skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It certainly is possible revenue source--once you have a big enough fanbase to support it. Which is probably multiple books and a number of years, during which your effective cash flow from an activity that takes up a staggering amount of time (and benefits others in the meantime) is essentially zero.

It is not, in the general case, very viable. Which is why nobody takes it very seriously as a good path for all, or even most, writers. Because they have to eat, too.
It depends on how much effort it would take to rewrite any of said components.

In my personal experience, for reasonably isolated and small components, 80% of time spent creating a component of code is spent on making decisions. By the end of it, when all the decisions have been made, I could probably rewrite the entire thing from scratch in 20% of the time—and it would likely be better in every way.

It would seem that the first iteration is largely prototyping. If you can save a significant multiplier of time by choosing a different language than the rest of the stack for the prototype and potentially rewrite it later if necessary, why not? Perhaps by the end of it all, you'd break even on time but end up with multiple implementations and better code.
The relevant information could easily be OCRed from the faxes (even more if they provide a standard form), only requiring a one click human validation.
Wow this was a very helpful article. Thank you so much. I am in college now and have planned on being a doctor for most of my life. But I've been having a huge internal debate about staying pre-med vs. switching to a tech field. I've always been a techie, but have been spending a lot of time lately working on my programming. I am just very conflicted about the whole thing.
Because they are engineers working on their own things with no red-tape?
Sounds like /somebody's/ never used an iPhone.
Lying is not just ok on the internet, it's practiced practically everywhere. People lie in business, people lie in politics, people lie in marketing, people lie in retail, people lie on internet forums, people lie on the street, people lie in their homes, places of business, and places of leisure. The fact is simple: people lie. You can and should teach your kids about when it is not appropriate to lie, but please get off your moral high horse of pretending that lying is the some sort of mortal sin.

Imagine how badly you would fuck up your kid's life if you managed to really convince him that lying is some sort of abject horror. He would be eaten alive the instant he took a step outside of your home into the real world. When in your opinion is a kid ready for sophisticated reasoning about when to lie? Do you suggest waiting until well past their core formative years before suddenly going, "Hey, remember how I said if you lie you will go to jail? Yeah, about that..." Maybe even wait for their rebellious teenage years so that they get REALLY confused about how they're supposed to behave.

Kids are not as stupid as you seem to believe they are, and that's something coming from me since I believe kids are pretty damn stupid. I am not suggesting that they are ready for a university level psychology lecture, but by that point they will have been exposed to plenty of negative things that you should probably take some effort to explain. If your kids are not ready for at least a basic introduction to social reasoning at 10 then you haven't been doing a very good job at educating them.
This Service is provided to individuals who are at least 18 years old or minors who have parental permission to open and maintain an account.

Great clause you found. Hope they honor that one, and change/remove other contradictory clauses.
(edit: fix italics)
June 2011: four Cisco vulnerabilities
> Its the very reason I never got an iphone, opting for blackberry instead.

That makes no sense. The iPhone does not have any capacitive button. It has 3 (or 4 depending on the way you count the volume rocker) physical buttons and a capacitive touch screen.

And no, it's not the same.
Sorry to say this but you have probably been deceived by the nuclear industry. First of all thorium is much cheaper (about 160 times I think), secondly it's far more abundant and third LFTR has a much better design.

The industry dismissed liquid reactors because of the problem extracting weapon grade material. Uranium based reactors where not as safe nor as cheap. During the cold war this made sense but not today.

It has also been about people protection their jobs. The uranium based industry can't say that something else is better because then they might lose their jobs. And who do you think the politicians ask when they want advice?
Way too much useful information, I could spend hours reading this blog :)
He could take that as a challenge and learn to buy his own domain, build his own site, install his own webmail system. That way he will never have to worry about a cloud service shutting him down.
Yay, let's link every service ever together, what could possibly go wrong!
So you're doing DH negotiation and AES yourself because "stunnel is 10k lines of code"?

What could possibly go wrong?
Glad to hear this, for some rough math the 20,000 liters of vegetable oil (unprocessed) is roughly 5,200 gallons[1].

Let's assume we lose no volume during the processing to biodiesel, the average semi carries about 200 gallons of fuel[2] -- so that provides 26 fillups for the year of biodiesel.

Not huge, but it's a great start. That is still a lot of oil not getting thrown out.

[1] http://goo.gl/MIhxV
[2] http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080326203920AA...
Yes, apparently those countries landed on the "implemented horribly" side.
People's ravings about Haskell are very effective at revealing my inner Blub-ness:

The pattern boils down to creating an expert system that is pure and encodes a state machine and creating a system within the IO monad that operates by querying the expert system. Both parts would be written in a synchronous style, but would use coroutines to mask the passing of control flow.

