skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Fortunately Intel is not quite so dumb as to not have multiple irons in the fire at the same time. But they came closer to killing the company with Itanium & NetBurst than they ever had before.

Itanium is a special case of the classic problem of trying to rebuild from scratch. If you do it right it can be a huge win, if you do it wrong you can kill the company. Generally speaking most times that such efforts fail it's due to ignoring the need to take the new architecture through enough iterations to gain maturity and parity with the old architecture, and ignoring the extensive costs of having 2 parallel architectures in play at the same time and the costs associated with transitioning from one to the other. The efforts that fail almost always assume that the new system will be 100% capable on day 1 and the switchover will be effortless and complete instantaneously (rather than costly, time consuming, and incremental).
We did a podcast interview with Chris McCann of StartupDigest just a couple weeks ago. Lots of interesting topics were covered. It's well worth a listen.

http://techzinglive.com/?p=243
Oh, I'm not a foodie. I don't know how to fry an egg either.

;)
Or you could download this PDF (http://www.newmoney.gov/newmoney/files/100_Materials/100_Glo...) containing a nice large scan of one with some light SPECIMEN text overlaid.

As for the Treasury having a problem with it, if you make your file/printed copy one-sided and either <.75x or >1.5x in scale (and delete the files you used to create it when done), they don't care.
Ask HN: Laws that should exist but don't
I'm curious if there are any obvious laws that enforce common sense (which sadly is not that common) which you think should exist in the US but currently don't. It would be even better to find out if they are already in the works.

Here's two off the top of my head:

1) Make it illegal for TV commercials to display 10 lines of size 1 font at the bottom of a TV ad for 2 seconds. Nobody can see it. Nobody can read it even if they could see it. The law should be something like this:

"Any textual information displayed on a tv commercial should be of big enough size to be easily read in its entirety in the time displayed!"

2) Make it illegal for companies' customer service to play an automated message about recording your conversation (eg. "This conversation may be monitored for quality assurance purposes") without giving you the option to opt out. Not only can you not opt out, but if you let them know that you are recording the conversation (as required by law in most states) most of them will either hang up on you or refuse to continue the conversation. The law should be something like this:

"No company should be allowed to record a conversation without your consent. No company should be allowed to deny you customer service if you refuse to be recorded. "
No idea. Personally, I hate DUMBO and find it very inconvenient (from elsewhere in Brooklyn), but I know maybe a dozen hacker types who live over there.
My best guess would be because the blog post was rather uninformative and it would seem that enough people clicked the "flag" link for the story to get killed.

Sorry, but your blog post really doesn't convey anything useful about how the sale of your hooptie somehow even remotely relates to startups or things that "hackers find interesting" (paraphrasing).
I see how it works with Firefox, but how can you get it too work with IE?
After focusing so much on the ones and zeroes, posts like this snap us back to all that really matters: other people.

In the past year, I have made dramatic changes in my life, both personal and business, for one reason: so that I can spend time with my mother who is suffering from severe dementia. We watch Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune every night together. I yell out all the answers and she laughs, not caring whether they're right or wrong.

Before she started slipping away last year, she told me 2 things:

"From the moment I first saw you, I knew I would love you unconditionally forever."

and

"I'm so proud of you."

Everything else from this point forward is gravy.

Thank you, Alexis.
YES!

The piece got picked up by TechMeme, and our server imploded.

We're working hard on getting it back up right now. Apologies for the delay.

Feel free to flame away at being cocky Bay Area types who can't manage a damn server properly....
Yes, but you should still have 1 focus. Don't worry that you can't explain everything in the tagline, "bookkeeping" is much better than "management". You have to be specific. You'll get a chance to explain all the other wonderful stuff later :)
Great movie. Thanks
Six teens drown in rescue attempt
Yes. Please post it on HN when its ready for some testing.
Again with this idea that Mongrel2 isn't working. You sir have no freaking idea what you're talking about.

"That's just plain wrong. Premature optimisation does not refer to having to measure before you optimise, it refers to optimising things that in practice may have little or no effect on the actual performance of the program."

No, that's just plain wrong. Premature optimisation is actually implementing something convoluted thinking it's optimized without knowing whether it actually is or not. It's voodoo cargo cult science. It's going against occam's razor.

There's nothing in Mongrel2 that's premature optimized. It's all very simple algorithms chosen for the right task, and later on I'll be testing them to see if they're still right. So your claim that this is premature optimization is just a buzzword and completely offensive. I took a long time to actually test my ideas before implementing them.

That's the total inverse of premature optimization.

What is total voodoo junk science is most of what you say. So far I haven't seen one set of data or any scientific experimental design or even a single testable hypothesis backing what you claim. It's all just rhetoric.

