skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We write a lot of evented code here (libevent and Ruby/EventMachine). Survival skills:

* Buffer. A tiny kernel of callback-y code buffers up data and gets an object into a simple coherent state, then a lot of synchronous code handles the action on that buffer all at once. Simplest possible example: HTTP server buffers inbound data and checks for completed request, then hands the whole request off upstream. But the pattern works at higher levels too.

* Serialize the slow path. Trade performance for maintainability by taking things that don't need to be fast and fob them off to a message queue with a sync worker on the other end.

* Functional decomposition. The temptation is that if the system gives you callbacks for events A, B, and C, that you should simply structure your code around A, B, and C. Instead, abstract away A, B, and C into interfaces. Good example: em-redis does evented Redis (and is a lifesaver), but does not handle blpop well (which is key to using Redis as a message queue). So we have a custom blpopper that just exposes a "subscribe to this key and get called back on messages" wrapper.

These may not apply to Node (I know js but not Node) but they've kept me sane through many tens of thousands of lines of C and Ruby evented socket code.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2424540
> If you dislike your status on a forum, it's easy enough to start a new psuedonym, especially on reddit.

Since you mentioned him specifically, I'll mention that kleinbl00 has on several occasions responded to this with varying degrees of, "that's not fair", "I don't want to", "I don't think I should have to", etc. ... of course, he usually puts it a little more colorfully.

> I think the benefits of a reputation outweigh its negatives though.

kleinbl00 has actually put this as well as I could, so I should just let him talk about it: http://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/gdig1/everyb...

What you're actually looking for, I think, is accountability: some way for bad behavior to have consequences. Unfortunately, in pseudo-anonymous environments like Reddit (and HackerNews), developing a reputation through score or activity or what-have-you can have downsides for the person with the reputation, and you still don't get the accountability you want. It really is the wrong solution to the wrong problem.

Likewise, you also say,

> ...but it will motivate more people overall, I assume.

...but in a field where we have relatively few experiments to study, this is one experiment that has already been tried. Reddit already uses this, and the only difference you really get in user behavior is that some of them choose to switch to a new account every once in a while.

That might be a good game, but again, it's poor conversation.
Actually in certain circumstances it can impose a legal obligation. For example, I'm licensed to sell real estate in California. As a real estate agent, I can create an agency relationship by giving advice in an email. This means that if someone acted on my advice and was harmed by it that they'd have the right to seek damages.

I believe attorneysand CPA's have the same obligation. Unless it is explicitly understood that advice given does not create an agency relationship or something to that effect.
I don't think that such a case would rely on contract law. It would probably be based on the doctrine of confidence or possibly copyright law.

But like many things in life, it's a legal bluff. Just like those signs in parking lots that say "we accept no responsibility for damage". They're a legal bluff - the car park is a bailee and has to take responsibility if you push them on it.

Now it's time for my standard disclaimer:

* I am not a lawyer
* This is not legal advice
* Your jurisdiction's laws may vary
* Seek professional legal advice before doing anything, anywhere, at any time
Probably the author hopes the HN submission will speed up this process.
I wonder if people actually even notice an email footer these days or if they're ignored like most advertising. The only footers I ever notice are the ones that say "Sent from my iPhone [iPad]" but I'm biased and those are potential customers.
Nevertheless, it is an FBI agent reporting to the director of the bureau that an air force official told him they recovered Alien bodies. It's not a primary source but it's the closest I've ever seen.
I think that it's true. They have been trying to secure streaming and sales licenses from the labels for some time now. I suppose if that falls through (the labels are brutal at this stage of negotiations) they might team up with amazon, but I'd be surprised if that happened.

They do have some precedent here, consider the google books ebookstore: http://books.google.com/ebooks
What's the incentive for people to contribute? It seems that it'll quickly turn into something like Associated Content.
Do you think that business/science/technology writers who have valuable information and insight are finding obstacles to getting published online?
I've always wondered that if there were "flying saucers" or some other form of UFO that had visited Earth in the past, and continued to do so in modern days, wouldn't we expect to see more footage rather than less? It seems like most of the incidences of UFO sightings happened in the past. Yet today virtually everybody carries a camera or a phone capable of photography or video, and there are fewer sightings.

