skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Some pilots have crashed planes with good instrumentation. Some pilots have successfully flown planes with poor instrumentation. Nonetheless, instrumentation design is a very important issue to talk about.

Similarly, programmer skill may make a larger difference, but language design is a very important issue to talk about.
Debian Etch or Ubuntu Server because there is NO dependency hell. Additionally, Debian based systems are extremely stable - only after BSD(IMHO)
When have parents ever been supportive of risky behaviour in their children?

I say this in defense of my non-supportive mother and somewhat-supportive father.
Real World Needs 'Net' Taxes [SJ]
PHP is VB6 for the web - quick and dirty. though now with some good frameworks, it's no longer as dirty if a PHP developer is smart enough to use them
Which VPS?
"Oh really? We put people in jail for failing to pay taxes. People get killed in jail. They get beat and raped."

Yes, really. Victimization in prison isn't part of the state's intent or action. Its an unfortunate consequence of a poorly managed correctional system. One that would see far fewer prisoners if there were more poverty assistance programs.

"If five guys vote that a woman should put out, she consents because she's free to say no and can vote against their proposal."

See above for a full explanation of how constitutional democracies prevent tyranny of the majority.

"Note that they also pay for a lot of other things; things that simply don't work."

This is a problem with certain specific programs, not with taxes in general.

"SDurkin suggests a social contract."

Yes, I do suggest a social contract, because social contract theory is part of the foundation of our and every other modern democracy. Sure, it isn't perfect, but its certainly better than the alternatives.
"Programmers get amazing value because for $30 they are presented with everything they need to program a certain tool."

There have been a few technical books that have more than paid their cost based on finding the answer to just one vexing problem (DHTML bible, for example). Theoretically, the answer could have been googled but opening the book found it.
So wrong it's hard to know where to start...
What will prevent someone who knows about the deal from trying to get a job at Zappos with no intention of staying, grabbing the $1000 after a week, and leaving?
A 256MB slice at SliceHost.
This is post is little more than link bait (and I guess I'm falling for it by commenting).
His approach isn't so good, as it creates a copy for the same message sent to multiple users.

Better safe the messages in a central store by id and only write the ids to the different pages.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=188080
The best way to counteract inequality is by raising more
revenue and then spending it on things that the middle and
lower classes need, like national health insurance.

It ain't the job of the gubmint to "counteract inequality" in the economic sense (it's an impossible task in a free society, anyway)

[The plan] also wrecks much of the political support for
tax expenditures...

When you think of lowered tax rates, tax credits and deductions as "tax expenditures", you've got it completely backwards. That money isn't the gubmint's money. If my salary were to be lowered by my employer, it's not an expenditure on my part like it is if I reduce my expendable income by investing in a CD.

And perhaps most important, his plan gives the American
welfare state a much sturdier base for future expansion
(esp. since the VAT is less transparent than other forms
of taxation), especially since there's room here to add
some form of carbon tax, which is necessary for dealing
with global warming and would provide even greater
revenue going forward.

Oh yes, that's brilliant.

1. An expansion of the welfare state is a horrifically bad idea. A smaller welfare state is an advantage, in all kinds of ways: economically, demographically, and with respect to liberty and (little-r) republicanism.

2. Making the functions of government less transparent is a goal?

3. Carbon taxes are not necessary to "deal with global warming". Assuming that whatever part of global warming we actually have any ability to affect is significant enough to matter (evidence suggests otherwise, and in any case is far from settled), capitalist market responses would be vastly better at "dealing" with it than anything the gubmint could do with carbon tax revenues (which may not actually increase overall government revenues).

4. I hate the phrase "going forward".
Practical web programming in Haskell
Am I the only geek who just doesn't get xkcd? I mean it's clever and all, but I've never been able to see why so many people have become so attached to it (and post every issue to reddit and news.yc).
It was unleashed on the world: Monday July 8, 2002. http://dictionary.reference.com/wordoftheday/archive/2002/07...

You def get scene points since you helped revive it!
The python code in the book Programming Collective Intelligence is aesthetically poor, with unclear naming, bad spacing, errors and some ugly duplication. But it doesn't matter. The algorithms work, the concepts get taught, and you still get to build your own little pageranking search engine in a single chapter.

Same deal with PHP. It seems that PHP gets the job done. (I say this never having coded anything significant in PHP.)
http://www.2ch.net/
PHP is "embeddable" specifically for markup languages by design

Not it is not! No it is not! Sorry to yell, but you're touching on one of my biggest peeves. The syntax that embeds PHP in the SGML family of markup languages was simply tacked on to an arbitrary syntax that vaguely resembles C and Perl. It was never designed.

