skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Pretty cool exercise.

My lame-o half-ass solution: buy a domain name, send out a tweet containing a link to that domain, and forward the domain to that tweet.

Why write a nerdy shell script when you can just throw some money at the problem? ;)
Listia (YC S09) Is An Awesome Way To Give And Get Free Stuff
"[...] how [IE6] is making the web a terrible place".

I can't really understand you. You're saying IE6 isn't terrible despite it adding so much to project development and costs - it's not so bad now all the bugs are categorised and things like IE7.js (javascript DOM manipulator to fix lots of IE bugs) are available. But back in the day IE6 prevented us from using the latest techniques available in the other major browsers and caused me (and I'm sure thousands of others) many hours of trouble.

I'm using links2 here - we're not talking about not serving someone, we're talking about ditching IE6 as part of the category A line; if they get the majority of info then that's fine don't worry about visuals being exactly right, etc..

Microsoft was evil with IE6 (couldn't they have just told us about hasLayout from the start), they've been forced by the likes of Mozilla to get with the program and now IE8 is quite a good browser with some innovation too (but they should have done PNG like everyone else, what is it 12 years they've failed to get PNG right - a browser that can't even display an image properly after 12 years of dev from the biggest software company in the world ... I mean come on guys, I digress).
> Resistance has been crushed. ... All we can do is fucking blog about it.

More precisely: we are all cowards. A nation of "please don't hurt me," over-civilized doormats. Were we not cowards, you would see: dead judges, dead police, dead politicians, dead CEOs. Until the lesson is learned.
I think you are missing another fundamental difference. The NoSQL solutions are more like a dynamically typed language where as the YeSQL ones are statically typed.

In NoSQL, I don't have to tell the database layer what I'm stuffing into the value (or even how I'm building the keys). Of course the application is taking on a lot of responsibility that previously belonged in the persistence layer.

I think this is the true draw to the NoSQL philosophy. Especially when you consider the apparent (to me) rise in meta-programming.
My opinion may be in the minority here but I think the crux of this article is misguided. It's like a farmer saying, "I long for the days before the combustion engine because I love planting 3 acres by hand".

I also think the two basic premises of the article are just plain wrong. There are plenty of examples where people have written their own operating system from scratch for the x86, there have been articles posted on HN describing as much. So to say that todays processors are "to complex to understand" is just wrong. On the assertion that programming has devolved into "learning another man's APIs" that's just a fact of engineering I suspect the Z80 had a thick manual describing all of it's interfaces and inner workings. The AVR micro controllers I've worked with, the same ones on the Ardunio the author says is still "fun", have a manual that is over 320 pages long describing in effect the processor's API.
They're just trying to raise awareness of the Conversion Optimiser tool. Surprisingly, there are quite a few small to medium sized advertisers who don't know about it even though they are perfect fits for the product.

In general, due to quality score and various keyword quality concerns, I've found many advertisers are terrified to change their bread-and-butter campaigns for fear something will go awry and they'll be penalized somehow. Makes sense really. Shame that Google can't do a better job helping people over this fear.
seriously, how many times does this article has to be posted in HN?
Redesigning your own site
jquery is a good example to use, I've only been into it for a couple of days now (after asking on HN what would be a good js library), and after a few days I already like what it does:

It hides the mess!

Most software is so absolutely messy. Just the other day there was an argument that it is perfectly ok to see the user interface that results from interpreting a spec'd document as an approximation. Computers are supposed to be deterministic, you're supposed to get exactly the results you want and not something 'good enough for government work'.

Elegance breeds excellence, bloat breeds badness. Cellphones that crash (who would have ever accepted that), computers that need to be periodically reinstalled and APIs that have manuals 10 times the size of the operating system components they interface to.

Complexity is a given, so, then we should strive to make the complex simple, instead of more complex.
Looks like that was forbidden in the rules... it had to have its actual URL in it.
If you're too ignorant to understand

That's not fair. Everyone starts out as ignorant. I think the "versus" mentality helps less informed people separate two fundamentally different approaches to persistence.

