skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thanks for the comments.

I didn't really mean to focus hype on the TC50 conference. Rather, I think it makes an interesting story about trying to get in to a decent product launch conference - we get told by the main main we've got 80% chance getting in [yah!], we don't get in [boo!], we get email saying 'actually you are in' [yah!], but then we realise we can't do it [boo!]. I'd hope it's at least vaguely interesting, regardless of the conference.

I agree there is a danger of getting caught up in the TechCrunch hype bubble, just as there is in getting caught up in the Y Combinator programme hype. As has been pointed out, the reality is that 99.9%+ of successful web startups have nothing to do with TC50 or YC. Nevertheless TC (just as YC) have had some notable successes that fuel the hype - just look at Mint (TC40 2007 winner) being acquired today.

I'd say that in terms of web product launch conferences, TC50 is about as good and prestigious an opportunity you can get. However after that it is unlikely I would have a need to attend again - it's not the sort of conference where you sell your service.

Part of the reality check we took in saying "no" to this opportunity was to remind ourselves that it is "just a conference" - it's not the be all and end all. It won't break us not to attend. I think that shows that we were able to resist the hype. As is said below - we want to do things right - not do something for the sake of it.

wrt to DemoPit - according to the information we received, the DemoPit was only for the TC50 semi-finalist companies. I haven't seen any mention of being able to buy your way in otherwise. That said, if you did want to do DemoPit you had to pay a few thousand dollars. In that regard it becomes just a regular exhibition. We were offered a free DemoPit place just in case we weren't actually needed on the stage.
English accents and their implications for spelling reform
(Encoded with rot13.)

Yvtug ebcr 1 ng bar raq, naq ebcr 2 ng obgu raqf. Nsgre guvegl zvahgrf, ebcr 1 jvyy ohea bhg. Gura, yvtug gur bgure raq bs ebcr 2. Ebcr 2 oheaf bhg svsgrra zvahgrf yngre.
The Machine Stops
Anybody who uses the Internet should read E.M. Forster's The Machine Stops. It is a chilling, short story masterpiece about the role of technology in our lives. Written in 1909, it's as relevant today as the day it was published. Forster has several prescient notions including instant messages (email!) and cinematophoes (machines that project visual images).
REST-*
This is about a year old, so what has happened in the meantime?
lots of people are going to become unemployed

Lots of people becoming unemployed from agriculture practically defines development.

There is another human suffering tradeoff: poor people will be able to eat meat on a regular basis. For many people, this is actually one of the defining things that makes them un-poor. It is routinely advanced as one of the "We've made it, guys!" signs for Japan in the post-war era, for example. (The truly poor can then transition to the health problems of the rich: obesity caused by overconsumption of cheap tasty food. See the lower socioeconomic strata in the US, who on a global scale are so un-poor it hurts my head to see the two compared with each other.)
> I see now that the author is saying that there are no significant applications for end-users written in Perl, which is certainly true.

Not really; I meant that I haven't heard of very many. The HN title is excessively misleading.

> I attribute that in part to the difficulty of distributing a reasonably small installer package for a GUI application written in Perl.

I agree with that.
Ask HN: How to made a Windows-tied library cross-platform?
Our main language (Delphi) will be, most probably, cross-platform in its next version.

While writing a cross-compiler isn't a thing which interests us very much now, porting a library which was/is Windows-tied to multiple platforms, /certainly/ does.

You can think, for example at VCL (Delphi's standard library). While it was designed for Windows only, it has value in it, and, of course, there are huge codebases which depend on it.

The question is: Which would be the best approach to made an application / library cross-platform aware ensuring a smooth conversion / upgrade path (as much as possible of course)?

I stress it again, we are not interested which is the best way to do cross-platform development only (there were questions on this theme). We are interested also in yet another requirement: The old code base / installations management.

PS: Experiences and/or methodologies from similar situations with other languages (eg. C/C++) which are regarded as standard practices are welcomed.

Thanks in advance.
Clojure - runs on the JVM, is a Lisp, strong concurrency support.
From the previously dormant http://twitter.com/enterprisey
Industrial meat production is ecologically unsustainable. Replacing cows, pigs and chickens with these soulless flesh-trilobites would do nothing to solve the real problem: there are billions of people mainly in Asia aspiring for the Western lifestyle, and the Earth can't support it. (Sounds like a recipe for global war.)

In the Roman era, clothes were washed with human urine. Fortunately modern detergents are not merely synthetic urine... Similarly, we need to give up on the notion of somehow producing indistinguishable ersatz-meat, and instead invent something fundamentally better.

(Personally I think the Chinese already did it a thousand years ago with the invention of tofu, but I know most people don't agree.)
Visit http://www.armadilloaerospace.com for the project blog - goes back a few years, and covers a huge amount of hands on practical experience with materials, propellant, components, control systems etc.

