skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"I used the opportunity of your reliability failure to make a larger point about reliable software."

Your argument construction is not very reliable either. You're basing "large points about reliable software" on... on what exactly? You can't overgeneralize like that, at least not while remaining convincing.
Closures in Ruby (run it and follow along)
I agree too. And the rounded corners are a nice touch.
"Wow" service
http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/The_Complicator_0x27_s_Glove...
Well, the problem is that my site is supposed to do exactly what reddit does. In fact, it was inspired by complains on reddit that an influx of new users buried the old interesting content. You do bring up a good point, however. I'll think more about differentiating!
If you do a quick search, you can usually find some pretty decent coupon codes on the net.
Great blog post on business cards:

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2007/08/business-car...
RetailMeNot.com works well, but they also send you coupons in email and physically when you order stuff. I've gotten as much as 90% off before. It's one of those sites, like GoDaddy, that you never want to order from without checking for an applicable coupon somewhere.
"the crazy days of 2005" -- is that what we're calling them now? :)
Services is expensive, but you should be billing for some of those things like off-the-clock support, documentation, research, etc.
This is a classic example of an article that I want to upvote, I want people to read it, I just don't want it saved in my list.

HN Feature complaint aside, thanks Reg for finding this. Just because something has a right answer (like math) doesn't mean you can't be creative in finding it. And with anything that's evaluated based on balancing multiple goals (like, um, everything) creativity is essential in coming up with new designs or solutions.
Why not link directly to the source?

It's at: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/04/01/fresh-free-and-go...
Why Adobe AIR Is Not Google Gears, Prism, JavaFX or Silverlight
I'm sympathetic to a few of these points, but this is just weird:

If you write applications without tests then you are a bad person, incapable of love.

Dumb attempt at humor? Maybe, but the zealotry of TDD advocates is to me a pretty strong indicator that something's wrong somewhere.
Dang it, you got there before I could!
Don Knuth wants to see your "O" face.
I don't understand all the hate on Google about GAE. This is not some new and evil business model. This is just a turn-key system.

Google has been very up front with what it expects and what it will provide; I don't think there has been any shadiness on their part.
You don't get to pick and choose implementations to compare. Mzscheme was probably chosen because it's a pretty well known scheme implementation and seems popular... likely because it's well done in many ways. But you have to take the bad with the good.
Actually, no, a square cover would have to have a much wider flange in order to ensure that it could not fall in . (rotated 45 degrees in relation to the whole and tipped up, a square cover would fall in)
A lot of the buzz around Lisp web applications does relate to mutable state accomplished through continuations, but that's not a requisite to using Lisp, nor is it the only advantage to using Lisp.

I manage state via relational databases, and haven't had to deal with any memory-leak bugs. I even found it easy to prevent leaking of database connections.

Mutation is definitely optional. A lot of people even still count Lisp dialects among the functional languages.
only 15 years ago.

we're old. you know that, right? anyone who remembers Mosaic, Fetch, the WELL... we're all old. You just put a finer point on it (above), that's all...
Clojure (Lisp on the JVM) videos on blip.tv
I've used them 3 times in 3 different years, all business cards came out great, especially the foil ones. Much higher quality than ones I've had done at Kinkos and Staples. If they're not standard size, I definitely can't tell when comparing them to others.

Free cards do say that on the back, but they're free. What would you expect? They aren't meant for serious business use, for that you should pay like you would anywhere else (but less).

I haven't had any trouble with spam from them ever. And even if I did, it would be 2 clicks to just block their emails in the future.

Perhaps your roommate doesn't like his job and is not the best person to ask?
Thanks. Based on some shield images (http://images.google.com/images?sourceid=mozclient&ie=UT...) it looks like there are non-circular shapes which provide at least some of those benefits as well as possibly improved coverage of an elongated object, like a soldier.
This encourages continued bad behavior, because as far as they know, their comments are still there for the world to see. They should see they've been deleted, but get no reason as to why.
Japan's Stupid Robot Contest
Mod_rails for Apache is here
Valid points - maybe it's just me then.

