skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>Another problem is the very rich, but complex, ACL (access control list) system of Windows NT. Although you can deploy extremely fine grained and subtle rights and authorizations with this system, in UNIX you just type "chmod 0755" and 99.9% of the cases you're fine with it.

Unixes - the *BSDs and Linux in particular - have supported ACLs for a long time. `man setfacl` will give you an overview of how it works on the filesystem. Many system services, like X11, and some other programs, like screen, also support ACL on some level. File modes are by no means the only means of permissions control.
I'd guess these don't require trained operators, but the difference that the article specifies is that the new machine costs $100,000. So it's an order of magnitude difference from the existing solutions.
Apple unveils faster, more affordable MacBook Pros
To answer teilo's question, is it hard to use? Once the IT is set up, can a minimum wage employee reasonably operate the machine?
Yahoo! and the need for speed
Ask HN: Synectics
Is anyone using this technique http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synectics for creative problem solving? I just liked this principle: "Trust things that are alien, and alienate things that are trusted."
Most of the time, all you need for optimizing an ORM is a declarative "batch retrieve" framework, where getting one object can also cause the en-masse retrieval of collections of other objects. (Reducing the number of SQL queries by 100X in my experience.) I've written one in Smalltalk that lets you declare the sub-graph of the object model to be batch retrieved as just a list of accessor methods. Before that, I pair programmed with another Smalltalk ORM author while he was fixing another framework. And at my previous job, guess what they had -- another Smalltalk declarative batch retrieve framework! (The last one was written for TopLink)
How quickly can conventional medicine rid me of hookworms should I dislike the results of harboring them?
Is it a fetus or is it a baby? It doesn't matter, it's so early that you can call it what you'd like. I think it's fine that they're looking for co-founders. They could just say "hiring first employee," but sounds like they're looking for a person who will be more involved than that.
The link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synectics
Why not local organic unpasteurized honey?
It's pretty trusting of techcrunch to tell everyone to go there, especially because it's a private owner. You never known when a harmless, 'cute' redirect will turn into horse porn.
Maybe so, but the docs had him on prednisone, which is also fraught with peril:
http://dailymed.nlm.nih.gov/dailymed/drugInfo.cfm?id=3735#nl...
Side effects?
It's not black and white. There's a lot of gray.

ie. A first emplyee doesn't usually house with the founders. A cofounder may be expected to.
Seems a lot of people missed the point. This wasn't about using the same password everywhere (obviously insecure) but rather, if someone did get your email password it immediately defeats the security of every other service you use.
Ask HN: Who makes the best APIs?
I'm writing a first draft of an API for Jobpic.com. Mostly just for fun, I have a friend who is going to write an app for us.

I love developer friendly APIs.

I want to model ours after a great one. What are some of your favorites?
So do you think it is reasonable to have to read through 4 pages of an article just to find out that isn't really about what the title said? I understand that a lot of people enjoyed the article but does that make this deception excusable?
Not for long I imagine.
Is it a fetus or is it a baby? It doesn't matter

If it dies, the law considers there there is a very large difference. :-)

More seriously: The English language says that "co-founders" are "people who found together"... not "people who found together plus anyone who joins them shortly thereafter".
almost all GCs are awful

Wrong -- almost all of the most visible GCs in the most popular languages are either 1) still awful or 2) were formerly awful for such a long time, they're still living it down.

It's a vicious cycle.

- GCs have a bad rep.
- Precocious programmer implementes their own dynamic language.
- They settle for Mark/Sweep or ref counts to "get it done"
(Hey, GCs are all awful anyhow, yeah?)
- Many people experience the awfulness.
- GCs have a bad rep -- REPEAT

Chicken & egg? GCs were bad. Experts have since figured out how to make them good. The programmer culture in general is slowly getting this knowledge by diffusion.

