skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
WebKit vendors also continue to support prefixed properties after the official process says they were supposed to drop them (while also arguing against other vendors supporting the same properties):

http://kevinjohngallagher.com/articles/opera-fat-lady-singin...
Sweet post. I think despite the massive AWS outage last year, a lot of setups still aren't as fault resistant as you'd want. Last year's AWS outage died cuz of a cascade failure on EBS. Have they resolved that issue or should your EC2 volumes not be on EBS on this setup?
The problem here is that the voters in the Netherlands and in France have rejected the EU Constitutial Treaty in 2004 that would have given the EU Parliament much more power. The "replacement" Treaty of Lisboa did not go that far.

But anyway, this is just negotiation what the dude is doing (although not very smart negotiation, imho). The ACTA is dead, it was rejected by a number of country governments, and the EU parliament will probably reject it too.

Btw, the commission is elected, but not directly. It is elected by the governments of the member countries, each representing the people of each country. However, it would be nice to be able to vote for those guys directly. But, because of language problems (english anybody? France? Germany?) that is not (yet) practical.
Interesting, but no preference panels for OS X? How is one supposed to change settings if they're in a language the user doesn't know well?

Apparently, there's some sort of binding thing going on, which I overlooked and now can't find a way to examine/redo? Additionally, some prefs are plists, some are python, and some look like they might be Textmate preferences.
To the OP: Is there a reason you are not taking this to Kickstarter?
Something I see neglected in the comments is emails. I assume you had a life before you started this venture and have met people in business and personal situations and emailed back and forth with them.

Your personal email list is one of the best ways to drive initial traffic and build awareness since:

1. These people know you and (hopefully) trust you
2. They're likely more willing to provide additional connections and introductions

When you have a rough estimate of when you want to launch your startup you should be emailing the relevant contacts on your list regularly to keep them up to date on what you're doing and when it will likely be ready. That way when you launch and are trying to drive traffic you already have an initial audience who can forward it on to their contacts.

Past that... yes you should definitely emailing relevant writers with your story, blogging, and generally creating as much great content as possible and seeding it online in the places that matter to your startup.
See, I tried to use Visual Studio and I must admit I don't "get it". Actually, I'm not mocking you there. This is the truth. But I don't get many things.

So I end up compiling with VS and editing code in Emacs, because VS does not have a shortcut to switch between files quickly and because VS does not integrate with Git properly and because VS does not have keyboard macros and because I just don't like VS much.

Funny enough, I used to feel the same way as you do, though. I mean, how can you live without auto completion? But gradually I realized that in fact, I did not miss auto completion any more after a day or two not having it. And I did not miss a method browser either. And a menu bar. And... a mouse.

I think we humans are clever animals and we can adjust to any number of things. Me, I have been through IDEs (XCode, Eclipse, VS), Textmate, Vim and now Emacs. In the end I think it boils down to fun: I can work with pretty much any tool or language you throw at me. But to really get me going I need to have fun. And Emacs is giving me that. I am not quite sure if it really is any more or less efficient than XCode or Visual Studio or ed or whatever, but I know that I am magnitudes more productive when I am having fun than when I don't.

So use what you like best. Just don't forget that it is about having fun! Anyone who tells you otherwise... well, I frankly don't care. Have fun!
That's not what I wrote.

The concept is that, in a first past the post system, thanks to Hotelling's law, the trend is towards the center. That has both positive and negative aspects, and I was merely pointing out that there are some positive aspects.

I'm not saying that the system in the US is perfect, either - it clearly has drawbacks as well. Just that there is no one perfect system, and that the US system does have some advantages.
In fairness -- and I write this as someone who has paid for ST2 and recommends it -- the linting and auto-complete support are weak compared to a good IDE.

As a text editor, ST2 is great. The editor has a project system where you just add whichever directories you care about, which is simple but effective for many jobs.

As an IDE replacement, I don't think the combination of available packages is even close to sufficient yet. If you want to start looking at things like code navigation, code completion, refactoring, and integration with external tools for build/test/analysis/source control, you need a bit more flexibility than the default project system. The catch is that for this kind of tool, it has to be done so that it plays nicely with arbitrary plug-ins in arbitrary languages, and without descending into the kind of abomination that is configuring a project in most IDEs.

