skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's what leverage does: it magnifies. That doesn't mean that these industries are inherently bad. We need a strong banking system and a strong real estate industry.

And what do you mean about no legal basis for LLCs? I'm pretty sure every state has a legal basis for LLCs.
> (defun f (x y) (let ((z (gethash x :a))) (+ z y))

vs

> (defn f [x y] (let [z (get x :a)] (+ x y)))

The CL defn of f is a function that is called with two arguments. That function is called like "(f a b)" If the Clojure definition is comparable, that is, the call looks like "(f a b)", why are []s used in the definition and the let?

> This slight decrease in regularity makes a lot of functionality more visible.

What functionality? x,y aren't part of a vector and neither is z. (x,y may come from a vector in the caller, but I'll assume that the defn works if they don't, so
that shouldn't matter.)
The curious case of the invulnerable Web browser
I haven't found a good open source profiler so I ended up buying a commercial one. The prices are pretty steep, but they are willing to negotiate. A quick email saying it's difficult to justify $499 for a commercial license when I'm just a lone developer resulted in one vendor discounting the product to $99. It ended up being less than an academic license.
Where would you live? In your own house? On your own island? Or somehow work in a company that lets you spend your free time working on an open source project?
The start of this thread is some FUD raised not by the actual thread starter, but a customer expressing concerns about web development and web frameworks here:

Hi and sorry for the provocative title of my post :)

One of our customers is doing a detailed review of a mason/modperl ERP
app we've built for them since 2001. Prodded by some buzzword-compliant
consultants they are expressing concerns that the app's underlying
technologies - perl, modperl and mason - are becoming obsolete. They
feel that a web application framework must have 'rails' or some other
buzzword in its name.

But their main argument is that perl is declining as a web developement
language. Also they rightly feel that competent perl developers are
becoming harder to find.

What arguements could I use to address these concerns and convince them
that their initial investement in perl is still safe and won't be
obsolete in 10 years?

The client's local developers (who maintain the app we've built) feel
that mason gives too much freedom to write messy code and badly
structure a web app.

Indeed mason has very little constraints, maybe just slightly more than
straight modperl. So it requires experienced, self-disciplined devs,
which are few and far between.

So my second question is, what perl web development framework should we
recommend to our client? Catalyst looks like a winner, but maybe there
are others?

Thanks for your insights,

--

This is not really about Perl in the "jobmarket" - just in web development and how it seems to "be behind" against all the cool buzzwordy frameworks out there.
This sounds alot like the "Monk and the Riddle" philosophy. Is this what you're getting at?
Are you a professor or a research scientist now?

I have pondered this route, but it seems that in general, the research community / academia tends to "shun" those that don't do straight undergrad -> research.
Matt Cutts responded in the comments that he will take a look at it. I guess this teaches us that the only way to get help from Google is to blog, get it picked up by the aggregators, get a "celebrity" blogger to notice, and hope he follows through. That's not encouraging.

Of course, many big companies have the same problems... so, can we propose a better way without it involving call centers or other massive human investment? Some human investment is great, but any solution involving "hire lots of people to help" won't fly.
Top Ten Reasons You Are Not an Architect
I disagree. It is a conspiracy theory about the implications of the naming conventions currently being used by Sun.

The "argument" between Apache and Sun is hardly well documented. He cites a two year old open letter from Apache to Sun, and then in a follow-up article indulges in a great deal of armchair lawyering.

The cited links to Sun developer blogs don't seem to support the argument being made one jot.
And profitable if you do with a more skilled person. However I hope replaced people are reallocated somewhere else.
Are my numbers wrong or shouldn't $200 million / year revenue support them and even turn a profit:

Generous estimate: 100 billion pageviews a month @ ~400kb = ~40,000 terrabytes of data or just under ~150Gbps of bandwidth.

What does a Gbps cost? $10,000 a month? Probably less considering their scale, but let's say it costs that much.

So for bandwidth: $20 million a year.

How many servers? I recall a presentation saying they used 800 or so servers, but to be sure say it's become 5,000 and say servers cost $4000 and must be replaced each year:

So for servers: $20 million a year.

As for storage, 10 billion photos @ 400kb (way too generous here) = 4000 terrabytes a month - What's a 1TB hard disk cost, $200? Triple redundancy just in case:

So for storage: $30 million a year

How many people does it employ? 1000?

