skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Zero to Binary in 60 days. The value of technology immersion.
This is an MBAHacks follow up to Why I am learning to program. I got such a great response from the initial post that I felt compelled to quickly follow up.
Being from Chicago, reading this was great. But I was wondering:

"Mr. Leshner thought MelonCard wouldn’t be able to put together a deal in Chicago nearly as fast: “Chicago moves slower. It takes seven meetings (to make a deal), and there’s more of an old-school focus."

Why do you think this the case? Is it Chicago's financial background? Is it the Midwest thing? What keeps it from being one of the startup hubs? All the factors are here: Close to excellent universities, tons of money floating around, culture, etc. (maybe not so great weather). People used to say that it lacked a big, successful startup to act as an anchor, now we have Groupon. So what gives?
Also, computer apps don't usually run full-screen.
Take one app which wants to do heavy IO and it will stall the OS more often than not.

Take a machine which boots the OS and check how much stuff gets on the screen and if you can interact with it while the HDD led is at full brightness or blinking heavily.

Take an i7 with 8GB of RAM and one 64MB WD RE4 drive and see how much that stalls compared to OS X on the same hardware...

How come the cost of accessing the disk for reads / writes is greater for performance when compared to OS X? Why is Linux able to get stuff done and displayed on the screen while doing disk IO? I am guessing it's trying not to block as much due to starving other threads which want to read / write

Notes: I've been using Windows since 96, Linux since 2001 and Mac OS X since 2004. I don't claim to be an expert or anything, nor a fan of any OS, I just made some observations over the time and wish that all the OSes improve in one or many areas.
Bailout? Are payments finite?
Google, et al are taking over the traditional printing and retailing business. This was only the province of publishers when it made financial sense to provide these services in house. Publishers also market, set, edit, translate, and finance books. In the ebook market, this can mean both simplified distribution and production; it is not a problem for publishers.
There was time, when desktops had 640x480, 800x600 and 1024x768

Those are all the same ratio (4:3). You don't have to change the relative position or size of the elements to accommodate them all.
Then you might be interesting in reading about this synthetic biology project to engineer an organism that can be used to inhibit or stimulate the freezing of water:

http://2011.igem.org/Team:KULeuven

http://2011.igem.org/Team:KULeuven/Project
It's pretty simple, we started off on Ubuntu for our linux boxes. Then made a decision to move to CentOS for the stability and vendor package compatibility for our core services. However, We are going to stick with Ubuntu on some of our back end servers - management and utility servers for the larger package repositories.
Our Core Q&A engine is written in C# with MS-SQL databases so obviously we need to run windows for that.

There are only 2 sysadmins so yes we work on all OS's
H.P. paying Mr. Apotheker more than $13 million in termination benefits
He's too modest to mention it, but yodasan and colinloretz are two of the 3-member team that created Colorstache, which was one of the five finalists in the Evernote Developer competition.

I'm also a Reno Collective member. I work out of the space writing iOS and Mac apps as an independent developer. Before finding the Collective, I was under the impression that no one was doing any Python, Ruby, or Cocoa (or anything similar) in the area. It was great to find out that there were all these people in Reno quietly working on cool stuff.
Why We Screw Things Up
Found a comparison graph of efficiency of various solar cell technologies.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/16/PVeff%28r...
Wow, I had no idea how that all went down. Thanks for the info.
Good at Chess? A Hedge Fund May Want to Hire You
All of which were 4:3 ratios. 1366x768 is also 16:9.

My point is that it's easier to scale any given UI when you have known pixel ratios. While the actual number of pixels may be different, it's easier to scale a UI from 640x480 to 800x600 than to scale 640x480 to 1600x1024.
How to Write a Good 'About You' Page
Right, it does build for it now. But Apple excluded Adobe's Flash builder specifically for quite some time and built in a "no 3rd party toolkits" clause just to exclude it. Of course, they then realized that this would also kill off many of the popular games on iOS, so they were forced to relent. They still block flash and all alternative browsers (settling instead for just pretty 'chrome' over Mobile Safari and calling them 'browsers' in their store), so there's still that issue.

