skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Still playing the devils advocate here...

> Often people are discouraged to talk their mind until they feel that enough people thinks the same way.

This is the case because people are so judgemental. As I posted in my original comment, eliminating the judgemental attitude of the majority of people would help with this.
> Applicants to Startup City, who will be selected based on a YouTube video they submit to the program's website

A YouTube video alone is not sufficient to make an informed selection from the applicants. An interview in-person, or on the phone at least, is essential. I hope the process was just over-simplified in the article.
Craigslist Founder Launches craigconnects: “The Biggest Thing In My Life”
I didn't expect to see an html element with id="asdfg" that actually makes sense.
Let's have a little empathy for people like me who aren't so technical, please. "Backup" is jargon for one particularly brittle and error-prone way to solve the problem of "What happens to my music when I drop my tablet into a vat of acid?"

It's no surprise that people don't understand its utility. Quite honestly, it seems like most companies don't implement backups particularly effectively. If "professionals" can't get it right, how does giving someone a filesystem solve the problem?

My suggestion to you is to think about how a post-PC device should solve the disaster-recovery problem in a way that appeals to postPC users. If you can invent something that a luddite like me would use, you have a YCombinator startup right there.

Think about DropBox as an example. It's a folder. And it syncs. DropBox is right on the edge of PC/Post-PC. It still works with files, but all of the moving parts are out of sight.

So go out and invent the post-PC disaster-recovery mechanism. Make it like DropBox, not like backing up music. Just don't try to drag people backwards to being sysadmins. That's not going to work.
Thanks a lot for letting me know about that site @dmlorenzetti! You are right, it's pretty similar. Looks like I need to refine my idea then.
Because the momentum behind git is huge. Like I said, I preferred hg at first glance and still ended up a git user because most of the people I wanted to work with were on-board and github is awesome.
*Facepalm. It makes a lot more sense from that perspective. Long day, brain drained.
The State of Version Control
No, mathematically nothing is "Turing Complete". The only usefulness of saying that something is "Turing Complete" is in knowing that you can treat it as if it was a normal computer for all intents and purposes.

So mathematically a laptop is not Turing Complete, but for all practical purposes, it is.
Will those two things included in the new apache change this?:

Event MPM: The Event MPM is no longer experimental but is rather fully supported.

Asynchronous support: Better support for asynchronous read/write for supporting MPMs and platforms.
EDIT: I posted a rundown of our deployment process, including where and how tests happen, and why they failed to catch this bug, at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2301680 .

While I'm sure there's a lot of stuff we could improve, the situation's not exactly as you describe.

Responding to a few contacts:

1 & 2. We do have a list of "if this breaks, contact this guy." What we don't have (in response to your first point) is a demand that those people be available Sunday night.

3. We have a known rollback procedure. It does not work if we do a irreversible schema change and the problem's not caught until 20 hours later. We couldn't just throw out 20 hours of data.

4. We actually do a lot of testing. Beginning on Wednesday, we deploy to our early leak accounts. We steadily increase that through the week. The problem with this particular bug is that you could use Kiln lightly (most of our test accounts are not large accounts) without hitting this problem at all. Even the full QA test suite did not trigger the problem. That happened because Kiln was designed to keep working in the case of a FogBugz communication failure until it couldn't, which was directly proportional to how much you used Kiln. The real problem here, which has been fixed, is that Kiln should not attempt to hide a problem communicating with FogBugz.

5. We don't do release in the middle of the day. We do them at 10 PM. I have no idea where you got that.

There's a lot we can improve. We need to make sure Kiln not talking to FogBugz, which can bring down Kiln, hard-fails, instead of trying to continue. We need to make sure that all hands are on-deck when people are going to work, as you noted, which is vastly easier to do midweek than Sunday night. And we probably ought to add more automated testing to the integration points. But I think you're painting a somewhat unfair picture of the current situation.
So the cost of people thinking about the ascii art is clearly much higher than the bandwidth consumed in transferring it. At least when factoring in gzip.
You can tell him WHAT you are going to do but not HOW. I used to have a client who would keep asking me for solution with the lure of a project coming up, but then said thanks, problem solved. I had to jokingly say I need to start charging for consultation for providing solution, but eventually had to fire the client.

