skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I like C++ but I think this article is helpful. Having come up the curve in the last few years, I notice a lot of things I stumbled on are listed... If this were titled "things to watch out for in C++" it could be a useful guide for people. Now, though, I just think "yes, that's right" for many of his points - but it won't stop me from using C++.
Ask HN: Examples of beautiful, nontrivial, code?
I'm less interested in code snippets, and more interested in mid to large sized projects that a consensus of hackers find well designed. Does this exist? In any language?
This stack looks to be described at a much lower level then LAMP which (as you point out) makes it more confusing. At the very least, they could consolidate HDFS, Hue, HBase, and Hive into just "Hadoop".
In that spirit, his last example could be improved:

foo = cach[:foo] or foo = get_foo() or raise "Could not find foo!"
foo = cach[:foo] || get_foo() || raise "Could not find foo!"

And I've seen the "foo() and bar()" usage screwed up more than a few times by people not fully understanding the return value of foo()
How Perl Saved the Human Genome Project
I'm slow this morning. That took me a couple of minutes to get the example.

'foo = 42 and foo / 2'

I was expecting an undefined variable since foo was never set because I was thinking of it as foo = (42 and foo / 2)

Basically I would write the example as this in 2 lines to avoid confusion and not use 'and':

foo = 42

foo / 2

Maybe another example in the article would have been better to show the power of 'and'.
The fascinating thing is that, including VC, Twitter really did - does - have a comparable IT budget. They could have just licensed Tibco Rendezvous, which is how banks and exchanges distribute thousands of price updates/sec, to the level of this desk at this bank is allowed to see that, but that desk isn't, and the other desk over there gets it 20 seconds later. Instead they went of and tilted at windmills, all the while telling themselves that they were breaking new ground.
I think the best is to rebrand your product/service since you don't have any users, yet. That's the easiest way out to avoid any legal battle/cost.
It's already seperated. One is in the db, one is in a pile of files that will be mostly deleted on the next major update.
3MB/sec isn't a fair share of a disk? I think it is.

to start, your cheap sata disk is going to max out a 100Mb/sec for /sequential/ transfers. Now, cut that in quarters, because two different guests streaming data to the disk make sequential random. so you have 25MB/s. double it, as they are probably raid-10ing the disk (at least, that's what I do) so we have a best case 50MB/s to share.

Now, they are probably in a box with 32GiB ram. say they give a gig to the dom0, and you are on a 512MiB guest. that means you are sharing with 62 total guests. So your fair share is less than 1MB/sec of hard drive transfer.

Of course, best case, nobody else is using the drive and you get all 200MB/s, but with 60 guests, that won't happen often.

Hard drives suck. Sharing hard drives makes them suck a lot more.

Note, I know almost nothing about the actual slicehost setup; what I'm describing here is guesses about their setup based on what I know about xen and what I know of my own set up.

My understanding is that Linode is perceived by light users to have better I/O throughput, but this is because they monitor and take action against heavy I/O users. (I think this is a good idea, and may implement it myself)
Subscribe,follow,befriend,connect ... Quest for a different type of relationship
Every once a week, I meet a person who is reasonably interesting. Almost everyday, I find a interesting person/site online (many of them through hackernews). I don't know these people. They'll not be my (facebook) friends. They are not my professional (linkedin) connections. I don't really care about following their day-to-day (twitter) lives. Yet, in some way, I'd like to make a note of the guy. I'd like to do this manner that is non intrusive to both - the person (so no fb, linkedin invites) and me (so no subscribing to their blog, twitter). Just some way to "bookmark" the guy, and maybe refer back if required in future.

First question - are there others who feel this need?

Now, imagine there was a way to do this. What would be a good descriptor for this act of "bookmarking"? To elaborate, twitter describes their primary action as "follow". Its simple, clear and precise. Everyone gets it. Its better than "subscribe". Likewise, is there a better way to say "bookmark/note this guy"?
I'm sure owning a private island doesn't hurt either :p

Branson's a fascinating character - that cover story Forbes ran a few years back about Branson and other successful people who were all afflicted with dyslexia really helped motivate my younger brother who has a really severe case, so for being a good role model for people like my brother he has my thanks.
While I generally agree with your statement, I think that you may be jumping the gun a tad in terms of the market. The "coattails of the old paradigm" are going to be very important so long as a good network connection isn't guaranteed at all times.

Amazing strides have been made to improve connectivity, but we're not there yet. So long as we're not there, you will continue to see the old paradigm.
I was speaking more about the mentality that led to the business opportunity that google exploited. More so than the technology. The mentality at that time was that "nobody would build another search engine". Any time I hear someone say "nobody would..." I think about how that mentality allows you to exploit that opportunity.

