skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When invites are available, perhaps something similar to the GMail Invite Spooler (http://isnoop.net/gmail/ ) could be created?

It would certainly beat the inevitable mass-posting of email addresses in comment forms (and worse, there's no way to be sure when someone has received an invite)
Double my salary and I will become an administrative management VB coder.
A sad, sad day. Hard to imagine I won't be able to see the great Dan again. I'll miss him and his antics, jokes, big talk, and huge ambition and drive.
I think he's confused because there are about a dozen different rules of thumb, some conflicting, that people call "the Pareto Principle". Nobody talks directly about the one Pareto came up with, because it's pretty abstract and doesn't actually prescribe a course of action by itself.
I was talking about his current venture being fueled by his celebrity as a kind of warning to people to not get too excited about starting a "new media" company and expect that kind of revenue. Having celebrity and leveraging it is not a bad thing and can be very lucrative while it lasts.
It's difficult to compare VPSes and el cheapo dedicated servers by specs alone because VPS hosts usually use server processors, ECC, and RAID while a $30 dedicated server is a POS. If that's what you want, fine, but everyone should understand upfront that they're not the same.
Learning Things of Lasting Value
I think Perl's bad reputation comes mostly from its expressive power. People directly perceive and compare the difficulty of reading and understanding a few consecutive lines or blocks of code. Understanding 20 lines of Perl is on average more difficult than understanding 20 lines of, say, Java. The upshot is that you need much more than 20 lines of Java to implement code equivalent to those 20 lines of Perl. But this fact tends to slip your mind when you're pounding your head against the screen trying to figure out how some specific passage works.
what is it with all these young kids dying? wasn't there a post like only a few days ago about a guy losing his cofounder to a car accident.

how did he die, if you don't mind me asking?
And there are cases where you want to get close to 100%- for example if getting near 100% of the market gives you near-monopoly pricing power. But does getting a 100% grade in a class compare to that? It's not even close in my eyes.
I am quite amazed that reading was considered uncool...even in the 50's
I find this difficult to believe. He wrote me 4 weeks back, and the email is still in my inbox, starred, so that I could reply it when I had a bit of time.
I don't care which language is popular, I want to know what makes a language popular. I try to choose languages orthogonally to popularity.
Perhaps for a small company, but with the investment google is making there, I doubt it's the translation... http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2009/09/29/where_googl...
Same here. Dan wrote me out of the blue a few weeks back with words of encouragement about some issues I'd posted about. We exchanged a few messages. Wish I'd written him more. This is very sad news.
Best Developer's Laptop?
useful bit of math
I believe one of the selling points of git is that it does not add cruft to each directory as a general rule as it only has one .git directory in the root folder. The only time you would need to do that is if you wanted to keep an empty directory in the structure of the git repo. If checking out an empty folder with a dot file in it is not desired you could always add a post checkout hook to delete them. Though in that scheme you would lose your empty dirs on checkin I would wager(not sure though).

Edit: you could probably do a precommit hook too to inject the dot files into the empty directories.
I agree that there is no reason to switch between Perl/Python/Ruby. They are all the same language with slightly different punctuation.

I think Perl has better libraries, but learning those and discarding your experience with one of the other languages is probably not much of a net gain.
I want to know what makes a language popular.

"Jobs."
Yes it does. There are also plugins on both IE and Firefox with a similar name which does that.
This guy is really good. Thanks for sharing.
Now who is going to IM me to laugh about the groupthink here.
My condolences. He will be forever remembered for sharing his experiences and inspiring others.
I see alot of posts from the design perspective but what is your brand trying to convey? Who are your customers? The sure fire way is to generate lets say 20 schemes, get friends, family, and biz partners to vote on their top 5. Get a collection of top 3-10 color schemes and show them to possible customers. Take their input and there you have a color scheme that has a high likelyhood of working for your target market. Attractiveness does not equal branding good, ex this famous brand: http://www.arrogantbastard.com/
I'm not sure that's true. There are plenty of languages as dense as Perl (e.g. how much you can get done with just a screenful of code) but no-one says Haskell (or even Python or Tcl) is "write only" (for example).
Oh, please... everything has good and bad parts. Perl 5 has e.g. CPAN and Moose. Afaik, no other mainstream language can really compete there, today.

