skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
And most people don't track how their representatives vote on each issue, especially on issues that don't get much press coverage so it's easy to pacify corporate lobbyists in this type of legislation.

You are right, changing the system from within probably won't happen so you need an external solution. That is what this proposal is -- an external solution that can be implemented regardless of what Congress does.
Video: Paul Graham at Startup School 08
I've built a dozen sites and Drupal and I'm also a Rails contributor. I agree with the sentiment of the post insomuch as I never want to work with Drupal again, but that's a matter of personal taste.

The fact is that Drupal is a viable solution for a huge swath of problems that Rails would cost orders of magnitude more to solve. Namely, boilerplate functionality. Drupal gets extra points because of all CMSes it provides the most hooks and thought towards extendability by developers... nothing else even comes close.

That said, Drupal is not a good design for anything specific. It imposes a lot of overhead in an attempt to be all things to all people. The architecture is actually pretty amazing for what it does, but in my opinion it's the wrong level of abstraction to really be useful to be people who are obsessive about usability, design, performance, or maintainability. That probably describes most people on HN in some regard, but it's far from the majority of people who "want a website".

In the wider business community there are far more people out in the world who have $5000, think its a lot of money, and want a full-featured blog + forum + e-commerce + brochureware site that they can update themselves. Enter Drupal.
"A noble cause, but the implementation may need more thought."

Please help make the implementation better -- share your thoughts. This is a work in progress, and we appreciate input from smart and talented people.
I'd like a way to see which of my comments have recently been upvoted or commented on. There are times (like right now) that I see my karma jump, and I get curious what got upvoted, but I don't see anything different on my comments page.
I wouldn't call this post "blunt" or "direct"

It's got to be 2-3x the length of Jason's original post ... and poorly written
Yes, fight fire with fire :)
I stand behind my use of the phrase "non-trivial". The fact that Drupal has a reasonably clean DB communication layer that separates out bind variables to avoid injection attacks was why they didn't give up on the project at the start. I doubt anyone involved in the project would describe the effort as "surprisingly easy".
Rupert to Internet: It's War
Sad, Sad stories for sure.
Perhaps building a micropayment service would get Twitter the much talked about revenue??? An option to pay anybody on Twitter by mobile would be great. Kind of like the App Store, you pay by Twitter and the sum + service charges get added to your monthly phone bill.
It's better to let the HN admins take care of such matters. They have fixed the original submission now.
I'm not sure I'd be so smug.

http://edition.cnn.com/HEALTH/9611/01/e.coli.poisoning/

http://www.cdc.gov/ecoli/2006/september/
The development team officially released PHP/FI 2 in November 1997 after months of beta testing. Afterwards, public testing of PHP 3 began, and the official launch came in June 1998. Suraski and Gutmans then started a new rewrite of PHP's core, producing the Zend Engine in 1999. They also founded Zend Technologies in Ramat Gan, Israel. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PHP).

"Mozilla" is sometimes used to refer to the free and open source software project that was founded in order to create the next-generation Internet suite for Netscape. The Mozilla Organization was founded in 1998 to create the new suite. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla Apache is a bit older about 1996.

My contention and my challenge is in respect to the "SUCKS". I found it totally disrespectful and arrogant. These programmers were hackers and they still are. They were pioneers they were 'real engineers' that used the available tools to the maximum, pretty much like what people are doing together with whatever product is at the forefront.

I am not an evangelist for either PHP or DRUPAL, I have used both many times over with success, even if the process was painful. For web applications the way most HN users would understand them, they are not the greatest of tools especially DRUPAL, however if one is proficient in PHP they can use one of the frameworks (CAKEPHP, CodeIgniter, Kohana) to pretty do any development within a reasonable time period.
A meta-lesson of many of these lessons was "if you can avoid it, don't work with difficult people at crummy jobs". Lesson #8 in particular smelled of an environment where people were actively seeking to be offended and unhappy (the smell is oh-so-depressingly familiar).
I don't know about you, but "whining like a little bitch" warrants a punch in the face where I come from...

He makes some valid points, but this could have been written in a couple of paragraphs and without constant personal attacks. I'd like to see this guy hold his own in a one-on-one confrontation...

Maybe this could be arranged?
Obits and Subscribers
Soo doh, but perhaps I should start saying sooo do.
#4: Taking backups for granted.

Everywhere I've ever worked I've encountered some variation of this. One recent customer had some MySQL problems which took down the sole MediaWiki server holding all their IT documentation. Not only did they not have a standby, not a single backup or dump was ever done.

These days what I find even more astonishing is how even experienced professionals make the mistake of thinking they don't need separate backups because their system has some integral disk redundancy (e.g. http://www.joyent.com/joyeurblog/2008/01/22/bingodisk-and-st... ).
I didn't read that at all from the guys post. While the guy did slam Jason, he also rebutted his claims of a VC controlled acquisition.
Props to Dave. All the flowery language, pictures, and hyperbole generate great discussion and traffic.

