skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, thats true, some people might suck at everything. But that can be managed as long as thats a small enough minority. (we have government welfare for a reason, right? :))

The hypothesis I proposed is too broad to prove easily. Maybe, we can start with a narrower premise. We can disprove "if you suck in English class, you are no good for college". A friend of mine, a maths genius, got a D in History class in college (without deliberately trying to fail) He had straight A's in all technical courses (CS, maths etc).
See http://joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/07/14.html

or just http://joelonsoftware.com will do at the moment.
No, I think they've got it right. All they need is one hit, one winning message, that'll drive traffic to their site. Once that happens, other people will want a chance to get some exposure there.

The one thing I would suggest is that they add an RSS feed and some syndication tools, and broaden their distribution on the net.
Good Android Book from CommonsWare
When Lighting Your Water on Fire Isn't a Magic Trick: Alberta Oil & Gas
Their web designers went to the "let's see how close we can get to a 37signals design" school apparently.

I've seen it 100 times and it's always boring.
Independent parser for every config file. It's the only way to do it such that it allows you to edit config files outside of Webmin, using the command line, using other tools, etc. and have it respect those changes, along with comments and file order. I've used dozens of management products over the years that start from a database and push out the config files via templates, and other such "One True Vision" kind of thing, and it's just not worth it. I can see a few places where it makes sense...for example, I see a place in the world for tools like puppet. But I've never been in a situation where I was willing to accept a GUI or management automation tool as the only way to ever edit a configuration file (though, with Webmin, I almost never need to hit the command line, I always can).

Webmin is written in Perl, and it uses a few relatively simple libraries that Jamie has built over the years (Webmin is 11 years old this October) for slurping files into arrays, breaking them into key=values, etc. Thus each module has a lot of code devoted to parsing...some more than others. We've begun working on making this functionality accessible to other Perl code (and eventually other code in general) via APIs, but that's still coming along slowly...and some of it is unfortunately not abstract enough to be as useful as we'd like. For example, using the Postfix module and the Sendmail module doesn't necessarily have the same semantics--starting and stopping the service are almost always the same between services, but anything config file related is very specific and you have to have knowledge of the directives to do anything with them.

Sometimes the parsers use regexes, sometimes array munging with splice/unsplice/push/pop/etc. grep and map play a big role in Webmin code as well, as they make a lot of kinds of parsing a lot more concise. The code can be intimidating at first, as it's really big (~400kLOC), and because Webmin has never (intentionally) broken backward compatibility for module authors (in eleven years!) has a lot of pretty hairy legacy code. Newer modules and those that are more aggressively maintained (Dovecot, Virtualmin and its related modules, Sendmail, Postfix, Apache, etc.) are nicer to read than older ones.

Anyway, I don't think there is any one silver bullet to deal with configuration files on Linux. They're all pretty wildly different, and some have very bizarre quirks and complexity. Apache, for example, can have arbitrary directives and syntax added by modules, and anything that parses the configuration has to be able to at least understand it well enough to skip over those sections and directives.
I'm surprised this didn't happen in Florida (although LA would be my second guess)
Yea, I think this article is just flaunted stupidity.

The author assumes that all times where any user information is needed, that all the information about that user will be needed. That is silly. Secondly, they completely ignores the billion and one problems he will now have.

For example, how do you ensure that the same AIM username is not used on multiple accounts? With the normalized schema, this is trivially done via a unique constraint on the user_id, screen_name, im_service triplet (probably the 3 make up the composite primary key of the table anyway, so viola, consistent data is ensured).

With the de-normalized schema, you are hopelessly fucked. All data consistency would be forced into some kind of ugly trigger.

Finally, joins are really-really-really fast for things like this. Frankly, the real thing that bites you is inconsistent data that violates basic assumptions your application makes, leading to unintended behavior of your application, most often exceptions that are not handled reasonably. In this case, for example, you might have a way to find your friend via AIM login name, but your app blows up when 2 seperate users are returned by the query due to there being 2 results (or you or your orm only get the first result, making finding the actual friend impossible).