There's a lot of information in this post. Granted, it's just one person's opinion. Take it for what it's worth and move on.
I disagree. That would the case if I were to say: "Please take away this Mac Pro and all the wonderful software because what I really want is a Z-80".

I'm not saying that today's processors are too complex to understand, I'm saying that the software running in the machine in front of me is too complex. I wouldn't mind writing assembly code for a modern processor at all.

But if we are talking about what's likely to make me happy, it's probably a relatively simple CPU, some I/O ports and a soldering iron.

That's probably like the farmer wishing a had a kitchen garden and was growing enough food for himself.
A little learning can go along way.

Do the same people take their 1985 Datsun Sunnys to the garage and complain that the radio doesn't get digital and it doesn't get the speed and comfort of a Bugatti Veyron.

If your business still has lead pipework or asbestos ceiling tiles then they need upgrading. If it still has "made for IE6" web apps they need upgrading.
Knowing your network status
I share your belief. At the same time I think it is going to be like trying to replace the automobile piston engine with something better.

The amount of money and time invested in the way we do things today is going to be a very large stumbling block to overcome in order to create a clean slate.
Flash plugin isn't developed by kernel developers.
So why?

Other than that, it's 3/5 funny.
Peter Seibel's Coders At Work available for pre-order
It's just physics. For a given transistor, more transistors @ higher frequency = more power. At the ultra low end people are using processors that run using energy collected from stray radio waves. While a better design and instruction set help unlike desktop computing the standard is already lean.
The more I read about the app store the more it looks like a classic bureaucracy. I mean what kind of people do you expect Apple has hired to "approve" all of these apps? I'll give you a hit it isn't some ace computer scientist with a degree from an Ivy league school. I have a hard time believing this is some conspiracy on the part of Apple the company so much as it is a few low level employees playing the CYA game.
Luscious Grocery Signs
How to not fail
wow! amazing deduction abilities...yet so limited, pedagogically speaking.
"What am I going to build my next app on? Probably Postgres. Will I use NoSQL? Maybe"

I just spent some time evaluating several k/v stores for a new project. My conclusion: These things may be useful when I'm ready to optimize. Until then, I'll put everything in postgres.
Since when is consumer tech driven by necessity?

It seems to me the last few decades have been driven almost entirely by capacity and convenience.
Ask HN: Whats a startup?
But, will his online presence hurt him or help him in this case? Zed is obviously intelligent, but his tendency to not "play nice" with others might not fit with too many grow mode startups who don't want drama, and just want to get the best stuff out the door as fast as possible. Though, maybe a little Zed drama will help get better stuff out the door. It's a tough call. I wish him the best of luck and can't wait to see what happens with the lucky company that he fits into.
How Is America Going To End?
Allowing Netflix to store movies on the phone would be a great move. I'm not sure how well it would go over, seeing that it would compete with iTunes. I would love to be able to load up a couple of movies for trips, where I wouldnt necessarily have access to the internet.

On a related note: I love how AT&T claims that they have no say on the iPhone application approval process, yet apps like Skype, Slingbox and Netflix (assumed) are not allowed onto their data network. Maybe AT&T should work on fixing their network so that they could support these apps, which would definitely enhance the user experience. I don't even want to know how much tethering is going to cost!
There's a summary here (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Stallman) under the section "Hacker culture declines". There's more detail in an RMS biography, the reference for which I don't have handy.
Steve is deaaaaaaaaad.
On romantic relationships and meteor strikes
These same people were just overflowing with insightful commentary about how a touch-screen phone wouldn't work and how people wouldn't pay that much either.

