skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This list immediately lost any credibility with Sposky as #1 when he hasn't written an article about development in (at least) over a year.
Thoughts on IronRuby and .Net Testing
I'm not sure this article rises to a level sufficient enough to label it as "journalism"
Tending Your Software Garden
Long live 4chan.

Anonymity and a lack of taxes & bureaucrats is what makes the internet wonderful...and sometimes awful.
Your education is what you make of it honestly.
Tom Preston-Werner on Powerset, GitHub, Ruby and Erlang
AMD, the only sparcs available were obscenely slow IIIis.

Without workstations, how's anyone going to dev for solaris? It's not known for its hardware support of non-sun hardware.

I've been in an office with a rackmount in it. The rack is huge and it's loud. They used to just shove the guts of their servers into a desktop box and call them workstations. But I guess that's too much for them now.
You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss, But It Helps...
By definition, a very small fraction of graduates attended a prestigious college. Wouldn't it make more sense to look at the odds of an individual reaching a certain level of (for lack of a better phrase) "corporate achievement", depending on where they went to school?

via Forbes, the median MIT graduate has a starting salary of $72,000. The median starting salary for all college graduates is around $43,000. Since only 50 people in the world can be CEOs of the top 50 companies at once, maybe it makes more sense to look at numbers like this?

I'm not saying that salary should determine your choice of school, just that this article is using a very strange metric to argue its point.
If they're going to sell x86 workstations, at least sell some more powerful than the macintosh I can buy down the street.

They've been shoving COTS motherboards into x86 boxes for a few years now, how about keeping up with the idea of some computational ooomph?

Seriously, what's a reasonable computer scientist supposed to use these days? I'd rather not spend a day a week fixing/maintaining a linux box for its own problems, or for tracking down the new compatible binaries, or begging for help on undocumented software on mailing lists.
Are you at all familiar with the UAWs negotiating tactics? I worked at Ford (in systems) many many years ago. I ran the IT and plant-floor systems operations for a now-defunct Ford plant (Dearborn Glass). This was about 14 years ago, for reference sake.

As a sideline I was also building and selling PCs to various coworkers, including a lot of fairly high ranking UAW negotiators. As such, I would go to their houses after hours to fix various user-inflicted issues, we would have a few beers and get to talking... Let me just say that there was little room for "management" to negotiate in the grand scheme of things. The majority of the demands by the UAW were completely unreasonable and unscalabe, and underneath it all they knew this.

Your first sentence is correct in that the UAW seeks only to increase its membership and payroll, but they go about this in a very non-beneficial parasitic arrangement. I am not saying that management is/was all saints either... But when I had to almost physically drag a forklift operator away from a poker game to move something, or witness a guy whose sole purpose for being was to make sure the "knobs" (thing the rear view mirror attaches to) were properly installed on finished windshields (he managed to do this job while simultaneously reading the paper) something was clearly wrong.

The non-American automakers really had to make only 1 critical business decision: keep the UAW out of the factory.
Cheap and tasty scurvy protection (Bay Area)
One thing to consider: Lots of situations can wipe you out in cash (family member gets ill, you get ill or injured, new child born, etc) BUT if you go for it now, you'll know if your cashflow is good enough to keep going or if you have to get a new job. You seem qualified, intelligent, and responsibile: You should be able to find a job pretty quickly if the entrepreneurial thing doesn't work out.

Faster you jump in, more likely you are to do it. There's tons of things that can come up to make jumping into the unknown a very bad idea. But right now, you can try your hand for 6-10 months and see where your cashflows are and if your business is growing. If it doesn't work, you've got 8-12 months to find a new job before you're broke.

Also as an employer, trying your own hand in business is a huge plus on the resume. Staff that can think strategically/managerially are really cool to work with. You'll learn a hell of a lot on your own, you've got a long time to make things work, and then if something changes, you'll know if your biz is viable to support you and your family.
I have never felt a need to mask my identity while online, even when I was younger and stupider than I am now. Hell, up until this year I didn't even bother to censor anything I said online. Unfortunately, now that I have the reputation of a business to worry about I have to be far more careful, but it's still not that big of a deal.

Life is about trade-offs. You trade some anonymity for some convenience or a useful service. Being anonymous on the Internet, in the sense of nobody knowing your true identity, hasn't really gotten any harder. Sign up for whatever you want, just don't use your real name. Pick some kind of innocuous handle and use it for all the inter-connected services you need and make sure those services don't also connect that ID with your "real" one.
How to Recover Data From a Dead Hard Drive
The issue was not a bug, it was a fundamental misunderstanding of how real estate markets work. Moody's had a model for pricing mortgages which assumed real estate prices never went down. It was basically the real life equivalent of the famous "Assume a spherical cow..." problem.
Top 50 iPhone Apps for Educators
iPhone is a great tool for education. Whether you're a teacher, librarian, or other educator, there are a number of apps that can help you do your job better. Here, we'll take a look at 50 of these apps and what they can do for you.
It seems that checks affect journalism too. "Citizen journalism" allows people to report much more quickly than traditional media. Bloggers don't have to submit their posts to editors and fact-checkers, the way broadcast and print journalists do.
MySQL and PostgreSQL release quality
Yes, for EC2 you are charged the amount of time that you use, your machine uses the RAM and still uses the CPU (it's not completely idle).

