skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why bother? Round hole, square peg. You will spend 99% of your time fighting against the language, instead of writing code.
Given that quote, a lack of network support is a little surprising. Why limit yourself to single-player games?
“Hurricane Carol” Bartz Could Announce a Major Yahoo Management Reorg
I'm chuffed that a respectable outfit like last.fm publishes a blog post with a title like that. About time.

Techcrunch has been on the inflection point of "mattering" to the wider public, which scares the life out of me!
You're not going to hear details about a trial involving minors, especially given that it was sex related. I imagine the court documents were sealed before they even existed.
My point was that database performance goes far beyond "waiting for the disk." The data is laid out in specific ways with specific widths, there are decades of implementation experience behind making queries and inserts fast because of this.

Among many other things, controlling which part of the disk based data to mmap in. These are things that a higher level language's runtime can't just optimize for you.
No, there definitely needs to be a term for such men. Lumberghs, perhaps? (This would be after Bill Lumbergh, the idiot middle-manager in Office Space.)

I would say that, whatever the term is, it should evoke the image of a middle-manager petty tyrant who takes his emasculation (both in the home/family sphere, and by nature of his being subordinate to upper management) out on his underlings.
Last.FM FTW, seriously TechCrunch is getting worse and worse every week.
Beanstalkd + async_observer (Rails plugin) have worked well for me. Add a Munin script to monitor the queue size (http://gist.github.com/36116) and it's a pretty effective and manageable system.
I (obviously) agree. You might see some reticence to post here though, as TC is a bit of a cabal and nobody with a public profile wants to shake the cage.
Google's Phone (Android) Paid Apps Won't Update
Although the Board's list does include Six Easy Pieces by Richard P. Feynman.
May I ask what you do use exactly? MySQL has always been my goto for simple db needs. What do you normally use and what's your "general" cases where you wouldn't use it?
I agree. Isn't it a bit arrogant that every time we see somebody displaying ingenuity, inquisitiveness, or any other intellectual virtue, we think, "Hey, just like a computer programmer!"
This makes me think about that TechCrunchee getting spit on the face...

I'd now like to get the spitter's side of the story.
DevCentral Weekly Roundup Episode 75 - Solar Flares
Fair Use exceptions to copyright laws net more than $4.5 trillion/yr revenue for U.S.
Practical Common Lisp (http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/) is a pretty good book, that covers these things. Accessible, practical material is definitely out there, but some kind of sea-change will have to occur before it goes "mainstream." I'm not sure it ever will, though, or if it even matters. As other commenters have noted, F# might be our Obi Wan here.
We are nerds, after all. Here's the most striking thing about the statistics of this post: the average "age when started programming" is 13. Think of how many 10-year-olds there must be in the data to balance out the occasional person who started mid-career.

No because the sample is biased. People who read stackoverflow are nerds and more incline to have begin programming early and mid-career starters are more incline to not read it.
Is the Kindle closedness about ensuring that the hardware experience is good or about ensuring eBook marketplace control?

People call me naive, but I honestly think that Apple's motivation in running the various iStores is to ensure a good experience.

The music store was targeted to ensure that people would be able to buy all their music digitally. The labels required that DRM be on every thing. When Jobs won, he kickdropped the DRM.

Apple isn't required to sign every app that goes on its phones, but keeping rigorous controls has kept the user experience pretty good and, like it or not, it's encouraged an ecosystem to grow because developers can ask for a little money for their work and get paid for it. Also, let's be honest about these apps for a minute. You're not gonna run that shit in an emulator on your Googlephone. There is no iPhone clone. And when your iPhone dies and you get a new one, you just sync it all back up again.

To be fair, I didn't think it was a good idea when Steve-o said there weren't going to be native apps on the iPhone, but I don't know how much of that was some sort of weird business decision and how much of it was because they had no idea when the SDK was going to be ready.

