skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I could be wrong about this, but I think the mesh capabilities depend on some of the intricacies of Sugar/Bitfrost and you lose that when running Ubuntu. Admittedly meshing is not a practical need (I mostly use it for reading books, but also some mobile programming and web browsing) but it's neat to be able to see all the other XO users in my neighborhood (actually it seems to extend pretty far past my immediate neighborhood). I actually like Sugar… (plus I think the Matchbox WM/ single app on screen is alright), though I really dislike Journal. I run Emacs in sugar when I work in the shell so I can split the screen that way, but for the most part Matchbox doesn’t seem annoying. I also use the real evince instead of the not as good evince-derrived “read” activity. I have closed source flash instead of gnash, and opera just because it's quicker to launch and find something that way than to fumble with the browser activity. Those things combined make the XO a very useful device, and I get to keep my mesh capabilities and the creatively designed Python Sugar UI environment.
I may well be missing something, but you still haven't differentiated yourself. Companies can upload photos to their yelp page, if they pay.

The people can also put their info in google base or other directories.

What I want to know from you is: Why are ou going to beat yelp? Why are you going to beat citysearch? Why did judysbook and insiderpages fail? How do you compare to americantowns.com ?

I wish you the best of luck. Really, i do. I am in the minority of people who go to the internet for everything, and hope/expect that everything is going to be on there. if there was more than just the hipster-overridden yelp, then i'd be a happier man. I just don't see the business case.
disabled people use accessibility differently. you might want to use ubiquity or platform-independence as alternative phrases.

But yes, i totally agree with you. multimodal data/application access is a beautiful thing.
My start-up has had an absolutely terrific experience so far with cvsdude.com. If you want a subversion/trac/bugzilla package, the pricing is reasonable and their customer service has been great. Also, if you want to host an open source project, they have free options.

I highly recommend it.
Google, Chevron Build Mirrors in Desert to Beat Coal With Solar
How so? Aren't presentations about a current project's shortcomings/roadmap for improvements pretty standard?

I do agree that it speaks well about the developer, but your opinion about whether Ruby currently sucks or not should be informed by the content of the slides.

[edit]
I can show you a shoe box and call it a car. I can candidly explain to you how it falls short of current cars, and how I will remedy these problems. All of that does not hide the fact that my shoe box is currently a sucky car.
Ask HN: How hard is your problem?
Are you solving new problems (3d scene construction from mono audio recordings), applying existing techniques to a new problem space (social network for dog walkers), or trying to one-up the competition (bill your clients online for small businesses ?)

It seems like popular programming and most startups focus the latter two problem sets. Focus on the latter two problem sets may be a "safer bet", but is far less satisfying as an engineer.

Where is the interesting computer science work being done in the first problem set? Are you doing it? Do you wish you were?
Facebook To Open Source Facebook Platform
+1 for dropbox
Review: Lightweight Linux distributions
Do Hackers Pose a Threat...
Another diversionary non-announcement; I don't think Facebook could have prevented anyone from cloning their APIs, and being able to plug Facebook apps into a different social network won't help much since you lose the network effect.
You are incorrect to assume my opinion of Ruby wasn't informed by the content of the slides.

The slides and the issues they outline were from 2003. Many of those issues have been/are being fixed.

The development outlined has taken and is taking place. I view that as a success of the Ruby community and I also believe Ruby to be a good language now that many of these issues are fixed.

Therefore, I believe these slides point to good things about Ruby.
"Time to fight back"? Sometimes I question Mr. Arrington's wordplay...
I would really like to see a demo before signing up, but I think a family based social network is a phenomenal ideaf or the very reason you said: keeping track of things going on with detached families.

Maybe detached isn't the right word, but I know in my case, family spread across the US and even Europe, with some members in Iraq I think this is GREAT.
Fix from the TC comments...

"Here is the solution that we used:
1. install geoip on your server
2. find the country your customer comes from using geoip
3. include &country=customer_country in the paypal url your customers are sent to
the country combobox will show the customer country as a default."
Why not? Do you think this will change?
Why Twitter Needs Scoble, Calacanis, Arrington and Loic
I think most technical folks' occupancy of your latter two problem sets isn't so much for lack of interest in new, hairy-scary problems. It's for want of the necessary tools to do so.

On the flip side, it's my guess a lot of hackers consider themselves new-problem-solvers-in-training. A 22 year old computer guy may not be solving the clean water and efficient energy problems of the world, but could conceivably have aspirations to do so when his or her talent is matched with the right street savvy, is matched with the right entrepreneurial network, is matched with the right funding opportunities, and so on. So in a lot of cases it's a question of "when," not "whether."

And if it's people breaking new ground in computer work you're after, you've got to make sure you're in the right ballpark; Plenty of universities are doing remarkable things in CS, but again, it's usually older entrepreneurs (with money and know-how) who get their hands on new tech through the technology commercialization centers.

