skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> The odds were fifty-to-one against me born in the United States in 1930. I won the lottery the day I emerged from the womb by being in the United States instead of in some other country where my chances would have been way different.

This isn't true - the odds of Warren Buffet being born in America, given that his parents were American and had him, were 100%. There's no random chance associated with where you're born - it was the result of what your parents and their parents did. They worked hard to get over to the States, or wherever else, and to make a good life for their kids.

Actually, that whole viewpoint that's come into fashion these days worries me a little. Before, one of the biggest ethics to live for was "making life better for your children" - you'd work hard, and sacrifice, knowing your kids would have a better life than you did. It's what my Great-Grandparents did, what my Grandparents did, what my Parents did. All came up poor, I came up lower middle class, my kids will probably come up reasonably wealthy.

But nowadays, a lot of people write that off as the "birth lottery", or luck, or chance, and think that happiness in your own life, right now, is the highest virtue. They even almost look at it as a bad thing for parents to work very hard for their kids specifically to have the best life they could, calling it things like a birth lottery or random chance. There's nothing random about why I was born in the States, or why my kids will be - it was a direct result of five or six generations of slogging towards a better life from miserable conditions elsewhere.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but this is what Rails does when the programmer fails. If you type in invalid identifiers, no programming language or web framework is going to be very happy with you. After that, it is a matter of taste and technical feasibility how the framework handles it. If you're lucky and using Java, you typed in an invalid identifier in such a way that the project fails to compile, and Eclipse will give you little red squiggles. (If you're not lucky, you get an undescriptive error message thrown up from a 700 line stack trace and have to guess what caused it then spend 30 seconds redeploying to see if you guessed right. For example, if you have a genetic predisposition against typing things correctly the first time, botching values in your XML configurations in such a manner than the XML is still valid is going to cause you a lot of pain.)

Ruby is an interpreted language and can't feasibly do the red squiggle thingee, but the common errors are trivially debuggable after a few hours experience with the framework. If you see an error message talking about HommeController, you search for homme globally, find the one instance of it, fix the spelling and reload the page you were just seeing. Bam, that took you three seconds.
Supercomputing will get an SSD upgrade
They got involved because the first Chipotle was right near the McDonald's corporate offices in Denver -- the executives were eating there so much, they bought into the company!
It's a lot cheaper to insert your markup by position than to parse the XML on every read. Of course, caching would mitigate much of that, but still I admire the design.
We were introduced by a mutual friend when we were in high school. We dated through college, and then got married. :) (Yes, my co-founder is also my wife.)

I'd always wanted to start my own business since as long as I could remember, but was biding my time in the corporate world until I felt I was "ready". She'd never really considered it, instead studying industrial/organizational psychology with the intent of becoming a professor.

After she passed comprehensive exams for her Ph.D., she started getting the feeling academia might be not be for her. Around the same idea, I had the idea that would eventually become our startup, and we started talking about it. As it turned out, she had studied the same topic from another point of view and had some great insight. The rest was dollars and cents.
Fixed and Fixed.

Thanks to all the opinions, advice (and complaints) from people, I've made the navigation for guests much easier, and also standardized the login and signup methods.

Next I need to decide if I'm going to allow comments for guests...
I don't recommend starting out on a deceptive foot. This will probably be discovered eventually, and may lead people to wonder what else you've been deceiving them about.

It's okay to have virtual E-mail addresses like "support@yourcompany.com", etc. for each category. But don't make them actual staff names.

When you say you can't afford people, do you mean full time, or at all (e.g. contractors)? Maybe you can find someone willing to work on something you need, which would give you a break. Then again, contractors can be expensive, so this would be a short term thing.
Those all look like perfectly legitimate, thorough error messages to me, far moreso than many languages would give you. Would it be confusing to a newbie? Maybe, but they're called newbies for a reason. Pay attention to details + write tests + take the time to learn the framework = problem solved.
Here his announcement to the Three20 Google Group.

http://groups.google.com/group/three20/msg/9ab6b6345775dc45
Well, it is a good product and I will probably keep using them.
In-N-Out has the highest profit per location and one of the highest employee retention rates of any fast food restaurant. Their ability to expand is limited more by their refusal to ever freeze their ingredients than anything else (they must stay within X distance of their cattle ranches).

Its a really impressive company, and one that I think backs up Jason's point. There was an amazing article on them recently that I'm struggling to find, if someone has the link and could post it that would be great (BusinessWeek?).
An interesting response. Thanks. My wording was lame and included unnecessarily expressed social forum fears.

