skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, and then someone forced me to code in ColdFusion and run EXCEL imports into a really bad CF ORM with SQL server on the backend.

I now freelance django / RoR and PHP and I do not complain about any of them, ever. ColdFusion is the language one should be forced to work with whenever they complain about any other language, it will fix their aversion to the language in question very, very quickly.
Didacticism doesn't open minds. By its nature it enforces perfect closure of a subject. Which is why scientific revolutionaries are conventionally rejected by the establishment.

Computer games are the condom balloons of computers.
Valid point. Now that you mention it, I have tried to email people at the .com when I needed the .net, and I have also mailed people at noun.com when I needed verbnoun.com.

And, I have been surprised to find that if I keep banging away at it, I do eventually find a good name. I was looking for a name for a new site to host some Flash brain games I've been working on, and it only took about 20 minutes of searching to find a domain I loved. I had to make up a word, but there aint no harm in that, I reckon, as long as it isn't too long or too hard to spell.
tinkerer==hacker?
Like the other posters have already said, it wasn't immediately apparent to me what service is actually being offered. The 'tip' which is buried on the how it works page definitely needs to be prominently shown as it does (somewhat) help to explain the service.

But that still doesn't tell me what happens when someone texts my user ID to x@txtms.com. (And they're probably doing this in response to me telling them to 'text kiwidrew to x@txtms.com for my contact details'.) Questions that immediately come to mind: Do they get a text message in response which has my details? Do they have to sign up to txtms.com first? Will this somehow automatically add my number to their phonebook? Is it actually any faster to give them my user ID and the x@txtms.com address? Why not just give them my phone number and email address, which is probably about the same length and easier to remember?

After examining the Help page in detail, it sounds as though the person sending a message to x@txtms.com (to get my details) won't get a response until I log in to the txtms.com website and approve their request. But if I'm out and about (away from web access) and tell someone to text x@txtms.com for my details, _nothing happens_ for several hours -- and if something went wrong (like the text being sent to the wrong address), neither of us will know until it's too late to do anything about it!
Name is hard to pronounce
Replace every instance of "iPhone" with "Macintosh" and you've also to a large degree explained the continued success of small Mac shareware houses like Panic and Delicious Monster.
Encrypt VoIP calls with Zfone
Objective-C (and Cocoa) is notoriously under-documented. Much of what you do in Mac software development is tribal knowledge, which honestly sucks.

Sites like CocoaDev try to maintain some semblance of a knowledge base, but it's still woefully inadequate.

Apple refuses to publish code snippets, and their API docs consist of little more than what you would learn from the header files.

Mac development is a pain in the ass, even though I like Objective-C as a language :)
Why eBay Should Accept Skype Founders’ Buyout Offer
How to Build a Spy Camera
* but I work day and night hoping to make this world a better place*
The best thing about life is that we are all different yet the same. Perhaps she does not care about saving the world and perhaps not caring about making the world a better place is better. Perhaps not. Her choice dude, got nothing to do with you. Take your anger with the newspapers who made her a freak of nature and perhaps lured her into writing a column as a practical instant way of using her intelligence. If you read the article the barrister clearly mentions that he, they, were looking for a way to "cash in on this" and as it happens that way is to write a stupid column. Who cares, you don't need a high IQ to improve the world. I doubt the inventor of penicillin was the person with the highest IQ in the world and he has done a lot for humanity.
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The Sansa Fuze 2GB (Black) is a super slim portable media player that is easy and fun to use. The View can handle the following music formats such as MP3, WAV, WMA, secure WMA, and Audible formats.
>"so if you don't believe in God, where do you get your morals from?"

Yeah, I guess so, but that was implied by the OP.
You Will Be Using FriendFeed In The Future — But It May Be Called Facebook
"Business cards, minus the paper." would probably make that a lot easier to understand, and I think it accurately answers the questions:

1) When meeting a person, rather than giving them your business card you say "Text 12345, which is my number, to this address" and then your business card shows up on their phone automatically.

2) They use your profile information however they would normally use contact and professional information. Its just a business card, after all. Go nuts.

3) You don't need to have a business card to get a business card, but it is a good idea anyhow.
And by "adult", they mean LGBT -- straight targeted books of what would seem to be equivalent adultness have been left alone. Amazon claims a glitch in response to the twitter crowds, and you could see how this could be a glitch in a complex ML algorithm, but still, I'm filing this under things that make you say hmm...
A high single digit stake is a lot of money if things go well. Just make sure you don't get screwed over by dilution and you'll be fine. Get your promised equity in writing and be happy that you're with people who are delivering what they promised.