Out of curiosity, what did you get for $1100? I normally order a batch of 300 cards in full color for around $50.
Maybe, but most of us have needs and lives beyond out work. I mean, even if you don't have a wife, maybe you at least have laundry?
Google App Engine ported to Amazon's EC2 (ok, it's missing BigTable)
Google XSS
I think the idea was that Google should provide everyone with 250K servers, dark fiber, and a pony, for free, forever; when it turned out there were some restrictions, all the jilted idealists immediately went ballistic.
7 Actually Useful Things You Didn’t Know Static Typing Could Do
I laughed all the way through, love the bits about the consultants and 25k mission statements!
Textbook Tipping Point behavior:

http://www.amazon.com/o/asin/0316346624/pchristensen-20
ACM Queue (March+April '08 edition) -- very interesting interface
How to Get Publicity for Your Startup
But also pick the right users.
Tribute to honor Jim Gray
Yah, I can't believe why nobody seems to even bring up this point. Perhaps, building those abstractions will be tough, may be impossible, but not even worth considering?
Google Analytics AIR beta
Effective Ways to Increase Web Traffic
Bidding On A Twitter Account: Insanity or Efficient Market?
Good article; I work 6.5 hours a day - 4 hours of solid work. Im happy, my employers happy ... what else matters?

(of course in the sense of startup; reverse that, 4 hours of sleep can be expected)
Actually because Google is an OpenId provider, I believe with just a bit of work you can export the application out of the GAE by adding support for OpenId
He just sounds like he was dying to piss on pg's tea party. He ended up just pissing into the wind.
Tell YC: "Hacker News" needs clean profile URLs
I would personally like to link to my YCombinator profile via:
http://news.ycombinator.com/user/{username}

Do you guys agree this would be valuable?
The spreadsheet mentioned is hands-down the most exciting program I've run into in recent months. They've built a usable, reliable, powerful system around a novel concept. The whole thing just works.

Looking at the program, you wouldn't guess it's only 30,000 lines of application code. They've obviously made all their code count, kept it short and maintainable. 110,000 lines of test code is a small price to pay.

[OK. correlation != causation, they might have made an even better program with less test code. Intuitively, I doubt it]
moo & 4by6.com
Most the people complaining are disatisfied because they want access to the service without the lock-in of the platform. They're the internet equivalent of a warning on the nut covered M&Ms package that says "Warning, contains nuts."

They won't be satisfied until the service contains no chocolate covered lock-in.
This article is weak, it throws out a huge degrading word(s) such as "Sharecropper" and "Plantation".

- I don't see any disadvantage of using Google's built in accounts..and in no way do you have to;I'm tired of all the loud babies in the room!
I'm currently managing the accounting and taxes of my 4 startups and my personal taxes, which includes two schedule C businesses. Two of the startups are LLCs and two are S-corps, though before I've had two other C corps. I've used Peachtree, Quickbooks, Quickbooks Online, PayCycle, Turbotax Business, and good ol' Excel over the years.

I recommend Quickbooks (the desktop version) if you are doing it yourself and/or have multiple businesses. If you want your partner(s) and/or accountant(s) to have easy access, Quickbooks Online is good, though it has some limitations. I've always used TurboTax business without any problems (and TurboTax personal for that matter).

I always use the Desktop versions of TurboTax. I don't think there is an online business version, but if there is, don't use it. You want that CD so that if you need to amend 5 years from now, you can use it.

For Schedule C and supporting documentation for Quickbooks I use Excel. I don't put every transaction into Quickbooks because that is crazy. Every so often, depending on the business, I reconcile the spreadsheet with my bank accounts by exporting data from underlying billing systems or PayPal or whatever. Then I put the aggregate values into Quickbooks.

For Schedule C, I have a spreadsheet that I've tweaked over the years to make doing my taxes really easy. I can go into more detail if you want.

I have keep scanned and paper copies of everything. I know it is anal, but it makes me feel good and it is proved its weight in gold in several situations.

I also highly recommend PayCycle. It integrates right into QuickBooks and makes doing everything associated with employees super simple.

