skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'd actually argue the best approach is to develop both sides fully: I agree that an OO data model is the best fit for non-trivial application logic, but I also believe relational databases make the best data stores. The two can coexist just fine, it's just a matter of selecting the proper design patterns and supporting libraries -- which is why I mentioned SQLAlchemy. In its developer's words:

"SQL databases behave less like object collections the more size and performance start to matter; object collections behave less like tables and rows the more abstraction starts to matter."

This false dichotomy that's always presented is distracting, and leads to people naively taking religious positions about what should in fact be a non-issue.
There's a black widow at the door, a rattlesnake in the window, and a scorpion on the phone. Do you: (A) None of the below...
First: Not all jews would agree with those answers as being OK.

Second: you need to understand that the main thing going on here is that non jews (who do not need to keep shabbos) are pressing the buttons, etc.

And normally that would be enough - no need for batteries and resistors.

But it's in israel, and in israel non-observant jews run the power plants, so what happens is that by going in the elevator the jew is causing another jew (in the power plant) to violate the shabbos, and that's a huge problem. (I suppose it's actually the non-jew who is causing it. That's not a problem for the non-jew, but a jew should not use an elevator knowing it's going to cause someone to violate the shabbos.)

That's why they added all the batteries and stuff, and that's also why it's not simply a joke. The "loophole" if you will is the non-jew pressing the buttons, and that's fine. Non-jews are not required to keep shabbos, and you'd be all set. But the jew must not cause another jew to violate the shabbos, hence disconnecting from the grid.

You might ask: what about lights and stuff that are left on? And indeed there are those who run on batteries all shabbos. But the majority say that the jew is not doing any action by leaving the light on, and it's only actions that are a problem. For example: everyone agrees that it's ok to leave a fire running on shabbos, as long as you don't make it larger or smaller, same with the lights.
Are We Harming Our Children by Banning "Risky" Play?
Ask HN: Web app feedback (intelligent chatting system)
Mixins are a horrifyingly frightening hack. Traits / roles are the right way to do things, and guess what... Perl has them.
Neither solution will help if they want to install surveillance software.
The only reason why you find the Perl hard to read is because you don't know Perl. I find Spanish hard to read. Why? Because I don't know the language. That doesn't mean that there's anything wrong with Spanish as a language, though, it just means I don't know it.
That seems like a truly bizarre "hoarding" mentality. What about a co-founder? What about an employee? No stock options for anyone?

I think a better attitude would be: "I will give up equity only if it raises the likelihood and magnitude of success".

Some of your comments after your post see to indicate that you feel that it's easy to get funded (it's not) and that you have to give up "creative control" of your business when you take funding (you don't). Getting the right investors gives you a HUGE advantage (if growth/exits figure into your plans-- maybe they don't).
you have a much better chance of having your laptop stolen than this happening to you.

Backup your stuff always
It'll be interesting to see who ends up on the show. Will DHH be there?
I like this question because of you word it slightly differently, you get an entirely different answer.

If you remove the condition that one of the balls is heavier and just say that one of the balls weighs differently, instead of slightly more, you can no longer solve it in 2 weightings.

In an interview, you can follow up the listed question with this one to see the response.
Well it's a matter of sales - you have to sell yourself and if that's what they are looking for, you might as well do it.

The same way you impress your clients you have to impress the people interviewing you.

Also, these are fun to do and give your brain a slight workout.
Hey guys! I've been building this app in my spare time. It's based on a simple idea I had over a year ago - somehow after all this time there still has not been a great web 2.0 chatting site to come into existence, so I've been steadily working at it whenever I've had the chance.

You can read my whole spiel at http://www.circleofconversation.com/#tab=theory, but basically the idea behind the app is that people like talking to strangers online(like we're doing right now) as long as there is a sufficiently precise topical specifier(like we have here). The app attempts to accomplish this by letting users give their chat rooms tags which fade out over time and then disappear if they aren't refreshed/spoken aloud. They're constantly replaced by now-accurate tags, so ideally every conversation has a very precise set of topical specifiers at all times, making them worth joining.

I'd love to get some feedback on the general concept as well as execution specifics, though the UI is rough and the feature set is basic. Thanks, HN.

P.S. I'm intentionally posting this in the evening to try to avoid any significant traffic, and to give myself time to hot-fox any glaring bugs, since I do client work during the day. I bet this sounds familiar to at least half of HN's readers.
I don't necessarily want to own 100% of my own company, but I want to own at least 51%. I think that Y-Combinator leads to individual ownership that is far less than 51%. Even the founders together will have less than 51%. Am I wrong?
1. The article talks about CPAN and says "If you are like me, most programming you do is about gluing things together with libraries."

