skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not sure if this is feasible, but it would be great to post your ASP.NET vs RoR code to compare the delta.
We have a distributed team (UK & NZ) so are rarely working at the same hours. Wave is useful for brainstorming complicated processes.

We use one Wave per issue (requirement/feature/etc). The top of the Wave we try to keep current with everything that we have discussed - so the first post in the Wave is sort of like a Wiki, while the rest is the discussion that goes into the creation of that post. This means we can come back at a later date and see how we arrived at the decision(s).

Once we are happy with how the issue has been resolved we then transfer it into JIRA. We could use the JIRA Wave robot but our current approach is fine for now.
They're also claiming that the initial agreement was fraudulently induced.
Mozilla begins rolling nightly builds of Firefox for Android
Physics prof fired from oil spill cleanup job due to controversial blog.
Awesome.

Can we create banners in HTML5 and start hating on HTML5 already?
Your ad sounds like you're looking for a senior level PHP developer/UI designer/database developer/marketing guru who will take over and turn your product from a blog-hosted platform to a real solution without any salary compensation, leading to the assumption of non-preferred stock in the single digit percent range. Based on the description of the company, the person you seem to be wanting to hire would seem to need more experience in everything than everyone already involved. You don't list the expected type of work (do you need backend developers, or someone to fix the UI, or will it be performance improvements, a complete change?) and the job position isn't even listed on the company website underneath careers.

All in all, it sounds like 3 people who can pay the bills but not the salaries who are in over their head and need someone to come in and work for minimal equity to save them.

NOTE: I'm not saying that any of the impressions I received are an accurate depiction of the company, however, given the cursory glance, those are the conclusions I would reach as a job seeker.
How do you do it without cookies? Changing the settings for each search?
Darn ... I'm halfway through writing one of these. I guess I just have to make it better..
Art of the Email Introduction
Google officially supports the hella- SI prefix
National Labor Committee report on Chinese CE factories, deplorable conditions
Because it's a robust and feature rich database/tool-set thats great to develop on and gives me peace of mind. It's been a while since I used MySQL but the database and it's tools left me underwhelmed. I found that I could be more productive with SQL server. I haven't tried Postgres.

I guess I like to think if my databases grow too large for the free version that's a good problem to have. It's not that bad a "time-bomb" to me. Many sites will never need the paid version - especially the ones small enough to be so cost sensitive.
These blogs will continue beating facebook as long as that gets them a flood of page views from confused/concerned users. FB has a PR problem. If it fails to communicate the intent and vision people will run around seeking the story from elsewhere.
Am I the only person who thought that instead of “an image for VMware” they meant “the source code to a functional virtual machine that Reddit uses”?

Don't get me wrong, this is cool. But the other way would have been way cooler.
I'm not a web dev per se, but I never heard of Rob Conery until now. I now ScottGu, Anders, Cutler, Brumme, Dussud, Crowley, Russinovich, Spiro, even Luca, but never Rob.

Not to say he's not a big name, but to say he's the most high profile MS employee beside ScottGu seems absurd. Even in the dev tools space I think you have to give that to Anders.
See http://singinst.org/accomplishments2009 for some of the stuff that we work on.
I'm quite familiar with all sorts of websites, but haven't ever used Facebook. Last night, I was trying to use the site to configure a profile, test an app and share the profile with my partner - I have to say the site confuses the hell out of me. I can't believe so many people are using something with such an awful design.
I don't think you can evaluate this by looking at the patents. If your sole business is patent suits, you're going to sue every time. If your business has paying customers, there's a chance you're going to spend more of your attention on them than your patent portfolio.
Get Growing: japanese black pine bonsai
Growing black pine for bonsai carries with it a healthy responsibility too.
talk about complex to play:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=muCPjK4nGY4

eerie!

