skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Wow, that's pretty harsh. I'm currently reading that book for the first time, and I don't agree with you. Quite the opposite, actually.

Despite the repeated and annoying misuse of the past-tense form of 'light', and the obviously strained attempts to inject philosphy into dialogue, there are some good points in the book.

I would be interested in reading any elaboration you may personally wish to undertake.
I do read this blog occasionally, and I sometimes find the candy-coated, primo positive tone of the blog offputting. I don't like this post. It's trying to give a step-by-step approach to something that is individually hard. But maybe this entrepreneur has found a niche - providing a 'inspiration of the day'-type post. The large number of comments that each blog post gets really emphasizes the fact that its found an audience that is looking for content of this sort ('10 ways to X', 'How to X'). I'm starting to see other blogs copy its format too - down to the pretty Flickr picture that leads every post.

Inspiration is good but inspiration is external-based. Inspirational posts like this can fluff you up and then you go outside and get deflated. Irritation is sometimes a better motivator because its more immediate and personal.
oh no, a lame xss bug in a 3rd party cgi script that runs on a solaris web server hosting a website that uses no cookies. surely this is big news!
If you’re looking for a way to ease the pain of using the command line and Terminal, try iTerm.

Probably not aimed at this crowd.
Simple tutorial to give your site an iPhone interface
It was $200. Wasn't out to make money off this, just get it to an owner with more time.
I'm really curious to know if Microsoft converted their own ad agency to PCs running Windows.
I really don't think its possible to predict ANYTHING that far ahead. Look at how far we went in the first 5000 days.
I apologize. I didn't mean to assume anything. I used the fact that this user has made 1 comment over a year ago and had only 2 karma from that one comment to base my statement. It's also why I said it "seemed" that he hasn't been active. That's why I was wondering how this user was found.
> But our monitoring servers, prior to some recent optimizations, hammered the disks as fast as they would go at over 1000 random writes per second sustained 24×7.

I don't know what that monitoring thing does, but if you make it hammer your non-persistent local storage, and then sync logs to S3, you should be fine.

As I understand this service, it's only for transactional stuff that absolutely need to be there after a reboot (e.g. transactional DB), if the plug is pulled accidentially.
This is great advice, but it requires significant project discipline to make it work with large projects. Breaking builds or introducing bugs that make your coworker's jobs harder is a cost you need to look at. Tools like git, with per-developer "branches" might be a good choice.

But I fear that it a typical team is told to check their changes in every few hours, this is going to cause more harm than good.
I remember once hearing that a privacy advocate had replied to that argument from a politician with "Senator, when you make love to your wife, do you kiss her breasts?"
Hmm... This is a little misleading. It looks like they're using brain matter as a circuit, but not so much a conscious brain making decisions and having circuits interpret that.

The researchers aim to get the robot to learn, by applying different signals as it moves into predefined positions.

This line speaks most loudly that it's just a circuit.

Am I mistaken?
Honestly, I think this is exactly backwards. The voodoo juice in "agile" comes from the mindset, and not the specific practices. The mindset is encapsulated pretty well by the manifesto, IMHO. Could someone write a better one? Maybe.

But if you want to know what agile is all about, read the manifesto. Decades of experience in XP, *DD, AUP, etc... isn't going to teach you much about the "why" of those paradigms. If I were an agile proponent (and I'm really not) interviewing a candidate, I'd want to know that they can explain the handful of ideas in the manifesto. Process stuff is something any monkey can implement.
Philosophy really has added so much to the world that you people seem to have blinded yourself towards: Scientific method, traced back to Aristotle

If you want to read what a real scientist has to say about the value that philosophy adds to science, I suggest "Dreams of Final Theory" by Steven Weinberg, chapter 7, "Against philosophy": http://depts.washington.edu/ssnet/Weinberg_SSN_1_14.pdf
http://www.johntreed.com/Kiyosaki.html

Here's a pretty thorough exposure of Kiyosaki as a total fraud, by the main guy cited in that Wikipedia segment, John T. Reed.
Invention kits let you build (almost) anything
I'm really impressed they even acknowledge the possibility of failures instead of just touting all availability and reliability stats.