In this case, I'm referring to banking. You've got an industry that is based almost entirely on legacy systems that has not evolved with the progress of technology. As correctly pointed out, you would not want to modify an existing legacy system to move it to a new technology, which is why nobody has done so. What I'm referring to is a new, from scratch, bank with new technology. One that would allow you to disconnect from the current banking model and allow you to offer services that nobody could provide with today's legacy systems.

This combined with the fact that if you ask any bank customer they will tell you how much they hate their bank and hate the service. Sounds like it's ripe for the pickings with the right investment, investors and people.
"It's what you do, not what you call it."
VP of Sales or VP of Marketing?
If I'm the CEO of a startup, and I have enough money for only one of these positions (VP of Sales or VP of Marketing), which one do I hire? And does it make sense to combine the two? Why or why not?
Is there some reason you didn't link to the original article on Bloomberg and instead opted to link to the tiny snippet on HuffPo?
You can get an unlocked iPhone 4 in Canada now. Some are popping up on ebay like crazy.
Writing it in two lines would defeat the purpose of demonstrating the difference between && and 'and'.
Unfortunately, the Android Marketplace as well as the SDK still sucks for us developers. Buggy and inconsistent behavior across different devices; Bad performance (MotionEvent anyone?); The lack of paid apps in different countries and the prevalence of spammy crapware apps on the unregulated marketplace. I wonder if google will do anything to address these issues as Android gain a wider audience. Otherwise I can see this as a hindrance to the adoption of Android.
Actually, it is something outside of the control of Google. Admittedly, they made the right choices to allow the OS to spread (I was going to say easier, but really they allowed it to spread at all). This didn't mean, however, that anyone else was going to pick it up and use it.
The thought that struck me was that it was lucky it wasn't someone's startup project, as Corning had the finances to sit on it for 50 years until it found a market use...
Which brings us back to the very first point made by kitcar. If you can make pizzas that taste better than Dominos and have a comparable price, then why aren't you a pizza company?
This article makes me want to buy some IBM stock. But, it's never performed very well...
Big Money Does Not Build Great Online Products
That's absolutely correct. I'm already paying that for my connection at home, so the bandwidth costs are going to be a wash.
Will the fork still be licensed under CDDL or is there a way to switch it to GPL?
"Inbound Marketing, Get Found Using Google, Social Media, and Blogs" by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah takes you step by step through exactly what its title says.
Is there a business opportunity providing a new signaling credential/certification that hasn't been as diluted as "a college degree"?

(An organization providing such a service would face a lot of temptations to get in on the traditional higher ed gravy train, while it lasts, but its ultimate success through the crash would depend on it staking out a different identity. It would probably also need a strong culture of elitism -- drawing a lot of detractors, and possibly lawsuits once its certifications get used in employment decisions.)
Fisheye lens effect.
The E-Myth Revisited. It's not specifically web related, but it's a great book (with a cheesy pie shop metaphor) on how to start a business that is a system you own rather than a business that owns you.

Check out the Amazon reviews, they're telling:
http://www.amazon.com/E-Myth-Revisited-Small-Businesses-Abou...
I'm curious why people link to a summary of an article that actually resides elsewhere--a similar example was just submitted at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1568011.

In both cases the summary bore a headline which significantly altered one's initial understanding of the article at hand, and in both cases it led to a more difficult and/or unrewarding read.
well, this one datapoint is that this guy is starting out where I started out (I didn't go to school.) Now, he's obviously a really bright kid and I'm sure he'll do fine eventually, but for now, he's certainly not in the place he'd be in if he spent as much effort on work as he has spent on school.
Although I'm not pursuing a PhD nor do I ever plan on pursuing one, my father has one in Theoretical Chemistry from UCLA. He tried to raise venture / angel funding for a desktop computing startup in the early 1980s a few years after he graduated and got his green card, and one of the things that really got in his way was, in fact, his PhD.

The reason is that his potential investors and perhaps investors in general hold an innate bias against those of the academic system, namely that they're impractical eggheads who couldn't possibly know how to run a business.

He removed all refernces to his graduate education from his applications for funding and that actually helped him get more meetings - he eventually got funding from an angel who actually valued my father's PhD but it took a long time to find somebody who didn't dismiss him because of it.

That was 25 years ago - things might be different now that PhDs are more common, but I figured I'd share his experience with you.
Writing a Good Essay
It is easier to write a good essay if students know the characteristics of a good essay. Students learn to write good essays if they frequently refer to the points mentioned in this article and always write winning essays. Read a list of characteristics of a good essay.
Out of curiosity, how would the govt change their policy to improve the situation?

Not subsidizing the loans would be a good idea. Another proposal would be enforcing some transparency/separability.

