skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Last time I tried using Asterisk on Amazon EC2 the call quality was pretty bad - presumably because Asterisk's timing was being messed up by the virtualisation.
For the Kindle (and others, I presume), you don't need to keep moving to flip pages, which allows me to lay on one side in bed and read comfortably.
Considering that Steve's speech doesn't really say anything original, we might as well have disallowed linking to it the first time, if old is bad.
Even for combining function calls (or when using a ternary operator or LINQ call) I'll make heavy use of brackets for clarity.
Given the international variations in public domain copyright law, I wouldn't do this without thinking about it pretty heavily (and doing a great deal of research). Your code can be "more free" with an MIT/BSD style license in some cases.
I read the email and url tags and thought "Cool! Finally the developers have it easy" but when I got to the slider and date section, I suddenly realized how backwards the web-standards really are in comparison to developing desktop-apps. Everything from Visual Studio and Office to wxWidgets has had these tools in their toolboxes for years. I've used the comctl32 date picker for a decade now. I placed a slider control on a VB3.0 form in 1997. Thirteen years later the web still doesn't have either and every single travel website has to implement it on their own (badly).

Instead of feeling excited over the new features of HTML5, I feel kinda sad that there still isn't a way to create live datalinks, sortable/filterable tables, listviews, tree-views, and real comboboxes (editable text + listbox) on the web without having to hack something up. Google made a great push towards replacing desktop-apps by creating a really fast browser but that doesn't make it any easier for web developers to create apps that work as well as desktop-apps. I once spent a week writing my own scrollbar and even as I wrote it, I knew I was wasting resources. However, it was a necessary feature for the project and if HTML scrollbars triggered the different events like those in almost any desktop platform, I wouldn't have had to write one from scratch.

I think it's great that the iPhone/Safari shows the most appropriate keyboard but compare the controls that iPhone SDK app developers can use vs. those that the iPhone web-app developers can call and you will see why HTML still has a very long way to go. And honestly, I don't see why a damn combobox has taken so long when almost every single web-app has a need for it ( http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1278431/why-does-html-5-n... ).
I thought so, too; I work at a web design / marketing company, where I assumed we could use whatever we wanted as long as the site worked in IE and FF. But our clients send site copy revisions in Word, and screenshots of bugs in Powerpoint, and they want hour estimates in Excel.

I tried using OpenOffice for about a week, but having 99% of MS Office left me 1% short.
Yeah but that's neither here nor there. HTML5 will be used quite a bit before it becomes official, it already has. So really the official nod just doesn't mean much. IE is the (really) long pole here.
Best world zone
Automotive,Baby & Child,Blogs,Business
YouTube's Top Launches of 2009
I just compressed the 1.6MB cgo application into 400kB using standard Mac OS X zip. A few other applications I tried compressed similarly well.
If you can make it work that would be cool. Currently there are too many reported free that are actually taken.
I was going to say the exact same thing. I don't trust myself to remember to check in; I'd rather be prodded by default. What I'd like to see in an upgrade would be the ability to add goals to any date, and have the option to have email reminders go out before and/or with overdue goals. I might even pay a dollar per month for that "advanced" feature, and I'd be sure to use the service because I hate wasting money.
I'm reading Dive Into Python 3 right now (yay Christmas) and I'm enjoying the hell out of it, even though I don't plan to write anything nontrivial in Python 3 for some time.
Sad that the animations peg both cores of my MBP using Chrome.
That's correct, but not the whole story.

