skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It amazes me that I read through all of these comments and didn't see one mention of the Zune software. Yes, it's Windows only. Yes, it only syncs with Zunes. BUT, it offers a far better music-playing and music-finding experience. It's laid out better, looks better, is easier to use, has folder monitoring (I can't believe that's still not in itunes), doesn't try to move or edit any of your files or metadata, and overall just performs better.

I actually have a virtual machine of XP just so I don't have to install iTunes on my host Win7 box. I only open it maybe once a month to check out new podcasts that aren't in the Zune marketplace yet. Because of this, I don't want ituneshelper, quicktime, safarai, bonjour, etc etc. installed on my system and put in my Startup group just so I can open iTunes. It's just unnecessary. I cringe every time I see someone struggling with iTunes.
Submit button usability: Big button w/ cursor:pointer converts more
This is great for python, a proven web framework that was stressed on friend feed. Thanks ff team! I have been torn on my next python server project between web2py, cherrypy and django and I think I just decided.
I don't worry about CPU. What I do worry about is cost and most of all the amount of effort required to set it up. You'd have to get a key somewhere (figure out where you get one that is both supported by most important browsers and as cheap as possible), install it (probably an afternoon's worth of work, mostly because of researching how) and then test it.

Cost is important too. As a small start-up we adhere to the principle that a penny saved is a penny earned.

Combine all that with the fact that there's no real demand for more security on our sites and you'll come to the conclusion that it just isn't worth the time and money spent on it. We're not running a bank, so it's not all that important anyway.
And just like a tank it has no ESP, ABS etc. OpenBSD forces you to do to many things by hand, instead of automating them as much as possible (just like some Linux distros).
True, I was having an emotional moment after getting QUACK + mzscheme setup.

As far as I know, the QUACK + mzscheme combo should work wherever you can have a running instance of Emacs and mzscheme. It seems to do the job pretty well. Running mzscheme with the errortrace argument and a few modifiers returns a full debug backtrace for errors...

Worth while questions though. I do, however, find the cleanliness of a programming language an attractor/deterrent to my learning it. Common Lisp is pretty crufty.

I imagine Scheme is certainly better suited to running as an embedded than CL.

Either way, learning the language first is my concern for educational reasons; making it useful is my secondary concern.
Slime is one of the things I miss most when writing scheme.
The more I think about this the more I am determined to simply boycott Bluray in its entirety. I already watch most things on my laptop attached to a large monitor. Going forward I feel an obligation to throw my consumer support behind open (or at least reasonably-licensed) streaming formats. Devices like Boxee should be supported and nurtured to help do an end-around on these cartels. I can't stand the thought that future technology could be crippled by a few mega corps without the first intention of doing any innovation. All that's needed are the right devices and a critical mass of good content and the cartels will not be able to secure a monopoly.
But it isn't text....
Building Scalable Databases: Denormalization, the NoSQL Movement and Digg
This is getting worse than "First Post!"
I'm getting really tired of clicking on the comments for Hacker News stories and seeing the first being:

1. A complaint about the form or presentation of the original article.

2. A whine that "this sort of thing isn't news for hackers."

Or, most egregiously:

3. A plea for people to be nice to each other on the internet, unlike that mean article author.

There's something about the HN moderation system that sends that sort of thing right to the top and it's degrading discussion.
Awesome to see more Python webservers coming to light, and fast ones at that. One observation though; anyone else notice that the bar chart is a bit misleading? It compares running Tornado in 4 processes behind nginx to running Django behind Apache and Cherrypy as a single Python process. As a fellow coworker put it, "With 4 extra processes running of course it will be 4 times as fast." I'm not opposed to this kind of comparison when the intent is to show how configurations can increase req/sec, but if the intent is to compare one Pythonic webserver to another, this comparison seems a bit unfair. That said, assuming the "Tornado (1 single-threaded frontend)" measure is simply Tornado running as a single Python process, it still is plenty faster than Cherrypy.
I think positive/negative is too shallow. I actually do enjoy this, but I think you need to rate sentiments on other vectors, so if I rate http://teddziuba.com/ I get something like:

Anger: 25
Smugness: 50
Vulgarity: 15
Boredom: 5

etc.

