skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The Pathetic Fallacy of RDF
OK, not the town on the north shore of Massachusetts, then.
Thanks for the correction, I'll remember that.
Cost of living is indeed fantastic, I bought a nice house in Baltimore for just over 200.

However, in terms of bike commute, or to say that it's hacker friendly, I don't see that myself. Have you found people that I haven't?

Also, is there much biotech outside of UMBI?
10 Great Tools For Online Business Communication
Oh, and I almost forgot to mention... when you start building and need a microcontroller, go to whatever company you need one from and ask for a sample piece. Typically all microcontrollers companies will send you 1-5 controllers as "testing and development samples." There is usually a form that allows you to order these for free on their website.
Oh, and the reason I mentioned Plymouth Township is because it's less than half an hour from Ann Arbor, so you could easily live in Plymouth Township and work in Ann Arbor.
I don't think so, but that's been debated.

A ban on stories that involve politics wouldn't be the right thing, but I think most political stories don't belong here. The only way to keep them out is insults, threats, and not voting them up.

I have a self-promoting link that bridges politics and hacking, and if this story gets more votes I'm going to put it in a comment here. Yes that's a threat.
(Startup) Life is what you make of it
GlassFish v3 Ruby Gem on RubyForge
TSA Changes Screening Based on Blog Suggestion
Justin, I think all of us on this site are interested in the upcoming election, but... a lot of us feel that 'politics' as a discussion topic is just too likely to be unproductive and divisive, and will degrade the overall quality of the site and its community. I can't force you to not post stories like this, but I am asking nicely.
I wouldn't say The Economist dissolved anything. They showed a great deal of disdain for the conspiracy theories, but they said absolutely nothing to debunk the suspicion that at least one of these cables was cut on purpose. Unexpectedly weak and biased writing from a magazine I rather respect.
Well the PS3 has 9 cores, or something like that. Don't you think that says something about the computers we'll all be using, and by extension, the parallel-processing capabilities we'll have to take advantage of in the future? Personally, I'd rather not learn Erlang either, but I hope that this sort of easy parallel processing becomes one of those popular features that every language will implement sooner or later. Hm, I wonder if it should be part of Arc's core...
So, I suppose I can't send this down just because you're from AA. (j/k, I'm the least hostile buckeye there is)
The Arc Challenge Explained
I lived in Austin 1996-97 and I loved it. Swimming in Barton Springs pool is one of my favorite things to do.

However, if you have a problem with heat, be warned. In the summer you expect 100 degrees every day. I like the heat, but it can be oppressive.

All the good things that other people are saying are accurate.
This is a great quote:

As an entrepreneur, Mr Semmoto "looks for the contradiction" (as he puts it) and then pounces. The inconsistencies might be high prices but no competition, or high uptake of a low-quality service.

That's something I need to do more of myself, with my own businesses.
You might consider Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill, NC area. I'm in the Bay Area now, but I enjoyed living in "The Triangle" as they call it.

Cost of living is great. There are three large universities in the area: UNC, Duke, and NC State, meaning lots of youngish, educated people.

There's a pretty good geek community. IBM, Cisco, Redhat, and SAS all have large presences in the area, and there is a startup scene (nothing like the Bay Area, but it exists).

When I lived there, we had twice-monthly geek meetups and got great attendance - met some really interesting, fairly diverse, people. The large amount of northern ex-pats mixed with the southern culture made for a pretty cool, laid-back, friendly atmosphere.

And there is biotech in the area as well. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Triangle_%28North_Carolina%... for a start...

Only downside is you'll definitely still need a car to get around. If you're smart and/or lucky you can probably minimize that a bit, though. The Chapel Hill/Carrboro area can be pretty walkable/bikeable.
Ask YC: Scaling questions.
Ok, so, from most posts on the subject, it seems that people around these parts like AWS. Contrary to that opinion I chose (mt)(gs) to build my application on, this was partly due to funding, and the fact that mt is solidly $20/mo, every month.

