skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I usually wouldn't care too much about karma for individual comments or posts but seeing the above comment being downvoted simply for not liking a book, I must say the voting patterns on HN are getting quite weird.

Unless a comment is offensive or distracting the conversation, take it easy with the downvotes people.

</meta>
One example from the book SuperCrunchers involves Vintage Wines. A guy took soil and climate data and ran the it against the most expensive wines. Then he deduced rules about which years would be best for wine purchasing.

http://www.randomhouse.com/bantamdell/supercrunchers/
>"For the first time in history, the discovery of writing talent will depend more on skill and persistence than on luck."
No it will go back to patronage like it was a few hundred years ago.

But now instead of a dedication to the king to get your self-published book read, you need to know a famous blogger who will get it noticed by the NT or Oprah.
Is Internet Explorer dying?
Virtually never have there been so much controversy about any subject in the history of Computing as Internet Explorer has been attracting the last couple of years.
> Languages with an open and welcoming, real-world problem solving oriented community....

I think the CPAN applies very well here. Did you know that the CPAN Testers service records a million test results every three months?
"The problem with these sorts of statements is that nearly everything is insignificant compared to something else."

Yes. Yes it is. Welcome to reality, and engineering. The problem with your statement is that if you're burning a lot of time and mental energy on the insignificant things, then you are wasting your time.

If you, personally, have already taken the time to secure your housing's heating situation, already have an energy-efficient car and minimize driving anyhow, then maybe for you worrying about your kid's diapers is the lowest hanging fruit. I mean that completely straight, not sarcastic at all. However, if you're sitting here encouraging others to worry about their diapers while their homes sit there blowing 75% of their heat out a leaky door, then you're just wasting time.

It's the 80/20 principle, only when it comes to things like energy budgets it's more like the 95/5 principle; one or two things make up 95% of your energy budget and the rest is fiddling around the edges. Optimize the 95% first. Worry about the 5% later, if at all.

(Fiddling around making optimizations smaller than the noise threshold is also a waste of time. "Noise threshold" may sound like a weird concept to apply here, but it does; making a small food optimization that, even if applied by a million people, is still less than the daily variation in the amount of food thrown out by restaurants daily would be a complete waste of time. This is an example, I have no specific optimization in mind. The temptation is to say "Well, these things add up", but in fact when you're dealing with these sorts of distributions, sometimes they don't! Even ten .001% optimizations don't add up to much, and for the effort of getting those you probably missed out on a 1% somewhere else. These distributions can be very counter-intuitive, we don't do well with such large order-of-magnitude ranges.)
I think he forgot to write part where he explains why native client is better than ActiveX, or did I just overlook it?

Anyway, he seems to have a very specific, narrow use case (native client).
>Just like traditional publishers, Amazon has a vested interest in the success of your book

They have an interest in the success of books - in general.

But just like any publisher they will only spend time, money, space promoting their author that will sell the most.

The danger with amazon is that when they become the only publisher in the world there is only one promoted author. Once they have 'their' JK Rowling or Tom Clancy it is not in their interest to promote an alternative one. At least with traditional publishers there is competition.
Of course, but if you want to go with the GPL, you can use exceptions and protect just the part you want.
No, it's not: http://www.gnu.org/software/guile/docs/docs-1.6/guile-ref/Gu...
Is this HN worthy?
Actually, I meant it the other way around. Teaching a grammar that is constructed from the language, not one that fits better to Latin. I think it would help if each language was thought with a specialized grammar for that language rather than through subsets and hacks on top of a "universal" one.
"And, sure, the guys behind it had made some of the biggest contributions to computer science to date, including: UNIX, regular expressions, Plan 9 and even UTF-8!"

It's a little far-fetched to say that two operating systems and a string container are some of the biggest contributions to computer science to date.
Well, he is not exactly a regular guy. He arguably wrote the first successful web crawler, managed the project to bring the OED to CD-ROM, was part of two startups, co-authored XML specification. This clojure series relates to his wide-finder project at http://wikis.sun.com/display/WideFinder/Wide+Finder+Home, in which "Wide Finder is an attempt to answer this question: What is a good way to write computer programs to take advantage of modern slow-clock-rate/many-core computers, without imposing excessive complexity on programmers?"

