skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This article kind of feels like it was just scraped from http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2008/09/what-was-stack-overflo... and http://blog.stackoverflow.com, doesn't it?

I'd be much more interested in knowing about the internal architecture of the software running the site rather than just "they threw this server together with that one and then v1.2.3 of this other one too".
Why is it not all that impossible to gain way more than ten pounds of muscle in a relatively short time? From what are you basing this?

I haven't read Tim's books but this seems like a reason to not like his work. This isn't science. Now, if he said body weight from water etc. Which he could have for all I know.
You misunderstand. People did not refuse to believe that Apple would break support. They refused to believe you had any compelling evidence to support your claim that they would.

That you happened to be right is no vindication when the odds were 50/50 and you put forth no model for predicting the outcome.
Less so - ironically, as a result of Apple's anti-piracy/unlock efforts. The Blackberry spyware that's being distributed here depends on the user's ability to apply arbitrary firmware updates, which isn't possible on the iPhone.
It seems like you're defending this article on the sole basis that it exists and may be helpful to a set of programmers that find this helpful, but shouldn't. Personally, I read plenty of stuff on MSDN (I'm a .NET dev for work and for fun) so I'm familiar with the territory. If there are already enough articles on it, why write another one that's not particularly useful and can lead devs down rabbit holes they don't want to be in?
I think posting that here is perfect--I actually like these more "forum" type posts. I wonder what size grocery stores use these analytical techniques though. What you describe here is, in my opinion, a pretty sophisticated analysis, so I can only really see the large chains being capable of pulling this off.

Regardless, I think this sort of practice is one that easily transfers from traditional retail to the web sphere. I've seen some pretty impressive analytic apps released recently, and thats exactly the kind of information you'd need. Maybe companies such as Clixpy could take their product to the next level with these type of statistics?
Learning of Risk of Alzheimer’s Seems to Do No Harm
It was indeed scraped from all the sources listed in the article. I would have like more too, but for me the emphasis was more on the viability of scale up.
You sound like a "Great Books" kind of guy...
Not even. Competitors are (as far as I know) welcome to use iTunes' xml database and files. But they are not allowed to label themselves as iPods, especially on user-facing interfaces. That's exactly what the Pre does, and it's a clear and blatant infringement on Apple's marks and trade dress.
Except that there are better ways to accomplish those goals AND get the benefits of a web app.

I don't fault any enterprise devs for trying to get stuff working and I understand they have a different set of working requirements than someone working on a consumer web app. I do fault MS for putting out "guidance" like this that will just be a waste of resources and a maintenance nightmare for corporate devs that don't know any better.
I don't think it's all that high; it's equivalent to about 12.5% of the current BM retail price. I could grow (and have) but it takes months and a commitment to gardening. A legal outlet will be able to make larger wholesale purchases and get a better price on them from growers, more than offsetting the tax.

I think your idea of corporate green cigarettes is deeply misplaced, BTW.
For some reason, it only works for certain combinations of countries and languages. E.g., it works for Argentina: http://www.bing.com/search?q=x-3%2fx-1%3dx-4%2fx-5&setmk... but not Chile: http://www.bing.com/search?q=x-3%2fx-1%3dx-4%2fx-5&setmk...
I don't understand why you and the thirty-odd people who've chosen to use voting to indicate agreement are so uninterested in the topic that you would choose to come into the thread just to indicate your disinterest.

Stop paying attention to things you aren't interested in.
Um, but you need to install Silverlight to see them? Does this man do anything without at least some kind tiny piece of ulterior motive?

Unrelated, this is a great biography of Richard Feinman: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3164300309410618119
Not http://stjohnscollege.edu as you've inferred, but http://evergreen.edu
I would suppose that these ex-founders (especially the ones with some fame like Josh Schacter) belong to an uber-class minority within Google, where they are given more freedom and respect then the average Googler.
Um, isn't Microsoft's whole business based on selling an OS that supports as many different varieties of hardware as possible? Specifically, in this very space, wasn't the whole point of "Plays for Sure" that there were a multitude of hardware devices made by a multitude of venders that interoperated with the Microsoft solution?