The ebook issue is well-known now and is the reason that many ebooks are more expensive than their paper equivalents despite having near-zero transportation costs, no warehousing costs, no storefront costs, no production costs after the first one, no ability to resell so no used market, etc. Some details, including Steve Jobs' quote showing he knew exactly what was happening, are here: http://www.libraryjournal.com/lj/home/891584-264/apple_and_b...

Android tablets based on Honeycomb are quite good now and I have a couple friends that are using them, one of whom ditched his top-model iPad for it after ditching his iPhone for a Samsung Galaxy 2. Personally, I'd wait on Ice Cream Sandwich - aka Android 4, due out next month - as that'll be the point that both the tablet and phone versions of Android are in sync and open source (Android 3.x isn't yet open source like Android 2.x is).
Security flaw lets anyone bypass Samsung Galaxy S II security
A lot of the examples in this article are kind of gimmicky. MailChimp, for example. You would be better off ignoring the chimp, who usually links to YouTube time-wasters as if they were important messages (the chimp is usually the "visually loudest" item on the page). Personality? Yes. But maybe not a good inspiration for your own product's personality. Maybe too much trading-off of utility.

To me, the web product that had the best personality of any is Feedburner. Kind of funny, creative, and slightly self-deprecating in consistent ways (e.g.: "troubleshootize" offsets the selling-out nature of "monetize"). The same clever, helpful, friendly voice is present on every page without getting in your way. The jokes are still actually, clearly communicating content. A tremendous achievement, IMO, and I believe it has kept me loyal despite their Google acquisition.

Groupon's email "personality" has attracted a lot of praise, but it’s polarizing, and I cannot stand it.

Another positive example is Pandora. The interactive, conversational tone encountered when setting up a station -- this was back in, what, 2005 -- has been a personal inspiration to me.

A counter-example is Stack Overflow, IMO. All the "site" messaging feels off to me. I’m always unceremoniously and orange-ly invited to "Read the FAQ." Told I can do something, and then prevented from doing so for having violated a secret policy, with a note that puts the blame on me ("Oops, edits need to be 6 characters or greater!"). Told I have "been logged in" and that I should click to refresh the page. It’s a personality, but it’s not a friendly one. It’s a red-tape-with-a-technical-explanation-from-a-lazy-programmer-with-no-UX-concept personality. An anti-pattern in site personality.

Be like Feedburner!
Not a new article but the title says it all. Every computer scientist should know this material.
Are you going to answer my point, or just the degree of relevance of my citation? You presented Argentina's dire situation as a consequence of its currency crisis, when in fact devaluation (i.e., the "currency crisis") was a great relief. One, by the way, Greece is unable to do unless it abandons the Euro. One, by the way, Argentina was unable to do by law during nine years [1].

Did you read craig's short comment? It talks about devaluation, not default. Now, it so happens that Argentina chose to pay just what it owed the IMF and effectively get out of "the world credit establishment" with a big, unpaid debt. Guess what? No Argentinean government could have set in motion state intervention/"stimuli" of any kind had most of its resources been devoted to pay an unbearable foreign debt. (Debt interests, in fact.) As you surely know, even though Argentina's debt is proportionally [2] smaller than the that of the US, the payback rates it gets are prohibitive, unlike America's 3%.

Just for clarity, what was your point? That Argentina would have been better off without default? Without devaluation? Both? Let me reiterate, there is nothing stupid about thinking otherwise...

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argentine_peso#Peso_convertible...

[2] https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/...
Start looking at Erlang driven telephone systems in Europe with 100% up-time, and the what it took to build them.
Don't know where they got the specs or even if they are accurate: http://osxdaily.com/2011/09/28/compare-ipad-2-kindle-fire/?u...
Unfortunately I agree with Mike (on site) on his comments.

Consumer apps used to compete on functionality - now everyone can mostly do that part.

Design (both graphic and interaction) is where companies will compete for consumers.

