skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why Slicehost sucks and you should use Linode:

1. Slicehost makes you prepay 3 months to get started. Linode charges month to month with discounts if you prepay.

2. Slicehost does not prorate if you decide you don't like the service. Ie. Try it for 1 week and the rest of those three weeks are lost. Linode prorates on a daily basis, whatever you don't use they give you the money back.

3. Slicehost customer service is slow and more reliant on the community boards. Linode responds to emails within 8-10 hours.

4. Slicehost does not give you as much RAM (which is a lot more valuable). Linode gives you 15% more.

5. Slicehost's web admin is clumsy and crappy. Linode has a very useful admin that does everything from host management to network/cpu graphs to account management.
Hmm. I think the statistics says "Attractive couples have more female children". (Edit: see the "Engineers Have More Sons, Nurses Have More Daughters: An Evolutionary Psychological Extension of Baron-Cohen's Extreme Male Brain Theory of Autism and Its Empirical Implications." and "Beautiful Parents Have More Daughters: A Further Implication of the Generalized Trivers-Willard Hypothesis")

Ok, we might just admit our stereotype that hackers are not that good looking. But for each individual, he/she may be a black swan.

Someone may start to build a model to predict the probability distribution of genders of Leah Culver's children?
It can be, but then why the hell are you staying?
As with most subjects there are levels of understanding.

One level is the ability to understand what other people are saying or doing. Another is the ability to do it yourself.

Once you get to higher level classes, at least where I went to school, the reading is relatively light but the work is relatively hard.

I don't think most people had trouble understanding the proofs -- they had trouble applying the lessons in a novel way to exercises and problems they'd never seen before.
C, Perl, bash.

Currently on my way to buy SICP so I can learn Scheme LISP.

edit: it may interest you to know that I do absolutely no web development.
Yup slicehost articles are really good.
Goodbye Amazon: Borders’ Online Store Is the New Face of E-Commerce
For the most part, life in latin america seems a lot happier than in more bureaucratically encumbered states. So I don't really buy that argument.

The millions of immigrants from there to here don't seem to buy your argument. Which Latin American countries do you mean?

"... truly excellent thought doesn't depend on the same skills that would allow scoring highly in an IQ test."

I happen to agree with you! One thing that's bugged me for years is that you can't design a test that distinguishes, in advance, between cleverness and original stupidity. So that means that whole lot of time-consuming activities can only be measured after the fact if at all. The difference in our views, I think, is that I would argue that IQ tests measure the kind of raw data-processing skills that are useful in any situation (the military tests people heavily, and for all tasks they've found that IQ correlates positively with results -- I think for some technician jobs, it explains about 60% of the variance in individual performance). There just aren't any studies I know of showing that people with low scores on IQ tests go on to succeed in any measurable way. It would be convenient, to say the least, if you argued that the success-deficit among low IQ people is more than compensated for by a success-surplus that happens to be impossible to measure. So I'd like to know if you can find some way to quantify your argument. It would change my thinking on a lot of subjects if I found that doing poorly on an IQ test predicted doing well at some other task.
Down mod because this thread is about something else.
I mean MS in terms of the entire corporation, ie, all that comes from MS is bad.

Last time I wrote in MFC was about five years ago. As I recall, I got up to speed by reading a couple books which went over basic application design stuff in Win32.

Didn't seem too bad to me -- I even did some COM stuff and some hooks and such. But like I said, that was a while ago. I wasn't a crazy fan or anything, but the tools did the work I wanted to do.
"So if you ever hire an architect and tell him or her to create something cool enough to put in a portfolio to show to potential clients, and you invite the architect to make a beautiful and useful space instead of a cheap and nasty space, the architect will love you and go to the ends of the earth to figure out ways to raise the ceilings another 2 inches."

