skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yeah, this IdeaPaint stuff is $175 (!) for 50sf of coverage. It could cost several thousand to turn your office into what you're looking for.

Whereas tileboard is $12 for a 32sf chunk. So cheap that even if it does break down, it's still cheaper to replace it a dozen times rather than put up IdeaPaint.

Rustoleum makes a whiteboard paint that seems cheap, but you've actually got to layer it many times to get decent performance. And even then it's not that great.

We're going with the tileboard route at the coworking place I'm putting together here in Atlanta. Shameless plug: http://www.ignitionalley.com
I hate dealing with people that can't talk things over or explain things without drawing on whiteboards. I would like to remove the whiteboard from my office. Doesn't anybody else just think things through in English?
I agree with all that, but how do you solve the problem I posed initially?
I agree. He's looking at a lot of businesses that aren't in the software/IT industries. For example, his statistics include plumbers, landscapers, artists, etc. If there's anything I've learned from the Internet it's that the Internet isn't quite like anything else out there.

I'd be interested to see what the statistics are for only tech-related businesses and consulting vs. producing.
I'm glad I 1) don't confuse news commentators with news shows, and 2) don't watch much of either anymore

People on cable need to be outraged over something to keep eyeballs. Anything will do.

The sad thing is that the net is not far behind...
Ask HN: How many of you look at the code of open-source software you use?
I came across http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/9w0yk/how_many_of_you_actually_look_at_the_code_of/ and was curious to find out how HN users/hackers would respond.

Indicate what type of user you are, followed by the names of the project (5 max)

'Active' - Active contributor/committer

'Patcher' - Not an active contributor but have submitted occasional patches/bug fixes

'One-off' - Modified code but did not submit as patch as it was too specific to your purpose and not generic enough to benefit others

'Guilty' - Modified code but did not submit any patches to the community

'Curious' - Looked at the code out of curiosity/to understand but haven't modified anything

My FOSS involvement:
One-off - Maven, Forrest
Guilty - CruiseControl, Struts2
Curious - Apache HTTP Server, Firefox, Spring, Shindig, Lucene
For now it seems that it doesn't, there is already much written about this and there are plausible explanations on how that stuff got in there. Best to wait and see and not jump the gun on this, if it is real it will definitely come out. Until then this is pure speculation.

Such accusations should only be made with very solid evidence in hand to avoid blowing the media attention on a 'dud', then next time when there is real evidence you'll get a small fraction of the response.
This is hardly the first time the US government has bailed out private corporations. Was compensation a major issue when we bailed out the railroads?
The privacy page is just an example. Your scenario replaces it with a confirmation page. So the problem still stands: How do you go to the ?page=contact-submit page? Do you use header()? Is that the canonical way?
Depends on the package, if it's a compiler or a big subsystem, not likely. If it is something that I plan on integrating then there is a much bigger chance.

I always wonder how easy it would be for someone to slip a security hole in to one of those packages that I 'make install' blindly, one day I'll be bitten, that's for sure.

But you can't really audit each and every piece of software that you install and a well hidden exploit would only have to be a few lines long, or in the case of an intentional overflow bug somewhere, it could be '0' lines.

Packages: apache, have looked at the source extensively long ago, not since 2.x, varnish, looked at it recently in some depth, heavy user of php, mysql, never looked at the source of either, newbie user of python/django, looked at django but not at python.

Usually my digging in to something is triggered by a bug, I usually will submit a detailed bug report in that case but not send in a patch unless it is well within my expertise. Submitted some for drupal modules.