I have no doubt that there's life beyond Earth. I'm just not sure there's anything we'd consider a UFO that's been zooming around our airspace.
Turn Your Dropbox Account Into a WebDAV Server With DropDAV
Do you really think that little people wearing shiny pants came here in saucers? Because that's what the paper says.
API Evangelism vs. Developer Evangelism
I haven't applied. I started an application once but didn't finish it. I talked about that previously. I still kind of wistfully wish I could apply but it really doesn't fit my situation and I have other plans. I don't really know how to explain why I "wish" I could. Perhaps just the standard theme of my life of regretting that "normal" never works for me (due to health issues, among other things). I've spent much of my life frustrated that I have the brains and all that but still can't find "success" on conventional terms. Part of me still wishes I had some kind of recognition. Most of me is mostly content that I've done the right thing and all other choices would have been worse. Still, it sometimes feels like being grateful for having been crapped on by life. :-/

My prior related remarks are here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1827795
How are you going to stop spam?
You won't find any. Most server hardware never gets sent out for review at all, and the "tier 1" vendors only give hardware to tame reviewers like InfoWorld. AnandTech does review whitebox servers on occasion, though.
Also because they tend to light on fire, have next to no torque where you want it, purposefully burn a metered amount of oil, get crap mileage (which degrades relatively quickly to boot), ...

Eventually people tire of playing the rotary game, usually when they realize the weight savings and high redline aren't worth the numerous flaws on anything but a track car (and even then, only if you can live without much low-end torque).
I'm told Toronto has the highest concentration of mobile developers in North America (or the world). I don't know the source for this claim, but it seems plausible.
More than anything else, it sounds like a great way to surround yourself with smart, creative people with a lot of ideas - sometimes you just need someone who doesn't know your project intimately to just point out the obvious or provide some constructive criticism. It seems like a strong network (including the alumni) of like-minded people working towards similar goals and a passion for doing what they like to do.
We've definitely studied AC. In our case, we're not telling anyone what to write about or incentivizing them by paying them (i.e., trying not to be a content farm here).

Users simply write about their interests like on any blog. The idea is to aggregate and promote the best content. We'll direct traffic back to their site via URLs on their profile, customization, etc
Do you know how many were engineers/designers?
How Lisp Techniques Can Improve Code Configurability, Maintainability, and Reuse
Untrue.

The RX-7's rotary engine (the 13B series) is actually phenomenally reliable, and there are many examples with well over 300k road miles. The RX-8 uses a newer variant of the same engine - the 13B-MSP RENESIS. Additionally, Mazda used the rotary in competition (in the infamous Mazda 787B) at the 24 hours of LeMans, which is a notoriously difficult test of engine reliability.

The myth of poor rotary reliability primarily stems from the 3rd-generation RX-7. The notoriously-complex mechanically-controlled sequential twin-turbo system (affectionately known as "the rat nest") was prone to hose disconnects and failures, which often led to over-boost situations. Additionally, owners that modify their cars often exacerbated the problem, installing free-flowing intakes and exhausts, as well as boost controllers, and did not properly modify air-fuel ratios to compensate. These situations led to increased engine heat and premature failure, which gave the rotary an unfair bad reputation. Many owners now convert to a simpler single-turbo setup with electronic boost control and careful air-fuel tuning, which is far more reliable.

The actual (and admittedly significant) drawbacks of rotary engines are poor fuel efficiency and high exhaust emissions, both due to incomplete combustion. This has kept them out of mainstream applications and thus they tend to be used primarily in performance applications.
After google, yahoo and microsoft released their designs. Welcome to the party!

Seriously, more open and efficient designs are good for everybody.
I try wearing a dress shirt now and then, but if the building temperature isn't lowered a few degrees, I just perspire in them all day. With a t-shirt, I don't.
You can own or start a company, but you cannot work for it until you have proper authorization, ie. CPT, OPT, H1b, Green Card, etc. If you are found to be working for any company including your own, you could be out of status and hence deported. Thats my understanding.
fwiw, http://weeklyworldnews.com/headlines/23926/ufo-over-richmond...
http://www.ghosttheory.com/2010/10/17/texas-ufo-sighting-sim...
There aren't really obstacles, you're right. I know there are sites out there, but I guess I'm just lazy to find them. By centralizing some of the content, it may be easier to find.

I think IW is also geared more towards the novice blogger, who simply has a blogger or wordpress site with little traffic. By syncing it to IW, it should generate more exposure.
I tried a lot of different phrasings to include that the release may have been inadvertent, or that there's nothing first-hand, &c. None of them would fit, or fit without linguistic gymnastics, so I went with simple. I probably could've kept the question mark.

As for "confirming", as I said in an earlier comment, this isn't official confirmation. It's just the release of documentation of a conversation where the phrase "flying saucers" was used in apparent seriousness by someone who claimed to know.
Yes basically. Your repository could grow faster using binary files but it's still worth it to have a version history. Even if for nothing else other than to be able to see how something evolved.
We actually met a VC at SXSW this year who asked the same thing. We have a ranking algo - rying to avoid spam the same way Reddit does by only getting the best content promoted. We're thinking of building tools so users accounts time out or a captcha generates if they post too much.
I can't believe they picked a PIC24F microcontroller. MIght have been better to pick an AVR for Arduino compatibility or even an ARM might have been a better choice.
I don't use any external scripts, I just set mine to block problematic domains for me (places where I find I sink a lot of time, HN, Reddit, Twitter are the primary ones), and usually I make it close my IM client (or sometimes set my status to Busy), close Twitter, and my feed reader. Then I'm good to go.

