skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I also agree about JSON. JSON is quicker to serialize to and from than XML, and it also uses less bandwidth.

Realistically though, the serialization should be a simple layer on the top of your API, and there isn't anything that should prevent you from doing both quickly.
HP Pavillion DV. I'm using a DV 2000.

There are Ubuntu 100s. Everything works out of the box at the end of the install with zero setup required.

Compiz, webcam, touch sensitive multimedia keys, wireless, bluetooth, touch slider on trackpad, multimedia card reader, and all the usual bits and pieces.

They're also great looking, and have won a Red Dot award to prove it.
Learned this neat trick from the EngineYard guys. If you plan to scale, I would recommend having seperate Xen slices for your web, app, and database components. It was a life saver to be able to just move your database and app servers to seperate boxes when we needed to scale out.

Memory is critical. Yes, Rails is a little slow but application servers are trivial to scale. The database is virtually always going to be the hard bottle neck so you're going to want plenty of memory.
Short version from someone in the middle of doing this:

Get a Delaware-incorporated C-Corp. You don't want any other structure if you want to raise VC money. Delaware is good for tax.

You can do this easily online. Should be $US200-500.

Have a small amount of shares at first. You can change this later. I forget why.

google delaware site:news.yc.com for more info.

If you live outside the US, get a a US postal forwarder. Also handy for the USPTO and getting Apple products without being priced gouged (eg, if you live in Australia or the UK).
So, are you a major user yourself? Even caffeine, which I use out of weakness and necessity, I worry about. Subjectively, it seems like my increased focus and lack of tiredness comes at a cost to my higher intellectual functions. No objective proof of this, though subjectivity counts for something.

Has anyone here achieved good enough control over their body where they don't need this stuff? Have you found a significant difference between operating on and off drugs when going without sleep for long periods?
Alas the attached .doc no longer exists at that URL - anyone got a copy?
It only helps with large regular expressions.
I would not recommend kratom or any stimulant as a substitute for sleep. The best thing for your productivity is natural sleep. For the purposes of productivity enhancement, I think kratom and coffee are best consumed during a day as slowly as possible... if you feel yourself getting tired or distracted, take a sip.

I don't feel that kratom use hinders higher intellectual function in sub-opiating doses but this is difficult to measure.

There is only one good pharmaceutical solution for suppressing tiredness without other side effects: Modafinil. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modafinil This is an account of extreme Modafinil use and abuse. http://www.erowid.org/experiences/exp.php?ID=45423
Chipmunk Physics
Water becomes the new oil as world runs dry
Not true. Compare, for example, the bloated Windows Services API and the daemon paradigm on UNIX. It is more about philosophy and overall architecture than how exactly the API functions look like.

The goal of UNIX creators was to simplify their job, while Microsoft's goal is clearly to sell the OS. That explains a lot.

In fact, this API style was invented by IBM and was later only borrowed by MS.
So long as it is relevant to the discussion and not just spam I don't mind.
Automated web testing with Sahi. (Flash demo)
The fact that the chat is automated has nothing to do with it, of course it is still entrapment, just like you can't shoot somebody and claim the gun did it.

However if two separate entities were involved you can get around it, for example if spammers use the bot for their own purposes and the police happens to be monitoring a chat room but had nothing to do with launching/controlling the bot it wouldn't be entrapment.
Please don't do that, while a few rare articles might be a good fit for all 3 sites, most aren't. Lets keep the sites separate otherwise we'll have to start looking for a new hangout.
3 Bad Examples of Landing Pages
I have always been surprised about Spolsky's observation. Although I don't know many C programmers, I can't believe pointers are something you just get or just don't.

When you learn about pointers you must also learn about addresses (star c, c, &c). If you get addresses, you get pointers. The problem you had, as it seems, was the syntactical anomaly of C where the pointer initialization is like a one-time shorthand, ie:

char star c = &a; // now, c == &a, star c == a, &c == whoknows?

