skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
^ exactly right. Of all the border problems Pakistan and India have had, for two countries that culturally have every reason to hate each other, it's a good sign they haven't sent nuclear bombs across the border. But we shouldn't be amazed at this. It should be the norm.
"The Taliban use them as lightweight tanks" is possibly the most effective endorsement that we'll never see on TV.
Overview of Jekyll - a static site generator written in Ruby
Creating great results sets, or at least much better ones than the competition, is why Google won in the first place. But I think the real battle-ground now is the interface. If Cuil or SearchMe really believed their technology was so much better than Google's at delivering search results they would have no need to also experiment with the UI.
This looks quite promising and I look forward to trying it out. I wonder how it will work compared with my current approach of using Mechanize and BeautifulSoup, along with the threading module.
What about abandonware? Consider two different scenarios. In the first, the manufacturer or distributor no longer makes the product (game) available, but it runs well enough under emulation. In the second, the manufacturer and distributor have both gone out of business. In both cases, the term of copyright has not expired. In both cases, the game is timeless enough to be worth playing even if it looks a bit dated.
Another good list http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Indian_inventions:

Decimal Number System
Binary Numbers
Panini-Backus Form (similarities to BNF)
Chess
Solving the money problem will keep you warm at night, assuming you pay your heating bill...

(And if you've got a messed-up family situation, money can put some serious (geographical) distance between you. :)
Lemmings was always one of my favorite games and I was sad to see them jump on the polygon bandwagon and basically kill the series.

A very impressive implementation of the original:

http://www.elizium.nu/scripts/lemmings/
I think the guy might be over his bandwidth service limit.

I reported the issue to the internal Y! service team so hopefully if it isn't a bandwidth quota thing the site should be back up shortly.

Frustratingly it's not in either the Goog or Y! caches or on Internet Archive. :(
Decades of the scientific method have established the status quo. You, as the outsider of convention, have the burden of proof. You intuitively know this -- if there was such compelling proof, you would be able to convince a lot of people of the potential, rather than saying "no, I don't have to prove it, you need to prove science." Science is already proven. I'm not denying the potential of alternative treatments, but for now, I expect you and I both would take the chemotherapy over making ourselves guinea pigs.
I switched my blog over to Jekyll last week. It feels much better to be using Git and Emacs to manage the blog instead of random Web apps and crappy text editors.

Since then the number of jekyll forks on GitHub has exploded. I've added tagging, fixed numerous bugs, made the templating work a little better, and added the ability to insert arbitrary script execution results (I use this to generate the tag cloud on my site).

You can find my fork at http;//github.com/metajack/jekyll/tree/master

I've also written an MT -> Jekyll convertor and an MT -> Disqus convertor which are at

http://github.com/metajack/mt2jekyll/tree/master

I imagine it will be a little while before the development free for all settles down, but until then, it is easy to hack on and easy to grok.
Theory Disproven: Money as Motivation
Ipowerweb uptime for November 2008 - www.ipowerwebreview.org
Ipowerweb uptime for November 2008: 99.906% over the Internet. Source by www.ipowerwebreview.org
I was actually quite interested in jekyll and was going to write a how to post about getting it up and running.. enjoyed this post.
'iPhone Freelancer' Lets You Employ Your Own Developer
Have an idea for an app but just don't have the skills to make it happen? No problem, now you have iPhone Freelancer, a new site that puts your ideas onto the developers' working desk. The two parties negotiate the pay, get the app done, and ultimately submit it to the App Store for approval. That's all there is to it!
What would motivate a company like Google to pay top dollar for a niche, one-product company with no revenue like Twitter? The smart thing for an acquirer to do would be to wait until prospective targets are tapped out and can hear the wolves at the door. It isn't like there's a lot of potential suitors right now. The era of large acquisitions is over.
The website: http://www.iphonefreelancer.net/
I recently wrote a blog post about something similar that might be applicable here: http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2008/12/19/12-ways-to-keep-sa...

