skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This struck a chord with me:

Failure, failing, and being “a failure” is such a part of tech culture that it is a cultural locus for entire posts, blogs, pep talks and conventions.

Failure is universally feared and derided, yet framed and re-framed again and again as a means of staying positive, of learning from mistakes, of using failure as a measure of working hard for success.

The ideal of success in tech is married to the terror of failure.

In that I can definitely relate to the "fear of failure" thing. Especially being one of the older guys doing this stuff, and walking around with a constant feeling of "I haven't done anything yet, and I'm pretty much down to my last shot." But by the same token, I'm always reminded of something I heard a long time ago:

"In business, you only have to be right once."

I find that thought to be a powerful antidote to some of the darker thoughts that creep in from time to time. I keep reminding myself that if this idea doesn't pan out, that it's entirely possible that the next one will be "the one" so to speak.

What undoubtedly makes it worse is the public nature of tech culture, populated with gossip bloggers happy to run any item for page views, the better if it humiliates their competitors. Add to this that the very nature of tech work itself is inherently isolating.

This may be one advantage to being on the East Coast and removed from the typical SV gossip machine and echo chamber. Nobody really talks about what we're doing, and the only time my blog posts make it to HN (or similar) is usually when I post them. And even that's usually just because I'm curious to see if anybody has anything to say. So we get to sorta "fly under the radar" at least so far. Thinking about it, that might actually be one good reason to adopt a least a "semi stealth" approach to your startup... perhaps it's a way to not go soliciting pressure and expectations until you're really ready for them.
Top Ten Articles of 2011
That's even a somewhat uncompetitive route; if you're doing a city pair with a lot of competition, it's more like $200s; e.g. Atlanta<->Houston is typically $200-250 roundtrip.
I'd like to know too. I'd like to hear from other people that received notices like the Vector Tank people.
I find more the opposite; RL chat is used for fluffy taking-a-break type stuff (take off a few minutes to go the coffee machine and talk about your weekend), while real work starts once everyone gets back to their desk and puts on headphones, using IRC or IM as a unobtrusive backchannel to discuss the stuff we're working on. Works nicely with collaborative document writing in Google Docs as well.

I've tried an "everyone in the same room" approach to collaborative document writing a few times, and that was a disaster for >2 people; online just works much better. Though IRL can sometimes work if it's exactly two people collaborating, who work well together, sharing one keyboard in the style of Extreme Programming (whether on code or prose).
'I don't need to think much about retrofitting the data for all instances of that model. I just add an attribute where its needed for the new use case, ensure I have basic checking in my ruby model object and my system keeps incrementally improving.'

That's exactly the same as adding a new column to your DB with NULL as the default value.
It might also have to do with how creative people are more likely to feel dirty fulfilling the wishes of the boss when they are wrong. Which might explain why your local restaurant would overpay for Flash heavy websites on eLance rather than hire someone on Folyo.me.
It seems like starting work before a contract is in place (save maybe very high-level exploratory work, like a table of contents) is a recipe for disaster. They don't really owe you anything until there's a signed contract in place saying you do.

Now, it's possible that Apress is problematic in that they strongly encourage people to work despite there being no contract in place ("we'll figure it out", "you have our word", "legal is slow", etc), which then puts them in a better negotiating position when it is contract time because people have already done much of the work.

But I wonder what would have happened if he had said, "I'll do high-level planning, but I won't write a single paragraph of actual content until we have a firm, mutually-satisfying contract in place." Maybe it would have gotten him a firm date on when he would get his advance that they would stick to, plus deadlines in the contract that were actually in the future and other good things. Or maybe they would have still said, "no, just write it, we'll figure that out later", which would not look good
Apple's Siri Curses At Boy, Tells Him To Shut Up
I can't find a wattage or a laser classification anywhere on the site. I wanted to say that they don't make 1w laser pointers, but I decided to fact check that first.

I was wrong, they do make "laser pointers" that powerful. Browsing their laser safety forum has a post from a teacher wondering what to tell the parents of a rich kid who is playing irresponsibly with a 200mw laser. Someone suggested helping them find a guide dog....

And another person wonders if they should shine their 1w laser back at the neighbors who shine 100-200mw lasers into their house and how may have injured them. I honestly wonder just how far we are from a media frenzied panic that gets nearly everything banned, safe or otherwise.

