skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I guess one problem with that is that it favors people with money too much. In principle I also believe in markets, but I think this is the point where the neo-capitalist logic fails.

As an example: I remember reading in "the armchair economist" how the author was angry at environmentalists because they denied him the right to pollute the environment if he was willing to shell out the money for it. He mentions that it might be worth 50$ per year to him to make sure lions don't go extinct, but not much more than that. Well maybe it would be worth 1000000$ per year to another person, but that person does not have the 1000000$ per year.

Tough luck one could say, but by that one would assume a certain definition of what is fair, and it is not obvious what consequences that definition would have in the long run.
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You are glad based on how it made you feel, not on what impact it made. Most probably it didn't have much impact and you might as well have dropped the trash. Not that that's what I would've done, but saying we should trust our emotions on this big and costly problem makes no sense. Of course, throwing rationality out of the window by definition doesn't make any sense. I'm not sure what your point is.
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Ask HN: Feedback on my Flex app
Replace it with &shy;
for associative arrays
foo: bar,
for non-associative
foo, bar,

surely this is unambiguous?

x:
y: "a",
z: "23",
q: 54,
32,
45
,
r: 43
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When Smart Is Dumb
This graph is produced by KCacheGrind from a backtrace file produced by XDebug (http://xdebug.org/). The combination of these tools is very valuable in identifying performance problems in PHP applications. Not at this level of detail, though :)
Twice-as-fast isn't good enough
This took me quite a bit of googling to "confirm" so I thought I'd save the next guy some trouble.

Lucene is sort of Doug Cutting's Java version of Text Database (TDB), which he and Jan Pedersen developed at Xerox PARC, and which, to complete the circle, was written in Common Lisp (see "An Object-Oriented Architecture for Text Retrieval").

http://code.google.com/p/montezuma/
What would you ask a porting house?
Hi, my partner and I have a meeting with a porting house today. We have an iPhone app and government funds to port to other platforms. What would you ask?
I played around with the Twitter API yesterday for the first time and running HTTP REST requests via curl (install it with Cygwin on windows) was invaluable to tracking down some problems and figuring out the expected results
I'm a .NET guy and I've tried both Dreamweaver and the Visual Studio shell and I prefer Visual Studio. It can get in my way sometimes but, since I'm likely in it anyway writing C#, it keeps me from having to use two IDEs.
That's actually pretty impressive - not so much the idea but getting the users to accept it (even like it). Unusual :D
Good points, but:

> The Internet's less than 20

The web is less than 20, the internet is significantly older, having been put together in the late 1960ies and early 1970ies:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet#History
"The two sidebar ads will stay, however, they will switch from a contrast visual style to a blend visual style (for text ads)."

Say what you will about Atwood, but he nails a lot of the details. Keeping the ads but making them unobtrusive for established users is a great idea that I'm surprised I haven't seen elsewhere.
Seems to me that Apple is a lot worse than Microsoft, and has been for a very long time. Microsoft prioritizes developers much more than Apple ever has, that I know of.
"Fast Times at Fairmont High" is an entertaining short read about this issue.
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You are not wrong about the capability of the Visual Studio IDE (well VS2008 anyway) when it comes to HTML editing but if you are looking to just edit HTML then VS would be just a little over the top I think.
I see that most of your comments in this thread fly in the face of what most climate scientists believe to be happening.

I'd ask for sources, but there's no way to confirm that the people behind them are actual "climate scientists", whatever that means these days. It's hard to see who's who anymore, but smug confidence like this definitely rings my alarm bells.
How about showing us the code for the Hello World script as well?
Anyone know a similar program for Mac?
First, no jokes about banning coffee, please! Studies have shown it to be good for general health (diabetes prevention, etc, etc) in addition to its mental influences.

I would love to try e.g. Ritalin, but couldn't handle breaking (non-traffic) laws.

Also, I can't even handle computer games and never install them. If Ritalin worked for me and I could sit and hack code/read manuals with higher efficiency, I'd never stop using it, whatever the side effects. ("Just this project; I also just want to learn X,Y,Z...")

I assume other people here would get the same effect.
The third suggestion about making the parts of a project get shorter and shorter so that you feel like you are making progress is really smart. I'm definitely going to try that.
Talk to your parents.

