skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
my point is that you can't remove stuff by compiling stuff from emacs to the repl, just add.

the repl is very nice for development, but not as a consistent deployment tool, imho.
ha ha!!! brilliant. ? but you can't instigate a x-domain attack externally - so the 'hacker' would either had direct internal access to the site, or the ability to remotely change a 3rd party library already embedded in the site, no?
Just run the PC decrapifier: http://www.pcdecrapifier.com/ and go get a cup of coffee.
Well, maybe there is some room for this in the market. If they can really provide instant provisioning of a dedicated server, then this should be more efficient than a virtual machine based approach.

Their API looks pretty decent, so you could use this in a similar manner to EC2. The downside is that instead of things like S3 storage, you get iSCSI. Sure, it's dedicated, but I don't know if it's redundant. And if you want any other cloud-like infrastructure (Queues, Simple DB, etc...), you're going to have to build it yourself.

While you could get more power out of a setup like this, I don't see how it can scale. I mean, we're talking about a dedicated machine for each user. And this is also for each class of machines. They'd have to over-buy machines by 10-20% to match unexpected demand. And this is for all classes of servers (and they have 5). What happens if they don't have a machine of your class available? At least with a virtual machine approach, you can buy big servers and slice them up in a variety of ways.
You have point, but it's a good first effort. It would be nice to see a short summary and recommendations at the top, with more info on separate pages or down below. Could even move this kind of thing over to a wiki (or maybe such a wiki already exists?).
You can return any new book bought on Amazon within 30 days, as long as you pay return postage, so it is, in a sense, a library.
Looks like a lot of chat applications are launching lately. Also check out http://hipchat.com
My startup actually just got some really awesome free office space in the ground floor of a building where the company went from 100 people to four. They are still paying 40k a month on the lease and have a year and a half left, so one of the employees is just letting us work there until someone else leases the space. It's pretty amazing though; right now my office is actually a conference room surrounded on two sides by glass and overlooking a duck pond.
Great article, and it really lowers my opinion of Best Buy. I couldn't help but think of the auto rustproofing sales pitch when buying a new car.

Another benefit to the article, I think the bottom section listing programs to "optimize" the PC is useful. Only thing I would have added is that cable/dsl internet services these days are likely to provide a free anti-virus from McAfee.
Apple acquires Qauttro Wireless
In NL this isn't the case. I popped over to Belgium yesterday, took out €50 from a Fortis ATM (my bank is ABN Amro), no charge. I was in Istanbul for New Years, using HSBC's ATMS, no charge.

When I go back 'home' to visit family (the US), ABN Amro charges me no fees for taking out money at local ATMs. The ATMs themselves (rudely) may charge a fee, but last time I was there there were still some ATMs that had no fees.
It's like one people saying "I don't want to use guns, because they are difficult to understand and I can do bad things with them."

Meanwhile, the people who are taking the time to learn about and use guns are dominating the world.

Any developer worth his salt will understand how to do SQL Statements to get back the right dataset or perform the correct updates. Harping on the benefits of an ORM is a bright red flag in my book, because none of them are better than the power, performance, and flexibility of actually understanding SQL. If you concentrate on learning the ORM, then you are learning yourself into a box and won't even know that there are great things outside it if you had only spent the time to learn SQL.
Yeah, I agree. For larger websites, the described approach would probably never fly. For a personal blog, though, I think it's a reasonable way to go.
Flexible Log Monitoring with Scribe, Esper, and Nagios
Remember that the article is about placebos having more effect now than in the past. So yes, Valium really does have effects. But if you did a double-blind study vs. a placebo today, it might not perform better than the placebo.
The same reason I built my own workstation. The same reason I build servers. Because you can build better equipment and gain an intimate understanding of the system so if something goes wrong, you're more apt to fix it without a $500 fee from the manufacturer.
Not 13x (the $34.56 figure for average rents for Class A space, as mentioned in the article, refers to annual rent - your $2.50 number is monthly). Thus, roughly comparable at this point, or at least not much of a rental premium to be in Silicon Valley.
Mhm, this was the state of the industry the last time I checked. I suppose it would be easier to take an existing laptop and replace the parts...
Considering that it's Second Life, I'm guessing leopard dildos.
Ask HN: Computer Vision and AR project ideas
I need to choose a summer project in Computer Vision or Augmented Reality. We will be given project suggestions in the coming week, but are not limited to these.