I think it's fair to assume that if Apple is going to release a piece of kit, they'll make sure it works. It might be as expensive as all get out, short some hardware and suffer arbitrary limitations. But have they even made a major usability mis-step in the last decade?
doesn't work in links2 either ;0)
I didn't work with these, but did work on the Symbolics 3600 circa 1985. It introduced me to a lot of new technology. I learned Lisp, of course, on it. I learned Zmacs and the "Meta" key. Emacs is still my favorite editor/IDE. We had a Canon laser printer ($12K, 360 DPI, liquid toner) that I used to print a proof of my wedding program (using proportional Times Roman font). I hooked it up via Ethernet (using 10BASE5 vampire taps http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vampire_tap) to a DEC 11/785. I first learned TCP/IP programming using it. All of the OS source code was available to view and patch if needed. It was the first windowing GUI I ever used. It was easy to program (in Lisp) and was the most advanced software development environment of the time. We developed a research AI system (called Pilot's Associate) that interfaced with a real-time flight simulation. It was great fun.
A beginners guide to OCaml internals
Mini Helicopter Allows Solo Air Travel
Is Wikipedia heading for bust? Scientists Search for Answers
That's one of my favourite misuses of language on HN.

A start-up is a thing that you depend on or plan to depend on for a substantial part of your income, preferably all of it.

It takes up more time than anything else you are doing because it is probably the most important thing in your life at the moment (with the exception of your nearest family).

It is not some web project that you threw together in an afternoon, though it can not be ruled out that what you threw together in an afternoon will gain some traction and will eventually reach the state where it will fit the above criteria.
I wish my boss would read it...
But if I'll send it to him, it will create tension
To be fair, as mileage requirements are part of the deal, this does have some (statistically debatable) impact on future resource usage that does impact all of us.
Bids Start at $300,000 for Chicago’s Old Post Office
Four security fixes the iPhone needs now
The article was a joke promoting inbox-as-TV. That was a teaser parody for this project, which is inbox-as-not-TV.
Good writeup of a true deadline pursuit with a distributed team, one of whom is offline.
This focuses completely on the U.S., but I'd argue that it's even more true in other—especially the developing—parts of the world. What makes Internet access more significant and important than TV or radio is the infinite nature of the information being made available.

If a farmer with limited financial resources wants to find out which fertilisers would increase crop yield without permanently damaging his plot, TV and radio are likely not an option. Word of mouth or libraries perhaps, but those aren't even common and easily accessible to city dwellers here in India, for example.
First SDK 1.5 Android book out
Impressive document! Someone's been reading Joseph Tainter.
I'm not quite convinced that this is more useful than the GUI-builder that comes with the Eclipse/Android SDK tools, or even than writing the XML by hand.
I don't think so, I generally dismiss holocaust deniers without much thought. His only crime was wasting my time.

I'm curious, did you read the piece? In it's entirety?
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After spending forever screwing round with books based on the beta, 1.0 or 1.1 SDKs where the examples frequently don't build properly on current software I'm finding this quite a pleasant change.
The Scheme79 chip (pdf)
Not much.

This program is only collecting up the 14mpg battering rams that no-one is buying; not even college students. (The difference in gas between a 'clunker' car and truck will approach the cost of the vehicles themselves in a year.)

A large part of why this program is so popular is precisely because these particular vehicles are worth almost nothing without it.
I think this is the coolest thing on there ...

"Signed copy of On Lisp"
http://www.listia.com/auction/207
Stacks, LIFO,RPN,Forth,Shunting yard, evaluation
> A normal girl who likes "shopping and hanging out with her friends", who sleepwalks through a boring shitty low-paying job, who doesn't exercise and doesn't take of herself... that's sane?

