skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Basically every community has their heroes, people that from the outside look like cult leaders but from the inside look like wise sages. Hacker News and Paul Graham. Joel on Software and Joel Spolsky. StackOverflow and Jeff Atwood/Joel Spolsky. FictionAlley and Cassandra Claire. Haskell and Oleg Kiselyov. Google and Jeff Dean.

Their popularity outside the community seems to reflect the popularity of the community itself, which in turn reflects how much it does for the world at large and how similar its values are to the "mainstream". I'm kinda curious why such cult followings develop, but it seems to be a near-universal feature of communities of sufficient size (basically anything over Dunbar's number, where not all members know all other members). I've got a few hypotheses on this but no answers.
This article has nothing to do with the general content of hacker news. This is an article about the social status of women and how they overcome it, more political than anything else.

I would rather see articles about successful women leading innovative companies, doing innovative research, or saying intelligent things that don't hide behind "male" pen names.

I think intelligent female hackers actually get a lot of respect from fellow male hackers and this would be more on-topic if it pertained to hacker culture.

This article gives women more reason to hide behind a facade then it does to actually inspire them!
Probably reliability. From Intel's docs:

X25-M: 1,200,000 Hours
X25-E: 2,000,000 Hours

I'd be willing to replace them more regularly for the added capacity though.
I wonder how Indian names are perceived in technology. There are a lot of examples of brilliant Indian computer scientists and entrepreneurs, but I suspect that Indian names are still viewed unfavorably in Silicon Valley. Everyone has experience with say, math profs with indecipherable accents, crappy Indian outsourcing firms, or the QA department that's entirely staffed with low-skill imports.
HPC Specialist Verari Sacks Staff, Restructures
Yes. I just had to open Task Manager to figure what the hell was going on. This box isn't amazing, but a dual core proc being pegged using Chrome to render a web page feels a bit absurd.
It's not a complicated version of the same solution - it's cheaper version of the same solution. As expensive as flash is, it's still cheaper than the equivalent amount of RAM.
URLs in Ruby
Name has always made a difference. Do you know how many Indian programmers have American sounding pen names on freelance websites? They'll always get more work and higher per hour rates with an American sounding name than an Indian sounding name.
I agree with you. I think the quantity of craft content has exploded in recent years, with the rise of blogging and with digital content sites displacing traditional media. However, as a proportion of total Internet content, yes, McDonalds content may dominate the pie chart.

I contrast the stuff I regularly read on two of my favorite online (non-tech) content sites, Salon.com and OpenSalon.com, to something like AOL.com's homepage and many of the blogs @ Xanga.com, and I notice a considerable difference in craft. But that doesn't mean the craft stuff isn't out there -- and in much greater quantity than ever before.

That's basically my rule for the web. The average quality of everything on the web is low, but total absolute quantity of high-quality content is higher than the world before the web. That's part of the reason I built my startup, http://parse.ly -- to help people find the good stuff based on their own personal interests.
Log4PHP 2.0.0 Released
I do not see how obfuscation is necessary for copyright.
you can't reference a good link without sharing it, that's just not fair :)
> I'm sure they have tested ads without photos, or with photos of something other than people, and found that photos of attractive smiling real estate agents work best.

Describing real estate agents as people who use empirical study in their marketing efforts doesn't match with my experience. The industry is full of "do it because that's what we always do" attitudes regarding the marketing of homes. Zillow's research seems to back this up - agent headshot ads performed way worse than anything else (http://www.zillow.com/blog/the-top-and-bottom-performing-ads...).
This is good food for thought. Let's also add to this a concept from a different realm: Everybody has at least two dns servers listed in their /etc/resolv.conf, right? The reason is that in case one of them goes down, there is the other one.

So this seems like a good lesson to take about backups. Mebbe three? One by your hosting provider, one at tarsnap, one on a separate dat tape, one on a usb stick?

