skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I won't try to tell the student what to do, but I will say: (1) Doing a PhD and anything else at the same time is pretty exhausting, and a pretty sure recipe for dragging for PhD out for a long time. A PhD requires a lot of dedication. (2) When you're trying to decide between the two options, think about what you'd rather have 30 years down the line. You can always start another company once you've got your PhD; once you've worked for a few years, will you be in a position to go back to graduate school?
> The problem with these sorts of statements is that nearly everything is insignificant compared to something else. The UK shouldn't bother about efficient energy use or renewable sources as China is a far greater consumer and anything we do will be insignificant.

You were being sarcastic, but that is a very good point. I am tired of feel-good "stop taking hot showers" + "ask for paper bags at the store" kind of articles aimed at individual consumers. Sure it makes the writer feel good, it makes the consumer feel good -- they are all working together to save the planet. But if they really wanted to have an impact they should aim the article at the government and the big industrial giants. Instead of "stop taking hot showers" the article should say "write your representative".

Because even a million people taking cold showers might not make as much difference for the environment as installing a single scrubber on a coal plant, or forcing P&G to stop dumping tons of crap into the air. Those are the things that really make a difference. But somehow those things don't get talked about in the mainstream media.

Then we have China and it is a real big problem. How does one make China cut down on its coal plants? Can they claim that they are still industrializing, so they shouldn't adhere to the same rules as the rest of the 'already developed' world? Can we tell them what to do when we are also major offenders? Want to do something, talk to your congressman. Get involved, get the media involved...

And I am not advocating to start buying Hummers and letting our hot water run all night, but we shouldn't delude ourselves that it actually makes a real difference. We do it because it is a good thing to do, it make us feel warm and fuzzy but that is about it.
OpenID is a good solution for this. Single login and the service can pull your email info from it. I haven't seen anyone do OpenID in an iPhone App yet.
i see what's stealing their thunder... http://www.google.com/trends?q=perl+programming%2Cpython+pro...
Why is that? I have my own OpenID (using phpMyID) as well as ids from various places and I have had almost no problems using it.

The biggest trouble was when I tried to associate multiple IDs with my StackOverflow.com account -- ended up they had a bug and it was fixed within a day.
The robots are coming to take your job away
There is a variation you need to consider: even if I have an OpenID, I may not want to use it.
Thanks, hadn't even considered that!
For better examples, check out

Information Aesthetics: http://infosthetics.com/

Flowing data: http://flowingdata.com
I'm not sure how much you'll make but one thing to consider is to build a flash game with persistent accounts and virtual goods that can be purchased by your players. This is more profitable than building flash games that you will sell to game portals. An acquaintance said they made about $2000 for building and selling a game. Games normally took him around a month or more to finish.
Which does not mean it's complete in any way - they simply release what they've got at that point: http://rakudo.org/status

"Common things that are known to have problems or not work in Rakudo (As of 2009-02-28.)" list contains "variables in regexes". It doesn't really matter how often they release in that case...

That's "as of february this year" and still open in november.
Because I don't have a google account. But I do run my own openid provider.
Can't blame the guy, though, since we reward this type of writing by making this "Ciao Apples, Hola Oranges" essay #2 in HN.
From Iterating @ Google to LinkedIn's Modular Innovation
If you think of your supervisor like a boss, that's wrong, IMO. You should pursue your own ideas in your own way, and your supervisor should do just that, supervise you and guide you as best as he can, then let you do what you want with his advice.

Of course it's hard to build a team as a PhD, at best you can get some reasonably competent master students to do some work for you.
This is excellent, but I have to wonder what happens to blockbusters when broadcast TV and radio suffers the same fate as Time magazine, HBO, big-city newspapers, and other former media giants and thought leaders? The reason why many blockbusters in the music and film industry do so well is because of the marketing power of broadcast media, in which ownership is concentrated in the hands of a few and millions of people watch or listen to their programming -- and make viewing/listening choices based on what they see in ads and in programs like GMA or The Late Show. When those audiences shift to niche channels on the Internet or elsewhere, what will happen to the blockbusters who used to enjoy such a high national profile?
>>If Perl feels like it's stuck in time, it's because the community stopped time nearly a decade ago.

Uh... jrockway, chromatic mst etc have listed cool new developments over just the last few years.

Are you doing language wars, or can you motivate why all that is wrong?

>>looks as if the whole idea of shipping Perl 6 on a specific date is being deprecated

What you quote says (afaik) -- Perl6 has a specification, so there will be multiple implementations. None will be the "official" one. That is a feature.

I'm sorry, but you seem to not know what you're talking about? Have I been trolled?

