skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No misunderstandings... When the AMQP working group was founded, RHAT took a very assertive role over AMQP and created versions that no-one else implemented, and which were pushed through the working group by sheer political force. Read the abomination that is the AMQP/0.9 spec, if you have the courage. The determination of RHAT to create incompatible forks of the spec is a large part of what killed AMQP in our eyes. We spent several years trying to save AMQP from that. We failed. We're a small team, RHAT had 20 people working on this.
I would add Scrapy (http://scrapy.org/) for web crawling.
We're showing 10-30 to different visitors and seeing how that affects pricing, like a behavioral economics experiment.
New Amazon patent: sending video of orders being boxed
You're looking at OpenAMQ, not SFL.

This is the metaprogramming we used to build OpenAMQ. It was very successful in technology terms (1M lines of real code generated from 20k lines of metacode) but a failure in social tems (too high a barrier to community participation).
Tech Secrets: 21 Things 'They' Don't Want You to Know
I like using Toodledo:

http://toodledo.com

I like it because it's free, and I can even sync it with my iphone free - just have to pay $1.99 for the app

Nice clean interface, has a nice Google Chrome extensions, and for me it is intuitively how I order things - by date and importance. I just use "Project -> Task" to signify next actions within projects
The Mechanics of Judgment
> you can pick up the phone and an Oracle salesperson will sell you the physical device that you're implying can't exist

Bullshit, and I will elaborate.

Oracle has two "scalable offerings:"

RAC relies on a single large san to "scale."

Exadata relies on super-fast interconnects to get multiple machines to look more like a single huge one, which has the obvious speed-of-light limitations as well as the price one.

Neither approach is the kind of scale out with commodity hardware that something like Cassandra gives you.

Invoking the mythical "pay Oracle enough money and they will make it scale" mantra is frequently done by people who either don't know better or are deliberately muddying the water, but that doesn't make it right.
I thought the coverage was pretty weak. Not due to unicorn but because there are many options (including passenger (aka mod_rails) for apache) that allow queueing to occur at the proxy instead of at the individual workers.

I wish they had discussed why unicorn instead of mongrel and why didn't solutions like haproxy or passenger or ... didn't work?

This discussion was: our apache configuration didn't work so we switched the load proxy mechanics and our app server at the same time.

I've had great success with mongrels with HAProxy (with maxconns=1 so only 1 request per mongrel at a time) for years. I've also had great success at Passenger with apache.

I think it is a great step forward for twitter's servers, I just wish the article had some meat. Isn't this the twitter engineer blog, not blog for the general audience about how twitter works?
I tried learning Scheme, and it is like a foreign language. Everything is so different: the idiomatic style, constructs of choice, manner of solving problems. It's not just the parenthesis that throw me off. Plus, I don't like how the core language and library are organized at all. I think clojure got it much better in that regard. In the end, I don't feel it's necessarily worth it.

Scheme's primary advantages are that it has the most powerful compiler plugin framework which includes the most powerful macro system of any language, and it has the best language support for continuations. However, those two things alone have not been able to convince me to bite the bullet and force myself to code in Scheme for a year or more to really learn it, which is at least how long I think it would take to be comfortable in it.
Ask HN: Do you have experience running an open source web app?
As many of you may know, HipHopGoblin is now an open source project. And due to popular demand, it is going to be back up and running soon.

What's the best way to make sure that changes pushed to the Github repository don't break the app? A suite of tests? A staging server? What kind of process should we use?

Thanks!
Certainly a cool idea and a nice feature, but how on Earth is this patentable?
All I can say is fascinating.

I don't think it can be drilled into developer's heads enough, that someday, somebody else will have to deal with this code. And that person might even be them 4 years from now.
10 mobile technologies to watch in 2010 and 2011
Recently switched from white board/notepad to http://speckleapp.com, which is made by HN member elliottkember.
Ask HN: Hackers in LA?
I grew up in Los Angeles (Pasadena/Glendale), transplanted to Honolulu almost 3 years ago, and now I'm ready to come back. I'm wondering where the startup/tech scene is right now in Southern California? I'm out of touch with my homeland, and would love to have the hackers here give me the heads up before I return.

