skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is what I like about http://railsapi.com (which is just Sdoc), it gives you searchable ruby docs, and each method comes with a link to the code on Github.

This way when you're looking at, say, the Request objects :remote_ip method, one click gets you to the implementation along with the ability to follow the code around the Class.

And since the code for it's available as a standalone (http://github.com/voloko/sdoc/), your not limited to just the Rails docs, but any ruby code on Github.
You had an O'Reilly bookshelf.
I don't make a distinction between a real identity and an internet one, and I assume that anything I put on the internet, no matter how ostensibly "private" the space, is part of my public persona.
Just to work with your theme, perhaps I could suggest:

LRMGFY ?

The endearingly sensitive Low Rent Motherfucker Go Fuck Yourself ? I don't think that'd get too many happy Tweeters.
In the UK, on a non contract pay as you go service, I give T-Mobile £20 once every 6 months, and in exchange for that, they give me 1GB of 3G data per month.
Yes, and it should be encouraged. In general, people tend to behave and put more thought into what they are saying when they are identifiable.
What is Best Org. Structure for Medium Sized IT Company
We are a 60 person IT company with a very high visibility and impact in financial services industry. We are experiencing growing pains: we are transforming from a small company where everyone was wearing multiple hats to a company that needs better organization and process if we are to scale. My question is what an optimal structure for our IT department should be.

Currently we just have Application Development and IT Operations. Neither department has strong long-term engineering effort; we are just working on ad-hoc feature enhancements and putting out fires. I want to change that. I want to make sure we have strong engineering department both our application development side and systems side. I want people thinking about how we can get to the next level from our server and networking set-up to our software architecture. I want the same thought process in our DBA department. I want QA being more independent and proactive. Out systems seem to be in need of serious tuning, re-architecture, comprehensive monitoring system and our application development has holes in the SDLC. The good thing is I have the mandate from the CEO to make things better, but I would like some guidance and best practices on how to best organize our department, and I am willing to bring in some strong technical and engineering talent.

I would appreciate the input from the collective wisdom of HN.

Thank you.
I registered with my nickname (Maro), my real name is reachable from the profile page.

Today I'd register with my real name though, and, if there'd be an option to change the user name I'd change it to mtrencseni, because ever since I'm doing a startup I got used to posting non-anonymously, in my own name, and not saying nonsense =)
Surely some level of self-censorship is desirable. If you disagree with something and doing it politely you generally won't get hit too hard from what I've seen (though I appreciate my account is fairly new).

Saying things like 'groupthink' are probably the sort of words you may actually want to self-censor.
I've written plenty of Rails code, and I don't know where you find these well-documented libraries that are magically readable. Most Rails libraries are as abysmally documented as any other project.
The fact that the person that founded the company might not be the right person to run it after a certain period, I think it is a very valid point... Still, in my humble opinion I personally think that thinking or discussing the exit strategies before u actually found a company is a disservice to yourself.. sort of demonstrates that one is obsessed with the "desired" outcome and not so much with the opportunity to make something better, which makes the loyalty to the startup idea somewhat questionable.
A few (an AMG v8 and a Toyota? at least) direct injection motors already choose the correct piston to start firing. I think they all still use a starter but it would be much less of a stretch to implement this on one of them.
I could see that working in web frameworks, where the library code is often doing something vaguely similar to the application code. I'm not sure how well it translates out of that scene, though. Am I really supposed to be reading the GNU libc source in order to debug my problem? Or the LAPACK source? It can occasionally help, but much of the time it won't. Do you really understand how all those libraries operate? Should you have to?

I mean, even with web frameworks you could take this to the next level. Want to know how a bit of CSS works? Don't read the HTML5 docs--- just dig right into the Firefox and Chromium codebases to see what browsers actually do with it.
Fixed... thanks for the testing :-)
Pic related: http://kibeloco.com.br/platb/files/104/2010/10/Mario-Chile.j...
At Cafe Hayek, they cite figures to show that Krugman is, indeed, blowing smoke to disguise that government really is spending a lot. See http://cafehayek.com/2010/10/hey-big-spender.html

Not so. Inflation-adjusted spending at the federal level rose 29 percent between 2007 and 2009. The White House Office of Management & Budget estimates that this spending will rise another six percent in 2010 and three percent in 2011 -- meaning that, since 2007, Uncle Sam's spending is on course to rise by nearly 40 percent over the course of a mere four years.

He goes on to quote a correspondent's email:

Governments at all levels spent 4.1 trillion in 2006, 4.4 trillion in 2007 (when this recession began), 4.7 trillion in 2008, 5.0 trillion in 2009, and were on track to spend 5.2 trillion in 2010. This equates to 27% growth over a period in which we’ve had 8% inflation.

