skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Of course @_ could mean anything, but it means just one thing, which is documented in the perlvar man page:

@_ Within a subroutine the array @_
contains the parameters passed to that subroutine.

Access to the man pages does not make one an expert, anyone can read them. I seriously hope that anyone who is intending to successfully understand or modify code know enough about the language it is written in to actually be able to read it.

There are idioms in every language, especially in syntax. Python's inheritance declaration looks like a function call or an argument specification. Ruby's uses < to indicate inheritance. PHP and Perl are more self-documenting in this regard, using "class _subclass_ extends _baseclass_" and by assigning to a variable named ISA within a package respectively. Python's decorator syntax is non-obvious, and uses a perl-ish sigil to boot. Ruby using sigils to indicate scope (vs type, which is how it is done in both perl and older BASICs) is non-obvious. Python syntax for single element tuple creation. PHP's arrays allowing both integer and string indexing in the same array, and its "hashes" or "dicts" keeping order, leads to idiomatic code. Perl assignment list expanstion when using arrays and hashes as subelements on the LHS eating up the rest of the input is idiomatic. unless is idiomatic in perl, but only because few other languages have that kind of construct, and instead force you to use an if-not, which isn't always as readable. Perl's map and sort look like they can take closures, but they're really BLOCKs which is slightly different. The difference between Proc objects, blocks and lambdas and how they can be converted between each other and called in ruby is idiomatic.

Latin is readable if you speak Latin -- for everyone else it's pretty unreadable.
Really? Why is this showing up on the /Classic? I'm surprised that people who aren't new to HN are upvoting this.
A lot of heritable diseases are recessive traits - dominant genes are easier to select against.

Two people from the same background/race etc. are far more likely to carry the same recessive genes for a disease than two from different backgrounds.

This is why inbreeding produces unhealthy individuals. Two individuals that share a parent/grandparent etc will be very likely to inherit identical recessive disease genes from the parent.

Two people of different backgrounds will have offspring that are somewhat more likely to be healthy and have fewer problems.
> As long as the difference between individuals in a single population is greater than the mean difference between populations themselves, I don't see much relevance.

This part is the Lewontin's fallacy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewontin%27s_Fallacy)
Where there's banking, there's COBOL.
> countries which didn't completely recover from colonialism

I’ve heard this statement and it is completely false (I did not take issue with the rest of your post). Colonialism actually introduced a lot of technology into Africa (things such as the wheel were not widely used).

The most heavily colonialised countries in Africa are the best. A good example is Botswana. They did not return to their pre-tribal ways but basically adapted the British system. South Africa is also heavily “colonialised” and it is the only industrial country.

Countries such as Lesotho and Swaziland had minimal colonial influences and still have much of their traditional leadership (uninterrupted). Those two countries are also the biggest shitholes in Africa.

The traditional African governance was a strong-man (chief) with absolute power. It was basically an absolute monarch who is only removed by someone more powerful. That is why Africans in rural areas usually like a strong-man – anyone else is seen as a weak leader. A leader who is compassionate is seen as weak.

I personally would content that a lot of African countries returned to their pre-colonial government structure.
What bothers me even more, is that very often voting is based on personal preference. For example, being down-voted by Google fans, when one criticized Google.
Rocket Fuel, based in Redwood City, hires paid summer interns - and they pay competitively with Amazon and Microsoft. I don't work for them, just interviewed with them last year.

http://rocketfuelinc.com/
This is spam. The user signed up just to promote his site. Even worse the submission is the homepage instead of the specific post.
A bigger SEO mistake: linking to your homepage instead of the permalink for the article in question.
It's a shorthand for 'I totally agree and what was said bears repeating'. I think it originated on fark, but I'm not totally sure.
A thought-provoking article. However, it's not at all clear to me why having a more informational economy is beneficial per se. Because the non-incremental change - or power law change - can work both ways, up and down.

