skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
To the anonymous downvoter, evidence of your ignorance:

http://norvig.com/design-patterns/
Linux Kernel Community Grows
Wine 1.0 Nearly Ready to Taste
everybody is given a gray T shirt that reads MAKE WHAT PEOPLE WANT

What they really say is Make something people want. It's interesting that, whenever I have inside knowledge about an article's subject, I always seem to catch little mistakes like this. And it makes me wonder, how many other details do they get wrong?

It's a tired but true cliché: don't believe everything you read. (That being said, this article is basically right---as far as I can tell.)
MS Research creates 'instant backing band' for singers
I've updated the original post. Hopefully it clarifies what I'm referring to. (I'm not referring to blogging software, webmail software, etc. :)
Top 10 Tech Cars
Has anyone got any experience with KVM? I've used Xen in the past, and the idea is really cool, and it's got some nice features like tying PCI devices to particular VMs. ('domains') Unfortunately, when you try and actually use it, it seems to suffer from all kinds of bizarre incompatibilities: it doesn't work with VLANs, occasionally domain management will just fail (and require a complete reboot), etc. This is on OpenSUSE 10.x, where Xen is actually quite well integrated.
What problems did you have with SCons? I haven't used it for anything serious yet, but I've been considering it, and I'm curious about any potential pitfalls.
Summary: If superclass has method X with behaviour Y, do not override X to have behaviour Z in a subclass, because this violates the spirit of inheritance semantics.

To be fair, his version is long, persuasive and well-written. And it has references.
Gmail Marked My First Domain Email as Spam...Again
so what exactly should be done to deal with this situation?
I know exactly what you're talking about, and I've long been as baffled as you are about why there aren't more. I pitched this idea to a bunch of people at RailsConf last year, and got a lot of yawns. I even pitched it to Peter Norvig of Google, who checked his watch and then "had to go". :-) But I predict open-source webapps will be big.

What's your contact info? I couldn't find it in your HN profile. (Mine's in mine.)
Sure, those are all parts of the syntax of a language, but I still maintain that CL's syntax is simpler and more regular than that of Ruby and vastly simpler than that of Java.

As an aside, the first form of the example you gave is what most Lisps use. CL, Scheme, Emacs and Goo all use this. The second, as far as I know is only used by Arc, which has a more complicated syntax than most Lisps.
"either it is lawful or it is not"

not really. things aren't really ever that clear cut. if they were, then being a lawyer wouldn't be quite a lucrative a business. considering the complexity of immigration law, "probably" and "maybe" are good answers until a judge gives an official "yes" or "no".
You can use urllib with pylibpcap.

http://docs.python.org/lib/module-urllib.html

http://pylibpcap.sourceforge.net/
Huh. A coincidence that this showed up today, right after I posted this:

http://www.gmathacks.com/gmat-verbal-bible/coming-soon-the-g...
I've found wxPython pretty straight forward - I understand Dabo is based on wxPython but haven't used it myself. I suspect it will be even more straight forward?
I agree. Additionally, the first comment under the article makes a very good point:

"I think one of the reasons offline browser applications are failing to take off is that people don't realise that we tolerate browser-based limitations because of the benefits of being connected to the Internet. Once offline, the browser is the last place we want to be."
I still don't really get it though. Wikipedia, Sourceforge, Slashdot, etc. are all major open source applications with an authoritative host and are user-oriented.
As far as I'm aware there are unscrupulous companies that will happily sell you SSL certificates without checking up on you at all.

Aside from that, I'd have a serious problem with a central authority controlling what I'm allowed to run. Aside from that, any such technology isn't infallible either.
Ideas for an Erlang Object System
sounds like ur app would be better on the commandline

but wxpython seems to be the most popular
Pros and Cons of Executable Data
How "Slaughterhouse Five" was born - Kurt Vonnegut's new posthumous collection
Ah ok. Well that helps answer my question :) I didn't realize those were all open source.

