skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's successful on the server space because Linux and friends are a cheapie imitation of Unix environments and Microsoft server offerings plain suck. Open source failed to produce new concepts -- to "explore the subspace of possible programs", as de Landa puts it.

It probably wouldn't have caught on the server space if Unix wasn't such an integral part of hacker culture anyway. The whole point of the (admittedly badly writtten. I'm not a native speaker, I'm just learning how to write more complex essays) article is that open source remained glued to hacker culture and it failed to deliver its promises or even confirm Linus' Law ("given enough eyeballs all bugs are shallow") as poor QA killed Linux on the desktop space.
in the olden days, people would buy Frisch's oreilly book, or the nemeth /snyder/hein linux admin books. Still good picks, but a lot to work through.

You probably want tutorials/recipes based on your deploy platform: PHP, rails, django each have a bunch. Ezra Z's rails deployment book is outstanding.

And a bunch of threads have gone over the Freebsd/OpenBSD, non-BSD choices, look in

searchyc.com
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=197878

http://searchyc.com/ubuntu+fedora
I'm also going to echo this- I've done only a bit of playing around with Ubuntu, but with mediatemple downtime issues I was having (grid service is not quite what they advertise) I decided to jump in and get a slice about 2 months ago.

I couldn't be happier. The tutorials (especially the ones for Ubuntu) are fantastic, and setting up your server and security with shorewall/etc couldn't be more painless. I probably took only an hour and had apache/php/mysql and rails up and running securely.

Major points to slicehost for the high quality walkthroughs- and for 20 bucks a month, it's more than worth it to just get a slice and jump in. That's something I'd highly recommend (No, i don't work for them, I'm just very happy!)
Facebook Releases Facebook Platform as Open Source, download here
I used to do it, I recall that it wasn't that much of a pain to setup (like I spent a half day getting everything working and didn't worry about it again), but it was enough of a hassle moving code between my laptop and the production Linux servers that I went and learned vi, started developing over SSH, and eventually just bought VMWare and loaded up a Linux image.

The shebang line isn't really a problem - Windows servers just ignore it. IIRC, the Windows PHP and Perl Apache modules go by the file extension to determine which module to execute. This is probably in the configuration instructions somewhere...I just followed a tutorial on the web.

The parts that are really painful are:

1.) You have to be really careful keeping your code platform-independent - which is good practice anyhow, but can be tricky. Paths are the obvious problem - I was always forgetting and hardcoding backslashes instead of using whatever the PHP platform-independent equivalent is. Since the directory structures are different, you'll need to keep every path in a config file and reference them indirectly - again, good coding practice, but easy to forget.

2.) Some functions don't work the same between OSes - anything with symlinks, permissions, umask, or pipes is going to behave differently. IIRC most of these functions had sensible defaults (i.e. do nothing) and didn't fail outright, but keep this in mind.

3.) Calling out to external programs is a real pain. I think this is what made me finally switch - the app grew so that it needed to call out to UNIX-only command-line apps written in C, and I didn't feel like porting them to Visual C++.

That's all based off memory - it's been about 4-5 years since I developed on Windows, and 3 years or so since I last worked with PHP. Basically the upshot is that it's possible, but there were enough corner cases that for intensive work, I found it was better just to bite the bullet and get VMWare.
Points 1 and 2 are outdated. Point 3 is not a fact. Where does Slicehost policy say that they will only respond to email after 10 hours? Just because it happened to you does not say it happens every time. Just simply say their customer service is not as good. Point 4 is not helpful because there are many more variables to take into consideration when pricing a VPS. And anyways, Slicehost has an option for 4 GB of RAM. Linode only has an option for 2880 GB of RAM. Doesn't that mean that Slicehost gives you much more RAM? I realize you probably mean something different, but you did not explain yourself. Point 5 is opinion.
I've done web development (PHP/MySQL) on both Windows and Linux, and Linux wins hands down for me primarily because of the number of useful utilities at my disposal on the command line and ease in moving around the directory tree.