Dave is one of the most savvy investors and marketers around. When we were first pitching Twilio no one seemed to understand "marketing to developers" but he got it while half asleep from an all-nighter.

If you curious about Dave's geek cred, scope his linkedin profile:
* Investment Program Director at fbFund Incubator
* Investor at Bit.ly
* Investor at DailyBurn
* Advisor at Life360
* Startup Investor (FF Angel Fund, fbFund Incubator) at Founders Fund
* Advisor, Investor at Twilio
* Organizer & Founder at Startup2Startup
* Advisor at 750 Industries
* Advisor, Angel Investor at SlideShare
* Advisor, Angel Investor at TradeVibes
* Advisor, Angel Investor at EventVue
* Advisor, Angel Investor at Oortle
* Angel Investor at RichRelevance
* Advisor, Angel Investor at KISSmetrics
* Advisor, Angel Investor, Boardmember at TeachStreet.com
* Advisor, Consultant, Angel Investor at Mint Software
* Advisor, Angel Investor at Mashery
* Advisor at Kiva.org
* Co-Founder, Boardmember at Silicon Valley Microfinance Network
* Advisor, Angel Investor at Simply Hired
* Angel Investor at Canopy Financial
* Startup Advisor / Angel Investor at 500 Hats LLC

And, if you head hasn't exploded from the colors in his blog check out his presentation style... in. your. face.
http://www.slideshare.net/dmc500hats/startup-metrics-for-pir...
Good to hear you're back on track.

16h resolution time is actually not too bad when you look at your monthly bill - but the initial auto-denial (typical for large service providers of all kinds) is ofcourse annoying. Perhaps you get faster action next time, now that you're paying for the premium plan.

It is indeed strange, though, that it took them so long to discover what must have been a huge traffic spike on your instance. Their administration panel needs work if it doesn't point out such anomalies at a glance. Also your own monitoring needs work if you didn't notice the spike of inbound traffic.

Anyways, good luck for the future and if you decide to switch or extend I'd be curious to read about it.
I can't agree more. That kind of sell is a life changing amount of money for most people. I would have sold and moved onto the next venture.
Agreed. A couple of companies ago I knew someone who complained to HR that her manager was bullying her. What happened? Well, he knew she was afraid of heights, but still relocated her desk (along with everyone else in her team) from the 1st to the 5th floor...
Why Google Isn't Evil
Revealing the People Defining Social Networks
Thanks polynomial. I threw the challenge as an answer to the 'SUCKS', I found it arrogant and disrespectful and I hate arrogance. If the author takes the challenge I will provide a list of basic OOB functionality and deposit the money with whoever they consider neutral enough and will agree the adjudication.

As I mentioned as a reply to the post below, I am neither a PHP or a DRUPAL evangelist, they are tools that I have used in the past and still using, although currently most of my own work is based on frameworks and they got their limits and issues.

What the heck for $ 2000 to get a :

RoR_CMS_FRAMEWORK = 0.5 Drupal

is a good bargain! :)
Is someone disagreeing with a member of 37siganls really that surprising? 37signals is a pretty opinionated bunch.

At any rate, when Jason states in his post that he "doesn't know the full backstory," that signaled to me that I'm reading a post that's based on a premise that could be completely wrong. And I was okay with that because Jason appropriately couched his post.
According to the article "the team previously developed tools which can create 3D models from a collection of photos, which subsequently evolved into Microsoft’s Photosynth." I can not wait to see the evolution of this stuff, especially from Bing and Google maps, in the coming years.
Ditching iPhone? What's next?
Hi there,

Recently I've came across a lot of disappointment in iPhone. Separate from this (but sometimes they are coming together) goes disappointment in AT&T, but they are going hand by hand because as how Apple does business with AT&T now.

Even @dhh recently complained:
http://twitter.com/dhh/status/4380606237
http://twitter.com/dhh/status/4380007726
And 37signals is well known Mac shop. :-)

Is this is the end of "good iPhone"? There is a huge amount of disappointment of still no changes to the hardware, still not physical keyboard/etc. -- and still bad email management (even impossible to change ringtone for incoming email!)

Blackberry actually is seeing growth recently. Many people (consumers, not businesses) started to adopt Blackberries just because they do email better. And there is Opera for the web at least.

@Jason Calacanis http://twitter.com/Jason and Michael Arrington @arrington all ditched iPhones, together with gdgt's Peter Rojas.