Um, awesome. You do that, and I'll continue to "print 'Hello world'".
But if you look at the design you will see that it's much more simple than a PWR. All calculations I've seen puts the cost of construction well below the cost of modern PWRs.

And the cost of fuel is still important, uranium isn't getting cheaper.
Not. In. Canada.

GRRR.
Me neither. And who is Certivox? Hasn't Microsoft even declared Silverlight dead? HN doesn't seem like the best place to announce an IE-only service.
Unclear why the DBD home page on HN, now (a USian independence day tie-in?), but I guess it is clear why it is on the front page. I voted it up, and presumably lots of people will likewise reflexively vote up an anti-DRM link.

Anyway, how goes the campaign to eliminate DRM? DRM hasn't worked to suppress unauthorized distribution (which of course was a fantasy) and isn't ubiquitous ... except where it is, e.g., Netflix and many consumer devices.

As far as I can tell, the campaign is at best at a standstill. Consumer outcry even when directly harmed (e.g., useless purchases when DRM service shut down) is at best tepid. More speculatively, my default view is that DRM is a misfeature of proprietary software and culture, and will only be eliminated to the extent free software and culture win.

My default view is probably short-sighted. What will be the role of DRM in attempting to control devices that have little to do with content, e.g., automated vehicles?
Living conditions in other countries compared to your own
Have you asked existing users what they like / dislike?
It also badly needs prettier URLs.
There is definitely an overlap area between < 13 year olds that are responsible and > 13 year olds that aren't responsible, but how can you tell who is who? Maybe 13 was a line in the sand to make the law practical.
Tell that to the people who vote "wrong".
And we'll see what they'll tell you.

Of course when we see an intervention of a country, it's a total and complete responsibility of interventor to preserve any economic and industrial infrastructure.
Trabant wasn't bankrupt in East Germany.
It was bankrupt in Germany.
Who do you think is responsible for that?
We've got Chrome and Firefox coming out soon, as stated above. I'm sorry, should we wait until then to declare our service? As far as who we are, we're British, you can have a brief summary read here: http://certivox.com/index.php/about-certivox/news-events-pre...
> He has suggested that laziness was perhaps not the best default. It is hard to reason about space leaks with laziness.

Aha, but it's perhaps not the best default for practical reasons, and it is the best default for theoretical reasons. Does that not make ML's eagerness an example of worse is better, because the worse theoretical solution is simpler the the rubber meets the road and you just want to find out where you're leaking memory>
It depends on what perspective you take I guess. From one view, ML is the worse language, but from other views it would be Haskell. Suppose you require a fully formal specification which has been verified in a mechanized way. You have that for Standard ML in Twelf and Haskell has nothing sort of that.

If you look at the concept of being a purely functional language however, it is the opposite with Standard ML being the "worse" animal.

Module system: Then SML got it right and Haskell got it Wrong.

Laziness/Strictness: This is a duality. There are advantages and disadvantages to both approaches so there is no worse/right choice IMO. If you look at the recent stuff on polarity in proof theory it becomes clear that when you latch onto a specific evaluation order, you make some things simple and other things hard.
The Boy Who Followed Somebody Else's Dream
3 Million units of Samsung Galaxy S2 sold in 55 days
Another issue people don't bring up: the weather. Living in Seattle I frequently wore mittens. With the physical buttons it would not be a problem to operate the phone, with the touchscreen there is this long ordeal of pulling off the mitten to answer the phone. If it is raining (or rather, when is it not raining?), the rain will mess with the touchscreen, making it sometimes impossible to answer a call. You might say there is a solution: either cut off the fingers or sew in some conducting thread to the tip of the mittens. This doesn't solve the rain problem though.
It allows you to focus on features and pivoting over ceremony

This always sounds nice, but I've found that ceremony almost never really reduces productivity by much. The real wins/losses almost never have to do with ceremony related features of language, but rather architectural and framework components.

You build something that evolves by bringing in the smallest architecture and least fx components and then build. The language you use may dictate the fx components to some extent -- otherwise it's typically just to make developers feel happy (which is important, but really is just about morale more than anything truly inherent in the productivity of the language).
Side effects can be checked in `@leave(check_side_effects)`. I plan to add something to check results.
This article would be more believable if they removed the word "deep" from the title. A deep analysis would show that other than the Google platform integration, these so-called differentiators fall apart.

Hangouts is unique -- for now. I'm pretty sure Facebook is already working on something similar.

The only real differentiation I have seen is the UI. The Facebook UI is getting very hairy. It is hard to find things. You shouldn't have to Google (oh, the irony) to find out "how do I do X on Facebook?".

So Facebook's real vulnerability, as I see it, is platform creep. It's due for a major re-write, but of course they then risk alienating their user base at the worse possible time. Google's move is therefore quite strategic.
First World Problems
I'm not at all sure they would be this successful if they'd tried to build on the JVM right from the start using the technologies available at the time.

