skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I can vouch for ledger. There is a learning curve, but it works great. Hledger is another implementation in Haskell. I went with ledger, and I'm not looking back.

I'm so sick of Intuit, and I got burned badly when I bought into their 3-year obsolescence cycle. In case you're considering Quicken or Quickbooks, DO NOT BUY IN. They have designed multiple kill-switches into their software to disable key features after a time delay. Specifically, you will not be able to download transactions, import them from a file, or export them - after 3 years.

I got ledger, and within a day I had written the code to grab my transactions and import them. It's a little strange, but it won't ever become obsolete due to the capricious and profiteering whims of some company.

Ledger is great. It's for hackers.
The blog (http://blog.plurchase.com/) contains a few frequently asked questions about tech, etc

The tech is probably harder than it looks on the surface.
>light-years to go before it's a viable platform
>for anything involving animation and graphics

once all browsers support the canvas element (as does firefox3) its just a matter of time until some standard 2D animation libraries popup that will enable game development.

flash is ecmascript + proprietary set of libraries and a great IDE. but javascript has the advantage of coming out-of-the-box with the browser.

(and in the distant future there is Canvas 3D, which really is opengl exposed to JS :) https://wiki.mozilla.org/Canvas:3D )
It needs to be prepared in a fed licensed kitchen. Luckily, there are co-ops and rental places all over.
Here is a list: http://www.commercialkitchenforrent.com/
Why won't shared providers like it?
"Wishlist for the World" ?
Courier New seemed to me to be significantly thinner than Helvetica Neue.
To make a general purpose site builder for estate agents, florists, lawyers etc.. is not that difficult. To make a general purpose web application builder is a hard problem.

You need to abstract 'a general business' and subclass as you drill down to the various business classes.

For example they would all include perhaps an 'accounts' section, but you wouldn't like to have an invoice from the funeral parlour stating:

1 ProductID one body Price $xxxx.xx

or even a shopping cart for this matter! :)

Even at the template level - and I am sure PG did not have that in mind when he wrote of his idea - this has not been very successful, although PG did quite well with it, at the time :)
Singularity University releases two lecture videos
How do you envision that scaling for say an factor of five increased load?
A lot of Nobel Peace prizes have been awarded for ideas more than results, so it is not unprecedented.
Here is the issue. The US government has tremendous power over world affairs. Norwegian politicians don't typically have much of a say in the decisions of the US government. But the Nobel Peace Prize is a way for them to have some influence, so they use it for this purpose.
link to the quote?

I am sure a Hong Kong style autonomy would benefit them but is hard to see the Communist party handing out semi-democracy like candy to whoever asks.
Yes, because nothing says "I expect results from you" like getting the most prestigous awards in the world for doing absolutely nothing.

"Please, Please stop adoring me. I can not take the pressure of your constant unconditional praise"
Modern Science and Bad Publicity (2007)
A rewrite of Playdar (C++) in Erlang - a work in progress
I was reading blog feeds and I thought I had come across a joke.
Same as anything else -- you start by adding a few more front-end servers (or VMs), or scaling up the ones you have just a bit more. You don't have to do nearly as much work, and not nearly as soon.

If load levels continue to grow, leverage ehcache to handle caching directly in the VM (if you're not already), begin splitting responsibilities across different service implementations, etc.
I just tried it on my wimpy celeron laptop running Ubuntu. The desktop client maxes out my CPU and drops frames, while Hulu shows run smoothly in firefox (with some cycles to spare).

So, for me anyway, it's actually worse than normal Hulu.
Working on a mobile device and mobile wireless network... http://s3.amazonaws.com/data.tumblr.com/tumblr_kqtqypaxuy1qz...

http://avecora.com
The end of the long tail is by definition not the "typical out-of-print book" that Brin was talking about.
Given that I know almost nothing about fonts and didn't miss a question in the first 5 levels, I think it's far too easy.
Ask HN: We've launched and I've got $5-10k for marketing, advice?
We launched a start up which we've bootstrapped so far. I'm willing to fork out $5-10k for some sort of marketing/pr etc. The site is PubliciTweet (reviewed here before) and we're targeting anyone who could benefit by running marketing campaigns on Twitter.

