skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Was that meant to be funny?
First a Django Guy and Now a Microsoft Guy: “Thank You, Rails”
I wonder if there will be jobs for any of these people who have heard for the last 12 years of their lives that college and success are synonymous. My guess is not so much and we will be hearing more stories about massive debts that can barely be serviced by people working in restaurants or Starbucks. I expect a lot of people will end up be disillusioned with the narrative they've been given their whole lives and that doesn't seem like a bad thing to me. I just wish they could avoid it in the first place though.
You have much to teach us, great one.
In simple English, orthogonal means "at right angles". People often say that two things are orthogonal when they mean is that they are different dimensions that are unconnected with each other.

To pick a silly example, the number of coffee cups I have is orthogonal to the number of jars of jelly beans I have.
Ask HN: Anyone ever use OpenPR for press releases?
It's free, but does it work? Please share experiences.
LINQ, so far as I know, backs to SQL, and thus inherits the inadequate relational aspects of SQL. The syntax is nicer, though, and also goes a long way towards demonstrating my point about the annoying inadequacies of SQL. Especially as I dig deeper into the functional world, the inability to meaningfully compose SQL statements is really getting annoying.

I am in the weird position of being both a relational snob and thinking that relational databases aren't the solution to everything.
And, rereading, he either edited his message or I have really poor reading comprehension.
Note: "software goes down" is a euphemism for "the corrupt city government decided not to pay for the software license, and the company shut it down."

At least that's what happened in Hoboken.
Adding Facebook and Twitter Followers – A Little One on One ?
i'll agree with this. i'm just trying to dissuade young people from dropping out of college to "pursue their dreams." CS is not obvious or trivial stuff, even though learning to scrap together a website in Rails might be. and the two are not the same.
not quantum mechanics

Except the twistor formalism he created (following ideas of no one else but Dirac) is important branch of research in quantum mathematical physics and string theory, not only classical gravity.

Just like Hawking or Freeman Dyson had, Penrose too earned his right to odd, and even braggart opinions on everything. Especially since opinions are by definition not meant to advance knowledge, or demonstrate results, but to provoke and inspire discussion.
A fundamental flaw in the article:

"The banks, however, are another matter altogether, and this is where I think capitalism has hit a roadblock. The government has intervened to save many of them, and now, these bailed out banks want to hand out billions in bonuses to their non-performing employees. Capitalism gave way to welfare economics, and now the government has to intervene further to limit these looters from behaving badly by imposing taxes and regulations."

If the government hadn't intervened in the first place, and instead let these irresponsible banks fail, then the transfer of taxpayer money in the form of bonuses never would have happened.

What she's describing here is, in actuality, yet another flaw of government intervention.
Im confused :) It was just a comment that sprung out at me

The fact remains the bikes are only as secure as the system used to storing them :) no reason hacks wont spring up. I was surprised no one else here commented on it.

(no need to be vicious)
Yeah, an experienced startup developer can acknowledge and articulate the tradeoffs between time to market and the perfect design, sometimes delaying some of the design (e.g. perhaps deferring scaling tasks until it's needed) to get things done faster, but at a minimum, making it functional and maintainable.

It's like the army corp of engineers. They can make a bridge for the general public, but they also know how to design something quick (and hopefully sturdy) for troops and supplies during a conflict. It may not be pretty, but it gets the job done when it's needed most.
This article suggests, twice, that "most intelligent people" agree with the author. Surely there is a better way of proving these facts, than just using such an assertion?
A closure enables you to keep local state in a functional language. Think of it as an object (a really abused word, I know, but it conveys the idea).

So what are the mechanics? Follow me (I'll use Arc):

Lesson 1) A function can return a function:

arc> (def adder-factory () [+ 1 _])
#<procedure: adder-factory>
arc> (= add-1 (adder-factory))
#<procedure>
arc> (add-1 10)
11

Lesson 2) A created function can hang on to information which you pass in:

arc> (def adder-factory (c) [+ c _])
#<procedure: adder-factory>
arc> (= add-17 (adder-factory 17))
#<procedure>
arc> (add-17 13)
30

Lesson 3) The information a function hangs on to can be mutable local state.

arc> (def make-point ((o x 0) (o y 0))
"Constructor for creating point objects"
(let methods (obj
get-x (fn () x)
get-y (fn () y)
set-x [= x _ ]
set-y [= y _ ])
(fn (method . args)
(apply (methods method) args))))
#<procedure: make-point>
arc> (= pt (make-point))
#<procedure>
arc> (= pt (make-point))
#<procedure>
arc> (pt 'get-x)
0
arc> (pt 'set-x 17)
17
arc> (pt 'get-x)
17

And that is a "closure". The name comes from the fact that the scope of the created function "closes over" the local variable.

