skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It is a bad sign that such a comment go so many upvotes.

> Of course, it takes less time NOW to dig into TextMate, but VIm or Emacs changes your way of thinking.

That you think TextMate won’t change your way of thinking shows that you have not used it in any serious way. Several aspects of the TextMate approach, particularly its declarative language grammars and the use of css-like selectors for assigning commands, syntax highlighting, etc., are fundamentally more flexible and powerful than the pitiful equivalents in Emacs or Vim.

TextMate’s low floor, no ceiling approach has enabled some complete newcomers to create amazingly useful tools for themselves, which would have been all-but-impossible for them to create in Emacs or Vim. It slowly sucks users in, teaching them first to make simple macros, then to use regular expressions, then to write their own code, in a gradual process.

It takes less time to dig into because the software is better designed, not because it is less “thought-changing”, or because the digging can’t go as deep.
Ask HN: Where to look for info on E-Commerce websites?
I hope this is alright to ask here...

I've been working on my own website recently, but I am having a tough time finding information on how to set up and design an E-Commerce website. I'm just looking for information on how to design my database, hosting options, and how to integrate with PayPal or other CC payment options. Anyone know of any popular tutorials/forums, or if there is a recommended book? Anyone build one themselves, and have any advice? Thanks.
I think what your friend's startup really needs is a VP of engineering/ Chief Architect.

Once that is taken care of you can figure out what type of CTO you would like to hire. Based on a paper I read, there are 4 types of CTO's between which to choose from:

1. CTO as “Infrastructure Manager”

2. CTO as “Big Thinker”

3. CTO as “Technology Visionary and Operations Manager”

4. CTO as “External-facing Technologist”

Here's a link to that paper: [pdf]

http://www.brixtonspa.com/Career/The_Role_of_the_CTO_4Models...

Have you searched linkedin for current VP's, Dir. & Engineering managers? Or do you know highly technical people in other companies that can introduce you to such people?
this is very true. government creates the legal environment within which corporations operate. most monopolies have required government participation to work well. Mussolini famously said fascism should be called corporatism because it was the ultimate union between industry and state.
I usually just put on my robe and wizard hat.
I once had to use some Gartner numbers and they looked really sketchy; they predicted that almost all desktop PCs would be the all-in-one iMac style in 3 years. I called up the main analyst (at a cost of $800) and asked him how he got the data.

After much hemming and hawing it turned out that he had sent out a questionnaire to 500 CIOs of medium-sized businesses, ~80 of whom responded, about their preference for this form factor. Nevermind that the vast majority of desktops are bought by large companies, or that the form factor has drawbacks which were not explained.

Total Garbage.
You again? I told you to stop messaging me.
Rental Property: Ever Wanted to See a Website's Source Code?
To state your comment more effectively, you should have said, "My current partner would make a most excellent boat anchor."

As albertcardona mentioned, it's always best to remain positive when you're in a leadership position.
I used to make fun of Gartner (and the like). Then I went to an insurance company and people just didn't get the jokes :)

Naturally, I still told people my true thoughts and if you know how to justify your arguments and have the technical capability to back them up with action you will be absolutely indispensable. (That recent book list had a book related to this subject, go find it!).

Great thing is when you leave (and you will leave) they feel a real loss (not that you intend harm), and all you have is a gain. Welcome to The Industry.

Learn to hack your way through it, or become part of the problem :)
I plan to come -- someone asked me to offer up my iPhone dev talk, so I'll see if there's any interest.
I'd be up for that
Yeah... the thought process alteration is really the same as the psychedelic effects. More so than visuals or anything, what the psychedelics do is temporarily change the way you think and perceive reality.
It's simple and easy to use if you want it to be simple, but powerful if you need it to be powerful.

TextMate sort of embraces the Unix philosophy (like using filter programs), but in a native GUI application that just works really well with everything else on OS X (like seamlessly editing files on an SFTP server via Transmit, etc).