But on the other hand, I have clients whom I gave detail proposal on WHAT to be done in the projects and the projects were awarded.
Physics Journal allows Creative Commons License
CVCSes work OK. But they all miss a critical piece. They aren't nearly as good at doing one of the main things that a version control system can let you do: branching and experimenting with your code

I hear this complaint a lot, but I do this all the time with SVN. Just have a directory (tempbranches) where you create your branches. It's probably something I do once a week (and not because I feel limited to only doing it once per week, but most of my work occurs in my local branch -- and I branch that one only when I want to do something that is more experimental, but will take a few days). I'll grant that its not as clean as a DVCS for this, but it works just as easily. The big difference is that we now have centralized accounting of this action, rather than it being distributed.
Why I love Adjix
I agree about the convenience of having multiple branches in a single repo, as opposed to the darcs way which is one working directory per branch. For one thing, I never found a convenient way to switch between branches in an IDE when using darcs. For another, having a separate working copy for each branch consumes disk space unnecessarily. (Hopefully with the popularity of SSDs these days, people are less likely to reflexively respond "disk is cheap," but just in case: with git, all branches of my current project fit on my USB stick; with darcs, they wouldn't. It also makes a big difference for copying times.) darcs repos can be deduplicated using hard links, but that only affects the patch history--the working copy is still duplicated.

[edit: removed question that was answered by sibling post]
I'm not as convinced this is terribly skewed away from the normal. Outside the Bay Area, the large organizations that hire thousands of programmers primarily use Windows for development. For example, go to any Defense Contractor (Lockheed, Northrop, etc) in the country and sample the computers they use for dev work. Each developer probably has a Windows box they do everything on. There might be some Linux boxes mixed in, but those will probably be headless. Or the developer runs Linux in a VM on top of Windows.

While in the Bay Area, we might think these are skewed because everywhere we go we see Mac laptops, in reality, the employees at big corporations are going to outnumber us.
it was. We're probably going to do something like Capital Factory. The video part is just to help get an initial screening done of the applicants.
Ahh.. The windows bit makes perfect sense. I wasn't aware (not a Windows user). Excellent point about git's community also. As obtuse as the commands can be (Really? git push :branch_name DELETES a remote branch?), I still love it. Also, the relatively high number of people who claim to love cvs in the survey suggests the bar for satisfaction might not be very high here :|
Hiten Shah about to Launch Newsletter for Entrepreneurs
Throws a 403 - persmision denied - and is it anything like the item submitted three hours ago?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2300802

That got lots of discussion.
care to share the reasons of this preference?
This is rather scary--How does this effect public domain code? For example, if I release some public domain code, can someone else copyright it with a minor variation and then stop me (and others who use the code) from using the original code?
but it works just as easily

Um, are you sure? I find branching and merging in git (after three months using it) much, much, much easier than I did in SVN (after 7 years of using it).
Thanks getsat for the shout out. Our guys have put in a lot of work adding features and keeping delayed_job up to snuff.

I do have to disagree with you on ThinkingSphinx. I have used both, and I gel much better with Solr. Don't get me wrong, the guy(s) who did ThinkingSphinx have worked hard. I just don't like the moving pieces of ThinkingSphinx: continuous rake tasks, the fact that it sits directly on top of the database, extra re-deployment steps when using capistrano. I prefer having the search server sitting apart.
Y Combinator requires a one minute video for each founder. No cute graphics, no special effects, just one minute of you talking. I did it, and thought it added value to my submission.

I'd be a bit put off by any video requirements that allowed for too much more technical wizardry than that. I present myself well, but I do so far better in person, and I'm not adept with making movies.

I'd be quite happy to come in for an in person interview, even though I'm 1,500 miles away. I want to evaluate you as well. Committing to a particular incubator is a commitment by both parties and I want to be sure I'm comfortable working with you as well.
The difference comes when you want to merge that branch back in (retaining history), or cherry-pick part of it.
With respect to "smart"
The releases are both automated (except for one component, as noted, which we are now automating), and are fully vetted.

Here is the old release process:

1. Monday morning, the version to be used for the next release is automatically built for the QA team, who begins running their test suites on it and doing soft checks.

2. By no later than Wednesday, the new version is leaked to testing an alpha accounts on Fog Creek On Demand. Tests are re-run at this point.

3. The leak is increased later in the week if the QA results look good, or the weekend release is canceled, depending on how testing goes.

4. Provided everything has been good, on Saturday night, the leak is increased to 100% of customers. This step does not have a full QA rundown, because the code has already been vetted several times by QA at this point. The sanity checks are truly sanity checks.

5. At the same time, we monitor that our monitoring system (Nagios) agrees that all accounts are online and that there are no major problems, such as massive CPU spikes.

So far, so good. The issue with this release is we had a bug that did not manifest for awhile, because Kiln had been deliberately designed to ignore the failure condition "as long as possible", which ended up just being too damn long. Once we started having failures, we noticed--that's why our sysadmin called us in--but those failures started happening 20 hours after the 100% release, and several days after testing and alpha accounts were upgraded.

