skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Vendor lock-in isn't as crucial to Adobe's CS as it is to Office. Microsoft doesn't want anybody to even think that there's such a thing as an "Office alternative", whereas recent years have proven that upstart competitors to components of CS can get traction.

So, while killing CS for Mac might work (users switching platforms might outnumber users switching programs), killing Office for Mac would just force universities to switch to ODF and in the long term, it would hurt the rest of Office's markets.
I became a beekeeper the end of August when I collected a swarm on the end of our block. I've since become keenly aware of the extent to which beekeeping has become "commercialized". Ignoring (external) factors like pesticides, etc., pollination activities subject them to intense pressures (monoculture, hive movement, sick bees from remote geographies, etc.). Varroa, for example, is pretty much endemic in hives throughout the US after having been "introduced" in the late 80s.

The University of Minnesota, known for the Minnesota Hygienic line, instructs fledgling beekeepers to follow a "two-year" plan. The first year involves lots of chemical treatments (routine use of "nasty" chemicals is now the norm in the hive), the second year more chemicals and (hopefully) lots of honey. After two years? Kill the hive.

The end-game in all of this seems unsustainable (highly-evolved diseases and highly-chemical-dependent hives). I've been trying to work out a better plan for myself: one that does not tolerate chemical treatments (but is willing to let weak hives die), works with the bees, and fosters reproduction of thriving stock. I'd appreciate any resources you'd be able to share to aid in this.
This is the culmination of HTML5 technology. It doesn't get any better than this.
Crowdsourcing involves getting many people to work for you for nothing; after which, you only pay one person.

I don't think it's surprising that many people dislike the idea.
There's RVM in the Ruby world. Anything similar for Python?
THIS is my boomstick!
It took Soft years to recover from that imho.

When I wrote a an XSI plugin for a feature film production, in 2005, for XSI running on Linux, half of the API was still using COM, it the app required a special gcc version that shipped with the sdk to compile plugins with and the Python was ActiveState Python (which clashed with the Linux system's Python).
In short, it was a disaster from a developers, and still a lot of trouble from a user's pov.

Now Adobe doesn't support Linux much but if what MS did to XSI is anything to go by, I wouldn't want to be a developer on one of those apps, after the acquisition.
this guy doesn't know what he's talking about.

For a start, the traditional whisky glass doesn't have a stem.

'preparing the glass' waste of time and whisky, just swirl the glass before you sniff.

Try a Speyside if it's your first whisky - they have the most broadly liked flavours. If you want something with some kick, go for a highland malt or an Islay, my favorite commercial bottle is probably one of the Lagavulins.

But then this guy works for Whyte and Mackay. Whyte and Mackay is pig swill.
It was the same talk, but re-given yesterday at Toronto DemoCamp #27. Fred mentioned that he had given it a few months back in NYC.
I've never written a cover letter. In fact, I've only needed a resume once in my life so far (I'm 31, been employed steadily in the field since I was 15) - and that was just so the company could "keep it on file." (I have no idea why it mattered to them - they had already hired me before even seeing one!)

I hope this trend continues for me. :)
I agree with that opinion as well.

They do raise awareness on some important issues, but they misinform on some key others IMO.

For example, I strongly disagree with their anti-nuclear campaign:

http://www.greenpeace.org/international/campaigns/nuclear/

My stepfather is a nuclear phycisist and works for the IAEA so I'm a bit biased, but probably more informed than most anti-nuclears
What do you mean by "cross borders" ? I travel oversees and no one has booted my laptop ever to see what's inside. Maybe I've never traveled to those countries.
It kind of do according to QM.
Adobe sells a lot of enterprise document software that could really boost Microsoft's Share Point properties.

I really do think all product development for Linux or Android would be cancelled (Flash for Windows Phone 7 only).
Not to rain on their parade, but wasn't data mining supposed to make FoxMarks valuable too?
The Rare team was spun out of Microsoft. They were the video game company that Microsoft bought from Nintendo. They were responsible for Golden Eye, Conquer, and Perfect Dark.

