skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The quote "Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon." used to be my favorite quote of all time, but it was replaced by "Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it."

There are a lot of good ones:

* "It is easier to write an incorrect program than understand a correct one."

* "A programming language is low level when its programs require attention to the irrelevant."

* "Everything should be built top-down, except the first time."

* "A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing."

* "There are two ways to write error-free programs; only the third one works."
I'll have a much better idea sometime in the next couple of weeks, if/when WakeMate finally ships...
Have you ever seen an article and thought to yourself, well, I guess I'll have to jump in now?

This article inspired me to share (ahead of schedule) some info on a new service we’re building to provide some of the lean startup metrics Tor mentioned, designed specifically for SaaS products.

We’re looking for folks interested in beta testing and providing customer development feedback at StartMetrics (http://startmetrics.com).

Plus, I think it’s fitting that we’ve been using one of the themes Tor listed. Took just a few hours to get the basic design up and running, which gives us more time to work on our MVP
Dude... You're a freelancer. Find a better coffee shop!
He said:

I've run e-commerce ops with $15k+ in revenue from "month one".
Alex Payne (One of Twitter's earlier employees..) had written a nice article on why he does not work in Infomartion Security, quite a while ago.

http://al3x.net/2008/12/31/why-not-infosec.html

..the core point being,about how little attention genuine, path-breaking work gets, if security researchers DO NOT make an attempt to publicise it,quite radically.

These sure are not some random guys making a bold claim.. that work has been published in Usenix!
You should befriend emacs' artist-mode as well ;)
I wish I could believe this would change anything.
I am still thinking about the model, I wasnt sure but taking a leaf out of Rework I launched early

I have three thoughts on it

1. Pay a small (>$10) fee per month to host a venture

2. Get the investor to pay a small fee to bid

3. Pay for extras, like export to pdf

Would be interested to hear HN's thoughts on a model.

What would potential founders be willing to pay?
Laptops have become capable enough for office needs, but for high-end cad or video work, the high-end desktops they run on are not going away any time soon. Any place where big files get involved, downloading from the cloud still isn't fast enough, never mind uploading.
If you didn't catch it, it's referring to Ubuntu Bug #1: Microsoft has a majority market share

https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/1
you mean reddit, right?

(edit: Oh, I see now that you mean Digg, but Digg not checking for 404 errors is not mentioned in the story, just FYI)
I wonder if this will persude Jenny McCarthy and co.

(holding breath)
What is wrong with the terms google came up with.

I got this as the first term by searching how to increment a number with Common Lisp.
http://www.cs.sfu.ca/CC/310/pwfong/Lisp/4/tutorial4.html

This seems like a likely search term for a "noob".
I'm having trouble emailing you. First I got an auto-response that said that I needed to be white listed. I replied to that to confirm. I got another replying saying that my email was sent, but just now I got a bounce that said that "Mail delivery failed". Can you confirm that you got my email (signed as Nogwater, but from apejet.org domain)?
They sound like they have a pretty good system, and if you can afford five petabytes and don't do much moving in and out, they are cheap, too.

On the other hand, their system is non-standard. It's not used by or tested by anyone else. And it sounds like a fairly complex system. The fact that they haven't lost a whole lot of data yet means that they must be pretty good... but the more complex (and unusual) a system, the more I would fear a failure caused by a software bug.
Testing on my iPod Touch in Safari, it does not seem to work.
> In addition, you need something that is more tangible than just a piece of paper to hang on the wall. Preferably it should be something that would always be visible, and be a constant reminder of your duties and the trust that had been placed in your by the other people.

A sysadmin clerical collar?

Are there any professions besides priest (confession) where the worker has similar access to information?
It depends on whether you work full time, part time, working for yourself or doing nothing. I imagine full time people try to maximise their spare time, so reduce their sleeping time and effectively turn into zombies.
Are you an even or an odd sleeper? I find I can do ok with 4/7/8 hrs of sleep but am off my rhythm w 5/7/9 hrs.
That's really the best way of waking up. Even if I stayed up late, the sun always wakes me up.
Ask HN: market for Facebook clones?
Every now and then, you see a blog post about some business guy asking a programmer to build a Facebook clone for this or that niche. Usually followed by derisive laughter from the programmer's part because the business guy was offering too little money.

Fair enough, but it would seem there is indeed some market for Facebook clones. Do you think a "build your own Facebook" web service has any future?
If they re-write, given that they're fairly inexperienced but are probably still sitting on a pile of cash, they run into the Second System Effect.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect
Where in this article does the author complain about it not being finished? It's the fact that the Diaspora team is not doing things right. No one cares that this project isn't finished they care about how much it sucks because their whole reason for starting the project was privacy and they don't even come out of the gates with a secure system for people to implement/build upon...
That is something I've found, it is possible that the posterous user base can be more easily monetised than the tumblr mainly because on average they actually have money too spend. They both seem to lack a real revenue model currently.
I usually get around 7 unless I'm "on" for a big side project which will have me getting around 3 a night weekdays and about 11 on the weekends.
But the rest of the company is... What do you think powers microsoft.com, office.com msn etc.

