skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The real WTF here is why HN considered it appropriate to run a production site on a shared host. Shared hosting is a bad idea all around if you are even slightly concerned about reliability. You don't control the server, so any 60 year old woman running a photoblog with a vulnerable WordPress version can bring your site down just by getting hacked.
Hrmm....HN was hosted on a shared server. That's pretty impressive..if I must say so myself.
It's not possible to make a business out of selling goods that are infinitely abundant. Free software is one such thing.

Making open-source is not a direct income driver and, apart from very limited niches, will never be, but, nevertheless, it allows a business to have full control of its technology stack.

Company A builds a great game using a closed-source library built by company B and company C builds another great game using, say, an LGPL library. When the underlying platform changes, breaking both libraries, company C is not subject to whatever the strategy of company B is and, therefore, can be first to market with a new, compatible, version.

This is a hypothetical situation, of course, but illustrates one important thing about free software - most people don't really make it: they use it and, from time to time, and, if and when the need arises, add a little improvement here or a fix there. Its strength lies in the sheer number of people that give a little hand, scratching one another's itch.
I'm based out of Denver but same area! I'll be there to represent our company Site5.com (old tech - web hosting) and a new startup!
I highly recommend gerrit for this purpose. It's easy to deploy, lets people manage their own ssh keys, and has a nice helping of code review on the side.
From today & apropos: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2010/04/how-to-buy-a...
Intex IN2020 QT Dual SIM QWERTY Mobile Review
From what I've read it's because pg uses this as a playground for arc and is far from optimized. It would be great if he got some help from the community though, it is embarrassingly slow.
Specifically, you re-invented DialKeys: http://images.google.com/images?q=dialkeys
Ya but if your dad wants to put up his pictures you go tell him to buy a nice scalable hosting product instead of a cheap shared hosting account for $5 to $10 a month?
Or you could just get a netbook.
Sure it was, customer service just means a tech who can talk to people.
Yep, totally smooth on the 3GS. Blows the hell out of those crappy Java games I played on the phone I had before my iPhone...
The email sounds pretty generic and policyish, which leads me to suspect it was auto-generated rather than typed out by some hapless sysadmin who's never heard of HN.
Results Are In: The Entrepreneur State of Mind 2010
Custom input views were added to iPhone OS 3.2, so someone could do this for iPad.

http://developer.apple.com/iphone/library/documentation/UIKi...
But they are trivial to migrate between machines on demand.
I realize this is Dave Winer and his place in the industry... but....

Is it just me or does this read like an old out-of-date guy that doesn't like change?
Its 2010.
IQ tests are to a certain extent a learned skill; you get accustomed to the sorts of questions which get asked. If the kids had never seen an IQ test before their first one then just the effect of testing 'em twice in a row could easily account for 13 points.

I bet I could do a study which showed you could get a similar gain by showing 'em a youtube clip of giraffes mating.
Exactly - they missed an obvious opportunity to upsell. If Trevor had gotten a mail stating that he needed to upgrade he would most probably just have done so and been happy. It's not like he can't afford it :-)
It must be frustrating to develop when you have to look at everything through a two decade old lens. Dave has had some brilliant ideas, but sticking with a hacked together dead environment is making him irrelevant.
That technology is not out there

Ofcourse it is.

Or how do you think they determined that it was pg's site causing the trouble?
"- Don't worry, Skynet will take care of the virus in no time.

- Skynet IS the virus!!!"
Cool leg stilts from Weta digital
And an even better thing is that you almost never have to - the list of languages without a free standard implementation of json is pretty uninteresting.

I like json a lot - it's a better reincarnation of s-expressions than xml was. The only thing I wish for is that it had a symbol type, so that I could use it as a syntax for programming languages as well as data ;)
Brain Games Won't Boost I.Q.
Because those are so much easier to type on while standing?
And unless I'm mistaken, he wrote the programming environment himself.

http://techcrunch.com/2005/08/21/dave-winers-creates-a-purpl...

