skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It seems nice, but it's more of the same: programming by specification.

There's a place for that, but the future of programming languages, in my mind, lies in changing the metaphor of the process from specification to experimentation. After all, the problem with the specification metaphor is figuring out what the specification actually _is_. To me, the best route to get there is experimentation.

Make programming more about experimentation and I think we'll get somewhere.

(I'm still going to read more about Omega. It looks interesting enough.)
Third party apps can and do use the VGA out; VLC doesn't yet, but it wouldn't be difficult to add.
Ping doesn’t actually publish any kind of information about your listening habits like last.fm does. All you can do is like music or comment on music. The only thing Ping publishes automatically (which is creepy enough if you buy a lot of music) is what you bought in the iTunes Store and who you followed.

This button is just a little shortcut for functionality that already existed but was ridiculously inaccessible before.
Some improvements:
http://www.google.com/trends?q=ruby+on+rails|RoR|rails+-trai...
>Tell all your existing, un-paying customers that in 30 days, you're going to start charging $19.99/month for it, but if they sign up before the pricing starts, they're in for $9.99 (or $12.99--whatever floats your boat). Leave all your existing customers happy by not charging them more.

This sounds a bit like pulling the rug out from under his current users. Perhaps a better idea, if the OP has the time, would be to implement new features in order to try and convert some of the free users. And every time a new feature comes out, announce it to all the users, reminding them how much better the paid experience is. That's how freemium works isn't it?
Not exactly. It's more like 250-300 bytes gzipped and it's delivered through an established request.
When did I say your experience is not valid? If you feel 0-click is must have feature and DDG search is better than Google search good for you.

The text you quoted was my opinion, was it not obvious enough?
I made a beer website, brooski.net, check it out. Let me know what you think.
Much like other ORMs, ActiveRecord makes it almost effortless to accidentally do very stupid queries in bulk. For example (from http://guides.rubyonrails.org/active_record_querying.html) this code

clients = Client.all(:limit => 10)
clients.each do |client|
puts client.address.postcode
end

looks harmless but requires eleven sequential round-trips to the database. This version

clients = Client.includes(:address).limit(10)
clients.each do |client|
puts client.address.postcode
end

still requires two, and one of the queries gets bigger as the number of ids increases. You can get into find_by_sql, but at that point ActiveRecord isn't adding any value.
You can now add pics too.
Or go to a small company where you actually can see people using your work.

As others have suggested, instead of being driven by tools/technology maybe focussing on the product can be satisfying.
Bear in mind that a HTTP Request is significantly slower than the bytes in the page. A request could be anything from .25s to 2 whole seconds, if the bandwidth is saturated. Not least problems with blocking other parallel downloads and delaying the initial paint. HTTP requests that are not images or the CSS are to be absolutely avoided!
Some things never change. When my mom entered college in the early 60's, her school had four and a half men for every woman. The joke was "one's a momma's boy, one's jerk, one's a bore, one has a girlfriend back home, and who wants a half a man?
You know, I thought I had UI design mostly figured out, using a few simple rules:

* Minimise the total number of clicks needed to access the sum of the program's functionality.

* Make frequently-used functionality easier to reach than rarely-used functionality.

* Don't have more elements in the UI than is easy to parse quickly.

* No surprises.

However, after reading this article, I get the feeling that it's a more arcane art, which not many people know. What are some simple rules about good UI design, in your opinion?
I think this is a great suggestion. I'm trying to be sensitive to the OP's situation though: He's in ycombinator and doesn't have time.
The external resource can be cached, pre-generated, shared, managed separately from your page templates.

