skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I tried using Heroku for a (very) small project which I already had working in Ruby, and using Google App Engine (even though it meant rewriting the code in Python). The reasons were:

1. Heroku didn't support a certain Ruby gem I needed for the application.

2. While (1) in itself is understandable (and eventually I found a way around it) Heroku never replied to my email asking whether they would support it in the future. As far as I recall there was no other way to contact them but feedback@heroku email address - if they don't answer it, that's that.

3. Heroku is just not certain to be around for as long as Google (or Amazon etc) will.

4. I admit I didn't research this thoroughly, but Heroku seems more expensive for what you get than other options (eg GAE, perhaps even Slicehost & co)

All in all, I'd say support was by far the most important issue. The last thing you want is to trust your application to someone who won't respond quickly (or at all). I realize Heroku is a small team, but this is just a critical requirement for such a service.
Hey, I'm pretty sure I know what company you are talking about and I have never heard good things about them. For a long time they did not have a single success, now they do have one company that's done pretty well, but it's still a rather miserable rate. I would only consider dealing with them as a convertible debt round, which they do sometimes offer.

Send me an email, there are HN meetups in Pittsburgh very occasionally, usually at the Church Brew Works, and I can let you know about upcoming meets.
I believe that there are other people living somewhere in the space, very very very far from here...

View the distance, I see like it's impossible to reach them, but if we just create a high precision telescope that can capture photos from these places... I'll create a program that automatically capture them and try to detect an aslike earth photo and we'll may be see those other people

this will be imaginary!!!
Make that a rate of 100% with a sample size of 2...
I hate it when people do that :)

I'm going to be walking around all day now muttering "balls of steel..."

Sounds like a great dare/challenge - see how long you can remain engaged in conversation using only the DN phrases in this video. 2* the points for use in a meeting.
Hey, I pre-ordered that at Toys R Us to get the gold cartridge back in college. It's clearly different than the regular. Why? Because we say so:

CE: http://www.dawdle.com/product.php/the-legend-of-zelda-ocarin...

Regular: http://www.dawdle.com/product.php/the-legend-of-zelda-ocarin...
Canon =! Conan
Looks like someone gamed this poll. 36 of Linode's 93 votes came from newly created accounts. (For comparison, 1 of Amazon's 78 did.)

I think in future I'll ignore votes of newly created accounts in polls. For now I'm going to manually subtract them.
News Corp Sees Big Drop in MySpace Ad Revenue
No pain at all. I don't rely heavily on plugins though. The important bases were covered: refactoring, vcs integration, and the usual javadoc/outlining.

Perhaps the only things I missed were getting a method's signature when you hover over it with the mouse, and the live variable value when you hover in debug mode. But these are so minor that I feel if they're not already there and I somehow haven't set them up, they'll be in the next release. But as I said, I get so much more confidence by being able to charge in to my code's runtime and poke around that it's worth it.
A lot of what people call "magic" in Rails are just conventions (as in "convention over configuration"). Rails expects to find certain things in certain places named in a certain way and works with them automatically, which might seem like magic if you're new to it.

Seems to me the article can be summed up as "So, I tried Rails for a while but found I prefer Django's approach". Cool, and totally legitimate, but 39 votes? I mean, he doesn't even mention Twitter in the title! ;)
That is Seibel's corrollary to Greenspun's Tenth Rule, no? Every sufficiently complex java program need a programmable IDE to make up for the half of Common Lisp not reimplemented in the program itself.
Quality Assurance Books
Various quality assurance books are available in the market for novice and experienced quality control professionals as well as students.
And, you can find his talk here: http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=1685
Well, Apogee published Commander Keen, but ID Software developed it. So fear not, maybe after DooM 4... :)
Use Twitter from within Vim
How do you do that for simple password protected PDF's ?
Can MySpace really not become the next GeoCities?
And they are only because they rich are awfully rich. I.e. in Dubai per capita income is over 100,000 usd a year - twice as much as in the USA. Why? Because prince and friends have Trillions (yes, with T in front!). The same is true for the USA. The base salary for McDonald's employee in Switzerland is 20usd/hr. The have no Bill Gates though. So "average" is more-less the same. But I wouldn't say that on average US citizens get the same life quality as Swiss do. If this was true, the US wouldn't rank 44th place for life length expectancy - the same as developing nations...
Greenland a longtime ago well was green. It's a cycle!

