skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I disagree. Factoring support, downtime, and hardware I think a mainframe will in an appropriate domain be just as cost effective as a cluster of small servers.

Mainframes are the best system for a lot of jobs and problem domains and dismissing them because they are "old school" is silly at best.

To put it in car terms. If you are moving papers it doesn't matter if you have one large truck that can carry 1 million papers or 1 million small cars than can only carry 1 paper.

But when you want to move a space ship it's better to have 1 big truck that can carry it at once instead of having to disassemble it fit it into your cars then reassemble it at the other end.
I use CentOS on my server, mostly because I'm the most familiar with Red Hat-based distributions. I like Ubuntu a lot more on the desktop. If I was using an Ubuntu desktop full-time, I'd certainly consider using Ubuntu on the server as well.
I love how Matt Maroon's post titles always sound like he prepared for blogging by swigging Haterade.
Do you carry that phone with you every time you leave the house? No? Then you're not really comparing apples to uhh apples are you?
Why not use map?

spam = map (eggs, spam)

Even shorter, more concise and clearer. What is not to like, as Seinfeld would say?
because design matters.
Call me crazy and out of touch with reality, and this is only partly off topic: but I'm one of those guys who still doesn't understand why people go bonkers to see a girl who knows her way around a computer, much less plays a video game.

Then again, my current love interest is a Network Security student so...maybe I'm just naive anyway.
Very nifty.

Proof II does gloss over a few details though; it should note that that prime factorization is unique for each integer.

Another clever proof is the geometric proof of the AM-GM inequality:

Draw a semicircle, and choose an arbitrary point on the diameter. Draw the inscribed right triangle with the diameter as the hypotenuse. Now draw the altitude perpendicular to the hypotenuse, bisecting the hypotenuse into to segments, A and B. Note that the radius is the arithmetic mean of A and B, and the altitude is the gemometric mean of A and B.

Clearly, radius >= altitude.
ubuntu 7.10 on EC2. Chosen simply because of familiarity, excessive documentation and the ease of apt-get.
CentOS 5.1 - we started on a hosted LiquidWeb box (they were installing CentOS4 at the time), and since it worked near-flawlessly for us, decided to standardize on it as we grew.
I use fedora but striped down to the core. I like to build the webserver and other tools so that I can customize.
I'm stealing that sliced lists line.
I'd parody this with 'Email Is Not Really That Special', but I'm too busy building a profitable company on Facebook.
Because it's completely and totally wrong. I work for Justin.tv, so we have our own traffic graphs. And we also have ustream's traffic graphs, because they use QuantCast. And neither of our charts have anything to do with what Alexa says. They're not even wrong in the same ways.

Alexa is only correct within an order of magnitude, at best.
On the other hand, since I have the actual traffic graphs, I can say with confidence we're much bigger than ustream is. So Alexa is accidentally right.
The problem (which you are right to point out) is that only top-level defines are dynamically scoped. That's why my first example doesn't return a 3 and why the binding from a nested define statement disappears.

The top-level defines do fit the description of "indefinite scope", since they can be accessed anywhere in the program (even before they are defined). I don't know of anyway to remove a top-level define without shadowing it with another top-level define, so it would seem that they also fit the definition of "dynamic extent".

Nested defines are very strange, so I think it is understandable that they don't quite fit in with either CLTL's definitions or with the classical definition of static scoping.
"Facebook is pretty good at what it does. But what it does just isn’t important."

Maybe not important to him (or me, for that matter), but there are definitely people out there to whom it's important. But facebook needs to find a good way to monetize all those page views before the hype wears off.
Don't you think that git's advantage over SVN evaporates when there is only one user on a team? I run my private Subversion repository which I use for everything (not just code), I looked at git, and while I see the benefits for large teams, I simply couldn't justify the switch.

