skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I question #3. Why is it admirable to play a role in the languages world? Shouldn't languages be a means to an end? If the end is good applications, DJB showed that you can produce good applications in C.

It seems like a lot of the energy around languages is frivolous. It's more fun to play with language features than to attack a real-world problem like writing a mail server.

As for #4, why does criticality matter? And why does the audience have to be programmers? Couldn't the author of a spreadsheet be as worthy as the author of a compiler?

Not that I'm endorsing DJB's nomination; I have pored through his source code for various reasons and have some reservations about it. But you could do much worse.

(And yes, it's all silly.)
Debunked: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/voice/thread?tid=7625b...
The End of Eternity: IPv4 Address Exhaustion and Consequences
> This story makes guys like Zuck and Gates seem extraordinary.

What makes Gates extraordinary in this sense? Just because he kept some shares and stayed on, it doesn't mean that the source of his fortune isn't the Microsoft-shares he sold.

IPOing is also selling out, it's just selling out to a lot of people simultaneously.
In partial defense of Texinfo, manpages are terrible at the kind of documents the FSF is trying to write with Texinfo. (man zshall, for example, is spastically organized and tries to be reference and tutorial at once, which doesn't work well). But you do need the man pages as well for quick reference.
Just to be clear about one thing: even in successful VC-funded companies with actual exits, 50MM is an anomaly. I have a bunch of friends who have sold companies, and in the crazy-talk best case, one of them got ~$10MM, and it wasn't his first 7+ figure win.

The companies that go for mid/high 8 figures are all apparently VC-funded, most for multiple rounds, meaning that any given founder might be hovering near single-digit points of equity.

Going after a "fuck you" $50MM payday seems like an awfully bad idea. It's not going to happen.
Never Too Early (To Pitch)
Microsoft locking out unauthorized Xbox 360 storage devices
or use SASS to accomplish... all of those tips... http://sass-lang.com/
Not to take anything away from Bill Gates, but he always had a million dollar trust fund to fall back on.

(Source: http://philip.greenspun.com/bg/)
http://searchyc.com/firefox+microsoft?sort=by_date

Shows http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=887076 as #2-#7, and http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=885764 as #8.
VASIMR VX-200 reaches 200 kW power milestone (with videos)
One caveat: Sector/Sphere is not used by anyone (notable) in the industry. I hope they become a viable alternative to Hadoop as they do have some strong points on paper.

OTOH, an industry maven told me recently that "they don't listen" (to industry feedback), which I hope, is not entirely true.
If you don't find it interesting then you don't find it interesting, but that's quite a retreat from what you were claiming in your initial comment.

>because I don't believe in God or in evil.

You don't believe that evil things happen?
Spotify attacking Nokia with new 3 deal
Ask HN: is gmail slow for everyone or just me
The site has seemed really slow to me for the last few days... and today it is unbearable. I haven't seen any official report on this. Am I the only one?
Jane Jacobs has brilliant essay on this topic; the difference between educating and providing credentials.

Dark Age Ahead, ISBN-10: 0679313109
If a site has undergone lot of changes based on the HN comments posted in the first time submission, it definitely makes sense to submit it second time...If the same old stuff is submitted for review again, we always have a choice not to upvote that
I always "wget -r --header 'Cookie: login-credentials-if-neccessary' | grep 500" my staging site before sending it to production.

