skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>Your startup sounds rather technical "a nontrivial web site," yet you have two CEOs, a lawyer and an accountant. In my opinion, you need to let go of at least one of the CEOs and outsource the lawyer and accountant until you have a need for them full time.

Well, a couple things. First, we're in the finance space. Second, both of the CEOs have a lot of important experience and connections. And the lawyer and accountant are kind of outsourced - they aren't doing this full time. They have both worked with one of the CEOs in the past.

The site is nontrivial in that it requires some serious initial development...but once built, it shouldn't require much maintenance. And it's nothing technically groundbreaking; there's just a lot of content management and user type stuff that needs to be put together. So it makes sense to us to hire a team to build it.
On the other hand, using an elegant, smooth, well-designed language like Scala is a perk that helps you hire excellent devs for less money. Plus, if you want to transition a bunch of experienced Ruby devs to a faster language without losing most of them, you'd better not pick Java or C++.
I wonder how the discussion would've been had Jason used GS' site itself to note concerns. It'd be a sanctioned and public forum.

Would people be discussing public vs private airing of grievances? Probably not.
Once you understand that, it becomes a great source of news and entertainment.

Or rather, a great site to ignore.
A trademark lawsuit would have actually made more sense. The blog post was intended to embarrass GS and therefore diminish their status in the Internet world, while at the same time airing your grievance.

That can be especially said for this follow-up post. If there was no need for the original one, there's absolutely no need for this one. If Jason thought that there are design considerations GS needed to think about, this whole post should have then gone privately.

However, opting to blog about it publicly so that one of GS's founders can go and say "Right, we got it. We will include it in our redesign" is, at best, pulling rank.

Sarah Hatter had said that she answers thousands of support e-mails every year. Saying it's not scalable to send an e-mail to a company you have a grievance with is childish.
The Future of Twitter: Social CRM
> lifespan for Paleolithic Homo sapiens was only forty years.

That is 10 years longer that people in Swaziland.

40 is not that bad if you think that most hunter gatherer societies abandon old people (since food is a scarcity). So the life expectancy in those times was basically the modern day retirement age.
How to install ruby 1.9 on Dreamhost
Just a guess, but I think if GS had a Jason Fried, the "conversation" would look more like this:

37s: The Get Satisfaction business model is dangerously close to extortion.

GS: We didn't realize it, but you're right. We're doing X, Y, and Z to fix it right now. We're sorry.

37s: Also there's 10x more 37s branding on your pages than GS branding, which is misleading.

GS: You know what? You're right about that too. We thought the branding would help our users, but it's turning out to be misleading. We're doing X, Y, and Z to rebadge the pages, and we're sorry.

37s: ...

Peanut Gallery 1: GS misled the whole Internet?

Peanut Gallery 2: Yeah, and they apologized. That all you got?

Peanut Gallery 1: ...

Peanut Gallery 2: ...

Instead, because GS apparently doesn't know how to concede a point cleanly and end the discussion, they're going to remain the center of attention for awhile. And while all publicity is in a sense good publicity, the people they make money from are hearing nothing except "trademark infringement" and "customer service horror story".
Simpler thing that can be exploited is indentation:

while(1) {
if(foo) {
if (bar) {
... I'm editing here!
}
}

it is clear from indentation that the unmatch is about if(bar). Of course in order to get the level of the open bracket you need to get the index of the first non blank character of the same line. It's a trick but in the practice may work well.

I could like GCC being able to give me an hint about this instead of pointing to the end of the file... that is, if an unmatched bracket is detected and there is something odd about indentation levels of brackets it could show:

Warning: non closed bracket may be around line ...

It is simple even to understand from the source if it's a program where indentation is usually respected or not.
It also corresponds to what I've read before, that a high-meat (not pure protein, but diets inclusive of bone marrows or organs like liver and stuff generally found in pâtés) and high animal fat diet can almost completely prevent the development of diabetes, and can actually get diabetics off of insulin.

