skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Okay, this looks cool. I installed it and will try it with my next tasks.
Virgin Media to dump net neutrality and target BitTorrent users
Or some fingers at the end of the finger's a la Olaf Stapledon's "Last and First Men."
Dumb article. Judaism and C are about as opposite as you can get. Judaism's texts (the bible and the Talmud) are famously convoluted, contradictory, debated, etc. C is one of the cleanest languages.
My religion changes after work.

That makes me think of the jews who live in Saudi Arabia and know enough of the Coran to pass as muslims.

Java would be islam then. No wonder it sounds indonesian.
> until I open my mouth and show them

On a complete tangent, this is one of the perks of living in a foreign country if you speak the language well - instant recognition that you have mastered their language, and that you must therefore not be a complete moron.

The downside of this in Europe, for me, has been moving about 4 hours away (absolutely nothing in the US, in terms of distance) and completely losing this advantage.
I've not done much Java for a while, but my most useful resources have been The Java Programming Language and The Java Developer's Almanac (especially the code samples, which I believe are available somewhere on java.sun.com).

Effective Java is also a great read for becoming a "better" Java programmer, but may or may not be useful to you right off the bat.
I think that in the United States a lot of the pressure on students to succeed on entrance exams are in terms of getting into more prestigious schools has more to do with desired prestige and college experience than future success. Few parents would unequivocally claim that going to Harvard over Big State University = more success for their kids. For parents and their kids I think its more of matter of wanting the prestige and college experience that's possible at Harvard.
A better idea may be to not log to file. If you were to log to a database you could record things like date/time, session_id, service_name, module_name, and a generic message and do clever SELECTs on your database of events/messages and it would be easier to answer questions like 'Is this exception clustered with time?' or 'is module X ever called in a session that results in an error between noon and 1pm?'

Cleaning old messages is potentially easier as you can remove lower priority messages first, or simply delete any message older than X.

Of course, if you're logging to another remote service (like a DB server), how do you record low level events in communicating with that service, or how do you record events when the db server is down?
PG claims that a shift towards smaller companies results in people being judged on their performance rather than based on factors which do rather poor jobs of predicting said performance; my experience with tarsnap indicates otherwise.

I have a small number of customers -- somewhere between 10% and 20% -- who are using tarsnap based on a recommendation from another tarsnap user; but the vast majority of tarsnap users signed up based on some other factor which is at best predictive of the quality of tarsnap. Reasons I've heard include:

* I am the FreeBSD Security Officer,
* They find my blog to be interesting and well-written,
* I have a doctorate from Oxford,
* They like the fact that I made the tarsnap client source code available, and
* I beat them on a mathematics competition 10 years ago.

There are a great many instances of companies succeeding with inferior products as a result of having superior marketing; while I am fortunate that people are interested in using tarsnap for reasons which are quite unrelated to the quality of the tarsnap code or service, the fact remains that the market isn't (in PG's words) "[taking] every organization and [keeping] just the good ones" -- rather, the market takes every organization and keeps just the ones which rank best on a nebulous combination of quality, marketing, and luck.

Yes, credentials are an imperfect way of predicting quality; but are they any worse than the marketing and luck which the market introduces?
Not only for emacs. It's remarkable how much the typewriter (or computer) keyboard exercise the pinky, compared with most other day-to-day activities.

The saxophone too... the left pinky table on a tenor sax is (almost) as much work as the shift key on a mechanical Olivetti typewriter.
I learned a lot from the java tutorial

http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/
Hm yeah. I hear you. Now I feel bad about suggesting an ulterior motive with the rss links - it's just it really strikes a nerve when I see that. Good luck hacking around - and good luck with the site.
If Apple markets a Netbook-type appliance the way it knows how, developers will jump on board. That's just how it works.
Yeah, Perl sucks. Instead of making me rewrite libraries, I have to actually work on the problem I want to solve, 'cause the libraries already work. I hate being productive!!1!
Visual Basic would be Satanism - Except that you don't REALLY need to sell your soul to be a Satanist...

Dim! Yuck.
Ditto. I've never wanted to get rid of my pinkie, I always wanted it to be stronger. I'm sure the author would also agree seeing how he broke his.
Related question... we're looking to get t-shirts printed for our upcoming startup (to give to helpful beta users, etc). Anybody have good experiences with a particular vendor? What did you pay, and how many did you buy?
I stumbled on Buxfer a few weeks ago having no idea it was a YC company. The Firefox extension that lets you import your statements is the killer feature for me.

