skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
to clarify: i was speaking up here in Seattle for Startup Day, and i was asked to do a talk on "Why Do a Startup".

i wasn't feeling in a particularly positive mood, and in fact i hate when people do the duplicitous inspirational talk about startups & entrepreneurship... which is usually hard & full of fail.

i thought a more realistic look at the downside of entrepreneurship would be useful, so i offered some experiences from my own early startup consulting business in the late 90's, which was a lot of stress & hassle for not much return (small exit, <$1M).

i think people who realistically look at the downside of entrepreneurship are more prepared for the journey, and if they still choose the path they at least know the risks.

(note: there are many lightweight forms of prototyping and startup entrepreneurship that don't have these risks, but in this case i was emphasizing the typical experience).
Of course, there's almost a guaranteed trade-off between making things super easy, and making things super-specific and customizable. There are lots and lots of different requirement possibilities that are possible even with a small amount of tables, and anything that builds these queries for you needs to know about all of them, or be able to know about all of them, at which case you're going to have to describe some things to it in some sort of, um, query.

I'm positive there is some framework that makes touching a DB barely needed, but I don't personal know it. I'm going to upvote your thread and hope somebody comes along and tells you what it is.
I'm pretty convinced that all the publicity accorded to the "US Cyber Command" is a decoy, meant (a) to command the attention of the public, (b) send a message that the government is taking the issue seriously, and (c) deflect questions from the real efforts the national security establishment is making to grapple with offensive technology.

I know much less about military/intelligence computing than a lot of other security people, but in a career spent neck-deep in vulnerability research, you get data points in dribs and drabs. They include:

* The immense role of military contractors in securing DHS/DOD networks.

* The NSA's (incidental) role as a feeder for offensive computing specialists into industry.

* The (very shadowy) network of business fronts for vulnerability purchasing, along with the notional understanding of the kinds of vulnerabilities they seem most interested.

* The large, contractor-run malware research groups set up around the country.

There are serious infosec people in the DoD --- particular the Air Force[1] --- but I don't have the sense that DoD runs the show on this. I think articles like this are a red herring.

[1] During the early '90s hacker rennaissance (the Operation Sun-Devil era), AF-OSI really did seem to run the table on computer security for the government.
I don't think dropping Facebook is the right answer. Announcing to everyone that "I'm leaving Facebook" seems too idealistic and self-righteous.

I have 45 friends on facebook. This number still seems too high to me, but I realize is very low compared to many of my friends. I share things only with those that I am closest to. I decline the large majority of friends requests sent to me. I am comfortable using Facebook for only my closest friends and family, however others have criticized my use of Facebook in this way.

There are many ways to use Facebook. If you are prepared to accept some criticism for "not going with the group", I think Facebook can be a very enjoyable social tool.
I like the ideas of getting up early to do work, I might try that. I'm usually either really tired afterwork so just chill out then sleep, or I'm pumped up and work until the wee hours of the morning.

Also don't underestimate how much time you can scratch on the job. I carry a A4-size book around and jot down ideas, think through problems etc when we're waiting for other people to get to a meeting or some other hold up. It all adds up and saves being bored.
It has improved a lot with the most recent version. Like I said, most of the rough edges are a ways into the game. Oh, and I strongly recommend using the alternate HUB in options, so you can keep track of your soldiers' health more easily.

It looks like there's code for a lot of cool stuff, but they have yet to enable most of it in the release version (there are a ton of other alien ships not yet enabled, for example). Some of their problems may be art-related.

But none of that should stop you from having a bit of fun. And I hope that some talented folks from here, especially artists, might become contributors. Because I want to play a polished version of UFO:AI someday.
Of course I want to have secure code. However, do I have to write 100% of my code in such a verbose language in order to guarantee security? I don't think that any security expert would claim that. It's sufficient if the relevant parts of the system and the communication protocols between your components provide a secure foundation. Writing all of your code in a verbose language would be total overkill and a huge waste of effort. So, in the end a combination of both systems might be the solution. The issue here is that this news post is about "the language of the future". It's definitely far from the language of the future. If at all, it might be a small component of the language(s) of the future (and even for that it should better improve on readability). There's just too much research going into verifiable systems and language theory and by far not enough research into making the majority of our code more expressive and reusable from a very practical point of view.
Free customers may add value by virtue of the data that they contribute during normal use of your product.

In my case, our free users contribute data which, in aggregate, allows us to peer deeply into the college admissions process and ask questions such as, "To what extent does applying early to Yale help my chances of admission?"
It should be noted that this post was written over one year ago and we are not using polling any longer, but comet solution.

