skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
'"Out webshop database has these fields." Fix: Change the database, then.'

Or let the app first sort out the raw input, make sure it makes sense, then pass it on to the database.

I can see wanting to have fine-grained table fields. But I don't like seeing the schema drive the model or the UI.

A single textarea really is a strong idea (and like others here have been advocating it fr a few years with mixed results).

Seems like these are the sort of mundane tasks computers should be good at. Let humans be quirky and let computers sort it out. Prompt for confirmation as needed.
3D without the glasses: introducing pCubee
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1017702
Romanians are doing great when speaking of communication skills.

There are 2 reasons for that ...

* English is learned in school from the second grade, and we don't have a local dialect

* TV stations / cinemas are airing movies in English (we are used to subtitles) :))

* we are a latin country and our culture isn't so different from the one in US

Of course, I'm not speaking for a majority of the population, but all the educated professionals I know have proper English skills, especially programmers ... since the literature here lacks, and the only valid way to learn real-world programming is to read books/articles in English. Of course, there are always exceptions.
I read posts like this often, and I think the author makes the common geek mistake of assuming that the way normal people use computers is a subset of how geeks use them. Take out all the programming, modding and even file handling and you get what ordinary users need.

This is not true. Non-geeks use computers in all kinds of ways geeks never think of. They use a very specific genealogy application. They connect an obscure 10 year old water sample analyzer. They connect a keyboard and record music.

This is why all attempts to make a simplified limited computer over the years have failed. Ordinary people need the full flexibility of a computer. Make it simple to use, but not limited.
The Things That Matter Most in Privacy
How to spot false gurus
Hi proexploit, I don't see your email address anywhere. Would love to chat. My contact info is here: http://alikewise.com/About/People (I'm the first Matt)
Android Is on Its Way to Beating iPhone in Mobile Web Use
I got my site done on eLance (two years ago), and was extraordinarily happy with the experience. It was cheap and much better than anything I could have produced.

http://www.kalzumeus.com/2008/03/02/my-experience-with-outso...
Twelve years ago or so I was up to 8-10 mugs a day. Not cool. After a year of this I quit cold turkey and went through two weeks of hell - everything was too loud, everything was too bright, I had a persistent splitting headache and was extremely irritable (even more than usual).

I didn't drink any coffee at all for several years, and then we got a coffee machine as a Christmas gift and I started drinking it again, albeit in strict moderation.

These days I stick to one or two coffees a day - one in the morning and sometimes one around 1-2 PM when I hit an energy trough.

If I have more than two cups, I toss and turn all night and wake up exhausted ... which of course prompts me to drink still more coffee.
For those that don't know the source of the headline:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=znxFrgql5dc

(I shall never forgive Fox for canceling that show. Never.)
Are you thinking of DOS? I can't imagine a Win32 compiler doing this.
Not everyone is buying a shoe for the same reason, not everyone is buying software for the same reason. When you are targeting certain markets, say sneakers, then yes the article applies. When you move to specialized footwear for a more demanding demographic things start to change. For example, climbing shoes or hiking boots for more challenging terrain then just going off the sidewalk will have other vectors of importance. (Durability, flexibility, friction, water/weather proofing)

Compare http://www.rei.com/category/4501296 to http://www.vibramfivefingers.com/

I think the real take away is people are looking for good enough for their situation. The more demanding their software needs, the more features/design/implementation will be, but if all they need is a todo list, then they'll end up at 37signals. :)
Instead of destructive, why not be helpful?

Tell the visitor to install google chromeframe and give them a download link:

http://dl.google.com/update2/installers/ChromeFrameSetup.exe
E.164 format. Every valid number in the world can be represented. The downside is that most people don't even know that this exists, so when doing an international based system, you have a filter based on the country they user is based in and automatically apply any codes needed. Just strip everything out of the field that isn't a number and prepend the country code if the region doesn't normally include it. That means that 210-555-1212 would become 12105551212 for a U.S. number and 21-555-1212 would become 55215551212 for a Brazil number.
Ask HN: Going to Grad School, which language/framework should I learn?
I have been programming in C# for about 4 years at work. I plan to go back to grad school for a masters in CS next year, what language should I learn to help me out with grad school courses?

Update: To be clear, the purpose of going to grad school is to sharpen up and most likely to go back into the workforce later.
OTOH I think it doesn't have the same weight to say I worked with x company and trained my skills in z language. As saying I worked at home on hobby projects for the sake of learning.

Being "under the supervision of an experienced programmer" gives you expierence quicker than working alone.
I recently made some parts of my web application worse in this regard in order to be compatible with more US payment processors and some regulations. I don't think I'll have a huge problem with international users yet, but if it needs more code to satisfy them then I'll add it when necessary.