I would like to create something packaged and fun but technically interesting (that's the dream at least) that I can show people, rather than say, coming up with a slightly improved camera stabilisation method.

Any ideas would be very much appreciated.
Didn't Nickelback themselves already beat them to this?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qs4tNeGyTyI
Fun example. And the idea of a Fractal track is one of those: how-haven't-I-thought-of-it-before things.

I don't know how a true fractal song would sound. The author of the post uses the original song to smooth the final result to make it listenable. I guess a true fractally generated track could/would have infinitely high pitches that could make it unpleasant for a human's ear.
Introducing runroot: live programming languages in your browser
A regenerative system on a door that has brushes that cause friction with the sides isn't going to make more power than it will cost to create a regenerative braking system in the first place. It adds a whole layer of complexity that will affect reliability and in the end it's going to 'save' piddly little bits of power.

If you take the cost of an energy storage system you have to divide the price of the unit by the amount of power that you can buy for that money discounted with what you think power will cost over the lifetime of the unit.

This will most likely come out negative.
I can't access the article. ( I'm not in the u.s.)
Headset hottie. Every business targeted at geeks must have one.
It is even called the same thing "Bare Metal Cloud™" And it seems as though softlayer has a trademark on that... interesting!

http://softlayer.com/cloudlayer_computing.html
runroot is a project I've been working on in my spare time for the past year. You provision a server to hold interactive instances. Each instance has a web REPL and full ssh access.

I think it has some great pedagogical use cases. Teaching a distributed revision control class? Everybody can have their own private server and practice pushing/pulling over the network. Teaching a programming topic? The instructor can jump into any student's REPL to help out.
Awesome. I'd bet most parents reading this have two sets. You should update your post with all the other possible configurations. How many 3 and 4 leaf clovers can you make?
Amazing UTF-8 Symbols for Twitter
I think they're great. Andrew has a knack for asking good questions, including ones that the interviewees may not really want to answer.

I like the format that he uses, and the transcripts are pretty decent if I want to revisit later to see what someone said.

Some of them are better than others, but given the sheer number of interviews that Andrew does that's inevitable.

What's your issue with them? Andrew reads HN, maybe if you offered some feedback about what you didn't like he could take it into consideration, instead of just saying that you hate Mixergy for some unknown reason. If anything, he's shown that he constantly modifies how he does things, perhaps you can raise a point that he hasn't considered previously.
The Hidden Benefits of Exercise
Thanks for pointing that out. I didn't notice that and it was linked today by another source.
Ask HN: What are you working on?
This question comes from a great thread from a while back that I really enjoyed (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=700662), so I thought with the new year here, it'd be a good time to ask again.

I'm still developing readthekanji.com, a site for helping Japanese students learn to figure out how to read kanji. It's been one of the best learning experiences, and I'm loving every minute of it.

So what projects are you currently working on, or planning for the new year? Is it a startup, or research perhaps? And how's it going?
Full body scanners may break child pornography laws
Oddly, in their table, Consumer's Reports did not list Microsoft's own free antivirus program (they did list Windows Defender anti-spyware).

http://www.microsoft.com/Security_Essentials/
Ask HN: What CRM/PM/DM/TT application do you use?
We are a small (< 10 ppl) startup that is pretty evenly balanced between technical folk and business folk. We have been searching in vain for an all-in-one CRM/PM/DM/TT application to satisfy our needs. Our needs are not that demanding - basically this is what we want:

CRM: lightweight contact manager, Companies/Contacts, has an Internal/Employees distinction from Companies/Contacts and an ACL/permissions model.

PM: A simple Company -> Project -> Task structure. Gannt charts, timesheets, etc. are overkill. Simple Milestones suffice.

