skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My algorithm would say:

- reject generic shapes and cliches seen ad nauseum in 99d contests: Astralify, black21, #64, KamNy

- promote designs that attempt to communicate transformation: #73, wenk, #31, #28, #25, #15

- promote designs that will print well on a budget (intricate designs and colours/gradients can print well, if you'll pay the premium for good print services): #11, #32, #66

Yes, some of these considerations will clash unfortunately, but it might help eliminate/promote from your shortlist.

I also asked friends/family for opinions with the logo for my to-be-announced project, and it really helped to uncover interpretations and connotations I'd not considered alone.

Good luck, and please let us know which you choose as your winner.
Readability Updated To Support Multi-Page Articles
I haven't seen the movie in a while now but I remember Cobb or maybe Mag placing the top inside of a safe, spinning it, and locking it up while they were in limbo. The top would appear to spin forever at in dreams closer to reality or reality itself because of how much slower time flows at the lower levels. However, the top will not spin infinitely. It will eventually stop when it finishes spinning in the deep nested dream reality, therefore I don't think it is necessarily a great indicator of reality if it topples over or not because it will stop spinning eventually.

At least this is how I read it. To be honest I didn't really think the top made a lot of sense but I think this is what it was intended to mean.
Smart Bear and Branding
Halo 2600 online emulator
I've always thought it's much more important to avoid tables when you're using templates. Using divs allows you to make your website more modular, you don't have to think to yourself "ok, should there be a tr there or another table?"

Tables may be easier on the initial setup, but for maintenance they are a pain. And considering the tools we have to make CSS easier (the Blueprint framework, 960grid, etc.), there's no reason to use tables.
If I have to iterate over all the objects in a container and erase some of them, I always push the keys/indices into another deque first. And then the deque is iterated through to remove those items from the original set (in the reverse order in the case of a vector).

I'm not very confident in the validity of iterators.
> (at obvious costs)

i suppose thats my point. languages are just tools. some languages are hammers, where you can accidentally hit your thumb. some languages are like an automatic electric hammer where its all safe, but its heavy and you have to keep it plugged into the wall.
Check EmacsWiki as well: http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/ArtistMode

Especially integration with Ido mode.
Surely all or most of these interpretations have been considered by the director and have been actively and deliberately intertwined into the story. The budget was $160 million so think of how many startup ideas could be funded with 10% of this amount. So it's easy then to imagine a team of geniuses working to plant the seeds for all these interpretations and ideas in our heads. That, coupled with the art of convincing somebody to fund the movie, is Inception.
I'm always baffled by this question. What on earth gives anyone the perception that data services are only about a connection and a server? How many concurrent TCP/IP sessions do you think that "free" Comcast cable router will support? I can guarantee you that you can overrun it's capabilities with even a single dedicated server. You might have a few spare UPSs lying around, but what about HVAC? What are you going to do when a squirrel blows the only circuit servicing your home? Sure, your servers and connection might stay up, but how long can you run without overheating? When you enumerate the things that data centers have, and your garage does not, I can't see how it makes any sense.

* Redundant electricity/generators
* Real HVAC systems (also on generators)
* Fire suppression systems
* Redundant connectivity
* Connections that can handle high levels of concurrency
* Secure facility

Never underestimate the impact of downtime to your business' viability. At any given moment, your service will be "critical" to someone. Often times, the loss of confidence can't be regained, and to be brutally honest, that loss of confidence would be justified given that you think it's ok to run your hosting out of a garage.

Given how small the cost delta is between hosting infrastructure at your home versus paying for something like a VPS, you're assigning a very small value to your customer's importance. As a customer, how am I supposed to feel about that? That is probably the single greatest reason more startups aren't doing this. You have to fight and claw for every customer you get. I'm not willing to have them walk out the door because I decided I could save $70/month on hosting by doing it from my garage. If you can't sustain the hosting costs required to run your business today, you won't be able to do it six months from now. Time to reassess your model.
It's under consideration, among other options.
So that's a $6 billion profit for keeping western civilisation open for business? I'm not sure I'm buying the premise that that is somehow unreasonable.
Are you suggesting packaging in debian or fedora has some issues? Can you elaborate in one or two lines? Thanks.
Spoiler Alert The spinning top is not a red herring, it tells us much about the movie. My questions is why is he using Mal's totem throughout the whole movie ? He manipulated it when it was in Mal's Safe and everyone in the group there knew how it worked. This makes it an useless totem. He could not figure out if he was in a dream . The ability to see the faces of the kids doesn't dictate he is in reality, it only shows that he is in a place where his mind is ready to accept him seeing his kids.
Hosting is a commodity now. Stop wasting your time and focus on your code.
It's public radio.Asking for money is pretty much the norm.
Healing old wounds
Getting my masters in mathematics was a task as practical as a carpenter's job. I would actually use everything I learned in some way, for example trying to generalize it. Perhaps that approach could help you remember, too.
>With modern software design and especially OOP the risk of data inconsistency is less of a problem

This sounds mighty hand-wavy. How does "modern software design" reduce the risk of data inconsistency?

