skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
nonsense. a look at the available add-ons for thunderbird clearly shows that enough advanced users are using it, and tweaking it to their liking without having to reinvent the wheel.

i think you are confusing thunderbird with outlook express or hotmail. i've never seen anyone not tech-savvy use thunderbird.
Glad someone posted that link, or I was going to :)

Pipes and method chaining "feel" the same. They're both expressions, but with the property that you could rewrite them as what looks like a series of statements without changing the semantics (although possibly changing the efficiency). e.g.

usual_suspects.director.surname

has the same value ("Singer") as

person = usual_suspects.director
surname = person.surname
surname

and

cat /etc/passwd | grep root | cut -d: -f6

outputs the same thing (root's home directory) as

cat /etc/passwd > tmp1
grep root tmp1 > tmp2
cut -d: -f6 tmp2 > tmp3
cat tmp3

They feel the same because they're both monadic (at least when the chained methods or piped processes behave in certain 'normal' ways). '.' (the method invocation operator) and '|' (the pipe operator) are monadic combinators, just like Haskell's >>= and F#'s |>. And a monadic combinator is just a generalisation of function composition.

Monads are going to become a lot more important in the next few years, as programming languages get more expressive and capable of more abstraction. LINQ in C# and VB is a great example - while it looks like they've baked in language support for lots of concepts (querying databases and XML, for data parallelism and for event-driven programming), what they've really done is recognised that those are all forms of monadic computation, baked in language support for one thing (monadic expressions), then implemented those concepts as libraries that any user could have written. (Erik Meijer and Brian Beckman on MS's Channel 9 explain this really nicely.)
really well said.
As an admittedly biased Oracle architect/DBA, I'm inclined to believe that the "Oracle" bottleneck was due to the design/implementation of the Oracle DB, rather than the technology itself.

If, for instance, you were pulling this data out of an Oracle instance designed to be a cheap, historical archive, on minimal hardware and cheap disk, then yeah, it can be very limiting in performance.

If you're pulling it out of a production database, and have the priority levels set such that the data suck won't affect production users/usage, then again, that bottleneck is by design.

I'm taking that statement as something that's a comment on the system, rather than a slam on Oracle's technology and capabilities.
It's not about usability for non-technical people. It's about focus on developers. Can Thunderbird do syntax highlighting in email? Fuck no.

And suggesting that technical people should use emacs is dumb. Seriously dumb.
You say that like "video" and "games" aren't a huge industry.
> it would not be reasonable to assume they were the same until proven otherwise.

I would have thought that would be the default assumption if there is no evidence to the contrary. Why do you think it's unreasonable?
this plugin has existed for over 20 years

14 years.

Regardless of how big the Mac market may be (its too big now to ignore and getting bigger)

Nu-uh. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Operating_system_usage_sha...

because it seems like a race where both parties are running backwards.

http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1925723,00.ht...
"reinvent the wheel"

Fuck you. I hate that phrase. Fucking hate it.

(Yes, I know this will be downvoted, no I don't care)
Using temporary IPs in the cloud considered harmful
Here's an amusing hobby:
1. Start Amazon EC2 instances (or any other cloud service)
2. Use something like honeyd to listen on all ports
3. Wait for random activity associated with the previous owner of the EC2 instance to start flowing in.

I stumbled across this by accident after getting flooded by connections from apps.facebook.com which seems to be trying to interact with a Facebook app that was previously hosted on an IP which I'm now using. Presumably the previous owner of an EC2 instance had a DNS name that resolved to this IP and didn't see the risks of doing so. Remember: the Amazon public IPs are temporary and will be reassigned once the EC2 instance stops or dies.

For the sake of your users' privacy and security, use Elastic IPs. Even if the instance dies, the Elastic IP still belongs to you and won't be accidentally be reassigned to someone else. When you start up a new instance you can have the Elastic IP assigned to the new instance using ec2-associate-address.
So you are suggesting the Flash plugin starts up an instance of windows so it can utilize the hardware acceleration?

The issue here (with the 10.1 hardware acceleration) is that it requires updated video drivers, and Apple controls those drivers on OS X, and Apple hates Flash. Maybe they will eventually add support, but why would they hurry if they don't like it in the first place?
Don't reinvent the wheel! You might change my world view! No, no! Go away! Everything's fine! :(

(+1)
What we do need is an open-source webmail implementation like GMail. SquirrelMail just doesn't cut it anymore.
would there be a way to try out a new hire for a 'trial period', maybe on like a 3-month starter project paired with someone more senior? then after the new hire has proven him/herself over those months, a formal offer could be made.
Brent Simmonds is a Mac developer and there's been a discussion about the Mac email client landscape brewing for a while. The Coccoa requirement is due to the unstated context that we're talking about an email client for Mac OS X.

