skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I am not necessarily advocating an MBA. But this line of argument can probably be applied equally to many if not most degree courses. Especially applicable if you're talking about a degree at a 'better' university vs one that might be cheaper or where you may be eligible for scholarship.

If you want to learn most things there are probably better ways of achieving it. You can gain most knowledge almost free. But Universities give you a bundle of people, a framework, deadlines, teachers and the rest that amounts to something that people don't tend to get elsewhere. It also works without the highest possible level of motivation. While not glamorous, that's valuable.

As far as needing the knowledge, it's a judgement call. There are courses out there with more of a small business focus. It's definitely not a prerequisite, but taking time & resources & dedicating them to gaining knowledge in this area can produce value.
Loopt is strictly permissions based, and built to be secure from the ground up. You could, for example install it, along with a couple friends, to help locate each other at a concert or some big festival (this is really handy), and shut off broadcasting, or just ditch it later. It doesn't need to violate privacy; you have the ability to broadcast your location when you want to be found, and only to whom you want to be found by.
Yeah, but you've gotta buy glue anyway, so why not sell you pulp at the same time?
I have sneaked into many concerts using the same techniques:

1. Dress nicely. (It works the best when you look nicer than anyone else in the concert, especially the artists.)

2. Immediately chat up and possibly be friend with someone who looks important. (e.g. host, venue owner, the person that would most likely to kick you out.)

3. Have your story ready, just in case.
"341 square feet (which would be a mansion in Manhattan). "

If the writer meant square "meters", I would agree. But 341 square feet is a shoe box even in Tokyo.
The only change I would make to the "stages" is to add caching up front. Most modern web frameworks make the use of caching pretty trivial therefor making it less of a pain than setting up load balancers and multiple web servers, etc. Static content should also make use of caching headers and be served by a separate server than dynamic content; this is also a trivial improvement.

Having only a single web server, database server, and static content server while making liberal use of caching and smart querying result in benchmarks indicating we can sustain around 1900 req/sec. Even if that isn't entirely accurate, the chances of us reaching the 82 million page views per month to find out is all but inconceivable.
These are all nice, but the prices of them are, frankly, ridiculous.

"This green, sustainable house starts at JUST nearly a million dollars."

Are you freakin' kidding me? Let me know when you can start cranking these babies out in five figures.

Then it'll be worth something.
Same here. And just in case you missed this:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=357647
What Are The Best Google Adsense Competitors or Alternatives?
for the merb grown-ups, merb 1.0 now has a well factored authentication framework. The docs/howtos are still a little rough, but I've just gone through migrating my existing app which had mature hand-rolled User model, session management, and registration process. With the new merb auth code, I've just dropped quite a bit of code.

also +1 for Blueprint CSS as well. This finally got me out of CSS hell.
I think people here appreciate the Indian achievement because it reflects on a number of Hacker News axioms:

1. It's better to hack something than design for perfection. India had a number of launch failures prior to this success, but kept at it at low cost. They literally launched early and got feedback :-)

2. The cost of creating technology start-ups is getting lower all the time. India did this on the cheap and was able to piggy back on years of prior work. It would be interested to see a comparison of the cost of getting into lunar orbit between 1945 and today.

3. It doesn't matter who you are, it's what you do that counts.

4. There are some places in the world that are best suited for particular technology start-ups: Boston and SV for software, anywhere along the Equator for a minimal delta-v.
We were a little ahead of ourselves with the Apollo program, but precociousness isn't a bad attribute for a species to have. We explore space because it is the final frontier. It is one of few unknowns remaining. Beyond the desire for exploration inherent to humankind, there is a lot of energy in space. Eventually we'll colonize other worlds and build superstructures, and for now, we explore the solar system.
Please review my web application
This is not a web application, this is two forms that go nowhere and do nothing.
America is a Democracy or a Republic, not a "Capital-something". Capital is just a tool. A smart country reaches into its toolbox and chooses the best tool for the job. Extreme models; extreme capitalism, extreme free-market views, etc... will always get you into trouble. It pays to be agile.