And on and on. It is better to have slower fully reliable data than faster bullshit.
Apple iPhone 3G Black (16GB) Unlocked avail at cellhut.com 
The apple iphone comes in two colors depending on how Gigabytes of internal memory you choose. If you opt for 8 Gigabytes then you’re stuck with black, but if you spring for 16 Gigs then you can choose between black or white.
Crunchbase now has an API
Sorry, yes, what I meant to say was: cars depreciate faster in the US than they do in Australia.
In the future the site hopes to integrate drag-and-drop widgets and ad placement, but with a company that currently consists of only two co-founders, these are probably a ways off.

Yeah, that sounds impossible for two people to implement. rolls eyes
My contact info is in my profile. Be in touch.
I never had a professor shoot down any paper I turned in no matter how half assed it was. I guess I was that good ...

Now, it was the papers I never turned in that hurt me the most :)
I agree with just about everything he said. I hate XML and find it extremely tedious, with almost no payoff. I think it's useful when using it in the context of XSLT transformations, but as protocol to exchange data between two services etc., it's far more work than it's worth.
I haven't read any especially good literary criticism, however (as I obviously failed to make clear) I do enjoy reading and discussing a book.

What I hated was attempting to mash meaning into every word in the story, even when there was obviously none intended by the author.
An example I remember was when, in The Great Gatsby, it was mentioned in passing that someone had blue eyes, and the teacher went on and on about how that represented sadness, how it showed the economic differences between the classes, etc, etc. No, it meant that the eyes were blue. stop putting words in the author's mouth.

As for the kind of books that I had to read -- I found the Handmaid's Tale (Margaret Atwood) to be utterly horrid. Bad writing, large plot holes, poor continuity, etc.

To be fair, many of them (eg, A Streetcar Named Desire) I disliked simply because I found the characters distasteful and unappealing. ("meaningless people with meaningless lives")
Very thought-provoking. Spending so much time reading what's new, I had almost forgotten the pleasure of reading what's good.
Fair point. Might be worth having the application show something from the website, so that website stats are more representative, or at least look more impressive :)
PG, If you could add a "Working On" or "Working For" element to our user profiles, or if everyone decided on a standard format, we could create a nice little widget with the Crunchbase API.
A couple Go resources that even people who follow Go might not have stumbled upon:

http://www.gobooks.info/bib-difficulty.html

http://www.audiogolessons.com/

http://www.aygoschool.com/Ang-Yue_guide.pdf

Also, while I don't advocate violating copyright when it's possible to legally purchase the material, Scribd has PDFs of most of the famous English-language books if you want to check them out. There is also a .torrent that is basically everything on Scribd in a single download. Of course you can also get all the books here:

http://kiseido.com/go_books.htm
SQL Server supports "indexed views" which is basically the same as materialized views.
Yes, I agree. I meant that with a touch of sarcasm. This idea reminded me a little of that. I offer no opinion on any possible success.
Seven tech CEOs who used to be lawyers
I've never met a programmer with handwriting I'd like to use as a font...
Nice, in that case I accidentally met them when the lift opened on the wrong floor
Reddit.com: submit
MYOB Indonesia - Data MYOB Premier max 2GB? - MYOB Forum
"Not sure I would ever pay for software to tell me where I am spending my time." --- Maybe not you, but your boss may. Rescuetime needs a function, where it can work in the background, so bosses will see what their employees are doing online.

I worked on a big financial company, and they monitor a lot of stuff. I wouldn't be suprised that they will find something like this useful.
QuantCast is horribly unreliable, far worse than even their competitors who are themselves terribly unreliable.
Did you go to university in the '70s pr something?