The VisualWorks GC is so good, as a lark, I once put an infinite loop into the app I was working on that did nothing but instantiate new objects. I could barely tell it was there!
These are some really good points to keep in mind. I'm working on a fairly serious website system for a client right now and just reading over the article and the comments here makes me wonder if I should perhaps think ahead and make sure that I don't have to end up rewriting things.

At the moment I feel that my code is fairly future proof, but the truth of the matter is that when it comes to performance its hard to tell how things will work out in the long run.
What we need is another word that means "1st employee and oh so much more". I'm thinking "employee++", or "founder'" (that's founder prime, if it's not obvious).
Screencasts are just plain smart when you have your demo, your single shot, your company, on the line. Don't count on the internet working anywhere (especially not a VC's conference room), or EC2 staying up, or your server on your laptop staying up. Give a well paced talk over a perfect screencast and nail it. It's not worth the risk - ever.
Assuming that your codebase will continue to be a work of elegance is challenging. Particularly if you're loading CPAN modules that are written and maintained by other people to a different standard. Of course if you reject those CPAN modules, then what's the point of writing Perl?

But, you say, we'll just limit ourselves to high quality CPAN modules? The real standard ones that everyone uses? Surely nothing will go wrong?

Fine. Last week I ran into a segfault coming from the Template Toolkit triggering a regular expression bug in Perl. (I am waiting on the bug report until I get official permission to submit the patch with the bug. I'm careful about copyright these days...) That's about as standard as you can get. Assume that an extremely popular pure Perl text manipulation module on top of Perl works as documented and enjoy the core dump.

The moral is that unless you are personally writing the whole software stack you're using, you never know what will trigger a bug somewhere. And no sane web company is going to rewrite their whole software stack. (For the record the most painful bugs in the application I described previously were at the C level, and none of that code was touched by anyone in that organization.) However there are architectures that let you mitigate classes of problems before they come up. What is that protection worth to you? Given how much traffic you can get per server, what lengths do you need to go to to optimize?
Not necessarily. LinkedIn technically had 1 founder: Reid Hoffman. But really he couldn't build LinkedIn solo, after raising a small amount of capital (and using some of his own from paypal) he recruited 4 others to help him and become additional co-founders. So LinkedIn actually has 5 cofounders, but really started with 1.
Bing So That’s What A Swizzle Stick Is.
Ask HN: Real-time photo stitching in DeepZoom?
Hi,
I'm a newbie to DeepZoom and I was wondering if anyone has any resources that give information on how to stitch a collection of images into a single DeepZoom image as soon as they are uploaded to a pre-specified folder or album. Is this even possible?
Mostly asymptomatic unless you get a severe infection (lots of worms) which can lead to anemia and protein deficiency.
Usually I'd 100% agree. But I think the RethinkDB guys are a special case.

They've gotten a huge amount done in the last few months -- in my "On Applying to YC" entry, they were the most notable exception to the "the teams that were moving the fastest at the beginning were also moving the fastest at the end".

But if you remove YC from the equation, RethinkDB probably wouldn't have incorporated yet. (Well, let's pretend that they wouldn't have, at least.) They're just a few months in. Really, I think it's exceedingly rare when "co-founding" teams all start on the same day. There's a period where the company comes together over a few months and the people that are there when it incorporates become codified as the "co-founders". In this case, the RethinkDB guys are early enough on that I think some of that DNA is still being laid down, and the term co-founder isn't completely off.
It's not that I don't like to solve problems, it's that Linux and MySQL code bases bring unnecessary problems to the table that I have no interest in solving.
Take, say, Trac --- what does Jira do for you in practice that Trac can't?

(Genuinely curious).
Absolutely. It's certainly something that needs to be a dialogue, not at all "I know something you don't, here is why you are messing up."

There are always circumstances that affect decisions that you may not know of. This is one of the reasons I am always encouraging artists/developers to be knowledgeable of their project at a higher level. The more you know about what's going on in the big picture, the more of an asset you can make yourself. It's also important for sanity! The OP sounds like they are stewing daily about disagreeing with the feature -- but if there is in fact a relevant reason, some of that burnout-causing heartache could have been avoided.