A good point is though that even something as big as a dat tape looks pretty small by the standards of what we need to back up today.
Didn't you have ID with proof of age?
They use the relatively-nonvolatile fluoride ion (F-), not the gaseous molecular fluorine (F2). Fluoride is corrosive in higher concentrations, but nowhere near as dangerous as the oxidative toxicity of fluorine gas.

Re. nitrogen, the radiation would turn it into ionized nitrogen radicals. Any info on how much damage that would cause to the graphite and metals? Also, carbon-14 is preferentially concentrated into living things, so a release would provoke a political panic similar to strontium-90.
Kayak/Bing Travel wasn't Microsoft, IIRC. They acquired another company who copied the look and feel of Kayak.
Customer focus - having an insanely strong focus on the customer distinguishes them from equally innovative competitors like Google.

I'm not so sure about that -- Google certainly claim (and intend) to be very strongly focused on the customer. Do you think Amazon are more effective at this than Google?
Was that really the prime motivator in joining MS? How do you mean "be a voice for startups"? Cool.

People usually cite this reasoning for joining the government -- an organization whose mandate is toward the greater good of its people, but I've never heard it applied toward a corporate entity, whose mandate is solely profit.

Would you mind posting a bit more about your motivations and thinking? I would really like to hear.
See, I still don't get it. I mean, to me, the nokia communicators of 10 years ago look like better devices than the iphone.

But then, I guess most people really like the touch screen interface, and apple (maybe? I wouldn't know. I can't stand touch screens) was the first to get the touch screen right.
What data, and how to present that in an advertisement?
Hacker News reader for iPhone (new native app)
That's a good point and a much simpler way to make good returns.
you have a good point; more features, all other things being equal, means more complexity.
after the instance has been up for ~55 minutes, you have your 5 minute warning.

Nope; Amazon can terminate spot instances at any time. Thought experiment: Assume EC2 is full (which it will be from now on) and someone requests a regular instance. To create the instance promptly, EC2 will have to shut down a spot instance.

(But then also request a bunch more spot instances at below the current spot price, in an attempt to drive down spot instance pricing.)

That's not how auctions work. The number of bids below the winning price is irrelevant.
Amix,

I feel for you, man. This is really awful to wake up and see.

China has totally different laws though -- do you know if this kind of copying is legal there? I have a number of friends who have told me that the whole web startup scene in Beijing is totally different than the US because the rules of the market are completely different over there (rampant copying, theft, DDOS attacks among competitors, etc). One example of this I've heard is that game developers have to give away their games for free and then rely on in-game purchases to make money, because there's no chance of actually selling software upfront.

What are your thoughts?

Best of luck fighting this -- hopefully this will just be a funny war story in a few months time.
There's a tradeoff between download time and execution speed there, and download time usually wins. I wrote the camelCaser in Google Websearch (basing it off Closure), and I used a simple regexp without memoization. You can burn a lot of cycles in the time it takes to download a hundred bytes over 56.6k, and often a camelCaser is used in situations like an animation loop where speed doesn't matter as long as you come in under the frame rate.
First ever interview with Sean Ellis
Sorry, that one wasn't the most effective example. 'undefined' is read-only in the ES3.1 specification and at some point you'll start to see code like the above failing.

15.1.1.3 undefined
The value of undefined is undefined (see 8.1). This property has the attributes { [[Writable]]: false,
[[Enumerable]]: false, [[Configurable]]: false }.

It's true that it can be broken today by unintentional assignment at the global scope, but you're basically skating on thin ice as soon as you redefine undefined or one of the many built-in global object types or global mutable values anyways (Array, Element, Object, NaN for example). Ditto for adding anything to Object.prototype.

I wouldn't blame a framework for wanting to place at least some burden on the user to follow a set of basic guidelines to ensure the library functions correctly. Ideally you'd ship your development-time, unminified version of the library with a bunch of startup-time assertions to ensure that the user isn't accidentally walking over core JS objects.