By shipping Mail with every Mac, Apple basically makes it impossible for someone else to come along and compete with a commercial product. Thunderbird, while a fantastic piece of work, doesn't behave quite like a Mac-native application. By saying it's got to be Coccoa, Brent's saying it has to be through-and-though Mac-like.
All I Really Need to Know About Life I Learned from Dungeons & Dragons (video)
I love "everything is just fine, all you have to use is (20 year old|text based software)" comments, especially when the suggested software has an FAQ with this entry:

+ I'm an average user. Why should I switch to Mutt?
The top two reasons to switch are color support and threading.
Meta point: There's mixed views on HN'ing your own stuff, but I think it's pushing what's "decent" to use such subjective headline as "The Best Hiring Tip".

Even if that's the title of the post on your own blog, I think most HN'ers enjoy a bit of objectivity.
About which bit do you think I'm joking?
I have to agree with many who've commented here. The author doesn't list a single problem with current email clients, except maybe that he hints at wanting one with keyboard accessibility rather than requiring a mouse. Either he has no idea what's available (in which case, he should search first), or he hasn't really thought about what he wants in an email client.

Regarding what he considers obvious:
- Cocoa? I have no idea why Cocoa would be obvious. Surely an email client for developers would need to run on at least Windows, Linux and Mac OSX since there are enough developers that use each of these.
- IMAP only? Good idea, but that's really the easiest part of the problem. I'd say defer this to fetchmail to start with and just read from a local directory. Add actual IMAP support once you've figured out the UI. That's the real hard part.
- twitter account? yeah. 'nuff said.

The biggest problem with email today is not that a client doesn't exist to satisfy your needs. Every developer I've met does in fact have at least one email client that satisfies all their requirements. For some it's thunderbird, for others it's gnus or mutt or pine, others like gmail, still others like Mail.app, and believe it or not, there are actually developers who like MS Outlook or Entourage. No, the biggest problem with email is that trust isn't yet built into it. PGP/GPG/DKIM/Authenticated SMTP, and others exist, but the majority of email users have no idea what these are or how to use them, and unless every email user in the world switches to using some kind of trusted authentication system, email will stay the way it is today.
($) is actually the least interesting operator in the world :) But as you say, its parsing precedence makes it useful (because it lets you skip parens).

What I like is how ($) generalises to (<$>) for applicative functors, so you can write

succ $ 5 -- -> 6
succ <$> Nothing -- -> Nothing
succ <$> Just 5 -- -> Just 6
succ <$> [1, 2, 3] -- -> [2, 3, 4]

Who needs "for" loops? :)
There is a gold bubble right now exactly because too many people are giving exactly this advice.

Do you not recognize how often people used to say the same thing about US real estate before 2005?

If you want to hedge against inflation then might I suggest US currency? It's remarkably stable and inflates by only a 3-6 points most years: http://www.inflationdata.com/inflation/images/charts/Annual_...
what about "don't throw the baby out with the bath water" or "don't count your chickens before they're hatched", perhaps "i before e except after c", how do you feel about those phrases?

wait, what was this discussion about?
Roundcube is slightly better.

Zimbra is definitely better if you're willing to put up with it's overhead.

But really, email is one of those things, where your preferences are unlikely to be the same as those of others.
It's not all that easy to write an extension. The threshold effort is enormous.

So for all practical intents and purposes, I can't define my own mail categories (tags, whatever), and I can't specify a simple script to run when something comes in, and I can't access my mail as a database for bulk processing.

I still use Thunderbird, of course, and have for years - but these are the things I periodically try to figure out in it, and I always end up entirely stymied. To the point where I've also seriously considered writing my own email client, if it just exposed its guts to Python or Perl or something.
a) The "spent all my money on equipment" was probably part of the lie.

b) Bar tending.
This model seems mistaken. Certainly in the negative direction, parents can "bring down" a kid far beyond the 10% that they supposedly have influence over.

I realize it's just a model and not intended to be entirely accurate. Just seems like a very small piece of the story.
"If you want people to sink hundreds of hours into a game, the gameplay is going to include a LOT of repetition."

Which is probably why I find it difficult to play most video games as I quickly get bored at any task that involves mindless/near-mindless repetition.

I also find it difficult to muster much interest in being involved in working on these kinds of projects because I find it sad that many people's pursuit of distraction/passtime would be something that involves massive repetition (work) with little tangible benefit.