However, it's incorrect that I'm karma baiting. Rightly or wrongly I mention that I essentially worry I'll be attacked. But my central, and I admit strongly worded point, is genuine and I stand by it. I think that we as a society have allowed the corporate mindset to dominate us in a way that our civilization will hopefully grow out of at some point.

While my rhetoric is abrasive, what I'm specifically opposing is the corporate dehumanization that is considered normal and even good by many people. It's very hard not to be abrasive when talking about such things. On the one hand you have a person who's fired for a technical breach of contract when it's clear that he was operating reasonably and in good faith, and on the other you have many people who's eyes glaze over at the injustice and harm to an individual's career because, hell, he screwed up and he breached his contract.

How to unglaze those eyes? I think one way is by making them take a side in the issue.

That whole "freedom isn't free" doesn't just apply to sticks and guns, but also to ideas, as you clearly know. It costs to say strong things, for me it costs me fear that people just won't like me.
Highschool baseball team ... best friends since
I hope they speed up temporary views in the future. MongoDB has a nice query-style language, and I think that it really helps ease some concerns for noobs to document-style data, plus, adds a nice level of flexibility.
Tennis match in a singles league... still kinda surprises me to this day that we're business partners now!
Down at the bottom is a link to a footnote with more information about the software and coding used:

http://samizdat.cc/cyoa/#fn3

Edit:

Wow! I just found the digitized Choose Your Own Adventure book with jump history:

http://samizdat.cc/cyoa/#/zork
The Rails backlash sometimes seems bigger then the hype ever was, and is cloying (so savvy, so de riguer). But this article is not one of those (you might think so from its title). The error messages really could use some TLC.
You wouldn't even have to parse the XML -- just anoint one form the canonical internal representation and then have filters which turn the internal representation into other formats.

For example, if you store all documents in a restricted version of HTML, then you can generate a text-only version by replacing all <em> and </em> with star, etc. This is much cheaper than actually parsing XML (no need to build up a data structure representation of the document, just assume it is mostly right already and apply textual transformations).

Then, once you have the plaintext version, cache it. Journalism sites are going to have an absurd number of reads to writes. (One guy writes the article, one guy edits it, 50,000 people see it within a minute of it being posted.) Caching is cheap and easy. Caching is robust against the article changing, too -- you purge the cache (or potentially just let it expire) and bam your new article is mostly right, whereas tracking the offset of <em>s seems to intuitively have a lot of possible failure modes to me. (For example, the first time one of your reporters tries to add a bit of local color with Japanese text in an article, I'll bet dollars to donuts that every tag after the Japanese breaks and the surrounding content gets corrupted.)
I remember when one of my friends told me that Intel had a trademark on the letter i. Of the alphabet. I grinned. Then he opened an Intel spec manual for some chip or other, and right there on one of the opening pages was a trademark statement for the lower case letter i.
I don't think a 50% tax that only aply's after the first 3+ million is going to change the lifestyle of your children. It's mostly a question of what happens to their children's children.

The advantage of a large (40+%) estate tax is to avoid creating an old money aristocracy. There is a long history of the problems created when people who never earned it get great wealth. Granted some people build upon inherited wealth, but it's far less common than you might think and looking at the net worth of people who inherited 100+ million you find few examples of people that did much better than investing in mutual funds.

Bill Gates might be considered a great CEO but he also inherited money and exploited family connections to sell an OS he never developed to IBM. None of which would have been impacted by estate taxes.

PS: Consider the Walton family the five of them all have about 15.3 - 15.7 billion because none of them are using it to actively generate more wealth. Even though they inherited it 15+ years ago it's just stagnating.
Surely this "trivial thing" is what is being patented though. I mean let's say hypothetically MS sues Apple, well Apple can say sure there are similarities but we don't do the accounts bit.
Oh, man, that new pointer syntax is going to trip up a lot of C/C++ programmers...
> Interface types are similar to interface types in languages like Java, with one huge exception: you don't need to declare what interface types you implement!

Nice. This seems to add the benefits of duck-typing, but with type checking.
Ignoring the argument is silly, you don't chose your parents. So, you don't chose the single largest impact on your success but, that's not the issue. The question is "Do we want a society primarily controlled by those who inherited money?" The reason we had huge numbers of smart people become investment bankers was the fact that conning stupid wealthy people is profitable. But, it's also a zero sum game that does little to help society at large. It's far better for society when the most efficient method for gathering wealth is generating it.
Tk is my favorite GUI toolkit
Dale Carnegie's Golden Book [pdf]
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I think I'm gonna try this with this dead 7800 I have sitting here.
I think wealth decays naturally anyway; especially if the descendent are not fit. Inflation and the exponential growth of offspring are already pretty good tools of attenuating growth. Moreover, it is easier to lose a fortune than to make one.