Edit: "A decade"? That was even before testing took over the Perl world, iirc... Damn, I must have been trolled. (Fixed simple grammar, made a sentence clearer.)
I have to vote this blog post up so I have a reference back. :-)
I recently thought that it might be an interesting experiment to not display any vote counts but instead order the posts based on them (as already done I guess).
The two wikipedia pages list the USDA Nutrient Database as their source.

http://www.nal.usda.gov/fnic/foodcomp/search/

You can put "chicken" in the search field wade through the many choices, or you can put input the NDB numbers from my own searches, listed below.

The two wiki pages don't say exactly which variation of bean or chicken from the database they're using, so I went with these:

chicken breast raw, NDB # 05057, 20.85g protein/100g chicken

chicken breast stewed, NDB # 05061, 27.39g p/100g

kidney beans raw, NDB # 16027, 23.58g p/100g

kidney beans boiled, NDB # 16028, 8.67g p/100g

So, whatajoke's source for beans looks like it's for raw beans, and tome's looks like it's for cooked.

Does anyone eat raw kidney beans?
The only Java ME I really use are Opera Mini and Gmail. And you could argue there are better apps for that functionality on stock Android.
Yes, but I wouldn't want to actually use it to register/login for a site.
I would say that the people who created it were.

Languages aren't really "created." Nobody sat down and formulated the rules that describe AAVE any more than someone took Middle English and decided modern English would really be better, so let's use that instead.

It's a process that's evolved over a few centuries and has its roots in the slave trade. There are people who think AAVE owes a lot to the creoles that formed on Caribbean slave islands like Jamaica.

And I would say that the people who
speak it now suffer for it just as if they were.

They suffer because people with your attitude make them suffer, e.g., calling them dumb, or saying AAVE is illegitimate or devolved. This is basically the definition of a low-prestige dialect.

A similar example is the relationship between people who speak French and people who speak Quebecois.

But be honest: do you really think Quebecois are dumb? Do you think the language is an illegitimate or devolved version of French? Is it just "French with mistakes?"

Quebecois' prestige in the French-speaking world has to do with the historical relationship between French Canadians and France, not the differences in the language.

As I said in another comment, if the South had won the Civil War, you might not object to things like double negatives, double modals, etc.

Thus for all intents and purposes, it is English with
mistakes, even if technically it is a dialect.

No. As _pius said, one point of view is about culture while the other is fundamentally about intelligence.

In an educational context the latter is absolutely destructive. If you're teaching an AAVE speaker SAE and think they're just "making mistakes," you won't get to the root of the issue, which is that their internal model of the language is very different from yours.
Google App Engine vs Windows Azure
In an ideal world the would be no need for Java being the middle-man.

That project was founded in 2007. The last release is from 2008. Has anybody ever adopted it?
Present one idea at a time and let others build upon it
Using Board Puzzles to Teach Operations Research
Seems like a common sentiment; I've added a new choice at the bottom.
I believe your best opportunity lies in the social space. Consider Farmville, a Zynga social game. It's wildly successful and derivative works could make incredible revenue.

I'm sorry I don't have specific numbers, but you can probably get them if Zynga goes public.
If it only accepts google logins, then it doesn't matter if google is using openid as the mechanism -- you can't say you use openid logins. It's like if I said that my application supports CSV, but you have to provide it as an Excel file.
good point. People may wonder if this is the same as using a caching solution like memcached or using Redis itself just like a cache. It's very different for a couple of very important reasons: 1) by splitting data by different access priorities there is not to handle caching and invalidation, it's just two DBs for two kind of data, both consistent. 2) It's possible to run complex queries in the Redis side, for instance sorted lists are invaluable to take elements in order even when there are frequent score updates.
Book Review- Googled: The End of the World As We Know It
"A little early" seems like a giant understatement. Go has only been out for about a month. Python has been out for ~18 years, About 200 times longer than Go.

Why someone would choose to switch from a well established language to a brand new bleeding edge one is beyond me.
When it comes to technology, "the death of X" means "the use of X being reduced to enthusiasts and absolute necessities".
Check for Website Problems with LinkAider | TechJaws.com
Appreciate the quote, but I know all this. This is why a) we don't pull from craigslist and b) i've talked to craig about it.

I chose to talk to him even though we could get the data without them knowing.
Well, I accept the term boss doesn't fit well. But still, in very competitive institutions you need to deal with lots of politics, do post-docs over post-docs to get a lab of your own or at least be more in control of the research. I think a startup that is financially successful is a good shortcut to that. You can become a CTO and go whatever direction you want.
So what he wants is a modern language in which to write fast programs for NaCl? I find Go to be a rather strange choice for that given that it is quite new and a bit unoptimized. I think that D might have been a more intuitive choice as it provides you with a mature environment to write native code that does way with a lot of the pain you get when using C++

Than again, if you want to be really cutting edge and be mentioned in a lot of conversations, Go is probably a much more interesting choice as it as more of a hot topic right now.
If you ask a company those questions and the answer you get is "we have no idea, we're innovating", wouldn't you agree that's a flag you ought to investigate? Eliminating risk in business isn't your goal as a leader or investor, but managing risk is.