If I'm working on the command line and I want to edit a document I just type "mate filename". I can also get a file browser of a directory by typing "mate directoryname" or just "mate .", then open multiple files in tabs.

Syntax highlighting is excellent, and themeable. All the common languages are built in, and you can get bundles for nearly any other language. Bundles include a hell of a lot more than just syntax highlighting too.

You can set up shortcuts for snippets of code and templates, like typing "html" then <tab> could give you a standard skeleton of an HTML document, and other more powerful macros.

You can easily pipe any text through any command line program you want. Need to sort a list of stuff? Just filter it through "sort". Need the current date? Just run "date" and TextMate inserts the result. Or any other arbitrarily complex command.

Of course, emacs, vi, etc probably have many of these features, but lack the integration with OS X. And I simply don't have the time/patience to learn them.

Oh, and the only SubEthaEdit feature besides collaborative editing that I miss in TextMate is the ability to copy an XHTML representation of syntax highlighted code. Very handy for blog posts, etc. And the multiple regex implementations in find.
awesome subthread
An OS in ROM? The Amiga 500 memories come flooding back.

I guess Linux is stored in re-writable nonvolatile memory so that it can be updated when the inevitable security bugs are found.

If I remember correctly, on the Amiga, you had to boot from floppy disk (not everything was in ROM), and the ROM code was transferred from ROM to RAM and any patches on the floppy disk were then applied.
memetastic
Fortunately you can buy Melatonin in pill form at your local drug store. 3mg pills are common, a doctor would recommend taking 1mg because that is closer to a natural dose. Side effects include vivid, lucid dreams...
High-Tech Japan Running Out of Engineers
replicating meme
you enable allusions
we bow before you
Strange. It's not working for me any longer either.
I feel obligated to say that Computer Science is not about the machines that do the computation but about the computation process itself.

If we are talking about the physical devices that do the computation, it's within the field of Engineering.

Daniel Hillis is an incredibly clever guy and the Connection Machines were probably the most beautiful computers ever built. Not only that, but they were, perhaps, the last computers ever built you could tell what they were doing just by looking at them.

I would love to see something like that on a desktop PC. Maybe not tasks or threads (and, certainly, not processors) or memory blocks being accessed and translating the patterns into blinking lights.
Komodo edit is really good. I had a tough decision between TextMate or to use free alternative (komodo edit). Only problem with komodo is the anti aliasing that is on by default and cannot be turned off in the application. One option is to recompile whole komodo (including mozilla) and to disable AA, or do this in terminal:

defaults write com.activestate.Komodo AppleAntiAliasingThreshold 20
see you guys there
The cooling effect of evaporation doesn't affect the vapors, infact it is just the opposite, it only cools the body from which they are evaporating. All you are doing is making your area more humid, thus making your sweat less effective.
Man's rare ability may unlock secret of memory
Graph of Amazon Web Services bandwidth versus Amazon.com
did you reply to that particular comment just to get to the top of the thread?
thirding, I've got over 200 supermicro servers and they're rock solid
I'll add to the supermicro recommendation - I bought from ASA Computers and was happy with the service.
Cancers caused by UV exposure may be prevented by avoiding exposure to sunlight or other UV sources....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skin_cancer
They're great at looking smart, but anyone that has taken stats 101 can see right through their surveys. Attended a conference once where people just drilled the so-called expert of all the flaws in the data-collection methodology. Felt kinda bad for the person.
OK, Mr. Science. Now I'm confused. Again.

However, I just stuck my hand in front of the fan, and I believe my experimental method is sound. If you have trouble reproducing my results, let me know. I'll have my landlord fix the physics in my house and try again. (Or, you could add the cooler temperature of the water in the basin to the calculations in your model.)
Thanks for the info! Interesting how you found a way to differentiate yourself from competitors.
Check out http://www.librivox.org. They have a HUGE catalogue of audio recordings of public-domain works. Grab a list of the 100 classic books of all time and download them. Don Quixote, The Prince, Picture of Dorian Grey, Pride and Prejudice...
So why are they primarily giving out high risk loans? Is it really a good idea to encourage poor people to undertake high risk ventures?
If you are colocating the box, I recommend either HP servers with iLO or Sun machines like the v20z or x2100 etc. that have a nice Lights Out Management (LOM) feature.

