skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't understand your misgivings about lisp. Particularly since you are citing PragProg as your inspiration for this question.

One good reason to learn a language is because it is radically different to the languages you currently know. Exposure to different paradigms will make you a better programmer.

Regarding learning Java, it's not a bad idea. Another good reason to learn a language is because it is used in a specific project you want to contribute to, or because you think that a novel project would best be achieved using it.

If you know one squiggly bracket imperative language, there's little point in learning another one prior-to-need. Anything you can pick up going through dry tutorials, you should be able to pick up on-the-job quickly enough. To achieve mastery, you need to really be using it, so learning it one year for its own sake, without a reasonably complex project, won't get you there.
Speeding Up Cloud/Server Applications With Flash Memory
They talk about how SEO wasn't important for them, which makes sense, since very few of their target audience or current users are going to search for "funny stories of people getting high" or similar.
Just as a side note, what don't you like about Notepad++?
The Scope of Mathematical Programming Projects
Kudos to you sir! FISA needs to be tweaked.
No smell, though? I once lived in a tenement block where somebody emptied their bowels in the stairwell and I didn't have to go near it to know that it was the genuine article.
For passwords and other sensitive, text-type, info: KeePass in Dropbox for syncing http://keepass.info/

For SSH keys, tax returns, other sensitive documents: True Crypt volume http://www.truecrypt.org/
It depends on the language, but I haven't found that useful with Greek, unless you specifically want to learn the formal Greek words for computer-related things. In casual conversation, nobody uses that vocabulary, and it'd be seen as very stilted/old-fashioned (English loanwords are more common, and even where Greek's used, it's often not the same words).
I agree I wouldn't have turned down the buyout, but from what I understand they're certainly not easily replicable.

Sure, you or I could set up a site that offers all the tech of Groupon pretty quickly. Then what? The strength is in their large and proven sales force and network of contacts. That can and will experience churn and cross-pollination with competitors, but they've got a heck of a head start, huge brand recognition and the resources to try new parallel ventures to hedge against problems with their current offering.

Any of a number of companies could and did duplicate eBay's tech. Outside a few national markets where eBay dropped the ball (Japan, New Zealand), how many succeeded?
Thanks. I found some great answers in this Math.SE question: http://math.stackexchange.com/q/540/6831
I'm not sure how you arrived at that. This guy's advice is generally good (division can be slow, even on modern desktop CPUs - particularly if a constant divisor is not available to the compiler), it's just his reasoning that's a bit flawed.

More importantly he at least tried to test his reasoning than assuming it was correct (even though he didn't do so quite thoroughly enough).

If he's managed to survive in a reasonably hard core industry for 20 years and his advice has at least some truth in it, then I'd say you're being a little harsh with that description.
I use Anki (http://ankisrs.net/).

The app store version is $25, but the desktop version is free. There's also a free web app that can be used from handheld devices with internet access and a free Android app. You can sync across multiple devices via the web app.
Haha I would pay for that, too. I'm fighting my way through Icelandic (post it notes, reading, tweeting occasionally) and any help is always welcome. If you want to do some "mail exchange in Icelandic" to practice with someone else, please drop me an email!
It would be awesome if I made to that level!!
Website Jemaat Ahmadiyah Di Indonesia
regarding "Read trashy literature", the tabloids are harder to read than normal newspapers. They seemed to just be colloquial ways of saying, "crazy, wild", and never had a point. I found lay science magazines to be great practice; interesting, clearly written and short enough to work through.
In a previous post (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2173155) there were many, many questions regarding marketing. I decided to do a detailed writeup of exactly how I marketed my little project. Hope this helps!
The earlier a whistleblower comes in, he will both be (a) less implicated in whatever dirty business was going on, and (b) he will have less valuable information.

