skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Let's address your main concern first. You see the ability to install multiple versions of a gem as a flaw. Let's analyze this viewpoint in detail.

First a few axioms we must agree on:

1. Libraries eventually have to break compatibility, otherwise progress is impossible.

2. There must be some way to deal with incompatibilities, either socially (release and compatibility guarantee policies) or technically (package managers).

Your point of view: social ways to deal with incompatibility are superior to to technical ways to deal with incompatibility because the latter encourages developers to be lazy about compatibility guarantees.

I have a few objections about that point of view.

1. It assumes a perfect world.

Although it doesn't happen often, an app can break due to reliance on library bugs or unformalized/undocumented behavior/internals. Sometimes a newer version of a library has a regression that isn't found until it's released.

Yes we all know things like these ideally shouldn't happen, but they do. Is it a good idea to ignore the reality that things like this happen from time to time?

According to the logic that supports your point of view, we should abolish protected memory as well. Protected memory allows programmers to write apps that don't bring down the entire OS when they crash... it makes programmers lazy!!

2. It assumes that DPKG/RPM don't make life hellish for sysadmin and end users.

For the most part, DPKG/RPM works fine. For Ruby stuff, not so much. Suppose there's an app called frobnicator, and it works on foobar 1.0.x but not on foobar 1.2.x. Thanks to the fact that DPKG/RPM only supports installation of single versions, your distro can only package foobar 1.2.x but not 1.0.x. Now the user cannot use frobnicator at all because you insist on DPKG/RPM. How exactly is this better for the end user?
My browser history tells me the same: http://i.imgur.com/S9qps.png
According to the blog post, the name was only one of a long list of factors involved. I think it's safe to say that if Mint had been called "Wesabe", and Wesabe had been called "Mint", things would have played out the same way.

I can't think of a situation where a startup has failed solely because of the name, or even where the name was the most significant factor.
What do you mean Wikipedia? I think that's one thing that really has changed the world for the better. It's completely free, surprisingly accurate (especially if you get away from controversial topics), and completely created by volunteers. It's a fantastic resource and more useful than a lot of startups.
That's bribing.
Google's Flintstones doodle
>If this offer was 25% higher then the next competing offer, you wouldn't care - you would just sell it, move on, and then let the neighbors deal with their new problem.

Love you neighbor.

It's possible that someone somewhere amongst those simply trying to screw these businesses for every last cent they can get is someone who thought beyond capitalism and decided that being bought out for more was not the be-all-and-end-all but that they should hold to some other moral.

Sadly, I find that unlikely though.
In theory, Wordpress should run on Windows servers, too? If they could get Wordpress to use Azure, it would be a really impressive showcase.
But messing with various points at different facilities in the same way can still be catastrophic.
These numbers of grossly inaccurate. Go to the last results page of each query to see the real hit count.
About 1: This test looks at the dual claim, and that's more or less justified. (Look up duality in linear optimization for the definition. It's useful.)
Untapped Knowledge Calculator for the uk
The untapped knowledge calculator is based upon a formula devised by Frank T.Smith, Professor of Applied Mathematics at University College London. The formula takes into account a number of different factors including the population of your region, income, lifestyle, educational status, travel, internet consumption, and employment...
Wait, to evaluate a 40$ book purchase, your boss tracked down the author's HN account and "reviewed" his comments? Where do you work, some secret service that's afraid of saboteurs masquerading as Perl hackers?
I think it's an attempt to put things into perspective. If so many people are funneling their energy into writing/downloading apps, playing Farmville, joining/creating online social networks, and reading/commenting on blog posts, you have to wonder what we're allowing to let slide. The innovations he listed required a fair amount of thinking outside the box. In spite of its seemingly awesome comprehensiveness, it would be a shame if the Internet turned out to be a tiny little box, and the only time we think outside of it is to get up and go to the bathroom.
Some people have the luxury of picking and choosing jobs, some don't. A challenging job is important, but so are a lot of other factors. I think if you are feeling that you would like to make a switch then probably best would be to start your own business.

