skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It really seems like the Ruby community does this to people who do great things. Another good example of this is Zed Shaw/Mongrel.

However, I'd have to say, being a loyal user of capistrano, I am not sure that I could have brought anything meaningful to the table regarding its architecture or decisions, it was just a great piece of software that I used, and will continue to use.
That's one of the things that agile development should ideally give you (in practice, of course, it's never as easy as it sounds). You make short-term (i.e. per-iteration, often 1-2 weeks) commitments to get things done, and base the amount you commit to on the amount you got done in the past in that amount of time. Other than that, leave the developers alone and let them get their work done. That gives developers a reasonable target that they can be held accountable for, which tends to make everyone happier.

Longer-term commitments (we'll release in 6 months with features X, Y, and Z) on software projects tend to be impossible to make accurately or to live up to, so as an engineer it's impossible to really take them seriously or to be held accountable to them.

By making the commitments much smaller and near-term, they're much more reasonable and doable and much more likely to be taken seriously by all parties.
Philly StartUp Influenced By WillyWonka Lickable Wallpaper...invents next best thing.
:) Either you're asking this because I look more established than I am or you're asking because it looks really trivial. I find both of these extremes hard to believe. Whats on your mind?
There is also memcachedb. (http://memcachedb.org/) Same interface as memcache, with replication features and persistent storage.
This is true and by 98 gave up complaining about Internet newbies.
Apple always had an arrogant marketing. It’s part of their DNA. Especially when they merely catch up with their competitors they claim to be the first, the fastest and the best.

This make sometimes difficult to understand when they truly innovate.

(The Powermac G4 at 400Mhz was supposed to be a “super computer”)

Anyways as long as Webkit is gaining users, it will also benefit to Firefox and Opera (and vice-versa).
George Bush doesn't care about Python people.
I agree with ardit in his reply. I was born and raised (for a while anyway) in Taiwan, and the education system there is vastly different, and he's bang on about the lowest common denominator bit.

In Taiwan the only school that you get into by default is primary school, which goes up to grade 6. After that is a standardized test that will place you into a corresponding middle school. At the end of grade 9 you will take another nationally standardized test that will place you into a high school. At the end of high school you will take yet another one to get into university.

At each level students are filtered by test score (and theoretically and consequently, talent). Classes are no longer held back by teachers' need to cater to the less capable, and it completely changes the peer pressure dynamic that is prevalent with all youth.

Instead of the few smart kids in the class feeling ostracized and rejected for their intelligence, they are celebrated, looked up to, and exist with a pool of peers who value academics in the same way they do. This does wonders for both motivation and competition.

This isn't all it's cracked up to be, though. This system causes some severe social problems - screwing up early (grade 6, which is age 10) can screw you for life, and there is no real system for "rescuing" people at a lower-tier school and trying to move them up. People are hyper-competitive from a very young age and this stunts emotional development. Many of my (younger) relatives still living there have a large number of relationship issues that IMHO stem from the fact that they never had a real childhood.

I'm personally glad I came to Canada and was able to grow up being the smart kid in the class, though I do wish we valued academic achievement more in our culture.
Open Source just doesn't work that way. People move on. I'm sure for an appropriate price you could find someone to continue to support the software.

It's one thing if people fall back on things they've explicitly promised; it's another if someone just honestly says, "I don't have the time and energy for this anymore."
Sure it is. Jamis did this work for free, he doesn't owe you or anyone else any of his time to continue to maintain an application that he has burned out on.

Open source software gets abandoned all the time. This is only being discussed here because Jamis took the gentleman's approach and informed everyone that he was stepping down.

People say there isn't an entitlement mentality amongst people these days, but this kind of reaction is pretty compelling evidence that there is.
2004 is not 2009.
I've got a soft spot for Opera, but while they're getting whipped at Javascript speed and the UI is, er, characterful, I'm not sure I care who came first with Auto-Click.

Also, I don't know if the guys in thread noticed that drlaunch's "rebuttals" all mostly support Apple's claims. Does he not know that Webkit was extracted out of, and in certain contexts is wholly synoymous with, Safari?
Nice project, I already read about it. Still note that one of the major points of Redis is to support more complex types as values. Tokyo Cabinet is basically an on-disk hash table library, with an optional networking server using this lib to export the functionality.

For example if you want to use Redis in order to store logs from a lot of different computers, and you want to only take the last 1000 entries for every computer, all you need to do is for every computer something like this:

RPUSH computer_5 "... your log line ..."
LTRIM computer_5 0 999

Redis offers atomic LPOP/RPOP too, this makes pretty easy to create queues where different computers can pop/push values with the guarantee the operation is atomic.

Another trivial example: think about implementing something like YC with a key-value DB. Support for lists and sets will make your life much easier :)
As always great post. On footnote 4 where you say being cheap and iterating are almost the same but the reason why they are not is markets move.

