skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Also, if this gets more points than the earlier link to the paper itself I will be sad.

It's all in the headline. If the paper was titled "Researchers confirm it: MapReduce doesn't scale" (and it if wasn't a PDF) it would have a much higher score.
Decent app, but it just seems buggy and unpolished compared to Balsamiq, you can really tell by some of the little bugs that are in the program ( try sending 2 items to the back multiple times, or switching pages and see your undo history disappear ) as well as its memroy footprint and lagginess when compared to balsamiq.

On a somewhat related point, this shows how a single american programmer can make a better product than a whole team of outsourced indian programmers. The wireframing/prototyping application space seems pretty hot lately with the big boys jumping on too ( catalyst, expression sketchflow ). Maybe I'll write something ;)
So, reading the order it seems that what happened was:

1. Guy is shopping for a computer for dev use.

2. Guy talks to sales consultant, explaining what he needs to do, and is told "get a MacBook Air".

3. Guy discovers MacBook Air isn't capable of handling the workload he's putting on it, it overheats and shuts down CPU cores.

4. Guy files dispute.

5. Apple says "yeah, the the MacBook Air can't handle this type of load".

6. Dispute judge says sales consultant shouldn't have recommended the MacBook Air, then.

7. Dispute judge says guy can return MacBook Air for a full refund since he was misled into believing it could handle the work he needed to do.

Moral of the story: an ultra-thin laptop which explicitly trades off performance for size probably isn't the ideal machine for compiling lots of stuff while also powering a monitor the size of a breakfast table, and salespeople who tell you it is shouldn't be trusted.
I use Markdown when I'm writing content-heavy prose, like wiki pages or READMEs. When I need more control over the exact classes and tags, HAML is a good alternative to HTML.

In the case of Markdown prose, I don't /care/ what kind of HTML it writes. Headers, paragraphs, links, all taken care of. I write text, it gets run automatically through a parser/html generator (I use maruku), and I don't think about it. HAML is great for templates & layouts, when I care about DIVs and ids and classes, without being the wordy, ugly HTML itself.
A Major Milestone in JavaScript Standardization
So... the top 10 percent had 0% divorce rate, the bottom 10 percent had 25% divorce rate.

Isn't overall the divorce rate is 50%? Something fishy is happening here.
Impressive, I updated my profile so it should be easier to find now.
Cloud-based telephony with Tropo
You must have seen a strange slice of the Valley. People here think much more critically about startups than in the rest of the US. People in Nebraska aren't worrying about Twitter's business model.
Hmm. Amadeus is a "lavish music musical" and a "lavish historic historical".
I searched on some of my favorite movies and was very impressed with the accuracy of the results. I've seen 95% of the movies it recommended, but I loved almost all of the ones it did. I think this would be good for finding movies that I would like to watch that are outside of my normal genres.
Report a Bug – The feature all products should have
If you're happy enough to have a genuine smile while attending an American highschool, then putting up with someone's shit for 50 year's is NOTHING :)
Sources please. Perhaps a name? A link to the aforementioned "Internet forum" or a screenshot of this primary source? How about some selected quotes from Amazon Kindle user agreement?

Not that I'm saying it's not possible, but as far as I can tell, this entire "article" (using the term loosely) is rumor and hearsay. Yellow journalism at its best. It feels very much like the author was simply trying to meet a story/word quota. Sad.
The fact that the Industrial Revolution was localized mattered a lot to the regions that were left behind. It made them the victims in the ensuing era of colonialism.
Our "worthless Australian dollars" were trading 0.2c off equal until the US failed hard.
Read this:

http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/10/the-pmarca-gu-1.html

"Once you have picked an industry, get right to the center of it as fast as you possibly can."

"Every job, every role, every company you go to is an opportunity to learn how a business works and how an industry works."

When you're young, you should always trade income risk and get to the center of the action ASAP and decide which "businesses" you want to learn. For example, if you want to start a enterprise software company, you would work at SAP.

This is only for you're very ambitious. If you're not, focus on the compensation, challenging work, environment, etc that everyone talks about. The fact is if you're doing a startup, you learn about the business from being in a company in the space. (SAP spun out of IBM, Salesforce/PeopleSoft/Siebel from Oracle, YouTube/Slide/Geni/Yelp/Linkedin from Paypal (all consumer internet), etc).
Couldn't have said it better myself. I didn't particularly identify with either side of the divide (or rather, I identify with parts of both sides). I'm usually not the life of the party, and I'm far from great at small talk, but on the other hand I tend to go absolutely nuts if I'm alone for too long.

