skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think if someone believes what we, as a country, are doing is wrong they should speak out. The sums and future commitments involved in all of this are absolutely enormous and if someone thinks it is being misspent this is the time to say so.

You are right that there is practically little anyone can do and that politics is usually played several moves down the road. The recent election will be taken as a mandate for whatever is passed and that will be that. That said I still think that if someone believes they should speak their mind.

I don't say this because I'm a libertarian or especially in any given political camp. I just do not want to see political opinion or participation discouraged. I think the long term solution is more people aware and interested in policy and not less.
Few experiences of my life were as frustrating as the times when part of my brain was on the fritz and I possessed enough introspection to say "This behavior is not normal!" but wasn't capable of correcting it.

Example: Back in high school I once got severely ill with drug-resistant something-or-other and got put through the ringer for a month, eventually getting moved on and off four different antibiotics, including two which included the side-effect "mildly psychotropic".

I was a very quiet guy in high school. Bit of an introvert -- had some close friends, kept my emotions in check, generally did not run through the hallways singing Christmas carols at the top of my lungs. Except there were presents out for Give-a-thon and presents mean Christmas and Christmas means I'M SO HAPPY hey that was loud DECK THE HALLS.

After running a the length of a football field to biology I burst in the door and saw a rather pretty female classmate who I had, perhaps, spoken two words to in four years. She said "Oh, Patrick, nice to see you back in school." "ITS GREAT TO SEE YOU TOO KATIE. tackle hug THIS IS NOT LIKE ME AT ALL IS IT."

It felt... I don't even know how to describe it. Like my normally tightly-functioning sense of self-control was on, operating, and evaluating things perfectly normally and I was appalled with my own behavior and yet that was totally unconnected to me at the same time.

I also had another incident in middle school where I had full control of my faculties but could not stop laughing for about an hour during a history lecture. This was despite the fact that it was disturbing the Civil War re-enactors who were explaining, e.g., that gangrene smells like nutmeg. (That set off a gale even though I thought "thats not funny" and moreover "that is monstrous to laugh at".) I excused myself to the bathroom and spent the better part of an hour with my brain terrified to go back to class for fear of what I would do and the rest of me laughing at the patterns cracks made on the toilet walls.

And then a switch flipped and I was me again.
Surviving in Argentina: United States of Argentina
Well, it looks like Safari is currently and will continue to be the most standards-compliant browser for at least the horizon of these technologies.
OK, But in that case how did you find out about campfire? If it wasn't for their blog posts making it here and Reddit, I probably would never found it.
Check out the docs on the "multiprocessing" or "threading" module. In particular multiprocessing.Pool is handy for controlling the number of parallel things you have going on at once.

# Assume we have functions GetUrls() that retrieves a list
# of the urls we want to get, and Download(url) which
# downloads the content of a url and sticks it in the
# database.

import multiprocessing
pool = multiprocessing.Pool(processes=100)
urls = GetUrls()
pool.map(Download, urls)

See:

http://docs.python.org/library/multiprocessing.html

http://docs.python.org/library/threading.html

Also, if you're entering results into a database, the easiest way may be just to spawn multiple python processes from the command line.
I wonder if Jeff and Joel are secretly just messing with us to see how much commotion they can stir up.

Is this not what you were doing with this post, by singling out the author instead of the argument?
In AU at least two major banks (CommBank and NAB - w/ SAP and Oracle respectively) are undertaking major core system replacements - this is driving up the local tech markets.
When you are just starting out with a shoestring budget, developing the product is the most important thing on the to-do list. Business skills are certainly desirable. But since the company is operating on limited budget, those skills cannot be procured at the expense of actual product development. However, when a company has grown beyond a certain level, the ability to manage, market, and sell the products becomes a crucial requirement for growth.
An Exercise in Species Barcoding
At the Federal level, long-term capital gains tax, since it's the profit from selling shares (not options) in the company which I owned for more than a year. At the state level, California treats everything as regular income.

