skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In the Internet landscape, sometimes there were opportunities literally lying on the floor. Remember domain names? Anyone could buy a good .com name and make a fortune few years later, without any business model. Later, there were expired domains with high traffic...people just discovered them, picked them up and made a fortune again.

The point is, that there were finite number of such opportunities, and this I think applies to this article as well.
Does anything else suck as badly as outlook?
My Haskell experience is too limited for me to have experienced performance changes resulting from small code changes. OCaml has a fairly predictable performance model and a language which combines aspects from OCaml and Haskell (this is the point where someone shouts "Scala!") will go a long way to reduce brittleness in the code and won't require much testing for unexpected performance issues.

I thought more about the original article yesterday and realized that - regardless of the language one uses - the author made a mistake by implying that the quality peak is equally high as one moves to the right of the graph. If by "beautiful code" we mean well designed code, then changes will have far less far-reaching effects. The quality peak will be lower (relative to the graph) and hence the descent induced by changes, less steep. And this happens because as you rightly state, less code == better code.

If a company needs to be agile (in the general sense of the word), their software should also be easy enough to adapt to changing circumstances. Given that good code allows for such changes, the extra effort to produce good code pays for itself.

On the other hand, for a piece of software that is at the end of its lifetime, there is little of sweeping changes. Beautification of end-of-life code is a bad use of time.

You are right that a programmer should be willing to endure some ugly code. Anything which encodes real world relationships (which are complex and messy) will have some ugliness in it. A programmer which rails against this makes life difficult for everyone around. But this can be taken too far and I have known people that are too conservative in this regard; this made the software unnecessarily hard to maintain and the programmers unhappy [1].

The answer to your last statement is that if you have to modify barely understandable code, then it is worth refactoring (and as a last resort, rewriting) it, even if you don't understand every aspect of it. If you don't you will likely spend more time trying to paste your code in somewhere in the hope that it will work and in so doing you the crufty monster will get even bigger and harder to maintain (and you don't gain an understanding of the code which is a very valuable asset to the owners of the code).

[1] No company has a legal obligation to keep employees happy. But such companies can expect mediocrity if they're lucky but probably much less.

Edit: I obviously don't know HN's markup. Fixed italization.
Need servers? Dell has an excellent deal for a 8 core server
Here's something different for the HN community, a server deal from dell that I saw on FT... Pretty good pricing on a 8 core server.
Good point on the icons, I'll fix that. Do you mind if I ask what OS/browser/display settings you're running? In the few months we've been testing the site at our school, you're the first user to complain about the stripes (including students and older landlords), but I take this sort of usability issue seriously.
Give again for more chances to win
Why do I have a feeling that these 5 areas are not on Xobni's radar? That would explain a lot.

In the startup world, everything moves faster, even evolution.
Let me try to make the case:

The repeal of the Corn Laws led to a massive flow of people to the cities, providing much needed labour to fuel the industries there. And by lowering the price of food, the entire country people had more money to spend on other goods. It also created a bigger market for the surplus of grain that the U.S. was able to produce, which gave a huge boost to their economy, and allowed it to continue to absorb enormous numbers of immigrants.

Also, the repeal of the Corn Laws became a landmark for the free trade movement, leading to a more efficient division of labour between states that gave a huge boost to economic growth that continued throughout the 19th century.
This suggests that liposuction is actually an important step if you want to keep fat off.
Ah, thank you very much. The "House, Condos,..." icons were a new addition to the site as of last night. I didn't even think of the fact that visitors would perceive those as links, so that is exactly what I'll make them. One of the problems we had been seeing is that users keep assuming that we only do houses, or only do apartments, because that is how everyone else operates, so we wanted to mitigate that popular assumption at the front page.

I agree about the enormous space the options boxes take up on the results page, and I'm still working on a redesign of that.

The browse rentals page doesn't serve much purpose other than to give casual views something to look at. Typically users who are actively looking for rentals either search for their school or type in a city or something, which of course returns much more relavent results.