Bump has needed a TON of help in the past and even does tdoay (even with their iphone app, http://www.iwebsnacks.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/Bump-2....).

Please - start with a new logo.
Here's my current strategy as a 'business guy' trying to get the attention of good hackers. Note: it's not working.

- Understand the languages we'll be using and build as much I can. The ugly truth is that it's very slow going.

- Distinguish myself from other 'business guys.' I ran BD for a design and launch firm that worked with successful, high exit startups. We also ran a major demo conference. Doesn't have much of an effect- maybe my story is a dime a dozen in this town.

- Genuine respect for engineering. I truly don't want to abstract away engineers like so many companies. I've seen a major startup with 100% technical roots drive off a cliff because they focused on "UX," marketing, partnerships, etc., realize the product they were launching was buggy and unlikable, scramble to rewrite everything and unsurprisingly fail. I believe it's critically strategic your team build consumer products they're actually using. Don't steamroll your engineers. Duh. Elevate them so they are the heart of your company? Takes commitment but will pay off- especially through your B and C rounds.

- Etc. Basically, everything I can to make sure the DNA of our partnership is centered on raw technical initiative and isn't simply a means to an end.

There's a stereotype of the dominant businessperson and workhorse engineer. And it does happen- I've met quite a few teams with this dynamic. Personally, I don't want it. The smartest guy in the room rarely exhibits the submissive personality and I'm looking for an equal.

On a tangent, I want founders and scrappy engineer/entrepreneurs to understand how to treat sales/BD people. I have a string of experiences getting excited about working for a young company before the founders try and get me to do the work on straight commission. The insult doesn't bug me, but I walk because it shows me you're not ready to run a relationship business.
'Ghostbusters' back in theaters for Halloween
Gimmicks are in the eye of the beholder. A lot of very standard business practices started as "gimmicks" including free phone support and being open on Sundays.

I think real gimmicks are things that trick you into doing something you didn't really want to do. I don't think any of the examples I listed were of that nature.

Check out Seth Godin's post on gimmicks: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/01/gimmicks.htm...
I haven't compared apps with their iOS equivalents, but facebook for android isn't great. The android market app itself is bad.

Honestly, now that I think of it, I don't know if I would stand by my initial claim that they actually look bad. I may just have that impression because Android's performance is (again, in my opinion) very clunky and inconsistent. It may be that the general bad user experience I've had with Android phones has tainted my entire view of the ecosystem.
A lot of Android Apps look nasty because they were created by individuals with the intent to solve a problem, and that problem is rarely - that Android Apps look bad.

Then, when they have solved the problem, why not put it in the Market.

Any Android App can look great. It's just a matter of taking the time to make it so.
none, let them waste their money. why do you think a government should impose anything on a company for a deal like this?
if you don't love Ghostbusters you are not worthy to be in HN.
Innovative technologies 2012: Will a Massive Asteroid Strike Earth?
Includes a $2.4 million performance bonus. That's my kind of failure. I hope the new Troll has a more reasonable severance package, you know 2 weeks per year like the rest of us.
>I haven't seen a stated resolution

Right from Amazon's page on the Kindle Fire:

7" multi-touch display with IPS (in-plane switching) technology and anti-reflective treatment, 1024 x 600 pixel resolution at 169 ppi, 16 million colors.

Not hard to find.
My broader point is that some of these examples aren’t of a personality being present throughout a product, so much as one isolated instance: A 404 page, an omnipresent chimp.

Less that gimmicks, as I used the term, are bad so much as they are insufficient.

Admittedly, showing pervasive personality is harder to do in a format such as your blog post.

(And it’s quibble-y and dead-horse-beating of me, but the MailChimp mascot has tricked me into clicking links I did not really want or need to click.)
I have a very naive question but would appreciate an answer.

Does using Amazon's CloudFront provide the same functionality if you live inside their cloud?
> The comma in its typical uses in variable assignment is pretty useless IMO.

