skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It can be both useful and beautiful to rage against the man.
I find it amazing that many of these people complain about the school system leaving them behind, behind in the sense that it didn't fulfill all of their curiosities. I felt the same way, but I didn't complain; I went to the library.
Starting your business - 37Signals [video]
If the issue is not the responsibility or fault of the person I am speaking with I do not expect their personal apology. If it is clear they are innocent of wrongdoing it seems unnatural for them to slavishly gush about how sorry they are.
You might want to back up your entire system before installing a beta OS...
Sue Decker resigns
well i can't comment on their site? button just goes gray?

anyway... i think outage messages should have generic language, it is a key to moving on or ignoring the notice...

but you should progressively be able to click for more details, down to the point where if you're so curious why don't you help: here's a link to the active outage discussion with the technicians
Are you technical yourself? You capitalize things like a Programmer. ;)
This is an unfortunate stereotype, to think that retail implies a certain amount of bullshit. I am more inclined to say it's a result of dilution of good practice and good faith when intents and goals are misaligned. You'd probably agree, but the blame isn't all on retail per se.
I once implemented CGI in Scheme. It's a long story involving trying to deploy to a shared hosting environment. I could implement CGI in most languages I know in under an hour, but if somebody already wrote a CGI library, I'll just use that.

If the details of passing data over HTTP and interacting with a database aren't a critical part of my project, I'm not going to do it by hand. I'll find some existing library or framework to do it for me. It's not that I can't produce something without help. It's that I have a problem I want to solve, and it isn't how to communicate over HTTP or store and fetch my data efficiently.
Dude, firefox.

Also, Safari Adblock, it's not terrible.
I've been using two spaces my entire life, and I'm not about to stop now! I will occasionally use one space when writing online, but I overwhelmingly stick with two.
This is sort of ballsy, because they're going to have this throw in their face next time they have an outage.
"At least until she was let go, Xiaoju believed that the day would come when she would make as much money as her boss. He was from Hunan and started out as a migrant worker, in a jewelry factory, before founding his own factory 10 years ago.

"As recently as the 2008 Summer Olympics, the Chinese economy was still bursting with energy, and no one expected the boom, which has lasted for years, to end anytime soon."
Thanks a lot. This was one of the most difficult aspects of txtful implementation. Translate the concept to an easy to use UI.
Uh, I've been spared this doom-widget.

I feel the press is a bit bubble-happy these days, but the scale of the economic depression doesn't make that unmerited. In fact, I welcome it; education costs have gotten more and more out of hand and no one seems to be making a fuss about it except those having to pay. The bubble craze has pointed out areas where things have been going wrong for a very long time, it's sort of like draining a swamp to reveal all the bodies.

I think part of the bubble is an untested assumption, that having a degree will always net you more income in the long run, much like it was assumed that house prices would never, ever, ever fall. It's a core indicator of a bubble, because it's easy for reality to break things if the assumption stops being true. I can definitely vouch for those who have gotten degrees and lead careers that have nothing to do with them; from a career perspective (not a personal or educational one, mind you), a lot of people have just wasted four years of their life.

I was raised by engineers who got degrees to go work in the very specific fields they got degrees in, so of course this flies directly in the face of what I thought was supposed to be the way things work.
Is there anyone else on HN who gets excited about distributed HL7 systems and healthcare?
Yes, there was some problem with that page earlier such that it wouldn't display at all to me. (There was an error message that implied the server was overwhelmed.) Now I see a lot of spammy blog content, which I'm not sure is an improvement, but I did think this part

"Robb claims that as 'there is reason to believe that costs of higher education (direct costs and lost income) are now nearly equal (in net present value) to the additional lifetime income derived from having a degree' this situation has all the earmarks of a bubble."

Have college costs risen so steeply that there is now no economic rationale (from increased lifetime income) to seek a college degree?
First, your OS probably is running some 20 year old code. Second, code can live on in the new structures and ideas it presents, rather than in their direct manifestation. We are building to higher and higher levels of abstraction.
Hopefully next time we have to apologize for something going wrong we'll be able to do a better job than the standard "We apologize for the inconvenience" reply.
The High Priests of Snark
Water is the enemy of wood and can rot it pretty quickly as well as invite termites. If wood is kept dry, it will last nearly forever. There is some ancient Egyptian furniture in museums that is more than 2,000 years old, and even more furniture and wooden artifacts (shields, tools, etc.) that are more than 1,000 years old.
The system doesn't leave you behind. It locks you into your seat with your eyelids taped open with turgid pap being projected onto a screen in front of you.

Any creativity or individual initiative which resists the system is swiftly punished.
If you google for hosting reviews, and find one that says "No-BS", contrasted against the others, it may stand out. You'd have to develop a reputation for being reliable, like any other site.
I can finally understand why more and more Americans come to Europe.

