skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> One side has power but lacks the vision and talent to use it; the other has the capability but not the means.

Classic sour grapes. Poor guy. In his universe the power fairies just wander around granting power to dolts. Meanwhile untapped capability just sits around wasted.

Newsflash. Folks with actual useful capability don't stay "propertyless" for long - they produce, which gets them property, which lets them do more, getting them more property, and so on. Yes, there's some luck, but the luckiest people are those who have the moxie to take advantage of the luck that comes their way and they make more.

Yes, some folks are born into money. If they're not capable, they lose it.
Yikes, you're making a fundamental mistake. A mistake that can destroy your business. What is a "request"? This is your mistake - it's not at all clear what your pricing involved.

You see, when I write, I spell check the document about 20-30 times. And your thing only allows 80 requests in a month. Is that a joke?

Explain what a request is, otherwise I look at the pricing page and shut it down, because it's totally overpriced. Now, if you you would say each article I write gets spellchecked for $0.063, no matter how many times I spellcheck it, then I would be fine with that. But everytime I spell check I pay that amount? Ridiculous!

And I think it's also a bit unclever how you did the pricing.

You should go like this: "Get your article professionally spellchecked for 7cents. That's all you pay". People don't pay per month, they just pay per article. However, the minimum amount they can put on their account is $5. You can't actually put 7 cents. And there should be no monthly recurring bill.
Any reason for "The Girl" in the title?
Microsoft has done exactly this several times. They won through superior business models, which made nearly as good better for their purposes. (Unless, of course, you include the business model as part of being better than the competition, in which case your statement is trivially true.)

I don't know if Microsoft has ideas for beating Google in the business model arena, but I wouldn't put it past them.
It sounds like you'd like to hire a designer, but the size of the project doesn't warrant paying for one. In this case, I'd recommend 99designs.com. Have a simple custom design created for a very reasonable price. Best of both worlds!
I found a lot wrong with this article. But the two that bothered me the most were these.

"Reduced scalability and increased maintenance"

The author claims code "can never be future proofed" because of different browsers. I don't see why that's so.
I personally use a renderhtmlforbrowser() function that uses a switch statement. So all I have to do when a new browser comes out is add another string to the switch statement and another function for the renderhtmlforbrowser function to call.

"It's Rarely Required"

The author says "Web standards have made browser sniffing far less necessary on the server" but I disagree with that. Standards have made things easier in that you can create HTML that won't be completely mangled by one browser while working fine in the other. But anyone whose tried knows that a site's appearance can be completely different in two separate browsers even though they are both standards compliant (even with CSS). So anyone who cares how their site looks still needs to pay attention to all browsers
Right, actual, physical electrons move about as fast as sap in a conductor. I'm sure the OP meant the speed of electric charge, while still not moving at c, it is a decent fraction of it.

Two second explanation that I'm sure everyone knows: When you imagine a conductor to be a pipe full of electrons that are all annoyed at other electrons, once you pop another one in from one side, that annoyance (charge) percolates up to the other end and pushes an electron out from the other side. This is what people claim is actually moving at close to c, not the physical electrons. Electrons are matter and thus can't come close to c. This is why AC is a lot more efficient at transmitting electricity: with alternating current, you push and pull a couple of electrons from each side really fast, and the 'meat' of the charge isn't moving more than an infinitely small distance. When you have a current flow that never changes polarity, you're always pushing charge in the same direction.
IBM Jazz-ing up software project management
No worries, your joke gave me a chuckle too.

Looks like my wp-super-cache plugin is not working properly so every time the page is requested it regenerates the cache. No idea why but its pretty much killing the server.
He did link to the really awesome blog entry from Accordion Guy... that has some marginal value... I guess.

Would've rather just had Accordion Guy's entry be on here.
A Simple Pictoral Explanation of RAID
It's not a question of how well our civilization can withstand significant changes just what level of disruption we are willing to withstand without doing something.

Taken to the extream to make a point, a 100 foot increase in sea level over 20 years would distroy an a silly amount of weath. However, a single 1 inch increase in sea level over 20 years would be hard to notice. It's not a question of 1 inch as ~0.1% of that increase = 0.1% of the dammage, rather it's a question of how much it costs to deal with the problem vs. starting over in a new area.

PS: Most of the time an inch is meaningless, but a dam that can take 10 feel might not take 10.08 feet. So, it's better to think of it as an increase in the number of local problems vs. a meaningless threat or some large scale doom. Granted, as you scale the increase more areas have larger problems.
Yeah, but he got it mostly right. That's a rare achievement in CodingHorror-land....
I didn't find this particularly interesting, personally.