Global warming and blah blah blah equals big business and many people are riding the wave of save the environment to riches; i.e. Al Gore.

It's uncool to say the above as the cool thing today is to be green; follow the crowd, but I believe what I believe!
Switch-pitcher Pat Venditte is living history
True. Another fact: in Netherlands you get the money from gov and you decide how and where to spend it. And you spend it for privately held child care, private doctors or private schools. So it is a very good mix of public funding and free market choice.
Ah! I did not understand the emphasis. It didn't occur to me that the novice would be working on things that were not relevant. Thank you for explaining. Also, I may still not understand the depth of this lesson, yet.
I enjoy programming, and I learn the theory behind it to make my programming better. Since motivation is an important part of introductory classes, I'm okay with the current order.

Mathematics, on the other hand, doesn't start getting good until after calculus. Mixing the order up there is something I could get behind.
/...it wasn't for a Scandinavian friend of mine introducing me to Swedish 'Snus' - a moist ground oral tobacco (debatably) reckoned to be nigh-on carcinogen free./

So you are using snus now, or was that only a temporary thing?

I used that stuff for a few months quite often, then quit somewhat recently.
It's sort of grown slowly but steadily for me...I mean I started with a few bands I had heard at friend's places or heard good things about. Then I went to their live shows, where I liked some of the openers, or read some review where they were compared to some other band, who I then got into, etc.

There's always pitchfork, the standard-bearer for pretentious reviews, although I find their music taste to be in general somewhat close to mine. Metacritic is likewise useful. I hear last.fm is useful to people as well, although somehow I've never really gone there much.

As far as specific recommendations, I'm afraid I'm not big on most classic music, nor on pop in general, so I'm not going to be useful to you.

Incidentally, do you feel this way about film, or art, or literature as well? That it's gone downhill? Or is it just music?
still doing much better than Americans without savings, bankrupt 401k, huge debts, health system for lucky few who can afford it.
Ask HN: quickest way to earn some hacker news points?
Ask HN: quickest way to earn some hacker news points?
Flame PHP.
Oh yes please! The lack of pogo stick in today's games is just embarasing... ;)
Say smart things and find interesting things.
blink tags... check.

embedded audio... check.

obligatory webrings... check.

homemade pokedex... missing!

It fails my unit tests for Geocities-ness, but I think you were referring to the recent collapse. I'll second that motion.
I recommend: http://www.hulu.com/watch/23946/cosmic-voyage
It's safe to read. The title is just misleading.
1) Create an irrelevant post asking how to get karma.
10 Things to Be Clear About Before You Start a Company
As per usual with any DNF thread, time to link to ‘Things accomplished since Duke Nukem Forever's announcement on April 28th, 1997‘:

http://duke.a-13.net/

(scroll to about a third of the way down for the actual list)
My startup is using Juggernaut[1] for this purpose. The only drawback is it only supports flash-ed browsers.

And, it is not polling.

[1] http://juggernaut.rubyforge.org/
the kindle 2 supports downloading files that you navigate to via the kindle's web browser. i would imagine the new one still lets you do this.
We do have theoretical technologies that could propel a ship or probe at speeds more reasonable for interstellar travel. We could certainly build them if we did something dramatic like cutting the US defense budget in half and putting the money towards space exploration. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_pulse_propulsion http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetoplasmadynamic_thruster
Roughly twice as many points come from comments as stories

> (with (s 0 c 0)
(for n (- maxid* 10000) maxid*
(let i (item n)
(if (astory i) (++ s (realscore i))
(acomment i) (++ c (realscore i)))))
(list s c))
(14501 28488)

so the way to get lots of karma would seem to be to post good comments. But that assumes comments and stories take equal work, which may not be true.

