skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Do something big. My experience has been that funders are pretty persuaded by the impressive cost-to-impact ratio. But the trick is to go after funders for the particular field you're in, not general technology funding. So for a book-related project I did, we went after funding from library groups. They're much more excited by the power of tech than tech groups.
del.icio.us?
Ubuntu's pretty good, and can be used both on your desktop and as a server, meaning you get to run exactly the same code in both places, which is very nice for testing purposes.
One other thing I forgot to mention: Apple refurb gear carries the same 1-year warranty that new Apple gear does, and you still have the ability to buy AppleCare (extended warranty) on it.

Generally, you're not giving up a whole lot going refurb except a shinier box and the ability to BTO.
I always wondered if it'd make sense to run a contest by the community and judged by the community on how to make twitter scale. There have been a lot of suggestions in informal blog posts and the like, but nothing official.

In one way it would be admitting defeat, in another a way to crowdsource difficult problems to be created and judged by the community. Judging from the interest it harnessed already, I imagine a few intelligent and interested people would submit ideas.
I worked for a startup that used Administaff.

Administaff basically sucks. They are expensive from a company perspective. The benefits (in Texas at least) are fairly poor and expensive.

Also, with noone on staff responsible for HR functions, there was a LOT of frustration when HR type questions and issues came up.
They bought delicious.com a while ago, and their new version will eschew their trademark dots entirely (another good example of a company moving to a 'better' domain once they've established themselves).
What contribution does this post make?
Being willing to drop projects is probably the hardest thing for most organizations to do. Allowing projects to be killed without any shame or stigma is so healthy in the long run.
Are you looking to learn about operating systems, or are you more interested in current linux desktops?

If you want current Linux Desktop distros try both Ubuntu and Fedora and whichever one you feel more comfortable with will work.

If you're more interested in going deep under the hood with a server operating system buy a copy of Unix in a Nutshell and Unix Power Tools (O'Reilly) and get a copy of FreeeBSD or Gentoo.
JavaOne: The Toy Show (aka The End)
The eye may receive 10 million bits per second, and the optic nerve and brain do a marvellous job of finding patterns in those 10 million bits, but that doesn't mean we're processing it efficiently.

As Eliezer pointed out, an "Efficient" processing would allow us to derive the theory of relativity (or at least Newtonian mechanics) from about 6 frames of an apple falling in a field. That would be a super-efficient use of available information, but not even the best possible use! The eye might be a fantastic piece of kit, but it sure as hell doesn't do that. (or if it does, I need a proper user's manual, cause I haven't figured out how to do it yet!)
I think it's good to have the option. I can't really have a problem with kids being able but not forced to use Windows.

XP might not still be in action by the time they graduate to a normal PC, but it will probably somewhat resemble whichever one does.
It sounds to me like the author is saying that programming in PHP is destroying his capacity for reflective thought. Having coded in PHP and a couple other Blubs, I can see where he's coming from. I do not get this feeling from Ruby, Lua or any of the Lisps I've used.
Third party support is essential when launching a console. Most critically, third party developers need to know the specification of target hardware so that a game can competitively utilise the platform without being sluggish. However, Apple has a culture of secrecy over hardware specifications, threatens news websites and may have even cancelled the launch of widely rumoured products.

It is cunning to get game developers familiar with iPhone developer tools. However, a dedicated console could be two years away - and with plenty of opportunity for specifications to change repeatedly.
I use sshfs (sudo apt-get install sshfs) and mount my web server to a local directory. From there, you can do a variety of things.
I recommend checking out powernotebooks.com before you decide. You might like what you see there. I have a Sager that I recently purchased from them; it's a great machine, well-built, and since it's factory direct, it's less expensive than a comparable machine from most other vendors.
I assumed he was referencing 'Time' from Dark Side of the Moon: "And then one day you find ten years have got behind you.
No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun"
Yes, we can all go right to xkcd, or techcrunch or whatever and read them ourselves. Thats not the point of posting them on Hacker News. The point is that the discussion that follows about the ideas in the articles/comics is still radically different on HN than most other places.

