skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Amazon.com down again? 
It looks like Amazon's web site is failing once again on Monday, June 9th around 10AM PST.

After last Friday's multiple-hour outage, is anyone becoming concerned about their ability to reliably keep a service up?
I use trac, a management tool that's usually used for open source projects http://trac.edgewall.org/. Admittedly its issue tracking features aren't very advanced, but it does an excellent job of integrating your subversion repository, tickets and a wiki. It's one of the better tools for finding out what happened and why.
US immigration policy is awful. I spent four years in a dead-end cube-land job waiting for my Green Card before I could join a startup.

I agree with the hints at the end of the post. I would add that having a PhD did help me a couple of times, so if you have one, make sure people know about it.
The average entrepreneur makes less money starting a company then they would of getting a job at an existing company.

I wish people would stop quoting stats of ALL entrepreneurship and focus on industries. High tech start-ups are much different and 824 times more likely to be high growth then starting something like a restaurant.

But there's far more restaurants in those statistics people love to quote.

Read: Finding Fertile Ground or The Illusions of Entrepreneurship by Scott Shane to understand the reality of entrepreneurship and high tech companies.
Why Social Network Spam Matters
I think they ended up having to do that because of jQuery's chaining support. Most of jQuery's functionality lives in a single namespace (jQuery.fn) which means you can chain method calls together like this:

jQuery('div:first').addClass('hello').text('Hello World').draggable().css('color', 'red');

If a plugin needs three or four methods, that's three or four extra functions on the one object - which ends up looking quite ugly:

jQuery('blah').draggable({options}).destroyDraggable()

The message passing idiom lets them add just one method to the jQuery.fn namespace that can cover a full range of different actions. I think it's a pretty clever pragmatic solution.
"Much writing which is self-consciously 'literary' in nature seems knowing and deliberately obscure."

I would say "some" rather than most, and the best are not deliberately obscure: look at writers like Fitzgerald, Bellow, (some) Updike, Flaubert, Hemingway and

Others are more difficult to read because of the nature of how they try to express reality, feeling, and point of view, like Virginia Woolf, Joyce, or Proust.

But I don't think neither is all that obscure or all that direct, as both words seem to be synonyms for the same ideas expressed along the axis of "nature" and "artifice" that James Wood describes in _How Fiction Works_.
Confirmed at 10:15PDT. http:// down. https:// still up. All AWS services are still operational.
"a couple bad border officials"

You haven't traveled to US that much then.

I did an internship last year in Washington so I drove back-n-forth a lot with my friends and other students from UBC and SFU. Boy... all of us hate dealing with US immigration officers.

Earlier this year, I had to go to US for a business trip. Things haven't changed. They're still the same Fat, Oily haired, snobbish, and stupid border officers.

I remember couple months ago I saw a blog post saying that they didn't know what MacBook Air was so they thought it was a bomb or something.
Sorry for the duplicated posting (This happened on Friday as well), but with Amazon's visibility being this high, I thought it was warranted.
I'm not sure it's so much a matter of ideas as of how those ideas are expressed; in literary fiction, the two seem inseparable, but one aspect of the post tries to cover how in SF I'm not sure most writers think of language that way.
I guess you could get a transparent keyboard-shaped overlay for when you need tactile feedback.
Trust me, you're wrong about "bad border officials." And having been in that room (at a different airport) 3 times, you also downplay the unpleasantness of it. I'm curious if you went through the fingerprint/mugshot process - can't remember if they bring that out on the first refusal or not.

Anyway everytime you get refused they seem to amp up the harassment. I'm reasonably sure if I tried to reapply, they'd be doing body-cavity searches.
Who is going to implement such a social net? Congress? The same Congress that has a 15% approval rating and a 97% re-election rate? The same Congress that is run by K-street? Currently, we spend as much as a percentage of GDP on Medicare/Medicaid as every other developed country spends altogether on healthcare. Theoretically, we could just turn Medicare into a single payer system that covered everyone, get the same benefits as the European countries, and not even raise taxes. Strangely, no presidential candidate has mentioned such a sensible proposal.