Unfortunately, one big text field doesn't cut it when every other system you interact with requires separate fields.
Don't sell yourself short. With knowing a few languages there's no reason why you can't get an entry-level programming job that you can get paid to do. You'll get experience and you'll get paid. Giving it away for free doesn't necessarily sweeten the pot.

The real trick is going to be finding a place where you will have a good mentor. You might be surprised to know that many programmers who are employed are not very good at programming even though they get paid for it. You don't want to be learning from someone like that.

Another option might be to talk to some of your professors at school. They might have their own projects going, or know someone who does. They would also better know people who might be good mentors.
I just tried this on vanilla IE8, and the "button on the right" doesn't display at all, only the link to continue without Firefox. Perhaps they should have tested in IE?
The Cell Phone Bill of Rights: Four rules to fix mobile phone service in America
"Out webshop database has these fields." Fix: Change the database, then.

Much harder when the "database" belongs to a third party such as UPS or Paypal.
And C# on .NET disallows non-virtual method calls on null instance locations. It does so by emitting a callvirt IL instruction for the non-virtual method, which in turn is translated by the CLR to:

cmp dword ptr [ecx],ecx

(Assuming 'this' is in ecx.)
OpenGL molecule viewer in Clojure
The balance of power ought to be tilted towards Apple in this situation right? I mean, I've never met anyone who owns an iPhone and actually likes AT&T. So I'm a bit surprised to see Apple doing work on their end to make the iPhone less network-heavy, rather than demanding that AT&T moves faster to upgrade their network. Am I missing something? Does AT&T actually have any negotiating power with Apple?
Artificial reef
You should be able to link on Facebook with the real text using the link http://www.cantrip.org/gatto.html?seenIEPage=1 .
The safety, benefits, and importance of the cannabis plant.
I would add MultiClutch to the list http://wcrawford.org/2008/02/28/everytime-i-think-about-you-.... It allows you to define custom gestures for any application. I was thinking of switching to jitouch http://www.jitouch.com/. Anyone know how they compare?
Ouch - aren't you getting a little bit personal here? I'll try to remain professional, and I'll accept the fact that you're quoting things you didn't say, as the re-write was clearer as to your intention.

When it comes to scaling, there's no rule which says you have to scale in any particular way. Many database customers consider scaling _up_ a form of scaling, and probably 99% of the world's database users will never go beyond what can be achieved on a single machine. They don't care about your pet project, about how the way it works is cooler and technologically purer. They consider databases a tool, and they don't really care how it works. I don't think too deeply about how a can opener works. I'm able to open more cans faster with a more powerful electric can opener. Even scaling up is still scaling.

There are customers with bigger needs. For some of them, SAN based scaling is just what they need; more IOPS let their database keep running and they can get on with their lives. If they need more IOPS, they add more drives to their SAN. Scaling with a SAN is still scaling.

Some customers have more complex demands, and look to Exadata or Netezza. They might start with just a few nodes, and add more nodes as their load increases. It's still scaling.

Now, we in CompSci circles get excited about scaling using clusters. That's _sexy_ scaling. Cassandra and FathomDB can both change the rules of the game, and I'm excited about what FathomDB can do here, just as I can see you're passionate about Cassandra. But let's not pretend that most customers really care about how it scales; they care about what we can do. To customers, if it looks like a duck, and it quacks like a duck, it is a duck. But when they're choosing a database, scaling is not the only requirement, and certainly scaling in a certain way is unlikely to be on their list of requirements. If you've ever read an RFP, there's a bewildering number of questions that have nothing to do with technology at all, and often the technology section is a depressingly short list. Although part of the RFP game is to try to get the purchaser to write in requirements that only you can deliver, purchasers are considerably more savvy than that.

You can jump up and down like Rumpelstiltskin arguing that yours is the only database that's _really_ scaling and the Oracle solution didn't meet the requirements, and that they should have chosen you. At the end of the day all you're left with is one person jumping up and down screaming about the rules of the game, and a customer that got what they needed and an Oracle salesperson that earned their commission.
I think the issue needs to be decided case-by-case, and it depends on the early-stage legal needs of the startup.

A few thoughts on what to consider:

1. As indicated by jacquesm, you should never do this where the amount of the equity will cause the attorney to have a conflict in the representation. A rough rule of thumb in the profession is that less than 2% is acceptable for this purpose but I use a less-than-1% measure when I occasionally do these. Very important to keep this part clean.

2. A deferred-fee deal is based on an extension of credit by the attorney performing early-stage services. For example, the attorney might extend up to $20K in fees prior to the earlier of 6 months or first funding in exchange for, say 0.5% of the company. There is real credit risk associated with this because, if the company fails, the attorney has no recourse except against a dead entity. In such a context, it might make sense for a founding group to want to do such an arrangement to avoid having to require members of the founding team to pay their share of such fees and to cut the risks of the formation and company launch.

