skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Startups looking for volunteers?
Where can one find resources connecting seed/early stage startups with people who are looking to volunteer (for the startup) part time? -are any HN'ers looking for someone to help launch a product, find clients, or find partnerships?

I like the idea of helping resource-constrained ventures in a non-technical capacity in order to learn more about how a business operates.

Jobnob.com looks like a good answer to this question. But I wanted to ask HN first.
For some time it is. You can be well for some time just with the oxygen lingering in you lungs and in your blood, as long as the blood is circulating through your body.
That's impossible under traditional system configurations. Windows Update can always update whatever "user has confirmed" record Firefox stores, because it has administrative access to the machine.
What if your employee was secretly being paid by a competitor to sabotage your project. As you say, you could just judge the results of his work, but it can take a lot of time to judge the outcome of complex projects, and to separate deliberate failure from normal risky-project / try again next time failure.
This is what's happening when oil companies pay-off people in power to sabotage environmental policy. It's really much more efficient if we can weed out the saboteurs from our teams.
Maybe you should list some track record / qualifications ?
MVC web development without ORM is definitely not fun. Being able to stay within the object paradigm when working with data keeps development momentum flowing. Stopping to write basic data access methods was always very annoying. I think the choice comes down to your optimization needs -- if ORM with caching is too slow, you could work backwards and create custom queries where needed.
Ask HN:  Are there any very long term genetic programming experiments?
Given that biological evolution has taken billions of years to yield intelligent life, shouldn't computer scientists be carrying out very long term genetic programming experiments?
Surely just make the [user confirmed plugin install] update something with a secret hash token.

When firefox starts, it checks each plugin has been explicitly accepted by the user. If not, it alerts them.

Sure, you could reverse engineer the signing token, and hack around it, but that wouldn't get you many friends.
The Future of Energy: A Power Station in Your Basement
Personally, I'd love for stuff to stabilize, and for someone to put an end to this madness of having to ditch all the stuff you've learned three years ago because that skill is no longer what businesses expect.

I'm frankly sick and tired of it.

Progress is good. Too much progress can be very tiring, and gives the industry as a whole too little time to consolidate the old with the new.

Which is one reason why everybody is re-inventing the wheel all the time, both in terms of business processes as well as development methodologies.
Microsoft Has Horrible Website Design & It’s Hurting The Web.
Idle question: when a friend visits from South America, he takes back a case or two of books. I suggested burning a few copies of the Project Gutenberg DVDs. He pointed out that the Spanish and Portuguese content was pretty small. For instance, there is not even a copy of El Correo Orinoco.

Can you think of a way to get more people to contribute to PG in other languages?
Two quotes from http://www.jwz.org/doc/java.html

C (the PDP-11 assembler that thinks it's a language)

C++ (the PDP-11 assembler that thinks it's an object system)

C isn't really a portable assembler. It was designed to be sufficiently efficient on a specific processor (the PDP11, a register based CPU), while providing basic abstractions (function, structures…).

C was an overwhelming success. And so were CPUs fast at running compiled C programs. As far as hardware optimization is concerned, the main characteristics of C are pointer arithmetic, manual memory management, and a relatively low ratio of function calls (in C programs). These are pretty big constraints. So, we ended up with C optimized CPUs. Now what if Unix has been implemented in Forth? All mainstream processors would have been stack based, and optimized for a very high ration of function calls.

C++, by extending C, also have this "portable assembler" nature. It also have a number of incredibly low-level mechanisms which can be used to build pretty high-level abstractions, but it's still an extension of C.
I think you're mistaken that marketing (in the sense of community building) is an important component of designing a language people would still care about in 100 years. The history of the Lisp family is a counterexample. For 50 years (except arguably for a brief interlude in the 1980s) Lisp was popular only with a tiny community of eggheads. Now thanks to Clojure Lisp is fashionable.

The history of such fashions also contradicts your claim that you can lock in a position of leadership by building a big community around your language. There has been new hot language every 5 years. First Perl, then Python, then Ruby, now maybe Clojure.

The way to make a language popular in the short term is build buzz and libraries, because that's what the average programmer cares about. But to build a language that turns out to be the ancestor of whatever people are using in 100 years, you have to appeal not to programmers but language designers. You have to create the ideas language designers want to copy (have to copy, because you found the optimal solution). That's what McCarthy did.
Because the US internet won out over the UK JANET?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JANET_NRS

Which caused no end of problems in mail relay at the time.
Entrar
The pocket spy: Will your smartphone rat you out?
He wasn't talking about the success (popularity) of C++ at all. He was talking about the success of the effort of adding "high level" OO features to C.

I think C++ totally failed at being high level. So, this "success" being highly controversial doesn't surprise me.
If he had done that it would've been massively confusing, given that domain names would still be the current ordering for everything else (e-mail etc.).
He didn't invent domain names. He invented the web. So, no, it's not citation enough.

