skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Agreed. It also reminds me of current ASP.NET where you can manipulate DOM (as long as it's marked with runat=server) as well, only with ASP.NET you also get super-powers of .NET runtime.

To me it sounds like a bunch of browser/JavaScript dudes are trying to write server-side software, being unaware of how it must be properly written. Seeing SQL surrounded by HTML tags is so late 90s...

The real gains, however, will happen when we'll be able to do it exactly backwards: run typical server-side code (blessed with rich runtime) inside of the browser. Browser's DOM (runtime) sucks. This is why there are so many browser-side runtimes being developed right now: Flex/Silerlight/JavaFX.

Aptana got it wrong.
Programming Language Continuum
On Amazons "Black Swan" day, there will be on new instances to fire up. Your current instance and all of its data may well be lost. Your little account will be the last thing they're worried about restoring. EC2 is great for startups, but when the time comes, you need a multi-homed, multi-located setup you've done yourself so you know what risks are involved.
I do think that Big-O notation and computational cost should be covered in a practical and intuitive way, but I'm not convinced of the utility of teaching Turing computability, programming language theory, or compiler design. You say that this "will all be of massive benefit when they're looking to actually distinguish themselves from the rest of the assembly-line game coders", but I think that anyone who wanted to get that real depth of knowledge and set themselves apart from the crowd should get a CS degree and (most importantly) continue learning on their own. What I'm envisioning for the trade school is purely what you describe as "a solid white-collar career path". I think there's a lot of people who are looking for a career that pays well and that they enjoy, but aren't interested in becoming an expert in their field, or making their career also their hobby.
In Defense of the Fistfight
From what I remember from Cognitive Psych class of late Bill Chase (CMU) 25 years ago. (great class because I still remember lots of it): Chess Masters divide a chess board into 6-7 patterns that fit into short term memory. They generally do not use depth first search. They usually immediately guess at 1-3 moves (most common was to look at only one move) and spend the rest of the time trying to verify the move(s). If you asked a chess master to memorize a chess board, remove the pieces then ask put them back. the chess master could always do it perfectly if the setup came from a real game. If the pieces were placed randomly, the chess master was no better than a normal person (basically could remember about 8 pieces).
Squidoo is hiring a developer
Do you ever think that maybe politicians are missing the boat here? With most Americans paying about 75% in total taxes (when you count sales tax, gas tax, property tax, etc etc) it seems we are always just a tiny downturn away from disaster.

If you want your people to spend money and buoy the economy, perhaps instead of making it easy to borrow what they don't have you should try NOT TAKING SO DAMN MUCH from them in the first place. Listen carefully: Money you take from the people and spend in Iraq is gone, mmkayy?

Constantly trying to balance on the razors edge of economic collapse and then issuing even MORE credit (and measly tax rebates) when you've gone too far can't possibly be the optimal implementation.

Ok, sorry, rant over.
predictions overlap hope mixed with feelings which is surpressed by logic vs risk, therefore acting on a predictions is a tottaly different task.
Predictions:
1. Some private reddits will be awesome
2. This will help accelerate the nose-dive in quality on the front page of the main reddit

I don't really believe in the "#1 top story on the intertubes evar" anyway, so personal #1's are the way to go.
http://www.xobni.com/blog/2008/01/22/microsoft-startup-accel...
Best BlackBerry Shortcuts: Aflac's Mobile Guru Shares Tips
Guy Kawasaki on Startup Teams / Business Partners
I've been experimenting with using Rhino (Mozilla's JavaScript interpreter written in Java) on top of Java servlets (Tomcat, in my case). After working through a few issues it's working pretty well. You can even compile JavaScript to Java bytecode for better performance.

Rhino is great because it lets you use all the zillions of Java libraries directly from JavaScript without the Java... dynamic typing, no compilation, etc. I can do things like:

importPackage(Package.java.io);

var writer = new FileWriter("hello.txt");
writer.write("Hello world!");
writer.close();
Best service for printing postage?
OK, it's finally time for me to use one of the companies that charge a monthly fee for postage. I know there is stamps.com and there is Endicia. Anyone have experience with either of them? And do any of these postage printing companies have APIs?
Please see reddit for your anti-capitalist green ranting needs.