That's a very tough problem to solve well. If you work on projects using multiple programming languages, I'm not sure anyone has actually solved it yet. But for single languages, IDEs do a lot more than what ST2's default project system can support, and if anyone has built a plug-in that gets anywhere near what I think would be necessary, I've never found it so far.
Again: are you familiar with the concept of "payment terms"? Has anything been disclosed to suggest that this vendor hasn't had timely payment? Are we all clear on what "timely" means in the context of freelancing?
Part of the zen of Python is "Flat is better than nested". Until recently, I always thought of this at a code block/function level. Recently I realized that this is also important when modularizing and adding layers of abstraction. The more layers of abstraction (from foo.bar.baz import Baz) you add, the more code you write and have to "keep in your mind". This presentation by Jack Diederich at PyCon 2012 really opened my eyes to the potential problems of adding layers of abstraction via modules and classes: http://pyvideo.org/video/880/stop-writing-classes
Would you pledge?
Former Facebooker Scoops Up $1.4 Million for Freshplum (YC S11)
There are plenty of valid and legal reasons to use P2P file-sharing network, I'll be the first to claim so. But in an objective manner, one can't deny the bad reputation (on the legal side of things) those networks have. And it's pretty easy to understand that Dropbox might not be interested in being related this kind of shenanigans.

I also think the Facebook argument doesn't work in the current situation. When you know the risk of being blocked is so obviously high, you don't go and invest 30k$. Facebook have their own rules and somebody who'd be playing on their border should expect and assume the risk of being blocked.
Data Shows Email Popups Work and Don’t Hurt
Get out and talk to the people that you think would make good customers!

A small-business product like yours is the ideal candidate for that model. Small business owners are relatively approachable. You can often get a chance to talk directly with the decision-maker and try to show them the value. More importantly, you can listen to what they think their problem is. You will learn a ton about how to frame the value-proposition in terms that resonate with customers.

It's almost comical seeing the lengths that many introverted technical founders will go through to avoid talking to people, when that is by far the most effective path forward.

Worry about scaling up your sales process after you've hand-cultivated a (probably small) pool of happy customers. This helps you polish both the product and the pitch.
The presumption behind the chant is that what is legal is also moral, but that's clearly not the case, particularly in our ever more corrupt legal environment.
Everything is in text files. This is awesome if you want to move your config to a different machine (or gasp OS).

Give it a try. It is not as bad as it looks on first sight. You'll get used to it and probably appreciate it a bit in no time.
Someone this determined to do something so wrong cannot be assumed to be neutral. This guy must be corrupt and on someone's pay-list.

It would be in the EU's interest to start an investigation of Karel De Gucht to determine if this person is bribed and if these proceedings is a result of corruption. The EU would be wise to do so for its own business sake and before it's perception as a democratic body is tarnished in favour of a US-led corrupt legislative-body.

If the EU loses its perception as democratic, chances are that the rich and populous democracies which funds it will be forced to stop doing so. If it's one thing the EU cannot afford right now, that is one of them.
Its a text editor first. (Writing a lightweight IDE hasn't worked very well yet IMO).
Because you don't always know your code base very well. I almost always use vim but when a new large project comes along I've found no better way to read through it than with a mouse.
I don't understand the Go versus C++ debate.
Let's define a good ORM though.

A good ORM should be able to handle a database designed for a different application, normalized to 5NF or BCNF, using composite primary keys, composite foreign keys, and other solid db design concepts, and be able to reliably generate queries to bridge the gap, and should do so where sets of objects are required in a way that does not unduly burden the database with small queries that could be consolidated.

That's a hard problem. There are some ORMs that come pretty darned close if not there. Many more, in my experience fall well short.
"Our current Tuts+ Premium app makes use of a third party plugin that unfortunately stores passwords in cleartext (i.e. unencrypted)."

"(...) with a plan currently in progress to upgrade away from the current plugin."

Oh, it's the plugin fault. Not theirs. Blame it on the plugin.
People don't like being ripped off.

Price discrimination is revenue optimization for the vendor, it's not eliminating some efficiency -- it's steering me to part with more of my economic resources.

I expect the kind of behavior from a salesperson with whom I am negotiating -- that's a customary way to do business in that model.

In the United States, we learn about fixed-cost in the grocery store -- an apple cost $1 whether I have $0.50 or $5,000 in my wallet. When I'm buying a product or service on what appears to be a fixed-cost basis, I perceive your "pricing discrimination" as taking advantage of me.
For me, for "serious" programming, I use a full-fledged IDE which has stuff like code linking, quick project search (with ST2 I have to switch to the terminal), built-in documentation, refactoring support... So paying $60 for a text editor, when there are many good free options out there (even outside of Linux) is too much.
Yes, I find the signage for the Victoria line at King's Cross is particularly bad - they try to send you around to the east end of the platform for some reason, when the west end is normally much closer. This tool is fantastic for visualising what that comparison actually looks like.
For what it's worth SQL Server doesn't meet his definition of "durable." It writes a transaction log and then writes those transactions to disk on a checkpoint [1]. Typically, that checkpoint automagically happens, but you can also force it to clear the buffer with a "checkpoint" command.

