skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yeah, the zlib of the entire thing would be interesting. Also interesting would be gzip(orignal + set of deltas). I would also like to see how his data did with a git packfile, and when stored in a svn repository. (This would answer an important question: Are the theoretical ideas better than what is currently used in practice?)
Storage Units
StorageMart is a family-run business operated by the Burnam family.
No thanks, I already took a look at Apache and it won.

By a long shot.
> Never being described as a "hot guy" first and a competent professional second.

Oh Really?

http://www.flickr.com/photos/46457493@N00/230535210/

> Having potential romantic partners assume from your career that you're smart and well-to-do rather than unattractive and unfeeling.

Unattractive, unfeeling, AND with neck beard is our stereotype.

> Joining in appreciation of the sex object du jour without having to be gay or bisexual.

This goes the other way too. Johnny Depp doesn't exactly place guys in a less awkward position, you know, because we're all totally comfortable with our sexuality in the male community.

> Listening to speakers refer to an inanimate software construct as "this guy" without getting distracted.

And ships are referred to as "she"'

All in all, there are some good points hidden among many "grass is always greener" style arguments. Programming is hard work, people are insecure by their nature, and yes, there are gender related issues in the community. Hopefully, the stigma against women programmers will continue to lessen as the stigma against all programmers (bunch of nerds) also subsides.
Maybe Gary Kildall would have had more success if he had a relative on the inside. Any treatment of the IBM/Microsoft deal without any mention of Mary Gates is misleading and incomplete...

http://www.virtualaltair.com/virtualaltair.com/mits0026.asp

"Fate smiled on Microsoft twice in these proceedings. First, IBM was somewhat leery of dealing with what they considered a somewhat flakey tiny software company, but it turns out that in addition to Microsoft's proven reputation as a viable language vendor, Mary Gates - Bill's mom - had served on the national board of United Way with one of the involved IBM senior executives - providing the validating social reference that they were working with "Mary's Gates' boy Bill".

http://www.nytimes.com/1994/06/11/obituaries/mary-gates-64-h...

"Mary Gates, a prominent Seattle businesswoman who helped her son, William H. Gates 3d, get the contract that led to a lucrative relationship with I.B.M. for his fledgling Microsoft Corporation..."

http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=199...

"Mrs. Gates also figured in her son's success. She helped cement Microsoft's early connection with IBM, which led to development of the IBM PC with DOS, an operating system supplied by Microsoft. When someone mentioned Microsoft to IBM President John Opel in 1980, Opel responded, "Oh, that's run by Bill Gates, Mary Gates' son." Opel served with Mrs. Gates on United Way's national board at the time."
They should, for the love of science.

While they're at it, please replace all unreadable URLs by just the word "link" and place the url as a footnote.

And, the @reply retardedness too.

Treat SMS differently if needed.

Jesus christ, I really don't understand how such a shitty service is so popular.

Well, besides hype...
"Not having to explain why the term "gentlemen" doesn't include you. " - So no "Hi gentleman", fair enough

"# Listening to speakers refer to an inanimate software construct as "this guy" without getting distracted. " - So no "Hi guys", fair enough

"Not being the special case ("hi guys and girls, I guess, too, if you want to get really technical about it!!") " - So no "Hi guys and girls", err..
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New Garbage Collectors Designed With Parallelism in Mind
I hate that get-rich get-huge mentality. It's seen here a lot, too. People want every one of their ideas to become globe-wide industries. Fact is, most ideas aren't good enough to grow that big, and that's not a bad thing. I'd rather be moderately rich with a cozy small company than ruin my idea by making it huge. In-N-Out is one of the few fast foods I'll permit myself, because they're so good.
I wonder if people like twitter because it is small and they don't need to read 200+ characters... and whats stopping them from being any different from wordpress.com with extensions
But why would the crime rate be falling?

Demographic transition (fewer young people of the age most likely to commit crimes) might have a large enough effect size to account for that.
The Man Who Could Have Been Bill Gates (2004)
I wouldn't mind having a $20/day gravy train... That basically takes care of food.

It's also $7300 a year. I can think of an awful lot of good uses for that kind of money, can't you?

If putting it hard work for a weekend or two gives me a perpetual (or at least in the medium-term) $20/day gravy train, I'm down for it.
Haven't you always been able to see all 140-characters on the web?

It kind of seems that most people don't know that the 140-character limit is put in place by SMS message length - not Twitter.

The only way they would be able to bi-pass this would be to basically add the capability to link several tweets together from a mobile environment. Too much effort, if you ask me.
Education. In each of those cases, the "buyer" doesn't understand the rules of the game, and misjudges his odds of payoff, and what that payoff might be.

