skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"In 2000 economist and former U.S. Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers became president of Harvard. In a private meeting with West, Summers allegedly rebuked West for neglecting his scholarship, and spending too much time on his economically profitable projects.[5] Summers allegedly suggested that West produce an academic book befitting his professorial position. West had written several books, some of them widely cited, but his recent output consisted primarily of co-written and edited volumes. According to some reports, Summers also objected to West's production of a CD, the critically panned Sketches of My Culture, and to his political campaigning."

And

"In October, he had the temerity to meet with Cornel West and suggest that he turn his hand to some serious scholarship-West's most recent production was a rap CD called Sketches of My Culture-and lead the way in fighting the scandal of grade inflation at Harvard, where one of every two grades is an A or A-. What an outrage! West went to sulk in his tent, announcing on the way that he was applying for another year's leave of absence (he had just returned from one) and letting it be known that he might just up and leave Harvard."

To whom were you referring?

Edit: I accidentally misspelled the professor's name in my previous comment. He is, of course, Cornel and not Cornell.
I was definitely joking. Like California, much of Australia seems to have a pretty nice climate, and does well economically.
If SimpleDB supported cursors, you could create sorted indexes. This should allow for better performance than running a sort as part of a query.
Spending Like Its 1999: Startup Burns $50k of VC Money on Crazy Contest
Get a 'Personal' MBA
How is it possible to "generalize" from one data point? The normal method of generalizing is finding a similarity shared across many data points, and proposing it applies more widely.

Perhaps one could generalize badly with 2 data points, but isn't it just impossible with 1, and therefore he must actually be doing something else?
Oh look, a company with what I consider to be crappy management. Do I (a) sell short or (b) ignore them to invest in companies with good management? How about (c) I buy their stock with my friend Carl and mess with them?

Now messing with them isn't working out to my financial advantage. Time to cut my losses. Who do I blame for my troubles? How about management? Am I a long-time stockholder disappointed with recent events? No, I am an opportunist who bought shares with both eyes wide open and a good idea of who management was and what they wanted to do all along.

Reading the OP has turned me into a typical Internet Troll, I am compelled to call T. Boone Pickens a bad name: cry-baby.
Not only is it hard to start with that mindset, it's noxious. Any framework should have a solid footing in reality, and that means developing it alongside a project that needs it.
Quit trolling. Clearly it's the founder's decision how many hours to work, not PG's.
Ask HN: Best way to handle Email as a startup?
Hi all,

Email has been a big headache for us. Our service doesn't send spam, or in large quantity, nor newsletters. We are only sending confirmation Emails and/or notifications.

On our server, we implemented reverse DNS, SPF record, and DomainKeys to get through all the Email filters (or attempt to...). Gmail hasn't really give us any issue. We were able to get through Yahoo Mail thanks to HN. However, we are starting to notice all the registration Emails being send to Hotmails are getting bounced, and as far as I can tell... they aren't fake Email addresses.

As a startup, do you recommend us to keep handling our emails ourselves? Or would you rather license out your emails to 3rd party handlers? I am already considering the 2nd option because this has been a persistent headache, and I would love to spend more time on actually coding...

Any tip or recommendation would be greatly appreciated
Code swapping, and taking the long view when writing software
This is an oldie but goodie. I think I first bookmarked that one 5 or 6 years ago, and some of those screenshots still make me laugh out loud.
Scrabulous would have a case, if they did not make such a direct rip-off of Scrabble (e.g. see all of the not-quite-direct-rip-offs floating around casual gaming sites or for mobile devices.) The coloring of the board, the design of the tiles, etc; all of this is covered by copyright and Scrabulous made the bad decision to ignore this fact and simply copy everything. Scrabulous can fight this, but they will lose.
func(SSN, DOB, Fname, Mname, Lname);

vs.

func(PersonInstance);

The first one is more tightly coupled. But there are no hard and fast rules in good design.
> The second developer receives the assignment and spends the next 30 minutes talking to the business to see how the software will be used and what value it provides. After he's gotten the information he needs he says thanks, but instead of letting him leave, the CTO offers him the job on the spot.

