skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why wouldn't you recommend the app if it's good, regardless of how he comes across in the podcast?

The biggest challenge for Instapaper was the iOS5 "Read Later" feature. This version of the app shows to his customers that they didn't waste their money and ensures that their loyalty continues. It's a great response from a small software vendor, and I applaud him for releasing it at the perfect time right after the new iOS5 feature is out.
Funny thing is that this was posted 3 days ago :
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3111258

and it only got 5 points

And the link was to the page of one of the guys who did research.

???
3. Also this:

Potential customers for iPhone 4 launch: 90 million (AT&T).

Potential customers for iPhone 4S launch: 240 million (AT&T, Verizon, Sprint).
Cebu House and Lot
You need to make sure all of your DB changes are backwards compatible. For example, adding new tables, adding columns (with defaults), and adding indexes can all be done without breaking existing code. The code does need to do the proper thing to make this work, such as INSERTs with the column list.

We normally disallow non-backwards compatible changes, such as renaming columns. We only drop tables after renaming and waiting a while (so we can quickly rename back).

When you have a lot of database servers this is pretty important since trying to keep them all exactly in-sync with the same schema at all times in the process is pretty much impossible. While doing the change, you are always going to end up with some finishing earlier than others.
Also amusingly, there's always someone to pipe up and say "you're complaining about someone complaining...HYPOCRITE."
Founding CEOs: How Not to Get Fired by Your VC
I did wonder when I saw the XCode screenshots & such. Homebrew whilst a huge help I'm sure, is just to make things _a bit_ easier.

I'm on Ubunutu & know its a lot "easier" than that
I developed it at PennApps a couple weeks ago. I'll be adding GitHub authentication soon, so you can add all your logs to the site. Was kind of hoping it didn't make HN until then :)
[video] Do Your Commit Messages Suck? (5 min)
Cebu SEO
Well, it turns out that it is extremely effective to make money by repeatedly crashing and booming the stock market.

I am not an economist[1]. Boom and bust cycles - I have read - happen as a natural result of millions of people making informed choices in their own self interest.

Simplistically: Cost of X perks up a bit. People buy in, seeing a trend. Price perks up a bit more. And so on. Rational actors see a bubble - X is valued now way above what it is actually worth. These guys are also paid to make money for their investors - fail to get in the market for X and you'll simply be fired and replaced with a guy who will.

Multiply that by millions and you get booms and busts.

How does one cause a boom and bust cycle, absent a grand cabal of Rich Guys and their cronies? How would _they_ do it?

[1] Would it be lame to say IANAE or has that kind of thing cycled back to cool, yet?
This isn't so much a celebration as a public shaming. We all know you're not supposed to be "that guy", right?

These commits aren't "funny" in the sense that they're clever, but it can be consoling to recognize the frustration that leads to such commits. I don't condone it, but I must admit there have been some late nights when the website just wouldn't stay the *@#$& up and I have done some things I'm not proud of....
Yeah, those steps are pretty crazy. They also aren't official, and most of the work is in setting up RVM, which you don't actually need to use for Rails. Just about any non-ancient environment that has Ruby provides 1.8.7, which is the minimum you actually need to use Rails.

If you want the real guide, look here: http://guides.rubyonrails.org/getting_started.html

It's still pretty long, but most of that is introducing important Rails concepts and walking through a hello world.

There seems to be a tendency in the Rails community to go nuts with packages and blindly follow quickstarts. I've never appreciated it, but it seems like the Rails developers have been rather careful to avoid falling into that trap.
Startup CEOs: Learn how to build culture with team offsites
While i am half techie at my core, i upgraded for the very reasons you cite. I'm a former 3G owner, and i was getting really fed up with how slow it was, not to mention no iOS5 support. It was time to upgrade so for me the 4s was the preferable upgrade path.

