skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
after trying to learn Emacs for a couple of years I had a similar experience once I learned enough of the basics. after I started to master Emacs I could no longer go back to any other editor. I just wished I would have learned Emacs sooner instead of looking for excuses for 2 years.
There has been some genuine research work in this area, with pretty much the ideas that you're suggesting. Google for data-flow computer architecture for a low-level take on the idea at the instruction level. (This guy seems to be talking about some similar concepts in places, but it's difficult to tell beneath the incoherence.)

There's also a bunch of work been done (with pure-functional computations or languages, for example, as well as some weirder research work with imperative languages), examining the writing of programs with automatic parallelism, with sequential ordering only when explicitly requested.

However, there's a big difference between actual work and the stuff this guy is spouting.
Your Boss Is a Monkey: "Managing Up" using tricks of exotic-animal training
Well, sorta. Honestly, the problem here was that your platform sucked. If sem_init() "doesn't work" on OS X (is that really true?), there's no guarantee that the putative exception-enabled version would be properly throwing an exception either. Exceptions can be really useful, but they won't fix broken libraries for you.

And it's also true that the POSIX synchronization primitives are a good example of how not to implement error handling in a C API. Too many things that are fundamentally usage errors (and should be caught at compile time) are flagged at runtime, leading to the silent failure issue you saw.
There is so much wrong with this I don't know where to start.

Paralysis of options!

I mean seriously. If I were in charge of this company, I'd fire everyone, format all of the servers and start the company over. You just can't fix it when its that far gone!
"No ORM (such as Hibernate); they use straight JDBC ... Spring as glue"

Spring has stuff in it to make working with JDBC much more sane (much less exception handling code to write, you can make it DRY, etc.). I'd be very surprised if they weren't using that.
seattle, austin, nyc, & boston. i'm fairly sure this has been discussed in length in the past.
25mm in revenues is small?

Yep. $12.5-25 million will only support about 100-200 employees. Maybe more, if they're not high end people (but I suspect Hulu does not have a lot of positions that don't require some sort of high end expertise--very little call for consumer sales or tech support in a business like that).

100-200 people is still a pretty small business in modern terms. Google employs 35,000 (or something like that). Microsoft, Sun, IBM, and Intel probably dwarf Googles numbers.
personal freedom and professional control.
Dangerous New Chris Anderson Theory: We No Longer Need Logic
`git rebase --interactive' is a tremendously cool tool. The rest of these are pretty basic and should be familiar to most git users.
Bugger. I have seen this many a time. But given you have a product launch ready and they are still talking, I would suggest using their might as your opportunity. Right now, I would be scanning the net, anyone posting about Flash I would send them a press release.

Just maybe you can get a mention off the topic as its hot right now.
Learning Ruby on Rails with Heroku Episode 1
That doesn't work even in the simplest cases. I know because it's the first thing I tried when I needed to find child Flash files and external references in Flash files. This is actually a tricky problem to solve. It's easy enough to find external references if the entire URL is in a string or assigned to a variable. These go in the constant pool and it's trivial to pull everything from there and try to identify URLs. When URLs are built up using concatenation they are much more difficult to find. If/else logic is even more difficult. At this point you need to implement your own little Flash player. The problem here is that it's not enough to only implement the few instructions you're interested in. The Flash Player is a stack-based VM and if you don't implement all the instructions your stack will get hosed.

The Flash files that pull in their content from XML are easy once you find the external references. You simply crawl the references like you would any other page. Text embedded in Flash is another story...

If you're curious to see how this works Describe SWF is a great little tool and there's some good documentation on SWF at the Flasm site.

http://www.flagstonesoftware.com/describe/index.html
http://flasm.sourceforge.net/
I learned Emacs cold turkey this summer and am loving it. The only problem is I use Visual Studio at work and the Emacs key bindings for it are not so good. So I end up deleting a line every time I try to save my files with ctrl-x ctrl-s :-)
Django releases File Uploads
Yup, I did the same thing about 14 years ago. I was steadfastly using pico (yeah, yeah, don't ask) until I finally sat down and forced myself to spend a week in emacs, and finally "got it".

