skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Nothing beats a solid TODO list. I keep mine in a file called TODO.txt with sketches on my grid notepad. (Makes designing html pages much easier.)

When you have a solid framework (I use Perl + CGI::App) the CRUD code/modules become the easiest to code.

It's the damn interface that takes a good while (especially without a good designer.)

What I like to do is use Blueprint CSS and make my pages jQuery themeable. This gives me good fonts and padding along with a standard look when working with the jQuery UI plugins.

I can't even fathom the idea of starting a business, there is so much to do when creating a decent app that adding the business part just adds to the headache.

Another hurdle I've come across is documentation. Even writing a good description for your app can be hard.

I envy products that take only a couple of months and are able to turn a profit. I've been working on my project for over a year now and just barely getting close to a release month.
> 4. Tune Apache now — you won't get a chance to do it when the stampede arrives!

Or take the easy route and ditch Apache.

I'm not saying that Apache can't be great (people who know much more than me use it), but if you need to quickly serve up a ton of requests without bothering to tune this and tweak that, there are better choices, in particular for static pages.

Cherokee's my preferred, but lighttpd, Nginx, thttpd, etc. are all good, too.
It is a rather obvious hack, isn't it?
Once again a Mozilla affiliate misses the mark completely.

Apple is not a developer-facing company in the slightest anymore: they make products for consumers by and whole. Every single one of Pascal's arguments is to developers, and his lone point for consumers is really about the operator not letting developers do things all willy-nilly. Apple needs developers, they provide for developers, but their platforms are built for consumers. Meaning that features for developers aren't in the final build.

Repo competition is great for developers, but bad for consumers, in that yes, consumers really do get that confused. "Vibrant, more dynamic, more innovative place" means odd changes and sharp edges, and most computer users don't want that in the slightest. Stable, similar and uniform are awesome for the majority of users, even if the curve is slightly behind what early-adopting technical users want.

You know how some people think that Microsoft Word is their operating system? Yeah.
S4 is a general-purpose, distributed, scalable, partially fault-tolerant, pluggable platform that allows programmers to easily develop applications for processing continuous unbounded streams of data.

I'm sure this is cool and useful technology. At this moment, from the marketing-speak, I have no idea what it does except that it has something to do with volumes of streaming data. Whose data? Is it a service? (Maybe not, since you can download it?) What could it do for me (in simple terms)? What's a basic use case? Why do people assume that we can mind-read?
A query that is always slow will not end up on home.php. A query that is slow 1% of the time might.
I am curious as to why you picked lulu instead of amazon? In fact, did you have a choice to make?
I typically run my ideas through a few friends on IRC first. They'll play devil's advocate on my ideas. If I still like it I'll draw up a little spec or general overview, and then I'll share it with some co-workers and best friends. Depending on how excited I am at this point and how much work there is to do, it might get done or it might be in my queue of things to look at later.

I have a lot of stuff marked "Later".

With regard to someone stealing the idea, I don't really worry about it. I regularly give ideas I've had away, especially if I think I'll never make them.

A few years ago a friend and I were at a restaurant and there guys were trying to figure out something to build on the iPhone, my friend and I had just come back from an amusement park in southern California and I suggested a custom map of amusement parks that has points of interest for all the restaurants and rides and gets you there within the boundaries of the pathways in the park. I had the idea earlier that day, but I would never build it myself, so to me it was fairly useless.
Seattle has the same problem. We tried to pass a measure to ban "aggressive" panhandling (criteria include talking to people or anything but sitting quietly by the side), which has done nothing to curb the homelessness problem downtown.

The city government has also aggressively harassed the homeless in parts of downtown where they congregate, displacing them further. They then had the gall to proclaim proudly that homelessness had gone down, since their yearly headcount (of the popular spots, of course) decreased.

All of this has served to cut the homeless off from the services that help them, and displaced them further afield.
Is it really that hard? Why not just let me check the box near "high school" and uncheck the box near "parents' friends"...

