skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thanks for sharing! I'll check out those books.

It's true that I read books that many wouldn't take the time to read. I don't think that's because those books are less interesting; I think it's because most people have much less interest in reading than I do, and therefore are satisfied with fewer books.

I totally agree with that. A point of clarification for what I meant in terms of "interesting" is in order. I agree that any of those titles you listed are very likely highly interesting, but exactly what is "interesting" is subjective. In no way did I mean to suggest books you enjoy to be inferior. Let me provide a supporting example of my own. I doubt many people would consider Beethoven's 5th symphony inferior music, yet no one would consider it to make Billboard Music's top 20 list anytime soon, or more youths than you can count on one hand blasting it from their cars. In this way you can see what I mean is not inferiority, but rather a broader appeal to the overall market. To put it another way, operas make plenty of money, I'm sure, but I doubt their revenues compare with even low grossing movies. Would I like more people to be into reading, or operas? Yes, but that's not how things are. To appeal to a larger audience, any work of art (especially a novel) would do well to be more than just good; it needs to be really great, so that even those with a passing interest in the medium will take the time to enjoy it.
Speaking as a programmer, I don't think you need to be a brilliant programmer to do a startup. If you can cobble something useful together using duct tape and glue, then sprinkle some glitter on it until it looks sort of nice, people will probably start using it until you have enough traction to hire a competent programmer.

But you do need to at least be able to do duct tape programming.
The problems with rails are pretty much universal to frameworks. Frameworks make it easy to do what the framework makes it easy to do, but eventually you end up paying back all that time you saved early on by fighting the framework later when you outgrow it.
Oracle is a many headed beast.

I think that PostgreSQL (RedHat database etc.) can serve most (but not all) of the applications Oracle DB serves.

There is an application server business (BEA), hardware business (Sun) and applications (PeopleSoft, Siebel).
D seems to be more sensitive to these concerns than other languages, at least as of late. Classes can be marked as "auto", which indicates they are to be destructed deterministically. I think this is a more elegant solution than requiring users to opt-in to proper semantics, though requiring the auto specifier at the use-site would make things more explicit.

Also, most languages have some sort of thread-based tasking framework that can make it easier to implement async message-passing based concurrency.
Mint is the new standard to beat.
The Worst Thing That Can Happen Is You Succeed
Boost 1.44
If someone is willing to launch your app five times, they probably find it useful, and ought to be pretty willing to rate it highly. Or at least, that's the theory right? :)
How would it work for spam filters?

Regards
"Ecstatic users do much of your marketing for you." is one of the biggest misconceptions a startup founder can have. Please don't make the mistake of depending on your users for marketing- you will fail.

And your marketer should absolutely know how to create good content/write good copy- but unless they know how to spend an ad budget to drive traffic to that copy, your content is worthless.
(This probably both offends both Perl people and C++ people. Here goes.)

I think writing clean, readable, modern Perl is like writing clean, readable, modern C++: it's _all_ about what language features you avoid using.

Writing good code is totally possible in both languages, and people have done it successfully. It's unfortunate that both languages are filled with features better left unused, but they're both very useful tools. Perhaps Perl has a little more competition in its area of focus than C++ does.

Many would argue that we should be using neither Perl nor C++, but I haven't seen any serious contenders to replace either.

(For the record, I use both Perl and C++, but only infrequently.)
I personally work three days a week as a consultant and I work on my startup the rest of the week. I don't have to sacrifice anything, the journey is very pleasant and I have the confidence that one day I won't need any consulting work anymore.
Myna - Online Audio Editor
While I wouldn't go so far as to say this type of post is problematic, what really drew me into this site were things like http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1156628
Thirty-six predictions for the world: 2010 - 2012
Which is why you would slowly replace brain matter with technology, cortical column by cortical column, until there was nothing left ;)

But honestly I think biotech could progress to the point to where biological aging is neutralized. Cells break down and make copying failures for only a few specific reasons. I think the biological will be preserved and merely augmented with better human-machine interfaces.

Also cloning yourself or making a digital backup from yourself isn't that much different from having kids. Both are to ensure the survival\existence of data whether its encoded genetically or not.
"if you think of the astronomical economic gap between, say, a Malian subsistence farmer and a one-man economy like Rupert Murdoch, it’s really the only binary phase-change there on the sweep from $0 to $6.3 billion"

This is clearly written by someone who's never spent time living on less than $5 per day.

There is a "binary phase change" at $1/day and another at $2/day.

Earning less than $1/day, like over 1 BILLION people do, is a constant struggle for survival. The moment you earn over $1 day, the most basic needs of food and water are much more likely to be met.

