skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A good benefit of renting is that you could travel anywhere you want to for months or years, especially if you're in a startup in the digital space that focuses on making money every month instead of raising Venture Capital. You could travel across the country or internationally. You could do this frequently, and live in places that are cheaper per month than your mortgage or rent--which is going to be especially true for almost every other country if you live in an expensive city already, but still true if your current rent is $1,000. One might not want to buy a house unless they plan on living in it for at least a few years (there are web site calculators that compute how long you have to live in a house to make it worth it, factoring local rent, buying and selling costs, and the small interest you would earn on the difference between the rent and mortgage price.)
It seems to vary by country; this is an example of what the article was talking about: http://www.reuters.com/article/technologyNews/idUSL295116342...
I'll second 8aweek. It has actually changed my browsing habits.
Thanks for the clarification. Not that I think it could be done in a few days, but I still see it as reactionary to developments in other technologies.
I rather liked that he pointed out reasons behind why things are the way they are, and why they're (arguably) no longer true. I guess that's what they call perspective.
http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2008/04/facebook-back-of... (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=161583)

http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2008/04/facebook-back-of...
Quick question on the legality of this: Say you hold a contest (cash or prize). Who owns the entries that are used? Who owns the entries that aren't used? Can you stipulate that you will only take entries under certain licensing? (CC or MIT or some-such)?

It seems like a very grey area.
Mothers are frequently overrated
I have been reading up on sleep a bit, and this is the best article I have read on the topic:

http://www.supermemo.com/articles/sleep.htm

The other articles on supermemo are also very good.
What the author seems to miss is that if you rent for 30 years, you still have to buy or rent a home for year 31. Whereas, if you own your home for 30 years, in year 31 your housing payment is $0 + maintenance, which I'll guarantee is less than the rent the author would be paying.
Google Confirms Friend Connect
Rack Makes It Onto JRuby
At the old place where I worked, I had a couple friends that just did porting work. I thought it was ridiculous porting basic things like string manipulations and stacks from one language to another. We simply did it, because languages evolve and needs evolve...and to use something, we often find it easier to rewrite the damn thing in another language.

However, you can't be sure that you did it right during the rewrite. This is where I figured unit tests, if it could be preserved somehow, between ports, would be useful. Then you can run the unit tests against the set of new code, then you can be pretty sure that your new code did what your old code did (at least the stuff you tested for). If there was somewhere, where this type of unit testing existed for basic stuff like stacks, linked lists, time converters, etc. was in a public repository of some sort...then you can run these unit tests every time you had a new piece of code.

Then taking it one step further, I thought then it'd be an interesting reason for humans to NOT write this type of code, since conceivably, you can use genetic algorithms for it. Because when you think about it, unit tests are basically evaluation functions (the environment) for a population of programs. Theoretically, people would ease themselves the burden of rewriting basic well-understood algorithms and data structures, like quicksort and red-black trees, etc.

But the thing I dislike about unit tests is really just how many of them there are. It's mostly because unit tests take one case at a time and test it...case by case. This is where I feel like rigors of mathematics is enviable. Math functions are basically generalizations of a lot of different, but related specific cases. A lot of math statements are succinct ways to declare all cases you'd care about across the board--the times it fails, is when you have piece-wise functions, then you get that funny big "{". If there was a more functional way to express unit tests, that would be an interesting avenue to explore--and save the rest of us on typing.
Someone finally took the dream of the movie adaptation of Congo and made it a reality! "Amy good gorilla."
Good observation, bad conclusion. If Apple had to sell as many computers as Dell to survive, then maybe it would overextend its market and be worth shorting. Since Apple sells relatively few computers, there are lots of people who settle for a Dell but dream of an Apple. If your customers would jump ship the first chance they get, you're not a good long bet.
I love the "please enter your account number exactly as it appears on your statement" prompts which then require you to skip dashes/spaces which DO appear on the statement.

Burn in usability hell..
Too much clutter for me.
The reception here is somewhat surprising. This release should be welcomed. Encouraged. Supported.

Open specifications do change the landscape.

For all sides involved. For Adobe, for Adobe's commercial competition and current and future Adobe partners, and for the Open Source world.

Having both open file format specifications and competing products perceived to have fewer features or lower quality allows you advantages in product bids. It's a good place to be for Adobe; it's a low-cost variation of the freemium model, and one that Adobe has used before.

Postscript and now PDF have survived in the wild for some years now, though you'll particularly note that the specs for PDF have been a moving target. It is nearly certain you'll see these newly-released specifications evolve over time.

Open specifications can inoculate Adobe against anti-competitive legal proceedings that can arise in various jurisdictions.

It also means that other entities are open to develop both competing and supporting products and to participate in the community without fear of exposure to the (il)legalities of reverse-engineering. And from the technical difficulties and the upgrade- and compatibility-related risks of reverse-engineering -- available specifications make for better open source, and more- and cross-compatible products.

