skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wonder if this is an example of the "big bang" system. Recall the concept that "large complex systems that work were once small working systems." Or put another way, if it doesn't work when it is small, can it be expected to work when it is large?

Do we know how to build these sort of things organically? I recall the giant FBI system that was scrapped. And it sounds like the FAA ATC system is too large to be replaced.
The neat thing about being a professional programmer is that you are always working in somebody else's problem domain.

So I wouldn't take the naysayers too seriously. If you can't peer review climate code, you can't peer review financial code, or medical code, or astronautics code.

Sure, you'll need problem domain expertise. But that's a given with any kind of programming. Climate science is no different than any other kind of work programmers do.

I think it's a great idea -- if you can pull it off. But that's a really big "if".
First steps with ECL
Don't Amazon covers the loss from ebooks with Kindle (ca $250)?

If Amazon sells 500.000[1][2] Kindles at $250, and sells 1 million ebooks with a loss of 2$ at piece:

$120m in Kindles

-$2m in ebooks

1. http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20090203/citi-says-amazon-so...

2. http://www.businessinsider.com/2009/2/amazon-sold-500000-kin...
Discussed in: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=979905
especially when it's numerical and certain approximations make scientific sense while others don't.
No, the most insecure things invented by people take URL parameters from unauthenticated requests and run them on the command line.

I didn't audit the code or anything, but all the request processing is gated by a function that requires HTTP basic-auth, which is at least hard to screw up. To accidentally add a function that bypasses auth, they'd have to write an entire new request handler chain.

That said, I noticed the same thing (popen), and if I was going to integrate this with our product, I'd hardcode the command line.
The problem isn't the average year over year. The problem is the outliers: we live in a modern world where massively game-changing events can occur and spawn whole new industries almost overnight without correspondingly wiping out old industries in the same time period (once such event -- the Internet -- is how you're talking to me right now). These events cause sudden huge upward swings in available goods and services, while gold remains stable. The only thing that can happen to a gold-standard economy in such a situation is crippling deflation.
I had a love/hate relationship with software programming for a couple of years until I discovered test driven development for me and committed myself to do development cycles with the client.

Maybe that would work for you as well.
You put your finger on it. Price elasticity. That is the claim Amazon is making.

Personally I think they are right. There is some elasticity. If I could buy books at 3-5, I would buy a lot more. @ $20+, I think abut it.
Play it now. Here's a Java Web Applet (downloadable too): http://symbolaris.com/applet/Rhythmomachia.html
Ask HN: Should URLs in browsers be displayed in fixed-width font?
I was just making some presentation in Powerpoint, and I was writing down a URL in it. Instinctively I set it to be in a fixed-width font, because it seemed to make sense that this is how URLs should be displayed.

Then I realized that browsers display URLs in a variable-width font.

Do you think this convention makes sense? Unless someone here raises some issue that I missed, we can suggest to the Chrome and Firefox people to consider using a fixed-width font instead.
The whole rental business reminds me of some conversations I've had with friends trying to explain how the first-sale doctrine (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine) increases the value of the books, movies, and games that they buy, and for that reason the digital versions which cannot be transferred should be sold cheaper, where they argue that since the experience is roughly the same the cost should be.

Basically, since you have the right to resell a book, DVD or CD that you buy to the used store, a friend, or a yard sale, that copy is worth more. That value is included in the retail price. Would you be willing to pay as much for a car if you could never resell it not matter how good the condition was?

As an example, take that movie you only end up watching once, the DVD and the digital download cost $20. If you get the digital download you would watch it once and that would be it, it would sit on your hard drive until you deleted it and then just be a database record on some server somewhere. If you bought a physical copy, you could sell that copy, say for 50%, to a friend who was thinking about buying it, or to at a flea market or the like. The net result is that the digital copy costs $20 and the physical copy costs $10. Which is the better deal? Sounds to me like the digital copy should only cost $10.

Of course, most people don't resell their movies, games or books and end up with selves storing a bunch of items they don't need and don't plan to use again. But that's another rant.
Give me a 10ft gold cable, then I'll believe it has anything more than a negligible effect on impedance.
We really need to remember that "make something people want" is a specific piece of advice relative to building a product. We get all giddy about this advice because as programmers, that's what we love to do; build things. But a business depends on many many more things than just your product. I'd argue that a company's product is, at max, 30% of what matters to the profit-generating system as a whole.

So to answer your question: it is irrelevant. And I encourage you to separate "product" from "profit". Because if you want to make profits, you need to master business and marketing. Making products is for those programming guys. The great thing about HN, is that we think we can do both ... and we can! - Just remember that they are different hats for a reason.

