skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There is also the possibility that several encounters with the inspector will increase the likelihood of getting caught in the future (the inspector will recognize you, and expect that you don't have a ticket). Kind of like a casino cheat who gets red-flagged by casino security.
While I agree that it's not important for long-running applications, there is still a lot of scripting done in Ruby, and it's very frustrating to get a a 5-to-10 second wait just to tell someone their arguments were invalid. Waiting that long for tests is also such a drag on iteration.

I think once JRuby has stabilized the native gem support and has some sort of Passenger-like deployment option (Glassfish and Warbler isn't quite there yet), we'll see some big players built on MRI start to move their Web applications to the platform.
I'm happy this list has a little variety in it.

It may have a few grammatical errors, but at least this isn't another here are another ten companies run by guys from silicon valley. Sure it has some of those companies, but I'm glad to see some variety.
Shell scripts to improve your writing, or "My advisor rewrote himself in bash."
It makes all the difference in the world - One can be converted by the compiler into a loop that will never use more than one function call's worth of stack, and the other must cause an unbounded amount of memory usage dependent on the input argument.

In other words, it's the difference between O(n) and O(1) memory usage.
Gee, then maybe they shouldn't make it so hard do fix in the jail break in the first place.
Sweet. Thanks for the info!

Now I just need to learn HTML/CSS and maybe some JavaScript to build the rest. That's a lot less complicated than I had imagined. If I can get a few more strips drawn I may just be able to get this thing rocking sooner than I imagined.
Not to rain on the parade, but I think it's unlikely considering the largest ISPs are also TV providers.

When an eventual CRTC ruling declaring the caps anti-competitive is your best hope, you know not to expect much fast.
In your italicized text, it was good up until "No other company is going to compete with it."

The point isn't that you have no competition, but that you have enough raw material to be competitive yourself.

The point isn't that you're guaranteeing success, but that since most pitches (that I see) don't include ANY of the advantages you just listed, those that DO have those advantages look a lot better at the outset.

Of course anyone can succeed, and many should try. But that's not how investors think; they think in terms of reducing risk, and things like past success and traction are ways of reducing risk.
Hey, I liked your photos. I remember the ones you shot in the cave, with all the slave flashes.

Didn't I give you my IR-pass filter gel sheets? Did you ever end up doing anything with them?

Sent you an email; we should catch up.
Mariano Rivera, King of the Closers
Seems like it could just as easily turn against them if
someone else turns their open source solution to better
advantage (assuming the open source license permits this).

Sure, but that's their comfort space. They're confident of their skills and economies of scale here, and enthusiastic for this to be the battleground.

My point with the amazon example was partly that if Rackspace found itself needing to build something similar, it has a stronger starting point if it already has a software group. And because the platform is open, they might have a shared interest with another company who has taken on their software to collaborate on new features. Or another party may build an open payment system on top of this open system when they're not even looking, and they benefit from the network effects.
This one is worse, the 76% isn't volume, area, height, or length weighted.

http://www.cnbc.com/id/38294088/?slide=5
One thing I'd like to see is the YCombinator logo for the logo, helps it stand out.
Taking the Mystery Out of Web Anonymity
I certainly agree with you in practice.

Think of this like an Einstein thought-experiment -- it's not how you should run your life every day, but it's maybe a nice foil for thinking about such things.
Wow, that site has the most obnoxious SEO bullshit. (Anyone with noscript will see a host of search keywords in place of an article, doubtless intended to hoodwink spiders.)
It would probably block node, so you're better off running it in another process and using the nonblocking IPC.
Most desktops would be hard-pressed to cook themselves through a software/firmware hack unless significantly (stupidly) overclocked. In contrast, lots of mobile devices could cook themselves with such hacks even without any overclocking.

There's also a significant difference between firmware and just installing software. The PC manufacturer and MS expect you to install any old software on that windows boxen. Apple did not manufacture the iPad with that expectation, and they were up-front about this.