However, I do agree with you that it might be a robust guard against the inherited wealth class gaming the system. I would prefer to intervene when such injustice is committed, but admit that that is not always easy to do. The argument you use for curtailing that risk is similar to the argument I would make in favor of term-limits.
As a non-ruby dev, it isn't obvious to me that I should grep 'Homme' instead of 'HommeController' ...

A statically typed language with a good IDE (yes, like Java) will find almost all these errors for you as you type (excepting config files, like you said).
"But when one of your little miniservers goes down, who is it supposed to report the error to and how will that be dealt with? If there is no good answer, then what sense does it make to let a miniserver go down without warning?"

Answer: http://www.erlang.org/doc/design_principles/des_princ.html#1... . You send the error to the supervisor.

Go strikes me as less C++ meets Python than C meets Erlang, but Go has the C side covered better than the Erlang side so far. If Go "steals" the OTP framework, and especially if channels grow the ability to span across different nodes, Google will definitely have something interesting (to me).
What is implied by a roach motel for data?

I hate walled gardens. But I really don't think they are objectively the same tune different band. You're saying they will be spanking platform devs who's apps prove detrimental...well that's pretty different from Apple. Hugely different. Hmmm, hardly in the same class.

[edited to move part to a different parent comment]
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Call_option:

"The buyer of a call option wants the price of the underlying instrument to rise in the future"

I'm no expert but I think it means a lot of people knew this was going to happen and bought call options knowing the share price would rise. 3com closed at $5.69 and HP bought it for $7.90.
LightSail Energy. There isn't much on our website. We're stealth.
That's easily solved by divorcing submission karma from comment karma, which pg should do anyway.
I've just started doing a few small campaigns for my company, and just using the keyword tool to look at search traffic and average CPC for keywords can give you a little insight on how you can market your product/services (though I also realize those numbers technically only indicate what people who use Google like to search for... correlation is not causation :)
Yeah but there was a still sizable smorgasbord of junk food being created and marketed to us as kids too. We were well aware of different chocolates/biscuits/soft drink/fast food and while some kids still got this kind of stuff (much to the envy of most of the class) most kids were forced to eat basic prepared foods. In contrast, these days I meet kids who can't recall ever drinking water (always a soft drink or milk). Is it perhaps that the parents of the current generation were the first to grow up as children with fast food they couldn't have and so enable their kids (perhaps without conscious thought) to have what they couldnt?
This is clearly working for them. What is interesting about this is that it puts a vote on the SGML idea that content and presentation are nicely separated and identified by the tags. But this has always faintly concerned me, as to whether this really will work.

As an example madair in an earlier comment notes that em is intended to be a semantic tag. But do the semantics of this particular tag ever mean anything outside of "show this text as emphasized"?

I am wondering if whatever semantic markup we do is still all about presentation, and takes a fairly arbitrary abstraction of what the text is to mean.
For that the key is the privacy controls. We can argue about whether Facebook's privacy controls are good enough, whether they are selling our data, and so on. But that's got nothing to do with the Apple walled-garden comparison.

I can write a FB app and have it up in a jiffy, that's just not the case with Apple. And I will be so very very surprised if Facebook censors a dictionary app.
You would be surprised how hard it would be to lose billions of dollars. That kind of wealth is usually locked up pretty tight such that access is only available to some trickle of dollars coming out of the interest, trust funds, etc...

If a trustee loses everything then the next year, they have access to another annuity distribution.
Hayabusa MMA Gloves
Point by point explanation:

* 3Com stock is up 35% (at $5.69) in after-hour trading because HP is offering a premium to the current stock price to acquire it. A call option to buy the stock for the fixed price of $5 (until it expired next Friday) sold for 80 cents when the market closed.

* 3Com is up 2 bucks (35%) in the after market. The value of that call option will increase by around that mount. So the price of the option went up from 0.80 to ~2.80. That is an increase of 250%, which is way higher than 35%. This leverage is one reason people trade options.

* The option buyer used a market order ("bought on the ask") to buy a ton of options, which is executed immediately at current market price. More cautious buyers tend to use a limit order in markets that don't trade a lot (like this one). A limit order will buy at no more, or sell at no less, than a specific price. This will move the market price less.

