skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The whole mini-Laptop thing (which I'm guessing Nokia is looking at) is just another trend that will die off soon. It was a trend about a decade back with the Toshiba Libretto and will die out as another fad once people (again) realize how the mini-laptop is a failed compromise between a full laptop and desktop.

Wrong. The Libretto was never a huge success, but netbooks are. What's happening now is not just another trend that will die off soon.

"By the end of 2008, Asustek had sold 5 million netbooks, and other brands together had sold 10 million. (Europe in particular has gone mad for netbooks; sales there are eight times higher than in the US.) In a single year, netbooks had become 7 percent of the world's entire laptop market. Next year it will be 12 percent."

From: http://www.wired.com/gadgets/wireless/magazine/17-03/mf_netb...

That's billions of dollars and several years of millions of people buying these things, using them, and continuing to buy them. There's a lot of trends making this happen, including widespread wifi, cost, and so much of our computing living in the cloud now, all of which are forecast to accelerate.

You may not like them personally, but these netbooks are here to stay.
Not so sure; if I'm not mistaken Lynx javascript support is rudimentary (if not non-existent). Doing Comet on that would be somewhat challenging, I guess.

An API to etherpad would realy help, IMO.
Well, my point is I looked at your YC profile, followed it to your website and found your email from there. You could pretty much do the same thing with me.

Ergo, feature not needed. :-)
Given that you are programming in Ruby, you can make your shell script part of a Ruby script that then calls the code to process each individual file, no? Ruby gives you best of both worlds in this case.
My point was only that some people fill in their email address and expect it to be available to everyone, something that isn't true.
Twitter's new business model: T-Shirts
Hmm,

I had seen a Martin Fowler article on technical debt before but the link to Ward Cunningham is new at the least.

As a part-time economist, it occurs to me that the debt metaphor actually doesn't work on some levels: Companies constantly increase their monetary debt, since THAT can be paid through increased profits. You actually wouldn't want a company that grew without increasing debt - that would be wasted resources. Technical debt is much worse to accumulate since it can only be paid by increased development time.

Also, one accumulates technical debt whether one wishes to or not. This is because often the only way to understand how to do a system right is to first do it wrong.
I was an mp3.com artist back in the day. It was truly the independent music revolution that people cry out for - basically it was good enough that normal listeners came there to find music - no alternative has successfully provided that marketplace since. It was killed by a $200 million settlement against them for allowing streaming of copyright content that had nothing to do with the independent artists.
Agreed -- and then gave suggestions below. Perfect! I immediately started coming up with ways I could use it on a couple projects I'm working on.

I hope all purveyors of webapps will use this as a shining example of a demo well done.
Let us extend the question to "Could anyone at a company where the HR department does interviews..."
Now that's pretty ingenious.

I'm sure they'll eventually run into gaming issues, if they ever care (after all they'll be raking in the cash on every purchase).

Great way to think of music distribution in a totally new way. I hope this catches on, since it may actually be a replacement for the current model that might actually work for everyone's benefit.

If only someone at the labels actually wanted to be productive...
Escorts Madrid
5400 half-seconds is 45 minutes. So, assuming you take 2 min to think for every 1 min of typing, that's still working on the essay just 45 minutes everyday (for 3 days).

I think (from comment above: "not working all day") you took much longer than the figure above? Perhaps a lot more thought goes into an essay than I imagine?
Geekstas Paradise (from Craigslist)
I think you're being overly critical of a very underdeveloped idea.

The theory behind it is worth much more than the current lack of presentation.
Ebay good in parts
In similar situations I just use a SAX parser, that's what it's for. I don't know about Ruby, but it's quick and easy in Python. And once you've written one SAX application, you can easily use it as the basis for the next.
Tips for Computer Science Drop-Outs Like Me:

- Get a decent paying job doing developement or IT. At the very least, something that gives you health ins.

- Do consulting/contract gigs on the side. Choose projects that will let you expand your skills and learn new technologies.