I have written lots of concurrent code, and I think it is hard, as does Herb Sutter, Donald Knuth.
Ok, but to create a wrapper for the Java library, you probably need to grok Java enough to read the documentation and create some code that sits on top of it.
Cyborg MIT prof touts iPhone-controlled power-jumping legs
I don't understand this winner-take-all mentality around programming languages. Why "switch?" Why not instead simply add another tool to your toolbox? I like having a myriad of languages and libraries at my disposal. Each has its strengths and weaknesses. Understanding those allows you to choose the best tool for the job at hand.

One thing we need to learn to accept is that no tool is ever perfect. What is optimal for building applications may get in the way when doing embedded work. An outstanding teaching language may not be efficient enough for experts. There are many different situations we'll encounter as programmers. Not every can be resolved with the same set of tools, so the more we have available (and understand!), the better.
Free book: No Bugs
idea & hard_work => success | failure
Gigabyte M1305 laptop with 13.3-inch screen and external GeForce GT220 graphics
Taking An Open-Source Approach to Hardware
Interesting. Sainsbury's has chicken at 30g and kidney beans at 7g. You can search for nutritional information very easily here:

http://www.sainsburys.co.uk/groceries/index.jsp

Wolfram Alpha agrees, for what it's worth:

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=kidney+bean+100g

I wouldn't trust Wikipedia to give correct nutritional information. I've noticed they've been incorrect about this before.
The Hottest Laptop of the Year1334 HP Pavilion dv6 Us
Exactly, and as I noted below, this book spells it out very clearly: http://www.withouthotair.com/
I don't know. I think those books are worth reading at some point, but without SICP, Knuth, or Norvig's stuff, it is hardly a great list.
His visualizations are awful. They are the sort of infoporn so beloved of newspapers and magazines that fail to get over the important underlying information. I criticized one in detail on my blog: http://www.jgc.org/blog/2009/11/how-to-fail-at-data-visualiz...
I suspect that the editor should be held responsible for the lack of context surrounding the Messiasen introduction.
i think it really depends on your field. in software, if you have a great product and are an awesome hacker, nobody cares if you got a Ph.D. (or even went to college for that matter). but if you're trying to start a company whose clients are in a more 'old-school' field, like health care, civil engineering, or bio-sciences, having a Ph.D. (or even an MD/Ph.D. if you want to start a company in the medical sector) gives you a mark of credibility ... that's the sense i've gotten from people wanting to do business in non-software fields.
This is some amazingly cool tech, and then this title makes it sound like it's all about the iPhone. Seriously, the iPhone bit in there is completely irrelevant and stupid. Why do people keep doing this? I don't think I've seen it happen with any other piece of technology.
I'm a non-perl guy working in a very Perl heavy company, so hatred of it is quite well justified, and based on discussions with many of my coworkers, it seems the Perl community doesn't want to understand why the rest of the world has moved on and has no interest in Perl anymore (resulting in this kind of bullshit "please, please, please pay attention to me!!!")

--The language sucks - yes it does. Usually the KISS principle is thought of as a good thing, except in the Perl language where nothing is ever simple or straightforward. There's 10 ways of doing every single little thing, and no two developers do it the same way. It is not a language welcoming of new developers, so as more schools and companies switch/abandon, I can only imagine it declining further.

-- it offers nothing new or exciting to most developers. If you're starting a new project or company and you already know another similar language (say, Python), Perl has nothing to offer. While it was innovative new 10-15 years ago, most of the good has long been assimilated in other languages.

-- real world perl sucks. a standard line amongst Perl monks is "you can do that in Perl!". Exceptions, objects, web frameworks, clean code, etc. You name it, you can do it in perl. Except in the real world, hardly anyone ever does, so Real World perl is as terrible as people fear. Python's strong community standards, OTOH, pretty much make sure you're almost always writing decent code.