By the way, I disagree on freelancing not being challenging because you should already know what you are doing. You are always having to learn new things and do things that you aren't expert at. Maybe you need to bust out something you don't have a lot of experience with because there is nobody else on your team to do it. Sure, you could outsource it, but often enough you find you will be tackling that thing yourself.

More importantly, freelance jobs are challenging not because of the technical stuff, but because of dealing with people and running a business. That never gets easier. You get more experienced with it, but it's always a challenge. If you don't feel challenged, then you probably need to up your game.
I understand that.

The point I am making as that Yelp was obligated to consider the offer (even if it ultimately was doomed). In this case, that caused Google to bail, and Yelp was screwed-- but not because their board screwed up. The board only did what they had to do.
Email List Building - Create Free Ebooks For Your Subscribers
New Twitter is really choppy on our EEE-PC netbook. :(
"Putting money in a jar" is a very handwavy way of addressing the problem of saving billions of dollars. You don't just put billions of dollars in a "jar". In practice, amounts that large have to be invested in some way. If you rule out federal treasury bills, what does that leave? State and municipal bonds? Pretty tricky (you could make a case for it though). How about stocks? No, that's de facto nationalization of industry. Commodities? Government interference in the market. Real estate? The government has enough land. How would you actually save the Social Security trust fund?
Hmmm although most of the developing work will be in 2010, most of the interesting stuff, from an observer's point of view, happens in 2011. Shouldn't this be Game On 2011?
I wasn't the one who said the trite thing about kittens - I think writing toy interpreters and compilers is a great way to figure out how languages work.
This is quite possibly the best Q&A on Stuxnet I have seen. Kudos to F-Secure for not overhyping it.
Perhaps he assumed that we'd implicitly agree that fart apps are a bane and Wikipedia is a boon. However, without explicitly making his position plain, it could be a trap!
It's value-based pricing based on the presentation. This makes perfect sense to me.
I do not believe that she got job offers--especially not from Google, which famously takes something like 4 months to make an offer. (The experiment lasted only 28 days.) Invitations to interview, maybe.
Oh and this.

3. It inherently excludes some valid compatibility cases, unless the developer is forced to hack around the package manager

Suppose 'foo' depends on 'bar'. bar consists of features A, B and C. Furthermore bar has made the guarantee that it will never break the compatibility of feature 'A', ever. It also has a compatibility policy that states it will increment its major version number every time it breaks B and C.

foo only uses feature A in bar, so we know that foo is compatible with every version bar that will ever be released.

foo also depends on 'libcat'. libcat depends on bar, but uses all its features. The current release of bar is 1.0.0, so we know libcat depends on 1.0.0 <= bar < 2.0.0.

Suppose that 'frobnicator' depends on bar. It uses feature B and it uses the interface provided by bar 2.x.

This seems like a completely reasonable case. Developers aren't being lazy about compatibility guarantees here. The only way to solve this problem is by versioning bar on the filesystem level. That is, while bar 1.x requires developer to type

require 'bar/feature_a'
require 'bar/feature_b'

bar 2.x requires the developer to type

require 'bar-2/feature_a'
require 'bar-2/feature_b'

You have to rename the entire library directory. In my opinion this is an ugly hack around the fact that your package manager doesn't support multiple versions. I think this is solved much more elegantly if the package manager allows you to switch the version on-the-fly... in other words, what RubyGems does.
The name is an albatross.
What your child can teach you about time management?
Until he has done something on the order of the things he listed, he doesn't get to berate us for not doing them either.

Not everyone in the world can cure cancer. Not everyone can build rockets. Not everyone can do brain surgery.

Some of us do more mediocre things like create art or entertainment. Or just keep the world functioning.

It is possible to improve the world a little at a time, by saving people time and/or money, and enable everyone to do greater things. Or even just give them a new or better way to relax after a long hard day at work.