The main argument seems to be that the metadata involved here is to do with the site, not the page, whereas <meta> tags should be for resource-specific use.
Previous discussion for background:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1704173
I don't think Ping is quite as stillborn as the tech media seems to think. I'm seeing lots of bands I like with 40-50K followers already. This isn't exactly mainstream Top 40 stuff either. If someone is taking the time to go find bands to follow they're at least somewhat engaged in the service. For example Band of Horses has ~316,000 followers on FaceBook -- they have ~30,000 on Ping in less than a month. Considering FaceBook has 5x as many users as registered iTunes users this is an impressive start.
I'm largely sympathetic, but it's not an entirely black-and-white issue. Some DRM systems help content creators and users. For example, Steam and hardware DRM on game consoles combat the piracy that is otherwise endemic to games and helped drive traditional PC game developers away from single-player games.

HDCP is an example of the opposite extreme. It punishes paying customers, while providing no benefit to content owners unless all other, easier forms of piracy were eradicated. It's pointless to worry about someone cracking hdmi when every available Bluray has already been cracked.

The key is that good DRM systems should invisible to paying users. Circumventing them should be just difficult enough that users are motivated to pay.
That's the issue though - for decades there was discrimination for female applicants to 'redress the male/female imbalance'. It's still being done at a lot of places. But suddenly now that the scale has tipped in the opposite direction, the same mechanism triggers an inquiry?
I think that Google's major shortcoming is that searches for specific subjects rarely lead to a canonical source of information on the subject. Instead the top results are full of forums, Usenet scrapes, and content-sparse SEO link farms.
They haven't changed how Ping works. They just put a pop-up menu in place of that little arrow button next to the track name.

It's actually a pretty minor change, but obviously there was some confusion of how Ping worked, so the UI change seemed necessary.
The Limits of Mathematics---Tutorial Version

http://arxiv.org/abs/chao-dyn/9509010v1

Previously in this LISP code only one-character identifiers were allowed, and arithmetic had to be programmed out. Now identifiers can be many characters long, and arithmetic with arbitrarily large unsigned decimal integers is built in. This and many other changes in the software have made this material much easier to understand and to use.
Sure, but how many times have you seen someone create something equal to that with SQL queries? Instead of using a join, they execute a SELECT against the database for every row they fetch. This is shockingly common in horribly written PHP code.

In addition, ActiveRecord also supports joins instead of using includes. Includes is almost always fine, unless the initial result set is large (100+ rows).
I live in Florida, and yes, we switched to the modern American style after WWII. That is, build any box we want, and let the central heat and air make it livable.

The old cracker houses here are substantially different. They are wood frame, 2-3 feet up on masonry pillars, with a shotgun floor layout. They have high ceilings with ceiling fans, large porches, roof of sheet metal roofing with large roof overhangs and high slopes, and are usually sited under the shade of live oaks.

The difference is dramatic.
Orgrimmar in Durotar anyone?
You can always favorite those really important tweets, or even resort to printing them in a compendium by Tweetbook.com. Some of my earliest tweets in a book form that I can go back and reflect on.

I agree that Twitter can do a better job of allowing us to search tweets by topic, but that's a 3rd party app waiting to happen. In the meantime, take a screen shot and post on your web or in flickr.
There are three reasons. You mentioned two of them - word of mouth, and potential conversion to paying in the future. But there's another one too, and that's just the total size of your userbase. Either for bragging rights (we're bigger than competitor X) or for future sale value (the more users you have, the more money you will likely make from a sale/acquisition of your service, even if a lot of them aren't paying for your service) - both are good reasons to offer a free, dumbed down version of your pay service.
You have apparently never used a well-designed ORM. A well-designed ORM isn't to create this magical, leak-proof wrapper for the database. The point is the make common use cases simple and allow the developer to incrementally use more SQL as needed, for more control.
This has been my experience with Rails as well. Most of the time, no SQL is needed, but it's easy to access when it is needed.
I looked at the results, and I found that Google has some problems parsing content. For example "50in TV $1200 after $500 discount" gets included because Google assumes $500 is the price.
Slight grammatical correction: "Inuit" is an adjective or group noun, like "English"; so "could one day make Inuits the Saudis of the north" should be "could one day make Inuit the Saudis of the North".
Know anybody fluent in Japanese, French, or Italian? Spanish and German I've got covered :-)
I tend to only need to use google when i know what I'm looking for but forgot something about it or its something I want answered. Error codes seem rather hard to search for on DDG.
Remuco: Bluetooth remote control for Linux media players
Basically: almost every attempt to simplify programming has failed. We have successfully made the task of programming more efficient and accessible, through the use of libraries, tools, and abstraction, but this is merely the elimination of duplicated effort. At it's core, it's still a task that requires significant mental focus, intelligence, and dedication to craft.
There should be some tool or way to generate a function/stored procedure/x that outputs your data as arrays/objects/json/xml/whatever based on some simple dragging or dropping or marking that you would do with a super neat efficient interface. The tool would then do all the work for you, and whatever query/procedure/function that it generates would already be amazingly optimized, now you would just invoke it and bam there is your result set ready in some array or object for you to use as you want.

