skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm going to put a premature stop to this by beating everyone to the punchline.

Libertarians: "It's always, everywhere, every time the government's fault. If the government would just get out of the way, everything would be roses and flowers in Libertopia".

Left-wingers: "You're on crack. This whole thing happened because we need more government regulation. If we could just get good regulations and put the people in power over greedy multi-national globalized corporate ... (and so on) ... we would be much better off!".

Real-worlders: "Libertopia is about as likely to work as Marxistan, the system we have is pretty good, but will always need some tweaking. There is plenty of scope for debate, on a case by case basis, looking at the actual facts and data for each case. Sometimes we should tack away from regulations, in other cases some government intervention might work to improve markets. In this case, Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac were probably not that good an idea to begin with. Oh, and by the way, these sorts of debates probably don't belong on Hacker News;-)"

Oh, and by the way, "wholesale indictment of American capitalism" is just handwaving. "American capitalism" is an awfully broad range of things, from Joe's Corner Sandwich Shop to Goldman Sachs to, well, Y Combinator.
You considered hiring someone to work 9-5 on your companies pet project as a way to break him out of his his dispirited 9-5 coder profile?
This got deleted when I submitted it, but I think it's a good read anyway:

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/7/31/64417/6293/543/55984...
Absolutely correct - a two day sample has no statistical significance whatsoever. All it can show at this stage is that some folks are running Chrome - wee that is hardly a surprise given the level of interest from software development professionals.
Oh, we'd have found something interesting and useful for him to do a couple of times, then we'd have expected him to identify such things for himself and just get on with it. Him 20 years ago would have loved it and contributed a lot - him now would have to either get it back, or sink without a trace.
The 121 seconds of my time would have been better spent showing me it in action instead of trying to instill that there's only one M in scrumy.com. I know that now, but I don't need to know it since I'm not planning on spending more time investigating it. I think that's a shame for the both of us.
I use slicehost from the UK and performance is good.
Wow.

That's the longest response I've ever elicited in any formum/email/conversation/etc ever.

As I mentioned, I don't have a problem with people who like Macs, if it works for you, great. I was only replying to the "extraordinary quailty" statement with my own admittedly anecdotal evidence.

And yes, probably what I am seeing is people who feel the same as you where the fit and finish of OSX exceeds their expectations and they are willing to pay more and/or be more forgiving about hardware failures if they happen. That's their choice, but it's not mine.
Yep. It's called the "make money from programming" contest. The person who makes the most money wins. Unfortunately, I think Bill already won. That certainly doesn't mean I won't quit trying.
Endangered Animal Stories
You actually only have to put in "yahoo.com" to log in with Yahoo's OpenID, not your whole identity url. Of course it's not perfect but his article makes it sound worse than it actually is.
If by "upgrade" you mean switching to Firefox, Safari, Opera and Chrome then I am in.

I could care less for a company that has shown no respect for web developers and internet users at all.
Haven't you seen the Dark Knight?
A bailout has been rumored for quite some time. There have been a couple instances in the past few months where news outlets have reported that a weekend deal is imminent, but nothing ever came. The mortgage basis (i.e. the difference in yield between mortgage-backed bonds guaranteed by Fannie/Freddie and Treasury notes) has compressed quite a bit in recent weeks, indicating a lower expectation of risk because market participants have been expecting a deal. But yesterday when the news hit, mortgages didn't really do much... we sold off a couple ticks and the basis tightened by 2 basis points or so, but that was it.

In short, the bond market won't treat this as news until some concrete announcement comes out -- it's already been priced in. It's only the common equity holders who are reacting, since any deal will likely wipe them out.
3D browser Plugin - Blender web plugin. What value would such and app add to the internet?
Well it was already quite successful the first time they did the "Give one Get one". No reason to believe it wouldn't be the second time around.
> I'm not sure why but people who can read music and play any instrument well tend to make great programmers.

For what it's worth I came to exactly opposite conclusion, which probably means that this 'predictor' is a bogus one.
Finding The Right Badminton Shoes
Badminton is one of the fastest games and it requires lot stamina to play this game and also we need the right racket and badminton gear to ensure success in the game. One of the important badminton accessories is badminton shoes. Having the right badminton shoes is as important as having right badminton racket because footwork is very important for badminton and one needs to be swift in their movement within the court so the badminton shoes that is used by the player should enable him or her to move easily, quickly and safely during the entire course of the game.
It's also resizing 1/3 of the images that the Cappuccino one is.
I'm not sure who would be embarrassed if our data did turn out to be that parallel :).

IMVU has a pretty typical data profile for a social network + IM site. We worried all the time that we would have to build a really fancy distributed transaction engine. We started by just doing all of those transactions on the centralized master database. Since we were incrementally moving load off the master as-needed, we just did those tables last.

