skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The problem that I have with his analysis is that it assumes that we continue with the all huge costs of publishing (including marketing).

At some point many of these costs may be significantly wiped out, e.g., by cutting out much of marketing (as well as shipping, wholesalers, etc.). What if writing/"publishing"/marketing of "books" (fiction & nonfiction) became a mutant of current blogging: with the public voting/marketing through the digital social media.

An ebook revolution is not going to happen IMHO through supporting the existing overheads of the 20th century publishing model.
However, given the fact that a good chunk of the post seems to be a rant about TC itself, I think it's worth pointing out who this is coming from.

It really isn't. In fact, "pointing out who this is coming from" is just a way of trying to discredit someone without actually addressing what they said.

In the end knowing who a person is can be used as a basis for choosing what to read but once you're actually reading the piece it doesn't really matter who is writing it or what their bias is unless they are misrepresenting the facts. If that's what he's doing you should point out what facts he's misrepresenting and not try to attack his character.
I have never fake Cisco routers? where do they sell them? :)
Why we tip and how to get a bigger tip
How is it trollish?

A troll is someone who goes into other communities and tries to disrupt the conversation by being inflammatory. If you look at the very definition of the word troll it's "to circulate, move around". The imposition on other people is what makes trolling wrong

But he's posting on his own site and while his writing style is inflammatory that's to be expected from someone who represents himself as an entertainer.
Stock couples
Stock couples HD
The Geo Wars: How Foursquare Can Survive
Non-ionizing radiation does nonetheless affect molecular bonds. It adds energy to them, placing them in more energetic states of vibration, mechanical energy. This is turn influences the chemical reactions they undergo. It could be a catalyst for adverse chemical reactions that lead to pathologies.

(Perhaps in combination with other "man-made" agents; does it perhaps help the odd chlorinated, fluourinate, bromated, or other carcinogen "get a grip" on a a strand of DNA?)

Specific effects depend upon the bonds and the RF frequencies. And affects accumulate in a statistically described fashion; it may take years to for a member of a population to accumulate a significant probability of experiencing an adverse affect.

I haven't had a chemistry class in years (aka I'm no expert). But what I did learn was enough that I don't rule out the possibility of effects induced by non-ionizing radiation. "Non-ionizing" <> no effect whatsoever.
Who are these people that can't do the simple math required to convert from serving size to the amount they consume? If they are too stupid to know that (3 servings per can) X (130 calories per serving) = 390 calories per can, then they are too stupid to count calories. Of course, counting calories isn't that smart to begin with. It's quality, not quantity, that matters.
Photo by Nick Giles Fashion
Photo by Nick Giles Fashion
85 jpg | 14 mb
i can't wait for this to go final. there are some features i'd really like to have coming from 1.1!
In the name of completeness, there are also great packages like OpenMPI and OpenMP.

At least for my particular applications, though, there's either 1) a steep learning curve for programmers 2) language support issues 3) they're designed for batch processing.

Personally, I find shared memory interfaces the easiest to program when there're complicated data access patterns. But that just might be personal preference.
Ask HN: What became of Steve Yegge's "Rhino on Rails"?
http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/06/rhino-on-rails.html

I just remembered about this and can't find any recent info besides Yegge calling it "a transitional thing"[1] in '08. It made a big splash after he announcement at FooCamp '07. Is it actually in use within Google? Has it or will it ever be released? Anyone know anything?

[1] http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/06/rhinos-and-tigers.html
US Navy Orders new Radios with Programmable Cryptography
Exciting!
Object-level permissions, anonymous user support, a new test runner, and general improvements. Sounds helpful.

