skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think I've created 2 accounts there before to check it out but never used it again. So, if you're counting "active users" it's only 1,999,998

The app looks great, I just have no use for it. I'm just saying, call it like it is. This is an account-tally, not an "user" count.

"User" counts implies "use" - but this may not be the truth.
Let it suffice to say that I didn't intend to accuse you of misleading anybody.
UX is making me dumb
While impressive, the number is actuallu quite meaningless until they disclose how many of these become active users.
Good advice. This is probably what I'll end up doing.
So at Least Pierre Omidyar Is Trying to Change the World
What is so wrong about IIT circle?

No doubt, they are top brains of India. PERIOD
Do you not see how useful it would be for the client-side to be open source? Most of Dropbox's value lies in their servers, especially the web interface, but they've stumbled a bit on the client-side.
Drew and the crew deserve the success. I'm a very happy user. The file sync is near instantaneous. If I'm working on a document with someone, by the time they tell me they've saved it in the IM window, it's already transferring to my local dropbox.
Well, he was specifically asking what ELSE they can do to make money. The answer is nothing, for now, because they don't need to. He can't grasp the fact that they actually make enough money to employ 16 people.
Lol, it’s common knowledge that NSS labs testing is funded by microsoft... sadly, that’s the only way Microsoft can get ‘away’ in rankings of anything
http://www.thetechherald.com/article.php/200912/3268/Can-you...
Gangstas Don't Scale
Memphis Bleek Talks Timberland & Blueprint 3 Track Leaks | Hip Hop MVP
TDD is not a tool for preventing errors, although it has that effect. It's primarily a way to use the computer to help you design. It's an attention-helper.

Here are two things you have to do when programming: start with a problem that is somewhat vaguely specified and flesh it out, and break problems down into very tiny subproblems. We all have lots of ways of doing those things: talking with another programmer, writing things down in a notebook, writing a little bit of throwaway code to flesh out an idea or convince yourself that it works.

TDD gets the computer involved in that process. You can't solve the whole problem this minute, but you can bite off a piece. Saying, "I'll write a little unit test for this" means you're not just thinking, you're really seeing how your approach works. You're getting very clear. Now suppose you find that something is hard to test. This is often a sign that it's coupled to the rest of the system in a bad way. When you have a lot of tests, you can try out new ideas very quickly and see if you've overlooked something, or quickly get an idea of how much code needs to change to accommodate the new idea.

A big benefit of TDD is that it leads you to write much simpler code than you otherwise would. I don't expect my say-so to convince you of this; it's just something you have to play with and see for yourself. Many times, I've found that something like an if statement was all I actually needed to accomplish something that looked like it was going to be hard. I found the simple way because I wrote the test first. Sometimes, the resulting code doesn't feel like "I" wrote it. It has a strangely minimalist quality.

The biggest benefit of TDD, though, is as a tool for communication within a team. When pairing, the unit tests make very clear what the current problem is. When understanding someone else's code, the unit tests make very clear how you're supposed to call some code. When you modify someone else's complex code, well, that's when you really start to value unit tests. The unit tests store knowledge of the program in a way that humans can understand and the computer can verify.

Of course TDD does not solve all problems. It's just a neat tool, which often produces simpler code than you could write "by yourself". You should know what it's for, though. It's a design helper, not a QA department. If it's not helping you design better, then you shouldn't use it.
Anecdotally, I see FolderShare quite widely used. I have no idea how number of users compares to DropBox though.
Keep the username, implement a "display name" option so nobody sees your actual username, just the name you'd like to display - but everything else stays nice and connected.
Even more, remember when Flickr transitioned to all users having to log in via yahoo? A month after the drop date, no one really cared.
Every adult U.S. citizen is a part of the "political class". The greater the involvement, the more you reduce corruption and even out influence. There is no other way for a Democracy to work properly. This is not limited to the paltry amounts being thrown at entrepreneur programs, but to the larger amounts in things like Social Security, Defense spending, etc...

