skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> They already do, of course. Heard of the WTO?

It's unclear that the WTO hasn't passed its peak of "good". There hasn't been much progress since 2006 and the recent G-20 meeting abandoned the term "free markets" as a goal.

Note the backslide from paragraph 12 from http://keithhennessey.com/wp-content/uploads/files/Summit%20... to paragraph 3 from http://www.g20.org/Documents/g20_communique_020409.pdf .

I'm perfectly willing to blame the US for that change (even though it's not the only one pushing that direction) - my point is that the smashing success is likely a thing of the past.
Images are copyrightable. It would never make sense to trademark an image because if you can put the image in a fixed medium a) it is free and b) it is protected much longer.
Coincidentally, the Boston Globe Magazine's "Coupling" feature just ran an essay by an Indian attorney living in DC, who has been ashamed to admit that her parents bought a newspaper ad and arranged an introduction to the man whom she will marry this summer.

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/magazine/articles/2009/04/...
Wrote my first college English paper on--what else?--Hacker News
The thing that surprises me about the graph is that MacOS jobs pay significantly more than either Linux or Windows; the advantage of Linux itself over Windows is so small that it might be a statistical fluke.

Maybe anyone who can afford to fill their office with Macs can also afford to pay top dollar for engineers to program and maintain them.
Moreover, I think the article's definition of Real programmers somehow do not work well in a team
That is beyond my abilities since, as a previous poster said, this is a potentially interesting topic but this article about it is completely uninteresting.
Similar startups that have emerged from Y Combinator and TechStars
A lot of people forget how recently westerns imported brides of their own. My family arrived in San Francisco from Quebec in the mid 1840s, but my grandfather (married in the late 1930s) was the first to stop importing french speaking brides. It went on for generations. Sheesh.

That said, I'm really, really, really glad he put an end to this little tradition of ours.
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Incidentally, it's the same in Ruby, and supports :

a = [1,2,3]
=> [1, 2, 3]
a << a
=> [1, 2, 3, [...]]
a.inspect

It's not true laziness, though; it's as long as the list when you tie it to itself.
The submitted article mentioned an ad describing one prospect as a "brahmin boy." How pervasive is caste as a selection criterion for arranged marriages?
I don't see how this is an HN topic. Flagged.
"Optimistic typing" as an alternative to static typing
Ðis is ſtupid. People condemn ðe relational model for SQL limitations, but SQL is not relational at all.
Is a student who took a very different set of courses in high school exactly as strong a candidate for college admission as some other student with the same test who took different courses? How about if one student sleeps on a sheet of cardboard under a bridge (working by day to support his family), while another lives in a mansion and has test-prep tutors come to coach him throughout his free time?
In short, sell disney's stock, don't watch the movie, kids will hate it, a horrible disaster.

If that isn't clearly intentional FUD I don't know what it is.

Journalism is as disgusting as politics.
That would be Sun, Netscape and Apple.
People that seek funding from early stage investors (and get rejected) probably don't have that much experience. They'll benefit just from the interview process, as it will hone the idea.
It's easy; go look at those colleges that didn't consider the test

The submitted article says there is exactly one such college, which I think from other sources I have read is correct. And the figures for that college are already posted to this thread.
I wonder how well a shortener that included a clue about the domain would be. e.g. suppose that you shortened an amazon.com link to

http://amazon.XXX.YY/ABC

where XXX.YY is some suitable 6 letter domain name and ABC is a three letter hash. Assuming three letters from the valid [0-9A-Za-z] you have 62^3 possible links _per domain_. Extending to four characters you'd have 62^4 (over 14m links _per domain_).

So an amazon.com link would drop to 25 characters. A TinyURL link is currently 25 characters (bit.ly would be 18). So this is still in the ballpark.

Of course, the results aren't consistent (e.g. a ycombinator.com link would have 30 characters). But it would give a lot of information. Also, I think for non-.coms you'd have to include the TLD.

An advantage of using subdomains it that on YC/Reddit/Digg these links could easily be made to show as, for example, amazon.XXX.YY
My experience at my university; there are simply too many architects. It's fun to study it and in essence it's a fun job, but the needed skills are not very sophisticated (although they will tell you otherwise).

A good recipe for a poor job market.
the tone was fairly aggressive

Yes. I didn't see a lot of equivocation there, so I didn't supply a lot in return. I apologize.

And I'm sorry if I have lost all patience with phrases of the form X is a slower language than Y. These catchphrases are everywhere, major technical decisions are often based on them, and they are often worthless. They are overgeneralizations.

To make such a statement meaningful, the least we need to know is: What problem did you try to solve? What languages did you compare? What frameworks, compilers, interpreters, libraries, helper applications, and/or platforms did you use? Can we see your code? And what are the numbers?

