skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've been using the paid version for the last couple of weeks, and it works equally as well as the old version. However they added a rollup feature, so if you're away it would track them all, but you couldn't remove it. The release a few days allowed you to be able to disable it, which works. However there are still some small bugs (like a notification that got stuck and you couldn't remove). It's really about the same as the old version.

The one cool thing they added was the ability to forward growl messages easily over bonjour (auto detection). So if you have two computers, when one is idle, it can forward it's messages to another active computer.
NFC Taxi Booking Made Possible In Taiwan
In fact, I think this problem is even worse in the CEO world due to the legacy MBA culture of greed.
I find your comment a little naive, with respect to the 'cheap' part.

I doubt the apps will be as cheap in a situation where there's a single company monopoly.

At the moment, it is in Apple's interest to keep apps cheap, to drive sales of hardware, and adoption of their platform.

If they ever got a stranglehold on the market, however, it would be logical to increase the price of the Apps, up to the price people were willing to pay.

This is exactly what happened with Nintendo in the late 80s and early 90s. Nintendo took a cut of the sale of every cartridge - think it was around 30%

Video games became very expensive.

iOS is not Windows. It is much closer to the controlled channel that NES was.

Apple very much have the ability to narrow access to the walled garden, and increase prices, if they achieve such a monopoly that it becomes advantageous to do so.
Seriously? Why don't you make the system generic enough (a service to manage "youth organizations") while still marketing it to Boy Scouts chapters? I'm sure there's more to it, but I can't imagine how you could have a system that is sellable to a client that somehow ceases to be sellable when you remove literal mentions of the client's trademarks.
I know people really enjoy not being notified. However for things like email for me, since I need to be reading and up to date on them for work, it's much easier to look to the upper right of your screen and see what it is instead of switching apps and checking to see it's just a 'normal' email you don't need to respond to.
Did C mean giving up on assembler? Maybe so. Some people still use assembler but it is good to have a choice.

JavaScript is just an 'ok' language. It has serious warts and it might have been great in 1998, but not now. But we are stuck with it. There are JIT compilers for it, it is on every browser out there so.
Typically I've found that they ask first, however even that is annoying.

I don't want growl support, and I haven't wanted growl support in a very long time. I've yet to see a use case for it that didn't seem bent on interrupting the user with a distraction, and preventing them from getting things done.

Screw that, I'll stick with programs bouncing subtly in the dock, where I can ignore them.

(Not to mention, the last time I used growl it (or the programs who used it) suffered from a few bugs which would cause it to occasionally barf notifications all over my screen without warning. How rude!)
Hero PHP framework: Promising CMS
It's more like pro basketball players telling people that proper basketball training, exercise and nutrition is useless and they should just go play 3 on 3 with the brothas in the 'hood.
With growl being a paid app now, will developer support wane?

If anything, this will help increase core Growl developer support; they actually profit from spending time on Growl now.
Interesting to see such an alarmist title attached to an article about graph theory and data mining.
The sentiment sounds nice but this isnt helping the vast majority of people.

People work for others because they need that steady paycheck. Maybe they like it! Not everyone has a terrible job. Not everyone hates their job. Not everyone wants to start a business. This assumes that just anyone has what it takes to start a company and it isn't so. I agree with the guy who said that those who who actually can do this don't need to read this.

The biggest problem with articles like this is that it feeds unrealistic ideas to all those idiots out there with terrible ideas, the ones who want to be the next JobZuckerbergParkerBezos for the sake of being a billionaire because hey, its cool and they think they have what it takes too. They're gonna be the next big thing! Yeah! But not really.

This makes people think that just because they can, they should and glosses over all the harsh realities of getting into business like the enormous personal risk, the high odds of failure, and the fact that, quite frankly, most people aren't competent enough to run a business.

It also does a disservice to those of us who have started a company. It makes it look like we're slave drivers making money off the backs of our poor employees when really our poor employees are getting as much as we can give them without having to deal with the problems we do which are far more than theirs. We take on the stresses they do plus the ones they don't have to. It also makes us look kind of, well... Common.

You know, I used to read articles like these before I started my business and now that I see things from the other perspective, I sometimes wonder if I'm one of those idiots I rail against that have no business being in business. I wonder if I'm delusional and if I'll ever get where I want to be or if I'll have to close up shop and say I was wrong and I'm not one of those people who are cut out for this. I'd tell people don't start a business. It's an ungodly amount of stress, the risks can far outweigh the rewards, and it's incredibly egomaniacal to think you're one of the special ones who will make it. This isn't something where you just open up shop, collect money and live large. You struggle, it can suck, and your personal relationships will suffer. Your ideas aren't special either. Everyone has a website or app idea that they think is the next big thing and it just isn't. I know because my clients are those people. That said while I often think these things of myself, the rewards have been worth it. But I must stress that it's not like that for almost everyone else.