Also, given that domain names were already in the current order, if he'd put it in reverse order for the web, it'd be far worse than what we have now, which at least is consistent across different types of services.

EDIT: I guess you could argue it's citation enough if we assume, based on his examples, that the original question refers only to web usage.
I wasn't so sure, until I reached the end:

Finally, if you still don’t know what language to pick, choose Ruby on Rails because it is the best. If you don’t agree, get ready for a public stoning.

Clearly, some very sound thinking! I like this guy already!

More seriously, the article is spot on. I have one caveat though: don't settle for what you know if you really want to know something else.

For example, if you've been doing PHP programming for years, and know it really well, but are really keen to learn Python and Django, give it a try! My advice would be to try the new language/framework for 2 weeks. It sounds long, but actually 2 weeks is almost nothing.

After those two weeks you might go back to your previous language, satisfied that you know it's the right choice since you've tried the grass on the other side and it didn't taste any better. Or perhaps you'll switch to the new language, safe in the knowledge that yes, it is a lot better and you can probably do a better job in this new language.
XKCD gives a nice glimpse of one possible problem http://xkcd.com/596/
I know it's cute, but goddamn, someday I hope puffery is declared illegal.
Seems to me that medical devices should be programmed in the same style as the computers guiding the space shuttle. It's not exciting, but it works and keeps people alive.
Interesting, but it is now a single AAA battery-powered server ... which appears to be down!
Zynga Under Investigation By Department Of Justice
Startup must haves vs. nice to haves and a particularly harsh lesson learned
I figured Tim Berners-Lee is in an excellent position to criticize not only his own work, but also the more general case of the domain name system.

Obviously if he had done it the other way around in URLs then that would have been a fairly strong point of critique against the DNS, the fact that he would have in retrospect been better of to choose the alternative in spite of creating two different systems makes that critique even stronger.
I'd like to know the software company's side of the story. If the bug is rare enough (half a million people treated successfully so far) and the bug's outcome is not serious, then an emergency upgrade may not have been necessary. What we're missing here are the consequences for the patient in a worst case scenario. What we do know is that this particular patient apparently wasn't harmed (in any way?).
Poll: What is your primary *nix distro on your home machine?
Just trying to get a feel of the *nix that people are using now.
Mandriva
None. Windows
Although if you're looking to get something done, learning a new language isn't going to help in the short term, there is such thing as a better language. PHP sucks. As a language, it's hackish, and not really designed at all. So unless you need to integrate with existing tools, it would probably be best to stay away from a language that will attract meto developers.

For more evidence: http://www.google.com/search?q=php+sucks&ie=utf-8&oe...
Verizon starts anti "iDevice" campaign
I just can't believe how foolish he was. He is a billionaire - he does not need to put on any inside trades at all. The risk to reward on that trade made it an incredibly bad trade to take. Boggles my mind.
In the end, a programming language is a tool to get things done. And while many tools are designed to solve different problems. Some tools http://www.flickr.com/photos/kjmeow/3078861757/ ARE just better than others http://www.flickr.com/photos/salyangoz/3466877208/ for getting the job done.
I was wondering just the same thing after those evolving block creatures that were posted yesterday, "what would happen if you let that stew for a couple of years?"
These same reasons generally apply to Chicago, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, San Diego, Omaha, Manchester, Paris, Munich, Tokyo, Osaka, Beijing, Hong Kong, Sydney, Melbourne, Accra, Sao Paulo, Buenos Aires, and every other major city that asks "why not us?"

To do a product company, you need 1) talent, 2) money to ride out the non-revenue-generating product development, and 3) precedents to help you navigate legal/vendor/cultural issues.

The two biggest pure software startups (37signals and Matasano) I know in Chicago got around this by "being Indian" - starting off as consulting companies. Even Zoho started off as an offshore consulting company for many, many years.
Showcase of Web Design in Russia
I keep flipping back and forth on the digital vs. analog future of media. Digital data can be cheaply propagated forever so long as the technology continuously exists, but won't be easily recoverable from the physical artifacts if the tech is lost. Human-readable analog recordings can remain legible for thousands of years without special tools. But then you have the great burning of the library of Alexandria...

We're in a strange transitional state right now, and the future will probably lie somewhere between these extremes. (I realize that's a really weak stand to take...)

Hell, maybe the Singularity hits and we put aside petty human concerns in favor of figuring out how to escape this Universe which is going to end in the Big Crunch. Or is it the Big Freeze? I forget which is the current prediction.
>
a few years ago Germany built a coal power plant with two times 920MW for 2.4 billion Euro.

The nuclear power stations built at Tianwan is then cheaper than that.

> Well, prices of nuclear power plants are so huge that only a few have been built in the last twenty years.