I think this is a bad syntax, but that's just how it is.
Perhaps if I skipped the one sentence that mentioned how in the initialization step, the c of (star c) is really a memory address, and only thereafter is it a dereference, I would've been just as confused as you. But hence, I think the difference between getting it and not is really a syntactical understanding (like vocabulary), rather than a conceptual understanding (like grammar).

Perhaps it would be clearer for beginners to separate declaration and assignment, something like

char star c; // declare pointer

c = malloc; // obviously c and malloc are both addresses

Whatever it is though, I can't see how this piece of knowledge affects your aptitude as a programmer.

Sorry about the non-markdown
I strongly recommend naps! It doubles the daily time when I can hit a flow state while coding, which is when I produce my best code. In terms of coding, I find the cloud that comes from tiredness to be worth always avoiding. I do this because coding's not like moving lumber where you're just slower if you're tired. Instead you'll move the lumber to the wrong place! If I'm not at-peak, I dedicate that time to grunt-work, research, but not coding. My newest approach is personal "sprints" where I ignore all distractions, set a big goal and race at it for 1-2 hours.
I don't buy it. Stress has nothing to do with getting kicked out of hack mode. Even the least stressful of interruptions, assuming it uses the local state registers that are used in hacking, can completely scramble your brain. The friendliest of comments from co-workers, assuming they're about hacking (but not your project) and require hacking thinking, can ruin it, if the comment turns into a conversation that lasts more than 60 seconds.

It's not about stress. It's about juggling a bunch of delicate state, and the state is being held in short-term memory registers that are easily clobbered.
The Internals of Mathematica
Did any one try programming on Modafinil?
Self-righting object - the Gomboc
homepage:
http://www.gomboc.eu/gomboc_english.html
paper:
http://www.szt.bme.hu/Munkatrs/domokos/cikk_archiv/100/final...
LOL ... He hit most of my points except for the insane complexity of the FETCH and SEARCH commands. Each of these commands could be broken down into smaller commands that could be implemented in a hour or two instead of one huge command that takes weeks to perfect...
This is a great suggestion. Thanks for sharing.
8 Tips To Launching A Successful Web Startup
The guy has a business that he mentions only in context, ever. If it were coffee or bicycle horns would you be whining about it?
More for anything obnoxious like PHP or IE Javascript incompatibilities. Fewer for things that are hard, but not evil (including functional languages).
Aside from developing a physical addiction, I respond well to caffeine. More of it generally makes me happy and stimulated.
Darcs is also a very interesting option. Have you tried it? I've been using it for one week after a few years using SVN and it seems like a very viable option.
If you learn hardware first, pointers are pretty easy. However, learning hardware inevitably slants your thinking towards solving ALL problems in those terms, which is bad for higher level architecture and design thought processes. When all you have is a hammer...
ROT-13. When that fails, XOR with a key posted in the text. Effective automated censorship is NP-complete.
Portal is the most subversive game ever
Ha! Exactly. Its easier to fool the male organ than the male brain. :)
A good post, and the comments mention some good looking books. Any other suggestions from fellow hackers for math learning books? I have perused MathWorld (http://mathworld.wolfram.com/) but it would be nice to have a book ...
http://www.everyoneforever.com/images_fullsize/165-585.jpg
The Twice Shy Entrepreneur
It worked for me when I wrote GCC-CIL, and that was one of my most productive periods ever. I worked a 40 hour/wk job at a research lab and hacked on GCC-CIL on evenings and weekends, progressing so quickly that it freaked out my mentor. But this data point really means nothing... it's probably just an indication that you have to be either drugged or insane to hack GCC's internals without vomiting.

