skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Risk. I'm risk-averse (as most people who objectively have it pretty good are). I have shit to loose.

Bureaucracy. I hate that I can't just do something. Ironically, the level of bureaucracy might be less at my job than if I worked for myself because if I work for myself I have to do lots of crap like dealing with laws that govern companies. I could hire a lawyer/accountant, but that gets back to Risk.

Sites like this. They make you think too much about scaling and building for a billion users. Databases don't scale. None of them. You do have to turn to a dumber object store at some point and loose a lot of query power. I'm moving past this mental roadblock.

Winner-take-all economies. A lot of what I would like to create isn't likely to result in money. This isn't because they don't have value. It's because they aren't good without lots of users. This is the most aggravating. Once users are using one thing, even if you're better, they just use that one thing for the same reason that more data trumps better algorithms.
Do you think the reference to the "old car with weeds growing over it's tires" is a reference to mac os x being built on top of *nix?
Using Natural Selection to Investigate Software Complexities
"Practical Brainfuck?! What was I thinking?"
They are just going from one gimmick to another. Although I like Vespas.

The Smart car is really only useful in urban environments, and is as much or more $$$ than my 4-door Toyota Echo which gets equivalent mpg and can seat 4 people and has a useful trunk.
Persona-Driven Development: Meet Customers First, Write Unit Tests Later
The biggest problem - no push notification.
TC50: Twitter-for-business startup Yammer wins TechCrunch50, I may eat my hat
MIT researchers find memory capacity much bigger than previously thought
Could you name some of these places?
And this is supposed to replace java? ;)
If you liked this and you want to go old school for a bit, check out these virtual sliderules. Do a few calculations. Its very addicting.

http://www.antiquark.com/sliderule/sim/
i like joel, his posts always get to the heart of what "everyman" coders deal with and he isn't pompous about anything

i've watched him move through lisp, adopt/drop haskell, claim ocaml was the way to go, and jump on erlang

my guess is that he has discovered what others have - erlang is half-baked in many ways. the community is microscopic even compared to those for lisp, haskell and ocaml. erlang is slow. haskell is faster at everything erlang does, including massive concurrency. everywhere but concurrency, ocaml and haskell destroy erlang performance by a substantial margin. haskell lisp have robust and well-used packaging systems and tools.i really don't know why erlang is so hyped.

my guess is that in the end, joel will end up on c++ or back on haskell.
I'm still in high school, but this summer i had a chance of getting a job. I didn't get one, instead i decided that i need to learn to program better and learn a few new languages. I also learned to draw, and I've been working on my writing style and my English. I also learned a lot of otter stuff(how to meditate for example). I don't know if I'll ever get a "real job", but I'll avoid it if i can. I probably will get one eventually, money is not useless. We like adventure more, and don't like having a boss in general(or any other authority figure for that matter). We are not afraid of failure, if we fail, big deal, we can take it(job security is for people who are afraid of change). I don't know how many hackers are like this, but from what I read on HN, there are a lot of them. You should ask your hacker about his plan, he may have good reasons.
There is a couple of problems with the current Erlang implementation that tends to nag me. One of the more problematic for newcomers is that the bytecode format doesn't contain line-number references from the original source. Hence, an error can not show you exactly where the problem occurs, but it can give you a backtrace. This is rather unfortunate for Erlangs adoption.
If you don't think you can stop him, don't try to fight it. Let him quit, and work out a part-time consulting deal. If you really think so highly of this guy, offer to become his first client and maybe invest in his new venture.
Yeah, the last time Microsoft made me laugh in a way that wasn't basically Linux newbie's schadenfreude was in Coupland's _Microserfs_.
Enso (Aza Raskin)
Whatever happened to "release early, release often?" Or does that only apply to startups?
Automate one-on-one Obama advocacy by embedding your arguments into a reddit-like Chatbot.
Did the falling man leave a note?!

This romantic pandering about a horrible situation is just not making any sense. He jumped because, perhaps he got scared? Paniced? Decided it was better than suffocation/burning? He didn't say when he got to the ground level.

