skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What, that Ralph Corderoy, one-time of the PCG? You should be able to work out who I am from my username ;)

Anyway, I can't remember when I last heard someone use "whom" outside of slightly cheesy television series like Morse...
Often times proper grammar isn't the best approach from a marketing standpoint. Look at apple's use of, "the funnest _ yet" slogans that they used for a while. Catering to the most commonly used vernacular is generally a better strategy from a marketing perspective.

I'm going out on a limb here, but my bet is that the mistake is on purpose.
Ha, OK while it is slightly naff to do it I couldn't help but smile and pull this quote out of pg's essay:

11. Its daddy is in a pinch. Sun's business model is being undermined on two
fronts. Cheap Intel processors, of the same type used in desktop machines, are
now more than fast enough for servers. And FreeBSD seems to be at least as good
an OS for servers as Solaris. Sun's advertising implies that you need Sun
servers for industrial strength applications. If this were true, Yahoo would be
first in line to buy Suns; but when I worked there, the servers were all Intel
boxes running FreeBSD. This bodes ill for Sun's future. If Sun runs into
trouble, they could drag Java down with them.

Prescient. I hadn't read that essay before.
If you jettison your principles, then you have no integrity. And if you have no integrity, you cannot be trusted.
That's interesting. I wonder if Google could buy IBM and then have them drop the lawsuit?
What a fantastic position to take.
You might as well just link to the blog entry directly:
http://brainspl.at/articles/2010/08/13/4-years-at-engine-yar...
You're living in a fantasy world: http://money.cnn.com/2010/02/02/news/economy/social_security...
>ah, but reputation matters here... you don't want to have a reputation for being easy money for patent trolls.

Giving into Oracle (who owns Sun's patents which were vast and probably only topped by IBM in the industry) is hardly going to give one the reputation for being patent troll bait.

And doing what's best for the rest of the industry obviously isn't something Google cares about.
I like your a domain purchasing analogy as Demand Media owns eNom, a domain name registrar.
I'm aware of that; I was getting paid for Java work in 1995.
Think of a sentence containing "at the end of the day". Now remove that phrase. Does your sentence convey any less information? Unless the time of day is actually germane to what you are saying something (e.g. "At the end of the day I draw the curtains and have a cup of cocoa.") then it is just superfluous verbiage. And that's bad because it obscures the message.

"Boilerplate" is jargon, but conveys some information, so I think that's OK.
I meant to but I pasted the wrong link. Can I edit the link to change it to the direct link? Or can a moderator please do that?

[edit] looks like I cannot change the url myself. if a moderator can change irt I'd appreciate it.
How the Google/Verizon proposal could kill the Internet in 5 years
Sideline them? Actually I think its theraputic for the kids to allow other people to take care of them. It helps them adjust to the world and understand that mommy and daddy DON'T have to be there for them to thrive.
I don't quite understand what heyzap is about.

Do I give you a link to a page containing my html5/js game and you embed the page it links to into social sites?
Note that OO programming in F# requires a lot of type annotations (even more than in C#, you need to explicitly upcast).
Perhaps the best way to fix your problem is to stop worrying so much about karma. ;)
Think "Google Summer of Code" for starters..
The backup plan is everyone else's primary plan. It can only help you - if you don't do anything stupid. (For example, don't take on any personal debt, and avoid non-competes / restrictive covenants.) Starting your own venture is a showcase for creativity, skill, wit and hard work; all things that will help you in a future career.

The one problem I've had is that some jobs are literally beneath you once you've started a company - people can be afraid to hire you. But that's not really an obstacle as much as a platform.
F5 Friday: How to Create Your Own URL Shortener
I think the frontpage explains it well enough: http://flattr.com
"it on another language say Objective C"

Maybe they could use Go for this purpose. (This would be a nice opportunity for Go.)

http://code.google.com/p/go/
Also, as the article j-g-faustus linked pointed, Google did something special to avoid the GPL, so JVMs that followed the usual rules won't be affected.

This makes me think that cscotta's point on uncertainty is not so strong. It'll be certainly an unpopular measure among developers, but Oracle can say that the case against Google is similar to the one against Microsoft and use the usual "fragmentation" argument.
You could make use of that new YC startup that makes you record video answers to online app questions (I forget the name). Better than a text application, less boring, fixed time to process.

edit: ah here it is: http://hirehive.com/
High School Valedictorian Speaks Out Against Formal Schooling
Like TipJoy.
Text of the speech: http://americaviaerica.blogspot.com/2010/07/coxsackie-athens...
I'm not a Yahoo"!" Technology Evangelist, but I want to express my agreement with sh1mmer. Being Google isn't the only definition of success. Yahoo is the best company in the world at selling online ad space. Search advertising makes way more money, but that doesn't change the fact that Yahoo is #1 in the market that they chose. They aren't doing bad in terms of media companies, either.

