skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I can't "confirm" it, but these are slightly dickish caricatures of the Jason Fried/37signals/Getting Real concepts. Jason is a good, smart guy and anyone who wouldn't waste his time doing something like this.
I never click on any ads. Didn't install Ad blocker because that's how sites make money. I seriously believe ads' can't make someone buy a product right away, they essentially serve as a billboard that we see on the highway. At least that how i look at it as of now.
Stock coolers don’t mean anything anymore
Easy Partials in Rails
What are your metrics for comparing it to salesforce? My company is thinking about switching from sugar to salesforce and this is an interesting option if it is indeed better.
For one of our JS bundles it's a substantial improvement over YUI's Compressor.

Original: 459220

YUI: 241920

Google: 209929 -- 13% improvement

YUI + gz: 66164

Google + gz: 61297 -- 7% improvement

Caught a few non-fatal syntax errors too. We serve hundreds of thousands of those a day, so that's already committed to our tree and on the way to testing.
I don't think that you can judge a real-time one to many discussion by a snapshot in time. There are frequently very good discussions taking place.

How would you suggest such a large group as #profood have real-time discussions with so many contributors on one person's blog?

You have to join forums and BBS'. How do you find out about them in the first place? Retweeting has the benefit that followers who don't know about #profood will see the messages.

For example, if you find out about Monterey Bay Aquarium's Seafood Watch and follow them, you'll then find out about #profood where you'll find out about all sorts of organizations and experts who Tweet in #profood. I have met people that I would never have otherwise met and learned things that I would never have learned from one forum, blog, or BBS.

You have to use it to 'get it.'

I don't understand why non-users are so emotional about discounting it's value.

@CulinaryHatchet
Mockup with Mockingbird
Is he whiny? He's a designer, this is his 'blogazine' about design, of course his post is going to be about AA's design. Later after posting from a result of his and Mr. X's actions Mr. X go fired. If I was Dustin I would have been concerned and outraged too and dam well would have written about it.
I don't know if I'm the only one who finds this pattern of acting on the string representation of the function as being a bit distressing.

One the one hand it's a bit like using macros, on the other, there's clearly no first class support for it in the language, and the possibilities for breaking things horribly when your best tools are regexen seems high.
Reminds me of a story from Tony Robbins. This turnaround expert was hired to fix Six Flags. Now the Eureka moment came when the employees started to think of their business as being in league with Disneyland, instead of being in league with the local Midway fairs. So for Microsoft to give lip service to Zoho is really a terrible move on their part, since strategically they want their product to be on the same level as no one, but they just revealed that they don't feel that way about Office.
But I think what makes twitter interesting is that anyone can become a broadcaster. Now, this is not news for people in the media, because they will just have another channel. But for everyone else it important.
And this, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, is a lesson in why establishing a brilliant culture in your company is of utmost important. It's amazing to me to see all the praises in this thread for JetBlue and would be interesting to see a case study comparing the differences in culture between the two brands.
I'm pretty sure this is what Steve Yegge was talking about on the most recent StackOverflow podcast he was in.

If that is accurate, it's a JavaScript compiler that supports a way of partially compiling to allow very tight integration with an IDE (or editor). Yegge's point was that an IDE or editor should not have to re-invent the wheel and a compiler should be able to provide sophisticated feedback about syntax, objects, variables, scope, etc.

Cool to see it out in the wild.
Good point. Maybe not the best example.
Yes. that is why I build my own shit. it makes no sense. I waste the time of a highly paid salesguy, and you charge me less than the guy who quietly pays what the website says? that seems backwards to me.

