skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Piggy Back was built to solve the problem of constantly owing or being owed by friends and family. It simply keeps a running balance of the debts between people.

The plans are to make it easier and easier to create these debts by leveraging email and Twitter.

Let me know what you think!
Apps you won't find in the app store
Twitter growth prompts switch from MySQL to 'NoSQL' database
Twitter plans to move from MySQL to the Cassandra database
10. Late Night with David Letterman Theme

What?! I watch that show somewhat regularly and doubt that I would recognize it unnamed.
Congrats on your success, then. 18 months away from making a living is a great place to be. Assuming it's web based, do you have links to the sites/projects/whatever? I'm curious to see, and I always try to pick up ideas from others.
DragonEgg, LLVM optimizer as a GCC plugin
Family farms and small businesses are often severely hurt by estate taxes. Many of the people who oppose the estate tax are those who want to see a farm or business stay in the family, but tax laws make it incredibly hard to transfer it to their children.

It is often portrayed as something only the super wealthy need to worry about, but plenty of farmland goes on sale in the midwest because taxes can't be covered.
hmmmmmmmm My wife is definitely not into the same genre of books as I am and frankly I'm happy with that. Is there some real correlation between compatibility and the books you read or are you just assuming that?
The site looks nice and I get the idea, I think the only problem is that I would see this as way to formal with my friends and family. If I pick up dinner with friends, or if I pay his part of the cab fare.. he just buys me dinner or a beer later. This seems too cold and formal for most uses.

Now for something like parents lending to their kids it would make more sense, or formal loans between friends (which is usually a bad idea)
I'd given up on getting her to buy in, when our house burned down (nobody was hurt). Now we both believe in simplicity!

Hmm...how convenient :)
Let me just say from experience, never put a Hersey's bar in a pot of pork and beans. I did this in 1991 and I still have the taste in my mouth.
Does she clearly have the programming ability? Her blog suggests she is an average programmer at best.

http://blog.leahculver.com/2008/11/couchdb-documents-python-...

Using exec to access object fields? Really? There was also a fiasco a while back where she converted floats to strings in order to compute an average (!). She deleted that post, but if you google "leah culver star ratings" you'll find some discussion of it.

She's a great marketer, but I'd hardly say she has the programming ability.
IPad Colocation
Because I'm not in the ad sales business. AdWords ads are exceptionally horrible for twitter-type sites where everything is rendered client-side, and if Twitter can give me ads that make me money then I'm for it.
I guess if your marriage is built more upon sexual attraction to your significant other than upon other kinds of compatibility, then this news would be rather shocking to you.
"q=Nietzsche, q=Sartre, q=Camus
Hmm, none yet. Try adjusting your search criteria."

where are all the a1=18&a2=23 philosophy chicks?

edit: q=Paul+Graham, success. We can be hopeless and poor together.
This certainly could be done. Here are some MATLAB routines that implement it:

http://www.acm.caltech.edu/l1magic/

Seven examples using compressive sensing:

http://www.acm.caltech.edu/l1magic/downloads/l1magic.pdf
Keep your saturated fat levels down (> 20g a day)

You used the bracket wrong. Correct: "fat levels down (< 20g a day)"
There are some good reasons developers flock to App Stores. App Stores take care of all kinds of annoying stuff developers don't really care about like distribution, payment, a little marketing. What is wrong is greedy developers of trivial apps mistaking a lucky strike for a stable source of income.
Six Tips for a Killer FAQ Page
Very misleading title. From the article: "arrays absorb 96 percent of incident sunlight at a single wavelength." Sunlight is hardly monochromatic, and is in fact spread out over a very broad spectrum. More specifically, these cells can ostensibly absorb 96% of light with wavelength <= 1130 nanometers, which corresponds to the band gap energy of silicon.