Sounds a lot like web design/development.
lkmnvwls.com is going to cause chaos when one person tries to tell their friend to go there over the phone/in-person...I don't think most people will think to say "Hey, just type "look ma no vowels", remove all the vowels, append ".com", and hit enter..."
Shorten it a bit? txtmsgr.com?
Maybe the could say each time you ask a price, if it is not accepted, they raise the internal price by x%

:You ask $10, they wanted $15. No Deal

:You ask $12, they now want $15+1.50 = $16.50. No Deal

:You ask $15, they now want $16.50+1.65= $18.15. No Deal

:You ask $20, they now want $18.15+1.82= $19.97. DEAL
That's brilliant! I didn't know about Firefox keywords until now. Thanks!
If he's competing with Twitter, iTweet might cause legal problems (IANAL) and definitely will cause branding problems...
Rent was 15% of revenue, now it's 2%. Conclusion: Fog creek revenues have increased around 7.5x since they moved into their current space. Impressive.
TroopRally
MobRally.com
Ken Iverson: Math for the Layman
Vertebra: Cloud computing with XMPP (EzraZ's latest project)
CUDA, Supercomputing for the Masses: Part 3
Domain Models, SOA, and The Single Version of the Truth
A brilliant piece of satire.

Best part was:

"It’s interesting to see how the demise of Linux as a consumer platform... contrasts with the starry-eyed hopes of the open-source project."

Classic.
The really cool thing is that you can search and bring up the result sites without a mouse (or any mousless browsing extensions).
Setup the distro you'd like to run in production in vmware. Learn from there. Set this up in production. Fully understand that running your own server means carrying a pager (or your cell phone with SMS as a pager).
What's so unlikely about doing everything 100% by yourself (at least for an initial prototype...you can bring in other people after you have some indication that it'll work)? Many - perhaps most - of the successful tech products you've heard of were developed that way.

Your point about time not being free is well-taken, but the original context of this post is people in college or just out of college. Their time is very likely undervalued by many of the jobs they would otherwise be working at, so they can get a better return on it by working for themselves.
What's wrong with using an IDE like eclipse or Visual Studio? That's what I do.
I find it very hard to agree with thesis when there is absolutely no backing information about how OO programming is "hard". What are the difficulties people are having with OO? How can I take this article seriously when it's nothing more than a statement followed by some fluff followed by a few half-thought suggestions. Who are these 'people these people who 'really understand' OO programming?

Am I one of them?

Are you?

How are we to know with no example of HOW OO is hard? What exactly is so hard about it? Class Apple extends Fruit. apple = new Apple(). apple.eat(). Makes sense to me. How are people using it wrong? Is the real issue that people don't understand when to use it?

Here's a similar article:

Playing poker is hard. A lot of people really don't understand how to play poker. People that play poker should stop, and start playing go fish. They should leave poker to the professionals that understand poker. All poker books should now become go fish books.
Programmer as a user friend or enemy?
It's based on twitter's functionality, but, we just launched, so it'll develop from there. There is no filtering yet. Right now we're providing a place for 'datees' to talk to each other. You just don't get that on other dating sites.
Googol.
Now make the target price, with perhaps a forced minimum, and dynamically define it as the average price paid.

Now it's getting closer to a free market auction, and should be getting a little harder to game.

Now functionalize the price increase along business defined price-increase-heuristic. Now if they game your system, you should just hire them to work for you.
How the heck did you do a -1 point? :)
Very cool resource. I've just been reading Iverson's "A Programming Language"-- I'll have to put this one on my list.
It's cool as a programming exercise, but I just can't see it being useful for me. If it can do something else, that might be cool, but it can't do much. ^k and dictionary bookmarks in firefox are far superior to using that shell.

Dictionary bookmarks, for all those unaware, are a beautiful feature I rarely hear about. For example, go to en.wikipedia.org and right click inside the search text box on the left. Click on 'Add a keyword for this search.' For name, put anything, for keyword i have 'w'. Now, whenever you are in the address bar (ctrl+l or alt+d to get there in windows/linux, apple+l in os x) you just type 'w plants' to get the wikipedia page on plants.