You can't re-price risk after it has been fully assumed and if I was one of your colleagues I would be pissed off at your attempting to re-negotiate a previous agreement. You seem to believe your co-workers have an obligation to see you get a certain level of compensation and that your equity stake should grow or shrink depending on that compensation. That is the attitude of an employee not an owner.
Walk & "Shoot" using HTML canvas
You could just, you know, log out first. Especially if you know exactly what it's going to do beforehand.
You too? Oddly, it still reports the update count for all of them, but only the most recent ones show up.
It'll be out this week.
Ability to link to the current view would be nice... I wanted to show a friend a neighbourhood I was looking at but couldn't :) Sorry to suggesting such low-priority things, I'm a bit OCD about these things...
A name + position + email + company name + phone number can easily add up to > 160 characters, which is the max a text can have. Having information split up across various texts isn't too useful; makes it annoyingly irritating to read a phone number, for example.

And with this method, the person receiving the contact info either has to:

A. Have a good memory in order to remember everything to reenter. This is irritating at best and very difficult at worst. Lets say there's more then one phone number to enter? Or the person has a slightly unusual name. Or any number of factors.

B. Have a few minutes to spend flipping back and forth between the message and the contact. This is time consuming and much slower then just trading business cards.

//edit: Perhaps my original question would have been better phrased as "But what does it do better then what is currently done?"?
Plus 3 years of law school and some tough bar exams.
Twitter for Indians, in their native language
I was amazed to find this site that you can twitter in hindi,telegu, tamil, arabic and malayalam. This is great for the Indian Crowd.
Guys you will need to check it out, its great
But should that necessarily be the best way to go about living in the past? You may well end up as endenturing yourself to said warlord as the boomstick maker. Probably better off trying to be a merchant of useful stuff to begin with.
I'm definitely switching to COBOL.
Browser storage: Do we need SQL? Or would a JSON approach be better?
Depends on the app I guess, we do a lot of large number computations that surpass the 32-bit limit, so I think for our specific case a 64-bit distro is much better.
Megumi Kagurazaka is the International Babe of the Day - 2/12/2009
An introduction to Beziers based on a presentation at GDC
A friend of mine interned at Skadden last summer and has a job offer from them to start this fall. He said that new graduates are being offered the same arrangement -- a lump sum to postpone his start date by one year. He doesn't think he's going to take it, for a few reasons. I don't blame him; I would be really worried that the job would disappear over that year. They say it's safe, but it seems a lot tougher to lay off existing staff than to lay off someone who hasn't started yet.
Making a worm that changes something on a site means disrupting the service between a service provider and a customer, it is not just using something for another purpose.

If something is easy to do or the actual damage is small does not make that something more "right".
This story frustrates me like being unable to find a bug in code. Why would you keep using the same instruments? Trying different ones would have told you whether your technique was off.
More than the actual distro I'd say look into what kernel you are loading on there. Make sure you're running a nice tight kernel with any extra fluff turned off (or loading as modules).

I can't find the papers off hand but there has been some research into how kernel level cache tweaks will dramatically effect how web servers and DB servers will perform.
Talk to Voxli (YC W09) for YC interviews
Hey YC applicants,

We are going to hang out in voxli.com/hackernews this Monday in the afternoon (~3-6 pm PST, 4/13). We'll be happy to answer questions about the interview / attempt to give advice. If you're not applying, feel free to come by and chat but applicants will have priority!
what's wrong with openbsd? is your webapp currently running on it?

i'm curious because i use openbsd+lighttpd (soon will be nginx) in my colo (because no slice/vps offers openbsd afaik)
This is nice but it's also nonsense.

Nether a program nor a poem is easily tractable. A change in one place requires rebalancing elsewhere. We try and minimise this with interfaces etc but it's never "so flexible, so easy to polish and rework".

Snowflakes and leaves are not each designed.

The minutiae of programming couldn't really be more repeatative.

The "pleasure of making things that are useful to other people" only happens if you project isn't cancelled and actually gets used. Outside of a startup this confluence of events is heartbreakingly rare.

I'm not against writing poetically but this is more Wordsworth than Tennyson.
That was amazing, a window into the thought process. Knowing that the whole bit about Erdos numbers doesn't appear in the final text I was fascinated watching the process of its evolution into the final completely different idea.
Something I've been musing over for the last few days has been whether or not this will help raise prices in the app store.

Or will "push" be an add-on, purchased for $4.99/mo/yr via the new in-app store.

As cstejerean said, "no shit, servers cost money."

In any event, there are new ways coming to make your money back. Ars may be looking at this within the context of the current app store. Looking at it from what will be available in the near future changes the game a bit more.