Wished I had more time to spend on the 'curious' department.
The other concern I have for Verizon is the lack of EV-DO Rev B handsets. Do they offer _any_ Rev B capable devices yet? I'm having trouble finding any on their website. The spec sheet for the Moto Droid handset also does not include Rev B support. Have they abandoned it for LTE? Either way it seems AT&T might have a future advantage with millions of 7.2Mbit HSDPA iPhone 3GS units ready for network upgrades while Verizon is stuck with EV-DO Rev 0 & A for the foreseeable future.
All true. I've bounced back and forth. On a previous project, there was no need for stepping through the code, so header() trumped. My current project has benefitted greatly from the IDE, so I'm using a session var (and hoping the user refrains from bookmarking! :)
I tried ZF a while back, but don't recall how it would resolve this issue. Can you be specific?
Depends on what the daemon is doing. JungleDisk and Arq backup products for instance are daemons on my box, but LittleSnitch tells me they're only writing to S3 which is a public API, and I can verify what's in my S3 account. Not so much with Dropbox -- can't tell what's going through that SSL connection.
While what you say is true, I'm not entirely certain what your point is. If distributing Erlang applications is/was untested, and (assuming I understand the article correctly) this is a data point regarding distributing Erlang applications, what do cross-platform packagers for Perl have to do with it?
Why? You're right that Java was a reaction to C++, and in that view it was a rather simple language. Virtual machines and garbage collection were indeed new (well, new for C-like languages. actually, new for c++), but one was necessary in order to make java embeddable (which was one of its primary goals initially), and the second was a very necessary solution to too many years of malloc.

But the essential point is that after HelloWorld a C/C++ programmer with a JavaDoc can pretty much start churning code. The immediate consequences, way before getting to esoteric disputes about single/multiple inheritance, were only positive: the code was portable, memory problems disappeared, the documentation was in one place, the library was standard etc. The language itself, for the ordinary programmer of the time, was just simplified C++.
Ask HN: What open source social network software do you use for you community?
I'm currently looking into open source social network software and I'm curious as to what the HN crowd is using. Currently I'm investigating Elgg and Wordpress Mu with BuddyPress.

I'm interested in this because I want to know if there still is a need for custom-made social network software or have the readily available open source software packages taken care of most of the needs of social networks?
And when I do a regular Bing search for, say, "ac milan," I'm not getting any real-time information, twitter-based or otherwise. Going to bing.com/twitter doesn't seem to be an improvement over just going to twitter.com to run my real-time search.

Searching "ac milan" on Google does at least bring up their last Serie A result and a news story about how they came from behind to beat Madrid this afternoon. I'm pretty sure Google will find a good way to integrate real-time tweets and status updates into its regular search results.
I'm curious as to how they picked the list of cities. By population?
The most useful thing I've learned about .gitconfig is that you can define custom diffs for arbitrary filetypes (including binaries).
You need a tagline explaining what the site is for. "For iPhones Apps" left me wondering, yea but the WTF for iPhone apps?

You should help people browse apps more effectively. Lead them into different categories. Highlight the most popular apps. I don't see any reason why using this site would be better than visiting the app store directly.
I worked at a software company where we should have run an experiment like this. There's an upgrade on user accounts that we charged a one-time $10 for, and people buy it all the time. We decided to try it as a subscription.

We spent a month getting the subscription code ready, then deployed it to some % of users, only to discover that nobody wanted it. What we should have done was build the front-end only, get people to buy subscriptions, and then just grant them the one-time permanent version.
Claim: "They appear instead to have just vandalized the data as valid databases by stripping the MS-SQL header data off, assuming that would stop us cold."

Correction: " It appears the files were NOT VANDALIZED and will open in MS-SQL Server 2005."

Claim: "This in turn revealed thousands of lines of Microsoft SQL code that appear to control the logical flow of the election. Stuff like:" (example follows)

The example they give looks like some code which adds a new candidate to the ballot.

This looks like an embarrassing debacle so far.
There was no reason to write it in C++ or worry about the difficulties of distributing an interpreter in the first place. There were good tools already. Stepping out on a limb and doing it with Erlang was unnecessary. I thought the thread was fairly obvious.
Inside Clojure [video]
Out of LSD? Just 15 Minutes of Sensory Deprivation Triggers Hallucinations
Gotta say, this is pretty sweet. Easy for app developers to add on something to make their apps social, with very little work on their part.
I suppose I don't care that much about whether clojure is really, honestly FP, but you brought it up...