But SimpleDB's machine hours is the actual time of your queries.
InfoChachkie: Corporate Panhandling - How Clever Startups Secure Scarce Resources
Great tips and tricks for leveraging personal relationships and securing vital resources, especially at a startup's early stages.
Specifically, you're mainly being downmodded for your last phrase: "you" and the following 4-letter word. If you left that off, you would've gotten a few points down at most. (And I would've up-modded you, as I also dislike spelling mistakes.)
"For anyone who hasn't been paying attention to the software industry lately, I have some bad news. The open-source business model is broken."

Yes, if you haven't heard that open source as a business strategy is broken, it's because you aren't paying attention. Or perhaps the real reason you haven't heard that is because not many people are reaching this conclusion anymore after so many astonishing open source exits in the last year alone.

"This will require many to adopt a new mindset, viewing open source more as a means than an end in itself."

Agreed, giving away software and source code for free does not directly translate into revenue. Point scored for knocking straw man on his ass.

"The traditional open-source business model that relies solely on support and service revenue streams is failing to meet the expectations of investors."

I think the only thing disappointing investors about open source business is missing out on opportunities like:

"Consider Sun MicroSystems' (JAVA) $1 billion acquisition of open-source database software vendor MySQL."

Now I know it wouldn't have supported the position about how much open source business sucks, but it's worth mentioning some more examples here:

January 2008 - Nokia buys Trolltech for $150M

One from my own industry, open source network security:

March 2007 - Sourcefire raises $75M in IPO

I'm not sure exactly how many other software companies went public in 2007, but it wasn't very many. 5? 10?
#2 is exactly what is happening, IMO.

There has been a pretty huge influx of employers that just really don't care what their employees act like on their own time. Granted, a lot of this influx has been in the software development industry, but I really don't think that it's much of a leap to assume that it will also flow into other industries - especially considering that it is flowing through general acceptance by the average person in society.

The optimistic part of me thinks that although it may have a bit of a rough transition, the next few generations after us will end up as being very open as far as accepting whatever behavior people indulge in with consenting parties.
I'm from Romania and I am applying for college in UK, even though it's ok here I consider there are other opportunities in Western Europe (it's too hard for an EE student to go straight to Silicon Valley).
I swear some of their photos make people look like Homer Simpson. When Richard Branson was on the cover in a space helmet, I could imagine him saying 'Doh'.
Are companies considered "American" if their profits are shipped to another country? If their design, business strategy, and engineering are done places other than America?

Or is that simply considered, "modern?"
BusinessWeek is one of the few magazines out there that is able to reliably trigger the "that's not even wrong" reaction from me.

Open-Source is not a business model; it's an element in the business environment sure; but in and of itself it has only the most tangential relationship to the flow of money.

And yes, some companies, Sun in particular have badly botched their open-source efforts, but that's mostly because Sun is in trouble in their hardware business and still thinking that it's the mid-90's. But for every Sun having a loud and spectacular failure; there's a Google or a Facebook building their success on open-source infrastructure.

//BW is just bad, they get get facts, quotes and names wrong too often to be an accident.
Nice solution to a nagging problem. Has a lot of potential for building data transformations for reporting type applications. And it does make sense as a web app if it leads towards the path of "hosted data warehousing" or "data warehousing as a service", where a client deliberately makes a decision and is comfortable with entrusting their data to a third party in exchange for easier path toward some type of reporting/analytical capability. As a matter of fact, I would think about using/licensing it for a system I'm working on...

However, for those advanced use cases (when it's not a one-off), there is a need for saving/editing/copying/versioning of transformations. Are you guys thinking about providing such capabilities?
Server Monitoring With munin And monit On CentOS 5.2
Rails TakeFive - A Conversation with Glenn Vanderburg
Songbeat: Interesting New Music Service - But is it Legal?
There are a few serious problems with this. First, this could also have the adverse result of making the eventual collapse even worse. I think that it is much easier to handle less serious but more frequent collapses, as opposed to the
Great Depression once a decade.

