skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Only if the drive is based on Intel's MLC or, even better - Samsung's SLC flash.

Regular (cheap) MLC-based SSDs are good only at reading big sequential files and lose out to 7200rpm drives when it comes to many small writes.

I can't find a ling to a guy who blogged about his disappointing experience compiling C/C++ sources on a regular MLC drive, but I googled Linus Torvald's experience with Intel:

http://torvalds-family.blogspot.com/2008/10/so-i-got-one-of-...

I personally find that I just have all my software open all the time, most of what I need gets pre-cached in 4GB of RAM I have, and I never reboot, i.e. no need to restart anything [unless, of course, freaking Adobe Flash freezes my Mac]
> It's all very confusing, and completely needless

Well, the funny thing is that the complexity is there for the some of the same reasons that HN explicitly doesn't document its behavior -- it's a small barrier. But these are much lower barriers than HN, as I'll describe below.

> Hide things or at least make it obvious what I can't use before clicking

Ah, but this is a problem -- we tell you what you need to earn to do something when you click on it. So a) you have an idea that the feature exists, and b) you can do it at some point in the future.

> Reduce the arbitrary karma limits

Our limits are quite low, far lower than HN. We require the equivalent of 2 karma on HN to upvote, and 10 to downvote. More here, just divide by 10 to get the HN equivalents -- http://stackoverflow.com/faq
Google’s Using its Whitespace - God, my eyes
I don't see the higher potential reward logic for Plan B.

Like.. you build a userbase and then one day you flip a switch and your 10,000 uniques open their wallets in unison?

When did it become fashionable in the business world to insist upon punching users in the face with a product or service?
50 States Classifieds
Mashable buys blippr
I experimented with combining the "Digg model" with indie music when I created Contrastream and although I have been too busy with another start-up to flesh out the idea, I still believe there is a lot of potential. I still find it difficult to find new indie music.

The next level may be a combination of scraped content (hypem) and social voting.

I recently met up with the founders of another startup trying to tackle this problem at http://cherrypeel.com, and they seemed excited about it as well. Hopefully there is some money to be made from it to make it sustainable.
Framing The Collapsonomics Practice: A response to Orlov's Collapse of America
1) submitted links cannot be voted down. This is, in fact, correct.

2) comments can be voted down, but it's uncommon, and the UI is invisible (literally) to the point that a casual user wouldn't even see it happening on most posts (very few posts go negative). This is a good thing, but it's not at all clear to a new or unsophisticated user that the possibility of being downvoted is on the table at all. Particularly given the front page which does not allow downvotes on submissions.

3) isn't your post the very sort of inflammatory stuff that you're claiming I write?
Workstations, Old vs. New: Real World Performance
Possibly.

However if I really felt slighted...

I have access to a proxy farm with ~500 diverse IP's. I also spend a fair bit of time on boring conference calls. If I were truly bothered by this, he would find himself with 10,000 new followers in 24 hours.
... That's actually a result of everything that's happened since Walt's death in 66, especially the terrible reign of Michael Eisner from 84 to 05 which nearly killed Disney's animation.

There's a book called "The Illusion of Life" that was written by Two of the "Nine Old Men" of animation who were with Walt from the early days.

When you read some of the early chapters, Disney held a lot of the values that many Hackers hold including iterating quickly, being open with information (within his own organisation that is) and always pushing the envelope with what was possible.
Does that apply to the individual document page, or to the whole site? That is, if I have one static page that's from 2008, and the rest of the pages are from 2009, can I only say (c) 2008 on the one page?

I ask because it always feels to me, when I see "(c) 2001" or something similar, that a site is rotting on the vine.
My blog's set in standard Helvetica. Nothing bold there, beyond the title. Do you have Helvetica installed? If so, is it actually Helvetica or a font using the name Helvetica? I've tested this theme on every major OS/browser.

This statement is SO wrong. Contrast can be very important in creating visual separation and hierarchy, but this is dangerously close to the implication that everything should be contrasty all the time. (Think about flourescent spandex from the 80s as an example of this idea brought to life.) Style needs harmony. Walk in to a banana republic and look at how all the subtle variations of earth tones can blend to make some very stylish outfits... visit barackobama.com or whitehouse.gov and notice how all the different hues of blue work together to create a great aesthetic.

