skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wasn't thinking about Oracle-the-database but all the other stuff they sell that makes huge, faceless corporations go. No YC-style company is in a position to take on Oracle toe-to-toe, in the lapdance-and-BJ market. The only option is some sort of incremental disruption where a product takes market share from Oracle at the low end, where Oracle is probably happy to see these not-very-valuable customers desert them. (This is straight from Clayton Christensen's Innovator's Dilemma.)

And for the record, I programmed against Oracle using oraperl back in 1994.
Entrepreneurs Unpluggd was great, Tim. As far as I'm concerned, you're leading the push to put Chicago on the map as a great startup city.
What's the difference between Google +1 and Facebook Like? How are they differentiating their service? Just because the +1 is integrated somehow into search results doesn't really make it better. A community cannot successfully determine the reputation of it's members if their only option is to give it a +1 or a like. If +1 also came with -1 or it morphed to thumbs up/thumbs down, it could become more of a reputation generator for any person or web based entity which I think could be much more useful.
The "hack" is when someone roots their server and makes it return "rm -rf ~". Even if it's the most secure server ever, it's still a bad technique, IMO.
While there are some interesting nuggets of information here, I think the author falls into the same trap as the myths he's trying to bust: overgeneralisation. Still, the book sounds interesting.
I see what you did there. (though, doesn't work with wget)
Tap.Me - in game advertising and engagement for game developers by game developers. Funded and about to announce some killer traction. Http://tap.me/
How to start a social startup: knowing when you’re right and wrong
Is JetBrains appCode a Solution Looking for a Problem?
Hmm, I usually like to prove my point without engaging in copyright infringement.
If your system looks like it did the first day you launched, you're doing it wrong. It's difficult to communicate to this...

Am I the only one who reads it is only removing RoR from the search stack? It seems the rest of the front-end will probably exist as RoR in some form.
Homeowner wins $21M lawsuit against lender – ultimate David beats Goliath
America’s 8th largest mortgage company, PHH Mortgage was just ordered to pay a single homeowner $21 million in damages after they falsely reported him as “seriously delinquent” to credit rating companies despite his never making a late payment.
Myself, I think message boards resemble fencing more than upvote-based comment threads. I kind of like that HN/Reddit mitigate the "quote piecemeal, attack piecemeal" back and forth that was the norm on message boards.

(You know what I'm talking about, right? - person A writes long post, B takes issue and responds to A sentence by sentence, often ignoring A's overall point to focus on incorrect minutiae, A, now incensed, refuses to concede that any of the minutiae were incorrect, and writes an individual response to each of B's sentences. I felt that this wasn't a good environment for conversation either - I think talking in person forces you to consider the thrust of another person's argument, since you can't hold all the minutiae in RAM, but my experience was that conversations in message boards degraded to many small parallel quarrels over nitpicking in a way that HN/Reddit comment threads don't (as much).)
I wonder though. How good is indeed's data?

I ran a query for "PHP developer" and got an average salary of $72k - check the standard deviation of about $7k. Is my salary really almost two standard deviations below the mean for Toronto?

That's embarrassing more than anything else. I find myself wishing I had a post anonymously option on HackerNews.
This is an interesting development. So one of the biggest problems to providing reservations (as they are called) is that the system is so corrupt it is very difficult to ensure that only the needy and deserving get the benefit. There are tons of people who "scam" these schemes by forging documents of income and or caste (which are usually the basis for these reservations). Until the underlying problem is fixed, these schemes, although noble will only be so on paper.
You're right that I mixed up the terminology a bit, but as someone else here pointed out, I was using "forum" in the classical sense: a place where people talk.

We now have the "old kind" of forums -- phpBB and its ilk -- and the "new kind" of forums, the comments-oriented sections of Reddit and HackerNews and Slashdot.

And, yes, I get that on these sites, the comments are prompted by new articles. (I'm not sure that I'd agree that articles are the focus, but that might depend on the individual.)

I was just pointing out where comments sites don't do as well in terms of the value of conversation, and why that might be, and comparing it to the older style of forums.

Nothing wrong with lurking to learn; I think that "looking at them in awe" was a bit of hyperbole.
What To Fix
Even `sudo rm -Rf /` with the password prompt in terminal would probably catch a few people unaware.
Coralrift.com is a simple Rails app but we changed the Apache configuration to route all subdomains to individual directories served by Apache.

We had to get a VPS instead of hosting on something like Heroku because we needed access to the filesystem and Apache configuration
Happy Birthday Linux 20 Years old and How To Get Started Linux With No Hassle
Today, Linux has just reached a very important and remarkable milestone: Linux is 20 years old, not young any more but not old enough too. Celebrating 20 years old, probably all founders and creators of Linux are completely happy with what success Linux has gained so far.