In effect, such rules help conspirators, because they can use it against one another: if you break the conspiracy, the US govt will use your lateness in coming forward, and your compliance with the conspiracy up to date, against you.
To those who are fluent in Mandarin: did you learn from your parents, from school/private language lessons, or all by yourself?
Let’s be honest: right now, most HTML-based mobile apps are a joke when compared to their native counterparts.

2007: Let’s be honest: right now, most native mobile apps are a joke when compared to their desktop counterparts.

2002: Let’s be honest: right now, most web apps are a joke when compared to their desktop counterparts.

1999: Let’s be honest: right now, most Windows apps are a joke when compared to their Apple counterparts.

1993: Let’s be honest: right now, most client-server apps are a joke when compared to their multi-user counterparts.

1988: Let’s be honest: right now, most PC-based apps are a joke when compared to their mini-computer counterparts.

1983: Let’s be honest: right now, most mini-computer-based apps are a joke when compared to their mainframe counterparts.

1978: Let’s be honest: right now, most on-line CICS-based apps are a joke when compared to their batch counterparts.

1965: Let’s be honest: right now, most computer-based apps are a joke when compared to their pencil and paper counterparts.
Depends on the goals. They didn't say how much their "10x traffic" actually is, but by the sound of it they could probably save money by moving to dedicated hardware.
Saturation is standard behavior of C's atoi() and friends. Over/underflow is signalled by returning largest/smallest possible value and setting errno to ERANGE. Many applications dont check for this (as it is not exactly straightforward) and thus get saturation.
and saying its going to "burst Tech" is even more knee-jerk.

I think that was a copy paste error. The original title reads "The Groupon Bubble is Going Burst | Mark Evans Tech".
The Gates Foundation Invests in a Facebook App for College Students
Actually, that is how Groupon succeeds. Well, more deals in an area without an individual subscriber receiving too many deals.

Targeted deals based on real-time inputs (weather, slow day in the business, new story about a competitor, etc).

Add in hyper-local targeting and enough automation and you have the holy grail of local commerce.
Whilst I don't think a profitable business like Groupon will 'burst', I think it will slowly deflate. Why? Does anyone remember the company from over a decade ago, backed by Paul Allen, who were going to revolutionise ecommerce by offering group discounts? It was Mercata and they went under in 2001.

The article at http://www.seattlepi.com/business/vc122.shtml sums up why long-term, Groupon will face challenges (and it's also the exact reason why I decline to use Groupons' services):

"Those who wanted a baby jogger or DVD player, for example, sometimes had to wait seven days for Mercata's so-called PowerBuy to kick in. By that time, shoppers had moved on to another store or online shopping site. Instead of creating a faster, cheaper way to buy products, Mercata actually slowed the buying process."

Que Groupon offering group-buying service with no time-limits, only a quantity-limit?
A question I've had is can we daisy chain via WIFI or Bluetooth cellphones to get a signal across the boarder? It might be slow, but things like tweets or small emails would still be relatively useful.
Getting Web Scale with PHP & Memcached
I've got a perspective here that will likely run contrary to the dominant view, but I encourage you to think about for a moment -

I'm of the belief that the ability to keep your work, voluntary exchanges, and assets private contribute to a free society in the same way that attorney/client privilege, priest/community, and spousal privilege all exist.

Now, in the United States, we don't have that and people know that and live with that. But people doing business in Switzerland are under the impression that they have a very private, safe relationship with their banker, the same way you'd have with your lawyer, psychiatrist, priest, or spouse. This man breaching that is doing a very serious thing.

This goes beyond politics. When you have a private relationship with a professional, sanctioned by the local law, that says that you have private confidence and that's betrayed... that's serious. If you don't believe in the Swiss banking system, not working there is acceptable. Protesting it is acceptable. Taking on a fiduciary duty of loyalty and confidence, and then breaching it... that's serious.

