skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Co-evolving - we change technology by creating it, and then it changes us as we use it
Car Sales at 10-Year Low
And of course, there's always the Django Book:
http://www.djangobook.com/
32 Sci-Fi novels that you should add to your reading list
How to beat AVG's fake traffic spew
It's obvious that the OP hasn't even tried to find out any of this information for himself.
Decent reminder about the issue. I think I've heard the Bob and the crystal widgets story before. Actually, that's a great name for a company. Or a band. "Bob and the Crystal Widgets".

I think the main case where Fail Open is important is if it prevents physical access/egress. Your laser alarm system can fail closed, because an inappropriate alarm won't stop someone exiting the shop. Your heavy iron bars should fail open, so you don't end up with trapped customers in a fire.

I can't think of any data/online cases where failing closed is really dangerous, as opposed to inconvenient, but I'm pre-coffee.
What the Olympics reveal, and conceal, about China
Also, forgot to mention the fact doing a web startup in these areas is cheap, quick, easy, and more likely to have a bigger payoff compared to building the kind of tools you mention.
Seconded on CI but what I'm surprised about is that there are so many of these speed benchmarks amongst frameworks and what not. But no definite benchmarks on security. Which is a concern of mine in any web project that invovles PHP.
AT&T says original iPhones can be inactivated and used as WiFi iPods
No matter how good the service is, I think the design of the homepage could use a lot of work. Just my two cents.
I grew up thinking all array indices started at 0. That belief was held up until I met Lua of course.
Fair points. I didn't know vim had tramp functionality. What's it called?
Cutting Edge Browsers and Their Development Tools
Exactly. When I was a proto-hacker I suffered from a kind of paranoid monoglossia. I had found Perl, Perl made me happy, therefore I needed no other languages, thankyouverymuch.

Over time, I've grown out of that, and have learned to appreciate learning a language simply for the sake of learning it. Playing with Erlang and Lisp and C makes you a better Rubyist. Sub any other languages for those 4.

So my advice? Pick one. Any one will do. Spend a week hacking in it. Read a little, but don't read too much without actually using the language. Write some programs that solve a very small itch, or do something fun like simulating a swarm of bees or creating two bots that battle to the death. Play, and then after a week or two, play with something else.

I think new programmers sometimes worry about learning a language that will be financially viable, or will help them get a job. I know I did. I also know I'm worse off for that belief. I would have been better served, both personally and professionally, if I'd just played more.
Update: I've tried on 3 different machines across 5 different browsers now, and this problem persists across all machine / browser combinations. I created an account and tried with that, and there was no problem upvoting anything.

So, it would appear it's a problem with my specific account somehow. Thanks to everyone for helping figure out where the problem might at least lay.
Are you kidding me? Once cheap massive parallelism becomes the norm, you're going to see amazing applications for the average person, especially intelligent programs. For examples, intelligent answering systems, voice recognition, handwriting recognition, face recognition, dog walker, housekeeping robots, portable language translators, self-driving vehicles, sentries, etc... The possibilities are endless.
Campus copyright battle moves to textbook torrents
CI is very barebones and minimalistic by default, which is what causes the nice benchmarking results. but it also means you might need to do some extra overhead work to get that little bit of functionality you need, or import the right library, as most things are turned off by default.

i'm a long time CI user and i like it more than cake/zend.
I disagree that a kick-ass multicore processor is not a product, especially if you can get $500 for every one that comes out of the fab.
For my last party invite, I tried using facebook but a lot of people balked at it. Pretty sure the reason was that it forces you to think that you need to sign up/log in and people just want to have an easy access to event time/address, and a yes/no button to rsvp.

I just created a test on anyvite and it was super easy and common-sense. Definitely preferrable to facebook in my opinion. Two comments though:

1. RSVP dropdown is smallish/hard to notice.
2. Background images stretch in an ugly way, at least on my work IE 1024 x 768.

Otherwise, a great site!
A slightly advanced intro to vim
We use Compact Flash as hdd's is small embedded systems. They are 10x more battery efficient than a standard laptop hdd and twice as efficient as a microdrive.

Of course, the largest CF we use is 8 GB and the typical size is 2-4 gb. (I did my consumption tests on 4GB Sandisks). The smallest used in the article was 32GB. Perhaps power consumption increases dramatically with size in SSD's?
Take a position with a startup that has no equity grant program yet?
I have an opportunity to join a startup on the west coast (this would involve relocating for me) that is offering an industry competitive salary, but it does not yet have a program to grant employee stock interests. They are planning on working this out over the next few months. How much risk am I taking by joining? I'm afraid that I would lose any negotiating leverage over how much equity I would get since I don't know the amount before I join. Would someone joining the company after I was there for a few months be able to negotiate a much better deal?
How to launch an iPhone: A tale of two videos
This seems more like Wikipedia's ethos, rather than Google's. A Google restaurant wouldn't actually serve food, they'd just give you a list of (hopefully the best) places to get the meal you had requested. Of course there would be restaurants that would have bid get listed as well as ones who did black-hat SEO to get to the top.

