skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sensationalist attitude? The 1918 influenza epidemic killed an estimated 100 million people at a time when the world was a lot 'smaller' than it is today. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1918_flu_pandemic

The H5N1 virus is wickedly deadly and treatment options are limited. Fortunately it hasn't yet mutated into a form that's easily transmitted between humans.

And then there's the SARS scare which might have been a little over the top but it had all the right ingredients: high morbidity and highly contagious.

Sorry that you find this stuff tiring but the risks are real.
Sampling bias. The respondents will be disproportionately the sort of people who waste time online.
Thanks! Worthy addition.
"It also encourages huge risk taking in mortgages, which recently has seen home prices go up to 30X average income."

I don't know if the government encourages it, but recently they "banned" third mortgages to cool the market down. House-flipping isn't really a Chinese phenomenon.

"It encourages its citizens to forget about the abysmal living condition by allowing internet game cafes to spread like wildfire and trapping the players in pointless alternative realities. So they don't realize they are doing slave labor at $1/day to make ipads."

Wrong demographics. Factories consist of mostly poor migrant workers from the countrysides, they probably don't have the time/money for gaming. Internet cafes cater to urban middle-class kids who can afford to spend all their free time in LAN parties.
Accessing a user's page from the regular directory will also allow you to click through to friends' profiles. This is nothing that wasn't already available.
"Pastured organic pork lard is substantially more likely to lead to trichinosis."

Not true. It is unfortunate that myths like this get spread. Trichinosis is virtually non-existent in the pig populations. If you want trichinosis then I would recommend eating wild bear from down south. If you want to avoid it, just cook your meat. In either case, better not to spread lies from Big Ag.
Sweet, how is MongoDB working for you?
Wow, awesome! Especially cool that you're releasing under CC to allow for translation - thanks :)
Wouldn't the other obvious approach (to storing data in an easily queryable form) be to store it in an actual database? As Fossil does (and apparently Veracity as well, but I'm still not too sure whether it's only storing metadata in a DB or if it's storing everything there) for instance?
You may want to remove the references to AppFlows in the footer on some pages. As it is, both sites show the same diagramme. Is one an earlier version?
http://www.flowshark.com/
http://appflows.com/
You should factor in not only license cost, but the total cost of maintaining and properly patching (as well as the mandatory unscheduled downtime that brings) a Windows stack.

Even if they give you the licenses for free, it's much more expensive.
It's fantastic... Fast, reliable, and damn easy to work with.

Granted, we aren't in production yet... Will see how that goes :)
I'm a C#/ASP.NET developer during the day. My latest project I'm prototyping in Python/web.py/sqlite. Why?

1) Cost, I want to keep costs low.
2) Hedging my bets. I want to see what the open source world has to offer. Can I be productive and not pay a lot of money to MSFT?
I die a little every time I imagine how many companies are putting their lives inside SharePoint black-holes.

OTOH, SharePoint extraction tools seems to me a very profitable model for the coming years.
Thanks! That was a snafu. There was no Hacker News code proper, because I accidentally named the discount hackernews01, and then forgot to fill in the code field with the actual code. Happily, despite the scary warning, E-Junkie's default behavior when this happens is to automatically apply any discounts with a missing code field—which in this case was the very discount whose code didn't work!

It's fixed now, and the discount code should work without any frightening JavaScript popups.

By the way, this is why I always monitor the Hacker News comments obsessively whenever I launch something. You guys rock!
Sharepoint should not fall under this discussion... that's a product and has little to do with a startup's development stack.. Most .net devs won't touch it
Yes, and I appreciate that insight about your customers not thinking about the UI. Flowshark represents the pre-UI stage of planning out an app, and as such I'm doing my best to make the screen elements as devoid as possible of distracting eye candy. The focus is always on the flow.
Well, I would rather live in a world that is making technological progress than a world where everyone was happy all the time. I think people need to be at least a little unhappy to drive progress.
Yeah, but most of the reforms moving us past that point (OSHA, non-discrimination, overtime pay, etc) were actually the work of bonafide socialists.