Alternatively, you could workaround the mutable nature of some of the globals by defining your own in-scope. When these values are eventually made read-only, these assignments should become no-ops:

var undefined = void 0;
var NaN = 0/0;
var Infinity = 1/0;

This is comment is rambling a bit, but I think I can justify the position that at least some of the recommended practices of the c.l.j folk are wordy, unnecessary and out-dated.
Not really, at least, not this time and not by this person.
If it was a set of anagrams, frequency analysis would have matched medieval Italian. See:

http://www.ciphermysteries.com/2009/02/17/edith-sherwoods-an...
The author does elaborate on that theory in a previous article:
http://www.edithsherwood.com/voynich_author_da_vinci
Reasons the 21st Century is Making You Miserable
Awesome work. Well worth £1.19.
If we can write a program that translates said arbitrary program into the rules for an n-state, m-symbol turing machine, where n = (2|3|4|5) and m = 2, then yes - we can determine if the program terminates or not.

We can make some fuzzy guesses whether or not the program terminates or not in other state/symbol combinations.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Busy_beaver

If we ever did write said program that could determine whether any /arbitrary/ program is infinite, then we have solved the halting problem. And that would be quite something.
Here's some more info: http://jf.posterous.com/after-5-years-of-using-linux-and-mac...
have my software make a decision to instantiate a full-price instance if my queue is too long and having no cheap-o priced instances running is going to mess things up.

Maybe auto scaling can do this for you; if it detects that the group has no instances it will start a new (full-priced) one.
> if I wasn't very familiar with the ripped off site.

Considering the ripped off site is a chief competitor of this software, I suspect the rip-off was aware at least by mid-level managers.

Well, either they were aware of the rip-off, or they were wildly incompetent to the point where they didn't even know their chief competitor's site.
The Original iPhone Was A Flop
Perfectly fine on OS X 10.6.2/Webkit 4 on this measly 13" MacBook.
Funny you should mention that. I'm Irish and white but my name (Eddy Robinson) 'sounds black' to a lot of people, and I wasn't aware of this until someone I was doing business with expressed surprise on our first meeting. I did a quick straw poll of acquaintances who I'd had first contact via email or seeing my resume and they confirmed this assumption. I can't say it's ever affected me personally though I wonder sometimes if it's a factor when I bid on a job and don't get a reply.

This article made me think more about the possibilities if I had picked some place other than California to live when I came to the US: http://daisysdeadair.blogspot.com/2008/04/on-having-black-na...
Well, at the other extreme the gnu people also try not to look into other code, even if it is open-source !

http://sourceware.org/ml/libc-help/2008-08/msg00009.html
The U.S. is a second-world country, but it's not Asia's fault. China had nothing to do with the emergence of tent cities.

We have more in common with Brazilian society (high economic inequality, corruption) than with Europe at this point.

An invariant across societies is that when the value of land and real estate becomes high (relative to incomes) the culture and civic values are in decline, and there's serious risk of a reversion to feudalism. This is why it was obvious in the late '90s that our society was in decline. The question is whether we can reverse the bleeding and get on the right track.
i use emacs but this really strikes me as an odd question that seems to suppose that emacs is 'better' than vim.
This is incorrect. What is being described is closer to PEGs. A parser for context-free grammars will correctly handle ambiguity between alternatives, whereas a PEG (and modern regex engines) will just try all of the alternatives and choose the first one that matches.
Another angle to 501(c) is that the non-profit is then eligible for corporate matching programs. There are still corps. out there, .eg. IBM, that match 1-1.

But there is overhead involved, setting it up, filing returns, etc..
I second this article - it really made me like James Cameron... dude is hard core.
As a Chinese guy, I have to say that the above comment is generally correct - there is fundamentally a different awareness of the concept of IP in Asia.

More frankly, this concept doesn't really exist.

