skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My point was more that just because some code example is written in PHP you can't automatically infer that the code is inferior.

Perhaps I'm terribly arrogant but I do make that inference. Simply because the number of good coders who would pick PHP when given a choice is very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very small. And shrinking.
He also implies nobody would write a foreword if it wasn't for the prestige. I would be honored to write a foreword for people I admire, I'd do it even if my name wasn't on the book.
What type of opportunities?
I've been waiting for the right time to buy a new development laptop, and I think that the superfecta in Q4 of this year (Mobile Core i7, nVidia Mobile 200-series, Windows 7, and these new X-25M drives) should make for a excellent and fast machine. The X-25M has great throughput for small, random reads/writes which makes it ideal for running VMs for testing.
>> Unfortunately, the jQuery.noConflict(true) method breaks >> almost all plugins.

NOT TRUE, if you know how to write plugins. Using some basic knowledge of Javascript (closures, scope, etc) this is very easy to remedy. The problem is that many are too lazy to avoid using the "$" alias, so plugins are often written to depend on it. If you take your "lazy" plugin and wrap in a closure, you can be sure that it will work even when jQuery.noConflict is called... yes, i can hear it now "but when true is passed to noConflict, even the global JQuery variable gets reassigned..." So? Read the source. It gets reassigned very predictably to _jQuery. So, write your plugins like this if you need to support cases where jQuery.noConflict(true) is called:

(function($) {

$.fn.lazyPlugin = function(opt) {
// ...
}

})(jQuery || _jQuery);
Yes, the server and client will be opensourced according to Google (which has a good history opensourcing their stuff).

And yep, some people can't wait so here is a server implementation (Python/Django):

http://code.google.com/p/pygowave-server/
Let your customers talk back
Comet Killed Ice-Age Beasts
Yeah, really, shouldn't that be expected? A phone costs much less than a computer and people are not impeded from side-switching by loads of apps that run on a specific OS.
Awesome. Maybe someone will make a good desktop client for Wave, which if you ask me, is needed for it to replace email.
Not saying that I'd rather live in China, just thought that particular example was a bit off.
the rules says you can "append up to 5 characters" but you consider entries with less than 5 optional characters invalid.
JobSyndicate (YC 08) Publisher API, Job boards and more
I wonder if a throat mic would be useful for this...sounds like subvocalization wouldn't be affected. Anyone know more than me about this?
No, there are several listed with less than 5 extra characters. It's just that most people are using all 5.
How about just enforcing reckless driving laws? It's not as if there are cops watching people drive like idiots while on their phones and going, "Dang, I wish there was some specific law covering why these people are driving recklessly so I could give them a nice, fat ticket towards my quota."
I'm not using any, and it didn't pick my entry up.
In the tech world there's another force: everyone wants to do something glamorous and cool, and get rich doing it. But if anything, the glamorous and cool things are the hardest to strike gold in, if only for the fact that everyone else is also there digging for gold.

I know several people who have gotten extremely wealthy by going into their own software businesses, but none of them are doing "cool" things like video games or society-transforming websites. They are all doing much more mundane things like logistics and IT automation. But in these "boring" fields you're not competing with every 15 year-old high school kid in the universe.
I'd love to see some market research about first-time buyers who bought the iPhone and the rates at which they adopt the Mac platform when they upgrade an existing PC Vs. the rates for PC owners who have no Apple products.

Or put another way - I'm wondering if the long term impact of this will be to raise Apple's market share on the desktop as well. That is, after all, one of the biggest advantages to managing the user experience as well as Apple does: strong brand cohesion and increased brand loyalty.
These guys have tried:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beal_Aerospace

Andrew Beal is pretty famous, but he's better at banking than aerospace.

There are lots of private companies building components for space exploration, but their margins are capped because their customer is the government. Atleast this is the gist I get from talking to my dad who is a program manager at Aerojet, which makes boosters for Delta and previously Titan.
Your team is quite talented, and that is to be commended.