I've screwed myself over a few times by getting into the habit of using the comma in this fashion. If you accidentally make that comma a semicolon, y in your example becomes global. My jQuery plugins all include a default settings object, and they happen to have the same name of "settings". Consequently, default settings for some plugins were being overridden and I had no idea why - until I found that I used a semicolon instead of a comma.
The Rise of the Zuckerverb: The New Language of Facebook
Here are a few issues with it:
event 500 / 501 with aero at 1920x1080 screen resolution - bad design & inefficient use of GPU functions and hardware for desktop composition & aero
While this may be normal behaviour for pre-DX10.1/11 cards due to software emulation of some functions, this is not ok for DX10.1/11 cards which have those functions.

laggy video - I couldn't get Windows 7 to play any kind of video smoothly on a GT 450 and 9800 GT at 720/1080p on an i7 with w7 64bit; you think you can play it smoothly, but then I play the same file on linux box and it's so smooth you'd think there's no such thing as frames

if you kill ALL your apps (including services and background apps which are part of your apps) and you check how many requests per second to the registry there are, you will have a shock; I did this back in the XP era and it had like 50-100 registry requests / second.

if you leave a W7 machine on for more than 24 hours and you have more than 6-8GB of RAM, you will have degraded performance even if you close the apps (memory leaks and/or memory fragmentation, maybe other issues)

As for Linux, it's been quite laggy and buggy before in the aspect of responsiveness, but it seems to have improved in those areas recently.

Mac OS X is doing fine too so far.

edit: Let's not forget game input lag. Also, some CPU intensive games perform better when you set the priority of the processes which are 100% idle in 99.99% of the time to idle. I am talking about things like print spooler, app notifiers & tray area apps, updater apps and others like these.

If linux seems slower in the graphics department, keep in mind it's got an X server, apps which render in that X server and that brings quite some overhead. Even though this is how things are, Linux is pretty close to "being there", pretty much like OS X is.

Windows also lets processes starve the entire OS completely.
It's not ok to have resources be eaten up completely so that the user might have to wait even hours until a task is done so that CPU usage drops below 100% across 4 or 6 cores of a system. This isn't normal.
Also, Windows can give you high latency and bad performance even when there are more than enough resources: CPU & memory.

Therefore, I'd say that the Windows scheduler is closer to the treat all processes equally and / or sink more time into idle processes with more idle threads than into processes with fewer threads and more active threads model.

Linux hasn't left me with this impression recently and OS X hasn't left me with this impression since Leopard / Snow Loepard.
> Grep. Grep is about the single best fucking thing ever written by the hands of man.

I like and use grep. But, as a programmer, I like ack[1] much better than grep.

[1] http://betterthangrep.com/
> I guarantee no one will waste their time creating 3 'users' on each server i.e. 3x4 = 12 'users' on that cluster.

It sounds — and I don't mean to be rude — like you have not been involved in a "real" production environment.

Modern Unix environments are automatically managed with modular configuration systems such as Puppet or Chef. Sysadmins have little or no need to log into servers to configure them; they just hook the server into Puppet (for example), and Puppet will do everything required to mould the server into its correct state: Create users, install public keys, install packages, write config files etc.

Puppet in particular is so simple that you would want it even if you were managing a single box. Why? Because if that single box dies/is wiped/whatever, you just get a new box and point it at Puppet, and it will become identical (minus whatever data you lost) to the old one. Or need to buy more hardware? Just point the new box at the Puppet server, and you have two, or three, or ten identically configured boxes.

So yes, in a sense you're right; sysadmins won't waste their time creating a bunch of users, because they will let the configuration management system do it. :-)
The reason for the "haggling" was that there was parlamentary elections in Finland and the presidential elections is also pretty soon so the populists are playing their games.. I'd say most Finns just as happy to contribute as everyone else.
Amazing. So the journalists at your newspaper obviously do not protect their confidential informants, since this is your policy.

