skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My advice was selfish. I run a personal server that is IPv6 connected, and sometimes web frameworks will break because the author tried to store e.g. REMOTE_ADDR in a VARCHAR(16) column.

So I would like to promote the fact that IP address != 32 bits, and if you really want to optimize for IPv4 address lookup, your code needs to handle it as a separate, specialized case.
The gradual decline of RSS readers
No. 7 has an unfortunate but funny typo ("Avoid SELECT" instead of "Avoid SELECT *").
Block on test failures
The point, as mentioned in the article, is not so much the (lack of) free soda, but what it is a leading indicator of. Once a company starts pinching pennies and ignoring the effect it has on moral then there is a good chance that worse is to come.
I'm kind of confused on the timeline:

"Last week as a favor to a friend..."

"The best engineers quietly put the word out that they were available, and in less than month..."

While both statements can be true together, it would seem to me that "in less than a week..." would be more appropriate, and devastating.

I realize I'm just fussing over unimportant details though.
Major Typolight CMS security hole identified
It's not about your compensation at all. The impact of free snacks is so tiny for the employers cost structure that the decision to offer them or not is completely unrelated to their ability (or willingness) to pay a fair salary.

Would you really prefer an extra $200 or so per year over free soda? I think you wouldn't even notice the difference in your bank balance.
It's not really about compensation... or even about soda.

These engineers joined a start-up in its early days because they wanted to work at the fun, informal sort of place that would stock free sodas.

(That said, it's not like keeping free sodas would have prevented everyone from noticing the changing culture forever; it's just an emblematic change that is difficult to ignore, even if you rarely look up from the screen)
My comment was meant to be agnostic to the merits of your argument. While we're talking about it, though, I think that this particular situation (reporting the Google-Yelp acquisition talks) is actually a bad example as well.

TechCrunch reported that Google and Yelp were in talks for an acquisition. As far as I know, that is true and TechCrunch broke the story with original reporting.

Then TechCrunch reported that Yelp walked away and talks broke down. As far as I know, that is also true and again they broke the story with original reporting.

Remaining agnostic to your claim about TechCrunch, how does this situation support the argument that they are not reliable?
I think what he means is that the amount of fructose you get from eating fruit is much less as a proportion of beneficial nutrients than if you were drinking fruit juice or stuff with high fructose corn syrup added.

I think the main message is to avoid fructose in all forms. The rest is basically ABC analysis. Identify where most of your fructose intake originates from and cut down on that source.
http://code.google.com/p/counterclockwise/

Counterclockwise is an excellent Eclipse Plugin.

I know this is available in other editors but Rainbow parens are super helpful for people coming from non-lispy languages.
> only includes "interpreted" data from Emotiv's software, not the raw EEG data. For that, you have to pay $7500...

http://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/antifeatures

Reverse the specs, publish anonymously, screw the bastards where it hurts.
I get your point, but incidentally, I am not a good driver, in fact. I am a careful driver, but I'm not particularly skilled.
10K sounds like a lot of cash for soda

This, by the way, is the very definition of bikeshedding. Everyone knows about soda; everyone has bought it before. So cutting out soda is something that the entire executive team feels competent to discuss -- unlike, say, the efficiency of the QA department's staffing schedule, or climate control zones, or the use of electricity for lighting offices at 3am, or the difficult politics of downsizing particular business units. Soda is a simple theatrical stunt for making the CFO look good. It's a good show.

Of course, as Steve points out, it sends a very clear message to the people who've been drinking those sodas: Your work is no longer considered an investment in the future. Now you're a cost center.
See this for why it doesn't make sense:

http://www.businessinsider.com/2008/11/why-companies-fire-pe...
Startup Therapy: Questions to ask yourself every month
A Conspiracy-Theory Theory
Directed electrical disharge is a popular idea that, generally, doesn't end up working very well. Engineering geeks still love it, though, and DARPA keeps funding attempts. Electrical arcs have an annoying habit of doing as they please once they get outside the confines of your device, so until we hear about something like this in actual real-world use, better to assume vaporware.

On the other hand, holy crap lightning is totally awesome, let's do it. QED, I rest my case.
If the accoutants looked at free sodas and snacks as leveraged salary/retention bonuses, they wouldn't suggest eliminating them.
It seems to me that this is really a testing failure which, ironically, could be avoided by automating testing. An automated testing procedure could have ensured that every possible combination of inputs and failures was tried out.
Sodas are a correlating effect, not a causation effect. Steve says "The sodas were just the wake-up call." (his emphasis).

