skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Taking out the trash is not intrinsically pleasurable, like playing Call of Duty, or masturbating. Or masturbating while playing Call of Duty. You take out the trash, study instead of playing games, or save your money for the longer-term effects, which is precisely my point. Saving money sucks in the short term, which by "Hedonistic GTD" would disqualify it for almost everyone.

The article is pretty much contentless fluff, and would be made 100x better if it was just replaced with the quote "do what you love and the money will follow." Still debatable, but at least it has brevity going for it.
Understanding RDFa
GrabMyTable Lets Mom And Pop Restaurants Easily Serve Up Websites
Programmable e-mail clients e.g. Eudora.

Of course most of the Internet users today, weren't users in the 90s, so this doesn't mean you wont find users to appreciate what you are offering.
I'm in Oregon and ATT works great here. The big problem with ATT's network is that it sucks in the two places anyone writes anything about wireless networks: San Francisco and New York.
The most profitable ventures are always at a junction of two tings. In your case a junction of someone who can code on one hand and who can see the point of another coder and negotiate to the agreement on the other hand is very valuable in any large company. Product development in large companies always requires more coordination between different teams than is available, so you just can't go wrong by targeting this niche. Do both and you will do well.

As a matter of staging, get a coding job in a large company. Straight out of college the expectations will be fairly low for you, so meeting coding expectations would be easy. Use the spare time to seek out right-sized communication gaps in projects that are important for your skip-level manager, suggest improving it, provide your budget (I will spend one week on this, this and this) and make a tiny but clearly measurable progress. If you make a decent effort you will be noticed, if you succeed after first three attempts you will be fast-tracked.

Remember that engineers respect other engineers, so if you start with coding and especially a coding achievement you will come from the position of strength compared to any regular program/project manager.
huh... What little I read was interesting, yet I was constantly distracted by the sheer volume of huge, brightly colored ads or labeling. Talk about information pollution.
It's merely an observation. See how many times the word "wizard" appears in the Perl documentation. Then try the same in, well, any other language.

There's no war to fight. Perl has its place. I might even use Perl again if I need a throwaway 10-liner.
I don't understand why this kills the CrunchPad. If Foxconn pulled that shit with Apple over the iPhone, Jobs wouldn't throw up his hands and say "well, I guess we're not doing a phone."

Just take the prototype to Foxconn or one of the other firms that would be happy to do what Fusion Garage won't.
What about Microsoft puts you off?

I ask because I've chosen to use the MVC Framework, and its been great so far, I feel like choosing Microsoft products has made development faster.
I honestly can't say if the GP (gaius) is a parody of a language fanatic or a troll. (-: Or if it's a Ruby guy giving Python people bad reputation. :-)
WeCanDo.Biz launches automated lead generation tool for Twitter
There is already way too much Information Pollution: for example, I read less than 10% of HN and other blogs/news sites have similar proportion.
Why not submit the actual article (as per the guidelines) instead of a link to a useless blog post?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=968018
The article says 2.5 years. Personally I would likely take an early exit simply to build up confidence. And resume :-)
I felt that way a bit until I met the people at Red Gate and saw what they're with the local startup community. While Cambridge has a great history of startups (ARM and a lot of other high-tech companies) it's not particularly friendly for small startups. Red Gate is helping a LOT, with desk space and a good vibe. I'm really not a MSFT fan, but I'm a huge fan of Red Gate.
Excellent explanation of Co- and Contra- variance
I'm extremely rusty on my statistics, and I upvoted this because I find A/B tests interesting, but... are these numbers statistically significant? For the population of internet users, are they actually practically significant? It just seems like the sample sizes and differences aren't really big enough to draw solid conclusions from. It doesn't say how long each test lasted for, either--what if the second test was done during peak hours?
Auto-tune your status with Sony's new Facebook app
Couldn't agree more. I've rarely seen an instance where you try to set price first on a piece of hardware (especially a ground breaking design) and then back the BOM into that price work out well.

You pretty much have to have deep expertise on the piece of hardware you are building for this work well, and on a "complex" device like this, I don't think it can ever be done properly.
Honest question: Why is everyone convinced that Twitter is such a great investment? How seriously should we take that $1B valuation?

Also, haven't the seed investors pretty much been priced out of the later rounds? Isn't that a bad thing (for them)?
I'd be up for that (in the first half of December).
You're missing the point. In our little what if scenario, the point isn't how long it would take, but that it would happen and we had the power to prevent it.
Techchrunch is an excellent bargaining tool.
It's not about being interested in it or not, it's about the appearance. Cops don't know anything about the hacker mind or why they are using them.

Cops aren't hackers. If you're too curious, you can't even be a cop. If I was a cop and I was busting a place doing illegal stuff and I saw lock picking gear laying around everywhere, I would think they are up to no good.

