skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> vimscript is a rather powerful little language worth learning in its own right.

Yes. IMO vimscript is good enough for most tasks that come up. I would also like add that with vim there is also the option of scripting in Perl, Python, Ruby, TCL and mzscheme.

E.g. http://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/if_pyth.html#python
Flying on the Cheap
Excellent point. So I propose instead "HART" -- "Hadoop And Related Tools". The HART stack.
Also, sales of iPhones do not factor in sales of iPads and iPod Touches, which both run iOS and run Apps. DaringFireball.net tried some back of the envelope math a few days back and his claim is that "Android isn't there yet, but its catching up."
Solar Roadways: a road surface made of solar panels
It is not uncommon to have green light for buses (esp. w. bus lanes) before the other traffic gets the green.
No, because it didn't. The iPhone is only about half of iOS device sales. Besides, there are no Android devices that compete with the iPod touch and the iPad.
FaceTime over 3G [video]
Surprisingly enough, the Corning website has some interesting tidbits that aren't in the OP's story: http://www.corning.com/news_center/corning_stories/gorilla_g.... An interesting read.
Job-Hopping to the Top and Other Career Fallacies
Having read both Losing My Virginity and Business Stripped Bare I totally agree with your comments, he is the first to admit that his success is largely born out of the ability of the people he surrounds himself with.

The branded venture capitalism method they have adopted for new ventures is something to be very envious of. The success stories of Virgin Blue (Australian Budget Airline) and Virgin Mobile are perfect case studies for anyone looking to learn about how to launch a disruptive company in a dilapidated market.
The Ubuntu Font by Ubuntu for All
If you want a smartphone and are already with Verizon, T-Mobile or Sprint, you're options are pretty much limited to Android. When the iPhone expands carriers, probably next year when AT&T and Verizon move to faster LTE networks, it will be a different story. Verizon currently has 91.2 million customers and AT&T has 87 million.
Give your guitar and iphone ipad some iRig Amplitube
Should I learn COBOL 2002, or some earlier version?

Are mainframes COBOL standard compliant?

Is there free standard document?
Yeah, like I said, I from what I hear, linode is managing disk I/O well.

Have you ever gotten a warning about using too much IO from linode?

ok, so let's go back and see the math again... so there were 14 systems or so on that 32GiB system, so if everyone was going at the disk, you'd get what, 3.5MB/sec- about what you were seeing.

I'm just pointing out, when you 'virtualize' a hard drive, you are sharing a resource that really doesn't share very well. you were getting your 'fair share' of the server at slicehost; it sounds like linode just does a much better job of keeping everyone from trying to use all available disk at all times.
"Rat" also has connotations of obsession, e.g. "gym rat". So an apprat would be one who eats, lives, and breathes apps -- just the kind of image you want to cultivate.
Quantum mechanics creates location-based cryptography
Are you hiring for your startup?

http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/01/feeding-frenzy-as-delicious...
Most good PhD programs won't take part-time students. It's all or nothing.
Instead of donating $1 to some guy on the Internet who made a cartoon, how about running for local office in your township right now? You might be surprised how easy it is to get involved in government at the level where most real decisions are made (the school board, planning boards, etc). The overwhelming majority of people in your township pay zero attention to local governance.

Which "tipping point" is more interesting: the one where Internet cartoon guy gets $67,000 and a long list of names on a web page, or the one where several hundred people from Hacker News end up on school boards?

As I get older, I find myself making friends with more and more people who have gotten off their asses and actually done this. I promise, it's easier than starting a company, and it's a drastically lower time commitment.
Inflation doesn't really measure cost of living.