We wanted to do realtime notifications and polling isn't a way to do this. We tried different options and in the end wrote our own comet solution using JBoss Netty. Working with JBoss Netty was really great, but we hit perfomance limits on lots of open connections (100.000+).

At that time node.js was released and I did some experiments with it and found it it had great perfomance and very low memory footprint. I also had an university course on the V8 VM (by the actual Google team :)) so I was pretty interested in V8 and node.js at that time. I experimented more with this and eventually we rewrote our comet solution to node.js

Fast forward today we are still running node.js and processing many millions notifications each day. I would recommend digging into node if you are interested in building a scaleable notification system. Our comet implementation for node.js is under 1 KLOC.

Other posts you might be interested in:

* http://amix.dk/blog/post/19484#Comet-with-node-js-and-V8

* http://amix.dk/blog/post/19456#Plurk-Comet-Handling-of-100-0...

* http://amix.dk/blog/post/19489#Comet-long-polling-for-all-br...
Discover Your Strengths and Supercharge Your Business
The meaning of life, according to faircompanies cofounder (video)
Neat, but I would not use it as is. It looks like you are adding the magazine-rack back, without removing the "noise". Can you customize the sorting, filtering, and style of the pages (Readability bookmarklet)?
On a side note, Heroku's web site is really, really pretty.
UI designer = "white space"

UX designer = "mental space"
Distilled water = non conductive
Distilled water + dust + sticky alcohol that you're trying to wash off = definitely conductive

See Tom's hardware guide experiment where they took out the fans and instead dumped the computer into distilled water:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/strip-fans,1203.html
It took me a bit over a year of job-independence and several projects that didn't work out to find something I could really get passionate about again. To do it, I really had to move away from "new tech for it's own sake" types of ideas and instead indulge a specific vision - something more _artistic_ than technical.

Work on your life, and then work on your work. That will make you strong enough to see past the hype cycle.
It depends on the product. In some products, there may be "network effects" where each user benefits by the number of other users in the system-- for example, if Facebook were to adopt a Freemium model, the paying customers would benefit from having the free users in the system.

This, of course, is not the case for most apps-- like Dropbox, in the example you chose. For Dropbox, the free customers have costs associated, but largely serve as a funnel. In other words, the costs of the free users are just considered part of the customer acquistion costs, the same as if they were Adwords costs with a given conversion rate.

I don't think big numbers strike an emotional chord with VCs when it comes to financing rounds, if by "big numbers" you mean "big numbers of non-paying users", unless there are plans to improve the conversion rate on these prospects.

If I were you I'd frame the question another way: given the product/app that you are planning, what advantages would a Freemium model offer over, say, a free limited-time trial of a paid-only product?
Are you sure you're not looking for an ORM?
whoever this "helge" guy is, if i should ever meet him, i'll slap him.
> programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.
A Techcrunch comment really nails it about Arrington's douchebaggery
Certainly ranking of returned results is a hard problem as the extraction/indexing/spider of web data?

I don't have a problem with DDG being a sort of meta search engine. Just give me the most relevant results first.
"This potential stigma has caused federal concern about admissions processes. In November the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights began an inquiry into discrimination against female applicants at liberal arts colleges"

So when there weren't enough women in college, it was because of discrimination against women. And when there's too many women in college, it's also because of discrimination against women.
The best you can do is either write a layer on top of SQL or simply use a NoSQL database... Dragging and dropping won't work, because you would still have to use the results in your application.
One downside to the geeky demand for an inalienable right to circumvent technological controls is that it drives vendors towards technologies that degrade the end-user experience; for example:

* Games designed to depend on servers run by the game companies

* Movies that only play on players that license and maintain a virtual machine designed for content protection

* Software that installs kernel modules to hook the idle loop of your OS to monitor itself

I could go on and on. Geeks tend to see themselves in a narrative where they're locked in mortal kombat with big dumb companies. After all, how dumb do you have to be to believe that you can keep information restricted? Well, it turns out money can buy some pretty excellent geeks. You may not be on the winning side of this battle!

When's the last time you saw a satellite TV hack?
"the rules of the market must be as general as possible to encourage as many participants with competing motivations to participate."

What does "general" mean? Does it mean fair? If markets are a total free-for-all, then the largest investors crush the smaller ones seven-ways-from-Sunday, with flash being only one in a long line of schemes.

The "only problem" with these schemes is if they are too visible, the smaller investors realize they just don't want play at all.