Helpful or noisy?
Counterpoint: flash trading. If I can peek at the orders the little guys put in through scott trade and execute a trade before theirs clears, then I can benefit from the upward price pressure that their orders induce. Little risk, no government, hardly "fair".

In an ideal world new stock markets would pop up without flash trading and the little guys would flock to those instead but there are huge network effects to get over. In this case regulation, or at least shaming the exchanges into doing something, seems appropriate.

I'm totally with you on the bailout moral hazard, there are just definitely some zero-work-ethic, unfair, risk-less behaviors that are quite profitable even (especially?) under anarcho-capitalism.
I guess I'm curious what "wealth-backed money" is. All money is only a medium of exchange, and is only worth what people collectively agree it is worth.

I'm going to take a guess and assume you mean gold, but if that isn't the case, I'm really curious to know.

The fact that people collectively agreed that gold was a good form of money has nothing to do with any intrinsic (or god given) value of gold. It had everything to do with certain properties of gold that made it a good medium of exchange. Namely, it's durable, portable, hard to counterfeit, malleable, etc.

Eventually, gold's cause was assisted by tradition. People have been using it to represent money for so long they mistakenly believe it has intrinsic value. (Granted, gold isn't a bad choice, if you are betting on the fact that others will irrationally value it.)

So yes, it's harder for governments to manipulate a gold-backed currency... but it's not that hard. The US effectively did it twice, most recently after WWI with the Gold Reserve Act. Also, your money supply is now open to manipulation by private entities and even individuals. Gold mining companies, for instance, would have powerful sway over the amount and price of gold.
Every time I've spoken with Jono I've found it well worth my time. I want to thank him for taking the time to pull this together and making it available to the widest possible audience.
I haven't downloaded or installed it yet, but based on the provided screen shots, I find that I probably won't like the interface. The iPhone's native UI set has gone through a lot of interaction testing and thought; it's what I've grown used to. Deviating from it, you better be damn sure it's more effective.

Also, your "quick-start" guide is a page (411 words!) of dense text. I'd expect it to be much easier to get started with a tasks app. I do like that it says "That's it!" afterwards.

Also, next time, I'd submit a link to your page ( http://gedapp.com ) instead of the iTunes link. It provides more information, sets up a context and lets people review the feel of it without needing iTunes.
Sorry, I wasn't clear. After 18 months, they don't keep the original IP anymore, that is correct, but they can still cross-reference everything. Which means that in practice, they can still figure out who you are, they haven't lost any "connectivity" of the data.

But to make regulators happy, after 18 months, they can't spit out your raw IP addresses. Feel better now?
I think 1 is the optimal number of amichails.
you can have voluntary, free trade without government. whether it's called "capitalism" or something else can be a matter of discussion...
He also says in the video that he got investors who were friends, which is revealing as well.
"Behind every great fortune there is a great crime". Obviously that isn't true, but I'm shocked no one has written a book that details the shady beginnings of famous silicon valley startups. There's more than enough material.

One of my favorites is MySpace, when they were still called eUniverse/ResponseBase.
I wrote this to answer that question: http://www.jerf.org/iri/post/2542

In particular, I focus on showing an example that is noticeably more complicated without closures, but also a real case that could conceivably come up.
The initial success of MySQL is evidence against your assertion.

When MySQL came out it was the first widely used database that explicitly said that speed of development and operation matters more than correctness. Experienced DBAs were shocked and horrified. Over time the database has matured, however its initial success stands as a testament to the principle that there are a lot of problems (particularly in the web area) where people care that the site does what they want and is responsive, but are tolerant of occasional problems.

Yes, I am aware of all of the possible shortcomings. However requiring people with good ideas to understand more theory before they can get things done does not help motivated newcomers to get interesting things done. And lots of newcomers getting interesting things done leads to successful startups. Which is how a crappy but convenient database (MySQL) got traction in the first place.

For a classic essay on the tradeoff between convenience and correctness, see Worse is Better at http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html.
There's also a huge debate about the validity of her claims. Not only did she not care about using the name, but she doesn't care much about the efficacy of her product.
Simple Clojure example:

user=> (defn add-n [n] #(+ n %))
#'user/add-n
user=> (def add-2 (add-n 2))
#'user/add-2
user=> (add-2 5)
7
I'm not convinced by the utility of your example. What's wrong with:

foreach (var obj in objects) {
AddButton("Delete " + obj.ToString(), obj.Delete);
}

This is even simpler and doesn't use closures at all.
Phone Smart - What Your Phone Might Do for You Two Years From Now
This is wonderful news; I'm really grateful to Google for opening this.

We already knew that Google's major javascript apps were not using GWT. I always had reservations about GWT because I think javascript is a very nice language. (Just the language - not necessarily the DOM or implementations).

While java seems like a step backwards.

