skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I would add a fourth step

4) This just represents a simple architectural
programming pattern and should be completely
open and commoditized

Of course, like the good programmers we are, most times we jump from step 1 to step 4 without thinking about the important details in steps 2 and 3 ...
The Economy is a Poor Predictor of Startup Success
I haven't read it yet, but it seems more 'body hacking' than 'fitness,' exactly: http://www.amazon.com/4-Hour-Body-Uncommon-Incredible-Superh...
He's referring to Tim's first "4-hour" business, which was a suppliment/energy drink business. http://www.brainquicken.com/
I'm having trouble figuring out how to run the program. Looks like I need a root shell? Any tips would be helpful - spent about an hour researching.
> instead of creating something of actual value.

Not to bring up this old discussion again, but all of these business provide 'value.' This is capitalism; if someone pays for it, they find it valuable. You're creating some sort of secondary game where certain businesses are below you, Tim's just trying to tell everyone to play the real game.
Real time or not. Misleading numbers are misleading. Being real-time is no 'cover-up' for a misleading data.As far as 'simple ballpark for how interesting or visited your blog post' is concerned. If a bit visited me a 1000 time and just 100 people read it, that doesn't make it interesting. Reporting bots is seriously no use.
I especially like the bit where someone else had embedded Mame with a pirated ROM as a "port" to a major console. Especially amusing if you read Mame's license, which includes:

> MAME is free. The source code is free. If you paid for it, you've been
ripped off. If you sell it, you are a thief.

> You are not allowed to distribute X-Mame ( source or binary) and
ROM's image in the same package or physical medium.

> If you distribute the executable, you should also distribute the
source code.

> The source code cannot be used in a commercial product without a
written authorization of the authors.
Can anyone verify this or is it one of those myths?
You're avoiding the question about misleading your users.

If the majority of page views are generates by bots then the number of page views you show isn't even a ballpark figure indicating how interesting/visited the blog post is. It's simply a semi-random number depending on crawlers/bot activity and nothing to do with real human visitors.

If you were simply off by 10% I could accept your answer, but you seem to be regularly off by a factor 200-300%.
> Do you really want to be traveling all the time?

Personally, yes. I'm aware that this is unusual. Maybe I will settle down one day but the few times I have tried so far I have experienced what I can only describe as cabin fever.

> ... it's also nice to feel home

I suppose that I do have the same instinct to seek out shelter/security/safety, manifested in an irrational fondness for my tent and the few other belongings I carry with me.
Cloud Business News Roundup: December 6 - 12, 2010 | Cloud Business Review
I'm surprised to see so many assembly projects on github. Also, Delphi is missing from the tiers.
you do know they host youporn and other huge streaming services? youporn host around 800 machines with them and i would guess use a lot of bw. softlayer is not a small hoster, theyre big.
I saw a good Frontline documentary on this the other day, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/warning/view/ apparently this whole mess started back in the 90's and the head of the CFTC then, Brooksley Born, wanted to put rules in place then to make the derivatives more transparent but was vehemently opposed by Greenspan, Rubin, and Summers. Turns out that the current head of the CFTC, Gary Gensler was one of the deputies of the three guys opposing any regulation of derivatives in the 90's. The three actually went so far as to get a law passed saying that the CFTC couldn't regulate derivatives.

Bottom line is anyone that acts surprised by the lack of regulation shouldn't be because Congress voted on and passed a law specifically prohibiting regulation of derivatives in the 90's. A law that was promoted by the same people who now run all the US government agencies like CFTC, Treasury etc...
"proprietary pricing enhancements", that sounds like a scam if I've ever heard one.
I wonder what they told the passengers. "One of our engines blew up and two are not working in full capacity, but don't worry everything is fine".

Wonder no longer, there's a video!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JyEJCg9etBg

"We do apologise. As I'm sure you're aware, we have a technical issue with our number two engine..."

The guy actually did a damn good job of maintaining a calm and reassuring tone; the fact that bits of the engine can be clearly seen sticking through the top of the wing is the only thing that detracts from the everything-is-fine message.

He did a much better job than this other Qantas pilot, dealing with a less serious (though more spectacular-looking) engine failure earlier in the year, who let his own stress show:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wI_5qDrMuK0

"...as you can imagine things are a little tense in the cockpit... please be assured we are trained for this situation. Of course it's usually in the simulator but we are trained for it..."
Pre-ordered when first announcement was posted here on HN in Nov '09. Was really surprised to see a print ad for Wakemate in the latest issue of Wired, where it seemed as if they were shipping normally. Still no sign of mine, but I really don't have any expectations anymore after a full year of broken promises.
Best of the best compilation of NASA Space Shuttle launches
>ld cathedrals are seldom unobtrusive. I don’t think that they must be badly designed because of that.