If you want a hackable tablet, there have been plenty of options around since 2001! I know, because I have one!
True, but if the rear lights suddenly stopped working then you'd expect the manufacturer to replace those under warranty regardless of what you did to the engine, wouldn't you?

Note that I'm not necessarily saying Apple have done anything wrong in this particular case, but making any modification (a sticker on the back?) shouldn't automatically void any warranty claim on the whole device. IMO.
For those of us who have worked closely with Metaweb's products and had a professional relationship with them (Powerset, my previous employer pre-acquisition, was fairly close to them back when we started out) over the past few years, this is great to see. Metaweb has been providing several invaluable services to everyone interested in NLP, Search, and smarter software in general.

Glad you got your payout, guys. Hopefully now the full power of Google's infrastructure can make Freebase fast and enormous.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replicator_(Star_Trek)
Part 2:

http://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/14/how-honest-tea-stoo...
From the article: "developers are certainly better public communicators than lawyers are."

Really? Paul Graham certainly is, but I'm willing to bet that the average programmer is not as good a communicator as the average lawyer. At least not to "normal" (non techie) people.

By the way, this article brings up something I've been wondering for a while: who impacts the world more, technologists or politicians? At the edge cases, I think (but am not sure) that it's the technologists (Bill Gates has certainly had quite an impact, I'm guessing more than most Presidents, even). I'm wondering about the average cases of, say, successful entrepreneurs versus elected officials.
Just release plenty of FUD about "virality" and the customers will line up for the commercial license. See MySQL.
The problem with open source projects is that it's often hard to break into their communities. Some can even be surprisingly insular, and "don't need" what you see they are obviously lacking.

Of course, if you find a good one, it can be incredibly rewarding, and you can make new friends.
I'm not sure if what you're saying applies to everyone?
Where I live it's not possible to get an international credit card, which means I can't get paypal to work.

Do you have more information about the virtual POB?
Any help/suggestions about how to get paid in a foreign country from the USA is appreciated.
Because we're needlessly pedantic, that's why.

The internet exists to allow us to have pointless arguments over things that don't matter, for no other reason than that we think another person is saying something which is not entirely true.

There's not much point in discussing how much oil 190 million gallons is, either. Personally I'd say it's enough to fill the world's largest supertanker about 1.3 times over, but that doesn't sound very spectacular.
I'm not sure I buy the assertion that doing your own DI makes your code more cohesive and self documenting. If you carefully consider your classes and dependencies as you create them as other commenters have mentioned, a IoC container seems to really make wiring things up easier.

I say all this as a relative newcomer to IoC containers but the work I have done on large applications with both Castle Windsor and Ninject has me currently in the camp that a container can make dependency management a great deal easier with the tradeoff of making it slightly harder for new developers (especially those with zero DI/IoC experience) to figure out what's going on. IoC containers make large, complex apps much more pleasant to work on, IMHO.
I'm pretty sure most developers would get really frustrated with the aribtrary, corrupt, stacked system almost immediately and just quit. It's like getting a program in VBA or something; you don't even try to support it, just hook up something sane immediately.
You are confusing the fallible person who delivered the speech with the principles a country was founded upon.

And, BTW, Ngô Ðình Diêm's family name was Ngô, not Diêm.
"I just feel like it's going to look like I am quitting because this project sucks... er... because IS why I am quitting."

Sounds like you answered your own question.

Would you really WANT a reference from these people?

I'm guessing no -- they're legally bound to confirm that you worked there, but your references should be people that you've worked with, trust, and respect. I NEVER list managers that have clusterfucked projects as references, I always choose people who've worked with me and that I respected technically as well as personally. (Some of whom WERE managers, but that's exceedingly rare.)
It would be tiny compared to any lake that anyone would have heard of.
People Are Happier When Insulated from Market Forces
I like this idea - never came up to me before

n * fac(n-1) vs. * n fac(- n 1)

or * (n, fac(n-1)) as a method call, which makes it clear * is the last function that's called.
Hi Mark.