As someone who spends an inordinate amount of time thinking about online advertising, I have nothing but respect for Yahoo. Holding them to the bar of "why didn't they become Google" seems a bit unfair, like a relative of an early hacker asking "Why weren't you as successful as Bill Gates?"

Disclaimer: I worked at a startup that was purchased by Yahoo and I'm obsessed with online advertising.
HTML5 Canvas feature
It's a sort of micropayment service: You sign up and distribute a fixed amount of money per month (I.E. 10€). Everytime you click on a flattr-button (Which seem to shop up on german blogs only, in my experience), they will get a share. At the end of the month, your fixed amount divided by the number of shares is payed out to the sites.

There are some implementation details which results into calling themselves a 'social payment service'.
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“If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough” - Albert Einstein.

I hadn't come across these before, they're fantastic.
Great news, well done! One quick suggestion: have a link to Flattr from the blog ;)
Well written. I had never heard of the author or his company, yet unlike so many of the articles that come through here, it had enough context baked in that you could follow it without a Google search.

I found it surprising that Rails needs this level of hand-holding to keep it running though. Rails devs, is this really the experience you have deploying your applications?
Serving images dynamically with CherryPy (on Google AppEngine)
I've always used whom, but now I live in Canada I find myself missing it more often than I did in England. Perhaps it's just that I was taught when to use who and whom.
That is awesome, could you maybe just give a hint about what kind of area it was in? I took topology last year and it was fun but I could never imagine it applied to CS.
Does this have anything to do with the GPL? I mean, is Oracle trying to enforce Java's GPL license on Google?
We currently have enough nukes to destroy the world many times over. If you take the comparison between patents and nukes to its logical conclusion, the same probably holds. Google vs. Oracle == mutually assured destruction, regardless of how much bigger Oracle's portfolio is.
Depending on your target demographic obviously. If you're aiming for the general market then you're absolutely right, you'll hit more birds with your stones if you talk to people on their level. However, if you're aiming college grads or PhD grads, you're probably going to annoy them if you're letting grammatical errors enter your marketing.

I've closed BBC news articles when there's been a grammatical mistake in the first paragraph. I didn't pay my License Fee in the UK for them to abuse it with bad news.
The $35 indian tablet isn't vaporware
So.. Alot of people talk about how much VC they raise...
But I hardly hear about how much ACTUAL profit is made, and how much (if any) the VC get back on their investments.

Being a simpleton, who has never engaged in VC or even the smallest of investments, I am ill-informed about these kinds of decisions.

Being the tight assed kind of guy I am, I never would lend money out unless I knew I was getting the same amount I lent or more back in return. I understand all investments are gambles, but reading about things like a: "4 year startup that took $38million in VC money" (to name a very recent posting) makes me believe that these people starting companies seem to be FAR more interested in how much free money they can get from investors (and how much they piss down the toilet with hardly anything to show for it), rather than how much free money they can make in PROFIT from a viable business model.

I do hope I'm not alone in this, and someone can shed some light on my obvious confusion.

P.S. I also would like to know how people get investments at all without a viable business model (Twitter). Doesn't seem very smart OR clever to invest in a company with no profit, no way to make profit, and no ideas on how they could make profit. (I realise Twitter has somewhat of a business model now, but considering the amount of money they piss away per month, I don't see them ever making profit).
I'll bet good money that there was a lot of negotiation going on behind closed doors between Oracle and Google before this suit was filed. We're only seeing this suit because Google must have turned down Oracle's best offer.
I still don't entirely get their model. They have all this rails deployment expertise, but you pay a more less flat fee every month, whether you're drawing on their knowledge a lot or a little.

I think I'd prefer to pay less for hosting, and have some experts on retainer for when they're really needed.

They're cool people in any case, and I wish them good luck.
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Babies are the sweetest gift of lord. Don't you think so?
Whenever someone says 'You infringe on my patents! Pay me! ... No, I won't tell you how you infringe,' I immediately think they're just spreading FUD.
In an earlier discussion, patio11 had an interesting comment about their business model - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1499269.
Not that it needed the help, but Oracle just became an even less attractive place to work, as a programmer.
1) Are you all aware of the Mythical Man Month by Fred Brookes? If not, read it, throwing more bodies at the problem will not solve it.

2) Your team already sounds quite big for a supposed 5 month project. Feels like people will be stepping on each others toes, and someone will be tearing ther hair out trying to manage everyone modifying the same codebase whilst it is so immature.

3) The Iron Triangle - this is the relationshp between scope, resources/cost, and deadline dates. If you can't build what is in scope, with the resources you have by the date specified then somethings got to give. Hint: increasing resources is the least effective way of doing this, see 1) above.