Although I'm not a fan of excess Defense spending, you would be well advised to remember that the Internet would not exist without it.
I wrote this short story because I enjoy the culture on Hacker News and because I was reading Maslow on Management. In the Maslow book, he was talking about the psychological importance of entrepreneurs to a society, and even recommended something like a monk's robe for entrepreneurs in order to endow them with a respect similar to doctors or other respected professions.

I find my best short stories are ones where I restrict myself to a theme or idea. In this case, the restricting theme was entrepreneurship.
Reminds me of Negroponte's observation (in his book Being Digital from sometime in the mid 1990s). At the time, digital television was hung up in debates about what high-definition standard to use. He said that for most people most of the time, standard def was fine and that in focusing on a level of "quality" that most people did not care about, a lot of other potentially interesting and useful things you could do in the same bandwidth were not being developed. At least, that's what I recall now. It's been at least 10 years since I looked at that book.
nearly 1 million, as it says in the article.
To each their own. If MS can revert their public image to a point where people will seriously consider them for a web development platform then hats off. Until then I doubt anyone in their right mind would trust the creator of Internet Explorer and IIS with anything web related.
I agree we should be able to lock the screen to portrait mode!
For sure, thanks for the names. I don't doubt that there are lots of great mid sized companies with large teams and revenue streams. I just get frustrated when 37S talks up their process and doesn't mention others that are doing likewise. I wouldn't be surprised if the bootstrapped companies were better deals overall for the founders, you just don't hear about them nearly as much as the vc backed ones.
We've been disappointed, in some way or another, with almost every one we've tried as well. Interestingly, one of our uses of Tokyo cabinet completely choked at somewhere between 60-70gb of data.

At the same time, these articles can be very valuable for us right now. Yes, this particular piece is a bit fluffy, but they invite skepticism and many of the feedback people give.

We've never used Voldemort in production, but in heavy load testing we were able to stuff in a few hundred million records with only three instances. Retrieval remained acceptably quick, even while the inserts where going on. However, when we looked it didn't support repartitioning/rebalancing of the data set. This may have changed.

Cassandra and MongoDB offer a great deal more functionality than, say, Voldemort or Tokyo. Cassandra seems like a really awesome choice, but is currently under heavy development.
Checkout http://www.arpnetworks.com for OpenBSD and FreeBSD VPS hosting. I'm a client and they've been quite good for me.
I can't help you with key-value stores, but document databases have been in production for years... under the name XML databases.
Here's a link to 5 people you may want to tell this to: http://www.federalreserve.gov/aboutthefed/default.htm

Its my understanding they are buying out "assets" from private institutions in the trillions $$ these days.
I would deride Frank Gehry. I've only been to one of his buildings, but it struck me as gratuitously zany: a very expensive and confusing way to do what could have been done better with a good ol' roughly rectangular box.

Many of those classic rectangularish buildings are beautiful. Their beauty is not the kind that stuns you for a week and then becomes annoying. It's the kind that is comfortable to be around, and you appreciate more and more as you spend years living with it.
For someone working regularly from multiple computers running both Windows and Linux, Dropbox has been a lifesaver. Good on them.
Sweet, I can't wait to change my display name to pg.
I'm pretty sure pg has changed people's usernames by request. Email him.
>Also, I don't understand why the HN community should view this as hostile

Building a company based on merit is admirable.

Building a company by getting the government to use its (not insignificant) power is not admirable (by the HN community).
I'm starting with a triangle and expanding random sides with triangles or trapezoids, filling in tightly acute angles as well.
No problem:
http://cronus.ws/~mta/fonts/FontCompareSource.nb

And for those without Mathematica:
http://cronus.ws/~mta/fonts/FontCompareSource.pdf
Actually I doubt I have. Usernames are built into all sorts of things.
Taking an improv class and going to improv workshops was and is still a stretch for my logical, dominant right-brained personality. I highly recommend it for anyone who wants to experience what it feels like to be spontaneous and/or funny (and sometimes both).

