skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Lisp Flavoured Erlang released
"2. If you have an exit strategy, its not an obsession."

That doesn't make sense to me. Why are those two things mutually exclusive?

"7. No offices."

Beyond privacy, which is great because I don't want someone looking over my shoulder all day long, offices provide a quieter environment than an open floor plan. All of us here are paid to think, and the best thinking is accomplished in a quiet environment; it is not done in a room full of whirring electronics, phone calls, water cooler chat, et. al.
don't forget about kratom! ;)
I am really disappointed that Amazon has not yet extended more invitations into SimpleDB closed beta or opened it up yet. I'm interested in utilizing it for my startup but I guess I'll just have to wait..
You can responsibly use amphetamine or modafinil without serious side effects. Amphetamine enhances the mental performance of millions of our children and few people seem to be complaining about long term side effects.

The military has studied the use of amphetamine and modafinil in extreme situations. If you go without sleep for three days, there's going to be serious side effects, with or without any drug. I doubt that any of the scientists on stimulants are using it that extremely, which means the side effects are limited.
Surprised no one has mentioned Erdos yet.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Erdős
And if it can't?
While Walmart is basically a ruthlessly efficient first-order company, I'd say eBay is more of a second-order company since it sells a sales-enhancing service and Amazon is somewhere in between since it does both.
The odds that modafinil causes permanent harm of any kind seems pretty unlikely to me. Obvious abuse of modafinil to stop sleeping would cause permanent harm, but that seems unlikely. The FDA doesn't have a perfect track record, but they do have standards that mean something.
And one for gamers telling them they shouldn't play so much, and should interact with real people; one for business people telling them they should work less and spend more time with family and friends; and one for all the web addicted geeks out there telling them the same thing.

Then, once they sign up, they can feel good about themselves because they did something! I'll call it webGym, since it serves the same purpose - relieving guilt by paying money:)
Do you count chess as a game?
Ugh. He misspelled espresso expresso too. Pet peeve. I guess that proves he followed his own advice!

I also disagree. If an espresso machine makes your office a nicer place to work for your employees, get two. The extra productivity from happy employees is more than worth it and it clearly shows that you went the extra mile for your employees.
I've had that happen dozens of times in my years as a sysadmin. Servers in development shops, in particular, have a habit of hiding in strange places. I once found that a regular office that hadn't been in use for about a year, and the whole team that had worked in it had long since left the company, housed a server (really just a desktop that was used as a dev server, and then became the production server when they finished developing the application) that was running one of the companies customers website and database. No one knew where it was, but it was still working so nobody had gone looking for it. It only found its way into the server room when the whole company move to another location.

It's worse when it comes to figuring out which Windows workstation is infected with a virus (they're easy to see at the gateway box, if it's a machine that can run ethereal or tcpdump). I would just unplug the fastest flashing port on the network switch and yell out, "Alright, who can't connect to the Internet?" Whoever spoke up was sitting in front of the infected host.
But memcached + s3 as the backing store could work. Or for a low traffic site you might just be able to use s3 directly.
It's a bitch to enable SSH connections on the Mac. At least, I found it so on my girlfriend's Macbook.

And, of course, if the machine is off, as a laptop that is lost is very likely to be, ssh won't answer even if you do have it enabled and accepting connections.
Yes, very much agree. I used to work at MS and one problem is that many employees (even devs) have no experience with the other people's dogfood, ie. Linux/UNIX.

Because of this, you'd have situations where people would want to write C to make a quick string parsing tool, rather than perl or bash script.

