skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Single-handedly developed robust 100,000 LOC threadsafe C++ service

I don't know if I love this or hate it.

Does "Single-handedly" mean "jack of all trades" or "doesn't work well with others"?

"Robust" according to whom? Save the commercials for your webpage. Just the facts, ma'am.

"threadsafe C++ service" that did what? for whom? Did anyone even want it? Does anyone even use it? The outcome is as important as the process.

"100,000 LOC" My favorite. I still don't know how I feel about this. Does this mean lots and lots of valuable experience or a newbie who can't write a function but is a whiz at cut and paste? Hell, my javascript generator just cranked out 100,000 LOC while I slept. Onto the resume it goes!
Recently Renovated 4 Bed 2 Bath MOVE IN SPECIALS (housing rentals/new york/274396)
I predict that this phenomenon will be connected with the fact that most people buy the same few bestsellers from Amazon and rent the same few big hits from Netflix, will be dubbed "The Fat Body", and will become the big meme of 2009.
HN gets a mention in this article:

http://www.alleyinsider.com/2009/1/who-the-hell-writes-wikip...

"The bulk of Wikipedia is written by 1400 obsessed freaks who do little else but contribute to the site, says a post racing up the Hacker News charts."

There is other interesting commentary on the facts reported in originally linked blog post in the Silicon Alley Insider article.
The only good thing to come out of this is that everyone involved (sysadmins and management) now is (or should be) a devout believer in making routine backups. It's a hard way to learn a lesson, but they're not the first nor will they be the last to learn the hard way.
When I left the military--I interviewed, outside my network, looking for a tech lead position. During the interviews I emphasized my leadership skills and experiences. I had come from a research background: won funding on my own, executed my own projects (i.e. wrote code), led development teams, and contributed in many places. I got things done.

Every interview led to an offer+. Yet I was frustrated during the whole process. I asserted tech lead and they pushed back with straight coder.

+ [Note--there was one company where I declined before they could make an offer.]

After reading this post, I can see there was a difference of values causing a misunderstanding. In the military, my technical skills were completely ignored (except at the research lab--I found my way there despite my career field). Leadership ability is what matters (esp for officers). In the civilian world, it seems leadership skills are perceived as fluff.

I won't say one is better than the other. A lot of time what people pass off as leadership accomplishments are just fluff. Its harder to fake a solid technical background.

Eventually I declined every offer and am continuing to work on my startup idea. At the time, the process gave me a bad taste of private sector "jobs". This led to a second wind and more determination to make it.

My failure tolerance moved from "almost out of money--get a job" to "sell everything I own, move in with my parents, try startup again--get a job if accumulating debt".

I haven't hit these extremes yet but find myself willing to go there if necessary.
I'm not sure where in the tree to place this, so I'll put it at the bottom.

The absolute best indicator I've found for separating quality developers from the 9 to 5 set is finding out what they read.

80% read nothing and admit to it.

15% will make up something like "I read lots of things" or "I read blogs". This is the dangerous group, they're the astronauts.

The last 5% will tell you books they're reading, and more often than not will recommend books to you because they are passionate about what they read.

This simple test has yet to fail me. I'm sure there are great programmers in the 9 to 5 crew, but they aren't the people I want to trust in a pinch. I'll always prefer the guy who is doing this because he loves it over the guy who does it because it's a paycheck.
I love Dropbox and I am a recent convert to it, thanks to someone remarking about it in a HN thread a few weeks ago. I now have my critical (encrypted) accounts & passwords file in Dropbox on computers both at home and work. I like that it's cross-platform too. I haven't heard about CrashPlan before, so I am going to Google it now. Thanks.
With the fb API, and you can get statuses, just not the history of statuses like in Twitter.

I doubt opening that up would kill twitter. There's a matter of cultural momentum and social ecosystem that's already in place that's not going to be abandoned in a blink.
I dunno about other big companies, but Google seems to care about it a lot.
They carry the most valuable cargo: information about structural similarities.
It took me fifteen minutes to realize I was listening to a symposium on corporate ethics.

