skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Sure, every single one of them is written by a guy who knows the difference between private working set and shared memory ...

I think this is a pretty big assumption. Anybody can create a Windows service in visual studio in about 3 clicks.

Also, these other services may hook things in Windows, hold on to a bunch of handles, constantly poll for things, etc. We really try to be well-behaved in XobniService. It uses a single thread, sleeps the majority (about 99.96%) of the time, has few private bytes, and will probably be swapped out to disk most of the time (unless nothing else needs the memory). So XobniService has virtually nil impact on performance, besides an extra entry in task manager.

If Windows had a workable cron implementation, I'd just have used that.

I'm thinking about removing it anyway, despite the low impact on performance, since user perception is obviously important. I've been thinking of some workable alternatives, but they don't provide as nice an update experience.

If it's really the only thing keeping you away, you can Start/Run 'sc delete XobniService' and the Outlook plugin will still work just fine. You may not receive future updates this way, though.

Thanks for the feedback, hope you come back to us :)
PayPerPost: Google Goes after the "Everyday" Blogger
ip2geo info in PHP
source of the script used to get the country of an online visitor.Demo here:http://play.trk7.com/ip.php
demo here: http://play.trk7.com/ip.php
I think you should know by now that you won't have any issues gaining and retaining users: I have witnessed your success around in my office and I am seeing your red-orange color scheme on my colleagues' monitors all day. And most of them don't care for a little and, I have no doubt, efficient background process.

Keep up the good work. :-)
If so, this thread is the sex tape.
Secrets of the 3D Game Programming Sages.
I wonder at what point angels/vcs will get tired of this sort of thing. I feel like each step down the ladder from Y Combinator becomes exponentially less valuable.

I've often wondered if investors realize that in Tech Stars they're essentially getting Y Combinator rejects. Not only that, but Y Combinator rejects who don't mind living in BFE. Now this group will get Tech Stars rejects. Doesn't seem like something I'd attend, were I an angel.
Muddying the waters of the digital copyright debate
XML Web Services for ASP.NET
I've done this for my site, in a list of more than 20 elements in which each element has it's own image.

Merging all those little images together was a great improvement in loading time of the page. I really recommend to use this technique :)
I don't trust a group of people where everyone looks like a slick businessman with no technical background.

I bet I could bullshit the hell out of them and they wouldn't know it.
I vividly remember feeling this way too (not about Wolfram, but about similar things) when I was 23. In my experience, a benefit of getting older has been that this sort of concern gradually fades. Eventually, you affectionately wonder how you ever could have let it matter to you so much.
we're still rockin (dropbox)
Did not plan on seeing that when I opened this, I have it too.... somewhere
Feynman's Letter to Wolfram
Hard to say...There've been so many...

I had this awesome book full of BASIC games for the Commodore 64. It ruled.

Mastering Amiga Assembler

Teach Yourself C in 24 Hours (all of the Teach Yourself * in 24 Hours books are embarrassing, though not as embarrassing as "For Dummies" books).

Ooh...No, I've got it: I took the TCP/IP portion of the MCSE exams, and I had a study guide for that. That's the most embarrassing (because it indicates I took an MCSE exam...but, there were dark times in IT before most of you were born...many servers ran this OS named Windows NT, instead of UNIX or Linux).
I go to one of those liberal arts school where English majors count on a JD for a career; and let me tell you, as much as I hate to admit it as a CS/Biol major, they are surprisingly well-adjusted people.

But don't get me wrong, my experience both on the debate team, going to tournaments involving all of ivies and NESCAC school's has taught me to stay away from law.

One time, I went against one of the eventual national champion of college debate from Cornell; as I went out of time in my closing argument, my dear opponent, the future model of Corporate America counsel, took his rolex off his wrist and shook it at me, and shouted exasperatedly that my time was up.