I look forward to seeing MMORPGs developed that require a far greater degree of creativity and open-endedness in them.
Bernanke and the Beast
He's wrong. Long lines mean a large number of people are being turned away. When your website is swapping and it takes 12 seconds to render a page, that doesn't mean "My website is serving all comers, there's just a bit of latency", it means lots of people are not being served.
Tell HN: EveryDNS down
have been using EveryDNS for donation-based hosting. They are presently a target of ddos attack.

http://twitter.com/EveryDNS
sup++

I just wish it was faster (on large mailboxes) and more stable. I'm stuck on gmail for now.

http://sup.rubyforge.org/
Agreed. I've been a longtime user of Thunderbird, and only a casual user of mutt when I've needed to do some quick processing of email on a server or over a slow connection. But my latest upgrade to Thunderbird 3 has been very disappointing, with continual freeze ups, extensions not loading, and too many restarts required each day where previously I'd let it run for weeks at a time. So I tricked out mutt with complete configs for my IMAP accounts and RTFM. I must say, I'm impressed and feel like I made a huge leap forward. I now have an email processor, not just a point-and-click dartboard. Still, it's not perfect, and I don't think any email client can be.
Your first point doesn't make sense, considering jd said "if Apple allowed browser plugins to move video-decompression out of the CPU too, then that would be great." Flash can't use hardware acceleration until Apple adds support for it to their video drivers. Sure, it took adobe a long time to get to this point, but video online is still young compared to the lifetime of the Flash Plugin, so your argument that the plugin has been around "for years" also doesn't make much sense.

I also don't agree with your second point, considering the things you are complaining about "games, sites, ads" are generally created with Flash because the advertiser (or ad agency) wants to do something that HTML can't do. It's their choice to do it, so don't blame their poor choices (and often poor coding) on the technology.

Consider that in general games and rich interactive things take more CPU than static HTML and graphics, so of course it will take more CPU to render those things. If you don't like it, don't play Flash games and boycott sites that use excessive poorly coded Flash.
14 years

Sorry, you are absolutely correct the plugin itself came out in 1996 with the original software having been developed earlier by PenPoint.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Operating_system_usage_sha...

Not sure what that is supposed to prove, some would argue that that is a sizable chunk (bigger than Windows 7 currently). But that's really besides the point since the argument was that the people that matter are running it.
I still get requests to my dedicated server at Softlayer for the Facebook app which used it before me. I've had the server since mid-2008. Really, this seems like a problem on Facebook's side.

The bigger problem is trying to run a mail server on EC2. You can't, really, as a lot of providers are still doing (stupid) IP based filtering.
We discussed Google Wave a few days back: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1048227

It sounds to me like it solves your problems; it certainly helped the author of that post.
This reminds me of:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_P._Burdell

also see:

http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/29787673/the_boy_who_...

and

http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/hoax/weblog/comments/4446/
You're new around here. Please read this: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
This comment on the linked page pretty much summarizes my feelings too:

Every time I see such an idea where I think this is not thought through very well I expect to read a name from the far east when I scroll to the designer. Graphically nice work but please, PLEASE put more effort in your technical research and concept work.

Not long ago they have featured another concept that called for lifting a heavy weight to the top of a floor lamp and then letting it slide down on a long screw that connected the base of the lamp to its shade. Clearly wasn't designed by an EE major. Concepts of the thin as a paper phones with transparent screens, beautifully rendered every time, are also a dime a dozen on Yanko Design.

So I have long stop treating it as an industrial design blog per se, and now just flipping through it as a 3D Max design portfolio gallery.
TLDR...

Actually, I completely agree, but I think online identities such as commenting with your twitter account id, and other similar paradigms help lessen the number of trolls, or people who don't read their own words before they press submit.

The internet was designed to be a two way street, so if comments are broken, instead of not using them, lets take steps to clean them up a little.
I don't really understand your objection. I'll try to explain what I understood and tried to say, and perhaps you can tell me where I was unclear/incorrect?

The original statement, on a literal reading, is universal ("the only way for men to get women's attention is to be a jerk"). Clearly, this was not what was intended: you call it a generalization, and that's the only reasonable reading, I'll agree.

As a counterpoint, I offered my personal experience. Admittedly, the plural of anecdote is not data; however, the fact that I know of literally no case where being a jerk got someone a girl does suggest that a closer look may be in order.

This argument works as a counterexample against a universal statement, but that doesn't mean you can't argue a more statistical version of truth based on these observations.
A full explanation would take a while, but here are a few points:

1) Reality is generally continuous. Anytime you see a discontinuity in life, it means someone is probably skimming off the top. (e.g. leveling up)

2) We're all basically the same. Anytime you do something in return for social status, you're probably getting fucked in other ways. (e.g. going to law school)

3) Wealth is generally abundant. Any time you're doing work to get something scarce, someone else is probably making money off what you're doing. (e.g. buying limited edition stuff.)
It seemed to me that she was genuinely concerned--at least somewhat--about minimizing her damage to others. She did rationalize that choosing a missing girl's ID probably wouldn't be that bad.

"No one would be hurt by the theft, she reasoned, as long as she was careful not to rack up debt. "I always thought, mistakenly, if there was no financial loss, there was no harm," she says."