I've been doing a lot of programming with Django lately, and there is so much happening. I feel like the pace is growing, and things like GeoDjango and Pinax are a HUGE win.
You don't need NFS to run a de-deuping file system. PLan9's Venti has been ported to unix based user mode plan9

http://swtch.com/plan9port/man/man8/venti.html

I use it as a generale backup mechanism. I can save file systems from inside Qemu to it, from Inferno running on Windows, Linux stuff and I can write to it over the net (though it is in the clear so tunnel it).

http://maht0x0r.blogspot.com/2010/01/venti-on-linux-via-p9p....

You configure it so it will spit out certain sized data arenas suitable for burning to CD / DVD as the data is write once anyway.
Lazy ≠ stupid.
IBM was on the precipice of destruction in the 90s; it nearly broke up into several smaller companies in an act of desperation. I think this is what the author is referring to. It was only through an awkward shift from software/hardware development to services that they kept their neck above water.
Because TechCrunch is a high profile source of information for the HN community and it provides the start of many of the threads here. So gauging the accuracy and integrity of it's reporting is relevant because those intellectual discussion use it as a starting point. Meaning the underlying topic of this whole controversy (and this is not the first news item posted on it) is "Who are we trusting to get our news and are they worthy of that trust?" Hence the relevance of this piece.

(For the record I don't really agree with the negative view of TC in that I think on balance they report more good than bad despite any personality quirks the founder might have)
The new ensopad: iPad like (on Android)
It's really interesting to me that he even considers taking Moore's law into account when doing cost planning, but of course it makes sense. I also like this line:

For a really quickly growing startup that's always doing something new, you have to multiply Moore's Law by Murphy's Law; "The number of things that will go wrong will double every year." Sure servers get cheaper, but you probably bought the wrong ones anyway...
Shared memory interfaces are easy to use, but they don't support the same platform as Hadoop and MapReduce because you can't efficiently split them up across machines. With a distribute system like Hadoop you can build a cluster of cheap machines and spread the computation across them. With a shared memory architecture you have to scale up with multi-million dollar machines like SGI's altix line. So if you want to be able to use a cloud of cheap computers you need something like MPI or Hadoop.
List of Cognitive Biases (and explanations)
I think personalization needs to happen in the browser so that silos of personal data (like Facebook, Gmail) can be used without compromising privacy.

There are not enough incentives for those services to integrate server-side - it's a lose for the individual sites themselves if, by providing contextual information and actions from another service on your page, you drive the user away from your site.

Use case for a personalized web: I'm searching on Yelp trying to find a good restaurant to go to this evening. Something tells me that a friend recommended a place in San Francisco several months ago (over Gmail when he learnt I was going) and I had completely forgotten about it.

(Disclosure: I'm a co-founder of WebMynd)
The hold Microsoft, Oracle (Sun) have over enterprise software comes from marketing.

You say that like it is a bad thing. Let's hypothetically say you can duplicate all of the Excel macros and VB apps which, ahem, run the world with a sufficient quantity of (e.g.) Perl scripts. That doesn't by itself help anybody -- you still have to teach them "Hey guys, Perl: it solves boring business problems in addition to enabling golf games." Microsoft has done an awful, awful lot of teaching over the years.
Why don't they exercise more competence with the powers they currently have, before asking for more? (For example, investigate and arrest a some of the crooks whose suspect activities derailed the U.S. economy.)

I'm sorry if this comment seems off topic, but I feel it's in line with some overarching observations. Law enforcement is hardly currently powerless. Where they fail is not in legal powers, but in execution and focus. The latter particularly suffers, further, when career timeframe work is continually jerked around and undermined by partisan politics.
No it's not. No it doesn't.

Flash is a terrible concept just like Java Applets were a terrible concept, and its only potential is annoying advertisements, slow splash pages that keep away return visitors, and browser crashes.
Bone Cancer Osteosarcoma Prognosis
Osteoscarcoma is a type of bone cancer. Malignant tumors are called cancer. Osteosarcoma is one the tumors that attacks mainly children and adolescents because the bone is in the growing stage. Once osteosarcoma has completely developed in the body it is very difficult to cure. so, early detection is very much needed for the complete treatment of the affected patient The mode mode of treatment may vary it can be either chemotherapy or surgery process.
memcached is a poor-man's distributed shared memory system for clusters. We've been layering on top of it to try and fix deficiencies with things like client-side caching, persistence in case memcached drops objects etc.

