skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
His basic point seems to be "use the right tool for the right job", which I think we all can agree with. I've been programming stuff in Go for about half a year now and I'd have to agree with the author - building a website in Go doesn't make much sense, for many of the same reasons building a website in c or java (for me the java process is too slow) doesn't make much sense. On the other hand, the concurrency model is excellent and for services, background processing, doing all kinds of intensive serverside lifting - i.e. traditional java application areas - Go, in my opinion, beats out java and is an excellent tool for the job.
Another good writing on this topic is the Fibonacci Flim-Flam:

http://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/pseudo/fibonacc.htm
PostgreSQL uses MVCC to ensure ACID compliance without read locks. Uncommitted concurrent transactions are isolated from each other.
For the artists and people who do use the GR, myself included, I use it out of convenience when any arbitrary decision will do. It's just an easy way to count exponentially.

For instance, I recently wanted to compute a moving average of recent events. I chose to use Fibonacci (i.e., last 3 days, last 5 days, last 8 etc), but my choice had nothing to do with any belief on my part that it has any deep significance. I just wanted a moving average and wanted decreased granularity as events got further out. I use powers of 2 as well. For instance on server retries after a failed request.

I suspect if the GR is used a lot in art it's done for motivations similar to mine: when we're presented with deciding on something arbitrary we can easily limit our choices and simplify decisions by using an established counting method.

Do you think Shakespeare's poems (iambic pentameter) would be any less beautiful if he decided to go for 12 syllables instead? Would we not like music as much if it were written in 6/4 instead of 4/4? There are limitless choices so we fall back on established conventions simply because any choice will do.
I use Netflix primarily for movies, while I use Hulu Plus mainly for TV shows. For example, Hulu Plus TV shows are usually available the day or so after airing on TV, while Netflix TV shows are available when the season DVD is released.
> Lets be reasonable here: a decently sized server farm could probably keep the entirety of documents hosted on JSTOR in RAM.

One largeish science publisher I worked with had 9-10TB of (pdf) document data. In addition to that there's a search engine, and image versions (of everything) to allow for look inside. Then there's dynamically generated HTML for online view. Electronic publishers do with large amounts of data and it isn't wholly static content. I don't know much about JSTOR but I think it's safe to assume that the implementation is non-trivial.
"My experience and some of my friends' experience is that Linux is quite unreliable."

I don't think any software is "reliable". Well tested/battle hardened? Yes. Reliable? No.
All Google did was tell Acer that developing with a hacked-up, forked version of Android would mean they'd lose their preferred partner status. Not that they couldn't do it. It's OSS - go to town.

Look at it this way: if being an Android hardware partner means you get early access to cool new features and source code before it's released (it does), but the terms of that say you won't use this on a forked version of the OS (like Amazon, for example) - don't be surprised when Google reminds you of this requirement.
I don't want to rehash Sparrow. But, if they'd had fixed long standing bugs, and added the features they promised I would not be so upset about it. But they didn't. They dropped the project and went on to Google.

Leaving with with a ridiculous "feel-good" blog post.

My point though, this isn't uncommon. And this kind of user treatment is one of the big reasons many tech start-ups have a tough time making the sale.

Now of course, if said company manages to get momentum (like a Dropbox, Github, FB - to name a few) - I guess they are no longer startups.
Is Amazon Prime the same as Amazon Love Film?
There is only one movie from the list (Metropolis) available on Hulu free.

Turning the lookup around is an interesting idea, it might provide a more statistically meaningful result.
Yes, the industry would like you to upgrade every year, if they could. They've managed to force most people into perhaps a 3 year cycle. But the truth is, for tasks like documents of a few pages, small spreadsheets, sending a receiving email, etc, etc, then a machine from 1990 could do all that.

Imagine if the car industry worked like this, if 3 years after you bought a car it wouldn't work quite right with the only fuel you could buy, and spare parts were impossible to obtain, and the engine compartment was welded shut!
Since you say you know html,css, then I think the easiest thing to do would be to learn javascript and jquery and get a github account. This will probably let you see results and start contributing to open source the fastest. Once you get good enough in js you can do some bug fixes for any of the tons of js projects on github and work your way in on that route. I'd say with any non web-centric language (i.e. c, c++, ruby, go, haskell)- especially since you don't know coding yet - your looking at a minimum of two years before you could start actively contributing to a project.

Here's some links to learn js/dom:
MDN: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/
Opera Developer Site: http://dev.opera.com/
Javascript Repos on github: https://github.com/languages/JavaScript (read the source!)