Btw, I have had my books professionally audited once, and there were no problems.
Well, from my perspective (and after using EC2 to great effect) I was just a bit disappointed that Google went down this route. Its not that its 'bad' but that its not as good as I was expecting. Everyone expects great things from Google so its difficult for them to impress now
http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jonallanharper isn't clean enough?
Yes, it covers C corps, as well as LLCs and regular more regular partnerships. They have state versions too for state taxes.
Agreed. Though I am scratching my head as to what that company he linked to actually does.
im there for sure :-D
Wondering Which Partner at a VC Firm to Pitch? TheFunded Now Breaks Out Individual VC Ratings.
Actually, yes, that's exactly what I was getting at. You'd have to make the square cover sqrt(2) times wider than the hole, but you could still prevent it from ever falling in. (Granted, it's not a very efficient solution, though.)
I would recommend putting 100% on the startup for 3 months. I find that I can get a lot done if I put 100% of my time into anything for 3 months. You'll probably get enough done that people will be able to get an idea about what the product could become. By that time you'll either be able to find investors or realize that it's time to move on (or go back to full time consulting).

There is a reason the yc session is 3 months long. That's probably about all you'll need to prove your concept. Save up the bare minimum you need to survive and go. Good luck either way!
http://news.ycombinator.com/user/jonallanharper is more valuable from a search engine perspective, I think.
Yes, those things need to be pointed out. I don't want people to think that Erlang is a miracle productivly booster. It's not. The productivity gains are only there in certain application domains, and of course it also require good libraries to support it.

But Erlang to me isn't as much about programmer productivity as it is about reliability. But when building highly reliable systems, of course it's a big productivity boost.

I should point out we've abandoned xmerl (and xml altogether), and things have been much simpler since. We are in the process of moving off the inets http server to mochiweb. Hopefully that will also go smoothly.
that's to assume pg wants search traffic

semantic urls are nifty but not that nifty
I pondered whether GAE was the right place for me to build my own personal feed hub. Basically, an inverted approach to FriendFeed-style aggregation in which I build my web lifestream and therefore have creative direction over how the content is packaged, sequenced and related. HTTPS restrictions would be fine, and the lack of SQL wouldn't be too bothersome for my feeble brain.

I'm still pondering. Maybe if/when they support Javascript. I'm salivating over the thought of TrimPath, CouchDB, Prototype and AIR as a stack, haha.
He wants people to take pride in their comments/submissions. Knowing your info is easily searchable by your handle influences you to create more valuable content.
for what it's worth, my HN profile pops up within the top 5 google search results
Does this still hold true? I know in the past search engines ignored stuff after the ? but is this still the case? Google certainly doesn't anymore.
Nice suggestion, but no, it really doesn't "need" clean URLs.

The current system works more than adequately and is indexable as well.
Consumer oriented 3D printing service started
fabidoo is an innovative self-funded start-up which brings 3D printing to the masses. After its successful launch in germany last november, fabidoo is now available internationally too. Check out the weekly design contests and revenue-share possibilities at http://www.fabidoo.com

Cheers
marc
Open Source Rails
have you tried the latest mzscheme? i remember you were running arc on v352, the libraries have changed a lot since then, so maybe the gc did too... iirc there's a patch on anarki or someplace to make it work.
Personally I'm just kind of allergic to question marks.
Nice clear up, but still wrong/bad... The author swaps one problem for another.

When people write

if (foo==null)

OR

if (!foo)

To check if something exists, they really meant to write

if ((typeof foo)=='undefined')

You can't check for a property existing by coercing into a boolean. That's horrible. What if it does exist, and holds a boolean.
Gender bias doesn't mean jack-shit in this situation. The genders of the characters involved does not alter a damn thing. He could have been talking about two hermaphrodite aliens instead.

Hell, he even said, 'Now when I say "old man" here and throughout this article, I don't necessarily mean "old" (and I don't necessarily mean "man") - I mean "experienced".'
> Startupping (or Hacking) doesn't have to be all gloomy and doomy, you know.