At chain restaurants in the US, we get a single bill in two inches of space and 10 inches of space with laborious instructions on how to complete their customer satisfaction survey.
Is Google planning to launch a tablet of their own?
The article underneath about 'givewell' was more interesting still.

http://www.givewell.net/charities/top-charities
"""
GiveWell was founded in 2006 by former hedge-fund workers Holden Karnofsky and Elie Hassenfeld. Frustrated by the absence of evidence provided by charities that they are delivering the goods in terms of their charitable ends, the pair decided to use their data-analysis skills to evaluate charities' effectiveness. They were appalled at what they found. Evidence-based charity lags far behind evidence-based medicine: virtually no charities do randomised, controlled trials regarding which interventions work. In fact, almost no charities collect any systematic data on whether or not their well-intentioned activities are actually doing any good.
"""
Yeah, when I saw "spoon-fed" I thought this was going to be about how people learn, not how they split up restaurant bills.

I agree, making things clear or intuitive is a virtue, not a vice, and the language should reflect that.
That being fugly and having absolutely no talent whatsoever does not mean one can't be a commercial success?
I feel somewhat obligated to reply because I originally tweeted this (and with a title similar to the above).

I didn't do this to kick the guy while he's down. It's that on Twitter I knew enough people working in various roles in startups and even just most companies that I thought this would be a good warning to all of them of what never to do. You don't ever publicly accuse your competitor of outright ripping off your idea (if that really was the case, take them to court, but it's clearly not appropriate here). You don't publicly attack your co-founder because it didn't work out for whatever reason. You especially don't do either one in an email to a group of pretty tech-savvy and possibly well-connected people and then go on to attack said group when they don't respond favorably because oh noes, they're being unfair to you. All because you wanted to tell them about your new startup.

Pratt seems to want to get more connections and more interested eyes looking at his new project for funding and development and more, and he's not helping his case by acting the way he does. All this bad press could have been prevented if he had edited out most of his original email. It should have been something like "Hey, remember me, we might have met before at a previous BarCampLA...I was one of the guys behind Fundable. I'm now working on a new startup called PDXCell, and I'd appreciate it if you'd check it out!". Not this burning-all-bridges tactic. I tend not to talk much at BarCampLA events, but I've still met people there looking to fund startups, talented developers/engineers/hackers, marketing types, and more. That's a lot of potentially useful connections that will now remember this guy as someone never to work with.

So while some of the comments here might really be kicking the guy while he is down, I saw this link as an educational moment, especially to HNers that might someday (if not already) find themselves tempted to do the same. I'd hope Pratt realizes what he's doing wrong eventually..
I'm not sure I'd suggest this way, but if you do…

Choose something relatively self contained so you don't spend all your time trying to understand the libraries. Once you understand the language and its idioms then you can worry about the libraries you need.
Latest DVB-S/S2 transponder updates 2010
Why are you doing DNS queries to determine if something is free? You can find registrars with APIs you can ping and check availability.
Regardless of MIT/BSD/Apache/public domain choice, I am heartened to see so many people coming out in favor of these licenses vs copyleft.
That's a silly standard. Are you also not taking any of Zynga's other investors (Reid Hoffman, Peter Thiel, Brad Feld, KPCB, Andreesen Horowitz, etc.) seriously until they all come clean?
nice idea. this is a very good vertical application to build on top of http://www.twilio.com/
A lot of people got ripped off. That's the point.
1: I didn't think so. But there is only one party, and once the party settles on a policy, it pretty much stays that way, and debate is certainly not encouraged.

2: From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Daily :

China Daily, has a monopoly, being the only official English-language national newspaper in China.[...] Journalists practice a high degree of self-censorship at the paper. Subjects such as Tibet, Taiwan and Falun Gong [...] have to be approved by a higher authority before publication [...] One journalist working at the paper said, despite more openness in the media, "80 per cent of what we know we cannot report." The editor of the paper has told foreign editors that the paper's editorial policy was to support the policies of the Communist Party and only make criticism of the authorities if there was deviation from Party policy.

Re. US papers - sure, but the U.S. (and other free countries) have competing papers and newsletters and even blogs.