He also links to a WSJ article (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870335850457554... ) which I'll quote briefly:

Spending rolled in for the year that ended September 30 at $3.45 trillion, second only to 2009's $3.52 trillion in the record books. But don't think this means Washington was relatively less spendthrift. CBO reports that the modest overall spending decline results from three one-time events.

The costs of TARP declined by $262 billion from 2009 as banks repaid their bailout cash, payments to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were $51 billion lower (though still a $40 billion net loser for the taxpayer), and deposit insurance payments fell by $55 billion year over year. "Excluding those three programs, spending rose by about 9 percent in 2010, somewhat faster than in recent years," CBO says.

Somewhat faster. You've got to laugh, or cry, when a 9% annual increase qualifies as only "somewhat faster" than normal.

...The 21.4% federal spending increase in two years ought to put to rest any debate about the nature of America's fiscal problem.
Hmm, interesting point about the bandwidth and about Sweden. But I'd like to know if Spotify cannibalized the iTunes sales, cause that's kind of the whole point about it being a free frenzy and not making significant money. Put it this way, they may have taken in more money than iTunes... but how much more music did they give away? (and even counting raw playing time, that doesn't capture the full effect of customers knowing they can access something whenever they want)
I'd like to read more detail about his setup.

What ticketing system does he use that he can "get in and out of in 30 sec" ... so that he can toss every new idea into it without breaking his flow?

How, specifically, does he track his context? In particular, how does he track context across multiple projects while still being able to react to interruptions in a timely way?

How does he track his one-and-only-one next action for each project in a way that's simple/easy/fast enough that he doesn't give it up in disgust?
New Skype Friends Facebook on Windows Machines
By 'thousand emergencies' they mean tweets from Paris Hilton or new comments on HN.
I thought the same, and he looked genuinely happy, of course... but what is the limit where we would say he was taking advantage of the situation?
Twitter Says No More Automated Replies
There is a cultural reason for googling instead of looking at the source: a lot of developers started programming for closed platforms like Windows or Mac OS, where looking at the source was not an option. In the same way, if you are accustomed to heavy frameworks like the ones released by Microsoft / Sun / Oracle, you don't seriously consider writing your own instead of waiting for their next latest-and-greatest tech release that is supposed to solve all your problems.
First we need an RFC standardizing transmission of IP datagrams over pneumatic tubes though.
Good piece, but the Knight Foundation is offering relatively huge investments to teams that can, generally, provide most or all of their funding for a year, with very few strings attached. The open source string is a very major one, but I think it also offers a great reminder of one fundamental media truth:

Technology will not save you.

Look at the newsy startups recently profiled, like Swivel and Verifiable:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1788264
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1786982

Both bet big on proprietary newsy technology, and both busted out. Meanwhile, what does TechCrunch use? Nobody cares. CrunchBase is their proprietary technology, and while I think it is a really cool asset, it probably drives very, very little of their value.

Look at WordPress, which is now driving some huge percentage of the world's media, both mainstream and particularly user-generated. They open sourced and gave away all their valuable assets, but their commercial side is very profitable.

Same can be said for TechMeme to an extent, where the technology isn't so much the value as the people driving it, and that's an aggregator, where personalities aren't supposed to have as much a part of play.

With Knight Foundation, you're given a huge experimental bucket of money and a year's head start to innovate with it. By the end of that year, if you lose because you open source, you probably would've lost with a proprietary product, too.
The customers for Excel are accounting firms buying 50,000 seats at a time. And the CFO probably uses it personally, so it needs to keep him happy. In contrast to most "enterprise" software, which is so bad because the people making the purchasing decision never have to actually use it themselves, they just get their PA to do it.
Yes, I used Opera's wand before, the big plus of 1password is the fact that it works with Safari, Firefox and can be synced to my iphone... I don't want my passwords to be tied to a browser...

Also with 1password, I just tell it to generate the password for me and so I always have completely random passwords for all websites I visit...
I don't agree with this. There are many other problems to be solved. World doesn't need yet another Social Network.
Speed, too. You run into some pretty hairy Excel constructs, and the Excel team's optimizations really pay off.

It's been a number of years, but I used to spend a good part of my days in Excel. It has its own quirks -- may its inaccessible underlying formatting constructs be damned [1] -- but hey, can that sucker eat spaghetti (code -- so to speak).

(BTW, it may help to understand that many financial constructions are politically driven and otherwise idiosyncratic, to the point where you will never be able to code them up in a formal, regularized, and consistent construct. The "pointy haired boss" (whichever one, on whatever day) is always having you either insert or compensate for another "x factor".)