Not everything has to be miracle achievements.

I -am- interested in startups.
Gentlemen, start registering your quirky domain names!
This was posted awhile ago. There were several HN'ers who received solicitations from her, and found them to be 'dubious'.

I believe they also replied in the original thread.
Comprehensive guide to installing NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP in a VM
After they buy it, it's not your business anymore.
This is a really good article and it does cover a few things that were probably factors, but I remember looking at both Wesabe and Mint back when they were both new and I chose Mint for two reasons:

1. The design was better, which made me feel more comfortable about handing over my data (Mint's designer Jason Purtorti talks about this here: http://vimeo.com/15066599)

2. Mint seemed more focused on being a really simple-to-use webapp to analyze my finances, whereas Wesabe's messaging indicated that they were trying to leverage the wisdom of crowds to help people make better financial decisions. I don't want the crowd analyzing or managing my finances, and it wasn't clear at a glance how their goal could be accomplished while protecting my privacy.

Also, as he mentions regarding the Yodlee thing, Wesabe had a "download this application and it'll retrieve your bank data" thing, but Mint just worked with thousands of financial institutions, and that seemed much easier and more reliable.

Regardless, this was a great blog post and I wish we could see more introspective posts like this when ventures don't work out the way the founders hoped.
This "Myth":
Mint's design, while definitely very appealing and definitely a factor in getting people to trust the company, doesn't seem to me to be enough to explain the different outcomes,

Is contradicted by this:
Second, Mint focused on making the user do almost no work at all, by automatically editing and categorizing their data, reducing the number of fields in their signup form, and giving them immediate gratification as soon as they possibly could

UX design isn't just pretty pictures - which is why its now called "user experience" as opposed to "user interface" now.

I think a lot of people dismiss ux considerations because they think its just the part of the site thats "pretty" and its not.
(How to Write a ((Better) Lisp) Interpreter (in Python))
There's more than one "objective" test for image quality, and some of them are closer to human perception than PSNR. The trouble with comparisons like this is that the JPG encoder might be tuned to minimize PSNR, but if the WebP encoder is tuned to optimize for something else, of course it won't perform as well when you compare the PSNR!

More info on the issues with this type of benchmark from Jason Garrett-Glaser (a.k.a. Dark Shikari), an x264 developer: http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/?p=458
Nearly all federal politicians with a realistic chance of winning federal office are Democrats or Republicans, with the exception of one Socialist, and a couple Democrats and Republicans running as independents because they lost their primaries.
This is exactly why I'm confused. It doesn't seem to make any sense. What exactly has jrockway said that means you can't buy his book about a web framework?
I have been working towards creating passive income. One of the projects I am working on is a v1 of my own freelance business management tool, but that is still a few weeks from completion.

And of course, I am keeping my chin up. As disturbing as it is to get calls about overdue bills, I am not letting that paralyze me (as shown by this experiment).
The key lesson seems to be that ease-of-use is of absolutely paramount importance. Maybe this can even be expressed in mathematical terms: you can't just look at the "raw value" provided by a service, you have to look at the ratio of value received to time and effort invested.
does anyone know where to get stuxnet from? can't find it on the regular virii sources...
3 secret Apple TV features Steve Jobs hasn't told you about
I'm sorry, I don't get it. What two opposing statements does he have?

And also I don't see what argument is he trying to make in your opinion. From what I see he makes factual rebuttal of previous (incorrect) statement.
You Need Customer Loyalty, Not Just Satisfaction
CssPad - an iPad made with CSS using Quplo
Q: What does it do with Simatic?
A: It modifies commands sent from the Windows computer to the PLC. One running on the PLC, it looks for a specific factory environment. If this is not found, it does nothing.