The problem is not that the sodas are no longer free, the problem is that the company starts treating its "most valuable asset - its employees" as just another cog in the machine. As such, the company has started to transition from being exceptional to being average, and its exceptional employees leave to find another company which is exceptional, completing the transition.
Outstanding. Using "jumped the shark" just never felt right for this situation. "The elves have left middle earth". A spot on perfect description of this sad and awkward phase all startups encounter as they grow to successful bigcorps. I love it.
A quick calculation says that $10k for 50 employees is roughly $16 per person and month. Less than one percent of the salary cost. If the margins in the company are so thin that this expense matters, they've definitely got bigger problems.
I somehow get the sense that the quality of the discussion has correlates with how long an article lives on the front page. A year or two ago, articles could hang on the front page for a day or two. Now, the volume of new articles pushes interesting discussions like this one off the front page within hours. I pretty rarely visit page 2.

I used to spend 30-35 minutes writing and editing a comment. It doesn't seem worth it any more when the article is going to drop off the front page in 8 - 12 hours. When I thought people might read it for a day or to, it felt like it was worth the investment.

It seems like the current speed of article churn has increased the pace of HN, and has inadvertently encouraged shorter, shoot from the hip type comments rather than encourage slower more thoughtful discussion.
Why does any company need to go through this phase? It's such a small cost relative to any pretty much any other expense that a business might have.

I know this is just an anecdote, but I worked for a non-profit for a number of years that had free soda fountains for employee use. It was a nice touch, and didn't cost them very much at all to maintain versus all the other costs of keeping the organization running.
I never expected employers to provide snacks and beverages but it is demoralizing when executives take away such perks but continue to fly first-class for the same cost as buying a month of snacks for everyone.
Being online: Your identity online--getting down to basics
Content-Search Deals Make Twitter Profitable
In a startup, every expense is potentially a total loss, whether it's for a computer, a soda or a consulting fee. But when a business establishes a revenue stream that is insufficient to cover expenses and generate a profit, it has to differentiate between essentials and luxuries. Free soda will always be considered a luxury, whether or not it is a cost effective employee incentive.

Personally, I hate working in places with these kind of perks. I think they're abused by both management and employees. If your salary isn't enough to cover your personal needs, free soda doesn't solve the underlying problem.
Facebook's $1 Billion Revenues Explained in 25 Words
Correct way of updating an OpenSource project released under the MIT license? 
Recently, while looking for a solution for a really complex problem, I found a small project released under the MIT license. Actually the "project" is just one class file and is not even hosted on any version control system like GitHub or Google code. It worked fine for like 80% of the use cases but didnt for the last 20% at all. More googling found a blogpost that I could use to make the class work in the remaining 20%. Now I really want to patch that file and release it on GitHub out there but I am not exactly sure what the most appropriate way. Do I change the class namespace to refer my domain? Do I append to the copyright note way on top on the MIT license (to include a like that says 'modified by ...')?<p>Whats the best way to extend such a project.
Once again the light has won the battle against the dark.
The second statement is referring to the four times Steve saw this happen in the past, in other companies. If his prediction is correct, the company whose board he sat in on last week will start seeing an exodus soon.
An apparent connection between random matrices and the Riemann Zeta Function
That's not the author's analogy, only a straw man resulting from your misplaced referent. A shuttle launch is not analogous to a company launch. A shuttle launch is analogous to a version or a feature deployment of one particular company.

A company that iterates a lot, and deploys a lot, gets good at iterating and deploying. An organization that preps, launches, and retrieves spaceships a lot gets good at that too.

More effort on proving the null hypothesis is suggested.
2000+ calories of fruits and vegetables alone will supply more than enough of one's daily sodium needs.

We need sodium. We don't need rock salt.

CRON-O-Meter (Linux/Win/Mac) and similar software/sites (e.g. fitday.com) will demonstrate this for anyone who wants to see how the numbers fall into place for any of the nutrients.
Politics, every human death is ammunition for people who want to cut the program.
The interesting thing here is the similarity with Fermat's Last Theorem (now the Wiles-Taylor Theorem). There it was a completely unexpected connection between Modular Forms and Elliptic Curves (Taniyama-Suimura Conjecture - now Theorem) that opened the way for the proof. Here there appears to be predictive power in random matrices to talk about the zeros on the critical line of the RZF.

And before you ask, I don't know much about this. I've been to a talk and it all looked reasonable and exciting, but there's no way I could reproduce any of it. I can try to interpret stuff if people ask.
You're right as well. Perhaps 'more true' wasn't sufficient. I basically was trying to express your same sentiment that politeness wasn't contained in the words used, while granting the author's assumption that words traditionally intended to be polite had been co-opted and therefore couldn't be unambiguously used to convey politeness by themselves.
I don't think he's actually comparing a company launch to a rocket launch. I think he's likening a development iteration to a rocket launch.
So, Wikipedia should be showing just large donations? ;)

I wonder what would happen if they changed it to just a $1000 donation all the time?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analemma

Edit: I've always wanted to take a picture of it, but I've never had a spare camera I can bolt down for a year...
which most people don't do lightly

Perhaps this is no longer true?