I am not arguing our system is perfect, but I'm a nonplussed where the your-deployment-system-totally-sucks stuff is coming from. I'll ask our build manager to post an even more detailed rundown.
Very interesting: I wonder at what point they figured out he was messing with his grades?
Medialets Architecture - Defeating The Daunting Mobile Device Data Deluge
Using a proper CDN ( http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/cloud_hosting_products/files/... ) you'll pay 0.18 USD per gigabyte. And that's the retail rate for a nobody. If you're somebody, you get discounts. Plus gzip and all the other stuff people brought up. Your real cost is like 10 bucks for that logo per month. I still wouldn't do it, but I'm a cheap bastard. Also, they're pissing away a lot more money with all that whitespace in the html/css/javascript!
Jark: Running clojure programs on a persistent JVM
Yeah, I branch in SVN whenever I feel like it and don't see any limitations. Other than the occasional experiment I haven't really used DVCSes.

In practice, how is branching/experimenting different between the two categories?
If you have a really huge dataset go away from sphinx, it takes forever to index and doesn't offer incremental updates, as well it crashes regularly
Are you sure those aren't spheres? 'Cause if they were, then it should really be volume, not area.
Also incorrect. Counterexample: Turing machines are Turing complete. You are correct that a laptop is not Turing complete, though.
SXSWi 2011: LiquidSpace launches an AirBnB style app for nearby workspaces
We have more than staging servers: we have staging accounts. I documented our full release process at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2301680.
Redirects to quora.com
Does this mean that apache2 + the Lua support are going to be the next node.js? On a more serious note, this is super-exciting.
Oddly enough, HP is the one of the major vendors that most appears to be actually planning an alternative to windows. They've already said they plan on bringing WebOS to PCs.
I'm reading the title and thinking "if it's gonna take a nuclear bomb to ruin my startup, it must be doing really well!".
Baaaasically DVCS means you don't need to go through SVN server setup horrors, getting repos becomes sane, and basically your vcs pain goes away.

Well, if you use hg. /cheapshot
"Distributed Version Source Control is to centralized source control as source control is to not having source control."

* Source: http://www.mokasocial.com/2011/02/four-things-about-fogbugz-...
Not sure if that's worse or the "GNU Hurd" pair of pairs of mutually recursive acronyms. [1]

[1] http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/hurd/what_is_the_gnu_hurd/o...
Thanks jhancock - I'm planning on writing a post talking about sunspot without sunspot_rails. I tried to make this post concise. It's cool to hear you have already had success with it.
1) System stability. If your video driver dies on XP, hello crash. On Win7 you see your screen go blank for about a 1/4 of a second and then redraws itself, back in business.

2) If you work remotely, RDP is way better. I've even streamed video over RDP and forgot that I was streaming it from a remotely located computer.

3) If using SSDs Win7 will have better perf and longer lifetime.

4) Virtual folders.

But I would say that if your machines are completely locked down, for example all XP machines are not on the internet, just some closed internal network, then I think XP might be doable. Once you touch the internet though, all bets off.
It is so refreshing for any person or company to come out and explain, in detail, how they screwed up and what they are doing to ensure it doesn't happen again.

The tone of your post encourages people to cover up their mistakes for fear of ridicule, and I am against that. Some of your points are worthy of debate though.
I actually don't mind The Wire reputation, because I loved that show so much. Lest anyone think I don't have a sense of humor about it, here's a tour I wrote up for seeing all the sites from the show, for people coming to RailsConf:

http://www.subelsky.com/2008/12/wire-tour-of-baltimore.html
I think we mostly agree here. Each person does make his/her own choices, and most people can improve their life situation if they decide to. And I definitely agree that simple income distribution isn't the answer - better to "teach a man to fish."

I was just picturing walking up to a drunk on the street and saying "the difference between me and you is that you made poor life choices and I made good ones." That would be overlooking so many factors in what made us who we are, right back to the vocabulary we heard around us from the day we were born.
Yet another canvas implementation of the game of life
Google support : no support for nicknames typos
Wonderful idea. Born and raised in Baltimore/Columbia and this is definitely more of what we need. Great work so far. Do you guys have a website yet?
If you don't have time to read it, you should buy it
Get out of #Jail Free Card
While the effects of a bug like this will be mostly short lived on desktop systems where patch management is usually pretty good in linux, the effects on embedded systems can reverberate for years. Look around your house or office and consider how many devices like TVs, dvd players, DVRs, broadband routers, access control devices, industrial control systems and the like run linux and have a usb port. Many of these will have a broad range of usb device drivers built into the kernel (even if they're not used) and often use a network port or wireless chip by design. Very few of these will have reasonable update policies, and even fewer of them will move to a new kernel or backport a vulnerable driver. Many rely on custom drivers that would need to be tested all over again to qualify a new kernel and have busy and relatively inexperienced staff on them.

The ability to use these devices as sniffers, network backdoors and MITM attackers is very much there. Most of the time devices like this are more less invisible, very few consumers will be watching their network traffic. Worse, even when an intrusion is detected on a network and all traditional computing devices are wiped or replaced few people will think to replace their blu-ray.

