skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The two big variables are the skill of the architect, and their understanding of the real problem.

Rewriting is valid if the new architect is more skilled and understands the problem better. Unfortunately it's quite likely that the new architect doesn't understand the problem better, in which case the new architecture will likely be worse than the first.

To complicate matters, the problem may change over time as well. So if you sink the time into a rewrite, there's no guarantee the new version solves the latest version of the problem any better than the first.

Given the uncertainties, I have to see a real solid reason and clear benefits before doing a rewrite. Just because there are some code smells or a lot of bugs doesn't mean I can come up with a better architecture necessarily. I'd rather refactor a bit at a time and see what shakes out.
FYI Peter Schiff is the economic advisor behind the politician, Ron Paul. [EDIT: for the 2008 Presidential Campaign]

Much of what Schiff predicts are dependent on the rest of the world 'cutting us off' by depegging their currencies from the dollar and turning away from treasury bonds -- both of which are not happening, and to the contrary, much of the world is turning toward our treasury bonds in this crisis. Oil being down and perceived weakness in the euro are definitely helping us right now, too.
ISM Manufacturing Data Now Trending Toward Recovery
Grade school and high school were almost completely negative for me: the only things I learned there were laziness and procrastination (still besetting vices).
Carly Fiorina diagnosed with breast cancer
Index Closes a New 350M. Euro Venture Fund
But thats the problem. Obama has already changed the lives of the 300M people in this country or at least helped in the process. The stimulus bill that he helped pass has permanently expanded the US federal government. His budget will go even farther in that direction.
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I've lived off of these numbers in BJ before, by splitting a 2 bedroom apartment and rarely buying anything beyond essentials. Aside from the pollution, I felt that my quality of life actually went up compared to living in the states because, although I go out to eat with friends very rarely in the US, I go out slightly more in China. Also, the women are very friendly :)

We'll have to agree to disagree on the talent issue - I'm a Stanford CS grad and I've experienced no quality difference working with Qinghua CS grads.

Can you explain what problems you've encountered regarding having a corporation in China? I'm also setting up a dessert cafe in BJ with a Chinese co-founder. We've registered it as a Nevada LLC and we have had to jump through a few additional hoops because it's a restaurant, but nothing related to the actual corporation part. And my software company is a Nevada S-corp - my understanding is that I'll pay taxes to the Chinese gov't for operating a company in their territory (I have yet to learn how much), but the first $80k or so won't be taxed by the US due to a trade treaty.

And can you be a little more specific about the nasty labor laws? This is an area that I'm still looking into.
When Linux Runs Out of Memory
I'm not asking for true PCI-E -- ASUS used the Mini-PCI-E connector for flash drives starting with the the 3rd? generation EEEs, and it became widespread. It's only true name is "FLASH_CONN", after the label on the PCBs.

Normally a Mini-PCI-E connector supplies USB2 (including the 5v), 1 PCI-E lane, 1.5v & 3.3v power, and control lines. FLASH_CONN keeps the USB2, but uses the PCI-E pins for SATA. A ton of the netbooks have two slots: a true Mini-PCI-E for a WiFi or 3G card, and a FLASH_CONN for the SSD.
Optimising strlen()
well if we're to believe the mantra of the invisible hand, then by definition only weak companies are being destroyed. having too much debt is unhealthy. if your corporation needs to live on faith, thats a red flag. look at the companies with huge (or even just respectable) cash reserves...they might have (or want) to do a layoff, but they know full well the company will make it through this
Perhaps I'm just bitter because I've been doing mostly IE compatibility stuff at work lately, but "because IE does not support basic web standards" does not seem all that inaccurate to me.
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The Tragic Last Days of Circuit City: It's a Wreck, and Stuff Still Isn't That Cheap
i want to know abt total hacking on networking.if u can help me plz send mail to my account with some useful tips at chandan.hicet@gmail.com
Where In The World Is Innovation?
I dunno, I've bought more vitamins recently than painkillers.
It's common to take a daily multivitamin, few people take daily painkillers[1]. The vitamin industry makes plenty of money; dietary supplements are big business. Not that painkillers aren't, but there's nothing superior about a painkiller in an economic sense. There are whole stores devoted to dietary supplements, the most popular painkillers are illegal (heroin, opium, etc.).