That was good enough for a while. Now we're starting to see worker's discontent again, it's focused on boogeymen, immigrants and liberals for now, but it'll make it's way back to employers eventually.
The question is will any of those developers make any money with the current state of Android's Market.
On a related note, I just don't see that many people using Android phones but I see iPhone's all over the place.
The Economist has tea with Julian Assange
It's not a false dichotomy. It's not true to say that life is too short to spend doing crap work because some people don't have the choice to make a living in any other way, no matter how reluctant their decision is and no matter how much it cuts against their dreams.
Clojure gets sponsored
Am I the only one that hates having to answer on a spectrum from "Strongly Disagree" to "Strongly Agree"? I don't need 7 choices, just give me Yes/No options.
One thing about Apple and the iPod Touch that I don't understand is why they don't sell a version with 3G on it like the iPad?

I'd seriously not own my iPhone if they did that. The only reason I switched from a Touch to the iPhone is for internet access everywhere.

I've been wondering this since the Touch originally came out and now that the iPad does exactly that, I hope this is in the cards for the next Touch. That could be seriously disruptive.
It could have implicitly meant the League of Nations, precursor to the United Nations, and simply misidentified (or simplified) it as such.
Thanks for catching that, fixed now. Yes, Appflows was our original name idea and we decided to go with something a bit more fun.
That "Price is no longer an issue" is a falacy. You are ignoring the cost of patching and rebooting Windows boxes and the cost of the redundant infrastructure required to accommodate the longer downtime Windows patches require.

And price is no issue only if you fail. If you succeed and have to deploy dozens of servers, you will quickly feel the it in your wallet. You can't grow horizontally as cheaply as you can with any free (even free-as-in-beer) solution.
I propose another reason aside of teachers for the results in The Tennessee experiment,Project Star.

My hypothesis is that children learn of their classmates, not so much of their teachers. A creative mind can give their classmates a lot of things to play with and can make them feel happy and motivated while playing or learning.

Perhaps some researcher would consider this a plausible hypothesis that worth to be tested. In Project Star you could compare the different groups with the same teacher, if there is not a global increase, it can indicate that the teacher is not the main factor, giving additional support to my (your, take it for free) hypothesis.

Searching with google "children learn from their classmates", I found Montessory philosophy and ideas. So I refine the hypothesis: a Montessory style of teaching empower the effect of children learning of each other. So to summarize my hypothesis or explanation of the Project Star experiment:

1. Children learn of each other, this is the main factor.

2. Teachers have a secondary effect on learning.

3. The combination of factor 1) and 2) is empowered with a style of teaching such as Montessory style, giving learning freedom to learn of each other, collaborate, explore, and obtain self respect. This combination is the greatest indicator of future achievement in life.
Facebook Q&A Service 'Questions' Begins Rolling Out
The StarCraft Economy
My dad, who grew up in the Soviet Union, was similarly impressed.
What ‘Platonic’ Means Online
kinda irritating if you spend the time giving a service your details if the product barely exists yet.
Orwell was just predicting what the future would be like if Stalinism took over the world in 1984. He had plenty of experience with it while fighting in the Spanish Civil War on the side of the anarchists POUM and often in conflict with the Stalinist backed factions.

The government of North Korea was founded by Kim Il Sung who was hand picked by Stalin to run the country, so it's only natural that they would try to implement the model Orwell was talking about.
I was thinking about this. If NK spread around the world, it would be curtains. 1984 would be realized, there would be no escape. However NK receives aid from the UN (that it denies). I'm guessing (hoping) it wouldn't be sustainable otherwise.
1. It's not difficult to customize Windows. There are well defined SDKs and interfaces for most of the kernel points. Honestly, how many web startups are customizing their kernel?

