skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You care when a bogus test or false accusation gets you in trouble even though you have not used drugs.

Like that article on DFS previously -- it's good to know about abuses in the system so you can be ready if/when it happens to you.

I imagine any articles about writing the Declaration of Independence on hemp paper would be dead pretty quickly.
This is going to be the next "Hitler finds out that..." meme, isn't it? Or is it already there?
Bring me Cakes and Ale
Obama demos healthcare.gov
Possibly not the third reality, but the only reality. What if pleasure and control are always two sides of the fascist coin? The totalitarian master isn't only saying "Sacrifice yourself for the good of the Nation, discipline yourself, follow the rules and give up your pleasures." He also says "We will break all the rules, no restrictions, all pleasures are permitted - we can kill some Jews, rape some slaves, lynchings and torture are OK!" The obscene underside of the control and discipline in the KKK and Nazism is the orgy of violence, throwing off the normal repressive rules of society that control our impulses.

Why is fascism so closely associated with control and discipline? The purpose is to conceal the totalitarianism inherent in our own society, like how we were taught that American society is free because individuals can enjoy their consumer pleasures, while people in the Soviet Union are subjected to discipline and control.
Follow along at http://www.healthcare.gov/
Follow the leader?
People like to work on what they're interested in, and share it. If you've spent a long time becoming a skilled programmer, you probably have a strong interest in software in general and you'd like for a lot of people to use what you make. This causes obvious problems if you want to hire them into a non-software company and keep most of their work in-house.

One solution to this is to look for people who are very skilled programmers but have already developed an interest in your problem domain. For example, a scientific company will often look at people who have already worked within that domain, and are skilled with programming, but are willing to move out of a lab-based role and into a purely programming role. (Disclaimer: this describes my current situation.) I'm much less familiar with finance, but you'd probably do well looking for people experienced in finance who have also developed programming skills, rather than pure CS people. If finance is anything like other fields, your best bet is probably to go hunting for grad students. :-)
>A directory containing personal details about more than 100 million Facebook users has surfaced on an Internet file-sharing site.

Oh you mean like the public directory that is already available on facebook that you've linked to in your article? Give me a break.
The paid/free argument isn't really a valid basis for business decisions. Developing software is extremely expensive, even using free software. However, there are numerous overriding benefits of open source software.

#1: Startup founders use technology they know. Open source developers tend to be willing to trade more risk and effort for a more tailored and flexible end product. This is a similar personality profile to someone who's willing to put in a large amount of work to build a business and potentially get nothing for it. Microsoft builds run-of-the-mill, sure-thing products that will at least do something well, and they'll support it for you. Commercial software dictates their software model: take few risks and sell to broadest audience.

#2: Interoperability. Microsoft software works outstandingly well with other Microsoft software. Open source software tends to be built on open standards, and, again, if you have the source, it's always possible to hack it together. The open nature means less business risk when making software decisions. The way out is of a situation where software won't do what you need it to do is to use the source, even if only as a temporary patch.

#3: Automation. While things are getting better, it's still much easier to automate most open source software, since these products usually either have a CLI, an API, or even in the worst case scenario: source code.

#4: Even with BizSpark, licensing has limits on your companies' use of technology. Simple example: Do we go with a bunch of small boxes or a few large boxes? Licensing concern may drive your team to fundamentally flawed architecture decisions.
has been for a little bit, or at least i saw this one a while ago http://damncoolpics.blogspot.com/2010/05/some-humor-from-bil...
I use an almost entirely MS stack for my analytics platform:
http://www.swfstats.com/

It's a number of applications ranging from windows services to command line utils and websites. Using .NET I'm able to do all of that in C# and not have to switch mindsets when I jump back and forth between all the different facets of it. I can also easily re-use code/classes between distinct applications.

These days I can be found in just about every major Flash game that's coming out. In total I run on 2x dedicated and 1x vps, however I've been working my ass off on making things massively more efficient and could easily reduce my hosting.

Some fun stats:

- I do about 130 - 150 million events per day

- the biggest game by views = 30 million

- the biggest game by total events = 2.27 billion events

- I lag about 4 or 5 minutes behind real time

- I spend more on coffee then I do on licenses on my servers

Open source I'm using:

- MongoDB for my (alpha) level sharing API + an open source C# library for using it

- ClamWin

- FileZilla

- an open source C# markdown library

- an open source C# geoip library
Redis understands URLs, so you can send it directly via connect:

Resque.redis = Redis.connect(ENV["REDISTOGO_URL"])
I think it's just 'fashionable' to not talk about your tech if you're using microsoft tools (aka .net framework). Mainly it seems that HN is very pro anything else. I'm actually the lead for 2 Denver start-ups myself (also a BizSpark member); I'm building everything on the back-end in c#/sql and using web-services to consume the data in my web and mobile apps. For me it's just a speed issue since I have 10 years C# experience and a ton of code to leverage. Plus if you get into BizSpark (which seems automatic if you are a HN member) you receive a free MSDN subscription which includes full copies of SQL, Visual Studio, Windows 7, Office, etc, so the 'cost' is really a non-factor.
Redis also manages URLs directly: Redis.connect('redis://localhost:6379/1') works as expected.
To deal with high demand, the server is being restarted once a minute.