Second, there's a reason states don't print their own currency and the EU has adopted a common currency: it makes economic coordination so much more efficient. If each state had its own currency we would waste efficiency constantly exchanging currency, and out of state business would become subject to the volatile exchange fund market. Sure, this idea may solve one problem, but it certainly creates many more.
I don't think tactics are relevant. Management had a choice at each negotiation:

1. Stand Firm and accept a strike.

2. Cave, agree to something clearly not viable and let someone deal with the problem in the future.

Option 1 doesn't make management look too great -- the were likely concerned for their jobs. This is why they took option 2 with the hope that the 'future someone' would be the government.

Let's keep in mind that the automakers are not profitable and have not been for some time. Long term, shutting down is generally preferable to operating at a loss.
This is certainly interesting. I think the more tailored view is that there are many people who have the necessary risk threshold, creativity, and ambition to undergo the challenge of working at or running a start-up. However, for everyone else, including brilliant people seeking greater financial security working at a large company can have many benefits.

Also, large companies like Google can give their employees freedom of action (20% of their time in fact), as well as the resources to actually see their ideas put in action.
The NYT seems to think it "provokes questions over online identity" (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/28/us/28internet.html?ref=tec...) not that they don't publish rhetorical Orwell inspired headlines.

However, as I said above they jury upheld the site's TOS which is hardly a landmark ruling. The NYT says the difference was it's only previously been used to stop "hackers". I still don't see the excitement here.

The TOS are a perfectly legitimate legal instrument to use against people violating the spirit of your site. It's common to see people in court over TOS violations caused by their bots. It seems equally obvious MySpace would be happy to press TOS infringement in this particularly heinous case.
Ask YC: Verifying Gender
I am mulling over the idea of a social news site for women. These already exist, but they seem to rely on the notion of being so "girly" that supposedly only women would want to read them. I find this limiting. (I am male, however, so perhaps this is just my distorted point of view.) Is there a good way to verify the gender of users that won't turn them off? Perhaps using Facebook?

I also seem to remember mentions of moderated women-only websites in Japan.
Map of Startups on CrunchBase
Guido's thoughts on Scala
Pick discontentment with the things you can change
Textflow - amazing 'parallel word processing' for Word and Google Docs
Sony Ericsson W830 Unlocked
Sony Ericsson W830 is one of its best imaginary phones ever seen with elegant and fashionable look. The Sony Ericsson W830 comes with 2 MP powerful camera and Music player with the track ID music recognition walkman 2.0 players.
It's just a blockquote. Here is the original:

http://www.propylon.com/news/ctoarticles/051115_master_foo.h...
For paying or for receiving payments? You can buy from outside the US with any international credit card, like Visa, whatever your bank account is.
This is what I was afraid of. I'm playing around with a couple toy webapps at appengine because it's free, and I'd like to do the same with ec2.

I really don't want to accidentally leave it 'on' and get a bill so I''ll continue avoiding it.
Plus you need to do all the stuff to set up a local server, no?
So if I'm on a boat and I happen to have a barrel of lake water in front of me and I dump it overboard, the water level stays the same?

Always good to know.
I thought that was Erlang.
It should be noted that most people actually get their jobs through their social networks (as discussed in books like Tipping Point) as well as other research into Management.

So, I think the logical result of these ideas is that the way to success for those at Ivies (and schools like Stanford etc...) is that their social networks include many other highly motivated and successful people. However, anyone at any large university has a huge network to possibly tap, including thousands of talented students, alumni, and world class professors. Thus, I think the more logical result is that motivated students at any large school do well by building large and powerful social networks.
Yeah, exactly.

Here is a who page for wsj editorial staff right now:
http://www.opinionjournal.com/about/whoweare.html
EC2 isn't free but it's pretty cheap, it starts from 0.10$/h.
If you follow the tutorials on EC2 you'll see that it's pretty well explained how you see your running instances and how to stop them. There is also elasticfox, a Firefox plugin to manage your instances (and other complex commercial management tools)
Interestingly these people would never have been caught (at least not by other players) had they been smarter about it. They could have made 100x what they did over a long period of time.

I've thought a bit about how I would do it if I had that opportunity and were trying to maximize profits without getting caught. It's an interesting thought experiment really. I'd probably do something like have preset starting hand standards that are on the loose side of what a winning player might have and stick to them religiously. Then I'd largely only use the cheating software on the river. I wouldn't call bluffs much, though I'd raise all-in against them frequently (since presumably the bluffer would fold and nobody would then see your hand). Etc.
There have been massive fluctuations in interest in computer science since the 1970s, so it's a poor assumption that 50-somethings would be under-represented in the industry.