Anyone who isn't naive about the implications of a "like" or a comment or a photo in everyone else's news feed will think twice about whether to post at all, which I'd argue uses more cognitive energy than simply opting in the correct group of friends to receive the information.
With all due respect, if you want the airlines to listen to you, you should say it to them, not HN.
Guys I get a malware warning from Chrome for that site. Anybody else?
No. This is a misconception. Think of the content on Hacker News much as you would the performers of the old-style circus freakshows. They're something to gawk at or to entertain you, nothing more.
That's been tested in court before, in Sega v. Accolade (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_v._Accolade). (You had to display a Sega logo before your game could run, so you had to have their logo in your code)

In short, it's fair use.
I'm glad this guy took a chance and that it worked out for him. I can't speak for all members of Generation X, but this member is a little tired of how much GenY is being picked on. Lazy, selfish, slovenly, worthless -- everything that we were called, and that the baby boomers were called, too. It's called youth, people. And you were young once, even though you may pretend you don't remember it.
He finished a rally with a $500 20 yo BMW, now he's building another at SEMA
As an Non-American, While reading the article, I got the vibe, that the ideology at the TSA security check is,

Unless proven otherwise, everyone is a terrorist (criminal)

IANAL, but where does US constitution/judicatory stand on it?
strong, b, i, and small tags had their semantic meanings changed in HTML5. Thus, a HTML5 doctype gives some information to browsers and search engines on how those tags should be interpreted.
I believe that location, interest, and sometimes a random event bring up ideas. I can't believe that 'anyone' can have my very idea. By that I mean, that sure, for every idea i have, someone else may have that very idea, but not everyone does. Agree?
Agreed. This is a sensationalist headline to a non-problem.

What surprises me though is that Netflix is pushing so much data given how poor their streaming library is. I'm a Netflix subscriber and I watch a few a month (the kids watch it much more), but just imagine how much of the Internet traffic they're going to account for when they are finally able to stream their entire catalog (which is what they want to do)...
Thanks. The main goal is just to keep people from feeling like they're alone when they opt out, and to encourage more opting out.

You're right that it's a little information-deficient. Some of that was on purpose, but I just added an "about" blurb to help clear things up.
Does machine learning count as maths? :(
The Fedora 15 release name is: Lovelock
Are you really going to write two additional books like this one? Nice. I cast my vote for R!
If you're using Rackspace (the costs above are similar to it), you can use reserved instances on EC2 and save yourself quite a bit of money.
You're right I've only experienced European pat downs so far. However, I doubt that any kind of pat down would bother me much except if it takes an unreasonable amount of time. Somehow they nearly always select me randomly. I make sure that I'm the one enjoying the pat down the most by smiling and winking at the officer when I get selected.

Agreed that the photographing and pat downs are unreasonable. One time I got selected for a pat down because the metal detector went off of my belt. They checked me thoroughly, but they didn't even bother to open my bag even though it contained a cooking set in a 30x30x30cm metal container...I could have put three guns and a kg TNT in there and they wouldn't have noticed it on their screen.
The Sartorialist!
http://thesartorialist.blogspot.com/
Should you hire a big company exec for your startup?
Changes in the Venture Capital Industry
These are exactly my most productive hours. I often feel like I should move to the west coast and try and telecommute in the UK.
It's interesting that people call about streetlights in the middle of the day, although they presumably notice the problem when it's dark, but they complain about noise right when it is occurring.
I have a lot of stuff marked "Later".
The sad story of my life...
But why wouldn't you make that app? Didn't it seem like a great idea at the time?
The parent hints at this by talking about minimizing unpredictability and describing Facebook as "people oriented" - it ultimately boils down to user experience.

Think of it this way: if you know a certain function will reliably take a little while to complete, you can justify the effort of adding progress indicators and other feedback to let the user know.