>On the other hand duplication of information is a great way to scale an application

Most relational systems have facilities for duplicating information to scale. Materialized views, for instance, generate vile offenses to all normal forms but perhaps the first, hyper optimized for consumers, but it is guaranteed coherent and consistent, and happens with barely any work.

Seriously, we've been solving these performance issues for years. Every time some, failing a better word, noob writes up their big internet paper on why the relational model fails (with "modern" software, which is chuckleworthy), the world gets just a little bit dumber.

The bit about checking data for corruption is just disturbing.
Twitter launches "suggestions for you"
More broadly, western civilization runs on entrenched systems which no one has the will to replace.

Sometimes it's easier to stick with what you know works than to try the newer thing, and that's probably the reasoning used by the people making the buying decisions.
Almost everyone honours the 4th normal form without thinking about it. I think the "the 3rd normal form is the practical level" just became a bit of a meme.
>The other reason why Iraq was moral was that the sanctions in Iraq from 1991-2003 were actually more genocidal than the US invasion of 2003.

The US played a big role in these sanctions so your statement amounts to: "This one evil thing the US did was ok because it wasn't as bad as this other evil thing they were involved in before".

>nd up to 30k indirect deaths. That is 10x less than during the Afghan civil war of the 1990s, and far less (2+ orders of magnitude) than the Soviet invasion.

Are these comparative numbers meant to excuse the unnecessary 30k deaths caused by US interference? Because I assume you must know that it doesn't work like that. If it did hostage situations would be a great deal easier. Just kill everyone involved because the hostage taker would have likely caused more damage then we did anyway, right?

> If I lived in South Sudan, Somalia, or Eastern Congo, I would welcome a US/international invasion and occupation, even if it meant a 5-10% chance of death for me of my family.

Those are some bad places to be sure, but I don't think you comprehend what an occupation is exactly. Do you remember the L.A. riots? Everything was out of control, innocent people were dying, the police were powerless. A news anchor asked a member of the military who was on the show "at what point should the military get involved" to which the military person replied "Please don't bring in the military". He knew that as bad as things were, bringing in the military would make it much worse because they are not a police force.
A way to increase your mental capabilities (AKA Onion Layer Abstraction Theory)
My own little theory that I think can allow for better reasoning and creativity..
Thanks. We'll see about getting a site redesign done. I have removed the javascript alerts and put in links to copy about what will be there. I really appreciate your feedback.
What application do you want to see?
I'm moving to Boston in four weeks and I will need to find a full time job unless I start generating consistent revenue. Maybe there's an application someone here wants to see that I can build in a week or two. The goal is to not be forced into a full time position.

I'm a PHP guy but I'm willing to learn any language to get the job done. In the middle of learning Ruby on Rails.

So, what do you want to see?
Fake Steve on mainframes:

http://www.fakesteve.net/2009/10/why-ibm-is-in-trouble-with-...

http://www.fakesteve.net/2009/10/case-against-ibm-continued....
Metro-inspired User Interface for Microsoft Windows 7 tablet devices
This is very excellent advice.
Unless you're displaying tabular data. Yes, I've seen sites using divs for genuine table data.
Tracking What 21st Century Schools Should Teach
Page is taking a long time to load right now, so maybe upgrade your servers? Guess you are getting a lot of HN traffic.

As the other said design needs improving, and sell me what your are offering with less text, and highlight what I am getting and what the benefits are.

Took me a while to see what it was going to cost, and no way to test for free.
Good luck though, seems like some good ideas in there.
It's not loading for me in Chrome
Most of the problems mentioned there don't apply to the regular C++ coder in his daily life, many of the mentioned problems are even non-existant if you stick to the encouraged coding styles of modern and real OOP C++.

In practice just the template error messages suck as hell. I'd really like something nicer there, but in practice you actually survive those messages without too much wasting of time. You just ignore the error message and rather look at the line of code mentioned and then you usually find the problem rather fast by just looking at the line.

rgds, René
Ipad Owners are 'Selfish Elites'
It's hard to think of it as a monopoly when the same services can be performed by a rack of servers running other software. For any type of data processing that mainframes perform, I'm sure you can find examples of similar jobs running in server farms.

