skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I hate to sound overly pessimistic, and I really appreciate the nice idea of having a more intelligent binary format. But I really cannot see the point of having "fat" binaries. Programs under Linux (and other unixy operating systems) already come in package files (debs under Debians, pkg under xBSD, rpms under RedHats etc.). The distinction about which binary to install could easily be done at install time, with a suitably extended package format. This would be much easier to accomplish, and wouldn't need changes to core components. And while I see the geek-value of having a multi-platform bootable CD (USB-stick, harddisk, ...) it's hardly news: AFS (the network filesystem) had "magic" symlinks that make /afs/your.site/bin and .../lib point to a architecture-specific directory for a long time. So if needed it could easily be solved by that, or some of the emerging userspace or merging filesystems available under Linux and the BSDs.
In econ terms: optimize for expected utility, not for expected return.
In this case, the something wrong is that the specification didn't have the foresight to create a syntax robust enough to support actually upgrading the spec for real users. Discarding unrecognized syntax is a nice, robust behavior, but it doesn't cut it.
It makes a little bit of sense, but I don't see how it's relevant to the problem of evil. You can pose the problem with pretty much whatever notion of evil you like: "If there is a good, omnipotent God, why do terrible things happen?"
This is great. I almost avoided reading this because I thought it was going to be something along the lines of "everyone should really understand how computers work and using CLI allows people to understanding arguments, etc..." instead of "CLI is actually more similar to the way people think in many ways."

Also, there is an interesting point here. Its not that graphics are bad, but that the CLI is a better starting point. This means (I think) that people should be happy pulling up GUIs from the command line. E.g. it might be easier to type

vlc "My_Birthday_Part.avi"

then opening vlc from the desktop and searching around for the file. If you think about its, not even very intuitive that you click "File --> Open" since most people don't think of the movie as a file. It's only a file in our (sorta wacky) jargon. <edit>Also, I don't want to "file an open" I want to "open a file."</edit>

Finally, this might lead to a better UI design. Something graphical but sequential could be good for many people.

Just random thoughts inspired by the article.
Well, the facts mentioned in the post just confirms my judgment why MooTools/Prototype are bad: monkey-patching existing objects and polluting global namespace like no tomorrow, all in the name of object-orientation in a perfectly capable language that's prototype based and functional.
For the record, I probably will have to support IE6 for the next few years, so I don't have any luxuries here either.

If we're just proposing new ideas, suppose we create a new tag to link CSS3 documents to HTML documents? <stylesheet>, perhaps. Newer browsers know what to do with it, while older browsers ignore it. This is just off the top of my head, of course, I haven't thoroughly studied this problem.

I don't mean any personal offense, I just don't like the idea of putting code in comments.
Machine-Generated News a Threat to Journalists? I Think Not
> very few indians

Not at MS
maybe at first. once you gain traction, a CEO should be whining and moaning about how he wants to code, and wishes he could code like he used to, but is busy doing all the people stuff that a techie just doesn't have the skills for.
You're in the ball-park.

The company is actually 90 people now. Revenues grew 350% over the past 12 months (in a down economy).

We do our best to spend the money responsibly. But, it's all relative. When I was a bootstrapped entrepreneur, even $1 million seemed like a lot of money.
If memory serves, last time I spoke to Dharmesh they were north of 50 employees. I think he's been pretty cautious about ramping spending in relation to growth... But there's always a lag between growth and cash. Time will tell, but I'd bet he pulls it off. He's wicked smart and has done this a few times before.

edit: Dharmesh response with actual numbers (holy crap-- great growth!)
its strange, someone comes to HN and posts something very similar to this once every month or so. and this is usually what i say:

Startup companies can come in all forms, including those that are simply life-style companies, but the phrase "startup company" is often associated with high growth, technology oriented companies. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Startup_company

typically, the definition of a startup is based on rapid scalability with the possibility for high risk/rewards. and it tends to imply that the company is funded or looking for funding to make use of the opportunity for rapid scalability. all of that tends to slant towards making efficient use of technology.

can you have a very successful business that grows quickly? sure. and you can do so without it necessarily being a "startup".
90 people!? That's a all the explanation necessary :-)
First off, a REPL IS a CLI.