You've already covered my startup, a bike reference for cyclists (VenturePimp writeup at at http://venturepimp.com/post/673622703/brightspoke; my site lives at http://brightspoke.com/) but I'd like to thank your for your kind writeup.

For what it's worth, your post sent a few hundred visitors my way, and they seemed more engaged than those from some other blog links we've had.

Thanks for your blog, it's great to have a feed of new stuff people are working on, especially when presented in such a clean and straightforward way.
Try reading a piece of legislation vs a piece of technical documentation and see who the better communicator is.
I think the new organizations feature of Github is an excellent way to address the need for a "canonical" repository. The fact that you can define an org for each open source project or group, and then add other users as admins mitigates the problems if the project changes hands, or gains a new primary maintainer. Just add the new "owner" as an admin for the group/repo, and nobody needs to be the wiser.
I don't think The Coca-Cola Company cares what brand of sugar water they sell. So long as it's them it's being bought from.
Craigslist is used by a LOT of flakes. I've also had people stand me up when charging for an item.

The best thing I've found to eliminate flakes is to include a paragraph where you ask them to only reply if they're serious, and not to waste my time if they can't come to pick it up--and also include specific instructions as to HOW to apply ("Include your name, a phone number, and when it's OK to call. Don't ask if it's gone...")

Folks who don't follow the instructions don't get the time of day from me, because they're the most likely flakes. Before I started doing this, I would have 2/3 of all people flake on me. Afterward, it was down to 1/10 or better.

BUT, in this case, I see your point: He'd be better off spending his time working for people who are willing to pay SOMETHING. Otherwise he'll get requests for products that may not ever see hosting, and that will be harder to use on a resume.
Never. It would be like working for a big company, but more so.
Why don't you volunteer your time to one of the projects listed on http://fairsoftware.net/startup-ideas-software-web-iphone ? That would go a long way to build your portfolio.
> Where I live it's not possible to get an international credit card

Here we go again with the, "I can't" stuff - banish it! Really! "How can I?" Can you get someone to buy you a prepaid card when they're traveling, or when you're traveling? Do you a have friend you can hit up for a favor who lives abroad? If the answer to all of those is no, keeping asking "How can I?" Someone's done it before.

> Do you have more information about the virtual POB?

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=virtual+post+office+box

Kidding aside, I used Earth Class Mail and they were good enough at what they do. I got it so I could get mail when I was international for long periods of time, but then it turned out I was able to get my mail volume pretty low regardless so I canceled. But it's a solid service.
"I guess that's karma - dishonest behavior highlighted a minor design flaw, and now everyone is hung-up over the minor design flaw."

The same thing happened to Intel with the Pentium 5 FDIV bug. By denying it, Intel turned a trivial bug into a major PR fiasco. Don't forget, it required a floating point division with TWELVE significant digits to trigger the bug.

The only reason that it became a huge PR fiasco is that when a scientific researcher ran into it, Intel tried to hide it.
A comment on the site itself noted that tail recursion does not imply parallelization -- in fact, I would make a stronger statement that it forces serial execution, at least as far as funneling results of one "iteration" into the next.

The benefit, as "everybody" here of course already knows, is to reduce memory (call stack) usage.

Knowing how to implement tail recursion allows you to write in an "assign only once" type of language, without blowing up the stack. And using such "invariant symbols" in a routine allows the compiler/interpreter to seek parallelization at other points in the function on your behalf. OK, so I just contradicted myself, but the point is there is an rather indirect connection between tail recursion and parallelization.
On slide 12 you can read that the spill is supposed to be equivalent to "1,9301.5 mW wind turbines"; i.e. for the money spent on everything you could buy as many wind turbines as required to achieve the specified energy output.
Sadly mW means milliwatts and not Megawatts, which they probably intended to say.
Thank you for the great tip.
In my experience, most good devs have no head for politics. The kind of thinking needed to thrive in politics is very different from that needed to write good code.