Perhaps I'll change the results page for the "Browse Rentals" to show the schools on the map and allow the user to click one to narrow down the search.

As for the "screwed" in the slogan, most landlords love it. I've also won a couple Elevator pitch contests by working the slogan in there, and had people coming up to me the rest of the conferences laughing and saying how memorable it was. I think it's all about knowing your audience and your boundaries and then listening to feedback from your customers to make sure you're not going to far. As for us, most landlords love it too and agree whole-heartedly that they don't want to get "screwed" by student tenants.

And as a side note, when landlords log in to the site, all of the language and vocabulary on the site change to a much more professional tone.

Thank you very much for your feedback. We appreciate it a lot!
Portugal to sell 500,000 of Intel's Classmate PCs
Online guitar tab player
FM transmitters create socializing networks in Africa
IDAHO Collection Agency - IDAHO Collection Services
IDAHO - National Asset Management LLC is today's most progressive loss prevention and collection agency available. Our purpose at National Asset Management LLC, is to provide to our clients unmatched support, service and financial growth.
Illinois Collection Agency - Illinois Collection Services
ILLINOIS - National Asset Management LLC is today's most progressive loss prevention and collection agency available. Our purpose at National Asset Management LLC, is to provide to our clients unmatched support, service and financial growth.
Indiana Collection Agency - Indiana Collection Services
INDIANA - National Asset Management LLC is today's most progressive loss prevention and collection agency available. Our purpose at National Asset Management LLC, is to provide to our clients unmatched support, service and financial growth.
market i don't understand + non-programmer people's existing problems that i don't know anything about = troll-like comment.

last time i looked hypertext was invented to help CERN scientists discuss and share their results. i think that worked out well.
You made the front page of news.com.au as well. Congratulations :)
Surely a better method would be to detect the point at which sum will overflow, and at that point halve the sum and the count (shift right)? Sure, it's still not exact, but I think it's a far better long term solution.
OK, this is lame.

The original article explains fairly clearly that.

a. this only applies when the vista volume is protected

b. that it stops installing the vista upgrade so it wont step on your bootloader.

So now we're kicking microsoft for doing the right thing?

I mean personally I'd rather experiment with recreational cholera infections than run any version of Windows, but come on, this headline is some quality flamebait.
Installing And Using OpenVZ On CentOS 5.2
Is ‘Smart House’ Still an Oxymoron?
tinyurl.com alternative web application
I completed in a day.
not necessarily. if the body can somehow keep count, it may just replace the cells you remove. I'm not sure we know for certain either way yet.
Tinyurl next time?
First, why is C nearly always required for writing compilers?

Because the author is clueless. Sure, you might want to compile your language down to C, but there's no point in writing the compiler in C, unless you want to make your life difficult for no good reason. Nobody cares how fast your compiler runs. (What I should say is, tokenizing the input, building the AST, and traversing the AST is going to be just as fast implemented in Lisp/ML/Perl/Ruby as it is implemented in C. Except you'll get a more correct compiler in less time. "malloc" is for chumps.)

But, these days, there's no point in compiling down to C. It's much easier (and yields a potentially faster runtime) to compile to LLVM or the JVM or Parrot.
Prolog-style pattern matching is quite helpful, at least in Prolog :) I think Haskell-style might be a subset of Prolog-style.

Python-style is destructuring without pattern-matching, so its not really the same. The assignment will be executed whether the structures match or not - if they don't match (e.g. the right hand value is not a list or does not have the right size) an exception is raised.

Pattern matching would not be that useful in Python anyway I suppose (unless you program Python as if it was Haskell)
Search 4 Linux
Point 1 is pretty good, actually. Email for me is mostly for "official" communications and bug reports from people that haven't heard of IRC. When I want to talk to a friend, I wait for them to come online instead of sending e-mail. When I want to talk to the author of some program I am using, I use IRC. At work, we use IRC for everything. Even our clients prefer IM to e-mail these days.