The dude invented RSS, but still. Old dog, new trick?
Web Developer vs Web Designer
Why would you be hunched over? I have no problems with using mine that way.
Yes and no.

I doubt it is a HN-Focused tool, as this affected the static content from www.ycombinator.com, and images and CSS are not the focus of bots usually.

Assuming it was not a DoS attack, a smart host should have noticed the traffic load increasing over time, and offered to upgrade to a less-loaded server and recommend a dedicated server.

By disabling the site, they have lost a customer, and lost on a up-sell to a dedicated server.
I think that if you have a steady income and a family, buying (or building) makes more sense considering the fact that the landlord/owner of the rented property can ask you to vacate any time. Even with an advance vacation notice, finding a new rental property and moving with a family is a huge hassle. With your own property you at-least have the peace of mind that it's yours to keep (alright, not really so until you pay off the mortgage, but still better than renting in this one scenario).
Java Founder Gosling Quits Oracle
Typing on one now, the iPad is at at angle so i am not hunched over. I wouldn't want to write a novel, but it's fine for comments. I have a netbook as well and it's about the same frustration level (being able to see the iPad's keys gives it an edge at the moment as it's dark in the room).
Because hacker news doesn't use a database, the site is file driven and runs entirely out of ram. Changes are made in memory and logged to disk and upon server restart, the files are lazily loaded on demand to prevent the need to load the entire db all at once. This might sound crazy but it's actually faster (once loaded) and easier to program than a relational database.

As hacker news was a fun project for Paul, I'd imagine he doesn't want to touch a relational database with a ten foot pole; I don't blame him. You can get a long way without ever using a real database, files and in memory hash tables work fine up to a pretty decent amount of traffic. It only becomes problematic when you need more than one server.
I actually freelance with a group that is making a web app for viewing medical imagery. Has a Flex-based frontend, though.

I guess I don't understand the use case -- I had assumed that the computers needed to tell if a patient was bleeding or not were connected to a machine that did some kind of image-taking or internal measurement, and that that machine was the stationary "is patient bleeding machine" computer. Do doctors generally perform analyses like that one on personal computers or normal workstations? I guess I just got a false impression from medical dramas or something.
I Think Facebook Just Seized Control Of The Internet
Bill Gates to MIT crowd: Start solving the big problems
The article seems to be making it implicitly, by calling athletes "geniuses".
I was told my work could be requested under the FOIA when I programmed for the army.
Hey, let's just buy another iPad and use that as the other keyboard!
So the answer is to have the work-experience kid press the copy/scan button 20,000 times! :P
From the article: "Additionally, the Python SDK has a new experimental feature that gives you the option to use SQLite as the datastore stub backend." The stub backend is where the development server stores the Google datastore information. That is very different from Google saying they will provide a SQL interface.
One of the comments on that the story summed up my first impressions quite well-

I'm glad Firefox let's me override whatever horrible font the web designers choose. I'm really glad I'll be able to ignore potentially thousands of unreadable fonts.
Assuming they have only 38 other minutes of outage for the rest of the year, looks like they can keep 4 nines.

Five nines is really hard--that's five minutes of downtime a year.
Perhaps it's you, or latency to you, the sites always quite snappy and fast for me and I never see load times like that. Most pages load in 700-800 milliseconds for me and pretty much always have.
The web design above the fold looks great.
Have a look at Sophos (http://www.sophos.com/).

It was the only one I found in my testing to not destroy Windows filesystem performance when real-time scanning was enabled and to have no discernable impact when real-time scanning was disabled. (Symantec, McAfee, AVG and Avast all hurt disk performance quite a bit, EVEN when disabled, merely by being installed. F-secure was the only other I found to not harm disk performance when installed but inactive.)

