skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Which part, exactly, is immature? Did I miss the part where he called Tom a "stupid fat head" or something? From what I read, the product does not work as advertised and in fact eventually causes itself to crash, yet the page begins with "monit except awesome". Hell, I loathe Ruby and I was even convinced it was a better alternative to monit!

I think anybody who releases open source software is to be commended; without it, most of us wouldn't have businesses. I have great respect for all contributors. That being said, just because you put something out there doesn't give you immunity against negative reviews. And it doesn't justify others, such as yourself, in berating those who give such reviews.

Most free software is forthcoming about its warts and issues. We're generally told when something should not be used for production. Instead, the pitch for god is that, well, it's God. I believe his tone was dead on for someone who felt betrayed by a piece of software that promised the world yet could not even maintain its own running state. After all that fighting, I'd be pissed too.
I don't know what you're trying to say here. I'm saying, if your argument is that there's a limit to how far Microsoft will go to ensure system security, and that limit is lower than the limit mainstream Linux will go to, you're likely to lose the argument. I can point to places where Microsoft has surrendered tens of millions of dollars to combat individual C code security flaws.

So let's stipulate that neither of us want to piss off users, neither of us are vouching for Microsoft's long term strategy, and neither of us are arguing against open source. We're not talking about whether you should use Linux or you should use Microsoft.

We're talking about, this is what it looks like when a company redlines security and code quality. Many of us have companies that ship code. It's worth knowing what the ends of the spectrum look like.
I guess that means that it is the smallest gojomo number. I think 40 is a little forced (only number whose name is spelled in alphabetical order). You should claim 40 too.
BaconSalt - Everything should taste like bacon
Video editor here. I much prefer it to a generic box or circle. Maybe an egg shape would be equally functional and prettier, but I liked the immediacy.
"recenly lost"=$3M down to $300K...dumped too much into keeping previous company alive when economy dumped.I can invest $200-250K of my own before seeking additional funding.

I am a proven operator and team builder. I believe I would be a great complement to brilliant technologist with great ideas but no funding and, most important, real life business execution.

I'm looking for pitches. No app's or piggybacks. Something that, if executed, can be a true disruptive technology. I am open to hardware as well as software technology.

My wife rocks.....would follow me to the moon. She is the best and totally supportive.
In-Q-Tel, the venture capital arm of the CIA, has invested in a number of companies specializing in facial recognition, and has also been closely involved in Facebook's funding. If you set aside all the conspiracy theories you can generate from that fact, it's actually kind of cool.

Comparing a person's face against a homogeneous collection of millions other faces is an intractable problem. If you place the search in the context of the social network, however, it becomes much simpler - assuming it's not some random face in the background, you probably only have to travel out a couple degrees of separation to find a probable match. Even if it is a random face on the street, you're aided by the geographical context.

I think Facebook is generally more hype than substance, but they do leave the door open for some pretty interesting ideas.
Thanks you. I'd never heard of Stoicism.

Just printed out three copies of this post, one for myself, two for friends (to begin with). Wow. It crystallizes all the bits of Power of Now, Zen, Entrepreneurship, How to be Happy, taking risks, going for "failure" that I've been selectively grasping onto. Thank you.

"failure" in quotes because as the author of that post says:

> What a Stoic does is turn every obstacle into an opportunity.