And I did it all again a few years later when (no longer using terminals or other people's computers) I finally bothered to map the control key to the left of "A", meta to underneath the '/' (sadly not always consistent on PC keyboards), stopped using the non-alpha keys, and realized how nice the "weird" keybindings always were.
Agile: Writing Good User Stories
Research Triangle in North Carolina:
http://www.rtp.org/main/
True in theory but the code given:

catch database error {
warn "Whoa, your database is broken!";
}

Ignores all that and hides the error. I only point this out because I have seen a lot of real world code where people skip even the assert in the catch statement.

Edit: You can add all of this stuff manually (or as part of the warn function) but I would like to see a language where you can define a standard place where all errors are logged independent of the given code unless it’s explicitly overridden. So you people can't add empty catch blocks.
Gnip: Grand Central Station for the Social Web
In my opinion, as a student, you must concentrate on subjects like Data structures, Algorithms and Operating Systems (If you have already done a course in these then go for advanced levels). They are the foundations. Moreover a semester is way too less for C/C++ . Once you have a good grasp on C/C++, learning most of the other languages will be fairly easy.
Interesting that the Techcrunch article hit the front page here and the Google blog article http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/06/google-learns-to-craw... hit the front page of Reddit.
Don't hide or disable menu items
Ships: August 7th, 2008

Why so long?
I like what you've done so far.

Not sure of your funding/day-job(if exists) situation. My first instinct would be to keep going with it. There may be opportunities to use the code as a competitor to Google (at time people thought they too were stupid for reinventing a wheel), or to create something that could be licensed to people to use on their own site for custom content search.

There are also SEO opportunities, to crawl a flash-heavy site and dynamically create pages with the same keywords/content that is easier for other search engines to find.

You could also expand to other sorts of rich meta-data, like indexing the EXIM data on photos, etc.
all good things in life do
Seattle and NYC for sure - and judging from the Web Innovators Group having hundreds of attendees, Boston as well.
Long Live Social Engineering! Identify Theft in Real Life
Googles Ethos, Applied to Dining
This hearkens back to the good ole' days when we had to steal data in person! We didn't have no Internet! Just our wardialers, blue boxes, Jolt cola and raw personality.
Is anyone using this? How portable is the configuration?
Yes, keep going. Look at it as a sort of market validation for your product. You've done a lot of work, now look for angles to possibly differentiate yourself.

The door has gotten a little harder to get through but it is by no means closed. Who knows, G and Y jumping into the market may make your technology a valuable acquisition for someone else looking to compete in search.
I think it would be better if it was labeled with the dollar amount instead of the sequence number as Immad suggested. This would both be less confusing and make the "value" of the item clearer.
I have never been able to use the finally block. I have yet to see an example where you would want to use it.
True, but in the above code such information is not propagated outside of the function. If you want to add that you need to throw another exception inside of the catch block or skip the catch.
I love all the subtle touches in the video, like the Monster.com page being up in the beginning.

Favorite part though: logging in to guy's Exchange account and deleting the message from the sent box. Brilliant.
Thanks to everyone for some great responses. I think we can live with the number 3!

Vesting is something we've definitely thought about - I now just need to do a lot more reading/learning about vesting arrangements and unallocated stock. Anyone know any good resources on these?

We also definitely need a good startup lawyer! Any recommendations for people in London?

Thanks again
What the experiment implies (assuming it applies to a broader range of decisions than just those in the experiment) is that the act of getting on the elevator, reading the names, and pushing the correct button is mostly done on unconscious autopilot following the conscious decision to go to your doctor's, despite the illusion that you are consciously reasoning about each step.