So it seems her inability to recognize her damage to others was more problem in rationale than understanding of empathy.
I find it interesting how, in discussions on this topic here and elsewhere, people tend to come down strongly on either side.

Perhaps it's careful selection of company, perhaps it's different circumstances (none of us are really the type for one-night stands; note the boy-/girlfriend theme of my post!), or perhaps we read events to fit our theories about how dating works; but I've very rarely read someone arguing the middle ("being a jerk can work with some women, but many other women ultimately prefer a caring partner").
Dan Bernstein didn't "regard immediate profit as more important than long-term quality". Neither did Wietse Venema. Both were at extreme pains to make sure their free software was free of security problems. Unlike any commercial software, security software included, software security was the #1 priority for both these projects.

Both failed to ship code free of game-over security flaws.

I find your point about "tolerating" failure to be irrelevant to the real world at best. At worst, it's just fatuous.

I've shipped hundreds of thousands of lines of code, and I've led projects to review millions of lines more: chipset to JVM, embedded to desktop, open source and proprietary. It is a point of pride with us: we always find things.

You think you're being respectful of users when you chant "don't tolerate failure". What you're really doing is being disrespectful of computer science. All evidence available to us suggests that it is practically impossible to ship code --- or at least, real-world code --- without security flaws.

Is secure software an impossible goal? Not for computer scientists. For instance, a Stanford team build a system for evaluating code for flaws based on abstract analysis. That project became Coverity, a commercial product for scanning source code for flaws. They compete with a larger company called Fortify, in a hundred million dollar market for static code analysis.

Projects like Stanford Checker, or the OS and runtime hardening work being done in countless labs, have a chance of advancing the state of the art to where you think it really is now. A line developer on a browser project has no such chance.
Am I the only one who get's frustrated by 'considered harmful' titles? Sorry for being off topic.

EDIT: I'll give you that it's not as bad as the whole (win|fail|this) thing that's becoming popular.
I would say you have a harder chicken and egg problem than most social networking sites:

Normally, the value of the site to a new user increases with the number of their friends use the site, because those are the people they interact with.

On this site, the value to a new user is determined more by the number of higher-year students of the same school that use it, and those people are less likely to be in that user's social network. This makes your site inherently less viral (although I hate to use the term) than, say, facebook.

Off the top of my head, I can't think of a solution to this problem, but maybe some relentless resourcefulness on your part can do the trick :-)
Our conceptual dark age of man-machine interaction
"x considered harmful" considered harmful
I would have that suspicion even if he posted about how he made up the whole story for a blog post and it got him traffic. Or at any level in this recursive tell-a-tall-tale-but-it-was-all-a-lie process.
while not helpful for his examples, some programs that don't grok "-" as a shortcut to read data from stdin (or a pipe) are ok being passed "/dev/stdin" as the filename.
Whether this is entirely true or not, surely the underlying message worth noting is that you can give the impression you are more successful than you are. This, of course, translates to the business/startup world where perception matters.

Regardless of the truthfulness of the story, I think there's something worth taking away here. (And it's pretty funny!)
I know what you mean; I couldn't do it either.

However, he confessed his lie, and now he works making movies. They're lies too! They're fictional. Yet good things -- including important truths -- come out of them.

Richard Branson confesses in his autobiography how he started his business career with lies. He would phone up a bank and try to sell advertising space in his student magazine by claiming that a rival bank had already bought space and that they should get in on the action.
You apparently think the code inside of phones, smart card readers, and TV sets is likely to free from security defects, and at the same time you feel qualified to argue about this?

You could, if you had given it 5 seconds more thought, chosen examples that were hard to falsify (even if they weren't based on any experience of your own). You might have suggested "weapons guidance" and "space shuttle life support". You wouldn't be right, except to the extent that those systems have virtually no attack surface, but at least your message board argument would be viable.
Yes. awsui is built on aws sdk and is hosted on ec2 instance and uses simpledb.
WhoIs.com hacked / dns redirected?
It's not often Whois.com gets hacked. Even worse if its a DNS attack, given that is their primary business.

Got a screener here in case it gets fixed quick : http://imgur.com/guUzL
I was just reading yesterday that DARPA is having a hard time finding computer geeks. This sort of wretching, chicken-little stupidity might be one reason why.

If any of these 'adults' had been paying attention in 9th-grade science class, they'd be able to tell what the kid's up to without calling in Sandia.
It's not often Whois.com gets hacked. Even worse if its a DNS attack, given that is their primary business.

Got a screener here in case it gets fixed quick : http://imgur.com/guUzL
Really. Considering that Israel is firehosed with money from state and private sponsors, I have always wondered why one hears so little of successful technology ventures coming out of there. Personally I have only ever heard of ICQ (which was not exactly neither cutting edge nor particularly succesful).
Absolutely. She was listed as VP.