Nuclear power has stagnated after Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. After that a lot of governments stopped building or made regulation so tough that building one became infeasible. With the rise in awareness of global warming nuclear power is getting a second look.

The problem is that the only viable alternative (with current technology here, today) is nuclear power. It is either that or coal power stations that emits a lot of Carbon Dioxide.

> The future is described in the article and it is not nuclear. It is decentralized production of electricity and heat, energy efficiency, wind solar, biogas, etc.

The future described in the IEEE Spectrum article is definitely not renewable. The problem is that renewable energy is simply a pipe dream in 99% of situations. All renewable energy projects are developed with incredibly large government handouts.

So, either it is an increase in Carbon Dioxide emissions, a dramatic reduction in electricity usage or nuclear power.

> They could park the waste cheap in Siberia... oh, they are doing it already.

With reprocessing of spent fuel, the amount of nuclear waste is reduced significantly. A coal power plant also produces a large amount of nuclear waste. The only difference is that it is pushed in the air (in addition to carbon dioxide, sulphur dioxide (which causes acid rain), particulate matter, etc…). With reprocessing a nuclear reactor probably produces less waste than a coal power station.

> The price is huge environmental damage.

Coal power plants already produce huge environmental damage (Global Warming).

> If France wants to invest even more into nuclear energy, let's see how they deal with the costs.

Nuclear power is a perfect fit for France since they are not blessed with coal reserves as large as that of Germany. It is better than any alternative (including importing coal or oil). Despite France’s lack of coal and a significantly smaller population, they produce as much electricity as Germany. They are also a net electricity exporter (which would indicate that they can sell their electricity for more than they can produce it).
Well you could potentially help people too ... :-)
And 98% of the time, what's passed to the db engine, however horrifying it might seem, works just fine without any performance problems.

For the 2% of the time when it doesn't, you can always just optimise that specific part of the code...
You're in one.
Not feasible in capitalism.
"Finally, if you still don’t know what language to pick, choose Ruby on Rails because it is the best"

um. ruby on rails != language.
His anti-todo list starts with "don't be(come) a parent."
Systems programming in "scripting" languages
Awesome. These drawings helped me during 61a!
It was a joke, worth at least a smile. I bet you're fun at parties, too.
IMDb Turns 19. Yes, 19. Older Than The Web Browser.
I'm thoroughly amused that the first tool link is a picture of someone using a hammer to pound on a screw. The photographer even says in the flickr comments that he's thinking about titling the picture "What happen when you use a wrong tool...".

This in no way diminishes your point, which I think is quite valid. I just found myself laughing out loud so it seemed worth sharing.
How Wall Street is making its billions
I like Ruby and Rails for that matter, or rather where Rails 3 is headed. But this has flame bait written all over it. It's a matter of choosing the right tool for the job, plain and simple.
At the bottom of cdbaby's contact page there are instructions on how to contact them via a homing pigeon. Cute.
I'd say kill it or leave the post open without the link; nofollow links still indirectly benefit pagerank/SEO via increased exposure.
Why? Independent invention of the domain name system, and the URL-path system, at different times by different people.

URL-inventors did not think it important enough to break the already-established convention for domain names to acheive hierarchical ordering consistency. With hindsight, nearly 20 years later, it might seem that it would have been worth the nonstandard novelty, but I still wouldn't be so sure.

Consistency with telnet and email was very important for early URL comprehension and adoption among technical folk. And, the reversal-of-ordering corresponds with an important threshold in URL-resolution, from one system (network-layer and owned-domains in a collaborative framework) to another (a single hostname's internal organization, usually under a unified authority). That signification can be helpful even if it's hard to explain why. (The same goes for seemingly arbitrary, path-dependent choices in natural language grammars that nonetheless dominate logically-designed synthetic languages.)

It's easy enough for specialized applications to adopt a reversed form; junklight mentions the 'SURT' form used by my project, Heritrix, which reorders a URI internally for certain scoping/sorting/policy-decision purposes as:

http://(com,example,www,)/path/to/the/resource

(joshu's proposed move of the port/protocol to 'between' the host and path also has a strong puff of logic about it. I think Google, in their BigTable URI-keys, tends to reverse domain-segments and put the protocol/port later.)
I'm not sure how feasible this would be or what you are technically thinking about. The whole thing with genetic programming is to have the population converge onto some optimal solution but in real biology this optimum is constantly moving around.
I'm beginning to fear that HTML5 really needs to have a spec for the SATIRE tag.
You'd most likely converge onto some optimal creature and just stop at that point since the fitness function is fixed.
Ask HN: Upvote after login bug?
Hi,

Whenever I click the upvote (possibly downvote too) while logged out, then login, the posts are no longer getting voted up.

However, the vote arrows are no longer present (as though I have cast my vote but it hasn't affected the total).