No matter; I usually pay less than half buying parts (which are usually sold in a rational manner) and assembling myself.
I love systems76.com new thin Lemur laptop with Ubuntu

forget Dell
I think YC is sufficiently competitive that teams without a demo (on the application) will not even get an interview. Also (I believe it has been said), the two weeks from when you're notified to the weekend of the interview should be sufficient to produce some kind of early stage demo. Your startup idea might be unfit for YC if you can't at least have something to show in two weeks of fervent work.
I bought a couple 1U servers from dell. Since none of my credit cards would go over a few thousand for a single purchase I called Dell up to ask if I could send them a check. I got transferred 12 times! I'm not kidding you, I was counting. Eventually, when I got to 13, I couldn't understand a word the guy was saying so I just hung up.

During those transfers they asked if I was charging them to my companies account. I couldn't believe how easily they were going to allow me to charge a personal purchase to the place they were going to be delivered.

Eventually I found out that their web interface allowed you to split a purchase over a few credit cards. Few years later they are still running with zero problems. Get them with DRAC, its great.

Bottom line is, if you are buying from Dell, either you are a "Dude, I'm getting dell guy", or a company with an account. If you are just buying a few rackmount servers, dont fit a profile and can get serious hassles.
I'm getting disillusioned with software naming. Everyone wants a cool name that's fun to say, but all the names mean other things too, and quite a few don't describe the project very well.
Closure Compiler - Google Code
I can't help but completely agree with that. After all, that's how I got most of my reputation score on StackOverflow. On the other hand, advocates of smaller but prouder technologies (such as Lisp) are more generous with upvotes than followers of more "mainstream" languages such as C# or Java.
Thematic Maps with JavaScript
We could always try an experiment have have this debate on Twitter ;-)

It's best to pick a short hashtag because it counts in your character limit.

#BHeard

@BHeard
I wonder where all those recent down-voters come from. It used to be more friendly around here. When only trolls got voted down to 0 or less.
Rarely seen Steve Jobs - Where it all began
Here's another data point:

I downloaded jquery-1.3.2.js and jquery-1.3.2.min.js from http://docs.jquery.com/Downloading_jQuery#Current_Release

> wc -c jquery-1.3.2.js

120763

> wc -c jquery-1.3.2.min.js

57254

> java -jar compiler.jar --js jquery-1.3.2.js | wc -c

55340

Using Google's compiler saves an additional 4% over the existing minified version

(disclosure: I used to work for Google)
The main argument against this is that teachers might be penalized for teaching in rough schools instead of lily-white. middle class, suburban schools. I don't see a reason the system couldn't be set up to normalize the schools based on what the metrics turn out to be.

I guess each school would get a performance index that would act as a coefficient for the teachers there. E.g., the metric is a test score, and one school consistently scores near the national average, while another is 10 points lower. The teachers at the lower school would have their evaluation bumped 10 points because of the index. That way we'd be comparing apples to applies.

It could actually incentivize teachers to move into more difficult schools if the index were a little over done so that they were rewarded slightly more for the same effort. Their effort would theoretically move the school's average into line with the national average, then they'd be evaluated/paid the same -- they could then move on to the next problem school, and improve that.
Backchannel - use case for Google Wave
You're not the only one. This is an html builder library for Javascript, with very little to do with Haml.
Lots of people make the jump. Like getting married, having a baby or quitting your job, its not a matter of "if your not your not", its more like getting your nerve up and jumping off the dock.
Based on all of the different third-party offerings of the same nVidia chipset, I determined cooling (and packaging design) was one of the differentiators.

And the optional pretty little CD wallet for the drivers disc. Which doesn't seem to offer much for my linux system. But that's another gripe.
BlueBeat Claims to Own New Copyrights to Old Beatles Songs
I remember a survey that said essentially that (I tried for a couple minutes to find the link but I can't).

I forget the actual numbers in the study but my recollection was that the number of people who read an e-mail with a picture of a smiling person on it was significantly higher. They attributed this to a couple factors...

1. When you differentiate people tend to pause. So someone going through 20 e-mails of all text will pause on the one with a picture for no other reason than it's different.

2. People tend to reflect emotion from other people and a picture can trigger that to a lesser extent. This is a well established psychological tendency that people have. Imagine yourself walking up to a group of your friends who are all laughing at something. Even without knowing what they are laughing at you'll instinctively start to smile. Same concept.