- Live below your means and save money for 12 months.

- Month 13: build and launch your startup.

- Continue your job for at least 6 more months, but stop doing the side gigs.

- Month 18: Evaluate your startup. If it's making money, quit your job.

- If it's not making money, build and launch another startup.

- Repeat as needed.
For sure. I use ruby as a wrapper for most of my shell scripting, so those commands will end up in a file with the .rb extension at some point ;)
Comparing Cilk++ and OpenMP
it would be awesome to be able to specify a rate of change as changes/second or something
Totally. If I had had to do anything much more complex, I may have had to resort to SAX. I was just too lazy to mess with it for this - and I'm a bit OCD sometimes about writing the least amount of code possible ;)
New Rule: Don’t launch a storage service if you’re going to close down within a year.
MacOS on the iPhone
How Not to write Network Applications
I think you're sitting on a goldmine. I wish you the best of luck and hopefully a record label with brains picks you up.
Great point. I haven't looked, but I think nokogiri fixes that bug. I think that was one tenderlove's motivations for creating nokogiri. He talks about it more on his blog:

http://tenderlovemaking.com/2008/10/30/nokogiri-is-released/

"I just want to tell you that you shouldn't worry about that old legacy code that uses Hpricot. Nokogiri can be used as a drop in replacement! Really! Nokogiri doesn't reproduce the bugs that are in Hpricot, but should work in most cases. Just use "Nokogir::Hpricot()" to parse your HTML. Of course, I've tried to keep the syntax of Hpricot that I like."
Politics done right - Land of a Thousand Liebermans
Facebook's egalitarian working of its TOS is an experiment worth trying
Start at your planned 'revenue event' and work your way backwards to your expected traffic volumes.

For example, if you have a plan to build a site with users and content, and your revenue plan is to sell T-shirts;

- What percentage of checkout pages will be completed?

- What percentage of tshirt page visitors will click the 'buy now' button?

- What percentage of site visitors will click your promo to view the tshirt page?

- How often will your users visit your site?

- How many users will you have?

Selling Tshirts isn't the best revenue model, but you can follow these steps to build a model for anything.
People get commission on all sorts of things, from car sales to health insurance. Markets still buy product.

Would I buy a song on your recommendation alone? No. Would I buy a song that I enjoy that you've recommended, knowing that you get a commission? Of course, why not?
Running Android and WinCE on the same device
Is it unprofessional to allow managerial deadline pressure to influence code quality

Actually, yes, I think it often is. If you're paying me to write code, then it's incongruent for you not to rely on my judgment about how to do it. If you don't like the results I produce, you're well within your rights to find somebody else. But you are not within your rights to hire me and then block my judgment about what the system needs.

The vast majority of the time, it's not a matter of explicitly saying "No": if you even get into that conversation in the first place, it's probably game over. Asking for permission to do a good job is likely to meet with, "No. Do a faster and cheaper job instead." That's an argument the programmer will never win. And rightly so, one might say! - because of the lack of self-respect they're demonstrating by such behavior. One thing I've learned over the years is that it's my own fault if I don't stand by what I value and know. (Well, partly learned, at least.)

If you want to be professional, don't act like a servant.

Edit: I was thinking about why this is by and large so poorly understood by software developers. I think part of it is that programmers tend to be younger. They haven't had time to learn this the hard way, and there is a large authority and status gap between them and their (usually older) managers. Perhaps another aspect is that many programmers are introverts and thus less likely to advance their own interests and judgments, even when they're right.

I find this interesting because those are both reasons why the hacker renaissance and the corresponding startup explosion are really good things. When the hackers own the product, the situation we're talking about is much less likely to arise.
This is awesome. It would've have been super useful building our mobile interface to Philadelphia's regional rail schedules where we scraped SEPTA's site for data. http://www.septa.org/service/sched/r2s_wk.html is an example of the markup we had to deal with.

