skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree with the others - please look into fixing this. A Linode VPS is great at $20 a month, many others here will vouch for Slicehost. I like the idea of domainpigeon, but on the three times I've visited and tried to use it I've had an awful experience. Soon after I start to navigate the site, I find it becomes too slow to be usable.

On a different note, I'd prefer it if Twitter names weren't mixed in with domains in the default view - perhaps it's just me, but my first priority when browsing domainpigeon is finding domains. The fact the site can be incredibly slow makes this worse, as switching to 'domains only' can be painful.
I recorded a song based on the kottke post and a similar thread over on marginalrevolution.com.

http://www.sugarfix.net/2008/06/23/song-1000-ad/
Another worldview changing article. I'd love to be a psychologist, but I'm not clever enough. Honestly, these guys are mind hackers. Finding unit tests for the brain.
It actually took me a bit to notice this was "The Onion"...

Unfortunately, it might be close to truth in many cases.
Fred Wilson on Disruption
College Is What You Get Out Of It

or, more HN-friendly

5 Things I Wish I'd Known in College

or, Redditized

How College Killed Lisp

or, for Digg

Picture of Boobs
Floating point: Fault-Tolerant Distributed Systems Made Simple
Kindle app for iPhone
Here is a screenshot.

http://trailofjames.com/archive/images/iKindle.png
When Amazon EBS harddrive fails
An EBS instance of ours failed, so we started a new one (recovered from our snapshots). We got this email the next day:

"This is a notification that your volume vol-xxxxxxxx experienced a failure due to multiple failures of the underlying hardware components and was unable to be recovered. We regret the loss and inconvenience, and recommend recovering from your most recent snapshot.

Please let me know if you have any further questions or concerns"

So when they say that harddrives will fail, I guess they're right!
The iPhone Is Accelerating Music Sales For Pandora
I'd like to ask Mr. Wiseman what he thinks about the statement "correlation doesn't imply causation".
> I'm not sure I would hire an MIT CS grad that did the new curriculum.

I want to know what line of work you are in where being an MIT grad is considered a drawback.
Paradoxes of the freelance world
how can he suggest engineering and artistry are mutually exclusive..... some of the most beautiful code is engineered.
iPhones in Iraq – the US Army's new weapon
Digital campus
Your argument could be used to prove Java superior to C++, too.
Oh, his Cardinal Programming Jokes have been here already, but thanks for reminding, this rare and awesome blog is somewhere between the worlds of technology and bed-time fiction.
Clojure on the Google App Engine
ning..?
Best free HTML editors
I have to say that if this weren't HN, your site was posted, and it timed out, I would never come back again. I mean no disrespect; I really like your idea, but going to a site these days and timing out makes the company look like it runs out of a cardboard box with a 2400 baud modem.

How many people trust their credit card information to a site with slow response times.

Finally I would say that your response to the slow site was rather disconcerting as well. You seem optimistic, like it's no big deal-- When users are having trouble using your product you need to sound concerned and proactive, not lazy and optimistic.
Would something like Ning.com be the kind of thing you're looking for?

Maybe, Posterous would be better, most people "get" email so it wouldn't be a problem for your family to post to and you can set up email subscriptions for the latest posts
Is the increase in students taking advance placement tests a "bubble" or "trend"?

The article makes a good argument in favour a bubble.

Others would argue it is a trend, ... since enrolment for bachelors degrees is up, and there is growth in graduate enrolment too.

It is only a "bubble" if it is unsustainable and going to collapse. Do we really think there will a sudden and large decrease in college enrolment? Empty lecture rooms? Idle professors? I doubt it.

It would be ok if fewer students took the AP test. If that's the only place there's a bubble, ... no big deal.
The App Store Is a Classic Example Of A Broken Business Process
Or you could use BuddyPress - http://buddypress.org/
Ah I probably do not know you then. I graduated in '04. Do you know Zico? He graduated in '05 and is a grad student at Stanford now I believe. We were in the same algorithms class.
For a scientific article two things were lacking: How do they define "successful"? How big is the variance/standard deviation?
why did you submit this to hacker news?
WoW is a great example of the concept that people enjoy new goals, but hate it when their old goals become harder.

