skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
AT&T 3G works reliably for me in Austin, though not blazingly fast. However, I'm tempted to go back to Verizon if I like the Droid. Verizon was always rock-solid for me: no dropped calls and much better service away from cities and interstates. I'm pretty sure Verizon's rural coverage was better eight years ago that AT&T's is today. I can't compare non-voice service directly, because I only used Verizon for voice calls, but Verizon wins the voice service comparison hands down. AT&T's voice service is really disappointing in comparison: occasional dropped calls in the city and limited service in the boonies.

Another thing I've noticed: with AT&T, I've often had difficulty making calls when I'm close to a concert or festival. This has been annoying since I live a few blocks from a city park that is often used as a venue. AT&T has apparently done something in the last year or so to ameliorate this problem a little, but (constant refrain) I never had a problem with minor local events when I had Verizon.
Thanks. A few people have just pointed that out to me. I changed the title here and on my blog but unfortunately the url is stuck with the misspelling.
this tree (found it on the 'recent' tab) is amazing: http://logo.twentygototen.org/CayQ5WNa
This Is Broken: From Game Stories to, Well, Everything
this is the exact issue I saw as an intern at an architecture firm right before I dropped out of it as a major
What helped me completely cure my wrist pain was reading "The Mindbody Prescription" by Dr John E Sarno. I was in a similar position and was considering a career change. I took over a year off of work to try and recover (eventually coming back to work part time). Once I read this book and applied it, I was able to immediately recover. It's been about 7 years now since.

The ideas it presents are definitely not mainstream. But it is fairly logical and scientific. There are plenty of other sources that talk about the connection between the mind and the body, but I've never seen anything present it in such a way that makes sense to me and gives ideas of how to directly apply it.

I'm not that great at explaining it in a nutshell. The wikipedia page seems to have some decent info:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tension_myositis_syndrome

But the best summary I've read is this word doc:
http://www.rsi.deas.harvard.edu/handout.doc
(hit the Google cache for HTML version)
Optimizing Clojure Code the Right Way
Inspired by previous HN discussion here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=943597 which discussed how you go about programmatically creating methods in Ruby. This post provides more of the why. (Short version: get more stuff done faster, go home early!)

Unfortunately by the time I got the syntax highlighting working it was already 3:15 AM, so it is unlikely I'll have much to say in the comments. Enjoy the article!
You can get a VPS for $19.95 a month now, with pro-rata billing. Set one up for a couple of days, see what happens, if it fails, cancel it and get most of the $19.95 back.

I don't think server cost is an issue to most people these days. Not until you start to scale, and then it's all good news.
The Tiger Woods Effect: Paralysis by Analysis
Google Translate does Text-to-Speech
Specifically, that's 0.25% of 2.1B in income (26.9B total revenue).

http://careers.jpmorgan.com/cm/Satellite?pagename=JPM_redesi...

Marketing is everything, and I'm pulling this out of my ass but I think Chase's biggest marketing ploy is the sheer number of branches and ATMs they have and are acquiring.

They get this huge tarp subsidy and then they spend a big chunk of it buying (or renting?) cheap real estate in the ghetto...

Buying cheap facebook karma is just the analog to this in the virtual realm.

JPChase were also deep with Enron, FHA, Fanny/Freddy and pretty much all the scams/information warfare that are draining the average citizen.

http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0407/S00040.htm

I bank at a local credit union. ATM fees suck but it feels righter paying Chase the one-off fee than giving them my savings so they can lend it out at a 20X multiple and continue the mindrape.
As long as they're out to disrupt complacent information aggregation businesses, I hope they have Bloomberg and Reuters in their sights. Like Lexis and Westlaw, they reap enormous profits from providing structured access to mostly free information.
i vote for stage 2 - sure, there's interesting material here and it could be pushed further as a domain specific idea, but if that isn't your end game then you should focus on pushing closer to your goal before giving in to distraction.
> the account just gives you access to the demonoid tracker, which you don't necessarily need.

