skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, good advice. But you're likely to find some large grey areas, and also some things that the ToS seems to forbid but seem reasonable / ethical, and lots of people are doing. If you avoid all of those grey and pseudo-black areas, you're hamstringing yourself. If you don't avoid them, you're vulnerable to being shut down arbitrarily. Which path do you choose?
I used it in a Scheme interpreter with no noticeable problem as my main personal hacking platform for years. OTOH, I didn't use it for long-lived servers, and Racket eventually migrated from it to a precise collector and IIRC the release notes mentioned occasional such problems as a factor. If they said how often or how severe, I missed it.
As an aside, we started noticing people running ads for their Dropbox referral links about a year ago at MixRank: http://mixrank.com/a/dropbox.com. I'm sure Dropbox loved this behavior at first, but then there were several people that started running unreasonable/false ads, like "16GB Free Storage Space. Access your files from everywhere" .. which is clearly setting Dropbox up for unhappy customers.
Accurately reading per-core CPU usage from the command line
They're virtually always shooting for fast growth, and have to, to work with VC economics. There are exceptions, but they seem to fit a pattern of "person we believe can hit the moon repeatedly has developed a weird fetish for counter service peanut butter & jelly sandwich shops".

Actuarially speaking, you are not getting in early on the next big thing. You're one of a cohort of 10 in which 9 are expected to fail; indeed, in which all 10 are being pressured to make longshot bets that hasten failure, because the worst case for the VC actually isn't "company goes out of business".
FB has been doing cool type/print related projects for awhile. They've been showing up on For Print Only for a couple of years. Very cool stuff:

http://www.underconsideration.com/fpo/archives/2009/12/faceb...
http://www.underconsideration.com/fpo/archives/2011/05/presi...
Who would DDOS GitHub and for that matter, why?
I counted 5 problems, not 99...is it just me?
I have indeed heard the whiny, victimized rants of some low-level employees ("Woe is us!"), however by and large I think it's nonsense. The restrictions and oversight the DoJ put on Microsoft were well known and are public record. They aren't secretly restricting them beyond what we all know.

Microsoft did get but a slap on the wrist, and rightly so. Though it's worth noting that had Microsoft received the punishment so many sought -- the breaking up of the company -- the parts would almost certainly be worth much more than the whole right now.

Microsoft's problems are Microsoft-created. Like RIM, Microsoft was more focused on entrenching the status quo than planning for the future.
The point isn't that "pressure to spend the money" (or, more broadly, that "the runway is 18 months whether you get $3MM or $15MM) is unintuitive. It's intuitively obvious, you're right.

The point DHH is making is that people don't really think through the implications of that logic.
Right! Time to step up the rhetoric and hype machine in prep for the release
Again, this is something that is simple to learn and understand. And you would learn this in a beginner tutorial. Why go through trouble to change it and complicate the language even further? I undeerstand weakmap may have some real advantage as far as GC, at least.
Startups are not a chess game
Thanks!

I am part of the company (Periscopic) that built the visualization for Yahoo!. We have been ecstatic about the positive responses to the project.
FILETTI DI TROTA AL FORNO
extra soft, or extra strong?
A Brief History Of Matrix Product
But in an earlier article you do admit that it is quite risky:

"To put it in a different perspective: as a startup founder, you are making a very risky and non-diversified investment."

You're essentially gambling your time. That's what coal miners are doing, too - it's just that their roulette wheel looks a lot different.

(I do agree with your sentiment that people place a lot more emphasis on the 'glory' of their profession. That's quite commonplace, I think.)
A Hacker School That Helps Solve Silicon Valley's Hiring Problem - Hackruiter
I'm not saying 37signals did it, but I bet someone who read this post did: http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3099-benchmarking-basecamps-u...

I'm sure it was tempting more than a few people with the resources.