Regardless, the fact the downvoting is just as easy as upvoting (and has no undo) strikes me as odd.

I suggest downvoting cost the voter something, not just the votee. 1:1 seems simple enough. It would also give greater pause to newer users than veterans. However, an undo (perhaps timed like comment editing) would be more desirable in this case.
Hmmm. It's a lot easier to automatically manage boxes named "server001" than a list of random names that constantly has to be maintained.

Your own personal laptop is a different matter.

Moreover, if you want personality, just set up your ~/.ssh/config to retain the legacy name for yourself, e.g. "ssh middleearthname" to connect to server001.foo.com
i also use adblock with firefox. i am on an online dating site that says 'paid users don't see ads' and i smile, because i don't see ads or pay.
Cyber Challenge tests nation's hackers
Seems like I've been hearing about the death of RSS a lot in the past two years, but as an avid Google Reader user, I can't imagine not having RSS today.

The article states: "I for one still maintain a Google Reader account, however I don't check it on a daily basis. I check Twitter for news and information multiple times a day, I monitor Twitter lists, and I read a number of blogs across a set of topics of most interest to me."

Anyone else do this? How would Twitter be a more useful way to monitor news?
Why would the fact that we like things that taste sweet indicate that they were hard to find?

Our bodies run on sugar; sources of sugar, such as fruits and starches were not hard to find.

Availability and use of fruit in our diet long ago is hardly anything new. It certainly was not hard to find.

http://www.health101.org/art_diet2.htm

Research Yields Surprises about Early Human Diets

Teeth Show Fruit Was the Staple

By Boyce Rensberger
May 15, 1979 issue of the New York Times
Landing Page Testing: How to test and what to test
Having only ever worked for one small company, it's really hard for me to imagine this actually happening.

Hell, from most of the stories I've heard from people working for bigger places, people who don't log into the machines frequently don't even know that the machines have names.
To be fair, it's still a 30/60 split between all of IE and Firefox.

But the good news is that we should be under 10% for IE6 some time next year. That has me even more excited!
Getting Computer Science Into Middle School
A certain VP I know once remarked that at one of his previous startup employers, he advised the upper management against providing employees with free coffee in the first place, because savvy employees know that losing the free coffee is a leading indicator for layoffs.

He said this at the engineering staff meeting following our day of carnage at which a third of the company was laid off. We also lost the free soda.
So what you're saying is that you wouldn't miss the free things that you don't use?

Yeah, I probably wouldn't even notice if my company stopped handing out free goats once a month.
I have a couple of friends who worked for NASA, and I've met and spoken with others who worked there. The part of NASA associated with the shuttle is a bit ossified. One of my friends ported the software that tracks the shuttle's trajectory, and determines abort trajectories. He did that either right at the beginning of this century or the very end of the last. In any case, it was very recent, yet the use of version control software was considered a radical and risky move on the part of his group!
I don't think his issue is with the amount of money these founders make, but the pyramid scheme nature of many startups. For a company to be actually worth 750 million it's got to be producing ~75 million or more each year in profit at some time in the near future, or have a lot of assets.

Facebook may be slightly profitable, but if they are not pulling in around 100 million in profit each year within ten years they are worth less than one billion today.
actual source: http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser_version-ww-weekly-200827-...
Not really. As Dijistra said: "Testing only proves existence of errors, not their absense."
The company has to succeed, my stock has to go up in value, and as the company grows in size it can get much better deals on things like health insurance than I can alone. $200/yr spent on soda doesn't benefit me in any way at all. I'll drink tapwater at work if I'm thirsty. Is startup culture really so averse to frugality and so blind to its benefits?
If a company is not making profits, it will hardly make a difference whether or not they're giving away soda. The larger a company gets, the more inefficient it becomes. A single unproductive employee is a much larger money leak than free snacks.

Not spending on soda gives them what? 3 more hours of runway before going out of business?

The crucial point here is that every minute management and/or engineers are thinking about soda, is a minute wasted. A classical case of "penny-wise, pound foolish".
"How would Twitter be a more useful way to monitor news?"

Assuming that you follow interesting people who are interested in similar things that you are, it's likely that you could be informed of a news story that matters to you faster than by going through an RSS feed.
That and probably as a pun on the D language. I'm sure Walter Bright just LOVES the name. /s
You need to understand that things change in deals. On Friday you could have reported GM was closing down Saab and it would have been accurate, but on Sunday it was GM had received more inquiries on Saab and a deal may still be made. Just because the news has changed does not mean that there was not a basis in fact for the initial story.
1. Sounds frankly paranoid. There are lots of ways of "screwing with the little people" already. Carbon output reductions can be done by tax incentives instead of a permitting system.

And why would a scientific panel be interested in giving power to a bunch of political appointees?