And the release means that an organization that is a sufficiently large target to draw the legal attention of Adobe is not going to get tangled up with Adobe in the process of actually proving that the EULA was unenforceable in various courts.

Yes, Adobe likely has underlying competitive motivations that supported the specification release. They're a commercial entity, and they make money selling software products. Regardless, Adobe appears to have done a good and useful thing for the community.

I'll thank Adobe for releasing the SWF specifications.
"how come it swallows so much of my screen real estate"

I second that,the first thing i do in Outlook, Visual Studio, Eclipse ... is reorganize the panes to maximize the editor area.

For oulook this would be the email body and email list
"Which brings me to the real difference between Dell and Apple -- simply put, it's me."

Sometimes it's hard to tell the difference between FSJ and RSJ.
That's silly, because the same keyloggers can recognize sequences of 16 digits as a credit card number, particularly since they can be easily checksummed for confirmation.
Go ahead and show the new support for languages like JavaScript and Ruby in IDEs like Netbeans to Java bigots and see how far you get. Show them how autocompletion, basic checking, and tons of other conveniences are there and working (and it's open source, and there's almost certainly a way to get commercial support, and blah blah blah). They may still disregard it. No matter how sophisticated the tooling support is, no matter how much you take care of technical things, they're still afraid of anything that's different and are looking for any excuse they can to maintain the status quo.

He only briefly alluded to it (80% politics, 20% technology), but like so much else that is discussed in terms of tools and technologies, this is a people problem. It's depressing, really.
Apple has taught us that good taste is everything. I'd like to see a build-your-own news site that allows individuals or small groups to maintain their own mini-reddit in a more moderatorship-style. Make the front page showcase the most popular feeds and feed-artists.
Even if the property loses money, the owner gets tax deductions for depreciation on the property, and the owner can apply the loss to their own taxes (useful if you have high income like a doctor or lawyer).
So the article says, in order to get over sleep deprivation, you have to go to bed when you're tired and wake up without an alarm clock.

That would probably get me fired... I do that on weekends. Go to bed at 2-4am, and wake up at 11am-2pm.
A Prada overnight bag
Powerset.com: Semantic searching of Wikipedia (more in the pipeline) Launches Today.
3 main lessons of Psychology
For a clear example of what the author is talking about, check out slides 30-34 of a 2006 PLDI presentation on Fortress: http://research.sun.com/projects/plrg/PLDITutorialSlides9Jun...
I don't understand how Xobni helps me? I installed it, I let it index my entire inbox... and .. what now? They should have taken the $20 million.
This was the core lesson of all my creative writing classes.
"...you can’t build software the way the Egyptians built pyramids: draw a triangle blueprint and whip the slaves until it’s all in place."

Nitpick: the pyramids probably weren't built by slaves.

http://harvardmagazine.com/2003/07/who-built-the-pyramids.ht...
Web start-up unveils semantic Wikipedia search tool
"It WILL pick up -- the country isn't becoming LESS crowded."

That's less important than the fact that the country is getting richer (despite wage stagnation). Poorer people can lower their expectations for safety, space, etc, but the richer you get, the more you want. I moved from 800sf in an old high rise to 1000sf in a suburban apartment complex to an 1800sf house within 2 years as I got out of school and my income increased. I could save 60% if I had stayed in my apartment, but I'd rather pay extra.
I love how these graphs erase the huge lead that craigslist has. it almost seems like a fair fight.
I have to admit that I am lacking in clue about Twitter.

Are they handling more than 64GB of user-generated data per hour? If not, why not just store everything into RAM on a big 128GB RAM server and query that?
Is that why this was struck dead?
ReactOS, a clone of Windows XP
Bah! Fie on these fancy toys. I learned to program at aged nine using Pascal. My first serious program was an addition driller which I then used.

Seriously, I moved into Mindstorms later when I was in middle school and was really disappointed by the limitedness of the blocks 'language.'
Music Operates Directly On Your Abstract Syntax Tree
The comments by a real veteran Dan Weinreb are a nice read.
I find as I get older, I'm more sensitive to losing sleep. Last Fall, I was extremely busy with taking two out-of-area courses, while at the same time changing thesis topics for my PhD. I was training Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu twice a week, and lifting two or three times a week.

The only way I could sustain this was to do almost nothing on Sunday. I would sleep off and on all day. No work, no training, just rest. At the time, I felt guilty about doing it, but I came to realize taking Sunday off was the only way I was getting through each week.
I think he just brought up the "int overflow into Double" thing so he could pimp out the double-dispatch type inference a little bit later:

> "... and so all this stuff about having a type-tag saying this is an int – which might not actually be technically correct, if you're going to overflow into a Double, right? Or maybe you're using an int but what you're really using is a byte's worth of it, you know. The runtime can actually figure things out around bounds that are undecidable at compile time."