But why repeat that, since it is a standard answer in all these endless discussions?

Let me instead note one big advantage for Perl: There are much fewer embarrassing trolls doing language wars.
I just assumed he typo'd "something like" as the empty string.
Whoa.

My condolences. I always appreciated his input and he was one of the usernames I seeked out when browsing comments pages.
This.

Artists are not the conservatives. They're the people embracing change and seeing what they can do with it. If anything, the artists will win even more now, because with luck there'll be a lower barrier to entry.
"Why is a media titan like The New York Times Co. -- already stretched thin by the challenges of a faltering business model -- dabbling in community news, traditionally the bottom of the journalistic food chain? Call it the Google Effect. The search giant's model, described by author John Battelle as "a billion dollars, one nickel at a time," is a perfect description of how media companies hope to take tiny sources of local revenue and roll them up into big money."

I think the New York times is missing the point of how Google makes money and how their income model works. The reason Google makes obscene amounts of money even though they only make a nickel per customer is twofold: They have lots of customers, and their expenses per customer is less than a nickel.

While I agree that local advertising is a great potential untapped revenue stream that can be harnessed through local news I think they have a bad business model. It appears that they try to set up an old-fashioned news outfit complete with editors, journalists et al. This adds substantial cost to the venture, and all of a sudden you need to make more than a nickel per customer to cover your costs.

In short it looks like an old media empire misunderstanding online businessmodels, namely create a service that might cost you a lot in initial effort but will scale (almost) effortlessly to millions of users, thus making your cost per customer approach zero. An editor and a few journalists for every community isn't cheap and doesn't scale.
I remember watching an interview (on Channel9, probably), that mentioned that Visual C++ had code in it dating back to the 80s.

Props to MS for eating its own dog food if they rewrote everything for .NET
I think you might be missing the point of the article. It's tips for converting a Subversion repository to a Git repository.
nice job!

btw. xrefresh also works over network and does "soft css refresh". Some disadvantage of that emacs system is that it bypasses whole server-side stack (imagine PHP or HAML/SASS)
A blogger wrote about a competitor of TS and I mentioned in the comments that the blogger totally missed TS. Dan reached out to me via e-mail to say thanks for the note. From that quick e-mail, we developed a great friendship.

Dan was another "business guy" with a finance background who jumped into a startup because he was angry, physically angry, about a problem he saw and wanted to make it better. He was the first real kindred spirit I've found on my startup journey. He was more than a mentor, he was an inspiration.

I leaned on him a lot, probably more than was fair, but Dan was always there to help me out, think things through, or just offer a pick-me-up when I was down about user numbers, distraught about my inability to help my startup because I couldn't code, or whatever else was on my mind. He introduced me to new ideas and new techniques, but most importantly, he introduced me to a world of new friends. Because of him, I have a place to crash and people to hang with when I visit San Francisco.

Dan paid it forward and did it because he liked to help people. He will be missed.
Wow, a bit bitter are we?

Well guess what...
Tom here. I am exhausted so pardon the informality and lack of feeling. Questions, etc. please contact me. Paul has a note that he's going to be posting on the YC blog at some point; try to keep discussion to one post, for my sanity. I will be keeping an eye on stuff and answering questions where possible.

tom@ts
also gtalk
Despite this, Bitbucket is great. Private repository with a free account option - you don't get that on GitHub.
I find the color schemes don't translate well to a web design from the format that they present on Kuler. But maybe that's just me.
Terrible.

Most of all, don't beat yourself up about this - there was nothing you could have done to have stopped it, and he did what he wanted to do for his own reasons.