It is the best way to sync your statements if your bank can't do it automatically.
Thanks Yan
Top Viral Video Star on MySpace in 2008
Is This Your Paper On Single Serving Sites?
The power of smart copywriting
Perl 5 is handled by the perl5-porters mailing list; basically, there's a Pumpking per perl5 major version (currently the active ones are 8, 10, and the 11 branch that will eventually become 12) who has final authority, with a set of committers who are generally expected to know when they can JFDI and when to check, and lots of bikesheddi^Whelp from the mailing list subscribers and denizens of irc.perl.org #p5p

The usual combination of dictatorship, oligarchy and democracy, basically :)
If large organisations are less efficient:

- why do they survive?

- if they survive despite all, why do we permit them?

If the market was regulated to set a cap on the size of a single company's workforce (or some other metric, perhaps market capitalisation), we'd also avoid the 'too big to fail' problem we have at the moment.

Not to mention quasi-monopolistic practices like large chains killing off small local competitor with an externally-funded price war (then raising prices once the competition disappears).

Is it that we need the largest companies for some large-scale activities (chip fabs, aircraft manafacture), or that they can be efficient at scale (fast food, wal-mart)?

Would the world/market be a better place if companies were forced to fission at a certain size?
SIRIUS S50 SATELLITE RADIO RUBBERIZED SKIN SPECK
Protect your Sirius S50 radio from the wear and tear of daily usage! Rubberized skin allows you to use all the functions of your radio without removing the case. Swivel holster keeps your radio secure on your hip while out on-the-go. Screen protector included to keep your display scratch-free!
"He received his Bachelor's degree in Physics from Yale University in 1975, and his Ph.D. in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University in 1980."
I was going to make a comment about ALGOL being zoroastrianism, but your smalltalk comment will suffice.
And, Taoism is more like Forth.
Outdoor and garden lighting
I found Blinking Sun have got some really great outdoor solar garden lighting all of which is eco friendly and can be delivered next day throughout the UK. Many of the solar lights featured would make really good gifts.
Microsoft OLE DB Provider for SQL Server error '80040e09'

UPDATE permission denied on object 'REPORT', database 'StreamingMedia', owner 'dbo'.
Twitter Hiring Product Manager To Bring In The Revenue
You might like dzone.com which is a link/news site for developers that has a huge bias in favor of news about Java.
The lack of syntax highlighting in books don't bother me too much, it's the size of the book. I've gotten used to a wide screen monitor for code so it's nice when that long if statement is on one line.

For the purpose of learning from a book the bold and italics in print is often good enough for me. Have def in bold and comments in italics and i'm generally pleased. Then again it could just me a bias I have since i prefer to reading books than pdfs on a computer.
Some of what you say is true, but it's not true that the principal value of YC is the brand name. The YC brand has little weight to the customers of a startup, and without those it quickly dies. YC's principal value is the advice we (and the other YC startups) offer.

The part you're right about is that "admission" to YC is structurally a lot like college or grad school admissions. The difference, though, is that our choices are immediately tested. College admissions officers do not, as far as I know, follow up on the careers of the people they accept and see how they did. Whereas if we pick a bad group, that fact will immediately be thrust in our face. This causes us to work very hard to try to pick the best people.

It was being in a sense a colleague of college admissions officers that made me think about such topics. We're the next bottleneck downstream from them, and it quickly became clear to us what a bad job they were doing:

http://paulgraham.com/colleges.html
Ruby: "There's more than one way to do it, but most of them aren't cool enough!"
Sorry, but designing CPU hardware is really quantum mechanics, both in your analogy and in reality.
An agreement between a big company and an individual really isn't a case of "consenting adults". The company has too much power. In the case of top officers, then I agree, it should be negotable. Put another way the choices are

1) negotiated noncompete
2) noncompete is a given
3) noncompete forbidden

We now have (2). In theory (1) would be better. (3) is bad for the same reasons that (2) is. But more people benefit from (3), so this legislation could be an improvement.

Re. (1), if a company had to pay me to not compete in the future, I wonder what it would really be worth to them? I bet it's worth more to the individual.

Many years ago I saw the managers at a former employer prevent an ex-employee from taking a new job based on one of these agreements. They were not really concerned about the competition. They wanted to teach him, and the rest of us, a lesson.
> why do they survive?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nature_of_the_Firm

I would really like to see more analysis of what structural differences point towards the lots of smaller firms that pg sees, and whether this is a short blip in time, or a long term trend.

