skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yeah, sorry ... I probably misread something, seeing now that I can't find a reference. So I removed that.
Basically, it's Sun's sourceforge. The fact that you've never heard of it should probably be telling. :-)
Does anyone know if the Chinese gov't could use information gathered by CNNIC for issuing the certificate to decrypt traffic it intercepts encrypted by the public key?
During the Stalin era and for several years afterwards, cybernetics research was discouraged as "anti-soviet": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suppressed_research_in_the_Sovi...
Looks redundant, but easy. Thanks.
People might have voted the comment down because they thought it was obvious trolling. Personally I'm not interested in yet another conversation on merits of PHP vs other scripting languages.
I imagine the high incidence of LAPD officers has to do with the large movie industry in LA; people making movies in LA are more likely to set them there.
Keep in mind when looking at the chart that the Y-axis starts at 80%, not 0%. There is still definitely a discrepancy, but I initially wasn't placing it in the proper context.
Human Space Flight Needn't Rely on NASA
Man, you are reading way way too far into what I said. Aren't introverts like us supposed to always be taking statements at face value? And isn't what I said true? Attacks like "algorithms junkie", and completely shoving words into my mouth just make me not want to be here anymore.

For the record, I write software rasterizers for fun. I optimize code using SSE2. I code mainly in C++. I am the target audience for this article. Maybe you were trying to illustrate a contrasting point of view, which is fine, but it is stupid to make it so personal.
That's true I suppose. But it still means that any products and services Google actually sells still accounts for about $200mil/yr and about $100mil/yr of that is purely Google Apps for businesses.

That means,

Google Earth Enterprise Geospatial Servers + Google Earth Pro + Google Products/Checkout (minus advertising revenue from that) + Google Appliances + Google Sketchup Pro + More Picassa Space + Google Voice long distance service fees + whatever else all account for $100mil/yr in revenue. Those aren't ad supported services and nearly all of those were acquisitions.

Google Appliances should be a multi-billion dollar/yr business, supplanting everything from document and content management systems, to Sharepoint, to many types of traditional Oracle installations, yet we know that it's entire business sits at under $100mil/yr. Let's be generous, and in a flight of fancy say it sits at $90mil/yr, that means that all the rest of those products would have to do less than $10mil/yr.

Too much you say! Google voice Long Distance has to do something in the neighborhood of $5mil/yr! And I know personally of at least a dozen or so Google Earth Enterprise Server Installs, at ~$20k a pop (or whatever the pricing is), that's not a whole lot of money. ESRI has a similar business at just under $.75 billion/yr. Assuming there are quite a few more installs than I personally know about, let's say all added up, $2mil/yr in geospatial products (that's about 10x the value of what I've personally seen so I feel I'm being pretty generous here). So the Appliance business couldn't possibly be that "big".

In other words, no matter how you mix the numbers, the performance of these offerings is not very good. I'm currently working in a startup, and we're doing numbers like this and we're considered very under-performing by our investors right now. It would rankle me in all kinds of ways were I in google management that these products are not each at least $20-30mil/yr interests and one or two of them should be $billion+/yr interests.

Again, don't get me wrong, I love Google and their products and services. I probably use most of what I just listed here at least 2-3x a week. But Google is an advertising agency that uses a novel distribution channel for it's advertising clients. It's not really much of a products company in the same way Microsoft of Apple is. Google should be analyzed more in terms of comparison to other ad channels and agencies not in terms of direct competition with technology vendors. This is the flaw analysts, users, employees and competitors make.
This is indeed the case. The weakness of our current SSL infrastructure is that any CA can sign any site's cert. So the more trusted CAs you have, the wider the attack vector is--all it takes is one rogue CA (or more likely, one CA with weak security) and you can be effectively man-in-the-middled.
Easy fix for this: If you have Slashdot mod points, browse at 0; if you don't and just want to read good comments, browse at +3 or 4.
FWIW, iTunes is written with C++/Carbon, not Objective-C.
Does Laszlo have a WYSIWYG editor? That's really the only component that's missing: the ability for any artist that just wants to draw a vector animation and hook up some simple events to make a game. If we can lower the barriers to entry on HTML5, it'll eclipse Flash in no time.
This comment further simplifies the thesis into an obviously trivial and tautological form.

