skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As a Michigan resident who has tried buying property in Detroit... many of the cheap plots of land come with huge fines and back taxes attached. The owner stopped paying taxes, and when the fines added up they skipped town. If you buy that land, it's now your responsibility.

Not saying not to buy land in Detroit, there are lots of businesses making good money on cheap land (and there are quite a few startups, especially around Woodward Ave, see: Dan Gilbert). Just make sure to do your research to keep away from any nasty surprises. That $25 half-acre with a plant already built might actually cost $100,000 up front.
Weekend Hack Idea: Learning to Tie a Tie 2.0
"Couldn't be easier than this."

Yes it can. Chrome does it automatically. It also has a better UI to boot.

The way Chrome works is, if you've ever searched a site, typing the first few letters of the site name (say, "go" for google), then hitting tab, will give you the site's search. These are added automatically, as long as you've ever searched a site before.

Advantages of Chrome's way:
* They're added automatically. Visiting your family's house? They probably already have the standard Amazon/Wikipedia searches, no setup necessary.

* Once in the mode of searching a website, the text you typed (e.g. "go" for Google) is NOT part of the textbox. This means that when you press "home", you go back to the start of they text you're trying to type. Want to copy paste the query before hitting enter? Much easier with Chrome.

Disadvantages of Chrome:
* Very rarely, a search isn't added. I don't bother adding them manually cause they're rare.

* The letters you have to type for a site are the first letters of the URL, not site name. This means Hacker News Search isn't "Ha<tab>", but rather "ne<tab>".
This only occurs with Xcode 4.2, while 4.1 has no issue. Reason is Apple went LLVM.

I encountered the issue previously with rbenv [0]. Even if it builds correctly with clang various tests subsequenty fail, although they appear to pass on ruby trunk.

So for now, one should rather install gcc via the installer, which also allows to build older versions of ruby if need be.

[0] https://github.com/sstephenson/ruby-build/pull/87
MEMORIES OF STEVE
Abogados y Gestoria en Sevilla EyS
Try telling that to Larry Page. Google believes greatly in the "hire smart people, then get out of their way" method. You might be surprised how well it works
In the most simplistic explanation possible, "public good" is the reason for everything the government does, including libraries.
Why are solutions like Homebrew and MacPorts insisting on compiling the packages locally?

So that an OS upgrade, in which Apple tends to include arbitrary upgrades to system libraries (or the Ruby/Python etc version), doesn't break whatever you installed with Homebrew/MacPorts.
"Likewise, sometimes a leader needs to step in and resolve bike-shedding conflicts among two equally smart, strongly opinionated engineers who disagree on a core question, and to look for a compromise."

The most effective people I worked for didn't try to dictate the solution to the conflict. They were effective at moving the disagreeing engineers past their conflict. Dictating a solution was always the last resort if the engineers had just "dug in their heals" instead of discussing rationally.
Silicon Valley, Hollywood and Iceland as the New Superpower
These questions are fine and all but they're not the ones to ask if you want to validate your idea. If you want validation you ask other people what they think of the idea, is it useful, would they pay, if they have the problem you're trying to solve. Asking yourself these questions will only get you twisting your answers to be "correct".

Point is, it doesn't matter what you think, it matters what your market thinks. Extra points if you can identify that market.
A Practical Guide to Propaganda
It's not a specific need. It's a specific issue. Figured I'd offer up a concrete example rather than gushing or hating on the service.
Bomb Notifier
Then you might also enjoy this review:
http://www.storagereview.com/intel_ssd_520_enterprise_review

I found the write speed improvements from overprovisioning the SSD 20% especially interesting. Although probably irrelevant if your webservers are mostly doing reads.
And since MacPorts installs everything in a separate directory from system tools/libraries, how could it screw anything up? Like Homebrew it never installs anything outside of it's home.
You are laughably uninformed. None of the major weapon systems that require big manufacturing were impacted at all by the war.