"You can't run a linear system on a finite planet indefinitely." I'm going to drop that one at a cocktail party and count how many people nod versus sigh.
There aren't really enough submissions per day to justify that, in my opinion.
>You can't run a linear system on a finite planet indefinitely.

We're doing rather well running an exponential system on a finite planet. These people always forget about that enormous ball of radiation continually bombarding us, feeding us, and creating us.
As is the worst case in a binary tree.
In other news, King Herod announces free daycare for all infants under 1 year old.

In response to the question below, I really couldn't see Microsoft being able to stomach a rails application. They really are all about the 'ecosystem' of Windows.
Frankly this whole startup hub crap just gots to be over with. I mean we are talking about tech companies and we still can't overcome location. Like we are real estate agents. Boulder has to start somewhere and I think they should push it. There will be a time (soon) when hubs won't exist anymore. Startups won't need to move, even after acquistion.
Excellent, and integrates a console for exploring programs.
Canada Needs to Realize The Technology Business is a Race
facebook digital gifts worth around $15m/year
You are absolutely right. Some people still think that yc funding has little value to startups, but most of us here believe the opposite. Let's give techstar some room and if we can't support, let's not throw stones at anyone who is trying to fill a void.
What I admire about professions like Engineering and Medicine
The state of Linux according to Google
A long but excellent piece on the history of major record labels which helped me better understand the music situation today.
Of all the posts I've read YCers make, this is the one that most looks like a press release.
That's because it is. Look on the Xobni blog for a post that shows a little more love :-)
> so either you'll hate me, or think i'm wrong. i don't see how i can win.

He could be seriously offended, but then not hate you. He might realize you were right, and be glad to find out.

Or if he isn't offended, he might still recognize that many other people would be. He might also consider whether he would dare say it, and discover he wouldn't.

So those are two ways you could win. However, in both of those cases, while you'd win with yters, you'd lose with a majority of the audience. You could only win with a majority of the audience if you said something that can be safely said on Hacker News (and thus you were wrong).
Wow, free visual studio... doesn't anyone hack .net in vim?
A decline in GDP for two or more consecutive quarters.
Your survey will be confused by people who know what entropy is, and thus aren't sure how to react because your statement will be literally true. Also, people may be distracted by the fact our planet isn't a closed system.

If you do it, also try making the reverse statement to a different group of people. You might find the majority of people nod, in both cases: people often make an effort to be agreeable.
C++ vs. [Common] Lisp [non-polemical]
Xobni's competition is Microsoft. The only good thing I imagine that could come from this is getting ahold of the next Outlook to see how many features MS adopted and figure out how Xobni can adapt.
Max Levchin: How to successfully launch a social networking development platform.
This graph perhaps just shows that the users of Debian know where to find info without having to google for the keyword debian.
Speaking as a member of the homogametic sex, I've been lurking on news.ycomb for a few months now. About the time I was considering speaking up on an algorithms topic, this appeared as a leading link: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=99255. The comments included such insights as "where can I get me some of that" and "those chicks aren't hot enough for the likes of me."

Now the use of "lady hackers" has raised my hackles as well. (See the American Heritage Book of English Usage for a deft explanation of why: http://www.bartleby.com/64/C005/021.html.)

I keep lurking because the community here is small enough to wash up a few pointers I wouldn't otherwise find. But, gentlemen, I take my insights where they're welcome.
good luck with your search kieran.
good point.. just verified <comment>...</comment> in the source. Google ready doesnt seem to render it.
Gates vs. Jobs: Keynote text analysis, 2008 edition
>But, gentlemen, I take my insights where they're welcome.

Where is that? And... I would tell you to give the community a chance and all that, but I'll let you make up your own mind.
Wonder what the fine print of THAT agreement is like...

