skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes for personal use (really just Basecamp).
No for app development...

I always use Facebook Connect (via Facebooker plugin) over OpenID authentication. The adoption rate and viral advantages of Facebook are unmatched.
This is a brilliant comment. You should rework it into a blog post so that it can be shared with a broader audience. (That is, of course, if you don't consider it a waste of time!)

Well done.
But it isn't that far-fetched to say that some of the people behind Go did made substantial contributions to computer science. Which is indeed what he wrote. Whether those four particular aspects of their work are the same ones you'd point out or not.

More to the point though, it is a dumb reason to use a language. Though not a dumb reason to pay attention to it or its design.
Not sure I agree with that; I would suggest that the opposite is true.

Top-tier PhD programs almost never allow students to defer an acceptance offer, so the person in question would need to re-apply. Being accepted becomes substantially more difficult the longer you've been working in industry, particularly if you haven't been working in something directly related to the PhD's field of study (like a startup).

Startup ideas, however, are a dime per dozen, so there is no danger in delaying because it will always be easy to find a worthwhile idea on which to work.
Did New Zealand's NIWA also manipulate climate data?
I have a feeling this is one of the key things that differ between greater Europe and Silicon Valley.
I have to say, I fear the day when people who prefer print books are looked upon like the vinyl snobs of the music world.
The many possiblities of CCD technology
This is impressive, but I think there's a point where something is no longer a "model plane" but a "UAV". And I think that point might be when it has autopilot. A really cheap UAV, which is a pretty cool idea IMO.
The Start-up Chronicles: Who Is Invested in Your Success?
The first time I read it was a few years ago, and it was in Russian. Brings back some memories, like when I was so crazy about programming that I learned basics of assembler using only the debug utility on windows without any books. Those were great days!
I am pretty sure ActiveX had some kind of sandbox model as well?

Even so, I remain very skeptic about this.
It's a reference to Chinese characters not having been further developed in the direction of sound-indicating writing (as was done later in Japan and Korea). Full historical details, based on quite recent archeology in China, can be found in the writings of William Boltz. I searched for some examples of his writings that are online and not behind a paywall, but didn't find any convenient examples. His observation is that Chinese almost went in the direction of explicit syllable-writing (as Japanese has had for several centuries in the katakana and hiragana writing systems) but development in that direction ceased during the Han dynasty.

P.S. I just found, by browsing, that the Wikipedia articles about Chinese writing still need a lot of clean-up. Too bad.
I'd suggest Django for the web and Lamson for email.
To clarify what I meant, for what it's worth, I have personally experienced Wikipedia to be inaccurate with nutritional data, and that's something I've spent a deal of time looking at.
I'm hoping someday in the future your statement will sound silly. There's got to be some way we can avoiding rewriting all the libraries every time a new language comes around.
The idea behind OpenID is great. The user experience of using OpenID is so bad that even as a technically-inclined person I can't work up the motivation to use it.
Like yourself, I have one and don't use it. Main reason is that I can never remember the identifier.

That is OpenIDs big flaw... How many average web users do you know that remember a url? Most of them head to google to find sites they know well.

This is why facebook connect and the like are more popular; they are easy.
I refuse to know my identifier, or care what an identifier is (though I think its a URL).

I do not believe anything more than an email address and service-specific password should be sufficient to authenticate me - like StackOverflow uses with their OpenID setup.

If a site asks me my OpenID URL or identifier or other thing, I don't bother, as it's too much work.
Until they develop a really good note-taking / annotation system, I think academics are going to remain buyers of printed books for a long time. I think a well-done annotation system could be a big value-add for e-books, if those annotations were searchable, or operated like tags, etc. But until that day, the ability to scribble notes in the margins, underline key points in the text, and make comments on the back pages is going to be indispensable.
But both the specific letter forms of the Roman alphabet and, more relevantly, the general spelling patterns of English are much more recent than that (as they would have to be). But, yes, writing is more ancient in the Near East than it is in China, for sure. It's just that it has gone through more language-specific adaptations, especially in the direction of exhaustively spelling all speech sounds with a minimal number of writing characters, than writing in China has.
You're right. attributes are a bit weird if you don't know perl.

Which is why we've been working on http://search.cpan.org/perldoc?CatalystX::Declare.

The Perl5 community does try and listen to the rest of the world. Unfortunately many of the people we'd like to be listening to make the sort of comments you just did rather than providing constructive criticism that we can effectively address.

The reason for shouting "pay attention" is that many people aren't even bothering to look because they're still stuck with an image of Perl5 based on ten year old information, and we'd at least like to be hated for what we are now rather than what we were back at the end of the last century.