Also, 10 times more reliable than a hard drive is pretty good. For me, the takeaway is that I should treat this as a hard drive and NOT as a magical solution that allows me to ignore everything I have learned about systems administration.

Babysitting servers at 2AM really drives home lessons for me and the urge to simply declare those problems moot is strong--but would be a mistake.
Regardless of the reasons/ethics for selling, it is still good entrepreneurship if you can turn around your efforts for profit in one day. Much of entrepreneurism is about grabbing opportunity.
Whoa horsey. Nobody is arguing specific practices here. I'm arguing that feel-good marketing bleck doesn't make a project run. In fact, it confuses more than it helps.

Want a good checklist of what agile is? Try http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2008/04/the_agile_che...

Or:

* Adapt - Always ask yourself what is wrong and what you need to do to fix it. If you continuously communicate to identify problems and fix them, I believe that in a normal world you will do the following things that I can observe:

* Time-Box - You have a fixed, immutable time-box in which you deliver tested changes (either code, documents, processes, beans, whatever) that be demonstrated

* Togetherness - The closer everybody is, the better. Co-located, non-cubicle, non-office spaces are best. Highly matrixed, separated teams are worst.

* Value - You have a clear way of determining the most valueable thing to do each iteration. Business Owners give you business value. Technical Owners give you architectural value.

* Ownership - The team, and only the team, owns its estimates. Outside factors are considered and can be communicated, but at the end of the day the team has the power to determine the amount and type of work it can take on for each iteration.

* Forecast - Being agile and empirical does not preclude precictability or forecasting. In fact, the value of agile teams is their ability to take highly-changing environments and put some kind of predictable forecastable order in them.
Sure.

This is the exact same strategy that got the PC into the enterprise. At first, IT departments wanted nothing to do with them and considered them "toys". If you needed anything, they insisted you go through them (and wait).

With the invention of the IBM PC and Visicalc, accounting departments bypassed IT and bought their own PCs using their own budgets. Fortunately, the cost was low enough to be under the radar. Several years later, IT had no choice but to accomdate PCs and real user needs into their plans.

History is repeating with web apps. There's nothing to stop you from finding a user or entire department that needs an app and isn't getting what they need from their own IT department.

Just sell directly to the end user. They have plenty of desire and budget to bypass IT once again.
Ruby Inside: Ruby blog with daily tips, news, code and fun
This was discussed earlier. Turns out, it can and does wildly vary based on usage scenarios.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=282528
even if we survive Languages are dieing off so fast that who knows how many will be left 3k years from now.
Digital Mars D is nice if you really must write systems software. It's a cleaned up C++ and has garbage collection thrown in, but you can do anything you can do in C (like drop down to malloc() and free() when needed).
Agreed. I would love to buy one if the price drops anywhere below $100.

From what I can tell, this is also in the creator's best interest as that is the natural direction for this project -- One in every household.
Horsey?

I don't much disagree with any of that. I might quibble with a few things (I'm not sure that "forecast" is really a central theme in most schemes, lots of very successful, nominatively "agile" development gets by without much of a timetable), but that's not particularly at issue. Your list looks good to me.

But it also looks like a manifesto. And that's fine. So maybe your point is that you like your manifesto better than the official one? I like the poetry of the original better, but yours seems good too.

But I don't understand the idea of "feel-good marketing bleck". The points of the original look awfully profound to me. I think you're being too hard on it here. If you like concrete guidelines more than statements of purpose, feel free. Just don't throw tomatoes at those of us who prefer the poetry.
In praise of skimming: A response to Nicholas Carr's "Is Google making us stupid?"
I officially announce ;) this acronym for EC2+EBS so we can just say ECBS whenever we talked about EC2 with EBS.
It really isn't an official YC C++ thread until tptacek posts a couple bitter anti-C++ comments. ;)
As others have said, Craigslist has an enormous audience which is a self-reinforcing factor.