The problems Aaron cites can almost all be blamed on the government. The drug companies, insurance companies, and big city hospitals are effectively state cartels. The AMA and nurse unions are a state guilds. They have all worked together to drive the price of healthcare through the roof. Government zoning regulations and negative interest rates have made housing prices rise at a far greater rate than wages. The decline of the dollar has led to massive investment in commodity indexes, driving up the price of food and oil. SEC regulations make it very difficult for entrepreneurs to raise money from small time investors. What makes you think that the government that causes all these problems is going to wake up tomorrow, and in a fit of competence and good sense, actually fix them? Better idea: abolish the Feds altogether. Without paying taxes to Washington and monopoly prices to state guilds, we could all retire at 30.
Erlang: A Generic Server Tutorial
Instant Karma
Secret audio stream of WWDC
One big difference is that both Prototype and mooTools make modifications to the built-in types (extra Array methods etc). jQuery (and Dojo and YUI) explicitly avoids doing this for compatibility reasons. It's no coincidence that mooTools and Prototype are the only two big libraries that can't co-exist on a single page.

The interesting thing about jQuery is its focus - it almost exclusively works to improve the interaction between JavaScript and HTML. DOM manipulation is more convenient in jQuery than any other library, and the other library features build on top of that core ideal.

mooTools and Prototype attempt to make improvements to the JavaScript language. jQuery tends to play along with the language - it supports a functional style of programming using lots of closures (while you can avoid them if you really want to I find jQuery code with closures flows really well).
Rumours aren't news
If you like hoppy beers, stay local. The most important thing is freshness.
Here Come The New iPhone Apps
I've also had good experience with Trac. If you need sophisticated traditional bug tracking features, it isn't quite all there: you can't assign a bug to more than one version, or more than one component, for example. But its subversion and wiki integration are features I can no longer live without.
mantis - http://mantisbt.com

Does not do all you want... No IRC and no SVN integration. That's pretty limiting if you actually do need that stuff. Go the TRAC route someone else mentioned if you really do require SVN integration.
You are 100% right about the unpleasantness of the entire ordeal. They did do the fingerprint, mugshot deal... but until I realized that he was going to refuse entry, I was being optimistic for some reason.

I did go easy on them in this article... perhaps as a reflection of my own paranoia about getting back in when I need to... I had mental images of 5 idle border officials googling my name as I sat in the waiting room.
http://www.macrumorslive.com/ have always seemed to have the better interface to me.
I've worked in this biz a long time, and have worked with several women, and I've yet to see useful documentation...
Maybe the smartest thing to do is avoiding United States altogether, collaborating with this kind of dumb rules is only reinforcing this kind of behavior since people keep trying to get in even when bothered.

You voted with your wallet, you can now vote with your passport. Moreover, some decentralization and diversity in economy can only bring benefits to the world, monoculture is toxic in the long run.
Buffett's bet: Hedge funds can't beat the market
http://www.ustream.tv/channel/wwdc-2008-live-keynote-audio-s...

You can hear live audio stream. Loopt is now on stage ;)
Sam Altman (Loopt) is talking right now at WWDC
Congrats Sam and team!
I'm assuming this confirms GPS is a go for iPhone2.
Sam: "Loopt will be FREE on the iPhone!"
by the way, reliable live audio stream at: http://www.ustream.tv/
InSuggest: Del.icio.us Recommendations Reborn
Jira here too

http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/
Saw that on Engadget. He's giving a demo during the Steve Jobs keynote. Very, very cool.
Loopt mentioned at 10:35. More here, with pic:

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080609-ars-at-wwdc-08...
This article is disgusting.

There's one source, and she's...playa hating, to say the least.

Advocating underrepresented minorities is like riding a tank. It's fun, nobody will disagree with you, and if a "tank man" (cf. Tiananmen square) shows up, you can effectively lynch him (cf. Lawrence Summers, James Watson).