The average American might not think this way, because they don't have a private relationship with their banker. But generalize this to all duty - this man pledged duty, people were under the impression that he had a duty of confidence to them, and he breached that. This doesn't get into right/wrong, but it's something worth thinking about.
Are programming languages really languages?
pawel [at] bulletinburst dot co dot za
The key difference is that the JavaScript approach makes you dependent upon third party ads being served correctly, while the standard HTML approach makes bad code in third party ads just affect the display of those ads.

That third party dependency is a significant difference.
What they can do though is further segment areas if they are easily filling deals, so instead of offering you more than 1 deal a day in your city they could break you city up into multiple areas and offer one deal to each.
I work at Seedcamp, our view on this:

- We see more than 200 companies a year at Seedcamp Events. A lot of them get external funding, and very often from people they have met at one of the events. I think that's the strongest "no" you can have.
- Other accelerators are also quite open about their process, and on hackernews you see many startups telling their story about how they did not make it through.
- Often, companies use the feedback, advice, and all of the connections they made during the day for a change in their business model or focus. In my opinion, that's the best confirmation of the value of these events (you see Ben from Geomium agrees).
For large solar factories micrometeorites would become an issue.
Having been there a few times there are a few suggestions I'd like to put out there. The points here should take a very minimal amount of time (< 1 week combined) but they are meant to be easy ways of getting more mileage out of what you currently have.

#1. Move all of the non-db specific crons off of your db servers (those that don't specifically involve the rotation of logs/cleanup of tmp directories) and onto one of your web heads. There is nothing more painful then seeing your master db crash because of a cron job or other non-essential role on your db server. It's much easier to recover from / spin up a new web head if it crashes then to restart mysql after your master db crashes (a slave db is easier, but still more of a pain point than a web head). If at all possible, since you're already on EC2, spin up a worker server just to perform these cron jobs (stats collection, db cleanup scripts, etc). EC2 affords you this kind of flexibility. Take it.

#2. Hooking into a CDN is very easy to do and can allow your web servers to offload the serving of static files. As an easy way of doing cache-busting set up a global version variable in your code that gets injected into each static url that's generated (so a request for cdn.mygengo.com/images/29384/bar.jpg would be rewritten to look for /images/bar.jpg on your web heads if and only if the cdn'd cache had either expired or the unique # had changed in the request).

#3 Set up some sort of perfomance monitoring if you haven't already. Almost every startups #1 pain point is the db server, specifically queries. It's great that you've been able to see such a vast improvement through adding indexes / cleaning up some queries, but as long as your data is growing you will need to continue to keep on top of your query logs as their impact footprint will change as the size of your data does. Since you're on AWS, enabling Cloudwatch
should be very easy and provides the basics. You can then move onto implementing Nagios/Munin or look to something like Cloudwatch/ServerDensity for an in-the-cloud solution.

You also didn't mention anything about having a K/V system like Memcache or Redis (yes @antirez we all know Redis rocks and how dare I place it after Memcache ;) which can really take the load off your db servers.

Best of luck with continued growth.
Radio seems to be one of the best media for this sort of thing, no?
Even worse, they dont appropriately use the canonical meta tag.
from:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_China

Ürümqi Time (UTC+6), two hours behind Beijing. Although this is not officially recognized, it is the time observed locally by most residents.
I can't ever read a claim that the Riemann Hypothesis is unsolved without putting a small asterisk beside that claim. See http://www.lrb.co.uk/v26/n14/karl-sabbagh/the-strange-case-o... for why.
Have there been that many stories? I've heard a couple from small time coffee shops that may not be the best financial planners, but those few sad stories seem to reverberate without a lot of new voices joining the chorus.
>"When you have a private relationship with a professional, sanctioned by the local law"

This isn't about local Swiss law. The clients broke U.S. law.
Managing Risk is the Essence of an Entrepreneur
See this thread: "Ask HN: I want to start a clothing company." http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1750073
This is not the best example.