It's been a bit quiet lately - I assume due to this event.
> At present consumption rates, know reserves will last less than 50 years

But those reserves are growing not shrinking over time. In the 1950s there was only 10 years of known reserves. We need to start worrying when the known reserves start getting smaller, rather than growing over time.

http://www.scdigest.com/images/misc/World-Oil-Reserves_web_0...

http://www.cheaperpetrolparty.com/Images/World%20Crude%20Oil...

http://www.theoildrum.com/uploads/12/opec_reserve_growth.gif

> Markets are slow to transfer information to economic actors when conditions change drastically

Hardly. Prices rise and fall in minutes when there's new information.

Also if the 20th century has taught us anything it's that we need to keep politicans as far away from resource development as possible,
The problem is that the article portrays "lightweight" as "being small in size". Which several others have pointed out here already.
If my site turns out successful, I fully intend on purchasing this facility. If you still want to go halvsies at that point, we can talk about it =)
Good point.

And a third benefit I didn't think of in the first place: third-world governments not only often misprice water, but also can't effectively enforce water access rights --- which often leads to violent conflict (between tribes with different modes of production, etc). Shifting food production towards richer economies would reduce the strain on water resources in the third world.
Oil is a convenient, efficient storage mechanism for energy, and there's a vast existing "user base" or machinery that runs on oil. If we use non-oil energy to provide heat and light in order to "grow" oil via some organic process we could still be ahead.
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I came in expecting to suggest Io, but it looks like somebody picked it. Seems like the people in your course have a genuine interest in programming, the same can't be said about most of the people in my courses.

Try something like K, a very terse APL descendant with no loops. KDB is built on top of it, and from what I'm told there are only a few programmers who actively use it and they make some good money. The Kx Systems web site doesn't have much to offer, but no stinking loops (http://www.nsl.com/) will point you to all the stuff you need to find.
Being An Influential Person - 6 HUGE Pointers
Cloudkick’s (YC W09) simple cloud management gets $750K
Python Community in Anguish, Pain, Despair Over Web Server
You can learn also Delphi.
Is covers all the ranges from very high-level till machine language. Also, it has a much cleaner syntax vs C, you can also have a real job with it (unlike Haskell), and is has a huge community from where to learn from.

Drawbacks are: not so popular compared with C (but waaaay more popular compared with Haskell), not so functional compared with Haskell. Far better compared with both ones WRT web development (there's a very powerful library shipped OOTB for this) - especially when it comes to manage complex session states. OTOH, isn't really a web tool, it's rather a high-performance RAD environment with main focus on native (compiled) code and DB development. Other drawbacks are:
- you must know that you should ask the community where to find good libraries and examples
- the free edition (Turbo) is outdated. But there are trials.
One more thing to add: NEVER underestimate the importance of body language. Think Brad Pitt in Fight Club. Think George Clooney in the Oceans movies... be a force when you walk into a room.
Having worked as a trauma nurse for years, I really can't believe that the entire hospital staff was conspiring to keep him there because he had good insurance. More often than not, we are kept entirely in the dark about people's insurance.

They may well have had a poor bedside manner, and they may well have tried to pressure him into having a surgery they thought necessary, but doctors disagree with treatment methods all the time. That doesn't mean that they were necessarily evil in disagreeing with the doctor in Boston.

It's also fairly standard practice for insurance companies to decline to pay a patient's hospital bill if that patient signs out against medical advice. So, if they said that he would have to pay out of pocket, they may well have been telling the truth. If he was signing out against medical advice, he may well have been responsible for the entire transfer bill, which would likely have been in the tens of thousands of dollars.

Also, if the hospital was the closest qualified trauma center, and if it was deemed by the Attending Neurosurgeon that he have surgery soon or risk permanent paralysis, it's understandable that they would have been reluctant to transfer the patient. And, if he was refusing emergency back surgery and if he was demanding transfer, he may well have been risking permantent paralysis as well as being financially liable for the hospitalization.
An airlift from the scene of an accident is different than an air transport from one qualified trauma center to another per patient's request.
Future generations will think us barbaric for killing other sentient life.

I think that it is more likely they'll look at us with bemused semi-contempt, much like we currently look almost all practices rendered economically irrelevant with the exception of a very few (slavery, child labor, etc).

"Man, that sure must have sucked back when they had to grow a whole darn cow just to have some beef to eat. Can you imagine how inefficient that is? Heck, the cow bits would be so valuable, you'd probably actually save the ones you didn't eat, so that you could eat them later! Imagine how absurd that would be!"