I would point out that sometimes they move away from you (competitors come in, new ideas, etc)

BUT, sometimes they move towards you, and that is the classic where the media says "they were an overnight success" but you see they had been working at it for ten years.
I mean, how would you write a WIN32 GUI in a functional language?

F# seems like a good choice.
It costs 10 cents to put it on the device wirelessly. You can still hook it up via USB to put files on for free.
Meh, some of these are true... especially Acid 3. (Depends on whether you consider safari == webkit and if you count Chrome.)

Afaik, Opera still hasn't released a public version of their browser that passes Acid 3 fully (including speed). Although I know Opera 10 does.
Yeah, that works great on platforms that don't support Flash.
I would have had a lot more respect for Vlad if the developers hadn't acted like complete jerks about it: http://rubyhitsquad.com/Ruby_Hit_Squad.html

Building a competing tool because you think you can do it better is fine. Building a competing tool because you want to take a different approach is also fine. Being rude isn't fine, and shouldn't be tolerated in any community.
Speaking of Safari, it really annoys me that the Apple software updater always wants to "update" my Safari install (even thou Safari is not installed.)

Am I the only one who finds this incredibly irritating?
There is also a strong correlation between global warming and the amount of pirates (http://www.seanbonner.com/blog/archives/001857.php). While I agree that dismissing it a priori is a bad idea, correlation still does not mean causation. Hence the request for proof instead of conjecture. If you're going to take someone to court you had better be able to prove your accusations.
When this happens part of me goes "Nooo!! I could have done that!" and another part goes "Sweet!! Now I don't have to build it!" It's hard to get the two parts to settled back down though.
I'm inclined to be optimistic. Nature has been experimenting with viruses and self-replicating machines for a while now, and has yet to come up with a design that cannot be countered. Bombs are capable of causing mass destruction, but we're still a long way off from having a doomsday device as cheap as a toaster.

I also suspect that, given a century or two, we'll have discovered ways of spreading the risk of catastrophic events. Perhaps by regularly downloading our consciousness and distributing backups across the solar system, perhaps even a few sent to neighbouring stars: "Alpha Centuri Backups - Just In Case Some Jackass Blows Up The Sun".
I agree. 8G cards are under $20 now.
When my daughter was in kindergarten, there were two classes at her grade school, both taught by young, new teachers. Her class was the so-called rowdy class. They were constantly getting visits from the principal. The other K and the two 1st grade teachers at that end of the building complained constantly about the noise.

I was at the classroom a few times while class was in session. The kids weren't out of control. They paid attention during lessons, but they weren't 'corrected' for standing up, fidgeting, or whispering to their neighbor. What 'assignments' they did in class were always done in groups and the groups could get as loud as they wanted. Nap time was often turned into extra playtime.

They let the teacher go at the end of the year. For first grade, the two classes were reshuffled, so as to mix the 'rowdy' kids in with the good ones.

Funny thing was, as a group, the rowdy kids had already covered the first quarter or so of 1st grade. Their grades in first grade were consistently better. According to a second grade teacher there we knew well, it wasn't until about midway through second grade that the original quiet kids caught up to the original rowdy ones as a group.

Did this experience change anything? Nope. My daughter's now a senior in high school at an entirely different school system, and both there and at her original kindergarten, it's still sit down and shut up.
Why "not fast"? USB 2.0 is 480Mbps, 802.11g is 54Mbps.
Observation: Many of these are the same people who were night owls in college, and often would work the same amount of hours if allowed to come in at noon. :)
Discussion started here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=494796
I find that annoying as well but 99% of OSX users probably keep it installed so its probably not a top priority at Apple.
Very well done. Bravo!
Somehow I remembered seeing fliggo repeatedly submitted on reddit with content taken from YouTube, and ended up associating it with blogspam. This must have been before it went YC. It looks quite different now, but how close was my impression?
Quick Intro to threads, critical sections, and synchronization in C#
Yeah, but probably 1% of Windows Quicktime and Windows iTunes users do.
This makes me wonder if Techcrunch is reading HN, looking for people who are launching their startup. Then if they like it they decide to write about it.
Kay Jewelers - SEO, Search Engine Marketing, & Online Brand Protection Evaluation
A 2007 iProspect/Jupiter Research study found that 67% of search engine users are driven to search by an offline channel. You can bet the hacienda Kay Jewelers drove an impressive amount of traffic to Google with their Open Hearts campaign.
they do, Arrington said so himself a while back
Good design: The ten commandments of Dieter Rams
Yeah, but (and I'm only one data point) I always click the "Always display images from .." link whenever I open a legitimate e-mail that looks like it's missing images, so they get to track me and I get to see a complete mail ;-)
During the time that the works were collected for the library of Alexandria fewer people could read and write than can today, which made it difficult for people to write books. Today, with blogs and other works available over the internet, we have the capability to create a vast database of everything from the noblest to the most unrefined or unsophisticated works of human achievement. Anybody with access to the internet can publish their opinions online for others to agree or disagree with them in order to find the truth about things. Plus dentistry has come a long way, we deal with toothaches much better nowadays than our ancestors could ;)
This is very true. I am still amazed at how much revenue gets generated from email still. I wish I could share some numbers.
And which are or aren't going to steal all of our jobs and escalate violence in the UK :)
I think that we should try to eliminate the distinction between artistic works and technological/scientific works. They should both go hand in hand. The word technology comes from the Greek word techne which roughly translates to art. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Techne
He just needed an excuse to write: "It’s like explaining heaven to bears."
Working through a thought process:

