skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree that the typical person can be a sheep, however:

* the church callout is unnecessary, it can be a type of self-analysis

* Alcohol is not toxic and in reasonable quantities does not have a purely deleterious effect.

* When needing to make personal connections (which one always will since you learn a lot from others, not to mention the benefits of having connections and even just social interactions) it is good to look like you fit in, so others do not become defensive.

* there's a limited amount of time and energy available for coming up with your own things. If somebody gives me clothes that are comfortable and look good, I won't spend time thinking of what clothes would "really be me as an individual". On my last personal project I had my own design, but we ended up looking through a Web Design idea book, made something that looked rather standard, and ended up with a better reaction, as it's what was expected and hence more usable. In other words, pick your battles, save up for the big innovations, recognize the value of others, and stand on their shoulders, even if you have to conform a bit to do so
> I don't think they can be as open as Wozniak wants and still be successful.

I don't think they could make the existing product lines more open, but they could explore the idea of a developer version of the iPad. Sure someone would find a way to download music or copying installed software without paying, but I don't think that would be even measurable.

I'd love if it came in beige, with a rainbow logo ;-)
Great example of how the majority of news sites behave. It seems that others play by different rules. I thought the foundation of any journalism is quoting your sources and writing your own material. Maybe the web has changed (for the worst).
What idea is that exactly?
There are a few in the UK but it's usually inner-city or highly personal: they don't make use of overnight vans so for me to pay for something to go to Scotland from London via one of these guys is going to cost me a whole lot more than $200.

I disagree. Trite comparison, but: "Most people don't want to pay the $999 for a Pentium PC… paying $1999 would restrict your customers to a very small part of the computer market." If you offer the quality I bet it's possible to make a really profitable business out of it. Think how many times these items are important: heck, I just wanted my TV so I could play Battlefield 3, but I'd have paid more than I did to get it sent to me. How much would people pay to not have a crummy experience with a courier if they used a courier a couple of times in a year?

Not suggesting I know the answers, but I think it's an interesting area for innovation.
No they don't. You misunderstood what acquisition-related costs means. Acquisition related costs are costs related to acquiring another company, not acquiring a customer. It is completely standard practice to treat one-time costs like that differently.
Personally id say Node and Rails simply shouldnt be compared in any way. They are just too different technologies. So node shouldnt even be concerned about trying to be rails at all. People are going to use whatever they want to regardless. So node should just do what its own users need. And thats it.
Thank you for being a part of my statistic. Alcohol makes you misrable. Say baaa sheep. :) you were trained to say it's fun by billion dollar psychoogical ad campaigns to brainwash you to think it fun.

It's abuse in a bottle, wolves realize this and profit off the sheep.
> If you don't test your backups, you don't have backups.

I couldn't agree more! It's amazing how often the question "we take backups, right?" produces "uuhh..". And yes, if you don't test them, they're worthless. Because the rule is, if you haven't tested them, they won't work when the shit's really hitting the fan.
There's a school of thought in the UK that feels institutions like this reject applications from applicants who's family don't have deep pockets.

Similarly, there's the perception that Eton is capable of producing well-educated idiots.

Understand me here - this isn't my view. Just saying it's a view that's out there.
I actually only was referring to the lack of infrastructure, not the poverty (although the two generally go hand in hand, because per-capita GDP is driven by the level of infrastructure investment.)

As for balance sheets, that's why you don't assess company values based on their balance sheets alone. It's better to have a somewhat negative balance sheet and strong income potential than a zero balance sheet and 1/10th the future income. We complain a lot here in the US about how terrible things are, but we still have something like 10X the per-cap GDP of much of the world.
Sorry, my fault, you are right that it is allowed in some states.
But my wrong perception came from the reality how weapons are actually used here. And aside from the most extreme situations, like someone who takes hostages and threatens to kill them, people are not shot with the intention to kill. (I've looked that up after you corrected me, and the law is very specific about the cases where it is allowed)

What I know is that when I asked years ago about the rules when it is allowed to use a weapon, that I was told, that in most cases it ends bad for the defender, because courts accept the use of fireweapons as justified in rare situations.