Ah, he has learned the Joel Spolsky secret: with contrived examples, you can prove anything.
I'm with this start up as well, and I want to resonate that this has been a huge problem for us. We have been getting a ton of bounced emails so if anyone has recommendations on what to do with those (the ones that actually look legit) then please let us know!
Quote from article:
While the theory rests on relatively firm ground, the next question is how do you expand space behind the ship and contract it in front of the ship?

Quote from Star Trek:
Scotty: "It's no use Cap'n, I just dont have the power!"

While cool in theory - I'm skeptical :)
I think this may tell us more about humans than about robots. Notice how the article mentions some children at the London Science Museum enjoy cuddling/"babying" the robot, others want to try and scare the robot. Maybe trying to simulate emotions in robots will give us insight into human emotions and perhaps open up ways to encourage "the better angels of our nature".
Flash Crowd Preparation - Load Testing With Siege
Wouldn't it be easier (and probably cheaper) to just buy Scrabulous? Now you have an official client that doesn't suck, and a fan base that doesn't hate you. Why did they waste money developing their own inferior version while they wasted more money suing people who had a good version?
That logical impossibility is exactly what I meant when I made the comment. If generalization doesn't work for you, how about this:

"This wouldn't be the first time that Atwood came up with a theory that only had to fit one data point."

He could just as easily have said that all open source developers are Italian or that Italians can't spend money, and he would have been just as wrong.
i feel your pain-- we've made do using google apps for domain, configuring SMTP is... quirky, but at low volume you should be fine.
It's not fun at all. I recommend it only for the incurably curious.

The only interesting part is how fast Viaweb was growing -- for all of 1997, they had $343K in revenue; for the first quarter of 1998, it was $290K. You don't have to extrapolate that too far to see a great deal for Yahoo.
You could write music. Beethoven completed both his Symphony Nr. 5 in c (Op. 67) and Symphony Nr. 6 in F (Op. 68) in 1808. A few people have heard of those.
ok i agree
I'd like to point out that I've never been entirely the type to put in insane work hours. To be fair, I've probably always worked more than the average person, but my particular peak efficiency (as I've been able to see while using RescueTime) comes when I work for bursts and then rest.

All of that being said, ever since I've been a founder (and especially during YC), I've noticed my work time shooting off the charts compared to how I used to work for other companies. I know why this is for me: it's simply because I know that every minute I'm not working is a minute that I'm subtracting from the company's success timeline. People talk about compressing your career into the span of 4 years as a founder, and yeah that's really what's going on. The reason is because if you don't work on your startup, there literally is nobody else that will. And for me, it feels like I'm costing myself money when I'm not working, and that takes a while for people like me to figure out how to balance. I have found that it gets easier after you've reached a more stable 1.0 of your product, but it's always a challenge.

I must say, though, that the idea that YC is a cult is pretty ridiculous.
You can't copyright a database of publicly available information (e.g. a dictionary, a phone book etc.): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications_v._Rural_Tel...

Some dictionaries have been inserting a fake word into their lists so that they can copyright that specific word and go after the infringer for using that word in their dictionaries. They can also copyright the definition of words. But you can't copyright Scrabble's list of acceptable words.
Does Ruby 1.9 have a web page or something? Ruby's site has very little information on how's the project going, and I am not too involved to follow the mailing lists.

Questions like: when Rails support is coming? Or will native threads be supported?
"Even during Viaweb I still slept 8 hours a night (roughly 3-11). The most productive people rarely have more than 6 hours or so of really concentrated work per day, except in emergencies. If you can ensure you get that every day, you don't need to economize on sleep..." -- by pg 358 days ago

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39778
Another quote from the article:
"What the scientists were able to estimate was the amount of energy necessary, if the technology was available, to change these dimensions: about 10^45 joules."