Would love to hear ideas, referals and what has/hasn't worked for you guys. Actual #s are always welcome.

We've considered AdWords, ads in Twitter clients, etc. but haven't pulled the trigger just yet.

Site is at http://publicitweet.com
is it as cool as every one say it is?
Clickable link for the lazy :)
http://publicitweet.com
Hmm...do Tumblr, and now Posterous, qualify as niche site builders? or maybe Shopify?

From all such site builder examples out there, the more successful ones seem to nail down the underlying problem first (publishing, e-commerce, etc), and then enhance it with customization - not the other way around.
Why Startups Shouldn’t Have To Pay To Pitch Angel Investors
I'm sorry, can anyone explain why we are downvoting these invites for invites?
no. every prior US president has also worked on nuclear disarmament. Probably every Russian president as well.

Only one Nobel winner ever achieved disarmament ... and I don't think he should have gotten the award.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F_W_de_Klerk
I think you should make plurchase completely public, so that I can see everyone (and they can see me). That way, I don't have to invite my friends to shop + I can spy on other people (making it fun even when none of my friends are online).
Ask HN: simple computer for less-tech-savvy elders
What would it look like?

Longer version: If you've helped your parents or grandparents set up a computer...

1) What have you found they need help with most (e.g. setting up wifi, dealing with malware, installing SW, generally understanding UIs)?

2) What apps or features do they use or would like to use most (e.g. photo sharing, video chat, email, news, web browsing, prescription reminders, personal finance SW)?

3) What form factor do you think they'd find most convenient (e.g. desktop, laptop, phone, photo frame, set-top box+TV)? Any other opinions on the HW?
Credit card + 19.95 monthly billing is about as safe as it gets for getting paid on the internet.
Does Microsoft need saving? I don't think they are going to announce bankruptcy any time soon.
A client once said his 8 year old nephew could put together a site using only Microsoft Word and Paint for 500 Microsoft Points and a copy of Halo:ODST.
I disappointed to see that the Linux version requires Flash. The Flash plugin performance are terrible on Linux. Hulu should do better than wrapping Flash to a exec. The VLC codebase is good to start with.
> javascript has the advantage of coming out-of-the-box with the browser

Well sure, but you get a different js with every browser, and always will!
> Most teams trying to implementation a Ruby compiler simply look at the CRuby source code, but this isn’t an option for Microsoft. CRuby is licensed under the GPL, which Microsoft is afraid of for numerous legal reasons. This means they have to reverse engineer it, a daunting feat.

Interesting. If the reference implementation of a spec is GPL licensed, can the spec reasonably be called open? (I'm not claiming that the Ruby spec is open.)
I don't understand why people insist on architectures where otherwise-independent processes share a single socket.

You're already running a reverse proxy in front of them! There's no reason each Unicorn couldn't be listening on a different port. Does that third layer of local load-balancing between the HTTP proxy and the event-driven app server actually get you anything?
I think your ideal tagline describes what you're doing and has a call to action.

Look at posterous -- currently "the dead simple place to post everything. just email us." Pretty wordy, there's really not much else to say about it. But it calls you to action.

Maybe you're "Share anything with your friends and save". Depends on where you want to take it.
I figure right between '16' and '32' bit ?

Neat! I hacked about a bit on a sperry-univac 1100 series mainframe, similar sentiment, only twice as wide.
That sounds about right. I seem to recall that it was for aerospace too. Maybe NASA? Something about zero defect software. I cannot for the life of me find the article right now though. I also vaguely remember that it was a HN submission too.
I just go to the library.

(Interlibrary Loan is awesome.)
Moon crash: Public yawns, scientists celebrate
Adobe brings Photoshop.com to the iPhone
[video] Aaron Patzer of Mint.com on how to build a company
I was being coy.

It's a good thing that GTK is a semi-independent project -- as obnoxious as the Gnome maintainers are, the Gimp asshats would have strangled it with their usual besieged malcompetence.
If you haven't, read up on Lean Startup/Eric Reis(http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/) and also Sean Ellis(http://startup-marketing.com/).

