skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That tends to be the cash-cow that enterprise software vendors grow into (SAP, Oracle, et al), though I agree that it's not the place you want to target from the get-go. It probably does have some seductiveness if you're boot-strapping.
I assume this wasn't meant to be comprehensive, but I believe a big factor for many developers is their coworkers. Working with people that are your equals (or better, people you can learn from) is very motivating.

Will I have to deal with people that don't really know the language we use and ask me questions instead of doing minimal investigation on their own? Will my coworkers produce code that looks like something you'd expect from a freshman CS student? Will I spend much of my time putting out fires caused by incompetent coworkers?
This is so true, usually when I start a project and there are lots a problems to solve I'm hyper motivated but by the end of the product development I start loosing focus and it's a pain to do little bug fixes.
Why is he being so demanding for such a low-paying job? I made this much money being a janitor when I was in high school.
Start-Up Offers Lower-Price DNA Mapping: Complete genome for $5,000
A contest between two modes of thinking in the election.
It's similar to Sequoia's "Elements of Sustainable Companies", but well, not as focused:

http://www.sequoiacap.com/ideas/

(Currently down, Google cache below)

http://tinyurl.com/4byylj

I really like the Sequoia list -- perhaps because it's like a point you can look at and aim for when trying to sort out business ideas.
PageRank = Direct Democracy
No. You can compile the vast majority of unix projects on linux and run them with no modifications. Darwinports is ok if you want only the top 1% of popular projects, often several versions behind.
Another waste of space by Jonah Lehrer
Do we all have some synaesthetic ability?
You're right that this could theoretically be the intent -- but it's very unlikely that it's necessary: "The value of errno is zero at program startup" - ISO/IEC 9899:TC2. If EINTR was 0, there'd be no way of detecting it.
Here's a point I wish were made more often:

The highly motivated people don’t come to work to play xbox.

I so agree. For great programmers working on great projects the work itself is the fun. Far too much emphasis is placed on extraneous goodies, probably because they're visible and everybody (including managers and journalists) can understand them.
RFC 2324 is a lot simpler.
We have built an online donation processing platform that exposes a web services API. We haven't launched yet - but our brochureware site is www.benevity.org

Our mission is to facilitate $1 Billion of online giving through the Benevity Network from individuals, integration partners and corporate sponsors by December 31, 2013.

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upmod if you tried mono, liked it, but just couldn't stand seeing files with .exe and .dll extensions on your linux box
error_intr is meaningful, but it's defined as the value of EINTR, which can never be zero -- so this is a bug.
A Free Network Service for Social News
Social news Web sites like Reddit, Digg, Mixx, Yahoo! Buzz and Propeller have become a staple of many people ’s Web experience. How can we make a social news site that meets the goals of the Franklin Street Statement (Free Software, Free Data)?
The piece is an anecdote.
layoffs are coming all over the bay area. whatever started with GOOG going public is now over in the markets. AAPL and GOOG are off 50% from the highs. YHOO is headed for 14 (congrats jerry, could of had 34). INTC is trading at levels from the 90s. and at least these companies can claim to be "in business". for the rest of the living-on-funding, maybe-one-day crowd, its time to read the tea leaves: the party is over
Ask HN: What are your thoughts on "unofficial" programming languages in companies?
All companies have their standards as to what languages they will support and not support. The company I work for in particular, a 10,000+ corporation, is strictly a Microsoft shop. I understand the decision for having "official" languages from a management point-of-view; supportability is the bottom line.

But after reading "Developing Erlang at Yahoo!" and how the new Delicious is written in Erlang, I started to think about how "unofficial" languages can be approved up the ranks for a production system, such as the case with Delicious at Yahoo! I wish the slides explained more about the decision making in the early stages. What are your thoughts about developing in languages that are not supported? If you were proposing to use unsupported language x to build a system, what would your argument be to go this route?

(My aim is to make this conversation more about management and less about programming language wars)
I have for years made it a habit to write "if (CONSTANT == variable)" rather than "if (variable == CONSTANT)" so that if (oh, let's be honest -- when) I accidentally use "=" instead of "==" I'll get a big nasty compiler error.

Some people have commented that it "looks kinda backwards," and I'm not sure what to make of that. My "backwards" way is perfectly correct, C-wise and math-wise, it doesn't make the code hard to understand, and it solves a real problem.