Turns out, that approach lasted more than three years, much longer than we ever anticipated given the rapid growth we experienced over that period. Of course, we did eventually have to tackle it, which we did by building a "durable message-passing" system.

As for terminology, you're completely right. We started using this term a few years ago, so it wasn't quite as overloaded as it is today. I am sometimes surprised how much more time and energy seems to be given over to thinking about the hardware, as opposed to the architectural, aspects of scaling.
It's well written and easy to understand, and I like the format of the code samples.

However, the topic bugs me slightly - "Why XXX is problematic" is a completely milked out topic, just like "Why XXX is better than YYY", "XXX is Awesome", etc. Although your writing isn't bad, I prefer to read about new ideas, not criticisms of already-existing products (although criticisms well deserved in some cases).

Don't take this too personally, of course - writing about new things is much harder, and even writing about things which may have not been summarized as concisely or not been put in your words is good practice.
I am very happy with http://hosteurope.de .. excellent service, good hardware, barely downtime. They have VPS instances and also dedicated servers for prices you can only dream of in the US.
That's awesome! Great job guys!
So how many week-long interviews are you planning to attend?

I don't doubt that this would work in a perfect world, but it's going to be difficult finding candidates willing to go through with it. Right off the bat you're going to have a severely limited pool of talent to choose from. It's also important to think about what kind of candidates would be up for this. They obviously wouldn't already have jobs and that could be for a variety of reasons - good or bad. These candidates would likely have to put off other interviews for a week, assuming they have other leads. Would you pay candidates during this interview process? That's going to have an effect on the types of people you can bring in for consideration. My guess is that in the end you're going to have just as many difficulties finding a suitable candidate.
We're just discussing over in this thread:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=296656

I have had really good experience with a very simple centralized lookup facility. It's very easy to prevent that from becoming a CPOF, either using replication or, if you insist, some form of hash-based partitioning of the directory itself.

I'm a fan of doing the partitioning at the app-level, and doing it horizontally rather than vertically.

The loss of joins is an issue, but in some cases you can vertically partition the parts of the app that need those joins. For the others, I have had good luck using a transactional message-passing system, where one shard can reliably send a message to another shard.
This almost makes me want to hire this guy to clean my car.
Java Sound & Music Software for Linux, Part 1
Actually, I'm going to take you up on that offer. A beer sounds really good right about now.
with Chrome compiling javascript code, maybe it would be easier to write a js library as the 3d plugin?
I'm sorry, I don't get it. What's a story and what is scrum?
In the neuroanatomy scientific community (and in the medical in general), we CAN'T WAIT to have a proper interactive blender-like 3D viewer in-the-browser that just works. All VRML viewers turned out to be horrible, or just incompatible with Blender.
Its probably locked-down enterprise computers. The old company I worked at delayed the deployment of IE7 for an entire year because of one annoying application: Documentum E-Room.
"You'll also notice that Microsoft recently has been putting on some very compelling web content that is only available if you use Windows and IE."

Does anyone know what this 'compelling web content' is?

"Google's greatest fear - that Microsoft will turn off ads in IE."

Google's ads are discreet text links, not blinking banners - does anyone want to turn them off? As the commenters point out, Firefox already has adblock.
I agree. Seeing how a programmer tackles a large problem is one of the best ways to gauge his skills/train of thought
I was half expecting to see a cartoon emo guy before I clicked the link.
Paul Tough: 24/7 School Reform
I strongly, strongly dislike this type of article.

With the effort that you need to expend to understand this guff, you could be up and writing concurrent functional programs in Scheme, or Clojure, or Scala. There are plenty of great tutorials out there.

Agreed, if you are stuck in some dreary code-mine (bad lighting, cubes, people with MBAs), these design patterns are a balanced part of the means of communication with architecture astronauts, but if you have access to more expressive languages, then most of these things are just 'how you do it'.
Yes. I'm reading your slides now. Very interesting set of technologies you have there. How do you integrate the usage of multiple languages? Do you use Thrift?

Instead of a centralized lookup facility, have your team tried a decentralized approach instead where each DB server (node) contains a portion of the lookup directory?
What about having something faster than JavaScript, say, Python running in a similar plugin instead?
Something that has a complete modern 3D Engine and a Physics Engine with VRML and fair Blender support.
Since Jim Collins (Built to Last, Good to Great) has come up a few times here, just thought I'd mention that Fannie Mae is one of his "Good to Great" companies.
My wife replaced a HP Amada with a MacBook. The MacBook had some early troubles but has been stable ever since. Two years or so.

The HP lasted about a year before the power cord connector came away from the main board and had to be resoldered. This happened a couple of times before we gave up on the machine. I bet the landfills are full of these things.