I'm not sure if this would be considered a successful spin off though as Microsoft bought them when they were, IMHO, at their peak.
Hey B&N, if imitation is really just flattery, then thanks for the flattery.
generalization/key point as I see it: doing x for x's sake or as an excuse to be self-righteous is bad, do things because they make you happy or make something easier.

This is actually a really useful rule in a lot of other places too.
How to get Sh*t Loads of Customers & Users for Every Thing You Do
Four zero-day vulnerabilities + one (zero-day?) in controller software + (at least) two valid stolen certificates for signed drivers -- that, afaics, is pretty hard compared to other worms; definitely not in dick-swinging league.
You just might be. ;-)

I have git status in my prompt but also use short shell aliases. If anyone's curious:

http://github.com/samsonjs/config/blob/master/zsh/zshrc#L230...
I mean select
Does My Ex Miss Me? How to Know if There's a Future Together
What is the smart thing behind wanting to get your ex back? Well, actually, it’s giving them and yourself time. Instead work on you, your emotions and the issues that plagued your relationship.
Not to mention all the color patents.
More plausible deniability for your encrypted harddisk partitions
I know all the people I friended, but don't want to be associated with some of their stupid groups.
"it could create relevant, topical ad units which themselves get inserted into the realtime stream in the form of Tweets, status updates or whatnot."

Fuck RIGHT off.
Isn't that all charity?
I seriously doubt that, MSFT has invested quite heavily in Silverlight. I could possibly see them working on a flash player for Windows Phone 7 but MSFT wants to maintain the development mind share in their tools.
interesting. So, is a ugly (but unique, and closely matched to the brand) logo better or worse than a pretty (but not so closely matched to the brand) logo?

ugly: http://prgmr.com/xen
pretty: http://prgmr.com/~lsc/penguin-logo.png
It's not clear to me why they don't just run development on their local machines. I'm not familiar with PHP, though. I'm all for having a build/test vm, though.
They really need to change the name. Something that rips off Sinatra less and promotes the fact that its a micro-framework. Besides that I would love to take it for a test drive.
Interesting example. In Mathematica, they opted for fully spelled out function names with caps to indicate new words for minimal ambiguity. For example LinearSolve is not linsolve or lnsolve or lsolve or even ls as it is in other languages or libraries. This makes the names of standard mathematical functions easier to remember or guess at.

Your minima may not be my minima!
That'd be nice, but sadly it's not the world we live in. Arson committed by firefighters is a small but expensive problem for the people who run fire departments.
http://www.usfa.dhs.gov/downloads/pdf/publications/tr-141.pd...

Doctors are supposed to be moral paragons too, but every so often one is revealed to be abusing their trust in some horrific fashion.
Someone should write a JavaScript -> CoffeeScript converter. Shouldn't be too hard, I might actually do this myself when I get time.
Juicing During a Power Outage
i just use the same fabfile on the server. and doesn't require tornado on linux (if epoll is available)
I only skimmed the article but I assume it’s about the benefits of running VMs to have solid dev environments with zero setup cost.

Let me ask another question: Will it become feasible to move code, tools and everything else into web services? Imagine you have your favorite editor (emacs, TM, vim) running in a browser window. Only that it’s live-updating like, e.g., Ethercodes or Wave. And you have very straight-forward access to SCM features like staging hunks of code. Also the code deploys straight to heroku or whatever. It could, of course, also go through closure or sproutcore in case of a fancy js client app.

Do you think it’ll all evaporate (I refuse to say cloud :) eventually?

The thing is I’m really going through a lot of pain setting up my system and other’s systems over and over again. Yes, there are ways to automate that but the effort is too high for most or we would all be doing it right now.
This is absolutely why I love hackernews. I mean really...how often do you have a question about a piece of software and the creator jumps right in to provide some insight!?
what do they have that could replace that? Sharepoint, SQLServer, Windows 7, Windows Server, Windows Virtual Server, CRM, Exchange Server, XBox, Xbox live, Bing, Zune, Microsoft Automotive platform, Win 7 phone.