Until you've got hard numbers backing what you say, everything you're saying is inferior to what I'm doing: science.
So why did it get 15 upvotes?
This has been said before and better here and elsewhere, but thanks for sharing your story Alexis, very inspiring and moving. Perseverance like yours is sensational.
Reverse engineering Apple's secret charging methods
Another thing that came to mind that this article alludes to: on the East Coast (and most other places) salesmen and MBA types always outrank geeks. It's deeply ingrained in the culture. Those who can do. Those who can't lead. Being a doer makes your social rank lower.

Ok, I'm way exaggerating. It's not that bad. But that mentality is present, and the best way for me to explain it was to describe it in its purest form. You rarely actually encounter it that bad, but I have at least once.
Sure, that's one perspective that's perfectly valid. But for something that doesn't remotely relate to things that "hackers find interesting," it got a lot of upvotes.

I have no problem––obviously––with people not liking stories or thinking they're boring, but why kill something that's obviously popular with at least some segment of the community.
Technical website? I thought this was more about business..
In Buenos Aires, most people don't wear T-shirts, but Che is a pretty popular image. He's right up there with Homer Simpson and Bob Marley.
I've been working on this for around six months. It's just two of us at this point.

Check out the coverage in the NYT [1] and RWW [2]. I'd really love your feedback, suggestions, etc. Thanks!

--

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/02/business/media/02startup.h...

[2] http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/newsbasis_connecting_jo...
Why no Scala?
We're back!

Sorry for the interruption in service. We got hosed when TechMeme carried the piece.
First off, again you miss the point that I've already got poll working in Mongrel2. If this fails (which I'll know since I like, measure stuff rather than care a bottle of cheetah blood around like you) then I'll just go put epoll in there or leave it with poll.

But hey, if I don't make it back alive from my complete dangerous experiment in disproving that epoll is always the way to go always you can come get me. Bring a big gun because this stuff is so scawy and howwible I might not make out alive.
No, I'm saying that big canines are useful for killing things, not eating meat. People don't kill the way a tiger does, and probably never have. I don't see how it follows that people weren't designed to eat meat.
We use sangoma here. (Far more reliable than digium in our experience). We just set up a test bench with extra cards (a cisco 1720 with t1 wic for data and an asterisk box with another sangoma in master mode for simulating a telco). This allows us to test with any of the bazillion different line protocols you're likely to face on site (especially in a 3rd world setting).

Also when we face the inevitable problems on site, we can simulate Apollo 13 style at home base to work out solutions.
alot of it is about tone, approach, etc. That's harder to show examples of, but definitely has the same feel.

For text, some of this stuff seems Apple/jobs-esque:

"When you post a job on GitHub Jobs, you're sending a message: you want developers who care about their craft."

I'm sure Jobs or Ive has said something like that in one of their videos.

"Starting next Tuesday, everyone will be able to search and browse jobs."

Sure, this is a standard type of sentence, but the composition is distinctly Apple- "when, who, what" - where the who is 'everyone' - no barrier to entry, straightforward, clear.

"Of course, .... if you don't find them useful. But we think you will."

that's again very Appleish. Confident of the opinion but not overly arrogant, suggestive of the outcome.

I'm not sure i can prove this with empirical evidence, but I definitely feel it.
The Tasmania Effect
PDF exploit in iOS 4
Those things are indistinguishable from making himself more hireable.
It's an idea I had after actually measuring. If it doesn't work then I tried something out.

What you really should be getting from it though is that epoll is not faster. It is not O(1). It is not faster on smaller vs. larger lists of FDs. Pretty much all the things you were told as advantages of epoll are total crap.

The only advantage of epoll is it's O(N=active) when poll is O(N=total). That's it.

So at a minimum I've done some education and spent some time learning something.
Great idea and done. The logo in the app now points to the all locations page. The logo outside the app points to the company home page.
That's exactly the appeal of NYC to me. I've been working in tech in the S.F. area for over ten years now and it's starting to feel very one-dimensional. Living somewhere where art and literature and culture matter as much as technology sounds extremely refreshing at this point.
What you say is true, but not the main point of the article. Its a kick-in-the-pants for young smart people to go and actually attempt to create something, instead of waiting for a job to come to them.
So do we!
The author is a moron. This movie is amazing, but it's also insanely straightforward. It doesn't require that kind of analysis; almost nothing does.

I'm growing increasingly disheartened at the blogosphere simply because it gives people as stupid as this author a way for even stupider people to reinforce his bad behaviors.
They gather the brains, yes. But a feudal business culture would make that irrelevant. Feudal social contracts in general kill all forms of innovation.
He is the sunshine on my shoulders
Area 51 - Web Apps 
In the 34 days since Web Applications launched, the community has generated 1,371 questions (1,260 answered!), 3,574 answers, 3,497 users, and 2,648 views per day.
Is that the kind of thing they might teach in college?
Not really. What you do is create a temporary account for each session, unless one exists already. If the user chooses to create an account later, it is not really created, but the temporary account is promoted to a permanent one, and the details like username are filled in.

