skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's not that the article is critical that bugs me. It's that Greenspun has bitched for about 40 (100?) consecutive blog posts about how lazy, wasteful, and doomed the American economy is. It's the same thing over and over again, and most of them have been on the front page of HN.

Having said that, I thought his Economy Recovery Plan (http://philip.greenspun.com/politics/economic-recovery) was excellent reading even though I didn't agree with parts of it. I'd vote up something thoughtful and productive like that any day.
In Greenspun's analogy, students == auto workers. However, students and parents aren't unionized to the point where they have made crippling demands on the school system.
I would prefer to hit thirty having done car rallies in Himalayas, knowing how to fly a plane, and building up some decent software as well. A bunch of 'memorable' parties would be an added bonus. :-) (And i think i should re-read my comments before posting if they give the impression that the author wrote them in a drunker stupor.)

Well i do not believe in the theory of one size fits all. If running a business works well for you at this point of time, it's great and wish you success in it. I guess i need some more convincing before i finally take the plunge. (Yeah i know there is never a right time)

tom_rath put it across very well in his comment above:
"You're not wasting time if you genuinely enjoy how it is being spent."
looks like a useful product. Isn't it similar to the stuff Ray Ozzie was doing before Microsoft acquired him? I think it has great potential.

I haven't tried one hub yet but I plan to.

One killer feature would be drag and drop file sharing with automatic versioning.
As the article points out, that's probably going to be a huge roadblock.

I don't really see this ever becoming successful, open source or not.
Ask HN: Review my Startup, Entitea
Distributed computing with Linux and Hadoop
i like the "like this" bit. And by "like this" i hope govt failures that are exposed publicly before spending fortunes just to sooth a few egos...
well there are two different issues that overlap a good deal.

1. wanting a way to uniquely identify a user that is easy for the user to remember (email works great)
2. wanting a way to prevent users from creating duplicate accounts

Using emails works great for 1 and is a decent low bar for 2. There are no good answers for 2 so using an email address is the best I have seen.
amazing how the reaction to dying computer languages is on the other side of the spectrum (terms like "thank god" and "damn company XXX for being adamant")
Is that a big enough niche to make any money from?
Dual-boot, my friend!
Thanks, that was actually the link I wanted to post. When I copied it I realized it was google's big messy click-through URL, so I went for the next result instead.
I often vote up because I want to see other folk's opinions on the linked article. And because Phil is an old but well-known hacker, I think it was relevant.
Vim: Registers
No, teachers are the auto workers and students are the cars.
Low cost of entry means anyone can try any number of ideas with minimal investment. Commoditization means all of those ideas will be the same, thereby lowering the value of the idea.

They are not the same thing.
Imagine an angry father yelling for his son. “Sudo!!” Sudo runs down from his room, sees the command he was supposed to be in front of, and executes it immediately.

No, no, he's got it all wrong. The son then says "Okay, I'll do it in a minute" and proceeds to go back to playing WoW or whatever he does for fun.
Public school administration that is. Teachers have one of the more powerful unions, and their PAC is one of the bigger spenders.
This may be considered off topic, but I visited the major London datacentre last month and perhaps there is also an argument that the growth in the internet is becoming a major hardware (and resultant energy) problem. http://www.channelweb.co.uk/crn/news/2232079/hp-warns-datace...
Do we keep our faith in Moore's law, or make a concentrated effort at slicker programming?
Idea - Shopping for visual goods
I wanted to brainstorm this idea with fellow YC members.
Problem: I need to buy some furniture for a room but I'm visually impaired (i.e. I lack good taste) so after seeing some furniture at crate and barrel, I went online to see some unique ways some of this furniture is being used in the real world. I did some searches on google & flickr and found some cool pictures of rooms but I'm not sure where the items are from. My life would be easier if there was a service that would tag user created photos with product links. My question to you: 1.) How would build this service? tech? 2.) Is there a real business somewhere here in this problem?
The teachers and administration are auto workers, and they are heavily unionized. The students would be the cars in his analogy.
anyone know if there's a google gadget for the to-do list?
Online ad spend is continuing to grow year-over-year and accountable channels like search and performance/affiliate marketing will be the largest drivers of that growth.

