skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This headline is false.

Flipping a coin has a 50% chance to fail, because there's little you can do to affect that probability.

There's a lot you can do to affect the probability of success in a start-up. In fact, everything you do affects that probability.

This is like comparing video poker to a slot machine. On one, you have an opportunity for input. On the other, you don't. So they're not the same thing.
I'm also trying to get http://www.PhotoQnA.com/ up. Not as successful as moms4mom yet, but I'm hopeful.
Guess that's my bad for assuming you thought performance wouldn't be a problem. :-)
The Making of a Mind-Blowing Space Photo
While I agree in general, there are of course exceptions. "look at the scalability of existing pre-fork/connection-per-process network daemons" -- exactly, look at SER/opensips/kamailio - while they work on a per-packet, not per-connection basis, the architecture is mostly the same - fork a pool of processes on startup and share the sockets. And they could probably still handle a small city's phone connections on a single average machine ;)
Anyone else think of the final scene in Real Genius when watching this video?
MMORPG accounts are a particularly perverse case -- they're a perfect commodity for automated exploits, there's a very high floor on value (the subscription cost), and law enforcement doesn't give a shit.
That's a great point. And this is something I've been thinking about recently.

It is as if some start-up business models are merely based on creating technology that either another company will want to buy outright because it runs parallel to their goals and portfolio - or because larger competition doesn't want to have to pay dearly for not buying them out while they could.

Acquisitions don't result in lasting innovation in my eyes - it increases proprietary code bases. Early exits are like leaving a cash poker game after your first big hand, the fun was just beginning.

I hope to see more and more "start-ups" use less and less VC funding (we do realize that it is the VCs who have the winning scenario here, RIGHT?), say "F U" to acquisitions, and stay around long enough to make a sustainable difference.
Yahoo Ends Support of Meta Keyword Tag | TechJaws
I suppose it's free in the sense that it's something they did themselves, rather than spending money on ads or external services.

It's free as in "didn't cost us money", rather than "didn't cost us anything".
I'm surprised people thought the perks would last. Every company goes through that phase, where employees are showered with perks (of bizarre variety - everything from free laundry to day care for kids to free pop soda). The company either grows to the point where many of the perks are no longer sustainable (employees grow older, have kids -> company spends a LOT more on day care etc.), and/or hits an economic recession where belts need to be tightened. These things don't last. The stuff that lasts are the quality of the people, the culture of the employees (and hence the company) and the products that they ship.
I didn't mean to imply that you were being 'commercial' or only submitting content to gain popularity. I found both the pieces informative, so I'm hardly going to complain!

I was just trying to express my surprise that you were not expecting such a large difference in traffic between the two posts.

If I have a book in each hand and one is titled 'Australia' and the other is titled 'Australia: Mayhem and Sabotage' I know which one I'm going to choose...
You don't have to have a UI which exposes it to the user as two bits of dot separated metadata. In fact, Windows doesn't by default.

My point was, given the reality of the systems we have now, embracing it is a decent plan.
That's one hell of a supportive "friends and family"!
Belly boost too.
His headline and the gibe about using technology from the Windows 3.1 era is about encoding filetypes in filenames and how you handle the consequences.
So... you're trivializing this guy's experience because somewhere out there, someone else has it worse?

His experience isn't worth writing about because, somewhere out there, someone has experienced something more interesting?

I don't see the logic.

I don't get the negativity here - I thought it was a well-written account of the kind of last minute ninja dance before any launch. The author certainly had a lot riding on the demo, and I didn't find it self-aggrandizing in any overt way.
This is why a proper test needs to be administered by a professional, I would expect.
Not to mention if necessary languages like scala can optimize for maximum use of this feature.

Now... If only my job would move from 1.4.2 to 7 :)
I don't know the details of your particular situation. That said, I've been in situations where that "single client" accounts for 75% of the user base and more of the revenue. Sometimes you give the client anything they ask for :)
> This meme is a silly amateur-hour wheel re-invention and ignorance of history.

