skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Isn't that no-strings angel funding predicated on the idea that there's going to be either a round of financing or an exit?

Really depends on the investor. Some angels explicitly want you to go Series A -> Series B -> $100M -> IPO. Others explicitly want to help founders start cool companies. Some are basically mini-VCs, and others are really founder-friendly. So it's just important for a startup to have the right angels, whichever direction you go.
I think the point is that this is the stuff that you always learn in the course of building your First Big Thing. By opening it up to public ridicule rather than to a polite code review by an understanding senior dev, they don't really get any extra learning out of the deal. Just extra humiliation.
Thanks for that! More reading for me.
On sabatical - coursework vs. real world
When I started managing my own VPS, I found the Linode Library's Linux Security Basics to be a fantastic primer.

http://library.linode.com/using-linux/security-basics/
Kinda what Tumblr have become of late, seems like a lot of younger people have began moving at least some of theironline presence over.
number 136 when i found it...

http://www.forbes.com/profile/james-leprino
Rumor: Two Facebook Phones Coming Next Year?
We used to say that Tcl/Tk was a C library with a very complex configuration file ;-)
no discredit to your post then- but your title couldn't be more misleading
I think this is definitley the case. The company started when Ben Trott developed a web publishing engine for his wife, Mena, who wanted to use it to update her sewing group. Similar to eBay, except unlike eBay Six Apart didn't bring in big-gun management until later on (and they weren't as good as say, Meg Whitman).

Most of the poor decisions were made at that time, Wordpress took the lead and then didn't look back from there.
I'm in for the first one...Seems like it could be interesting.
I read through this and didnt see it mentioned, so here goes. The single most effective thing I do to avoid mishaps at intersections is to look at the driver of the car. Make eye contact and you know they see you. If you can't catch their eye then be extra careful.
I remember meeting someone who said "oh yes, we did assembler in our course" - upon being questioned they had been doing .Net CLR instructions.

So much for the 6502 assembler I grew up with :-|
If by not confusing you mean not ambiguous, then that's rarely the case in Japanese, which is a very context-sensitive language.

The original Japanese text is probably not at fault here.
But Mono is a totally different story.
Onboarding: Designing Welcoming First Experiences
(1) - I don't see the problem here. Somehow old DOS stuff still works in Windows 7. You need new features? They're coming with the newer OS, but your old features rarely go away. Contrast this with upgrades from PHP 3 to 4 or 5, stillborn Perl 6, great divide between Python 2 and 3.

(2) - Please... Your old frameworks are still there. You are discouraged to use them, but they didn't go away. I seriously don't understand how this is a problem?

(3) - Again, technology is not frosen. Competitors are coming out with new shinier things - why Microsoft should stick to only what was there back 20 years ago? So they push their shiny stuff into the limelight. But given that old frameworks are still in place, it's not a problem.

"The push to COM and machine generated stub code." - I don't understand your grudge here. Why didn't you ask yourself: do _I_ really need to use COM? COM solves some particular problem - was it _your_ problem? Did ole-good Windows API and C++ classes just go away with the advent of COM? I for one am a C++/Win32|64 and .NET dev. Last few years I'm asking myself a question - do _I_ need to use WPF, just because it is there? My answer is no - I'm just ignoring it, as I ignore other shiny things that don't solve _my_ problem.

BTW, maybe this will sound like a blasphemy here, on HN, but Microsoft could teach a thing or two to the "platform vendors" out there. The pace of change and amount of inconsistency that is being introduced by everyone and their dog with web service "APIs" is astounding. Compared to that, MS' approach of keeping of old stuff while introducing new one is simply a god-send.
Although it bears more truth than you might think. As of Clojure 1.2, you can implement Java types from Clojure and you could build a plain old Java interface to the system if you needed to. And you'll likely be making use of many standard/community Java libraries.
Also so far Facebook has become profitable from gaining a very small amount of revenue from each user. They have a total user attention for much longer over the user base now than Google do, the trick is just monetising this attention.
My brother is a very heavy Facebook user but he's still logged in to Gmail almost 18 hours a day. I'd say he spends about equal amounts of time on each.
Microsoft Xbox Chief Predicts Doom & Gloom For Blu-ray
Google Reader turns off tracking service
http://googlereader.blogspot.com/2010/09/turning-off-track-changes-feature.html