However, packages like XAMPP help greatly in making sure everything runs smoothly when developing on Windows. Nothing in the PHP/MySQL code itself should have to be different on Windows, but configuration settings need to be tweaked prior to launch on a Linux box.

Caveats I can think of when moving code written in Windows to Linux is that Windows uses the backslash instead of the forward slash for directory paths, but I think newer versions of NT support the forward slash, too - please correct me if I'm wrong. Also, Windows uses a semicolon (;) to separate path variables while Linux uses a colon (:).

Windows also uses \r\n instead of just \n as a newline character so when/if you edit the code after porting to Linux, you'll get ^M characters at the end of each line, which I can't stand. A quick global search and replace restores my sanity though.

I don't have any experience at all using Perl on Windows, sorry.
Yeah, the dictionary bookmarks is probably the most hidden feature of FF, despite it saves time and is something each browser should have. I've stumbled upon it just recently, but I'm using it heavily every day since...
The phrase you want to Google is probably "XAMPP".
Getting Away from the Daily Digital Noise: A List of Time-tested Classics
Hooooooray!

Unfortunately this is far from over. The issue will probably soon be brought up in another district by another league.
Thanks for pointing that out. We will fix this very soon...
How to Admit Your Mistakes
GreenNote Offers Peer-to-Peer Loans To Tackle the College Funding Gap
Use Cygwin for Linux like environment on Windows.
Sorted Linear Hash Table
to everybody with timeout errors:
if you use the noscript firefox-extension you have to add "ajax.googleapis.com" to the whitelist.
And remember... spolsky's earned it. Fog Creek has been around for a while, so they can afford the amenmnities.

Fiscal conservatism should be all the rage if you ever startup something. So you can grow, and then get the 150 gal saltwater aquarium.
Linux admin is one of those things which is easy to jump into but takes a long time to get to a point where your skills can be trusted enough to manage an important production site. You might go with a managed VPS. For example, Servint is a managed service. I am not recommending them, just using them as an example. To learn, practice using a local Linux box.
The Social History of Lisp
Ask YC: Ever used an SEM aggregate technology like Clickable? Recommendations?
I am looking into a simple way to manage my SEM efforts. I ran across a company called Clickable (http://www.clickable.com). They charge for their service using percentages of revenue you plan to spend on the ad campaigns (ie: if you spend $1,000 you get charged $29.99).

I am not sure I love that ratio, do you guys recommend others? Have you used this? Is it worth it?
http://www.masswerk.at/termlib/sample_socket.html
11 external links in that one article, at most 2 of which are optional. I see he went to the Steve Gillmor school of article writing.
I have the online PDF myself, but I still want a hard-bound copy. Sometimes I just need to curl up with a book away from a screen.
Forget about the academics (Lisp? SICP?.) You want to make a web app RIGHT NOW and make some cash. If you are good with PHP then look no further. Start working on your apps ASAP and update your PHP skills as you go. Take a look at the Zend Framework and CodeIgniter for some good frameworks.

If you must learn a different language then learn them on the side (hobby) while you are making your bread with the rest of your time using skills you already have.
Don't do it. It does not help your:

1. Marketing
2. Sales
3. Customer satisfaction

It brings in uncertainty in your financial breakdown. It's silly, if you want to do silly things, do it in marketing, as they can have a positive effect there, but not in the way you close your sales. Your price is the end of the pipeline, don't mess with a customer that is already that far down your sales funnel.

I notice for example that if I absorb the tax on my products, it bumps up sales by over 90%, but if I decrease the price so that the tax does not matter, the rise in sales is about 5%. This is because of the no-suprise philosophy. A person who is clicking through your shop likely wants to buy. When you suprise him at the end with an additional fee, you lose him.
"It used to be the case that the development tools division at Microsoft ran at a loss, but that's not the case today. They make money out of us. It just seems a bit short-sighted. If I am developing in Visual Studio, I'm almost certainly developing Windows programs for Windows users to run on Windows."