Sophos also has a decent enterprise management console. No connection, other than as a customer.
The government is accountable to us, and we subsidize this work.
Hysterical. I've been telling people about the cost-benefit of rent/own around our neighborhood for years. I can buy a 1000sq. ft. home with an arm's length of property around it for $419,000 or I can rent a 1000sq. ft. home for $1400. With default yearly increases and 5.5% mortgage rate it's better to buy after... never! With a 2% annual increase in home value, never! 3%, same as rent, never! 4%, never! Houses have to increase at 5% just to be positive, after 13 years. (We have 2.7% tax rate.)

Damn. Nice to see a chart like that.
The History of Computers in a Nutshell
Facebook to Google: "Thanks for keeping the web warm for us, but we'll take it now."
I think someone's lost touch with reality. Facebook hasn't seized anything and couldn't scare Google if their lives depended on it.
Absolutely not. I use a virtual instance of windows for that stuff. I'd never do web browsing like activities (or much network connectivity at all) on a machine that was about to compile a binary that might be duplicated thousands of times to thousands of places.

The Parallels windows pc on my mac was hit by this very problem. I had to restore to a 3 day old snapshot just to get it running again. I feel bad for those who were running windows bare-metal who can't just press a button and go back.
The world's ugliest programming book covers
It must be frustrating to develop when you have to look at everything through a two decade old lens.

You don't have to though. I've seen a lot of stuff reinvented already, some of it badly. That doesn't stop me from doing the pragmatic thing most of the time though.
I really don't want Facebook to be the identity of the Internet.
Six weeks?
Is that enough to see difference?
The Forth book does appear to be real: http://www.amazon.com/Forth-Atari-Learning-Ekkehard-Floegel/...

I would totally learn Forth if I got an awesome helmet like that.
Sorry, Google does not serve more than 1000 results for any query.
But that means you can only do it for your own apps right not the entire OS like android?
Well, yes and no.
I wish they would have IPO'd before this, bet we'd see a nice bump in valuation over the next few months.
Agile Engineering for Online Communities (IMVU's Engineering Process)
I actually have experienced the same depression and listlessness you described, and I imagine a lot of it could be tied to the constant lack of choice and excessive amount of expectations that our current, mill-like educational system forces students through. I definitely agree with you that our system, one that burns so many kids out about caring about anything, needs an antidote. But, along the lines that you said, I don't think that the antidote is necessarily forcing kids to take on full adult responsibilities at age 15. I guess I can see a real-life-buffered educational system that allows for more responsibility and choices without going so far as asking kids to start working full time and living on their own at age 15.
AVG is good

http://free.avg.com/ww-en/free-antivirus-download

ClamAV for windows is ok too:

http://www.clamwin.com/

Hell, just running housecall once in a while manually can do wonders:

http://housecall.trendmicro.com
I think that's the attitude that has lead to the demise of more than one great company.
and you'll need to change the salt every time you fire someone or they quit unhappily.
I can't decide what is more comical. That he's going to write off FB and Twitter because parsing JSON is too hard. Or that he thought the Open Graph was a bad idea in 1997 and still thinks so today, and apparently is proud of it. Or that he thinks FB could buy Microsoft.
Genentech Using Home-Built iPhone Apps For Daily Business Functions
Interesting... thanks for the update.
Ask HN: Please review my webapp (and help with autism research)
For the past 6 months or so the lab I work at has been working on a system to administer studies and surveys related to autism. We wanted something more customizable than something like SurveyMonkey, so I was tasked to create our own version.

You can see the result at http://thegatewayproject.org

Usability was extensively tested and geared towards autistic and disabled, so the design and layout is very simple.

Note: by default, registration will only enable the first survey, which is pretty basic and unremarkable. If you'd like to check out some of the more sophisticated ones, shoot me an email at sngardner {AT: wisc.edu with [HN] in the subject and I'll set you up with a test account.

Thanks for any feedback you can give us, and feel free to email me directly at sngardner {AT: wisc.edu if you have any technical questions / bug reports.
you get a random person tailgate you into your office building, and then they just walk around from cube to cube looking for passwords on postit notes, note them down and walk away. They can't just pick up the hardware, both because it's locked down, and also that looks really suspicious.
My thought is that sensationalist headlines are nothing new.

