skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
http://www.apacheweek.com/issues/96-04-04

> If you don't know where Apache came from, here's a short history lesson. In late 1994 and early 1995, the NCSA server was stuck at version 1.3. Patches being submitted for the NCSA server didn't get incorporated. So a group of people who wanted to keep developing the server got together, and using the public domain code from NCSA 1.3 developed their own server. There was also some doubt over what the license would be for the next version of NCSA. Because the new server developed from a need to integrate outstanding patches, it became known as "a patchy" server.

http://web.archive.org/web/19961028122409/www.apache.org/doc...

> Why the name "Apache" ?

> A cute name which stuck. Apache is "A PAtCHy server". It was based on some existing code and a series of "patch files".

So there you go. You'd think a bunch of people who make web servers would understand the archival properties of the web.
Life is difficult. Not just start ups.

Almost anything worth doing is difficult and to an extent risky. You are likely to fail both wasting time, money and other resources. But you are also likely to win big.

Anything that is easy is either already solved, or leads to mediocrity or pays too less.

To succeed at your goal you either need to get lucky or simply persist until you get there. Some can, many can't. Some just get lucky.
I've very rarely seen something with a > 1 Billion market cap and millions of users simply disappear. (To use an unrelated example, even MySpace still exists :)

Very simply, the more users are in Bitcoin the more vendors there will be who accept BitCoin. The more goods and services can be bought in Bitcoin during the relatively smooth periods the greater the proportion of people who like to have the currency for currency purposes, because it can be used to buy goods and services. There will be 'induced traffic', a network effect - more roads into Bitcoin will pop up because there's an incentive to start an exchange (you make money off of each transaction, after all!). More roads = greater demand for more BitCoin. It is the fact that some buying power of BitCoin still exists even given the boom/bust cycles that will support the currency in the long run, and that this buying power will on average be higher on every contraction than the previous contraction. The fact that an anonymous, decentralized currency that prevents double-spending is desirable (i.e. has inherent value) to a lot of people will also support this buying power, and support the currency in the long run.
Very interesting piece, and a great way to make the basic point: getting rid of marriage would be like rewriting Windows.
Mapping at Stanford reveals social networks of 18th-century travelers
Great pull in from Tolstoy!
It's kinda funny to watch the markets. Once it opened the price shot up to like 120 again, and then went right back down to 75 when the site went down.
Doesn't it make you think? Given the ratio of bad programmers vs good ones, should we even bother with degrees? From my experience, there are more bad programmers with degrees than there are without them. Like this project I just took over. It involves fixing the whole stack of a company, because some guys who had Masters degrees and had worked in IBM and NASA (two guys) managed to build a system so bad, that SQL injection is the worst of my worries (they never sanitize or check the contents of the GET or POST array (PHP)). But I, who lack a degree, much less a master's, am going in to get them set up with nginx, Python/Django and Mongo. Plus write re-write some custom systems because the geniuses used global variables everywhere.

But any big company HR dept. would hire them in a heartbeat.

Disclosure: I don't have a college degree. But I don't want to work on your big company either. (:
I was thinking of posting about this as well, but noticed you already posted. Looks like another attack on the site again. This in combination with the volatility of Bitcoin of late signals an obvious attack on the currency, there's a landrush for Bitcoins, everyone is trying to make a dollar.
My personal stream was my RSS feed, you want me to replace it with a Google+ profile.
Interesting I wrote about this just about a year ago: Social Networks Killed the Content Providers (http://www.lanceramoth.com/blog/2012/05/social-networks-kill...)

I also introduced the idea of Personal Digital Asset (PDA). Would love to know what you think.
The ordinary user argument. I argue it too, because it's true for now. Facebook and email don't require 8 cores and a Kepler card and 32gb of RAM. They require an $80 Pentium 4 machine. Youtube HD is about the only thing that a normal person uses that'd push that, other than games.

The best counter-argument I've seen so far is that these modern machines are capable of great but uninvented or unpopularized things. If developers give users a reason to upgrade, they will. Nvidia wouldn't exist if game developers hadn't made 3D games to take advantage of their hardware. Same with PCs, developers have to give them a purpose.

I agree with that argument, and I hope someone capable steps up and makes it happen.
> isn't solely the case and in-fact Apple are selling fewer Mac's as well

Gartner's numbers are a bit different actually, though they both have Lenovo pegged as growing slightly. http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/2420816

What if it's just that the market for crappy laptops (Ultrabooks or not) is disappearing?
It seems like you are implying that current and soon after generations of young folks aren't going to be entering the engineering/software trade in droves. Considering that's where a lot of the well paying, available jobs are currently, it seems like everyone and their sister will be vying to become developers
There are good companies that will hire people like us. Just keep searching. Hint: they are not startups, but boring, regular (but stable!) companies in boring industries. But you can go crazy getting them up to date with awesome software because they appreciate someone who knows what they are doing.
Database Squid - Load balancer for your Heroku followers
This was already submitted in some form in the form of a Verge article here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5535664
"The web google has been promoting is inclusive and egalitarian."