I got the distinct impression that he wasn't arguing against type inference, merely said that the classic way to do it doesn't always work with dynamic languages, and there are better (newer) ideas regarding how to infer types without resorting to type tags.
Sometimes it reminds me of Stockholm Syndrome.
Would be ironic if QBasic came back. That is what I wrote my first real program in. (I made that game where the snake eats the apples and grows longer. Only mine had cheat codes and teleporters and stuff!)
EconTalk Podcast: Chris Anderson on Free
I stopped reading after this:

"C is really fast, because among other things, the compiler can inline function calls. It's gonna use some heuristics, so it doesn't get too much code bloat, but if it sees a function call, it can inline it: it patches it right in, ok, because it knows the address at link time."

This statement shows that Steve has no idea how the base of every modern OS works: separate compilation, calling conventions, machine code, shared objects (libraries), etc.

Once I compile a .c file which defines a function into object code, there is no practical way for the linker to "patches it right in" -- that would require actually decompiling the function to get rid of the calling convention implementation as well as tie-in all the argument references in the function body to those in the calling code.

I noticed something similar a while ago in one of his posts about Lisp (I think it was about why Lisp is not an acceptable Lisp). There he made pretty strong statements and when people who actually know and have used Lisp in real world pointed to his numerous mistakes in comments, Steve admitted that he actually doesn't know the subject matter very well.
From the comments: Seems to me that far too many people reach for the 'silver bullet' that is XML, then end up with a big pile of mess.

The same happened with OO. It has uses but it is generally overused.
Dominate low competition keywords via article writing
From the article I found this graph interesting http://gigaom.files.wordpress.com/2008/05/xobni_mail_client_....
Outlook 400 M - Lotus 250 M - Yahoo Mail 260 M - Hotmail 200 - Gmail 100 - Apple Mail 50 M - Thunderbird 30 M

This totals 1290 M , now if their market penetration is 0.5% (i.e. 0.05) and they sell the product for 1 dollar that's 60 million in revenue

Lets try another what if. What if they sell it for 20 dollars, how much market penetration to they need to make 100 Mil revenue!

~0.39% (0.0039)

I am guessing they played a math game. And the math says, unless they totally suck, they will pass that 20 million sooner than spending 20 million

Finally we meet some business men in the startup software market

pick your market, before you pick your product
From the article: And hey, that "better search" thingie you were droning on and on about? How much better can searching the Internet really be? Why would anyone care?

We get that quite frequently, so we just keep codin'.
Hank Williams just published an article about scaling in languages vs architectures that relates to Yegge's points about Java being faster than C++, RoR being faster than Struts, etc

http://whydoeseverythingsuck.com/2008/05/blaine-cook-writes-...
facebook is good for single people
Amen. The best way to convince me of your vision of the future is to build it. Rock on!
yes thats an option but those credit cards last like 6 months before you need to bounce them. And you need to qualify for the credit. With equity line you qualify once at your best at then you can still get access to it if you no longer work/have bad credit etc.
I know that in the UK at least a lot of landlords get 'buy to let' mortgages, where you only pay off the interest on the loan, which obviously makes the payments (and rent) cheaper than a normal mortgage. This does though rely on the house price remaining the same as when you bought in order to pay the full mortgage off at some point.
I've created a very effective way to keep family and old friends up to date on your doings when life gets busy (especially w kids) by letting digital photos create the chronology, and letting you send your doings by email in a mixed text/photo format whenever you find time to catch up. I hope you're right that solving this problem can be a killer app.

http://ourdoings.com/
When I can get an answer (bonus if it is correct) to queries like 'How many times has John McCain appeared on the Daily Show?', I'll be impressed.

One weak area in Google's armor is taking time into account, eg: 'How many times did John McCain appear on the Daily Show in 2006?'
New Google Service Makes Web Pages Social
Blaine Cook Writes First Blog Post Since Twitter... About Scaling
1. Tell them what you're going to show them.

2. Show them.

3. Tell them what you just showed them.
I agree, too much clutter. But the "factz" feature is pretty awesome (even wit the gratuitous z).
Indeed even the best search engines are only going to be able to answer that question if it is stated somewhere. Hakia can do that. However no search engine is going to be able to figure out the answer by, for example adding up all the times he appeared in a given year. So if someone wrote somewhere "john mcain was a guest on the daily show seven times in 2008" hakia should be able to give you an answer.
Sure, but the point is that "constant rent for 30 years" is a pretty lousy assumption.
Renters definitely lost over a short period of time the secret is they do it for the long run, now the article kind of makes logic for your first house.
This is the only way I can program. Sadly that makes me a terrible programmer for implementing systems at BigCo, since I usually don't use whatever product they have me working on.
Nit-pick: "Theorems that have withstood the test of time are falling, one by one; just ask Fermat and Poincaré."