Aside from Wikipedia, do you know of any other web apps that appeal to people outside the geek population?
Yes the mark up is huge, but it is used to offset costs elsewhere in the network. The money is used to build and maintain all those tower sites, pay for the expensive 3G licenses and subsidise handsets.
i can't help but feel like this is an odd fit (auctomatic + communicate.com). Of course I know nothing beyond what I've read, and auctomatic sounds like a group of talented folks with savvy advisers - but the synergies between the two companies just aren't clear to me.

Maybe communicate (like many small google acquisitions) is buying for talent which would makes sense from their perspective, but they are not quite google so the allure from the founders side is a bit less shiny. Hard to second guess 5 million though.
Some cool cars in there.

I have to say though, that I've been thinking about a couple of Lincoln vehicles as choices for my next car purchase, until I saw the Sync thing. That is a deal-killer for me right now, not being an MS-basher, but they have a horrible track record in terms of "trying" things in the consumer space (Ultimate TV, anyone?). Since I've been keeping my vehicles longer the last few years, the last thing I want is to try to sell a 3 year old car with an EOL'd software system.
Perl has been my primary language since 2000. I would learn it in the context of building an application. Read chapter 1 of the Camel Book (the basics), which you can get online. Then just jump in and search the web or look in the book when you run into problems.

Note: tons of stuff has already been done for you at CPAN: http:://search.cpan.org

I've also found the Perl Cookbook and Mastering Algorithms with Perl somewhat useful. However, much of their content is now in bits and pieces on the Web, and so searching for your specific problem often is enough. If you don't know the site already, check out http://perlmonks.org/.
Real Launches Official FB Scrabble...Outside N America only.
Once it can overcorrect the pitch, add extreme compression/limiting, and a harmonizer, then I'll be really scared.

Still, I'd love to play with this thing.
Time.com Goes Trolling For Blog Links
Common Startup Misconceptions and How to Avoid Them
Real won the rights to produce Scrabble from Mattel, who owns the game outside North America. In yet another case of digital making physical legalities meaningless. Let's see how long this geographic shoe-horning holds, as Hasbro owns the NA rights with EA covering electronic distro. My hunch is neither will let this one go...
read his essay 'lisp is not an acceptable lisp' for a good example of stevey wandering outside of his expertise.
Tapping into Universities to Help your Business
As a comment on flickr[1] put it:

The 12 year old in the front is teaching the 30 yr olds in the room how to use the programming tool created by the guy in the flannel

[1] http://flickr.com/photos/mahalie/2312434677/
IANAL, or even an immigrant, but I am almost sure that the US legal system will never take away your stock (or any other property you may come to own in the US) because US law protects property rights very well. If there are adverse legal consequences, they will almost certainly be restricted to two things: (1) your ability to remain a legal resident of the US or to become a citizen of the US and (2) whether you will have to pay a higher tax rate on your capital gains from the startup than you would have if you were a citizen or if you held a green card.

A minor consideration is that the bureaucrats in the U.S. government earn lower incomes than most mangerial-class Americans (although they are much less likely to lose their job) and that about 90% of the employees of the U.S. government have left-of-center political beliefs, which usually include some amount of resentment towards successful capitalists and high-income earners. Consequently, an immigration bureaucrat will probably envy the income or assets of a successful technology cofounder. Usually the rules dictate the bureaucrat's decision, but in a case where the rules are silent, envy might make the difference between a favorable immigration decision and an unfavorable one. But like I said, most of the time the bureaucrat's choice will be forced by the rules, and if the rules dictate a favorable decision, then the bureaucrat will have to make a favorable decision no matter how envious he is (or you will be able to force a favorable outcome by spending a moderate amount of legal costs).
photo.net runs atop the ArsDigita Community System, also open source. It's not quite a plug-n-play solution, but a good number of websites are/were run on ACS.
Read the man pages.

Start with man perl, then read the following: perlintro, perlreftut, perldsc, perlretut, perlboot, perltoot.

This should get you started then read all the others, get the Camel book which is the defacto reference.

And write as much code as you can (which is really true of learning any language.)

Dropping into #perl on EFNet (now on freenode) used to be helpful, but it doesn't look like it anymore.
yters you said "Finally, it really helps to think about what the author is saying, especially if I try to anticipate what's next."