I'm going to go ahead and call shenanigans on your post. I don't think it holds up to scrutiny.

Now if you want to make an argument about how Microsoft hid APIs in it's operating system so that its office suite or browser performed better than anyone else's, or how it bundled its browser to try to use it's OS monopoly to strangle competition in another market, you'd have a point. But it should be clear how those are vastly different circumstances that cannot meaningfully be applied to the case of media jukebox made by company "A" and random hardware media player made by company "B".
I feel that integration is more about addition than multiplication, and differentiation is more about subtraction than division. Is it just me?
Inflation is an increase in the money supply. Rising prices are a side effect of that increase. The government has many reasons to hide and distort real rising prices including TIPS and just generally wanting to stay in power.

Inflation was directed by the federal reserve for 8 years at a record pace. When the fed lowers interest rates they in effect increase the money supply through the expansion of bank credit which is the primary means by which money is introduced into the economy.
I've read that article before and I don't find it particularly convincing.

Implementing any complex piece of legislation is hard. Luckily there are people who specialize in that sort of thing -- we wouldn't be hiring computer programmers to do it, any more than we'd hire policy wonks to code something in C++.

If the political will existed to legalize and tax, the actual implementation details, codifying the regulations, wouldn't be trivial but would be significantly less of a hurdle than getting the legislative votes in the first place.

What it would probably involve is standing up a new government agency (either at the state or Federal level), or increasing the scope of an existing one, to administer and perform the regulation. That's not exactly black magic; there are actually consultants you can hire who work exclusively in the public sector, managing "stand ups" of new agencies.

Lots of things look like impossible tasks, if you're not familiar with them. Imagine what a complex piece of software, or the whole software-development lifecycle, the process of building a major piece of software, is like for someone who's totally unfamiliar with it. You could forgive them for thinking that building anything more complex than Minesweeper is totally impossible. But it's not, and there's a huge body of knowledge within the industry on how to do it right, and how to do it wrong.

The same thing exists within the 'industry' (and it really is an industry) of public policy. It's good to appreciate complexity, but not a reason to run screaming away from it. Marijuana legalization is an eminently tractable problem.
While I didn't know anything about those useless service, I don't think Vistaprint becomes a $1.9B company just because they do shady things. As an entrepreneur, I would love to learn about how others build their companies but it doesn't mean we have to agree all of their moves.

I don't want to argue about the ethical issues here. But I believe every company has done something in the gray area. Do you think all those Google ads on domain parking pages are click scam? I do.
I lost all respect for Joel Spolsky when I read this article:

http://www.inc.com/magazine/20090101/how-hard-could-it-be-th...

Summary: Intern comes up with a job sales board for Fog Greek, grosses $1m. Joel decides not to compensate him, arguing that it is difficult to measure the contribution of each individual.

The whole article is sickening, because Joel tries so hard to contort reason and make it sound like he was being fair.
Ask HN: Hosted customer support (for cheap)
I'm starting to drown in support requests for my site: http://www.obsidianportal.com I manage it with one other guy, and we get several emails a day with basic requests. Sometimes both of us answer the same email, other times we dodge it and it falls through the cracks.

Further, we set up a forum a long time ago for people to report bugs / request features. It was great...until we got popular and the influx of requests overwhelmed us. Now, we haven't checked in months and the thought of it terrifies me.

So, we're looking at using a tool for this kind of thing, and we'd like something that crowdsources it as much as possible. I know that sounds lazy, but we want to reserve our time for the stuff only we can do (like database edits) and leave the "I can't figure out how to X" to the crowd.

Any suggestions on tools to use? We're looking at GetSatisfaction, FogBugz, and TenderApp. If anyone uses these (or others) and has any very strong positive or negative feelings, I'd love to know.

