markerdmann

Which version took longer to write? Which version has fewer SLOC (I'm using SLOC here as a proxy for code complexity)? Weigh those two factors, then choose the winning language accordingly.

I'm oversimplifying, but I believe the point is an extremely important one. We've all heard the startup lore that David-sized startups beat industry Goliaths by being much more nimble than the lumbering giants they're competing against. If you're a software startup, your engineering tools are your sling and stone: if your tools are good and you can wield them with expert precision, you'll be able to iterate more quickly, make your users happier, and outpace the competition sooner.

Yishan Wong has written an excellent essay about the importance of tools:

http://www.algeri-wong.com/yishan/engineering-management-too...

Ah, I see it now. I just got a POST from one of your servers in the AWS US-West region. Is Twilio also hosted in US-East (the region affected by today's outage), and, if so, would Twilio have stayed up if it hadn't been spread across multiple regions?

Evan, I just noticed that your service seems to be running on Slicehost, not the AWS colo in Virginia. Is that correct? I got the opposite impression from your post, which seems to imply that Twilio is hosted on AWS, yet managed to weather the storm because of your design decisions.

Ok, come on. Now you're just trolling. Amazon also promises not to share your credit card information. It should be obvious that trust is necessary in business.

This is just a suggestion, but it might make sense to post a CV, a LinkedIn profile, or something similar that gives interested individuals a better sense of who you are and what you're bringing to the table.

CrowdFlower in San Francisco, CA (Mission district)

http://crowdflower.com/about/jobs#backend_engineer

You may want to try CrowdFlower (disclaimer: I'm on the engineering team), which is a Dolores Labs project that connects users to several different crowdsourcing marketplaces, including Mechanical Turk. We offer a GUI for designing tasks and backend algorithms that automatically reject untrusted work.

The source of the negative sentiment may boil down to the cold calling. It seems to be one of those things that just hits a nerve, and I wouldn't be surprised if you could trace the anti-Yelp movement to this business practice. The other thing people complain about a lot is that their reviews aren't counted (presumably because of the anti-spam filter). If Yelp fixes those two major problems, it will be in much better shape.

This is basically the project I started working on a few weeks ago. If anyone is interested in getting together on this, feel free to get in touch (my email address is in my profile). I'm a programmer located in the Mission district of San Francisco.

It would be a nice to have a Craigslist or Wikipedia-style Yelp (fast, lightweight, and non-evil).

Learn Haskell! I've been using learnyouahaskell.com, book.realworldhaskell.org, and haskell.org/haskellwiki. If you get stuck, the people who hang out on #haskell (freenode) are both helpful and brilliant.

Learning Python and Scheme was fun. Learning Haskell feels like being in an 80s training montage. One day you're a nobody, the next day you're an FP-wielding superhero.

http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Applications is good for inspiration.

I'm surprised that this made it to the top of HN. I did something similar for my friend's birthday last year, but I never considered it particularly newsworthy. Another fun project was proving to our product manager that he was completely wrong (about listing overdue timesheet dates in reverse chronological order) by submitting the question to Mechanical Turk and getting instant user feedback.

Does the popularity of this link mean that there is enough interest in Mechanical Turk to justify the creation of web apps around it?

Everyone who is interested in this may also be interested in skritter.com, which features a very similar interface. Skritter's focus is on reading and writing Chinese characters.

This saga reminds of Warren Buffet's advice to invest only in businesses that possess "excellent business economics and an outstanding manager."

In my business we've conducted several off-shoring experiments, and they have largely failed to realize a significant return. The lesson I learned from observing and assisting in those experiments is that the secret sauce in business is reputation. Finding people who are honest, reliable, and intelligent can be very difficult. When you find people like that, "grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel." If, like Michael Arrington, you wander into an industry with nothing but your hubris to guide you, you'll most likely be taken for a ride.

Our civilization is one worth celebrating because we have engaged in progressively less war. This, not our use of one evil to flail against another evil, is the cause of our success. If you haven't read Steven Pinker's essay A History of Violence (or seen the related TED talk at http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinker_on_the_myth_of_violen...), I would recommend taking a look.

I appreciate the thoughtful responses, especially from raganwald (my original comment was directed primarily at this discussion thread rather than his post).

The common thread in your responses seems to be that politicians, not soldiers, are responsible for wars. My response to this idea is that one must not conflate "dying for freedom" with "killing for freedom". We should certainly oppose the enemies of liberty, but not by glorifying violence. It has always been, and will forever be, possible to oppose something without killing your fellow human beings. For this to succeed, however, you must have the courage to enter the fray with your arms at your sides.

On a day like today, I prefer to remember men like this:

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

Downvote me if you must, but as you do consider deeply the message you send when you thank men and women for engaging in war.

This discussion reminds of the time we interviewed a senior in the EECS undergraduate program at Cal (who had a 3.9 GPA). To quote directly from the interview:

Interviewer: So, what was your favorite course? Interviewee: Oh.. probably Data Structures. Interviewer: Ok, great. Let's start with a question about that. What's the running time of a hash table lookup? Interviewee: Oh.. uh... <stares blankly>

The rest of the interview continued along those lines. By contrast, another guy we interviewed who had earned his CS degree at Oregon State was a brilliant programmer.

His use of the word "embarrassing" is tongue-in-cheek.

Just a quick heads up... When the dashboard is "paused", the page is not properly masked. When I clicked to resume, it opened a link in a new page.

The sign up page (https://chartbeat.com/signup/) says that the price is $9.95 per month.

On the other hand, this is such a glaring security flaw that it's hard to have much sympathy for Microsoft (or Microsoft's infamous legal department), since this could cause significant problems for a merchant. The people deserve to know the truth. ;-) Thank you for making this public.

The original post can be found in this Google cache:

http://74.125.155.132/search?q=cache:3hxOgSPu460J:bountii.co...

If that doesn't work, the text has also mysteriously made its way into this EtherPad:

http://etherpad.com/0feqRE5pmE

Wolfram Alpha has been a bit of a disappointment in terms of natural language parsing, but it's hard not to be impressed by the way it handles mathematical inputs.

Does anyone know if the natural language parsing is showing improvement, or does it still choke on most inputs?

You seem to be intentionally taking that Clojure code out of context. The refactored of version of that code, which compares much more favorably with your C# 3.0 version, was given as:

  (reduce (sum-field :productioncost) 0
     (filter doubleMargin?
           (map attach-liquid-value assets)))

Thank you for your feedback, Jacque! I'll change the script accordingly.

Is there any way to turn it off? For now I'm just using the "ignore" feature to block as many of those people as possible.

The fact that it's constantly moving is very distracting, and it adds so little value.

The classic C book is The C Programming Language by Kernighan and Ritchie (http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Language-2nd-Brian-Kernigh...).

Clickable link:

http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/1395097/MyFavoriteSubmitters.py