What do YOU think about?
A sprinkling of nanotubes makes plants shoot up
If my differential equations class taught me anything it is the fact that the growth curve for population hits a saturation point where there is not enough food/area/resources to sustain that kind of growth. Not saying that you can't get sick but I don't know if the hazmat suit is a necessity.
Yikes, always remember to check interface utilization when troubleshooting performance issues with anything network related!
I couldn't find any example code until I downloaded the PDF specification and scrolled to page 7. This seems like very interesting research, but as a hacker: show me the code! There should be a taste of it either on the front page or on a page clearly labeled "examples".
oh, really? maybe he should have written more about it then, instead of only posting a photo and this idiocracy.
Same thing happened to me. It looks very well put together but it won't get anyone excited as long as they try to get everyone to fall asleep on the homepage.
Google "salmonella vanilla" and you might find it. That's what it was called around here: I had a friend who used to work for Schwan's, the company that made the ice cream. Although I should note that the problem wasn't caused by Schwan's: it was their supplier who was sending them contaminated dairy products.
ahh, just scroll down trough this shit and watch Gordon Gekko clip from the movie!
Superficial stylistic reasons

Style is an indicator of content. If someone uses five different colors and five different ways to emphasize text (I'm not exaggerating: count them) in the first few paragraphs of a blog post, then I expect the content to be equally lacking in thought.

These 'interesting points' have already been made a zillion times by a zillion different persons in the time since the Mint acquisition. Instead of shortly restating the argument, he seems to think he needs to repeat it a number of times in a row, with small variations. This certainly doesn't deserve the term 'essay'.
Another true story: A while ago I was DBA on a very important database (as in, the company would likely go out of business if it was lost). The way it was backed up was to quiesce the standby, take a snapshot of its filesystems on the SAN, then send those to tape while the standby was reenabled. Sounds good. But what had happened was that the sysadmin, to speed it up, was running several parallel backups, each one of which had a hard-coded list of files.

So as soon as one new datafile was added to the database (I estimate, a week after that regime was put in place) all subsequent backups were invalid. We were in that situation for over a year and everyone believed that the databases was being properly backed up. We would even occasionally restore a file (picked from the backupset, hmm) and block-verify it. I only discovered it when I was upgrading the system and I fixed it real quick (dynamically generating n equally-sized lists of files is trivial!). Hard coding the list of files was stupid, sure, and betrayed a fundamental lack of understanding about how the system worked - but it was also stupid that no-one ever checked, and that betrayed a lack of understanding of how organizations work.

The lesson I took away from that was, you have to have people who have visibility of things end-to-end.
So it was actually entirely unrelated to EBS? The reason it was taking 10 seconds to do an "ls" was simply a saturated connection to your server, not too much EBS activity?
This is surprising to me. It seems like Amazon should have dedicated ethernet (or at least a separate VLAN + higher QoS) for EBS.
There's not a standard admissions process in the U.S. At my alma mater we just filled out some forms and directed the school to any prior educational transcripts we had. No essay, no interview.

It's actually considered bad form to inject any subjectivity into the process. Students are de-identified for most of the admissions process.

Admissions are based on a combination of grades/marks and standardized testing (SATs, GREs, GMATs, etc. and depending on what is being applied for).

The result? Strangely enough, one of the most diverse schools in the U.S.

http://encarta.msn.com/encnet/departments/college/?article=m...
>> "It's realtime"

The trend to label websites "Realtime" as if it's something amazing and new is really pretty funny.

The only real concrete feature I've heard about google wave is that you can see characters as users type them.

Did we just go back in time 20 years?

The technology twitter is simple, anyone could build it. You could likely run twitter on 10 servers max. The brand and community they've built is what is valuable.
My company has always pretty explicitly discouraged working nights or weekends, though obviously some people will always end up working more because they want to.

While burnout and recruitment are both good reasons (you don't want core people to burn out and leave, and people don't want to come work for a bunch of slave-drivers), the less-often-cited reason to not work "harder," and one of our explicit motivations for it, is because often times saying "we'll just work harder" prevents you from having to make tough prioritization decisions, and that can mask bad decisions that have been made and that are costing you time.

As with all rules, there are exceptions, and there are times when you just need (or want) to crank hard on something. But in this case, we've found that the constraints imposed by working normal hours helps to improve your decision making and focus your priorities.
Murdoch has always taken the reverse approach to how people like us do things; instead of innovate hammer them till you win.

There might be logic in that approach; he's certainly done ok with it so far...

It will be interesting to see what happens.
I have seen this list of suggestions repeated on different blogs for the last several years, with only minor differences. They are always heavy on security-by-obscurity tactics and light on serious suggestions.

This article is even worse than the usual ones. For example, it makes no mention of securing access to the admin area by forcing SSL connections.

The plugin mentioned, AskApachePassword, relies on your Apache config files being writable by the Apache user. It also only creates one user/password combination, which rather contradicts the purpose of an authentication scheme (although it does use Digest, rather than Basic authentication, if it's available, which is something I suppose).

