skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you are forced to take memory dumps to debug your database-backed application, or lock things to write out a line to a logfile, you are probably doing everything wrong. This reflects more on Jeff Atwood's poor choice of technology than problems with logfiles.

"nobody looks forward to mining a gigabyte of log files for useful diagnostic information"?

This is the problem with the Microsoft mindset. grep -C and less -S are your friends.
How low can iPhones go? Wal-Mart say $99. Maybe. Actually, I kind of doubt it.
Here in NYC I'm seeing a tough market all around, but especially with large companies, banks, brokerages, etc. Most of the interviews I'm getting are with smaller companies and startups.
I'm surprised he didn't mention ninja gaiden. I'm not sure what that game does AI wise, but it certainly seems to know what it's doing.
"Basically it implies that most people are doomed to live a live in dependency and slavery, because they will always depend on the goodwill of other people to not screw them over. Maybe it even implies that in the long run communism is the only workable system." - except that communism only makes it harder to survive without "other people", AKA "The Party", screwing you over. With capitalism, you can get out with programs like this and discipline. With communism, you have no such option.

(One of the things I never understand about communists spouting off about capitalistic exploitation... by the same standards you're accusing capitalism of exploiting me, communism only exploits me harder and with no hope of escape. Not progress. The answer to this paradox is that the communists always assume The Party is a magical fairyland group of people which, unlike every other group of people every formed, only has your best interests at heart, whereas they grant no such fairyland powers to anybody else.)
You say "It's a silly thing to get worked up over." The "it" is later specified as "the extension". You also say it's "merely", reinforcing that you're saying that the extension is not worth getting worked up over. My point WRT aiding and abetting, then, is in response to your comment, which is about how the extension is not worth getting worked up over, by highlighting that the extension aides people in breaking the law.
It's surprising how something as seemingly trivial as having to walk 3 blocks can change human behavior.
"Battery chemistries have improved since the old NiCad days, but they will still exhibit some memory."

This is incorrect. Lithium ion batteries do not exhibit memory. However, the digital tools to check them can develop a memory, which leads to inaccuracies. (and is why it is recommended to occasionally cycle the battery). Cycling is hard on lithium ion, so you should try not do to it too often.
n-th restatement of the same idea. jeez, what a bore already
You're really naive if you believe a "discounted" Wal-Mart iPhone costs $99; the purchase is accompanied by a much, much more expensive 2-year AT&T contract, which subsidizes the phone. The lowest current iPhone prices are only available if your AT&T doesn't already subsidize the last phone you bought.
You are not Dave Ramsey's target market.
We don't need communism. Just basic protection from loan sharks, con artists, and the worst dishonest business practices.

Libertarians may hate it, but consumer protections make the lives of most people simpler, safer, and more free. They also reward honest businesspeople, rather than rewarding the con artists who are the least detectable.
AT&T to Cut 12,000 Jobs, Capital Spending
It also seems far from certain that this was a "hookup." I go to "meetups" and talk to mostly men. Does this make me gay AND soliciting? (the answers are NO and NO, just to be extra clear!)
It's too bad nobody's going to look at this because of the title (and because everyone here is trying to sell social music playlist apps at $10/mo to strangers on the Internet). This is a really tight, useful little post. Thanks for getting it up here.
"Actually, he's asking you to put your money where his mouth is..."

Uh, yes. That is his entire business proposition, telling people how to manage their finances.
"Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity." --Seneca
Coase's argument really applies to the ratio between internal and external transaction costs.

While we've certainly seen a decline in external transaction costs, I think we're also seeing a decline in internal transaction costs. This may eventually spell the demise of the hierarchically rigid organization if organizations become more internally flexible and democratic (this is certainly not yet the case), but as PG points out it won't spell the demise of large organizations per-se.
'Cuz it's worth looking at!

It's a "scoop", man! ;-)
Thanks, but it's not my company. I found it via this blog post: cussionleader.hbsp.com/haque/2008/12/how_to_be_a_21st_century_capit.html
Edo Japan is a pretty unique case. A famous historical curiosity, in fact. And indeed the power latent in Japanese society became visible in its unprecedentedly rapid industrialization in the second half of the 19th century.