The best politicians combine a cold blooded ruthlessness and extreme ambition with some idealism. The worst don't have the idealism, or are actively evil. Most good politicians are extroverts who love meeting people and are very good at organizational wheeling and dealing and power plays.

Most devs are the opposite of all that, and the few who do have some political skills end up as CEOs and such. By and large, developers can't even handle office politics. Legislative politics is to office politics as a knife fight in a dark alley is to a pillow fight.
Terminology for iPad Cruises Up the App Store Charts
The bandwidth of a fully laden 747
> Try reading a piece of legislation vs a piece of technical documentation and see who the better communicator is.

The confusing, indecipherable, loophole-ridden mess is a feature, not a bug. That's the typical legislator's monetization strategy.
Minor Quibble: The name of the party is the Democratic Party, not Democrat Party.
Regardless of my tone. How can this be anything other than my opinion? Isn't it obvious that it is my opinion?
That's where GitHub is really great. Find a smallish but active project that you find cool, clone it, fix some bugs or add some features, and send a pull request to the project owner.
But they can't pull in library APKs on install like in a fully functional package manager.
I'll second this feedback, and add one other minor point: I wouldn't use the acronym (or is that an abbreviation since it is not pronounceable?) "IaaS" as part of that signup form. I do a lot of work with SaaS and it took me a minute to figure out what you were talking about. (It didn't help that in your chosen font upper case I and lower case L look quite similar. At first a thought you mean "logging as a service" which seemed like a strangely narrow expression.)

For what it is worth, I would either spell that out, or even better, change it to something a little less jargony, such as "cloud based services" or something like that (which is still a little jargony).
> As such, its close enough for most purposes.

Well, this purpose was to make it a tail call so that it could be optimized. Since it either is or it isn't, "close enough" to "is" is, sadly, "isn't". Which turns it from O(1) to O(n).
What are you using for "one atom"?

Using one square angstrom as the cross section of an atom (which is about right), and plugging

"187 million gallons / 1e-20 m^2 in light years"

into google, I get:

7.48237279 × 10^9 light years

which is at least an appreciable fraction of the universe, and ten thousand times the width of the galaxy.
I'm creating a craigslist alternative
I am trying to create a craigslist alternative. I have been doing this project all by myself, so I need a little bit of feedback this far. Basic things should be functional , but no where near perfect. I still need to add searching (which I am working on now), and a few other little oddities.
Let me know what you guys think so far. Also tell me if you would like to see a specific feature added.
jdefr89@gmail.com
PS: And if anyone is interested in helping out, also email and let me know! (I don't have funding or anything)
Crowdsourcing meetup tonight (SF)
You forgot the the app for the RSS feed.
I think this misses the issue I think Coke has on this subject. People believe HFCS is bad in part because companies like Honest are pushing against it. There's a real argument that public perception can be swayed one way or the other. You're assuming that the perception of people is preordained.
Could we please have less Stack Overflow submissions? That is unless you actually have something new to show us. This site is no different than the Gaming site that was submitted to HN about a dozen times last week. They look the same. They function the same. Like the Gaming site, the Food and Cooking site is lonely and branded poorly. Nothing about the UI says food --- except bland.
[no longer applies to the comment]
This makes me wonder how fragile parts of Mint's technology are. They couldn't find some way to transfer the data from Quicken?

Also, Mint's new Goals feature requires you to have separate accounts. You can't have two goals, save for car and house, both using the same account.