As Yehuda points out, when you leave these things out you end up with mindless 1-D generalizations like "Ruby is slow; ergo, all systems which have Ruby in them somewhere are slow". Which you never question or test. And then you mislead everyone. You even mislead yourself! And even if you happen to be correct, for a given problem on a given day, things can change by next week. For example: the Javascript interpreter folks are working wonders, speeding certain computations up by orders of magnitude. (The Chrome JS interpreter nearly made me weep with pure joy.)

I don't see how we're going to break people of this bad habit except by correcting them, one by one if necessary. We certainly won't learn from history: We went through all of this with Java, less than a decade ago. Java was famous for being "slow", until one day everyone realized that it wasn't "slow" anymore and that it hadn't been for a couple of years. Now people hold up the JVM as the canonical example of a fast thing! (And C, of course, is always assumed to be extra-fast -- as if every C routine in the world were written by Knuth himself, in flawless bug-free form, with optimum algorithms.)
I've never seen a competition for a small family house. The competitions are usually for larger projects as organizing and running a competition is not inexpensive and requires jurors, marketing and prizes.

I try to never do competitions as you are right on point 2, the economic rules are the same.
Well, you're using data that doesn't reduce to what you want it to.

Divorce is only one possible indicator of unhappiness, there are lots of people who are unhappy and do not or cannot divorce.

You also assume that divorce leads to decreased happiness overall and I'm not convinced that's true either.

Moreover, I think it's pretty remarkable that almost 50% of people make a "successful" choice of a life partner. (Exclusively in the sense that they do not divorce.)

Considering how horrible people are at decisionmaking in general, and how vague and slippery the idea of "happiness" is, (see Stumbling on Happiness, and/or Mistakes Were Made for a great layman's overview), it's pretty remarkable... or merely a great indicator of how much people are willing to withstand/fool themselves/constrain their nature.
Nope, that's why I emphasized the word before.
Why not have the person who lost the item be able to offer an additional reward?
> I meant per-country local actually, so for the USA that would be the FBI. Are you against that?

No, I'm not especially impressed with the FBI. Their crime "lab" turns out to have been a sham and that's supposedly one of their best features.

> Plenty of examples of national/federal law enforcement, they seem to work OK.

Oh really? How about some actual evidence instead of quotes cribbed from their funding requests.

> Large governments have their flaws, but it's hard to see a viable alternative.

Small govts of limited scope are pretty easy to see.

> Greater international cooperation would hopefully act against this kind of thing.

Hope isn't a plan. Greater international cooperation doesn't have the properties you assume. We have agricultural subsidies because the contries involved want them. We'll stop having them when they don't. International cooperation won't change that.

> And then you come up with that point, in which it would obviously be a good thing if a supranational body had the power to force the US and the EU to abolish an unjust subsidy.

You misunderstand. You're claiming that the WTO is good. I'm pointing out that it isn't good because it hasn't done the good thing that is obviously within its scope. Claiming that it could doesn't change that fact.

> You were holding up isolationism as something good, and I was pointing out it has been on the decline for a century, with few bad effects and many good ones.

Actually, you didn't point to any effects - you merely pointed that it was in decline.

>>How does getting a bunch of evil together in the same room produce good?

> My suggestion was that you'd have the major trade blocs sitting around a table, and empowered to authorise, or not, wars.

Trading blocks are composed of nations and we've already heard about nations, namely "I would be a lot more persuaded by your points about an evil supranational if we didn't see so much evil perpetrated by mere nations all around us."

> It would produce "good" in the same way that getting a bunch of evil people together to make the laws they all have to live by would produce "good". Even a society of murderers doesn't want to make murder legal, since they all have to live in it!

Except that it doesn't work that way. The murderers don't want folks murdering them, but they don't extend that courtesy to others. You need mostly good to pull off good govt and that's not an option at the supranational level.

> You can question the IMF's methods but they're hardly a "disaster".

Actually, I can question pretty much everything about the IMF as it has been a disaster in both methods and results.

> There are plenty of good supranationals, and they all seem to be working OK, or at least not actively bad.

The good ones have extremely limited scope and are in areas where standards have huge benefits to all parties and almost no downside to anyone. (That's why I mentioned the radio folks.) The WTO is on the edge of that and starting to fail. The organizations that you propose are well beyond that threshold.

> I don't understand the kneejerk antipathy to the idea.

That's okay - I do understand the fanboy reading of the press releases.
And here's a Discover Magazine take on eggs from a molecular gastronomy point of view.

http://discovermagazine.com/2006/feb/cooking-for-eggheads
The relational model is perfect, what is not is the rigid implementation of it by sql vendors.

