skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Actually I meant Monit, sorry.

Ruby has a memory issue with long running processes. They seem to grow and grow and need to be restarted when they get out of hand. People commonly use Monit or God for this.

When you use Passenger, you can have it restart your processes after a certain amount of requests to prevent the memory leak issue, but when it happens it seems to block all requests to all processes for a short time, which is annoying to end users. It means your site can be speedy and zip along, then just pause.
Why would people who don't want to register for Twitter register for your website?

(a genuine question you need to ask yourself)
"Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To hell with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages."

After having read most of Vonnegut's books, I can say that this is a big hallmark of his work. Vonnegut has such a microscopic view of events and characters that doesn't exclude even the slightest and faintest of the details or idiosyncrasies. Its refreshing to have that view but sometimes too much - but more than that, it leads to a very special relationship between the author and reader - Its probably just me, but I think of Kurt as a member of my family or karass because of this.
How to Remove Security Tool Virus | TechJaws
If you have an Arduino or equivalent kicking around, it's also pretty easy to rig up an LED to flash at the same frequency as the beats. Mine looks a little ridiculous though. http://burkelibbey.org/brainwave.jpg
I'd buy that. For me, listening to music while coding is an engineering problem: how to minimize the tendency to let the mind wander without overwhelming it with new input.

For me that means using music that is ambient enough without verging on elevator muzak style irritation. I ended up with instrumental hip-hop (dj shadow, etc).
I'd be interested to read what Energizer and Procter & Gamble think about this kind of tech.
Because in twitter, you have to find and follow the celebrities yourself.
I still remember having to look into a French-English dictionary to find the right word for 'spacesuit'...

I had the same experience playing Space Quest I as an 8-year-old kid with my friend. Except that it didn't occur to us to look up words in a dictionary; instead we kept calling an older friend who actually knew English and could tell us the magic incantations we needed to type to get somewhere in the game.

I'll never forget that you need to "fasten seatbelt" before launching the escape pod.
You need to use single quotes. !, $, `, \ are expanded inside of double quotes.
Flash on the iPhone
Seems quite possible he is with Sequoia. http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/9s5k3/iama_i_am_a_high...

Let's not speculate about his identify though because it may be possible to figure out who he is and then he will have to stop answering questions.
I use a little perl script, because it works everywhere I need it (and I suck at shell scripting ;))

> cat `which title`
#!/usr/bin/perl
print(
"\x1b",
"]2;",
join(' ', @ARGV),
"\x7",
);
I don't care if it's "unprofessional" or not and I only think it's abusive if there's a rule that I can't yell back.

I have no problem with having heated discussions on occasion. I think it can be a great way to get people saying what they really mean. Mutual alcohol consumption surely is a gentler method though...
I just got into the process of self-publishing so I thought I could give you some numbers.

Background: I run a blog (betterexplained.com) which has built up a solid base of traffic over the years. I've had some requests to make the content into a readable, printable, ebook-able format which I've just taken:

http://betterexplained.com/articles/betterexplained-math-ebo...

Editing: The oft-unspoken benefit of blogging is that it can really improve your writing. Over time I've learned how to cut down my writing and take in feedback from readers. You get direct feedback on what works and doesn't, so I used my best-performing posts to make a book.

Also, my mom is a really good writer so I run my posts by her :).

Layout/Design: I originally hired a designer (~$500) to layout and typeset some of the HTML in InDesign. Ultimately, I decided to go with LaTeX (I kept the cover design he made) since the book is math-heavy and I wanted the text to look as good as possible (with InDesign I had to use images for the equations, which is a pain, especially for inline).

LaTeX is very powerful, but finnicky, and if used you must (must! must!) customize the layout lest you look like the other 99% of research papers out there. I recommend the "memoir" package. Take a look at a sample page here:

http://betterexplained.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/chapte...

Marketing/Pricing: Amy Hoy had a great post highlighting some lessons learned (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=632104). The biggest tip for me was to have a paid (vs free) beta. Beta users get a free upgrade... it's just a good way to validate your market and give a deal to your early-adopters.

Use e-junkie to sell/manage your lists (it made the process very simple, and it's only $5/month for the basic plan). I haven't determined the final price, but I'm planning $19 or $24. I'll probably do a printed version (with Lulu/Blurb) and some combo deal.

Overall: So far, the book has been out for 3 weeks and sold pretty well (hundreds), mostly to long-time readers who wanted to support the site (thank you!). I haven't advertised it elsewhere on my site except for that post, which I'll do once the final version is ready -- the primary target will be search traffic who came for a specific article.