Also... are there any HN meetups or groups in LA?
Hacker News Chicago meetup Wednesday 3/31 at 8pm
Chicago hackers: Please join us for the next Hacker News Chicago meetup on Wednesday, 3/31/2010, at 8:00pm at the Hophaus (646 N. Franklin, 312-280-8832, http://www.thehophaus.com/). Please join our mailing list (http://groups.google.com/group/hn-chicago) for announcements and hacker discussions, and follow us on twitter or identi.ca (@hnchicago).
Is "commuting the daily activity most injurious to happiness"?
These slides are pretty skimpy - I'm guessing the actual talk had a lot more meat to it.
I think Adult Friend Finder fixed that issue already :) .
Thanks -- good article.
The 'app' frenzy has long since reached 'bubble' proportion. You've been warned.
My honor :-)

Several times in my life I thought of sending an unsolicited resume to you guys, but always doubted I had what it takes.
You're misreading his argument or are being deliberately obtuse.

Well, it seems you're misreading mine now.

does not mean it is impossible.

I never said that.

If you re-read my post you will see that I was merely wondering about their claim of not just meeting the goalposts set by Oracle et al but of exceeding them by a large margin. As I understood it their new system is supposedly not only maintenance-free, but also efficient regardless of the workload or schema that I, as a user, might throw at it. And all that supposedly hosted on commodity VMs in a cloud (probably EC2).

That's about as bold a claim as it gets in database-land, so if I was reading too much into it then feel free to correct me on that, but please don't suggest I said something that I never said.

To put it into perspective (again): I would think both Google and Amazon have probably also thought long and hard about this problem. A full fledged SQL Store would be a much more sexy offering than their crippled SimpleDB/Datastore solutions after all. There's also a good amount of academic research in the area, with Cassandra (Dynamo/BigTable) seemingly being what many people consider the best we can currently do in terms of linear scalability on commodity hardware - at the cost of not having SQL and no ACID.

So here comes this startup out of the blue, claiming to have solved all these things.

Yes, leaps like that happen sometimes. Google happened, too, after all. But I think my skepticism is not completely unjustified either?

Hence my question which tradeoff FathomDB chose to make, to get at least a basic idea about what to expect.
"Chinese consumers aren’t really reaping the full fruits of their labor."

If having savings is not a fruit of labor here in the US, we'd do well to emulate that behavior more. The Depression generation learned that lesson the hard way, and we clearly forgot it.

Part of the reason is that hard-sell marketers here manage to continually create 'needs' where none existed, and 'value' that's abstract in the extreme. I can't fault the Chinese for erring on the side of caution. I can only wonder when we'll remember why the 'fruit' of financial security is one worth treasuring.
AT&T Prepares Network For Battle
Twitter Releases Sleek, Clean Homepage Redesign
Nobody likes watching stuff in the mushy middle. Rightwing wants Fox news, Leftwing wants MSNBC. Always better to specialize.
A tad off topic but...Does anyone actually know how to get a FathomDB account? I thought, as a long time Rackspace customer and the promo code "RACK" they promote on their site, it would be relatively simple, I've tried to register three times over the past few months, but I never hear from a peep from FathomDB........
Congrats to Eric Sachs and the rest of the team for getting this out sooner than expected.
The thing is, they're not just dealing with startups -- they're also dealing with fraudulent ventures calling themselves startups.
This is funny. I now just wanted to find something interesting on HN. I decided to check Patrick's comment feed. Here I am finding something interesting about him. Congratulations, man.

Cheers

Edit: I actually have it on my list to read every single post he has written.
Not that I disagree with your point, but "[...] CNN ranks 21st, while MSNBC lags even further behind at 25th."

Doesn't sound like specialization is working well for MSNBC, to me.
Yes. Actually I was expecting an answer to what do YOU hackers would like to have and dont want to pay for it. For the moment this is the most voted idea but I'm still open for more input if you have other ideas.
Who's this speaker?
Oh, wah, wah.