You're correct about the 'reproducing pianos', I didn't know the correct English term.
http://www.authenticjobs.com/

http://jobs.37signals.com/

http://www.krop.com/
I think the point is $1 is too much money if the tools aren't the best. But $10k is not a lot of money if the tools are great. I tell my team, if you find a tool that makes you more productive, buy it. There's almost no reasonably priced tool that wouldn't be worth it if the dev thought it was.

We budget around $10k per dev for tools and training per year. We usually come in a fair bit under, but given we spend over $200k/year per dev, this is a small fraction of their cost.

I think your point is that the tools weren't the right fit. Because if they were, it seems like baulking at $10k is a sign that you can't make the right cost-beneift tradeoff -- which is a very bad sign for a company.
Was the cost of rewriting that small? In my view it would only make sense if the cost of rewriting the app is insignificant. If you can do it in a week or two, sure... any more than that and I would start to question if it's worth it. I mean, you gotta make sure it brings in money first, right? :-)
Out of curiosity, how much external contribution is there to reddit's source code?
Whenever I see the term "prediction" applied to software, I immediately think of the books "The Eudaemonic Pie" and "The Predictors." I guess they've spoiled me.
And that's why the AGPL provides no value: Code < Data < Community
That sounds like a Debussy remix :)

The wind in the planes crossed with something undefinable.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1N5fvYejvXk
I don't agree with your points on human nature.

On blame, every executive staff of a large company that I've ever seen casts blame. Yes there are startups with a small number of people that are all pretty even keel but as soon as you get to a certain size you'll get opposing interests and that's where blame comes from. The blame game is a political game played by people trying to get leverage over other people in order to get more resources. It's stupid but it's the reality of the world. If you don't see it you just aren't high up enough to be the one fighting for resources. Because as someone who read about Microsoft as a kid I know it was happening at Microsoft (Silverberg/Alchin?)

As far as brand, that's just human nature. Look at the side of any Grocery Store brand and you'll see the same ingredients as the big brands. But any grocery store manager will tell you Captain Crunch outsells generic white box crunch 100-to-1. That's why companies build up brands in the first place. That's why Microsoft brags about being one of the most trusted brands in the world.

So this really isn't old guard as much as it's the stupidity of human nature and I really don't see it changing that much.

P.S. This is Username: TomOfTTB not Username: SamAtt. If he doesn't want me posting as him he should learn to @#%& log out.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1346040

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1302151

http://scala-programming-language.1934581.n4.nabble.com/The-...
Right, but it's in how it sounds. Hmmm, maybe what I want to say is that the performer is up and the composer is down.
The Internet interface is dying.
Please discuss!
Ah, thanks for this.

I tried to run reddit on my machine. However, I got into many dead ends, the redditdev IRC was quiet, and because I had no idea what I was doing with MacPort or the Terminal (or my filesystem or the many different paradigms I had to deal with) I lost all faith in me trying to understand how sysadmins (or python developers) got things done.

Essentially, I became contempt for being a noob of a CS student, but at least I know how to run a virtual machine and prove by induction. That's a job skill right?
A Sneak Peek At TweetDeck’s HTML5 Browser App
Intel Confirms 25nm NAND Flash in Mass Production
You're providing a lot of entropy to a body that has even more sitting around. If anyone could find some part of a dataset that might be sufficient to deanonymize your data Google could.

Not saying you need to be so paranoid, just that non-readability of data might be comparable to obfuscating your javascript to keep people from prying into your code.

At least to a sufficiently knowledgeable corporation.
No one says to ignore Node.js. It's just a terrible comparison and intellectually lazy javascript programmers seem to be taking advantage of it to remain intellectually lazy.
Then put MySQL on a Linux box, no need to have it on Windows...
Reddit itself is hosted on EC2, right?

I use scripts (http://github.com/wr0ngway/rubber/) to boot up, configure, and deploy to my instances from a stock Ubuntu AMI -- but from the looks of this maybe you set up and maintain AMIs for each role instead?