There's probably a better way for me to say that, absolutely. It's not contrast per se, it's just making sure that your colors all look pretty. Gradient colors are very pretty when they're used well, as they are on all of Obama's page designs.
One important distinction that a lot of agile people make is more around writing down the specs; as the PM you still do work up front to think about what to do, make mockups, do your homework, etc., but when it comes time to communicate to developers it's done as stories (much less detailed than specs) and with in-person communication for clarification (or, under less ideal circumstances, over the phone or e-mail or chat). The process of getting to the story in the first place ought to involve plenty of back-and-forth, design vetting, and mockups, but once you get there you don't build something based on a spec of any kind.

The theory there is that written documents will always be out of date, incomplete, stale, and open to multiple interpretations, so we might as well just accept that the face-to-face communication is infinitely higher bandwidth and will have to happen anyway and not waste the time trying to write it all down up front.

So if the PM needs to spec for their own edification, that's fine: do whatever works for you. But I, as the developer, will trust the PM themselves as the source of truth as to what the feature should do, and it's the PM's job to know what they want well enough to answer my questions real-time as I'm building.
This anandtech review was very helpful to me:

http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/intel/showdoc.aspx?i=34...

Gives a lot of detail about the various types of SSDs and why the intel is currently the best bet. Warning, reading it might cause you to go into a "gear lust trance" and spend a lot of money.
Teen-created Muziic likely to irk YouTube
Oh okay I think I finally worked it after toying with things off and on over 20 minutes - a "tag radio" list has appeared when I'm in a radio section and if I click one of those tags music will play continuously. I guess by playlists I meant ones I create.

In any case I think this feature needs to be a lot clearer.
That's very smooth!
For Loop Liberation Front
Brilliant. I love the idea of bootstrapping start ups, but I love it more when the start up has some kind of business model behind it. The real achievement is not only to get 'eyeballs' but paying customers. After all, once you're keeping yourself afloat, you can continue to do what you do.

There was an article titled 'Free is Killing Us - Blame the VCs':

http://www.businessinsider.com/2008/4/-free-is-killing-us-bl...

This might sound cruel and heartless, but I hope the financial crisis has the VC-funded toy-companies fail and the legitimate small businesses prosper sooner than later.
Indeed. In retrospect, it's somewhat ironic that the group of banks that bailed out LTCM included Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers, and AIG. The "bailers" became the "bailees".
Hi Paul, let me just start by saying your essays are great and a true inspiration.

My team and i are from australia and we have all been working in a 9-5 and also doing our startup which after 1.5 years is almost complete (just a FEW more months). It isnt totally my choice to do a 9-5 but certain things happen in life that require that you have a stable income. Im still relatively young (27 and so is my co-founder.)

To do a 9-5 and working on a startup at the same time takes alot of resourceful-ness. Juggling responsibilities, making deals with the boss such as working from home agreements ;) occasionally telling white lies because of a major release require testing all takes fast talking.

Also getting since money isnt in abundance in our startup, as the money is being used to support family (parents and sister) we have had to come up with alternatives and do alot of our reading to understand the best company structures both for the future and for now from a company structure and taxation point of view.

Finally the coding after work until the weee hours of the morning and then getting up at 8:30 to get ready for work again. There is the relentless drive that you need to have and the resourcefulness to make the best of the money and the situation.

Reading your articles just highlights that currently we have been doing things the right way, and its good to know. We are almost done, company structure, code/application (final stages of testing), business plan, monetization plans ... cant wait to release her out into the wild.
Don Norman on 3 ways good design makes you happy
If you know of any other high quality, advanced undergraduate or graduate level courses in these areas, please leave them in the comments and I'll update the list.
No, I'm not saying that.

But we don't know quite how, and to do that, you need to go to school (or a textbook, if that works for you) to learn about this stuff. Otherwise, you end up asking questions that don't quite make sense to scientists, or lack relevance for contemporary research.

That is not a put-down - I had some of these same questions/thoughts/ideas before I took any classes.
Advice from business-people is inapplicable to us science students most of the time.

Walt was an innovator first, businessman second.

Did you know he invented the multiplane camera that revolutionised the Animation industry?

Or perhaps that he insisted on having the pegs on the Animation Discs down the bottom where it was the standard at the time to have them up the top? This was so they could do rolling, a small change but a huge revolution at the time

Every chance he got he tried to push the envelope of what was possible - in fact, this nearly sent him broke in the early days.

I think if Walt was born in this century, you'd see the guy in Silicon Valley doing what a lot of us are trying to do now.

Anyay lastly, I think I should finish this off with another quote of his, which kind of underlines the point I'm trying to make.

"I don't make movies to make money. I make money to make movies"

- Walt Disney
Long time artist user of TheSixtyOne.