3. The performance differences are negligible in the general case. Startups write their own code so most of the performance differences are going to come from the code they write rather than underlying performance differences.
In both cases, python vs. C# / .NET you can always drop down to C. I doubt that whatever their problems are they stem from language / compiler. Most sites are IO bound. IO bound applications are largely a factor of how many disks you have. The throughput for writing a file in PHP and C are identical on machines with less than 10 disks.

4. Licensing costs decrease drastically as you scale on the MSFT side.
According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALGOL, a quote often attributed to Dijkstra, but actually written about Algol by C. A. R. Hoare in 1973: "Here is a language so far ahead of its time that it was not only an improvement on its predecessors but also on nearly all its successors."
Perhaps then it's more of a mindset issue since .Net is used in a lot of traditional business - aka they already have SQL, Windows Server 2008 and Sharepoint running for example.

.Net might just attract personality types that are more risk averse, aka programmers more interested in a steady paycheck than the ups/downs/stress of the startup life.
If someone applies for YC intending to use MS tech, do you count that as a point against?
Joint Preparation and welding procedure for SAW
Loopt is based on Microsoft's technology stack. We use:

Windows Server 2008 R2, SQL Server 2008 R2, IIS 7, C#, ASP.Net MVC 2, WCF, AppFabric and more. We also use Ubuntu, Apache, PostGRE SQL, and many other open source technologies and libraries.

I'd imagine most people don't use Microsoft's offerings because they're expensive (but affordable with volume licensing). They're also rarely on the bleeding edge, but sometimes that's a good thing. They offer some things you can't easily get with open source offerings, like:

SQL Server: Mirroring, Transparent Data Encryption, Spatial, Partitioned Indexed Views, and Full Text Search (all in one offering)

IIS 7: Ability to host transport independent services. That means the same code can be accessed over TCP, HTTP, MSMQ, or custom protocols you write yourself, and all be monitored and managed (lifecycle, health, etc) from one place. The closest open source offering I've heard of is Mongrel 2 (which looks awesome).

And so far, I've only encountered one bug that's affected our production code. It's really quality stuff that just works.
Threaded model has two detractors;

Foremost, context switching. This is a non-trivial process: on-die caches get flushed, virtual memory has to get re-mapped, registers re-loaded. This is by definition lost time, time the OS is spent not doing your workload. If the number of context switches gets too large, a system is spending an inordinate amount of time performing context switches, and less time doing "real work" inside threads. You cite two isues, slow and not scaling.

Second, memory usage. Each thread has its own stack space, which consumes a fixed memory size.

As to "slow" and "does not scale;" slow is relative; the amount of time spent context switching is very dependent on a variety of workload factors. Threading _can_ be slow. Scaling, on the other hand, is less unequivocal. A quarter million active threads, each doing very little, is not a good thing: too much memory, too many context switches, and too high a latency.

The problem is not threading per se. It's pre-emptive multi-threading, where a programs state is transparently pulled from the CPU by the OS and serialized to someplace else, and another programs state is de-serialized and loaded in transparent; that is, without the loaded or unloaded program knowing. Erlang and tasklets are examples of userspace or lightweighs threads where pre-emption is not permitted, and the context switching penalty is negligible. Instead of threads being ignorant, and being preemptively swapped in and out, they are coordinated and actively yield themselves back to the scheduler, thereby reducing the context switching penalty.
I was taught that the purpose of virtual memory was originally for running multiple programs without their memory spaces overlapping rather than to use more memory than the system actually had. Is this incorrect?
Is that because not many people are using Android phones around you, or because they're using garden variety handsets with Android and you just don't notice them because a) they don't have that distinctive iPhone style, or b) people don't feel the need to flash their Android phones around like they do with iPhones?

I'm not trying to be snarky about it, but I've noticed multiple times in public that peolpe have Android phones just because I recognize one of their distinctive ringtones or notification sounds. I've also noticed that 9/10 people who keep their phone out and visible are basically wearing their iPhone as a fashion item rather than a functional device.
60 percent of the developers asked had been or are working on Android projects, with the iPhone and Jave ME following behind with roughly 50 percent each.