I find 50 minutes is a good duration for me. During the ten minutes downtime in an hour, I let myself read Twitter, and get up and walk around the office. Then back to work.

It's marvellous for staying on task.
The programs on Github were written by amateurs. Professionals can do better - compare Python, PHP and Gnuplot to Mozilla, Scheme, Haskell, Plan 9 and Mathematica. But evidently people can keep their day jobs and still write good programs.

Science is different. The amateurs are called cranks, and a small community of professionals does the good stuff. (There are exceptions, but few.) The basic issue is who will pay their living expenses, and buy the million dollar machines that they work on.

These days, almost all research money is spent by governments. They spend most of it rewarding people for publishing in prestigious journals. Scientists will keep packaging their research that way until someone starts buying it in a different package.
28 Ways To Get Your Media Viral- Adsense for Profit
howtewcreatemusic.blogspot.com

These are 28 good ways to get your media noticed on Youtube, Myspace, Metacafe, Skyrock, Facebook, and Vimeo.
Tu mat Alaska - Thuong hieu tu mat hang dau tai Viet Nam
Tủ mát Alaska bảo quản thực phẩm luôn tươi mát, an toàn. Tính năng làm lạnh cực nhanh, tiết kiệm điện năng. Kiểu dáng đa dạng.
What plans do you have in place to prevent the site from (if it becomes popular) being a place where most content is written by SEO copywriters who discover it's a great place to get links?
1) The YC staff and Alumni possess a wealth of knowledge that would be available to you.

2) To get out of your bubble. Being surrounded by other intelligent individuals all working toward demo day helps you stay focused and keep moving.

3) The experience. Being able to have gone through the YC system wouldn't hurt.

4) The seed money would be a huge help.

5) Access to VC's with the YC brand name behind you. So again, the money.

6) The alumni network. I hear it is extremely supportive even after YC.

Disclaimer: I applied to Summer '11
This post does sound a bit over-the-top and very node.js biased by calling LAMP architectures obsolete today. But on the other hand, there is a reason why JavaScript is the #1 language on Github - https://github.com/languages
I don't know prolog but it seems to operate on relations and not functions. So my guess it that you are right and it is not a functional language.
* Yes, I think something a little instructional would be good. Although as your app is very simple, it also makes it easy to understand already, so that's a great point.

* I think whether a task is "Deleted" or moved to a "Completed" list or just somehow marked as completed but staying in the same list is a design decision you'll have to make. I've seen it done either way in different To-Do apps. Some people prefer the style where a completed task is completely gone and out of sight and removed from the app. Others prefer to see a log of their completed work at the end of the day (/month /week, etc). So I think it's up to you to decide what's best for your app. I would lean towards keeping the ToDo, but either marking/moving it to indicate a completion, and maybe also having a way to remove it completely.

And deciding what to do is half the fun anyway! Best of luck with it.
Bye mozilla.com, but not Mozilla community « beltzner
FYI: https://vault.fbi.gov/unexplained-phenomenon
Add a paragraph at the end of your article, describing how Facebook contacted you for the case study only after the article's publication. Then take the publicity and run with it.
Most of the articles are copied from somewhere else.

http://www.insideword.com/member/profile/31 ->

http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2011-04-04/compu...

Solving the original content problem is a must.
We filled in a few for demo purposes.. will be deleted :)
Show HN: Props to the Akinator App for creative crowdsourcing - I taught it pg
The Akinator app, free on the Amazon App Store today, guesses a person you choose based on a series of questions. It knows a ridiculous number of people, seems pretty amazing - when I tried pg, I figured out how it worked. It asks you at the end to name your unknown figure, with a title - we're training it as we use it. Major props.
You aren't going to find dramatic changes in 1980. The human body is remarkably adaptable and many health problems accumulate over years or possibly even generations (epigenetics). Obesity implies an impaired metabolism, which takes years (used to be decades) to develop. Moreover, health problems have been epidemic in our society pre 1980 (just with less dramatic consequences). I think you are going to really limit yourself with a 1980 cutoff, and that it is more likely that the same factors just got worse around that time.
Hi pg - didn't get an interview, but thanks anyway for HN/YC and your essays. (: Consider me inspired!
Great post! Lesson: build multiple MVPs, quickly ship and see which stick, then let the market forces be your compass.
I do projects like this all of the time using an archival file system from a company called FileTek. FileTek is a software product that presents a tape library as a NAS. You use a small amount of disk as a cache. It then stores the data on tape with redundancy and all kinds of media management. I have several clients using with multiple PBs of capacity. If you contact the company ask for a guy named Diamond and tell him that Jacob sent you. www.filetek.com
Dijkstra was provably completely wrong about this: pretty much all the most talented programmers I have ever talked to or read about started with BASIC.