I guess I am asking for a small lecture :)
> YCombinator is simply busy. YNotCombinator is not an anti-group - it's a pro group

Clever name, but it also kind of makes you sound like sloppy seconds.
Sometimes it is, sometimes it's not. If you allow me to generalize this to list comprehensions vs. standard functional techniques, sometimes the list comprehension is cleaner. Take the list comprehension

[f for f in os.listdir('.') if f.endswith('.csv') and not f.endswith('_avg.csv')]

The lambda alternative (which would make a great blog name) is

filter(lambda f: f.endswith('.csv') and not f.endswith('_avg.csv'), os.listdir('.'))

I find the list comprehension cleaner because it introduces less noise.
Autism: Not more, just different
I mentioned it in the article: map was going to be deprecated in 3000, but now will return iterators. Contextually, not what you want.
Agreed.

> The lambda alternative (which would make a great blog name)

I'm stealing that.
Bootstrapper's Bible by Seth Godin, What Every Entrepreneur Should Know Before He/She Launches
Artists impression of PC viruses
Just curious, what made you switch from Lisp to Smalltalk? Assuming you put quite a lot of work into Croma.
Groups on LinkedIn are unfortunately a very under-deveopled and over-utilized feature. LinkedIn, however, does provide a unique link for each group. You can access it from the following path:
Groups -> My Groups -> Manage -> Invite Members

You will see something like this:

-------------------------

Invite Members

To invite new members, send out an email invitation with the link to join your group.

http://www.linkedin.com/e/gis/2342/3423ASD3432

Important: You should pre-approve people to join your group before you send out the email invitation.

----------------------

Just copy and paste the link above to this thread. You DO NOT have to pre-approve people. Anybody who clicks on the link puts in a request to join and sit in a queue waiting for your approval. You can access the list by clicking on "Requests to Join"

Hope this helps!
It took nearly 1000 words to say this is all a gut feeling?

Can you dismiss their 65 billion page views a month? The fact that half of their users return daily? Can you explain why it's not valuable to essentially own most interpersonal relationships on the web?
Ubuntu.

We used CentOS when I started (because it was the EC2 default back then or something), but as we grew everybody seemed to know Debian better, so we switched. I find it's much easier to find and install packages for Ubuntu than it was for CentOS, but I admit that may well be because I'm an idiot (esp. w.r.t. RPMs).
Clouds Rolling In: The Google App Engine Q&A
In a purely technical sense, none of the web 2.0 phenomena is special. What are blogs, social networks, and the like? Merely the web pages that we nerds have been messing with since the dawn of the internet.

However, the real "technology" is how the popular perception of this tech has been (purposefully?) changed so it is no longer "techie."

On the other hand, the fundamental problems of the internet are not inherently technological anyways, but based on social dynamics and trust. That is why things like facebook and myspace are important.

What I would like to see some genius do is figure out what the "purpose" of the internet is. By this, I mean what is the compelling, concrete, and feasible potential of the internet? Sounds like a facile question, but it isn't. I don't mean something like "communicate faster, broadly, and more efficiently" or "watch porn."

There is a deep, underlying motivation that compels us to interact and be social, to avoid loneliness and the like, despite all the narcissistic toys we surround ourselves with. Why, and what does the internet do for this motivation?
Any other startups in Los Angeles?
Hi,

I'm looking to get together with other startups in LA area to share thoughts and experiences.
someone thought facebook was special?
Another suggestion regarding the LinkedIn process:
Since Groups and Associations can be publicly available, I would rather not post my YC-handle there. Rather, when a user makes a request to join, LinkedIn allows them to send a msg to the group manager. It would be better if we can use that to let you know of our YC-handle so you can figure out the real requests from the SPAM requests.
It's nice to be able to share things. Presumably it could also get too much (computer stuff all the time), but couples of the same profession seem to be quite common. Besides, computers are among the most interesting things, especially because most other things can be analyzed in terms of computers.
"I'm not advocating using drugs to help you think better, btw, but there's more of a case there than in sports."

This could mean several things. i'm curious what you think about a few cases that make explicit some of the ambiguities.

