skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
They couldn’t have done it without either (a) duplicating a significant number of SQL queries in some kind of ad-hoc tool (begging for maintenance problems as the SQL schema changed) or (b) prying the SQL queries loose from the GUI and isolating them in some kind of service broker, either an Apache plugin or a service daemon, that both the web interface and a scripting tool could call on.

An "Apache plugin or service daemon"? It may just be me, but he sounds like a crazy person here. Oh, wait.
So it's a midi guitar with a breath controller and built in synth/drum machine?
That's the biggest trap many of these kids will need to avoid. When you are a kid everything is cute and celebrated. I say that having been there! Then you slowly grow up and realize all that stuff doesn't matter that much. Especially in light of things like revenue and profit.
Can't you do this with http://drop.io/?
As one of the people featured in that article, I would agree with you. A lot of what the industry calls 'teen entrepreneurs' are teens first, entrepreneurs second. That is to say, the industry collectively cuts teen entrepreneurs slack because they're teens, which is counterproductive not only the industry but to the individuals themselves.

The less popular alternative definition and the one I strive to achieve is an entrepreneur who is also a teen. And in this case, when they do something that deviates from the standard entrepreneur, there isn't the excuse of 'oh--that's okay--he's a teen!!11'

Although that doesn't mean I won't reap the rewards of starting out early. :)
Yeah. I'd personally prefer to see such a site using the same software as Hacker News, just on a subdomain. ask.ycombinator.com or something.. *Overflow is icky.
Here is another [long] list of mathematics-related blogs by academics:
http://wiki.henryfarrell.net/wiki/index.php/Mathematics/Stat...
Track SEO rankings and Sitelinks with Google Analytics II
That remains to be seen. I've seen quite a few systems come out over the years - MetaFilter clones and open source Reddit, to name just two - where a lot of new sites are created but then fail to thrive. A year or two later, hardly any exist anymore even though the original site is still doing fine. Technology isn't community, long term.
You've missed the point. Drop.io isn't Team collaboration software. This application would be focused on helping teams collaborate, drop.io is (based on what I saw) more focused on file sharing collaboration.
About damned time, search in the whole Google Groups universe has been terminally broken for at least a year.
advocating that employers and employees should not be loyal to each other

Unfortunately I have yet to personally see an example of a corporation being loyal in my lifetime. On the contrary I have seen the trust of family members abused by their employers.

I do believe in positive effects of loyalty, but that loyalty can only function when it is mutual. The reality I have seen for myself and my family is that corporate loyalty does not exist. Individual humans can be well-intentioned but organizational behavior is the ultimate arbiter of the relationship.

One definite misfortune of the current state is that the power relationship between employer and employee is unbalanced. In theory that relationship is a capitalistic trade of time for money, but the severing of that relationship is far more disruptive to the individual. I think much of the resentment found among employees results from the loser's choice between a poor employment situation and the uncertainty and upheaval of changing employers.

Only I can take responsibility for my own well-being.

Edit: The one counterexample I have seen is SAS. That privately-owned company treats its employees extremely well. Its turnover rate is also nonexistent.
Plus the search functionality is completely and absolutely broken.
Informative piece. Short history tangent:

> (Donald Gibbs, of Pearl-Harbor conspiracy-theory infamy)

I had thought thae "USA wanted in to WWII and provoked Japan" was just a generally accepted position by most everyone who'd looked into it.

United States companies were responsible for 80% of Japan's oil. U.S. Government bans companies from exporting oil to Japan, declares Japan "a hostile nation", and starts stationing more troops, supplies, and armaments in the American-owned places you'd need troops to launch an attack against Japan.

Following the embargo, Japan goes into "oil shock". They're set to run out of oil in two years. Consumer prices for oil-based products go up 10x or more. The nearest place where there was oil was Indonesia, which was at the time was owned by European colonial powers already at war with Japan.