If you're the CEO of Coke, you'd better know what Pepsi tastes like. "Company Loyalty" can be a convenient excuse for ignorance of the competition.
But wouldn't it be trivial for evolution to change the quantities of those chemicals in the brain? Meaning, if other quantities were preferable, evolution would have adjusted those quantities long ago?
Why would it be broken, though? It seems with diabetic, at least with type II, Insulin is not necessary, just change the way you eat. Likewise with the brain I would rather know the causes of the problem, than experiment with drugs.
Stephen Levy is extremely well-known among technical journalists, and a genuinely nice guy. Show a little respect. He wrote Hackers, Insanely Great, Artificial Life, along with hundreds or thousands of articles in dozens of technical magazines. I suspect many of your peers here at news.YC have, at the least, gotten some inspiration from something he's written. I certainly have.
Register your Domain through Google and get instant Google apps
Hmm, interesting. My boyfriend has a kindle and I've occasionally played around with it. I love books, so I've also checked out the sony reader, cybook, etc., and I've owned a couple of ancient ebook readers as well. I really love the idea of ebooks and so a physical reader only makes sense to me. The problem I've always encountered is that it's not really something I'd want to carry around with me all the time or that I'd probably end up using that often so I haven't even bothered to think about ordering one.

I think the ultimate reason why is that I have a jailbroken iPhone with (among other apps) Books.app and unlike the kindle, it can do a lot more and it fits in my pocket and my purse for when I'm not lugging around my laptop. I obviously take it everywhere to make calls, to check email, to play Solitaire, to hang out in IRC. As a result, I have it with me all the time so I can read too - for example, I read most when I'm at a restaurant waiting for a takeout order that's taking forever or when I'm in line for some event or another. Sure, I can't get the latest books and magazines on there to read, but there are plenty of free ebooks to read and download e.g. from manybooks.net and textonphone.com. It's definitely not a dedicated device for ebooks, but that is exactly why I think it's so great for them.

Finally, in just over half a year of having Books.app on my phone, I've read over 200 ebooks (well, some of those were short stories, but the vast majority weren't). Surprisingly enough that's more than I've read in the previous couple years, textbooks included. I suspect I wouldn't have even come close to that number with a kindle (etc.) just because the convenience is not there.
Right - in Sweden, when he dies, Hacklehaber stays in the room with him, and then walks out with some guy under a sheet, which is evidently Root.
That's a cool idea. How fast is simpleDB on EC2? I'd be interesting in contributing.
Live Sara alone!!...... not.

Seriously, who gives a sh!t. This is more valleywag type conent, has nothing to do with HN.
The good old BASIC days :)
We can't avoid all problems, so the general strategy we need is to get more knowledge so we can be better at solving unforeseen problems.

And it's not reasonable to fear the unknown on principle. Being "conservative" by avoiding an advance doesn't make sense in isolation. It might cause a problem. It also might solve one. We don't know that. We do know technology is useful.

But "gung ho" doesn't sound right. Sometimes we have a substantive idea about a way an upcoming technology could be dangerous. In that case we should respect and consider that foresight, not just charge forward anyway.

BTW David Deutsch's TED talk touches on this.
This sort of thing makes me want to have public voting information on the site and the ability to remove votes by certain people from my own news.yc front page.
Color me the unimpressed.

Anyone writing an article promoting the use of threaded concurrency and using PHP as an example of threading done right obviously doesn't know what they're talking about. PHP has basically zero support for threads, and historically has basically barred you from using the threading MPMs in your Apache setup, too, since so few extension modules were thread safe.

Even worse, he obviously has some trouble understanding the relationship between threads and processes in any modern multi-tasking OS, which leads him to say silly FUD-esque things about processes being unable to effectively utilize multi-core systems.

Threads are just processes that share some state. They offer no inherent performance advantages over plain processes in a "shared-nothing" architecture, unless your bottleneck is copying of data between processes on a single machine.

A fully-threaded Rails stack would kick ass for one reason: RAM. Instead of having 6, 8, or more 100+ MB Mongrel listeners, you could have a single 150-200 MB process with only one copy of its shared state, loaded libraries, etc.
You basically shouldn't be using 'if' in Erlang - it's very rare that a pattern match wouldn't be a better option.

That said, I agree with him:

http://journal.dedasys.com/articles/2007/09/22/erlang
Clinton to upset Obama?
13 + 1 Tips for Aspiring Entrepreneurs. Be Aware of the Entrepreneurial Context You are Living In.
Yeah, that's more what I'm getting at. I don't like straight knee jerk conservatism, but sometimes it is a useful instinct and it warns us to count the costs.
Posts with higher karma gravitate to the top of the comment tier in which they reside. e.g.: (12 (4 2 2 1) 8 (5 (3 1) 2 1) 2 (8 1 -2) 1 1 0)
IMO revolutionaries are worse than conservatives. They are more destructive. And there's more ways to be wrong than right.

