skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
fml is, really, just a humor site and a place to vent when some perfect storm of events comes over your life. No matter how hard you try to remember the temporary nature of life, most people will still get upset were some of those things to happen, and rightly so.

Like this one: Today, my package from Maxim Electronics came in the mail. My parents thought the package was from Maxim magazine. I am now grounded for months, and they threw away hundreds of dollars of electronics. FML
As the saying goes "Don't you get it? It doesn't matter who you vote for, Government always wins!"
I hope they decide to sell cartridges for this. My original 2600 is still working after all these years, although it gets more challenging every year to hook it up to the TV as the connectors lag further and further behind. Anyone makeing a game/tv switch for hdmi? :)
Haven't you read Flowers for Algernon?
Out of curiosity...does this information make it easy for apple to stop this method of jb-ing? If so, why publicize details?
The startup scene in the Philippines is concentrated on Manila. Friendster, Insync, ProudCloud seems to lead the pack. I suggest you mail @terpua since he can introduce to the details.
Along with the "young" startuppy atmosphere and skillset is the commensurate payscale. It's cheaper than other cities and provinces to hire people, especially programmers. From everything I've read so far about the city, I think starting out is around 45k, then sr. positions is 60, and tops right out at around 70k for level IV guru coders. So, it's definitely not the Valley in terms of developer salaries.

The corollary is that the great programmers in Vancouver all move to the USA so that they can get paid effectively double what they would make in Vancouver. If you're good, it's also very easy on a TN-1. (I've worked with a couple dozen programmers from BC (Vancouver, Victoria) throughout my career)
Unless the spot is very subtle, in context and well executed.

(Which his was not)
Econtalk is wonderful! Don't be put off by the title and your unpleasant memories of the micro and macro courses you took in college. Econtalk covers a lot of ground, including emergent behavior, behavioral economics, Prohibition, and the Russian revolution. Great stuff.
This would only be valid if there weren't any other languages/platforms that can build fast solutions and also be appreciated by CS majors for not being a huge ugly mess of a language. Unfortunately for PHP, there are.
I really liked inception, but felt that the character development wasn't there. All the characters except Cobb exist only superficially, as if they are just dream projections. We never find out what anyone else wants, why they are coming along on this mad scheme.

Still a great movie.
How to Use KISSInsights on Your WordPress Blog
Masterpapers.com takes off your assignment burden
Overload of academic and extra-curricular work on students is nothing uncommon. A tired and exhausted student may not be able to write a research paper that gets good grades. Let the expert writing team at masterpapers.com take the burden off your shoulders.
Or have closures yet.
Hell, no, I 80% wouldn't pay for Twitter
Unfortunately, PHP is also fundamentally broken in a number of ways. Ways that you're likely not to find out until after it has pissed in your cornflakes.

He doesn't seem that interested in fixing those problems, either.
Too Smart for Git
And then they can have this cool tattoo:

http://theartoftattoo.files.wordpress.com/2009/04/y-combinat...
I'm sorry, wasn't aware of it. Does it happen on other browsers too? I didn't notice it on Chrome or Firefox.
Well, PHP is obviously doing something right, or everyone else is doing something wrong since PHP still sits near the top of the heap in usage. I noticed this the other day:

http://www.activestate.com/blog/2010/07/growth-dynamic-langu...

which shows PHP is used more than any other dynamic language and it is growing faster than Ruby, but not as fast as Python and Javascript.
Treason charges are nothing to sneeze at. Someone like Lamo (with his history/record) has a huge incentive to stay squeaky clean during something like this.
Webcam Motion Tracking in Python
Simple app using Python and OpenCV to track motion. Good for automated Sentry Guns!
Yay! Disclaimer: I'm an investor.
The 1/2 means a bathroom. Not sure of the origins; perhaps it is from the days when some apartments did not have bathrooms.

http://newtomontreal.com/apartment-hunting-ads-lingo/

Montreal is very much a renter's city. It is common for anyone under 30 to move once every two years -- some people move every single year.