If programmers were staying in the field, we should probably see a distribution where there is a good representation of 20-somethings from the early 80s (the last major boom) -- those people would be around 40 today. I don't see that; I see a lot of 20-somethings, and a few 30-somethings, and it's been that way for as long as I can remember. There seem to be other forces at work.
More information on Tyba, I found on his blog:

"The startup is Tyba and it’s a simple concept: You download a Firefox extension which allows you to rate web pages and append tags (a feature I like is that when you come from Google or Yahoo the search term is automatically sent with your rating). The rating and tagging is simple, done by clicking stars or using keyboard shortcuts. Then when you feel like it you can login in to the web interface and organize the links you’ve rated into groups. These groups become public and anyone can view them. The other Tyba users can follow your groups and you in turn can also follow other people’s groups. When you follow a group you can do two things, see when new links are added to them and you can search through them. It’s a bit like building your own search engine with the links you rate and the groups other people make. Right now all this functionality is there in its most basic form."

I've developed a few Firefox extensions, though I'm not available to help as I'm driving my own company.

What kind of platform-specific code does the extension use that makes it difficult to run cross-platform? I'm surprised it has problems because no extension I've ever coded required much more than visual tweaks across Mac/Windows/Linux. Some extensions clearly are tied to a platform, but from what is described here, I'm not seeing a piece that can't just be XUL/JS.

Good luck, regardless!
Where was this 2 days ago when I was using Excel macros to reformat some data pasted from the county assessor's office? This would have saved me a good half hour.
although its not really "women-only", sugar inc (http://www.sugarinc.com/) is female-focused, somewhat-social news and such.
No need for a full-on CDN. Even just blip.tv or youtube or something would be great, plus then you get the occasional read from a searcher there.
EU to search out cyber criminals
It is a reasonable assumption, but the term "anchor" can also reasonably be applied to an object expressly intended to anchor a boat, regardless of whether it is attached to a sufficiently long rope to work in all parts of the lake.
A problem with the central analogy: he's not really talking about bosses in particular. He's talking about environments. Poachers are a problem for current-day Africa, hence active management is needed. They weren't a problem before, however, and they were not needed. A good boss makes a healthy environment for innovators. Other healthy environments exist.
This is even worse than the "pseudo science based on anecdotes". This is pseudo science based on the shoddiest "statistics" (if it's worth calling it that) possible - pseudo science based on pseudo scientific data.

"Here's a very small sample of data. Let's draw totally arbitrary conclusions from the data and then extrapolate wildly about extremely complex systems and patterns of behaviour. Tada! I can haz argument!"

How much lower can we go?
> where to take this from here

Your only goal should be to try and sell yourselves to Microsoft as quickly as possible.

While clever, the central idea is trivial to replicate. Try obtaining as much of a legal protection as possible. You have a year from your initial public disclosure to file a patent application. This will run you at about 10-15k, but will greatly increase your chances of a technology acquisition. If in doubt about the patent, consider the fact that once a variation of this gets into the next Excel version or a service pack, your customer base will go to zero.

Definitely drop the SaaS model, this is the worst application of it ever. Virtually all business data is confidential, copy-pasting it around random web servers is not encouraged to put it mildly.

It is a nice idea and it is certainly a neat tech demo. Your best bet in my opinion is to try and sell the actual technology bit.
I prefer Mercurial (Hg). I'm sure Git is the preferred choice amongst the alpha of alpha geeks, but for small and medium-sized projects, Hg's simple intuitive command structure, and more than adequate speed (2nd only to Git) is a God send.

Git just seems overly complex for all but the most sophisticated workflows. I could be wrong, but that has been my experience.
I can attest first-hand to the uselessness of the Kahnawake Gaming Commission. I was involved about a decade ago in proving that the blackjack games dealt by a couple casinos was rigged. Someone much smarter than me proved conclusively that they were dealing seconds, meaning that if the dealer's card would have busted him, instead it was digitally tossed out and replaced by the next card, totally unbeknownst to the user of course.

The KGC was given a record of hands that any stats professor would have been able to use to verify it. They did nothing.
PG overstated the case IMO. Having good bosses helps many people, and being independent helps a (I believe a smaller number of) other people.

One of the problem with managers today is the MBA and the management ideology that it has spread. The average MBA makes a lousy manager, in my observation.
His statistics are double bad because he confused correlation and causality. He just assumes that people are motivated by their bosses and good bosses equals good motivation. I find that assumption extremely suspect. My suspicion is most of the time it works the other way around, people are motivated by a large variety of issues and their current passion for their job colors their opinions of everyone working there.
Lessons for Chinese Companies as They Go Global
I considered posting the original, but it seemed meandering by comparison.

The later post looks like just a blockquote, but it's not. There's an introductory sentence there that frames the excerpt and makes clear what it's about. The subtle power of an editor!
Ask HN: Hacker stuff to do in Philadelphia?
I'm wandering around in the University City area in Philadelphia today and tomorrow during the days. Anyone have any suggestions of where I should go to hang out and hack, or of geeky sites to see?