DM: Should have ability to create folders, checkin/checkout and create a workflow/approval based on a document.

TT: Ability to create tickets/tasks via an email queue/gateway. Ideally supports more than one so could create one for post-sales (support@) and one for pre-sales (info@). Auto-reply, Standard Responses nice to have. Ability to respond to email/customer within application.

Other: Calendar, preferably SaaS (with SSL and unified login) and ~ $10/user/month.

We have looked at dozens of candidates (too many to list) and they all have certain strengths and weaknesses but none have satisfied them all for us.

IMO, the best one so far is the open source dotProject but its email queue/gateway is pretty weak. (I know its open source and we could improve it but we don't want to go that route.)

Would love to hear what you are using to satisfy similar requirements or if you just gave up and used multiple applications (which we're trying to avoid).

Cheers
amen. Occasionally even well-intentioned writing suggests that humans are at a more advanced evolutionary stage than our sister species, even though we've all been doing it the same amount of time.
What are Avira's two annoying habits, if you don't mind my asking? I hadn't heard of the software before you mentioned it, but now am interested.
http://newservers.com/nap-of-the-americas.html

They are hosted in NAP of the americas, which is based out of Miami,FL.

Not exactly the best place for a datacenter (except if you want extra low latency to south/central america)
I suspect the truth is somewhere in between what you are saying and the utopians I was talking about.
That's besides the point, if you are making it possible for a third party to use your server to fetch resources you should probably make sure the service can not be used as a simple attack vector.
I second the rec for byoung2's article.

As I don't know your situation, it's difficult to give advice, but I'll throw out the generic stuff:
- if you're going to do a web startup, you probably should have 1 technical co-founder
- if you're just building a basic website, try some of the outsource sites like odesk, etc. Then it's a matter of finding people at your price, with decent reviews. Give them a small amount of work at first, and evaluate.

Note that any time you have other people do the work, you will have to evaluate what it looks/acts like, rather than how well it's written. That may be OK, but it may cause headaches later on. If you're taking intro to CS right now, you are many years away from being able to judge internal structure (sorry, but it's true...) and will only be able to know if their code does what you think it should.

As I said, that might not be a bad thing -- but you won't have someone who can say "the buck stops here", WRT all technical matters.

You can find people who will manage outsourcers for you, but they're probably going to add a bit more cost on that for you. And in that situation, you still have the same problem: how do you find that person?
As I've said before, this article is incredibly wrong and quite misleading. If you ever wanted evidence that most Americans do not understand how medicines are developed or what the Placebo Effect is, this article (and the responses here) serve as ample evidence.

For a more rigorous refutation by a trained professional, please read: http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?p=1248

I'll pull the zinger quote from the article above for you:

>No, it’s not like that at all. Perhaps the studies are just that well done, or maybe the drugs being developed suck, or maybe companies are studying more candidate drugs and screening for efficacy. Just about any explanation that doesn’t involve aliens is better than “placebo is getting stronger”.
I like C.S. Lewis, and this quote definitely makes me want to read this book soon. It seems timely and relevant to the "Singularity" kind of thinking.

Thanks for the tip!
I became interested in NewServers while looking for affordable dedicated server hosting providers. I am personally less interested in "cloud" scalability for my pet project, and more in getting a "decent" quality dedicated server or 3 for a "decent" price (lots of hand-waving here I know). That is, I find EC2 to be "expensive" for what I want; I'm not super profitable yet in my tiny little startup so saving money yet maximizing server performance at the same time is the tradeoff I'm researching.

I have not found any hosting providers besides NewServers that are as affordable for "lots" of RAM. Also, NewServers' bandwidth quota is 3GB/hr with $0.10/GB overage.

NewServers offers add-ons like extra RAM. These require maybe a couple of days but for me, I don't need pure cloud scalability in minutes. I just want a few cheap dedicated servers.

