skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Am confused. Please suggest
Hi, I am a long time reader, first time submitting.
I'm a bit confused with my current situation, I would be very grateful if you guys could give me a few pointers. I am not so experienced as most of you here, but i've mostly picked up stuff I'm interested in quite well and easily.

My primary interest is network programming. I have done quite a bit of reading and experimenting and am familiar with mechanisms of most protocols. Now I want to start writing code. I read introductory stuff on python and grasped it well too. I had just started playing with the python modules, when I met somebody(with a tall reputation) at the local lug meeting who told me that I could always learn python very easily later but C was the language I must know, specially given my interest on network programming. I did some research and thought maybe the guy is right. So I've been with a k&r for 4 weeks now. It didn't intimidate me but I am progressing very very slowly and maybe that's why also slacking a bit. I am posting this because I'm at the stage where it's even worrying me now.
I'm always thinking that in python i could be building stuff right now. I know python won't teach me low level things like memory management etc, but my progress is pain-stakingly slow in C.

Question: Should I continue battling with C like i'm now and write some working code in it or switch to python where i'll be at a bit more ease? Will a high level language spoil me too much to come back to C later?
I guess no podcast this weekend.
I totally agree. On April 2008, when my employer applied for an H1-B, there were about 190,000 applications within the first week. Considering that the available quota is 65,000, the odds of getting one were not very good.

The fact that there are 3500 positions not filled as of December 2009 cannot be interpreted in any way as employers stepping up foreign workers hiring.
I'm actually having a general hackathon starting tonight that overlaps with this: http://www.meetup.com/atlantacoworking/calendar/11881982/ I hope we have neat stuff come out of it for the GAH too. I'll be sure to share if we do.
Want Everyone To See Your Credit Card Transactions? Meet Blippy.
Yes. When maintenance is not considered something you do after you've built the software, but a part of the evolution of said software, you regularly see senior people fixing bugs and such.
So according to your logic Apple sued Psystar because Apple was falling behind in the market. I don't think so..

Companies sue when they think that they have to defend their IP. (I'm not talking about patent trolls, I'm talking about genuine companies with real IP).
The trick is to simulate a data loss before it happens.
Ask HN: Sales Resources
I'm working on a webapp that is targeted at will be directly sold to a pretty specific niche, like a 37signals app. I don't have much experience in direct sales, and was wondering if any of you had any good resources (books/sites/etc) for a beginner trying to get into the sales game. Your advice, tips, etc, you may have as far as marketing and selling an online service are all welcomed, of course. Thanks.

EDIT: It's targeted at the religious market.
Using JavaScript 1.8 expression closures:

function Y(X)
(function(procedure)
X(function(arg) procedure(procedure)(arg)))
(function(procedure)
X(function(arg) procedure(procedure)(arg)))
Why "no thanks"?
As an anarcho-capitalist, I would argue that intellectual property right violates the right of property owners.

That being said, the rights of a owner of a mp3 file is overruled by a wider power enforced by the state. That owner cannot reproduce, sell, and compete at will with the originator of the mp3 file without permission. He, as owner of that particular mp3 file, cannot do with it as he see fit.

The whole system of intellectual property is government intervention into the economy for the political interests(patent lawyers, corporations that benefit from monopolies power, software developer, artists, etc). It is a system that also changes widely from nations to nations, and in history. It is an unstable system that tends toward chaos as parties compete for special privileges and political favors.

Contrast that to property right, in which anarcho-capitalist recognize it to not change over time and remain universal throughout history, regardless the whims of democracies, dictatorships, and other coercive apparatus.

How long should copyright should last, and what kind of freedom is afforded to public? Should patents last for so and so years. How should we choose non-obvious between obvious patents?

That's the question of an interventionist utilitarian technocrat who don't care much about property right but the end it achieves, not the product of a thinker who believe strongly in private property.

==Addenum==

That's the emerging views of anarcho-capitalists led by none other, a lawyer who specializes in patent.

It is also a view that have practical impact on spreading libertarian ideas by changing a think-tank organization(mises.org in this case)'s strategy toward spreading ideas and economic knowledge toward everybody else by the mere embrace of giving anything and everything information that could be given away.

We made the decision to give away everything that possibly could be given away, from code to text to the right to reprint — as far and as widely as possible. - mises.org
In case you'd like to back up your own blog, I posted a four part series on how to do it with Amazon S3 and cron: http://techiferous.com/2009/11/getting-started-with-amazon-s...

This assumes you're running your blog on your own VPS.
Deleted Twitter account, now someone else has access to updating my FB status
I delete my twitter account some time back, since I wasn't seeing the point of it as a regular internet user (ie. not releasing 'important stuff', still having love for traditional rss, not being fond of sharing my latest poop with the whole world, etc.).