Yay! This is good news for other tracking services like Femtoo.com! Roll on the investment... :-)
Not merely playing the devils advocate here, but what exactly do you mean by "the tools are great"? I have heard that numerous times about MS stuff, but I don't really get it.

I find that the oss/linux/socialist camp has some excellent tools available. But maybe you mean something different by "tools" than I do.
JRE and JVM are technical terms. Unless you are talking to techies, I think "Java technology" and/or "Java platform" are a better choice.
From the perspective of an information security researcher with plenty of time spent working on both sides of the issue, I can tell you that any attacker worth their salt will be persistent and use multiple attack vectors to get what they want. This holds true for bored teens, corporate spies and real penetration testers (not just dorks that get paid to run scanning tools on your network) alike.

I've spent the last decade doing mostly IT Security defense work. I don't worry when I see someone port-scan my servers. Those kiddos are almost always benign. I worry when I see that our IDS starts to correlate many subtle attacks over a long period of time from similar places (such as the same school, ISP, etc)
I see what you're saying but upgrading an OSS library is usually undertaken by somebody that thinks beforehand "I wonder if upgrading this will have any implications" whereas clicking "Express" on update.windows.com is billed as pain free, just like all things point and click.

Plus I had followed the advice in MSDN concerning connection pooling which was a registry setting for ODBC NOT part of the framework I was using (VBscript in ASP). Responsibilty for pooling was pushed into the framework.

The goodbye python article was about assumptions one could make about what would be available before one's code arrived. I bet php3 code still runs just fine.
That's not what the man page says. AFAIK HAProxy splices from one socket to another.
Cisco releases critical IOS security patches
You're right. I had the Starcraft 300 action/minute metric in my head, and I've definitely seen Farmville players at that level, but the average is probably much closer to 60 actions/minute.

My original point was less about the actual numbers, and more about the exercise of estimating server load, instead of just blindly declaring that they must have crappy code.
$12.2 Trillion Was Not Enough Stimulus
Thanks, I checked that list. All clear!
And its a great metaphor for http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl%27s_law, which was one of the "secrets" to the success of the Cray 1: even when you couldn't use the vector hardware it was blindly fast (80 MHz in the mid-70s).
Jay-Z, Buffett and Forbes on Success and Giving Back
For the U.S. to Recover Its Investment, General Motors Must Sell For $134/share
> the main effect will be that the Japanese people will be a lot poorer

I'd say the main effect will be a global financial meltdown to end all meltdowns.
Not to dance on someone's grave but to me this is fantastic news. When Blockbuster was the dominate player, they were quite the nasty bully. Ridiculously high late fees that were very hard to avoid. Half the time you'd return the DVD on time, but the employees wouldn't inventory it until it was too late and still hit you with a fee. A fee which they were extremely reluctant to remove. Their customer service was downright awful. Before Netflix came around I responded by stopping shopping at Blockbuster altogether and just started buying my own movies. Even at $20+ a pop, it was still more convenient and less stress filled than hoping Blockbuster would show you some mercy.

I'm very glad to see the market can respond and a new player can come in with a better business model and treat customers better, and win. It's reassuring.
Clickable: http://opencal.com/
I wouldn't go long on Barnes & Noble or Borders either.
Are these guys important, respected people? Of course. Do they primarily invest in companies within Silicon Valley? Yep.

Is the country, and the world much bigger than the ego's of these guys? Absolutely.

My point is, why should I care about a closed door meeting that happened 2000 miles away from me.

As a startup founder I find myself hesitant to comment on articles / topics like these mostly due to the fact that you never know who you might work with in the future. But I'll make the exception here.

