skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
gallon of gas cost was 1/4 ounce of silver in 1968, 1978, 1988, 1998 and is still the same in 2008. The only speculator here is Ben Helicopter imposing inflation tax on Americans, so they pay for all the stupid wars and bail outs.
Details that I had to dig a few clicks deep to get:

No code available yet. (Promised for September.)

Apparently code will be in Ruby(-on-Rails).

Website doesn't mention planned license. They seem to aspire to the Identi.ca model, so perhaps Affero GPL?
Start with ads immediately. Just make sure you do them well. Ads can be made unobtrusive or obnoxious.
"Give me a week or two and i'm writing code at an advanced level in any language."

Whereas the Peter Norvigs of the world need ten years.

Sigh.
If you want to show your appriecation for design, then nothing would show it better than a bare wall and a debris free workspace.
He already had $100m before writing the book.
Have you thought about doing a causes-donation type thing where the beneficiary is some advertised cause (eg: ACLU)?
It's a joke, thanks for the karma hit.
When my mom told me I could do anything I wanted, I actually believed her.
Interview with MIT Subway Hacker Zack Anderson
Running on Google's App Engine :)

Seriously, though, I'm not arguing python's anonymous functions are just as good as ruby's. I'm curious about his particular situation where "3-4 lines of Ruby" is all it takes.
I didn't downmod you, I only replied to your comment. Anyway, talking about karma is probably just noise here.
Why don't you review/summarize it for Squeezed Books?:-)
So, while 37signals doesn't break it out as clearly as you did, they do in fact recommend the same closed testing that you're recommending. For instance, in their book "Getting Real", they talk about how they do closed beta testing of individual features inside of their applications to selected groups of users, just like Google Mail does. They also publicly did closed beta testing of Highrise, their most recent application. I'd be surprised to hear that they didn't quietly test Basecamp before it shipped.

On the other point, I think I felt like in a discussion of whether we should be doing things this-way-or-that just because somebody said so, your resume was fair game. I think differently of that now. I'm sorry I offended you.
A subscription to paper version of WSJ is the best $100/year you'll spend. The content is authoritative, exceptionally well researched and complete. The opinion side of things is pleasantly conservative.
Because I am lazy. Hardware is cool, but too complicated and tedious. With programming, I hope to eradicate boring tasks from my life. Most of the time I am too lazy to actually program the computer to do the task for me, though. But it is nice to know that I could if I really wanted to.
We actually did the same thing for Kongregate. Except we gave out an invite code to everyone who asked - usually same day. So the artificial scarcity was... artificial. But if we'd had a big problem we could have stopped the invites.

We did that for about two months and then took the invite barrier down. Worked for us.

edit: I forgot the second half of this story. A few months after we took the invite barrier down, we decided to do a "Hollywood" launch - really all we were doing was changing the "alpha" to "beta" and releasing some new features (earning cards by playing games). It worked, we got lots of press. Fox News even called and asked if I could go on their afternoon cable show. I did (here's the video - http://tinyurl.com/2gpz7x). Our site immediately cratered - it was a much, much bigger surge than Digg. We got it back up in about 20 minutes and the follow on traffic was good as well.

So I guess we did a hybrid Gmail/Hollywood.
but its not enforced by the language or the object model. advantage ruby ;)
I've somehow forgotten to rant about ruby's totally hackish broken tools for importing code. require and include are just heinous crimes against nice programming. (I /love/ it when I clobber my global namespace with an include in ruby).
You're obviously right. I've just had the experience of wishing I had that kind of equity to throw around. I'm "arguing" a point you didn't really make --- is YC worth 6%? I don't know. But I do know that it's more significant than it might sound.
More to the point, it's a feature, not a bug. That everything is a symbol table hack makes metaprogramming much simpler.
Is Database-as-a-Service a Bad Idea?
It is not hard to remap your key bindings if you find `_` too hard to type.
afaik, almost all new printers come with half-full ink/toner cartridges.
No, he is testing Jason Calacanis's approach to PR. By attacking Aaron Swartz ad hominen, he raises his fame/notoriety in hacker community.