I can't help but think they may have accidentally sold their souls for free copies of Visual Studio.
FOWA 2008 is in Miami from Feb 28-Mar 1
If you use a simple binary tree, which nobody does, you're right. If you use a red-black tree, like everybody does, you're wrong; worst case search time for a balanced binary tree is O(log n).

Worst case search for a radix trie is always O(k); radix tries don't require balancing.

Where did you go to school?
Is the Internet destroying our culture, or is it just annoying our snobs?
YC is not perfect. But which places are considerably better?

Certainly there are places where people focus narrowly enough on the topic for gender never to come up. But, that's probably true on YC too. Go to a different thread, make an on-topic post, and you can probably even post under a female sounding name with no one noticing.
Lisp plummets in popularity while COBOL and FoxPro win hearts
The Genome in High Resolution
Color as a determined communication (Very Interesting)
Newton characterized light; Goethe contemplated its appearance.

Great phrase. :)
Worm fears shut down Skype video feature
Jobs is an excellent speaker, Gates... well, he's getting better.
How to balance a startup, family and a full time job
Two Reasons Facebook is in Deep Doo-Doo
World of Warcraft now has 10M paying subscribers
I too have a startup, family, and a full time job. I found limiting the job to 8 hours 5 days a week has been the most important thing.

I make enough money to make sure my wife does not work so she can take the kids to school, pick them up, and help them with there homework. One important thing I do is to make sure our kids are in activities Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, piano, guitar, church group, and a few other things. I believe these things help make a person capable of fitting in (unlike myself!). I spend time with the kids before they go to school, before they go to bed, and I put them to bed every night talking over there day and motivating them for tomorrow.

I skipped the partners part but at the sake of speed of development. If I had a partner I would be making money now. I am winding down how much I am working at the job I have and focusing on making money from my startup.
Anyone have opinions on this?
Actually in classical macro theory, lower interest rates (which amounts to the Fed increasing the money supply) leads to greater investment due to cheaper credit, leading to higher output growth in the short run and subsequently lower unemployment. With higher demand for their labour, workers will ask for more cash leading to wage inflation. And because wages are a major input into goods and services, higher wages will cause firms to raise prices - hence price inflation.

That's the theory anyway. There's been alot of criticism on it, but macroeconomists in reserve banks around the world tend to subscribe to this theory when using interest rates to control growth and inflation.

The relationship between interest rates and the dollar is via the interest rate parity condition (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interest_rate_parity), which is a feature of open markets (to take into account arbitrage opportunities). Lowering the value of the dollar doesn't cause inflation directly. I suppose it does so indirectly by stimulating exports and raising output growth, which leads to lower unemployment and so on.

Lowering interest rates will likely increase inflation, but hyperinflation is a bit rich. Current US inflation is 4%, which is high, but a long way from hyperinflation (see zimbabwe - 1000%+).
A Taste of Silicon Valley in the Philippines?
Ha! I bet you IBM didn't even get fired.
Security, for one.

If you have sensitive client data, EC2/S3 is not for you.
this is hacker news because...?
>1. Without password and encryption keys, access to the hardware is meaningless from a data security perspective.

Are you shitting me? What school did you go to?
Maybe it's a warning. We thought we lived in a civilized world where no one would actually punch us. But we don't. In consequence, we should torrent some martial arts PDFs and then write a 3d app in C to simulate the techniques. Once we add a slow-motion feature, and an evolutionary AI to figure out the best strategy, we should be safe from punches.
75% in taxes? Get a grip man... taxes are quite high, but definitely not that high. Check out this report by the tax foundation, which breaks down federal and state taxes by the average household:

http://www.taxfoundation.org/files/sr151.pdf
Remember when people actually posted constructive compsci/programming articles that covered a wide variety of topics? Neither do I.

This current obsession with programming supremacy and geek dick waving is absolutely pointless.

If Universities started churning out uber hackers that were "20x more efficient" than last years model all these guys would start crying about how they can't get a decent paying job.
Something else to keep in mind:

If a lawyer volunteers for an hour serving soup to the homeless his donation should be valued at minimum wage. If he helps set up a trust to stop the corrupt "directors" of the charity from helping themselves to the money both now and in the future, his hour is worth a whole lot more.

