skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I would hope they weren't downvoted equally. Random acts of meanness are much more poisonous to a site/society than random acts of kindness.
Pretty sure that if your boss tells you he's going to spend 30 minutes trying to get you in his bed, that's sexual harassment. Apparently there are "laws designed to protect you from sexual harassment": http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=...

As an attorney, you know that there is an enormous gulf between "what is illegal" and "what will hold up court."

As for it being "systematic" -- how many stories of rude and raunchy VCs would it take? Infinity and beyond!

A thing is not "systematic" unless a bunch of people get together and decide to do it together, intentionally -- and with a process. Otherwise it is merely "widespread" -- just like rude men with poor social skills hitting on women is wide spread in many, many situations that do not involve VC.
Writer's Rejection Letters
Yes, at some point you need some sort of atomic ID generation. I'm using Riak for the key-value store and Redis's atomic incr for the ID generation. Anyone who wants to save an object into the bucket first has to get a unique ID from Redis to be rotated and base62 encoded.
i love those illustrations

ex: http://bulk.destructoid.com/ul/user/9/9346-103247-111195jpg-...
We're currently in the process of replacing every one of our hosts with new OS versions. As we do this we are in fact going to the EBS based instances.

Those instances actually show the same problems, but they aren't too bad, because once you boot them, you don't need the root vol that much (that's what the instance storage is for).
Is the browser render speed actually true? http://saveie6.com/compare.php

O_o
I didn't even get a chance to have a Guinness today. :(
Do you have a source for this? I'm seeing newsfeed items from Minomonsters right now...
Sometimes I arrange my variable declarations so that they make a picture of something in profile...

... don't hate me because I'm beautiful ... :D

----

On a more serious note, something I have noticed working on large projects with other programmers, is that if each programmer has their own distinctive style and conventions, then you can tell straight away by looking at it who wrote it, and more importantly who modified it.

Thus if Billy (who is an idiot) modified something written by Sheila (who is like unto the goddess of inspired poetry in wisdom and understanding), and the whole is broken, you can pretty much bet that it is Billy's modification that has broken it, and you can spot his bits straight away, this makes debugging a lot easier.

I think this is one of the more unfortunate side-effects of things like checkstyle and other forms of overly restrictive style enforcement. The more we sand-paper everybody back to the same (low) level of code appearance, the more information is lost for what I like to call "forensic debugging".
Web X-Ray Goggles
I am totally at odds with what PG has said here.

I said - "If every developer was to focus on the very achievable goal of building a lifestyle/micro business – the entire house of cards would crumble."

I stand by that.

To expand, IMHO the current "chasing after the golden ticket of investment" model would crumble.

But we humans are a very diverse bunch. It would be impossible for a few of us NOT to notice large scale problems and go after them.

Therefore, out of the masses of self driven "no-investment" entrepreneurs - there would be a few that would create the next internet, or cisco, or cable.

Under my Utopian ideal there's no reason why anyone couldn't seize and capitalize on big ideas as they arose.

The only difference is that VC's (and dare I say organizations like YC) wouldn't be the hub of the entrepreneurial universe that they now seem to be.

Of course there would most likely be a new hub of sorts. I'm not sure what that would look like. Although a while back I did have some specualtion.

http://justinvincent.com/page/100/how-to-trump-microsoft-goo...

Also, if I'm not mistaken, isn't the "lifestyle business" model the exact route that PG took to success?

He built Webgen/Viaweb an app that solved a problem for people that were willing to pay money for it. He iterated on it, built up the revenue, and then had the good fortune of selling it to Yahoo.

(I'm not even sure if Viaweb had investment did it? Anyone know?)
Also, its not a great idea to badmouth someone who is currently providing you with a service and actively working on improving it for you (according to the blog post.)
>3 engineers is more than enough for this type of website.

Sorry, but you lost all credibility right there.
I just signed on to express your first sentence, but you beat me to it!

I've been lurking for a short while on here and found out about HN because I wanted to get into programming and the whole IT world. I find HN great for those things, but as soon as they start posting "creative writing" material, it's really only good for a chuckle. A lot of it competes with the self-absorbed, snobby (Liberal) Arts, so-called objective, essay writing that I had to put up with at university. They only base things on subjective meanderings.
That might also be a good solution, particularly if reversibility is necessary.
Mercurial and Trac for source control and issue tracking (later to change soon).
I agree re: risk taking. I would go as far as to say that when the fundraising environment is frothy, paying yourself $150k p.a as the CEO of a VC backed firm actually isn't 'taking a risk'.