It's amazing what the response to

"I just recently graduated. Instead of going to Europe to get drunk for a year, I'd like to go home for a year and write software for my startup."

can be.
I didn't mean it's not :) Only that a downmod without comments leaves no room for discussion. Even if you agree with the downvoter, it's still not ok.
This might also be used as an educational tool for exploring the intricacies of the Zend FW.
Especially those parts in which the Zend handles the 'View' and 'Controller' of the MVC :)
Image is broken...
It would be very nice to have a "postgreSQLite" with all functionalities of postgreSQL but could be used as sqlite when only one application use the database.
Are there charts like this for some of the other PHP frameworks? CodeIgniter, CakePHP and Yii would be good ones to look at.
Well, first of all, what's hard for one person can be easy for the next. Plus, people have a lot of misconceptions about many business related fields.

Take marketing, for example. It is often misinterpreted as purely "promotion" when really it also encompasses product development, pricing and placement. For me, product development and placement come naturally while I find branding to be tremendously difficult, certainly more difficult than any technical challenge I've ever faced. What one person finds "easy" or "hard" is dependent on a lot of factors, including personality type, skills, what sector that person is operating in, etc. For one product or service, pricing may be extremely simple while in another it might require significant market analysis.

Also, whether a person finds something "hard" or not doesn't directly relate to its value. I wouldn't find it "hard" to spend hours reading case studies, but they are tremendously valuable since you can learn from other companies' successes and failures and apply them to your own company. On the other hand, someone might find advanced corporate finance "hard," but unless he or she wants to work in a job in which it would apply, it's largely useless for that person.

FWIW, I'm not in an MBA program, but I do the web business thing while my wife is in a top-tier MBA program and is an exec in the financial industry. She has an analytical background but prefers strategy and operations. I know one of the things she finds both challenging and valuable is being exposed to fields that are outside of her interests but are important for having a well-rounded view of how businesses and marketplaces function. In bad business conditions this is especially valuable since you can't just stumble and guess your way around like you can when money flows easily.
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>On the other hand, there're a lot of people online who are famous for being famous: people like Julia Allison or Cory Doctorow come to mind.

that line doesn't seem to follow logically from it's previous one. seems almost like you went out of your way to diss these people on the internet. in any case, i have to say that i've enjoyed what few i've read from doctorow.
I think this is an excellent article and it's clear that the guy who wrote that did a lot of research.
An even worse case occured here in Greece, where the owner of a rss news aggregator site was sued and forced to shut down his site, got all of his electronic equipment confiscated, arrested and as far as I can recall had to pay a fine, let alone having to spend a night in jail.

The reason for all that was that in one blog, related to the site only through the blog's rss feed, made a post with libelous remarks towards (according to) the plaintiff.

The greek authorities (or the plaintiff, I am not sure who first took this approach) couldn't prosecute the blogger because he used a US hosted blog service, and thus could not be identified. So the solution was to sue the owner of the news aggregator, which had a greek domain name.
Spam moving to Twitter?
KCacheGrind works on the mac. Install it via MacPorts or Fink. I've blogged about this waybackwhen:

http://www.gnegg.ch/2006/08/profiling-php-with-xdebug-and-kc...

And if you don't bother installing KDE3 on your Mac, there's also

http://www.maccallgrind.com/

and

http://ccg.wiki.sourceforge.net/

and

http://code.google.com/p/webgrind/

All three tools parse the profiling Output that's generated by XDebug which runs perfectly well on a mac, or on any machine PHP runs on.
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This line of thought follows previous posts on the same subject.

It's very Norvig-esq (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNjJTgXujno), but there's also http://anand.typepad.com/datawocky/2008/03/more-data-usual.h... and also Chris Anderson and Wired's flame bait http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/magazine/16-07/pb_t... (that month's wired was dedicated to this subject)

And like someone at the previous discussions has said, this is the base of the scientific method, not it's death
Yes! The main reason why sane people want legal cognitive-enhancing drugs is more regulation, not less. I want to be sure that whatever I take is as safe as aspirin, in what conditions, what dosages and for what length of time. And current regulations don't say any of this.

Oh well. I fully expect both this and the other kind of cognitive enhancing to be available in Japan way before the rest of the world. One more reason to move there.
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"but from a greenhouse gas perspective, the savings are small at best"

Taking that argument down to an even more micro-level: most of the light in my apartment comes from overhead halogen lights (hot), and sometimes I'm inclined to switch them for energy efficient fixtures, but...