All that's "expected" of students anymore is a pulse, AFAICT.
Is there really a considerable portion of American (or we could say Western) society that is practically illiterate? This seems counter-intuitive to me, I thought it was hardly possible to function at all without a basic understanding of the written word. If these people are out there, I have certainly never had any deep face-to-face conversation with them.

Try reading the comments on youtube.

I'd expect even a car mechanic to have enough brains to grasp some abstract literary concepts.

A car mechanic has enough brains to grasp some pretty complicated mechanical concepts, but for whatever reason he can quite easily fail to grasp a simple literary concept no matter how well it's explained. In the same way, I'm sure I can find you plenty of professors of English who are incapable of grasping how an engine works. In both cases, I'm not sure whether they're genuinely incapable, or whether they just have psychological barricades set up which lead them to think that this kind of knowledge is "beneath" them.

You'd have a hard time convincing me that most people who can't comment intelligently on 'The Wizard of Oz' are fit do be much more than corporate monkeys.

Most people out there probably just don't think that commenting intelligently on The Wizard of Oz is a worthwhile thing to do.
It makes me wonder how much of that is really "repeatable", and how much is due to things like Rails.

Probably a little of both.

I hear you, davidw, and understand why one would be a little skeptical of capricious claims like that.

OTOH, aren't these "out of the box thoughts" exactly what it sometimes takes to have a breakthrough. Some of my biggest breakthroughs weren't necessarily from lots of hard work, but from looking at things differently and doing much less work.

I believe 37signals has earned enough "literary license" to preach a little without losing too much cred. I trust their demonstrated performance before anyone else's theory, no matter how logical it sounds.
Cross that Chasm! Please ;-)
A vice president of a state university once said to me during an interview:

"I wonder when the state legislature is going to notice that they are giving us money to teach to students the same things they gave high schools money to teach to the same students?"
I tried it, and the minimum bid is 50 cents, which is 50 cents more than I'm willing to pay, so it's not "free".
One really cool Summize feature is the automatically updated search results. Say you're searching for something and you pick some conversation from the SERPs... Summize actually notifies you automatically, right on the page, if the conversation updates. Search with Gmail-like real-time updates? Awesome!
If they cost less money why are they harder? Do you think it’s a question of funding or a question of scale?
>I can bet that woman must be good at something she has never been tested on and probably does not know about.

Hah. That women may very well be average at a lot of things, and bad at the rest.

This idea that "everyone has a special gift!" is just pixie-dust dreaming. Most people simply aren't special, in any sense of the word.

Fight Club:
"We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact."

The sooner people learn that, the sooner they can get on with their lives of mediocrity.
We make people check out at PayPal when they bid, so that we can automatically charge them later. If there are less than 11 bids when midnight ET rolls around, we never send that charge. I take it that we should word that more clearly on the bidding form instructions?
When Sprint Overpays Taxes They Get a Refund, When I overpay Sprint I get Screwed
I went to college to be an English major. My first paper freshman year came back with a "D" on it and the remark, "Sophomoric Ramblings". It didn't seem logical, a bad grade and a compliment. (Since I was a freshman, I thought "sophomoric" meant "advanced".)

One week later, I became a math major and I've never looked back.
I got so fed up with discussing Phineas and Gene in high school that even the mention of them makes me convulse in hatred. That story did not just die while we were dissecting it. Its corpse rotted away and its bones decomposed completely, leaving nothing but a faint stench.

I can still hear my English teacher saying their names over and over again...
We decided to keep ads off the site because they're not as interesting as people writing things they genuinely want to say. The vibe is like Best of Craigslist.

Since there are only 10 messages that go up, we can screen manually.
You are starting to sound like a lot of the big web portals out there.

'Let's break an article into 10 pages so we get 10 times the hits!'

'Let's turn that AJAX gallery that loads really quick into separate pages so we get way better traffic scores!'

In jest to you - but they really have those types of meetings.
No, but your boss would.
It sounds less awful than binging on coffee. Like it or not, sometimes a lot of work has to be done in a short period of time.