But I appreciate that it's important not to upset the other people on your team willy-nilly. So it's a bit of a quandry.
indeed! the aeron chair went from cool office tech to sad artifact from the collapse. amazingly i found someone who actually paid the retail list price for one.

the freedom chair owns it anyway
The product continued to make them a lot of money after I left, so it's not like they lost anyone critical :-)

I think what this shows is that products are successful after they become successful. Once everyone has heard of your product and know that it's good, they want it ... regardless of whether or not the competition is "better".

If I were Microsoft and one day I replaced Visual Studio with vim, I'm sure people would like it much more than when it was called "vim".
I would also like to understand the role of the naked woman in the picture.

maybe your boyfriend can explain it to you
DOW under 10,000
Taleb - the new sage of Wall Street |
I noticed my server was sluggish. I ssh'd into it just in time to see some out of memory errors and notice my top was loaded with apache children. My ssh terminal became unresponsive.

I went to the slicehost chatroom and said "uh oh" and they told me to use their local web-based console. It got me to the machine just in time to see an endless loop of 'out of memory' spam.

They told me I was swapping like crazy and having memory problems. They asked me about my mysql/apache config.

As per their suggestion, I rebooting the machine to try to get into apache and lower the number of children, and the machine crashed after reboot before I could do anything, with more out of memory spam.

They suggested the best next step was to do an upgrade on the slice from 256 to 512, which I did. It took about 10 minutes. It's prorated, so I only pay the higher price for the amount of time I'm at 512. Once I upgraded, the machine was stable enough for me to re-enable caching.

Now that the crisis was averted, all the extra apache threads died off, and my machine went back to normal. They gave me a bunch of links showing how to more properly configure apache/mysql for low-ram VPSs.
AWS Start-up Challenge
I agree with this. I am generally not a direct or assertive person, but when it comes to issues of customer service I strongly dislike the asynchronous aspect of most computer based communication.

Online chat wouldn't qualify as asynchronous, I suppose, but the one experience I had with it (ordering internal parts for a malfunctioning HP laptop) involved an agent replying once every 7-10 minutes -- one time it was so slow that I actually left for lunch before getting a response. Waiting 10 minutes to get a very clearly cut and paste answer does not give one happy customer service feelings.

So yeah, for me a quick phone call (even if I have to have the phone on mute for 10 minutes while I wait for a person) wins out over the new (cheaper) ways of communicating.
ugh, here's a better idea, i'll self-fund so i don't have to indulge stupid cunts and the lists they scribbled down in the business section of barnes and noble

if things were nearly as much of a lock as this person demands, i sure as shit wouldn't have to slum it with angel funding, i could go to a marquee vc firm
It seems to me that the hardest part about implementing an idea is probably figuring out how to make money out of it and, since that is something (smart) investors require for starters, my question is: How does one come up with a business model for, say, a website for monkey owners to ask questions about their food (not the owners', the monkeys' :))?

Is the grand majority of websites limited to rely on advertisement or are there some constructive guidelines to help in this subject?
sounds like notes with a new name and an integrated wiki

when you hear "lotus notes", RUN THE OTHER WAY AS FAST AS YOU CAN

anyone who has actually used it will agree
yeah, I'll bet we'll see a lot more people going for MBAs or other grad schools this year.
Avoiding the Dangers of Ambiguously Defined Data-Types
Self-Storage
Local Storage – Local Self Storage – Local Self Storage Units – Local Car RV Storage
Android emulator from the command line
Another example for an annoying update was the recent xbox live update. The service was down for 24hrs and nothing had changed. Users were pissed.
Hacking the London Underground
Details of how to hack one of the world's most popular smartcards (used in the London Underground system) have been published online.

For the technical details see:
http://www.sos.cs.ru.nl/applications/rfid/2008-esorics.pdf
Far (not 10% worthy) fetched but could this also be related to them improving operational automation?
Resumes, cover letters, and the lot of it are overrated. I've gotten nearly all of my work through word-of-mouth and the same is true of most good programmers I know. The way to do this is a lot more congenial to good hackers than the resume/interview circuit: make friends with the kind of people you'd like to work with, work on personal and/or open source projects, hone your skills. You'll build a reputation among your local tech community and (eventually) hear about good jobs from good people. Most such jobs never get posted in the first place because they're filled the way I'm describing.
Never spend money you don't have, just charge things to your card and pay it off at the end of the month

Isn't a debit card better for that?
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I've heard this argument thrown about before, and it really doesn't work for me.