There is a class of entrepreneur who don't quit their job, or leave one foot in that door, until they actually raise money and can pay themselves that salary.

for eg. I know of a smallish no-revenue VC funded startup where the CEO and founder pays himself $300k. what the board and investors didn't know is that for the first 6 months in the life of the startup while he was 'salary sacrificing' he was actually consulting with a big co. for $30k a month. I wouldn't call that taking a risk, its the opposite, really

The guys grinding out on almost nothing and quitting their jobs are the real risk takers - and that happens with self-funded, family funded, friend funded, angel funded, VC funded or zero funded businesses.
Thanks for the follow up jedberg, I was just guessing based on what has been publicly stated in the various blog posts over the last year or two. I used the same process for my own s3 -> ebs boot volume migration. That took a few weeks and I didn't have that many instances to migrate in the first place. Given the large number of instances reddit uses and the surprisingly small staff and one would reasonably expect that the migration would not be done.
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There's no need for it to be a completely separated interface, though - in theory, at the top level you could have "Files", "Music", "Photos", "Mail" and so on. When you descend into "Files", you see the root of a traditional filesystem, when you descend into "Music" you see a music-specific interface.
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Basically, I'll know my project is a startup when I feel like it is a startup, regardless of whether someone else agrees. Clearly this method breaks down when taken to the extremes, but for my purposes, I'm fine with it.

The startup term is very muddy and I have seen it applied to big projects, little projects, big organizations, one to two person coders, well funded, no funding--etc. Like art, I don't view its lack of a clear definition to be a bad thing. There might be a number of shared characteristics that are generally found in art (or a startup), but their absence in part or in whole doesn't necessarily mean the piece isn't art or the project/group doesn't qualify as a startup.

If we can draw a clear line for the purposes of labeling something or something a startup, that's fine and I'd be inclined to accept it if it's universally accepted. I just hope that it doesn't serve to delegitimize people's work if they disagree with one's assertion that X is not a startup.
By far the best investments are the ones where you can play a major role in determining their return. So basically business ventures.

As for passive investments, if you buy David Swenson's argument that asset class is almost everything (timing and picks are really hard) then what to invest in depends a lot on your macro outlook. Personally I'm bearish on bonds, US residential and commercial real estate, and USD/euro, and bullish on Asian stocks and commodities.
Okay, geolookup on Heroku's proxy IP says seattle, but EC2 doesn't have a region there! Is Heroku running their own data center there? Curious...
Would you really want your file browser to become such a monster?
Mobile Form Design Strategies
http://traffic.alexa.com/graph?&w=400&h=220&o=f&...;

Isn't that drop in traffic around the same time AOL bought them?
Okay, sure, but that's trivial. You've just created a bijection from Z[62^5] to Z[62^5]. I could just use "X+1 mod 62^5" and get the same effect, minus some fake attempt at security.
Ron Mueck is a London
To be fair, once you incorporate you need to name a CEO, no matter how small of a project is being created by the company.
How the iPhone, NFC and Mac App Store Will Enable Remote Computing
It's really more of a question of "Why does my shell currently privilege file browsing above music or email browsing?" I would contend that it's for historical reasons more than anything else.
He could just be telegraphing his intention so as to minimise confusion. Humour not clearly marked as such is often down-voted. As such, this would be a defensive move in ego-space, rather than an attempt for validation. Hence a self-protective mode of thought rather than an energy stealing vampiric dependency mode. Thus I feel that it is a positive, yang based maneuver, rather than a negative ying based energy flow.

You suggest hate as a primary motivator. Hate is based on repressed anger, and anger is the archetypal emotive of rules that have been broken. What rules do you suggest that he feels have been broken? Perhaps some kind of rule that the things that are valuable are those that are unique and not derivative? What would you suggest is the causative agency of such a feedback based rules paradigm?
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That's a shame...
devops and all, the ratio's still staggering for the number of hits that reddit gets.
My biggest issue with IE as a browser is that Microsoft's enterprise support priorities are not inline with my innovation priorities. I would rather support faster moving browsers such as Chrome or Firefox.

Supporting IE seems to me to be supporting a project that will be obsolete in many ways soon after launch, and will stay that way for quite some time.
I've got friends who do it 'cause you can't boot your new roommate out when your parents want to come visit for a week...
I had not. But it doesn't seem to be up right now.
14yr old creates Winphone app for dog lovers
That's like saying that not buying the winning lottery ticket was a bad decision. You did the best with the information you had at the time.

Drinking and driving is a bad decision. Putting all your eggs in one basket is a bad decision. Passing on a given investment opportunity is just everyday business for a VC.
To go along with the recent post "My fellow geeks, we need to have a talk." (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2322696)...

Who cares? Let's just embrace the fact that a simple side project could very well turn into a profitable business in the field we're all operating in? How does a rant bring more to the table than someone calling a side project a startup? (whatever the distinction may be)
That is nice.

