skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think usability testing is important(Shout out to Steve Krug:http://bit.ly/dloM7j) but you can't be a slave to it. These days one of the criteria I use when picking services is "how dedicated does the company seem". After having my stuff disappear with a few failed startups I've come to value someone who goes all-in.

When I see a startup shooting for "minimally viable" I head in the opposite direction.
Bollocks. I use my health insurance (publicly funded - I'm Canadian) for oil changes and checkups, and Canada still manages to spend about half, per capita, on health coverage as the US.
The article does ignore it, and doesn't claim to do otherwise. However, it would be trivial to modify their algorithms to improve code size.

Just solve

argmin running_time(prog) + alpha * code_size(prog)

instead of

argmin running_time(prog)

Here, alpha is a parameter representing how much you care about code size. I.e., if alpha = 1 sec / 1mb, then you will accept code which is 0.99 seconds slower if it shaves 1mb off the code size, but not code which is 1.01 seconds slower.
[edit: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=872072 for some clarification on a few Homebrew vs MacPorts misconceptions.]

I used Homebrew for a bit, even submitted some recipes, but I've since switched back to MacPorts, in short because:

* MacPorts was once as simple as Homebrew, it's not now for good reasons. Eg, the reason MacPorts uses it's own python is beucase Apple is slow to update their own python, and when they do it happens outside of your own setup so you won't necessarily know you need to rebuild X, Y and Z.

* Homebrew did some silly things like aggressive stripping (which seemed to just be commands pulled from the Gentoo wiki without any real justification) which caused problems a few times when I tried to install things outside of Homebrew (eg, easy_install of MySQLdb didn't work out-of-the-box with the Homebrew mysql libs).
Deal Fever
The Expedient, Desirable Product
Personally, I try not to log personally identifiable information. I don't log Referer, I don't log User-Agent, I definitely don't request a list of your fonts and log that, etc. I do log IPs, but I will stop doing that in the future; imagine a scenario where you are hacked by an oppressive regime, and the information in your logs is used to convict someone of a crime that is punishable by death. No thanks.

Basically, spying on your users is bad. Keeping data around forever is even worse. I would rather become an open relay for spammers than to compromise peoples' privacy. (Although I am pretty good at avoiding the first one, too.)
Duplication, easily found by this search:
http://searchyc.com/submissions/A4+A8?sort=by_date

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1158741

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1158358
Kitchen furniture profitable for you | Home Improvement & Health Care
It's also fantastic for inbound links (SEO)
I used to go semi-frequently. I have specific musical tastes. Now, I can't help but get it to shuffle to something like 9/10 songs that I would never want to hear.

Limiting to a genre, in the old version, it used to be 1 or 2/10 that I didn't care for. I've tried a few times, but effectively have stopped using it. I can't find the same feature. The "moods" thing is not nearly as effective. It feels like it's become a radio station, and I don't listen to it for the same reason: I have no control over what it plays, and it seems to play "pop" (don't read that literally, just "things lots of people listen to") music all the time, and never what I want to hear.

I also, generally, find the new interface very difficult to use. Lots of mystery meat navigation and hard work to find what I'm looking for.
Note: he's talking about users ceasing to use Google's services, not talking about Google's employees moving on to other employment.
Yelp: How a Conspiracy Theory is Born
Zeromq: nginx of amqp systems
What to keep in our heads?
I agree with your base assertion fallacy.
The incentive, for me anyway, is that I can afford $200, and now I never have to worry about "what if I get cancer" or "what if I'm in a bicycle accident and need major surgery and months of physical therapy". I mean, both situations are bad, but I won't have to worry about "how will I pay for this" in addition to "how much longer am I going to be on Earth". IMO, it's money well spent. So far, my insurance company has won in terms of dollars made, but I've won in terms of peace of mind.

Not everything is zero-sum.
Does anyone really 100% trust their complicated redundant gear?

And without watching the explanation, I'm pretty sure that is an empty outer insulator. It cuts way too easily with scissors and I don't see the light colored insulators and wire ends in the opening.
Major software vendors would never have had a platform to standardize on, so they would have to try and pick a winner and loser. Consumers wouldn't know which platform to buy to run program X, and when that platform goes away, how will they keep mission critical program Y.