If all the mailing lists I read were on Usenet, I don't think I would even need e-mail. An interesting thought.
Search 4 Linux - Mixx
Business to Business Directory, Import Export Business, Shipping and Transportation
B2bdirectory.biz is business to business web directory. Our site provide accounting, dvertising, company, shopping, wholesale, travel, jewelry, advertising, manufacture and more.
Bahlul comments on Search 4 Linux
I am surprised there aren't more hackers here openly flipping sites in this manner, especially the most entrepreneurial ones. Maybe it's a hacker's best kept secret. Forget coding from scratch, angels, VCs and team members, just do the flip.
Django + Spawning (WSGI Server) is fast.
Web video boom sprouting gray hairs: Akamai says media and entertainment growth is slowing
Hope they will sell these at a low price
Knol Proves The Importance of Transparency
What the hell does this have to do with HN? I noticed that you only registered a few days ago and every one of your submissions links to thenextweb.org. What's the deal?
It's not "my theory", but rather the theory I learnt in a Behavioural Neuroscience course. There was a chapter on hunger and eating that spent a good deal of time debunking set point theory. The textbook is "Biopsychology" by Pinel, chapter 12, if you're interested.

If there is such an fixed "equilibrium" weight, there's no evidence for it I know of. I find it curious you call the settling point model "extremely complex", since what I've described so far is very simple: body weight remains constant under constant conditions, and weight changes are dampened by negative feedback. Yours is actually the same so far, but adds a fixed, constant set point.
The Scrabulous developers messed up. I've read they were offered $10 million. They should've taken that! A couple of million would give you the freedom to work on whatever you want!
I am surprised there aren't more hackers here openly flipping sites in this manner

I think it's because of two factors, as the article mentions:

"Creating the value, though, is the tricky part."

and

"The average selling price of Web sites on eBay was $78 last month."
Building an Object-Oriented Parasitic Metalanguage
Find Clarity in One Day
World's best places to migrate
Nokia to invest $150 mn more in VC arm
This is savvy. If I ran a big company that depended on smart people, this would be a priority. For top technical talent, starting a company is the alternative to working at Google. With a VC program, Google can say "Come work with us, you'll become a better engineer, and if you later want to start a startup, we're here for that too."
Balsamiq has come full circle (concept, dev, launch, business).
the average person still uses email, not facebook. i think sometimes we think we are the average person and that is a huge mistake.
Consolidate servers by using acceleration technologies
the cost is less but are you from India?, if not then you may have tough time to get things done quickly - its better to know someone down there (a co-founder may be) - also the culture and social structure is way different than SV - so you may take time to get used to it ... may be i can help you more if you can post your email address ...GOOD LUCK
WOULD?
A good read that provides a hacker's look at dieting:

The Hacker's Diet by John Walker

http://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/
This only works for people who have their "hunger point" properly calibrated to when they should actually stop eating.

Some folks don't stop feeling hungry until well after they should have stopped eating, leading them to eat way too many calories.

John Walker explains this concept in his "The Eat Watch" chapter here: http://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/e4/eatwatch.html
So far the Get Rich Quick crowd seems to have focused their attention on the website marketplace sites like SitePoint, which drives up sale prices for those who are willing to find sites to sell in other (smarter but harder) ways.
I'm guessing that part of this would be the difficulty in getting the average corporate user to accept a radically different application. Even minor, release-to-release changes bother users--imagine what an entirely different interface might do.
I think this brings up a bigger issue surrounding Facebook apps- most of them don't really know their users.

Scrabulous doesn't have the email for their users, and thus has no way of contacting them like a normal web application. If Facebook were forced to change their name to BlueSocialNetwork for some reason and the change was enforced immediately and without warning, they could just email all their users about the change. Scrabulous hasn't collected emails, so they can't do that.