Wow, they really are trying to imitate Rails.
The cop has the power of the state in their hands. If it was an arbitrary individual, I wouldn't care. But a cop can do nearly anything they like to you, and unless you have a video, you're likely out of luck. The state and courts will generally side with the cop.

There are some things the state can do to make the encounter better, such as _requiring_ that all police/citizen interactions be required, except in cases that would put the police in harms way (like getting caught in the middle of a shoot out).
The Most Common Mistakes When Growing an Idea into a Business
Windows, IIRC, has a filesystem caching system which is distinct from VM.
After spending almost 20 hours on the phone with Microsoft support last week I can tell you why I wouldn't use it as my technology stack - you can't dig in to understand and fix a lot of things yourself.
That's totally awesome then. Though with one slight modification to the goal there, in that I don't want my customers thinking about UI. It should be so easy and fluid that they don't have to think about it. They shouldn't know what UI is. They shouldn't even realize that they're doing my work for me. I like your notion of "playfully intuitive". It should be a fun little way for them to make my site work for them.
You're absolutely right -- things are much better now than any time in history, for a majority of the world's population.

But "better" really means "more choices are available." We should try to make sure that we make the best choices, and that's what posts like these are trying to help us do.
This is awesome. I actually built a very similar tool about 9 years ago and it's incredible how effective it is for selling/managing business consulting services. It's amazing how many barriers can be overcome by simply getting everyone involved to visualize the discussion in terms of simple, changeable work flows.

The one I built had the following features:

- people could make suggestions for how to improve the flow
- email notifications when a flow was changed
- document uploads tied to each step
- tracking whether each user had viewed new flow changes, etc.

I have gone into a sales meeting and sold thousands of dollars of consulting services just by drawing out how this tool works on a napkin or scrap of paper. The idea is so simple and powerful that it is extremely valuable for businesses that care about process improvement.

I strongly recommend against listening to the 1% of people who get mad that it doesn't do all sorts of complex branching, etc.

I no longer work with the company I built it for (I was a minor partner) but I believe they still use it extensively, though it's focused only on supporting business/management consulting services and not on UI design, etc. We would routinely get $15-20 per user/month for it.
Blog spam, the original is here: http://www.recombinantrecords.net/docs/2009-05-Amusing-Ourse...

And the original discussion here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=627476

Edit: (article link was changed by moderator)
You are free to form your own opinion about "illegal" substances, but no one should be penalized for behavior that does not infringe on the rights of another individual. In short, Marijuana and all other drugs should be legal. Acts which violate the rights of others, committed under the influence of substances (or any condition really) is no different than an act committed with a clear mind/body.

Trying to prevent crime by criminalizing victimless actions only creates more crime.
Just to add onto this: a company I worked for was a somewhat heavy user of a 3rd party api, and they integrated our key use cases into their test scenarios in order to avoid breakage.

Depending upon what percentage of Java developers use eclipse, seeing if it still works seems fairly reasonable.
More About Google's Experiments (A/B testing)
I'd love to talk to you more about this. Would you mind shooting me an email at hajrice@gmail.com ?
unless used in a reductio ad hitlerum or a reductio ad outsourcedum situation, it does not apply.
UTSUP: Simple Team Awareness
Study About IP On The Human Genome Shows That Patents Hindered Innovation
This is just an archive of URLs and names. It's pretty useless data. It saves you from crawling Facebook's names directory but to actually get any data about users you'll need to crawl 100 million+ pages. This data is hardly worth putting a torrent up for.
How to use check_box in nested model forms
Details of 100m Facebook users collected and leaked
and Free > non-Free
My startup uses MS technology, primarily because both my self and my partner have many years of experience on the MS platform.

Regarding cost, it's really not that bad -- especially if you qualify for the BizSpark program.
I hate to look a gift horse in the mouth, but e-junkie is vomiting on the code.

EDIT: No, wait, the discount happens and e-junkie reports that the code is invalid. ;) So I guess it's just a scary false alarm. Might want to fix it though; it nearly scared me away, so count me as an "A" in the informal A/B test of "scary popup/no scary popup".
Education is not a public good since it's both rivalrous and excludible. That makes it a private good. The fact that a private good is provisioned by the government does not make it a public good.