It's considered an "installment sale", meaning I can defer paying taxes on the escrowed amount until the tax year in which I receive payment. There are some limits on this that I don't fully understand, which I paid my accountant to figure out and justify to the IRS if I get audited.
Wife pulled $15M before Madoff's arrest
It can assume that its users know more about PC operating systems but that's all. That is not really correlated with intelligence.
HN: Where is the value of a business-only partner?
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=477601

Stemming from this discussion, I was wondering what everyone's thoughts are on a business-only partner when pursuing a technology centric startup.

I don't understand where the inherent value-add lies with someone that cannot help build the product. All the other stuff seems pretty simple in relative comparison. Am I just naive? Or do you guys agree?
Here in the UK we spend about 30 billion squids a year on defence. About a third of that is service pensions, another third goes on the bureaucracy/long term projects and another third on the actual services themselves.

That's half what we spend on healthcare and one-fifth of what we spend on welfare. Anyone who thinks that by cutting defence spending a government can suddenly afford anything is dangerously misguided.
Another little IBM deal
Moonlight 1.0 Release
You really think a site the scale of Facebook just pulls the latest version of mySQL and deploys it? I think even smaller sites like Smugmug put new releases through extensive testing before deployment. It seems to me that pulling the source, applying their patch and building is probably a pretty small part of the effort of rolling out a new version.
More (technical) coverage here http://www.hanselman.com/blog/Moonlight10ReleaseOpenSourceSi...
At the adoption rate it's going, I can see Facebook Connect replacing a high amount of "secure" websites like bank accounts within the next few years; and that's unfortunate.
Twitter is a particularly difficult problem

Excuse me? Twitter, at its core, is a large-scale pub/sub system with a bunch of frontends. Such systems are well understood and, frankly, quite trivial as far as the non-existant constraints of the twitter-app are concerned. After all no ordering guarantees or fancy routing are needed and obviously they don't give a damn about fault tolerance or latency either.

Their constant failure to keep that thing online just screams incompetency very loudly...

There are plenty of mature building blocks available in the OSS world to implement such a system. RabbitMQ and the spread toolkit come to mind.

Or, if you have the dough, you could buy a shrinkwrapped solution from TIBCO, Solace or the like. The latter will even come with fancy functionality and availability guarantees in writing because those are normally deployed in "mission critical" industrial systems, such as logistics, banks, stock exchanges.

Now, twitter is not SWIFT and doesn't need five nines of uptime.
But saying that this is a "particularly difficult problem" is, sorry, ridiculous.
Since when was having a Twitter account considered tech-savvy?
ECalc: Cross-platform Calculator with Ajax
Online Dating - The Top New Free dating site 2009 Youand.me
Ask HN: Anyone know of a service like usertesting.com but for iPhone apps?
Even if the testing is done only in Apple's simulator, it would still be very useful.
I'm not flipping out or anything. It was scary at first, now its just annoying.
Uh, no. Martyrs don't often kill themselves, and virgins in the afterlife have nothing to do with martyrs. But I do (really) applaud your acrobatic linguistic effort to battle out this point.
Yes. Well, at least the panic is over, and some companies are hiring cautiously.

I got three job inquiries last two days, from recruiters and: I got another request from a startup that I got an offer in October, that week that Sequoia send the RIP presentation.
They had to withdraw the offer, b/c of a hiring freeze mandated by the board. It seems that they are hiring again, and contacted me if I was still available.

I am not, as I found a new job in a same size startup.

Basically, if you are really good, you will be able to find a job. I might take some time, but there is some hiring going on. The only thing is that there is a lot of people laid off, so there is a lot of competition out there, and some interviews will end up like an "american idol" contest, but be patient and don't get discouraged.

In another anecdote, mobile seems to be a field that is still hiring. A friend of mine was laid off in December, but he was able to find contracting work within 3-4 weeks.

