skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How Startup Birchbox Uses Content To Sell Tons of Beauty Supplies
In 2010, two Harvard girls set out to create a subscription service for women who wanted to try beauty samples. Hayley Barna and Katia Beauchamp called their startup Birchbox, with the mission “to help women cut through the clutter of the beauty world to find products that really work for them.”
I'm a little biased, being a pretty heavy CouchDB user, but it seems like Mongo is claiming that their auto-sharding is the defining reason to use Mongo. The forthcoming release of Couchbase 2.0 is going to have the same type of functionality, with buckets distributed across the cluster rather than required replication of the full dataset. Couchbase 3.0 should (if I remember correctly) have the functionality for both the key/value store and for view results.
After reading a detailed article about how we spend [...] do you really think that we then CHAIN them to an Aeron chair [...]

The place that I worked that had such nice equipment basically did exactly that: you were given your standard issue equipment with virtually zero flexibility (amusingly other than keyboard and mouse, just like your setup).

That said, the impression mostly comes from the way that you write about the place. You use a lot of absolute terms. There's a lot of talk about best and ideal and happy and then very precise definitions of those things. This gives readers the impression that while you have a very luxurious office, that it's also one that's quite rigid.

Honestly, I'd be surprised if that wholly misses the mark. You're obviously a really smart guy that wants to do well by your employees, and good on you for that. But it also sounds like you're running a grand experiment at FogCreek where you're (mostly by fiat) deciding what you think is best for a company's culture. That may actually produce a place that for the type of folks that get hired there really clicks. I don't think I'd be one of those sorts.
There is little indication that Facebook isn't painful to deal with compared to a functionally identical version of Facebook built in another language/platform. Because someone did it and is profiting from it does not mean they could not have done it better.
I would invest in gold. No hassle. No risk since every country is printing money and putting savers at risk. Doubled in price in dollar in two years thus far.
Is developing for Facebook not painful?
"There is nothing more exciting than modifying a file, hitting Refresh on your browser and seeing the result right away"

I think this feature is definitely useful, but you can virtually do the same thing in other languages with templating engines.
I find it rather straightforward to modify H5BP into a responsive design, anyway. When the time comes for mobile-only to die, it's not going to be a difficult transition. No rush.

Thanks for all your great work, Paul!
That's all very nice, but I'd rather just stay home. I get to keep using my own highly personalized office space and avoid commuting. Employer get to save $5000 and reduce office space requirements.
There is a great site called http://www.detroitblog.org that goes through many of these buildings and, more recently, features the people that live in these areas.

If you are more interested in the building porn I'd go back several years. The human interest stories are also mostly great and are more recent.
The point of the project is to deal with source in multiple version control systems, and helping deal with all the cruft between version control systems.
Obviously the decline of the auto industry was a major factor in Detroit's fall but the civil unrest of the late 60s is what caused the "white flight" out of Detroit and into the suburbs. The city has remained unstable since for a slew of reasons, the biggest one likely being corrupt government.

There's just very little incentive to live in the city itself anymore between the lack of small businesses, crime, etc. I heard a story of a guy who purchased an entire block of houses, demolished them, built new condos and was waiting on city inspection so people could start moving in. Inspection took a while and in the meantime the newly-built condos were broken into and stripped of any valuable piping/wiring. Does that really a place you want to live in? The only reasons I go into the city are for sporting events, the occasional concert, or urbex.

The segregation of Detroit and its metropolitan area are SHOCKING. Look at this map: http://bit.ly/ptgVNe

The blue is African-Americans. The red is Caucasians. The all-too-clear division begins at 8 mile.

Some sort of link has to be established in order to unify the suburbs and the city. Hopefully the M1 rail project can be that link -- unfortunately, like I said in another comment, the rail has to stretch further into the suburbs for it to have any chance of success, IMO.
If you don't like this behaviour, you can set a git repository to reject non-fast-forward pushes to it. Run:

git config receive.denyNonFastForwards true

This will permit branches to only go in a forward direction.
And BigCouch has sharding too (edited to add: for data and views)
When i see things like this i sometimes wonder if (in america at least) this could be illegal under wiretapping laws. Obviously it seems justified because the laptop was stolen, but i've heard about stranger things. For instance one of my CS profs (Sam King, UIUC) told us in class about a honey pot experiment he was running once. The whole idea was just to monitor what intruders would typically do on an unprotected system by recording shell sessions. When they were getting the experiment approved by network admins it came up that this might count as wire tapping (Illinois has weirdly strict 'all parties consent' laws for wire tapping). So to protect themselves they had to add a disclaimer to the login prompt saying that user activities may be recorded. (nevermind the fact that these attackers would most likely not ever see the login prompt).

