skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's not a problem if he works with someone else who has the social skills and prose style to look good to VCs...
The impression you give of yourself when looking for funding is as important as your idea.
We have web standards to prevent browser bugs. Ironically sticking to standards 100 percent of the time often causes buggy visual display in some browsers. Standards are supposed to make things easier but the browsers have been pretty slow in complying. That does not mean that standards are not a good idea.

The lack of empirical evidence is due to that non-compliance. The same browser sometimes allows non-compliant code and chokes on valid code. This is a coordination game (just like driving on the right side of the road). If everyone complies (developers, browsers, etc.) things work. If enough don't, everything breaks.
On a somewhat related note, has anyone read the OReilly book on AWS? I haven't looked into Amazon's documentation yet, but I'm wondering if the investment in that book would really help the integration process.
Self-publishing a book: 25 things you need to know
I think this website (hacker news) just uses persisted hash tables. I'm not sure why he thinks databases indicate "lazy programming" though.
Paul - I have terrible vision, but I found that switching contact types has definitely reduced irritation. What brand are you using? I switched from standard Acuvue 2 to Acuvue Oasys. I keep my contacts in about as long as you (18 hrs) and I'm in front of a computer for most of that time during the week. Prior to the switch I wasn't able to keep my contacts in even 9 hours without irritation (while in front of a computer).
I'm sure I'm preaching to the choir, but wow - not using one way hashes is an absolutely terrible security hole.
Great question.

People will always try to abuse a system, especially when there's a monetary incentive to do so. We manage fraud risk with a portfolio of approaches that includes building real relationships, designing good automated signals/indicators, monitoring the network closely, and having strong TOS + great lawyers.
Congrats Paul! Hopefully going to be implementing Skribit on a blog I'm relaunching in a few days!
Why You Should Study Philosophy
No, he wouldn't.

The fact of the matter is, if he had the business, he'd hire the employees, as they would be making him money.

Just like the myth that he'd "pay his employee's more" if he didn't have to pay their payroll tax. Odds are, he'd pay his employees the going rate for their labor. Or, if he believes his employees deliver an above-the-market quality of labor, he'd pay them at what is an appropriately scaled competitive wage. The rest he would pocket.

You hire someone because you need someone to do a job. You don't have a mythical set of employees doing nothing/odd jobs simply because you have a "tax surplus".
It took Jobs years to hit his stride -- his early stump speeches are nowhere near as good as his later ones. And when he doesn't have something good to announce, they're pretty damn dull.

I thought that all things considered the keynote was pretty well delivered. Schiller was clearly a bit nervous. Once he's more relaxed and has better stuff to show, they'll improve.

Whether Apple can keep making the better stuff without Jobs is another matter entirely. MacBook Performa, anyone?
Just finished the book last night.. Some thoughts:

1. It covers the core language pretty well.

2. It covers the secondary aspects even better. Including: Linking to C, performance analysis, parallelization, and a touch of compiler internals.

3. Written in a very readable tone, but assumes it's not your first time around the functional block. I picked up the pragmatic erlang book after this, and was put away at how much "baby's first functional language" it was in comparison.

4. Lots of examples in different areas: GTK, databases, networking, binary I/O. Grounds the reader coming from C/C++/Java land pretty well back in how to use the functional stuff for real work. Also shows that you can get all those tasks done with a good functional style, without mind bending.
Wait. http://www.tcl.tk/software/tcltk/8.5.tml . Most recent release was ... last month.

Looking at that list of Tk highlights, I'm getting the impression that various screenshots and wiki docs on the net are a tad out of date. It would seem that Tile has already been included. Tk 8.5 is looking quite good.
Lousy Products Might Break Your Bones - But A Bad Name Will Seldom Hurt You
In that we also aggregate news and are focused on quality (hence the name "cred-ibility"). But that is just our consumer facing side and not our revenue generating biz model.
"I always wondered why Indian IT companies pay people so low when compared to the rest of the world."