It's just sad that we're in such a deeply narcissistic society where self-glamorization is now so normal that nobody even notices it.

I learned nothing from your posting about much of anything except how cool and groovy you think you are. Granted, you are talented -- but that's not the point you should emphasize. In the end, it's not about you. But, is that maybe what you _do_ want it to be about?

All this said, I see you as victims of the society and times. You grew up in a world that values Fame and Attention more than anything else. It's important to note that despite that, you studied hard, learned much, and have applied it well. The last sentence and the first are what counts: Great job on a clearly very useful technology.
Would be interesting to see a comparison of profit over materials and manufacturing for both, taking into account how many of each they've sold.
Submitted three months ago to much discussion:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=555971

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=555549
What's the link to your tweet? The Twitter Search API is dropping some tweets. Does your entry display in the search results?
it is amazing how many non sequiturs you have managed to cram into this tiny comment.
Raindrop Forms Parachute, Explodes Into Motley Smaller Drops
Rats!

Yes, I did indeed mean 1/(x-1). Thanks for the correction.
Not these phones. Recall that you're also signing up for a two-year contract with AT&T. So about $2000 over two years.
Doom to Dunia: A Visual History of 3D Game Engines
BuilderBot sim copy tool may save Second Life
Old School Wooden Ruler With Digital Display
Just popped up! Guess it just took awhile.
This works in Safari too, so I'm assuming it's a WebKit feature.
CEOs of competing companies rarely praise the products of their adversaries
Too bad they still don't support full drive encryption. We can only buy laptop drives with that feature due to concerns over theft or loss.
I agree. Wave is complex enough that people are going to want to use their OS's native interface with it, for both usability and speed reasons.
Solar Eclipse Live Stream Webcast Online July 22 2009
And I’m wondering whether that matters.

It will be very interesting to see which role Macs play in Apples product lineup ten years from now. Maybe future’s Apple is all about mobile phones. Or not. Or something in between. I really wouldn’t want to bet one way or another.
Don't forget that if you "do what you love", the money will inexorably follow.

(Not incidentally, the only two circles where I have heard this myth seriously repeated are amongst young musicians, and young programmers.)
Does anyone read blogs?
Friends say I should start a blog. I like to write, and I have lots of wide-ranging interests and ideas. So why not post some of that to the web and maybe make some money?

I find myself drawing a blank about what I'd blog about, though. Who would I write for? What would be their purpose in reading?

I seldom read blogs. I find them boring. With one exception, I don't see why anyone would read them. Seriously, does anyone except your spouse and closest friends care what random thought crossed your mind today?

The exception is blogs about fast-moving domains, written by people who themselves follow the domain closely. Following the blog would be of interest to others who want to keep up with that domain. Indeed, my understanding is that the most popular blogs are about gossip, politics, and specific industries. This is what we used to call "journalism". Similarly, a kind of blog that I can see the value of is a blog about some skill, like "lifestyle design" or getting straight A's in school. Not "any random thought", but "the latest about a specific topic from a very good source".

I hate to shoot down an idea without even trying it. Without a purpose for writing, though, I don't see how to even try writing a blog. Any suggestions?
"You can't watch a video and drive a car. We're focused on music."
- Steve Jobs on including videos into iPods

"We're not making a phone."
- Steve Jobs on iPhone rumors
Succinct and correct.

Besides, even good software teams are now losing people simply because the money is not there, either in financing or for the customers (thereby reducing the customer base). They do not hire -- on the contrary, some have to lay good people off. This is not good. It's the opposite of good.
Apple has 10.8% of the market share. Blackberry's market share grew by a larger margin than Apple's. Nokia has 41% of the market, followed by rim.