1) The stock market is a collection of all known information about the stock, including future predictions

2) You can see that in options, their value is tied to the value of the stock market at some point in the future, but you still calculate them based on the current value of the market, since that's what the current prediction is, giving the known info

3) Prediction Markets are just another kind of derivative. You are betting on a future value of the market.

4) That means, when it doesn't match up around the current value, there are inefficiencies in the market.

5) Why? Too few people? Dumb people?

6) Inefficiencies lead to arbitrage opportunities. Why not buy an option, and buy the other direction of the prediction market, and get paid either way?

7)???

8) Profit.
>I honestly dont understand why you think the sexpr syntax will lead to fewer errors?

I already backed off on the strong version of the claim - that s-expressions would lead to fewer errors in general for the average person writing XML - but I still prefer s-expressions because as a Scheme programmer I am accustomed to using sexps and I find them cleaner and easier to us. People who don't use or don't like Scheme or Lisp probably wouldn't feel the same way. It would probably be harder to use sexprs in MS Notepad, like I said. Maybe even in vim.

>The syntax is just as complex, and there seem to be plenty of quote signs and nested parentheses to forget or mismatch.

Any decent text editor will highlight strings, so it will be difficult to mismatch quotes. In Emacs, I like paredit-mode, which inserts a closing paren every time you enter an opening paren, so you always have a balanced number of parentheses. Combined with editor features that highlight whichever s-expression the cursor is in, and auto-indentation which sticks out like a sore thumb if you make a mistake, it's rare to mismatch parentheses and easy to fix if you do.

I'm aware that there are Emacs modes for editing XML, and I tried them, but I still found it worthwhile to write in SXML and then convert to XML, because it's just cleaner and easier. Partly this is just because you use the same editor mode for editing an s-expression-based XML-alike as you would use to edit code, so the commands are already wired into your spinal reflexes, and bound to the most convenient keys. But it's also less verbose when you get rid of all the closing tags and half of the brackets, so you can see more of the data at a time.

Also, if you're using an s-expression based language (and I know most people aren't), it's convenient to use a data format which is simply part of your language itself.

Of course, YMMV. If you're using, say, Python, you might prefer to use something like looks like Python's dictionary syntax (JSON?). I don't really know what Python programmers do. But I do know that there's a reason that there are a jillion XML-knockoffs with different syntaxes - XML is friggin ugly.
By this logic, I have to pay royalties if I hire someone to read a book out loud to me.
We have laughter, fire, art, lovemaking and the best tools around.
This kind of thing is really starting to irk me; and I'm a libertarian (although, not a 'Randian' libertarian).

Summary: Greentech sucks compared to the low low cost of wonderful coal. Brilliant deduction. I've got a calculator too. The implicit (and never stated) "solution" offered by articles like this is, "just keep on burning the coal and don't think to much about it." Its just complaining without offering up any ideas to fix things.

The whole point of renewable energy is that its... (do I really have to say it?). So Keith thinks green energy will wreck the economy? Wait till there's no more coal. If the government is going to make-work, we might as well work on saving our asses.
If you're a sole developer or small team of friends, don't bother until money is rolling in. First priority (over lawyers, accountants and whatever else) is just getting something up and running. Invest too hard early and if you abandon the project, you've wasted more than necessary.
New iPhone ELITE Concept and Interview
Humanity has survived long enough to produce me. Yeehaw.
I've been involved in the Functional Java project for a while, it was created as we worked for a consultancy that did most of its work in Java and we wanted to use functional idioms in Java. It was also intended as a bit of an experiment to see just how much could be done in Java,
Crowdsourced website accessibility via Herdict
I'm constantly baffled by how people like you can reasonably be disappointed a Jamis for giving a great piece of software away for free. Is this how you would treat a person who gives you a gift? By complaining that he stops giving gifts? How can you even look at yourself in the mirror without thinking that you've done him injustice?
People have no idea for the time what a huge undertaking that was. It was like our space program.

