skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Your ability as a Lisp programmer is entirely unrelated to your ability as a Windows/Linux/whatever sysadmin/build engineer/whatever.

Are we sure? Isn't this a case of Law of Leaky Abstractions? We may think we can and should ignore issues related to underlying hardware, but reality is we can't and we shouldn't. As programmers we need a bit of knowledge about system administration too, even when we are working on a virtual machine.

Kudos to Clojurers! Maybe there is more enthusiasm and understanding about newcomers in Clojure because it is a new language. That is, the are not under the Curse of Knowledge.

We should acknowledge that Haskellers are trying to meet the needs of newcomers too, by releasing the Haskell Platform.
Normal people don't have the tools to check the math on a formula that involves 500-digit numbers. It's not like I'm going to pop out my TI-80 and graph it. This formula is cool, but it's only a bit more accessible than the human genome.
CSS-Tricks: Guidelines for URI Design
Sometime back I found myself in a slightly similar situation. I felt like I had forgotten many things I had learned in my masters (CS), and I also felt that many new technologies have come about and I do not know enough about them.

I organized my learning goals as another masters in CS, and have started doing the first course (web technologies). For each course I plan to identify open courseware and other resources and blog as I learn stuff. I am hoping my blog will help me establish a learning trail, which might be an alternate for the credentials of a paper certificate.

Check it out - http://opencs.wikidot.com
Someone wanna prove this on WolframAlpha.com?
the latency difference between fios and co-lo is going to be tiny. 10ms vs 50ms at most. (yeah, 5x difference, but it's still fifty friggen milliseconds)
Ask HN: The Right Now Company vs The Innovative Future
I am sometimes told by successful entrepreneurs that to be super successful, you need to have a vision for the future, and to spend your time morphing the current world into that vision, small steps at a time.

But then I see a lot of successful startups that seem to just build things that somebody has a need to pay for to solve some problem today. The company does not at least appear to be born out of some great vision to change the world.

An immediate example of this is twitter vs (most) applications built on top of twitter.

What are your thoughts on this?
Personally I think looking at higher ed is looking at the wrong side of the equation. We're not in an education bubble, but a "bunge"[1] if you will - the opposite of a bubble - with regard to labor prices.

In other words, people aren't overpaying for education, businesses are underpaying for human talent.

[1] http://www.johnkay.com/2008/07/02/metaphors-in-free-fall-the...
You know, not everybody likes onions. But everybody loves cakes! Cakes have layers. You know what people really like? Parfaits. I could just as easily say "our thinking is based on a theory of parfait layers of abstraction, and come on, who don't like no parfaits? Parfaits is delicious!" You know, I think parfaits are the tastiest thing on the whole damn planet.
That's not the point here. The case study was about a company that wasn't remotely news and had no shot at coverage based on who they were or what they were building.

PR is about taking something boring and making it interesting. Like an online shoe company (Zappos). Or a suite of project management tools (37 Signals). Or a bug tracking tool (FogBugz).

To your point though, if you talk to Arrington, you'll learn two things-- 1) The guy virtually never sleeps or relaxes and 2) He's always digging. TechCrunch breaks news a lot. I think they are a 15+ person company now-- plenty of room to cover inbound and outbound leads.
The laws of supply and demand will make sure that there will always be people available to maintain those systems. The price will go up until some 'modern' programmer is tempted enough to open a 3 decades old book on COBOL and JCL.

Your understanding of business is flawed, businesses are advancing by marketing, not by shacking up with every new hot tech that comes along in favour of their old, trusted and reliable tech.

The larger, older and more profitable a business is the more likely that they are going to be ultra-conservative about using new technology at the core of their business.

Eventually we'll get rid of this stuff but I wouldn't bet on it happening in the next two decades, unless someone finds a way to emulate a mainframe on a cluster with similar reliability. And then we still need to get rid of the software.
The State of Haskell, 2010 survey - help us out by filling it out
Google Checkout backs onto a payment processing gateway. Google isn't a bank!
Banks are actually kind of a bad example for needing synchronized processing. Banks settle transactions pseudo-asynchronously in batches. While they adjust your "available balance" as well as they can, AFAIK, transactions are officially settled in the old school, nightly batch.