Also, the article does not address the important fact that absorbing light is not tantamount to converting it to electrical energy. Namely, any energy that a photon carries in excess of a semiconductor material's band gap (silicon's is 1.1 eV) is wasted as thermal energy. For silicon, which lies near the tail end of the sun's spectral curve, this means that about 61% of absorbed sunlight goes to thermal losses.
The Broken Window Fallacy
Amen. I've heard a lot of people run into same issue we did (wufoo and Joe Kraus' Jotspot both talked about this issue). We started with a free product, turned a paid product and promptly said, "WTF! Why aren't people buying our premium stuff?!" It was a long learning-intensive road to get smart(er) about freemium.
You can do script/generate rspec_model User with 2.3.5 right now.
I benched it about a year ago and it was quite impressive, but I know there have been developments since there. I may do it again and post results.
Walmart sells vibrators and they are a company that requires CDs to be censored and covers up many magazines.
Open Source NoSQL Databases
He does realize that Rails required well over half those things in versions lower than 3, right?

And it now generates 30 fewer files?

And the only reason you didn't get nasty backtraces before was that they cleaned the backtrace, which it looks it's not doing for that un-upgraded app?

Some people are such curmudgeons for no good reason.
Thanks! I fixed the error issue with the quotation marks.

We are not doing proper boolean searching just yet. Everything is treated as "or" right now. Something to work on.
The "predates agriculture" bit is a little spun. Dates for the dawn of agriculture in the fertile crescent typically run about 12kybp. So this thing (if the dating holds -- often times new sites jump around a bit) would be contemporary. So the causality could still go either way, or you could posit a feedback situation I guess. Still a really important find.
Servers and Bandwidth for a site doing 1 million page views a month should cost at most a couple hundred bucks, maybe $500 if you go overboard. If he is spending $1900 a month on servers that is ridiculous.
It does in showbusiness.
Considering Applying to Y Combinator?
Are you looking for another cofounder? I'm a rockstar hotdog flipper and am knowledgeable in condiment spreading.
Yeah... I'm not terribly sure why this submission is getting upvotes - having a hard time installing a beta (and I guess the way Rails is organized?) is eons away from Rails jumping the shark.
Looked at it... and while it shows how to break one practically, it dosnt go into details. If you want to see how to actually break a CAPTCHA using python have a look at the tutorial I wrote some time ago,

http://www.wausita.com/captcha/

*NB May be down due to being on Westhost which is having quite a few issues at the moment.
"I am incredibly excited by the flexibility we're going to get from Rails 3."

Try Googling for "Rails" + "Flexibility is overrated"

Amazing how things change.
Indeed; see

http://www.railstutorial.org/chapters/modeling-and-viewing-u...

from my book for an example. ;-) But it requires running a special bootstrap script and has a different syntax from the default, i.e.,

$ script/generate rspec_model User

for RSpec vs.

$ script/generate model User

for the default Test::Unit. In Rails 3, they will both simply be

$ rails generate model User
I end up doing this by cooking vegan (I eat anything but my roomates don't). The constraint of not being able to use any animal products while cooking forces me to think creatively about taste and ingredients.
How I Conquered Insomnia
I couldn't agree less.

Mint.com is a trusted holder of a LOT of financial data. They should not in any way be a platform.
The author asks whether his metrics (number of gem dependencies, number of auto-generated file, and length of stack traces) are meaningless. This commenter has an answer. It is, "yes, those are meaningless metrics".

1. The number of gem dependencies for Rails is an implementation detail, optimized for the benefit of people developing Rails extensions, and barely exposed to Rails developers. 80% of Rails developers couldn't tell you whether a method was defined in activesupport or activerecord, and those are two Rails dependencies that date back to the origin of Rails.

2. Since you don't have to edit any auto-generated file you're not interested in, the number of auto-generated files is irrelevant to you. Since the beginning, Rails has generated files that you're unlikely to care about; for instance, the only benefit I get from "schema.rb" is that I can make impressive printouts from it.

3. You can filter your stack traces, which is what you should do regardless of whether Rails tacks 10 lines to it or 100.

Has Rails jumped the shark? Maybe. I find myself reaching for Sinatra now instead of Rails, and I think the RESTful/Resourceful/multi-format idioms in modern Rails are overkill for most applications. But this article doesn't make a compelling argument about Rails.
AT&T stopped by my home to say that they ran fiber (uverse) to my building. Great, but I have to buy a TV subscription to get internet from them! Same policy from Verizon FIOS.

