skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I largely agree, but I've always had this little bit of me that says "Most people do not need to know most sciences".

I mean, we don't teach circuit design to everybody, on the sensible principle that most people will never design a circuit. But we teach the anatomy of worms to everybody because... most people will eventually have a pressing need to dissect a worm? I mean, I'm not the world's most accomplished programmer by any stretch of the imagination, but I very rarely get asked by the bosses "Hey, Patrick, after you get done with that Javascript, could you please pull the heart out of the worm on my desk?"

I was also forced as a child to learn about some rocks floating around in the general vicinity of the sun. I still don't know why these rocks matter -- my best guess is that pre-modern civilizations thought they were gods, poets picked up on it, and people now consider the notion of travel to them sort of romantic. I'm at a loss as to how learning about rocks prepares one for programming, unless one aims to be one of the few hundred programmers engaged in writing software to control missions to space aimed at getting ever-more-detailed photos of the rocks "for scientific purposes".

Ditto lab chemistry. Titration is a) technician work -- its a repetitive process with about as much intellectual content as swapping hard drives which b) will be performed by perhaps half of a percent of the population in their lives, if that. Yet we make everyone do it. It makes about as much sense as making woodcarving mandatory for everyone... because you never know, right?
Here's a link to a proposal for reform of the current financial aid system, with extensive input by economists. (It's long, but worth the reading.)

http://professionals.collegeboard.com/profdownload/rethinkin...
because it's harder to maintain.
Record and sell hacker screencasts a la PeepCode.
I always get nervous when I see Haskell/MzScheme/etc bits about "Here's how to make a web server!" or "This is how you parse JSON!".

Where's the "this is how you make a blog in 15 minutes", where the blog's code looks as well thought-out as the Haskell Prelude?

Not to say that the aforementioned topics aren't important; they are, but what is there at a higher level?
I think the best way to prove functional programming (or your favorite programming paradigm/practice/methodology/language) is as much an advance as you say it is is to implement something worth paying money for in it.

I have a deep, abiding affection for Ruby, for example. A few years ago it would have been a tough sell. Then along came Rails and people constructively demonstrated "Hey, this language is not quite C or Java-esque, but there are persuasive reasons to use it. Why, metaprogramming techniques let you build a web application framework which allows impressive tech demos in 15 minutes. And look, if you go a bit beyond the 15 minute demo, you can actually build applications that people will pay money for -- faster and easier than you could before."
Yeah, this is a common complaint. There'll be a page where anyone (with or without an account) can see all of our pricing details soon (it has in fact already been designed).

As a sidenote, people I've asked who have experience in the freemium space have suggested that displaying your pricing for nonusers serves more than one purpose. There's the obvious one of telling people they can pay for more "features" (in our case space). But there's also the less apparent benefit that often times people (especially more mainstream users) are more likely to believe your service is truly free with no strings attached if they see that there are indeed paid options. Of course this kind of rationale applies more to some kinds of services than others.
I think it's interesting that Andrew considers 8 years a long time to build a company. I think if you look at Buffett, the reason he's so rich is because those first 8 years were just the beginning.
the simple answer is that functional programming makes the easy things trivial, but for the hard things FP makes it obvious that you need to do something clever that involves a capacity for abstraction in design that few people have. There is no way to sweep the complexity under the fuzzy rug, you need to knit it a tea cozy that's the right shape and mechanical properties
I believe you can buy 14x14" tile/brick slabs made specifically for this. It's definitely worth it, brick oven pizza is delicious.
BBRails: Ruby on Rails Productivity Tools for BBEdit
Balsamiq Mockups copycat!
What do you have that relies on future performance?

It's not a matter of what's available but rather how one treats risk. I expect experts to have more sensibility than to bet the entire financial well-being of a company, employees, and public investors when dealing with 'invented' high-risk assets just because a computer said "Okay".

