skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For someone who linked to the 37signals book, Getting Real, he doesn't seem to have read it. From Getting Real (http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch01_Caveats_disclaimers_an...):

"You take too much of a black and white view."

If our tone seems too know-it-allish, bear with us. We think it's better to present ideas in bold strokes than to be wishy-washy about it. If that comes off as cocky or arrogant, so be it. We'd rather be provocative than water everything down with "it depends..." Of course there will be times when these rules need to be stretched or broken. And some of these tactics may not apply to your situation. Use your judgement and imagination.

And that's how I read all those things. Sure, they could preface everything and when I write I am much more wishy-washy, but I understand why they've chosen that route too. It's important to realize that no one is as confident as they put on to others and once you realize that, you don't get as worried about how you fit in (at least I don't).
It's not only not the case that you must do it, it's usually suboptimal, it's just hard to tell that from the inside. He even mentions himself that he's working at a greatly reduced capacity. If he spent less time at work and more time on himself, he'd probably get more done.
Your argument only holds if you equate "programmer" with "single developer who wants to ship an entire application."
Got something stub-in simple right now. Doing the leg work on the existing library frameworks... but it seems like this problem has been solved atleast 100,000 times already.
Isn't this the exact business model of magazines like NewYorker and Economist?
While not an instruction-set feature, I find the register windows thing very interesting.
There's a difference between saying "There is no market", "There's an untapped market" and "There's a market and we have numbers to prove it."
> It's a compiler - a source-to-source compiler, yes, but still a compiler.

This was kind of my original point. The very first version wasn't a compiler, just a collection of pre-processor macros. I didn't have the opportunity to work with the language back when the bracket syntax was still macro'ed, but there were still some design warts in ObjC when I started before gcc was modified to support more modern, Java-like extensions to the language.... (I've written code that used the macro based NS_DURING/NS_HANDLER/NS_ENDHANLDER instead of the modern compiled @try/@catch/@finally version.)
Ruby Proxies for Scale, Performance and Monitoring
The Obamas' Image is Carefully Tailored
It's getting to the point where proposing a new solution to the newspaper industry's problems is like posting a clever "new" solution to end spam. Odds are it's neither clever nor new.

Someone needs to come up with a Final Ultimate Solution to the Newspaper Problem Response form based on http://www.claws-and-paws.com/fussp.html
Well, here's the thing:

(a) That is what we are told and

(b) That is what is reinforced by those who have been successful

How many stories have you heard that were basically, "Yeah, I started this company part-time, never worked on it more than a few hours a day because I had this other job, and it was bought for 20 million bucks!" Personally, I've heard none.

Now, I'm not going to sit here and tell you that I still work 20 hours a day, because I don't. Last summer I was close, though. I stopped sacrificing my health at the beginning of this year when I began going to the gym every day again and stopped smoking a pack a day. Now that spring is upon us, I'm even beginning to remember a time when "woman" was a word in my vernacular.

The reason you see these types of articles and the reason you will continue to is because for those of us who have no other jobs, our startups are our lives. I could work for Big Co. and go home at the end of the day not at all worrying about whether or not they will be there tomorrow. The company would pay me X to perform Y and that would be exactly what I'd perform (if I wanted a promotion, maybe Y+1).

At TicketStumbler, I am not merely a cog. If I don't write code for that new feature or fix that bug or setup that new server, nobody else is going to. This means that not only do I constantly have a lot to do, but it all has pretty much the same priority: done yesterday. And if I decide to take a few days off instead of doing one of those things? I get the pleasure of feeling guilty about it the entire time.

So it basically boils down to: at an early-stage startup you have the pleasure of controlling your destiny and being your own boss; for those of us who cannot stomach traditional employment, we feel as if we actually have a soul. The downside? Well, you live in a constant and unrelenting state of stress and obligation. The effects of that state differ from person to person, but alienations/estrangement from family and friends and unwillingness to prioritize anything other than the company are common ones.
Any possibility that the exchange was recorded in some way?