Egalitarian, for as long as you can fund, and outbid others in, Adwords. Google has switched to what amounts to a pay-per-play model in searches they have ads for, and on the rest they favor huge established brand$. Hardly egalitarian
Gary Kovacs Email: Steps Down as CEO
I am solving a problem. It's a video chat platform. The basic functionality I can provide and it's enough to solve the issue. However, I am always thinking ahead... sometimes too far off ahead, but I recognize when something is not currently pertinent. This isn't pertinent currently. However, I still would love do what Google does with their Hangouts, and enable others to create apps for my platform.
Where's VRML when you need it?
Previous submission of canonical URL (with more comments than here):

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5534971
How to Name a New Product
I think this is a hugely important distinction. The linked-to analysis seems to assume that BTC are bought with USD, sit around in a wallet, and then come back out as USD.

When in fact, BTC's usefulness is its frictionless-but-secure, anonymous transactional nature. Its anonymity is even stronger if you mine coins yourself (or acquire coins directly from a miner for favors or whatever).

You can probably make the case that BTC must be deflationary, in order to draw in traders/investors, who actually provide necessary market liquidity to proxy BTC as USD, backing the worth of BTC-for-goods transactions...
The only reason that you need anonymous financial transactions is because you believe that money is free speech.

I disagree.
Is glass really that amazing? Personally I think it's going to fail, like a long line of recent Google products.
State of Internet Freedoms in 2012 (pages 16-20 summary by country)[pdf]
Already reading longform; just checked out gwern and it looks great. Thanks for the recommendation!
Wait, sorry - I don't quite get that, what am I missing here? The logic I'm hearing:

1. Because your emails are "open" (like a postcard) when being transferred over a network, you do not enjoy an "expectation of privacy" for them

2. Therefore if the government "sees it go by" (like a postcard in the mail), they can read it

3. So if the government plants themselves in the middle of a bunch of networks to "see emails go by" and then stores them in a big database, that should be admissible, no?

It seems like the postcard analogy should hold all the way through, right? Ie the government could photograph all mail going through, store it, and look it up later to use in court if they wanted to.

Sure - the IRS may or may not actually look into those databases it in practice due to national security concerns, etc - it's just that they could. [edit: formatting]
Your friend goes to columbia? It's pretty good. Not perfect, but what is. Great Job!
I'm not sure any of this is "damning" really. It's mostly nitpicking at facts (e.g. the time of their last contact) which aren't material to a rape accusation. Really I don't understand what Arrington has to gain here. If these are actual facts relevant to a criminal defense, posting them on the internet like this is insane. So clearly they think there will be no trial, so they're slinging mud... just to rub it in? I don't see how this improves his image. It's just a mess all around.
If there's a common thread between endless startup failure stories, then it is "we talked to a bunch of people who said they'd spend money on this" and when push came to shove said people didn't actually spend money.

We're not failing, but even from a (modestly) successful startup perspective, the vast gulf between "people who like to talk to you as if they will spend real money" and "people who will actually spend money" is painfully apparent.
People don't spend real money?
Or they are reading the same marketing textbooks he is reading.
I have an old blogger account and was being prompted to switch to using g+. The prompt said that I could do a trial run and I decided to switch. However, after switching to my real name, I couldn't find a link to switch back to my blogger username. Luckily somebody had blogged about it and found a link to switch back. The change would have been permanent after 30(?) days.

I wonder how many bloggers have their real names and pics appear alongside their blog posts in google search because of this.
SoftTech VC's Charles Hudson on state of gaming industry
Lisp is like Gothic architecture that can and has stood the test of time. C++ is more like Brutalist architecture that had its appeal and still appeals to some...
I disagree. I think the only people who back this idea are the startup CEO's trying to keep tabs on their remote employees. I get more done from home because I can avoid this exact kind of distraction. This is another idea developed by extroverts who don't understand introverts at all. How is this even a main HN article?
Self-taught programmer here and wholeheartedly agree. I've seen a lot of bad code from developers with high-level degrees and supposedly aeons worth of experience over me and yet it is I who goes out my way to write decent code and fix the professionals mistakes, I'm not exactly the first choice for a lot of companies because I wouldn't look as good as Tommy G with a masters degree would on a proposal document tendering for a big project as opposed to I who hasn't got any sort of showy trophy degree for a company to parade around.