Take the financial system for instance. Finance is one of the most "informationized" industries, with news coming in fast at Bloomberg terminals, ubiquitous access via smart phones, and thousands of trading orders executed every second. Yes, a system becomes more efficient the less (physical) constraints it has, but it also gets less robust. At the core of this problem is that we don't really understand non-incremental change due to the properties of information and a whole host of cognitive biases.

Therefore, I'd like to see a distinction being made to cases where the informationization is beneficial, and where it is detrimental. It's a good thing in industries where there's mostly exposure to positive non-incremental change (e.g. Internet businesses, biotech), but otherwise not.
Como llamar gratis a un telefono de tricom - Buscar con Google
Gladiatus Server 1
Are there really programming jobs where you only use one language? I'd prefer to work with people who use the right tool for the job. I work with C/Java/Perl on a daily basis and occasionally modify Ruby or Python. I've also used quite a lot of C# in the past.

In general, I have no language preferences. It's just C# for Windows front-ends, Java for management layer, Perl for configuration, C for core software.
Github spamming...
Google needs to do it first with its Wave. If it succeeds, Wave may propagate as the harbinger of the end of working weeks. It's gonna be a real wave, who knows?
There is a certain amusement value in a perceived SEO-spam account, posting a story about messing up backlinks, messing up the link.
> What you put in "language" are requirements for conforming implementations.

That's a language definition, not a language. Consider a language L which is implemented in implementation language M.

Stuff that's written in L is part of the satndard library. Stuff that could have been written in L but is written in M (e.g. for speed) is part of the language. And stuff that is written in M is also part of the language.
I actually find it much easier to work at the office. I have a lot fewer distractions plus having a separate environment for your work and your home life I think is important. Having said that, my commute is only a 15 minute cycle and I actually enjoy that part of the day.

I'd be interested to hear what other people feel and how they benefit from working from home.
Where are you based, and what are you interested in? There are folks from all over the world here! ;)
What's coming in Django 1.2 (presentation notes)
I'm always interested in the mutation and evolution of language, especially because so much of my work is related to parsing and alaysis of language, natural and otherwise. Hence my question:

Shouldn't it be "Everyone makes this mistake" ??

Although it's not definitive, Wikipedia only finds 2 instances of "does" and many more of "makes," and I was wondering what others here might think. For me personally, I find pages with spelling and grammatical errors almost physically painful.

Of course, the irony mentioned in the other comments is amusing.
i always marvel at how your comments continue to get upvoted.
I agree working at the office is much better. I have a family (young son and stay-at-home mom wife) and it is way too many distractions at home. I work at home 2x per week, and have 1hr45min commute each way other 3 days. But train ride is good for reading/programming too. Ideal situation: small work cabin in my backyard...
Google has focussed too much on common searches (the money makers). They have had so little competition that they forgot that people select their search engine based on specific searches.
It's easy to have this opinion when you are from the group perceived as superior. When you are from the group that is going to receive the "scientifically validated" stamp of inferiority, I think you would be very much against such statements as advocated in the article.
good point. I harp about ideology being an inappropriate ego boundary extension all the time but failed to apply it in this case.
Most African societies do not have a single strong king - I think you are confusing Africa with Europe. Europe and Asia are the societies that have always had a system of very powerful leadership at the top, and a large peasant class. African society is usually not constructed that way.

But I guess knowing what you are talking about is not fundamental to your argument.
"Heritability" means something like "how much of the variation in a population is due to genetic differences". This leads to some odd results, e.g. number of arms has low heritability (almost all variation is due to environment).

Anyway, language is not heritable. The variation in the languages people speak in a population is not due to genes but rather to environmental effects.
Comments like these are why I like news.YC.
Some friendly shell-scripting hints!