But if query performance is unpredictable, even planning the UI design becomes difficult - not to mention the end user's experience.
Pretty much the same information from a master typographer without the lame side-by-side comparisons. http://www.typography.com/ask/recentTopic.php?rtID=92
Primarily, that the original article is presented as a report on a scientific survey, the subjects are called "scientists" (which they may well be) and yet for the fundamental question of "how many people believe in the paranormal" we're falling back to prime-time line-ups.

Which is to say nothing of the idea that the actions of a huge industry must ipso facto be based on correct data. Relying on entertainment media as a litmus of society, or even culture, is a huge discussion, completely off the point.
Ask HN: Preparing to move to California, Got Tips?
Hi HN,

Disclaimer: I think this post could be classed as a bit self-indulgent. I'll let the voting and karma system sort that out. Please feel free to post any general advice with respect to "relocating" if you prefer (as opposed to a specific note concerning my personal circumstance)

All the paperwork has been assembled, "eyes dotted tees crossed"... An appointment is booked with the US embassy tomorrow morning. Barring any unforeseen circumstances, in about 3 weeks I'm going to be a US / Canadian dual citizen.

Once that's in place, I'm planning on moving to California. I don't have a solid map of the exact timeline, it's a bit "hurry up and wait". Roughly a month to the passport. XYZ to find a job, apartment (or do I do it the other way around?)

I was planning on moving to LA. I've got some friends and my fiance has family there. Recently however, I've been thinking that maybe there is more opportunity for a hacker/developer in San Fransisco, though we've got to find a place that has an equal balance of opportunity for a marketing manager and a hacker (since she wants to work too).

I'm really interested in hearing any and all sort of "what would you tell someone?" type advice from people who have made a similar move.
- Canadian to the US?
- XYZ to California
- Upping and moving your life from A to B

Did you stumble into any "Gotchas!"? How is LA for developer opportunities? Maybe some tips on how to sustain oneself on web-app freelance?

It's a huge life change and a hell of an adventure. I'd really just like to hear what you can tell me (at the very least to help settle my nerve with what to expect).

Anything you can tell me through the lenses of hindsight + wisdom would be welcome (and possibly interesting to others?)

Thanks!
- Alex
I'm quite open with ideas. I don't think they are worth much. I'll share them with IRL friends, people I work with, online friends, strangers on IRC/forums/etc.

I'll even email a company, tell them I have this idea for X (that relates with Y which they already have) and ask them if they'd like to hire me to help them build X. Sometimes that will get you a nice contract job. Most of the time it will fall on deaf ears. I haven't had an idea stolen yet this way.
Ask HN: How much compensation would you like from "Hacker Monthly"?
Every magazine is required to compensate its writers. Hence we can assume that Hacker Monthly should be no different.

How would you like to see "Hacker Monthly" compensate YOU, as a HNer, for publishing your contributions here?

What would be a fair approach?
I'm sure the rationale here is that if a given query takes 100ms, they don't focus on getting it down to 50ms even if that's several times what the average is because they know they can. Certainly someone should focus on making that query faster, but it's more straightforward.

The harder problem is figuring out why that 20ms query suddenly balloons to 200ms. You can say, "no big deal, it only happens 1% of the time," but if you don't know why, you could make changes to the system that cause it to happen much more frequently and eventually bring the whole system down.

Also, there's a bit of UX here. People are much more frustrated by things they don't understand and/or aren't used. There are parts of GMail that are always slow (archiving a lot of messages). I know this so I know I have to wait 5-10 seconds. What if sometimes it took 1 second and sometimes it took 20 seconds? What if it took 20 seconds 5% of the time. I'd probably always click again and think something was broken. If it's always slow, I want it to be faster, but at least I know what to expect.
True but not that much - it wouldn't be difficult to inject a reply on an unencrypted wireless network, you just have to sniff the trafic and then reply faster than the wireless network and then blast the reply out with a higher signal.

Since everything is cached locally for your, replying faster shouldn't be an issue, and you can sit closer to your intented victim than the wireless router, which should give you a better signal.
A train buddy! I live all the way out at 88th st, so I always get a seat.