The article was geared toward home workers and focused on tips and tricks to avoid getting stir crazy. But a lot of it talks about how to keep work and personal lives separate, which is especially difficult when your home is your office. So much of the post may be helpful to you.

Short version of my tips of things to do during the work day to stay sane:

1. Clearly define your work space.
2. Take a walk.
3. Take a nap.
4. Have lunch with a friend.
5. Join a local user group.
6. Engage with a community online.
7. Use Twitter.
8. Subscribe to a trade magazine.
9. Keep work and personal contact info separate.
10. Get a cat (or a dog).
11. Take regular breaks.
12. Schedule time off.
Why We’re Still Happy
Awesome, now somebody go back in time 3 months and release this so I could have not spent that time writing the same thing (okay, not exactly the same, mine isn't nearly as pluggable).
For long-running, large jobs I can tell you from experience it would work about a gazillion times faster. Especially if you drop BeautifulSoup for something like lxml.
i used to believe in working lots of hours. reading 4 hour work week changed my mind some. one thing i took away was: do the 20% of things that gives you 80% of productivity and skip the rest.
And (just over a year ago) - http://www.rubyinside.com/bloom-filters-a-powerful-tool-599....
I've done rolling deployments but also a similar but different way at Yahoo!.

We have access to multiple colos of slightly over-capacity machines. It's not uncommon to migrate by switching all traffic over to one colo. Then upgrade the next colo to the new code and switch all traffic there. Finally upgrade the first colo and then start cross loading the traffic between colos again.

Since we are big enough to have at least a couple of colos per geographic region this means we can avoid rolling migrations which are pretty horrible when you get trapped in a failure mid-roll.
"If you're going to half-ass your startup because of some 'work-life balance,' you're going to lose." - Michael Arrington

Mark Cuban was known for working 7 years straight on Broadcast.com (originally known as AudioNet) and that was at the time the largest IPO in history, sold to Yahoo for $6 billion in stock. He didn't take vacations, holidays, or leave work during these 7 years.

It depends on what you want out of life. I think too many people get into entrepreneurship because they think it sounds fun, but they don't realize it requires everything of you. If you're the CEO or President of your startup, you set the example. Every single person on your team will only work as hard as you will.

If you're unwilling to sacrifice friendships, family, weekends, holidays, then you're not very competitive to others who are. I'm not trying to say that in a sleezy way, I'm just stating the facts. A lot of people are willing to sacrifice everything to be successful, so if you only want to be self-employed and do your own self-startup, then you can probably get away with as much or little work-life balance as you want.
Eurosport Design
Peformance Products for BMW, MINI, Audi, VW & More - Supersprint Exhausts, H&R Suspension, Euro Lighting, KW Coilovers, H&R Springs, BMW Error Code Readers and much more.
I think it depends on the kind of upgrade. Seldo is describing a major migration to a new platform. In the case of a point release a rolling migration or the type I described above are the norm.

When doing a major release seldo is spot on. Especially given the small amount of time it takes for hardware to get out of date it's often cheaper to provision new hardware prior to the major release and then deploy straight onto that. Mostly the old boxes would then get cycled back in to production, something less strenuous like staging, or retired.
Saying that something is better than something else would surely merit a single clinical trial, showing large effect low p outcomes in favor of chemo vs lifestlye? Can you point to a single study since it is already proven? :)

Here are a few that may change your mind:
http://jn.nutrition.org/cgi/content/full/137/1/233S
http://www.annieappleseedproject.org/lifchancline.html
http://bastyrcenter.org/content/view/913/

Surely you must admit that your claim that lifestyle change cannot reduce mortality rate is premature. It's only recently being studied, and with the great early results we will see many more such papers investigating the effects.

My money would be on a combination: Lifestyle change + aggressive supplementation + chemo.
The cameras can't look everywhere, without operators helping to guide where they should be looking there are lots of things they miss, or potentially incriminating evidence they miss.

