skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's one of the better articles that Tim has put out as of late.

I still don't get the angst against Apple and their approach though. If you don't care for it, don't use it - what's the big deal?

Apple has went out of its way to complete a infrastructure and effectively trained it's customers to make purchases in small amounts. From music and etc content, to anything in the App store. That's their ecosystem.

In what other market can you go inside and and just start putting products on their shelf and that be ok? I mean, I'd _love_ to walk into Wal-Mart and put a whole stock of pull-my-finger novelty gifts in aisle 9.

Sarcasm aside, I can't see how developers can bitch about an ecosystem that they're wanting to exploit. Otherwise they'd be building little j2me applications for the RAZR, or apart of the Blackberry ecosystem, or... .

But every other day there's someone new on a blog griping about something they well and truly signed up for. Android is about to be out en mass with the upcoming phones, Blackberry already has a mass of phones.

Teach those users to make purchases in an ecosystem that isn't going to be easy to do so and then leverage it. But to soapbox against Apple just doesn't make sense to me.
Still, an interesting article nonetheless.
I think the implication may be swaying over into the box store segment. Meaning, while they may not be battling other online entities, they are doing a lot of pushing against the online presence of several box retailers.
I would remove Facebook from that sentence, not Amazon.

Amazon, Apple, and Google are three heavyweights with a slightly different focus and strengths, but who find themselves competing more and more often for a sort of internet consumer dominance.

They compete at several platforms:
1. The storefront (iTunes and Amazon, Google's in there as search and recommendations).
2. The datacenter / cloud (AWS, MobileMe, Docs / Gmail / more to come from Google)
3. Mobile devices (iPhone + iPod, Android, Kindle)

There are other companies competing in each of these areas of course, but these three companies really excel at taking over markets (very smart people running them) and it's going to be interesting to see them going head to head as they reach into each others core markets.

Plus I think they'll destroy most other competitors in each of these areas as they battle it out.
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Pure Player, Digital Newspapers , Press relations, press releases national, international, newspapers, radios, TV, News Online.
It seems a little unreasonable to enter into a discussion if you're not open to changing your opinions based on what other people say. It's your prerogative, of course, but why bother discussing these things if your opinions are so fixed?
That's not a catch 22, it's just a problem.
Robby on Rails : Sending email: Controllers versus Models
Ask YC: What software is a must have for startups or small businesses? 
I'm a journalist researching an article that will review the best software applications for start ups and small businesses. Which reasonably priced software applications do you think should be included and why?
Unfortunately, last night I completely failed to remember that Rackspace and EC2 are direct competitors in this space so what was intended to be a simple data-point may be construed as more than that - my apologies.

What I intended to say was "you can make Cassandra work on EC2." However, if the I/O throughput of EC2 is a fraction that of some other provider, you'll need more machines in EC2 to achieve the same throughput.

My personal site is hosted on the Rackspace Cloud and I've been very pleased with it, but my workload is different so I can't give a comparison.

I also know that we've benefited directly from jbellis' support on IRC and the mailing list, so this should be considered an endorsement of Cassandra, if anything.
I think I am wrong. I now think top's 'SHR' isn't the "total amount of virtual memory shared", it's "amount of RES which is shared". (Hmm...but my test could be conflating "RES" memory with "allocated" VM (memory which is backed by something, be it swap or RAM).

So you can indeed substract SHR from RES to get a feel for per-proc RES.

(But that 'feel' doesn't tell you how many procs that SHR is shared with, and worse, which ones. If firefox fork()d then all it firefox-specific code pages would contribute to SHR, but you'd really want to account for them in the "firefox application").

(I'd also definitely expect chunks of libc and gtk libs to not be resident, primarily because they're code pages containing only code paths not yet chased on this box. And only one app has used those pages, do you really want to call that 'shared'?)
Recently I had to study skip lists. After years of thinking black-red trees were the way to go it was a very refreshing experience to write an implementation of skip lists. In general most code implementing randomized data structures like bloom filters, skip lists, hash tables, tend to impress me a lot.