2. scott_s references the latter, without referencing the rest of the article or CPAN.

3. KevinMS references scott_s' answer.

4. I reference scott_s' "Then I am not like you." and KevinMS's answer.

5. You somehow think I'm attacking CPAN and go berserk.

You might want to review "locality", "dependencies", "modularity" and other concepts.
Ten Things he wishes he had known about business.
What are you researching?
Ummmm I may be way off base here but I remember hearing that some implementations (*BSD??) randomly reorder the local variables on stack to make exploiting buffer overruns more difficult. So if it's true then you do need to make a function call.
Most likely, it involves private internal trading between employees. Those that would rather just take the cash and run can sell their stock to others who would like to invest more into the company.
If you're going to drop anecdotes like that, please at least name the senator.
> Just because security by obscurity is not a barrier you should lean on doesn't mean that it lacks value in combination with other measures.

Damn straight. Check out the DNS spoofing defences - using random ports to issue requests on. There's a known limit to port numbers, and you could probably circumvent it with massive amounts of traffic, but using an unknown port number makes it hard enough that performing that kind of attack is significantly more difficult.
I don't get Markdown. Why make end-users learn a yet another markup language to make bold text or a table (unless all your users are news.yc readers, rather than the general public)?

Why not give them an actual bold text button? It's not hard.
That blew me away. I can never get enough of these Ted talks. Even the ones with the most awful titles on the most boring subjects tend to be utterly brilliant and captivating.
This is engineering, not artwork.

All of the weight of the rider is being borne on the tiny pivot joints between the circular bits and the "boxes". The rear circular bit would have to be hollow to contain some kind of drive chain, and the rear wheel would need hub gears. Internal break cables, or breaking by pedaling backwards.

Steering pivots on the middle joint, so the front circular bit turns too.

Definitely ugly though.

;)
Load imbalance in a single node in a distributed stream processing system and language, and programming models and code generation techniques for the Cell processor.
I consider Lisp modern, as it:

a) uses a very human language, similar to other modern languages

b) is gaining interest, rather than decreasing interest like C, Java and Perl are [1].

[1] http://radar.oreilly.com/Language_all.jpg
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/07/kansas-senator.html

Sam Brownback, Kansas.
"A major study says parents harm their children's development if they ban tree-climbing or conkers"

Does the word study in England not imply empirical research published in an academic journal?
So far that's an online community, not a business. Or at least a site to build a community around. It could be monetized by ads, but could this attract tens of thousands of people to actually make money? I'll wait and see.

Starting a site doesn't make you an entrepreneur. But he has made a lot of important friends that are apparently sold on the IDEA of a 15-yr old entrepreneur, therefore making him one.

His intentions may be in the right place but the technology behind the site is uninspiring.
When change got stuck in office coke machine, upon handing over the keys Michael Dell said he learned the most important thing to building a successful business: how to delegate.
Climb out through the chimney?
"There is a really persistant meme that SSL breaks when the DNS breaks, because all that happens when your certificate doesn't match or verify is that you get a warning. That warning says SSL isn't working anymore. You're not supposed to click through it."

I didn't know it was this bad, Browsers should "freak out" and totally refuse to proceed with the page then.
Let's say your area of research just so happens to involve the Cell processor. Then let's say that you have a choice: $600 PS3, or $20,000 Mercury Solutions Cell Blade?

For less than the cost of two desktop machines, we have a cluster of PS3s that lets us get research done. Now, don't buy the hype: a cluster of PS3s is not a great platform for high performance computing for the reasons you mentioned; 256MB of RAM for each node means your data sets are going to be small. But for getting research done cheaply, it's great.
That may be true, but this in particular doesn't seem to be any attempt at censorship (in fact it's the opposite) and we can't just throw the baby out with the bathwater.
huh? YC usually takes 6% of the company - assuming an equal distribution with three founders at 33% initially, now everyone is at 31.333%, with a combined 94%.
But he's no Mark Pilgrim!
Chess programs that only look 1 move ahead and make all their moves in under a second are better than most human players. Their evaluation function to decide what is a good position is actually quite smart and has a lot of knowledge of chess.

Most of the article consists of saying that chess programs have certain weaknesses that humans do not have. That's definitely true, but it doesn't mean that computers "barely understand chess".

The article's author doesn't seem to be a serious chess player. His 19 move "forced line" contains no branches to show what happens with other defenses and, at a glance, looks like black used some moves inefficiently and it'd be hard to be confident there was nothing better without seeing a lot more analysis. I'd only trust it either with extensive branches and notes, or if he checked it with a strong computer...
Sorry. The site has different URLs pointing at the same links and thus it didn't come up when I posted :-/
Two points:

1) He said - "you can comprehend it without knowing the language" and you responded with "well, of course you can't read it - you don't know it!". The argument is specifically about being able to read a language without knowing what % ! and $ stand for.