It is too bad that it is opt-in. And it doesn't immediately fix the problem that some authors write tests for themselves only. But it is definitely a good step in the right direction.
Ah, you learned your first lesson of web typography: line spacing should not be 1.0.

But you have not yet learned the second lesson: line spacing should not be 2.0, and certainly should not be even larger.

Keep it in [1.2, 1.5] for body text, and you will die a happy man.
Empirically very few big technology companies do it without taking money from investors.

I've never really liked the term "lifestyle business" and I don't know who invented it. But I think it is a useful distinction, even for the people starting them. Is your goal for the company to make yourself a nice living, or do you want it to grow into something bigger than would be needed to achieve that?

It's false that VCs want companies to be acquired. They would much prefer that they continued to grow as independent companies, like Google or Facebook. Those are the big successes that generate most of the returns in the VC business.
I have a lot of respect for him, but it's pretty disappointing to see him so opposed to doing things that would bring more clarity to those trying to understand his work. This is at least the third quote I've seen of him blowing off the idea of giving examples or more documentation. It's further disappointing to see "that document is my dissertation" juxtaposed with "I sometimes need to expand on the terse explanations provided in the dissertation, because I was in a hurry when I wrote it".
Legal representation can't be totally inaccessible unless the justice system removes the right to trials altogether. Representing yourself in court is possible, at least to some extent,^ and it doesn't require hardware like flying does. (Incidentally, this is also why it's a good thing to have libraries in prisons - the innocent can use them to learn more and help exonerate themselves.)

^I know that it's a very poor idea to represent yourself if you have any other option, but it's still better than being on trial in a 100% rigged system, such as the USSR had.

All this complexity regarding law makes me think of Phillip Greenspun's research into computer-aided law: http://philip.greenspun.com/research/area-exam.text

(Holy cow has this gotten off the original topic. Sorry everyone!)
You got it. See you there.

TLChan
By hipsters for hipsters?
Are you sure? What's that at the 1:30 mark?

Serious question, I thought it was IE 1, but now I feel like I missed something.

Edit: I'm sure he does, he explicitly mentions various performance issues with IE 1.0 several times, starting with a screenshot at about 1:30
Thanks for the extra info! I'm doing a lot of work now with python on EC2 and the reddit write ups + presentations have been a huge help. Thanks again.
Http://www.bugmenot.com
Screw the environment. Print this email immediately. And then burn it.
Sure. So perhaps it's not a net win or lose either way. The iPad is quicker to get up and going with, perhaps like a car with higher octane fuel. Long haul, the computer's going to win out for sure. But that initial feel of faster, and the way you can just grab it and go instead of sitting down at a desk to check email or get online, will make most consumers prefer tablet computers to full comptuers. Same as oven vs. microwave. It's much faster to bring 10 gallons of water to boil on a stove, but your cold cup of coffee would be reheated much easier in the microwave. Complementary devices, some similar use cases, but for the most part the microwave let us warm food we otherwise would have just eaten cold. The iPad brings computing in an non-intrusive manner to areas we otherwise would have not used computers.

And it's not just the iPad; Android Tablets will play a big part, and HP/Microsoft/RIM/others will as well. But for now, the iPad is the 900 lb. gorilla in the room, pushing tablet computing forward.
it's actually not a bad strategy for the 'tl;dr' cravers - a graphic near the bottom that expresses the main point of the piece
> If you give a mouse a cookie...

...you'd better get its consent first or the EU will come after you.
Indeed. You should always have a second and third hammer any time you swing, with an automatic failover to complete the job in case the first hammer explodes on contact or spontaneously ceases to exist.
Interesting trivia. One of the inspirations for Page Rank was undoubtably the Science Citation Index. Which was ultimately inspired by a 1945 article called As We May Think by Vanevar Bush.

HTML is inspired by the idea of hypertext, which was inspired by the idea of a memex machine, which was invented in a 1945 article called As We May Think by Vanevar Bush. Yes, the same article.

In other words Google lives in the intersection of two ideas whose history both trace back to the same essay. An essay written before most of us were alive. With that in mind it is interesting to read http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-ma... to see how it lead in both directions.
Thunderbird 3.3 is Approaching
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Liquefaction from the Sendai earthquake – a remarkable video
The major problem I have with any of the computer learning stuff out there is that I still need to reach for paper and pencil each time I actually try to solve a problem.

I wish there was an iPad app that taught college-level introductory physics (with a place to draw with one of those 3rd-party stylus things).
This is a tough one. I'm not sure there's any answer I could recommend to someone who didn't want to invest the time and effort required to gain some expertise about it. Certainly there are opportunities in the stock markets, the commodities markets, and the currency markets right now, but I wouldn't recommend any of those for novices. Real estate is probably easier, but this is not a great time for it. And yet leaving it in CDs isn't very attractive these days either.