Here's a decent world map:

http://www.ciese.org/curriculum/boilproj/images/Reference%20...

America owned the Philippines at the time. Japan's war was taking them into Indonesia. The United States had just declared Japan a hostile nation, embargoed them, and started moving troops and arms into the Philippines and Hawaii.

It was obvious Japan would attack the United States following those events. Since United States foreign intelligence and military analysis were very good at this time, the pretty obvious conclusion is that the U.S. Government wanted war with Japan. Later, Pearl Harbor was sold as attacking for no reason to the American people for PR reasons, but the leadership must have known that their actions made a Republic of USA/Empire of Japan war pretty inevitable.
This looks interesting, I like the combination of drums, synth and woodwind.

I think this would be a great instrument to use if you were playing electro or other types of sampled music live as you would be able to actually play it, and not spend most of the gig standing behind a laptop and some synths.
Optimizing List.map
Those quotes of Wade definitely sound like a lame attempt to apologize to the creationist readers for his positive review of the book.

The facts are the facts, the laws summarize the regularities in the facts, and the theories explain the laws. Evolution can fall into only of of these categories, and it's a theory.

So according to Wade, gravity is a not a fact, since we have a theory of gravitation. That's an utterly ridiculous point of view that no philosopher of science supports.

Oh, before you ask how this is ontopic for HN: if you're smart and excel at something, it's easy to overestimate your knowledge of other subjects. In this case, Wade mistakes his common sense about science of philosophy with actual knowledge of science of philosophy.
Hardly a "new instrument."

A new interface != a new instrument. Typically, a new sound is the necessary condition for that label.

As someone who works with music on a daily basis, I would welcome with open arms a truly new instrument - but trends in popular music suggest we may not see one in our lifetimes.
20 Essential Infographics & Data Visualization Blogs
The irony is Twitter's a bad forensic tool. Because the messages have to be so short it doesn't allow people to make clear what they actually intended to say.

As any cop will tell you bad info is worse than no info at all (because it leads you to draw false conclusions)
To give credit where it's due, PG pointed this out long before I did:

http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html
Thanks for the great insights.
One: This has nothing to do with forensics.

Two: I guess he deleted the tweets because they're very insensitive things to have said on the night someone died. A little like radio stations not playing "First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin" in the days after 9/11.
The popular mythology in the U.S. is that the attack was not only unprovoked but actually unexpected. Without this myth it's very hard to maintain our self-image as the Good Guys, particularly in light of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The Applied Theory of writing bug-free code
I taught Computer Science 101 in grad school. I think this has a lot of potential.

Well, that remark certainly devaluated my opinion of grad schools. I understand not everyone is fit for SICP at 18 (I certainly wasn't), but this is quite on the opposite end.
Care to explain?

Is this just a job posting from 10 years ago or so?
It would if you think I was going for the up arrow - I was actually going for the reply link of the parent post (yes, I had already zoomed in).
Oh no! And all of these sites will be generating useful content, fooling their users into thinking that's more important than text size and kerning! What will we do?
I Don't Code in my Free Time
The Golden Triangle
At the very least it is a start. Now that the maintainers are allowing the single-window mode to be created the onward march of open-source progress will keep improving it. It may not approach the elegance that Apple's designers deliver but we can sure as hell beat Adobe.

Edit: Did all of my downvote arrows disappear? I don't want to downvote anyone in particular here but that seems odd.
Wow, this article is particularly vacuous. Someone died, and someone twittered. Lets draw conclusions!
In theory that relationship is a capitalistic trade of time for money, but the severing of that relationship is far more disruptive to the individual.

Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't. A startup I'm consulting for recently lost an employee, and it hurt us far more than the employee.