Consider this configuration;

Intel Processor Cores RAM HDD Price/Hour
Jumbo 2 x E5405 Quad Core 2Ghz 8 8GB 2 x 500GB SATA RAID 1 $0.38

An always-on Jumbo is thus:

Jumbo = 720*0.38 = $273.60/month

RAM add-ons:

8GB $0.04/hr 720*0.04 = $28.80/mo. more
16GB $0.08/hr 720*0.08 = $57.60/mo. more
24GB $0.12/hr 720*0.12 = $86.40/mo. more
32GB $0.16/hr 720*0.16 = $115.20/mo. more

Thus, a Jumbo with 24GB RAM = $273.60 + $86.40 = $360.0/month with lots of bandwidth transfer.

Compared with something like EC2, this is a no-brainer on the cost front, provided you do not need the other Amazon features... (I don't, but that should be made clear).

Also, I talked with Alex at NewServers and their turnaround time for provisioning servers with the above add-ons is "2 or 3 days". Good? Bad? That's fine _for me_ but do note that servers with add-ons are not provisioned on the order of minutes but days.

Thoughts? What am I not considering but should be?
I am working on making 500 of these: http://www.jgc.org/blog/2008/03/building-temperature-probe-f... for schools in Uruguay.
http://www.cloudclimate.com/newservers

"PING Times from Locations Around the Globe (48 Hours)"
It's also not practical for many scenarios. Signals in python can only be received by the main thread, and since that's what multiprocessing uses for communication, it means many common scenarios are out: GUI programs where the main thread is the rendering loop, network programs where the main thread is the connection handler, etc.

I've had much more luck using Python Remote Objects: http://pyro.sourceforge.net/

It's trivial to make a network queue and use that for communication across different processes/machines/etc.
You could handle dlopen() by:

- have parent isolate process monitor a dir in the chroot env. If it sees a file appear (with no .tmp suffix) it adds any .so files which are listed in the file (one per line) then removes the file

- set a LD_PRELOAD shim in the child process to hook dlopen() to write the filename to a .tmp file in the monitored dir (and then flush/close/rename/loops until file gone, then loads the .so)

Protecting data files is part of the point. You could try hooking some open/stat calls via LD_PRELOAD and make them available in the chroot if they are world-readable I guess.
I think everyone would agree that getting a truly clean PC would be nice. The problem with Best Buy's approach is the pre-optimizing of the PC first, and having only that version available. IMO, it's counter to the way they built their reputation - non-pushy, non-commission, knowledgeable/trained sales people. I just hope it's not a sign of the direction they think they can head now that Circuit City is out of the picture as a competitor.
How Apple's 3D tablet might work
That is one crazy lede: If you have an iPhone, you may be reading this with an app. A newspaper? Made of paper? Go and suck an arrow and protest against feudalism by dying of plague, Luddite.
Much-Anticipated Google Phone To Be Unveiled
Group Theory in the Bedroom: the curious mathematics of mattress flipping
This author doesn't know ORM, plain and simple. ORM has serious limitations and we can all agree that it sucks some of the time but a lot of the suckiness depends on the tool. If you use a crummy ORM expect crummy results. I could go on for pages and pages about what a good ORM can do but I'll just try and sum up my experience with Hibernate.

On the whole Hibernate is awesome. Yes, it has it's warts and it's very complex sometimes but once you make it a part of your infrastructure it's fantastically good. Using Hibernate with sane session management and second level caching gives on the average much better performance than would otherwise get on of hand written SQL. A good hibernate caching strategy can keep you from hitting the database at all and the best part is you just turn it on and go. If you need more performance you can use views and stored procedures for the maybe 1% of cases that can benefit from them.

Lazy initialization is a godsend for complex object graphs and HQL makes complex joins extremely readable and a breeze to write.
.
The biggest knock I have on Hibernate is that it's so easy to use poorly. No matter how much documentation is on the Hibernate website people insist on using it poorly.
Not just for Twitter, really, but anywhere that supports UTF-8 characters.
I think "T"'s comments on the Python community are depressingly close to the truth.