Even then, there are consistent, synchronous databases that run on Linux clusters. Oracle RAC and Sybase ASE come to mind. Linux also supports hardware NUMA implementations, which allow single system image software. An emulation layer could run on top of NUMA hardware.
Because they taste better.
The book "C++ Coding Standards" by Herb Sutter and Andrei Alexandrescu is an excellent way to get up to date with modern yet pragmatic C++ style.

I also recommend the "Effective C++" series by Scott Meyers and the "Exceptional C++" series by Herb Sutter.
You were down to -1 points. Your phrase is awesome and try to live by it every day. The people that down voted you must be really screw up. I'm really curious as to why they would do that. What is it that bothers them so much about your phrase? They are probably old and bitter. Or maybe young and pessimistic. Who knows. If one of those persons that down voted this comment could shed some light as to why, it will be greatly appreciated.

Of course, more than likely those same people are now going to down vote me.
I suppose what I'm talking about is a company with real biz clout (like HP) coming up with a solution to compete with IBM.
http://37signals.com/rework/

I really like this book. It helps put things into perspective, especially for smaller companies.
indeed. When you want to do a quick and dirty 'replace-string', this command looks very good. I've ended up copying the whole region to scratch to make my edits more than once.
There can be substantial differences among what's technically feasible and what's economically feasible and what's politically feasible.

An existing environment is usually a large pile of twisty dependencies on operating system calls, on database or file formats that aren't entirely portable, on language extensions that don't exist elsewhere, on objects built from source code that's been lost, on dependencies on products from vendors that no longer exist, and it's all often inextricably linked with front-ends that would have to be rewritten, data bridges that would have to be rewritten, and users that need to be retrained.

In some cases, this effort can involve re-architecting substantial parts of a manufacturing facility that's involving six or ten buildings and that are each most of a kilometer long. And with many industrial-scale environments, change is not going to happen. You (might) see a new environment implemented when the entire production line is nuked and paved at the end of its useful lifetime, and replaced with a newly-deployed production line. In other cases, you'll probably see the existing system patched and re-used.

For many of these cases, just ramping up a load test would be a substantial effort.

Some hunks of the environment will have test cases and specs and documentation, and some hunks probably won't.

For many of these installations, substantial downtime has SEC-level visibility, or can involve exposures to various legal entanglements, or can involve re-establishing politically- or legall-mandated external certifications, or can cost thousands or millions of dollars per unit time off-line, or requires the production line to be cleaned with a jack-hammer or entirely replaced, or other issues.

If you can afford an incremental port or a big-bang port, well, what's that cost in comparison with the incremental costs of keeping the existing environment going?

C-level folks just don't blindly sign the really big bills involved in keeping these environments going, and most competing vendors seeking to acquire least part of these mainframe-scale budgets.
Readability Redux (Chrome Extension)
The author points out that auto_ptr is useless. shared_ptr is broken too. What do you think this program does?

#include <stdlib.h>
#include <tr1/memory>
#include <iostream>

using namespace std;
using namespace std::tr1;

class Node;
typedef shared_ptr<Node> NodePtr;

class Node
{
public:
int data;
NodePtr next;
Node(int data, NodePtr next) : data(data), next(next) {}
~Node();
};

Node::~Node()
{
/* cout << "Destroying " << data << endl; */
}

void shared_ptr_vs_linked_list(int n)
{
NodePtr head;
for (int i = 0; i < n; i++) {
head.reset(new Node(i, head));
}
head.reset();
cout << "Done " << n << endl;
}

int main(int argc, const char** argv)
{
shared_ptr_vs_linked_list(atoi(argv[1]));
exit(0);
}
And there is a bookmarklet as well: http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/
I'm gonna say that's a slightly over-negative view.