Which is to say that new problems are being solved (in CS, too), just in different territories and in different ways than we hear about in mainstream tech news.
I'd recommend a cheap VPS, which you can then use for any number of things, including running svn, git, whatever.

You get root access, so you can do whatever you want with it. They're great for prototyping web apps.

I like Slicehost (as low as $20/month) http://www.slicehost.com/
It's total overkill to install a whole new OS.

The XO shipped with Fedora 7, and it's trivial to switch off of Sugar to something good (xfce and xmonad are the two I'm tinkering with on mine).
When I started using Mozy, they offered 2 GiB free and that still seems to be the case.

http://mozy.com/free
Seems like a pretty elegant language but it needs more parentheses.
Another vote for github.com if you want a proper code repository. It's well designed and easy to use. If you just want to archive/backup your code, you could also take a look at jungledisk, which provides you a layer on top of Amazon S3, and depending on how much you have to store, might be economical for you.
What kind of tooling is lacking?

Your point about being in-training is an interesting one, particularly for the readers of this site.

Where do you find out about the remarkable things that people are doing in CS? Also, are you suggesting that most interesting new CS work comes out of universities? If so, does that mean "If you want to solve problems, go to grad school. if you want to make money, start a me-too business?"
I got a VPS with vpslink.com

I paid for 2 years upfront and got a 50% discount - total price was ~$12/month for a Xen instance (debian) with 256MB Ram

I have SVN/trac on it ... although, I've been thinking of migrating to git.

I also use it to host a lot of other stuff too.
why is that bad?
The geography of Internet infrastructure - Refresh the Net
meet the new boss, same as the old boss:

profit.
By "worst example", I meant that I thought it was a poor example of your point, because the notation you quoted is okay. A lot of the other ones were worse code (and better examples of your point).
What you say makes a lot of sense. And yet I know people who would break the code as a matter of principle, feel good, and not charge anyone for it.
"Aren't presentations about a current project's shortcomings/roadmap for improvements pretty standard?"

no. for instance, presentations about Rails are often about why other things suck (PHP, Java, VC-funded startups, etc.)
Ow. The triple arrow thing is over the top. The orig UI was nicely subtle and understated. Too much overthinking user experience sometimes isn't good.

OTOH, users always bitch about change.
I really like what the NY Times is up to. They're already one of the poster children for Amazon EC2 and the new silverlight reader is pretty sweet.
Report from Management: Programmers don't know how to develop software
Pesky programmers potentially putting profits puttering!

Apparently management researches believe that what's really costing software development projects are that the talented developers are making too complex software! The only logical reason: because programmers are evil and only think of themselves. Management's solution: make pay based on short term software development metrics (because you can measure software development, after all!), and force talent to dumb down the complex solutions.
Classification libraries for Python
Yeah, I think it looks good, but the community itself has been shockingly changed. Even as recently as a few months ago I found the discussions to be well reasoned, but it has really fallen apart. Now it is a contest to see who can make the best joke. I removed reddit.com from my selected subreddits and it has helped... but even the science discussions are not great. I hardly visit any more since I (re-)discovered HN.
Uh oh. I did not know that version 2.0 will be such a project. Any bets on whether it'll succeed at its goals by starting from scratch? The track record on that sort of thing in technology is notoriously lopsided in favour of failure.
In the 90s, I heard it was 4.7% of computer (I guess that's software) startups made the fortune 500.

The odds of a startup taking off are about one in three or four, which isn't all that bad.
> how did lispmachines work? was the basic system programmed in LISP?

Yes. However, I'm not sure why that's relevant.
Where do you find out about the remarkable things that people are doing in CS?

Good question. I'd start in the pages of Technology Review.
> If enough people complain in reviews of an individual Chili's venue that the cash registers are understaffed, that venue will take notice.

What are the odds that such a Chili's will maintain a web presence? Better yet, to observe such a community.

Hint - go to a different restaurant. You'll be happier and you'll be helping to solve their understaffed cash register problem.
Because multiplication has a tenuous relationship with Array#join, because Array#join shares none of the "other" mathematical properties of multiplication, because :* is overloaded in other, conflicting ways for other object types, and because the resulting code is needlessly terse and no easier to read as a result of this hack.
Name two of them, and then tell me why they haven't done it yet.
> But functionality is commented at a higher level, so then what are they doing reading individual statements from my code anyway?

(1) Because it's not doing what I expected.
(2) Because I want to do something with it that you didn't forsee.
Daignose Malware in your Website - A Google Product
Google, world's largest search engine is now providing a smoother website browsing technique. Google's Malware diagnosis can now make website browsing safer.
Yahoo Joins Hand With WPP, Advertising is Now Broadening it's Borders
Online advertising company Right Media is to provide online advertising space buying to GroupM & 24/7 Real Media.
Thanks! Glad you like the idea. (And good point about seeing a demo first -- we definitely want to add something along those lines as a next step.)
S3. I have a script that takes one argument, a directory name.