I think this recession will probably drive some subpar talent out of the industry, which I think it is a good thing.
Another site rater or more?
Simple Cryptanalysis with Arc
I say it would be very silly to form an opinion of S.J.Gould based on this rant. He was a remarkable person who did a lot to popularize evolutionary ideas and as such will aways be the target of attack, even by other scientists. If you want to have an informed opinion go and read his wonderful books, it is time well spent.
Vienna, Austria has had a system based on the same technology for a few more years than Paris, albeit on a much smaller scale (600 bikes vs. 20,600). The bikes are much more rugged here: They're single-gear and have solid rubber tires -- surely less comfortable, but also much easier to maintain.

In either city, to rent one you need to provide a debit or credit card -- so I don't quite get how they can be incurring such high losses from lost/stolen bikes.
Wikipedia says "The credit/debit card will be charged €150 if a rented bike is not returned" in Paris. In Vienna, you'll receive a €600 bill.

A previous attempt in Vienna with an anonymous system where you just had to deposit a €2 coin to unlock the bike failed miserably: Hundreds were stolen within the first week.
I think I mostly agree though I think "quick and dirty" has a negative connotation that is not necessarily justified. A lot of corporate environments has web apps that are only used by 10 or 20 people and which are being transmitted over ultra fast gigabit connections. In those cases the so called "quick and dirty" app is very much a plus in that it cuts down on vital developer time and still allows a company to have a web based applications (with all the advantages therein)

What had been missing until now, at least in an official capacity, was a way to make serious public facing web apps and I think Microsoft has made great strides with their support of Jquery and the ASP.NET MVC project.

From that perspective I think Microsoft is in a really good place right now. Webforms continues to serve that corporate environment that other companies don’t seem to care about and ASP.NET MVC allows them to challenge Rails et al. in the web space.
Twitter? It's What You Make It
I played ice hockey since I could walk until I turned 21. At the end of my senior year in HS I was getting mildly recruited to play in college. I got a bad concussion when a guy but-ended me in the chin w/ his stick. I was out cold but went back to playing a few days later b/c I didn't want to loose my chance. I started getting concussions from mild hits and I ended the season w/ about 4.

The worst was the nausea and the headaches. A few times I went completely deaf and a few others I lost peripheral vision. Every time I would forget basic words and common phone numbers (pre-cellphone.) It was incredibly frustrating but I think it's worse in your head than in reality. You actually don't need to talk fast and effectively to be a competent human. Take a few weeks and go really slow. Make it a goal to just get by. You'll be normal before you know it. No doubt get the EEG's and MRI's just to make sure, but chances are you just have to ride it out. While your experiments are fascinating I think they'll drive you nuts in the end. Load up your netflix and relax. Hope you feel better soon...
It has hardly even started yet.

Many tech companies have been insulated as they were funded (therefore not relying on revenue for survival).

There will be no new funds for many of these companies - so they need revenue - and they have to achieve revenue in a contracting economy.

I had hoped we'd see an uptick in activity in H2 2009, but I fear it's going to 2010 or 2011 before we start to see real recovery - the history of the 1930s indicates it may be even later than that. Many economists are saying comparisons with 1930s are wrong, which could be true, but in the 1930s the economies outside the US were unaffected and exports to those economies dragged the US out of depression - this time it's global.

It's possible we will see some fake recoveries, some may last a year or so, but the problems this time are so vast it's going to take many years to heal.

These massive spending measures that are being put in place all have consequences and we've got to deal with those before we get back to stable growth.

Some companies, for instance those doing business apps that save money, will be counter cyclical and may do well. For the rest it's going to be hard times.
im fairly busy working on a startup already, but this sounds really cool. anyone in chicago going?

you can find hackers at your school at hndir.com, to go along with this.