Oracle offers object views and graphs and a million different ways of storing and retreiving data.

Compare that to mysql and it feels like riding a bike over railtracks.
Non sequitur. Gruber was analogizing the management motivation for the marketing campaign, not the products being marketed per se.
I think improving the process of making scrambled eggs is an epitome of hacking. And I think we can at least agree that hackers eat too.
At the moment, the demand for highly scalable post relational (can we say) databases is fairly limited although with many governments now keen to try and store every email, phone conversation and Internet browsing session of their populace perhaps the demand is going to increase in the near term.

It is my view that the RDBMS has a lot of life in it yet - indeed it's effective penetration is still woefully low. Far too many businesses have no coherent database in place and rely upon piecemeal record keeping and ad hoc processes just to manage day to day transactions. Perhaps we need even better relational solutions before we need post-relational ones.
As far as the skill argument, you are quite wrong. Most architects don't really get good until they're about 50 years old, as there is an insane amount to learn.

I tend to try very hard not to hire people right out of school as they are so unable to add value to a project because of an intense lack of needed knowledge. In fact, the usual experience when I waver and take an intern is that we spend more time fixing the mistakes than the time made making them.
Zuerich: a good place for startups?
Do Economists Breed Greed and Guile?
This is incredible.

Another pair of downmods -- again, no one addresses the points I make.

I ask again, what are these other, benign, interpretations?

Hacker News is becoming a ghetto.
Ditto in Phoenix (5th largest US city by population) where the job market strongly favors Microsoft tech. I search indeed.com every few days and the lamp/open-source/mac jobs here are super rare compared to .net demands.
Cash flow is definitely an issue these days. My policy now is to stop all work earlier rather than later. If the client has the ability to pay, they will to keep the project moving. If not, they can't, so stopping makes sense.
It's hard to optimize bacteria. You get your bacterium juuuust right, and then you get it to multiply and by the time you have a tank full, it's been intelligently designed all over the damn place!

--EDIT---

I don't mind being downvoted, unless it's because people's sarcasm detector isn't working.
you think an online food marketplace is a unique idea? Geo-location services? Unique?

Why do you think so often two similar movies are released close to each other (Antz & Bugs Life, Volcano & that crappier one, etc, etc)

Better example: When http://nowdothis.com/ came out, another 2 or 3 alternatives came out within a week of each other -- you think people "stole" these ideas from each other? I think it's far more likely that people just came up with similar ideas.
From experience: OS X by far.

I used to debug Ubuntu 64.

Windows 64 is getting really close to perfect though, most hardware have the necessary drivers (do NOT use no-name hardware on Win64), fallback 32-bit seems to function fine, but there are corner cases that don't exist on OS X.
Wow, what a douchebag.
Some of us don't assume that the good guys will always win and have figured out that bad is stable too.

The first version of "centralized Germany" was pretty much a disaster. The first version of "centralized Russia" (aka the USSR) wasn't a lot better.

You don't get to assume that the dominant power will always be a force for good.
People who don't understand databases theory complain, news at 11.

it isn't helpful when the data model evolves over time

No, poorly designed and maintained databases have issues, but that's a developer problem not a database problem. SQL is highly flexible and you can dynamically update the database format at run time which few "modern" languages let you do. IMO, The problem is developers who think OOP means all data must map 1 to 1 with an object which manipulates that data and then complain that the database is now tightly coupled with their code.

As to scalability it's that's a software problem that has little to do with the relational model. A link's to B and B is somewhere out in the cluster works just fine. You can even write a relational engine that uses a key value store to keep the records.

PS: I like to think of it as Java/C++/whatever infecting the database.
Everytime I see somebody using .toSource() I show due respect.
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Why wouldn't I just stick my address / phone number on my stuff?
The article asserts that sharp variables are "pretty useful" without actually mentioning a use. What exactly would one use them for?
Second Life's Message Queue Evaluation Notes
Okay, that could be true. I admit my assumption was based on the fact they don't learn construction mechanics (i.e. calculating if structures are strong enough). And from a few Master thesis presentations I generally got the idea people just make what they think is nice, instead of giving solid reasoning for their choices.
It results in a human readable "pickle" format, which is its own reward, I believe.
FCC needs fifth net neutrality principle
Even dirtier IT jobs: The muck stops here
Data Centers get 'black box' flight data recorder
Both of us own 50% of our new startup? Wait a minute
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> Societies where marriages are based of 'love' have a very high divorce rate. Divorce in America or Europe is not easy, it's a long and expensive process. But there is still a 50% or so divorce rate.

Since those exact same societies had a low divorce rate not too long ago, it's unreasonable to blame the high divorce rate on what didn't change between then and now (love-based) and ignore what did change (ease of getting a divorce and stigma).

