skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's true. With lots of my students, just getting running is a fairly large stumbling block. Everyone seems to hit a different issue. Hopefully some of the newer initiatives can resolve this. In the meantime, I'm trying to think of better ways to help my students. Let me know if you have any ideas!
Related: you can't create filenames in DOS reserved by devices.

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Why_can%27t_you_create_a_folder_na...
SpaceX has a backlog of 40 launches or $4 billion
Ask HN: I'm not confident in my startups ability to execute
I recently began as the first employee and second engineer of a startup. It went well for the first couple of months, but now I'm beginning to have doubts. The idea is fine, not stellar, but alright. The problem is both I and the founder recently learned to code, and I don't know if we have the technical prowess to accomplish what we set out to do. Furthermore, I don't know if the founders or I are simply clever enough to do this startup. Both are down to earth, nice guys, but I'm having reservations. I'm a high school junior in the new york area. What should I do?
CornellNYC Tech taps ex-Twitter CTO as Founding Entrepreneurial Officer
"we have some real designers on the team"

Problem solved!
Yes, in fact an up and coming discipline for this is called model based systems engineering - data driven, model based development of systems (including software systems). The main tool in this area is UML/SysML, but it looks like there is a Modelica-SysML transformation out there.

I would have liked to have seen an IT/network/software example on the SystemModeller examples page as this could be an interesting tool in that area.

Edit: just to point out, UML has been around for a while for this purpose, and SysML is an extension for development of systems in general not just software.
Sure. And if you get a static analyzer, you solve the problem more or less.

But, most of the bugs I notice in the static analysis output are not possible in the model of other languages. That's... kind of depressing.
Simple. To add a new attribute with MongoDB I simply add a new variable in my Java model and that's it. Done.

With RDBMS. I have to write an update SQL script, rollback SQL script, run it against my dev environment, ensure it is applied through test environments and hope the DBA doesn't forgot to run it in production (it happens).
This is a stupid question, but it's beyond difficult to search for an answer (I've really tried!):

Can I import Java libraries into Go? If I can't find a Go library to do what I need, what are my options besides messaging to another process, or (presumably) finding a equivalent C library (I don't trust my C skills enough to make wrapping something a confidence inspiring no-brainer).

Is there general language/library interop details out there any golangers could point me towards?
It would most likely scare them off, if they were coming from little to no programming experience, but I agree. In fact, I think that what you said applies to most languages, learning them is often a lot harder then it is portrayed.

I for one am sick of hearing "Learn Python in just ten days", "Learn Ruby, the easy way!", "PHP Programming in ten minutes or your money back"... you get the idea.

But if it was easy, there would be a lot more developers and companies like Google and Apple would not pay half as much as they do, nor specifically head-hunt talent, it would come begging to them, so I suppose that there are both pros and cons to this.
I guess you're right (especially considering nobody else seems to agree with me)
ASK: Macbook for dev purposes - used/cheap. recommendations pls
Extrapolating your day on day sales figures, you should see about 600k copies get sold tomorrow and 54M the next day.[1]

Morgan Stanley probably isn't too busy now, you should get their Facebook team to run an IPO based on that, before tomorrow's number come in.

EOM

[1] by July every particle in the universe will own a copy, that might cause sales to taper off.
Jonathan Ive: simplicity isn't simple
Good job!

btw: I love how their Revenue counter is poised to go up to a trillion dollars.
I'm reminded of Randall, Dante, and the roofer discussing the "independent contractors" who were killed on the second Death Star. I have to agree with the roofer -- like those contractors, spammers knew what they were getting into.
As with most things, there's a balance to it.

Should you spend 40 hours customizing your e-mail solution? Probably not.

Should you spend 1 hour and get it to an efficient state? Why the hell not. It'll save you some time later on.

This article is an overcorrection to a problem which stemmed from a lack of balance. The thing itself is not bad (engineering systems for your life), the imbalance of over-engineering was bad.

So yes, lifehacking to the extreme such that you spend more time working on systems than using those systems is probably a bad thing. But living your life as though no system could aid it is just as bad.

If you read GTD with the idea that David was a very eastern-religion influenced guy and studied martial arts and meditation, you sort of get this intuitively. There's a limit; a zen about it.

Don't over-engineer your life. Balance it using the tools available to you, so your tools just work and you don't have to think about the tools anymore. If you're spending too much time on the tools, you're doing it wrong.
I think they're looking for:

import org.somelib.*

x = new colors.RGBA(255, 255, 255, 0);

So you don't have to bring all the classes into scope, but you don't have to write out the full path to use them either. Just the last bit of the package-name as a qualifier.
Thanks for sharing such a comprehensive tutorial. Good starting point. One thing missing are some worked examples of building something end-to-end (ie a basic application).
Oh man. We were only there for about three hours. So I missed a lot of that. Next year I'll have to get the full weekend ticket.
It doesn't really invite discussion. If you were the original author of the blog post would you engage with the author of the comment?
In a similar note... ( American Idol prediction based on social media ) http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4015553
Getting started is normally the hardest part, I remember giving up on java because I couldn't get the darn compiler to work.