3. Given the rationale in point 2 for when this might make sense, there are various situations where it obviously does not: (a) where the company does not expect to have too much in the way of early-stage fees (e.g., if it will incur incorporation expenses and not too much more in the early phases, particularly where it will not be going for outside funding - in such a case, the anticipated legal expenses at this stage may be a low as a few thousand dollars); (b) where the deal among the founding team assumes one lead founder will advance such costs and the lead founder is willing and able to do so; (c) where a sole founder is willing to incur the early costs and can comfortably do so; and (d) where a founding team is willing to incur the up-front costs among themselves and does not want to give up the equity.

The prototypical case where deferred fees make sense is a founding team going out quickly for VC funding. This is the "big firm" model. In such cases, unless the founders are serial entrepreneurs or otherwise quite capable of paying the rather high up-front fees of such firms, they should at least seriously consider doing a deferred-fee deal. In all other cases, do so only with caution, as the deferred-fee arrangement often makes no sense for the startup (I can say this from the attorney side as well).

General rule: always consider it as an option but be careful before entering into such a deal.
ESR has a new post up "Autotools Must Die" http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1877 .
His main suggestion is moving to something else - he suggests scons http://www.scons.org/ .

As far as the linux-hate promoted by BSDers; I would like to try FreeBSD, and have been mildly interested since the late 1990s. Why don't you people make it reasonably available to people who don't personally know anyone who is running it and can't download it?
And just in case you doubt Lebedev's originality, try browsing his studio's website. http://www.artlebedev.com/everything/ I've lost whole days there before.
Record Industry asks:"Please ignore data that 3-strikes increases piracy"
http://bu.mp/apideveloper.html

is giving me a 500 internal error; its not a nice break either. spewing some errors instead of a generic page.
Ask HN: Would you sell your future earnings for cash today?
Was just reading about these guys who are looking to sell their future earnings for cash today.

http://www.thrustfund.com/

I think this was mentioned before, but would you do it?
I don't have a business, just an office drone; but I have to find out about legal ownership of companies all the time, when our customers issue purchase orders we have to make sure that the names on the invoices we generate match them.

Changing the names in our CRM/ERP systems is a laborious process and we have to get the customer to sign legal documents confirming that all the software licenses owned by the previous company are now owned by the acquirer/new merger.

I think that a website containing all the name change documents, press releases and possibly a service that tracks legal ownership (though this could be hard to scale) could be worth pursuing, along the lines of a Duns and Bradstreet ( http://www.dnb.com ) type company.

It could be something like a more focused docstoc or perhaps a legal wolfram alpha.
So even if you're familiar with the case for medical cannabis, there is a lot of academic research in here that you might not be familiar with. Overall this is probably the best explanation of the case for medical cannabis that I've ever heard.
Seems like in Britain the closest equivalent to US states is countries (England, Wales, Scotland). But countries within countries is just too danged confusing.
People used to sloppily dereference null pointers on VAX machines because position 0 in memory was always readable and had the value 0.
> If the original title begins with a number or number + gratuitous adjective, we'd appreciate it if you'd crop it. E.g. translate "10 Ways To Do X" to "How To Do X," and "14 Amazing Ys" to "Ys." Exception: when the number is meaningful, e.g. "The 5 Platonic Solids."

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

It's okay to downmod me for getting too meta. Just thought I'd throw that out there.
Heh, in DOS a far NULL pointer was the start of the interrupt vector table -- divide by zero being first. I remember writing a program that wrote the address of one of my subroutines to a far NULL pointer and then dividing by zero.
I've found that the administrative details are pretty minimal when you do your filtering well- people on Elance are often looking for long-term gigs, 10 hours a week, 5 hours a week, that kind of thing. That incentivizes them to work with you with an eye to the future, so there aren't as many details to the day to day.

The trick really is in getting rid of 99% of the applicants, and then paying well and being nice to the person you choose.
I'm not sure this is the best example for young startup founders: Paul English started out with a shitload of cash to burn on hiring and his cofounder was one of the former heads of Orbitz. Makes me wonder how I can compete with that on my shoestring budget. Maybe this is the level that Gabriel Weinberg is starting from given that he has already launched and sold a company before. But I'm not there yet so this feels a little discouraging.
You could say: "Yes, you are right. We, too, have noticed what huge pile of hopelessly overengineered garbage it is. Thanks for admitting your own mistake, so glad we can finally get rid of this monstrosity and move on to something sane."

This would be the automatic response from anyone who has had the misfortune to work with AMQP, thus I'm a bit baffled the RabbitMQ guys want to stick with it.

Edit: And yes, I'm not really surprised that I'm getting modded into oblivion. Still, would the downvoters mind to elaborate on what kind of exposure they've had to AMQP and what part of it they consider worth keeping?
Very insightful (as is usual from Derek!).

