skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've heard from many people on this, in the publishing industry, in the music industry, in the software industry...

The funny thing is how not worried about it some people are. Maybe they're just in denial. I hear from one talk that textbook publishing is dead (since it no longer costs ridiculous amounts of money to typeset and print equations - I can do this with the school printer now). Six months later, a senior editor tells me that hard covers are here to stay.

I must point out that the publishers are at least a little bit right when they claim their function encompasses much more than printing discs. The entire engine of marketing and distribution, including the parts with industry connections, will have to be relocated before old publishing can rest in peace.

My guess is that no matter what they say in speeches, everyone is watching the Internet right now for some sign of the great new business model. I like this article, because it suggests the beginnings of a solution. Most merely state that we have a problem.
I wouldn't worry about it too much. If you consider Google Apps, Google is already hosting email, documents, spreadsheets, etc. for a lot of businesses, including many that compete with Google in one way or another (after all, Google has an awful lot of products). Furthermore, Google is a pretty large organization, so it seems like it would be risky for them to try to spy on you (since it would involve a number of people in at least two or three departments). If they got caught doing this, it would be pretty damaging to GAE.

I think a more interesting consideration is, how does this affect the prospects for your company to be acquired at a future date (assuming you're interested in selling out)? Presumably hosting on GAE would make your company an easier acquisition target for Google (since you've already bought into their infrastructure). Presumably it would also make you less attractive to a lot of other companies who might be competing with Google, since you're basically going to be stuck on the GAE platform, and those companies may be more paranoid.

Just my 2c.
Clickable: http://quarket.com/

OK, some feedback - this will sound harsh, but it's how it happened ...

I can't understand the first 10 seconds of speech because I haven't yet got used to the accent and tone. Then it's 52 seconds before I get any clue as to what it's about. I nearly gave up at 40 seconds.

Then at 1:05 it looks like things I know, and it's 1:12 before you say that it's not something I know, it's different, and I still don't know what it's doing.

For someone who's looking to invest, maybe they'll sit through it, but for me, I'm out. Probably it's cool and useful and interesting, but I've got other things to do.

Finally, you might want to resubmit, putting the URL in the URL field, your request for feedback in the title, and then expand on your reasons and request in a comment. Then two things happen. Firstly, it's automatically clickable.

Secondly, you don't get penalized in the rankings for not submitting a URL.
You should read my reply again (or maybe for the first time) and comprehend. I did not say nor imply that I think Erlang's processes are OS processes. Sorry for not using quotes ('process') if that's what has confused you so deeply.
I really don't understand the push button start fad. Unless it's coupled to an RFID key or some such, it's less convenient than just turning the key.
The instances where you don't have to implement IE workarounds are the isolated incidents, in my experience.
The very first thing I thought about after reading this article was memories of listening to Disney stories on my toy 33rpm record player. You would follow along while the beautifully voiced characters recreated the story. When you had to change, Tinkerbelle would ring her bell as a notification to flip the page. This article reminds me simultaneously of the cheesiness of that page flip bell and of the fun and enjoyment of listening and reliving my favorite stories over and over.

In this age of push notifications, continuous Twitter feeds and the like, I think it is always a welcome return home to the visceral feel of reading an engrossing book page by page.
I'm not expecting $400 for life, I'm more interested in trading time for money. How much time? Theoretically that should depend on how good I am.

Some of the opportunities people (such as patio11) have posted are what I'm interested in. I will be following up on some of those.

On the other hand, I also find some of the longer-term infrastructure-building advice (e.g. SEO, e-book stuff) useful, provided it's got a high probability of generating some cash within a month or two.
Apple Stock closes at all-time high, now 4th largest Market Cap in the US
Some of these graphs are much more confusing than they need to be.

The money scales should remain more consistent. Most of the graphs are scaled in billions of dollars, but one is in trillions, and one is (completely inexplicably) in millions of dollars.

The 'Strategic Petroleum Reserve' chart doesn't tell me much. It tells us a value of the strategic petroleum reserves once, and then gives two values for the price of a barrel. Which is being used to calculate the total value?

The brown/grey background also makes several of the charts much more difficult to read. It's very hard to see any but the darkest-colored countries on the map of foreign countries that hold US national debt.
Although most of the pro-tips are good (in general), some look like put together without understanding... Especially this fragment got my attention:

# Drop sync
$IPT -A INPUT -i ${PUB_IF} -p tcp ! --syn -m state --state NEW -j DROP

# Drop Fragments
$IPT -A INPUT -i ${PUB_IF} -f -j DROP

1. First rule drops everything apart from SYN on unknown connection, so the comment is wrong.

2. Why would anyone drop fragmented packets? Good luck with people on strange / misconfigured links.

3. spoof ips looks very dodgy... why would anyone drop localhost?