I don't doubt that the divide is real, but as with most behavioural traits I suspect that reality is more of a spectrum, with the majority of people falling somewhere towards the middle.
I wonder if this suffers from the Napoleon Dynamite Problem:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/23/magazine/23Netflix-t.html?...
Other research has shown that happy people smile more.

In various photos outside of the yearbook, the tendency to smile might indicate the positive attitude of that person.

Though a bit weak, this study might suggest that happiness predicts marriage success.
Really Facebook?
Oh please. The time you spend learning HAML or Markdown (and all their potential intricacies) could be better spent learning to write clean HTML. I'm sure that both of those "alternatives" have their own quirks that must be worked around, not to mention the fact that you don't know exactly what HTML the parsers will spit out (yes, you can learn the output, I suppose, but why?).

I can see these tools being useful in certain circumstances, such as a way to provide HTML-esque markup somewhere where you don't want to bother cleaning up someone else's potentially malicious HTML (a wiki, a comment form, etc.). However, for building actual websites, just do it the right way.

Sure, these alternatives are nice in that you can avoid the scary HTML, but in the end it is all HTML anyway -- so why not learn it from the start and produce better code than what a parser will spit out based on your abstraction?
There is also http://designoutpost.com
They have had a few very talented designers in the past, and there is a very collaborative discussion, where you can help guide the designers to a final version.
Isn't overall the divorce rate is 50%?

No, that is a statistical fallacy.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/19/health/19divo.html?pagewan...
Here is pg's take on how to deal with high school:

http://paulgraham.com/hs.html
The kind of companies Paul is talking about appear to be software companies, in general. More new software companies originate in Silicon Valley than anywhere else in the world by a wide margin. Most new software companies (Google, for example) tend to be internet companies, but that's just because the internet is the most sensible way to distribute most software now.
I'm fairly willing to be convinced that, on some point or another, the best course of action lies close to what I held to be true, but differs by a few degrees. I also try and think about the holes in my argument and to consider the fact that I am not actually omniscient, and may very well be wrong about things (it is rare, but does happen:-).

I was thinking about this, and part of the problem is that these threads often feel like someone selling me something, rather than trying to figure out how things really work. They'd be much more interesting if people "let down their guard" a bit, upped the reasoning, and lowered the propagandizing. I guess it may not feel like propaganda to those involved, but I really like reading comments like mechanical_fish's, which cast a wide eye on things, considering all points of view, rather than people pulling out all the stops to fit the facts to their point of view.
This appears to be the thread from the forum:

http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=44350
It appears that the auto-complete is filtering from a local cache, thus initially downloading a list of all the movies in their database, rather than posting back to the server.
This story is about my Macbook Air. In January I'd had enough of Apple and Renaissance mucking me about, so gave them another week to respond, they didn't so I filed the dispute. I also purchased a new 15 inch Macbook Pro to use in the mean time. Got it home, and it started exhibiting problems too: http://vimeo.com/2911394

Apple said to switch the power settings to "high performance" and leave them there. Basically I think this forces it to use one of the video cards and not the other. Since then it hasn't shown the problem, but the battery doesn't last as long...

Apple. Love 'em, Hate 'em.
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The autocomplete is nice. The selection is lacking. There seem to be virtually no foreign films, for example. The most important implication of this is that I've already seen everything it recommends (but that at least means that the recommendation algorithm is on target).

Making the user click on a nanogenre after entering a movie is unnecessary - you could show at least a partial list of all of them instead (and maybe show more of a particular list if you click on it).

Overall, I like clerkdogs better, mainly due to the wider selection.
PG&E Plans to Beam Solar Power From Space Back to Earth
I'm not a big fan of using markdown for creating HTML, but using a CSS compiler has definitely been helpful for me in writing CSS. Nested styles makes your code much more maintainable, and makes inheritance easier. Plus, variables and basic arithmetic operations are nice.

CleverCSS is a CSS compiler pretty similar to Sass, which I tend to prefer for the simple reason that Sass requires my indents to be two spaces, and it doesn't matter in CleverCSS. The only problem is that it doesn't seem to be maintained anymore, and there are a couple of annoying bugs in the official release. I submitted patches but to no avail, so I'm hosting the patched code here: http://django-css.googlecode.com/files/CleverCSS-0.1.2.zip

I was so pumped on CSS compilers that I wrote this so you can use them in your Django projects: http://django-css.googlecode.com
Unfortunately, ubuntu becomes less and less "controllable" as they add layers for "user-friendliness" (I'm thinking to hal/dbus, see http://modeemi.fi/~tuomov/b/archives/2008/10/29/T20_34_21/ for a detailed explanation)
Nope, not the ideal machine. a $10k Mac Pro would be much better. I was given the impression it would be adequate though, and I picked it for it's portability.

