skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I do believe that we will see more and more companies go without their own physical data center footprints and will rely on a more fluid, "cloud" infrastructure.

The initial costs associated with building a data center seem enormous. The maintenance costs also must be staggering. Does anyone know what percent of DC construction/maintenance is spent on redundancies? (e.g. backup generators, UPS, multiple carrier services, etc).

Abstracting away the physical infrastructure for a 'logical' infrastructure (if you will), seems very attractive to me. Particularly if I can have an on-line balance between compute cost and benefit.

One major concern with this approach is security, both physical and otherwise...
classic dissenter view of a new product (or products in this case). newsweek writer pissing on facebook, twitter and buzz in one article.

i guess this is indicative of why i haven't read a newsweek article since never and probably won't unless i am baited into it again.
Couldn't this really help per-article/micropayment content get around? Especially if billing was tied to your Google account in some manner?
The web doesn’t hold much attraction for Rupert Murdoch who is now enamored with e-readers and tablets.

Tablets, according to those in the know, are being viewed as saviors for News Corp.’s core business: news and information. He thinks that since devices are not that useful without his content; he eventually wins because he will get people to win. “Content is not just king, it is the emperor of all things electronic!” he recently said.

I think he's missing the point here.

a) Newscorp has flourished as a business because up until recently media has been an industry with a high barrier to entry. To paraphrase Warren Buffett, if you own the only newspaper in town it's a bit like owning a local monopoly. The same applies for television channels, etc. which have high upfront costs.

b) The problem facing Newscorp now is that the internet has lowered the barrier to entry dramatically, so that its size and financial clout is no longer a major advantage. For instance, would you rather read an article in a Newscorp paper or one of PGs essays? In the past it'd be hard for PG to get his essays out there, now it's much easier. This means a much higher level of competition, and competition destroys margins.

c) e-Readers/Tablets don't make the barrier to entry much higher. (You can publish stuff on the Kindle for free, for instance: https://dtp.amazon.com/mn/signin). Hence it's hard to see how he can compete in the tablet/e-Reader space any better than he could compete online.
I agree with your overall point. I run a Chinese teaching business though (http://popupchinese.com) and think the analogy is a bit misleading. Unlike English with all of its irregularities, Chinese definitely gets easier and easier as people learn.

There's a failure of pedagogy in teaching the language. Chinese grammar is trivial if taught properly (we teach "prepositions" and "adjectives" before introducing "coverbs" and "stative verbs" and that seems to work). And while the tones can be tricky, most people don't get nearly enough listening and speaking practice.

As you said though, practice makes perfect. For me recursion was fun but memory management with vectors of pointers was a bitch. Easy to have a conceptual understanding, but the sort of thing you only master when you need to trace stuff through source to figure out where an error is. Then it clicks for good. :)
I have fucked myself more than once by typing > instead of >>

I find that to be a far more pernicious design error -- they should have made the longer token the destructive one, or used another character in it.
Someone needs to make some gloves where the fingertips are a material that works with touchscreens.
I believe these exist already. They feature a small metal mesh sewn into the tip of the index finger.
It could work, but no matter how you ask us, we would just be guessing. So stop asking and start testing:

Write the text above on your website, make a simple form that is free that people can upload the pictures of the watch, and then spend $50 on google adwords to see if people are at all interested in your idea.

If you spend $50 and nobody takes you up on your offer even though it is free, then it will be tough to sell it.

(On a side-note, you can't get certain brands in Shenzhen Luohu market any longer. For example, Marcopolo has been taken out of the market, but some other brands like Armani are still there)
I've done xdebug profiling and cake does add some non-negligiable overhead. However, 90% of the issue here is that the host is really crappy, and the latency on the db is bad, so view caching is helping. It'll be moved to a new host in 48-72 hours.
While electricity is pretty much fungible, data is not.

Imagine there exist two companies who are competitors, A and B. Now company A outsources its data with a third party service. When company A managed its own hardware infrastructure it had tight control over physical access to every machine. Now that its data is hosted with a 3rd party, there is a greater possibility that the data becomes physically compromised.
Thanks, I didn't know these existed. Found via google http://www.dotsgloves.com/
"Don't be yourself--be someone a little nicer." Mignon McLaughlin