Also, I hate to dredge up that ugly topic "politics", but currently, in the US, if you or your firm fail, that's great in terms of opening up space for others to try, but a little scarier in personal terms, with regards to things like health care. Long term, who knows how things like that will play out.
You'll have to start over. That's not such a bad thing. So, Italian before, what now?

It's good to still have a bit of an accent. I knew an American who had mastered Russian to the extent that he was indistinguishable from a native speaker. There were, however, glitches that would show up in his speech - an occasional wrong phrase or something. Because he spoke perfectly otherwise, Russians sometimes thought he was a dumb Russian. This made me realize that you want people to know you're a foreigner, just a foreigner who speaks amazing X.

I never spoke Russian as well as this fellow did (and most of it is now sitting freeze-dried in my brain somewhere), but there was one funny thing in my case. Much of what I learned came from reading, so sometimes I would speak Russian like a 19th century novel. This made my friends laugh, but they also liked it - Russians are big on literacy.

Edit: your core point is quite right, and is easy to verify by the impression it makes when you meet a non-native speaker who speaks excellent English.
Pressed Button State With CSS
What about multiple processes? Threads and multiple processes are not the same, and using multiple processes cuts out a lot of the issues with threads while maintaining the concurrency.
Incidentally, this is also the top rated comment on 4chan... erm, programming reddit. Glad to know we have the same tastes :P
I think Facebook should put up a puzzle on their website called "Make Facebook Profitable" and hire based on the solutions to that.

Somewhat a joke, but also somewhat serious... I wonder if that would net them a few good ideas. Maybe even give this puzzle a prize akin to the Netflix challenge. It would give them a ton of idea output for what amounts to a small award compared to the work performed.
Google Transit Could Happen if it Made Them Money
his comments on C are completely unfounded. C's type coercion means you can ram all sorts of things into places they aren't supposed to go. typecasting says to me that there is nothing orthodox about C at all. if anything it is modern protestantism, a faith that lets you ram in whatever you want, but one wrong move and you go to hell (segfault)
I honestly don't think that 'cram schools' are particularly effective. I taught for the Princeton Review for a while ($20+/hr when I was 18 sounded pretty good). In my experience, the average student would only gain about an extra 50 points the SAT (relative to what they would have gained studying on their own). If memory serves, a standard deviation (on the old 1600 point test) was usually in the neighborhood of a 110 points.

Increasing your score by less than half a standard deviation was nice, but it rarely made or broke your college application.
I want to know which blogging platform would be the best for a programmer running a shareware business.
You can convert into Judaism.
Really Cool Audio Visualizations
There is some truth to that statement.
Paul said: History suggests that, all other things being equal, a society prospers in proportion to its ability to prevent parents from influencing their children's success directly.

I am studying development policies and growth economics this year. His statement really doesn't count for the countries who have very little wealth to begin with. In fact, he needs to clarify that it is better for wealth to be passed through families, than for that wealth to be destroyed.
CE Mark - EMC & Norms
CE Marking (which includes EMC - Electromagnetic Compatibility) has been introduced in order to unify the products security features used in CEE countries. In this article you'll find some EU directive.
Paul seems to be hitting on the optimization by proxy issues seen in many areas, even in pagerank. Google looks not for quality of a page but for indicators of that quality, namely inbound links by quality websites. Similarly exams and credentials do the same. If you can write about these books, you know literature. If you got a degree there, you must be very capable. And in the first generation it works.

However, as people become aware of the ranking mechanism, they try to get ahead by overoptimizing for the narrow areas inspected. So pages do linkfarms and black-hat SEO, students goto cram schools, etc. etc. essentially producing the exact opposite of what was initially sought. I believe Joel spolsky had a good article on a simillar pattern in sales.

The question is if an algorithm that affects its input data can be made so that it adapts to the changes and gradually reaches some kind of equilibrium with the input data or stabilizes in some other way. As paul suggests, one way would be to make the system more transparent, or even 'social' such that the participants have a way to update it in an agreed way. This would keep the minority from cheating on the majority.

Doing away with such filters though might be a bit harder than we think, especially given the breadth of their applications. As aristus commented, even YCombinator has an examination system. In fact it wouldnt be too hard to imagine cram schools for YC given enough incentive. I fear this is a problem we have to either solve or live with.
Recapturing the Joy of Programming
I like the general idea, although if I had a kitchen timer ticking on my physical desktop and going off every 25 minutes, my officemates would beat me senseless, which could have some impact on my productivity.
Palm App Store Opens
I can't think of a better time to pay a premium for excellence in user interface design than when my physical user interface is constrained.