So shooting at burglar or somebody attacking you without a gun will cause you major troubles if the attacker should die.

It's just heavily discouraged here to solve any problem by aggression. Even for slapping or insulting someone publicly you'll be held accountable for that in court.
The upside to calling free() is that it is a valuable lesson in understanding memory lifetimes for a beginner programmer. You can't know when it's good to omit free until you know what it means.
It's because of people downvoting him.
Meet Apple's Secret Feline App Tester
I am always amused at this mentality. Have you ever noticed how Reddit is full of people who all think everyone else are sheep?

Everyone is unique if you only count the things that make them different, and people are pretty similar if you look for things that make them alike.
You will be miserable if you abuse it. It's quite nice in moderation. (Although I understand if people would rather not drink it, for whatever their reason.) Humanity has made alcoholic drinks for thousands of years, well before modern ad campaigns.
I'm not sure.

Apple has been faithful to its principles since Jobs returned - to offer a few products, not to compete in features and to provide a seamless experience. It's successful because its clients like it that way.

I don't think Woz has as many fans as Jobs had, but I still suspect the "tablet ][" is yet to be invented.
Yes, success. Suppose it validates that it's a cool marketing idea. I'm sure you have others (and those will be copied too...if you're lucky). Think of where else you can post this to get some attention (sorry I have no suggestions). Maybe show side by side of the UI in the blog post?
It's our way of voicing very clear disagreement.

Anyone who wants to read his words still can.
http://wardcunningham.github.com/

I think Ward's Smallest Federated Wiki is an interesting direction to go, and should really be taken seriously.
a three-month old article on a 10+ year old site is hardly outdated.
This is a very cool experiment, this should be standard practice in teaching CS. I'm a little surprised at the limitations of their interpreters, given the fact that they are 2nd year already - but then again, they were given the task do develop a language for a very specific test case.

The absence of support for nested loop/if constructs probably means they didn't write parsers that generate trees, but rather chose to execute scripts line-by-line, right?

I'd like to ask you fellow hackers: if you created a toy programming language today, what features would it have?
No, I'm looking for a courier whose responsibility for the item extends to packing it up for me. I don't have packing materials. I could obtain them, but these guys are in the business. How many claims do they have to deal with for goods damaged in transit every year? How many could be solved if a guy with a few rolls of bubble-wrap and a pre-printed box of the right size wraps up the item for you.

Again, ad nauseum, I am not in any way suggesting that UPS or FedEx should be doing this.
You know, we were already convinced you're a sleazebag. Lying to our faces in an attempt at damage control was unnecessary.
Exactly. It's a feature. And an easy one for anyone to implement.

But. It's also a good idea and take credit where credit's due. I'd take it as an awkward compliment that Pingdom copied it.
Green Dot Charter: Turning Around L.A.'s Worst School
Which is why humans have been drinking alcohol since the dawn of history[0]? I don't think they had billion dollar psychological ad campaigns in ancient mesopotamia...

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_beer
"I think it happened because they wrote just C code until now (they will meet PHP next semester)."

This surprises me. Of the higher-level languages you (or your school) could choose, why PHP? I understand for beginners, but why for students coming from a C background?
Where should I go next?
I am currently working full time at 3 years old startup. Have been working for little over a year now and starting to get a feeling that I have exceeded my growth. The startup business starts with the website, but is not in the area where system efficiency is critical.

I have been php, sql, javascript, html, css developer for like 7 years now and iOS developer for two (although its only after work experience). I would love to use more new things like NoSQL databases, caching applications, NodeJS kind of stuff.