(If this dialogue strikes you as unlikely, consider what you would say to any friend who, on deciding they were done drinking from a glass of water, put a saran wrap cover on the top of the cup and put it in the fridge "so I can drink it for leftovers tomorrow". Local caching of water made plenty of sense up until quite recently, historically speaking.)
Are you searching the full Twitter feed?

Do you have an agreement with Twitter or is your service limited by the API request limits?
TippingPoint IPS struggles in new security tests
I'd eat tofu if they got the keto-estrogen out. I'm not eating something that will make me androgynous.
You could take a look at nearlyfreespeech.net . It is a pre-paid service for technical users similarly to yours and it has quite usable interface.
Using BeOS was extremely pleasant due to its multitasking prowess, which really had to be experienced to understand how much better it was than other operating systems at the time.

Sure, most apps were lightweight and, like allenbrunson said, the pervasive multi-threading model made it harder to develop sophisticated applications, but they must have been on to something because the responsiveness was so good that it felt like you all of a sudden had a computer from the future, where _real_ multitasking was finally solved. It really was something else.

The quality of the file system and the way its advanced capabilities were fully utilized throughout the OS was also novel. Here is part of an old article written by Scot Hacker, who also wrote the BeOS Bible, which explain some of the advantages: http://www.osnews.com/story/421/_I_MacOSX_Week_I_Tales_of_a_...

Much of what the BeOS had going for it is now available in other OSes, in various shapes or forms, but what made the BeOS such a joy to use was how it all came together in a unified way. The Tracker, for example, which is the equivalent to Finder on Mac OS X, treated attributes as first-class citizens, making it very natural to set up views like the example in the article above, focusing on Category, Title etc.

Another thing that really stood out was the quality of the icons and the look of the window manager. The icons are everywhere on the web today, and while the UI might not be considered sexy by today’s standards, the yellow tabs that could be dragged along the top of windows were cute as hell. Other little touches, like the built-in desktop switcher that allowed different resolutions and color depths for each desktop (excellent for web development), are not commonly found today, afaik.

It will be interesting to see what the experience is like now, after so many years with Mac OS X. Will definitely install.
> There are actually a lot of people arguing that animal life is equivalent to human life.

The reference you've provided doesn't really speak to the absolute or relative number of who hold this view. They certainly exist but I'd say they would be a small minority. Most people who cared about animals in a way that compelled them to act wouldn't see a direct 1:1 equivalence.

Interesting video.
His diet as presented doesn't, but if you read his research notes (specifically, read through "what makes food fattening?") you'll see his own personal evidence/anecdote for this, and how it sits with other results. (But basically, beyond his own anecdote and theory which does not imply or contradict anything about calories, he mostly channels and enhances Cabanac and Israel)
Keuanreeves
Free affordable health care is there to offer you good medical coverage while protecting both your health and your wallet in the current recession period.
how do you measure mental pain?
What will be cross-platform in Delphi? VCL? Then rewrite everything that uses WinAPI with VCL.

Without specifics, there's no answer.
increasing perceived value without increasing objective value makes me feel kinda slimy.

I feel like this is representative of why technical people leave money on the table in general. every product has a laffer maximum, objective value doesn't really exist.

also you are getting that you can maintain your current pricing structure completely unchanged except for adding some premium option that you don't intend to actually sell (you can price any added features that you don't really want to support so high that on the off chance someone does buy it you won't mind working for that money), right?
Mine are entirely without comments, but on the off chance that they'll be useful:

.vimrc: http://paste.ubuntu.com/270777/
.gvimrc: http://paste.ubuntu.com/270778/
nice round number
How To Limit CPU Usage Of A Process With cpulimit (Debian/Ubuntu)
Or move closer to work or buy motorcycles. Point is, it's not like Mac instead of a Windows, it's like margarine instead of butter. Change hurts.
Precautions to be taken before using Cialis tadalafil - Article Blast
I'll let you know; I've noticed the phenomenon but never put it to use myself. I will do so over the next few weeks.

One thing the article isn't clear on: is the author simply staring down the other person (i.e. eye contact with no words), or is he simply maintaining eye contact while speaking to them?

If the former I'd certainly think that's hostile, if the latter... well.
I could...

$20,000 setup, $10,000/month; I will rent you 10 32GiB ram/8 core servers, and give you a gigabit connection to the 'net, and hold your hand when not working on prgmr.com;

See, I don't think that would increase the perceived value of my existing offerings. Just because you have the price posted, that doesn't mean people believe it's actually selling. Really, if you want to charge that kind of margin, you need to give half of it to a salesguy.
Deliver a presentation like Steve Jobs
Same for me, minimal config here:

set tabstop=4
set expandtab
set list
set listchars=tab:>.
hi Comment ctermfg=darkgray
syntax enable

I have the tabs replaced to ">." since I moved from tabs to 4-spaces in all my code. That way I can do a :retab in those old files which still have tabs in them.

ps: Glad to see I'm not the only Vim geek around here! ;)
> The final paragraph, though, about the power of calling service staff by their names, is is interesting. Maybe I should try that. Anyone got any experience with habitually learning and using names (or just reading off their nametags)?