You are confusing design with art and architecture. Science of Art is design, and design of structures (usually overlaid with art
I also pre-ordered one last December...still waiting.
It would be very hard to conceal such conformally-packed explosives from sniffers and dogs.
> Some people like their solitude and are probably happy that alternate means to communicate empower them to enjoy more of it.

It's not just communication but the ability to easily keep track of where people are in the world and to coordinate meetings and shared holidays. Facebook is particularly good for keeping in touch with old friends and acquaintances because of the contextual information it supplies. I saw recently that a friend I haven't seen in years is spending a month in Thailand and I arranged to change my travel plans so that I would be passing through during the same period. We weren't close enough friends that we would still be in touch if it wasn't for those kinds of coincidental connections.

I also meet a lot of new people through couchsurfing.org and various expat sites. Couchsurfing is particularly interesting because its goal is explicitly to create friendships between people of different cultures. I would probably be much more lonely when traveling without it.
"Twilio would never be able to keep up with Tropo on features" -Danielle Morrill, Twilio head marketing

edit: to downvoter, i just wanna hear from danielle himself about this qoute, no harm mean
BinPack - A portable security kit for Windows with 100+ tools.
The key factor is that for a lot of bloggers audience is the reason they blog. Audience is the ROI of the time spent blogging. Someone who thinks they've got thousands of visitors may spend more time blogging rather than spending it with their families or working (which they would have done if they only had 10 readers)

It's even worse if you're using it for a company blog (like many startups are doing). Because your blog page view stats can often become part of investor pitches or sales material to show traction. If you write an advert and say 10,000 people read your blog when they don't and that influences your customers buying decision, you can be prosecuted for misleading your customers.
I see a lot more comments at -4 than at 0/-1. YMMV.
Clickety-click:

http://www.theshybot.com
MAME saved my ass too.

I was working on a coin-op game for a mid-level manufacturer in Chicago. Let's just say they were the last dinosaur in the tar pit and they didn't have a stellar hardware engineering team. They tended to copy other people's designs and not really understand the architectures, so things like in-circuit emulators and IDEs were scarce or non-existant. You debugged via trial-and-error and, if you were lucky, printf().

So I was working on this title and started working from home a couple of days a week to take care of a family member. That made things hard, and even harder since you tend to have the physical machine next to you while coding. It was frustrating to code for a day, get to work, then find half of it wasn't working.

Then I discovered that the MAME kids had already supported the platform. With a small amount of work I could develop on the emulated platform. I could work remotely and I had access to things the in-house guys didn't even have: hardware breakpoints, live RAM viewing, scripted testing for example.

Without MAME I would have seriously been suffering on this project.
Brilliant article, well designed too.

I really want the typical 'web designers' to read it who are more busy in decoration than design.

Especially the part - Good design is as little design as possible. Best tip ever. When you are left with just bare minimum - that's good design. Apple's products are inspired by all these principles.

[2] Design just doesn't remain till visuals, it goes to code too. As I am diving more and more in coding - I see that everything is design. How everything is structured, how things (functions, logics etc)interact with each other and How code becomes poetry. Those are the very principles of design.

I like how Ryan Singer, 37 Signals, puts it, 'UI is software, so designers should know how to program." But that's another story for another day.
What strikes me is that the software he's talking about appears to be badly designed; or at least, not well designed for this rare situation where you've got dozens of error messages coming up at once and they're not prioritised.

Also,

...once we’d extended the undercarriage using the alternate system we had no indication it was down until we’d gone to the system page to make confirmation of that.

(What, there's no big-ass mechanical dial with "Gear up" and "Gear down" on it?)

and

In the Airbus and the A380 we don’t carry performance and landing charts, we have a performance application. Putting in the ten items affecting landing performance on the initial pass, the computation failed. It gave a message saying it was unable to calculate that many failures
Robotic Drone Flies Itself by Looking at Landscape Below
Because doing something new and stupid often leads to great things?
They told me the name of the person that the one in my area code is shipping to. Sadly not me.
Anyone else notice the 'No Xerox' sign on the pages?

Seems to have a double meaning of "don't copy this" and "don't send this to Xerox".
The story remains the same: A few folks got really rich and the rest of us paid for it through taxes, inflation, higher home prices etc.
Yawn. It's like you think nobody has ever made this point before. It's the most boring conceivable objection. Don't be boring.
The insecurity of OpenBSD (Jan 2010)
Could this month get any better for Amazon?