Which is why sucessful games tend to add hard content that becomes easer over time just as new goals are added to the game.
I balked at the idea that "the main determinant of doing well in AP classes is IQ," which I'm not so sure about, especially when conflated with the idea that IQ is also a measure of student intelligence. In my experience, AP classes are focused on test preparation, which I would argue is not so strictly bound to intelligence at all.

Probably what we're seeing is an expression of the widespread American notion that every child is special and smarter than the other kids and is bound for greatness, and that success is to be achieved through excellence in traditional educational and career channels.

Aspiration is one thing, but many parents are actually trying to force their children through the educational system to "become the next president" in some sense. We simply have a deeper well of more diverse test takers in the AP exams (i.e. more variety in preparedness), thus the trending in scores.
Powerfully Get Him/Her to Change
Love Coach Rinatta Paries helps people recovering from an affair reinvent their relationship/marriage. She will help you create the vital, loving relationship you want.
I love advanced math.

But 99% of my life can be managed just fine with addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division.

It's that other 1%, though, where more advanced math kicks ass. If you've never seen it or watch it happen it's hard to describe how cool it is. With C++ you're controlling the CPU at a level just above machine language.

I love advanced math, but I rarely ever use it. Advanced math kicks ass.
I wonder if any of the 'Brain Gym' genre of games train this delay gratification? lumosity.com has games targeting attention but they aren't the games mentioned in the article.
I don't know what ning is and I can't access from work, so I imagine other family members may be blocked from their work, too.

Posterous looks like an interesting option because 99% of the people on the list have email. Also, it has to be simple for them. I clicked on "Families and Groups" to learn more and got an error. Is Posterous a yc company?
No, not at all. In fact, I'd say that if you're self-taught, you'll probably learn more than if you're only learning through school.

Doing both, however, can bring some nice benefits.
C++ is so not perfect and is definitely not for large scale development

The article you posted is a interesting concept, but it's unproven, and seems a bit silly.

Lets consider some "large scale development" in C++ that's proven, fast, stable, scalable, and here to stay. Not C, But C++

* Adobe Software
* Autodesk Software
* CERN's Data Analysis Software
* Google Chrome
* Firefox and Thunderbird
* MySQL
* Java HotSpot VM
* Majority of the large scale, succesful games out there (Doom 3, WoW, etc, etc)
* Etc

Tell me which one of those are not large scale development? I excluded things like Microsoft OS's (since their half and half mix of C and C++).

Lot of the even larger scale applications are C/Pascal because they've been around for much longer (ex *nix projects), and higher performance. C++ offers very much the same, except on top a richer set of features and keeps the coders a bit more sane. No one really uses PURE C++, it's always a mix of C C++, but it's one of the very few languages out there that match in performance to the original C.

(counter that with Java, if so tell me why only such a small number of VERY LARGE software systems is written in it, it's fast as C/C++ now right? right?). But don't counter it with C-Ruby... because, just don't.
"If You Don't Know the Answer, Know Someone Who Does" - with google around everyone "knows someone who does" :)
No, but it helps.

I would love to bash programming (pun!) at the university level like everyone else. To put this in perspective, I almost flunked out of my CS program and now I have started a programming startup that is doing quite well for itself.

But, college teaches you 3 very important things about programming that you probably otherwise wouldn't have, or be as likely to have learned by yourself:

1. A solid foundation in engineering that spans across fields that you wouldn't normally know you need until you need them. ie. simple linux kernel theory, machine code, etc.

2. Meeting strict deadlines and iterating through imperfection. School forces you to continually program and learn faster than you would by yourself. CS is a hard major, setting extremely short deadlines on huge projects has taught me to focus and stay on task. It gave me the confidence to finish fast and iterate faster.