This is also why private trackers don't like DHT and discourage its use.
A new type of web browser for the iPhone
Talk to rackspace's cloud division about doing something. They seem big on working with developers and they offer really small slices. You can spawn via an API, so letting people on/registering and being on their own vps is fairly easy. Maybe do it where it's invite only or there's some advisory board? I don't know how you control who has access,etc.
Tor has well known issues with the Bit Torrent protocol, tangentially there was a well known exploit where someone running a Tor exit node ended up capturing all to and fro traffic.
The author comments below the entry: "more about personally doing something to combat the lunacy of forced-registration"

After setup, it takes me one click to bypass the problem, too: using my stored username and password.

I fear I am turning into a crabby old man, but seriously, does the NYtimes owe you something? Considering the value that it provides at no monetary cost, having an anonymous handle to contact me at or track what I read (or rather, what an anonymous representation of me reads) seems like a more than fair trade to me.
You could be right on both counts. Obviously.

Still, I do think it's at least plausible that significant changes in environmental context might lead to different adoption and uptake patterns. Languages not excepted.

Witness the revitalization - relatively speaking - of Erlang as the market fetishized scale-out at the expense of scale up.

The specific criticisms, I think we mostly agree on. I might nitpick on the performance question or the idea that C works fine with respect to Go or the outright dismissal of Lisp dialects, but they're arguable at worst.

That said, I think the trend, and history, both point to the addition of new languages to the toolkit. These seemed like pretty reasonable guesses based on the current intelligence, but maybe your objections are - as you argue - simply insurmountable.

I'll be interested to see what happens next year.
I suspect that the lack of a tracker helps them out more (legally) than hosting .torrent files vs magnet urls.
Of course, there is no reason why shouldn't you be able to log in using any of the unique information in your profile, be it email, your username/alias, your phone number etc.
I posted this article about myself because I'm excited that Microsoft is featuring me and one of my products. In the past I've been more of the programmer in the background and my business partner took care of the networking for us. Now I'm trying to make connections on my own and being part of something like this is a nice boost to my morale.
I am an art school grad, have been an industrial designer, UX/UI designer, and have a lot of friends who are architects. Unless you are REALLY gifted aesthetically. I wouldn't go through the time/expense of design school. You could probably transition to UI design pretty easily. ID is an interesting field, but largely shrinking. Look at the open req's at what were top ID firms (Frog/Ideo/Continuum) Very few are doing much business designing things compared to UI's or some mech-e work. As for the RSI, the average designer spends a lot of time in the Adobe suite or a CAD package so it probably won't help. That said if you are really passionate go for it.

Feel free to contact me if you want more info.
True, even though it hasn't prevented him from suggesting his solution. But my point was that it is still unknown -- I would dare guess even to its creators -- what problem is Google Wave supposed to solve.
Analytics: Sometimes 10% &gt; 200%
Seems like an over-simplification. The CTO (or technical cofounder) is a key piece of the machine that enables you to iterate quickly to find product/market fit, and thus get the sales. This article almost seems to advocate not bothering with a good CTO and getting a good sales guy instead... but if you do that, you'll have a whole different set of problems.

So the boring, but correct, take-away, is: You need a great CTO - and you need a great CEO who can sell the product too.
Yes, and if you bang on a drum the magic cargo planes arrive and drop food to you.
No, don't do that. If you want well-working and most appreciated filesharing on an anonymous network, please join us I2P fans: http://www.i2p2.de
I'll repost my comment here:

"With PHP, never mind the lack of step-through debugging, if you want to do any kind of debugging you have to litter your code with tons of print statements to have any shot of catching the bug. Ugly."

Um....WRONG. There are many, many step through debuggers out there for PHP. Netbeans, for example, has extremely good (and free) step through debugging, along with many more features that are at least on par with what Visual Studio gives you.