Also "javascript the good parts" by Crockford is a good javasceript book.
I disagree. I've watched three members of my family save and save and ultimately die of cancer with a pile of cash which consumed their life obtaining. I'd rather live for the moment.

Obtaining money takes far too much time when you could be having fun (fun rarely involves much expenditure).
You should look into Anki and "Spaced Repetition."

The gist is that you submit a bunch of facts you want to remember to a computer program, and that program applies an algorithm to figure out when you are likely to be about to forget something. The program quizzes you just as you were about to forget (but before you do), and the act of responding to that quiz renews and strengthens the memory.

Powerful. I've been using it for myself and my 9 year old daughter, and it has been very effective. Many use it to build foreign language vocabulary, or memory of Chinese pictographs.

(Note: This is not the subject of the "Moonwalk with Einstein" book -- I mention it as an additional tool for helping with the memory goals you stated).

Some Links:

Anki: http://ankisrs.net/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaced_repetition

Article on Piotr Wozniak and Spaced Repetition: http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/magazine/16-05/ff_woznia...
After reading some of the other tabs I opened up looking for that article -- it appears that there was a bunch of other works bundled into the project. Still really expensive - but more than I had originally realised.
> Sure B-trees are hard to write from the ground up but there are plenty of good implementations already the Internet that can be modified.

Care to name some, also having a non-restrictive license? (That excludes GPL).
I agree pbiggar. This rule applies to any business transaction. "No" is terminal, "silence" is not. Why say "no" and terminate a discussion when they can drag it on for as long as they want by saying nothing? I see it all the time in normal everyday business.
What's sure is that, to quote DHH, "It never gets easier."

If you feel things are getting easier, than you're doing it wrong.
Maple's powerful vimrc
The Handwritten Report of Mindmaps on how to Start a StartUp
Hello YC Crowd.Mindmaps are a note taking method that envisions information visually and attempts to instead "draw" a story instead of force feeding readers with a pre-set and rigid sequence that is a block of text . This design form is a great learning aid and is used in some medical schools by students to assimilate course material and make it reference-able. Each page is meant to describe an individual concept but all merge into an individual story, flow and narrative, which is in this case today, a perspective that every new startuper must take up inorder to "win" at this business of building and making of a new digital world.<p>While this book is targeted for everyone who comes to this parts (i would call them digital pyramid-makers), those who "get it" will have some artistic sensibilities to fully appreciate the marriage of message and design that is this report.<p>Imagine an exam-cheating app that is an improvement from the scraps of paper that people carry into exam rooms which are noisy and can be repossessed as evidence by the administrative bureaucracy.<p>The idea being to cheat exams digitally with scanned "cheatsheets" made in advance on A4 paper and then scanned them into .JPEG files. The app should also "pool" this cheatsheets globally, the course work across universities to be relatively standardized and so what one individual uploads for a certain course code/name is useful to any student, anywhere in the world to cheat with. The idea is to help students compress course material into smaller, digitized and zoom-able scraps accessible via a mobile app. Users should be encouraged to upload their own "work" on different course material. This is the true value of the idea, a database of cheat-sheets, while mobile phones are the hardware to run the Cheating-as-a-service app.<p>/end monologue/
Do you mean going over the entire catalog and counting movies that are above a certain rating (let's say 8.0)?

That's an interesting idea. I might go ahead and do that.
Yes, of course social proof has substance as marketing strategy. But gaining trust is orthogonal to actually being reliable. (this is still about the top comment)
pil·lo·ry [pil-uh-ree] noun
a wooden framework erected on a post, with holes for securing
the head and hands, formerly used to expose an offender to public
derision.

Is that really what grandparent did? I think it's an unfair characterization. It was a personal opinion stated weakly and with restraint, not some attempt to incite a mob.

I have no opinion on this specific startup. Perhaps they've provided enough time to migrate; that's for their paying customers to judge. But it's naive to think failures doesn't affect your reputation. It does, and it should. Do you really think savvy users won't take your track record into account when deciding whether to use your service? It goes against their interests, and nothing is more darwinian than a startup.

---

Here in silicon valley we say that failure is ok. And yet accountability is also good. There's a tension here.

Perhaps failed startups are fine for investors, who might have diversified into many different vehicles. They're more problematic for customers who rely on a product. And paradoxically, the closer a startup gets to solving a hair-on-fire problem, the more careful they need to be about how they treat their customers on the way out.

Even if investors claim failure is ok, is that always the case? I suspect past track record does play a role somehow, even if it's subtle and hidden behind the scenes.

Even if failure is sometimes ok, there are failures and there are failures. A lot depends on how the wrap-up was carried out, and how people feel about it.