At US companies--I can't speak to how things work in Japan--departmental admins/secretaries often wield an enormous amount of influence and can absolutely help or hurt you. A personal secretary almost always has the ability to help you if they choose to. Your attitude toward them can make a difference.
It's neat to see James Hague write about APL/J/K, and the article makes an interesting historical observation about the point-free style of functional programming. But I think he does the APL strain of languages a bit of an injustice. They are certainly different, but not as utterly difficult as he makes out (or as first impressions invariably suggest). And while the community may be miniscule, it is far from moribund: it thrives in its niche, which is in fact quite lucrative.
has been a Haskell programmer since 2005, before the dawn of dons

wc Lines $ sort $ grep "bar" $ xargs "foo" =<< file
Politics reports ,pakistan news alqaida reports
Stupid question: does this work with chicken? I tend to prefer the white meat.
Totally agree. This guy is the management equivalent of patent medicine - sounds great to amateurs but will kill you if you take enough of it.
There's a good overview of how persistent vectors are implemented in Clojure here - http://blog.higher-order.net/2009/02/01/understanding-clojur...
Ever Notice How Often the Cities on Google Maps Change?
I'm having steak this weekend, will have to try this out. Educational and tasty (hopefully)!
Send gifts to Pakistan  
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I'd rather call it:
Parsing a given language is solved.
Unterstanding the not-C (love that term) language those 40+ C-Compilers accept is hard.
Yes, it surely is a Facebook competitor. At first glance, it looks to me like a Friendfeed inserted into a GMail - which I see like a simple, yet brilliant idea.
By the way, I'm recruiting designers for YC companies here. The tone and style is very purposeful and is yielding very good results.
thanks!

wei.xiaoma@gmail.com
Toxic drywall
Toxic drywall is one of the most significant construction defects in recent memory. This material is causing severe health issues and destroying homes.
When it comes to it very few people are driven by money

No economist believes that they are. People are motivated by a concept called "utility" which is, money, a nice office, interesting colleagues, meaningful work, a short commute, opportunity to assert authority, and other factors. The exact mix will vary from person to person, but the money is important: it often determines quality of life outside of work. All other things being equal, people will join the company that will maximize this, or appears to at hiring decision time. If one company has, even on paper, profit sharing/bonuses/stock options/whatever, and its rival doesn't, who's going to get the pick of the talent?
You'd be surprised how many people still use RCS. I've recently learned RCS so I could make changes to files managed by Foswiki, a modern and quite nice Wiki.
The article says one of her influences was a chef that did this with chicken.
You need to look at it through the eyes of a teenage girl. People customize their myspaces in ways that Facebook will never allow, and it becomes part of their identity.

Here's an example: http://bit.ly/cLX6RT
http://www.nytimes.com/1982/07/07/garden/getting-the-most-ou...

This works really well with fish too. My favorite catalonian restaurant cooks its fish on a slab of salt, with excellent results.
I tried this once -- it was very salty, which I don't mind, but it was nothing special as far as tenderness.
Hey thanks a ton for your opinion. You are definitely right, i will surely go out and try it. I see your point about Luohu market, but still, you just gotta ask and they will bring you an hell of brands, all of them, any kind of goods. And what if you go to Guangzhou, there is like the far-west of faux merchandise.
CEO of Myspace would look good on my resume and I suspect it pays well, has a good health care plan, etc.
Have you actually tried satellite service? Latency is worse than dial-up. We tried for a while to get some of our customers using satellite but that turned out to be a failure due to the miserable performance.
I rarely look at startup advice; I've been inured to it after so long. But this was good. Very good. Thanks.
I had to click a button to enable Buzz. Did they change their sign-up policy at some point?
Low temperature cooking with DIY "sous vide"
Soviet City in the Middle of the Sea.
Color Theory For Designers
CrunchGate: Techcrunch Still Can't Do The Right Thing
The shell has always been the kitchen sink full of glue holding the whole thing together. There have always been builtins: language control structures, job control, etc. -- there are some things you can't trust others not to fuck up, and where the coupling would just get ridiculous.

Here's cat as a pure sh builtin:

shcat {
for arg in "$@"; do
exec 3<>"$arg"
while read line <&3; do
echo "$line"
done
exec 3>&-
done
}

The shell by it's very nature can't just do exactly one task well, it's a programmable environment for living in. The cancer that's bloating UNIX was the way that the BSD and especially the GNU crews took simple tools and cross-pollinated them randomly with stupid shit. Try running "/bin/true --help" on a GNU system sometime -- there's a damn good reason why "your shell may have its own version of true".
You have to define usage here. They are giving an example of a single piped command on a file of who knows what size, probably not very big, hence milliseconds. However when it comes down to scripting large log processing, backups, and other forms of automation then I think it will yield better performance. Not to mention good coding practices, I am looking to improve in any form, something like this changes the way you think which will prove to be very useful when programming in ruby, c, java, etc. Not necessarily the use of piping commands, but just about how to be more efficient and less wasteful.
You make a good point. I never really thought through what that point sounded like. (Partly I'm really just pissed I can't pirate as easily)

My only slight rebuttal is that you can't trade or resell your purchases like you could with console games or regular desktop software.
Good point. I'll write a follow up post on where I've found some of my mentors.
Our current affairs programs such as 'Today Tonight' and 'A Current Affair' feed on stories like these, which only provide more fuel for newspapers, radio talk shows and even schools for discussion.