With either the HP or Sun systems you can even do virtual media, where you boot the remote system off an ISO image or a CD/DVD disk stored on your laptop or desktop system,

It will save you a huge amount of time and effort the first time you are miles away from the machine and there is some kind of issue that you need to diagnose.
No vertical scale seems kinda chart-junky. The point is obvious, but lack of a scale (even just something to indicate that it's linear and with a lower limit of 0) casts some doubt on the point its trying to prove.
Currently employed at near market value :)
I've found that when I start laughing at Dilbert cartoons it means I need to quit my job.

That rule of thumb has worked well twice for me. Hopefully I won't have to apply it too many more times.
Ok I bought an AC!
Thats not my line of work. Just an observation.
Does size matter: at what point does a company lose its edge?
I'm not sure if you've read any of the content on this site, but it's not really a "hacker" site of the meaning you're implying. Hacker News is more like a digg.com for people with more than a handful of neurons.
And, BTW, the essay is dated May, 1981.
Firefox 3.0rc1 is now available for download
It struck me as quite clever (perhaps too clever, which seems to be a common thread in these recent Thinking Machines articles...).

Just to put "recent" into perspective, this article is from 1981 :)
It's hard to gauge your level of expertise from your post, but if you're a fairly non-technical person (don't mean to offend), you may be better off looking at some sort of pre-built option. Amazon offers "stores" where people can go set up their own shop. eBay's another option (although they're kind of ghetto these days).

If you're determined to go it on your own, take a look at some of the really great open-source e-commerce packages out there (Google it). After a few clicks, you're usually in to adding products.

Especially with E-commerce, it's better to test the waters with something before you invest a ton of time in it. Don't build something from scratch at this stage.
High-Tech Japanese, Running Out of Engineers
I agree. It seems that with print magazine sales on the decline, Conde Nast might be looking at ways of increasing their online presence in the same space as Wired.
I'll second that. All of the low-cost payment processing solutions are so unprofessional looking. It's terrible having a professional looking site, and then having to send a customer off to Paypal or some other ghetto service.

Bonus points for white label.
Soaring over the Alps on homemade jet wings
Ars isn't quite the apex of reporting being eluded to.

http://www.parislemon.com/2008/05/brief-update-on-ars-situat...
Yeah, this article seems clueless in the extreme.
I can vouch for the freemium approach. Your free service is there to create word-of-web and word-of-mouth growth. You may even want to hold off on the premium version for a year or so. There's some conflict between being non-commercial and buzzworthy, and pushing your premium version to get subscriptions.

Learning about your customer is crucial. The easy and cheap way to do this is run a survey on your site, while your service is still in the free phase. You can promote this survey aggressively to a portion of your user base and expect around a 15% response rate. One of my businesses had some obvious quantifiable differences between a free and premium version, so the survey included these 3 questions:

* Would you be willing to pay more for an enhanced service?

* How many Xs, Ys and Zs would you want?

* How much would you be willing to pay for this per month?

After collecting thousands of responses, I ran them through a Bayesian clustering algorithm (which can handle missing answers) and it spat out a bunch of service levels and price points that made a lot of intuitive sense. These were $5, $10 and $20/month, and later we added $40/month. Interestingly there was one big cluster that wanted the world for $1/month, whom we naturally decided not to cater for. We also learned that some features, such as RSS, didn't correlate at all with people's willingness to pay, so we added them into the free version.

Net result after a few years is about 1.5% of active users are on one of the premium levels, with the number approximately halving as you go from each price point to the next. Since the price doubles at each level, the total revenue from each price point is about the same. And it's a very tidy living for me and my partner.