For example, the govt could demand that colleges break down there costs more granularly than they do - $X for instruction, $Y for the gym, $Z for student activities, etc. They could also demand that all such fees (besides instruction) are optional to the student, and that subsidies only apply to instruction. Colleges waste a LOT of money on irrelevancies, and such a mechanism could reduce some of the waste.
Boltzmann brain paradox
That's not the opposite, that's the same.
I agree. I would care so much more about this _iff_, as a software developer, I could capitalize on it. Looking at numbers from various posts and outlets, iPhone (or even iPad) app sales are orders of magnitude larger than equivalents on Android Market.

If I were a _device_ manufacturer, the "Free as in Everything" aspect of Android is definitely alluring, as it saves from Symbian or WinMo royalties. That's where it matters: to the Motorolas, HTCs, and (eventually) Nokias of the world.

For a hacker doing software, though, it just doesn't come close to the App Store as far as outlets for monetization.

Also this: http://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share....

It looks like Apple gains market share in web usage, and doubles Android in growth, according to the report. So, it looks like even though Android may overtake iPhone in sales, the users don't often use one of its primary features as a smartphone. Is it the browser experience or laggy hardware that stymies the growth?
Color in brand identity
That quote at the end? That's hacker talk.
I really like Drunk and Retired. It's done by Michael Cote at Redmonk and Charles Lowell at the Frontside. Can get a little offtopic sometimes (like tangents about Austin traffic) but in general really funny.

Here's one about sandboxed javascript...

http://drunkandretired.com/2010/03/04/episode165/
Fixing the Computer Science Problem with an Act of Congress
+1. I absolutely love my Nexus One (we have iPhones in our family) and I believe that N1 represents the "next generation" of mobile devices, if you will. iPhone is stuck in the past - it requires a computer to be fully operational: a few months ago we went overseas and I wanted to put more stuff on it to listen/watch on the plane, but the people we were staying with only had a Linux laptop - iPhone was as useful as brick.

Too bad N1 isn't available anymore: the overall experience/quality you get is incredible, plus absolute carrier independence, user experience and overall value: $60/mo for everything on T-Mobile without a contract, including tethering and cheap international calling via Google Voice, and yeah - proper utilization of Internet, without the need to sync with the most retarded piece of software ever known (iTunes). It even plays music to my stereo via Bluetooth: every time I walk into my apartment and experience the song transition from my headphones to my stereo I think "F&&& yeah, the future is here".
Based on my own observations I take it as a given that people regularly break traffic rules. Car-car smashes happen with frightful regularity too. It isn't a Houston-only issue.

The reasons for this may be carelessness or disregard--reasons don't really matter. The behavior exists and rules/signs don't appear to mitigate very successfully (especially strange signs and irregular rules you don't see anywhere else).

Carelessness and disregard are part of the human condition and why defensive driving is great. It follows the robustness principal of "Be conservative in what you send; be liberal in what you accept."

Unfortunately, the performance envelope of Houston's passenger train precludes defensive driving on its part. It can't be a good street-citizen.
So it sounds like every time there is a decent-sized online community, media feels the need to plant somebody to repost content and engage in conversations?

Is this only done for Twitter and Facebook (and now Tumblr), or does this also apply to Orkut, Netlog, Bebo, MySpace, etc?

And is this only applicable to social networks that are extremely communication oriented (vs. profile or media oriented)?
My biggest regret was folding up in 2007, shortly after ec2 came out. I'd be two years ahead if I stuck with it rather than pulling a Ross Perot.

details:
http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2007/12/7/3649/26418

just think how much further along I'd have been if I didn't own goal that one?
Marketing supports sales. A VP of Sales in a startup should make her own marketing collateral.
We're Trying To Be Less Evil. Really.
Modifying the 3D Vision Glasses
I know so little about relational databases that I'm worried about being misled by an unreliable guide found on the internet. Reading suspiciously, this guide seems garbled.

Section 3, second and third normal forms, says "Under second and third normal forms, a non-key field must provide a fact about the key, us the whole key, and nothing but the key. In addition, the record must satisfy first normal form."

There seems to be a stray word "us". Ignoring that, this is cute word play that doesn't quite make sense. If your table has non-key fields you are inevitably providing facts about the non-key fields.

Continuing,

"We deal now only with "single-valued" facts. The fact could be a one-to-many relationship, such as the department of an employee, or a one-to-one relationship, such as the spouse of an employee."

This is the wrong way round. Usually there are lots of employees and a few deparments. Each employee works for just one department, but each department has many employees. Thus the "department of an employee" is a many-to-one relation, or function, which takes an employee and yields a department. The one-to-many relationship here is the employee list of a department.