So it seems that there is one factory layout Stuxnet is looking for. I.e. it will know what point 35 is.
But now the people viewing your ads are the type that are willing to pay for things. The Wall Street Journal isn't free but commands a premium for ad space.
Mint focused on making the user do almost no work at all...Their approach completely kicked our approach's ass...Changing people's behavior is really hard

Hmmm, reminds me of an old saying, "When in doubt, leave it out." Now I'm going back to all my forms and mockups, wondering if there's anything else that can be removed. Short attention spans, human nature, and plain old laziness make "Keep It Simple Stupid" more relevant than ever.

A domain name doesn't win you a market; launching second or fifth or tenth doesn't lose you a market. You can't blame your competitors or your board or the lack of or excess of investment. Focus on what really matters: making users happy with your product as quickly as you can, and helping them as much as you can after that. If you do those better than anyone else out there you'll win.

Bulletin board material. Front and center. (I really should be spending more time writing code and less worrying about the market or reading Hacker News.)

[EDIT: We complain a lot here about "survivor bias". This is an excellent post and a great counterexample with much to be learned. Wesabe may have lost, but AFAIC, Marc is most definitely a winner.]
How To Fix the ASL.dll Error
Decreasing circulation doesn't necessarily devalue their ads or job listings. Why do you think so?
37 Signals' New office (pics and video)
We pay £3 a fortnight to have about 6m^2 of window (ground floor) cleaned to retail spec including wiping down the paintwork afterwards and a free internal clean every 6 months or so.

It takes probably as long for them to take the money as it does to actually clean (about 5mins I reckon).
This is correct. I'm seeing what happens, and if I can get my bills off my back. My standard rate for work is $25/hr so I'm currently quite discounted, just to get some work quickly.
I don't pretend to know his motivations.
Not really sure why I'm replying to this, as it just seems like vitriol, but anyway...

Just because a technology seems silly and annoying at first doesn't mean it's useless. Facebook is a prime example of this. Allowing people to play Farmville and post about their drunken antics isn't inherently valuable, but under all that noise, there's actually something hugely valuable going on. People are creating and sharing content with people they already know, strengthening bonds that already exist in the real world. This is a major weakness in the Internet -- at the outset, it enabled information sharing in the large. Facebook allows for information sharing in the small. Just because most of that information is inane doesn't mean it's any less fundamental than ARPA's internet vision or other major informational ideas (e.g., assembly lines).

You can make similar information-sharing arguments about YouTube and Twitter -- YouTube spreads ideas that can't be captured in words, Twitter allows for personal broadcast. The signal/noise is miserable, but the absolute impact is huge.

It's easy to look at the garbage produced by informational technologies (which most web startups basically are) and condemn them as silly, annoying, and useless, but that misses the point. Each new successful startup trains another subset of people to expect more from their tech, enabling the truly visionary among them to forget about whatever problem that software solves and concentrate on their own work.

Building a tool that allows anybody who uses it to actually push the boundaries of human knowledge is not silly and annoying. Be careful not to miss the forest for the trees.
Even though it's a pretty sloppy rant, there is a small dose of reality to be had in there.
I will have to start trying this approach. Thanks for the tip. That was one of the problems I had, was that it was so cheap.
you can write

select sum(x=1) from y;

in standard SQL, Oracle, and Mysql. True == 1 in standard SQL, False == 0. Both pgsql and Microsoft SQL server define a nonstandard boolean type that requires you to add a cast or an if statement, bulking up the query.

I did a shootout of mongodb and the three RDBMS systems (!Oracle) I mention for building a system to represent data from Freebase. It was possible to make a VARCHAR(4096) in mysql and only index the first 64 characters which meant I could map freebase types to mysql tables without running into index limitations -- I wanted the better GIS capabilities in pgsql, but I didn't want to double the size of my tables and queries to be able to handle strings losslessly.
The reason there isn't a backlash is because Twitter isn't used at the same level of intensity as Facebook. When there are only 2-3 features that are interesting on a web application, there isn't going to be a huge disconnect from version to version.
I think he talked about aesthetics in the first case.
Does his article change the world?
I really should be spending more time writing code and less worrying about the market or reading Hacker News.

