skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is the most irresponsible thing Joel Spolsky has ever done, and I lost all respect for him after he posted this essay. My bosses at my then-current workplace began using this article as an excuse not to do proper software architecture.

I ask you, in what other industry would doing shoddy workmanship be considered an insightful viewpoint? Would you be happy if you discovered you'd hired "The Duct Tape Plumber" to fix a leak in your house?

Furthermore, I've actually known real people like the ones Joel Spolsky idealizes: "He is the guy you want on your team building go-carts, because he has two favorite tools: duct tape and WD-40." Spolsky is wrong wrong wrong: you do NOT want this guy on your team. He's the guy who ruins bearings because he uses WD-40 instead of a real lubricant, the guy who spends 40 minutes crafting a duct tape solution rather than take a 20 minute drive to O'Reilly's to get the right part. I had a guy like this work on a truck I used to own; we accidently bought the wrong heater core but rather than get the right one, he figured out it could fit backwards if we cut the panels around it and routed the hoses around it in a loop, and then he covered it in duct tape. The problem is that it wasn't really air tight, so it was no good as a heater because it didn't force the air through. I had to redo it myself with the right part, and had to reattach all the panels he cut.
The offense taken at this article is intentionally undertaken to change the norm, to encourage men to take more responsibility for their children and for women to take more responsibility in society at large.

The offense is not at the statement of fact, the offense is that the fact is stated as if it were the good and proper order of things. The good and proper order of things is equality.

Now, you're free to disagree, but don't misunderstand us.
I nearly stopped - but it's the opinion of the blog writer. The video is not from the blog itself, and is definitely worth the watch.

But I agree - stupid things like 'Micro$oft' are a pet peeve of mine. I think people should use what they like and what works better for them. I personally use Windows and Linux, just for different things. And I've have a Mac box to play with if I wasn't broke.

So I suggest to anyone else who didn't watch the video - ignore the irritating blog author and check the video out. It's completely unrelated to the idiotic comment.
http://www.casio.com/products/Calculators_%26_Dictionaries/G...
money trail !always = scientific fraud

But it sometimes does - see, for example, the debunked "vaccines cause autism" research that was promoted by lawyers trying to get rich.

With climate change, there's plenty of money on both sides, thus probably some malfeasance going on in both camps, but the consensus is definitely for it existing:

http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2009/climate-change-a-...

If that's not convincing, the US military is convinced of it, and is already looking into the political/military effects of climate change - they're not known to be a particularly progressive organization...
This also assumes that having children means one or the other parent's job is to stay at home with them, which hasn't been true for a number of years because of the amount of money needed to sustain a family and the fact that women no longer need to give up their careers to have children.
The internet has actually enabled a whole generation of female entrepreneurs to 'do their start-up thing' and have children to boot.

It's the perfect tool to have a company and be around the house all day long (or as long as you want to be), I'm not exactly female but I would have found it very hard to decide for children if I had been a person with a 9 to 5 job.

If you and your spouse can work together on a start-up (not always the best for everybody, but there are definitely cases were it worked very well and plenty were it worked good enough) then you can find some pretty good splits between raising children and running a company.

Things like web design and programming go very well with working from home and raising kids, I see it as a win for everybody.

If your idea of a start-up is to have lots of employees, a huge office and turnover in the millions then that's another case entirely, but on a lesser scale it is perfectly doable.
This law never will have exceptions that last long. Once its Wikipedia entry lists an exception, it no longer will be an exception, as the listing creates a path of length 2.
if customers did leave in mass exodus, wouldn't Oracle get the benefit of effectively closing down mySQL, without the adverse publicty, while also increasing revenue?

Sounds like win-win (where both wins are for oracle, rather than the conventional meaning of both parties winning.)
Lighting strike kills a whole team of soccer players?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/203137.stm

Am I missing something here, is this satire? Can someone smarter than myself explain this, please?
Apart from isolated examples in certain countries I don't think the world as a whole has much to worry about in maintaining replacement levels.
The Wolfram Alpha App for Android Has Landed
I'm with you as I'm also a single 29 year old working 80 hour weeks on my startup, and still hoping one day to get married and have a lot of kids.

The difference is though, we as men can (hopefully) keep spending 80 hour weeks on work now, get insanely rich by 35, meet a woman of our dreams at 40, get married at 45, and have kids at 50. Women don't have that option.
Countries Most Likely To Default: Ireland Surges Higher
Sizing Up the Average Wolfram Alpha User
Those are angel investors as well as advisors.
I buy your argument for Facebook and twitter, but not foursquare. Foursquare is structured like an MMO, and needs to be to get people to use it.
wrt the pedantry elsethread, might I suggest "Babbage's life's message" as a better start to the title?
I run a company, work ridiculous hours, and the other devs on my team are male. I don't think any of us puts it fewer hours or energy based on the number of ovaries each has.