Go and try it, type ctrl+l, 'w firefox', enter. I almost can't live without it. And the same works for anything else, so google news can be 'gn', google images: 'gi', etc thus making that more useful goosh. goosh doesn't even have any of the features you'd want from a *nix shell like redirection.
If you like this then you'll probably like mudsh ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=186849 ).
I use Jing on Windows (also has an OSX client) www.jingproject.com. Works great and it is free.
What are the alleged advantages of this pricing model? I have to say that as a user, I don't think I'd sign up for anything with this kind of model.

If it's "donate what you think it's worth (including zero)" that's fine; otherwise, just tell me how much you want for it, and I'll decide if I want to pay it.
I would bet you are primarily a Ruby user ;)
Python is a great language, Ruby is also a consideration.
This is nonsense. Ruby's MRI interpreter can be beaten by an unusually wide margin because it is unusually slow for an interpreter of a language like Ruby. Go look at the benchmarks on http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/ -- on many benchmarks, fast implementations of similar dynamic languages like Python, Scheme, and (tellingly) Smalltalk beat Ruby's MRI by ~10x.
Here are some real playas, for reference: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NyuSk0KILB0
Threads are evil at the application level - IMHO.
Its available online - free and legit.
> Why do people say things like this.

It makes it hard to take the author seriously. Actually it makes him sound like he's 10 years old.
I have used pretty much all of those and then some (e, EditPlus, Komodo, etc) over several years and the best the only one I finally fell in love with was VIM.

Actually decided to use Vim cause my "e" trial expired and I have never looked back. Been using it for a few months and text editing is so fluent, easy and intuitive despite the strong learning curve. Take an hour or so each day (or every few days) and do a chapter on the 500 page Vim book.
I use Python and I look back (and right and left) all the time.
That's really awesome! I wonder if athletes extend the range of the extrapolated vision. Think it would be possible to create a game that trained you to extent the effect for longer?
I'm still using SciTE on my work PC too. I tried E, which is supposed to be like TextMate - but it was a poor immitation, imho.
Sometimes the best way to recover Windows data is Linux
Yahoo! SearchMonkey Developer Challenge
Why Start-up Lawyers Frustrate Me?
As a designer, I take issue with a couple of these , but all in all a good read.
I more reasonable in-browser viewable version of the interview is available at http://www.elektrischer-reporter.de/index.php/site/film/61/ . Fast-forward to 1m15s to skip the german-language intro.
From the article: "From managing our to-do lists and writing code to jotting ideas and keeping a grocery list, nothing beats a solid plain text editor." Do you write all your text in an IDE?

And: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=72774
Language Usage Indicators
had a chance to go hear him talk one time, well worth the effort.
Maintenance at The Planet.... Still Down
It's user generated news. You could have just read the title and continued on.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamebait
The basics are easy to learn, it's just a matter of following some tutorial ( howtoforge has some great ones!). But keeping it running is harder I'm afraid... I suggest you try to find someone in your area (or even join a LUG, Linux User Group) to help you with the more advanced things. You can first try setting up a server as a VM, you can get virtualbox for free and it works great! Good luck but if you want something, you can do it (some people here have learned me that)
GratZzz!

This explains why he's been inactive on the arclanguage forums.
You're Not Done Yet - Things to remember when finishing a chunk of software work
Things to consider about Technical Debt
Slicehost is great. My advice is to start off learning how to use the package manager for whatever OS you choose. apt-get, yum, rpmfind, etc. They usually make things easier and if you start off learning to compile from source (like I did) it can be hard to unlearn old habits.

Something to think about when using slicehost...when they give you a fresh OS install, there is very litte on it. There is only the bare minimum to bring the server up. The 'man' command isn't even installed! It might be a bit tougher for people without much commandline admin experience.
The article it is announcing is here: http://www.inc.com/magazine/20080601/how-hard-could-it-be-ad...

Discussion here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=207005
http://www.dornbracht.com/en/

Never heard of them until now...it's art you actually use!
My latest woes were in trying to take a program written in a Modern/Standard C++ style and build in some existing sources that were written for MFC.