Are you seriously arguing the side of a bunch of middle-men who provided no value, saying it's too bad that their industry is going to disappear?

Wow. And I bet you spend the other 364 days of the year talking about how the private sector is so superior through survival of the strongest and all that.
It is a business method patent. From Wikipedia: A business method may be defined as "a method of operating any aspect of an economic enterprise". It is mainly in the US, Australia, Japan and Singapore that business methods are usual. In Europe this is not regarded as being inventions, and are therefore not patentable.

More info on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_method_patent

Oh, and _of course_, there is a lot of discussion going on about these kind of patents.
My problem with CNN is that it provides nothing of substance. I don't need the off-the-cuff opinions of their "journalists" during news events. That's armchair stuff.

As a consumer of news, I want/need someone to break a story that took days, weeks, or months to construct. I can voice my own post-debate opinions - I don't need theirs. I can find feel-good/feel-bad stories in my own neighborhood - I don't need theirs. I don't need Anderson Cooper to give lip service to "keeping them honest." I need journalism from which I learn something.
I had this idea a while back and wanted to create just that... so I bought http://ifundedthat.com

I'll sell it to whomever feels like taking a stab at it :-)
Wordoid is great. Another favorite of mine is: http://www.nxdom.com/

Shameless plug: I threw up http://domaingroovy.com/ to keep track of sites like these. Maybe someone else will find it useful.
I think that is due to OpenAMQ and not AMQP the protocol. sudo apt-get install rabbitmq-server will get you a working AMQP server on Debian or Ubuntu in one step. Building from source is fairly easy, as well: http://www.rabbitmq.com/build-server.html
URLs Are The Uniform Way to Locate Resources
You hit it. Best comment I've read in a while.
"Leftwing wants MSNBC"

Are you kidding? MSNBC is even more right wing than CNN. PBS is about it, as far as mainstream TV news goes. And even they are pretty much in the center, rather than on the left.

For some good left-wing media try Democracy Now!, Free Speech Radio News, and FAIR's Counterspin. Some college radio stations, WBAI in NYC, and Pacifica Radio afilliates are also good.

My problem with CNN and MSNBC is that both of them tried to follow Fox to the right once Fox became popular. A losing strategy if they were after Fox's right-wing audience, since they were clearly not as committed as Fox was to being further to the right than any other station on TV. They should have moved left instead, and provided a real alternative.
Heroku (YC W08) launches SSL Hostname Add-on Public Beta
The Problem with Amazon's "Convenient Packaging"
With respect to the language: having strings as the only data structure (everything is a string) and the developers stance on OOP (we don't need that) didn't help either and made way for python & ruby. With respect to the WWW, there was ACS/OpenACS, which even the author doesn't mention.
Something tells me the end of the recession had an effect on this ratings decline.
Cooking with processors
Confidence and Entrepreneurship
There are a bunch of other active user groups in the Cities too. Python, Cocoa, mobile dev, groovy and many others.
Amusing quote taken out of context:
"..called Stormcloud, to kill Unicorns when they ran out of control."

Tomorrow's headlines: "Twitter is killing Unicorns"
Yeah Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow are right wing. O_o
Shopping is even more efficient if you distribute all your items across all the cashiers. That way, the time from you are first in line until you are done, is n / num_cashiers instead of n.

Someone, please try this the next time you go shopping, and then blog about what happened.
If you watch "The Daily Show" it gives you all the reason in the world to not watch CNN. There is pretty much stupidity on there at all hours. We turned on something on CNN this morning and my wife groaned at some stupid pun and my two year old daughter walked up to her and tried to comfort saying "OK? OK?"