Easy to forgot how recent it is that any talk or lecture is likely to have been video recorded and already available on the web somewhere.
Not true; you can download 10.2.0.4 for OSX from OTN.
Father Tries to Sell Slumdog Child Actor
I don't think Twitter will be destroyed by mass uptake. I don't care if 100 million people are spouting rubbish on Twitter, I'll just follow the few hundred who aren't. Twitter Search will become less useful, but the obvious next step for that (albeit difficult to build) would be to let me search tweets just from people who I am following.
One of the things I missed most (and will miss again in a couple of months) are the inside jokes. I guess that falls under watercooler chit-chat, though it's harder to stay in the loop with that. Come July, I'll bid a fond farewell to balloon god, uncle credit card, baby thumb, spin city, etc. These are the kinds of things that come about from constant, hours-long-at-a-time interactions, not running into someone by the watercooler.
The 2nd Amendment has nothing to do with someone's feelings on Stephen Hawking's illness. So the fact that this guy is very pro-gun says nothing to this apparent dislike of Stephen Hawking.

Now, if his username was "GodHatesPhysicists", then his statement would be totally expected.
More buildout notes
Oracle is written in two layers, there is an abstraction layer and Oracle itself. If you know Oracle then you know it handles a lot of stuff for itself that the OS would traditionally do, for example it has its own process scheduling, interprocess communication, filesystem/volume manager, memory management - as of 11g it even talks directly to NFS servers in userland, bypassing the OS filesystem mounts entirely. Once the abstraction layer is ported then yes, it would be just "make" for Oracle itself.

This is how back in the day Oracle ran on 90+ Unix variants...
The only thing that makes me think we aren't entering the post-Windows era is that Office is still a cash cow for Microsoft. Because the situation Microsoft is in now with Windows greatly resembles the one they were in with Office '97. People kept buying new versions because no one else offered anything all that different and it was preloaded

It comes down to the next great thing. Linux, OpenOffice, Google Apps and Zoho are all trying to be just like Microsoft in their look and feel. But the only thing that will draw people from Microsoft is the next evolution of the desktop. Microsoft clearly can't provide it.

When I see that. Something that makes it worth the effort for people to ditch Windows I'll know we're in the post-Windows era.
I don't. What was it?
IBM GS would happily sell you Solaris services, but there's no way they'd port Solaris to POWER.
It's important to realize that no one is as confident as they put on to others and once you realize that, you don't get as worried about how you fit in (at least I don't).

I think that's why he wrote the post: to explain this to people who don't yet realize it.
Another well known webcomic which has been released in print form is Megatokyo. In fact, they're up to five volumes now! See: http://www.megagear.com/category_s/67.htm
Root-finding algorithms, or more generally iterative optimization and numerical solution of equations, isn't something to be sneered at. Sure, it's a front end position, but the ability to do this is something I'd want to know if I were interviewing you, too.
It's a perennial issue, but not a very important one. Fears that 'I'll be left behind if I don't take xxxxx because everyone else is' are overblown, and balanced by fears of 'I'm only productive because I take cocaine, maybe I actually suck' or whatever.

I've always liked recreational drugs, and a little boost at a critical moment can enhance work; but since one's body quickly develops a tolerance it's not compatible with any long-term work consumption (as many have found to their cost). Many (most?) articles about drugs posit some kind of linear relationship between the input and output, whereas the reality is nonlinear dynamic system with a complex feedback loop.

Thus, I love a big mug of coffee every morning, but it's not so much that it makes me super-productive as I get a bit slow and crabby on the days when I skip my coffee. It doesn't give me any edge over a non-coffee drinker. On the other hand I don't get a caffeine hangover or crash, which would be a risk with a more potent drug if I took it regularly.