I think that is the stuff of misunderstandings in a serious discussion. If someone is trying to say something new to you, then anticipating and trying to skip words based on knowing what he's saying won't work so well.
No. Malone didn't write that; it's not so black and white. But there's plenty of gray:

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=USDEUR=X&t=5y&l=on&#...

The silver lining is that Americans can now get a lot more dollars for the things that we sell abroad.
http://www.revzilla.com - RevZilla Motorsports - an ecommerce startup

While what we are doing probably is not incredibly interesting to the new.yc demographic (selling motorcycle gear online), the technology behind it (rails + pgsql) and our end goal (becoming the #1 supplier online for the powersports industry (big market)) should be.

Our startup launched about 7 months ago and is starting to turn the corner into profitability. Trying to get traffic up anyway we can so a link would be much appreciated!
Real-Time Referrers 1.0 Released
struggling startup? check

http://www.revzilla.com
http://meneame.net is spanish digg clone (trolls included) which is licensed under the Affero GPL: http://svn.meneame.net/index.cgi/branches/version2/
I wish I know jQuery as well as him and I am 22
Actually you're exactly wrong about the contrast.

If you convert the red-orange scheme to grayscale you'll see that both the ugly and nice schemes have the same value contrast. If you convert the green-blue scheme to grayscale you'll see that the ugly combination has more value contrast.

See: http://img357.imageshack.us/img357/9127/grayfx0.png

The issue isn't contrast, it's hue.

The author uses the Müller Formula to explain it, but I'm not convinced about the "follow the natural brightness" argument – does that explanation still make sense if you reorder the colors in the scheme?

I learned this stuff in color theory without this formula. It's simply this: combinations of colors with similar hues don't look good together.

I hope this picture helps explain it: http://img181.imageshack.us/img181/3797/vomitev5.png

Obviously the left scheme doesn't look great in that graphic because all the colors have the same value. But you can see that it looks better than a scheme with colors of similar hue.
How Important is Offline Access, Anyway?
> write as much code as you can

Can't agree with this one enough. Also, it is better to write a lot of small scripts, than to write one big one. They will be easier to debug, and you'll get more done.
The best way to learn any language: Write something in it! Think of a particular webapp you want to build, and do it (referring to a book/CPAN/anything else. Perldoc is useful to learn specific syntax.

The CPAN modules are pretty useful, especially DBI (databases) and Mechanize (automate website interactions).
Bridging Desktop And Web Applications, Part 2
Assuming you are on F1 visa without OPT, you can be a co-founder, but you can not 'work' for this company you found. The key is not about making money or not, you can receive passive income like dividend. You are not allowed to 'work', even volunteering will violate your status.
Pubmatic Data Suggests Small Sites Command Higher Rates For Remnant Ads Than Large Sites.
Announcing the darcs 2.0.0 release
Linux version available here: https://launchpad.net/rescuetime-linux-uploader
I doubt very much that it will go well. I used to work for a small Overture-like search marketing company. We were purchased by Yahoo about the same time Overture was. Overture's bosses took over that end of the business, to the extent that we were given @overture.com email addresses. Then they sucked away a large percentage of developer resources for years to do their total rewrite called Panama, adding features we'd had in Brasil (Brasil!) for years. Our code got drowned in the bathtub, except in the countries and languages that OVT couldn't bother to support.

So there's an example where better code and cheaper infrastructure, already in hand and ready to go, lost out to Overture.

So you think Microsoft will fare any better with that maligant tumor? MSFT's tech is nice, but it's not (repeat NOT) ready for anything other than US English + Europe.

It's a disaster in the making.
And to be fair, your summary expresses the idea succinctly and directly. Bravo!

May I quote you?
British schools are falling for the pseudoscience of Brain Gym.
Python Fans Take Aim at the Enterprise
Ask YC: Tech startup blog search
I'm in a startup that has been growing slowly for the past few years. We're getting an intern this summer, and we were discussing compensation/benefits.

I remember an article about treating employees like employees instead of founders, and how mixing that up means that you'd be experiencing frustration dealing with expectations of sacrifice, reward, etc. and lose a lot of qualified employees.