I also use hoptoadapp.com for error reporting.
Ask HN: How did you find HN?
I was wondering how did everyone else came across HN in the first place? For me it was several months back when I googled "hacker news" in an attempt to find something better than techcrunch or mashable. HN was the first result.
While one can hardly disagree with 11 years qualifying as geologic time in the context of the internet, the original comment, "Thank GOD, I was not part of that era.", was referring to something delineated by events (the widespread use of geocities-like HTML formatting and page design), which has nothing to do with how long ago those events occurred. The only notable thing about that comment is that nipra either isn't old enough or didn't get into the industry soon enough to be solidly aware of that period in Internet history. That era ended an eon ago.
I found similar issues with a lot of other companies. I notified them. Maybe they don't care. Maybe my emails went straight to the spam folder.
Geoengineering is No Free Lunch -- A Comment on SuperFreakonomics
I can't find any mention of the transaction or who the new CEO is on the Smart Bear site. Jason doesn't say who purchased the company. It would be interesting to read the full story. There was probably a two year earnout provision on the sale which is coming to an end (Dec-07 to Dec-09) which is why he is talking about it now. Perhaps in January 2010 more of the story will come out.

This post have focused Jason's your inner psychological landscape, I would be interested in other aspects of the deal: how did he prepare employees, who did he pick and why to help you with the negotiations (e.g. attorneys, accountants, sell side M&A, other entrepreneurs, other advisors), how did he manage the two year transition.

Looking back and knowing what he knows now, what are one or two key things he would have done differently, what are one or two key things that he believes really made this decision a success?
Wait now; there were a bunch of girls at comic-con and the guys were complaining?!
Amen.

If no one can use your code, it doesn't matter how beautiful, well-thought-out, or well-written it is. Software exists for the purpose of being executed. If your project cannot be deployed with a reasonable amount of effort, it's worse than bad software, it's a waste of time.
I hate this attitude. If your code targets my system, I should be able to install it without editing it.

You certainly should, but it isn't the coder's responsibility to make this possible. It's the language/system designer's.

Just because C doesn't let you deploy nicely has nothing to do with djb's ability to create beautifully architected code, which is what Aaron is praising. I'm sure djb could have written equally beautiful code in Squeak Smalltalk, and it would have been a breeze to deploy, but had no impact on how elegant the code itself was.
I spent quite a bit of time last night researching financial services (eventually segued to COBOL/mainframes) and one company, Fiserv, kept popping up for a lot of services.

Do you mind sharing some examples of what some of those dominant vendors might be?
Or CleverCSS for Python users: http://sandbox.pocoo.org/clevercss/
Ask HN: Startup School Meetup, SF, Sunday 25th 6pm
any others looking to make the most of the startup school weekend?

a few people have talked about an informal meetup over beer, I guessed at a time/city that would be best,

noisebridge could be a possible venue, but would prefer a member confirm that it would be cool, or a local to suggest somewhere.
DJB's code is a lot of things, but when someone says "beautiful" is one of them, I start thinking about how I might quiz them to get them to prove that they've actually read it. Smarter coders than me have sat in rooms for nightlong studies of qmail and come to the conclusion that, while clever, the C code in qmail and djbdns has clearly been compiled down from some higher level language[1]. If that code is anything, it is idiosyncratic.

[1] Having asked this question directly to DJB in person, I can say that I am at least convinced he wrote this stuff in C.
An Encyclopedia of Probability
Ups & downs, like that it's slow as molasses, like that it's lightning fast.

I think it's very much to do with how many people are trying to access the site during peak hours.
I feel like it's only partially debunked.

Ok, not all messages are searchable this way, but from the Google Voice interface I can't find anything that says if it's searchable or not, or if it's searchable when sharing by email or embedding in a page.

It's not very clear to me.
Well, sure, that takes care of the symptom but not the underlying issue: comments shouldn't affect runtime! To put it differently, if I remove all comments from a source file, the compiled/interpreted result should be 100% the same. If it isn't, something's wrong.
> This seems like a grace note to a swan dive.

Pure poetry.
this is a good point, but can be expressed with a blog post about "what are the qualities to be among the top programmers of the world?" instead of "djb is the best programmer of the world".

