skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Shouldn't the title be more like the original one?

I am also unsure if Joel Spolsky is that much relevant outside his narrow field. Most notably, I am not sure how relevant his advice is within his narrow field either.
Fast by Default and Web Performances
I think the real value of the real-time web will show when the comments sections of all webpages are in real-time. This will allow users who are viewing an article on the same webpage, which may be over a decade old, to see a comment appear as it is sent. This will encourage users to comment back and forth across all webpages, no matter how old the page is, due to the real-time appearance of comments.
Perfect article. Short and to the point, and even though it's something I've thought about before, I learned something new.
>If a 16-yr old CEO has the social acuity, business acumen, and maturity of a 45-yr old CEO, then major kudos to them.

That would be a horrible 45-year-old CEO. If you don't learn something in those thirty years that can't be applied to give you an edge on a sixteen-year-old, you're doing something wrong.

Age deserves more respect, imo. It's extremely unlikely that any sixteen year old would be a businessperson than a forty-five year old.
Buffett said ... that railroad operators cannot do well unless American businesses are producing goods and customers are buying them.

"It’s an all-in wager on the economic future of the United States," he said in a written statement. "I love these bets."

I wonder if it's also a long-term bet about the future cost effectiveness of rail vs. long-haul trucking for shipping goods to U.S. consumers.
Maybe this will the beginning of a new era of investment in long distance freight.

(A renewed interest in public transport would be great as well)
Because that sort of discussion is simply not germane to this site, and especially not facile treatments such as "our capitalist masters".
Is it me or those numbers are impressive for "yet another project management app"? How can it be explained?
Maybe Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud Makes Cloud Computing Too Easy
I recommend NMI.com. They are a payment gateway and alternative to Auth.net. Their API and admin console is great.
Blub by Convention (In Defense of Arc)
A pet peeve of mine but Buffett didn't purchase the railroad - his company Berkshire Hathaway did.
The only time I use the term CEO in my title is when I feel as if I have to convey my leading role in the company over giving the impression that I'm an everyday employee. This normally only happens over e-mail and with people that don't really know me or my company.
> When we speak, we frequently start a sentence not knowing how it's going to end.

You can start and continue with a Lojban sentence indefinitely via various means. Metalinguistic markers such as sei ... se'u allows a discursive (on-the-fly) predicate or sentence. You can insert parenthetical notes with to ... toi into anywhere. You can insert the attitudinals (used to express attitudes, emotions, evidentiality, etc.) into anywhere. A construct called tanru allows an endless sequence of predicates (whose form in Lojban do not alter according to the natlang parts of speech such as adjective or adverb, thus imposing less restrictions on the way you keep forming a sentence than natlangs such as English does). With li'o you can omit any quantity of text you don't want in your expressions. With si/sa/su you can 'erase' various mistakes in your utterance. And so forth.

> We pause and insert filler words to give us time to form our thoughts.

That's what y is for in Lojban.

> We use ambiguity because sometimes we just don't know precisely what we're trying to say

The unambiguity of Lojban is mostly syntactic, not always semantic. You can be semantically ambiguous in Lojban with e.g. tanru.

> (Lojban has, if I recall correctly from Okrent's book, over 30 ways to say 'and').

Which includes ju'e, a vague connective for "and".

> Forcing people to have a complete understanding of what they want to say before saying it

Which is not the case in Lojban.
my guess is it comes down to two things:

1. The capital expenditures of railroad companies are changing. Most of them have pretty much laid track everywhere needed. If expansion isn't necessary, CapEx will go to maintenance for the most part, this means a ton in "owners earnings" to go up to BRK-Parent

2. Railroads > Trucking when oil shoots up. Could be his view that this is likely.

For bonus, I know there is a lot of talk about BNI having a competitive advantage at getting access to shipping Chinese goods because of their west-coast track network, apparently they are better developed than others for this.
Good article.