Now, blatant reverse sexism aside, is the writer correct? There's one source, who may be an itsy-bit biased, but yeah, I believe it. It could be true that women document more. I don't think that they're categorically superior coders, though, as this article seems to imply, and I'm not exactly eager to work at that database company.
http://s3.media.macrumorslive.com/p/f1213033038.jpg
+1 for JIRA
How is this news? WWDC is kinda a big deal these days.

Silicon Alley Insider: Tom Robinson spotted in his boxers sitting at his desk in his room.
Are they really considered a .NET startup? The actual app itself is Flash. Just having the corp site in aspx doesn't make them a .NET shop.

Loopt has some .NET in their architecture and Sam Altman told me at startup school that it was never an issue with YC.

To answer the question though, I believe I've heard in a few places that they don't care what you use, as long as you are building something worth funding.
Why does so little science fiction rise to the standards of literary fiction?

Because the standards of "literary fiction" are, at best, orthogonal to the factors which make a book sell well?

"Science fiction" and "literary fiction" are modern marketing labels. When a publisher labels a work "science fiction", they're trying to say "if you like stuff by Heinlein, Clarke, Bujold, Cherryh, Dick, Stross, or Stephenson, you might like this. It might or might not be literature, but we think it's a good read". Whereas a publisher who labels a work "literary fiction" is trying to say "if you drop quotes from this at a party full of literature professors they won't laugh at you. It might or might not be a good read, but it's literature".

Naturally, one of these genres sells more books than the other.

The situation is complicated by the lingering death of the novel as a popular art form. Guys like Nabokov or Fitzgerald or Thurber or Joseph Conrad wrote in an era where everybody bought and read novels of one kind or another -- TV didn't exist, you couldn't watch movies except in a theatre, radios weren't portable. In that world, the novel was at its peak. There were more marketing channels for books, and a larger population of people who were highly print-literate and appreciative of subtle literary gestures. So publishers were that much more willing to print stuff regardless of whether it could be sequelized, or sold to Hollywood, or stamped with a genre label. Life today is harder. It might well be true that nobody [1] would buy Heart of Darkness if it were published today... unless it were in the form of a movie, or an HBO miniseries, or a video game, or a series of Youtube shorts [2] -- you know, a living genre. Or unless it could conform to the restrictions of one of the remaining established marketing channels for books, like the SF market, or the fantasy market, or the "Harry Potteresque" market, or the "will get recommended by Oprah" market.

[1] Where "nobody" is defined as "not enough people to make it a profitable use of the publisher's limited resources".

[2] Incidentally, the first person to turn Heart of Darkness into an awesome series of Youtube shorts will win my admiration. And the videogame version would be fascinating.
A true libertarian.

One implication of having similar temperaments (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=204240) is that a lot of NTs tend to be libertarians. So this site will likely favor a libertarian view.

I agree partially with this. Government regulation in some industries prevent startups from entering (ie health care and medicine). And since the most radical solutions are going to come from startups, no startups will slow down innovation. I also agree that the US is spending a lot of money inefficiently where companies motivated properly could spend it more effectively.

I believe if the house, senate and presidency is democratic that a social net is possible in the next 4 years. Implying that low approval ratings mean congress won't do anything isn't true. If anything it may motivate them to do something like this.
If you are a rails shop, redmine is good too. I have used jira, mantis, trac, but do not like any of them.
I asked the same question on HN earlier:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=73284

I ended up buying the book CSS Mastery by Andy Budd and I'm quite satisfied with it ;)
Hackers are people, spread around the world and all social classes. They listen to all types of music.

I would be shocked to find any kind of music that some hacker somewhere doesn't listen to.

Therefore, the question is as meaningless as asking what colour hackers' hair is. Or what they eat.

Also, the idea of HN turning into an endless repetition of the same questions that new people ask all the time because they don't know that they've been asked before proves my point quite thoroughly: it's not a good future for HN.
Yeah, I should shut up too ;-)
The best way to answer your first question is to look in their job listings, or in this case their blog. This is something I learned from PG's story of looking at competitors' job listings in his Viaweb days.