— Quoted strings continue until the close quote, regardless of intervening newlines, tabs or spaces. Your REPOS definition would be more readable without the backslashes and work just as well:

REPOS="
$HOME/git/repo1
$HOME/git/repo2
$HOME/git/repo3
"

— pushd and popd are handy, but are bash extensions and not part of POSIX /bin/sh (and yes, a lot of systems including Ubuntu and Debian have a bare POSIX /bin/sh). Even when they are available, shell error handling can make it difficult to be sure that each pushd has a matching popd. A simpler approach is to just cd in the subshell:

sh -c "cd $REPO; $1"

— Rather than explicitly invoking the shell you might find it easier to do the same thing with syntax:

(
cd $REPO
eval "$1"
)

...or, you might find that even less readable. Up to you!
jerf, is there an email id via which I can get in touch with you? Or you can send me an email? thanks!
i work from home, but i keep regular hours and have a desk that i tend to use "just for work" (not always; if my personal computing needs more power than my laptop then i need to sit in front of the "work" desktop).

i like it, but i am something of an anti-social clod. i can have a nap on my bed after lunch without anyone complaining. i can do the shopping at lunchtime (we live near shops). i don't waste time commuting (in fact i cook + wash pots in the time my partner commutes). i can surf the net as much as i want. play my music as loud as i want. have more space and more privacy and better furniture than i have had in any office.

but i should also admit additional pressures - i live in s america (chile). the work culture here is appalling (it's not what you do, but how many hours your boss sees you around for) and the wages low. by working from home i can do consulting "internationally". i do sometimes consider renting a small office nearby, just to keep work and "life" more cleanly separated. but it seems a lot of expense for little real gain.

[edit: while i agree with much of the article, i find the title a bit odd. i don't want to dedicate my whole life to others, so the "working week part" (9 til 5) makes sense to me. if i nap or surf the web in that time it's because i need a break - that doesn't mean i then have to work more hours to "make up". the idea is that i manage myself better than someone who isn't me could do]
I don't even use JSP/JSTL, I do straight HTML, CSS and JavaScript for the front end now and use a CMS for all of my static templating (by-by tiles). The only thing I use Java for now is RESTful services using JAX-RS. I do use JPA for my data access so for the most part, if I am just doing CRUD, I can generate the JPA class and the RESTful service off of that class without "writing" java. It is a far less convoluted stack and is far more efficient at getting work done quickly.
I agree, I find it difficult to work at home - I mean, seriously, there's a big screen TV and Xbox right over there! When I do, I also find it easier to work in the kitchen... my regular workspace has too much "fun stuff" and is distracting.

Also, am I the only one who doesn't experience this "cubicle nightmare" scenario? I don't listen to inane chatter by coworkers, I'm not overly burdened with meetings - and the ones I do have are productive and enjoyable. Also, I bus/walk to work, so I don't really experience the gas-brake-honk freeway experience either...

Oh, and I never, ever get called. I get emailed, people drop by my office, but I think I've gotten less than 5 calls in the past 6 months.

Are there others out there like me who find it just fine to work at the office?

Also:

> We’re commuting instead of computing

I disagree with this vehemently. There's nothing wrong with going to work at a physical place - the commuting problem is not solved by making people sit still. It's solved by wide, far-reaching changes in how our society perceives quality of life. It's solved by denser urban centres, surrounded by denser suburbs, and the elimination of the gigantic American backyard. The freeway culture is a direct result of the American obsession with the house, two cars in the garage, and the huge backyard - go look in Asia or Europe, high quality of life without the massive suburban sprawl. We need to get on that train (somewhat literally) or continue to suffer twice daily down the highway.
Cross-reference for those interested in this sort of thing:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=955628

Within the discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=955902
Pivot (from Microsoft)
i think i have a similar skill set to you, but i have tried both django and scala, so perhaps my perspective can help.

if you're fluent with python, django's way better than java for most web stuff. it's nowhere near as efficient, of course, but typically that doesn't matter for presentation layer (unless you're having to do some heavy processing of data for display, for example). the documentation is pretty good, but if you need to tweak something, be prepared to read their code.