=)
This is correct. :-)
The wall-plate most probably has a AC-DC converter in it, and you're correct in thinking that these draw a small amount of power even under no load. However it would be almost trivial to completely turn this off when there is nothing physically plugged into the port using an electromechanical switch, and it makes sense to do this to avoid wasting power when the port is unused, so I suspect this is exactly what they have done.
Jury is still out, but free/freemium music services look hard. (People don't seem to want subscription services.) lala sold allegedly because they weren't getting to profitability fast enough, imeem struggled, and Pandora needed an act of the United States Congress to deal with sharp increases in streaming royalties.
36 Most Successful & Creative Design Blogs
Perl can be readable. However its wide and varied language features make it easy to make it unreadable. I have nothing against Perl used in good hands by good people but that can't always be guaranteed. The unless operator is the example of one tiny special case (of an if statement) that got its own built-in. My feeling is that unless you have a number of very good usage cases for a feature and it greatly saves time and energy it should not be added as a built-in to the language.

It all comes down to this: Perl doesn't have a "Right Way"(TM) of doing things. Many people (perhaps yourself) feel that this is a good thing. I simply believe the opposite.
And you can do the google trick with programming languages: Microsoft's C#, which supports its platform. Another example is postscript - a highly specific language tied to a system.

You can also make money by implementing a language that someone else created: java vendors e.g. BEA Systems; C++ vendors e.g. Borland; and SQL vendors.
dschobel's comment clearly demonstrates how the distinction between pass-by-value and pass-by-reference in Java is not purely academic: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=979799

It's a relevant distinction because it's required to explain code behavior.
Read carefully, the author explains it very well. Basically, 90% of app sales are made during first 6 weeks, which happens only and only if your app hits to top 100 (which is 99.95% less probable for an average developer). After that sales slow down to virtually zero (1-2 sales a week).

PS. Developers want to eat, support their families, pay their mortgages, etc. so patience is not an option here.
Mobile phones and digital cameras etc often come with USB cables for charging. The intent is that they be charged from the ports on a computer but there's no reason they can't be charged directly from a socket. The exception is the iPhone, some versions of which will not draw any current from the USB socket until a handshake protocol with the PC is complete, and so they will not charge from this kind of arrangement.
"it has ceased to be a relevant distinction."

I think this distinction ceased to be relevant in the late 70's...
> Unless someone here raises some issue that I missed

That you haven't explained any benefit of doing so?
This is a refreshing change from the "The Linux kernel should use C++ more" that crops up every so often.

Despite it's refreshingness, it's still tiring to see these kinds of questions/goals. The Linux kernel is written what it is written in, by the people who wrote it. If you think it's a worthwhile thing to have it written in something else, patches will be entertained, and baring that, forks are acceptable.
Because it means they don't understand what's going on in the language runtime. That is, it betrays ignorance.
Distribution costs include subsiding the Internet connection of Kindles for the life of the device. And maybe subsidizing some of device's costs.

Book royalties are around 10%. Amazaon has already "afforded to give them more". Three times more.
Most airports have had USB charging ports for a while. At least all of the recent remodels that Southwest has done seem to include them.
How will electronic writing affect the form of literature?
4chan is probably the best example of this. Loads of people want an image board but it isn't profitable.
Plenty of tenured professors and very well-paid research associates create these sorts of things...

UC, MIT, Bell Labs, Google, Microsoft, Sun, ... the list goes on and on.
why does it make sense that a url be set in fixed width?
> claims to have a proof for an upper limit in how much "general intelligence" (that would be IQ) can change in the case of individuals or in the case of populations. In fact, the existing OBSERVED degree of IQ increases all around the world

I did not mention the Intelligence Quotient (which is subject to boosting). I mentioned the general intelligence factor (which is mostly innate). Using google scholar you can find many interesting articles about the general intelligence factor and its neurological basis.

Using google scholar with “general intelligence factor” I found this article that is cited 417 (it just struck my eye since the citations is extremely high for such a recent paper):

A Neural Basis for General Intelligence
Science 21 July 2000:
Vol. 289. no. 5478, pp. 457 - 460
DOI: 10.1126/science.289.5478.457

This one just struck my eye, but there are many more. In my opinion general intelligence factor has become beyond doubt – the question is now what the neurological basis for intelligence is.

I also think that we will not do this complex and interesting topic justice if we discuss it here.
Technically speaking yes it will draw power, all wiring draws power (the wires develop capacitance, but there's also electrostatic leakages around the bare connectors, but at 110/240V it's negligible, this is a concern around 10,000V+, with DC it likely has no electrostatic leakage, and very little drain due to capacitance.

However, what I believe you're thinking about is the transformer required to turn 110V->5V and yes you're correct. An old school transformer would drain a few watts when inactive, however the current types of transformers used in Wall->USB devices provide virtually no drain, perhaps less than a watt, so will have no noticeable effect on your electricity bill.