InnoDB also does this, too [2]. I don't know if MemSQL actually has checkpointing or what, but it's just worth noting.

[1]: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms189573.aspx

[2]: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/innodb-checkpoints.ht...
I would go even further: to be a good developer you have to hate programming. If you like to fiddle too much, you'll waste time messing around and bikeshedding instead of taking your time to think about the problem at hand at a more fundamental level. Sometimes you solve a programming issue without writing even one line of code, but challenging the business requirements instead. It's important to be holistic.
Too much code?

0MQ ~15k LOC
RabbitMQ ~107k LOC
AMQP Qpid ~542k LOC
ActiveMQ ~1160k LOC
Really appreciate the honesty in this post. Looking forward to seeing the new Rocketr!
Well, make it torrent-to-mail then. It's not like Dropbox was the only good choice for the receiving end of the service. You don't need to be a genius to find other replacements.
For me, the take away from this article is that MemSQL's ACID compliance is half-assed at best, which is a much more damning criticism than using a flawed benchmarking methodology.
> Since tuning a database is by definition a custom process, we wanted to demonstrate what performance you'd get "out of the box."

Yes, and Domas was criticizing that as a strawman; as comparing apples to oranges. Since they tailor their defaults to different criteria (e.g. different standards of durability), of course they will perform differently.

The only really valid benchmarks are when you get an expert in each to tune their respective products to optimize for a specific scenario, and see how outperforms who. And then make public exactly what configuration was done to get there.
9 hours ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4160605
Anyone using solar as main source for home/office?
We're about to move into a new house in the Dallas, TX area and it's a home we expect to be in for 20+ years. We're looking at lots of options for sustainability and a greener lifestyle. One of the options we are currently exploring is solar energy - you know, panels installed on the roof of a structure that provide the necessary electricity to the home.

My wife and are skeptical about the savings we should expect (vs. what the marketing reps tell us). My take on it is that, if it was a proven money saver, then major corporations would have them in place at warehouses and other locations. Anecdotally, I don't see many/any when I drive around North Texas.

It would probably be around $30,000 to install the panels on the roof at my new house. That's a lot of money and I'd want to know that I could make it back within 7 years or so. Given that the average electric bill at the new (West-facing) house is $500/mth, we could justify the upfront cost if it truly will lower those costs to $50/mth (as a backup source only). We are also concerned with hail - a major problem in North Texas - and how the panels hold up in weather.

Any ideas/advice?
Maybe Dropbox is not interested in being part of the "P2P against RIAA" fight.
That study is Intel-only, but it seems to jive with the return rates Anandtech mentioned: http://www.anandtech.com/show/4202/the-intel-ssd-510-review/...

There are also numbers for hard drives: http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2147063

Basically, Intel SSDs from a year ago are more reliable than all hard drives. And SSDs in general are more reliable than any 2TB hard drive.

The data isn't ideal, but it's better than anecdotes. Return rates should correlate pretty well with failure rates. If anything, return rates should favor hard drives, since people are less likely to return a faulty cheap hard drive than a faulty expensive SSD.
Well at least she was nice about it.
Hey, what agscala says below is absolutely right. I tried it, but honestly, Sublime Text 2 is far superior. Even my Vim-core colleague to my right agrees. And thats saying something!

Edit: Scrap that, rush-read - CntrlP doesn't beat Sublime's Apple+P. Honestly, try it and you'll see what I mean.
I bet it was a "planted" question to reinforce the hierarchical culture and approach to management they seem to have. Otherwise, that would be a very silly thing to ask the CEO, indeed. I think his answer was completely logical in that setting.
just you i think. my sgs works perfectly w/ firefox (although i use cm9 and aurora).
I think Go hews to the minimal side, but I agree that it definitely aims to be practical and full-featured. The language itself is small, but not painfully tiny (unlike, say, Scheme), and the standard library is quite nice from what I've seen.
This was a given [1] (TOS based API key was pulled). Too much liability for Dropbox to take on even if they were not the primary on this one.

No matter how much the tech (or HN) audience hopes to the contrary, Dropbox is doing what they perceive to be the best thing for their service in the long run.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4152595
I fixed that just after you posted the comment, I think.
the job of a designer is it, to let things look beautiful in different ways: in the way it looks, it feels, how to use it and so on.
i wouldn't say that i'm only a software engineer, but also a software designer.

code == ui

code has to look beautiful, it should feel good to work with, easy to use, etc.

maybe this is all about the zen of coding.
I don't know that the apple analogy holds up. Yes, an apple could be perceived as a hand grenade by a crazy person, but a sane person could see how boxopus will likely be used for piracy.