Technically speaking, I paid for the cover design since I did the editing/typesetting myself. Of course this involved a lot of learning over several years (LaTeX) so it's free if your time has no value :).

Hope this helps! Feel free to email me (kalid.azad at that well known gmail address) if you have any specific questions.
How to structure a Flex / GWT App to support Deeplinking
Yeah definitely. There's a lot of potential in approximation (something humans are naively good at for NP complete). My little irrelevant point was that approximations hold an incremental solution (as you've noted along with the fact they aren't necessarily transposable) but are unlikely to lead to a revolutionary solution.
That's exactly how i feel about EverQuest. I have yet to find a game that I like even half as much. The unrealistic graphics really lets your imagination fill in the gaps. This becomes increasingly hard with more realistic physics/models/movement as you start concerning yourself with flaws only in the details.
Definitely. He's someone I aspire to.
Reminds me of The rememberance agent, a emacs plug-in that recorded/indexed all actions/text. It was mainly used for those in the mid-90s doing wearable computing projects at MIT. Though it was only used for text.

See: http://www.remem.org/
Well it's not something I would use but it is a pretty cool idea.

I can see something like this really being popular, especially in LA and amongst the perezhilton.com crowd.. In fact you should try to get him to blog about your site. =)

Best of luck..
Counterpoint from a few days ago: http://www.quietbabylon.com/2009/there-is-no-single-use-lego...
Yeah but the guy in the video explicitly made the comparison between VHS and DVD, and it's an incredibly poor metaphor because it's not true.

I get Gmail having more utility than say Outlook for certain things. But I can access my exchange server (I use google apps for business, but used to use exchange) in all the same places I could access Gmail which renders the point slightly moot.

I have no issue with people disagreeing, but at least argue the disagreement if you feel strongly enough to vote me down.
There've been a bunch of companies that have tried to do just that - EZBoard comes to mind.

The problem is that individual communities almost always want to control the look & feel of their forums. So as they start growing, they eventually outgrow the hosted, consistent UI and get something like vBulletin that they can customize themselves. The biggest ones end up ditching third-party forums entirely and writing custom software that's integrated with the rest of their site.

Forums are not a natural monopoly - there's no economic reason for one company to "own" them. We have the option of creating a Google Group that's basically alt.hacking.ycombinator with a prettier name. Several hacking groups do just that. But this community is big enough that it has special needs, so news.YC arises naturally anyway.
Valid point - but from the way the article was written this was a life changing event.

Read it again.

While I agree 'yelling' is not the most professional method of getting your point across, the CEO felt the need to impress a point on everyone that he wasn't going to stand for something. And that he was going to put resources (travel with VP of sales to talk to customers) into the person he was yelling at to make sure he does things differently.

This was not a casual emotional rant about something he said. This was a thought out attack on a way of thinking that was unacceptable to the CEO, followed up with a strategy to fix it.

I'll bet the author would agree that was one of the more pivotal moments of his professional life. A lot of CEO's might hear a comment like that, file it away, and then just not promote you, or put you first in line to be laid off. It takes effort and guts to stand up and pronounce what you, the leader of the company, believe in.

And that's something that's often missing today with CEO's.
The term you are looking for is "work for hire".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work_for_hire#Law_of_the_United...
I'm not name dropping, but I have exchanged emails with Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive, and he's taken a couple of my ideas under advisement.
That's actually a really good question, although the answer is controversial.

There is great debate about whether any/all of these diseases are communicable, especially Lyme (because of its prevalence.) Anecdotally, there are many doctors who argue that they are based on their own patients, and there have been a few medical studies that have also shown that they are, but the status quo maintains that they are not. Even though syphilis (which is caused by a very similar, but less insidious, spirochete like the one that causes Lyme) is obviously sexually transmitted, the insurers and their cronies say it's impossible. There is a woman in the documentary I mention that battles with that issue (and miscarriages) and you can also find information online. In my case, my wife had no symptoms, we had her tested for some of the scariest bugs, and we took some other precautions.
They've been using small nuclear batteries (Plutonium-238) to power heart pacemakers for decades. They even left one on the moon to power monitoring equipment after humans departed.

Pu-238 has about a 25 year half-life and the batteries maintain current for about half of that.. That's why folks with heart pacemakers have to go get them replaced every decade or so...
Thanks. That crowd is part of the target audience.
You mean the Mac UI is not good for small screen right :)?
I know about variable and command substitution and escaping, it makes sense that those expand inside " but not ' - but history expansion, something seemingly inherent to the interactive REPL, seems out of place here.
Ask YC/HN/PG: Startup School 
Are we notified if we aren't accepted to Startup School?
Command-` cycles between windows of only one application. Would that do?
What's the embedding API of JRuby 1.4.0RC1?
After reading the discussion (all 14 comments that exist right now), it seems that people have given you plenty to think about.

