skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's a great idea in theory, but I don't think that the execution would go too well. IMHO, startup founders and hackerspace users have much different requirements for the space. If I'm working on a startup, I'd be coming to the space when I need to get work done, first and foremost.

That's very different from the hackerspace environment, which is largely a project space. You don't know what will be worked on there or when; it might just be guys hacking code, maybe a little soldering, but maybe not. Someone might start up a robotics project; now you'll have welding / metalwork noise going on. To get an idea of how widely hackerspace projects can range, check out our project list: http://wiki.freesideatlanta.org/project-list.

The only way I could see this working is if you severely limit the type of activities that can be done in the hackerspace. But if you do this, I'm not sure you'd get enough support for it to be sustainable.

EDIT: missed the fact that this is for hardware startups. In that case, I could see this working if the startups / hackers have separate workspaces as well. That way, you wouldn't have to worry about separate hours.
I prefer swapping Caps and Ctrl. I use Ctrl-[ instead of hitting Esc. It's an extra button press, but Ctrl is a more generally useful key (screen, C-c, etc.) in that location.
where did I say I was forcing it on anyone?
This sounds like something like we'd complain about if Microsoft did it.
AppEngine is about scalability, not performance. You shouldn't care if a single hit on an AppEngine app takes 2 or 4 times as long as a single hit on your dedicated sever; the point is that when there are zillions of hits, your server will be on fire while AppEngine will be taking about as long as it did for that first hit.

Of course, this scalability is not without cost. Most web apps don't need this kind of scalability, so the development tradeoffs (like the chance of datastore operations failing, or the inability to wrap transactions around arbitrary sets of data operations) may be too much trouble.

AppEngine isn't for all web apps, and many web apps would be very painful to shoehorn onto AppEngine. Still, if you want to build your app so it scales like Google's own apps scale, AppEngine can help get you there.
Most web designers don't grok <your_favorite_langauages>, but some limited template languages/tags. A web framework without template doesn't scale in terms of development resource unless you figure out a way to automatically translate a template delivered by a designer to your Smalltalk code.
These are fair concerns. I think they can be engineered around, however.

There would be lockers available, as well as secured office space. Also, the office workers wouldn't have to leave by 5pm, it would just become more crowded. There would need to be an efficient registration system to make sure the shared resources were fairly allocated in these busy times.
The Linux kernel is monolithic, yet it provably does not "need to be developed by a single party" given the Linux development model - a lot of features are added in isolation by third parties and only added to mainline when they are mature and have a userbase.

Nor does the Linux kernel need to be recompiled to turn on/off features - most features can be turned on/off via /proc or sysctl or by loading / unloading modules.

As for the unnecessary dependencies, is this a problem in real life for Linux? No. Modules tend to depend on well defined kernel interfaces.
Ever wondered why almost all of Win32 API is __stdcall ? :)
Replace all conditionals with polymorphism:

class TrueClass:
def if(then, else):
then.call()

class FalseClass:
def if(then,else):
else.call()

condition = true
condition.if({print "true"}, {print "false"})
> I would think that we'd be too afraid to try something like that during the cold war in fear of starting a legitimate war.

It certainly didn't sound that way from the speeches of B-rate actor you had in charge of your military at the time.
I would imagine that some companies would start in the open hacker space with a project and a locker and then grow into a closed office space/work-space. Some others might already need their own space, but would just like to go down to the hackerspace and occasionally borrow/use equipment. Others might have a workshop and use the space as an ancillary lab.

I don't see why we couldn't accomodate all of those use-cases. The noise is an issue, but hopefully we could have some areas that are far enough away/sufficiently insulated from the heavy equipment/socializing to be relatively quiet.
I guess I see CS theory encompassing PL theory - not that that's correct.
Yes, there are big plans for Windows Mobile 7.

No, I will not tell you about them.

Microsoft is a big beast to move, but once it gains momentum you should watch out. It's certainly not going to be tomorrow, but Windows Mobile will be competitive with iPhone eventually.
@clarencewenham, you should have a nice blog and move your content there. Doesn't matter whether you update it frequently or not.
To make it worse... my Iphone now has 'Coma Modes'. This is a GREAT toy...but a horrible phone. My Nokia might have had only snake, but it NEVER dropped a call.
I think you should probably contact #VHS to see if they are interested, what they have learned (they are currently running and in the black), and to gauge interest.

http://vancouver.hackspace.ca/doku.php

In short, there seems to be plenty of interest, but other projects like Workspace have failed by over-reaching their targets.
> If you generate enough radiation you can essentially guarantee you wipe out your enemy by wiping out the majority of life on Earth.

