skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
But 99.9% of these innovations don't help the world. They help a small subset of a small subset of a small subset of problems from a small subset of a small subset of a small subset of society.

Compare to if someone worked out how to stop Neurofibromatosis dead in its tracks for example (a condition my youngest daughter has), they'd give 1 in 3000 people a better chance.

People get a Jesus complex because they build a tool that a vocal minority uses.
are all nerds living in the UK (or going only there for day trips)?
This is rajeshvaya's hobby: http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=rajeshvaya. Flag away on his submissions!
In 2025 Shanghai & Beijing GDPs higher than Los Angeles & London
Yes, that "beginner's mind" is an invaluable thing. It is true in life as well as in business. I have found that the ability to "revert" to beginner's mind is a skill which I believe can be mastered with practice, and thus improved.

Also, thank you for taking notes and for being aware of that situation. I believe the world is a better place when people engage in those behaviors.
Seedcamp Week 2011 – New teams and winners, plus a bonus
WM Web Marketing
agreed, this is silly. a simple half-hitch works better, period.
How 9/11 Completely Changed Surveillance in U.S.
Why does everyone get Moore's law wrong? He said: "The number of transistors that can be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years". I guess that "Computing Power" and transistors are related, but he was really just talking about more transistors on the chip.
Seeing that they probably would have never beat Foursquare, I'm glad that they are continuing to iterate. I have to say that I'm a bit skeptical about this new product. It seems a bit murky conceptually, and I'm not sure if travel is the right industry for them to be putting their bets on.

I met a lot of diehard Gowalla fans during SXSW at their party, and they seemed much more keyed into the gaming / object collection aspects of the service. Bottom line - I think a lot of these superfans (many of whom traveled on their own dime to the party) will probably feel alienated by this new app. Gowalla will probably have to find a whole new market, which may not be the worst thing but won't be the easiest either.

No matter what, I think Gowalla has a huge uphill battle to climb. They haven't even really been able to build much excitement here in Austin (even among people I know who are addicted to social media). I think their design and UI is top notch, but they seem to be missing whatever makes consumers super excited.
Japan's richest entrepreneur plans country's shift to renewable energy
I've always felt this way... enjoying a story is more about the experience the writer creates while telling it. I always encourage people to go ahead and "spoil" the story for me.
You know how it is with benchmarks...it can vary so much. I'm not sure how much work is done these days on the OCaml compiler. I recall there being a big debate a few years back about it, a lot of people cried foul that OCaml benchmarks were close to C/C++ speeds because of the heavy use of OCaml's imperative constructs (rather than writing functional style implementations of the code).

In my experience with OCaml, you can write efficient code that approaches C/C++ speeds if you know how functional language compilers work. The biggest performance killer in functional languages is efficiently implementing closures on a stack based machine (i.e. funarg problem). OCaml is smart in that it implements activation records on the stack if it can tell that a function won't return a closure. If you're writing in a heavily functional style, you'll inherently create a lot of closures and lots of heap-based activation records (i.e. less efficient). At the same time, the compiler can do a lot of interesting optimizations that would be difficult in an imperative language. Pretty much every OCaml book including the official manual describes all the various places where you can have performance penalties and what OCaml is doing underneath the hood. Also like any half decent functional compiler, OCaml performs a lot of inlining which results in huge performance gains.

One thing to note, a big part of the reason why OCaml as well as other ML languages and Haskell have such great performance compared to other functional languages is because of very strict and static typing. For example, one of the interesting restrictions of the OCaml type system when dealing with objects is that you cannot downcast an object once it has been upcast (i.e. like a C++ dynamic_cast). Though this restriction is annoying, the generated code never has to do any runtime type checking - everything is statically verified!
How My Startup Suffered Thanks To Arrington's Conflicts Of Interest
I chose interpolation in this example because I found the lack of any break character between the method and the variable to not read well.

puts k + " " + v

Does that execute as puts(k) + " " + v, puts(k + " ") + v or any other combination? While those of us familiar with Ruby know the answer, I would still argue that it takes greater cognitive resources to evaluate over the single string, especially in the presence of a syntax highlighting editor who clearly defines the string boundaries in colour.