If it's not adequate for the tasks it shouldn't be promoted as such. The web page for the Macbook Air says it comes with Xcode, and runs a large external display. Perhaps I should have known better, but I tried to do my research. ;-)
The UI doesn't make it clear, but if you don't want to use the Nanogenre thing, use the 'most like' bit on the left. I think the UI would be improved by making the Nanogenres and 'most like' more equal, as they are both useful but in different ways.
The part where I said "non-reproducing people" and "(if you believe the "genetics" argument)" cover what you said.

You refute your original argument with your first sentence.
Ask PG: Why is the Arc logo a womb chair?
Logo for Arc: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Arc_programming_language_logo.jpeg

Knoll womb chair, designed by Eero Saarinen: http://www.knoll.com/products/product.jsp?prod_id=145

I recognized the chair because the MIT Brain&Cog center has a few, and they're wonderful for naps.
How does it feel to be a member of the lesser race? ;)
(no hard feelings, jus' kidding)
I hate software patents, but the article mentions its author presented to MS, and the company knowingly infringed it.

Knowingly, I guess, it's the key here. MS knew they were doing "something illegal", but decided to go anyway.

Of course, neither I or the article present any proof, as an internal corporate email saying "Yay! Let's do it anyway", but if we assume the judge gathered enough evidence to show this was done, then damages are owned.

USD 388m worth? No idea.
It all depends on what your goal is.

In health care applications? In financial applications? I would never trust anything less than fully acid with all the bells and whistles.

In a website where people aren't going to be that bothered of a few transactions are inconsistent if some major snafu happens? (status updates get lost in the ether, for example.) The cost isn't worth the benefit of high power.

RDMS is a similar tradeoff.
I think the person who complained about the correlation/causation comment was right, whether it was knee-jerk or not. You don't need time travel to see what the problem could be.

Say a typical person may or may not be the smiley type, and say that means nothing at all about their chance of marital bliss. But say oh, I don't know, all migraine sufferers frown, because they are in pain. And say that being a migraine sufferer puts a terrible strain on your marriage (look, it's just an example) and so you are more likely to divorce. Now if you look for the divorce rate of people who frown, it will be much higher than that of people who smile. But that has no predictive value for an individual who frowns, because (in this hypothetical example) it's not the frown that is the issue - it is whether they get migrains. If there is no predictive value, there is no real science.

The other fundamental problem with presenting research in this way is that it is very easy to pick two percentile ranges and find a difference even in random data. The question that one should ask is - was there a dose response. In other words, if you plotted divorce rate along this so called "smile strength" axis, would there be a linear correlation (the weaker the smile the higher the divorce rate)? Or is your conclusion based on the outliers?

I can't tell from the OP.
You must have spent some time 'out west' during the Viaweb acquisition. How much did you see of the valley in those years? I lived in San Francisco in 1999 and early 2000, and thought things were actually pretty crazy. I don't think I knew anyone who wasn't doing something related to computers, and there was a very unhealthy "free money! wheeee!" attitude amongst a lot of people, so much of it was being sloshed around in a way that obviously wasn't sustainable.

Also, there were virtually no children, no old people, not many "middle class" people... it all just struck me as very out of kilter.

That's not to say that there aren't lots of good things, or that the area is a bad place or somewhere people shouldn't go, just that it has its downsides too. I got the feeling that it has never really cast off the 'gold rush' mentality: get in, get rich, get out. Sure, some do stay and make it their home (you, for instance), but so many move on that I never felt much sense of community, something that I do enjoy over here in Italy, and have found more of in other towns in the US.

> People in Nebraska aren't worrying about Twitter's business model.

They're busy getting rich with more traditional stuff that they understand:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_Buffett
Given the "more" links on the front page, I'm guessing HN is using continuations as state storage mechanisms, and that they're stored on a per-user basis. So, I'd expect the site's RAM requirements to be pretty hefty just on that basis, hence the 12GB of RAM.
I think Twitter is a bad usage case, because it's not something that NEEDS to be scalable.
CSS compilers rock
Replicate IE 8 Features in FireFox 3
Getting Attention Is a Stupid Business Plan
Interesting that the anchor URLs on results links don't change it seems (simply remaining as the destination URL), but the referrer information passed to the underlying site does change. (so it isn't the page that the results are on anymore) Am I missing something?
It's not the logo. But I used it because (a) the womb chair, like Lisp, is an old design that's still holding up well, and (b) as a reference to the idea that language design is like chair design (rather than bridge design).

http://www.paulgraham.com/langdes.html
> People in Nebraska aren't worrying about Twitter's business model.