So for people: $100 million a year.

people: $100 mil
storage: $30 mil
servers: $20 mil
bandwidth: $20 mil
------------------
total: $170 mil

What am I not seeing?
If I read that search correctly, it's saying that the number of threads about mod_perl has declined.

That symptom is also affected by:

- increasing maturity of mod_perl (fewer problems)
- a decrease in apache/apache2 modperl/mod_perl2 discussions as apache2/mod_perl2 has become dominant over that time period
Thanks! Thats what we were thinking as well. The fact that we are also based in Utah also helps us easily contact local retailers that sell products (shirts, ties, etc) to just missionaries and so there is a lot of potential for affiliates.
> Who could provide better advice than an organization that routinely deals with these kinds of failures?

How about an organization that SUCCESSFULLY deals with these kinds of failures?

> -banks too big in size

When/where did the IMF dealt with any banks approaching the size of Wachovia, let alone Citigroup?

> -banks influence policy (treasury officials are often former bankers)

Since the IMF is filled with bankers....

I note that the current Treasury Secretary was IMF. I've heard that his Indonesian work caused horrific damage.
Director of Engineering at Facebook discusses scaling architecture
Huh. I didn't know about Dropbox. I could definitely use that.
Ask HN: is there a startup school 2009?
looking at: http://startupschool.org/
I don't see the application for startup school 2009

If I recall correctly, around this time last year, the application for startup school 2008 already started.

Thus: is there a startup school this year? or is it delayed / (worse yet ... canceled) due to YCombinator moving to CA?
If they ever get to the point of making this into a game engine, one of the first licensees will probably be the company making the official Lost strategy game.

If the engine can handle the plot of Lost, it could handle anything.
> What are the continued operating costs [?] ... When I lived in Toronto I could have an all-access unlimited subway pass for $100 a month,

This does not speak to operating costs.

Mass transit fairs are usually subsidized from general tax revenues - user fees usually cover something like 10-25% of actual costs.
Unified Cloud Storage/Retrieval API (BSD Licensed)
Possibly in my own house on my own island ;P

But I'd certainly go for maximum independence so going to work for a company if I don't have to (which presumably I won't have to if I sell a startup) is out of the question. I want to be able to pursue crazy projects that might or might not turn out to give results.

Oh, and I'd crank up on my knowledge of theoretical CS too.
Right, this I'm aware of - so I'd be interested in seeing someone do some numbers on the real costs of highways vs. mass transit.
This forum ought to focus more on what new business opportunities arise from a larger/richer Chinese middle class, than be afraid of losing old business ideas.
I love the end: ”The entire … “pro blogging” industry … is predicated on the notion that blogging is a meaningful verb. It is not. The verb is writing. The format and medium is new, but the craft is ancient.“

This is true, but note that Daring Fireball is one of the most masterfully executed blogs around. From the RSS feed to the the way John Gruber picks excerpts when linking, everything has a unique simplicity to it. For example, the RSS feed entry titles link to source articles, not the blog itself; how awesome is that? This kind of simplicity does not happen without painstaking attention to detail.

So maybe there's something to understanding and working with the medium as well. But that probably comes after you make you peace with the ancient craft.
How does this boring account qualify as satisfying anyone's "intellectual curiosity"? Will "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" be posted soon?
For the multi-page problem, tabs are useful.

I ususally open all subsequent pages in backgound tabs in one run, then read the article.
The Pirate Bay to roll out secure €5 per month VPN service
Since when is interrupting someone's life to shove an advert in their face considered "helping the customer", "making their life easier" or "making their experience with your company better"?

All advertising email is spam, "solicited" is just a weasel-word to sugar coat the fact that you are trying to pound your company name into someone's head harder than all your competitors are doing with their name, and keeping up the status quo that this is an acceptable thing to be doing.

Obviously, not all customers find this to be the greatest experience

Do any customers find receiving an advert in the middle of their daily workflow the greatest experience? A great experience of any kind?

[Edit: transactional email, though, sure - make that more pleasant]
Analysis of the new Microsoft "I'm a PC" ad.
Article in three phrases: Guy makes it through high school and college while high. Damages relationship with family. May or may not be OK now.
Good suggestion for the tour.

So the private/public pages thing gets a little tricky and it has been on my mind since I started the project. Pages are actually default to public but that doesn't mean open to the internet. What that public means in this case is that any registered user can search/find and view the page. In short it basically works more like facebook and not myspace.

After viewing a few other sites that provide guestbook/forum type services I noticed that a lot of people (moms/dads/grandma) seem to be more willing to post emails and other contact information publicly because they trust the site for some reason. Which means google could crawl that.

