skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"raganwald" IS my real identity, in the sense that it's a nickname I've used from before I was on the Internet and is quite easily associated with my "real name." I've even considered getting moocards made up with "raganwald" on them instead of my "real name" to give away.
I couldn't afford personalized license plates so I changed my name to J3L2404.
Not the founder, but one of the core committers does (full-disclosure, I also work @ meebo).
http://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/MarkDoliner
http://www.meebo.com/team/ <--- look for the guy called "The Pidgin Guy".
That list is sorted by start date ... mark's been @ meebo for over 4 years now.
Learning what a programming language is actually doing is good, but arguably that is a different course than an intro to CS course.

One big advantage Ruby has over Java is that irb is simply a snap to use.
"Davis said that the principle complication with the creation of an official facebook was figuring out how to design an interface so that directory information could not easily be compiled without authorization."

Funny how focusing on the wrong things will leave you in the dustbin of history.
Facebook-Microsoft Alliance to challenge Google Search
I totally agree. The value of ideas is zero, but by making a list like this, you start to build your own internal filter for ideas. That filter, in my opinion, is actually quite valuable.

For reference, I've posted about 200 ideas over the past three years at http://astartupaday.com . And yes, the majority are crap, but there was one idea that got some traction and now I'm executing on it full-time as part of TechStars.
I think that's a foreground, actually. :)
You're right; it didn't take Zed to convince me, I just thought it was odd that I read two articles arguing about the same thing on vastly different ends of the spectrum.
When users think "fast", they think "fast" as in "fast", not "JM fast" or "TM fast". It would be better for "arewefastyet.com" to address "fast" from the point of view of the user rather than from the point of view of the Javascript engine developer.
You mean they became less relevant because they became less evil?
"Starting Wednesday, Bing will take data posted on Facebook -- such as users' "likes" or preferences -- and use that information to provide more relevant search results."

This is a step ahead of Google's Social Circle, which currently pulls data form buzz and Twitter.
How many are there (PC manufacturers/sellers) in the US?

Can some non-US person comment on how Packard Bell is still selling PCs in your country?
In other news a group of Chilean Miner's Families chased the 1300 journalists camped at the mining town out of town claiming that stunk up the joint..:)
I always use my Alias, but my real name is not far (or hard to find) behind it.

The reason is pragmatic though; there is a "famous" Tom Morton here in the UK plus a historical figure called Thomas Morton. So rather than make googling me hard I like to think this makes it easier (using my alias)
Lawn moving robots are already around but pricey ($1K+). This blog, Robot Stock News, has a report on iRobot's patents for a robotic lawnmower, Roomba upgrades and more. iRobot also has promised new home robots soon, so we will have to see...
I don't think it takes very much complexity before this kind of situation arises (perhaps my example was a little contrived!), maybe it would be clearer to apply this to debugging where it certainly becomes very quickly apparent even with extremely simple code.

I don't think what you claim as ideal is possible - the only thing a programming environment can hope to offer is to eliminate as much accidental complexity as possible, leaving you to focus on essential complexity. The real-world problems we try to solve as developers are usually at least somewhat hard (even the seemingly simple ones), no getting away from that.

In no way intending to be condescending, I seriously recommend you read 'No Silver Bullet' by Fred Brooks if you haven't already - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Silver_Bullet - an absolute classic (and important too I think).
Review my startup - GoBuzz.com
My startup recently launched a new online application called GoBuzz. GoBuzz is a news monitoring and email alert service. GoBuzz can monitor news in an Industry or relating to a Topic (for example, "Acquisitions in the Biomedical Industry"). Whenever we see news about this topic we will email you.

Additionally, GoBuzz will monitor a large list of contacts and companies in the news.

The Industry and Topic alerts are great for finding new prospects in your industry. GoBuzz will attempt to identify names and companies in an article which can be quickly added to your contact list for further monitoring and prospecting. We may also be able to identify a social network profile for them.

