skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, we absolutely will be. We were running 1.9.1 (can't remember which patch level off hand) in a stable config with Rails beta 1, but as the Rails beta progressed, we were unable to move forward with ruby 1.9.1 underneath. This morning, we moved our staging environment to ruby-1.9.1-rc2 and rails-3.0.0.beta4. All our testing since this morning has gone 100% smoothly (thank god!). Every increment in beta before this point has been a nightmare.
Get in there and do something with your VPS. You can always reset/reinstall. The process of following through and doing it - until it works as you originally envisioned is the best way to learn and improve. During the process understanding how things work and why is more important than finding that perfect configuration (see bediger's comment).

Now as soon as you have users or a business, etc... things change quickly. Your goal will change from learning to maintaining or stability. That's why multiple environments are so common. Most people in IT are not learning they are optimizing, maintaining and protecting. So you have to understand when viewing most comments and information on the internet that you have a different goal (learning) than most of the IT industry.

Almost all the most useful ideas that I learned about managing a server, I learned due to an experience. Opposed to just reading about it on serverfault or superuser :)
Should Leaders Ever Swear?
I absolutely adore F#. It's basically a direct port of OCaml, in the earlier versions if you omitted #light then it was basically OCaml. I personally very much enjoy the pipe operator (|>) which lets you pass the output of one function as the input of another.
Based on my initial test of inDinero, Mint/tags + python script seems like the better option. Their interface is more refined and auto-tagging is more powerful. Its not entirely clear how the inDinero product is different from Mint.
It helps to use one of the more flexible and less user-friendly Linux distros on an old desktop or in a VM. I kind of like ArchLinux.

The problem with Linux, though, is that there are several main families, and even distros in the same family don't really adhere to any specific standard. Some might use syslog, others syslog-ng. Some sendmail, others postfix. It's kind of a mess.

Familiarizing yourself with a few flavors (and maybe FreeBSD or OpenBSD for good measure) on a machine you force yourself to use on occasion, you will find your comfort level for basic UNIX power-user and sysadmin stuff will grow.
Weird... wonder's what's going to happen to HashRocket.

http://hashrocket.com/people/view/mark-smith/

"I am the Chief Morale Officer, in charge of alcohol and fun activities"

http://hashrocket.com/people/view/marian-phelan/

Mariam is also getting charged with money laundering...
Global Wireless Coverage Map (from Kindle DX product page)
If only compete showed monthly revenue... perhaps that might be a better indicator of success, no?

btw my post isnt trying to suggest either company is > than another, lets not get into that.
I tried it, doesn’t work for me. Too complex, too many steps, too much work. I need a simple, accessible way to save bookmarks, not a sophisticated but somewhat complicated one.

That’s not to say Instapaper is a bad idea, it’s just not the right thing for me. (It’s also that I’m using only one laptop and hardly ever any other computer. I can afford to save bookmarks locally but I can see how that might be a problem for others.)
Or just Wubi to make an Ubuntu install you don't have to hose anything.
Firefox also has keyword search (i.e. type in "wp something" and go to the wikipedia page for "something") - you just have to define a keyword for an existing bookmark, and then place %s in the URL where you'd like the search term to appear.

For example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search/%s

I believe the default installation comes with a handful of these Bookmark "Shortcuts".
Bookmark toolbars are a thing of the past; Bookmarklet toolbars aren't. :)

I hide my toolbar in Opera by defeault, but I enable it when I want to use Readability or Instapaper.

Edit: Didn't see c1sc0's reply.
Ask yourself why you feel the need to identify with Free Will. Are you free to choose otherwise (e.g. reject Free Will)?

You may find that Free Will is a paradoxical concept.
Yes it's overzealous to assume either way. That's why it's philosophy not science.
I'm pretty happy with VMware Fusion.

http://www.vmware.com/products/fusion/
The Rise of the "Game Mechanic in a Box"
Ask HN: Whats the best hacker job ad you've ever come across?
Ever saw a creative job ad that dropped your jaw?
HN is, in part, one giant job board.
remember that spam bots can be designed to work just like a browser and so they can execute javascript too.
Wait a month? Insanity.
But those graphs were sexy ;)
Congrats! Just signed up, but my co-founders didn't get the invite e-mails when I added them to the account... Any ideas?
Fair enough. I hope you'll also complain about the original poster presuming that anyone who doesn't agree with him must be lazy and ignorant. It's a very common argument tactic whenever someone defends Lisp or Scheme: "everyone else simply don't get it."

There was a recent article posted here about people assuming, by default, that they are smarter than everyone else. Lisp has had over 50 years to prove that it can be used to develop software better than all the alternatives and it's still less successful attracting developers than languages just a few years old. It appears the previous commenter is just assuming he knows something that 99.9999% of other developers don't.