There is an extremely long history of what happens to whistle blowers and it isn't pretty. Do you deny that outting government, police and corporate corruption is dangerous and anonymity is often necessary to do so without one's self and family being exposed to great harm? What newspaper do you work for again?
> I bought a $29.99 Kindle Fire Zip Sleeve

I use a used bubble wrap mailing envelope. It fits the Kindle perfectly, protects the Kindle very well, costs $0.00, and it doesn't scream "steal me".
22 Essential Tools for Testing Your Website’s Usability
Windows Phone Gains, Makes Up One-Third of HTC Sales
Yeah, I know. But I have faith in people, even the not-so-good ones. We're all in this [crazy life] together; all we can do is to try to help each other, and shrug off the bad times.
Amazon is very sensitive to costs, and they are also very, very good at negotiating costs. If you knew how much UPS charges them for some of their services you would be shocked, for example. Given that the naive component cost for the Fire comes out very near to the retail price I'm pretty sure that they are actually making a profit on the devices.
Because german banks have been benefiting from the usurious interest rates being charged to the southern european countries. If Greece defaults several german banks go bankrupt.
Weather in Chile is pretty much the same as in California, and varies the same as you travel away from the Equator. Santiago, the capital, has about the same weather as San Jose.
PTT - What Is  PTT
Communication has become an important part of today’s world and many different types of communication mediums have been introduced but voice communication has remained of extreme importance. To carry
Oh, my bad! Thanks for the correction.

I probably meant "one of the few banks left", rather than "the only ones left".
Innovative technologies 2012: Amazon challenging global tablet PC market
The chess part of the story makes for a nice diversion. I think the main lesson from the story is having a good relationship with someone in authority is far more useful than a resume.
I think it is about the type of person running it. It comes down to the difference between an entrepreneur or a person who likes to tinker with things.
Heard about this. Sounds like Kelora is fishing for money.
Good luck upholding this in court. I hate what these patent trolls are doing to the industry! Time for government involvement.
Yup. For haskell users, I have a trivial fork of Mailrank's riak-haskell-client that is tested to work with riak-1.0rc1; I haven't tried the secondary indices stuff yet, but it's possible that it would work too. It's at https://github.com/tsuraan/riak-haskell-client for anybody who wants to try it out.
Anonymous' Occupy Wall Street Call to Action
To give credit where credit is due, Perl got the comma operator from C. A quick glance at their manuals suggests that neither BCPL (http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/dmr/bcpl.html) nor B (http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/kbman.html) had it.
riak_pipe... moves Riak from just being a "database" or even a "batch processing system" into a realtime platform

Interesting - could you explain more about this? I've not really grokked Riak's map-reduce yet, and all I understood from the blog post about riak_pipe was that it was a new layer under the hood but didn't change the programming model for map-reduce queries. Is it simply that it's so much faster as to permit new use cases?
Traffic on an EC2 micro instance for a website I run: http://i.imgur.com/bR6I8.png
Please think of India when you do. Paypal recently botched big-time in India (search paypal pan card) and there is a big hole that needs to be filled.

We have a volume of about $500k and with Paypal failing us big time, we've ourselves been searching like crazy for the past one week for a good payment processor. Alertpay was looking most promising until I came across this post. Unfortunately, since stripe is US only, so as soon as you start support more countries, we're definitely add you guys to our site too!
No,

An consistent theorem system can know no bounds. There's halfway. If Peano arithmetic is inconsistent every statement in it is provably true and false. QED.
I can't seem to find information about weather or not ripple (the official ruby library) supports the new features at this point. Any heads up?
Check out AppMobi[1], it may be what you need - at least, from my brief glance at it, it looks like it: build iOS and android apps using HTML+JS, no need for a Mac or the iOS developer kit. The core tools are free too, but they charge for services such as compiling your program for iOS and such. They also have something called DirectCanvas which is basically HTML5 canvas without the rest of the browser cruft, for higher performance canvas apps (eg, games - they have built in support for the Impact JS game engine, for example).

[1] http://www.appmobi.com/
That is a higher traffic site than I expected a Micro to be able to handle.

Are you hosting dynamic content (PHP, Java, etc.) or is everything really heavily cached in static files/varnish and hosted out by nginx quickly so as to avoid saturating CPU or I/O?
Learn a system that actually works for iOS app marketing (developer interview)