Still it is surely important to look at this great programmers in the aim to try to emulate all the stuff that they got right in order to improve ourself.
Please avoid Exim. Even if you can't stomach qmail, which is an acquired taste, you don't have to compromise on security. Smart people can disagree about whether Postfix is _as_ secure as qmail, but none of them disagree that it is at least _very_ secure.
Implementing Startup Metrics for Pirates using Mixpanel – Part 1: Features
As someone who has hacked mail servers, written DNS servers, and come within 100 miles of typesetting, I'm going to throw in my vote that TeX addresses a much harder problem than qmail.
Without paying for minutes? Can I use VoIP?
I disagree.

In most web apps data in per-user (or per-object, whatever that object is), and it's not a major headache to denormalize it to be per-user. One notable is exception is a social network, but that can be handled with some care.

We're talking about web apps written by programmers, not MBAs. Sure, if your web apps are written by MBAs, then they should use an RDBMS, because they can do less damage (?).

I'm not arguing against RDBMS/SQL here, all I'm saying is that a KV store is actually a good choice for the domain of web applications. You can also use an RDBMS of course, as we have for the last 10 years with the LAMP stack, as long as you're handling a managable amount of traffic. Even with a lot of traffic you can handle it with an RDBMS, it just stops making sense at some point.
The Fourth Paradigm: Data-Intensive Scientific Discovery [Book by MSR]
I disagree, the buildings designed by Wright or Le Corbusier improved the field in many ways. They created a new architectonic system, it's like inventing a new programming language in some way.
Sadly, there are enough patent trolls and litigation-happy companies that would just love to have someone as determined and single-minded as him, on board :/
The rich people I know personally drive the Mercedes-Benz E-320.
Two(?) years ago I read about Y Combinator since I knew about pg from his essays. Browsing yc's site, I came across news. After a few months of lurking, I registered.
No contest there, but qmail is far from 'trivial'.

If you're going to compare qmail to something else though I think it should be compared to sendmail (or postfix for that matter), not to TeX.

Personally I think djb is a great coder, but there are quite a few of those around.

Programming is not a single-valued enterprise anyway, so best is a very hard to measure quantity, as good as meaningless. But I know 'bad' when I see it :)
It's a far point. I was referring to youth in the twenties sense. Of course younger than that you are quite right. Immaturity is a bitch.

Unfortunately, certitude can also lead people to be fierce advocates of the status quo.
Instead of a thinly veiled advertisement, how about some information on the capability of the hardware: histograms of RAM size, hard drives, CPU units (equivalents of some known CPU) and network speed/latency for these "50,000" machines?

Without a reasonable description of hardware, any ideas would be just hand waving.
@generalk You're right, I sure wish there was a better way. Do you have one?

Also, you could decide to not use this particular aspect of the syntax if it offends you, could you not? Those of us who have to support ie6 for the next three years, do not have that luxury.
Business models of the new web
It seems micropayments are the general trend on the web. Early in September, Google announced its micropayments platform that could save the newspaper industry, or to help monetize the all free new/social media. On the other side, there are many local/regional players betting on micropayments. For instance...
One could combine this with the HASTOL concept to get very cheap launches to earth orbit.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tether_propulsion#HASTOL_.E2.80...

Basically, a rotating tether substitues for the upper stage(s) of a launch system. But for each assisted cargo, the rotating tether needs to accelerate again. Ion engines can do this, but their low thrust and short lifespan make them less than idea. VASIMR has a longer lifespan and higher thrust.
Here (Belgium, Europe) it's also unbearable slow most of the time. It even made me use imap to fetch mail. That seems to be unaffected by the slowness, so I guess they are only having issues with the front-end. That or they are re-factoring/changing the way it works.

I'm having the problem for a couple of weeks now by the way.