EDIT: five copies printed
Enough serious talk.. have a little break http://xkcd.com/224/
My wife is totally supportive. She has seen me create millions out of nothing before, and wants me to feel passionate about why I get up in the morning.
My sentiments exactly. Tom has contributed some wonderful things to OSS including Chronic and Grit. I've used Chronic on many projects and have been very happy with it because it works as advertised. Thats just not the case for God.
Loard of the Cloud: John Markoff and Clay Shirky Talk to David Gelernter
This links to at least one site that won't let you download the icons without installing the Zango toolbar. Spam
I'm actually getting rid of my TV when I move. It's not worth the cost, plus 90% of what I watch is on Hulu the next day anyway. I've also thought about buying a Slingbox and hooking it up to my parents cable if I really miss some shows that aren't on Hulu. There are some amazing gems of entertainment on TV but the ridiculous cost is what bothers me ($42 for basic cable, WTF comcast).
I'm a first-year Ph.D. student. I attempt to "work" a 40-hour week, but I count classes and classwork as part of that 40 hours and try not to count unproductive hours. Toward this end, instead of taking a full weekend off, I often take Thursday through Sunday "half off". I'm not sure whether this results in more or less work getting done than would otherwise. During my first semester, I felt very unproductive, but I've been fairly successful at getting things done this semester.
Behavior Adoption on Social Networks: Two Models of Viral Growth
Cloudkick  (YC W09) Now Lets You Migrate Your Amazon Machine Images To Slicehost
The obligatory link for any discussion of a report on a research result like that is the article by Peter Norvig, director of research at Google, on how to interpret scientific research.

http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html

Check each news story you read for how many of the important issues in interpreting research are NOT discussed in the story.
"9951 is the number of ways to color the vertices of a triangle with 31 colors, up to rotation."

Thank you! I was wondering about that just last night over beer. Now I can sleep easy :-)

Seriously the only thing missing:

1 is the number of web site authors with way too much time on their hands.
Those protocol discrimination and QoS concerns are possible results of "deep packet inspection" (how deep?) but just because these results are good does not mean we should accept DPI (~converse fallacy).

The article outlines some of the problems with DPI but does not make a compelling case. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_packet_inspection#Deep_Pac... for some uses of DPI at the ISP level. Each of these use cases has negative features. Those are "the problem with DPI".
Urgency is that I've spent last 6 months licking wounds and doing due diligence on what's next. It's time to make a decision and start swinging for the fences.

I am so eager to get back to putting in a 60 hour week of real productivity I could cry!
Looks like the main reason for the choice was efficient HTTP support.
Amazon's Mechanical Turk (mturk.com) would be one place for you to look.
Unless you mention specifics (which site), you're probably gonna be downvoted
Capital Factory Selects Companies for Startup Incubator Program
Same. I might watch an hour of television combined in a week unless they're something specific I want to see. And that's rare these days.
> Decide on any exempt shows: There may be few shows that you feel are educational and want to encourage yourself and your other family members to watch.

That's exactly what I have done. Family Guy is exempt, Seinfeld is exempt if it's one I haven't seen before (I'm new to the US, so I still have that occasional joy)
I just checked and the web form appears to be working correctly. Someone mentioned we had a glitch recently. Feel free to submit it again.
Also, since the OP said the spam was from accounts just created, you could add a third threshold (time since account creation before you can submit a story).

By the way there is no reason to pick these thresholds out of thin air - presumably one can look at say the karma distribution of link submitters and figure out what the highest threshold that would inconvenience the least number of people is. For example, I would be truly surprised if 95% of stories were not submitted by people with a karma of 5 or more.
"When does taking risk = stupidity?"

When it becomes selfish.

In order words, the moment your wife and children have to make sacrifices to accomodate your dreams.

You may love the thrill of the endeavor, but they probably don't, even if they say they do. All they really want is you.

If you have enough runway to avoid falling into selfish mode, go for it and keep us posted. If not, think hard about the others whose lives you'll affect.
Neat to see a good, live use of SVG out in the wild.
Hiring the right person is never easy, and your question "where their heart is" makes it even harder.

I want to give you a question that has served me well for nearly a decade, and gets as close as possible to your question.

Ask the candidate what they would do if they won the lottery tomorrow.

This question will immediately advise you as to what their core values and true ambitions are. Certainly this isn't a "tell all", but when evaluated within a comprehensive interview is valuable information.
Am I using a different version of God than you guys or something? It's been nothing but awesome for me and the framework I built around it, which now has been running in production happily for months monitoring over 20 different ruby processes (http://www.github.com/jcapote/theman).

