skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As the music industry is now learning... music is a service, not a product. Its short run as a product (records, tapes, CDs) was an artificial creation that still made some sense when bound to physical media (a product). No one really has a good solution yet, but it seems that information really doesn't like being a product.
Noca, The New Online Payment System - Say Bye to Paypal
One of these days, information is going to be free, I promise you.
Me and a friend tried to invent poker-chess. Can't remember the rules but I think when a piece would ordinarily be taken their was a showdown. Anyhow it sucked.
Continuing the artist analogy, you are a poet if you write something everyone agrees is a poem. It doesn't mean you're automatically the poet laureate of anything, or even a not-terrible poet, but you have written a poem, and you can probably write more poems, therefore you are a poet.

Similarly, you are a programmer if you can write computer programs. Even if the programs suck and you're a mindless hack, and nobody in their right mind would hire you.
The point of IT is to combine information with technology to answer questions. When designing something like this you need to start by asking yourself what questions your users are trying to answer. The problem with Tufte's sketches is that they answer different questions. The official Apple version of the stock widget is designed to answer the question, "How much money is my portfolio currently worth?" Whereas Tufte's version is designed to answer the question, "Is now a good time to buy a given stock?" (And I would argue that he answers this question poorly and unaesthetically.)

The real problem though is that since his widgets are designed to answer a different set of questions, there isn't really any basis to compare the two sets of designs.
Are you using the same number of clients? From the openload website:

Number of simultanous clients to simulate. This is optional and defaults to 5.

I believe ab defaults to 1 client.
This one is fun: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antichess
I'm a little bit more concerned with software myself. Bands (good ones, especially) can perform to make money. Programmers can't, really. Locking everything up on a server, and only handing out web pages is one answer, I guess...
Boy he really screwed the pooch on that one. LOL!

He was described as "a fragile individual, with no particular genius who was facing family problems." That describes the majority of people I know! Somehow though he weaseled his way into the center of operations.

The big question is was it incompetence (i.e. doubling down to cover earlier losses) or was it sabotage. The press says it was not for personal gain. He made a salary under 150K USD.
This is the first time I here something like this happen. Yahoo may start being careful...
Is it possible to be diagnosed with HIV, not know you have CCR5, and mistakenly purchase the medicine?
http://smartstartup.typepad.com/my_weblog/2008/01/digg-offer...
Hacker Public Radio
This is very promising - nice work.
Here come the flame wars... Look away. Don't get sucked in. It's fun to start grinding on each other, but oh, such a waste of time!
Not necessarily, but you are a painter.
Unholiday cards (an Alexis Ohanian collection)
If I ever get a pet, I'm going to name it 'information' just so you can keep your promise.
for (i=0;i<ManyTimes;i++) {
div1.innerHTML += 'For the '+i+'th time, me <I>still</I> is the Chief Programmer of the USA<BR>'
}

If it runs, it must be true.
With all of the excitement I see online about SICP and Lisp/Scheme, do you (or anyone else) know why they are transitioning away from the book and Scheme?
By the time you did a scan through all of the text to split it by words (by looking for spaces), you could've run the corpus up against the pre-computed Trie and decided whether it was kosher or not. Not to mention the overhead of computing permutations for character substitutions in words.
Actually micro-credit works. The one supplying the capital needs to be fair about the rate they get in return though.
I certainly agree with the point that the cartoon aesthetic needs to be dropped in lieu of higher resolution data. Sparklines are an obvious (and very Tufte) solution.
It's the predictable pattern of tearing down a darling. I think its actually for the better. Ruby has had a nice ride, some negative attention will help drain the hype. What'll be left will be closer to the truth and able to stand on its own merits.
The market for that is incredibly small. I have only seen one case of a CCR5 delta 32 homozygous individual with HIV in the scientific literature. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi...
That was... boring. Executive summary:

- stocks and weather should use higher resolution imagery to convey more data
- MobileSafari's bottom button bar should be transparent as to not take up extra screen real estate
- he really like the phrase "computer administrative debris"
Well, for metaphor's sake, I hope Information can fend for himself in the wild.
One big problem with charity is that nobody cares until they are mega rich. The middle and lower classes don't have resources and don't feel the same moral obligations.