I'm not even sure that's a good example or if it's clear, I just think positive/negative is an oversimplification of the sentiment of most sites.
I don't like "they" because it's ambiguous. I have been trying to switch to using "it."
I like these ideas.. ultimately you want people that are interested in becoming productive, value-adding members of society, whether that be genius tech founders or hard-working floor moppers. The challenge is finding the right mix of objective qualifications that represent this characteristic.
Steve Job's Keynote From Yesterday
Determination matters.

If desperation is how you get it, fine. PG will tell you that you need to be hungry, but it's just one of the ways to get determination (also one such way that makes you more likely to be seek YC funding).
You're not arguing against me, but with me. ;)

The article suggested that it was obviously a bad idea to write a templating engine in PHP, since PHP is already in the category of "templating engine". As you point out, it's easy to implement a template system in PHP that's better to use than raw PHP would be.
The US is not rational, but just follows its regulations (as judged by the case adjudicators). Are you familiar with the so-called "NYSDOT case" with respect to the National Interest Waiver? Why did your lawyer put you into NIW? Does your work have biomedical applications? (It's not necessary, but that's what NIW is usually used for) Otherwise, I think there are special categories for high-earning folks like you, called "top of the field" (or something).
Attacking the Growth Barrier of Data Storage
Facts I found interesting:

97% of UK female Internet users research products online and 92% of UK female Internet users buy products online.

50.1% of online shoppers who placed items in their shopping carts did not go on to place an order (is this how we window shop on the internet?)

51% of Internet users purchased a new Financial Services product in the past year.

Paid mobile search spend worldwide is forecast to grow from $260.60m in 2009 to $2,977.30m in 2012.

Search made up 47% of online advertising in Western Europe in 2008.

On January 26th 2009, more than 76,000 job cuts were announced worldwide in a single day.
This sort of thing isn't news for hackers.
Here's what a start-up ad for a programmers should look like:

* mycomapny.com [link to google maps]

* tech skill required: x, y, z

* [full-time || contract] && [local || remote]

* growth or biz model [link to mycompany.com/biz_model]

* investment [link to mycompany.com/investment]

* salary range $x to $y depending on experience

* benefits - health care, etc [link to mystartup.com/employee/benefits]

* employee rules [link to meycompany.com/employee/handbook]

* stock options [link to mycompany/com/employee/options]

If you want more high quality applicants, provide these details up front...Transparency Rules!!!

Skip the multi-paragraph fluff. You don't want to read it in the resumes, and job searchers don't want to read through it the job ads. Also, skip the puzzles. Puzzles limit your pipeline to those that have loads of time on their hands to solve your captcha. Do you want an applicant that has loads of time on their hands or the applicant that has the skills and right attitude?
I would be interested to learn about the importance of fitness and nutrition in the lives of people in the study. Proper exercise and dieting leads to increased energy and can make someone an earlier riser and a night owl...
I'm sorry but I can't even read this. It is hard to look at, textually awful and filled with needless coarse language. If you want to write a longish essay that people will read, learn to edit.
I doubt it. A bought a 16GB SD card a little while back, and it cost maybe $30. A Blu-ray disc holds 25GB single-sided, and 50GB double-sided, and probably costs well less than a dollar to press.

Flash is a loooooong way from beating the disc.
I'm glad for any trend against the corporatism, homogenization and prudishness in American professional culture that dehumanizes and demeans people.
Don’t throw the information at me, I expect you to work at it
Isn't their saying, "If a nail sticks out, hammer it down"? Is that what you're going for? Or an unintended side effect?
Well, there're workspaces for this.