But, I have to say: once, when I was a young clueless college student, I tried both the pre-med and pre-law path. It was the thing to do at my school which charged 40K+ for being a holding pen for New England rich family's kids. And even now, I have friends on campus who question my decision to pursue a career that will be soon "outsourced" and not the tried and proven path of i-banking/medicine/law. In response, I just smile because the irony is that, they are the ones who don't know any thing better than writing abstract essays on obtuse topics, memorizing tedious information on biological structures, and tinkering with Excel spreadsheets (and programming in VBA...oh the horrors!) at their summer i-banking internships.

They have no idea how fun it is to fire up your compiler on a late night and to plug away at your own ideas, to work for fun and not for work. That there is a whole world out there,of one's own with interesting areas to explore, outside of the usual everyday social small-talk BS and climbing the corporate ladder.
Also -- if you are hoping investors will contact you based on this post, you need to post your email address here or in your profile. The email address box in the profile is for YC internal use only.
"The Joy of Sex" HA!
Visual Basic 6.0 For Dummies (the french edition).
Ask YC: is MVC the best solution?
Somehow my intuition is always a little bit at odds with MVC (as found in current web frameworks). It feels more natural that the view would request the data it needs, especially if it is putting together a mosaic of different sources.

For example, I guess most web applications have some sort of layout view and include the content into it. But what if there are different kinds of things to include? For example there could be a list of logged in users to be displayed in the sidebar, or any number of widgets. It seems unnatural to have to gather the data for those in every controller call.

My experience is with Java frameworks, where usually the flow is through one controller - how does for example Rails deal with that sort of thing? For Java I guess the proposed solution is Portlets, but I haven't seen their wide adaption yet, and they seem to be another headache (those Java specs should be made shorter and more concise).

What is the best solution?
Dating Design Patterns
Dreamhost etc.

Ssshhhhh... lets keep the mystery for the suckers that read scoble.
Online beautifier for javascript
So many people say that they would never consider ebooks. But consider an ebook reader designed by Apple, the iPhone of ebook readers. I think eventually there will be a "must-have" ebook reader, just like the iPhone/iPod stuff.

Would be cool to start working on the perfect ebook reader interface now...

(Note: I am actually not that crazed about Apple or the iPhone, just mentioned it as an example - I think there can be better designs still)
Wasn't the gist of his advice to not try to predict prices and instead just invest in index funds? That fits in perfectly with the rest of the book.
I think we are past the era of a gadget doing one thing and doing it well. Why would I want an e-book reader when I can have an e-ink style touch screen that lets me surf the internet and install applications?
23andme: Evil Or The Way Of The Future?
Whoa: Adult FriendFinder May Have Been Acquired For $1 Billion+
NBC Picks Up Made For MySpace Show QuarterLife
I tried using Struts for a project a few years back and after I realised how much easier it was to maintain the codebase with a proper enfored separation, I never looked back.

Though I found myself, in many cases, writing more code than I would have without a framework, I found the maintenance benefit more than compensates.

Things have got more complex in recent years with more and more complex interaction logic embedded in webpages with Javascript and i'm not sure i've seen many frameworks address this.

Admittedly, there are now better frameworks out there than Struts (this was Struts 1) and I think i'll have to do a bit of exploring for my new project's website but we'll see.
There are a lot of organizations looking for investment opportunities. If scalability matters I'd find a more established company in your field and try to get them on board.
The Best Solution for what? Client side mashups? Greenfield development? Mixed-platform interop? Speed and threading? Flexibility with changing requirements?

Not trying to be a jerk, it's just a complicated question. I guess you mean greenfield web applications? Even then I'd have to ask things like how heavy you were client-side, what languages you knew -- most importantly, where's all the data? If you're delivering data basically from the server to the client and back, does most of the processing take place on the client or the server? Some MVC paradigms are crazy to push into Javascript. Some are crazy to use for simple projects.

Lately for Web 2.0 Applications, I'm using a framework that has a lightweight MVC (very lightweight!) in Javascript and pulls information using JSON from various sources. But I wrote it myself, so I'm biased.