The point of Perimeter in confrontation with the USA was to punish the USA, not to wipe the life off Earth.
What I Learned From My Startup Failing
VS Ramachandran on Your Mind
The official post from YouTube:
http://youtube-global.blogspot.com/2009/09/five-stars-domina...
We just went through a lot of these questions ourself while founding Baltimore Node (http://www.baltimorenode.org) which is now a small hackerspace in Baltimore.

From what I am hearing from you I think what you want to do is three fold: (1) have a workshop for people to work in, (2) have a coworking facility (office space) and (3) to have a hackerspace.

The first one requires space and expensive tools.

The second requires a comfortable office space to work in.

The third requires a solid community that perceives the value of sharing ideas and having a place exclusively for workshops.

I'm not going to say that serving all three goals is not possible but as we explored them we found that without a donation of space and/or serious capital investment the first two would be somewhat difficult.

We opted to go with the third option and stick to it (some tools in the space though) and we are now profitable with 19 members at a $50 a month membership fee. I think the real benefit to a hackerspace is being part of a community that is about encouragment, sharing and doing.

It's been a blast so far and I am really glad to be part of this crew, I strongly recommend if anything that you try to establish a simple non-profit hackerspace to encourage general hackery.

Also, not sure why this hasn't come up yet, http://hackerspaces.org
I'm aware you didn't say don't build your network (you didn't specifically point to doing so, but it's not my intention to call you out for not doing so). I also like the idea of a non-technical person getting their feet wet as to shake the fear of technology. However, there is quite a difference between getting your feet wet and living in the ocean.

I also couldn't disagree more about them learning to code equates to talking the same language. That's what I call "smart enough to be dangerous". It gives them a false sense of security and can lead to them making decisions up the business chain without consulting the development team because they now "speak our language".

A non-technical person who doesn't have a true desire to become a developer shouldn't be dictating directly to a development team. That's why you have TPMs and Business Analysts (in larger companies) and in smaller teams hopefully you're using some sort of Agile process whereby business desires (stories) are translated into tasks for the dev team.
Windows Mobile is the prevalent operating system on phones

If you work for Microsoft, you may find comfort in that fact, but for everyone else out there, I wouldn't bet on Windows Mobile dominance based on what's happening with the iPhone (followed long-term by Android).

Kind of like GM selling SUVs until last year...
I tried simple tagging of interests, favorite activities, books, etc. From that, I tried for find clustered similarity. It may have worked -- if i had any users.
But this doesn't imply that Windows "lost", does it?
Zendesk adds integration to Basecamp
> certifications are a base level of competence for a job

Unfortunately some of the certified people I've met have been so genuinely awful that I don't think you can even claim that. I tend to be with the article author on this one - people tend to get certified because they are unable to compete in other ways and want to bolster their resume.
What's it like being wrong so frequently, as you seem to be on HN:

http://www.google.com/search?q=windows+mobile+7&ie=UTF-8...
An exercise from the essay:

...And present union leaders probably would rise to the occasion if necessary. People tend to; I'm skeptical about the idea of "the greatest generation." [2]

Footnote:

[2] Oops, offended another constituency. Exercise for the reader: rephrase that thought to please the same people the first version would offend.

Please submit your solutions below.
As someone who does a lot of work in App Engine, my only gripe at the moment is that you can't delete an app once you create it. It exists forever.
I know a fever of ~40.5 or 105 when taken orally is a medical emergency, you shouldn't even waste time calling anyone before sticking your kid in a car hugging every icepack you've got, because the problem won't be brain damage it'll be death. A fever over 41/106 when taken anally is hyperthermia and can lead to the rapid breakdown of cells (likely the girl's brother got brain damage either through braincell death if he had a severe fever, or his fever was associated with swelling of the brain, which usually shows with uncommonly intense headaches/migraines).

From what I remember, if your kids fever ever gets over 39/100.4 (obviously if they're a baby or infant you should call your own doctor for any fever and follow their orders) you should call your family doctor, keep them cool (cold clothes and such, nothing severe) to keep them cool and do what the doctor says. Over 40/104 (and this is what my mum did to me, she's a nurse) she kept a cold bath and had me sit in it for 5 minutes or so, before laying down in bed with cold clothes and IIRC sometimes even ice packs to keep the fever dipping under the 40's. Over night my fever broke and stayed below 40 and my family doctor said I'd be fine. She even said, the only reason she kept me out of hospital was because doctors treat a fever with everything but cold until it's a last resort. I wasn't a particularly happy kid having been dunked in a cold bath all night, but I'd certainly have been more uncomfortable for a lot longer in hospital, but I had a nurse with over 20 years of experience (a considerable amount more experience than the junior doctors they leave on staff at 3am).