...why does this have to be the alternative to women who work 70-80 hour weeks for a startup? I'm sure that's not what you're saying, as your girlfriend anecdote is neither, but that's how it reads.
In DroidDraw you can browse through widgets as they would appear on screen. In Eclipse or MotoDev you have to know what, e.g., a 'DialerFilter' is before you add it, which often means dragging a bunch of crap onto the canvas just to find the thing you want.
It's quite probable that x86 processors are more complex than they need to be-- at least, the instruction set is more complicated than is necessary. CISC architectures are meant to make life easier for assembly language programmers, letting you do things like load, multiply and store in a single command. In practice that hasn't been all that valuable, because programmers just use higher level languages like C when they need that much expressive power. From a compiler perspective, it's easier (or at worst about the same) to generate code for RISC than CISC, and RISC has much more flexibility with regards to automatic optimization, pipelining, etc.
Yahoo turns to Twitter for search results
Stars have strong opinions, so send the signal. And work hard to become a star :-P
I think it is unfair to group Chinese English with Japanese English ability. The English ability of mainland Chinese people is terrible (even though they are enthusiastic). Talking to them, even those who are well educated (grad students/professors) is like a game of charades.
The problem with China is that most young people (20-30) started learning English at age 13 at school and their parents learnt Russian as a second language.
Well, this is the first time I saw it, so I don't mind.
Only if breast cancer research is underfunded.

Not that this is a particularly good use of $3B. But the fact that it exists does not speak directly to American priorities.
Sony Cuts Prices on E-Books, settling at $9.99
One of our clients who has the biggest percentage of IE6 users sells a lot to education.

Are you going to foot the bill to upgrade all of the metaphorical lead pipework in every education establishment in the UK?

No, I didn't think so.
Google plans to dominate Web video tech, open-source it, with On2 deal
This is a great story. Just reading it made me think of "Lucky Jim", not for the details but for the general level of absurdity. Somehow Apple has gotten out of touch with this particular market.
I once sent the director of a company where I worked an article about working from home (the article mentioned how IBM does this) and got a snotty reply.

He also refused to allow me to take unpaid leave.

It's amazing how some managers think that working from home or taking more than 15 days of leave (unpaid at that) is an undeserved luxury and that they'd rather have you less productive, but in your seat at work.

This was at a 5 person company.
Zed is well known in the HN community and looking for a job in a funded startup with about 5 - 20 employees. It seems reasonable that this link ends up here don't you think?
> This was at a 5 person company.

I was nodding and thinking "that's not unusual" until I got to this part. Wow.
This article makes a distinction between mature companies and startups, but I think the most important distinction is between simple web projects and startups.

The difference between a personal project and a startup is that a startup has a primary goal of profit, whereas the personal project may just be for fun or a personal exercise.
IPod sales Vs iPhone sales
Open-Xchange Tries To Liberate Your Contact List
IE7 was only released at the end of 2006 - less than three years ago.
Woah, buried in there was this claim:

Well, in a perfect world I’d just work on Lamson but the days of companies actually paying people to work on open source are pretty much over.

Have I missed something? I thought that, at least, most of the kernel and gcc devs were employed by companies to work on those projects. Is he right, and something has fundamentally changed?
Outlying opinions are not appreciated on HN though

I would amend that to, "Outlying opinions are often subject to harsh treatment on HN."

As an occasional outlier here, I used to wonder if I was losing my mind from time to time. How could I feel so strongly about something while almost every responder felt the opposite?

I don't worry about it so much any more. Just say what you're thinking and let the chips fall where they may. Maybe we'll all learn something.

Better to have that learning experience in this "harmless playground" first than with a boss or a customer.
Gooogle to aquire video compression company on2 (official press release)
Uh, my email client already does this? (Gnus + w3m)
Measuring Economic Growth From Outer Space
Should I Tap that Hash?  (Ruby 1.9 Style)
Link to the paper:
http://www.econ.brown.edu/students/adam_storeygard/HSWLights...
Also see the HN comments here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=740524
I don't see how this question is relevant.

As this thread makes clear, there are ample other platforms if we dislike Apple's policies. Anyone is free to purchase, or develop for, Android or Windows Mobile or RIM.