Unlike Google Alerts (the first question on everyone's mind), GoBuzz...

* Allows you to search for high level concepts such as an Industry or Topic, rather than low-level keyword search queries
* Makes search very person-oriented. The name, company, and location of your contact influences what we send to you. You can add keywords as you see fit to differentiate between John Smith the felon and your John Smith, the highly regarded client.
* Makes monitoring a huge list of contacts very easy (just upload it). Ever try setting up more than 30 Google Alerts?
* Can identify names and companies in new articles, along with social network profiles which can help your contact list grow.

You can create a free Industry and Topic alert. Monitoring contacts costs $24.95/mo.

We are based in Madison, WI and have been in business for a year and a half. I've been a HN user for a little over two years now and look forward to your insight and feedback. Thanks for your help!
I'm just not comfortable with having a large amount of easily accessible forum comments indexed and linked to my (fairly distinct) name. I don't say anything particularly controversial, but the anonymity gives me a bit of freedom to write whatever I feel.

When emailing people from HN I give my handle and real name though, no problems there.
Wouldn't a hydraulic physical layers get better bandwidth?
http://gobuzz.com/
> I suppose the ultimate goal is too keep one's code clean and simple enough that one does have to go into super brain mode in order to solve a problem.

Let's drop back into reality for a minute. Just 15 minutes ago I was tracing sql data converted to xml by a rails application which was processed by a perl frontend. Yay legacy code.

It would really be nice for things to be simple but the reality is I'm dealing with multiple erp systems that output mostly similar xml thanks to the people that where here before me. It is not possible to not end up in super brain mode with some of the problems I deal with.

Now my latest project was rather complicated. I took a report that only showed current inventories and converted it to display inventories at any specific day. It was all fine and simple until I encountered a little off by one bug which caused most of the dates to be off by one. Tracing that error through all the layers required a number of hours. I am thankful I was not interrupted with an emergency fix to some production report so it only took hours to fix instead days.

It would be nice if things were simple but not everyone gets to work with clean environments and applications.
I'd rather talk on a site that has private chat, e.g. reddit.
Having been a constant reader of HN for about a year, I had been wondering if I should create an account and whether it should be identifiable. Reading the comments here, I feel it should be. Account created!
Actually in the context of calling someone a penis, you spell it "nob". But yes "deadmansknob" with a "k" would definitely raise an eyebrow even written - let alone spoken :)
For people who have somewhat common names (I know of at least two fairly famous people named "Matt Morris"), there isn't much concern about any controversial stuff popping up if a future employer or something were to google me.

Of course, I don't think I've ever posted anything on HN that I would consider controversial, so it's not much of a concern in any case.
Fund the latest First/Third person shooter and earn great rewards
I prefer the other story...

Sysadmining for a start up when you're not a sysadmin
Minka Kelly Sexiest Woman Alive 2010
Minka Dumont Kelly is an American actress who stars in the NBC series Friday Night Lights as Lyla Garrity. She is an only child and the daughter of former Aerosmith guitarist Rick Dufay and the late Maureen Kelly.
What I like about this article is that it's a bunch of helpful hints which are largely inside your control.

There's no suggestion that you're going to change your environment in unrealistic ways, it's more about dealing with the fact you don't work in a perfect space.
I've tried out a few different tools now; the only two I've had any real success with were Capistrano and Fabric.

Capistrano works well, great git integration, but it does have some rails-isms you need to override to make it work sanely. The capistrano-php extension can help with that: http://github.com/namics/capistrano-php but you'll need to use gem to manage it. You'll also definitely want the multistage plugin which doesn't come standard. There were some bugs present in the CVS integration which may be a problem depending on your source control system.

