skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There are people who never grow up and behave irresponsibly. The first example, people who party and lie about being sick can easily be detected by their peers and removed from the group when their partying stops them from doing their share.
If however they pretend to be sick or in any way evade some things at work, but do perform, it is not the worker who is the problem, but something in the way the company operates.

The other example on developers estimates has more to do with people being optimistic in estimates by nature. Another cause is misaligned interests where a developer gets payed the same if he is on time, misses a deadline or does the work before the deadline and gets more work for reward. When the incentive is direct, a customer gets his update on time and pays the next years support fee which in turn gets the developer more money and the developer can connect these, there is no problem with estimates or deadlines. This is ofcourse hard, but doable easily through openness.

It boils down to being surrounded by people you trust. If someone can't be trusted it is a huge waste to manage them. Finding responsible adults is hard, but in the long term brings more value, not just in terms of €€€ but in a better balance between work and life. Life is too short for squeezing productivity from losers.
Yes. I'm at the Dojo right now!
George W., Knight of Eulogia (2000)
Big Nike High White Yellow Green Save 30% - 70%
Much as I love _why's works, you may have a point - I've been reading through http://pine.fm/LearnToProgram/ on the suggestion of a couple commenters on the post, and I'm pretty impressed so far. I'm going to forward it along to the friend whose question spawned the post.
Being a UX Team of One
PG's assertions based on anecdotal or no evidence used to be one of my main complaints about his older essays. Though I often still agreed with his overall points, I didn't like how he would reach them. Having said that, it's definitely hard to toe the line between succinctness and backing up your claims.

But, as it turns out, he's gotten a lot better about substantiating his claims. I'm tempted not to substantiate my claim after that sentence, but his presentation at startup school last year was pretty much all about the evidence.
Apple Patent War continues - this time with the poor HTC
There is an interesting documentary related to this: Food Inc.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QqQVll-MP3I
While the article's content uses the phrase, nothing suggests that this distribution, which appears to be a very loosely-rebranded stock Linux, is any sort of "cyber-weapon" in terms of digital warfare.
I can't help but see this post as the blog equivalent of the guy trying to keep people from fighting in the real life, at the same time trying to draw attention to him, and at how mature he is.The article has almost no content at all.
Because you can run the exact same machine instance on other hardware with VMWare, which makes you much more flexible in purchasing hardware.

Because you can host the VMWare instance on a SAN and not lose it when the machine dies, which allows cheaper machines.

Complete machine failover is easier.
3-5. Way too many competitive threats for it to stay on top forever, but Facebook needs time to ossify and get slow.
Well, from reading the article I'd say it's neither secret nor a weapon either way.

I doubt DPRK cares about the GPL at all. I imagine the app suite that's "similar to OpenOffice" is OpenOffice, perhaps slightly reworked. A full OpenOffice-like suite would take a lot of time and people to build from scratch, for no real benefit.
Is it too late to fix a Babylonian mistake?
A proposal for a new calendar
To clarify, I think YC makes a lot of sense for a lot of startups. However, I am not sure if my startup would be a good fit for YC. It is slightly older, already profitable, etc. YC seems to invest really, really early on, which is why 5-10% and a small amount of cash makes sense.

However, even though I am not part of YC, I'd love to meet up with fellow SF startups -- I have never found an online community I identify more with than HN. Also, surely many people who give advice to YC startups are not on the payroll and would be happy to talk to me, if I had their contact info.

Maybe I'm wrong since I'm not part of the group, but I feel like the identity of "young, full-time startup" is much more important than "young, full-time startup [yc funded]".
Wow. I can't believe I have to explain this.

You do, because it's silly. By the same token go and ask any founder who did not take YC funding and was successful.
People care about equity well before they succeed. Talk to any investor.

Go and ask any YC founder who is currently successful

Explain to me, again, how this is not selection bias?
Plancruncher is the web application that implements the concept I presented at the recent 'Bootstrapping-and-agility' event: http://www.meetup.com/Bootstrapping-and-agility/calendar/123...