MVC is a paradigm that can be applied a lot of ways, in a lot of situations. Most frameworks emphasize the controller, when the model is really what you're after. Your controller classes can "dumb down" in many scenarios to be so lightweight as to not require a separate class. Hard to do that with a pre-canned framework. I guess I would be extremely careful in confusing the framework with the architectural conceit it uses -- two different concepts.
Cost figures for some startups: Wesabe, DropSend, Freshbooks, Maya's Mom, Mobissimo
Cost figures for some startups #
I must confess I was very excited when I read it! It's indeed one of the best IT jobs in both worlds :D I wished I could work on something like that. Btw, I was surprise he went so open with the stuff the Rovers where running :)
Memory Leak Torpedoed Princeton's DARPA Chances
I think MVC suitability is dependent on the language used. MVC works well with imperative languages but isn't necessarily desirable if developing for example in a functional language.
What is your strategy for secure automated updates? I have a desktop app in development that I will probably need to do that for.
Here is the complete thing: http://elzr.com/posts/wolfram-feynman (including the original letter that Feynman was replying to)
A Short Talk about Richard Feynman (by Stephen Wolfram)
I am a lawyer in the UK, English qualified, we're not all bad, honest.
Seth Godin: Openness gaining traction as marketing technique
30 Resources for Joining a Startup Company
Rails has filters that can run before, after, or around some or all of your controller actions. This can be done on a per controller basis, or it can be application wide. In this case you'd probably define a "load_widgets" before_filter in your application controller, then set your view to display whichever widgets it had data for.
Ask YC: How does one reset or retrieve forgotten passwords here?
I've forgotten my password, but it's saved in my browser. Now that I'm switching browsers, I'd like to retrieve my forgotten password. Any way to do that??
and well!
Same question goes for reddit.
The biggest benefit of MVC, in my view, is the amount of reuse it encourages. When a view has no knowledge of what it has to do, you can reuse it an infinite amount of times. A table view is a table view, it shouldn't need to know what its displaying. A button shouldn't need to know anything about your app, because its just a button. This is what makes Cocoa/IB so powerful. In some instances, you don't even need to write a controller, you can just use a stock controller, like Cocoa's array controller.

I would also say that this is one of the biggest drawbacks of current client side web frameworks. Reusing views is much more difficult than it should be, especially if you want to do anything remotely custom or complex, since subclassing is essentially not possible and delegates are very infrequently used.
Try Rails and see. It's pretty impressive. Django is supposed to be pretty good too if Python is more your thing.
Navigenics (http://www.navigenics.com) is a KPCB-funded biotech that does something similar.
What Google Android Could Mean to Businesses, Corporate IT
A news analysis piece on what Google's effort to revolutionize the consumer mobile space could mean to business and corporate IT
The lack of a password reset is another pg screening mechanism...
Thanks for the reply. I know you're right, and I have a few ideas that I should start on and let evolve.

I am looking to join up with a few others (technical, design, or business/marketing) but am in the DC area now and will eventually be in Austin.

If anyone in Austin is interested in meeting, please lob an email my way.
What Exactly Are You Trying To Prove?
> Somewhere, I dont know where, Im standing exhausted outside a hotel ballroom right after the umpteenth demo, and someone is giving me some ridiculous objection. Well, its all good and fine what FogBugz does, but we wont use it, because we need PROJECT MANAGEMENT.

A good salesman welcomes an objection like that. It means, "I'm ready to buy; but first you must solve this problem!" One path forward is to ask the prospect, "What is the biggest challenge facing you currently in project management?" Then demonstrate how FogBugz helps with this challenge.

This assumes, of course, that FogBugz really can solve the prospect's problem.

The fact that the prospect's objection was easily overcome by another audience member tells me that a skilled salesman would also have easily overcome it.

> Excuse me, SIR? Do you have some kind of SUDDEN AMNESIA? Traumatic HEAD INJURY maybe? Did you WATCH the demo?