More seriously, I know enough people who disdain/distrust Facebook that this seems ridiculous to me. Then again, maybe I know the wrong people.
I'd try Foremost: http://foremost.sourceforge.net/
You're assuming the load today wasn't extraordinary. That's not yet clear. PG doesn't know of any surge, probably based on figures he has access to on other hosts and analytics tools. But what if HN/YC static resources at Pair were newly being deep-linked, by a much more popular site? Only seeing the end-of-day logs from Pair, compared to previous days, can definitively answer this question.
> McAfee has just demonstrated a computer autoimmune disease.

My goodness, what a fascinating idea. (And a search suggests the you are the first person in all of history to think of that.)

When will the biological parallels end? Will we someday get viral transmission of OS code snippets from one machine to another, leading to improved OSs? The mind boggles ....
The terms and conditions pages for shared hosting sites usually outline that bandwidth, disk space, number of sites, and number of databases are unlimited, but CPU and memory are not. There's your bottleneck. You can put thousands of sites on shared hosting, but get one or two with decent traffic or heavy scripts and you get the upsell or leave email. That's why I host at Rackspace Cloud now.
Yeah, it’s just for your own app.
Customers nothing. "I didn't know what that 'hacker news' thing was or if it should have that much traffic so I shut it off". Really?

Please turn in your geek card at the door.
Tell HN:Launched Cloudomatic(start): all your startup's web apps. one place.
I have a proposal for HN: replace those triangles with 'Facebook recommend' buttons :)
Hey guys! This is pretty much an organic product we made and think you'd find useful. Some backstory on why we created it /how here: http://blog.cloudomatic.com/company-news/new-product-launch-... Feedback is definitely welcomed. We spent a lot of time polishing some loose ends, but there's always a ton to improve on. So yeah, rip it apart.
i still dont use facebook that much.
I'm not sure of the details, but this may be complicated by the fact that a lot of government source code was produced by outside contractors.
I just found this striking. It makes the sentence on the previous page sound rather grandiose.

"Results 916 - 922 of about 642,000,000 for search terms. (1.46 seconds)"
Facebook Lets Merchants Convert Rewards Points into Credits
Reconnaissance, Observation and Vital Execution Rotocraft, for a little throw-back to the old Prisoner series...
95% of people never click past page 2 anyway.
H3 Solutions Delivers SharePoint Solution for iPhone
Not that I'm all that interested in getting into a pissing contest with Some Guy From The Internet, but:

1. I've been doing virus and malware cleanups for people since -- well, since 1995 or so, at least.

2. I've recently begun presenting seminars on basics for novice computer users.

3. I was among the first to clean up the rather nasty kbiwkm rootkit a while back. One of my clients was infected with it before there had been an a/v response, and before anything could be learned about it anywhere.

4. I've recently begun to get contacted internationally (well, from Canadian individuals, anyway) to clean up websites infected with various sorts of nasty bugs.

5. Most importantly, I follow the results and reports from av-comparatives.org religiously; they're not affiliated with any particular antivirus vendor, product, or group, their tests appear to be very thorough, their methods appear to be fairly rigorous, and they provide reasonable results for a number of different metrics related to antivirus products, all in a regularly-released report that's quite readable.

6. I started a company three years ago to address the various flaws that I saw in the I.T. industry, one of which was the number of people that got hit with viruses over and over again. I have a very, very low rate of repeat virus cleanups for my clients, many of whom are novices that are particularly susceptible to multiple computer virus vectors. You might feel like being snarky and saying that I never hear back from them because they don't care for the service, but then again, I'm currently experiencing my third straight year of 300% growth, and most of my "marketing" comes from word-of-mouth.

But, I don't have a blog, so of course I'm not an expert. Carry on.

edit: ohbtw, two of today's systems that were infected with rogue antivirus also had up-to-date and active McAfee installations, which isn't at all unusual. But, yeah, you're right, it's much better now than it used to be.
A bug: upvotes are swallowed when initiated while logged out.