-- Edit:
Just thought of it, wave could have something to do with it...
Having so clear a vision of how your architecture should behave that you human-compile it into idiosyncratic code that looks generated seems to be a very good definition of beautiful code, no? Maybe he hasn't had time to write a book about the "code patterns" which he's using, but that's hardly something to hold a grudge about.
Scientific illustrator? Someone please tell me what is scientific about this site. No mention of the actual amount of radiation that was released at TMI, which was miniscule compared to normal background radiation that is present all the time. Yeah, lets go find some bugs with spots, assume that the spots are caused by radiation from a nuclear plant, and call it scientific. Get educated people!!
i don't even know if being king is fun. i think the process of becoming king might be where the fun is. for me, at least. ymmv.

which is another reason to sell once you're on top -- to get back to the pursuit of kingship.
The 50,000+ computers come from a distributed grid computing system that's similar to a commercial opt-in SETI@home.

Because of that, we don't know exact specs on the computers, but here are the limitations that 80Apps have: http://80legs.pbworks.com/80Apps#LimitationsonYourCode
Why the Borg's copycat business model no longer works
#3: sure, in general terms. Not true in my opinion for the best programmer of the world. Naturally he is "the one" that can master programming so well that it must be able to drive even programming language designers into more expressive / productive languages. djb can never be the one as in his code is very rare to find high level abstractions.

as for #4 it's very admirable to write real world software, but the best programmers in the world, like Joy or RMS tend to write big systems that can be used by the other hackers in the world, because to write a new operating system, a C compiler that live for decades contributing even to the development of new operating systems (It's hard to imagine Linux without GCC in some way), or world class text editors (vi, emacs) is not something everybody can do, but only the best programmers in the world.
One other saying is: Get rich to get wealthy. If you can get enough in the bank to not worry about money, and at a young age that's not a whole lot, you can focus on going for the homerun next time. A successful first time exit could be considered a "blank check" in this industry:

a) You are secure. You don't need to worry about funds to pay yourself ramen money.

b) You probably have enough to have people help you build a prototype, so that gets rid of the friends/family cash crunch.

c) You've done it successfully before, so angels+VCs are much more likely to write you a check.

d) You've done it successfully before, so people are likely to join your team. The equity you're offering has value due to past success ie- don't believe me? I've done it once and I made the last guys who believed in me make some damn good money
I don't believe it. Same goes for his 4 hours a month work out. If you are going to make claims like that at least provide details so we can try it.
Three Reasons You'll Upgrade to Windows 7 - Time, Money, and Hassle
your points 2 and 3 directly conflict with each other. his software is "difficult" to configure because he does it in a non-standard way. individual files for options, installing everything in its own root directory, using /service for daemontools, etc.

he had these new ideas for software development, installation, and maintenance, so he implemented them and because they are different, people equate that with being difficult. he didn't like a lot of standard libraries, so a lot of his software uses his own routines (which has been extracted as libdjb - http://www.fefe.de/djb/) which is partially the reason for his impressive security record. i think you underestimate his impact on the unix software development community.

your fourth point is just wrong. a lot of ISPs rely on qmail and djbdns and to say that they wouldn't care if they just disappeared is just silly. sure there are alternatives, but so are there to linux and gcc.
Programmers At Work: Charles Simonyi
If you write code that looks like it was generated with e.g. yacc, then you probably would have been better off writing it in yacc and bundling that as the source. There's nothing glamorous in being a human compiler. Other people will have to touch the code at some point.

I haven't read the qmail source (just some design docs about how the whole system fits together, which I found rather impressive), so I'm not talking specifically about that.

NB: Qmail's license wasn't public domain until 2007. (Also, damn, tptacek, you're fast! I deleted that part, since I'm talking about auto-generated code in general.)
Why hasn't Vista sold well?
He's the inventor of the Hungarian notation, and has a very interesting explanation of what it's intended to accomplish.

Great interview throughout.
> It's totally feasible to have full SQL (and more) implementation on top over Hypertable.

Except that would be ridiculous, since the data model is just not designed for denormalization. (And that's okay!)
Especially if you're a security person, I think it's uncontroversial to say that the design is beautiful. It's not only an elegant design, but it is the first major piece of systems code to take that design approach. To put it differently: most of major systems programs that have been proven secure in the last 10 years owe their design to qmail.