As an example, I picked up both Django and Catalyst over the last year. With Django (python newbie), I immediately picked up decorators and started using them - both the built-in ones and my own. Its simple - just syntactic sugar for a function wrapper.

Catalyst OTOH, tries something vaguely similar using method attributes - except their are neither as powerful nor as simple/clear and despite many years of perl experience on the team, few people had seen them used, used them themselves, nor did they have a solid idea of how they work.

My point is, when you make something simple and accessible, it'll get used. When all you do is repeat "you can do that" and wave your hands about, you'll get ignored and eventually forgotten.
Yes, and it's running on my domain :P
Dell Offers Customized Chrome OS Build for Mini 10V Netbooks
Bah, a voice of sanity. :-)

I think the problem is that the bigger the ecosystem for an environment, the more valuable peoples' skills are, with those tools.

Hence, language advocacy is an "efficient" choice (see the blog post about Perl on the front page, right now... pure flaming comments voted high.)
http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/ You should check this book out and contemplate the generalities of programming languages. Java is the most popular example of a whole class of programming languages - object oriented, automatic garbage collection, no lambda functions :[, single inheritance, runs in a VM etc. etc. If you know C++ really well then moving to Java is easy and if you know Java really well then moving to C# is easy etc. There's no reason to hate on Java just because it's not sexy anymore. Also, there are a hell of a lot of libraries already written in Java and a hell of a lot of jobs for Java programmers out there.
If people are desperate for a place to complain about Apple's stinginess, then I suppose this article give a platform. I kind of feel like there are plenty of other places on the internets for that, though.
How to get hired at a startup
Yes, I have one, and I know my identifier. No, I don't like using it, and, given the choice, don't use it.

I toyed with the idea of adding OpenID to my various projects, but haven't, and don't intend to, but my apps are targeted towards a different audience than yours.
I don't disagree with any of that. Being Canadian myself, I know it's far from the idea model.
If you use a Yahoo/Google OpenID, the user doesn't need to know the identifier (or anything else for that matter) - you use a fixed URL (https://www.google.com/accounts/o8/id for Google), Google/Yahoo handles the sign in and sends them back.

I'm currently building an app that relies solely on OpenID for user auth. I chose to enable only these sites, so that (a) users are not required to supply/complete a URL, and (b) there isn't the "which OpenID did I use this site?" when a user returns to it after a while.
If it only took you a night to do it, then I guess so. However, it sounds like you are making a shed or garage instead. Still, you are not sending anyone to the moon, I suppose.
Well it is The Reg. They pride themselves on tabloid-style headlines.

I love the Prof's style though, his quotes are awesome:

"The fact that I'm missing lower limbs is an opportunity."

"There are no disabled people, only disabled technology."

And especially,

"When amputees participate in sports, they call it courageous.
Once you become competitive, they call it cheating."
Having gone from Ruby to JRuby, I think it's worth learning enough Java so you can truly benefit from the JVM platform. You may not write much Java, but you'll want to use all the wonderful libraries available to you.

I do, however, know C++ well so Java isn't much of a problem. But it's not a difficult language, especially as it's designed to stop people making mistakes. (!)
It's explained better on the Wikipedia page

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

It seems to be sandboxed, whereas ActiveX is a security nightmare.
One sorta starting point is the list of average TOEFL scores by native language of test-takers, which should tell you who finds English easy and who finds it hard. Page 9 in the link [1]. Of course, they say "use of average TOEFL scores to infer the overall English-language proficiency of a population or of a country is not appropriate due to a variety of variables that influence the test-taking population" =)

20 languages whose speakers get the worst scores: Lao (56), Bemba (58), Wolof (61), Mossi (62), Javanese (64), Khmer (65), Japanese (66), Arabic, Fula, Uighur, Uzbek (69), Burmese, Hausa, Kurdish, Vietnamese (70), Kazakh (71), Amharic, Oromo, Somali, Thai, Turkmen (72)

I wonder how much of this is due to how "complex" your own language's morphology and syntax are. For example, Mongolians tend to be better at English than either Japanese or Koreans who have studied for the same amount of time. And Mongolian's morphological and grammatical rules are much more complex than Japanese or Korean. (Anecdotally, Mongolians also find Japanese and Korean fairly easy to learn due to the structural similarities [2]).