The brand dollars are the ones that get thrown out of the window in an economic downturn. But companies still have to acquire new customers when the economy is bad and they are very likely to double down by spending their ad dollars on accountable media channels to hit their numbers.

Startups that are building targetable/monetizable audiences will be just as likely to make an ad supported model work now as they would have been able to a year from now. Startups who believe that they will be able to just grow a really big general audience and magically monetize it with high price CPM ads from big brands are the ones that are in trouble.
Thanks. I'm excited to finally get to Silicon Valley - a lot of the folks I've met through various YC meetups have all moved out there.
For task and shopping lists, I always recommend emacs Org Mode, but then I find I have to justify using emacs :).

I can update my grocery list for example, and publish it as html which I retrieve from my mobile phone at the store.
It's a fundamental problem of language design.

In Lisp, extending the built-in functions is trivial, so lots of people built Lisp up into the language to solve their problem in, and Ruby makes it easy to do the same. Rails is extends the language, and some people like it. Even the JSON gem does -- when you do "require 'json'", you give arrays the power to convert themselves to json strings. Ruby lets you convert arrays to Ruby-evallable strings, so it's natural to convert them to JSON-parseable strings.

So, do you do what Java does, in making the String class final? Languages only exist for people who speak them, so you need to gauge the social aspects whenever you choose a language. Perhaps Java means that your bozo coworker won't trample your toes. Perhaps Haskell means that you can import just as much as you want. That's ultimately your call.

There are lots of valid complaints about Ruby 1.8: the syntax can be baroque, the scoping rules have too many gotchas, they're (thinking of) taking out continuations in the next version, the VM is dog-slow. But 200 methods on an object is small fries in comparison.
beautiful sentiment, but don't make him the center of your universe, because YOU should be the rightful, temporary center of his universe and not the other way around.

Remember that the end goal of your being his father is for him to become his own man; if your identity is solely 'his father' you will have nowhere to stand when he is no longer first and foremost 'your son'. A man with an identity crisis does not a mature man's father make. For his sake, devote your life to something honourable and deserving of your attention; he will see your example, and model after you, directing his energy upwards and outwards, instead of inwards and downwards like you are doing.

You may not believe me, but that's exactly what happened to the Chinese (my) people, so, be careful.
Suggested additions: Facebook friends and feedburner subscribers.
Did Facebook cause the New Depression?
Do you happen to know any other examples of such things from biology, particularly in a shockingly small number of neurons?

Great explanation, btw.
Understanding SLIME - Using Emacs and Lisp Cooperatively
So what exactly are we supposed to be doing with the "prime of our lives"? I've been in front of the screen since 7 years old :)
Your Online Ad Business Model: Screwed, but Trending Upwards
The site seems easy enough to navigate and the messaging is straight forward. I don't know enough about the tea market to know how big the niche is (although there is a ton of search volume on Google Trends for tea related keywords, which is a good indicator).

Regarding monetization- I noticed you are using adsense. Your content is so ultra targeted that you would probably make a lot more money with affiliate or revshare deals than with adsense. Here is a list of tea related affiliate programs (I have never used any of these and am not affiliated with them in any way, just thought it would be a good starting point).

http://www.associateprograms.com/directory/food-and-drink/te...
BTW, I've been using the term "CAPTCHA" incorrectly. It stands for
"Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans
Apart."

What I describe here isn't automated. Users must submit a question to
test comprehension of their tweet selection.

But like a CAPTCHA, we want to make sure this is not a computer (or
mindless clicking by a human).
objective truth may be objective beauty, but objective truth may not be subjectively beautiful--hence little white lies.
I don't like the "real software engineering is big heavy Java projects" thing (aka "bondage and discipline"). Plenty of "real software engineering" has been done to great effect with dynamic languages.

