skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In programming, I have found it's very useful to step back and remember why we do things. Unit tests are not intrinsically wonderful, they are a great way to accomplish certain things. If they don't accomplish those things, dump them. Just as a concrete example.

If your goal is to produce a well-socialized child, keep your eyes on the prize. You describe some cases where in fact following the suggestion of leaving them in high school didn't work out; this also matches my experience. My point here is that actually you can't make a call about whether you should leave a given person in high school; in the exact same environment, one will flourish and learn a lot, the other will crash and burn and learn horribly pathological things.

So, ultimately, my point is that if your goal is to have a "good child" (without getting into whatever that may mean), debating whether "children" should or should not be left in school or never accelerated or moved to college or anything is actually a waste of time, because there is no such thing as a "children" in the first place.
China: Closing for Business?
No, NYC couldn't have created a small, crack team for several reasons:

1) Government Software jobs pay less than civilian. It can take up to 6 months of paperwork to hire someone. While that paperwork is in process the job applicant must wait and can't be hired. Guess what kind of developers the government gets?

2) Requirements, they've never heard of them (sarcasm.) My last project had the language changed 3 times, went from a plug-in to a stand-alone app to an API, and during the 4 years had 3 different "final" decision makers. Feature creep was more like feature tidal wave.

3) Paperwork. There's massive amounts of it. One of my coworkers spent 1 month writing paperwork for 10 lines of code.

I could go on but the government does everything in its power to interfere with rapid development and then wonders why costs overrun.
For those that prefer the print version: http://www.businessweek.com/print/magazine/content/10_14/b41...
Whither hi-fi?
We have 1. But a base version wouldn't work for them.
two things: 1) the about page throws an Unhandled exception error, and 2) by not linking back to the original photo page on flickr (from the individual image page), you are breaking flickr's TOS.

Other than that, looks pretty cool.
Yes! Idea is nothing, execution is everything...

Ten people thought of the Spyparty idea three years ago. One of them spent two days doodling up rooms...

Great novelists spent their time rewriting their text. Mediocre novelists spend their time worrying about someone "stealing their idea".
Ack. Didn't mean to downvote you, sorry.

And agreed, if you want a Mac, just buy one. Refurb or second hand, if there's too much of a sticker shock.
That doesn't look like an infinite roll of paper tape to me.
move around. If your current place does not have people who are significantly better than you are, get another job elsewhere. Repeat until you are surrounded by people who are better than you are.

Develop humility. (False humility is almost always good enough.) remember, If you have not gotten into a place full of people better than you, then you have failed the previous goal. In the technical side of things, almost always it is best to error on the side of humility. (the opposite is true on the business side of things.)

talking about your accomplishments is okay, but it's usually good to acknowledge that you are just learning, or otherwise downplay it.

Ask what you can do to help try to be useful. There are many good people who actively look for mentors. The hard part is finding them.

If you do find someone good willing to help you out, take advantage of it. When I was a little younger than you, I got to work with Paul Vixie. My great regret is that I did not take advantage of the situation as much as I could have; he was willing to mentor me a lot more than I took advantage of. there is a place for doing it all yourself (and certainly, that is the only way to go if you can't find good mentors.) but if you find good people willing to help you, let them help you.

And lastly, choose a mentor who really is better than you. Getting mentored by a mediocre has, eh, mediocre value.
Thats very well put together. Great attention to detail with the user display as well.

I wonder how long it took to put together.
Field Collapsing in SOLR - Supercalafragilisticexpialadocious
Every modern american political campaign has an 'online action team' that will get flash alerts and talking points to help shape public perception of the news. Any news site will have people who are known partisans for points of view who are regularly involved and regurgitating the party line at every opportunity. We also have a huge contingent of people who promote commercial interests through social media. If you add up the shills, the various different formats of political astro-turfing and the subtle but universally understood sanctioning of some points of view as 'unserious'. I am not so sure that the Chinese are ahead of us in that game. We have a greater surface diversity of opinion, but those who step out of the bounds of the acceptable range of opinion are sanctioned in recognizable ways.
The effects of anger on decision making
Thanks, very helpful.

However, the challenge is we haven't started a full blown cycle yet. So we really have only 1 "client" so far. This is in a space where customers are not very innovative which is where we come in.

Seems like we do have to start the customer development process.
My university is banning under 18s after several centuries of admitting brilliant child prodigies.
Simply because government rules call for detailed background checks for anyone working with children.
We aren't sure if this would only apply to a kid's teachers, all teaching staff, all researchers, all staff or even every other >18year old student they met.