That's the energy contained in (roughly) 22 x 10^43 Big Macs... easy, lets do it!
First: whoops, I edited my comment while you were replying. Second: Summers was clearly in the wrong at the beginning of his spat with West, who was at the time a University Professor (an extreme honor, which places a professor outside any department, and accords him the ability to teach whatever he likes); West’s outrage at Summers’ disrespect was predictable and easily avoidable.

There were several resignations of much-loved deans, &c. in the last couple of years of Summers’ presidency. Go read through the Crimson’s coverage of Summers’ departure if you want a reasonable semi-outsider’s (students aren’t party to internal faculty disputes) look.

Edit: that National Review article you quote is garbage: “The unpalatable truth is that Afro-American Studies is a pseudo-discipline—an academic ghetto constructed to accommodate the beneficiaries of ‘affirmative action’—and that the celebrated occupants of Harvard's department are second-class scholars with first-class salaries and perquisites.”
I think you may be mistaken about which Paul you're responding to. http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=paul
"Little b" creates biology-specific language using Lisp
Port Knocking: What are you hiding in there?
I have a solid feeling we'll be building one of these much sooner than anyone thinks...
I think the only reason it hasn't been killed is that "silencing critical voices" would be added to the list of offenses. That doesn't bother me at all though. That's just not a good reason to avoid killing a weak troll post.
So are you using gmail to handle your outgoing mails?
Sneaky. They released a new variation called Wordscraper: http://apps.facebook.com/wordscraper

You can make your own custom boards, it seems, but otherwise it's the same game so far.

Screenshot:
http://screencast.com/t/Cb1m0kGeVh
Next time you're in the bookstore, check out the chapter on conferences in Keith Ferrazzi's Never Eat Alone. It will provide a good counter-perspective.

At my own company, we had our founder and a director present at a recent conference, and the contacts and credibility they gained there will probably directly contribute to doubling our revenue over the next 2 or 3 years.
In my opinion, this is exactly how copyright should work, instead of the sue grandma bullshit we have now.

Hasbro has exclusive rights to Scrabble that is pretty distinctive in brand and shape. Trademark, not copyright protects both the brand and the design of the board. Hasbro would have a case here, rest assured.

What we have here is a situation where one party is making money based on the IP of another, including using the brand's strength to attract attention. If that isn't outright IP infringement, we may as well get rid of the whole concept.

We're all better off that this didn't get to the courts. If Hasbro had lost, you can all but guarantee that there would be new and even more restrictive measures put in place to protect IP.

Scrabulous violated the spirit of the law, if not the letter. Those of us who already feel the letter of the law goes too far shouldn't be supporting these guys, honestly.
Ask HN: What IDE/Editor for RoR Development on Mac?
Dearest Hacker News Community,

to all Ruby on Rails Developers on the Mac platform: what IDE or Editor do you use for developing your Rails applications and why did you choose it?

Thanks for your comments!
I'm going to lay the blame fairly and squarely on the Simpsons.

Seriously.

The show is the only mass market show that I can think of that is continually giving nuclear power (in general) a bad reputation and because of its popularity amongst young people, it is helping to prevent the adoption of nuclear power, even though the technology is much safer than earlier implementations.
hopefully we'll finish exploring our own system before venturing out into the universe.
I know it's "gmail Paul", but my comment still stands.

I thought your comment was a more appropriate response, to be honest.
This is good news, but we still have the idiotic habit of using airplanes for mid-distance travel, due to the lack of a decent train system.
And he actually enjoys his job!
I was just going to post that. If that's what he means it's the opposite of what you should usually do; in that example you're making register_with_irs() depend on the implementation of customer when it doesn't need to
I think the test of the importance of your work is not how much people will be hurt if you screw up, but how much people's lives are improved if you succeed. Some of the most important work is done by people working quietly on mundane problems. Judged by the standard of how much it contributes to people's well-being, Google probably does more for the world than the Apollo missions did.
I think I am giving up on this "hacker" thing, there are just too many possible meanings and different people perceive it differently, thus it makes no sense to use the word in real life anymore.