It also has a practically-unimpeachable reputation as a company which doesn't seem to have much interest in making as much money as it can - only as much as it needs to make.

It does have a number of weaknesses, though. Certain areas are gigantic, useless spam traps. Some territories (the UK springs to mind) are full of basically nothing. Some other territories (like Ireland) are almost entirely uncovered. And a spam-controlled free version of those parts CL is charging for would have a chance at competitiveness.

Nobody's "become a serious threat" to CL because nobody as yet is trying to hit those soft areas while also providing the other services you can get at CL.

Making "a dent in the CL market share" is probably the wrong metric to pay attention to, though - a number of CL-alikes have significant traffic outside the US where CL basically sucks at the moment and has no market share to lose. A quick comparison of Gumtree.com in London versus its CL equivalent shows that it's not Craigslist in pole position.

Again, on localisation of content: CL contains an awful lot of material of no direct relevance to the city you're supposed to be looking at, and all its discussion areas are US-only but propagated worldwide anyway.

I get the strong feeling that on top of all this, CL reinforces its innocuous-little-guy image with its almost wilfully unstyled UI. I doubt that a slick WebTwenny design would help any competitor.
Even if you're not interested in reading the article, I'd recommend a quick skim to look at the pretty pictures. There are some novel approaches to data in there that may inspire you later.
Obviously, you just wait for an itinerant hero to be played by someone who wants to finish all of the collection quests before they beat the game.
why is this unacceptable? you do realized that there is no 0% failure storage in existence
Hilarious Resume'
You have achieved the difficult task of making CVS less usable.
It is completely unacceptable for a normal FS. Something a bit more advanced like ZFS may be able to cope. What I am wondering about is why amazon didn't implement such a solution on a massive scale themselves and then run EBS on top of it.
OH NOEZ! U G0TZ MY CVSWEB COOKEEZ!
Stacking would be the wrong way to go about it. With ZFS, you could still get 99.99999...% but with only a slight percentage increase in necessary storage space.
Microsoft stacks shipping container servers like Legos
> This really reads like a "WAHH! C++ isn't Python or Java!" post. only by someone that barely passed his C++ class in college.

I agree with many of your points, but I think that last bit is unnecessarily harsh.
In my consulting business I've tried to move all of my clients to fixed-price iterations: Each iteration has a fixed length and fixed price, and we determine the appropriate scope at the beginning of each one. Hours worked never figures in to it. They budget better, I budget better, I can work smarter not harder some iterations, and bust out the Heroic Measures for others.
From what i understood, the brain doesn't make decisions, it just reacts to stimulation.

I think today's xkcd is appropriate :D

http://xkcd.com/465/
This is exactly how PDAs got into the Enterprise. RIM took a direct approach with BlackBerry, but they are the exception. It's happening again with iPhone.

Consumers buy these things and bring them into work. Then, IT tries to get them under control once they fail to prevent them from getting adopted. These products are all useful to regular people as well, so this variant (Consumer->Enterprise, vs Individual Department->Enterprise) is only interesting if you're building something that is interesting to both Consumers and Enterprise (or Consumer->Individual Department->Enterprise).
250EU for a whole tasting menu is not dirt cheap. For less than $370 you can get the tour menu at Alinea with wine pairings, and Alinea is in the top 5 in the states. For $250 you can get the tasting menu at The Fat Duck, which is the second best restaurant in the world.
Chef Ramsey has fucking posters of Fernan Adria on his bedroom wall and taped to the inside of his locker.
Ask YC: What is the corporate culture of typical YC startups?
Hello,

I was wondering if I am the only one that seems to have seen a pattern between YC startups - they all, on the outside at least, look like they have the same corporate culture.