Not too happy with myself for giving in to standing 2 hours in line though. I should have at least waited a day or two.
Wireless carriers to send 'voluntary' overage alerts to customers
I don't mind the length, in fact I prefer it, but you're right that Dan needs to jump in more often. My favorite podcasts on 5by5 are those in which Dan has a strong part in the discussion.
The CO2 + 2H20 -> CH4 + 4O2 has seemingly been done (per the paper linked). I agree that the issue would likely be economic factors, but perhaps it's worth investigating those more fully. There are already tankers that transport liquified natural gas all over the world, so there's clearly enough economic incentive for that. The question, of course, is the solar bit.
Google Chrome's chrome:// Commands
I get the same message in Firefox 10/Nightly.
If it has no place on HN, let the voting take care of that. It appears this link has vanished off the front page, though it is doing quite well in terms of score. Probably because it was flagged. That's not how open dialogue works.
Strange case of the vanishing Arctic lakes
This isn't produced by Google; see some of the comments above.
Man, what a bummer. I was so looking forward to that magazine.
Programming blogs post daily????
To get Rails running on a Mac, you simply have to install XCode

Why?

Seriously, even in Java you can get to "Hello World" with just a text editor. You don't need to download Eclipse first.

If installing XCode and editing things freaks you out, then you may not be cut out for the level of coding required to actually use Rails

I love the idea that someone who prefers emacs or vim over an IDE like XCode is insufficiently l33t for the awesomeness that is Rails.
You are right, it is empty: http://code.google.com/p/openclass/source/browse/#git
The trademark issue is the only issue as far as I can tell, and I haven't actually heard anyone say that they're really bothered by it.

OpenOffice.org was a pretty shitty trademark to begin with.
I'm not trying to pick on the original tutorial. There's a deeper problem here.

Yes, you can `sudo gem install rails && rails new blog`.

But that's not going to get you a suitable environment for any standard Rails project today. Especially not if it involves other people.

Installing things from gists using cURL, RVM, 1.9 (Lion still comes with 1.8), juggling gem updates, bundler, cloning git repos (submodules for plugins, etc.), etc., are all totally par for the course.
3GS users have waited more than 12 months. I haven't upgraded yet, but that's because I wanted to wait for the lines to die before I decided on what I wanted to get.

The 4S is looking mighty tempting though, and I was going to get it unlocked. (Because I hate being locked to three year contracts, stupid Canada.)
It's the standard Utah Teapot https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Utah_teapot also the Stanford Dragon makes several appearances https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Stanford_Drag...
Pure is a modern-style functional programming language based on term rewriting.
What's your perfect language? I'm genuinely interested.
>Or you're playing it safe.

You're exactly right. This whole article sounds like someone pretending to understand risk analysis. You can make as many technological and human process improvements as you want leading up to the deploy, but even after doing everything else possible to reduce potential impact you'll still further reduce potential impact by pulling triggers when your service is at minimum load. And there is always a trigger to pull, the article argues for gradual rollout (which is good), but one still has to introduce new code to replace or run side-by-side with old code sometime. What if v2 worked alongside v1 in testing and staging just fine but something in production makes it explode?

Assume if everything else is equal, A is better than B. Also assume if everything else being equal C is better than D. This article says "You're doing A?!?!?! WTF DUDE!? Just do C instead of D, then forget about A and go back to B".

If he wants to argue that the benefits of A over B outweigh the costs of D over C, then he should do that instead of writing what comes across as saying A is the magic bullet that makes C and D equivalent. Not to mention that there the value of A over B and cost of C over D are different from organization to organization.
"The Galaxy S II, largely heralded as the best phone ever made"

The best Android phone but nowhere near consensus as best phone. The iphone 4 probably sold 10 million just in this past quarter, it's 5th on the market.
I don't think there's a more trustworthy contender nowadays (definitely not facebook). Many of their requirements for new terms and compliance are due to state regulations, especially here in the EU. For me, the fact that they require verification through official documents makes me trust them more, not less.
It depends what posts appear in my RSS reader :-)
"PROSPECT SCORE
This API enables you to know the purchasing potential of a user visiting your site. Users are classified into Gold, Silver, or Bronze based on their average spending value, frequency, and online transactions. Product details..."