The question: I'm growing, and I need to know how scaling _should_ work. I have a hosted, subscription based cms, there is one version of the toolset, hosted on the same server as a number of domains using the tools, I also provide e-mail via webmail and IMAP and POP (via (mt)).

As everybody knows, (mt) is a little slow, and a little prone to failure.

My current direction (needs work): When I start to max out one (gs) account, get a second one, run two copies of the program. (repeat as necessary)

This, to me will cause many headaches if I have more than say, two servers. (could be quite soon)

So, if my option were AWS, how would that change? I can't just add resources to an already running server, right? this just-in-time stuff is pretty new to me.

Would it be running the same way, but n servers could pull the app and client files from S3?

Could I have n number of servers pull an app, and files, and server x runs the app or starts a new server based on load?

How do the DNS issues work for AWS?
What if my users want webmail, should that all be on a separate server instance, or can I scale that too?
I'd like to ask nicely too. I'm not in the US, can't vote in the US, and whilst the outcome of the US election is of interest to me... it's not until November.

Please keep this stuff off Hacker News.
Have you looked into optional static typing (e.g. EC4 style)? The default Array type for EC4 takes types of all kinds as well. It is a satisfying middle ground.
xkcd - Möbius Battle
That crashed Firefox...
Anyone have experience with Sacramento? There is definitely some tech stuff going on in the surrounding area (Folsom), but I am not sure how many startups there are.
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bs math Pomona College,
ms statistics, ms,phd computer science U Wisc -Madison
Am a programmer; love what I do.
6-word novel describing my life:
"It worked! Still can't believe it."
Microsoft to acquire Ustream.tv for $50 million?
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Thank you!

Maybe I drop a word about why.
CS was an option for me, but I would have done it only to learn more about programming (and maybe how the hardware works). Since I already knew a lot about programming when I was 18, I decided to go for physics, because Astronomy and Quantum physics were both also strong interest of mine.

Basically this decision opened a bunch of very interesting job opportunities in science programming that would have been hard to get into without a scientific degree. I can wholeheartedly recommend to not study CS, but a different science, especially if you know that you want to write software. You can easily learn programming by yourself and get detailed knowledge in another topic. This combination is hard to beat (most scientists are very bad at programming).

It was a lot of fun to program in my own lab environment. Maybe because I controlled the whole pipeline starting from requirements to finally using the software for my own scientific work.

Its a pity that this is rare. Currently I develop software for an ESA space observatory. Sounds incredibly cool, but sucks a lot because of the size of these scientific projects (and because of the bureaucracy of ESA and NASA).
High school dropout who has been a programmer for about 7 years now. Voracious reading habits on a wide variety of subjects, a willingness to work hard along with a constant assessment of knowing what I don't know has served me well.

I stretch but know my limits.
I don't mind being called a coder, but then I don't mind being called an information plumber either.
Reuters CEO sees "semantic web" in its future
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Ask Hackers: Opinions on OCaml?
I've been looking into OCaml a bit, and it looks interesting. Here are two articles, one on either side of the debate (sorry haven't figured out embedded links):
Stevey on OCaml (pros) - http://steve.yegge.googlepages.com/ocaml
Steingold on Ocaml (cons) - http://www.podval.org/~sds/ocaml-sucks.html

Anyone here an OCaml hacker?
Essentially: "smart and gets things done."
I, for one, would prefer bread and circuses.
Microsoft's Head Is in the Cloud
The follow-up question then would be how many existing problems can be converted to the type that Erlang can solve well? And how many problems previously impractical are now practical to solve? So if it ends up to be a bigger class than you thought, you may well be limiting the number problems that you can solve easily and practically out of the ones that will be important in the future.

I think it's important because it allows a program to easier to scale out rather than scale up. We'd want speedups in this way because CPUs are becoming multi-cores, and to take advantage of them one will have to write some type of parallel program, since it's been difficult to fully automate parallelizing serial programs.