I particularly like the free survey tool provided by Sean Ellis at http://survey.io. Basically it gives you an idea whether you have a service that you can charge for.

Bottomline:
(1) don't assume your product will sell(be open to changing almost every aspect of it)
(2) test, modify, test more whether your product can sell
(3) don't scale marketing until you know from a smaller data sample that there is demand for your product. Simply put, don't scale till for every dollar of marketing spend, you can make more than a dollar. Ignoring that last piece will lead you to having no money in the bank in little time(cough last bubble).
Me and a friend are starting a healthy-eating salad bar, the first in the city. It's very different from programming, which is what excited me the most about the project.
How did you make it from 3.1 to 95, or 98 to XP?
I was actually quite keen on Windows 7 until a critical update a couple of weeks back totally borked my system. I tried every recovery and rollback tool I could find without success. Rather than reinstall W7 again I figured I'd try Ubuntu (for about the 4th or 5th time) and I'm very pleased that I did. Last night I upgraded to the Karmic beta and everything - hardware and software - is smooth as silk. I've kept Windows XP on a VirtualBox drive for the odd time I need to use Office or Adobe products, but I can't see myself going back to Windows Anything as my primary OS. They almost had me.
Critical Django security updates released (0day, exploit in the wild)
Critical security updates to Django 1.0, 1.1
Replacing N ports with one simplifies configuration.

I never understood the complex HAProxy in front of Apache in front of Nginx in front of Mongrel type setups that seem to be popular in the Rails world. Why not just use Unicorn? What value is GitHub getting from having Nginx in front?
That's funny, I was just reading this from a Google search ~1 hour ago. HN is starting to read my mind!
Paypal Freezes Much Needed Funds For Charity/Emergency Work
Oh crap, the vids require Silverlight.
How about a few of these? http://textbookrevolution.org/index.php?title=Special:Ask...

I want to buy a dx too, but like this fellow I'm worried it can't display all the free textbooks out there.
Wufoo Launches Integrated Payments Feature For Online Form Builder
Someone will discover a successful advertising strategy for the tech industry...
Unicorn is not for slow clients or static assets. That's what nginx is for. See http://unicorn.bogomips.org/PHILOSOPHY.html for info on Unicorn and slow clients.

nginx also has features like ESI, serving from memcached, and rate limiting which Unicorn does not (and doesn't need).
Just a good example of how hard it is to tell what things are like based on remains rather than actually being there.
You still have the problem of having your package's dependencies be broken/mutilated/ancient -- the only solid way to get around it is to statically link with your own unfucked builds, but that isn't always possible.
We plan on supporting both public & private. Mostly just UI work to add the public functionality. One idea: when in a public shopping group/room, we'd replace the little preview boxes with a stream of just-product-pages as people visit them.
If each Unicorn worker listened on a different port, we'd have to use one of nginx's load balancing strategies (unless I'm misreading your comment).

We have not had success with them in the past which is why we employed HAProxy with mongrel.
Ephemerisle: Floating innovative ideas in a sea of creativity
I honestly don't get why this is so heavily down voted.

Because it's a lie? "Piracy" isn't theft. Abortion isn't murder. You can argue that they're wrong, but this kind of misrepresentation is the lowest possible way of discusion. In fact it's an admission that people doesn't look at copyright infringement as wrong, so it must be tagged with a stronger word.

This debate is not going away, because that's the politics of our time. So please, at least let's keep it a little more intelligent than that.
Plurchase uses a neat idea to act as a proxy for shopping sites. They don't seem to be storing passwords before sending them off to the actual sites (which is good). I hope it takes off. Good luck!
I think this argument is disingenuous. We as consumers do not have any "right" to copyrighted content. If you can't watch a movie because of some distribution problem, so what? It's their loss because they've alienated a purchaser, but it still doesn't mean you are entitled to it.

I am very against DRM on content I have purchased, and I've admittedly "sampled" music that I may or may not have purchased later. But I've never violated digital rights because I felt like I had some sort of privilege to do so. I would love to see an overhaul of the industry, but until we do, we can play by their rules, or at least be genuine about it when we don’t.
I've followed a bit of Eric Reis' stuff and had been adhering to it already :). Will check out Sean Ellis. Thanks.
Not a web app nor a desktop product, but back office b2b ecommerce application. And yes, it is written in Lisp.
You don't understand Fitt's Law.