There are many definitions of corporate culture, but they best one is basically how things are done by the company.

Is this something you get from Paul Graham?

Thanks
What magic storage device have you been using that has a failure rate better than the industry average for disk drives? If you are really concerned about this issue you can just run a software RAID over these raw block devices.
Thank you. This is the most thoughtful and really mind expanding thing I have read in months.

I notice a lot of commentary on lecture 23. Skip that. Read 16 onward. The meat of this whole thing is his really long treatment of the questions of why we fear death, what it is we fear, what about death is so bad, and what that suggests about how we should LIVE.

These are not new concepts, but it is easy to try to ignore them.
Nice story, but a shame her handwriting is perfectly regular...
Because some users don't need reliability beyond what a normal hard drive offers, and they really shouldn't be compelled to pay for it. If you need reliability on these devices you can run software RAID or ZFS over the raw block devices being offered and tune the cost/reliability equation in whatever manner makes the most sense for your application.
Rockin' super badass skills in HTML? I'll pass, thanks.
"My point is that as society "progresses" - as we have to deal with larger and more difficult to interpret social structures - as democracy arguably breaks down - philosophy becomes vital because it is in some sense our actual lingua franca."

This is what I don't get: wouldn't it make much more sense to study economics and complex systems to get an idea of what the outcomes of any particular choice of social structure are? It worries me that people want to build these decisions on "Ethics" (I assume you meant this special case of philosophy), because they are just a poor substitute for real understanding (morals = how to act when I don't have clue about the consequences of my actions). How can we make a philosophical decision, without having an idea of the actual, physical outcomes of our actions? Especially in the face of growing complexity, I would call for maths to the rescue, not philosophy. Economics can tell us what are the outcomes of Democracy or Communism or whatever (like in Democracy, I guess some people will be exploited, but the average is happier, or whatever). Once we know the likely outcomes, we can apply our values to them and decide which system to use. I don't see where Philosophy enters (in picking social structure, physical power decides in the end, nobody asks the philosophers anyway - better to convince the "powers" with hard facts that some particular choice is also better for them.)

"They can't prove their ideas all the way down to ZFC"

I don't think that is true in general. They build on other mathematicians proofs, which build on other proofs, which eventually go down to ZFC (or whatever foundation you choose). Of course there can be errors and holes in the chain, but ultimately, to have an unbroken chain is the goal. I am aware that the consistency of mathematics can not be proven, though - sure, the whole thing could collapse from on moment to the next. Let's hope it won't ;-)

I am not saying that there aren't any mysteries in the world...

Also sorry if I sounded aggressive at some times, I didn't mean to attack anybody personally (even the prof from the lectures seems to be a smart guy after all). I guess my anger is really just the frustration that the really important questions are left unanswered.
Perhaps. I was giving my first impression, but I strongly get the feeling that the author didn't really try using C++ for any real project, and had already decided against it long before he ever did anything with it.
You will also pay for increased i/o transaction costs. TANSTAAFL.
The power of Python is a consequence of a design with focus on clarity, readability and consistency. GvR understands that code is as much communication to humans as instructions to the computer, and that code is read much more than written. This makes the language very productive, but is especially valuable when you have to read or maintain code written by others. It is easier to learn from each others code and libraries.

Related languages like Perl or Lisp with a focus on TMTOWTDI are more immediately gratifying because you can easier tailor the look of the language to your personal preferences. This however have a long term cost to maintainability and sharing in the community.

The power of Python is an emergent property caused by readability and clarity combined with the network effect in the community.
I think you miss my point.

I'm not crazy about manfiestos or checklists period. If you made me pick something, it'd just be "Adapt" But if you insist on having some list of statements that define what agile means to you, at least pick something that is measurable and doesn't leave you in a confused quandry.

Valuing one thing over another has the impression that it is giving you information, when in fact it's leaving things more murky. If it's all relative, when would the other thing hold true? Why must there be tension between the two things?

