can be migrated; I'm not even sure how to begin putting it into words, but there's definitely some skill involved there. (I'm not guaranteeing I've got it all figured out, but I've certainly improved, which is enough to establish that it is a skill.)

They're not equivalent either, certainly, but when you say "orthogonal", you're making the claim that they are not just different (which is true), but utterly unrelated, and that claim is unsupportable. I've been deliberately spending my last couple of years learning how to build things both fast and right, and I've gotten to the point where I can spank anybody just "hacking around" after about a two-month window, after which it's all profit. In fact I'm building a system replacing just such an effort right now... well, after I stop posting this anyhow. My system isn't a glorious paragon either because as an experienced developer I know where to cut corners to get it out, but it's a lot stronger than the hack job it's replacing (and I'm doing it in less time, too).

(Part of the reason I started this learning is that I was at a startup where I did in fact make this exact error. In the end, this is not what killed it (what killed it was the management insisting that there was always just one more feature we needed before release, and then once we had that, there was just one more, repeat until out of money with no customers), but I've made this mistake and I won't make it again. But the alternative is not hackhackhackhackhack, the alternative is being more familiar with the cost/benefits ratios and picking the winners, some of which will still be "do it right", and some will not. Hardcoding the answer in either direction is wrong, as it pretty much always is.)
no makin it for me either. But I still have such a good feeling my idea will be a winner!

If anyone wants to see if, I'll add you to the list.
Mystery: A Ghost Town That Exists Only In Google Maps
1 year later, go back for Series B after people get sick after eating ice cream so you have to restart the entire company, 2 years later fire your first 3 employees and shut down the factory as sales dwindle due to economic recession, 3 years later fight to stay alive due to competition from Ben and Jerry's who have now invented their own version of your product as your friends and family leave you and your health lapses, 4 years later get sold in a fire sale to a large Chinese company, don't get any money because of the participation of the VC's, and go get a job at Ben and Jerry's. You are now bald and in your mid-thirties.

(Seriously though, sell the company for $200M after 1 year, not very realistic!)
I think the difference between the best practices for "lean startups" vs "enterprise" is overstated. The benefits of fast feedback still apply to large projects - the only real difference is that big companies won't necessarily die from inefficiencies like over engineering. And the fact that, over anything but a very short timeframe, the right way is also the fastest way still applies to startups. Sometimes a shortcut is in order - but you can't sustain that for as long as it will usually take to become established.

Real experience teaches you how to choose the right balance.
That is what I don't like (see my other comment). It is just the same marketing trick every other vendor in the world uses. You know when you shop for clothes and you peel off the "reduced price: 50$" sticker, and underneath you see that the original price was in fact just 40$...

Looking at MacHeist, if you haven't bought those apps before, then they have not been worth 20$ for you - so you don't save a thing. Instead, you spend money on stuff you wouldn't have bought otherwise. Yet many users fall for it, somehow.
i DONT get this attitude of Google. even MS uses jquery but the open source king Google do not. is this so hard to improve upon Firefox or Ubuntu or even much less complex jquery?
This bit was interesting.

"With Haskell you've been always thinking it's side effect free, right? Writing a function is side effect free. In Erlang just the fact of passing a message is a side effect. Don't you find it a bit of a problem or a difficulty when programming with Erlang?

Most of my Erlang programming is side effect free. I think I probably write very unusual Erlang programs that look a lot like Haskell ones. Now and then, I do write side effecting code. For example, when I use the random number generation libraries that comes with Erlang, it has a side effecting interface. It's very tempting when you are building something on top of the library with a stateful interface to build code on top of that that also has a stateful interface. "

I find that one of the key advantages of programming in Haskell is that you think in terms of the minimum stateful interaction your program needs and most of the program is not "side effecting code"
I am having an experience that is in some ways strikingly similar to the one described.

I want to iterate on my game's level design abilities to choreograph various enemy AIs with detailed scripts - things like "this group will spawn over here and take this path over there, shooting at these intervals."

But figuring out what the best paradigm, the best data format and tooling to help me iterate on the choreography is - is a guess. I can make a bells + whistles solution, but it might not be the right one. But neither is it something that can just wait and becomes obvious at some later date - the technical solutions and the design solutions are intermingled and have to be resolved together. So even though I'm my own customer, I'm still in the "lean" stage of this feature.

So I'm trying to stick hard and fast to "stupidly simple" means of tackling each problem I encounter. Instead of making one all-powerful choreographer system I've started with the stupidest, simplest one I could think of, hedging my bet by allowing multiple systems to coexist, while making the key pieces of data I already know I need, like spawn positions and trigger targets, sit in a different layer where they're easy to edit and interchange.

Essentially, I want to ride on the "80% solution" for a while and then gradually accumulate the rest, and I think the key to making that work is to know where you are uncertain and start fencing off the most suspicious areas so that you can build the eventual shift into the architecture - not modularity so much as "this code will someday become legacy code, so treat as if it already is."

I'm really sleepy right now so this might seem more profound to me than it is.
LOL, I love this!

Ironic that someone on HN brought up this Ali G video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nkuOuxRD1Bc (where he invents the "ice cream glove" and Donald Trump thought he was going to say ice cream that doesn't melt) in response to an article on the front page today.
You could make the unemployment number get "better" by convincing people that they shouldn't try to find a job because the market is so bad.

That is why a lot of people look at the payroll report at the same time. But the payroll report usually comes with large revisions.
Also, writeroom is a very popular app among bloggers
That's the point though, right? They show results for Youtube, Google Maps, Google News, etc. so they can keep you on their websites to look at more ads. The more ads they show, the more money they get.
I agree this mistake is typical, but I would not be surprised to see a senior make it.

A related mistake is, of course, to keep a pilot project in production (usually as the core of the production project, with a variety of both functional and structural additions to keep it sort of working). This mistake is usually a result of a management decision more than development (but could be the same person).
Agile Says What?
Andreessen On Skype:“One Of The Most Important Companies On the Internet.”
Great idea. @pzupan
Perhaps a better title would be "Mercantilism's fundamental flaw". Rand makes few assumptions regarding the inherent integrity of "leaders"; in fact, she assumes no such integrity, and argues for liberty.

While we trip over ourselves (as a society) to give up our freedoms and grant ever more sweeping power to "leaders" to save us, we will reap what we deserve -- ever greater examples of waste, bungling, abuse, malinvestment and looting, on scales simply unimaginable just a few years ago.

We gave up our ability to directly monetize wealth 2 or 3 generations ago -- what features of our present financial system makes you believe that it is "Capitalism"? Government giveth, and government taketh away. Sounds like good, old-time kingly Mercantilism to me...
I would love to see what goes on during the ramp up to and rollout of a startup. I know what I'm going through right now, but how does my day to day compare to other startup founders?