First off, I'm fairly certain that Docs doesn't allow for offline editing yet, and that's a biggie. Google would want to have that in place before launching Chrome, if that was their goal. There would also be much more of an effort FROM Google to do this.

Second off, look at how Docs has been evolving. It's not being treated as a huge, money-throwing competitor. I mean, it's been passed by several document editors, most primarily Buzzword, and it's happened without Google making any sort of a fuss.

The method of saving documents is horribly inefficient. If you need an SSB for every single document, it's merely adding clutter and it's using a fairly inefficient task process to do so.

Frankly, I don't think that Docs is an Office competitor. I think that people who think that are deluding themselves. Docs is an effort by Google to hold more of your work and to index it. I've seen several people using Docs as a blog to distribute papers. That's what Google wants. It's like how they will give you links to Notebooks if you look for certain research information. They're going entirely the wrong way with Docs for it to work well.

If anything, I think they made Chrome to force everybody else's hand. Ultrafast Javascript, advanced script handling, Gears support: they're doing that so everybody else feels forced to catch up. I'd guess the goal of Chrome is to advance the web browser so that Google can make its own products more complex. Other theories ring hollow.
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Alas, I have never found a way to write a resume that even remotely comes close to properly describing me.

OTOH, every piece of software I have ever written says volumes about me.

Therefore...

Screw job hunting, write some software, start a company and sell that software.

What a concept.
I always imagine years to be a series of ovals; with the summer and winter months of the year forming the long part.
Slicehost is just like your real server now, but imagine your real server running Wordpress like this guy without caching...on 256 megs of RAM (the cheapest package).

I run a lot of stuff off a single 256 slice myself, and have had zero problems.
2. Include a misspelling.

7. Apply for a job for which you are clearly overqualified for

I guess what he means is "prove that you can turn a spell-checker on".
If anyone is interested in sticking their head in a proton beam, you could try proton therapy. Like most things, the dose makes the poison.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton_therapy
Supply and demand. He said he received 90 resumes.
This is what I like least about Rand detractors: they never actually seem to have read the book.

Rand gets very specific about what constitutes a useful law and what doesn't. Mainly, she says that government should protect the people with law enforcement, protect their rights with courtrooms, and protect the nation with a defensive military - all things that private enterprise can't be trusted to do. She believes in government in a limited capacity, but she believes it should exist.

And one thing people don't seem to get while reading Atlas: she's aware that she's writing about a pipe dream. Her story is merely a hypothetical ideal, not an idea of what she actually wants to happen. Her writing worked, too: it made millions of people think about self-reliance and freedom. And that's not a bad thing at all.
It's just a financial vernacular. Call option is a type of a contract that gives the buyer an 'option' to buy the underlying instrument (a derivative or a stock in this case) at a later date at a specified value. Simply put: the buyer will profit if the value of the company increases.

So all he's is saying that he is looking to invest into a business that will rise in value over time and that will be sold to a third party – "an inherent" part – and he also means that he's not looking to invest in "lifestyle"/"we'll pay out dividend"/"37sig" type businesses. And the last sentence fragment is self explanatory: he expects the value of the company to increase the value over time by at least 10x so he makes back roughly 10x on his investment (roughly since it doesn't really work out like that with IRR).
She's not somebody to be taken entirely practically, no. However, she's invaluable in that she teaches that man should exist for the sake of himself, and in that she writes in a captivating manner that has drawn millions of people in.

I would never call myself Republican (I hate social conservativism with a passion) nor libertarian (I hate that they've made such a mockery of themselves), but Rand certainly showed me that the far left was as crazy as the far right.

I think that free markets go too far in their "punishment" when they start punishing companies who ARE working for their wealth. As things stand right now, one side isn't being punished enough, while the other site is being punished too much.
Software is about stories, not code
Other things to prevent this error:
1) Don't ever use assignment in a conditional expression, even on purpose.
2) Aggressively declare everything as const, even scalar input parameters to your function.
3) Use code analysis tools that treat this as a warning, which you should be treating as an error.
And it's not. Because from the data I've looked at, 10% is a vastly high number. You can't make numbers up and call them statistically relevant. And you can't disregard the fact that 3 out of 4 could just as easily be the statistical anomaly.