The edges of the screen are infinitely big targets in one dimension, and the corners in both dimensions -- you can't overshoot them, unlike local context menus.
Are they pushing this patch out? The article gives the impression that XP/Vista users would have to patch manually, which isn't going to happen.
Project Mercury Alpha 6: Scalable Drupal on EC2 with Solr Search
This is a re-post of Jasons email in its entirety, I assume it is with permission, it certainly is an interesting read.

He's literally going to take the fight to funds that charge for presentations.
Domain-Specific Languages: An Annotated Bibliography
I believe you're thinking of Kalman Filters. They're commonly used in sensor fusion and noise reduction, anyhow.
These stories make me cringe. The security of SSL is as good as the verification practices of the laziest CA. We need fewer of them, not more, and any CA that can give certificates away for free is guaranteed to have atrocious practices.

It appears that this company authenticates you by verifying that you can receive email at the domain that you want the certificate for. In addition to completely defeating the purpose of SSL by sending secrets in the clear over SMTP, ability to receive email at a certain address is no proof of ownership of that domain. Unfortunately, though, StartCom didn't invent this stupidity. I already discovered a few months ago that I can get Thawte to issue me an SSL certificate for hushmail.com.
I'm not too sure of the technology that goes on behind your proxy but I just had an issue connecting to the server from behind my corporate firewall. Is this something you guys plan on tackling?

I think a lot of people shop online at work and many of those are behind firewalls. A quick online search threw numbers at me like 50% and scaling upwards to like 75% as you get into the "facebook generation."

Btw, great product. I also love how when I tried to test if it was a browser issue and loaded up IE that it notified me that my browser was "too old."
Can you drop me an email?
Twitter is Playing Favourites with New API Methods
Disclosure: I know these guys and I know they were really trying to help. There were people dying everyday and rescue funds were needed badly in the wake of the calamity. All monies were to be turned over to the Philippine Red Cross and they even had an endorsement from them.
I cut that cover off the magazine at the time and have it in a box somewhere.
dude, this debate is not "going away" because it's grey.

abortion at 8 months 29 days is undoubtedly murder. abortion at 8 months 28 days is undoubtedly murder. Now work backwards, when is it no longer murder?
Seconding South Park (between Brannan and Bryant and 2nd and 3rd). It rocks.
I don't know why it wouldn't work behind a firewall though -- everything goes through port 80. I use it behind a firewall too. Maybe your corporate firewall does more than just firewall packets, does it block sites with questionable content as well?
github killer?
You can support 10,000 requests/second hitting a servlet engine, with dynamic templates, and backend DB calls, on one quad core box? I'd like to give you a job.

Maybe I've been working with heavyweight frameworks too long, but that seems an order of magnitude off at least. Any stats on Servlet JVMs that can do 10k requests/second on a single quad core?
I did this recently. What i did was just get them a macbook pro 15 inches (easier to see the larger screen). Increase the default font sizes until they are comfortable. Setup USB based speakers into a hub and plug as much as you can into that one hub so there is only ONE cable connection other than power that they need to remember to connect the laptop once it is on the desk. I then labeled that end with one of those small labeling machines so they don't get confused. Using a weirdly colored usb cable also helps, so you can say did you plug in the RED one over the phone?

Wireless setup as easy as it is on the mac was done by me to make sure they are secure. Make sure to configure the guest account if you get the more expensive airport router extreme, this way they can allow anyone to surf without having to open up the entire network.

They were setup on a gmail account that tied into the standard apple Mail software via IMAP so that they can check their mail from anywhere.

Their small digital camera was setup to import into Iphoto and they seemed to really like that. I removed any icons from the desktop and dock that they did not use. So basically they have finder, safari, mail, iphoto, ical, itunes, and chat.

I advised them not to use personal finance software on this thing due to their lack of experience with it. They prefer paper statements and going into the bank. Some of the spam emails look so authentic that they might get confused and make a mistake if I tried to have them start using online banking.