Details: If I click up-vote while not logged in and then log in using the form that is subsequently presented, I am returned to the original page. However, every time I try this, the item has the same number of points as before I upvoted it, though it no longer has an upvote arrow next to it, so I cannot upvote it again.
They won't shut you down for over-using resources. As a matter of fact you can't over-use resources, you can only use the resources you are given to you. I know they are different type of VPS, I am referring to Slicehost/Linode type VPS which has hard limit and acts very much like dedicated single box.

More important to me is that I am really really really surprised that Ycombinator was running on a shared account. This just blew my mind.

I have no hard feelings towards pear, I would have shut the site down too; possibly long ago.
Dreamhost also repeatedly shut down my sites, such as mapwow.com, due to too much traffic. One time they even denied they shut it down -- even though my web directory had been chowned to root, which requires root privilege.

I moved to slicehost and appengine[disclaimer,etc] and have been relatively happy with them.
Right, because you know how to conduct a brain study better than a neuroscientist at UC Berkeley who's been working on this for years.
I've been curious about the practical applications of LISP as well. Pure functional programming, as I understand it, means no side effects. The issue with this is that procedural & OO programming lives off of side effects: screen displays, file writes, etc. How would you build a GUI application in something that shouldn't give you anything but an answer? I'm aware that it is done, of course (web servers, games, etc), but how you would do something like that escapes me.
But they're derivative works of Drupal, which is GPLv2: http://drupal.org/licensing/faq
audio + digital dictation = text?

Just a suggestion.
It's a minor nit to pick, but I believe the majority of this was done pre-election, and hence, paid for out of campaign dollars. That isn't to say that some of us didn't pay for it, but the initial development of these plugins was almost certainly not done with taxpayer money.

If you're ever in the DC area, I'll be more than happy to depress you with all of the ways in which taxpayer money is all but thrown away by the millions, but in this particular instance, I think we're okay.
I would love to see more data behind their users, as in how many of their nearly 500 million users have even used the service? Added to their profiles? Created a friends list? Verified their e-mail address?

I have friends who have, combined, created hundreds of dummy facebook accounts that they do not use because while they do not have dedicated facebook accounts, they often want to see someone's profile or friend's list. So they hit "Sign Up", put in a fake e-mail address, fake first name, fake last name and register. Facebook makes this quite easy because they don't even require, last I checked, that you verify your e-mail address before you start using the site features.
Many people occasionally copy/print multi-hundred page documents. That runs to many gigs of RAM, $30 just for the DRAM chips. And then you need to design what amounts to a custom PC motherboard to talk to them. The price could easily run to $75, not counting the enormous engineering costs.

Or you buy a $40 ATA drive and connect it to your embedded processor's built-in interface.
Here is mine: www.examprofessor.com

It's an assessment engine that allows you to embed your exams anywhere you please.
I've been working on http://shortreviews.net recently - an entertainment review site.

Our emphasis is on allowing groups of friends to sign up and influence the entertainment choices of their peers. To support this many sections of the sites allow you to view only your friends reviews, if you wish - and signups with social networks automatically associate you with any members you are friends with.

Right now we support Facebook/Myspace/Twitter logins, with the ability to post your reviews back to your social networks if you wish. We are almost finished adding Netflix support, to enable users to automatically retrieve a list of movies and TV shows they've watched.

Any suggestions are appreciated - we plan to keep adding features and evolving the site in useful ways while our user base grows.
Many times, those pieces of software integrate with commercial third party components. In most of those cases, the government produced software is basically just glue to bind together lots of libraries.

In other words, it would likely be useless.
the main problem is that the rent I receive is taxed as income and the rent I pay isn't tax-deductible

Your costs as a landowner are tax-deductible, right? So you're only taxed on actual profit? Doesn't seem like you should be any worse off