Also, the labor market for most govt employees is not remotely a free market. Unions keep out the competition, essentially getting no-bid contracts to supply labor. They play politics to elect politicians who will give them what they want - in many cities the teachers unions essentially control the political system. You might as well call Halliburton's no-bid contracts in Iraq a "free market". It's a "free market", closed to new entrants, with no negotiation between the buy and sell side, but with the buy and sell side colluding to rip off the public.

In any case, just because it's tough to quantitatively measure some development does not mean it's tough to measure teacher performance. Students either know the material at the end of the term or they don't, simple as that.

All the whining about how it's impossible is really just an attempt by teachers unions to avoid accountability. I'm sure Halliburton would love to avoid accountability for their performance in Iraq and elsewhere too, doesn't mean we should take them seriously.
I don't think it's just a matter of fashion. Only a handful of the startups we've funded use anything from Microsoft.
splashup.com does. anywhere.fm did.
Why did Joystick Labs (accelerator program for gaming companies) choose RTP, NC?
Here Comes Payback Time. Prepare for Storage Shortages.
Hey,
I just wanted to say thanks for writing this.
It really made it easy for me to get into rails development.
Anyone who is interested in starting rails should definitely take a look at this.
Can't wait to take a look at the Rails 3 version.
Because who wants to run Windows on a server?

Yes, you can, many people do, but it's less common, which is why basing a startup on an MS stack is less common.
Wait a few years...
Ziipa.com-Start-ups and web 2.0 discovery
Visual discovery platform fro start-ups and web 2.0 applications.
Well there tend to be two classes of startups. There are the YC-like startups. Which I think are often college grads or recent college grads. College students are generally familiar with open source software. I certainly never touched MS software in college.

The other class of startups are those by relatively successful people who left their current job to start a company. More of the Spolsky model. Here you'll find a lot more MS-based stacks. Usually because they're familiar with it and with BizSpark the upfront cost is relatively cheap.

Of course these startups probably have different funding models, so you hear about them less on places like TechCrunch. Lastly, they are often more enterprise focused as their experience in industry has given them the ability to see gaps in the enterprise offerings (college students don't do enterprise focused startups) -- but they aren't exciting consumer technologies. But a companies like Topaz Bridge are still doing some interesting stuff.
There are tons of startups using the Microsoft stack... Just because they don't live on HN or don't appear on Techcrunch does not mean they don't exist.

Microsoft even has BizSpark - a network to provide resources to startups (we are one). All you can eat Microsoft software via MSDN.

"Price" is no longer an issue and Microsoft has made a point of building a solid startup ecosystem around their stack.
Great question. The flows created in Flowshark provide the foundation for you to move forward with your page-level design mockups. In other words, this is a tool to figure out from a high level what the user will see/do on each screen. Once your team (or clients) reach a consensus on the user flow, the next step would be to get into more detailed wireframes and high-fidelity comps. Think of Flowshark as a central, always-current map that everyone on your team can reference while they're working on their specific parts of the project.
Does anyone know a good book that explains these things (CPU caches, RAM, virtual memory, etc.) in more detail?
It's just not trendy and the release cycle is very long compared to open source. The long release cycle contributes to the tech side being less newsworthy. Also, the stack is fairly standardized so if you are making a website your stack is going to be either ASP.NET or ASP.NET MVC and it's going to run on the sanctioned VM, and you'll likely be running SQL Server.

Contrast this with the ruby stack you might be running MRI, YARV, Rubinius for your VM, and then for your web framework you might be running rack, sinatra, etc. Thus when someone makes their stack OpenBSD + YARV + Sinatra + Active Record it's newsworthy as the non-standardization likely created some kind of interesting issue they needed to solve. This stuff doesn't happen on the MSFT side of things. If someone says they are doing a MSFT start up the only real question about their stack is LINQ-to-SQL / ADO.NET entities / nhibernate. I already know that the rest of their stack is going to be Win2k(3|8)R2 + IIS + ASP.NET + SQL Server and it's going to be written in C#.

I was considering doing an Win2k8R2/F#/MVC/nhaml/LINQ-TO-SQL start up but my market isn't tech guys so any blogging I did about my unique stack would attract people who wouldn't be interested in the startup.
It was a SharePoint issue with the emails it sends out and it ended up being a permission issue (well, not even sure you would call it that - but the fix was resetting the system account's password). There had been no changes in accounts or anything else besides the creation of new sites and to make it even harder no error messages or useful logging. I've seen issues like this more times than I can count over the years and sometimes there is no solution that can be found. With open source it might take a lot of work, but there is always a fix that can be made.
Other nasties to look out for: follow on queries that could have been done at the time of the first one and joins.
Yes, that's pedantic.
Asking for zip code, age, gender, and earnings is a little much for an anonymous survey. That is pretty specific.
I'm ok with proof of concept sort of things - everything has to start somewhere. However, I think that having an idea of what it'll eventually be good at helps. Haskell seems to be fairly performant... what else? Concise? I suppose, although I can't read it enough to tell what it's even doing.
In NZ $80k USD would be epic!
Interesting article, horrific story, but one oddity stuck out: "The Duquenois test was developed in the late 1930s by a French pharmacist, Pierre Duquénois, while he was working for the United Nations division of narcotics."