It's not that the culture is more tolerant of ripping others off, but rather that when it comes to creative works, it's not seen as ripping off. Being able to take, adapt, and re-release the work of others, even for-profit, is a matter of course for the majority of the population. Many are not even aware of the moral issues surrounding it, and as far as they are concerned, none exists.

In all likelihood this wasn't so much a team under pressure and stealing out of desperation - in all likelihood someone just did it without very much thought... and it flew under the radar of those who know better.
I also read that script many years ago, back when kuro5hin was a fun place to hang out...
Bias is not necessarily an "ism".

Saying "sexism" has with it the connotation that there is a fundamental wrong here which should be corrected for the betterment of our society. That it's a product of backwards thinking and known prejudices.

What you are seeing here though is much more than that. We're seeing that people conform to a pre-ordained bias. In this case, that all good writers are upper-crust white guys with distinguished names. This is a much deeper and subconscious display of human behaviour that all of us are bound to.

It is unlikely that all of this woman's readers feel women should be barefoot in the kitchen.
(OT) I would have to upvote this even if it were only the regeXzibit pic.
The link 404s
Nice presentation!

Sorry that this is little off topic, but: MongoDB is released under the AGPL. As a MongoDB user, I have been fine with this because I always use mongodb as-is as a service, and will probably never want to modify it. Question though: why is it a big deal that MySQL be available with commercial licenses as long as it is used as a service, and there are non-GPL client libraries available? I asked this question before, but did not receive very many replies. The bruhaha over the Oracle Sun acquisition made me think more about this.
Well, reading the entire article, there were a/b tests there, so the increasing experience claim doesn't explain the result.
Review My Startup: Recruitly
Read the guidelines [1]:

"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."

[1] http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Just take care you don't look like 50 once you're 40 -- and even young looking people can age quickly at that age. If this is an advantage or not, probably depends on whether it's discounts or, well, girls :-) you're after.

I personally find the article's conclusion rather tautological. Especially since with elderly people even a minor illness can make them look older within days.
I disagree; "you shouldn't read Open Source code" doesn't fix anything much because it's impossible to find out if developers are sticking to it or not (so it doesn't decrease the burden of proof). It's just as impossible to prove that MS work doesn't include GPL code with or without the rule :)

A better (more effective) one is, surely, dont reuse restricted code.... :)
"When most of us think about computer programming, we think of typing in lines and lines of code with semicolons and complex syntax. This common perception about computer programming helps keep people from getting excited about computer programming" I don't know about you guys, but that GETS me excited...
Along with JK Rowling, if I am not mistaken.
I think your argument lacks a crucial element. Since public resources are limited we cannot just fund everything that meets the criteria you cite. Tax-payer funded work comes with a process of prioritising and deciding what is important to the public and should therefore receive public funds.

Someone has to decide whether building a particular new bridge or hospital is more or less important than Rich Hickey building Clojure or Monty Widenius building MySQL.

Right now I don't see how open source development is connected to that democratic decision making process (apart from research grants) and I don't know that I want to see it connected to be honest.
They can't steal what's really valuable about Plurk:

1) Your loyal community
2) The team that created this site in the first place

All they got was a snapshot of what you were doing yesterday.
Both are highly data-driven and responsive to customer metrics. But Amazon sees personalized customer support as a core value that they provide in-house. Google sees support as a pure cost, to be eliminated through automation.

(That's not to say that Amazon is always great at support, but I do feel that there's a different attitude about it, having worked at Amazon and having many friends working at Google.)
Troll Apple users, get web hits, sell ads. Duh.
Unless you are very specialized and find a job posting that matches your skill and industry specialization, it is hard to get flown across the country for an interview.

It has happened, and a unaccepted lowball offer is all that came out of it. Then I decided screw it, we're moving. I took 6 months to find a job, she took 2 months (more specialized than I am).

Both happy we made the move, but we could have lived off savings for years so it was a low stress move for us.

