skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
YC banner exchange
We're currently working on a simple ad tracking system for in-house ad sales at POPrl. However, before we roll out the new ad system i wanted to give an opportunity for two startups to grab ad spots while we work out the kinks. The ads will run for at least one month and should generate decent leads. The requirements are as follows

# Ad size has to be 125 by 125 pixels
# Simple ads with limited to no animation
# The company and/or logo should be used
# Has to link back to your company product page

If you can manage those criteria, shoot me an e-mail with the banner and the link back address. I'll take the top two submission. You can find out more about POPrl at http://poprl.com

-Sam
This graph: http://www.roughlydrafted.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/08/200... weirds me out how it suddenly overlaps in the last segment.
Come up with a loose guideline. If your spec is more than a page, and rigidly specifies stuff, you've over specified. The idea is to get an idea of how the system fits together and what the components are needed for putting it together, not to detail exactly how each part behaves.

Then, as you implement, fill in the blanks in your initial spec. Make sure that if it's implemented, it's fully documented.
I think you underestimate the power of James T. Kirk in a fursuit.
Have Indian investigators been duped into using highly suspect brain-mapping technology?
I was intrigued by this snippet in a article about the recent bomb blasts in India.
"Haywood, who underwent lie detector and brain mapping tests, fled from..."
Article: http://www.rediff.com/news/2008/aug/18ahd3.htm

Brain mapping? I'd never heard of fMRI or PET scans being approved for forensics, so digging further I was rather shocked to see that they have been in use in India for a while.
Article: http://www.rediff.com/news/2006/jul/19george.htm

Brain mapping or brain finger-printing is being peddled by http://brainwavescience.com/ (Their website's definitely worth browsing)

A search on scholar.google.com turned up this review article, which describes most of the grandiose claims made about the technology as "florid" and highly exaggerated.
PDF: http://cns.bu.edu/~gsc/Articles/Brain_FingerPrinting.pdf

Having failed to get the technology employed in the US, this company seems to be targeting other countries. Good strategy, even if ethically suspect and porous!
I disagree, this is a technical problem. Atwood closed the dialog box and it still popped up a realistic UI.

The people reading this site might know there's something up but your average user won't. Windows and the programs that run on it pop up legitimate warnings all the time to regular users: "Please install this patch...", "There's an update to your program...", "You have unused icons...", etc.

People now expect messages like this. It is simply unrealistic to expect your average user to be not fooled when a well-written fake pops up on the screen.
The links seem to show up as text above:

I was intrigued by this snippet in a article about the recent bomb blasts in India. "Haywood, who underwent lie detector and brain mapping tests, fled from..." Article: http://www.rediff.com/news/2008/aug/18ahd3.htm

Brain mapping? I'd never heard of fMRI or PET scans being approved for forensics, so digging further I was rather shocked to see that they have been in use in India for a while. Article: http://www.rediff.com/news/2006/jul/19george.htm

Brain mapping or brain finger-printing is being peddled by http://brainwavescience.com/ (Their website's definitely worth browsing)

A search on scholar.google.com turned up this review article, which describes most of the grandiose claims made about the technology as "florid" and highly exaggerated. PDF: http://cns.bu.edu/~gsc/Articles/Brain_FingerPrinting.pdf

Having failed to get the technology employed in the US, this company seems to be targeting other countries. Good strategy, even if ethically suspect and porous!
Whatever you want to call it -- I use the word idea -- a song is certainly not a tangible thing. (If you can hand me a song, I'll recant. No, not that, that's sheet music, not the song itself. No, not that CD, that's a copy of the recording of the song.)

The constitution says -- I'm paraphrasing -- that 1) congress can't make laws that limit the freedom of expression (including my ability to use someone else's work to express myself), and 2) that the exception to that is for artists, who are granted a monopoly on their own work for a limited time, to encourage them to make more art.

There is NO provision for "owning" a song. And the 1st amendment trumps any law that says you can.