Less than a decade ago everyone was freaking about because banking software might cause a financial melt thanks to a Y2K bug, little did we know the real impending crash was user-error. :)

Just a thought.
Thank you for posting it. 2 of my friends have already upgraded as they were hitting the cap on their 50GB accounts.
Custom Google Search Engine for Ruby on Rails
That service is called Attributor.com
Online presentations for web developers
erm, you quoted someone else, and aren't really addressing what I said.

I certainly don't have a problem with someone making a lot of money doing very little. However, I do think the idea that someone can "invest" without ongoing in-depth research is a scam.

The financial industry exists to make money by allocating resources to where they are most effective. If you aren't adding to market intelligence but just investing based on already-known financial data, you're essentially gambling.
Software design is not architecture
Not quite. Balsamiq has significantly more UI controls and buttons. Mockups aren't Twiddla's focus, so they will never fill the same need that Balsamiq fills (and vice-versa).
37% rule

> Estimate how many people you’re likely to date in your life, dump the first 37% but keep a photo of your favourite on your bedside table. Then, marry the first one after that who beats your sweetheart! Of course, every rule has exceptions and sometimes you get an offer that’s too good to refuse, 37% or not. Sometimes, mathematics doesn’t have all the answers!

> Using this process, we find that we can be successful in selecting the best from a group of N by letting
approximately 37% of the available positions go by, then selecting the first choice better than any seen before about 37% of the time. And this is true no matter how large N is! This is a strikingly high probability.

http://www.illuminatingscience.org/moving-house-part-i/

http://courses.ncssm.edu/math/Talks/PDFS/spouse.pdf
I will try to give you a quick recap, the books other have suggested are good.

Your connection to the Internet is probably single-homed, that is, one connection going to one upstream provider. Simple enough to understand - "send all packets not meant for the LAN to this address".

Consider that a large company, or a datacenter with hundreds to thousands of servers, will have multiple connections to multiple providers, such as ATT, Level3, Sprint, Cogent, etc.

BGP is the border gateway protocol - it lets you load sets of prefixes (eg. 207.89.0.0 if that range were all owned by one provider) and then given the connections you have and what prefixes are connected to that connection, it will try to use the least number of hops to get your traffic to the destination.

ASN is autonomous system number - basically a "site location" that represents an organization that has some number of IP addresses (represented by prefixes as above).

You use the ASN in conjunction with the other information you give BGP, so that you don't have to store ALL the routes for ALL the locations and compute the path for each packet.

Big routers like the larger Ciscos have custom RAM chips and do most of the routing in hardware, in order to be fast enough. They are called TCAMs : http://www.enterprisenetworkingplanet.com/nethub/article.php...
"I need to find a way to earn 30,000 dollars or so after taxes..."

Learn objective-C and create an iphone app that is novel but incredibly simple. Should be based on a humorous topic (e.g. iFart, Sound Grenade) That should be able to bring in 30k in a day. If you don't have a mac to hack on, turn your pc into a hackintosh.

Write me back with the results. Good luck :)
To find replacers you mean?

I certainly don't think the code itself is harder to maintain or change, quite the contrary, good functional code is more modular than object-oriented.
It wouldn't fix the problem, but since sexps aren't so damned ugly you probably wouldn't see as many errors in the first place.
I think Alexander Smith put the "point of love" quite well: "Love is but the discovery of ourselves in others, and the delight in the recognition."

You can love a friend in that sense to a point, and that may be enough for many people. Obviously romantic love is an entirely different story: irrational and perhaps less efficient than a work partner, but the sort of thing that contrasts and enhances the purely logical.
I find this to be the best suggestion thus far. iPhone apps are making more and more money each day. I believe the percentage is 70/30 nowadays. So If you sell 15,000 copies of your game at a price of $2.99 a piece you will bring in 70% or $31,395 which will be pretty close to bringing you to your goal (still have to pay taxes.)
"Sorry, what's the platonic ideal you're suggesting as an alternative?"