If that upsets you, you're welcome to continue to not pay attention - but we've been getting lots of useful feedback from the people who have and so far as I'm concerned that makes it all worth while.
Sorry that post stinks of corporate team-building. The secret to having a great team is two-fold: find a worthy challenge and ruthlessly remove anyone who doesn't contribute to accomplish the goal.
Great feedback. And glad that the button is more visible now. Thanks thamer.
Ha! Good catch.
The edit-button is gone so I guess this is how my post will enter history ;-)
Pandora Desktop (Free Alternative)
The Parrot VM [http://www.parrot.org/] has been discussed here before: [http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=552850]

Projects like this might help, but I suspect there will always be someone willing to port a library to be native.
Function pointers in JavaScript
Any such claim about Esperanto should be regarded as a claim that needs further verification.

http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html

http://www.xibalba.demon.co.uk/jbr/ranto/

Anyway, it is very doubtful that such a claim, even if true for speakers of English learning French in England, would be true for speakers of Chinese learning Japanese in China (or the other way around) or for any number of other likely pairs of native and acquired languages.
There's "sandboxes" and then there's sandboxes. Native Client uses the latter while ActiveX had barely the former.

It does present a real concern and exposing additional APIs is going to always present increased security risk. That said, having looked a bit at Native Client's sandbox and having examined the findings of the well respected security researchers who examined the sandbox protections, Google's taking a pretty good whack at it and their sandbox itself is fairly sound.

My worry is not with their sandbox, but the additional APIs that they expose with it. (See also: WebGL which now throws your entire GL stack into your web browser as security critical code.)
Here is my way of decision making on this:

If you don't mind dealing with faculty politics and report to a boss, go for the PhD. The benefit is that you get a reasonable salary and funding, and managing others badly does not bring fatality to the venture you are pursuing. You can also focus on your research, without immediate financial worries.

If you don't like a boss, if you want to build your own team that you are in full charge, and if you want to expand the team to pursue partly financial success and partly research goals, go for the Startup. In fact, this is what I did, and I am happy to be in full control right now, even though it is harder to manage people and manage finances in addition to R&D.
If you let them know that lots of hot, cheerleader-VCs think you're kind of cute

Usually if that is the case, you shouldn't have to tell them. They'll know. That aside, I thought the article was aimed at the other 90% of startups that don't have VCs knocking their doors. In those situations, I think it helps to be careful about what information you give out.
You have been misinformed about batteries and shelf life, the mileage is variable, it depends on the driver.

If you drive a prius with a thought toward efficiency it is quite good. If you are a pedal masher it won't be so good.

There are other, cheaper, paths to efficiency. A tiny diesel in a tiny car will get about the same mileage as the prius, but you will have to put up with slower acceleration. Most Americans do not tolerate slow acceleration. (The 1980s diesel rabbits were 50+mpg cars. 0-60 in 22 seconds with the air conditioner on, and they would fail modern emissions tests miserably, but cheap and efficient they nailed.)
Pictures. We shop craigslist via listings with pictures. We want the pictures up front and easy to find. The map roll over would be good, or as a thumbnail on the listings. Other then that, it looks great and is a site I would use.
I like this text a lot. There is this serene peace you get when you know your code works no matter what.

The first thing that came to mind after reading the text was Joel's article: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/LeakyAbstractions.htm...

quote: "Today, to work on CityDesk, I need to know Visual Basic, COM, ATL, C++, InnoSetup, Internet Explorer internals, regular expressions, DOM, HTML, CSS, and XML. All high level tools compared to the old K&R stuff, but I still have to know the K&R stuff or I'm toast."
I'd like to see some stats on that. Not that I think you're wrong, just that for me it isn't completely obvious that incandescent bulbs are giving off that much heat.
I think as the current cycle in Valley gets more competitive, you'll see fewer people being super open. Not just VCs but everyone, especially entrepreneurs.
I think it depends what you do with your toolbox. Most people have a limited amount of working memory and filling it with syntax rules + library APIs of 15 programming languages is not best way to get most tasks done (unless the task is to learn as many languages as possible).

I would prefer to know as few languages and APIs as possible that let me get my work done. Python is one of the languages and the other one is C.

C is for doing realtime stuff and Python is for everything else (setup, network IO, GUI, web, etc). Unlike the author of the artice I like using Twisted and it works reasonably well for what I am doing.
With JRuby (and I think scala and clojure as well) you only need to know the API and how to get the class or jar file onto you load path.

There are times when a Java method demands a specific Java type and JRuby does not automatically convert correctly, but mostly the use of Java libs from JRuby is pretty trivial, and the only time I've had to write Java to wrap anything was when I wanted a nicer API for some 3rd-party crypto libs and adding a few methods to the Java source was easier for me.
You're right - but for my apps I don't think I'd support these, for the same reasons.
Tell HN: UPS is Awful
UPS is the worst shipping company in the world. Please use DHL Fedex or USPS in the future.