If the model is get rich then help people, then there's never going to be very many people doing it. The real heroes are the people who give to charity BEFORE they are wealthy. That model could change the world.
List of venture capital firms
Oh so right you are!
Maybe we've got a false dichotomy on our hands? Rather than a binary programmer-not, we should think of a spectrum of programming ability.

It's just a label after all; what really counts isn't what I call you, but what you can do.
Very, very unlikely. And you would still want to see a doctor and have your viral loads regularly checked.
Is America Tired of Social Networking?
You may have missed the other excitement online about schools changing their computer science programs to make them more attractive to students. MIT's not really ratcheting down the difficulty, but starting off everyone in Scheme was really off-putting to a number of students.

The new intro classes are in Python, which you could argue has the immediate benefit of being used in the world outside of MIT. They're also now more focused on learning while working towards project-style goals (like building a robot) instead of towards academic goals (like getting Scheme to do OOP).

Personally, I loved 6.001, but I'm the first to admit it was not for everyone, even people who could become great coders.
You used perl to write WHAT? best/worse uses of the langauge
If you get a chance, you might want to check out the Rockridge neighborhood in the East Bay. It's on the border of Oakland and Berkeley, very nice places, cool walking, shops, and stores like Trader Joe's, Whole Wallet, etc. There is a BART station there that will take you to the city, and people are out and about a lot. I live there with my wife and 3 boys. I also lived 12 years in LA near Manhattan Beach, and the main difference is that you don't really need a car in Rockridge, whereas in LA it was a necessity.

Some other interesting areas in SF are Potrero Hill and Bernal Heights. Our startup is in Potrero Hill and there are lots of good restaurants around, plenty of parking, and nice steep hills. Bernal has a bit more of a parking challenge and isn't really close to public transport, though it does have a pretty cool strip and it's close to the Mission for good food.

Hope this helps - if you want more details, just let me know at secorp at gmail dot com.
95% of music downloads are illegal
>"How much money is my portfolio currently worth?" Whereas Tufte's version is designed to answer the question, "Is now a good time to buy a given stock?"

I disagree. As someone who has some experience trading stock, there's no way that anyone would seriously make a trade just based on looking at sparklines. Even technical analysts need more information to make a decision. So in that regard, sparklines are a failure.

>The real problem though is that since his widgets are designed to answer a different set of questions, there isn't really any basis to compare the two sets of designs.

What about weather? What question is Tufte's version answering?!
Actually copyright exists so that producers don't have to simply rely on contracts, and so that the people doing the copying have breached law and not just the person who breached their contract. The alternative is restricting access to copyrighted material via harsh contracts and supervised access.

As a copyright producer of both music and software I really feel copyright protection is moral and just. The damages awarded for copyright infringement for personal use are clearly ridiculous and should be seriously limited. Also I think both copyrights and patents terms should be reduced and the originality threshold for patents has to be increased. Each patent term should be determined separately with reference to how expensive something has been to bring to market and how novel it is.
Evidentally, it was either her or an eventual hard drive crash.
I'm normally suffering the opposite of this; the fonts are too small for my high resolution screen. Nice little font though.
Will you be my co-founder?
> Make directory trees in a single swipe.

Really? How often will I need to make a directory structure that is several levels deep, but only one directory at each level?

>Match certain fields in output, not just lines

For someone who was trying to save a few keystrokes, instead of trying waste time getting the right field for awk, just use grep. Its easy, you can't mess it up, and unless the formatting really matters its the best option.
Mapping the Most Complex Structure in the Universe: Your Brain
Seattle Startup Weekend... This Weekend
How IBM's Venture Capital Group Can Help Your Startup
I was surprised to see the equivalent of a powerpoint in '86. It's weird to see the same ideas that we have now, but implemented in an older technology. Kinda like when you watch the mother of all demos.