They want (or wanted) someone with "Heavy experience with C# and/or .NET in general". That makes me think Flash isn't the only important technology for them.
I don't have enough kind words for Redmine http://redmine.org. I have been using it for some time and it is perfect as a simple bugtracker/SVN browser/wiki.

It's open source and built in Rails, and it's easy to tweak to suit your needs (via a plugin system) and perfect if you want to get your feet wet with Rails.

As for speed, I'm using it on a shared host with Passenger and it fast enough. Speed on a VPS is quite nice, and it flies on a local network.
Funny. I assume the "karma" is Arrington's bad karma for saying twitter should not have spoken before the fact about their steps to avoid downtime during WWDC.
Location-Tracking Startup Sense Networks Emerges
One reason people pursue startups is to achieve so-called "FU money". A strong safety net gives everyone at least a minimal version of "FU money". So at the same time it makes risk-taking easier, it might remove a major incentive for risk-taking.
Free SVN repository?
What is your favourite free SVN repository?
Google Code?
Sourceforge?
Another one?
Which one would you recommend for a small-medium sized project?
"The superwoman of code ..... forcing men to write more detailed accounts of their coding issues, and expressing their programming problems before each new block of code is written"

You know much better your programming problems after starting writting code. Prototyping facilitates thinking and designing. The "superwoman" is clueless.
Agreed, but Engadget seems to go in a little more depth, and have more quotes from the speakers.
One of the alleged selling points of a hedge fund is that their short-selling makes them outperform during market downturns. So it's a little odd that Buffett stipulated just returns, rather than returns adjusted for some measure of risk (if I had something that returned .5% less than the market on days when market was doing better than average, and .5% more than the market when it did worse than average, this would be a better thing to own than just a market index, even though it gets exactly the same average return -- because it's giving me extra money right when I'd want to buy other things, in exchange for giving me less money at times when I'd prefer to sell).
would loopt need more than the current location support of the iPhone?
I have to say I strongly agree with this. The personal risks I am taking to start a company, are a little crazy, and I've had no shortage of people telling me so. And I know so many people who are waiting for their life to be settled and stable before they begin. This is one of the main social influences repressing our potential founders.
My point is that people can safely say that women have skills often less seen in men, but not the reverse.
This spring I defended my PhD. The very next day I had to fly home to see my cousin, who I grew up with, one last time. She had cancer and died about 5 days later. I am very sad that she is gone, but extremely happy that the timing of events in my life happened such that I was able to get home one last time to see and talk with her before she passed. So, hopefully you will get an explanation for cause of death, but either way maybe you can try and remember a pleasant event with your roommate and use that as a source of comfort. We can't always explain events in life, but we definitely have the power to remember and enjoy what has happened.
A serious problem with this thesis is that in addition to making good profitable startups easier, a strong safety net makes many other competing activities easier, too.

One of those competing activities is: bad startups.

When we accept the premise that "promoting startups" is a good thing, we are assuming such startups are still a net social positive. In fact, that quality may depend on them failing-fast, attracting investment from greedy investors, and generating enough income in a competitive market to sustain the founders/employees.

With a strong safety net, it is easier to pursue a money-losing, wealth-destroying startup indefinitely -- really just a hobby masquerading as a startup.

A strong safety net also makes it easier to be a painter, or a musician, or a writer... even if there's no paying audience for your work. Perhaps some who do startups now would, with a bottomless safety net, prefer to sit in a cafe all day sipping coffee, blogging, and posting snarky comments about real startups. "That seems easier."
Gizmodo's liveblog has been surprisingly good so far:

http://live.gizmodo.com/
Under a B-1 visa, you're not allowed to work for a US company or receive any money while you're in the US. Since YC is a program that clearly intends to fund a US company of yours, it's no surprise that you were put under additional scrutiny. The border officials were just doing their job.
The "sortables" have been using these arguments, I was a bit confused by them when I read the documentation, but now it seems okay.
It's working in Europe right now.
assembla.com
One thing that may help is not to call YC a "program." We stopped calling it that a long time ago, because it gives people the wrong impression.
I'd like to hear more about this. Link?
Current location support says I'm somewhere in manhattan, west brooklyn or east jersey when I'm in midtown. I don't think it's accurate enough to be useful.
The company's not dead. They just changed their name to Zecter. They're working on a new approach to some of the problems Versionate solves.
IPhone 3G is finally official
I've been experiencing flakiness with .com and .co.uk since an hour or so ago.