Should we bail out GM? I don't want to, but if we do it won't crack my top 10 list of things the gov wasted money on over the last 20 years.
FAQ on Climate Models
No, not within its rights. The government is not a profit-making venture, and schools are not its property.
Do you not realise just how much fun it is to stand at one end of a stadium frantically waving for half an hour with your cellphone, trying to locate other people you know?

Talk about taking the fun out of it!
No GPS on iPod Touch.
18k Gold Plated Mobile Phone Watch
This is a bluetooth multimedia phone watch that also comes plated in 18k gold. It features a 1.5 inch touch screen display which is colour. 1GB of memory is included in this phone and it also sports a 1.3 megapixel camera.
Money Manager's prediction of internet businesses from 12 years ago [1996]
ECO Technology - Pictures
There is no electricity, wires, or batteries! Just a sophisticated package of miniature cogs and parts, that is a joy to disassemble and put together again… Just ECO.
I've found that it's rarely, if ever, the number of keywords that directly contributes to the complexity of a language, but the size and accessibility of the standard library.

Look how easy it is to set the desktop background image! You just need to know that the SetWallPaper method of the Desktop object needs to be invoked! Admittedly, it is the small, quick successes that lead to further interest in programming.

Setting the desktop background image is the Hello World of GUI apps.
Examples of clean, legible fonts with download links
Some highlights:

"Pure Internet access is a commodity, and the luxury prices that ISPs are charging will fall to $3 to $5 a month for unlimited access."

Damn, I wish I paid $5 for unlimited net access.

"Shrink-wrapped software will be replaced by problem-specific applets delivered over the Net for a small fee or packaged with data and services."

Shrink wrapped software is still well and kicking. Web apps have not come close to replacing desktop apps, though business models like SaaS are a start.

"The proprietary Internet-access model is even worse. The Microsoft Network abandoned its proprietary software soon after the network launched, Prodigy followed, then CompuServe threw in the towel. America Online has to be next."

Good call.

"You may pay 25 cents to use the applet online; your Internet service provider will itemize those quarters in a monthly bill. (AT&AMPT is pretty good at this.) For the moment it would be too speculative to even estimate the size of this market, but I think it will provide numerous opportunities as we approach the millennium."

Nope, we've yet to see micropayments take off...
Yeah, I've maintained there are two kinds of lazy: laziness that leads to procrastination and laziness that leads the least amount of work being done overall. The former is the classic "sin", the latter is what every tech person should strive for. At the end of your life, you should divide the sum of your output by the sum of your total work; the one with the greatest ratio wins the title of "most lazy".
It's not one of my favorite games, I have to say. :-p
A Mercurial “super client”
How does loopt make money from this? Does the app cost?
I agree on many points like performance and scalability are not the same but his traditional approach to just make a bigger clustered database is not good. It's like fixing the bottleneck by making a gigantic bottle, it'll work but the cost will be many times over what was really necessary.

If a any single component is a critical bottleneck the best is to either replace it or redesign to stop requiring it.

Same goes for the more memory approach.
Uhm, that's a pretty standard size for a studio apartment, and would be on the big end for a Manhatten studio apartment. Note that that model is labeled "studio".
None of these distinctions would be necessary if people just called efficiency by its proper name. (That would be 'efficiency', by the way.) The use of 'lazy' as a synonym is pure marketing for the slacker/non-conformist programmer (whose idea of non-conformity means wearing a t-shirt to work). And it gets you hits, because OMG someone is saying u should be lazy at ur job! Haha that's so counterintuitive!
that's correct. However, I do not believe our elected officials pushed it to allow "poor and minorities" easier access. I think they did it to allow financial institutions to reap the benefits of more and cheaper funds.
Ballmer: Microsoft working on App Store-like software distribution
The day your website starts generating more traffic than one server can handle you need to do something very quickly to make sure it all stays up.