1 A person has debilitating OCD and is prescribed ritalin by a psychiatrist, which they take daily, so they can function.

2 A healthy person at the top of their field takes ritalin and other stimulaties daily over his career to enhance performance, prescribed by a physician. Cannot perform at the top of his field without it.

3 A person has debilitating OCD, is uninsured, and self medicates by taking illicitly obtained psilocybin mushrooms 6 times a year. (studies show that psilocybin reduces symptoms of OCD for longer then a month).

4 A person has treatment resistant cluster headaches that stops them from thinking. Their treatment provider informs them that their best bet is probably psychedelic mushrooms, which must be obtained illicitly.

5 A person has a psycho-spiritual crisis after finding out their religious leader is a fraud, and takes illicit LSD in the aftermath with confused and possibly self destructive intentions. Partly as a result of this experience, their psychology is permanently altered in a way that makes their thinking better.

6 An alcoholic uses illicitly obtained LSD to induce the kind of spiritual experience his psychologist said correlated with a relapse of alcoholism.

7 A musician takes illicit drugs as part of the creative process.

8 A musician takes prescribed drugs not according to directions as part of the creative process.
Is there anything significant Hypercard did that you can't do in flash these days?
In what way? Because people buy pretty things? That is probably what the parent thinks, so he doesn't see how you answered his question.

However, I suspect you mean something much more insightful. I know from your blog that you consider design to be more than an issue of functionality or marketing, could you expand on what you mean?
I need some enlightenment on the tagging business. Do people really find tagging useful? Do people really browse by tags?

Is there a site that uses tag in such a way that I can get something substantial out of it?

I ask this because, for example, blogs all have tags and I click them occasionally, but I never get much out of it.
facebook makes no interesting steps forward in solving trust problems. i made an account. people give facebook their email password and thus entire address book (this amuses me when the topic is setting up reasonable trust system), and thus i sometimes get friend requests from acquaintances. which i ignore.

all they came up with is letting you make one type of connection with other people with an account. nothing to see here. the only thing that makes it notable is the large amount of data put into it.
You are right. I thought mabe we would vote on eachothers work before accepting.

The bigger problem is location and if we'll be ready to move :)
you should try reading his post before criticizing him.

he literally said he couldn't foresee GOOG in particular getting so big, just that type of thing in general.
"What was it like to quit your job in February? Were you ready before you decided or did you become ready once you decided?"

I made my decision back in October, and gave notice then. I was in my cube, an email with a busywork task popped into my inbox, and I knew right then that it was time to go. (I had been preparing for years, however, saving money and keeping expenses low.)

I think your idea of relocating to a lower-cost country is intriguing. Moving can be disruptive, though, so you want to make sure the additional time you get (through a lower cost of living) isn't all eaten up with the distractions of travel.

I've heard Argentina is pretty wired.
1 happens all the time.
2 similar to Paul Erdos.
3 happens occasionally, people can be jailed. adulterants possible.
4. happens occasionally, Jail, adulterants possible.
5 similar to Steve Jobs. Jail, adulterants possible.
6 similar to Bill Wilson, founder of AA (Jung advised him years earlier a genuine spiritual experience was the best hope for treating alcoholism.) Jail, adulterants possible.
7. happens all the time (see: jazz, rock.) Jail, adulterants possible
8. Similar to Glenn Gould. Jail possible (unlikely)
A lot of backlash coming from here, but I absolutely agree with this post.
Py3K goes wild with generators. Basically, everything that used to return a list (e.g. range()) now returns an iterable, and to get a list you just apply the list() constructor to that. It's about lazy evaluation. So these will be equivalent:
dinner = [eggs(x) for x in spam]
dinner = list(eggs(x) for x in spam)
dinner = list(map(eggs, spam)