I've also tried Fabric: http://docs.fabfile.org/0.9.2/ I liked the tool. I found it a bit more low level then Capistrano but also a little simpler to work with. It comes prepackaged (albeit an older version) in Ubuntu without any dependencies other than stock python which our sysadmin preferred to using Ruby gems. I do recommend the new version found in pip though. The two main problems with Fabric are its lack of any integration plugins and the Paramiko SSH library it uses has no support for SSH key forwarding (there is a workaround: http://lincolnloop.com/blog/2009/sep/22/easy-fabric-deployme... but it has its own set of problems).

In the end, neither worked out for me. Capistrano had to much of a learning curve for my co-workers and Fabric wouldn't work with our SSH setup. For now, I'm using a script in our working directory that I SSH to, run, and it updates the code in place. Crude, but ultimately effective. That said, definitely looking forward to a replacement.
You May Find Decent Ideas for Your College Term Papers on Custom Writing Sites
College term paper writing can be tough for many students. There are many aspects of college term paper writing that students need to be thorough with to submit a good term paper. Therefore, good ideas for term papers can be found on custom writing sites.
How Apple is Positioning the iPad to Slaughter the Competition
It's good for getting live news updates. For example, right now there's a bomb scare in central London.

You can get updates and pics at; http://twitter.com/#search?q=holborn

Nothing in "normal" media yet, as far as I can tell.

It was also quite nice to follow during G20 demonstrations in London. Of course you see a lot of dupes, but filtering that out you get instant updates and pics from the front line.
Cataphora - Bootstrapped, Profitable and Proud
Great question, however this caught my eye

If you know the basic principles of programming then you can always just search for 'how do I _____ in ______' and get your answer quickly.

Very true, however this only works for languages that are just like the languages you already know. So taking a mythical enterprise programmer (no hate mail, please!), he can google for "How do I implement a for loop in Scheme" and get an answer, but of course he may entirely miss the fact that tail recursion is optimized by default and that the idiomatic way to solve his problem would be to write a recursive function.

For this reason, I hope that when Googling things, people take the extra step of just plain reading words. Lots of words. Blog posts, books (online or dead trees), rants in forums, everything.

The limitation of asking a question (whether in Google or StackOverflow or whatever) is that when learning a new way to think about programming, you don't know what question to ask.
Wow, that's some vitriol. Don't take this guy too personally...
"Ideas are worth nothing" - it's a big statement and quite a prevalent view these days.

I think it's true to an extent - a successful startup doesn't need an entirely new, innovative idea but at the same time a new, innovative idea doesn't necessarily result in a successful startup.
I think what's more important is not the idea itself, but the angle you take to market your idea. And that is why the blog post has some sound advice.

For example, facebook wasn't the first social network but the way it marketed itself (ie exclusively to college students ) etc was quite effective. Google wasn't the first search engine but its 'clean, simple' branding was quite unique.

Your marketing strategy/approach shapes the design and the features of your product.
What kind of pressure do you think they should exert?

They worked with Debian for years, but ultimately Debian didn't quite agree with their vision for total software freedom.
Toolsmithing Java with JRuby
That's still a whole hell of a lot better than a random unexpected illness or injury sending an employed, insured person into bankruptcy.

Do you have any evidence that this occurs much in the US?
How can you compete with Google?
No. I would if HN threads were not indexed by search engines.

I'm uncomfortable with the fact that anyone can find out my activities/interests/opinions/biases just by searching for my universal handle in a search engine.
I was able to snag a copy of Balsamiq for doing Appleseed UI mockups (it's free to open source projects), and I want to say, that it's been extraordinarily useful.

So, kudos to them, it's great to see this growth, they have a really fantastic product.
This is an alt. account for the reason of posting anonymised comments. That way I can present my view point without someone being able to find out who I am and how I have gained said knowledge. Does that make me less credible? Most likely yes, but it also protects me and my company when posting stuff that was just plain stupid.

I also have an account that is tied to a username I have used online for years, that is what I use for more on-the-record type comments.
Optimizely sounds like a great service but after entering my URL it took a long time to load. It would be great if you could speed that up... If I hadn't heard of the link from Hacker News, I would have closed the tab after a few seconds.
That's any language that has scoping. I think what you're searching for is something like using lambda {} that captures the outer scope.