The example for 3.2 seems to be opening the wrong can of worms. Suppose that Mr Strauss, who works for the department of waltz in Vienna, is seconded to the department of piety in Rome, in order to teach them some dance steps. Then we want his row in the database to read

(Straus, Waltz, Rome)

So one can of worms is sticking generic labels on your fields. If you label your fields (Employee, Department, Employee-location) there is no problem. If you label your fields (Employee, Department, Department-location) you have a problem, but it is obvious. If you label your fields (Employee, Department, Location) you are heading for trouble as some users of the database fill in the location of department and other users of the database fill in the location of the employee.

Hmm, second and third normal form are suspiciously similar, differing only because we regard some fields as belonging to the key. Is the article trustworthy?
Does Apple Know iPod.app (iPad) Has Bugs That Make It Unusable?
You could add a simple http server to your worker app that is pinged when something needs to happen. You could even make it respond to different requests for different tasks it has to do.
Technically, better money spent is testing children for developmental disabilities in the pre-kindergarten years (0-5) and spending the money to "fix" at that time is a better first step. A problem found in kindergarten might end up costing the government in excess of a million dollars can sometimes be fixed for less than $100,000 if known about earlier. For example, hearing problems can be worked around earlier in life to allow proper development.
I don't think the mentality was that 'nobody would build another search engine', it may have been around where you were at the time but I know plenty of people - myself included - that were wondering about building another search engine. Also, altavista definitely wasn't the only player. Even today, with google as established as it is I'm pretty sure there are at least several hundred people involved in building new search engines. Whether one of them replaces google at any point in time remains to be seen, but it's definitely not classed as a 'hopeless problem'.

As for the banking bit. You are missing my point, nobody builds a bank because of the technology, people found new banks because of the money. If that means adapting old, tried and true technology to jump trough new hoops then that's a cost of business. Bankers are conservative by nature, not because they like it but because it makes very good business sense when you're a bank. It's no coincidence that banks, insurance companies and governments are the areas where the mainframe is still dominant.

I'm really not sure what kind of services you could offer with a 'new' software stack that you could not offer with the old one. Bank transfers are routinely done in seconds between banks, you can pay with everything from credit cards to mobile phones and computers, they seem to have done a remarkable job at adapting to new tech while remaining conservative at heart.

People hate their banks mostly for the costs and for the lack of human interest, rarely if ever because of the lack of technology. In fact, I could do with less technology and better human interaction.
Certainly timing is crucial in these things. Sun might have actually been a little too far ahead of its time in the 90's, for example.

Ultimately though we should be thinking of local storage as cache and not anything more privileged.
C? I guess that only puts them 30 years ahead of the banks, then...
For example, the govt could demand that colleges break down there costs more granularly than they do

The government already does do this, in mandatory reports to the federal IPEDS database. And a private foundation has published the information on a user-friendly website, so that even if colleges don't report to the public directly how they spend their money, discerning members of the public can find this out by looking it up.

Compare

http://www.collegeresults.org/search1b.aspx?institutionid=18...

to

http://www.collegeresults.org/search1b.aspx?institutionid=16...

for example.
Same for cable.. on TWC I can ping 1,500 miles away in ~60ms.

L3 latency is usually a small fraction of the initial website load time. Inline the js + css, strip whitespace, enable gzip, use memcached, get a server that can fit the whole DB in RAM, etc.

Preventing packet loss is very important, though (a TCP retrans adds 2-3 seconds). I do think datacenters have a real edge there.
I supervise a couple Ph.D. students working full-time jobs.

It's definitely a challenge for them, and it requires immense self-discipline.

Coincidentally, I just posted this morning about the three qualities of successful Ph.D. students--perseverance, tenacity and cogency:

http://matt.might.net/articles/successful-phd-students/

The middle part of grad school is generally depressing: you're failing constantly, your work is getting rejected everywhere, and you get consumed with self-doubt.

It's tough to get a Ph.D. part-time because to do it right, it must consume you. Exceptions are rare.

Also, if you're hoping that what you have at the end of a Ph.D. will be ready for end users, you might want to consider that the benchmark for software in academia is "proof of concept." Most academic code is a disaster in terms of usability and maintainability.

The code is so awful that I even drafted a special open source license to encourage academics to release it--the CRAPL:

http://matt.might.net/articles/crapl/
Nice post, Galen.

It seems like everyday I read another post talking about how VCs are dead...VCs are evil...don't take VC money. This brings to mind two thoughts:

1. Does anybody have anything good to say about VCs?

2. Is it possible that consumer-facing web-based businesses just aren't suited for VC money? I mean, a hair salon or pizza joint isn't suited for VC money, but nobody is complaining about that.

If my second point is true, what businesses are suited for VC money? Green technology, for sure...what else?
Except that it's not obscure at all. "and" and "or" exist specifically to facilitate this kind of code. That's their primary purpose.

And it's not like that's exactly unusual in the ruby language. Post-conditionals have a similar low precedence.
IBM also makes a lot from their consulting (human mainframes).