Randall has some thoughts that apply very well in a group like this so his comics appear here often and start interesting discussions. The only thing not interesting to me is that every time one is getting started I have to wade through a boundary layer of "lets blacklist xkcd" comments.

Doc my karma if you will, but I think the silent majority has voted with the upmod arrow on the post. I am one of them.
Buy something used; the Powerbook G4 I use seems to go for about $500 on eBay.
Some providers use non-profits as loss leaders.

Iceberg is one:

"Free for 5 business users and unlimited Non-Profit use"

http://www.geticeberg.com/
This is where haskell makes me jealous

if any (< 10) numbers

is so much prettier.

I really want a dynamic language with haskell's beautiful function composition.
I would definitely like to hear about this as well; right now we're outsourcing our payroll using PayCycle (http://paycycle.com). We're bringing on our first employee soon and definitely want to focus on our core business (ie, making cool stuff) and not administrative tasks.
For my personal site, I use rsync, and I keep the command in a makefile so I don't have to remember it (I also use the makefile to generate the static pages from templates). It looks like this:

sync:
rsync -az --progress ./ user@host:public_html/

.PHONY: sync

But for anything significant, I use a VCS, currently svn or git.
The point isn't that we can't overlook them. The point is that the slide from XKCD to lolcats can be subtle.
There are two text boxes at the top of my screen--URL and Google. They function almost interchangeably. If I type a search phrase into the URL, it redirects to google. If I type a URL into the google box I am one click from the site I want to be at. I guess I'm just sloppy, but I use one for the other all the time.

It almost seems as though the two could be combined with some clever rules.
If you read this and it causes you even the slightest twinge of doubt as to whether you are a "real programmer", please remind yourself about things you read on the internet, forget you ever read this self-indulgent blog post, and go buy yourself an ice cream cone.
That's pretty reliable evidence that it's a crappy company.
Dan, each comment includes the author (swombat in your case). You don't need to keep signing them.

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

"Please don't sign comments, especially with your url. They're already signed with your username. If other users want to learn more about you, they can click on it to see your profile."
When I purchased my Thinkpad T60 (nearly 18 months ago now -- how time flies!), the Lenovo sales staff was unable to help me find a notebook with Linux preinstalled. Maybe this has changed recently, but you're better off just buying the base Windows version and putting your favorite Linux distro on top of it.

http://www.thinkwiki.org is the best resource I'm aware of for Linux + Thinkpad installation tips.
New Trend in Biofuels Has New Risks
I agree with everything you said. It's been working the same way for my company. To us the key has been to choose our clients carefully, and make sure that our contact on the client's side is a technical person. Having to explain why something is easy/hard/impossible to a non-technical person can be a huge time sink.
Results of Business Comp. at UCI
Just though you guys might find this interesting. The links are to their elevator pitches.

Presto Wireless

1st Place, Overall Competition, $15,000

http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid988218058?bctid=1539384670

Wanzo

2nd Place, Overall Competition, $7,500

http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid988218058?bctid=1537863078

Adball

3rd Place, Overall Competition, $2,500

http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid988218058?bctid=1537854052

I’m 2 Young for This

Wild Card, Tech Coast Angels Seed Financing Invitational

http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid988218058?bctid=1539384651

MenuSwap.com

Wild Card, Tech Coast Angels Seed Financing Invitational

http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid988218058?bctid=1539384655

ChapterBoard

1st Place, Undergraduate Division, $2,500

http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid988218058?bctid=1537863029

NextStage

2nd Place Undergraduate Division, $1,500

http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid988218058?bctid=1539384664

Irvine Biometrics Company

3rd Place, Undergraduate Division, $1,000

http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid988218058?bctid=1537863056

DiagGuru

Best Undergraduate Concept Paper

http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid988218058?bctid=1537863044
All this interest in how twitter could scale really highlights the opportunity for someone who knows what they're talking about to write an intelligent analysis. After ten or more tries, clearly TechCrunch doesn't employ that person.