Brown can't do shit for you!
> I have some data

> everyone my age has at least played with one or knows someone who has one. Amazon has been pushing it massively and adoption is only going to accelerate

Um, that's not data of the "valid to support sweeping conclustions" sort.

Insert questionable math based on single point of data 35% sales, from single source, for a narrow datum "books available both in print and on Kindle.

> In spite of the shortcomings and shortcuts, I think my model provides a good ballpark estimate

Yeah, I think you're full of hot air and bull shit.
In general, the return on investment for a native speaker of English learning any language as a second language is lower than the return for the same person learning a lot of mathematics. People who don't know English usually find better gains by learning English, but they still have to learn some other career skill as well. The least expensive and most effective way to learn a language is to learn a bit of it before foreign residence (so that you'll live in fear of not knowing the language, and study hard) following that by foreign residence and continued part-time focused language study while working and participating in the culture in the new country. And that's just how a lot of second-language speakers of English reach very high levels of proficiency in English.
Does it matter whether he does his PhD first or the business first? One always finds people going from one to the other. I believe doing any of the two will enrich him and will place him well in his next step. If both of them look equally good, then this may help: http://sivers.org/scares-excites-do-it

However, if the success of his business idea is time bound, he should probably do that first.
Top-tier PhD programs almost never allow students to defer an acceptance offer

At least in CS, all the top schools I'm aware of usually allow you to defer an acceptance offer (IIRC 6 months for MIT, 1 year for Stanford/Berkeley/etc.).
My startup's based around the tech I was studying for my PhD (I dropped out to do the startup, my research was leaning more real-worldy than academic, and to stay in academia I'd have had to go in a direction I didn't like). I'm pretty sure (in fact I've more or less been told) I could get the PhD within a couple of years without too much hassle, either full time or part time. I agree with another commenter's point that I might not actually enjoy it though!

Computer science is a little different from chemistry, though, it seems easier to jump in and out of academia like that.
I've already studied that book, thanks
Deferred mine for a term (3/4 months) at Cambridge so I could go pretend I made video games for a living.
Larger and more profitable. The sort of things that will get your cv noticed by the right people around here are: Haskell, some sort of particle physics or similar simulation experience, and/or games programming experience.

Oh, and for goodness sake don't put down on your cv that you've read the first 13 chapters of Hull and know Ito's Lemma and the Black Scholes model. (Unless you just want to give people a good chuckle.)

If you really want to bone up on your financial maths with a bias towards a job in computational finance I always recommend people read Joshi. http://www.markjoshi.com/
This is still OpenID.

Google uses a singular URL for all identities that OpenID consumers use to discover the true user identity, which is unique per user per consumer domain.
I'm using Google ID, but the technology that enables this is OpenID. It's just under the hood, which IMHO is where it should be. Most users have no idea what OpenID is, and are confused when they are asked for a URL in order to sign up.

Even for an OpenID-savvy user, why would it be frustrating or less secure to login via Google? If someone got my Gmail password, sites like mine would be the least of my worries..
Because ActiveX is a proprietary, Windows-only technology?
Ditto.

And the provider implementation is my own, running on a server I have physical access to, with a self-signed certificate.
> Why?

Because you have a blog and must fill it with something or it whithers. Controversy is more filling than pragmatic rationalism.
I think personally I would start the PhD but use that to shoehorn my way into the university's innovation support, spinout funding, etc, take part in university entrepreneurship clubs, business plan competitions, so on. Really milk the level of support and encouragement there is within academic institutions for new enterprise.

(Conditional on the business being pretty much at the 'idea' stage and some easy way to ensure the university doesn't grab all the IP etc. If he has a fully developed, tested product and it's just a matter of executing, well, why is he even considering a PhD ;))

It is possible to do both, I know of several PhD students here running or starting up businesses. It's not easy to excel at both and sooner or later there would be a decision point: continue with a PhD with some sunk time and research, or continue with the business which is starting to take off? It should be clear which is the better route by then. Meanwhile the 'kudos' of being a PhD student at $university will help lend credibility to the business.

(note that this is sort of what I did, happy to answer further questions.)
Ask HN: How much do you flash game devs make?
Hi guys,
I've been doing a few flash games for fun, and recently I have been wondering if it could be something that I could make a living out of. However, most literature on the subject paints a bleak picture, so I thought I'd ask the devs themselves.

So here goes: How much money ends up in your pocket every month/per game??? If possible, please include a split-up indicating how much you got from sponsorships, revenue-sharing, in game ads and virtual goods and also a measure of popularity of the particular game.

Regards,
chaosprophet
Google Wave Explained in Simple Terms
I'd say it's no more important than, say, mastering the knowledge that showering before a job interview is useful. But because it's language people feel inclined to state the obvious.
Your life moves forward one second at a time. And if a project is part of your life -- if you visit it every day, and follow it closely -- it also moves one second at a time.