It's the balance between practical freedom and idealistic freedom. The Kindle trods upon a lot of practical freedoms at the cost of little in the way of an enhanced experience.
The "readers" are obviously not well read. Two Ayn Rand books and the ever popular "Dianetics" in the top three?

Laughable.
I spent four relatively enjoyable years sequencing DNA in the lab and on the computer. I met James Watson one time. The Double Helix is one of the most boring books that I’ve ever read. I’ll add this one to the list of popular, mediocre books that address noble topics.
> I have a new startup nearly ready to go

How about spending that time getting your startup from "nearly there" to launched? Your patent won't mean squat if you don't have a good product.
If someone can work quietly in a corner and churn out a thesis after a few years, does that make them more likely to be able to churn out a startup by themselves?

I doubt there's a strong correlation here. When you're working on a thesis, you're still within some academic community, have a rough deadline, and have a pretty good sense of what's going to fly or not. Moreover, the progress you make on a thesis is inherently satisfying. You can stand back and look at even a page or a paragraph of work with pride.

When you're working on a startup, you spend much of your time working on things that don't work yet or will look and feel like crap for a while. A lot of the problems you solve aren't going to be intellectually interesting, as they would be for a thesis. Which means that there are precious few rewards to be had from the pre-launch development process by itself.

I tried to go solo for a while, but found myself crushed by the lack of feedback. Then I paired up with someone (remotely), and if we weren't pair programming, we were at least showing each other what we'd done several times a week and giving feedback. Not only is this immensely helpful in terms of sustaining motivation, but merely having someone else who thinks of things you don't is incredibly valuable.
That title is nothing new. I'm just glad someone (with a big audience) is saying it publicly.
All very good points, but I can't help feeling that anyone sensible who uses this list as a guide to whether to start up will never ever start a start-up.

It's a scary world out here, and you need a little bit of ignorance (or a lot of arrogance) to get started. I chose the latter option, but not everyone is as arrogant as me ;-)
thanks for these additional links. They were helpful.
I consulted for a few hours on a very enterprisey project involving UPS RoadNet Transportation Suite last year. RTS is used by the big company I worked for to plan truck-driving routes. Note: this is a more ambitious technical challenge than anything we did in-house. The major thrust of the project was reconciling the logistics team's desire to work together with IS's desire to simplify desktop management and IS's desire to isolate everything from everything else (for security reasons!).

Our users were satisfied with RTS's planning results. The UI gave them some trouble. The major dissatisfaction with it was the difficulty in updating/maintaining the many desktops at our company and at our partners' offices. A year ago, word was that UPS was considering possibly offering RTS as a hosted service.

So, is RTS amazing? Well I haven't seen any papers from UPS computer scientists describing their novel contributions to the algorithmic state of the art. The UI is a bit clunky; users don't fall in love with it. But, it doesn't crash often and it does a satisfactory job solving a non-trivial problem, which is more than I can say for typical in-house enterprise software.
I agree. Project courses like this one should not even have a midterm and a final. They only distract from the main goal of the course.
too many cooks spoil the dish.
HCL Ezeebee MAX XP Q329 Desktop
Have recently switched from using Solr+acts_as_solr to Sphinx+Thinkinh Sphinx I have found quite the opposite. Thinking Sphinx is simpler than Solr and required no 'fiddling'.

I had to work around some problems in acts_as_solr, such as it's tendency to automatically update solr as soon as a DB record changed (regardless if no fields that solr is indexing have changed). Thinking Sphinx simply updates it's index in a batch process that is called by cron (and is super fast!). I highly recommend it.
Did he mean to say "Techcruch are full of shit" instead of "Techcrunch is full of shit?" Is there an inside joke I'm missing?
"Sort of". I love to build stuff, and want to be independent. Not sure what other options there are, really.
I could use a book like that
So why does Enterprise software bought from a vendor suck the hardest?
What you're really pouring from that carton of orange juice
YC alumni keep amazing me with how much help they're willing to give other entrepreneurs. releasedatez, great interview.
It'll be interesting to see if TechCrunch acknowledge this, respond or apologize...