If your intent is to give accurate and honest information, you should probably research your topic a bit. However, given the overall tone of the article, I'll wager honesty and accuracy were never really high on your list.
It was great to have discovered Yappler and MichaelApproved on HackerNews and I look forward to meeting more .NET devs here. I came back into MSFT to bring some of the startup mojo to our marketing and product development in developer tools, and we're definitely making forward progress.

If there are other folks on HN doing cool stuff with .NET, please let me know about you. I want to be your conduit into MSFT. Let me know how I can help you. As someone who ran a company that was a Vista launch partner, I know what a total nightmare it is to navigate MSFT. Let me help you. Oh yeah, and definitely go check out yappler.com. :)
From what I've seen, architects go to school, really arduous school, for years, after which they continue to work constantly, much more than 40 hours per week. I believe they get paid less than developers, have less job security -- and, yes, sit at a computer all day.

As I spend a lot of time working with architects, I can confirm that.

Architects spend all day in front of the computer, they click much more repetitively (a 12-hour CAD session will do wonders for your RSI), and they get paid less and find it harder to find a new job.

Then again, they do get to design cool buildings. Well, some of them do, anyway (a relatively small proportion, however).
Not trying to troll or anything, but in the age of services like EC2, App Engine, and Heroku, why would anyone get locked into a long term hosting contract without prior proof of "legs"?
"Project Management Methodology News

The Top User-Ranked Technology Stories Updated Every 15 Minutes"

Project Management Methodology != Technology. The title and tag line need to be consistent.
Innovation: The dizzying ambition of Wolfram Alpha
I imagine it's thrilling to be featured by Microsoft in this way, so it seems like a big win. But your comments on Visual Studio were soaked in a Microsoft reality distortion field, and it was off-putting to me.
Server Cool-Bags Could Cut Costs By 93 Percent
Swimming Servers: Motherboards Immersed in Coolant
Legacy code really is aptly named. There are COBOL and assembly routines in production that have outlived their programmers. Even if a product (for example Oracle AS being replaced by Bea WLS) is desupported/killed, it still lives on if it's still in use.
The one thing I know about the future is that the predictions are wrong.
J - A modern, high-level, general-purpose, high-performance programming language
> think that they know

Think they know and do know are different beast all together. Which part of insider information laws do you not understand. Speculative information is completely different from material information that is unavailable to the general public. Using such to your advantage is not only unethical it is a crime in regulated markets.
A lot of the comments are bashing predictions as fiction, linkbait, etc, but I like predictions. They are the only way to really measure the vision of an individual. Perhaps not the only way, but a good way. I takes understanding, imagination, realism. Science fiction writers are not only lauded by the imagination of their stories, but the plausibility.

I personally like making predictions. That's what our industry is all about. That's what science is all about. Predicting the future.

That said, I don't see anything particularly insightful in the predictions made in the linked article.
" A model, however, is the canonical representation of your data. In Rails, the database and in-memory stores, together, make up the model, and are inseperable, as they are both considered to be canonical—if one is changed, that change should be considered canonical and replicated through both. To put it another way, all canonical stores of the data should be bijections."

I've seen way too many examples of model code that uses "virtual attributes" to present a model as having assorted properties that are not present in the database schema. So I don't buy the claim that the model is simply a mirror of the schema, and vice-versa. Sticking to such a privative approach would be crippling. Coupling object and class design to database schema design is a mistake.

More broadly, Rails (like many other Web frameworks) takes a seriously skewed approach to MVC anyways, so it is more useful to just figure out what works best in any given Rails app rather than worry about whether something is technically a "view" or not.
> All of the Internet's successful systems are decentralized

HTTP hosting is decentralized and not decentralized. If I run an Apache server hosting my website, it's centralized. Everyone that wants to access my website has to go through my server. They don't have to go through my server to access the whole internet net though. The internet -- for the most part -- is globally decentralized, but locally centralized.