It has seriously driven more people to my music than anything else has. Granted, I don't play the myspace 'thanks for the add' game.

http://www.thesixtyone.com/devin/
I think you're on the home page. For an example, you can see my personal tag playlist named 'mellow':

http://www.thesixtyone.com/tags/song/show/sam/mellow/

Or go to your profile and click on the tags that appear to your right.
In Nature’s Casino: catastrophe insurance
I had no idea that only 85.5% of the population had normal color vision.
Ah, so you are the chubby, short, boring, badly dressed, poor, always late, glib, irresponsible guy who gets all the women with his sense of humor!
I don't think it uses Collaborative Filtering technology, but each user has their own radio which is basically a list of their favorite songs.
And then software will expand to make everything slow again.
Right thanks :-)
I see now I can just go to my profile and "listen to radio" to play my favourites.
Not true. We have an incredible chemistry department at Wisconsin! [This is not a plug - many of the undergraduate physics courses here are awful.]

This was my 2nd semester organic professor:
http://www.chem.wisc.edu/users/tyoon

He's amazing, and if you learned organic chemistry from him, you'd say the same thing.

At any rate, how can anyone be interested in deep questions like the orginal poster's question without also being interested in at least a basic understanding of the chemistry of life?
There is a really easy way to do it right now, that just involves recoding some drivers (no hardware needs to be changed): steal the port bytes from TCP and UDP and use them as two additional bytes of host address. No server is using all of its ports; turning them into addresses (and requiring a server to have as many addresses as it has connections open) would flatten the two spaces together, which seems almost elegant to me.
I would absolutely see a therapist. You could try out a psychologist just to "talk things out with" and he/she can recommend a psychiatrist if medication is needed. It can help. I have ADD and occasionally have anxiety symptoms as well, and I've been to a few therapists so I know that therapy can really help.
As a developer on the receiving end of "stories" I find that a few sentences on an index card are, in most cases, woefully inadequate at describing the desired functionality. So what happens is you end up going back and forth to the PM with your questions, which is inefficient, OR you make assumptions to fill in the gaps, which sometimes works out well and sometimes does not.

On the other hand I've also had the unhappy experience of wading through dense, arcane specification documents written in stilted language ("the system shall...." ad nauseum) that are ultimately not much better.

In the end I think what this illustrates is that writing a good, concise, clear, complete functional specification is not easy. It requires a talented PM and no formulaic approach, whether it is agile or anything else, can get around that.
"At least in the traditional sense." It was subtle, but if you have looked at Machiavelli's original political theory, you notice it has been grossly mischaracterized in today's society. If I were to sum up what Machiavellian means, in the traditional sense, I would say it is prudence, ability, effort, and fortunate circumstance.

In a previous post, pg revealed a situation where applying ideas created more ideas and this is perfect because it has nothing to do with theory, it has everything to do with authentic experience. Great ideas are easy, applying them is a whole different animal.
I wish I've had a classics education

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/anagnorisis

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/peripeteia
Exercise is what always saves me, specifically running, soccer (before hurting knee), and yoga (since hurting knee).
Charles Stross, a science fiction writer, has an interesting essay about the difficulties involved: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/06/the_high...

His conclusion is that it's unlikely, and I agree.
EMI’s Outrageous Lawsuit Against Developer Takes Its Toll
Please elaborate on how my questions don't make sense to scientists or lack relevance for contemporary research.

So what if what I propose is not feasible anytime soon? Thinking about the distant future could make for interesting discussion.
Not if you consistently have $25,000 to spend on a computer.
Good idea, but I see three problems:

1. Chicken and egg: Until such a feature is ubiquitous, labels can't rely on its presence, and won't release in a suitable format. Until there is demand, player manufacturers won't include it. And I don't see much independent consumer demand.

2. There is no one algorithm or processing technique which will give optimal results for all inputs. The process is still an art requiring a lot of skill and, well, taste. Mastering is still a real necessity. There's crude automated compression, sure, but for the real end product I don't think anyone wants that.

3. The sound is already mixed at the consumer end. For successful remastering (which is basically what you're doing on the fly) the separate tracks would be needed. For example, in an otherwise uncompressed track, a distorted electric guitar is pretty much naturally compressed. Drums are the opposite. Naively just compressing the whole thing will keep the guitar and lose the drums. I'm really oversimplifying here but hopefully you get the picture.