You are describing network effects. In a hypothetical world where there are no network effects, there is no benefit to picking the most popular option -- precluding the need to standardize or pick winners. In the case of operating systems, this means you need to assume it is trivial for users and vendors to move between competitors. (For something closer to this ideal, think of JVMs or x86 chips.)
I think the point is more that the general instructions tell you to do it without any justification (which a lot of experienced *nix users seem to think it needs, myself included), it makes you wonder what kind of code is sitting in there without real justification.
Tcl meets GTK+ and Gnome
Trunks - Hosted source control specializing in private repositories
Extreme Makeover,  RKS Redesigns the Deadly Hot Dog | Not Quite Conversation
The author (of Homebrew) is well intentioned but I've gotten a few hints that he doesn't really come from a *nix background (the /usr/local thing, the aggressive Gentoo-esque "optimization", etc).
Action Streams: A New Idea for Social Networks
I'm planning to make a copy for viewing the interview later. Not sure how long it will take me to post it since it's my first time:)
"dizzying complexity"? Seriously? Have Internet users really degenerated to being that stupid?
Getting there with a little help from my friends:
http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs162/sp10/
Especially pertinent as more data falls from our head to our computers, and then our devices, and now The Cloud(TM).
What is more surprising?

A) That people will fall for this and whip themselves up into a some sort of frenzy
B) That these same people haven't realized that they are essentially being used by Apple as a marketing tool
GDP Fetishism: why GDP is not a good measure of wellbeing
I will say very frankly that you should NOT be lifting weights.

I have exercised both with weights and without, and I think for the time spent, and given that like me most of you probably sit at a desk, you will get more benefit with less chance of injury, by doing calisthenic/pilates style exercises.

The reason is that posture and the use of small muscles to make adjustments, plus working the abs/core, are more important when sitting down, and help you avoid injury.

The simplest plan is Canada's "5BX" plan designed for their air force.

A more complex set of exercises are the series done by John Peterson, such as "Pushing Yourself to Power" that focus on using your own body resistance plus variations on pushups and what are variously called "burpees", "Hindu squats", etc. (I have no financial or other interest in his company, which is at http://www.bronzebowpublishing.com/ )
opt into Youtube HTML5 beta.

http://www.youtube.com/html5

Visit a video page. Right click on the video and "inspect element" (assuming your in Chrome) and it will show a url in the <video > tag. (Note view source wont work as it appears to be loaded using JS)

You could probably automate this process if needed.

Also: im not sure if the URL is time sensitive or not.
Simple or not, but I remember statistics that some 65% of first-time users do not get Twitter and leave. So it seems like it is not only about having less features.
I thought the obvious first number to try was 69..
Well it's not just that the prediction was off a by a bit, the entire relationship was wrong.

It was GW -> More Storms, now it's GW -> Less Storms.

Now of course this is just science being done, there's nothing wrong with that. The problem is that Climate Scientists claim to have a much better understanding than they do. As Feynman said, it is the duty of the scientist to bend over backwards to inform you of all the ways they might be wrong. In Climate Science, you hear this is the consensus, not that we have data for 30 years of 10000 year cycle and we think that this will happen. In my opinion it's not honest.
I would love this. Many times there are articles that would be more appropriate for that kind of forum, but I post them here to catch the hacker/biotech crossover crowd.
I'm not sure that works when it comes to major breakthroughs. I'm hardly an expert, but I'm not sure Einstien's work, for instance, could be replicated by a 100 physicists 'breaking it into easier parts.

Not mention you're contradicting Heinlein, and we all know that's never good.
I know a lot of people who like resharper, but I'm a CodeRush guy myself. I've evaluated both and CodeRush has a much better UI (no modal dialog boxes) and does some awesome stuff with graphics so you can preview what your code will look like after a refactoring. It has had some mem/perf issues in the past, but they have fixed their issues - the same can't be said for resharper.
So what kind of performance can you get from Cassandra? How big can the values be? I was thinking of using it as a backend for a mail system.
I'm excited! I hope it is the first of many.
Interesting perspective. I tend to agree -- and with the MVP concept taking hold, it can be tempting to release too early. Figuring out where to draw the line can be tough though, especially when you are operating on a shoestring.

One thought/question: How much of an impact does a high-quality graphic design have on your perception? I'm betting that going the extra mile on the visuals can strongly aide the perception that the company is legit.
I wasn't trying take anything out of context - I was just trying to gain a better understanding of why RoR was mentioned.

Thanks for the clarification and I agree it can be a challenge keeping up with any software that is modular and utilizes code developed by volunteers and hobbyists. Whether it by Python or even .NET using 3rd party components.
It took two weeks to program an ancient IIS error page? I could have done that with cut and paste in just a few minutes.
It depends how "leadership" is defined.

By and large, I am a strong believer in rule by the smart, although culture is a lot more important than IQ. Probably 20-30% of those in the ruling class have a high enough IQ (125+) to be there but less than 1% have sufficient culture. Paul Wolfowitz and Dick Cheney come to mind as examples. They're so uncultured they probably eat steak with their fingers; that such louts could rise to such high levels of influence is a serious problem. And our society is such an ugly mess because people like them (uncultured people, with ugly minds) rise to power and remake the world in their image.