Hello world never made it to my console :(
If you have nigh-unlimited energy -- and crazy people do too -- then planets become remarkably big targets. And space habitats become a practical alternative. That could be an interesting setting, and remarkably non-dystopian.
The reason I don't like adding extra methods to classes is because by doing so you often end up adding an extra layer of dynamic dispatching. If I have that functionality in a static function when I read it I know that it can only do one thing but if I see a method call I have to always wonder if its going to be polymorphic.
Well, you're suppose to learn Ruby before Ruby on Rails right? Thanks for the link, I'll check it out.
I see a lot of potential for a new class of musical instruments based on waving your hands.
When you've got hundreds of millions of shares, you can sell tens of millions without losing ownership. At the same time you also insulate yourself from the risk of you or somebody who works for you fucking everything up.
The unsubscribe link is how spammers know that the autogenerated email address they are sending to is read by a human being. It makes the address more valuable when sold to another spammer. That one spammer may stop sending you messages from the same brand, to avoid landing in blacklists, but his other brands and his affiliates will be sending you more.

The US is a bit different from the rest of the world since US law (the Yes-You-Can-Spam act) requires that US-based spammers include and respect an unsubscribe link. Neither requirement is actively enforced, so the question of whether one can expect an unsubscribe link to work remains questionable.
Love it! There are some great web resources now for young coders in case you weren't already aware. Check out codeacademy, mykidcancode, and of course - scratch. In fact, I think Google has their own block programming initiative that they were showing at the maker faire.
My wife used to be on a team that managed Heinz ketchup. When I spoke to her about this, the decision analysis usually runs as follows:
1) Does this incremental improvement (i.e. non-stick coating) provide a distinct competitive advantage that is backed by clear and pressing consumer demand?
2) How much will it cost in terms of: i) disrupting/modifying existing at-scale manufacturing/bottling processes ii) fixed cost increase iii) potential liability

There is usually a laundry list of pressing consumer needs with associated costs, balanced against market share numbers (usually culled from Nielson data) and satisfying power distribution channel partners.

The non-stick coating is, afaik, not high on the list of consumer demands for Heinz ketchup.
Of course he would, he's in person. It's easier to be mean on the internet than in person. Not to mention no one has perfected punching someone through the internet.
LXC also has an under-appreciated mode where you can run some processes (but not a full OS) in a container.

Please elaborate, I'd like to try this out. I've been playing around with LXC for years, but assumed /sbin/init always had to be the root process.
Facebook IPO Post Mortem – Killer – but not for the reasons you think
Bros - the social parasites
BitTorrent Inc. Sues Germany’s BitTorrent Co. for Infringement
Better design alleviates the problem out of the gate, for a system-specific solution. But if our best solution is people gotta get smarter... man, I don't know what to say.

As someone who supports ordinary programmers, expecting smarts is not the right track. expecting average and mistakes is the right track. If your foundation is not robust by default, your systems will not be robust by default either.

To mix metaphors: Better to design foundations that keep the gloves on by default, then when you need to, take them off. You can see that design philosophy in Mercurial.

Suppose - for argument's sake - that C had two different pointer types: checked pointers for arrays and unchecked pointers for arbitrary memory and that conversions between the two were relatively seamless. What difference would that make, 97% of the time?
Part of the problem with (most) airline web sites is that they still rely on very old mainframe reservation systems. These run low-abstraction code and use fixed-format EDIFACT messaging (often using ALC, a six-bit character set predating ASCII), and are therefore hard to work with and hard to connect to modern web infrastructure.

ITA Software (which I cofounded but at which I'm no longer an employee, and which is now part of Google) has been working on a new reservation system built on modern technologies. This is a monumental undertaking, but they have already launched with at least one airline.

It'll get better, but for the next few years, at least, airline websites are going to be patchwork quilts prone to this sort of problem.
100% agree. Also notable is the Charlie Rose persona of "really interested, really earnest interviewer". He almost always takes on this persona, whether it impedes the interview or not.

Sometimes it's unintentionally comical, when he uses his earnest, excited voice to ask a mundane, obvious question to which there's really only a pat answer.

Searching at random, here's a clip of him interviewing Daniel Day Lewis and Paul Thomas Anderson (Boogie Nights, etc.):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6tTw24Jt4AY&t=3m4s

I love that portentous pause when Rose says "religion and .... business". When the camera cuts to PTA and (especially) DDL in turn, it seems like they may be trying to suppress a giggle.
Personally, I learned Ruby with Rails - this is a pretty good resource - http://railsforzombies.com/
Dear Android users who are now on Instagram- Here's one tip
This is a great result for a single day, but isn't this a sign of a wrong initial pricing?