This sentence then points out that there is nothing new or insightful in the simplified thesis.
Its kind of like astrology - they are almost all right if you want them to be right.
The web didn't had at first a common format for images ... but now all modern browsers have support for GIF, JPEG, and PNG.

And it was probably a smart move on their part to avoid political issues. Apple will add Theora support if the demand increases. Mozilla will add H.264 support when the IP-issues are cleared.
Ah, I didn't know about the Bluetooth. That's nice.

Get back to me when you have Emacs and xterms working and I might consider getting one... ;-)
Periodic Table of World Internet Facts
Please don't put words into my mouth. All I said was that we were slightly annoyed at being copied.
That is a very good point. Every C/C++ developer should be familiar with #pragma pack (Visual Studio... not sure what the GCC equivalent is).
Not that easily actually. You have to re-interview - and I don't actually want to be in a coding role, so I doubt engineering would suit me ;)
Yes, it's only going to last a month.
You sound like you've worked on physics simulations. Care to elaborate? That sounds interesting.
I'd say PHP is more sane from a business and coding standpoint. Need to find a PHP developer? No problem. Want a PHP IDE? No problem. A large community to handle bugs and any future development? Yes.

It's obvious that wasabi has been good to Fog Creek, but that doesn't make it a sane decision, regardless of the quality of the syntax and semantics of the language itself.
Having a WYSIWYG editor for HTML5 or Laszlo is only a matter of popularity, since that would be a good business.

And as a dev, trust me, you don't need one for Laszlo.
Interesting. It seems like an amazing material, but I wonder what long-term health problems might arise due to exposure to nano particles of silica.
The enemy of my enemy is ... wait a minute: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2007/3/5/
I like how whoever checked in the code included their .suo file, which is the user options for the solution!
Steve Krug on the least you can do about usability
I expected this would be used when you have a file with no extension.
Graph on decline of Music's lost decade: Sales cut in half in 2000s
The Abu Ghraib protester was first http://www.democracynow.org/2004/6/3/boston_protester_faces_...

Then the ATHF thing you referenced
http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2008/01/mooninites_from_one...

Then a freaking traffic counter that had been put in place by the department of transportation
http://www.boingboing.net/2007/02/28/boston-police-blow-u.ht...

and the MIT student with the LED sweater
http://boingboing.net/2007/09/21/mit-student-arrested.html

These are only the ones I know of. Maybe there are more cases of Boston PD going nutso over some imagined bomb threat. It reminds me of the aftermath of 9/11, all of the soccer moms in my rural home town, running around and buying up all the bottled water and duct tape in town, like they expected The Terr'ists to be interested in bombing Middelofnowheresburg, PA.

I'm sure Boston is a great city, but stories like these make me never want to visit there, lest I worry if I forgot a half-finished Arduino blinky-light project in the back seat of my car. I don't view Boston as that important of a city for someone to want to bomb it.
re: 1. "JSON databases" are starting to displace Relational Databases?

Your terms - json databases - do not have enough search volume to show graphs. http://www.google.com.au/trends?q=json+databases

OODB were all the rage a decade or two ago, and they solved the O/R impedance mismatch - but they didn't become mainstream. What has changed, that will make "JSON databases" succeed?

EDIT Actually, hierarchical databases were popular before Relational DB were invented, and then everyone switched. Why? Normalization of RDB is said to be important, but it seems little used in practice. It seems more a selling point, but it usually takes more than a good pitch to motivate deep organizational change (maybe it was different in those early days, when new installations quickly outnumbered old ones?)