In general, a recurring trade creates wealth. Ending the trade tends to hurt whoever is getting the lion's share of the wealth created. In the case of unionized workers, that tends to be the employee. In the case of high value workers, that tends to be the employer.
Big business, who advises Big Business and is invested in India says India is going to be the leader. They are trying to create there own self fulfilling prophecy. Until India and the rest of the world creates an atmosphere of innovation (which requires certain human rights) they will not overtake the US as the dominate business factory nor will they be the leader in cutting edge tech services. There will come a day that it would be foreseeable that a Google or an Intel will form out of a new country of origin but right now culturally there are few destinations for that to happen. Quite honestly Brazil seems like a far more likely candidate if we where solely looking at emerging countries. I am sorry (and this is not disparaging Indians or India) but until that happens they are just picking up the scraps which in no way makes them a leader.
I used to work at a place that did this.

We had an online system that everyone was required to use twice a year to rank every other employee from best to worst. You could also provide comments. When everyone was done they showed you what your results were and how your average ranking compared to everyone else. The results were anonymous (except for one time when a glitch let everyone see what everyone else said about them).

The comments were generally not very helpful, but for those used it to give good feedback it was mildly beneficial. Some people took it seriously and gave feedback which was useful. Other people used it to vent and others merely went though and added things like "Good employee" to meet the required number of comments.

Most of us hated it, but I think the management liked it. You could instantly see what your employees thought of each other.

When it came time for evaluations and raises, the results always closely aligned with the results of your peer rankings. Here's a question to ponder: in general, would you rather your raises be based on your peer's assessment or on your boss's?
leveraging shared memory and other operating system tools, you can turn a fork(2) implementation into a thread alternative -- but then, you'd have ... threads

There's an important difference: in the threading model, all memory is shared by default, whereas in the processes + shm model, you need to explicitly allocate and access shared memory regions. Because sharing mutable state is such an important design consideration, being explicit about what is being shared improves reliability by reducing the chance of unintentional sharing. A related benefit is that processes are protected from one another by the virtual memory mechanism: it is much more feasible for a service to recover from a crashed process than to recover from a crashed thread (which typically takes down the entire process).
The Universal Law of Leverage
Thanks for an sharing the info. I think I will go and digg nyc nosql links.
Steve Wozniak definitely fits the description of someone who was doing cool stuff while young. Of course, there was no techcrunch back then to widely announce to the whole world how he'd built a calculator from scratch. Maybe that's what it takes to keep your head cool and focused.
"..given the amount of front-end stack required, hired employees, and 3 6-core (6?) 40 GB front-end webservers"

Could you have misread the article?

We have one developer/sysadmin (myself, and I'm pretty much half-time on the development work and no-time on the sysadmin work) and the 6 processors/40 GB RAM is the total amount of app server resources across all machines.

I am a big fan of the JVM and I don't want to get into an argument about language productivity, but since I believe that I have saved a lot of time (and therefore, money) with Ruby, I don't really see the ~$5,000 spent on app servers over 2 years as an issue.
Ed Catmull on outsourcing
So...svn update?
then I would not hire you.
I drove out to Moffett Field in Mt View to see the show. It was pretty weird driving on to the base at 3:30am and I was impressed to see probably about 4-5000 people there. They had a giant 50ft screen and an excellent sound system, tent area for the kids/families and concession stands for food and drink (coffee was critical at that hour). Kudos to Nasa-Ames for putting on such a great event. As far as the actual impact, I saw nothing and like most people I was a bit disappointed.
I agree with some of the others. Age discrimination reigns (as the younger crowd who follow HN will find out in 10 to 15 years). Wasn't there a study published recently that showed that a significant number of entrepreneurs (especially the successful ones) were in their 30s and 40s?
"Instead, I spend my free time saying nasty things about people who do - it's easier and more fun!"

Although, to be fair, in this case I agree that it's not an appropriate question for an interview, although I would be unhappy if I didn't have at least a side project or two to hack on, though. I have less time for that now, with a child, but it's something I need to do.

