skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Is the problem that they're sitting there in a city without any other Internet industry, stewing in their own witty ideas, listening only to the adoring comments they get from the groupies?"

As opposed to being located in a circle-jerk of similar minded companies and VCs, responsible for the first internet boom?

"The whole section "Minority investment evaluations aren’t real" is so economically bizarre and incorrect that I don't even know where to start. It's like you wrote a blog post arguing that it is incorrect to refer to a 5' tall boy as 5' tall because he's often sitting down."

If he's ALWAYS sitting down, then it's accurate to argue he's not really 5' tall ―not for any practical purpose, that is.

But not only "minority valuations" are not real, but majority valuations are not real either. Valuations are based on guesses, feelings, estimations and some facts thrown in for good measure. A declaration of fact, they are not. Some time they are even complete BS.

"Finally, to the main point. Facebook has certainly figured out how to make money off of 500,000,000 users. And as they optimize, they will make a lot more money. When they figure out how to make another DIME off of every user, they will instantly be making another $50,000,000 a year... in pure profit. How much profit will 37signals make if you figure out how to make another dime off of every customer? Eh David?"

And how useful is David's products to customers, eh Joel? How possible it is that they jump ship en masse when something trendier comes along, compared to Facebook? That is, which business is based on a solid offering, and which on virtual smoke and manure?

Yahoo could once milk 500,000,000 users too. Nowadays, not so much.

"Facebook works on the theory that when you have a lot of people, you don't have to make as much per person, because the amount of money you make is the number of customers times the amount of money you make off of each one. Again, that pesky multiplication."

Yes, many a business failure was based on that theory. It's the old, "we lose money on each product, but we'll make it up on volume" idea, adjusted as "we make a tiny fraction of money from each user, providing no real benefit or substance, and he can jump ship tomorrow like he did on several of our predecessors, from Frienster to MySpace, but we'll make it up on volume".

"It's weird, it's like in Chicago they don't have multiplication or something."

Most likely it's like NY has no manners...

But the real question is, should someone even partially responsible for Visual Basic even be allowed to talk about tech?
I see your old map app and a raise you a collaborative multi-user map app http://multimap.wakawakafoobar.info/

Multiple people can view and control the map in realtime. nodejs, socket.io, dnode, and google map api.
The post is a bit of fluff, but the paper is better. Haskell already has GADTs, as the paper points out. Those of you crying out for examples, just read the paper. The real gem are these extensible kinds, which I haven't seen mentioned in Haskell before.

I don't mean to keep throwing water on the fire but the research community already made trees that can't be unbalanced because they wouldn't typecheck, by encoding the depth of the tree into its type. Okasaki demonstrated the concept in Haskell, I believe. Getting it to work for RB-trees sounds new though.
Openness is a lot of work.
A handful of condoms would have the same effect, and even more people might use them.
Do you have someone specific in mind? IMO, the decision to get married is a personal one and isn't linked to your career, even though it seems like it. What's the purpose of life to you? If you feel like marrying someone (after giving it some deep thought) then aren't they more important than your career anyway? If marriage is what you want, then yes, you need to spend time with your significant other, and you might need to tone down the time you spend at work. Tell people you have a family - they'll understand.

As a married guy, while marriage is technically a restriction, I don't see it that way at all. It's great having one (or more, when you have kids) other person to share everything with. You'll look at your career a whole different way. It's given me a greater level of focus knowing that peoples' lives are directly affected by my choices. In my experience it's only had a positive effect.
Of course he is a hacker if you redefine hacker like that. This is just a semantical question.

2+2 also equals 5 if you redefine the symbol 2 to stand for 2.5.
After using dropbox for quite a while I finally had a problem, 120 of my files were truncated to 0 bytes. I was able to restore the important files immediately using their previous versions features and their support team fixed the rest for me. I'm still quite a fan of dropbox.
I almost bought a new router recently because the connection was so unreliable, but then I decided to at least poke around a bit. Turns out that even if reception strength is shown to be very good, there can still be other problems killing the connection.

In my case, apparently the external monitor attached to my MacBook would disturb the signal somehow. Luckily, simply switching the channel fixed it. It just never occured to me to switch the channel because signal strength was always good.

What amazed me most is that I was able to find a solution even though I had 0 idea on how to debug a WLAN network. Buying a router with a stronger signal was my only idea initally.

Blog article: http://blog.blinker.net/2010/09/12/fixing-wlan-connectivity-...
>No down voting: So people will not lose karma just for having an opposing view.