Of course, as I mentioned I'm not convinced 100% yet that this is the right way to do it. There are definitely many people who just want to view the page and not bother with signing up. The alternative is to make public pages open to the internet so that any unregistered user can view it.

But that makes things interesting for the private pages. Thats because when we ask for the 'password' for a page we actually only ask for it once and then store the fact that you now have permission to view the missionary in the DB. Maybe the solution is to either create a cookie if they aren't a registered user or store it in the db if they are?
"You can download the XP images free from microsoft, ready installed with IE6 IE7 and IE8."

Where??
You jsut brought back some old memories for me! DoTT was one of the first games where I really enjoyed the story.
Pretty ironic, considering usually an argument for free websites over free desktop apps is that it's easier and less dangerous to try out a free website because you don't have to install anything.
I think this would be a good start, but I think for the sake of convenience I would like to see something more along the lines of wireless power like Intel have been playing around with.

http://blogs.intel.com/research/2008/08/you_have_to_see_this...

I would like to see power companies deploy these wireless charging substations in parking garages and in people's homes and perhaps have it so that the vehicle has it's own power meter - something similar to what you would see on a home now, so that multiple vehicles could be filling up at the same point perhaps and each is generating their own bill which could be paid at the end of the month? similar to how homes work.

That way, the need to "fill up" is removed, making it more convenient than a typical car, which I think might help adoption rates more than just saying it is a more eco-friendly car.
A good CEO should be able to delegate day to day activities for a week - how else would he ever get to go on vacation? In fact, a good CEO should probably be able to delegate all day to day activities he might be involved in, in case of an emergency, in case he's hit by a bus, or just so he can spend a day thinking strategically.
Wow. I've actually been working on a board game that uses time travel as its mechanic: http://jetpackshark.com/recursed
You're right.

I wonder why Google closed the account: was it that b/c she never clicked "Shipped" to any of the orders and so Google's algorithm thought the account fraudulent, or was there another reason?

If Google doesn't come clean on the reason, it's going to lose a lot of future customers.
... that are locked to AT&T.
I don't use XCode. I usually use vim, but I'm learning emacs at the moment and tend to use that for any new projects I work on. I'm not an iPhone developer, so I can't speak to that.

Visual Studio is definitely a much nicer IDE after you get ReSharper installed (VisualSVN is a nice addition as well).

The mac is nicer to develop on because of its unix underpinnings. Things in emacs tend to just work where it's a constant battle on windows.

Beyond that, I'm very lazy. Most of the stuff I work with at home has been written by people on macs. I have a much higher likelihood of things working "out of the box" when on a mac than I do on my windows machine.

I don't have anything bad to say about Microsoft in general (although I would love to have a heart to heart with the MSDN team), it's just that OSX feels like a much more developer friendly platform than Windows XP or Vista do.
It's an interesting campaign, on a side note: does anyone else think that the new IBMer is a bit from the I'm a Mac/PC playbook?

Next we'll have I'm a McDonald/BKer.
I don't think this is a gesture. He's learning about the company and about how to improve it.
No - the extent of America's financial dominance in the 20th century was not the result of a single event (the Great Depression), but of three; WW1 (in which Britain lost its position of financial dominance), the Great Depression (in which the USA cemented theirs), and WW2 (in which all other industrialised countries were either defeated or depleted to a much greater extent than the US was).

As a result, there wasn't really any country in the position to challenge the USA at the end of WW2; China is not at all in the same position now.

This being said, the crisis may have helped China along in its aim to becoming a global superpower; they have reserves that no-one else has, and so far they've been using them to buy strategic resources (mainly primary materials) as well as lending to the USA. It's a nice position for them to be in, although they probably would have preferred finishing their transition away from manufacturing before being thrust into it.
People learn at their own rates, and if you're a parent, you'll learn (extremely uncomfortably) that your children have to - must - make their own mistakes. And poking folks, rubbing their noses in their mistakes is a good way to get a black eye - not a friend.
Here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=21e...