I would try to lower the price for a month or two, to see how the market reacts. I believe that you still have to find the sweet spot in the price/demand curve.
Yelling and swearing and saying "shitbitch" just isn't funny now that I'm not 13 any more.
Interesting, so 6000 x 2 ($12,000) vs 300 x 14 ($4,200) a price elasticity factor of 3.

If you are reading John, how did you pick $14 as the price? Pricing software is always difficult because you marginal costs are 0.

One school of thought is to take the time needed to write something, pick an hourly rate of what you would have had to pay a person to write it (or use what it cost you to produce it [1]) and then divide by the 'nominal' market to get a price.

Working a contrived example, lets say you write an App all by yourself, it takes you 3 weeks and you put in 300 hrs of work over those three weeks. Now you say "My time is worth $100/hr" so you've invest $30,000 into building that App. Now if the 'nominal market' which is people that you think need this capability at any cost is 1,000 people, you might charge $30/.3 or $100 ($99.95 if you're clever) for the app. After capturing your 1000 sales you've covered your development cost and are 'profiting' on the long tail with additional sales.

The danger of course is that you can over value your time and over estimate the number of people who might want your product.

[1] Cost to produce can be tricky if you are building several things, how much of your UI design developer do you charge to one project or another? Even fractions is a common technique but the designer will tell you that some projects took more of their time than others so its not a perfect strategy.
Here's a post from a while back on this subject - http://www.rassoc.com/gregr/weblog/2011/05/16/learning-ruby-...
I was watching this, but to me it was so boring. It seemed helpful, so I guess I'll have to suffer through it.
Does anyone know what twitter (data) is predicting about the final? Twitter has done quite will in picking recent elections, sporting events etc

The recent crisis in Europe should make the voting interesting.
Loose means something totally different than lose. Personally, I read each as their (real) meanings and when they don't make sense I have to go back and reread the sentence.

Yes, I can figure it out, but it's no fun to have to work to read comments. May as well let commenters use 113t-speak if we don't care how hard the comment is to read.
You should lower the price point to somewhere between $2-$5 and keep it there. It would be a shame to lose the top app store ranking when it goes back to $15.
Interesting idea. Good luck to you and the business.

But why are so many [things] in the [How it works] page [wrapped] with [brackets]?
Cracked at least makes a modicum of effort -- they have a stable of columnists who are more focused on being funny or informative than being eye-grabbing (Seanbaby probably being the most well known).

9gag and FunnyJunk are a whole different level of content farming.
That's assuming your replies end up in a mailbox they actually monitor, though.
I'm actually the maker of Two Dollar Tuesday. You can click go to developers area on the site if you're interested in featuring an app and we can talk. :)
What is the advantage of YC going public? I doubt they will have any trouble raising more money if they need it.
Because I still need to write the [content pages] for that.
Any tweet beginning with "get" yields the same result. It's being interpreted as an API command.
Thanks for the warning. I was pricing it out but was wary because of weird problems I've experienced with EC2 and inflexibility of ELB.

For what it's worth, I've used Postgres in production systems with great success.
Linus is a bit brusque on a regular basis. Many people in OS design/development tend to be that way (Theo DeRaadt being another).

It's less of someone being a jerk, and more of them being direct and to the point, coupled with a large degree of cynicism.
Normally, I would say quit. But, since you are a high school junior, I would recommend sticking it out. There are all kinds of things you can learn from this experience.
http://tryruby.org
I use dbx and gdb almost every day to debug c/c++ code. We have executables that approach the OS file size limit. Debugging with print statements is a nightmare. We absolutely need conditional breakpoints, stack traces and such.
related, about a month ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3893783
http://lxc.sourceforge.net/man/lxc-execute.html
Agreed on all that; my post was just addressing the last question.
Hacking fitness by finding exercise in life's margins.
I like it. It will work. Limiting the tip size to 150 chars is a good idea. As is, not using loud, distracting adverts. Will you be collecting info on what a user looked at and then emailing them updates or tips on topics of their interest? Although email is getting out of hand and I think ppl will ultimately simply start deleting the email and finally unsubscribe. But what other way to keep them from forgetting about wizgig and keep them coming back?

Why do I check YCombinator everyday? I guess because I work with technology and would like to start my own business one day. YCombinator concentrates on these things. So I don't fail to check.

I am trying to think how it could become a place people like to go and checkout often. Give them a badge they can share on Twitter if their tip collects certain number of points?
That kind of thinking is the exact type that will lead you to wondering why you can't find a programming job when you're 40.
Thanks for the link. I think pg's first response is exactly the answer to this question.
once YC is public, mutual funds could buy it and then we could invest in those mutual funds to really diversify our exposure.
Any comparisons between LXC and Solaris's Zones feature?