The author means "conjectures", or "open problems" rather than "theorems". Theorems are the end-product of mathematics and do not fall one by one (unless someone finds a mistake in a proof, and a counterexample, which is pretty rare).
I use 2 computers on a KVM. One for work/projects and the other one for "everything else." The work computer has all alerts and feeds off (including email). I find it gives me a psychological separation. If I really need to work or hit a deadline, the non-work computer goes off.
It's really long but he responds almost point-for-point to everything in Yegge's essay.
Ask PG: What Marketing/PR strategies do you suggest to YC companies?
How do you help YC companies to create maximum buzz in minimum time and money? what practical tools would you suggest (SEO, facebook, twitter, blogs, buying email list (not spam), google ads, display/banner advertising, other social media etc.)?
Do you ever suggest them to hire a professional PR firm?
The other problem with a group karma system is that coders will obsess about it and spend their karma distribution time not writing code and not really getting better as a result of doling out positive karma. And then Sr. Architect X announces hiring of a replacement in the next 6 months and everyone spends 2 hours a day up-modding his/her old code, etc.

Oh and what if I think that nested if statements are easy to follow so I go around dinging you for extracting to methods or using ? : form or something.

Perhaps if you had a really bad-ass coder whose job was to apply karma to code from either lower-tier or less experienced for part of the day, that might work. It provides incentive, it comes from a source of understood quality and authority and it can be accompanied by constructive criticism or substitute code to study. A system like this would have to have a clearly defined goal of rewarding good programming according to some metric or standard.

It's a good germ of an idea, but not a good idea as stated I think.
SMS 4x More Expensive Than Data From Hubble
Ask YC: Automating jobs
For work, I have to upload a report to the server everyday. I am wondering if there is a way to automate this. The only internet browser that we can use is IE6. Is there some kind of script that I can write to make my life easier?

Here is the procedure:
1. I go to a page in the intranet in IE.
2. I click on "Browse" and browse for a file to upload. The file is in this format: report_mmdd.xls. So, I choose a file for that particular day (mmdd).
3. I click "Send"
True, but landlords usually either do their own maintenance or know who's good and cheap. The average person might tend to get ripped off by incompetent or unscrupulous repairmen.
"Wouldn't it be nice to have easily readable, understandable data and configuration files"

No, not really

How many times do people actually read XML data, or configuration files? Once in a while I suppose, when performing some configuration tasks, or debugging some data operation. But 99% of the time, your programs are the ones reading the XML. And this is exactly what XML is designed for - being easy for machines to read.

XML is easy to parse, because you have hundreds of available XMl parsers. In many languages you don't even need XML parsers, they're included in the language (actionscript and scala come to mind). It's easy to query with xpath, it's easy to validate with xsd. Most databases can store it natively. There's a whole ecosystem of xml tools that help you work with the data. It would be hard to trade all that for something slightly more readable.
Thanks for the tip. I'll definitely try it.
Open-Source Software: How the Stock Market Views It
Not necessarily. I have 15K credit card debt at less than 6% until the loan is paid off. The trick is to max out a credit card, make a big payment, and then they send you a blank check for some ridiculously low rate for an indefinite period on your account with a note that says they hope they're not losing you as a customer. Then you pay the rest of the credit card off and write the check for (almost) your entire credit line. At least that's what Chase did for me.

I do have good credit, but then you have to have good credit to get a low enough interest rate on a mortgage to make it worthwhile, right?
I think the word impossible was used loosely. Because I can honestly say that I very well could have lived my life never having heard of the word 'trochees'.
I use a firefox addon called LeechBlock that lets you list sites that you shouldn't be allowed to go to. I have it redirect me to a to-do list at rememberthemilk.

Sounds like that won't help you too much since you're using Safari, but I urge any firefox users who have this problem to try it out.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4476
Thanks for the heads up about the whitelist feature. I would also like to be able to record all my activity locally and not send anything to the server. It would make RescueTime more useful and eliminate my privacy concerns.
There's a bigger problem there. For the current year, the quantity could change. Old, incorrect values would outweigh new, correct values. So, you still wouldn't get the right answer.

"Who, what, when and how do" queries can be answered with current AI techniques but "how many" queries are much harder.
Where does Google go next?
XML isn't used for its readability, it's used because it's a good standard format for exchanging data between different pieces of software. I work in the web shop business and for us standardization on XML is a god send: We no longer do have to maintain (or write!) parsers for product data supplied in all sorts of different insane CSV-like formats. Instead we can simply throw a well designed off the shelf XML parser at the data and when a data file is corrupt, it saves us from having to spend hours on the phone with a partner company trying to figure out whether it's their data, their output software or our own parser that is broken. With XML it's either valid XML or it's not.