Is there a particular book you read that discusses this idea? I'd be interested in reading it.
Interview with Replay: a debugging tool that's "like TiVo for software"
Neat post. Erin and I have the same problem. Question: you're chopping and freezing garlic, onions, fresh green veg --- I get that the protein freezes just fine, but doesn't the rest of the dish suffer?

The major timer saver we have is a slow cooker; throw a frozen package of chicken thighs in before we leave for the office, and when we come home we have a better protein than we would if we started from fresh thighs in the evening and an hour to cook them. Thighs, brisket, ribs, chuck, potatoes, all work well.

You're a foodie; have you looked into sous vide? You can vacuum-bag a protein and some accompanyments and leave them cooking to a precise temperature for 4, 8, or 30 hours, and you're going to end up with a perfectly cooked protein. No thaw at 5:30PM, just a quick sear and you're off.
I had the same thought. It was a little unclear as to why the author picked that tone, I wasn't sure what the point was.
The problem is, it's not addition and subtraction. It's exponents and amortization and, sorry, most folks only think linearly. Beyond that they get frustrated and reach for the next beer.
Why do you think people overvalue Twitter? CNN is starting to embrace it as a news source, and that's huge.
Actually, by this analysis, it isn't that far behind Perl and Python:

http://www.langpop.com/#normalized
Is Technology Rewiring Our Brains? (why some hackers may lack social skills)
Holland Puts a New Spin on Old Technology to Combat Climate Change
60 Really Cool and Creative Error 404 Pages
Telling people they should completely abstain from something when you know they won't (be it alcohol, sex, or credit cards) is just plain stupid. Telling them how to use it responsibly is always much better.

Not using a credit card costs you a ton when you go to get a mortgage. Building a solid credit history is well worth it.
Actual sms text:

"dude u got 2 cut off yr lft arm lolz"
Seneca was kind of a rebel, and quotes like that discount the instances of true luck.
Official Google Blog: Helping healthcare providers become more efficient
Encouraging for Loopt. Not really for the rest of us, unless you're seeking a gay hookup on Boost, Verizon, or the iPhone...
"After the incident, Mozilla said it would scan add-ons in its repository when antivirus signatures were updated."

Amazing this wasn't already being done.

What about iPhone apps with well hidden Trojans? What's the review process?
Yeah, it's a lot like doing OO programming in C.

Not everyone gets to choose their language. When I do, it's usually something saner than Java.
FWIW, I've found Salary.com to be pretty good with it's mean and distribution information.
How is Goog making money from this?
Am I the only one who couldn't stop laughing at the quote "It was suggested that he had been bitten by a hippopotamus while fishing"?
None of these 404's are very helpful to the site user or administrator, just funny.
Ok, so you agree that since 1960 it's been true that large organizations no longer get all the best people. The question is whether before that ambitious people were drawn to larger organizations or not.

You have (accidentally I realize) selected a very anomalous time and place as your counterexample. In the first half of its history America was practically unique among richer countries in having huge amounts of unsettled agricultural land. So yes, in America between 1650 and 1850, a lot of ambitious people moved west to establish new farms. But broaden the scope to include the rest of the world, and the time to more than that 200 year window, and ask the question: did an ambitious person stay in his local village and farm, or did he leave to seek his fortune?

You can also approach this question from the other direction. Examine a large organization for its time (e.g. the British East India Company, the Medici bank, Cluny, the papal curia) and ask: were the people running it more or less ambitious than peers who'd stayed on the farm?

Either way you get the same answer.
Good point. But http://www.python.org/download/ says in its discussion of 2.6/3.0: "if you don't know which version to use, start with Python 2.6." To me, this advice is inconsistent with the layout on the front page, since most people who don't know what to use will click on the 3.0 link.
You're obviously not a sysadmin, living on the front line between the non-technical, and mountains of computer hardware. I've worked at more than a few places where "I can't send an email more than 500 miles." translates to "One person 500 miles away has had their automatic spam filter nab my message."