Hence the theory that people are more likely to read an e-mail with a smiling person's picture.
Using this code on the code here (except for processing.js):
http://github.com/cburroughs/minification-compare/tree/maste...

Latest full release of yuicompressor vs closure at SIMPLE_OPTIMIZATIONS level:

----- TOTALS -----
base: yui-compressor-2.4.2
('abs diff:', '768050', 'gz: ', '184071')
('% change: ', -0.56976157623774126, 'gz: ', -0.51009685330672982)
challenger: closure-compiler
('abs diff:', '814830', 'gz: ', '193817')
('% change: ', -0.60446432545511197, 'gz: ', -0.53710493134361448)
"Closure" being a general concept in programming, I always disliked the name "Clojure". Same thing as Google Chrome, everyone is now confused when you talk about browser chrome as a general thing.
So now there is Clozure common lisp, Clojure for the JVM, and now Closure.

I was already getting the first two mixed up.
I'd go further. Patents are nice to haves for VCs and investors and look pretty on glossy business plans (look at our shiny algorithms and wireframes!). Don't bet the success of your company on your patent portfolio. The fact is, no startups out there succeed in the long run because of their proprietary technology (think facebook, myspace, youtube, yahoo, google, flickr). Even if something is "rocket science" and very hard to build, it might keep your competition at bay for a while. But once, you're successful, they'll always find a way to do it. So, what can you do? Figure out your sustainable competitive advantage. What is the rocket science that will insulate your startup from big competitors? I think that is the angle worth exploring here.
It's not marketing. Marketing is doing well, but operations are crap. Two different departments.

My advice to Dell. Don't sack the marketing guys, get better operations people.
I didn't say that protocols which can be described in under 10 pages are necessarily secure! However, if you can describe something in less than 10 pages, it's probably going to be obviously insecure, rather than having problems lurking unnoticed for a decade.
Free Open Source ASP.NET Shopping Cart: nopCommerce
Thanks for the advice. I was under the impression that the demo would be unimportant, and since I'm in school right now, I thought I'd go slow at it unless I am accepted.

I can whip up something in two weeks easy (even with school), but I didn't submit a demo in the application because I didn't think it would be necessary, so I focused on developing the idea instead.
You're asking the wrong person. I was the creative/mkting director... but also, the startup began in 2005 and died in late 2007-ish. AFAIK, there were not very many scalable solutions for a gaming platform when we first started. But again, I'm not the right person to ask about this. :)
4th Time's a Charm - How We Got Through the iPhone App Store's Reject-o-matic
It's not so much that there is a discount, as it is that the market using a sales guys is a lot less.

The reason is that if you use a sales guy, you're considered a "client", and they can get a good idea of your total profitability based on a collective snapshot of everything you buy. If you use the web, they don't.
> Even the editor of Bon Appetit wrote about it, How many other food trucks do you think she writes about? Major PR score!

That's probably more due to the fact that Kogi made the New York Times and the LA Times, than due to direct Twitter awareness. Kogi often has long lines now, but that pretty much started happening when it hit traditional media. The first time I went to Kogi was last December, before it hits NYTimes/LATimes, and there was no line.

Definitely Twitter helped them hit their early following, but it doesn't seem that a majority of their customers now use Twitter. Last few times I've been waiting in line for Kogi, most people I talked to around me got the word that the truck was there due to their website itself, or word of mouth from friends.

> I didn't follow balloon boy but I can picture the scenario that anyone interested could follow the balloon's path in real-time

You could have also followed it on CNN. It's funny that Balloon Boy is an example. That story was not broken on Twitter, but via traditional news channels, and all the Twitter chatter was based around updates from those same traditional news channels. Except if you tried to follow the story on Twitter, you'd have way more noise to filter through, as Twitter has a lot of redundant posts (Retweets don't add any value when you're searching).
It seems like femtocells are are a half way solution. Leveraging a dual mode smartphone would provide much easier solution. Maybe a phone based client that automatically routes through the WiFi to the cellular infrastructure would be a better solution.