I believe the theory is, is that the body uses insulin to convert glucose to glycogen, AKA 'animal starch', and every other effect (that I'm aware of) it has on the body is not considered good. Example: It promotes triglyceride production from fatty acids (high triglycerides are usually a big factor in heart disease), and decreases the metabolism of fats (I think everyone wants this one high), proteins and reduces gluconeogenesis, which can exacerbate lactose intolerance in some people.

Everything more complex than raw glucose doesn't require insulin. That's why the body largely doesn't react to fructose (which is a result of our ancestry, primates largely live in a symbiosis with the trees they feed off because larger animals like Elephants frequently kill the trees in the process of foraging, but shrieking monkeys tend to stop them) so that we do consume more of it. I think it also helps that foods high in fructose (IE fruits) are generally also high in vitamins. I mean some of the recommended RDA's for vitamin C are actually around 6,000-12,000 mg a day (30,000 mg if you're sick). Basically from what I understand, if you look at our close relatives diets (which are very similar to our ancestors diets) they essentially eat 1:1 ratio of vitamin C (in mg) to kcals. So an adult male should eat 2,500 mg of vitamin C and 2,500 kcals. Incidentally vitamin C is used in the body to produce carnitine, which moves fatty acids into the mitochondria to produce ATP.

Your average goat produces around 13,000 mg of vitamin C in normal health through biosynthesis, which has to make you wonder about WHO's RDA of 45 mg a day if a goat produces 290 times that amount. We, unfortunately don't biosynthesise vitamin C.
One of Fried's original points was that they didn't want to run a duplicate support site just because another company wanted to make money off of them.
Although the Reg sensationalizes the story, it's interesting to see how Ruby is in limbo. How much damage has been done to Merb by the 1.8 to 1.9 fiasco?
http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u64q/benchmark.php?test=al...

Scala is 900x faster than Ruby for some workloads. Ruby is not a fast language. It works for web stuff because every language waits for IO as quickly as the others.
So it's better to sue someone than shame them into better behavior?
After just a week, Tesla Motors already has 520 reservations for Model S
I guess if I was in your shoes, I'd hire a small team of developers (3?) to do the initial build. Pay them with a combination of cash and equity. If this is in the finance space, you should have some funding or be able to get some.
You're right. And again, this whole "public" vs "private" thing is nonsense; 37s is complaining about a very public offense commited by GS for profit. Live by the sword, die by the sword.
I wish they'd picked some more exciting businesses. I mean a shoe store and a salsa company, doesn't really sound that interesting.
Thanks for the correction, I fixed the language in my post. But I generally agree with you: GS should be able to keep a 3rd party support forum for 37 Signals as long it makes it abundantly clear that they are not affiliated with 37 Signals.
Uh, who cares?

Some day you will realize that programming languages are tools for getting work done, not religions.
That's kind of a straw-man argument, isn't it? Nobody is moving from high-level languages back to C or even Java. The talk here is of moving from "early adopter" to "innovator" on the adoption curve. And I'm just making the point that when you do that, you necessarily either contract your candidate pool, or add ramp-up overhead to new hires.
But still, it's not a "5-people-only" trait.

So why Sam Altman instead of, say, Jeff Bezos? Or Mark Zuckerberg?
It's funny how that comment triggered such strong responses. Ironically enough, I am working on a gaming startup myself - I understand that if there is a need, someone will supply it.

I still find it hard to believe that gaming has even become something considered a real profession. Something just feels off about that. Kids used to dream about becoming astronauts and doctors when I was in elementary school and I honestly don't want that to change. Especially with gaming, their only goal will be to play games until they're good enough to play professionally. This logic is coming from having to help my younger sister with homework and making sure she is doing well at school, something that seems a lot more difficult than when I was in school because of endless distractions (and the internet). Gaming is already an issue - she and her friends play a lot of games, I can only imagine the arguments they'd start giving if professional gamer came into their vocabulary.