For example, if a crime is committed but the criminals face isn't seen, it's the camera operators that track them until they run into another camera on the system that has been angled to see their face. A system running on autopilot is going to miss a lot of that.
That's pretty cool, but not all that original.

I have a greasemonkey script (http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/30598) that does that nesting on twitter's site.

Fetching the titles of links is something my twitter app (http://tweetlinkmonster.com/) does.

And I was just talking to someone recently and I was thinking of adding a feature to fetch twitpic and flickr pics posted and put them in the feed.

That said, it's cool to tie that all together into tweetree.

Also, please don't turn this thread into a "Never give your twitter password out!" "But it's not that bad and you get cool sites!" argument.

It's already been done several places (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=393048 was a story all about it and half of http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=405106 was arguing about it), and basically many twitter apps have no choice until Twitter gives us OAuth.
9am to 3pm: study
3pm to 1am: work <- Work is my life.

Enjoy your work like you enjoy your life.
Stack Overflow is a Wiki
Unless twitter start using python? LOL
The new UI looks a lot like KDE...
Makes sense, especially when you consider the example of racism in history.
I'm the author of Jekyll and cofounder of GitHub. This is a great review of Jekyll in its infancy. We're using Jekyll as part of the GitHub Pages stack, and because Jekyll is a very young project, we're giving our customers a chance to shape the future of this feature. If, after you read this article, you find yourself trying out Jekyll and/or GitHub Pages, think about what else you'd like to see included, and if your ideas (or code!) align with our goals, I'll be happy to implement (or merge!) them in the project. I wrote Jekyll to scratch my own itch, but now that it's in use by a broader audience, I'd like to help you scratch yours as well.
This is very basic stuff, really. Any blogger would have told you these things, and #1 isn't even true (i.e. sethgodin.typepad.com).

No great insight revealed.
While we often hear how fascism is descending on the US, I'll note that it lands in Europe.

Or, if you intend "ethnocentrism and classism" in a less malign form, to the extent that it's bad, it will work to the US' disadvantage. Are you opposed because you want the US to succeed?
“Business is a sport. Except there’s no seasons, it’s 24×7x365, and there’s always someone out there trying to kick your ass.” - Mark Cuban

I like this.
Spreedly - for sites with regular subscriber fees to collect
Pity those forced to emigrate to Iceland? Where do you live?
> They have the great policy of requiring immigrants to take on Icelandic names

Nonsense. I've been there for 3 years, begged to be called Stebbie because it sounded more like my name than when they try to pronounce Esteban (they always stress the first syllable), to no avail.

Truly great place to live, though.
That's so wrong in every way. A proper work-life balance makes you more effective at both. Hours worked is shown very strongly in studies to follow the law of diminishing returns, to the point of even turning negative.

If you're sacrificing friendships and family, you're not doing it right. And not only that, even if you succeed you'll end up wishing you didn't. I've seen this happen.

For every Mark Cuban there are 1,000 entrepreneurs who succeed without working 90 hours a week.
> Interestingly the higher taxes will in part be used to raise the standard of education which will result in a more dynamic and entrepreneurial work force, which will in turn result in more business owners looking for employees.

Yeah right.

While Obama didn't go with the worst from Chicago's education gang, their best isn't all that good.

A convincing counter-argument will cite actual results from Chicago, a noted bastion of educational excellence....
Maybe he was referring to a bed warmer (wink wink).
What makes this a "classic" SV tale?
Well, when Google App Engine comes into play, this problem isn't big. They have something called versioning (in the admin panel) which allows you to change the app to the next version or revert back to an old version.

From an amateur POV:
But when usual servers come into play, I have had no clue abt big ones.

Infact a couple of months back, when my home server had a burst of traffic from my mobile app, it couldn't handle it (256kbps connection, 256MB ram with a 1.3 GHz P3 processor. well suited to serve a high bandwidth mobile app of 1000 users and also for constantly collecting data from APIs). But due to sudden traffic outburst, I had to string a friend's comp to mine.