I think I'll have to go back and crosscheck your selectors with what I came up with to see if we can't improve anything. Thanks!
A hint to Nokia: to instantly create a niche and a small army of devoted followers, simply use normal quality LCDs with full 24-bit color, LED backlight, 178x178 viewing angle and matte finish.

I highlighted word normal because I'm not asking for a miracle or Star Wars grade technology, just the kind of quality displays that used to be the norm on $1K+ business class laptops 2-3 years ago, but slowly got replaced by ugly, cheap, unevenly lit, 6-bit color, often glossy junk [yes, even on macbooks]

In addition to my MBP's built-in display I have a 5 year old 17" Samsung hooked up as secondary monitor and comparing the same photo on 2008 MBP vs 2003 Samsung depresses me.
Please share it. But only with me, of course.
It's a one char fix:

http://github.com/fizx/hpricot/commit/1208019ade1af02816de62...
I've hears the opposite too. That merchandising and touring is where artists make money, and recorded music is where the labels make money. I wonder which it is.
Free Scaling Rails Screencasts
Storing sessions in a cache is a really bad idea. Too many sessions, and they start expiring randomly. I have been bitten by this, so I always store sessions in a non-lossy data store now. (BerekelyDB, FWIW.)

(As for in-cookie sessions, I like the idea, but it does require some server-side state to allow a user to invalidate his previous sessions. If someone steals the cookie, they have access to the system "forever", and the user has no recourse. The solution is to store a serial number in the user object, and reject sessions less than the current number, but I don't think Rails implements it this way by default.)

I am also not a big fan of running the cleanup job from cron. My main application has an event loop capable of firing timers (libev), so I use that to kick off a (forked) cleaning process. That requires no additional configuration on the system that the app is running on, which is just the way I like it. (Yeah, I know I am reinventing UNIX. UNIX needs to be reinvented.)

The event loop has other advantages, like non-blocking IO, and non-blocking subprocess invocations. A request can literally wait all day for a database query, and it won't prevent the app process from handling other requests.
I have the same problem with my wife. She wakes up at 5am!
This game made me relaxed, peaceful and happy : http://www.kongregate.com/games/Trickysheep/anikas-odyssey#g...
Rogers, the largest Canadian ISP, will redirect you to a page filled with their ads if you try to access a domain name that doesn't exist.
Digg Is Working On a Toolbar To Go After StumbleUpon, TinyURL, and All The Rest
That could be a long ways off with the expense of building a network and the difficulty in raising capital these days ...
Adobe? You mean, for doing 3d stuff in Flash/Flex/AIR?
Rails doesn't have any user management functionality. Most of the user libs do something to this effect with auth tokens.
Does a new or emerging programming language really need practical libraries?
Using a factor or forth, Arc or whatever as an example (note: factor is a bad example because it has a large set of practical libraries). Lets say you are considering using a programming language. Does having a large set of practical libraries matter? If your language is well designed, then it would be easy to create a 'string' library or a 'date' library. Maybe even a web framework?

I mention this, because when a language emerges, it seems that someone brings up 'practical libraries'.
Myth Revealed: Not all gamers white teenage boys
Worry not, I adjusted the score ;)
JamLegend founder on launching a start.
Are you still promoting programs after programs in the hope of succeeding in some of them?
"Would you buy a song on the recommendation of someone who you knew was getting a commission for recommending that song? Of course not."

Of course not? How so?

I don't usually care what the motive is if I can determine the veracity of the information. For example, there are many people who blog about books, with an affiliate-tagged link to Amazon. (I do that myself.) I know they are getting a cut, but a) it does not change the price I pay, and b) if I trust their judgment I'm more interested in getting a good book than spiting someone out of some loose change.

Besides, I take all reviews with a grain of salt, and if I do not know the reviewer I consider possible ulterior motives (financial or otherwise).