The voice of reason appears to be some inquisitive teenager, who appears to be more responsible than everyone else. Forget age restrictions, someday we should figure out a way to test how responsible people are and ban people from doing stuff based on that.
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He's a pretty cool guy from everything I've heard. It's sad to hear about some of the things that drove him away, especially the fights with the syndicate, or even how when he used to sneak signed books into a local bookstore, people started selling them, much to his chagrin.
Sigh. Designing with 7400 series was fun.
I think maybe a better title would be 'Lesson learned: Don't start work until a contract is signed.'

I fully understand that the potential for delaying or losing the contract completely could be part of the motivation for starting work in advance or in parallel to a contract. But, it seems that in this case, was the headache worth it?

Regardless, I do agree that it sounds like Apress should have treated the author with more respect. I'd love to hear the other side of this story as well.
Wordnik: All the Words
I don't know why this was downvoted, it's true. The web's more than 18 years old... in 1994 you could log on AOL and browse the web, or even take a "guided tour" in a split screen chat room and web browser.
I agree: great topic but light on details. If you're considering ideas for additional posts, I'd personally love to see case studies from Pinax itself to see exactly how/why to use the techniques you talked about.
the historic result of not having the Federal Reserve was high inflation - it's been tried

Do you have the backwards?

The dollar has lost 95% of its value since the creation of the Federal Reserve.

Inflation with gold based currency is rare. The California Gold Rush is the big example of inflation with a gold currency.

a public statement that the gvernment won't at all
seek to defend the value of the dollar

The Federal Reserve and the government have already signaled through their actions that they want to devalue the dollar. Examples: Geithner asking China to revalue the yuan, quantitative easing, record deficit spending and so on.

If the dollar really is so wonderful, then it shouldn't be threatened by gold.
Steve Jobs Tribute Calendar Rejected by Apple’s App Store Police
Do you really think the Airbnb guys haven't considered this possibility?

People who do that sort of thing leave lots of tracks they don't realize they're leaving.
For me, Apress's apparent feeling that the wording of contracts just doesn't matter, and the comment that they "don't modify the standard contract" are huge huge red flags, and I've had major issues in the past with this.

Their seems to be a scarily common school of thought that contracts are, basically, magic incantations to ward off the lawyer demons. You just need to have a contract, sign it, and somehow, magically, everything will be okay.

This is, obviously, not how it works. The wording of a contract is of absolute import; you should never ever sign one without reading it closely, and (ideally) getting a lawyer familiar with the issues to read it over. But I've had more than one boss or client who had a "standard" wildly inappropriate contract they expected me to sign, and when I pointed out some issues would just say "oh, those clauses don't matter"/"don't apply to you"/"just ignore them".

In my experience, confidentiality agreements are especially likely targets for this egregious mentality. "Uh, this contract says that if I throw together a mockup of an iPhone app for you, you will own all the IP/product ideas/designs/technology I develop for the next three years." "Oh, don't worry about that, it's just a standard clause - just sign right here." "...No."

Madness. And yes, most people are playing it honest, and have no intention to try and enforce whatever crazy clause is in the "standard" contract, or invalidate it, or other legal shenanigan. But you just never know...
Poll: Which website do you spend the most time on?
Which one of these websites do you spend the most time on?
At the stores I use, the bagging area has scales that total up your items to avoid people sneaking stuff out without paying for it. When my son would lean on that area it would prompt me to "remove item".

So putting your purse there indicates a lack of attention.
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The two are not unrelated. If the best distributed companies do 1% as well as the best concentrated ones, then it's reasonable to worry that the same ratio holds all the way down the line, till you get to the point where 100n is on the right side of surviving, and n is on the wrong side.
Rogers Will Handle 6000 SMS per Second on New Year
Lets extrapolate on that data a bit. Granted we don't have much to extrapolate on but lets put it like this.

1950-1970 = 20 years.
1970 + 20 = 1990.

So by that logic those who are ~20 right now at the end of this, IMO, "bubble" so by that theory we should be pretty experienced in starting start ups in the next 10 years and by that time new opportunity will open up.