I think that we're talking past each other - I'm talking about expressiveness (once you know the system, you can easily ask the right questions and get rapid, informative feedback), while you're talking about discoverable interfaces (if you've never used it before, can you figure it out?). There's a certain point past which having a discoverable interface is overrated. Complaining about a system advanced as (say) AutoCAD not being intuitive is a bit silly, IMHO.
Checking for 500's seems like a pretty minimal test suite. There are plenty of other errors that could occur.
Had been reading pg's essays since around 2002, and saw the link to Hacker News (or Startup News at the time) not long after he added it to his website.
I've been reading HN for quite long, mostly parallel to /., then one day I figured /. is no longer for me (I think it may have been one too many instances of browsing at -1 during breakfast or so), so I registered here, a little less than a year ago.

I visit /. very rarely now, the best stuff from there makes it to HN anyway and the S:N ratio is many times higher here than there.

Frankly, I'm amazed it is as large as it is without being overrun by the wild hordes. Apart from one single instance of a downright abusive user ('arrington', a couple of weeks before I joined up) I have seen only very little of that sort of thing here.

I try to keep my 'memberships' to social news sites down to a minimum, I've registered the usual (fb, twitter and so on) but I only really use HN.
Optimizing Parrot
I suspect he doesn't feel the need to justify it because it's a commonplace in his world. It sure is in mine.

This was especially problematic during the dot-com bubble. This town filled up with MBA-holding locusts and greasily slick smooth talkers. They were in it for the money, and nothing else. Of course, most of their businesses failed, and they went off to plague somebody else. Good riddance, I say.

The problem still continues, though, and it's not limited to high tech. The big MLM scams are funded mainly through taking money from idiots who believe that they'll quickly get rich through this exciting new turnkey business opportunity, even though they've gotten totally screwed on the last three. You want some data points, go to an Herbalife convention.
Maybe that was a joke, I can't tell. But just for some perspective: Microsoft has an annual gross profit of $46 billion [1]. The only companies in the world with larger profit are Oil companies [2]. That is a far cry from break even.

[1] http://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ:MSFT&fstype=ii

[2] http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/global500/2009/perfor...
Denormalization can happen automatically based on the usage of queries with joins. Some commercial RDBMS like DB2 already do that. SQL is a declarative language. It doesn't force you to use a particular implementation.
From Techcrunch, which I found while searching for info on iPhone apps.
It's not the language you use, folks. It's what you do with it. Bravo!

I cannot agree more with you!
Diving into a deep madness would be more poetic. Maybe in the style of Nietzsche: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Nietzsche#Mental_brea...
Any other details out there about it, since the site is down?
Wouldn't intellectual property be scarce if there was no incentive to make it known to the public such as Coca Cola's secret recipe?
Because it only offers a marginal improvement of XP. It is the same thing as DVD vs Blu Ray. To a videophile, the difference is obvious. To a normal person, the difference is noticeable, but irrelevant.

Vista is blu ray and I suspect that windows 7 will be as well. I honestly think we've reached a point in desktop OS development where the average user simply does not care anymore. Things are moving onto the web now. People care about facebook doing a redesign, they do not really care what their desktop looks like beyond "does it work?".
The NoSQL movement is in direct support of the central tenet: do the simplest thing that could possibly work.

Relational databases are complex beasts that have a lot more configuration and administration overhead. They are overkill for most use cases. It's not just about scale, it's about simply wanting to be able to store and retrieve values because that's what we do more than anything else. Key-value stores are simple... you put things in and get things out. Instead of calculating things on read, you calculate and store them on write.

Key-value stores make a lot of things braindead simple that are otherwise fairly complex in relational databases.
You can't shift-1 with your left hand?