Anyway...the article assumes there's only one kind of enhancement. A good scientist or engineer is just as likely to have a brekthrough idea while decompressing on the weekend with a beer or a fattie, as when sitting at their work station. Same reason many people get their best ideas while walking, soaking in the tub, or whatever.
I'm gonna get dinged for this, and I don't care.

Admitting that you like sounding arrogant doesn't make it OK. Just a little more honest.
> Tweeting requires neither skill nor forethought which are things that most people either do not possess or do not exercise very often.

This is the exact reason where I think Twitter's restriction shines. The average person isn't going to rethink or edit their tweets. In some cases, the 140 limit forces them to, without getting in the way of the user experience.

Type type type type. Is my message under (140) characters? yes -> post. No -> rewrite it.

------------------

I will agree with you that the people worth reading aren't on Twitter. But I think there's something to be said about making a large number of average people marginally better at something.
http://www.capitalcentury.com/1992.html
The Twitter hype has really gotten ridiculous since Friday's Oprah. The bottom line is this: I don't know how big Twitter will eventually get but the initial rush of people checking it out doesn't prove anything. Statistics show most people will look once and then leave.

Put another way, Oprah has an average of 8 million viewers yet 3 days after the broadcast her Twitter follower total is a little under 400k. What's that tell you?
Those numbers look a little skewed to me
Brad Fitzpatrick and Brett Slakin's pubsubhubbub
Yes, Windows has been commoditized, but Microsoft is not really suffering from it. Even though most users don't care about the OS, they still need one. In most cases, they go with Windows.

You can even say Microsoft won the battle by having everyone else compete on the web and leave Windows alone. Think about it - Microsoft gets $100+ in licensing fees from every PC user every 3-5 years. Add another $100 for that user's PC at work. How many web businesses can make the same statement?
I'd love to see a thorough account of who did and did not predict this event. The most I've seen was Peter Schiff being mocked on cable news for arguing there would be a bust. Nouriel Roubini correctly predicted this as well. Who else?
Before you go public, or selling for that matter, make sure your startup is not your life's work. My first project was one I worked on since I was 16 and sold it when I was 24. Granted, it wasn't a startup but a software product, it was to me a combination of high school, college and graduate school. When I sold it and signed the ridiculous non-compete papers, I had NOTHING else to work on. Even the much taunted liberal arts PhDs get to keep their titles; I kept nothing. (sure, I was happy to sell it by then, because I was burned out, but it might have been better to delay the negotiations until I was in a better emotional and financial state and was optimistic about the future.)

I know this is tangential to the topic at hand, but had to air my grievances to warn someone else who might be tying their startups with their personal identities.
The way I understand it, currently the Gulf Stream evens out the temperatures between the tropics and the north pole. The melting of the the north pole is alleged to stop the Gulf Stream an this would make the tropics a lot warmer but northern Europe colder.
Active Facebook Users By Country
504 Gateway Time-out

nginx
They're as bad as the developers!
My hopes are on them finishing BTRFS -- it'd probably take a lot more time to butcher ZFS into something that could be shipped by Linus (It took years for XFS, and ZFS is way more proprietary about VFS shit).
The "Newspapers Are About to Die" message has been repeated over and over again since the mid 90's. Because of the recent high-profile closings/cost-cuttings of newspaper organizations, the last 15 years of gloomy prognostications have essentially become reality (mainly precipitated by the current economy).

Similar to Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid and global warming, these are train-wrecks that can be seen miles and miles way. Unfortunately for newspapers, it seems they are in the middle of one.
Great comment; your positive spin made me smile :)
That's like saying work at Twitter is easy because it's just a simple messaging system.

Scaling a system to the level of Google, Facebook and Twitter is the hard part.
For me it's before and during. HN is a deadly weapon in the hands of a shrewd business opportunist with kickass hacking team/skills.