I do think such an approach could work, but you'd need to supply the mixable tracks, or relevant groups of them at least, and then supply mixing/compression instructions to the player. If the instructions were standardised with fairly predictable and consistent results, that could be a way to implement such a scheme.
This "article" really says a lot, mostly how Jeff Atwood and the average redditor are at about the same mental level. (Note how Jeff snipes at HN, and then the rest of the sheep pile on. It is hilarious.)

StackOverflow is a nice site, but I wish Jeff would spend less time spreading ignorance and more time programming.
Exactly. If you want to be good in options trading, be good at physics. Acceleration and deceleration of options values are very interesting (and very valuable) in volatile markets. And as the article states there is no Pi solution. It's simply fun to apply physics to financial markets when applicable.
How to land your dream job using LinkedIn
Cool service, I'll be signing up my two servers over the week
How to Succeed at Anything, applied to programmers
EtherPad Adventure
Hints, CamelCase and, it's not done yet. Contribute!
This should work with USB thumbdrives too.

The ones I've tested are faster than a HDD (and faster than the SSD in a eee PC). They're also cheap.

Bottleneck would shift to USB bandwidth (60 MByte/s) and the PC itself.
This almost certainly also applies to entrepreneurs.
Does anyone actually know what's really wrong with the economy?

Because I've been reading about this shit for nearly two years and I don't have a real good handle on it, particularly how CDS are involved.
It's not done yet. Contribute!
Is this a "real" acquisition or is it some sort of "join our team and I'll pay you" swap? I always wonder about these things...
Very cute puppy.
Why is it calling me RoyalPerson?
You realize that if you did this, your computer could only ever open 256 concurrent outbound connections to a single host, right?

If you really were going to upgrade every router and switch on the Internet and port every single program that used the BSD sockets interface or the Win32 WSA Socket interface, and for some perverse reason you felt you needed a backwards-compatible frame format, you wouldn't break TCP or UDP to do it. You'd add a pair of IP options, called "source address extension" and "destination address extension".

But of course, you wouldn't do this, because if you're going to go through that much pain, you might as well get the full IPv6 address space.
As compared to the all too common Hacker News circlejerks? :(
Could Customized Newspapers Bring Readers Back?
Not bad at all. I've been using Kuler: http://kuler.adobe.com/
It reads too much like a paid advertisement for LinkedIn -

Quote -

"What follows is THE POINT of this article!

Do yourself a favor and upgrade to a premium LinkedIn BusinessPlus Account, ... "
I was thinking the same thing. I wish re-tweeting verbatim would go away.
So that means 12/26, or 46% of respondents have reached some level of profitability. This seems high to me.

Yet again I boggle at the notion of an environment in which 46% of businesses turning a profit seems unreasonably high.
http://esciencenews.com was profitable the second I decided to turn on some ads on the very darkest corners of the site - it could have been in 1 month, but I decided to turn them on only 6 months after.

http://biologynews.net was profitable after a year, but it was my first project and I didn't have much experience at the time (many years ago).
I DO NOT work for LinkedIn or have any affiliation with them. I just think they have picked a great business model and I've been able to take advantage of it.
I had a day job for the whole time so it was not exactly a pressing concern, but it took me about 16 months for the first seasonal spike leading to ramen profitable, a year after that until it was a consistent thing, and about 4ish months after that until I am more or less "day job profitable". (As in, "this could be my day job".)

If you want to see the actual numbers, see left hand sidebar here:

http://www.bingocardcreator.com/stats
When Does it Feels Right to Kiss a Toilet Bowl?
If you don't subscribe to NYTimes, you can read the article at:
http://www.iht.com/articles/2009/03/10/business/10quant.php
How to Get A Job at a Top Ruby Shop
There are a lot of games that need voice chat that do not have it. Most other MMOs come to mind - there is plenty of starving market before you even get to the behemoth that is WoW.
Bad paper was co-signed by good people.
So you quit your job to run your own company.

I did? News to my bosses. ;) I've had a day job for the entire duration.

I started being consistently ramen profitable about 28 months after starting. (Last October-ish.) In February I hit my next milestone, which was "sales > salary". I'm hoping to hit "profits > salary" sometime before the end of April.

I've only ever had one product. I've tried making two others in the interim, but they got put on the back burner for a variety of reasons. Someday.

Stuff of interest: I don't know what you find interesting, but my blog is in my profile if you want the whole story. If you want to skip to pretty graphs see http://www.bingocardcreator.com/stats .
TED: Aimee Mullins on Running ( inspirational )
I think you're doing fine. GitHub is infrastructure, and programming is a dirty job.