skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Don't overlook the Myers Briggs personality type. I'm betting a large portion of hackers fall into that INTP/INTJ or a similar type.

Thus we assume that people are rational, will act rationally and by extension, live peacefully with their neighbors.

However we are a small minority of the population.

Our personality type is drawn to systems work, the architecture of things. We strive to understand systems, whether it's a desktop PC or the government. The aesthetic we seek is a simple, logical architecture that can be explained and reasoned about.

Unfortunately, the world doesn't often meet our expectations. We are left with C++ not Lisp and a republic slipping towards totalitarianism, not an anarcho-capitalist paradise.
You're being too kind. I disagree with the "little or no basis in reality". In actuality, there's no basis in reality.

I should know, I wrote the article. I hadn't actually planned to have the headline read the way it does -- but now that I re-read it after a cup of coffee, I can see how it implies something. Guess I won't be the first person to have implied something in a headline that is not based in reality.

Should be a fun day...
Some of the major features that hooked me on Git (as compared to Hg, Bzr, and SVN):

- primary local branching is done in the same repository without needing to create multiple parallel directories.

- local branches need not correlate to public branches on a remote system.

- keeping local branches current with trunk/master is dead easy when using rebase.

- using interactive rebase is incredibly powerful for splitting, combining, rebuilding or reorganizing a set of commits on a local branch.

- commit amending is dead simple, for those times when you miss adding a file (or part of a file) and catch it the moment after you've hit the enter key.

- much better two-way integration with SVN. I work on projects hosted using SVN using Git, and I gain all the benefits of local branching, etc, and I can still push all my changes perfectly easily to the server whenever I want.

Basically, Git is powerful, flexible, and designed to fit a more natural style of development (IMO), and really puts the developer in control at all times. After the initial shell shock of finding that "standard" source control commands work a bit different in Git (as compared to SVN, Hg, etc), and you learn the what/why/how of the staging area (the index), I've found Git to be the most development-friendly source control tools around, and for the first time in the history of using source control, I have never once cursed the tool for doing/not doing something wrong/stupid. That alone has made me a lifelong convert.
Lots of great UI ideas coming from this post. I'll be playing with LOTS of different ideas over the next little bit.

I've noticed a few odd results creep in myself. I'll work on that.
Thanks
Proof and Beauty
The point is the same: creating a dark pool (like an exchange) is more a market forces challenge, less a technical one.

I.e., you still have to attract a critical mass of traders to your platform, and once there, you have to figure out how to deal with anonymity, backing away, and gaming issues.

Even LiquidNet, despite its success in this niche, still has these problems.
I don't see why this is a good thing.

This just changes how a buyer pays for an existing solar system. It doesn't make the solar system more valuable. If a potential buyer doesn't think that your solar system adds value, they're not going to say "I wouldn't have paid you what it cost but since I'll get to pay for it with the remainder of a 20 year loan, no problem".

So, we're left with the "it's through govt". Govt programs tend to be paid for by all of us and it's quite possible for it to be expensive and provide no actual benefit. (If it's actually a market-rate loan, there's no benefit. If it's subsidized, the rest of us are paying for it.) It's impossible for the benefit to exceed the cost because of the overhead.
Candace Parker in WNBA Brawl Video | Daily News Blog
Yeah, this is the unfortunate effect of how the artists have entered there data into MySpace - not sure who I can fix that.

When artists supply good data (which seems to be the majority), things work well.
Google maps seems to default to the US when searching for locations, so I'm guessing that entering UK into a geo-search isn't a rarity for you.. is that right.
I'll see if I can get some sort of filter that tries to pick the name with the greatest population or something. That makes much more sense.
Have a good time at the show.
Reading it all is not the trick; my reading time is pretty much bounded. The hard part is reading only the most important things, given limited time for reading.
The site works for Copenhagen 1081 shows listed. I assume you mean the geocoding couldn't find you?

If it didn't find you on the first visit, i set a cookie for future visits so you don't have to type the address again.
Thinking about relocating for business?  Here are some good pointers.
Hey JKent,