And this is the market share for smart phones, which is itself a subset of all cell usage (12.7% of the cell market). So Apple has 11% of 13% of all cell usage, which is the context of Ballmer's quote. He also talked about it in terms of Apple's original pricing, which certainly was far more prohibitive than current pricing.
Email isn't that complex, and I still prefer using Mail.app to Gmail's web interface.
Google Voice from anywhere in the World using FonoSIP.com
You can use google voice from anywhere in the world using FonoSIP.com. To configure follow these steps:
Then stay neutral. Trash-talk is just egg on your face later. There are plenty of neutral ways to deflect that question:

"I think it's an interesting direction for their product, but I'm not convinced that there's a major market there."

A lot less quotable and won't haunt you later.
Dear PG: Please post a canonical list of editorial guidelines for HN.
Is there a clear explanation posted anywhere of why: one is sometimes unable to reply to a comment; the title of a submission is often changed arbitrarily; down- or up-voting is sometimes disabled. And why does a thread sometimes turn up locked, with no explanation? (http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=716546) Is HN now Wikipedia?
They confirmed here: http://groups.google.com/group/google-wave-api/msg/b6649dcc5...

"Yes! The plan is to release a reference implementation of the client, as well as the server. "
Discipline and creativity
Never ran into those problems but I did do a custom install and never installed those components.

I run Opera as well so would never the link scanner to begin with.

I do agree those parts of the AVG are horrible.
Most coders don't have the choice.

I'm sure that if it was up to the programmers many big sites would be hacked out in Haskell, but as it is an awful lot of them happen to be done in PHP. And Coders have jobs and bosses.
If you do remember to hit custom install and remove the link scanner.
The fact that a system requiring ad-hoc attributes wouldn't work so "hot" in a relation isn't a problem with the relational model. This difficulty comes from the application of the relational model bringing to light that such a situation is necessarily more complex than one without ad-hoc attributes, and you cannot treat such data the same way as you can treat data in a relation. The important lesson is that you cannot abstract this added complexity away without losing something else of value (data integrity and simplicity of reasoning).

This gives you more power when your situation isn't ad-hoc attributes (by providing more guarantees) and lets you model the ad-hoc situation with a EAV model if you must. SQL maybe should provide some more sugar for accessing that EAV, but it's not a fundamental relational model issue.
Gah, Zeno's Paradox. A professor tried to stump the class with that one in an introductory philosophy course I took. I then proceeded to introduce him the fundamental principles of calculus with respect to limits. I think I threw in some snark about how this was the difference between mathematicians and philosophers - mathematicians actually find solutions! Then scientists ensure they apply to reality, and engineers make them useful.
I do find it amazing how many people don't hit custom on installs like that.
http://code.google.com/p/wave-protocol/wiki/Installation instructions just went online
> Bah! Constellation program, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Constellation)

Ares and Constellation are dead, except in name. The NASA budget has been reduced to a level that is incompatible with completion of the program. I've read NASA insiders acknowledging this on semi-public message boards.

See this, for example: http://www.spacepolitics.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/grif...

> But work at the staff level continues out of view of the nation’s elected
leadership, and in the recent passback to NASA from the Office of
Management and Budget, the news is not so good. After a small increase this year, Exploration Systems at NASA goes down by $3.5 billion over the next four years. When combined with earlier reductions of almost $12 billion during the Bush Administration, well over $15 billion has been extracted from the Exploration Systems budget in the five short years since the new space policy was announced. Funding for lunar return in the Constellation program was
already less than $4 billion in the years prior to 2015. This was to be allocated to early work on the Ares 5 heavy‐lifter, and the Altair lunar lander. With only a half‐billion dollars now available, this work cannot be done.
"This is what I believe: to have consciousness, or rather to be conscious, and in spite of being sure of this, it should be considered as a proper belief, since one cannot formulate exactly what is meant by this, leave alone prove that it is so."

WTF!?

Eric Berne, founder of the bizarre 1960s psychotherapy called Transactional Analysis, had a name for that kind of writing: the Berkeley Subjunctive. "In the extreme case, the title reads, 'Some Introductory Remarks Concerning Factors Involved in Gathering Data Toward a Theory of...'—a very modest title indeed, since it is plain that it will take about two hundred years before the theory itself is ready for publication."