This is the same for any trained professional. Anyone who has to pause and ask him/herself, "does my insurance cover me if I donate my time doing X" has highly valuable time to donate.
I used Endicia for a while a couple years ago (selling textbooks on Amazon), no complaints. They do have an API, but we used an out-of-the-box order tracking/shipping system, so I don't have any experience coding with it.
ah -- the misinterpretation of text. sorry.

PS. I think PikLuk is a good idea for a great market - best of luck!
I've always thought this would be a really good feature for conferences or big lecture classes to have so that people could ask and vote on questions in real time.
Thanks. I'll probably use something out of the box also... it just makes me feel better knowing that there is an API there if I need it.
World of Warcraft grosses $1.5bn+ per year? Really?
Is Endicia capable of accessing a sales database on a remote MySQL server?
5 Tips for New Media Newbies
Face to face communication is still the best. One of the reasons that Silicon Valley works so well is that it is so small. Many industries develop from hubs and it's not surprising that web technology companies would be any different from automobiles (Detroit), insurance (London and Hartford CT), or movies (Hollywood and Bollywood (Mumbai)) to name three other examples.

For some background on Silicon Valley see

Anna Lee Saxenian's "Regional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128"
http://www.amazon.com/Regional-Advantage-Culture-Competition...

"Clusters and the New Economics of Competition" by Michael E. Porter in the November-December 1998 Harvard Business Review
http://harvardbusinessonline.hbsp.harvard.edu/b02/en/common/...
As someone who never studied much biology, I must thank you for adding the word "homogametic" to my vocabulary.
Sorry, I was actually talking about that very blog post. I should have pointed that out.
This is blog post is the first time a YCer posts something that sounds like a press release. I guess that's cuz it was a summary, but it still weirds me out.
An outage at a Web 2.0 site is unlikely to kill anyone, so it doesn't justify government intervention like the NTSB. Laws have been proposed requiring companies to report on privacy breaches, but I don't think they require companies to say why the breach happened, and they don't require an outside audit.

The ROC project suggested something similar, although their analogy was not to the NTSB but an internal Ma Bell policy that required a report to be written for all outages. However, most companies don't want to release details about their outages, especially ones that are not customer-visible. When companies do talk about outages (as Joel just did) it's usually as a form of PR damage control.

http://roc.cs.berkeley.edu/#pubs
As someone who recently cancelled my kids WoW accounts (they played for about a year before losing interest), I tend to think the number is probably inflated by at least 1M.
Dirty Tricks Without Illusions
Now I know. Thanks for the link.
Video Interview: The story of Pandora so far from founder Tim Westergren
HTML 5 is now a W3C Working Draft
Sub-Pixel Problems in CSS
Ruby is soooooo 2002
iPhone 1.1.3 is READY for SDK apps
Well, nobody I know uses hash tables without periodically "rebalancing" them either.

Where I went to school, we were taught not to compare the worst case behavior of one structure to the average of another. We were also taught not to confuse binary trees with red-black trees.
Doing nothing or breaking protocols may also be critical errors, so Time Warner's plan is not necessarily doomed.
'Cloverfield' Mythos Explored: Monsters + Marketing = Millions
if Europe, why not Asia? ;-)
ok I am just indulging in wishful thinking here, so don't mind me :-)

"We all know the UK scene is seriously lacking - not enough founders, not enough investors, not enough ambition..."

heh you should come to Bangalore! Plenty of outsourcing/ body shopping. No interesting work. Plenty of frustrated talented people though. Someone who figures out how to tap them (as team members not (cheap) "consultants") is going to get seriously rich.

". We're going to redefine the social experience for PC/console gamers, and have tons of gamers itching to use the service already. We're fully funded (backed by some of the best investors in the world), and you'll get some nice goodies like Herman Miller Aeron, new computer, snazzy dual monitors and free drinks/fruit when you join. We want someone who has a thirst for learning new things, gets stuff done fast, and has a passion for making the Internet a better place."