Ironically, my cable company allows me to get internet only and they are faster (20/2 vs 18/1.5). Certainly none them are 100Mbps.
Some BBSes from 1984 are calling and want their G-Files back.
The way I see it is that the code to test if a GUI element is properly formed is basically the same code that would just properly form the element in the first place. So by automatically testing the GUI you are basically just repeating yourself over and over.

Not to mention that when you want to improve the usability by rearranging things, it will be twice as hard to do if you need to change both the code and the tests.

Unless you have to render something pixel-perfect, it is probably not worth it to write automated tests. A human can look at your screens and verify that they aren't (or are) completely crap fairly quickly.

Ultimately humans will be the ones finding bugs in your software, and when they find UI layout bugs it should be immediately obvious by looking at the code what is wrong. If it isn't then you might need to separate UI from the rest of the gunk better.
NHTSA Has No Software Engineers or EEs To Analyze Toyotas
Uh, Q.E.D.?
What's nice is that it is flexible! You could create a computer in a jacket powered by solar cells :)
Those girls are too busy going on dates with people in their philosophy classes. No time or need to mess with an internet dating site.
That's a fair point. Certainly with really close friends, there's always casual transactions that take place.

There are people though that you may not consider really close. While you're happy to pick up the tab and know eventually they might get you back, Piggy Back will help you take the guess work out of it.
Can somebody tell me why I was downvoted?
Good questions. Niche is the only way to go, I think, the big guys have the big middle ground. And honestly, none of them are so great that people should be loyal. (OkCupid does a nice job.)

There are other social book sites out there, and they seem to do well. In our case, the difference is that user intentions are clearly about dating. I think (hope) that matters.
Really horrible "architecture" there.
Not at all. What I mean is that if I invest in a platform, I expect the rules to stay roughly the same so I can hope to make a fairly predictable return on my investment.

If Apple creates a track record for itself of saying things like: Even though there are X,XXX companies developing porn apps (which we approved), we're going to stop allowing those arbitrarily, right now. Or what about: gee, we'd really like to get in on retail banking, so money related apps, those are out. Or how about, we want to partner with acme social media company, so any apps that interact with facebook, those are out.

My point is that they can do this once to the porn guys and just piss the porn guys off. If they do it again, to another group, that will and should scare the shit out of the entire developer population, because who's next?
When was the last time your friend investigated hosting options? $1900 a month for hosting a forum with 50,000 uniques sounds crazy to me.
"Old people like unnecessarily performing the same exact task a number of times, and enjoy spending time with obscure debugging tools when they forget to do it right in one place?"

OK, sure, I agree.
Ha. The disaster alarms were ringing loudly in my head. Josh-
I assume MS means Morgan Stanley, not Microsoft. If so, do you think all the sorts of problems we see financial organizations taking advantage of could be applied to gambling markets. That is, does Miller's contention that finance would not exist without transaction costs apply equally to gambling? If so, is gambling just another form of an options market? And finally, should gambling be treated like any other market with buy and sell prices (like commodities or bonds)?
YouTube to kill IE6 support on March 13
yes -- scripts I have had memory problems with stopped having such problems when I rewrote them as procedural (not OO) code.
"And a huge chunk of the population (over 30 percent) never go online at all—less because they're retired and not interested; more often because they can't afford the prices."

From the survey, the main reasons given for no internet use at any location are...

Don't Need/Not Interested: 47.2%

No Computer or Computer Inadequate: 22.3%

Too Expensive: 18.6%

Lack of Skill: 4.3%

Can Use Somewhere Else: 1.4%

Other: 5.5%

To me, it looks like more people don't go online because they aren't interested (47.2%) than because they can't afford it (22.3%+18.6% = 40.9%).