I much prefer a scripted installation to a frozen hand-rolled installation, even if the latter is more reliable.
We're not quite that talented. ;)
You can do anything at Zombo.com in HTML5
It's unclear to me why the professor's opinions on homosexuality or multiculturalism would impede his ability to find a solution to our current predicament in the gulf, which requires a rapid and expert insight.

If his other four colleagues selected by the Obama administration were unable to work with him, that would be one thing. There doesn't seem to be any public indication of that. This mostly seems to be a bow from the administration to pressure to enforce political correctness.

It would be a shame if the professor's absence unnecessarily prolonged or impeded a rapid solution to the gulf oil geyser. The longer that geyser is allowed to spill, the greater the devastation to marine life and the gulf economy.
Yeah, we use EC2. We are trying to move towards your model, which is, I think, better.

But when we started no one really knew what the "right way" was, so we went with custom AMIs.
Did you happen to try out other frameworks before deciding on RoR? I'm thinking about testing the waters outside of MS land and I'd like to know why you chose RoR versus, say, Django or even Struts.
If the domain exists it can be used in the Chrome URL bar. Any search engine that puts its queries in the URL can be added manually to Chrome.
Not a lot right now, but hopefully more with this release.
What realistic chance do they have of building anything that would make up the difference of around $30 million?

"Shrug it off and go build something else, it's not worth the hassle" is for when you miss two weeks of consulting fees on a terrible customer before you cut them off, not $30 million.
For a fairer comparison, on the second page of the article there are some clips that sound much less wretched.

It's hard to be sure whether a piece of music is any good on the basis of a sample less than a minute long, but FWIW I'd say they're fantastically impressive as productions of a computer program and distinctly unimpressive as serious musical compositions.
And when Mozilla is sued by MPEG-LA for patent infringement will you say the same thing? Of the companies who say they will support this codec so far I think Opera is weakest and will be sued first, but Mozilla is domestic so they might be the one to take one for the team...
I was reading Paul Graham's essay on "essay writing" today, and he mentioned how he lets thoughts flow freely onto the page but occasionally needs to back-track several paragraphs if some thread of the discussion led to a 'dead end.'

It would be a cool experiment for a talented blogger/essayist to compose something in Google Wave and then make the Wave public. We (the readers) could use the playback feature to examine what stuff was cut, what the editing/refinement process was.

Of course the whole point of cutting material is that you don't want the world to see your unfinished work... but on the other hand as a one-off it might garner some more attention/publicity than usual.

Sigh. If only I was a talented blogger...
Sounds like it's an ActiveX control -- I thought you could only get away with that in South Korea.
What's "abundant" in the article is emphases.

Just to take a few... "much more interested", "far greater variety", "very bad", "a much greater variety", "much more of an Extremistan", "a huge difference", "a lot more complex", "a lot more volatility", "very far removed from" "The ever increasing complexity", "making it very hard to accurately measure", "it is very challenging", "it is very important", "very interesting observations", "a huge deficit", "far ahead of the other countries", "very abstract", "very abundant". "completely different"...

And a lot of "a lot of"s.
Now the user has to manage their privacy for a bunch of apps through Google's central server instead of the app itself, and the app now needs to talk to google as well - seems like kind of a drag to me. Extra moving part for dev, and for user kind of like having settings for a game in your system preferences, sure it works but it's a bit odd.

And the cell tower problem too, which I didn't know about.
> And due to a terrible oversight the header is actually mis-spelled and it came out as 'Referer

Well, Cant blame DDG for it though

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_referrer#Origin_of_the_ter...
Look at his publications:

http://wuphys.wustl.edu/~katz/publist.html

He does not seem to have particular expertise on this problem.
> So does that mean that any company with patents should just suck it up if someone infringes instead of defending their IP? Regardless of what you think of the validity of patent, it was granted and MS has a right to defend it.