I'm sorry for your loss.
Okay, but the school example is bull. I've blown people away with all kinds of stuff, but i've never gotten anything more than an "A" out of it.

Of course this is one way in which school is unlike real life. In school your success is effectively capped, whereas in real life it is... well... still capped, but very very loosely so compared to the school environment.

In other words: school encourages mediocrity because you can never break the 100% barrier.

Now i know that's a generalization, but it's a lot more true than the given example.
How incredibly sad. Condolences.

He will be sadly missed in #startups and obviously on hn.
oh and a few more famous brands to back my argument for colors focus on your brand (story)...
http://www.google.com
http://www.purwater.com/#/healthy%20water,%20healthy%20you
http://www.toyota.com/prius-hybrid/
http://www.teslamotors.com/

As you see the color schemes are only there to accentuate the brand. Do customers buy teslas in order to be green or because their a luxury sports car? Their color scheme is chosen on the basis of their brand and who their customers are.
Ugh. I am working on the next gen architecture for our site, and I wanted to focus on hosting it in a cloud - but all these outages give me no confidence that cloud-based hosting is really all that ready for primetime yet.
The other "rule of them" i've heard is that the first 80% of the work takes 80% of your time, but the last 20% of the work takes the second 80% of your time.
Don't worry, you'll be able to. I imagine what's going to happen with Twitter will be the same thing that will happen with Facebook, just faster. They might even beat Facebook across the finish line. It's a pretty simple plan really:

1. Build a product that gets lots of users. (check)
2. Build a platform on it that is easy and compelling to develop for so third parties can build apps. (check)
3. Let developers figure out how to make money off of those apps. (currently in progress)
4. Create a payment system to make accepting payments from Twitter customers as easy as tweeting, take a cut of the revenue from that.
Thanks. ( It was an actual question. )
Everything fails. Design systems that minimize the impact failures have on your customers. Moving to another provider isn't going to fix the problem. Data like this should be stored in more than one place.
Some Haskell is "write only" :)

http://dev.pugscode.org/browser/src
I last talked to Dan ten days ago. Can't believe he's gone. His feedback was instrumental to us getting into YC - it was exactly the kick in the ass we needed. If we succeed, a share of that success will belong to him. I think lots of other people could say the same.

My condolences to Tom, Dan's friends, and family.
My side project, wikifieldtrip.org, is trying to approach this problem.
Git doesn't keep track of empty directories by default, so he's just making a file in each directory so that they're there. You could name such a file anything, he's just picking .gitkeep because it's descriptive.
Was there a note or some type of reason? Dan seemed perfectly normal in his conversation.
Well, anywhere in London except Parliament Square without prior permission as you'd be arrested for doing an unauthorised protest.
Hacker News: "♂♂♂♂♂♂♂♂♂♂♂♂♂♂♂♂♂♂ M 99.9%"
I think compiz has a plugin that does this. Haven't used it though.
I am stunned. While I don't know Dan as many of you do in person, I did read his comments. My condolences to his family.

I initially thought it was a mishap. The news that He took the exit door by himself is what chokes on my thoughts.

Why do the good guys do this to themselves? Why did he go away?
Sure quality of tools is important. But you first need to define what it is. Are you suggesting that there is an objective definition of "quality of programming languages" applicable to everyone regardless of the context?
No. Nobody suspected anything including me, family, friends, and his girlfriend
Please! Dont decide on the behalf of everyone what is good or bad.
I'm here to answer questions if there are any (I run Bitbucket.)
I agree with your take on his piece. But understand that there are many people out there who have seen livelihoods and futures dashed by the rapid commodification of content. These people are afraid, angry, and looking for someone to blame.
Sadly not. I'm British & this guy is not joking. His 'career' is making unobservant remarks about his life for a newspaper. The internet has opened up what he does to comparison & he is discovering that the market places a low value on his work. Rather than wonder why he is not popular he blames 'nerds'.
Thanks. I'm into P.K. Dick's stuff, too. I read everything I could find in the local library. But since I just moved, they may be more here.