Inflation as measured by the government is largely meaningless. They have so much leeway in what they include, and even the ability to arbitrarily tweak the actual price of a good (tv X this year is 10% better than tv X was last year, so lets tweak the price, nevermind that tv X is the cheapest tv you can buy), that the government can make the inflation number be almost whatever they want it to be.
I agree: A PhD is too painful to complete one for non-work reasons. I defended 12 months ago, but I really like teaching at the college level, so I stuck it out. If you don't need one, you almost certainly don't want one. They don't teach you how to focus, they instead get rid of the people who can't. It's a winnowing process at least as much as it is a learning process.
I agree, I find the whole idea of deleting non-notable articles from wikipedia as idiotic. The whole process of determining non-notable things is a joke. They could at least deprecate the articles to a sub wiki, like a universe (compared to main on ubuntu). Deleting is just dumb.
In my opinion this is the best book out there I've read relevant to starting your own start up!

http://www.startupbook.net/

I've read quite a few and where some are in sightful / useful when scaled or when funded, this book is the best I've read for a typical software developer to have a successful start up business!

It is also written by a fellow HN'er Rob Walling - so you know it'll be full of great information! Check out his blog 'SoftwarebyRob' for a taster.

http://www.softwarebyrob.com/
I invoke something similar to Greenspun's Tenth Rule (any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp.)

This would be an inferior implementation of a concept of 'leave everyone the fuck alone' aka libertarianism/minarchism/what have you.
3 qualities of successful Ph.D. students: Perseverance, tenacity & cogency
I don't feel like it's fair to say tumblr is a competitor to Facebook. It's not the same at all. I use both and I don't think they overlap that much.
The iPhone is the only mobile phone running iOS so the only way to do market share for mobile phone operating systems means just counting the iPhone. If you're doing laptop OS marketshare it makes sense to just count Apple's laptops even though the same OS runs on other devices.
I think I need real people around me to make the problem appear much more real, and keep me motivated.

What about users/customers? Perfectionism aside, how about launching a version 0.1 of your webapp?
One of my friends who works on a Z mainframe told me that the last time their mainframe was 'rebooted' was about 4 years ago. Hows that for downtime ?
I worked in Corning's S&T plant (Sullivan Park) for a number of years. Corning is all about process and the recipe may have been around for a while, but the process surrounding getting large enough (in the case of TVs) imperfection free pieces of glass was extremely difficult and time consuming. I don't think they really 'sat on it' and 'dug it out' so much as they were able to perfect the manufacture of some of their other recipes more quickly.

The glass has to be completely clear, completely flat and extremely thin - not an easy result to get at no matter what your recipe.
Adds a whole new level of enforcement to the left turn only lane.
"My main motivation is to produce an original piece of work"

In that case, I suggest working on it right now, before a PhD. You can start doing a heavy literature review on a focused topic, and try to improve the state of the art by however small you can. The standards for publication are much lower than what many people outside academia believe.

You can do this and even get a publication without an advisor (may be not at a premier venue but a decent one nonetheless). That gives a great sense of accomplishment.

If you want to continue, the work will surely help you in your PhD (won't be wasted time). If you don't like it, you can move on to other things (and it won't feel like giving up on a long commitment).

The reason I say this: the beginning of a PhD is probably the hardest time to see results, and keep you motivated. So starting small would be helpful. Once you believe you need larger goals and are not satisfied by the small accomplishments, you can go for the long haul!
Well, sure. Haskell uses mathematical terminology sometimes.

Other languages use weird terminology, too: "public static void main"? How about "pure virtual destructor"? "Visitor"?
Scaling Strategies Facebook Used To Grow To 500M Users
If you know how they got their visa that could be very interesting. From what I read, the other major way to gain work entry is to have a company sponsor you (which your own startup doesn't usually count for that).
Yes, you can. I know of a delivered project at one of the World's major financial institutions where their mainframe was replaced with x86 hardware. The system architecture was funky, but the hardware was commodity.

Just because one x86 box doesn't have the required level of reliability doesn't mean you can't build a reliable system out of them.
Will it? I'm not so sure. The few million left who don't have an iPhone aren't enoungh to slow androids snowballing (with increasing speed) growth. For consumers now, a full touchscreen smartphone is enough, they don't care what OS it has. The ones that do are AT&T customers already.