Also it deeply saddens me that an article as emotional as this makes it to the front page.
This is probably great for him, I rarely watch TV anymore, but I still watch a lot of series on DVD and such. However, in the space of 60 minutes, I can (for example) watch 3 episodes of The Simpsons or Futurama, not the 2 I'd get on TV.

I probably still watch the equivalent of about 3 hours of TV a day, just it's compacted into 2 hours. The other hour I can read a book, and a lot of the time I leave shows running on my media server just for some background noise.

I hate radio DJ's, so quite young I picked up the habit of using TV not radio as a tool for background noise. It's probably a bad habit, but I find in residential areas (I grew up in the quiet of the country) I get highly distracted by noises outside.

It is a compelling argument that if you dropped the 3+ hours of TV a day, you could make an extra $10K on minimum wage (here in Canada it would be about $16K on minimum wage). However, this advice might work great for one person, however if everyone in the country suddenly decided to cover 30+ hours a week of extra work, it would probably further collapse the economy. There's not enough jobs to go around the people we have already, if people suddenly double their hours then lots of people would likely loose their job.
It's all about context. The more of the enclosing context you need to keep in mind to understand a line of code, the more you increase the cognitive load on the programmer.
Another nightmare for windows on netbooks. Imagining porting the OS and then all applications for ARM. That would be fun!
"What is your username on HN?"
God doesn't actually work.

We used god on FamSpam, currently use it on GitHub, and I've heard at least two massive Facebook apps (Friends for Sale and Rock Legends) use it to manage a large number of processes across a large number of servers.

For intelligently killing runaway processes (different attempts with different kill methods), monit is rather lacking. At CNET we ran into this again and again so I was very excited when Tom started god.

On one of our GitHub app slices, god has been running for 8 days and is using 8 megs of RAM. I can't speak for anyone else's setup, but I haven't seen the famed memory leak.

I would recommend god to anyone running a high trafficked Ruby-based site.
Well, there's a couple of issues out there; one being that most of the DBA's I've met were coders before they specialized, so on average most DBA's are more experienced. Another is that a shocking number of people in the industry don't understand and don't want to understand the basic concepts underlying the field. There is an unfortunately large class of developers that seem to want a pile of Lego Bricks that they can assemble into a semblance of functionality and who don't want to "bother" with understanding the fundamentals.

/me apologizes for the rant.
news.yc works well for me - I wonder if YC will end up buying the .yc TLD at some point? :)
Wikipedia's list of sentient fictional planets
Cool Web App (click "Open We Feel Fine")
How to balance privacy and transparency in the context of virtual companies?
Virtual companies allow people to assemble online on common projects. A condition to success is transparency, since members interact mostly online, not physically. However, the Internet also presents privacy issues. For instance, do you make the name of the members visible to everyone?

What guiding principles would you use to balance transparency and privacy and make such decisions?
I should mention that if you can get s3cmd to do what you want, it's probably the best choice. s3sync has an odd way of storing folders that makes it hard to use with Elastic MapReduce if you ever want to. I mention it because it may interfere with other software, too. Otherwise, it is a fine piece of software.
> I've never come close to needing the sort of dramatic scalability that people seem to worry so much about.

s/worry/fantasize/
The Future (of Java)
Taking note: Note-keeping in 1786 - Blumenbach's System of Maps
Interesting...I assumed that since Mechanical Turk is pitched as a cheap solution for baseline intelligent labor, the quality of people who are part of the network is very low. As a bit of context, we need users who are willing to write reviews of online authors and bloggers. Do you think the people at Mechanical Turk can write intelligent reviews of David Brooks or Steven Levitt?
Ask HN: Delaware LLCs living in California - where is your bank account?
I have a Delaware LLC and I live in CA. If I open a bank account in CA, I have to get a foreign qualification and pay $800/year franchise tax, which is way too much.