You are right that it is definitely subjective. Coding is user interface design, but we don't usually have the luxury of processes like A/B testing to validate our work like other interface designers do. It would be interesting to put both of our code samples along with some other variations in front of an audience and see how they are received.
Processing CoffeeScript Editor
Ask HN: How to test price variations? 
We have a product with a setup fee and a monthly fee (currently $399 + $20/mo).

I'd like to do some testing of variations on the setup price. What's the best way to do this? It seems unwise to simply randomly show different prices A/B style.

- Should we try a higher price for a time period, then a lower price for a time period? Or vice-versa?

- What's a good time period to test? 2 weeks? 1 month? 2 months?

- Other ideas for testing price changes?
Web software at that. HNot to pile on (I saw the comment below about sloppy wording), but there are a lot of other business models besides 'online service that does one thing really well'. If you want to create the next Photoshop or Excel, for example, you need to deliver a lot of functionality right from the get-go, which will take longer to build.
Carpentry Tools
(I didn't downvote you)

I think it's important to make a distinction between businesses that are aesthetically pleasing and appealing to you, and business-in-general that's successful. Lessons from business-in-general can be very useful even if you wouldn't patronize them yourself and it's always nice when people open up about their experience.

Unless a business is actively knowingly hurting people, I think it's good to celebrate business-in-general even if the aesthetics/offers don't appeal to you.
this is awesome. I just discovered another place to hit on my vegas trip next march.
The employee files for unemployment insurance regardless, lying and claiming they were laid off.
You file a dispute, claiming they were terminated for cause.
The unemployment office makes it quite clear that you will lose your dispute and should drop it.
You refuse, because you have a good clear case where clearly this guy was fired for cause.
You present your good clear case, and you lose anyway, and the person fired for cause still gets unemployment, and your unemployment insurance rates go up.

That's just how it works. It's not how it's written, and it's not how it's supposed to work, but it's how it works.
"We want to establish the idea that a computer language is not just a way of getting a computer to perform operations but rather that it is a novel formal medium for expressing ideas about methodology."

Programming: it's not just a skill. It's a way of life.

http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book-Z-H-7.html#...
How would this be linkbait? Unless you mean "interesting for developers who aren't using GCC or Clang."
Wow, that can't be legal
I tried to create an account and got a php error
chx- your personal attacks would be distressing, if they weren't so hilariously silly. Yes, my attempts at keeping the Drupal Association accountable, and specifically howling against the DA taking money out of my pocket and putting it directly into the pockets of my competitors hurts Drupal, causes global warming, and is almost completely to blame for world hunger.

For anyone who wants to know what this angry fellow is referring to (self dealing on the Drupal Association board), you can find it in my complaint on groups.drupal.org: http://groups.drupal.org/node/162604
I do a lot of near-pixel-for-pixel reproduction from Photoshop documents, and I find that using rule nesting, mixins and child selectors (a similar style to the final example from the article, the first example is atrocious) definitely helps me build more semantic HTML.

Here is a quick cut-and-paste from a LESS stylesheet:

https://gist.github.com/1212027

There are a lot of random items and I find it easier not to cascade styles as much as some recommend. I try to consolidate styles into generic classes or mixins as I find opportunities to re-use them. I try not to use the child selector unnecessarily (the article uses it a totally unnecessary amount) because I often need to add unsemantic wrapper elements to achieve the right effect.
Small typo on landing page: "We ate a small team..."
Congrats, Robbie and crew! You guys deserve it.
Seedcamp Week 2011 – meet the finalists, the winners and one good Samaritan
> There has been tremendous progress in both frameworks and languages over the last decade. If you can't see that then, well, I don't really know what else to say, other than to perhaps get off your lawn.