That said, the desktop metaphor issue mentioned below seems kind of reasonable (though it might just be a matter of preference and acquaintance).
This is great. Any idea if they will do the same for the FriendFeed datastore?
I can understand the Oracle-Sun acquisition, and Ellison's view of a integrated hardware and software solution. (Guess IBM wish they had thought about that with Windows and OS's.)

ERP has always interested me. Vendor/customer relationships are often complex however the software side shouldn't really be the case - if anything, software should be the easy part.

Anyone starting up in the space obviously can't (successfully) build an integrated solution. You would have to develop something better than current SAP/Oracle/SAAS solutions for one or two of the operating units described by joshwa.
EY blog: to Redis or not to Redis?
Note how many of the larger technology and biotech companies are now bussing a very sizable number of their employees in from San Francisco -- Apple, Genentech, Google, etc.

Smaller companies in the field are also buying into these shuttle services, eg, Genentech shares their shuttles with some smaller biotech/drug companies.

The Silicon Valley suburbs are a very unfortunate accident of available land and timing. Personally, the very first thing I did when I moved to Sunnyvale was start looking for an apartment in San Francisco -- I thought I could handle it, but found that I couldn't stand living in the area's suburbs.
I guess this means, buy my app. Or is there a way to review it without buying?
You know your situation better than we could. Your decisions are your own and are right for you. As some of the other responders show, a child can be raised in the suburbs and come out with an open mind. It is just easier for someone raised in the burbs to not come in contact with non-white racial groups, poor communities, openly gay couples, etc...

Just some food for thought...

When many people think of cities they think of New York, Chicago, LA, etc. There are smaller, second tier cities that offer good proximity to an urban center and cultural life while still giving good public education and safety. A city fitting this description that I'm really high on right now is Portland, Me.

When I was single I lived in Boston for a bit and didn't own a car. It was one of the happiest periods of my life. A monthly pass for unlimited bus and train was about $45. The low price allowed me to live in the city, sharing an apartment of course, on a $26K salary.

One of the benefits of relying on public transit is being able to read. Nowadays I'd probably code but laptops were large and expensive then. (There is nothing more wasteful of your time/life than sitting in a traffic jam IMO.)

I worked out in a section of the city called Forest Hills. On Fridays, after workouts ended around 10p, I'd take the Orange line down to Chinatown to eat. I'd regularly walk around side streets late night and never had a problem. (You get used to guys asking you if you need anything. A quick "Nah, I'm cool" and they'd walk away.)

I don't know your nearest city so only you can judge the safety, but I looked up the violent crime index for my own and it's on par with Chicago.
Share Lists of Twitter Users
CherryPy is multi-threaded, so I am not sure what you are saying is correct. There are two types of servers: multi-threaded, multi-process. Tornado is multi-process. If your server is multi-threaded, it uses all of the cores without additional processes.

CherryPy did max out the CPU on all of the cores in the load test, so I think it was a fair test.
It is interesting to think about both you and RTM are sons of the programmers in first generation! I am wondering what about Trevor Blackwell?
Likewise, 4 extra processes does not mean 4 times as fast if you only have one or two cores on your machine. Check out the details at http://www.tornadoweb.org/documentation#performance for how we ran the test.
> Your fingers are going to be crossed for a long time.

Hm. That's going to make it very difficult to type.

> I think the Steering Committee has too many divergent interests on it for there ever to be agreement on a serious standard library.

That would be most unfortunate.

> Schemers are very DIY; for example, see [snip]

Not sure what about that story points to Schemers being particularly DIY. Sounds like the fellow needed something tiny, so rather than take a full-blown batteries-included language and strip out what he didn't need, he instead just used something small that he was familiar with.

> There's no sense in waiting, just dive in.

Yeah. Trying to make the time... thanks for the encouragement. :)
Single-domain certificates are cheap. RapidSSL charges $79/year, and you can do better.

Wildcard certificates have come down as low as $200 a year, very recently.