Two of the attendees blogged their thoughts:

http://turtlethink.com/2010/02/business-plans-2-0-lean-and-i...

http://www.involvd.com/blog/2010/02/17/the-route-to-launch-d...
This reads like Dante's inferno.
Paul Graham wrote an essay on software patents in 2006. I found it helpful to get an overview of the wider issue:

http://www.paulgraham.com/softwarepatents.html

I wonder whether this part is relevant:

"When you read of big companies filing patent suits against smaller ones, it's usually a big company on the way down, grasping at straws. For example, Unisys's attempts to enforce their patent on LZW compression. When you see a big company threatening patent suits, sell. When a company starts fighting over IP, it's a sign they've lost the real battle, for users."
Don't forget you need about $10K to file each idea as well. That is probably the biggest barrier to entry.
Our gadget photo comics (I'm creating these with my neigbhor in China)
This is simply not true. I work for a major internet company that has millions of users. We use SQL for all of our data (images and SWFs excepted, of course). We do all logging to SQL tables. We use key-value cache servers for hot, non-relational data, but we don't have a lot of that.

We built most of our data center with cheap hardware. It is quite possible that we splurged on a load balancer and some other funky networking gadgets; I don't know. We did, however build quite a lot of custom software to abstract away the fact that we have split our data among dozens of machines. This is essentially the work of two people (one hardware, one software). Finding the people who can build such a system is difficult, to put it mildly, but once you find them, you don't need deep pockets.

Reddit is another example of a site that runs on SQL. Part of the problem with the "SQL won't scale" argument is that essentially all of the live queries function like key-value lookups (or lookups against a very small number of rows). If you're tempted to do something insane like service a request with a join, then you're doing it wrong and you need to cache.

Lookups by index will have the same performance characteristics no matter what. It doesn't matter if you're using a Python dict, an index in MySQL, or a key-value store.

THEY ARE ALL O(1).
Wow, I'm surprised to hear this is legit. That site is extremely shady looking, and there's nothing stopping me from making an exact copy, coming up with a similarlongnamelikethis, and stealing peoples' addresses. Very scary!

They should at least reverse proxy from something that Google obviously controls and that has an SSL cert.
Ask HN: Anybody else using "noprocrast"?
Are you guys using noprocrast setting (in the profile page)? Do you find it useful? How do you resist the urge to turn it off?
How A Good Manager Is Like A Ninja
Audiobooks are of course an option. However, I've found that, for me, listening to something isn't the same as reading something.

When I read something, it sticks much better than when I listen.
It's actually the same when I read something aloud, more often than not I have to re-read the text for myself afterwards, reading aloud doesn't seem to register with me. :D
The cost of monoculture (2007)
This is in a work environment too though.

I was more interested by the use of "frontline" in the original posting. It's not so much technical merit as your ability to, well, be a programmer (as a career).
I used to, but I turned it off and then found I didn't really need it. It seems much more effective to have a job that you enjoy more than Hacker News, than to just block HN. Otherwise, you'll quickly find other distractions.
Absolutely. I think forcing these factory farms into more wholesome practices might accomplish a few things:

1) More research into sustainable farming techniques
2) More research into automation that makes these sustainable techniques feasible at a market cost

Unfortunately, the companies that can afford to do that research are too busy using their money to genetically modify their crops and pump their livestock full of drugs.

If the government forced these guys to cut back through sanctions, the cheapest food might not be the most unhealthy anymore. Issues of environmental and public health concerns are one area where I actually agree with stronger governmental powers vs corporations - people won't vote with the dollars because it's a) necessary to live and b) they usually live so far away from the heinous conditions that they don't even know about it - or worse, don't care.
I'm in the very exact situation like you. I also do not have a programming background and started to learn to program (Ruby) last fall. "Learn to Program" was also my starting point. Like you said in your blog, it is a decent book, but didn't get me very far. Being involved in a Rails project, the ultimate goal is to master Rails in a way that I can work on small features for our project. Right now, I'm kind of cross-reading "Heads First Rails" and "Beginning Ruby". "_why's poignant guide to Ruby" is also on my reading list, but more because of my fascination for _why.

