skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I tend to think that if users really think they need something, they'll find a way to get it. For example, most people managed to get themselves a DVD Player. They saw that their neighbours were doing some cool thing in their homes, and m,anaged to inform themselves and buy the bloody players.

If people were so keen on IE alternatives, they would pester their bosses to be allowed to switch. Apparently, FF is not different enough for people to care.

Going the legal way might just open a huge can of worms. For example, how likely will companies be in the future to agree on standards, if next thing they know they'll end up in court for it? As a company, I'd rather stick to my proprietary stuff instead (Flash...).

Also, maybe it simply isn't so easy to be 100% compliant to a specification. Is the specification even unambiguous enough, and clear enough for every developer getting the same picture? Should we really use the courts to establish the meanings of paragraphs in specifications like that? And what about Opera, they suck pretty bad, too - if Microsoft gets some flack, they should be next.

As a web developer, I'd rather wish the EU would shoot down both IE and Opera, and simply force everyone to use Firefox. While they are at it, they should also disallow new versions of Firefox to come out, because they might force me to adapt my code. But that is not the world we REALLY want to live in, or is it?
Pretty much bang on, I don't swear too much, but replace that with banging my head off the wall and the pie chart is bang on.
Ladies and gentlemen, the submarine in action. How many media hits are we going to have for AppJet?

AppJet does seem pretty cool though. I wonder what happens if your app really takes off though? AppJet will own you.
Sounds like websites to me
What a fantastic post.

One thing I'd like to add: It's extremely difficult to overwrite or unlearn things that have already been learned. You can teach users something new, but if it conflicts with what they already know, they're going to run into trouble and much effort will be expended to overcome the multiple messages.

One silly example from my research: We found developmental traces of pre-school knowledge in biology professors. The professors acted like children even though they've had at least 20 years to overcome their early confusions. The simple, bastardized story: The brain doesn't have a delete button and overwrite appears to be very hard.

Better to conform to users, because they're not likely to conform to you. At most, pick one thing you want them to learn and the more novel, the more likely they'll "get it"..
If what you have to say about neurosurgery makes sense, what's the problem?
First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win.

MK Gandhi
18 upvotes already huh.

From now on, every one of my submission titles will contain the word 'Porn' regardless of content.
Ask YC:  When is a relational DB the wrong tool?
The thread about Amazon's SimpleDB got me thinking about this, as did a recent night spent wading through some material on XML, XSLT, and XML Schema.

Since I've gotten into web programming, I've been stuck (happily) in a LAMP and RoR mindset: model data, normalize, create schema, lean almost entirely on SQL statements wrapped in whatever scripting language I'm using.

When have you forgone the relational db in your web apps with good results?
You're totally right. A little Googling would have filled me in.

I was just excited to see 6.270 up in lights!
Some good advice here.

If you feel that you should switch off - then you probably need to. It won't be instant, but you can relax over a few days and be able to clear your mind when you need to.

Exercise is essential for me. If you live anywhere other than NYC (where I live) then you can probably do yoga - which is the absolute best. You can also run and meditate. After a week or so you'll have more control over your mind.

If you are looking for a cheap shortcut buy and read Be Here Now by Richard Alpert/Baba Ram Dass. I think you have to be under 25 for this to work.
Review: Windows XP significant improvement over Vista
Podcast: Venture Voice interview with Tom Perkins of Kleiner Perkins
My Vigor router has a JS alert dialog that reads

If you have a fixed IP address press cancel to continue
Changes in Ruby 1.9
I thought it was charged like this, if you use it once then the minimum amount you will be charged is for an hours usage per hour.

but it could end up really expensive if you are hitting your database a lot. 100k users hitting a 2 second query per view ain't going to be cheap.
From the perspective of what you would want to ask them (you'll need to phrase more politely than my thoughts here):

Founder(s) background(s) / prior wins

Competitors

Market for product / growth potential / expected scale

How many other developers

Release schedule (ie: when is the first Beta, etc)

Founder(s) reason for starting the company (get rich, get famous, have fun, etc)

How far is the Angel or First/current funding expected to take them? Then what?

Pricing model.
Let's stay on topic here and keep this kind of thing on reddit.
Nano tech will, if it isnt already make this redundant.

Forget 'every few minutes', nano in the carpets are watching your every footstep!

And tomorrow id like my bmw to be blue - wheres the remote?
Try soccer. Even if you don't play it, you can find amateur co-ed leagues, which are not that competitive, but more fun.