Maybe the demo doesn't communicate as well as Joel thinks it does. A key to sales is recognizing the prospect's needs and objections as legitimate. Indulging in negative thoughts about the prospect distracts you from understanding and addressing his objections.
Not from the 80s, but Wolfram's "A New Kind of Science".
Similarly, Django has context processors for the same purpose.
$999 is way cheap for 23andme to be selling this, the microarrays cost $650 each before they are analyzed. As per a Techcrunch comment, I suspect they are subsidizing or selling below cost which will probably work out because of the rapidly falling costs in this area.
I don't think the most tangible benefit of MVC is reuse, but rather code organization. In MVC, if you're looking for something, you know where to find it. That saves a lot of time. It's easy to write an application, but harder to maintain it.

Also, imagine an application with a Web view displaying a data set returned from a controller. Now the client/user wants an OS-native version of the app. That's simple, just build a native (OS-specific) window view and call the same controller for the data set (model). Or maybe an API is needed for external consumption. In that case a web service "view" can be built to return the same data set from the same controller. We're just swapping views here--it's plug-and-play.

It's a clear separation of responsibilities. I believe that used to be called "modular" programming. ;)
Oh, that's much better. Thanks. Funny that all my Googling only dredged up that barely legible photo.
Data Binding in Windows Forms 2.0. The book is terrible, but the API is worse, so...
C for Dummies.
Many people accept the MVC dogma as the word of god. In truth, it is a design trade-off just like anything else. You should really look at SeaSide or UncommonWeb. In SeaSide the view and controller are combined into a component in the way you describe as intuitive. In Rails best practice is to create partials (partial views) that can be re-used across views, put code into the model instead of the controller, and use before_filter to trigger re-usable functions.
To answer your question in the title...MVC is a good solution. The way frameworks implement it also varies, but basically the idea is to setup a way to separate things into a few layers. I have found MVC-based systems easiest to implement and modify because of this separation.

Caveat: My MVC experiences have been mostly with Java (Struts) and Python (Django)
Then to get into your actual points:

1) The view CAN do the work of determining what will be shown. To quote the Django site: "In our interpretation of MVC, the "view" describes the data that gets presented to the user. It's not necessarily how the data looks, but which data is presented."

2) Anything that is a common widget should be abstracted and included on the page in some sort of "include". Either have some sort of base page that does the work, or on the individual pages do some method of "include". This really doesn't relate to MVC, other than your point about adding the data to your context/session, which should again be done generically and non per-page.

3) The general idea for any MVC system is to have the flow go through one controller. This controller may delegate to sub-controllers, but the idea is everything goes to one spot.

4) What is the best solution? There are many good solutions for writing a web app.
ok looks like i got quite a few(in fact nearly all) things wrong there..

@socmoth: ya i no the list aint accurate and highly pessimistic but was just tryin to get an idea of whos around and whos not.. and some sort of data to discuss wld be better than none at all so..

Once again no offense meant to any hus very much alive and kicking.. and i see that all those under my doubtfuls list are also very much alive.. heartening to know.
the updated list looks thus:

Alive: Weebly, Virtualmin, Jamglue, Scribd, Pairwise, auctomatic(blog returns error but they'r brand new so..), Bountii(again no blog but new), draftmix(no blog), fuzzwich, anywhere.fm, Xobni, i'm in like with you, Justin.tv,Versionate, Octopart, Buxfer, adpinion, Socialmoth, Heysan.

well only the follwing companies remain in the dark now:
Thinkature(Dec 2006), Shoutfit(site doesnt even load!), Flagr(Dec 2006).

No1s commented on their status..
He's right for most situations, but some things cannot be tested. Concurrency comes to mind. If I'm told that a particular deadlock or inconsistency cannot occur, I prefer formal proof to a green light bulb on 100 test runs. The issue might only crop up at test run 9999999 using a particular cluster of particular CPUs.
Not everyone has a stable day job before they get into a startup. It's not in everyone's best interest to suffer through one for a few years first either.
Pretty misleading title - the issue wasn't a C# memory leak, it was that these developers didn't remove old objects from an event subscriber list...
You can change who you are
Google offers API for Outlook migration to Gmail
Sybex HTML Complete.
Worst book ever. Not worth the paper it's printed on. Bought it when I was in elementary school though..
Ask YC: Meetup for UK based hackers
There's good interest in a meetup for UK based hackers (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=79164).