One advice (from beginner to beginner) is to find yourself a good mentor. I've got to know a Rails programmer and he is helping me to get into Rails and giving me advice on good ways to work (using the command line etc) and how to solve problems in Rails.
Woah now. Okay, I apologize for calling you "friend".

Fact is, we all have different risk tolerances. I can tell you to play your pocket aces aggressively, but if you want to slow play them, thats up to you.

I did my best to rationalize with you why the numbers don't matter in the big picture. The best question to ask yourself is: can I create more value than the value of the stake that I give up? If the answers yes, then give up the stake, whatever the number. Most of us believe we'll get at least equal value, and that giving up 5%-10% is worth it. Thats why the numbers mean nothing to us, we don't equate 5% to being a lot because we know our new 95% will be worth more than the previous 100%.
> Developers from Canada ... will receive a Nexus One.

Does that also mean that some day soon I might be able to give you money and in exchange you would send me your product/service?
Sorry, too late to edit :( I wasn't aiming for sensational, just dry humor. I apologize.
The Power of Digital Ecosystems
Unfortunately life is to short to wait for a person you can fully trust and then starting your own business.

It is better to start with few people to be honest with and try to squeeze productivity from others than waiting through your life to find a enough good persons to work with.
If you don't do nothing you usually do not meet much people and thus have a little chance of meeting someone valuable. But if you do work with what you have, you start getting publicity and more good persons visit your company, and you can pick.
Even with that approach you cannot have a company of completely honest employees/partners, because even if you do think so one day, they can be the ones lying and you just didn't find that out yet.
I must sound like a complete dumbass, but could you give me more info?

TechCrunch parties <- how do I get in on that?

YC/Startup parties <- ditto

Entrepreneurs Helping Entrepreneurs event <- this sounds great, but how did you hear about this?

Lean Startup meetup <- this looks great! I will definitely be at the next one. Thanks. :)
I too am jealous of the Y Combinator Experience. To rectify this I have submitted my application. I don't have a degree from MIT either, and this blog post has helped me remove some of my concerns. Thanks Ryan.
“Who Is Online” Widget With PHP, MySQL & jQuery
That looks really interesting. Sadly I'm in San Francisco.
i am working on using closure libraries on backend. converted some and seems to be working fine.
Just sounds like every song in the charts to me and I am a native English speaker.
Creativity can strike when a computer isn't near you? Not everyone has a computer? It's just s toy? There are lots of reasons to do this on a mobile device.
Mathematics in Ancient India [pdf]
While there's somewhat of a culture of being "hardcore" and taking lots of classes at MIT, I find that many people abandon that mentality after their freshman year. In reality, most people are just trying to get by with the minimum 4 classes, which can already be a lot of work. The question is whether the others that have the intelligence/work ethic/time management skills/etc to take on more work are inclined to load up on more classes or take on side projects.

The answer depends a good deal on the kind of MIT subculture you live in. I live in a place where people like to build awesome things, and frankly, I feel a lot more guilty about not making enough time to hack on side projects than I do about not taking more classes.

On the other hand, in certain other dorms there are strong communities of math/cs/physics olympians, some of whom regularly take 8+ classes a semester.
Alice Abernathy
Cool Twitter feed from the fashionista Alice Abernathy the self made fashion queen of cyberspace.
Two of your links don't work. The first post is interesting, but I think the Crockford book is a much better read. Norvig's articles and wikipedia are of course awesome! I don't count them as blog posts though.

The other point you illustrate is that most reading on the internet is scattered into bits and pieces. Going through all of those topics in one morning is too much, for my brain anyway. I'd much rather read on one of those topics at length and work out some problems and code. Reading small posts here and there may make me feel smarter, but I'm not convinced it actually makes me smarter. I ask myself, "How does knowing this change my expected behaviour or my anticipation of the world?".
The berkeley interfaces that come out of the box with e.g. Python don't have any of the advanced features that the sqlite interface has, e.g. concurrent access. Any advanced usage of Berkeley DB is far more complex than sqlite, e.g. try opening a database so that multiple users can read/write it. With sqlite, no extra steps are necessary if you have an occasional separate process that needs to access the database (obviously it's not built for efficient concurrent access).