Dialogue and accountability two huge keys to the management/artist relationship.
So if a new company sprouts up and I swipe their domain name and squat on it, I can be taken to court and forced to relinquish it.

Does this not apply to misspellings?
Please don't sign your comments on HN.
I don't know if you were making a direct reference to Salesforce.com's "Employees have fun in the office, participating in foundation/volunteer activities with their peers and wearing Hawaiian shirts on Aloha Fridays." (http://www.salesforce.com/company/careers/culture/)

I consider the whole Hawaiian shirt thing to be a "gateway" perk. If the company promotes wearing fun attire, then you can be sure to expect other more exciting perks. I don't know of any Silicon Valley software companies that advertise Hawaiian shirts as their one and only perk...

I also think Salesforce.com's volunteering perk is very enjoyable and worthwhile. You essentially get paid to do a workday of community service each month. Didn't sound very exciting or interesting at first, but it turned out to be extremely rewarding. I'd love to see more software companies adopting similar programs and following suit.
Does anyone know whether HP had anything like 20% time in its earlier days? I've never heard that they did, but now that you mention it it does seem like the kind of thing that HP might have done.
Did Google Just Start Testing Adding Extra Additional Links To Adwords Ads?
Is this supposed to work with any parasites? 'cause my doctor said I have scabies, and I still have allergies. But then again, my doctor was probably wrong... scabies??
In my opinion, a lot of The Software Problem(tm) can be traced back to this tendency to underestimate the difficulty of using magic black box X. Maybe this is because most programmers never try to make a real magic black box X that will be used by random person Y in random situation Z themselves. If they did, they might have a little more respect for the fact that it's really fucking hard, the interface will inevitably have all sorts of corners, and the result is never going to be as magic as you would like.
I first read the title as "Russia's plots of land will be returned to Venus". If they added two additional letters to the title to make it, "Russia plots to return to Venus", then sentence would have been unambiguous.
The problem with perks is that not everyone wants the same thing. I worked for Google, and while the annual ski trip was an amazing perk, I never really enjoyed it. I just don't like group travel very much. I'd probably feel the same way about a Europe trip.

I also found that the longer I worked there, the less the food perks mattered. Right out of college they were unbelievable, but after a few years I wanted to go home and eat dinner with my friends, without feeling like I was wasting the perk benefit.
He said he was going to talk to Joel about it. I'm not sure where/when they will be online
If you don't mind me asking, what was the final diagnosis? How was it discovered? And how are you coping?
My favorite was the thread that followed that, outlining the differences between "wear what what you sleep in to work" and "wear pajamas to work"
He had data to back his claim. He has not posted the slides yet.

An example: Omnifocus ($20) has sold 50,000 copies, and made the company $700,000. It is selling at a consistent rate, no race to the bottom or gimmick app. It rivaled (if not beat, i can't remember now) Flight Control in profits

Also, I was not saying "All $50 dollar apps were top grossing", I was making a point that you do not have to make the next flight control to be able to make a reasonable profit (thats not to say that you don't need a good product to make a profit)
Most of the people that I knew who had 20% projects, it was something like getting unit test coverage up for their main project. Mine was maintaining my previous project for years. Some people do have cool ones, but it wasn't common.
Ask HN: What HN-like sites do you visit?
I love Hacker News. So much so that I can't get enough.

What other HN-like sites are out there? By HN-like I mean

A. Digg style submissions.
B. Latest Internet technology.
C. Web development.
D. Hacker culture.
Human parasites in honey? Must be a weird life cycle! References?
Guidelines for Designing an API
The article mentions something about immune systems not developing properly but I'm sure there are better ways of exercising your immune system other than infecting yourself with parasites.
"As you can see, adding this feature slows down the rendering by a factor of 4, but I think it's a small price to pay for the added accuracy, even if you can't see it."
django-privatebeta
More importantly Argentina's educational level is very good and has been for a long time. Argentina has five Nobel prize winners (three for science) and Brazil, for example, has none. The literacy rate in Argentina is 99% and has been for a long time, and so on. Picking 1900 as a random point to correlate with GDP in 2000 is arbitrary and meaningless.