That's a good insight, if not horribly original. The talk of development ecosystems, open APIs and other things highlights a long term problem here: app developers should get awesome tools for free whenever possible because they make your offering more valuable at basically zero marginal cost.

As a thought experiment, imagine that little Johnny was going to write the next killer app for Windows. He looked at the tool offerings, decided he didn't want to use a "lite" version tool and needed some of the bells and whistles in the full version. So, he decided against Visual Studio and instead built a [insert alternative here] app which turned out to be multi-platform. As a result, the killer app does not provide any lock-in value and is not a win for Windows.

Not that I'm in favor of lock-in, of course. I've heard of developers going Mac for TextMate, though, so I suppose freely facilitating the development of platform specific apps that are really usable on their target platform is probably a good principle if you're not preventing them from going the other route in any way.
Nothing has failed yet. You act like the project is over and done with. It's not. Linux has conquered pretty much every single space but the desktop. This is a huge success, especially when ten years ago it was exciting to read about any company deploying Linux publicly in any sort of way. Now it's expected.

As for the desktop, the work isn't finished, and it'll take a very long time to get to the point where it's a real contender. It's not a QA issue. The Linux desktop of today is actually of very high quality. It's that it's a very difficult space to compete in.
The stats are interesting, but still dangerous to draw direct conclusions from. (What the graphs suggest may be accurate, you just can't assume it from the article alone.)

For example, suppose a language's standard library is already powerful, or its 3rd party libraries are very reliable. If one language has one Really Good library to do X, and another language has 7 mediocre libraries because no one does X well, which language is more useful? Do you count the 7 projects required in the 2nd language as evidence of higher popularity, when they're all just picking up the slack?

Yet another example is projects that use multiple languages. For instance, I can combine scripting languages and lower-level languages easily. This may technically be evidence of the "popularity" of the lower-level language, but my hybrid could be using the scripting language much more.
Boost::lambda is a poor substitute for an actual lambda. Every time I have attempted to use it in a non-trivial way, I gave up because writing a one-off function object was clearer and required less code. (Albiet spread out more.)

Your claim that you can achieve everything in C++ misses the point. Sure, I can write lots of function objects every time I want to apply a function to a data structure (and I do), but I also have to write a lot of tedious code to do it. That tedious code increases the size of my code base, which increases the likelihood of errors and its cognitive load. You can write object-oriented programs using ANSI C, but your code base is going to be much larger than if you did it in a language with actual OO support.

When a programming concept has first-class support in a language, programs that use that concept are going to be shorter, clearer, and less likely to have bugs related to that concept's implementation.

Luckily, true anonymous function support will be a part of C++0x.
The Octoparts have such a great, inspiring story. It's the quintessential startup: some guys have a problem they personally encounter, they casually decide to fix the problem for themselves, and a business is created almost by consequence.
Point 1 and 2 were valid as of May 5th of this year. In my multiple correspondences it took over a week before they finally relented on reinstating my account just so that I can see it run out instead of getting my money back. But now that you point it out they've updated the ToS, Slicehost sucks a bit less than I had thought.

Point 3 was a comparison of response rates in customer service. Linode has been consistently faster in response time for both tech and billing response. My billing inquiries to Slicehost and my tech inquiries had longer turnaround.

Point 4 was a comparison of product offerings. Linode doesn't list a 4Gb memory option but I'm sure you can ask them for it but this wasn't in contention.

Point 5: I can flesh this out into paragraphs. Would that make you feel better?
Thanks. What's your email? I want to make sure to double check with you what I want to write next time on a public website.
Anybody use YubNub: "a command line for the Web" (http://yubnub.org)?

It's a similar idea that's been around for a few years.
Not only that, but he's revealing his ignorance of how the VMs in question differ. The 1.8 Matz VM traverses a partial Abstract Syntax Tree to interpret. The Gemstone VM is JIT-ing. On top of that, it has better GC.