Write it yourself? If you did it well, maybe it would help other people understand your point.
For audio software -- http://www.kvraudio.com/get.php
Stop thinking about arrays. Think ordered relations. Think collections and comparators. The sort is vulnerable to an attack at the highest abstraction level, where only necessary conditions are used. The usual implementation, using arrays of integers, is not similarly vulnerable.

I'm not a fan of randomized algorithms, incidentally. It's selling your best case upriver to ward off offensive poisoning, and adds a multiplier to running time. Still, if you're offline, memory-restricted, timesharing and public-facing, I guess randomized quicksort's better than most alternatives. I'd still be looking at median-of-medians, but that's a fair bit of extra work (so much so that it isn't really even quicksort anymore).
Since this isn't used until the menu is pinned, and doesn't show on the page, the time it takes to download should only be taken when the user requests that it be pinned. This shouldn't hold up the page being rendered, since it is not page content.

Edit: Additionally, how does what's in the pinned menu get updated? Does it need to make a full page request to get the new items? This will needlessly inflate pageview numbers in that case (I'm sure the "fix" for that will be that Microsoft will change the User Agent to say that it's not the browser but rather than pinned menu making the request). As for implementation, does the browser create the menu from the this and it's static? Or does the URL to the page get passed to the menu bar where it is pinned and then the menu bar is responsible for making the request? Or does the browser actually run the menu bar -- this seems like the wrong kind of integration.
In this case - sysadmins.
Neat. One thing I might have done differently was to not make ratings on a 0-100 scale. We learned this the hard way at Cork'd; what's the real difference between 85 or 86? To the untrained palette, not much.

Also, curious how you're dealing with normalization of beer names; also an interesting challenge.

Good stuff overall; the site is fast and seems like it's got the right mix of features to make it fun to use. Best of luck!
Killerspin Table Tennis – Tactical Tips and Strategies
There still is in STEM fields. One wonders why there is no inquiry into that.
I thought this was awesome. Being able to recount such a horrific event in that calm manner is an immense display of mental fortitude.
I use this, is it similar?

http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/
I feel like this isn't going to go anywhere- after all, you can't prosecute someone based on vague tweets and a witness (Arrington) that felt awkward. It's possibly a few of the "uncomfortable" Angels will step forward with more evidence, but I'm not convinced there's enough evidence to make a real case out of it.

But then again, all I really know comes from TechCrunch blog posts.
Students: You Are Probably Not Mark Zuckerberg, So Stay In School
Unless your site is profitable, selling it is not going to get you a fair profit for the time you have spent on it.

The cheapest investment for you is marketing. Use your favorite outsourcing site to hire a worker to create a list of sites that would benefit from your service. I'm guessing that how-to and news blogs would be your best customers.