[1] As one, but not the only, example, try formatting 999D9 as text with leading zeros, some time. You'll find an odd result you eventually realize is the value with D9 expanded as an exponent. Like Fortran (so I was eventually told while mentioning this behavior -- never used the language, myself), Excel treats not just "E" but also "D" as demarcating an exponent. (Besides, you're formatting as "text", so why is it interpreting the end as an exponent? Although I can see where the leading zeros specification may throw it into a different mode.)
Unspoofable Device Identification Using NAND Flash Memory
Interesting how the last lines of this article references the then year-old and unnoticed LinkedIn.
Capistrano, despite being written in Ruby, will deploy PHP. I've used it to deploy WordPress and SMF installs once or twice. The advantage here is that you don't have to choose git over svn or any CVS for that matter. You can keep your configs separate and link them in.
Honestly, I have not used it with unlimited mode. I was using the 5GB/month, so I paced myself (never more than 3 hours).

I did notice it does run hot, though. Maybe change the orientation of the MiFi.

I haven't checked for firmware updates, either.

Sorry I couldn't be more helpful.
Clayton M Christensen's speech to Harvard Business School's 2010 grad class
On the other hand, when I had a travel-heavy job I relished time on planes because it meant there were 18 hours a week when I was in the air and absolutely unreachable by anyone.

I'd land and end up with three dozen emails, but at least I could just lie back and sleep confident that everyone knows I'm out of contact and doesn't expect an immediate response.
Of course iChat seems more plausible. The Facetime-in-iTunes idea is rather wild, but:

* iTunes is available on Windows, thus bringing FaceTime to Windows and making it a serious contender against Skype

* iTunes is widely deployed and this move would greatly expand the FaceTime user base

* iTunes already has your Apple account, which is an email, which is used by FaceTime to make calls (if I'm not mistaken)

* iTunes even has a Social Network :) Maybe you'll be able to FaceTime your favorite artists? A one-to-many call would make more sense here.

Perhaps having FaceTime bundled with iTunes makes more sense. Anyway, speculating about Apple's events is one of my favorite pastimes :)
Yes, that is very annoying. It should just send you back to the page you were already on and to the position on the page where the comment you clicked is.

You could probably also do some clever trick with checkboxes, the css3 :checked pseudo class, and background images to make it work without javascript and without page refreshes. Browser support isn't going to be great atm though.
Yeah, I don't know how he intends to compete with myspace
I don't necessarily know if programmers need to go so far as embracing interruptions, but I think the author makes a good point. In fact, this is the challenge most introverts face in their careers. How do you remain focused in your inner world without shutting your coworkers out?

Extraverts of course face the opposite problem. How do you remain focused on the outer world world while not becoming completely dependent on your coworkers?
How Mint Beat Wesabe
That is a good deal.

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/Virgin+Mobile+-+MiFi+2200+Wirele...
Good point -

There was another article recently about Apple that addressed this -- "You Can't Innovate Like Apple"

http://bit.ly/3eYW

In short -- Apple's focus on perfection/design (they plan on 'throwing out' 90% of their work) is hard to match for a young start-up with limited time/money/(talent).
Lucas is so scourged for Jar-Jar and those late 1990s remakes that I often lose sight of how innovative and influential he's been on special effects, movies, and our lives in general.

Lucasfilm and its subsidiaries (Pixar, ILM, THX) should be considered among the great start-ups of our time.
When logo crowdsourcing goes horribly wrong
Killer virus Rinderpest is completely eradicated in the wild
Manchester Police Tweeting All Incidents in a 24 hour period
poorly formatted documents from others won't display properly

What is the proper method to display a document that has been poorly formatted? A poorly formatted document looks like crap no matter how you display it. (I've found a correlation between the quality of the formatting the author did and the meaningfulness of the filename).
Ah, so that was you.
Wow, I hadn't noticed the time difference between the original thread and Chris's reply, thanks for pointing that out. I honestly don't think your estimate (I gathered that two months was more realistic) was that bad to get a first cut of a simple app out the door. I have never seen Twitterific but to your point it looks like it went through a fair number of iterations over the course of several years, plus a ton of design work, which you were not trying to account for.
It seems a lot of the "magic" with Ruby comes from Rails, and I would say that teaching a new language using a framework is probably going to be pretty overwhelming to any beginner.

One thing I would worry about with Ruby as a teaching language is that the syntax is somewhat unique. I don't think this is a terrible thing, the basic structure is similar once you get past the syntax, but I think it can trip people up if it's their first language, and then they move on to Java/C++/Perl/Python/PHP which seem to follow more of a continuity.

I think, from my experience, I actually think learning a couple different languages at once can be really advantageous. I pretty much learned Pascal, C and Assembly at the same time, working in the demoscene, and linking them all together.