Still better would be to make downvoting cost one point to the downvoter. This would discourage rather than prevent downvoting (and people will happily pay to correct real injustices).

It would also more accurately reflect human psychology: in IRL conversations a participant occasionally gets angry, but it always comes at a cost to himself.
It's been my experience that the more often a person says "I'm honest" "I'm transparent" "I'm doing this for the good of xyz" - the more they're lying. Certainly, using words like "honestly" in a negotiation is a popular type of 'tell.'

You're right, the whole email did seem calculated to make himself look good. It sounds more crafted for its future audience (the whole web) than the mailing list.
No video of it in action yet? That's always the part I look for in 3d printer articles.
He has nothing to apologize for. You use features clearly marked 'unsupported,' you are going to get burned.
I'd be careful with inferences like that. It's not a directed graph, so talking about flow in time is very speculative.
Always Innovating has updated their product line
I would start by being less pessimistic about your own experience. What are you good at? What problems are you paid to solve today? How could you solve them better?
I'm personally convinced that it's both.
I have never owned a netgear router that stayed alive for more then a week or two before requiring a reboot. I will never go back to them.
I guess I can understand that they want to test the waters with a brand name app, but now that they've actually published something the continued stinginess with the sdk is off-putting. Maybe one consolation is that, by the time they open it up to regular folk, there might be much better Kindles to play with.
I wonder how they handled the case where X claims relationship with Y, but Y doesn't agree.

I once amused myself for a few minutes by dreaming up an app for Facebook that would let you claim a relationship with someone and send that person a message allowing them to confirm. It would then collect statistics like false claims, and potentially produce graphs like the one in this article about your social circle.
Memcache will only make sense if it is hosted in the private LAN.

I think the point is that he's only offering it to Linode users in the Dallas data center, which is where his service is located. Therefore the latency will be in the sub 1ms range, comparable to a private LAN. There may be other issues with this approach, but latency isn't one of them, at least in this implementation.
An alternative for gnome; Klavaro. Despite the 'K' it's gtk.
Random street view
A professional organization NEVER turns off features -- final, beta, experimental, it doesn't matter what you call it -- without warning unless external pressures force you to. What you do is determine who is using the feature and send a warning to those customers. Then after waiting a while (a few days to a few months), you can turn it off.

Predictability is critical to B2B services. It is more important than price or performance. It allows customers to make an informed decision. It prevents dissatisfaction and PR disasters.

I also think this should be a lesson for younger businessmen. Customers will even get angry if you cut undocumented features. Or fix bugs they relied upon. Any change that impacts customers needs to be communicated in advance.

IMO, if you truly "put developers and applications first", you would have done this. I humbly suggest some soul searching.
You're probably mostly correct with that assumption. For me the exploration of new concepts was the driving force and the main endorphine trigger. Actually applying what was learned was more of an afterthought.

It's probably no coincidence that I studied theoretical CS and minored in math :)
Triskweline: A new fixed-width font for programmers
Actually, that first idea, the "cooling off" timer before karma is displayed, is a really good one.
Presumably, Twilio knows who their top users of the international SMS feature are. Why not just look at the logs and email the top users, telling them the service is going to be discontinued?
This isn't rocket science, people.
What are Sample Research Papers
When looking for sample research papers you need to know specific information it should contain. Without this knowledge you will not be able to write a good paper. The right sample research paper will provide you the knowledge needed to write your papers.
I think I'm paranoid after being denied "Work at a Startup" — any idea whether semi-hackers (designers/front-end devs) are encouraged to attend?

Regardless, my application was in on the first day it opened, since I've only heard good things about the event from past attendees!
I added that mostly for variety, my two personal interests are medical records for the ID-less (specially pediatric medical records.) And vigilante education reform with games, song and dance. I can talk about those two all day.

The principle behind my idea for language documentation is that logging diversity, in one Nigeria-wide record, also underscores the equality of the Nigerian people as a whole, across religious, linguistic and clan divides. Right now most people identify with one of few macro-clans, something that aborted our own Somali state.

Documenting dialects and noting the nuanced differences between people makes an amusement, a public spectacle if you will, of what could otherwise have been a matter of tribal pride and differentiation to feel superior over others. I didn't become a "Somali" until I saw the British records, and how identical we were to them.

Empower the minority sub-cultures, and the large clusters come apart. Give voice to individuality, and local culture at the micro-level, and, paradoxically, the larger group identity becomes stronger. Could you imagine how better off Africa would be if people didn't vote along clan lines?