Worth every penny.
This is complete FUD.

I wrote a simple script to parse the numbers on this page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedians_by_number_o...

Turns out, the top 1,400 account for 17% of the edits. Even the top 4,000 listed on that page together account for only 28%.

I've been on Wikipedia since mid 2002. That statement by Jimbo sounds like exactly the sort of thing he would have said back in 2003 or 2004, because it was true back then. He did know a whole lot of editors personally. But in 2009, those numbers are way off the mark.

Furthermore, as someone else said, these top editors are mostly admins doing janitorial duties such as rolling back vandalism semi-automatically. If you remove this component, the distribution would be even more equitable.

Finally, this is just the English Wikipedia, which is only about one-fourth of the total, by article count. And different languages have mostly disjoint authorship. So I'd say the true impact of the top thousand globally is around 2-5%.

Seriously, this is pure trolling.
For free or for pay?

A Google Mini is about $3K (http://www.google.com/enterprise/mini/index.html). That's about as close to a private google custom search that you'll find. I used to admin one, I believe you could integrate it's authentication into LDAP or Active Directory.
I'm curious - why the bad taste of private sector jobs? Because of the emphasis on technical skills, or something else?

I can sympathize with the "declined all offers and continued to work on startup idea". I did that once and was very tempted to do it a second time. Eventually I figured that since I had a good offer in hand and my ideas didn't seem all that hot, I was better off taking it before I got into dire straits.
I don't think so. (Congratulations, you've found something that isn't wrong with the ontological argument!)

1. You can define something to be "godlike" if nothing greater than it can be conceived, in which case the conclusion of the ontological argument (if it worked) would be that at least one godlike thing exists. That's probably enough for anyone who actually wants to use the argument; they'd probably say that "obviously" uniqueness is a kind of perfection, or something.

2. The nearest thing I can see to a Cantor-style paradox would be if somehow the totality of thinkable things were necessarily "greater" than any particular thing. But "greater", whatever it's meant to mean (the vagueness of the terms is one of the problems with the usual ontological argument) isn't the same as "bigger", and you could probably get away with arguing that the totality of all thinkable thoughts isn't so "great" because it involves inconsistencies, or something.

(Given some of the other arguments Anselm makes, which involve saying e.g. that something that causes greatness must itself be great, I think he would have had trouble making that last argument. But the ontological argument is so weak that I feel one ought to make all possible excuses for it :-). )
I run a few mediawiki's, and so far the search that comes with it has been adaquate.

For other sites I have experimented with CLucene, htdig, and maybe some others. A decent search can be put together in the course of a couple of days of careful attention.

Do you think that your current problem could be the basis of a paid-for service ? I.e., if you could pay a monthly or per-use fee, give credentials to a service that would then access the private data you wanted indexed, and then provide the search functionality in a way that only your server could fetch it (and then re-display it to the authenticated user), would you buy it ?

I have also thought about using open source software to make a search appliance similar to google's, and selling them or selling an installer CD that would configure an old PC to be one.
Their ad implies "quality", but I don't see it on their site.

Charging for a service pre-screens your members to a certain extent, while PoF doesn't.
Ask HN: How do I convince my boss that he should get me a Mac?
I've been working as a web developer (client and server) at this company for over a year now, and the office is full of PC computers running either Windows or Linux (programmers may choose themselves). The thing is I am a Mac user, and a quite devoted one. I dislike working in Windows as I feel the means for increased productivity in Windows are far behind the thought-through UI and apps of OS X that help me get my daily work done. Also, Linux is not an option as---as extremely impressing as it might be---it is (honestly) a bit shaky on the desktop.

IMHO, the best of both worlds is OS X with its glitch-free UI, stable core and BSD roots with a terminal and toolset similar to the one in Linux (a great aid for us developers developing for and working with Linux servers).