I think it's also obvious that most business executives are selected for people-pleasing and crude optimizations (next-quarter profits) rather than vision, creativity, and humanity.

The traditional two-tier managerial structure (although excruciatingly flawed and less-than-useless in practice) had the right idea. At one degree above the average (110-125) you have the managers, whom the line workers look to for leadership, but who do not alienate them with their intelligence. At two degrees up (125-145) you have the executives, who can lead and mentor the managers, and whose closer connection to "the metal" gives them a strong voice in the decision-making. At 3 and more degrees, you have strategists and academics who present the information and advise the decisions. However, modern corporate society doesn't work this way; the executives are often mediocrities, the "advisor" class isn't really listened-to, and most of what goes on in academia is self-referential bullshit.

"Rule by the smart" is not flawless, of course. Bigger problems than a lack of intelligence in our ruling class are the lack of integrity, vision, and compassion... which are also much harder to measure-- although all of these correlate are correlated much more strongly with IQ than with "leadership" as measured by our current selection process. Therefore, an "IQ meritocracy" would be an improvement. Between a set of 140+ IQers (among whom there would be some who are unfit to lead) and the people running the show now, I'd bet on the first class without hesitation.
"You are not responsible for other people's expectations about you" - Richard Feynman
Ask HN: you've got a few weeks of free-ish time, what OSS project do you try?
you are ninja-esque in your .net skills, but have been moving to more interesting tech (python, nosql/couchdb, erlang).

current candidates are (in no particular order):

bespin, couchdb

what else?
Doh, I'm sorry I missed that when I looked in the thread previously.
I doubt that this is true. Realistically, your loved ones will be more loyal to you than your boss. Which is more common: lying, embezzling employee keeps getting rehired by the same boss, or lying, cheating husband keeps being forgiven by his wife?

You'd have to be a pretty shitty human being to exploit this, but it is true. The transactional nature of business means it's the least amenable to long-term relationships, and requires the most aggressive maintenance if you want to optimize it. Most people naturally behave in a way that counteracts this: they could abuse the trust of their loved ones, but they don't.

So perhaps he should have said something like "business is a glass ball. The others are all hamster-balls, with little hamsters in them. If you drop the hamster-ball, it's not going to kill the hamster; it might not even seriously hurt it. But don't be an asshole; if you're going to drop something, drop something that won't be hurt."
I'm actually not advocating for a database per customer. I was more wondering why you have so many collections -- surely they're not all representing different logical data. My guess is that you create some number of collections per customer?

With the new built-in sharding support, couldn't you have a 'customer_id' field and collapse many of those collections into larger collections, then shard by 'customer_id'? I'm just trying to understand tradeoff between these two types of schemas.
I distinctively remember customers in the mid-80's knew what software was available to the computer platform they chose to use. They used to base their choices on that.

Machine-readable data exchange was not as important as it is today, but market pressures would, probably, influence software writers to both write more portable software (in order to sell to larger markets) and to use interchangeable data formats (something educated customers would see as added value).

The whole idea of "major software vendors" would also be very different, as the market would be much more fragmented.

And no. We wouldn't be behind what we have today. We still have files in folders, windows and mice. The coolest OSs available today are flavors of Unix and a rehash of VMS with roots on a rehash of CP/M. Most Windows users still believe files must have a 3-letter suffix. Windows users still endure drive letters. Unix users frequently endure differences between local and remote files. Most computers have two processors and most programs can't figure out what to do with one of them.

No. We have had pretty little progress during this period. We had more of the same - faster boxes with more storage, more colors, more pixels and more GFLOPS doing more or less what we used to do in the mid-80's and 90's. It's really hard to imagine an environment that would result in even less progress.
My and I am sure a lot of others' experience with RoR and gems/plugins is completely opposite.
I don't have control over newgrounds, but is it still an error?
Huh? I pay for it too?
Video of the Day: The First Sushi In Space
Clojure-CLR might be interesting to you: http://github.com/richhickey/clojure-clr
You do realize that you just straight-up insulted Alinsky without attacking any specific arguments, or presenting any evidence, right? Was that for irony?
Breakthrough in Electron Spin Brings Quantum Computers Closer to Reality
SamAtt, you have a great point. When building a new product and service you must be dedicated and put something out that is tight and usable. When you are using a service, this is just as important to see in the founders / company.

When I say "minimally viable" it regards quantity rather than a quality, as in "we think the market wants something that does X, so lets build something that does only X right now ... we will build Y and Z if we see further buy in, but we aren't going to build those until we see if our first go at it was in the right direction."
> So what kind of performance can you get from Cassandra?

~10k ops/second per quad-core node. Scales roughly linearly w/ node and core counts. ("Roughly" means, obviously there is network overhead as you move from single node to multiple, that kind of thing.)