Just a note on the tone of the discussion:

Everyone is a silly amateur at one stage when learning something – there is nothing wrong with it. You have to do things that are silly and immature to learn. Most of us did some silly things in areas where we are not yet specialists.
Cloud for Academia?
No, I had a vision of some random protesters being 'poofed' out of existence in an instant.
"Most apps take at least six months of full-time work and cost between $20,000 and $150,000 to develop, according to Forrester Research"

So here the strategy is simple: just develop stupid things that takes a few days. If you check the top apps, half are not hard to code at all but stupid things that people are willing to buy.

So instead to write a smart, interesting application that costs 100,000$ it's better, I think, to write 20 applications costing 1000-3000$ each.
Actually, Ha-Joon Chang pointed out that the economic powerhouses (US, UK, Japan, etc.) relied on enormous protectionism when they were developing. However, now that they're powerful, they "kick away the ladder" and push developing nations to struggle under the ineffective free-market principles that they knew to avoid.
http://www.newamerica.net/events/2008/why_world_isnt_flat
Video: Peter F. Hamilton takes fan questions
It really depends on what team you work for.

Lots of people I know are too busy on their main project to even think of 20% time. It's nice to know that you have 2 months of 20% time booked but it's not feasible for most people to bank it and then use it later.

I'd say that unless your 20% project is a pet management project then the chances of you working on it 20% of your time is pretty small:(
I believe Aaron is on the record saying that Mint never purchased traditional advertising, instead they relied on pr/word of mouth.
Readily available snacks make people obese.
Thanks for posting this. I came to the ORM party a little late, and am still pretty infatuated with them overall. I was thinking when I saw the link that I've never had a problem with an ORM, but then realized two things:

1) I've only ever used them with fresh projects, where I had control over everything
2) I designed my objects with the ORM in mind.

I'd only ever bumped up against annoyance with an ORM when I was trying to do something with inheretance, and after a brief check into Rails' 'polymorphic relationships,' the requirement was basically dropped anyway.

Hm.
Probably because if Jira works for them between $10 and $8000 is really not "lots of money"? It takes hardly any employee time to rack up that amount. I more often wonder why people value their time so little.

Disclaimer: Atlassian are actually competitors of ours, but not in either of these product categories.
I think people will manage just fine without a company dictating one, and only one phone specification for everyone to use for all purposes.
http://fsinfo.noone.org/~abe/pictures/windoof/whymac.png
Silicon Valley Cloud Club Report (Part 1)
Mobile software is hard.

At our company (small mobile software shop) we currently have ant scripts that churn out builds for over 100 devices with at least 10 different screen sizes and many different input methods touch/dpad/trackball. On one binary. These things can be done, it just takes work.
It's unclear to me if this is human nature, or just cultural.
James Watters and Replicate CEO Rich Miller took notes and questions at the first Silicon Valley Cloud Club. This is part one of the discussion.
Finally! I can see ice!
Nothing wrong with comparing against a single benchmark, regardless of how good/bad the benchmark itself is. On the other hand, how would you have gone about measuring the security of browsers in a meaningful way?
When I submitted it that was the default title that came up (and what is in the title of the web page) so I didn't re-title it deliberately, but I agree a change in title can often make a big difference.
I think you might be taking the title of the post a bit to literally.
It obviously can't do very much to a truck, but I wonder what it would do to a human. Nothing very good, obviously, but how long would you need to keep it focused on someone before they dropped down, brain cooked? (I can't help but notice that the beam is approximately head-sized).