The point about the term becoming muddled and meaningless is pretty spot on. When I first started hearing this term being used all over the place (heck, Toronto's already had a couple mini-conferences laced with this buzzword), I assumed we were talking about systems with "real time" data flows like Pachube.

Now the term seems to have boiled down to "I taped my F5 key down".
BNSF is a freight railroad network, unsuitable for mass public rail transit. Buffet is getting into the freight service business, not passenger traffic.
The way cars have monopolised USA and lack of poor public transport infrastructure might provide a huge opportunity for rail road companies. I really hope to see cheap public transport system in USA. Also given lot of public awareness about global warming and reducing oil consumption may be added incentive.
In general, when you find an academic type without a PhD, it's even more impressive. Read about Google Eliezer Yudkowsky, and tell me you aren't even more impressed when you find out his educational background.
Poll: Did you have a blog that you closed?
In the comments, tell us why did you stop writing?
Have a blog
Have a blog but should close it
Had a blog, closed it
Never had a blog
I think you are being a bit pedantic here. While he may not have made the purchase with his own finances he is the one making the decision and coming up with the strategy... and THAT is what people are interested in. People will be interested in this because of this implies about Buffet's thoughts on the future economic situation in America. Whose money he uses is of little interest or importance.
bgjgjgyj
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He was the decision maker here. It is not like a Berkshire subsidiary (i.e.: David Sokol at MidAmerican) did the deal
This looks like a really cool product, but where are the TOS and privacy policy? I know not having them is the in thing now (I'm looking at you, StackOverflow), but there's no way I'm signing up for anything and giving my data without them.
Fear of flying?  There's an app for that
So what is the value of the real time web?

This article seems to say it's about immediacy, about finding out things faster than you would have before.

I've also heard that the real time web acts as a filter for news, so you can use the people you follow on twitter or your facebook to find out what information is important.

I know a lot of people on here are working on real time apps...what do you think that value is to the consumer?
Is there a document explaining the protocol, something such as the RFCs of the IETF?
I agree, my current employer spent the last five years building a product using mostly overseas developers with one developer over here coordinating and piecing together the code. They treated development as something that just needed to be done, as apposed to treating it like the core of their product (which it is). Now they have a big, slow, behemoth and they've finally brought more developers in house to try to help clean things up. I think that a lot of people tend to treat design and UX the same way, something that just needs to "get done", as apposed to something that (might) be a major piece of your product or service.
I work for a web host (not this one). From my experience, this is generally what is going on during downtime (note: times are BEST CASE scenario):

T0: Servers go down
T5-15: Someone realizes something is broken.
T15-45: Initial someone calls another someone to tell them it's broken because the night guy probably can't fix it all by himself.
T60-70: All the engineers are woken up and know OF the problem.
T90: Engineers figure out WHAT the problem is.
T120: Engineers fix problems.
T150: More problems arise.
T180: All problems are solved, no more customers are mad.

Moral of the Story: As you can see, it already is a very involved process to get servers running again. Now, as a customer, you want an email to notify you that services are down. First, the admin needs to find out exactly which customers are affected and then write up a nice happy email to you letting you know we're working on it. Do you want a happy email or do you want your servers fixed? Your call. Downtime is chaos. Do not ask to be notified of chaos.
Dynamo - Part I: a followup and re-rebuttals
This reminds me of a project I worked on in a large enterprise years ago. All of their systems, believe it or not, were batch. Inventory, accounting, order processing - all data was entered into hold files, or worse, filled out with pencil and paper and turned into keypunch. All databases were updated in a large batch overnight. (Today, it's hard to believe anyone ever did that.)

Our project was to migrate all apps to a new real time package. They spent millions of dollars and when it was all done, the controller complained, "Who decided that we needed real time Accounts Payable? Why would we ever want to pay our bills faster?"

No one had ever asked that question before. No one even thought about it. We had spent $1 million on a module nobody wanted because IT decided it. Eventually he added procedures to continue to fill out all accounts payable transactions with pencil and paper and enter them into the on-line system at the end of the day. What a waste.