It seems like the author picked an arbitrary variable to make a point without enough subject knowledge or citations to back it up. Just visiting Argentina would make it glaringly obvious that the education hypothesis doesn't explain anything.
The interwebs say a drug called mebendazole "cures more than 99 percent of all cases of hookworm if given twice per day for three days cures more than 99 percent of all cases of hookworm if given twice per day for three days"
I'm not sure I buy it.

That one user can probably cause a lot more users to quit than the Wow player.

The screw up to the Blizzard economy will be temporarily and will be corrected in less than a day.
No, I vote maggots for the removal of necrotic or poorly-healing skin for the title of "least desirable". http://drbloem.wordpress.com/2008/10/11/maggot-debridement-t...

At least hookworms are out of sight and (unless there's a rupture into the bloodstream) out of mind.
Don’t Be A Dick: Compiled Flash and You
This guy writes up his adventures infecting himself with hookworms over at k5: http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2009/3/16/3408/66053
Wierd, I read it as 'plans'!
I was confused too. Looks like they already have a technical co-founder there; why another? Is he leaving the company?
Ya that's right, now I remember
I like 37signals Basecamp API (not as much Highrise and Campfire), but a standout for me is Wufoo's:

http://wufoo.com/docs/api/

Really nicely documented.
I'm married to a Crohn's Disease sufferer, one of the conditions people talk about hookworms as a treatment for. It's one of those squidgy conditions that doctors don't understand that well and can have a hard time treating. The remedies might have unpleasant side effects (steroids - weight gain, methotrexate - cancer).

The Discover article is typical crap science writing, but if you've got a condition that puts you on the toilet with diarrhea four times a day, getting infected with some little worms can start to sound like an appealing alternative. To stop a little bout of hay fever? Not so much.
Amazon's product advertising API is nice. You can't help but get startup ideas browsing through the documentation.
This isn't really alternative medicine. You need to become better acquainted with the hygiene hypothesis:

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

We've covered this material in both of the immunology courses at my university. It's a fairly uncontroversial idea nowadays (and it should be that way, given the evidence).

You might have this idea that you're somehow a biologically independent organism from the commensals in your gut and skin, but you're not. Humans (and other animals, of course) evolved symbiotically with their intestinal flora, and are heavily dependent on it for survival.

If still you feel that this is yucky, remember that you have about three pounds of bacteria in your gut (at least in an average healthy human adult), and you need it to live!

This does not mean that we shouldn't find another way of treating people (with a vaccine that stimulates IgE production against worms, for instance). For the moment, however, worms are cheap (and they appear to work). And if you purify your culture properly, they really aren't a bad idea; clinical trials with them are underway for a variety of conditions (MS, for one).

Finally, remember that anti-vaccine nutters often invoke phrases such as "fraught with peril" when railing against vaccines. But consider the peril we would all be in without them!
This Cubby guy's biggest expense was the $29k he blew on programmers. It's crazy how many people are trying to make money on the iPhone and are either not programmers, or don't have the drive to actually learn how to write code.
Right. You'll notice that my article doesn't mention performance at all. I never claimed that ORMs are slow, or that any slowness caused by the abstraction couldn't be easily overcome.
I haven't used Trac in a couple of years, so I may be out of date, but:

The interface is much nicer. Superficial, yes, but I like it, and so do the less technical folks.

Built-in integration to Mylyn in Eclipse (you CAN do this with Trac, but you have to install plugins and configure things within Trac).

Better reporting on workloads, productivity, hours, etc...

Easy custom workflows. This is huge.

Easy custom issue types with custom fields. Also huge.

Powerful user and group based permission schemes, which can differ based on project, and hooks up to LDAP or Crowd very easily. Also does SSO.

Can create tickets via incoming e-mail, and track replies to the same ticket.

