skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Only silly companies compete with free. The smart ones partner with it.

Consider the Eclipse example:

Eclipse and the surrounding set of tools for debugging, testing and profiling Java code are not great. But they are good enough because they are free. Companies could no longer justify paying for products from, for example, Borland and as a result, IBM's strategy worked beautifully

I guess he doesn't know about Builder 2007:
http://www.codegear.com/products/jbuilder

Builder 2007 is an IDE built on the open source Eclipse framework, which makes development ...

So here you have IBM and Borland both leveraging the same open source framework.
cron + rsync

Most days nothing's really changed in the folders I've selected for backup; when things do change it's usually just a new directory of pictures, maybe an mp3, and some new source code; the whole backup takes maybe a minute to run in that case.
For a billion dollars, they could sponsor 200 years of "DARPA Robot Car Race" style events which would really move technology forward.

Please don't get me wrong, It is Sun's money to do with as they wish, I am just trying to get my head around a billion dollars.

I doubt if they'll ever see a commensurate return on that investment. They'd have to make millions of dollars in profit per year just to keep up with the time value of money.
spaghetti - COBOL

fettucini - enterprise

stove pipes - FTP

macaroni & cheese - Javascript

risotta - XML

lasagne - web apps

ravioli - OO

microwave pouch - agile

angelhair - CSS

al dente - 37 Signals

wheat flour - C++
As I wrote below, yes, somehow missed the news about JVM, but the thing is, as an example, MySQL is GPL'd too and it is not quite open (and I still don't get it how they managed to take GPL down that way).
Call me pessamistic but I always assume most data collections are illegal in some way, violoating TOS, privacy, etc.
Facebook is overvalued. But the numbers 1 and 2 in a market are much more valuable than the rest. If you buy number 1 you are the market leader and if you buy the runner up you can fight for market share or buy some smaller players later on. The number 3 is only interesting if the company can quickly gain a lot of market share. Often those companies are sold off again if that does not happen.
Preamble: This is a post I wrote on a private message board to a friend of mine who got hit by overdraft fees to his debit account when DH made their screwup.

Holy crap.

Just... wow.

That really really sucks that you got bitten by this, $friend.

As it so happens I work in the ISP billing industry. Writing billing software is what I do here. This Dreamhost screwup is pretty much the largest, most high profile disaster you can cause. Ouch. Kudos to them for resolving the situation quickly, but I would not be at all surprised to see some lawsuits headed their way.

I hope this can serve as a warning to us all as to why you should never ever ever give your debit account information to any sort of automated billing system. The risk of getting screwed over, hard, is just too high. Of course banks love to hit you with huge nasty fines if you overdraw your debit account. I've been nailed by that in the past. For a $0.50 overdraft. After I had just put a large chunk of money in that account, which they hadn't posted yet. Blech.

Also!

Check your billing statements each month to make sure that they're correct. Just... trust me on this one.

I hope you get everything resolved quickly $friend. Dreamhost may be fixing things on their end but you might have to tag-team your bank to get them to make things right. Fees, fines, overdrafts, and other similar charges can really screw you up. And banks are famously recalcitrant when it comes to fixing such situations. (Credit Unions are significantly better. I highly recommend them over banks.)

Sheesh, I'm getting the chills just contemplating the situation.

Good luck getting everything fixed up folks.
All source material (.py, .psd etc) and documentations go in to local LAN subversion, Subversion is svnsync'd to a remote repository every 15 minutes.

All email mirrored from off site to local IMAP server once a day.

SuperDuper on macs to firewire drive once a week.

rsync and cron on FreeBSD to remote FreeBSD boxes once a day

No PC's so no problem there (for ever) ;)
Autotest-ing Your Rails Plugin
Jungledisk is great. Its easy to use, cheap and runs on Windows, Linux (includes GUI and CLI) and Mac. You can treat is as a network drive or setup automated backups. The protocol is open so you can use tools like S3 Firefox Organizer to retrieve your data outside of the Jungledisk front-end.

Another big plus is that you can run an unlimited number of instances across any number of machines after paying a one time fee of $25.
Why would you test that many browsers and then include Opera 5. They're on version 9 now...