So it raises the question, could this software pose a liability for the owner?
Trained to use hard to remember passwords which are easy for computers to guess
Klout Adds Blogger, Flickr, Instagram, Last.fm & Tumblr
An interesting look at a theorized national German character. But I agree with the driver/interpreter woman, Germany is huge, Bavarian, and North German, and High German are not even mutually intelligible. The article just didn't convince me of anything.

It didn't explain exactly why German banks were so blind to risk. And the claim that German banking is behind the times, is also just plain wrong. I can't find the Economist article, but there is one bemoaning how backward and inefficient American banks are compared to German banks. But the Economist might have referred more to retail banking, this seems to be more about investment banking.

In any case, long article, interesting read, but does not answer much unless you buy into the author's weakly supported thesis that Germans are anal-retentive to the point of being cripplingly oblivious to any kind of deceit.
Dear Hacker Letters to the Editor of 2600 Free Download
You don't want your product to be the one with hundreds of people having their accounts compromised. This warrants a bare minimum of password requirements.
With additional setup, yes, but PHP has a fast development cycle out-of-the-box which I think is significant.
I think there is some overlap between what you and I are suggesting.

If people on the right put more weight on allegiance to a tribe, and respecting authority, I'd expect them to be more inspired by an idealist past attributed to their tribe or authority.

If people on the left put more weight on ending harm and injustice, I'd expect them to be more inspired by an idealized future in which these evils are dealt with and solved.

I don't doubt that there are really many dimensions to political ideologies, but it seems entirely reasonable to expect a lot of correlation between ideas that seem logically orthogonal to one another.

This strikes me as similar to the ideas underlying hunch.com -- that they can ask you about your preferred operating system and brand of fast food, and then predict how you'll vote or what music you'll like.
Yes. I do. I had tried before and found that I failed quickly because I would try and do like everyone suggests, set a specific time and make sure I write in it. Or at the very least write once a day.

That didn't work for me at all. It felt like a chore, and one that I didn't enjoy so I just stopped. This time I bought one (A nice Moleskine) when I was struggling internally for a long period and felt I just needed to get some things out. I wrote in it frequently during that time and only wrote in it when I felt like I needed to or wanted to. Any time of the day, didn't matter when it was.

I find this to be really helpful and going back and reading what I had wrote is very interesting. The whole process is great. I still write in it although not as frequently right now. The frequency varies. The only trick is that I keep it with me in my laptop bag so when I feel like writing it's available.

Also having a pen and paper is far better for me than typing it in electronically. I can't see myself changing that habit. So if I were to pass on any advice I would say buy one and keep it close to you at all times so that when you feel like writing you can. This is what worked for me - your milage may vary.
You do realize that the "research" you cite comes from an ultra-rightwing think tank, right? They have a longstanding agenda of trying to make people believe that poverty doesn't exist in America.
1990? Really?
Exactly. This is not a feature of PHP, but simply CGI.
Rent Jungle
Rent Jungle (http://www.rentjungle.com/), launched in October, 2010, is the most comprehensive rental listing site on the web. It works much like other search engines in that it scours the internet to amass apartment listings from a variety of sites. Unlike other search engines, Rent Jungle specializes only in apartments and rental housing. Users can search, sort and bookmark individual listings, as well as save them for later use. Users can also view listings on an innovative user-friendly map, powered by Google. Rent Jungle was founded to fill a void in the online real estate market by offering a simple, easy-to-use directory and one-stop-shop destination for renters.
MacBook Air SSD Benchmarks: 2010 vs 2011 vs Lion Encryption
It's a matter of preference to be sure. I've never had a totally private office. I've had high-walled cubicles, which I found tolerable with headphones, shared offices, which were likewise OK as long as your roomie wasn't too chatty, and open "bullpens" which I think are the worst.

We're moving soon into a new building where it's mostly open "bullpen" seating. They have provided a handful of "focus booths" where individuals or small groups can retire if they feel they need some isolation. We've been preached at about studies that show that "open, collaborative" spaces are the best.... by managers/administrators who are all going to have private offices! Classic "do as I say not as I do." My guess is that I won't be sticking around.
I think it's probably easier to create unmanageable spaghetti with PHP. It's not that you can't build a large project in PHP, it's that it's easier to foul up.

By far the part of PHP that shines for small projects and causes havoc in large is the way includes work. It's possible to be disciplined about this, but it's not common. I remember many times searching in vain for some function or another that was included somewhere, somehow. Sometimes even in code that I wrote entirely!