[Edit:

I gotta get ready for a flight, but I really wanna keep this conversation going, hopefully with Oo's involvement.]
Ask HN: Anyone going to Maker Faire (NYC)?
I find myself suddenly and unexpectedly able to go to the Maker Faire here in NYC. But I don't have any plan at all nor any real idea of what to see (other than arc attack... I'm totally up to see giant bolts of electricity)

Do you plan to go? Already there? If so, please post what looks particularly cool to you so I can add it to my list.

Thanks and I hope to see some you there.
Gee on how videogames recover the pleasure of learning - 2:30 video
Project 10 to the 100
I frequently wash keyboards in the shower and never had any issues either.
Thought about breaking things instead of making things? The security industry is an interesting place to be at the moment.. researchers continue to push the envelope and come up with new ways to abuse / bypass 'the system' and - if you dive deep enough, some significant technical and meatspace challenges to deal with. Privacy, or lack of, is increasingly an issue with various specific challenges to be addressed. Consulting adds a twist too; I definitely get a kick out of helping people / organizations realize what process & technology vulnerabilities they have and determining the best way to address them.

And I find that snowboarding, mountain biking, hiking, and running help avoid feelings of drudgery.. do you have hobbies that get you away from a computer screen for a chunk of time every day?
I have to disagree with you to an extent about the state of the net today. I look at it as something like a movie studio. You're getting upset at all the big blockbuster stuff. The things that have little to no plot but yet rake in billions of dollars. What you don't get is that it allows studios to invest in things that have more risk, because it has potential to sell and there's a market for it.

The same could be applied to the net and to software tech. I mean, look at ycombinator and all their startups. Things like Facebook, Twitter,etc; their popularity is only natural because we all can't design a website. They give the average joe the tools that they need and they go crazy with it. The more money they make, the better, because it gives the little guys the chance to make something better. Maybe not revolutionary, but some original idea that solves a problem and gains revenue from it. And who knows, maybe out of all of that something revolutionary will come out of it. But it's hardly winding down as you say.
What the JVM has going for it is the incredible amount of resources thrown at it in order to make it fast. Technically, the CLR seems more interesting (it has runtime type information for generics, it allows structs, it allows unboxed data, ...).

Personally, I'm not a fan of runtimes. They don't give me the same warm, fuzzy feeling as compiling to native code and running directly on the OS.
> I bet 100% of the STDs are unwanted too.

Yes, hence my suggestion to ask the question about safe-sex and to add two more sets of dots.

> Don't want to minimize the seriousness of teen pregnancy - it's a really huge problem,

ok

> but, at least, the baby doesn't kill its host

Teen pregnancies are a serious risk to both mother and child.

In developing countries the risks are much higher still.

It is much less rare for a teen-age pregnancy to have complications which may even result in fatalities.

> And that's why I am a very careful parent.

Good :)

> I tell my kids I wish them an uneventful life and death from old age.

Not sure about uneventful, but if by that you mean unscheduled hospital visits then I'm all for it.
I don't think Python is the "de facto" language at Google. They also use Java extensively. And anyways, who cares what Google uses? The OP isn't trying to get a job at Google, he's just trying to get some work done.
Loss of (generic) types at byte code level. Coordinating between dynamic languages and standard java code is a little cumbersome ..
The main motivator and source of satisfaction for software developers is the human aspect, not the technology itself. Is your product making a difference in someone's life? Who are your customers? The difference between these two approaches explains why college grad developers go into finance thinking they'll work on 'neat' problems and a few years later hate they jobs because at the end, their contribution to society is simply a number that indicates profit and not a single person's life has been significantly affected. In the end, we all just want to be appreciated. Like edw519 pointed out, go solve people's problems. Everything else will fall into place.
Strangely enough, if I had the money, I'd probably go back to university and study one of the splinter-subjects genetics must have exploded into during the past 15 years. I've kicked myself over the past years repeatedly for not staying in university and getting some research job there. Maybe I can have a look into the DIY aspect of biotech, that someone already mentioned.
I have used isopropyl alcohol with success also. IF you have a choice at your local store, choose the one with a higher % .
The obvious answers are:

- hardware failure of the previous device

- hardware that can't keep up - an older WRT54GL class device will have trouble routing more than 20-25Mbit/s, which is getting pretty close to what is available from consumer level internet service

- Local speed. Gigabit wired and N-wireless are both valid reasons to upgrade, if you're going from 10/100 and G-wireless.

- Power usage - if you need gigabit networking and have very few devices, it makes sense to not run an older router and a gig switch - consolidating to one device is power efficient and probably pulls less power than older devices.