4. (own rule) You should never ever follow anything that mentions "SSL" and "Type the following commands" without reading the openssl docs and understanding how certificates work.
Except its missing an important part. Salary.
Yes, I know you're thinking "but this is a startup and the opportunities and experiences are more important!". People still have bills to pay.
So you want to make a client side app
Yes, I'd trust them.
How about separating the voting from the sorting?

People like voting. They like scoring systems. As much as folks might say "who cares?" study after study has shown that if you provide a numerical feedback/points system, it's going to motivate users. So I'd leave the points in.

There is a second question: what should be at the top of my display? This doesn't have to be tied so closely to the scoring. It's probably much more related to the type of material as well as the overall voting activity.

I think you've tightly linked these two concepts, voting and sorting -- lots of other boards do the same thing -- and the linkage is what is causing the mismatch.

With the app I'm currently writing, sorting happens based on a Bayesian system of matching up tags from what you've liked in the past. The tag-for-sort seems to work a lot better than the vote-for-sort.
Thanks for the heads up on Qt.

It seems a lot of development time, especially early on, is consumed with debugging and fitting pieces together properly. What is your impression so far of the ease of debugging (not on hardware, the simulator)? XCode's Instruments and their debugger are tools I've only started getting more out of using.
Off the top of my head: run several Node instances (one per core would maximise potential performance) and load balance between them. Have the load balancer / some other monitoring script periodically check each instance to see if it's hung and remove from load balancer, kill and restart it when that happens.
How about "Will the software you're writing be done within a month?" What's the right answer there, when you really don't know?
> Brief nitpicking: "persistent" and "purely functional" are not really the same thing.

You are right about that. But I did not have time for a longer explanation and some people take "persistent" to mean "can be saved to disk".

For stochastic algorithms you will probably use the same trick as with monadic I/O --- you can make the description of the algorithm purely functional, but not its execution.
You mean movies have lied to me? :(
I have never assumed that the software itself held the core value. The value comes from my trusted name, my continued support, and other things I do for the environment of the software.

This is a mistake a lot of coders make. The software does have value. It's the completed project that solves a problem that has value. If the project is a success and meets the needs of the users, it often matters little who the coder was who built it. The value comes from automating processes, simplifying tasks, and enabling collaboration -- all of those have value regardless of you. Just like a bookshelf has value without the IKEA. Is hacker news great because pg wrote it and can maintain it? Maybe it's a better community because he is around, but it matters little that he typed the keys to make the loops. What matters is that the software has been written and we can use it to communicate. The existence of the software is the value.

Of course it takes a certain skill to get a project to completion. That has value up front, but once the project is done, they may not need you anymore -- the software is what they wanted.

The same is true of everything else. Is it the furniture maker that is important -- or the table? Is it the running shoe that is important -- or the nike swoosh? Is it the water that is important, or the bottler?

You could argue there is a certain level of quality associated with a coder, maybe you, but that quality -- again -- is independent of the coder who wrote the lines of code. If the code is exactly the same, doesn't matter if you wrote it or someone else did.

To your other points: Have you ever tried unobfuscating code? It's really hard. Just try unminimizing javascript. It's really hard. It's so hard, you may be better off just rewriting it. Obfuscation does wrap code in a magic, specially sealed black box. That's exactly what obfuscation does. It reduces code to a jumble of wires you don't know where go, encrypted strings, for loops that do maybe nothing or something extra special. Can it be unobfuscated -- yes, but probably not by the client. If you can't write code, you can't unobfuscate it. PHP, while interpreted, can still be obfuscated.

People don't really care about the fact that you can create software. They won't pay you for that ability. They will pay you if you create some software for them, but they won't pay you just because you can. Lots of people can, but will they?
I imagine it's best to ignore them completely, if there is evidence that you've been reading up on patents that just makes it easier to prove intentional infringement, tripling the damages.

At least that's better than copyright infringement, where you could be liable for 100,000 times damages.
Ask HN: What happened to Vidly?
Seems like Vidly was taken down very suddenly. Presumably they're working on something new since they have a mailing list where you can sign up for information... but seems strange that it was so abrupt.
Effen is a jQuery plugin that supports Concrete Javascript.
I remember when the most popular use of javascript was putting scrolling text marquees in browser status bars. For years, javascript was largely dismissed as a gimmicky toy. It's kind of amazing how much further we've been able to take it.
Why Ad Blocking is devastating to the sites you love
No, it depends on the distribution. Let's say (as a first guess) that number of children follow a poisson distribution. A poisson distribution with mean of 1.84 has 74% of children being first borns.

There are a lot of reasons why a poisson model probably isn't great, but it's worth pointing out that a model with more density near zero is probably likely and implies that first borns are more popular than the they look.

74% versus 80% isn't anything to write home about.