Another impressive stuff are IMHO genetic programming, neural networks and language interpreters. Every programmer should play with this stuff.
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Including talks by Drew and Alexis, among other innovative entrepreneurs.
When I'm extremely cautious I'll do something like this first:

find . -name ".bak" -exec echo rm -fv {} \;

That will print out the commands it would* do. If I like what I see, I simply run the command again without the "echo".
We're using both. Existing MySQL back-ends are still there, but for new development that can leverage a distributed key-value store we're using Cassandra.
Voted up in hope that someone can adequately explain that piece of code frighteningly close to line-noise.
I stopped taking this post seriously after I read this:

> Further east we hit ideographics. The concept of a "letter" has just flew out of the occidental window. Not only that but the text is laid out top to bottom.

Chinese and Japanese are both read from left to right (although in the past characters were written top to bottom and right to left). The only language that I know of that is presently laid out from top to bottom is Mongolian. I'll be damned if I ever need to write software for people in Mongolia.
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Google Applications - Free

The suite of applications that google provides for small businesses such as GMail, Analytics, Adwords, Calendar, Document Processing, etc are a must have. I use GMail to manage my small business' email and love it.
Pardon me while I practice the "code" tag to avoid my posts getting botched:

<code>
find . -name "*.bak" -exec echo rm -fv {} \;
</code>

Thank you <b>very</b> much.
Oh I give up.
Boilerplate is an implicit abstraction: recognisable generality, but lacking a coded mechanism.

These could always be manually transformed to fit standard abstractions, such as functions or classes. But Lisp's macro facility instead allows them to be captured more 'directly'.

Now, whether fewer standardised abstractions is better/worse than more various tailored abstractions, is a deeper question . . .
While Horde is an open-source email reader, it's not in the same league as gmail. Not even close.
He makes a bad analogy because 1) you never needed Microsoft's permission to develop a Windows app and 2) developers on Windows (very nearly) had the "write once, run anywhere" promise that Java still hasn't lived up to taken for granted. Plus there were very low barriers to entry for developers in the Windows world; anyone could knock something up in VB or Access and nearly anyone else could get it to work on their Windows PC with minimal effort. Try doing that on the 50 (100?) Linux distros out there...
>>What would our software need to do to operate in, say, Europe? Well, apart from selecting a subset of the myriad of languages (France alone has 30+ )...

Who said that you need to support every language in a region to have your software operate there? If someone living in France speaks an obscure dialect then its a pretty safe bet they ALSO speak French. And if they only speak a single obscure language they probably aren't going to be your customer anyway.

If you hit the top 15-20 most used languages in the world then you'll be fine.

Just use unicode.
You can charge for GPLed software, the only thing wrong with this one is the restriction of use. People (even highly talented and educated ones) just don't get the GPL...

By the way, it's a beautiful theme, and a good price. I am sure they would lift the use restriction (and possibly increase the price)
Mastering the Art of Application Development
I could never ever get the same kind of use out of facebook or something like that that I get out of this particular forum, so as far as I'm concerned they're here to stay.

The group-enemy problem is a serious one though, and one that every forum has to contend with sooner or later.

There is an interesting article on K5 on that subject:

http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2009/3/12/33338/3000

I don't agree with all of the conclusions but it is one of the better stabs at defining the problem.
I remember a lesson I learned the hard way once. I'd put it something like, "Occasionally someone will get power over you or your organization that you didn't mean for them to have. Trying to make decisions as if they didn't have that power - just because you didn't mean for them to have it - will result in pain for you."

