skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
From the article:

"As a special limited-time promotion,you can get free sugar and cream packets with your coffee at participating 7-11's when you say 'I hope I don't spill this on the CouchDB.' The promotion is not supposed to start until tomorrow, but I just tried it and it works already."

+1 about the promotion - totally works ;)

========

I've been playing with CouchDB for a few weeks now. It took awhile for me to rescript my brain from years of relational databases, but now it's hard to look back. The sheer flexibility and the siren-call of map-reduce is hard to resist.

There were a few things that helped me get my head around using CouchDB:

First was the CouchDB screencast from PeepCode: http://peepcode.com/products/couchdb-with-rails

Second was an article that helped me understand how to 'join' different types of documents: http://www.cmlenz.net/archives/2007/10/couchdb-joins

Third was this discussion that explains how/when to divide a document into sub-document-types: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/147837/couchdb-modeling-f...

It's been fabulous to play with and I'm building a merb app with it at the moment - very fun. I'm looking forward to it maturing into having camps, books, conferences etc... (here's the first book announcement: http://books.couchdb.org/relax/ )
Marketing in a recession: 5 things B2B marketers should do in tough times
The MIT Media Lab launches a "storytelling" center for future film and TV technologies
12 myths about how the Internet works
Talk to a lawyer. Someone on hacker news can direct you to someone with experience in this area. Reach out to contacts you might have yourself.

Personally, I wouldn't take anything down without talking to a lawyer first.
How big of a difference is it between creating and maintaining an e-mail address for each student, and instructing students as to how to create an e-mail account with say Gmail, for instance?

In both cases the student needs to figure out how to access a mail system in order to actually use the e-mail address.
well SOX only deals with U.S. public companies. Whats stopping the startups from basing their parent company in some other country and selling the "stock" on the open market? Or if possible, just selling the "stock" on a foreign exchange, does the sox apply then?

i.e. PG LTD, the owner of YC Inc and HN Inc would list 10% of his company for sale on lets call it CEX(Canadian Equity Exchange). He would want to raise $100,000 in exchange for that equity, so he'd list 100,000 shares at $1/share. Then he would put an "invest in us" link on his main site. And U.S. consumers, would be able to go to CEX.com, review the terms, and then buy some equity.
the difference is that AWS is a new direction their company has taken. The Google thing was just another one of their bandwagon expansions, a me too service.
set it up as a club or an llc?
I started college about 11 years ago, and there were people who didn't check their email accounts because they never used email. College email has become ubiquitous and then obsolete in the span of a decade.
Virgil Griffith, Internet Man of Mystery
UserTesting.com - 15 minute video of a user testing your site for $19
I was going to post about how I thought it's not bad when people commit suicide, because life is just a ride we are all on. I was gonna put a link to this youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZkhR8suCF4 Then I saw your comment. And I realized I might sound like you did. So I changed my mind.

I did work with hospice patients before I die. Everyone thinks my attitude about death is callous except for the people I was helping to feel better as they were dying. They appreciated it, and hence liked me. But sometimes saying "It's OK that people die" isn't what family wants to hear. I seem callous, put the clients appreciate someone who doesn't treat them special because they will die soon (that makes them feel already dead and like they are defined by their dying.)

You are not apologizing for your joke. If humanity was more evolved, you wouldn't feel like you had to apologize for anything except a really lame joke. You are apologizing because most people are so deluded they are all afraid of dying and you did not give the people's fear of dying the superstitious awe they demand. And because most people are so insistent on enforcing their superstitions on everyone else that your lame joke threatens your business partners. You are saying: "I'm sorry I didn't adequately say what the consensus reality demanded of me." The next step for you (besides getting much better jokes) is to learn how to manipulate people's perceptions in consensus reality to control them instead of just confronting tranced people with reality accidently. Further, any publicity is good publicity. Apology not needed or accepted.

You should of seen me after Tim Russert died. I was gleeful. People die every day. If you're anxious about that, you can't live your own life. Fear of death is one of the main reasons people unknowingly live lives of quiet desperation. Using humor defeats the fear.
From what I've seen, any link between Aspergers and violence is largely irrelevant. When people who are already socially isolated are mocked and ridiculed by 'normal' people throughout their lives, then it isn't a case of Aspergers being linked to violence it's a case of victims getting revenge and if human history tells us anything it's that victims often go for revenge.

If I was repeatedly mocked and ridiculed, it would only be a matter of time before I went on a killing spree.
I disagree, but I still up voted you.

Edit: (It was to long) I think the program is fairly close to the human creative process. While it probably produces a lot of junk so do we. I would consider it a success when presented with a few good ideas out of the countless possibilities. Saying it lacks good taste is different than saying it's not creative.
"Prosecution of anybody "egging him on?"