Why do you need to get karma fast, though?
Ask HN: Equivalent of CodeIgniter, but in Perl?
Has anyone encountered or written a Perl framework that is lightweight, yet at the same time includes a lot of useful (for web development) libraries, and most importantly, is fun?

Compare/contrast with PHP: In my mind, CGI => straight PHP, Catalyst (=> Rails!) => CakePHP, CGI::Application (and related plugins) => Zend Framework. CGI is too bare-bones, do-it-all-yourself. Catalyst seems all-encompasing, strict in structure, but heavyweight. And CGI::Application (with plugins, of course) has something for everyone, if you can only remember to include the library; aside from that, it lacks a clear structure for how to go about things.

What I want to find is this mapping:

? => CodeIgniter

What Perl web framework feels the most like CodeIgniter?

---

(btw, tonight I just found http://perlbuzz.com/2008/11/the-evolution-of-perl-frameworks.html, which referenced Mojo/Mojolicious; this might be the one...)
I get the impression Pylons tries to be the "anti-Django" inverting the NIH attitude of Django and trying to be all things to all developers. The end result however is a huge number of dependencies and options that make installation and setup harder than it should be. Turbogears 2, which is based on Pylons, has an even greater number of dependencies - such that I needed to install virtualenv to get going with it.

For example, in order to support a large number of template engines, Pylons uses Buffet, another library which provides a common interface for these engines. Typically, however, you will only use a single template engine in your project and it only needs a few lines of code to set an engine up.

Although I do most of my web development in Django, when I do need more control or something a bit simpler I go with a Werkzeug + SQLAlchemy + Jinja stack (plus WTForms, similar to Django forms but in a standalone package). The code needed to get up and running isn't that much more than Pylons (and paster generates a whole lot of code anyway) and I can count the dependencies on one hand. That makes deployment a lot faster and easier, and it's just as easy to swap out these dependencies as with Pylons.
and you would push keys on that with what? it's not a touch screen.
It's an interesting topic, but talking about probability when you're extrapolating the extremely limited information we have is dubious. There could be so many other explanations for why we haven't detected alien lifeforms, and we don't know how to assign probabilities.
Unsolved problems in physics
This is like a never ending issue. One way to start the path to a better practice of C is to read http://www.amazon.com/Expert-Programming-Peter-van-Linden/dp... after you finished http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Language-Prentice-Hall-Sof...
The take on web 3.0 is interesting, at least it's not full of crazy shit like the people who talk about the internet becoming the operating system and localized storage becoming completely useless
contribute relevant information and/or clearly labeled opinion.
Is it just me, or do the majority of these really large tech company founders all seem to have gone to very prestigious schools? Is there something about the schools that also helps with technology and not just business?
His main point is that a strong community is a strength, but many different communities leads to too many fragmented (and incompatible) codebases and ideas.

Some counterpoints:

1. The number of different implementations grew as the number of available computers and users grew. The number of smart people using each distro nowadays is probably still more than the total number of users of some of the original Unix implementations - the same implementations he says spawned the most good ideas.

2. Many different distros allows for many different ideas and paradigms to be tried out. Over time, the best ideas will escape their parent communities and become adopted by all the major versions. Ideas that may never have gained traction in one massive community might find purchase in some of these splinter groups.

The fracturing of the distros was a natural and necessary step in the evolution of the nix system. Yes, Microsoft managed to assert its dominance because it presented a single unified solution, but its heyday is nearing an end. Slowly, the myriad good ideas coming from the countless nix's are again unifying into a very strong front. Mac OS X (FreeBSD Unix) and Ubuntu (Debian Linux) are two great examples of how many different ideas have coalesced into a pleasing and usable system.