Same argument here. Some things you want faster. And you're willing to pay for them, one way or the other. But other things should just stay the way the are.

Some things never change: you actually have to think about your apps before you implement them.
Maybe so. I agree with what you're saying, but even Buffet doesn't work alone, from what I understand Charlie Munger is pretty influential in most of the decisions as well.
Ibiza Guide
Never mind, I found it.

http://www.waveprotocol.org/draft-protocol-specs/draft-proto...
Unicode also has separate Line Breaks and Paragraph Breaks somewhere around U+2000.
Your VB app will still run perfectly happily on the latest Windows, even if it's 16-bit, it's worth mentioning. I'd be willing to bet the VB5 toolchain could too, or at least run in a VM.
gnu screen is the reason i find terminal tabs obsolete.
Did anybody get a notification from Slicehost about this?
Two, Five, Ten …
> They offer some insanely cheap servers

I've looked at their prices, and I wouldn't call them insanely cheap. I'm with Hetzner (both rented and an empty rack with own hardware) and the prices are about the same.
Zumbox and ECM are very different.
With ECM, you purchase a mailbox and get a real postal address in many destinations (USA and others). With every letter that is sent to your address - you get an email notification with a scan of the envelope. You can instruct ECM open and scan the content of your letter or you can instruct them to recycle it instead. It's a very convenient service because it saves you the need to handle paper mail.

Zumbox offer a new marketing approach. They try to get people to sign up and try to get marketers to send mail to those who registered. I guess their ultimate goal is to render the USPS worthless.
These numbers are very impressive. I'm building such a tool too, with a twist. I'll tell how it goes when I'll launch.
Syntactic ambiguity is half the point. I still have to decide whether or not I want to use the vague/all-purpose connective for "and." If I want to add parenthetical information, I have to realize I'm doing that and indicate it. If I want to "erase" a mistake, I have to recognize that that's what I want to do and use the proper word. I still have to know exactly what I intend to say. When I'm speaking, I don't think to myself, "Ok, this is parenthetical... this is correcting an error... this is vague and all-purpose." I just speak.

In Python, whether or not a method is private is defined basically by whether or not you call it from another class. In Java, you have to be explicit about it. You CAN just declare everything public (be vague and all-purpose), but aside from being frowned upon, you still have to conciously decide to do this. If you don't care about the protection of scope, you can make everything public, but you're still specifying scope. In Python, you don't specify scope at all. Even if you wanted to, you can't.

The same thing shows up in type checking. If you want, you just call everything an object in Java. It's vague and all-purpose, but you still have to specify a type. You still can't write 'a = 4'. You still have to write 'Object a = new Integer(4);', which it's tough to argue is simpler just because it isn't type-checked.

Explicit ambiguity is not much closer than explicit disambiguity to implicit ambiguity.

I realize at this point, I'm getting beyond my own knowledge of Lojban, but I just want to make the general point that being able to be ambiguous does not automatically afford the advantages of the natural ambiguity in "natlangs."
It's not a Fibonacci series and it's not a prime number series. It might be the second three denominations of U.S paper currency, but it's not. (Yes, Virginia, there is a U.S. $2 bill.)

Instead, it's a measure of the potential impact and uptake (or lack thereof) of new technologies.

To see why, let's move from the abstract to the concrete, considering when new technologies gain credence.
>>> If you’re a consumer of information (and we all are), turn off the live notifications, unless you need the information for your work. <<<

This looks like a common knowledge to fight distraction, but anyway: I currently experiment with email notification, and I start to reconsider using it again. The point is, that the small blurb doesn't actually distract me that much, and I immediately see that nothing important is coming, and as a result, I doesn't have an urge to check if some important email didn't come. And if something important came, I just know that immediately.
Is it him or his company who controls though? Im going to say him...
I'm using PostalMethods (www.postalmethods.com). It is reliable and offer decent prices. I think it is the best service for business use.
Agreed. I bet there's a lot of VB5 code out there humming along quite nicely.
This might not be true in the humanities. I've had quite a few students repeat the idea that they must call be "Dr.", since the title "Professor" is reserved for lowly grad students. They tend to hear this from literature professors, so non-science fields might have different customs.
We three.