Also, Safari and Konqueror are not the same thing.
Jobs Keynote in 60 seconds
http://daily.mahalo.com/2008/01/16/md038-the-steve-jobs-90-minute-keynote-in-60-seconds/
Plaxo Pulls The Social Network Into Mac Mail
All 3 levels hate Unix? You gotta quit that job.
Meh...my MBP is only 1 year old, so it will be some time before I'm in the market for a new portable.

I was hoping Apple would do something revolutionary, like a portable that's basically a 10-inch screen iPhone (all touch/styles gestures and writing, tablet style, virtual keyboard that pops on text widget focus...).
Learnings? From looking at his site, it doesn't appear that english is his second language. Lots of stuff on valleywag about jobster, e.g.
http://valleywag.com/tech/startup-hell/jobsters-death-march-...
Good lord, please put a NSFW in the title. I'm gonna get fired.
The ACM is so utterly backward that I won't even click on their links anymore. In an era when nearly everything else is a 5-second web search away, they place barrier after barrier in front of information. What are they protecting other than their own obsolescence? Googling the titles of most papers brings up a free copy on the author's website or elsewhere.
Heh. Can't say that vi makes me feel much better ;)

Pg has a lot of people fired up about using lisps, but right now it's a sport you can only participate in if you've got a certain -other- set of skills like vi and emacs and a decent knowledge of system administration. Preconditions like this limit the user community massively. Small communities find it difficult to get momentum.

I've forced myself to stick with emacs/slime because basically that's that there is. I'm getting comfortable, and starting to like it. But I think it's actually a kind of Helsinki syndrome...

I'd like to write the next Viaweb, and I'd like to write it in Lisp. But if the basic language is inviting, the rest of the environment is sorta hostile; a shangri-la in a swamp.

So the quality of the installer, the libraries distributed with it, the documentation, and the bundled editor will ultimately affect it's success.
Nice. I didn't know that in Ruby * prefix applies not only to parameter lists, but to any arbitrary expression turning it into a kind of in-line array.
And that's another shark jumped.
I use Time Machine.
I'd like to be able to embed it in apps. Any license that allows that is OK by me.

Some ideas I've got floating around are to use it for scripting (instead of, say, LUA or XSLT) and for config files (instead of XML) in existing apps. Also, lisp seems fantastically placed for HTML generation, so if I embed it in an IIS or Apache site, then great!
Comparison of ActiveRecord to DataMapper
That looks really neat. I had wondered about using S3 for backups. I'll definitely have to try it out.

It looks like the "Plus" service's block-level access
and transfer resume would pay for itself pretty quickly with a reasonable volume of data ($1/month vs 0.10 or 0.18 per GB up/down), besides being worth it for $1 anyway.
Twitter Isn't That Bad (or Inane)
This is a fantastic article summarizing what I have learned and what I tried to write on my own (http://www.startupforless.com).

I am humble by it.

Basically it boils down to the following ...

1) Create "value", not "valuation"
2) Be a "surrogate" customer, live their lives and adopt their persona
3) Be frugal, use your VC money as working capital and treat it as the last money you ever going to have and need
4) ... and more

--Denny--
Users can now create personal iGoogle Themes
Perhaps we should focus on the message and not messager (sp??).

--Denny--

Note: English is my second language.
Narrow-minded hackers! OMG :)
Actually, MySQL could really use an embedded procedure-writing language. Java wouldn't be the worst choice they could make, especially given the proliferation of other languages implemented atop the JVM -- being able to use JRuby for stored procedures inside a running MySQL instance (with no network I/O or marshalling overhead) would pretty much rock.

Of course, you could also just use Postgres, which already lets you embed your choice of scripting language(s) in the database server...
Facebook asked to pull Scrabulous
What do you mean by no PCs?
Has E.T. Made A Call? (Possible Contact from Intelligent Civilization)
NYT Interview with Steve Jobs on MacBook Air, Kindle
As far as I know, they keep a dual license; every change in the code goes for both licenses, excepting those changes they want to keep closed, those going only for the non-GPL license. Only the real owner of the software (not the licensee) has the right to do this kind of stuff with GPL.