Back when I had that account, my updates were linked to my facebook account. Now a new guy registered a twitter account with my old nickname, and HIS updates appear on MY facebook account.

I could probably delete the twitter app from my FB account, but that's not the point. The point is that although my account is suppressed, it is still somehow linked to my personnal FB account.

How lame is that ?
Programmers abhor stuffed shirts and their style of organization and discipline. They tend to accrete methods of organization and discipline suited for their work. That's what hacker culture is all about.
dumbest idea of 2009?
This has to be tough. I run a small server that includes email hosting and an image gallery site that numerous people contribute to, and I get a lot of questions or complaints when it is down (usually bad network or a brief DC power outage). I have been using SSH and rsync for a long time to pull the contents of every important directory on that server to a local Solaris server running a RAIDZ pool and time slider (so I do get incremental backup).

I didn't actually lose data like Jeff, but the datacenter the server was in decided to kill the power to the machine 2 weeks before the scheduled date (poor processes and a move to a different building) and I didn't get any notification before it happened. It took another 3 weeks for them to ship my machine back to me. Becuase I had nightly backups I was able to restore email and the photo site to a new Linode instance in a few hours. Without those backups I would have been hurting bad.
Txr: a Pattern Matching Utility for Convenient Text Extraction
I'd argue that the general idea expressed in the post below applies as much to system administration as it does to programming. Rule #1: Take responsibility.

http://74.125.93.132/search?q=cache:xGcmkwq9zUkJ:www.codingh...
If I follow your logic Madoff was a brillant startup founder?
I.e. he convinced ppl to give him money :)
Then again, the number of users on the Internet has grown every year, so even if a browser just held its % market share steady, that would mean an increase in quantity of users.
Doesn't Jeff derive a significant portion of his personal income from the site? If so, I'd say mission critical is a good way to describe it.
If you think there are H1-B's out there rejecting positions by the droves because of low salaries, you are mistaken.

Every H1-B visa comes with a few thousand dollars of legal expenses to file the visa, front loaded and then 10-20K more if they insist that you file a residency application for them, which most good programmers will.

Additionally, any company that accepted TARP funds is legally prohibited from hiring H1Bs (actually it's theoretically possible, but so hard that they just don't).

Separately, it is one thing if you want SAP code monkeys but if you want people who really know how to code an/or have a degree in CS from a decent school in the U.S., paying them less just because they need an H1-B just doesn't work.

Source: personal experience, at least 20 batch mates from grad school.
you don't find it at all intriguing?
Conferring advice does not imply a claim of authority. If I give someone directions to a coffee shop in New York, the recipient should not infer that I am an expert on New York, traffic grids, coffee, etc.
sorry would help but I'm off to do a backup
This is the part where I find I need to admit that I'm growing older. I'm no longer young and hip, but part of an older generation of "unsocial" people that see absolutely no point in something like this.

To be frank, I don't give a fuck what my friends buy. I don't care what random thoughts they have during the day either, or how many fucking cows they bought in some stupid game I've never played.

I'm sure this will do well though. Just not with me as a user.
i don't think cutting costs by reducing office space has anything to do with employee productivity....it has more to do with cutting costs.

it is still a good point to optimize where it matters.
plz post back when you have the answer :-)
Finally! Javascript gets an "Option Explicit" ala "use strict;"
No. That's our competitor. And uh, they can keep that project :)
Because, as a relatively high achiever, A union will only serve to bring me down/prevent my advancment. I see no reason why I would want to encourage that.
Looks like coding horror is now back online.
Which Metrics Equal Happy Users?
A discussion of what metrics mean in regard to the happiness of your user base.
I think their anti-foreign worker stance is more about anti-artificially-low-salaries and anti-screw-hiring-local-workers-who-are-available-to-work: http://www.programmersguild.org/docs/stephanie_job_11sept200...

This page further explains their position: http://www.programmersguild.org/h1b.asp

The problem appears to be companies are firing local workers in order to hire foreign workers. The foreign workers are no longer a supplement to the workforce, but are used as a replacement.

The people themselves aren't the problem, the problem is the companies doing the hiring and cost-savings calculations.
JooJoo (formerly Crunchpad) late to launch, hit by TechCrunch lawsuit
Graudit -  Find potential security flaws in source code
besides the technology?

no...I find it insane. How about an iPhone App that let's the world hear all of your conversations?
>So, how can I tell whether my users are happy?

Ask them.

>You know, without talking to every single one of them?