You actually don't need to hardcode the html in the javascript. You can use a template system that is already included in backbone, or you can preform a request to the server,

I prefer the first approach.
Apple begins production on iPad 2
Moneyshot:

"The guy who started the larger of the two events emailed me several hours after I began posting links, and half-jokingly asked for “royalties”. How could I pass that up? I didn’t know what his privileges were as an event administrator, but I told him he would be subsidized if he could leverage the attendees (200,000+ at that point). He agreed[...]"

I see the above as the most important factor in the huge success! It would be interesting to hear if guynamedloren agrees with this.

Generalizing: One should attempt to achieve exclusiveness in the promoting medium.
> a German speaking country

> a Franc

I take it you're in Switzerland ;)

Are there a lot of other foreigners where you are? That can make language learning difficult.

Also, there is a whole website called All Japanese All The Time[0] (AJATT) for learning Japanese via an SRS, although they use Anki rather than Mnemosyne.

0: http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/
The “burning platform” inspirational stories are probably based on an actual disaster:

“Piper Alpha was a North Sea oil production platform operated by Occidental Petroleum (Caledonia) Ltd. The platform began production in 1976, first as an oil platform and then later converted to gas production. An explosion and resulting fire destroyed it on July 6, 1988, killing 167 men, with only 59 survivors. The death toll includes two crewmen of a rescue vessel. Total insured loss was about £1.7 billion (US$ 3.4 billion). At the time of the disaster the platform accounted for approximately ten percent of North Sea oil and gas production, and was the worst offshore oil disaster in terms of lives lost and industry impact.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piper_Alpha
It's important to remember tha whistleblower statutes protect you from retaliation by the company when you expose illegal behavior.

They do not protect you from prosecution for any illegal activity you've done.

That being said, often the DA or US Attorney (as appropriate) will offer lighter sentences and/or immunity to secure a prosecution.
You're definitely not alone - "read your favorite (series of) book(s)" is an old trick.
Feature Detect Placeholder to Adjust jQuery Mobile Layout
Notions of the lower class of another nation does more damage than directly addressing issues ever will.

I think this is an important notion. The Chinese view themselves as the most sophisticated culture in the world. The Chinese view the currently dominant economic power of the West as having an unfortunate side effect. It hinders the rest of the world's understanding of the true value of Chinese culture.

How North Americans view the Chinese notion of cultural ascendancy is very instructive, because it's a mirrored by how the Chinese view a North American's notion of cultural ascendancy.

North Americans are well advised to consider this, as it's likely that China will soon have double the economic output of the US.
We Live in Public ...the future?
| In some cases we managed to speed up integral queries by over 8000%! That's both an indication of the growing pains

That is an indication of sloppy db planning and bad SQL use. You should test with a data-set size and type that resembles a live data-set in the outcome you become successful. Yikes.
Fake it till you make it. Seed your community with users and content, appear full of life. And they will come.
Opera quenches the thirst for better web compatibility
While I share your 'hype' skepticism, that gain could easily be gained by adding a missing index. By itself the above statement really doesn't say much, either about the amazing improvement or the quality of the current schema in place.
Just depends. The more of the app's data and interaction is cloud based, the better web apps will be.
"Fully 70% of your tax dollars go to the Pentagon, and the Pentagon is the real government of the United States."

This does not appear to be a well researched post.
To repeat the quote:

"With regard to whistleblowers: those who seek to be treated as true whistleblowers need to know they must come in early and give complete and truthful disclosures.... Mr. Birkenfeld did not come in and give complete and truthful disclosures. Therefore, he is not entitled to whistleblower status."

Late as he came forward, if it had been the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, he would have been entitled to whistleblowing protection. It wasn't, which is why he's in prison, but was of value which is why he's doing less time than he could have been.
Of course it can! The fact that it is on-demand practically negates the need to buy the music else where. On radio you have to sit around waiting for your song to come on. I've seen royalty reports from Spotify's largest artists, and it was indeed microscopically small.
For me it doesn't really feel like a switch (unless we talk about a very fast one). I tend to mix thinking (and sometimes speaking) in English and Polish to the level they blend together - sometimes I express separate phrases or even words in another language just because it "feels better" this way. Similarly for programming languages - I tend to mix thinking in them with thinking in natural language.