Dogfooding is a tradition in Microsoft, where sometimes pre-beta quality products are shoved down the throat of (sometimes unwilling) devs.
> And to steve: i think you hold 'professional programmers' (which i interpret as programmer that get paid) waaay too high..

What I meant was more of "someone who's knowledgeable about their craft," but you're absolutely right anyway.
"Bad development" sounds like some kind of phrase from a 1950's development model.

"Fundamentals" are things like: there's no identifiable data model, the code is pure spaghetti and structure is a fleeting concept.

From my very quick scan of their code, it's readable, the parts of the data model I looked at are fairly obvious (thanks Rails), dependencies are identified, crypto seems fairly localised. Correction of bugs seems definitely doable. Extra features shouldn't require a total refactoring. Looks good to me for an alpha drop.

Next up: posts criticising the spelling in the comments in the Diaspora code.
Traditional journalism.
I saw that. But it's still funny =)
Unfortunately many vaccines (TB for instance) are only effective in children, and children don't exactly get to make enlightened decisions about whether or not they get a vaccine. By the time they're old enough to decide for themselves it's too late.

It wouldn't be right to ostracize people simply because their parents can't tell the difference between a stripper and a doctor and took medical advice from Jenny McCarthy.
It's not the usual case of extra fluff in the URL causing the uniqueness check to fail, they are significantly different and only following the link would show them as the same thing.

Looks like this one is the canonical URL vs the one I posted previously, or he's updated his blog software and the URLs have changed. I would have thought I'd have noticed the redirect.

The uniqueness checker could follow links & redirects to check for duplicates, or maybe simply a note on the submission page along the lines of:

please search Google for 'site:news.ycombinator.com "article title"'
to make sure this hasn't already been posted.
Please see the discussion from last night: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1699641

Rather than type a bunch of replies to everyone, here's some random thoughts:

1. Release early, release often is great. But when your product's main focus is "a private social network where you control your data" and other people can do anything they'd like with your account...

2. If this was just unpolished, I wouldn't say anything. But like patio11 is saying, this has been covered by major news outlets, and many non-technical people are getting involved. This is a plea to pay attention to the fact that it's pre-alpha software.

3. The mistakes are beyond amateur. This isn't "omg it's not perfect," this is "I can't believe they didn't even apply the basics." The reason that this matters is that it doesn't bode well for the future of the project. If they can't even get this correct, how am I supposed to trust them later?

4. I only complain because I care. I want this project to succeed, and I really like a lot about the interface, actually. But that doesn't mean I won't call a spade a spade.
K&R

ESR's writings on hacking maybe?
I don't think this article was that mean spirited. The author did submit patches, and is planning on submitting more patches. I interpreted it as a concerned party that wants the project to succeed and is thus pointing out a very real concern, asking others to help, and is himself helping.
The lying one was probably the salesman, if my past experience is any guide.
Discussion on Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/df72k/quite_ser...
Ask HN: review my mattress startup
I want to share a company I have been working with. The idea is that
by selling exclusively online we can offer a high end mattress for
less than anywhere else. We are also trying to simplify the mattress
buying experience by only offering 2 varieties of mattress: firm and
plush. I would love to get some feedback from HN people about the
site.
http://saatvamattress.com

Thanks!
You're going to turn blue waiting for that. In their world, facts != 'truth'.
What's the likely hood, security issues asside, that much of this code ends up in the 'final' Diaspora product down the line? I might misunderstand their intentions, but as I understand them, these guys are trying to start an open-source project. Open-source projects need momentum before they need anything else. Money is a start, but they need code. It doesn't even need to good code or even passable, so long as it kind of works and provides something for hackers to hack on. If they play their cards right, it's that last bit about attracting hackers to the project that will turn Diaspora into something viable. None of the code they write right now really matters.

Just think of many of the older more established FOSS projects, Linux, Apache, etc. Many of them started out very rough, but attracted developers and turned into something useful. I think that dumping the code right now, was probably the best move that they could have made.
Reminds me of that saying "no good deed goes unpunished".

As a user of SO, I always prefer to see an answer already there than asking it. Even though SO users are super fast at answering my questions (usually get answers < 1h), there is something to be said about the answer already being there.

Having said that, the "hive" at SO has already developed a set of informal rules, and there are plenty of people who seem to make a point of making meta-commentary on questions.