I wrote a language that actually was designed to embed dynamic strings in static strings. It doesn't get ugly the way PHP does when you embed static strings within dynamic code within your outer static markup. It doesn't look anything like PHP.
Geohash
Stampede! Facebook Opens Its Profile Doors
A lot of it was the designers themselves. I remember one who genuinely believed "users like a challenge" and everything he came up with, from page layouts to actual workflow was like a puzzle.

Fine, except we were working on corporate intranets. He didn't last long.
Since you already know Fedora, use CentOS. In case you decide later on to move your stuff to dedicated server, centos(rhel) has the best support for the big enterprise servers like Dell PowerEdge.

Most of the software can be installed through the yum, just add rpmforge repo:

rpm -Uhv http://apt.sw.be/redhat/el5/en/i386/rpmforge/RPMS/rpmforge-r...

Updating the system is really easy, and if you do not know how to setup something, http://howtoforge.org/ has most likely info you will need.
Haskell-style monad do-notation for Ruby
imho, it's rails. rails (and any other ruby framework) is not suited for a real-time communication platform like twitter.

also you forgot about messaging queues.
3. Scribd

EDIT
See the comments at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=195067 for more on the Scribd issue.
Actually php5 gives almost everything that was missing. The only thing is that a lot of pilots used to work with poor instrumentation and don’t want to switch!
If php sucks then why there are so many successful products/services written on it?
Yeah well with OSS your competitors can end up contributing to the "inferior" platforms instead of to your "superior' platform. Apple/Darwin comes to mind
This is bearable with
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=195431
whereas there's no apparent client-side fix for (2) - and (1) sounds bad, although I've not had it happen myself. That said, HN was down for me for most of yesterday, although ycombinator.com was fine. (?)
I posit that the 3rd point "share your book" is as much about increasing the word of mouth for Mr. Godin's books as about helping readers increase value derived from the book.

I am a fan Seth Godin and his books. His second point about keeping notes is actually very true. If I am not making notes, I just read the book for the vicarious pleasure. Putting in the effort of taking notes forces me to digest and revise the points just to get returns on the effort I put into taking the notes.
I don't follow... Can you elaborate?
You're absolutely right. Very good point.

What I meant was that you could build almost anything with almost any language.

This != "it doesn't matter".

(I sometimes react this way because we often debate endlessly over language fine points that are really just personal preference.)
problem #3: No downvotes on stories.

Seriously, after the "last wave" of newcomers there's been quite a lot of crap on the main page. A downmod arrow would be nice. Not to decrease karma (it should be limited so that noone could downmod a 1 point story) but to keep high quality of the site.
I asked a friend who is crazy about sports and fairly tech savvy. Here is what he said:

Not sure I understand what it is. An “A” vs “B” in different sectors (sports, tech, etc)? Just to be a comparison site where you can shit talk and or compare products?

One of your target markets has no idea what the is for.
I'm not young, (turned 35 today), but I have a number of war stories about regarding parents and their being supportive.

For the first 14 years of my life, we lived as missionaries in Central America. And, on top of that, we moved around tons. I moved 20 times before I was 21. So, I didn't really have tons of chances to develop lasting friendships aside from my parents, brothers and sisters like most teenagers. The first couple of times that I went against the parental flow, it was really rough.

So, there was an immense resistance when I wanted to get our of the family business (being preachers) and follow my own dream of being a software engineer. The first time my Dad found out that I had been on a BBS, I got grounded for a week. They talked me out of majoring in CS back in 93, because they were convinced that computers were a fad. Doh! And, they talked me into being a nurse so I could have a steady job. And, that's what I've been doing for money for 15 years.

I've been trying to escape nursing for 15 years. I've tried a bunch of different ideas: painting, sculpture, architecture, furniture design, Animation, Visual Effects... Non of which my family approved of or supported. Finally, I decided to go back and pursue my first love--programming and engineering. I've been chipping away at my schooling online for the past 5 years, and I'm done this semester. Meanwhile, my parents were trying to talk me out of it the entire time.

So, I'm now embarking on my first startup idea, a suite of online tools to make contract nurses lives easier. And, finally, after 15 years, they're a little excited about what I'm doing. Honestly, they only started coming around to the idea of my starting an online business since Startup School.

They finally understood that there might be something to these computer things after all.
FCC, wireless carriers in talks to curb/cut early-termination fees
No, business books sell well because of the fantasy aspect.

Business books are overwhelmingly bad - and still sell - because it's very difficult to verify anything said empirically. Most of the time, business isn't treated as a science (a mistake), and a lot of business books are written by people who are good salesmen, but not much else.

Good business books are very rare. They don't have marketing titles like "small is the new big", they don't feature the author's face on the front cover (where else but ego-centric business books does that happen?) and they don't endorse moronic checkbox routines like "Decide, before you start, that you’re going to change three things about what you do all day at work. ".

Seth Godin is very much a junk author.
List of Q1 2008 Web/Internet/Technology Acquisitions
Democratizing The Art World
When have parents ever been supportive of risky behaviour in their children?