<edit> there's a flash error when opening the home page of starupweekend.com
I'm planning on a Startup Weekend Vancouver, if you live in the lower mainland and are interested in going you can fill out the form on the site: http://startupweekendvancouver.com/

I'm trying to gauge interest. If you're interested in helping me out with getting everything organized please send me an email (it's listed on the page, also in my profile).
Keetsa Mattresses | Organic Mattresses 
If you're looking to improve your sleep with platform beds you should also look toward the concept of organic mattresses. With so much concern over the types of materials that come into contact with our bodies it is only natural that there would be an increase in popularity of organic mattresses.
If you wait to say he's doing it wrong, then people will just say that hindsight is 20/20, won't they?
Facebook founder paid $100m settlement to classmates
Appreciate the kind words. They're not really experiments, just observations. Can't help but notice. I've also been experiencing the hearing loss bit, so its nice to hear that.

Retiring from computer to watch movie :)
Red Hat Linux 5.3: Screenshots
That's a fair point to make in relation to a loan that must be repaid. But actual government debt has to be backed by a claim to someone's labour and that someone is the tax payer. If there is no such backing all that fiat money will quickly lose its value.
It might be innovative, but it doesn't show its innovation in a good way (XUL makes the interface feel incredibly sluggish).
nice, very impressive.
Good. I always thought punctuated equilibrium was a load of tripe.
More firms challenging legitimate unemployment claims
Making Valentine’s day special with Haskell and brainfuck.
I've talked to several founders of sites in this vein who say one of their biggest problems is keeping it clean. Maybe giving people a place for just this sort of content is a good release valve, even if it doesn't make money (and free porn doesn't make money...at least not very much...the clicks just aren't very valuable, and the bandwidth usage is massive).
Like all Microsoft development tools ASP.NET is huge and designed to do just about everything for you - provided you are happy to build web sites as they were envisaged by the tool designers. There lies the problem - the folks that built the tool set were not web site architects but tool set architects. Thus its abstractions leak as soon as you start to head off in your own design directions.

I regularly use ASP.NET to build complex Ajax powered interactive web sites BUT (and this is important) I take from the tool set what helps with my sites and ignore the rest. I write (just about) all my own client side scripts and use the normal techniques for building parts of pages on the fly from JSON objects but server side the ASP.NET framework is near perfect and provides just what I need to build my apps.
I agree with you that arguing against the Obama strategy is pretty much futile, but I think it's wrong to assume it'll be obvious after the fact whether the bailout made things better or worse, since there's no way to run a controlled experiment.

I think the best strategy for people who think they have a good understanding of the situation to follow Bryan Caplan's advice and state publicly how they will interpret different outcomes.

http://econlog.econlib.org//archives/2008/09/how_would_we_kn...
Thoughts about job interviews
Snappy answers to stupid questions:

Q: Has Jef Atwood jumped the shark?

A: Hell no. If you don't like is blog, don't read it. Stackoverflow is still a great resource.

Q: Is SOLID a good idea that more programmers should read?

A: Hell yes.

Q: So why is he "waging war against SOLID" and saying we shouldn't we follow these rules?

A: He didn't say that. Solid principles are absolutely worth knowing. But when you're a master programmer, they more what you'd call "guidelines" than actual rules. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shuhari)

Q: do these "Ferengi rulebook programmers" exist?

A: it's rare, but they do.

Q: So Kevin Pang is wrong then?

A: Well, he's wrong about Atwood jumping the shark. He's right that the vast majority of programmers aren't masters, so Atwood's points don't apply to them and they should learn the rules. Maybe he's wrong to get into a blog-post-fist-fight, maybe he's right to stir up debate. Take your pick on how you want to see that one.
What the GOP needs to do is punt the social conservatives out of their party and take the middle to form a coalition. Bring back truly 'conservative' values such as self reliance, personal accountability etc., but also acknowledge that society has to function smoothly to avoid market chaos. That means leavening libertarian ideals with some realpolitik. Pure ideology almost always fails, no matter which one you choose. What works is starting with some core principles, but accepting that pragmatic decisions sometimes have to stray from those ideals.
This has been talked to death.

http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Ahackerne.ws+%22idea+gu...

http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Ahackerne.ws+%22busines...