(this is not meant as a troll or a flame, I really didn't know how good European work laws are until reading things like that).
I don't know if you're being facetious or not, but I think that it's interesting that they trusted a very new language for doing health care related work.
Maybe. But maybe the people that want the magazine will keep the subscription and the publishers will gain me as a customer.

I read BusinessWeek every week. I pay for that subscription. They would not lose me as a customer if they went on iNews.
Wow, they aren't even shy about it: all of the advertisers on their front page (except adsense) are also in the top 10 list. Shouldn't that be a conflict of interest?
I like this idea for personal projects (er, experiments) as well. I have a list of side projects I work on, but new items get added much faster than existing ones get done. A lot of times the list feels like a burden. A mental switch from "I should write this widget for myself" to "I wonder if this widget would make life easier" takes the mental pressure off and at the same time reminds me why I wanted to make that widget in the first place. Sometimes that switch in perspective is the difference between having the motivation to tackle an item on the list and not.
It's also possible he's telling the truth because no one is looking for any evidence.
I call bullshit on this bullshit. When my systems go down, I AM sorry if it inconveniences my users. Why is this not OK? It beats the hell out of some stupid-ass whale picture.
Have you seen Spring lately? I'm not sure it's much of an improvement. Stripes is nice as far as Java web frameworks go, but it's fairly simple and this is where the problem lies.

Someone comes up with a tool that's great for a specific job. Later, someone else comes along with a slightly different problem and the tool changes a little to accomodate them. Then a few others. Before you know it every feature under the sun is added to handle every possible scenario.

Now you're stuck with crappy middleware. It does a decent enough job after you configure it properly and strip it down to only the modules that apply to your specific problem. It's not so bad because you've been using it for a while and you know it inside and out. Plus, it can be used to solve everything. It can probably even cure cancer with the right module and proper configuration.

But sooner or later someone else comes along, decides this nifty universal tool is a steaming pile of shit and sets out to invent something simpler and less bloated. And it will only be better because it doesn't have everything, including the kitchen sink, bolted onto it. It's focused and lean. But then someone comes along with a slightly different problem than what it was intended to solve and the hot new framework with all the buzz starts going bad just like the last one.

Look at Stripes. It's just a better version of Struts2 which was based on Webwork which was intended to be a better Struts 1. Eventually, more and more cruft will be added to Stripes so it becomes as bad as what it was designed to replace and someone will come along and invent a better Stripes.

In my opinion, this is the biggest problem with frameworks. Many developers prefer to have a universal tool instead of having several that are good for different jobs so we end up with this cycle of cruft.
Interesting – I wonder what the variance in the “kind” of sign-up might be. Perhaps those designs that highlight the “free” aspects will encourage a lot of try-outs that then bail after the 30 days; while the designs that don’t will see more longer term sign-ups.

The results of a follow-up after 30 days to see how many stay could also be enlightening.
Having taken online classes, I can say that they are no replacement for being in a classroom and having interaction with a teacher and classmates.

It would be a shame to see all education move online for purely cost reasons.
Hmmm. I remember a while back when 37s had a piece of hardware die, they posted on their blog slating rackspace for not dealing with it quickly enough. A while later they admitted they did not have a hot standby for the hardware that failed (I seem to remember it was a load balancer, so kind of important).

So basically I call bullshit on this. How about when you have a failure you don't blame a supplier who was not in the wrong? I'll try and find the blog post.
here's how a company such as yours can do better (i'm addressing a web app company in general, not 37s in particular):

* reassure users that the service was "merely" unavailable and no data was lost (i think you already do this)

* explain specifically what happened and why to the best of your knowledge (i think you already do this)

* explain specifically what you're going to do to ensure it doesn't happen again, within reason

* if the downtime is extensive, give paying users a free month or whatever of service (i think you would already do this), within reason
In need of a micro-loan.
(This is a side account.)

Hi HN,

I am in need of a small loan ($5,000) for my startup in a couple of days. Traffic has been increasing, and it has been growing fast in users every day since the launch here on HN, and I came up with a business model (which users have expressed interest they want), but I first need to incorporate my startup (just an LLC, nothing fancy). This would also help me with my late rent so I don't have to move. While I work on my startup, the other person living with me is very close to getting a legal job (plus we are expecting a large amount of money this month), and together we would be able to pay off the loan in 6 months or less, with 20% interest.

Would anyone be able to help (not necessarily with funds, but maybe finding someone who would like to invest)? Thank you so much, HN. It means a lot to me.