As far as usefulness goes, you're dead on about the entertainment industry and their current demand. If people want entertainment then they have a need that can be supplied with a product, in this case a 'professional gamer'. I do think that this logic is flawed as well because people find a lot of things entertaining and a line must be drawn somewhere.

I understand that some people here are (ex-)professional gamers and might be inclined to down vote me to oblivion - I'd ask for a comment on your responses instead.
I use JRuby to run a web application that I first coded in Ruby and it works pretty well even though it reserves and consumes more memory. Having a dedicated server for JRuby applications instead of running such applications on your own desktop alongside other applications slightly helps with the feeling of speed of the JRuby application, as it does not compete for CPU time with the other desktop applications you have like the browser, when you can feel that JRuby requires more work than Ruby for doing similar workloads. :-)

I know that the pros of JRuby for running Ruby applications mean things like being able to run multiple instances of Ruby from the same process, being able to run JRuby applications in a standard Java web-server be it as Servlet or a more high-level installation, and so on.

Also, Java has had a lot experience in running server applications so Java does help with maximizing the use of the resources available, be it 100% of CPU time, gigs of memory, multiple CPUs, and so on. Java has those famous garbage collectors and HotSpot technologies. JRuby can enjoy all of that so it does improve things over pure Ruby. Let's say, Java doesn't break a sweat under heavy load, or at least it shouldn't. Whereas with pure Ruby all bets are off.
>>it's how not to handle a PR crisis.

What? They've handled it as well as they could have considering the position they were placed in.

I don't care for either side "winning" this debate. This is about mature behaviour, not PR spin. Their problem can, and frankly should, be viewed from the technical perspective. Had I participated in the system development, I would advocate for e-mail notifications that need to be sent to the original company's support e-mail address. There's no reason NOT to do it.

As I've said above, GS is to blame here, as well. However, there was something that 37Signals could do that would show that they're the fantastic company they market themselves to be. Sadly, their charismatic leader chose the route of public airing of his grievances. It wasn't needed at that point in time, since 1) they knew about the problem for a while and 2) they haven't talked to GS's founders privately first.

As for scoring of comments, I really couldn't care less. I believe in my standpoint and if I don't express my standpoint clearly, let me know. If you're going to downvote me, because I'm being critical of 37Signals, then they're speaking to the right audience.
If every person in the company can manage a project, then Spolsky's formula is artificially restraining compensation for the majority of his employees, and the selection of who gets to lead FogBugz and Copilot and Project Antelope or whatever is simply a proxy for the same subjective political BS that happens in every salary negotiation. Which is kind of my point.

Again: no doubt at all this system works for Fog Creek. But it was written up in Inc. because someone believes it could work elsewhere. Not so sure about that.
I'll take a look into it, thanks for the link.
>I'm pretty sure Femur was asking you for some more details of that evidence.

Indeed I was.
I'm not downvoting you. Comments scores aren't scientific, but they are one way to gauge the prevailing opinion at Hacker News, and from what I can see, the prevailing opinion at Hacker News --- which is a sweet-spot collection of GS prospects --- trends profoundly towards 37s on this one.

So I think that's interesting and worth pointing out. But you? I have no idea who you even are.
Btw, every time I read about "we are just at the beginning, and we already think we know all about that" I have a strange feeling. Basically nobody can tell. The contrary happened a lot of times, think about AI, it basically stopped to produce significant results for decades. The only way to know is to invest more work in the field.

And if we want to remember the advice in "you and your research" what really matters is to understand in time fields where it's worth to spend time and investigate more.
We have funding. :) But we still want to keep costs reasonable as much as possible.

And hiring a small team might make sense...but we don't have office space right now, and we're actually spread across the country a bit (I'm in California, one person is in Florida, the rest are in New York). So most of the situations in which we hire a small team end up adding more overhead than they're worth, unless I'm not thinking of something.
I think it's important to remember that Twitter had this problem because they were ULTRA successful to the degree of being a household name, a new cultural lingo, a game changing tech of enormous value, etc.