The Navy isn't cranking out more aircraft carriers, destroyers, or submarines. And they just announced they are retiring all of their cruisers early.

The Air Force lost most of it's F22 and the JSF is on the ropes. Neither got cranked up to support the wars of the last 11 years.

The Army barely got to use its M1 battle tanks and hasn't built any extra. The Bradley is in the same boat. Some of the other vehicles like the Stryker and the mine resistant trucks and upgraded HUMVEES might have gotten increased production, but those are small potatoes in terms of cost.

The Marines lost their new vehicle in the last 10 years (the expeditionary fighting vehicle).

Other than the army light vehicles and UAVs (again, small potatoes, a submarine costs $5-7 billion each) I don't see anything that has been increased by the wars. And general manufacturing and defense manufacturing are basically entirely seperated these days. There are no ship builders pumping out both commercial and military ships. As far as I know, there are no companies pumping out tanks and cars. Aircraft are the only area with overlap.
Add-on performance indicators would be awesome. I'm looking forward to addon syncing too.
And the cost was staggering and the technology was never truly debugged. (Fun fact, Apollo 13 nearly became famous for a completely different reason, as resonance caused the rocket to come within seconds of tearing itself to pieces during the launch, only prevented by sheer luck when the massive vibrations tripped a fuel sensor and shut off the offending engine.)
There's no bathroom/toilet.
I think the university analogy is distracting from the real point. He's advocating a form of servant leadership, which is where the CEO/President/etc is perceived more like a steward than an autocrat.

If you've ever worked for someone who had a broad array of responsibility, was universally respected, displays humility, and available to help resolve problems, that's what Joel is talking about. A great professor tends to adopt this role -- which is probably where the university analogy came from.

The "catch" to this style is that you actually need to be respected, empathetic and humble. (Know-it-alls need not apply.) That usually comes with lots of experience.
"Consumer information is worth billions in aggregate, but individually, the bits of data are worth practically nothing."

This speaks to an aggregation effect, similar to a (retail/commercial/non-investment) bank. Individual deposits aren't worth a lot to such banks, but the total aggregate deposits are much more valuable to them.
I see you're selling source code to one of your projects. May I ask why it was shutdown and if the domain is for sale?
Any update from Iranian users on the current situation? Are the blockages still in force? I covered this issue for Ars Technica on Friday: http://arst.ch/sg1 and would like to be able to provide an update. Thanks.
Reddit: “Jailbait is bad, but pics of dead kids are OK”
That's just a pet peeve. The other two are bigger. But really it just irked me that he felt it necessary to add that Oracle wasn't better than MS SQL Server. There are cases where it most definitely is better. There may be cases where MS SQL Server is better (probably especially if one is running an all MS stack) but having worked as a full time DBA with both I know where I prefer to work. Of course I'm not a fan of windows either - so some of my preference for Oracle and PostgreSQL come from the fact that I get to manage them in my preferred environment.
Looking ok on 17/OSX.
Every Entrepreneur Needs a Mentor, but not a Critic
The only major drawback I see is that it pollutes the tab history so that if you view several images you have to click back several times to actually go back one page. This is no fault of the author as that is the expected behavior of the browser but it is something to keep in mind if one wishes to use this. Most people have been trained into thinking that a popup gallery of this sort doesn't affect the back button so it may come as a surprise to them to have to keep clicking back.

Otherwise, it's a clever use of :target and classes.
Can Men Be Feminist Leaders?
No, but if you are employed for n months, you get at least n*salary as revenue.
Everything has an opportunity cost. In this case, he managed to both go to work and build a house. He gave up his hobbies and in return built a house for "free" (gaining a new short-term hobby). How much are you and I giving up by reading HN right now? It's very, very difficult to attach a dollar value to opportunity cost when you weren't going to be doing anything money-making with that time anyway.
Win Free Copies of Android books
Been running Ubuntu on my employer-issued MacBook Pro for almost a full year.

Ubuntu 10.10 was nearly flawless.