The general public here is still of the naive opinion that the internet is dangerous.
Do you find sporadic errors and/or limitations too restrictive or is it smooth sailing?
Ask HN: What are some good developer portfolios?
I'm setting up a personal website and want to include a portfolio page to showcase the work I've done. Does anyone have any good examples of portfolio pages for developers? I'd like to look through some to gather ideas for setting up mine.

I've come across this one - http://thinkcage.com/portfolio/ - but he is a designer, not a developer.

Feel free to promote your own.
The boring programming grind should only start when you're doing work for other people that you don't care very much about

Hm, this doesn't sound right. My programming education only began in earnest once I started writing programs for other people, for money. Every new project stretched my abilities.
interesing, if only google wouldn't bring the cpu speed down to zero by some of its bad javascript code.
Assignment Statement Considered Harmful
http://skandiabanken.se
I've tried this a couple of times. It's nothing special. Your better off finding locally sourced fresh meat - it's usually as cheap and you will be able to find one you like.

(also, incidentally, I'd say a good steak is as much about taste as texture. This sorta sacrifices one for the other)
The limitations are not really a problem for me. If you're referring to the sporadic datastore errors, that was actually resolved in 1.3.1, by having it auto-retry natively (no need for a decorator anymore).

I would really like to see support for 500 MB files in GAE, so I don't need to use S3 anymore (large game downloads). Comet support would also be fantastic. I'd also like to see lower latency. However, these are not deal breakers for me and I am more than satisfied with GAE. I am tracking maybe seven issues on the Google Code issues list, and if those were fixed, I seriously would not have any gripes about the service.
I'm pretty excited about the prospect of eating a delicious steak for only a few bucks! I also enjoy that this person has the same method of cooking as I do, which is to create a recipe and then iterate on it several times within the span of a few weeks before it eventually tastes amazing.
Yeh, we have a site to site VPN through Cisco hardware firewalls. This is a good way to do it because it removes extra complexity from the database. Let the database handle just what it needs to do, and do it well, because there's probably better tools for the other stuff elsewhere.
Which Greek bank was involved ?
Yes, that's why I said to go for it on your other post. Just do it and at the minimum you will learn something that will help you on your next endeavor. You have the idea for a reason.
OK. Sous Vide looks more interesting to me that overly salting a piece of meat. tptacek care to weigh in? I am about 23 hours away from buying a rice cooker + pid controller to make this happen. I do the pid part at work so it is interesting to me from a work point of view too.

Edit: If you have not seen sous vide cooking: http://amath.colorado.edu/~baldwind/sous-vide.html

It looks amazing to me.
same here. actually, though, this is awesome. i only recently started using facebook (< 1 month). i was surprised by how cool it was to see friends i'd known but fallen out of contact with. i wanted to connect with them....but facebook is confusing and strange for me. plus, some of my closer friends, the ones i do keep up with, don't have facebook accounts, or if they do, they still responded over email instead.

email is where i connect with people, organize events, share. i mostly use it for work, but it's still what i go to for the few connections i have.

putting social connections in my email app has been awesome because it's allowing me to talk to folks in an app i'm already comfortable with. sure, everyone else has had myspace, aim, facebook, cellphones, even twitter, for ages. maybe it's just coincidence that i wanted to jump on the bandwagon now. or maybe a nerd company has finally scratched the social itch in the right way :-)
same here. it's like hacker news discussion only with people i actually know and care about.
the idea is ok but your business model not so great. why not instead of checking each product do a background check on vendors and certify them. maybe charge the vendor annualy. this model already exist for busnesses in general. but I guss for fake products this could be a niche.
Reminds of me that table saw that stops in an instant when it comes in contact with a human finger. They tested with hot dogs to simulate a human finger (although the creator does use his own finger). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTUOhYcw4ZY
If you were a designer with a style similar to Dustin Curtis, you'd probably know who Dustin Curtis is. His online presence is kind of... loud?
Http://sexpiar.net/
good technology but the first thing I looked for was how to make people unfollow me. It's simply stupid how they forget privacy and only look at the _buzz_ it brings. I will turn it off for now.
http://dustincurtis.com/ is his index of articles, some of which are really good, and all of which have a unique design. They almost all have Hacker News discussions. http://searchyc.com/submissions/dustincurtis.com?sort=by_dat...
It's easy to inadvertently reveal personal information to the entire internet using email. Claire Swire, Peter Chung, Trevor Luxton and countless others can vouch for this. The point-to-point nature of mail communication (and text messaging for that matter) gives an unfortunate illusion of privacy, yet publication and mass replication are only a couple of clicks away.