-It's December

-Mastercard.com and Paypal.com went down making Amazon one of the few on-line shops that could still process payments

-Since no Amazon service went down under DDoS, big companies will come crawling to them to use AWS

-SimpleCDN goes down, no doubt driving lots of customers to bigger parties like AWS

-They are making boat loads of money
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=AMZN+vs+GS+vs+GOOG

Boycott? Pfff. I predict record revenues.
The original blog post that kicked off the conversation is here: http://brendaneich.com/2010/11/paren-free/

Some previous discussion and counterpoints here: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/eb3xt/so_you_ki...
Google gets physical on Hotpot
Single page: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/12/business/12advantage.html?...
Bullshit or not - it is interesting to think of the fact that we all are a continuation of biological life dating back to our common ancestors.
How Not To Feed Your Daemons
Ask HN:  Good Rogue-like game to learn with?
I don't know a programming language. I want to make a game. I have a clear purpose in mind. I need something simple that I can tinker with and try to learn from and build on.

Language: I don't care. If some example clicks, that will presumably be the language I end up learning. I currently know a little (x)html and css.

Hoping to get a link to a downloadable open source game I can fiddle with. Bonus for links to supporting forums.

(Yes, I have done some googling of "Rogue" and "rogue-like"..etc.)
I doubt trademark law applied to those WAV files. It's likely only copyright.
This reminds me of what my electrical engineering friend once did when his washing mashine stopped working. He got out his multimeter, opened up the back panel, and finally traced everything to an open circuit: the lid was open.
If you're wondering whether the story is true or not, it appears to be. All of the relevant facts are present in John Howland's (heavily cited) Wikipedia article.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Howland
This quote is completely fabricated.
The Master Switch: From Hobby to Industry
This is a general programming issue, not a system programming issue. Not so long ago at work, I had to implement a regex search over a Lucene document store. Now, the thing is that we used the latest version (at the time) of Lucene, 3.0. All the examples I found online and most of the documentation referred to version 2. Naturally they didn't mentioned they were using version 2, I just had to scratch my head a few times while I tried to realize why the regex API depicted there is not only different, but not even merely existing. Turns out one of the design goals of Lucene 3 was to separate stuff from the core Lucene to external libraries. So, after finally searching through their SVN I found the source files for the regex libraries. I ran into some problems with the way Lucene parses regex queries and relates it to terms and again, as in the article, after hours and hours of searching through documentation I resorted to just reading through Lucene's code, which indeed turned to be fruitful for less the time I invested in finding and reading documentation...

I really was not sure what to learn from that episode. The logical conclusion seems to be to try to read your way through the target source code, if you have it, before investing the time to find and skim through documentation. On the other hand, it feels like a really bad lesson.
Time will tell if this moral holds up.
Source? That sounds unlikely.
Pretty much anyone who was alive in 1620 will by now either have no descendants or a ridiculously large number of descendants.

If his descendants continued to breed at the rate of 2.5 children each at the age of 25 then by now he'd have approximately 1.6 million descendants in the latest generation (plus another million or so from their parents and grandparents' generations, still alive). Bump it up to an average of three children and we're looking at 30 million descendants. Bring the breeding age down to 22 and we're talking 287 million descendants, which just happens to be the population of the US. Of course you'd need to adjust that downwards since there'd be plenty of (mostly rather remote) inbreeding along the way.

If you could get a complete list of your (seven hundred thousand or so) ancestors dating back to the 17th century you'd probably be totally thrilled by the number of famous names on it. But of course, everyone else would have a similar number of famous names on their own.
Cancer Research Blog
Tip for next time: Make deliverables relative to the time you get the initial assets you were promised.

BigCo promises you the original source code + game assets.

Instead of promising Alpha/Beta/Release from the signing of the contract, promise X/Y/Z business days from delivery of those critical assets.

(Make sure you have a timeout clause in there too, "Assets will be delivered by BigCo within 60 days of the signing of this contract or we will not develop that title and BigCo will pay a penalty of $X")

[edit to add] Be careful to define what "assets" mean to you. Assume what you write will be read by a lowest-bidder consultant, with active disincentives against showing initiative, and who can barely read. (Not stupid though)
Ask HN: Who Is Hiring Remote Workers? (December 2010)
Just like last month but all over again:

Similar to the "Who is Hiring" thread but, please, remote positions only.

Remote and co-lo'd work posts should be kept separate. Many of us who work remotely tend to work exclusively remotely.
Is the "Xerox - do not copy" badge on the front meant to be ironic or what?
Both companies have a vested interest to avoid creating a cryptographic arms race between the US and the rest of the world centered around their products. It's better for both if the arms race is centered around military hardware than their security API's. It's not as if China and Russia wouldn't seek the same access.

The DOD has the authority and ability to ban insecure devices from their network and in the absence of contracts with the DOD it is difficult to see any obligation for either company to provide the DOD with security API's. An appeal to patriotism denies the realities of the global marketplace
FYI status.vps.net doesn't include most outages they deem "too small" and only affect ~5% of customers. They only post there when it affects a large number.
It's possibly not as good but this looks like a not-so-advanced version of the same thing:

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/sleep-cycle-alarm-clock/id320...
What degree of knowledge should be assumed?