You can't define mainframes as a separate market just because they're physically large.
No clue. Our potential series B was smaller than that, so it wouldn't have been possible.
http://www.custdev.com/ - Learn how to do Customer Development, an essential component of the Lean Startup philosophy. Learn how to: Find prospects and how to approach them, Develop and iterate your "Minimal Viable Products" (MVPs), Segment markets, position products and when to pivot, Validate before scaling"

http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/startup-lessons-learne... - "Written by Eric Ries, one of BusinessWeek's Best Young Entrepreneurs of 2007, Startup Lessons Learned is a collection of 128 essays originally published at StartupLessonsLearned.com from 2008-2009. Each essay, or blog post, is unmodified and presented chronologically, rather then thematically, so that the reader can see ideas develop over time. Eric Ries provides actionable insight and advice on how to build successful products by listening to and learning from your customers. Startup Lessons Learned is a must-read for anyone trying to build a company in this new economy."

http://www.startupbook.net/ - "Start Small, Stay Small: A Developer's Guide to Launching a Startup"
1) If you need to do a lot of relatively simple things bloody quickly. There's nothing in the Unix world that can match the TPS of a mainframe. "Eventually consistent" just doesn't cut it for credit card auths.

That is the real difference between mainframes and supercomputers. A supercomputer is about computation, a mainframe is about I/O.

2) Extreme reliability. There are mainframe clusters in production with a continual service availability for decades. Again, nothing in the Unix world can touch this.
This strikes as feasible, assuming total computerized control of all the vehicles, both the "bus" and the cars trying to drive under it. Humans will be smashing the sides of that bus with frightful regularity, though.

And by the time you have that, there are probably way better ways to deal with traffic than this sort of crazy contraption. Even if this ever becomes practical I have a hard time seeing it ever being the best use of money.

Segmenting the bus enough to give it a safe turning radius will make it seat very few people. (And note I don't say "decent" or "cost-effective", I said safe. If cars are driving underneath, the "bus" must also turn exactly like a car.)

Nifty concept, pretty pictures, much less practical than the only-barely-practical-if-that trains that don't have to stop that got posted four or five times a few months ago. But worth noodling around with; I don't fault the designers too hard, I fault the credulous media.
As someone who named my design/development company Beard, Beard & Beard I find this encouraging that non-serious names can still be taken seriously. Although I'm doing fine so far I always wonder if the name is too silly and is turning off potential clients I never hear from. I was in a rush when I was coming up with names but I definitely chose not to go with anything like Something Something Designs or Something Something Design Studio and am happy with that part of it at least.
Accessibly UseIt
At foo camp I usually run a session called "that sucked" in which people share failure stories and I tally the root causes. Thais year the worst were both "going with your gut" and "not going with your gut"
Our first attempt won't work.

...

public static def main(argv:Rail[String]) {

This line is just the same as in the Hello, World example. (In fact, the Hello, World example had a latent version of the same bug. It compiled because we never tried to do anything with argv, and thus never tried to do anything that violated the place rules with it.)
What Your Discount Gambit Says About Your Company
I think I bought one of those games. Something with hoverbikes and grappling hooks?

Hopefully there will be time for the buzz to die down before I actually release anything.
Computing Fallacies
Problem is, when you use a programming language without arrows, you end up rewriting generic plumbing every time. If you want to write more code in your app to avoid using the word "monad", that's fine, but probably not rational.
No. Debian and Fedora have just fine package managers. What they can't do is boot from a ZFS file system. I am implying Solaris and FreeBSD (the other OSs that boot from ZFS, AFAIK) don't have a sane packaging system.
What does Eastern civilization run on?
Felt like I was watching an old school cracktro with the rainbow effect going on there (a DLP projector issue?).

Most of Rasmus's talk is the same as it was for years in regards to optimization. If you've seen one of his older presentations take a look at the slides directly (http://talks.php.net/show/digg/1) rather than watching the video.
It's a cool innovative idea. Now it's the execution, which probably won't be easy. Vehicle design and construction will be different from norm. Road design and regulation will be different. Kudos for coming up with the idea.
Humans will be smashing the sides of that bus with frightful regularity, though.

I'm pretty sure Houston drivers would be. They can't even deal with light rail on city streets!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CV2rdGX4JYc
An extremely simple inventory management system. Maybe something like this already exists, but so far I've only found highly complex enterprise solutions.
To answer my questions (according to your links): Yes, normal numbers only have to satisfy conditions on finite strings. And subsequence means deleting some items out of a sequence.
The whole point is that you can't.

> You could perform the same services by a rack of servers running OTHER software.

But with the software that is there today the cost of re-writing it would be prohibitive and that's why the mainframe market is still as large as it is.

