skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yeah, ACE hardware isn't a proper hardware store, dude.

$2500 was about par for the course for a doorman building in the Financial District in 2005. Was the lowest price among the ones I looked at. The whole point is that you have to savvy (i.e. have some inside connection) to the local real estate scene to not get fleeced. A tool like Craigslist democratizes the market, and makes inside information less valuable (which is why I suspect it's never caught on in New York....cause New Yorkers like feeling like they got the 'deal').

As for the foodie scene: I'm aware there is a thriving one in New York. The point is that it's totally orthogonal from the sort of ambitious creative class that would create a startup. The guys I knew from Wall Street most certainly did not know how to fry an egg...they knew how to order stuff on SeamlessWeb, and that's about it.

In the Bay Area, those worlds intersect, if not directly overlap. Paul Graham of Y Combinator used to cook for his startups at the weekly dinners. I can't even begin to imagine a Goldman partner cooking for his desk.
It's irrelevant whether you can rationally defend dropping an atomic bomb. The only thing that matters is that you lose moral credibility when you do, whether you like it or not. This isn't about who is right; this is about how the public responds.
StatusNet raises $$$
You're kidding me, right? If your goal is to perceive a tech hub as trying to beat Silicon Valley you have absolutely no clue what you're talking about. No other city will beat Silicon Valley. We know this. The point is this: to build a good ecosystem of education, talent, and investment that lets a city flourish on its own without having to flock to somewhere better. Take the foundations of what makes Silicon Valley what it is and have it provide a sustainable community.

Some posts are legitimate link bait with a well baked argument, this is just downright rotten.

Disclosure: I've lived in Silicon Valley, so I'm not taking sides of NYC or city x here.
Good idea. I think I will make this one of my next project.
I read the whole article, and frankly this touchy-feely crap is just a bore.. on the basis of the post title, I thought I was going to read some great new insight into reddit, but it turned out to be little more than a soap opera targeted at the techno-cult gathering around their Net Personality De Jour.

How many of you really know this person?

Is the big revelation here that co-founders are people too, and that life is not all shiny macbooks and free money from millionaires to do whatever you want with?

Well, what a shock .. welcome to the real world, kid.

This heart-string tugging story has a relevance-sphere that doesn't really extend beyond this persons immediate friends and family .. do you all count yourself in that sphere?

Seriously? Are no 'cult-like behaviour alarm' bells ringing in your head about now?

Downvote away. By the way, I'm cringing reading the rest of this thread .. "I'm crying at work right now" .. freakin' give me a break, people. If this article demonstrates anything, its that you're all a bunch of fragile souls who probably need a little less hand-holding and TV-watching and validation-from-peers, and a lot more outside time getting to grips with real human emotions and circumstances ..
Where in Brooklyn do you live where you're paying $700 (even with roommates) for a great place? I'm intensely curious as I'm planning on moving to BK soon!
Essay Editing and Proofreading
If you want to submit an error free term paper, it must be edited and proof read by an expert. The aim is to correct the spelling, grammar and typographical mistakes. Apart from that an expert in the subject can find if there are omissions and incorrect flawed facts.
1) I've never heard of BigThink.com before.

2) I very often open many links without thinking about which domain it's on.

3) A post's karma will never show below -4, even though the real karma could be way lower.
Is that supposed to be ironic?
It always blows my mind that someone (a philanthropist or the government) hasn't just thrown down a few million bucks to make a truly user friendly version of LaTeX. The amount of grad student and professor time wasted dealing with the flaws in LaTeX is mind-boggling.

Or am I naive in this cost estimate? Does anyone know roughly how much money and developer time went into the currently best editors, like TeXShop and TeXnicCenter?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_friend

There are links to false friend lists at the end of that page.
I would pay for one.
Thanks for the feedback. Our conversion rate is good for CPC. We have done a ton of work with LPs and A/B testing, so we feel confident in that area.

I will look at the API consumers you mentioned. Thank you.
A score of -4 is actually -5 karma points (since everything starts at 1 point).

Here's a tip though - you can't cash it in for prizes, don't worry about it.
Very nice write-up. Little details such as this should make Mongrel2 very solid. It's nice to see how he analyzed the issues around poll and epoll and then figured out how to make use of both for optimum performance no matter what happens in production. Many other programs could benefit from this sort of analysis although at different levels... e.g. Sorted vectors may be better for smaller containers but hash tables better for larger containers, etc.
After using (and writting) several ugly Makefiles for compiling LaTeX, I discovered rubber (http://www.pps.jussieu.fr/~beffara/soft/rubber/) and never looked back. It is packaged at least in the standard Ubuntu and Fedora repos.