There's plenty on HN that I don't understand but I'm yet to come across anything that 30 seconds with Google couldn't explain.

The only knowledge that is a pre-requisite is how to find information on the internet.
This thread was started/answered at the beginning of the month: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1957364
Kind of reminds me of how the hostess of a recent flight was telling us how terrible the flight would be. "There's a big storm that we will be flying through. It's going to be a bumpy flight, and we're taking on extra fuel because we might be diverted to another airport. Oh, and I also might have to bump someone off the plane because we're too heavy."

My initial thoughts were: "keep that kind of information to yourself. I don't want to know." It was more like a roller-coaster ride rather a flight so she was right, but i still didn't want to know.
Just in case there was any doubt about Posterous not filtering out bots given that Garry hasn't specifically admitted it:

http://twitter.com/#!/richiepear/status/13809170130149376

Rich Pearson (VP Marketing - Posterous)
@imranghory No - we just don't filter out your own views
and search engine visits
Using Tir's Tasks For Async Photo Uploads
I have a client (stealth startup) who I've been working with for a little over a month. I'm consulting with them while they get an MVP out the door. After that, I'm shepherding them to stand on their own. I'll let them speak about their funding themselves; however, for reference, they've had zero problems paying my invoices promptly.

They are seeking an EMPLOYEE (remote is A-OK) for a PT/FT Ruby on Rails developer. Particularly interested in people with experience using: Heroku, Test::Unit, Capybara, Rails 3, and developing/maintaining RESTful APIs in Rails.

Contact me through the email provided on the last link in my profile.
Oh, no kidding? And I missed it too. I'll be damned...
Are you experienced with this? It sounds plausible, but the publishers sound like the kind of assholes who would have a way to screw you even then.
Staging Servers, Source Control & Deploy Workflows, And Other Stuff
that why i put the quote here, to hear a response from you
There are obvious holes in the methodology, so I wouldn't take the content of the post too seriously. What I do think is great about this post is how the authors generated a bunch of hits from an hour or so of work. Pick a topic with wide interest, do some simple (but non-trivial, if you aren't used to the tools) analysis, watch the traffic roll in! It's a good model for anyone trying to drive traffic to their site.
The poster is in the European area. Very few pirates in that part of the world.
While I personally would prefer to follow the "good design is as little design as possible" mantra, it's not a principle that should be followed in all cases. Dieter Rams is speaking from a modernist school of design philosophy, and while many companies/brands are adherents to this school, not all are.

For example, from a graphic design or typographic design perspective, designers like David Carson (http://www.davidcarsondesign.com/) have demonstrated the power of postmodernist approaches for certain brands. If brands like ESPN or Wired adopted the "as little as possible" approach to graphic design, your experience with those brands would be much different to your experience today. Wired magazine would be black on white with symmetrically placed photos and no visual decoration. That's as little design as possible. For some people, this might be an improvement to Wired, but the problem is that if they delivered a magazine like that, you would have no idea that it was in fact Wired. You would forget the brand and possibly never buy their magazine again.

So this principle - and just about every other principle Dieter Rams lists as good design - is very specific to the brand he was working with when these principles were developed: Braun. That's not to say that these principles are not excellent. They are. But they are specific to their context. And the design principles that you develop for your product or brand should be specific to your context.
Looking at this was just worth the last page. :)
The downsides are that it's cold in the winter

Can you not sail south for winter to the Medditterranian? South of France or Italy would be a nice warm place to overwinter.
Do C/C++ compilers use staged (on-line and off-line) specialisation (removing control-flow dependant on run-time constants)? I suppose specialisation is more suited for languages executing with a virtual machine, like Java.
I think it would useful to have this implemented as a actual feature on the site.

If we can't make a decision without knowing how other people feel, I think that's a disadvantage.

At its worst, the karma system helps fuel a popularity contest. At best, it helps interesting comments rise to the top. This system stands to discourage the first, and encourage the second.
I think this is one of the primary religious debates between Airbus and Boeing pilots - Airbus is a much more highly computerized experience inside the cockpit vs. Boeing which is still a more mechanical/tactile experience. For some fascinating background, see the NOAA on the recent AirFrance crash. They cover this issue specifically and essentially concluded that the pilots were likely overwhelmed with the number of error messages and warnings coming at them from the plane's computers and it became paralysis by analysis which they ultimately couldn't recover from.
I don't argue that games are a good way to kill some time (I play angry birds myself every so often) - what I find incredible is that people are making as much money as they are, selling games for these platforms. I don't know if any other class of apps are making as much money on these devices as games are - and that disturbs/disappoints me.
The article said it was "based on" MAME, so it's unclear whether any of the MAME source was actually used in the commercial product.
If there's anything we can do to make your Twilio experience better, I hope you'll email me, I'm danielle@twilio.com
Any remote asp.net, c#, wpf, wcf work?