Likewise, Burger King purchases are unlikely to require conscious thought: you probably already knew what you were in the mood for when you entered the Burger King, and you certainly had a good idea what was on the menu before seeing it. Matching your known desires with the available choices (also largely known) was an automated process that didn't involve a conscious decision.
Yes, 100-200 is a small company, but do you think they even have that many? For a site that went live in March, I'd be surprised if they had anywhere close to that many employees.

I don't think any of those companies would have had that many employees 4 months after going live.

So 12.5-25 million? I'd say they're doing pretty well for themselves..
I'm trying to do the same thing right now. After about an hour of using it though, I start wanting to beat my head against the wall because I haven't yet mastered everything in Emacs that I used to be able to do in Vim.
It's really not that hard to just type "site:news.ycombinator.com <search terms>" into google. Just sayin...
I've been struggling with this one myself. My current company will have grown from 50 people in January '07 to 300+ in January '09. And the larger we get, the longer it seems to take to get anything done.

I'm very interested in hearing strategies for keeping a company aggressively small without having to give up the ability to chase increasing revenue.
A design for a train that never stops
wow your market just got validated by the major players - this is no reason to stop, you do however need to push forward on a specific niche - this can be seen a major set back or opportunity - likely there is a lot of buzz on this announcement. maybe you can great some adwords adds against the news story keywords and get folks that are excited about this server to try our your site first.
Are there any questions we didn't ask or other stats Ruby hackers would find interesting?

Perhaps most common used gems or plugins?
I was the same way in school. I also used pico for a long time, and for a while after that, I used vim, but only with the bare minimum necessary for edit, save, up, down, left, right. I finally had a teacher that required us to use Emacs, and I've never looked back.
The finance guys are buying operational experience by funding you.

Their goal is a good rate of return. They have (or should have) no interest in running your business, because they already have a business of their own to manage.
easy: silicon valley then boston, seattle, austin, and nyc

why do you ask?
Exceptions in mainstream languages have a fatal flaw: they unconditionally unwind the stack when thrown. This sacrifices flexibility and makes it unnecessarily difficult to save state or take action at the point of the throw. Of all languages I've ever seen, only Common Lisp really does this right by separating out the concept of signaling a condition and of handling it.

I don't want to get into the details here, but Kent Pitman wrote a great paper on the subject: http://www.nhplace.com/kent/Papers/Condition-Handling-2001.h...
Thanks. That's cheating, you can't use magic :) We use Spring in our current app and I don't know how it does the cross-cutting it does; it just does.
I have not really researched these into depth just yet, but you should check out the following links:

http://www.techstars.org/

http://www.iwalphalab.org/default.aspx
Consider licensing your search tech to companies not blessed by Adobe? (I.e., other than Google / Yahoo!) I know my company would be interested.
It's a bit different when you're an NBC / News Corp joint venture. The whole issue of getting your name out there, networking, etc. is not really an issue -- the CEO makes 10 phone calls and has all his content lined up. Also the amount of free publicity was massive since NBC and News Corp together control a number of different media outlets, and other news organizations jumped on the bandwagon.
Vistaphobia: Dell continues to offer XP systems
'Operating systems that aren't Windows' are already at 10% if you count Linux.

(Which you probably should - the benefit is the end of monoculture, not the promotion of a new replacement monopoly.)
Is all the Vista fear just hype? I hear more and more how people don't have problems with Vista, at least not any more than they've had with XP.

I thought about getting a Dell laptop just to keep the XP. Are Dell laptops any good? If Vista is nothing to fear, I might get a ThinkPad instead, or a Mac if I can get the software I need to work installed.
Kevin Kelley wrote a less critical, more constructive response to the Petabyte theory here:

http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2008/06/the_google_wa...