It is very easy to find pythonistas on python-list who are eager to tell you how wrong you are, or how you shouldn't even want to do <X> because it's not "pythonic".

I think Yegge was right, and that this is the main thing holding Python back.

That said, I still generally like the language itself.
Yeah, he pinged me on Twitter.

My problem with Mixergy is that there's a ton of enthusiasm and it gets to be a bit much. The design of the site also screams "I will show you how to make money online", and is a bit of a turnoff.
Wait, people buy computers at Best Buy still? What year is this?
Perhaps a better headline would have been "Silicon Valley Commercial Real Estate Speculation Leaves Entire Office Buildings Empty."
What, was twittersymbols.com taken?
Maybe the people that were there got a real life instead.

March '09 seems to have been their low point, since then they're slowly growing.

The media hype around second life has caused expectations to be idiotically high, I remember my bank sending out a press release they'd set up a virtual office in second life. Totally nuts, since their 'real' online presence is only a click away at most, and will not have to deal with all kinds of clumsy virtual world issues.
I suspect instead that their thinking went something like this:

We want to provide this service for our customers, but we can't afford to do it post-sale. For one, it'll take longer, and for two, customers won't wait an extra 20 minutes to pick up their shiny new laptop.

So instead we'll provide both versions, and let the customer decide.

...and then, like almost every retailer in existence, they just screwed up their inventory management.
The art of the doable to-do list
What I learned from Rick Alden, Founder of Skullcandy
...wow people downvoted the crap out of that comment. He said he has not even read many of the books he has bought. Clearly a lot of those are impulse buys. There is nothing wrong with that...we all make impulse purchases...I was just saying that is a lot of impulse purchases.
That it is not a formal review is exactly the point. People think too much when they write reviews. Quick thoughts are more interesting to me, because quick thoughts dominate most people's purchase decisions.
You can drop me an email also, allan at familylink dot com.
If a college was using Second Life for "teaching", I'd quit then and there. Have you ever even tried it? The controls are beyond awful.
I honestly would say MOST people who reach for threads do so instinctively, not after actual analysis of what type of concurrency would serve the project they're at best.

Lots of devs come from the java world or windows world where threads are done all the time but multiprocess concurrency is rare.

I'd say that out of the projects I've seen people grab for threads, only about 10-15% actually need the type of heavily shared data or marginally smaller memory footprint that threading gives you. Of the rest of them, it was a toss up, or leaned towards the simplification of data structures, easier porting to multiple processors and overall less complex components that IPC gives you.

Additionally, I'd contend you're doing something wrong if you see a HUGE increase when you go from threads-> multiprocessed solutions. Usually you just see a small overhead increase unless you're doing something questionable like loading data structures over and over in all processes and the like.

May I recommend Stevens Unix Network Programming Vol 2: IPC to see some common designs of MP programs? You may see some large memory footprint gains by just looking through some of the programs in that book and rethinking your processing/responsibilities of your different processes.

I by no means think EVERYTHING should be multiprocessed, I just think MOST things can be equally well done with threads or processes, and MANY programmers have never seen multiprocess programs, especially large multiprocess programs, where most have worked in multithreaded programs (where there are more than 1 user threads).

Having worked with both, the errors you see in multiprocess programs are MUCH more traceable and manageable. Multi-threading errors can take months to debug sometimes, and weeks to even get a good reproduction scenario for. Then again, for a SMALL amount of concurrency, threading is simpler to setup and do for sure.
Since when has Brio ceased to be a company?

They're on the internet and I've seen Brio trains in toy departments each year -- bought some extensions for my own kids a few years ago, too.
...he stated that he has not read most of the books he purchased. That is what makes it obscene...they are impulse buys...
There are plenty of Unicode symbols that can be used in web design as an alternative to images. Combine that with CSS gradients and you can cut your page load times by a lot.
It'd be interesting to see what would happen if you applied this to all of Nickelbacks work and limited it to about 3 minutes 30 seconds and see if what pops out sounds like one of their songs.
Learn Symbolic Links in 30 seconds
Well exercised, mature and stable?