Edit: just to be clear I meant any reader of signal vs. noise could have seen that (and Jesse's #1 comment and the jokes about DDOS in the comments) and decided to pull a prank. 37signals would never do that to anybody.
Tony, it was amusing and educational to see you and Montana brainstorm and evaluate various ideas. Your list of tests that a startup must pass, in order to have a shot at a big success, are definitely worth referencing for those of us, still figuring out the exact business model. Thank you!
There is also one thing I noticed: companies which raised VC money don't curtail their paying customer as much as bootstrapped ones (or with small investment).
Of course, they are some exceptions - but in general I see the trend.

(This actually run thru my head when I saw Stripe getting big VC funding. I was thinking - damn their great support will probably significantly deteriorate : if I run into a problem, I will probably be forwarded to some low wage employee reading the script)
(Revised):

As presented in the essay, an organization of code for the purpose of explaining the code to a new programmer might differ from an organization for the purpose of maintaining the program by people familiar with its design.

The premise of the original Literate Programming was to use meta-annotations to write documentation that showed the code organized for explanations, while leaving the original in a form suitable for the machine and/or for experienced programmers.

Lacking this tool, if we use techniques like AOP to reorganize the program for explanation, we might be making things more difficult for the experienced programmer, who does not find all of the methods for a square in one place in the Square class’ definition.
The weird thing is that Apple is trading for less than 10x PE and Chipotle for about 40x. Chipotle is certainly well-appreciated on Wall Street and, given the implications of the PE, is seen as a steadier and more resilient business that will grow enormously over time.
I remember reading a comment a long time ago -- maybe here or Quora, I think -- talking about how people don't usually realize how much trouble organized crime gives small and midsize businesses. You'll start getting DDOSed and then an email appears a day later: pay us and we'll stop bringing down your site. I have no idea if extortion is what's happening here versus simple lulzseekers or a grudge someone holds against them, but I wouldn't be surprised.
Let's Kill Cash: Q&A With Author David Wolman on Our Moneyless Future
> The ECMA committee is working hard on designing

"Committee" and "designing" in the same sentence gives me the shivers.

But the features they're describing actually sound pretty reasonable. Actually a lot of them seem to already exist in Lua ("proxies" sound like what are provided by Lua's metatables, and Lua already has weak tables and lexical scoping).
To be fair, SOAP was intentionally being transport-agnostic. It was a bad idea (when other transports were becoming irrelevant if not unusable due to draconian firewalls) but it wasn't an accident. My takeaway from the debacle is that a useful schema language needs to be read and comprehended by humans, not absurdly complex tooling that may or may not ever exist.
Where is that recent HN article that stresses the importance of a good subject if you want people to click on your link?
I agree - systems fail for many reasons at once. People like root cause analysis because it allows everyone to point the finger at someone else.

Of course the flip side is equally awful. When folk say "that's just how it works around here" you know you are doomed.
Github is really great, but I'm a cynic.

Indeed, why _would_ anyone want to DDoS github? How can we believe Github that the outages were due to a DDoS? They're smart people, aren't they using solid load balancesrs that can mitigate DDoS attacks? Why haven't they issued an actual statement describing the supposed attacks in better detail?
Hi Imran, I'm guessing you're probably not interested in what services I can provide because I just looked at your profile, but if you are, please email me, and we'll get into the details of what I have done in the past. Thanks.
You might not write:

dict["valueOf"]

since that's obviously a bad idea, but you might write:

dict[user_provided_string]

Since user_provided_string could be anything, you are susceptible to unexpected behavior if the string ends up being "valueOf".
This seems a bit far fetched.
"All 10 are being pressured to make longshot bets that hasten failure"

Failing fast isn't necessarily a bad thing. I'm sure there are many companies that have gone out of business because they took VC and tried to grow too fast, but what percentage is that really? When bootsrapping you often don't even know if the business will be viable for a couple years, which IMHO is a vastly worse situation to be in.
That's not just cynical; that's down right paranoid.
"Now "let" is the new "var" – traditional "var" declarations are complemented with "let" and "const". Both are properly block-scoped bindings, eliminating a common source of errors and weird behaviour."