I am so insanely jealous!

Good Luck folks!
Reality check: WoW is desktop software, built by a large team of highly experienced professionals (not college kids). World of Warcraft took 3-4 years to build. The profits go to Blizzard's parent company, Vivendi, which is a massive global media empire.

The old ways are still here and if you're at the top they are very profitable. Think about that the next time you read Tim O'Reilly drivel about Ajax-Web 2.0-old business models "dead" bullshit.
How to Outsource the Inbox and Never Check Email Again
If your brain and your genes are similar in that they both see continuing to exist as their ultimate goal (because if they didn't they'd stop existing and be replaced by things that are driven to keep existing), you could prioritize immortalizing your mind, if that's what you think "you" "are." That might mean trying to live as long as possible, uploading your mind to a computer, spreading memes as a way of spreading your mind piecemeal, or writing and art as a way to leave a footprint.

Of course, it would be good to get your cake and eat it too; it might someday be possible to calibrate your brain's reward system so it rewards whey protein instead of trans fats, say. It might be possible to stop the negative feedback mechanism that regulates dopamine levels. If you could permanently increase dopamine levels, you could be happy ever after.
Roadmaps and Features and Enhancements - Oh My
No, because the majority of players are in the Asian markets, where you pay by the hour for only the hours you play. These players pay far less than $15/month, I would guess.
It's you.
Engineers and doctors are driven to abide a code of ethics because they don't want to kill people. If there was software which was safety critical (maybe NASA code), then I'm sure that the developers would have the same kind of ethics.

I'm a power systems engineer involved in designing offshore oil and gas facilities. We frequently have to shoot down dangerous hare-brained schemes from clients who want to save a little cash. Thank god for the national standards though, they usually back us up. Which is another thing - failure to adhere to standards is a legal offence (especially if the oil rig explodes).
I see your point. Part of being the president of Harvard is never saying anything controversial, no matter how much the organizers of a conference push you towards it. I think it was Vartan Gregorian who said a University president could charm, but never offend.

You basically give up your freedom of speech.
thanks and I'm not steve.
N.E. Patriots CIO keeps IT moving up the field
Top 10 Worthless Facebook Applications
The Tree of Life Has Lost a Branch
In a nutshell, don't.
Is this bullshit? I can't tell anymore; I've spent too much time on crappy websites and my bullshit detectors are pretty sore. I just get the feeling this might be worth reading, but I don't want to have to find out on my own. I would upvote anyone who read it and found out (I don't think this is a bribe; whoever reads that legitimately deserves a karma point).
For postage, just go to a USPS "Automated Postal Center", select a size, place the package on the scale, select a package, zip code, delivery, and confirm. It may take 5 steps but may only take 30 seconds per item. Pay with your credit card, attach the printed postage labels, and leave your packages with the USPS.

If you use the Dymo just for printing address labels, then not only can you start with the cheapest label maker, but you can use the address label for any purpose.

For many daily shipments, you can use a Dymo Label Writer with combined address/postage labels customized for Endicia.

Endicia's API, unless they changed it, is an always-on program that checks if a certain file has shipping information in it. If it does, it prints out shipping labels and clears the file.

Endicia has excellent support; I believe actual developers answered your questions last I used them.
How about a top one list of Facebook Apps that aren't worthless?
In fact, exactly the opposite. Do it - just be aware of how to handle it.

Don't be afraid. Go for it. I did.
Engineers have a certain line that they will not, cannot cross. Doctors work the same way.

While the romantic in me would like to believe this, there are too many counterexamples out there for me to just accept this generalization.

When software engineers fail the results often are not visible or comprehensible to ordinary people but when those professions screw up the results are dramatic. As a consequence they have to take extra steps (like always letting everyone know about these codes of ethics) to maintain trust.
Jeez, their year revenues must be huge. They could conceivably spin off WoW, take it IPO, and make a killing.
Keep dreaming!