Is there any content on that page, beyond "Uhh, maybe consciousness exists and maybe it doesn't"?
I tried to do it myself and you pretty much have to write your own textarea implementation in Javascript. Wave as an idea is good. As a protocol I think is horrible for Javascript because either implementing the straight server-to-server spec is impossible on a regular textarea, or you need a beefy enough server to parse full-text states between keys for X many users.

While Wave is a good idea, and the hype is justified for a closed system, implementing it on your own system requires a deep, DEEP knowledge of Javascript.
On their personal blog?
"Friends say I should start a blog"

This is not a good reason to start a blog :-)

I read just under 20 blogs (by which I mean real people's blogs, not tech news that just happen to use the blog platform to publish).

The best blogs are defined by a very strong focus on a particular topic. This both because it gives the writer the opportunity to explore themes at lengths, and it gives the reader a certain amount of predictability in what they are going to find.

Narrow-focus blogging also has the advantages of allowing you to build a more diverse audience. This may sound counter-intuitive at first, but the more subjects you touch the more you end up narrowing your audience to people who think like you.

I think your instincts are correct. "Random thought" blogs are not going to have a wider audience than your friends and family.
Bumper Sticker Goes Beyond The Imagination
Having used Prototype + Scriptaculous, jQuery and Ext, I'd say jQuery is a good generic library choice. Libraries these days are fairly interchangeable in terms of core features, but I find idiomatic jQuery tends to be shorter, more intuitive, and overall more popular (which is good if you plan on leveraging existing plugins for those sorts of things that browsers really should do but don't).

My experience with Ext hasn't been so great because I feel the learning curve is a bit steep, there are a lot of leaky abstractions and whenever I had bugs, they were both difficult to trace and to fix. Also, I feel deviating from the defaults tends to be cumbersome (or impossible)

Prototype has improved immensely over the years, but imho, the improvements are also its downfall: historically, the Prototype API has been pretty unstable, with methods moving from one class to another and some APIs being completely overhauled.

One other library that I should mention (that I haven't used much myself) is Dojo as it is the "Java of Javascript" in terms of domain specific libraries. There's stuff ranging from crypto to comet there.

Pick your poison, I guess.
People discount the monthly cost when considering a device with a service contract. And when it comes to phones most of them are just deciding which provider to go with, so the difference in monthly cost between two phones may be a consideration but the total cost is already factored in.
Good job! Could you add a timestamp and option to sort by it? (I know, feature creep!)

ETA: I also find it interesting that the lowest score from those not using the optional 5 random chars is currently 38. All the lower ones use random chars.
Thought about it, but the two systems I used to compile the data are showing different timestamps (almost like a timezone mismatch) so now it's too late to fix them. I do have the "latest 10 entries" as a compromise.
I started to blog mostly for myself (Dec 2008), and initially that was the audience. After a while I started to find my focus areas and now I have changed the name of the blog twice - and become a tech source magazine like publication with a bunch of writers and hundreds of readers (maxping.org). Money? No, at least not yet - unless $60 from google adsense counts. I recommend to just start doing it and find out how it folds out.
Why not use something like TrueCrypt? The only thing that isn't encrypted is the truecrypt bootloader, which isn't really a big deal.
Sorry to be pedantic but the title is a bit misleading.

TMT has selected Hawaii as its preferred site. In order for it to be actually built on Mauna Kea, it has to obtain a Conservation District Use permit, as explained in the linked article. Due to Hawaii politics this isn't necessarily a slum dunk, but I whole-heartedly wish them luck.
For the gedit kids feeling left out in the audience, check out the plugin "code comment". Who loves you, baby?
Link to the PyCon video (split into three parts): http://pycon.blip.tv/search?q=django+in+the+real+world
Why use Gambit Scheme for application development?
It's just yet another concept.