Almost every analysis I read, including this one, points to Rails as the major bottleneck but then can't say anything concrete to justify it. This article says that Rails is no good for processing intensive tasks and that you should use C. Rails is a framework for serving web pages, it isn't doing any of the processing or message queueing. I'm sure that Rails won't work out of the box with whatever backend you would need for a stable twitter, but I haven't heard anyone address the actual technical issues. Is it just a matter of having to tweak Rails or is there a reason that Rails is the wrong architecture?

Blaine released Starling, the queue system that Twitter uses. What do people think of that? Was it the right architecture? Is there some out of the box proprietary solution that would have worked better? What were the tradeoffs of writing that in Ruby?

People seem to be catching on that one of the problems is a small operations team. Some people say there's just one person but I'm pretty sure there's two. Either way, I can't imagine that with just two people they've had enough time put in fully redundant systems let alone a real staging environment. What should operations look like for something Twitter's size?

On the Gilmore Gang, Blaine mentioned that the reason Twitter's track feature only works on the phone and not the web is because it's much easier for them to do broadcast than to do the lookups necessary for historical display. Yet, I use Summize and Tweetscan to give me a web based track feature. What are the real issues there?

I'm sure there's lots to get into here if someone with the chops to get into it would speak up. But given the lack of in depth commentary, maybe there really aren't very many qualified people.
If you're going to buy the new MacBook Pro (or another Apple laptop with multi-touch trackpad functionality) you'll want to get the application MultiClutch. It basically lets you set up rules globally or per-application that assigns gestures to keyboard shortcuts.

In other words: if I'm in Safari, I can remap three-finger swipe to changing tabs, swipe down for new tab, rotate right/left to back and forward, etc. It's very useful.
Yes, that's the line.
ok.. i'll bite. how the heck can one find a list of sites via google??

but to your point, we're looking at creating a couple of blogs, but wanted to figure out what one can reasonably expect to earn from a blog. To that, we figured on creating a survey/questionaire that would (hopefully) be completed by various blog owners. Which would necessitate that we have a list of bolggers/blog sites to contact.

So, we're looking for a list of 400-500 bolg sites from the "long tail" that we might approach to complete a short survey.

We're more than willing to share results of the survey if we can obtain/access a list of the blog sites. And no, we're not trying to "sell" anything, just conduct some basic research.
Waste Not, Want Everything
Making Windows Usable for Old Linux Farts
One of the comments to the article references the Dreyfus learning model (described at http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000203.html) which should - somewhat - allay those fears :)
They have $15mm cash and a $80mm valuation; Lets see if throwing money at the problem can solve it. I still have trouble seeing something without a business model have a valuation of $80mm ;/ just me?
Craigslist isn't non-profit, it's a for profit business whose goal is user satisfaction, not revenue maximization. For instance, apartment listings are free everywhere except NYC. NYC landlords and brokers asked Craigslist to charge for listings, because it reduced the amount of spam and fake listings. Since users were asking to be charged, they started charging. The money from these few exceptions (like jobs in SV and a couple other markets) makes more than enough money to pay for everything else. They make something like 600-800K per employee, hardly non-profit.
I read somewhere that the #1 search phrase on google is "google". (They publish a different list that filters out that and similar.)

I've definitely seen people get to google by searching for "google" on yahoo as well.
Limited Understanding and Stupid Advice: Will It Work?
I'll agree with that. I own a MacBook Pro and although it has some nice features (larger screen, better video card, aluminum finish...) it's not totally worth the difference in price, if you're looking for an economy system.

With that said, I'll also recommend that you get a ThinkPad instead of a Mac. They're time- and battle-tested machines, and work well. The Mac may seem to have less problems, but both usually have about the same amounts of problems, but just of some different natures.

I like the Mac, and I can live with Windows. Both are good machines, and you have to try both to see which one you like better.
the need to have two teams. One to maintain the current POS and another building a new scalable one.