What it has to do with Internet at all?
I thought this was the most telling line of the article: "Ultimately the first factor of performance is the maturity of the implementation."

That supports a common conviction held by fans of functional programming: if all of the years of arduous optimization that have been poured into GCC had instead been poured into (say) GHC, then Haskell would be even faster today than C is.

That is, to many people functional programming languages seem to have more potential for performance than lower-level procedural languages, since they give the compiler so much more to work with, and in the long run a compiler can optimize much better than a programmer. But so much more work has been put into the C-style compilers that it's hard to make a fair comparison. It's still hard, but this experiment seems to give some solace to the FP camp.
> [Quoting the article.] It’s because programs are difficult to comprehend to the extent that they are impure.

That's wrong.

> And the reason for that is that they are not sufficiently abstract.

Abstraction has nothing to do with functional purity.

> A writer of impure code is not operating on the level of abstraction of programming.

Nonsense.

> He’s operating at the level of abstraction of the machine.

The real world has mutable state and all abstractions leak.

I write functional when I can and single-assignment (mechanically translateable into pure functional, but is often cleaner in procedural languages) almost all of the rest of the time, so I live on the functional Kool-Aid(TM).

The above is the sort of crap that makes it harder to get people to write functional.
So does Google. Or was that your point?
Most web browsers already have spell checking.
Definitely! I'd easily need 500 checks a month, and to me that isn't worth $20/mo.
That writing is "Simple & Amazing"
Optical computing would be pretty cool.
On re-read, I was being snarky. I apologize.
98% chance of failure?

My understanding is that the 5-year failure rate of new businesses is about 40-50%. Given that an average 2x-year-old has a much lower chance of being successful enough in his first couple of jobs to (a) stay there for 5 years and (b) have it still be worth coming to work every day, this isn't a bad failure rate.
Run_later woes
You are correct in everything you say but we have to be careful of each and every layer we build on top of the "fundamental particles" of programming to minimise the risk of accidental complexity.

I firmly believe that all techniques that help us reduce errors are valid but that they should be selectively applied according to the context of any given task. I know that such an approach does little to help the newcomer to our craft but silver bullets will always lead newcomers in the wrong direction - at the end of the day what we write is executed by a silicon chip and the more aware we are of it's capabilities and limitations the better.
Thanks. I'll clarify this on the site. I arrived at the numbers using data I collected about the behavior of my beta users over the past 90 days. One of my users is a blog with eight writers on staff and they do nine requests/day. If the pricing is wrong, it'll change.
How do they compare to those who have?
California Motorcycle Accidents Attorneys
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The fight over open source 'leeches'
The funny thing is, most of this stuff isn't new. The integration is just better.

Cashback launched about a year ago, and has been integrated into the product search for months.

Infinite scroll on images is nice too, but that's been there as long as I can remember.

Farecast (the airfare search engine) was acquired by Microsoft a while back, and was part of Live.
i tried "I be smart" and "Thus sucks" and nothing was underlined. Did i not read the directions properly?
Wufoo is similar, but there are some differences in functionality between the two. I compared them in my review.
What I find really interesting is the relationship between conducting 'electricity" and conducting heat. Why is the property of electrical conductivity closely correlated with the property of heat conductivity?

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0521456606?ie=UTF8&tag=...
Time Warner sets stage for tiers, again.
I have a simple question, in the spirit of "What evidence would it take to prove your beliefs wrong?": How many years of dropping temperatures does it take before global warming is no longer an acceptable hypothesis?
>>Marriage, or what Mr. Wrangham calls "a primitive protection racket," was a solution.

I am happily married, and it's a little bit more than a protection racket for me, but this made me laugh :)
This paragraph is from a NY Times article. Can you find the error in it?

Still Mr. Franken said the whole experience had been disconcerting. “It’s a weird thing: people are always asking me and Franni, ‘Are you okay?’ ” he said, referring to his wife. “As sort of life crises go, this is low on the totem poll. But it is weird, it’s a strange thing.”

Neither can the spell checker in your browser. Why? Because most spell checkers do not look at context. After the Deadline does.

Visit http://www.polishmywriting.com/nyt.html to see the answer.

Besides misused word detection (and contextual spell checking), After the Deadline checks grammar and style as well.
Kind of old, but a good read again.
awesome example.
Educational but I think some of these proscriptions are a little stodgy. For example, I know what "alibi" really means but the usage of the word has expanded to conveniently include more explanations than only proven ones, because it is typically used in situations of alleged guilt over some crime.
For a litmus test, to help isolate the problem, you might prefer to write the test in Selenium, and do a traffic analysis to compare the pattern of flow with Curl.
Dragon’s Den is bad PR for business, say experts
AWS usage by HotPads, including costs
Krugman on the current economic mess: It's Reagan's Fault
I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.

james.andrix@gmail.com
It annoyed me that the best suggestion was not at the top of the right-click menu. Most people don't like having to move their mouse more than needed. See picture for more clarification: http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/10047/atd.PNG

The style subsection demo retains a couple of errors after following the suggestions of ATD (though I guess if the person checking it is paying attention, they would notice and fix up the sentence).