My procedure: I first stopped updating data from APIs to my DB and kept it static. No updating the DB. Copied it to my friend's fast comp. I had my computer interfaced with a mobile which accepts input from the user mobile phones. That was the app's requirement. So I had an advantage of lining up requests right there in the mobile phone while I was switching the server. That trick should help if you are developing a mobile app on a very limited resource (a hobby project).
Step 1: think about your priorities. This is something you should have done before starting up, of course. For instance I'm married, and my marriage comes before my business. If I had to choose one to fail, it would be the latter. My wife is very supportive, so I don't have to choose. If yours isn't, you will. Same to a large degree with friends and family.

Step 2: I call it Agile Life Development. Apply the same principles you do to your startup to your life as a whole. Start with a routine you think might work, run it for a few weeks, see if it does. If you find it's not keeping you both happy and productive, and working toward your goals while keeping your priorities in order, try to determine why and make some changes. Test again. In this case your product is your life and your user is you (and friends and family) so good feedback is really easy to come by. And you're definitely making something you want.

It'll take a while, but you'll get there. Just don't stop working on it. I've been attempting it for ~7 years now, and I'm still not where I would consider it perfect, but it's pretty damn good.
i dont, my girlfriend does it for me.
Or by adding value.

I believe Y! still unofficially ignore the scraping of our address books because it was adding value to our users even though the services that did it broke our Ts&Cs and used the username/password anti-pattern.

In the future I think it will be more likely that we'll clamp down on that stuff because there is OAuth to authenticate with.

However the main point is because it added value to our users we let the scrapers get away with it.
Considering one of the first rounds of money that a startup takes is usually friends & family, I would suggest not sacrificing them.

You can maintain a healthy social life, or marriage, or keeping in touch with family, and still succeed. Read Balsamiq's story: http://www.balsamiq.com/blog/?p=79 - It's not the largest sample size, but he's not the only one doing it.

Your family and friends should support you. My wife understands the life, she understands that when I'm in "the zone" to put my dinner in the fridge and I'll reheat it later. I gave my wife 12 hours notice that 3 other rails hackers would be in our house for a weekend for RailsRumble - she went out and bought groceries and cooked for us. When the internet went down that weekend, her father came to our rescue and opened his lawfirm's office for us to work from - the end result, we won RailsRumble 2008 - and we did it with the support of our families.

The fact that I have obligations (Mortgage, Student Loans, Car Payment) keeps me focused.
Sorry, Joel, it's not.

Or, more accurately, its users don't use it that way.

Unlike Wikipedia, where articles tend to gradually converge on some "consensus-reality" version of "the truth", Stack Overflow encourages each user to add another answer to the growing detritus, and the voting (as has been pointed out numerous times) tends to reward the earliest answer that is in the neighborhood of accurate, at the expense of later, better answers.

If Stack Overflow actually functioned more like a wiki, I'd be more inclined to spend time there.
Here is basically what one of our big financial clients [1] does twice per year:

Integration, or sytem testing had taken place over the previous 1-2 month period.

They have 2 large datacenters, let's call one "production" and the other one "disaster recovery" (abbreviated "DR"). Between these and the internet are some large routers (the Cisco ones that cost about what a house costs). At the beginning of "migration" the routers are switched to point from production to DR, so that all internet traffic points to DR.

At this time, the servers are being updated with the new code. This can take some time, especially if large databases need to be restored as part of the migration, or if the update scripts take a long time. There are a lot of servers involved, a ballpark is about 100 servers: some Sun, some WinTel, some IBM mainframes. Some mirrored, some clustered, some all by their little old lonesome. Some applications are Java, some .NET, and some Cobol[2].

Approximate timeline [3]:

People start dialing into the main conference call about 5:30PM eastern [4].

Switch to DR about 6pm eastern.

Code in production is migrated/installed, servers rebooted if necessary. Done about 9-11pm eastern.

Testing [5] starts and continues until about 3AM.

GO/NO-GO decision is made sometime between 3 and 4AM[6].

