skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Hosted forum with SSO?
I've got a community site that I built in Rails, and there's a forum kind of tacked on. It's really crappy and I hate supporting it, but some of the users really like it. Plus, it's not really core to what we do.

I'd like to just sign up for some kind of hosted solution that I redirect/CNAME a subdomain to. The only sticking point is that I really want single-sign-on (SSO), so that my users don't have to register new accounts or anything. Preferrably, I would just construct a link that has their user id, username, and userpic URL all hashed together into some parameter that I append to a special link. Then, when they go to the forums from my site, they're logged in automatically.

(Note: tenderapp.com does this for a ticketing system, and I like it a lot)

Any YC companies that do this? Anything else people can recommend?
The pitfalls of changing sales compensation plans to manage a cash flow problem
Autocorrection: its by Susan Su and posted on Andrew Chen blog.
Maybe my $100k target was too low to illustrate my point. I have yet to see a valuable killer iPhone app that Apple didn't write. Mail, Maps, and Safari could each on their own convince me to buy an iPhone. Trism? Some Polaroid sim? These are useless entertainment. Where are the VisiCalc's of this space? Apps where people stare dumbfounded at the screen and want to trample their neighbors to spend $200 on software.

What really bothers me about the "gold rush" stories is that they just aren't big enough. Some kid makes a game that nets $250k - basically enough to hire a couple people to help you make your next game before you go out of business. And to top it off, these are only the cream of the crop - most iPhone devs never recoup their investments. We aren't seeing real value being created here, just a few people capturing the spare change of the masses.

The modern smart phone is as close as we've gotten to a flying car... lets see something awesome already. I grew up thinking that software developers were like astronauts, not crop dusters.
Yeah but it makes sense when you think about it.

If your friends are Harvard MBAs who have been working for ~30 years on Wall Street, they'll have a nice bit of cash set aside for funding
It doesn't really make sense to me to pay more than $50 a month for something like this. For under $120 you can get an AMD Athlon X2 5000+ (2.2 GHz dual core) and a solid matching motherboard on Newegg. Throw in some old hard drives RAIDed together (I personally had about 2 TB laying around that I RAID 1+0'd together) and you have a server that will fill all of your needs WAY into the future. Once your service starts catching on and you need better than 95% uptime, convert your residential cable Internet service (what, like $40/mo or so?) into a $100 (?) business line (better upload speed and reliability), and you are good to go.

With hardware and bandwidth being so cheap these days, why are we still so hung up on VPS solutions? Personally-hosted solutions are much more manageable and the costs are quite similar.
> Why should developers waste their time

No one should do anything they really don't want to do. That's not what I'm saying. (And more power to everyone developing for iPhone, whether successfully or not.)

What I'm saying is that in the long run, this is a temporary state of things, and I personally feel we are better to move beyond it sooner than later. Geo-social apps are a great example that will benefit from better cross-platform support. And doing it in-browser, or some other compatible way, encourages more innovation faster than having to develop for n different proprietary platforms.
I would argue the people that MLComp is trying to attract probably already know about common machine learning techniques. And if that is the case, they probably already know where to get good data (ie. Machine Learning Repository). I'm one of the machine learning researcher's you speak of, and I can tell you this is something I would not use--only because I apply the algorithms I create on problems that I'm interested in and can find data for. I don't ever think "gee, I've got this sweet algorithm, I wonder what it could be used for." Instead I think, "this algorithm does clustering really well, I bet it would work in this case". Then I go find that data. And data providers don't care what happens to their data--that's why they provide it.
I have no sympathy for such complaints, or even for expectations that Apple should support it on non-Apple hardware. I'm just saying that there is no reason for legitimate purchasers to lose any sleep about the morality of otherwise violating the EULA.
I knew an architect whose job was designing buildings that never got built.

He worked for a company that would buy residential land, he'd design a commercial building for that land, the company would take the plans to the local city council and get it rezoned, then the company would flip the newly rezoned land at a significant profit.

I liked him, but not his job or employer.
Not really. There is no standard client-server protocol; each server may use a different one.
enjoy it while it lasts?
I think you are simply biased against microsoft and pro apple. What Apple is doing, if they are intentionally not working on ATOM is essentially what Microsoft would be doing if it didn't allow its software to run on apple hardware.

Vendor lockin, whether intentional, or simply because the vendor doesn't care to make their products work with others, or whatever, doesn't change the vendor lockin.
It's kind of like dialysis, but for seawater. Sweet.
Risky Business and Five Areas to De-Risk
You realize that DFW was primarily a fiction writer, yes? Sure we all like A Supposedly Fun Thing I'd Never Do Again, but Infinite Jest was his Magnum Opus, and was fiction.
Can someone with more experience with these formats compare Avro to BERT/BERT-RPC? Is that an inappropriate comparison?
I'd agree that "length of manual" is a poor heuristic for complexity. Condor is super-customizable, and they document those options pretty extensively. To the direct point, they've even started highlighting the use of condor as "condor cron" in the Open Science Grid to run monitoring applications: http://vdt.cs.wisc.edu/releases/1.10.1/notes/Condor-Cron.htm...