It encrypts the directory name and adds a timestamp, to make a filename that reveals nothing about the contents of the file except for the time it was created. It stores the original directory name along with the encrypted directory name in a local log file, so I can tell what's what later.

Then it zips the directory and its contents into a file, names it with the encrypted filename, and does a GPG encryption of the file.

Then it uploads it to Amazon S3 and cleans up after itself.

All of this is completely automated once I type in the command. I do it for my project directory, which contains all my projects for the calendar year, periodically. After the year closes out, I start a new year and the old files (from previous years) stay safe and unchanged on S3.

Over the course of a year, if a few backups for the same year pile up, I usually delete the old ones. I haven't automated that part.

This scheme is OK for backing up a few important directories, if they aren't large, like for source code, just what you asked about -- a few hundred megabytes will cost just pennies a month on Amazon.

It's not a SVN or GIT solution, but it gives you total privacy, rather than relying on a third party to do the encryption for you.
I wish the USA had more professors like this presenter. Cheers to him.

The talk makes the point of: why are we exploring Mars while neglecting the oceans, which are about 2/3 of the Earth's surface? And the presenter understands the need to motivate the new generations to tackle the quest of discovery.
I'll view it as a success of the Ruby community when the issues are fixed.

Judging from the list on these slides, I think you're being a bit sanguine about the state of Ruby; at least four of the seven issues are still outstanding.
Also, if it's not "website relate" (as in, the website you're using Dreamhost to host), Dreamhost wants to charge you 20 cents/gig per month extra.
Meet Your New Recruits: They Want to Eat Your Lunch
I think their statement (of developers acting for their own personal good) is overblown and shows a lack of understanding of software development. It's a reactionary publication predicating on the fears of not being agile enough in the new software development world.
The proof:

Their suggestions of using better metrics on development practices of the software being built.
Which is a ridiculous suggestion for anyone well vested in the literature of practical, real-world software engineering.
Measuring software development is inherently difficult.
What will you measure? lines of code? number of functions written? bugs fixed?
All of those are ridiculous and fail at any number of different approaches to software development (and are all easily gamed).
The problem is that there isn't a sure-fire way to measure how well a developer is doing without someone well experienced/knowledgeable walking through and checking everything
At which point, what would be the reason for having that person develop the software to begin with?

All that can come of this study are managers in corporations reacting to suggestions of improvements in software projects from good developers by shutting them down.

This will, in effect, make those corporations slower and less productive than any sensible startup, accomplishing the exact opposite of what they want.

Yet my biggest qualm with this report, though, is the implication that it is a bad thing that developers are trying to become better with new/more complex technology! It's in the interest of all IT departments to nurture growth of their workers. While the comparison isn't exact, it would be like a pro-sports team saying it's a bad thing their players are trying to become really good.

From a tin-foil hat perspective: this was funded by YC to create more hackers dissatisfied with their jobs and go form startups!!!
Google Checkout maybe? it might be only unidirectional at the moment
I disagree with your assertion that the safer bets are less satisfying. If my users like and use my app over our competitors', that's more satisfying to me than building something challenging that no one uses or likes.

If you're working on something in a crowded market, designing your product to stand out/work better than the rest can be just as challenging (and satisfying) as writing something technologically complicated.
Is There a Cure for the Internet 'Distraction Virus'?
Top Ten Mistakes in Firefox 3
Only if that's your bottle-neck.
Microsoft's survival strategy
Company sues website owners for using image links
"Mainstream attention" kills most of the things I'm most fond of. Of course, I knew this day would come and I'm happy for Randall but there's still this small sense of a let-down now that the secret is out.
Interesting work seems to flow naturally from interesting data sets. Start by seeking the data.
Steve Yegge: Singleton Considered Stupid
+1 for NO to Dreamhost. Hands down the worst web host out there. Go for a cheap VPS like Slicehost and roll your own. You have control over everything, and they have rock solid uptime.
Yes, that is what I was subtly getting at :)
I think xkcd has enough built-in "barriers to entry" to keep it a cult phenomenon-- I doubt that anyone reading the Times article who wasn't seriously tech savvy would be tempted to start following the strip. I don't think we're going to see Jay Leno start cracking "sudo" jokes any time soon.
I'm using them for my latest release, and perhaps 20% of the time the servers 404 after a long delay:

"We are unable to complete your request at this time. Please click Retry or try again later. We apologize for the inconvenience.