Oh, this is really rich: "However, it seems to me that Smalltalk is far less flexible than Ruby, while being semantically much more machine-friendly." (From the comments.)

From my comments:

"Oh, and “Smalltalk is less flexible than Ruby?” Uh, no. Any serious language maven will tell you that they are almost identical in many respects, but that Smalltalk wins because you can not only modify the entire library, you can refactor base classes completely out of existence, and you can arbitrarily change the grammar. (And there’s even more!) This is precisely why it’s relatively easy to put Ruby on top of the Smalltalk VM. If you can bootstrap a Ruby parser into a Smalltalk image, the Smalltalk image can incrementally morph itself into Ruby.

(And another goal of the Rubinius project is to give Ruby the same level of meta-capabilities already present in Smalltalk!)"

PWNED!

EDIT: Okay, Sho has changed his tone in his latest comments. I think he just blogged off the cuff and didn't realize how widely read his blog post might be. He even says he's going to check out Smalltalk.
Hi syntaxfree,

I suggest you to read a blog post from my friend. http://bob.wyman.us/main/2008/04/liquidity-and-c.html#more

I hold similar point of view like him. Because I think the current problem is in fact open source succeeds greatly, but to bring a usable system to end users requires integration and current integration on desktop linux is not that great.

Another thing is for non native speakers, maybe we should just try to write sentences as simple as possible. I learned an old story from an old friend. She and her husband went to a graduate school in midwest and both were required to take a simple writing test. Her husband failed badly while she did great. She said to me : "I don't remember all those complex grammar rules of English so I just tried to write everything as simple as possible and my husband is proud of his study of grammar and tried to write very complex sentences".

I like PG and NNT's writings because they are simple and elegant. The most important is what do you want to say and can you say it clear. I remember when I was in graduate school, a rule is that "If one can not even clearly describe his/her dissertation, then it is impossible to defense it". (I was science major, but I guess for literary and philosophy, the opposite holds true because both disciplines adopt a different strategy: defense by obscuring)

edit: Can anyone tell me why this gets down voted? Because of url inside a post? I don't know where and why in this post makes people feel bad to down vote it?
Can you be a little more specific on how I would accomplish this using google analytics? The main thing I want is to run a method on adclick that stores some values in the database (used to track clicks, for the purposes of the app it needs to be done this way). Google analytics doesn't help accomplish that.
Xobni for the phone; Its like saying the "Youtube of documents" (Scribd) ... if your company is every quoted by someone else in the first position, Congratulations you've probably made it.
Because other sites recognizes that communication is two things: asymmetric between guys/gals and a premium feature, so they charge for it.
Depends on what you're going to use. Cygwin makes it easy. Using ActiveState + Native Win32 MySQL is going to be painful (I didn't have much success getting DBI/DBD::MySQL working in that environment, but that was a few years back).
It isn't such a hard space to compete in. There's a huge movement towards cheaper PCs. But anyway, for a while there was a huge gaping window when Linux was "cool" (the way OS X is now) and many many people tried it. The QA sucked by then.

I mean, I was a true believer -- I went all the way building a Gentoo desktop and whatnot. But none of the readymade distributions I tried (SuSE, Mandrake, Fedora, etc.) were up to the task of fueling a working environment where I don't have to worry about the working environment.

After a while, I just got a Mac and quit bothering with useless geekery. I went geeking into functional programming instead.

Did you get the news that the next batch of OLPC laptops will use Windows XP? They weren't bribed by Microsoft. It's not a matter of interface either, they'll keep the same interface.
so that was the problem.
Looks too much like Delicious Library (http://delicious-monster.com)
"When we started we didn't know how to do any Web programming whatsoever," Morey said. "We didn't even know how to set up a Web server or a database. But we both sort of fell in love with all the new things we were learning."

Wow! That pretty much sums it up, AFAIC.