As a common end-user, I feel very excited too about this event. Though Windows continues playing an important role in my daily basis, Linux also make its presence more than I have ever imagined.
Not sure i agree with your "linear" point.

Conversations used to be linear in Groupie (forum app i created) and things got completely out of control. Three people would try to have a conversation and someone else would randomly throw in a totally unrelated point. Get a dozen people doing this and all of sudden there's a mess. What happens is that users stop trying to follow along and only read whats immediately in front of them. Anecdotally, threading and nesting dramatically improved the experience of forum-based communities and noticably improved the quality of replies.

Also, another benefit of scoring is that it lends to reputation. Just like in real life, people do what they can to preserve their digital reputations (once they establish them). Last week I saw something rather incredible: several of my users dished out extremely harsh digital justice on one of the most popular (by "fame") users who made some ridiculous statements. When you're among the most influential on a platform, people watch and literally hold you to a higher standard. Anyway just wanted to share this view.
Good luck not reading things thoroughly.
So basically, just like the U.S.?
Ask HN: Why Are No Black People In Y Combinator?
Y Combinator's website has a slideshow on it: http://ycombinator.com/ . I always notice there's exactly one black person out of all those pictures. Do black people just not apply to Y Combinator? Is the posterous video link to remove any black candidates? Do they just not have black people where pg's from? What?
Dude, what do you think the easiest way to purchase a senate seat is? In most states it costs a couple million dollars to run a campaign for a job that pays 200k.

I understand that a lot of conservatives want to go back to the 1850s but that's not what I'm talking about, I'm talking about as recently as 25-50 years ago when the current state of affairs would have been a scandal. And heck, even during Tammany Hall, such bribery was at least technically illegal, and widespread breaking of the law meant our elected officials said "how do we stop this". Now it's not only legal, it's encouraged, and our leaders are trying to enable more of it.
Since the real data (link above) disagrees with wikipedia, I prefer to believe the real data :)
This is an obvious thing for them to do, but the surprising part about it to me is that half the time youtube is too slow to play a video clip I choose. It's very unreliable, so it will be interesting to see how well the streams work.
Totally agree: commercial APIs are over-represented and open formats and protocols are not represented at all.

Some comments:

4. Centralized subscription manager.

If we're talking RSS, nearly everything syncs with Google Reader at this point. I'd love for that protocol to be opened up...

8. Open source Dropbox clone.

This would be awesome, especially with Dropbox's history of design related security issues.

11. Make Apache an end-user product.

WAMP/MAMP and similar are one step in this direction.
Save your money, Steve: we don't need more Microsoft Stores.
I consider myself an introvert and most of the descriptions under each myth were spot on for me. Shared it with a few people to explain how I think.
I like the writer's breakdown, but all of this is common sense to me. It can all be boiled down to: (1) write good, engaging content and (2) respond promptly to readers' comments.
"EDIT: And looking over the comments here, the only links offsite is someone complaining about pricing and someone else offering up some git projects where someone is currently translating a project into english. Pretty fucking pompous to say non-Lispers are scared of parens."

Please can the attitude.

Not everyone speaks English as their first language. The RESTAS documentation is well-written and the translation is high quality (I helped proof-read it).

If you have trouble using github, there are help pages for that. If you think "github isn't friendly to newbies," too bad, because you will need to use git if you want to write software.

If you wanted links to tutorials about Common Lisp, you can ask for them. But if you really wanted those (and not just to troll HN), you would have asked already. Like that guy who asked for documentation for RESTAS and received links to the documentation and several example projects.
If rms can use SMTP for web pages, we might as well do the opposite. ;-)

Email has different needs than do web pages, thus the protocols are different. Could one implement email over HTTP? Sure! But what, exactly, will be the benefits and costs? And then there is history. Unless the benefits are extremely compelling it will never be worthwhile to upset the entire email infrastructure.
I don't understand why you're trying to make this an "us vs. them" thing. What is it about academia that makes it so that Google's research can't be considered a part? Does the fact that there are students around somehow make it different?

Perhaps I was being unclear with "...in nature". I meant that it was academic in origin, and still much of the work is academic. I did not claim that Google has not contributed, but that I was defending the community against a misconception that Google invented/developed something that is partially the work of NLP academics. Re-read my comment please. In particular:

The premise of this article--that Google developed the speech-recognition technology--hurts my feelings (to say the least) and underestimates the contributions of the NLP community.

They publish papers like "Stupid Backoff" [1], but that makes them as much a contributor as any other member of the NLP community.

I am not saying that Google has not contributed to speech. I am arguing that the premise of the article, that Google DEVELOPED the technology, is misleading and insulting.