At the moment this is an actual working interface for MySpace music. But I'll be adding more features in the near future which extend beyond that.
if we had 80 years of male cub-rearing bears, 80 years of flashy female peahens, and even 80 years of zebras racing in the Kentucky, should headlines still "celebrate" what is a repeatedly confirmed fact of life?
a confirmed fact of life that happens infrequently is still something of interest (eg conjoined twins, a shark attack, a winning lottery ticket, etc.). and yes, female programmers have been around as long as male programmers, but that has no bearing on the disproportion of males to females in the programmer community (which is why the fact that the hacker is female is interesting).
If people don't find SED tetris terribly exciting, why should people be excited suddenly when it's a girl?
they shouldn't, but if people were interested originally, then hearing a female wrote it (an uncommon thing) would probably make them more "excited". (sorry, couldn't resist)
I'm sure there are many 'ways' to start a company and live off the net income, and there may even be an optimal way. Historically the way a lot of business owners have achieved freedom and security is 1) love what they do, so that the work isn't a chore (their work is what they would do if they could do anything in the world, which is one definition of freedom) and 2) spend/live within the constraints of the net income generated. Seems pretty simple to me since both can be chosen. This also solves the main disadvantage of you 'hav[ing] to keep running it', because you actually want to keep it running.
Ah... it was news to me. Interweb reception isn't good in my cave, I guess. ;-)

Good point re: Google. They definitely have nice charts but I'm trying to not rely on Google for everything. I'm already using them for ads, maps, and AJAX libraries, but I don't feel comfortable putting all my eggs on one colorful Googly basket. That makes third-party solutions that I can host (like this one) especially attractive. Spread the love, and the risk...
The layout is horrid. Sorry to say. The controls seem awkward and kind of broken, and the event listing is small and hard to browse through. I got many of the same results (As in same band, different date) but the way it was presented didn't flow too well

APART from that, it worked great. Normally hard to find services that can actually find stuff in my smallish town but it did a good job.

Also I would definitely add a date range to the calendar and not just a single date (or all dates) .. that'd be neat :)
click "help" in your profile.
Avoiding Risk Confines You to Mediocrity
Union Square Ventures invests in Meetup
All great and valid points. Music I find is a great way to drown out the noise of my office (Other people talking, the radio playing) plus some nice melodic, soothing music is always good for the brain.

Getting away / taking a day off works wonders too. Sometimes you just need to rest your mind. Even if it means taking a walk around the office or outside for 5 minutes. It helps so much and is much better then grabbing some coffee and hoping the rise in caffeine will help you focus.
But an algorithm is easier to share than a gold mine. Fixed and marginal costs are lower.

If you could find gold by scraping your bathroom tiles or filtering water for gold dusta gold standard would be terribly inefficient.
What a luxury and a pleasure it would be to have to decide, given a profitable web operation, whether to keep running it like a traditional small business or to get acquired for several hundred thousand dollars.

What a pleasure to have such a problem.
Well you don't have to - I just wanted to append all answers to the post for reference.
Ok, thanks. (I'm guessing that the two-way integration with SVN is a big deal for a lot of people, too.)
Ask HN: Propagating configuration changes to multiple servers
Hi,

I ordered a handfull (about 10) of servers for my startup and I was wondering if there exist a good tool to clone servers. (espcecially propagating changes in configurations/installed programs)

All my servers are identical in terms of hardware and I would like to be able to install/upgrade/remove programs/libraries or change configuration files on one master server, which should then be overtaken by all the slaves (about 10 servers), without me making the same changes on all the other slaves.

Private keys can also be copied, as no private information/user data is being kept on the different servers.

One thing I was thinking about was rsync'ing / (except /proc, /log and the data directories) to all the servers, so they are uptodate. But I don't know if this will work reasonably well. (This might not work after a kernel update)

What are your thoughts on this? There are certainly other people out there who have done something similar. (Also some applications have to be compiled, so I can not build a snapshot of the packages I have installed from the repository of the linux distribution.)
utnick! I'm so disappointed the songs don't work for you. You're the second person to report that. I'm also on FF 3.0.1 & flash 9, but on XP - I'm probably going to make a big change so that this isn't an issue anymore, but it might take a week or so - hopefully not more.
DevCentral Daily - July 23rd, 2008
And his point is that the longest serving for the majors are obscenely over paid. That's why Southwest makes money and Delta loses it (not just pilots, but that's a good place to start).
I guess the headscratcher for me is that I can't understand why someone would start a company if they didn't think they'd enjoy running it. The odds of growing to the point where someone will buy your business for a substantial amount (read: order of magnitude greater than a year's sales) is much less than being able to grow it yourself and live off the revenues.

I guess that's why I don't play the lottery.
None of them are walk-awayable. (At least from the original core) They're fully aware of this, and they've mitigated that fact by not expanding, so that as they bring in more money, they're able to continue to divvy it up between the same core group (or thereabouts).

Their reward is making the company fit the lifestyle they choose to have as much as possible, instead of selling out. I agree that this is very appealing.
Apple2fpga: Reconstructing an Apple II+ on an FPGA
What about sharing risks between startups?
You could set up a startup shares pool, in which a group of companies trade some of their stock for a share of the pool, so if some companies go under they could still receive some income from the pool.