Perhaps that could be said more elegantly, but it's oh-so-painfully true. Sometimes someone low in the org chart without a fancy title comes into a lot of respect, or becomes the face of the company, or becomes good friends with a supplier or major client. Like it or not, that makes it time to reward, promote, and retain them, even if they "shouldn't" have that power. Best case scenario you can be enlightened about it and try to bring out the best in them. This, this entry right here - this is the worst case scenario in action.
If you want paragraphs put in two consecutive newlines.
While there have been mega-floods in prehistory, there's a very strange tendency to try to pin particular events for the genesis (so to speak) of flood mythology, especially when cultures all over the world have flood myths.

Somehow it's inconceivable that ancient people could experience normal disastrous flooding, with inundation as far as the eye can see, and then imagine what it would be like if a flood engulfed everything, even trees and hills, and remained for a long time.
So 2006.

Nothing new after: http://weblog.jamisbuck.org/2006/10/18/skinny-controller-fat...
I love this book. I bring it with me everywhere. Still it lacks a few things, for instance the compression algorithms are not cover well enough, and IMHO not including skip lists is a too big mistake as most of the times skip lists are as good as balanced trees but with a smaller memory footprint and simpler implementations.

Also bloom filters are not covered. There are too little real world hints. For instance things like collisions resolutions algorithms in the real world (with real CPUs): is chaining better than double hashing? And so forth.
Of the 5 themes he shows, only the 'windows XP' styled one even looks remotely 'ok'. The rest make AWT-era java look pretty - Swing isn't perfect (certainly on the 'feel' portion of L&F), but it's a huge improvement over AWT.

Still, Swing does prove a point, you CAN make an ugly UI more bearable by using themes alone, it doesn't make it an example of a beautiful UI, but it makes it bearable.
Perhaps they shouldn't, but those lists shouldn't be immediately visible from their profile. I don't think anyone wants to have "Giant Douchebags" listed on their lists page.
"I also agree with this tweet from Dustin Curtis: ”I have never heard an entrepreneur say ‘I wish I had launched my product later.’”"

I am sure Cuil would disagree with this, however their problem was more mass marketing too early and having too big of an audience for their effectively Alpha release.
The Forer effect doesn't necessarily require that everyone feels that a specific characterization applies to them: only that the person being characterized feels that that specific characterization applies to him. This is an important difference, because it allows astrologers, illusionists and their ilk to use all kinds of the usual psychological insights to determine broadly into which category someone falls, before coming up with a characterization that will necessarily be recognizable to someone in that category.

Anyone can put me in the INTJ, ENTP or the two intermediate categories. That's already 4 out of 16. Now collect some characteristics from those 4 and mingle: voila, you have produced something I will consider recognizable. In this way, everyone is as good a psychologist as Jung.
As far as readability goes, this might have as well been written in machine language.
Thanks, that's a good link.
Interesting article, but seems to really over-simplify things. There are many reasons to diversify your product portfolio. I agree that most of them don't apply to an early start-up, but the fact that it takes a quasi-infinite amount of time to perfect even just one product should not be a reason to ignore all other products.

Diversification can become a valid strategy for companies once they reach a certain size.
There is a very simple solution to getting your stuff to run on many linux distros without too much trouble: static linking.

You'll still need to support 32 and 64 bits so it isn't completely painless but it's a lot better than trying to cope with all the flavours.
That won't work. The rate at which different foods spoil after they're opened varies dramatically. Foods with a lot of salt in them, for example, stay good for a long time, while my carrot juice spoils within days of opening it. Not to mention, until you break the seal, what are those bacteria using for food?

I just write the date on things with a sharpie when I open them. A technological solution here seems to me to be more likely to complicate than simplify.
What surprised me about this:

1) How quickly Google moved to contact him. Dodge is very knowledgeable (I've been reading his blog for years) but I also have to wonder if Google moves a little faster when high-profile Microsoft employees are involved.