Overall, I don't recommend it. Do it every once in a while and you might have some cool ideas, but I bet you'll spend most of your time giggling and watching The Simpsons. I have not experimentally confirmed this, but apparently proper use of hallucinogens is the way to go for broadening perspective and etc. I'm personally interested in learning meditation techniques and seeing what sorts of effects that can have on the mind.
Bridgewerx - Product Success, Business Failure
Ugh. I tried to order one but couldn't get past the 'enter desired serial number' page due to a Javascript bug.

I hope it doesn't take another 2 years of research to find the forumula for a correct implementation of a Javascript event handler.
A quick stroll through DTrace (Ruby, Mac and dtrace)
Two Stories of Simplicity
Perl On Rails - What the BBC Does Right
I find I write my best code when I am extremely tired and working late into the night.

Mind you, I need to have a good idea in my head already of how I want to solve the problem, but I write a whole chunk of code often in one evening (or all nighter). When I write code and am entirely awake, I often get bored or distracted, or keep trying to rethink ways to solve the problem better.

I definitely can't code after a beer.
It's all about smoking the right blend at the right amount. Varying strains have different properties when imbued, so you have to choose carefully and not go overboard. You need to know what your smoking, the amounts by which to smoke it, etc.

I'd say that 90% of my staff smokes on the regular. I find the cognitive dissonance helps me abstract problems out much more quickly, as well as increases concentration and thoroughness when tackling an issue. I understand this is the opposite response one would naturally assume to occur, but it really is about what you are smoking and how much. If you smoke so much that you suffer from a round of derealization, then it's going to dampen your output. Also, it's about how regularly you smoke as well. The more you do it, the more skill you have in dealing with the high itself. If you don't smoke weed regularly, social or otherwise, the less capable you will be of being functional on it.

Naturally, it's not something I'd recommend doing every day, but it's certainly helped us more than hurt us at our particular company.

There are some negatives, but for me, the positives of smoking and coding far outweigh the negatives.

YMMV.
Yes, double good when taken while high.
Bad Changes In The New GMail Version
We decided against dealing with those companies. Just the fact that they are charging startups, not investors, is a good indicator.

Why would you charge customers who need money as opposed to those who want to invest? Pbobaly because all your customers are of the first type.
Just what is this Javascript object you handed me?
Corrections about sync(2)
A Guide to Gaining Value from Social Media Traffic
Here are 12 tips. What value have you received from social media traffic?
I emailed transburgh a while ago and said I would like to try GoBig's service for free and write about it on news.yc. His response was that they didn't think it was a good idea because whether or not I raised money had little to do with them and everything to do with my company.
Upon immediate inspection it looks as if good business sense went straight out of the boardroom windows from this article. Looking closer, however, you can see the reasoning behind these decisions.

One just has to be aware of where the profitability is arising from. Since IPOs seem to be a dying breed and acquisition becomes the latest exit strategy du jour, its clear that larger firms are buying startups not just for brand value or even the developed application itself but rather the collective expertise of the individuals involved.

So in some sense startup acquisition may be seen as a one-time consultation fee, with no hourly rates attached!
What's new in Groovy 1.5 
Some interesting additions, keeping Java 5 in mind.
In a perfect world we would get rid of the CS major entirely and teach only math. Students interested in a computer career would take a maths course with a CS focus: very hard math and then data structures & algorithms, theory of computation, and some electives. Good programming is all about good design, and the way you learn good design is from spending a lot of time thinking about really hard math.

When two programmers are skilled in mathematics, there's no disagreement on the right way to do something since they both realize there is only one right way to do something. Minimal footprint, minimal dependencies, ease of change, minimal variable names, canonical structures, efficient run times...How can people have arguments over object-oriented programming semantics? The very notion is absurd.

When math is taught well computer programming falls out of it as a corollary. Courses like operating systems and programming languages are absolutely ridiculous. A bright student can pick up all of the useful concepts in an afternoon or two. At best they're excuses to have large programming projects.