I don't advocate any particular language or platform for all possible solutions. Sometimes Java is right choice, sometimes PHP, sometimes C#, Python, etc. And whether or not a developer knows the language is a large factor but it's not the overriding factor. Trying to shoe-horn in a language of choice into every situation is a recipe for disaster. Sometimes it's necessary to learn a platform/language to effectively tackle certain tasks. So far, I've personally been unable to find a situation where Lisp seems to work. To generalize it: there is lots evidence that a vast majority of other developers haven't either. You can either assume they're all morons or not.
You may be right, but that's an awful lot of speculation. As for "Pivotal Labs doesn't work for free," the publicity of "helping the famous kids dream big" may be more than enough payment. (That's assuming we want to be ultra-cynical, which I have mixed feelings about frankly.)
Keyspace - a distributed key value store
Hey Dave,

This is an interesting thought, because although you're "supposed" to have separate accounts, the reality is that many entrepreneurs never do.

For now, inDinero would only be able to show you the finances from your combined transactions -- that is, unless you had sub accounts that you used only for business transactions, in which case we can ignore your personal sub-accounts.

Will follow up via email to figure out a better solution to this. Thanks for the feedback, Dave!

- Jessica & Co
Good job! It's really encouraging seeing a UC Berkeley grad successfully launching a start up. The support structure and culture here isn't quite geared for that but I'm super psyched to see someone persevering in spite of it.
This is the basic service we are building right now. The interesting part for me was the revenue model the author mentioned, where the whole thing is paid for by advertisers. We have currently been exploring primarily driving revenue by charging the site owners.

I'm still trying to sort out how I feel about the approach of using it as a extended ad model.
Google, Microsoft Pitch Cloud Computing To Feds
I am not a lawyer, but you should consider incorporation and separating out your personal affairs from your business affairs. Not only is it easier to see what is going on, it can provide you with the other benefits of incorporation.
Executive compensation: the more pay leaders get, the meaner they get
Nice. I've done something similar myself but I didn't take it exactly in the same direction. I leave much of grouping, wrapping, appending work to my own template engine layer. Is the source to your DSL available?
I read this about 5 minutes after going to a bunch of different websites to export files for my accountant. So yeah, this fills a need.
How does this relate to the TDD mindset?
Congrats Jessica and Andy! I remember testing the site many months ago, it looks like it's matured and grown quite a bit since then, I'll have to give it another try.
Best of luck!
Break stuff often. Be aware that prgmr's out of band management console is very spartan: if you break your system, using prgmr's console is analogous to loading a Live CD in a computer and attempting to recover the installation manually, so be aware of that.

This sounds borderline zealous, but I recommend installing Gentoo or Arch Linux as your first VPS system if you're just starting out on Linux; either that, or start off with NetBSD if you're willing to go down that route as well. The default install options for each of those distros/OS's are very minimal, and so you're forced to think about exactly what you need to install in order to get a working system.

I second bediger: be sure to investigate _why_ things work, and not _how_ to get it to work. The latter is very important for getting things done, but the former is what trains you in diagnosing obscure system issues.
I've avoided PHP like the plague so I'll take your word for it. I'd consider using it for a couple of quick & dirty simple pages but for anything more complex I'd definitely use Rails (or Django etc).

As another poster noted, Clojure gives you access to the Java libraries, which is a huge, huge win for Clojure vs most other functional languages but gluing that stuff together is still going to be more work than it's worth if you're not doing something really unusual with your site.

The functional web stack that looks the most promising to me at the moment is the Play framework with Scala. It seems a lot simpler and more manageable than Lift and Scala drops in pretty nicely in place of Java. From what I can tell there are still a lot of rough edges but I think it's a combination worth keeping an eye on.
http://virtualbox.org

I wouldn't have recommend it about a year ago but nowadays it's caught up with others quite nicely feature wise, is very fast, supports snapshots and USB, and is completely free.
Yes i probably should have. But I am annoyed that I have broken enough electronics that rectifiers weren't always part of it (but that is unrelated to batteries).

Fwiw in the apple magic mouse you can only mechanically out them in one way.
Here we go. 2nd one in 24 hours. please let's not let HN turn into Stack Overflow. :)
I'm convinced that Weblocks is one of the worst things to have happened to web programming in Common Lisp. There are lots of very good CL libraries you can put together for developing web applications. Weblocks is a half-baked framework that adds needless constraints and complexity. I have seen (and had my hand in building a couple) technically (I'm not rich yet) successful CL web apps from these common libraries (Hunchentoot, CLSQL, etc). I have not seen any real-world Weblocks application, and the only one I've ever worked on is a mess.

I'm not sure what Slava's goal was when he started Weblocks (he never intended to start a web startup at that time as far as I know), and neither do most of the developers that came after him (Slava stopped working on Weblocks long before RethinkDB) do full-time commercial Lisp web work. And that's the problem.