4) Have you tried approaching this in an Agile manner? Prioritise all the functionaltiy thats in scope, tackle the most important first. Continually refine the priority of functionality as you develop the system. If that deadline is immovable, and you're not going to get all the functionality in, at least you've delivered the most important parts of the system. What you might find, if everyone gets Agile, is that they realise you won't hit the deadline early on and they start buying into this approach, by prioritising they are in effect reducing scope without realising it.

5) in conjunction with 4) monitor the productivity and efficiency of your team using burndown charts. Note that this is different from speed of development. The concept of technical debt is integral in all of this; productivity & efficiency take into account technical debt and implies you are trying to manage it, speed usually increases technical debt.

6) Finally, tell people "things take as long as they take". Just because someone says they want it by yesterday doesn't mean that it can be built by then.If they want to bake some bread it will take them approximately an hour or so, if someone told them to do it in 20 minutes they wouldn't be able to knead the dough and bake it in that time - and get something edible at the end. Essentially that is what you are being asked to do.

My two-penneth

Good luck!
You know what annoys me? When a company has a blog for their product, but that blog doesn't include a link to the product. Anywhere.

If your blog post interests me and I want to learn about the product, it should be as easy as clicking your logo to get to it.
Flattr strangely seems to have taken off in Germany fairly quickly. And it seems to work. If you are a popular blog you already (with Flattr still being invite only until very recently) seem to be able to make between a few hundred and maybe a thousand Euro per month.
I'm not convinced that an infinite number of parallel universes splitting off every moment is any less spooky.

Cramer's transactional interpretation explains things at least as well:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transactional_interpretation
Rare Sharing of Data Leads to Progress on Alzheimer’s
That is the new way to build companies, College degrees don’t matter much IMHO anymore, for developers anyway. It’s more how you interact with the open source community and what you release yourself. Your github account has become your new resume and what you say on Twitter and in various IRC channels are more likely to get you the best jobs then any recruiters ever will.

I'm interested in education, hiring, and matters of accreditation. Those last few paragraphs really got my attention. I'm glad I read all the way to the end.
Right, I guess my comment might even be insulting to some - if so, I apologize. I am in Denmark but I think wages here are pretty comparable to the US for many industries.

But, if what you say is true then surely you should consider writing a blog as described in the article?
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"In 2004, when Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin wrote to prospective shareholders about their vision for the company, they outlined a commitment to contribute significant resources, including 1% of Google's equity and profits in some form, as well as employee time, to address some of the world's most urgent problems. That commitment became a range of giving initiatives including Google.org."

- http://www.google.org/about.html
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It wasn't any specific results or theorems, it was just a way of thinking about "closeness" and the structure of a space we were working in. Instead of thinking of a succession of two dimensional grey-scale images, I said - let's consider the 4D space where the dimensions are X, Y, intensity and frame time, and then think of the images as a mapping from that 4D space into {0,1}.

Now generalise into a mapping from C^2 -> [0,1] and think about continuity. Various properties of objects moving in your images translate nicely into properties of the functions. The thing we were trying to do turned out not to be posible, but this way of thinking showed us a similar idea that worked, and the solutions provided could be warped into a solution of the original problem.

Interestingly, in a sense it was like proving that a given problem is NP-Complete in that we converted the problem we had into another, then converted the solutions back.

It's the rich inter-connectedness that gives you this, not the individual fields. People recommend that you learn Linear Algebra, or Complex Analysis, or Group Theory, or Topology, but in truth, no single field helps on its own.

They are intertwingled, and it's the connections that carry the real benefits.
Oracle/Google: the patents and the implications
Infosec Island Security News Digest for 8-13-2010
I like the business model, even though it's heavily geared towards content creators. I have no problem putting a little money in and rewarding other content creators if I get something in return, too. It doesn't have to be equal. So far, I have flattr'd one thing, and have received three flattrs. There's something in it for me.

However, if I didn't have stuff people could flattr, I doubt I would've joined.
>>>you didn't work hard enough/ideas weren't good enough/didn't develop fast enough/weren't emotionally strong enough<<<

No one ever is, but you can always make a choice.
William Safire said it best:

"The best rule for dealing with who vs. whom is this: Whenever whom is required, recast the sentence. This keeps a huge section of the hard disk of your mind available for baseball averages."

Put this in the "most people don't care" bin along with the subjunctive mood, which I see intelligent people failing to use more often than not.
http://unsuck-it.com/as-soon-as-possible-asap/
Strange; Whenever someone tells me they need something ASAP, I generally consider it to mean "they don't know when they need it, so it's not important".
It is completely within the context of what you wrote in reality. Money is taken from some people and given to other people. There is no moral difference between the mugger's threat to shoot you for not forking over and the government's threat to take your property or throw you in jail for not forking over. And the recipient/beneficiary of the theft is a thief, even if you/they are too gutless to do your/their own threatening. Maybe you are one of those idiots who actually believes in the "Social Security Trust Fund" and you get your own money back; but that belief does not make it true.
They don't even need Oracle for that. NetApp already flexed muscles and made clear they'll go after anyone daring using OpenSolaris and most probably anything sporting ZFS (including *BSD), in a storage oriented product. Frankly, I don't see any reason to use OpenSolaris if not for ZFS.