Oh. I just forget Linus Torvalds called security people m________ting monkeys. It seems very hard to discuss issues rationally lately without calling names that based on some a priori assumptions of the opposite side.
"If it flies, floats or fornicates, rent it. It is cheaper." :-D
There are none that compete on a direct level. I use Gmail for free email myself.

That said, we've seen that better is possible. MobileMe set the current standard, though Yahoo! has done some pretty excellent things (though they rarely DEclutter) on occasion. I think that something that worked like Gmail, looked like MobileMe, would be the best solution. Something ridiculously streamlined, with powerful built-in search and threaded messages.
Yes indeed. You have phrased it better.
But what I referred to was that it's not that cut-and-dry. You can work for two different companies and have different experiences. It's why I named Valve in particular: I would be willing to state, despite no knowledge of their work environment, that the people there love working there. It comes through in their games.
Firefox to get massive JavaScript performance boost
Subdownloader: Free tool for automatic download/upload subtitles for videofiles
I've most definitely taken ad space into consideration:

- a banner near logo,
- a leaderboard under primary navigation
- and two squares (300x250) can fit nicely along the right side

Last night I embedded all of the ad blocks into the tpl, and can control each via CSS using display: none.

Does anyone know if this will this render problems with adsense in regard to false impressions? (as oppose to completely removing the code from the template).
Special peek inside Nissan's R&D Battery lab
I usually checkout techmeme for hot news for the day. Othe than that, techcrunch,gigaom and some voip blogs.
Are beta blockers a performance drug that could increase the fairness of Olympic contests?
He called OpenBSD people masturbating monkeys. He called security people whores. He actually had a sympathetic audience among many security pros for that statement. The whole thing is indeed a bit shady.

That doesn't make me any happier with my original comment, though.
Not feasible, unfortunately. If you're really curious, I'd be happy to talk about it via email, but not here.
What's a metaprogramming problem that's easy to solve in Python, and hard to solve in Ruby? Here's a metaprogramming tactic that is surprisingly annoying to duplicate in Python: "method_missing".
Microsoft patents 'navigating paginated content in page-based increments'
Valve may be great. I don't know, but from what I've read online and heard people talking in RL (and not just from my coworker I mentioned above) I'm inclined to believe that if Valve is great, it is an exception, rather than the rule.
Indeed, this is good. However, it's sometimes also good to be able to actually paste data. Must we be denied both?
Ma.gnolia.com new version will be open source
Yeah, Symbian API and the entire SDK is complete bullshit. Sadly I have to use it for past three years :-(.
derail the conversation

De-rails-ing conversations about Ruby is often an improvement.
That's never caused a problem for me. It's also a tradeoff: in Python, you have to meticulously "import" every symbol you might need, which is tedious. I compared a really good piece of Python code (CORE's Impacket library) to a similar piece of Ruby code (Jamis Buck's net/ssh), and it's 3-1 in average number of important statements per file.
This is great news. I thought the boosts in JS for Firefox 3 were nice, this looks even better!
Seth Godin Advocates Fucking Over Advertisers, Advertisers Outraged, Jazj Tickled
From Awesomely Futuristic User Interfaces to Micro-Site Modular Innovation
For a lot of web apps, including the one I'm working on, the JS interpreter isn't the bottleneck, or even close. Basically, anything involving rendering or the DOM is orders of magnitude slower than pure JS computation. So what's the point of optimizing function call and loop overhead? For what real-world apps will this make a noticeable difference?

When we ran our app in FF3 for the first time, we were dismayed to find that, after all the talk about browser performance improvements, it had actually gotten a lot slower (especially when scrolling) [~]. As far as I can tell, they're optimizing the wrong stuff. It's possible that our app is unique, but I doubt it. To judge by Google, many people appear to be experiencing the same thing.