Rollback if necessary.

Switch routers to point to production at 6AM.

Preliminary postmortem report generally done by 2PM.

If no rollback, then repeat the following evening for DR.

Notes:
1 - They're a Fortune 100 company, I'm not telling who they are.

2 - That I'm aware of. It would not surprise me at all that there are a number of other "brands" of servers or programming languages involved.

3 - The actual timeline is usually a spreadsheet that's at a minimum, 50 pages long, plus about 10 more pages of first, second and third contacts in case something bursts into flames.

4 - It is common to have 100+ people monitoring the main conference line, and 1-2 dozen other conference lines used for individual components/products. One has to be awake and alert in case you're "called out" on the conference line.

5 - In general, because the main URL/URI/Hostnames are now pointing to DR, hosts files are changed so that configuration files don't get edited.

6 - Sometimes the decision gets delayed until almost 6AM if there are some problems.
> Making something more complicated does not make it better.

I think the confusion here is that strong OOP is actually simpler. Breaking code into smaller chunks (such as objects) makes it more modular and easier to understand. That's the point.
(Quality results + boring but usable interface) > (average results + a great interface)
"Green" is not only about the energy sources themselves. There are lots of viable business opportunities that don't involve screwing with the landscape and environment.

For example, a MMO that will soon have as many paying subscribers as Iceland has inhabitants:

http://www.eve-online.com

How much heavy industry do you really need to support a country of ~300.000 inhabitants, with a culture of work, integrity, ambition and optimism, abundance of geothermal energy sources, a healthy fishing industry and a touristically attractive landscape?
As the economists David Hemenway and Sara Solnick demonstrated in a study at Harvard, many people would prefer to receive an annual salary of $50,000 when others are making $25,000 than to earn $100,000 a year when others are making $200,000.

I find it more surprising that everyone didn't choose the first option. Even though $100,000 is more than $50,000, in terms of purchasing power it's all about relativity. The more other people earn given the same productivity, the higher prices will be overall and the less purchasing power you'll have.

For example, if you gave everyone $10m and I only got $2m.. I'd still be a "millionaire" but inflation would go through the roof and I'd still end up with rather little compared to everyone else.
I'm not sure how many details reviewers are allowed to mention, but that's usually what I'm interested in. Vague comments about stability or performance are extremely dependent on what you're doing (which the article doesn't say much about), and therefore aren't really saying anything.

A more useful review would be something like: pick 5 tasks, remind people how horrible and awkward they were to accomplish in XP, and then show how Windows 7's new features make those tasks much easier to complete. (I can probably find more like 50 tasks that are awkward in other versions of Windows, so finding a small list shouldn't be hard.) If Windows 7 hasn't changed at least enough to make 5 common tasks easier to do, then I really don't care about how snappy, stable or pretty it seems to be.
Teen with Home Chemistry Lab Arrested for Meth, Bombs
Best Buy Coupons
How to find the Best Buy Coupons
If Stack Overflow is a "wiki" then so is a blog where comments are ranked in order of score.. so, no, not a wiki then, really. Also, wikis don't usually require you to earn points to do stuff.

Wikis are easy to get involved with, you can usually contribute semi-anonymously, and articles gradually improve and converge on agreed content. Stack Overflow doesn't offer any of that.
You forget opportunity cost. Apparently they have/had a high profile team. People who could've made more money elsewhere. Anyway, personal success or failure is never the same as corporate success or failure. Some of them might consider it a personal success and others may not.

I find it more interesting how intelligent people looking at their own search results could think this was enough to become a significant search engine. Maybe they just had to launch something knowing they were not ready.
Ah just what I needed and on the day I needed it!
Thanks HN for posting it and the creators for making it.
2008 was the year man-made global warming was disproved
best advice i have seen for a while
Exactly. Present and Future is more important than Past.
"The guy who never loses a hand is not the guy who makes the most money in the long run."

If you never lost a hand then you would be the guy who makes the most money in the long run. Everyone else would lose.