I wonder if a reflective helmet would be a decent countermeasure (or, dare I say it, a tinfoil hat?)
Totally didn't see that coming coughbubble onecough
This is a good post going in depth to provide value. Keep this series going please!!!
Yes, I was disappointed that the truck wasn't full of popcorn.
How to Search the Web real-time
Link: http://startups.stackexchange.com/
your half-assed "iteration" has led them to decide that you don't have the chops to solve the problem

While this theory sounds good, it is disproven time and again by initial half-baked versions of sites that then go on to take off. Just check the original launch of YouTube, Digg, facebook.

Also, a HUGE idea coming from lean startup way is to invest very little in marketing until you have a product users like. You don't need to get one million users to tell you a product sucks. Often, 50 would do. Now if you are saying that 50 users writing off your product will doom it for its lifetime, the problem isn't the lean way it's that your market is too small. YouTube guys had very poor reaction to their initial site.

"because our metrics show no one wants it"

They have little idea on how to use metrics. Don't blame lean startup ideas for that.

ie. What lean startup would do is put up a button that looks as good as your best competitor can put up. Then see how many people click on it. What you measure is action until the click, not the engagement after the click to draw conclusions about the demand for that feature. Now if 1000 people are clicking on the link but only few are using it, chances are your product sucks. Take that insight and work on your product. Just one small example.

failing to fix a hard problem will never increase the value of your company.

If you are saying that you have to solve really hard technical problems to increase value of your company, I full disagree. Just look at the web2 companies that took off.

Craigslist did not take off because it solved a huge technical problem. Craigslist also has a lot of value as a company.
You avoid this problem by not restricting APIs to what works on every phone, but providing optional APIs for the more capable devices. Good apps will be well integrated with multiple devices - where those devices have enough market share to be worth targeting.

The alternative of only having one device to rule them all is unrealistic. It's a kind of lowest common denominator approach to matching users to phones (as opposed to matching apps to phones).
This will bite them in the ass.

Wages are rarely a source of satisfaction in a job. Employees consider them simply the fair exchange for their time.

The perks on the job and the company culture count for much more. I suspect that is everyone was given a 5% paycut, but the perks kept, they would be happier than they are now.

(I refer in general to all employees - not just the engineers)
Ok, just so it's clear that Apache's prefork mpm forks to handle concurrent connections, but does not simply fork() each and every time a new connection comes in, which some people naively believe. It does use select to handle requests that are arriving, and then farm them out.

This model does scale pretty well though - you can saturate a T1 with Apache just fine. Also, it's a pretty decent model for when your connections are causing something to do work (like running a script which hits a database). If you have everything in one big poll()-happy process, you still have to farm things out to separate processes if they risk blocking. Well, unless you're using Erlang, which has a scheduler of its own so that its processing doesn't block.

Moral of the story: event based servers are faster/smaller/more efficient when it comes to serving static content. When you start doing more than that, things get more complicated and you generally need to offload work to processes/threads/something in any case.

Which is one reason why Apache has always been quite popular, despite the presence of whichever select/poll based server du jour.
I think it's a responsibility of everyone in any scientific or engineering field -- specialists and "not-yet-specialists" alike -- to think long and hard about advocating an approach without studying the large body of academic and practical work that exists for nearly every subject imaginable.
One of the more interesting points was that even the developers who everyone thought were getting or had gotten rich seem to be struggling to maintain/repeat their success or got rich for other reasons (such as the guy who bought shares in Palm from the revenue of his game).
No question about it -- and yes, its hard work.

Your in a great position to answer the LCD question then --
I imagine some of the phones you are targeting have features that others don't. And some of those features, in the higher end phones, would be useful in your applications. So, do you just ignore them, or do you spend resources building some features that will only be beneficial to a subset of your users?
Form factor is only one problem. At work I've seen a couple not yet released Android phones, and each OEM feels the need to customize Android itself. One even modified the maps API to be incompatible with the G1/myTouch. Others replace all the built in UI controls.