When startups are few and creation is to be encouraged, failure can be ignored. When startups are plentiful and failure starts to be taken for granted, perhaps it's time to emphasize accountability.
It certainly is a classic book. That book has changed more lives than Kant ever had. Everyone should read it, especially people with un/under-developed social skills. It's that great.
Ask HN: what do you use for instant/asynchronous communication?
Hello,

I'd like to know what instant chat tools HN folks favour for instant asynchronous communication.

I'm leaning against setting up an IRC server simply because graphical notifications would be nice. I would also prefer something open source, and possibly PHP based as I'd like to extend it and tie into our existing systems.
Copied from "Show Dead"

To me the Largest Sadness is that he did not succeed in releasing the corpus to the public, which I presume was his real goal. Making this information accessible would be one of the largest contributions an individual could make to the world, possibly worth the trade of spending the rest of one's life in prison. The tragedy is doing so without the reward.

The only greater contribution I can immediately come up with that is definitely accessible to some of the readers of this board would be leaking the Google Books archive. Depriving the world of life saving knowledge for purpose of profit is as great a sin as genocide. Sometimes conscience must trump the law.

Sincerely,

A long time member resorting for the first time to an anonymous account.
EBay: Payments and Marketplace have interesting growth prospects
> The point of reading anything is to ingest a certain type of content.

What an awful definition of reading. I do occasionally read books on this purely utilitarian basis, but reading is also done for other reasons, for example because you are completely engrossed in the story and just can't stop reading.
MIT alum here. Lots of MIT resources are accessible to almost anyone. That doesn't mean they all are -- it's easy to get into our computer labs, but the network closets are actually off-limits to anyone other than network admins. Some things are more liberal, but that's not a free license to do whatever you want.

Nor does it mean it's acceptable to abuse MIT's trust. In particular, presumably as a result of this case, JSTOR now requires strong authentication from the individual MIT account holder, instead of permitting access from MIT's IP address space as they used to.

Finally, yes, MIT does have an "it's better to ask forgiveness than permission" culture. But that very clearly only applies to legitimate MIT affiliates. I know of at least one other legal case (of perhaps equivalent importance) where MIT's lawyers said, if this guy were an MIT student or staff member, we'd go to bat for him, but since he's not, take the content down.
It's not a fair comparison and never was. Apple makes appliances: the hardware and software. When they let hardware clones into the market they cannibalize their business. Power Computing made great Mac machines and much cheaper than Apple. But Apple didn't want to be outsold on hardware and be reduced to only a software company (like Microsoft). You're right: Google is now the Microsoft in this scenario, the software company (although they're moving into hardware now but we'll see how that goes).
You're stuck in a bubble.

Campfire gets a fair bit of attention here, but is unheard of outside the 'startup'/B2B space. The stats they post are laughable - last time I checked it was a few thousand messages a day - which is pretty minuscule.

Hipchat fills a hole as well, but there are literally thousands of different ways to spin 'webchat' and carve a big following out.
Here, the government is pursuing criminal charges for someone who broke into locked facilities and committed a textbook case of computer fraud to do something that might be morally defensible. If he weren't illegitimately accessing these articles, it'd be a different story.

If you have a tip about an unsolved murder that you want to report anonymously, and you break into someone's house to do so, good on you for reporting the tip, but you still broke into someone's house.
This would be great for connecting up to a CI server or monitoring system. If a build breaks, flash red or maybe if the site goes down go to solid red.
And let's be kind about the result : they may actually survive the crisis ... right ? 50% chance ? What do you think ?
Picked up the e-book a few hours ago and read this gem:

"Monotony collapses time; novelty unfolds it. If you spend your life sitting in a cubicle and passing papers, one day is bound to blend unmemorably into the next -- and disappear. That's why it's important to change routines regularly, and take vacations to exotic locales, and have as many new experiences as possible that can serve to anchor our memories. Creating new memories stretches out psychological time, and lengthens our perception of our lives."

Really struck me personally since it reminds me of my grandmother. She's in her 70s now and she has a daily routine that consists of eating, watching the news, playing Hearts, and hygiene duties. She's in really good health but it's obvious that she is getting mentally slower and her memory is fading.

Reason I mention this is because I picked up the book expecting it to be filled with scientific data and memory improvement techniques I've read about before. But instead, it has been a really enjoyable read filled with anecdotes and passages that made me stop and think about how I can improve my personal life (beyond improving memory).

It might not be the best book for what you're looking for specifically but just wanted to share my gains in case it interests anyone.
I'm afraid that by saying "My priorities are God, Family, Health" that you are just punting. You fall back on that when in every measurable way your life isn't what you hoped it would be so as a coping mechanism you redefine your values to measureless standards.