If you are in a similar situation, where did you open your bank account?
My advice would be to team up with others in the VC/angel community. You may be the type that VC's like to put in as the CEO of a heavily technical group. If you don't have the technical savvy yourself, you may be putting your nest egg at serious risk.

In the past month there was a thread about becoming an angel investor. One of the key points was to spread your investment over 10 or so companies. Going that route improves your chances of finding a winner and finding a good fit as a CEO.

SV is a good move. There's a good community of like minded folks.
Market forces are mostly to blame for the devaluation of common stock.

When you negotiate that first round with the VCs, it's all about who has more power in the negotiation. A known weakness of the newbie entrepreneur is that they don't know all the tricks that VCs put as hidden terms.

That's one reason I like Adeo's initiatives to bring transparency and shed the light on the VC industry's practices.
I only watch shows that are exempt, I do this by watching solely on an off-cable medium. Not having the advertising helps to see more shows in less time.

All movies are exempt for me, however again I usually only watch DVD's. I came from the UK where TV always shows complete episodes, not the syndicated crap, and movies aren't cut and edited to death. I believe when I first came to Canada most stations still cropped the picture in movies, I never even knew anyone did that, because on a PAL set the quality is high enough to keep the letter box format, so the switch to NTSC cemented the death of TV.
If only Jonathan Swift were here to laugh at you in person.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Modest_Proposal
How the Other Half Writes: In Defense of Twitter
By virtue of living of California and conducting any kind of business in CA, you'll have to pay the franchise tax. Establishing a bank account is such a case, but frankly, unless you only work for that LLC when you are traveling outside California, you'll get hit. You can hide, but that's a different question.
For long term maintainability, absolutely abstraction is the way to go. Any pros and cons listed now can help you decide, but what about a year from now? Two? Five?

This goes double if you are considering commercial products.

For various reasons we are forced to use $Vendor, but we are not a commercial shop and we always have the fear factor that $Vendor will price us out (they occasionally try it on by "forgetting" our academic discount). We hid all the DB interactions in two layers (one to hide the relational nature of the database, and the other to hide the specific implementation). As a result, I am in the position to tell $Vendor "How much? Well, you can give us this price or we can move to postgress - either is fine by me". And mean it. And they can tell.
>I'm actually getting rid of my TV when I move.

I highly recommend this. I've been watching my 'exempt' shows on my laptop for over a year. I'm not quite sure if i will ever have a TV again.
Yes, but then you should go back and fix it. One can only hope that there were more "ugly hacks" that have since been fixed.

The measure of a good programmer is not whether he or she recognizes when they're writing bad code, but whether the final result is free of bad code, and thus more maintainable.

I would argue that someone commenting known bad code, but leaving it there in perpetuity is no better than someone unknowingly writing bad code (although the comments could serve as signposts to help someone else find and fix your bad code - but how often has that ever actually happened?).
Launch Your with Launch
Be advised that the only reason my family currently enjoys it's quality of life (think big house and foreign cars) is because I have taken risks. I grew up poor and have defied the odds since I was 18.

I don't understand your comment. Are you saying a family man should no longer stretch, grow and strive for abundance....because it is selfish?
I'm surprised there isn't more talk of Bazaar. It's awesome.
Python's move to Hg might have been an influence as well. Mssr. vRossum does work for GOOG after all.
For me, TV is the opiate of the masses that numbs my brain after a long day quicker than booze, god, or exercise. Replacing it with a second job is about as likely as giving up weekends and vacations.
>There's not enough jobs to go around the people we have already, if people suddenly double their hours then lots of people would likely loose their job.