This doesn't feel right. Aren't there privacy issues here? Have I unwittingly signed some T&C on this?
You don't need Xcode to develop with Rails on a Mac. You just need to install Xcode to get GCC and various other tools that the Rails install process requires.
See also:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pure_%28programming_language%29
You have to install java first before you can create hello world in your text editor. That's the same as installing xcode. The point is to get a compiler, either the java compiler or the c compiler.
Agreed. Facebook may have momentum (700M+ users), but it has terrible ratings from users[1] and developers[2] alike. I will be very surprised if they are a major contender five years from now.

[1] - http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/facebook-webs-worst-custome...

[2] - http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/11/facebook-wins-worst-api-in-...
Why Pearson’s "Free" LMS Kind of Scares Me
This section is a poorly constructed ad hominem[1] attack. If we want to criticize skepticism

But that's the point! It's supposed to be an ad hominem attack. The author, in this essay, is not attacking skepticism, but the Skeptic Community. The author is saying that they do not want to be in the Skeptic Community because of X, Y, Z. And if you're attacking the Skeptic Community then, of course you should use ad hominem attacks, and talk about what certain people said.

If you want to talk about how Skepticism is bad, then you should talk about Skepticism, not the Skeptic Community. If you want to talk about how the Skeptic Community is bad, then you should talk about the Skeptic Community, not Skepticism.
Can Mainstream and Ethnic Media Collaborate?
Raymond Chen's blog, The Old New Thing (http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing), is still my go-to site for any WinAPI discussion - and he's got plenty to say on the subject of developer & user behavior as well. Come for the brilliance, stay for the snark.
Me too. I'd never seen "swegr" before.
All good points! In terms of parking it ashore, ships have access to plenty of water, which isn't necessarily the case in other desert areas.

Maybe a desert near the ocean though, like in Somalia, but then you still need a ship to transport the liquified natural gas to market (or a pipeline). If the economics worked, I guess either would be fine.

The reality is that if the idea were viable with a ship, it'd almost certainly be (probably more) viable without one too. If land use were the issue, then you could also imagine a flotilla of permanent rafts instead of ship.

Though other commenters have noted that the ships could move to the Southern Hemisphere in the winter to get more solar exposure.
Bzzt wrong. Installing Java is the same as installing Ruby. The JDK doesn't include an IDE.

And why do I need a C compiler to work in Ruby, anyway? I assume it's to compile your own version of Ruby. (Which is another way the Java comparison doesn't work -- you need the Java tools to compile your own code, not to compile Java.) But why on earth would a newbie want/need to do that?
Like Chrome but miss the Firefox AwesomeBar? Try Fauxbar
You are correct, that was a mistake on my behalf. The post has been amended.
And they should be par for the course.

rvm: managing ruby versions. This is a big win, and you offer no better way to do this.

bundler: managing dependencies. This is a big win, and you offer no better way to do this.
Wow, thanks for the tip! I assume this is the link? http://www.lanl.gov/news/newsbulletin/pdf/Green_Freedom_Over...

Will have to take a closer look.
Fantastic. Thank you for that unexpectedly wonderful metaphor. I especially like the part about Sam—er, Timmy getting told on by Lisa. She's so crafty. :)
I do think 3AM is a terrible time to do a release. I'm personally a fan of doing releases in the early morning instead of late night. I'd rather get in the office at 6AM & push the release. Plan for a light day and let everybody leave early if things went smoothly. If things do go wrong it gives you about 2-3 hours before the rest of the office start showing up to roll back or fix the situation.

Choosing the time should be a balance of off-peak usage time and a reasonable time for the developers. If you're a global business then you may not have a perfect time, but you can usually still choose a day and time that is less likely to cause inconvenience.
They lost to D2L if I remember correctly. Not sure how it was resolved exactly. Anyone has more details?
I modded your comment up because it makes some important counterpoints to our usual knee-jerk "hackers good, businesspeople bad" mentality.