To frame it differently: I'm in China and I disagree strongly with Mr. Stiglitz. Free markets have done wonders for China and the policies backed my Mr. Stiglitz serves only to promote poverty. What do I do to voice my opinion? I write the editor of China Daily, and maybe I'm published. But maybe not, and maybe the next day I'm fired from my job at a large Chinese University. Maybe they tell me I'm a reactionary, maybe they don't, but suddenly I just can't seem to find a job in academia.

Alternatively, if I'm not in China (which I'm not), I go on HN, and write my opinion. If I cared a bit more, I might write a blog entry or a letter to the editor of a newspaper I expect to find my view interesting. Whatever I do, my family and my self still have jobs tomorrow.
read code.
if you don't understand a function, read it's man page.
if you don't understand a type declaration, use the cdecl command (http://linux.die.net/man/1/cdecl) - you may need to install it first.
write code.
make mistakes, read the docs, fix mistakes.

If you already know one procedural programming language, picking up another isn't that hard. Don't worry about the hardcore internals - you'll pick that up over time. Read books like the "Practice of Programming" and "The Elements of Programming Style".
I've had a brand new high-end German car for almost a year and some of my closest friends don't even know I own it (I live in a large city where driving isn't that common).

I like to keep a low profile for the most part. I don't want to attract the wrong kind of attention, look like a "young hot-shot kid" at work, etc. There's nothing wrong with women appreciating your success and ambition, but nobody wants to be a meal ticket.

I think women like confidence more than money, but having both never hurts. I once joked to a friend that my luck hadn't improved significantly despite earning much more; he quipped "you were still a guy who was going to make a lot of money back then, you just didn't have it yet."

The most interesting signaling behavior to me is being a hipster. Not having to work is really showing familial wealth and status. Most people don't come from a background where they can spend all day finding cool music and weird clothes rather than working a 9-5.
Careful - many legal jurisdictions do not recognize an author's right to place its work in the public domain. SQLite, arguably the most famous/successful example of public-domain software, has a paragraph on its copyright page[1] dealing with this circumstance. I remember reading (though I can't find a reference) that the SQLite authors regretted placing their choice of license, due to the legal issues, and stated that if they were to choose again they'd pick the new BSD or X11 license.

Let me ask you: how often have you passed up on utilizing a great software library just because its open source license was not compatible with your own preferred flavor?

Usually only when it's an unusual / poorly-designed license, such as WTFPL or four-clause BSD. Though sometimes, if the library is particularly important to whatever I'm doing, I'll choose/write a GPL'd version over BSD.

Contrast this with the GPL/LGPL, which are one-way streets, or put another way, they are an entry without an exit. To paraphrase a classic song, your code can be checked out anytime you like, but it can never leave. It’s easy to see that if you want your code to be used as widely as possible, copyleft is perhaps not the way to go. But then, that’s sort of the whole point of copyleft, of course: you can look at my code, but if you touch it in a way I don’t approve of, I’ll crucify you with law and impunity.

Well, yes, that's the point of copyleft. It simulates a world where all source is available, and embeds it into current copyright law. As more works become available in the embedded "sandbox", there is more incentive for others to open their work.

Somewhat unrelated, but the outright hostility towards copyleft that I sometimes see from the BSD side is baffling. I recently had an internet-argument about using the GPL for some software I released[2], where some of the same claims in this article appeared. Most notably, that using the GPL "doomed it to relative obscurity" and "copyleft code is contaminated". From where do these beliefs originate? Most of the software I use every day is available under the GPL -- the only cases I can think of which aren't are Xorg and OpenSSH.

[1] http://www.sqlite.org/copyright.html

[2] http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/ajbvb/cpython_haske...
Take this post with a grain of salt, since I have the zeal of a recently saved sinner, but you should try using Hive and Hadoop for this sort of thing.

We recently switched from a workflow that is very similar to the one you describe to using Hive with Amazon's elastic map reduce. Hive presents a SQL-like layer of abstraction over exactly this sort of thing. Instead of doing the sorting and merging by hand, you simply write it as a series of joins. It's like writing SQL, except the actual implementation works almost exactly like what you're doing.