It's the same with Bittorrent and trackers. If a tracker goes down, someone else can start up a new tracker that is serving the same torrent. It's not centralized the way something like Scour.net or Napster were (all peer-finding goes through the same servers).

> Decentralization greatly increases the reliability of the system.

Not necessarily. If you have two groups of 20 peers that are only connected to each other by a single peer, what happens when that one peer goes down? It's now impossible for those two groups to find each other. And consider that it's a lot more likely for a single peer in a torrent swarm to go down (someone's computer crashes, close the torrent, residential internet goes down) than it is for a centrally hosted tracker that is probably on a dedicated server in a colo somewhere.

PEX from Wikipedia:

While it may improve (local) performance and robustness—e.g. if a tracker is
slow or even down—heavy reliance on PEX can lead to the formation of groups of
peers who tend to only share information with each other, which may yield slow
propagation of data through the network, due to few peers sending information
to those outside the group they are in.
Uninsured ER patients twice as likely to die
Also don't underestimate the influence of oxygen.
2 of my favorites from the past year..

The cheating Red Sox
http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=simmons/0905...

and a ~3,000 word obituary of his dog
http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=simmons/0901...
You missed an independent variable in this test. What were the relative levels of tasting expertise among the tasters? I think you can only conclude that wine price doesn't matter much for the lowest common denominator there.
It pains me that metaprogramming in Ruby is often treated as some mystic advanced voodoo topic, something only the adepts are free to enjoy.

It may seem weird to someone coming to Ruby from VB or Java, but a little time peeking under the hood is revealing, and it should be one of the first things explained to Ruby Nubies (instead of shoved off into chapter 23 or something in the typical Ruby book).
How I quickly recovered from Carpal Tunnel Syndrome
iirc box.net as well. However, they later bought him out.
Become a cobbler.
Now let me see if I got this right...OP is a venture capitalist who is complaining that he regularly sees pitches where the business is not focusing enough on their market and customers.

Did it ever occur to OP that this is just selection bias? How can he comment on all of the pitches he doesn't see?

Start-ups focused on revenue have many more options before they'll pitch him. Perhaps they're self-funded. Or now that they have a presence in the marketplace, they have more investor opportunities: customers, vendors, angels, strategic partners, even banks.

Customer focused start-ups are out there. OP has just positioned himself to see less of them.
Mary Poppendieck: Competing On The Basis Of Speed
Hit the nail on the head. For a lot of people USENET is out of their depth. The media companies know about USENET, they have to, but it's not the current popular form of distribution.

Even if bittorrent were to disappear, it seems more likely that sites like Rapidshare would be the next 'mainstream' distribution method.

Besides that, when it comes to bittorrent the end-users have to do some uploading while on the torrent, so the media companies can nail them for distribution. If someone is just downloading content, it's harder to punish them -- from a legal standpoint -- then if you can get them for distributing content.
There are plenty of software jobs out there that require writing new components in C; I'm not sure that the same is true for COBOL. Sure, there's a ton of legacy C code, but there's also a great deal of new C code being developed, which makes it hard for me to see C as being "dead."
Congrats that is awesome, keep up the good work.
maybe you won't outright fail because of it, but brilliant technical leadership is half of the difference between a mediocre company and an enormously successful one.
AT&T works great for me in Boston's North Shore, but not for my wife (iPhone I) nor my son (iPhone II). I can routinely make and receive calls with my Razr standing right next to them when they can't with their iPhones. So, make sure you compare apples to apples. I suspect that the sensitivity of the iPhones' transceiver is lacking. That's why I haven't bought one yet: my cell phone is my business phone and I need to be able to get calls most importantly.

I have no information on the third iPhone model, though.
I'm not so sure that applying statistics to wine tasting isn't like applying physics to haircuts: yes there's probably no relationship between the money you paid and the way you feel about your haircut, but if you thought there was you probably were missing the point.