Talk about a black hole of tool-chain hell...
There's a variation of this prank which requires the victim to be drunk - and a fortuitous arrangement of rooms.

A student returned to his fourth storey room in a very drunk state and fell into a comatose sleep. While he was asleep, his friends swapped the contents of his room with an identical room on the ground floor. In the morning, four people with balaclavas burst into "his" room and threw him out of the window. Of course, he thought that he was on the fourth storey and that he was going to be thrown from a great height.
Basic Physics Savvy Quiz
JQuery UI 1.5 release candidate, we’re getting excited
X should vary according to a random component plus something based on user behavior. Someone who spends lots of time on your site, clicks links obsessively, etc., might get a higher bump, because they appear to have worse impulse control.
Response to "Maglev and the naiivety of the Rails community" from Patrick Collison
mobilsocial.com/net - available
mobilepostr.com/net - available
mobisoci.com/net - available
Ask YC: Is it painful to develop with PHP/Perl/MySQL on Windows?
I've been using OS X for a couple of years now and am proficient in the terminal. A situation has come up where I might be using a Windows notebook for a couple of months, and I'd like to know if there will be any challenges in using PHP/Perl/MySQL on Windows; as I said, I'm not very familiar with it any longer.

Based on some research, MySQL has Windows binaries available, Perl has ActivePerl (from ActiveState), and both PHP and Apache have binaries available as well.

The only thing I'm concerned about is if I'm going to have change anything in my scripts when uploading/deploying them to servers (running Linux). For example, Perl usually uses the #!/usr/bin/perl shebang. Or if some PHP and Perl extensions don't run under Windows.

Thanks for any help.
Tangent, but your comment reminds me of MIT's site morphing paper: http://web.mit.edu/hauser/www/Papers/Hauser_Urban_Liberali_B...
I just setup a vps with linode.com two days ago and chose ubuntu. It's been fairly trivial to administer remotely, without x. I haven't had to take on the role of an SA anytime recently, but it couldn't be much easier than to work with ubuntu so far.
Been using UltraEdit for years and still love it on the PC, using TextMate on my Mac. I'm a bit surprised BBEdit isn't on there - it seemed to be the perennial fav for mac users for years.
No dice. Too overbearing and flashy... Swear to god, no pun intended.
Too busy working my professional day job to reply right now...Gotta get back to using an open source 3D animation package to deliver a project while I ponder the demise of open source software.
Did you bootstrap a Ruby parser in Ruby into the image? Or did you take another approach?
Unless proven otherwise for a specific application, the answer is python.

In general, the reason is simple: python programmers tend not to worry too much about the language, although there's a fair bit of fretfulness about the folks trying to do functional stuff in Python, or people who want Python to be LISP. But apart from those groups, pretty much everybody else just sits down and writes their code, and generally pretty soon forgets they're writing in any language in particular, they just sort of churn out code that pretty much works as expected.

And that's really the point of Python. You stop noticing it after a while. It doesn't reward extremely subtle cleverness (much) and it doesn't severely punish stupidity, it just sort of does what you expect, and pretty soon there's your working application, stable, maintainable and clean(ish.)

I can't give a language higher praise than "it doesn't get under foot, and there are very few nasty surprises."

Python. Unless there's a specific reason to do something else.

PS: web frameworks in Python kind of suck because they're mostly a bit abstract. You might well wind up bolting together something dirty for your own needs.
How does UE compare to TM? I have never used TM before, but apparently E is the one to compare with? I was a diehard UE fan for a couple of years.
Stanford's forthcoming Information Retrieval book (complete text)
How to pickup an entrepreneur
Chirpt.com

I own this but am not using it.
That's very vague. For example, my answer is yes, but I live in Manhattan, where that's the default.
best thing I've seen around here in a while. I like it.
Which part of Octopart don't you understand?
A Flash interface is not going to help kill Amazon. Lower prices and faster shipping would. Amazon massacres the new Borders on price.