I also used to sing in NYC trains, not the A though. I made about $100 every 6 hours.
wouldn't that cause unnecessary pressure?
Yes, it is good to point out insensitive/mistaken/hypocritical companies. But there is something that can get lost in these cases.

Everyone is provoked to a belligerent counter-attack: demand restitution! lawyer-up! sue! But this only consolidates the underlying problem. It is just the wrongness of the system popping up in a different place. The way forward is less restrictions, less legal action, not more aggressive enforcement for everyone.

If someone plagiarises something, and then excuses themself with a pack of bumptious squirmy nonsense, they can be ridiculed. But generally we all ought to be copying stuff pretty freely.
I don't think many people would say 2-3 levels is the threshold for refactoring in Python. 3 levels is 1 class, 1 def, and 1 other control structure. Then you have 68 characters left.
Glue, Facebook, and Twitter
When the ink on the constitution was barely dry, the first US copyright law gave authors a right to their work for 14-years, with an option of one 14-year renewal.

If that were still the copyright law, you'd have had no case unless you renewed your copyright in 1998. And even if you had, by 2012, the work would be public domain, republishable in collection/digital/etc. format by anyone.

So, yes, copyright law is relevant, and shorter terms would free up a lot of magazine material now in limbo because it's impractical to clear the rights.
I read "The Easy Way to Stop Drinking" by Allen Carr. I had already stopped smoking after reading his smoking book. I haven't had a drink since summer of 08, and I have much a much better ability to do productive work, get up in the morning, etc. I think it's great you want to quit drinking.

For those who have never read the books, they encourage you to consider the reasons why you drink, the excuses you give yourself for not stopping, and what to expect when you quit. The alcohol book also criticizes AA, because AA is a belief system that says that you will never be a non-drinker, whereas Carr thinks that's bogus. I agree with that, in that I don't need meetings or anything, and I'm not constantly tempted. I simply don't want to drink anymore.
Don't mess around when it comes to getting your driver license/tags. I know it's not exactly what you are looking for advice-wise, but it will save you some hefty fines.
Cable companies will probably start first by caching items regionally, and using that regional cache. They already do this on some level, but I don't think on the 4gb movie level.

I agree though - they will be competing directly against companies like netflix. Maybe they'll come out with their own franchised netflix style streaming system?
I had exactly this struggle, although my daily consumption was slightly lower (2 to 5). I tried all the standard tips: exercise, nutrition, etc. Despite making me much healthier, these things never diminished my appetite for my nightly drinks, although I was able to abstain for weeks at a time. I also had a big appetite for caffeine, which I had no reason to believe was related. Surprisingly, what worked for me was getting an actual diagnosis of inattentive-based ADHD when I was 31, at the prodding of my girlfriend who recognized the condition, for which I now take a prescription time-release stimulant. A side effect I was not expecting was that my desire for caffeine and alcohol both dropped to near zero overnight. I do not recommend experimenting with this if it is not a condition you legitimately have, but for me these things were all clearly related.
"Does anyone seriously think we will grow old and die 500 years from now?"

Absolutely. Here's a few reasons why I think that way:

A)Even if we somehow solve the problem of aging, some people (quite possibly many or even most) will still choose to live a "natural" life for any number of reasons.

B)History suggests that we will not continue our current rate of progress indefinitely. Who knows how long it may take to recover from the inevitable disruptions.

C)I suspect that, like cancer or practical flying cars, aging is a harder problem than we think it is. Just because we can envision the end result does not mean we can achieve it.

D)Based on current medical trends, any effective anti-aging treatment is likely to be so expensive that the vast majority of people will not be able to afford it.

E)In the end, entropy always wins.