Facebook and Wordpress and Digg being in PHP isn't a decision that was made with a large architecture in mind, it was done because the people who wrote those projects knew PHP (And in Wordpress's case, because the people who use it need it in PHP).
You can do anything web related with PHP, it might not be the coolest kid in town but it gets every job done pretty well in the space it has been designed for. Use a framework like symfony and large scale applications with decent design are no problem at all in PHP.
Same is true for Python, Ruby etc though, so just use what suits you best.
Comparing it to C ? Dunno, completely different animals. I wouldnt do web dev in C, but i also wouldnt do graphics programming in PHP. Just because they both are not designed with OO at the core doesnt mean they are exactly the same.
It's a feature of PHP because PHP isn't a compiled language. C, Java, anything .NET... They all require an added step in the middle.
Many of the in-incubation YC startups tend to exhibit a bit of secrecy around what they're doing in my experience. I was at the TC party two weeks ago and met a few current YC class founders who weren't willing to share even their name just a vague "we're solving a problem in X industry". I'm not sure if secrecy until launched is a directive/suggestion from YC or if it's something each YC company decides on their own.
Yes of course it's slow. It's interpreted and for 80% of sites out there that's fine. For the other 20% you compile the php down to C/C++
The two are not mutually exclusive. There is a recession for lower and middle-class jobs, and a tech bubble.
Joel, let me introduce to a wonderful phrase: Haters gonna hate.
I imagine most of us do not work at Facebook and have no idea how hard working on their code base is.

There's not necessarily any connection between developing external Facebook applications and working on Facebook code itself.
Mozilla (Carefully) Slams Apple
Exactly. So you do care about the security of the users.
PHP is fast to develop with, but its inconsistency and quirks make it a real PITA to work with quite often. a good summary of the main crap is outlined well at http://www.phpsadness.com/
Why does it matter? The point of the essay is that if you're going to start a startup, it shouldn't matter what the current economic conditions are. You and your idea will either succeed, or they won't. It has much more to do with you and your idea than with the economy.
I can't say I agree with this one bit.

One bubble/bust cycle does not a trend make.
An iPad success story
It may not be represented to the level that you would like it, but that isn't to say that isn't represented in any meaningful way.

In much the same way, George W. Bush is considered a "conservative", but there are many on the right that do not feel that he in any way represents their beliefs as conservatives. That is a fair argument to have about both Bush and Obama, but to claim that that means that the left (or by extension the right) is not represented is disingenuous.
now who's nitpicking
amazing! converges very fast.
Learn them together with WebGL -- I recommend "The Lessons" over at LearningWebGL.com very highly.
Kind of odd to mention the German obsession with shit and not mention the shelf toilet. That's like stop #1 on the tour.

http://asecular.com/~scott/misc/toilet.htm
If joe sixpack is still watching jersey shore italy, listening to lady gaga, eating mcdonald, drinking starbucks, playing medal of honor 4, watching spiderman 5, what makes you think they'll do anything but use facebook, amazon, google, microsoft?
Justice in the Crow's Magick deck is your Tarot card of the day
> PHP is exactly like C. Either you like both or you don’t like either, there is no claim you can make about PHP that can’t be made about C as well, and vice versa

* C is fast and has tight resource control

* C is portable

* C has a transitive (==) operator

...
I think the point about the need to be a contrarian investor, and the fact that contrarians are in the minority by definition is really compelling.

I'm not sure if I'm reading this into the essay, or it was intentional, but it seems to be that a good quality for a founder is the focus on the business they want to create should be strong enough that external factors like the macro-economic situation become essentially background noise.

Or, maybe I'm just pig-headed!

I do always wonder, when investors talk about how important the team is, how they judge the strength of a team. Recruiters can't judge programmers very well, so, how does the average investor? PG has an advantage, being a programmer himself. I'm assuming most investors are not technical people.
Show HN: Proxino - optimize and monitor your javascript
Because we're likely to suffer a great deal if it changes too much or too fast. Stop projecting stereotypes onto other posters.
This sounds very clever and well engineered. And let me just say that I pray to all the gods I hold holy that I never be forced into a situation where I'd need to use such a thing.

Viewed from outside the box: this is a classic example of a clever hack to work around the wrong part of the problem.
in .net you can run your site off source files, and the server will compile as needed
One of the reasons I like PHP is that it still lets you get to a lower level of coding. Many of the newer languages and frameworks that have become popular in the past couple of years abstract things such as database connectivity away (Django is a good example of this) and it makes it difficult to optimize queries effectively without hacking onto the framework.
We need to because we are aware of the detrimental effects our environmental behavior has not only on nature, but on ourselves too. (And we like preserving ourselves right?)
Gold is the safe bet, but some people like to diversify with some riskier investments.
What happened to Hackstor?
www.hackstor.biz has not been updated in a while, and looks like it just just become frozen in time.

Does anybody know what happened?
Typically wild insects meant for food are allowed to eat flour or corn meal for a couple of days in order to flush their digestive systems of whatever they may have been eating before. This isn't as big of an issue for farmed insects.
How many users also access the web via their cell phones?
Why?

In the current context talk about a recession isn't due to any sort of tech bubble. Talk about a recession is due to issues with the financial system and debt.