People come to me all the time because they don't understand that the manifesto is empty of meaning. Instead they think there is something profound there. They say things like "we should eliminate all documentation because it's in the manifesto" or "we value people over contracts, so offshoring can't work"

But the manifesto says no such thing. In fact, it doesn't give much practical advice at all. It's just feel good, mom and apple pie stuff.
It was borderline until I read that he was best in his class for science at school.
He launched the site last night and has tons of traffic -- that's the opposite of fail. Fail is "I launched JustHackIt.com six years ago. I'm really enjoying managing the site but didn't expect to have no hits ever and I'm tired of it."
> Somebody missed the point of the name

Actually, the whole rant is largely just a rant, quite clueless and poorly argued in places (e.g. nullptr vs NULL). However, it's hard not to agree that auto function and lambda syntax (the -> and [] things) and rvalue references are astonishingly bad additions. It's obvious that Boost people have very strong influence on a committee, because hardly anyone else outside of Boost needs these features.
what i want to know is why techcrunch would cover such a stupid website - and I can't even get them to respond to my emails. never understood them.
Hands on with the next wave of search aggregators
Jason Calacanis On How To Get PR For Your Startup: Fire Your PR Company
Same here, after speaking with them, I realize the founders really are committed to making this work. They have some establish visions beyond simply just a badge. Its pretty impressive.
What’s wrong with make?
You're looking at the wrong level of abstraction. The C++ standards committee is no doubt a group of very smart people. But they're trying to "evolve" C++ by adding every feature under the sun. It doesn't matter how smart you are; if you try that, you'll make a mess. In fact, the very fact that these are smart people might be blinding them to the fact that they're designing a language to be used by mere mortals.

Really, C++ started simply. Early cfront languages were delightful, IMHO (with a few warts, like "protected", which in hindsight were a mistake). It was C, but with a pleasing syntax for class encapsulation and virtual function dispatch. I still write most of my C++ in that language.

But then we got multiple inheritance, and operator overloading, and placement new, and constructor initializer lists, and koenig lookup, and RTTI, and templates, (pause for breath) and now garbage collection, and synchronization, and lambdas. When will it end!? Every one of this changes is justifiable in isolation, but the end result is a language that almost no one actually understands (literally: I'm not sure I know anyone in my professional circle with a solid grasp of the entirety of C++ -- contrast that with the fact that almost everyone knows C more or less perfectly).
Signal vs Noise Rebuilt in Squarespace CMS in 18 Minutes
Cool video of the Squarespace guys rebuilding Signal vs Noise blog in 18 minutes on their CMS.
Does anyone here use scons (http://www.scons.org)?
Mailinator Data 2005-2008. 3million to 15million emails/day
Jerry Seinfeld to Push Vista for $10 Million
I realize there is no 0% failure, 100% guaranteed storage.

However, saying "yep, your storage space is now dead and you have lost all your files stored there" is not something I feel comfortable with. Why not offer something more resilient?
Interview with Bjarne Stroustrup about C++0x
when I was in church there was talk of it in the past. My mom says this happened to her in s. korea.

anyways, it's a good hypothetical example.
Ask YC: Salary comparison for WFH vs office-based?
Hi there,

Does anybody have any experience with how salaries for jobs where you work from home compare to equivalent office-based jobs? Would you expect to be paid more because you have to pay for your own electricity, etc., or does it not really make a difference?
Isn't the real bug here that your hiring process is using the degree program as input in the first place? If a few questions about pointers are all it takes, then isn't that a better, cheaper indicator to use?
I find myself working this way almost all the time. In the middle of a refactoring or other change, I try as much as possible to get it commited by the end of the day, in a runnable state, even if accessing the affected unfinished area will crash. Better that than to have to walk in the next morning and try to remember what portion of the code change is actually finished.

In a way this is like looking at your changes as atomic operations: If a change is so big you can't get yourself back into a runnable state by the end of one day coding, it probably should be broken up into smaller stable steps.