"Act of defiance"? Who the hell cares?! The building still got destroyed and they're all still dead, the US still went to war, etc.

I guess if emotional romantic babbling is how one deals with emotional stress, then fine. But try not to make factual conclusions
->+>+++>>?
While one-on-one advocacy in person can be quite effective, automating one-on-one advocacy by way of a chatbot allows you to reach more people.

BTW, "one-on-one" here refers to the one-on-one conversation between the chatbot and a human. The chatbot's rules come from many people, so it's not one-on-one between the rule submitter and the person chatting with the bot.
20% to do whatever you want (as long as it makes things better), kept me in the corporate environment ...
Re-reading this article, it makes me think of the BF Skinner pigeon experiments where he described superstitions. It also reminds me of human pattern recognition and how humans will see things when they're not there.

Perhaps the falling man fell in that way by chance? I guess we'll never know, but let's not draw wild and probably invalid conclusions.
Nice. It won't be long before the chatbot will be the most electable candidate! (All soundbites, zero thought. Perfect politician)
The security blanket is nice and its probably what keeps most people in their place in a kind of Matrix mentality. Startups only offer the truth of what you dare to be vs what the blue pill offers you.

He has you, and all that corporate goodness but thats just it, you have him. He needs more.

I think only thing you're missing here is the sheer creation aspect. Creating, manifesting that did not exist before and won't go beyond your napkin sketch unless you take it somewhere.
Re-read article. Nope, still snuff photos.
Use Icontact or Mailchimp then.
Why did this get modded down? It seems informative and it's on topic. I don't know Erlang. Is this information incorrect or something?
The BBC has a special version of RealPlayer that doesn't have the adware or nag screens:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/webwise/categories/plug/real/newreal.sh...
99.52% of statistics are made up. The rest is irrelevant. </quote> http://www.dilbert.com/strips/comic/2008-05-08/
I'd rather see more of Google's strategy. At least it actually works...
Java's Biggest Long-Term Problem
I really recommend you take a real job at some point in your life for at least 6 months.

Some of the best lessons in life come from contrast. Being able to remember what it was like at a regular job provides a lot of motivation for people to continue working hard at their own company. You will also learn some good lessons about what to do, what not to do and make contacts.
(Un)Reasonable Attorney Fees?
I know each case is different but what are the approximate number of billed hours for small startups (e.g., funding rounds, angel investment).

And especially the sale of a company
It's essential that you complete Isaac Asimov's I, Robot for a thorough understanding of how badly things can get out of control.
I'm one of the folks behind Zencoder. It's been a side project up until now, but we're about to take it full-time this fall, complete with a new version. Ping me if you have any questions - see my profile for info - or I'll post Zencoder announcements at http://railspikes.com.

There is a lot of need for lightweight video transcoding infrastructure right now, so I'm glad to see another solution on the market.
Maybe because the US has military bases in half the countries in the world? They definitely didn't put them there to ensure peace, how about military, political, economic and cultural dominance?
Scaling something to 10K isn't easy no matter what system you use. Erlang isn't a silver bullet.
Ok, I will address your argument directly. You state that it's possible to write maintainable C in the best case, but that the worst-case is more revealing. However if we're to be fair, we must also look at the worst case for scripting languages. For example, which of these is more maintainable?

http://www.p-nand-q.com/python/obfuscated_python.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Obfuscated_C_Code...

I would suggest that neither one is particularly maintainable, nor are either of these styles of code likely to appear in the real world. Therefore the worst case for these languages is not really more telling, and not applicable to this discussion.
FYI you need iTunes 8 to see the iPhone 2.1 software update.

....yeah.
What the hell is going on to his left that is more important than talking to his audience??
Screw going west, go east .. I'm out on Cape Cod and loving it.
Thanks! MailChimp looks awesome. First one that Ive seen that it's the YC mold... fun, modern, easy. The rest of the services are all dinosaurs from the Web 1.0 stone ages.

I wonder what MailChimp's delivery records are like. Do you know if they have agreements with ISPs like the others?
Freedom. You can't keep someone employed that values freedom. A startup offers freedom from being a "wage-slave". It offers liberation from indentured servitude and if that is what your employee values, nothing you do will satisfy him.
Right.