I blogged about how information density is outstripping our ability to adapt a few days ago. (shameless plug: http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2009/02/who-was-i-aga... )
I think it's important that a site that kills submissions provide a way for users to see what got killed if they want to. That keeps editors honest, and just as importantly, makes users confident they'd know if the editors stopped being honest.

I think on HN, editor transparency is less important than story Quality.

Reddit and Digg were built explicitly around some democratic idea of deciding what stories should be displayed on the front page. While both have their problems living up to this, it is their stated objective.

Hacker News has a different objective. It's goal is to be interesting to Hackers. I really could care less about democracy and I think others would agree. Submissions and voting are just a means to the "hacker interesting" end.
Foreclosure Information Resources
While going through foreclosure is definitely not good for either you or your credit rating, it can give you the chance to step back and look at the way you handle your finances, and if you also end up filing bankruptcy.
Steve Jobs will be back
Microsoft -- 'Linux client use, higher than Apples'.
Glad to hear that the orange names won't be back. I think people do more than enough judging based on the poster name as it stands without any highlighting.
I read the article. Most of the claims are not outrageous. In one place, Apple marketing says "the first popular browser to support..." which, in marketing terms, is meant to rule out Opera. So the claim is technically accurate, slightly misleading, but nothing out of the ordinary for marketing.

Where I think the article is misguided, is that you don't fight marketing with engineering. I mean you can try, but then your only receptive audience are computer geeks.

Of the general population using Safari, IE, and so on, how many care about the exact date, time and seconds when a feature was announced or released by Opera? That's my point. I'm a big fan of being perfectly accurate, but I'm smart enough to know that it's not enough to win in the real world.

Which goes back to one of my favorite topics: if only open source had decent marketing...
Absolutely agreed - and this goes for the voting system as well. I don't necessarily care about up-modding a submission or comment; I do so to try and help out and keep discussions clean and at least somewhat intelligent. If there was some intelligent way to filter submissions or comments without user input, then I wouldn't mourn the loss of "democracy" in the system at all.

Oh, and from the post - snarky comments and memes are definitely becoming a problem on HN. They add nothing to a discussion, are not insightful in any way, and do not express anything except the author's ability to regurgitate old jokes. They need to stop.
The issue there is the bandwidth required for streaming audio. This is a device set up for batch downloads and not much else -- when you add time-sensitive network requirements like this, you make customers unhappy.

Also, what if you're using it as a "book on tape" in the car, on a road trip through the middle of nowhere? You lose network connection, you lose your book on tape.

tldr: I think it would be better quality, when you could get it, but at some level reliability is more important for this application.
The Secretary Problem, or an Optimal Mating Strategy
This came up in another thread, under the "37% Rule", but without the definitive reference here. Although 1/e is most likely to give an optimal answer, it has pretty bad worst-case behavior (time runs out and you get stuck with a fish). Settling early gives much better worst case behavior while only slightly decreasing the best case. The last reference Ketelaar and Todd, is quite interesting.
Developer, Engineer, or Architect?
xkcd is now selling reddit schwag, potentially starting geek merch empire
Microsoft Files Suit: Linux Violates Our Patents
Oh, and if you buy a shirt, there's still a chance for a free bobblehead - and all it takes is 3 hamsters and 1 Richard Stallman: http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/7zxqk/xkcd_store...
A lot of startups have some kind of secret about the subterfuges they had to resort to in the early days, and I suspect Digg's is the extent to which the top stories were de facto chosen by human editors.

These also make for excellent reads. What was Viaweb's? :)
It shows how linux use is increasing a lot in the personal use space. Especially because of all these netbooks, and mobile phones running linux coming out.

Maybe this is the year of linux in the handbag, on the lap, and in the pocket?
Here's an idea that I don't think anybody else has suggested: find another developer to help with the first contract. You can't be the only Actionscript 2 expert out there.

I'm not sure this is the best solution, but I think it's better than leaving them hanging.
I find pur ability to achieve and improve the most amazing.

I could single out a list of things ot be hugely proud of as a species: but that belittles (not deliberately) all of the other achievments (especially the ones in the past we have forgotten or ignore).

The capacity of humanity always amazes me (and, conversely, it saddens me to see so many people waste it).
Check this one out: an intriguingly extreme case of redundancy.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/12/12/elevator-pitch-friday-d...
Does the submitter have a script that automatically posts new essays from paulgraham.com? You've submitted the last three in a row almost instantly. Not that I'm criticising; just curious :-).
Mhhm add another network connection, install Tor , privoxy and perhaps some other network encryption / clean up tools. Config with sensible defaults et voila: nice userfriendly device to overcome data retention.
Isn't Clustrix funded by Sequoia Capital: http://www.sproutsys.com/investors.html