You will enjoy it. Tennis, volleyball, swimming etc... they are all great sports, but I would encourage sports which you have to play in a team.
follow 'brk's advice on asking questions. just thought i'd mention. you should avoid asking about salary, benefits, etc. gives the image you care more about getting paid than the actual project. and besides, if you get an offer, those questions are easily answered in a page or two of an offer letter.

just ask about their project and business. but nothing you could have easily found out on your own.
Would you like to start a startup with me?
Hello, I am starting a startup, and I am looking for accomplices. For now, I think I need a php hacker who is familiar with the cake framework, and a frontend hacker who can make nice designs and dhtml. If anyone is interested, please send me an email TIRRELLP AT HOTMAIL DOT COM.
"Many people would give anything to be like us."

--Oh boy. Presumption at it's worst. Not everybody is a workaholic buddy. Most people, in fact, are happy with what they have. It is just in this country many like you forget to take it easy once and a while, and enjoy life. Sure, it is great to make it big, and become wealthy enough so you can enjoy the rest of your life, but if you keep doing it, without resting, that's pretty sorry.

Knowing who to relax when it is needed, is just as useful as knowing how to work hard.
That's a nice lamp.
It sounds like SimpleDB runs on EC2, meaning it can't do anything that you couldn't build yourself on EC2. If you replicate data across enough EC2 nodes you can get durability (at the cost of complexity and high MTTR).
Yeah, I forgot to mention,don't ask anything that is already answered on their page/blog.

Also don't ask about pay details until after they bring it up.

However, as far as options are concerned, you SHOULD (IMO) ask:

What is the size of the total pool?

What is the size of the employee pool?
How are the shares distributed in terms of preferred/common?

Under the current terms, what point do the preferred shares need to hit before the employee/common options participate?

Extreme and simple example: They could grant you 5 million common options out of a total pool of 100 million with an employee pool of 25 million. Which would sound like 5% of the company and a HUGE chunk of the employee pool. The investors and founders might have 50 million preferred shares between them, but if the terms say that the preferreds split the first $500M in an equity event before the common shares participate, your 5 million shares are never likely to see any value.

I wouldn't get too far down a rat-hole with this, but asking some good questions will usually help show that you're not option-drunk and easily bought off with big, but meaningless, numbers :)
I am not talking about the size of the market, just pointing out there are already several companies that seem to do this. To be more clear: looking at idrives's home page's table iDrive, Mozy, and Carbonite all do "Security: Encryption on transfer, Encryption on storage" now I don't think these systems are going to be NSA level security but you now have to convince people you do security better than the existing players which tends to be hard.

In the end security is more about trust than the algorithm. I need to trust you not to log the password somewhere etc. Established players gain some trust because they have other things on their mind than your data and presumably they want to protect their reputation, so IMO the new guy is bester off focusing on something more tangible so you get a chance to build your reputation.

Which is why I suggest a free App that demonstrates you do security. You could build that relationship of trust and drum up some somewhat free press around how subversive your application was and turn that into a strong market.

PS: Good luck with your startup. I think you can make it work, but after considering the same idea and talking to people about what they trust I moved on to other areas .
mine :)
"Honour thy error as a hidden intention" - Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies
Rethinking Arithmetic: A Visual Guide
Do you play lots of solo or 1-on-1 volleyball? :)
Academia.edu looking to hire rockstar Flash developer
Academia.edu, currently in beta, is a San Francisco-based social networking site for academics. The founders are from Oxford and Stanford. Academia.edu has raised venture funding from some of the leading investors in Europe:

- Saul Klein (the 'Ron Conway' of Europe)
- Brent Hoberman (founder of Lastminute.com which was acquired for $1bn)
- Oxford University
- NewMedia Spark (UK VC firm)
- Hugo Burge and David Soskin (founders of Cheapflights.com)

We're planning a really cool Flash application for Academia.edu. Version 1 of the app should take approximately a month. We're looking to hire a Flash developer to code the app. Initially we are looking to hire on a contract basis, but if things go well (we hope they will), we'd want to make an offer for a permanent position.

Candidates must:

- Have CS background or equivalent experience
- Have 1 year+ Flash experience
- Be passionate about developing great products

Academia.edu is in Rails - you'll need to be able to handle the interactions between Rails and Flash. We'd prefer it if you were in San Francisco, as we can then discuss the app in person, but we'll definitely consider candidates outside of San Francisco. We want to work with the best people, wherever they are.

If you could be interested in building a cool Flash application, send Richard an email at richard -at- academia.edu
I wish I was rich enough to throw away all my possessions.
Please put the right link to Ruleby. This blog is full of copy-paste of the actual links (of any subject).
Then who decides what's best for the economy as a whole? Industrial policy has been a dismal failure almost everywhere it's been tried. Perhaps we would be better off with fewer web applications and more vaccines, or automobiles, or novels, or furniture, or whatever. One person's opinion that we need more web apps doesn't count.
"If people were so keen on IE alternatives, they would pester their bosses to be allowed to switch. Apparently, FF is not different enough for people to care."

This is what I am getting at. Its not enough for your average person to care, because the stakeholders in the browser war are the developers who have to put in all the extra time to make it work on IE so the average person can be browser agnostic.