People should do what is moral, not act as selfishly as they can without overstepping the bounds of the law. Enforcing patents against software is immoral. As Bill Gates famously pointed out, if software had been considered patentable when Microsoft started, the industry would have been at a standstill decades ago.

The fact that it's possibly legal does not make it moral. You can list any number of actions that are legal but immoral if you think about it for two minutes.

> If you put in time doing research and then spend time and money patenting that research because you believe it to be innovative (subjective), would you just suck it up and "try to make your own software better" if someone copied your work?

No copying is being alleged here. Presumably people who can see that enforcing patents against software is immoral would do exactly what you're saying, and furthermore would rarely spend time and money patenting in the first place.
He is complaining that a business word processing program is not ideal for use by a professional writer writing books/articles. That is a bit like complaining that a minivan is not a sports car.
Before I saw your request, I put this one together: http://imgur.com/pR1IL.png

It's Win7 FF on the left, Safari on Mac on the right.
I'll try to get some more when I'm at work tomorrow.
Yes, lots of professional writers (of books, especially) use Microsoft Word for their writing. In many cases their editors require them to do so.
Block Party is the longest-running demoparty in North America, ever. It's been running four years. Kinda sad. You can see what the North American demoscene is like: archived live video from BlockParty 2010 part 1 http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/6264966 part 2 http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/6267675
There are no truly good men, according to cooperation study
Health and Fitness Discussions: Sudden hair loss women
Marketing Abacus 2007-AC1
To be honest, how many fonts do you need? This is the web, and it is not 1998, when a lot of people would want to use as many fonts on their page as possible. Show some restraint.
Another article on Cope, with a Hofstadter cameo and non-MIDI samples: http://www.miller-mccune.com/culture-society/triumph-of-the-...
That is why I clicked-in as well. The title is very misleading.
You can't even do automated backups with SQL Server Express (without some hacks or other tools).

MySQL is a pleasure to work with and so it MongoDB, more so than SQL Server.

If you prefer SQL Server than more power to you.
Ask HN: How in the world do you optimize iPhone app promotion?
For the past week or two I've been trying out different methods to promote an iPhone app (I'll probably post it in a "review my startup" thread pretty soon).

The HN mantra is measure, quantify, A/B test, optimize, etc. The problem is that I'm very limited in what data I can actually get.

To some extent I can measure how effective my site is (for example, how many people click the "Download" button). But as soon as they enter the Apple ecosystem, they're gone. I have no idea how many people view the app's store page. I have no idea where they're coming from (other than from my website). I have no idea what the conversion rates in the final stage ("download") are, for users from different sources. I have no idea how effective the app description is - or, if I change it, whether it helps or hurts conversion rates.

I can maybe try to do some IP matching between visits to the website and people who launch the app, but this is very limited - for one, it only applies to users who download the app through my website; for another, there's no guarantee the IP will be the same.

Any ideas? Most of the advice for iPhone app promotion tends to be "get blogs to talk about you", which is fine, but doesn't really help optimize the process. I've found surprisingly little quality information on this topic.

Incidentally, I think this would be a "problem worth solving" - I can't be the only iPhone developer feeling this pain.
I'd love to see how well it could predict comment ratings from Hacker News.

The following data would be a good start:

1. Text of comment

2. How many points the comment has

3. How many points the article has

4. Time article was posted

5. Time comment was posted

I'd also be interested to see what kind of user bias there is. If you don't provide user names, you could see what kind of rating a comment should have based on its content, and what rating it actually has because certain users are generally loved (pg) or hated (jasonmcalacanis) by the community.
What web site? Or, at least, how general-interest?
Except things like Spotlight and search in Windows are great too. For apps you don't use often, it's much easier to find them by name, by task, or tag then by scrolling through a long list of icons. Chrome's omni-bar is exactly that.
That's only because if you're not doing all the claims, you're not infringing.
Actually I find my web sites by typing one or two letters, and awesome bar does the rest.

And it is already possible to put bookmarks to web sites on the desktop.