3. The other skillz needed for (life) business, ie. finance, accounting, people skills, etc.
The redeeming quality of C++ is that there's nothing better in its specific niches.

The question to ask is:

- do you just care about results: I need a program that produces these outputs when given these inputs

- or do you care about what actually happens: I want the computer to do this, then this, then this, in exactly this way please.

...?

It's usually a good idea only to care about the former -- the essence of functional programming, higher-order functions, etc., is to be able to focus on the former as much as possible -- and so long as you only care about the former C++ doesn't have much to recommend it except in special circumstances.

On the other hand, there are times when what happens, exactly is important (eg: device drivers, other low-level code, directly interacting with hardware, etc.). In that scenario what C++ offers is a language that standardizes a lot of the functionality that most sufficiently-large raw-C programs have implemented in an ad-hoc basis.

There are other ways of doing low-level code, but at the present time C++ is the best of bunch (or at least the safest choice if you have an eye to the long term), not so much b/c it's particularly awesome but b/c the others have either faded away for business or political reasons, or b/c the others made limiting choices (C++ makes very few decisions for you, which means it's equally suited -- or unsuited -- to every task in its particularly niche).
Executive function is determined largely by the amount of self-directed play before age five. That's why electronic toys and baby videos are generally thought to be harmful.

edit: I don't know much about Brain Gym, but Pamela Paul has a whole chapter in Parenting Inc. comparing the different ECE programs, which might answer your question.
You decide where the pointer points, and how the compiler should start treating the data. That's the point of the pointer, you are given total control.
Ask HN: What's the most easy-to-learn framework?
I primarily program in PHP. Over the last three years, I have tried to learn various frameworks(rails, cakephp, symfony) only to give up after a couple days.

I feel like I am too used to my current development process yet I know that my current process is probably not the most efficient, time-wise and quality-wise. I have my own little framework I've naturally developed. But it is still a hassle to setup a new project with it. At the same time, I find difficult to adjust to the database magic that frameworks do.

So I am set on learning a framework. Is there a framework more easy to pickup than others? Or is that like asking what's the best programming language?

I know php/python pretty well. Thanks for your help.
This does sound like a ridiculous law - it's possible that all they need to change is to allow people to harvest water if it's to be re-released on the same property.
New Amazon EC2 Competitor: Cloudlayer's pricing announced
http://ramamia.com/ Was very good when I tried it, and I think it may provide most of what you are looking for.
Does anyone here, like me, really appreciate Feynman's just the fact's style of writing?

Most people describe it as eerily cold, but I love it. Articles like the this one on the other hand, while excellent, bury their valuable information under a lot of fluff. And most people like that kind of writing, but I just find it annoying.

Good article, I just wish it was more direct.
If you believe in the power of Twitter, you know it can’t last.
Ning is basically an out-of-the-box social network that anyone can set up

Yes, Posterous is a YC company. I'm not getting the families and groups error that you're getting, here's the details you're missing: http://posterous.com/images/homepage2/whositfor4.gif
I made Reid (http://www.minionapps.com/reid_tutorial.html) which is a document reader optimized for both low-vision users and speed readers.

I also had a hand in the other Minion apps: Pat (a sequence game), rePete (a Simon-style game) and Penny (an interest/future-value calculator). The early apps were little more than "hello world" experimentation with various parts of the SDK, but we're actively developing Reid and some others.
Building your own Gaming Company: an Interview with Muse Games
The lectures are online at http://academicearth.org/courses/the-structure-and-interpret... and are really interesting. I'm about halfway through them. I only wish my Scheme-based course had been as cool.
He certainly likes pejoratives. 4 uses of "dumb/dummies", 1 "stupid", 1 "losers". Makes it somewhat harder to pay attention to the data and arguments presented. Is the argument really strengthened by parenthetically adding "stupid" to clarify "ill-prepared"?
Apple Rejects Another iPhone App: Religious Photo Parodies 'Objectionable'
Not quite. There are 2360 individual tasks. Each one would take no more than 15 seconds, perhaps a bit more. Spread those across the several hundred people that are on MTurk at any given time, and you can get done in 2 minutes.