So, what I want to do is to try and convice my boss that he should get a Mac for me the next time it is time to get some new hardware for the developers. How would you go about doing this, seeing as Macs are a bit more expensive than a bundle of workstations from say Dell?
"Ask HN : How do big websites roll out new versions?" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=411282

Lots of interesting replies to that one.
After building the app, of course. Without the app, there's no data to back up. Point taken, though.
One Two Three... Infinity by George Gamow
Don't think it is a dupe; it's the blog post that jeffbarr said he'd put up in response to a comment on that article you linked to that asked for the option to add a surcharge.
I think you need an "about" page. It's not obvious to me what the site is for, even with the blurb on the right had side.
Thank you, that is helpful. I wish there was a button for it on the top bar at HN.
"They didn't get distracted into writing "architectures" when all that was needed was a "tool.""

I'm fighting this fight right now :( Someone I work with feels the need to add 3 layers of leaky abstractions and a few anti-patterns (visitor patterns without double-dispatch for example) to solve every little problem.
Well, I know what I'm doing in my free learning time now.

Thanks for sharing, this looks awesome!
Exciting New RSS Feed Reader With Podcasting Features
"The 'Dragon' is a metaphor for God."
should have been omitted from the preamble. if the reader cannot figure out that the dragon = god the rest of the argument is in more trouble than explicitly asserting that can fix. and for the rest of us, it's a lousy spoiler.
your best route is productivity. you're an OSX pro and the few hundred more it might cost will come back to the company via your increased productivity across your time working.

also, for testing purposes.
Looks cool, but how is it different from Minix? Minix is a pretty nice system for learning, and very clean.
dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/sda1
Some great general purpose design blogs are:

www.core77.com - focuses on industrial design. There is a blog, but also a portfolio and jobsite for designers (www.coroflot.com)

www.designobserver.com - is also great. The writers are some of the top practitioner in the world. It is a little NYC biased, and a touch snobby, but a great resource.

www.thedieline.com - is a blog focused entirely on packaging design. Frequently updated with great design examples. One nice thing about this blog is that they feature high end stuff in boutiques and clever designs you could find at a super market.
Elastic IP addresses are also flaky right now. But I have worked around the issue by specifiying a particular availability zone when provisioning a new instance:

ec2-run-instances $LATEST_AMI -k gsg-webmynd -t m1.large --availability-zone us-east-1b

"us-east-1b" does not appear to be affected by the problem
Solr (http://lucene.apache.org/solr/) is a web search engine built on top of Lucene. It should get you most of the way there.
This didn't really have anything to do with idea and opportunity cost vs. job. It was about cultural differences. I interviewed outside my network (to avoid burning bridges for saying no). At the time--I found the process distasteful as they ignored what I had been conditioned to value most about myself.

I'm thankful I did get offers and was welcomed into these organizations. But I did feel devalued and this is no way to walk into an organization. This further motivated me to keep rocking it on my own.
I agree, Brand New is one of the most focused an interesting design blogs around. analytically dissects the change before opining. Also does a great job showing the before and after and doing some research. Really adds value where most blogs are just links with a sentence or two of filler.
Those #s are probably bullshit too, with people just trolling for points, and basically doing the "+1" equivalent

i.e:

November 2008:
#1: Rjwilmsi	230816

September 2008:
#4: Rjwilmsi	170750

That's 60,000 "edits" in 2 months. 1,000 edits per day.

The thing is, that all those #s, don't actually rate the quality of edits.
It is intriguing to think that the fact that an article is high on the HN front page somehow makes it more true/valid/legitimate to some people...
Have you submitted the "Report an issue" form from the status dashboard? Amazon doesn't have people reading their forums all the time (especially on the weekend), but always looks at issues reported via the status dashboard promptly -- there have been several instances when issues have sat in the forums for hours without any response but then been fixed within minutes of me reporting the problem via the dashboard.
Python patch to speed things up to 20%
Are You Gonna Do It?
Actually, academics have for the most part grudgingly accepted Wikipedia. You'd be surprised. Some example: From theoretical computer science: http://scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=367 From biology: http://scienceroll.com/2008/12/20/rna-biology-journal-and-wi...