The original, true meaning has been lost: nobody I know uses this word it in's original context. A "hacker" these days means one of these three:

1. Programmer (or a manager) who prefers quick&dirty hacks that can't be maintained and, after accumulating into a critical mass, tend to bring the overall project progress to a halt.

2. Someone who breaks into other people computers, steals their personal porn, collection of cat photos and, of course, credit card numbers.

3. The other, non-business type of founders of "Internet Startups". Often not having an MBA, or simply a possession of "Python in 21 days" automatically qualifies you as a "hacker".

And since majority of people use the word in one of those contexts, I figured why bother... BTW my cat is a hacker too: his portfolio of hacks is growing every day.
Yes, I agree. I can easily be sleepy all day if I don't make an effort to do something productive.
Cool use of twitter from a pretty cool website :-)
The separation indeed occurred long ago, and the most dramatic evolutionary changes happened then. But the populations on the Galapagos continue to make observable evolutionary changes because of weather conditions.

http://www.nwf.org/nationalwildlife/article.cfm?issueID=115&...:

"Recently, the Grants witnessed another form of natural selection acting on the medium ground finch: competition from bigger, stronger cousins. In 1982, a third finch, the large ground finch, came to live on Daphne Major. The stout bills of these birds resemble the business end of a crescent wrench. Their arrival was the first such colonization recorded on the Galápagos in nearly a century of scientific observation. 'We realized,' Peter Grant says, 'we had a very unusual and potentially important event to follow.' For 20 years, the large ground finch coexisted with the medium ground finch, which shared the supply of large seeds with its bigger-billed relative. Then, in 2002 and 2003, another drought struck. None of the birds nested that year, and many died out. Medium ground finches with large bills, crowded out of feeding areas by the more powerful large ground finches, were hit particularly hard.

When wetter weather returned in 2004, and the finches nested again, the new generation of the medium ground finch was dominated by smaller birds with smaller bills, able to survive on smaller seeds. This situation, says Peter Grant, marked the first time that biologists have been able to follow the complete process of an evolutionary change due to competition between species and the strongest response to natural selection that he had seen in 33 years of tracking Galápagos finches."

I'm also aware of the negative correlation between IQ and Fertility; however, this is not without explanation. IQ correlates with k-strategy (bigger investments in fewer children that are slow to develop), and k-strategy correlates with having few children. [1] R-strategists have lower IQs and higher fertility rates. In the society outlined by Gregory Clark in his paper, wealth correlated with reproductive success. Right now, we live in an anomalous situation where food is not a limiting factor. But this is coming to an end; food prices have increased dramatically in recent years, with no sign of falling any time soon. This phenomenon is not new, and illustrates the possible advantages of r-selection.

From Clark's article:
"The strength of the selection process through survival of the
richest also seems to have varied depending on the circumstances
of settled agrarian societies. Thus in the frontier conditions of
New France (Quebec) in the seventeenth century where land was
abundant, population densities low, and wages extremely high the
group that reproduced most successfully was the poorest and the
most illiterate."

http://www.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/gclark/papers/Capitalism...

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-selection
"US citizens drove 9.6 billion fewer miles in May 2008 than in May 2007, or 3.7% less. Yet May usually means an increase in traffic because of Memorial Day vacations and the beginning of summer."

I don't think Memorial Day being in May means May this year has an increase in traffic over May last year, that would've only made sense if they compared April and May
I am sure there are many, but I am more than happy with Textmate
See also:
"Fictitious entries"
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fictitious_entry)

"Ghost words" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_word)
My wife is a wedding photographer and I must say that projectwedding.com was a brilliant idea.
The American government could have put a $3 tax on gas when it was $1, and the consumption would have dropped and all those oil profits could have been invested in renewable domestic energy development.