Please correct me if I'm wrong in my guess.
PayPal Moves Into Facebook But The App Is Broken
From http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Please don't sign comments, especially with your url. They're already signed with your username. If other users want to learn more about you, they can click on it to see your profile.
I think it's a strategic move for the company: MySQL might help positionate better all Sun products, and so they buy. I don't think they are going to get that kind of profit from that product alone, that's not the objective afaik.
Thanks. I am from the old World.
Oracle buys BEA for $8.5 billion
I was going to ask about that - the Neumann one was the only one I found interesting, but I could not find an actual download link.
Yeah, our very first message to an advanced civilization should be (from the article):

"Any materials you'd like to give us to help... We're running out of oil," she said.
I can't say this enough, or nearly as well:

Try to ride some powerful existing waves vs. just creating new waves. Find some big and important industry trends and ride on top of them. It is very very hard to create your own industry trends. Be careful about getting out too far ahead of any wave.

It is where I made a major error - getting way out in front of the wave.
It's strange that the human body is 'nsfw'

Edit: rather, that it is considered to be nsfw by society.
Too bad we won't hear the dial tone when they 'hang up on us'.
Software Icons have needs too
Many Sun boxes are sold to run Oracle. Many Sun boxes are not sold because there are solid options that are not Oracle.

Step 3... Profit!
I agree. I think the article basically summarizes what we have all learned (the hard way) ... ahead of your competitors but never too far ahead of your customers.
If this is credible, why is the article on ktvu.com and not cnn?
Ipod Touch: $399, Firmware Upgrade: $20, Getting Suckered by Apple: Priceless
Having worked at Jobster, I can safely say that 95% of the stuff on Valleywag about Jason is just plain wrong or horribly exaggerated. Pointing people there is the startup equivalent of pointing people to the National Enquirer.
I think it's ridiculous to think the aliens might be hostile to us...

Imagine a civilization 1000 times more advanced than us. Why would they want to kill the equivalent of cavemen?! And there are so many planets out there, I don't see why they'd want to enslave/destroy ours specifically.

It's not like they could possibly feel threatened by us. It reminds me of some people who wanted to prepare for some kind of war against the aliens. In the very unlikely one is declared, we obviously don't have a fighting chance of any kind. It's civilization-who-can-barely-go-into-space VS civilization-with-faster-than-lightspeed-ships.

But as I said, if they're smart enough to travel the stars then they're certainly responsible enough not to destroy a comparatively irrelevant civilization.
Reinstate hystry's Hacker News
hystry.com lets me read Hacker News comments in chronological order instead of having to go back to each story (http://hystry.com/newsyc/follow/). I found it invaluable and I was a lot more involved in the community when I could follow the conversations easier. It died a couple days ago, apparently its IP address was banned from crawling Hacker News.

pg, could you please let them back in? Please, pretty please?

EDIT: or at least change the Comments page to include link and title for the story each comment pertains to?
One more reason to stick with PostGreSQL in the long run...
I use Time Machine, but intend to use SuperDuper as well once the Leopard compatibility issues are solved. (It's taking a long time, but that appears to be because the SuperDuper author is a really careful guy. That's what you want in a backup vendor.)

For Linux I just use rsync. Restoring a failed Linux system often requires fiddling with Knoppix as well; get a nice recent Knoppix disc burned and ready to go in an emergency.

Don't forget: have more than one backup, and have an offsite backup.

I never really tested my Windows system backup solutions; I decided to abandon Windows instead. For backing up Windows files I used to use SyncBack: http://www.2brightsparks.com/downloads.html -- it was pretty good.

I need to work on doing better online backups. A lot of my work is web stuff, though, and that lives on other servers anyway.
>Why would they want to kill the equivalent of cavemen?!

Comparatively irrelevant FOR NOW. But that's discounting the exponential progress of energy consumption. They aren't afraid of our nuclear weapons, but why let us live to develop gamma ray bursts? If they study our psychology at all, they would learn that our leaders wouldn't hesitate to gamma ray burst any potential threats.
Some bodies are less safe than others.
The theory says that for any two programming languages there is a constant c such that any given program can be translated from one to the other with only a c difference in size.