I'm much more inclined to believe user error first. That said, the words "consultant" and "upgrade" give me cold chills...
Yeah, so, I think this might have been true in 1997, when this article was written. And it may technically still be true based on the law --- I haven't checked. But it's certainly not true in practice: every major bank guarantees accounts against fraud with $0 liability, a service I have availed myself of repeatedly with Bank of America. If they suddenly decided not to honor that pledge, they'd be civilly liable.

I'm calling "urban myth" on this debit card liability thing, and eagerly await my comeuppance.
What the heck is this all about?

Two articles on HN today with similar headlines from the same site. One about iPhones being $99 and this one about laptops being $99.

It's like a two for one rumor/speculation crap special.
Birds of a Feather Twitter Together (A User's Guide to Twitter)
"The Middle of Nowhere'ってどこでしょう。。。
You know the pill can fail, shit does happen. And emergency pills are not %100. And who's the one that's pregnant with a child?
By far the easiest way to get started is something like Dream Dinners or Dinner A'fare, as mentioned. The price and convenience are both somewhere in between cooking yourself and eating out.

They've got a bunch of recipes you can choose from, and they do the shopping for the ingredients, so it saves a lot of time.

The one downside - if the one near where you live is like the one near where I live, it might be a bit awkward being the only guy there.
How to get the Seth internship, get into college, win any contest, etc.
A copy that costs under 50USD. Even one with somewhat limited functionality would be great.
I don't think enough people highlight how many startups depend on open source software to keep their costs low. Everyone knows it's the case, but it doesn't seem as highlighted when people talk about near-zero startup costs. Without Apache, PHP/Python/Ruby, MySQL, etc. etc. we'd all have to be buying webserver software, databases, frameworks, etc. or wasting a lot of time (and thus capital) rolling our own.
My fiancee and I are in a similar situation.

We've taken a less radical approach, we simply cook twice a week and make enough to cover the rest of the week with some to spare, which we freeze. It doesn't usually take much extra time to double or triple one recipe at a time.

Then, when a week is too busy to get in 2 cooking nights, we just start pulling from the freezer.

Meals that work especially well with this approach are soups, chilis, and fish dishes. Frozen salmon + herbs and lemon sauce, wrapped in parchment and frozen by the dozen, is our fast food. Just throw it in the oven for a few minutes and you've got a healthy, decent meal with no cleanup.
Shop With Embought and Donate to Child's Play This December
Even at Google, where the preferred scripting language is Python by far, many system administration tasks are handled with Perl.
HalfLife2 mod generates $3m on Steam downloads; Valve reveals retail sales numbers
Pretty good article for a newbie. I'd also include using third-party tools on the desktop (Twitterific, etc.) since it alleviates a lot of the problems with the web. Oh, and http://www.twittermail.com of course.
HTC MAX 4G (UNLOCKED)
HTC MAX 4G the world's first integrated GSM/WiMAX handset. Supported by a broad range of services based on Yota’s Mobile WiMAX network, the HTC MAX 4G delivers a rich multimedia and high quality telephony experience in a sleek and powerful touch screen handset.
Yep. Reference: http://tinyurl.com/68xg5k
Well at least it let's them do some sports... plus, in 3 blocks they have the time to think about how much money they wasted in that one hour of pachinko...
What is preventing this technology from becoming mainstream?
Ethanol or Lithium: Pick Your Poison
Something I'm wondering - how do you spot that "transformational" value in foresight, when the next element ("social disruption") is all about how these huge shifts in value creation are never really apparent at first glance?

For example, I think that YouTube is easily a 10x improvement over things like VHS tapes. I was just hunting for the opening credits of children's shows that I watched as a kid, and I found every single one (except Voyage of the Mimi ;-)) in about 15 seconds. My dad has been searching for the songs he grew up with, in the 40s, and they're all there. It's like a vast nostalgia library.