Again, it sounds like you think any given scheme code isn't functional programming, either, it not being lazy by default, etc. Small world, that.
Are Property Rights Enough?
My ... God ... their website blows. Couldn't stay around long enough to find out if I could give them money.
I "think" in diagrams, I use the whiteboard behind my desk to explain things to myself.
Volunteering Computers for Science
"For example it wasn't until Switch.pm was pulled into the core that it could be done without source filters."

Not true, actually - it could comfortably be done with Devel::Declare - we just haven't had time to yet.

(I wrote Devel::Declare and in fact have been trying for about a year to persuade somebody to write me the smartmatch logic for perl5 v8 with a promise that I'll do the given/when syntax if somebody does ...)

Source filters fail because they're line-by-line; Devel::Declare is still effectively a filter in some respects but it's one that co-operates with the tokenizer so it tends not to interact badly with anything. If you've seen places it does, failing tests would be very welcome.
Bing.com/twitter is actually pretty cool for topics that have recently been in the news, especially the most shared links. On the other hand, if you search for anything that is not news oriented and is highly commercial, the results are super spammy.
Hope it finds its way to Verizon.
Just thought I'd disagree with this one. No offense at all, but I'd rather see a range. Too many talentless design kids out there. I would rather be able to pre-filter by only looking at what someone else has paid good money for. Just me two pence.
FREE Video Twitter Tutorials For Getting More Twitter Followers
Some learn best by reading while others learn best by watching which is why I’m writing this post. I for one would rather watch someone explain to me how something works through a video then having to read something and try it on my own. That’s just me.
They've already reached the 1,000 pre-signups and have at least 20+ pro accounts. They made a (very) small fortune in less than 5 hours.

If they can give designers a decent return and keep clients coming back... wow.
I believe it is for everyone. They are investing in both people and ideas and want to know how all founders function.
I couldn't find a way to filter by location or budget w/ Carbonmade, though, just expertise and skill.

Haystack seems more focused on clients while Carbonmade is more focused on helping designers manage their portfolio quickly and easily.
Active: Cupboard (http://github.com/gcv/cupboard), an embedded database for Clojure. I wrote and open-sourced it, I guess that's about as active as it gets. :)

Patcher: Samba. I work with it extensively, so I look at its code all the time. Found a bug once. :) All joking aside, Samba is a really nice piece of work IMO, and a great example of clear, understandable, and maintainable C.

One-off: Apache/Jakarta Slide. That project died, and good riddance. It had some of the worst code I've ever seen: designed by architecture astronauts who never met a "design pattern" they didn't like, and it sported exponential-time algorithms for things like adding entries to ACLs. I had to hack it extensively just to make it barely usable. Thinking of Slide makes me want to go shower.

Curious: Git. Want to look more closely at it, but don't have the time.
Nope. It does not show that.
Advice from Google on large distributed systems
> I like Gruber because he gets Apple without being a fanboy. Some people would disagree, but those tend to be Apple haters

I have two macs and just ordered a third, but Gruber is a fanboy. (An intelligent one, but a fanboy all the same.)
I did this too. Covered half my dorm room for something like $35.
I agree wholeheartedly that all voting machine code should be open for public inspection, but I don't think it helps the cause to make fantastic claims that are not supported by the evidence.
This is tremendous advice:

"Jeff makes an insightful point that, when designing for scale, you should design for expected load, ensure it still works at x10, but don't worry about scaling to x100. The problem here is that x100 scale usually calls for a different and usually more complicated solution than what you would implement for x1; a x100 solution can be unnecessary, wasteful, slower to implement, and have worse performance at a x1 load. I would add that you learn a lot about where the bottlenecks will be at x100 scale when you are running at x10 scale, so it often is better to start simpler, learn, then redesign rather than jumping into a more complicated solution that might be a poor match for the actual load patterns."
Google Earth Building Maker
I suspect it works how it always does for a BDFL (as I am for DBIx::Class in the perl world) - whoever likes proposes, if I like it I try and argue for it, only if there's a majority in favour does it get accepted anyway.