Start with a problem. Find a way to solve that problem, no matter what it takes. Have fun.

What more could you ask for?
I personally don't agree, I think my working environment is directly related to productivity. Maybe you do only need a internet connection, but for me having whiteboards/glass, natural light and music is important. Also, sharing office space with bright people is always a plus as you can bounce ideas and you don't need to answer too many dump questions.
Anyone else get pissed off at the aarp ad covering the 1st letter of every sentence, and not being able to be closed or moved?

- or am I the last to not use ADblocker (using FF )
I've used XAMPP with PHP on Windows. Easy to setup and use. Supported toggling between PHP4 and PHP5 (I think the default was PHP4).

Currently I'm using VMWare and Ubuntu 7.x (be careful about using Ubuntu 8.x - I've seem to recall that VMWare tools may not have caught up and play well with that version yet).

I prefer the VMWare/Ubuntu approach for now since it will more closely mirror my intended deployment on Amazon Web Services (already started playing with an Ubuntu AMI).
I've looked at all those things, but I'm looking for something that's cross-browser and that works with the newest version of adsense and google analytics. I haven't found something that does, which is why I asked here.
Integration is a part of QA. I explicitly held that QA was one of the two main drivers of Linux's failure. And don't kid yourself, it's definitive -- Linux evokes images of crummy half-baked software in most people's heads.
I bought a VPS from VPSlink to learn how to set up a server about a year ago. They're plans start at $6 per month for a server with 128MB of RAM. That is a pretty wimpy box, but if you are just trying to see how things work, it gets the job done.

For me, the best way to learn is to just go at it. I recommend Ubuntu for ease of use, and the Ubuntu community can be quite helpful in getting a server set up. I just started with basic LAMP and then used google to find tutorials on adding and configuring other things such as virtual hosts, SSL, etc. I found it to be a pretty good way to learn.
Is there a section that benchmarks interpreters within the same language against one another?

I think the point of this article was to see how realistic the promises of MagLev are compared to the fruits of labor of other teams building specifically Ruby interpreters for the last couple of years.
I don't think there's any benefit to extending it beyond the neural lag time.
Yep, Amazon has absolutely nothing to worry about. This looks and behaves like a CD-ROM from 1997.

Vast amounts of slow-loading overdesigned chartjunk. The home page is stuffed with lovingly Photoshopped filler material, author photos, and the covers of books. It does seem like a great website for people who don't like to read.

A search on "Wallace Stevens" at borders.com brings me to this page:

http://www.borders.com/online/store/SearchResults?keyword=wa...

Prices are shown for only three books. The rest are shown as covers only; to see prices or titles you have to hover over them and wait for the slow-zooming JS popup. No user ratings anywhere, possibly because this site is ten years late to the party and doesn't have a database of user ratings like Amazon's. No used-book prices. You can get to a used-book site from Borders, but it comes complete with a warning popup (!) which tells you that it's a separate site requiring a separate login.

The equivalent Amazon page:

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_gw/102-8248473-4108915?url...

... makes it instantly apparent that Amazon's new-book prices are 20 to 40% lower... to say nothing of the used book prices, which are right there for comparison.

The best that can be said for this site is that it may have met its primary design criterion: "Do not be Amazon, and make sure people know that we're not Amazon."
That's a bad thing? I love Delicious Library. Stuff like the bookshelf, coverflow, and seeing a visual representation of items does actually have value.
Kevin Fox of Gmail & FriendFeed on User Experience Design
BTW, did I break any actual grammar rules? (Not a passive-agressive rhetorical question, a question asked in earnest)

The main thing is that in portuguese sentences within sentences have more connectives, are more common and thus more readable for the general public. I've been trying to contain sentence length and linearize thought (instead of exploring its arborescent structure).
Apple Store Detains Teens
Hmmm. I've used Texinfo+CVS+patches extensively working for the GNU Project. I despise using Microsoft Word for anything but the most simple tasks.

Perhaps folks just think differently about software usage.