In short: No.
I've been using wordnik since they ate Wordie. But, honestly, I miss Wordie. I felt like they had more soul.
Crashing my mobile safari browser before the page fully loads is usually warning enough :(
سنة جديدة سعيدة 
سنة جديدة سعيدة سنة جديدة سعيدة سنة جديدة سعيدة سنة جديدة سعيدة سنة جديدة سعيدة سنة جديدة سعيدة سنة جديدة سعيدة سنة جديدة سعيدة
http://bgyc.blogspot.com/2012/01/happy-new-year.html
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بالفيديو تعليق عمرو اديب على اخبار إنشاء هيئة الامر بالمعروف في مصر
Yes, absolutely. When you are an individual dealing with another individual and you both want to move quickly, then possibly considering getting some small work done ahead of settling on a contract. But if you are an individual dealing with a larger corporation then you are really opening yourself up to this kind of thing if you begin work without a contract. It doesn't matter if there are some genuinely good people at the company pulling for you. Accounts payable doesn't care.

Get a contract.
Yes, he is young.
Yes, but he wasn't working continuously for 8.5 years. If a full time work-year is about 240 hours, that's 312 1/2 years! I admire his persistence.
What about start-up time? Isn't it significantly longer with PyPy?

[disclaimer: this is not FUD, but a honest curiosity]
>Now use what you’ve learned in a project. For the love of pete do not use it on a project you get paid for, unless you have an explicit understanding with your employer that you are using something you’ve never used before, and will probably get it totally wrong and have to rip it up and start again in six months. Otherwise, use it on a personal project. A small personal project.

Whoops.

To be fair, with my current project there was an expectation that this was a going to be a month long "use and dump it" project.

Well, I just got hired for the rest of the year to expand my horrible, horrible mistakes. It was my first django project and I didn't realize you have to explicitly define relationships in the model on related fields in order to do joins. Now there's too much data and legacy code to go back, and I'm stuck pulling up related fields in other tables one by one... kill me now.
Ask HN: 2012 is here. What are you creating this year?
Hi all

Wish you all awesome people a very happy and a fulfilling year ahead.

So what are you going to create this year ? How are you going to change our world ?
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I don't know about changing the world but I will make a fitness/foodlog app for my Playbook.
Apress is a freaking publisher - shouldn't they be expected to be at least minimally professional? Whatever the initial agreement e.g. regarding advances was, the fact remains that Apress did not pay the author until several months after they had completed the work despite several months of inquiries, reminders and so on.

Either Apress is just plain unprofessional (e.g. unwilling/extraordinarily slow) or as you said they are doing this in order to put themselves in a better negotiating position.

I had a similar experience with Apress while working with them as a technical reviewer. They printed the book without asking me for my bio, so I didn't get my five lines of text credits for the work I did. It wouldn't have cost them anything to do that, but they nevertheless screwed it up.

Needless to say, I figured it's way too much of a hassle to deal with them when they approached me to write an actual book, since I want to spend my time writing rather than following up to make sure my publisher does what they are supposed to do.

Yes, with a contract you have better legal recourse. But I'd prefer to work with people I don't have to sue in order to get paid, esp. when the sums involved are tiny.
This is really cool; I'm going to have to try this, thank you!
Happy New Years
Here's to another year of great ideas, cool projects, and a wonderful community!
Let's say you understand the most basic principles of electronics, you've done a good bit of programmable logic and microcontroller work, etc. How does one go from that into discrete logic? Is the best way to just get a bin of crap and start building?
"Drawing comic strips for five years without pay drove home the point that the fun of cartooning wasn't in the money; it was in the work. This turned out to be an important realization when my break finally came."

I feel like this is the key to any great work.
Bitcoin Finishes 2011 Up 1473%
A patent isn't a restriction on publication, actually the patent itself is publication. It's a restriction on commercial use.

The original intention of patents was that, rather than keeping your trade secrets secret, you can file them with the government. The government will grant you an exclusive monopoly to it for a limited period of time, which is a stronger but more temporary protection than is given to trade secrets, but more importantly it will publish your patent so that once it expires it becomes part of common knowledge. It was essentially intended as a means of open-sourcing technology.
35mm slides are quite opaque when showing most images. The only equivalent would be a pure-white scene, which is an extremely far cry from the MGM logo they demonstrated with. You're also comparing LED wattage with laser wattage and claiming the lumens are the same - I doubt they are, though I have no idea what the actual difference is.