But that didn't exist until enough people started using YouTube that basically everything became available online. When I first saw YouTube, around the fall of 2005, I was basically like "What's the point?" You were limited to 10 minute clips, and it didn't have anything I wanted on it. Even when Google acquired them for $1.6B, many people say they overpaid. Heck, people still say they overpaid.

And Google Video, which came out before YouTube and offered a very similar feature set, never really caught on. Nor did the zillion other video-sharing startups.

Ideas? My cofounder once talked with Clayton Christiansen about this (who's done a lot of work on disruptive innovation), and he said that on a micro level, it was basically all luck. You know what doesn't work, but finding out what does is basically just a matter of trying lots and lots of ideas and letting the vast majority fail.
Lamarck is now remembered for the single idea that acquired traits can be inherited. When I say his name that's all I'm referring to. Similarly, Democritus is remembered for the idea of "atoms" despite having nothing to do with modern physics. This is just historical convention.
Well, I guess it's time to start dusting off that old assembler book....
A more reasonable way of putting it would be, what would be really interesting is a breakdown of the languages used by the last 100 successful internet startups, where "successful" is whatever metric you feel like.
I've found that the people who are most successful are those that ascribe their success to good luck. And when things fail, they examine what they did wrong: externalize success, internalize failure.

Those that believe that luck has "nothing to do with it" are generally endowed with a huge ego and no way to see around it. Strangely, they're also the ones most likely to blame bad luck when things go wrong: internalize success, externalize failure.

The advantage to internalizing failure is that you can learn from it.
whoa whoa whoa

You're doing the "text communication has no sense of tone, body language, or other important indirect communication, so I'll just assume you're being a dick" thing.

It's all cool. Try and assume people aren't just being dicks.
If I were Pownce, I would say to me...
Well you can increase your exposure to luck. Although the odds of rolling a die once and getting a 6 are 1 in 6. The odds of rolling a 6 when you roll the die 100 times are much greater.
Prototype blood scanner can detect cancer in less than 1 hour
Dead to me, too.
As it stands, help isn't a string - if it was then typing help() would tell you that strings aren't callable. It's a <class site._Helper>

So as well as printing that message, it could go into interactive help mode. Since you're only going to want that at the console it could only happen at the console, and since you typed "help" you probably want "help", that would be ... helpful.

The real problem with DWIM is that nobody else has the same WIM. (But that's not my problem, because it's all of you who are wrong. ;)
I am not a sysadmin either but I had exact same reaction as nazgulnarsil. I would think a sysadmin's thought process would follow the path of distance->latency->timeout pretty quickly. In other words, I understand what you are saying about sysadmins having to deal with non-technical users, but in this case I actually think the "customer was right". From what I've gathered from this story, the end user was highly analytical in figuring out the exact issue and made an intelligent and acccurate analysis. The sysdamin's emotional filter was the problem, if anything.
I feel very lucky right now - I got an offer after an internship this summer, before everything imploded. Am I glad I did that!

As for my anecdote: there were some rumors that the company I had the offer for wanted to renege on it, but that didn't end up happening. I'm still personally a bit worried, since they didn't knock down my pay, and maybe that puts me on the fast track when the layoffs start happening?
The world does not revolve around you.
Yeah. I'd hoped they would show some error pages with some utility behind them. And not all of these are very impressive. The list is quite padded - though that's to be expected, with lists nowadays...
No one is saying that python is a dead language, as you say it's flourishing. But a little pain IS preferable to a dead language.

While python works it doesn't mean it can't be improved. We are all free to stick with 2.6 if we want to.
You wouldn't consider PHP mature?
Curating Content
IBM: In 5 years, solar tech will be built into asphalt, paint and windows
Change libraryUrlPattern (first line in the function) in the script to the Minuteman Library Network's Catalog.*

For the Metro-Boston library, it is

var libraryUrlPattern = 'http://catalog.mbln.org/ipac20/ipac.jsp?index=.BN&term='

*-To edit the script after installation, open it using the Greasemonkey icon in your browser. Click on 'Manage scripts' to open scripts in an editor.
Amazon Startupchallenge 2008
Opera's browswer hits the big 10.0
Melanie Griffith starred in Working Girl. The rest of your post was spot on though. :)

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0096463/
Physics:

dmd said on December 4th, 2008 at 3:47 pm

Ok, check my math here:

The owners estimate that the door will generate approximately 4600 KWH per year.