Again, check out stackoverflow.com. They do this.
Coming Soon to Pastebot: Music in the Background
> But I'm skeptical those numbers are true. That was my point.

Yeah, I'm skeptical those numbers are true too, but then again we're talking about totally different numbers.
Nope, handset vendors are screwing that platform up, with junkware you can't delete, customized interfaces (often for the worse), locked down firmware, reluctance to support Android OS updates, etc.
I wonder if things are different on the BSD side versus the Linux side. Just a guess, but Linux kernel development has always had a sort of anti-academic view, perhaps soured by the early Tanenbaum-Torvalds flamewar, whereas much of BSD was actually written by academics (the name comes from UC Berkeley, after all), and collaboration still seems reasonably common. There might be some downside to Linux being so popular, as well: it's now the default option, so people who just need something, anything to test on will pick Linux, whereas my guess is that people modifying, say, the NetBSD kernel for academic work are more interested specifically in NetBSD and contributing back to it. Solaris development also long had a close relationship with academic researchers working on Solaris, for whatever reason (probably Sun actively making efforts, including hiring academics for summer consultancies).
Way to keep it classy and prove me wrong. Very rational and measured of you. It served your purposes exactly.

Are you one of the people who engage in conversations around "Women: Does society screw them up or is there just something weird with their brains (on average of course, let's be PC here)? Dudes speculate." ?
NYC cafes where I've personally witnessed coders at work include: Housing Works & McNally's at SoHo, Amrita in Harlem, Gorilla Cafe in Park Slope, Esperanto on McDougal..

I definitely agree the NYC startup scene is overhyped - this is the city of hype and startups are now cool by New York Magazine standards. But man, your view of NYC in general seems much shaped by a very specific social circle and long hours at GS ;)
There are already far too many laws in the US. We should probably focus on making less things illegal rather then more.

When making things illegal, there is a lot of overhead involved. Take your examples for instance.

1) Make it illegal for TV commercials to display 10 lines of size 1 font at the bottom of a TV ad for 2 seconds. Nobody can see it. Nobody can read it even if they could see it. The law should be something like this:

"Any textual information displayed on a tv commercial should be of big enough size to be easily read in its entirety in the time displayed!"

Say this law is passed. Now who determines what size is big enough and how long is long enough. Suppose I'm a nearly blind, slow reader. Maybe 30 seconds at a size of 2 inches high is not a long enough time or large enough size for me? You could say that you mean an "average" person, but then it must be established what an "average" person is. Who does that? Then aren't you discriminating against people who don't fit the average? Should it be set to the lowest common denominator? In that case, you are boring to death people who can read exceptionally fast. I'm not going to stay tuned to text that stays around for 30 seconds when it only takes me 1 second to read it!

Now suppose we come up with an acceptable definition of "big enough" and "long enough", which will be a compromise definition. How do we enforce this definition? Punishment. What is an appropriate punishment for people that do not make the text big enough? For those that miss the size by a fraction of an inch, what is the punishment? Oh, and what about for people that the size is big enough for a 55" tv but not for a 25" tv? Yikes.

So, suppose we come up with a suitable punishment for these law breakers. Who will enforce this punishment? What if they do not pay the fine? Do we throw them in our already crowded prisons or build new prisons? Where does this money come from to enforce this law? Do we have monitors who scan the tv specifically for this rule, or add it to someone's position who already monitors things? Or make it reporting based, so only when it is reported it is punished.

There are lots more questions as well, this is just the tip of the iceburg.
I thought it went by the name octopussy, but i want one too
And, if you find this line interesting, read this excellent speech, "Is there anything good about men?" (of course, the answer is definitely yes.)

http://www.psy.fsu.edu/~baumeistertice/goodaboutmen.htm
My initial worries were that perhaps features for the job board would be given preference over features for the repository hosting. Money talks, and things like job listings can bring a lot of money. I just want to be sure that code hosting will always be their top priority.
Michael Jordan on failure (Nike commercial)
These don't seem to be qualities of Ph.D. graduates
I think DHH shares your understanding of Apple's motives (although he stated it less precisely), but argues that -- if there is a big benefit to using Apple's tools -- someone will do that and create the better app. Why stop folks from creating a mediocre app that happens to be written in a cross-platform way? There are lots of apps that are mediocre and/or slow to incorporate new features anyway.

Are you suggesting that Firefox and Eclipse are lacking in some way because they are built for multiple platforms and would be much better if they were written for a single platform to take advantage of the latest windows or mac os features? I don't share that view. In fact, I'd go as far as to say that I think the existence of apps like Firefox and Eclipse are a strong argument against Apple's policy (at least from the perspective of end-users).
I'm currently in a situation where I have such a person close to me. It was very helpful to have that pointed out again.