Both of these reek of a technology base that is fragile.
Well America is 300 million. 850,000 then is about 0.30 percent of the population. Thus, it is secret to the 99.70% of the American population. That sounds very secret to me.
I've already witnessed the classic 'is it a question' debate. Brilliant.
I am not sure. I think I would like the red button to be kept very secret.
And it looks like it's slower that either 1.8 or 1.9...
Especially they confidently tell us, that the system is accurate to two feet. Sadly two feet is the difference between parking ok and damaging both cars significantly (i.e. you'll have to at least fix your bumpers.)
"Most reporters are not going to do days of research to find the companies"

A journalist's goal is to communicate (usually new) information, not necessarily to write about harder to find, harder to describe stories. I don't think this is a question of low hanging fruit, but one of form factor and audience.

From a company's point of view, especially a startup, communicating a message that is both beneficial to you and interesting to others is damn hard work. To take your VWO example, and the context that it came up in last week with Optimizely, I think there is a lot more than having or not having a "hook." The people at YC do an awesome job of prepping new startups for their first press coverage, often on TechCrunch. There is the obvious benefit--that the company is funded by YC--but also the non-obvious benefit that the company is drawing on lots of experience in successfully getting good press coverage and avoiding mistakes that others make.
Maybe some Canadians can chime in on the Canadian Post. When I was a credit analyst that dealt with Canada, many people would not get their mail every day or have a reliable way to send it back. Many would take their bill payments into a bank or store or whatever and pay them.

This may be the reason streaming only works much better. In fact that's the first thought I had, "I wonder how they are going to deal with the Canadian mail system."

This seemed to vary by province/region. I remember some towns way out east having only a few phones (in the local store). And I remember thinking, "wow, and we think the Midwest is isoloated."
So far that hasn't happened.
Here's another visualization for you:

The flow rate of Niagara Falls is about 1833 m^3 per second. So if Niagara Falls suddenly started gushing oil instead of water, it would be about six minutes' worth.
Some research on business strategy, by rita mcgrath("discovery driven growth") found that many successful entrepreneurs have changed their initial idea while building their business.

This is specially true for very dynamic/chaotic business areas.

Her recommendation for dynamic/chaotic business areas:work with an adaptive strategy, using small experiments(in similar spirit to eric ries's "lean startup").
Canadian mail is slower than US mail, plus there's no deliveries on Saturday, so Netflix wouldn't be quite as good a value. Zip.ca, a similar service, does one thing that helps get around this - it has an honor system where you can say "I've mailed this movie back today" and it will ship out the next one.
It's worth noting that startup times with 1.9 are longer than with 1.8 (in my experience anyway). Startup times for my 1.8 instances on Heroku are sub-second. Whereas instances running 1.9 are 6+ seconds!

Disclaimer: I haven't dug into this issue much, so its possible other factors are the cause...
"If he's providing real value, it's fairly simple to start paying for advertising and driving new customers to sign up etc."

This is definitely not fairly simple. Getting the attention of potential users is a huge problem and a difficult, valuable one to solve. This is to say nothing of what the founder of VWO should be doing, but whatever the answer is it shouldn't be because getting customers is fairly simple. It's super hard.
Netflix (like Amazon with books) has a long way to go before all the movies that are available on DVD are also available on streaming. Also Blu-ray customers would be disappointed unless Netflix can stream in 1080p, which is difficult across a high bandwidth wireless network, let alone the Intranet.

The quality is just not as good yet.
Conformance, not intelligence, predicts success in school at every level (well, until you're a tenured research professor, at least.) This fact is why I find it so amusing when people use school drop-out rate to as a proxy for per-capita intellect (as in the study on HN yesterday that showed that "Socratic discussions lower the drop-out rate"): all you're measuring is an increase n the amount of shit students are willing to put up with before walking out.
Another NASA open source programmer checking in.
Nice site. It maybe impossible to get traction though. People are mostly happy with Craigslist. It has the volume of ads that buyers want, and the volume of buyers that sellers want. You can't have one without the other.

Judging by the success of Kijiji and backpages(sp?) I'd say you have a nearly impossible task on your hands, but I wish you good luck none the less.