2) Equating a programming language to a human language as if proficiency or deficiency in the first implies something about the second is really a bad idea. Human languages evolve naturally without a designer who can make a language less or more readable. For a programming language, there is always a designer, and readability by a person "unskilled in the art" is a major category by which the language is judged.
True, but code is rarely ever shipped then abandoned. Refactoring is (hopefully) all about making code more manageable and as reusable as possible, not attaining some sort of aesthetic elegance.
You somehow think I'm attacking CPAN and go berserk.

Berserk? Really? You took my response to be the ravings of someone gone berserk? Huh. I don't know what to make of that.
It is an obvious simplification, but his boss is wrong. The order of uninitialized variables can be changed by the compiler. For example to better package the variables due to an alignment requirements. E.g. allocating

char a;
long b;
char c;
short d;

on a RISC-style platform as "a,c,d,b" requires 8 bytes, while as a,b,c,d - 12. This may not matter in a majority of cases, but it some it does.
How is it done?
Clever site: http://www.soonerdev.net/screencastvideos/

It lets you view a video while simultaneously seeing the transcript.

What I'd like to know is just how they got transcript from video?

Thanks in advance for any ideas. Just can't figure it out.

Nice concept for those times when you've watched an informational video, but aren't sure just WHERE the critical code might be -- and don't want to watch the whole thing all over again!
I assumed that the company was buying back the stock using the company piggy bank.

But as mentioned below, maybe this is achieved by direct trading between employees or investors.
The UI definitely needs work.

I didn't completely understand it until reading your comment.

Seems very difficult to get off the ground without a large, extremely active userbase.

I don't use twitter or friendfeed but it looks very similar to it.

Still not sure if I see a real use or appeal for it - I could be wrong. I'd like to see how it plays out after some time.

Domain name is wayyy to long..

Nice work so far though.
That's rather Reddit-esque.
Most of the discussion regarding laptop seizure at the border seems to focus upon how to protect your data. This is important, but I already do this. I'm an independent programmer/artist and my laptop is my main tool, and very expensive. If my laptop was seized randomly for an indefinite time period, I'd have to spend $3K to replace it, which is not an insignificant amount of money.

I see this provision mostly being used by customs agents who want to steal someone's laptop or ipod for themselves.
Just know that 2^10 is about 1000, so you do 2^4 followed by 1000^6, ie 6*3 zeros.
Not quitting sooner the startup where I had to learn J2EE.
Interesting points. It could well be my professional frame of reference that's shifting. Maybe a historical analysis of job listings would give a less biased take?
I rather like it. No idea if it will take off or anything, but it's really nice.

Your approach to user signup is superb.

There should be an explicit "tag this conversation" link. Otherwise nobody will even know that they can do that.

Can I post a link to an ongoing conversation in some other place, like Twitter or, say, here?

The "Theory" page is... a bit too theoretical. I mean, everyone here will get it, but not the mass market. I doubt that many AOL Chat users understand what "asynchronous" means. Don't delete the existing page... just make a slightly simpler, shorter Theory page and relegate the existing text to a second-level "Theory of the Theory" page.

Other than that... it's hard to know what to critique. Many of the essential design features of such a site will only become obvious when it's flooded with traffic or overwhelmed by griefers. That's hard to test. Maybe you should start a really provocative conversation and then post a Digg link to it. ;)
>I didn't completely understand it until reading your comment.

I'm finding it hard to sum the site up in a phrase, but I know this is important.

>Seems very difficult to get off the ground without a large, extremely active userbase.

Yep, same old problem. I don't have a marketing budget, so I'll just have to try doing it the hard way.

>Domain name is wayyy to long..

At this point in the game it's either made-up words, non-descriptive domains, or descriptive, long domains. I like conversational speech, so I went with the third option. I think it's very easy to remember, which may offset the length. I think it's funny that we consider three words so long when it comes to the web, but I basically agree with what you're saying.
I'm going as usual =)
Well, in your first post you just thought I was attacking CPAN, while the berserk part is when you combine your two posts together.

"maybe you're just that much better of a developer than I am [...] So, either you're writing all of this from scratch, or your software is anemic and lacks basic APIs and data export capabilities and interoperability and good security, etc. I'm sure your app will kick ass when you finish it two years from now. [...] I don't even really know how to respond to this one, but I'll take a stab at it. Is a template engine a "super powerful technique" that you're excited to figure out? Payment processing? Session handling? How about a test harness? Form validation? Having a good selection of available libraries saves you from the boring crap, not the other way around."