So I think its often reasonable to pay the exorbitant prices as a stopgap before you can start doing any of the more complex scalability re-architecturing.
What does a startup mean?
Is your startup worth a fund?
Ask HN: GMail reads and archives mail on its own
Yesterday evening I had 25 letters in my inbox, 20 of which were unread. When I woke up this morning, I found only 5 unread letters in my inbox, all of which were received during the night. Those 25 letters that were in my inbox in the evening were marked read and archived.

I changed the password and went back to bed wondering what's going on. When I came back in about 2 hours, my inbox was empty and all the unread mail received this night was read and archived.

I'm sure nobody knew my passwords, especially the new one I set this morning. There are no filters set up; I checked it. I'm running Safari on Mac, if that matters.

My bet is that it's a GMail bug. What's your opinion? Did anybody else experience the same?
Burst Tries: A Fast, Efficient Data Structure for String Keys
Specifying Performance
WARNING: Mostly useless for psycopg

WARNING: API changing in trunk soon
Windows 7 was the real Vista | TechJaws
Your blog is what you make it. Just because its hosted on a blog-hosting site and has all the features you expect from a blog it doesn't mean it impersonal.

No one expects anything from you, do what you please.

I guess vanity plays a part here..
Maverick schmaverick. However, to give you the benefit of the doubt, name 3 startuppers that you would propose. BTW, do you seriously think Warren Buffets advice on macroeconomics would be worth less than someone who has started the corner deli?
Google AJAX Language API - Language Detection
This looked safe so I input some personal, easily-exploitable information.
Apple Exec Hired From IBM Ordered to Stop Work
The Rocio Romera is about $23,000.

But I am surprised that these are so expensive. You'd think that a factory would have advantages over having guys come to a lot and building a house (imagine if we built cars that way). Maybe the volumes are too low to get much in the way of economies of scale.
Installing Xen On CentOS 5.2 (i386)
Feedback wanted for a new site :)
Gordon Brown says your data will never be completely safe with the Government
I agree. It's not that it's extensively documented; it's that the code is easy enough to hack to one's needs ;)
What's everyones take on using something like Pinax where a lot of things are done and bundled up for you?

I've never been a huge fan of this approach. I like Django because it removes some of the annoying parts of creating a web app, but I don't like when the user registration, commenting, profiles, avatars, and more site-specific functionality like "groups/message boards" are pre-built for me
The Fringe
I can finally have the Fu Manchu I've always wanted!
It's a little hard to give feedback on something that has no data to display.
Let's End Adolescence
Oh Xen, how I love thee! If you're ever lucky enough to find yourself as a customer of Softlayer, check out the Virtualization forum; I have a nice tutorial there on getting Xen setup and running pretty quickly on their dual networks.
Looks like they are all free. Awesome
At the bottom of the gmail page, you will find text like: "Last account activity: 40 minutes ago at this IP (201.82.153.204)." followed by a "details" link.

Click on the details link, and you will see the last IPs from which Gmail activity took place.

You will also find a "Sign out all other sessions" that might be useful if your account was compromised - even if you changed your password, if someone was logged in already he will not be suddenly logged out - so he might still retain control of your account.

Good luck.
I don't seem to get a preview on Google books, but there appear to be thousands of versions of that story on the web, e.g:

http://www.progress.org/gandhi/gandhi03.htm

"He wrote the station master requesting a first-class ticket and received it only because the man was not a local Boer but a Dutchman from Holland."

I don't claim that this link gives an accurate story, but I would view the negotiation story in the book with equal suspicion.
If he were giving it away for free that'd be one thing, but this is still just a roommates wanted ad.

That said, hmmm, is it close to BART?

update: No, not really.
wow! That's a pretty impressive demo. So it's basically RJS on steroids?
Adolescence was invented in the 19th century to enable middle-class families to keep their children out of sweatshops. But it has degenerated into a process of enforced boredom and age segregation...