It is because databases often outlive the application that created them. They also often serve more than one application, for more than one purpose (e.g. operations vs. business intelligence). For this, you need a data representation that is in terms of the data itself rather than the use. The problem with data structures in a programming language, such as objects is that they are designed in terms of their use; a data representation is chosen that makes sense for what you want to do with the data.

The O/R impedance mismatch is not just between "media" (objects vs. tables), but also between the specific representations chosen within that media. If you store your objects directly in a DB, your data is closely coupled to your use; the same problem occurs with OR mappers. I surmise that the advantage of relational over hierarchical databases was that they could better represent the data in terms of itself.

JSON databases will have the same problem - the data representation will be designed in terms the application that generated them, and this close-coupling will make it difficult to interoperate with a later application, and with other applications, with other purposes. The data representation will not be designed in terms of itself.
I think my biggest learnings from building systems, and although he didn't mention it explicitely, he did mention it, is to build your system to self heal.

Shit happens, whether it is a database starting to fall over for some reason, or your heap growing too big, or who knows what, something will eventually fail. Having monitoring to tell you that is of course the first step, but the second is to have that monitoring be able to shoot everything in the head to see if it fixes things. It doesn't always work, but does a lot of times, and although inelegant will usually result in a better user experience.

Every system needs to be able to self heal, especially if you want to keep your sanity and you are a small outfit.
The writing is on the wall, javascript is THE web language, php will be THE legacy web language.

The train is just leaving the station, be sure to get the best seats.
Compressed file-systems increase performance
I see this as being useful if you already have these two things:

1) A large PHP codebase and

2) A CPU-bound app with scaling issues

If you're starting a new app, I don't see why you would choose PHP. And I think most web apps are database-bound rather than CPU-bound. HipHop seems incredibly useful for Facebook, but are other people here on HN excited about using it?
I am glad to see that the replies here have been humerous - Hackernews can be a little too serious sometimes.
Well! This looks to me like Apple holding out on them might have finally gotten their attention. I am curious to see if they are still nimble enough to react accordingly.
Well you'll find that a history of being the "superpower(s)" and then wasting it all by bombing the crap out of ourselves results in a slightly different point of view in the world (from the EU).

Empire building was Europe's "sense of mission and purpose in the world" we made the natives "civilised". It was our belief of divine right and our ridiculous optimism in regards to war and "glory" (it will be over by Christmas) that led (in part) to our downfall.
git-diff doesn't require you to do gymnastics to compare files from different branches

It requires me to use git-diff. How do I do it without involving the VCS tool? How do I get both files side-by-side in Emacs so I can go through them thoroughly (some of us prefer that to reading diffs, you know)?

Since you can reconstruct deleted branches, I don't see the problem with deleting them.

I want the history of my codebase to be easy to get a feel for; that means major work (e.g., a long-lived branch which made significant changes) should be easily accessible. Telling people to hunt down the right merge commit and work back through its ancestry doesn't do that. Inventing ad-hoc schemes of tags or renamed branches to try to make up for the inability to keep a branch but say you're done with it doesn't do that.

It reminded me of why I like git so much.

Meanwhile, it's (one reason) why I don't like git so much.
If Adobe wants Apple (and me) to care about the future of Flash, they have to make it not suck on Mac OS X. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if Apple omitting Flash from the iPhone and iPad isn't a ploy to light a fire under the Mac Flash development team.
65 years to correct?
Consider the British Empire in 1914 and then again in 1971. It's more or less the same for all European nations. We lost our minds, a generation, many of our cities and all of our empires. 65 years is not going to correct that, it was a one-way street.

Do you have ANY understanding of the state of Europe's economy following WW2? We were heading for WW3 after the US pulled the mat on the debt repayments. Luckily Marshal understood this and hence the Marshal Plan prevented WW3 in Europe.
What if the file extension is non-existant, incorrect, or uncommon? This site handles that.