Smiling and laughter wastes precious calories and time. Time that could be spent perfecting your quirky web2 startup into a soulless corporate killing machine.

If we allow jokes on news.yc, people might start having fun, and fun is the antithesis of productivity!

Back to work, people! (whipcrack)
Or "why I think OCaml is great"
http://news.ycombinator.com/user/{username}.{rss|atom|json}

... would be elegant though, IMO.
As a project manager I usually don't care about when something happens, what I do care about is predictability.

Knowing (with fair warning) that something is going to be late lets me set the right expectations. With a month to go I can usually persuade a customer to slip a week because something just needs needs more time. I can also reconsider my time estimates for future jobs to make sure that in future the engineers get the time they need.

What I can't do is keep promising delivery "tomorrow" to external people, because I just found out today that you won't be done on time. That's bad for everyone.
http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=alaskamiller
You don't have to be that old to remember those times. I was only 8 years old when this article came out, and I remember around that time my dad mentioned this new thing called "the Internet". He described as being like the BBSs I was used to, but world-wide. About 8 months later we got an AOL account.
John A. Wheeler, Physicist Who Coined the Term ‘Black Hole,’ Is Dead at 96
Sure, so maybe in reality you only get ~30 GB/s/socket, which is 15 GB/s/core. That's a lot more bandwidth than other systems have.
The article was fine to skim but when I went to find out more about the other, Tim Negris, I found that he was recently the VP/Marketing at SCO. Weird.
http://ir.sco.com/ReleaseDetail.cfm?releaseid=170511
I like the way Lua does it, where "null" and "undefined" are the same concept, and represented by nil. I don't know if that could be done in Javascript though due to the difference between variable access and property access.
Yea. I know this isn't a typical post but I felt that it might be able to help some others out.

Doing a google search for that gives you too many garbage results so I'd prefer to hear the opinions of people I respect.

Given the number of responses I don't think it was too terrible of a post.
Before Monday Morning Blues Comes Sunday Night Insomnia
Quite right. I've been teaching calculus for several years, and for the most part it is a soul-sucking experience. Big chunks of it are utterly pointless. The main goal of the class is attrition.

Seriously, integrating 1/(1+x^2)? Surfaces of revolution? Trig/hyperbolic trig substitution? Calc is full of stupid tricks that buy you closed form solutions.

Adding Big-O notation to calc might help a little, especially when you get to series (with Big-O notation, you can explain divergent series). It's certainly a useful topic, and I can think of a dozen topics from calc I'd love to replace with it.

Eliminating calculus and designing a basic math class from scratch would probably help a lot more.
The Private Equity Data Center
Is the contest stupid or the robots?

English is really failing me right now.
"your compromise is that if you promise something then MAKE SURE YOU FULFILL IT! I'm sick of how many supposedly "reliable" people don't live up to their promises.. yet we're supposedly meant to accept this nowadays. Well, I won't, and I'm with 37signals on this one. Ditch urgency, live up to promises, and it'll all go a lot smoother and with less stress."

Fulfilling promises is about as much about which ones you make than what you do to make them happen once they're made.
So where can I find one of those WAIS servers? I hear they can connect to the "World Wide Web" to retrieve physicists' data. I'm sure CERN will publish their LHC results onto there.
My misogynistic and politically incorrect, but very accurate, metaphor for erlang is, "The Ugly Girl Who's Great In Bed." You don't mind doing the horizontal polka with her, but she certainly won't win any beauty contests.