In this case Microsoft is abusing their power as a large presence in the market to do whatever they want even though that is detrimental to the market. While I do think that an antitrust case would be over the top, there has to be some way to do something about this.
What You Need To Know About Amazon SimpleDB (A Quick List of Good and Not So Good Points)
Layer Tennis - weekly dose of design
The right system is a train and if you get on you never get off? I think Fred Brooks would differ.
Perhaps I didn't make myself clear. I think you're inferring a lot that I never meant.

What I "meant" has nothing whatsoever to do with workaholism, leisure, money, or in fact, anyone else. Here is what I meant:

It is an ABSOLUTE JOY to be in the zone when I'm hacking. I feel totally alive and love the sense of "doing" and "achieving". And I'm in that zone a lot lately. Many people I know understand that feeling but are unable to (easily) get into that mode. Not because they're workaholics or money grabbers, but because hacking is a kind of "sex" and they not as "horny" as they used to be.

No problem getting in up in my IDE. I'm glad and I hope it stays this way. I wish this on anyone else who desires it, too. It's great.
http://www.google.com/search?q=questions+ask+joining+startup

there are a bunch of useful "top N questions" blog posts from VCs and entrepreneurs that should give you a good start.
..."Then you win" because the Japanese made an offer for Indian independence and the Brits had to match it or lose all of Asia.

...or something like that.
That mat really tied the room together.
Your food shortage example isn't relevant to programmer shortages. Food shortages typically only occur when governments impose price controls that artificially force prices below the market price. Then farmers stop growing and distributors hoard supplies. Total worldwide food production is far in excess of what it would take to adequately nourish all 6.5B+ people; for practical purposes food production capacity is unlimited. Major famines now are typically caused by breakdowns in the distribution system due to wars, natural disasters, or active governmental malice (c.f. North Korea and Zimbabwe); this is not a market issue.

The fundamental point is that if there really were a shortage of programmers then programmer compensation would be rapidly increasing. However, industry data shows that average compensation is increasing at only slightly more than the rate of inflation. Therefore, there can't possibly be a shortage right now.
On the fundamentals of programming
More on learning to program and why a comp sci degree is not enough...
Moo.com on turning the printing world on its head
SQL is good for doing arbitrary queries. Most web sites don't need to do that!

Look at duels.com (a simple player-vs-player game). On each page it needs to know your stats/equipment and that of the person you are dueling. In an SQL database you might store the person/stats in one table, the inventory in another, and the fight record in yet another. In SimpleDB the stats and inventory could be in one domain with fight record in another.

SimpleDB or even dumb file-per-player based systems don't pay the overhead for allowing arbitrary queries so they scale better. Your SQL store will be slowed down by the weight of inactive players and their inventories and all the indexes and data they have lying around. Using in-memory caching (like memcached) is a popular way to pay the SQL cost less often while keeping the arbitrary-query ability on the back end.

And of course don't forget that SimpleDB is hosted by a farm of machines tweaked and maintained by someone else. Your MySQL setup will never be that cool.

Edit: and as for XML,if you add that to SQL, well now you have two problems.
Here is the dirty little secret about evaluating the code you write in the interview:

What is on the piece of paper (or editor) doesn't make a whole lot of difference.

What happens when you and I talk about what you wrote tells me almost everything I need to know.

Less than one percent of interview code I've ever seen even compiled. What I was really looking for was:

- Did he understand the problem?

- How did he approach the problem?

- Does he appear as if he has any idea what he's doing?

- Can he explain what he has done?

- Can he defend what he has done?

- Does he understand the concepts of order, cleanness, iteration, branching, recursion, etc., etc., etc...

- Based on this small sample, do I think he can do the work we need done?

- Do I like him? Will he fit in and be a good team member?

So assuming they interview like I did (a big assumption), here's the good news...whether or not you'll do well has already been determined. So don't bother to "cram" between now and Tuesday. Relax. And have fun. Be yourself and it will all work out OK (one way or the other).
This past summer I did a couple interviews for a position that sounds similar to this one. If the interviewer is like me, these tips will be helpful:

-Do some of the Project Euler problems: http://projecteuler.net/index.php?section=problems . Think about how you could optimize your solutions.

-Read/skim through the 'language reference' section (http://www.php.net/manual/en/langref.php) of the PHP manual, paying particular attention to the PHP5 section on classes/objects.

-Familiarize yourself with a couple of the popular PHP5 frameworks (cake, symfony, codeigniter), just do get a general idea of how object-oriented web applications are done. If you have time, play around with one of the sample apps or build something simple (i.e. a blog).

-Make sure you're comfortable with all the relevant PHP and SQL vocabulary--not just the definition, but also the application.