But I was curious if other people had similar problems and how they were solving them.
“actively contributing to a company’s codebase”

You think you will provide value which exceed the knowledge you might gain from learning about their systems and working/talking with their other employees, etc.?

It is a great chance to get to work with new people if the domain is exciting. I would welcome such opportunity w/o demanding money for my “services” which probably consists of asking a lot of questions :)
well,

all of the things you are talking about requires hardware + software. which is more expensive, slower and more dangerous than building web 2.0 sites that are easily patchable.

that's actually a very prohibitive point, as most startups we hear about nowadays use software because of its low bootstrap cost and economies of scale
Kewlr.com | New Social Media Bookmarking Site Launched
ActiveRecord Job Resume: be different, be bold
For some reason people are more willing to invest all there money in a single company than just put it all on black in las vegas. Granted when you don't have a lot of assets it can be the best choice, however if you are close to retirement then it can be devastating.
Is anybody else frequently bothered by this type of voice in blogs? If you are going to go out of your way to research all these points and write ten thousand words about them, please don't finish it off by telling me I might be ass-fucked. It's not a "firm slap in the face," it's a simple vulgarity that makes you appear incapable of using expressive language. It seems inappropriate for the type of blog the author seems to be trying to write. Most confusing moment: using asterisks in ass-fucking. You either think it's appropriate to use or you don't, don't use it and simultaneously censor yourself.
Is Sarah Lacy Making Sponsored Posts on TechCrunch?
There's nothing decent about IE8 -- and competition doesn't really apply to it since it's installed (and upgraded) by default on the majority of PC's. Since nobody chooses IE, there is no real incentive to make it competitive.
The people this new regulation seeks to help are the ones that count calories, but can't multiply serving size by calories per serving. People that count calories aren't lazy in this context, so we're left with the subset of people who are too stupid to multiply. My comment demonstrated that this subset is the empty set.
The site I write for isn't particularly addressed to geeks. It got about 14 million pageviews in January, and Chrome represents about 5.8% of visitors.
Works fine for me. Scrolling is just as smooth as Safari, if not smoother.
How to get on TechCrunch
Google Interview Questions Those Seems Weird To Me
It is? Why?
I'd just like to quickly make note of something.

I'm a big fan and regular reader here, and as a result, I'm very careful about what I post on HN. Lately, though, I've posted a few times with links to this video channel.

Each time I do so, I feel a twinge of hesitation. I don't want to pollute the site, but, at the same time, I think there are stories here that might be helpful to the HN community.

If any of you feel that the content isn't appropriate (or that I'm linking to it too frequently), please let me know. I certainly don't want to overextend my welcome here!

Happy Saturday!
The best use of the "per 100g" version is that you can compare different brands of the same kind of food. If you're buying breakfast cereal the interesting question is which cereal suits you best, not if it contains more energy per 100g than butter (if it does, it's unlikely to be healthy).
Indeed. I think people tend to underestimate the cost of actually printing stuff, as well as shipping it, storing it, returning it when it doesn't sell, etc. It all adds up, and required a lot of capital machinery, buildings, employees, etc.
Times of India: The strange underworld of Chinese hackers
...and what will that accomplish?
Thought CV stood for Computer Vision; was confused.
Narcissistic Leaders: The Incredible Pros, the Inevitable Cons
Such "opportunities" to donate work for free quickly get old.
Favorite Django Tips & Features
Interesting tidbit at the end where the hacker being interviewed said 'if you opened a particular page in Google you got infected', pity he did not mention the page.
Curriculum Vitae - it's what most countries call a resume'.
I find Evernote's free model oddly generous and I suspect their conversion rates could be much higher with some tweaking.