I do want prosecution of egging someone on who is suicidal. Suicide is a medical emergency like a heart attack. Inducing a heart attack in a person with poison and inducing a suicide in a person with words are the same to me.

Incitement to commit suicide should be the same as incitement to commit murder.
Bacteria can convert wastewater to electricity
Who Doesn't Want Their Own Personal Flying Watercraft?
In LinQ we pass anything by reference and we got closures then, and closures inside the reference objects. Doesn't that break any model of using lambdas and list comprehensions?

That's ok. Sharing is fine; references are fine. If you and I point to the same string, the fact that the string says "Hello", we don't need to have 2 copies of "Hello", we can share the same copy, so long as we don't change it. It's not sharing that's the problem, it's effects. If you share references to values that are immutable, everything is cool. If you share references to mutable values and you mutate them, everything is very uncool.

I got my ass bitten in python by this a few times, i had a few objects with a few references to them, and i assumed that all of them pointed to the right objects, but i soon discovered that some of them pointed to copies of the objects from a previous time, and that they staid the same, while the other ones changed, and i assumed they all had the same value. This took a whole day to debug, and i managed to do it by writing the program in a functional way and the functions that changed the state of the objects simply returned new objects, and i got rid of the references, i just called functions, that returned the current "state" of the objects. pretty much i minimized state, that got rid of the bug and made the game easier to understand, as Mr.Jones points out, learning a functional language(scheme in my case) does make your imperative programing better :D
people link their scores to the dopamine reactions in their brain so downvotes seem more important to these non introspective fucks then a suicide.
The “O” in Obama
Well, there is one way around that; let congress invest in VC's with historically high returns, but don't let them place the onerous restrictions on the money that usually surrounds public funds (labor laws, oversight, documentation through the ying-yang), instead merely restricting to an area of investment.
I can't say if it will work for RescueTime, but it has clearly worked for Salesforce & Leads360.

It also seems to work for Freshbooks, Netsuite, PBWiki & ConstantContact.
I actually don't drive :) But based on my experience in that car plant, here are some pointers, just IMHO:

- Avoid Pontiacs at all costs. The quality difference between, say, a Sunfire and a Chevy Cobalt is ridiculous. Even "higher end" cars like the G6 are somewhat questionable. Chrysler are built cheap. The radiator motor that I worked on while I was there was timed to stop working after about 4-5 years (brushes in the motor will wear out).

- Avoid anything built in Mexico. This is not a knock against Mexicans, but my company's Mexican plant was completely devoid of precision manufacturing. Where an American plant would laser-guide parts into their fittings, in Mexico they're literally eyeballed (and malleted!). A full 80+ percent of warranty returns were due to parts built in Mexico.

- The high-end Chryslers are actually pretty good in terms of quality, and when I was working there the Ford Fusion was still under development - and based on what I saw (of the radiator design) Ford seemed like they were willing to pay for good parts. A good sign I suppose.

- Nothing beats Mercedes and BMW in quality. You do get something for your money, regardless of what people might say. Whether the cost per unit-quality is low enough for you is your own decision though :) Where GM was running brush motors, BMW runs entirely brushless (e.g. theoretically infinite lifetime, will run as long as your solid state electronics and assemblies hold together), and they're powerful to boot.
You should move to the titanic if you are learning to build a ship that won't sink.
I know the EFF is small, and maybe doesn't have the resources to offer advice, but might that be an option? (http://eff.org)
For what it's worth, after my brother killed himself (not on webcam, thankfully) it was humour that got me through.

I found your comment funny.
TypePad Takes On Disqus With New Distributed Comment System
I don't understand how half of this stuff works, but it's always awesome to see the guts of a complex system. The first time I looked at linux source code was comparable to the first time I looked under the hood of a car - I had only the slightest idea as to what might have been going on, but my curiosity was peaked and it made me want to learn more.
DC Post of the Week - SSL Info in your HTTP Headers
Unless your school lets you keep your address forever, I don't understand why people use it at all. At my school once you graduate you lose your school email unless you become a paying member of the alumni association. I just forward all my email to my GMail address and now I don't have to worry about it.
Cilk++ Sets World Record for Crypto Hash Function Throughput
Some resources if you don't go the lawyer route:

http://www.chillingeffects.org/question.cgi?QuestionID=132
http://www.chillingeffects.org/dmca/counter512.pdf
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/Terrorism/form-letter.html
""America" did get what was coming to it."

Is verbatim what I was going to say too.

When you treat people like shit forever, they are going to strike back blindly sooner or later.

And like always, the people who deserve to die make profits from the wars (on both sides) that followed, and thousands of innocent peoples die on both sides. I think they should hang Dick Cheney and Osama Bin Laden on the same gallows at the same time.
That's hilarious. The list of movies that are hard to classify reads like a list of my favorites...