BTW I think you ought to look up what the straw-man argument, because I don't think it means what you think it does.
NetBus
Quake
OpenGL
Multiple Monitors
Yes. Food isn't only calories. If it was, we'd be able to live off of nothing but sugar water.

Food brings in not only calories, but various other nutrients that your body needs to keep itself in good condition. It can also bring in things that the body works hard to get rid of, and still do damage while they're being removed.
From a non-dev perspective I'm not sure they would see much of a difference in complexity between SVN and GIT.

It might be helpful if you could specify if the "non devs" are also "non contributors".
... perhaps we all do?
Where there is money and people with power corruption is very likely.

What fascinates me, about America specifically, is how ingrained the representative democracy concept is. Direct democracy is this wild and crazy thing that absolutely and directly = Hitler.

There could be an interesting argument why Swiss style direct democracy would not work for a huge country like the US. But what about local government? What about little towns?

It's fascinating that Americans from a very young age learn that the head of local government is the mayor. What would happen if a little town in nowhere decided to mimic Switzerland in governance and eliminates the middle men? Doom?
Although Django is my preferred Framework of choice, the first moment I heard about all those MVC Frameworks and what they do was definately a "HOLY SHIT"-moment.
Hey Will,

Whatever happened with the startup you were working on?
Can we have the paper instead of the press release? I guess it wouldn't get voted up, though.
If the user is already interacting with onlinebanking.bankofamerica.com and the certificate changes, that's a serious error.

If the browser has a longer-stored certificate for onlinebanking.bankofamerica.com (say because they've bookmarked it), and the level of the certificate changes, that's an error.

If the browser has no idea about onlinebanking.bankofamerica.com (perhaps the user typed it in, probably without the https prefix), then the user must verify the security properties of the site. This is what a user must do now, as there may be no redirect to https, or redirect to an arbitrary https. If the site sends a certificate signed by an unknown CA, the user would not see a lock icon, blue background, green company name, etc.
I've got to give the guy respect for giving references with his arguments but I don't think his sources are sufficient to suggest that marathon running is bad for you.

It's a shame he loses much of that respect as we near reason #1 and they get increasingly 'silly'.

Let's take #2: "At least four particiants of the Boston Marathon have died of brain cancer in the past 10 years. Purely anecdotal, but consistent with the elevated S100beta counts and TKN-alpha measures. Perhaps also connected to the microthrombi of the endothelium found in marathoners."

I'm researching this with google but,
"In the United States, the annual incidence of brain cancer generally is 15-20 cases per 100,000 people." http://www.oncologychannel.com/braincancer/index.shtml
"In 2007 more than 20000 runners completed the race." http://www.bostonmarathon.org/

I can't quickly find numbers for the preceding years, nor how many each year had run it previously, so lets assume the numbers increased linearly over the preceding 10 years to give a total number of runners as 100,000. That, rather conveniently, suggests 15 - 20 incidents of brain cancer should result. Shock result - marathon running prevents brain cancer!

#1 is the first runner of the marathon, Phidippides, died. Hopefully I don't need to explain why this one is silly.

Some of his other points would be worth further study but I can't find a single point without weaknesses.
Wow. Testing with a "Dark Launch." Basically, they used cycles from every user machine with an open Facebook page to do their load testing by distributing a version of their app with no UI and a test script. This is very powerful and kind of scary.
Tomorrow is Felicia Day! Celebrate!

Srsly, tho-- She's the female star from Dr. Horrible and (more obscurely) The Guild (a YouTube-only series about a WoW guild). http://feliciaday.com/
I'm having a "holy shit" moment right now at the thought that there are WoW TV shows. Not sure it's the good kind though.
I understand your point about risk. My point is that most mobile developers will accept that risk in exchange for the marketing, distribution, and payment processing platform that the iPhone App Store provides. Until the other platforms you mention provide similar turnkey solutions, "looking elsewhere" is, to Apple, an idle threat.
This is why we should have topic limitations. Yeah, people will post stuff like this anyway, and I don't think we should punish them.

But we also shouldn't make it officially legitimate which will encourage a higher volume of such posts.