The biggest issue is that I am telecommuting from small country in EU and relocating is probably not an option, I can imagine offers where relocation would be an option, though. Anyway, all the exciting work is on the other side of ocean. :)

So my question is: Does somebody knows where should I go from here? Where are developers looking for new opportunities? How are a lot of guys found by employers not the other way around?
Journalism ethics and standards taken from Wikipedia [1]:

The basic codes and canons commonly appear in statements drafted by both professional journalism associations and individual print, broadcast, and online news organizations.

The primary themes common to most codes of journalistic standards and ethics are the following:

-Accuracy and standards for factual reporting

-Slander and libel considerations

-Harm limitation principle

-Presentation

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journalism_ethics_and_standards
This should be published on both on your Twitter page and should be a post on The Next Web, not Google Docs.

And you learned the wrong lesson.
You forgot one: Java is the new COBOL.

Now, more seriously, such cycles do exist and we can observe them easily. History repeats imperfectly in subtly different ways. If Apple is to be the new Microsoft, it won't be exactly like it just as Microsoft is not exactly the new IBM - both have learned from their predecessors. Will they make mistakes that doom themselves? Eventually yes, but they won't be the same mistakes that doomed their predecessors.
Pingdom's UI is the same as their public status report feature they released over a year ago: http://royal.pingdom.com/2011/02/08/new-public-report-from-p...

They didn't copy the UI, they just made a list of websites using a feature they already have.
I'm not sure Eton is really applicable here, since the income of your parents matters a whole lot more than the application process (and Eton suffer for it in the league tables) — and whilst you may argue that Ivy League schools do just that, I doubt it's quite to the same extent.
In the vast majority of sci-fi movies, the main mode of remote communication for humans is video based (last one I have in mind is Avatar, where the characters left each other "video voicemails"). You can also find a lot of speculations in the 1900's about how the future would have "videophones". So there's definitely some basic human desire for that.

But that being said, we've had the technology for videophoning for a solid decade now, and it never caught on as a default mode of communication. Is it that the offering just wasn't good enough? Maybe.

But I also have a feeling that it's not really something we want except for some certain cases (long distance relationships, talking with your young children, for whom image is essential, etc.).

Videochatting is weird— you get some of the body language, but not all of it. You lose on some subtlety of facial expressions because of screen size+resolution, distance to the camera, lossy encoding, etc. You have to be focused on the screen, you can't move around, sit down, get up, etc. like you would in a normal conversation.

As a result, videochatting today is almost uncanny valley-like, and for most cases, audio only largely suffices. I feel like until we have high-fidelity life size holograms, visual telecommunications will never really catch on on a wide scale.
Back in the day we would take the days backup tapes and restore them to a test system that was also available as a "playground".
>I don't see the relevance. //

The only purpose of those sites is to get you to follow affiliate links.

Were you trying to refer to some sort of passthrough short-linking system or something?
Show HN: Ruby on Rails Launch Page for Multiple User Types
Can anyone explain why Quora would garner such a high valuation? I have a hard time believing its revenue based so is it seen as an acquisition target?
New codeacademy Advanced HTML/CSS Class
Note his core concerns:

* It's harder to "stand out" amidst the crowd of startups that easy capital has created.

* It's ridiculously hard to hire.

* Seed funding is slowing down.

* Something about the "innovation cycle".

These might be very good reasons to defer the dream of financing a startup with venture funding, but they're also advantages for bootstrapped companies, which:

* Lock in viable business models early out of necessity and can outlast most of the built-to-flip companies in the current VC cohort.

* Are founded by people who can actually execute on technology.

* Don't require outside financing at all, and can thus look at "increasing difficulty" of capital raises and grin.

I don't know what to say about the "innovation cycle" though. That might be a killer.
Doesn't this get absurdly game theory, though? Some minimum requirements aren't, so applicants ignore 80% of the minimum requirements, so employers increase the minimum requirements to get applicants that are a little more qualified, so applicants start ignoring even more...
TheNextWeb apologizes for plagarism
WikiPedia defines 3 basic things that make up actors:

* send a finite number of messages to other actors;
* create a finite number of new actors;
* designate the behavior to be used for the next message receives.

