skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Finally, it's wildly offensive to say women should not run a startup.

No, I said women shouldn't run a startup and have a baby at the same time. Apart from the fact that having a baby unavoidably takes up more of a woman's time than a man's on a biological level (how is babby fed?), the general observation is that women psychologically want to spend more time with their children than men do.

Men and women are largely interchangeable, except around breeding time, where their brains and bodies become very different. Their brains much less so than their bodies, but there's still a lot of instinct built into the human psyche.

As a more general point, while you'll sometimes go wrong with generalizations of the form "women like A while men like B" you'll go wrong less often than you will with the belief that men and women are completely interchangeable on all levels.
>> When exactly did he say "women
>> should not run a startup."?

At the end of his message he writes: "For the case of a female entrepreneur I'd say no, you probably shouldn't have a baby and a startup at the same time.)"

>> Women founders are an edge case.

While it might be true that female founders are a small percentage, that doesn't mean they don't deserve the respect of being included in the discussion on equal footing.

They are equally capable of being founders, as such it's best to use gender-neutral language out of respect.

Another way to think of this, is that women wanting to vote was an edge case.

Another way to think of this is that black founders are an "edge case" according to your description. That doesn't mean you should exclude them from the discussion.

The words we choose are very important, and being inclusive costs you nothing but a little bit of empathy and diligence when thinking about the "edge cases."

And yes, his point about having a supportive spouse making it easier is correct. However, in many cases that spouse needs to make money to support the startup spouse--which precludes them being the primary caregiver. Which goes to my point of "start in your 20s, family in your 30s" advice.
All Hail the Adaptable Web
Atoms Are the New Bits
Rails 3 Remote Links and Forms: A Definitive Guide
Ask HN: New product idea
I am a Java developer for my day job. We have a bunch of servers running Linux on the Amazon cloud.
I have created a Windows application in C++ that acts like a remote desktop to the Linux servers.
When I run it it connects over ssh to a server and displays a window that simulates the desktop of the server even though there is no GUI running on it.
Inside that window I can view the file system like in Windows. I can drag files from my local machine to the server or vice versa.
I can double click on a text file and it opens within a subwindow as a text editor.
It effectively combines Notepad++ for editing text files, putty for opening comand lines and WinSCP for uploading/moving/deleting files.
I am also working on a MySQL module so I can manipulate the local db too.
Is this something any of you would find useful? Could I make a product out of this? Is there something like this already available?
Considering he is posting this under his aerospace company, does anyone else wonder where aerospace would be today without government funding? Sure, you could argue that it has been inefficient in terms of pure dollars. But there is more to advancement than simply the money spent.
Oracle Responds to JCP Concerns
I'm sorry, I must not have been clear before. I'm not trying to assert or to prove that TDD "guarantees an improvement in the quality of our code and the speed of delivery" and I regret that it's come off like that. I'm saying that it's worth investigating with rigor and trying to steer this discussion towards specifics. As I implied in my first post, I disagree with the OP's opinions specifically because it stomps out the discussion I want to have here.

As you've implied, there are probably situations in which TDD is useful. There are situations where TDD is detrimental. The discussion I want to have is to define and support as precisely as possible when it's good to use TDD and when you should not. This isn't a call to bring up objections that I can shoot down - I'm genuinely interested in knowing because not knowing (or at least having a very good idea) is unprofessional (in my opinion, obviously).

Anyone who disagrees TDD is "a mixed bag" is unprofessional (as you pointed out - "No silver bullet!"). What I asserted originally was about what's in that bag. I asserted that not knowing is unprofessional because then you're advocating or dismissing a practice without evidence.
The internal level editor at a game developer I used to work for had a habit of crashing. Lots. Something like 10-20x per day, per user. Starting it back up and loading the level took more than 2 minutes, ignoring any lost unsaved progress. Saving took some time, too, and risked crashing. The level editor probably had around 30-40 users. (level designers and environment artists) I'll leave working out the amount of lost time per day as an exercise to the reader.

For some reason, fixing this situation was not a terribly high priority for those in charge. Someone did create a crash reporter that emailed a stack dump plus any user comments to a central email address. The quota for that account was soon full.

I decided to spend an hour or two here or there on going through the crash dumps. Within a week or so, I'd fixed the bugs causing 99% of the crashes. After rolling that out, we were still getting tens of crashes a day. Fixing 90% of those was pretty easy, too. When I left the company, we were getting maybe 2 crashes a week.

As you can probably imagine, this made me rather popular among some of the artists and designers.

The editor was fairly ancient, they'd been using it for well over 5 years. I can't begin to imagine how much effort was lost in total.