Overgeneralization is mostly a bad idea(especially when pointing negative things). When you mean "pay less" does it mean relative to other professions in India? In which case, it is simply wrong, IT professionals are one of the highly paid folks in India. If you are comparing the pay with people in other countries like US, i am not sure if that is the case as well, unless you are talking about salaries in dollar terms - this can be easily explained - a dollar costs around 45 rupees.
Obama's Presidential Limo Will Be a 'Rolling Tank With Windows'
Tetris could reduce trauma
It looks to me like this guy is attempting to create waves, rather than just riding them.

Creating a technology wave, before the world is ready for it, doesn't appear to work.
This totally reminds me of "The Other Half of Artists Ship" http://www.paulgraham.com/artistsship.html

pg: "It's natural for organizations to learn from mistakes. The problem is, people who propose new checks almost never consider that the check itself has a cost."

FTA: "The process is so pervasive, it gets the blame for any error -- if there is a flaw in the software, there must be something wrong with the way its being written, something that can be corrected. [...] Does a question need to be added to a checklist?"
I seriously don't see the point of advertising how much money I'm making off a given site. If someone else knows that putting together a site like RSSTalker will eventually bring in thousands of dollars annually with a minimum amount of maintenance, doesn't that increase the chance that my site is going to get cloned by someone else?

If I were to visit RSSTalker and not know whether or not the site was profitable, I would be less likely to take the time to consider cloning the site.
How to Save Time by Watching Videos at Higher Playback Speeds
All you have to do is build a mechanism that distributes threads between interpreter processes then just spawn an interpreter for each core. For many applications, that's all you need.
I would be interested in how Sudoku compares. That is also a deep distraction, challenging but not overwhelming (they can be made pretty simple, and progressively harder), but doesn't have the moving colored objects.
The Booms & Busts of Behavioral Targeting
But consumer spending is easy to stimulate. Just give consumers more money to spend.

Economists still argue what works best to stimulate businesses. There's no one right way to do it. Some believe in deregulation. Some believe in low business taxes. Some believe in business-ownership tax incentives. Some think lax credit laws or "high liquid markets" make it happen.

Others, like the letter writer, believe in trickle down and low taxes for business. An aside, anyone with a functioning brain that lived through the Reagan era knows this to be a complete falsehood. Second, its been observed (again, this is like some people say, so take with a grain of salt) that many pro-low tax people cannot control their lifestyle spending.

Therefore, the only way to increase their ability to repay on their debt/save money is to reduce their tax burden.

I've worked for a small business owner like this. They're small minded and arrogant beyond belief. They don't respect the people who work for them. "Penny smart, but pound foolish" as the expression went. He was sure to talk to us, off company time, in 2004 to remind us how dangerous it would be to vote for John Kerry because of his plan to force businesses to offer health care. At the time, none of us working there had health care, except the owner. He had a private policy which he could afford because he paid himself such a high salary. We would make $20/hr (with no benefits) and he would pocket $60/hr from our labors.

He was eventually forced to offer health care anyway, once most of his top employees (and me!) left to companies that provided benefits and didn't treat you like cattle.
I've worked with Qt.
It's great -- C++ and cumbersome build procedure notwithstanding.
The API is also nice.
Further, it works on embedded platforms too (think cellphones).

There is a PyQt, but the last time I tried it, it wasn't as mature as I wanted it to be. Maybe you can give that a try.
Not knowing what you're doing isn't sufficient for success, but it's not sufficient for failure, either.
Why Does Hollywood Hate the Suburbs?
Though I suppose Moore's law has a head start, and grows faster than the overall population. At some point, if it continued indefinitely, databases would become powerful enough to serve 100% of the human population for a typical app on a single server.
I considered military hardware to be part of the "standing army". I know a fighter jet isn't exactly counted as personnel, but we need less of an inventory of them. So I'm sorry I was obtuse.
I would be funny if the real RMS got banned from Hacker News over karma transfer :-)
It's really easy to just throw everything in a db, and then start worrying when you scale.

