skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't think its pointless to debate which language is best, or that it is not interesting anymore. I still find it interesting.

But more than that, I think it really doesn't have anything to do with labeling yourself a 'java developer' or 'rails developer'.

When programmers add titles like that, it usually means (or should mean) they have a lot of specific expertise on a particular language/framework. And of course this knowledge is not easily transferable from one technology to the other as one might think.

If you have a shop with ASP MVC product and are looking for a hire, you could hire a 'rails dev' or even a 'struts dev', but that won't be the same as hiring an 'ASP MVC dev' or even any programmer 'like a systems programmer' or 'firmware programmer' to fit the bill.

Of course they can all program, but those are very different beasts and the title makes a difference. The title helps you get a programmer with an experience and knowledge set which is more closely aligned with what you need.
I was referring specifically to the music hydra and its 175,000 users as the example of the superior product. All of the rips on the hydra are of the highest quality and in multiple formats, as I said in my post.
> They are saying that content has always been free and the medium is whats being charged for, hence you sell papers instead of news stories, CDs instead of music tracks etc etc.

That's only entirely true in a market where, using your example, the quality and content of news articles are identical.

People usually choose to purchase a paper based on the type of content inside; they might be paying more than the content is worth because of the media - but that is a slightly different point.
Dirac does come up, and it's interesting technology but not suitable for web video, being considerably worse at this task than both Theora and H.264.

And no-one, not even the BBC, can guarantee they won't get patent trolled. That's part of the delicious brokenness of patents, you have prove a negative, prove that there are no black swans and while reasonable people will go forward based on probabilities and heuristics, the wider discussion about Theora moved onto politics and business a long time ago, where demanding people prove a negative is a good rhetorical trick even when it applies just as much, if not more, to your own side.
It used to be Javascript-obfuscated. For all the times I clicked on one of their links only to have my blood pressure raised: I hope Experts Exchange withers away into obscurity.
Methinks that the relatively small community (and market) is what helps keep the quality up. Larger communities would probably see a decline in overall quality because generally people aren't too worried.

Or rather, the people pirating music because of a desire for higher quality is, I suspect, only a small portion of the group - most want a free lunch.
Whoops. Apologies. Very red faced at the moment!
Round Robin DNS can play havoc with e-commerce software that was built on dumb assumptions about session handling. The usual symptom is carts vanishing and reappearing semi-randomly. If I'm going cheap a webserver set up as a reverse proxy can manage a large number of sessions spread out over multiple application servers. It's not as good as dedicated network hardware, but it's better than round-robin dns.
How much should writers make?
not mutually exclusive
I may be mistaken on this (it's been some time since I've read a relevant license), but I believe that most multimedia licenses have wording to the effect of "we own (or have licensed) all of the relevant IP around this technology". In that way, if some submarine patent surfaces and is used against a licensee, they have legal recourse against the original license authority.
You could use something like Rackspace cloud sites: http://www.rackspacecloud.com/cloud_hosting_products/sites

They claim to offer automatic scalability and server redundancy out of the box. I have no personal experience with this product thou.
Some good jokes
Some Jokes, ready, laugh and stay healthy.
Hi Ben,

I appreciate your concern about scaling your service but I think you should consider a fremium business model that allows you to accommodate more free users at lower cost.

Instead of logging tens of millions of events for free users, you could log just a subset, which will allow you to use far fewer servers whilst allowing free users to "evaluate the usefulness of your new service".

It will also make sure that the future of your startup is not wholly dependent on external investors.

We've done something similar with Trafficspaces. We run our service off Amazon's cloud system, which gives us a lot of flexibility.

If you need assistance on how to structure your freemium model to make sense, send me an email at niyi [at] trafficspaces [dot] com.
http://www.crunchbase.com/company/y-combinator
All the rest are neutral technical names. And mp3 sounds kind of nice to my ear; easy to remember and rolls off the tongue.

Ogg, on the other hand, is an actively stupid-sounding word, reminiscent of a particularly moronic caveman's grunt. Theora sounds OK but is ruined by the first part, and Vorbis is again a silly-sounding word.

All told the names remind me of the worst sort of childish open source whimsicality. They paint the picture of a bunch of nerds so intent on demonstrating their lack of care about marketability that they deliberately name their project the stupidest thing they can think of. Well it worked - they certainly affected the marketability, and here we are, with the developer who stands up in a meeting and says "so, what about Ogg Vorbis support?" looks and sounds like an idiot. Well done.

I don't even like having an .ogg file on my computer, the name annoys me so much. You might say names are irrelevant and maybe they are to you, but they're not to me.
If they run an API, some hosts (Dreamhost) ignore the TTL for ages. I discovered this when one of my API users emailed me after a DNS change asking what happened. In the end my user had to edit their hosts file to over-ride Dreamhost's obscene DNS cache.
There are two services. One is producing unique content and second is delivering content to people who are interested.