My bet is they completely ignore it.
I do not understand your analogy. Please explain.
How to break venture capital
In British English company names act as plural nouns.
Not only will you fight against the language, but the functional style code you produce will be awkward and unreadable by other Java programmers. If this doesn't matter because you are working alone, then why would you choose Java in the first place?
Copygator actually crawls the internet looking for your blog posts. All Tracer does is sniff for a ctrl-c command from someone visiting your website and injects a link into the copied text.
That's a really old/dated analogy they pull to highlight why the Kindle might fail if it stays closed. It almost doesn't even seem relevant due to how much has changed since the days just before the WWW. I can think of a few more modern closed systems that are doing quite fine.
There is a start at it here:

http://www.scipy.org/scipy/scikits/wiki/MachineLearning

Still some active development, but needs more people:

http://projects.scipy.org/scipy/scikits/browser/trunk/learn/...
I don't think it's a joke - I just read it as a Britishism.
Look at my history. I've been talking about OurDoings here for years. If somebody wants to say every such comment should include a disclaimer I'll listen, but I won't be lectured on transparency from an account like izboyd created just for posting this one comment.

This vulnerability is an example of Facebook's failure to think things through. It does push my buttons and I'm going to say something. Just because it's popular doesn't mean it's good.
Just I have this thought that if the world is not what it is...and everyone followed basic logic, then the world would have been a dull place to live in. No colors, just everything in black and white based on some accepted commonsense...it is the diversity that gives color to life. I hope your JSH is enjoying this attention and bashing in that forum:-)
inglorian, I really like your attitude and I can't add anything to this discussion since I never dated an American girl myself. However, I have a few friends in real estate circles and all of them agree that whenever they have a house on sale due to divorce, the most common cause by far is a male losing his high paying job.

I find it shocking and very telling fact about internal dynamics at most American families. You would think losing your job calls for your partner's support, while it seems to me that for significant number of American men losing a high-paying job likely means losing the family too.
I usually do this, and editors always want to change it. I never realized it was an English thing.
> The numbers say otherwise. 51% of all vehicles sold in the US in December 2008 were pickups or SUVs. [1] Average vehicle sales price is $25,000 [2], despite the existence of nice cheap fuel-efficient cars like the Yaris at $12,000.

Actually, the numbers don't say that.

If you only have one car, that car has to satisfy almost all of your car needs. The Yaris doesn't for a lot of people. (The Scion xB does for a lot more people.)

If you're going to buy an "extra" car for its mileage, it has to be cost less than the amount of money that you save by using it instead of your "all uses" car. A $12k extra car usually doesn't do that.

A 10mpg vehicle will use 10k gallons over 100k. A 15mpg vehicle uses 6.6k gallons. A 20mpg vehicle uses 5k gallons, 30mpg uses 3.3k, a 40mpg vehicle uses 2.5k, and a 50mpg vehicle uses 2k gallons.

At $4/g, the 10mpg vehicle's gas costs $40k, the 15mpg vehicle's gas costs $26.6k, the 20mpg vehicle's gas costs $20k, 30mpg costs $13k, the 40mpg vehicle's gas costs $10k, and the 50mpg vehicle's gas costs $8k.

Note that gas isn't the only cost - the "gas saver" extra car also has license/registration, insurance, maintenance, time value of money (the gas cost is over time while the purchase cost either isn't, or requires paying interest), etc.

So, if you're already getting 15mpg, the gas savings from an extra vehicle that gets 40mpg are considerably less than $12k.

If you're already getting 20mpg, it's even harder to save money by buying an extra vehicle.

In other words, the guy who wanted a $4k gas saver may have been at the upper end of economic sense - the "extra car to save gas" probably needs to be less than $3k.

Yes, the ability to "rent" big vehicles for occasional usage can let people have smaller "main" cars, but only if the rental cost is sufficiently low. I note that the zip car people seem to have gone the other direction. Hertz and the like charge a significant premium for big vehicles.