I use it every day and I don't come close to reaching my monthly limits. It's actually become one of my most used apps in recent months and I'd happily pay a monthly subscription for it - but the free plan is so generous I've never needed to.
Sounds like your life would be simpler with Redis if you are using memcached to take state about a computation. Atomic operations on lists and persistence are two good points about it in this context.
Yahoo invisible checker, invisible scanner, invisible detector, yahoo status
Is the job market that bad for us techies; web designers, developers, Internet marketers, SEO and such? Which fields are suffering the most? Ones that don't require special skill sets?

Where I live and fortunately (mid Atlantic region) there are always many job postings for web design/development on craigslist. My viewpoint Im not seeing all the unemployed; even with friends.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/433

http://rentzsch.github.com/clicktoflash/

https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/cdngiadmnkhgemki...
very cool. thank you.
Ask HN: CSS/JS/SVG game IDE?
Does there exist an IDE for making games using open web standards (read: not flash)?

Do you think there is a market for a website to allow users to create, host, and share these (presumably free) games?

Of course, the adoption of the newer standards is what really stands in the way, but I've seem some great things made in Javascript, and I'd just like to see them expanded upon.
30 entrepreneurs to follow on twitter
Microsoft et. al have very effectively used training and certification as a marketing tool. I guess I do see it as a bad thing because I have to deal with it and this came through in my comment. A decade or two ago these companies did provide the best solutions available to some problems faced by companies but I do not think this is the case any longer. Most of their products have become free or inexpensive commodities and professionals trained by these companies have become more of an obstacle to be worked around than an asset.
Printing is 10% of cover price, distribution is 10% of cover price (this I believe includes the cost of returning too). For a hardcover this can total $8, for a mass market paperback this can be $1. Amazon, lik

I didn't get into a discussion of benefits of eBooks, especially when colour e-ink readers arrive. Specifically comics and graphic novels would likely fare excellently, low editing costs (almost all the work is done by the author art, inking, and minor amounts of writing), virtually no marketing or advertising costs make printing (higher than a simple black-ink book) and distribution the major costs. It could literally be back to $0.99 comic books. Printing in comics can be up to 40% of cover price, distribution taking 30%, which compared to a book is killer.

I have no intention to say eBooks aren't going to become huge one day, but many of the costs in book making are from well before the ink hits paper. Unless you're willing to sacrifice quality, the prices are going to remain very close.
Nigeria’s web startups to watch in 2010
I don't understand the obsession with the nutrition labels. And if you really think that nutrition labels can help fight obesity in any way, you are dreaming. FDA thinks that people are stupid and need to tell us what we should eat. Show me one man/woman whom, while munching away on big bag of chips OR pint of ice cream, doesn't know that chips/ice cream is not going to help his/her waistline. I don't know of any. I think everyone knows that vegetables/fruits are vastly superior to processed food. But we still eat the crap which tastes good and no regulations FDA can think of, will change that.

Here's a riddle. The nutrition labeling became law in 1990 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nutrition_Labeling_and_Educatio...). Do you think obesity has increased OR decreased after 1990?

On a side note, I am from India and we don't have this nutrition label requirement and India doesn't have obesity problems. It's about what and how much people eat, nutrition label ain't gonna change it.
Subpixel Abe Lincoln
http://www.michaelbach.de/ot/fcs_mosaic/
As a person who has never completed a webpage, I should thank this guy for finally ending this cycle. I read every part of his page and was even checking the backlinks out of curiosity.

MSPaint has a strange way of pulling me in; then never letting me go :(
Whenever any of guy guys assemble a multi-billion dollar company just by selling software you let me know. Or at least get a job with one of the companies you seem so keen to analyze in depth (Google, MS, Apple, IBM). Then maybe your opinions would count something.