Upgraded to 11.04 and lost the ability to change screen brightness easily.

There are some configuration recommendations on the Ubuntu wiki specific to the MacBook that you should take note of.

The nvidia display configuration tool is finicky; unplugging from an external monitor at my desk and plugging into a projector in a conference room sometimes takes multiple rounds of invoking it and clicking "detect displays." Also there are a couple of projectors it won't play with.

I used grub-pc (the default) not grub-efi. If you don't have to dual boot Windows you don't need Boot Camp, ReFit nor the ridiculous hack of MBR partition table syncing. Just carve out some space with Mac OSX's partition tool and have Ubuntu install its bootloader to sda. Hold down option when you boot to choose your OS.

Don't blow away the OS X partition, you apparently still need it for firmware updates.

If I had the option, I'd get a PC instead. I like Asus, and I'm aware of more than one fan of Lenovo but never used them myself.
You have to put things back in context. JSLint was written in 2005 when no one really knew Javascript and there was no well-written open source Javascript.

JSLint was, and always is, a wonderful tool to educate people about Javascript common issues.
Fantastic argument, user is having a problem, but it doesn't matter what's going on, let the user try arbitrary things which I already explained that are folklore and why they make no sense, maybe it works.

If that's you advocate, let's stop here with this discussion, as there's no common ground.

When you're having a problem, first you try to understand it in order to try to solve the root cause. Applying rules of thumb like "kill top RSS process" are as sensible as rules of thumb regarding running repair permissions, sizing paging files or hoping arbitrary herbs cure arbitrary diseases.

Activity Monitor is useless because it's impossible to assess how a specific action will affect the system. Users should understand what's going on when they kill a process and the tools should help them to do so. When people do something, they should understand it, even casual users. Activity Monitor exposes data that's not understood by most users, although it leaves the impression that it does.

Just for trivia, memory pressure, hasn't been the primary reason for "the whole system become sluggish" for a few years already.
Once they offer a full set of modules, for say a CS degree, this could be very disruptive indeed.
Golden!

Also, if I have a 'trouble understanding how someone so smart could be that dumb', it doesn't say much about that person. It says that I do have a problem with my understanding.
Personal Data is a really interesting area and something I've only recently started working on. The problem is nicely described in the article

I'm not sure data-store companies are going to take off unless there's some specific thing they can offer to users e.g the Mint.com example is a good one.

Looking back now, Mint could have become the de-facto data-store since trusting a service with your bank details (highly-sensitive info) might have encouraged people to entrust them with even more data.
MSSQL probably has the '= NULL' syntax around for backwards compatibility. It does support the 'is null' and 'is not null' syntax that is in Oracle (which is standard IIRC).
If I were an architect
How's your quiche?
SystemTap is a Linux thing, which you can use on Linux to see how this works, but it won't be a pleasant experience.

DTrace is also available on FreeBSD, so if you look at what happens on Mac OS X, it might be helpful or insightful to also look at what happens on FreeBSD.
I think this one of the cleverest things Spolsky has ever written, actually.

All the great managers I have had acted this way. None of the bad ones did.

In a healthy organization, you can get respect by avoiding the Dunning-Kreuger problem, giving people credit in public, and discussing problems in private. I don't know if you can learn empathy, but you can learn to pause before making decisions and thinking about what everyone wants out of a given situation.

Humility probably isn't necessary, but hubris has been a killer since before Golden Age Greece.
"Actually, weren't Afghanistan and Iraq countries that traded oil with most of the countries that bombed them?"

No, they weren't. Afghanistan has very little oil. They had some other trade but it was relatively small and inconsequential even before the Soviets invaded (and it hasn't gotten better since).