Exactly how does the linkbait headline follow from any of the data on the page? Even if we assume that this difference is both statistically significant and not an artifact?

Even "Android developers and apps are growing in numbers", while apparently true according to other sources, isn't shown by this data. These data are from a single point in time.
"A better way to visualize and plan user experiences."

IMHO: "A better way to visualize and plan user flows."

then sub text: "Create, share and collaborate on creating beautiful user experiences with your team."

Your primary message is: this lets you create user flows

and the secondary message is: *collaborate & create great UX"

whereas currently it's the other way around.

The screenshot when clicked should lightbox and add some more details

I'm not sure what the text below is meant to mean, honestly. "Built for people who build software" but then you list various other job titles in addition to developers...

As I mentioned above, was hoping that I could use it today, I think posts where you can't actually "review" a product (because it doesn't exist) should be titled as such on Hacker News.

Why does your contact google map zoom in on the ocean? :)

Love to get in the beta though, signed up.
> You don't have to endure multiple "No's" trying to convince clients to accept your offering. You can find out what they need and build that.

True story here:

Client: I want it to feel like a storybook, complete with an opening page that has a child talking, and lots of animals around to make it look Snow White-ish.

Me: OK, here's exactly that.

Client: Yes, that is exactly like a storybook and has everything I asked for, but — nah, I don't want that. You're fired. I've hired another guy. Here's his design: It's a tall pink box with a bunch of unsearchable green text inside JPEGs and a couple of photos of flowers randomly dropped in.

The moral of the story is that asking people what they want does not guarantee a yes.
I actually heard of a "green energy" startup that listed Oracle and Crystal Reports as a requirement. It was one of those grotesque things started by lawyers and energy veterans.

I usually latch on to people with extensive domain expertise outside of computing, just to see where things might lead, but that particular one felt very FAILy and the people too unreachable and bureaucratic (i.e. "fax the requirements to my office and I will tell the girl to embed them inside the spreadsheet" -- horrible.)
Just bought it. I have a feeling this will be a better value than my $1500 Thoughtbot class. :)
ryah immediately posted the following series of tweets, to such effect:

"Thanks-some valid criticisms. The story doesn't stop at the process boundary. Concurrency through Spawning&IPC should be discussed"

"ie, "actors", although not explicitly given that name, are baked in. I just don't feel then need to put them inside the same process."

asked about impl discussion;

"Not really. It's not fancy: unix socks, no framing protocols, no RPC daemons. But using what's there is a valid concurrency solution."
Ah, sorry. I didn't actually know the law. Looked it up on Wikipedia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law

It's wrongly stated there, so you might want to change it there as well.
So, by your logic, roads and sewage are private goods? Basically everything except the military? Consistent with a libertarian.

In almost no city does the teacher's union essentially control the political system. The police union is always, always more powerful, for one. They're just more politically engaged, people who are driven by power. Several private unions will be more powerful. And that's leaving out every power broker that isn't a union (representing most of the power).

"All that whining about how impossible it is to measure programmer productivity is just an attempt by developers to avoid accountability." You might consider that you don't know a single thing about teaching in a non-college or lower-class environment. No offense. I don't claim to, either. But I'll at least listen to what every teacher I've ever met says about the matter.
Any native speakers able to translate from the Yosion web forums (http://translate.google.com/translate?js=y&prev=_t&h...)?

The google version just isn't cutting it.
More From Google Chief: Facebook Not a Competitor
Great job guys! I was looking forward to this update, as it should help streamline the header image editing quite a bit without having to continuously go into the css editor. This is definitely going to help a few of my non-technical clients make a few of their own image adjustments as well.
In our case it's as cost effective to light up a Rackspace Windows VM than it is a Linux VM... There are maintenance costs on both sides.