The UN wasn't founded until 1945. How did he do this work for the UN in the late 30s? Should that be late 40s?
"I get out more now than I did five years ago"

I mean, 5 years ago I was in college...
The parental access is a really small piece depending on where you are. The larger the district the more important it is from what I've seen. The district my wife teaches in just moved over to Infinite Campus and it has very little to do with the parental access features and everything to do with the data retention and security issues, federal accountability, and all the tracking features. It's horrible software but it checks all of the boxes on the bean counters and mid level managers check lists at the district and state offices.

In addition to adding the new software it's been mandated that every teacher use it and all other grade book software has been banned. Even if what learnboost is producing is the most amazing thing in the world these teachers can't use it. The existing system is such a pain in the ass there is also the added issue of no teacher wanting to do double data entry.

Any company that wants to break the stranglehold these companies have in the space is going to have to come in with a complete solution at a lower cost. Most of the software will also be required to run within the existing infrastructure or be dropped in, so forget about running on one of the various cloud infrastructures.
I must take this opportunity to note that the ASP.Net MVC release cycle is far more aggressive than Rails.

Secondly... SQL Server is by no means required in the stack. We are using MongoDB as our datasource in an ASP.Net MVC app. You can use ANY database.
I didn't think blackboard had any patents pertaining to grade books but in their collaboration and online lesson pieces. Even so, most of them wouldn't likely hold up in court now due to Bilski.
MS seems to have equalized most of the initial price advantage of FOSS with their free bizspark stuff. Other issues involved:

1. Many startup hackers are good enough customize Linux for their needs, but would lack that freedom under Windows.

2. Open source security model perceived as more reliable than MS's security through obscurity.

3. Performance. Not an expert here, but from anecdotal evidence of running Win7 vs Ubuntu10.04 on my desktop, and WinXP mobile vs Ubuntu UNR on my netbook, in both cases Linux can run more servers, background, and foreground processes simultaneously with no system degredation than Windows can. My netbook under UNR is especially amazing - slow and clunky under Win7, as responsive as a desktop under UNR. Does that carry over to servers too? (and can you run a headless Windows server?)

The recent article on Reddit's server costs brought up an interesting consideration about hardware maybe not being as cheap as it is reputed to be, at least not in the Amazon cloud, and that maybe choosing your technology stack based on its inherent performance is still a valid issue (eg, choosing Rails (or MS) for developer productivity and then throwing servers at it till it performs well enough may be more costly than perceived).

Can't say for sure since I haven't used MS products for web stuff in almost 10 years.

4. Vendor lock in, increasing licensing costs as you scale.
Morality in Web Development – Your Thoughts?
Hey Paul. Yes, and I think it's great for jumpstarting the process when talking about a new flow and getting new ideas. We're taking this general concept in a more collaborative (but private) direction with Flowshark.
Funny, I was just reading about this.

"A young man Demick interviewed read 1984 after he escaped to [South Korea]. He was startled to learn that George Orwell, back in the 1940s, had perfectly understood the thinking of modern North Koreans."

http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2010/07/24/robert-fulfor...
yeah because it's the year of the android. also linux arrives on the desktop.
Yeah, sorry about that.

I was torn about what to put in there. No right answer, really. At the end of the day I decided I would rather have fewer answers with more data than more answers with fewer data.

Things like gender, income, and zip are pretty important, actually. (I should have asked eduction level! doh!) The thing is, without any kind of specific tags, it's just a random opinion survey, whereas with the data it's possible to say something like "yeah, but that's only true for rich people living on the east coast", or "sure it shows a lot of internet usage, but the average age is 17, so probably you grow out of it" -- I think those kinds of observations are very important, and I wouldn't have wanted to do the survey without them. The goal here is to try to have a detailed conversation -- as anonymously as possible -- so that then I can post results back here and then we're talking data and not opinions so much.
Stack Exchange / Stack Overflow is MS based. Exception rather than the rule though.
That's a false dichotomy. The issue is not doing crap work, the issue is doing it reluctantly. If you put a little effort into your work and think of the big picture, even the stupidest job can be considered a success if you pair it with a solid Plan-B and an exit strategy.

Work on crap, but also work on your dreams while at it. What do you have to give up beside TV and idling? I bet this English graduate did nothing on his spare time but read Walt Whitman. If he is so smart, why hasn't he reverse-engineered human interaction and learned how to build rapport with people? Hint: you meet people on their terms when you need them. Learn to mimic their personalities and walk in lockstep with them.