Of Americans without internet access (31.3% of the population) only 18.6% go without because of the cost of access. That's just 5.8% of population who can't afford access, which seems like a very small fraction to me. Now, slightly more of those without access attribute it to a lack of a computer, but this isn't something that can be fixed through the market for internet access.
"... I think that's the problem (I'm also not a technology bigot: you can do s/scripting languages/J2EE/ and s/MySQL/Oracle/). Doing simple things may pay well at some point, but there's no technical career growth path. ..."

Intelligent comment. Does it break down when you do startups? In all the products I've worked on you start off doing simple CRUD but pretty quickly move into doing other deeper things.
I can only hope for that.

Seeing from yesterday's buzz regarding how hard it is to find a good developer, one can only hope...
Is this marriage/kids advice coming from the same guy that wrote a blog post comparing picking up freelancing gigs to picking up chicks?
IE6 Funeral in Denver - leave a remembrance
If this chart ( http://www.creditloan.com/infographics/corporate-campaigning... ) is to be believed, ATT was the largest donor in the 2010 election cycle.
I agree, for formal occasions (a pre arranged meal with friends) this is perfect. Though it may be best as an iphone app where the phone can be passed around and everyone deducts their own meal. How do yo u know who ordered what?

For a night out it seems a bit too formal.
What mint should be is a bank not a platform.
I tried to read the article, but... that bright cyan background. Ugh. I can handle most color schemes. Not that one.
"From my experience so far, Rails3 is a breath of fresh air."

I'm curious to know if you've tried any of the dozen or so other Ruby Web frameworks, such as Ramaze, Camping, Sinatra, IOWA, Waves, etc.?

It seems that the things people seem so excited about in Rails 3 have been available since, say, Nitro, four or five years ago.
Its linkbait... but very funny
Are Derivatives the Real Problem?
Too late to edit/fix. Each of those points above was, one of (contractor garbage bag | large rubbermaid bin | pile on the dinner table)
I'm wondering why you have a Twitter login instead of a Facebook connect button, since most friends and family are probably going to be on Facebook, not Twitter.
Cool, but I suspect we're not your audience.

It would be hard to imagine your API being simultaneously simple enough to be less work using Twitter's API manually, and customizable enough to dump out exactly what I want easier than massaging the data and presenting it myself.

But then if I was a guy in a band setting up our website, I could see this being really useful.
The Future of Social Games
Chicago startup/jobseeker happy hour tomorrow
I've been coding Rails apps since 2004. Java before that. Never did the PHP thing.
he has a lot of regulars. Gets something like 2,000-3,000 people on at the same time every night + it's an old site, so there are a ton of threads, I think something like 2 million at this point.

Infrastructure wise, I know that he has 4 web servers, 2 DB servers, and 1 image server...I'm not certain on specs, but I believe all of them are dual xeons.

But yeah it's pretty crazy, since it's a hobby, I'm sure he is getting things that he doesn't really need.
My father had major health issues after following a reduced salt diet as suggested by doctors due to his hypertension problem as his sodium fell below the usual levels.
But I have mad social engineering skillz!
My goal would be for people to be able to create debts in any number of simple ways:

* An iPhone/Android/Blackberry app
* Tweets
* Emails (cc'ing Piggy Back)

Even for a casual night out if you could just snap a picture of the receipt and deal with it later, it could be really useful. Especially, where there's alcohol involved.
Facebook Connect is coming soon. Too much to do, so little time!
Why would you need pg's permission to publish your own work?
It was embarrassing back in 1990 when I was in engineering school ("we need more female engineering students!"). What's really embarrassing is that we're still having the same debates 20 years later.
The Doghouse: Demiurge Consulting
Ahh ... isn't Mint build off a platform that allows it to do all of the fancy secure financial banking login and information sharing?
Better off building it with the standards that mint.com uses, that would be OFX or Open Financial Exchange. Now that mint is at intuit they might not be as agile. Also there are pretty big security issues that OFX have solved. Maybe mint.com could expose your data via OFX.