If you have to deploy dozens of servers on any platform you will quickly feel that in your wallet.
If you already have software guys that are satisfied with their jobs have them do some of the recruiting with you. My company sends its engineers to college recruiting fairs.

Also, some things that I like about my job that I would assume a non-software company does not offer:

-Control over how I code (IDE use and coding style). Some companies (even software based companies) micromanage this.

-Somewhat flexible hours.

-Managers that stared off as software guys.
Yeah that's a good point that I think non-.Net dev's aren't aware of - you really aren't that locked into doing it the 'MS Way'. Like you mentioned you don't have to use SQL - it's up to you, really, on the DB.

Similarly, you don't have to use ASPX/WebForms either; a lot of people I know are switching to MVC and not using any of the .net ms usercontrols on the front-end, instead going with open standards and using something like jQuery to handle a lot of the UI and web-service interaction. This is the approach I've taken in recent years, and it makes it a ton easier to create clients for other platforms like iPhone, Droid, etc.
Thanks for the feedback. The google map is zoomed in on a shark :)
Hilarious amount of hardware? How do you figure? If you put a Rails app next to a ASP.Net app that do the same thing I guarantee there's not a "hilarious" difference in the hardware needed to run them.
We're using ASP.Net MVC2 with Mongo DB as well. So far the experience has been fabulous. Even more so considering that the entire development process from coding to deployment has been done completely on Linux - giving us more flexibility with deployments like being able to use Varnish for caching, etc.

We spent three weeks evaluating Rails, Flask and Django for the app, and the team had experience with all three tools. The risky move to a statically typed, compiled environment paid off because of a solid IDE and good surrounding tools.
How astronauts who couldn't get life insurance made life insurance
Neat idea.

Website low-contrast, full-justification can make pages like http://www.utsup.com/about harder to read. (Some downvoted comments on HN have higher text-contrast, and HN is trying to hide those!) Looks like the app uses the same low-contrast text in many places.
I don't buy that.

Have you ever read Fish? http://www.charthouse.com/productdetail.aspx?nodeid=11010

There is an art to everything it's just a matter of finding it and you can learn a great deal from even the most tedious work.
This is why I don't go to Dick's sporting goods anymore.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commission_on_Narcotic_Drugs

Founded in 1921
I meant after weeks of sending out resumes to companies you wanted to work, and hearing nothing back. That would be most people's experience.
Have you made comparison of windows hosting vs linux hosting in terms of price?
Yeah on that note you can use ANY view engine to run your ASP.Net MVC application - you are not locked in to the classic web forms system. We use jQuery and standards based html/css to do everything.
At some arbitrary time in the past I did use the xorg server from this ppa https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-x-swat/+archive/xserver-no-bac... when I was using compiz and things were slow on an ati card. I dont know if that ppa is updated for lucid but you could give it a try. If youre using it as a htpc you can disable compiz no ? I mean in most cases wouldnt you want to directly boot into mythtv / xbmc ? Also can you specify what card are you using ? If its x1xxx series or earlier then youre beyond the support window (the closed source driver is only for newer cards) and you might be better off using the radeonhd driver. I think I should do a write up on how to setup ati drivers on linux the right way. It takes < 5 mins to get a dual head display with auto detection going these days. HINT: aticonfig is your friend.
One mans recession is another mans opportunity.
the particular danger i'd cite w/r/t JS is that its a much more flexible language than many, and that there's not the same level of entrenched best practices and tooling to enforce best practices. in other words, everyone knows JS, granted, but they know very different styles of it.

consider the plethora of means of doing inheritance that exist for JS.
> I've also noticed that 9/10 people who keep their phone out and visible are basically wearing their iPhone as a fashion item rather than a functional device.

I really don't understand this perception of the iPhone as a fashion device or a status symbol. Everyone has one, there isn't much status to that, and it works really well which might be why people have it out and ready to use. At least thats why at a bar or casual restaurant I'll have mine out 8 times out of 10.