I live in a cold place anyway, so I'm not sure that switching makes a lot of sense. I know it's more efficient for the central heating system to be doing the heating (and not light bulbs, refrigerators, or laptops), but I need the heat, I need the light, and my energy bill isn't that big, so why switch?
I'm not sure if this is one of the things preventing such, but it's an issue I had with our DB:

When an embedded database is interacting with something like, say, Apache, which uses fork to create multiple processes, your locks have to be multi-process-safe as opposed to multi-thread-safe. For something that's designed with single-process, but multi-threaded access in mind, that can be a bit of a chore.
I would also add the "Theorizing from data" talk from Norvig:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nU8DcBF-qo4
The truth is Engineering colleges are churning out more Entrepreneurs than MBA schools.
This comes across as totally meaningless. Even ignoring the fact that this corresponds to no real world use of ZF there is way too much detail here for it to be useful.

For a comparison to other PHP applications see this post: http://blog.fedecarg.com/2008/08/04/php-applications-where-i...
I suppose if(!) man-made warming is happening, climate is not really a cycle anymore.
Tip to speed up your internet
I think your example is useless. Of course predicting any kind of calamity would warrant spending money to reduce the damage (in the larger context, ie considering where spending the money will have the most effect). If a meteor would be about to land on your hometown, would you scramble to get to the other side of the planet? Of course you would, no matter if the meteor falls down because of natural causes or because of a giant magnet somebody build to attract it.
Here is a real example. Pretend like you are in a finance class. It's a case study. On Microsoft buying Yahoo! Determine how much Microsoft should be willing to pay for Yahoo! and the assumptions and rationale behind your conclusion. Or how much is AOL worth as a spinout of Time Warner. The core of the answer lies in something called the Capital Asset Pricing Model and it is as every bit as complex as the fixed point combinator for which YC was named.

A little more practical and more marketing aligned, doing real market research for a natural foods store to determine if they should expand their footprint to other locations or just increase the size of their current store. It took over a month to design the questionnaire before the prof deemed it acceptable.

With that said, the real challenge, and what any top school does, is teach students how to prioritize. They give you so much work that you can not possibly get it all complete at the level of excellence in which you want to operate so you have to learn when something is good enough and move on to the next pressing issue. Which, BTW, is pretty much what you need to do in a startup as well.
Just being curious: have you (or anyone else building their startup on their parent's expense) ever considered giving your folks a cut of equity in your company? And if so, how much?
" In the case of the warmists, since you are literally stealing food and medicine from people's mouths with your demands of what is necessary, you better be damn certain you're right."

The same goes for you - if the warmists are right, then the non-warmists are stealing food from people's mouths (as farmland will be burned or flooded or whatever).
Is there any difference in the logic? Locking access to a variable will work the same way, even if it's multiple processes trying to access it vs multiple threads. Is the difference just in the mechanism of the lock, or is there some type of difference in behaviour in accessing shared items between threads and processes?
The risk of going part-time isn't that a competitor will beat you, it's that you won't make a good enough product. Don't worry about competitors, worry about the product.
Pet peeve: why use a video to convey a couple simple suggestions (one of which is "use S3" - not a huge surprise since this is from the blog of Amazon CTO Werner Vogels)?

The other suggestion is more interesting, and one I been contemplating several ways of implementing: off-loading very large (proportionally) text fields into files (one raw; one html-tagged; etc) simpling linked in in a db field.

Anybody else had a project where that was applicable? effective?
Lomborg's claims rest on the assumption that the benefits are small and uncertain. I remember him citing "heat deaths" as one of the worst predicted outcomes of global warming. "Warmists" would certainly disagree that this is the worst thing to expect. I don't know the proper name for this argumentation technique, in my opinion Lomborg creates a kind of strawman, but that is not quite the right word. He says "look here, heat deaths are a non-issue, so global warming is a non-issue", when really heat-deaths are not the main issue of global warming.

You are of course right about rational decision making, but the estimates of the risks diverge between the groups, so they arrive at different decisions.
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Because natural gas is around 4x cheaper per joule than electricity.

If your energy bill is, say, $10 per month, maybe it's not worth it. Would you buy $30 in lightbulbs to save $7.50 * 12 months * 10 years = $900 over the next ten years?

If not, would you like to fund my startup?
I live in India, Pune. So the expense are really low as compared to US or Europe.
Plus, I really cut down on expenses and still manage to have decent lifestyle. I have a cook coming in to cook food and a maid to clean the house.

I worked for a year and saved enough ($3000). This amount of money will go long way (8 to 10 months) if I spend frugally. I am already 4 months into developing the startup.