Rents are not as cheap as they were in the 90s but they are still desirable compared to other major cities in Canada.
AT&T, Verizon Said to Target Visa, MasterCard With Smartphones
I assume this is your website?
10 years on: free software wins, but you have nowhere to install it
This embodies the irreverence that I love in this industry.
OpenSolaris fork imminent?
Regarding his anecdote of the company porting a client's application from PHP to Rails: Maybe the fact that completely rewriting an application in Rails is preferable to maintaining their PHP application is telling.
It's not simply businesses that are effected. Overall, it is young people who use BlackBerry's in the UAE.

The two carriers (Etisalat & Du) have pushed them heavily here. They allow young people to talk to each other without actually talking - which would be taboo.

If you go anywhere in the UAE, nearly all you can see is BlackBerry's. People spend more than half of their time messaging each other, email or otherwise.

I think the Gulf states are trying to apply their power to make RIM play their game. The states will succeed if RIM thinks it's a worthwhile market to stay in.
sorry, I missed that sentence" would be fine with no further explanation

Actually I did read the article, but I must have missed or forgotten the details of that section

I thought that is what I said before.
I've noticed this at work. There are some developers that just don't seem to want to take the time to figure out what git is doing, and so get very confused and throw up their hands right away.

I'm not sure what the right solution is. We switched to git to try to get out of the hell that was svn merging between long-lived branches. It's seemed to have helped, but in exchange for much day-to-day frustration for a lot of devs.
Maybe everyone else already knew Zero Hedge was a waste of time, but I'd never examined it closely enough to be sure. Now I know. This "expert" they're interviewing understands Roman history at about the level of a B student in a freshman class on the subject.
I remember the early days when you couldn't log in to Friendster for hours because the servers were overloaded!
I've never heard of anyone getting a visa to start a startup.

Getting a visa to work for an existing Canadian company is generally not a problem, and Canada has a points system for accelerated naturalization if you decide you want to stay permanently.
Did they attribute their performance problems to tech stack or architecture? Or did they ever say?
Forex trading
PHP still has a lot of momentum behind it, but I think that momentum will fade (or PHP will dramatically change). You still frequently see "PHP" as a three letter acronym on job postings, even if the employer doesn't use PHP. "PHP" in those cases basically just means "we want someone who develops software for the web." Or it might mean "we still have some old nasty PHP code that you may have to peek into from time to time."

As for growth rate, I question any study on "programming language usage" because it's very hard to define what that even means. Still, I'm not surprised by their findings. We've all seen the explosion of Python—both with hobbyists and huge corporations. As for PHP still increasing, that could be attributed simply to the persistent increase in web usage in general. It doesn't necessarily mean PHP is "beating" Ruby.
Ruby Best Practices Book (free pdf)
Stack Overflow claims that by running a Windows stack they save money compared to a LAMP stack due to its better performance (MVC2,SQL2008) outweighing the initial cost. I think they talked about this in their Google Tech Talk (Joel Spolsky).
These are pretty great and it looks like an interesting project, but why "4+ years of experience"? First of all, what exactly is a "year of experience"? You spent the entire year using some piece of tech? You used the tech once a year ago? I hate how commonplace these sorts of non-verifiable claims are in job postings.

Edit: I've been thinking about this some more and perhaps "hours of experience" is a better metric, given the 10,000-hours-to-mastery correspondence.
None of those options seem particularly viable, even given advanced technology:

* Nuclear has trouble with radiation shielding - not good for passenger planes unless you make enormous planes with a couple of thousand passengers.