Specifically, here are some questions from my usual set of technical questions:
-Explain the difference between private, public, and protected, and give an example where each is useful.
-Explain the difference between an abstract class and an interface, and when each is useful.
-Explain the difference between an inner join and an outer join.
-What is the difference between GET and POST?
-In as much detail as you can, explain what happens between the time when you type "http://www.google.com" into your address bar and press enter, and the time when Google's homepage appears on your screen. (Looking for basic knowledge of DNS, routing, TCP/IP, and more specific knowledge about the HTTP protocol)

-(Given a small db written on the whiteboard,) write a handful of SQL queries (testing knowledge of joins, group by, having, subselects)

-Two PHP coding questions, one solved by writing a recursive function and one to write a basic class for string-processing.

I'd also ask a few questions about HTML, CSS, and Javascript.

Hope this helps, and good luck!
TortoiseSVN-style SVN status in TextMate
"All you needed was a cup of tea, a light, and your stereo ..." and a multi-million dollar home in Southern California to put them in.
Googlepedia
When I was at MegaCorp the smartest guy I knew (photographic memory, ninja puzzle solver) thought that users should be required to pass a test to use OUR software! His rendering engines were amazing and his UI's were a disaster.
Boy, I remember seeing that picture when it came out in 1982... it really influenced me.

The article that accompanied it was about how Apple computer had grown so fast that the founders didn't even have time to spend their money and buy furniture. Steve Job's reformulation of this story, as if he were some kind of zen minimalist monk in the old days, sure sounds better than what he said at the time, which was way more prosaic -- something like "I just bought a big house so I would have some place to live and Apple has kept me so busy I haven't had time to buy furniture."
how did you manage to bend the .edu registration rules?

per http://www.educause.edu/edudomain/eligibility.asp :
"Only postsecondary institutions that are institutionally accredited by an agency on the U.S. Department of Education's list of Nationally Recognized Accrediting Agencies (see recognized accrediting bodies) may obtain an Internet name in the .edu domain."

I am aware that "[a]ll institutions holding names as of October 29, 2001 in the .edu domain will be allowed to keep them without regard to institutional eligibility requirements at this time." but am sure that this would not cover the sale of an .edu domain to a startup company not engaged in education per se.

Care to clarify?
I don't think so. Example: Most of the things I have are replacements for what would otherwise be services. My oven and refrigerator and car and local grocery store combine to replace a maid, or 3-times-daily restaurant visits...both very expensive.
Yes, my typo. It was the 6.370 contest.
For those interested, compensation seems rather generous:

"We are offering a salary of $80,000, and options of between 4-5%."
(cf. http://www.kdnuggets.com/jobs/2007-09-11_academia_7_senior.h... )
I believe you can buy a printed copy of this pic at Top Dog in Berkeley. For whatever reason.
Northern California. It was about 1.25 million back then.
SimpleDB appears to be Amazon's Dynamo opened up as a web service. There's good technical information, including a paper, over here:
http://allthingsdistributed.com/2007/10/amazons_dynamo.html
You mean "downvote," right?
Werner Vogel, Amazon's CTO, on Amazon Dynamo/SimpleDB:
http://allthingsdistributed.com/2007/10/amazons_dynamo.html
Appjet doesn't have a PR firm, and neither does YC.
I can't think of anyone who is in a place to condescend towards President Eisenhower.
Mnesia looks like something that might be interesting. I have never used it, though, I'd be curious to hear more from those who have.
Sold Out Kindles Going For Up To $1,500 On Ebay (What?)
Is this that historically-protected house that Steve was trying to give away a few years ago? He described it as "one of the biggest abominations of a house I've ever seen."
I am guessing there a few AWS fanboys on here for this to be modded down :P

does anyone know if this works like ec2 or not when it comes to hourly charging?
Ask YC: Where to find co-founders?
I am sure this gets asked a lot, I am a developer and I am looking for a flash/flex guru to play around with some ideas and want to know where you guys found your co founders?
where can I catch this right system train?
I hope that "system" is defined as hard work, passion and faith on your project. Otherwise this poster has no value.
I am looking forward to the release of 3.5. Its gonna make my life even easier. Anyone else looking forward to this release...
i actually quite enjoy the discussion on each individual comic on Hacker News. It seems a bit more structured than the forums on xkcd.com.
these are really good
Often those I went to school with or connections in my personal network. That can be hard depending on the talent you need and where you live. Currently in Columbus, finding good developers in specific disciplines is hard.
I wonder if she was thinking about hacking:

There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. If you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is; nor how valuable it is; nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours, clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep directly open to and aware of the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open. - Martha Graham

Absolutely not
"Today more Indian than American firms meet the highest internationally recognised standards for software development."

Is this in reference to the CMM model?

I'm not sure exactly what the economist is referring to by the "highest internationally recognized standards for software development." Sounds impressive, which probably means it's a lot of complete bull$%&#.
your thinking too much into it