Simply put, changing say 20 wall sockets in your house to one of these USB devices will likely have less effect on your electricity bill than plugging in a 7W night light and leaving it in.
Which, if we were to take this example seriously, would be very important, since these rules would likely be user specified.
AFAIK they can patent it all they want, if it's introduced as an acceptable electrical standard (with the mass usage of USB devices, this possibly isn't too far off) then the patent means shit and there's little to no recourse the company can take.
You define "reliable" as "can run Visicalc". I am not sure this is a good one.

For me, reliable is "works every time the way I expect it to work". According to this, Windows is pretty reliable. The trick is in my expectations.
I disagree the B&M's provide services that people like. Browsing, reading, social space. Been to an Barns & Noble lately, very much like Starbucks. In that they are selling a lifestyle and environment more than they are selling coffee. When books are distributed and produced digitally they will get POD and service the niche that still wants paper.

Publishers and distributors, they are Dodo's. They cost more and aren't as good as digital distribution/production.
A huge thing to note, even with a large number of unprofitable cases, is not that the YC mantra is flawed, but more likely systems may not yet be in place to facilitate profitability. For example, if there were an awesome micropayment solution I'll bet a lot of currently unprofitable sites could find profitability.
I'm sorry, I haven't explained my motivation well enough:

URLs are "machine text", not "human text".

Practical examples would be: Easier to spot phishing URLs, easier to mark and edit parts of the URLs.

In fixed-width font every character has the same width. Useful in coding mostly because succeeding lines are aligned precisely to each other. But, to get a little more philosophical, it also gives the message of: "Every character is equally important". For example, a dot is very important in code, and it has the same width as other characters in a fixed-width font. But in "human text" dots, while still important, have a tiny width.

In a URL a dot is very important, and thus shouldn't have a tiny width. It often happens to me that I want to select text before/after the dot in a URL but it's so hard to do it precisely because the dot is so small.
His criticism is more about what he sees as the blogosphere's negatives than about blogging in general. But I agree with it.

There's immense pressure for people, particularly newbies, to do the kind of blogging he's talking about. In effect it's become an expected part of "playing the game" in the medium. Of course you can ignore that. But you'll probably be ignored by the blogosphere.

I never blogged because I felt the blogosphere expects articles like: Ten Things Corn Flakes Can Teach Your About Lisp Programming. I can't imagine talking to people that way. Does that really sound natural? To me it, regardless of how friendly or informally written, that make me sound like a one-man newspaper. Eck.

I think a big part to the success of Paul's essays, is how his friends are the immediate audience. Newbie writer's usually don't have that. They have to build an audience from scratch.

When I really think about it, what do I really want? Ultimately, I want communication and connection with a few passionate people who care about the same things I do. If I can just bounce ideas off them I'm satisfied. If my ideas hit mainstream, wonderful. I like blogging, But it feels likes it at the point where I'm "not allow" to use the the medium that way anymore.
I think perhaps he means when the "lowest bidder" electrolytic capacitor in the AC/DC converter, with the 2000 hour specified life span (83 days)[1], overheats, bursts, and shorts the AC wiring inside your wall.

Presumably you installed it in a proper outlet box (I like steel) and it will be able to handle the energy released while waiting for the line's circuit breaker to trip without reaching the ignition point of anything inside the wall.

[1] Not that these people would use them, but you find them in a lot of gear. Especially dramatic when their tops are close enough to a case or heatsink to short when they burst.
I was curious - apparently 4chan costs upwards of $85k to run... http://www.4chan.org/faq
I think a better motto is "Make something people want to pay for."
10 Red Balloons Found
Testing Multi Threaded Scala Code
I disagree. The point is to get an insight into the subject. The last question and the way that Jeff concludes the interview is very helpful there.
It costs $90 year to have the tool to get in iphone appstore.

The game console dev kits are very expensive (at least they have been when I looked)

Is MS Visual Dev thingy free?

There is free version of probably every language out there. But, that doesn't mean people aren't making money selling that language. Cobol compilers come to mind.
Google. You can usually find a torrent or something on megaupload.

I just got a bunch of e-books I had been trying to take out of the library for years, unsuccessfully (all the copies were missing or somesuch; they were kind of rare.)
Paywalled search can definitely work, given that you are searching an exclusive data set. Look to Lexis Nexis.
This technique is ancient for anyone that has an associative array and function objects.
True. Capturing value is not the same as creating value.

But if you don't create any value, it's easy to capture it.
> URLs are "machine text", not "human text".

This is no longer true. Partly as a consequence of SEO concerns, most URLs are now extremely descriptive of the resources to which they point.
Im not sure I agree to be honest; indeed it looks like salvaging the situation rather than diplomacy.

I would tend to agree, but I guess my definition of diplomacy includes salvaging situations. My kind of diplomacy isn't all roses and puppies.