It's a bit like doing rewrites of major production systems. Not a good idea. But of course it's much worse because human culture is more complex than a computer program.

But also like major production systems, we definitely can improve them. Now we just need unit tests for cultures to make refactoring easier.
I know this forum isn't about politics, so I really shouldn't even comment here, but...

How can the frontrunner upset the cinderella?
The Java Proportionality
My Biggest Lisp Project
There have been two losses of shuttles: 1986 with the failure of the O-ring in the solid-rocket booster and 1996 with the foam that fell off during lift-off that damaged a tile on the leading-edge of a wing which caused the shuttle to burn up on re-entry. Which loss are you talking about when you say, <i>it was exactly this bug that caused the shuttle to crash</i>?
Not shuttle. Mars probe. And it was a bad unit conversion.
Are .NET developers the American tourists of the software industry?
AP probe finds drugs in drinking water
And then I get a down mod because someone disagrees with my political opinion? Haha. News.YC is definitely not the place for politics.
Patent raid at German tech fair
Watch out FriendFeed - SocialThing! Is Even Easier To Use
From the article: Microsoft ... Java\Python\Ruby

Is this an example of thinking in Blub?

From the article: drinking from the Redman firehose

Surely, that should be Redmond?
I went to Techstars for a Day on the 5th of March and met the founders of SocialThing! there. They are a nice group of people.
YC Startup MightyQuiz: Stump Strangers with Your Arcane Knowledge
Not to say that every project needs to be planned like NASA, but I would like to know how many start-ups have calculated their acceptable rate of failure (in their software) prior to launch.
Travel 2.0? Hands on with Zicasso, a great first attempt
Dropping 22TB of patches on 6,500 PCs in 4 hours: BitTorrent
Aah, always wondered about that.

Thanks for clearing it up.
I'm a pacifist, and have never been in a fight. It was an attempt at stating my opinion in a humourus way. Sorry if I failed at that.
There are a bunch of other things that are also a bit clearer if you read the Baroque cycle, which also add to a rereading of Cryptonomicon, like the Samurai swords in the trunk of the Shaftoes' car.
This could have been a very interesting case study on the BitTorrent protocol. I wonder if they recorded much data.
Germany doesn't sound like a very fun place to be at the moment... first they pass a ridiculous law preventing security professionals from doing their jobs http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070528-germany-adopts... and now this?
The conundrum of self promotion and social media
Make sure you are signed up with payment details for S3 or EC2 and you should get an invitation very quickly.
No. Apples focus is on the consumer market - they have fought the war for the business customers and lost. Now they are fighting in the consumer market and making a killing.
The making of... Japan's First RPG
"This is an epidemic among business types"

While I agree with your basic premise we're not all like that. I've heard the exact same thing from engineers - "hey I built this great product and it should sell itself, how hard can it be to market and sell it?

It's common to dismiss the work needed to accomplish a task in an area you are unfamiliar with. Especially if the people doing the task are good at what they do. Then they make it seem easy. This goes for both tech and biz people.
This sounds like the good old "I have an idea, and I'll give you 5% if you build it" fallacy.

A tell-tale sign of someone who doesn't know what it takes and where value is added and wealth created.
Directing the Future
As a .NET developer, I can confirm that the grand majority of .NET developers are ignorant of anything that doesn't come from the mouths of Microsoft evangelists.

I think the difference is between people who consider themselves "Microsoft developers" and those who consider themselves ".NET developers". I never quite understood the former; it's sort of like Java developers calling themselves "Sun developers". Microsoft developers don't bother to learn anything unless it's branded with the Microsoft logo, whereas .NET developers recognize that the .NET framework and the associated languages are simply tools in the toolbox. Sometimes it's the right tool for the job, sometimes not.