Some links for the size of the vitamin market vs. painkiller markets:

The largest vitamin company makes $80 million a year in profit:
http://www.foodnavigator.com/Financial-Industry/US-vitamin-s...

The total spent on painkillers in the US is $11 per person, which comes out to about $330 million gross, which probably means less than $80 million total profit:
http://www.euromonitor.com/Specialist_products_to_revive_ana...

[1] Except aspirin, which is being taken for its blood-thinning effect rather than its analgesic qualities.
Native Client: Native Code for Web Apps
ok dis hacking tool were nice.but i wnat to sure abt it 4 its safety requirements
Having experienced East St. Louis (and most of North St. Louis), reading about places like Detroit and Buffalo, I start to wonder, at one point do we just decide to 'give up' on a city?

Are there modern cases of abandonment of a major metropolitan area? (I don't mean losing 50+% of population, or large-scale migration to the suburbs like STL, I mean actual wholesale abandonment of a city).

It seems that with hundreds of thousands of people, Detroit and NOLA are still going to survive for quite a while, but at what point do we just declare a city below critical-mass for survival and start working on transitioning people out?

At some point it has to cost far more to provide fire and other basic service coverage to these heavily-built but sparsely inhabited areas than they could ever hope to return in revenue. Cities regularly clear out large areas for urban rehab or sports stadiums, would it be plausible (if even ethical) to just buy out 50,000 people and ask them to leave?
Gibson Guitar Hero patent suit thrown out
That's very true, however it still doesn't make it a good example of why eating your own dog-food is good. Instead, it's a good example of why designing for yourself as a target audience (like 37signals) can be a good thing.

Incidentally, I am most definitely not arguing against the dog-food approach to development.
I've never heard of Peter Schiff being related to Ron Paul in any particular way (not saying he isn't, but "behind the politician" seems extremely implausible). I'll point out that Ron Paul's basic premises are what he's been espousing since the 1970s, when Peter Schiff was about ten years old.

Wikipedia says "Schiff was an economic adviser to Ron Paul's 2008 presidential campaign." Sounds like he was one of multiple economic advisers, and it sounds like they aren't associated in any official capacity today.
Erlang factory is coming to SF Bay Area 2009
Conference is: April 30th - May 1st.
Don't miss Robert Virding, one of the three inventors of Erlang, speaking on the Erlang rationale.
Experts Discuss Security in a Recession
A recent benchmarking study by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) suggests that much work still needs to be done to ensure that a combined IT and corporate security function is adequately prepared to protect businesses from 21st century threats.
I'm not worried. I've been saving adequately for a while now and I have a good job. Even if the job goes away I'll be alright, because I'm not afraid to wait tables (or perform any other type of manual labor).

I didn't buy a house I couldn't afford and I went without when I could (even went so far as to live in a small room rented from a friend, where I slept on a $150 futon from Ikea for over a year and a half [this was during 'good times']).

All this talk about bailouts is very upsetting to me. I never asked for anything when I didn't have anything.

A very small bitter part of me wants the country to fall apart. If it does maybe people, will stand to the challenge, by standing with one another and overcoming. If not then maybe at least the glow of their reality tv will keep them warm.

There is no rational in going into a panic. This is a financial problem. It's not like people are dying en masse as a direct result from this.
How can we help but go through a slow period while households and banks repair their balance sheets? Just increasing the savings rate from the current 5% in January to a more sustainable 10-14% means people will need to forgo a of consumption. I doubt the wheels will fall off completely.