Edit: Umm, you guys like wordy articles about fad diets with bad signal/noise ratio?
Fruit is not bad for you but If you combine it with other sugary food it is no good for you

To be super healthy eat lean protein sources in every meal, a ton of vegetables, some fruit, and some good fats like fish oil and olive oil.
How did they do this? I cant find any such reference here, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ansari_X_Prize
VMware snapshots. Before multiple snapshots, I didn't get the value of VMware.

AWS S3

AWS EC2

Yahoo Music subscription service, back when it 1) existed and 2) ran on an OS I had (W2k).

Moose

xmavisx on wretch.cc
1 in 3 business PCs drop Vista for Windows XP
From $200 to $250. Yawn.
Yeah. Functional programming. I "understood" it for a good while before, rather suddenly, something clicked and I realized what the big deal was all about.
Blackberry 8830 Red Verizon CDMA
BlackBerry 8830 World Edition gives you phone, email, organizer, web browsing and instant messaging. And then it goes a step further, providing GPS for enhanced access to location based applications and services, including the pre-loaded BlackBerry.
makes sense. Unless you are at TC50 stay out of the press until its over.
Hank Williams (http://whydoeseverythingsuck.com ) mentions KloudShare every now and then.
Hacking away day and night.
I've just noticed I'm comparing cases with deaths. Clearly some people will survive brain cancer.

The death rate would appear to be 5.6 per 100,000 according to this source neuro-oncology.dukejournals.org/cgi/reprint/6/3/179.pdf

It is worth noting that this is the annual rate suggesting that 5 runners of the Boston marathon should have died from brain cancer in the last year alone.
Ask YC: What do you do when a small project keeps getting larger?
I am working on what started as a simple web scheduling program. Since its inception, the client has added different types of customers, different types of jobs, job tracking, schedule editing, etc... Basically, because this system has expanded beyond everything it was originally supposed to do, the code has gotten extremely messy and hard to maintain. This is all my fault of course, but I am not the super programmer many of you experts are here. I don't know what to do at this point, small changes are taking forever and some of the stuff they want done seem to be almost impossible now. Any help is extremely appreciated. Help me News.YC, you're my only hope.
sorry about that!
http://charlotte.ucsd.edu/users/savage/papers/Sigcomm08.pdf
Guy Kawasaki's rule# 2: Make Mantra [2005 speech]
The GPU is higher power but much higher performance and thus more power-efficient.
Anyone going to the LA event?
I don't think so ;-).
Ask YC: Offbeat startups
What are the offbeat startups you people like? My favorite, http://www.babajob.com/, It use social network, to use as a trust network to find domestic help. Nothing particularly technology interesting, but uses technology to target an offbeat market.
Michael Phelps also swims 120 miles a week. He eats 10,000+ calories a day because that's how much energy he needs to maintain weight and muscle mass.
Threaded XMLHttpRequest In Shoes Ruby toolkit
The Long Wow
I like mindmaps to sketch my ideas. Its stops me from making the document formal, and keeps the ideas freely flowing.
ThurayaLocate - Locate Thuraya users in Google Maps or Virtual Earth
Bait & Switch.
As an American, I think the biggest reason that the majority of Americans embrace (worship) representative democracy is because it frees them from feelings of responsibility in the outcome of the government, and means that much less effort they must contribute back to society. Why learn about all the issues and directly vote for what I want, when I could more easily just elect someone else to do all that hard stuff for me so I can spend more time on the sofa watching the drama of Hollywood retards unfold on high definition TV?

As an added benefit, when my elected representatives then vote the "wrong" way, I certainly can't blame myself, because A) I'm only one of thousands, or millions, of votes, B) I voted for the other guy, or C) I didn't vote at all / that's why I don't ever vote. It's the exact same reason that companies pay barrels of money for IT support contracts; it's less work, and when something goes wrong, the blame always shifts to someone else.

Solution: Nuke it from orbit; it's the only way to be sure...
That post is from 2005. Hopefully, I don't ramble about myself anymore!
I guess a line needs to be drawn.