Not joking - there was a case about whether in high school any student who turned 18 in their final year needed a police check if they helped a still 17yro student with their work and so were 'in a teaching position'
We saw this earlier this month: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1167754
Firing on all neurons: Where consciousness comes from
Would you consider i18n marketing? That's how I see this 100 version effort.
Is Customer Service Better than Sex?
At Digg we had probably a hundred or so tables, each table had varying indexes (a char here, an integer there, a date+time here)

This may be part of the problem, actually. 100 tables to serve posts with attached comments? Um.
what prompted the rewrite?
Thanks for the aerospace insight. I'm sure there are other issues with the half-baked idea as well.
IPhone Style Radio and Checkbox Switches using JQuery and CSS
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coded_Anti-Piracy
yeah, i think this needs to be better understood. norvig was not "solving" much of anything there. he was simply writing out a solution for a problem he had solved many times before.

that doesn't mean he's not a smart guy, but it's wrong to infer, from comparing those articles, that he doesn't make mistakes.
I agree with you that high school culture is a dead-end. . .but I do think that social interaction with age-peers is valuable and here is why:

It changes your context of self. If everyone you know is younger than you, or smaller than you, or not as smart as you, you will see yourself as the teacher or protector or strategist. If they are all older, or bigger, or smarter, you will see yourself as the upstart, or weakling, or pupil. If all your friends are always 15 years older than you, when are you an adult (in your own mind)?

Being around age-peers helps one better understand and assert themselves and gives them opportunities to make friendships that may come easier than bridging a 10 year gap.

I'm not saying the age-peers shouldn't also be super smart and accomplished teenagers - I'm saying there are real-world benefits to not always being the youngest of your friends.
If or when you get a massively multi-player version, you'll be able to have every variation of the Turing test (say, a scenario with ten humans and one killer bot).

What would be really fun is if this were to ramp-up to a large enough scale that there was a financial incentive to create narrow-Turing passing bots - it would obsolete the Loebner prize.
Note that if you want it for iPad development you should look for a screen bigger than the iPad simulator.

I'd suggest either getting a Mini off of eBay or the Apple Store's refurbished section (when they're there, usually aren't any), or building a desktop Hackintosh.
I have to disagree that WestJet is the Canadian equivelant to SWA.
Though they don't charge for baggage, they do charge you for a seat... after you've bought a ticket!
So after you've bought your ticket, you have to pay a $10+ charge to purchase your seat.

The details are here
http://www.flyforless.ca/news-westjet/westjet-news37.html

If that isn't nickel & diming, or bait and switch or whatever, I don't know what is.
It seems watermarking with a patern of dots is already popular, but embeding the watermark in a color histogram might be much less distracting

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAP_code
What's surprising is that the legacy system still works after the reimplementation. The guy might know what he's doing and this way he really understands the domain now.
And I concur - as another Android fanboy.
> So we hired sales people with expensive hobbies, and watched them work the magic.

In case anyone misses the reference, there was a post on HN a while back about why you want salespeople to have expensive hobbies. It basically boiled down to this:

Sales staff get paid more if they make more sales; people with expensive hobbies need to get paid more; sales staff with expensive hobbies need to make more sales to fund their lifestyles, and will thus be more driven to do so.
Actually, You are allowed to talk about your setup, you're just not allowed to release your actually data. But that's true for a lot of systems.
The vigilante's guide to social networking
Even classical music is rather suspect, although I've lost the original article: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/02/thoughtful-music.html#...
The curse of the gifted programmer is apparently the need to deal with occasional direct emails from Eric Raymond.
Most likely it's more than time tracking. It's also paychecks. And once you get into paychecks in government, there are LOTS of nasty little loopholes and special rules that apply only to this small set of people, etc, etc, etc.
GitHub moves commit notes inline
I've found that with good code, you actually have to read relatively little, because comments explain what it does. You read a specific section if you want to figure out the detail of what the comment says, or find it surprising ("really, it just does that in 5 lines?"). I try to do this with my own code, because I don't even like reading my own code.

Put differently, I 100% agree with Knuth's still-mostly-unheeded call for literate programming, as the real solution to making code readable.
It's rarely about being first to market. Apple didn't make the first MP3 player, Microsoft didn't make the first GUI, Google didn't make the first search engine. Stick with what you're doing; you can't be first, but you can be the best.

Personally, I would also keep in mind the 'competitor card'. 'Well, your competitor bought our competitor's version, and it's good, but if you go with us, you'll get these extra awesome features that'll help you get ahead of them' or whatever. Then again, that's a job for sales, not for development, and good sales people will know when to play it.
Sure, first someone took out a hit on Tiger Woods... apparently next in line was Toyota.
One question about your implementation. Last time I checked Django their file upload mechanism wasn't pretty, I'm not sure if you're dealing with file uploads, but did it cause any pains? Please enlighten me.
Entrepreneurs should have a four year perspective
I was expecting this to be a group to play mastermind with other like-minded single founders. Oh shucks.
It is true that there exists an entire spin machine for every campaign or cause. And yes, pundits do work for the news organisations. Same goes for every major corporation in the world.