Yes, different languages and techs for different advantages and purposes.

"Just" developing a web app with models and views and controllers is enough to create the user experience smash hits are made off. Scaling issues are big, but certainly fall in the class of problems we want to have at some point.
ACCESS I was saying two things, one you saw a refined version of elsewhere: "making it exciting is more important than making it easy to develop for". Designing a great platform (in terms of the insides being usable for developers) doesn't matter if the platform does something great. Many sins are forgiven if you have this. I think there are probably many examples of horribly ugly technologies that became wildly successful because they enable access to something exciting (DOS? windows? netscape navigator?)

USABILITY To elaborate on the other idea: it's much easier to make something usable if it has a specialized purpose. Fewer features, fewer interactions/interdependencies, fewer controls, fewer things to go wrong - it's gonna be simpler to use. e.g. ipod shuffle. That is, not being able to do things makes it easier to use.

The big problem with a platform is that you don't really know what the specific use will be, nor the exact nature and parameters of it. A platform, by definition, is general, and not specialized to one specific purpose. And you won't even know the nature of the general use. Except, perhaps, that it will want to be part of whatever the cool, exciting thing you have going is - that's a predictive organizing principle.

Therefore, for a platform, rather than trying to guess at the kinds of uses it will have, maybe just say: (1). what is the cool, exciting thing that we enable? (2). how can we let developers build something that has that cool, exciting thing? That is, an API that gives them access to whatever they need to do that. It doesn't need to be great access, they just need to be able to do it somehow.

This is "overgeneral" in the sense that you can not only do the things you want to do, but you can also do things you don't want to do. This looseness makes it harder to use - if it was an exact fit to the problem, it would be a delight to use. This extra power gives you "enough rope to hang yourself".

RAILS On reflection, I think Rails is a much later stage in the development cycle: webapps are in a more mature stage, and by that I mean that people now know what kinds of things they want to do, and most importantly, what kind of defaults are useful. At an earlier stage, we didn't have enough collective experience to know those things. This knowledge is to do with how webapps appear to users externally, as well as what architectures and internal approaches have been found to work. Webapps are becoming an understood art, when previously, it was a bit of a black art.

Rails represents a systemization of webapps; no longer ad hoc, many design decisions are now captured in a mechanical tool. It is specialized to the task.
As also pointed out by BeaufifulSoup's author, I would suggest you to use lxml (http://codespeak.net/lxml/). It is much faster. I've migrated a couple of my projects to it.
executive summary: you get what you pay for. if you want a quality product, you'll pay for that quality product in some form or another. cutting corners now will compound costs later.
Let me offer an analogy:

Your neighbour trespasses on your farm. Moreover, he builds a small store on it with no permits and when he gets tagged for it by the inspector, he points to you as it's your farm. Do you:

a) Find him, take him to the town square and publicly whip him in front of the whole town?
b) Take him to court for trespassing?
>> "Tesla delivered 104 Roadsters to customers in March, marking the first triple-digit delivery month in the company’s history. Tesla delivered over 170 cars in the first quarter -- more than the total delivered in 2008."

Wasn't Tesla's secret plan to sell 1k of the roadsters, 10k of the model S, and 100k of the third model yearly? Looks like they're well on their way to meet the first goal... not too bad.

Edit: This is the secret plan blogpost: http://www.teslamotors.com/blog2/?p=8 , but I can't find the numbers that I thought I read there.
I assume you need this many Apaches to fully use all of your CPU?

If so, there are a number of approaches to take. If your app is blocking on sending/receiving data to/from the client, it would benefit you to segregate the actual app servers from the frontend servers. You can use mod_fastcgi and run your PHP stuff in FastCGI, or you can use a frontend threaded apache talking to a backend PHP apache via mod_proxy.