[i don't really understand your objection to rest - even my java code (with spring + jsp) uses rest. anyway, it's easy to change that.]

i was surprised by scala. if you've got experience with functional languages, it might make sense. however, i was disappointed by the instability and lack of documentation, given its age and reputation. it's a sweet language, and i am using it for a personal project that requires efficient code, but i was hoping to recommend it for use at work and decided against that (for now - in another year i am pretty sure that will change).

but you don't give many details of what experience you have outside java.

if you do go with java, i find spring to be the "lightest" framework, typically with just jsp and a few tags. but compared to django that's still very heavy.
I always though a good feature for Photoshop would be a way to select areas of a file and mark them as dynamic content and non image content, that way PS knows what all of the static content "or template" is. Then PS could analyze and auto slice the image and generate the template HTML file that you can then go back and add any non image HTML to. As well it wild be nice to be able to define groups on the template so that PS would slice them out separately for items that may be repeated on the page or that may be used on several pages. My thought was that all this could be accomplished by tagging a layer to be ignored for generating the auto slice.
IPhone sync on Linux
Type "bing.com" in the address bar, hit Tab instead of Enter and search for anything.

Open Options from the tool menu. On the Basic tab, locate "Default search" and click the Manage button. In the list of "Other search engines", select bing.com and click Make Default.
We're hiring paid interns all year round. We need programmers and writers (content producers). Brooklyn, NY. Get in touch.

jobs at mybanktracker.com
I can't believe that they haven't got a captcha (or similar) anti bot system upon account creation.
I these spammy days, it's a must. And even more for such popular website.
Anyway I bet this will be fixed in the following days.
Afaik, most captcha system are crackable, and if not, will be in the next few months/year.
Google has been working on a new captcha system: http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2009/04/socially-adjusted...

This is kind of old, I wonder how it has progressed.
Emacs Lisp interpreter in JavaScript
just because others have been doing it doesnt mean they arent some of the best, etherpad ranks quite a bit above most other real time web stuff.
Reducing image size by eliminating literal tables from code heap entries
EtherPad - Service Restored
When I searched for $HOME on google, the result page had this:

"See results for: $home unix"

Which leads to this:

http://www.google.com/search?q=%24home+unix

I.e. if you want a unix-related result, say unix.
DDG founder here. We started out solely with our own crawler, which we still use for various things, e.g. finding and removing 50 million+ parked/spam domains. But we do use Yahoo BOSS as well.

However, we do not use BOSS straight up. We re-rank, omit, edit, merge, etc. in ways (I think and hope) yield much more relevant results, especially for more specific queries.

The Yahoo/MS search deal shouldn't effect us. We already have Bing in place as a backup and could easily switch to Ask's feed as well. We treat them as somewhat of a commodity, i.e. an output of the Web link graph, with our ranking stuff on top doing the important "last mile" work.

Thx for your feedback about news & images.
I consider unless to be one of my favourite things in perl that would fit into other languages. The key to the multiple ways of doing things is to make code clearer - you have to look at it not so much as "there's more than one way to do the same thing" as "many things compile down to the same opcodes on the VM".

I suspect in other languages lots of things compile to the same thing -

x = x << 1;
x = x * 2;

should produce the same thing. But if I was affecting a bit vector I'd use the former and if I was affecting a number I'd use the latter - because while the operation at the machine level might be the way, they are conceptually two different things and I want to express the concept to the next developer to look at this code.

The fact that perl intentionally supplies lots of features to allow me to write my code to express my intent as clearly as possible is an advantage to me, just as I find the english language an advantage over, say, lojban.
Ask HN: I'm a programmer. I am always angry at job. Is this normal?
Something always pissed me off at work -- whether it is bad code, unknown crashes, demanding boss, demanding clients, unreasonable colleagues, insensitive colleagues, damn deadlines that I didn't agree to, or emergency calls on weekends away.

I think I need help unless this is very normal for those in software development.
Free classified ads in Dadra and Nagar Haveli, India
Free classified ads search engine in Dadra and Nagar Haveli, India. A free, easy and fast way to find or to place ads in Dadra and Nagar Haveli.
I need to be in the office sometimes, because it really is much easier to grab a couple of people and scrawl on a whiteboard than it is to use IM.