I for one will be raising prices on my apps, whether that cost is up front or via an in-app purchase after a short trial. We're not selling apps to lose money.
I can't really say I agree with you. There are a lot of good books on the subject, there are a lot of great tutorial sites (free) on the web (look at scott stevenson's work, or cocoa is my girlfriend, or CocoaDev). The mailing lists are pretty heavily trafficked, as is the #macdev irc channel (if not always entirely helpful).

The API documentation is better than most development environments I've worked with. Admittedly, Apple's secrecy problem gets in the way of publicly acknowledging bugs, missing features, or planned upcoming features. These things can be frustrating. Apple publishes a large selection of sample code though. In fact, they ship a lot of it with the developer tools themselves (plus all the docs), so you don't always have to go looking through the website.

iPhone development is undeniably worse right now. I imagine this will change over time, but I agree their is a lot of work to be done on that front.
As a child, I was never told what I tested at. What I was told is that they aren't supposed to tell you.

Of course, once they start moving you into different groups of students you know you test out in the upper "bucket", but still, your not supposed to know your IQ score.

Is my experience the norm here? Or did others here get told their score as a child?
To be fair, column storage isn't just engineering around the peculiarities of disks (although that's the biggest part of it). Columnar storage offers large benefits in compressability and when working with wide tables. In a wide table/row oriented environment you end up bringing a bunch of data in to memory that is totally irrelevant to your problem, which has a bunch of negative consequences: particularly poor data locality, which dramatically slows the processing of the data (kills cache prefetching, and poor utilisation of cache lines can lead to your L1/L2 cache getting nuked). If you're making use of a page cache, row oriented systems offer poor utilisation here, too.

- additionally, this guy has the impression this implementation might be "easy"; that is, a lot less work to do compared to writing a traditional rdbms from scratch

I think he's oversimplifying dramatically. A vast amount of the code in, say, postgres is dedicated to query processing/planning, transaction maintenance, etc. That's not going away or getting any simpler with SSDs. Writing the storage engine is certainly a big job, and yes, SSDs will be more forgiving to unintelligently written engines, but DBMSs aren't really going to get a great deal easier to implement.
and they would have a copy of it in English too!
Yes. Sometimes.

PHP is a great language for the basic stuff, but you try to do serious things with it and you have to wrestle with it. And it's all so ... badly designed. You sob because it can all be done so much better and... cleaner.
Mikeyy: Second Twitter Worm on the Loose
The only thing I remember about being hauled out of class at about the same age, was sitting in a room with some guy I'd never met and taking some test thinking "this is complete BS...I don't want to be here".
Google App Engine / Java and Maven
As near as I can tell, high intelligence does not imply "shitty teenage years". I know plenty of "not so smart" folk that will tell you it was tough being a teenager.
good q. if you can, use the same thing on the server as you use on your desktop. i use 32 bit ubuntu (8.04). if it performs fine on your 2GB RAM thinkpad, it will probably do fine on an ec2 box, no? if the config works on my desktop, it will work on the server, etc. tremendous advantage in terms of sysadmin requirements in my book. your mileage may vary depending on how much you like os x :>)
It's also the eye color of the main character of possibly the greatest historical fiction series of all time, The Lymond Chronicles by Dorothy Dunnett.
Cooliris: Finally, 3D browsing that really is cool.
Water shortages go global
What sad language do you use? :(
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The thesis of this article would seem to be that instilling a sense of approachability toward a subject is a key component to learning the subject. The two stories presented comport with this thesis. Mr. Condom breaks the taboo about sex talk by inflating prophylactics, helping people to become more comfortable with them and thus more willing to use them. The computer program helps break down the student's fear of fractions, and subsequently her math scores improve.

In my view, this points to the thought that education requires two components: first, the presentation of materials by a teacher; and second, willingness to receive those materials by the student. In some places, such as Japan and South Korea, the latter is accomplished by fostering intense competition. This article presents an alternative. Perhaps the merits of these and other alternatives for creating a willingness to learn are debatable, but it seems rather dismissive to suggest, as the initial comment does, that more teaching is the whole answer.

I do sympathize with the initial's commenter's complaint that teaching has too much moved to what are essentially therapy sessions for children. The problem does seem to be a lack of balance, with a focus too strong on making children willing to open their minds, without providing anything to put inside.
I wasn't told mine directly, but I found it out later by reading the assessment letter (I was forced to take a test to see if there was a learning-disability explanation to my poor grades).
Unlock iPhone 3G, Save Solution for Full Function iPhone
I'm no startup founder (yet!) but as someone who's worked with a lot of them when I was in law, that is the surest recipe for disaster, because as soon as there is a disagreement between the founders there is no one who can make decisions.