It seems .co.uk is down at the moment. ("Http/1.1 Service Unavailable").

A week or so before the first outage, the .co.uk search facility stopped working temporarily - anything I searched for (and knew they do sell), it said there were no results.
What is the preferred term then?
Ask YC: How do you start a social bookmarking site (like HN) w/o an audience?
I've been experimenting with a site like HN, but quickly realized in order for stories to become popular you need a decent amount of people on the site participating. Without users, I seem to have 2 choices: Let everything appear on the home page, or show the very small amount of content that is voted on (or 3, make a bunch of dummy accounts and fake it). Thoughts?
And it was just confirmed
Ask YC: What do you think of Apple's tactic of closing their online store for updated products?
And if so, why don't other sites do it? (maybe some do that I'm not aware of)
Why it's better to be lazy
Their 'additional scrutiny' concluded that I was a student even though I had massive amounts of documentation pointing to the exact opposite conclusion. It is their job to investigate extra-ordinary situations. Suggesting that I needed a student visa was just plain wrong.
Remarkable how well it lines up with counties that voted for Bush.
He's not kidding about the beard thing. When I was 22 I went on a six-week round-the-world trip without packing a razor. By the end I had a terrible unkempt beard, and was getting "randomly" selected for extra searches at every airport.
Me.com - The site you are trying to reach has moved.
Barely getting by, but with decent health care might be ok for some people, but not for most.
I'm in Tucson, AZ and me.com isn't working. It's defitely not the new apple web2.0 site that they are talking about at WWDC.
Sure. I think there are some phone apps that have to use it, for example.
Wii uses less energy than competitors by a factor of 10. Why aren't they marketing this?
Iphone 3G is official -- and only $199
Bloom Filters: Designing a Spellchecker
$199 price tag, too on the 8s.

not too bad, though i would've liked a dip in the monthly cost to boot.
http://www.amconmag.com/2008/2008_02_11/article.html

Cheap real estate (which usually equates to lots of driving) is a very strong predictor of votes for Bush.
Psystar "open-mac" benchmark results
We (or should I say 'I', as I'am the only developer) also use Bugzilla. I agree that it may be complicated at first, but it does pay of to learn it. (note: I have only used Trac and Bugzilla during my career, but as I am satisfied with BZ I don't have a need to try out anything else.)

I recommend to turn off features you do not need and ignore those, you cannot turn of. It will be easier to work with.
It's only been announced, it's not available for consumption... I'd have titled that "A new package management system for Lisp, being developed by ITA" or something.
Iphone 3g on july 11
8gb 199
16gb 299
including gps
blackberry and palm are done.
Depends on the context. The most common is to talk about the summer or winter funding cycle.

What I'd tell an immigration official is that I was going to work with some investors who had agreed to invest in my startup. I am not an expert in what to tell immigration officials, though.
google code is straightfoward, but FOSS only. I also use svnrepository.com for private projects, and syncing my documents between work and home. It's about $4 per month, which is peanuts.
Twitter Shows the Whale after announcement of 3G iPhone.
kept reverting back to 9:56 am for me, but I followed Gizmodo and Engadget for the whole thing, alternating browser tabs to cut down on the refreshing.
I tuned in but just heard a few geeks talking about what was happening, nothing live, I turned it off.
4) make admin accounts weigh a lot more and promote the things that you like the most to ensure promoted content.

5) get more users

6) develop some sort of algorithm to determine popularity that works in conjunction with user voting.