That's just an elaborate way of saying that you can write an interpreter (of size c) for one language in another.

Nevertheless, I have a hard time believing that viaweb could not be written in C short of writing a Lisp interpreter. For that to be true, the runtime compilation of s-expressions would have to be essential to the application; there would have to be no other way to write it.
Jon Udell: The personal service management console (business idea?)
I didn't mean it in a negative sense.

Indeed, but horizontal scaling has been common before Rails and will be common after Rails, since most web apps are stateless and transaction based. So, even though Apache and mod_blah only runs as one process, you can still horizontally scale. With rails it is apparently common to have more than one process per server.
Facebook also has a much better revenue model than providing support for open source software.
All my backups are made to a NAS.

On Mac OS X I use Silverkeeper (I don't have leopard).

On Windows I use SyncBack [1].

All my development work is on a remote SVN server which is backed to the NAS.

The NAS is backed up to DVDs which are shipped to my parents house.

Any recommendations for online remote storage?

[1] Syncback tutorial http://lifehacker.com/software/geek-to-live/geek-to-live-aut...
AFAIK the $20 firmware upgrade exists because tax laws, not because Apple likes it that way.

Proof: it was different before, and Apple got in legal trouble.
@kirubakaran - "What are your Arc related plans?"

I plan to build the arc, set sail and bring 2 of every animal with me.

;)
Navigation system with visible lifeline.
our fox affiliate is equally a credible news source as a hackneyed cable news show
NSA Must Examine All Internet Traffic to Prevent Cyber 911
I remember seeing The Titanic many years ago when it came out. During the scene where Kate Winslet poses topless for Leonardo, the artist, I was sitting next to a couple with their 8-or-9-ish year old children. It took a couple delayed seconds for the husband to react and shield his kid's eyes. During that time, the kids didn't flinch; the parents eventually did. Perhaps the kids didn't see anything wrong with seeing boobies - but now they associate them with something forbidden.
Yes, C is another good example. The language is fairly small, and it's not terribly difficult to learn the language itself and write your own programs. But to be able to look at an arbitrary piece of C code and understand all of the implications is another matter entirely.

This is true of any language to some degree, although some are worse than others, and if the code was purposefully written in some non-traditional way it can be even harder.
Tell it to the lab manager shooting me the dirty looks.
What Sun's acquisition of MySQL means for the software industry
I've observed co-workers working long days because they don't accomplish much during 9-5. Some people confuse activity with productivity. Quote from Jim Rohn - "If all you get from your job is a paycheck, you're underpaid" I think it's hard to do be good at something if you don't like it - I remember near-falling asleep in some boring (to me) subjects - I think some people are awake but asleep at their job.
Hot Air? Apple's New Macbook
some of the weaker points of apple's latest product
"Did you say it would take them 3 million years just to get here to destroy us?"

"No, maam, I said 3 BILLION years."

"Oh, good. I feel much better now."
The incentive to share
Time Machine to a drobo.
Interesting. Could you elaborate, please?
I hate being hopeful when I hear this type of news. It's always a big let down.
Have a look at rsnapshot (rsnapshot.org), a perl wrapper script over rsync. Supports *nix and incremental backups that roll over.
How is that different from the "comments" link? Other than you don't have to login.
Not CSP, no, but libraries that bolt onto existing languages, e.g. C, Python. I'd love to see it become more of a mainstream technique in Python than `import threading', etc.

For those that wonder what we're wittering on about, visit http://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/teaching/07/modules/CO/6/31/slides/ and read these PDF slides in this order.

motivation.pdf -- just pages 1-39
basics.pdf
applying.pdf
choice.pdf
replicators.pdf
protocol.pdf
shared-etc.pdf

Ignore the crufty Occam (Transputer anyone?) syntax, just concentrate on the concepts. Although some of the PDFs seem to have many pages, often a page is the same as the previous with a minor change; they're slides!
Seems to be part of a general pattern: For most people math is much easier to understand with a $ sign.
Does anyone have a link to more detailed information about the "signal" that was detected? I'm very ignorant of SETI and radio astronomy - what does it mean to "decode" such a signal? What is the evidence that this signal is produced by a civilization, and does not come from a natural source?
From a Google news search, this is the only only source. There's nothing here: http://www.seti.org/news/ so this story is worthless.
Did anyone notice this article is from September 2005?
Unix is sexier than those two ( or four, depends on what you're looking at ).
We're all going to die!!!!!!!!!!!
The comments page shows all of the comments in order, but hystry shows the link to the article next to each comment, lets you filter out comments from specific stories, and view all the parents of a comment.