There is a small but growing minority of .NET developers that are interested in open source. In fact, I've now incorporated questions about open source into my questioning when we interview new developers. Just because someone has an MCPD doesn't mean they can code their way out of a paper bag. A bunch of commits to an open source project does, though.
The Most Beautiful Computers of all Time
blatant advertising
I tried using simpleDB for a while, and would not recommend it for production use.

No joins -
SimpleDB was designed for parallel operations - so if you need data from multiple tables, you need to fire multiple queries (in parallel preferably).

No retrieval of multiple attributes -
You cannot retrieve attributes from multiple items. So if you need to retrieve 10 items, you'll have to first fire the condition query to get the item-ids and then 10 queries for each item. If you're using serial access, this could be painful.

UTF-8 issues with the REST interface -
Minor annoyance. It works with the SOAP interface though.

1024 byte limit for each attribute -
This could sometimes be an problem, especially if you're using UTF-8 data (with the REST interface issue)

If you're ready to code for parallel access, no UTF-8 (while using REST), and don't mind the 1024 byte limit then you could give it a try.
I wonder if there's potential for offering some kind of SQL engine that sits atop SimpleDB. In the same way that MySQL used to sit atop of BerkeleyDB.

Could even run the engine on EC2.
This might be what you mean, but a combination of memcached and a replicated database running on some ec2 boxes should work pretty well. The socialtext link implies that.

I haven't used simpledb yet, but as far as I understand it seems like it could be a good use case for replacing the replicated database piece.
Hell has no fury like a Twitter-er Scorned
An Introduction to NSM-Console
NSM Console (Network Security Monitoring Console) is a framework for performing analysis on packat capture files. It implements a modular structure to allow for an analyst to quickly write modules of their own without any programming language experience. Using these modules a large amount of pcap analysis can be performed quickly using a set of global (as well as per-module) options.
Congrats! Looks great!
I didn't say he was right! But it is an interesting observation, to me, because he's mostly right, based on quantities.

Good luck collecting enough poppy seeds. Same deal on the coca leaves, but try eating a mouthful. Same deal there on tobacco. The same logic applies to caffeine, chocolate, and alcohol. The drug is extremely weak in it's natural form so it requires a decent amount of work to get something really psychoactive.

To him, you can simply pull a marijuana bud off a plant, like an apple from a tree, and eat it for the full effect. That's quite a contrast.

Psilocybin and peyote apply but I don't think he's ever had the opportunity, especially since they don't grow like a weed.

His point: Nature has done a pretty remarkable job providing for our physical and mental health. Why muck with that?
being a .net contractor myself I have to agree and then disagree.

The most day coders I have come across are in the .net field but as I work in this field I don't know if this is true. I suspect java has its fair share of day coders.

However I have met a lot of really good coders who use .net as a tool that has been given to them to use.

I don't want to get into a flamewar but the article did make me wonder if most developers view .net developers as lesser developers because of their chosen toolset. Does this have more to do with the hate of MS or do they really believe it.

From a knowledge point of view .net requries a lot more traditional programming skills than ruby ever does. I bet .net developers don't look down on ruby developers in the same way.
Girls and young women are now the most prolific web users
yeah I got it fairly quickly because I am using the other services.
Sometimes shorter lines are easier to read. But in most of the cases you should be right. You can even be more consice by using point-free form:

f = baz . bar . fab . foo

[Haskell syntax - sorry, I do not know enough about Erlang - but something like this should be possible.]
Hello, Dave.
Keep in mind that 28-11 doesn't fully describe FriendFeed's lead over SocialThing in services supported. Unless SocialThing's LiveJournal support is really RSS support in disguise, FriendFeed supports infinitely more services than SocialThing.
My 10 “Un-Tips” for Starting-Up Right
I think this is just toy-example syndrome. In my experience the real-world example looks more like this:

f(X) ->
X1 = foo(X, "Blah blah blah", true, :definitely, :ack),
X2 = fab(X1, X, sizeof(X), X-1, bar(X, "martini"), :with_bells_on, :pdq),
X3 = bar(X2, "fim tim lim bim whim bim bus stop"),
baz(X3).