Maybe something similar to this Artist Pension Trust.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2007/aug/12/4

I think this would be similar to what VCs do, invest in 20 startups and hope for one big hit or a couple of good hits.
If you're being acquired, you're walking away. You should understand that the company as you know it is already dead.

The goal becomes to make it to the walkaway date with as little trouble as possible. To continue to manage "your baby" post acquisition is futile.

Hence, even managed quarterly, public co. is a better option for you.
Wow, those were actually useful. Virtually every "linux tip" list I've ever seen is stuff like "press tab to complete a command!!!", but these are actually good tips
FusionCharts DOES release a free version of their charts, though. Their paid charts are some of the best on the market.

Also will suggest amCharts, they are also really good.
Of Buffett's mistakes and wisdom
Companies are not apartments or houses, companies are people. You don't have to worry about motivation, energy levels when you are dealing with houses.

You cannot "optimize" people - even talking about what is optimal is meaningless when you deal in collections of people. This is the fundamental libertarian assumption, which is why libertarians are for free market capitalism. Not because it maximizes wealth, but because it let's people simply be.

I am afraid this essay is a perfect distillation of the flip-it model, just as the model is going out of fashion.
I still don't think it's likely that people are willing to pay for Facebook applications. Facebook is too limited. It doesn't give you mobile opportunities, not like the iPhone does. It really doesn't give you anything new that you can't find on other sites. Facebook is grasping at straws.
One example would be if you were selling stock for cash. Although I don't know how often this happens.
Because it enables quality control and simplicity. It means that people looking for an app only have to look in one place, and after that their job is done. Enabling multiple sites means removing possibilities for quality control and making the download process something less than a "click once" process.
From the article: The technique of data normalization is about correct ways of partitioning the data among tables to minimize data redundancy and maximize the speed of retrieval.

The part about minimizing data redundancy is fine, but I'm not so sure I agree that normalization is really about maximizing speed of retrieval. As we're seeing with high traffic sites, normalization is proving to be one of the biggest bottlenecks because of all the joins it requires.
Facebook innovates quickly, polishes late. Look at how they handled the Newsfeed. It's the same thing here. Though judging from the current redesign, it would seem they're running out of ideas.
I have no patience for this sort of thing.

Just yesterday a client's son called me out of the blue to ask me to forward my client's website to his mac.com account, because he was taking over the website.

I called up the client, who confirmed the transfer.

So, I called back the client's son and gave him the FTP username and password, to which he said, "What's FTP? I've only ever used iWeb..."

Out of curiosity, I asked for the URL for the new design. It's in a sub-directory of a mac.com member account, and the online store page comes up blank. The contact form has been replaced with a mailto link with the client's personal email address.

I wish them both the best of luck. In the unlikely event that they ask me to clean up the mess later, I will refuse, and they'll end up paying a lot more to someone else (I don't charge enough).
heh. You have your mom running Linux. Nice. :)
"We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us"
Ever thought of using something like Instapaper? It works wonders.
What's your email address? I have 10 invites left.
Somewhere there must be a top 10 list of most overused internet memes, which unsurprisingly would include top 10 lists.
Wedding photographers? Huh? Most people I know paid about $2K for their wedding photographer. Let's say a really good photographer can book both days of the weekend for 40 weekends a year. So he or she brings in $160,000 -- before paying for all the film and processing fees?

Not sure how making somewhere in the low-to-mid $100Ks for having to work on most weekends gets you on the same list as mutual fund managers and bad CEOs. Sounds like the author had a recent bad experience booking a photographer if you ask me.
Preferred Stock: Why Liquidity Preference Exists
California alone consumes more gas than China & India
Except that it's not likely they actually improve one another.

Google is extremely fit technically, yes. It can almost certainly help Digg out in that regard. But will it? They've been extremely lax in working with some of their services. (Jaiku, for instance.)

Meanwhile, Google continues its search for community. But is Digg really the sort of community Google wants? Its community is roundly dissed around the 'net for being immature, juvenile, shortsighted, and fanatic. I mean, compare it to reddit. The fanatics on reddit have NOTHING on the average Digg user.