It was one for a minute accidentally and we encountered serious stupidity. That's somewhat impressive.
Cycling in Copenhagen
Yes, technically it has been over for quite some time:

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/bernanke-declares-the-reces...
It's amazing how much CNN is obsessed with Twitter!
Is there some technical reason I'm missing for why they wouldn't go the Passenger route? Seems to be by-far the easiest way to deploy a Rack-capable web app, and it (correct me if I'm wrong) allows for "hot deploy": update the code on the server and it'll sit there unused until you touch "tmp/restart.txt" under your app root.
Simple -- with OtherOS running, the only code executing on the platform other than Linux itself is the hypervisor. So if removing OtherOS addresses a security concern, the only thing that could have been threatened is the hypervisor. There is only one known hypervisor exploit, and it is implemented from OtherOS.

QED
A College Education: "The most overpriced product you could possibly buy"?
I bought a nice hat from http://www.kleinbottle.com/ and he sent me pictures of it being packaged up, so this sort of thing has been done before. I've no idea about patentability though.
I'm quite interested in how you're handling joins in a manner that is scalable. What tradeoffs did you have to make? Do you support full join semantics, or are some types of joins not supported? Its not that much of a stretch to scale out an RDBMS not using any joins, but I can't bring myself to really take your claims seriously until you elaborate on how you handle joins (if at all).
Seriously? Apache? There is another low hanging fruit guys :-). Tremendous speedups can be had by moving to nginx from apache (something we did at shopify about 2 years ago )
Canberra. Rails. Hi.
Whatever, it was obvious what you meant -- if someone has the choice of either figuring what you mean and addressing your question, or changing the subject with defensive pedantry, and chooses the latter, it may say something about their argument.
(HAProxy + Mongrel) and (Apache/Nginx + Passenger) work great. Don't get me wrong, I've seen lots of different Rails server architectures and I've spoken at RailsConf on this very topic. I would recommend either setup to a Rails startup in an instant.

But in the edge case of immense load, they simply don't keep up to Unicorn.

The thing that sets Unicorn apart is that it does it's load balancing on the Kernel level. All Unicorn worker processes are listening on the same socket. The OS takes care of getting each request to a single, available worker. So unlike Mongrel, you don't end up with per-worker queues. Though HAProxy is smart about distributing load well, Unicorn makes it seamless. The workers simply ask for a new request and the Kernel gives it one.

There are some other niceties too. Unicorn processes are forked from a master process. If you are using REE, they can keep Rails in a shared memory. When we deployed it, we dropped memory usage by 30%.

On top of all that, Unicorn's flawless rolling restarts are a pretty big plus.

In conclusion, if you're in the top 10% of Rails apps by traffic, give Unicorn a look. It is likely that switching over is worth the dev risk and cost. Otherwise, keep it on your radar, but don't consider it a must-have.

[reference]

http://unicorn.bogomips.org/DESIGN.html

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=872283
End of the recession? Tell that to the 16% still unable to find work.
I guess if you cook the books you can make them say anything. It's hard to take anything Bernanke says seriously. He didn't see this crisis coming and he was never right about anything before. Why would we think he's suddenly right about something?
Just as I mentioned in today's thread on FathomDB, I'd be interested in what kind of workload scales linearly to 50 cores. I'm guessing its not very join heavy. H-Store's main advance, IIRC, was that it pushed many points of RDBMS engine operation into RAM. While this would indeed make the engine much faster and eliminate some historical cruft, I don't remember any fundamental breakthrough that would make distributed joins scale out very well. Anyone have any insights on how they are handling joins?
Extortion-Like Mass BitTorrent Lawsuits For The US: 50,000 To Be Filed
Most of CNN's programming caters to a certain age group that probably does not, by and large, know how to use a computer. You just have to watch the ads to get a feel for their target audience. Fox and MSNBC have much more diverse programming. It's been a long time since I saw anything of interest on CNN.
Google tasks is fine for me
"I also don't see how Harris is defending classical utilitarianism."

His primary mode of definition is hand-waving, so it's hard to pin him down, but it seems like he is advocating for maximizing wellbeing/happiness/flourishing among all people. This is pretty much the textbook definition of utilitarianism.

Admittedly, he contradicts himself enough that it's hard to know what he really wants, so I might be wrong. When he says, "I think people should be able to wear whatever they want" and simultaneously advocates for condemning those who don't objectively promote human well-being, you know he doesn't have an internally consistent ethic worked out.