Personally I believe, a paediatrician shouldn't have got into the job if he didn't expect panicked phone calls all hours of the night. So anyone with a half-decent paediatrician and concerns, I'd say call away. The bastards get paid way too much and if they don't want to deal with their patients complaining they should have become a mortician.
Hah. F*ck me. That is roughly the exact implementation of my project from two years ago (even down to the metro area concept). Difference being their site seems to be successful.
I'm reminded of an Arthur C. Clarke story, "The Last Command", where the letter orders the men to... surrender to the enemy; since deterrence has already failed.
Thanks. I was a bit skeptical, but thats an interesting read.
Details of Galactic Core Revealed
Non technical tips to deliver great software
Well they're a bunch of pansies, couldn't build a real doomsday device(!)
Code bloat?  Try web bloat ...
A recent article submitted here to HN caused my browser to crash. (Don't ask) As a result I did this:

curl "http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=837790" | grep -o "http[^\"]*" | grep wsj

and hence this:

curl "http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125354895752528171.html#mod=WSJ_hps_sections_smallbusiness" | less

I could then read the text. but it struck me just how much other crap there was, so I save the text:

curl "http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125354895752528171.html#mod=WSJ_hps_sections_smallbusiness" > wsj0

and edited out everything except the byline, text, and legal phrasing at the end. I stored the result in file wsj1.

The result:

# ll wsj?

-rw-r--r-- 1 RiderOfGiraffes users 126701 2009-09-22 21:41 wsj0
-rw-r--r-- 1 RiderOfGiraffes users 5042 2009-09-22 21:44 wsj1

Yup. 5K of text in 125K of page.

I'm glad I don't use dialup anymore.

And the article wasn't worth reading anyway.
I really don't see why, as the article claims, the fact that opinions are subjective and everyone has a different one makes the 1-5 star rating any more useless than a thumbs up/thumbs down/do nothing or a favorite/not favorite rating. Those are subjective and different for everyone as well, and the idea is that it averages out over lots of people.

No, the problem is that people can't be bothered to spend time to think about just how much they like something, compared to everything else, and that it can become uncomfortable to try and do that because you realize that your relative liking may not be neither constant nor consistent, and trying to make it so could be a lot of work (I like A a lot, but B even more... hey, C is really cool! But some things about A are better than C... now what?).
I'm skeptical that some groups of people are inherently braver, smarter, or harder working than others.
Thanks for responding. It's great to hear from someone who has some first hand experience with this process. It looks like you are running a cool organization over there.

Hackerspaces.org has been a helpful resource for me as I was researching this over the last week. I encourage anyone else who is interested in it to check out some of their awesome projects to see what is possible.

My goal would be to have a serious capital injection to start this off. I don't know where it is going to come from, but I am seriously looking into government grants. I don't know what kind of strings will come attached yet, and it sickens my inner objectivist, but it seems like a great match for this kind of organization. BC happens to have a whole range of accessible grants, from the arts to small business to tech. Maybe it will be too much hassle, but it solves the problem of seed capital.
Yeah. thing is, I've not seen a good integration between forms and email. I bet the hard part isn't implementing; it's figuring out what a good implementation is. Ultimately, you'd want the email interface to look like an email list, and the web form to look like a web form, but you'd want the content on both, and I'm not sure what the best way to do that is.
I've never met Arrington, so whether he's nice or not doesn't really apply to me. I also don't own a startup, so there's no conflict there. My personal beef is that TechCrunch is a 'serious journalistic entity' when they get documents leaked to them, but the second people start trying to hold them to the standard of real journalism suddenly it a blog. It's difficult to pinpoint, but there's something two-faced about TechCrunch that I don't like. It's some combination of the sensationalism, exaggeration, and in some cases outright fabrication that really get to me. Since Arrington is the founder and figurehead of TechCrunch, my feelings about the blog naturally extend to him.

The fact that page views and advertising revenue are the ultimate goals is fine. I applaud TechCrunch and Arrington for being successful. That doesn't mean I have to like their methods. Google was successful through technical merit. They never did anything flashy and eventually won because they were better. I'd like to see a startup blog succeed because of journalistic merit, instead of link-bait headlines and baseless speculation. TechCrunch has its gems to be sure, but there's too much garbage there for me.

An example for your consideration:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/11/22/the-secret-strategies-b...

For those too lazy to read, it's an article about making viral videos. Some choice advice: "Content is NOT King, Make it short, Make it shocking, Use fake headlines, Appeal to sex". It also goes on to tell you how to spam yourself to the Most Viewed page on Youtube. Arrington is the founder and an editor, so either himself or someone he appointed approved this article for publication. That's why I don't like Arrington.

Perhaps the reason why people don't hate Paul like they hate Arrington is because Paul has produced things of value? Hell, having the PDF of On Lisp online available for free is more valuable than the aggregate of TechCrunch's entire publication history.