Rob Pike ends his message with an injunction to the Unix users of the world to unite, to work together as opposed to walling themselves off in their own segmented communities. While I think the segmentation was beneficial and necessary, I do agree that a strong effort towards unifying the current crop of ideas into a uniform package is beneficial, if only to provide a seed for a whole new set of distros splintering off in new and unique directions.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/08/070814150630.ht...

http://www.iop.org/EJ/abstract/1367-2630/9/8/263
Google App Engine Scales and Develops Fast
I actually preferred CakePHP to CodeIgniter, and really only on the basis of aesthetics. I don't like This_Case :( I was going to say Catalyst, but Mojo looks way cooler. If I were you I'd give it a try
If someone is incapable of caring for themselves, there's a good chance they won't be able to care for me. Likewise, when I see a disheveled, unshaven, sloppy looking candidate, I'll (quite rationally) ask myself whether that's the same level of care he or she will apply to good governance.

Not that there's anything wrong with being disheveled or unshaven, but if you want to play a part, you can at least make the effort to look the part.
oh really.

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/228/519444730_4eb3859a9a_o.jp...

"This machine has Windows 2000 with 256MB ram installed."

http://www.hightechdad.com/2008/04/16/bart-ticket-kiosks-run...
Hey HN: I need a dead simple automatic way to backup my databases.
I use a bunch of mysql databases. right now, i manually export them once a day for backup. i want a service that asks me for read-only database credentials and does daily backups to the cloud automagically. this must exist? no? please build it :-)
Or you could provide a jabber server that uses your web app's authentication mechanism so users just need to add another IM account to the IM account they are already using. Or things like growl could take an jabber server as a configuration option to receive notifications from. Desktop notification is mainly just a reformatting of the UI on technologies that already exist, are in use, and are pervasive.
Visa Secure Credit Card
Discover what's great about a Visa Secure Credit Card
Can a Palm Pre multitask better than an iPhone?
33 Rules to Boost Your Productivity
"If you view work as something that starts at 9 and ends at 5, you won’t be able to finish everything by noon."

"If You Work at Home, Never Work 9-5"

But it's only a fencepost error.
Let me summarize: "I usually slack off half the day. I realized I could move all my slacking to the second half of the day, and viola, 4 hour workday! I'm genius!"

I don't know about most people, but I get twice as much done in an 8 hour workday as I do in a 4 hour workday. It may even be more, because 8 hours gives me a greater proportion of time "in the zone."
Jon and kate plus 8 affair
The UI and Design of LinkedIn is horrible. I really don't enjoy using LinkedIn. I wish someone has the balls to compete with them. I would if I was interested in professional networking but i'm not. I haven't used XING but hopefully its better than LinkedIn.
I would kill for BART and Caltrain to adopt the same ticketing technology used in every metro that I've been to in Asia -- namely, a little RFID card that sits in your wallet, that you just hold over the sensor. Most mobile phones (in Japan, at least) incorporate the same technology, so you can just hold your phone over the sensor to handle payment.

No moving parts, and no openings, so they're very durable. And incredibly convenient.
This article highlights some of the problems with Palm's design but I don't see it as a serious limitation for my typical daily use pattern.

As I understand it, quite a few people like to play games on their iPhone and they worry about battery life. I don't. I find that games work much better on my console attached to my 50" plasma TV and I generally keep my iPhone in the charger while I'm at work. So as long as the battery lasts 24-48 hours, I'm good.

On the other hand multitasking and notifications are two things that I really find annoying on the iPhone and would go pretty far to make it work. Even so far as ditching the iPhone for a Pre. Besides, everyone has an iPhone now. :)
Bold and darker keywords aren't enough?
A bit out of my area of expertise. Anyone willing to provide an explanation?
Twitter's Real Value
I did it because telling people to quit is shown to increase the odds of quitting smoking. And it pains me every day to go into the hospital everyday and see the consequences of smoking.

Lung cancer is frankly trivial compared to the bad outcomes associated with lost physiologic reserve due to connective tissue damage and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. An overwhelming number of patients who smoke have bad surgical and medical outcomes attributable to smoking.