If that's true, can programmers today do things they couldn't do 10 years ago? Can they program faster than they could 10 years ago due to all these innovations in languages and frameworks? I'd say no on both counts.
"... churning out quite a few CS graduates who are simply not smart enough to work as programmers on anything more sophisticated than Yet Another Java Accounting Application, although they did manage to squeak through the newly-dumbed-down coursework."

From a guy whose company isn't creating accounting applications but Yet Another Bug-Tracking Application, Yet Another Source Control Application, and Yet Another Remote Desktop Application. I generally like Spolsky's articles about software but this one is a little too pot-kettle for my taste.

The plain fact is that the time of low-level languages where pointers are king is over. You can get great performance without them, more specifically without messing with memory at all. Of course, pointers still have their place and if you want to go that route feel free, but you can do a lot without them.

As a disclaimer, I went to school where C was our weed out course and Java was the new-hotness. On graduation I was in a university focus group that specifically asked us if they should change from C to Java for the intro course (I voted against the change). I like pointers and recursion but do not see understanding those as defining a great developer. I've seen plenty of people who were way more adept at pointers that couldn't design a fuctional system if they tried.
If you have a tour video, which is nice, please try to create voice-over (very easy with 10.6+) - your video isn't that clear.
Here is the error.
Fatal error: Call to undefined method Account::logger() in /home/www/eventlogapp/application/controllers/account.php on line 49
Seems to have created an account for me though
One bus away is definitely on my list, this was just first in a series of transit API related posts.
I staff my company only with people whom I distrust, but whom I know I can defeat in hand-to-hand combat. At first it seems like a bad work environment, but the beatings continue until morale improves.
Best thing to do is test all reasonable trial expiration scenarious, including those tied to user behavior instead of time. You never know what will be optimal, you need to test because each product and audience is unique. I know of a number of software publishers who had near zero conversion with a 30 or 15 day trial but made a lot of money when they expired trials based on other factors such as usage.
Two interesting beginner posts: http://www.skorks.com/2011/09/why-developers-never-use-state...
http://www.shopify.com/technology/3383012-why-developers-sho...

And a more dense and complete beginner friendly article: http://ai-depot.com/FiniteStateMachines/
Adventures in self-publishing: Here’s what a month-old news site looks like
Are these two laws even mutually exclusive?
You should probably connect with the team at LearnBoost. They've had great traction building a product that serves K-12.
Apple's Third Co-Founder Sold His 10% Stake For $800
Reminder: pg and zed are not deities. They have an opinion.
YC Office Hours at TC Disrupt [Live]
Kind of predictable. There is no way he could be a "serious startup journalist" while working as a VC. While at first AOL seemed to be the "big evil corp.", it now seems to me that this is a simple journalistic principle that should be held and valued highly. As such, I applaud AOL to sticking to this principle. It's simply the right decision. And if Arrington did a good job and laid all the groundwork (and AOL doesn't mess up), techcrunch will keep on going as it has..
Kendo UI - a framework for modern HTML UI
I might be an outlier, but, I spent a few hours last weekend looking for a color picker that had CMYK support.

Although, maybe I'll send a pull request your way, if I find the time to add it in.. should just be a matter of colorUsingColorSpace: and {cyan, magenta, yellow, black}Components of NSColor and a quick addition to your NSColorFormatter.

(// edit: other than that, this looks pretty awesome.)
http://wiki.basho.com/The-Riak-Fast-Track.html

It is being updated now for Riak 1.0.
They were pretty much forced to pivot because they could not compete with Foursquare.
Without it, SELECT * FROM table WHERE text_column LIKE '%word%' involves a full table scan. With KNN + pg_trgm, it's an index scan. That's huge.
That was a tongue in cheek comment, maybe not so explicit; however, I still think there's quite a bit of truth in it. The mom and pop store example isn't quite relevant because (i) generally "mom" marries into the business, i.e. it was established before she came in, she just helps and (ii) well, there's a reason they are called mom and pop, they are married (when expectations about marriage were a little different). That's why you see so few such stores established by twenty somethings today.
Categorizing software bugs as Minecraft mobs
Why she left Hunch is really none of your business or mine.