In my opinion, when it comes to the app store, the root of the problem is that people are grossly overestimating the number of dollars that are up for grabs, and because people are ashamed to admit their app isn't selling well, and because Apple only publishes vague numbers, no one has a really good way of determining how much money IS out there. That's why I've been talking about my numbers as much as possible, and I hope others will as well.
Thanks for jumping in. Welcome.

I hope I haven't come across as critical at your expense. I was very intrigued by your project and I read the site more or less cover to cover. The house is very beautiful. I also agree with much of what you say (and the things you didn't say) about zoning restrictions being used in a way which is harmful. I do not think there is sound economic reasoning compelling governments to artificially inflate housing prices. I think if anything, the opposite is true.

Regarding the discussion here: Most of what I was saying doesn't necessarily apply directly to you but vaguely to that part of the "sustainability movement" that I don't have a name for. That is people who have a certain aesthetic (for lack of a better word) preference for home grown foods, locally produced goods, traditional practices and such. A lot of it seems to be reactionary to industrialisation.

Ecological arguments (with climate change being the contemporary variety) become a vehicle for making this preference part of something bigger. Often the arguments themselves are very silly. 'Food miles', are a perfect example. That is, the ecological effect is zero, harmful or negligible relative to the level of advocacy. At other times they are not silly in this way. That is, the proposed action or lifestyle may be actually ecologically beneficial. I'd like to note that I am inclined to think this project falls into this latter category. However, I am also inclined to think that it is not a scalable solution and is therefore unlikely to be part of a wide solution to the ecological problems it averts. Regardless, the logic is still backwards.

The ecological arguments are not the starting point with houses such as these the logical solution. I think that if mass produced housing or increased scale agriculture turned out to be solutions to the same ecological problems, they would not have the same advocates. The house (or a hobby farm or local produce), is a preconceived end searching for a grand Raison d'Etre. This sort of flawed logic opens doors for the type of illogic you can see in food miles. More harmfully, it opens the doors to bad government decisions or outright exploitation such as the (now dead, I hope) US plan for ethonol production.

The other reason this rubs me the wrong way is precisely because it is beautiful. Just like garden markets & hobby farms, I like this house. I would be very proud of it if it were mine. I am frustrated that those that share my preference feel they need more of a justification then this.

In any case, the overwhelming response here is positive. Even the criticism is not really a criticism of you or the project, but of a general phenomenon.

I may be near Wales in about a year. If I am, I think I'll be tempted to drive by for a peak.
Perhaps the reason whales are the largest mammals is that, for anything larger, their tumor-tumor get tumors, killing the tumor-tumor and allowing the tumor to kill the whale.
That the HTTP-powered Web browser is a universally popular piece of software has no relevance on its effectiveness. Chatting through a Web browser is as formally arbitrary as chatting through any other sort of client.
Contingent on the story at the link being effectively true, it sounds like your first paragraph is just a bad lead in to airing a pet peeve of yours, because the logic does not follow. While that explains why IBM contacted Bill first for no apparent reason, the story says that Bill did the right thing and redirected them to Kildall. Kildall had a fair shot at the deal, but passed it up.

Again, contingent on the story being effectively true, there is no way Kildall was going to get that deal, family relationship on Bill's part or no family relationship. He saw it more as a distraction than an opportunity.

(It's a pity he became bitter because it sounds like he already had "fuck you" money; I certainly don't have a yacht or personal airplane or any of the several other things he had. If you ask me the truly sad part of the tale is that Kildall was owned by his possessions.)
" ... solitude is the school of genius"?

Also, television and silence are of different realms. To misappropriate GK "Silence--don't know how that works on radio". I no longer even have the radio on while commuting.

[Edit]
I recommend the remarkable documentary film "Into Great Silence" by Philip Gröning as a supporting argument.
An interesting contrast to In-N-Out is Five Guys (http://www.fiveguys.com), originally a DC-area regional chain. They're only 20-something years old, but they're opening new locations on seemingly a near-weekly basis.

It's arguable how much of a bond they've built with their customers, considering their rapid expansion, but when I ate at a recently opened one near Seattle, it was packed.