Unfortunately, I can't find where that article was. Googling for an hour pulled up nothing, it didn't show up in my searches in my feed reader, so it's likely either from here or linked from a feed.

My question is, how can I find it? Is there a good place to search for tech startup blog posts? Would something like yahoo pipes be useful (maybe full-text search for every page linked to by news.YC?) I'm thinking that this situation will come up in the future, and would like to have a better solution for it.
Lazy web sites run faster
"Just" send out spam?
Indeed. I've been in the newspaper a few times, and every time there was some glaringly wrong detail.
Social Network Psychology
For the analytically inclined
I disagree.

Startups succeed and fail for many reasons. For example, lot of startups fail simply because the idea doesn't work, not execution. Read the "black swan" book, the single most important reason for failure or success is actually luck. Keep tinkering with things, and you may get lucky.
C++ is an expert language
To all the non-hackers out there... the Taggars learned to hack.

Although having Patrick and John was surely a huge benefit, it goes to shows where there's a will, there's a way.
It is one of the major disadvantages of a common law system (as opposed to statutory law, like the French legal system).

Because things are so heavily influenced by precedent, until there has been a legal opinion it is very unclear what the law actually is. Even if there is a statute on the books that is very unambiguous that doesn't mean that a judge will always be compelled to follow it.

Not only that but because of the difference between binding vs persuasive opinion two different courts might even (legitimately) make opposing rulings.

This means that you can't really rely on a certain ruling in many causes, and if you _are_ convicted based on a judge's interpretation of the law you will have to wait for the appeals process. Assuming your appeal is even taken up you might need to wait months or years and spend a large fortune on legal bills. In the mean time you might have the penalties for "breaking" the law applied to you anyway.

After 4 years of court costs and expulsion from the US it won't console you much that they will now let you back in, considering the opportunities you may have lost while all this was going on.

Hence the 'probably' and the 'maybe'.

IANAL etc.
My impression is that maths has everything to do with human motivation, ethics and so on, when you consider economics and evolution.

For example, with respect to ethics, it seems to me the only sensible way to look at them is the desired outcome, which you determine with maths. The rest is just arbitrary preferences of people, so discussing it is meaningless.
1) Learning to code Ruby on Rails
2) A coffee shop companion
3) 1 and 2

The performance isn't great - about that of a 4 to 5-yr old low-end notebook, not a pressing issue as long as I don't care about it / learn to breathe. Occasionally I wonder what the SD disk is doing thrashing (even though I can't hear it - no moving parts -see the little blinking LED). I'm not doing anything processor-intensive just hacking/googling my way around the unfamiliar neighborhood of Ruby on Rails. As a distraction, YouTube videos play fine. I have Windows XP installed (so I can tunnel into the corporate VPN) - the Ubuntu should perform for coding much, much better.
Yeah, "just" send out "500.000" spams a day. Like we hadn't enough already. The vikings will win, if the pace of the war remains the same.
Yes, I think Microsoft will excise that 'malignant tumor' completely. Why would MSFT keep it? They want Yahoo's traffic (and all the bright, shiny bits everyone is worried will be destroyed), not Yahoo's failed business model implementation.
Also, officials tend to enforce the letter of the law and judges are expected to rule per the spirit of the law.
Like every one has said so far, find something to do and code it in Perl.
I've used wxPython for a very large game editor. It is (or at least was a few years ago) the most complete desktop API for python. It's very easy to use and the examples make it easy to knock together a prototype VERY quickly that can be extended to a full application.

There are some issues on the OSX port though which tends to lag behind the Linux/Windows version on bug fixes (not by design but due to having fewer developers devoted to OSX).
You must be kidding! Corvette as a top tech car? Just look at the suspension - european tractors had one like that 50 years ago! I'd rather had an Audi R8 anyday.
There's a good chance MSFT would want to excise it. I doubt their ability to do it, politically. OVT is entrenched. Too many high-up people (including Jerry!) would have to admit they were absolutely wrong and let an acquired company take control of the cashflow.
I'm not convinced yet that it is flawed.