In addition, parallelized systems (not just erlang) can be more fault tolerant and can fail more gracefully (or hobble along, if you'd like to call it that). Sensor networks are one example. Instead of a single radar to detect the environment, you many sensors out there, and they network themselves and report what they see/hear. If some of them gets destroyed that's ok, because the system's still functioning with less sensors.

So what concrete examples of problems fall into this class Erlang is good at? The obvious ones are the embarrassingly parallelized algorithms, like genetic algorithms, neural networks, 3d rendering, and if I'm not mistaken, FFTs. Indexing web pages is another. That said, there are problems that are inherently serial. It takes 9 months to begat a baby, no matter how many pregnant women you have.

Ruby and Haxe language writers are both implementing the actor model like Erlang, if that's any indication of how important they think it is. While I don't think Erlang will be the 100 year language, the ideas by which it's a poster child will reverberate in the descendant languages for a long time to come.
Ballmer Confirms Yahoo Brand Will Live On, MSN The Likely Casualty
Digsby is Here
Presidential politics is vitally important to web entrepreneurs. Barack Obama is the only candidate who has pledged to make net neutrality a priority if he gets elected.

http://www.techcrunch.com/presidential/issue.php?issue=1

If the government does not make sure that the Internet playing field remains level, then the same thing that happened to to FM radio will happen to the Internet; it will be controlled by a very few major players, and the rest of us will have nearly insurmountable barriers to entry.

I agree that we don't need stories about every minor detail of the race at this point, but we, as hackers and entrepreneurs, need to be informed so that we can vote in our own best interest.
Madison is pretty great, especially in the summer, but I think our winters are a bit foreboding.

The main problem with creating a startup atmosphere in Madison is that most people leave once they graduate. I've managed to stick around almost a year after graduation, but the coasts are beckoning. :)
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like.com is strange, it really does work quite well!
but I just don't know that people look to buy things that way :)
Interesting thoughts. Visuals in the article would have been a nice touch.

What about lower pay as a cause of lower productivity?

Also, poor leadership can play a big factor in software development productivity.
Why YaSoft, MicroYa and Yoogle Are Not Important
Aurora, IL
How to Win Big at Negotiation: 3 Rules You Must Definitely Know
Learn how to win big when you negotiate. These 3 rules are good negotiation rules to follow to arrive at a win-win-win situation.
Designing What’s Right for Consumers
So many improvement for both specs! I must say that I find myself much more attracted to XHTML2 over HTML5 because it still acts like a document markup language where HTML5 wants to do application interface stuff. I still am unsure why they wanted to add so much interactive and browser dependent functionality to HTML5.
Internet Cables And Sharks With Laser Beams On Their Heads
A chat with Stephen Covey on conflict vs. synergy
I see how Microsoft gets a heart out of this deal.

How does Yahoo get courage? Or does it discover it "had it all along" when it makes the leap?
BSc in Computer Systems Engineering, UPC, Spain.

Currently studying MSc in Computation, also at the UPC, Spain and working as a programmer (mainly in Perl and JavaScript).

Programming since I was 14 (currently I'm 23), lot of self-acquired knowledge.
I just hope they don't expect it back later.
Snocap CEO Rusty Rueff interviewed about managing top talent for entrepreneurs
How can we stop the design thieves?
I've checked facebook about 60% less since I got my FriendFeed account. It really is an awesome site; the UI is like butter. Just wish more of my friends would join.

http://friendfeed.com/jraines
I think the idea is to add some functionality that would make the browser a viable environment for "sovereign applications." That is, applications that are long running and highly interactive. Ajax has gone a long ways towards doing this for the web, but a local persistent data store, real networking, offline capabilities, and more fine-grained control of the UI (drag & drop interface, editable, etc.) will make a huge difference.

I wouldn't say it's "browser dependent." The point of making it a standard is so it wouldn't be browser dependent...