Have you been paid for a general set of deliverables and only now are the specific requirements coming out?

If you haven't been paid yet, will they not pay until they're "satisfied"?

Is the site even online yet?

That line being drawn is between the original contract and the hourly rate which you'll charge for further enhancements.

(I don't know if you're doing this on contract, as a favor for a small set amount, or for free.)

If maintaining the codebase is becoming unbearable, you probably can't throw away the whole thing and start over.

Maybe you could start the reorganizing effort with the enhancements and work in changes to your yucky, "legacy" code as time permits.

Warning: Any changes you make to simply allow easier maintenance of your code in the future can possibly not be seen by the customer as requirements or time that they'll pay for.
Perl Foundation statement on Artistic License 1.0 court decision
I love novels - except I wasn't reading a novel.

At least I thought I wasn't - this was billed as "The diet that really works". And that's what I was here to read, and then I didn't.

You want to write "personal insights about the man who made the diet that really works" no problem. I might even like to read it - but that's not what I was expecting.

You say you are writing about a diet, then do so, or change the title.
Do train like a madman, but not for more than an hour at a time. There are diminishing returns and, sometimes, losses. Weight training is definitely superior to cardio, but you need both.

If you are specifically trying to lose weight, limiting calories is key, but you must eat plenty before and after these madman workouts and then don't eat as much on non-workout days. Just be sure to eat healthy stuff with a good ratio of macro nutrients. If you don't, the training will be more difficult and less effective.

Luckily, your body should be pretty good at telling you when it's hungry. Don't fight it (much). Diet and exercise info is all over the map, but the basics I have mentioned here are more or less undisputed.
A San Francisco restaurant health-map (with code)
Mosaic. Since the first day I saw it, I haven't gone as much as a week without writing a computer program.
Its actually very well done and pretty funny if you are into WoW. I'm not sure if that makes the concept of a WoW TV show more or less scary for you :P
Even if that was true, it would still mean that a comparison to OS X does not really make sense.
* Blogs: The fact that anyone could and would keep a journal online for the world to see was so exhibitionist that I could barely comprehend it.
* Rails: Making web development so easy it hurts.
* Valve Software's 'Steam': Digital distribution done right.
* Microsoft Photosynth: Pure coolness. This is what the future should be like.
Internet Traffic: Growing or Slowing?
Maybe this article can help:
http://nedbatchelder.com/text/deleting-code.html

Also, do you have a clear data model of your application? If you have a clear data model of your application, with the right foreign keys among tables, then almost everything the application does is INSERT, UPDATE or DELETE. When you can have the data model in your mind, then you can understand what the application should do and start deleting code.

Edit: Is it the problem that the client keeps extending the requisites? Is it clear in the contract what was going to be in the application and what not?
Let's check back in on Phelps in 20 years. If he's lucky, his current lifestyle won't have lasting effects.
It's available from the regular version of the page too--just scroll to the bottom like you do on the cache:

http://www.experts-exchange.com/OS/Microsoft_Operating_Syste...
Are they expanding the requirements and still expecting to only pay for the original, or is this a case of they were happy to pay, you just didn't expect it and now the programming is a mess, and now when they expect to pay for a little change its actually a huge change for you to make?
Top Ten Reasons not to Run Marathons
You also need to consider the overall health effects of all the chemical additives in your food. Why dump those things into your body for the fleeting pleasure of succumbing to your lower brain.
Body Building for Skinny Guys
I've actually read one book about "sugar addiction" where one candidate allegedly got their sugar fix from eating lots of fruit. Not sure how credible the book is, though, but I thought it was interesting.

It did not say that fruits in general are bad.
This guy should have just read In Defense of Food. Not much that he says here hasn't been known for quite some time. And it's very interesting to learn exact where our diet went wrong.
There was a thread on reddit just a couple of days ago about maintenance. Many useful ideas to be found there:

http://www.reddit.com/comments/6wn6j/maintenance_work_blows_...