It takes more programming to think how best to organize things - what stuff should be in memory? How best to store it in ram for performance/size? What should be on the disk as flat files? What needs to be in a db? Should parts of the db be cached in ram and just used for writes etc.

Also does everything need to be in a db? Or are some things better dealt with by just passing messages around, queuing them up if needed etc.
Ask HN: Am I the only one tired of Twitter apps?
Practically every morning when I tune into HN, I find an announcement of at least one if not more new apps related to Twitter. I always check the comments to see if anyone else is as sick of Twitter apps as I am, but all I ever find are other hackers cheering them on.

So, am I the only one who thinks there's an enormous waste of developer/entrepreneurial resources here? Aren't there more interesting problem spaces for developers to explore -- especially ones that are relevant to people outside the ubergeek set most us belong to?

This isn't meant to be a rant against Twitter, and it's certainly not a rant against any individual one of those apps or developers working on them. (In fact, I posted this as a separate discussion because I didn't one to impugn any one developer or group's efforts.)

But I'm just curious if anyone else feels the same way as I do -- or if Twitter is such a revolutionary new platform, akin to email or blogging, that I'm being short-sighted in poo-pooing innovation efforts in the space.
I'd welcome an outbound mail queue in gmail (or whatever web mail provider is your favorite). Preferably one with some configuration options. In my case, I might have a default delay of 2 minutes or so. For more uncertain messages, I might bump their individual delay out to some hours.

This allows for alteration of a message that has not yet made it off the queue. But it has the advantage over e.g. a draft message in that, if circumstances do not change, no further action is required.

If a queued email bothers you enough, you can go back in and change it. But you don't have to remember the things that end up not bothering you; they will be sent after their delay expires. This works in concert with the natural flow of your attention, rather than requiring you to keep track of and follow up on draft emails whose topics your mind has decided it is no longer worried about.

It can also be used to email yourself, or others, reminders at a pre-determined time.

I imagine one reason gmail, for example, does not add such a feature is all the potential avenues of abuse. Accounts set up with to spam without further sign on, or to harass someone else. Or just the person who ueber-automates every moment of their day with umpteen bazillion delayed messages in the latest GTD meme. Google may have better uses for its electrons.

Plus... If its automated, you're not looking at ads while it's sent.
Have you tried Tk8.5? It looks like there have been some pretty substantial improvements since 8.4.
Firefox: An Acceptable Cross Platform GUI Toolkit
Seems like the opposite of the 37 signals way... aren't you supposed to introduce fewer features that are well thought out?

(Not saying that's the only way, but it seems more sensible than building loads of features really quickly without giving much thought to them.. after all, extra features increase the complexity/difficulty of both user experience and maintenance)
Which gadget do you hunker down with?
How are going to compete with admob? Admob has very nice statistic too especially for iphone app.

Sorry. Not to discourage you. Anyway, you have a nice application.
It's not that bad.

Mitch Resnick, professor at MIT Media Lab, finished his PhD when he was 36. Fourteen years after his undergraduate degree, meanwhile spending five years as a science/technology journalist for Business Week magazine.

And he has done some great research even while being older than a typical graduate student.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchel_Resnick
IIRC, FLTK had their 2.0 version in the works a long time ago ... and it just kept being in the works. They just never left their 1.x series. Was their redesign doomed to never replace 1.x?
Twitter's more than a company. It's a new protocol. (That's what makes it such a big deal; new protocols are rare.) So it is no more wrong to find lots of people building things on it than it would have been, at the corresponding time, to find lots of people building things on http or email.
Yep, these topics are pretty dated. However, some community colleges still offer courses on these topics.
Distributed personal wiki - server-free (well, kinda)
Anybody ever worked with Satyam consultants or developers?