[~] Safari 3, on the other hand, sped up our app considerably.

Edit: The only person I know of who's raised this issue is John Resig: http://ejohn.org/blog/javascript-performance-stack/
Hmm, should that not have terminated at the $?
That's where you fail. The first thing we learnt about assembler was this - write in assembler, do not invent your own language and write in that language. If you do so, nobody will be able to read your program but you.

It sounds like you went and implemented your DSL on top of assembler, which is really bad practise.
Useless? Huh? How else are we going to reinforce our strongly held cultural perceptions about those awful foreigners?
If you liked this, check out tom ashbrooks interview with Felix from NPR.

http://archives.onpointradio.org/shows/2008/06/20080623_b_ma...
VC Tip Of The Day
Ok, awesome. And that's the same story as RubyGems. I've noticed that Python peeps are pretty big on "show me the code" anyway, but I think a lot of untapped potential is lost by not having a dead-simple distribution mechanism, as good as Python libs tend to be overall.

That's one thing I do like about Ruby; it wasn't always this way, but RubyForge + GitHub (Oh, GitHub!) + RubyGems combine to make for a very fluid feedback mechanism and make good use of The Cloud.

The result is that new libs get announced, distributed, tested, and improved by rabid Rubyists rather... rapidly.
Can people please stop using "software" and "webapp" interchangeably?

I realize most members here are founders of startups that deal with webapps, but there are some startups that deal with traditional desktop applications - true "software," who share similar interests.

That said - I wonder which of these two approaches is better for desktop software development. I'd imagine the fact that a user has installed your software is a "hook" of sorts - they're easier to reel in than website visitors which can escape rather more easily.
Does this mean that the cause of hate comes from security people charges high price by hour to give people false sense of satisfactions? It seems that all people charges high price service by hours are hated in general such as attorneys and so on.

How life is so unfair and I feel your pain. But Jesus Christ loves everyone who charged clients by hour and then turns over a new leaf to wash his corpse in funeral.
nope. hydrogen for ammonia comes from steam reforming natural gas and thus generates a lot of emmissions. the haber process is incredibly energy intensive (those pesky n2 triple bonds and all). all you've done, as in most 'fuel switch' schemes is create a 'displaced emmissions' system. this also goes for electricity by the way unless, and a big unless, you source emmission free electricity. personally, i like his idea.
Thanks for bringing this to the light.

I'm sorry to say that Firefox has become more about the marketing and less about the code - they're too worried about looking good in the benchmarks and raising their mass-market appeal than about true good code and user experience.

From JS benchmarks to SSL certificates (http://royal.pingdom.com/?p=339) to false advertising of FF3's memory consumption (http://neosmart.net/blog/2008/firefox-3-is-still-a-memory-ho...) - it's all going downhill.
You probably shouldn't share your secret key.
SECRET_KEY = 'blahblahblah'

It is used to seed hashes.
confidence is for marketing guys

you should make important decisions on the rational level, not the emotional level. You should weigh the risks and rewards in a rational manner, rather than running with what you feel. Feelings can be quite mercurial, and if you quit after you have a depressing weekend, or (sometimes worse) get in over your head and charge up lots of personal debit because you 'feel good' you can get in a lot of trouble.

Once you find that there is a positive expected return, keep making rational decisions.

But then, my start up isn't making any money, so what do I know?
sudo I like things doing what I tell them to do
I read a couple of forums(a few for my hobbies, a few general ones, a few for politics). Then I have HH and Techcrunch for tech etc. And finally I visit reddit/digg to see if there is anything interesting on the front page.