I use the following Makefile wrapper around it:

DOC = memoria

all:
rubber --pdf $(DOC)
clean:
rubber --pdf --clean $(DOC)

.PHONY: all clean

It handles biblography, knows how many times recompile and discovers dependencies.
>Did you take anything away from reading it that will help you in the future?

I grew up with an understanding that life is really, really hard unless you make it: so no, this #1 "hacker news" story wasn't particularly insightful.
They don't get off Scot free either. Here in England they voted in the Nanny State in '45 and we've been paying for it ever since.

Did you know in '48 they claimed the cost of nationalized healthcare would go down in time as the population got healthier...?
I am designing a language I call ShowMe.

The main idea behind ShowMe is "viewability", by which I mean that every object in a running ShowMe program can be navigated and displayed (and potentially altered) in a Viewer. By object I mean every entity within the system; ShowMe will be a pure object-oriented language.

There will be multiple Views, so the user can view the same data in multiple ways (for for example a table of numbers could be displayed as ascii text, or as an HTML table or as a graph). One of the views will be a low-level ascii string, from which the object can be re-created; this format can therefore be used for serialisation. User-defined classes will be able to define their own views, or re-implement existing views for the new class.

Like Clojure, a lot of data structures in ShowMe will be immutable.

ShowMe will not be a pure functional language, but it will be possible to program in it in a functional style.

There will be 2 syntaxes for writing ShowMe programs: one based on Lisp, the other similar to C. The C-like syntax will be compiled into the Lisp-like syntax.
Heh, this reminds me of Subversion: branching is easy, the really tricky problem is merging.
The work of Gen X is cleaning up after the Boomers and babysitting the Millenials. Gen Y could go either way.
Another interesting idea is to compare modern satelite view on google maps with aero photographs from WWII. Here is Leningrad/Saint-Petersburg, which is depicted on many Sergey Larenkov's photographs:
http://wwii.sasgis.ru/en/?lat=59.945749&lon=30.331364...
The point I consider most important is only alluded to.

In NY people try to maintain monopolies of information. One place that applies to is a very restrictive work for hire doctrine. If you have a job in NYC, by default everything you create belongs to your employer. Even if it was done at home on your equipment. In California that particular right is one that remains yours and cannot be lost (unless what you do relates to your employer's business).

The result is that in California it is common for people to have a day job and work on the side on a startup. You almost never see the side startup in NY. Furthermore if you do see it, those startups can be squashed in an instant when the employer finds out about it. I've seen it happen. Not pretty. (The same thing can happen, and does from time to time, with open source projects. However it happens less often because there are fewer cases where someone wants to leave their day job for their open source project than cases where they want to leave their day job for their startup.)

That nasty little dynamic is a constant hidden drag on NY. Nobody knows how many good ideas got squashed and never saw the light of day...
How difficult would it be to pass this law?

"It shall be unlawful to place any kind of access control or restriction on a copyrighted work without the permission of the copyright holder."

It will need some sort of exemption for personal use (like an encrypted hard disk).
That's an interesting hypothetical. However, in practice most billion dollar company's advertising budgets tend to be much less than their taxes.
Everyone in NYC besides bankers have been getting their apartments from craigslist since 1998. And, you can get a 500sq foot 1bdrm in battery park city for $1800.
Javascript testing using JS Test Driver
Hm. I should note, my information was as of 2008. If there are more cafes now, than I'm pleased.

Have you seen a California cafe'? I can't really recall seeing anything comparable in Manhattan. Sure, there are cafes....but one where a guy is writing a Rails app on his laptop right there by the barista? Have trouble believing it...be glad to be proven wrong though.

I'm actually not so down on NYC. Just the tech part of it. Part of me is scheming about how to get back there...
> And as jacquesm points out, in a web-facing server, that's the case you should care about.

Yes, but where's the evidence what people see for active/total ratios in the real world? I'm showing that unless it's below about 60% (probably more like 50%) then poll is the way to go.

60% active isn't entirely unrealistic at all. I can see quite a few servers hitting those thresholds, so in that cases, poll vs. epoll doesn't matter.

I think what's more important in what I'm finding is that you really need both. It's entirely possible that you have servers that are at 80-90% ATR all the time. Others that are 10% ATR. The key is either you have to measure that, which nobody does, or you have to make a server that can adapt.
js-ctypes goes through the JSAPI, so the JS engine can still guard against rogue NaNs.
Interesting, I guess I wasn't aware that was question anyone cared about. Keeping in character with the 2nd greatest generation (X), I certainly don't.
Sigh, another blogger trotting out the tired, false cliche that college is useless. From the article: "Were you smarter at 21 post college than your Dad was at 21? And whatever the difference, was it worth the $50k-$200k he paid to get you it?"