Traditionally first service was paid by establishing monopoly for second service and channeling disproportionate gains from providers of second service to the providers of first service.

Since second service became ubiquitous (anyone can provide it at almost no cost and without involving anyone else except himself and his customer) it became virtually impossible to uphold this model of financing creative work.

Of course no one gives away old ways without putting up any fight, especially if old ways brought him mountains of cash, but all antipiracy campaigns are just futile attempts to play against the market that due recent developments in communication technology made coupling used in the past infeasible.

There are new ideas (new for the industry) how one can pay for creative work. Some are advertisement based. Some involve entangling content to services provided by server that is under complete control of party who has deal with content producer. Some (dumber ones) involve closing up content delivery process by limiting capability of device.

Some things turn out to be more profitable some less. Market adapts to advancement of technology. Some people are not seeing money that past experience led them to believe they deserve but that's just the way life goes.

Technology giveth, technology taketh away.
CLRS is the classic textbook for Algorithms... For some topics Klienberg and Tardos is good, I will suggest to read the CLRS text and keep K&T for topics you want to read more on, also the K&T problems are much harder (usually) than CLRS.
Neat !

A good test for 'correctness' is to run the F-pentomino both in some known good program and your own.

It looks like this:

xx
xx
x

I's a really interesting little pattern that will expand quite a bit before stabilizing, it also fires off a bunch of gliders.

edit: I've looked a bit more at your code, and it is almost correct for free-running instances of 'cell'.

The problem is with the generation counter, you only have 1 bit for the generation.

In a synchronous environment that would work, and because you propagate the 'update' signal from the first cell that is hit outward you will (probably) observe correct behaviour.

But that is not the same as having cells completely independent.

The connecting cells are all triggered from the first cell that gets hit. If multiple cells get triggered simultaneously (not possible in a single threaded program!) then as soon as there was a little bit of speed difference between any two cells things would go wrong.

I figure the absolute minimum number of bits in the generation counter is 2, because then you have one 'dead' state in between the 3 possibilities that are current.

A neighbour can be 'ahead', at the same generation or it can be 'behind' and what a cell does should be governed by the states of the neighbours.

In your program you can never get in to the 'behind' state, but in a free-running hardware solution that is a definite possibility.

I hope that's all clear :)

Think of it this way, effectively you've made your cells globally clocked again.

You also can't delete dead cells, two populations that were connected at some point in the past should stay connected or they will drift away from each other.

If a 'cell' is run by a completely independent thread which runs at some arbitrary speed the whole thing should still work.

Simulating asynchronous devices on synchronous devices is quite tricky!
No edlin, no debug. I was disappointed.
Chyawanprash
Ugh, I didn't know that about session handling.

As a tangent: guys, current ecommerce packages really, really suck. I've had a couple of ecommerce jobs recently, and for one client in particular, had to evaluate most of the field of both free and commercial offerings. They're almost uniformly horrible. Is there anybody willing to take a crack at doing it better?

I suggested round-robin DNS over a reverse proxy because reverse proxies (and similar services, like OpenBGPd) still have a single point of failure in the front-end. No matter what you do, it can still go down, and then all that back-end redundancy does squat.
Rackspace made headlines recently for having multiple outages.
give this man your upvotes. repeat after me: economic statement are value free. nobody said piracy was good or bad. piracy is a natural outcome given human preferences.
In my current trip to India, I decided to pick up a pack of Chyawanprash because of good things I have heard about it.

Nothing like a couple of studies to help me gulp down that pretty bad tasting stuff. I posted this here as I was wondering if people here have tried it with any results and also to let people know about it.
I see most of the comments are about the fact Bill Gates doesn't need SEO.

I believe the point of the post is to offer some case study of how to improve one's SEO. And I find it very informative.

He makes his case study even more pertinent by choosing a well-known target, Bill Gates, but that's not the main point.
When the marginal cost of production falls to zero, classical economics ceases to function and extra-market restrictions are needed to force the continued existence of the market.

You don't even need marginal costs to be zero - external utility factors are required for even the most basic of markets to function, laws being the primary example, but there are others.

For one, most people feel bad when they steal. They feel embarrassed when they are caught, even before they are punished. The likelihood of being caught stealing a physical product is rather high, and once you layer on the punishments, which are rather large, it's enough to make most people refrain from shoplifting.

Unfortunately for digital media, stealing and getting caught are both extremely impersonal acts, so there's very little embarrassment or guilt involved. And getting caught is so rare that the financial penalties are all but meaningless.