A fool and his money are soon parted.
An informative comment from a really knowledgeable guy downvoted.

The comment in question was polite to a newbie flame without supporting data. The flame was upvoted... like a large number of flames without arguments/motivations.

I feel sad for HN.

OTOH, some language communities are hilariously pathetic in their fanboyism... :-)
One thing I would like to know: why hasn't anyone else duplicated CPAN?

I don't know Perl, but I've had to pull things from CPAN to make a Perl script work and I was impressed.

At the moment I'm running parallel Python code on many different machines and it's a pain to make to sure that all the right packages are installed. I'm sure that something like CPAN would have helped.
Excellent find and share Clawrence.

Worrying too much on the front end about optimization not only inhibits productivity, but results in wasteful optimizing since the majority of our bottlenecks reside in a few key areas. And we may not know or have coded those areas until the project is well under way.
Ways to Promote Your Startup
Ask HN: Informal Financing Patterns
So I was talking to a friend of a friend over Thanksgiving, and we started talking about my latest startup venture. I could probably use some help with a runway, and he has a chunk of extra cash around and might be looking to get involved with something new and exciting.

Nobody's serious or anything -- we were just shooting the breeze. But now I've asked him out to lunch next week.

Question: is it possible to receive Angel financing from some random person off the street? Assuming that no other financing was available, what are the things to look out for in such an arrangement? Are there any resources for folks looking to finance from friends and family?

I have heard the basic "don't get investments from anybody unless they meet certain criteria" argument many times. But in the real world, sometimes you have to dance with the choices you have, not the ones you'd like, so please, no boilerplate replies.

Any advice or experience along these lines?
If there's a geocodable address in the optional location field, we use that. If not, it will default to the general region it's posted in.

We're currently seeing approx 75% of listings geocoding correctly, but like you said the resolution is often low. In order to change that, we'd need at minimum cross-street level data from Craig. And although I've talked to him about it, I don't think I have enough leverage to change this without a user outcry..
The point is you took the time to figure it out.

My browser keeps my login state and I don't want to figure something out to replace something that works pretty well.
I'm glad he hinted that there are a lot of people reverse telecommuting at their jobs. Even though companies usually try to stop this by monitoring their employees' desktop and network activity (which I think is wrong), it's nice to know people still do it.

As mentioned in PG's "What Business can learn from Open Source" essay, employees often want to build great things for the companies they work for. When companies squelch that by locking down their computers and networks and spying on employees (I understand the security and intellectual property motives of this), they sometimes inadvertently prevent such enterprising employees from helping them in this way.

Even if it doesn't look immediately relative to their jobs, working on a more-interesting side project brings new skills to the employer for free. It also revitalizes that employee toward their actual job. When the employee can no longer do this for themselves (and their employer), they get upset and leave, taking their increased abilities with them.

Eventually, they realize that pretty much anywhere they go, they'll encounter the same problems they just left. That's the cause of a lot of entrepreneurship.
Informality sans Mysticism
A Liberal, Accurate Regex Pattern for Matching URLs
Tell you what, get a bunch of your friends to email me requests for a Canadian province, and I'll start pulling it into our db :)

romy@ucla d0t edu
Thanks. What is it specifically that you've been craving ?
The XKCD book page numbering explained (or skew binary explained)
Understood, and I'd have them already if craig decided to not exclude them from RSS feeds. Presumably to shut down previous, more annoying offenders. Wanna talk to him ? :)
~13MB, 448,358 line text file of messages from 2001-09-11 03:00:00 - 2001-09-12 02:59:59

http://911.wikileaks.org/release/messages.zip
When, to get a book printed, you'll have to take the assumably digital-only copy to a single-copy press, it'll be very similar to converting CDs to vinyl. I just wonder who the commercial market will be, as DJs are for vinyl?
Litl computer launches
And of course attend a Co-Founders Wanted Meetup (http://www.meetup.com/Co-Founders-Wanted-Meetup/)

I know it's self-promotion, but it's also a service for everyone who wants to join a startup at the earliest stage possible. An experience that I highly recommend (it will change your life).
What happens with traditional book stores? Are they going to slowly go the way of Blockbuster?
The CAPTCHA and the Man-in-the-Middle Attack
Nope, RSS isn't push. RSS us just a common way of "formatting" the information, but it stays where it is :) If you (or your reader) don't poll it, you'll never see new items.
... and of course the comments at Hacker News are always the smartest. I love you guys. :-)
I can't decide if I'm interested in seeing these messages or not. Sad memories.

Things have changed a LOT in the communications world since that day, however.

If a 9/11 event happened today, twitter would make most of these messages public instantly.