Feel free to contact me: qouade at gmail dot com.
That's the real problem with reviews.. I know there's a bunch of false ones for various hosting sites, since the tech support was unwilling to walk people through basic processes, or code their entire site for them.

I can't really come up with a solution to that, as there's no way to accurately tell if someone knows enough to be reviewing the place.

I recently switched hosting to a place called Spexhost, which is run by some people I knew through IRC. That alone makes me trust it a bit more then some random company.
A lot of the jQuery "way" is inconsistent from my experience. And some of it is just backwards (like .each gives index, value instead of value, index). I just want to get the best of both jQuery (speed, chaining, non-intrusive) and Prototype (Hashes, Array, Function binding, etc.) in one consistent framework.
All my emails tend to be formal in style even to people I know well - so I would never consider it appropriate to write 'really, really sorry about that guys' to customers.
Yep - here it is: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/800-what-happened-this-mo...

"Naturally, we’re going to have a long, serious talk with our service provider (Rackspace). They’re supposed to be the best in the business, but in this instance they failed us,"

Then further down in the comments, DHH admits that their LB blew and they didn't have a hot standby:

"It was no doubt a mistake not to have a second load balancer sitting ready"
Another idea: Implement one-dimensional cellular automata in Excel. There are fairly simple Turing-complete ones.
I'm serious. I get snubbed every time I mention a healthcare startup to a group of hackers. This is me saying, "hey, look, it _can_ be cool..."
I had this memorized at one point..
http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/698-downtime-notice

From first comment on the post.
I can't, because in order to do so I have to guess how unreasonable the person assessing the test is.

Take the question "You have to give up on some things that you start." The answer you're supposed to give is "strongly disagree." But I strongly agree with that statement. Something I've noticed in research is that the most productive people know when to drop something and move on to something else. The opposite of this statement is a platitude - you should never give up. I think you'd have to be a moron to agree with it.

On the other hand, I know that saying, essentially, "sometimes you have to give up" sounds bad to some people.

So now it becomes a guessing game. Do I assume the person assessing the test is a reasonable person with a nuanced appreciation for the realities in life, or is the person a moron?
Also

"You don't give up on things you start" could be good or bad, depending on what it was you started!
I do a little web hosting on the side. Only for friends or companies that are run by friends, though. Depending on what they want I charge somewhere between 10 and 40 euros a year. If you don't know the dollar/euro exchange rate, just assume it's 1:1 for now.

I've also built several web-hosting (static HTML and PHP/MySQL) systems for ISPs (years ago) along with the management and backup solutions to go with them.

I make a small loss doing the hosting I do for friends, but that doesn't bother me.

I over the years I've often been asked by the people buying my services why I am more expensive than a lot of advertised hosting services.

Ha! More expensive, now there's a joke. The key word is 'advertised'. I basically re-sell capacity below cost and re-sell domain registration at cost plus one euro a year for administrative overhead (read : the cost of sending a yearly invoice through snail-mail).

My hosting services are 'expensive' because this is what the actual cost is.

If I'm running this at a loss in my spare time on a good-will basis, why are there parties out there with full-time staff charging less for (superficially) identical services?

Well, let's see..

Registering a domain with a random party is generally a bad idea. For example, some hosting companies put themselves in the registrant information (as owner). In other words, the domain doesn't belong to you and you do not have control over it. Not something a non-techie will know or understand (unless you explain it to them).

The price for registering a domain is generally lower when you go with a big hoster, because these organizations have bulk registration deals, which lowers the price they have to pay to register an individual domain. Buy 1 domain at 10 euros, buy 1000 at 1000.

Some hosters also play bandwidth games. Ooops, you got linked from a major site and that's caused a spike - which is why your site is now shut down. Please wait 24 hours or upgrade to 'premium'.

Pay extra for email. Oh yeah, this is a popular one. Besides not having proper forwarding facilities (or a POP or IMAP server - forward to one address only), many providers will store any email on their own systems and charge for it. Bonus points for "adding email addresses to your domain", which will cost more (of course).
TeX has reasonable defaults, but it is not all-knowing. A typist who cares about the spacing of his document must memorize TeX's period-spacing rules and carefully annotate the exceptions -- which includes both errors of too much and too little space:

http://john.regehr.org/latex/#little
JoelOnHosting.com?
Ask HN: Why is there no "execution" rule for patents?
At my company, in addition to working on our core competency, we occasionally look at cool, compelling side projects to branch out to in order to grow the company. Recently, though, I've been consistently frustrated by existing patents blocking us from executing on really compelling, valuable concepts owned by people who aren't doing anything with it! At the end of the day, a lot of these things we want to use ourselves and would pay for them I'd they were offered. Are there subtle (or not subtle) arguments against a "to qualify for patent protection you actually need to build this" clause? Ideamen are usually annoying but harmless, but more and more i'm seeing them actually impede development and innovation.
37signals: The bullshit of outage language
So right now the old I-hate-Java-frameworks post from 2005 and this one from 2006 are both front page "news." Has the internet finally run out of actual news? Perhaps it is a dump truck, after all, as opposed to a series of tubes.
Crayons + Physics Engine = Award Winning Game
I worked for a company that has an open-plan office and the work environment did not do anything to improve in-person communication between developers. I'm sure that it is possible for an open-plan office to be a positive thing, but by itself there is no added benefit. The reason that having an open-plan office made no difference was because everyone communicated via IRC. I would spend more time typing questions into IRC than I would spend talking to co-workers who were sitting right next to me with their headphones on. The fact that the company had an open-plan office did nothing to prevent IRC from being the main communication vehicle.

There were definitely positive things about IRC being the main communication tool, but it killed off any potential benefit that having an open-plan office would provide.
The fact that people have a career in an area different from their university degree doesn't mean that they wasted time with education. They just didn't know what they wanted to do, and the education helped despite not being in the field that they ended up working.

A better comparison would be: how many people with college degrees are doing worse than people without them? If you do the math, you will see that very few people without college education are working in the same job as people with degrees.

The main reason for that is that a college degree is a pre-requisite for most well-paying jobs. Which means that people cannot afford not to have a university education, because their prospects will be pretty limited without it.
So, is that per affiliate (i.e. if no New York affiliate generated over $10,000, then Amazon owes no taxes) or aggregated (i.e. affiliates in New York generated $500,000 total payments, and Amazon now owes tax on said $500,000)? My guess would be for the latter.
You met your standard last time:

http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/800-what-happened-this-mo...

(Although the Rackspace comment might have been a tactical error).

I was impressed with the post today, is why I commented.
Medicare Supplements
Compare Supplemental Medicare Health Insurance For Senior Citizens, and also no medical exam life insurance for seniors.
Absolutely. We're always going to start-up and tech events around the city. I'll be at http://likemind.us/ on Friday.
Hey Neil,

I've known who Carol is for a while. She's awesome in her field. If you told me she was taking over Adobe or even MSFT, which has some software DNA, I'd be excited. She's grown a company as well with autodesk to new heights. The facts are pretty clear, but they are there to support my opinion.

I can agree, hacker news has a lot of people trying to feel superior with a snarky comment rather than enlighten. I was not trying to be one of those people.
Not surprising. To do sales well you really have to be able to step back and think like someone who knows nothing about what you're selling. Hard for someone who's been buried deep in a project for a long time.

One of the reasons I love trade shows. By the end of a few days talking to potential customers at a booth you'll have a rock solid pitch.
Buy Pandora Battery or Magic Memory stick here
Downgrade and install custom firmware for your PSP to unlock homebrew features on your PSP using a pandora battery and magic memory stick.
Will probably do. I thought of Minesweeper first, but Turing machines don't seem to be that hard anyway.
When the fake review sites see one that says "No-BS", exactly how long until 10 of them say "No-BS"?
I probably do sell myself a little short, but again hanging around here it's not that hard to do. In the end, I probably reacted a little strongly, this is a community of experts and you were venting. I doubt you go stomping around the office yelling at people when they make mistakes. Thank you for a good discussion as well.
The health industry is one of the last great bits of arcane magic. Everything about it is hand-wavey. You've got all kinds of regulations and tons of data and all of the carriers have their own little fiefdoms and everything is done a thousand different ways... Don't even get me started on actuaries.
Why doesn't this Jaheem character get banned? lol
Whenever I see 37signals posts like this, expressing some sort of outrage against a completely inane topic (like support rhetoric), it feels like one of the team members had an experience they didn't like, as opposed to just having a bad experience in totality.

I say that because the inanity of this topic is amazingly evident; support language functions the way it does because people sometimes need to know at least the problem has been recognized and is being addressed. Not communicating with your customers at all is certainly much more of a folly than using words chosen to appease those who are linguistically anal.
I may be the only one, but I'd rather the link was left as clickable, even if the item has been deaded.

Otherwise there seems no way to find what the original url was.

I think the items deaded are pretty much spot on, but sometimes I'd like to be able to see what the fuss was about, or points raised in discussions.
"Writer Noel Weyrich compared college administrators to the mafia. "Call it La Alma Mater," he suggested. "Cultivated and well-connected, its kingpins are masters of what amounts to a high-stakes protection racket. 'Nice kid you got there,' goes the shakedown. 'What a shame if he ends up flipping burgers without a degree.' That's an offer most parents can't refuse."

http://www.incharacter.org/article.php?article=3