Here's a random idea: rather than strict locks, perhaps transparency would be a good approach. Load up a third party library, and you get informed that it's fiddling with things, and can then find out what. Maybe it really does need to fiddle with things. Or maybe in a given situation, fiddling with things is the most efficient way of accomplishing something.
Microsoft releases free, open source, MVC-based CMS
agree with the first two.. overall i think a tea site could be aesthetically a little nicer because I imagine the audience your targeting are not for example twitter users, but still very niche. best of luck
The highest ranking social networks in each country visually displayed
You can get one way passenger flights for close to that price. Shipping typically doesn't include and customs fees.
But wait, there's more!

You can achieve immutability in ruby: http://scie.nti.st/2008/9/17/making-methods-immutable-in-rub...

You can achieve data-hiding if you really need to in ruby using the same techniques you use in JavaScript.
Thanks for the input, and for the link to the tea related affiliates. I definitely think that is a better way to go for monetizing the site, I'll be looking over those affiliate links.
I had a great question in a job interview yesterday: "What do you like least about your least favorite programming language?". I picked Ruby as my least favorite, as there's not many languages out there that undermine themselves so totally (I may not want to program in basic, but it does what it says on the tin). Here's my answer:

Matz's decision-making process
He tries to make Ruby be all things to all people
Lots of confusing sugar and overloading baked in
I much prefer Guido's hard pragmatism

The panoply of function types: Methods, Blocks, Procs, Lambdas
All intertwined and yielding into one another.
I love that in Python there is only one:
Objects with a __call__ method, defined metacircularly.

The culture of adding/overloading methods on base classes
Many gems do this en masse, and there are a lot of low-quality gems
Especially disastrous because it's unscoped, and infects the whole process
For a language with four scoping sigils it sure screws up scope a lot

The Matz Ruby Implementation
The opposite of turtles-all-the-way-down (Smalltalk crushed beneath Perl)
It punishes you for taking advantage of Ruby's strengths
The standard library is written almost entirely in C
It doesn't use Ruby message dispatch to call other C code.
That means that if you overload a built-in, other built-ins won't use it
Anything fiddly that's not written in C will be dog slow
> if you release the source, it's open source

That's not what Open Source means, read the Open Source Definition at http://www.opensource.org/docs/definition.php

Incidently, Oxite is Open Source, it's licensed under the Microsoft Public License (Ms-PL) -- http://www.codeplex.com/oxite/license

The Ms-PL is a BSD-like license that is incompatible with the GNU GPL; it's part of Microsoft's attempt to poison the well of open source by introducing gratuitous incompatibilities with the most common open source license.
Don't care about the alternative. Just use whatever you are good at.

Don't get into this endless programming languages war.
10,000 Hours are Not Enough - How to Practice Anything
Ben Stein: Bail Out Detroit -- Now
The Economic Motivation of Open Source Software: Stakeholder Perspectives
I think we're on the same page; I don't want my epitaph to read, "Well, he sure worked a hell of a lot." So, I mis-interpreted your post... by quite a bit. :)
As usual, Gladwell is cherrypicking data to display something unrelated to reality. Let's look at the first QB picked since 1999.

2000: Chad Pennington, this year starting qb for the Jets, doing well.

2001: Michael Vick, who was one of the top few QBs in the league. Of course talent scouts can't predict animal cruelty.

2002: David Carr: Playing backup to Eli Manning. Started for 6 years until an injury sidelined him. Not a McNabb, but far from a Tim Couch

2003: Carson Palmer: 2 pro bowls with the Bungles.

2004: Eli Manning: Superbowl MVP

(here's where players are still too new to tell much about)

2005: Alex Smith: that one hasn't worked out yet and may never.

2006: Vince Young: Promising backup on the Titans.

2007: JaMarcus Russell: Starting for the Raiders

2008: Starting for the Falcons.