The article lacked a warning to people to tread carefully into entrepreneurship with a supremely grounded attitude. Think realistically. Life isn't like The Social Network. It's ugly as sin and encouraging the masses to take a leap like this is scary.
I just recently published an article describing my experience migrating from SQL Server to MongoDB, you can read it here: http://www.wireclub.com/development/TqnkQwQ8CxUYTVT90/read

I tried my best to describe both what we gained and what we lost after the transition. At the end of the day, MongoDB (and other NoSQL solutions) are different tools for different jobs. Obviously it takes investment to master a new tool and we almost aborted the migration in two different occasions simply because we didn't know enough about maximizing MongoDB performance. Now that the dust has settled and with all things considered, I am glad we didn't.
Accelerating sustainable startups w/ a list of problems
Is there a maintained list of market-researched problems that exist in non-web-centric industries?

I’d love to see more web-based startups attack problems that businesses in industries like farming and forestry face instead of making more todo list phone apps.

Do lists like these exist? It’d be so awesome to point energetic students at something like this that came with librarians and domain experts to lead them on the right path to skipping having to wait to be inspired and hit with a knowingly-profitable/sustainable startup idea.
This is what I was thinking as I read the article. Unless you have a full developer environment there seems to be a big practical difference between your VM being written in C and compiling to C.
Great article and don't give up. One thing you missed was that you could do contract work for part of the year and then work the rest of the year on your idea. In the UK (where I am) contract rates are two or three times permanent rates so with a one year contract you can spend nearly all of the following year on your idea.
PHP is an ugly language, but its issues are way more manageable. The worst PHP code I worked with was easier to understand and debug than an average JQuery plugin I've worked with.
Les Beatles - Come Together
You can't spell NoSQL without the word no.

Nor can you spell it without the word os. But I don't think we're talking about a mouth or other external opening.

A lot of people now read "NoSQL" as "Not Only SQL", which seems more positive than negative.
"What engineers really need to do is to put more skin in the game. Push for more equity, even if it means accepting a smaller salary. All too often I see programmers who just want a 9-5 that pays 6 figures"

A lot of engineers I know are like this because they were badly burned earlier on in their careers with promises of equity (while working below-market paying job for that equity) that turned into dust (due to massive dilution and other factors) even when the company had a very successful exit.

One could argue there they only have themselves to blame for not being sure of the actual value of their position in all possible exit situations, but now you're arguing they shouldn't just be engineers but also financial/contract law experts, which is especially unrealistic when they are just getting out of school.
In the states all salary numbers are before tax unless stated otherwise.
I think he was questioning whether developers will continue using Growl notifications.
Never had an issue with growl "parasiting" my attention. I'm happy to use it for automated tests feedback.

I have no issue to pay a few bucks for that to help out on maintenance.
Steve here, one of the founders of TouchFire. The iOS keyboard layout for iPad has remained unchanged since the first release on iPad 1.

TouchFire lives in the iPad's cover when you don't use it so if you want to use portrait or split keyboard, TouchFire doesn't get in the way.
Mekkanika: a typeface inspired by old technical drawings and modern machinery
CS/STEM. Need not be Ivy League but it certainly doesn't hurt-- though I know a team or two in the top tier that almost have a preference for non-ivy league :-)

To be a quantdev or quant, an MFE is far more useful than an MBA.
> Any thoughts on this? Can a small startup compete with the Googles and Apples in the Valley?

They can and do!
There's no real comparison between CoffeeScript->JavaScript and Ruby->C.

Ruby doesn't have any necessary relation to C. Case in point: JRuby. The underlying language is just an implementation detail to provide an environment for executing Ruby code.

CoffeeScript has no executable environment. It is purely syntactic sugar for generating JavaScript code that gets executed in a JS environment (which itself is implemented in C or C++).

CoffeeScript is more comparable to GWT.
A lot of the good things that happen do so mostly by accident. The DMCA's Safe Harbor was one of these things.
http://groups.google.com/group/growldiscuss/msg/0793d15920fa...
Migrating a large site from SQL Server to MongoDB - Lessons Learned
SQL and NoSQL are different tools for different jobs. A couple of months ago we migrated a large site from SQL Server to MongoDB, it was a bumpy road and I decided to write this article to share what we learned:
http://www.wireclub.com/development/TqnkQwQ8CxUYTVT90/read
Jacques, are you back?
Since CoffeeScript is a transpiler it's unfair to compare it to Erlang/C or Ruby/C.
IQ is a good test, but at 120-125 you are still far smarter than most people on earth.

Just look at the normal distribution of IQ scores: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:IQ_curve.svg

Sure, a lot of people are in the 120+ range on Hacker News, at top management consulting companies etc. but if you are 110+ IQ you are probably smart enough to do almost any job on the planet.