My apologies for all the pessimism. :)
If you're thinking along those lines, they already won.
Not necessarily. It's not gambling, video-games, or pot, alcohol is physically addictive and restructures the brain of an addict, making it (alcohol) a vital substance. Hence cold turkey quitting of alcohol can kill a person. Probably not in OP's case, I'm just saying that it's not as easy.
I was hoping to find a "for example, S4 can be used to" line in there, but I didn't see it initially. I assume filtering the Twitter fire-hose of data could be a common use?
Mobile Commerce Trends from the PaypalX Conference
terrible "infographic" SEO spam.

edit: This is an interesting user. Maybe some kind of sleeper? Two submissions >200 days ago, then nothing. One of them for the same website.
Will Netflix Destroy the Internet?
American broadband capacity might not be able to keep up with everyone who wants to stream movies.

Blogga, please. If it can't, then (as others have pointed out) the infrastructure will have to grow. It should have already -- it's just that companies are busy protecting their monopolies.
Looks like the Internet Retribution Machine is currently in full effect on the offender's Facebook page:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Cooks-Source-Magazine/19699419...

Among the commenters are vigilantes hunting for further infractions and advertisers withdrawing their business.
The first thing I thought of was this:

http://www.supersimplestorageservice.com/
Ask HN: Best jQuery resources?
I'm learning jQuery now and thought I'd ask if you guys have any sites/books/resources in mind that have helped or any other useful tools too.

I've been going through the docs on jquery.com and also this sitepoint ebook that was posted a while ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1506274

Thanks
I know I'm just splitting hairs on the semantics here, and so this possibly isn't helpful... but maybe it is ... but I wonder if you might better phrase that as "LGBT startup" or "LGBT positive programmer for"...

As far as I can tell, there's really no requirement for the programmer to be LGBT, just willing & happy to work on those issues.

Splitting hairs I guess, but an "Eats, Shoots and Leaves" moment for me.

Regardless, I think it sounds a noble project and I wish you luck :)!
Google Instant Arrives on iPhone and iPod Touch
It's called TV Anywhere.
So, will you elaborate, how browsers will act differently upon encountering b, i and small?
Reclaiming Fragmented Disk Space; Or, Thoughts Upon Leaving TechCrunch
It's a fake. Please flag this article.
Probably some of the best advice in this thread. I'm surprised by all the moralising and severe responses from other folks. (exercising with a hangover is very dangerous? Really? Please explain how)
Then some entity somewhere will decide to get off its ass and offer internet service the way PG&E supplies power -- with no conditions. If you're an ISP then you have no business competing with other internet services; it's time to spin off a new company.
I'm on the same boat as you. One minute I'm working on my website, the next minute I'm doing Processing/Python/etc. tutorials. And soon after I'm designing other stuff.
Maybe Netflix will partner with Google to use some of its local storage.
The TV streaming library is pretty great though. And a season of TV is much longer than a single movie.
Great Portland promotional video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1B2_r6Azvg
Designers: What's your browser of choice?
I know that as designers, you have to design with your client and users in mind.

However, on your main development/design machine, what browser do you use?
The risk of climate change shouldn't be political. That needs to be studied, rigorously. Al Gore may have closed the debate on whether climate change is happening, but to what extent is far from settled. Are X costs worth preventing Y damage, should be the political debate. We don't know Y yet.
Peering reduces load on the backbone, but not on the middle or last mile which is where I think congestion is predicted to appear. Only the broadband ISPs can upgrade there.
Jason Calacanis interviews Reddit/Hipmunk Co-Founder Steve Huffman
I enjoyed the section on creating quality, not quantity, and its emphasis on minimizing variance. I can see how these heuristics could be applied to most startups.

The section on diagnosing should be taken with a grain of salt, though. If your company ever gets to the point where you need to monitor everything at subsecond level to catch problems or analyze and understand every layer of your stack to see how it performs, you've already won. That amount of attention to scalability means your company has a huge base of users. Not only that, it means you have the large and impressive engineering resources to devote to that problem.

That's definitely not my startup, and so the tools described, while definitely useful (and probably fun to build!), aren't anything approaching a priority for me. In the words of the stereotypical Yiddish grandmother, you should be so lucky to have those sorts of problems!