Another thing is, develop a knack for getting things cheaply. If you search around, you can get same things far cheaper, than say from a Mall or Big shop.
doh, I missed the root comment (threading isn't very obvious in links).
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The heat in your basement does actually have somewhere else to go. Typically, uninsulated basement walls and floor are near the temperature of the surrounding earth, which ranges between 45-55 F depending on how far down you are on the wall and your latitude. Heat conduction between basement air and those cold surfaces is not negligible on the scale of home heating.
I would suggest a part-time job as well. That's my situation right now. I'm a soon-to-be-grad, and I'm doing part-time school, part-time work at a software company. One or two days a week there (depending on my work load at school) pays my living expenses, tuition and loan repayments.

If I weren't in school, and didn't have student debt, I could live quite well on the same amount of income, yet bootstrap a startup at the same time.

Mind you, this requires a well-paying and flexible part-time job, but it's definitely possible.
Oh man, so many memories... I still remember my first interaction with a bubble jet printer. Back in the day, the electronic card catalog machines at Ball State University's library were hooked up to these early bubble jet printers. I remember what was distinct about them was that they held on to all of the old dot matrix conventions: the head was mounted horizontally and in front of the roller, and the paper was still fed by sprocket wheels. The speed was pretty decent too!

One that I would have liked to see under the hardware section is thermal paper fax machines. I still remember working in my parents office as the "gopher" when I was in grade school. One of my jobs was to make photocopies of all the faxes so that they could still be read after the thermal paper faded.

...good times...
Props to the YC crew for giving all of us this opportunity and hacking (machete, not keyboard) their way through the applications.

I hope our video isn't too boring. We tried to keep it light, but we had to script it to say everything we wanted to say in <= 1 minute. I would have much rather submitted the outtakes, but we aren't getting graded on hilarity. :)

Good luck to all!
No, you aren't giving away your SID. The random-looking number is the ASIN of the product. (You could have reassured yourself by reasoning as follows: everything apart afrom that final number clearly contains very little product-specific or user-specific information; and there surely isn't enough information in a 10-bit number to identify both a product and a user uniquely.)

I don't think it's reasonable to expect Amazon to have product URLs with no random-looking unique ID in at all, and 10 digits seems pretty modest. But I don't see why they couldn't make http://www.amazon.com/ASIN/0961392118 take you to their main page for that book.
In a database you have to lock access at the file level, naturally. To do multi-process locks you need to store your locks either in shared memory on in an mmap block so that they're shared between processes and then you have to deal with the case of processes crashing or being killed without releasing their locks, which can then trigger a deadlock because the lock is held by a process that doesn't exist anymore.

To resolve that you can pop up to the process tree, assuming you saved the PID along with the lock and see if that process still exists (and hope its PID hasn't been reused) and if not iterate over all locks held by that process and free them to break the deadlock, but that sort of overhead at something as fundamental as locking code can be annoying.

Also note that your semaphores then have to usually be implemented in assembly or you have to have a library that implements atomic increments of reference counts. Qt's QAtomicInt will do the trick if abused a little (just because it has an assembly implementations for multiple architectures). pthread_* doesn't have support for this as far as I know.

So, yeah, it's doable and some DBs do handle multi-process concurrent access, but it can be a pain in the ass. I believe SQLite does it by just locking complete tables on write access rather than using more fine-grained locks. MySQL embedded may also support multi-process access -- not sure.
Ask HN: What to do after selling startup?
As a young, recent college CS graduate interested in startups -- I'm curious -- what do most of you plan to do after selling your startup? (And for those who have sold startups already, what do you spend your days doing?)

Contributing to open source projects?
Teaching middle schoolers how to program?
Traveling the world wasting money on drugs & hookers?

I'm kidding on the last one.

It almost seems like "day jobs", besides providing a basic source of income, also provides a social environment for one to live in.

Thanks!
This strikes me as being worried about the same thing, especially in a market ripe enough for you to have real competition. Presumably, in trying to best your competition, you and/or they -- hopefully both if both are paying some attention to the other -- will ultimately approach a product the customer wants. Otherwise, you're both dead anyway. Past that, it's up to whoever has the better product.

The only other thresholds to overcome is that you or your competition solve enough of the customer's problem for them to be interested at all, and that the price is something the customer would be willing to pay. Odds are, if you are tooth-and-nail with one or more competitors, you'll pass both those thresholds just trying to keep ahead of them.

There might be very niche markets were you won't have the threat of competition to keep you honest about product quality, but I can't imagine of any. I'd worry about any market where no one cares enough to make a competing product.