He has an article on that too:
http://www.esquire.com/features/influence/ESQ0506INFLUENCE_7...
non-random access memory: I suppose it depends on how you define "RAM". To almost everyone (even in your target audience, I think) "RAM" doesn't mean "any randomly-accessed memory", it means something like "fast writeable randomly-accessed memory whose vendors call it RAM". For instance, mask ROM would not generally be called RAM, even though it's addressed in hardware and commonly comes in power-of-2 sizes.

should be opening up in a new window: ah, I see. I've got so firmly into the habit of middle-clicking such links that I didn't even try left-clicking :-). (Which, yes, means that if you make them do fancy AJAX stuff then I will lose out...)
I would go for Ada, used in the industry, but not so much known and have interesting concepts.
Women in Jeans 'cannot be RAPED'...Guess Why?? 
Italy's highest court has ruled that a woman wearing jeans cannot be raped.
You should use javascript to learn functional programming.
/music and /programmes are implemented in Pinwheel, a Perl MVC framework strongly inspired by Rails. More details are available here:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/radiolabs/2007/11/perl_on_rails.s...
Other pointers:
http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2002/11/14/22741/791 - for an older version of K (from 2002), still very relevant.
http://kx.com/q/d/ has the docs you're looking for (for a language called "q", which is exactly k with more english and less symbols).

You can download a runtime from the kx website
No, but I can't prove it.
Probably an initial asking price. If anything it strongly suggests that there wasn't much haggling on the price. It would be a huge coincidence if they all haggled on the price and just happened to end up with the same number.
One small flight for robot.
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"I feel like this is representative of why technical people leave money on the table in general. every product has a laffer maximum, objective value doesn't really exist."

Maybe. what about comparative advantage? I can probably compete with the best SysAdmins my competitors hire. Yeah, some of them are better than I am, but it's at least a contest, you know? I'm not completely outclassed. I have a fighting chance.

Put me up against the best marketing guys my competition can hire, though, and I'll be humiliated. I'm just not very good at manipulating emotions, so I'm better off if it appears that I'm not trying.

That, and I still don't believe I'm leaving money on the table. my growth rate right now, (a bit over a server a month) is probably about optimal. It's fast enough to be exciting, but it's slow enough to be not overwhelming. The hardware margins are fine; a full server more than pays for itself in two months. Really, any more than that is just silly.

I think what I need to be focusing on now is automating the bits of support we are currently (badly) doing by hand, that is, provisioning and re-sizing domains. Next, I think, backups, as that's the biggest threat right now. Data-loss events are horrible.
Using Google Trends' hot topics to help spread malware
So as soon as one person 'knows' that the moon-landing was faked we all do? I'll decline on that bio-port unless it's just an interface to my computer (i.e. limited access to my nervous system), and not some borg collective device.
People associate anything involving space flight with fake. Usually because they can't comprehend it.
Well, as long as there is an option... maybe it won't be so bad.
You have mail - OEAPI and COM
Wesabe is not a good competitor IMO. When it first released it had a lot of promise (philosophy of data freedom, etc). Unfortunately that's pretty much completely been lost, which I guess to some extent because some of it was too hard to be realistically accomplished with limited resources and time (pulling your account data with software controlled by you rather than giving Wesabe your account password).

The core app itself has gotten continually worse. The "v2" that launched some months ago now was less usable, removed functionality (which may have been restored by now to some extent), was full of bugs, and was glacially slow and balky.

The only possible draw for Wesabe over Mint is the "community" part, which never interested me.

I guess I really see Wesabe as a money-management community with an app attached, not as a money-management app.
Thinking again, I would give a complete implementation of Lisp. You can define EVAL and APPLY in about 4 slides. That lets you have a 1 minute intro, 3 mins per slide, 1 minute conclusion, and 1 minute for questions.

If they've seen this before in class then you obviously can't do it, but it's historically significant, and interesting from an academic POV.
TwitApps shutting down
Not well if you trust compete.com: http://siteanalytics.compete.com/buxfer.com+mint.com/
Ask HN: Learn a programming language in a foreign language
I've been looking around for a Japanese version of SICP to improve my Japanese and learn Scheme at the same time. Has anybody else here tried this? Tried to improve your ability in a foreign language by studying a subject in that language? How successful were you? Do you think it's a bad idea?

P.S. If you know of where I could find the full text of SICP in Japanese it'd be great if you could post it.