All of which is completely irrelevant.

It's great that you ended up in tech, nobody is suggesting you're in any way less suited to perform well than men are (at least not in any reasonable discussion).

They're simply suggesting reasons why other women don't choose the field; clearly there are some causes for this phenomenon, and they've got to be pretty strong given the overwhelming disparity.

It assumes that all women want to have children, that men are mostly absent/dismissive in their children's lives (if they have them),

No, it assumes that many women want to have children, and tend to take greater roles in their lives if and when they do so. Do you really disagree with that? I know it's anecdotal, but both these things hold true for such a vast majority of the people that I know personally that I'd have trouble believing it wasn't the case, not to mention the overwhelming biological imperatives in play here.

and insinuates that women just aren't biologically fit to run a company.

That's a radical interpretation of the text; the closest thing that she said to that was that women with children have a difficult time putting in the insane hours that a venture-backed startup requires.

FWIW, despite my apparent defense, I don't think that this article really pins down a significant reason we don't see more women running tech startups - the sad fact is, most women never get interested in programming in the first place, and that happens way before they're thinking about having children or what sort of career might go well with that goal.
How Many Piano Tuners Are There in Chicago?
She seems to have the tendency to take what is true for her and extrapolate that to a general theory of what is true for everyone else. Oh well, certainly not the first person to do that.
As I read this, I couldn't stop thinking about my sister:

Age 25 - met her future husband
Age 26 - got married
Age 27 - Child #1
Age 27 - graduated law school
Age 29 - Child #2
Age 33 - Child #3
Age 35 - Child #4
Age 39 - Child #5
Age 46 - Child #6
Now - runs a minor league baseball team

(I don't really know how she does it. But, then again, no one does.)
Cue the global warming conspiracy theorists to spin this far and wide.

What makes it interesting is that to me there really can't be a global warming scam, it either is real, or it is not, we may be able to do something about it, or it may turn out we're along for the ride.

But which ever of those is the case it is not going to hurt us one bit to know.

Writing it all off as a scam is going way too fast, some people have been messing with the data, that much has been established but we are nowhere near the point where the whole thing should be written off.

edit: would the downmodders be so kind as to explain which part of the above was the reason for the moderation?
The slow start approach doesn't work well for novel, or large-scale fast growing businesses.

The former case, one needs repeated iteration and trial and error to discover/create a new market. You will deviate several degrees from your original direction within the first 2-3 years.

In the later case, you have no choice to grow "smart" if you have something viral. You don't choose your scale or the speed of your growth once a few people discover you. You will end up working insane hours just to keep the infrastructure alive. (this is strictly for software businesses, btw. but I can think of an instance of D.C. hole in the wall sandwitch joint that got reviewed on NPR. Nothing like a flesh-DoS, and you can't tell that guy he doesn't need to put in insane hours.)
In my opinion less code means less bugs means better code. Simple as that. And by code I also mean everything that is auto generated, inherited or linked.

Of course there are rare cases that you need to trade size for speed. But it should be done with careful cosideration.

Edit: I forgot to add that I always thought that 'duct tape programming' means writing hacks to fix hacks - which is bad.
Example of Great Mobile "Call to Action Buttons" from Instagram
I was thinking about QrCode graffiti the other day. Basically, each QrCode links to a specific page and capture "engagement points" with that page (i.e. viewing the page, filling out the form, etc). Then give reward people for the engagement points they earn by posting the Qrcode places.

Then provide as a service to people employing street teams, guerilla marketing, etc.
You'll get fewer downvotes if you respond to the article's specific claims that you have a problem with, using data from studies (and absolutely no anecdotes).
Mobil Keluarga Ideal Terbaik Indonesia « Travel Blog
RSS data in JSON format
BS! The highest risk in the modern world for both men and women is to form a lasting marriage with children!

The difference as in other professions is the unfair and unjust burden women face in having a family as Men of the world are not yet up to the task of full sharing of child rearing duties.

Has very little to do with the want..cost of the want however different story
Yep, but not vice versa :)
Sounds like you're saying the British Empire was more similar to the Romans than to the Third Reich. I don't necessarily disagree, since I consider myself ignorant on large swathes of history to make a confident judgment, but doing a little searching brings up a couple numbers. The Holocaust killed ~15 million (which includes non-Jews too). In the late 19th century, the British Empire was directly responsible for ~30 million deaths from starving people in India. ( http://archive.arabnews.com/?page=7&section=0&articl... ) The Empire did a lot of good things, but do you think their good outweighs their bad over 250 years? I think it's part of human psychology to say a short, painful event (like the Holocaust) is worse than a prolonged, perhaps even more painful event ( http://www.ted.com/talks/daniel_kahneman_the_riddle_of_exper... ), especially if the ending is a peak or decay (Nazis were still evil in the end, British Empire hasn't been very "empirical" after WW2).
i do, though it ended up being a lot like chronic (http://chronic.rubyforge.org/) except you could give it a full string ("walk the dog tomorrow at 3pm", "next monday is bob's birthday") and it could parse out the time/date and store the other parts as the event.
Remember that Joel Spolsky is a brand. He's got products and sites to sell. People should take his articles for what they are - opinion and marketing. Good for some, not for all.