One last thing: pay a lot of attention to what happens when people's subscriptions end involuntarily, because their credit card expired or stopped accepting payments. This happens a lot. You want to target these people with reminders about the premium service's benefits, and a discount promotion to sign up again with their new card.
There's a company mentioned in The Tipping Point whose founder surmised that the opitmum number was around 100. He kept all his locations as self sufficient entities of no more that 100 people.

The details escape me now, but some other hacker that has read Gladwell will no doubt fill in the blanks.
Wired Buying Ars Technica
Early Adopters Are Useless
I was highly receptive to this article given its title but it turned out to be a toothless disappointment. Despite Cringely's self-congratulatory sense that he is "attacking the temple of IT" and "alienating an entire industry," everything he says about Gartner et al could be applied to any type of consultant, and nothing he says is particularly surprising or revelatory.

I was hoping for an article exposing the fact that Gartner et al are actually pay-to-play extortion rackets run against enterprise software vendors. The software vendors need their products to appear in Gartner's supposedly objective reports, but, hey, surprise surprise, Gartner only covers those vendors who pay them for <sarcasm>totally unrelated</sarcasm> research services, and, hey, surprise surprise, the vendors that pay Gartner the most money somehow end up with the most favorable <sarcasm>objective</sarcasm> research coverage.

There is a symbiotic relationship between Gartner et al, enterprise software vendors, and corporate IT departments. The IT department managers have no incentive to find simple, cost-effective solutions to their problems because that would mean cutting their own budgets and headcount. Rather, they need to justify their bloated budgets and headcounts -- Gartner provides such justification. On the other side, the enterprise software vendors need to justify their overpriced, overly-complex software -- again, Gartner provides the justification. All three sides of this unholy trinity know that this is a racket and that providing real value and usability to the actual business users is beside the point -- the real point is to provide money and jobs to the IT departments, the software vendors, and, of course, to Gartner.

Will the real Robert X Cringely please stand up and point out how naked this emperor really is?
W.L. Gore & associates.

http://www.gore.com/en_xx/

The later Roman army was made up of eight (in the early republic, ten) soldiers per contubernium, which shared a tent and ate together. There were ten contubernia in a century. These numbers seem awfully familiar.
Is Media Temple Nitro worth the price? 
750 dollars a month for 15,000 RPM hard drives, Quad Core Xeon 2.33 Ghz, 4 GB RAM, 2 TB Monthly transfer.

Is it worth it? I think it's expensive, but the availability of stacking multiple Nitros for load balancing is attractive.
Frequently... maybe. A lot of people here pointed out caffeine. I'm going with aspirin: low daily doses are recommended for everybody over 50. Vitamins, too, the whole long list. Mineral suplements. Alcohol, mostly low quantities of red wine.

I think we as a society (and I don't talk about americans only, i'm european) have a huge alergic reaction to using medicine for non-healing purposes. I never really understood why. Of course, there are the rational risks, but it looks too much like a gut reaction. Maybe is related to the fact that people avoid doctors in general?

Some day we are going to have safe drugs that can make us live 20 years longer and a lot better, and we're not going to realize it. And if that day was in the 80s, we wouldn't know it.
don't post with the wrong parent!
From PG's recent essay, I think it's because we're taught from a young age that drugs are bad. And they are kind of bad, but really it's much more complicated than that.
Here's the download page, which curiously isn't linked from the 'what's new' page above (as far as I could tell):

http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all-rc.html
I've gone with dell servers, which are sort of fine (cheap at least), but I guess HP with ILO is way better. The Dell lights out management is overpriced and crappier. One way or another is's very nice if you later can add exactly similar machines to take any Linux hardware surprises put of the way (if that's what you're running).
Shades of Jorge Luis Borges' 'Funes, the Memorious':

http://io.uwinnipeg.ca/~morton/bigidea/funes.txt
Website Development Involves Navigation too
Why 37signals changed the focus of Backpack- mo money
Social news sites never seem to be strictly news, sometimes in complete contempt of their domain or site names. Personally I blame, in order: the term 'Web 2.0', Wikipedia, and the rap music.
Oatmeal Cookie Recipe
Old fashioned oatmeal cookie recipe
The only thing I'm waiting for is firebug.