Something like Yaws, built in Erlang. With fine-grain threading that works well, you don't get the one-to-one OS process to task mapping.

But that certainly comes with its own set of tradeoffs. There are some workloads where that can be a massive win, but committing to any of the currently still-obscure languages/runtimes that can pull this off with panache means you're committing to a less-well-developed library environment.

Facebook chat runs on Erlang for a reason... and the rest of Facebook runs on PHP, also for a reason.
No easy route that is legal. if you are innovative, you can find unique business idea - but the sole goal should not be to make money quick, since those endeavors typically don't embody the passion to be successful in the business. See: The Entrepreneur's Manual: Business Start-Ups, Spin-Offs, and Innovative Management by Richard M. White. Though it is out of print, you might find it used on abebooks.com
Ha, we actually created that to add transparency and because most of the presale blogs out there are spammy.

But since you brought up the topic:

-Dividing metropolitan area by venue capacity is a good indication of how in demand a given set of tickets will be (all else equal).

-Google insights is also an excellent indicator of what's popular:

http://www.google.com/insights/search/#q=concert%20tickets&#...
Seth Godin on email marketing, social media and the internet
Friedman Misses the Point and Economic Reality of Silicon Valley
Map makers (at the street level) did a similar thing.
that's nice, but not enough.

i seriously considered adopting D as my primary language a couple of years ago. the fact that it is primarily a windows thing was the main reason i didn't. a sort-of-working mac release years later isn't enough to make me reconsider.
No, the fastest way to $30,000 profit after taxes is to be the one collecting taxes.
Ask HN: Who's got good Javascript?
As part of my continuing eduction, I like to poke around sites and see how they are using JS. To help me optimize this process, does anyone have any opinions about which sites have "good" Javascript? By good, I'm primarily looking for getting the most functionality out of the smallest number of lines of still comprehensible code. Thanks!
If you can't afford to pay back $30k for health care don't forget to try to negotiate with the hospital/doctors. You should be able to get a large discount on that amount if you agree to actually pay it back (instead of never paying a dime, which is what they're used to).
Recently on the homepage: "Most iPhone applications gathering dust". http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=490756

Newly submitted: "Why asset bubbles are a part of the human condition". http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=491179

Problem with iPhone dev is that there's a lead time to ramp up. It takes time to learn Objective C, learn the various SDKs, build your app, get it into the app store, and get people to buy it. By then, the iPhone craze may very well be over.

I'd do this only if you already know Cocoa/Obj-C development and don't have to ramp up your dev skills, or if you're planning to get in it for the long haul and actually build a real business around iPhone apps.

Incidentally, I ran into this same thing with my startup and FaceBook apps. When it came out, I was like "Wow, this is cool, we can surf this wave and get instant adoption." But I was still at my day job, and by the time I'd quit and really had time to devote to it, the Facebook app market was saturated and all my friends were like "Get these damn zombies and throwable sheep off my page!" I ended up not learning the platform, which turned out to be a smart choice in retrospect, since only the Slides/RockYous made appreciable money off it (and I'm not even sure about them - what's Slide's valuation now? It isn't still $500M, is it?)
I think the problem is that there actually is a lot of lead time on this. I think a lot of the explosive apps you see were people that started early and had a lot of failures before they finally got a win. Still a bit of a gold rush going on, but it is a gold rush. Most people strike out.
iPhone web browser simulator.
As do encyclopedias and dictionaries..

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

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/08/29/050829ta_talk_al...
How Cable & Satellite Can Save the Newspaper Business
I do as well. I like to see the article the way the author posted it and read the comments.
Yeah, definitely when it doubt big cities are better. But it's also harder to get good tickets for big cities -- I've never been able to get good seats for a show at the amphitheater in the Boston metro area. My biggest success recently has been for Bruce Springsteen tickets in Austin. It was a college stadium that had their own ticketing system instead of Ticketmaster and took a lot longer to sell out than his other shows. I think a lot of the brokers miss non-Ticketmaster shows.