It might be safer and more efficient to have only the big boys investing with each other while small investors keep their money in banks. And it might more efficient for most people to rent their houses rather than buying. But America for whatever public policy reasons wants to keep the middle-income folks feeling like they have various stakes in the country so policy favors an apparently fair stock market and subsidizes home ownership.

Good or bad? You decide...

And if you privatize everything, I'm going to buy the tanks...
This sort of thing gives me hope
What, that some people will utilize the whole animal?
The top three: http://twitter.com/z0va/status/25525821627
I have extensively researched on the software products relating to the PC maintenance category. What I have found is that you can cover the cost associated with non-paying customers through advertising,etc. For instance, Trial Pay is used by many software vendors to let customers pay for essential things and get software for 'free'. There are other advertising models which can be adopted. Yet for our product, RegInOut, http://www.reginout.com , we have not yet tries these freemium model yet.
I have been a "product person" for 15 years and I believe that product people like Michael describes are bad product people. A good product manager knows the UI and the guts behind it. I am not an engineer by training but I wouldn't be a good product manager in this field if I didn't know how to build a web server either.
For the "Jeep Cherokee made from iron ore": I give up. ;-)
The market should accommodate as many strategies as possible(biodiversity) to ensure its stability.

... except that all evidence points to the various "new" strategies moving things towards instability...
A Hacker News posting that really nails the reason we have a 'flag' button.
ORMs do that, mostly. Look at Active Record: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_record_pattern

The problem with ORMs is that relational databases are complicated, and you often do wind up having to do manual SQL writing anyway if you want well-performing queries in edge cases. But for simple cases where you have a person table and need to make Person objects in your app... it works.

In fact, Rails used this as one of its big selling points, combined with convention-over-configuration. If you stuck to the naming patterns Rails preferred, it really would Just Work without you having to tell it anything beyond the names of your classes.
Could be. Another thing to consider though, is what Google's going to target with Android. Will they try and keep chasing high-end features, or will they try and go for a more complete range? In other words, I can easily see getting the 200 euro phone for 100 in a few years, but I can also see Android's requirements growing to mean that it needs tomorrow's 200 euro phone to run...

Or not! Interesting stuff in any case.
For real? I bet some real software could've been written in the time it took to make this. It's not even that funny =/
Good to be reminded once in a while that code is written for people and not machines.
Missing humour as well.
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Optimists & Pessimists: How do you respond to failure?
[kill this, the URL is broken - sry]
Yeah, I don't necessarily think geeks will come out on top as far as these particular technologies go. Mostly I object on principle to the government enforcing controls on how I can modify/use/destroy/whatever my property. To me that principle's more important than any particular battle over circumventing dongles or whatever.
Here's what I do to plan my code based on user experience. I use Free Mind http://freemind.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page
and write in the middle of the home node "Things A User Can Do"

I end up with things like "arrive at site", "create objectX", "view & edit objectY" as the next level nodes and keep going down levels from there. Since a mind map is a tree structure, it really helps to visually map out decisions a user will make. Following a branch is the user making a decision of what to spend their limited attention on. If you are improperly the distributing number of decisions a user must juggle at a particular node or repeating a lot of functionality in different areas, you will instantly visually see it.

Then when you start translating to code, if it's M-V-C architecture like most webapps, the first order nodes are the names of your controller functions.

What methodologies do other people use?
HN Crunch: Greasemonkey script for Hacker News
That does sound bad. On Symbian the store is a separate app that takes care of everything for you. The install is done in the background and you can launch the app directly from the store app.

Each app has up to three screenshots and description text, but this depends on the publisheer.

Depending on when you wanted to publish, it might be better now because they allow individual developers and you get free signing (for Symbian).

P.S: As a developer I'm happy that the prices are higher. :) 0.99 is ridiculously cheap for software.
Statecraft as entertainment: Ars reviews Civilization V
Great stuff. I think I'm developing a severe case of nerd crush on Zed.

The part about linguistic experience was especially good. I have thought for some time now that all configuration files, command-line options etc. should have simple and clearly defined syntax. Some already do. My dislike of weird, inconsistent and complex syntax (and semantics) is so severe that I've semi-intentionally not learnt shell-scripting, Perl or Ruby.

Sadly, there are very few systems that I feel I get a good linguistic experience(TM)(R) out of. I have come to think that GUIs as we know them are based on fundamentally flawed ideas - pointing and grunting - instead of using a language, the feature that separates humans from other animals.

I really wish good textual UIs (there aren't many that I know, but I'm using one for writing this comment: GNU/Emacs) became the norm, instead of the randomness of the contemporary GUIs or the bass-arckwardness of shell-like languages. I think UIs should aim to become Turing-complete, completely self-documenting and reflective. The distinction between a function, a program and an user interface is in my opinion mostly arbitrary and harmful, creating an unnecessary wall of misunderstandings between the author of a program and its users.
Try Ruby on Rails!