!!!
Further to what vicaya said, when you are building a huge system like Cloudera, you should invest extra time/$$$ and write your own library.

Crockford wasn't joking when he called javascript the most misunderstood language. A lot of libraries have really bad code- Its a huge risk to take to build an entire system on top of the library, without properly understanding the kind of code you are dealing with. The number of Javascript experts that haven`t gone through the EcmaScript specs is probably upwards of 99% (I only guess, ofcourse, based on the "advanced" code that I have seen).

Seeing as a lot of people prefer jQuery, and not wanting to get into a debate of its usefulness, the point is simply this: When writing a huge system, crank out your own library. 2k-4k lines wont take that long to write. Take a week out, decide what your specific app needs, and then write a library to handle those needs. If its a small site, or one that will run on a specific set of browsers in a contained environment, a library will do fine.
I would appreciate a web based app without a registration requirement to view basic data.
Pretend the con is Starfleet - full of weird people, with various degrees of alienness to you. Different groups have different cultural and emotional development. Try to understand them and get along with them, you'll be a better person for it.
My take is this. You can make a ton of money without a formal education, but getting a formal education just improves your odds. If that stoner turned his life around and went to Yale then went to India, I'm sure he could have ended up the same. This is correlation, not causation.
"What if the reason why most PCs are still running XP has nothing to do with whether Vista is “good” or “bad”, but rather is the result of indifference on the part of whoever owns these untold millions of XP machines, be they at home or in a corporate IT environment. I.e., that switching to Vista, regardless of Vista’s merits, seemed like too much work and too much new stuff to learn;"

No, no and no. Vista is just horrible, usability wise. I bought a laptop for my parents, and I curse I didn't wipe it out, and install xp instead.
I get twice more "how do i do this' request, than I got with XP.

Finally, last month my dad asked me if I could install the older OS he had on the other computer, as he liked XP much better.

Horrible product.

I have used it personally at work, and at my home computer I sticked with XP.
A lot of the comments here seem to be about how ugly the device is. While I agree that they could have done a better job to make it more aesthetically pleasing, it's the hardware and software that are important. It could be a bright pink Hello Kitty phone, and I'd still want it.
Happy 2nd Birthday Clojure
Agreed, checkout http://asciicasts.com/ for text versions of some of the railscasts
Sure, but the point is that when resources are very low you may need to get by with the minimal amount of testing required.

The options are either to spend a bunch of time trying to squash every potential bug, or know that some bugs will get through but at least users will benefit from having a bunch of new features to play with.
I was pleasantly surprised that this article was not simply bashing Vista (whether it could do so justifiably or not), but rather focused on the observation that nowadays there's hardly ever a reason for average computer users to upgrade their OS, discounting the one you get when buying a new computer.

However, I'm unsure whether to agree with interpret his assertion, "The upgrade market for average PC owners is dead." This may well be true for PCs, but I've known a lot of Mac users over the years who have shelled out for OS upgrades. Sometimes they've been fairly technical people, sometimes not. I wonder how Apple's numbers would compare to Microsoft's in the home PC market if you adjusted for technical know-how.
The stats iPhone developers are missing: Sales Conversion and Referral Source
How many people in the hackernews community would find this tool useful?
I don't know about the fiction, but anything that might marginalize critics(?) like this one is an improvement.
I posted the whole set yesterday, not a single vote. It's a real pity because I think this is quite a nice companion set of articles next to 'the halcycon days' and 'coders at work'.