I'd like to think that users and carriers were smart enough to realize this is bad, but I've seen this before: Android, meet J2ME. You share more in common than you know.
I'm pretty sure the major factor is your project manager; some are very liberal with how their managees spend their time, others require 20% can only be used for approved projects and set the bar higher than one would hope.
YUI-FX Beta. Effects Library With Unobtrusive Javascript
That might solve the problem for great apps -- but lets face it, a lot of the apps we see in the app store(s) out there aren't great. Which phones are end-users going to buy? The ones with cool features that no apps use, or the cheaper one that runs all the same apps as the high end phone?

And it doesn't solve the different resolution problem....

(Just playing devils advocate here -- your strategy is basically what apple has done w/ iPhone 1, 2, 3--and has been quite successful thus far. But had apple built a dozen phones in that time frame I don't think things would be playing out the same way).
Granted that picture doesnt really explain much, but it did get me on the right path[1], so thanks.

Remember the days when DOS/Windows file name restrictions were a target of mockery?
E.g. the sarcastic “C:\ONGRTLNS.W95” full-page newspaper ads Apple ran when Microsoft launched Windows 95.
With the iPod Shuffle, Windows’ limitations are now ours, too.

[1] http://daringfireball.net/2005/02/firewire_hysteria
Looks like they've updated the Atlas website since I posted that last link - the video is here now: http://280atlas.com/what.php
For learning this side of Unix, I've found the following very helpful (note that this is a bit BSD-centric):

1. _The Unix Programming Environment_ by Kernighan and Pike. The best overall intro to the pipes, shebangs, and other assorted command line stuff in Unix. Very old school, but still very relevant - those are the root of many of Unix's strengths. (K&P's _The Practice of Programming_ is also excellent, though not as specific to Unix.)

2. _Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment_, 2nd ed., by (the late) W. Richard Stevens. This and man pages will go a long way.

3. The man pages themselves. It's generally understood that OpenBSD's man pages are particularly well written, but if you're using Linux and the GNU userland, there will be lots of differences in the details.

4. The 4.4BSD "Programmer's Supplementary Documents" (PSD) - This is a collection of papers and man pages. While some are out of date, and some are mainly of historical interest, the introductions to tools such as make, lex, yacc, gdb, etc. are quite good, and often a tenth the length of the corresponding O'Reilly book. (These papers may be installed with your distro. OpenBSD has them in /usr/share/doc . I bought the book used for a couple bucks.) There are also "User's Supplementary Documents" (USD) and System Manager's Manual (SMM) collections, with papers on configuring sendmail, using vi, etc.

5. _The Art of Unix Programming_ by Eric S. Raymond - I recommend this one in spite of finding ESR incredibly irritating. It's a very good conceptual overview of the big design ideas in Unix and their ramifications, albeit one interspersed with narcissistic soapboxing by the author.

In general, using a Linux distro with a strong emphasis on having a friendly GUI layer can keep you at arms length from really learning Unix. Dig around in /etc. Learn to use cron and ed. (No, really.) Get your hands dirty.

I would also highly recommend learning a scripting language that integrates well with C (some people like Perl, Python, or Ruby, I prefer Lua), because really using Unix well is going to involve some C. Working with C isn't scary unless you're trying to build a large system in C - try instead to break it up into a suite of smaller programs, rather than one monolithic one. Take advantage of pipes and all the other existing Unix infrastructure. It's there to help keep complexity at bay.

Mostly, though, tinker and explore.
the architecture is mostly the same

Well, not exactly. Per-event delegation of processing to subprocesses (as in the case of opensips) is an multiple-connection-per-process event-based model. It's also a very complicated way to achieve it, and not what's being discussed in these "... is UNIX" blog posts.
"Now imagine you're an app developer."

I am actually an android app developer and some of the comments here make me question how many others actually are, versus relying on second-hand bullshit.

While it's slightly harder than developing for a single device, it is quite manageable. Some examples:

- different screen resolutions: this means that you must rely on UI layouts or make your pixels in your graphics code relative. This is an issue the iPhone will have in the future as well, as they WILL eventually upgrade the resolution on that screen.