As for science vs. technology:

NLP is very systems and technology heavy. If you haven't done much NLP research, you might think that it's very theoretical. No, it's very much about how to stuff a larger language model in memory, how to take an NP-hard decoding problem and produce a linear time approximation algorithm (decoding), how to take an optimization problem of multiple parameters and optimize over them computationally, etc.

I agree there is a distinction between science and technology, but to argue that NLP in the academic world is also not "largely technological" is misleading at best.
Laptops and Other Electronics May Be Seized on Entry to US
How is this the slightest bit different than faking a site and altering the binary/source package on the other end of a regular old Download link?

(edit: Oh. You're doing user-agent sniffing for curl. Fair enough, but this still isn't any less secure than downloading and executing a binary.)
Fundamentals are nice, but rote learning of them is directly on the route to formulaic solving. You have to have something to force you to use math like an artist and not like a computer.

Which is to say, I highly suggest doing this stuff as long as you get value out of it. It'll be a boon to your comprehension speed later.

Eventually, however, go find a hard textbook and work through every single line of it. Really. Understand that it'll possibly take years and involve finding many lesser sources to fill in the gaps, but without a hard motivating problem you're going to get stuck in an affective loop on formulaic knowledge. Easy, satisfying, but somewhat flat.
#1 don't think about traffic first. My advice? Be genuine, creative, interesting and insightful. All while trying to add your own unique flare to your writing. Focus on specific interests and passions that you are practically obsessed about. Readership will follow afterwards.
This dependency injection madness must end
Google already tried to buy Twitter to some extent.

http://techcrunch.com/2009/04/02/sources-google-in-late-stag...

It seems like Twitter is the last piece of the puzzle for them. However, I think Twitter needs more time to mature from a good product to a great product.
Oops. Better?
Ask HN: Is anyone still looking for an intern? 
Hey guys I am a Senior/Junior Computer Science student, I had plans to go to Spain for a study abroad but I just found out I can’t go anymore :(. This caused me to not apply to any summer internships. I am curious if anybody is still hiring an intern for the summer. I have been working with ruby/rails for the past year and would be interested in doing some web development. I would love to find a place in NYC or go to CA if there is an opportunity there.
NATO and Pelosi Apparently Unaware That .ly Is Owned by Qaddafi
No! That was the orthodoxy for 40 years and it got us nowhere, because the construction metaphor is fundamentally wrong.
Which part of the meaning of the work "estimate" are we missing:

"an approximate judgment or calculation, as of the value, amount, time, size, or weight of something."

??
I prefer how Google handles that search query. If you're looking for a flight does entering 'fly' after your two destinations really hurt that much? 'to' is -more often than not - a pretty meaningless keyword, and I'm pretty sure most people don't want half of what's above the fold to be taken up by flight information if all they enter is a very general 'New York City to Los Angeles'.
Ha!, I think all of us rejected think personally YC made the wrong decision.

[Edit] I did not want to seem like a jerk with just leaving a jab. Continue to grow your company and listen to your users and don't focus on hypothetical reasons why yc did not choose you.
Oh yeah, I agree that Google should be praised for taking research and producing useful applications.

I am not disparaging Google in the least. I respect them for bringing NLP to the masses. I meant to dispel the myth that Google invented speech recognition, or that it developed it. The reality is that it is as much of a developer as anyone else in the NLP community.
As a separate company, Tripadvisor can now be considered more impartial, not favoring Expedia partners... This will also increase their sales appeal to Expedia's competitors.
How Inflation affects your income, investments, and savings
For the record, I'm a designer, and do frontend coding.

I'm not advocating everyone to be a programmer, but to deliver the best experience, you need to be in control of the design. And I don't say you need to do frontend coding (even I think you should) but just to be part of the workflow, making your work better and everyone's else easier.

I taught my girlfriend to use git/github.com(how to commit, push and pull) in an afternoon, and she's not a coder or a designer. So I think quite easy to learn, specially if you have people around helping you if you get stuck.

It's like saying "I'm a designer, I cannot use email, IRC or Skype", when everyone else around you are using these tools.
Make Your Own NFC Tags
Do you inspect the source code of every program you download? Do you decompile and reverse engineer the closed source ones? At some point you have to trust the developer isn't doing anything nasty, and be careful about where you get your software from.
Carlos baute | Quien te quiere como yo Video Musical HD | Video Musical
You might be want to read http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2349477
>"I think it's strange that Google is going after social."

As a company whose revenue is based on data-mining internet traffic, it makes perfect sense because of the potential value of pushing ads to an individual based on knowledge of their social network, e.g. pushing Mercedes ads to a person whose friends all drive Porsches. And for Google, that's what better search means - it doesn't mean putting useful long tail information on the front page when such information is not easily monetized.
On ‘Radiolab,’ the Sound of Science
I strongly disagree: the designer is on the team and what she produces has to be integrated with the work of the other members of the team.