The real question now that android is the 'windows' of the mobile world is where will Win phone 7 fit in the landscape? Premium offering to compete with Apple? Or a consumer OS like desktop windows that will go against Android
The CDDL may be a problem for a new Red Hat or Canonical that decide to take OpenSolaris/Illumos forward.
Wifi Phones without Wireless Plans: SIP & Google Voice
If you ever write code like
template<class T> struct Loop { Loop<T*> operator->(); };
Loop<int> i, j = i->hooray;
at work you are shown by the language that you have probably failed to think before you code. A plus in C++, rather than a downsinde.

If you begin to realize that you need garbage collection you probably failed while choosing the appropriate language for your project or subproblem.

Same thing here:
struct a{typedef int foo;};struct a1:a{};struct a2:a{};
#define X(b,a) struct a##1:b##1,b##2{};struct a##2:b##1,b##2{};
X(a,b)X(b,c)X(c,d)X(d,e)X(e,f)X(f,g)X(g,h)X(h,i)X(i,j)X(j,k)X(k,l)
X(l,m)X(m,n) n1::foo main(){}

Wich sane person would consider writing this a good idea?
Slightly related video presentations Curing Cancer with Perl by David Dooling of the Washington University Genome Center:

* part 1 - http://blip.tv/file/1997719/

* part 2 - http://blip.tv/file/1998152

* part 3 - http://blip.tv/file/2000983/
I don't think that it's such a great idea.

ACCESIBILITY:
In crowded cities you need people to get in and out of the bus quickly, meaning lots of doors and very few steps. Also let's not forget wheel chairs. How could an elderly person climb all those steps to get out of the bus? How about someone with a baby in a buggy?

INFRASTRUCTURE:
Yes, it's cheaper than a subway, but that's the only advantage. When this bus makes a turn, at least some part of the traffic must be stopped. Cars will crash into the bus without doubt. The bus stops will be expensive to build.

SUGGESTION:
Spare two lanes and build a light rail, separated from the traffic by fences solid enough to prevent cars from landing on the rail. Make all intersections with regular traffic at different grades (overpass or underpass).
It's a proven technology, no accesibility issues, cheap stations, completely separated from the rest of the traffic (because of this it can become completely automated).
Hardcore History is the best podcast by far (even if you are not a history buff) -> http://www.dancarlin.com/disp.php/hh

Others on my list include:

This Week In Startups -> http://thisweekinstartups.com/

Mixergy -> http://mixergy.com

Prairiecast -> http://prairiecast.com

Smodcast -> http://smodcast.com/main.html

Tell Em Steve Dave -> http://smodcast.com/stevedave/index.html

Common Sense -> http://www.dancarlin.com/disp.php/csarchive
Our i/o isn't really very high. It is under 1 mb/s on average, actually! So I have no idea what the issue is. You're right, 3 MB/S SHOULD be enough because according to our Linode graph, the i/o hasn't been over 2 mb/s in the past week. I can only imagine that certain times at Slicehost must have been providing less than at the times I tested it.

That's what is frustrating for me. We don't have a demanding application. It's well written and tuned, but I was having these problems, and as far as I knew I was paying enough to not have such problems. Maybe we're on a spacious server at Linode or were graced with idle neighbors... all I know is, the system load on Linode is muuuch more stable, (and low!) even though our system is doing twice as much. And, it costs half as much.
Smart Bear makes me think of Yogi, so I approve.
One thing I learned as a film major is that there's a subset of film critics who will believe every good movie (especially one with any theme of "creation") is a metaphor for moviemaking. Infertile couple? It's about the director's struggles with the movie studio. Mad scientist genetically engineers a monster? That's clearly how the director feels about his creations once they're in the public eye. These critics are right sometimes, but I think there's a large element of "When the only tool you have is a hammer…" at work as well.
>There is only so much power you can draw in 1U

that sounds like a challenge to me, and is the opposite of my experience.