Supports multiple projects on a single installation, with as much privacy and security as you want. We have many clients who each have their own project, can't see any other projects, but we can see all of them, etc...

Jira supports other code repositories, not just SVN.

I'm a Java guy, so having it written in Java, with access to the source, and built for extension, make it easier for me to customize than learning to write Python eggs.

Project Roles.

Of all the free stuff I've used, I liked Trac the best, but once I tried Jira I didn't look back. And with $10 licenses, it seems pretty good for small shops. Large shops should see it pay for itself pretty easily.

YMMV.
It's not a web service, but I always thought Qt had one of the best APIs out there in terms of style, consistency, and documentation. It's worth looking at just from a packaging perspective.
Looks like a GoDaddy parked domain now
Some times I go to the programmer Reddit but 9 times out of ten the page is close enough to identical to HN new that I just check here.
Depends on how often they eat it.
> To stop a little bout of hay fever? Not so much.

how about to stop uncontrollable sneezing, blocked sinuses, itchy streaming eyes for half the year?

Not that I'm rushing out to buy me some worms - but don't trivialise hay fever. It's a bitch, too.
http://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Google-Salaries-E9079.htm

Looks pretty good to me.
Fair enough... I guess my impression was that existing treatments were pretty tolerable
twillage now has fulltext search, e.g. find concerts in San Francisco:
http://twillage.com/search?q=concert+san+francisco
OMG why do I hate that baby already!
You may also know ALS as Motor Neurone Disease (MND), particularly for those of you outside of the USA.

It runs in my family.
Best Tool For Detecting Breast Cancer
Its interesting how things become trends and the next "big thing". The same concept has been around for a long time (divide and conquer), even in CS (though perhaps more related to hardware) in tree machines.

Not to say that google isn't doing great things with the concept, just interesting to note that we've already studied some really complex problems and come up with smart, efficient solutions in the last 50 yrs and a lot of what we think is innovative is anything but.
tolerable... but also expensive and pretty ineffective IMHO
Perks are a really bad way of measuring the workplace.

Me, I wake up on Monday morning and think 'cool, there's work to do!' - and most of my coworkers feel the same way.

For me, that's the measure of a good job.
I'm curious as to what their test protocol is that it has dispelled every other posting on this topic. A person told to buy shoes at Amazon.com isn't going to be stifled by a scrollbar, but someone who isn't being directly told to interact with the website in a given manner doesn't seem as likely to scroll down looking for content that isn't found on a sparsely populated top page.

(Related: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/word-matching.html)
In all honesty I think that all that is needed is a dose of reality.

If this to-be-hired person is going to be on-par with the existing "founders", in terms of pay, equity, and ability to vote to affect the outcome of the company, then I would call them a co-founder.

If instead this to-be-hired person is going to be a very senior employee with more equity than later employees, and some input on the product management stuff, then they are an employee, not a co-founder.

I do not know which case is true, my only point is that we do not need to invent new pseudo-titles for everyone to feel special.
Careful, that's my son you're talking about... just because I'm brainwashing him into a life-long obsession with Apple, doesn't mean he's someone you wouldn't like. ;)

david
I am the technical cofounder, I am most definitely not leaving the company :) I couldn't have described the reasons we are looking for a cofounder and not an employee better than zaidf - expectations, equity, and pay. We expect full dedication, tremendous force of will to change the world, incredible technical expertise, and capability to lead people and define the company. In exchange, we will give a significant chunk of equity (it's not a 0.25% - 0.5% deal at all), and because it's such an early stage, we cannot pay a competitive salary yet.

Expecting these things and calling the person an employee would be dishonest at best. We're in this to nurture a great company, not to nurture our egos. We feel that assigning a title of employee at this stage would be a display of vanity and would significantly detract us from the real goal of building a next generation database that will change the world.
I got that. Its just irritating when someone who's not an authority in an area pretends to be one.
Not cuts so much as scaling back and eliminating waste. If you can provide the same perk in a less wasteful way then you save.