Point 6 recommends explicitly denying access to the WordPress config file. Why, I have no idea—after all, since that file doesn't print anything, if someone tries to view it in a browser they'll just get an empty page.

I could go on, but it's starting to get depressing. It's good that people are concerned about security, but I wish they'd do better research before going round acting like an authority on the subject.
I got e.coli after spending spring break in Mexico with my dad. I didn't get it as bad as this girl, but it was awful nonetheless. I was horribly sick for 4 days with diarrhea and vomiting and couldn't really eat or drink much. What is scary about it, is that it affects everybody differently and can do anything from giving cramps and the shits, to killing you.

Ugh, it was awful.
Have you talked to any of the developers about those issues? I've found every Drupal developer I've dealt with to be extremely friendly and open to improvements. Tickets actually get responses and fixes, and they can be bribed with money and patches to make things better.

Sure, it has many flaws (even deep architectural ones), and there are many things to complain about but compared to the other leading CMS', it's a dream to work with.
yeah seriously...it totally depends on the app...how can you define the perfect tools for the job when you explicitly state you don't know what the job is yet?
This article would also be a good read without all the f-bombs.
I think it was a little bit of both: half clever marketing campaign, half a plea for change and an exposure of corruption.
Radicals and Visionaries: Chris Anderson vs. 37Signals
Drama 2 Where R U?
I don't know why Plone doesn't get more love. Very nice UI, very responsive developer community, active community of 3rd party developers and add-ons...
Isn't some portion of the official PostgreSQL website powered by Drupal?
Try searching on google for site:drupal.org your problem here
I've been writing java for a bit over ten years myself and I love eclipse. You're sitting here writing code in this language that is known to be extremely verbose and you want to type it all by hand, refactor it all by hand, navigate it all by hand? Now THAT is silly.
How does this compare to LLVM?
This is mainly a neural network library, it has svm support mainly for comparison.

It still can't replace weka... which you can kinda use with python http://weka.wikispaces.com/Can+I+use+WEKA+from+Python%3F
I'm not sure why this (and crowdspring) is voted down. For the initial phase of design or designing small parts (logo's icons, home page) a global marketplace of competing designers works very well.

When you have the design you can run with it - and if you actually want to develop a working relationship with the winner you can always do that.
I think the author is unaware of a great tool for scaling PostgreSQL. A few years ago Skype released plProxy and pgBouncer, both of which are key to PostgreSQL scaling. What they in essence do is allow for transparent horizontal scaling of servers. One defines a cluster in plProxy and then when you run stored procedure queries, they remotely execute on the proper shared server based upon the primary key data. It's fast and effective and I have been using it in a very large OLTP environment using PostgreSQL, driving a US Top-25 pageview site.
They like the iPhone, they don't like AT&T -- they were just complaining to try and pressure Apple to broaden its carrier selection.
While I do agree that ridiculous colors and font sizes do lower the deemed quality, it doesn't hurt to hear similar statements, though slightly revised, from an adviser close to the company. If anything, his 'interesting points' help to keep us levelheaded after reading Jason's rally cry.
How does this .com.com work?

(I am being serious here) Can I get a .com.com?
Congrats on taking the road less traveled. I too started a business while I was in college to pay the bills-- turned out to be one of the best experiences of my life. Looking back, the most important thing I had going for me was a great co-founder that complimented my interests and skill set.

When we were starting out we thought about the following questions all of the time:

- Do people want our product?

- How are we differentiated?

- What will this cost us?

- How will we make money?

- Who can we ask for advice?

- What are we forgetting?

Focus on making something people want-- this is paramount. A good rule of thumb is that your product needs to be good enough that people willingly recommend it to others. Make sure your product is differentiated-- people won't trust you at first (and they will trust an established competitor) so you need to offer something customers can't get elsewhere. Charge for your product-- sounds obvious, but you can't make money without it and it's not as easy as it sounds. Network, network, network-- too many founders forget to network with customers, vendors, business partners, future employees, etc. because they get too focused on developing the product. Networking will be a great source of feedback and will open doors you may never have known existed. Remember, you're creating a business not just creating a product.
I remember a while back that wood cutting boards tended to have much lower bacteria counts than plastic ones did. I keep mine in good condition so they last a while and I don't have to be cutting down trees all the time.

http://www.knife-expert.com/cut-bo93.txt
How is this a joke? The author has given a set of requirements and asked what you think are the best choices to meet those requirements. If you are ever considering a web startup this is a perfect question to ask and one you should know the answer to.

Incidentally I'm a fan of the ASP.NET MVC stack (using MS SQL) for web development, but I don't think it's the most scalable and is unlikely to have a large pool of good developers to source from (you would probably want a good C# or non-MS-hating RoR developer).