Oh, and I'd much rather spend my time riding my bicycle than fiddling with it. My mechanic is way better and faster than I am in any case.
I wrote a short post about our setup in March and it hasn't really changed since then: http://codemonkey.ravelry.com/2009/03/10/quick-update-ravelr...

If you have any questions or are looking for details or something, ask away - just stick a comment on the blog post.
Also, if you're using Monit to watch the memory bloat of your passenger processes, when you kill one process it tends to do the same stalling thing on all your processes until the ONE you killed is back up.
amazing, thanks for this information :)
Being a native Spanish speaker, I am glad that at last one of the Spanish speaking countries is starting to take the lead for growth. FINALLY
So you are saying that this is the Segway of musical instruments.
So here's my problem with this: How much of the fun is predicated on the novelty of the situation? After a week, how many people on their morning commute are loving those stairs? After a month?

Fun benefits tremendously from novelty, but genuine fun has long-term value, too.
Also, riak is pluggable like mysql in that the datastore can change.
What this is and what's exciting about it is that it's a new human-computer-inteface designed solely for producing synthesized music.

Think about what we had before: Midi keyboards, Midi guitars, keyboards and mice, a few more interesting control surfaces and not much else.

Sure the keyboards and guitars would be good for producing keyboard and guitar sounds, but what we needed was a way to control the gamut of sounds that can be produced by a computer in a unified way. This could well be it...

Agreed, their demo was poor, but Les Paul was no Jimi Hendrix either.

I would be interested to see what sort of software comes with it and how reprogrammable it is.
...and the ghost of Keytar's past come back to avenge decades of disrespect?

I wonder how the notes are laid out on the board. It would be cool to play with one for a while.

However, the demonstration didn't exactly live up to the title. I was expecting music beyond Franz Liszt's transcendental etudes or something.
What's the difference between your idea and Yammer.com?
Short summary: Author talks about how ease of getting leverage is inversely proportional to how much you need it. A little bit of hyperbole but solid general points. The value in the article is the way the author thinks and talks through it, a couple thought provoking sentences in there make it worth a read.
Rate My Startup - eclocking.com
Please take a look at eclocking.com and give me some feeback.

It's a stopwatch that lets you save, organize and chart your times.

Some questions:
1. Is this useful?
2. How much functionality does a premium plan need before I can charge?
3. Any other feedback is appreciated.
With Augmented Search, Xmarks Sees New Service, Revenues
"I like to spend free time wrenching on a car or a bike, but I don't set out on Saturday morning and say "I'm going to learn how to use a torque wrench today, because those things are the future of tools"."

That one made me laugh.
Just play a round of poker with friends.

Only rational way to invest: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_portfolio_theory
Apologies! I meant DVI (along with a DVI->HDMI cable). But as far as I can tell, that's just as good. All digital signal and it looks crisp on my HD TV.

It's a T43/p. I believe the /p is important since the regular T43 had a crap graphics card. And I think it's a ThinkPad Port Replicator II (like $20 on ebay).

Getting the drivers for the DVI port just right under Linux took some work though.
I don't understand #5. Using a library makes something a "Hybrid Application"?
Chile is a country for cutting costs. That's true. But nothing more.

It is not a good country for startups. Tech and software industry is supine because there are not hackers not even great programmers. It's hard to find a programmer developing software outside the office. So even though is a great place to be frugal the lack of an entrepreneurial network and advice is going to set you apart.

And Viña del Mar is a great place but Pucón is the best with a lake, a river and a volcano.
I agree that it's not fair for you to be downmodded so ruthlessly. I think you're getting a lot of decent feedback on this thread about why your approach to starting a company through YC might be misguided. So I did whatever I could to at least raise your comments up to a 1.

Friendly request to moderators: please only use 0 and below for trolls and other unhelpful comments - don't just downvote because you disagree with the commenter.
> You know what's more awesome than spending my Saturday afternoon learning Haskell by hacking away at a few Project Euler problems? Fuck, ANYTHING.