YMMV
And yet not uncommon. We (Django) had a rather frustrating mailing-list exchange with IBM folks who wanted to build a DB2 driver for Django; they claimed their corporate policies wouldn't allow them to look at the existing Django DB backends, or anything BSD-licensed, to gather information on the API.
Testing your (off-site) backups is an obvious first item in many lists http://watsec.com/article/49
* The real uncanny valley only applies to attempted depictions of humans.*

In my experience the same reaction, though sometimes muted, applies to just about any living thing Hollywood attempts to computer generate. I can't remember having ever seen a convincing depiction of a dog, cat, or even insect for that matter.

It's entirely possible that an alien humanoid biological creature would appear to be obviously living to us in the same way as other non-human animals, and thus subject to the same "uncanny valley."
Quite. Folks with the recessive MC1R gene for red hair, like myself, are at much higher risk for skin cancer since we don't really tan, only freckle. Interestingly, this gene is also linked to a vitamin K deficiency, lower tolerance for thermal pain and has implications for anaesthesia and post-operative pain management.

Inexplicably it also correlates with a higher tolerance for electrical pain, which might be a useful adaptation for hackers :)
MS seem to be doing this quite a bit. Remember Bing copying Kayak back in June: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=674123
Could you do something like Readability on the article text? One of the most painful things about reading HN on the iPhone is waiting for the stuff around the article to load. Even having an option to only load images on demand would be a good start.

http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/
Using Mixpanel (YC S09) API In Google App Engine Applications (Python)
A few of us actually live on the east coast.
This doesn't make any sense. Unless you have some other reason to suspect there's animosity between them, why would you invent drama between the lines?
Black hole starship
That's assuming people need to keep things running at all times, whatever the cost. This is for those people who want to do their calculations only when CPU is cheap.
Recruitly combines helpful tips with rigorous, step-by-step job application tracking. For now, the key features are:

* Single-screen application: see and work on everything at once
* Consistent structured approach to each opportunity
* Step-by-step workflow, emphasizing "what I can do right now"
* Tracking of key contact information and interview times

The goal is to job seekers to parallel-process many simultaneous job opportunities, with the result hopefully being a shorter job search time. This is my first HN soft-launch. I'd appreciate any feedback! Thanks for taking the time to look. The questions I am pondering are:

* Is the workflow logical?
* Does the sales funnel function effectively?
* Does the product pitch resonate?
* Is the current product a complete MVP? What's missing?
Interesting how javascript is turning source code theft into copyright infringement (a civil matter), when traditionally it would be trade secret theft (a criminal matter).
Exactly. Companies can say one thing and do another. My argument was against the accusative tone of "whoever did the due diligence".
Even with that explanation, and the risk of user-triggered track-skips, the seek-heaviness doesn't seem inherent to the problem.

Much of the time, and oftentimes for runs of many minutes/megabytes at a time, you can predict exactly what data will be needed at what future time.

Perhaps another approach would be to add more buffering in front of spinning disks -- perhaps RAM, perhaps SSD -- and tune the disk IO scheduler to be extreme in the other direction: have the app request everything at least N minutes in advance, and let the scheduler take up to N minutes to deliver it. Then it can take advantage of any seek-minimizing physically-near blocks over a much larger window of time.

(For those occasional skip exceptions, data could be pulled from a smaller lower-latency system, or from a smaller set of 'whatever happens to be ready' fill-ins, etc.)
How to Create a (Great?) Startup Office Space While Being Absurdly Cheap
This is kind of funny. I'm going to just say that this is pretty one-sided. One example is the traffic heat-map. Anyone who has an iPhone in the US has a far superior solution to this problem. In addition, although japan has some awesome toilettes, it also has some very un-awesome toilets that lack seats and require squatting. These kinds of toilets are not to be found in the US.
Microsoft actually tries to enforce the policy of "you shouldn't read Open Source code". For example, they block access to Sourceforge from the Microsoft campus.