Basically, everything on the Web is suspect until shown otherwise. People still find the means to establish trust and reputation and act on shared information.
I think labels will continue to play a role, if only for the legacy that they already control.
Also, I don't think artists want to have to or should have to be their own record-store-managers.
Handling all of that daily grind artist-by-artist is contrary to the fundamental principle of specialization in economics.
Lastly, I feel that even if an emerging artist wants to self-start and promote using a blog (which worked just fine for Lily Allen), will they want to handle t-shirt distribution in Australia ten years from now? Is that what guitar-players are struggling to get to?

Incidentally, my startup is all about solving this problem by disengaging the license from the file. Let's see if it works. I have to get it built first.
Listen To Twitter With The PoshMouth PowerShell Service
Standard and Poor 500:
http://www.google.com/finance?q=SPY
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S&P_500

Russell 3000 Index:
http://www.google.com/finance?q=IWV
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell_Indexes

These are highly correlated over the short run, but technically different investments. So, you can get cute with the taxman by writing off a loss on one and buying into the other every down year.
I think that's a good idea. When people can give out unlimited upvotes, it's like the government printing money non-stop. Karma loses its value.

I don't know if the ability to upvote should be related to a persons Karma score. That might make one group too powerful and reduce the egalitarian nature of the site. What if everyone was just limited to 10 upvotes per day? Do you really need more than that? The more you read HN, the more carefully you will have choose what to upvote.
There's a default decision, but there's still a decision for me to make: do I override the default? Same with your system icon.

With a browser plugin, there's no option to override, so there's no decision to make.
Amazon ups their percentage as you sell more items, you go to 6% after less than 10, and keep going up another step or two past that. Makes the numbers a bit more appealing, but still not as good as they could be via a more targeted method.
One trick is to build on a virtual machine or other platform that already has a bunch of libraries. This is why there are a lot of languages for the JVM and CLR. Objective C and C++ got all of the C libraries by being supersets of C.
Interesting site. My biggest issue with listening to DJ sets/podcasts in iTunes is the lack of trackname visibility and accessibility. I really wish iTunes supported an Audiobook chapter-style interface for these types of tracks.

I really like what you guys have done with the interface, and have a fairly good selection of sets. I think the biggest problems are portability and integration. Whenever I'm listening to a streaming set through a browser, I inevitably tap the "pause" media key on my keyboard out of habit, setting off a nice random mix of streaming audio and whatever happens to be cued up in iTunes. I also tend to download sets to my iPhone and listen to them in car.

I wonder if down the road you could address the portability issue with a iPhone app that mimics your site's UI, and the integration by providing custom streams to iTunes (or winamp, or whatever) that include tracknames in the stream.

Do you have any plans to support user-submitted DJ sets?
I'm one of the authors. It is totally OK. Thanks for thinking of us!
Why today's netbooks won't kill the laptop market
Microsoft could make the online tool that replaces Word

Something like Windows Live Writer 2009?

http://jalaj.net/2009/01/22/enter-windows-live-writer-2009/
I totally agree... this is especially true for web development where almost anyone with a passion for solving problems will do some sort of personal projects or freelancing due to how easy it is to get set up and competing. In my first interviews straight out of University, after four years of intensive Java, all we talked about was some PHP CMS I did for a friend. I got the job too.

The other rule I'd add to your list is:

5. The first job you get is vital for the future direction of your career. You REALLY need to be working with talented people who are better than you and know what they're doing or your progress will suffer.
Only if you want it to thrive. There are a number of interesting backwater languages that never get more than passing interest. Even the motivated developers that experiment with languages move on after a time if they can't do anything more than write Fib() with it.

Take the case of Lua. A compelling small language if ever there was one. It has many great things going for it: simple syntax, elegant grammar, small and efficient VM. Even after 15 years it has only gotten traction among game developers and as an embedded language. The obvious reason why is that their standard library is very small (for important reasons).
Exploring Logo Designs with Mathematica
"If your language is well designed, then it would be easy to create a 'string' library or a 'date' library."