However, the other comment I've made still stands. Can we all drop it? Nobody cares, nobody will prove anything either way. I like the MacBook Pro, love it, think it's the best machine I've ever used. You, Matt, don't. Neither of our opinions matter to the other person, and this entire thread was started pointlessly and seemingly with intent to inflame. Let's drop it and go argue our operating system of choice somewhere that invites actual DISCUSSION.
Deep water wind turbines vs. NIMBY: see for yourself
I find it surprising no one commented "(possibly) NSFW!" yet...
Great market timing!
The problem with Philadelphia is the City of Philadelphia. The surrounding suburbs have tons of capital and businesses and highly educated people and very nice neighborhoods. The city itself is a hopeless basket-case. It just seems to me that you can't make the leap into being a first tier metro region without desirable urban neighborhoods. I've read that younger people leave Pennsylvania not for lack of jobs or for notably better wages, but because it's boring.
I'm just saying what works for me. But I'm also looking to have fun, etc. I'm reasonably sure I don't want to be a VC...
Good overview of the motivations behind the DreamIt program as it ran this past summer, but it does cover any of the apparent upcoming changes to the DreamIt model which were mentioned (http://www.psustartups.com/content/2008/09/25/ignitephilly-a...) in Steve Welch's (another of the DreamIt founders) ignitePhilly talk, including the so called "Hacker Track".
I thought the same thing. The acquisitions part seems to me to be positive news, and my impression of eBay is that it has become large, slow and bloated.
EBay Spends $1.34 Billion On Bill Me Later, Danish Sites
>The other point I'd make is that far too much attention is paid to the reasons why PHP sucks, when we should instead be trying to figure out why PHP even exists.

Because you can go to GoDaddy today and pay $3.99 for a hosting account and start writing PHP code right next to the HTML in your site. It's simple. If all you know about web programming is HTML, then PHP is an easy next step.

Also, it's widely used.

Does Perl do that? I don't know. I don't think Ruby or Python come close to the simplicity. It took me way longer to set up my first Rails server than it did to write my first PHP function.
I don't think so, but there were a few people from Glasgow at the last meetup.
As someone who lives just outside Philadelphia I would disagree. At least the people I know who have left the city do so because they only came here for school and take jobs back home.
Couldn't agree more with the idea with about ignoring companies that say they need $5-$10 mil in order to be a "viable business." Today's companies (look at ycombinator) can do that with much, much less. $1-$2 mil seems like a good level - more than I would personally need! :)

To restate/clarify my original point (messed up the thread, my bad): getting a valuation of $25 mil to $50 mil, with a TOTAL investment of $1-$2 million is very hard. Google and a few choice companies may have done that, but I think that's definitely the exception. A lot of good companies are out there that aren't Googles (take over the entire market in 5 years) that deserve investment, as well.

These investments might not produce a valuation of $25-$50 mil after 5 years (like Google, etc etc) - but maybe they would after 10, 12, 15 years. This is where I think we agree.
> But after reading "Developing Erlang at Yahoo!" and how the new Delicious is written in Erlang

Didn't you read the bit about it not being written in Erlang ?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=323116

One route would be simply to go work somewhere where you can learn new languages, rather than try and get around obstacles at BigCorp.
Not much to add beyond what's already been said. The linked article isn't very good, but the paper itself may be correct. I haven’t checked the paper, but the possibility of this kind of break is quite plausible. The reason is that when quantum cryptography researchers say quantum cryptography is "unbreakable", there’s many unspoken caveats. All they mean is that the theoretical scheme itself is unbreakable. Of course, (a) the real-world implementation may differ in subtle ways from the theoretical scheme; and (b) side-channel attacks cannot be ruled out. Both these possibilities can potentially be exploited to crack quantum cryptography. I’ve written about this at some length at: http://michaelnielsen.org/blog/?p=122

If you feel a bit cheated by this state of affairs, given the hype that often surrounds quantum cryptography, I don’t blame you.
It's down again now. Just make this point to a static page?
EBay Buys Bill Me Later and DBA - Lays Off 1,000
I meant the "problematic" list -- not yours. What you said jives with what I've heard from other angel investors -- that it's more of a gut feeling / labor of love than a calculated investment.
Hakia Semantic Search Taps Librarians for More Credible Results
is it too late to get our $700 billion back?