2) how long it took him to switch from Internet Explorer and Windows Mobile.
Thanks! If you can't find it, don't worry, though. It's just that I recently implemented one myself and struggled a bit to make it elegant.
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Be happy it is not APL, where if you need two lines to express your problem you'll be scolded because you programmed it before you properly understood it ;)
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thanks. I'm thinking Microsoft Office Web Apps versus Google Docs. Possibly Salesforce CRM for small business. Any other apps? Web apps seem to be the preference.
Don_Dodge, Google = +1,+1 for class. Microsoft = -2
Laid off, not fired.

That might sound pedantic, but there's a big difference between the two.
frighteningly close to line-noise

That's everyone's initial reaction (it was mine too). But my experience has been that if you suspend initial disbelief and approach the language on its own terms, the result is jaw-dropping awe.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=266167
I didn't put in those p tags, the system did that all by itself (which seems like a bug?)
The whole premise of the link is flawed. It's an article about "localization is hard". Well, duh.

I don't see anything in it, at all, about character set and encoding choice. And in that realm, yes: you should just be using UTF-8. Not even "unicode" -- you want to be in UTF-8, period. Convert at the edges of your system if you absolutely must handle other encodings. But wherever you can, you should just be using UTF-8.
I have read the changes in the available Preface PDF ([1]), and wondered about the authors using MacDraw Pro for creating illustrations. What does HN use?

I used to create drawings using Visual Thought. Now for my technical TeX-documents I use InkScape. I would very well like to know if there are better tools out there...

[1]: http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/chapters/0262033844pref1.pdf
Ask HN:Review my science fiction story.
Hey Pascal,

HN is not a 'linkdump', please have a look at the http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

guidelines.

I've flagged your posting so don't be surprised if it gets deleted, if you want you can delete it yourself.
Cheap barcode scanner + Atmel AVR + strong refrigerator magnet.

The first time you scan your product, it memorizes the date. Every time after, it indicates the product age with leds, sound, or an LCD. You keep it stuck to your fridge, scan groceries going in/being opened, scan anything questionable again before use to check the age.

You'd have to keep a sheet of one-off barcodes for stuff like restaurant leftovers, fruit, etc.

As the userbase grows, you could support downloadable tables of expiration dates for various foods(barcodes) so you wouldn't have to even think about that.

Somebody could probably make "a bundle" by mass-marketing a gadget like this, but that would make me angry. Thinking like a user rather than an entrepreneur here, I'd prefer to see it as a cheap, hackable, perhaps Arduino compatible electronics kit on Sparkfun.com or the like.
I like the look of the older X toolkits. I am getting kind of tired of the modern widgets with "pretty" gradients and whatnot, and the old stuff has a nice minimalistic look to it. I compiled my Emacs without gtk+ support, and I don't regret it. I think gitk looks nice, too.

Anyway, it kind of reminds me of an era where people wanted computers to solve their problems, not solve their problems AND be some sort of fashion statement, like they are today.
Of course, but the most interesting point is that GPL allows someone to repackage it and sell it themselves. GPL in this sense has ethics baked - implicit trust in consumer of the software to do the right thing.
Removing the tax shield that some forms of debt provide would only make one avenue of capital raising difficult, it would act much more to encourage other forms of capital raising than to put any kind of stop on it.

This could of course be counterbalanced by making other forms of capital raising easier by doing such things as lowering capital gains tax or, as you suggested, making divident payments deductible.
hey wow. Yes, that is a bug for sure then. There is other weirdness happening today.
Do you mean Microsoft didn't mean to give Don Dodge any power?

I think Microsoft did a good thing by firing Don. It definitely turned out to be good for Don Dodge, Google, and our industry in general.
But it might be good for Microsoft too: if organization is not ready for what one of her high-performers is doing -- it might be better to keep such high-performer out in order to keep the organization more consistent and less confused.
A perfect example is Java's getters and setters, which follow a completely regular pattern but still have to be coded individually.
I find it weird that he's so transparent about "company X pays me now, company X's products are SO much better than anything I've used in the past".

Is this stuff compelling to engineers who care about technical merit rather than who is paying his salary?
Sorry, but you don't joke about not having backups if you take your image seriously.
Except that a machine language program would be thousands if not millions of times as long.