But that has nothing to do with the code, which is not only epsilon from assembly (Bernstein fully embraces the notion of writing code in high-level assembly), but also clever and concise almost to a fault.

As someone who ran qmail since it was originally released in beta, I also remember vividly Bernstein's original idea about configuration, which is that "configuring" your mail server with C code was more reasonable than learning another programming language (Sendmail "cf"). Which implies that a lot of the code in the interesting parts of qmail are less about design, and more about encoding mail routing policy as C code.
A friend linked me to their "rate my startup" submission.
The case against virtualization (and 4 reasons to do it anyway)
A postscript by the author appeared:

"I’m not naive. I understand that sites should have anti-spamming filters in place. Lorna’s had some. It could have more. But I’ve also seen spam get through anti-spam filters on my own Sphinn social news site. That site employs multiple-CAPTCHA barriers, along with an array of other deterrents. It also has human moderators. Link spammers still attack it. Link spammers will attack ANYTHING out there, and nothing is foolproof. The first programmer that tells you they have a perfect anti-spam solution will soon after encounter another programmer who will blow that fallacy out of the water."

His experience pretty much mirrors my experience. Just using any of the main CMSs out there (drupal, joomla, wordpress, etc) will give you an entry in a bunch of databases of people that will 'visit' you with gifts from time to time.
Which he doesn't; qmail is public domain.

(I'm in 100% full-on maximum overdrive procrastination mode today, since what I need to get done is to script and record a screencast of my app, and I'm frozen up about where to start with it. Sorry for being so fast to respond).
Weird, the only distributed system that gets even a passing mention is Voldemort.
I read quite a few female writers and they're good and relevant.
Bujold would be an obvious example, and much more local authors.

I'm going to visit a fantasy/role playing convention in two weeks, and I think female participants would account for more than half visitors.
I believe that calling something evil is gross oversimplifation. Terrible things happen. Evil has overtones that I disagree with, if that makes sense.
i stumbled across YC (2-3) years ago while looking at some of their companies (while casually looking at jobs), and stumbled across HN in the process.
The algorithms and pure theoretical CS in qmail actually is trivial. From what I remember, pretty much the only genuinely interesting thing in it is how he implemented his hash table.

From a systems programming perspective, qmail is not only nontrivial, but actually groundbreaking. His allocator design, the way he architected his libc replacement, the extent to which he takes advantage of bare-metal Unix programming (look at his queue notification mechanism), it's all really cool stuff.

But there's a big difference between theoretical CS and systems programming, and the parent commenter is right to point out that TeX is more complicated from a CS perspective than qmail is.
A VC's Perspective: Blogs I'm Reading Now
I think you're being a little unfairly downvoted. I don't think anyone would claim Gates should win prizes for minimal or beautiful code.

But he certainly did a lot of good programming.

In any hall of fame where we mention Linus, Guido and Bernstein we probably do need to mention Gates as well.
Based on $6 million remaining I'm guessing their burn rate is around half a million per month. I'd love to hear how that much money is being spent. Unless there are 30+ employees and significant advertising/infrastructure costs I can't imagine how to spend that much money responsibly in a really small company.
It is hard to imagine the serious, rational, objective argument that could exist for running BIND instead of djbdns, if those are your two choices. There are viable alternatives to qmail (Postfix and Exchange), but there aren't really viable alternatives for djbdns, and djbdns is less opinionated than qmail is.
Startups are not all Geek-driven
startups aren't just for geeks.
Don't know when or why America started to think that startup was synonymous with tech. Did anyone miss the dotcom era? Newsflash: the bubble burst.
Don't get me wrong - I love tech. I use tech - I rely on tech, but it's the idea that non-tech need not apply.
After all, many millions have been made on the Home Gym advertised by Chuck Norris. Tons of Romco choppers and cutters have created millionaires who have gone on to start up their own firms. So let's hear it for non tech nobodies who still provide lots 'o' fuel for the world economy.
Generaljohn