IMHO OpenSolaris won't represent much more than NetBSD pretty soon.
The ERROR is in the Details
Yeah: Business jargon. Whenever a PHB tells you they are a rock star or a wizard you know they _may_ know how to use a mouse.
Joe Armstrong & Dave Thomas on software craftsmanship
Dup: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1592436

Text and many, many comments:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1573636
Dup: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1592481

Also: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1592436

Text and many, many comments:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1573636
F# has better library support (at least if you're on Windows).

It also has monads.
Is Oracle faring so bad? Last I looked, a company actively suing for patent infringement meant that they have no real product, so it's their only hope of "generating" "income". It is a sure sign of imminent corporate decline.
That's good to hear. Where I was (both in the private sector and the public sector) we seem mired in managing the complexity of the tools, which prevented us from being creative in this way. Perhaps that's the real opportunity, making a new generation of tools that's easier to use (or figuring out how to better train people in these skills)
Would you even want to work for a company for whom a failed startup is a negative?
Almost certainly that one. Mr Burns, is that you? You've had me accessing bits that hadn't been scrubbed in a long time and have suffered some rot. Have you just arrived at number 63 or just left? There's a Dorset LUG if you're interested.

Morse can be cheesy, but I thought it was a cultural reference that Americans may know. :-)
And everybody should see why and how eInk devices (Kindle, Sony PRS, etc) are hundred times better tools to read books and papers.
CompassionPit.com, Share your feelings without fear of judgment
For how with google. Why you your from
Title is derived from word frequencys in hacker news titles.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1599395

link is one of the more interesting results when searching this phrase on google.
This attitude increases exponentially the further removed from Silicon Valley you are & is pretty much the status quo in Europe.
Is there anything in this

"Oh the stories I could tell if only I could. But I feel that telling this positive story of the history of EY is the classy way to go out and I wish Engine Yard all the best in the world"

Any unrest?
Which is worth pointing out - it is not a social payment service, it is a social donation service, since you get to view the content whether you pay or not.
A pit doesn't sound very compassionate...
Of the $35, which equates to INR 1500, INR 750 is government subsidy.

So it's really a $70 tablet. That's a lot more plausible given that you can already buy Chinese-built Android tablets for less than $100.
Maybe Twitter should consider changing to "Whom to follow" as the quirkiness would stand out to those unfamiliar with "whom". May help partially offset the slight staidness.
Sometimes I wonder who decides on the morals that Hollywood movies transport, though. Like the obvious "sacrifice yourself for society" - I picture fattened movie studio bosses laughing their asses of watching the perils of the common people. So maybe this "accept your boring life" falls into the same category - a meme beneficial to the ruling class. (I haven't seen the movie)
Looks like a good place to go to pick/prey on vulnerable people.

Edit: I'm not saying that because that's my idea of fun. But someone's going to think that.
I'm not positive as to what you specifically are referring.

There are easy options for simple apps. As things get complicated, there are managed hosting options that are hyper-specialized to Rails, such as EngineYard.

There was a time when administering a Rails app was a much more hairy proposition than it is today, though.
Dramatic rehash of the old same story. Don't mistake QoS with net neutrality, please.
BasicISP dialup is $6.95 per month. You can't listen to music, watch videos, or play games over it, but it is plenty adequate for reading text. And you can access it anywhere there's a phone.
They wouldn't be normal people if there weren't a bit. It sounds like things went ok though, all things considered, and he's just ready for new things and a new place.
PythonSecurity.org (Python security wiki and tools)
The ride isn't over yet. This happened - in private - to Wiles many times over, but each time he had the knowledge, insight and ability to add the extra material.

Then it went public, and even then there was a hole. That eventually required Taylor's assistance.

Math is like this. Lots of people with tangential deep knowledge are bringing their attention to the problem, but Deolalikar likely has more that he hasn't presented yet. I'm not betting the proof is right, but it's not dead yet.

Even more, there're ideas raised here yet to be explored, and who know, even if this proof doesn't do it on its own, perhaps it will form the foundation of a successful attack later.

Math goes on.
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Neat. An empty query brings up every strip:

http://michaelyingling.com/random/calvin_and_hobbes/search.p...
Big companies that can't smell very well and have piles of Cobol-esque Java [The Java Programming Language (tm)] code running on things like AS/400's will probably just pay whatever patenting licensing fees they need to in order to carry on with Java as long as they possibly can.