While this is standard fare for social sites and the interwebs in general, at least the signal to noise ratio is an order of magnitude better than most other social sites.
Thanks for your advice. We are trying to figure out what kind of conference/places our target customers get together.
Yeah, it's basically a standard blog BS post bragging about their service with a bit about the controversy tacked on the front so it gets linked all over.
It's an MVP. Problem is, it's in an established market. Although this worked for open source in the established unix market, that wasn't a mainstream market. But note: only a tiny subset of users are going to switch initially anyway, so, in practice, it's not mainstream at all. Besides, expert coders will contribute; I've seen it happen.

And it's infinitely better than the alternative, of getting everything right first time, because that's impossible. Something is better than nothing. Live it!
why are you posting this again? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1698433
To me, which hours I get are even more important than how many hours. Even shifting my pattern by an hour or 2 usually makes me less alert the next day.
Your point about studying code & improving it in isolation is good. The weakest part of the analogy, in my opinion, is that in tactical chess puzzles there's actually a right answer.

On the other hand, if you have a chess puzzle but not its answer, you can still practice recognizing the tactical situation (hung pieces, checks, forks, pins, etc.) That's closer to what I was suggesting, and I still think it's useful: learning the jargon first, and then reading code and taking the time to describe it in terms of that jargon. The purpose isn't to "discover things you don't know", it's to concretely drill and internalize things you do know.
FAIL - PG&E needs to be spanked
So would you consider designers as non-technical people, in a similar role as product managers? Or take the Steve Blank view and lump them in with engineers as the "solution team"?
Agreed.

I was talking about low cost goods, like toasters, hand vacs, etc - avg ticket of $75-150
Momentum can die as fast as it builds, while maturity is lasting. All these projects are in active development, and it'll be very difficult for Diaspora to catch up.
While I mostly agree with you, I have to note that Hamilton was competent. One of the reasons we're an economic powerhouse vs. all those countries that keep themselves messed up (or in the case of Argentina threw it all away on the verge of becoming a 1st World nation) is the efforts he helped lead to put our financial house in order and keep it there. (In point of fact, one of the reasons the previous system of the Continental Congress fell apart was a failure to deal with that.)

One of the points that Codevilla is making is that our current ruling class doesn't have what it takes to guide our country through its current travails.
"The mistakes are beyond amateur."

Can you pinpoint them? I don't think it makes sense not to at this point..
Trent Reznor releases soundtrack to 'The Social Network'
The point here is that if you are a single owner LLC, sole proprietorship or s-corp you can't technically claim it as your employer - at least for tax purposes. Yes you get liability protection and so forth, but you are in the eyes of the law still self employed.
The default "user is logged in" cookie in ASP.NET is vulnerable to this, since that cookie value is just an encrypted username. An evildoer (even a relatively unskilled one) could use this attack to login to an ASP.NET app as anyone they wanted.
Maybe go to the ruby meetup http://lrug.org/ and meet some people who might be interested.
No, but perhaps when non-vaccinated kids start dying of things that sounds hilarious because we've eradicated them - things with names like "dropsy", "whooping cough" and "cholera" - people will start thinking. It'll be a terrible price to pay, though, for parents who just wanted to do the best for their kids.

I wonder if truth-denial is genetic.
Interesting comparison. I have sent Digg technical support questions about the MIA mobile version of Digg and they refuse to respond with any type of intelligible reply. They say 'try again in an hour' or something ridiculous. The fact is: http://m.digg.com was created by someone else, they used in on their website for years, then ditched it when v4 showed up. Now it just redirects back to normal Digg. Funny that they do not acknowledge the truth; but it's easy to see why: they don't read or understand the issue, they are just responding back with the 'best fit macro'.
"when following on from a relatively small, elegant, and successful system."

I don't think that the second system effect applies, specifically given that it isn't elegant or successful yet. (In fact, most of the comments are that it is inelegant and a failure).

Second system effect mostly reflects the evils of redesigning a perfectly good working product.
Every time I read of these, my thought was always "how do they get light?". I just assumed that this was somehow solved, otherwise why would everyone be so excited about it? I figured some day I would have some time to properly investigate it and find some cool tech.

It saddens me greatly, and in numerous ways, to find out that "How do they get light?" is a killer question.
>- MS needs to really decide how much longer they want to push an OS that is based on Windows/DOS

Especially for their mobile offerings. It makes economic sense to push windows, but it's not best for the customer.
Falling in love will cost you two close friends
While George Monbiot is often wrong about a lot of things, it's nice to see him being right in comparison to someone even wronger than he is.

A quick calculation: the total floor area of the Empire State Building is 63 acres. You can do your own calculations for the cost of building the Empire State Building vs the cost of buying 63 acres of land (which, incidentally, gets light) in upstate New York, but I'm pretty sure that one is much, much, much larger than the other.
The "V" in MVP stands for viable.

As is, the Diaspora code base is not viable.
Not even minimally so.
The major thing for me is Simplicity!

