skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is a fantastic article - something wannabes definitely need to be seeing - Instagram started when he was TWELVE YEARS OLD. I hope this article goes into a series like uses.this.

I personally also got a kick out of this one because I had an extremely similar 'start' - Doom levels and script kiddie maliciousness - amazing. Unfortunately it starts to diverge when he got accepted into Stanford and started kickin' it with internet billionaires and instead I went to UCSD and spent most of my free time drinking microbrews by the beach LOL.

Guess that's why I'm not the guy who made Instagram! Now I know. :)
Note the theme of how collapsing publishing sectors get eaten by Hollywood.

Consider the case of comics, particularly Marvel and DC. I'm a huge fan of Stan Lee's work from the 1960's and 1970's and I like some Marvel and DC stuff after that.

Lee created some incredibly popular characters in the "Silver Age" but nothing added later really caught on. But, 40 years on, what can you write about the Incredible Hulk? How many times can Magneto trash the X-Men's house?

Sure, later on the comic houses published some books by Frank Miller and others that had more literary and artistic pretention, but none of those sold as well.

By 2000 or so both Marvel and DC flirted with bankruptcy and got bought by media conglomerates because movies about comic book characters were much more profitable than comic books.
Detailed List of HTML and HTML5 Elements
Isn't that against youtube's api tos? I thought you had to display the video for the user.
Anyway, I like the site.
But in no case would that be the shortest sequence.

For your example a shorter one would be 9,10,15.
Not only that, but also active directory,which requires a window server, which requires a special dns thing, which almost requires a dns serviced by windows. An endless chain of turds...
>Many teachers in the English department actively rejected the idea of a 5 paragraph model

Hmm. There are problems with that - writing to a limit / self editting is a skill in itself. Work needs to be equable in format to be readily compared.

Should every piece of prose be written to a format requirement, no. Should the idea of writing to a particular format be rejected? No IMO.
Firewalls and Anti-Virus Aren't Dead - Should They Be?
Can it run a Lisp?
I see some in Google:
http://www.google.com/#hl=en&output=search&sclient=p...
Amazon joins Netflix, Hulu, Google with original TV programming
1) "Excellent" is a vague notion. Regarding coding for example, do you mean Knuth level excellent, Torvalds level excellent, Brad Fitzpatrick level excellent, some RoR "ninja" level excellent? All those (and more) are very different levels, still one can consider each as "excellent".

So, mainly what you want to ask, is: is it possible for one be competent in both design and coding. That is, produce good results.

Well, it is. There are people that are good at both, and have launched products with success.

I said good, not excellent, and here's why:

Nobody cares about actual "excellent" in a startup.

What you should care about is "good enough". Excellent is the enemy of shipping stuff. If Facebook tried for excellent, it wouldn't be built with messy PHP code and butt-ugly graphics when it was released. If Linus wanted to release something excellent, he wouldn't release a half-baked implementation with tons of problems, drivers missing etc in 1992. You get the point.

I also find advice like "You need to focus on ONE of them", "excellent" etc, non pragmatic. It's pop advice acquired by reading too many bullshit business self-help books. The reality is, especially in a startup, people have to wear many hats at one.
>the next I will be writing an ad targeting algorithm in Clojure

Please don't. Leave ad targeting algorithms to the unwashed people, Perl, etc. Let's keep functional languages pure from the scum of the earth that is advertisers.

Half kidding, of course.
Having VM per core may be quite beneficial -- you get more fault tolerance, immunity to GC glitches and one tier less when scaling over several machines. And there are nice tools to manage multiple processes.
This reads like a thinly-veiled advocacy for CISPA.
Linux debugfs Hack: Undelete Files
i guess you're right... but i don't give much importance is something I've done in a couple of hours to have fun without any purpose of making money, the source code is available on github ;) https://github.com/miquelcamps/pin
I believe one of the major social functions of the legal system is to disseminate the law.

Random people don't read 100s of blogs a day. Random people don't track 100s of RSS feeds. Random people watch major historical events. I personally think it's good to subject randoms to social activities analogous to "code review."

It's not a matter of "one" versus "many". The problem is ALWAYS: Code for 0, 1, or ∞. What we're witnessing here is an Optimistic Aristocratic Approach, which chooses "many". In our society, "many" is too primitive and vague of a concept. I imagine this is why less complex cultures correlate with linguistic markings which top off at "many," or that it's simply highly probable.