But let me join the chorus of people saying that we don't know enough to call him "the bad guy", even if only because he may not understand why shares usually vest in the first place (if you're a first-time founder who came up with the idea, you might reasonably believe you have an iron claim to your % of the company, even if it rarely works out that way in the real world).
IPhone 4 vs Galaxy S II Drop Test
This is a sad day. A lot of good thought went into the plans for multi-form publication and the design for different form-factors. If anyone is interested in working on publishing readable, annotated code in print and on mobile devices, please get in touch.

Best of luck to Peter as a writer and editor. We need more technical people who enjoy crafting clear prose.
I think his criticism is that all of XKCD's female characters fit the archetype of what TV Tropes calls the Manic Pixie Dream Girl:

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ManicPixieDreamGi...

This isn't female empowerment, it's just a masturbatory trope that's being (allegedly) used as a shortcut to doing actual storytelling or character development.

I don't really take any position on his use of female characters. But I will say that the whole "Science: It works, bitches" tagline that Randall has popularized is perhaps the ultimate example of the intellectual laziness and lack of curiosity that currently characterize the self-proclaimed skeptic community. This is exactly what he's talking about when he talks about how skeptics uncritically embrace logical positivism despite the fact that it's been completely rejected by the philosophical community.
Yeah, but it wasn't "mind-blowing" then. Good titles are important.
A lot of web apps are very basic from a development point of view.

Sure you need a doctor if you are very ill, but plenty of people can self-diagnose smaller problems using the internet.
Not only did you write this article in an unreasonably sarcastic tone in response to a blog post that isn't the best "intro to Rails", but it's also clear that you clearly lack the programming experience to say that installing Rails is "insane".

> If you want to use Linux, sorry, you’re kind of on your own.

Rails does run best on a Mac, and there are reasons for that. However, it can also run on Linux or Windows with cygwin.

> Open the Terminal. Don’t worry about what it is or where it resides on your computer.

This is where I seriously doubt your ability to have a professional opinion on that. If you've never used the terminal and you're so unfamiliar with it then you're scared the author might be using an unfamiliar program, then how are you expecting to get started with a web framework that works exclusively out of a command line?

> Install a package manager. What’s that, you ask? Don’t worry about it!

Once again, if you don't know what a package manager is, maybe you should learn about things like this first- RVM works wonderfully with Rails gems, but you don't appear to have anywhere near the amount of technical knowledge to know that.

> Now quit the Terminal and re-open it for some reason.

Yes- you have to restart Terminal before using newly installed frameworks. This is basic terminal knowledge.

> I want to see people programming, and learning to program.

Excellent! Yes, the article you responded to isn't great, especially if the reader has little programming knowledge. But slamming Rails because it requires some basic skills around Terminal is inappropriate and reflects upon poor technical awareness.
Yeah, you're probably right about it being more expensive, and much more difficult logistically, to do on a ship.

The motivation for it was threefold: 1. Less environmental impact (no covering up a large swath of land). 2. No cost to buy the land. 3. Plenty of access to water.

I hadn't even considered the possibility of moving the ships depending on sunlight conditions. That's really brilliant.
A glitch in the matrix many many years ago. :-)
Can't see this working for things like logging in to leave comments or play games like Twitter and Facebook identities.