I do agree that those two issues - thinking in programming and natural languages - might be connected. It somehow feels similar.
Yes but show me the figures that break out Electrician/Plumber/LPN from 2 year business degrees.

My sister in law got a 2 year biz degree. You're qualified to be a secretary (without experience). She went back and got LPN with an additional year at school.

Her job outlook is amazing. Her income is 2 to 3 times what she could have made with only her business degree.

Associated degree/some college includes a lot of things like child care/business, etc.
Actually, the fact that a disgruntled tech can who exposes secret bank accounts to governments [1] gives me a lot of faith that secrecy will inevitably be broken where it actually matters.

It's this same reason that allows us to dismiss such laughable conspiracy theories as the faked Moon landings, aliens at Roswell and so on.

Let's not forget that many use these Swiss bank accounts for practices that vary from the questionable (eg evading taxes illegally) to the nefarious (eg hiding assets for the Nazis and various dictators).

[1]: http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/t/story?id=5378080&page=1
Obviously there's hyperbole here. America sucks in some ways (the vacation stats make me sad), but we're not the only ones with a government fiscal crisis right now.

But what bugs me most is this:

"... playing musical chairs for a spot in a cubicle (a spot that will be outsourced to India next week anyway)."

Seriously? We're still doing this cliche?
> If there's one general thing to say about scaling then that you scale applications, not stacks.

very true! which is why i think it usually is a good idea to analyze how you could split up your application into more or less discrete subsystems/"services". that way it becomes easier to react to bottlenecks in the subsystems instead of having to operate on the whole system.

ideally you design your system like that in the beginning but usually you grow and find out the harder way... step by step.

still there are a couple of things that are "always (about) the same": for example do session mangagement or logging/sitestats usually put quite a bit more write load (INS/UPD/DEL) on a system than other parts of a system.

so if your product grows the write stress these subsystems/functionalities put on a system on the one hand and the read load from other subsystems on the other hand make it hard to optimize your db/storage systems because they have quite contrary I/O needs.

if you have separate subsystems that run as discrete services with their own API it becomes much easier to put out a fire that breaks out due to growth or load spikes.

so to add to the comment by moe:
"you scale applications" - and you get into a better position to do so if you design your applications in a way that they are composed of seperate subsystems that communicate via apis.
Hard to say. I didn't do a whole lot to track the results of his efforts, but it definitely didn't hurt.

I do believe, however, the "sharing" resulted in more traffic than the event (once the project started to gain a bit) for the following reasons:

- More eyeballs on "shares", which are posted to news feeds. If we assume that each person has 100 active facebook friends over the course of 48 hours (easily achievable and realistic), and the link was shared almost 4,000 times, that's 400,000 impressions.

- Events are passive. If you don't make an effort to go out of your way to visit the event page, you will never see the photo/description/comments etc, meaning they are basically non-existent for you.
Sports cars are an interesting object lesson in signaling. Often their track performance is way out of line with their price and/or appearance.

For many, an old Mazda MX-5 is a superior track-day car to many newer vehicles costing several times as much.

The Ariel Atom is especially instructive, as it achieves higher performance by dispensing with the sheet metal -- which is the primary medium for an automobile's signaling.
I wholeheartedly disagree; the provisions outlined by the Patriot Act, including these three, do not protect US citizens. They serve only to erode our rights.
You just described exactly what you're _supposed_ to do in a progressively-enhanced single-page Javascript application. Build the existing site first without a single line of js, develop the hash-bang/HTML5 history syntax on top of it, and replace the links if javascript exists.

The Gawker family of sites failed at doing all of this.