* gasp *

The key here is that we all know who they are, and know that they represent a particular view that they are pushing. It's all about transparency.

It isn't astroturfing unless you're pretending to be grassroots in the first place.
Learn from their mistakes. Look at the reactions from their customers, and make sure that you ship with their #1 wishlist feature and make sure that feature is emphasized.

This is a good point to emphasize. Let someone else be first to market and make all the mistakes. Learn from their mistakes and respond faster than they can and you can capitalize on their first-to-market advantage.

People generally prefer the most minimal product that actually solves their problem -- only established users want more features.

I'm not entirely convinced of this. People will tend to buy things with more features because it has more features that they might someday want. The key is complexity. If it's simple to use despite those extra features (or because of them), then they're a benefit. If they make the product harder to use or slower, it's a drawback.

In Japan, the cell phone industry is the logical extreme of this. People cycle phones at ridiculous intervals to get more and better features, most of which don't work well or at all, and all of which make the phone more complicated to use. Yet still, it's a status symbol that you paid for a non-functional accelerometer that your friend doesn't have.
> Now anything pro-China is tainted.

Why? An argument is an argument is an argument. If it holds water, let it carry the water. Saying that a pro-China argument is tainted just because there is a possibility that the person making the argument is paid to make the argument is fallacious, it's a kind of reverse Appeal to Authority.

Of course, there are certain arguments that are tainted. For example,if someone says "I counted 280,000 signatures on this Kick Google Out of China petition," that argument is suspect. As is the "My friends and everyone I know see no value in Free Speech" anecdotal argument.

And I'm sure there are some others that are subject to scrutiny. But if someone makes a good argument backed up with reasonable premises, it could come straight from their Premier for all I care.
Wikipedia suggests that Ryanair release these outlandish ideas once in a while to get some free publicity. While I obviously can't verify that I'm personally inclined to believe it. Since even restaurants have regulations which force them to have toilets when they are over a certain size I can't imagine this idea would be legal. If it is then it'd only be a matter of time before someone who had one too many coffees before getting on board sued them for breaching their human rights by not letting them go to the toilet!

I'd agree Ryanair take the opposite model from what was described in this article but they have also highly optimized their approach. No seat back pockets for you to dump your rubbish etc.
Reacting to 'Memcached is not a store'
Why link to a loose copy?

why not the hundreds of mailing list archive where you can read the prequel, or the followup?
Especially as it's a come-on for a term-paper farm.
it's actually not that bad ... especially if you use ModelForms ... you just need to tell the FileField where to upload.
Things SQL needs: sargability of monotonic functions
Internationalizing software is an engineering effort to fulfill a marketing objective: namely, extending placement into foreign countries.

When you internationalize a film, there's a bit of "filmmaking" (in that you have to have voice actors dubbing the original film, or you have to have translators rewriting your dialogue) but unless Cameron's more multilingual than I thought, I rather doubt directing all those voice actors and supervising those subtitle writers was any artistic effort on his part. His input was a marketing input: I want my film dubbed and subbed into dozens of languages and shown on half a dozen different screen types. (Cameron's not the first director to film with multiple aspect ratios in mind, nor is he the first to make the artistic call of having different aspect ratios, but I'm sure it affected the filmmaking.)

I didn't mean to take away from his studio's technical chops. Avatar's raised the bar for special effects, distribution, and pioneering new screen formats. But it's not a "labor of love", it's just well executed business.
That depends on the business. Some businesses consider things like that proprietary information. Some go so far as to consider just about every detail of their system including hardware and even OS sensitive.

Others are less secretive, but still want to protect the details of their schema. Properly and carefully developping a schema for a major system can be a big project that reveals a lot about your business and can give an upstart competitor an advantage.
Is Alexa Relevant in 2010?
Is this a joke? No, I'm being completely serious here. Because it really is so awful that it feels like a joke.
Grass mud horse is a homonym for "fuck your mom" i believe.

Anyways I don't think swearing in Chinese is that big of a deal. Everyone I knew as a kid said it and I said it to my parents all the time... Or maybe we were obscene.
unless said smart people were in a committee :-)
Exactly. Rather than a computer trying to seem human (the Turing Test), and human is trying to seem like a computer (reverse Turing Test).
Sure.

1. I haz bizness idea

2. LOL credit cardz

3. ????

4. OH NOES

I'm not being facetious here, really. Lot of businesses get off the ground using bank credit. Kevin Smith famously made Clerks on his credit cards (a film = a startup), won a prize, and sold the IP for a lot of money and further success. But lots of other people have followed the same recipe and failed.