And maybe that's just fine, but it's kind of drop box's house, their rules. It's like if you own a building and your new tenant, a computer repair store, decides to pivot to being a medical marijuana dispensary. Hey, it's legal-ish, but you can't really fault the landlord for kicking them out.

Plus, once you take 400 million, you're part of the system and you don't need to make yourself a bigger target than you already are.
Oh yes, sir. So much yes!

Incidentally, why is it that so much software on Windows is "under-designed"?
'Patent trolls' cost other US bodies $29bn last year, says study
I mentioned RoR, because that was what I've used in my previous project.

RoR's learning curve is much more higher than Tornado. I don't even think that is fair to compare those two.
IMHO, RoR is more suitable for apps that requires lots of objects, views, etc.. E.g: A business app or a website.

In our case, we don't have that many tables, but lots of code around it and our app also runs on top of a single page. All the rest is taken care via AJAX.

One more factor in our decision was simplicity. You can easily dive into Tornado's code ( web.py ) and understand, whereas in RoR you need to read a lot of code, and Ruby is also making it harder to find out the flow of the code with its advanced concepts ( was called extends I believe )

And I am not a big fan of Active Record as well. We use PyMongo to communicate directly with MongoDb.

Tornado's Asynchronous abilities also an advantage.

Also I did not have that much of experience to use RoR in full scale, and if I got stuck on something, I need to read a lot and I don't like that.
This is great, Victoria would be an interesting one to try!. I'll pass this on to my colleague who looks over all our mapping, he'll really like this! (Note : I work for TFL Online).
In Vim, you can bind several windows to scroll together by doing :scrollbind in each. It's a bit more manual than what you do in Emacs, but you could use this and some :vsplit'ing to achieve a result similar to the follow mode described at your link (though I'm not sure if Vim has the learning curve you're after).
Gloria Vanderbilt - inspiring or what
I started this company with two other friends from YC companies: Nick Alexander and Michael Yuan. It was really to scratch a personal itch: online pricing. When you're selling something online (especially a virtual good) choosing a fair price is hard. Most people (including me) seem to guess.

I felt like there must be a better way, where econ & math is used instead of intuition.

Freshplum grew out of that. After building the company to solve that need we realized that analytics can help online businesses in several different ways - not just pricing. We now how a more holistic focus on helping companies understand their online business through analytics.
People go ballistic when you suggest that they are obligated to accept terrible
working conditions where they don't have (for example) any free time to spend
with their beautiful family.

No, that's a straw man.

I'm talking about people going ballistic when there's no true obligation in question.

We're in a high-demand industry where you can normally go get another job. I'm not saying there aren't exceptions, but typically there isn't a need to suffer in a bad job. When I don't like my work/life/compensation balance, I find a new job. People I work with do the same thing.

Hell, HN is a site dedicated to people who have or aspire to creating their own companies to mold the work environments that suit them and the people with whom they wish to work. Read the article this thread is attached to. Ryan Carson is living a work/personal life balance that is enviable by many standards. I would argue that in order to allow people like Ryan to go out and do what they want, you need to allow other people who want different work/life/compensation balances to pursue the environments they want. Freedom of choice and encouragement to experiment would seem to be a much greater set of principles to embrace, rather than sniping at hard workers from the sidelines because their idea of working through a Saturday evening with their team while they're trying to get that big contract isn't your cup of tea.

What place does glorified perpetual self-victimization have here?
I thought his main criticism was that MemSQL isn't durable by default, and that when you enable that it becomes incredibly slow. That's a pretty big deal, and IMO running database benchmarks on an unsafe configuration like this is extremely dishonest.
For everyone with an incompatible ARMv6 device: I installed the last Nightly Build from http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/mobile/tinderbox-buil... on my ZTE Blade with Custom ICS and haven't run into any troubles yet. It feels quite sleek, well done Mozilla!
> it's a perfectly valid hypothesis that would certainly warrant investigation

No one said otherwise, but causation was suggested, and hence disputed.

> All scientific theory starts with

I require no science lessons from you.

> We could say that correlation doesn't imply causation with CO2 and the climate change debate as well

There are known causal effects of C02 on the atmosphere, it's physics, the science has moved far beyond merely trying to prove causal effects and well into trying to understand them.

> Until Science disproves a lack of causation of spanking and discipline, then it's just as valid a hypothesis as any other untested hypothesis.

No one put forth a hypothesis, you're arguing against your own straw-man.
The "Golden Ratio Typography" page this post links to claims that the ideal width of a line of text is equal to the square of the line height. It does not give any justification for this claim.

This implies that doubling the line height should result in quadrupling the line width, which sounds dubious.
This thing is just disturbing. Clearly there are severe mental health issues involved.