Now, I'm not saying that xmlrpclib and actors are the same, but one could implement a system that has these properties using xmlrpclib as the basis of transport, and to "designate the behavior to be used for the next message receieves." The way you'd designate is the message you sent, is the handler that gets run.

And, if you want to get even more actor like, run xmlrpc servers in their own threads.

But, yeah, a real actor system would probably never do this.
And you're a sheep that rejects the other sheep because being anti-sheep is cool right now.

I do what I want to do because I want to do it. Sometimes that means doing things that gasp other people also enjoy doing. Are we all sheep then? I get the Fight Club anti-consumerism mentality, but taking it just as far in the other direction isn't any better. Trading one sheeps skin for another means you're still a sheep.

BTW, wines and beers have been produced for almost as long as humanity has been around. If everyone who enjoys a drink once in awhile is only doing it because it's cool, then alcohol is longest lasting fad known. :)
Don't forget the exams. That is loop jumping par excellence and should you try to be a non-conformist over that, you will be out of college before you know it and unable to listen to these excellent lectures on how not to conform.
The moral and ethical complexity of genetic research
hype based
Well, I believe this line of thinking leads to the inescapable conclusion that consciousness is only an illusion.
Miserable? As a bit of an introvert, alcohol can actually be a powerful tool. Most all humans, myself included, crave social interaction. Sometimes coworkers and a smattering of friends isn't enough, and it can be refreshing to occasionally visit a bar and make friends for the night.
I also paid $0 for college, but that's because I did my undergrad in Europe, and my US university entirely paid for my grad school costs :3
I see what you mean by ironic, but it might be a bit less ironic when you consider the history of the name "JavaScript." Its original market positioning was as a lightweight complement to the heavier Java. Now we have other languages serving in that capacity as well: Python, Ruby, Scala, etc.

I don't know if there will someday be a language that is as easy to work in as a Python or Ruby for simpler programs but which lets you get (almost) as fast and fine-grained as C as your features stabilize and you start to optimize, but while we're waiting for Godot, it's not too ironic to use different tools for different projects, even if the project relates to one language in particular.

(And I don't know why you were downvoted for this. Sheesh, downvoters.... I'm contradicting you a little with my post, but I see no reason why you shouldn't say what you think. So, after contradicting you, I'll now go and cancel your downvote with my upvote. How's that for irony?)
call to arms : Woz a new "next" ... maybe start back where http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeOS left !
> I'm not positive if MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, or similar would perform the same date and time manipulation correctly. However, I know from personal experience that MySQL handles date/times more consistently than PHP.

Postgres boasts some very pedantically excellent timestamp and timezone support. If there is a bug, it will be rectified in all possible haste once reported.

For example, from http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.2/static/functions-datetime...:

The first century starts at 0001-01-01 00:00:00 AD, although they
did not know it at the time. This definition applies to all
Gregorian calendar countries. There is no century number 0, you go
from -1 century to 1 century. If you disagree with this, please
write your complaint to: Pope, Cathedral Saint-Peter of Roma,
Vatican.

PostgreSQL releases before 8.0 did not follow the conventional
numbering of centuries, but just returned the year field divided
by 100.
But it is clunky. It's a threat, but it's clunky.

Roku - weird platform, but improving. BrightScript has its issues, but it does support HLS and VAST for ads.

Boxee - buggy.

SamsungTV - horrible platform, horrible (borderline abusive) approval process. Already fragmented between 2010 and 2011 models, poor and/or outright wrong documentation.

GoogleTV - possibly one of the best of the bunch, since Android is a worthwhile base, but still has a few screws loose.

Others - often too small/difficult to invest heavily in making something truly good.
What would he say to the idea of selling Apple hardware without tying it to an OS?