Is this issue happening to anyone else?
The reason there are a ton of "php sucks" posts is that tons of people use PHP. The reason tons of people use PHP is that sometimes it's the best tool for the job. Engaging in 'language X sucks' debate is a waste of time better spent designing an innovative product.
Protectionism vs. the Innovation Nation
There was a great article posted about that here a bit back: http://www.fastcompany.com/node/28121/print
Thank you.

1) Fixed.

2) Fixed.

Yup, we are taking care of the timeline issues.
This may be fanciful, but I think this is a likely outcome of the spam/malware vs. filters arms race. At some point this kind of code may become sufficiently self-modifying to evolve on its own, with interesting results. A kind of virtual cockroach.
I believe the problem is with ever advancing hardware. The new chips are much faster and would "overtake" an experiment that's been running.

This problem is sometimes described as putting colonists on a space ship and sending then off. They travel for generations but before arriving they are overtaken by another ship which started several generations later, but was much faster because technology back on Earth kept advancing.

Then there's the problem with convergence. Even on a scale as large and complicated as Earth creature often reach an adaptive maximum which tends to keep them the same until an external shock. Think sharks, or punctuated equilibrium.

In a computer the simulation will also quickly reach a maximum and there's only so large and complex a simulation can be before you're talking crazy money for the machines. Without crazy money the simulation could hardly be complex enough to keep evolving for ever.

Obviously we have game-of-life like algorithms which can generate new patterns for ever, but they are not under selective pressure.
A similar question and its responses - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/396938/computer-simulatio...
Well that was nice. Now this is an e-mail that initially made my heart race a bit, which perhaps was the intended effect as it was written by a heart rate monitor company, but I'm still not sure if that's a good thing:

This message is in regard to Repair ID 7U8SGP2182.

We have some good news and some bad news! Good news is your monitor has been serviced and has been shipped back to you today. Bad news is that you no longer have an excuse for not exercising! =)
(snip)
I thought of the xkcd version of set theory - http://xkcd.com/468/
I think you are missing a critical point. Computer simulations can have iterations that are several magnitudes faster than anything you would likely see with bio evolution.
All right, I hereby declare it illegal.

(Did it work?)
...and I clicked through expecting some sort of reference to either Borges 'Library of Babel' or Idries Shah's 'Book of the Book'.
I only just checked my submissions again and found this. Thank you very much for such a helpful series of links!
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/516406/latex-equivalent-t... lists a bunch of possible options that would be rather trivial to integrate (either a modified version of Markdown, or the editor)
Essentially, you want a dev machine set up so you never break your flow/mindset/focus because you're waiting for the PC to respond.

Lots of RAM. Once you go 4GB++, you wont go back. The amount of time you spent waiting for a pc with 2gb of ram when developing is more significant that it seems. ON that note, grab two of the best gb per $ drives, raid mirror them, and enjoy similar speed enhancements.

Re. The CPU, a Quad core might be a good investment for the future, as it seems muti-core programming is going to become more and more important as time goes on. I don't know if your compiler can use multiple cores, so assess that benefit there. If not, dual core may be a better option, as they tend to have higher performance for each single core compared to the quad cores (IE. Core1 on a dual vs Core1 on the quad, the dual will tend to be faster given similar clock speeds).
No, not really but given the amount of meta programming DDH made to make ROR possible, I am not so sure.
Yes, PG has explained that he's experimenting with which votes count and which do not.
Halloween Hack: programming a "haunted" Jack-O-Lantern
I feel you overestimate both the anti virus industry, and the malware industry. It's rare for a piece of malware to do anything that the average, mediocre programmer couldn't write in a weekend.
I don't think that it is necessarily a need for US trained managers - I just think that some fairly average Indians and Chinese middle managers working in the US have seen that they can leverage their 'American Experience' into a better job back home.

Rather than a reverse brain drain - it could just be the Dilbert principle.
This seems pretty much right based on the historical data.

It doesn't seem like ordering of domain name parts was given much thought. RFC 882, which first defined the domain name space, said only this:

By convention, the labels that compose a domain name are read left to right, from the most specific (lowest) to the least specific (highest).

Additionally, it seems that when the first TLD was defined, .arpa, some people were hacking to support it by just concatenating .arpa to the end of all the domain names. Concatenation, of course, is much easier than prepending when you are programming in C. Note the following from RFC 881, which described the transition to using domain names, at a time when the domain name mapping was all stored in HOSTS.TXT files:

So far, no new domains have been introduced. Only a table with all the entries having official names in the ARPA domain has been provided. This should allow programs to be constructed to deal with domain style names in a general way without any special hacks to add or delete the string ".ARPA" to or from host names.
I wonder if people who support this move would support Microsoft adding Chrome Frame to IE's ActiveX blacklist under the same circumstances.
That's awesome! I wonder if candy in the bowl would screw with the capacitance