There's good stuff to be learned here.
John Pratt and his company FUNDABLE NEVER SENT ME A CHECK for the $400.000 raised. It was raised JULY 27 2009 AND THIS IS OCTOBER 18 2009. He will not reply to any emails and the company has NEVER had a way to SPEAK to anyone EVER. I am sure i am just one of many people who have had their money stolen from FUNDABLE. I would like to start a class action suit and am looking into creating a website so that we (ripped off people) can all find each other. He is a common THIEF. This is not a story of basement company gone awry. This is a story of outright plundering of peoples wallets and then walking away and thinking there is no consequence. WHERE IS THE 400.00 ALL THIS TIME? Anyones guess but it (minus their huge 10percent cut) is NOT in my hands nor supporting the rescue dog SY that it was intended for. DO NOT USE FUNDABLE EVER.
I've only setup a single BIND server, and chose that due to previous exposure to the zone file format. It got the job done, pretty quickly even, but I'll definitely consider djbdns next time the need arises.
What, you think DONKEY.BAS is exemplary code?
I think a lot of Apple upgraders treat it like dues to a club membership. Apple has done an outstanding job of making their customers feel like they belong to an exclusive club (Microsoft obviously has not!).

I'm not a huge apple fan (but I use Macs) and haven't felt the SLIGHTEST itch to upgrade to Snow Leopard. There's just no OS pain for me that it solves.
Well, yeah. That's why nonbelief hurts the debate also. My response is a simple "There isn't." Kind of a flat debate.
The action that McBride took resulted ultimately in what could be seen as a failed strategy, but the fact that he went out on a limb in attempting to revitalize his company speaks wonders. There are a lot of companies that would value a CEO who can take risks.
The site is running magnum
The Dangers of Real Dreams
Agree. For most people todays OS is 20 years ago's BIOS boot code.

20 years ago the BIOS was there to startup the OS so we could run all our desktop apps.

Now, the OS is there to start the browser so we can get to all our websites/apps.
Every Developer Deserves More Memory
Do you have any more data about this? I mean, the Standard edition included an optimizing compiler, libraries like ATL and MFC, etc.

Are you sure they will be free?

I knew about the free Express editions but Community... never heard of it.
PS: I was just being an ass with that last comment, quick google surfaced this though: http://code.google.com/p/magnum-py/
Can you use our tool http://EventGel.com/ to coordinate this and tell us what you think? This is our new startup. Since we are aiming to be useful to exactly the thing that you are planning, it will be great if you can tell us how practical our tool is and how we can make it work better for you. [our earlier HN post : http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=883731]
Googled lisp -> pg's essays -> arc forum -> HN.
Sorry, I think I meant Express - got confused with Community Technical Preview.

The compiler is the same I believe - it's the tools you get with it that varies between editions.
Mozilla VP: “mistakes were made”
What it helps a lot with are the terms of the deal. If you NEED the money to keep your company afloat investors are going to put the screws to you for a much lower valuation.
It sounds like the company in this article is doing everything right - they're following Dave McClure's cheeky metrics plan, they're using Mixpanel, and their numbers are going up. Yay metrics! Unfortunately, they've made a fatal flaw. The metric they are measuring is worthless.

Eric Ries likes to call them vanity metrics ( http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2009/05/19/vanity-metri... ). They are great for making you feel good about yourself, but they don't necessarily improve anything.

What if Google tracked site actions per user? What if thy celebrated every time that metric went up?

The important thing to remember is that you need to measure the bottom line with every test you can. Do the people with feature A resubscribe? Do they create more referrals? Do they make you more money? Money is what matters in the end, do measure that.
Allowing your company to be used as an attack vehicle against a global movement is not just 'taking risks', it's criminally stupid.

For what McBride has done he deserves to be behind bars, not to be someone that is 'valued as a CEO' or in any other capacity. I remember the 'millions of lines' episode, as well as a whole bunch of others.

He played the dirtiest game ever and made a lot of money in the process while shafting his shareholders in the process. Don't forget that SCO was a publicly traded company.

If he had had a real strategy instead of positioning SCO as a tool for microsoft to do their dirty work for them they might have made it in good health to today.
both of whom earn a lot more than the normal marketing and sales people

Not true. Good sales people earn a lot of money. In a lot of companies sales folks earn more than the management team.
And where can we find any of his programs to look at?...
I think this is it. Up until Windows 2K and XP the OS upgrades were marked improvements over previous versions. Not just that but hardware usually improved considerably from windows OS to windows OS. But XP finally was an extremely stable platform (finally).