The 4 multiplier comes because as you said, each individual task is fairly unreliable for quality. He's testing each individual domain name across 4 people (not the same 4 people each time).
I've never had much trouble holding back -- it's pushing myself forward that's the hard part. Any tips on metacogitating my way out of that?
you take this too far. i agree that it's possible to learn CS without taking courses, but i don't think that CS courses are useless.

if you can learn CS without a course, i don't see how taking a course would hurt. your argument is based on CS courses teaching you the wrong thing, but if that's true, then you're equally, if not more likely, to learn the wrong thing if you just learn on your own.

if you were hiring a programmer and you had two candidates were exactly the same, except that one had a degree in CS from, say, Stanford, would you really be indifferent between the two?
I love nice people who make cool things
We need more art in here!
There were 2300 2-minute assignments, at $0.04 each.
Took a lot of self-control just to read through the damn thing!
I think the increase in AP exams comes down to basic economics. If each test only cost $86 these days and is the equivalent of 3-4 college credits (depending on the course), passing just one exam is a great savings to the student in both money and time. With tuition costs at even local community colleges ranging from $100-$200 per credit, taking a chance on an AP exam for $86 is a great deal. Students are likely just piling in as many AP classes as possible.
Wow, that seems low. Even more reasons to work on a startup.
The site is very slow and is causing errors.

If you get a page load error, just hit refresh in a few seconds.

Lesson learned...
While it may not fit the "definition" (not sure who is really authorized to define what the cloud is and isn't), it has gained acceptance by a vast majority of people that SaaS is a cloud service. The most growth "in the cloud" is going to come from there. The market for IaaS is relatively limited in size and growth (though it still has tons of room), and PaaS is even more limited.

The markets are pretty clear in size...SaaS touches everyone. IaaS touches IT departments and PaaS touches developers. It's not hard to see what SaaS gets so much attention, followed by IaaS and very little attention to PaaS.
Natural selection may not do much anymore, but sexual selection is alive and well.
thanks for the post. I was waiting for this to be setup by someone. We also have php working on the app engine http://www.webdigi.co.uk/blog/2009/run-php-on-the-google-app...
Or simply put it in a google spreadsheet...
I think you would be better off with a hosted version ..
if you know php already, codeigniter, imo.

its the lightest-weight (edit: popular) framework and least restrictive. very bare-bones by default. plus, the docs are great.

if you feel like subsequently moving to another php framework from there, the principles are very similar and the transition would be easy.
Could you define "self-directed play" for those of us who aren't 100% clear on its meaning?
It's a summary of academic research for the New Yorker. If you want statistics on the results, you'll probably need to consult the research itself, not a popular summary.
The Failure of 3G Hurts Apple and Its Competition
This game is great, but you really have to read the documentation, otherwise it's pretty much impossible. I found that the more games I lost the more I learned for the next game which made it just that much more fun. Learning new things also had the side effect of causing my games to run longer, so.. be careful :)
Great points and you're absolutely right.

It is a big deal--half the posts in this thread are about how slow the site is. Even now when I load the home page it occasionally says page not found. I'm losing visitors and missing out on potential customers.

99% of the time Dreamhost is fantastic as the site doesn't receive enough traffic to be a problem. Unfortunately, its the 1% that's the most important and we're seeing the results of that right now.
The best advice I ever heard about luck was: "Be prepared to get lucky."

If only luck can save you, do everything as if you will get lucky. Not because of positive attitude and stuff like that but purely so you can take full advantage of a lucky break no matter how improbable.
It's the secret to avoiding procrastination too - if you can't stop mulling over all the other things floating around your head, then don't - just start. The other things will be replaced fairly quickly with what you're trying to do, and there you go - you've distracted yourself from your distractions and are now being productive :)
Consider the source, though. People who place a high priority on dense, "just the facts" writing are probably going to read the research directly. This is intended to introduce the research to an audience that would find it interesting, but are unlikely to already comb through academic journals of psychological research.