Microsoft has one of the most diverse revenue streams of any software company. They're going to be around for a while.

Google should actually be more afraid of disruptive technologies. Their revenue is primarily from advertising. They are truly a single revenue source company.
Razorfish was acquired when Microsoft bought aQuantive. It was then spun off and sold to Publicis.
NYT: Adobe, Microsoft executives discussed sale of Adobe to Microsoft
Lessons Learned from Monetizing Quick Sprout
I bought the deal just for the Twilio credit since we're existing customers. Prob won't use any of the other apps.
I'd say that seems to cover both bases for not needing a VM.

Every language should have something as simple as these. Heck, it should be part of the OS, IMO; why I can't (easily) run two different versions of Firefox with two different profiles at the same time is beyond comprehension.
It's quite possible for it to take a long time, though. Microsoft has been more or less in the position you describe for ~15 years: by the mid-1990s they were making huge profits, almost entirely from Windows+Office. Now, 15 years later, they've still got large profit margins on that same duo.
You'll need a C library, a small handful of C libraries, a web-server and the Linux kernel. SSH would be good, possibly git as well depending on the way you deploy. Ignoring any need for a GUI, I think you could get a rather small system.
To continue citing those from my background, “value” is an modern invention of “intellectuals,” and therefore, either of the devil or a liberal plot.
4. Include security in the software lifecycle. This means something at Microsoft (security is a gating step at design, at implementation, and in testing), but doesn't mean something for a team that has gotten a minimum viable social network out the door with little to no testing. You might as well ask them not to be a startup.

I'd agree with this. From my experience, the most effective part of Microsoft's security practice is that we had dedicated developers whose only job is to evaluate the security of proposed changesets. This doesn't really help a startup that doesn't even have a product yet and only a handful of developers.
Patrick Moore, one of the founders of Greenpeace, is now a critic of many of their policies. Stewart Brand is another critic.

Much of what they do is good, but it's clearly not driven by a cold and careful evaluation of the actual consequences of human behaviors, but by emotion.
MongoDB's lead developer: Foursquare outage post mortem
Bundler was supposed to remedy dependency hell problems and I believe it eventually managed to do that. But boy can I tell you stories about migrating from pre-1.0 bundler versions.

RVM is just great and simple.

What I’m trying to say though: Having done quite some side projects with node, the ruby stuff suddenly feels very enterprisey to me. More and more conventions might make it harder to keep track of everything in the future.
I agree, Softimage was just mishandled. It was brought into Microsoft with a single task, and Sumatra(XSI) was architected at a really bad point in time for them. It was done on the verge of NT era, so they went berserk. Softimage (they have renamed XSI) is now a really solid piece of software, AGAIN mishandled by Autodesk. sigh.
Does anyone use bit.ly pro? Any other white-label url shorteners people recommend? http://shortswitch.com looks pretty decent.
Duress is where someone forces another into a bad position, eg by setting the house on fire first.

Duress only implies impaired judgment of the contract signer as due to immediate fear; it doesn’t imply the other party created the situation. Any lawyer would easily argue that the fire department charged an irrationally high cost for fire fighting that the home owner wouldn’t have agreed to had they had time to fully weight the cost and benefits of fire fighting services. In the worst case, one only need say they planned to demolish the house in the near future and therefore paying to have the fire extinguished was irrational.

A contract for non-insurance, pay-for-use fire fighting would only be enforceable if signed before the fact.
Strangely, while mentioning Damn Small Linux, geek.com doesn't mention that it's the same person, Robert Shingledecker, behind it and Tiny Core. Apparently, there's been some drama involved (http://www.shingledecker.org/andrews.html) and Shingledecker had to leave Damn Small Linux to stagnation, while Tiny Core is reincarnation of his ideas on a new level.
I have used it. I like it quite a bit. It's very simple and integrates nicely with Scalate, a Scala templating library.