I previously had a server with 64G of RAM. Satyam requested a 128G swap file, because 'the server was running our of memory'.

I mentioned that I could certainly create a 128G swap file, however when using swap their app would be 300,000 [1] times slower when accessing memory, which would slow down their app to the point of unusability. I also mentioned they had 14 x 12G Java processes running, which may be unneccessary.

Satyam mentioned that the 12G processes were necessary, as the entire heap was being used. I mentioned that Java, being Java (and having its roots in embedded hardware), will walk it's entire -Xmx heap size over time.

I was employed as a Linux administrator. And here I was explaining Java heap to a bunch of Java developers. In three separate conference calls. With all their managers present, asking questions.

Eventually (after around a month of meetings) they decided that the massive swap file request was no longer needed, and I noticed the heap size of the processes had shrunk to a couple of gig each.

[1] Memory speed vs hard disk seek time
We've all been cornered by Mr. (or Mrs) Unfortunate, where they start by saying how they invented blah product years before it's time and then Big Company stole it. I had the great-uncle Jimmy who invented the backlit buttons on a telephone, only to have it 'stolen' by AT&T years later. Ideas are cheap. We all have them.

Looking through his resume it would appear he had a lot of fun, doing what he enjoyed. Yet today all he can muster up is some post blaming everyone else for his apparent failures and disappointments. I would think he's made a good living doing all this impressive work. How lucky is he that he can make a living doing what he, hopefully still, is passionate about?

If he really wants it, he'll find his "Jobs" or "Cuban" to help make it a reality, though chances are they couldn't stand to be around him. Rule number one is don't blame others, no matter how obvious or right you may be. Rule number two is avoid assholes.

My Unkle Jimmy never had another great invention. He was too bitter.
I overcame the extremely poor, rural part and I can raise you being homeschooled, and, in an information-society on-paper at least, relatively uneducated. That's a bigger barrier than being Black to being part of societies norms.

I was exposed to less of society than most people and in a culture much, much further than societies norms than black culture is.

I'm also dark enough to experience prejudices, if any indeed existed. One thing that life has taught me, you're treated the way you expect to be treated and the way you act accordingly. Perception is reality. You hold the key to how people perceive you.

Everything I have in life I earned by myself, I haven't finished college yet but have a decent job. I taught myself enough *nix and networking experience to move through jobs to where I'm making the mean salary for a single person in my city.

The only barrier that has ever held me back is myself. I've also experience big setbacks in life. If you feel sorry for yourself and stop moving, sure, life sucks you in. If you pick yourself and keep on striving, you can do almost anything you desire to.
Are you logged in to twitter? It just puts "follow username" as a tweet, which is a twitter code to start following that person. Not perfect, but doesn't require giving your username/password
This to me is the way to do it. You can limit it to something pretty large like even or 3 tries, wait ten seconds or something. Basically making it normal speed for a human but waaay slow for a computer is the trick to me. A dictionary attack has to try tens of thousands of words and combinations to crack an account.
Ditto and I agree, it is awful.
Instapaper is the bomb. And you don't even have to register-- just pick a username (no password necessary).

The iPhone app is also really killer.
As much as programming the profession needs improvement, so do HR and management when dealing with programmers.

How often do managers make the project worse? How often does HR ask for people with 10 years of experience on a 2yr old language?

Like every other profession, there are different levels of skill & talent. Usually we deal with this via differing salaries, technical incentives, and placements in various teams. Software development still needs some work in these areas.
Most websites are likely to be using mysql/postgresql.
Free publicity? I had never heard of RSSTalker - until now...
Well, congrats. That's some determination.
The International Consumer Electronics Show, the world’s largest toy store for adults.
I seem to recall a benchmark that showed Erlang as much faster than Stackless (for an admittedly relatively arbitrary problem).
He's confusing two things. "We’re always taught to look before we leap, but it’s interesting to hear about the Segals of the world - those who succeed by rushing forward without thinking."