Why everyone here is shocked by thought that cops would think people publicly collaborating to defeat security measures are up to no good is a bit perplexing.

I am not saying they were up to no good. I am saying it is easily believable that they were up to no good. In fact, I would say, cops who did not assume they were up to no good would be remiss in their duties to protect the public, because in most cases, people with that kind of stuff lying around aren't into it for benevolence.
Wow, this is very cool of Red Gate guys. Way to be a good community member and make a difference.
I love this talk. Rich talks about the concept of time and identity and its importance in programming in general, and especially in concurrency. Good stuff. I was able to better appreciate clojure after watching this talk.
No, you're not in the wrong major but you do need to look at fields outside just "programming."

A smart girl I used to work with realized that she was more interested in the business than in coding & testing and left to become a Business Analyst. The job suits her personality much more than being a coder did and she's good at it. Basically her job now entails meeting with customers to elicit requirements and understand their needs from a business perspective. Having a CS background gives her the ability to talk to both business people and technical people and be able to translate between either "world."

In software development today, your interpersonal skills are much more valuable than technical skills. I rarely turn down an job candidate for tech skills: it's almost always a personality problem.
Spotify heads towards TVs and consoles
Perl has "wizards" Ruby has "rockstars" and so on.

They are all irrelevant monikers.

Use whatever works for YOU. Taking the conversation any further is as pointless as any other religious war discussion.
I'm an old Tcl guy ;-)
I think this article presents a brief, well written summary of an important issue from someone who clearly knows what he's talking about and I would recommend reading it.
The product is pretty awesome on iPhone, so I expect it to be very nice when it's available as a service on TVs or consoles. It's replaced CD listening mostly at home for me now (along with Boxee, depending on the room).
Virtualization Will Cross the Chasm in Two Years
Interview with car critic Daniel Albert
These do no represent a "conspiracy" to wrongly withhold data, because it does not represent:

1. Wrongly withholding data. They deleted data of questionable value that they knew could and would be misinterpreted by the disreputable people that, despite repeated attempts to reconcile with, had remained stubbornly antagonistic.

2. A conspiracy. It's only a conspiracy if it's kept secret, and as others have pointed out in this thread, the declines they corrected for were publicly acknowledged in the CRU's works. In order for there to be a cover-up operation and a conspiracy... there needs to be an actual cover-up.

If you see more evidence of a real conspiracy when you read about the loss of the "original" (although I think the proper word is "raw") data, I'd like to offer an alternative perspective. Having worked on climate-anlysis and recording systems for Lockheed Martin (in 2003-4 for the RSA2 & AWIPS contracts) I can tell you that it's not unusual to throw the raw data out. That data is noisy, often produced by poor equipment, and frequently the systems used to gather it have "curious" false reporting characteristics. We only kept interpolated data as well, as that was the only data of any value. This is in sharp contrast to the financial data you like to compare it to: financial data doesn't have significant noise and every transaction is of clear value independent of the whole. That is not what climate data is, and continuing comparisons along these lines suggest deliberate ignorance.

Most scientists simply don't see any value in this obviously noisy raw data. They're not used to having a bunch of belligerent charlatans try and anomaly hunt their data for even slight inconsistencies and then be told their life's work is meaningless and compromised. The way they react to this once they come into contact with special interest groups trying to fight science varies. Some go very aggressive (like Myers and Dawkins), some simply leave the field, some do their best to ignore the problem.
Steve Souders: Making Web Sites Faster in the Web 2.0 Age
> I'm unconvinced it needs special syntax at all.

What's interesting is that it's actually not special syntax - at least, it's not special syntax for regex usage. The syntax obj[arg, arg, arg] looks weird because in most languages things that look like subscripts can't have multiple arguments, but it's just sugar for the method call obj.[](arg, arg, arg), which is pretty mundane. The semantics are just the semantics of that method on the class of 'obj', and can therefore be defined in library or user code.

Note I'm not defending the specific use of it here to write odd-looking regex code - I just think it's interesting that the language is flexible enough to allow that kind of usage without special-casing it.

Raganwald wrote a blog post [1] along similar lines, arguing that it's a core part of Ruby's language philosophy, about this snippet:

(1..100).inject(&:+)

[1]: http://weblog.raganwald.com/2008/02/1100inject.html
This is exactly why I don't read other people's A/B experiment results. I haven't seen a single A/B experiment that listed it's statistical significance (and how that was calculated). I fear that bad data is worse than no data at all.
It'd be cool if you guys would figure out how to properly implement RSS

1. You should be including a LINK element pointing towards your RSS feed in the page's HEAD so RSS-hip user agents can pick up on it.