That said, I think there are definitely pros and cons for both specs. I'm kind of excited about the APIs though. (Also, the APIs are technically being developed by a third party, the Web APIs working group.)
16805
Page loads extremely slowly due to (presumably) 16,805 images...
Spanish seems to have 'th' as well
Ten ideas about Ideas (old but interesting)
Why are you downmodding me? This is a valid point. At least have the decency to refute me if you think I'm wrong.
Small is not Always Beautiful
Most excellent web calendar app MixIn
You can always downcast in the presence of an instanceof case statement:

ArrayList myList = new ArrayList(new Object[] { "foo", 42, new Bar() });
for(Object elem : myList) {
if(elem instanceof String) doStringThing((String) elem);
else if(elem instanceof Number) doNumberThing((Number) elem);
else if(elem instanceof Bar) doBarThing((Bar) elem);
else doObjectThing(elem);
}

Or you could keep elements as Objects until you needed to perform a specific operation on them, then cast at the site and perform the operation, letting the ClassCastException propagate if you're wrong. This is basically what Arc does.
The books are pretty much like glorified reports.

The only material that can be produced are ones that are so devoid of human judgment and editorial input that a computer could do them.
Agreed. However, you haven't mentioned the BEST "feature" of Austin. We have an absolutely unique freakin jungle within 6 miles of downtown called "Greenbelt" where you can do all kinds of crazy things on your mountain bike, or swim with your dog in one of those natural pools or just walk for miles. Also you can rent a boat and have fun on lake Travis, where my favorite thing to do (although dangerous) is to jump off the rocks. Those things are why Austin is 1st or 2nd fittest city in the nation and this is why I don't want to move to the Valley. We have lots of "Valley refugees" here, who moved because of cost of living and "lack of culture".

However, if "good hacker community", and especially start-up community, is priority #1, I'd stay around SF Bay Area. Austin has only one traditional "software VC" and they're not nearly as open minded and progressive as numerous VCs in the Valley.
Caveat: if you really love computers, don't shy away from them.

I started as a physics major, for exactly the reasons above. Problem was, I couldn't keep my mind off programming, which made my performance in physics courses somewhat lackluster. Most of the hard sciences are not stuff you can just blow off and mostly-understand, like, say, sociology. You need to have some dedication to do well in them. It's hard to have that kind of dedication to both CS and physics (I know some people that have pulled it off, but they're often very narrow in other respects of their life).

People qualified to judge you won't judge you by what degree you have - but they will judge you by how well you know your strengths and can make decisions to emphasize those strengths. If you're really passionate about computers, they'd rather see you pursue that passion rather than dick around with something you don't really care about.
Ok, so I see infinity is U+221E(http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/221e/index.htm), now how do I go from that to posting it on a forum like this?
State of Open Source Message: A New Decade For Open Source
There is a public git repo anyone can push to (the so-called git "wiki", or anarki). It contains regular expressions. You could wrap some DB bindings for mzscheme with relative ease.
Using AWS doesn't magically make your application 'scale'. You still need to architect it in such a way that you can add additional resources (app server, db server, web server, etc) to accommodate your load.

What AWS (or slicehost/other VPS) does take care of is the server provisioning/bootstrapping process-- if you have images set up for each of your server roles, you don't have to go through the headaches of calling up your server company, ordering servers, doing burn-in testing, etc. You just whip out your CC, and 10 minutes later you have a working server. (or, in the case of AWS, you can automate the whole provisioning process and scale in near-real-time according to load)

For your situation, where you're hosting domains, you probably want to have one or more frontend/"master" boxes hosting the domains, but internally forward the traffic to whatever server is actually hosting that instance of the app.
I've been reading /. for ages and ages. For me the key to avoiding the frippery that can consume the site is to turn off .sigs, and to use the new-style commenting to adjust my comment thresholds. I have threads which are not highly-modded show up as just a "X comments here" note. Generally even if something is downmodded for being unpopular it will still get a lot of replies, so you can use the to keep an eye out for downmodded but still worthwhile posts. The Slashdotter Firefox extension is helpful too.