But often the top entry would be a Wikipedia restaurant. The food would be prepared by what seemed to be a big group of people, but it was really controlled by a small group of Chef Ramsey types who would slap the hands of wannabe chefs and quickly remove the side of lutefisk some joker slapped on your order of vegan tacos just before it left the kitchen.
"Freedom is a terrible gift, and the theory behind all dictatorships is that 'the people' do not want freedom. They want bread and circuses. They want workman's compensation and fringe benefits and TV. Give up your free will, give up your freedom to make choices, listen to the expert, and you will have three cars in your garage, steak on the table, and you will no longer have to suffer the agony of choice."
-- Madeleine L'Engle, in "Walking on Water"
1) Tcl/Tk is very very easy to learn (and to embed in C applications)

2) I've never implemented my own widgets but plenty of people have, check out BLT as an example

3) I don't know what Enso is I'm afraid.
Thanks. looks good.
The headline goes into as much detail as this entire article. I'm not even kidding. The bankers "screwed everything up" isn't even a snippet of a longer quote from the article. It's presented the exact same way in the article with no added context or background. There's no explanation or even speculation as to how the bankers might have "screwed everything up". This article is complete and utter garbage.
Really, really glad to see that Down and out in the Magic Kingdom made the list!
Jobs vs. Gates: A thirty year war
In my opinion, that's exactly what they are doing. They have adopted a paralllel computing model (multithreading) that is known to be a pain in the ass to program. So far, they have no plans to change the model. They either don't know how or they are stuck in a rut because they need to maintain compatibility with legacy systems. They are in a state of panic right now, spending money left and right trying to find a solution that does not exist for their chosen model. This is a great opportunity for some other company (or a startup) to come on the scene and make a killing.
http://de.amiando.com/index.html?requestLanguage=EN

The european competitor, as a I european I prefer them
I don't know all the specifics, but I doubt that was a "successful" exit.
I find this to be strongly lacking in completeness. There are many different PHP frameworks, libraries, etc. The author decided to compare only 3. Comparing only 3 of anything in a field that is easily 10 times that is somewhat useless, and seems somewhat bias.

That said, I feel it necessary to put together an actual comprehensive test of all the leading frameworks and libraries across platforms. Let me get my WAPT fired up. I'll post the results sometime this month.

(disclaimer: I'm affiliated with NOLOH (http://www.noloh.com))
This is related to this thread. I followed the advice given as well as my own advice. -> http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=169295
I'd rather eat at "Apple applied to dining". Pick a few very specific dishes and the cook them exceptionally well.

I wouldn't always be in the mood for Apple dining, but when I was, I'd know where to go.
My wife calls shyness a form of selfishness, as we decide not to share of ourselves with others.
The article seems to contradict itself.

Also, these are still pretty new, and their power efficiency (and prices, ahem) will no doubt improve over time.
I have to disagree. I think that XML is better used for machine-consumable processes rather than human-edited ones. The wealth of tools available mitigate the need to roll your own data format and help ensure that your output will be usable by anyone with a (ubiquitous) XML parser. If your data will be used by an arbitrary 3rd party there are a lot of advantages to using XML.

Optimizing for ease of development is certainly a good goal too. Ease of development equates directly to lowered maintenance costs and redevelopment of poor code. In my business at least the maintenance costs far outweigh the initial expenditures when evaluating different technologies.

EDIT: I agree that SOAP is abominable. But that's due to its overall architecture rather than its use of XML.
I'm bootstrapping my current startup, and putting up a splash page would have taken me a couple of hours to set up a slicehost server, install a simple php script, or web framework du jour, and then code and design the splash page with the "put your email in here" form.

At this point, on my day job, my time is worth $75 an hour. So, if I can save 6 minutes, I've saved myself $7.50. By spending $5 a month on launchsplash, I've saved myself about $250 worth of my time.

It's not a matter of having to use the service. It's a matter of expediency. The quickest/cheapest way to get from point a to point b for me is to outsource my splash page and email collection right now. It's not a core competency, why not outsource it?
It would be interesting to see the Kohana framework (http://kohanaphp.com) compared, since it was originally a fork of CI, but includes a true ORM library.
Web Design Case Study: Search
"Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."
It is probably not a good strategy to blame yourself of being selfish if you are already shy, since that will just hurt your self-evaluation and make you more shy.

Better to realize that other (including non-shy) people are just as self-absorbed as you are, and therefore wont bother to judge you - they are far to busy judging themselves and wondering how other people will judge them! :)
Word. Looking for programming info via combinations of del.icio.us tags became surprisingly useful for me once I knew the basics well enough to know what I was looking for.