This seems more like a Days of Our Lives episode.
Yes, I built http://ihackernews.com (a mobile version of HN), along with http://api.ihackernews.com, and http://viewtext.org, all with ASP.NET MVC. I've built these projects just for fun.
Classic read and write pointer can have any address, it doesn't have to be a multiple of kernel page size or whatever. Is OS supposed to implicitly do a new "hidden" mmap whenever it sees an address that's multiple of the page size? And to do the lookups for matching chunk still mmaped for every write? How long are you going to keep such relations at all in the system with more reads and writes in progress? I don't see how that concept can be made efficient, and Pike doesn't actually explain in the post how he'd do it. sendfile looks ugly and inelegant but solves a real problem.
...or start with the official documentation coming from - gasp! - Microsoft:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd208104(PROT.10).as...
And some background on the one big mistake that hastened their death by years:

http://www.slate.com/id/2133995/
Guess I'm glad we havent invested in it yet at our house
If I may restate this: You're on the article page, therefore we can reasonably assume you want to read the article. Being on the opinions splash page however does not lead one to conclude that you want to read every opinion in the paper.

An alternative, for example, might be only showing the top ranked opinions, plus some minimalist options to find the others if you want them (a list of categories, a search bar, a "complete index" link...).
I wouldn't work somewhere that does not allow me to use Linux on my development machine.
> The read(2)/write(2) solution from userspace would involve no copying as well, assuming a competent kernel implementation.

Wouldn't the userspace application have to ensure that the buffers being passed to read(2) and write(2) are page-aligned?
Ask HN: (please help) How to deal with an unethical and dead-weight co-founder?
I am a young developer a few years out of school.

A few months ago I entered a shotgun (start-up) wedding with 2 other people: another developer and a (non-technical and non-MBA) "CEO". We were equal partners, and the "CEO" put some of his own money in.

We built the product for the whole summer. It was basically all code, and I ended up doing the lion's share of the work. The other developer did a lot of work too, but the CEO literally did nothing. No marketing, no fundraising, and there was nothing else to do, so he did nothing. He did't even have ideas, or project management help. Absolutely nothing. He stopped showing up the office altogether eventually, and would stroll in every few days and demand to know where the next feature was. In addition to this, some steeply unethical behavior of this dead-weight CEO came to light during the course of our partnership.

It was just a terrible arrangement, in every way, so this past week the other developer and I decided to shut down the start-up.

When we told the CEO, though, he wanted to keep on running it, get all of our equity back, and profit off of the hard-earned code/design/ideas that he had zero part in.

This really bothers me out of principle. Because the whole reason we wanted to close down the company is that we wanted to kick him out, but out of courtesy to him, we felt it would be more graceful if we just shutdown the company and started working on a new idea with just the two of us (me and the other developer) - rather than it being a power play, etc. (Also, to avoid bad blood, we told him that we just "weren't motivated about the idea anymore" (which was true), as opposed to the more blunt "we just want to stop working with you because you're a joke."

Technically, I believe the corporate structure dictates that the three of us have equal seats on the board, so the other developer and I could "fire" the CEO, but then the company would awkwardly owe him the money he put in (which was a "loan"). I suppose we could liquidate/bankrupt the company, but that would require some messy legal involvement.

We wanted to shut down the company gracefully, but our third co-founder's rude and ungracious reaction to this decision, I fear, leaves us no other choice than to explore messier options.

Please offer any advice you can.

Thanks,
Steve

P.S. And believe me, I wish I hadn't had to learn it this way, but now I know exactly what pg is talking about when he says how important your choice in co-founder is
I'm really really going to take that dusty old Blockbuster card out of my wallet one of these days....
That's interesting. I've never admin'ed a server before so I hadn't thought about this at all.

It'll probably be useful to me to keep more verbose access logs and hash IP addresses to track what individual users (at least those not behind a group firewall) are up to.