With this list compiled send them all a template email telling them about what your product does for them. The ultimate goal being more paying customers which allows you to either sell it for a good price or hire someone to work on it for you.
The extra HTTP request only has to be performed on pinning, probably only once (or at least only once in a long time depending on the HTTP headers, and the refresh of the file can be performed asynchronously by the browser when and where it thinks it should check) and only by users actually able to pin (so IE9 users).
In my opinion usability requires a lot of grunt work. You have to craft error messages for any and all user input. You have to degrade gracefully if the user's interface (no JS, IE6, small screen on a phone, etc) doesn't meet the ideals for which you've designed the interface. Usable is much more work than functional.

Most programmers are aware of that, and are willing to put the time and effort in to making what's required. But often the product people, besides deciding what things should look like overall, are also in control of the budget and schedule, and they expect all those kinds of things to just magically appear.
But this has nothing to do with the internet or technology, and everything to do with projection: http://essays.dayah.com/lazy-evil-genius
Did you ever end up testing Varnish in the polling solution?
ive had the same experience. i set up a wiki for a large multi mil project for a group of non technical employees, and brought so much additional work on myself (can you edit x page) that in the end it just wasnt worth it. some people just dont understand that they can edit the pages themselves.
Google's "Did you mean?" has gotten increasingly annoying for me as they evolved it. It's now at the point where it will silently, automatically return results for a different word than what I searched for if it thinks I misspelled it (aka it isn't a common term).

This is infuriating 99% of the time, and I'm at the point where I just automatically enclose most of my single-word searches in quotes to begin with.
Maybe I missed the news, but are home routers really attack vectors now?
I agree. I'm developing on Google App Engine now and the lack of a true SQL language in the Datastore is my biggest pain point right now.

The expressiveness of SQL and performance of a mature DBMS beats the pants off of the GAE Datastore at the moment. Obviously scalability is the major benefit of App Engine, but I'm not so sure the trade-offs are worth it.
I work fairly often in the field in Kenya, and am frankly just shocked that they were offered a "walking safari". At the Ol'Pejeta Conservancy where I work, the rules are simple: stay inside the vehicle at ALL times. There simply isn't the option to get out of the car, EVER. Elephants are the same everywhere, and this is a terrible omission that ended in an unfortunately inevitable way.

If you've ever had a male bull elephant plan on getting frisky with your land rover, you'll never even consider a "walking safari", which (come to think of it) sounds like a monumental recipe for disaster. By the way, should you find yourself in that situation (in a car), don't drive away -- rev the engine as loudly as you can and try not to soil yourself.
I still have no idea how to find my personal URL to add my friends on Ping.
Has anyone compiled a good error code database yet? Perhaps I can integrate it.
The answer is whatever creates more buzz - "declined to say" is the most "interesting" way to say no.
That would only be possible if the framework of Gallium3D can be ported to use the Windows DDK. Gallium is pretty well tied to X11 and a few kernel features present on BSD and Linux kernels.
فودافون
Queries work -

An SQL statement tells you in almost-English exactly what to expect

The SQL standard allows me to understand what's going on in an MSSQL query when I've never used MSSQL before.

Conclusion: even though you say writing queries is easy for you, it probably isn't. Once you familiarize yourself better with SQL, you will appreciate it.
All depends on whether what's come out so far is enough to convince a judge to issue subpoenas.
Further qualification: Dual band models. Run separate channels on 2.4 and 5 GHz. Assuming you have upstream bandwidth and/or local traffic to warrant it. Also, 5 GHz may get you away from interference from neighbors' older equipment (router, or crap-leaky cordless phone or whatever else is noising up the 2.4 band).

(Be careful, though; some equipment has limited support for dual band operation, which you only learn from hard to find fine print or third party online sources. E.g. Only one band at a time. Or degrading all connections to G if any of them are G. Or effective throttling due to an under-powered processor. As a couple of examples I encountered a year or a bit more ago while helping someone buy one.)