Integrating simple Ruby scripts for JSON processing was also trivial.

Elastic MapReduce also had near-zero infrastructure and management overhead for us (besides the 10% Amazon charges for the machine instances). We use S3 for all data input and output, which is perfect for us.

Even when running on a single machine, using Hive was a big win in terms of development time, and performance of the jobs seemed only slightly slower that using Unix utilities on big text files. It's almost a bonus that we can also scale it out to dozens of machines, for a huge speedup. Running a job that took several hours on a single machine took less than five minutes, and only a few hours of EC2 machine time. Cheap and easy!
Unpaginated version:

http://www.anandtech.com/printarticle.aspx?i=3702
Oops, this was already covered here in this thread:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1024982
FWIW, when I taught network programming many years ago, I asked my students to write an SMTP or HTTP client in C. It's fairly simple to do, so think of it as an exercise.
It's nice, but using tables for layout is so 1990s. How about making it nicer by moving to CSS for layout. If you need help, just ask here on HN.

Good luck.
Definitely a great read. By the way, if you find Pirsig on the sophists interesting, you might look up Lev Shestov, _Potestas Clavium_.
I get what you're trying to say: be prepared for failure, don't take it too hard, and if you're really interested in this kind of stuff, then try again.

But: I think that this attitude is one of the things that separates the lucky entrepreneurs from the skilled entrepreneurs. As difficult as a small business can be, the attitude that failure is acceptable can mean the difference between giving up (and moving on to the next idea) or pushing on and actually becoming successful.

Others have said this better, but basically, I'd rather bet on the founders and businesses that refuse to fail.
No. You'll have to read the book to find the reference. Sorry.
The recruiting industry will not go away, but sites like CareerBuilder and Monster as major players within the recruiting industry will. The value of matching job seekers to jobs is far more efficient within LinkedIn.
Why does something need to be fun in order to be consistently useful? Search is not fun but I do it multiple times a day.
A better question would be: what percentage understand what a random variable is and will be able to apply this understanding later. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwslBPj8GgI for exploration of the difference by a Harvard physics professor who realized a few years into his teaching career that most of his into physics students weren't learning very much, although they were able to apply all the appropriate mathematical recipes to all the standard type homework and exam questions.
Four I had forgotten:

_Warrenpoint_ by Denis Donoghue. Memoirs of youth, beautifully written.

_The Great Melody: A Thematic Biography of Edmund Burke_ by Conor Cruise O'Brien.

_Autobiographies_ by W. B. Yeats. This was I think the first time reading it through, though 25 years ago I read a fair bit in a housemate's copy. There are sentences that you will want to reread to see how he does it. And in the art of payback, Yeats on George Moore makes Hemingway on Fitzgerald/Ford/Stein/etc look amateurish.

_The Italians_ by Luigi Barzini.
What I have never understood about LinkedIn: If I am looking for a new job, why would I want my current cow-orkers, including managers at my current employer, to know about it? Keeping your profile up to date is one thing; soliciting recommendations from current cow-orkers is a broad hint and setting your status to be "is looking for a new job" is blatant. How can it possibly work?
You and Your Research
Hehe...ever looked at the HN HTML?
Not caring about failing is a better attitude than thinking that you probably will fail. People who are obsessed with failure or success aren't focused on the right thing. What matters is that you build something that people want to use.

That's all. No more stupid mantras.
The site appears to work without js enabled, except for dismissal of that popup. Perhaps you could default the popup as display:none and bring it up with js? Certainly I was able to set a goal and check in without js (well done!) except that I had to inspect element and delete the popup to do so.
If you actually look at what I use tables for, it's:

1) Laying out the calendar (programmatically generated)

2) Having an element with a working 'vertical-align' CSS property

3) The layout of the form on the initial page.