The common link, in my opinion, is that both chains go all out for quality (Five Guys, for instance, posts the city of origin of the potatoes used for their fries on a daily basis). And the food truly is on a different level versus your average fast food place. In the end, success for both seems to come down to the old maxim: make [burgers] people want.
the more popular categories are even more competitive and thus harder to rank on. i had an app that just fell off the top 100 entertainment category and i was still getting 60+ downloads a day. it'll be interested to see how many sales i get now that its not listed.
Two diferent products for two diferent needs
Copy pasted from wikipedia:
* Centralized Backup - Allows backup of up to 10 PCs,[7] using Single Instance Store technology to avoid multiple copies of the same file, even if that file exists on multiple PCs.[8]
* Health Monitoring - Can centrally track the health of all PCs on the network, including antivirus and firewall status.[8]
* File Sharing - Offers network shares for computers to store the files remotely, acting as a network-attached storage device. Separate categories are provided for common file types like Documents, Music, Pictures and Videos.[8] The files are indexed for fast searching.[9]
* Printer Sharing - Allows a centralized print server to handle print jobs for all users.[8]
* Shadow Copy - Takes advantage of Volume Shadow Copy Services to take point in time snapshots that allow older versions of files to be recovered.[10] However, after introduction Microsoft has recommended not enabling shadow copies on HomeServer for unspecified reasons, and had not fixed the problem by September 2008.[11] A web search in May 2009 did not locate a fix.
* Headless Operation - No monitor or keyboard is required to manage the device.[8] Remote administration is performed by using the Windows Home Server Console client software provided in the bundle. Also supports Remote Desktop[12] connections to the server while connected to the same LAN.[13]
* Remote Access Gateway - Allows remote access to any connected PC on the network over the Internet.[13]
* Media Streaming - Can stream media to an Xbox 360 or other devices supporting Windows Media Connect.[8]
* Selective Data redundancy - Guards against a single drive failure by duplicating selected data across multiple drives.[8]
* Expandable Storage - Provides a unified single and easily expandable storage space, removing the need for drive letters.[8]
* Extensibility through Add-Ins - Add-Ins allow third-party developers to extend the features and functionality of the server. Add-Ins can be developed using the Windows Home Server SDK, to provide additional services to the client computers or work with the data already on the server. Add-Ins can also be ASP.NET applications, hosted in IIS 6 running on WHS.[9]
* Server Backup - Backs up files which are stored within shared folders on the server to an external hard drive.
An old article, but full of lessons.

What seems to be less often known about Kildall is that his thesis was about writing optimizing compilers, and he is was the author of PL/M, a language loosely based on XPL, a language designed as a tutorial for compiler construction.
The Age of Optimization
For a moment there I thought this was reddit-like Wolfram bashing.
Maybe this is why my summer hourly is less than $20, assuming I only work 40 hours per week.
Now there is some argument bait--who is the better programmer, Bill Gates or Gary Kildall.
Article has been updated - it was a bug...
What about "ash"? I'd expect that to be in both networks: in "black" as a synonym for "coal" or "cinder", and in "white" as a form of "ashen", "pale", etc.

More widely, why must there be K non-overlapping networks that cover the entire language? Naively, I'd expect an unbounded number of non-overlapping small networks. But the two ideas of "Basic English" and of specialized vocabularies lead me to posit that every "significant" network (a network with a N number of members, where N > 5,000) overlaps with at least 1 other "significant" network. As a result, I would suspect that it would be difficult or impossible to find K non-overlapping sets that partition the entire language (where K is less than... oh, let's say 100).
Bill Gates and early Microsoft were revered for their ability to commercialize software - not their ability to write the best code.
Life’s a Patch
I was right in the middle of meeting one of the members of the team I manage to discuss her performance review when we got interrupted by instant messages quickly followed by a phone call. The app servers running an application that serves over half a million people a day were all dropping like flies ...
So they are selling hope to the ignorant... It seems kind of wrong to do that. Well, it doesn't feel good to think about anyway, maybe it isn't wrong.

I suppose it is like those infomercials at night selling real estate mogul programs...
> Unattractive, unfeeling, AND with neck beard is our stereotype.

Yeah, I didn't get that either. I have never had anyone identify me as smart and well-to-do from my career choice. People just seem to assume I'm nerdy, socially awkward, and would rather have sex with a robot (actually heard that one before, for some reason).

Some of us are (somewhat) normal dammit :(
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Repurpose : Video documentary about hardware hackers at Foulab in Montréal
Which is more important - good programming or good business skills?
Gary was probably a better programmer. Bill is undoubtedly better from a business standpoint.
Storage
Local Self Storage Units provider
Ad Revenue on the Web? No Sure Bet
Finaly, they need to lower the minimum wage and cut government services, so more people are desperate enough to commit crimes.

Or better yet institute an extremely high minimum wage, so that if you're an unskilled laborer you remain unemployed because walmart greeters' labor isn't worth $20 an hour just because the government said it is.

After all, it's not like working 0 hours a week at $20 an hour would make someone as desperate as working 40 hours a week at $5 an hour...
> The author hit the nail on the head pointing out the importance of being on the top 100 lists. Really, if you aren't on there you are invisible to buyers.