2. Serve your RSS feeds with a proper mimetype. text/xml instead of text/html.
2 vs 6 orders doesn't seem like enough. There are people in affiliate programs that don't change anything and yet one day they have 20 orders and 0 the next day. It seems like something doesn't work, but it's back to normal next day - just a fluctuation in stats. I really wouldn't consider 2 vs 6 orders a significant sample.
Yes indeed. How about having the meetup at the 26th Chaos Communications Congress (26C3), the week between Christmas and New Year's?
Where Should I Eat? Chain Restaurant Flowchart
I didn't see it mentioned, but, btw, this code allows a method to introspect to figure out what the method name that's currently being executed.

caller[0][/`([^']*)'/, 1]

Note that you only need to do this for Ruby 1.8. In Ruby 1.9, there will be a __method__() and __callee__() method that does the same thing.
Suggestion: Do it at CCC: http://events.ccc.de/congress/2009/wiki/index.php/Main_Page Non-Berliners might also want to come.
I claim that anyone who buys books on the Kindle is in fact renting them, just for an unspecified duration that Amazon gets to choose after the fact. Amazon has already demonstrated that they are capable of remotely deleting books on people's devices, so your rental will last as long as it's in Amazon's financial interest for it to. That will probably be as long as Amazon exists as a company, but who knows.
I've yet to find a considerable value-add in Haml. With Sass the value is pretty clear -- CSS can benefit from having variables and functions to make scripts more reusable and easier to manage. As a Python user I'm a lover of significant whitespace, but with the ability to have my text editor auto-complete tags it isn't worth it to learn a new DSL just to save on some brackets.

With Jabs it's even harder for me to see the value; I'm required to learn a new syntax in order to remove some braces and add implied variables. The $ selector for instance removes all of four characters, two of which could be added automatically, if that's your thing. jQuery itself is already a rather terse library and with Jabs I'm adding yet another layer of abstraction and the need for compilation to writing JS.

The code is also harder to parse (for me) as a result of all the implicit variables. I suppose that isn't of much concern if you're just using it to write your own JS and nobody ever has to look at it, though. The ability (and probably frequent need) to mix JS and Jabs only creates a larger mess, I would imagine.
Not to worry Paul. If the first one goes of well, I'm thinking of making this a regular thing.
sounds like a good idea :)
And ruby's manifest destiny continues

Your current language is too ugly or verbose? There's a ruby DSL for that
How programming works -- a parable
I think the key difference is that Apple (probably) built a working prototype themselves before showing it to Foxconn. This way IP rights were completely owned by Apple. Foxconn may have helped tweak it, but the rights still belonged to Apple.

It sounds like both TechCrunch and Fusion Garage have rights to different parts of the IP. So TechCrunch can't go to Foxconn (and neither can Fusion Garage) w/o violating the IP rights that the other party has.
Good to know, I may be moving to the area soon, so I'll certainly check them out some more.
I just recorded a screencast showing a quick example coding session for Jabs http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JdnXJ6bj_qs
Also these climate models are likely calculated on Intel hardware: a company notorious for floating-point bugs. Even if we verify the software is correct, unless we see the RTL that describes the logic behind these chips, it's all just hocus-pocus as far as I'm concerned.
The 8½ Laws of Rumor Spread
How are we going to prevent it?
Good idea. A similar thing happened to me when working with a team in another country. In my case the group were a bunch of good friends.

From my experience, they didnt respect or understand all the work that I had done on my end. And I blame the fact that I was so far away that I didnt realise that this was the case. I also owned a big part of the equity in that relationship.

And similarly it happened just when we were about to sign a big contract.

I however think that Arrington can fix this. Printing this on his website was probably the stupidest thing he could have done w.r.t trying to get the relationship back on track.
very good point! we have a mathematician in our engineering team. one of our teachers (software engineer) was working toward his PhD in nuclear physics, but stopped in the tick of it because he wanted to work in the IT. you really just should do what you think is right for you. if you wake up in the morning and you're happy to go to work, then you know you've found the right thing for yourself. a major in CS doesn't restrict you. it's quite the contrary. you can choose to do a lot of things, since IT does not only consist of programming positions.
Link to Fusion Garage's blog, although it hasn't been updated in a while:

http://www.fusiongarage.com/blog/
Chinese as a programming language has gained some market among Chinese programmers. There's government backed 汉编 which has little value, but there's also an cooperate-run programming language named 易语言, it's quite good. It can compile natively, object-originated, has all the features of VB, even support cross-platform UI (Win32 & GTK, IIRC).

http://www.dywt.com.cn/eftx/jdyx.htm (in Chinese)

An actual use case of 易语言 I can think of is the 360Safe, the No.1 anti-malware tool in China, part of its UI is written with 易语言
>C is easy enough until you hit pointers

You forgot recursion. If there are two things you can count on CS1 students to not understand, they're pointers and recursion.
Speaking of which I've become a huge fan of Ulysses for OS X, http://www.the-soulmen.com/ulysses/. Costs $$$, but it does exactly what is described in this article - you focus only on writing and document management. Only when you're exporting (to LaTeX for example) do you worry about presentation.
They (TC and FG) jointly own the IP, and that will be an obstacle for outsourcing to other vendors to do the same product.
How to tell true love from ersatz love
Agreed. Count this post as Arrington's own heavy-handed negotiations.
"The single biggest difference I have ever seen (over and over again) between a good programmer and a great programmer is how they respond under pressure."