Readability is relative. Java is unreadable to my grandmother. Turkish is unreadable to me. In other words, the opinion of someone who hasn't learned a language regarding its readability is irrelevant.

It is true that the way you read a language like this is different from the way you read Java. You don't expect to grok a line of code atomically, then move to the next line. It's more like reading math: you work with each line, understanding what makes it tick. No doubt that doesn't appeal to everyone. But the APL/K/J people do amazing things.

The ultimate answer as to whether or not this is just line noise? http://kx.com/Customers/end-user-customers.php
When a girl breaks up with you, you want to be sure she knows that the new one is way, way hotter. And smarter. And frankly has better friends.
Yeah, that actually took a little something away from the article, for me. Glad that he has a job though.
I am a little confused when we talk about "The Web" and include applications for mobile devices. I am really more concerned with what HTML5 is capable of and how widely it is implemented. The iPhone, in my mind, is more like the XBox or PSP model of development.
When high-profile person is "laid off" it's more appropriate to call it "fired".
Or would you say that it was simply a matter of cost-cutting?
Even with nested lists, I'm still not clear why this is such a powerful concept.

How do lists help us to think?
Is it too much to ask the Mongolians to turn their monitors 90 degrees clockwise and look at them in a mirror?
Yeah, it's a happy ending for sure. It seems like everyone who has ever met the guy likes him.
With regards to (1), I'm sure they do, especially considering the negative PR Microsoft was accruing for this lay-off. With one stroke, you get a good guy working for you and you make your competitor look bad. Win-win.
For me more surprising thing was that Don didn't even try Gmail while working for Microsoft.
Optigenetics: Writing to and reading from the brain with light and genes
There's a ton of products that failed because the markt wasn't ready for them. Segway, anyone?
InfoWorld's top 10 emerging enterprise technologies
For those of us who don't really know who he is or what he was doing (other than a vague sense of "microsoft and startups") anyone care to comment?
8 Sales Questions You Can't Live (and Sell) Without
This is on the homepage twice now: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=943919
Yeah, esp. since that guy had his fat binary patch rejected.

The wider point is tho', that criticizing a walled garden because it doesn't do something you want, and criticizing it on principle may overlap, but they aren't the same issue at all.

I personally quite like that Facebook is walled off from the real Internet... Go browse the comments on Youtube if you want to see what that's like.
Breaking into many lines and renaming variables would go a long way to make this code look more like C.
Good point. How can you argue that Outlook + Exchange is a better alternative to the competition when you don't know what the competition is.
i totally agree, though i'd phrase it as: RescueTime is too granular, whereas i want something with low but abstract resolution.

i manually track every hour of my day into categories such as startup, sleep, professional-fun, social, sports or waste.

1) some of these can't be tracked by computer usage; eg, sleep, social, sports and unprofessional-fun which includes making music and reading books.

2) when i'm doing work i don't want to sift through which websites i'm visiting. localhost:8000 could mean i'm doing startup work or i'm doing a professional-fun side0project. i visit hundreds of online blogs and APIs for help with coding, but i also procrastinate via hn.

i use iCal to mark my time and leave notes, though i can see using a spreadsheet work as well if not tracking 100% of your time.

i wrote python scripts to analyze my iCal files and create weekly stats and graphs:

http://github.com/diN0bot/iCal-Analyzer
How to install an application in Windows XP Mode?
The Industrial Haskell Group: support for commercial Haskell users
You don't normally 'lay off' people in that bracket.

Either they leave or you fire them.

Lay-offs are for people a lot lower on the totem pole.

It's harsh, but that is how it is.
A revolution is indeed over, but it makes me wonder why was Ruby the initiator. There were other languages which could have done the same, well mostly. Python for example or SmallTalk to some extent. They had all the potential, then why Ruby?Was it just because it had the first real Killer app (namely rails) or was it some game of chance?