I used to run a bunch of these:

http://www.supermicro.com/Aplus/system/1U/1021/AS-1021TM-T_....

with high power CPUs, the goddamn thing would draw four amps. with the advent of socket g34, quad-cpu systems now cost no more than 2x dual-cpu systems, even without the 'two in 1u' bit:

http://www.supermicro.com/Aplus/system/1U/1042/AS-1042G-TF.c...

where are you located? I'm in the bay area, (where power is super expensive) and my experience has been that power doesn't average out. people keep wanting to bring in ancient dual netburst Xeon space heaters, "It's only 1u!" even though the goddamn thing eats two and a half amps.

this, you see, is why I don't do co-lo anymore.

Now, it's possible that power is just so much cheaper for you than it is for me that it doesn't matter... either way, I want more details. seriously, right now I'm recommending other co-lo places on my co-lo order page... http://prgmr.com/san-jose-co-location.html I know the guy running rippleweb is in sacramento, and is paying around 1/3rd of what I do for power.
I'm totally ignorant of the Android landscape but does it have a music player than can rival the iPod app music + iTunes syncing of an iPod Touch?
As an iPhone developer (who occasionally gets requests for Android ports), my assessment is that the Android-revenue issue isn't going to change much in the short-term.

As for the total Android vs. iPhone sales numbers, I think two factors will play a significant role next year
(a) if the iPhone is available on Verizon, T-Mobile etc. they'll be able to overtake Android sales again (b) I realize that Microsoft is unpopular on HN, but imo Windows Phone 7 will take away more sales from Android than from the iPhone.
That is, if you can't setup a CL system, you simply are not skilled enough as a programmer. Get over it.

"Can't" is not at issue here - with enough effort, anyone can do just about anything. The question is whether it's actually worth the effort.

Given a choice between languages A and B, both of which have very enthusiastic userbases that are utterly convinced that their language is the One True Programming Language, but neither of which I've actually spent enough time with to know whether it will be worth the investment, which one will I spend the time to learn to work with?

A smart programmer will pick whichever one gets up and running the quickest so that he can actually see what coding is like in that language, as opposed to configuring/installing/compiling sources/tracking down a supported version/etc. Why waste time doing all that stuff when if you just hop to the next language over you can have it all for free? Not to mention that problems setting up a dev environment are loosely predictive of future problems dealing with deployment, hiring extra hands, getting support when things go wrong, etc...

Common Lisp is getting its clock cleaned by Clojure because the Clojure folks know that lowering barriers to adoption is a critically important thing when people are faced with such a glut of choice.

But then again, I've never gotten the sense that the CL folks actually want more people using it, that community seems to be more than happy to remain an elite insider's-only club that is - obviously - smarter than everyone else. Which explains a lot of the hate for Clojure - it's bringing powerful tools to the unwashed masses, and it turns out they wield them quite effectively, shedding some serious doubt on the implicit assertion that you have to be really, really smart to use any sort of Lisp.
How do you convert a base two byte to information in neurons?
I thought the exact thing. Traffic in China reminds me of a school of fish - cars wiggle and dash in front of one another with total disregard for lanes.
"The iPhone is reliant on iTunes completely."

Syncing of email, events, contacts, bookmarks, and files can all be done over the air, through MobileMe. Purchasing and downloading apps, music, podcasts and movies can also be done from the iPhone itself.

You only need to connect to iTunes for activation and software updates.
FWIW, I went from making $20 a month on Android apps to $100 a month in the past two months or so.

I wonder if developers that actually sell mass amounts of apps are noticing this too?
Why should we care about Linux when we have BSD, and vice versa? Competition and versatility of course, they encourage invention - Sun developed NIS, NIS+, NFS, VFS, ZFS and a bunch of other things in the UNIX world.
I'm in the process of creating a landing page as well for my web app (Facebook game). Along the way I've done a quick research on newsletter services like MailChimp, Campaign Monitor & Newsberry.