In many cases, he has valid opinions, but just like in medicine, more opinions should be sought before making a final decision.
Don't know about them - but there seems to be a somewhat scary, hopefully brief, undercurrent out there where business (startups, corporations, whatever) think they can work solely with a few developers and some outsourced services - nobody is really taking responsibility for overall architecture and growth.

(again, NOT saying this applies to foursquare, I have no idea)
He's probably sold a bunch of that stock on the second market. FYI, drinking absolutely has an age limit! In fact, in some states, the ticket for underage drinking is more than for possession of weed.
Or, rather, you just enter a URL and it tells you what frameworks the app is using.
Fatal error: Out of memory (allocated 1572864) (tried to allocate 4864 bytes) in /home/thegwpf/public_html/libraries/joomla/html/parameter.php on line 146

Fatal error: Class declarations may not be nested in /home/thegwpf/public_html/libraries/joomla/error/exception.php on line 25

WTF!!
lol thats so fake
Middle School Research Paper Topics Should Correspond
The writing of research papers is a common task in middle school. However, many students find the selection of topics a difficult task. These students will be benefited by understanding that the topics selected should correspond with their interests. This will make the selection process easier.
Yes, women are more risk averse... but why is that? Is it possible it cycles back to the same instinctual genealogical pulls to continue the bloodline?
Experience as a single founder.
> more evil than the Third Reich, given what we know about the sheer scale of systematic extermination during the Holocaust.

Six million people died during the Holocaust. Probably many more died because of the British Empire's policies. The biggest causes of this was probably the policies of the British Empire that caused famines (by letting British landowners export food while the native population starves) and the British stoking of ethnic conflict in a strategy of “divide and conquer”. Two examples of this was the series of Indian famines in the late 19th century and of course the Great Famine in Ireland.

Examples of the latter are probably too many to mention. Should wars basically caused by the British (between native populations) not also be counted?

There are however other cases where the British simply killed people in concentration camps (by destroying the rural areas through a scorched earth policy and imprisoning the civilian population in camps and denying them food, e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:LizzieVanZyl.jpg).

> Also, the British Empire, whilst causing harm, did bring benefits to some countries (something it would be hard to argue the Third Reich did).

The benefits that you mentioned was simply benefits of an industrial society. The general population in the victim countries did not share in the advantages of it, yet they paid for it (with their natural resources and the sweat of their brow).

In general not all people were allowed the benefits of education. The Catholic Irish were for long prevented from obtaining an education. In countries such as Sri Lanka, a ruling class was imported who received education. The aim of this was simple – to benefit Britain (not the local population). For Britain to develop to a high level at that time, required the work of many people in colonies (out of sight and out of mind) that was screwed in the deal.

---

Probably the worst thing that the British Empire did was large scale ethnocide (destruction of indigeneous cultures and forcing native populations to use English).

But yeah. At least the Germans owned up and agreed that the 15 years of the German Reich was a mistake (and abandoned the symbolism and nationalistic tendencies). People in Britain still live with the mindset that colonialism and their colonial empire was a good thing.
Ask HN: Why don't Digg, Reddit show a cached copy of a submitted site?
The title says it all, there still are a lot of sites that go down after being slashdotted.

So why social news submitting sites don't just show a cached page of the site? (Also, if they feel like it they would be able to "justify" showing their header with ads above the site in a frame.)

How comes this problem wasn't addressed? Or was it?

Maybe this wouldn't help for AJAX sites (but it won't break them aswell), but for the rest of the static content i am pretty sure it will

Do you think this might be a startup idea? Perhaps it can be enhanced with a "show a page how it was 5 days ago, 3 months ago, etc" so if you suspect the page might change you can show it "freezed" without having to do ugly things like screenshoting it and submitting to tinypic.com
I'm not saying that there are no options to workplace bullying, I am saying that it happens.
Perhaps it's just my own background that pushes me this way - but as soon as my deployment was growing ot eat up anything over about 60% of my available memory, I'd be looking at deploying more. Your high water mark for spinning up more nodes and/or upgrading shouldn't be your maximum physical ram capacity - that's just nuts.
Clickable: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/203137.stm
It's not a matter of objecting to the picture. I don't at all. But when you are linking to something that is not safe for work, you are supposed to warn people as common courtesy. Also, I find your tone patronizing and unusual for this community.
The Entrepreneur's Keynesian Beauty Contest
> It forces me to have a repository for every topic branch when I'm contributing to an open source project.