Message 3004"

Completely unacceptable, we're shopping around for alternatives. Unfortunately, I'm in NZ and Google Checkout isn't released here yet.
Fibonacci primes in parallel
Many software designers intentionally create unnecessarily complex products that do less to serve their companies and customers than to advance their careers.

Many software managers intentionally create unnecessarily complex projects that do less to serve their companies and customers than to advance their careers.

Breaking news: people sometimes act in their own interests.
It's not a bad strategy in itself, but the lack of a business model makes it pretty hard to pitch the value proposition to any interested buyers. If the founders haven't been able to come up with a way to monetize the site, what's to think the buyers will?
We're doing a bit of both, with the known and quantifiable (web hosting management) supporting our pioneer efforts to be part of a new and almost entirely unsettled territory (cloud computing). I wouldn't necessarily recommend it over other tactics, but it's what fit our business and our existing codebase--we launched based on an old and well-established Open Source project and the existing code greatly directed our first couple of years in operation. But, we also know that becoming a leader in a well-established field, full of well-funded competitors, is not necessarily a trivial endeavor.

So, while we think our hosting management products will be a nice source of revenue for years to come, it's the combination of those tools with cutting edge stuff in the virtualization space that will allow us to lead rather than follow (because no matter how good your products are in an established market, you'll probably always be playing catch up in the mind of the market).

I also think you're underestimating the amount of interesting work that can be found underlying seemingly mundane tasks. I've found that data analysis and visualization can be a really interesting and fun pursuit within systems management software, and it's an area that brings tears of joy to customers (seriously, people wet themselves over graphs and charts...if you also add export to Excel or CSV, there will be fainting).

Regardless of all of that, you have to solve problems that customers want solved. If you're doing that, the harder problems are better, if you are willing and able to solve them faster than your competitors.

But, if you are starting a business rather than a research project, you need to make your decisions based on what people want rather than what you want to work on. You cannot start from "here's a cool technology, let's figure out a way to sell it", at least not generally. You must start from, "Here is a market that is being poorly served, and I can serve this market well." If you can fit, "by building interesting and cutting edge technologies" into that sentence without breaking it, then you've got yourself a winner.
The latest relevant update I found was this talk he gave at google

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oEkJvvGEtB4

I think most of you stumbled upon it, I also believe it was even mentioned on hacker news before
We are going to create a 21rst century patient facing medical experience.

The experience of going to a pharmacy sucks, and is obsolete. The entire medical industry is complacent in allowing 100 billion in unnecessary medical costs because of non-adherence to medications. The doctors don't consider it their job to make their patients adhere. The pharmacist maybe talks to you for a few minutes and hands you a sheet of medical and legal jargon that says, on page 3, how important it is to take medicine. The drug companies also fail to ensure adherence. Yet patients don't know enough to care.

None of these people have stepped up to the plate. So we're gonna do it, and when we solve the problem, we can start upending all the parts of the patient facing medical experience where bad decisions and stupid compromises have been calcified into the shitty experience that anyone who has had a sick family member knows all to well.

We are not exactly a web start up though. We must design some actual stuff people will use too. The computer science part of our project is that all this adherence stuff can actually reduce to a flow of information problem given a few assumptions and the right way of conceptualizing the problem from a psychological and brain science standpoint. The computer science forms the informational backbone along which we can build a medical experience that doesn't suck and isn't full of compromises that suck for the patient. From a computer science point of view, we are applying existing techniques to a new problem, but from the point of view of the medical establishment, we are solving a currently unsolved problem of huge proportions.

Information about your medication is some of the most important information you encounter, because it directly influences how long you live and how well you live. Edward Tufte is an old man now, and the pharmacies are still basically acting like it's 1952 in the way they present this vital information.
Sorry I didn't reply earlier - there's nothing wrong (well, mostly! :-) ) with male engineers, except that there just aren't enough of them. Encourage women into the career, and you double the number of engineers you can put into industry each year... Sorry if you got the impression that I had something against male engineers :-)
You are of course aware that there is strong legislation in force protecting pharmacists and that industry? And that people are not allowed to decide on their own medication?
Identity 2.0 Startup Sxips Into the Deadpool
Predicting Whether You Need to Reply to an Email
That would be a false dichotomy... A project with shortcomings is not necessarily sucky. It could be a very good project with still more room for improvement if it is to become a brilliant project.
+1 for slicehost - rock solid
Ruby 2.0 is a not a "start from scratch" project. It's an evolution of the language (which will be done mostly in the experimental 1.9 releases) with a new interpreter. Once 1.9 is stable it will turn into the 2.0 release. The actual effect on Ruby users will be noticeable, but minimal.

See http://eigenclass.org/hiki/Changes+in+Ruby+1.9 for some of the changes that are coming up.
I've been looking at duplicity - do you do full system backups?
A new type of cipher: DICING_CSB