It may be easy to create such things with a new language, but you shouldn't have to.

I consider it good enough if established libraries can be linked to new languages (e.g. via C). That way, the unique features of the language can be more readily tested in existing tools. For example, I may have a program with a critical algorithm, that might be faster in a new language; if the language simply links to C, I can easily test that algorithm in the new language, without having to replace the rest of the program and the libraries it uses.

Note that I'm not saying it's bad for new languages to be capable of implementing something like a 'string' or 'date' in a simple way. In fact, such practical examples may help when learning the new language. It's just a question of whether or not that is mandatory before anything useful can be done with the new language.
I use "devastate" in a few forms to talk about the effect an attractive woman has on me. With that remark, I generalized the usage towards the calculators, and the beautiful things on the rest of the page helped bring the word out of me too. The whole site (I agree those speakers are great) was beautiful.

I have no design experience, unless you get metaphorical with the word. This just lit my aesthetic taste buds.

But I wish I could know what I really mean with "beautiful". Viewing the calculators, I noticed it felt similar to looking at a beautiful woman; that was novel. I never felt that about a calculator, so I noted it.

And after this experience, I won't squint my eyes at mathematicians when the call equations "beautiful" again.

This is a great question, aesthetic preferences seem odd. This one just hit the right buttons with me.
Meh, not much substance here. A bit of marketing speak, "razor-focused" etc.

I wouldn't mind some details about how they excel, why they built those features in, when they realized each feature was the next critical step, etc. That would make for interesting reading, and I assume "Aaron Levie, CEO and Co-Founder of Box.net" has knowledge to explain it all.

Here's hoping we get to read about that next!
From my own experience, CampaignMonitor is pretty good. http://www.campaignmonitor.com/

Also checkout the archive http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/startupswiki/Ask_YC_Archive#t... or use search http://searchyc.com/
An excellent case of backwards compatibility above all else, including common sense!
Put a picture on every blog post. Then at least it can be visually stimulating. That's my 2 cents.
California has a lot of problems, sure, but this article seems to blow many of them out of proportion. Some of the statistics sound shocking, but the author fails to make comparisons to other states.

The statistic that 95% of the people live in 5% of the land sounds bad, but I bet it isn't that much different than other states. Also, California looks big on a map, but you must remember that 45% of the land in California is owned by the federal government. That means that the land is generally off limits to housing people. Some people like park rangers and military personal might live on federal land, but very few do.
http://strangemaps.wordpress.com/2008/06/17/291-federal-land...

I live in Santa Rosa and my biggest problems with California are prop 13 and the zoning laws that encourage sprawl. California planners don't seem to like multi-use zones, so strip malls and sprawling apartment complexes pop up all over. I want to live in an apartment in a livable, diverse community on the same street as stores and restaurants, but this is extremely rare outside of places like San Francisco.
reminds me of old days of Mac programming, when PICT format could store & replay Quickdraw commands
True, to the HN crowd, there's not much substance, as we want details. But for the average consumer of the types of services Box.net is offering, this seems like a great marketing move to me.
DevCentral Weekly Roundup Episode 76 - RealIT
Extremely useful. I love it. I've been using the Firefox Web Developer Toolbar to guess at my selectors, but this is infinitely faster.
Oh, certainly I'm being critical! I figure that perhaps the criticism I've got might help the people making their service, and if not then criticism's not hurting anybody.

The theory is good, but where art's concerned the form is concerned entirely with the function. Things like showing me a feed of activity doesn't particularly inspire me, and it doesn't make me see enthusiastic about the music being sold along that feed.

I think they're doing a great thing: I'd like to see an open model get huge. Right now it's lacking.

(As a counterexample regarding site design: when I saw the new Muxtape for the first time I began mentally planning an album's worth of music, because I thought Muxtape was so lovely that having a band to be on the platform was something I wanted. Beautiful design attracts beautiful things.