The price issue is mostly perception at this point, but like they say, perception is reality. I would gamble that most people don't realize how much cheaper SSL certification has become.
I'm sorry to hear a 1,100 word essay cows you down into illiteracy.
Wunder-ful iPhone Multitasking - Design by Gravity
With a recent update for a popular audio streaming app, some true multi-tasking is now within reach without jailbreaking your iPhone.
I think this logic is fundamentally flawed.

If you don't present your ideas well, they will be missed. If your content is wrapped up in junk, your audience will move to another content provider.

This is the law of the land. Any tiptoeing just delays progress.

As my friend's grandpa used to say: "shit + ice cream = shit"
It might be a harsh stereotype, but it has been said that the Apache project is an exercise in bureaucrats doing open source. Alternatively, it's an ideal outlet for bikeshedding.
My municipal power company has already implemented multi-stage gas-fired generation in its new power plant.

Fortunately, I'm in California, where the weather is warm, so ideal here would be to use waste heat from an air conditioner to pre-heat water.
Facebook Open Sources FriendFeed's Ultra-Fast Real-Time Web Framework
Just checked at Amazon.de, the price for a writable blu-ray disk seems to start from 5€, for a 25GB disc. 16GB USB sticks were around 23€. It does not seem that far away?

Also, I suppose Blu-Ray will be stuck at it's size because of the norms and patent hell, whereas sticks can just continue to grow. Flash drives are becoming popular, so the price of Flash in general might come down.
More detailed thoughts from a Sun engineer about Backblaze and cheap storage
Title should be, "What Happens When Hacker News Features Apple Featuring Your iPhone App".
Seven Startup Success Stories
This looks great. I'm likely to look at it a little more in the future. I've been using Second Life's asyncrounous coroutine library called eventlet. I've implemented most of my code with a good lightweight framework that fits; restish. On top of that, I use spawning to manage my server processes. I myself have seen these kinds of numbers with my own app tests.
In your example though, the complexity comes from having to know what things like "Order allow,deny" are. If you moved to lua I assume they would still use the same terminology, you would just have to represent it in lua instead of the current format. I think a file like this is easier for someone who has even a little bit of HTML experience to understand versus lua.
Post a business for sale or browse listed businesses for free
The most exciting part is that all of us have the potential to be number 8, 9, 10........

The first and most important step is to realize that anything is possible as long as you allow yourself to believe that everything is possible!
Why do you assume that our artificial intelligence will not be organic? Look to the rise of wetware, my friend.
"Anti-H1B people love to rave about my taking jobs from US citizens."

I'm largely opposed to the H1B visa, but I definitely don't like to rave about your taking jobs from US citizens. I certainly don't think that you have.

This visa was truly a miserable piece of public policy, and I think the US should regard it as a failure and try to implement something that is in the better interest of the American public as well as the people who would like to work here and would make great contributions.

I read a bit about Australia's points system, and I think it's a good approach. You get points for having valuable skills, proficiency in english, and so forth. If you exceed a certain threshold, you get a "visa" (I'm not sure if that's the term they use, it's a residency and work permit). What's so cool about this system is that the visa is granted directly to the individual, so it preserves freedom. I also like it because it doesn't single out high tech - lots and lots of different professions and trades get full points, so engineers/programmers won't feel singled out and thrown under the bus, so to speak. While the needs of employers are a factor (a job offer adds points), it doesn't give employers control over the worker's right to reside in Australia.

I know you've had a bad time of the US immigration system, and anti-H1B ranters have given you plenty of opportunity to view critics of the program as anti-immigrant (and even potentially racist). But I'm hoping you can also agree that many US citizens who work in technical fields are legitimately outraged about abuses of this program.

I don't mind at all if you personally disagree that the H1B program has deterred Americans from entering the field at a time we badly need to ensure a steady supply from our own population, but I do think you should recognize that this is a reasonable point of view that can and should be debated.
A New Horizon for the News
This matches my experience -- I'm typically a 6am riser, but I have trouble doing any serious work after, say, 5pm.
For HTTPS you need a dedicated IP since security negotiation happens before the HTTP hosts header is posted and your cert needs to cover the host you want to connect to. That is, it is impossible to host several sites using HTTPS on one single IP. HTTPS using SSL (instead of for instance TLS) means that this is a limitation built into HTTPS itself and can't be mitigated.