Moreover, as Mz points out, only-children are a totally different case.
Oh well, indiejade, deleted her comment.
More specifically, that's just object oriented programming. Albeit with static objects. Ever written in Java?

System.out.println("Hello world");

Don't bash or insinuate things about Microsoft just because they happen to use the same wording that their Console object uses. Oh by the way, which makes more sense in that context: "Console.WriteLine()"? or "TextWindow.WriteLine()"? ... hm... it looks like a text window to me, so I'm gonna have to go for the second one.
You can even let the type system guarantee the red-black-tree laws. That's even better than idiot-proof. (http://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/people/staff/smk/redblack/rb.html has an implementation in Haskell.)

Shouldn't trees be a nightmare to maintain without a GC? (Are you modifying in-place?)
The level of difficulty for Google to do cross department sabotage would be high and I imagine the cost of damage to Google would be WAY higher than the value of taking down your service (unless you are wildly successful - and then it would be a lawyers party!)

Focus on success first -- and think about your "exit paths" -- and the costs/benefits of being on GAE vs. another option as an independent decision.
There are a few reasons:

1) They are not very memory intensive. It's up to you basically. Changing parameters about the probability of a node to have a given number of levels will make then less memory intensive than btrees.

2) A sorted set is often target of many ZRANGE or ZREVRANGE operations, that is, traversing the skip list as a linked list. With this operation the cache locality of skip lists is at least as good as with other kind of balanced trees.

3) They are simpler to implement, debug, and so forth. For instance thanks to the skip list simplicity I received a patch (already in Redis master) with augmented skip lists implementing ZRANK in O(log(N)). It required little changes to the code.

About the Append Only durability & speed, I don't think it is a good idea to optimize Redis at cost of more code and more complexity for a use case that IMHO should be rare for the Redis target (fsync() at every command). Almost no one is using this feature even with ACID SQL databases, as the performance hint is big anyway.

About threads: our experience shows that Redis is mostly I/O bound. I'm using threads to serve things from Virtual Memory. The long term solution to exploit all the cores, assuming your link is so fast that you can saturate a single core, is running multiple instances of Redis (no locks, almost fully scalable linearly with number of cores), and using the "Redis Cluster" solution that I plan to develop in the future.
The Value Of A Blocked Shot
yeah, I'm using Chrome and it works fine for me :)
SQL Server. It sounds great -- I can't wait.
Gloss: Painless 2D vector graphics, animations and simulations in Haskell
Here's an account of someone using the Mechanical Turk:

http://www.thesimpledollar.com/2009/07/05/can-you-actually-e...

If it's like it was back then, I think you might be able to make $400 on it in a month. Not the quickest or most fun way to do it, though. I like the eBook idea.
How To Block Unwanted Twitter Followers
Does anyone else notice that they seem to be using a variant of Logo for this project? Complete with calling the things on the screen 'turtles'? I Logo does take out a ton of the work for programmers who just want to get something on the screen as fast as possible.
The article says that page flips are better than scrolling for iPad books.

I'd say it's one of the form options (http://craigmod.com/journal/ipad_and_books/) that designers for an iPad should get to choose. Do you want your book to scroll or flip, or leave that up to the reader?

For example, a book of long poems may work well to scroll through each poem, but flip between different ones. The innovative thing about a digital screen is that it de-couples length of a text from the need to flip the page.
New Emacs Org-mode talk by Carsten Dominik
I think part of the op's argument was to consider what the best way to learn programming is. Imperative/OO programming is important to learn someday, but it's not necessarily the easiest or best one to start on.

So Microsoft's motivations might not be clearly aligned with learning. Should or shouldn't they be?
I think in a post iPad world it might become a lot more common.
I'm absolutely fine with what concurrent threads would do to it? Thread synch stuff is really not hard once you've done it a while. It's actually one of the more fun pieces of programming, given that you have jprofiler (or similar) to inspect what's going on in the jvm as you try different things. To me, it is a very logical idea and powerful tool to pair up a bit of memory with a bit of algorithm.
+1. Most big companies will also give you relocation assistance, at least if they really want you to come work for them. Putting you up for the interview, paying for a rental car until you can buy one, giving you temporary housing while you find a place, sometimes even giving you tours around the area. It's so much more pleasant than trying to find an apartment while you're halfway across the world.

Also, there's some validity to the comments asking "Why?". I do think that if you're actively starting a tech company, there's no better place to start it than Silicon Valley. However, you should expect that starting a company is a multi-year, even decade-long process. And it makes sense to do the earliest stages of this - learning enough skills to make you valuable to the places where you can learn more skills - in a place that's a little less expensive than Silicon Valley. The cost of living here sucks.
Yes, and from a usability perspective. All US currency is the same size, shape, and (now with minor variations) color and design.