Thanks,
Micah
Not unless you had time for both. I definitely didn't have to spend as much time as my peers on Comp Sci homework, and had plenty of time left over for my own pursuits.

The great programmers I respect easily got CS degrees without working too hard; you show up and submit your tests/projects using your self-acquired knowledge. You should also have a natural curiosity for the subject matter. I think this is why Google's strict GPA policies work for them.
Real-time, interactive recreation of the moon landing
Making your accomplishments sound more impressive on paper than they are in reality is something that anybody who has ever written a résumé has done.
How did you come up with this figure of 95% if you have a sample size of 1?
What will be the distinction between 'shared' and 'dedicated' hosting?

How in are they going to get 'shared' hosting working with such a silo-ed vertical setup? Are they going to be assigning customer sites to machines ala Dreamhost et. al.?

Will they end up paying for separate Windows Server and SQL Server licenses to run each 'dedicated' site in its own VM? Are they going to be manually migrating customers who exceed the size of what they can handle in one VM?
The gravitational pull on the moon is 6 times less than on Earth so it requires a lot less energy to lift off.
I like spec based testing because I think the tests you end up producing with it are seriously useful and can actually help guide your programming if you think of the test names (not the actual test code) before you start coding, but I've never been able to actually write tests in full before coding.

I try to think about how I'll test something when I'm coding it (so that it's easy to test), I try to consider what I'd actually be testing in a given piece of code (so the concerns are separated), and I try to stick pieces near each other that are coherent (so they can use similar setup/teardown for a testing context as needed). But I don't have the actual test code down.

I'll fight anyone that says automated tests aren't wortwhile though.
I don't disagree even a little. I'm just pushing back on "here's an example of Microsoft being crazy".
What exactly is the 4th spacial dimension? Since we only experience space in three dimensions, how can we assign meaning to a fourth dimension in space?
Growing more marijuana will help with global warming too!
We're using Basecamp for this, and I'm happy with it. Basecamp will work better if you have a small number of customers with intense engagement; it's not a good public support site.
Synthetic "tree" captures more carbon than a real one
To get to be part of an elite club which excludes others?
So that they don't get abused and mistreated like they do at most startups and large software companies?

Depends on what you want from your life really, but if you're given a challenging environment where you get to perfect your craft and learn from other equally intelligent people - what more could you ask for?
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That is quite optimistic.

Until the early 1990s, the import of gold into India was restricted by the government and there was a large delta in the price of gold within India compared to the rest of the world. As a result smuggling of gold was very profitable and most of the Bombay underworld dons were gold smugglers.

One fine day the government lifted this restriction bringing the price delta to near zero and rendering the smuggling of gold, rather a waste of time. You'd think all the baddies would now be dis-empowered. No, they just switched to extortion and whatnot and are just as powerful and rich today as they were before - just doing different things.

It's like the Willie Sutton story. Q: Why do you rob banks? A: Because that's where the money is.

These drug lords are not in the drug business because they have a particular fondness for the trade but because that's where presumably the easiest money is. If that avenue is gone, they'll try and do other things - extortion, smuggling, counterfeiting etc.
In my opinion, TDD is a double edged sword. Not only does it depend on the persons preference but also experience. [1]

For the experienced or good programmers TDD is a hassle and often results in less efficient code and often in less code. (read: less done in the same time). Later tests are written to cover the code which is of course arguable. [1]

For the beginning or (below) average programmers TDD is great as it often results in much better code quality and helps produce more robust code. [2][3]

Here is an excellent article about TDD and its aspects.
http://use.perl.org/~Ovid/journal/38616

[1] TDD Effective or is it ? http://www.theruntime.com/blogs/jacob/archive/2008/01/22/tdd...

[2] In favor of TDD, http://collaboration.csc.ncsu.edu/laurie/Papers/TDDpaperv8.p...

[3] Indications that TDD increases productivity
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1070618.1070834
I'm not sure this is funny, Sarah Lacy.
Even weirder...