At that time I was still using my ISP's email system, not Gmail. I used to turn on the TV in the morning, not the computer (TV was how I learned of the event itself: "what's Peter Jennings doing on TV in the morning?").

I don't think I was on any IM services by that point either.

I owned a mobile phone, but the only non-voice connectivity was SMS.

I don't miss those days, and that day in particular.
State of Real-Time feeds : less polling
The web industry needs a positive political platform. A platform we can explain to legislators. A platform that delivers clear benefits to the economy.

The content industry has done a good job of packaging their platform. Legislators, who deal only in big-picture abstractions, understand that they're protecting intellectual property, and thus enhancing the US economy.

The opposition to DMCA, ACTA, etc. has been fragmented, reactive, and based on an implicit set of values. These values are not easily explained to our legislators.

Open roads were key to the growth of the physical economy. Open networks will be key to the growth of the info economy.

Can we explain, package, and simplify this concept? Work it into a congressional resolution? A focal point for political fund-raising?
The volume of high-quality business and life observations you've been producing lately has been super impressive and inspiring. Keep up the great work!
Ah. My information comes from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POSIX

The article might be wrong, of course. Since you appear to have more experience in this area, I'll just take your word for it :)
I need to reply to my own post above. I just had a long discussion with my mom, and at first found that we did not have the exact same views. However, she now agrees with me that when telling a child speaking ebonics at home is acceptable, even that is damaging, because it sends mixed signals, and should not be encouraged. There simply is no benefit to hanging on to usage of ebonics.
Hum, that Reddis thingy really starts to be more and more exciting. We can't wait to implement it at Superfeedr :)
A little sucking up will go a long ways :)
Painting with your thoughts
Probably the folks who use bookshelves as physical proof they are super smart and deep. Hiding it all away on a tiny e-book reader wouldn't serve their purpose.
Cool article about establishing relationships, but I have a question...

I'm 22 right now and have no family; the idea of having a project that I can completely immerse myself in (the type of things I see being linked on this website almost constantly) is more than enticing. (edit: to clarify, there are projects of my own that I've immersed myself in. The enticing part is being around other people that feel the same way about it. Writing my little news aggregator website on the weekends, or making arduino projects in my kitchen is fun, but it would be great to be doing this [working on projects] full time.)

To those who have had the privilege (and believe me, to the people on the outside looking in, it is a privilege) of working in these types of environments, what is a realistic set of required skills and how did you gain them?

I've been coding in perl and python since I was in about 14 or so and feel like I can accomplish pretty much any task I want in it, but I know that I'm nowhere near good enough to start applying for jobs as a programmer.

To those working in this environment: how did you finally know you were good enough, and how did you get there?
Televisores+con+firmware+Linux+actualizables+gracias+a+SamyGo
Just a note - App Engine is more JVM than just Java, so you'll likely find many other languages will support it. I've also written apps for both Azure and App Engine and I'd change a few of the scores:

Easy scalability: GAE, hands down.

Learning curve: Azure. GAE will surprise you a lot.

Maximum db size: GAE. Last time I checked, Azure was limited to 10GB. If you need more than 1GB you pay $99 per month for the full 10GB store. Maybe you can get more with Table storage, but then it's a very different animal.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POSIX requires editing then, both,linux and Freebsd are listed in the incomplete side. http://developer.apple.com/leopard/overview/osfoundations.ht... seems to say the same damn lie !
yes please. if this was continuously improved it would become my main interface for craigslist.

try user accounts so i don't have to type in my zip code every search. and so i can save certain searches.

and a really killer feature would be if i searched for 'desktop computer' the category searched was automatically set to 'computers/tech'

thanks!
Related: Modern Warfare 2 earns $550 million in five days. http://kotaku.com/5413847/3-billion-worth-of-call-of-duty-so...

The blockbuster is very healthy it seems.
"Maybe in the end, even on the Internet, you get what you pay for."

I'm not sure that I want to read the book, but that was an interesting review of it. The last paragraph had me thinking about 'free' in the context of music. We've had free music before - radio. It was a lot more restricted than todays 'free' music, but it was free (beyond the initial hardware purchase). Of course there was a monetization strategy (radio = ads = physical albums sales + other revenue).

The solution for the problems today isn't a return to yesterday. But also, importantly, things of value yesterday aren't always going to be valuable today (and vice versa). Things change.
He used "ccd" when he meant "computer vision". There are more sensors (and cheaper sensors) than ccd.

I'd expand it even further, but saying "as computers become more aware of their environments, new technologies become possible" might not make for as interesting (or as long) an article.
prgmr.com is just like slicehost except with more RAM. I've been happy with them. Currently up 157 days.
Savour your first few weeks of making money
As someone reading resumes a lot these days, I'd say there isn't a magic formula. If you're local, you've made something cool in the past and know how to write well (in English, not just code), you'll have a much better chance than most of the people who apply.