Ad-hoc SQL queries on the sqlite database are also a huge win. Much better than defining your own data structures and then tools to read/write them.

I don't know you mean by "proper" transactions. Sqlite has transactions for DML.
Just make sure you really do slow down.

http://www.esquire.com/features/answer-fella/toilet-reading-...
They work for me now on Firefox on OS X.

I suspect that the bug got fixed.
That's quite an interesting point - if you restrict holy wars to the "my imaginary friend is better than your imaginary friend.... fight!" kind then you are probably correct.

I'm trying to think of other real "holy wars" - the 30 Years War is perhaps the only other major one I can think of. I guess most other "holy wars" are really justs lingering fall out from conquests Ottoman invasion of Europe, Ireland, .....
Growing Traffic for your Web Startup
Why bzr and launchpad?  Launchpad is open source.
Thanks! We are about to release a pretty sweet update to the comic in the next couple days.
Techcrunch parties: by reading Techcrunch. I have been to CrunchUp party, Star Trek and Avatar screening.

YC/Startup parties: Some people I know RSVPed on Facebook. I also follow several Twitter accounts of YC founders.

Entrepreneurs Helping Entrepreneurs event: Saw it on Techcrunch. I applied and got in.
MTG Merchant 
The Web's Best Deals on Magic: The Gathering Cards.
Comparing Eventlet and gevent
A few months ago, I mentioned on HN that I've switched to bzr again... after having troubles with it a few years ago. Then someone asked me to report back after a month or so to say how I went.

In short, bzr is going fine for me. I've had none of the problems I had before. I think in large part because they've settled on stable releases, and development releases. So they are concentrating on making a stable release, at the same time continuing their great pace of development on their development releases. Also, the file format seems to have stabalised... and just lots of polish generally I guess.

All new projects I've been using bzr. As well a few open source projects of mine I've released using bzr+launchpad. Also there are a couple of launchpad bzr using open source projects I've been using.

Finally I've used it with a couple of subversion projects... which work really well. I just create a bzr branch... which downloads the whole history locally. Then when I commit, it commits to the svn branch. However, I can easily branch with bzr and commit to that branch, before merging back into svn. Haven't had any trouble doing it that way.

Anyway... there's my bzr experience. No issues this time around. Kind of boring, like how a vcs should be.
Does "War on terror" count as a holy war? Then we could have a contest after all. It's not a few hundred years yet, but give it some time to unfold ;)
"The RDBMS cabal set a particular set of standards (ACID)"
What's the problem really? ACID or SQL? They are mutually exclusive. You can have ACID without SQL (BDB) or SQL without ACID (MySQL 3.X). Which of the two is the problem?
Ask HN: What to do with two unused domains?
I own collegetanks.com and everstretch.com. The plans I had for both of them fell through, so now they just sit on the interwebs, useful to noone - myself included.

My question is this: what can I do with the domains until they expire? Could I, for instance, put ads on them - for tank tops and stretching/workout equipment, respectively - and hope for the best? Or, could I sell them? Or, are there other options?
Yes, Google analyze the email for ad purposes. I thought we were talking about much worse behaviors (e.g. looking for business insider information or things usable for blackmail).
I'm not sure where people are getting this idea from. DBA != "Guy who works with relational databases." If you have a sufficiently large amount of data and/or a sufficiently high amount of requests for that data, you will eventually need someone to manage your data(base| store) and the accompanying cluster.

Edit: Or, now the programmer is the DBA, and he still requires the skillset a DBA.
The Bloom boxes are nothing more than more efficient natural gas powered generators. If anyone truly believed that anthropogenic CO2 will cause catastrophic climate change in the 21st century they would not be looking toward Bloom boxes as a meaningful solution to that problem.
Do they get traffic? If so, monetize it by parking with a service or whip up a little site and stick some Adsense on. If they don't get traffic, then either get rid of it or develop it.