Scalatra + Scalate + development using simple-build-tool (using ~ prepare-webapp) is a pretty killer combination, in my opinion. The feedback cycle is every bit as fast as rails.
Successful YC 2010 companies
Is there a list of companies that were successful in the previous YC funding round?

Thanks
Not realistic. The box moves smoothly and as fast as you move the mouse. Add some random pauses and glitches ;)
It's kind of funny because originally it was called step and then they renamed it a few months ago. I liked step better.
All I would have to do is abstract the outer function out and call it curry (partial[1], really).

var add = function (m, n) {
return m + n;
},
partial = function (mth, fn) {
return function (l) { return _(l)[mth](fn, 0); };
},
sum = partial('reduce', add);

sum([1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9]); // => 45

-----

[1]: http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/2266
Y Combinator Q&A Session - New York edition
I good PHP environment that models the server is very hard to get going locally. At least on OS X. The only way I could get a good environment for Nginx+MySQL+PHP was to locally run a debian VM in VirtualBox.

Now this doesn't even take into account things like memcached that require a lot more customization.
You're not- I can't stand waiting 3-5 seconds every time I hit enter, just so I can have a more verbose prompt that tells me things I already knew.
I think it quite might be Tiny Core Linux. Tiny Core is meant to be not just smallest possible distro for its own sake, (an a lot work has gone into this), but the smallest possible core on top of which all the necessary functionality should be mounted.
Foursquare Outage Post Mortem (10gen CTO)
Not determining the root causes of why the bees are actually experiencing this plague is like thinking aspirin cures someone with chronic headaches.
The Oldest Person in the World
Antisa Khvichava from a former Soviet republic of Georgia turned 130 years old.
More interestingly (to me) is the quadratic performance they are reporting for the SSE optimized variants - ISTR when they were introduced there was some performance figures quoted. Looks like they didn't measure very well.
Ask HN: Anyone have experience with Rules Engines like Drools or FICO Blaze?
I am doing some work where we decided to use a rules engine. We are on a java/hibernate/struts stack. Are leaning towards Drools as it has some integration points with AppFuse that we are using. Plus FICO Blaze is way more expensive
Ayup - it's the RPocalypse ;-)
Sorry, been a while since I looked @ all these definitions and I was typing from memory.

A discouraged worker is one who has looked for work at some point in the last 12 months, but is no longer looking because they believe there is no work to be found. (and are often correct in aggregate)

Where the BLS further skews the statistics is that discouraged workers who have been discouraged longer than 12 months just drop from the labor force completely, they are a hidden statistic. (I believe this definition was changed under the Clinton Administration)
Gah, that is stressful.
I hope I'm not the only one who added style="visibility:hidden;" to the post-it-note image hoping to be pleasantly surprised.
117 GB of data and 300 B for a checkin means that Foursquare has had 408,944,640 checkins.
Also the entire Dynamics series. Web people don't understand the ERP world and the profits that come from annual maintenance plans. What is Dynamics? It's what runs the internal systems for most small/mid-sized businesses that can't afford Oracle/SAP. It's a HUGE market.
There are numerous indexes on the data - so actual data is about half of that.
For example, if we had notifications in place to alert us 12 hours earlier that we needed more capacity, we could have added a third shard, migrated data, and then compacted the slaves.

Where did Foursquare find their engineers? I hope no one lost their job here but this is pretty elementary stuff.
That was one of the most well-written, to-the-point explanations I have read in a long time.
Math for Computer Science forum [math4cs]
Ask HN: Where to find UI designers by region or zip code?
This problem keeps coming up on almost every project I work: where can we find good user interface designers? I know a lot of designers, and they know how to make things pretty, but they are not what I am looking for. What I want is specifically designers with experience designing user interfaces. That is, people who can design software (its visual interface), rather than design a website (or a print publication).

And also, I need to find them in my area.