Buy Opera. They have an awesome browser and such a small market share. The perfect browser to replace IE. If not at least make IE use Webkit or Gecko. Pref. Gecko so its split 2v2.

When I plug a new monitor in I want it to detect it and turn it on, default to extend my screen or ask me what I want to do. Win+p is nice but a lot of people don't know it.

When I plug in new speakers I want the sound to change to use that, or again ask me. I don't want to pull up the damn control panel every time I change speakers.

.Net needs to be able to run on mac and linux. Yes there is mono but its not the same.. I want an official release, same for Visual studio make it run on all 3 major OS.

I want to be able to install IE on linux. And make IE6, IE7.. Installable side by side.

I want something like GnomeDo built in. The startmenu is ok, but not the same.

Drivers are getting better but I still end up having to go download drivers from nvidia, hp or whoever. PITA

Microsoft needs a software marketplace built in similar to the one in Ubuntu. Its so nice being able to open up a software center and click download. No searching the internet nothing.

Same goes for a webapp center within IE.

Release an enterprise IE and a standard IE. Make the standard auto update like Chrome and make the Enterprise version have longer support cycles (basically the enterprise version is what IE is now)

Improve your web apps. Yes you have an alternative to almost everything google has but they are all (arguably) worse.

I think thats enough for now :)
They have a mechanism to detect if it's present or not. For example, some cards don't have OpenGL drivers so they created ANGLE to fix that. They also have software rendering which can be reenabled if needed.
I try to get at least 7, preferrably 8, but not more than 9. Any more and I feel tired for the rest of the day. Less, and I don't feel like my mind is as sharp as I'd like. Left to my own devices, I don't get very much done at either end of things.

I can work with too much sleep, if I have something that needs doing. But with too little, I find that the code I write isn't very good and wind up rewriting it later on. I write better code after a few drinks than when I haven't had enough sleep, for example.
http://www.longevitymeme.org/news/view_news_item.cfm?news_id...

"The process of declaring parts of aging as a disease is driven by regulation: the FDA does not permit treatments for aging, only for named diseases. Since there is little funding for research that cannot be legally commercialized, the incentive is to carve off chunks of the process of aging and go through the process of having government employees add it to the list of diseases - which can take years and millions of dollars. Sarcopenia, for example, is still not recognized by the FDA, meaning that no potential treatment can be commercially developed in the US. Here is an example of this process at work for memory loss."
Pretty self explanatory, I think.

~/ ls
abs bin dev media

~/ ls dev/
freelance opensource personal work

~/ ls media/
audio books games images mnt tmp torrents video
Indeed I misread the original post. I wonder if reddit did it for the same reason.
Which should give you more incentive not to annoy users unnecessarily.
> I always wondered why Kevin and Alex felt the need to hide behind their laptops on Diggnation.

What do you mean by that? The stories are online and I'm sure the show wouldn't be any better if they memorized them.
Particle Code does the dance of multiple platforms
With an increasing fragmentation of mobile platforms, like Android and Apple’s iOS for iPhones and iPads, there is growing room for a development platform that translates across multiple devices, a spot Particle Code hopes to occupy with pizzaz.

Particle Code is pegged for developers looking to build an app to run on multiple platforms who don’t have the tools or time to do so, providing a translation platform for native languages like Android and iOS.

The technology was born from Mytopia, a cross-platform publisher for networked casual games that was picked up by 888 Holdings, an online casino site, in May. The CEO and founder of Particle Code, Guy Ben-Artzi, was also the CEO of Mytopia. The management team of Particle Code was also leading Mytopia.

Their biggest looming competitor will now be Alcatel-Lucent, which acquired a similar development platform in OpenPlug earlier this month. Alcatel-Lucent is also gunning for mobile platform development.

The Palo Alto, Calif.-based company was founded in 2009 and is currently run by 8 employees in the U.S. and 16 in India. It raised $3 million in funding in June this year from Benhamou Global Ventures.
I think being careful not to ask for things you don't know about is good advice. Demanding that the system use 'Rails' when you can't program is probably not a good idea. Maybe your developer will choose it, but they'll do so for (hopefully) a good reason.

To that end, you probably shouldn't take on a cofounder that can't handle at least 2 languages. How can you make decisions if you have no choices?
I suspect seltzered wants first-class user-level *nix compatibility. The fact that Cygwin exists demonstrates that something along those lines is practical.
"Now" is a biased measure. There's a difference in years between "now" and the geneses for the projects you cite; for Diaspora, a couple of days.

During the summer, I could only shake my head at the hullabaloo coming from Diaspora supporters. Now it's at the detractors.
Its not only okay to express a contrary opinion, but encouraged. However a short brief post with no further details does not provide any extra value to the conversation. I believe this is why you were voted down previously.