The starting language matters very little, the important part is to remain curious and to keep learning.
You can impose a legal obligation on yourself by sending an email, and that's what some of these footers are intended to avoid. I don't think you can impose a legal obligation on the recipient of a message though.
We also need a GitHub of government / legislation.
The situation today is different. This engine is supposed to optimize hybrid cars (it is supposed to generate electricity to drive an electric motor) and hybrids are something new, they haven't existed for more than a century, which means that there is likely more untapped potential for optimization. This engine wouldn't be practical in a standard gasoline car and it's not designed to be used in one.

It obviously can still fail but I don't think it's possible to draw historical parallels.
I don't think you're giving it quite enough credit. For a hybrid car what you can do is marry this to a more powerful electric motor (say, 40HP). When the car is cruising at a constant speed it's running on the engine and charging the batteries (or using just the batteries with the motor off). When the car is accelerating a lot it's using the batteries/motor and the engine at the same time (generating say 70HP or more). Given the lower weight and higher efficiency of this engine that's pretty significant. If it's possible to create a hybrid drive-train (including batteries) that weighs only as much or only a little more than a pure gasoline drive-train that could translate into much cheaper hybrid vehicles on the market.

P.S. For clarity's sake, modern hybrids are enormous compromises due to the weight of the battery and electric motor. For a hybrid you want the highest efficiency possible and thus the lowest total vehicle weight you can manage without compromise safety. The necessity of heavy batteries fights in the opposite direction, so in order to produce a fuel efficient vehicle car makers use more expensive, lighter weight materials in the construction of the vehicle. This increases the complexity of manufacturing (more different materials are being used) and raises the price of the vehicle. If you could drop in a drive-train which kept the weight the same that would change the industry dramatically.
You probably want to take a look at Firmata:

http://firmata.org/wiki/Main_Page

It basically does the wrapping for you, so you can control the Arduino from your PC using software you're already familiar with: Python, MaxMSP, Processing, PD etc
Can you provide reasons why you think this is a good idea? How it would make your life easier? Or what is broken with the current protocols?

I think a stronger argument would be for moving from MIME to XML, I can envision some advantages there, but I don't think that will happen anytime due to inertia.
It's a known historical fact that the United States sent a chimpanzee into outer space before sending a human being.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/january/31/...

Thus it wouldn't be too surprising if Air Force flight experiments also used chimpanzees as test flight subjects.

Even if the FBI memo fully accurately recounts the conversation the special agent had, and even if the person interviewed was not mistaken about what he described, "bodies of human shape but only three feet tall" doesn't exclude chimpanzees. ("Three feet tall" is a round figure, unless the person asserts he made an exact measurement, and female chimpanzees are about that tall at full growth.)
>> So the three of us are trying to quit our finance jobs and get into startups.

bubble :-)
Tensions Rekindled in Real Housewives of New York
Grt idea, please iplement on USA .. all the best
It was actually a bit of an afterthought.

We are going to try another startup anyway -- and we realized just days before the deadline that YC was a possibility (though a bit of a long-shot). So we gave it a shot. It's just one of hundreds of things we'll try...
No deal yet as government shutdown looms
Wow, I am extremely surprised at the low salaries you guys are speaking of. Is it because of the python language that it is so low? As a java developer at a so-so company in dallas 6 figures is the starting point for someone with 5+ years of experience.

I honestly don't know how someone could make it in an the Bay Area on 100k which is really disappointing because I have been wanting to move there and also have been wanting to make the switch to full time python development.
1. Pre-built structure to be around lots of awesome people and advice from the startup Godfather himself
2. Money to attract a cofounder
3. Vote of confidence from pg
> We already have a category for "corporate manufacturing partners can pay to access the source" - that's proprietary software.

No, even stallman approves of selling source code. Free software and open source have never been about price, it's about being able to get the source:

> Commercial software is software being developed by a business which aims to make money from the use of the software. “Commercial” and “proprietary” are not the same thing! Most commercial software is proprietary, but there is commercial free software, and there is noncommercial nonfree software.

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/categories.html
The title of this story is over the top. The document confirms nothing. It says "someone claimed some flying saucers have been recovered. We decided it's a matter not worth pursuing."