Same for Slide's apps- it's interesting how these companies are operating with their userbase completely outside their control in terms of contact information.
Now Do This, and The Single- Tasking Philosophy
Download Death Note Episodes
“Death Notes” is found by a high school going boy Light Yagami. Death Note actually contain all the information and directions regarding its use and its extraordinary powers. After getting the book, Light discovers that now he has the power to kill people and he decides to change the world by killing the criminals. He starts killing the crooks and tries to build his ideal world.
@your slogan- I laughed out loud when I read it, it's perfect :)
Ask HN: How do you keep motivated?
I suffer from Programmer's Apathy at times. Especially when work is dull.

Does anyone have any tips for getting through it?
Yuil's been taken down? Why?
Something that bugs me about Python is that code like this is distributed on random blogs instead of on some central repository like the CPAN. It's a shame to make people cut-n-paste code into their applications.

Also, I'm conflicted on whether or not I would want to globally change the behavior of a process in a class. setsid, "close STDIN", etc. affect the entire process, not just an instance of the class.

I prefer the Perl approach:

http://search.cpan.org/~ehood/Proc-Daemon-0.03/Daemon.pm

At least it's clear that the entire process is affected.
Cuil Announcement: A quick look back at launch
DjangoCon 2008 -- Anyone else going?
The first batch of tickets for DjangoCon 2008 sold out a few minutes ago. The website was inaccessible for a a good while, as geeks from around the world hammered into it, trying to get tickets of their own. I was hanging out on IRC when someone posted a link to the direct registration at Event Wax, so I was able to snag a pair of tickets for me and my new boss.

Is anyone else attending? Is there anyone that tried to get tickets and couldn't, due to the site being down? If there's enough YCers, should we hold a Hacker News meetup?

The next batch of tickets will be released tomorrow, August 1st, at 6:00pm UTC.
Firefox Changing Behavior of Ctrl+Tab in Latest Nightlies
I'm in good shape. To some people, it's a bit of a mystery how I'm much more physically fit than they are. They know I go to the gym, but, hey, they go to the gym sometimes, too, so what's the deal? Here's the secret:

I work really, really hard.

When I go to the gym, I push myself as far as I can take it mentally and physically that day. Some days it's more than others. But overall, I work much harder in the gym than most people I know.

Treat your exercise time as something to excel it, not a chore to do. It can make a world of difference.
Connect with users.

http://ourdoings.com/ourdoings-startup/2008-07-29
Kinda. It is really similar to mod_wsgi. It can run Ruby applications that implement the Rack interface (there is a Rails/Rack adapter). The Rack interface is just the Ruby port of WSGI, so it can also run any WSGI application (e.g. Django).
Afrika?
Perhaps my sarcasm was not communicated properly. In any case, I'll pass on this one.
Why free software and Apple's iPhone don't mix
They should have been linking users to Wordscraper at the top of Scrabulous. Or on the taken-down page for Scrabulous.
Boards.ie SIOC Data Competition launches
A competition to do something interesting with the SIOC data set containing 10 years of history from a large Irish online community site boards.ie.

Three prizes with the combined amount = 7000 USD.
The DC metro area has one simple advantage over the surrounding areas: money. There's a very strong correlation between lower and lower-middle income people and obesity. There are too many complex relationships involved to even begin to draw conclusions.
Don't do dull work. Seriously. It will kill you. If your work doesn't matter to you, then you will either have to find out why it matters, or find something better to do that does matter.

I like to sit down with users and talk with them. Pour a cup of coffee and talk. You'll get the coolest stories and usually, when the 3rd cup is empty, you know exactly what needs fixing. You may program computers, but the point is to shape that friggin' turing machine equivalent so it helps people.
I posted this more for the set of stats they divulge than for the "more women than men" tidbit. I'd been trying to get something long these lines for a while. I never meant to turn it in to a "(wo)men are better/worse than (wo)men", although I do believe that a healthy discussion on gender issues (specially in a male dominated area) can be very productive.
Take a break.