I don't know why some people have such an aversion to tweaking the biochemical machine whichh they inhabit, except of course with caffeine, nicotine, and alcohol, all of which are harmful and less effective for their intended purpose than manufactured drugs.

I don't think any drug has done as much damage to my body as the intense stress that I suffer from being unable to focus on a project unless against a deadline and the attempts to complete massive amounts of work overnight wit a fuzzy-headed caffeine-fueled incompetence.

I know I sounds dangerous and iconoclastic here, but I think many people would share my point of view if they weren't conditioned since they were 5-years-old with "drugs are bad" propaganda in their schools.
...whether they just have psychological barricades...

I'm convinced that this is the bulk of the problem.

Perhaps I'm still an idealist, but I have always believed that almost anyone can learn almost anything.

Ever think of asking a parent how many times they'd let their baby fall before they gave up teaching him to walk? They'd look at you like you're from another planet. They'd probably answer, "He'll keep trying and falling until he walks."

Think how far ahead everyone would be if all teachers were like parents of one-year-olds.
"Drive traffic" is still the problem. If 10 people a day visit and a person gets 2 hits out of getting their link on the page, they won't be back.

If 10,000 people visited the page each day, and having a link on the page guaranteed 1,000 visitors, you give motivation for people to relist their link.

Another part of the problem is targeting: bad marketing is all about trying to get everyone's eyeballs, great marketing is about selling the guy who is starving for Mexican food a taco.

The current model is unsustainable.
Intel says first quad-core mobile chips on the horizon
The big news here is the 30% reduction of electricity usage. Before this announcement it was believed that new Montevina chips would use 29W instead of 34W, which means at 25W the power savings is roughly double what everyone was expecting. This is pretty huge.
Nor do many of the US's own citizens, sadly. Maybe that's why education is in this miserable state. Then again, when you compare it to third world countries...
That's most probably because he didn't care about his History class.

Not only that, in math (and programming, etc), you just "get it" and thereafter practice it to get the straight A's. In History, even if you understand everything, you'll always have to memorize dates, names, people, places, etc.

This why smart students do well in school without having to study too hard, but maybe get worse (or even better) grades than the not-so-smart students who study their ass off and memorize everything.
Well, plenty of people playing in bands sound like crap anyway.
Again, fair point :)
As long as the subscriber numbers are good, that's cool. I'm used to looking at websites rather than desktop software so it's a whole different game.

Also depends on their strategy. I'd expect the summary to display some recommendations from a website, maybe some recommended software (adverts), etc Maybe some social networking - "Here's some people who have similar usage patterns to you. Go chat."
I wish I understood that. I've been learning low-level stuff lately, assembly, but I still have a way to go it seems...
How to Find the Right VC for Your Company
see rx.el in (i think) the emacs-lisp directory
they already have complete access to your system using VNC, and they already have complete stats of all your browsing
Glen Rice Jr. Going to College | My Philly Network
Obfuscated JavaScript Redux - Malware's new tricks
Another option is that traditional media has caught up with the bloggers and is using Digg to drive traffic to their online sites.

NY Times and Guardian both seem to be providing much more "usable" online content that shows up here, on reddit and digg alot more often.
Great post. I plus-voted you.
Maybe, but why spend the time creating something if you can buy it, have one less competitor (wasn't it planning on using other services too?), and get some very talented engineers too?

Normally, yes its lazy - but in cases like this its just the smart thing to do...
Two contractions and one possessive; what's your problem?
Who'll win the election in November? A baseball stats technique may predict the answer.
My trip to Boston: The 7 tips from Y Combinator
yeah almost all of them added social networking links to each of their stories, so people are more likely to submit/confirm a new story, and it goes to the top faster compared to a nobody blog that gets 20 diggs a day
...these programming blitzkriegs are some of my favorite periods in life. Under the right conditions, writing software is so intensely pleasurable it should be illegal.