Git is just one tool to share work within a team, and it happens to have nice GUI (like SmartGit) which make it almost unnecessary to learn the Git command line. I cannot believe that someone who can use Photoshop is unable to learn to press "Pull", "Commit", and "Pull".
Is Google Marketing Linux-BSD?
Great article, and fun to see what is going on inside. We used a similar strategy with great success at my last company (though we were using Passenger).

Once you've nailed the zero-downtime deployment, it's a short hop to adding a small box (or a script on your test server) to do continuous integration and then moving from there to continuous deployment. For our small team this setup was really liberating.

If you head down that path, I'd love to see updates on what your team's experience is with that transition.
Developer estimation improves when the developer is estimating the time for a task that is repeatable and they have experience or data on how much time the task took in the past. Substitute any title for "developer" in the previous statement and it remains true: civil engineer, drywall installer, plumber, etc.

The challenge is that relatively few developer tasks are highly repeatable, and very few developers are disciplined about collecting data on how long similar tasks required in the past. Also high performing developers get bored easily and frequently want to chase the new shiny tool/framework, where they have no past experience or data to rely on for estimating.

A first question in asking a developer about their estimate is "have you done this type of task before with the same technology you are planning to use". If no, disregard any estimates.

You can get good estimates for high volume of task teams, like maintenance or break/fix teams where the technology remains relatively static from one work iteration to the next, and the work items can be bucketed into meaningful and consistent sizes (T shirt sizing or what have you). Those are typically where you have your junior (or offshore) developers staffed as they pay their dues, and they can benefit greatly from having discipline around collecting data on their actual experience and using that data to reduce variance in estimates vs actuals in the future. This is also a great space for a new dev lead or manager to cut their teeth on managing the consistent collection and application of this data to reduce variance to plan.

For the really fun work though, where your high performing developers want to be operating so they can thrive and experience self-actualization (see Maslow), forget about the estimating angst and just timebox them or go agile -- build something, release it, refactor it, repeat. Don't waste your time creating the illusion of certainty about the future when you have nothing but optimistic gut feel as input to the estimating machine.
Speaking from experience at a large multi-year project at a BigCo, I am quite familiar with the failures of estimation. Some information is absent because some things are simply unknown due to inexperience or inability to predict future changes or mistakes (reasonable). However, other things are lacking because there is no motivation or demand to produce them. For example, waterfall processes generally throw the software development lifecycle on a schedule for a system or subsystem: requirements, design, implementation, test. If the lifecycle stages are not divided into tasks upfront (which then should be further divided), then the complexity of each stage is basically not being factored into the estimates for each stage. This is setting the stage for failure unless it is a project that has been done repeatedly over many years in the organization.

Furthermore, continuous process improvement and monitoring is not done enough even in organizations that declare achievement of higher levels of CMMI. Our team had subsystems that overran their initial estimates by over 100%, causing nearly a year in delay. However, there were basically no penalties or major process changes despite the fact that multiple subsystems overran estimates multiple times. Process professionals, engineers, and managers are simply not aggressive in tackling these problems.

In addition, estimates tend to come from individuals. I imagine that a more collaborative team-based estimation approach would be better, factoring different levels of experience and sharing the burden of making estimations realistic. Also, recorded estimates need to be coupled with recorded justification.
I'm on the fence when it comes to the bit on "conversation by community"; I included it because it's unlike traditional in-person group conversation, but I haven't been able to figure out yet if it might be beneficial or harmful to conversation in the long-term, or neither.
Jean Bartik, Software Pioneer, Dies at 86
Yes, I agree with you, things can get out of control. That's because the other thing the sites with great conversations have in common is an element of moderation and "etiquette". You can't take a random selection of people and expect their community values to spring from nothing. It has to be tended and moderated and standards have to be established, people have to establish reputation by becoming known among others.

Threading and nesting and numerical reputation have an allure because they seem to allow you to skip all that -- let the math and the tech enforce a lowest-common community value. But, as I think we see time and again, that doesn't really scale and it doesn't engender great conversation on a par with the best of the flat forums.
The Top Types of Douchebags in Tech and How Not to Be One
What do you mean with "most promising near term development in computer security for the common man"? Can you expand on that?
PSP to get streaming music next week, powered by Qriocity
Tested with the suggested configuration from the lighttpd wiki. I could not replicate the issue, which is strange.
What's interesting is that they're still only opening it for "partners", so they're not quite taking up the fight with Ustream, justin.tv or Niconicodouga yet.
An old thread about designing a replacement for IMAP:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1101693
I've been using Emacs as my editor for 8 years, and I don't get org-mode.
Anybody found a broadcasting API for this yet?
Would I notice any differences? Does it still feel like vim?
Russian security service wants to ban Skype, Gmail