* Beaming power is going to cook birds along the route

* If you're going to the trouble of making hydrogen, which is notoriously hard to store, you might as well just make jet fuel instead.
Try not to do things outside your expertise or your team's. I've found it more of a disadvantage and playing catch up than the idea of bringing a fresh perspective into the mix. It does depend but you either need to be able to test your ideas quickly or have a lot of time.
Ethanol is basically a hydrocarbon anyway.
Well, does this mean that most iPhones out there are full of spyware then? And why not?
Maybe checkout the Oresund region (Copenhagen and southern sweden). Lived there for the last 2 years, they are really pushing for startups. Immigration isn't too bad if you've got cash to finance a company (at least in Sweden). Lots of startup resources in the area as well (many incubators, some venture capital/angels, some top universities for tech and business).
wanted to upvote nearlyfreespeech. Even though being a registrar is not their main business, their site is a no-bs godsend for managing your domains. My only wish is that they had support for more than the usual .net, .com. .org domains
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Totally agree that benchmarks should be taken with a grain of salt. I was scanning the ruby docs for Array and saw shift(n) so I thought it'd be fun to try it.

I'm pretty ignorant about how the GC affects these benchmarks - I'd like to investigate that further in the future.
I outlined some of the problems a while ago:

http://www.codexon.com/posts/why-arent-functional-languages-...

Short version: Haskell is harder than C while being slower and uses more memory. The main implementation GHC, comes with GPL concerns.
An aptly named blog for the analysis.
Not epic but I made the mistake of rebranding and relaunching after getting some seed funding. As a result I'm doing things very differently this second time around.
Selection bias is perhaps your problem. The people talking are still trying or succeeded.

That said, if you want a story of failure, I spent a year working on a startup idea, spent a large chunk of my savings and ended up scrapping it, it never got finished or even launched. Much of the reason for spending so much time on that one idea was because I took a Master's degree in Entrepreneurship and it was part of the curriculum to write a business plan and try and start a company.

If I had a second chance, I would have saved 5 figures worth of savings and done it a lot leaner and pivoted to other ideas which had a better chance. However, the way the program was structured, there was a certain lock-in which meant degree or startup in a sense.
Looking forward to seeing the pet food review site. It's definitely an unserved niche.
The Dell Streak Tablet missed the July 2010 release date
So I've not done business in Warsaw myself (as I said I'm in the Bay Area), I've been there and I know of quite a lot of activity going on. Internet is ubiquitous, everyone I met there had Internet, and it seems most cafe's did too.

I'm not brave enough to drive a car in Warsaw, public transit is "European class" (which is to say, there is more of an expectation that public transit works, and that it will get you anywhere... anywhere... even remote areas of the country. I cannot say that of the Bay Area where I can't even get to most of Marin, or Napa).

English is pretty ubiquitous as well. How ubiquitous you may ask... well, even the strippers spoke English. ;-)
Money causes problems that a bunch of semi-anonymous people in most cases won't be able to handle without a clear organization.
Friendster is actually in decent shape today. So inability to scale didn't kill them--it just dealt them a very substantial blow.

Twitter would be an example of a startup that experienced severe scaling issues and still ended up on top.

Know any others?
Looks like there can be a more significant difference after 100,000 repetitions: http://rubybenchmark.com/reports/13. In general, the program is pretty dumb and my math isn't that great. Accepting patches: http://github.com/sandro/bench_press
As amazing as it would be to have investors pitching to you, I think resource scarcity can be healthy. That being said, best of luck goes to him and I hope he puts the money to good use and makes something truly great.
You can't throw taxes into the mix without knowing whatt the site is using to calculate cost of living. (I don't know either.) I'd assume that taxes are already included since that's part of what'd you'd consider when moving between areas, and is another area where you'd save by moving.

If we assume that taxes are included: Moving to Austin costs $20.9k in total salary. Total expenses would have to be $79,167 ($20,900 / 0.264) or less for the Valley to win out. If the hypothetical person saves more than $20,833 a year (after taxes since we're assuming those are part of the cost of living), having higher earnings is preferable to having a lower cost of living to increase the size of the savings. Many people don't save that much.

You also chose San Jose as the city for the comparison, when most people I know prefer to live in San Francisco, where the cost of living is even higher. Moving to Austin from San Francisco supposedly results in a 42.7% decrease in cost of living. You'd have to be saving $51,053 after taxes for moving to be a bad idea financially.
Wow the pressure and attention on at such an early stage makes it that much more riskier. Bit hard to stay small and make mistakes early on when you're in the glare of so much public opinion. Not saying he can't deal with it, but I wouldn't want the attention!