Either way, in any non-Gladwellian universe, I'd say college QB scouts are doing pretty well.
We already have government signed x509 (not 100% sure about this detail) certs here in Spain. They can be used to fill taxes online. Just like you said, "showing your ID documents to a public official will be part of proving who you are". They use local administration offices though.
While I don't claim to know much about public school administrators in the United States in general, I have to say that my experience growing up under the WCCUSD (http://www.wccusd.k12.ca.us/) makes me believe that that may be more of a blessing than a curse.
Can widgets pull in the actual comments? The widget I'm looking at only has a link to the parent article. I'd actually like both.
Noted. Thought about both, but didn't see an easy way to integrate, so put off. Anyone know of any easy way? Feedburner seems only to serve images of the #, and FB seems to require auth.
Your referents are a bit vague: "You say that as if you knew it to be true."

Are you referring to my first paragraph, where I say could?

Are you referring to my second, where I say would? (Would if it works like it's supposed to.)

As for my last paragraph, this is an opinion based on personal experience with the "security" of ActiveX and other plugins I've run into in my professional life. Web plugins and other downloaded executables should be sandboxed for security.

Also, the fact that it's not a virtual machine, but virtualized machine code will help with setup: the X86 ISA seems to change much less often than the JRE.
MSVC the "most advanced" compiler, despite:

1. Doesn't support C99.

2. Can't correctly align its stack, making SSE optimizations of any sort a complete nightmare and forcing us to disable a number of optimizations when compiling under MSVC.

3. Has the worst 32-bit libc I have ever seen in my life, with a memcpy that goes at less than 1 byte per clock cycle for small copies, a massive performance killer for large apps.

4. Completely incompatible with almost all features of the more widely used C compilers, e.g. AT&T-syntax inline assembly. ICC, on the other hand, supports nearly everything.

5. Loves to mangle its entire project file every time you change one small thing, resulting in enormous numbers of false deltas in version control.

Now, I'm not big on GCC either and can come up with dozens of regressions and miscompilation problems with GCC, along with who-knows-how-many cases of suboptimal compilation. But at least it works and doesn't force us to mangle our entire codebase just to get it to compile!

If you want to make an argument about compilers superior to GCC, pick one that is actually good, like ICC, rather a relic like MSVC. Merely what I have to do to keep supporting this late-80s-technology beast makes me want to gouge my eyes out. I mean, seriously, a compiler that doesn't even support variable declarations in the middle of a code block? It's 2008, folks.
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.ruby/browse_thread/...
Study: U.S. students improve in math, science
Right now the search widget is the only one that displays comments: http://mm.urbantwelve.com/

We could do this pretty easily though.
Multithreaded Javascript on its way: Web Workers
Ask HN: What to do about a strike?
HN Community,

I'm a grad student in applied math (for my masters) and I work as a TA to help pay the bills. Now the pay is pretty pathetic (about $1000/month), but its enough to get by. The union that represents student employees like myself decided yesterday to strike tomorrow (wednesday). They are bargaining for "Fee Waivers" for all TA-like employees (so we don't have to pay 1/3 of our yearly pay to pay tuition. )

Now I would love a fee waiver, but I'm not so sure I'm down with striking. I don't really understand why they are asking us to strike and I don't know how I feel about unions in general.

Now, obviously I'll make a decision tomorrow if I "strike" (i don't teach tomorrow anyway), but I was wondering how the HN community feels about unions and a strike like this.

The link to the bargaining news I have:
http://www.uaw4123.org/news/bargaining.php
Sony lays off 16,000; will close factories
Yes, there are four boolean values, at least electrically: zero, low, grey, high.
Bungles. I see what you did there... ;)
First turnoff, it runs on ASP.Net. 2nd turn off, the frakking designer couldn't be bothered to notice that Lucida looks like crap on most Windows machines.
Ask HN: Is it worth switching to a Mac?
My current Dell system is in need of replacement and I'm considering switching to a Mac with VMWare. I am a long time Windows user and my work involves mostly web development, research and technical writing. I use Eclipse, UltraEdit, SQLYog, WinSCP, TortoiseSVN, Adobe CS3, Camtasia Studio, MS Office and a local WAMP server for most of my work.