And the loss of flexibility is important. I can (and have) gone diving with 15 minutes notice. If I had to rent a car....

And, yes, many families have multiple vehicles. They still have to satisfy simultaneous users so the above analysis applies. (Yes, many can, and do, make do with a "big" and "medium", but that means that a 3rd vehicle to save gas must cost even less than the above suggests because they're already using the big vehicle less than their average.)
The scrollbar has been removed, thank you for the feedback.
I'm afraid the web might come full circle back to something like we started with separate networks and walled off content. The recent buzz about Cable companies wanting to restrict online content to paid customers and the net neutrality flap are examples of this. As belts tighten content owners are getting scared and want to monetize their 'stuff' with more control.
Who needs sleep when there is caffeine pills to take instead? :-)
I have a public profile, and long ago dismissed TechCrunch as one of the least intelligent blogs on the Internet. The writing is bad, the content is boring, and now we know it's not even correct.

Go away, TechCrunch.
I forgot to add one important thing...the brain cells need something different everytime to propagate and prosper (whatever that means), and the best inputs to brain are not the same recurring patterns but totally new and diversified patterns.
I think the idea is that in order for your startup to succeed, you need TechCrunch to like it. The spitter probably got a bad review.

(Anyway, I don't think this is important. Very few people with money to spend have ever heard of TechCrunch. Their opinion mostly matters in the VC echo chamber, not in the real world.)
The numbers may be a little high (they must be including entire industrial sectors like say Internet/web), and it is undeniable that 'fair use' is essential to our information economy.
Ask HN: Do you know of other good HN-like places to post your articles?
As a blogger, I regularly post things on HN if I feel that they will be interesting to the community here. I also often post things into the appropriate subreddit. I tend to ignore digg, and submit some things to Slashdot.

Ultimately, that works very well for technology-related articles, because all those communities are technology-minded. So, for example, when writing blog articles on Woobius Scribbles (my company's blog), if they're relevant, I'll post them here.

However, the market for Woobius is architects and the construction industry. That's a very different niche from HN. And yet, there are quite a few people linked to the construction industry on this site, as witnessed by the comments on http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=479749 .

So, my open questions to HN users who have blogs (or read blogs) in niches other than this one are:

Where do you go to find those non-technology blogs?

Where do you go to promote your blog(s)/businesses in non-technology niches?

What are the other "niche HN's" out there?

Thanks!
Either is correct in American English, but it may violate a style guidelines. It generally hinges on whether you consider Techcrunch a group of people or a monolithic entity.
Ubuntu Will Target Cloud Computing With October Release
Good point.

For the time it was written (1970s, I believe) the SQL language was way ahead of the curve compared to the languages being used in enterprise.
My (admittedly anecdotal) evidence is to the contrary. Enterprise applications are neither the fastest nor the cheapest solution (at least not as implemented in any of the "Enterprise" places I have worked).

I think generally the problem is twofold. First, as the GP pointed out, design decisions (both technical and aesthetic) are made by people who aren't programmers or end users. These people care more about documentation and 'The Plan' than solving the problem elegantly.

The second problem is that most 'technical' people doing in-house enterprise apps aren't that great. I know this sounds callous of me, and there are definitely still great people here and there, but the average ability level is pretty low. My 'enterprise architect' has never even used Java 5 (her excuse: she hasn't had any training for it yet). People like this aren't going to be confident enough to suggest (or even aware of) alternative implementations to those given them by the 'design committee'.

I just started a job doing 'Enterprise Java' (gotta pay the bills until grad school this fall) and they have me working on this project for the next 6-7 months. Once I finally parsed all the buzzword bingo documentation, I realized that what I'm implementing is basically a read-only ORM.

The design as I'm given requires 15+ lines of Java to get a single object back (you know, Post.find(:title => 'foo')) and requires the end user to know which table goes with which DAO goes with which business object, among other things. I'm slowly but surely getting changes approved by my 'architect', and hopefully will, in the end, have something a little more sane.