(x-3)/x-1=(x-4)/x-5 works OK (ie Bing treats it as math); indeed for (x-3)/x-1=x-4/x-5 Bing properly gives both solutions 1/2(5+/-(29^0.5)).

But it absolutely Does Not Like parentheses in denominator (eg x-3/(x-1)=x-4/x-5) on either side of the equation. Clearly, I need to get out more.
Google Voice Moves into Mobile Arena
The keyword is excessive. It doesn't say they're getting rid of them completely.
Dear Apple,

Thank you for providing me with Safari on the iPhone. I've reviewed Safari and determined that you cannot continue to provide this version of your iPhone application at this time because it is not appropriately rated. My review indicates application content is not consistent with the current rating. Safari allows unfiltered access to Wikipedia, which include frequent mature or suggestive themes. Applications must be rated accordingly for the highest level of content that the user is able to access.

Please provide me with a new version of Safari rated appropriately.

Regards,

A loyal customer.
The problem with this though is when you end up assigned to "their" project, and you curse how un-unit-testable "their" code is. At which point it's "your" code too.
Haha, thanks - I guess the problem is in my parsing :)
Surely state capitals count as capitals in the US?
Are you talking about unit testing or are you talking about TDD? Easily confusing controversy we have here.
I think this title is a bit misleading, the author is talking about attempts to reform and modernize healthcare-related IT; not overall healthcare and health insurance reform.
Wolfram Alpha also isn't sure what to do with this:

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=per+capita+consumption+...

It's yet another real world question that's come up in conversation that I've wanted to know the answer to, and which Wolfram Alpha would be really awesome if it could handle, but sadly cannot.
Are you outside the USA? I'm in Taiwan and Bing isn't calculating it for me either. It's just returning a bunch of normal search results in Chinese. Maybe calculation only works for queries coming from inside the USA.
That made me smile so I forgive you.
I think that working at a company like Fog Creek or 37 Signals would be seen as highly prestigous, but only by a pretty limited audience: those that follow software development blogs.

Whereas working at Google, pretty much everyone who has touched a computer is familiar with who Google is.

So I guess it depends on what your intended audience is.
Recreating 'Star Wars' on the Web, 15 Seconds at a Time
Live! search could do these types of calculations for sometime. It could even handle solving quadratics.
This is a very poor substitute for trees. Trees convert gaseous carbon dioxide into solid organic molecules [1].

I am pretty suspicious of the idea that humans (especially the humans who come up with the lowest bids to win these contracts) can store planetary-scale amounts of carbon dioxide over geologic time.

This may very well accomplish nothing.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_fixation
Not necessarily. They would just have to pay a settlement and stop any future distribution of their product that contained GPL'd code.

e.g. They would pay $x to the rights' holder for the code and not distribute the code until the GPL'd version was replaced with a non-GPL'd version. or they would just negotiate a price with the rights' holder for a non-GPL license of the code. (this obviously gets murky when there are multiple rights' holders; especially in code where (major) patch submitters are not required to agree to hand the copyright on their code to the maintainer(s) of the codebase just to get their patch accepted)
Thank you, as this puts paid to anyone here saying there's no visible difference except to pixel peepers.

(Well, assuming one is comparing on a true 8 bit screen.)
Isn't it Kirstie Alley, not Kristie? Is that the right person?
Well, I can't comment about running barefoot, but I can comment about running in traditional running shoes vs. running in cleats. When I first started playing ultimate frisbee, I used running shoes because that's what I had. I got shin splits constantly. Within a week of switching to soccer cleats, with almost no padding, the shin splints went away and never came back.

It's also worth remembering that not everyone has been running heel first for years. Most of them haven't been running at all.
Leave Your Wi-Fi Open
Microsoft to Open Retail Stores Next to Apple’s
I'm a Mac and I'm a PC....

hypocrisy much? although the mac ads were at least good
Nice, where is your list of celebs coming from?