There are probably plenty of other reasons, but these came to mind immediately.
مسلسل العشق الممنوع الحلقة 71
And it does not document promiscuity either (in time), for all we know these are nicely serialized or it could be one big orgy.

It also keeps the relationships within the school, which is not a realistic picture whatsoever, and once you add in the outside world (especially to that larger chunk of the graphic) all bets are off.
Heh, you can't really hold up Google as a paragon of developer relations or customer service. They have a pretty poor reputation on both counts.
A multi-user real-time google map application built on nodejs, socket.io, dnode, and the gmap api. Definitely works in Chrome and Safari, not sure about the rest (anyone have socket.io working in IE and FF?)

I built this to better learn nodejs and the google map api. Seemed like a good time to post in light of dadgum's Advice to Aimless, Excited Programmers.

If you have any useful application ideas for this map app, let me know!
It doesn't matter why they shut it off. What matters is that they shut it off without any notice.
I can't think of anyone who embodies the hacker mentality better than the MakerBot guys. The polish on this version really shows. Keep it up!
Cool, thank you very much for looking!
Personal Experience Essays Encounter with Death
Personal experience essays are common writing assignments. However, when faced with writing a personal experience essay as an encounter with death, many students will balk at the assignment. However, if the proper knowledge is gained, writing the essay will be an easy task.
"I've recently had the possibility to escape the constant mental treadmill that comes with working in most IT departments"

You wrote some pretty prose but you did not really tell us what you know or what you have been really doing with your life for the last ten years.

When someone says "IT Department" I think large (or small) corporation supporting a group of people who actually bring in the money. The key reason these places are so soul crushing is that many times management does not know how to use them effectively to help the bottom line by making smart technology choices. You are just a cost center.

The other reason they are soul crushing is that 2/3rd's of your colleagues are probably all kinds of incompetent and should have been fired or never hired in the first place.

In any case the trick is to get out of there as quickly as possible. (It took me 10 years too and I'm still not recovered career wise or personally) Get yourself employed by a technology company working on their core products. All the sudden you are not supporting anyone (except maybe your customers.) and you may find it a much more pleasant experience.

I would also suggest making friends with some people more successful than yourself and really try and learn from them how to manage you finances correctly. It's something that many families just don't teach.

Finally I'd recommend reading "The wealthy Barber"[1] to get an idea of what a healthy financial situation and practices might look like.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Wealthy-Barber-Updated-3rd-Commonsense
Liked the philosophy behind the text:

"A word about style and efficiency. As you will see, I tend to write programs in _VERY_ small, easily understood pieces. None of the procedures we'll be working with will be more than about 15-20 lines long. I'm a fervent devotee of the KISS (Keep It Simple, Sidney) school of software development. I try to never do something tricky or complex, when something simple will do. Inefficient? Perhaps, but you'll like the results. As Brian Kernighan has said, FIRST make it run, THEN make it run fast. If, later on, you want to go back and tighten up the code in one of our products, you'll be able to do so, since the code will be quite understandable. If you do so, however, I urge you to wait until the program is doing everything you want it to.

I also have a tendency to delay building a module until I discover that I need it. Trying to anticipate every possible future contingency can drive you crazy, and you'll generally guess wrong anyway. In this modern day of screen editors and fast compilers, I don't hesitate to change a module when I feel I need a more powerful one. Until then, I'll write only what I need."
Already did that. First teaching evening courses at community colleges while at university, then doing freelance jobs for a well-known IT teaching center during the episode that nearly broke my financial neck.

However when I did this I was (obviously) in a different mindset, so the experience would be different this time around. I'll have a look into revisiting this aspect.
Lazy Saturday Mornings are my Religion
I'm not sure you understood my comment.
"Enterprises don't need social solutions."

Actually they do, in large global enterprise with thousands or tens of thousands of employees at hundreds of locations worldwide it can be a real problem to locate people with the right expertise to help solve particular problems.

That's presumably why things like SharePoint 2010 have so many "social networking" features built in.
at least the 99 bottles challenge looks to be a direct ripoff of codegolf. or vice versa.
I think @oothenigerian's point is that downvoting comments simply because they express a contrarian view is bad form.

It requires a certain level of maturity, introspection, humility and openness to not simply tag opposing views as pointless and therefore worthy of a downvote.

Another way to express it is this - is it possible to upvote a comment that you disagree with? i.e. simply on the ability of the author to substantiate his points?

Perhaps we should introduce transparent algorithmic voting.

Hmmm....