Without that, I'd say it would be a slightly masochistic exercise to take a big system like condor and try to make it a cron replacement; while it clearly has that capability, if that's not one of its use cases, it's going to be a real bear to force it into that configuration. I've been a fringe user of condor before, and it can result in some unfriendly "rejected your job for unknown reasons" situations.
Not open source client, just UI. I won't let that near my PC any more than before.
I already do not want to work for the OP.
Can you break down how you spend the other 99% please? Into percentage brackets, please? Thank you so much, it would be very insightful.
If you build it, it will get used. The system was justified in the name of "terrorism", and is getting used for white collar crime.

I wouldn't want to bet against it being used for other things as well. Such as to give prominent, connected politicians inside information on their opponents' campaigns.
You can't take away jobs (in the big picture and long run).
Not getting Flash on your iPhone? Blame Apple, says Adobe error message.
Twitter probably won't be the first to 1B users, at 45M plus 1 new user/second currently that will probably be linkedin. Also, pumping huge amounts of cash into things that don't actually have the corresponding cash value is how bubbles form and burst. (reply to jfarmer above)

EDIT: whoever downvoted me shouldn't have. Regardless of your feelings about Twitter, my statement about economic bubbles is correct.
I made a site kind of like this... except for songs instead of stories:

http://singingmemories.com/

Hooked up seesmic so anyone could record themselves singing, since it's hard to learn songs just by reading them.

Hope you guys like it!
I should have been more clear. I was referring to the "waste of time" comment.
>Dozens of studies conclusively show it does not work in the long run absent focus on the composition of the calories. Even in clinical studies where they control everything the subjects eat it doesn't work.

If my Internet wasn't capped, I could easily list a dozen academic papers describing clinical studies where subjects lost considerable amounts of weight after being put on low calorie diets. In all of these studies, the addition of regular exercise had a measurable but small affect on weight loss.
Nice work updating that so fast.
A couple observations from my experience:

1) It's hard to find truly insightful designers who also have an entrepreneurial instinct. The most famous examples who do are legendary. (The Real Steve Jobs)

2) Hiring out for design work usually means superficial work like graphics, layout, etc. The reason to include a designer as a founder is to go deep on user experience and other psychology of the user, in a way that no one can or will do for hire.
Reference the character "Cameron" from Ferris Beuller's Day Off. I don't want to whine, or I'd chime in with my own experiences.
I'd guess they stayed away from experiments which end in bruising when successful.
Agreed. Nobody knows what is transmitted over the wire.
Both. Arrington gets a bad rap, but I think he's an all right guy with a good heart and the best intentions.
I wasn't aware that you could even take out the SIM without some serious physical hackery to get the case open.
Actually, no. Many languages implement == as a operation on the object itself, i.e. invokes a method named == on the object on the left side of the statement. If the things you are comparing are not the same class, then == is very much a directed relation. I agree that logically it might not be, but in many implementations, it actually is.
Laverna's Brute 1.0 Released
HelpSpots Website Evolution - anyone know of others like this?
Windows 7 USB installation
Perhaps you should have studied math instead? The education system in Rumania should have a longer experience teaching math.

(But then I only know the German way to teach math at university --- which is very formal, and prepares better for programming than most computer science courses I have heard of.)
...For very young people there are also two universes. Squatting over a tub of warm water is a much cheaper and healthier way to give birth than lying on your back in a harsh hospital room where the high priest will take the infant away from the mother to teach it alienation...

Arghhh. Having children is _not easy_. There's a reason we still say "Mom and baby are healthy and happy." For a long time we lost one or both pretty regularly. I don't agree with all aspects of western society, but clean hospitals and infant intensive care units are most of the reason infant mortality has dropped.
New Technet magazine: Gear up for Windows 7
How to Protect Yourself from Phishing Scams | TechJaws.com
I think you are certainly right that design is less of a success factor in the enterprise, though 37 Signal shows that a bit of design can get people excited about a fairly underfeatured (intentionally or not) product.

Yeah, that reminds of client who once told me "people want their beer with foam" as a metaphore: no matter where you go, people are still people, and they like to be pampered.
At least you do not have mandatory schooling in Denmark. In Germany the state does not force you to get an education --- it forces you to go to school.
Arrington seems dissapointed that he doesn't get to milk this for the next 3 months.
What's your point?

Without getting into the Latrodectus Mactans Productions quiz to prove our geek/hipster DFW cred: I just picked three writers of nonfiction with both very different prose styles and very different worldviews, and I don't think you'd disagree with my point.
I think the peculiar bit is that he is conscientiously avoiding fiction rather than the practical fact of the matter that this is not an uncommon phenomenon as you rightly point out.