I tried that beta version (of firebug) back with firefox 3.0b4 I think - and it crashed firefox like crazy.

Anyone know if it's better yet?
> proposed

Being the key word. I think the more likely explanation is night workers eat more junk food since all the normal places are closed. They don't grab a salad, they grab drive-thru or donuts or similar all-night crud.

Day workers do that too, sure, but not exclusively.
Portable ACs tend not to actually... work.
Had this problem once here. Got a portable AC.

Next time I moved, I made sure I had (central!) AC. I think if you're working from home in the Bay Area, it's not really optional - maybe it used to be, but not any more.
I find EmacsWiki to be a great resource. Just getting into using emacs and the how-tos are very useful.

Formerly I had no religious preference in text editors but since I've started to learn Lisp emacs' gravity has pulled me in. Thanks for the pointer to http://www.cliki.net/, looks like a good site I hadn't seen before.
Man, I wish I could go. Anyone up for a Boston hacker meetup this summer?
Scoble: Mike Arrington is Right, Facebook is Wrong
11 Top Tips for a Successful Technical Presentation
Seems highly overpriced to me. I'm on MT's Grid, and I haven't been impressed with that either.
latest version works great.
This seems to be pretty much the same thing as the ideological battle of communism v. capatilism during the 20th century.

Centralised command theoretically allows the avoidance of duplication of effort, and the sharing of knowledge over an increasingly large problem domain. The trouble is, as noted in the article and as discovered by the USSR, no-one has discovered a way to make internal communications sufficiently efficient to make it work. Large organisations have problems with teams working at cross-purposes, teams doubling up on effort, and in general just not benefitting from the fact that somewhere else in the large organisation, someone has already solved the problem that they are working on.
The Marginal Cost of a SMS Message is 0
High-Tech Japanese Running Out of Engineers
I want to start a business where I sell a mediumly priced device that is made only for texting, kinda like a phone, but has a QWERTY keyboard, etc, and comes with cheap texting service. CHEAP, I tell you. Maybe only a dollar a month. Sound crazy? But everybody uses it, and those cell phone companies need real competition. Even if my company died and I went bankrupt, it would be worth doing America a favor by dropping the insane price down to how cheap it should be. There's no way they would let me use those cell phone towers though, and there's no way I could raise enough capital to build them myself.
Think you're dedicated?  Meet the inventor of BulletBall and BulletBall Extreme
A friend sent this to me. I thought it was a great lesson for entrepreneurs.

If I could channel that kind of determination...

If the above link doesn't work, try YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOOw2yWMSfk

The official site: http://bulletballgames.com
Yes. Much of what provigil and stimulants do is put you in a state where your body uses up more of your available energy (hence the weight loss aspect of them). This may be a totally illiterate statement, but generally speaking any substance that causes loss of weight (or causes weight to stay the same despite increased consumption and lack of excercise) due to metabolism is going to also cause greater ability to concentrate and a greater mental stamina.

One way you can eat the same amount of calories and either lose weight or gain no weight is by reducing complex carbs in your diet. Avoid things that are high on glycemic index and you won't feel slow: this doesn't meant cut out all carbs! Eat whole wheat bread, brown rice, dark chocolate if you have carb cravings just lessen the white wheat, high fructose corn syrup, white rice etc...

Combined with regular excercise (at least 3 times a week, at least 45 minutes each time -- with at least 30 minutes of that being cardio) you will feel a lot better and be (or remain) in better shape (if you are worried about losing too much weight or muscle mass simply eat more - but more calories, not more carbs).
Just think of all the things you can do if you only have a web browser today. Now think of all the things you can probably do if you only have a web browser is 5 years. Not such a bad idea, eh?
Goes along with this:
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/09/18.html