What is supposed to be the great new replacement for files - a grid of norm sized icons???
Any particular reason to believe a patent troll will be involved, as opposed to a company suing over patents that it practices?
It's a bit more than that -- looks like a tighter marriage of Spring and Google App Engine is coming, including some GWT/Spring integration that Google and VMWare have been working on.
Another question, If I wanted to improve reddit's search, it would help to know what solutions you've already investigated (and what you are currently doing)?
We're looking at making the move from Rails to ASP.NET MVC. So pretty much the opposite of what you've done, and we're planning on hosting on Azure. So I read this thread with great interest.

We've found that like for like the Azure platform is very well priced and is actually less expensive than our current Ubuntu setup, as well as being cheaper than comparable high level Microsoft hosting providers.

We don't much like lock in either and for the parts of the Azure platform that will lock us in we're extracting the code into a wrapper so we can replace with the minimum of work should we need to switch hosting platform in a hurry. Database wise we're going with SQL Azure and their 10GB limit I find to be quite spacious for our needs, although that would depend entirely on what you're storing. I believe they have 50GB databases in the works for the near future?

The deployment times are an issue and I have heard similar, but again I believe if you upload the project yourself then request the update the deployment time is greatly reduced making it less of an issue. It would take some doing to match Capistrano deployment though which is simply awesome and something I will certainly miss.
In the exact same position. .net by day, anything else by night.
I've got a small webapp targeting ASP.NET MVC 2.0 (built with Visual Studio 2010) running on Linux with Mono 2.6 and served with nginx (using the fastcgi interface to mono) so if you put the time in, it's possible to deploy on an open source stack.

I saw a commenter talk about Linq-to-SQL and yes this is possible too. I use a PostgreSQL server and use Linq-to-SQL with it. It works but as expected, the documentation is poor.

This is free to use, but from my experience some of the costs can be very frustrating time spent trying to figure out why things are not working as they should, or barrier to entry with poor documentation.

As one commenter pointed out, mono behaves strangely when changing part of your codebase while it's running. Modifying a file can cause 500s or timeouts to be thrown. Killing and restarting the fastcgi process is needed.

A major positive is the developers who work on these parts of mono are very responsive to issues and code is improving all the time.
They sound mostly like 'variations', not really compositions. I'm not sure if I can make the distinction clear because I'm not a composer and the difference is subtle, but a variation on a theme will not be the same as the theme but is a fairly logical derivative of one, whereas a composition takes place on a 'blank slate'.

Now, of course this program - just like a real composer - works against a backdrop of the knowledge available about music of a given era. But when Bach wrote his first fugue it was a breakthrough, and even if after that each and every other fugue was linked back to that first one in a more or less direct way (some sound like close cousins, some are much further apart and some are different pieces altogether) then the act of creating such a variation is a composition of sorts.

But when a composer speaks of a 'variation', he does so in a subtly different way than an ordinary person would, to a composer a variation is 'obvious' given the first few bars of the variation and the original piece.

And that's what I'm getting at when I say these sound to me like variations. They're along an existing or at least familiar theme and they've changed. It's as though sampling has met classical music and it's bits of everything but not a 'whole' by itself.

This is very tricky to put in to words.

For a computer program though, it's definitely quite a step forward compared to the usual. Some of those pieces on the second page could have you fooled for a few seconds. The fact that some more modern composers make ear-splitting stuff doesn't help either because this computer program seems to be at least well ahead of some live humans :)
Etherpad did this for one of Paul Graham's essays, but sadly they were bought out and it's no longer there. Apparently it was at http://etherpad.com/ep/pad/slider/13sentences
Here is where we publish most of the info about search:

http://www.reddit.com/help/search

In short, it used to be a fulltext search through the database, and now is is Solr built on Lucene.

However, I think PG's essay about why he doesn't have a better search on HN applies equally to reddit -- because there are much better things to spend time on.