Government regulation is a whole other animal, because they ensure that there cannot be any alternative to compete and let the best idea win. That's the problem with government action, but that's also a different discussion.
Awesome building, but with $12.5 mil for keeping the lights on, $300,000 is too much.

Interesting how technology improvements (new letter sorting technology) has made a building of that size essentially unusable.
That's right, I`ll keep the 'ignore the troll' motto. Trolls add nothing to a discussion, constructive criticisms does.
That sucking sound you hear is a day of productive programming being lost forever to Twitter ... ;)
Lost generation? US grads work for free, look abroad
Perhaps I'm misreading your analysis but it seems to me you're suggesting that the US visitor count for each of those sites is 8.9 million people total? I would suggest it's actually much lower - the chances are that the people who use reddit are the same sorts of people that use posterous and disqus (and so on). You're potentially counting 1 person who uses all 5 sites as 5 separate people.

The problem I see is that - particularly for reddit, posterous and disqus - the audience is mostly technical (or at least fairly Internet literate). These are not the types of people who need to warned about IE6.
x% of others would agree. (100-x)% would probably be put off. Solve for x.
So remember there was a flurry of talk about what was going to kill Flash a few months back?

This (meaning Google's fairly clear intention to make some kind of royalty free video codec from what it's just bought) has just killed Flash and moved the web forward about 5 years.

I wonder if they'll create a new standard around the technology (perhaps pair it with the Ogg container format or with Vorbis audio, run it past some standards org like IETF) and/or release it as is.

It's a fairly big move for Linux Multimedia support too.
Your also missing out on the fact there are "mature startups" that really should be classed as personal projects since there's no real revenue, only eyeballs.
This is a highly controversial article, I admit: http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/abstract/329/15/1084

Gun ownership is widespread in the US, and lots of people have them in perfectly safe regions. So do they not create a source of danger where there was none? Accidents do happen.

In my country, gun deaths went down considerably after the police started taking them out of circulation. As one police officer put it, bar fights became a lot less deadly in the suburbs.
I think in the absolute, it will absolutely help him. It might detract some companies from hiring him, but I think his contributions in software and publications opened him up to a magnitude of potential employers, even if some of them might not want that sort of exposure.

Let's say he didn't post or publish anything, would you say he'd be better off? I'm positive he won't.
I understand that startup is early stage company which not reach mainstream customers, yet.

So they sell to earlyvangelists customer and work or redefine their vision to reach that big mass market.
If they respond in writing you learn something if all you get is a bunch of unmotivated downvotes (and that happens quite often) it even leaves the old hands feeling like they got beaten up for something without knowing why.

This is frustrating.
I also don't get how a phone call is less bandwidth than a blog post.

This is a silly made-up graph that Seth should probably kept where it belonged: on the back of a napkin, in the restaurant's bin.
"Don was responsible for the LM P60's (Lunar Descent), while I was responsible for the LM P40's (which were) all other LM powered flight". Two men were able to write all that code and understand its operation.

Is this probably why we don't use more advanced technology for space flight today; it's too complex? I've always wondered just how much more we could accomplish if we used modern computing technology in space shuttles, but if safety is of the utmost important, maybe the complexity is a bad thing?
also a self referencing comment:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=743351
The application of forgiveness in social system design
WSJ & DJ Wire's New Policy: Won’t Take Herd Embargoes
In one sense I really liked this, though I wish it could have done without "bitch" and "faggot" strewn throughout.

I used to be afraid of socializing, managing to defer the painful learning process by about 5 years. I thought I could avoid it by observing others; that was a big mistake. Seems to be true of starting a business too.
If they're running Windows, I can somewhat understand the paranoia.
assuming that we'll see change at the previous growth rate is silly if we get molecular engineering.
Do not multitask with credit cards
Berkeley Ventures launches new Bay area incubator
SEC to Ban Flash Trades of U.S. Stocks, Schumer Says (Update3) - Bloomberg.com