While you sit at your desk analyzing this and that, thousands of business flourish and make money, thanks to the privacy killers (Google), the imperial monopolists (Microsoft) or the vertical Nazis (Apple) or the old Nazis (IBM). What have YOU been doing to change the world like that, huh?

And don't come all "I have been doing Linux!" on me, because the largest amount of contributors to Linux are the very companies you pathetically try to bash from your fantastic jobs as code monkeys at ACME International Ltd.

"Hacker" folks need to understand that software is just a tool for business and consumers to use to get shit done; it's not an end on itself. The massive success of all these companies, MS included, shows that shit is getting done, lives are improving, people are making money and being happy.

In the end, that's all that matters. "Experts" have been killing IBM, then Microsoft, then Oracle, even Apple, for years. These people grow old, retire, and these companies continue (and will continue) to be successful for a simple reason: they provide value.
Well, the visual aging didn't give me that impression.
But it is important to note the presenter calls normal sugar a poison as well because they're both high in fructose and devoid of nutrients.
Why Climate Science Is On Trial
Could you cite your sources? Are those industry averages, or just for one publisher you are familiar with?
Also, I love this author's "Microsoft could be the right place for me, but then I decided it wasn't". I am pretty sure it was the other way around. It would be nice to know where such a genius works these days and what are his great contributions arising from his great wisdom.
Title of the article is misleading. The post is about TechCrunch firing an intern for being paid to write a biased article about a company.

The issue the author has is Tech Crunch didn't single out the company that bribed the intern instead they just pulled all the intern's article leaving 26 companies as possible bribers.

Any credible journalism/news organization will take these measures to protect itself from the damage to it's readership and lawsuits. I don't know if I can agree with the author.
this was in the NYT: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/02/business/global/02hacker.h...
"I've yet to find a company intelligent enough to hire me."

Not to be rude, but do you think this attitude might have something to do with it? I'm asking this because sometimes us geeks really don't know when we come off as condescending.

Bear in mind that I say this as someone who has put my foot in my mouth and said more stupid things than I would admit to publicly.
It benefits Apple greatly to have their core technology as one of the driving forces of the open web.

And now they've pretty much won the mobile browser war (WebKit is in Android, iPhone OS and coming to RIM's OS), the "war" seems to be over.
I think a better title for this is: "What to do when a larger company infringes your trademark", since it was more about having a clever response to the name similarity than being featured on techcrunch per se.
"What most startups need is not another engineer. What most startups need is a business person who understands engineering. We can quantify value."

Can a business person who understands engineering build the site? Nope.

You're basically hiring a business person who would hire engineers. I believe the engineers in a company are good enough to hire engineers.
This is from 2008?
IE should be Trident.

Trident: 41%

Gecko: 38%

Webkit: 17%
If you're trying to "fix" memcached's dropping of objects after a time, you shouldn't be using memcached. You should be using something actually designed to persist things. Turning a cache into a persistent store, or vice versa, is a dangerous game, and of the two cache -> persistent store is the worse.
California’s CTO Responds To Our Challenge With His Own
Oh thanks, I have made some contacts with advanded server collocation, but finally, we have decide to go further and assume the risk of increasing the bucket for the project. We are going to try Amazon EC2...
We will share our experience about amazon as soon as we take hands on it.

Thanks again.
Bias is Real
I was searching for quality news sources and found this article. I thought it looked interesting, so I thought I'd post it for comments.

But I'm also curious: what mass media news sources do you rely upon? I'm getting a little bored of the obvious like NYT, WSJ, BBC, etc., so bonus points for something eclectic.
>> 1. Make a product that a billion people will fall in love with and use for the rest of their lives.

>> 2. Make it easy for a single-digit percentage of them to pay you a few bucks a month once in a while.

>> 3. Make sure your variable costs are low enough that you can make a mountain of profit if you get #1 and #2 right.

This is great advice.
What became of Steve Yegge?
It's ‘Been There, Done That’ for Bartlett Mel