Couldn't have said it better myself.
Game interface infringes copyright
This list may be useful... http://lispjobs.wordpress.com/category/ai/
Viral Marketing Review: Using and Identifying Design Patterns
I'm looking forward to using that feature above all. It's like having Writeboard built into your blog. Except you can use Markdown instead of Textile!
> I trust their demonstrated performance before anyone else's theory, no matter how logical it sounds.

This stuff isn't a science, but still, one example doesn't mean that something works for anyone but the example.

I like their approach and what they have to say, by and large, just that I have some nagging doubts that it may only apply to them.

One of the things I like about PG and YC is that he's taken his approach, and applied it to many companies, and gathered data in the process. It's still not, nor ever will be "scientific", but at least he's getting some more data points.
Extra Extra Traffic Secrets 2.0 TIDAL WAVE Hits The Web
Todays the day John Reese releases his fully reproduced Traffic Secrets 2.0 course. I can’t tell you how many emails I received this morning about John Reeses launch. I’m sure you’ve probably received a few yourself.
I really enjoyed Handmaid's Tale when I read it.

Of course, I didn't read it for school, which might make all the difference.
The reason that, for example, Palestinian textbooks contain maps omitting Israel is that they don't want to teach their children a fair and peaceful message.

Schools are great when people are reasonably open to living peacefully but can't work when people do not want peace and sabotage attempts at real education. So, unfortunately, we're going to need a bunch of missiles.

I know it's hard to grasp, but there are people who do things like destroy greenhouses of their own out of spite or hate. If you give them a a voluntary choice, some people don't want peace; their agenda for how the world should be comes first.

You know, it's funny, one of the memes strong enough to change some dangerous people enough to be safe is Christianity, but the idea of converting Muslims to Christianity is met with extremely loud screeching about how we shouldn't do that and they should be allowed to believe the (uncivilized) things they believe now. If we can't convert them to peaceful Western values then it's going to be missiles.
Brain Cell / The Universe
This puts my faith back into humanity. I've heard people say "we should have nuked Afghanistan, to show that we are not to be messed with... you punch a bully in the face, you don't talk to him trying to work out your differences."

I've always felt that taking people out of ignorance will always make them less inclined to kill. The more logical justification people have for doing good and not doing bad vs purely faith-based, the harder it is for some religious nut-job to come in and say "kill the infidels in the name of god".
Join NextNY, sign up for the email list, start going to events and start networking. http://nextny.org/
Google's "Edit Search results" experiment
Thin skin much? It was a (possibly lame) attempt at self-deprecating humor.

I was trying to say that not everyone is cut out for coding, and if you haven't had an interest in it (or that type of thing) before, you probably won't be very good at it. I have seen this with a bunch of people who thought they'd get into IT and be millionaires.
Some of those reasons seem a bit strange to pin on a technology that from my understanding has never claimed to be good at encoding binary data or none hierarchical data.

XML is used to create custom mark-up languages for documents, so why you would put binary data in it I don’t know, surely you’re missing the point if that’s what you’re doing. Perhaps store a link to a binary file rather than encoding the binary inside the XML.

As for the verboseness of it, that’s a trade-off that you consciously make when you choose to use XML, if you want to use binary data and have small files then use a binary format. You gain file size and efficiency loss, but you also get the added advantages of interoperability over hardware and software systems - which is probably the main reason you would want to use XML in the first place.

As for human readability, I don’t think the creators of XML claimed it to be readable like a book, but rather a human being could look at it and see language rather than gobbledygook! It might be hard to understand when there’s loads of XML but it’s still 'readable'.

Editor problems aren’t really the fault of XML either, that’s a bit like saying a song sucks because you’ve got a rubbish CD player.
Wonderful.

And did you know one antonym for "I'm clueless, hold my hand" is "Google"?

http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&lr=&q=stimul...