I'm not sure who are these people who still feel threatened by Wikipedia. (The author of this article -- and I use the word article liberally -- is no academic, just a random blogger trying to drum up some pageviews.) In my experience, it's mostly print journalists who're still leery of this whole 'web' thing that tend to have a problem with Wikipedia. Just give them a couple of years, their publications will go bankrupt and they will find other jobs :-)
Israeli army's new YouTube strategy may have backfired
You can run Android on your PC
Penis size is inversely correlated with IQ
Did you read my comment? The part where I said,

"these top editors are mostly admins doing janitorial duties such as rolling back vandalism semi-automatically."

If you'd taken a cursory look at Rjwilmsi's user page, you'd have seen:

"I'm not a bot. I use [[Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowser]] to assist my editing, but each edit is reviewed by me. Any mistakes are my own."

These people are not trolling, they perform an invaluable service to the site for no reward except the labor of love. To use a technical term, they clean up your shit after you.
Flagged; this is not reddit.
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SEO hosting is the latest SEO strategy. With more and more webmasters starting to pursue it, SEO Hosting is slowly becoming the most popular link building strategy for most Search Engine Optimizers.
I recommend the original post and related comments over the link provided above:

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/12/against-interesting-pr...
EMC buys SourceLabs, operator of open source site Swik.net
how do you look at a user page?
Romantic luxury holidays
The Free2 site is great for exotic luxury holidays and honeymoons to some of the most romantic locations on earth.
The nice thing about having enthusiastic users is that I'm already getting lots of advice about how to make tarsnap better (and more usable). But if you want to give me some more advice, I'm always happy to listen -- and even better if you sign up for tarsnap and try it out first. :-)
Nearly all products online, with user generate content and participatory actions, all that comes from usually less than 1% of the user base. Everyone else is just reading, consuming, watching, etc. This is FUD as you can see the same breakdown on almost any product with free user generated content.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:username

or google the username, the wikipedia page usually comes up.
This is smaller. Its probably more comparable to Nachos. Minix is a full featured UNIX with many features TCP/IP, Posix support, etc. That said, I'd rather learn (or possibly teach) from this code over Nachos.
printf ("%s Should Buy Yahoo", query("SELECT NAME FROM COMPANY WHERE INDUSTRY LIKE 'COMPUTER' AND MARKET_CAP > 10e9"));

Really, just go down the list and you'll see just as much* justification for any other company to buy them.

* Where "much" means "little"
Evidence of 'risk-taking' brain
http://www.coderscv.com - a live version of this type of thing. I've been playing with it. Still needs work but it is a step in the right direction. Ben (the guy behind it) is awesome about accepting and implementing suggestions.
The (Mathematical) Theory and Practice of Juggling
I find the painfully obvious commentary insulting. It's like reading an office supplies catalog, "Our elastic bands come in many useful colours, and incorporating it's classic, world renowned, dimensions, can be used to put your original mark on a simple, multi-functional binder to keep all those important things together." IT'S A RUBBER BAND!

Of course if the logos weren't obvious, they wouldn't be good logos now would they?

Love,
Captain Obvious
The Truth About the "Robber Barons"
Who said we had to compete like this in a global economic arena
Ask your congressman and news editors, who said we had to competel like this in a global economic arena. Follow the journey of an artist and advocate in the global economic arena with links to the real world of the streets of USA
I'd like to be able to login from my G1. It seems like it works, but the session doesn't want to stay active. When I upvote something it calls for a login, and then upvotes the item, but then I'm no longer logged in.
Do you really believe that they could get away with 95% fraudulent spending? That nobody would notice 95 billion Euro corruption?

Or to put it another way, if this is true, it means that they are able to run real EC functions with just 5 billion Euro budget. That would quite efficient indeed.
Yeah, network effect. I seem to recall having heard a more specific term for social networks, but that doesn't matter now.