When I'm feeling worn out there's nothing like a day off to reinvigorate me and get my creative juices flowing again.
With something like this, I feel like if it has hit the papers, it's too late.

Better luck next time.
LG Releases Blu-ray Player with Netflix Streaming
but I mean hackers can do a better job than that.
I'm really cynical about the numbers SEO people and internet entrepreneurs give to reporters.

There are a few missing pieces as well. Sure the dude bought a website, but how's the rest of the business being run? It's not just a "website", it's a whole store. They're going to have inventory to manage, suppliers to deal with, etc, etc.

It's possible they solved the inventory problem by letting their suppliers drop ship things, but there's still quite a bit of effort required for something like that.
10 Skills You Need to Succeed at almost Anything.
Does anyone have experience with DSL's for non-developer customers?

I did that on one project. It didn't work. The response we got was "But I'm not a programmer." We replied, "But you don't understand! This is not a general-purpose programming language, it's a high-level domain-specific scripting language!" The response we got was, "But I'm not a programmer." I learned a lot from that experience.
W.
Leaked trailer for Oliver Stone's upcoming film "W." chronicling the life of George W Bush. Supposedly it will be released 10 days before the election this November.
Since when do people have a choice? Instead of "don't do dull work" (which might translate to "don't do what you are asked to do"), I say you do the stuff you hate as fast as possible. Engage it with zeal, and get it the heck over with as soon as possible.

If you avoid doing stuff you hate, the cloud of having to do it lingers over you; you are not really avoiding it, you are prolonging it. Just get it over with and move on. You'll deliver it on time (or earlier), and will have gotten past the hurdle.
Nope, that's it. Erlang is designed for cluster environments, and the cookie method is lightweight and good enough for that sort of environment.

If you want better security, unfortunately you have to roll it yourself. You could write a message router that tunnels Erlang messages over TCP, and apply some sort of authentication process to that.

Erlang applications that are exposed to the Internet do not allow Erlang connections from the outside, but rather implement a custom socket protocol and only use Erlang distribution internally.

I hear that they're planning on adding better security in future versions, but I don't know any details about that.
The last is different in that it returns a list, not a tuple. This makes a difference if you want to change the object.

>>> tuple = x, y = 1, 2
>>> type(tuple)
<type 'tuple'>
>>> tuple
(1, 2)
>>> tuple[0] = 1
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in ?
TypeError: object doesn't support item assignment
>>> lst = x, y = [1, 2]
>>> type(lst)
<type 'list'>
>>> lst
[1, 2]
>>> lst[0] = 3
>>> lst
[3, 2]
PD: real-time graphical programming environment for audio, video, and graphical processing
Ask HN: Web 2.0 Expo - worth it?
Info about September's Web 2.0 Expo in New York can be found here: http://en.oreilly.com/webexny2008/public/content/home

I'm impressed by the list of speakers and the topics they'll be discussing, but the price seems steep. For those of you who have been to these expos in the past, what was your impression? Was it money well spent?
Pretty interesting post. I'm working on something cool that attempts to solve problems 1 and 2, plus what I think is currently the biggest problem with email (and every other form of messaging): incredibly lousy interaction design. I'll launch it here in a few days; I'm eager to get feedback and maybe some technical help from the community.
Can we use it in Europe too?
The article is just flat out wrong.

What makes oil special is that it cannot be produced. It is finite. Bandwidth can be produced. While we might be dominated by a few companies, there is nothing stopping you from raising money and building out your own fiber. Yes, it's a massive undertaking to build a fiber network, but it can be done.

With oil, we can't make more of it as demand increases. We can lay more fiber. Likewise, a country without oil can't turn itself into a country with oil while a company without fiber can make itself into a company with fiber.

While we don't have a plethora of people owning fiber, if the price ever starts going up like oil, more producers will enter and the prices will stay in check. That isn't the case with oil.
The inventor studied in The Netherlands, the concept should work everywhere! I wonder if they are legal in Europe though...