The important part of programming isn't the syntax, it's the structure and the concepts. You can always look in the manual for syntax, but structure and concepts are the hardest parts to grok.

So maybe my suggestion is to have side-notes for the examples that say, "here's how you do this in PHP, here's how you do it in Java, here's a breakdown of the differences and similarities."

On the other hand, I may be completely wrong, because I'm biased based on how I learned programming, and not everyone learns that way.

With all that said, this is a pretty great piece.
I was really fine with the painted figures, cardboard sets and resin armors. I wonder why the saga of Star Wars could not continue and if it wouldn't maybe be cheaper to do the next without CGI (classic style). Maybe time for Indian Bollywood studios to show us what they can do to make us dream! ;-)
Rob Pike: The Expressiveness of Go [pdf]
When Crowdsourcing Goes Wrong
Testing if an arbitrary pointer is a valid object pointer
Due to the ease of unintentionally spending so much so fast, it seems like the US should have consumer protection laws in place that the mobile phone companies should at least be mandated to text or call you and let you know when you've gone $100 over your monthly bill.
What I've found interesting recently is working a bit with a very non-technical user, and finding that after a bit of introduction, Google Docs word processor is actually easier for them to use than Word.

They don't need a ton of options and mostly just get confused by them. They just need some basic controls and good looking results, and Google Docs is beginning to realize this surprisingly well.

Plus, they never "lose their file".
I'm not sure how you can really test w/o documentation. How do I know the test is testing the correct thing w/o the docs? I'm almost more worried about code with unit tests, but not docs, as I suspect a developer who just attended the latest "Cool Coding Trends Camp", rather than someone who has built and maintained a lot of code.
Ideas (and in most cases even the code itself) is worth little. It’s marketing that makes the startup.

But it does have some truth to it.

You can write great code and still not get customers without _some_ good marketing. And on the opposite many mediocre products can thrive with great marketing.
My About.Me post
Because its usually better to give your money to someone who's desperately poor than to someone who's moderately poor, even if you give less money in the first case than in the second?

If you're arguing that South Korea and Taiwan are politically free and that its better to give money to democracies thats understandable. But its pernicious to think that giving a desperately poor person something which is far less than you could give makes you morally responsible for their plight, causing you to avoid helping them at all.

South Korea and Taiwan clawed their way up to being only sort of poor through working in sweatshops (and before them Japan did too), the sweatshop system is something we should actually be encouraging in the short term while we work on improving infrastructure and education in poor countries.

EDITED: 'if' to 'is'
My initials are somewhat unique, so most accounts with a nic of "zdw" out there are also mine.

Not to compare myself to them, but the precedence for using initials in this manner is that most people know who "rms" or "jwz" are.

I tend to register for new services I think might become big even if I'm not going to use the account immediately, just to reserve "my" name.

This also leads to a pet peeve: services that have a minimum nic length requirement >3 characters...
Upvoted, just to keep you refreshing, John ;)
Recruiting for a start up when you're not a recruiter
Capistrano + Git. Works beautifully, and rolling back bad deployments is a breeze
Mozilla measures many of these at http://graphs.mozilla.org/. "Ts" is startup time; "Tshutdown" is shutdown time; "GFX" includes 8 I believe.
The “d” in Design
Yes, absolutely. I think that unless you have something to say that can immediately hurt you when it is linked to your identity the general mode of conversation on the internet should be tied to your real world identity.

There are two reasons for that:

The first is that you will be aware that you're saying stuff on your personal title and that if you decide to go postal on someone that it will reflect bad on you in the longer term. Anonymity seems to bring out the worst in people.

The second is more subtle. When you say stuff attached to your name you're putting a calling card out there, people will remember the overall tone of your content and they'll build up a mental image of the person that goes with that content. Over time this will translate in to more concrete (for instance real-life or collaborative) relationships to grow out of the more casual online ones.

So reserve the anonymous stuff for the 'leaks' and the 'revelations', don't bother with the anonymous attacks and the trolling. And do the rest as you.
Yes, but I wear glasses when I'm on here, so nobody can recognize me.
When the said contract is over 25 pages long with legalese as the only language how can you expect anyone to know what they're saying? And cell companies know that if they make these terms unintelligible, they make more money.
Ask HN:  Where do I start to learn how to develop?
I have ZERO coding/development skills. ZERO. Never written a line of code in my life.

Have a great idea for a business. But it's the same old story - finding a tech co-founder is damn near impossible.

So if I'm going to learn how to build a MVP myself, where in the hell do I start?

My product would fall into a user interface/user experience type product vs. a super super technical. It's more of a social community built around a game concept.
Or maybe as Christina Aguilera's manager, now that she's divorcing her current manager. :)