Incidentally, that sequence of events also cured my fear of large, horrible code bases. This thing was written using a proprietary extension library to MFC plus some creative use of DirectX. I think the only code that can scare me now are life-or-death systems.
South African interview with Mark Shuttleworth
The search for a co-founder has been on as a serious milestone for the last month. Solo is something I chose when I started because I didn't have a co, and didn't want to let that be a blocking issue. I'm fully aware what a great co could do for my biz.

If anybody knows of a rockstar Python dev in NYC, let me know.
Brandon is a force and the exception to the rule.

... the man doesn't sleep!
> "that at least vector in that direction."

He would say that...
There's no combo of options which matches that. The "member of" options all have specific text such as being "not in relationship" or "in a relationship with someone from the site".
When I was a senior in High School I worked evenings at a call center fielding extended warranty repair calls for a major retail chain. There were many calls about older Macintosh computers that would not turn on. Some would give the chime, others would not, but they all stopped before video initialized. The standard procedure was to send out a replacement motherboard (refurb from a contracted parts warehouse). These replacements would often suffer the same failure within days of being installed, if not immediately. No one in the call center seemed to know the problem.

I knew a little trick from my days in the school Mac Lab. I would have the customer flip the power switch, wait ten seconds, then flip it off and back on again (not too quickly). Often I would have the customer stand up and spin around or some other humorous ruse before the second step. The Macintosh would boot up and work fine. I would order a new motherboard battery ($2.50) and the retailer would pay 75 bucks for a tech to go install it. Still much cheaper than what they were doing before.
You used an expensive resource, and the citizens of London freely voted (twice) that this should cost you £8 to use. Pay it, or don't drive in London.

The Congestion Charge systems won't tell you whether you should pay or not

Of course not, because the cameras don't record every number plate reliably.
The Iraq war was not about anti-terrorism, although that's partially how it was sold by politicians. The Iraqi government has never launched a single terrorist attack against the United States (please correct me if I'm wrong as I've never heard of one instance).
Ruby
JavaScript
Objective C (Mac)
C# (Windows)
Perl
...and a vacuum source. And a power source for the vacuum. And a way to keep the sound under 90 dB.
I want to understand why this is good marketing and who has moved from Paypal to Wepay. The services are very different, Wepay seems to cater to a tiny percentage of American Paypal users, it's like Hackernews competing with Reddit. Can anyone clarify if this is a legitimate "move to Wepay from paypal!" thing or if it's just a way to get attention, not necessarily customers?
I wonder what the charge would have been if the police got involved. Littering?
looks weird on opera. the enlarged preview for a game on mouseover gets too big for the grid, so that the entire next row is pushed back.
It's time -- lord, long past time -- for smart hacker types to leave behind the immature, naïve libertarianism that pervades their industry and engage with a real, honest politics that, at least implicitly, acknowledges and owns-up to the great wealth and resources already afforded them. /You didn't get here on your own, and you never would have otherwise./

This argument is highly misleading. Libertarians complain about the quality of the public services all the time. They complained about congestion on roads, the high expenses of hospitals due to emergencies law, and police that spend way too much time chasing drug dealers rather than providing actual security.

They are taking money by force. You pay your taxes, or you go to jail. You don't have any option of not driving on roads, not getting emergencies care services, and so on.

It is by laws that emergency services will be provided for you, regardless of your ability to pay. It is by government mandates that create all these roads that we drive on. Your security is not provided by a local milita but by a professional army.

That is the cost of giving up your freedom. It's freedom that I wouldn't want to give up. Because a large enough government to give everything you want is large enough to take it away.

The French revolution history lecture by my history professor is enough to change my very reason of being a libertarian from idealism to never again resolve.
Canadians are very critical of their health system, but this discussion takes place in the context of the existing Canadian system. It's only on comparison to the American system that the Canadian one starts to look good, or even excellent.
Yeah - driving traffic via sponsored games would be in the long term plan. I'm still not certain if the traffic is sustainable.

After all, after friends and family finish checking it out, who do I have left? Everything gets a 'blip' at the start with your first facebook post "he friends, check it out" then trickle until search engines find you.

I wrote a game for KONG once. I like how it works there. (http://www.kongregate.com/games/lythrdskynrd/dizzy-ship)

There is a question of the value of sponsored game traffic VS a good PPC campaign. What point do you decide it's worth throwing a few hundred down on a sponsorship? I'm not sure :)
A much better example would be technology brought us companies like LTCM and other quantitative investments that allowed people to borrow 30-70% of assets for leveraged investment (which when the funds had to de-leverage and were unwinding we saw some big stock market volatility).
> I dug in and changed 1 byte of code (1 byte, not 1 line). The next day, our bank account had $6.5 million more in it.