I know t-mobile has a solution but that still requires you to get a separate router and it is limited to certain phones. .

I've looked at enterprise solutions like Agito Networks, but the cost seems prohibitively high for non enterprise users..
You host your own blog? WordPress.com is your friend. Get on the cloud, man! :-)
Also, the Ghostery Firefox plugin is supposed to be good for blocking Google Analytics and similar services.
Haml? Looks more like Markaby-inspired to me.
Corporation Versus Limited Liability Company
I'm quite impressed with the differences table.

9 | | 73 | | 241 | | 561 | | 1081 | | 1849
| 64 | | 168 | | 320 | | 520 | | 768 |
| | 104 | | 152 | | 200 | | 248 | |
| | | 48 | | 48 | | 48 | | |
> How do you protect your idea without any kind of "secret sauce"?

Wrap it in a business model that's somewhat robust to competition. Photo uploading is not technically complex, but the business model to support free is more of a barrier to entry.
Glad to see Matt writing more. I've always enjoyed his posts.
Ask for feedback: Google Alerts for Twitter Lists - Listiti.com
I learned about difference tables in Conway and Guy's great book "The Book of Numbers". I wish the book had been available when I was an undergrad. It describes everything I loved in math that I wasn't able to pinpoint. There are so many little gems in it, I've spent months reading it halfway through and then starting over to pick up what I missed. Highly recommended. http://www.amazon.com/Book-Numbers-John-H-Conway/dp/03879799...
My guess is that scientific computation is a lot of fun. Plenty of clean mathematics. Probably not too much dingy boiler room stuff. I can see how one would be attracted to using languages like Python (and maybe Scheme too) for such tasks.
Crazy marketing idea: Record your work.
"Anyone can become a broadcaster" also counts for blogs, mailing lists, usenet, etc. People still have to opt in to tune into you, so why is Twitter more interesting than all those other options?
Mark,

In the past you have flowed about the wonders (price) of Dell on the Seattle tech startups mailing list. One stumble in the relationship, and you're telling the world how awful they are. You even went so far as to publically mock the appearance of your Dell sales rep. This type of public bullying might not produce the desired outcome. That is, if your desired outcome is to get a good price on your server and maintain a relationship with your vendor.

Sales reps are human beings, fallible and fraught with human problems. Perhaps your rep came down with a certain flu and forgot to tell his/her customers who their secondary is. As a customer of Dell, I keep all of my "sales team"'s contacts in a text file, for this very reason. (For the record, I hate dealing with Dell, and choose HP or Sun whenever I have the option.)

If you feel Dell is untrustworthy, consider moving on. HP and Sun are superior alternatives who are willing to match Dell's price. You just need to know how to work the channels (for HP call up CDW, for Sun look for Tim Van Loan). Also, Supermicro resellers like Silicon Mechanics, PogoLinux, or Penguin Computers sell servers comparable to Dell's crappy
commodity hardware, and will likely beat Dell's server offerings.

From an infrastructure management point of view, your model is broken if you cannot afford a few extra days in provisioning. Consider multiple suppliers, or rethinking the model. Cloud and Dedicated server models are designed towards infrastructures that require rapid resource provisioning.
> So someone going through 20 e-mails of all text will pause on the one with a picture for no other reason than it's different.

So when every other marketing email has a picture of a recently-laid soul patch guy, it will make sense to send plain text again?
Identity on the web is broken
"Twitter is what you make of it."

If what most people make of it is banal posts and celebrity watching, is it deserving of all the hype?
The irony of my comment above is that I'm just the opposite. A picture of any kind embedded in the content is usually my cue to move along.
More details on the page -- regarding what the money is needed for -- would probably help increase the amount of donations. Also a link to the local news story would be good.
I'll give microblogging a serious thought when there are protocol standards and more than one provider is actually operating in the space.