Just another brick in the pervasive insecurity wall.
Interview: WaySavvy Partners With Expedia For Better Travel Deals
I can confirm this (working at mega-corp) and can also add that a lot of specialized and embedded tools are primarily hosted on Windows. Even high-end CAD and modelling tools are primarily on Windows where I've worked.
Interesting now lighttpd, nginx and apache are all going to have some degree of integration of Lua in request processing. Its really useful having a real programming language built right in.
What is the cost in lost rankings on Google? They do seem to consider loading speed in their rankings.
Home - freshaz at vere technical
You are probably being downvoted because your comment is 94% spam, and because "loosing" is not a word that makes any sense in the context of your post.
This only pertains to ads and malware, but I use Ad Muncher on Windows, which is a paid program (with a month-long trial). I use it, because I can't be bothered to set up countermeasures, every time I use a new installation. And it works in all browsers (obviously) - and outside browsers.

Cons:
* Whitelisting is a hassle: I still haven't figured it out, which means that good ad networks like Yoggrt, Fusion Ads, and Deck Network are blocked.
* Blacklisting is also a hassle. You'd think they would support a widget filter - or a good import feature, but alas.

It's the best desktop client I know, though.

http://admuncher.com.
If anyone has any good resources on Riak search, please share them. I keep hearing good things about Riak and haven't dived in yet.
Google Adwords Keyword Tool
Here's the thing - there's a huge variety of answers there, all coming from the different backgrounds, contexts, abilities, and situations.

How can I care? How can I assess? How can I analyse?

Why is this not just a waste of time? I flashed through several in under a minute and have decided that reading this is less value than having a coffee with someone I might actually make a connection with.
Banks do not loan deposits. And yes, wikipedia is wrong. Ask a bank accountant.
Yep, it's the same thing.
for http://www.virtualrockstars.com I am using SVN, simply because that's what I used before and I didn't know of Git being so awesome at the time. But I must say SVN is still pretty good... I agree that you can't love it compared to Git but its pretty pretty good.
would be funny if it was someone like Richard Branson or John Carmack vying for these instead... to burn them!
Sphinx does have the advantage that it runs fine on a little 256 Meg VPS, where you're not going to shoehorn in Tomcat or Jetty
I can cherry pick easily when I merge back. I just select which revision range I want to merge in. I can say revision 1, 2-5, and 11.

I think I do lose history though. And while history is important, if its just history, why don't people say that? People make it sound like you just can't do branches and merging in SVN easily, while you can.
OpenText Acquires Mobile App Deployment Software Maker weComm
There's also ClearCase, which I believe is popular in Big Iron Enterprise shops.
Well so far there have only been two systems that made any effort to keep them separate, so that is true. But it's still the same base exploit.
With its huge new campus, Facebook is getting into urban planning
Ask HN: Which advertising network do you use and why?
I see lots of short term websites popping up on HN. Sites that ride on the tail of a meme or one that has a lot of traffic but only for a week or two.

I often have smart or funny ideas* for a site of that description but I wouldn't really want to spend money on it.

Do ads recoup the cost of the domain name and hosting? I know it might not be much, especially if noone actually uses the site but it could potentially be a few hundred euro if the site took off.

Assuming that ads do cover the costs, what advertising network do you use? Are some better than other for monetising a short term site? The only ad network I know of is Adsense.
Andrew Warner, Noah Kagan, and Ramit Sethi are Doing it Right
Is it possible to do anything with that apart from run the existing Smokescreen demos? There's nothing on the site that refers to anything having shipped or even a target ship date.
Will apache support Google's SPDY at some point? Also, how much is having to support all the legacy platforms slowing down development of new features?
Will my international startup owe U.S. taxes?
"But what's in that string? That still counts."

Sure, but it counts regardless of what you're talking about. We don't generally talk about charging data against the TM because they all need data of some sort to do anything interesting. "eval" still gets you there. (Pedantic.)
I didn't realize Apple kept that from you, but OK. Alternative. Twitter clients normally send their user-agent as part of an API request. Twitter probably still has that data, and could check to see who sent a Tweet from Tweetie between a given period of time. Is there the possibility of false positives? Certainly, but it's better than nothing.
I think the response options were more than just love/hate, and that the infographic is representing that about half of the VSS users are "meh".
inside a dream, inside another dream!
Here at HP we're using our own equipment on a fairly large installed base so we actually have a reasonably good feel for relatie support costs.

Also, we have an internally supported and externally available standard Linux environment (LinuxCOE) which engineers (like myself), who run multiple OSes in their cube, can use.

Speaking for myself only here, I would say that the alternatives are available but we can't really ignore what the market demands.
I see you implemented the changes. Hope it helps.