Maybe it's something about the online medium which is conducive to people making categorical statements or maybe that's just Jason's personality, but still I do find it odd.

Although I do agree with you that we've spent way too much time talking about it at this point...
I understand buying your own machine, but you still need to co-locate. $40/mo cable internet connections aren't suitable for hosting are they? I server up port 80 and various other traffic from mine, but it's minuscule, and I think if you tried to do much of it, your ISP would shut you down.
1) It's true. I think a lot of that is training. Most design programs don't promote an entrepreneur track. There really is nothing like YC or even the constellation of tech bloggers who can share the path with young designers.

2) Exactly. It is like Steve Jobs quote "We don't have good language to talk about this kind of thing. In
most people's vocabularies, design means veneer. It's interior decorating.
It's the fabric of the curtains and the sofa. But to me, nothing could be
further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a
man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers
of the product or service. The iMac is not just the colour or translucence or
the shape of the shell. The essence of the iMac is to be the finest possible
consumer computer in which each element plays together."
Sphenopalatine Ganglioneuralgia
Few years back there was wiretapping of government officials in Greece. It turned out that was used wiretapping interface of the phone switch. Presumably illegally, nobody was caught.

As you wrote - you build it, it will get used.
I agree with you about the abrupt ending but I think it's because the article was adapted from an upcoming book ("The Greatest Trade Ever" by Gregory Zuckerman).

Weird editing, but maybe the purpose was to make it abrupt enough that people who want to go get the book to figure out what happens next.
Right. It's been around since 1955 (in spirit at least, in the form of Loglan) and the best anyone can muster is to converse "fairly well" in "real-time" but not in spoken conversation. In other words, it's a language no one can speak. Klingon speakers are even more fluent than Lojban speakers.

I'm not trying to say Lojban is stupid. It's not. It's cool. It fills an interesting niche in the language world. However, I'm not convinced it's speakable. Remember the quote by Kernighan: "Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it." I would argue that speaking a language is at least twice as hard as inventing it or writing it in a non-real-time fashion, so if you create the most complicated language you can still manage to write (however laboriously), you are by definition not smart enough to speak it. Lojban is that language.
Thank you! Yes, we did. The book is a PaperVision3D model and we do a little mesh animation to make the pages curl nicely.
You're a douche if you write an essay seriously advocating for raising children "outside the system" in a junkyard. That's all.
Good PR lesson: even if you're a fucked up company and someone calls you out on it, if you admit the problem and take proper steps quickly people will likely forgive you and perhaps even like you for it.
+1 for Schwa. If you're a food geek, it's heaven. Good luck getting a reservation though.
I actually really like the look of the site, the bookshelf works well imho. I can see where it might get unwieldy as the site expands, but as a main page I think it works really well. Of course this is just my personal opinion and I think the best way to validate what design works best would be to do some A\B Testing on the page.

I like the idea of having some books available for free though!

Nice work though the site looks really good and it's certainly the type of product I could see my self purchasing.
But society wasn't foisted on us without our consent.

I don't recall having any say in it. Where's the opt-out clause?

At one point it might have been America (if you were European). Supposedly, the colonists had a lot of trouble with their indentured servants going native, thus the early colonial emphasis on freedom and natural rights as a mitigating measure.

Later, it might have been the West.

But today? How do you opt out now? Where's the release valve?
Concern about getting a reservation has stopped me from going to a lot of places, but in reality all you do is call them up and ask them when the earliest you can get a reservation is, and they'll just tell you. It's usually nowhere near as bad as you think it will be.
Fuck Goldman and Wall Street!!!
Mechanized farming, medicine, hospitals, and everything else modern civilization affords most of us are the extreme change in our environment.
Why Start-Ups Survive
Funny URL! says "43" when it is "4.3"!
Imagination, process failures doom software projects
I want you to know, you've just ensured that I spend way more money on food in the next year than I otherwise would have. Even lowly Naperville has a great deal of good looking places listed on that forum.
There are lots and lots of little things different between every generation of Intel chips, many (most) of which aren't exposed directly in the ISA.
I think the easiest way to sum up Lojban is this (my understanding based solely on reading ABOUT Lojban, I don't know a single Lojban word... aside from Lojban):

Anything that can be said in any language can be said in Lojban. Anything that can be left unsaid in any language can be left unsaid in Lojban.

Thus while it is not possible to use the verb "to be" in English without expressing a tense, it is in some languages, therefore it is in Lojban. Presumably it is also possible to specifiy a tense when saying "to be" in Lojban. It can be done in English, therefore it can be done in Lojban.
I am not sure where I read this, but AFAIR it's from "The practice of programming" from Pike and Kernighan (1). The suggestion circumventing this was to not use a space before the assignment, i.e.:

"a= b;" instead of "a = b;"

I have been doing this constantly in all C-style languages and derivatives and never had any problems using this. This is probably less invasive that your initial suggestion and preserves readability/the usual style.