(Strangely, I tried these same searches on searchyc.com, and it failed to do anything useful with the quotes, so it came back with a lot of irrelevant crap. It used to work...I'm pretty sure of it.)

Summary: Hackers don't think very highly of "business guys" or "idea guys". "Business guys" and "idea guys" think hackers are interchange-able cogs. If your business or idea guy doesn't also bring "money guy" to the table, you're better off without him.
GNOME Shell Status
I think javascript can be a possible solution - if only making Firefox extensions were more accessible to kids (remember - short attention span; they wouldn't want to read much to do it).
Bearable (Well... Excellent) Online Advertising
Are falling housing prices an example of "losing money"? If government policies artificially inflate housing prices, does that mean houses are worth more?
New mammal species a warning for humanity
you should make that static html page freely avaliable :)
I agree. I am programming for my own startup but I actually think that works to my disadvantage at times. The reason being that it limits my perspective - I tend to look at problems and want to solve them by writing code. Someone who is unable to do so will have to solve them through delegation which is often much better for business.
The sad state of future web standards.
Aside: Dawkins's Information Challenge

Yikes, I'm wary of contradicting Norvig, but using Lempel-Ziv (or any traditional compression algo) is a terrible idea. By that measure, a string of random bits would have much higher information content than a human genome of the same length (re: SINEs and LINEs)

The "amount of information in the genome" is a fundamentally bad concept. There isn't any inherently useful information in there without the context of the genotype->phenotype conversion.

Similar to programming, we could define a "size of the smallest possible DNA sequence that would result in the same animal". That would be interesting to measure. One day, maybe there will be DNA programmers just as there are C++ programmers now.
Just goes to show that whatever the news - someone can explain why it is bad news.
Covering the cost of stolen bikes seems to be common sense, so charging €150 for a €500 bike seems nuts to me. But then I'm surprised at the amount of thefts anyway, considering law enforcement ought to be able to track you down based on credit card data. Don't tell me people actually steal credit cards just to steal a funny-looking bike with presumably zero resale value.

On the other hand, all of that presumably wouldn't solve the vandalism problem: you don't have to put in your credit card before you destroy a bike. I've never attempted to vandalise a rentable bike in Vienna, but they don't look THAT sturdy. I suspect the people who vandalised bikes at my school would've had no trouble. Which leaves me to conclude what the article hints at: it must be a social/cultural problem.
Personally, I would feel more comfortable with an advisor, which actually took a small stake in my venture.
The grammar is perfect. Do we want chance of extended pain or foreshortened? Given the purportedly uncharted macroeconomics, each solution could give us either outcome. It's a many-worlds interpretation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Many-worlds_interpretation).

But boy, if will be wonderful wasteful fireworks, 2 trillion manically disbursed.
I wrote hardware reviews years ago. Describing something as "solid" is straight out of the standard playbook. It sounds vaguely positive but it's devoid of meaning.
> capture all the money out of the existing system

I suspect that you're having a go at the investors in this comment. Your suggestion that they 'capture' the money 'out of the .. system' is flawed, because wealth is not a zero-sum game. Creating wealth doesn't mean that you're taking it off someone else. Certainly that's the case in the dynamics of investment.

However, your comment could be read as a pithy attack on powerful governments who took us into this mess and are using the chaos created to further their reach into it, and if that's what you meant - touche!
This site was Startup News when I registered. It was about software startups. Most every person who registered found this by googling for PG's name from lisp books, slashdot, and ycombinator. When the discussion became about web startup and business advice from blogs, pg increased the scope.

Nowadays, such articles about web startups are actually much rarer and do appeal to many users.
I would love to read something about those predictable outcomes. Do you have a link ?
Satellite collision creates copious space junk
I would humbly submit that perhaps there are more appropriate forums for speaking up.