That's just gangsta. Can you expand on that last story? I can't wrap my head around such a simple problem costing so much.
I have three kids (ages 4, 6, and 10) and built examprofessor.com which launched in 2006. The company is profitable, but not wildly successful by Silicon Valley standards.

I am not the sole founder, but I venture to say I have done (and continue to do) my fair share of the work. I work on the design, sales, the user interface, programming, support, server maintenance, maintenance, accounting - nearly everything.

The key to success? I try to make the product a little better each day, even if the changes are tiny (code comments, etc.). I am not able to sit down and bang out code all day due to family obligations, but persistence, focus, and making smart, calculated changes, over a longer period of time can make for a pretty fantastic product.

Also, doing your own support + programming puts you in a unique position to listen, work on, and fix issues that cause the most problems.

Rome wasn't built over night, so they say.
A book of short stories. And it was idiotic.
If it's a very general term, you can expect a lower quality score. I would break out all the queries it's being matched to as exact matches, effectively using the broad match to research keywords.
I wonder how useful would be a VoiceOver-optimized editor for iPad.
I, for one, appreciate that you've logically outlined some counterargument.

There are certainly immature, naive libertarians out there (probably down-voting your comment right now,) but the places where you have been immature and naive here are in thinking that anti-gov't/every-man-for-himself is the cornerstone of the opposing argument.

When I read Carmack's post I think of anti-inefficient-gov't not anti-gov't. You may attempt to say those are the same, but I disagree.

The "imagine a privatized [gov't agency]" argument is a thought-experiment to show the idealism behind the anti-efficient-gov't movement. It should not be taken literally.

By the way, work earned that dollar; it did even when there was unsafe work, discrimination, and abuse.
"Money" only exists because of the organization of government. If we didn't have any, I could just come on to your land, shoot you, and take all your land and possessions.
While I don't disagree with you, and I don't mind this being here, the parent isn't totally out of line. The guidelines do say:

> Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon

It does say most... this would seem to be an exception.
Ask HN: Can we avoid buzzwords like "cloud" or "grid"?
Is there a non-buzzwordy way of saying that a web application provides its users with compute capacity that scales up with their needs? We keep coming round to the buzzword du jour, "cloud computing", but are reluctant to use it in our tool's tagline because it smells too much of marketing...

Here's a little more background: we've written an online Python-based programmable spreadsheet (in limited beta right now, details at http://projectdirigible.com/), and its killer feature (we think) is that spreadsheets are recalculated server-side with a certain amount of parallelism -- so that big recalculations can be split over multiple machines. This all happens on Amazon EC2, so neither we nor our users need to worry about hardware costs etc. In theory, at least, it should all scale transparently.

We're currently calling it "a spreadsheet-like tool for Python grid computing" which is (a) clumsy and (b) uses the word "grid", which is not just a buzzword, but worse, an out-of-date buzzword. People have also pointed out that "grid" captures the whole parallelism thing but not the "scale your calculations up without buying hardware yourself" aspect.

But we're really reluctant to start using the phrase "cloud computing", which we worry would send our target users -- fellow techies -- running.

Is there a better word for tools like this? Or are we going to have to bite the bullet and talk about clouds?
Seems like the last the web needs is another half assed Flash games site.
Cool, thanks. Fancy running into you here :). I'm missing Colombia a lot!
http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S030439751000428...

You can see the article there if you have a subscription. If you don't have one, you can buy a copy for $40. Otherwise, you can just go to the library.

It's also not too difficult to find a 2005 review copy online. Preprints for the paper apparently date back to 1995.
I'd imagine that most people who have worked for larger companies for reasonable amounts of time should have plenty of these stories - after all that's how good employees generate their value, through innovation. I've worked on projects in the past that improve manufacturing yield by small single digit percentage amounts. On product lines with revenue in the tens of millions, these few percent really add up.
Short answer: Build scripts + standard layout.

(I'm a Debian guy) I used 'dpkg -l' to check what all I had currently installed and narrowed down what packages I was still using. Check /etc/init.d for start up scripts. Hard files on disk are easy to migrate, live migrating MySQL data is more tricky, but my personal sites don't really have that much going on. I always keep a .tar.gz of the entire server for future reference.

Move over as much as possible and try to get things running. Save your .bash_history and get a build script going. Pull any /etc/ config files you are missing. Reinstall your required packages. Test your new site via editing /etc/hosts, then move the DNS. Watch your logs and look for 404 erors for files you didn't copy over correctly.

It takes time, but if you use an organized and repeatable process, it can take less time in the future.
Well, I found in incredibly hard to find 'Add to Cart' button your site. On your product pages, you should move it to top and make it really prominent on the page (maybe a different color, how about red?). Plus, your product pages lack brief one line description. Ideally, I would like to see what a product is just below the product name. You have paragraphs and videos but not brief description. ou should emphasize the discount given. For now, I have to mentally calculate how much I am saving. Why can't you tell that directly on a page? You are also underplaying 'Free Shipping' aspect. It is a big, big advantage and should be written right next to the price.