After playing around with them I found that Campaign Monitor best suits me. My ranking is Campaign Monitor > Newsberry > MailChimp.
The congested cars in China aren't neatly stacked in their lanes.
While I agree that in principle the government could use hedonic adjustments to fake the inflation rate, do you have evidence they actually do this?
Electrical Supplies Orders Process Quickly With Waytek “Quick Order Entry Form
Machine Learning: Google Prediction API
>> My colleagues, and the fact that I work on "real" problems motivates me

Unfortunately, both of these are hard to come by when working on a PhD. They are actually the two areas that I struggle with most in my PhD research. Getting a PhD is very isolating -- you are often the only one working on your problem, and it often seems like no one else cares. Also, I enjoy more real-world, applicable problems, yet most of what PhD students work on is theoretical or not market-ready by far.
I tried to be really clear on this that I am talking about online startups.

But I think you missed the point: It takes a lot of money (VC or otherwise) to create companies that go public, but it doesn't take much to create a great product.

Google is a perfect example: they didn't need significant up-front investments to create their first search engine - they ran it out of Stanford on borrowed computers. They built a product and had users way before they raised a ton of money.
Within a mainframe your interprocess bandwidth is limited only by your bus speed.

You're ignoring System p, Superdome, Altix, Beckton, etc. which are also big SMPs but are significantly cheaper and easier to use than mainframes.
The (uncredited) image was created by Charis Tsevis. http://www.tsevis.com/

More info on how it was created here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/tsevis/2311088410/in/set-721576...

The article itself is garbage.
It is simple in a way. It's an alternative to building another deck on top of the road for light rail to run along. Probably cheaper and less devastating to communities that it runs though.
Well iPhone kind of implies iOS, doesn't it? So yes, technically speaking they should have said iOS instead. In any case, I think the comparison is fair, and more analogous to comparing Mac OS to Windows.
While I'm at it. I'll tell you about some other's I have read.

- Getting Real by 37 Signals http://gettingreal.37signals.com/
- Rework by 37 Signals http://37signals.com/rework/

These are great and really get your mind thinking about alternatives to what most people believe.

- Sarah Lacy's Once your lucky, twice you're good. http://www.amazon.com/Once-Youre-Lucky-Twice-Good/dp/1592403...

This isn't a technical book, but can really get you motivated to succeed reading the stories of previous successes! It also gives a bit of an insight into the internal workings of a start up in the early stages. It highlights networking as an important factor!

- Start up success guide - http://www.amazon.com/Startup-Success-Guide-Books-Profession...

This book was quite good, but felt a bit dated in comparison to Rob Walling's 'Start up book'.

Finally 'Founders at work' is definitely worth a read. http://www.amazon.com/Founders-Work-Stories-Startups-Problem...
Ask HN: Evaluate our idea: Hosted email services for startups and apps
Qackle is a hosted email service with features that apps and businesses will find useful.

We had a itch, we dislike rewriting all the code that deals with emails everytime we make an application. If you felt this itch too, we will scratch it. Tell us by filling out a two required question survey. More information at the site.

http://qackle.wufoo.com/forms/qackle-hosted-email-services/

Is this concept, sensible - do you understand it easily?

Do you know of other services that offer something similar?
It's been pointed out before but it bears repeating: the stakes in this game are totally different for Google. Google doesn't need to dominate in this market, it just needs to keep it open enough that the client is commoditized. If clients are commoditized and communicate via open standards Google wins on the strength of its superior systems engineering. History suggests that Apple will fare poorly in a commoditized market.

I suspect Google is actually a lot more worried about Facebook right now than Apple though.
I'm a Rackspace Cloud customer until I found this post. After reading much of the comments, mostly +1 to Linode, I decided to give it a try.

The service is superb, instant activation and the speed made me jump ship.
Actually I just checked and there's only one in there -- I guess I use shell scripts a lot less than I used to. Here it is:

#!/bin/sh

# reform = re-format code to use different indentation
# Usage:
# reform oldIndent newIndent source destination
#
# e.g. reform 3 4 fred.py fred1.py

unexpand --tabs=$1 $3 | expand --tabs=$2 >$4

Incidently, this is typical shell script for me -- anything that requires loops or control structures, I do in Python. The predominance of comments over code is also typical for me.
Smodcast is fantastic... so is Tell Em Steve Dave
Clickable link - http://qackle.wufoo.com/forms/qackle-hosted-email-services/

Opens in the same window.