Gist: "My guess is that this emerging method will be one additional tool in the evolution of the scientific method. It will not replace any current methods (sorry, no end of science!) but will compliment established theory-driven science. Let's call this data intensive approach to problem solving Correlative Analytics ... In the coming world of cloud computing perfectly good answers will become a commodity. The real value of the rest of science then becomes asking good questions."
The voices in this video are sort of annoying, they sound all pitched up. The one thing that is great how each party has different terminology for what restarting is and means. plus the desktop is pretty funny.
I am having hard time imagining who's going to pay $5 a month for this and yet don't bother using registrar's own page editing tools, which are routinely available for free.

RSS and maillist support are nice, but I don't think they add to much value to the proposition. If I am expecting a pre-launch hype, it likely means that I have a marketing budget and therefore I can certainly host temporary landing page myself.

In other words - I'm not sure about the customer acquisition and conversion strategies. I just don't see qualified paying customers between your potential users.
All I have produced before the age of seventy is not worth taking into account. At seventy-three I have learned a little about the real structure of nature, of animals, plants, trees, birds, fishes and insects. In consequence when I am eighty, I shall have made still more progress. At ninety I shall penetrate the mystery of things; at one hundred I shall certainly have reached a marvelous stage; and when I am a hundred and ten, everything I do, be it a dot or a line, will be alive. --Hokusai
I have used vista (I run ubuntu on my home PC) and I think its more of the usual afraid-to-change mentality. The only people I know in real life that are vista haters (and windows users for that matter) are the ones who have never actually used it.

Just the fact that some buttons moved is enough to get people avoiding it...
I remember trying to install Linux...on my particular computer, it took ages, and never really worked.
In languages with implicit construction/destruction facility, like C++, you'd probably live happily without the finally block. There are however situations in C++ when you want to create a class with ctor/dtor only to make sure some block is executed when going out of scope, no matter how. That dtor would be your finally block.
confusing as heck
- took me a while to figure out what was going on - how about a quick: here's how is works section - would be helpful -
'Guilty Pleasures : I sometimes edit my .emacs file in vim.'

http://mark.nirv.net/post/6694167/guilty-pleasures
This is a bit different to normal applications though.

Normal apps:
Developer writes application. Code is installed via user engagement with a package management or installation system.

Comet apps:
Developer writes application. Code is pulled and executed by (almost) every vistor to the website it is deployed on.

If the code could open sockets to arbitrary destinations then a high traffic site could be used to spawn a very effective DDOS or distribute hacking attempt.

Of course for Orbited this isn't relevant as the browser security model limits connections to the originating host. So you can't, say, embed javascript into Slashdot.org that does:

End users >>> DDOS attack target.

Instead you get:

End users >>> Slashdot.org proxy >>> DDOS attack taget.

(Which is obviously a total waste of time as any attack via this method would be predicated on having control of Slashdot.org in the first place.)
People who work AND network online is a niche I would say.
IPhone 3G video tour
Take this with a grain of salt, as I may have judged this too quickly, but I was not impressed. The tutorial linked is indeed pretty solid and it was trivial to get Scalr up, but the product itself seems half finished (which to be fair makes sense since its very early at v.5). I also took a gander at the code, and I was equally not impressed.

I am excited at the potential of Scalr, and maybe in another few months to a year I'll take another look, but for now I would still rather just manage EC2 by hand than become dependent on Scalr.
If you are sharding, I recommend
"distributed hash table"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_hash_table
with a twist - make sure each physical machine participates in the table many times (1000). This way you can relocate small pieces of data to balance the load without affecting other machines.
Nit acknowledged. I actually originally wrote the headline that way, but decided to preserve the Aza's original.
Aza works for Mozilla. He hints that he is, in fact, writing some code.
Try IntelliJ sometime (for Java at least)