EDIT: Hate is a strong word. If you hate anyone over the internet for any reason, that's pretty stupid. Dislike is what I was getting at.
It just sounds like too many rules and regulations to be useful.
I agree. Is seems a bit underhanded that the journalist used her job to punish the cell phone company she's angry at. If she really wants to get back at them, she needs to prove her case with hard data and not circumstantial evidence.
I'd look to see where built in audiences exist. Are their any congruent groups in the area that you could associate with? Then you have speakers, experts possibly built in.

Anything to get you starting higher than the ground floor would be ideal
no no, if Microsoft had the browser, that passes Acid and Google had some broken mess you can't even render a diagonal line with, but somehow the vast majority of clueless users would use the Google Browser,.. then.. that would be a perfectly fine move of Microsoft.
I dislike the blog format, I've tried it several times and it doesn't work for me. I found that I prefer the Wiki style where you focus on a TOC. Hopefully Google will figure out how to implement RSS for GSites one day.
In adding to contacting VHS (dedicated Vancouver hackspace), as suggested by Rantenki, I've heard that Bootup Labs (Boris Mann and co.) are looking for funding for a startup/coworking space (to substitute for the now defunct Workspace). Maybe you can join forces.
And present union leaders probably would rise to the occasion if necessary. People tend to; all generations have the potential to be as great as the (Greatest Generation, GI Generation) when faced with sufficient external challenges.
Techshop does a killer job with their classes. I think that's an essential part of making this thing self-sustaining.
Naked mole rats never get cancer
I'm fairly sure it's the comment thread that I started (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=831461) which set off this essay, so I guess I'm the archetype of "ordinarily calm people who go berserk when [Arrington's] name comes up in comment threads". But if your explanation of my psychology is correct, then why don't I go berserk at you as well? I've disagreed with a few of your essays, and by and large pointed out those disagreements in these comment threads, but I've never disagreed violently with any of them. My beef with Arrington is that he writes a gossip tabloid. Nothing more, nothing less.
Dynamic dispatch is not syntactic sugar for a if-cascade. It is normaly implemented via vtables. If you try to do this in a language without polymorphism (e.g. C) you have to do this by hand and keep track of your vtable layout (third function pointer is 'evaluate' ...). Your example is nice to describe the effect of dynamic dispatch, but misleading about the mechanism.

Polymorphism is the core of OOP, which consequently means that Haskell is OO.
I question the benchmarks that are claimed for a single server. 10 million hits per day? Stackoverflow is just approaching 1 million hits and they've just recently gone to 2 web servers. Never mind the fact that the DB is also on a different server.

The fact is that my argument makes as much sense as author's does. It all depends on what your server is doing.
Just what nobody needed!
Having "xx% liked this video" under each video would be more useful and meaningful.

BTW, they really should have used a histogram here.
it's only using Chrome's engine if there is a explicit meta tag on the site, so all old IE6 only internal webapps will be fine.
It was worth the repost.

I don't understand sites that have serious length limitations on passwords. I recall Amex had an 8 character limit last year when I had an account with them.

Passphrases + randomly generated passwords via KeePass or Password Safe is the way I go.
HECK YES. A cowork for hackers? YESS
Internet powered rapid microcontroller development
Window is bundled with flash. So is Mac OS X. That's why it's so prevalent. So most people never have to actually install flash.

I don't see any reason to believe this particular plugin will take a different trajectory than Gears, which has almost no adoption.
Good Dinosaur:  Epiphany
Great guy. Gotta get his book
"Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind"
I don't think the site is very successful. I tried it once, and there was never anyone else in my area, which is right in the middle of one of their metro areas. They run OKCupid as well, and I'm sure CBD would be more popular (and therefore useful) if they advertised it on the site like they did at the very beginning.
Actually, I remember reading a post around the Netflix prize that was basically saying that it wasn't important to know what people exactly thought 2, 3, 4... stars meant for them, because overall, it was still enough to obtain the data and rating relevant to your point-of-view.
Yes, that's what I meant. What a great way to embarrass myself mixing that up.
I commented on the article:

"Five start systems are supposed to work on the basic idea that the one and five votes will average out to a value somewhere in the middle. In this way the two, three, and four star ratings are averages based on the ratio of one star votes to five star votes."

However, that doesn't always work. People seem to be lazy and they don't want to judge the comparative value of different items.
Thanks. They're on my 'to contact' list. Hell, maybe they'd even want to move to an area with less junkies. They seem to have a great community, but they have a terrible address.

I really like their 'principles' page. I think that's important to have up in writing, publicly, and not fixed in stone.

Their insistence on GPL'ing everything might be an issue. I would hope that most projects would be GPL'ed, but it would definitely limit the business potential having it mandated.
Isn't a valid part of "supporting standards" declining to support what ignores standards?
Ray Kurzweil - Immortality Only 20 Years Away
Google posted a tech talk about this a while ago: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4F72VULWFvc
which is more comprehensive than the posted article.
... Or that most worms are written by Microsoft?