But we also have very good flexitime - I can start work at 7:30am and finish up to 6pm, so long as I get 35 hours of work in somewhere during the week. This means I mostly work 10-5:30 with a half-hour lunch, while others work 8:00 - 3:30. And either way we miss the rush hour.
In comparison against the TIOBE Programming Community Index for December 2009:

Javascript 372 (17.72%) [ 3.515%]
Python 315 (15.01%) [ 5.185%]
Ruby 221 (10.53%) [ 2.653%]
C 191 (9.10%) [ 16.285%]
Java 182 (8.67%) [ 17.061%]
PHP 167 (7.96%) [ 9.770%]
C++ 124 (5.91%) [ 9.175%]
Other 121 (5.76%) --
C# 82 (3.91%) [ 6.258%]
Perl 70 (3.33%) [ 2.692%]
Clojure 53 (2.53%) [ 0.881% / 3?]
Lisp 42 (2.00%) [ 0.881% / 3?]
Haskell 37 (1.76%) [ 0.190%]
Scheme 34 (1.62%) [ 0.881% / 3?]
Erlang 31 (1.48%) [ 0.277%]
Lua 16 (0.76%) [ 0.585%]
Ocaml 11 (0.52%) [ < 0.15%]
Go 7 (0.33%) [ ??]
Arc 7 (0.33%) [ < 0.15%]
Fortran 5 (0.24%) [ 0.425%]
Smalltalk 5 (0.24%) [ 0.150%]
Coldfusion 4 (0.19%) [ ??]
D 2 (0.10%) [ 0.587%]
StressLinux, the Linux distro for high load stress testing
Tucano. Simple and functional portfolio type case, very slim.

Also has a leather option.
Ultimately the reason you should use it is because it gets you the information you want faster and with less mental effort. That's the primary goal. I'd encourage you (or anyone!) to try it for a week and then let me know how it goes with this goal in mind.

We've tried to achieve that goal via UI and a number of features that may or may not appeal to you individually. We also try to concentrate on features that the major search engines won't do because of their business position. A lot of those features are listed here: http://duckduckgo.com/about.html

What's not listed there that I think appeals to this crowd in particular is the background relevancy stuff I mentioned in my other comment and answer to your other question: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=979479

I think what also appeals to people like me (and by extension, I assume a lot of HN types) is keyboard shortcuts, aggressive filtering of parked/spam domains, and disambiguation.

We do have our own index and use it to improve relevancy as well as to add our own Zero-click Info and links to search result pages. Search any major topic and you should see a red box on top with a quick snippet and related topics. We also use it to build our own category and disambiguation pages, e.g. http://duckduckgo.com/c/Social_bookmarking

Our most recent major feature launch was Duck It!, a search view accessible from our homepage that features more topic summaries, e.g. http://duckduckgo.com/?q=tinychat&v=d. HN feedback link here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=919505

Of course, we'd welcome suggestions for additional features/improvements!
Is that web link graph freely available or do you have to pay
for it? I've been trying to get one for Google Scholar but
can't figure out how.
Any sufficiently advanced damage control is indistinguishable from ethics.

Already quoted: http://simonwillison.net/2009/Dec/6/ethics/

A similar sentence could be constructed about altruism, though it might be hard to keep it as short.
It's an interesting visualisation technology - but I'm yet to be persuaded that it's not just a neat toy.
Swimming in Data? Benefits of Visualization
I work in this field. The reasons for these problems are probably relatively simple.

1) Current GWASs focus on common variants, but the population explosion over the last few thousand years means it's likely that most human genetic diversity is rare.

2) Current GWASs focus on the marginal effects of variation at single-nucleotide sites, but it's likely that there are complex interactions between different variations.

These misplaced foci of current GWASs have more to do with what we could do with current technology than with what we ought to do, given these biological realities: sequencing was so expensive that it was hard to determine the rare variants; sample sizes were so small that we had to use simplifying statistical assumptions like independent phenotypic effects from each nucleotide variation. Those technological limitations are changing, now.

The "thoughtful geneticists" the article refers to aren't just wringing their hands about this. They are working on both of these issues. (I'm one of them.)