All of the open protocols are already in place for someone to trivially build a clone of twitter's basic functionality. And actually, there are a number of microblogging sites out there lying mostly derelict.

The real value of twitter is not its technology, but its vibrant user activity. And you usually don't get critical user mass unless a closed system is locking them in somehow.
that's the exception, not the rule right? It's also a example of something that I would absolutely write thorough tests for.

I'm also curious how modular it is. Does a kernel hacker have to keep the structure of that whole set of code in his/her head? I'm guessing there are a lot of clean seams in it that in practice reduce the actual lok related to a project down to a much smaller number.
Yesterday I got to see a great Foo Fighters concert, because someone queuing for tickets twittered about it.

Benefits like that are good enough for me. Twitter has been the best source for me to learn about events in my city in the last year.
GNU Screen, Emacs, and Mac OS X
No. However, I am more optimistic than I was a year ago. I think that here in the USA our economy will (hopefully, slowly) settle downwards over the next decade - I don't think it will fall off a cliff. Slow adjustments are good because people have a chance to adjust their lifestyles and expectations.

My wife and I don't buy anything on credit, including property, cars, etc. We save first, then buy - a smart way to live (I think) because it avoids a life time of making interest payments at the small cost of having to wait a while before making large purchases. Having a modest life style also helps :-)

It seems like most of our whole country has gone crazy living on credit.
Would love for this to be true, but I really want to hear a success story from someone who actually build an audience on unscripted day-to-day work recording.
> Linux is meant to be stable, secure, reliable.

Disagree. It's meant to scratch a lot of different itches that a lot of different contributors have.
PayPal Adaptive Accounts - Create PayPal accounts from within your app
I've been using a Macbook with a SSD for about a year (mainly for coding in Eclipse), and it's noticeably snappier than my desktop machine with a magnetic drive.
It was definitely worth the cost for the productivity boost.
Joel vs. Joel (about startup discussions): And The Winner Is...
Well, I'm pretty sure you'll hear a success story about this from us. We're implementing it.
That's not really programming, now is it? I was hoping for some genetic or soil modification that outputs "Hello world" in size or color variation of the grown wheat.
Google's Eric Schmidt on What Sets Silicon Valley Apart
Naming is a pretty powerful thing. If you name your crap with regular nouns, what's left for others there?

Like, suppose you build a crappy GUI system and just dub everything based on simple self-describing words such as windows, word, notepad, internet explorer, you might end up wildly successful yet for reasons other than technical superiority.
Recording your work for promotional goals works when your audience can do your job. Watching a chef will teach you how to cook. A programmer may enjoy watching you code.

When your target audience doesn't directly have the skills to understand the raw footage, that's when editing comes in. Think of all the documentaries on PBS. They address I know nothing about, but provide me with enough background information that I can follow what is going on. And in the process, I learned something. Which is great.
I like the vesting idea. Don't co-founders often disagree on decisions though? I'm not sure I agree there are fewer decisions in the early stages. Perhaps even more.
I am never going to be able to refer to an actual closure again and have anyone understand what I'm talking about, am I?
My employer provides a completely customized catalog for each customer. We view this as one of our competitive advantages.

In fact, I'm working on this subsystem right now. For large catalogs and large numbers of customers, this becomes quite challenging. There's a huge volume of data, and keep it current while product pricing, availability, licensing terms, etc. change, is tough.
Indeed, I took it to mean that OSS guys only build from source, or something along those lines.

Proprietary software uses binary formats, yes, but interchanging 'proprietary' with 'binary' is a bit confusing.
Being smart and attentive to detail are not related to age. So I'm not much surprised. Lucky for FLOSS and Ruby communities, one more new and bright guy came in.
How to Achieve Your Goals by Changing the Way You Surf the Web
There's a Firefox extension BetterPrivacy that will delete your Flash cookies automagically.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6623
Report: Mossad hacked Syrian computer to uncover nuke site - Haaretz