I'm not a programmer, but I imagine that like business, there are plenty of terrible programmers with 140 IQs that believe they are entitled to not working hard or being good with people.

They will always make less and even their high IQ will not allow them to figure it out.
i think what's happening here is that no one really envies hedge fund programmers. sure, they make a lot of money, but the job itself is perceived as unpleasant, unfulfilling, boring, stressful, or some combination of those. google, on the other hand, is a standard[1] software job - the type that most people in the hacker news demographic are probably doing, so it is seen as directly comparable.

[1] i don't mean that in a dismissive sense - i work there and it's the best job i've ever had, but the work is not qualitatively different from what you'd do in other software-focused companies. hedge funds are not software-focused.
It comes to 14 if you ignore the first line of each function (e.g. `def iconcat(xs, ys):`). I'm not sure why one would count lines like that, though.
I don't know about the article, but the industry hates it because it leaves the burden of enforcing their copyright on them and they don't want to. They want someone else to do it for them, probably the government.

And yet, there's no one else who can reasonably bear the burden. After all, infringement is a matter of permission. Other people can guess about who has authorized what, but no one but the copyright holder actually knows. And more than one person has, for example, released their own work on The Pirate Bay (even a "pirate edition" of that one game!) Moreover, as the Viacom case showed, sometimes even they can't keep track of who they authorized to do what and if they can't do it themselves, nobody else should be expected to do it for them.
Is there some reason why your benchmarks look like you're cheating?

"The Citrusleaf server node received input from 4 client nodes, the MongoDB server node received input from 1 client node running 2 client processes, and the Redis server node received input from 2 client nodes."

I mean -- if you're cheating, that's bad. If you're not cheating, why the hell do you set things up to look like you're cheating?
I've heard this is part of the reason Google is expanding in non-SV offices. They can recruit someone right out of school, move him/her to Boulder or Portland or Austin, pay them less and not worry so much about Facebook stealing them.
Really disliked Growl when I had it installed.

I wonder why people like it... is there some killer use case, or does it just interrupt your work endlessly with Skype notifications, software updates, and other nonsense?

It's bad enough that I keep my GMail open continuously... I've thought about shutting that down for most of the day too.
No, you are not. The more damning trait would be believing you are not qualified because of a test administered when you were 8 years old (or worse, believing the results of any IQ test administered after that).

There are certainly brilliant folks around in the valley, who can grasp concepts faster and more deeply than seems human, but they are a significant minority.

The prime requisites for success as an employee in the valley are still:

1) Good judgement (which tends to come from accurate self-reflection and critique)

2) Love of learning (so it takes you a couple hours or even days to grok redis's failure modes instead of 20 minutes, who cares -- the question is are you going to learn it (and every other useful thing that comes along, for years))

3) Basic sociability (the valley is a small world, everyone knows each other, if you are a jerk life will get more difficult).

For a much more eloquent description of how to thrive as a programmery type in the valley, consider http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html but translate research into "generally useful skills for building stuff."

"You and Your Generally Useful Skills for Building Stuff." :-)
I just recently published an article describing my experience migrating from SQL Server to MongoDB, you can read it here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3203601

I agree with the author that MongoDB is green, maybe not quite ready for prime time yet. All things considered, I realize we took a risk by switching and while I am quite happy with MongoDB, I do worry that at some point we will experience a failure condition we might not be able to recover from.
Good luck collecting that from a bankrupt startup.
yeah, I am sorry, I did not follow C naming etiquette to the letter. You are right: these days I am a bit accustomed to starting struct's names with a capital letter because I do a lot of C++ programming.

(I would not call the struct POINT though because it would feel like something from WinAPI :-))
Stop pissing and moaning. ASAP. New York will eat you alive with that attitude. This is not a setback; this is an opportunity. http://nytm.org/made/

You've made it to Ellis Island. Now it's time for you to hustle.
Mistake #5: Two-sided markets
Yeah because a lot of start-ups are willing to navigate the clusterfuck that is H-1B.
Katie Akin - "Up To Me"
The Payday Project Mass Income Generator Free
Important things and advice to know that people generally aren’t told about
True. The author forgot to add "scalable" there -- but that is actually mean there.

I am studying Multi-Dimensional Indexing for more than 3y now and have implemented many of the state-of-the-art indexes. They are all not sufficient as especially MongoDB's implemention is insufficient in especially the scalability-domain.
As Cloudera and ex-Facebook hacker Jeff Hammerbacher once put it, "I've never seen MongoDB used in anger against anything resembling real scale."
People also enjoy slot machines and heroin.