- different input methods: make sure both gestures/swipes/touches and key presses both map to the correct functions

- missing features: accelerometer, cameara, etc: check and Handle gracefully or refuse to work. iPhone developers have to deal with this as well, except they can only refuse to work (by specifying minimum OS version to install).
No offense taken. I was just arguing from an academic point of view. In the real world stuff is often much hairier, and if you can make C (or whatever you are using) to behave nicely, that's good for you.

(I do not like Java either. Perhaps you should check out Ocaml? It's a nice and fast functional programming languages. The high-frequency traders at Jane Street Capital are quite fond of it. And I guess they are not too tolerant of delays.)
Spherical virtual world breaks the limits, an unrealistic space explained
J2ME does just what you suggest. They're called JSRs. I know from experience that doesn't work, because even if the platform doesn't target the lowest common denominator, app developers will out of necessity.

It's too expensive to optimize for every device. It all sounds great until there are multiple extension APIs to access the same thing, all of which are subtlety different and none of which are common across OEMs.

What's even worse is when the API is shared, but each OEM implements it differently. For instance, one OEM's phones regularly return pictures rotated 90 degrees clockwise.

Each problem by itself seems small, but combined they're formidable.

It sucks for users too. They may hear that app X is awesome from a friend, only to find that the same app sucks on their own phone.
The responses in TechCrunch disturbs me a little. While Google's occasionally stumbled over its informal "Don't Be Evil" policy a few times (China, I feel, will forever haunt them, along with everybody else that's ever been tempted with its forbidden fruit of 1.3 billion seeds), their business model is so deviant from the Microsoft propriety method that trying to accuse them of being the next Evil Empire misses the mark by a wide margin.

It's not as if Google can't be more open, more altruistic, better about intellectual property management and better about privacy concerns. But there's a pretty big difference between demanding for more and dismissing them for not being "perfect" in the eyes of their critics.
Depends on the snacks.
I was an Internet millionaire. Ask me anything.
What happened with TripIt??
That looks cool, but it looks like that patch is not in the CPAN version. I'm not sure how much I'd trust it. Particularly if you'd loaded some badly behaved XS code. Or run a disaster RE. For instance I ran into one last week which took down Perl 5.8. Losing one mod_perl process occasionally was only an annoyance. Losing a good fraction of my site capacity would be much worse.

EV::Loop::Async lets you handle events, but won't solve the problem of, "I loaded an external library, and it didn't return control for 10 seconds."

Neither addresses the problem of protecting yourself against badly behaved functions that have a fast memory leak.

BTW you're assuming wrong when you assume that I'd be surprised at how often my processes are blocked on IO or how much resources they take. I am painfully aware of both factors. However it is easy to plan for that. I've personally seen 2 servers pump out a million dynamic pages/hour with real traffic on a website with only obvious optimizations. I know for a fact that the application code had memory leaks, bugs, and the occasional segfault. I'm happy to buy 4x the RAM to go with an architecture that makes those non-issues to the overall function of the website.
Obviously as storage becomes plentiful and cheap, those who care about their data will use filesystems that are intelligent enough to deal with latent sector errors (such as ZFS or NetApp's WAFL). Perhaps storage servers will also incorporate daemons that actively scan online volumes in the background to detect and recover UREs before they foul up a rebuild.

RAID-6 is also a possibility, though it just postpones the inevitable.

I don't understand what this has to do with rebuild times, though, as stated in the title. The time is directly proportional to the bits per spindle and so is the probability of latent sector errors, but they are otherwise unrelated. If there were a magical way to recover an array in zero time it would still fail on a URE, and if we took twice the amount of time to recover it wouldn't double the probability of failure (though it would increase it slightly because there would be a larger window for a failure to occur).
Agree. "Just be happy that you're getting paid" is not an acceptable culture - petty things like snacks and freebies count.