I don't really have an answer to the 'early posts are more important' problem though. That's been bugging me too.
"with" is dangerous, because it makes it impossible to tell lexically whether you're assigning to an object or to a global variable. If you mistype a variable or pass an object of the wrong type in to "with", you can find yourself with very difficult-to-track-down bugs. In practice I'd only use it with a bunch of assertions, which could bloat the code significantly.

Chris Double suggested another alternative over on Proggit: tailcall to window.setTimeout with a delay of 0. This is effectively a trampoline; the continuation gets pushed onto a timer, the eval function returns, then JavaScript picks up again where it should. As a nice side effect, it gives the browser's event loop a chance to run, which eliminates any chance of locking up the machine. Pretty elegant solution, though I'm guessing there's a significant performance penalty.
There are clear reasons why this is true:

Here are my theses:

- People with lots of years in one field don't have the courage/curiosity to learn something new.

- without curiosity you don't learn a lot in life.

- People with tons of experience do a job for many years without being bored? Does that mean singlemindedness?

- Our worst programmer has 20 years of experience in her field. She has a tenure track position and cannot be fired. She HAS this position because she was the only one, who did not leave in the last 20 years. Since nobody else wants her she will stay forever.

- On the other hand: smart people are bored quickly. If you don't give them new challenges, THEY will leave (with few years of experience in every field they have ever touched).

My best guess is this: The HR departments are full of mediocre people who are not smart enough themselves to find smart people. Look around: the average rules.

If we find vacancy announcements that require lots of experience or a washlist of buzzwords, this tells us something about the company already: About who writes the announcements, about the influence of the smart people in that company and about how complex they are organized.
Sun's 'disturbingly quiet' cycle prompts fear of global Cooling
Why can't they just say "no"?
Great Inteview with Avid founder Bill Warner
I live in Boston, and I agree that the climate sucks (I keep telling myself that it builds character). Housing prices are outrageous...for anyone who isn't coming from the Bay Area or Manhattan. (If you do move here, rent an apartment and wait for the housing bubble to finish bursting.)

But there are a number of tech companies around, either in Cambridge/Somerville or in the Boston suburbs. The public transportation system is decent and the city is compact enough that a lot of things are within a half-hour drive of one another.

Regarding biotech, I used to work on the Human Genome Project at what is now the Broad Institute (which got spun off from the Whitehead Institute). Novartis rents a floor or two of the building I work in and owns a whole building a block away.

Boston's Museum of Science is a good place to take kids; they have a "Discovery Center" that's specifically oriented towards 0-to-5-year-olds, but my three- and five-year-old have fun at a lot of the other exhibits as well.
I'll try:

Yes, people need to be informed. But everyone who uses this site is good enough with a computer to find other sources of information without it being foisted off on us 'for our own good'.

To scratch my own "do something" itch, I joined Democrats Abroad. If you really want to do something, sign up to volunteer for one of the campaigns, or something along those lines.
I've used it.

I think OCaml would be a big win if you have your software designed all up front, and need to verify that it works correctly, e.g., avionics software. Unfortunately, avionics software development seems to be moving toward C/C++...
There's always this: http://www.paulgraham.com/vanlfsp.html

But in general (at least from what I've observed on Hacker News), OCaml gets less love than Haskell. Actually, I don't ever remember OCaml getting love here.

This pdf is a report from the Commercial Users of Functional Programming workshop last year. There are some good stories about OCaml, Scheme, and Haskell. 20 pages but well written, reads quickly.

http://cufp.galois.com/CUFP-2007-Report.pdf
Astronauts to check shuttle for damage
VC Fundraising Manual: Be Nice To Assistants
Some entrepreneurs are rude to Executive Assistants, treating them as second-class members of a VC team. While assistants aren't directly involved in the investment decision making process, they do have important influence...

Read more at markpeterdavis.com