I'm not sure why you think that, or why you think Twiiter had a 'grow' vs 'evolve' strategy. Their approach seemed not nearly so self-aware, and resulted in serious, core deficiencies that required considerable time and expense to correct. From an external position, it very much did not look like a rational considered approach to solving he problem through 'evolution'.
There is no good DRM. Claiming otherwise is simply regurgitating the same bullshit that companies such as Ubisoft, EA and Valve spout at every given opportunity.

DRM, in all of its forms, limits what you can do with the product you paid for. That is - and always will be - intentional crippling and therefore defective by design. There is no justification for these limitations besides escapist claims of "protecting intellectual property" or similar nonsense. It's simply companies trying to control (and lock in) their customers.

I might add that I used to be a big fan of Nintendo for their awesome franchises. Mario, Link and all the others basically make up a good part of my childhood. To me, it's just sad to see them going down the same path as all the other publishers.
The eternal meaning of Independence Day
tl;dr! A skimming seems to say, "Erlang isn't parallel, but it's parallel! Erlang isn't concurrent, but it's concurrent!"
Anything that helps break the Blackboard monopoly is good news in my book.
Cool idea, although internet explorer / silver light isn't my cup of tea.
Poll: What do you find buying online really hard or annoying?
I'm building a shopping site because I find online shopping for some products really frustrating. The idea is to have one site where you can search for all options for a given product category and quickly filter down to the one you want to buy.

I have some product categories in mind that I would like to work on, but I want to know what you would find useful.

Please vote for one or more of the following and comment below to say what you find most frustrating about buying that online. What would you like to be fixed?

Thanks!
Computers (laptops, tablets, desktops)
Kitchen appliances (blenders, coffee makers, toasters, kettles)
Home appliances (washing machines, fridge freezers, dishwashers, vacuum cleaners)
Home electronics (TVs, music systems, DVD players)
Furniture (dining tables, wardrobes, chairs, beds, sofas)
Software (Server software, desktop apps, Web apps, mobile apps)
Other (please comment below to say what exactly)
Ask HN: How does a developer get started with usability testing?
I launched a web app a while back that got a good number of sign ups but all of the feedback I got from my users was the same: Usability really needs some work.

I decided to do things right. I did some research on usability and started over with regard to design. I've come up with some mock ups a la balsamiq that I feel makes it really easy for users to do what they need to do on the site.

Being a developer, though, I'd like to test this. How does one do so? I'm looking for more than just "go to a coffee shop and offer to buy them coffee herp derp." There are more facets to it that are question marks in my head like: What questions should I ask? How should I observe them? Should I have a plan going in to it? If so, is there a format I should follow?

If anyone here has some knowledge and/or resources they can share please let me know!
This is an example of Apple's design brilliance. They have a feature that just works, and it's perfectly normal for users to have no idea why it just works or why other products that seem to have the same features are so frustrating to use.

Of course, the downside is that people sometimes buy a product that seems to be "as good as an iPhone," and they have no idea that their user experience is worse than the iPhone's, they just assume the iPhone works just as poorly as theirs.
No, I prefer STUD over stunnel because stunnel is 10k lines of code.

spiped is because it's dumb to do asymmetric crypto when you can establish a pre-shared key.
Thanks for the RABL reference (https://github.com/nesquena/rabl), interesting stuff, perfect timing for one of my projects.
Netty is a godsend. Java threads are extremely memory-hungry, so async I/O is a must for handling many connections. We routinely handle 200K simultaneous connections on our push servers without breaking a sweat.
Balderdash. This is an unintended consequence of Google keeping too much information across system boundaries.
Aside from the additional information that the C compiler is capable of knowing about in the case of A, it is the same crap going on under the hood.
Why the Internet is America’s greatest weapon
Actually, there merely need to be 1/N programmers capable of using Haskell. There's no separate species known as a "Haskell programmer."
This is why I liked the older Android devices (as opposed to the new ones). Having physical buttons and a trackball were significantly better than both capacitive buttons and optical trackpads. Trackballs are significantly better than optical trackpads from a use-perspective. They work in all orientation, have finer grains of control, don't require awkward flicks to work, and have a much easier learning curve. The industry really needs to stop trying to the trendy thing and focus on things that work.
Google and Apple, frankly seemed indifferent. MS and Facebook both came and basically said that COPPA goes too far, and self-regulation would largely handle the issue (with some exceptions).

With that said, I wonder if one could make the case that COPPA is unconstitutional. Hear me out:

In the recent video game ruling SCOTUS has said that computer programs (video games) are a form of free speech. And they further said that conveying that free speech to minors w/o parental consent is protected.

So web services too are computer programs, and therefore free speech. And like violently deviant video games the ability to convey this speech to minors w/o parental consent is also protected.

COPPA overturned! :-)
I think it's important to look at how twitter got there though. They'd been using just Rails for a long time before introducing Scala. At that point, it's fair to say they weren't a 10 dev startup anymore.