Such extreme condescension stemming from an misunderstanding of what I was saying I consider "going berserk", yes.

"I guess you can talk about anything you want, but you can't possibly expect us to know you're not talking about the same subject as everyone else."

"I'm sorry you feel that way. I'll try to tone done the sarcasm in any future replies to you."

What a beautiful paragon of passive-aggressiveness. I applaud you!
Probably to existing shareholders, or a select group of investors, via private deals.
That was painful to watch. Couldn't get past 30 min. While watching it, I thought - some smart people really could use image consultants. Maybe I'm getting into marketing. What a horrible thought.
Interactive map of cool new Olympic buildings
EFF: MySpace suicide charges a threat to free speech
If it's "berserk", is it still "passive" aggressiveness?
US Government not subject to DMCA
Shafer's a friend and a very sharp guy. There's a lot to his point that newspaper no longer carry as much social currency.

But I tend to agree with kennyroo's point about cost structure a lot more. Newspapers are used to spending X to get the news out there and making X+1 on the transaction. Now they're making X-1 on the transaction, but are still more or less spending X to get the news out there.

They're trying to change, but they need to more or less lay off their entire print production staff to really make it work. The unions will never allow this. So major papers will continue to drift downwards until they either shut down or take the steps necessary to be profitable, lean businesses.

As a journalist who recently finished up a master's degree and had to decide what to do next, I chose to turn down my job offers, teach myself Drupal, hang out on Hacker News and bootstrap a new Chicago news site at http://www.windycitizen.com

More than a few classmates, most of whom are now writing for B2B publications, dailies and magazines thought I was being foolish, but it seemed like the best bet out there in the long run. The papers are only going to keep falling apart. I believe I can develop something from scratch with a cost structure that will let us either become an acquisition target for an existing media company or get back to X+1.

The Citizen is a blog network focused on Chicago, produced by a growing community of local media makers who want to expand the local conversation.

This past weekend, we attacked Lollapalooza (http://www.windycitizen.com/blogs/lollapalooza-blog), and by approaching our coverage with a startup mentality, the two of us who attended scooped the big dogs all weekend long with video, pictures, reviews, links and news from the festival.

If there are any Chicago-based hackers out there interested in getting involved, hit me up through the site. Scooping MTVNews at one of the major music festivals is a real rush.

There are a lot of reasons why newspapers are dying. My vote is for the "our business model fell apart" explanation. And unlike most of the journalists I've met, I'm putting my money where my mouth is by trying to bring something new to the table.
Thanks! In a way the signup process is my favorite thing about the site, since there's no process required at all. I love it when I stumble upon a painless method of any kind.

You can post the link from your address bar, but the next step will be to make each tag and conversation a static URL which can be crawled by Google.

The theory page was basically written for the HN and reddit/r/programming audiences, because I wanted to get some serious feedback on the concept itself. In the next month or two everything will be made more palatable.

Thanks for the feedback.
The intro is a little slow, but it gets better.
I am interested to know at what point usa.gov starts becoming a problem for hackers such as pg and his followers?

As someone who resides outside the USA, news articles like this cause a HUGE problem for me if I ever wanted to visit the USA.

As a hacker I am already used to being treated to varying degrees as a 'freak' by regular folks.. What happens if a border guard decides to pick on me and then isn't happy when I try to explain why my laptop has no GUI? According to what I've read, not only do I have no rights but I may be detained in uncomfortable conditions for weeks before they send me back to my home country.
Rare and beautiful Iolite Jewelry and Iolite Rings
Iolite Jewelry is beautiful, known as the water sapphire
Why Software Patents Are Harmful (PDF)
An excerpt of the paper taken from the "Open..." blog:

"In other industries, research continues up to a point where further research costs too much to be feasible. At this stage, the industry's output merely consists of replacing parts that have worn out.

However, in the software sector, a computer program that is fully debugged will perform its function forever without requiring maintenance or modification. What this means is that unlike socks that wear out, and breakfast cereal that is eaten, a particular software product can be sold to a particular customer at most once. If it is to be sold to that customer again, it must be enhanced with new features and functionality. This inevitably means that even if the industry were to approach maturity, any software company that does not produce new and innovative products will simply run out of customers! Thus, the industry will remain innovative whether or not software patents exist."

http://opendotdotdot.blogspot.com/2008/08/why-software-patents-are-harmful.html
I was actually asked this problem on a job interview (not Google) and gave the answer your boss pointed out, but the interviewer then pointed out that local variables aren't necessarily laid out in memory in the order they're declared.

The function call is the only reliable way I can think of. Any others?