Where I can see it working (and working well) is SaaS subscription services - it streamlines the signup process, provides additional data to the provider and pushes signups towards Paypal (and away from merchant account or other providers).
Just listened to the latest Digital Age podcast and they discuss litigation funding, which sounds like exactly what you need:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdXO2WgKazM

They answer some interesting questions about the process and there are obviously some advantages over a contingency arrangement (e.g. counsel gets compensation and thereby incentive to prosecute your case with all of the necessary resources). Here is the description of this program:

The cost of litigation can be catastrophic. Many litigants drop
good cases, or lose their businesses entirely, because they
run out of money. Recently, third parties have appeared to
advance legal costs, in exchange for a piece of the recovery.
But is this new structure illegal? Litigation funder Selvyn
Seidel tells Jim Zirin how funding has transformed the global
marketplace.
Watchdog Culture: Why You Need it, How You Can Build it
Unfortunately, I can't offer a better way to do it for Ruby. However, I fully intend to illustrate a better way to manage this sort of thing in other languages; specifically Clojure.
Verizon Alters TOS to Profit from Customer Data
The Customers You Really Want
He then goes on to say: "To their credit, many big-name skeptics (including PZ Myers and Phil Plait) called Dawkins out on his obvious sexism; but to my knowledge — and correct me if I'm wrong — not one of them has said a word about his Islamophobia. It seems as though this racist trash is as accepted within the skeptic community as it evidently is within the common rooms of Oxbridge."

Even disregarding the caricaturization of Islam, the Dawkins quote is the worst kind of dismissive, sarcastic non-answer that should, rightly, be criticized.

At any rate, TFA has now been removed from the front page of HN, and I can't help feeling that it's due to the fact that the HN overwhelmingly disagrees with the author and not because the post is poorly written or thought out.
One of the biggest server hosting providers in germany ,hetzner, uses 100% renewable energy since a few years. (http://www.hetzner.de/hosting/unternehmen/umweltschutz)
Samsung to supply A6 processors for next iPhone
This gets a bit off-topic, sorry.

The British Broadcasting Company started a rule about "no biscuits for meetings of only internal BBC staff". That saved them over £200,000. I don't know what that was in USD in 2001, but it's a reasonable amount. I also don't know how much good-will they lost amongst staff.

(http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2001/jul/25/broadcasting.bbc)

> According to a report compiled by the BBC's "revenue, procurement and services" department, the BBC spends £3m a year on catering hospitality, of which £350,000 goes on free tea and coffee for staff - not counting refreshments provided for meetings.

> A further £210,000 is spent annually on biscuits for meetings of BBC executives and middle managers, with half of the snacks consumed at BBC Television Centre in west London. About £500,000 goes on complimentary lunches, meals and buffets for employees; £80,000 on alcohol and £100,000 on "miscellaneous staff events".

Remember that the BBC is funded by a "tax" / licence fee that people must pay if they install or use a TV to receive broadcast signals. "TV" in that sentence includes computers / smart phones capable of receiving live streaming Internet. "Broadcast signals" in that sentence does not just include BBC. A person might never watch anything by the BBC, they still need to pay the tax.
The Great Shock
That's sort of the problem. Paypal is acting more and more like a bank, yet they're investing millions in lobbyists to make sure they don't become a bank, legally. If they were a bank they would be accountable and would fall under all of the rules and regulations that banks must follow, and they wouldn't be abe to withhold funds from their customers so readily.
I've done a large project in clojure. It isn't any different with the exception that leiningen is also used to manage the version of clojure used for a project.
I think this is the type of process I was talking about. And yes, it's Phi that is important, and not the fibonacci sequence.
To extend your analogy, it's more like: here's how you build a house. Skyscrapers apply all of the same principles in a more complicated way, but this house here solves a very clear real world problem in a way you can understand and emulate for yourself.

Now, picture a world where all the "serious" people with "mindshare" spent all their time explaining why skyscrapers were the best thing in the world, and how only PHP-using dinosaurs would every build "houses" any more. And fast forward to the inevitable attempt to explain to construction newbies how to build skyscrapers from scratch.

So I ask you: where are the houses of modern web development? I don't see any. More to the point: I see some, but they're "old" technologies the cool kids don't use any more. Everyone freaked out about Rails not scaling up, but it also fails to scale down to the level of a new developer.
And why do I need a C compiler to work in Ruby, anyway?

I'm not a Ruby programmer, but I'm betting it's the same reason as in Python: to be able to use libraries that have pieces written in C for speed.
Teaching As Leadership