Not to mention selecting "Books" on the top menu gets me an error message on a blank page:

> This page can't be displayed due to a security violation. Contact support for additional information

I can just see Amazon quivering.
Supreme Court rejects fantasy baseball dispute
Why would you want to do this? Are you hoping people will pay more than what you want? If so set the price at $x and offer them the opportunity to pay more (and note it in the account for faster support or something).
This will never happen and here is why: the more companies sign onto an agreement like this, the greater the economic incentive for the remaining companies to not sign.

The scheme would depend on every company signing and yet economics makes that a near impossibility.

I doubt very much that companies such as Youtube, google or Facebook would allow ISPs to effectively 'block' them without some legal challenges.

Add to that the first amendment lawsuits that are sure to crop up en mass and I think we can put the likelihood of this happen down to near-zero.
Then again, Bryce was developed in a proprietary environment and then released as open source in an attempt to build goodwill. Was it even improved in terms of speed or stability? I can't imagine open source developers actually adding features to it.

The reason I had the time to blog about it is that Microsoft Word's control revision system is simple enough that I got my job done way before deadlines. As much as I love TeX typesetting, that would NEVER happen in a LaTeX+CVS/Subversion/darcs/git environment.I'd be still struggling the "quantum theory of patches".
This is just the IA scenario.
Really cool, but I see it more as a curiosity than something useful.
The trouble with technical debt is that it can be the right business decision to take those shortcuts.

Let's say you choose to take the extra few weeks or months to build a more maintainable, properly factored, fully tested system that will be easier to change for the next release. Let's say your biggest competitor chooses to ship right away instead. Let's say your competitor gains market share and locks in customers in the time you gave them.

On the road to the next release, your maintainability advantage doesn't matter if you go bankrupt or if your customers' switching costs are high.
Yikes. It's like a "Fr33 software is teh suxor!" flame written by a literary analysis poseur. Not a lot of insight, but wow, can he nest a dependent clause!

Meh. Sure, whatever. Open source hasn't taken over the world, hasn't killed windows, and is most successful on the server. I guess that's "failed" for some interpretations of the term.
Might it make life easier if you just ran Linux as a virtual machine with something like Virtualbox?

You can run samba on it and export the filesystem over to your Windows host, allowing you to work with all the stuff with Windows native editors.

Alternatively, just install Linux and do all your work inside of it. If you use WUBI (which the current Ubuntu Hardy offers) there's no need to repartition or anything and uninstalling it leaves the system in it's original state.
Facebook Turns Platfrom Open Source Via fbOpen
Kind of sad that you have to attract programmers with glass walls, marble floors and shiny objects. Give me a connection to the 'net, nothing else, and I'm there.
Ruby 1.8.7 Released: Enumeration Object Support Backported From 1.9
Hopefully this will eventually open the door to some reasonable use of professional sports data by small businesses and entrepreneurs. Sports news and stats are a great foundation for community building.
You don't need to turn off the equivalents of eval and method_missing to get full performance in Smalltalk. Not using them might be advisable in performance critical code in either language, however.

Also, the commercial Smalltalk JIT VMs are generally quite a bit ahead of the 1990's in terms of performance. Don't be also guilty of using "common sense."
javascript (Server side).
I write code in an IDE and other text in notepad. I've never felt the need for any other type of editor. Those fit my needs quite alright.
I was required to take two semesters of Statistics as an undergrad. I didn't think it was especially difficult, but I didn't see applications for the things I was interested in (mainly Computational Linguistics at the time).

A few years later, pretty much all Computation Linguistics/Natural Language Processing research revolved around Machine Learning approaches, which is largely Probability and Statistics applied in various ways. I really kicked myself for not taking Statistics more seriously at the time, and not learning more.

I was away from this field for about a decade, but have been working with researchers in this field again in my current job and have been taking classes to catch up. In addition to Probability and Statistics, I've been learning Linear Algebra as fast as I can and want to take a course on Optimization.

So, I suppose the moral of the story is: you never know when that particular branch of Mathematics that doesn't seem at all relevant to you might suddenly turn out to be very relevant.