Poor tensile strength of connective tissue is associated with skin tears, diverticulitis, impaired wound healing, emphysema. I'm sure you can all spot an 50 year old smoker from a mile away: they're the ones who look like they're 70. That is simply the outward sign of something terribly wrong inside. These folks consistently have bad outcomes in the event of trauma, including surgery of any kind. Surgeries that are usually overnight stays become weeks in the ICU with infections and being stuck on the vent becasue we can't get their oxygen saturation back up after the OR. The loss of physiologic reserve leads to trauma patients who can't be weaned off ventilators, more tracheostomies, more inpatient infections, more of pretty much everything bad.

COPD similiarly decreases the physiologic reserve and leads to poor vent weaning in smokers who go in for surgery of any kind. We had a woman in the ICU last week for a brain surgery; now she's going to get a hole cut in her throat because it's her lungs that can't heal, so she's getting a "prophylactic tracheostomy" because it, believe it or not, causes less damage than leaving an orotracheal tube in indefinitely.

Children of smokers have a higher incidence of asthma.

I couldn't help but read the thread and think "what kind of doctor am I to not tell these folks the same thing I would tell any other smoker?"

To those I offended, I sincerely apologize, that was not my intent. I just don't want to see you or someone like you in the hospital, with complications of poor wound healing or other really ugly outcomes.
The jewelry of the red carpet. Part I
The creativity in science does not come from the verification stage, but from the stage where you figure out how to attack a problem and formulate theories.
> In your world, you spend a week doing it and probably typing javac over and over on the command line.

Perhaps you should learn to use the command line if you think refactoring without an IDE takes a week. :-/
I've always had this nagging suspicion that I could become more productive, if only I truly learned how to use emacs. But this post has just finally convinced me that the only people who cling to emacs for large scale development are true believers who will never be swayed.

The automated tools don't fake your workflow. A refactoring tool performs code modifications that it can prove make no change to the semantics of the code. You can sort of fake this, in a painful way using perl, but as you've just stated, your system is so unreliable that you create a branch to do something I may do a dozen times in an hour when I have some time to go back and clean up.
WonderHill raises $7 million for online casual games company
It's good to be wrong (about Lisp performance)
What do you do at these meetups?
Quỳnh Lưu (Nghệ An) chuẩn bị khai trương du lịch biển 2009
This is pretty impressive. Can somebody tell me why I should even think about EC2 at the prototyping stage?
His point is to use C instead of the preprocessor.

#ifdef MIPS
mips_stuff();
#endif

should be

if (MIPS) {
mips_stuff();
}

Even a mediocre compiler should be able to eliminate the then-body in the non-MIPS case.

Another possibility is to generate the same symbols in every architecture specific component and link the one you want to use.
Talk to each other. Food and beer are optional.
Rats! Now I'll have to stop joking that Duke Nukem Forever is in a holding pattern, waiting for a rewrite in Perl 6. And it would have been great, too -- if they just could have gotten a fully implemented Perl 6 compiler in time! :-D
I would kill for BART and Caltrain to adopt the same ticketing technology used in every metro that I've been to in Asia

This is what the Translink card is eventually supposed to do.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TransLink_(San_Francisco_Bay_Ar...
If the preprocessor knew the syntax, it would happen after parsing rather than before, which is exactly how every language other than C handles things that C handles using the preprocessor (turning "using" or "include" or "import" into keywords instead of preprocessor directives). I'm really not sure in what way it would be a pre-processor at that point.

So perhaps it's more accurate to say preprocessors aren't particularly useful.
Exploiting spammers to make computers smarter
Good counter example: Bush vs. Gore
What I have learned from science fiction
EC2 is more platform agnostic.
Well, you never know. If the universe really is holographic and we can find a way to move within that, then locality might come to seem like a quaint concept. I had a near-death experience some years back which left me with the gut feeling that our space is embedded within 5 dimension. It was pretty strange, but that's another story. For about 5 minutes after I came round I could see around things. If you think that sounds weird, you shoulda seen it from my side.
Quality Assurance
Various quality assurance books are available in the market for novice and experienced quality control professionals as well as students.
But why 24 x 80, not bigger?