Moral: do not assume 'less burdensome regulations' = 'level playing field', especially if you are the needy party.
In each of your other examples, you are listing two things that are direct (or almost direct) competitors. It makes sense to compare them and then pick one over the other.

SQL vs RDBMS are further apart. There are cases where it makes sense to use both for different parts of your system. Sure you can force one to do the job of the other, but that shows you don't know when to pick one over the other (or were otherwised forced to do that...), not that they really target the same use-cases.
Facebook's primary data storage is MySQL supported by memcached. Cassandra is only used for messaging (inbox search?) This is at least from what I have read - it could be outdated thought.
Iter8 CoFounder Hackathon (San Francisco, only 8 seats)
Just because some bloggers are obsessed with arguing whether NoSQL or RDBMSs are "better" doesn't mean we need to post every article to HN. Why don't we agree to just stop?
I probably just don't have the relevant plugins installed. I installed vim on this computer for some reason or another, but I usually use Emacs or nvi.
I know this is off topic, but techno remixes of classics sounds interesting. Any recommendations?
asked matrixownsyou on #startups to post this for us (our fresh account got autobanned by HN)
No, the thing here its plain robbery
What's Jason Calacanis's accent?
yes. I don't mind dups in general- good to get a refresher once in a while- but when it wasn't even a whole month ago...
Doesn't Arc require you to use a version of mzscheme from 2007?
Tell us more about who you are and what gets you excited before I waste time bragging about myself to an anonymous wall.

Also, far more minor, lack of clarity with the question Skype or XMPP => I'd just reply "XMPP" ;)
Steve Jobs and Eric Schmidt are getting coffee at Starbucks right now
Daring Fireball: Generals' War
Websites for Spotify Fans
Actually there are tons of voting groups of Flickr, I was really hoping that app was a way to do that better, but everything is lumped together, so it doesn't.
37 Signals profiled in Slate.com
Yeah. This seems strange to me as well. If you need biometrics to prevent people from reporting hours when they aren't even in the building, why would you even want them to show up in the first place. If you get them to show up in order to collect a paycheck that doesn't mean they are going to do useful work. I'm guessing the problem is that you can't fire public employees.
Non-Profits Can Increase Engagement With YouTube
I am actually working on something similar to what you mention in your second paragraph. I hope to have it in alpha sometime next month.
I think the word you want is "bimodal".
many of the projects with less-technical users do just that. The guy who wrote the billing system i use, http://freeside.biz is a good example. He charges for features and if you want it installation and other support.
It is arguable that the need for a DBA does disappear with the change in the systems. The base approach of the relational model is that there is a professional DBA who makes sure that the mission-critical data is available in a format that multiple applications and multiple department can use directly (the type of data is know but the ordering isn't set). Thus DBA is "hat" that most programmers can't "wear", especially since a large portion of programmers don't understand the relational model.

On the other hand, Nosql and object-databases allow a programmer to just stuff data into the a data-store without worrying about a cohesive datamodel. If we consider this as mission-critical data that multiple departments of a large organization would want to see in multiple forms, then we can find many ways that the approach of "just save this array of values" produces serious problems.

But there are many applications where these problems don't appear. Diggs seems like it could get away with doing nosql. A health-record site seems like it could not do nosql since it ultimately is going to want ACID-and-beyond in its data model.
How about solving related or similar problems? The way one may approach those problems may give insight into incremental steps necessary to solve the hard problem.
New Version of Digg Revealed
Times and Sunday Times to charge for online contents - Starting from June
Inch-by-Inch: Spotify Now Buying Server Space in United States
Oh, I'm awesome, I just don't like answering to other people and not working to my own schedule.
Wikileaks is a medium for whistleblowers. No such resource can be nor is trusted blindly, no matter what past track record shows. Every leak is evaluated on it's own merit.

It is also public, which means it's there for public benefit. Of course governments or other parties can and do fiddle with it, but information that's in the open will be evaluated and eventually will either be confirmed or denied to fit into larger picture.
I do know of one Start Up that is making huge amounts of $$$ from the government: http://www.palantirtech.com/government

.

It seems that if you know how to navigate the red tape and can deliver a compelling product you can make millions.
Or PhP vs Every Other Language Out There. The NoSQL crowd is mainly saying that RDBMS isn't for everyone, and that other storage methods need a bit of time in the limelight.
There's a bit more going on there. See http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2009/07/code-its-trivial.ht... for a related principle.
Also I believe that clicking on the photos has to take you to flickr.com, according to the TOS. At least that's what I remember. Clicking on the photo (from the detail view) seems to go to the same page.
600+ Communities Are Fighting for Google Fiber Internet
Could you describe some ways that would make it better?
FB’s Plan To Automatically Share Your Data With Sites You Never Signed Up For
Steve Jobs and Eric Schmidt Spotted Together Again: Photos