I can see why old-timers think nothing's changed in the past couple decades sometimes.
Embed your reading list in your blog.
Please do. I'd like to see how it works out.
Tips for 'n00bs' moving to the Bay Area
Part 2 Follow up - How to balance a startup, family and a full time job
"Given the eminent background of both academics, though, this is surprising. DeWitt has researched large parallel DBMS since the 1980s and, in addition to his pioneering work on Ingres and Postgres, Stonebraker is currently active in the large DBMS area with his new company Vertica."

Someone with a strong background in DBMSes doesn't get a new technology somewhat unrelated to them because of "expertise bias". What's surprising?
Don't they wish they had spent the $XX/mo to do online backups!
I don't know, I haven't looked at it. But you won't go wrong with Cooper & Torczon.
As I said, aimlessly.
try ab -c 1000 -n 100000 <url>

that will give you 1000 concurrent connections, 100k total connections.

good luck.
Standards rise too, though. When I was poor I was way better off materially than most rich people were 200 years ago. But I still felt poor, and felt like I had to get a lot more money to have a comfortable life.
Suited for space - can humans cope with the final frontier?
What the boss looks like determines how he performs
21 New Startups in the Valley
We're still a long way from solving the logistical and sociological problem of getting food to everyone that is starving. Here's hoping that we converge towards that.
Thats my preferred analogy. From what little I know of the fashion industry, the parallels are amazing. A lot of the fashion industry spends its efforts trying to out do and impress itself (and tear itself down) - with little regard to what "ordinary" people want to wear.
Curious Histories of Generic Domain Names
The tension between information creators and information organizers
"As someone who has some experience trading stock, there's no way that anyone would seriously make a trade just based on looking at sparklines."

That was kind of my thinking, that sparklines are more information than you need to know how much your portfolio is worth, but not enough to answer the question of whether to buy stock. (Which is what I was trying to say when I said that it answers the question poorly and unaesthetically.)
Code Rush [video]
I'm pretty sure grep could do 185000 if it the data is pre-cached...
Why I'm Done With Facebook
This is the point I was trying to make: that there are programmers who would be better if they applied the fundamentals. I though the foot-painting analogy would make that clear.

But judging by the response, everyone thought I was presenting a dichotomy, which proves that although I am a writer of sorts, I am not a good writer.
In other words, debates about what makes one a good programmer are interesting and helpful. Questions about our responsibilities to the industry and society as a whole are worth discussing. Discussions of the meaning and value of a university degree and universities' responsibilities can be valuable, even if they're inflammatory.

However, arguments about taxonomy are boring, a waste of time, and usually more rooted in snobbery than any desire to learn or teach about our chosen field, so let's all agree on this definition so we can go back to the more interesting discussions.
Yeah, it's more about the attitude towards learning, so I'd say so. The main way homeschool benefited me was to not kill my intellectual curiosity (and give me plenty of time and freedom to do my own investigation).
Being a Developer During a Recession
> usually more rooted in snobbery than any desire to learn or teach about our chosen field

I defy anyone to start teaching programming by opening with the lines "You may think you're a programmer, but you aren't." It will probably go as far as writing a blog post that says "you may think you belong to an exclusive club, but you don't."
And a tangent on that:

It's been said that algorithm + data structure = program. But really, the only true 'algorithm' is the cpu. Everything else is clever data structures.

Just thought I would say...
You also said compose. :-)
I think it's the other way around...

The performance of the boss determines what he looks like.
Remember when people on reddit had a clue?
Those are good points. Thanks.
I can't wait for her new book.
A shockingly large number of Americans don't understand how debt works. I suppose this must apply to people in other countries as well, but I haven't noticed as much fiscal ignorance coming from non-Americans. Among the crazy comments I've heard recently from outraged Americans:

"You can't take away my house just because I stopped making mortgage payments! I live here!"