Except that if there's no consensus decision after a long discussion I get to make the choice. And no matter how any decision was come to, it's my fault if it's wrong.

Guido, Linus, and the various other BDFLs with important projects and actual talent seem to run things much the same way - I can't speak for their approaches but they largely inspired mine so I suspect I'm not completely wrong :)
I do avionics and am personally working slowly on an aviation startup (I hate the word!) in the experimental/homebuilt space.

Ada is used in the realtime life critical stuff because of the huge ecosystem from tools to paperwork behind it supporting safety. I could use C I suppose, but I simply am not smart enough to not miss a pointer dereference now and then.
We even have a name for it - Tall Poppy Syndrome - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tall_poppy_syndrome

I think it's slowly changing (certainly I haven't heard anything negative about Elizabeth Blackburn and Barry Marshall/Robin Warren -- Nobel Prizes for Med in 2009 and 2005)
My involvement:

Patcher - Thrift
One-off/Guilty - Lucene
Curious - Django
One-off - Log4j

Did not like what I saw in Log4j, was really a mess, far more complex than necessary.

I really need to polish up some of my code and submit them as patches, however that takes time and I've got a product to ship (I'll have to do it after my 1.0 is out)
The point's been better made elsewhere in the thread by now, but: what I mean is Google's always been a "best to market" company (to borrow a phrase from a friend) more than a "first to market" company. That certainly holds true for search itself, anyway; there are lots of exceptions within Google I can think of, but not lots that have been successful.
Hyperbole aside, it does appear that Sequoia is violating the laws regarding security in such a system. This is executable code which could impact the results of an election which is machine-generated, interpreted, dynamically loaded not integrity-checked. All these characteristics go against federal recommendations for the design of computerized voting machines and constitute cause for concern.
I'm unclear about what you mean by "unnecessary". In the strict sense, rewriting the software at all was unnecessary; in the very strict sense, writing it in the first place was unnecessary.

My best guess at what you mean is that they incurred unnecessary risk by rewriting it in Erlang as opposed to some more mature language, but even then I'm not certain what would be meant by "risk", given that it's an open-source project that is distributed for free. In that context, it wouldn't be a business risk in any sense (particularly given that one could just decide to scrap the rewrite if it was turning out poorly).

Might it have been easier in Python or Perl? I have no idea, but it seemed to work out well enough in Erlang, so Erlang would appear to qualify as a "good tool" in this case, at least.
The third world is craving for low cost technologies ,and there's a huge market potential there. only in the last few years companies have started to become interested ,so there might empty places for startups.
Did you see the figures posted in the article

In 2008-09 the classification board received 7,036 applications. That figure included applications for classifying 4,792 films, 1,095 computer games and 197 publications.

What happens when you add 20,000 iPhone games to that. Plus updates - do they have to be re-censored? The principal is ok, but the implementation scares me. (Oh - and we need an 18+ rating for video games, but that's another story)
Wow, everyone's signed non-exclusive agreements, no one's shipped anything stable... it's almost as if there's nothing to discuss.
Actually the formal document languages have type checking and consistency analysis systems/tools.

Tools like Alloy[1] allow you to write your documentation/definition and check its consistency. These languages are always limited so you don't get into Gödel incompleteness problems.

1. http://alloy.mit.edu/alloy4/
This isn't a crawl deal; this is a deal for access to "the firehose," the realtime data of all public tweets that Twitter most certainly does not give away anymore.
One-off: Ruby CGI, MZScheme, CRM114, SBCL

Curious: more than I can remember, but recently: Clojure and Linux
> communist sensorship ideals

Puritanical catholic not commie, but once the system is in place that wont make a difference.

VPN's for one and all!