Somehow going from one keyword for variable declaration to three doesn't seem like a good way to reduce errors.
Well, at least they'll get to get rid of their dated name now? The toolbar doesn't even have a Digg button.

Disappointed to find out that it's a WordPress extension, though- means I can't use it, at least.
As another poster mentioned, DDOS attacks on successful companies are not uncommon. And there isn't an easy fix for this.
Why din't Raspberry Pi use Kickstarter?
I thought this discussion was about sexism in tech - what kind of comments are sexist and why that matters - not about convicting or even trying a particular individual in the court of public opinion.

Of course it matters to his reputation, but by definition if we're talking about the larger question of sexism in the industry, it doesn't seem relevant to me. In fact, I think it serves to excuse or ignore the question of sexism that was raised.
...or Twilio
This is a great article. I've only made this realization in the past few months after listening to a ton of Mixergy interviews with various startups and companies.
Did they ever have any affiliation with Digg? If not and it's so popular, I'm surprised they haven't got a C&D or something. Two trademark violations don't make a right... =P
Wow. Your logic is quite bad.

1. Man criticizes worthless activities in the classroom.
2. Man creates product to help teachers with their bingo day.
3. Bingo day can be considered to be a worthless classroom activity (I'm such a person. I'd never use bingo in the classroom.)
4. I point out an apparent disparity.

It's ironic that a person who decries worthless classroom activities creates a product to make it easier for people to engage in a worthless activity. I made this clear in my previous post.

What I wrote is quite logical and reasonable. Your second to last paragraph contains assumptions not supported by the evidence.
I still don't see it.

If this is a marketing piece, who is it marketing towards? It certainly doesn't read as if it is written for people who decide what web-based collaboration software their company will use.
Maybe he was smiling and didn't want to be caught on camera (It would reduce the value of the $35k reward)
The Cheap Product Today
The Cheap Product Today Qualified Orders over $25 Ship Free just for you The Cheap Product Today
You think that was an error? come on, it's HN!
Not sure about your experience

Well it is not like it is a secret, right?

http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=emmett

http://www.crunchbase.com/company/justintv

http://www.crunchbase.com/person/emmett-shear
Caution, train wreck in progress
"We're probably not in the center of the universe"

The way I understood things, there is no center of the universe. Or equivalently, all points in the universe have a view such that it appears that you are in the center of the universe. The universe is spacetime itself, and the idea of a center requires an idea of space outside of spacetime, no?
That's unrealistic. I'd settle for no stupid, reasonably avoidable loss of life.
Responsive UX Design
Load balancers generally don't offer as much mitigation against DDoS as you think. The load balancer will probably fall over if the backend servers don't do so first. The sheer volume of seemingly valid traffic is what kills you.

Which is why effective anti-DDoS means working with your upstream provider to figure out how to differentiate between real traffic and fake traffic. The best solution to a DDoS is the phone # of a tech that can implement firewall rules upstream and a good traffic analyzer to tell them exactly how to filter it.
I didn't actually quite present them as a dichotomy. My point was a bit subtler than that in my opinion. In fact it was less about the practice of literate programming than problems of context in many programming languages.

An aspect I didn't discuss is that when we write in English the usefulness of the text is then subject to the ability of the author to write clear, logical, concise (hopefully beautiful & elegant) English. So it's not surprising, to me at least, that the best literate programs I've read are not online but in books.
I once worked on a project that used the Boehms collector for a long-running server process.

About once a year, we'd lose a week or two to tracking down a memory issue. While the root cause was never a GC bug, the GC would make it dramatically more difficult to figure out what the real problem was.