"I missed three credit card payments, and now the credit card company has raised the interest rate from 16% up to 28%! That should be illegal!"

Maybe people are just taking cues from the US government -- after all, if the government is going into debt by over a thousand dollars per year per person, why shouldn't individual Americans?
Jump Green: A number puzzle game for two players
sarcasm FTW
Way to rub it in buddy. Now, I got go and work even harder.
http_load does not replicate heavy load; it replicates a DOS attack.

It generates N requests every second without waiting for the previous N requests to complete. Actually, it never waits for requests to complete. It kills them so the http server has no where to send data. With Tomcat, this causes hella errors in the logs. It's just not an accurate stress test.

ab is okay but I found it was more difficult to ramp it up to really stress the server. I prefer siege (http://www.joedog.org/JoeDog/Siege) because it performed well, produced useful output (ab's output is pretty good too), and was convenient.

We used these three to test a new app stack for yellowpages.ca a couple years ago. siege became the standard in the end. We also tried JMeter which performed pretty well but the GUI/XML configuration was inconvenient (it's a complicated development environment).
"It's not about the content (although unlawful or hate stuff can stay away thanks)"

So does this mean that mailinator filters for "unlawful or hate stuff"? I'd like to receive my daily insults, thanks.
What you're seeing here is web 3.0 technology.
It's always a small group of people in my friends list who think it is a great idea to spam everyone they know with this crap.

There really should be a setting to ignore all application requests.
Micropayment systems have a long history of failing, and chances are this one won't be different.

Just for fun: take a closer look at the screenshot of the virtual check: 00 dollars and 00/100 Cents. 00/100 Cents. Milicents. Yes. Although technically correct in this case of 0 (mili)cents, it doesn't build confidence.
so you build his graph thing at the end. and if you go part way down, then dead end (no match), then don't you have to go back to the 2nd char of the non-match and try to match a word from there? and thus do a lot more comparisons than the number of bytes.

the reason is when you put 100+ words in the tree, they'll share some substrings.
Rather sad actually. The more I read, the more I think economics should be mandatory in high-school.
Startups Reddit
It was in my (wealthy, suburban, white, public) high school. At the non AP level, it was dumbed down beyond recognition.
Usability Disaster Story
Thats almost as fast as a one of those guys looking for action at a bathhouse
agree with Wil. in fact, Wil, shoot me a quick msg if u could.. slvrspoon a t g-mail..
Spooky. On the very day that I abandon Textmate and go back to emacs, SteveY gives me a handy cheat sheet.

This is an auspicious sign. :)
Anyone on here going to this? (Or just plain in Seattle?) Let's meet up! rkabir@gmail.com

Alternatively, I will likely be wearing a bright yellow t-shirt...
Recession 2008: How bad it can get?
XMPP is the future for cloud services
I think to release - we're aiming for good enough
iPhone Guitar
Microsoft Says Vista More Secure Than XP, OSX and Linux
DIY: Small $200 linux box
How do you make money?
downvote me for submitting my own stuff, but I figured you guys might like building a small and cheap linux box. i might even make one just to run apache-top for my server all day and see live hits come in.
I was running both of them at 20 clients. More than enough to start pushing the milliseconds/page up.
"I missed three credit card payments, and now the credit card company has raised the interest rate from 16% up to 28%! That should be illegal!"

Where I live the national limit on interest for Credit Cards is 16%, no ifs, no buts. If credit card companies benefit when people miss their payments they have an incentive to give credit cards to people who can't afford them. This, in turn, reduces the general level of prosperity in the country.

So, why do you think it -should- be legal for CC companies to raise the interest rates to absurd levels?
Keep drinking the Kool-Aid, I just started and it tastes wonderful...

For those interested, Steve Yegge has an old post on emacs productivity tips:
http://steve.yegge.googlepages.com/effective-emacs
Tesla Roadster Gets Federal Approval - Production Starts March 17
FTC Defends Ethernet From Patent Troll
Thanks. I've nearly forgotten that it isn't running. I had a crazy experience moving my account between Dreamhost accounts and ended up trying to repeatedly send my Typo database through a webform 500K at a time -- enough said. I'll fix it now.