> admin tasks you do repetitivly in whatever o/s you use.

Excellent advice. When you find yourself in a situation where you keep having to do something boring and repetitive, try to write a script for it. The immediate feedback and sense of accomplishment from this will teach you things that spending weeks on internet forums never could.
Here's how it works: Joe Manager goes to Silicon Valley and sees all these incredibly talented Indian engineers and thinks wow, I gots to hire me some of them.

What he fails to understand is that an Indian entrepreneur in Silicon Valley is not really representative of Indians as a whole, any more than a pro athlete is representative of the fitness of the average American, or a Hollywood A-lister is representative of how the average person looks.

In fact the quality of engineer you will get outsourcing to India is lower than the average, because the most talented engineers (in any country) aren't really interested in working for huge companies on other people's dull corporate applications. They're busy working on their own startups or at least for small companies doing interesting work, whether in India or in the US.
Agreed, for me it's always disappointing to find articles on HN from sites like nytimes, cnn, or their competitors.
Interesting list.

Timeline by Michael Crichton is only worth reading because of how it portrays history. As sci-fi or entertainment it’s horrible and it basicly assumes everyone is an stupid but it does show history far more accurately than most books.
Scaling Facebook vs. scaling LinkedIn
I would, negotiate a deal now, if they don't stick to it at the time they allocate or take too long to allocate than you can always leave and make that clear from the start.

Unless you feel you have a better option...
Akkartik and I talked for quite a while at the reception before startup school. He's a really nice guy and I wish him all the best in finding a new gig.

If someone needs a CTO, I'd drop him a line.

Full disclosure: I really don't have any vested interest in this at all. Our conversation from 4 months ago just stuck with me, and I thought I'd give him a plug.
no greg-egan or ian-m-banks or arthur-c-clarke...what gives ?
Code Coverage Analysis
The Most Addictive Facebook Apps Are Games
IM Feeds Provides RSS Updates via IM
Second Life land value, premium accounts decline
This will probably run contrary to all the other advice you get here, but my take is: it doesn't matter whether they have a stock plan yet. It is not as if a pre-existing stock plan really protects you; after multiple rounds of VC, any deal that was on the table when you started will have been rewritten many times over.
Exactly. If the database server blew up, there's nothing my program can do. I could try reconnecting, and some libraries do, but that doesn't usually help anything. Once the server is back up, the Fibonacci (or exponential) back-off is so high that's it's faster to just restart the program manually. So usually, dying is easier for everyone.
Agreed. There's nothing inherently power-hungry about flash. It's read cycle looks a lot like DRAM's, but there is no refresh required and the quiescent power is zero (duh, I guess: that's what non-volatile means).

A flash drive running full tilt and hitting all the cells as fast as possible is probably going to have power consumption about the same as a DRAM array of the same size and cycle time, so somewhere in the low-integer watts. If existing drives are consuming more than that at "idle", then it's pretty clearly a hardware bug that should be fixed.
The old 900:

2 hours battery life.

The new 901:

5 hours battery life.

With the same disk (SSD), battery and screen. The only significant component change is the processor. If the disk peaks at 2W/4W (SSD/SP) and is mostly idle then you would really expect it to be lost in the noise of the 20W+ for the rest of the system.
I'm actually going to have to agree here even though I'm usually a little annoyed by the whole "off topic" stream that so often emerges.

While interesting in its own right, the story does not fit the profile of what I come to HN to find. I see this stuff on Google news on my way to HN.

I'd hate to think of Hacker news being replaced in any large percentage by public interest news.

No upvote here. An interesting story that was legitimately off topic.
"Parallel programming is a pain in the ass."

Eh, it is really not that bad.
Where's "Dhalgren"?
Loom: Annotation based Java framework
Though an option plan doesn't protect you, once you've been granted a specific number of options (or rather, restricted stock), there is little anyone can do do take them away from you, short of firing you, without diluting the founders equally.
The Andromeda Strain is really, really dated. Shouldn't be on the list.
most of those got turned into movies. Speaking of which, I'd love to see Ender's game movie but it'll probably suck since it'll be a bunch of new young actors
This is kind of along the lines of what the senior people at the company were telling me. That you have to believe in the idea of the company and have faith that they will take care of employees and want you to be 110% committed to making the company a huge success by giving you a generous equity package.
Qt and Windows CE
http://www.just-eat.co.uk/pages/frontpage.aspx -- this is a site that originally started in Denmark but they seem to have expanded to UK etc. pretty well.