The short answer is that it sounds like it's time for you to begin taking code quality seriously (better to have done so from the start, but we all fail at that most of the time). Whatever your language of choice is, find the resources that cover good coding practices, and begin making use of them. I work in Perl, and the definitive work is Perl Best Practices (and perlstyle covers a few bits and pieces)...there may not be such a definitive work in your preferred language, but I'm sure there's something. JavaScript has Crockford's new book which, based on reviews, is excellent--I trust that's true, as his lectures and his website are truly wonderful resources.

If you don't have tests, start writing them, and including test development costs in your estimates. If you don't have good code documentation, for yourself and future maintainers, start writing it, and including the cost of writing it in your estimates. It doesn't take that much longer to write a test while you're working on a piece of code--it's fresh in your mind, so you know exactly what you need to test (or vice versa...some folks write the tests and then write the code...I flip back and forth based on whether I know how the code is going to work yet or not).
I think this is largely a problem of jargon. "Object request broker" may have a useful meaning to you, but I've only got a very vague idea of what it might be. (I could look it up, but what I've learned over the last two days is that it's much easier to say that it's a dumb idea, its proponents treat it as dogma, and besides everybody was already using its useful ideas anyhow.)

I get Remote Procedure Call, but I don't see how "a synchronous call and response" comes from the name; stripped of its nuances, all the name means is "doing something somewhere else".

Similarly, "transferring a representation of a resource's state" is much more precise than "sending some "stuff" from one place to another", but only if you're familiar with what I mean by "transfer" and "a resource's state".

> The problem is that a lot of REST proponents actually think that REST invented a lot of stuff

A lot of people think a lot of stupid things. Why is that notable?
Honestly, I didn't know there was any Y Combinator hate... I suspect that particular attitude might be local to the start-up center of the US where Y Combinator is direct competition for the other residents.

I'd like to say that I have learned a LOT from reading the contents of this site. I'd imagine any YC hatred is a sign that YC is actually do it's job well!
In my work, an IDE is beneficial in two main cases. First of all, for someone new to a language or library, auto-complete and instant doc lookup help you figure out what's available to call and what the various methods and classes do. That's also useful if you only use a particular library occasionally and just don't remember how it works. Secondly, refactoring and find usages is useful if you're working on medium-to-large projects with a large number of people; on a 500k+ codebase there are probably enough methods named "add" that just doing a text search is going to be pretty painful.

The average Ruby project is probably a lot smaller than the average Java project because it's far more concise and powerful, which is a good thing and one of the huge advantages of the language. For smaller projects, smaller teams, and expert users, the weight of managing a project in an IDE could outweigh the benefits, so I can see how plenty of people would ignore an IDE in those situations even if it were the best tool in the world, simply because it might get in the way more than it would help.

I think that there are other situations, primarily for working on larger projects but also for people new to the language or who use it less frequently, where the benefits of a really good IDE would still help out Ruby.

But I can see how there are plenty of development scenarios where even the best IDE would just get in the way, and my judgment is probably just clouded by the fact that my current working scenarios (a few million lines of Java code, 80+ developers, working infrequently enough in Ruby that I forget everything in between) are greatly aided by an IDE. So personally my work style is now tailored to using an IDE, which slows me down when I have to shift out of that mode, and I'd use a great Ruby IDE instead of Emacs if one were available. But I'll accept that other people whose work style isn't tailored to using an IDE wouldn't find it as useful.
Quick summary:

"The real technical innovation of their work, said another of the authors, Geoffrey M. Voelker, 'is in how information about changes in the network is propagated. The XL routing algorithm propagates only some updates, reducing the number of updates sent through the network.'"
101 of the Most Classic Computer Ads
Representative sample or not, this is a real phenomenon. A lot of Vista's so-called sales are not really sales at all. Just last fall, I bought an Everex laptop that came with Vista and never even booted into the OS, immediately eschewing it in favor of Gentoo.
Not for me. This 'trick' stopped working for me about a month ago, so now I have to use the cache links.
Bright flash of light outside and a Nuclear Mushroom blowing up just behind the horizon.