The CS curriculum as designed is little more than a vocational school, one whose difficulty is increasingly ratcheted down to get somebody, anybody, to do the work that grows each year in complexity and tedium, owing to the previous class of terrible coders it was necessary to graduate. The demands on the software haven't gotten any more taxing, the existing codebase has just managed to grow in size without any new intelligence being added to its construction.

When you think about it, the CS curriculum, its practical side anyway, is basically just a massive toolset designed to cope with the fact that its students are bad at math. Constructs like object-oriented programming, they start out with the assumption that you won't see the canonical way to do something, and then everything that follows thereafter is damage control. How to program at the lowest common denominator.

That books on design patterns exist, and are so widely celebrated, is perhaps the most damning indictment of the field I can think of. If you can look at a design pattern book and learn something, it means you are missing the strong inner core of understanding that allows another, better designer to look at the table of contents and go 'duh', and that inner core is absolutely necessary to construct any sort of code that is going to work together with other code in a completely seamless, mathematical sense.

The curriculum, and these techniques, are heavily influenced by economic forces---this is not a secret. (Programmer churn, outsourcing, the never-ending cutbacks in the cost center.) You need to have all your programmers speaking the same language, and it's a lot easier to have them speaking OO than math. And so you get a product that sucks, and we're all using an internet in 2007 that still looks like a Model T, and everyone gets excited when they can update a calendar without refreshing their browser. You've got to be kidding me.
The real question: Are they using MySQL?
What is the best way to register a country-specific domain extension?
Are there any central repositories of information on rules and regulations of foreign domain names? (This is for the purposes of a domain hack, ala del.icio.us.) Most of the information that comes up in Google is not even in English.

Do you have any information on what registrars are good at foreign domain names? Any caveats, such as the government enforcing "interest in the country's culture / having ties to the country" and taking the domain away?

I am specifically looking for information on Spain, but any general tips would be appreciated.
I've been hearing that by Xmas for Ruby2 and the Rails guys have been doing quite a bit of work to make sure Rails2 is compatible with the upcoming Ruby release. I'm not sure how much will need to change, but they have indeed been working towards making it compatible.
I'm currently slowly working my way through Concrete Mathematics by Ronald L. Graham, Donald E. Knuth, and Oren Patashnik.

It's basically an expanded version of the first bit of Knuth's Art Of Computer Programming. I've found it really fascinating and a lot of fun so far even if it is a bit slow going for me.
When I was looking into it I found that wiki tells quite a bit of info. Also there are usually (I think .es included) English websites that can register for you. Some of the domains require you to be a resident of that country or have a business there, and some companies can register for you but with their name. Maybe I am paranoid but I don't feel safe having online identity of a company in the hands of some other company.
This Yahoo deal has to be cheaper to implement than access to the real internet.
I can't imagine how that could possibly be true without pathologically CPU intensive code. But, all things are possible in an infinite universe, so I won't argue too strenuously about it.

I just haven't seen any web service situations in the past seven years, or so, where CPU was the bottleneck, and I've been involved involved in a lot of web scalability projects (it's what my previous company specialized in).

Are you sure you weren't actually seeing some kind of thrashing triggered by being low on memory or too-slow disk access? For example, when Squid gets overloaded, CPU usage spikes up to nearly 100%--but increasing the speed of the CPU does nothing to make things go faster. You have to give it more memory and more disk throughput. The reason it looks like a CPU usage spike is because the select or poll loop is so busy waiting for file descriptors to be ready (not an entirely accurate description...but it should give you the gist of it if you've ever done any concurrent programming in C without using threads). But maybe PHP and Ruby can work the CPU in pathological ways that I've not seen...modern CPUs are just so damned fast, it's hard to imagine.
Linear algebra -- matrices etc. -- is the bit of my undergrad. mathematics that I use most often in programming.