Very true, but we should not be so dismissive of non-startup small businesses. I'm new here, and have worked at tech startups since I got my CS degrees and started my career a few years ago.

Starting a new business on the basis of a great idea and hard work is nothing new. All around me, I see examples of small businesses being creative within their domain, and they are growing profitable businesses using the same tools we use (in theory: great graphic design, viral/word-of-mouth marketing, accessible customer service, and hard work) without any promise of making it big. These businesses see a niche and try to serve it uniquely.

I appreciate SV and the hungry tech culture as much as anyone, but we're not operating on fundamentally different principles.
You are completely missing the point of HAML.

HAML is for people who know and use raw HTML, but who would rather not spend time on typing closing tags and all other syntatic sugar and line noise. HAML allows writing pages using leaner and more concise markup, all the while improving its readability.
you know what, actually, I wrote a big comment justifying the same point of view (currently right below this very comment) but the irony is that as far as I can tell none of my comments were deleted at all.
Brent's Patches to the Ruby intepreter
There are very, very few markets that it is truly winner take all. Ex. even Airbus/Boeing, Microsoft/Linux/Apple, etc

For most part, I find that ideas are essentially worth the paper that they're scribbled on. It almost always comes down to execution. Go for it! You'll never know until you try, otherwise you'll always be saddled with the shoulda, coulda, wouldas(particularly if that startup competitor ends up exiting in a big way down the road). I learned my lesson the hard way.

Remember, sometimes its better to be a fast follower (and faster at reiterations) than a first mover.
I would agree with you if you were talking simply about Markdown, but it seems you don't understand the point of HAML. Markdown is a complex syntax that loosely translates to half of HTML. It's good for user-input, because it's designed to be written like users already write stylistic formatting when the result will be plain ASCII, but it's not HTML.

HAML is HTML—it's a one-to-one conversion—but it's simpler and more concise to write. It's what HTML should be: no closing brackets, no line noise, and simple syntax to access DOM-relevant attributes (class and id). If I had the option of immediately converting all HTML worldwide into HAML, and all HTML parsers into HAML parsers, I'd sign up in a second.

Also, I don't need to see the raw HTML any more, because that's not the point: it's like looking at machine language instead of assembler. They're equivalent, so why read it the painful way? When debugging a page layout in HTML, I actually find it more useful to convert it into HAML first.
I guess I am the lazy one - I just use an IDE web designer in design view, then switch to code view as needed. Benefits from both worlds.
I'm surprised the general response here is so negative. Besides the fact that it's obvious, research does in fact confirm that happier people smile more. And the average high school student is probably not focused on being cynical and grumpy whilst having his/her picture taken (though perhaps cultural norms around pictures have changed over the past decades).

Anyways, couple the happiness-smiling connection with a few other facts about human psychology, and this makes a lot of sense. (1) Emotional states in humans are contagious. We naturally tend to empathize with one and other, laugh together, and cry together. (2) We also naturally tend to mimic physical gestures made by people we are interacting with, often subconsciously. (3) Facial expressions actually influence our emotional state. Being happy makes us smile, but also smiling actually makes us happier.

It doesn't seem much of a leap from there that happiness would correlate inversely with divorce. In my take, this article is just reaffirming that naturally happy people are less likely to divorce.

Here's another interesting article about the contagiousness of happiness:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9784878...
I feel the same way you do about photos, but I fear that the study isn't quite as meaningless as you suspect. It's seems quite plausible that unwillingness to conform to social norms by faking a smile correlates to (lack of) success in marriage.
Almost all of the occupations you list require graduate degrees to practice professionally; two of them are primarily practiced in academia. Most of them are hard-science degrees whereas CS is at least partially a liberal art. (The exceptions to this where CS-related degrees are issued as BSs are most notably issued at the most well-regarded colleges for CS, as far as I know.)

Although the average CS program is pretty terrible, the underlying differentiating factor is that doing practical CS work is cheap and easy (the same thing that motivated internet entrepreneurship); additionally a large part of the literature is directed at 'lay practitioners'. Doing (advanced) physics or chemistry is neither cheap nor easy, and it's pretty hard (impossible, AFAIK) to do pure professional mathematics outside an academic setting.
I think this trend will pick up over time. The idea of a virtual gift is a status symbol almost. It is very similar to someone buying a Jean Paul Gaultier belt vs a regular leather belt. Both hold your pants up but the value comes in appearance/brand/perception of success.

With the focus now advancing in social media and virtual worlds, I am sure a large portion of users are willing to pay to "look good" or for a show of status.
I thought the GP was a correction to the headline.
Use a WYSIWYG? I mean if you seriously can't wrap your head around HTML/CSS maybe you're in the wrong business...