I've worked in and around startups in SG for the past three years and am now starting my own.

Sure there are blowhards in every community but there is a real sense of a movement happening here in SG. The Hackerspace, good user groups for multiple languages, Pivotal Labs are setting up out here, Joi Ito's Neoteny Labs incubator, a founders institute class has just finished and universities that are churning out an increasingly startup friendly work force.

Plus the weather is great, you're in a regional hub for bringing in wider SE Asian talent, or hitting a beach (cheaply) for a couple of days to get some vitamin D.

There are negatives: if you are a pure idea person rather than technical founder you'll struggle to hire a good developer out here, not because there aren't any but because the community of good devs are sharp enough to smell bullshit a mile off and would be happy plowing their own furrow or joining a startup in which they had more stake. You can't outsource to here.

Broadband and wireless are cheap and plentiful, nationwide free wifi in most coffee establishments.

As an Brit entrepreneur bootstrapping out here there is a lot to recommend the place. For interest you might want to check our 'startup experience' blog, http://nakedstartup.com. Or hit me up on twitter (@andycroll) for a more detailed chat.

In short, I like it, perhaps others might.
He's talking about FedEx. They understand that it's a risk to their business continuity. The guy who hijacked a FedEx plane planned to fly it into their datacenter near the airport, which houses the primary mainframe that runs FedEx's most critical business software. He wasn't an IT employee either, so it's fairly common knowledge. AFAIK, they are now running in a hybrid mainframe / client+server model. Most of the package transactions are processed simultaneously. Apparently all of the tracking on FedEx.com uses the client+server system to back it. Obviously they are taking it slowly and carefully (it's like a decade-long project) to avoid any screwups.
speaking as a hosting company, setup fees are /really really nice/ - I've got to go buy a rather expensive server and get it to you - now, obviously, I've priced it so that I make a profit long term, but I need to go buy another server /now/ not long term.

Personally, I address this by having pre-payment discounts. cover your account for a year and I knock off 20% (and usually use the cash to go buy a new server) - I also allow people to sign up and pay monthly (at a higher rate, of course) but with my current price /discount setup, the majority of my income is from pre-paid customers.
He makes a valid point; i.e. if you write bad code, your code will be bad.
From the end of the article: "I haven't found a way to short higher education as a whole. If you can think of one, let me know." Any ideas?
Awesome.

You could add an auto-switchover generator to that setup for less than $1.5k.
You can be up and running in Emacs in a few minutes, if you grab AquaEmacs. It uses the Mac keybindings. Cmd-w, Cmd-s,Cmd-o, Cmd-c,Cmd-x,Cmd-v, etc. Just like any Mac program, navigate the menus to see what features and keybindings are available, when you get the urge.

http://aquamacs.org/

I imagine on Windows you can find one with equivalent key-bindings.

As you get the urge to learn more, start reading blogs, etc.

Here's a good place to start:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/60367/the-single-most-use...
Would that really be infringement on my part ?

Its just a twitter handle. (But it is getting 100+ retweets for almost every tweet, and when I last checked, their following jumped from 80k to 100k+)

It concerns the 12-17 year old market segment, and it surprisingly not related to 'justin bieber.' Maybe its just me but it seems that this segment is being under-served.

I will try to correctly use twitter's API. I did try and get in touch with the owner of the handle, still waiting to hear back.

Thanks.
I used my iPad quite effectively with a VOIP phone while in Italy last month. It was €5 for 3GB data and we barely used half of that.