"He doesn't claim that (again, as far as I can tell) that people who don't share his point of view are imbeciles"

He describes important questions from critics as "profoundly stupid". But this is the money quote: "Others will be free to define 'equality' differently. Yes, they will. And we will be free to call them 'imbeciles.'" The others are those who disagree with utilitarianism, so it's there in black and white.
CNN is incredibly afraid to call politicos out on their sheer stupidity, group-think and hypocrisy.
The Citibank Bailout Paid Off (the Treasury made 8 billions)
I predict this will be the end of BitTorrent lawsuits. The monetary amount is large enough that some EFF type will wrap it up in a class action.
Some Ways for Get Writing Training
All through your academic career, probably starting in school and most likely, later too, you will be required to write a lot. Writing is a significant part of many jobs. But that is nothing compared to what the students have to deal with. College is definitely a huge writing training.
This is nice (I use it), but be aware, at the moment, this doesn't properly set X-Forwarded-For. Their piggyback SSL does, not sure about their other SSL option. The upshot of this is that you can't tell what IP your requests are coming from, which could be a deal breaker.

Heroku's said they're in contact w/ Amazon looking at a possible solutions.
It most likely will - the gov't just hands out the loans, customers come to them, they don't have to market or any of that.

But those jobs marketing a government backed loan shouldn't have existed anyways, no institution was taking a risk to earn that interest, it was a legally created market distortion -- so whatever.
I saw the same thing when I was living in Port Elizabeth, ZA. It definitely works, the kombis with the best paint jobs always had more passengers.
However, like the article mentions, it was mainly a good indicator of someone who took care of the vehicle. That's the reason I preferred the decorative kombis... chances are there won't be any holes in the floor and a wheel won't fall off halfway through the ride. Not the case with some of the other vehicles.
The supreme court is currently reviewing the legality of business method patents in the Bilski case. I have a Google news alert for it, because if they rule broadly enough, many software patents could be overturned.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_re_Bilski
Will you publish the results? I'd love to see them!
Recession has a definition, and it ends with GDP growth above 0.000001%, not employment or consumer confidence or anything else.
Wow. A company blog that uses the first person plural to describe a political party. Glad I don't work at OkCupid right about now.
Http://kid-lili.blogspot.com/2009/11/hack-tien-trong-nha-hang-vui-ve.html
NASA Data Worse Than Climate-Gate Data, Space Agency Admits
Your gender ratio seems to be biased in the wrong direction, probably an artifact of seeding it with Hacker News folks. In a community site, the quality of your community is a feature. Features aren't just things you can code.
Two commentators do not weigh the same as an entire multi-thousand employee network.
i hope they win - Jobs finally realize patents are bad
The strength of your argument seems to rest on the statement "he was never right about anything before". If it is literally true, you have a very strong point. If it is only true in some handwavy, "you-know-what-I-mean" sense, then your argument is itself handwavy. While I admit to being undereducated in these types of discussions, my suspicion is that your statement is closer to the second option than the first one.
Their CNN Live (online) was halfway decent until they suddenly fired all the hosts last year just after their big website revamp.

It was a really strange move to make all that investment to be the online leader and then threw it away.
What? IMS?
BBC, al-Jazeera, and the Economist, for my institutional news. Democracy Now for my outsider news. The rest are just fluff that I come across but never seek out intentionally (NYT, Harper's,New Yorker, etc.)

CJR for the meta stuff.

CNN, Time, NewsWeek, etc. are just crap.

NPR is excellent infotainment, but not news.
A thought occurs: Congress should stop incentivizing people to buy homes they can't afford.
Unfortunately I have to think that this will only make CNN think that they lost viewers because they were covering too much 'news' and not enough commentary, opinion and soft stories. What it should be of course is a wakeup call to them to because a decent news network again.

The lack of content of the news when I look at CNN vs BBC/PBS/NYT/WSJ/NPR is appalling. They have simply forgotten how to offer a decent view of things that actually matter in the world.
You think there's a chance $30 pricing will be more popular than $10?