The real reason list comprehensions are favored over map() and filter() are that the latter two require another Python function call, while list comprehensions are evaluated directly by the interpreter (a bit like rewriting the loop in C or using Pyrex) -- better performance.
You're right, I misread it. Thanks.
We're still here. Based on my personal experience, there are plenty of reasons why geek girls are avoiding CS. For starters, I've had to deal with a few of my classmates make lame jokes,like boobs and brains being an inverse ratio and following that up with "Oh hey, you're not flat chested. Haha." It's a no win situation for me. If I complain, I'm too sensitive. If I say something back, I'm a bitch. I've also had problems with one of my professors, who seemed think women only took CS classes because they were gold diggers in search of a MRS degree. Most of the guys in my classes are decent, if occasionally awkward when we do group projects together. But the ones who aren't tend to be the ones who go out of their way to be an ass.

I think the article nailed it with this quote: "These roles would probably be ideal for women who prefer to be in communication-focused roles, if they know computer science and can communicate to all parties involved." My husband and several of our friends work at the same company. They are write code. All the women on their floor are relegated to "communication-focused" roles, like project/product managers. I've also run into this when people at my husband's office ask what I'm majoring in. When I say computer science, everyone's reaction is "Great! We could always use another project manager! You should talk to so and so about an internship." They look sort of baffled when I explain that no, I want to write code, not manage coders.
Planning a Product Launch
"Sounds pretty accurate to me..."

Only if you're lucky. If you're not they make you go fix other people's computers and pull cables and stuff like that.

Or they make you a manager or a sales engineer and you don't get to write code anymore.
being able to make money off something is different than it being important. and the sense of important Matt meant was made pretty clear in his post.
People aren't analyzable by computers, at least on an individual basis. Women tend to be more interested in individual relationships than men, and you can't have a relationship with a computer.

In my opinion, it is pretty obvious from the clearly differing motivations of the genders why there is such a gender divide in academics. Maybe it has to do with intelligence, but "intelligence" seems to largely be determined by what a person loves and focuses their time on, i.e. genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.

Today, we measure intelligence in quantitative/technical terms, and men are much more interested in technical subjects than women. Who memorizes thousands of intricate statistics about hundreds of people they'll never meet? Who gets bored stiff by that stuff and wants to share personal experiences instead? The difference here is quantitative vs qualitative.

So, again, I think it's pretty obvious why there are barely any women geeks. People only think it is a big issue because they think it is important for women to be self determined, and you have to be technically smart to succeed in what we consider success (career, wealth, material goods, etc). I think our modern worldview is way too narrow.
he agreed it was convenient for them, but said it's not important in some directly world-changing sense. you haven't contradicted this.
What you are describing is poverty begetting poverty, not inequality begetting poverty.

If everyone in the world had the same income as the average Nigerian, the world would be perfectly equal, but the Nigerians wouldn't be any better off. The problem isn't that the third world doesn't have as much as the first world, but that they simply don't have enough.

You're absolutely correct, we need to help people who are less fortunate than ourselves, but inequality isn't the source of the problem. Our being rich, doesn't make them poor (usually.)
pokemon is popular too. that doesn't make it important in the sense matt means.
True. I think it might also be generally possible to pull a mapping function and a filtering function out of any list comprehension or generator expression. That helps with debugging, too, without hurting performance:

def crazy_mapping(var): ...
def crazy_filter(var): ...
foo = [crazy_mapping(b) for b in bar if crazy_filter(b)]
Don Norman actually points to that phone as a pinnacle of design:

- it has enough cord to move around a desk

- it has enough weight to not fall off, but not SO much weight that it presses buttons when on its 'face'

- the hang-up knobs are guarded by the handset holder

Compare this to the crappy (landline) phones that were in use in the same timeframe (early 80's?) and you'll agree.
What part of his post, specifically, do you disagree with?