I find Oliver Sacks, Douglas Hofstadter, Stephen Pinker, etc. fascinating, but when I want the direct data (rather than commentary), I still go to primary sources. That's what they're for.
So then we arrive at exactly the point that the article made: you need both.

You need the "artists", i.e. the extraordinary, unprofessional people who do something crazy that no professional would ever attempt, and come up with something that pushes the envelope in new and unexpected ways.

And you need the "engineers", the professionals who will convert that (or other things) into something steady, reliable, rock-solid.

I don't think that your rephrasing helped, personally. It made a point which was in agreement with the article look like it was a disagreement.
I had to do this once, and I can't agree more. Don't try to roll your own, and don't try to roll out community software like phpnuke, mambo or joomla. Most of the time, at least with my family, if it takes more than one depth into a menu its too complicated. Email is something everyone can do, and it looks like Posterous is doing a great job with that. Facebook does a decent job as well, though the new interface is an abomination. Ning is pretty, well, annoying. There's a bunch of menus and groups are almost indistinguishable from users themselves. It needs to be easier.

Might be a good idea for a start up, actually... ;)
Depends on what the other candidate had done. If they were identical in every way potentially I would take the CS candidate. But that is a straw man argument ;)

With a group of newly graduated candidates (and we have been hiring programmers recently so this is from experience), assuming "newly graduated" means they have a degree of some sort, the CS majors tend to be, in my experience, the weakest real world programmers. Engineers and physicists are the best.
"I know php/python pretty well."

If you know Python, Django is rather well reviewed and you can leverage your current knowledge.

I've started with Ruby on Rails in spite of almost no Ruby expernience. I've found that the learning curve for the language was low (I've used PHP/Python/Java before) and the framework was rather straightforward.
C++ is the first language I used, the one that pays my bills, and probably also still my favorite one. And while the FQA is an attack job, it's not just any attack job. It's done by a C++ expert and reading it will make you a better C++ programmer.
Self-directed play is simply kids playing on their own terms, making up games with their own rules, making up their own characters etc. You know.. being a Kid and playing with your imagination.
Ask HN: Review my startup - UsabilityTest.com
Hello guys,

Here it comes, the real test which will show whether all my work for last couple of weeks/months have been any good. I would appreciate your honest feedback. Whether you think its rubbish, useless or a good idea?

www.UsabilityTest.com - free remote usability testing platform

The target audience can actually by some of you! So thumbs up or down? :)
Your problem was that you gave after a couple of days.
Don't give up after a few days. It'll make a world of difference.

If you choose a framework in a language you're not familiar with, spend time learning the language first, then learn the framework. Yes, it'll take some time, but that's what it takes to really learn something.
The 75% answer
I'm stick to FreeBSD since 2.2.1-RELEASE, I like it a lot and prefer to use it in all my projects. I tried to migrate to Linux several times during my 15 years career, but with no avail - whenever I touch any Linux box it makes me puke because of issues with bash, incompatible libraries, innumerous distributions and package management and wrong filesystem tree, etc. The more I use FreeBSD the more I like it. Recently we moved our production servers to FreeBSD 7.1-RELEASE with ULE scheduler and gained a lot in performance (as we run busy pthreaded VoIP switches which do audio transodings) on Intel quad core CPUs. FreeBSD rocks!
If you want art and engineering in programming, think of the way architects bring art to the world's most impressive buildings and bridges. It doesn't count if the bridge falls down.

Interestingly, the architects have structural engineers and all sorts of other engineering professionals to help them make sure the building, bridge or whatever will not fall down.

Perhaps that's the problem with software development. We still want the coolest fancy looking bridges that span miles, but we haven't quite figured out how to get the artist-programmers and the engineer-programmers working together.
The Sproutbox Manifesto