The fact is, most young people want to be challenged and given real responsibility. They want to be treated like young men and women, not old children.

Where have we heard this before?

http://paulgraham.com/nerds.html
It's nothing new or uncommon. This has always been standard operating procedure for gangs.
Interesting argument, but now let's assume that Comcast builds it, promising unlimited internet and that they won't throttle users. Then they change their mind. What can you do? As a town, you might be able to revoke Comcast's charter, and then build your own anyway, but you've certainly wasted some time (and probably money in the legal battle with Comcast). Not to mention torquing off the residents who don't know enough to care.

A town, on the other hand, can hold the leaders directly responsible.

On a broader point, perhaps the town should be able to decide whom they trust more--the local business person (who you've painted to be competent, but that isn't always the case), or their own manager (who may be excellent, in any isolated instance).
<i> India had a number of launch failures prior to this success, </i>
If you are referring to a lunar satellite kind of mission, this is not true.
"Chandrayan- I" is their very first shot at it.
Even the launch vehicle (PSLV) has a very good track record.
[http://www.isro.org/pslv-c11/brochure/Page10.htm]
"During 1993-2008 period, PSLV had twelve consecutively successful launches carrying satellites to Sun Synchronous, Low Earth and Geosynchronous Transfer Orbits."

When it comes to hacking spirit, they are pretty good though:
http://www.isro.org/newsletters/spaceindia/octdec2003/webpgs... [Transporting a Sounding Rocket nose cone on bicycle during the early days of ISRO]
The easiest explanation for that behaviour is that you have either forwarding or POP/IMAP enabled and have a client running somewhere you've forgotten about.
So you want a dynamic form (django)
VC Road Trip
Spoiler alert: boobs.
It is naive to assume that "adolescence" was a concept invented out of the blue, then deliberately experimented by some politics, it never works this way. The opposite is true : at some point we needed a word to describe a change in society, and a new cultural phenomenon that didn't exist before. Then was born the concept of adolescence and the teenager, wich is a worldwide phenomenom in Occident and other parts of the world.

Necessity is the mother of all virtues. People responsabilise when there is a need for it, especially when there is no other choice. Should the economic crisis worsen and make our life tougher, you'll see a lot of young people do whatever it takes to support their family and take a more serious stance on life and politics.

Some people are afraid that young people cannot responsabilise because of their education. I would argue that the same people underestimate (1) the potential of the young people, wich fuels the problem, and (2) underestimate the greatest educator of all : necessity.
You're absolutely right. I set up a mail client to download mails weeks ago and it was downloading them 1 at a time (seems like a server limitation), so it wasn't a problem until today, when it downloaded first unread messages ever. I didn't suspect it because it's been operating for weeks in the background and didn't cause any problems.

Thanks for help!
Scalability Mistakes
I get the feeling that the internet is starting to repeat itself. It's been quite a while since I read something on the net that I've not read somewhere else in a somewhat modified form.
While I wholeheartedly agree that there are many things wrong with "kids these days," completely abolishing adolescence would... what's a good word here... suck! Look, I did my fair share of dumb stuff when I was younger, most of which was done in the name of boredom. But what's the alternative here? "Happy 13th birthday, son, now go get a job!"?

If high STD and drug use rates tell us anything, it's that these young people are, on average, too immature to assume adult roles. I adore the feelings of achievement that being an entrepreneur/adult have brought me, but at the same time I recognize the fact that "being a kid" wasn't as bad the article makes it out to be. I spent most of my time playing video games, hanging out with friends and, yes, doing drugs! OMG! But you know what, at the end of the day, it was still fun.