I used lambda actually to introduce some middle schoolers to capturing behavior in Ruby. It worked well.
Safari Reader (or the Chrome/FF extensions like it, or the readability bookmarklet) fix it nicely (and many other sites like it).
You have to wait weeks/months to have a surgery, but you have to do that in the US

There are many things messed up about healthcare in the US, but I've never had to wait for it. I had an emergency appendicitis surgery and from when I went to the doctor to when I was put under was about 2 hours.

I've also had a non-emergency knee surgery (replaced ACL). I went to the doctor one day and had an MRI that same day. I had to wait 2 days for the MRI results, but when they came back positive for an ACL tear I had the option of surgery 2 days later. I opted for 2 weeks later so I could get work all set up for me to be out a couple weeks.

Now, I have insurance and paid a bit here and there out of pocket, but waiting for care is one thing I didn't do.
Swagbucks in getting Social
> I believe, and you'll call me crazy, but the indicator for this second trend will be a focus on automated testing (not just unit testing)...

I get that for most companies that are developing software it is to support some other profit center and not their primary focus. They hire subpar engineers because that's all they really need (and they're not compitent enough to tell the difference), so a lack of automation in this context, especially test automation, is not surprising to me in the least.

But the idea that you would have a software based profit center that isn't automatically tested, especially with the competitive nature of the web requiring rapid turn around on features, absolutely blows my mind. Are people firing from the hip and hoping nothing breaks or clicking every link on your site? In which case you're either way too overconfident in your own abilities or have no value for your own time.
I'm curious: how many of you would be swayed to use Bing over Google because of this?
As someone who signed up for BankSimple around the time the first wave of press was going out, I can say that I probably check your blog once a week, and have sent your site to countless of my friends. (I'm trying to be patient, but it's hard. :)) I think it's a great example of why marketing early (with the right message) can be super useful.

One thing that the article didn't go into was getting people familiar with you. Even if someone doesn't sign up (or if you don't have a way for them to give you their email address for some reason), if someone stumbles across your site/product a few times before it launches, they're likely to start to remember it and be more interested when it launches.

(KirinDave- Keep up the good work! I'm excited to hear back from you guys and start using whatever you guys give us.)
Behind the Scenes at a Nuclear Alert Facility
In many cases you can get free wifi when there isn't free wifi by tunneling your requests over DNS. Check out iodine for how. I use it to bypass paid wifi hotspots in airports and other similar paces.
Review of Ringtone Designer Pro – Make your own awesome ringtones
The simplicity of this app is obvious the second you open it up, at which point you can do only one thing, and that is select a song to create a ringtone from.
It usually takes me a while to remember that it isn't your real name, and then I remember that there's no way I could spell Braithwaite without looking it up
Kindle and Social opportunity
Sort of. I'm obviously not using my real name, but I don't go out of my way to keep my real identity a secret either.
I used to be a PHP developer (Python only now) but I still used Fabric extensively. Rsync is invaluable, tying it in with fabric makes for a pretty useful deployment tool.
The trouble isn't political so much as the inherent complexity of the causal relationship between life expectancy and virtually every lifestyle/demographic factor you can think of. Not all lifestyle factors are isolated from the quality of healthcare either - there may be many significant cultural reasons why the US diet is more unhealthy than the Japanese one, but it's easy to argue that there is a [weak] causal link between quality of healthcare and healthier eating habits.*

Probably the best measure of heathcare quality you're going to get is looking at survival rates from specific treatable diseases whose incidence is largely uncorrelated with climate/genetics/lifestyle.