Try chaining that and see how readable it is.
My vote goes to most day coders being Java people.

My coworker across the hall can't see why anybody would write Python if Java is an option. "Ooh yeah, let me at it in Java... I'll have a JSR-4567-compliant Bean to drop into a custom container in no time!"
> JSR-4567-compliant

In 1995, Java was a fun language. Since then, the fun has been squeezed out of it and it has become more akin to accountancy.
Sifting the data on Web audiences
From the article: 5. know your competitors and their next moves

Don't get obsessed by competitors. Failure modes include cloning your competitors implementations but without the userbase; losing passion; and it can be a time sink.
don't -> don'ts
I would be happy if you could find a sporting competition where humans are not enhanced currently.

There are many known tricks such as blood doping that are almost impossible to prevent, and once a few people start doing it everyone must to remain competitive. A huge number of potential athletes take steroids in high school, before testing begins.

I personally think that we should take care to ban these drugs and practices to people who are still developing mentally and physically, but adults should be allowed to make their own decisions. If Stallone wants to eat barrels of HGH to get huge for Rambo, he should be (legally) allowed.
From user ptm's description ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=133086 ), you could probably hack up the MySQL NDB Cluster interface.
I hope they don't. I love Apple kit, but they should be a benchmark for others to beat. We need constant competition to create innovation
From palmtops to brain cells
do you get something similar in e.g. Darcs?
I see that Git has indeed advanced, sexier concepts than Hg. However there is one thing that makes me uncomfortable with Git: Its source code is a bit like the Linux kernel: written in C, messy, with lots of scripts (including Bash and Perl scripts). Mercurial's is written in Python. As an Ocaml hacker, I do not like Python much; however I think a tool such a VCS ought to be written in a higher-level language than C, even if that means Python. How are we going to be sure that the Git code doesn't contain nasty buffer overflows? If Python does not give static type safety, at least it shields against segmentation faults.
The story was mentioned here as well: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=124608
Why detect, when you can correct?
Yeah, that's the one.
It's interesting to note how most hackers are obsessed with grammar and spelling. On some forums there would be a flamewar for this mistake.

I like it though, it shows attention to detail and it makes it more enjoyable to read sites like HN.
Academia is extremely competitive at the professional level,as are many pursuits. That's why many many researchers cheat, and it's so scandalous when they are caught.

Think about this: you lose out on a job opportunity to someone who forged their data or perhaps used stimulants to work at an unnatural pace over a certain period of time. This changes your career in a dramatic way. When that person is caught, what is your compensation? Yes, he (she) was exposed but you were wronged. What would be fair compensation?
How can demand-threading possibly be faster or more memory-efficient than event processing? Web apps are, to a one, I/O bound. Event programming schedules those applications on I/O.

The hand-waving on threading bugs is funny, too. "They're both hard, they both have learning curves!". Nobody has ever livelocked competing events. It's awfully hard to serialize an entire event-based program on a single shared variable. This post gives me the impression of an author who has never scaled real threaded code.
You mean like with ritalin, or the antidepressants? I don't think your argument sticks.

It feels like regulations do well with medications that science understands. It does not understand modafinil well. What evidence do you have of "the odds" that it causes no permanent harm?
Hyperbole should only ever be used sparingly, else it gets annoying very very quickly.
We use Mirror Image. Relatively cheap, once we beat them up^W^W^Wnegotiated a bit over price.
Best article on the subject since PG's 'how not to die'.
Lacy Responds to Zuckerberg Keynote Disaster
PMOG
Zuckerberg SXSW Interactive keynote (disaster)
hehe, indeed.
11 Must Have Firefox Extensions (programmer heavy)
I'm not usually a fan of facebook apps but mightyquiz would actually make a great one.
Ask YC: What Is Your Favorite Board Game?
Chinese Checkers is a great game which scales from two players to six players, but what do you prefer? Chess? Monopoly? Risk? Escape From Colditz?
xkcd - Kilobyte
Interesting. I'd never heard of "git add -i" before. I missed that feature from Darcs.