* Given that the acquisition was announced later today, this large order of options is suspicious. This trade will almost certainly be investigated by the SEC.
Actually, as I look at carbon more closely, that's exactly what they're drawing. The inner circle (s orbital) has two yellow dots (electrons) on it, and the outer circle (p orbital) has 4 yellow dots. It does look like they totally ripped off this lady's drawing though: http://www.dorlingkindersley-uk.co.uk/nf/ClipArt/Image/0,,_1...

Clearly they aren't drawing the orbitals for water, which I already stated.

But you're right, carbon is probably too big. Wolfram alpha says the diameter of carbon is 134pm, and we all know WA is right about everything.
I don't think you can be taught stock trading in an HN reply; when someone speaks in an interesting but undecipherable jargon, it's best to make a mental TODO note of it and do your own independent research.

In a nutshell, what he means is that news of the acquisition was leaked to the public, which explains the huge interest in the 3COM stock; it saw unusual uptick in the traders' interest in it, meaning there was information those traders were privy to. If you know someone was going to buy a company for an X amount of dollars per share, and you had the opportunity to purchase those very shares before the acquisition for X-Y dollars. If you bought N shares, you would be making N*Y dollars in profit, with in a few days (until the sale is final.)

Not bad.
Documentary of an ant colony from the inside out
Sure.

Say there's a stock, and on average it trades 100,000 shares per day. And then one day, we see large orders, someone actively buying shares on the offer, about 450,000. And then the day after the stock jumps up on being acquired. The odds are very high that someone new ahead of time.

The same thing happens in the options market. The COMS options market is relatively dull. It doesn't trade much, and there are not that many contracts open. Then all of a sudden a player goes out and buys 6,000 calls, half of which expire in 10 days. These contracts give them the right to buy COMS at $5 a share.

The volume traded today was about 17x normal, and these contracts were bought to open.

So at 12PM a trade came out and bought 3800 Nov 5 Calls for 0.65. They also bought 3100 Dec Calls for .80. I'm sure this wasn't a calendar spread as the November calls were bought not sold.

So someone put about 500k down on a very speculative bet. And now the name is up 35% aftermarket.

Not including any premium, the contracts are now worth about 2.70. So they made about 1.5M, or a 300% return overnight.

Anyways, I just laid out the premise for an SEC investigation (and hopefully) prosecution. If they don't they're either cowards or stupid.
It's a reference to the old roach motel slogan: "Roaches check in, but they can't check out".

In this case, referring to the fact that Facebook doesn't exactly go out of their way to provide you with the ability to 'take your data and leave'. Can you get an easy dump of all of your comments? Your friends' contact info? Your photos?
what he means is that news of the acquisition was leaked to the public

That's the thing, it wasn't. The entire volume was done on a single trade by a single buyer... that's fraudulent.

Same thing happened with Perot systems, and the guy got picked up by the SEC.
I don't think so. I think the vast majority of users will down-vote and/or flag comments intentionally padded with nonsense.

I'd like to see a more sophisticated quality detection system - a learning text classifier of some sort. PG might have enough experience in that field of programming to come up with something useful along those lines.
Ideology in the work place is tricky. It's something most people should be very careful about. Most of us cannot opt out of a platform/technology we dislike personally. Even if you can it may be hard to rationalize their existence when you deposit your paycheck. I hope it works out for him.
If an exception is thrown within the server function, who catches it?

Go does not have exceptions for precisely this reason.
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You know what, it's not really that much better. It's better, but it's not so much better that I can really tell that one is written by a computer.

If you factor in the costs, time to market, and other factors, I can easily see the automated version winning out in the long run.

I'm sure similar comparisons were made between robots on factory lines and people as well, but the cost differentials really push toward automation. Perhaps robots will write the initial article and then hand it off to a person for the flair.
I've found RubyMine to do a pretty good job with "red squiggly things". Its an IDE (yes, like Java) but for Ruby. A dynamic language. Static typing isn't a necessity for a good IDE, just look at Smalltalk.
I have to agree. Google should have known better before naming a new language "go" in 2009.

It is hard to believe, they didn't think by now someone else would have come up with that name for a language.

Or did assume they would just throw a bunch money and lawyers at whoever comes out claiming the name.

Something similar happened to http://www.wxwidgets.org (ex-wxWindows). Microsoft payed the author some money and he changed the name of the project. I don't think that would be such a bad outcome.