The fact that they are paying both me and her for six months worth of work to do something that really could be handled by an existing ORM definitely doesn't point to in-house 'Enterprise software' being the cheapest solution. Throw in some of the ridiculous design decisions and 'requirements of our company's standard architecture', and it's not really the fastest either.

As for the Enterprise software from vendors, I'd argue that the problem is that it's solving the problems of these in-house developers and managers, who only have the problems due to over-complexifying (not a word I know) what they do.
Are American women so adept at hiding their "true" selves for so long? Perhaps your friends are poor judges of character, or simply didn't date them long enough to properly assess how they would function as a married couple.

Where I come from, it is taken as common knowledge that you should live together for a significant amount of time before getting married (2+ years is usual). Also, big extravagant weddings are not the norm -- most of my immediate and extended family got married by signing papers in a courthouse, or in a small ceremony at the most.

>>She doesn't need to hide who she truly is, because with the divorce option on the table she hit the jackpot.

I find this surprising also. From what I hear, divorce is terrible for everyone. I can't imagine that so many women marry into a relationship they don't expect to maintain (emotionally and sexually), especially with the way love and marriage are so glorified in the US.
Understanding the Role of Fat in Type 2 Diabetes
An Interview with the Founder of 4chan
> Can Porsche design and market a car that goes 35 mpg?

And costs less than $20k out the door.

VW Brazil can, but those aren't German workers.
I would be interested in hearing nominations by HN readers of good English nonfiction books published in the twentieth century. Presumably, the selection bias in this voluntary response poll would include the interest predilections of HN readers, but that's a selection bias that might very likely choose some books that I would like.
Siftables: Cookie-sized computers
That's a licensing requirement from Microsoft to avoid the "XP Tax." It's not the case if you get Linux and, anyway, is not a technical requirement.
Hitler's nightly build fails
The number seems very sketchy indeed. The study linked from the press release

http://www.ccianet.org/artmanager/uploads/1/FairUseStudy-Sep...

is not nearly explicit enough about methodology to inspire confidence in the implausible claim of "one-sixth of total U.S. GDP" in the press release.

On the other hand, I have nothing against at least as much fair use as now occurs, so it would be wonderful to see the case for fair use made in more convincing fashion.
you can't access uploaded images in flash. you have to send the full image to a server, then re-download it, do your manipulation, and then upload the final version.

particularly annoying when uploading to S3, since you have to go client->server->client->server->S3.
Of course, I would most certainly be too lazy to actually add any images :)
You guys are all pathetic. You look at the graphics and conclude it's not advanced. Be honest. If I had made a pretty picture... disgusted with you apes. The same sort who said in 1900, "everything has been invented". You're prolly linux cultists.
> Call and speak with her again - ask her what stories her readers want to read

Before you do that, read her stories and see what kind of stories she's written in the past. That will help you "pitch" her with "what kind of story do you like to tell?"
It's not even grammatically correct!

"Techcrunch is full of shit" would be right.
Is Philosophy All in Our Heads?
I don't see any "hard barriers" but a lot of soft issues that will take time to overcome. As of now, there isn't even a uniform event handling framework in JS. So, first, we'd need a good generic 3d framework. Next, we'd need a significant speedup in performance across the major browsers. If OpenGL is a model, there would probably have to be some graphics-specific optimizations made, which might be difficult to get everyone on board for. Third, I'd either need to buy a new computer or JS would need gpu access, because ATM this site brought my relatively face computer to a grinding halt... and I don't think I'm going to have money for a new comp for at least a year or two :).
You are right, that is terribly sad. I also find it very strange, though: unless I am missing something, the woman isn't going to be better off on her own (especially with children) than with the currently-unemployed husband, unless she somehow expects to marry another high-earner immediately (this seems very unlikely). How is it a better decision financially to get divorced in this situation than to stay together? Divorce alone is extremely expensive, and if the couple did not sign a prenuptual agreement, presumably the man cannot be forced to pay high alimony payments if he is unemployed.