There is no reason why that service can not be built this day and age.
Didn't take too long to find the model with OpenSUSE installed on their site:

http://shop.lenovo.com/SEUILibrary/controller/e/web/LenovoPo...
I don't sign comments with my URL. That said, I'm afraid signing with my name is a habit I've developed over the last 12 years of posting online, and it would take a sizeable conscious effort to get rid of it. Since it doesn't bother me in the least, I don't.

Why does it bother you so much?
Is using Twitter really very different from the Gale messaging system? It seems like the user experience is fairly similar, but Gale's architecture is much more interesting to me (and it scales! wow!).
Seconded. The QT licensing is actually more restrictive than other dual-licensing schemes: TrollTech will not allow you to start developing your application with a free version (including the ones distributed with Linux), then switch to a commercial license later. In other words, if you think there is any chance you'd want to distribute any of your application's code under a non-GPL license, you need to get a QT commercial license before a line of code is written.

http://trolltech.com/developer/knowledgebase/182/
Down on the server farm
the essence of your comment if beautiful.. tomorrow would be great.
David Karp responds to the discussion. Check post.
It is the way of the Valley.
They are all Intel Reference platforms: only your budget will determine the model (if you get your money through work, then you'll go for the best "bang for the buck").

That said, there are 4-5 (tops) companies in the WORLD making notebooks: all the choice you see in the shops are about branding and artificial product differentiation. ECS, Acer, Asus etc. fall off the same machines as Apple, Fujitsu, HPQ etc. (Lenovo being a notable exception). They contain the same CPU, same RAM ...same MS licence etc. Some even have almost the same shell (e.g. ECS-DELL-FSC-Toshiba).

If you use it for work, I suggest you get the cheapest one that offers you enough value to perform your task (e.g. 15.4", 17" being no longer portable; x3100, 2Gig are all sufficient for coding: if you need real power, you'll ssh anyway to the given HPC). You will not get a heart-attack if it drops, gets scratched or stolen: you will just get a brand new one, being 2x better for approx. the same price within a year with strong batteries (they will fade within 2 years anyway).

If it is (also) for showing feathers, then obviously Apple, Sony (and no, Lenovo is no good for attracting attention).

But then again, these are PC-s, and the P stands for Personal: tastes and habits vary. On a pure technical level, whichever runs Linux/BSD best (generally the least fancy ones) already gives enough empowerment to change the world...
Because if people only know you by what you sign at the end of the your posts then it makes it very easy to impersonate you.

Daniel
Ask YC: Email marketing tool
I am looking for a low-cost email marketing tool that I can use to start sending newsletters and messages to potential customers. I want to find a reliable provider that has high deliverability, but that isn't too pricey. I'm a start-up, after all.

I considered building this myself, but I'm guessing that there are lots of good products already on the market. Can anyone suggest something that they've used?
> run a contest by the community and judged by the community on how to make twitter scale.

There's already been more effort discussing the problem than fixing the problem. Most of the discussion has been based on very little factual data. For example, armchair architects can safely suggest Blub where Blub != Ruby because it is a theory which is unlikely to be disproved and extremely unlikely to be made in isolation.
AOL Keyword: E!
my company uses eloqua. I have a feeling that they might not satisfy the "low cost" requirement, though.
I'm a pretty big fan of the Lenovo X series if you want to go Windows. You may want to look at the T instead if you're not planning on using an external monitor though due to screen sizes.
Well, it's certainly justified, but if you have $1.5k to spare and not $2.5k, then that doesn't matter.
you can get an almost unobtrusive (only sticks out a fw mm-s) usb bt adaptor for the price of a sandwich. It is very popular for the eee.
Twittering About Architecture
Agreed. I haven't had the awesomeness of a dual touch touchpad, but I've had both normal ones and "the nub", and the latter is vastly preferable.
I don't live in CA, but I'm pretty sure the homeless wouldn't fit into the state aesthetic.
He missed one: every program expands until it can read email, or is replaced by one that does.
Great method for making your facebook app, not so great for flying the space shuttle.