Mint does have providers that they get the OFX data from, these are pluggable. But the product that is mint is all the metadata about the purchases not just the exchange. I can see how this would be beneficial but also how it might harm mint's reputation if anything were to happen with failed security.
Very funny, but.. there are commercial offerings for Apple TV based hosting, believe it or not: http://www.beasts.org/appletvdedicated.html (running Linux, though)
I love their solution for getting around the lack of multi-tasking.
On my birthday. How fitting.
If you're passionate about something, it hardly ever feels like work. I absolutely love what I do and it feels like i'm just playing every single day. If money comes, then perfect. And if it doesn't, i'd probably be enjoying too much to notice.
Is it just me, or does this title reek of disdain for his wife and/or all women?

To spell it out: the "let's go shopping" meme indicates stupidity on the part of women. Here he's using it seriously to complain about his wife having "difficulty" with simplicity. This in turn implies that women in general have this difficulty, and this is a negative trait of the sex at large.

Maybe I'm being a little sensitive here, but I kind of want to smack this guy.
The Anatomy of Twitter's Fail Whale
Decoding CAPTCHAs
An introductory guide to breaking CAPTCHA's with source code. Walks through identifying weaknesses in a CAPTCHA using them to extract the text and then identifying them.
mint is built off of yodlee's service (http://yodlee.com/) which does all of the communication with banks. i'm not sure if they're even using OFX anymore because they don't authenticate the same way (mint doesn't require your bank logins).
Whether or not it's mint or some middleware, the point is: There're lots of interesting thing you can do with pieces of financial data. There are also lots of security implications. Handing the security problems off to one company (say, mint) and still being able to have access to all the metadata (without the ability to, say, leak your customers' account data) would be dandy. From a consumer standpoint: That's much better than giving all of that secret information to every company that's interested in accessing it.
Here are a few ideas. The debit/credit terminology is too formal. Use something like "I owe" and "I am owed".

I can see myself using this if it was more closely focused on helping me track who I owe money. The confirmation system you have is too formal.

How about this. I can record who I owe money, or record who owes me money. If I owe John money, I can optionally choose to send him a note (email) as a friendly reminder. Maybe integrate with Facebook so he can choose from a list of his friends. No need to remember an email address. I can also have it send me reminders to my facebook account or email.
Um, you should probably mention it's a joke someplace other than on the "Sign up" page. The way it is now, the only people who find out it's a joke are the people stupid enough to want to use it and the people smart enough to know that no one would ever, ever run a service like that.

There's a whole big chunk of your customers that will fall into a middle range: they'll be smart enough to know that this is a terrible idea, but gullible enough to believe that you would try it. They certainly won't click on the "sign up" link, and therefore may not be let in on the joke. And you really don't want your smarter customers thinking that you're actually selling this service.
Clojure, Haskell & Ruby vs Euler 25
Awesome. Would have been +1 if they'd rickrolled you after the signup click-through.

Although ... you _could_ do this with a custom app. Wouldn't be too hard, really.
That is indeed a great commentary. Now I wish HN was more like Reddit!
I certainly applaud you for thinking that who she associates with is irrelevant, but I'm telling you that there are many people less enlightened. I've probably heard as much gossip about her personal life as discussion of her technical chops, and I see that as good evidence that women in tech generally are not "taken quite seriously all on their own". No one cares who any guy in the tech industry is dating.
I gave this an honest try because the video looked awesome, but sadly it is not useful to me.

I basically just got a list of thousands of retweets for blog posts and a bunch of Disqus comments. Despite combing through many pages, I seriously could not find a single appropriate testimonial.

Maybe you could add Google Checkout support? For example: https://checkout.google.com/reviews/merchant/endUserReviews?... I have a really low volume of Google Checkout orders, but even that is a gold mine for testimonials.

Send me a message if you'd like some more info on my experience: jeff@wolfire.com
I might be totally misremembering, but I sure thought it was from government and not Bowker. Seems like something that has been privatized and of course prices jacked up tremendously.

IRRC I wasn't getting an individual ISBN either I was getting a publisher code, and could issue thousands of ISBNs under it.

What a scam/racket, esp the barcodes. (like https certs, domain registration and other government mandated monopolies) It doesn't flippin cost $150 to track a number in a database.