The market is definitely broader than “pure” phones.
Great article, thanks! Very interesting
So this stack will curse us all with having to fix awful programming mistakes for decades?
I am very experienced with RAC and its predecessor OPS. It really is nowhere near as performant or reliable or scalable or manageable as a mainframe. Which is not to say it's not "good enough" for many serious, real-world workloads, of course it is. But you're comparing a Toyota pickup to a JCB earthmover.
Infrastructure won't do you any good if you don't have a backup, like you mentioned in your GP post.
it's hard to take an article like this seriously - i just want to make 2 highlights. he started using C++ when the STL didn't exist yet. This is ancient IMO, so his section on ever-changing standard is moot to me. if he didn't want to maintain the code base, then he should have kept using an older compiler.

second highlight, errors messages - Debugging is the first skill programmers (re)learn, so IMO it's a pretty important one. when he says "You get an error message? You start fudging the code until it compiles." is down right negligent at best - C++ will tell you at exactly in which file, at which line and in which function called from which class your error was caused (more than i can say for other languages) and, i'm sorry, but if you don't know that compiler errors wrap the code in ' ' then wtf have you been doing since the dinosaur age when C++ had no stl?

yes, the STL makes compiler errors extra long but to say you need to fudge with your code to make it work is a spray of FUD to anyone looking to get into the language.

To close this, everything he said in his "hard to read" could be applied to any languages with mutability. The code snippets he took were so small or narrow that no one could be expected to make anything of it. C++ is a strong typed language, should be read as such and evaluated as such.
If you use transient-mark-mode (which is on by default these days), you can mark a region and then use replacement commands like query-replace (M-%) that affect just that region.
Interesting research, link-bait headline.

I don't understand what the first paragraph (regarding "metrosexual" men) has to do with the rest of the article or research. Is modesty considered a metrosexual trait? I think I'd associate metrosexual more with vanity, and that vanity and modesty are inversely proportional.

Also, he article notes that 132 women and 100 men evaluators participated in the study, but the results for men aren't fully reported. We read that men didn't view modesty as a negative trait in women (and it is implied that women also didn't view modesty as a negative trait in women) but did the men find modestly a negative trait in men?
Why do you believe talent is underpaid?
It's amazing how sexy technology can get when someone's offering you a six or seven figure salary to figure it out.
Interesting, how did you determine that they only provided voices for the phone call?
I've had work passes of three different types since I've been here and had little trouble. Gimme a shout if you want a fuller run down.
As lsc explained the setup fee is not normally for human labor but part of the hosts cost calculation.

Serious hosts will give you free trials (before you pay the setup fee) any time, unless you ask for special hardware that they themselves have to buy first.
Is probably the curvature of the edge of the lens causing that.
Don't presume that you're operating with sufficient domain knowledge to make those judgements, and don't presume that the folks that are making those judgements are ignorant of the options and alternatives.

When you're operating at the juggernaught-scale of business or with industrial-scale production, the rules and the requirements and the competitive landscapes are different.

And the risks can come not from the existing environments - which generally work - but from making the changes to the environment, and from the risks of outages and downtime.

Every vendor that can make even a tangental case for a platform or application or process migration or update or new hardware is also certainly pressing that, too; that's an automatic education for the folks involved.

If you can't process customer orders for a week or a month or can't ship orders or your outage slags a whole production line, you could well end up out of business. I know of places that have had similar meltdowns during updates and during migrations, and it's Not Pretty.
The U.S. (and for the most part, Canada) doesn't count. You have two main carriers and two also-ran carriers; two use CDMA, which is a dead-end, and the other two use GSM, which is not. Canada has three carriers, and two of them share a new GSM network (the third, Rogers, has been GSM for a decade).

In Europe, there are more carriers (2-3 per country) and lots more competition. As I said in a different comment, I paid €5 for a 3GB data plan for my iPad last month in Italy, whereas I would have to pay $35 for 5GB here in Canada.
you know what bothers me? when people quote co-lo price in rackspace without power. If you are willing to go with 1/40th of a 15a circuit, 33.7 watts usable, I could sell you 1u for $20/month and I'd be doubling my costs. Of course, running almost anything in that power envelope would be nigh impossible. that's barely enough power to run three 3.5" disks and nothing else. the OP is talking about a quad-core CPU, so we're probably talking at least 120 watts. If you are selling 120 watts and a reasonable amount of bandwidth for $60/month, you are significantly below market (and I'd like more information)

but yeah, you do have a point, if he's willing to spend that kinda scratch on connectivity he can get a box co-located. From what Ive seen of the market around here, he's going to be a bit over $100/month, (but, if you are way cheaper than that... seriously, lemme know. I get people pestering me all the time about co-lo and I usually send them away.)
> "Can you feed the cats and take care of the servers in case they have a problem at 3AM?"