I think we as a society should do everything in our power to encourage young people to focus on school so that they don't get dragged down into the worlds of drug addiction, poverty, etc. However, the reason I had so much time to dick around during my adolescence/teenage years was mainly because school was far too easy and not engaging enough. The entire schooling system is not nearly as progressive as it needs to be. Furthermore, there are not nearly enough reasons to excel at it. Working hard in high school just means you can get into a good college where you have to work even harder (and, unless you really excel or are financially secure, take a long-term monetary hit for the privilege) and the reality is that where one attended college is rarely relevant today.

School should be designed to provide useful knowledge instead of information that is merely cataloged, regurgitated, and forgotten. It should encourage and enable young people to find something they are passionate about and learn relevant things about that and gain useful experience in the process. The only classes that I worked hard to excel in and go beyond the bare minimum were programming and writing courses. It should come as no surprise that these are the two topics I am most passionate about to this day.
Earlier discussion here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=341997
The song, if anyone is interested, is by The Submarines, it's called "You Me and the Bourgeoisie": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYvt0boSRXQ
Which is unfortunate because Facebook is kind of a walled garden :-/
Great stuff, Josh! As Nivi requests in your comments, can you share some of that info?
If high STD and drug use rates tell us anything, it's that these young people are, on average, too immature to assume adult roles.

Or that they have nothing better to do?
The 3 stage process of childhood - adolescence - adulthood is already irrelevant in many affluent Western countries, but what was removed isn't adolescence but adulthood.

Many 40 year olds manage their lives as teenagers (look at the low birth rate in western Europe, or high divorce rate in the US) and vice versa - teenagers build $15b (if you believe it ;)) companies.
Sex and drugs are not activities exclusive to adults (nor should they be). Kids DO have better things to do, and for them (as well as adults) it's usually sex/drugs/rock&roll that are the 'better things'.
Isn't IBM a 'consulting/services' company now having sold off their PC unit to Lenovo? How is Apple a direct competitor? Given the large size of IBM and Apple, and the many areas they compete in I don't see how this non-compete is enforceable.

Seems like sour grapes to me.
C++ for the next decade
Anybody who thinks women ALWAYS feel colder than men has obviously not lived with a menopausal woman... Talk about role reversal!
I'm going to write an 'informational' article today about keeping cool with 'helpful' and convenient links to products from stores that have in no way anything to do with this article, myself or my company. And of course there will be no sort of financial agreement that benefits me as the author in exchange for sending traffic to these web stores.

/end sarcasm
But can it play Locomotive Breath?
Is this starting to become like "I, for one, welcome our new X overlords?" is on Slashdot?

PG wrote everything. Let's take that as a given. Now can we move on?

I'm not trying to be persnickety, but your comment adds absolutely nothing to the discussion and sounds like fanboy tripe. If PGs article was on here, we could talk about that. But it's not. AFAIK, every one of PG's articles has already appeared on here and we've already talked about it. So on with the new material, okay?
Nokia 7610 Lcd Ways
6670, 6670 lcd ways, 7610, 7610 lcd problem, 7610 no display, display, lcd, no, Nokia, problem, ways
Sorry, Dan, but the strange loop generated by what I am submitting here is irresistible. Cheers:
http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2007/12/the_guy.php
IPhone passes BlackBerry in Market share at the expense of Nokia
Advice to the President Elect: Restore confidence first
Gatto has a lot to say about this in UHoAE as well.

My own thinking is that it is impossible to end adolescence because American society is structured around competition, and competition depends on measurement. And because there's no good theory on what can verse can't be measured, it's too easy for the proponents of adolescence to put some numbers on what they're selling. And because these metrics make the benefits of adolescence seem more salient than the benefits of anything else, adolescence will always beat out every other option, short of some radical philosophical shift in society, which is beyond the scope of this movement.
I really shouldn't nitpick-- particularly on something thrown together in a week by one person-- but I can't resist: I bet you'd double the fraction of people looking at the site who actually build a list if it lets you start building a list before signing up. After I've built one you can remind me that I should sign up if I want to keep it.

Its much better to let people get their feet wet with out jumping through the hoop of a sign-up.
Party at Flint, Michigan?

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0098213/