Similarly, I've had success with Seinfeld shows, which are usually at non-Ticketmaster theaters.
For those not wanting to create an account or sign in to find out, it's $20/mo or $200/yr.
Google, but they compress everything, so good luck understanding their code.

I'd actually check out the source to some of the major JS libraries: JQuery, Prototype, OpenLayers, etc. Most sites build off them, but the sites that know what they're doing will be packing/minifying their JavaScript, making it a bit hard to read.
Wow, that's genius! Let me make sure I have you straight (I've never heard of this before)...

You check the TicketStumbler blog for hot pre-sale tickets. You buy them for face value when they go on sale (10AM?) hoping they'll get sold out. Then, you flip them on StubHub/Craigslist after they're sold out? What if the show doesn't get sold out?

Also, did I understand you correctly in that TicketMaster gives the best tickets to the first people who buy them, and you might get bad seats buying at 10AM? How can you tell if the seats are good enough?

Thanks for the info :)
I cannot prove Windows had BSD code in its TCP stack as I never had access to its source code, but I never implied it must have been so _because_ ftp.exe has BSD code inside it.

There seem to be numerous references to BSD code inside Windows TCP stack from the late 90s. Maybe it is only utban legend, but maybe it's not.
Are our brains becoming "Googlized?"
Rspec, Cucumber, Integrity, and a custom end-to-end testing process that runs using the daemons gem that assures all critical aspects of the site runs at all times.
i believe this still works with copy (apple-c) and paste (apple-p), which i do all the time. not just click-drag.
It really makes me sad to see this comment on HN.
The bigger issue with kernels is that they are, as you say, close to the hardware. That makes them harder to do in higher level languages (you need something to run on...). However, it is possible to do, for example Singularity.

Personally, I think that the "kernel" will begin to be a smaller and smaller part of the OS. More like L4 et al, as the performance costs become smaller (L4 is already pretty good).

Eventually, C might become the old assembly; you need a small amount of it to get started, but once you've boostrapped, you can live in higher-level code.
In order to 'save the newspaper business' you must first understand why the business is failing.
For years, newspapers have been giving discounts to national corporations who run full page ads in publications. Local advertisers advertise less and usually pay more for ads. In the past, there have always been more local advertisers paying more $ and this is where traditional publications received the majority of their revenue.
So when big businesses like Home Depot, best buy, petco, walmart, papajohns, target, etc... start becoming more and more popular, the small local mom and pop shops are forced to close up shop.
Less mom and pop shops = less local ads = less revenue for publications.
Industry turned upside down (not to mention the million other factors in play here ie. economy, increased cost in supply, etc...)
Cable and Satellite can't 'save the newspaper business' the newspaper business need to diversify their portfolios. Investing in products that can complement their publications and help them adjust to the crazy world we now live in.
This has been around. I remember discovering this when I wanted to share pictures found on facebook with others. A simple "View image location" and copy/paste and they could see it.
Interestingly, a few years ago I discovered that you could also change the "t"/"s"/"n" (tiny/small/normal) to a "b" (big) and access the full-resolution image which was uploaded.

They seem to have discontinued the "b" prefix shortly after I found it (perhaps to save space?). It was a bit of a privacy concern that they retained the full-resolution image, considering that most users probably do not crop their images before uploading them.
He's been investing since the 50s. How many times in his long career could someone have told him "the world is fundamentally different now, and your old strategies won't work"? Many times.

The fundamental business of Berkshire Hathaway is this: get cheap cash (float) from the insurance business and use it to buy high-quality companies. Berkshire's inflow of cheap cash is unrivaled, and it has an extremely good reputation as an acquirer. In the "new, diminished age," I think those factors are even more important.
This response I enjoyed and agreed with. I am sad, however, that this thread made the front page.
I believe that, now, they resample the images prior to upload. Perhaps to save bandwidth as well.
Yeah, you got it. It's not just presales, there isn't a big difference between buying in a presale and a regular sale. Presale just gives you two shots at it.