There's another phase change at $2/day, at which point shelter becomes a real option and survival rates increase significantly.

I know this isn't an article on international development, but don't bring up the Malian subsistence farmer if you think his life is somehow just as easy as that of a $100,000k "wage slave".
Mint was bought by Intuit.
My partner and I have participated in coders4charities.org the last few years and will pledge to help again in 2011. Coders 4 Charities is a wonderful event that has helped dozens of non-profit organizations with their web development needs.

At the moment, I am heavily committed to my current venture, but I will pledge two weekends (32 hours) to help a non-profit (preferably one on this board) that is in need of a CMS website using the WordPress platform. Just provide the hosting account, content, and existing (if available) graphic assets and I will handle the rest - including the design and skinning of the site.

In the past I have helped with numerous other non-profit sites including children.org and various youth league and team sites such as potentialplayers.com and jayhawkinvitational.com (including a registration system processing over 30K each year for the foundation).

I would really appreciate the opportunity to attend this year's BOS conference. My partner and I have been neck deep in development of our current app since February, while at the same time juggling full-time jobs and families. We have been saving every penny to bootstrap our company and do not have the extra capital to send me on our dime this year. We can afford to spend the travel and hotel expenses and if chosen, will gladly send verification of my airline ticket.

We have a launch date of February 2011 and feel this conference could help us with many of the marketing/pricing/capital/going out on your own types of questions we are facing.

Thank you for giving all of us this opportunity to attend!

update: randy@embarkco.com
Honest question:

What was Xobni's plan after turning down Microsoft's offer? Making > $20MM selling $40 software seems pretty unlikely.
The design team has lead the way, developing a “touch language” which goes beyond the work that we’ve seen elsewhere. Rather than single, magic gestures, we’re making it possible for basic gestures to be chained, or composed, into more sophisticated “sentences”.

This sounds very interesting! Both to develop and to use.
Huh, I stand corrected. That's really weird; can they tell what carrier you're on when you download an app, even if it's over wifi? Definitely evidence toward Google favoring free apps and not caring as much about the Android Market as much as they should.
I love how "historians" now troll the media with revisionist re-writings of history with glaring and obvious gaps. The US submarine fleet had so decimated the Japanese merchant marine by 1945 that they essentially ran out of targets. That wasn't news, and the ability for Japan's colonies to supply the home islands had been in decline for over a year.

I'm sure that even a group as disconnected from reality as the Imperial Military Command had figured this out, and gutted the army in Manchuria long before the Soviet land-grab. The Japanese faced veteran Soviet armored armies with no tanks and a few dozen effective aircraft.

IMO the pressure placed on Imperial Japan by the firebombing and nuking of Japan's cities, the impending total destruction of the overseas possessions and destruction of the Navy was enough to flip some key individuals in the General Staff or the Emperor to stop the insanity. The Japanese surrender IMO is all about internal politics and is something we are unlikely to ever understand fully.
Why did you submit the wikipedia page for stackless python? Is the idea that most people here don't know about it? I'm confused.
So by that logic is it more pleasing to have a bigger test suite than a smaller one?

I'd argue that a test suite should be as small as possible to test the critical areas of the app, at least until the app ships, and then new tests should be added as the app takes a more definite shape, etc.

How much fun is it to refactor a test suite b/c the product changed substantially and you are now mired in the cognitive dissonance of a very un-agile (slow) change or in a bunch of broken tests.
Probably forced by VCs. No point is liquidating at that price range, doesn't make an impact on their fund.
The main reason to use Minion is that it’s an awesome text face which ends up taking up a bit less space than other faces at a similar size without sacrificing readability (I used it for almost all my papers the last couple years of college, for example). As a display face, it’s not terribly exciting (especially since it doesn’t seem that the fonts designed for display size are included here; so these Minion fonts are intended for 10–12 pt. on paper).
Specifically, it is hard to develop meaningful long term romantic/sexual relationships if you are transient. Women especially seem to value stability and investment in a community, even beyond the purely logistical issues. This isn't much of an impediment to spending a year or two in this lifestyle, but after doing this for basically my entire adult life (since 1997 and leaving MIT), there are decided sacrifices.
I love how the author includes a line within the article that pretty much sums up the insanity of using pure CSS to create buttons ... "a small truckload of CSS" A designer could replace that truckload of CSS with 1 image and 1 line of code.

We gotta stop sometimes and think .. what are we trying to achieve exactly? Strikes me almost as an extreme diet that excludes 100% of fat from your intake just for the sake of having no fat irregardless if it's healthy or causes you to lose weight.