But to the general public, the apparent flow of project time is defined by its managers. Time is measured in milestones. Major book releases. Major new adopters of the project. Major upgrades. If you want time to move forward, you need to clearly define and communicate your milestones, to give the community something to rally around and synchronize on, to provide news hooks and talking points and historical points of reference. If your project has fuzzy milestones, it will feel stuck in time.

It's storytelling. People don't want stories to move in real time. They want plot points. Time moves nonlinearly in a story. Nobody has the time to actually live through every single minute of somebody else's life.

This is why companies issue press releases, novelists and filmmakers put out sequels (a sequel helps sell more copies of the original), and software publishers keep releasing upgrades (each upgrade bumps up sales, if only because it gives news agencies and potential customers a reason to check out the product again.)

If Perl feels like it's stuck in time, it's because the community stopped time nearly a decade ago. They blocked future major releases of Perl 5 by assigning the name "Perl 6" to something else, a move that makes the invention of New Coke look like marketing genius, and which perhaps explains why -- although Perl 5 is said to "be much better than it was five years ago" -- none of the featured books on books.perl.org are much less than five years old, and many of them are nine or ten. New ideas are sold by new books, and new books are sold by version upgrades. Just ask the Pragmatic Programmers, who will presumably come out with the fourth edition of Agile Web Development with Rails in five years when Rails 3 ships. If Rails 3 doesn't ship, nobody will bother to revise the books, because the revisions won't sell well -- not as well as they will when they are coordinated with the news push around Rails 3.

Anywa, back to Perl. Perl 6 was announced in 2000. Then it didn't ship. Then it didn't ship some more. And now it looks as if the whole idea of shipping Perl 6 on a specific date is being deprecated:

http://darkeside.blogspot.com/2009/08/perl-6-gets-release-da...

Big news from the current Perl conference YAPC Europe 2009 here in Lisbon is that Rakudo (star) will be released in spring 2010. Rakudo is Perl 6 on Parrot, which is an equivalent to the JVM or CLI.

Is that an official Perl 6 release? Well, it is the nearest to official that you will see. The Perl 6 team are keen to point out that there will be no such thing as a official version, just different implementations

So perhaps Perl 6 will never officially begin, just as the Perl 5 described by the Camel Book (last revised nine years ago) will never officially end. And so I fear it will be deja vu all over again.
"Perl works the way I think just as jQuery does"

Never ever say this again.
It's a good roundup, but I think you missed the most compelling reason to do a PhD, at least it was for me. And that is that you get the opportunity to dig really deep into a problem for three year or more. And that is your only concern, no business crap, no customers, just you and your problem.

Also, the freedom of doing a PhD is great. Want to take two weeks to learn a new programming language? Sure! Want to take two weeks off and go surfing? No problem!
In fact, some of my most important work on my PhD was done during one of these "diversions".

Finally, some jobs require a PhD. You may want to consider if that's the kind of job you want. Hard to answer that before you finish, though. For me the answer was a resounding YES!
Fear and Public Perception - nuclear reaction: Dr. Robert Dupont
Found on Schneier on Security blog http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/11/fear_and_publi...
Why Perl Is a Great Language for Concurrent Programming
(disclaimer: old article)
This is one of my favorite papers, thanks for reminding me of it!
From a user standpoint, OpenID has little to offer to me usually. Most sites have a simple enough registration (email and password) that it really isn't that much easier to use openid in its place. To add to the confusion, Google and Yahoo have long identifiers, and you must use a seperate button to login with them.

From a website owner standpoint, it's so hard to implement, both technically and conceptually (tying into my sites regular registration flow) that it just convolutes the process for the user.

For example, as far as I know since the last time I attempted implementing openID, the only info I am guaranteed to receive from an openID identified user is their identifier. So if my site collects email addresses or any other info, I would have to have them enter that anyways.

In most cases OpenID registration actually takes longer, just so the user can use one account password.
Not interesting blog post per se, but interesting to me from a marketing perspective.

The blog post wasn't relevant to me (i'm not a wikipedia editor) and the "open letter" concept was a bit of a stretch (tagging locations != editing an encyclopaedia), but I hadn't heard of flook and am i'm interested in location services. I saw on the same page that they came out with an iphone app last week, so I downloaded it.

The message came from a strange trajectory, but somehow it worked.
Maybe the integration with the browsers (like shown in this mockup of Firefox: http://www.azarask.in/blog/post/identity-in-the-browser-fire...) is the solution.
it isn't completely obvious that incandescent bulbs are giving off that much heat.

All energy ends up as heat eventually. Since indoor lighting only leaks a very small amount of light (unless you've got an excessive number of windows), a 60W lightbulb will contribute to very close to 60W of heating.