You younger folks on HN have a great opportunity to save your money now and make a killing in 25 years. The stock market could lose another 30% and then move laterally for several years. But over a few decades, you might average 8% returns annually. Just remember to sell out before the great crash of 2049.
The name in the article is "Alan Feng"
A college degree is used as a white-collar/blue-collar litmus test by a lot of people. You probably don't care about gov't or big company jobs, but the following might matter to you some day:

- Immigration, if you ever decide to work abroad

- Banks, if you need to finance a house

- Dates. Education level is one of the main filters

- Parents of women you're dating

- Universities, if you ever want to hang out for a year doing research between startups

You might think most of those people are flexible enough to realize, once they know you, that you're a bright & ambitious guy. But then, when they try justify you to other people, it's harder without a college brand name.

It's probably less of a handicap in life than, say, having "PSYCHO KILLER" tattooed across your forehead, but it's significant. You can get along, but you'll always be explaining it. People who never went often seem to turn into defensive people later in life. YMMV.
One depressing take: Jim Kunstler's The Long Emergency (a book, summarized here: http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/7203633/the_long_emer...).

I'm afraid I think he's right (even if he's indulging in a lot of schadenfreude)--it's just a matter of timing. Our society isn't going to survive the peak oil crash intact.

The bright side is that we'd have to become hyper-local in our economy, give up the hyperconsumerist dreamland of suburbia, big box stores and electronic entertainments, and deal with the real world.
There're actually a few of us that are not able to use third-party libraries because of latency constraints...
Hot springs, dynamic oceans, silent lakes, and shrinking pools??

Sometimes consulting doesn't seem like such a bad career, then reality smacks me in the face.
We heard similar feedback from pg and team after our interview. We think we have a fighting chance, so we are still hacking... http://www.classlet.com/
Source code analysis
You sound exactly like someone who has been in college for 2 or 3 years and thinks he now knows all the answers to every problem.

Wait until you try to get a job. Then the real fun begins.
It seems best suited for small, focused applications that are developed quickly and expected to live hard and die young (lots of traffic for a short amount of time).

I can also imagine applications that designed for the user to be able to install it on their own AppEngine account. Maybe something like Wordpress for GAE, or imagine a distributed/federated version of Twitter. People might find a new app very useful, but have concerns about investing time and effort in an application from some startup that could vanish on short notice. If they had it instaled on their own app engine account, they'd at least have a chance to move their data over to another application before entropy took its toll.
This solution pertains to Delicious (since I assume it's the best option for now). If you were to create a new account (just to start off fresh) and import your bookmarks, you do have an option to set all of them as private. For future saves, tick off the 'do not share' box each time - of course, it's not the optimal solution, but if you don't mind that extra click...

I do get a gut feeling that Delicious will ultimately come up with an option to set a profile as private.

Or you could just start a new service, as the person above suggested. =)
Clean User Interface CSS Tips
So in this post i want to explain how to design a clean user interface using CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). It's useful to make your web pages more simple and neat.
Who is the most famous philosopher of 20th century
Not so interesting about the list, but thought provoking about how you can measure fame, especially in the field of science.
God damn, go out and have a drink son. You have the rest of your life to learn how to traverse a fucking graph.
You're right, I overreacted. I just don't like seeing a politician trained in medicine given the same credibility on economic analysis as someone with a technical background in finance. Not to downplay Ron Paul's solutions to our economic problems, but I've never seen him make an in depth case for why we are where we are today like Schiff has -- his job doesn't call for it.
Indeed, I did just that. I moved all my wordpress installations over to a $10 account with webfaction. I considered a VPS, but dropped that idea quickly. I wasn't interested in being a sysadmin, and I didn't have to worry about shoehorning the DB server, OS and web/application server into the space afforded by a cheap VPS.
30% cost to support 70% of your userbase seems like a win to me.