There are sites like http://dribbble.com/ that allow me to find good designers. However, this is a mix of designers who are good at all different kinds of things, not just UI design. And I do not thing I can sort by them by region or zip code.

UI design tends to be the kind of thing where face-to-face communication among developers and clients is important. In the Agile Manifesto http://agilemanifesto.org/ it says "The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation." I find this to be most true when figuring out the interface.

When I was in Florida, my clients asked my recommendation for good UI designers. But I did not know any good UI designers in Florida. When I was in Virginia, my clients asked my recommendation for good UI designers, but I only knew one who was truly good and he was more than fully employed. It was difficult to find anyone else.

Now I am in New York. The people I work with are asking me to recommend someone who is good at UI design. Again, I'm having trouble thinking of anyone. Again, I only know one who is truly good and he is already happily employed at Arc90.

It is easy to find a designer who can take a WordPress or Joomla template and tweak it for a sites purpose and have it look good. It is difficult to find someone who understands the importance of visual information and is also willing to think hard about what a given piece of software is trying to do.

Does anyone know a place, online or offline, where I can find good UI designers, and sort them by zip code, or region?
Same for me, I hated GoDaddy. To surf their site form menu to menu it's take more time to load and why people like GoDaddy?
Hey, well, in that case, your mileage might definitely vary from what we usually saw. I suppose it's always a good idea to have plans for this sort of spike, Oprah or no...
Ask HN: API to search across social networks?
Is there any startup or tool like this? I want to use an available api to search a name across dozens of social networks
Entrepreneur Wins $625 Million Payout From Apple
Chikinini – Parokya ni Edgar « Free Mp3 Code & Lyrics « VideokeMan
Azure...
Summer 2011 internships - Mixpanel Analytics
In fact, much of the URL is meaningless:

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/print/1666/09/great-fire...
YC Q&A Sessions coming to Boston (11 Oct) & NYC (13 Oct)
They hit 200 million on Oct 6. http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/06/foursquare-200-million/
Drools/JBossRules is actually pretty sweet (disclaimer, I worked on it once upon a time and JBoss gave me some kick ass headphones when they bought it from Bob and Mark). They have been taking it more in the direction of a traditional business rules management mabob, and I don't love their little language personally, but it is WAY nicer for programmers than Blaze, plus the devs are always in IRC and helpful, cannot beat that for support.
> 1) It's a language that has stood still since November 2000 as far as standards go.

That used to be true, but ECMA-262 5th edition was just published in December, 2009:
http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Ecm...

And the next version is under active develpment; it will likely address many of your other points.
ROFL! Great job! This is something we should keep in favourites and show to our grandchildren.

My favourite HTML 5 site so far :)
M.A. Turner did the design. He works at Medium (http://thisismedium.com/) with us. Usually we work for clients, but we've started some projects of our own like MarkUp.
A bit harsh but a good point. There are a few red flags here. Resource monitoring on the servers, like you mentioned, seems pretty obvious. Especially considering that the system was almost guaranteed to crash when it ran out of RAM.

Sharding needs to be managed in a way that evenly distributes the data. I would never do it by user ID unless a proper analysis of the data showed it to be a fairly even distribution.
I can have fun with this for hours. Addictive X-D
I've used Drools - works well once you figure out the ins and outs of their DSL, and is actively developed. Haven't used FICO Blaze.
I wonder if there ought to be a move to allow for sharded systems to lump groups/pages nicely.. kind of like MySQL's partitioning.. where you won't run into the issue of sparsing out pages when you migrate data.. instead you'd effectively migrate pages.
My point was not meant to imply they would accept bribes. They do the job to fight fires so why agree with the idea that we should stop them when some equipment was not yet fully amortized? If they accept bribes or not, the idea you stop volunteers from doing what they want (fight fires) is wrong.
Not yet, but we we're toying with the idea of adding a real-time stats/zeitgeist page. Stay tuned to @MarkupIO on twitter for updates.
People regularly convert verbs into nouns. It's a semantic error, but it makes the invisible process of "making the web better" visible to the muggles.