I maintain that the concept is, if not immune, then more resistant to it - I'm not going to a dating site, because the people I want to hook up with aren't there (at least I don't know them to be). They are, however, on Facebook.

Of course, and that's where I think you have a point - it's not immune to competition. But once the first of these services get a few breakthroughs, the viral effect is going to be pretty hefty, I think.
I would be a lot more cautious about saying things that imply a former employee (who can quite clearly be identified) committed criminal acts.

If that employee decides to go after the company for defamation, and the company can't show that everything they said is backed up by the facts...

Let's just say that losing the company due to lack of backups is bad, getting sued and losing other assets because you wanted to justify yourself on the internet is worse.
I've tried that as well. No response so far. We haven't paid for Premium Support so I don't think there is anything else to do at present.
Very nice tutorial(s). He links to Google, saying "There are plenty of resources out there if you know where to look." But here is something that takes the concept a bit further, already having done a bunch of "weeding" : http://www.zentu.net/oss/?q=forum/10.

BTW. If you or anyone else happens across some tools/etc. that aren't listed in that directory, please submit them! I think all the ones JamesM's tutorial mentions are in there somewhere, plus are there quite a few more.

Haven't been focusing so much on this aspect of my project, esp. not promoting it, but I think it's still useful -- namely for researching options that a perfunctory Google search that might not capture efficiently. Anyone is more than free to add a link relevant tutorials, wikis or forums at the directory.
Google Android is about to kick the iPhone's ass.

AFAIK there are no hard Android sales figures yet. Android's manufacturer predicted "more than 600,000" unit sales in 2008 (representing about 2-3 months of sales, from launch to end-of-year, spanning the Christmas season):

http://www.mercurynews.com/businessheadlines/ci_10799172

Meanwhile Apple sold 6.9 million iPhones in the fourth quarter ending Sept 27, plus 11 million iPods, some of which were iPod Touch units:

http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2008/10/21results.html

Note that very few people shop for Christmas before September.

Wake Steve Jobs up when these numbers are closer.

Meanwhile, if the "monopolistic distribution channel" of iPhone software ever becomes a serious handicap to Apple's sales, Apple will just end it, overnight. [1] They could open up the iPhone distribution model within a handful of weeks if they wanted to. It's mostly a policy decision. So I wouldn't build my business on the assumption that Apple is going to blindly follow their old path until it dooms them.

---

[1] They've already shown signs of trying to do this with their music store. Apple sells DRM-free music from many labels and has publicly stated that they'd like to do so with all the labels. The likely reason why they don't is that the labels won't let them. The music labels are trying to use DRM-free music to grow Apple's competitors in a desperate attempt to prevent Apple from consolidating its dominance of paid music distribution.

Such machinations aren't a consideration for iPhone software. The only reason Apple runs a closed iPhone software store is that they think it works better.
I don't get it. How does the music industry make money through spotify? Can spotify users copy the music to their iPod? Unless there is a good answer to those two questions, i can't imagine spotify as a wide-spread alternative to piracy.
How about allowing the poster to mark their submission as anonymous (perhaps you forfeit any up vote credits this gets).

How would that be different from simply logging-in under a different username?
He mentions in "The Screen"

You could also have a scout at the linux0.1 code - that has an implementation of vsprintf which is quite neat and tidy. You could copy that function then use it to implement printf()

here are the goods:

http://oldlinux.org/lxr/http/source/kernel/vsprintf.c?v=0.11...
Glad you like Twistori.

But how can it act the same way? There's no web framework in our pipeline at all. It is literally a static HTML file on the server.
Now all the article needs is a manual that is purportedly written two thousand years ago that rules "dragons exist in garages." And then all peoples with garages and dragons need to have a special purpose for existence (making people aware of the reptilian friends in the garages), and he'd have modern religion in a nutshell.
Hahahah, Android is NOT kicking (nor about to kick) iPhone's ass... some of you early adopters need to stick your head out of the tech bubble and breath a little consumer reality.
Why We Keep Falling for Financial Scams
Ten Things I Hate About You (Internet Edition)