> How big can the values be?

2 GB, although you probably don't want to max that out.

Cassandra is mostly used for smaller pieces of data, although I do know at least one person using it as an S3 replacement by chunking files into 64MB chunks; each file is one row consisting of columns that each contain one such chunk.

> I was thinking of using it as a backend for a mail system.

It should work fine for that.
For some reason I want to read heavily between the lines of the wikipedia summary, and I find it incredibly sad. I mean in the first place my knee jerk reaction is to equivocate "I'm still good enough, even if I didn't solve diffeq problems at 6. My son's okay even if he still doesn't read at the age of 4."

But I don't want to imagine the kind of expectation people put on this kid (when he was a kid). Cynically, I suppose as I read I thought "oh yeah what's he done now? We still have cancer and no unified field theory. Does P=NP?! huh?" and yet under that was the expectation "well this guy should be curing cancer and resolving open problems!"

No wonder he escaped to something ordinary (poor Civil Engineers, though, what a bad rap that is ... my profession is the most ordinary!) People haven't changed much since the dark ages (or before). They still expect miracles and magic to cure their woes, they just expect it now from Science.

It agrees with me that accomplishment comes after the 120 IQ...heck I'm barely above the marker.. shwoo. But it comes in increments. It comes in mostly in pieces we have to put together. Einstein didn't make the world a better place single-handedly, it was the engineers who came after and created GPS (for instance) that did it. There's no reason this guy should have created miracles with his IQ, we probably don't have enough of the base research to solve that (whichever) problem, yet.

Instead, he's improved the world a bit (quite a bit in the sector of civil engineering apparently). Honestly, the universe is miracle enough. The fact that we can make it slightly better by our actions and increase joy in the miracle of existence at all is a good thing. Some people do a better job of that with much smaller IQs.
Poorly named tech products
Litotes: my favorite figure of speech.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Litotes
Last month, we killed our first eBay data center
How genetics works
SteD, I think this is now fixed. Let me know.
Yes, I got modded down. I didn't list my credentials on the topic, so maybe I should have. I did get sued and went through significant $$$ expenses to defend frivolous lawsuits, so anyone who blankly states "oh, use robots.txt and don't worry about a thing" sounds like a beginner in the intricacies of the law to me.
GitHub Branch Lists
prosa, great question - 100% think you must have a graphically appealing product out of the gate, but like you said, it is a fine line that you must walk. I try to test my thesis early and often, but my tests will only be taken serious if I put something out that is engaging. Quality must be there, but be mindful to not get caught up in the "extras" that will delay seeing if you should continue down your current path or course correct.
Yes. Vi is also not too dissimilar to ed, but much more useful. (Also NetHack is quite similar to Vi, and much more useful and fun in turn.)
My net worth is less than $10,000. I live in New York, so I neither own nor need a car. I think I could pull it off. I buy about $1000 of computer science textbooks that I've been meaning to buy, take a nice vacation, then put the rest into physical gold and hide it. It would be a huge hassle, but less life-ruining than medical debt is for people who are older and more established.

99% of what I own is the knowledge and skill I've gained over the years, and that can't be taken in BK.

If my net worth were greater than $50,000, or if I had a wife and children to protect, I would have to buy health insurance.

Realistically, if I thought I were about to get sick, I'd get on a health insurance plan as easily as I could. It'd be easier to bribe a doctor sufficient to hide a pre-X (post-date the intake forms) than to pull off bankruptcy fraud.
Microsoft Warns of New IE Code Execution Flaw
Great, thank you. Looking forward.
DSi cameras used for clever 3D tilting hidden object DSiWare game
Watch Your Stocks Like a Fish Tank
I'm not sure that I would be so willing to call a guy who's published 90-ish papers in CE a dummy.
I love the comment at the end. "We have permission to do this, the sales manager...". As if that makes it okay. Someone who has nothing to do with the technical operations says its okay to cut a cable in the data center (magic trick or not).

That would be like setting up a sales call, convincing the sales manager that he is going to close a big deal and then saying something ridiculous that completely ruins any chance of a sale. In that situation wouldn't he be really pissed off?
Similar to the story of William Sidis.
I didn't even notice the actual headline or the first sentence of the post. Years of internet use have taught me to start reading below the largest text on the page.
There is also [the possibly out of date?] Rudix (http://rudix.org/), which is basically standard OSX packages (.pkg) of typical unix tools. Their summary:

> Rudix features a world class collection of pre-compiled and ready to use Unix compatible software which are not available from a fresh installation of Mac OS X but are popular among other Unix environments. Here you can find utilities, programming languages, libraries and tools delivered as standard Mac OS X packages.

I haven't used this, though it may appeal to some.
No, it worked just fine for me. Well done on the game, BTW.