I'll check out 'The Space Merchants'.
There's a chicken and egg thing here...
That's what I thought at first but then I got all the way through and I'm not so sure. I think he is actually serious.
Fkin hipsters had it coming. lol, jk
Has the police ruled out any possibility of foul play?
How can something that only purports to be applicable to some scenarios be wrong?
Writing a cross-platform media management system that everyone already uses is easier than changing a few constants in their firmware source code and rebuilding it?
Yeah, there's a lot of questions and wonder about how someone like Dan, who just... seemed fine and happy (perhaps on the outside), could bring himself to make such a terrible and extreme choice.

It's a puzzle that, despite my only knowing him personally to a limited degree, that I may never understand.
I didn't have the chance to talk with Dan, but the comments here make me feel like I missed out on a tremendous person.

Sorry for your loss, Tom.
In your situation I would go for Oxford. I'm biased since I've got an uncle teaching there in Economics. Cambridge is better in Sci/Eng Oxford in Arts/Social Science. But if you wanted to do Ec you'd be better off at LSE. The faculty access at Oxbridge is incomparably better than anywhere else worldwide, Ivy League, Stanford, whereever. Ox and Cam are both great, they both have good startup scenes by European standards. Cambridge's is definitely better. If only Ox has the course combination you want go there. You can improve the scene there, get a rep, like jedchristiansen at Cambridge (seed accelerator MBA thesis guy, ask him) email me
The main problem that you notice, that is.

I don't use ECC RAM in my desktop, and I notice that one a year or so my "every-30-days fsck" detects a filesystem error when I have not uncleanly unmounted the disk. That is either a filesystem bug, or memory corruption.
In reality, replicating across two clouds is difficult and expensive. It's quite possible that Bitbucket wouldn't exist at all if they had used such an architecture.
When people don't mention the reason for a death in an announcement, I've always thought: "Why? Why keep it a secret? They're gone now anyway." I think I've just realized why.

I can't say anything else other than that I'm sorry for all of your losses and I hope you do his dream proud.
No luck required. Most of the big well known tech companies are devoted to making it easier for people to do their thing and/or share the results.

Google: Advertisements for your work.

Apple: Music and graphic production toolchains. The iPod / iPhone. The AppStore (for all its many, many flaws).

Yahoo Stores / Ebay / many others: Sell your stuff online.

Free or nearly free webhosting. Social networking, blogging, Twitter, etc.

This isn't accidental. People are social animals, and many of us are creative social animals; we want to share news and creations with our friends, and some of us want to make a buck doing it.
Suicidal people usually do not exhibit much abnormal behavior for strangers to get the idea. There is little strangers can do, anyway. Even professionals can only help when the person genuinely wants to be helped. This is sad, but this is life.
I agree that this business model has little in common with that of Google or other online businesses, but that doesn't necessarily mean it wouldn't work. I think a better analogy would be a Subway or a Starbucks in which you have a small staff at each location. By standardizing business processes and sharing expenses (advertising, accounting, etc) across many small locations, they can generally outcompete the local, independent operations and, in aggregate, generate a large amount of revenue.
Yes, there are. But if your living is content, then ignoring developments in your industry is a failure to engage in your career - and if you blithely blame others for the result of that failing in print then you diminish your authority with your readership further.
It doesn't make it any better but it's pretty remarkable what some chemicals swirling around in our brains can do to us as humans. A lot of good things, sure, but a lot of distressing, uncharacteristic stuff too.
Why did several people downvote it? Seems a legitimate question.