I stick with Dreamhost primarily because the founders were in my college class (yeah, I'm a YC senior citizen), so I beg your pardon for my sentimentality.
If I read that article right it says 1% not a single case (but then again I didn't read too hard)
why do you think it -should- be legal for CC companies to raise the interest rates to absurd levels?

Because someone who misses three credit card payments -- I'm not talking about someone who doesn't pay off the credit card completely, I'm talking about someone who doesn't even make the minimum payment -- has a significant likelyhood of going bankrupt and never paying off the debt.

Not making credit card payments on time exposes you as a poor credit risk; why should those of us who are good credit risks pay higher rates to subsize you?
I created a site for Refactor Phoenix. Once created, I saw that the URL kept the space in the words, but it's encoded as %20.

In retrospect I wish I had entered the name differently so that I could have avoid that space.

Really, I want to have it both ways: a title of Refactor Phoenix, but a url with no gaps (/refactorphoenix).

I saw no way to edit this, or to delete the network.
I get a huge amount of friends who spam me with this crap.

lmao whats even worse is when you're trying to find someone's wall because they have 50bajillion applications on their frickin page.

Reality Check: nobody honestly cares about your honesty box! Pirates and ninjas can go to hell! What the hell is the point of a super wall?! I'm not your top friend? Throw your ugly pet rabbits into that pot, there are homeless kids to feed. No, I am not interested in you, I am straight thank you very much.

Yeah half those applications are ridiculous. Many people liked facebook cause it was simple/clean, now its almost as bad as myspace.
Maybe it would be better if people always used cat, always used wc, &c. Sure, performance is better the other way -- but multiplying the functionality of each command comes at a price, namely that only grognards can do things "the right way". If we instead emphasized the way of distinctly separate commands for distinctly separate things...
Let's BEE friends.

(And there's a picture of a bee)
The credit card companies will eventually get their money - it will just be painful for them. They have to send a bunch of warnings, get a collection agency involved, and so on. If somebody goes bankrupt the CC company won't get its money back, so the rates then become irrelevant.

You argue that the pain to the credit card companies will ultimately end up at the doorstep of those who do pay off their debt. And to some extend, that's true. But I don't think it's as bad as you make it sound.

Let's take an analogy. When amazon offers free shipping, are you upset when you live close to their distribution center so that you (effectively) pay a higher price for the product? After all, the money for the shipping has to come from some place, and if shipping to your house is relatively inexpensive, then you're subsidizing the shipping costs of others. It's not really something anybody would worry about. Implicitly subsidizing others happens all the time, and I think that it averages out pretty well.

Besides, when people go bankrupt because they borrow money irresponsibly, the society as a whole also suffers. So preventing unnecessary bankruptcy is a good thing. And CC companies make it hard for people to get higher caps on their CC to minimize their own risk. And everybody benefits from that.
1% of people are homozygous for the mutation. The study itself is of one individual with the homozygous mutation that persistently had measurable viral loads for HIV-1. Normally the homozygous CCR5 mutation means you don't get HIV, because HIV infects through the CCR5 receptors which CCR5 D32 homozygous positive individuals don't have. But you could get infected by a blood transfusion from a late stage HIV patient, because HIV eventually starts infecting via the CXCR4 receptor. You could also get infected via the less transmitted and geographically confined HIV-2.

But these scenarios are unlikely to happen, so they haven't happened very often. The study was notable because they found ONE GUY who couldn't fight off HIV with CCR5 delta 32 homozyous.

If we could magically take away the CCR5 receptors from HIV+ individuals, many would be able to fight HIV to the point where they tested negative on some HIV tests.

See this old thread for discussion of Josh's curing HIV idea. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47751
I think a lot of people like those apps.
Old discussion on CCR5: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47751

Includes Josh's idea for curing HIV
Information is inherently free, dissemination isn't.