Too many companies place emphasis on degrees instead of capabilities. I might not have a degree but that's because I thrive and learn a lot easier when I'm teaching myself as opposed to absorbing and listening to someone else drone on about things that might not interest me. At least when you're self-taught you only learn the parts that matter to you and so, you're more likely to learn them correctly.
If you don't like, make it better.
The Modern Data Nerd Isn’t as Nerdy as You Think
A lot of comments have thrown flak, justifiably, at your landing page video; it is terrible. But the reason is not simply aesthetic, it's because you chose to present an image of musicians that relies on tropes which could only possibly be relevant to non-musicians, and even they would probably think it was not funny. Nobody who is seriously pursuing art thinks of themselves or their work in the way you portrayed them.

Your problem wasn't amazon payments, or flakey artists jumping ship. It was that your audience wasn't even on your radar.
The Second Coming Of Facebook
All I get from this is a bunch of hand-waving that the problem is too complex to consider, and libertarians are the only group that want marriage privatized. Never mind the fairness of the law. I think this issue spans the US as well, so I'll respond in that context.

Point for point:

1."the presumption against intention to create legal relations when the parties are in an intimate relationship.
...
That presumption would need to be statutorily reversed, with, of course, unknown consequences."

Marriage is already the exception, it doesn't follow that a revision of marriage law would reverse that convention universally.

2. Non-libertarians (or even, non-strawman libertarians) also want marriage decoupled from the state.

3. "Even without duress, the ordinary law of contract would take a good long look at some of the family structures tolerated in Sharia and may well find find undue influence (England and Rome), facility and circumvention (Rome) and unconscionable dealing (England and the Commonwealth)."

Marriage laws preventing abuse are redundant and can be cut.. what's the problem?

4. "a mass of new law will have to be enacted, worked through and litigated; it will cost a fortune and clog the courts for years."

That's a salient point. I think we'll have to decide if equality is worth it.

5. Interesting points to consider for a revision of current law.

6. Irrelevant to the merits of state sponsored marriage.

Interesting perspective all around! I'd like to know more about ancient Roman law.
Good luck getting onto a commercial apron and installing that with nobody - not even the pilots who perform the preflight inspection or the before takeoff checklist - noticing.
As I understood it, Carnivore was a system for the FBI to use against domestic criminals, not as a tool of war: http://email.about.com/od/staysecureandprivate/a/carnivore.h...

Then the only question is whether the FBI and IRS will cooperate in their investigations - the answer there seems pretty clear.
Here is another for the list: the start-up you're being interviewed for might not exist next week due to the volatility and reliance of start-ups on investment capital that is becoming increasingly harder to obtain, companies that rely on third party investment to exist are vulnerable and so are you.
Http://www.writelonger.com/show/YzNJE
We've got more Haskell, some Erlang, Lua, more Scala, a bunch of PHP, and myriad other goodies in Round 3 thanks to a bunch of pull requests. I think Round 3 is going to show a lot more competition at the top tiers.
>> Google, has no obligation to support Reader. What they did to the RSS market was shady, indeed, but it is well within their rights

And people complaining are well within their rights, if you want to go that route.

>> Apple on the otherhand enforces a single marketplace on their operating system today.

Apple doesn't hold a monopoly share, Microsoft does. You should see what we say /said about, and what governments did to Microsoft. Google also holds almost a monopoly share on search, maps, video etc (largely because Google's own stuff was promoted on Search, while drowning competitors).
And everyone who could be a good software engineer is succeeding? None of that talent is wasted on excessive obligations, or crime, or malnourishment?
Without state there shall be no order cried the politician.

No, what would happen is that you would get a series of contracts that are universally used by a subset or group.

Essentially what it boils down to is this: Do I have the right to make an agreement with an uncoerced, sober adult?

"Oh but she is a woman and didn't know better than to sign the pre-nup" -> shouldn't matter, unless she was coerced.

"Oh but giving all your inheritance to male heirs is icky and doesn't give with our values" -> shouldn't matter. Don't let them in the country if you don't like the practices of their consenting adults.

As for the tax code stuff: That is what you get for taxing stupid things like investments and income at different rates depending on the amount invested or earned. Fix that.
Do we have any chance to look at round 3 results?
Google+ is the Bob of our times
"“We have elected to put our money and faith in a mathematical framework that is free of politics and human error,” Tyler Winklevoss said."

He sounds like quite the expert on the matter.
>You really need to go at least this far.

Oh please. Nobody's ever done such a comparison across more than 2 or 3 languages or frameworks. Have you even seen the benchmarks in question?

Why not just go do it, if it's so essential and straightforward?
"With companies coming on board, we may have to rethink this a bit. "

Why?
>Specially if your music tastes are not mainstream. And visualizing the data would be really cool.