[Like] “Napoleon Dynamite” — culturally or politically polarizing and hard to classify, including “I Heart Huckabees,” “Lost in Translation,” “Fahrenheit 9/11,” “The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou,” “Kill Bill: Volume 1” and “Sideways.”
This article parrots Detroit's "take what you're given at shut up" view. Dealers see things differently. My family ran two automobile dealerships. The one that dealt with Detroit (Ford) had little choice in what they were given to sell, and complained in particular of Detroit shoving lots of big cars and trucks at them when the demand was for a size or two smaller.
For some reason it's easier for me to wrap my head around one thread driving a 16-wide SIMD unit than 32 threads that execute in lockstep. I know it ends up being equivalent but it feels different.

Also, on Larrabee you can execute a different kernel on each core, while on GPUs you can't.
Same here, until I read they were forwarding, which works for me. I never use my college email for anything important beyond a couple of somewhat annoying profs who set their filters to ignore everything but college email addresses and refused to send emails to private email addresses, which even the school itself uses to send information vs. the official .edu address (excuuuuse me if I don't login to the insanely backwards webmail more than once a month if at all, so I miss your email about something along with the entire rest of the class..)...as well as once on facebook, glassdoor, ms dreamspark and like one other time.

Wish more colleges at least gave an option, or did only forwarding as opposed to in-house solutions.
I consider program brevity key to holding the problem in ones head, and the key to running a successful IT operation, particularly a small IT business. However, it would seem to me that the mainstream has been going in precisely the opposite direction.

In my opinion, there have been only two significant developments in mainstream languages in the last 50 years - structured programming (if..then..else) and object orientation. The operative words are MAINSTREAM and LANGUAGES, as there have been some very innovative and terse non-mainstream languages.

In the beginning, there was FORTRAN. You forced your problem to fit in a series of matrices and got the job done, usually quite efficiently. Add to Fortran structured concepts, and sooner or later you get Pascal, PL/I, and C. C introduced pointers - for better or worse, programmers finally had time to get really creative in solving problems by inventing all sorts of data structures - some legitimate, some a distraction from the problem. Bigger code. Add to this rampant object orientation, one method per class, and the ability to really go overboard with content vs. form. Form is winning. Bigger programs.

Although not part of a language, these days with Java, .Net, and so on, it is not possible to get by without a heavy duty IDE - Eclipse and Visual Stupido. These tools help you navigate a problem which you can no longer possibly load in your head, hopefully you can get a little part of it.

To me, the place where there has been the most progress, and outside of programming language design proper, is in the field of memory management and garbage collection.

Maybe everything I know is wrong. But in the last 20 or so years, I have never seen a programming language which stressed clarity through conciseness. It's all starting to be more like COBOL. Is this what the world really likes?
Whether or not he knows what he's talking about, he didn't mention the other advantage of having a more diversified gallery of manufacturers: none of them would be "too big to fail". Yeah, there's economy of scale, but that has to be weighed against putting all our (collective economy's) eggs in a few baskets.
I agree with dhuck, don't you guys know that being a hacker in the countercultural and sci fi sense is all about sounding like you are surronded by 70 year old lutheran women at church. I read in neuromancer about how that cyberpunk guy was always like "tone it down for the communities sake man."

I think if this comment offended you, you should get the fuck off of hacker news. You are polluting an important and necessary countercultural concept with your bullshit morality. If you want it to be all prim and proper, call it "hierarchically organized entrepreneurial news related to information economies for boring professionals who take themselves too seriously" and leave my cherished countercultural concepts out of it. I'm constantly amazed how many people in here are stuck in old paradigms. This site is branded hacker news, not lutheran technology update.
As someone who is currently getting his pilot's license, I wouldn't be comfortable sitting in a craft that abstracts flying to making "it seem like more of a car that is able to move in three dimensions." Regular pilots are well-versed in everything from weather, to emergency conditions, to physics of flight and practicing everything that can possibly go wrong. Not to mention interacting with other aircrafts. I really hope that they took this into account. It's very improbable that they didn't.

I am just scared that many drivers' feelings of entitlement being transferred to something that flies. People forget that a car is capable of injury and death and end up taking liberties behind the wheel. Then again, it might be psychologically different when you're actually flying.

I'm all for opening up aviation to a wider audience, but something doesn't smell right.

edit: Looks like they require a sport pilot license. I'm less worried now :)
Also, a lot of universities have their application process online and require an e-mail address to apply. So the information is already available and that would eliminate the step of requiring the student to set up forwarding manually.

If it's already a method of contact between you and the university, why add another place to look by creating a separate inbox?
As a native speaker, I'm pretty sure it's a separator. Reading it as "web programming: the gay perspective" may help.