It looks like you wanted to make a web app that was simple, interesting, and attainable. For that, I give you an A+. Using the Twitter API is good practice because its extremely popular.

That said - the added value of something like this is probably minuscule in comparison to the effort it took to make it - especially nice and polished like it is.

In any case, I bet you have a list of things you learned, plus a working demo on the web of your capabilities. Kudos!
On the other hand, I think the HN karma system has worked well to maintain focus in the site; lame attempts at humor get smacked hard, as do "+1" posts, coarse language, ad hominem arguments, etc. If the post rating were hidden, you wouldn't know if a down-voted post was due to one person disagreeing with you or a major breach of etiquette.

(Of course, in several ways, karma is a poor motivator for behavior that is valuable to the community.)
I didn't get that from the article.

The CEO was trying to prove a point and used drama to get it across. I doubt Steve would have taken it as seriously if the CEO did not do what he did.

In addition, I'm sure that experienced contributed to Steve's development and he's thankful for it.
Mysql has great replication support which everyone who does webapps requires. Postgres has bolted on solutions which all don't work well for different reasons. It's really good at all the things that webapps don't tend to use when they get big though. Postgres is far the better database in terms of correctness and sometimes even in terms of speed, it's just that the web use case doesn't need real databases but replicated (fairly dumb) data stores.
Why is it always false dichotomy with these people? It's either the bun or the patty, never the whole burger.

The sad realization is that in most cases the code only has to be good enough to be extensible (we can add features!) and not break publicly (we won't embarrass ourselves). But the quality of the product experience has a direct impact on the company's success.

If that's what you truly believe, then you've got a nice surprise in store somewhere down the line when your nicely extensible code, which used to break only "privately", starts breaking in public because it's not scalable.

Nobody in their right mind is arguing against the importance of the user experience anymore (if they ever did), but that's no excuse for not caring about how you do your code, as long as the user looks happy.
You mean when they first bought out Deja, right?
I've always wondered whether this could be done with a piano... thanks!
Yes, I'd say Hacker News has done an unbelievably good job of keeping things good around here. I am your typical Digg->Reddit->Hacker News migrator (I stayed on Reddit WAY too long...).

If anything, I say that here at HN we use "karma" as more of an indicator of RELEVANCY. Upmod comments that are relevant to the discussion, and leave it alone otherwise (very similar to the conclusion of the linked article).
Fuck professional. What I want to know in my CEO is that he knows what he's doing. Beyond that, I don't give a shit if he's nice or the most terrifying man alive. Similarly, if a CEO is professional as all hell but knows nothing, I want nothing to do with him.

As much as I love etiquette, it's a nice little side deal, not the primary concern. What matters above all else is competence.
What I do outside of work is none of my employers business - period. I'm surprised I'm the only one that finds this practice offensive?

For the record I have known many, many engineers who devote themselves 100% passionately to their 9-5 jobs and when they get home, they relax and do other things. These people are the type of people I would hire in my organization in a heartbeat.

I have also known the 'entrepreneurial' type of developers who have side projects and while they are generally good workers, a few of them are more interested in their side project then their actual day job and their work quality has suffered.

Hire the people with the skills and aptitude to do the job, leave their personal lives out of it.
these are great
I bookmarked the page where you announced your e-book just a few days ago! Thanks for all the info - the way you did it was quite inspirational - you clearly have a very engaged audience.
Mmmm, I interpret this practice a little bit differently.

I wouldn't hire someone who isn't passionate about programming. Many of the people I work with today rarely code outside of work - kids, hobbies, friends, etc. This is okay.

But what you really want is one of the guys who stayed up all night in college to bang out the latest and greatest piece of code. You want the people who genuinely love doing this - because there are twice as many people who slummed their way through CS doing the bare minimum necessary.

I work with both types, and as the former type I cannot stand working with the latter.
I agree. I think one would have to have some sort of automatic moderation in place. Something like the Robot 9000 built for the xkcd IRC channel that moderates on the basis of originality (such that duplicate noise comments get chatters a temporary muting). Perhaps one-liners below a certain length could be posted at a score of 0 instead of 1. Other automatic wordfilters could also aid in downplaying the user-as-judge-and-jury aspect of moderation.
Same here. Sheesh, remember when we all used to use our full names when posting online?
Tiered pricing for AT&T/iPhone a good idea?
> The French Revolution was a step forward for humanity, no matter how messy it was.