By the way, the tweets don't scroll up correctly in chrome, and I think it'd make more sense if new tweets showed up on top and the list moved down.
What works for me is running in shoes for my workout, and then doing barefoot strides in a grassy field to strengthen my feet and ankles and improve my form. Running barefoot everywhere would be hard, mostly because there aren't a lot of soft trails for bare feet.
Note that in the ScummVM case, Atari had no problem with the GPL'd code... until their lawyer informed them that Nintendo's API license didn't allow them to open source code like that. And in Atari's defense the code was outsourced two layers deep to some place in Eastern Europe.

i.e. Atari had no idea there was GPL'd code in there until they were notified. They were cool with keeping to the license until they realized there was a conflict with Nintendo's Wii API license... then they hunkered down and git tight-lipped.

That seems pretty normal. Once the lawyers realized that the company was probably in the wrong, they when into 'damage-control' mode to try and minimize the losses to Atari.
or when they are assigned to your project, change something, and break your test suite
These may help visualize 4D space:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_dimension

http://www.instructables.com/id/How_to_draw_a_4_dimension_cu...
Fog Creek is running the hosted version and they already have the infrastructure in place running FogBugz on Demand. And I'm confident enough to guess that none of the hosted instances will have anywhere near the traffic of SO.
Those paper thin spikes are NOT meant for comfort, and aren't for running more than 800 or so meters. For distance events (1600+) spikes resemble more of a running shoe.
Sam Hart, whoever you are, you rock. Like any number of other software development techniques, this one has some applicability in some situations, but the superlatives and the dogma with which it is foisted upon the world is unwarranted and insane. TDD (Test Driven Douchebags), you are emperors without clothes.
$600 million into Craig Venter's oil-producing algae
So do the 15" and 17" have 6bit or 8bit displays? I keep reading conflicting answers...
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=554166

Regarding most points made on this thread - I really don't think it's that simple. Steve Yegge's post on the subject is by far my favorite on the complexities of the subject, and not surprisingly, something I share with the majority of my smoker friends.
Twain once said something like "The most sought-after prize is the envy of other men". It's natural to want "prestige", but chasing after it kind of misses the point of life, no?

If you haven't done so, I recommend working for a small technology company with a strong engineering culture, staffed by smart & competent people who have nothing to prove. Worthwhile problems are fractal -- there's almost always more there if you keep digging.
Not necessarily, but hopefully some of that arguments by either side will have at least some informative parts to them which will help out HN readers. At the very least, it might cause HN readers to apply some critical thinking (and research) of their own to the BSD vs GPL debate in their own personal/commercial projects and possibly avoid some of the pitfalls of either approach.
Rails / Flash / Biz Dev Team members
A startup in Palo Alto with a solid product(cool advertisement platform), closely working with a top VC firm in the valley and moving
towards raising money in the next few months is looking for
Ruby on Rails programmers
Flash/Flex/CSS
Business Development Associates/Manager
to join the team.
If you know anyone who would like to get involved please send them along to me.
My contact: sumi007@gmail.com
add'l info:

http://www.nytimes.com/gwire/2009/07/14/14greenwire-exxon-si...

http://syntheticgenomics.com/what/renewablefuels.html
I prefer development driven testing or DDT. Don't write tests until the refactoring churn has settled down a bit. Then write unit tests to to document expected behavior and prevent anyone from breaking that code in the future.
>> we filled our red plastic cups to the brim with Bud or Miller Lite or Icehouse...

I would say that if that's the caliber of beer you're drinking - which makes up a significant portion of most people's college beer - then screw the head, and just fill that red cup up all the way. No one drinks Icehouse or Bud for the flavor; they drink it to get drunk. You could pour some Bud perfectly into a freshly cleaned glass, and it would still taste bad.

Once you've moved on to better-quality beer, then yes - bring on the head.
well for one, noone writes like they do in those reviews. You can taste the fakeness