After I add product to a basket, you should swap the order of buttons in the popup. The checkout button should be displayed above the continue shopping button.

Lastly, your checkout page: if possible, add tax in the price itself. Visitors don't prefer surprises on the checkout page. No where it was obvious to me that you were going to do that. Please avoid that or mention in price something like 10% tax extra (or better still, add in the price and say all inclusive).

Then you ask users to register with the site but you do have a express checkout as well. I would test eliminating that step. You should be able to detect a repeat visitor from cookie or something, so ideally should show that step only to those visitors. Lastly, try to take all information in a single step (that is shown to increase conversions).

Hope that helps!
Does WePay process payments themselves, or do they use a third party payment processor?
>Laws are there to be respected. In exceptional cases - such as the going out of business of a repository of this size - you can break them if you go about it nicely and try to limit the damage as much as you can.

That's not how the law works here. You break the law whether you're held to account for it or not. Copyright law in Europe is stricter in many ways than in the US (WRT personal use for example).

>That might be a better target for your anger.

Grrr, I'm soooo anngggrrry. Really, I'm quite calm. /rageface

>Lastly, how much would you give for a copy of the library of Alexandria ?

A lot. Probably not my first born though. This hits at the correct route for attacking poor law. Obviously in Alexandria there was no copyright, it was all PD.

People are welcome to mark their pages PD (or some other liberal license; this is the legal procedure for your #4) and HTML5 should (does? via microformats?) allow a license (CC, PD, C, CL, FDL, whatever) to be applied and readily parsed so that you could stay within the law and still do your white knight deal-y.

Moreover those who wish for people to be able to copy without restriction should petition for a change in the law.

The law is an ass but you're stuck with it. I don't consider the value of the stuff you've saved (as much as I've seen, certainly not an in depth study) to be that high that civil disobedience should be practised in order to preserve it.
I have used canoo webtest to test browser interaction that involved a log in to a deployed server.
> Take into account the existence of night, cloudy days, and the fact you're probably not at the equator: divide that by four.

That's still somewhat optimistic; about 10--20% of peak is more realistic, based on what we've seen with existing solar installations. It's closer to 20% in sunny places, and closer to 10% in places with less sun.

However, that still leaves us with a respectable amount of electricity. Good for them.

Of course, the panels themselves are not the whole cost. There's other electrical equipment needed to make that energy usable, for example, and someone has to install and maintain the solar panels. I think the next big source of money in this market, after they get the cost of manufacturing the panels down far enough, is streamlining installation and maintenance. Perhaps someone could make durable "solar shingles" that are relatively easy to put on a house, or some such thing.

Longer-term, solar photovoltaics look like they could provide a pretty hefty amount of energy cheaply, if we solve a lot of engineering issues. Where they fall down is producing power reliably, close to where it's needed. One way of dealing with this is to have the solar panels in space, but obviously that's pretty tricky. Another way of dealing with it is to use something else to provide the base load of your electrical grid -- nuclear could handle this with cheap green aplomb -- and use the solar power for things which can easily soak up cheap intermittent power, such as charging the batteries of electric or plug-in hybrid cars. Theoretically, it could also be used to power interesting energy-hungry chemical processes, like ammonia synthesis or aluminum refining. Making this financially viable is another big engineering challenge, but definitely a worthwhile one if it works out.
One method I've used (with Ruby) is use of FakeWeb, and collecting the various responses from oauth providers to test against. It's the closest I've seen to hitting the real services.

If you're testing javascript, you'll need to use Selenium or something similar.
It's not misleading. The political economic function of the government is to ensure that markets function under controlled conditions. An elaborate government apparatus provides services without which capitalism as we know it today would be inconceivable. Those services are worth something. If you disagree, let the government cease the enforcement of limited liability.
Didn't you also comment recently about doing an analysis that led to the reorganization of stocked products such that the most frequently lifted products were more accessible? That must have saved some indirect dollars (if not direct), through increased worker efficiency.

Seems like you have a real eye for this type of thing!
Man I would love to use WePay, but from their website they don't seem to do the same thing as PayPal at all. Can you send any WePay user money via email?
On the contrary, I think people do care about cutting government spending. They just want it cut from very specific places, and there's no widespread agreement on where these places are. Do you want cuts in defense? In social security/medicare? The interstate highway system? Government worker benefits? Unemployment benefits? Veterans' benefits? It's all well and good to cut spending (at pretty much every level), and it's going to have to be done, but every time a serious effort comes along to actually do it, it gets drowned in details.