Now you have large swathes of corporate users that can use older (2-5 year old) PCs that run XP well enough for their purposes. I used a 4 year old Dell Latitude with XP for years and it served its purpose fine with nothing more then a RAM upgrade. Prior to that I needed a new computer almost every 2 years.

There's no longer the same urgency to upgrade to newer HW and software for IT departments to justify upgrading computers with the same frequency. There still isn't really a good reason to upgrade until MS pulls support for XP.
Vista didn't sell well because most of the good changes were under the hood and most of the bad changes were visible and affected usability negatively.

Vista made some good advances. For example, the number one cause of hard crashes (blue screens) in Windows 2k/XP has been video driver crashes. In Vista and Win7 if the video driver crashes the OS can recover, instead of lost work and frustration as your computer reboots you get a little pop-up in the system tray. Yet few users appreciate this because MS is bad at marketing this sort of thing.

Out of the box, Vista's default configuration made for a hostile user experience for both novice and sophisticated users. Vista was still a decent OS upgrade over XP, but it took a lot of work (in learning and reconfiguring Vista) to get to the point where it was worthwhile.

Moreover, there quickly sprouted up a negative user impression of Vista, even among those who had never used it. Given that there was little in Vista that was "must have", this hurt sales greatly. In reality Vista was as much, if not more, of an upgrade over XP as XP was over 2000 (another flawed, but overall worthwhile OS upgrade). Yet excessive negative public opinion squelched the regular upgrade path.

Overall, Vista's lack of success was a boon to MS because it forced them to buckle down and really succeed with Windows 7. It's better to fail spectacularly and get a wake up call than to fail a little more with each release until your product is irrelevant and unprofitable. Win7 is a truly worthwhile OS upgrade, MS should thank whatever deity that they got a kick in the pants when they did.
Sure cheers,

http://eventgel.com/ev/startup-school-techmeetup/

got a few feedback notes for you but Ill compile them all in one email
Having read some of DJB's code as well, I also thought, "Huh?" when it was suggested that it was beautiful. One thing that would lead a person to believe the compilation argument is the almost complete lack of comments, as-short-as-possible variable names, etc.
I just wanted to add that we're working on the design right now, so the look of the page is going to change in the next day or two.
Yes. It helps if you are working for or plan to start a startup/early stage company. A lot, but not all, can be applied to a new product in an established company.
Appsto.re bothers me a lot so far.

I say so far, because they seem to offer very little (the screenshots show number of clicks, regions and referrals), but in return, they put their iTunes affiliate link: from what I gather, that get them 5% of all iTunes purchases for that account in the following 4 months (or until another affiliate link is used).

Honestly, that's disproportionate. One could get the 5% themselves and have the same level of analytics just by setting up Google Analytics and a LinkShare program. An hour's worth of work.

Sure, they provide a free service and deserve to be paid for it. I just have the feeling that their reasoning went the other way: "let's put our affiliate link everywhere. Now how do we do that?". The fact that their offering is very light for now seems to indicate that I'm right about that.
The formatting, the heavy reliance on idiosyncratic CPP macros, and more than anything else the repetitively procedural nature of it is what set off alarm bells for us.

But really that's just the way he codes. It's very intricate. It's like a very ugly Swiss watch.
You can also roll your own with linkshare affiliate program and a URL shortener. These guys need to provide (emphasize if the already provide it) some better analytic tools.

Most traffic still comes from within the app store, however, and these users are non-traceable as far as I know.
I don't think it's just women who are responsible for the rise of Extruded Fantasy Product.
Change the theme to XP/Classic and you'll find there really isn't much to learn.
A Story of Why Devs Should Think Twice about Developing for the iPhone
I don't see anything wrong with this business. If somebody can't be bothered with linkshare this is a useful service. Linkshare is actually a bit of pain to use.

I agree that they could develop a bit ricer presentation, but maybe they practice the minimal-viable-product and plan to iterate. :-)