In my opinion all of these industries need to stop worrying about what is "due" them for their hard work, and start worrying about what the optimal price points, payment systems, and purchase/discovery paths are to get paying customers. These may be very different from the current levels, and may require radical steps: I don't think it's out of the question to offer vastly different prices, going as low as you can imagine, to different people based on how likely you think it is they will purchase the item. If it costs nothing to sell a digital copy of Britney's new CD, then it's crazy not to let someone buy it for $.25 if you're pretty sure they'd otherwise either pirate or ignore it.

These changes may end up meaning that margins and/or revenues are significantly cut from the pre-Internet era, but that's life. And if things do get so bad that certain types of information can no longer be produced, so be it, the market has spoken.
I see, they cloned the first 4 they hired.
Two words: Credit Union.
narcissism seems naturally correlated to self starters IMO.
What if those handful people had started/contributed to some open source project? Now they don't have access to their own code.
I'm not so sure that simply having a grasp of the core underlying paradigms in a given polyglot scenario is really enough to say that you can therefore take your well undestood abstractions and apply them to any other language.

For example; I just spent the afternoon trying to pick up Scala / Lift by way of checking out the open source code to Apache Esme project, I must admit that I'm a little baffled at this stage, I can see tantalising glimpses of familiarity here and there within the framework, but compared to my prior experience in PHP / Django / Ruby on Rails / Grails I can tell this is going to be quite a paradigm shift. Wondering if maybe I should've started on something small and less complex first rather than diving in on Esme.

Time will tell I guess.
Sports Highlights: Tiger vs Phil Heavyweight Slugfest
Engaging with applicants before the deadline seems like a great move. From the stories from previous YCers it sounds like this sometimes happened already, but it's good to have it spelled out.

Oh, by the way Paul: the "Apply" link in the footer is still the W2010 one, which now 404s. It shouldn't stop anyone serious about applying, but... :)
(a brilliant UI innovation)

nit: ...though not theirs. Something that Microsoft gets little credit for.
When should you store serialized objects in the database? (via abcphp.com)
Clickable: http://www.workaholicwives.com
MP3 pioneers launch 'deluxe' file
Yeah, I think it "workaholicswives.com", so that it reads like "Workaholic's Wives" would make the implication he was trying to make.
Ask HN: I've built a product - how do I take payments in the UK?
I am based in the UK and I have built a web application and now I want to charge people for a 'premium' account.
I guess I have the following basic options:

1. Use an API from a bank and handle the payment processing myself (which one?)

2. Use a 3rd party payment system and don't have anything to do with the actual processing

3. Use PayPal

Does anybody have any experience (pros/cons) with these approaches? Any help would be REALLY appreciated (of course, I will research this myself and also publish my own findings).
Brains in a vat by Hilary Putnam
Why do consumers have the right to their choice of form, channel and price?

They don't have any particular "right" to these choices.

But that doesn't mean the choices disappear. And it also doesn't mean that real value is not created by offering them, even if it's done illegally: the Pirate Bay has probably created more real value in this world than most startups could ever dream of. It doesn't matter that it's ethics are questionable.

What's wrong with "if the buyer and seller don't agree on terms, the deal doesn't happen"?

Nothing at all, that's exactly what happens a lot of the time.

With most digital media it just so happens that there are plenty of illegal "sellers" that are willing to step in with terms that are more suitable to the buyer.

It may not be legal or "right", but it's pretty damn efficient.
3D capable TVs are already available. Its just a matter of them becoming mainstream.
Free Insurance Quotes
These free insurance quotes distributed online have saved a lot of money for the insurance applicants.
Blender to Flash: Introducing ASBlender
As all 3D modelers probably know: exporting models from 3D applications and use them in Flash (Papervision3D etc.) can be frustrating. Enter ASBlender, a library I slapped together in a few days to read Blender’s .blend file format and parse it to AS3.
It's not appropriate to downmod someone for an opinion!

If you disagree with something, post a reply. A downmod is for spam, and (sometimes) for wrong information.
Our service needs to be highly available, so our infrastructure reflects this. Basically, we have a hosting provider that has 3 geographically separated datacenters within the same IP subnet. We have a clustered loadbalancer solution, with one loadbalancer in each datacenter, that monitor each other. When one loadbalancer goes down, another one picks up the same IP address of the one that went down, and the whole thing fails over to another datacenter.

Of course, the load balancers have a lot more webservers behind this, but this is what we consider a pretty highly availalbe solution for the front-end.

The problem is in the backend: how do you handle databases going down ? Do you make a master/slave setup like the loadbalancers I just described? Or a multi-master that sync periodically ? It all depends upon your requirements. So in the end, there is no best practice, there's just a good practice for your problem.
Any hosting company with an outage is going to get headlines these days.