I don't think you have a full understanding of just how messy the French Revolution was. Are you familiar with the war in the Vendee? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_the_Vendee

How about the Committee of Public Safety? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_of_Public_Safety
Similar report here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=866653
the US is definitely B. Because my parents did just that, they didn't like the public (or private) schools in my area, and instead mixed homeschool/unschooling principals for me and my brothers.

I don't know enough about China to say it's "A", I can assume it is, but I could be very wrong.
I liked that in Cat's Cradle, which is the only book of his I read. It was interesting having the Ice-9 tracked throughout the story, even before we knew what it was or what it would do. At the same time, it was a little exhausting, and it made the narrative feel somehow shallow. While it was enjoyable reading, there was no point in the book where I actively felt a desire to know what would happen next. That's the problem with the lack of suspense, I guess.
This is going to make tiny flying spy machines possible.

Micromechanical Flying Insect: http://robotics.eecs.berkeley.edu/~ronf/mfi.html/

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10...

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/04/flighttheory/

The biggest unsolved problem for these is the power-to-weight ratio (real bugs are amazing). Nuclear batteries is exactly what they need, if they can be made very small.
You might want to look into this: I just "liked" the same entry 10 times.
Show HN: Checkout the app my company helped launch
The ability to pick your celebrities once you register was not obvious and something that I thought the site needed. I'd make sure this was front and center as an incentive to register.

Having said that, why make people register to select their celebrities? If there's not a good reason then drop an id as a cookie and track their choices that way. I was not going to register, but had I been able to select the celebs right from the get go I probably would have done that then returned.
Unfortunately they're already calling them "nuclear" so I doubt this is going anywhere unless some better buzzword takes hold -- it's a shame but people are just too scared of the word.
The Evolution Of Click Fraud: Massive Chinese Operation DormRing1 Uncovered
Wow, I'm actually going to use this site as a source of music for myself as well. Good find.
And I bet that you would call a Zen master hitting a novice over the head with his staff [and provoking him into an enlightened state] assault and battery. It's obviously a method which can be overused and abused, but used wisely on appropriate subjects, can produce incredible learning, as it did in this case.
Hey guys. I'm the topic's author.

I think Trizle makes more sense if you read it in context with everything else on there; my total apologies for the ambiguity.

Some points:

1. The typical $1M business has about 5 full-time employees working on it (~$200K in revenue per employee); so while building a business that generates that much by yourself is possible, it's out of the norm. I should've definitely mentioned that.

2. You probably don't want to throw X market dollars at something without understanding your conversion rates first. First, get your average conversion rates (you can do that through statistical inference) from a random sample of your target market, determine if the model is profitable, then gradually expand your reach.

3. The "$25 bi-weekly newsletter" is just one product example; you can replace it with whatever product you're selling, and then use the model to determine your conversion rates to get an idea of how many pitches it'll take with your current model. For instance, selling a $200 product would take 10x less pitches than a $20 product (in terms of revs) to make X.

4. The free market creates incentives to provide as much value to your customers as possible; it's a broken system when you let get-rich-quick folks exploit others and get rich; mechanisms drive society, and that's why the Trizle articles tend to emphasize that providing immense customer value as the sole way to building a solid company for the long-term in a free-market economy.

There are no get-rich-quick-schemes, and any model that tells you that you can consistently earn greater returns than Warren Buffett's annual ROE of 20% is likely suspect. Solid, long-term companies, are built over years/decades.

------

BTW, I love Ycombinator's board (pleasantly surprise someones posted the article here); I come back daily to read the stuff you guys/gals post on here. I come from a technical background (EE degree, using Rails daily), so it's always a fun read every time.
Special characters are substituted in double quotes. They're treated as literals in single quotes.

Seems pretty consistent to me.
Actually it is intentional :). There were two reasons

1. If someone was that interested in liking an entry, there is no harm done as of now, as there is no ranking as of yet.

2. Evil idea: If someone likes an entry multiple times, it gives an impression of more users :). Reddit apparently started out like this. The founders had multiple accounts and posted stories under various accounts to show activity.
Infrastructure 2.0 is the Beginning not the End
"... they could own the vast internet message board space, and we would be reading this on alt.hacking.ycombinator or suchlike. ..."

alt.games.programming used to be one such place.
What if he'd thrown a chair, destroyed a phone, or punched a wall? Where do you paint the line between what is and is not an acceptable amount of 'drama' to make a point?

I, personally, would have taken a calm statement of the facts far more seriously than screaming; dramatic means to an end or not. And if the guys screaming at me was doing it just to make a point, I'd find that far more offensive than if he was a short-fused rage-aholic.

How confident in the merit of your position can you possibly be, if you need to resort to pushing emotional buttons?