But in the "cool project" nerdy line of thinking .. it's pretty neat.
That's an unfair assessment. The first-line Soviet armored and motor rifle divisions were well led and disciplined soliders who did their job and moved on.

The second/third line infantry divisions essentially levied anyone who could walk into service, including criminals, POWs, etc. Those units were mostly the ones where summary shootings and no discipline were common.

That wasn't a phenomena unique to the Soviets, either. Life for a German in the French occupation zone wasn't a bag of cherries.
imho, sites like this are great in concept, but the chicken-and-egg problem becomes more intractable the more "broad" it is. The trouble is getting just some traction, in just 1 niche. It almost seems easier again in my opinion, to conquer a specific niche/vertical first, then adjacent areas, one at a time (as opposed to attempting to do a land-grab but see nothing stick)
This is not a new problem. It was an issue for Valve with piracy of their games in the Russian market. So they decided to actually sell their games in Russia and it went a long way to reducing piracy of their games in that market. People will get things as soon as they can if they want it. For instance, fansubs of anime and foreign films are pretty popular and widely circulated. If that means stealing it then they will.

[0] http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/valve-we-dont-worry-about-...
Do court records count?
Actually, the customers that use OEL are normally customers of the Oracle database. They get the OS for free as part of the license deal and enjoy not having to play the finger-pointing game with Oracle and RH support any more.

You have no idea what a relief it is when your DB vendor can't blame the OS for bugs and performance problems, and actually have to solve them.

Thats why we love it when Oracle does storage, network and hardware (i.e. Exadata) - we love having one throat to choke.
That seems too simple. Why did they get so close to an acquisition if the VCs were steadfast against the sale?

The TC article implies the Xobni team pulled out, over concerns about the product & team's future within Microsoft. If that's true, I'm confused as to why they built an Outlook plugin to begin with.
Each of those questions can quite simply be answered "Lack of Capital"....This is what is unique about being a software developer. As mentioned in the article you don't need funding to get something up and running.
It's patents all the way down.
I never said anyone were drooling, barbaric apes. Any race of people governed by fascists or Stalinists will commit atrocities. In fact, my willingness to blame these atrocities on the men at the top if anything exonerates the people of these countries--I don't collectively blame the German people for the Holocaust so much as I blame the individual leaders of the Nazi cult.

FDR was many things, but he wasn't a totalitarian thug who ordered the execution of prisoners. If he was, the US likely would have been no better than its enemies. And the US did happen to commit atrocities during the Second World War as a matter of policy, just not against POW's or occupied territory.

Now, let's be clear on what you're asking for. Any order to plunder, torture, murder, or rape either prisoners of war or the people of an occupied nation issued by any military branch of Japan, Germany, or the USSR.

"Military" does narrow it down a little bit--for instance, the only part of the SS that was really "military" was the Waffen-SS, which was separate from the SS departments that ran the concentration camps or rounded up the Jews. So I'm going to take the liberty of counting any state organization, including the SS and NKVD, not just the military itself.

Germany: If you're going to deny the Holocaust you're a very silly person and I'm not going to answer you.

Japan: Let's just start with Unit 731. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731 That's not the end of it, and it's barely the beginning, but all you asked for was an existence proof.

Russia: The Katyn Massacre (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katyn_massacre), was carried out based upon orders signed by Stalin himself to murder Polish POW's and residents of Soviet-occupied Poland. Again, not comprehensive, but all you asked for was an existence proof. And I guess it might not technically count because NKVD are separate from military. Oh well.
Ask HN: Okay okay, I'll learn to program...now what?
Nearly a year of daily hn visits (spent reading the stories I understood) I've come to a realization: Knowing a programming language seriously reduces the barriers to entry for a tech startup.

So the big Q: Where do I start? Do you have any resources to break down my options (Languages for Dummies?) and help me decide what, and how, I'll go about this.

Background info: I've programmed in C, C++, and VB, but nothing more than what an entry level course would teach. I'm rather adept in CSS, but that doesn't really count.
I'm reading "Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach" and yeah, learning more about compilers would be cool, but a big time commitment is not something I want ATM.

Might try asking the dojo if you're in south bay on any semi-regular basis.
Well, if you have years of effort put into something which can be copied easily, as is the case with mechanical inventions, drugs, or cryptography/compression algos (yes I think those actually make sense as patentable), that's one thing. Most software is the opposite -- copying it and applying to your business would often be more effort than inventing your own. So the patent system is exactly backwards for us.
It's a very crowded space, even for the whole 37signals style apps. I suggest you do more research into all the other startups and smaller, simpler solutions that exist out there and determine if there's really an opportunity.
I would argue that most of these are parsers and not compilers. While a compiler needs a parser, a compiler and a parser are not the same thing.