You order and pay online (which is nice for deliveries); they either phone in your order or use some kind of Internet or fax device to send it in (I'm not sure about the details of the restaruant communication). This is perfect for a local pizza/grill place (of which there are a huge amount of in Denmark); when you sell a pizza for 50kr there's not much margin for complex IT or even a simple web page. The pizza place takes care of the delivery.

They get most of their money from restaurants but seem to offer some monthly subscription with a few extra features and small discount at certain "VIP" restaurants.
TFA provides enlightenment:

In contrast, flash SSDs only seem to know two states: active or idle. We don’t have specific information on this, but we received confirmation from two vendors that many flash devices don’t feature power saving mechanisms yet.
Blockbuster Withdraws Proposal to Acquire Circuit City
If you like the company and are happy with the salary, sure: take the job. But don't expect that they'll suddenly drop a big equity package in your lap in a few months. You're absolutely right that you will lose most of your leverage by taking the job first.

And let's be honest: it's not like this is brain surgery. If they really wanted you and needed to put together a stock grant to do it, they would.

So treat it like any other job: if the compensation and work interests you, go for it.
Just remember to get it down in written form, just to protect yourself from all those fake promises companies always make when you join.

"Oh yeah you'll get a 15K raise if we like what we see after 3 months" - then 3 months later somehow you always fall short of their expectations
Ask YC: A different kind of scaling question...why don't web dev shops scale?
In a recent submission, I asked if any freelance developers would be willing to share office space. I thought it would be a great environment working around other good coders to share our knowledge and leverage our contacts. With the right group of people and projects, we could develop a better professional reputation than any of us could by ourselves.

But that got me thinking: why aren't there any large web development shops? (Or are there?) The largest I've seen is around 6-8 guys. I know developing software for other people isn't as sexy as working on your own startup, but I enjoy it and it pays well. I've worked with smaller shops in various states, and they have developed local reputations as doing good work, but never talked of big expansion plans.

I've got a few theories...

- It's hard to expand and keep your average talent level high. Great coders want to work for a startup or write internal software for Microsoft/Google, not for some car dealership with an $3,000 budget.

- If you do have a group of good coders, it's much more profitable to develop your own software/websites and sell/license them than to continually solicit gigs.

- Service-based businesses are inherently harder to scale. The CEO of a product-based business knows each of his stores have a low standard deviation in terms of customer experience. Not so for programmers, carpenters, lawyers, etc. That's why there's no country-wide lawyer firm with a good reputation and thousands of franchises. However, a counter-example is large accounting firms. How do they scale?

- I've run into several really good freelancers who work by themselves and bill multiples per-hour of what I can charge. For them, they have no incentive to partner with anyone.

Coders are disparaging of headhunters because of the large percentage they scrape off the top, but many still use them to get work. It seems large companies are more willing to deal with a firm because of their reputation and the feeling of safety. If they can bill at $200/hour and pay the coders $60/hour, more power to them - that's why I love capitalism. But why isn't there a coalition of programmers with a great reputation that can do the same thing? They can guarantee the work of their members, buy insurance against data loss or programmer theft, and do all those things which make companies willing to pay $200/hour.

One absolute requirement of a setup like this is to only work on large and well-funded projects. No good web developer wants to make brochure-ware or to spend 5 hours on a inventory app for a local flower shop, that's bulls*. I'm talking about competing with CyberCoders, Robert Half, MATRIX Resources. Not right off the bat, of course, but eventually...

What's your thoughts?
Redeye VC: The Story of Francis Bates
If the salary is industry competative then the only thing you need the stock for is to compensate you for risk of losing your job.

Given that any losses you have are likley to be limited to a few months salary (unless you work in a field with low mobility, or they have a huge non compete) I wouldn't worry too much and then consider any equity to be pure bonus if it does turn up.
Sounds like they are not funded (or self funded). Any VC or lead angel would have required an options pool as part of the funding round. Assuming this is not true, granting options from an existing options pool is as simple as a few documents, if they can not do this it seems to me to be a sign of bigger problems.

"it doesn't matter whether they have a stock plan yet. It is not as if a pre-existing stock plan really protects you; after multiple rounds of VC, any deal that was on the table when you started will have been rewritten many times over."

Somewhat true, you are liable to be diluted over subsequent funding rounds, but then so is everyone else. Its no excuse not to grant options immediately. Its not as if the basics of options change with subsequent funding rounds. The only thing that should matter is the strike price at the date they are granted, which means you want to get them ASAP.
If this is a true startup, meaning a company where equity is a big component of compensation, then you should negotiate the amount of equity you'll get (as a percentage of the fully-diluted shares, not as a mere number of shares) when they hire you. Taking a job at a true startup without knowing how much equity you'll get would be like taking a job at an ordinary company without knowing what the salary would be.

On the other hand, if they don't currently have an option plan, they're probably not a true startup.
Right, because we all know how well iMac lookalikes sell.