Pretty good deal for the yanks, they get to export freedom of speech for just $5 bucks a month.
Ask HN: Does anyone know of a good primer on (oo) software design?
Hi HN,

I've been programming for quite some time now, and like to think I'm pretty decent at it, but of late I find myself having trouble with creating classes, it's not that I can't break a problem down into classes/methods, it's that the result doesn't seem...elegant at all, and I often have trouble finding clean ways to express interfaces for the groups of functionality I need. Does anyone know of a good set of principles on the subject? Am I just being OCD?
Common Lisp has a moratorium on language changes since 1994.
don't forget nanny.gov.au will have to protect the children from all those evil flash games as well.
GvR talked about retirement for a while, I see this as the official announcement. It's unlikely that in N years when the freeze ends GvR will continue to moderate the discussion on Python evolution.

This could also signal the beginning of python as "the" mainstream language as this makes it a lower risk proposition for vendors to embrace the language.
Yet they also have odd junk like this in their page:

<b></b>
Education is starting to being disrupted by various companies: straighterline($99month college courses) , Guaranteach(personalized online learning for k12) , and quite few others. but it's a huge industry so there is place for many companies.
but i'm not sure the big barrier here is good technology, probably making sales , and building contents are the barriers here.
Funny, I was wondering how a Computer Algebra System could help.
I'm an Australian and I agree with your comments except to say that I find the "laid back" attitude is a bit of a misnomer - it's really indifference spun to appear as a positive thing.
such software exist , there's one i know called isabel/isabel health or something similar.there are probably others.

from what i know there's quite a strong resistance from doctors to working with software that automates their jobs.
such software usually slows the doctors (he need to type etc) do it's hurts productivity.
but to really gain the monetary benefit from using such software, a cheaper , and less knowledgable healthcare provider should use the software(for example nurse doing some jobs of the family doctor like in minute clinics, or family doctor doing some jobs of the specialist).
As you can imagine ,shifting jobs between providers in the healthcare industry is not an easy job:)
I need to check...is there still room for being a fan of something without being a fanboi, or have those two concepts completely merged?
I don't think you can use PAM for authentication if you want to use public key authentication (see auth2-pubkey.c in Portable OpenSSH).
One-off: FMDB, Three20, MPOAuth
Guilty: I had an issue with Jaxer requiring a head element in HTML5 despite me not wanting the jaxer framework being pushed to the client side.

Curious: I'm supposed to do a six month placement with an open source project next semester (I'm a bachelors student on my second year), so I've been trying to figure out what to work on. I'd love to find something that is both interesting and not to terribly scary at the same time if anyone has suggestions.

@jlees - That's an excellent idea, thanks! :)
Business Idea: Online Community Integration
VideoPress supports Ogg
Ask HN: Anybody Interested in Collaborating on a F# App?
I was thinking about writing a small application as a proof-of-concept.

The application will allow users to post one entry to multiple places on the net -- FaceBook, MySpace, Twitter, YouTube, Wordpress or MoveableType blog, etc.

After posting, the app goes back to each place and catches all the replies and puts them in a place of the user's choosing -- perhaps as comments on his blog, perhaps as just a list in the app, perhaps as comments on FaceBook, perhaps as tweets to his phone, etc.

So it's kind of a switchboard where users can both post and track entries without having to visit dozens of "channels" on the web. I guess you could call it a poor man's wave.

Right now I'm thinking it will be a Win32 F# app. I'd like to make it a webapp, but I think screen-scraping is much more legal when done from the user's computer instead of a centralized service.

Anybody interested in doing some F# work over the next month or two? Let me know. I don't see any reason several of us couldn't collaborate over the net on this.
The principal of classification isn't that great, but it is in play and it is here to stay. So it does need to be fair.

This just underlines the point about scalability issues that this is running into and the great wall of Conroy will also run into. We all know the Internet is way too big to control so why try?
I did this too, in my old home office. Cheap and worked great.

The reality is though, the more space I used to have whiteboard discussions with others, the harder it was to capture this information for later use. Nearly all of the time, a pad of paper or a smaller whiteboard was suitable for the conversation.