While we're speaking of money, how about the motivations of the people with the large stock portfolios they don't want to see devalued? The people with the kind of money to hire PR companies to, say, astroturf a conveniently timed "AWG is a lie" campaign?

2. You do realise that we are going to run out of resources on this planet eventually, right? Saying that we must keep on increasing economic activity at all costs lest disaster strike is a surefire way to guarantee disaster, not just via climate change but via overfishing, deforestation and the resulting land loss, pollution, etc.

Also, the decrease in energy consumption is clearly not the cause of the depression, but rather one of its effects. Things can be done in a much more energy-efficient manner.
The conclusion of the article: Automated Trading could be dangerous to the market as such and should be closely monitored. They appear disturbingly similar to the hedge funds of the old days. Besides, quant-finance big shots like consider automated trading based on algorithms risky.

Correct me if I'm wrong.
"For much of the last century, educators and many scientists believed that children could not learn math at all before the age of five, that their brains simply were not ready."

That's just crazy. I've seen four counterexamples in my own family.

One example: my oldest son received a present from his uncle and aunt for his first birthday, a toy that allowed putting plastic balls into a chamber, were they couldn't be seen, and then dumping out the balls again. So my son began playing with the toy, and after a moment of experimenting with it he put in three balls, and then inverted the toy to dump out the balls, but only two came out. (Apparently, as we adults surmised, one ball was still stuck inside.) He looked at the toy, very puzzled, and moved the toy around some more until the third ball came out. This was definitely before I made any formal effort to teach him mathematics. Already at age one he knew that 3-2>0, so he knew that there was still a ball inside the toy after the first attempt to dump out the balls.
you might be surprised, then!

i used to work for a company where i wrote critical pieces of their software infrastructure. it's a series of interconnected apps which i named after marsupials. i have now left, and they are in the process of giving the apps boring names that more directly indicate what they do.
Lisp is only alien if you've learned another programming language first.

I went to a school that started students on Java. Excessive syntax seemed to bog down a lot of students early on. It seems to me like scheme is the perfect language to start students on because it has one consistent syntax.
Conkeror:  Firefox meets emacs
A few observations on the points made in this post:

1. Push for the issuance of convertible notes

Counterpoint on this from Chris Dixon ("why seed investors don't like convertible notes"), with some detailed comments by me in the thread on exactly what convertible notes are and the good and bad of such notes from a startup's perspective: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=761767.

2. Preferred stock financings are complicated, time-consuming and expensive.

A VC-style preferred stock financing is expensive (between reimbursing the VCs for their legal fees and paying the company's own, can easily exceed $60K or $70K) but startups can and do simplified preferred rounds with angels typically for much less (easy to do a so-called Series AA round, with basic preferences, for $5K or so with friendly angels).

3. If the angel insists on equity, issue shares of common stock

This one is problematic for me, since it likely will create tax and valuation problems for your startup (e.g., all subsequent option grants will need to have a strike price of no less than what the angels paid per share of common stock, creating disincentives for future key employees).
The thing that more often than not that list of 'random' names isn't random. There is often structure and information embedded in the naming scheme, even when it might not be obvious to an outsider. Having someone come in and replace all of that with server001-server999 will often remove information.
I agree, it should cost the voter 1:1 to downvote a comment, but only one that's already below 0.
This is a very good (if unintentional) argument against manned space flight.
There is no way that firing an elaborate terrarium full of large primates into space is ever going to be cheap

One should only say something like that with some physical principle as its basis, otherwise, it's just pointy-haired boss flying by the seat of one's pants.

Some prominent physicist once published a "proof" of the impossibility of heavier-than-air flight in the New York Times. (One which treated atoms as billiard balls and ignored fluid dynamics.) I think it was Kant who once gave "the chemical composition of the stars" as an example of something we'd never know. Two very smart gentlemen who had good sounding arguments, but a mistaken physical basis. From this thread, I haven't any idea about your acumen nor the basis of your argument.

I think if someone told a subject of Queen Elizabeth, that someday teenagers could idly write a screed, to be read by ten-thousands or millions of others, and effectively pay only a pittance to do so, they'd be dismissed as a lunatic.

EDIT: energy to get a spacecraft to orbit? It's comparable to sending a 747 over the Atlantic.
My soon to be 8 year old is enjoying Scratch immensely. (As am I.)

Without any instruction, apart from two tutorials from YouTube, he has made a number of exploratory programs.

I cannot recommend it more highly then seeing him dancing in delight as he showed his mother how the flying bit of doodle (made with the in-skin paint widget) that shoots from the mouth of the cat makes the stick men 'ghost'.

He set up broadcasts, loops, events, and keyboard control, all on his own.
Soda is a simple theatrical stunt for making the CFO look good. It's a good show.

Nailed it.
The original HashLife paper:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/5998925/hashlife
New Ratings System for Radio Gives Guilty Pleasures a Boost