There is not a fixed amount of work to do. If the author of this article just watched TV instead of creating the blog network that he did, he wouldn't have put anyone out of a job.
This will be a huge change for people who live in cities, but are currently effectively disconnected from one another. Imagine even just knowing the name of each person you pass on the street, and knowing that they know your name. Huge social change. I think it's positive.
thank u, this makes a lot of sense.
In all honesty, I bet the GitHub folks are ecstatic over this decision.
=)

edit: To elaborate, we view the growth of DVCS in general as a good thing. (Also we have a big surprise coming soon for hg users.)
You can just throw money at Postgres problems and make them go away. There are a number of very capable firms that do nothing but Postgresql support. And, they don't hold you captive w/ licensing. And if your needs are really that unique they can help you with building extensions to postgresql that support the capabilities you need.

See http://www.commandprompt.com/support/ for an example, or http://pgexperts.com/services.html
I'm glad you brought this up because I'm struggling with the same question. Since I'm developing in Django, I am currently abstracting out the db layer while I do the programming. However, I will eventually want to make a selection for when I launch the app and have been trying to decide between these two.

I'm currently leaning towards PostGres but am interested in hearing the pros and cons of both. The recent purchase of Sun by Oracle makes things a little more interesting.
Direct download links, anyone? :D
Agree with edw519 entirely. I should add that we always arrange for a sightseeing tour and meals with interview candidates in order to facilitate talking on a variety of subjects. These activities are chaperoned not by the people who will interview them, but people who would work with them if they got hired. We also give them interview tips, and brief them on the background and style of the people who will interview them. The best interview is one without surprises.

(We're not google, we only shortlist 4 people at a time, and hire rarely, so we can afford to take the time).
What's surprising, and perhaps sad, is that operating systems have aroused people's passions so intensely...

People look to form tribes using whatever brands they can - be they personalities, cars, clothes, or programming languages.
Good idea, might even end up lowering the costs for Amazon, since people will no longer be stuck with them
Windows 7 Discontinues "Ultimate Extras"
I've not gotten to exempt shows, but I have blocked entire chanels, including the MTV family. It's been great for me and my whole family. I need to block more.
Conned by Microsoft again. Glad I don't pay for that. (And no, I don't pirate it, either.)

On a more serious note, the multi-tiered pricing scheme is insane.
I haven't had cable since 2005, and it's never been a problem. If you can't stream it somewhere, you can always torrent it.

I rarely watch shows, but still have a bit of a movie addiction. However, my total weekly watching of video might amount to 2-3 hours, so I'm ok with it. Video games are a much harder habit to kick in the interest of productivity.
>> "Privacy is dead in the sense that you definitely have to worry about it."

>> "Most people won't,..."

Seems like a contradiction. Fact is, most people don't care.
Well mostly the part where he rants about how much time he wasted, etc.

That's not a negative review, it's a slap in the face.

Also, it is somewhat disgusting to me that a wanna-be blogger would decide (to publicize his blog?) to rip on a guy who has been a great open source contributor AND has managed to bootstrap several successful startups (notably gravatar and github).

Tom is clearly busy and productive and is (in my opinion) a great role model for how to combine excellence in open source and entrepreneurship, and is the LAST person that anyone should be going out of their way to rip on.
Do all YC startups that move to MV pay the franchise tax for at least one yer?
eval-when is black magic :-P
I agree that the original "Ultimate Extras" gimmick was a huge con, seeing as they didn't get anything other than an extra sound scheme and two lame games.

But is it a con for people that purchased Ultimate Extras to lose them when upgrading to Windows 7? Ultimate Extras were an added-value pack for Windows Vista, they don't necessarily have to carry over to a new OS, do they?
I find it sad that you think that only children should be well looked after. What should we do with adults, kick them in the teeth?

The comment you responded to made the valid point that unstressed secure people can offer you more. If you are not interested in more and just want enough, that is another issue.
At the same time, it'll be trivial to fake high res movies of you doing anything - "photoshop" for movies mapping your physical form onto others etc

Wow you robbed a bank today? Nah it was a 'shopped movie.

I think that lessens the need for privacy even more...