Isn't this the exact point of Last.fm, the leader in this space for years?
Looks very detailed. Let this be another reminder to wait before assuming every accusation is true. Especially in rape cases the damage is done the minute allegations are spread. Mike has made many enemies, and by all accounts he is a d*ck but those ex-friends of his that used this case to get even with him are blacklisted forever in my mind.
I kind of feel as though Facebook's time and opportunity for mobile domination has passed (I could be completely wrong though). But having said that, is there any better alternative that has all of your high-school friends or that guy/girl you met last night on it? Facebook has become an everyday utility like Google for search and Wikipedia for information so anything is possible.

And the worries about betting it all on Android as opposed to iOS I think are the right ones. Android is a more open and democratic mobile operating system where no one central entity controls its direction nor it's appearance unlike Apple or Microsoft do. I think this is Google's advantage and weakness.

We'll see.
No, ZeroCoins are computationally easy to create. The concept is that you easily create a zerocoin, and then 'buy' it using bitcoins. When you buy the zerocoin, you create a bitcoin transaction, so you have to spend the corrosponding amount of bitcoins. When you want to redeem a zerocoin, you have to prove that you bought one.
In this way, zerocoins are a lot like gold notes. They are cheap to create, but have value becuase they can be exchanged with gold/bitcoins, which have value and are hard to create. Unlike goldnotes however, zerocoins should be impossible to forge.
Hahaha, i'll take the honesty!
The Groovy is slow argument has sort of run out of steam in my opinion. Support for invok-dynamic and the static compilation annotation provide a lot of speed. I use Groovy daily and my experience is anecdotal but maybe it is time to do some benchmarks of my own.
Microsoft Xbox exec who insulted fans on Twitter has left the company
I think it's more like leaving your wallet and laptop on the table at a cafe while you go to the bathroom, then getting upset that they're gone when you get back. In that case, yeah, it's absolutely your fault.

Put it another way, if you lent your laptop to a friend, and they left it on the table like that and it was stolen, would you really find your friend blameless? Would you lend them a laptop again?
AltStock: The best alternatives to the stock iPhone apps
Is anyone else turned off by the idea of ubiquitous voice interfaces? I can think, type and process visual information much faster than I can vocalize or process sound, and an interface that mimics natural conversation seems unnecessarily inefficient for a conversation that is, essentially, me talking to myself.

Not to mention it just feels weird. Have you ever used Siri on the middle of a crowded subway platform? It's a strange feeling.
Under some circumstances, yes, you should have a reason: say Google makes it require an effort to keep the accounts separate (I think this might aspect be the case), then you probably should have a reason for thinking its worth the effort.
Maybe he doesn't fear a criminal trial, he fears his reputation being lost.

So clearly they think there will be no trial, so they're slinging mud... just to rub it in?

Someone accused him of being a rapist. What should he do, buy a CNN spot hailing the accusations?
Shameless self promotion, I know, but I put a lot of work into this and wanted to show it off. Enjoy!
Mathematically difficult does not mean infeasible in practice. Not even mathematically impossible means infeasible in practice. Having a solid theory is a good start, but a minor oversight in the implemantation could doom the system.
We were a middle-man to the artists. We had to setup so when a fan bought their music all of the money went directly to us, and then we paid out the artist. That is where we went wrong. You need to use "recipient tokens" so the money is split by Amazon. This was the money goes directly to the artist and we get send a cut directly from amazon
>we only actually render the rows that you see and simply reuse those rows and change their contents

What warranted this extra load onto your database instances, as opposed to loading all rows on the client? Do they usually have a million tasks?
Every time I've worked anywhere, no matter how simple the problem domain seemed, it always turned out to be far more complicated than I thought at first. Eventually you'll learn that too.
Reminds me of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpsons_paradox
Your example of china (where google sacrificed profit in order to stay true to their ideals of openness) destroys the rest of your argument. "1.3 billion Chinese" are living in a censored Internet, that is a far greater tragedy than how an public corporation chooses to prioritize feature requests.
I'm not sure anyone is completely ready to found a startup.
If you are, you're probably not all that hungry.
Obviously a line, but these guys demonstrated plenty of competence.
I did want to open source it, but the problem is all of our passwords and keys for amazon and everything are in the code. Is there a way to get around that?
Figure 3-12 on http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/seind08/figures.htm#ch3

says that only 10% are involuntarily not employed in their field.
lol. He is using a Logger in an exploit.
"...scaling a company requires steadily increasing productivity, quarter by quarter and year by year."

I really admire this long term thinking. I am transitioning off of a project that for 5 years tried to 'make it big' as soon as possible never taking the time to think about continually getting better.

Five years later we have created a lot of code but our process and culture have gone now where.