It has been an MBA for me.
This isn't exactly the best place to ask this question, but I got frustrated trying to google for the answer: do you need a mac to program for the iPhone? Apple.com only offers the SDK in a .dmg file.
I got the reference, I just don't find 'references' funny. I don't see it's a joke (or otherwise interesting) for a commenter to remind us, that like the parent commenter, former Vice President Dan Quayle also mispelled "potato" in 1992.
Google Labs: Similar Images and Google News Timeline
I would appreciate if 'dear author' proofreading-comments were actually directed at the author, rather than appearing here. Especially if, as here, the author is not an HN regular and the article already has its own comment thread, and the recommended correction has already appeared in those comments.

I'm OK with polite corrections that address writing that canonically lives here -- especially when it can result in a quick correction to the original headline/comment. (Even so, I would love to see software support for friendly proofreading comments that don't clutter the main thread -- for example visible only to the author, or appearing in a separate 'meta' view, or which expire when the revision-window of the target expires. Then we can get the benefit of many-eyes-improved writing without lingering proofreading noise.)
no png transparency in ie6
Stock market tanks 2.5 percent. Was recovery a dead-cat bounce?
Live At The Google Labs Press Event: Real Image Analysis
Suspect in Craigslist robberies...
The very pro-gun attitude taken by the twitterer is correlated with other conservative attitudes, such as anti-science religiousity.
Not directly, no, but the union between "People who are obssessed with guns to the extent they create twitter accounts and websites called Save The Guns" and "Science-hating right-wing Christian fundamentalist rednecks" seems to be about 99%, so it's a reasonable assumption to make.
When I visited the Unix room at Bell Labs in 1993, there was a picture of Dan Quayle before a blackboard with the famous misspelling. Below the the picture was the text "My heroe -- Ken Thompson".
WEB - not sure if its available
or WWW
At least in my company's market, a 'sales engineer' role is definitely going to be commisioned, and it seems like it meets the "demonstrating, guiding, training, advising, etc." criteria.

Lots of oportunities to work with customers, lots of technical involvement, and a strong position to influence product direction. It's also good background if you think you might want to move into product management at some point (or if you eventually get interested in engineering management, for that matter).

But (again, probably depending on market), the travel demands can be pretty significant, and you have to thrive within the culture and pressures of a sales organization. Personally, I think I'd burn out on it pretty quickly.
Anyone here have kids, and intentionally raised them bilingual?

I am more interested in anecdotes of trying to raise bilingual kids in a monolingual home. My wife speaks some Italian, and I speak some Japanese, but we are both native English speakers, living in the U.S. My two kids are early elementary school age, and I fear the clock is running for them to have any chance of something approaching native fluency in another language. "Move to another country" is of course one option, but there are many other factors involved in that decision.
I both agree and disagree with you. I agree because as you mentioned, Twitter's unique structure in regard to following/followers helps minimize that type of noise. However, retweeting for example is not something you can block and that's where I see problems.

Certainly I always have the right to unfollow or block, but it doesn't solve the problem if I want to continue following a tech entrepreneur who's side hobby may very well be celebrity gossip or American Idol. (god save us)

Fortunately (Twitter's API is what separates them), clients like TweetDeck provide a secondary interface that's more adaptable to social changes through prioritization, customization, etc. If it wasn't for this, I would likely not be using Twitter... and any lifestream-competitor should give this a lot of consideration I think before trying to compete.

edit man i can't write today, sorry for edits.. it's monday.
The reason why some children from bilingual households stuggle in school probably has more to do with the economic and social challenges immigrants usually face; not because of bilingualism.
It kind of reminds me of how HyperCard was first touted with the Mac. If only that system was network aware, things may have turned out different for the platform...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperCard
http://www.wired.com/gadgets/mac/commentary/cultofmac/2002/0...
I prefer to use the first choice, (Google - GOOG) or (Microsoft - MSFT) as it's unique and represent my company
http://oss.oracle.com/projects/

Their sponsorship of BTRFS is a pretty big deal -- especially that it's truly open source (development model and all), unlike Sun's simulacra.
Duplicate submission:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=566190