$1M/day in sales at the iPhone app store (august data) suggests people want more than a web browser on small devices.

I don't think Apple would sell a "badly wounded MacBook", I think they'd sell a "premium communications solution"... either way it would be the same hardware.
It's not as long as it sounds, as there are a lot of blank pages and images.
I'm tired of all these apple netbook rumors.
sadly i think college credentials in the US have lost their luster because its always a let-down. without a doubt there is only one school that i have never met a single retard from: caltech. cmu is a close second. every other school has let me down by graduating some goof who i have interviewed or worked with. never again will i get uptight or impressed by stanford, mit or the ivies.

my attitude is that i do not care where you went to school. in an interview, if you ace the questions, why do i care if you went to ball state? so what, maybe that is all you could afford. on the other hand, if you can't answer my questions, why do i care if you went to stanford?

furthermore its likely that most people here do not know what the best colleges in korea, japan, china and india really are. so best to just skip the education section of the resume entirely
Googleallready.com - No I don't want Google in language X.
I second that. Byte for byte, GNU Screen is probably one of the most useful pieces of software ever developed.
BackBlaze Offers Unlimited Hassle Free Backups For Your Computer
2009: The Year of the Linux Revolution
> If the market was regulated to set a cap on the size of a single company's workforce (or some other metric, perhaps market capitalisation), we'd also avoid the 'too big to fail' problem we have at the moment.

I don't think either of the metrics you mention would solve the "too big to fail" phenomenon. The fact is that "too big to fail" is a misnomer, which has actually been used to represent the concept "too connected to fail".

I.e. it is not Bear's/AIG's pure size that prevents us from allowing them to fail, it's the connectedness that they have in our financial system, which depends on a web of millions of transactions per day between every large bank. Then, if a big bank were allowed to fail (not that I'm endorsing this theory), that would cause a cascade effect where banks started charging higher rates for those millions of transactions, which would cause less of them to happen, which would cause even higher rates, etc. etc., ending in a completely broken financial system where each bank wanted too much money for each of the many transactions they depend on to exist in their current form.

So, I don't think that limiting the size of companies in the financial sector would prevent the "too big to fail" phenomenon by itself. Which doesn't mean it's not a good idea; just that I think that particular example doesn't suport the idea that well.

(edit: and read Coase, like davidw's comment suggests :)
There are several "that's what SHE said" jokes I could do here, but I better not :)
Initially the users of a new product will have random motivations. They can't all come from recommendations when you've only just launched. But a year from now the number of users you have will depend mainly on how good tarsnap is.
What Do Prostitutes and Rice Have in Common?
Neither are X servers that handle thousands of events for dozens of windows per second.
"Judaism's texts (the bible and the Talmud) are famously convoluted, contradictory, debated, etc." that sounds like C's type system to me. Is that a char or a number? A pointer or a number? etc.
I think that a self-hosted blog would be better, because it looks more professional.
On College-Entrance Exam Day, All of South Korea Is Put to the Test. Noisy Flights Can't Land; Offices Open Late To Avoid Traffic; Mothers Pray a Lot.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122644964013219173.html
The YC brand has little weight to the customers of a startup, and without those a startup quickly dies.

It would be interesting to see numbers on that. Informally, I noticed that back when reddit was good, anyone who was asked had either heard about it because it was YC-funded, or heard about it from someone who heard about it that way. I'm not certain, but I would probably bet that the submitters of, say "Man sentenced to NINETY THREE days in jail for taking 6 seconds to sit down! Outrageous!" or "Warrant Issued For Man Paying Fine With Pennies" didn't find out about it the same way.
No, hardware is reality, QM is still an abstract representation that seems to work if you ignore the bugs.
I don't think it should be a joke at all. It seems to me that a company that doesn't know what its business plan is should probably be hiring people who have a talent for making business plans.
I remembered this discussion from before, perhaps this will help you:

WordPress or TypePad or....?
'd like to start a blog and I am wondering which platform HN suggests. Thanks for voting/discussing!
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=280016

Also, very good discussion here:
Blogging platform: Wordpress or Webby?

I'm relaunching my blog and I'm considering two platforms, Wordpress and Webby/Webgen/staticfiles. I plan to use disqus comments for both, and my requirements include easy embedding of media and syntax-colored code.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=338485