This is only an issue for developers who target Firefox initially. That's the wrong way to go about web development. Run IE7 on your dev box and build everything against it. That's what your users will have, so that should be your first priority. Step two is making it work for FF.

The added benefit to that approach is that you'll find less cross platform issues. Going from IE -> Firefox is a lot easier than the other way around.
> something-something" will follow whatever we end up calling this mess.

The boom that follow this shitcan of an economy will favor the operationally frugal and those who know how to turn a dollar out of fifteen cents. No doubt some clever writer at WIRED magazine will coin some catchy term for this generation of people in the year 2011. It will coincide conveniently with the rise of Green revolution, no doubt.
There have been a few that have been abandoned for environmental reasons. Prypiat, Ukraine comes to mind as one example. In that case, all 50,000 residents were forced to quickly abandon the city due to the nearby Chernobyl accident.
How To Lead Like Richard Branson
Having a personality of caring about people is important, says Branson. You can’t be a good leader unless you generally like people. That is how you bring out the best in them.
For one thing the concept of Fame as it relates to the importance or relevance of philosophers is somewhat dubious.

However if Fame can be applied to philosophy. Andy Warhol is undoubtedly the most famous philosopher of fame, and he is not on this list.
> My big question: will the rest of the world continue to use USA's economy and currency as the global economic focal point and medium? -or will it abandon them for alternatives?

Here's the crux of the matter: there are no alternatives. The US is a meta-country that drives the rest of the world. It's a proxy for the world.
Already have: http://www.nhplace.com/kent/Papers/Technical-Issues.html
Are you kidding? Developing for a crappy browser first is the perfect recipe for an unmaintainable mess of code, since you will be relying on hacks to get IE to do render correctly, then adding hacks again for every browser that does the right thing.

First develop for a standards-compliant browser, then add (conditional) hacks to support IE. The other way around is just silly.
I disagree. IE is the moving target. If you want maintainable code, it is best to build to standards, then hack to IE with conditionals.
I think we posted this at almost the exact same time. Awesome.
From the article: "In other words, option prices suggest that there is a very real chance of, dare I write it, another Great Depression."

I thought that option prices were mathematically priced primarily on the volatility of the underlying stock or index, with the market makers taking no position on the direction of the price change one way or another. This would make the statement above equivalent to "the recent drop in the market shows that there is a risk of a much larger drop", which seems sort of obvious.

Am I missing something deeper?
It's hard to imagine anything on that scale. Centralia PA (former pop. 2600) was deserted due to major underground fires. But real cities have bounced back from far larger disasters. Hiroshima lost 2/3 of its population but recovered in 10 years.

Remember, though, the actual city of Detroit is only 1/5 of the population of the metro area. While Detroit is failing, the metro area is only hurting. It won't be abandoned.
Well...

Keeping Firefox/Safari is the default option for most web developers. Change is difficult. Web developers struggle to make a living in many cases and know that fighting for pixel-perfect view in IE means wasting ammunition they need on more important projects.

... couldn't hold myself. Sorry :-)
I'm not sure what you are referring to.

When it comes to social science, there is no one single comprehensible good explanation for the vast majority of phenomena - what I was pointing out is that there are systematic biases when comparing "adopted Asian Americans" and "Asian American immigrants". These biases - financial, psychological, etc - will have a significantly larger influence on how children perform than what you're testing for (genetic differences).
Who did the bachelor jason pick?
Retr0Bright : How to deal with the “not-so-mellow yellow” of old computers and consoles
When I worked in college admissions we'd get a report from one of the standardized testing companies every year that basically showed that black and hispanic people scored lower than whites and asians across the board, everywhere. You hear about this stuff on the news and assume it's true. But then you see graph after graph after graph displaying the gulf and it's a still a shocker. We'd probably not have standardized tests anymore if the average Joe was able to see at a glance how much worse blacks and hispanics do on them in every part of the country and under every possible set of testing conditions.