I wish him luck I love delicious to bits!
I see php as a lightweight web framework. And it works well for that. I wouldn't use it for general purpose scripting though.
Cool, I'll keep that in mind. The site is intended to have user-generated content so if you find the exact thing you'd like to benchmark, use the bench_press gem to test locally, then publish it to share your findings.
Entrepreneurs can see the silver lining in the worst situations. They can fail, but then stand up, brush themselves off, and say "next" without skipping a beat.

That being said, I could say that I wasted money on some bad investments, and I spent months too long on side projects that resulted in nothing....... BUT even the worst decisions I've made HAVE paid off in some way.

I made life-long connections with great business people, I learned about an industry I was unfamiliar with, I learned about the building blocks of business by losing that investment money.

See, it's just impossible. If you are going to be in business, you don't dwell on things, you constantly forge ahead.

All my failures made me smarter, faster, brighter, and a better person.
Thanks. Comments would be cool, I'll give it a shot.
As a freelancer, I may have up to 3 or 4 active paying projects at any given time but I have worked over the years to discipline myself to only one personal project at a time. I have a queue of projects that I would like to get to and when I have an interesting thought about them I document it in a project document but I never do development on them until I am done with my current personal project. The other rule I have on this is that I am allowed to jump ship in the first 2 weeks of starting a new personal project an go to a different idea. This allows me enough time to really decide if this is the one I want to focus on.

The nice part about being disciplined in this manner, is that ideas that are nebulous in my mind are usually concrete by the time I get around to them. you would be surprised how much stuff gets worked out by just having a project floating around in your mind for a while.

Almost every time I go through my notes when starting a new project, I think "wow I am glad I let this one roll around in my head for a while" because the notes create a very clear and coherent idea, by the time I get around to working on it. And I can usually see by my first notes that if I would have dived right in, I would have spun my wheels reworking better ideas that just popped into my head at a later date.
I think I was earlier motivated by originality of idea and a chance to change the de facto in the world. Like I was, I assume many fresh college peeps are high on "changing the world" through their great ideas.
Top of my list!
Sorry about that, didn't expect any traffic...ever.
Seconded.

Also, people who usually have that sentiment are not the same people who have to maintain the code. They're usually long gone by then. I have personally suffered many sleepless nights having to maintain projects like that.

I think it's healthy to avoid extremes. Neither a "whatever works" nor a "write everything in lisp because it's beautiful" sentiment. It's up to the good programmer to decide when to be a pragmatist and when to be a purist.
Ask HN: What is the best way to implement a listener for web applications?
I am wondering what is the best way to implement a listener for a web application?
And how do large apps do this?

I can imagine a web application, e.g. php or ruby etc, that is linked to a typical database, e.g. mysql.
The job queue is stored in the DB and another separate backend process polls this job queue - doing sql Selects
Upon detecting a new job, the backend then starts a resource intensive process, e.g. launch a virtual server, uploads file, start crunching data.

I guess polling is fine if it is not so urgent or the db is small.

But for faster response, is there a good way to implement a listener?
It simply accepts the job from the web application, stores a copy in the DB and starts the resource intensive part. The whole idea is to skip the polling of the database.

Java has some useful classes but what about other web languages?
Or am I approaching this in the wrong way? What are your experience in implementing this? Thanks
Odd, in the western US I'm accustomed to a "half bathroom" being a room with a toilet and sink but no bathtub or shower stall. Listings look like "2br 1+1/2ba" meaning two bedrooms and one full and one half bathroom.
In the comments he talks about how he wanted to find investors to work with that were smarter than him. Good move if done properly and at the right time. As the parent said resource scarcity can be good, see Duke Nukem Forever for what happens when money is no object.

Who knows how far along this idea is, given that he could have funded a fair bit of proof of concept work (or done it himself if he can hack).