That said, even though I took a compilers class in college, I think my education was severely lacking in the value and use of parsers. I've seen so many problems that lend themselves well to some type of parser solved in some asinine, brute-force (often regex) method.
>in some circumstances

It is very important to note that this only applies when a defendant is a danger to self or others. You cannot force a person with bipolar disorder to take medication if they have not committed a crime, or if they are not a danger.

Both cases also deal only with persons incarcerated- as opposed to "free".
Thanks for the link.

I think this paper does help put bounds on the upper limits to creating efficiency through some mechanisms. Using those bounds you can think about the limits to which reasons for crashes are not reflected, based on size of the time series of crashes.

I always think of efficient markets as an idea like a frictionless surface, an invalid, simplifying model to make the mathematics tractable. So the question would be is the market close enough to efficient that well understood crashes are reasonably well reflected in it, most of the time: implying you should be thinking about something else.

I guess I should not believe in efficient markets since I work for a large active fund manager.

Our definition of "weakly efficient" is different that the paper you site. Our definition is "close enough to efficient to make exploitation infeasible". And I can't simultaneously believe in that, and believe in our products.
>it’s really the only binary phase-change there on the sweep from $0 to $6.3 billion.

Oh man, spoken like someone who has never earned less than $20K/year. I don't have any experience supporting myself on less (as before I made it to that tax bracket, I was living with my parents) but I imagine the transition from
$1/day to $2/day is even more dramatic.

Granted, my experiences living in that income tax bracket without parental support were mercifully short, but there's a pretty dramatic difference between making $10K/year and making $30K/year.

Also, I think your perceived earning ability has a lot to do with comfort levels. Right now, I'm paying myself maybe $30K year... but I think it'd take about 20 minutes to get a $100K+/year job, if I could convince someone I was ready to work for them rather than for myself, which I think makes me quite a bit more comfortable than I would be otherwise... I have a safety net. Maybe not quite as much of a safety net as a couple million in the bank, but it's still a pretty cushy net, and I use that net from time to time. No matter how badly I fail, I know I can go get a cushy job that pays me far more money than I need without requiring me to work that hard.
This is just counterproductive.
they were the same person underneath

Were they?

Everyone has many personas. Storytellers and actors are experts at crafting personas and switching their minds in and out of them, but it's not an activity that's restricted to artists. Everyone does it.

I have an authorial voice when I write on HN. It isn't the same as the voice I use in the rest of the world. For one thing, I don't speak in carefully edited three-to-six paragraph essays.

I'm also a different person to my wife than I am to my coworkers, a different person at a funeral than I am at a blue-collar bar, and a different person when I'm healthy than when I'm in chronic pain.

This isn't some kind of lie. It's how human personality works: Your personality isn't some Platonic ideal that lives alone inside your head; it's embodied in flesh, conditioned on environment, and constantly retuning itself in reaction to society.

Your example undermines your point. Richard Feynman deliberately adopted a variety of public (and private) personas and switched between them depending on the circumstances. For example, he consciously adopted a different persona in front of a general audience than in front of other expert physicists. He explicitly discusses this in his book. After winning the Nobel Prize he would try to give a seminar, and they'd stick him in a huge auditorium full of everybody in town, and he'd feel so guilty about putting on his experts-only talk that he'd switch into his general-audience mode and give a general-audience talk. But he missed being able to give expert-level seminars so much that he started giving seminars under a pseudonym. Yes, he invented a handle. Very hackerly of him.
I actually gave my dropbox username/password to someone just hours ago to login to my dropbox and upload a couple large files. This is definitely a better way. Thanks!
You are wrong.

They discriminate against you just because you are solo.
Confirmed Natural Oscillations of EIC Based Fusion Reactions
This reminds me, Derek Sivers seems to be putting together a project along similar lines: http://karmalist.com/
That's certainly a risk, but it seems like a lot of Dropbox's resources are going into mobile, at least for the time being. We'll see though.
Huffman coding is computationally much simpler, take a histogram of the input tokens and make a token->bitstream function. At the time it was released a newish computer would be an IBM 650 with 2000 words of memory on the drum and 60 words in core. (Note that absence of 'k', 'm', or 'g' in those numbers.) It was "quite popular". 1800 of them were sold.

The LZ algorithms of the later '70s are more computationally involved with dictionary lookups in mutating dictionaries. At this time a newish computer would be a PDP-11 with 64k words of memory and a hard disc drive that could store megabytes! I'm not sure how many were sold, but universities were littered with them.

I suggest LZ style algorithms merely waited for appropriate physical tools.