With Active Record you rarely if ever need to write SQL any more.

http://guides.rubyonrails.org/association_basics.html

http://guides.rubyonrails.org/active_record_querying.html

I think SQL is slowly going the way of assembly language over time - still useful to write by hand in special cases but most of the time you want to write in something higher level and have it generated automatically.
Watch this next:

http://ahungerartist.bobdelgrosso.com/2010/09/almost-nothing...

I won't spoil it, except to say: not about food.
>Listen, a family culture exists whether you acknowledge it and actively try to create it or not.

>Duty to whom? To the family and their way of thinking, of course.

I think that our family "culture" is simply emergent out of the interplay of our individual characters; the kids are obviously part of that culture whether they're pulling in the direction you want/hoped/prefer/demand or not.

I'm in for a chat over a couple of cold ones on these things but it's a bit too OT for here I think. Thanks for the thought-fodder I'll find a proxy for you and see how it all goes.
What language are you using?
Grails with GORM is the closest I've found. Not perfect, but I rarely write 'queries' for most projects unless I have specific complex reporting needs with performance considerations.

http://www.grails.org/GORM

I don't write create scripts, or data management stuff, or SQL of any kind.

def smithUsers = User.findAllByLastname("smith")

It's not drag/drop/gui, but it's a lot less mental friction for me when writing code.
EZTV.it
Yes! Good one.
Russians Building Floating Nuclear Plants
I think (say) AMD probably cares a lot less about what you do with what they sell in your own home, and a lot more about how you propagate the information you obtain from reverse engineering it. Of course, the subtext to the "right to circumvent" is "the right to publish circumvention techniques".
Yes, it's simply a joke. But it's a really fast (and small) one.
I submitted a pertinent question to HN a moment before this was submitted, and it's only up to 3 upvotes. This stupid shit is going to make the frontpage. Ok, ok, I'm just jealous.
You know there are entire disciplines dedicated to the study of usability and user experience. Zed seems shocked that someone would claim that programmers (who generally have no training or interest usability) aren't good at making usable products. It's about as controversial as saying that construction workers don't make good architects.
I've heard that Nokia is almost nonexistant in the US. But the 5230/Nuron should be available.

It's a very cheap Symbian 5th ed phone, that's similar to the 5800 with no wifi/weaker camera and so on. It can get you far enough and then you can use the forum nokia virtual device lab for the rest.

Nokia might release the N8 to AT&T in 2011 judging by their Calling all innovators 10m $ competition.
Security flaws in Facebook's Instant Personalization program
I havent written a query in almost 4 years.

http://rubyonrails.org

http://code.google.com/p/redis/

http://github.com/nateware/redis-objects
Often at database-like sites, where I can get a list of something in a selectable category that matches a particular term. For example,

IMDB can give me a list of all TV series / films / etc. with "Hobbit" in the title: http://www.imdb.com/find?s=tt&q=hobbit

Musicbrainz lets me search by track name, album name, artist name, etc.: http://musicbrainz.org/search/textsearch.html?type=track&...
The illusive Pay Window. Have you visited it?
It's probably just a JSConf inside joke/social experiment.

I must admit loving tweets like this one about it: http://twitter.com/me1000/status/25514118214
Here's what I want: someone to offer memcached as a service on aws. I only pay for memory used. I can set a maximum of memory. I don't have to setup/admin the memcached server. It can cost a little more than a bare server, but since I only pay for what I use, it's cheaper for me, and you still make some profit since you have multiple customers.

Anyone?
Development Aid Achieves the Opposite of Its Goals
Invasion of stink bugs has homeowners, farmers seeking relief
I believe that Google need to officially support the existing Qt Android port for it to catch on.
That is a nice summary of what is out there.
Sounds like Microsoft Access.

Couple things:

1. Most of the times, when you're building a webapp, your queries depend upon user input. How would you model that in your GUI? Once you start having to do significant processing on your input to figure out what to query, the visual model falls down pretty hard.

2. I suspect that if you actually used this interface in day-to-day work, you wouldn't like it so much. There's a reason why many hardcore hackers still use the command line: once you've burned the language syntax into your brain, you can get things done much quicker than with a GUI. If you do like it, I'd encourage you to try MS Access.
Cyborg professor looks to future of bionic technology
It sounded like he wanted to be able to access data without writing any code at all - ORMs just replace one type of code with another.