In any event, Optimistic Aristocratic Approach (which assumes the lowest-common denominator in its decision procedure over its sample, not the "ignorant" or "non-technical"), to me, entails that the legal system is attempting to familiarize randoms with these problems, not only to set a precedent in the law, but to set a social template as to how these issues should be treated systematically in court rooms. It also gives us a gauge of how effective we are at communicating these problems to "laypeople." Of course, no society would want randoms if it could not assume randoms were competent; but no society would want randoms if it could not assume randoms were indeed random. "Randomness" is a feature of our legal system insofar as it is a fact of nature (mutation): we cannot respond to randomness blindly. Choosing our best, ignores randomness because it assumes we are knowers. Choosing one, like a previous poster has noted, involves a predictable historical trend in law. Choosing our WORST is insane. Choosing RANDOM is pragmatic, even if stupid. (I don't care to see this legal system or government last, but I believe all I've said can be taken without anarchistic sensibilities.)

We should all bear in mind, perhaps, that this legal system is largely going to analogize these issues to industrial-products and scenarios. I believe the thrust of "no, no! not the randoms!" is contained in the Internet Declaration of Independence. Do you remember?:

_Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel_, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather. [my emphasis]

I believe the point is not: "Don't trust commoners!" That's insipid and moronic. I believe that the general spirit is: "Don't trust commoners from the Industrial World to contribute meaningfully to our new set of values, whatever they may be!"
Biochemist creates CO2-eating light that runs on algae
There are alot differnces. The biggest is that its international, so for people like me (german) its way better, + you can spin with people from all around the world, which is really fun. Not US only like turntable.
They also have multiple playlists, live streams! and other stuff.
So even if you're from the US, its def worth checking it out, you will love it! (;
Developers Creating the Next Great Social App at AT&T/Facebook Hackathon
I was discussing with a friend saying that in almost every other field the world is changing for the better quickly (relatively speaking...) - poverty, hunger, health, education, sanitation, communications etc....

Except in one key area- our tolerance and acceptance of those unlike ourselves.

Sure- there has been and will continue to be great and positive change on the "tolerance" front as well.

40 years ago - the world seemed to have come together to solve a "vertical/one off" tolerance problem around blacks and civil rights.

Now- the African American community (not everybody of course!) themselves are opposed to Gay marriages:
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/postpartisan/2011/02/whats_...

Why has there no concerted effort to horizontally and structurally attack the tolerance problem so that we are not solving new tolerance problems towards a new class of people every generation?

Why hasn't the Bill and Melinda Gates or any of the large non-profits large/stealth/public marketing/branded/communication effort to solve this problem.

Maybe- the argument for structural tolerance has to be linked to prosperity and capitalism that Paul Romer is suggesting.
including people that would not even know what button to press to start a PC so to speak.

Could you please cite some examples of textual content created efficiently on the ipad's on-screen keyboard by authors who can't start a personal computer?
I wrote a simple python script that fetches videos form pyvideo and converts them to QuickTime so you can watch them on your Apple device.
https://github.com/codeinthehole/pyvideo2quicktime

This is useful to me as I spend 2 hours a day on the London Underground, which is a good time for watching conference talks.
I'm sorry that I've come across as pointlessly mocking him, but this question doesn't make sense to me.

Take for instance the drug war. I don't agree with the drug war. I think criminalization of marijuana is terrible policy. But is it unconstitutional? The Constitution provided a framework within which the citizens of the US were able to elect representatives who passed laws that outlawed marijuana.

"Even in States that have legalized it"? That's an objection the Constitution explicitly presages: "This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in pursuance thereof; and all treaties made, or which shall be made, under the authority of the United States, shall be the supreme law of the land; and the judges in every state shall be bound thereby".

I re-re-read 'nirvana's point, and I think my interpretation is valid and that I haven't misrepresented him.

'nirvana has adopted the idea that much of what the government is doing is illegal because it isn't spelled out in the Constitution (in this one case, because the power to establish a federal police force isn't one of the Enumerated Powers of Congress). That's not how the Constitution works.

Could you be more specific, then, about what you're asking me? How do I propose to fix what? The drug war?
thanks for your comment! I applied the same functionality to other sites like slideshare, take a look to pinslide! migueldev.com/pin/slideshare.php the source code is available in the same repository on github ;) https://github.com/miquelcamps/pin
Especially the part around 2/3rds of the text, about how to improve XML.

Also loved the jokes and metaphors. We need such people in tech discussions, most community leaders have turned teletubbies-nice to each other, to the detriment not only of a good flame-fight, but of the actual dismissal of brain dead ideas.

Instead of violently ridiculing proponents of bad ideas/software/etc to shame and (hopefully) sepuku, we tip-toe around them, or at best, just make light fun of them, like in the "Mongo is webscale" video.
This looks really promising! But I can't really say until I try it out ... would love to be let in the beta since I do a lot of exploratory coding with API's and always setting up a minimal environment is a pain.