I've done quite a bit of research on hardware/software, but it's been hard to find objective opinions on switching to Mac. I'm especially interested in experiences from other web developers that recently switched to a Mac -- did you notice an appreciable improvement in workflow to justify the learning curve (OS, keyboard shortcuts, etc.)? Has your overall experience been positive?

Edit: To clarify, I would prefer using native Mac software over the VM wherever possible and have found equivalents to everything except Camtasia Studio.
if the stereotypes are true, he'd be able to market this to the entire population of Great Britain
This gives me a bit too much foresight credit. Honestly, I got the idea for these widgets after seeing one too many comments like this one: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=379936. I agree with that thread that your YC karma isn't too useful on other sites, but then I realized it would be useful to display on your own sites.

So I got to building it... I quickly realized that there is karma on other sites, and it might be cool to aggregate. Then I realized I could possibly generate some new Duck Duck Go users this way. Then I realized (by someone indirectly pointing it out to me), that there are SEO implications when deploying widgets.

But I didn't think (until your comment) about improving search by aggregating profile information :). Just to be clear wrt privacy, we're not currently storing any IP info or the aggregate usernames in the DB, and have no plans to do so: http://duckduckgo.com/privacy.html
Smack of Serendipity
Oh, most certainly!

I'm concerned with doing two things really:

1. Making sure he has the opportunity to become exactly whom he wants to be, regardless of what that is.

2. Through example and instruction, ensure that he's capable enough to properly value and evaluate his different options, and mature enough to work hard enough to achieve them.

While ultimately, everything I do is tempered by what I think would be the best for him, I do live my own life and have my own goals. For example, I've always wanted to be a pilot, and in due time I hope to achieve that goal. I'd love for him to share in that accomplishment, but I certainly have no expectations of him to become a pilot himself, and if he's not that big on flying, it certainly won't stop me.

Your advice is sound though. From my outside observations (I live in Vancouver so I get a good chance to observe) of asian families in general, I think there are many that should be heeding your words. I'd just as soon say though that many North American raised people - regardless of culture - could use some more devotion to something other than themselves though!
that advice could apply to big companies, say GM and Chrysler, who at first went before Congress with a plan to convince us (the taxpayers) that they made no mistakes and that we were wrong to think they did.
I submitted a formal request as well, just in case no one was monitoring this thread.
Reminder: Non-Hacker News
By and large, unions serve no useful purpose these days. They exist for the benefit of the higher-ups (union management) to make money off of the members (think ponzi scheme).

My guess is that you had no choice but to join the union when you took the job.
Nice, I guess I can get rid of the reflection invocation of the T Type constructor. Should speed things up a bit.
Cheers.
When I said "that", I think I meant, "all of it". ;)

ActiveX vs. NaCL is a false comparison, obviously. You can't do worse than ActiveX, and nobody promotes it.

I don't understand your last paragraph; setup time isn't going to be based on the X86 ISA, but rather the time it takes to fork a process, monitor it in a debugger, set up the system call interface, and then do whatever UI goop NaCL wants to do to give native code a window context. It could be faster than the Java applet plugin. It could be slower. And applets could get faster.
Dupe.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=391570
I'm using BizSpark to get access to tools so I can develop some Office plugins and related msi installers. In such a situation, the greatest competitive advantage is found using their tools. And, in general, you should be able to use any language that targets the CLR.
Here's the way for Feedburner: http://api.feedburner.com/awareness/1.0/GetFeedData?uri=Hack...
I think more importantly [with regards to humility] that while it's important to talk with your users, you still need to be hubristic. His reason for being humble is this:

There is a huge payoff for being humble about your ability to understand software requirements. In Agile methodologies, the goal is to get users a working program as quickly as possible so they can try it and tell you what they really want

But you still need to be a bit of an arrogant dictator and remember that just because users tell you what they really want, doesn't mean they really want that. Which doesn't really map to hubris I guess, but it certainly isn't humility. GNOME 2's `draining the swamp' effort comes to mind.
I'm curious why so many negative articles on startups keep coming from the NYT. It's like they are sinking with the Titanic and laughing at people in the lifeboats.