Wine is an immensely subjective and varied experience. That's one of the reasons people like it so much. There's one feeling you get when you're dining out and a friend turns you on to a 10-dollar red that tastes great and another feeling you get when you go to the cellar for a special occasion to get a hundred-dollar bottle -- even if the wines are statistically indistinguishable.

What can I say? It's a great product. All of human experience goes into the process: peer pressure, prior experience, atmosphere, cost, anticipated pleasure, etc.

When I started trying to learn how to taste wine I went through Wine Spectator and only ordered wines of the very highest rating. I understand this is just an anecdote, but I found that about 1 in 3 were actually distinguishable by me from grocery-store wine. I took that to mean that yes, there are differences, but the amount of signal is vastly overstated.

But that misses the point: it's emotional, not statistical.
Inventing a Better Patent System
I still can't tell which laws apply to me, specifically (my state, for example).

You have to know a lot, just to know which decisions could possibly apply to you.
cfml: the context-free music language
Feedburner Graphs Suck, or How to Generate Nice Graphs for Feedburner
I don't so much care about their rationale; I will be pursuing that $1 million chunk of change for my organization.
West has keycite. Keycite, Westlaw's case history features and the West Digests/summaries are enough of a value added service that it will enable them to continue to thrive, even if they can no longer hold the legal industry by the nuts.
I don't know if they are doing A/B testing or some kind of segmenting on which plans show up. Turns out it's $6.99, very reasonable for me anyway.

I used their 50 gig/6 months promotion a while back, and when it ran out I wasn't using it enough so I thought about cancelling, but the 20 gig option was what saved it for me, which in itself is interesting because the difference is only 3 bucks :-)

Here's a screenshot of dropbox.com/plans for me: http://grab.by/COT
Is it possible to use a service such as this to host user files (pdf, word, images) for a web application? Do cloud hosting services offer virus scanning for docs and pdf files? I was considering just using the Scribd API to host the file on Scribd since the files do not need to be private, but would be interested in a solution that does not involve Scribd branding on my site.
PHP is a pretty easy target - I'd be much more interested to hear why you chose ASP.NET over modern open source frameworks such as Ruby on Rails or Django.
Jammit: Industrial Strength Asset Packaging for Rails Apps
That is very true. The value in this is for lawyers; lay people have always had a hard time finding and understanding the law. This may help a lay person, but Google's implementation appears to really be focused on lawyers.
How is this guy not contradicting himself? First he says:

Convince [me] that you first know who your customer is. Second, make clear that you know how to address these customers. Finally, show that these customers will spend their hard-earned cash on your product. [..I]f I don't hear the business case, it all becomes "blah, blah, blah".

Then he says:

I believe Foursquare is on to something. Sure, it's like Twitter in that it hasn't yet figured out it's business model but I can already see there's money there. Same is the case for Twitter. Give me this feeling when I am listening to your pitch. I don't need to see the break-even point. I need to see the huge exit down the road thereafter.
> private sites are usually safer to use on the legal side of it.

Why's that? It's not like it's impossible for a PI to infiltrate one of these private trackers. Once the tracker is sued/confiscated, they usually have all kinds of information about you.

I joined what.cd just to see what these private trackers were like and they asked my a ton of questions. From 'where do you live' and 'what type of 'net connection do you have' to 'do you know the difference between encoding X and encoding Y' and 'look at these spectral analysis of a music file, which one was converted from mp3->flac instead of source->flac'.

Of course, I don't know how much of that they actually keep on file vs. just running you through the 'gauntlet' to filter out flakey people.
Sorry for the typo.

Fishes die everyday because they eat polymers and can't digest it, their stomachs fill and there is no space for food.

It's normal to discover dead sharks and whales with their stomachs filled or nearly filed.
Honest question:

I don't know what exactly you do, but do you think you could do it without keycite?
Are they wearing enough flair?
$5 for a VPS

http://prgmr.com/xen/
I blame Howard Roark.