It's hard to get a feel for it now since the feed got shut down, but I could browse through the last 100 comments in just a few minutes, and quickly get a feel for which stories people were talking about.
If they are that much more advanced than us, would they even regard us as intelligent? Would we be roaches to them?

Eh, I generally agree with you. Just playing the devil's advocate.
Treetop: a syntax analyzer and expression grammar parser in Ruby
Web 2.0 Companies Waiting to go Public
the nuclear bomb was not used by those who built it
Anyone know what the results calculus graphs mean? The one for jquery looks rather exponential, but I'm not really sure what that is representing...
So what language do you use when you roll a 20?
It still has to be highly compressed. An uncompressed HD movie is something like 25 gb. I don't have or want iTunes so I can't verify it, but I'd be surprised if the files they send are more than 1/10th of that.
That's a pretty human-centric view of the universe. The thing about aliens is, they're alien. Maybe they regulate self replication, therefore the humans need to be licensed. Maybe they can't handle the concept of not being alone, like Kricket. No way to know up front.

I'd like to say we have things, therefore humans are slightly more likely to build stuff than destroy stuff. I'd hope civilization works that way everywhere, but there is no proof of that. Really, there isn't all that much evidence.

We'd share physics and math, and that's about it.

However, this particular article is nonsense.
After searching for correlating articles, I believe that this article jumped the gun. It's cool to speculate on what would happen if we made contact with an alien civilization, but it appears this is premature for the particular signal they're talking about. See here:

http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2004/09/64818
Agreed that the ACM's Digital Library is a total waste of a person's time and always has been. Practically every important paper in physics and astronomy is available from a central location (arxiv.org) without restriction and with two clicks (one to specify the paper, the second to choose between PDF, Postscript, Latex source code, etc), and it is only a matter of time before computer science is the same way.
Bye Bye Scrabulous
I second that! I don't think its the human body thats nsfw, but those two weren't hot enough and in my circle of friends if I'm caught looking at the ugly chicks then I lose the small amount of credibility I had
Wow, that was a cool comment. I don't think I've ever agreed with and wanted to argue with a comment so much as that one. I sat there for about 30 seconds deciding whether to vote it up or down. Kudos! (note - that was totally sincere)

At first I thought you were leaving out their smarts and technology, but speed and agility were because of the smarts and tech. Then I thought I remembered pg saying they were going to close another round of funding when they got bought instead.

But I totally agree with your main point.
I too used SuperDuper! with Tiger but as soon as I got my hands on Leopard, I started using TM. Why? Well, it's automatic. Problem with SD! is that I would forget to plug my external HD sometimes and the backup would not go through. You can enable to backup TM to a HD attached to AirportExtreme (with a small hack) so that's my makeshift TimeCapsule and works well because I don't have to remember to do anything.
No, we're all going to die!11!1!!1111111111111
The more advanced aliens are, the more we can make reliable predictions about them. For example, they will have values and ways of thinking closer to what we call "scientific" than "religious/mystical/superstitious/etc." If they did not, they would not become advanced.

Wars are very expensive and destructive. It's hard to become advanced when you keep destroying wealth. On Earth, as we've become more peaceful, we've also become more wealthy, and more able to travel space. The same logic for why this would be so on Earth, applies elsewhere.
Ask YC: Your best programming websites/blogs
Curious to see apart from news.yc what do people read on a daily or occasional basis (apart from what you find on news.yc) ? These could be general ones or language specific.
Whoa, didn't see that coming. I appreciate the humour, but as the others said, a warning would have been nice.
I'm a big fan of http://www.mattmaroon.com.