The exercises that you do literally are designed to get you comfortable with thinking on your feet. Starting with simple exercises like A-Z (conversation with someone, one statement ping pong 'A beautiful day', 'Because you got out of bed' etc.) and going all the way to 15-20 min improvised loosely-tied sketches.
You have gone past the point of no return, embrace babyshake, be proud of it. It has brought you to where you are today.
When you look back at school, do wish you'd done things you couldn't do now? Or just more of what you're doing now?

Python? You can learn that over the weekend while you're working an internship. You can learn to engineer real world systems by taking up said internship, or taking part in the school's RoboSoccer team (If you win much at all, you're going to have a giant codebase. When I was at CMU, we had over 200mb of C++ code which was a lot to look at if you were a student).

I'm not a fan of teaching "real-world" systems stuff because it's nonetheless easy to learn incrementally. If it weren't easy to learn incrementally, it wouldn't have become such a mainstream real world tool/system now would it?

It depresses me to say this as engineer but it's true. Real world systems are a pain in the ass, they take a lot of time, patience and experience to manage, but are they mentally challenging in a way like Lisp? Not so much.

Lisp is one of those things with a giant, intimidating barrier to entry-- the sort of things they need to teach in school.
If needed, I could help on bring up a site like news.ycombinator.com using Reddit opensource code. (like http://www.123emprender.com). Let me know!
I would attempt a "Fanboys" style trip to the datacenter that hosts ycombinator.com and change it yourself. I will go with you so I can add a search box. Along the way we can interrupt the diggnation and TWIT podcasts, and mock all the reddit readers.

It will be pretty sweet.
Yeah, I wish this were an OS-level toggle.
I never noticed that definition of 'beg' before! Thanks for that explanation. My world is a little more coherent now.
This recent effort of Lacy's is very irritating. What the hell even qualifies as 'trying to change the world'? Is there some threshold of number of individuals a service must be used by in order for it to be qualified as world changing? They just published an article saying Dropbox has reached 2 million users. Is that not enough? Whether your service is loved by 5 individuals or 500 million, you're changing the way a subset of the world behaves.

Let's even forget someone purposefully trying to change the world. Even if your goal is to score it big in the startup scene, your product is going to have to be somewhat useful and appealing to customers. You have to offer some sort of value. So indirectly, you're changing the world in that respect.
There is a subtle art to selecting the granularity of testing that takes a while to learn

This is very true. The only way to learn TDD is to overdo it. You need at least one project (maybe on your own time) where you over-test and find that your unit tests are making the code harder to modify, not easier. It's sort of like inheritance. You have to abuse it to learn that it's best used pretty lightly and obviously.

I knew even before I started that TDD is an aid to design, not a substitute for QA. Still, I got charged up with the idea that my tests were going to cover the entire space of all possible inputs. Bad idea. The resulting pain taught me a lot.
I hack on Arora a cross platform WebKit based web browser. And your right, I am having a blast. I have even contributed to Chromium so I know what I am up against :) Knowing that they have a team of really smart people working full time and Arora is a few devs in their free time really does make me think about what is important.

I did realize one thing though. While Chrome can never ship with adblock, Arora can, and 0.10.0 out next week will ship with it. :D
This is slightly offtopic, but the first time I saw Kobe Bryant play (in the McDonalds High School All-American Game) he wore a shirt under his jersey with one long sleeve, one no sleeve. Despite how you feel about him personally he is definitely his own person. This story seems to validate the concept that individuals can and should do things that make them...individuals...including wearing shirts with one short and one long sleeve.

:)
(Just) Curios why you point out the technical angle of their achievement but don't mention aferdowsi. Doesn't he deserve any credit as the CTO?
37Signals Valuation Tops $100 Billion (sarcastic write up)
How so? It's a folder that syncs. I can't think of how to improve that. Perhaps add versioning? But that's not exactly an essential.
I've got a VPS with prgmr now and whilst it's too early in the piece for me to share any meaningful opinion, I will say that I think it's quite likely they represent genuine value for money. Feel free to email me (see profile) in a month or so if you'd like a more in depth review.
Do you have a webpage? Pictures? Any technical details?