Let’s say they’re open 14 hours a day (say, 7am-9pm) for 360 days a year. That’s about 5000 hours.

Now, divide 4600 kilowatt hours per year by 5000 hours - that gives 920 watts.

920 watts - or 1.2 horsepower - from opening to closing, all year. I know Dutch people are (a) generally healthy and (b) like cafes, but somehow I doubt those figures.
Or Python, for that matter... I mean, it's 17 years old. It can drive a car and almost vote!
One reality that perhaps should have been touched on in the essay is the effect of increased regulation on a field over time, which overwhelmingly tends to favor mammoth organizations.

We're already seeing this, of course. Bad laws have real consequences, and it often becomes politically impossible to repeal them. Sarbanes-Oxley has all but shut down the IPO exit. Consider what the expansion of 'know your customer' laws to online commerce might do to startup SaaS businesses, for example, when you consider the huge compliance costs. And there are a million ways to hamstring online startups in the eternal quest to 'protect the children.'
Why Apple Should Be Worried About Songbird
Your friends aren't average.
I think the hookup clue was "You wanna hang out later at my place?" I go to meetups and talk to mostly men too. But they tend not to invite me back to their apartment before we've met, though.
From an optimistic (and even mental health) perspective, externalizing failure and internalizing success - aka "I did the best I could but the situation did not materialize" - is much healthier than internalizing failure and blaming yourself when things go wrong. Externalizing success never gives yourself due credit when things go right, and internalizing failure always blames yourself when things go poorly. See the problem?

This is not to say one should have an inflated sense of value or "don't learn from your mistakes", but it is much healthier to optimistically look at failure as not a personal thing, but something external.

People who have succeeded and are confident in themselves are never afraid to look back and admit that a little bit of luck (and opportunity) was part of the equation. But by no means will they discredit their own personal influence and attribute the entire success to something external.
NumPy and other libraries aren't working 100% (have some breaking tests) on Python 2.6 yet due to some C API changes
Couple thousand creative-commons licensed recipes with a social networking twist: http://www.opensourcefood.com/
so why doesn't loopt just tweak the code a little and give the user an option to ban all the m4m from showing up on your list? (I mean for those random messages, not your friend's list)
The new Cicero
from __future__ import XXX

"I'll borrow features from myself in the future!"

[time passes]

"Hey! That guy from the past just copied all my features!"
Disagree. You might hope that those individuals maintain the highest level of confidentiality, but you've got to realize when you start asking that many people, some of them are bound to start talking.
YouTube succeeded because it's a good brand and good enough software. If Google had just integrated video results more tightly into search, thus making it a feature rather than a distinct product, and made uploading straightforward, they might have won. They still could, actually; a lot of people I know use Google to find YouTube videos in the first place.

I've noticed that whenever Google launches Google _, where _ isn't a search filter, it more often then not fails. It's the branding. I think that for a lot of people Google = web search. Google Image Search is popular because it's an easily comprehensible feature of search. Google Docs is a shit brand; if I only knew about Google search and Gmail, I'd guess it's document(ation) search. Or just a word processor. It's not immediately clear that it's a web-based office suite.

A large part of Gmail's success was in creating a distinct brand; my hunch is that if it was launched as just Google Mail, it wouldn't have been nearly as successful (technical merits aside).
I'm not just being glib. The computer industry is extraordinarily buzzword-driven.

For a good summary, watch Steve Yegge's presentation, "How to Ignore Marketing and Become Irrelevant in Two Easy Steps". (http://blip.tv/file/319044/)
Book Burro

http://www.bookburro.org/

Finds item at both online stores and numerous libraries, including my local ones.
$2100 a month? That is extremely cheap by US standards.