In other words, you can buy the great Apple form factor and design, but you don't have to deal with the restrictions of the OS. You could install your own OS.

Obviously this would initially only target hackers. NetBSD can run on some Apple hardware. And there is all the Hackintosh work to build on. Eventually there would be more free OS offerings to install after giving the hacker community some time to adjust to the newfound freedom.

Apple could even sell OSX and iOS separately.

There is a lot of value just in the Apple hardware. Even without the Apple OS offerings. Apple is primarily a hardware company.
And if not for the tempest, when would this have gotten "fixed," if ever? This isn't about one job, it's about the reality of everyone having an ingrained sense of "education = capability."
I've emailed you. For anyone else who's interested, here's the support email we got (back in January 2011 it turns out):

> The following URLs fail to load:
> http://cdn.lanyrd.net/css/core.221dbc4b.min.css
> http://cdn.lanyrd.net/js/jquery-1.4.3.min.97be02d1.min.js
> http://cdn.lanyrd.net/js/jquery.jplayer.min.72d89d00.min.js
> http://cdn.lanyrd.net/js/lang.ENG.4f594a71.min.js
> http://cdn.lanyrd.net/js/global.f0851851.min.js
> This is on the basic page - http://lanyrd.com/services/badges/. As far as I can tell, no files from the domain cdn.lanyrd.net will load.
>
> Also, it seems the Lanyrd.com site doesn't can't load any resources from the CDN domain as well - the homepage is totally broken for me.
>
> Oh, and I'm situated in Slovenia, if that helps.

I replied and asked them to run "host" and "ping" against
cdn.lanyrd.net and they sent back the following:

> Host cdn.lanyrd.net not found: 3(NXDOMAIN)
> ping:unknown host cdn.lanyrd.net

I also had an incident a few months later where our assets failed to load for a period for me sitting at my desk in London - GitHub's assets were affected as well, which lead me to suspect it was a CloudFront failure. Unfortunately I don't have any notes from that.
Zee has apologized.

https://twitter.com/#!/Zee/status/202154649183203329
Each one is one consciousness starting from the same point and diverging after that.
The problem is that it isn't cost-effective for large national players to fight for this business, and small players face powerful barriers to entry.

One potentially viable solution to addressing this problem might be an adaptation of the "Shipping Consolidator" business model (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Package_delivery#Role_of_parcel...).

Shipping consolidators pick up a shipper's parcels, sort and route them, then enter them into the Postal system for final delivery.

A shipping consolidator startup would be able to offer many of the value-added services on your wishlist without facing the barriers of starting a stand-alone national carrier or the limitations associated with local/regional carriers.

Of course, you lose control of the actual handling of the package after turning it over to a 3rd party carrier. Still, I'd imagine that a shipping consolidator using RFID data could develop a sufficiently sophisticated predictive model capable of providing much more accurate delivery estimates than those provided by the UPS, FedEX, et al.
We really like Quora. It has an active community, made up of a wide range of experts giving really great answers. The Quora valuation sounds high but the wealth of knowledge, number of users and available intelligence must be of value to some investors.

We have written an article (still to be published) on these expert Q&A sites. Stack Exchange, Quora, Askolo, Sprouter, Reddit plus more are delving into matching questions with answers.

There is growing trend towards matching experts to inquisitive minds. These platforms are essentially allowing subject matter experts to sell their knowledge to others. Why not?

Maybe the high valuation - Quora and others are commoditizing expert knowledge with the intention of selling this on?
No I didn't, and I admit I didn't investigate very deeply (I chose to switch back to S3 and move on to other things).
Absolutely. You are always a sheep in some regard; non-conforming in every regard is an exhausting and worthless endeavor. Not to mention, you almost have to pay more attention to trends than the unconscious conformer, at which point... who is the slave to trends?
For anybody wanting to learn about node the NodeUP podcast is excellent.