I actually designed this system decades ago

Really?
More obvious rebuttal: IIT is merely a mark that you were smart at a certain age. When investing in startups you don't want to disregard what they did since or, god forbid, exclude older people entirely.

Focussing on IITians at any age is like leaving stale comments scattered in a codebase and being misled by them.

-

The less obvious rebuttal: Getting into the IITs marks one as smart, but not making it doesn't necessarily mark one as inferior.

In my experience those who rank 1-50 are in a stratospheric league of their own. But choosing between ranks 1500+ and the best of other indian colleges (who often didn't pass the IIT tests) is a crap shoot. There's just too many deserving students for the IITs to accomodate.

(Full disclosure: I prepared for the IITs for two years, didn't make it. It was a long time ago, but perhaps I still bear the scars.)
Yes. I like this option. I would just assign my real name as my display name instead, and all my URLs would remain the same.
A few things. First, the "shoot the messenger" reply was inevitable, but doesn't really detract from my point that these types of blog posts trumpeting features and hype are not worthwhile. We will report this as a bug if and when we have a useful bug report to submit. As of right now we don't.

Second, we use PostgreSQL for our RDMBSes -- I can't really say we've tried using it with the same use cases we'd be using for our K-V store and if it would work. We're talking tens of millions to hundreds of millions of HTML documents keyed by URL, and I'm skeptical the performance we'd get would be close to the 1000-10000 tps we experience with tokyo. Would be a good experiment, though!
(0 unread) Yahoo Mail, reymartacero123
Clicked through expecting a Perl tutorial. Title does not deliver.
The sad thing is that I have seen this all in the past as a single image that shows up on reddit every once in a while. Turning into a flash pos just wastes my bandwidth.
If my imprecision bothers you, feel free to s/con game/shell game/.

Your imprecision, as you call it, is that you are associating Dropbox saying they're working on an API with a shady person trying to steal your money. Unless you've paid them for an API that you didn't receive, they haven't conned you.

I don't think you know what the value of free and open software is.

I'll hazard a guess: It's free, and also anybody's able to improve it if they want. I've only got five years' experience with open source, though, so perhaps I'm still an amateur at this.

To clarify one other point. Ubuntu has already reverse-engineered Dropbox (as Ubuntu One), so if Dropbox's profit relies on their having the sole access to the magic formula, it's already too late. Anything can be (and generally will be) reverse engineered. I don't think that closing off the source is a royal road to success.

So they use Dropbox's exact code? Or are you saying that they saw what Dropbox did and decided to copy it? Because that's not reverse engineering.

Funny story: Once upon a time I thought that open source would lead to everything getting better. I thought Firefox, for instance, would just continue to be an unstoppable beast because, after all, anybody who wanted to could make it do anything any other browser did. Then I realized Firefox was slow and ugly on the Mac, moved to the closed-source Safari, and enjoy its incredibly sleek design. It was around the time I stopped using Ubuntu because I realized the closed-source OS X was better. Now that Windows 7 is spreading, I think Ubuntu's dropped to my third-favorite OS.

The problem with your line of thinking is that open source doesn't pay. The best people in certain fields, meanwhile, only work for money, and occasionally only for large gobs of money. That includes interface designers, and a lot of the people who work on fixing the ugly problems that nobody really likes working on. So open source's downfall is that it can't compete with the quality and focus of closed-source. It's the problem with democracy, so to speak.

I like open source for some things. I still haven't found an open-source application that's as cutting-edge as its closed equivalents. Even Quicksilver left me dissatisfied until I discovered the Google-sponsored Quick Search Box.
Parent has the worst vote count/relevance score I've ever seen. JWZ didn't write Netscape 4.
Point well taken: School is a time to learn things that the practical world won't pressure you to learn, and you will learn the practical stuff once you're hired.