If you are blocking on things like database access or other non-web IO, then you need an event loop so your app can do something else while waiting for IO. I don't know what your options are in the PHP world, but this is very easy to do in Perl.

Finally, real threads will probably also solve your problem. I recommend CL or Haskell. (Although I think Slicehost still uses an ancient Xen that can't handle SBCL. Oops.)
Authentic Happiness: Using the new Positive Psychology
I don't that that's how it'd go, for the simple reason that if Jason Fried was so outraged at the GS's behaviour, it only stands to reason that had there been another JF on the other side, he'd be outraged by the 37S's one that he'd flame him back.

You know what this is just getting too complicated.
Gatto uncovers the underlying intention for public schools to produce docile factory workers. Once you make your goals clear and explicit, much of the argument over how to educate becomes moot or even silly.

Sudbury Valley School in Massachusets (and other offshoot Sudbury-model schools) are one answer to the "ok, what then?" that comes after reading Gatto. If you set a goal of producing thoughtful, self-directed citizens of a democracy, you end up with a school which is democratic and self-directed.
There is good paleontological evidence for how long adults survived in Paleolithic times, and it wasn't for very long.
I'm the author of the article. I was aware of the research you link to. I enjoyed it, but research is too often focused on the formal side and too little on the user-experience side. I even mention it succintly in the article (not by name):

"I had a look at what was available on incremental parsing, and found a few research initiatives, and even mentions of a few products. But it turns out none of them was focused on the kind of problem I was trying to solve. They were either trying to improve the performance [...] or they were trying to study the formal mathematics of incremental parsing"

I mean to include other research initiatives in the above description.

Their technique is based in not accepting text edits until they parse properly, a technique which I describe in the article and which I dismissed as a hack and too basic for my goals.

My system is more sophisticated and powerful: I actually incorporate partially-wrong stuff into the parse tree! My tool highlights an incomplete 'if' block with the correct if-color, because it knows what it's dealing with!

I can also apply heuristics to choose the prefered parsing, which they don't.

There's plenty of work pending in incremental parsing, and that thesis just skims the surface (even if the academic-looking presentation may seem like it's going very deep).
You're arguing from premises that don't seem valid to me (and likely others):

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=542530

The whole "GS is to blame here, as well" (emphasis added) approach probably strikes people as either GS-fanboyish or 37S-haterish.

The wrong was done by GS - full stop. The repeated assertions by a few people that Fried was wrong to publicly complain about the wrongdoing aren't convincing people.
Frontier DSL, which also serves communities around Rochester, NY has also been talking about a bandwidth cap -- at a ludicrously low 5 GB/month.

Frontier serves a number of rural areas where they're the only option people have for service: they've backed off on their threats when customers threatened to take their cases to their state PUCs.
Finally something to fill the void after Dragons' Den ended.
I found that I tend to enjoy topics with a lot of up-votes and low comments the most.

I would say that your assessment is correct. I am, however, against making that an official metric; things are working fine as is.
It is sad a state of affairs that someone can receive a check and cannot cash it at no cost (not just put it into another account). There is no basis for requiring credit to receive money from an account that clearly has the funds. Between the banks and now payday companies, this state will persist until we get state politicians that aren't corrupt.

Note: this goes for most states, not just the lovely one Chicago is in.
Maybe it's obvious just to me? There will be full AI. We will create artificial brains. We will fully understand how the parallel system in the brain works. We will create brains more powerful than ours.

I don't think it's that far, either.
Ah, but it's also a sweet-spot of 37Signals' fans. I guess we know which way readers here will lean, now, don't we?

I hoped that HN readers would be more objective than this, but then again it's only a news site. Oh, well.

P.S. dude, you should totally meet me. I'm very cool in person. ;-)
I know the co-founder of CDDB from a reverse-engineering forum. His advice to me for a magazine database startup? Get a good lawyer!