I feel extremely lucky to not only have known what I wanted to do from a young age, but enjoy it, and can make good money doing it.

I like to ride my bike, hike, climb mountains, go to the beach, and walk my dog as well as solve problems, math or otherwise. I really hope for Ted's sake that he enjoys development at least a little bit. No one wants to work with people that aren't happy.
Calling someone "worth watching" assumes that he/she has some kind of characteristics, which could possibly make him/her successful. This was written by a teen. Not sure if I trust his judgement on this. There are lots of talented kids out there though, no doubt.
Donor's Choose: Fred Wilson's Charity of Choice
For all this person claims to be wise and experienced, this is a very contentless and juvenile blog post. The tone is condescending and reeks of insecurity.
My first thought was that they looked like the cantina band from Star Wars.
"I love it when twenty-something engineers take such a hard-line position on something they have so little experience with, like hiring."

Uhm, the author graduated from college 3 years ago. It took me about 2 minutes of searching to find out that the "twenty-something" he's referring to (raganwald) is about 20 years older than him.

http://www.linkedin.com/in/teddziuba

http://reginald.braythwayt.com/RegBraithwaiteGH0909_en_US.pd...
After seeing Pressflip, I don't blame him.
"I would not want to work for a company that wouldn't hire me"

Me either ;)
Working in Spain, I know of some companies which outsource to Chile's neighbor Argentina, where labor wages are comparatively cheaper.

I think this will get more common in the future, and in time more and more companies in Spain ill be hiring labor in Southamerica, as the english speaking companies are doing with India.

Considering the poor incentives Spain is giving to entrepreneurship, I can only hope my own country will look at chile's example and help our punished IT industry.
I have a deeper problem with it. You are bringing NOTHING to the table. I said it: NOTHING. And you are trying to EXPLOIT an engineer, someone who has developed ACTUAL SKILLS through YEARS OF HARD WORK, STRESS, AND FRUSTRATION. These skills have GLOBAL SOCIAL VALUE. That means that people are willing to PAY ENGINEERS MONEY on the market in order to build things. You claim you are bringing an IDEA, but truly, ideas are WORTHLESS: NOBODY will pay you money for them. On the other hand, if you have something PATENTABLE, that's a different story.

If you had been around the site a while, you would have observed these things for yourself. Oh wait - checking out your profile, you have been around for over a year. In my opinion, your complete lack of social/political savvy will lead to your complete failure as a businessman.
And I don't want to go out with any hot model that does not want to go out with me!
How can you say it's bad without knowing how knowing what each request is doing?

Github isn't a microbenchmark.

A concrete example:

I can say that one of my rails sites handles 850 dynamic requests per second running on a single small 1 cpu server. That's because all that particular request does is lookup 4k of data from memcached and returns it. (i.e. http://www.tanga.com/feeds/current_deal.xml)

However, as a general rule, I know that each small server can handle about 30-50 pages per second, because each page takes a lot of data crunching to generate (and because I haven't been bothered to make it as efficient as possible, it's fast enough as is).

If all I was doing was returning a small bit of text that didn't require much lookups or calculation, then sure, a 8 core cpu with rails could probably do 4-5000 requests per second easily.
Couldn't you spin not coding outside of work into something positive?

Job interview:

What have you coded in your free time?

Me: I spend my free doing X and Y. I find I'm most effective at work if I save all of my creative energy for the job.
I've been doing some copyediting for a friend on some young adult fiction of his. It's hard work! I definitely have a new appreciation for the people who do this professionally.
Ask HN: Little things/tools that improved your work or life lately?
I found that sometimes the little tiny changes have the biggest improvement in your work or life. For example yesterday I installed "Tab Mix" which forces FF to open external links in a new tab and take you there. +3 for me.

What tiny tools, hacks, changes do you know off that improved your work or life significantly?
yea - same thing with me. this is my second account. help us pg! :|