But. I have seen so many college graduates, who've spent four years taking classes and passing exams, who still can't program. Programming is a craft. You learn it mostly by writing real code. If you lack the craft knowledge, the deep, theoretical insights are just words.
New Picasa Version Has Name Tags and Face Recognition
They do, just not often.
AP teaches what a plurality of colleges teach. Ten years ago, most colleges taught C/C++, and so did AP; when the balance switched to Java, AP switched as well.

I heard earlier today that CMU will be switching its three basic programming courses from Java and C to Python within a few years (and changing its mid-level algorithms course from Java to ML). With CMU and MIT both teaching Python, you can bet a cascade of lower-tier CS departments will follow, and then AP will as well.
Untrue, they were original partners. Paul is the public face.
I wasn't attempting to dole out credit. I was highlighting the fact that dhouston was brave enough to start DropBox in the face of circumstances that would probably have deterred many of us.

The whole team deserves a ton of credit for what they've accomplished.
I concur wholeheartedly
Would a beginner be able to pick up this book easily?
Would someone who knows of/about functional languages but not used them be able to pick up this book easily?
Never been interested in learning lisp but from the comments and the table of contents of the book I may give it a try.
Ask HN: How do you deal with customer support requests?
We have a location-base iPhone game that has been growing rapidly since we made it free. However, with the growth comes an increase in support emails. Currently it is just two founders (one technical, one business). We both try to share the load, but it is difficult to not step on each other's toes.

Assuming that you had to have incoming requests come in to an email address, how do you handle them?
Have you considered how blocking ads is bad for the way online services are currently monetized? I'd rather have advertisers pay for my services than have to pay for it directly. If you don't like that trade-off, why not ask sites you use to offer an ad-free paid version? It sounds like you're trying to get the best of both worlds, and it isn't sustainable.
Jonathan Zittrain: The web as random acts of kindness
The one thing I want is to be able to turn certain folders off/on depending on the machine.
Remember this experience the next time you have to choose a username. When I worked for Kaplan, I scheduled teachers and tutors, and I once had to tell a student that the person most directly responsible for her success on the LSAT could be reached at drmonkeystud@[schoolname].edu (changed to protect the innocent)

I'm really boring when it comes to usernames, opting for the first initial, last name, and a number at the end just in case it's taken. You won't likely grow tired of it, and there's less explaining to do.
Boiled Frogs and the Long Arc of History
Twisted author's reaction to Diesel
The best sf story I've run into combining the two is John Varley's Press Enter. Highly recommended.
Yes, but you have to work out how. It is the final test of HN.
To be fair, the guy works on aging research. Someone who works on aging research isn't likely to say "Aging research doesn't really need any more money."
With a VC you get a rolodex, which includes press contacts. Maybe there is something to that whole "you hear more about VC backed companies" thing.
I don't disagree with your conclusions; I just think that arguing the case in the way that you are makes your point of view irrelevant.
Is it the only way they are doing money? I found suspicious that it can be the only way for DropBox to make money. Do you have any statistic about how much user does pay to have an account?
Text messages are very very cheap everywhere except in the US. In the US it looks like the phone companies have created a cartel to make a ton of money from text messages.

Text messages are carried in the control signal in a wireless system. Ie amount of actual communication bandwidth used by a text = 0! Amazing huh?

I dont understand why no one in the US says anything about this. I think the charges from SMS amount to well over 1 billion dollars for each carrier per year.
It’s All Algorithms, Algorithms and Algorithms
do not follow in the footsteps of the sages, seek what they sought.
Were it only a logo change, I'd say much ado about nothing. It's the watermark that's raising hackles. TC piece misses this entirely. See here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/shellen/3951018593/
With Snow Leopard I'd say just use Spotlight. Its just as fast as QS, Lunchbar, or Google QSB for me. Since its built in and already running why bother using anything else? Of course I use it just to search and launch apps and files.