I love emacs and the philosophy of emacs but IntelliJ just makes a lot more of the pain from Java go away. Ive tried but the emacs-equivalent tools like Semantic are just nowhere near as mature as the IntelliJ equivalents. As far as code generation and refactoring tools go, IntelliJ can't be beat.
Sure, we'd be very interested.
The rest of us should consider wether we're writing a feature for someone else's product, or if what we do can stand by itself.
80% of us hate our boss:  what to do
You've done a lot of work, so don't think its worthless just because someone else jumped in. But you need to strategize and think about all the ways this will affect you. What was your monetization strategy in the first place? You may need to change it to account for the new development. Maybe you'll license your code instead, or come up with something new. But don't just give up without at least thinking long and hard about what your business can do. You should also research what Google, Yahoo and Adobe (hey, where's MSFT?) have ACTUALLY done, not just said they will do. You may have an opportunity there as well.
You're a glutton for punishment vak..
Ask YC: What do you think of Boulder Colorado as a startup hub?
What are the highlights of Boulder Colorado as a startup hub?
Chuckle… There Is No Plan B! :)

with apologies to Instiki
The real value of the rest of science then becomes asking good questions.

It were ever thus. Oddly enough Picasso appears to have been one of the first to recognize the relevance of this in the computer age -- "Computers are useless. They can only give you answers" -- long around 1968.

I fire up Maxima (Macsyma) all the time to do mindless derivatives, integrals, sums, and series, so that I can get frustrated as hell working on less tractable problems. The symbolic rearrangements (the ones that can be done without reference to the more complicated reality at hand) are just bookkeeping, and computers are awesome for that.

If raw data (and lots of it) were sufficient, things like dynamic programming, heuristic decomposition, and approximation algorithms (complete with correctness bounds) would be pointless. It's not and they aren't.

nb. Don't take any of the above to mean that the province of "asking interesting questions" is somehow restricted to scientists, or artists, or anyone else. But it is probably the highest hurdle towards discovering something worth pursuing. The antecedent execution thereof is rarely easy, either. Tools help -- a lot -- but by themselves they cannot somehow pull the future into the present. For the time being, at least, intelligence amplification still trumps artificial intelligence. (I hope it stays that way for a while, being human and all)
If it cost $1,000 to do it in-house and $5 to outsource it then that would definitely increase my trust and comfort level regardless of whether I was a customer or an investor.
sorry my math was off - I meant 50.... its late.
In the coming world of cloud computing perfectly good
answers will become a commodity. The real value of the
rest of science then becomes asking good questions.

Will you look at that. The same is true for software engineering. Eventually we will have machines choosing both algorithms and data structures for us based on workload and data models. But someone will still have to come up with models and make sure the relate to user's problem space.
This is a big exaggeration. Dangerous? Because it might lead to an outbreak of bad science and poor conclusions? What's one more drop of water in that ocean?

If, in fact, Anderson's idea turns out to be half silly and half banal, the world won't even notice. Folks are too busy squaring the circle, constructing their perpetual motion machines, and printing out new labels to paste on their creationist tracts to take much notice of yet another half-baked idea.
Store It: 100 Online Spaces to Store All Your Data
There are hundreds of services out there that provide data storage over the Web. Some are even available to use free of charge. Here are a few services this article has compiled to help get you started storing things online.
I think the name is definitely memorable and fitting. 1 shirt = 2 nipples x 100 = 200 nipples, duh.

I really like the counters. They add suspense and excitement for some reason.
AT&T’s Text Messages Cost $1,310 per Megabyte
While it sucks that it's still locked to AT&T, it may help the process of hacking get underway sooner.
Pretty cool. Thanks, just bookmarked it.
Fire him!!
"How many programs do you have running?"

Dang, I sometimes have 2x that much going at once, and not all little stuff either. Like, 5 eclipse instances and Visual studio, 7 or 8 shells, 10 notepads, 3 or 4 mysql prompts, 2 remote desktops, FF, IE, IM, outlook, word, excel, not to mention 5 different dbms's running in the background. I guess I could top it off with Halo.
This looks like an awesone resource. Thanks for the link!
Are we supposed to comment on the coding or the business model? Not bad for four weeks coding. Might have a little trouble making money with the copyright issues involved.