(Update: FWIW, I believe the parent read "people enjoy being notified", with no 'not', when I wrote this. Not sure if I misread or it was modified.)
You should read their actual paper, esp. section 3.1 (last graf) and 3.2 (first 2 grafs). You've oversimplified the problem; there is a variant of the attack that doesn't require an XML signature, for instance.
I don't know how much more simply I could have said it, but I'll take a shot:

If your employer treats you more poorly because you negotiate a better comp package, you shouldn't be working for them; they are a bad employer.

If negotiation costs you a "once in a lifetime" opportunity, the opportunity is "once in a lifetime" in the "boiler room pump and dump" sense, or the "late night infomercial" sense. A year of your life, however, is priceless.
I thought the whole point of the KA was no physical schools....
I took "MongoGate" (sorry, I just fell in love with that term) as an example of what happens when overly positive expectations hit the hard ground.
Removing the hype from NoSQL ("it's innovative", "it scales", "the cool guys use it", yada yada) is what I like to do.

I surely do not uncover any secret there. But I haven't stumbled upon a "what NoSQL lacks" blog post recently either. You can read my post in many ways, but the latter one is actually one possible way imho.
The only thing I haven't noticed anyone mention is that these laws only affect the US. Other countries will be free to let their companies continue without this draconian legislation. With Pirate parties gaining strength in various countries in Europe it would be an uphill struggle to get this type of legislation happening there. Does this mean that these type of companies and their jobs will spring up elsewhere?
Major Usenet Provider Shuts Down Following Court Order
foursquare seems to be doing fine http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3203006
Clearly you didn't actually read the source file. I graduated in CS. I know B+ trees.

I also know that an 85-line, 7-argument method in a 1988-line file shouldn't depend on a global variable ("guessIncreasing") modified from several other, unrelated functions. I know that in bt_insert, which (apparently) assigns to "guessIncreasing" and then resets it to false just prior to exit, should be using an RAII class to do so instead of trying to catch every exit path, especially in a codebase that uses exceptions.

This code is amateur hour.
Uh yeah...

HN has lots of readers. Most probably make less than $250K even though quite a number make more. Still, most of those who make less than $250K probably aren't venture capitalists.

A million dollar deal doesn't get anyone chiming in with "but my deals aren't million dollar" 'cause they don't have deals of any sort. $250K salaries, on the other hand, do get exactly that reaction.

Is there anything here that isn't screamingly obvious?
If he was a cofounder or a member of upper management I would be concerned. But he's not, he's a developer. Are you saying you agree with the personal opinions of everyone you've worked with? That you shouldn't work somewhere because another employee has questionable / controversial opinions? Give me a break.
For email and events, I don't really need another piece of software. Chrome offers desktop notifications for webapps & extensions (e.g Gmail & Google Calendar).
Same here, though I had to get this book from my school library. High School library. Years after my 520 ST was already out of date. I programmed in the basketball game, which took about an hour or so, as I recall. The next year I got a Mac LC III and joined the modern age.

Great book though.
That isn't how I read his statement, even after reading your reply to me.

However.. the SDK is still free, easy to integrate (having done the integration process myself) and users still like it. That last point is, really, the important part here.
Thanks for attacking me personally. But I have no interest to pursue it more. I made claims that clearly hold true, and they have nothing to do with what you said (I did not say anything about bugs, for example)
Robot scales walls using biomimicry of gecko feet
If you have a finance MBA and want to make money in finance, you'd be insane to try programming.
Clickable: http://www.wireclub.com/development/TqnkQwQ8CxUYTVT90/read
Because they did not handle the situation gracefully. But a screwup on their part doesn't obligate them to hire someone they've decided is a poor fit.

Put any moderately large company's activities under a microscope and you will find things to get "message- board- upset" about almost every day. People screw up.
The article he responds to is discussed here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3202828
The complaints about growl being an impossible distracting productivity suck are overblown, and completely miss the point of growl.

The great thing about growl is that it provides one central place to control notifications, adjusting their parameters with fine grained control. If you find some particular type of notification obnoxious, change its behavior or turn it off.

If growl didn't exist, every application would provide its own mechanism for notifications, and the user would be left turning off distracting crap in 10 places instead of one, and unable to adjust that one vital notification to behave as desired.
I have to agree.

Having been using Growl for years, I mechanically went to buy it on the Mac App Store when 1.3 was released. To make sure the upgrade was clean, I first uninstalled the 1.2.2 version I had on my system… only to realized I could not install the new version, since I am still running Snow Leopard.

I did not reinstall Growl, and I am very happy with my system as it is. I had already disabled some notifications before, such as Adium messages showing up on my screen, but I still had some, like the name of the new song playing. All this noise is now removed and it is great.

I can see how Growl can have its uses though. Sometimes, you need to wait for a long process to finish in order to perform the next action (e.g. wait for a long download, deployment, or software build). Or for alerts of a monitoring system, where you would really like to be interrupted. I may reinstall it when I have such use cases, but enabling only the minimum number of notifications.