Everything else is done with CSS. Except for 3, which was because I was running out of time, I don't see how getting rid of the <table> tags helps things. I hope you don't want me to encode the positions of all the calendar dates in the CSS file.
This may violate their AUP
"Using the Services in connection with any unsolicited or harassing messages (commercial or otherwise) including but not limited to unsolicited or unwanted phone calls SMS or text messages, voice mail, or faxes."
http://www.twilio.com/legal/aup

That said, I'll definitely consider them in the future.
I think if you view being a successful startup as some simple set of teachable attributes, like "founders and businesses that refuse to fail eventually succeed", then you are living in a fantasy world. Let's assume for a moment that there aren't a zillion different "how to succeed in startup" books. Let's say there are a 100 things you must do to succeed.

So you do all of them. Odd are you will still fail. That is, odds are that whatever you set out to do will not be successful.

I think perhaps we are playing semantics games. If you start with a good team and pivot repeatedly, always adjusting your business model to find and target the customer, and then never giving up? Then you've done exactly what I recommend -- failing a lot repeatedly (and quickly) You probably can fail a lot better with a good team iterating quickly than you can forming a new team each time, or giving it one 4-year shot every decade or so.

If, on the other hand, you view gaining skills and pieces of knowledge as incremental rather than pivotal factors, and you understand that the odds are naturally against anybody, then it becomes a zen thing, just like sales. Just like sales, you adjust your attitude, you screw down your courage, and you go give it all you've got. Just like sales, success comes from within and not without. Just like sales, you do the best, right thing everyday but you're looking at the long haul for value.

Some folks think successful startups are just luck. They are partially right and partially wrong. Some folks think successful startups are like a science, something you can learn and perform repeatedly. They also are partially right and partially wrong.

The only real answer is that success has to come from inside of you long before it appears on a balance sheet. That you create your own value by acting in accordance with your values. From there success will naturally follow.

If that sounds too mushy I apologize. I just hear people in such pain about how screwed up it all is, and I wish somebody would sit down and explain to them some of this stuff.
I'm not trolling. I am annoyed to see copious downvoting with minimal response or discussion.
I agree. Every rational person realizes failure is possible. The most motivated acknowledge that at the outset, when setting up partner terms and agreements, and never consider it an option again until failure is real.

That said, I also think there is an important differentiation between focusing on failure and realizing when its time to cut away from a bad project/idea/concept and adapt. Adapting from incremental failures is critical to success.
The worst case scenario happening when starting a company
Philosophy is mostly games of words that lead nowhere. Wittgenstein wrote all about it. History is interesting, but too ambiguous and too subjective. Literature is to be enjoyed, not to be analyzed. CS is rigorous Philosophy and, hence, it's a good mental exercise that one can't get in other fields of knowledge.

When you design an algorithm and implement it in code, the computer will not allow you to be ambiguous and imprecise. You made a wrong assumption? Sorry, your program won't work. No partial credit for you. It's tough, but it's fair.
Fantastic presentation. This actually made me see Steve in a new, better, light.
My son goes to a public middle school in Colorado, and each student only has Physical Education for half the year. They also only study foreign language for half a year. The two halves of the student body trade at mid-year. The academic schedule is too busy to allow for all-year PE and FL.

I expect PE to be uncommon some time soon-ish. Besides, PE is too hard when you're fat.
What turned me against GPL was mysql -- MySQL AB decided that shipping Mysql with a commercial product was a "violation" of GPL and thus we'd have to buy a commercial license.

Their argument is essentially that you can't use mysql for a commercial product because if you do, you're "linking" to it and thus need a commercial license. If using a database as a database server doesn't count under the "work product" of a database, then what does?

Thus, I have to assume that any company backing GPL software might eventually go that route, making it dangerous to my business to ever try to use it for a commercial product.

That is a worry I don't want to have, and thus I use non-GPL open-source whenever I can.

This is what the OP meant by "contaminated", and since many people don't like to use GPL code for this same reason, it is what lead him to call it "doomed to obscurity". Clearly hyperbole, but point taken.