I couldn't disagree more. Worrying about your market is how you know what to code. I think the number of startups who fail because they don't get sales, marketing, and product-market fit outnumber those who fail because they didn't write enough code or good enough code 100:1.
I can't either :/ It would be fantastic to be able to annotate your code a bit with types and speed it up many times. Hopefully, with Python 3, many tools (e.g. Cython) will be able to do just that.
>Would you seriously spend so much of your own time doing such boring work if you could just pay a profession a measly $100 to do it for you (probably faster and better than you would do).

Working off $100 as near enough £60 then it would have to take at least half a day for it to be worth doing IMO. Sure if you're on £60 an hour then it's probably worth paying someone that for the 15mins they take to clean all your windows.

Seems a bit steep to me though - I could buy the ladder, squeegee and sponge and do the windows and still not be down and of course next time I'd have the ladder, etc., already.
That's fine, I agree. My point was not "His metric is the most awesome, shut up", it was "Despite only giving one kind of number, the author still included other analysis and subjective opinion in the writeup for each photo, so it's not as bad as you're trying to imply".
:D yes, I meant macros
Kevin Kelly and Steven Johnson on Where Ideas Come From
Its fun to look back and enumerate the reasons for success or failure, but dumb luck is just such a huge part of this game as well.

Marc had a vision, stuck to his guns, and the competitor "won". If Wesabe had won Techcrunch 40, we'd be reading an article about Mint's failure due to shoddy data accuracy and how Wesabe succeeded by "build[ing] tools that would eventually help people change their financial behavior for the better, which I believed required people to more closely work with and understand their data."

A startup can't implement every feature perfectly, and will ultimately have to make choices without knowing which was the "right" one.
True but most entrepreneurs probably don't want to sell their baby to someone who they think will let it die.
Jonathan Kiefer on The Social Network
Users of b2c software are incapable of making decisions about their security, and should not be asked to.
The Control of a Character Analysis Essay
Writing character analysis essays is an easy task. Students are simply required to read a particular text and provide an in depth analysis of a character in the text. This will provide the students the ability to give their opinion of the character and what could have been improved in him or her.
$0 in the bank, but enough sidejobs here/there to keep my cheap lifestyle going. Now, the company is returning enough to pull a tiny $1k a month in salary, which is getting me by.
JavaScript - It’s a Real Language
Yes, but the point is that in order to use a stolen cert, you need the passcode and the cert. They somehow got three certs and three passcodes from three different companies.
But then the rich would have a lot more power over the budget then the poor.
But can you (reverse-)pinch to zoom and swipe to scroll?
Twitter COO Dick Costolo's lessons learned
While I'd love to see all the home borrowers who lied on their loan applications jailed, it just isn't going to happen. They are "victims" who need a bailout.

Besides, it's probably also not that useful to do. From now on, you can expect banks to do a little more verification, so creating disincentives for mortgage application fraud is not that pressing an issue.
The way some of the line items are written/described is very misleading.

Setting aside money for "Low Income K-12 students" or Foreign Aid or Amtrak (with prices as high as flying and quadruple the travel time) does not necessarily mean that investment is getting results.

I'd only trust a receipt like this if it were annotated with hard numbers on how my dollars turn into meaningful progress.
Funny Darn-It Photos
This photo gallery will make you laugh so hard that you won’t know what hit you. It’s contains funny photos of both people and animals in the God damn it position.
Google's servers can identify when the client can handle this format and give those users a better experience (faster download). So it will be saving money for G while at the same time either driving wider adoption of Chrome, or spreading the format to other browsers. Sounds like a good move to me.

disclaimer: i work at G but not on this.
... yet he goes on blogger to write his rant.
> However, ongoing sickness can be a reason to fire an employee.

Are you sure about that?
Compilation also helps distribution, though. Distributing a single compiled binary for a particular platform is a lot easier than telling people they need to have some particular version of Python and libraries installed.