Iraq clearly has a lot of oil. But your history is a little short there. Prior to them invading Kuwait we were trading heavily with them, but then they invaded Kuwait. There were a lot of countries that showed up to push them back into their own country. Then they became the subject of sanctions, no-fly zones, WMD inspectors etc. There was a lot less trade at that point. THEN the US went in an invaded. Truthfully it kind of makes the OP's point that trade is a good way to prevent war, because there was a notable lack of trade before the US invaded in the 2000s.
I think that's because 'ps -x' command only gives your own processes and not all processes. Add '-a' option to show stats for all processes.
I ran Ubuntu 9.04 and 10.04 successfully on a MacbookPro 5,4 with very few hiccups for ~2 years. There's a bit of community support around Ubuntu for getting it running on Mac hardware, but your results may vary. rEFIt and friends are a bit difficult to get working initially, but it's not impossible.

I had the same feeling as the author: displays are a pain in Linux. The sound, wireless and touchpad support weren't as seamless as they are in OSX either.

Even now I've just switched back to OSX because my Ubuntu partition stopped booting, and I do most of my work over ssh on an Ubuntu VM with gnu screen / bash / vim.

The thing I miss most from running Linux desktop is the highlight to copy, middle-click to paste clipboard.
I've always used 'is null' when working with SQL Server, but I guess the fact that it even allows you to use '= NULL' is what troubles you?
This quote is actually pretty representative. I have some very close friends in finance and have heard that many people are quitting or planning on quitting to join the tech/startup sector for this very reason.

Interestingly, instead of immediately quitting some people are instead just slacking until they get fired and receive lucrative severance packages.

Of course, this is only for my finance friends with technical backgrounds. I haven't heard the same from non-technical people in finance.
Suspended Airplane Installation in Tate Britain
[video] collaboration for remote teams
"Survivorman" Les Stroud did the same, recounted in his documentary Off the Grid http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001WAMB9U/ref=carldonath
I think some, such as knowing all of the date/time types and their precision really depends on what kind of work you're doing.

IMHO, knowing there are differences should be enough. Documentation is for looking up exactly how precise each datatype might be, and in general going to the documentation for specifics is preferred since it can and does change.
Firefox Hotfix: There are small issues that can occasionally affect Firefox users after a release. Correcting those small issues should not require a full Firefox update. With a new hotfix system, Mozilla can patch minor issues in Firefox without requiring a browser restart.

This is great.
Am I signing up for spam?
Libraries aren't just books, though. That's kind of an old fashioned view of Libraries. Many librarians coming out of schools now have degrees in information services, and they're fairly progressive programs that are a subset of computer science programs. Many of the librarians I know are experts at using the web.

For example, libraries provide services like access to computers and the Internet, for modern kids and adults without access to the Internet.

Many libraries also now provide ebooks available for the Kindle and Nook devices.

And then there's the fact that they're merely an indoor public space, usually with rooms freely or nominally available for the public to simply meet and share ideas.
My feeling is that the first question is only answerable by the market. That answer is never certain. You're only as sure as the effort/time/money you put into reaching the market to answer it.

The second question is easier to get an estimate for, but you probably defined your market incorrectly (especially if you're not solving your own problem).

The last one is sticky. It reminds me of BSG. The human capacity for self-deception is without bound...

That said, it's still useful to struggle with these questions periodically. Startups are all about the fight. You'll never have certain answers. Measure, learn, and adjust.
I really like the idea here. Good lucrative opportunity.

So I can start selling some projects and source codes I have crafted.
Didn't everybody already know this? I'm not particularly in Silicon Valley, but I really thought most startups work the way Joel describes, instead of with the fake Steve Jobses. Was my idea of the world too good to be true?
This has bothered me so many times when using Bootstrap. The compressor I mainly use (UglifyJS) handles the compressing alright, but the concat process fails. At least just have a semicolon at the end of all JS files and that's enough for most people.
The article doesn't use the OTP libraries in Erlang unfortunately. This means that you have a view of low-level Erlang message passing, but most - proper - Erlang programs will process messaging at a much higher abstraction.

The most important omission in the example is to monitor processes. If an error occurs in another process while it is processing for a client should have the client knowing about that problem. Otherwise you are facing either a dead-lock situation or a timeout condition which you have to wait until triggers.