I also installed logmein software (they have a free version) that allows you to show them remotely how to do certain things and they seem to appreciate that quite a bit.

Backups are done via superduper, I am still considering an online backup service for them but have not gotten around to that just yet.

Games to occupy the grandchildren were also added so they can enjoy that with the kids. Adding a remote wireless apple keyboard is probably going to be a good idea since the kids tend to bang on things they should not.

Importing their music into Itunes also made them happy.

Behind the scenes with their permission you can also probably setup an automated rsync or rsnapshot to a remote server.
As someone who is forced to do LabView programming to set up experiments in a class, I disagree. LabView is the most unproductive way to code ever. Doing an `if(x<y)` takes like 100 clicks. The reason LabView is acceptable is that it has a lot of libraries for interfacing with hardware, and libraries for displaying measurements (but if I right click on an array view then "copy data" it copies the number as an image (!) instead of the underlying array, WTF?).
Probably. Maybe just me though? Anyone else?

I mean plurchase loads, just unable to connect to the server. So the tools worked but the social networking did not.
None of my Linux boxes can do full-screen HD Hulu without blockiness and jerky video. This includes all major video cards (very recent ATI 4850 and nVidia 9xxx, as well as older Intel onboard, ATI 3200 onboard), and both 32 and 64 bit builds of Flash. I'll give the desktop player a try, but I'm not holding out hope of being able to use it for actual big screen viewing. I sometimes watch shows in a window while working, and that works fine on all of my Linux boxes. But full screen remains useless.
Looking at this setup, I agree that the server costs are high for the amount of traffic they have. That being said, I don't believe your proposal is a fair comparison.

Of course, using Java on bare metal is going to have more performance/$ than ruby on Xen. That's not the point. The point is to use tools that maximize human capital at the expense of server costs.

I don't know what you mean by reducing moving parts. The only parts involved in handling the requests for this setup are Nginx and HAProxy. All the other technology parts (Tokyo Cabinet, memcached, Sphinx) are used to scale the database, something your stack still has to achieve.

The tradeoffs between using bare metal vs virtualization and using Rails vs Java are well known at this point. Recommending a NASCAR driver to use a Formula 1 car isn't helpful advice.
Linked Data: Interpretants and Interpretation
"CRuby is licensed under the GPL"

Somebody didn't do their fact checking! From the Ruby Source (http://svn.ruby-lang.org/cgi-bin/viewvc.cgi/trunk/COPYING?re...):

Ruby is copyrighted free software by Yukihiro Matsumoto <matz@netlab.jp>.
You can redistribute it and/or modify it under either the terms of the GPL
version 2 (see the file GPL), or the conditions below

...where it then goes on to describe the conditions commonly referred to as the "Ruby License" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_License), which is half-way between a MIT/BSD style and something with explicit copyleft.

Probably the reason Microsoft didn't go directly to the MRI implementation has more to do with them wanting it to run on the CLR.
If you want something a lot more lightweight and written in emacs-lisp I made this:

http://justinsboringpage.blogspot.com/2009/08/simple-budget-...
Where were all you people in this thread the other day when I seemed to be the only one who understood the other side of this debate?!? :-P

I'm also very curious about the 16 workers per box model. Frankly, that github would ditch haproxy in favor of a pre-fork Ruby web server is shocking.

I'm just glad we have CherryPy in the Python world.
On XP, through Windows Update. On Vista, automatically the first time you visit a StartCom-signed site.
Blog posts are not Advertisements (usually)
I've never had anything published through the Prags; I was talking about the bigger company you mentioned.

I get the impression that their current marketing strategy is to send Tim to conferences to talk about how great Twitter is. I'm not sure how that helps books on other subjects. Certainly it hasn't helped mine.
Hilarious: Which is easier to understand: Google Wave or the US Tax Code?
Vote now! Google Wave or Osmotic Pressure? Google Wave or Sarah Palin? Google Wave or Women?

Oh, and turn up your audio.
YAHOO.namespace in YUI does the same thing, except that it creates everything under the YAHOO namespace.