I can't help but be interested given what a simple and great product delicious is.
Great resource. Looks like I've got a lot of porting to do =). Thanks.
The site now lives at http://www.poplinks.me/ and has been "rebranded" accordingly.
I've always thought that 5NF is a bit overkill. Didn't find one decent example that would make me say "oh, so that's why they do it".

I must say though, after the Database Systems course at DTU, when I come up with a DB design it's almost always in 4NF to start with :). Man, I hated this course.
If you found these photos fascinating, you may find Vivian Maier's photos interesting. A street photographer from the 1950s to 1990s. Discovered at an auction. Tens of thousands of undeveloped rolls.

Memento mori

http://vivianmaier.blogspot.com/
Will this type of jailbreak let you use the iPhone 4 on a different carrier?
GPL concerns? Its BSD licensed. Haskell's library system is perhaps uniquely BSD-friendly, with over 75% of libraries BSD licensed.

And as pointed out at the time, commercial users already funded the -dynamic flag, along with the ability to swap out libgmp.

So that's FUD. As was pointed out in this forum at the time: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=847120
Laying the grid for the electric car (photos)
This week GM revealed the price of its Chevy Volt electric car as the automaker looks to draw buyers looking for a more eco-friendly mode of transportation.
Cutting Edge Web Design Trends (that Can Actually Improve SEO)
I wouldn't be surprised if the code was making mistakes - it hasn't had much peer review. I think the percentage calculation may be wrong? We can always fix it if it's broken and resubmit the benchmarks.
I bet the government is interested in all the gossip that goes around on BlackBerry service.
I live in Shenzhen and work in the IT myself (Tencent/QQ), but I cannot fully recommend it for startups:
1. GFW, you absolutely NEED a VPN to get access to Facebook, Twitter many blogs, YouTube etc etc
2. There are very very few Western IT people in the city. There is no community with meetings etc.
3. Though more and more people speak English, many people speak still very little English. Especially all official documents, all practical matters... all in Chinese
4. House prices are very very expensive, offices also. You say rents are cheap,... not really. Perhaps compared to Western cities, but even then the gap is narrowing quickly.

On the plus side:
- many Chinese study Computer Science and there are many very bright young students eager for a job.
- salaries are still relatively low (though higher than you perhaps would expect)
- weather ain't bad if you can stand the summer heat :)
- food is cheap, I eat in restaurants every day.
- Shenzhen tries to focus on innovation and high-tech, I think you can apply for some subsidies
I agree, I now care much more about how was that image generated. The article itself wasn't worth the time.
How To Get an Article on TechCrunch, A Case Study
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1112407
Toronto - silicon valley north / Markham (high tech capital!)
I started using Haskell five years ago (before the age of dons), and wrote a very intensive (parser generator)^^3 project in it in 2007 that was inspired by some half-finished postdoc papers I found from researchers at Utrecht University — but I haven't really used it in the last several years.

When people in that reddit thread started debating zygohistomorphic prepromorphisms, even I assumed it it was reddittard parody. Apparently not!
I love the way he answered the "why raise money Josh when you obviously can self-finance this venture?"

From the comments (which with the exception of one very stupid 'blind leading blind' reference is actually quite good so far):

An angel round is a good way to get a lot of people who are a great deal smarter than myself on my side and involved.

I’m a pretty junior angel. I don’t invest big dollars, nor do I lead deals. I think I bring product sense and ideas, and being an angel is a fun way to be a part of the story.
Precisely why I stopped caring and focused on forward movement.
Seems like there's a 0-day kernel-level code execution vulnerability in all iOS PDF code.

Watch your clicks iDevice owners!
Getting a visa for China is much simpler than getting a visa for Europe (and I imagine for the USA). I get a 1-year multiple-entry visa every year without problems, though with help of my employer.
I wrote an article about the cost of living in Shenzhen a while ago:
http://www.startinchina.com/shenzhen/life/cost_of_living_in_...