15 people have emailed me so far. A mix of start-ups, hackers working on cool research projects, people working on stuff around their day jobs and others. The mix you'd expect at News.yc.

We're happy to host at our offices in East London (near Livepool St). We were part of the most recent yc class and got massive value from interacting with other teams at the dinners. We'd like to do something similar. If it goes well we'll make it a regular event.

It should be a good opportunity to share cool ideas, get some inspiration, get advice from other hackers, meet co-founders or meet start-ups who are hiring (we are, along with a few others).

7-830pm meet at Songkick hq in Shoreditch. We'll get a projector in case anyone wants to demo

830pm Curry at legendary local curryhouse (http://www.tayyabs.co.uk)

Proposed date: Friday 30th Nov.

Hit me at founders/at/songkick and let me know:

- if that date doesn't work when does

- if you've got a projector we could borrow!

I'll wait till next Wednesday (21st) to gauge numbers and then email with directions to our offices etc. I'll also post confirmed date on here. Hope that works.
I too would want a proof, but its wrong to think that you can't test this. It might be difficult, but you absolutely can. Tracking down the order of things that causes the problem is where the troubles comes -- reproducing that order is easy using semaphores or something similar.

Of course, for any moderately complex set of interactions, you won't be able to write tests to cover every possibility, which is exactly the point of the main detractor in this article.
Here's the NY Times article which is currently a broken link in the post:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/17/us/17dna.html?pagewanted=a...
Don't forget barcamp london 3, next weekend, and geek dinners.
How quickly things change
this is also an interesting article in terms of how it compares the European culture and attitude with the American one
I think the author is pretty off base. I don't mean to say that testing isn't valuable, just yesterday I wrote some unit tests to help me work through a very specific problem. But the assumptions are flawed.

The main point of the author is that proving correctness is too difficult. But the same can be said of testing in general. If unit testing is designed to be applied only to the smallest of units, where testing should be obvious, I would argue that an informal correctness proof would be only trivially harder. Take for example the function I often see as the starting point of test driven design presentations: fahrenheitToCelsius() or fToC()

Somebody writes the test assertTrue(fToC(32)==0). Alright, well that fails. So I go ahead and write the function:

fToC(f) { return 0; }

Test passes now. So we write a new test: assertTrue(fToC(-40)==-40). Repeat:

fToC(f) { if(f==-40) return -40; return 0;}

Maybe that's enough special casing to get someone to finally write (in this presentation):

fToC(f) { return (5/9)*(f - 32); }

Congratulations, our tests pass. But the presentation points out that fundamentally you start off with the assumption that passing tests is your goal, as opposed to writing verifiably correct code. Proving that this function is correct is trivial, so just write it in the first place.

Obviously this is an incredibly contrived example, and perhaps the presentations I have seen on TDD have not been that great, but I think it accurately describes what I see as the main problem with TDD. Tests should be there to idiot proof your code, so that once you've verified your algorithm is correct, and that your code matches that algorithm, the test sits there to decrease the likelihood of a regression through some silly or unrelated change. But to start from the assumption that you will write all the correct tests and thus your code will be verified seems highly suspicious to me.
Not if you use VDS or DS from an inexpensive host(ie GoDaddy).
VB.NET for Dummies. Maybe it was VB for Dummies...i can't remember, it was 4 years ago, and I threw it away, along with my Java, C++ and Technical Math book (I regretted throwing the math book away).
Perhaps, but it points out the often overlooked truth that using a garbage collected language is substituting one set of memory problems for another. I can't tell you how much of my time at work is spent trying to work around the java garbage collector because I can't manually destroy objects.
Tayyabs == awesome