(edit) And I am being down-modded why ? Concepts are dime a dozen. What makes a concept interesting is a working prototype. But even if this one had a working prototype, it is still based on the idea that one has to draw a line in order to measure it. This doesn't strike me as very practical, it's the solution in a search of a problem.
If you're laid off it is never 'good for you'

I don't know, I'd sort of welcome it if it happened. Between savings, severance pay, and my small business I'd be in an excellent position to go full-time, and being laid off would alleviate any social reservations I have about quitting. (Both in the "I promised my bosses I would stay a while to justify their investment in me" and "Salarymen who quit are not likely to be salarymen again" senses.)
I read this twice - and I'm still not sure what he's trying to say.
Advanced Squid Caching in Scribd: Logged In Users and Complex URLs Handling
Title changes are explained in the guidelines:

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Up- and downvoting depends mostly on karma thresholds, though there are also some protections against karma-bombing and voting rings. You can't post comments on items that are dead or over 45 days old.

Most of the details can be found in the source:

http://www.ycombinator.com/arc/arc3.tar
Never blog for other people.

If you want to write commercial content, do so. Find a tight niche, call it a blog (it's really a serial newsletter but let's not quibble) and saturate it. This -- I think -- was what I had in mind when I started blogging.

But it sucks. Look, if you can blather on about the same topic for 3 years God love you. I can't. I like all sorts of things. I like writing about them. The fifth time I write a story on debugging I'm through with debugging for a while.

So I decided to continue blogging because I like writing. Hell with everyone else, including friends and family. I'm not writing to be cute or narcissistic. If anything, I'm blogging to a) help sort out my thoughts by writing them down, and b) leave something behind of myself for my great-grandkids besides a bunch of computer code somewhere. I can't email the little buggers, but I can leave some essays and bits of trivia.

So blog if you like writing. Blog commercially if you like that sorta thing, but no matter what you do, focus inwardly instead of externally. It shouldn't matter whether you have 10 readers or 10 thousand.
Interesting. Is this at the point where one could just buy a slice, run a server, and play around with the client or is Google holding some piece back until they open up their implementation to the public?
Well I'm certainly an ill-trained author and it seems to me that the details of the markup are wholly irrelevant to the people actually writing and making movies.

The screenwriter should be chugging along with (e.g.) a dialect of markdown that keeps the details the hell out of his way. Whether the markup that comes out the other side looks like XML or HTML just doesn't matter.

And "1 page = 1 minute" is a dodgy heuristic* that could easily be supplanted by software that could process the source and know what's set direction, scene changes, dialogue, etc.

* "1 page = 1 minute" has long since gone from handy heuristic to self-reinforcing delusion.

Today, if a screenwriter is selling an average (hundred minutes, more or less) movie, he will ensure that his script is a hundred pages (more or less). He'll tweak margins, font sizes, spacing, descriptions and more.
He doesn't want his masterpiece stigmatized when it makes the studio rounds just because it showed up thirty pages either side of proper.

And so it goes.
Yes--they ensure that guys living in caves are our biggest threat. If we did not have stealth fighters and stealth bombers, actual countries might think a war with the US would be a fair fight, and they might start shit.
Readability is awesome and I would love to see some version of it for my iphone. I concur that if apps like this become ubiquitous then the 'industry' (whatever that is) will shift toward inline text inclusion of things like credentials as well as advertisement.
For what it's worth, that sounds nice, and disruptive, but possibly short-lived. Someone recently asked me how I enjoyed using Google Voice, and while I didn't immediately have an answer, after thinking about it, I decided that I liked it mostly because it allowed me to keep my SMS messages in the cloud.

Many people use SMS to get actual work done, as I do, and it surprises me that nobody seems to care to back them up (or at least, there doesn't seem to be much in the way of allowing that) -- but Google Voice gets rid of the problem altogether, in that they're only transiently on my phone, and always stored in the Googleplex (deletions are 'archived', similar to Gmail).