[1]: To anybody who knows this, too: I am really, really, really unsure where I read that and it's been about 15 long years since I have been doing it, so any correction is much appreciated.
Logo Design Budgets – Freelance Designer or Client to Decide?
It's true, the frame makes all the difference. It's a book in the sense that it's a bound text, but not in the sense that I was using the word. Having adjusted the definition, the criticisms pretty much evaporate. Maybe I'll do penance by posting such a review.
I have never --- not once --- had a bad meal at a GnR.
cx01 has already pointed the problems in your arguments. unfortunately i understand quorum protocols (they are so simple!) and you are dead wrong. because of hinted handoffs, lack of central commit log and lack of resync barrier - transient failures will lead to stale reads being returned to clients.

i understand you are one of the core committers for Cassandra. It speaks much for the design when a person so familiar with the code base cannot speak accurately of it (what to talk of all those open source freeloaders!).

i would be wary of marketing a commercial service based on such consistency protocols.
My mom was also a homemaker while my brother and I were kids. And being a homemaker it is definitely not a free ride. Neither is it an occupation which you can do half-heartedly.

And I'm not arguing with you, by the way. There was just something about the article's tone that ticked me off :)
Instead, prepare an email template that asks the applicant to write a few paragraphs on a few topics

I've routinely filtered this sort of thing out as arrogance on the part of the employer and a waste of my time.

To whit, the respect in the hiring process must always be a two-way street. If you want me to engage my brain and write something customized to your posting, say so up front.

I'll gladly write a few sentences, but requiring a few paragraphs filters out candidates who don't want their time wasted. These are very likely the very ones you'd want in a startup.
"I don’t think queueing something as time-sensitive as interactive HTTP requests is a good idea."

Queuing will happen somewhere in your architecture regardless. If I understand github's setup properly, it'll be in the operating system's accept queue for each backend. We know from queue theory that a queue per worker is inferior to a single queue for all workers.
Chains of meaning in the STEPS system
I have been a member of both organizations for about 10 years now. I like ACM's magazines but IEEE's local chapter activities. So, it may depend on why you are joining.
Last time I went to Schwa (over a year and a half ago) the wait was over 2 months.

It did help build the anticipation though!
If dolphins have that much personality there's not much guarantee any two dolphins would act the same way in the same scenario.

Additionally, given that dolphins can apparently teach each other behaviors the entire batch of dolphins they've got in their research tank is contaminated by the first dolphin.

Designing experiments to determine if your test subjects are smart enough to mess with you is hard and it's harder if they all live together and gossip between sessions.
I just use a Google Docs spreadsheet file to record when I arrive, when I leave, and when I go to lunch. (I have another pair of columns I can use for extended breaks, but I rarely use them and usually leave those columns hidden.)
Because if they don't make money they will go away.
I think this just proves it's hard to stereotype or generalize anybody - even the creative ones.
I cycle to and from work, in London, 14 miles a day round trip. If it's driving rain I take the train.

Keeps me fit, costs me nothing and I get to the office feeling great. It's quicker than any other mode of transport save for maybe a motorbike. Almost carbon neutral, other than the production cost for the bike I suppose.
The good news (I guess) is that evil keeps on coming back. As Frind pointed out in his comment on the earlier stories, this has been going on for years, and Zynga are just one of the more recent more obvious purveyors of this brand of nastiness. For every one that gets called out, there will be ten more "entrepreneurs" that read the article and think, "Hey, that's a great idea!"

Unfortunately, sometimes companies get away with doing this (or some other equally nasty tactics) in the early days, and then convert to more legitimate models once they've got some cash in the bank, but before it really has a chance to bite them.
That's actually not true. Better doctor hygiene practices is most of the reason infant mortality has dropped.
It's not "working for the man" in the way it's usually meant. (In particular "man" means something different in that context!)
FireQuery - Firebug enhancements for jQuery
Can these guys actually make real money without these scams? I've not played their games, so this is an honest question.
How long does Google expect us all to keep working with them to turn Wave into what it is some day supposed to become? They've already burned through a ton of hype. Now this:

> Please keep in mind that things are early, and there will still be many changes, so your feedback is important.

That's a lot to ask of people after a hugely hyped launch. I'm starting to feel like Google will still be asking me to try out buggy previews/betas of Wave 3 years from now. I can already sense that even many in the HN crowd have stopped caring.

"Release early, release often" works for startups, but it doesn't work well for big companies who are in the spotlight. Wave is incredibly ambitious and a monumental effort. With all of these early launches, I don't think users will stick with it long enough to get it past the beta stage.