It depends on what you mean by "risky". My barely present parents never advocated I drive a car recklessly but they fully supported me (mentally, anyway) when I hopped in a van to travel with a band for a month even though I was completely broke at the time.
Of course. But there are solid examples from web1.0 and before that did more than twitter, and scaled to more users.
Twitter is pretty simple in terms of functionality.
This post to be honest is from someone who does not obviously use PHP on a day to day basis.

Why PHP? In the end the quote below summarizes its success,

-- begin quote --
In many ways, the IETF runs on the beliefs of its participants. One of the "founding beliefs" is embodied in an early quote about the IETF from David Clark: "We reject kings, presidents and voting. We believe in rough consensus and running code".
-- end quote --

From the "Tao of IETF" http://www.ietf.org/tao.html
Same here. And the "Streaming document" progress bar is kind of irritating IMHO
With the latest Fedoras it is the same experience as Ubuntu or Debian.
I was wondering lately, perhaps it is the time for the site to be passed over to the community so it can get some improvements.
He again followed up with this:

Kind of stupid, there’s nothing differentiating. If he could come up with some way of getting discounts or a way to affect the entities that he’s matching one another against, then great, otherwise, it’s just a sounding board, of which there are plenty in existence.
my parent's are in their 70s. I don't think they have much faith in my ability to pull this off, and they certainly don't understand the internet or even computers. They support me as much as they can.
Very much so. It looks childish and therefore I don't want to use it. Sorry, I've been harsh in my criticism so far... Just being honest.
The suggested plan seems reasonable. Yes, if you denormalise users inbound and outbound messages then you store the data twice. Yes, shards give almost limitless scalability. However, could it be that during peak load, the number of messages to be written plus indexes to be maintained exceeds the total available disk seek operations?
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=163696
Provide as many tips and rules of thumb as you want. Sometimes, it's safe to modify code you don't understand. And then, those tips will help. But that all goes out the window when it comes to security code. If you don't understand security code, don't mess with it.
Twitter Got TWidgetized | Live Crunch
M-expressions==LISP in "normal syntax"-kills LISP?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-expression

if i understand it right M-expressions would make it possible to have a LISP without parenthesis?

well what a lot of people love about LISP is macros and that code is data and data is code.

if someone rewrote LISP to have "normal" syntax and notation could you write

defun sq(x)
x*x

or somehing along those lines?

would that then make it very hard to do macros and do write programs that write programs?
I haven't looked that closely at arc, but if it's a continuation based web server (for some reason I thought it was) it has to store those continuations on the server, which means it has to get rid of them after a certain timeout period. Considering I get that expired message quite a bit, I suppose the timeout isn't long enough.

On the plus side, because I have to go back, about half the time I go back I see someone has said something similar to what I was going to say but clearer and more succinctly, which means I don't have to bother posting whatever I was writing.
See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=195221 for a more active discussion on this topic.
yeah ads seems very ahrd to do on a mobile. everyone hates them and they need space to get their message through and well obiles dont have a lot of space.

i want it as clutterfree as possible, ona computerscreen some clutter is acceptable but on a small screen it is a mess.

im not an avid mobileuser though so maybe im not the target.
They post it because it resonates with them. Personally, I'm always happy to XKCD pop up on HN or reddit.
not really django-specific but you can check

http://www.python.org/community/jobs/
Well, Bruce, perhaps

...The best way to think of BRL is as a Scheme interpreter with an alternative syntax for strings

is where you should look for reasons of BRL's unpopularity, I think.

Can you tell us please, what is really special about BRL other than it being "Scheme with square brackets"?
How about:

1) It's not just a DB problem.
It's irritating that they all pop up. If it was somewhat noteworthy, it'd be different. In the meantime, I assume most of us have RSS readers.
I would like to see Search Engine, and also about 100 characters description of the topic given.
Hopefully those kind of people will be caught by the interview process, but I'm sure they slip through the cracks every once in awhile. In that case, they eat $1000. Oh well... it would appear that most people are honest enough that it doesn't happen very often, and doesn't make much of a difference to their overall business.
"It’s not about you, it’s about the next person."

Not just for business books, but for everything we do.
Web Pages to image files program
Cory Doctorow: Our dangerous statistical ignorance
I needed something like this for one of the projects I'm doing and I found this program to help me out. Unfortunately it looks as if it only works with Windows at the moment.

I'm still trying to find a web based one with an API. Maybe if I have the time I can try to create one. Not sure how I would approach it since I've never really done image manipulation.
I am reminded of Borges's "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" (http://www.coldbacon.com/writing/borges-quixote.html) (and what do you know, Borges even slips George Boole into it).