Also, there is nothing about CLSQL that prevents writing race-free code. Sharing connections across threads without locks won't be race free (duh).
I've been using (Oracle) VirtualBox and am happy with it.
I'm on Snow Leopard and have 4GB RAM.
Ok more and more HN is reedit. Yes I flag, no I shouldn't comment but enough please !
"In Clojure I still end up rolling my own libraries for a lot of things, which is really quite fun in my spare time, but not justifiable if I'm billing by the hour and there are a dozen Ruby gems already written to do it."

How do you think these Ruby libraries got written?
"particularly while trying to move or assist fat or obese patients"

There is a mechanical solution for this. A crane like apparatus for moving a patient. It was used in a revalidation center when i saw it last. Instead of a couple of nurses who move one patient, one nurse uses the device. This one nurse moves the 'cloth' which holds the patients under the patient etc.

A couple of Nurses are faster though.
"Copyright laws exist to restrict people's rights to free speech and freedom of communication. And in the age of the internet, business models based on scarcity of copies are obsolete; they cannot be propped up except by restricting the utility of the internet."

Businesses were never based on scarcity of copies, but scarcity of creation. The latest version of Photoshop can't be created with once click of a button. It takes many programmers and designers thousands of hours. Copying the bits is the easy part. When anybody can create (not copy) photoshop in their homes, I will agree with you.

"The copyright cartels (RIAA, MPAA, etc) want every computer to be a DRM-crippled locked down device like the iPad, and for themselves to have the power to kick anyone off the internet by merely accusing them of copyright infringement. If you don't want that future, it's time to support the Pirate Party."

There was an app designer awhile back that posted his sales numbers on reddit. He had 80% more sales on the iPhone. The reason? Android made it very easy for people to download his app and share it (and not pay) (he had the ability to see the people that pirated his app).

I wonder what would happen if I came out with the piratebay2 and claimed I was thepiraebay.com. If I made it look like the piratebay owned the site and I hurt their reputation in some way through disparaging comments. Would they (thepiratebay) come after me? After all, I'm not "stealing" anything. It should be fine, right?

My problem is that it has nothing to do with freedom of speech. Thepiratebay supporters want the ability to freely download commercial applications with no repercussions. I don't agree with this. If you don't want to buy a commercial application, that's fine (it's your right). But you shouldn't be able to download it for free without the owner's permission.

I also don't think many people realize what a world with no copyright would be like. Once a company got big enough, they would easily be able to take ideas from smaller companies just starting out. The smaller companies would have little legal recourse or enough resources to defend themselves.
Teams losing coin toss pay penalty
Oh def Dylan ;D
Make backups (for whatever definition of "backup" you need in your context) religiously, and store them somewhere that isn't your primary provider. Test your ability to construct a new running system (preferably on another VPS provider) from your backup. Do this regularly, not just once.

Now you have a safety net, and you can go nuts with whatever hare-brained schemes you happen to find in a how-to. :) Both Slicehost and Linode have excellent libraries of articles for setting up typical services, although neither one give ongoing maintenance (backups, patching, monitoring, log reviews, etc) nearly enough attention.

If you really want a learning experience, find an old machine, and spend some time with "Linux From Scratch": http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/ . You'll learn an enormous amount about how the whole system fits together by going through that exercise. (I did that with a few machines back in the day before there was something like LFS to point people to; having a roadmap like that would have sped the learning process up significantly.)
I've used virtualmin in the past, and while it might provide a certain level of convenience, resolving server related problems becomes, well, a problem. It pays to learn to do things the hard way when the inevitable server issues arise.
Regaring child-care. A similiar, if not far worse, example that comes to mind for me is domestic abuse. When I was in college I rode with the domestic abuse team for our local police department (many police stations have programs for this, if you're interested).

I was shocked by (a) how much domestic abuse happens, (b) how violent it is, and (c) how much leeway the men get. Officers routinely push the women to not press charges, because it will "likely escalate the situation" or frankly, "we probably can't do anything until he kills you or worse, and that doesn't benefit you does it?".

And the crazy thing is that in the US domestic abuse is about as good as it gets worldwide. In other countries men can kill their wives if they have affairs or even get raped. And if you count the number of victims of sexual violence in this country, women far outnumber men.
Coming to America, circa 1922
This would be flagged off-topic on Stack Overflow and migrated to Server Fault ;)
I agree. DabbleDB's user interface is great - user friendly, intuitive and yet with many useful features. I don't care much about Twitter, but I hope the team has a good experience there.
NO WAY!
http://redmine.ruby-lang.org/issues/show/3140
Is still not closed in 1.9.2 :(
I'm not offended (or motivated to downvote) by your claims, but after following your links it seems like quite weak sauce, and some more substantive documentation is needed.