For instance, TaskPaper stores its todo items in a file with the extension ".taskpaper" -- googling for that will tell you that the file comes from the TaskPaper app, but it won't tell you that the file is really "ASCII English text"
Even in the case of video, where Flash is enabling over 75% of video on the Web today, the coming HTML video implementations cannot agree on a common format across browsers, so users and content creators would be thrown back to the dark ages of video on the Web with incompatibility issues.

Not really. Most of that 75% is in h.264, a format supported natively by every browser/platform that doesn't support Flash (e.g. iPad) and some that do (e.g. Chrome). Even Microsoft, if and when they do implement <video>, are likely to support it.

It may be messier than just assuming Flash is available (welcome to web "standards"!), but I would hardly call it "the dark ages".
I think it depends on context. Some blogs, like AVC, are more of a discussion with users, so the comments are integral. Some, like Engadget or TechCrunch, are much broader-interest, news-oriented sites, and the comment sections quickly devolve into unreadability.
Power savings on a platter: How to save on storage
Cellular pricing models crumble
Much more interesting to me than Apple vs Adobe is Macromedia vs Adobe.

Adobe was once a seriously great company (Jobs apparently talked wistfully about those days in his Q&A), which together with Apple pretty much created desktop publishing and everything that goes with it (like Photoshop, Illustrator, PostScript, PDF, PageMaker, InDesign). The world would be a much worse place without it.

It started going off the rails after founders Geschke and Warnock left but after the Macromedia deal went through in 2005 the lunacy just took off. The only bright spot since then has been Lightroom -- sorry Adobe Photoshop Lightroom -- and even that was a skunkworks project that they had effectively killed until Apple previewed Aperture. All the rest has been just hicky and nasty, and Flash has become endemic (Flash for Photoshop palettes? Really?)

It feels to me as though, rather than being acquired, Macromedia has actually overrun Adobe, to its serious detriment. There's lots of precedent for this in tech deals like this: there were big political struggles in Apple between the incoming NeXT people and the existing Apple people (those struggles emerged as Carbon vs Cocoa, and you can guess who won).

I don't have any insider information on this, but it's interesting to note that all this recent childish posturing and blow-harding about Flash has come from former Macromedia people (this link, the inane blue lego image, everything jdowdell writes). Meanwhile, old Adobe hands like John Nack have been pointing out that, actually, the company's future lies in making great communication tools, not in making sure Flash "wins" a pointless fight.
i would just like to mention the following (yes, i think google rocks, when i look at where google participates in open source):

http://code.google.com/soc/2005/

http://code.google.com/soc/2006/

http://code.google.com/soc/2007/

http://code.google.com/soc/2008/

if thats not enough, we can go ahead with open source OS (android, chromium, hired linux kernel devs), browsers (chrome, firefox participation), python, go language..
just out of my head of course ;)

on the other side we have companies that just try to conform to licenses.Atleast that's my impression. I am wondering how open source contribution from apple or MS would look like if there where no GPL but only BSD licensed software.. (now, i'll most probably be bashed for trolling, sorry.)
This is the pithy offhand comment that gets ten times more upvotes than any well-reasoned and thoughtful response you'll ever write.
Why does CTO of Adobe want Apple to open up to them when Flash is not opened up to Apple and others ?

towards the later part of his text, he argues for an open access to all devices, yet his app is not open (to apple's accusation that flash crashes a lot and part of that is others can't fix the problems that flash causes their systems- flash being a closed system).
Maybe one can illuminate
I love this. Absolutely love it. I've always kind of dismissed comments as mostly empty white noise on the internet, and have never figured out why so many CMS systems/Blogging software/Web apps/etc are so eager to add comments to EVERYTHING.

Give me the content, I can form my own thoughts on it, and if I actually feel like my thoughts are worthwhile for reading I can publish them myself.
11th Annual Top Ten Tech Trends of Churchill Club
I had posted a comment on that there iceberrrrg site regarding how I believe his analysis and 37signal example was incorrect. Low and behold my comment did not get approved.

I'm still sticking to my guns that 37signals heavily implemented tactics for optimizing click-throughs and conversion ratios based on their bread and butter services being listed with bright and bold colors ABOVE THE FOLD.