For example, all those languages mark the role of nouns in a sentence by tacking on extra syllables ("particles"/"case markers"). For any given particle, Japanese invariably has one form, Korean one or two (some change if the word ends in a consonant), and Turkish usually two (vowel harmony). And the forms with pronouns follow the same rules. But Mongolian regularly has as many as eight forms depending on vowel harmony, what kind of consonant the word ends in, random rules for inserting "secret n"s and "hidden g"s, plus the forms for pronouns are irregular, plus there's rules for dropping vowels sometimes.

[1] http://www.ets.org/Media/Tests/TOEFL/pdf/test_score_data_sum...

[2] http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/12/world/mongolians-and-korea... --- though contrary to what it says, linguists don't actually believe the two languages are related
Doesn't seem to work for Canadian listings. A shame. I like it a lot though.
The Ph.D. will always be there, but the opportunity for a startup might disappear with time. Given that, staying upwind (http://paulgraham.com/hs.html) would tend to dictate going with a startup.
Inductive Reasoning and Bounded Rationality
This is BS - if a company knows all the answers to these questions, then the company is not innovating. The hardest thing about innovation is finding out who else believes your vision. The assumption that a good business has answered all these questions is the assumption that this good business is not innovating.
Revenue forecasting for new products is hard, and investors who add value to high risk start ups must recognize the risk in innovation. If you want answers to these questions, either insist on bullshit stories or invest in old school businesses. No risk = no return.
If this student can't figure this out for himself, then he should absolutely not start a business.
More generally, "I wouldn't trust Wikipedia to give correct $TOPIC information. I've noticed they've been incorrect about this before."

Articles like the one under discussion would be a helluva lot more persuasive if they linked to some resources for their stats. The claims about vegetarianism struck me as clutching at straws just to be contrarian.
Very misleading title. To clarify, this doesn't seem to be an official Dell thing, but a hack.
Thanks Mikeyur, that's a great list to start with, and thanks to all the valuable answers, the main trend is: Stay away from dreamhost VPS, so I will be checking the list above and probably pick one of the Host.
I think you'll likely get a lot of biased answers in here, and here's mine: Django.

I've had great success with nginx (load balancing, static serving) -> apache/wsgi/django (dynamic). Have a local postfix email server that handles the email sending requests rather than sending to a remote SMTP host - it will keep things snappy. Overall, it's a simple, easily scalable (horizontally) setup.

Of course, I am sure that RoR would work equally well in a similar configuration. Basically, if you're not worried about webapp performance, you can use any language that you're comfortable with and allows you to iterate quickly. For me, that language is Python.
Actually, google has just begun to use your profile URL, using that 'Vanity URL' business.
If you turn vanity urls on, your OpenID identifier will be like so: http://google.com/profiles/<your-google-login>;

I have used it and logged on to stackoverflow.com. It does work.
I use Google Apps for my domain and have OpenID running on my domain using it. Here's how: http://jeremiahlee.com/blog/2009/09/28/how-to-setup-openid-w...
I work with this fellow so keep in mind there's history here between us on the subject. :)

"the language sucks" -- Is very much in the eye of the beholder. Perl works the way I think just as jQuery does. As for not being welcoming, I think you'll find perlmonks.org to be a huge welcoming community.

"it offers nothing new" -- I'm sorry, but if you already know Python or Ruby why would you switch anyhow? There's a big time investment in becoming really good at a language. No reason to switch when you have languages that can just get things done. I'm not even sure what you mean by "new". Perl is 22 years old now. Python and Ruby are both around 15. What's new here? I also find this "new" comment hilarious in light of the Python feature freeze. Things like Moose and Catalyst are new(ish) to the Perl community and they're doing great things. Further, CPAN is expanding at a huge rate, more than ever before. There's ALWAYS new stuff there.