Certainly, there seems to be connections between the Pirate Bay/Party and this guy who has an unsavory past and connections to an unpleasant political fringe. But how strong and how current are these connections? One might argue in turn that the RIAA is the lobbying arm of an industry which has had more than its share of dubious characters, both ethically and politically. Or point out that TPB was the main distribution vector (and helped to promote) a Swedish anti-fascist film last year - 'Nasty Old People', IIRC. Or we can get into the perennial internet argument about whether it's ethical to use PCs because IBM sold punch-card machines to Hitler's government.

I'm not saying your point is wrong, but that it needs to be backed up with more context than a simple allegation of guilt by association. I've worked for companies that were later found to have been breaking the law, but that doesn't make me a participant in their illegal activity.
Science is not just a body of knowledge, it is a methodology of description and the update process for models in the face of new evidence. Perhaps they are simply so open to shifts in their models and the terms in those models that the term "heat conduction" is open to, what seems to us, quite radical revision. Quine would be proud.
First, learn how to reduce your attack surface. This article is a pretty good introduction:

http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/articles/hardening_linux
Lots of what's in that presentation could be applied to more intellegent sorting of contact "authority" to build something truly useful in the email space.

We inherently know when looking at an incoming email how important / timely it is to respond - in my personal experience a huge part of it is related to the sender.
I, as a member of a small startup that will use banks intrinsically in our everyday agenda, have had multiple email conversations with them. They are real people, ready and willing to discuss how they can help you with life/business/whatever.

Kudos. You will be my bank.
It's so much easier to google than rant about someone else's use of a term. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemical_vapor_deposition_of_di...
You don't just send a resume, you send a covering letter too. In the covering letter you can write "I understand that the position calls for XYZ as a requirement..." and go on to explain why you think you are qualified none-the-less. That means you have basic comprehension skills and an ability to think outside of the box too.
We do offer open-source projects license, and have an open-source guarantee. Meaning that if anything should happen to us the source-code would be opened. We're currently designing a clearer product section that details the guarantee along with clearer descriptions of the free and commercial license options.
You'll be more unhappy that you wasted so much time than you are unhappy with the product. You'll feel really dumb if you waste all that time perfecting something no one cares about. Trust me, I know.
I've run into some kind of infinite log-in-log-out loop in both Chrome and Opera when I try to sync PayPal. Known issue?
Amazing support. I got a Google Chat invite and a follow-up email within 5 minutes of posting.

If you guys can keep up that level of service as you scale, you will crush it.
love this idea! i will definitely be ordering a couple.
"This really makes me question my vote for the pirate party. I really like them, as a voice for freedom on the internet and beyond, and would really like them to lay of the pirate propaganda and start preaching the gospel of freedom instead. Perhaps I bet on the wrong horse all along. Unfortunately I don't know what the right horse is."

I would vote for them as long as "freedom" doesn't mean the ability of anyone to download/share commercial software, music, and movies with no legal consequences.
Site's down for me. Here's the text-only Google cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...
Thanks for this perspective!

I recently had the opportunity to outsource some of my development to India. An Indian friend of mine had a team that was looking for a project. I ended up not working with them for two reasons.

1) the small size of my project meant that the time I would spend writing up extensive design docs and requirements, and meeting with them via skype, could be better spent just doing the coding myself. This is probably true for a lot of small companies.

2) I wanted to be able to learn for myself how to do some of the stuff I needed to do. Teaching myself has been very rewarding (it is difficult though, and not for everyone)

I think, as your said, outsourcing is best for really big companies who have the structure to manage it, and the size to benefit from it.
Brain - javascript neural networks
sorry, my server is having memory issues. i'm looking into it now.
They are like 5 seconds of annoyance. I fill them out all the time, and I still don't particularly care. (perhaps because when it's a recaptcha, I am too busy gleefully wondering which word is the test and which is the text)

If I wrote this article, it would go...

Why you should never use CPATCHA:

Because reCAPTCHA exists. You should be using that instead.
Get some books on Unix admin. Nemeth et al's "Unix System Administration Handbook", and its Linux version are usually a good start. The most recent edition is coming out in 17 days: http://amzn.com/0131480057

You will also need a bunch of O'Reilly books.
"This just sounds like over-engineering the problem."

Except the problem was never defined. Of the five commercial Lisp applications I've worked on, two are addressing domains (large-scale financial calculations, and a web platform/OS) where using PHP makes absolutely no sense, and the current one (ERP) where PHP was previously attempted and found not to make any sense. All three use basic techniques like closures, markup generation and metaprogramming, and one of them is continuation-based (which I think is a mistake, but opinions differ).
@mattew - in fact, the IRS often scrutinizes entrepreneurs who charge personal/business transactions to the same account. CPA could fix it by having your business account reimburse the individual, but it gets complicated very quickly.

I'd highly recommend making the 1 hour investment in getting a business sub-account with its own checkbook and debit card :)

Hope this helps!