This makes me wonder if there are a lot of developers who would try to pay for XX of their network of friends to buy the software just to try to get it on the charts.
Can't dismiss it, but this line nudges me in one direction:

"The term “Setup” is the preferred customer-facing term for First Use."
"could'a should'a would'a"
Your comment inspired me to brush up on the California Gold Rush, and this quote from Wikipedia made me chuckle:

"Sutter was dismayed by this, and wanted to keep the news quiet because he feared what would happen to his plans for an agricultural empire if there were a mass search for gold. However, rumors soon started to spread and were confirmed in March 1848 by San Francisco newspaper publisher and merchant Samuel Brannan. The most famous quote of the California Gold Rush was by Brannan; after he had hurriedly set up a store to sell gold prospecting supplies, Brannan strode through the streets of San Francisco, holding aloft a vial of gold, shouting "Gold! Gold! Gold from the American River!" With the news of gold, many families trying their luck at Californian farming decided to go for the gold, becoming some of California’s first miners."
I think a lot of us have seen successes like Bill Gates, pg, Larry & Sergey, Zuckerberg etc. We know we're smart and capable and that big success is a genuine possibility.

But we can also benefit from understanding the difference between Profit, Growth, and Profile - In-and-Out has taken profitability at the expense of Growth and Profile (I've never heard of them); McDonalds has Profile and Growth, but not so much profit.

The three aren't mutually exclusive, and we can have it all. I don't want it all myself; I look at examples like patio11 and go - 'That's pretty cool'. Niche success over Zuckerberg success works for me.
How are you defining importance?
You mean telomerases? Perhaps, but that also would probably increase cancer rates, as our own DNA copying enzymes would not have been increased in accuracy.
I think there's a reasonable argument for using the Kelly criteria, but leaving that question aside, the author misses a most important factor: the marginal utility of the money. If I am a millionaire, the upside of extra money is low, and the downside of losing all my money is high. If I am choosing between a cup of coffee and a lottery ticket, the upside (even divided by my chance of winning) is high and the downside low.
Totally agree. Gaining initial traction is magnitudes harder as a first time entrepreneur. Would Twitter be at its current level if Evan Williams didn't have the credibility that came from founding Blogger?
> Listening to speakers refer to an inanimate software construct as "this guy" without getting distracted.

I wasn't sure why this particular item was included, but I suppose I too am momentarily distracted when I hear a woman personify an inanimate object as 'she'. I mean, I understand it's a perfectly reasonable thing to do, but there's just that split second where the world seems to turn inside-out and I have to recollect my thoughts.

I wouldn't call it a Male Privilege, though.
It wouldn't be too bad if it was likely to last for a year or more but without upgrades the sales are likely to fall. By the sounds of it once you are out of the top 100 they fall quite a lot. Remember also that the guy has nearly 20 apps in the store and this is likely to be his best seller so he's probably put in more than a weekend or 2.
Define 'defining'.

Are you kidding us with the semantic gymnastics? What do you think 'important' in this case means?
I suppose there are a lot of reasons (see the other reply) but my thinking when posting was this:

In-N-Out is a burger joint with a niche meaning they have a few million customers. Those customers come by maybe once or twice a week to get a meal. Apply that same number of customers to the software industry and you'll have trouble surviving because they're either only going to pay you once or in the case of websites pay you little to nothing. So my conclusion was that an In-N-Out level success would not be what most software developers would be interested in.

So that was it. The logic isn't exactly air tight (if you want to be a one man show you could do perfectly well with a few million visitors) but it was what I meant when I posted
How very sneaky. But who's going to fall for that?
Hi Denny,

I appreciate the advice. Honestly, I believe myself to be an employee. I'll be making a pretty decent salary and getting a few percent of equity upfront. The founder has worked very hard on the produce for about 15 months or so. I probably didn't give enough information earlier but I'm not sure exactly what I can or can't say legally.

I also don't think I really understood how ESPPs worked before. We'd revalue the company and I'd be able to purchase at a reduced rate. I don't think that's a bad deal, especially for a product and monetization model I really believe in.
Why does one have to be above the other at all? Zuckerberg made something really cool. I'm of the stance that we should excuse the guy for his failings since he still ended up with a neat product. It's hardly his fault that Facebook became so popular.

Also: I don't think PG is quite on the same level of Gates, Zuck, and the Google guys. All three made a product that became an enormous success on their own. PG made an online store that another company bought. I'm not trying to insult him; in fact, that's a better person to run a company like YCombinator in the first place. PG is proof that you can succeed several times in your life without becoming a superstar.
Title is misleading but story is very interesting.

Gary Kildall sold his company to Novel for $120 million so he did fine financially.

Even if Kildall had made the deal with IBM, it is questionable what would have happened. After all, he eventually did make a deal with IBM and it didn't matter.

The end of the story is a stretch. It is hard for me to believe that all the bad things happened to him because of the IBM deal.
It's not unheard of to make an ad purchase (banner ads or admob) in order to "bump" yourself onto the charts, in hopes that you'll make your money back once you're on the chart.

It turns out that, just like any other business, it takes marketing and capital to succeed, not just ideas and good engineering.
Might as well create the "male singer checklist", where we mention all the perks rock stars have that programmers never will.