I agree with a lot of these problems. The profiling woes with gen_server in particular are annoying and need to be addressed.

But I can't help but feel that this article shows someone who misses the point of Erlang. Erlang is not that fast on a single machine. In fact, it's basically equivalent to python for most common ops and much slower for string ops.

Erlang is about making scalable, concurrent software that you can horizontally scale across hardware. Getting >1k dynamic r/s processing is not something easy for anyone on one box. Quite frankly I'm shocked he got the numbers to go as high as they did on his box.
Hurricane Ike's impact on Planaroo.com's traffic
Why do you need a separate sort of namespacing entity than objects?

I probably don't. I'm just another Perl hacker who thinks it's nice being able to use any programming concept anyone ever thought of all in one language. It's a flaw.
"Automated trading systems start a massive stock self off based on the old headline..."

Quant firms played a very little role in the selloff. It was retail and some institutional investors seeing the headline come across on their Bloomberg terminal and immediately start dumping shares.
Agreed.

But, it is tough in some markets where it's very difficult to test many of the customer configurations that can mess things up. Like anything on Windows that's sensitive to DLLs.

On mac os, there's little excuse.

On a hardware platform you built yourself, and have full control over, there isn't an excuse. Just failure.
Good:

- Thinkorswim [the one I use]

- Interactive Brokers

- OptionsExpress

- eSignal

- NinjaTrader

Bad:

- etrade

- scottrade

- fidelity
Honda, Ford, Nissan Prep Hybrids to Hunt Prius Before Volt Unveil
Read http://norvig.com/21-days.html .
Who's Going To Get Money For Facebook Apps?
Try "The Practice of Programming" by Kernighan & Pike (you can download it here: http://truly-free.org/e/n/Kernighan,%20B.W.%20&%20Pike,%...).
The New Eten Glofiish M700
The glofiish M700 is set apart from traditional Pocket PC Phones, which rely on a touch screen and stylus for data input, by giving users the ability to enter contact details, write SMS text and email messages.
I think maybe you've just seen the movie, and been misled into thinking you know what Asimov's robot stories were about. I, Robot the book, has no bad consequences (likewise almost all of the other Robot novels...excepting the bit with the mind-reading robot and the 0th law leading to interesting results for planet earth...but it was still all for the good of mankind). The robots were all basically the good guys.
Speech Wars [for design and technology]
Romantic & Green: Illinois Couple Buys Solar Power System Using Wedding Registry
Antique Lures for History Buffs
Probably because its free; but, things like MailChimp are a lot simpler.
do it for video and music and I'll be really impressed
LOL @ Bill reading the story. "The fact that a design uses inheritance in polymorphism doesn't make it a good design--" "are there any monsters in this story?"
I wonder what the minimum # of companies you need to get the critical mass for people staying. By which I mean numerous companies staying in the same area where you can stand in the middle of a street and point to 30 different buildings and say which company stays there
According to their website, they have agreements with ISPs.

http://www.mailchimp.com/learnmore.phtml
See: Deliverability

Here's a nice comparison of them vs IContact:
http://www.mailchimp.com/compare/

On an unrelated note, i like the clean design on Newscred.
(Yeah. Nothing to do with the post but just thought I let it out)
Firefox 3.1 With Porn Mode | TechJaws
Yes, I tested it too and it's very nice! It finds images with differences in color, and even superposed text, etc, just as promised in the video. Amazing, really.

Maybe it calculates some kind of hash on every image, an then it looks for images that are at a distance lower than n to such hash? But I don't know any hashing system for images that could work this way... could anyone explain?

Edit: a fingerprint is mentioned in the video, so I guess there is some kind of hashing system after all.
Most enterprises don't seem that web friendly right now. It'll probably be another decade before we see the change happening.
Yes they do. http://www.mailchimp.com/blog/isps-switching-to-returnpaths-...
The freedom to develop code I want to in the manner I wish to. Enough of the usual crappy corporate tools/procedures/apathy.