I wish people who mod comments down would at least explain why.
What are you thinking in terms of movement / failover at this point?
I have a similar point that I like to make:

Imagine two wireless devices that want to communicate. You can have them transmit omnidirectionally, but now you have two problems: (a) you transmit radio power in all directions, including useless ones, which wastes energy/battery life, and (b) you create interference in that frequency range, limiting the number of such devices you can cram into an area. If your devices can transmit their signals more directionally, at just each other rather than everywhere, you can fix both problems: your devices would require less power and produce less interference, making the world a much more gadget-friendly place.

Well, radio waves being what they are, they have a tendency to spread out as they travel instead of following a straight line. When waves bend around corners, it's called "diffraction", and when waves bend in empty space, it's called "divergence". Even a laser beam doesn't remain perfectly straight forever -- it "decollimates" over a long enough distance. The best way to keep radio waves from spreading out, and thus to obtain the full benefits of directionality, is to use a wave guide.

A wave guide is a device that forces the wave to flow down the center of the guide, usually in a straight line. It works because, as the wave approaches a section of the guide, it produces tiny electrical eddy currents in the sides of the guide, and these eddy currents repel the wave and force it to the center of the guide. As the wave passes by and leaves, the eddy currents are re-absorbed by the wave, ideally leaving the wave with 100% of its original energy content. (In reality, unless the guide is superconducting, the eddy currents will experience resistive losses, thus converting some tiny bit of the wave's energy to wasted heat. But this tiny resistive loss is still much, much tinier than all the wasted wave energy that would've gone flying off in useless directions if the guide hadn't been there.)

If they're so great, why haven't wave guides taken the world by storm? Because their cheap, flexible cousins are already ubiquitous: we call them "wires".
Depression is an incredibly insidious disease folks, especially because sufferers normally keep it hidden from others.

Some days you can feel completely fine, have amazing connections with people, love your work, be a completely present and loving parent and spouse. And on really bad days, it feels like the sky has completely collapsed on you and that the only logical thing to do is make the world a better place by leaving it. It may sound silly if you don't suffer, especially when you recognize much of it is brain chemistry, but it is very real to the person experiencing it.

If you know someone who suffers from depression and has communicated to you that they have suicidal thoughts from time-to-time, I strongly recommend that you let them know that you are there for them at any moment when things feel really dark. They can call, text you, get you on the computer, whatever. Things can go downhill extremely rapidly, so if you ever get a 9-1-1 from a sufferer, react immediately. Get to them in person if it's possible or get someone who lives close to get to them, don't stop communicating with them until you do.

And don't try to fix the problem, telling them it's all in their mind. Again, it's all very real. Let them talk, just allow them to express themselves in whatever way it comes from them, it might be sadness, anger, rage, pain. Let them know they are safe to communicate anything with you, even the dark thoughts. I hope none of you have to go through this, but if you do, you might be saving the life of a friend, spouse, child, parent, aunt, uncle, someone many people love dearly.
From Facebook's Modular Innovation Initiative to the Evolution of an Interface
It's not that black and white. It was Deng's regime that crushed the Tiananmen Square protesters. There were other nominal heads-of-state at that time, but Deng had de facto power.

His reputation is generally favourable today because of the economic wonders he orchestrated in the 90s.

Depending on how you define a good politician, Zhao Ziyang, the party general secretary in 1989, was sympathetic towards the pro-democracy movement. But overall he didn't change as many lives as Deng did. He lost power after Tiananmen Square protests.

One liberal political who was pro-democracy at that time yet still remained in power is Wen Jiabao, the current Premier (second in power maybe). He is probably the most popular politician in power today. If there is going to be top-down democratisation, it would probably start around him. He is in a lineage of politicians who rose to power through meritocracy rather than loyalty, succeeding Zhu Rongji.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wen_Jiabao
Such is the reality of a field where the decision-makers are not practitioners.
At least a 10% raise, I'd hope!
IHMO AWS Windows instances may not be ready for prime time.
This issue seems not to affect Linux based instances.

There are other cloud providers like the YC favorite, SliceHost - I have no direct experience with them but may soon try them out.