On that note, it's slightly disheartening that this article is generating such attention on HN.
I wonder if anyone has done a feature by feature comparison between HTML 5 and Flash? That is what can I do with Flash, that I cannot with HTML 5 and vice versa?
As of right now, I am forced to assume that Flash has an advantage over HTML 5 solely because most people are not aware of the potential benefits of HTML 5 over Flash.
...and lack of non-interactive space in front...

Are you saying that the bezel around the display responds to touch inputs? If so, do you have a citation?
Was wondering: Why do you need to use flash for this?
A lot of that is because Google doesn't define success that way. Their view is that anything that stimulates the internet will indirectly benefit them, so that makes products like gmail or chrome clear winners. Gmail brought us threaded emailing, ajax (and good javascript-supported interfaces in general), etc. Chrome brought us tear off tabs, fast javascript execution, etc. I think if the focus was stand alone profit generators the products they put out would be very different - what would Android look like?

*brought us = made popular, not necessarily invented.
Ask HN: Interesting Statistics Books
I have noticed a lot of cool algorithms involve statistics, however, I am hindered by never having taken a real statistics class (absolutely terrible professors and books). I would like to basically start fresh and learn some of the core statistical concepts from a standpoint of understanding and not on formula memorization.

I am wondering if anyone recommends a book (or any resource) that could teach me statistics for the purpose of understanding the core concepts that may open up the world of statistical algorithms to me. I would prefer this to be a book that is more about explanations/examples and less about proofs/abstractness, but I am open to all suggestions.
He states in the comments that something like that would be "too intrusive".

It's actually clear from the comments that he's become more fixated on the device he has in mind than in actually solving the problem.
Is Your Organization Being Targeted for Attak?
Homebrew: OS X’s Missing Package Manager
Or at least big enough, to make our models apply.

The real world is also not made up of smooth stuff --- atoms pop up when you look to close. But engineers are using differential equations without too many problems.
Amazon vs. Apple: What Should E-Book Prices Be?
Freakonomics: Testing Geoengineering Before It’s Needed
If you ever write an essay on making online community scale, I'll certainly be an enthusiastic reader! Quite a bit has been written on the subject, but I've found surprisingly little that seems really good, despite the importance of the topic.

Two useful links on the subject are http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/006036.html and http://www.meatballwiki.org/wiki/
That's what you believe. I believe something different. I believe that these languages had the chance, and it didn't happen. Technology rarely gets a second chance without some type of major change.
With HipHop we've reduced the CPU usage on our Web servers on average by about fifty percent, depending on the page.

Hmm. I'm guessing they're comparing it to their PHP stack that has already had the living daylights optimized out of it (with cached bytecode, etc.) and/or a large proportion of their pages doesn't hit much code (lots of stuff cached?). I'd have thought there would be more mileage in this.
NetBSD here.
This is the comment in which I point out how irrelevant your point is. This is the sentence in which I address the point you made, while excusing myself for continuing the offtopic discussion.
The average programmer does not use Ruby or Python. He uses Java, PHP or C. And the programming world is dependent on the average programmer.
It seems odd to me that anyone thinks PHP is "easy".

The syntax is odd, as is the behavior of the built-in functions (many retain seriously warts from older versions of PHP)

It's "easy" in the sense that you just edit one file and the webpage changes, but if that's a stumbling block for your developers then you have bigger problems.
Woz says there's an acceleration problem with his Toyota Prius
That's pretty much the premise that sites like reddit and HN operate on at the link level, too - most people only read the first page or two, but some people are interested/obsessed enough to go through the dreck and flag up what's interesting. It seems to scale reasonably well so far.
I actually agree with you. Javascript is next in line. But it's not yet its turn. It will come soon, though, but what's the point in jumping off the dock on a boat when the boat has not arrived yet?
I'm going to be in Germany in the summer, I was curious if anyone knew where to purchase it there.