I've managed to work 2 hours on my startup idea this evening. Whereas I otherwise probably would've given in to the demons ("it's 20:40 already.. too late to get anything useful done, I'll just play some videogames the rest of the evening").
I procrastinated quite a bit when writing my master thesis by trying to make it as beautiful as possible. Take a look to see what's possible with LaTeX: http://www.duo.uio.no/sok/work.html?WORKID=81971&lang=en. The source is available here: http://bitbucket.org/uggedal/thesis
Thank you; this is what I was wanting to hear.
The nice thing is that we can tap into the internal GitHub info and show listings only to users that specifically opt-in. 3rd Party sites would have little choice but ask people to opt-in through their site or to spam everyone.
So, you're comparing my track record with writing simple maintainable well documented code to something you did in 1992 with ODBC? That's your experience that's causing all the paranoia?

The worst two things that afflict programmers today is:

1. They never update their information, even after 18 years (18! You realize that right!? Things change man!)

2. They have an irrational paranoia about trying new things, as if me trying this out is going to destroy the universe.

That really needs to change.
WhizzyTeX is _amazing_. It probably triples my productivity for LaTeX when the material is math intensive. If you’re typesetting matrixes or tables, or anything else where you have to align things, then WhizzyTeX is even better still.

In graduate school I could take math notes in real time as long as the lecture was fairly well structured and there weren’t too many diagrams. I think my System ID and Control notes turned out even better than the textbook.

Unfortunately, while I didn’t have any trouble running WhizzyTeX on Ubuntu, I never got it working well on OS X. I think I (maybe) got it to go using xpdf in X11, but it’d be much nicer if you could run Skim or Preview as viewer instead. If there’s ever a time when I need to do a lot of LaTeX again then I’ll definitely look into writing a patch.

I still dream that one day I’ll have something like WhizzyTeX for building websites. Imagine if you could edit your source files in your favorite editor and have the rendered webpage update with every keystroke. It’s the best of both WYSIWYG and plain source editing. You could definitely make something work if you were editing plain html, but if you’re using a framework (and who isn’t?) then it starts to seem a lot more complicated.
Sorry protomyth - yours is not the message I was replying to. I'm not sure what happened there!?!
Google is already testing this: http://smarterware.org/6394/google-apps-vs-google-accounts-r...
MeeGo Summer Seminar, Pics Too
Contextual advertising fail - The ad showing up for me on that site is for Columbia college MBA.
Read "on dial-up" as "slow". The argument depends only on there being a certain distribution of client speeds. It's not about dial-up in particular.
That's entirely possible, but then you pay a penalty in complexity because you have to keep track of missed events yourself. I think (unproven) that it's actually a wash because of this.
It's not like there are penalties for breaking it. Actually, only benefits.
I should also mention that the form builder will be embedded in a web app, so it can't be available only as a web service.
Now Cory just needs to write something I'd actually want to read. Hope his fiction isn't as preachy as his articles. Though this one wasn't as bad as he usually does.
Ask HN: What is your experience with payment providers as a startup?
This question is for those of you who charge customers on a recurring basis.

I have been looking for a payment provider for my monthly subscription based service.

There are some services like Spreedly however the charges are not justifiable by a startup that is just getting traction.

So far I have looked at Amazon Payments, PayPal and Spreedly.

Is there any other one that you can recommend? If not, what was your experience with PayPal/Amazon?

Thanks in advance.
This is garbage. California does this as much as NYC.
Calling real people "females" is a good counter-example.
Maybe that's a good law in theory. But as soon as such a measure was on the agenda, it would be complicated by the addition of various provisos, exceptions, and limits, each inserted at the behest of a well-heeled interest group with access to majority-party legislators on the relevant committees.

If there's one area I want Congress to stay away from, it's copyright law. Under the system of campaign finance and interest group lobbying that we have now, there is no chance---none---of an improvement if they get involved.
"I get that [having a good network gives] you an advantage, of course, but does not having them mean a career in holes?"

Yes, obviously. If you aren't even well-networked enough to get a job then how the hell are you supposed to be an entrepreneur? Being well-networked is probably the single best predictor of entrepreneurial success, so criticizing the grandfather's advice while telling him to start a company makes no sense.

The one thing the kid is probably right about though is not taking the job. When I was a kid we used to talk about McJobs, i.e. jobs with no chances of any upward mobility. These days pretty much every job at a big company is a McJob, so you have to be really careful about working for someone else.
Yep, that's what I thought too, that at least epoll would be as fast. Turns out it's not though, but then I could be wrong.

Also, your assumption of EPOLLET is potentially wrong. I think (unproven) that the extra overhead and complexity of using edge trigger right makes EPOLLET pointless.