Does it also support collaboration? That'd come in handy for teaching people web programming.
Ask HN: Best practices when pitching your startup to Techcrunch, Mashable etc?
Our product (distilbio.com) is in good enough shape to be exposed to the whole wide world (we think :)) and we'd rather have top rate criticism sooner than later. Is it ok to just cold-mail Techcrunch and others, or is there a better protocol? Comments from fellow HN readers much appreciated.
I'm not disagreeing, but I think one important thing here is to set up the perception of learning, even if the lesson isn't technically right. Few lessons are harder to unlearn than 'I can't learn this.'

(though these inaccuracies should be noted by the end of the lesson.)
Isn't that exactly what Highlight does?
The Constitution is not a guarantee that the federal government will not make mistakes.
Automatically activate virtualenv
I didn't see the GP ask about a big, unifying vision. He was asking about ideas.

> Obviously you need some idea before you start making a product

That's not the discussion though.

>> The idea for a company is an artificial barrier to becoming an entrepreneur
> Oh really? How many successful entrepreneurs have you heard of without ideas, just totally empty heads and whole bunch of hustle?

Can you be an entrepreneur without an idea? Obviously not.

And even Microsoft had an idea for a product (starting with the BASIC interpreter for the Altair). That was, after all, where it all started.
So are we supposed to be designing all our databases to conform to third-normal form? I am not very adept at DB stuff but doesn't that increase the number of lookups needed to retrieve a row of useful data? Is the performance hit from that less painful than storing redundant (perhaps simply for caching) fields in one table?
Edit: the below isn't a very good answer to the issue; I will leave that anyway. But it boils down to that in order to divert responsibility in a big company, you have to show you did all you could and to do that all you could, you need to show you paid money to 'the head ninja'. This could be MS/Oracle/IBM: very safe. When using Open Source, you need to show as well that you did all you could when it fails (if it succeeds, the company wants to be in the news using open source to 'cut costs') and so you pay people who can support it (the original devs) large amounts of money to support you. TL;DR It's covering your ass.

Previous reply;

You haven't worked with big companies before then; they pay for support (and licenses if needed). It's how it works as it is a liability thing; if you pay for something it's better than free as free doesn't exist. And that's kind of true; for free open source you need highly skilled employees to maintain it while you can also buy support from the company who actually built it. TL;DR big companies buy your support if they use your open source.
So another way of 'shortening the perimeter' that you are trying to defend would be to simply decide that some information does not have to be hidden?

How much information does a commercial company selling a product or service have to keep secret?

* User details

* Future plans that might affect customers or employees

* 'Secret Sauce' stuff like code if it is closed source or plans &c

What else?
In fairness, Magellan didn't have the Panama or Suez canals, made rather a lot of pitstops along the way, and died in the Philippines.
The URL above wasn't clickable: http://www.distilbio.com By the way, is there some list of such blogs/sites which profile startups?
Well, the point of every news organization is to sell ads. That may or may not disgust you, but doesn't invalidate that some news organizations will add value.

To concur with Yuri, I clicked on the article here hoping to figure out what Glancee is, since I'd also never heard of them. Their post tells me nothing, except that they're going to Facebook, and other positive rhetoric.

99 times out of 100, I'd probably be in line to rally behind you to get the original article up above the rehashed news article, but in this particular case, TC added value, to the degree that the original story was no longer useless, and deserves to be the higher rated article.
I was not trying to imply that America was unique in punishing its criminals, but that America is retributive to an unusual degree. The "useless vengeance" comment was someone else.
> So, since most of HN seems to be liberals, and I know there are many such crimes that many liberals disagree with: such as the patriot act, the kim dotcom fiasco, airport porno scanners, domestic spying of all kinds, the drug war, even in states that have legalized it, etc. how do you propose to fix this?

I gave up and left the USA. I don't think there's any "fixing" it short of taking our productive energies somewhere that respects the rule of law.
Very clear. I found that the met comprehensive explanation of normalization was in an APress book, Applied Mathematics for Database Professionals.

Incidentally, did you cover 4NF and 5NF in the course? IMO, you'll almost never need 6NF.
This sounds like a classic con: Kevin met Steve Anderson from Baseline ventures, and during the meeting Kevin got texts notifying him that people were joining Burbn. Steve knew some of the people signing up, and was intrigued enough to decide there must be something here. In this meeting Kevin secured his first $50,000 of investment for Burbn.

I don't believe those texts were purely organic, but I'm impressed all the same.
[sorry, incomplete post that was sent on accident]
Hey look, it's yet another HN list of things "Every Programmer should know", followed by a list of everything the author knows! Funny how that works.
That's a process called de-normalisation, covered here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denormalisation You should only consider doing that after thorough profiling showing your joins are causing the performance loss.
I like the idea of fetching a youtube video for the audio track. It's a pity that Youtube doesn't see it in the same way. Well done!
I feel that Mr. Stross has sidestepped the strongly related medium that has been likewise disrupted by digital mediums and delivery - the music industry. It seems to me, as a not frequent observer of the music industry, that genres in music are doing just fine if not better than they were ten to twenty years ago.