Currently time-limited to april 30, but so far MS continues to provide new versions. I guess they're just trying to prevent any other use of these images.
Good point. I guess the question is: in the long run will Amazon be better of having Jeff Bezos performing his usual duties as CEO 3/23-3/27 or acquiring first hand the experience of working in a distribution center. The net difference is probably de minimis. Although it does make for good publicity and employee moral. So net-net I think this is a decent one-off gesture, but I don't think it belongs in every CEO's playbook.
There's a how-to here: http://www.10voltmedia.com/blog/2008/12/screencast-install-i...
Sony Ericsson K610i Unlocked 
Sony Ericsson K610 is up to dated presentation with latest features and has come to rule the world with its stylish look and amazing functions.
As per http://www.usatoday.com/tech/wireless/phones/2008-07-31-att-... Apple is under contractual obligation to allow AT&T as the only carrier till 2010.
World's Worst UI?
They do and thats why they don't use C# for action oriented missions or mission critical apps.
I attended a talk by a consultant on how they do these "best places to work" surveys. Setting aside the issue of how accurate these surveys are, one of the dominant traits of these organizations is that performance appraisals float up the chain of command as well as down.

This means that employees and junior managers get a chance to evaluate their bosses as much as the bosses evaluate them. I don't think Bezo's action shows a lack a faith in lower management but rather a "trust but verify" approach.

Of course it might be a more strategic approach to finding out how stuff really works on the front line. Given a big enough management structure the "on the floor" reality might not filter up to the board room correctly. Remember the game of gossip? That effect plagues large organizations.
Erdős was an amphetamine fiend from when he was 58 until the end of his life. Lots of guys I knew in college were unhealthily addicted to caffeine and sugar. It's worth noting unhealthy habits.
Granted, I don't know enough about the track record of the IMF. Them sort of being the 'Emergency Room' staff for failed nations does give them insights into typical reasons for malfunction. I don't really have a grip (and most people don't) on how these huge sums here in the U.S., e.g. 4-5 trillion dollars estimated in bad assets on the books, add up. Reading Krugman/ de Long/ Cowen/ Kedrovsky etc. still hasn't given me enough perspective. So I'd like to see some input from people that know all the angles on how crooks get away with money! Their experience from developing nations is helpful.
"The more options for entrepreneurs, the better."
"I’m just not cool enough to be a Mac person."
Twitter still has no business model, and that's OK
This thing has been circulating for years and is much better suited for thedailywtf.com. Flagged.
Does anyone have any data how to become beta? I'll code for possibility of testing it:P?
Things You Need To Start a Start-Up
Outside.in saves newspapers
I'm just going my what I've been told by G's head-hunters.
What is an Internet Business ?
Do you come here to read 10 year old stories about writers that had a drug addiction in college? I don't. I come here for technical and startup news and to discuss those things with people that are knowledgeable of them.

As a founder, honestly, while stories like this are interesting, it's just not worth the time investment of tracking the site if it's not focused on the topics above, and I fear that as it becomes more general, more of those people who come here for similar reasons, whose opinions I value, will also stop frequenting the site.
What was that about limiting the amount of CodingHorror posts on HN?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=510309

This wasn't uninteresting though.
The Chinese are used to the "The Wolf is Coming" March :)
Shot in the dark:

Maybe there's a connection between the narrator's struggle and an entrepreneur's struggle. Both seem to enjoy the fight to overcome mediocrity and strive for their goals despite hardships and constraints, but the narrator's hardships and constraints are entirely of his own making. Check this quote:

"I loved the feeling: Floating slightly above everything but still able to cope with the world, sensing that I was somehow special, or at least different, that I belonged to a secret and exclusive club."

Couldn't that apply to a hacker? At least in the abstract?

Food for thought...
Er, architect does have more than one definition...

I.e., "the deviser, maker, or creator of anything: the architects of the Constitution of the United States" (definition #3 on dictionary.com)

My guess is that the word architect in the author's job title refers to something closer to that defintion than to the literal "designer of buildings" definition.
But they're easily unlocked. With Tmobile's inexpensive 3G data plans, it'll work out cheaper in the long run to unlock and switch providers.
It would only require special effort to type the double quotes. The iPhone will fix capitalization for you, including converting iphone to iPhone.
I'm guessing the Chinese farmers also have a lot of practical skills.

But other then that you're right, and lets not forget the huge brain drain into America over the years.

Attracted both by the economy but also by the level of freedom.

Not just democratic freedom, but also the freedom to not stand out just because you look different.
Always Assume That You’re The Problem
Top 1 reason this article is mis-titled:

* 1. The title should be "Top ten unimportant and uninteresting reasons you are not a building architect"
I love the principle of Today/Soon/Whenever. Your app is a brilliant idea, and I reckon it will gel well with how my brain works.

I'm going to build something simple around this idea for our office.
I wish they would have put the data in a simple table as opposed to a large, shiny doughnut.