Mike Arrington may or may not have received some information from someone who may or may not have been telling the truth, which he then chose to describe in a blog post as 'sordid'. That still doesn't make idle gossip and speculation appropriate.
i look forward to the rest of your series, then :)
Paul Graham and Harj Taggar on stage right now
So Mr. Wildberger has rediscovered mathematical constructivism. This article would have been more newsworthy around, say, 1920.
More people are abandoning US citizenship because a rule change in 2008 has made it simpler, cheaper, and less restrictive to do so: http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/16/more-americans-...
Jelly-like polymer gel battery promises safe, flexible lithium-ion replacement
Multitouch Finger Paintings
It seems to me like 'Koomey's Law' is just an emergent property of Moore's Law.
I must say I reacted in the same way when I read about Madoff. The fact that people who are supposed to inspect investments would fall for such a scheme was one of the first nails that was put in the esteem I had for economy specialists.
GE Data Visualization: The Breast Cancer Conversation
Reading Is Elemental: How to preserve the humanities
> Young people care a lot more about what others think, the very foundation of "expensive lifestyles".

Speaking of ageist ...
Having started on QBasic as a kid, cut my teeth in high school on Pascal/C/C++, continued with C/C++ in college and the first part of my career, then transitioned to Java, then expanded into a blur of languages (Ruby/Python/Perl/C#/Scala/Groovy/Boo) I keep coming back to Java when I want to accomplish most of my tasks.

I prefer Java's environment compatibility over C#'s.
I prefer Java's execution speed over Python/Ruby.
I abhor Perl's syntax, and would rather use Ruby/Python/Groovy to solve Perl problems.
Java's greatest strength is it's JVM, cheap, reliable, versatile.
C/C++ force me to deal with a class of memory management bugs that I would rather not, even as a seasoned programmer who understands pointers/references/diamond problem/template meta programming/data structures.
Non-type safe languages force me to move things the compiler is doing for me, into a test infrastructure. I'm not removing the compiling phase, just renaming it to unit tests.
Lamda functions/co-routines and no-side effects are interesting, and makes threaded programming easier, but need more exposure to the subject, it's more a hobby then a tool in my belt at this point.

So I come back to Java

Let me ask you, what do you perceive as a "better language", and for what field?
I'm working on deeper stories along these lines. Many of these agencies have signed into extremely long, and closed contracts, that give away ownership of "our" data.
"Suppose you're working on a product that is time sensitive."

Pick another project. There's a lot of money to be made on the internet.
The ultimate form of social networking. We will be more connected than ever! So this was what Zuckerberg has been planning all along...LOL
I've actually come to believe that, with what I know now, I could have gotten traction with a few of my earlier ideas. Impossible to know for sure.
The liquidity of BTCs is notoriously better than that of live or dead chickens...
>My best colleagues made/make more than my average colleagues, at every place that I've worked, and that's exactly as it should be, IMO. //

Do they do a different job or produce more output in the same job? That's the only reason, IMO, for them to get paid differently. I believe that you should get paid the same to do the same job.
> In fact most wage earners have exceptionally high mobility in the United States, supporting evidence in this publication from the Evil Capitalist Fed.

That's false. The U.S. has considerably less income mobility than other industrialized nations:

http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2006/04/Hertz_Mobilit...
Maybe I was mistaken about their relationship, but that wasn't my point (at least not my main one): With people as prominent as Fake leaving a company (that she cofounded) you just can't say "mind your own business, she's free to do anything", people want to know. When Bratz or Jobs or Schmidt changed their roles or left, could you make the same comment?
Great suggestions. Very interesting...thanks for sharing.
24 Habits of Insanely Great Business Leaders
I'm working on adding in a voiceover, wasn't possible tonight since there's no place quite in my house. But thanks for the comment.
They don't matter because having one at the right time in the right place is entirely out of your control. It is much better to build a system capable of handling an idea then to spend a lot of time waiting on the 'right' idea.
Woops, thanks for letting me know. It's fixed now. :)
Seo Web Mexico
Seo Web México – El Blog ha sido creado con el principal propósito de compartir los conocimientos y estrategias de Marketing Online, claves y secretos de Google Adwords, Herramientas del SEO, noticias interesantes sobre SEO y mas, esperando que a algunos de mis artículos sean de gran utilidad para iniciarte en este mercado del Posicionamiento Web y Marketing Online.
I may have been hungry whilst writing that.
He wrote an article about a year later which addressed almost exactly that point: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/08/01.html
I do not think anybody would want to build a large installation with cells with a 0.1% efficiency, even if they could get them for free.

$ per m² is important, too. Reason is that, the lower prices get, the greater the fraction of installation costs that are not due to the price of the solar cells themselves. Those costs scale with panel area, not with power output, and they do not sink.
Good point. Thanks for the meta-clarification.
This is the correct answer. Sure you can work smarter; sure, you can come up with superior ideas; but time is almost always the limiting factor in execution.

It's unpopular to rally against the cheerleading "you can do it!" crowd here, but the reality is that you've made a choice to have a family, and that choice carries some consequences with it. Some people who have families choose to pursue their work above all else anyway, but this approach often carries the cost of divorce, resentful children, and some degree of social ostracism.
John Graham-Cumming is also the author of The Geek Atlas.

http://www.geekatlas.com/
That is the attitude of all the people who later look at a either a working process, or a working product and say, "damn, why didn't I think of that?"
Should I as a web app developer at a startup be looking for an RDBMS beyond PostgreSQL, probably a commercial one?

I have somewhat of a database background, so I see the obvious advantages of PostgreSQL over MySQL. In particular, things like more procedural language support, a better query optimizer, better concurrency control, etc. (Though things like Amazon RDS are compelling from a deployment perspective.)

I fundamentally believe that using an RDBMS, rather than a NoSQL data store is the right approach for rapid development of web apps. (Though, I primarily mean this as an attack on, e.g., MongoDB, since I think Redis is great, just not a replacement for an RDBMS.)

However, I have almost no experience with the more advanced end of the RDBMS spectrum, primarily because they tend to cost money (for the real, non-free versions). Should I be learning/looking at DB2? Should I be learning/looking at Oracle?

Or do the additional features of these more advanced RDBMS options require such specialized scenarios (a bank, a big enterprise) or such specialized hardware (weird clustered setups) that MySQL/PostgreSQL will always be just as good?
Groupon Needs to Get Its Growth On
I think the tool is cool, but you could have shown an error message and greyed out/disabled the input elements rather than disable the entire site and block the user from reading anything.
Am I one of the few who thinks that Arrington & TechCrunch are a problem in the startup world today?

The reason TC gets the scoops is in part because they strong-arm startups by not writing about them if they don't provide an exclusive. Now, granted they get a lot of scoops about major companies which is quite impressive - but honestly, that's not very insightful, just juicy bits of info that we like to read about.

Most startups that TC 'scoops' tend to be "social mobile local" startups that generate buzz - there are a lot of successful startups in decidedly non-sexy areas that are quite profitable, which never get covered because they don't get the same page views that say, Color's $40 million investment does.

I think Arrington & TC actively hurt the startup community by providing a narrow world-view. Sites like GigaOM & Ars Technica provide thoughtful, indepth analysis of the technology scene , while TechCrunch continues to post opinionated, linkbait pieces.

Am I the only one who feels that TechCrunch is the startup world's Jersey Shore? Just because you get a lot of views doesn't mean that your content is valuable or useful in any way.
So there will be an "official" JS VM but there will be no actual compilation. Title should be updated IMHO.
A link to the real article from MIT's Technology Review:
http://www.technologyreview.com/printer_friendly_article.asp...