The main thing missing from javascript is some stricter checking, and it looks like Closure Tools provides this.
Yes. The recession began in late 2007. Unemployment didn't start spiking until mid-2008.

What happens is that companies are not anxious to start laying off employees when the economy goes south, for a variety of reasons. So they start spreading less work among their existing workforce. Worker productivity and hours worked both go down.

This makes these leading indicators. On the other end, when the economy starts winding up at the end of a recession, the now-lean companies aren't anxious to start hiring again. So instead they start giving their existing workforce more work, asking people to work more hours, etc. So you have the opposite: unemployment stays high for a while while productivity and hours spike.

Worker productivity is currently "surging":
http://news.google.com/news/search?aq=f&um=1&cf=all&...

However, hours worked is "holding steady":
http://news.google.com/news/search?aq=f&um=1&cf=all&...

What that means, I'm not qualified to say. And it looks like real economists are (as always) of differing opinions on it. Ideally you'd want to see both of those indicators on the up-tick, but given that one is increasing and the other is not getting worse, it's probably a sign that unemployment is going to start going down here pretty soon.
I think people should upvote jmtame. He probably wouldn't have gotten any response from Dustin Curtis unless he leveraged the threat of public embarrassment. Similarly, whenever I see a bemmu thread, I point out that he owes me $20, because the only way to bring him out of the woodwork is through social shaming.
yeh I agree that how they treated you was bad, it's odd that they refused a refund :(
You are right, it is a flawed number, it does not take into account "the discouraged(people who gave up looking for work)", "the startup(ie most of YC)", prisoners(1.5% of theworking population in US) and some other groups.

However, 10.2% unemployment even by flawed definition is still significant.
Dangerous, maybe, but high affect.
> Isn't it the case that a calling a method with (say) null parameters where they are supposed to be non-null should raise an exception?

Not really. Checking parameters in every method (especially an OO system) is a sure way to have poor performance. Null values as other kinds of testing should be done in the areas of the system that create and receive objects from outside.

Normal methods should just work find even if a parameter is NULL. Although this doesn't look nice, it is a way to make the system testable, in the absence of true NullObjects.
Actually it was inspired by Mathematica:

http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/ref/Slot.html
Yeah, there's a "show all" button at the bottom of the transcript to expand all the answers at once.
Aren't the map results organic?

Just because they're displayed in a different form doesn't make them any less organic.
Cool, now they don't have an excuse to keep the protocol closed in the new "open-source" version.
I think this whole argument implies an interesting normative method for evaluating government policy. Your implication seems to be that restricting some freedoms for some people ends up producing an overall increase in freedom relative to no restriction. The obvious crimes come to mind first but the framework could be applied elsewhere. Take copyright for example, do I have the freedom the control my own creative work however I like, or does the freedom not to have to constantly worry about the source of media outweigh the freedom to control my creations. More succinctly, in a world without copyright are we more or less free? It's not obvious to me.

Singapore is a case in point, freedom not to be caned for minor infractions vs. freedom to walk around relatively safely in a high density metropolis. Again who is more free is not clear.

I think you are wise to suggest there might be "maximal" achievable liberty. Does the culture of society affect the attainable liberty opportunity set? It seems like it must.
Interface, interface, interface. I like the whole cracked leather on splash but there needs to be a melding of that into the native UI. Aside from that, and my love for the GTD system, you definitely have something going on.

I would more then love to see and critique a new updated UI if you wanted to go that route. Really glad you spoke up and shared because I would have probably never found the app on my own.
There shouldn't be a central bank in the first place. The government should not be a "lender of last resort," nor should it be allowed create a fiat currency and require people to accept it.
You are confusing front running with flash trading. What you describe is front running, and is illegal.

Flash trading is simply trades based on receiving market data with lower than normal latency (usually by having colocated servers).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Front_running

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_trading
A common quote from balzac, inaccurate though. The real version is:

“The secret of a great success for which you are at a loss to account is a crime that has never been discovered, because it was properly executed.”

http://www.thevalve.org/go/valve/article/epigrammatic_accumu...

(please excuse the marxism)
In my experience, hacking things is only faster because you rarely try to do things the right way and are more familiar with hacking your way out of problems than you are planning for them. Hacking should be a last resort, when timelines are up and it is down to that or shipping nothing.
Just wanted to say:

If you do not quickly clue into the fact that Array#pack was redefined in a file you've never seen before that was committed last Tuesday by your most junior developer in the Seoul office, enjoy spending the next several days going over code you swear looks right looking for the error.

Code reviews are absolutely required with any dynamic language. It's a good practice anyway, to keep everyone on the same page.
You should check out Io. It is an OO language with laziness: http://www.iolanguage.com/scm/git/checkout/Io/docs/IoGuide.h... (see the Messages section).
I don't know the details, but it seems they took advantage of eBay's ignorance. Screwing people over is not a good longterm strategy. I know I wouldn't want anything to do with them.
It looks like the results are actually good. If you are searching for dentists in a particular area, chances are you would also like to see them on a map.