It never fails to amaze me how people actively avoid getting their answer from the source than can provide it.
It doesn't seem to be particularly fair to the hosting provider, really, to put their name on the failpage and to tweet about how it's half their fault. Especially after you've advocated redundant backups, implied that you have them, written about the advantages of hosting your images on S3. When a mishap reveals that you've actually done none of these things, it is more than a little disingenuous to try to emphasize your hosting provider's relatively minor role in making you look foolish.
CDD = Career Driven Development

Choosing technologies/fads for a project based on what will look best on your resume.
Great advice. I find that any to-do list that I use on my computer distracts my flow because I flip to another window or get away from my browser/Textmate work and try to find the thing to tick. There's something enormously satisfying about crossing out something you've written onto a quality notepad.
You might find very useful answers over at StackOverflow, or ServerFault, most likely from people who are already successful network programmers.
pricing transparency for variable priced services (comcast, gyms, etc.) could be very empowering for consumers. crowd-sourced fraud detection seems pretty interesting as well. and of course, discovery elements...
it's easy to retrieve google caches with a ruby script. here's one i used in the past:

http://pastie.org/739757

edit: if you use this, add a sleep! whoops. i didn't get banned though, shrug.
Sometimes it's all about being in the right place at the right time and getting a little lucky. I have a friend who had a lastminute.com affiliate account go ballistic because his affiliate code somehow got onto all of their call center's terminals. He was earning commission from every single holiday booked over the phone at lastminute.com for around a month!
Arrington and TC point fingers and pre-judge things on a daily basis. I think people are enjoying the roles being reversed. It seems both sides have some major inconsistencies in their stories and both have bad reputations in certain circles. It seems likely to me that both parties involved did some shady things so anyone striving to find a classic right vs. wrong story here is likely to be disappointed.
So If I were to make a business out of this, would you sue me for stealing your idea ala TC? :)
Do you also test that your airbags work properly? I don't audit and test the safety measures on most of the equipment in my house: that's what I pay the supplier for and there'll be hell to pay when they screw it up. Similarly, I don't audit and test my disaster recovery procedures, because that is what I pay my hosting partner for.
I dispute the generalization that good programmers, whether on H1-B or not, work cheaply. Obviously there are exceptions, some people are just afraid to negotiate. And yes, if you are a SAP code monkey on an H1-B with a degree in construction engineering from India and no formal training or real experience as a programmer, you will work cheap.

Also, the reason H1-Bs work more is as likely to be the fact that most of them are single folks in their 20s, often just out of school, with no or little family here and possibly a smaller social circle. There's a reason Google prefers to hire out of that demographic.
This link appears to no longer link to a relevant post :(...
Having nothing special to do this evening I would have loved to try out FriendBinder.... But like a lot of other sites, you have to complete a registration process in order to test the tool..
Don't they ever learn?.. if they want me to change my habits in using their cool new service, maybe they should try to lure me with some eye candy, and cool feature demos; not by citing CNET and Louis Gray (who the fuck is louis gray anyway ?).
This weeks podcast: How to empathize when someone screws up.

Edit: from his tweet -

"on the podcast this week (unpublished, because I suck) @spolsky and I discussed "worst case scenario" biz outcomes. prophetic!"

http://twitter.com/codinghorror/status/6582023681
I don't watch all the interviews but the ones I have watched (this one included) have been well worth it to me. I find it inspiring hearing other peoples stories. It's cool to watch interviews with folks willing to get out and do something.
You can't outsource liability.

So you've tested whether your toaster has proper grounding and other safety precautions, in case it shortcircuits? I bet you haven't and that why you should stop repeating that stupid soundbite. We all 'outsource' liability all the time: we pay others to perform services for us and hold them responsible for the proper execution of those services. This includes hosting content and backing up that content.
James Dyson made 5,167 prototypes before he came up with the winning formula for the Dyson cleaner. I doubt that he could have become a successful billionaire without the right to fight off the companies who tried to make a quick buck out all his hard work.

http://bobsutton.typepad.com/my_weblog/2009/02/5127-failed-p...
We'd love to talk with you about what you're building, our scrape is the most complete outside of Twitter that we know of.

http://blog.infochimps.org/2008/12/29/massive-scrape-of-twit...
It has since grown to 40M users.

joe@infochimps.org
Warrick works better for that, at least:
http://warrick.cs.odu.edu/warrick.html

It sleeps in between queries, so you don't get temporarily banned from Google.

I think it's not currently working for Yahoo or MSN/Bing. Fixing that might be easier than doing everything else manually.

Edit: I've gotten a response from Frank McCown, creator of Warrick, that he's looking into it.