That said, a few small changes to the erlang grammar could go a long way towards fixing it (changing separators to terminators, etc). Once you get more familiar with Erlang, you go from writing ugly cascading ifs on multiple conditions to simple clean case statements on tuples. You learn when to use function-clause matching vs. internal matching, etc.
Remote collaboration can work. It depends alot on how the goal and objectives is defined and relayed to the team. There is a strategy project consulting company in SF Bay Area that trains project teams to collaborate remotely.
One more thing. it is all about the process preceding the technology not the other way around.
Programmers: Work from your home office.
Monocle: design notes
That's great! That's why I love what we do! As a proof of concept its good to see
I agree with this. The same goes for physics as well. Both physics and calculus look like humongous legal code created by a bureaucracy. They were intended to solve 18th century problems. The idea of creating a new version of these from scratch is a good idea. Why not eliminate calculus altogether and teach computer science instead, including programming?
Maybe frequent backups would be a better solution?
I lived in rural Georgia and ran up a $600 phone bill dialing long-distance to an AOL connection the first month we had "the Net".
Maybe the problem is Arc's lack of tensile strength.
I also have both devices and the use case for me is entirely different. The iPhone is designed for consumption. The ui lets you choose what you consume, such as music, video, email etc perfectly. The Eee on the other hand is ideal for creation on the go. It's got a full keyboard, webcam sd reader and usb ports and is lovely for bloggin on the go. It's certainly not a device you'd carry in your pocket all the time like the iPhone. Typical users consume far more than they create.
These guys crack me up. If they're really worried about productivity, they should go down to a 1-day work week.
Yay for automated monitoring software. Nagios (http://www.nagios.org/) does this for networks (and is extendable for some other things). At my old job we used Hobbit (http://hobbitmon.sourceforge.net/) to watch our Java server instances (memory usage, etc.). There’s no reason why these monitoring programs couldn’t be used to monitor internal program statistics, as long as those stats were made available.

Generally you monitor from your internal network, and then provide some hook for the monitor to get information that’s only accessible from there. (SSH or a limited-access URL, etc.)

Monitoring programs are super-powerful and generally complex. Check them out — it’s a good skill to have when working with production software.

(I also posted this on the article.)
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=163474

Heh heh!
Why There Aren't More Googles
Indeed. Of course there's nothing wrong with that as such, it'd just be nice if the title was a little less link-bait-y.
Wow! That was both entertaining and enlightening. Thanks nickb. Though some of Ruby's scoping rules do bite me sometimes. I think Ruby 1.9 is going to fix some of that, if I am not wrong.

On a tangent, I wish I was this organized when learning something. Most of my hacking is playing with it till it makes sense, and essentially throwing it all away, only to realize a few days ago that something I just tried (or learned) now escapes me and have no where to turn, and end up doing it all over again.

Anyone out here have a better way of documenting stuff they learn?
What Exactly Is Google App Engine?
Don't throw out the baby with the bathwater.

Calculus is a fundamental topic, and even in computer science. Trig substitution is the bathwater. Curvature, tangent and normal are the baby, and they can be handy when you need them.
AppDrop: Google App Engine Ported to Amazon EC2
Backups are damage limitation, and yes, they are always a good idea. I would consider this kind of strategy not only damage limitation but also prevention, which is interesting.
Weeeell... There is a back-story here, as evidenced by teh links he provides. I think his view is that there is a very misleading debate between Ruby/Python and Java/C#, with much strawmanning on both sides, namely that all dynamically typed languages are like Ruby and Python, while all statically typed languages are like Java and C#.

I think what he is trying to say goes beyond "What I like about Ocaml" to "What YOU like about Ruby can be had in Ocaml and have strong type inference to boot."

Of course, his contention that people shouldn't assume static typing == Java ought to be familiar: Lispers have been crying foul that people shouldn't assume dynamic typing = Ruby for a while now.
The startups who turn down acquisition offer do better thing might have a bit of reporting bias. ie. the ones that fail, we never think about.

Except of course, there was a big famous example -- Friendster. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/15/business/yourmoney/15frien...
I do a lot of face to face selling, and get a lot of cards. Your card is going to get lost in the noise; there are people out there with metal cards, die cut cards, probably glow in the dark neon cards. I wouldn't lose a minute's sleep over yours, as long as it's printed on heavy stock.

Here's mine; the back of the card has actually gotten us business. =)

http://www.matasano.com/bcfront.png
http://www.matasano.com/bcback.png
OpenMac: A Mac Clone For $399 By Psystar
Depends on the customer, but we never bill for rustproofing. Get used to bending over backwards for people who pay you now; good survival skill. Truism: it's the perception of customer service that people appreciate, not the execution of it.