Google doesn't get that community involves finding a way to get people to connect with other people. Orkut was a round failure because of that - it didn't innovate, like Facebook did, it just maintained status quo. By acquiring Digg, they've acquired a community on paper, but in reality they've really just risked their reputation for being mature and classy.
I think the majority will be happy that it's not Microsoft buying. But there'll be the group that says Digg ought to remain forever independent. They won't be too pleased.
Comp.lang.scheme discussion: "Why R6RS is controversial"
Maybe puppet and capistrano are for that kind of thing? Haven't tried it myself yet.
a professor told me he gave up picking cheap books because the campus bookstore marks them up to the same price, anyway
some are good initiator but not the operator for the rest of the life ... also people who have tons of ideas are driven by bringing does ideas in to reality ... they love being a king-maker rather than being a king for only one kingdom and run the show (thats boring for them) - they like to have more than one kingdom and then find someone to run with it.... i think pg himself is the right example for this.
Glad to see somebody's using Drupal for their projects. The code for Drupal is amazing; the designers, not always so much. But it's extraordinarily powerful and, as you said, it can do nearly anything you want to.
Reading this article is like eating candy. It tastes good, but you get no nutrition out of it.
Assumes facts not in evidence.
Google, Ambani, Tata are other good examples who have tons of companies/product run by good managers/CEOs
That's what happens to people who prefer prestidigitation to honest thaumaturgy.
They want enough money that (a) they don't have to worry about running out of money and (b) they can spend their time how they want. Running your own business offers neither.

In this thread:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=79057

pg has answered the question, "What would you do if you were a billionaire?" with "Day to day? Much the same thing, actually."

Perhaps doing a startup is "spending our time how we want".

Right now, it's hard for me to imagine myself doing anything else. Maybe I'll feel differently later.
You say that now. But my mother got Google Talk a little while ago when she was trying to figure out how to use various "web 2.0" sites to stay "with it" and it was frustrating. I kept wishing it was morally acceptable for me to fix her n00bspeak.
And conversely, hackers tend to assume more competence from their fellow human beings than is really present, and thus are surprised when people end up suffering due to their own stupidity. And since it's surprisingly stupid, hackers tend to be less compassionate to the folks affected.

But the problem is, suffering is still suffering whether it be stupid or not. A society with a destitute underclass suffering due to its own idiocy is still a society with a destitute underclass. The general definition of a "progressive" is someone who sees this as a problem irrespective of culpability, where a "libertarian" is someone who doesn't see it as a problem at all.

I was a libertarian in high school, for the same reasons I was more or less a jerk in high school. I've softened since.
I believe cfengine is used for this where I work (http://www.gnu.org/software/cfengine/).
Ubuntu founder urges Linux desktop to rival Apple
I have discovered that if you slightly misspell prestidigitation while Googling its definition, Google doesn't suggest the correct spelling. :-)
And it's bullshit. A $250K pilot is typically:

1. An airforce veteran, possibly with combat experience.
2. Capable and qualified at flying every aircraft in the fleet.
3. Capable of training younger pilots.
4. Probably has 10000 hours + of flying time.

His point that it's largely an "automated job" is ignorant. Everything is automated, sure, until the engine flames out, you have a major system failure on takeoff or approach, or you run out of fuel, like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimli_Glider
I googled myself and found my hn comment leading someone else's blog
I vividly remember writing that. Glad to see someone else felt strongly enough about it to include it on their site.

The links are pretty good, including some to pg and dhh. Pretty good company, I'd say.
By 'the internet', do you mean the descendant of the government funded Arpanet? ;)
Who in the hell cares what Facebook does anymore? Are we going to see a repeat of the last year, where every monkey in a marketing department wants to jump on the Facebook App bandwagon again? Sorry, but we've had a year of biting vampires, useless applications, and too much hype.

How much investor money has to be poured down a hole before people will start building businesses that have actual value?

I personally couldn't care less about Facebook/Myspace/<insert name of social network> anymore. I doubt I'm alone.
Southwest makes money because they're still paying $1-something per gallon of jet fuel while everyone else is paying over $4. Years ago when prices first started to go up they contracted to buy something like 10 years of fuel at a fixed price. Right now they're doing the same thing to lock in $4-something per gallon for like 20 years. Southwest also owns every 737 that's going to come out of Boeing for the next 4 years.

Southwest doesn't make money by paying low salaries. In fact, Southwest and UPS pay the highest pilot salaries in the industry. They make money because they made very good management decisions that led to their having lower operating costs than anyone else. The fact is most airlines operate horribly inefficiently and suffer from a lack of decent management.

Anyone who says pilots are overpaid doesn't have a clue. Being a commercial pilot is akin to indentured servitude. You have a couple choices when it comes to training. You can spend $25k+ a year in order to build hours or you can work for free in return for the opportunity to fly right seat a couple times a week. After that, if you're even able to find an airline job, and not flying cargo in some rickety old wagon with wings, you can expect to get about $35k making overnight trips to someplace like Laredo, TX.
His point seemed to be that bad wedding photographers were grossly overpaid. I agree not on the same level as mutual fund managers and bad CEOs, but probably on the same level as the West Coasters he mentions.