Yes, US divorce is expensive and can be long, but it is also socially accepted and easy to start. The latter is more relevant than the length and expense of the process because said process keeps itself moving. (The expense and length is also a choice - the choice to fight, which has nothing to do with "ease of divorce" or love vs arranged.)
I'd think incubators would really want to avoid competing with each other. That's why there's all the flap about exploding term sheets. They want the good ideas (and teams) for themselves.

I'm not trying to be a fanboy when I say that an incubator would have to be crazy to compete with YCombinator head-to-head on an idea unless they think they have an amazing team. YC just has more history and better connections.
First 2 Words: A Signal for the Scanning Eye
The perceived ability to manage Windows is lower. And that's enough to make the entry barrier lower.
Here here! Well worded!

This argument about the relational model have been coming up for years and I see articles like this all the time.

The fact is that RDBMSs work great when properly implemented and maintained. They are very commonly used and are not going away any time soon.
Look at that - Consumorist listened to you :) Story is back online again, with an update
they should also clear this up:

Our premium service, the FeedBlitz Newsletter Edition paid account, prevents ads from being placed in your messages.

are they sending ads to your RSS subscribers? or only in the emails?
Fill a hole (and don't be surprised if someone else is doing it too)
I'd have to disagree with this.
The change of a marriage going sour would seem to be almost independent of whether it was arranged or not.

I'm not speaking from experience here, but I would guess any marriage requires a lot of compromise and understanding, regardless of how they came together.
As an Oracle DBA by profession, I agree with you 100%. The Oracle product is more than 30 years old and extremely refined and developed. It can do amazing things when used properly.
neither deserve criticism for selling something people are willing to buy.
There is a place for rumour - it can help one plan for the future, after all. But I understand your sentiment.
Coming soon to news.yc: Mammal eats grass, farts biogas.

Harvesting cow farts is a logistical nightmare though :(
So a "sharp variable" is just a particular syntax to represent a reference? Is anyone else somewhat unimpressed by this? I mean, sure, it's kind of helpful for readability in the printout, and it's kind of nice to be able to one-line a recursive data structure. Just about any reasonably clear syntax will work for the former; there's no reason that the programmer would need to know about it before encountering it.

The latter is mostly useful in a lazy evaluation context; in other situations, you're only rarely creating recursive data structures in the first place (circular linked lists are the most obvious case).
Copyright only lasts for a certain number of years (unless you're one of the people who thinks the government is going to extend copyright terms forever so Micky Mouse never falls into the PD...) whereas trademarks last forever if you can enforce them.
sounds like there's something wrong with the relationship between architecture schools and real-world practices, if they aren't graduating with needed knowledge.
According to the RSS FAQ, they don't add ads to the feeds.
You're completely right, but since when did someone need to know the Win32 API to manage windows?
The Guardian ranks highest amongst UK newspapers for Online Reputation
According to my sources, basically all of the truly cutting-edge fab techniques exist only at Intel factories. I don't think Intel is inclined to start manufacturing SPARCs under contract, meaning that x86 is the only CPU arch on the upper end of the power scale that can be manufactured cheaply enough to meet the price point you want.
I'm fairly sure this was posted a couple days ago

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=547991

Flagged
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Ask HN: Do you vouch for the accuracy of links you submit?
When you submit a link to HN, is that an implicit statement that you agree with the content at the linked source, or are you inviting discussion of a source that you possibly disagree with? I have found some recent comment threads in which commenters presume that the submitter agrees with the linked content, but it seems to me under the HN guidelines,

"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."

it would be possible for someone to submit a link to invite discussion, without implying that the linked source is the last word (or even an adequate first word) on the subject.

What do you think? Does every link you submit come with your endorsement of truthfulness and accuracy?
Making the HTML5 &lt;time&gt; element safe for historians
Flagged not only for being irrelevant to HN but for having mixed responses (is ok to is interesting to is again).

However, because sometimes interesting conversations come out of bad topics, I'll comment and say that it's vastly overrated, that most anime is terrible, and that it's keeping back the genre as a whole when the anime fans parade Hiyao Miyazaki not just as the terrific filmmaker that he is but as sort of a godlike artist who's better than everything else ever.
A brief aside: One of my favorite features of the Internet is the disintermediation of anthropologists.

Not that I dislike anthropology. But it's more fun as a game that you can play from home.

I learned what you're saying here from an anthropology anthology in college. But somehow it's a lot more credible coming from an unedited, contemporary person.
What we did to (not) get into TechStars
I think there are a couple of factors in play there. One is the iPhone, and the big spike in his graph would indicate that demand shot up when the iPhone SDK was released. The other is that there just aren't very many traditional MacOS jobs.