(If what he said is true then it's pretty ridiculous to call it hate.)
no investors. russia is like pg's example of pittsburgh in that essay about making a silicon valley. although, there are rich people in russia, but they don't know tech; they get rich from crime (drugs), oil, or knowing the right people in the kgb^H^Hremlin.
I didn't have that option when joining a group recently, feel free to send me a message as an alternative (or even email, if you feel so moved). I just want some means of filtering for folks that are actually participating in the news.YC community.
I have a lot of scripts that sit on top of svn which I'm thinking of moving over to git. Even in the case of a single private repository git offers some advantages.

Git seems a lot faster compared to svn, especially when checking out a large tree. svn co can be glacial at times.

Also with git you don't have .svn directories all over the place. This may not seem like a big deal until you want to store a directory structure created by an application that wants total control over the directories it creates.
Yes, I think facebook started out right, but now the pressure to profit is causing them to make stupid decisions.

The key is to allow the kind of control people have in real relationships. From what I understand, it isn't possible to terminate facebook friendships, and that eliminates the basis of accountability needed for a good trust relationship.
"Liquidity on a position" means getting someone to give you money for the stock you hold.
But it's not just popular. Almost any undergraduate in the US will tell you that facebook is already an essential social resource. That isn't trivial nor is it easy to dismiss.
"They look sort of baffled when I explain that no, I want to write code, not manage coders."

Good for you. Sorry about all the jerks.

Since the studies apparently show that women are opting out because they prefer communication focused roles, others figure that all women are like that and would never want to be in the trenches writing code. And, indeed, many (or even all) of the women they have at that company may prefer those roles.

But even if many people are bad about stereotyping others based upon their past experiences, there are definitely places where people will be happy to see you program as long as you have the aptitude and the interest.

Unfortunately, one thing you will likely have to deal with throughout your career is programming departments dominated by male-centric attitudes and humor. (This can range from benign to outright offensive, depending on the people involved.) I don't really have any helpful advice for that. Then again, I spent a couple of years working in a very female-centric office, and that was a strange experience, too, so I guess that can work both ways. The last thing I want to do is to talk you out of programming, but you should go into it with your eyes open on this one.
I've written at length about this:

http://www.obsceneart.com/?p=30

Our software runs on millions of servers world-wide running every OS imaginable, and so I'll self-righteously claim the exclusive privilege of making bold pronouncements and expecting everyone just to go along with them.
Well in all honesty, I think this article isn't trying to say the Internet is inherently shitty, but more subjectively shitty. By that, I mean it appears the way people approach the information presented, and the way we value it has turned an otherwise incredible resource into a vague, hard to define collection of data. By that argument, some of what he says makes sense.

Take for example modern academia's persistent fear of Wikipedia. It's almost like it's threatening their way of life and their authority on the rite of passage of knowledge.

Maybe I'm just crazy though, but I only agree with him in the sense that so-called "experts" still have a distrust of the Internet, and the trust we put in them lowers the value of everything that truly matters.
Java is probably the heaviest-used language at Google for consumer-facing web apps.

More surprising (if this sort of thing surprises you) is Writely, which was in C#/.NET.
how is "anyone will tell you it's awesome" different than "popular"? if they know something that makes it fundamentally important you could relate what that thing is, rather than just implying there is one.
True. Is embedding ads deeply into the content stealing from the viewer? Like a product placement in a movie? The more people block ads the more content producers will move in this direction.
I knew Google was, in a way, similar to Yahoo (which everyone had been using up until then) but took one very critical step further. It was clearly a paradigm shift, the difference between a propeller and a jet engine.

Wasn't Yahoo using Google to generate search results when you first saw Google?
rPath Linux. I used the public rBuilder to create a recipe and then build both an EC2 AMI and a local Xen DomU image with everything I needed in a day.
Doesn't look like a disagreement, but just an observation/opinion.
"hate" is a bad thing.
I heard Interwoven bought Scriptics mainly so they could totally screw over their competitor Vignette, whose whole system was totally dependent on Tcl at the time. Kind of like the way Oracle bought InnoDB to screw MySQL.

Did Interwoven actually end up doing anything with Scriptics/Tcl?