They sound quite similar in concept/execution.
You can get OpenModelica, an open-source implementation of the same underlying modeling language (Modelica).
http://www.openmodelica.org/

The language is quite complicated, though, and not all programs can run all well-formed simulation problems.
I thought we were hackers.
Do you use a full featured PHP framework akin to Rails?
Since being public is obscenely well-known to be a pain in the neck (even before the Facebook debacle), the OP is obliged to make a much stronger case for "Why?".
indeed, the focus of this post seems to be "why not?" when it should be "why?"
Oh man. I tried it out for a little bit but gave up when I absolutely could not find any way to skip a track I didn't like. Never occurred to me that it might be hidden behind the popup.
Continue. Everybody has doubts at some point in their career, should I pursue this course, should I get rid of this one.

This is not failure to launch, rather, it is failure to fly.

If your skills are not yet good enough, then improve them as you code, the best way to improve is to keep coding, even if it doesn't work out then at least you will leave with a sound knowledge of your chosen platform.

You have already invested months in to this project, the very least you could do is release the minimum viable project and then using requests from your users, improve upon the project in real-time.

You are clever enough. Coding is as simple as adding one and two, getting three, outputting it, making it look nice and shiny and then poking the user with it.

It is only as difficult as you make it. You can do this. Have faith. Not the crappy faith you might possibly get if you ask your chosen deity for help, but the faith you can use to keep the will to continue.

You can do this.
Clever.

“Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.”

Seeing the recent evolutions, I thought Rails people learned that magic in code leads to debugging unhappiness.
Zynga's Draw Something aided by Dreamworks
When they released the android version they knew what they where getting into. Trying to control/define what kind of environment you want is impossible, this thing will define itself organically. It's like being a regular at an 'artsy-ish' cafe, and now you discovered that that more regular/non-artsy people discovered your beloved cafe shop and now you try to create flyers and put them on their tables to let them know that they have to be like you?, hm, no, they will feel the vibe and if they don't like it, they will organically leave the place.
This's a great thread. Under the new startup investment laws that come into effect January 1st, are you going to be allowed to use something like Kickster to raise an investment fund? That would be seriously interesting.
A bit late, aren't you?
Which is why double opt-in is the only way to run a list if you truly care about marketing with permission.

Respectfully, I think you are entirely wrong: the two options are VERY dissimilar. In one case, you send them a single "Click here to confirm" email -- and maybe a single follow-up a few days later.

In the other case, you're continually marketing to them and putting the burden on the recipient to opt-out, usually in tiny text at the bottom of the email.
The point is not writing blog posts at all. He's suggesting that you can continue to use WordPress behind the scenes, as an implementation detail, if that makes you happiest --- but to stop blogging.
The mattress retailers have the best scam going. Nobody carries the same models [edit: or more precisely, each retailer gives each mattress a unique model name], and even the manufacturers websites don't list most of the model names or make them easily identifiable (and the manufacturer's websites certainly don't display prices). This, and the limited number of independently-owned retailers, makes the markups pretty surreal.[1] Let's just say if you're not negotiating 50% off, you're probably getting soaked.

It's similar to the way car buying was 20 or 30 years ago, when nobody really knew what invoice prices were. I see a huge potential to disrupt this market.

[1]I recently went mattress shopping again. During the "Memorial Day Sales Event", sticker prices (even after the "$XXX dollars off!!") were at least 10% over the MSRP displayed in the store's computer. I had no trouble negotiating 50% off the sticker price, plus tons of extras.
I imagine that the regulatory overhead is enough of a reason not to go public. But more importantly instead of asking "why not" I think the real question "why go public".

Sure it would be nice if we could all invest in YC (read: make $$$ off pg) and take some of the risk of YC's hands. But I don't think YC is frightened by the risky/volatile environment. YC's business model and prowess seems to be identifying which risky investments to make in a volatile market. Don't forget less risk means lower returns. I have no idea what YC's bank statements look like but I doubt that lack of capital is the most pressing business challenge.

Has PG ever compared BRK to YC? BRK seems to invest in companies at a completely different stage than YC.
judofyr is about as credible about Ruby as they come.
Cleveland; however, I have no issue in working remotely with someone.
I'm more astounded by the fact that Linus is on a social networking site like Google+.

I'm really hoping he makes a Twitter account for his rant-I mean comments :D
A) it's not "not news" because the intent for this was disclosed in the S-1
B) is this a necessary distinction on hackernews? I'd been under the impression this site is more about discussion about topics of interest to geeks and the odd primary source (such as this SEC link is). Did you write this same comment when Berners-Lee original email proposing the web made the front page?