It's really important when submitting articles from the Economist (which are usually well worth submitting) to search first for duplicates, as HN's automated duplicate detection is flummoxed by the many dissimilar URLs assigned to each Economist story. If you see the link after the Economist print edition has already been delivered, the link has probably already been submitted.
Jackie Chan: China Has A Problem With Its “Suzhi”
With apologies to William Gibson: The post-Windows era is here, it's just not evenly distributed yet.
LG KS200 Smartphone Black Touch Screen
LG KS200 is a completely flat touchscreen, a perfectly stylish and slim design and a fluent and direct interaction further enhances your mobile internet convenience. 2.8 inch large screen allows you to have an easy to use mobile internet environment.
We have brought up our children with two languages, General American English and Taiwan standard Mandarin Chinese. The second of those is not a NATIVE language for either parent, but we both speak it. We have lived overseas during the lifetime of our three older children, and at one time my two oldest sons preferred speaking Mandarin to each other to speaking English.

It's very helpful for parents attempting to maintain bilingualism to find lots of children's books in the less encountered language, and also listen to Internet radio and otherwise keep exposed to the language.
Yes, newspaper readership has been declining for some time, but ad revenues didn't really start to tank until the past few years (http://www.npr.org/blogs/globalpoolofmoney/images/2009/04/pa...)
Oracle doesn't need and probably doesn't want it to be shipped by Linus. They just need to license it under the GPL and convert it to the Linux filesystem API. Then they can ship their own Oracle Unbreakable Linux with ZFS. They don't need to send in patches to integrate it into the kernel officially. Oracle can maintain its own private source control for the ZFS kernel module, refuse any third-party contributions, and put tarballs on OTN when they actually ship releases. Officially it would be GPL'd but practically it would be useless to any vendor except them and their partners (RedHat).
Being a sales engineer is usually commissioned and you get to do lots of demonstrations and presentations, working with customers (read: more prospects than paid customers). It is a very useful experience because you get to do part of a sales job (selling, convincing people, handling disagreements, presentations) as an engineer.

However a lot depends on the size of the company. If the company is fairly large and established, you will hardly be able to influence product direction. In fact, you will most likely be in the position where you might be able to provide feedback to the product team, but you will almost never have the chance to do any hands on improvement to the product. Obviously that is because you are not part of product development/R&D, but believe me, that feeling sucks if you are a good engineer.

If you have never done it before and the opportunity presents itself, jump at it. I learnt tons when I was a sales engineer.
That after just three days nearly one in twenty of her viewers are following her on Twitter? That's a pretty astonishing number.
When I’m in the office, I sit near the break room, which makes it very easy to corner people I need to speak to about projects — they’re bound to make a coffee or eat lunch in there at some point.

Thanks, dude. Because when I'm sitting there with my lunch and a book, that's my secret signal for "COME BOTHER ME ABOUT WORK."
It actually makes it marginally more likely (Oracle's not going to be so worried about pissing off old anti-GPL Solaris engineers), but the license is the least of the problem.

ZFS would have to be completely rewritten to ever make it into Linus's tree -- it's written for kernels that don't really have a VFS layer, so it implements its own, and the linux kernel devs are pretty anal about sharing implementations. Once you fixed all the VFS issues, you'd end up with essentially a BTRFS clone that uses ZFS's on-disk format.

Incidentally, BTRFS's development is sponsored wholly by Oracle!
I find I miss the social interaction altogether. I don't have any co-founders, and so my social-interaction is merely talking with my wife when she's home from work, weekly lunch with a few friends, random get-togethers with friends, ventrilo/video games, and customer calls.

The daily socializing from being in an office is definitely missed, though I have no problem giving that up for the freedom to work, wear, and wake up when I want.
Great post - made me flashback to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - excellent book that is calling to be read again ;)
Set-Top Boxes To Die, Along With the Rest of Television
As far as I know, yes. Few reasons, XCode is not available for any other platform other than Mac. You'll still be able to write code without XCode but wont be able to test it in a real environment.