That said, I'm white, and I also learned about regattas by reading about them in a book somewhere. I was bummed out when they got rid of analogies on the SAT. I studied hard to learn new words so i could do well on that part, which I found difficult.
(to save you the 3 minutes of googling around,) brad is apparently from http://www.polleverywhere.com/ , a YC startup that does sms polling
Can I ask you (and others in a similar boat) a question about your work environment? When you say "I have to use IE at work," do you mean at the exclusion of other browsers? I too have to have IE6 at work (many old business apps require it), but I can also run Firefox, Chrome, Flock, Safari, etc. And I don't mind having multiple browsers open, in fact, I just usually do naturally, without any impetus.
Does you workplace lock it down so you have only one browser?
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Do-It-Yourself Laser Zippo
I think the better question is to look in the mirror and ask myself "Am I in trouble?"
Be sure to check out Akihbara -- the otaku and computer geek mecca:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akihabara
Nice to see Brisbane, Australia on there, although the whole reason I left is because it certainly didn't seem like a "hot spring". That said, universities there were certainly doing some great research (very cutting edge all things considered), and getting a lot patents, etc.
Nice to see Tokyo floating big. There is a lot of great stuff going on here, even more than is commonly noticed by the press.
XML: A Retarded Innovation
Code reviews done "right"
Check out Milpitas if you need to save a little money. Great East Asian restaurants and not too far away from the main part of SV.
I actually could build a solid enterprise app in 30 days. Really.
The World As I See It - An Essay by Einstein
Not even the homeless are moving into the city. The poor and desperate can't afford to leave. Sell your grandfather's house for 10k and go where? Once houses really become worthless, even more people will begin to walk away.
Unfortunately there are many people making predictions about where the market will be. The real question is can someone make a prediction, commit capital, and realize a gain based on those predictions. Only time will tell, and for those of use watching from the sidelines, it's virtually impossible to tell who will be right, and if they are right that it's because they deeply understand the fundamentals of the problem versus just randomly having the right prediction for the wrong reasons.
The following NH comment thread has predicted current recession http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=102176 but I doubt anyone has became rich because of that.
When I was working with migrations and ActiveRecord a couple of years ago, we just treated the production database as authoritative. We basically used migrations as disposable chunks of code that would transform the database from state a to state b. If a migration from 3 months ago didn't work anymore it really didn't matter, as the production database was well beyond that point anyway. When we needed to test the migrations, we'd load the most recent backup of the production database into our dev dbs and try it out.

But we did have the luxury of running a (fairly small-scale) website rather than distributing an application.
Whoa! My Master's thesis is devoted to solving several of the organizational limitations you've been voicing. Please check out: http://facette.csail.mit.edu/. It's a tool augments tag-based organization by adding facet-based categorization. Example: http://facette.csail.mit.edu/user/peterjlai
Oh, thanks for pointing that out.
Very nice. Sums the realization up well.
I guess the real people they will benefit from meeting will be the remaining Gecko Gordons (if any).
Cause of gray hair discovered
Programming re-visited
I'm trying to express a couple of thought which might be a bit "out-there", and would really appreciate feedback - is a "clarification loop" self-explanatory, or "out there"? What about the rest of the intuitions about programming?

PS - please leave comments (instead of upvoting, even). This stuff is unpolished - feedback from people I've never talked to about this is much more valuable than visibility at this point.
Where are you now?

I know the McKinsey is a subscription - but does anyone know if the complete data set available? In particular, I'd like to know how other Australian cities were positioned (I'm in Melbourne).
hmm... you've been listening to Donny Deutch and Bill Maher, and you still don't know what's going on? Obviously, the problem is you didn't pay enough attention to Suzy Orman.
Welcome to Chester England.
The city of Chester is almost completely surrounded by its 2 mile circuit of walls. The beginnings of the walls are said to have begun construction as a defence to the fort or ‘castra’ built by the Romans.
43,439 reasons to use append() correctly