*i) [free] accessibility to specialist advice from medical practitioners should improve the number of people willing and able effectively managing their weight/cholesterol level etc
(ii) healthcare spending can include preventative measures such as campaigns to encourage healthy behaviour (which depending on their efficacy may be be an optimal use of resources, particularly for a heathcare provider that views treatments as an overhead rather than a revenue source)
If this is the worst in me, I think we're okay.
Ask HN: How much does an iOS app cost? You tell us
After reading this discussion: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/209170/how-much-does-it-cost-to-develop-an-iphone-application/3926493#3926493 we thought it would be interesting to get an idea of what different developers/locations would quote for the same app to be developed.

You don't need to give any details about yourself or your business if you don't wish to, but a price and location would be great. We'll compile and publish the results once there's enough entries in the books. There isn't much of a brief, in fact there isn't. We'd just like you to quote us on building an existing app already on the store, this one... http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/convert-units-for-free/id337224035?mt=8

Please fill in the form here: https://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?formkey=dGhkXzJEX2hGQW50RGE3bkxET1dGTEE6MQ
Harvard published a paper in the American Journal of Medicine in 2007 on the subject. It was also a big talking point by all US candidates and pundits that year.

http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/content/jun2009/...
> webapp IDE

The closest I've seen to this is Aptana Studio ( http://www.aptana.com/ ) , which is far from what you suggest, but is at least is on the same track.

> Flashy feature is showing structure of html pages (block-level elements) in 3d, where each block is separated along Z from the previous one, so you can rotate the page and understand its structure better.

Far from flashy, this would be AWESOME.
I think the question is a little ambiguous: If, by real identity, you mean using a real email address in the profile as opposed to a specially created one, yes I am. If you're asking whether I use my name as my handle, then no, and I think few people actually do that.
(Pedantic) Verizon uses CDMA, not GSM, but the question is still a fair one. I wonder how the numbers change for CDMA, if at all.
How? With a little bit of effort. Spend 5 min. reading online reviews of the service before singing. Check the roaming rates before going to Canada, it takes 1 min. to find and read http://b2b.vzw.com/international/naroaming.htm
I've been teaching myself programming over the past six months or so, and I'm very glad that I started with Ruby.

The syntax is clean, and I think it's awesome that Ruby's object model is so elegant. I agree that the magic parts are frustrating at first, but it's pretty neat that you can spend a couple weeks reading, e.g. Paolo Perrota's Metaprogramming Ruby, and then actually know how it works!

In terms of conceptual and syntactic elegance, I personally prefer Ruby to, say, Python. I watched most of the videos for MIT's intro CS class (available on academicearth.org), which uses Python, and just never particularly enjoyed it. It just struck me as messier than Ruby. That said, I'm sure I should give Python another chance.

But at the end of the day, I think the main advantage of Ruby over something like Java, at least as a teaching language, is that you get a REPL. My memory of complete-noob-hood is still fresh enough to say that being able to do interesting things in a REPL is HUUUGE. And even now that I've got a bit more programmatic maturity, I wouldn't have gotten nearly as far with Haskell as I have without GHCi.

So... I wonder what it would be like to teach a class using Javascript? Marijn Haverbeke's book, Eloquent Javascript, is pretty awesome, and I bet you could teach a pretty sweet class using it in conjunction with something like Node (for its REPL, in addition to all its other webby goodness). Hmm...
Yes, I guess?

When I signed up, I just used my standard alias, but I've used my full name in comments before, and it's trivially easy to figure out who I am if you're so inclined. I'm not actually anyone of note though, so I doubt anyone actually is so inclined.
When he says "ideas/technical expertise are worth nothing," I think it might be meant to drive people who are obsessed about ideas/technical implementation toward the middle where things are more balanced, more so than it is to drive them too far to the "marketing is everything" side.

I agree though, saying "X is >> important than Y" tends to not be a great plan.
Yes, enough so that a certain HN personality could with a moment's googling find a picture of me in my underwear to link to in an attempt to discredit me in an argument.

People routinely try to tell me that I'd never say what I do on the internet to their faces, and they're dead wrong — I'd be more profane in person.