In other words: Real Erlang programming is not like this.
I agree with this, any minifier worth using handles semicolons just fine. Try uglify.
Twitter will be faster anyway :p
In terms of both.

Yes, fraud is an issue, but it doesn't scare me from the idea. You risk 'fraud' when you purchase a rug from a souk in Marrakech. There is a chance that rug was made in China, but you chat with the store owner, inspect the rug, and you make an educated decision. Buying on Gumroad will be like that, and with a reputation system I feel most of the fraud can be mitigated.

Concerning if enough people would want to use it, Sahil could speak to that better than I. However, I feel like enough people 'use' flea markets, right? What's stopping them from doing the same with their digital goods - especially if there is a known digital 'flea market' to publish your gumlinks to.

Or maybe a consignment store is a better example with the website owner purging and sorting the digital 'product'. Gumroad marketplaces like a poetry corner or upcoming garage bands might start cropping up.
Really? Glad in many ways I am still using 10.5 then. I've no problem with stability. As you mention it seems quite rock solid.

I had no idea that the memory requirement for 10.6 or 10.7 was so high (I've heard anecdotal comments from non-tech friends). But then I'd also heard the official Apple line that 10.6 was meant to be better at memory management and slightly faster than 10.5 because the binaries were no longer dual PPC and Intel -- just Intel.

So, in God's name, why are the later versions so resource hungry?
Wazzub World
It's not that the NY Mag article was particularly pro-Wall Street. It's that it wasn't anti-Wall Street enough. The Wall Street types quoted in NY Mag blamed financial reform for their declining revenues, when (as Taibbi points out) it's actually the European crisis that's doing it.

Taibbi writes with a fairly angry tone, but he's got the facts to back up the bombast (and those facts are plentiful in his post).
I agree with this post, but it is very light on details. "Don't be a douche. Let your employees think." thanks for the tip...

So, to that end, my management tips:

1. Make sure people are working on the right things. This is most important and where Joel's academia argument breaks down. The problem is that everybody in the company doesn't have a transparent view of everything in the company (past ~10 people).

To do this, you ask questions and provide information. "Why is this the most important thing?" "What about <some thing they may not know>?" Etc. ideally, you are proactively providing that information, but if your employees are always waiting for you to provide information, you are the bottleneck.

2. Cultivate communication. Make sure the rit people are talking to each other. Make sure the environment is sipuch that people not only want to, but are incentivized to talk to each other.

3. Be open about when you learn something new. Few people don't enjoy teaching the boss something new. Give people that opportunity.

4. (EDIT: Forgot one of the most important) Conflict resolution. At some point, two very smart people are going to disagree. Your job isn't to pick a winner (usually), but to make sure resolution happens.

I'm sure there are others (feel free to tell me!). FWIW, I don't think I'm being original here. For details on how to do many of these things, Joel's blog is not a bad place to start (though I really don't like the lunch thing at Fog Creek ;).
The story of the hardest platform game ever
It depends on how you service your boxes, and how much whiz-bang crap is on the motherboard.

If you rely on vendors to service the boxes, and use a vendor like IBM that likes to tweak the firmware of the boards, you're going to have alot of random crap diagnosed as "motherboard failure".

Many of these issues are really configuration or software issues -- issues that the SAs should be fixing by keeping firmware up to date. Back in the 90's, the vendor CE's would have a clue and advise the customer staff to try applying software fixes, or stop using buggy feature X. But these days, the smart CEs are mostly dead, retired, or laid-off, and their replacements are often contracted out people who just know how to swap out parts. (Or have an incentive for you to have more failures, since part swaps == money.)

If you as an admin actually service your stuff, you'll notice failure patterns and actually troubleshoot the stuff.
Almost,

In theory: "Bah! Real programmers ship good, properly reusable code"
In practice: "Bah! Real programmers ship code, eventually."
How would you convince a domain owner to sell his domain to you?