The grammar subsection demo does not catch the missing hyphen in one-hit wonder (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-hit_wonder).

I'm loving it Raffi. I use it to check my HN posts.
There is a subtle Futurama joke about P=NP in one of their episodes (the size of the books on the shelf):

http://www.mathsci.appstate.edu/~sjg/futurama/futuramatalk10...
The Future of Manufacturing, GM, and American Workers (Part III)
Easy Map-Reduce With Hadoop Streaming
I mostly agree with you, except it's dangerous to compare weather models to climate models.

I think this statement by the author is a bit disingenuous: "If correlation doesn't prove causation, what does? Taken to its logical conclusion, you could observe the same result in a hundred experiments and dismiss it as merely a strong correlation."

The problem here is that there are no actual experiments done on the climate - it's all models, the outputs of which are essentially unverifiable. In other words, nobody is taking a test planet Earth and a control planet Earth and filling the test version's atmosphere up with CO2 and seeing what the difference is, much less repeating this and getting the same results.

That is why, despite the fact that these models are based on scientific theory, the models themselves are not, strictly speaking, "science". For the record, I believe global climate change is probably happening, and is probably caused by human activity.
Its interesting that the Bing cache is from the 25th May, and the Google cache was this morning. Eg: Google crawls this site way more.
Part I: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=632335

Part II: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=635381
I love the show, but it's clear to anyone who's spent an hour in a startup that you're seeing a tiny fraction of the business. It may paint a semi-accurate portrayal of a VC meeting, but that's where it ends. Of course, they make you think about your business -- who your market is, how much you're making, what would you do with the money, etc. These are useful things to keep in the back of your mind, as it's easy to lose sight of them when you're in the trenches.
Duplicate of http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=635624, which has comments.
Why not just rsync -auvz?

Avoiding a small bit of initial frustration in setting up Capistrano, SSH keys etc, in order to have what feels like an easier deploy is a wonderful case of penny wise and pound foolish.

Take the time, do it right, get the benefits of a real deployment. It's worth it.
I'd also like to make this available to my users.

2,500 posts per day, some edited a few times.

That's averaging 76,041 unique posts being spell checked each month...

What realistic price should this be?

The demo works very well btw, I am impressed. It's the pricing you need to think about.

You might want to consider pricing that reflects the type of site... how would you charge HN for the service? There are enough users here who would benefit from it. Does it really costs you X to spell check? Could you lower the costs to achieve a faster growth?
Design is a subject to be learned like any other - there's whole books and schools dedicated to it. Go to the library, look through some art and design books, if you see a style you like then write it down and emulate it (don't copy it outright, just use it as a framework or guidance). If you're into what a lot of people here are calling "minimal", look at modernism and the swiss-style. Browse published graphic design poster histories and start to pay attention to how the compositions are put together and what makes styles similar and different, and typography. In no time you'll have a greater appreachiation of the craft and your own designs will look a lot better. It's a lot like programming actually.
AtD biases heavily against false positives. If it's too noisy, using it is more work than it's worth. I only flag a missing hyphen if P(WordB|WordA) > P(WordA-WordB).
That is an example. You can edit the regular expressions.
Bootstrapping for fun and profit (BarcampNYC4)
Not extremely helpful in comparison to the google sublinks:

* New
* Innocuous News
* Submit
* News News
* Leaders
* Jobs
* Guidelines
* Apply
http://blueprintcss.org/ is much like 960.gs - a clear concise framework designed to give you nice typography with easy layout - look into it. It will save you serious time.

Get someone else to do graphics if that's not your thing.

Make sure any content (phrasing, wording, etc.) is TARGETED towards your users. As a developer, you will think you have the right content, but likely you won't.
New & Improved Google Suggest Box
We've been living with Moore's law so long that young people seem to think it's similar to an actual law like gravity.

Fact is, computing has benefitted from some core technologies (ex. lithography) that have lended themselves to order-of-magnitude increases in things like number of transistors per square cm. It's been a happy coincidence, but, inevitably, that ship has about finished its trip and is heading back to the dock.