People would have screamed bloody murder then, but they're screaming now anyways. 20-20 hindsight.
Ragogmakan (Google) goes to the Amazon
As if cosmic inflation weren't bad enough, we'd have cosmic obesity.
... Just like an application written for an O/S will always be slower than a custom written application which runs straight on the hardware with no O/S.

It depends on your definition of O/S, and what you think it should do.
That is indeed what I meant though of course it is not an absolute statement. As a general rule of thumb, inside your own web application, passing objects rather than raw data will lead to easier to read & debug code, quite likely at the risk of tighter coupling, you are correct.

'Course unless you're building a framework or library coupling should probably not be your main priority when building a web site.

As for the Law of Demeter, like my list that too is a rule of thumb and not an absolute, requiring judgement calls.
It's an interesting mind game. Don't expect it to be happening any time.. uh.. more or less ever. From the article:

...were able to estimate was the amount of energy necessary, if the technology was available ... about 10^45 joules

How much is that?

"That's about the amount of energy you'd get if you converted the entire mass of Jupiter into pure energy via E = mc^2," said Cleaver

But even disregarding the energy needs, they don't know how they'd actually interact to produce the warping they'd need:

"These calculations are based on some arbitrary advance in technology or some alien technology that would let us manipulate the extra dimension,"

On the other hand, it is an extremely interesting mind game, and who knows, there may even be some interesting consequences, at least in theoretical physics.
# You’re not building atop an open-source framework

# You’re writing your own framework upon which to build

# You’re not using an ORM layer

# You’re writing your own ORM layer

I'm glad DHH and the boys over at django did it wrong, to be honest.
Hardly. Did you try following the link in the post? The link text says "textbook definition of a cult," but it's just a link to the Wikipedia article. This list is one of several that appear in the article, and judging from the multiple citations it is an amalgam created from several different sources.
I'm pretty sure that NASA actually does worry about asteroid impacts and has guys at JPL working on ideas.
That's fixing itself too - airplanes are so unreliable that people are using them less and less. That plus security checking, long lines, drive to the airport; and flying takes about as long as driving.

Hmm, what's better: fly, together with a bunch of people, or drive all by yourself?

Anyway, you'll see a lot of airlines go bust this coming year - unless they start offering on-time guarantees.
It just looks like a fancy furby to me. However, wrapping the robot in cloth (á la cloth mother) looks like an inspired decision.
"...how do you expand space behind the ship and contract it in front of the ship?

Cleaver and Richard Obousy, the other coauthor, propose manipulating the 11th dimension..."

That's silly.

Everybody knows you need to adjust the phase shift of the dilithium crystals. Either that or adjust your plasma flow.

Good thing I watched all those ST TOS and NG shows. This stuff would be a lot harder without that.
I upmodded you because I share your wish, but unfortunately what you're asking for is impossible.

Both of my parents have been railroad engineers all their lifes, and the main thing I learned was this: railroads are not economical at transporting passengers. Nearly all countries with "decent train systems" use government subsidies to effectively sponsor passenger railroad transport. Even subways can't make any profit.

And I am against paying more taxes. Period. Therefore, no government subsidies to Amtrak from me.
And therein lies the trade-off. It may be that one day you need an address as well as an SSN to register an IRA. If you chose door A, you update the calling code to either pass both properties or pass a customer object. If you chose door B, you update the callee code to extract the address as well as the SSN.

In one case we're arguing that the registration code shouldn't have to know how to work with a customer. In the other case we're arguing that code initiating a registration shouldn't have to know what the IRS wants from a customer.

Seems like there's room for reasonable people to empty a bottle of single malt while debating the alternates.
I hope they patented.
While the site had images of software for this purpose, it didn't provide links to it. Anyone know where one can find it? I'm curious to see how seamless the process is. Some of the ones in the article looked perfect while others looked very non-real.