Posting on openly public sites such as Twitter and Facebook actually forces a lot more careful consideration up front. The sober reality is that you and your children should be treating the private emails you send in the same manner.
How To Add Google Buzz Share Button On Your Wordpress Blog
I think Myspace still has the band/musician space, largely because what Myspace allows and Facebook doesn't (restyling the page, embedded music player) are pretty necessary to artists asserting their brand identity. Which is really the main reason for them to have a presence.
Google Turns Evil for Facebook and Twitter with Google Buzz
Finally a Hacker News article I can share with my Mom!!
Quickly and Cheaply Validating Your Ideas
"... The Chinese censorship that Google is pulling the plug on? ..."

Yes, "Google baulks at Conroy's call to censor YouTube" (Asher Moses, The Age) ~ http://www.theage.com.au/technology/technology-news/google-b...
What good does local sourcing do? Is it freshness? I'm not a meat expert, but I would guess that a big company with an economy of scale would be able to produce higher quality meat for a lower cost. Also, if you're sourcing locally from non-big brand names, don't you have concerns about their cold chain?
To be fair, he didn't advocate cheating vendors, it was the reporter who claimed that he recommended not paying vendors on time.

His response was that he tells businesses to honor their word, but to negotiate terms. Of course, if you negotiate after you receive the goods, that's scummy, but I don't think that's what he meant.

Lots of big businesses extend their payables when negotiating with suppliers, why can't smaller businesses try to do the same?
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Amazon.com launches Auctions
Same here - logged into Gmail and I was forced to choose whether to go into Buzz or old fashioned Gmail. Maybe they're tinkering with the process or something...

I'd have to agree, though, that the default of following everyone that you e-mail is a bit extreme, especially if everyone else can see it, too. Probably better to at least offer people a choice, either follow all, follow none, or manually select.

As far as privacy violations go, though, I don't see this one as very major. I'd expect that with all the complaining going on, this behavior will be changed very soon.
_The Chinese censorship that Google is supposedly pulling the plug on._

A lot of talking, but so far everything looks business as usual in China, AFAIK.
What is PubSubHubbub? (video)
I was cooking at a two Michelin star restaurant last year where a large majority of proteins and vegetables were cooked sous vide. Don't underestimate the importance of a good salting, but sous vide will make everything you cook perfect, and consistent.

There is a better home option now than the rice cooker + pid timer( which does not circulate water and leads to uneven cooking. http://www.sousvidesupreme.com/

This is as good as you can get without buying a $995 dollar immersion circulator(which you should buy if you can).

Pick up the more expensive foodsaver, if you can't afford a commercial unit.
I cook at arazorashinyknife.com these days, and our commercial unit which costs $5000 just died on us, it cost $1000 just to have a guy look at it -.-

http://cookingissues.wordpress.com/2010/02/02/coming-soon-so...
Here is a primer on sous-vide cooking, which by the way can can be done the ghetto way by sealing a sturdy ziplock bag almsot under water, to get as much air out as you can. Then you can leave a large pot of water running under the hot water tap until you can get the water to the temperture you need.
You'd think so. But I have found you get better quality for very little premium. And even the cheap stuff is better than supermarket schmuck.

My aunt rears poultry for several markets. Her supermarket produce is usually additionally processed in a variety of ways by an intermediate to increase it's sale value (with poultry it is usually water plumped).

It might take a while but there is sure to be a local butcher or farm shop nearby where you can buy more directly.

Edit: also I personally don't think meat is a Market that benefits from economy of scale :-)
I usually find supermarkets a false economy.
protip: salt all meat 10-60 minutes before cooking, depending on size. Don't do this with fish.

alternative: brine all your meat.
My guess would be that they are experimenting with the algorithm used to determine which cities are prominent enough to display on the map. As for why it changes so often, perhaps they are not changing the algorithm itself but just fiddling with the parameters in an automated fashion for A/B testing?
High return often goes hand in hand with high risk.