I really liked the informal text by Gilbert Strang, "Introduction to Linear Algebra". The 3rd edition is quite expensive, but Strang's video lectures are available here:

http://web.mit.edu/18.06/www/Video/video-fall-99.html

For "getting" mathematics as a way of problem-solving, I suggest Polya's books, starting with "How to Solve It".
Sounds like a problem of information asymmetry:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asymmetrical_information
Good programming is all about good design, and the way you learn good design is from spending a lot of time thinking about really hard math.

An interesting idea, but empirically false. Design sense is a necessary condition for being a good hacker, but not a sufficient one. As for the second half, I agree one can learn about design from studying math, but most of the people I know with a great sense of design didn't acquire it that way.

If you said "A sense of design is a big component of being a good programmer, and you can learn a lot about design by studying math," you'd be right.
The site says there are an infinite number of shapes with these properties. Anyone know if there are any that look dramatically different from theirs?
The team that put the net in orbit
Astronomical "computer" from 100 BC is surprisingly complex
I only tried it every single day for the last 6 months. Works for me.
Of course already rich investors think you should risk it all so they can make their funds. Personally I think Techcrunch should be a bit conservative. Arrington was making millions a year by himself in almost pure profit. There's no obvious (to me) way he can replicate his success by throwing resources at it. He found a solid niche and if he just managed to grow it a few times what it is today he'd making $50 million+ over the next 5-10 years or so and he could share that with a small group of helpers.

That's probably the kind of business most of us will grow. It's up to investors to choose businesses like Facebook or Google, which really proved the grow fast/big quick idea. They had some huge ideas and by taking equally huge risks they've managed to do really well. All the people (myself included) who would have sold Facebook for $1 billion to Yahoo would have lost out on the amazing opportunity Zuckerberg has now to fundamentally change the way people use the internet.
An Offer
Hello friends,

Recently, a startup made me an offer to move to San Francisco from Missouri to work with them. It would be great to get your thoughts and opinions, and to learn from your experience.

I'm nineteen, and I've been programming for seven years. I left high school when I was seventeen to work in the video game industry. Over the last few years, my job has improved my programming skill from "decent" to "pretty competent". I can hold my own, fix bugs that aren't mine, and implement new features and big systems. Some screenshots of my three-year-old demos can be found here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/16941908@N08/ and you can actually play those demos by downloading them from here: http://www.mediafire.com/?b9mvmstg04v

The startup is a group of seriously awesome fellas, and they're extremely smart. It would be fantastic to jump into the startup scene feet-first by joining them.

To keep confidentiality, let's say that I would be anywhere from the 7th to the 10th hire. I was offered a salary of $60,000. As to the stock, I'm extremely new to the terminology, so please bear with me. To avoid saying the exact share numbers, let's pretend that I was offered four shares, vested over four years. The total number of "authorized shares" is then 2391.56, and the total number of "issued shares" is 1916.1. (Again, those numbers are not the actual numbers, but they are accurate in proportion with each other.) There is a double trigger acceleration of 50%, so if they were bought before the shares were fully vested, I'd receive 50% of the rest.

Is that offer reasonable? I'm certainly not counting on them getting bought. I'd simply like to find an interesting project and then really throw myself at it.

Some other questions, if you don't mind: What's it like to live in, or near, San Francisco? What would you do in this situation?

Thanks a lot. I really appreciate your feedback on this.

Shawn
Seems pretty cool. Anyone using this?
How Poor Marketing Kills Great Content
Tell me the future
If it were me, I would want more than .1% of the total shares. I don't live in California, but how competitve is that salary for what you'll be doing?
If you like the idea and the people, you should definitely come out and give it a shot. The stock offer seems slim, but I don't know how old the company is. What it really comes down to is deciding if you'll like the company and people you're working with, since almost everyone likes the bay area as a place to live. So come visit, meet the guys, see the area, and decide after that.
The Dynamics of Viral Marketing [PDF]
As far as the salary goes, it's a bit lower than what a college graduate would expect from a startup in the area, but it might be fair for your age (depending on benefits). You might be able to push for either more stock or more pay... the job market is very tight for good developers around here.