This, imo, is part of having developers choose the best language for the job. They chose ruby to get their mvp out quickly and be able to grow their userbase. After that, they pinpointed trouble areas in their architecture and made pragmatic choices in fixing up those areas.

While I suppose it's possible to "let developers pick the best tool for the job" and end up with 5 different languages in your stack, most good developers are likely to steer clear of such an endgame, unless the trade-offs are very, very clear.
I think this is a real YMMV subject - using a single email address can be a little dangerous if your startup has a chance of "going big" (and don't they all??). Even 50 extra messages a day can be overwhelming and you may find yourself skipping over important messages as you struggle to move them off your plate quickly. Even worse if it all lands in your primary inbox folder, distracting you from focused work (this is especially important if you're "two guys/gals in a garage" where productivity & focus really, really matters).

I actually set up multiple email addresses for support in this way on purpose, based on platform. I find I'm far more efficient if platform 1 goes into folder 1 and platform 2 goes into folder 2. No need to make giant cognitive leaps in jumping from one message to another, and you can sit down and respond to everything all at once, not interrupting your flow...you're more productive, less overwhelmed, and contacts get their answers faster (and their emails don't get buried in your overwhelmed primary inbox).

If you are a consumer Internet startup and have a single downtime, you will completely understand where I'm coming from here...
What's the DRM in Netflix streaming restricting that you should be able to do with that stream?
The way we eat
Yep, you are right that I am missing out on the fact that there is different types of parallelism in the post. But it was getting too big of a post already :/

You can also classify parallelism. An example is to compare that you annotate parallel execution on the data structure (this is a parallel array) or on the control-flow (when operating on this array, do it in parallel). Another is if the parallel distinction is largely dynamic (worker pool) or static (we know we have 16 cores so the optimal communication structure assuming a double torus pairing configuration is ...). Yet another is to look at the data themselves. Are they a flat array or a nested tree structure (Nested Data Level parallelism is cool btw). And finally, to stop all the examples, we could look at declaratively making the code parallel and doing so explicitly yourself from primitives (think rolling your own database versus writing queries in SQL for an existing one - and hope the query optimizer can help).

The main point is that Erlang has taken a choice here. And that choice only covers some uses of what people may want to do. For the other things, people tend to use Erlang as a controller and then write their FPGA code and run it separately. This is what the original telephony switches were doing with Erlang.
Features my site, Housefed, and YC Grubwithus
Yes, the argument presented for point one is pretty weak, but I do agree with it. Having the lazy I/O, and especially lazy bytestring option is great IMO. Although Oleg style left-fold enumerators as used by warp are superior in many respects, typically as a user you don't need to interact at that level; iirc you don't in Yesod, which is built on warp. As an example of approachability LBS approach, checkout this two line "wc -l" implementation, which beats "wc -l" by 64x, apples and pears no doubt, but shows fast enough,(from http://www.mail-archive.com/haskell@haskell.org/msg18878.htm...):

> import qualified Data.ByteString.Lazy.Char8 as L

> main = L.getContents >>= print . L.count '\n'

edit: actually it beats "wc", and is roughly same speed as "wc -l".
Didn't they try a similar theory with Knol vs. Wikipedia?
I never suggested they were self-aware, only that they evolved. Therefore, I do not suggest that they decided anything.

All evolution strategies involve serious, core deficiencies, that's the trade-off, that's why it isn't 100% obviously better to evolve than to grow. But I do suggest that evolution--however it came about at Twitter HQ--has worked out for them.
Yes, that's what the slang means. "Red tape" is bureaucracy you need to fight through in order to accomplish something.
مسلسل معاوية والحسن والحسين
مسلسل معاوية والحسن والحسين
Well, yes, but what I linked is more recent.
don't know why everyone assumes jvm language = over engineering. I agree that some jvm language code can be more robust, but the reality is most of us should live in our test suites. I would even say that Java test suites start and run faster than the standard rails tests ( without all the things to make it faster like spork). The frameworks argument of configuration vs convention I think is moot as most jvm language frameworks are taking a more conventional approach, but allowing for greater configuration now.

on the other side the reality of a startup is you're going to push out so much code / features / product based on demand so fast that a lot of the things that you consider building for the future will be thrown out the window pretty fast. Just build it, see if it works, and move to the next thing.
There's no right 'in' language, but there is a language you feel most capable/comfortable in. As you know C, the different languages are all of equal simplicity (afaik) and the frameworks fill equal gaps on the various languages. Sorry there's not an answer here.
Steam is DRM, but it adds so much value. I prefer to use Steam (with the DRM) than I do to use a game that doesn't have any DRM because of how much Steam improves the process of purchasing, installing, downloading and updating games. DRM done right (eg: Steam) can be awesome.