If you are distributing a medium complexity application then you get several choices including.

- Web app. Online only but cross platform and low pain to 'install'.

- Binary. Hard work to make multi platform and who the heck trusts a binary from Bob's Software Shack (no spy ware guaranteed!)

- Offline capable web app. Low barrier to adoption (small download from a known and reputable brand) plus you get cross platform capability for free.

So assuming that your product really needs to go off line to magnify it's utility (e.g. a mail client or a to do list) and you can work out a slick way to sync data from multiple clients to the server it seems like a good idea to me.
Mergers and acquisitions usually don't work out as planned, especially when the companies have very different cultures (which is nearly always). Your assumption -- that they succeed in combining the best of both businesses -- is more of a best-case scenario for MS.
Yaw, I think this is a case where a really profitable domain company decided they needed a webdev team and found a well-priced turnkey team in the Auctomatics.

It's easy to underestimate the value here, but it's huge, I think. Imagine the time, cost (and opportunity cost!) of trying to build your own team, including the risk that you'd hire a bad seed or two.

With a scant $5mm, this company gets a functional team that's already used to working together. In addition, presumably there's a vesting schedule that requires that they stay there for some number of years to get paid... With lots of web devs hopping jobs every year or so, this is a big deal.
Code == Data: The Basics
Can You Spare a Wind Turbine, Man? There's a shortage that could cap the growth of the wind industry
Poll: Is your webapp running on an OS that is virtualized or bare metal?
For your hosting, are you using a virtualized OS?<p>If so, how's your experience with that? What upsides have you leveraged (other than cheaper hosting packages)?
Virtualized (primarily)
Bare metal (primarily)
Don't know but probably should
Don't know and don't care
On the Mac, you can use pyobjc to write Cocoa apps. Included with Leopard.

http://www.friday.com/bbum/2007/10/27/pyobjc-20-pyobjc-in-le...
I agree with most of the suggestions here. Read the man pages, perlintro, perlreftut, all those. The Camel book is great also. And of course write scripts. One thing I would like to add is reading Higher Order Perl. http://www.powells.com/biblio?PID=29575&cgi=product&...
DIY Panzer Tank
How can they be big? What's the revenue model for an open source webapp? I don't get it...

You create some cool app, then some big player takes it as it's open source, installs it, and laughs in your face :/

Once you've established your own site as 'the leader' like wikipedia, then open sourcing would probably work fine. But open sourcing from the start seems a bad idea...
[Sunspots] The thriving edition
College Isn’t Worth a Million Dollars
Please, please, PLEASE, look at whether something has been submitted before posting it. This has already been submitted at least once.

We really need to try not to re-submit stories. Other than this, I'm sure that the Microsoft/Yahoo stories have already been submitted at _least_ 6 or 7 times.
I still don't get it. Quote: "DimDim is more like reddit.com", so to explain how DimDim is different from a web app like reddit, you say that it is like reddit. No, sorry, I really don't understand ;-)
Virtualized, Xen - the RH Xen tools seem less than polished, but it still beats bare metal by a long shot
Agile Can Work For Your Whole Company
110 best books: The perfect library
The downside of using your title tag for SEO is that it makes a lousy headline on social news sites.
Then we prosecute the companies. Why is that so hard to do the right thing?
Are you a photography enthusiast, or were you just using flickr for personal photos? Where did you go after that?
You're right I can use any version control system for my project. But rails has this nice automated hooks to subversion, which I don't have to configure myself. I'm hoping that they have now added the same integration for git.
Hmm, I don't know if I'd necessarily call it a "disadvantage," it is a difference however.

Not being up on the merits of different legal systems, I'll avoid demonstrating my ignorance and just refrain from making a decision I would not be able to back up. I am now curious though, so I guess you just grew my "to research" list.
Lisp macro systems
How would you sell water?
They produced wealth - they turned raw materials, people, and money into telecom. They just charge a price very close to the total value they create, so they capture a large part of the wealth they create. Asterisk creates the wealth, captures none (or very little) of the value, so it's there for the taking.