As many have pointed out already, there's a big difference between the pressure of an interview where you've got a couple of minutes to either win the job or completely blow it and a deadline where you usually have several days to plan and prepare.

I would also point out that if management is constantly springing short, do-or-die deadlines on workers then there's something very wrong with their planning.
Turning Points for 6 Successful Businesses
David Parnas on Software Engineering
Most interesting bit for me:

>What is the most often-overlooked risk in software engineering?

>Incompetent programmers. [...] If we had more good programmers, and could easily identify them, we would need fewer, not more.
What Would Jane Austen Have Twittered?
Secret compartments
The Life and Death of CrunchPad
You Bar (http://www.youbars.com/) does something like this for nutrition bars. People with food allergies will be particularly interested.
What LHC is all about (video)
I expect most other applicants to do the due diligence and communicate with program officers as well, it's even suggested on the application paperwork. In general I expect similar situations to attract similar caliber of people, the only exceptionality I expect is in their core competency not in other things such as process, paperwork etc.

I agree on non-monetary rewards, those can be useful for some people depending on their future plan. I see myself in consumer market, so it's not clear how much benefit will I get from it. Would be nice to know more about that.

I need to look closer into the two-week thing. You might be right, and if it's less than a week I might as well just do it.

Speaking of probabilities, they have funded 395 out of 2067 submissions in 2007, so the estimates are going up slightly: http://www.nsf.gov/eng/iip/sbir/phaseI_map.ppt
Statsy - more data points for markup quality
In the spirit of the content-to-markup ratio bookmarklet, here's another one that gives you some more data points to help you judge the quality of a page's markup and help answer the old question - where does all this page weight go.
Sure it's useful -- in a world of ever-increasing specialization it helps to have a few people who take breadth-first approaches to learning and to effectively spread the knowledge of subfields to masses. But I've always had the feeling that both (1) he often musses the message for the sake of the yarn and (2) he might be trying to play it off as if he were more than a reporter.
Ok I started a facebook event for the 28th

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=191348163674&index...
No, you are not in the wrong major. There are many career paths available to you. I work for Boeing, and we have a lot of people in systems engineering roles. They define requirements, perform integration, and generally do a lot buisness like tasks on the engineering side of the org chart. There is Quality Assurance, where you need to understand code but not necessarily write it. In addition to that there is Configuration Management. Our current SCM lead is not a coder but you need general technical ability.

Those are just a few examples, but it shows that there are careers out there that require a technical background but don't involve coding.

However don't expect to jump int business/marketing/management" out of the gate with a cs degree. Your going to be competing against mba's, and people with marketing degrees.
Yeah, these sorts of things aren't for everybody.

I love my editor too, and for me it makes writing html and jquery code bearable.

One thing I like about HAML is it really changes the way I think about my markup while writing it and while I'm reading it. This is very much my thing :)

One thing I like about Jabs is the stylistic constraint it imposes. There is a very uniform way to write behaviors in Jabl. I find that when I write straight jQuery I sometimes draw outside those lines. Jabs keeps me in check.

I also think it's important for something like Jabs to stay strictly in the realm of Dom manipulations and event callbacks. As far as I can tell it has no place managing the business logic of your javascript applications.
Even if this has a G-test significance of 99.86%, it doesn't mean it is valid. You need to have AT LEAST 10 results for the formulas to work correctly. Also, saying 300% conversion is madness. I'm not even fully statistically convinced that the challenger is at ALL better, let alone a certainty of 300% better.
This is an excellent find. Thanks

How did we let this problem develop? I think it was simply a matter of creeping normalcy.

Probably so. I know from working with various industries, such as military radio guys, that gradually their jobs became all about software. Twenty years ago you'd have one software guy and 30 engineers and now you have 30 software guys and 1 engineer. It was very late in the day when folks sat down and said "Hey! We're really a software organization now, and this stuff is really important, so we'd better start tightening things up" I imagine some types of academic research are in that same place now.

It just creeps in over many years.

Open Source Science is looking better and better.
They have funded 395 out of 2067 submissions in 2007, so the my estimates were even too conservative: http://www.nsf.gov/eng/iip/sbir/phaseI_map.ppt

Another poster indicated the money comes with no strings attached, other than quarterly reporting. Is there a multi-year contract I have missed?
Using enslaved spiders to produce large tapestry (with hand tools)
<META NAME="GENERATOR" CONTENT="TtH 1.93">

I was happy to see that he practices what he advocates.