A small recession caused by a tech bubble would honestly be more desirable (in my mind anyway) than what issues with the financial system and debt could produce.

Also, a downturn in the tech industry now wouldn't necessarily be because of a tech bubble, but rather due to lack of confidence in the financial system as a whole.
Aaron Patterson on Rails 3.1 and Ruby Performance
You can't blame PHP because the developers using it write messy code.

I'll have the same problem in Java. I'll need to find out where I implemented some logic, and have to start digging through classes and following my own breadcrumbs until I find it sometimes.

Just because I commented my code poorly, or put logic in the wrong place isn't the fault of Java, it's my own, and the languages, Java and PHP, in my opinion, are easy and fun to work with for the most part.
Haha. Far from it, I'm a fan of reddit and was excited when Hipmunk came out. There's a link to my first blog post on Hipmunk at the beginning of this post.

I haven't tried international flights yet. I do think Hipmunk will do really well if they fix the UI issues, even if they do only domestic flights well.

Didn't get the points in your 2nd paragraph. I'm arguing for more usability; how does that correspond to less power/overview?

durga
This is essentially a "Tu Quoque" -- other cities have bad parts, so how can we point fingers at Detroit?

It's ok for both LA and Detroit to have bad parts. But I think it's disingenuous to pretend that Detroit's downfall is anywhere near that of other cities (unemployment, scale of abandonment, population decline, etc.).
would be good to enable a feature where you have to submit emails of at least one friend. when you fail to submit a daily entry, you friend gets an email to encourage you. knowing someone else will be pestered about your slacking will be just one more motivating factor. :)
Good Cleaners
Cool site! Is it yours?
I actually program on a 30" monitor connected to a laptop, so that doesn't follow either...

edit also I guess I stand corrected on point 1, I wasn't trying to be rude, but you had in the past said telecommuting was essentially against what you were trying to build as a team at FogCreek.
You haven't done much asp.net development I take it?
Today not many people create large apps without a solid framework at the bottom, be it Zend, symfony, Rails, Django or whatever.
Wordpress is pretty awful but the codebase is also pretty old, rewriting everything would be loads of work and make many plugins unusable.
Oops, yeah, blackouts.
Actually, they're connected: the Fed is trying to encourage a recovery in the general economy with low interest rates/quantitative easing, which has the effect of creating asset bubbles in some sectors (tech, commodities, ...) as investors look for decent returns.
How is this not higher? I'm not an expert, but they're saying that most of the NoSQL tools and Node.js are incredibly insecure.
I can't tell if they had multiple people trying to complete each task on each phone, or if they had only one shot per phone.

Plus adding contacts and dailing a number, aren't really common tasks on a smartphone, are they??

On the iPhone, it seems the user didn't have to select a person to send the txt too.
Most ORMs (including Django) let you easily drop-down into writing your own custom SQL queries when the need arises.
I sort-of felt like this comment was added in his post to get the blood boiling a little.

I love his other points about PHP (as I too like PHP), but I felt this was one of those bold statements that was a little sensational and attention grabbing at best. I too find it pretty far fetched.
In the states this is handled by the FFIEC but there is no specific complexity requirement. In accordance with the rest of the guidelines the complexity requirements are supposed to be based on a risk assessment.
it really depends on the application/site. 2mb of JS is not much when you look at some of the more advanced web apps. also keep in mind this is progressively loaded. initial page request with this design pattern will be minimal.
Paul Graham is the man. So many great posts.
Speaking of packet sniffers, DEFCON would be, by far, the best event to try out a Wireshark packet dissector 0-day!
"I don’t even bother writing tests for most of the PHP I write (obviously, I would be a bit more thorough if this code were destined to be used in a more mission critical web site). Not writing tests is not the only software taboo that I break when I write PHP: I happily mix up presentation and logic all the time. That’s just how PHP is supposed to work"

And this is why everybody else hates PHP. It tempts you to write bad code, and so most people working in the language end up doing so. I have to periodically stop myself when I'm writing PHP and make sure I'm not falling into bad habits. It's possible to write good code in PHP, and I know some people who do, but the pull to write sphpghetti is too strong for most. And there is no real corresponding benefit (aside from "noobs who don't care about code quality can still write programs") arising from the design choices that cause this.
This mind-bendingly important. In 1999, you could download one single installer on Windows, run it and with literally no further configuration you'd be writing PHP on an Apache/MySQL stack. No other environment even came close at the time and for a long time following.
Language app helps U.S. troops in Afghanistan
A new iPhone app is helping soldiers deployed overseas overcome a major obstacle: the language barrier.
Depends if you consider writing a PHP-to-C source transformer "painful".
> PHP is like C

In all the bad ways, and none of the good ones.
Mark Suster: Stock Market Drops. Then It Rallies. What Happens Next for Funding?
Unfortunately, grammar captchas like this would keep out a lot of second language learners as well.