To be judged on what I produce not how many hours I'm in the office.

Rewards equal to my contribution, this is where corporations fall down completely. If I'm ten times more productive than my team mates why am I not rewarded in such a manner OR to be more truthful I will not put in any more effort than is needed to secure my position in the corporate hierarchy. So I dutifully do what I consider a mediocre amount of work and yet am rewarded in the top 10%

I couldn't care less for the crappy soda and chips or a paid lunch. Pay me the money and I'll decide how I wish to spend it.
I've been following the development of the chatbot for a while. It's gotten much better over the summer.

It would be great if other developers could have a sandbox to develop rules with an API....
Review: Common Lisp Quick Reference
Are we sure this isn't a pilot for a new spring season replacement show for NBC. Maybe a reality show featuring Jerry and Bill -- it's not "The Simple Life" but rather "The Billionare Life"
"You'll probably find a fair number of critical comments too."

Sure, all of them downmodded, which proves his point that HN got invaded by microsoft shills.
I'm always a little surprised to find a programmer who can't type while looking at the screen. I never actually sat down and learned to touch type, it was a by-product of coding.

But this isn't just about programmers, you can see it in the movements of any expert.

Systems administrators know how to move around directories with minimal keystrokes - the characters seem to just fly by the screen. I know I'm in the presence of a good one when this happens.

A former colleague of mine proved that he'd spent many years in the trenches as a consultant through his mind-blowing ability to do excel. Any shortcut, he knew. He could set up a pivot table, create a LUT, denormalize data, simulate a query, set up scrolling, and automate charts in, like, 4 minutes. I could do this, but I'd have to hunt around the help, and it would take me a long time.

Good tennis racket stringers chat with you while they instinctively weave the crosses through the mains with a slight waving pattern that reduces friction and extends the life of the string job. They use the clamps and tensioner without really looking at it. I have my own machine and I can string a racket fine, but it takes me an hour and requires my full, fumbling focus - I certainly can't multi-task.

When a Judo expert falls backwards he/she just sort of rolls through it. No thought is necessary.

It goes on and on. Programmers type fast without thinking about it. It's one of the things they are simply able to do as the result of programming. I'm not saying it's critical, but it would be really odd to get good at programming without making this skill inate.
Agile for startups, or "customer development engineering"
"Please, Global Warming, can I at least have this?" (PIC)
Probe into how Google mix-up caused $1 billion run on United
Cloud computing may draw government action
New Powertrain Increases Tesla Electric Roadster Range to 244 Miles and Boosts Torque
I agree, please don't hammer my Yammer.
The black hole would consume the sun eventually, yes.
Sun prevents independent Java conference from using 'Javapolis' or 'JaVoxx'
Interesting article, but there is no actual size estimate.

I wonder how this impacts Kurzweil's "Singularity" timeline?
Growing renewable audiences (a talk at O’Reilly Alphatech Ventures)
Yup. Already did and made (and continue to make) millions on it. The Enterprise is a vertical and the app serves that vertical and that vertical has deep pockets.
This is way too variable to estimate. Hours for the sale of a company: typically 20-2000 maybe?

For my current angel funding round, we've probably incurred somewhere around 30-50 hours of legal time.

Is there a more specific question you're driving at?
I used to work at Banc of America Investment Services before I quit to go back to school. I can safely say that I would never do business there. Unless they have cleaned up their act in the ten months I haven't worked there, the place must still be a mess.
I would like to learn Erlang, but am looking for a general Computer Science/Programming book. A book that will explain some of the fundamentals behind computer programming no matter what the language.
The next set of commercials might have bonding between Steve Balmer and Bobby Knight.
Really nice, succinct strategy article. Impressive how far a little anticipatory legwork can go in building buzz and bringing customers in.
I think when people were discussing this:
http://www.ycombinator.com/seriesaa.html

most people were saying figures in the 25-50K range.
> The comedy of errors began with just one reader who went to the South Florida Sun Sentinel’s website and viewed a 2002 article on United Airlines’ bankruptcy.

> That single visit in the early hours of Sunday morning, a period of low traffic, apparently bumped it into a "Popular Stories" in the business section.