Yes. Yes I was smarter. And I didn't pay 200k because I went to a state school. I graduated a wholly different person with a completely different world-view and a ton of applicable skills that landed me a high-paying software engineering job instead of doing the manual labor or trivial office tasks that I was qualified for before college.

If you go to a private school to get a history degree then sure, it was 4 years of expensive partying that doesn't leave you any more employable. Go get a science/engineering/JD/MD heck even an MBA and you damn well better be smarter at the end.
Detecting and punishing cheating in those circumstances sounds like a Hard Problem. In particular, when your software says 2 essays were probably written by the same student, but both students deny it, how can they reasonably be punished, since there is no proof?
How to Start an Email Newsletter Company
Although this is useful, it still doesn't solve having multiple address books across multiple accounts. Until it is you can use Soocial.com to sync the contacts between them. (Disclaimer: Soocial's my startup.)
I find myself agreeing whole heartedly with the sentiment of the article. So much so in fact, that I am a bit nervous to share the link with my social network -- mainly because I know my dad will read it!
The "Greatest Generation" who guaranteed themselves the "Greatest Retirement" package. In the fairy tale, all the goods and services they consume will come from the magic money tree that the government fertilized somewhere with all the money they paid into social security.

Back in reality land, a smaller population of heavily taxed and badly paid members of the Gen X and Gen Y cohort will have to change grandma's bed pan and they better be damned productive given how long everyone's living.
It's people with this type of personality that change the world.
I have to disagree with your Craigslist in NYC comment. Not only did I find my apartment on Craigslist but I frequently buy and sell bike parts on Craigslist and pick up items from Craigslist's free section. I've been a New Yorker using Craigslist since high school. Being savvy ≠ "some inside connection."

RE the foodie scene: Consider Brooklyn Grange a foodie startup. We also have great initiatives like Windowfarms (http://www.windowfarms.org/) which is sponsored by Eyebeam (http://eyebeam.org/). This illustrates food, tech, and art intersecting.

(ACE has worked just fine for me. If I need wood, I go somewhere that provides lumber.)
> I've started thinking of TeX as the assembly language of document formatting

I remember having read a Knuth interview saying exactly that's what he intended TeX to be. He was also surprised that everyone settled for LaTeX instead of creating their own TeX dialect designed specifically for their own needs.
It's easy to characterize lawyers as "subtly screwing someone", but it's an unfair generalization.

A lawyer's job is to advise and speak for their client. Basically, they would say what their client would say, if they had the appropriate legal knowledge.

I know that if I were wrongfully accused of a crime, I wouldn't consider my defense attorney to be subtly screwing me.
I live near Grand St and Bushwick Ave. The place is also for a 4 bedroom and we only have 3 dudes which lets us have office space. If you look hard enough, great deals emerge.
I don't have any experience in the field, but I did not find it too abstract. Rather not abstract enough. (But on the other hand, I am a mathematician, and know about relations in theory.)
I wrote this in response to a HN member who asked me how we got started with our email newsletter. If your interested in starting an email newsletter business or just curious about the industry check out the post.
I assumed the referent was to the "why aren't women in CS?" articles that crop up with some regularity.

I would hesitate to necessarily call these sexist. The psychological aspect of that question might appeal to both male and female hackers, and I don't think the acknowledgment of a fact (i.e., the difference in enrolled CS students) is somehow sexist.
I just read a blog post today about Starcraft 2’s rating system: http://www.sirlin.net/blog/2010/7/24/analyzing-starcraft-2s-.... It seems like Microsoft’s TrueSkill system described there might be very applicable to this chess-ranking problem.
Motto to run a startup by:
"Keep Calm, Carry on" -Alexis Ohanian
I'm Blogging From My Shower
I also live over there and pay $1500 for a big place (by NYC standards) two people could easily split.
Apply this technique for exercise/yoga :)
Yes. It's only when you get principal-agent problems --- like the legal department of a company advising litigation when settling or ignoring would be best, for reasons of their job-security.
> It's amazing that the soviets were able to maintain some level of parity as long as they did (maybe to 1960-1965 in most military forces)

They actually never had arms parity - USA had over a 20:1 ratio of nukes in the 1960's. The problem is, the :1 is still enough to wreck all sorts of havoc. Also, massively more infantry.