It's nothing to do with them being physically large.

Converting a couple of billions of lines of COBOL to something more modern, re-test the whole thing and add a bunch of magic to get the same kind of reliability is not a task any sane CTO at a bank or insurance company is going to sign off on.
Redframes.
IPad apps more involving for users, valuable for developers than iPhone
The top is quite simply the movie's final inception.

Only this one is placed in the mind of the viewer.
In fact, at that price it's cheap.
Think of it the other way around: cars don't drive underneath, but the bus drives above the stationary cars in the congested metropolis.
There's no pressing reason for a company to toss its legacy mainframes. What VP would sign off on replacing core systems that run an international corporation? The downsides are infinite! I mean, are you insane? Just throw money at an "expensive" COBOL programmer and get out of my office!

I grilled an employee at a Major Package Shipping Company a few years ago about their infrastructure, and it's pretty stereotypical: a few mainframes that were coded decades ago in COBOL and an expensive team of legacy programmers performing surgical tweaks. They're porting unimportant side systems to modern hardware + languages (ostensibly so the mainframe programmers can focus on the major systems), but there are no plans to replace the core. Ever. Replacement systems just aren't good enough to consider switching the heart of their company. And so it will continue until there's a compelling storyline for dropping mainframes
Well, this is kind of "the web is the whole of computing" mentality.

You pick up the phone, you get a dial tone, not a fail whale. You put in a plug, you get electricity. When a bank's core systems go down, it makes the evening news. It's a whole 'nother world from OMG sharding RoR lol that web kids think is "scalability".
I haven't worked with mainframes, and I frequently chortle every time someone mentions one even though deep down I know the article is right. But still, lack of experience has never stopped me from making stuff up before, so:

I imagine that the primary reason companies buy mainframes is that their monolithic architecture abstracts away a lot of the hard thinking that goes into a clustered system by putting it all in one chassis. If my 2000 CPUs are on separate machines then I have to write code to coordinate them and move data between them. If there's a super-fast bus connecting them and they can work with shared address space and let the OS deal with scheduling and data flow then even the average corporate code monkey can write naive large-scale apps that run a little slower but get the job done well enough to please their corporate overlords. And maybe the cost of developing a "proper" architecture for these sorts of business jobs is too high compared to the cost of a few hundred thousand in rent-a-mainframes.
Not to mention, the system interface provided by mainframes has inherent failover capabilities. This means the cobol software is intentionally less robust in the "what happens if a part of the system fails" area, as that is something that rarely happens in a way that actually affects app level software.
There are always some surprising delights about Emacs from time to time.
I'm curious if pg agrees. He sometimes presents startups as this extraordinarily painful chore, but my experience is more like Branson's.
I've seen these for at least:

- payment processing

- mail order sending (retail market)

- insurance databases

All on fairly large (world-sized) markets. Never programmed these myself, but had to interface (file or api) with it.

My feeling is that high reliability / data throughput is favored over programmer productivity and data structure elegance (most data I've seen there was fixed width strings :-).

See Host Integration Server (http://www.microsoft.com/biztalk/en/us/host-integration.aspx) for an example of product that allows to use .Net (I guess, even IronRuby) to talk to a mainframe.
Well, according to this article [1] a burglary happens every 15 seconds. I highly doubt any government agency is that efficient, but even if it did happen and you have a backup you could be back live in a couple minutes. Just like the scalability comments below allude to, the key is having the infrastructure right and then everything else is easier.

[1]: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/artsandliving/homeandga...
Anyone know why legacy mainframe software couldn't be emulated/compiled to run on a cluster of Linux boxes? Licensing, patents, legal concerns, etc? Obviously this is not a trivial issue, but it seems as if the amount of data we're talking about is not immense. Banks exchange and process large amounts of information, but how does it really compare to what people are doing with Hadoop or what Google does with MapReduce? I would imagine Google processes orders of magnitude more information than banks.
It is taking a hit on traffic at the moment. I tried it in Chrome and, while it is slower than usual, it is coming up. We have load balancers on the site that should handle some of the traffic. But we are also looking into giving it a bit more juice for the current peak. Please persevere, and thanks for looking.
Second printing (of Points of View) now available
Points of View is a collection of previously-unpublished essays written to celebrate Alan Kay's 70th birthday. Twenty-nine luminaries from diverse disciplines contributed original material for this book.
Springwise- Business Ideas
The Dark Side of C++ is that everyone is an opinionated expert. C can be abused in a similar manner. The output of cpp is notoriously hard to read, especially if all newlines are removed :) But this is implied and understood by your average C programmer and therefore it is simply not worth discussing.
Middle button works for me.