You can try selling them, but I'm not sure they're worth much.
Quite a useful post, almost everything there I had considered the right things to do already, but it's nice to have an account of someone who has gone through it, so you know you are not alone in the same approach, thanks.
I have that wish for humanity: I'd really like people to use words that are in proportion with what they describe.

Things like: "we're dead" (when we just talk about loosing a contract or even closing one company), "it's totally catastrophic" (when someone cannot make it to a meeting, or the vegetables you had planned for dinner are not available anymore at the groceries).

Come on.

Talking about "worst holy war" for tooling trends - sorry, not for me, even for the purpose of creating a catchy headline or of underlining a point.

Oh and yes: I use both NoSQL and SQL, sometimes in conjunction in the same system.
Interesting... how were the Crusades larger/worse than the muslim expansion all the way to Spain/Balkan/India?

(Let us bunch the Crusades as one single example, at least for this argument.)

(The Huns/Mongols were religiously tolerant and motivated by conquest, right?)
The RDBMS cabal set a particular set of standards (ACID) that were a good match for a lot of the early "big data" systems and the computing infrastructure of the time, but times change

Times change, but in the sense of adding additional systems with new requirements.

The existing systems have not gone away, and are not going anywhere. In fact there are more than ever of them around. I certainly still want my bank to run a system that has ACID transactions. Likewise my mobile phone's billing system, utilities bill, etc.
For everyone interested in this topic I strongly recommend "Eating Animals" by Jonathan Safran Foer:

http://www.amazon.com/Eating-Animals-Jonathan-Safran-Foer/dp...

I became a vegetarian before reading this book, but reading it only made me more convinced that to stop eating meat and fish was one of the best decisions in my life.
Housefull Movie Reviews, Wallpapers, Story, Trailers
Housefull is an upcoming Bollywood Indian film being directed by Sajid Khan and starring Akshay Kumar, Deepika Padukone, Lara Dutta and Randhir Kapoor. Ritesh Deshmukh and Jiah Khan will play important roles in the film. The film's shoot has been progressing for several months in London.
They gave away phones at the Android developer days. So it was to people already showing an interest in Android, and investing their time (half a day). Maybe just giving one to every iPhone developer would be too easy - they should at least show some investment into Android? Not every iPhone developer will become an Android developer, but I am sure nobody would mind getting a free phone.
>I use both NoSQL and SQL, sometimes in conjunction in the same system.

As any sane developer would, and without having to go all-or-none either which way. I don't understand the people who are balls to the wall for either side. They both have a purpose.
The 30 Year War was really a Holy war?

Consider that Sweden, one of the big participants, was financed by the famously Protestant country France! :-)
Amazon Kindle: (Not) Made in America
> But it's a two-edged sword

I second that. Use this kind of speak with people that are aware of rhetoric, neuro-linguistic programming or non-violent-communication (for instance) and you will shoot you in the foot deep.
Gave up a day job Now what? – Report number 0 – Part 2
ПО для вязальной техники
Продажа аксессуаров для вязальных машин. ПО KnittStyler для подключения вязальной машины к компьютеру. Обучение!
As we see it's not true that corporations buy patents 'just in case'. It's nice tool to axe the enemy :)
On risk and health-and-safety culture
You have to read this (I read the french version, I hope the english one is close):

A Short Course in Intellectual Self-Defense

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1583227652
Ask HN: Co-working space in Delhi, India
Does anyone here know of any good co-working space in Delhi, India.

Or, would anyone be interested in sharing office space?
This could be good. Whether they are North Korea or not, imagine the pace and polish Linux could pick up with an entire country dependent upon it! Assuming, of course, they submit to upstream.
Google rewards Android devs with free phones
I'm wishing for a multiplayer portal where I can eliminate others through clever portal usage.