As for me, still on my 54GL -- good enough for my limited needs at home.
So use getmail_fetch through the POP server; it downloads a few hundred at a time into a maildir format. Hard to get more convenient and storable than that (tar it up and gzip or 7zip it).
If you nail all the things you mention, you'll probably be far ahead of most software out there.
Co-founder agreements
Can anyone point me to an example of a good starting point for a good written agreement between cofounders (pre-funding)?
Unboxed data (incl. structs) can be a performance win, because it removes indirections = memory loads.
Emergency Bra
Upvoted, but curious...why is this good advice? Can the car not outrun the elephant. Is the elephant afraid of the engine? Does the elephant outmatch the car's velocity? Because you can be sure I would get the hell out of there as fast as possible.
The way it's usually done (in Silicon Valley) at least, is that all co-founders are shareholders of a C corporation. They buy their shares at a very low price, and the corporation has buy-back rights to those shares in case the co-founder leaves before 4 years.

Note: it's slightly different from regular employees who have stock options. The main differences are: employees don't own stock upfront, plus there usually is a 1-year cliff for vesting, so if the employee leaves before a year, they have nothing.
Couple things:

1) Ping is only available in the US, so a straight comparison of user numbers to FB isn't necessarily valid. You have take the number of US users of both iTunes and FB, and I don't think that breakdown is readily available.

2) Non-mainstream stuff is likely to be overrepresented in these sorts of things, since people who are into to music are more likely to use such new music services and are also likely to have more varied tastes.
Quitting your day job
I think you're hitting on some of the key points.

The Fed is continuing it's policy of monetary expansion. Most major central banks around the world are doing the same. US treasury debt is in a massive bubble. The Fed is propping it up daily. Money won't find safe haven in any fiat currency and have nowhere to go but gold to preserve wealth. Good ol' Greenspan said as much in a recent announcement he made. He advises central planners to stock up on gold.
They generally do much better than a README: machine-parseable is the way to go.

Perl (CPAN) packages include a YAML file that specifies what other modules (packages) and what minimum version of each is required to configure, build and run the package. There's an ecosystem of tools available for turning a Perl package into an RPM or deb, some of which can even work recursively. Even before the YAML was standard in CPAN packages, it just wasn't that hard to parse out all the "use" and "require" statements to automatically detect all the required packages (and minimum versions of those). There's also a unit testing framework to make sure you don't accidentally introduce any incompatibilities with untested newer versions of required packages.

I haven't dealt with Ruby quite as much, but the gem format also includes dependency information and there's gem2rpm for RPM and dpkg-gem for deb packages.

I think I've only ever once had to build an RPM or deb package of a Python package, but Python seems to natively support building both formats; just call the same "build and install" method you'd usually use with an extra argument and you get a native package, which will use dependency information if the python package provided it.
Weather or not the investigation will succeed, it will change significantly how reckless angels and VCs have been when it comes to back-room deals and silent partnerships. Time for transparency and thinking before speaking.
> people seriously looking to have sex in college seem to be in the minority

This is, reciprocally, a mind-blowingly alien worldview, completely contrary to an assumption I've only now realized was even an assumption, and had previously just taken as part of the fabric of the universe. I think it may be more plausible there's some difference in terminology here and we're not talking about the same thing.

I would like to know more about what you would consider to be the mindset of a typical incoming 1st-year undergraduate, if you would share it.
OpenID didn't work too well an year ago. I don't remember the details, but it was enough to make me not use it even if I use it whenever I can.
Wind towers are part of Middle East heritage and I always wonder why they've gone into building all those a/c energy wasting offices, malls and homes, instead of simply adopting this technology from the start.

Second of all I'm waiting until someone counts how much inefficient energy resources will be used to build these 'green' cities in UAE or China.
Their stock is pretty much invincible.

When people say things like this you know the stock has about hit it's peak and nowhere to go but down. Just watch :)
Why are either of you hypothesizing about publicly available data? Read the patent application yourself: http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Se... .