They used to have a killer of a deal (empty 19" rack for 99 EUR/month, inclusive 19% VAT) they unfortunately no longer offer.
What does a failing charity have to do with the cost of living in Chicago, or the US as a whole?
This is journalism?

"The funny thing is that as absurd and comical as this sounded when the Engine Yard guys told me about it, I've started to think about this as a way to possibly achieve a real technological breakthrough"

Technological breakthrough? At the end of the day, it's the http protocol + POST. What breakthroughs are we going to see?

140 characters - barely anything useful can be sent in 140 characters for messaging systems. Heck, a unique identifier will take up most of the message.
Ok, cool, but how is this relevant to us, hackers? How is this Hacker News?
Maybe it's just me (most likely), but I didn't understand the punchline.
My first thought was exactly the same - it would be for oil. It would also serve as a great investment for biofuel transportation.
Hate to be negative, but have you seen some of the startups listed here:
http://blog.tetuanvalley.com/2009/10/startup-school-fall-200...

They don't seem to be very high quality.
They are presented during the second stage of signup.
Cracking Passwords in the Cloud: Breaking PGP on EC2 with EDPR
Firefox Showcase - Successful Installation
> If they cached you, you could lost all your allocations.

Is this because of a poor serialisation format?
I wonder if they're attracting more European customers. Also, could price be a factor (one user for $5, six for $25)?
I will be generous and assume this is by someone just new to programming language research, Lisp, or just programming in general.

The entire essay is tongue-tied and appeals to the gentle reader's kindness and forgiveness, instead of saying something.
Agreed. screen is one of the single most useful tools I use.
Just because we're hackers doesn't mean we have to be cut off from everything else.

Personally I find the movements of someone who's been so successful in business for so long interesting.
> Is $3.99 per mbps with a minimum commit of 10Mbps expensive?

Yes. I currently pay about 12 EUR for a TByte of traffic, 100 MBit/s dedicated router (i.e. not shared switch) port.
Mr. Buffett said that the deal came together quickly...Mr. Rose took the proposal to his board - and got an answer in about 15 minutes.

Hell, it takes us longer to pick a font.
And it's just as easy to say that Europeans have been brainwashed to say things like all Americans are brainwashed to consume, consume, consume. It's a highly condescending argument on several levels to make sweeping statements like that about people who have different motivations for doing what they do.

We might as well all be brainwashed, there's no proving we're not if that's your argument.

The original poster in this thread was being insulting and condescending. There's no other way to look at it, whether he meant to or not.
this is not a good title: "You can make up a new title if you want, but if you put gratuitous editorial spin on it, the editors may rewrite it."

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
But yet, the price is comparable to other products of that kind that I saw.
How many soldiers have died due to an M16 not killing the enemy fast enough? How many soldiers would die from being less familiar with the weapon during the transition period? Would the weapon chosen as a replacement actually be the best for the job, or would the choice be based on which defense contractor is in a state with a senator on the panel who will be ignoring the military's recommendation?

Don't they put out a tender, get a sample of weapons and have 100 soldiers do test firings, range events and war games using those weapons? How can the senator manipulate that, you try the things first, if they're not better than what you've got then don't buy them. If it's better but only in limited conditions then can't you buy some and only use them in those limited conditions? Is military procurement really that broken.
The newer information is, the more valuable it tends to be to the consumer. People prefer to know what's going on sooner than later. Just look at old newspapers, nobody buys them except for historians and newspaper collectors.
Control-zoom is awesome indeed, but has been available for a long time using the scroll wheel of any mouse.
Enable it in Universal Access > Zoom options > Use scroll wheel modifier to enable zoom > ^
How does "partner" sound? Same a co-founder? Or more like someone climbing up the ladder in a law firm? English is not my mother tongue which is why I am wondering...
Got a link? It doesn't seem quite as clear cut as you paint it.