New business strategy for botmasters: find old stories on news sites that do this "Popular Stories" thing, buy/sell stock, get the stories onto the front page with the botnet, profit!
To play devil's advocate here - maybe it's because many of their subjects were MIT students.
I saw a black Tesla at the Stanford shopping center a few days ago. Very pretty little car. I was excited enough to see one in person that I had to loop back around the parking lot to get a better look (oops...wasted some gas...but once they become more common that won't happen anymore).
What do you mean, "not web friendly"?
For me it's the need to try and do something for myself, and to do something that is excellent - something I'm proud of.

I've been in large corporates for 10 years. A corporate can basically never compete against this kind of desire (which, is actually quite rare).

Even though I've got more senior over the years, you just end up with less control over more - until you reach the point that you're just a powerpoint jockey.

It's almost impossible to do something innovative at a large corporate - because of the inertia and the massive amount of consensus building that's required to do anything different. Pure design doesn't exist, it's an exercise in compromise.

That's not meant to knock it. The environment suits many (i.e most) people. It won't suit everyone though.

Personally, I've never found going over the top to keep someone around is a good idea - If someone wants to leave to broaden their horizons, I'd encourage it.

Sometimes they leave and succeed - then they're a great person to keep in contact with. Sometimes they leave and it doesn't work out - in this case they sometimes come back, and usually a much better and more capable person for the experience.
Yeah... that was a great improvement in 2.0 to 2.02... instead of contacts pausing for a minute when it displayed, it paused for a minute before it displayed. Great.

2.1 seems much better so far.
I think his point was finding the points of contention should be easier, not about its speed

hes also having problem fully utilizing all the cores, so adding machines wouldnt solve anything
Court overturns Virginia spam law, conviction
Sigh. This is why we can't have nice things -- whatever cool thing you create, sooner or later somebody is going to show up and use it for boring political arguments.

Well, that or porn.
Depending on how far you're willing to go with this, there is the best of both worlds. Give him command over a group. If they get somewhere, offer the chance to lead a spinoff.

The other thing that'll hold a hacker in a job is a hot wife and a good family life. A man's focus can change over life, and one can prefer to put their heart there instead of in the industry. Of course, there are few legal ways to work in this area...
Yup - like the occasional trader that misses a decimal point and sends a stock whirling off in the wrong direction (most trading systems have mechanism to prevent this, but it still crops up now and then).

Whilst this is an unusual case - 99.99% of the time the access and currency of information available today actually makes for a much improved market.
I probably will, but i doubt it will be a programming job, but who knows? I don't.
Testing SSL in Rails
If anyone wants to download the four part series, here it is concatenated: http://s3.amazonaws.com/2008/09/javascript.mp4 (178 MB).
I use http://www.thinkorswim.com for mutual funds since you get 3 free mutual fund trades a month.

I use http://www.zecco.com for my standard stock trades as you get 10 free a month. Definitely not the most fully-featured broker, but it works and it's hard to argue with no-commission trades.
Here you go:

http://google.com/search?q=dancing+monkey+boy
How is it viral?
Me!

http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/7/the-best-of-the-best-the-...
Not sure if I'm missing the point of this... Doesn't the rise of SalesForce completely contradict this?
Rubyconf Unofficial Speaker List
+5 for this one I'm impatient. The ease at which established companies take important matters and the time it requires to have a simple change kills me. And decisions take an eternity.
I doubt the efficacy of sending someone salmon steaks. How about live fish wrapped in newspapers instead?
Nonsense. The ad is interesting and faintly amusing, and the advertising strategy from which it is drawn is worthy of discussion. I think you are vastly overreacting to say it is "goofball lowbrow crap", or that it "makes us into Microsoft's tools": YCers are more than capable of viewing an ad without being brainwashed, I think.
"Good ideas have lonely childhoods"
I cheat... I use 1Password and only have Macs.
IPhone podcaster app rejected because it duplicates iTunes functionality
Looks like Ballard in Seattle.

FMI http://www.myballard.com/2008/09/11/microsoft-ad-set-in-ball...