This way I tend to find all of the interesting stuff as soon as it happens.
This article is being publicly translated into Russian:

http://translated.by/you/lies-we-tell-kids/trans/

(almost finished)
whoops! Freudian slip I think!!!
I've found OCaml to be quite complementary to Python: It's excellent for functional programming and has one of the most sophisticated compile-time error checking systems I've ever used (two things relatively weak in Python). Both are very pragmatic and portable languages, as well. The OCaml community is tiny and rather quiet compared to Python's, though.
Two new, popular malware attacks
It's a bit absurd that in many cases it's actually cheaper to throw your printer away and buy a new one, rather than replace a multicolour cartridge.
I'm nice like that :) Don't worry, pg doesn't like me too, you're in good company ;)
I haven't used Ruby enough to have used method_missing, but I have used Python's __getattr__ to accomplish the same thing. Can you give an example of something that would be easy to solve in Ruby with method_missing but hard to solve in Python with __getattr__ ?
It's kinda funny how that works...

When I was in college and looking for internships, I put about 20 languages on my resume - Basic, Pascal, DCL, C, C++, Java, JavaScript, Perl, Assembler, PHP, HTML, SQL, CSS, InstallShield, Common Lisp, Scheme, Dylan, Haskell, Ocaml, and Erlang. After all, I'd written code in all of them, even if "code" was just a small 100-line program.

By the time I was looking for my first job, I'd pruned that to the C, C++, Java, PHP, JavaScript, Lisp, Haskell, and Erlang.

Now, I don't even list skills any more, just what I've done and what technologies I used to do it. But the list of languages that I consider myself proficient in is Java, PHP, Python, and JavaScript.

I used to wonder why it was that adults got so stupid between graduating from college and their mid-30s. Now I know - it's not that they're getting stupider, it's that their world and the difficulty of problems they face is expanding faster than their abilities. I feel much, much dumber than I did when I started college - but the program that took me a month then, I can whip off in a weekend now.
The only elegant way I can think of to solve the toasting non-uniformity problem requires a breakthrough in materials science.

If you could make the toaster's heating coils out of a substance that increases its resistance with increased light influx, then the bright areas of the toast would increase the coil resistance nearby, thereby producing more heat locally and tending to even out the toast.

Of course, this is probably a lot of work just to make a toaster.
Dude, I think you just wrote a Tool song!
With a title like that I would never have considered reading this book ever had it not been for the comments on this thread.
Am I missing something? He lists three requirements for a new phone:

- decent mp3 player
- laptop tethering
- good Exchange synchronization

Then he spends the rest of the review explaining why the E71 doesn't meet those requirements.

Seriously, at one point he says: "I’ve been desperately trying to get Merlin Mann’s Inbox Zero concept working and you need a great Exchange client, not a 1.0 Exchange client."

Then, two paragraphs later: "Nokia’s built in Exchange synchronization is very 1.0."
I liked this one: A Moms Life Uncensored
In addition to what others say, it also violates the terms of most ad networks. Inciting users to click will get you quickly booted from many ad networks.
Yes: make this evaluate as Python (in Python idiom, of course):

@bb = Bblock.make {
push ebx
mov ebx, dest
pop ebx
retn
}

That's all method_missing.
This is nice, but the only upgrade firefox actually needs is multithreading and they won't do it (according to some blog I read, which I couldn't re-find).

They can optimize all they want, and it'll help, but Intel hit a wall with CPU performance, and multi-core is the future.
Looks like yet another journalist who doesn't understand correlation vs. causation.
I couldn't agree more. I'd be interested in seeing an indepth examination of why Britain is failing so badly, particularly with their relative GDP.

This story isn't that. It's a diatribe about anecdotes combed from the media.
A Programming Interview Question Explored
While I was on vacation I wrote a whole bunch of essays on programming topics that had been on my mind and decided to start posting them. This is the first.
I don't like all aspects of this guy's philosophy. He is to a large extent only concerned with his own well-being. A great example is where he talks about how he fired his entire management team because they asked for an equity share in this company. For startups, the philosophy should be "we're all in this together", not "I own the company and you're not going to get a share of the success."

That being said, the book is a very entertaining read.
Perhaps it is a diatribe. But Dalrymple's point is that the numbers don't lie in this case. Birthrates in the UK--as they are in all of the West-- are on a steep decline. We are witnessing the Graying of Europe.
Surely this is part of a plan to prove the inanity of software patents in order to have them all thrown out.