I've developed a nice thick skin while working at justin.tv, but in the early days I'll admit some of the contact I had with our users was pretty devastating. At times I was simultaneously trying to scale the chat server code to handle more and more users, fighting off a bunch of script-kiddie attacks, and replying to emails telling me I must be just about the most useless programmer in the world :)
Disagree a bit with "Anti-pattern 3: Overusing a technology". If you decide to use a technology, embrace it (even as you recognize the lock-in potentials). You often stand to gain more by making the most of what you're already more-or-less committed to (but usually haven't yet acknowledged just how committed you really are). The point is to use that dependency wisely. If it's a solid library you'll be saving yourself a lot of time in the long run.

Of course, if you've chosen poorly, there's no helping that.
You might be able to expect a 5X annual profit sale if you could manage to find a competent investor who wanted to grow it.

It's unclear though from your COGS line though if there really is any actual profit, or if you're just managing to cover salaries and necessary R&D efforts.

The best way (IMO) to expedite a sale would be to:

- Have accurate accounting data for the last 5 years readily available and organized.

- Set a realistic price, with some justification of the price ("I am looking for $500K based on year over year sales growth for the last 5 years and a $100K bottom line profit last year. The market is Y and this brand has the ability to grow to own X% of Y based on Z. " Etc.)

- Be available to answer questions

- Offer to be available (for free or on retainer) for the first 6 months after acquisition to help with any transition items.

...just some thoughts...
Yes, it's a common nerd delusion that the UI is a presentation layer on top of something else and that you can therefore have an "iPad-like UX" presenting some complicated underlying system.

This thinking leads to a kind of UI cargo cult where the nerds are copying superficial aspects of the iPad without understanding what fundamental properties make it "iPad-like".
If you restrict yourself to the IE6 feature set, then yes, it should be relatively easy. But if a complex web app is this easy, why is Google giving up on it for it's web apps?
i don't recommend it. your interviewer most likely views this phone screen as a chore, and isn't anywhere near as excited about it as you are.
For PHP at least, there is a license match issue.
Thank you. For those that are ultra-curious about this, please make it a point to read "The Biology of Belief" by Bruce Lipton. Quick summary there is - "Garbage in; Garbage Out." :)
I guess I'm struggling to think of a case where it's particularly important that visited/unvisited links differ by complex styling. If leaking history is a paranoia thing, that's a useless fluff thing.

The checkmarked visited links thing seems completely wrong to me, to take that example. Something like a checkmark next to a link feels like part of site UI rather than the browser's, and a site's UI shouldn't have access to what I've done on other sites! If they want to keep track of what links I click on the site and maintain checkmarks in their UI accordingly, they can still do that, of course.
We may have different goals in mind... I have a bunch of PDFs I need to get to my sony reader, for example academic papers. I want them to look basically OK, which I don't "think" is an AI hard problem. Detecting any text that represents a chapter certainly is... but I'm OK with writing regex to get my data out. I'll be posting in the mobileread forums about this at some point in the coming weeks if you're interested in whatever solution I hack out.
FAQs were very successful on Usenet and listservs, as evidenced by their enduring popularity. They served to pass along the accumulated wisdom of the newsgroup (even if they didn't eliminate the repeat questions.)

But getting back to the article, this may not be the best way to provide help or additional info on a website. In particular don't use the label "FAQ".
Anything running over Ethernet has packets with checksums. Yes, noise will cause packets to drop, and that results in lower overall throughput, while connectivity still remains possible.

The signal running over HDMI is not packet-based. You don't have any mechanism like with TCP where packets can get dropped and resent later. So if interference causes bits to flip on an HDMI connection, you will immediately see the interference on your TV, and it won't be pretty; it would probably look something like an HDTV antenna signal that loses reception--missing or discolored chunks of the screen or sparkly pixels. The effect is immediate and disruptive.

The end result is that Monster Cable might do a better job of keeping your picture intact during a freak electrical storm, but there is no practical difference otherwise. If you are able to see a picture with HDMI, and you don't expect any wildly varying levels of RF interference in your environment, your cable is as good as anything else.
One thing to also keep in mind: if you're getting too good a deal the worker probably won't stick with you for long, so make sure you treat the worker well and pay them what they're worth (or someone else soon will).
This would be risking/wasting an amazing opportunity
Climate researchers 'secrecy' criticised – but MPs say science remains intact
Well, a lawyer friend described some EU privacy laws and it's not clear to me what we'd have to change to comply. Or if we even have to comply, since we operate in the US. We are looking into it.
If you don't care about the job, do it! It will be fun. Otherwise, don't.
Max Levchin talks about this in jl's Founders At Work. They made the web app mostly as a place to offer the Palm Pilot app for download, but it took off much to everyone's surprise.

IIRC, when they finally abandoned the Palm Pilot app it had 12k active users vs. millions using the web app. So as much as the Palm Pilot app was their baby, it was an easy decision.