Edit 2: He'll try to update it next week.
but that's not what this is
His biggest problem appears to be the images (and possibly other resources included in the pages). It's pretty much a given he'll be able to recover the text itself.
I'm having a little trouble parsing your first sentence, but ... if you have a truly specialized/niche product, my best advice is to find high-profile people inside the industry, partner with them in one way or another, and let them sell for you. We did this initially and it was instrumental in our growth.

For most niches, there are trade organizations, annual conventions, and "connectors" (as Gladwell would call them) who have been around for years, teach workshops, run regional groups, etc. This is where I'd start looking. Hit an annual convention or two–you don't have to exhibit just yet (but it would help), but at least walk the floor and introduce yourself. Look at the speakers and get in touch with them. Many trade organizations allow you to advertise directly to their members.

Hope that helps.
Eric Ries also did a good blog post earlier this year based on the same experience:

http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2009/01/achieving-failu...
If you regularly spend time testing backups, you should start paying someone to do that. For instance, the guys who make the backup. Who should provide that as part of the service. Which mean they are responsible for failures and can be held accountable.
Its a great idea, but I wonder what its uses would be considering any long term use would make the users arm tired.
If you issued a RENUMBER command with sufficiently nonsensical parameters (you gave it, I think, the first line number and the increment), the result was the error message "Silly.", which was (1) unusually casual-sounding and (2) not mentioned anywhere in the manuals. I can still remember the brief flash of OMG-it's-alive panic that hit me when my computer first told me I was silly.
I assume you're talking about mine. Perhaps you'd see it differently if you knew that many of the people most keenly aware of the problem I describe, and who do at least half the work done to address it, are high-achieving women in stereotypically masculine endeavors who want to encourage other women to follow them. When they identify someone who has a special talent for a field, or who could simply benefit from an activity, sometimes their first task is to grant them social permission -- which is a more delicate and uncertain task than it sounds -- to acknowledge and develop their ability.

The examples I cited aren't made up; they come from personal experience. Of course, when dealing directly with somebody I don't use the (admittedly complainy) tone I did in my post. I'm more subtle and try to be more sensitive. But my observations are simply, unfortunately, observably true. They're no different from the academic studies that have established many ways in which providing social context can hurt women's performance on tests. Nor are they different from the observation that many men require lots of social permission and support before they can reveal intimate emotions to other men. It's a general problem of people self-limiting because better performance would violate their identity and threaten their place in society.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0976470705?ie=UTF8&tag=...

Takes pg's motto: "Built something people want." and expands on it a fair bit. This seems to be a great way to succeed ... gloriously.
Hey Kyro - Bring someone on. It takes about 1 year to really learn sales, 6 months if you have a bit of a marketing background. If you really can't bring someone on, then here are some pointers based off of the sales guys I work with.

First, treat everything like a funnel. First time visitors to repeat visitors to trial accounts to paid accounts to referring accounts. Test around about a bit to determine where you are best able to impact the conversion from one part of the funnel to the next. Make sure your tests are not biased. Randomly assign yourself to a certain number of leads vs a control group. In some companies, the best way to spread the word and impact final sales is through contacting your already paying accounts and getting them to spread the word to their contacts. This works especially well if they have a ingrained interest in seeing you do this (ie, they get value by bringing people on). But usually your best performance is reached by calling, emailing, sending real life snail mail to people that have created free accounts. Also, always CARE about your users, especially your first ones. Care, care, care, care, care. Your first users are typically cutting edge folk that others look to for advice. Even if it looks like a negative ROI to service these users it's not, because they spread the word. You should be emailing these guys back within the hour.

Once you reach enough visitor volume, split test EVERYTHING. Pricing pages, home pages, sales tactics, etc. Send me an email if you want some tips on how to do this successfully, it is part of what I do for a living :) p.engineer@gmail.com

All the best going forward!
But but but he has "managed projects far larger and more complex than you can imagine, involving multiple languages, various data base structures, artificial intelligence, and universal applicability"

Data base structures! Universal applicability!

I find it hard to believe this is not a parody...
We can own property, we can possess it, we can alienate (sell or transfer) it, we can bequeath it, we can improve or modify it, and on and on.

Why should this bundle of rights be any different for intangible property rights (so-called intellectual property)?

Because "intangible" property doesn't exist, except as a legal fiction. We can't possess it. Alternately, if you consider knowledge to be possession, then possessing isn't exclusive.
Backup your mysql blog with cron
I looked for beemodel.com that he mentioned about a dozen times, think he got the address wrong! Whoops. There is a bemodel.com but only a domain seller holding page at beemodel.com.
It's exactly the opposite. Fads are forced on programmers by managers who know nothing more than they read about them in a vendor sponsored article in "CIO Monthly" magazine they read at the airport.