The tickets are first come first served so whoever completes the CAPTCHA fastest gets the best tickets. However, some will always be released when people don't actually complete the transaction. So you can keep trying again and again for 15 minutes or so. Whatever you do, do not try to buy different tickets at the same time on the same computer. You cannot buy tickets for two cities at once, you will lose all your tickets. You need a VPN or your cell phone internet if you want to start playing that game.

The best way to decide on a show is to look at the listings on Stubhub for a show by that artist that is already on sale. Assume that to sell a ticket you need to beat the lowest price on Stubhub. This isn't always possible and that's where your intuition comes into play. If you're in doubt about whether or not to purchase, feel free to email me and ask. For now, Leonard Cohen is a really good one to start with. The presale passwords are easy to find on google. Phish will also be announcing more shows soon and they are just about the hottest ticket this summer.

In a small theater, any seat is good enough. In a pavillion, only the front sections or the front of the rear sections are ok. The back of the rear sections in pavilions are a trap. Lawn tickets usually don't have very good margins. In an arena, anything that isn't behind the stage is usually ok. This is because in a pavilion the rear seats are usually the same price as the front seats, but in an arena the upper seats are significantly cheaper.

I haven't had a show yet where I have lost money, but I make my picks carefully. 200% profit isn't very common though. 50% profit is probably a realistic average. I may end up getting rid of Billy Joel/Elton John tickets soon at just a little over cost.
Actually, I think critic above had it right. Sure, women are considered more attractive when 20-30, and get a lot of attantion from men in that age, much more than men do at any point in their life. After women get past 30, things simply get back to "normal", but to them this seems as a shortage. In fact, single women above 30 seem to be the only group that ever refers to a "shortage of suitable males" - in my experience, younger women and men are generally surprised as to why such thing should ever exist.

Furthermore, the theory that men are trying hard to marry, and the most attractive ones "succeed" to marry at a younger age, just does not seem to be realistic, especially not in modern society. There are good reasons for men not to marry early.
Typing Devices Won't Die
Seeing fancy navigation and object manipulation demos, people forget how much of our use of computers for every day work involves typing. So great as it is, I really don't see the multi-touch screen replacing all separate typing devices.
Good news, you can deduct medical expenses over 7.5% of your income.

http://www.bankrate.com/brm/itax/tips/20010323a.asp
Oh, one more link while I'm at it:

http://www.slideshare.net/stoyan/high-performance-web-pages-...

The presentation I cited in the parent is more motivational and less stuffed with "Here is a checklist of actionable steps that if you implement will make you more money for each one you do."
There is an additional privacy "hack" that I noticed a few years ago. The surprising thing is that as of about a month ago the hack no longer works -- not because Facebook stopped it, but because your data on Facebook is now less secure by default, removing the need for the hack!

It used to be that when a friend was tagged in a photo album of a non-friend, you could only view those photos that your friend was in. By removing the "id=xxxxxx" from the URL, you could view ALL photos from the non-friend's album.

As of recently, you can now view ALL photos from any non-friend's album if a friend is tagged in only one of the photos (alleviating the need for the "hack")! Hence, for all their talk about privacy and their very complicated privacy settings, it seems that in some ways your Facebook data is becoming subtly less secure!
Prevents the formation of lynch mobs who get their kicks by ganging up to downmod some user to negative infinity.
Dropbox is great when you need realtime access to your files. I have a free account and use it for syncning some music and important files between home and work.

If you're only using it for backup purposes, there are a lot of cheaper alternatives. I've been using Mozy (home vesion) for a year and it has unlimited space for $5/month. I don't get realtime access, but for backup it's great. As a bonus, their sync program lets you specify your own encryption key so they can't even view your file data (file names/directory structure is still open).
If only there were some good non-GPL machine learning libraries for Python...
We simply use an in-memory queue. Beanstalkd has worked quite well for us. (Not a rails app though)