I'm disregarding the content of their point, but that's the form.
Ah the US regulatory system. The problem was never too much regulation or too little regulation, but rather, completely random regulation written hastily by people who have minimal domain knowledge, and complete unwillingness to change regulations after they have been made.
How did you go back to classic permanently? I click "Older version" and it goes to classic mode for that session but every time I open it I get the new version.
Whoa there. Marriage is not so much a right as a societal mechanism with many purposes.

For the female: make sure the provider doesn't run away.

For the male: monogamy gives non-alpha males a chance of having offspring.

For the child: life support.

For government: bind people into clumsy units that you can tax, threaten etc. at will.

For ethnic and religious groups: arranged marriage is a way around natural selection, letting you enforce "proper" genetics and upbringing of the next generation.

When people start talking about gay marriage, all of this gets instantly forgotten.
I really like this idea, and I'll probably use this for my own site currently in development.

Have you considered selling an embeddable recorder that people can use right on their site? Why or why not? i.e. I pay you $xx for a google analytics style plugin that I can embed and have any user that wants to provide feedback...

Just trying to understand why you chose to implement as it currently stands.

Once again, really nice.
I'm finding CouchDB to be a natural fit with Sinatra. On Ubuntu 8.10, the database was easy to install and CouchRest has made it very easy to operate from Ruby. I was enjoying Google App Engine, but find this much easier to work with. I'd like to try it with Python next.
It's a pretty good article about how assumptions manifest in database schemas, sometimes unintentionally, and these can lead to major maintenance problems down the line.
The Official Netflix Blog: Encoding for streaming
LISP is worth learning for a different reason — the profound enlightenment
experience you will have when you finally get it. That experience will make
you a better programmer for the rest of your days, even if you never actually
use LISP itself a lot.

This is from "How to Become a Hacker" by Eric Raymond.

However, I think the more correct thing to say would be more on target with what you just mentioned. Functional languages teach you to minimize the mutation of state, which is a really great win in all languages, as your anecdote demonstrates.
You need to talk to a lawyer and protect your interests.

If you are sophisticated, you could concurrently make sure the info leaks everywhere. Get an anonymous friend to go to a computer workspace at a library (preferably in another geographic area, and not leaving a record of the communication) and cut and paste it to wikileaks and anyone who would spread it. Information needs to be free, and you have the power to make it free anonymously, and the ethical obligation to destabilize established powers.

But as for your site, martyrs are useless, protect your interests. You do not want to be involved in a lawsuit with apple, even if you win a few months later. For an individual, being on the winning side of a court battle with apples money and lawyers is still losing proposition. For your ethics, anonymously get someone else to leak the content, and smoke a bowl and smile when you send apple a letter that says of course you'll comply, you are sorry, you love your 4 macs, and could they send you a signed picture of Steve Jobs, again you are sorry, and complied just as soon as you stopped crying for possibly upsetting steve jobs.

In football, this is called punting, and you do it because if you play, worse things could happen that aren't worth risking.
-75 comment votes; +125 article points - you are a genius. As to your company, I'd never even heard of it before. There is no such thing as bad publicity.
I've used it - really helpful. Wish they would send their testers eye tracking monitors - that would rock.
Is anyone using Haskell as their main programming language in their (web) startups?
What to do when twitter's lack of OAuth support is a real showstopper?
Should I launch a twitter service without passwords initially and then reset the database when OAuth support is available?

There's very little data that users need to submit in this service I plan to build, so they probably wouldn't mind doing it again.

I don't want to ask people to give me their twitter passwords.
I bet if some famous gay hacker (you know who you are) wrote a book with this title, it would sell.
http://jottit.com/sy2s2 - Here is a link to a more readable version of the article without all the Infoq interface nonsense.
See: _Microserfs_ by Douglas Coupland.
Scheme would probably be better than Common Lisp -- the design of the language encourages functional programming more. If nothing else, naming functions that mutate state with !s (e.g. set-cdr!) seems like a good convention: it doesn't twist your arm, but it reminds you in a way that stands out.
you can't sell ads on low level APIs.
...and people think you're from New Zealand. ;-)

(Apologies to any Kiwi friends out there...I loved the semester I spent in your country. And no, I didn't see any sheepfuckers. Lots of sheep, though.)
Human musicians and composers can riff off a single rhythm or melody and produce something wonderful the very first time. Engineers can visualize a solution, implement it, and have it basically work, with only surface elements changing. Artists can have a vision of what they want to achieve in their minds and cast it out, bit by bit, ever remaining the work they intended it. Sure, each incorporate many patterns already learned and practiced and processed. But computers are a long, long way from even doing that. This is a very different type of creativity.
LimeWire Co-Creator Launches LittleShoot: The New Model for P2P?
IBM to build brain-like computers
That reminds me why I never buy from Apple. Or anyone else who wants to take away my freedom.