The MacBook has worked out vastly cheaper than the HP over the actual ownership experience, even if the upfront cost was a bit more.
remember that the HTML5 canvas 3d context is currently in the works, and from the demos that i played with, looks awesome.
The CIA dude on CNN showed an "about" page (and seemed to be showing it off as some sort of novelty).
Absolutely. It matters more to some people than it does to others.
i hate advert blog posts like this. what value outside of wikipedia does this really provide?
Firefox does have adblock, but:
- only certain % of people use FF
- of those, only certain % of people install Adblock
- of those, only certain % block also text ads

But, if IE (most used browser) would contain "block all ads" dedicated button, that would really bring Google much trouble. So those two things are not comparable. But I still think that M$ will not do that...it's too dangerous for everyone and I don't agree that the fear of this was the primary Google motivator to create this. In this case, I do believe what they proclaim - they want to speed up the browsers development in general, since it's in their interest.
People who block Google ads don't make too much sense to me. I agree with what you said: they're text-based, oftentimes they're relevant, and they don't get in the way at all.
This almost makes me want to start a successful startup so I can afford a Lamborghini.
"It takes so long to file the papers into my filing cabinet... I file them into individual folders for bills, insurance, mortgage, etc."

I can't quite see how this could be such a time-consuming task.
Nah. Nobody cares about Google's privacy problems beyond a slim margin of users. Most people care about what works best, not over what's least harmful to them? Or are people still using Blackle? Or reading GoogleWatch?
+1 on this.

I recently took a job at a startup in Campbell, and the San Jose area is really nice. It's not as expensive at SF, but it's still "bay area".
Y Combinator Dataset Of Posts Version 1.7 To Be Released In 3 Hours
The next version of the Y Combinator Dataset Of Posts will be released after 7PM BST.
Obvious answer: You probably can't identify the good ones without actually testing them.

I worked at an oil services company where I fairly regularly interviewed candidates. I was 180 degrees wrong on every interview I did. The bad ones turned out good, and the good ones turned out bad.

I would not, knowing what I know now, bother with anything else except a chat with some managers, and a some pseudo-code testing of the kinds of problems I'd expect a computer science grad to be able to solve.

This opinion is backed up by a basic training course for some new hires I gave recently, where my ranking basically flipped around from my first impressions, and the guys with actual real ability didn't really float to the top until after about 10 or 12 hours of training / evaluation. However, this could be shortened easily into an interview format.

There's a lot of people who hide their light under a bushel, and a lot of people who talk a good game, but are basically just warm bodies.
These are fairly tired criticisms of python.

For the first example, learn to use the "global" keyword. It makes those things work, and it's clearer what you're doing when others read it.

lambda's are weak because in a language that uses whitespace, you can't easily have a function declared inline be more that one line. You can declare functions anywhere though, so if you need a complicated lambda, just declare a def above it and proceed as usual.

The floats bother me too. I'm not sure why they're so messed up.
Pushing daisies the complete first season
Pushing Daisies is latest creation of Brian Fuller whose previous credits include Wonderfalls and Dead Like Me. His newest show is original, witty, and delightful. While being an incredibly fun show to watch, it is also extremely well done and earned 12 Emmy nominations for its inaugural season
DVD releases include vegas nightmare
Cameron Diaz is a jilted Wall Streeter, Ashton Kutcher’s an out-of-work carpenter, the two getting hitched on a drunken whim in Las Vegas then going to extremes to scheme each other out of the $3-million jackpot they won. The movie comes in a single-disc DVD with the theatrical version or a two-disc DVD and Blu-ray high-definition sets with an extended
Cost of Living - Justifying the Cost of an iPhone
Yep. I lived (alone) in a studio in Potrero Hill, $1050 a month.
I hope I'll be settled by Monday ;)
I've never owned one, but I hear that thinkpads are also reliable, and they're still significantly cheaper than Macs.
Short term rentals seems to be more expensive than long-term ones
Microsoft tries to explain Seinfeld ad
This is a tough nut to crack: Google has opted to bundle Gears directly with Chrome (which is a whole other discussion) but has explicitly removed WebKit's HTML 5-compatible Client-Side Storage API.

According to their FAQ, "the Google Chrome team plans to support the HTML5 database API, as well as the other APIs that WebKit supports, including offline and workers, in a future release". Although I'm not sure how this makes sense, if Resig is to be believed it took effort to remove HTML5 databases from WebKit in the first place.
Despite how hard you try, you can't get this 100% right. This is how I approached hiring:

1. Weed out the truly incompetent. A very simple programming exercise is sufficient. Keep in mind that the goal of the exercise is not to identify a great programmer, but rather to identify those who can't program at all.