Thanks for the tip!
Language Flamewars and the Blub Paradox
"considering only the area nearby would be rendered"

Well yeah if you make the area around you small enough, then sure.

Taking WoW as an example again (because it's what I'm familiar with), decreasing the view distance is the single most influential parameter to improve performance. When you fly across a landscape and mountains pop up out of nowhere as you approach them, in triangles, it very much takes away from the realism.

Of course this is not just about rendering triangles any more, LOD is constrained by the CPU and memory, but more raw poly pushing power would lessen the burden on the CPU...

(experience drawn on a NVidia 9800 video card, not top of the line but a rather average casual gamer card I'd say)
This was the system where after the craft explodes and is falling to earth at mach2 - you jettison a hatch, extend a boom, put on safety harness, clip the harness to the boom and slide out to then end (to clear the wings and tail) jump off and open your parachute?

No mention of what happens if something goes wrong while you are still attached to 2Million lbs of liquid hydrogen/oxygen.

I remember the laughter at the time ....
In 2.6.31, support was added to

> Allow splice(2) to work when both the input and the output is a pipe.

http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6...
I'm sorry, but I don't agree. There is no reason why my customers need to know in what language the solution is developed in.

Besides, Ruby powers many highly visible websites and web apps. If I'd be losing a sale because I develop in Ruby and NOT Python, chances are I don't want that sale in the first place.
I couldn't agree with you more. I'm glad that Netflix and RedBox have torn Blockbuster apart. I knew this day would happen, and I don't want to wish any employees any financial hardship, but the company itself deserves this.
Most SMT systems are trained using the procedings of the European Court - as it's a huge corpus of multilingual documents which all have the same meanings.

This is a large factor as to why non-european languages typically don't fare that well in Statistical Machine Translation systems. The corpuses (corpii?) aren't as large for other languages.

Subject-broadness is another problem. Early information retrieval systems were trained (and many still are) using the Wall Street Journal as the corpus. Which means they work great for searching on the topic of big business, but not so great on getting apple pie recipes, as WSJ doesn't talk much about that ;)
Farmville is a perfect example of the self-actualization tier of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. [1]

The people playing Farmville are enjoying themselves and expressing themselves. Would it be better if they deployed that cognitive surplus and attention towards Wikipedia or a similar project? Of course.

But it doesn't make me sad that there are 215 million people in the world who have a comfortable enough life that they can afford to dabble in some casual games. In fact, I hope that in 100 years we can have all 7+ billion humans striving for self-actualization instead of food and water.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslows_hierarchy_of_needs
Product Review: Spreadable
Like the pentagon?
I was exaggerating when I said 'all', but probably 'some'.

By 'stoical' I meant that they might be prepared to take the loss for the country's sake. After all, they could have always got a better rate by investing abroad, even with some currency risk. The existence of the carry trade shows that international financiers have exploited the stoicism or irrationality of Japanese citizens. Perhaps it is just 'not the done thing' in Japan to short your country, pull out your savings and burst the bubble.
Cartagen: HTML5 Vector Mapping
I still see btrfs as years behind zfs as measured strictly by maturity (not features), and therefore consider it to be at least a few years away from being usable in situations where an advanced file system really matters (mission critical databases, 30+TB file systems, etc.)

ZFS has been around 4-5 years, yet in the last few months we hit a severe data loss bug (ZIL corruption) and a service affecting ZFS cache performance bug (ARC cache maintenance routine with math error).

I'd assume that btrfs will have similar teething pains.
And then there's the interminable delay in Java 7. In this case, "made", as in the past tense of "make" is the operative word. As I noted elsewhere, I'm not sure Oracle wanted to give Gosling and his peers decision making authority (let alone retain them) based on their recent preformance.
How to get invisible on facebook
Facebook and Google have a similar reach, but Facebook has much higher pageview counts (pageviews are redundant today anyway) and much more time on site (I will dig up the numbers again).