Half my family is Asian (though not Japanese), I have a personal interest in Japanese culture and I'm generally aware of the cultural differences between East and West. Irrespective, I still would not sit tight in a meeting and smile while someone passes off my work as their own, regardless of how much face is at stake. I wouldn't much enjoy living with myself after such an episode.
Compiz has a "smart" window placement mode where it tries to place the window in the least "dense" location on screen, preferably empty space. It fills the screen in a left-right then top-bottom search.
Gosh, you must be a rather depressing person to be around. I'm imagining a friend telling you about a funny anecdote and then you interrupt them by giving a stern look and pointing to your wristwatch.
Hyper-reactions are always telling. My bet is that these people feel somewhat threatened. The fact some Microsoft users and enthusiasts feel that way here is, itself, very interesting.
You're ignoring the fact that 'want' is just one of many considerations people make when spending money. Things like 'need' and 'affordability' are going to factor in too. Want is probably just the strongest.
The article was pulling at least some of the numbers ($2 loss per ebook, authors take 10%) out of thin air (I almost wrote somewhere less polite), which destroys any value to his "analysis".
You have to find something for all those cores, CPU and GPU, you have in your computer.
What's scary is this might not be a violation of the 1st amendment, since it's their network. But the FCC may (hopefully) say otherwise.
Copying birds may save aircraft fuel
I wanted to try it out but after installing SilverLight on my Mac the Download button gives me a .MSI installer that tries to open in VMWare. Good work Microsoft, as always.
> When you say "Africa", I assume you are not speaking of "South Africa".

My experience is admittedly limited to Southern African countries (SADEC countries including Zambia and Angola). I chose the South African examples since they are the best documented.

But I see no reason to believe that there would be a significant difference in other African countries.

> Most of Africa has always been organised into communities, where the communities select a non-heriditary leader, who represents the community in a meeting of all local leaders.

Not really – I have not seen any evidence of this. Most of the leaders are hereditary or semi-hereditary (when the line is broken by the brother or family member of the chief).

As another example, take the Bamagwato. Ian Khama is the chief of the Bamagwato (in Botswana). He is the great-great grandson of Khama III (who is again had his chieftanship descend from his father). Ian Khama is the president of Botswana (this is not to detract from Botswana’s good governance and its incorporation of Western values).

> He cannot assign all the land to himself, that never happens in Africa (in constrast to Europe).

Unfortunately many similar things happen. A good example is the Reed Dance in Swaziland. King Mswati selects brides for himself from people (he recently selected one that was under the age of consent). The whole purpose of the Chief is self-serving.

> In Africa, the chief is a person who is best thought to represent the decisions of the people, and so what he says is representative of the people who he leads.

You live in a dream world. In the 1800’s, Shaka killed thousands of his own people because his mother died (and wanted people to share his pain). He also subjected them to famine.

> Ground is not communal, ground is owned by individuals in small portions across the villages or towns.

Not completely. Cattle are grazed communally and most work is performed communally. Ubuntu (most Bantu languages have a similar word) literally means “shared grazing land”. This actually also makes sense (specialisation of labour and all that).

> I believe there has hardly ever been a situation in Africa where a chief attacked his own people with an army, and caused some kind of internal massacre.

The Shaka example I showed you is a good example where he killed off and starved his own people.

I personally believe that you may have a little too romantic view of Africa (while I concede that I may suffer from the opposite).
The problem with that is that people will always want to pay less.
Visual Studio is quite expensive and yet it is selling very well to enterprise markets.

The trick is to pick the right customers.
The slashdot thread for this story is funny. http://yro.slashdot.org/story/09/12/01/1743252/Verizon-Chang...
The design patter of one is the syntax of another.
Except the fact that plenty of large private organizations manage to do things like this every day. The NHS is huge but no bigger than Walmart's worldwide organization. But if Walmart spent $25 billion dollars on a system they'd do it with the knowledge that it has to be done right or they'll drive themselves out of business.

While with government agencies you have politicians, who don't know what they're talking about, defining artificial timelines based on political concerns. So the project implodes 7 years later and no one holds the individual politicians accountable.
Wikipedia needs 7mm in donations but only has raised like 2mm so far.

Hiphopgoblin had a bunch of people who proclaimed their love for the site, but I doubt any one of them would have paid cash for it. Maybe I could have cooked up some sort of new media advertising plan had I realized enough traffic, but I decided to abandon..

People's love is a revealed preference when they vote with their wallets.
On standard English, African American Vernacular English (AAVE), and efficiency
They've missed the boat, by several years.

All (new)movies are online at a price of zero (not counting risk of being convicted for copyright infringement).

Legally, more movies are online at a cost of greencine or netflix account. There's also Hulu and the like.
The Best-Selling Record of All