http://www.creditloan.com/blog/americans-debt-to-income-rati...
> Now, they don't use ECC ram

Right, which is why I wouldn't use them for production, other than firewall. I've just oredered a http://www.supermicro.com/products/system/1U/5015/SYS-5015A-... kit for 199 EUR sans VAT, add about 35 EUR for 2 GByte Kingston ValueRAM, a port riser for 10 EUR and a dual-port Intel NIC (e.g. E1G42ETBLK) for about 100 EUR, a little flash DoM with pfSense and you've got a nice firewall.
Just a small note: You can also use CELERY_BACKEND="amqp" to send back the result as a message, it's the most efficient way, but then you can only look up the result once (unless you send another message with the same result).
It's gonna be tough getting by his hotels on Park Place.
I wonder if the simple, clean design is attracting people? Or perhaps it has to do with the pricing (which as you've said is competitive) or the presentation video. If every site that I checked out had a 2 minute "Here's how our site works, in a nutshell" I might find myself staying interested a little longer, and it would probably stick with me a little bit more.
I've met the enemy. And it's me.
Oh, interesting, I did not know that. Thanks.
Just because this food bank doesn't have food doesn't mean there are millions of people starving in Chicago. There are a myriad of reasons for why the food bank might not have food, chief among them is that in a major recession like we have been experiencing, fewer people donate.

Do people exist in the US who are consistently hungry? Yes. Do they starve on a regular basis? No. It has nothing to do with whether your link is a lie or not.

Does unemployment run 70% among people with partial disabilities? I wouldn't be surprised at all to hear that 70% of people with partial disabilities who are trying to find work are unemployed. It doesn't sound like a particularly useful stat. I wouldn't be surprised to hear that 70% of all people who are trying to find work are unemployed. They are looking for work after all.
Detecting Terrorists by Smelling Fear
Found on Bruce Schneier's blog http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/11/detecting_terr...

As usually comments are worth reading.
Could you explain the "Railroads > Trucking when oil shoots up" in more detail?

I would assume that the fuel costs of diesel locomotives are just as tied to oil prices than fuel costs of trucks. The operating costs of electric locomotives would get equally more expensive as well as electricity prices are not independent of oil prices (and electricity is always more expensive than oil).
Great article. The author suggests saving time in two formats, (1) UTC and (2) local date-time with a geographical time zone. The app would then pick the right one to use depending on context.

BTW, let me take the opportunity to praise the Joda Time library for JVM languages. First time I've ever seen date and time primitives implemented well. It can be used for the scheme suggested in the article.
U.S.  to support the first mobile social network in Pakistan
I really, really hate the fact that I upvoted you.

Seriously. I was going to make the same joke, but I was also going to follow it up with something more pertinent, like the fact that rails have the best cost-per-ton-mile or that railroads are both a monopoly and in limited supply (you can't just make more of them)

So -- love the joke. But everybody can't just shoot out one-liners like that, myself included. Next time add something of value to the reader besides a joke. We don't want this place turning into reddit.
Yet I would never go to the second stage without seeing them. This sounds like a paradox.

... and I just signed up without seeing any TOS, so...
We're happy with the numbers, but I think they can be partially explained by our long beta period. People have been asking us "when can we start paying?" since the beginning of the summer.

We are entering a crowded market, but it's not as bad as you may think. A lot of the competing project management software startups take the exact same approach. So we see Basecamp and all the Basecamp clones as just a single competitor, and we deliberately take a different approach. As a result, some people will prefer their approach, and other people tell us they've been looking for something like Thymer for over ten years, and that's the kind of feedback that confirms we may have found a good niche.
Google Labs - see related links for your page.
C++ Smackdown: Competitive Coding Champ Emerges
Long distance trucking is sure to loose. If the economy recovers, the oil price is sure to "recover".