I mean... they can't be serious, can they?

If you ask a programmer to implement a "page down" function, they have to make a couple decisions that can lead to what... three possible sane outcomes? This is one of the outcomes.

* Am I talking screen page or document page?
* Do I leave a little bit of overlap for context?
* If there are multiple document pages on the screen, do I just go one or do I skip past all the ones that have already been displayed?
* If there are fractional document pages on the screen, do I skip past the undisplayed portion?

Document,No,Just one,N/A = patent.

I wonder if they covered the other 87.5% of the solution space in other filings.
Microsoft granted Page Up Page Down patent
-3? Looks like I'm the only desktop developer here then. My bad.
Greasemonkey script for cracking airport wi-fi
Yes, if the industry you are going into puts a lot of value on college name. If not, not really worth it. My sister got her degree from Cornell(considered #1 for her major), went into the 2nd most prestigious company in her field(assistant manager), put herself something like $160,000 in debt. Starting salary? $36,000, working 60 hours a week and is required to work weekends.

But if you are in Finance or Computer Science or some other field where school determines your ability to get interviews, that degree can help open most doors for you. I'd say the comparison in the eyes of the typical employer has a 3.75 from a regular state school on the same level as a 3.0 from an Ivy college.
I went to Northwestern, and I must say that "(a Big Ten university outside Chicago)" is not how I would describe it. It's the only private school in the Big Ten, and it's dwarfed in size by the others as well. To call it a Big Ten university is about as far off the mark as you can get while still being accurate.
A university is what you make of it.
The future rests on the soil beneath our feet
Interesting, but: "Since mealtimes are usually when families get to converse" is not true. You can complain about lack of eating together, but don't make up reasons why it's bad.

But the rest of it was quite insightful.
I don't believe that a non-engineer should be screening engineers. If you're doing that, you've already lost the war.

That said, I think that alpha geeks are susceptible to hiring false-positives, just like everyone else. The causes might be a little different, but they're still real.

The point of asking someone to evaluate bad code is to see if they have good taste, and the ability to understand other peoples' code. Too many "alpha geeks" want to screen for raw coding ability, but don't properly filter out the people who can't read code. It's a separate skill, and since you (should) spend far more time reading than writing, it's also very important.
I think the salient issue with big name universities is selection bias. MIT gets to choose valedictorians with perfect SAT scores as its student body; is it any surprise that its students are more successful than a less selective university's?

The real question is how well would the students accepted to MIT but who chose to go to less selective schools do (not perfect data, but the best we can get from the real world). I'm personally inclined to believe they do just as well as those who actually attended MIT, but I don't have the data to know.

Interestingly, a similar issue comes into play with YC. A surprisingly high percentage of YC accepted companies are successful (for some definition of success), just like a surprisingly high percentage of ivy league grads are successful.

The real question is how much of that success is due to the fact that companies yc funds are intrinsically better than the rest of the field versus how much impact pg's help has. Maybe pg is just amazingly good at picking winners, and the companies he picks would have succeeded with or without his help.

The only way to get a better idea would be to compare the success rates of people accepted by yc who declined to those actually accepting yc's offer. This wouldn't even be a perfect measure though, since maybe there is some underlying factor (media savvy, proclivity to seek help, etc) that causes a company to both accept yc investment and succeed.

The only real way to tell would be to have pg randomly issue offers to half the companies he normally would, and compare the success of companies he issued offers to against those he would have but didn't issue offers to and a random selection of those he didn't plan to make offers to.

For obvious reasons that would be an impossible experiment to run. In this case though, I'm inclined to believe that pg's help does provide more than a "6.4%" boost to your chances of success.
Programming....gratifies creative longings built deep within us and delights sensibilities we have in common with all men.

-Fred Brooks
Adding Simplicity - An Engineering Mantra: Latency Exists, Cope