2. Set expectations. During the interviewing process, try your best to work out what you would expect from the individual if hired. Would you expect them to churn out a ton of quality code? Do you expect them to be great at determining business needs and writing less code, but code with a high impact? Is this going to be your go to guy for technology X? Do you expect your junior person to learn Y and Z so they can start contributing after N months?

3. Communicate your expectations clearly. Make sure the candidate knows what's expected of him or her. Towards the end of the interview discuss how they feel about those expectations. Ask how they plan on going about meeting them.

4. After hiring: If you get it right great, if not, let the person go sooner than later. You do yourself and the individual a great disservice if you try to turn them into something they are not. Don't try to turn a lump of coal into a diamond. It's a trap. It doesn't work. They will be unhappy and resentful if you try. Nobody likes to be fired (or do the firing) but you have to tell yourself it's best that they get back out there and find the job that they can be happy and successful at.
I'm sure there's empirical evidence somewhere that can either confirm or deny this hypothesis, exactly as stated. But it's so valuable that Google isn't likely to give you a peek at it for free.

Maybe some other market research firm will sell you related information. Or you could buy a few Google ads and see, I guess. Watch out for sample bias.
The Accidental Complexity of Logic
How is VB.NET Doing?
Download Weeds Episodes
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Textmate 2: Search & replace, regex changes, panel or drawer?, ...
If HTML and CSS were supported correctly across all platforms, then they would indeed be great DSLs. But until inconsistencies in their interpretation are corrected, they're a pain in the web developer's neck.
I'm still not sure why people are so fascinated by this. I don't know of any blog articles complaining about the porsche boxster: "but look! it's jussstt like the pontiac solstice!"

It's just the way it is. Of course "the way it is" happens to embody a significant amount of contemporary economic theory.
Goodbye MapReduce, Hello Cascading
Why not have scheduled bookmarks for scheduled web browsing?
It would be sort of like a calendar app, but with bookmarks instead of events.
For something you use every day, and on which you may work, $750 is really not very much at all.

Laptops are all really cheap these days. When they're all cheap, you may as well get the best IMHO.
I agree. It's a weird phenomenon. People just don't question high performance sports cars. They seem to understand why someone would want to pay a lot of money for a porche, but they don't seem to understand why people would want to pay slightly more for a mac :/

A mac isn't even in the same league though. A luxury sports car could be 10x the price of a comparable 'standard' car. Mac's are only slightly more expensive than other some cheapy laptops.

I'll just stick with my Macs though :)

edit: That 'advert' is completely bizarre.
I've heard the office division at Microsoft is likely to drop IE6 support for the next version of SharePoint as well, which would be a big deal here.
I'd rather see X3D get a proper DOM: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=300874
Neat! Would be even neater if free for 1-user.

I did a quick search on Google for "scrum boards" and "virtual scrum boards" and found some similar, but maybe overly complicated and expensive, apps. Also found this http://code.google.com/p/scrumboard/. Anyone try any of these?
could make sense if they found problems with it
Erlang: An introduction to gen_server by creating a banking system
Helicopters Learn Tricks 'Watching' Other Helicopters
I have come to have a term for these announcements of action to take over banks, restructure credit, etc. which always seem to happen on Friday afternoons, timed perfectly to have minimal impact on the news cycle and get the least amount of attention.

"FDIC Fridays" or in this case "Fed Fridays"
Yes, actually I'd concur with the reliability. My TP 600X probably holds the record for being the longest continuously useful portable I've ever owned.
this one too

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=228581
I'm one of the Cappuccino developers. While this is neat, it's not particularly surprising, and it misses "the big picture", not unlike the sort of "MapReduce implemented in 10 lines of Ruby!" posts we see so often.

It actually highlights several of the reasons we set out to do Cappuccino in the first place (some of which might be offensive to web developers):

1. This is minor, but the speed comparison is a little unfair, since the original has 3 times as many photos to scale. Yes, Objective-J method calls have a little bit of overhead, but in profiling a real world application (280 Slides), the message dispatch overhead is not a bottleneck (something like 1%).

2. It's 45 lines of JavaScript... plus several hundred lines of CSS. With Cappuccino you don't have to write CSS, ever. Some may see this as a disadvantage, but we don't. No more fiddling with CSS hacks to get it to look right in all the major browsers, which brings me to my next point.

3. It doesn't work correctly in at least Firefox 2 (OS X) and IE. Yes, this could be fixed, but it's another thing you (theoretically, and usually practically) don't need to worry about when developing in Cappuccino.

4. Cappuccino is designed to scale. The FlickrDemo is a small demo which is just that, a demo. It's definitely on the small side of the types of applications Cappuccino is good for. I'm not bashing jQuery, but I'm honestly curious if anyone can point me to an application written in jQuery approaching the complexity of 280 Slides.