Now, we've got the iTunes Store, iPods, individual song purchase and the 'death of the album' and while there is genre blurring, it seems to me that this has also been happening for a long time and there are plenty of strong musicians who play almost exclusively in their genres and succeed.

The music industry is not an exact analog to the publishing industry, I know, but it would seem they have enough similarities to be explored by someone like Mr. Stross, and extrapolated out to genre fiction.
More important for storage space, quicker updates and faster indexing. If these things are less important(most cases) don't worry.
Surprised to see no mention of BCNF or 4NF, as these are the two most commonly used in practice.
http://songpaste.com
By 3NF most database schemas are good enough(tm), going further usually results in minor changes for large amounts of work.
I'd rather read the TC story as well! Keep in mind that the glancee.com site will likely disappear within a few months, but the techcrunch article is here to stay. I bookmark a lot of things i find on HN and I'd rather not have those links disappear later!
No your parent is right, font replacement on windows still looks bad most of the time. Larger font sizes look a little less bad but there still exist rendering issues especially in chrome.
Not really. If you are concerned with extra lookups, then you might want consider a materialised view (Or an indexed view in SQL Server). But bare in mind that write performance will be affected, whether this is worth the cost is a tradeoff. Also consider that databases have some very efficient join mechanisms. YMMV though.
This is the classic denormalized model vs. the traditional database model. The denormalized model, of storing all data in one lump, is popular with nosql systems and object oriented systems, in that all the data you need for one key is all in one "place". If you know that that will always be your primary access pattern, then yep, it may be faster for you.

However, if you have a variety of ways to get at your data by this key for this situation, or this key for that one, or if you have large amounts of redundant data that you'd like to be updated "all at once", such as what salesperson is assigned to the Northeast region for all customers, then you may find a normalized form is more efficient.

The big learning is YMMV: for years, relational was a religion. Snowflake and other designs showed that there was a middle ground... and nosql has shown that non-relational designs can work well also, esp in many online and large-data situations. The trick is to pick the right one for the expected workload your app will be facing, not to adhere to any religious dogma (3nf, nosql, or anything inbetween)
Google case judge calls for more deliberation
I don't feel that the marketing or curation is problematic really. However:

Suppose I want to buy "A Song of Ice and Fire" for my Kindl - a reasonable enough proposition in my view. A quick check reveals two problems: Firstly those bits & bytes are somehow more expensive than the massmarket paperback - which is completely ridiculous. Secondly both the individual books and the set have warnings (either by amazon or reviewers) that clearly state that its a criminally bad OCR job.

So essentially the product is overpriced and defective. Doesn't matter under what genre you file that its a crap purchase.

Same thing for the Dune series. So in the mean time I think I'll just side-load books until Amazon sorts their shit out. Hell I'd even look past the overpriced bit if they fix the crap OCR jobs.
The 3A/3B course has very little regard for modern best practises, just what was relevant 15 years ago when the course was written.
12 Tips for Getting Your Startup Featured on Mashable:
http://mashable.com/2008/04/10/get-your-startup-on-mashable/
Flippin sweet
Free Premium Files For May 2012
A genius boy shot himself in the head after calculating the benefits of life
I don't really know if there is much to analyze. The guy went to Stanford and had the priviledge to meet other great folks with the same passion. His connections and this environment is what made him successful.
I just spent way too long trying to figure out how to do something simple with facebook open graph. Haven't used codenow yet, but it looks like it could have saved me a ton of time.
That is what I meant by saying "you won't use it but understanding it is important". I should have said "you won't code it" for it to be more clear, as I meant that most Python probably don't spend their time reimplementing whateversort, but still should understand what it is and how it works.
Step 1: get popular on user driven site. (HN, reddit, digg, etc...)

Step 2: blogs like Mashable and TC see popular post and pick it up

Step 3: mainstream media see it spreading through blogosphere and pick it up.
"As good a list as any, with just a few nitpicks; I'd like the story on (1) elaborated a bit more. Explaining to your manager that your perception of reality differs from hers doesn't seem like it'd warrant losing an ally in the company."

It felt a bit like the lesson is "be servile whenever possible". But maybe I'm misunderstanding the author.
Can you imagine if our bran was like a computer? Every terrible memory we had would be there in perfect clarity.
I don't print code, but when I do, it's in landscape mode and wider than 80 characters. But hey, I do this for all languages.

I'm pretty sure I've never printed ObjC
I, for one, welcome our javascript overlords
With Opa you use standard programming language features to abstract presentation, business and data logic. For example you can define one function that gets the data from the database, and passes it to another function that builds up the HTML.
Why only HTML, CSS, JS, PHP? It should be replacing also the recent fads Ruby, Python, Haskell, Clojure and god knows what else. It is high time we have single, elegant solutions. Stacks are so yesterday!