Here's what will happen (and is happening) when hardware hits that limit: pretty much nothing. People will still use computers for email, browsing the web, watching videos, numerically solving partial differental equations, etc. There will be no clamour to make faster computers because computers are pretty much fast enough for what we want them to do. If they're not fast enough, then tasks can be spread out and handled in a distributed manner.

Oh, also, computer hardware companies will find that they can't get you to upgrade every few years to get the latest and greatest. This is great news, btw, for, say, schools; since they'll be able to invest in computers and expect to keep them long enough to be worth the investment.
Froogle (now Google Shopping) has been a tremendous disappointment for so long. You're right, this Bing shopping is considerably better. I was trying to find Red Wings jerseys last night on Google and it was brutal.
I freaking hate prescriptive linguistics. The people who love to prescribe are so often prescribing incorrectly. I couldn't get past the first one in this article:

> Acronym: this is a word, like radar or NATO, not a set of initials, like the BBC or the IMF.

Wikipedia:

> In 1943, Bell Laboratories coined the term acronym as the name for a word (such as SONAR) created from the first letters of each word in a series of words (such as SOund Navigation And Ranging). The terms initialism and alphabetism are neither widely used nor widely known. The term acronym is widely used to describe any abbreviation formed from initial letters.

First off, the word was created by a corporation; secondly, the term is widely used and understood to apply to words like "BBC" ("Three Letter Acronym"); thirdly, the "correct" alternative is not widely used or understood. So if you use the correct terms your communication would actually be less clear, which is, as I understand, the point of studying grammar/linguistics in the first place.

For more on this exciting subject, see David Foster Wallace's excellent "Democracy, English, and the Wars over Usage":

http://instruct.westvalley.edu/lafave/DFW_present_tense.html
Feynman wrote an interesting piece about schools that teach strictly to the test: http://www.feep.org/articles/feynman.html

It seems to me that every student that graduates from this school is going to make the US a worse place to live. How are you going to fix anything that's broken if your colleagues have been trained from early childhood to strict obedience and unquestioning acceptance of authority?
From slide 6, "Why should I not do it?"

You should not do it if... you can't focus if everything else is falling apart

I have to say, this has probably been one of the most essential skills for me. There is an incredible amount of crazy shit going on in any real start-up, stuff that threatens the very existence of the start-up, on a pretty regular basis. "The world could end tomorrow" seems almost like the standard situation for most of the early life of the start-up. If you can't get stuff done in those conditions, you're pretty much toast right from the start.

I wonder what other skill correlates with this... I've always had an (un)healthy ability to ignore people around me and focus on whatever it is I'm doing (whether it's working, reading, playing computer games, etc). That ability also applies to meta-distractions... I can still throw myself into my work even when I don't know if that work will still have any meaning the next day, or when something really disruptive has just happened in my personal life, or when I'm sitting under a large cloud of uncertainty about my future. Sometimes that might give the impression that I don't care about what's happening around me, but I do - it's just that I can put it aside and focus on the task at hand...

From the same slide:

You should not do it if... you have a low appetite for risk

I would disagree with that, though. Appetite is the wrong word. I don't like risk, I don't enjoy it, and I avoid it whenever possible. However, what I think does help is to have a high tolerance for risk. This is somewhat related to the point above, of course. Tolerance and appetite are different, though.
Not sure about abyssknight, but they block random random things here at work (corporate america!). They've got weird rules and/or regexes for this stuff. Some of it makes no sense whatsoever
As long as IT services business, the most cost-effective solution will always be considered best.
What about code hosted on bitbucket / hg ?
The Stack Overflow Trilogy
This article was absolutely terrible. Several points sound more like the author is playing buzzword bingo, and the rest are unsupported by the explanation. Take #1, for example. How does the number of business plans that received funding relate to a 98% chance of losing your capital investment?
nice app - i also use timer-applet for nice Gnome integration on the taskbar
I really like the bird's eye view that they offer with their maps. It is much more detailed and usable than the normal satellite view. You can rotate the view 90 degrees to get 4 different angles of the location and it zooms in close.
Apple And RIM Take Majority Of Cell Phone Industry Profits
And on top of that, how is NATO not a set of initials? Doesn't it stand for North Atlantic Treaty Organization?
what about the crappy user experience of having a blog and no place for people to comment?
Yeah ... I don't know how I feel about it either. I like to imagine that I have a pretty good grasp of English - but I'm pretty sure I violate about half those rules on a regular basis.

In any case, it's informative to see the style guide of one of the best periodicals in existence. Also, there are some really hilarious jokes hidden in there if you're into easter eggs ;-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/11_nanometer

It goes to 11.

My personal belief is that non-semiconductor technologies will come around, at least for specialized tasks. I imagine I'll be using similar technologies we have now for some time longer when it comes to day-to-day operations.