"He did not want to compose another Quixote —which is easy— but the Quixote itself. Needless to say, he never contemplated a mechanical transcription of the original; he did not propose to copy it. His admirable intention was to produce a few pages which would coincide—word for word and line for line—with those of Miguel de Cervantes."
Source code is available, IIRC.
37signals Architecture
I posted this one because it wasn't your average xkcd comic. Its an interesting idea that is backed up by actual working code at http://xkcd.com/geohashing.

Yes we all have RSS readers, but I was happy the first time somebody posted an xkcd comic on Digg (back when I used it) because I didn't have that feed in my reader yet. I'm willing to accept multiple exposures on behalf of the guy who is having his first exposure right now.
Apparently, if you submit a PDF, Hacker News automagically converts it to a Scribd iPaper link.

Some people apparently find loading the flash iPaper viewer as more annoying than viewing a raw PDF.
This article doesn't say that it's good for your brain. Merely that it seems to cause anti-anxiety and anti-depressive results in mice. However, this doesn't mean it's good for you. Many drugs have those effects as well as significant negative ones. Alcohol, for example, has quite strong anti-anxiety properties, and no one (that I know of) is claiming getting tanked is good for your brain. Likewise cigarettes and marijuana (I suppose some folks are claiming that marijuana is good for the brain, as it is attributed with all sorts of miraculous properties by folks who really want their recreational drug of choice to also be a cure for everything).

I'm not saying incense isn't good for the brain, just that this article does not say that it is.

One could also take away, based on the circumstantial evidence of its frequent involvement in various churches over the past few thousand years, that frankincense makes you gullible, easily parted from your money, and more likely to believe in ghosts and magic. These are not desirable traits, though all could result, I suppose, from a bit too much anti-anxiety medication.

I think I'll refrain from dosing on frankincense for the time being, along with every other drug that I'm being told is good for my brain.
How (not) to Raise Venture Capital
Why would you say that? It's not like the Ruby code is handling that many messages. Even Rails sites don't use ruby for their concurrency and messaging. They push down to a database or to another concurrency level like ActiveMQ. Above them lives another piece of code or hardware to do load balancing.

This isn't even about Ruby, it's about the Rails architecture.
I think the post is well structured and informative for Twitter Team.
"This is the basis of constitutional government. Just holding a minority opinion doesn't necessarily mean the majority can't constrain your behavior with force."

It's the exact opposite. A constitutional republic maintains that holding the majority opinion does not justify force.

If you don't understand this, you don't understand anything about the US.

Your examples are ridiculous. Stopping violence is not violence.

"Pretty much everyone on either side of the left-ride divide agrees about the need for the modern welfare state, even if they disagree about the extent"

You really don't know anything about this, do you? Who exactly do you think you're talking to if not someone who disagrees with that sentiment?

This thread is over.
Fab @ Home - make your own 3D printer
I am 17 years old myself and am still living at home, at least for a few more months till I move to London.

My parents have been supportive since day 1 I picked up a programming book together with a business book; determined to create an e-commerce site for a local retailer. To be honest I see myself more as a business oriented person then as a hacker, but I thoroughly enjoy writing code nonetheless.

While in high school (I am now in my last 3 days) I had to travel a lot for various business projects and all throughout my family has supported me and never stopped me to pursue my dreams and goals. Since September '07 though, my IB diploma has been my primary focus and I've had to put off my goals and ideas up until this Friday. I fully agree that work experience adds tremendous value to your chances of success because theory never quite cuts it in reality. For anyone reading this, my age or younger I can not stress enough to go out and get an internship at a company in the field you want to later be in. Get experience by listening to those older then you but never shy away from giving your input. The most important lessons I learned from real-life experience are:

1. Only surround yourself with people who want you to be successful. Find those people that have integrity and character and don't bother with the rest.

2. Never underestimate the power of networking, and make it one of your top priorities for your business.

I am about to launch my first full blown company and will go to India for 2 months to work with a development team. It's an exciting time and my parents are very supportive of me and have faith in me. Which provides you with a great basis to start from because you'll run into enough people who won't.
climbing Mt Everest/K2 has been done many times already, but it's still hard; and not something taken lightly

I just don't like gloating on someone else's mistakes and failures (essentially kicking someone who's already on the ground), especially when I'll probably have my own set of spectacular f-ups to deal with related to my own startup
That's cool. If I had known about yours, I probably wouldn't have bothered, though it was kind of fun learning about Greasemonkey.

I made it in response to the comments here. It's kind of sad that for all the hacker/entrepreneurial spirit here, the default reaction is basically "try asking one more time" (there's even a couple of those in the comments on this post!). We had a poll, and people overwhelmingly voted to at least make it optional, so it's not like they don't know what we want.

So I did something about it. I'm tired of reading endless "Something should be done!" comments, when it's completely in our power to do Something. Here's a Something. You made a Something, too, so I respect that.