As one of my law profs (who also has tons of business experience) said to me: "If you remember two things from law school, it should be these: never share equity 50-50, and always have a prenup."
I assume OS/360 was written in assembler so it would have been even more true for Fred Brooks.

Except he had his crazy crap about being the "surgeon" only writing specs and leaving the team to the lesser work so that might explain his viewpoint.
About a week ago there were 1.4 billion tweets and 27 million registered users, based on the tweet and user IDs. If anything, that number is slightly more than the real thing, because of deleted tweets and spam. I multiplied the tweets by 200 bytes (I added 40 bytes of metadata, and a 20 byte premium for any unicode tweets).

The size of the social graph is harder to estimate. Out of a sample of 459,000 "more influential" Twitter users, the average user follows 262 other twitterers. So the information in the social graph is about 30 GB, assuming 64-bit IDs. They potentially store an edges table of the form (user1_id,user2_id) (60GB), and a denormalized list of followers and friends for each user (30GB each). This comes to about 120GB (I revise my earlier number).

Yes, it's a very rough estimation, but it is in the right ballpark.
I have a domain with "get" in front of it and I think it's a great domain. However it's an ecommerce site where the goal of the user is literally to get the product offered. For web services it's not a good idea.
Tractable compared with non-thought stuff - try reworking wood or metal. But you're right that it's impossible to eliminate all dependencies, and a large interdependent structure becomes tedious, and scary, to change. "Throw one away", Brooks even admitted (if you can.)

Alan Turing predicted that programming need never become boring because you can automate the mechanical aspects. If it really is repetitive, you can automate it.

One can also make small tools that are useful to others. e.g. I got a thrill even from a trivial script to automate away a tedious step, when other people used it.

I don't believe in a personal god but I respect people, like Knuth and Fred Brooks, who do. If they think a tree is designed, I'm happy to think of the intrinsic beauty of a tree - and of all nature. I couldn't make any of it.

It's surprisingly renewing to spend some time in nature.
Parkour has a purity to it that is hard to find in most pursuits. The thrust towards utility and awareness of one's own environment distinguishes it from "stunt performance." Danger and physical challenge are only part of the picture. It really invites a more reflective mode of thought than other athletics.
Marriage in Poland to foreigners - 1/4 are fake
I think there are no hard and fast rules about equity sharing. What matters is not so much what each has done as what each will do.

So the question is not so much what each side has done but the role you see your new partner taking in the future. If you two see each other as partners in the venture, the split should probably be something like 60-40.

If you see him as someone who will do a bit of front-end dev and then move on to other things, you should give him less.

Although of course, it's always a negotiation and is based very much on intangibles: how much you guys like each other, see yourselves working together in the future, how talented you think he is, i.e. if you think he's a star you should give him a big share of the pie to entice him and keep him involved in the project.

In general though, the guy who started the company (i.e. you) should get a majority of the equity and the people who come later should get equity/options based pretty much on an asymptotic curve with equity on the y axis and time joined on the x axis.

This might be a bit complicated for a side project but you should think about founder options to avoid the "YouTube syndrome" of one founder bailing early and still getting a big payday if it comes to that, and give your partner an incentive to stay involved over the lifespan of the project.

So basically, if you think of him as a full-fledged partner, it should be something like 60-40, and if you see him as less than that it should be something less, and you should think about founder options.
Perhaps I wasn't clear. I wasn't refering to whether God designs. I was refering to the differences in each snowfake or leaf being of random source that is what I meant by "each".
There are world-wide parties to celebrate this:

http://yurisnight.net/
Put £100,000 into 10,000 startups
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It is a classic diagonal argument. Suppose algorithm P determines whether a given algorithm produces a valid search tree. Consider the following algorithm Q: "if P(Q) the produce invalid tree else produce valid tree." In words, the algorithm Q does the opposite of what P predicts. Such Q exists by Kleene's Recursion Theorem (or simply because you can write its code in your favorite language).
‘Surgical’ Bankruptcy Possible for G.M.
How is the validator gem used in rails? I'm thinking of starting a rails project and I'd like to validate every single produced page, every time it's produced.

I'd assumed the best way to do it would be cache the output and run the validator 'offline' but I couldn't find any rails or rack projects that do this.
I guess Skadden thinks its economical to pay $80K as a retainer fee than to go out and recruit the same people with equivalent experience in a year. Another way to look at it is a generous severance package with an option to rehire.

The alternative is to lay off 2/3 of their associates.
Geography of Buzz In Los Angeles and New York
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