You "value" your family. What does that mean? You spent one hour pushing your kid on a swing because you realized you don't have the confidence, discipline, or perseverance to do the things you really want to be doing.

You "value" your family because you hate yourself, but you don't have the confidence to admit it.

IOW, you live your life however you want to and when you feel like it you just move the goalposts to make sure you look successful. Depressed people are the ones with the integrity not to move the goalposts.
How's being an open source a requirement?

One would want to use an external service, because... well... it's a service. You are paying for someone else to maintain the system and care about the uptime, scalability, security, etc. You surely do not imply that you would pay grove.io simply because you can't bring your own IRC server up, do you?
Big mistake posting that URL because sync.in has a 8 user limitation. Can't edit the document atm :(
Not only will it always be hard, it will probably get a lot harder too.
I'm assuming the LIFX did their due-diligence and attained "freedom to operate" before undergoing this venture - or is "assumption the mother of all f-ups"?
Email interview experiment: Threatening Puppies (kinda) Works
I like the project. It's neat. Also neat is watching the video and seeing hundreds of dollars pour into the Kickstarter project.

I guess the WiFi/logic controller is on-board each individual bulb? Then you would pair(?) the bulbs to the app?

If that's the case, I wonder what they're doing about security - since most anyone skilled would be able to hack different homes with different light setups.

Hopefully this doesn't get held up by patent trolls...
Have you seen this one from 2011?
http://www.drdobbs.com/open-source/interview-with-ken-thomps...
Ballmer: There’s no doubt Windows 8 will be a success
I come to Hacker News for sober technology discussion, not for breathless and conspiratorial posts advocating libertarian politics. Your continual political raving does a disservice to HN's readership. Please take it elsewhere.
Hello YC Crowd.

Mindmaps are a note taking method that envisions information visually and attempts to instead "draw" a story instead of force feeding readers with a pre-set and rigid sequence that is a block of text . This design form is a great learning aid and is used in some medical schools by students to assimilate course material and make it reference-able.

Each page is meant to describe an individual concept but all merge into an individual story, flow and narrative, which is in this case today, a perspective that every new startuper must take up inorder to "win" at this business of building and making of a new digital world.

While this book is targeted for everyone who comes to this parts (i would call them digital pyramid-makers), those who "get it" will have some artistic sensibilities to fully appreciate the marriage of message and design that is this report.

/end monologue/
Are you serious? Or maybe you mean "directly"? Because Kant certainly changed the life of much more people, but indirectly.
Removable battery is a really good feature, actually.

The other day I was discussing long flights with a colleague. He said he is always weighted down by the number of adaptors he has to carry to be able to charge his laptop anywhere. I asked "why not just get an extra battery, they're in the supply closet for free."

Then I realized he was a Mac user.
Kickstarting a hackerspace in Iraq
As with all things it is a balance, having built up wealth can let you take advantage of more opportunities and be more flexible than if you are living paycheck to paycheck (even if that paycheck is sizable)

Go to far and you are right.
Since you're here, could you give a statement on this current suit versus Laminar Research? How do you justify suing an independent developer over a common technology provided by Google? Why aren't you suing Google instead?
The fun thing about this argument, is that it's pro-nuclear. Nuclear fission reactors are the only thing on this planet that reduce radioactive emissions. By quite a bit even.
Of course, after that reduction, we massively concentrate what is left and then store that absurd concentration in a really small spot, where "nothing can ever go wrong".

The problem with radioactivity is not nuclear power, it's the idiotic way we do nuclear disposal.

We should do what coal power plants do : simply process it into building materials. 10x thinner than background levels and just use it for anything and everything.

There are plenty of places on this planet where natural radioactivity levels are more dangerous than inside a modern nuclear reactor (Ramsar in Iran being the canonical example). A city built straight on top of radioactive rock, 200-500 times normal background radiation levels (like a constant dental scan, a little more than you'd get swimming in the primary coolant circuit of a nuclear reactor, 3 meters from an active fission reaction, without any separation between you and the reaction other than the water that sustains the reaction), yet you will not find a single trace of a nuclear power plant. And yes, they have a history of higher cancer rates (though not nearly as high as our radiation disease models predict they should be).
Companies are shut down for a variety of reasons, and entrepreneurial success is often equal parts idea, luck, and hard work. Leah has built several popular products with loyal followings - which is more than a lot of us can say.
I'm not sure what your trying to get at, but for the sake of argument- wouldn't it be wise to move the goalposts if it means you aren't depressed?