To me it is a case of Google trying to give a good search result - but using another Google app. And in the bargain raising eyebrows. But if you compare it with Bing, the difference between ads and results on Bing is even harder to make out.

I am sure this will draw antitrust eyebrows too.
Here Google of course is promoting their map application with local listings and reviews. They might actually believe that it is the best way out there to give local listings with reviews etc. But it kind of forces everyone to add reviews in Google map which in turn will actually become the best even it is not right now. And apps like yelp will slowly be forced out of reckoning.
They are functions you can make up on the spot. That's usually the extent of my explanation.

Surprisingly, most of the people I talk to assume that the "fancy" parts of closures (such as variable value capture and upvalues) are the way such a construct should work and require no further explanation to use them. People who are surprised by capture (and assume, for instance, that the variable will take on the most recent value assigned to it by outside code instead of "remembering the value when the closure was made") get a more lengthy computer science-esque explanation. But I generally find that explanation to be unhelpful if a person can't see why closures are useful; "An anonymous function with some teeth" is often how people I talk to come to closures first, so it's how I let them think about it until the model is no longer helpful.
Don't Let the Funky Math of Convertibles Bite You
yes i am so very excited about it.
they seem to not have embraced the same philosophies i have been exposed to around this community. i'm going to try to share what i have learned there though i dont have much experience applying it
There's certainly been drama, but I don't think that eBay was ignorant of the fact that they never purchased some of the core Skype/Joltid technology -- per http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/07/technology/companies/07sky...

"EBay did not purchase this part of the Skype technology in 2005 because the Skype founders, and Joltid’s other shareholders, were asking for additional hundreds of millions, and stated that they intended to use the technology for other unrelated ventures, like their video startup Joost."
"The government has intervened to save many of them, and now, these bailed out banks want to hand out billions in bonuses to their non-performing employees"

So presumes the author that the people who are ostensibly receiving "billions" in bonuses are the same people who pushed this over-leveraging scam. All bankers are equal, none managed wisely.

"And thus, we lose Berkeley Ph.Ds in nuclear physics to hedge funds and MIT computer scientists capable of delivering computing to 6 billion people to derivative manipulation on Wall Street."

So presumes the author that nuclear physics and democratization of computing are more noble pursuits than finance. What he forgets is that mortgage-backed derivatives really did reduce risk for really bad mortgages. This was a phenomenal development, we could get more people into houses while not losing our shirts in the deals. Unfortunately, those same mathematicians weren't the ones employing this great tool that they created. "When the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail." It's not that mortgage-backed derivatives were wrong or evil or bad, it's that they were grossly overused. They reduce risk, they don't eliminate it, so when the scenario in which that risk turned to losses came true, the losses were too much to handle.

But, few people saw the risk for what it was because the Fed suppressed the price of money to lower-than-market rates, explicitly encouraging this sort of speculation. Price floors lead to shortages, this is a basic tenet of Capitalism. Is it any wonder that the entire nation is over-leveraged? Without the manipulation of the Fed, the price of money (interest rates) would have been much higher and this sort of speculation would not have happened.
Unfortunately you gotta do this these days: +django +video +tutorial

http://www.google.com/search?q=%2Bdjango+%2Bvideo+%2Btutoria...

There's probably a Greasemonkey script for this somewhere that can automatically get this old behavior back for you.
Doh!

It would have made more sense if I had some other piece of information to inject in, like if you had a database reference that needed to be passed in to the Delete() method.

Then:

AddButton("Delete " + obj.ToString(), () => obj.Delete(db));

Vs.

var d = new DeleteHandler(obj, db);
AddButton("Delete " + obj.ToString(), d.DoDelete);

EDIT: fixed
FWIW, Django was in private use before Rails was made public, so while Django and Rails are kindred, it's not reasonable to call Django an iteration of Rails.
Apple has thousands of employees. But it's not design by committee. There's a strong drummer in that company that keeps everyone marching in step, so that the entire company adopts and shares that one person's vision, or at least the general philosophy behind it. That's not to say that the drummer has a vision that goes unaltered by interactions with other smart people, but when their vision changes, it propagates.
Decision on MySQL/Oracle a Test for the E.U.
Are You A Founder, CEO, or Entrepreneur?
Do you have any idea what the current financial situation would have looked like if the government had just let the banks collapse?

Hint: a lot like a jenga tower does just after you take away a vital piece.

Letting the entire financial system collapse might _possibly_ have led to better behaving banks in the long term(although I doubt it, people don't learn). But in the short term it would have cascaded through the entire economy and left the economy entirely non-functional.