LOL now this would be a friend.
> It's pointless to invoke the almighty Google; they simply don't deal with problems in this class

FWIW, I worked at a major bank (top 5 in the U.S.) and listened in on several discussions between their top tech guys. As mentioned in other comments, their number one worry was the supply of COBOL coders.

They were terrified of Google and/or Paypal and what would happen if one of those companies got serious about competing in the banking arena. Most of the top architects _knew_ that it was possible to build a bank on a huge cluster of servers. They also knew that there was no way an existing bank could build the infrastructure and software while also maintaining their existing infrastructure.
phew, you said movie ... i was about to say, when the comic first came out, Branson was probably still in diapers
A book about Git, hosted on Github
I think part of the loyalty numbers for iPhone users is the substantial investment they make in other Apple hardware, software, and App Store apps. Unfortunately, I don't have any hard data to back this up, but I imagine a large percentage of iPhone users have at least one other piece of Apple hardware, such as a Mac, iPad, iPod Touch, etc., that works seamlessly alongside the iPhone and iTunes. That makes it tougher to break away from the iPhone. My coworker is one such example. He has an iPhone, a Macbook, and a Mac Mini. He loves the fact that iTunes ties them all together, and wouldn't get a different phone because of it.

Android doesn't have that kind of integration, simply because there isn't that tight integration. For example, my girlfriend and I both have Android phones, but everything else we have is Microsoft (2 laptops on XP and Vista, a media center PC and a Viliv S5 tablet on Windows 7, and an XBox 360). If Google could get all of those other devices dependent on Google software like Apple does with iTunes, they'd have a shot at keeping people loyal.

You'll also notice that Microsoft missed a big opportunity here. In addition to all of that Microsoft hardware, we used to both have Windows Mobile phones, but there was nothing to tie them all together like iTunes. I would have thought something like XBox Live Marketplace could have worked (e.g. as a central place to buy content for all my devices, share contacts and data, etc.), but Microsoft never executed. Maybe with Windows Phone 7 they will...
I had tried that before transient-mark-mode was on by default (Emacs 23?) and it didn't work, but turns out you are 100% correct.

Thanks ramen!
A Simple Guide to Small Business Insurance
So long as sciences and social sciences are lumped together as 'a college degree', the advantage and profit associated with a science degree will prop up the expectations of a social sciences degree.

It really does make sense for an experimental physicist to go to college. No matter how bubble-y it may be right now, there aren't many with just a high school degree.
Actually there's a pretty simple way. Start a guaranteed tuition plan. Parents can pay you today's tuition cost for their child to go to college in 5-18 years. If higher education drops then you make money. If they continue to go up, then you lose money.

You probably need to set aside a pretty sizable chunk though in the very possible scenario that college costs continue to rise.
Or compared to the money that could be lost in case of a business interruption.

Some of these companies carry a downtime penalty on the order of hundreds of dollars per second. You really don't want to mess up when there is that kind of money on the line.
Ask HN: Startup with same name as mine, what should I do?
A couple of years ago a friend and I developed a product which we never really pursued that hard as we went off and did other things. The website still exists and runs, but we don't have any users, do any marketing etc. I don't know if we will ever go back and pursue it, but I wouldn't want to close that door either.

At the time we could only get the .net of the domain we wanted. The .com was being used in a completely different field. Last year it came up in a domain auction but the bidding went higher than I was willing to pay so I missed out.

Now someone is getting ready to launch a new website on the .com doing exactly the same thing as what our system does.

My question is can or should I do anything about it, do I have any rights with prior use of the name etc (product name is same as domain etc)?