The closest we had to an actual GC bug was a leak involving a data structure containing a list of IP addresses that was incorrectly interpreted as containing pointers. It took forever to figure out what had happened, since the issue only appeared if you worked with a specific set of IP addresses--and even after we had a replication case, the GC made it extremely difficult to determine why memory was growing rapidly. The fix was simple once we identified the precise problem--flag that memory as "atomic" (i.e., guaranteed not to contain pointers)--but finding the precise data structure that was holding memory live was a nightmare.

We eventually ran into a slow memory growth issue that we couldn't figure out. After much debugging, one developer became fed up with the situation and tore the GC out. It took him about two weeks to produce a version of the codebase that leaked less than the GC-enabled one, and another couple weeks to eliminate virtually all memory leaks. We continued to find minor leaks for another several months, none of which were difficult to correct. (We used a debugging malloc library that flagged leaked memory on exit, so we always knew exactly where the leak had originated.)

Not only did the GC-less version leak less, it used about 40% less memory.

I would strongly recommend against using the Boehm collector for any long-running processes. The tradeoffs may be more acceptable in short-term processes where slow leakage over time is unimportant.
tl;dr: different people think differently, and that doesn't mean they're stupid.

I'm exactly like the person you describe, arethuza.

I've been a sysadmin for 15 years, and am fantastic at what I do and am highly sought after by recruiters and so on and so forth. I started as a programmer, and I've never stopped programming, mostly for fun but my job regularly requires scripting, of course, and I'm great at it. I also really enjoy writing test automation and release automation, and I'm fantastic at those, too.

I can't design a program from scratch to save my life. I've never been able to. When I try, what comes out is absolute garbage, and usually extremely hostile to being actually used by actual people.

If I stick with a piece of non-trivial from-scratch code, I can usually get it to the point of being useful, but it takes 5+ iterations of near-total rewrites.

The basic issue, which is much like the original article, is that I just can't see the end result in my head, at all. If I have a system I need to change, seeing the end result of the system + my one change is easy. But when I try to imagine a complete system in my head (or on paper or whatever) it just ... fails. What I have in my head is much simpler than reality requires, and frequently wrong in major respects. I don't know why and I've never been able to fix it. At this point I've basically given up; when I need a high level design, I get someone else to write it, and then I fill it in.

If you give me a program where all the functions definitions and what they're supposed to do is written out, but nothing else, what I give back to you will be amazing. But if you tell me to write a program that does X, what I give back to you will be crap. This potentially has impact on my career advancement, but so far I've been able to do well by simply stating clearly that these are my limits, and I can be most effectively used in role X that doesn't cause trouble with these limits.
Is Path Violating Google Maps ToS?
Announcing Servo (Netflix OSS)
For the first time, iOS generates more web traffic than OS X
Go right ahead. Name some uses for a censorship-resistant network that doesn't violate the law of the country in question. (It doesn't count if the use merely breaks a law you dislike, as in Chinese or Iranian suppression of dissidents.)
Has Kim Jong-Un been assassinated?
Walmart Knows What’s Good for You
Walmart announced this week that it will start putting a new Great For You label on food products to help consumers make healthier food choices at its stores.
a VC investment usually implies a moon-shot.

You lose me here. 'Lean' startups can benefit from a VC investment as much as 'Moon-shot' startups do. My experience is that a VC investment implies that someone believes that the product can be accelerated by the application of money. When I hear 'moon shot' I hear mostly a pejorative 'high risk, publicity loaded but ultimately no follow-on project' (which is what the NASA Moon shot was)

I also agree with the 37signals guys that money in the bank is great, but its only great if you getting somewhere. John Walecka was one of the investors in FreeGate and he used a car analogy where money is the gas, and if you're sitting there idling you are using gas and not getting anywhere. Money, like gas, should be enough to get you from here to your destination plus a little reserve to cover contingencies.
Shim for javascript getComputedStyle().getPropertyValue() in
As long as this doesn't become another difference between browsers (= headache).
those examples are from the same theft
https://www.google.com/search?q=tea+party+guy+fawkes&tbm...