But yeah, a 1 watt laser is a massive amount of power. That'd be kinda terrifying to have in one of these.
Startup Chile bound Startup in need of Developer
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I think that back in the day, people got along fine in many circumstances without relational tables, using traditional hierarchical stores.

A good solution for dealing with changing/varied schemas is to record multiple schema versions. This is the type of problem that will occur on small systems just as well as large ones, any time the requirements change, and of course how you handle those changes is a key aspect of your system design. And a relational setup has the same type of problem in keeping the requirements, schema, application and deployment in sync. I don't think I implied that there is no value in facilities for data consistency, and I did not mean to imply that a relational database cannot have some advantages, but overall for most cases my current belief is that there are more advantages, in most circumstances, especially if you are using something like CoffeeScript/Node.js, with MongoDB.
Curious, what was the title and subject matter for the book?
I don't think that it is accurate to describe MongoDB as a key/value store.

My designs for use of MongoDB have always included my own versioned schema representation to be used, for starters, in generating data entry screens.

Which NoSQL databases did you use?
That's Buddhism basically.
Since we only "hear" one side of the story, it's impossible to tell if he's brave, daring, or foolish doing work without a specific and valid contract. At least it ends with him getting paid.
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I'm going to guess it was http://www.manning.com/mcanally/
The roto-zoomer example, so you can copy/paste into the javascript demo[1] (typing it in doesn't seem to work)(edit: later version which doesn't keep zooming out):

v8rdsx.6+s4X3)Lx~2Xv*vv*+i!L1@2@^

I'll happily admit I have no f^@!in clue why it does what it does. Nifty, though.

[1]: http://ibniz.asiekierka.pl/ibniz.html
Happy New Year from Los Angeles, SF's less techy but more attractive big brother!
Your analogy doesn't work - because George Elliot is a woman. George Elliot isn't "a small part of the whole" of male authors, she's an exact counterexample.

Roads-by-government are "a small part of the whole" - they're not contradictory in any way to the idea that services are supplied by government. They're not a counterexample. It would only be ironic (and would also fit your example) if the roads in question were actually provided by private enterprise.
I think the card would look more distinctive if it were white. :)
Were your writes changing the size of the documents so that mongo had to move them? I've had this happen and it'll cause mongo to grind to a halt.
Ah, I was thinking this was another book that he didn't finish. Thanks.
2011: A year in Interface Design
I don't think speed is a big enough pain point for the python community at large to justify the pain of moving from cpython.

PyPy needs to use their great implementation stack to develop their own killer feature. Like for instance a small and fast python for embedded scripting or compiling normal python program to a small and optimized native executable.
240 hours is a very short full time work-year.

(52 weeks/year - 2 weeks vacation) * 40 hours/week == 2000 hours. Many workers exceed that.
Facebook’s Mobile App Has A Big Holiday Week On iPhones, Bigger On Android
I am going to be deployed for the majority of it. so i guess that will change my world.
wow, nice.
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Thanks for assembling this list!
Wordnik’s Online Dictionary - No Arbiters, Please
I have no problem "pirating" works that should be in the public domain by now, such as The Great Gatsby. It is clear that Congress has stopped representing the American people, and I refuse to respect laws that were designed to benefit a well-connected few at the expense of the public.
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Radio 'still' works in the UK. It worked for me when I lived in London. Radio in the US is a joke - payola and playlists.
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Tldr.

Don't do business with mikeash because he will totally criticize you on the main page of Hacker News.
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'A Big Relief': NASA Probe Enters Lunar Orbit
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I disagree. I think there is a very real dichotomy between ease-of-use and flexibility, where flexibility is defined as the ability to run arbitrary software from arbitrary sources.

Ease-of-use in the real world is only partially a user-interface design issue, even though that is what software devs spend all day talking about. Turning on a device and being sure that no viruses are going to infect your computer, no malicious people are going to steal your email, and your device will probably just work is a giant ease-of-use feature. It makes your device easier-to-use when you don't have to worry about what your software will do, and that only comes when every single piece of software on your device comes from an authorized source that has been vetted by fairly reliable people who have the power to remotely fix problems on your device (for example, removing apps that turn out to be malicious). Don't kid yourself, even though you might disagree philosophically, removing developer flexibility is very much an ease-of-use feature for consumers.