With the current shortage on IPv4 IPs and most shared hosters trying to squeeze as many websites as possible onto the same single IP, that effectively means that getting a site up and running with HTTPS (and that is not even mentioning the cost of getting a properly signed certificate) is very, very costly and hard compared to regular HTTP hosting.

Until IPv6 goes mainstream don't expect any of this to change.
I especially like the implications of item (b). To achieve this, we would have to have a public db of _all_ salaries!!! It would help normalize things in the same way we normalize real estate sales. Note: I do not believe public real estate sales data has anything to do with the real estate bubble and its collapse. Its possibly the best part of the U.S. real estate market.

But good luck getting congress to force all private and public companies to publish their salary data ;).
Google Launches Internet Stat Center
Dotspots.com: distributed/collaborative annotations.
Trying out the beta now.

http://dotspots.com/#dots/home

Reminds me of gooey.com, a dot-com era product made by and sold by Hypernix. (Lost my link to a video demonstration of it.)
I have a script much like cut, but which can reorder and duplicate fields.

http://github.com/ChickenProp/f/tree/master
amen, brother sachinag!!! I'm all for the power of immigration. But we have a vast pool of people already here that can be enabled by fixing these types of problems.
The post makes no mention of investors being able to offer a green-card. Rather, only temporary status in the US for 1 year. Sure, most of the companies will fail and the founder's status would expire, but if you can get 1 Google founded in the US for every 1000 failed startups, I think the net effect would be positive for the US. In fact, I mentioned Google intentionally, because it's just one of a handful of companies started here because, at some point, the founder was grated status here. The same goes for eBay (France), Intel (Hungary), Nvidia and Yahoo (Taiwan). How awesome would it have been if a Samsung or Sony were started here? I don't know about you, but I'd much like to continue to see such companies in the US, making the American economy and the ecosystem of entrepreneurship unparalleled in the world.

In fact, Paul Graham's original essay leaves handing out the "founder's visa" entirely in the hands of the government. No mention is made to giving investors the power to grant immigration status. It would work in exactly the same way that the H1B visas work: Companies can vouch for a candidate to the government in an application, but ultimately it would be up to the government to decide. Don't like who they pick? Don't vote for your senator next time.

VCs and investor would "gain control over the immigration system" with the founders visa no more than universities and tech companies have control over immigrants with H or F visas
not to mention writable (think of movies/series that can save where you left off and pick up from there).
To me, the complexity comes from using a pseudo-XML syntax to indicate control flow and function (?) calls.
Hah, love the change in shade of blue on the graph to match facebook's - interesting touch.
You are correct but you are looking at it from the wrong perspective.

Who cares about reprogramming your stick: for blu-ray, you want to buy a movie. The movie studio is the one wanting to make a profit, so most of the sale price of the movie should not go into the media.

Therefore, mass producing blu-ray movies, at around $1 (or less) per disc is very effective (the studios will sell you the movie at $9.99 or more).

When will a USB stick for 20GB cost less than $1? It's still quite far off.
You find that it's a great time to have your server in the cloud and be able to upgrade easily :D
Six step guide to porting from Solaris to Linux on POWER
These are pretty much the conditions for an E-3 (treaty worker) visa available to Australians. I believe Canadians have something similar, too.
> It might be an interesting to think about what programs would look like if you applied code=data rigorously in a conc model. Would a language whose expressions are represented as concs look or feel significantly different than a cons-based one?

Now that is food for thought.
Or even better BSD so that BSDs can integrate it, too.
They don't assign colors based on wavelength, but on chemical composition.

nitrogen (red), hydrogen (green), oxygen (blue), and helium (violet). (via Hubblesite)[http://www.hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2000/0...]