Why does it seem silly to you that the largest and most effective anti-government movement of the modern era would have some sympathizers who adopt the symbol?
Careful. We're not talking about failing fast.

We're talking about being presented with the choice of a medium-risk medium-growth model, and a high-risk fast-growrth model, and invariably selecting the high-risk model.

That's what VC means. At the strategic level, it means invariably selecting the higher risk business model.

Again: "company going out of business" is actually not the worst case for the VC.
Google Docs now supports customized Styles
In that case, most of my teaching experience was at the K-12 level, in small groups and classes of 25 through 40. Some in a classroom, some outside. I also tutored college students for a bit. Many kids wanted to learn, some not so much.

Your turn. Do your opinions come from actual experience or do you have a bias against elementary schoolteachers?
Ok, here's a specific question I've been mulling over for a little while. We're launching our college in about 10 days and have been discussing the best way for prospective students to try out the system.

We have limited server resources (limited as in we probably shouldn't let in more than 1000 guests at once until we know our true capacity) but want to show the system off to as many people as possible. Questions we need to answer:

Should we require any personal information in order to try the system? If so, should we verify that information before signing in.

If we don't collect personal information up front, is it worth bugging them when their session is over to be put on a mailing list?

How should we handle limiting simultaneous users? Options:

1. Allow unlimited user signups but only allow logon if total active sessions less than our max.

2. Only allow signups if there is space in the system, logon is immediate.

3. No signup at all, just rotate through a fixed number of guest accounts for preview. If full, no entry allowed, but can be put on mailing list when slot opens up.

4. ?????

5. Profit?

Our target audience is proficient programmers and our primary system focus is speed, simplicity and usability.

Any input is very appreciated.
No one disputes that the success rate of VC funded companies is low, but I'd like DHH to propose an alternative model of funding that creates a world changing company like Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Twitter with a better success rate.
PaperKarma, Craigslist and unintentional disruption
Great tutorial, but how is this on the front page? This article is 4 years old.

str is definitely not a special form, and wasn't, at least as far back as the 20081217 release. The article's date is from May 2008, though, so it's possible, if unlikely, because most special forms are special because they require non-standard evaluation order, and str doesn't qualify.
right. It's not a group. Also, way to generalize!

If a government attacked people they didn't agree with without a trial (Even under the name "Anonymous"), I don't think I would agree with them either.

Anyone using the name "Anonymous" to attack another that they don't agree with is wrong.

I don't like the people the people at the wall street protests so I'm going to steal all their credit card info or fake a police report that they are child molesters. But don't worry, it's all under the name Anonymous...so it's okay!!!!!!!
Quite the contrary - it may force them to evolve into companies fully adapted to thrive in this environment.

No. Not really. What will most likely happen is that big-media will just use it to push legislation that assume the users cannot be trusted and that enforcement must be more thorough to catch all those bad guys. If you do a lot of high bandwidth encrypted data exchange, someone will have to search your computer for "stolen" content.
2013 Chevy Silverado Spy Photos
Have You heard chevy Silverado 2013 will be released in spring 2012? Many rumors say like that, but there is no official information from GM about these Issues when 2013 chevy Silverado will release. But a lot of 2013 chevy silverado spy photos that have been circulating on the internet.
"Lean" vs. "fat" is orthogonal to "steady growth" vs. "moon shot".

Again, think of it this way: the runway is 18 months, whether you took 2MM to "go lean" or 15MM to "go nuts".

The fact that you're hiring slow has nothing at all to do with the economics of a venture capital fund. The fund wants your company wrapped up within a fixed time frame either way.

2 great things about "lean": (1) it enables some companies to find their market without ever needing VC, and (2) it sets some companies up to confidently shoot for the moon with a validated market. Lean is helpful. It just doesn't change the mechanics of VC investment.

(I voted you up; someone voted your comment down, which is annoying, because it's a good comment.)