Other countries have very different designs, sizes, and colors for different denominations. It makes it easier to pick out a bill from others and more fun to look at.
Exactly. A choice should be given.

But I agree that for the book format, page-flipping should be the default and is more reader-friendly than an endless scroll (as long as the page flipping animation is non-annoying and fast).
Don't take the clause out. If you have a client that insists on code ownership simply give them a new quote for the project. This new quote should be significantly more since you won't be allowed to reuse any of your existing code to build their project. You'll want to charge a higher rate since you also won't be gaining new code to use in future projects. I've had to do this a few times. In one case the client went elsewhere, in a couple of cases the client paid the higher price because they felt that the work would be a profit center for them in the future if they owned it and could resell it, but in most cases clients want cheap and they will be happy to pay for a license.

I would also make sure your contract has something specific in it about non transference of your license. It should be clear that if they sell their company or something like that the new owner can continue with the existing licensing terms, but they do not have the right to resell your code to any third party outside of that type of an event. It will almost certainly be unnecessary, but there are enough unscrupulous people out there that it's better to be safe.
soon to be added...

data entry specialist - at the dawn of modern computing in the late 20th century, data integration was so difficult that companies often employed entire teams of people to type in hardcopy of output from other computer systems.
For media designed to be displayed in pages, my prejudice fits with the author's claim.

However, infinite scroll in Bing's image search provides a more enjoyable experience than using Google's paged image search.
Imagine that people are starting to have a printer that can print any objects from any design at will, including the biological kind. ... That mean every person with a 3D printer is barred from printing designs from a patent of an inventor. In order to make lot of money, he essentially bar the people with 3D printers from printing so that he can sell his invention at the market for really high fees.

If you had a replicator that could produce anything, why would you need money at all? There wouldn't even be markets as we know them today where an inventor could command really high fees. And without needing money, you wouldn't need the government enforced monopoly that is patents to allow restricted exploitation of an idea.

Besides, stupid people would think they'd be being smart by have their 3D printers print money, there by making money worthless.

In this thought experiment, I want to be part of and explore the sharing/open community, because I don't think a community that hides its best (and only assets), it's ideas, when production costs don't exist won't be able to grow as fast as a community that shares. When the key resources, and those that provide the basic necessities, are unlimited, there's no reason not to share.
The way I learned OOP it would be

Window print "Hello World"

or something like it.

OOP is so much more than object-dot-methot...
I was thinking about changing the type of a parameter and return type in parallel --- where the application only treats them as block boxes and just gives and takes those objects, but never looks at them.
Some of those tips won't be applicable to any real-life server set-up. I mean, for example:

## Start: Size Limits & Buffer Overflows ##
client_body_buffer_size 1K;
client_header_buffer_size 1k;
client_max_body_size 1k;
large_client_header_buffers 2 1k;

Many web-apps will need larger request and body sizes than this! And I'm not sure why setting a buffer size protects from buffer overflows. Why does a 1k size work better than a 16k size? If the buffer is used correctly, it shouldn't overflow, no matter its size...

Seems to me that cargo-culting this set of "best practices" is a good way to DoS your own server. Who needs crackers when you can do it all yourself?
Sorry, downvoted by accident.
I'd rather have a statue.
$ ldd `which nginx`
/usr/local/sbin/nginx:
Start End Type Open Ref GrpRef Name
0000000000400000 000000000089c000 exe 1 0 0 /usr/local/sbin/nginx
0000000206c17000 0000000207042000 rlib 0 1 0 /usr/local/lib/libpcre.so.2.3
00000002082fd000 000000020874b000 rlib 0 1 0 /usr/lib/libssl.so.15.1
000000020874b000 0000000208cd7000 rlib 0 1 0 /usr/lib/libcrypto.so.18.0
0000000204a0e000 0000000204e22000 rlib 0 1 0 /usr/lib/libz.so.4.1
00000002017b8000 0000000201c99000 rlib 0 1 0 /usr/lib/libc.so.53.1
0000000204600000 0000000204600000 rtld 0 1 0 /usr/libexec/ld.so

Doesn't look too bad. Start by copying the relevant libraries and config directory to the appropriate places within the chroot jail, then test. (Those paths are on OpenBSD 4.7-beta, probably different on your system.)
Foolish Strategy? iPhone SW Company Opens Its Books to see the Hard Numbers
I did not post the original, but I can see why. I've run a few businesses from the UK and after visiting San Jose (and surrounding area) a great number of times I can see the benefits of being in the area - from the general buzz, through to the quality of people and support available
not having used groovy I'm not really qualified to give an opinion.

But part of clojures value is that it isn't the java mindset. Boilerplate just melts away in clojure. That might not be relevant to its use as a java repl but it greatly enhances your productivity as a jvm programmer.