The problem that Google has is that it is a doorway to other sites - they have spent 10 years now trying to find ways to keep this userbase on their site further with different applications. I think it is fair to say that Gmail is probably their only success in this regard - and even that hasn't solved their problem of diversifying revenue.

I think much of the current GOOG valuation is predicated on both the revenue growth they were seeing (as you point out, though investors should have seen the flat line coming) and a bet on the ability for Google to utilize their place on the web to build out a 'platform' of sorts with applications and other services. They have failed at both tasks, and it is only a matter of time that the market wises up to this and brings the value of the stock back to a PE more in line with that of a traditional media company (as that is what Google is at its core with this revenue model).

Watching Facebook grow must be really painful for Google, a real punch in the face and a bruised ego. At some point, I wonder, when will they take a step back and admit failure and re-evaluate their entire management structure.

I have the numbers somewhere, but Google's eCPM rate is just insane. I imagine that Facebook atm would be lucky to achieve a penny - so there is some room for improvement but I do agree with you that their primary business model will come from platform.

I think if FB are game, they could try in-stream advertising. A scenario would be a new movie being launched. The marketers for the movie could throw away their traditional website and go to the FB sales team, setup a custom page and then specify who they want targetted - say, 18-30 year old males in the US. Facebook could carve out this demographic, and then run an exclusive in-stream pop-in for a 24 hour period for millions of dollars. The users might react, but they could just make the ad clear. This is much more powerful than what Google offers - since they can only target a users attention, while Facebook is the only website with a global reach where users can be targeted directly.

I think in 2-3 years time that $3-5B from advertising is possible. Add another $3-5 from platform, and you are at $6-10B, with a lot of room to grow and a potential $60-150B valuation.

Also as an aside, won't Facebook be forced to go public at some point due to SEC regulations? I know they have placated employees by offering a sanctioned second market, but at some point they have to bite the bullet and list. It could be possible that they are waiting to book 12 months of platform revenue and a full year of those results for the prospectus (which will make the filing look a lot better - 2 major sources of revenue and strong growth).

Overall a very interesting topic. If you had a chance to today, would you buy Facebook stock at $20B? or $10B? :)
The opensource school management and e-learning software Fedena
First thing: get a real SSL cert. One that's not for the Xbox marketplace. You don't want browser security warnings scaring off potential customers at the signup stage.
It's unwise to go against Rob Pike and Keith Adams, but I'm going to give it a try...

The read(2)/write(2) solution from userspace would involve no copying as well, assuming a competent kernel implementation.

AFAIK that was tried and it's slower than sendfile; sometimes it's even slower than copying data.

software may well outlive any existing hardware and its quirks.

Virtual memory operations like modifying page tables appear to be consistently getting slower relative to other operations, so I would expect that sendfile/splice will always be faster.
The real story behind the Twitter mouseover exploit
My point is: if you're doing a startup, you want to have a business, not a hacking hobby. If three years down the road your business isn't generating enough profit one way or another, it's a "busyness" and you seriously should consider doing something else.
E-Z-Fynd - The Next Google?
The engineering potential of Google is second to none. Founders of Google are brilliant and morally impeccable persons who have been making a lot of good choices for the company.
Facebook on the other hand, has a CEO who is a autistic semi-retard with a tendencies to screw people over and his luck is about to run out...
It all starts at the people at the top...
Brin and Page >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Zuck
Alright, I'm so dang close. With just the issue of write. Here's what I've got so far:

in_file = open('c:\original.txt', 'r')
out_file = open('c:\output.txt', 'w')

for line in in_file.readlines():
out_file.write('<tr> bgcolor="006699">')
out_file.write(' <td>' + line[0:12] + '<td>')

in_file.close()
out_file.close()

There will be more text written per execution of the loop, but I can handle that coding. :)

What I can't grasp is why write doesn't start a newline and what I can do to remedy that. Currently this is just making a huge line of text instead of individual lines.

Thanks a ton!
LINQ to SQL was killed. IronRuby is terrible. Constantly evolving C# syntax is not inherently a good thing.