Edit: Sorry, my numbers were wrong, misremebered. 1964: USA 2,416 USSR 375 [1]. So more like 8:1... later on the USSR closed the gap, but the USA had better strategic positions with bases in Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, and West Germany, and they cut off Cuba from the USSR after the Cuban Missile Crisis.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_arms_race
I live in Park Slope, on Union Street. When I say Brooklyn I really do mean Brooklyn, all the neighborhoods have something interesting going on.
If I'm not mistaken, Massachusetts is more like California in that respect. That might be one reason Boston is better than NYC for tech.
Looking at ubuntu.com and going through the download process, the only mention I see of supported hardware is worded as "certified hardware" and placed in the footer under "Partners".

I don't recall finding an exhaustive list of supported machines for other well known operating systems, either. Typically when purchasing hardware we rely on the manufacturer to indicate which operating systems the hardware works with. It seems wholly unreasonable to hold Ubuntu accountable for not running on a piece of hardware that no-one, including the manufacturer, claims it's compatible with.
This is good, but I'm still frustrated by the fact that Google Apps accounts are not full Google Accounts. I wish they'd merge all Google Apps accounts into the regular Google Accounts system. Or is there a reason that this doesn't make sense?
So let's take your assertions and take them apart:

> the ones on dial up and on congested lines will get you every time.

Do you have numbers on the dial-up users for your server? My understanding is that there's far fewer, so this is bogus. Show evidence of high dial-up penetration first.

> They keep the processes busy far longer than you'd want and you have to hit the 'poll' cycle far more frequently

Again, you have no numbers on the active/total ratio in your server, so unless you do this statement doesn't refute what I found. I've presented evidence that just shows the math of O(N=active) / O(N=total) holds up. Simple math. The only way epoll wins for all load types is if it is as fast as poll all the time. My tests show it's not, which stands to reason since it's implemented using more syscalls than poll.

> The impact of this is very easy to underestimate, and if you're benchmarking web servers for real world conditions you could do a lot worse than to run a test across a line that is congested on purpose.

Again, you have no definition of "congestion". If you adopt a simple metric like ATR then we can talk. As it is, you (and everyone else) just throws around latency numbers like those matter when really the performance break is in the ATR. In addition, my numbers show the performance break being at about 60% ATR, so if you're saying that no server every goes above 60% activity levels then you're totally wrong. 60% is not completely unreasonable on a loaded server.

But, I think you're missing a key point: You need both in a server like Mongrel2. I never said epoll sucks and poll rocks (since you probably didn't read the article). I said something very exact and measurable:

> epoll is faster than poll when the active/total FD ratio is < 0.6, but poll is faster than epoll when the active/total ratio is > 0.6.

If you don't think that's the case in "the real world" then go measure it and report back. That's the science part. I totally don't believe it yet myself, which is why I'm measuring it and showing the methods to everyone so they can confirm it for me.
Don't change course after you've invested significantly into an idea that is likely to come to fruition?

Hmm, would never have thought of that...
> The Appstore is full of crap because apple won't pre-approve things, so no one will risk doing "big" things as they're afraid of rejection.

You're right that fear of rejection deters bigger, riskier apps from being made, but that has nothing to do with the App Store being full of crap. Bigger, riskier apps that are not crap would make up a tiny percentage of apps in the store, and Sturgeon's Law would still apply.
This article presents some interesting consequences of using a unified map from numbers to glyphs for all the plethora of human languages.

Perhaps instead of Unicode there could have been an established way to change character encoding mid-string? Regarding and treating control characters as normal characters, as this article demonstrates we do with the mirror character at least, is nonsensical. Maybe a string could have a primary encoding, and tags could be placed around sections which use an alternate.

Under such a scheme, in an english string any cryllic sections would be surrounded by "tag" bits. The viewing program could then handle the cryllic part according to its capability and known environment:

- An english terminal might render as nonsense english characters.

- A capable viewing program could render proper cryllic glyphs according to the cryllic encoding.

- A good browser could render the cryllic glyphs but highlight them, display them in a different color, or even remove them.

Likewise, right-to-left languages would be implicitly rendered as such according to the capability of the viewing program.

But this has no-doubt already been suggested and rejected by somebody...
That was a 'religious' statement from DHH, not a rational argument. Wonder why he wanted to bash it like that.

To misuse DHH's statement: to use the word "fascist" when describing an app store is sign of being backed into a corner. Otherwise, you'd be more elaborate.

I've heard the Android store has even more crap and way less restrictions. If that is true, it certainly doesn't help DHH's argument that abandoning the restrictions will help quality.