If he could find a good investment advisor, that person could show him how to set up a diversified portfolio. Really, that's probably the best plan. However, I don't know how to find a good advisor; I'm sure even this requires some work. And if they told him to put a lot of his money in stocks, as they might, I'm not sure that would be good advice at the moment.

Starting a startup is something that has to come from within. If he's not already doing it, it's not a good plan.

Really, I think the only good advice I can give is to do some soul-searching, and explore some possibilities (without actually spending any of it yet), and figure out what he wants to do with it. From the sound of it, that in itself is likely to be a big project that he could spend the next year or two on.
Mark Pilgrim:

"Wait, so the big conspiracy is that Apple made their browser faster? We should all have these problems."

https://twitter.com/#!/diveintomark/status/48512225597591552
Also note the two other former employees replied in agreement: KeyserSosa[1] and raldi[2].

[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/g66f0/why_reddit_was_d...

[2] http://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/g66f0/why_reddit_was_d...
From the comments in the original thread:

"I helped my boss through this one... I had him call AT&T and explain that he received a message about something called "tethering" and to act dumb and explain that he is a heavy pandora and Netflix user and doesn't understand why he's going to be billed more for it. _Bottom line they couldn't prove it so they apologized and removed issue from his account with no changes._

Good luck to everyone. (my boss was on 4.2.1 and he is using about 25gb per month)

AT&T is hoping people will either ignore the message or call to apologize (Don't act guilty and you'll be fine)"
EBS isn't really RAIDed, it's virtualized block storage with replicas. The issue Reddit experienced wasn't drive failure, though, it was network degradation. The solution is to deploy redundant replicas in different availability zones (and/or regions, if you can). Reddit unfortunately wasn't built for that.

This isn't really any different from an on-premise application. An availability zone by definition implies "shared network hardware". Using multiple is what you do when you want redundancy.
Competition is always good.

In some of your other posts, you've said that you support universal public education, but that seems to directly contradict the statement you've made here.

Government schools have no competition, at least where I live. When I was a child, my parents paid taxes, which paid for government schools. They had no choice but to send me to terrible schools because they couldn't afford anything else after paying their taxes (my parents were not rich).

Attempts to compete against government schools are always rebuffed by people as being "against public education". So which is it? Competition is always good or government schools are somehow sacrosanct, or neither?
[Invalid] Markup Validation of Apple.com
My obligatory link to Joel Spolsky's lament on JavaSchools and championing of C:
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/ThePerilsofJavaSchool...
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Encouraging legitimate use of Online Content An iiNet view
MySQL Fork Drizzle Finally Releases First General Availability Version
I discovered Hacker News very recently and so far I'm amazed at the quality of the community I've seen here. I'm not sure how I missed it as I've been reading PG's essays for years.

I just registered to say that I'll be at the get together later today.
Hey PG,

Thanks for publishing this exchange. I've never known you to be anything but exceedingly polite and thoughtful; now I learn you're doing good work behind the scenes too. Inspiring!
Yeah, I'm sorry but I'm not sure if any of those examples are at the depth of a typical beginner who is learning what polymorphism is.
I already mentioned other types of polymorphism.
I probably shouldn't have left it at that - if there's much regularity outside of tables, then you're definitely doing something wrong. Within code I see the alignment as a way of highlighting regular areas as potential spots for refactoring. Sometimes it doesn't make sense to turn something into another layer of abstraction yet, but it may later. I can certainly see how the extra spacing might grate on some people's nerve's, though.

Edit: Something I hadn't thought of - you mention "rivers of space" - aligning code might make it harder to read for coders with dyslexia: http://uxmovement.com/content/6-surprising-bad-practices-tha...

Regarding your point about unsigned types - If I'm remembering correctly, "Writing Solid Code" had a section about exactly that - nasty bugs caused by things like looping over unsigned integers in reverse.
I'm going to Vancouver soon with my family; the first thing I did with my wife this week was pull up AirBNB (where is your ipad app, guys?) to check out what sort of deals we could get.

I'm not saying I wouldn't check hotel deals, but reading honest reviews from people who really stayed in each room, and sometimes getting to half off a hotel works great for me. They are definitely moving into 'high on my list' for travel, personal and business. I'm guessing I'm not alone here.
Well, he does make a good point. The original post is about extremely mundane situations. Everyone not getting excited about your startup, people questioning whether or not you'll stick with cycling and your new diet? These are the hardships of life? Seriously? Sorry, I don't mean to sound rude, but the original poster needs some real world experience, and the ability to understand the commitments that come in life, before criticizing people for working the same job and living in a fish tank. We know the way out of the tank, but unlike the original poster, we know why we need to stay at times.
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