There are different kinds of code and different kinds of programmers. So much so that "real programmer" is like likely a nonsense statement, especially if it has anything to do with "gut feelings".
"Of course, every once in a while an impromptu idea may not be perfect; indeed, it's possible that they're fatally flawed."

Fooled. By. Randomness.
I'm aware of that but I've always been wary of doing (setf print-case :downcase) globally because it can break code. Consider this example:

(let ((*print-case* :downcase)
(my-symbol 'mine))
(intern (format nil "IT-IS-~A" my-symbol)))
=> |IT-IS-mine|, :INTERNAL

Let's say print-case has been setf'd globally and my-symbol is an argument to a macro. The macro wants to derive a new symbol from my-symbol. But the result is ugly because the macro assumed print-case :upcase. There are many such examples in my and other people's code.

edit: How do I prevent asterisked variable names from indicating italics?
He's not arguing that it is a bad thing that an AI gets let out of the box -- he's arguing that it is inevitable.
Hitting the High Notes
Good, but I think you can do better. I got a Dell with the identical specs (plus Windows) 2 years ago for $700 and change (incl shipping). The time value of those two years makes me think you can get better specs for this price.
Measuring Informational Distance Between Cities
Perhaps, but I think it adds a nice personal touch
I think a lot of these grievances apply to any notebook, really.

* Any white computer, like a white car, is going to look super dirty.

* Bootcamp comes with any new MacBook as part of the package. You would only need to worry about trojans(!?) if you were buying an old, used machine and didn't have the extra money for 10.5. It's a fraction of the price of Vista, so what's the trouble here?

* The German keyboard sure is peculiar (http://flickr.com/photos/fuzheado/453807351/) but is this just an Apple thing? How does Asus, Toshiba or Lenovo compare?

* Right-clicking is usually done with control, and that works in VMWare, but BootCamp is a different deal. If Apple had better Windows trackpad drivers, they could fix this.

* The webcam only appears to be mirrored, it's all done in software. You can turn this option off.

* Any CD stuck in a machine that's slot load will be difficult to rescue if the power is off.

* The MiniDV output is a bit of a pain because you need a dongle, but you can use VGA, DVI or composite from the same port. Most notebooks only have a VGA port which is probably more convenient until you want DVI, in which case you need a new notebook.

* If you need to buy a computer to 'be cool', then I guess you need a MacBook Air. That's gold-plated. With diamonds.
In my opinion, no one without serious programming credentials has any business writing articles like this one: telling others what "real programmers" are like (and often implying that the author is one of those programming demigods).

Fair enough if you share something you've learned that helps you be more efficient, write less buggy code etc -- I like reading that kind of essays. Making generalized statements in god mode like in TFA -- I just find that amusing.

Who is this guy? Writing a MIPS cache simulator is hardly a challenge -- we had to write one for the computer architecture class at uni (http://www.inf.ed.ac.uk/teaching/courses/car/)

Where's the downvote button when you need it?
WebPower ( http://www.webpower.nl/ ) runs opt-in mailing lists with quick import options and an AJAX interface. The client list ( http://www.webpower.nl/wp.php/webpower/klanten/ ) is quite impressive.
This is completely unrelated, but why do some comments render at a lighter shade of gray than other comments? This comment renders at #323232, and the rest of them render at #000
this is existentialism in a shiny wrapper.
This is just getting ridiculously boring now. Twitter is broken. They have no clue. We get it.
self-help books are generally watered down philosophy. instead of presenting the arguments of different philosophers, the author tells you that this one works and to do it. people don't like choice, so they buy a guide they can follow rather than a text they have to think about.
Gaps in the popular presentations of scientific theories
I've a Dell D830 with the clit mouse. Lack of said clit is one reason I stay away from macbooks.

(The better screen rez on the D830 is another)