My first startup was a hosting company -- my partner still runs it and I exited a few years ago. Having "been there and done that," I have a lot of respect for anyone that can stay in the hosting business -- when everything is running just fine, your customers are complaining about why things can't be cheaper. As soon as the network blips for even a second, everyone's talking about how crappy the network is, why they pay so much (even on $10/mo accounts), etc.

In other news: it's early, I can't sleep and I might be a little cranky. :)
The performance evaluation vs Hadoop looks bogus to me. S3, SQS and SimpleDB run on real (non-virtualized) hardware. You need a lot more Hadoop nodes to make it comparable. At least throughput per AWS dollar should be reported.

The ~100k files inverted index test is completely unfair to Hadoop: launching 100k map task per small file is ridiculous as it's basically measuring JVM startup time. People/crawlers typically put all these pages in large map/sequence files. Hadoop would automatically launch a map task per chunk (default 128MB).

Fetching data to EC2 for computation is also a step backward. It cannot scale on large data as the cluster will become switch bound much ealier than the "kosher" map-reduce, where data locality is observed.

In any case, it's neither fast or lean (it's basically Java glue code to use S3/SQS/SimpleDB, and seems to have larger overall carbon footprint than Hadoop)
The problem with SVG and Canvas
They claim that being in the DMOZ directory has high impact, while being in the Yahoo directory has low impact. Does this agree with the experience of fellow HNers?
I predict that by January 25, 2015, pure-managed operating systems will, combined, occupy 10% or more of the computing market (desktops, servers, mobile, and other embedded computers). Pure-managed operating systems being defined as operating systems completely written in managed languages which permit direct memory access only for hardware access in drivers.

I'll throw $1000 down on this; anyone want to challenge it?
I have the same problem but I'm based on Italy. Banks can be really expensive but paypal is too evil for me to even consider it. If you've been here for more than two weeks you've seen how many horror stories about paypal are published.

I'm considering google checkout and I'm wondering if anyone has experience with them.

UPDATE: based on another response, I learned that google checkout is available only for USA and UK customers? That makes it pretty unusable in my opinion. Are there similar services?
Be careful... from the buy link

"Zoomable street map + Greater London map. Patented folding. Comes with an information leaflet, containing an index for streets, stations and places of interest, useful numbers, official tube map. Street map shows all underground lines. 100+ museums, galleries, sights."

Patented folding FTW!!
The full responsibility for the fate of your company, and all of the people depending on it, though it depends to a great extent on investors, partners, customers, the markets, technical and social and financial risks that you can only vaguely see and barely control, ultimately rests on you.

This is so completely unlike the typical modern day human experience that people often just get culture shock and flicker out. Even more often, they give up and fade out, blaming some little thing or external cause for their failure.

The creation of valuable new technologies, while challenging, seems like a cakewalk compared to the moral weight you're required to bear when running a company. I think this can be partially seen in how many entrepreneurs do end up giving up the reins of their company; either during an acquisition or to 'professional managers' (who often themselves simply shirk the moral weight since the company isn't theirs to the same extent.) Those who can take their company to the next level are, at each step, both rare and exceedingly valuable.
Thanks and yes I will put the entire source on github as soon as I clean it up. The current un-minified javascript can be found here:

http://tsh.ashafa.com/static/global.js

It was really a quick experimental hack that turned into something worth dedicating a little more time to. Not my best javascript at all.
The blog claims that you can't develop a video codec without tripping over patents but then links, approvingly, to an article written by the lawyer who okayed using Theora in Mozilla, talking about why he thinks there isn't any patent problem with Theora.

(At least the original author points out this patent situation is a terrible situation, I've seen this same point made repeatedly with responses that range from fatalistic acceptance through to a bizarre sense of triumph over freetards.)
How is an algorithm proprietary if I can go online to the website of the ITU, a division of the United Nations, and download a copy of the standard and go write my own implementation?

Simple: your understanding of the definition of "proprietary" is incorrect. Keeping a technology secret is a sufficient -- but not necessary -- condition of it being proprietary.
As a buyer mostly, I would recommend having paypal/google checkout along with an alternate method so your site is still usable if paypal blocks you or goes down... I don't feel safe while handing out my credit/bank details to a new website.
Gates "surprised that the climate debate hasn't focused more on encouraging R&D"
For Tarsnap, I just use PayPal; I don't like it, but they're better than the alternatives.

Since you're in the UK, I'd recommend looking into Google Checkout -- I understand it's available in the US and UK, albeit not the rest of the world. Then you can offer your customers a choice.

EDIT: I'm also looking forward to using Amazon Payments -- so far it's US-only, but I'm sure they'll be expanding to the rest of the world any decade now...
Developing versus graphic designing and vice versa
Your budget does not allow for building a redundant system. The only way to mitigate risk is to set up monitoring and automated backups.
Thanks! That's a great idea - Google Checkout completely skipped my mind - I'll look into that.