"real world perl sucks" -- Real world code sucks period. And I do clean code. There are standards in Perl and they do evolve. You need to engage in the community a little as I think everyone should with their languages.

What is fairly obvious to me is that Python fits very well with how YOUR brain works. Perl fits very well with how MY brain works.

Just because it don't jive with you, doesn't mean it doesn't jive with others.

'Scuse me. I have a mod_perl2 handler to write.
Cultural fixes needed for Internet Explorer
What would you say are greater contributions than UNIX or regular expressions (which you skipped)?
Agreed! Ironically, this kind of encourages him [in a subtle way] to start a business to prove he can do it. :)
Optimization tips
They are trully honest, but that doesn't really help your site stay up, pingdom is almost spamming my email box with alert from dreamhost downtimes, at least twice a day, I was expecting to have a better service with the VPS, but as I've just learned: very very bad idea.
Strangely, the investment bank I used to work at relied heavily on Perl, without most people even realising it. A huge volume of live rates information formed the basis for a large number of Seriously Enterprise Applications, all with architecture groups and best practice gurus and all that stuff. What was ironic was how the rates got into the bank: six instances of a single Perl script that almost noone knew about, connected to the Reuters Market Data System. And the reason that it was so poorly known was simple: it was cronned to start and stop at particular times during the day, and in the four years that I was there, it went down once, when the box it was on suffered a hardware failure.

Funnily enough, a few more people knew about it after that, whereupon I got funding and contingency hardware thrown at me until I could confidently tell the powers that be that a box failure would be followed up by immediate failover and a whole bunch of alerts being generated.

Overall, I think that's where Perl does a really good job: in holding stuff together. While the Rubyists and Pythonistas are arguing over who's got the better language, Perl hackers are just getting stuff done.
You're not using OpenID if you do this, you're using Google's id.

It's fine if that's what you expose by default, but you really do need to give the user a checkbox or something so they can input their own if they have one. I have an OpenID I use everywhere, if I come to one of your sites and end up using my google ID instead it will cause me nothing but frustration and end up being less secure.

In fact I'd probably not login to your site because of this if I didn't have a compelling reason to do so.
Having chosen to go into business rather than a PhD (in physics) -- and then having succeeded in selling my startup, I explored going back to do a PhD. It was not an attractive option. The heads of department said I would get bored and frustrated with the politics and slow progress of the department.

Bottomline: starting a business (that succeeds) does change you expectations for "action" which will likely poison you from academia. I hypothesize if you fail in the startup that the PhD will not be an economic option at that stage!? The implication: it's hard to "reverse" this decision.
On the upside, this gives you the ability to be the one that implements and open-sources some of the later heavily-used libraries and to carve a name for yourself in a burgeoning Go community.

This would hopefully lead on to job opportunities down the road.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_machines, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quicksort, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dijkstra%27s_algorithm, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_programming, graph coloring algorithms, etc.
For Chemistry, go with the Ph.D. Here's why. Having the Ph.D. at the end of your name gets emails answered. Having the Ph.D. gets you access to collaborators. It's a huge differentiator. It makes you an expert, which you need to be in Chemistry. Anyone can do a startup, very few people finish a Ph.D. When you're finished, you'll have access to hundreds of thousands of government R&D dollars which you will otherwise not have, which can translate to a huge advantage. Ph.D. dropouts who hit it big are usually in the right place at the right time, in addition to being smart, but that's unlikely to happen to you.

One word of advice- when you're finished, don't try to blend the university with your business (by splitting a company with your professor, for example), that never works.
In the mean time, I've found it's not too difficult to work around the RAM limitation. I'm working with pretty small servers, and I just use another database (MySQL usually) as a datastore for infrequently accessed data.