You might want to read the first link you gave, I think.
That's only 15 states, in the rest of them underage drinking in a private setting is either explicitly allowed or not on the books (so in a gray area).

I got that here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_drinking_age

Which may of course be out of date.
I know at least 8 married-with-kids guys in the startup scene. None of their wives are more than a year or two younger (and in some cases, several years older). But their wives all have a very different career path.
"Cue the global warming conspiracy theorists to spin this far and wide."

My first thought too. A GW Denialist - couldn't care less what he has to say, he obviously doesn't have the sense to stay outta the rain.
Kary Mullis is a great example of why you should only consider scientists to be experts in their specific, narrow domain.
It can be entirely acceptable and preferred. Knowing your working set size and how your memory is being utilized is a critical part of any systems planning... and memory is one heck of a lot faster than disk, hands down, no debate there.

Not we're not talking necessarily about a ramdisk here or specialized software (though we could be) - we're talking about proper system design with enough ram and tuning to get the response times you need.
Nice! XML is overrated, but the definition of RSS is really that it is in XML format. Perhaps it shouldn't be called RSS? Someone should come up with a JSON Schema ( http://groups.google.com/group/json-schema/web/json-schema-i... ) for JSON "RSS" feeds.
Your assumptions are just wrong. People do want to see ads, they do work, and almost nobody cares enough to try to block them.
Middle Class Slams Brakes on Spending
i'll probably still be too addicted to minecraft :(
Essay on Transportation Writing Help
As transportation plays a vital role in today’s life, an essay on transportation is a common writing assignment. Many students might find this assignment a challenging task. However, having an understanding of how to approach the assignment with the right help will enable them to write a good essay.
It doesn't mean the DB files have to be stored in a ramdisk or something like that - you just need enough ram so your working set can fit in ram.

These new projects really seem a lot like re-hashing problems that have already been solved over and over again - people just keep forgetting to do proper systems engineering in the first place. There is no magic bullet.
I've worked with architecture astronauts before.

We were a bootstrapped startup, and the need to use bleeding edge tech (our product was hardly rocket science) reinvent the wheel (hey, look at this - I spent a week and created my own grid control!) and a general need to overengineer seemed to blind the astronauts from the fact that if we didn't have anything to sell, we were going to run out of money in a matter of one or two months.

We were "using" agile, and the lead engineer's approach to test cases was "well, if the function failed the test, let's just change the test to make it pass". Sheesh.

Needless to say, the company struggled to meet payroll for an extended period time since we couldn't release anything to generate revenue.
Absolutely true. It's a common misconception that the drinking age in the US is 21; federal law mandates that states outlaw the sale of alcohol to those under 21, but states have varying laws regarding the consumption of alcohol by minors.
That pattern of behavior is treated unfairly, though. He argued for one theory, did a study, and then published a paper with a very different direction. That's how it's supposed to work. You change your mind as the facts come in. The article treats this as a betrayal.
You're portraying this wrong. Only 19 do not restrict underage drinking at all. 15 ban it in all cases and the rest have certain exceptions for location and family members. The majority ban underage drinking in most cases, not allow it.
Stop thinking about it and set it up. There isn't anything to think about. Nagios (I like using it through groundwork) are certainly not overkill... it's thinking like that that is what gets you in trouble in the first place.

Get that tool in place NOW while you are small, so it's there when you get bigger... so you can hire people to watch it while you move on to other things.

You will always have a lack of time, and always be busy. Spend a weekend putting up Nagios, setting up alerts over SMS or XMPP or Twitter or whatever you want, and then move on. This is fundamental to systems management.

Dont' over think it - just get nagios/cacti (again, try groundwork) up and running and graph EVERYTHING you can... yuo'll be very, very glad you did.
What do you mean? I read that guide almost an year ago and decided that branching with clones is the best option for me.
That is how the pattern is supposed to work (opinion informed by data), I agree. However, credibility can be called into question by the appearance of impropriety. Perhaps one could say that the appearance of impropriety increases the prior likelihood of actual impropriety, but it's not black and white.

This article is serving as a counterbalance to a NYT article that failed to disclose this author's relationship with industry. That is usually a prominent disclosure; I've had to be very clear about my funding in every paper I've submitted, and if it's of high interest to those in the field, one can imagine that the public has an interest in this knowledge as well.

I really felt that this was an article written to draw attention to the scientist's funding, and I don't think it was done badly. When doctors fail to disclose funding in situations like this, they rightly get slammed. This strikes me as no different.

Like I said, it is quite possible that this scientist's conclusions are correct, but it is always important to have independent validation, where independent != funded by the company that benefits from your stated results.
> (how to lie with statistics)

Right, I'll just leave it at that.