My guess is that the guys didn't rush forward without thinking at all. They probably put a lot of thought into it. But their thoughts were along the lines of "how should we do this?" rather than "how do other people do it?" It's not about "going with their gut" or anything like that. It's about thinking the right way.
Great suggestion. I just added to our site's list of open textbooks. Thanks, Judy
No. You can export reports, but you can't export the hit data itself. If there's a report with the columns ip address, session id, timestamp, url visited, referer, etc. I'll be happily proved wrong.

http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&...
The next big political fight: healthcare
Also London and Stockholm for downtown areas.

The 91 Express Lanes (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/91_Express_Lanes) in Orange County are an interesting case - instead of charging a fixed toll to enter an area, there is a variable toll on a 10 mile stretch of freeway. There are 4 free lanes in each direction and 2 reversible toll lanes that go with the rush. Tolls vary from free (at night) to $10 on Friday afternoon.

One concern about these variable toll lanes is that they would only be used by the rich, but studies of license plates of drivers showed that every demographic used them about once a week, rather than every day or never. Pretty cool what happens when people have the option to pay more for better service.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congestion_pricing
> Should parts of the db be cached in ram and just used for writes etc.

You are working way too hard. Let the OS figure out what needs to be in ram - it does it automatically anyway, and it does a better job that you an since it's caches what actually used, and not what you think should be used.

You should not use flat files for web apps - they don't handle concurrency very well.

> Also does everything need to be in a db? Or are some things better dealt with by just passing messages around, queuing them up if needed etc.

Message passing, and db are not interchangeable, so that's a false question.
Blending the link and query-click graphs
I agree with your points. However I know many programmers who don't enjoy this step-by-step nonsense it gives and would rather just have the language definition and a few short examples (not a complete JSON parser or binary file parser for instance).

So I would say: Want a book that'll have you learn Haskell fairly well and give you giant examples, but takes a week to read (or more)? Read RWH.

If you want to learn the basic language, w/o much example fluff, and learn the language in 2 days, read YAHT (linked in a comment below by me).
I think Seth Godin just hijacked their blog.
Mother Earth Mother Board is the classic. http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass_pr.html

Get comfy before you read it though - it's lllllllooooooooonnnnnnnnnnnngggggg.
One other thing: Moore's law is fundamentally limited. Remember that the limit of the exponential function as t-> infinity is infinity.

This should be enough to show you that at some point, Moore's law will end. It is less important right now (there is still some development going, and new paradigms in the far future) , but the world is not limitless.
Its one thing to say 'rate my startup', but to say 'look how much I'm making' is something totally different.
I don't think the point about quarterback IQs is necessarily valid. McNabb got a 14 on the Wonderlic (IQ 88), but Tom Brady got a 33 (IQ 126) and Eli Manning got a 39 (IQ 138). All are very good quarterbacks.
What exactly does this have to do with libertarianism?
Ask HN: Where to find a partner/developer for a micro project
I am looking for someone to help be program a micro project over the weekend to be launched as an iphone app. Need someone who can scrape data from a PDF, basic mysql input and iphone package delivery. Are there any forums that I can hit up to find an interested party?
You can get frustrated or you can get better at the skill. Human emotion has played a part in our decision making since the dawn of time and I don't think it's going to go out of fashion any time soon. We are predictably irrational beings and like anything else these social interactions can be figured out if you apply some effort to it.
Too bad AIR gives up on native look and feel.
From the default index.html that is placed in a user's Sites folder on Leopard:

"Open System Preferences and click Sharing, then select Web Sharing.

Your done. Your site is now available on your private network at home or work."

What, what's that about my done?
Probably not, given that they are just following the standard blueprint.

Also given the risks (tumors and immune-response), this seems to be the kind of thing only used in extreme cases.
Richard East - Free Internet Marketing Lessons
Great chance of hiring a Traffic Assistant through the Oms3 team lead by Richard East, find the change in your business stats.