skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Bilton later responded to our request for clarification, saying, “My source said it was OK to quote them, just not say who they are.” So apparently, this Facebook employee wanted this information to get out, for whatever reason."

Doesn't sound like the employee was joking.
I find it really annoying that these tech news sites (read TechCrunch) never link to the company. Always to crunchbase or in this case some silly twitter search about Cloudkick.

Anyway, they do seem to have pretty good coverage for the major providers (https://www.cloudkick.com/providers/) Anyone used their service in production?
Its simply a byproduct of being in an emerging market. I don't know much about The Gold Rush, but I'm guessing people involved with it weren't staying at their jobs very long.
See, I like the idea of the iron ring, but there's a certain sentimental value to the one you got at graduation. I think I'm going to try and keep this for as long as I can even though it's stainless :S
Lots of YC funded startups use them. Everyone seems happy with the service.
I get that a lot of people like WebOS, but as a developer it seems like the worst POSSIBLE thing that could happen is for a third mobile OS to actually get traction. Back in the days when Palm ruled the PDA market, things were good, but they're hanging out in fourth or fifth place these days.

Regardless of merit of their respective UIs, the absolute best thing that could happen to the mobile space is if one completely open mobile OS became completely dominant. And pretty much the only reasonable contender for that role is Android.
I just left a similar comment on the post - it likely wouldn't affect resources. The ranking bonus from fast loading pages is probably because Google knows humans prefer fast loading sites.
Userscripts.org is down?
Death by DOJ. Possibly.
Here's how to turn the Big Short into a bunch of little shorts and save us all a lot of trouble in the future:
Require the banks to report each and every line item that they are long and short. A line item is simply there aggregate position in any security, loan or derivative.

The banks already have this information, obviously. All they need to do is publish it--daily. In the past this would have been "infeasible". Now it would cost them little to release it electronically and it would be feasible for a small shop to analyze the risk for an entire bank. If available, the information would lead to an industry of small analyst/investors buying and selling bank stocks, eventually providing better information about the bank's risk than the banks themselves. Under this regime, the regulators can go back to sleep or continue surfing the web.

Until now many would claim this information is the banks' by right and not ours. Is it? You and I effectively disclose this information for our houses and loans. It is deemed necessary for credit markets to function. We have no inherent right to keep it a secret. Banks are just bigger versions of us with thousands of assets and liabilities, playing with taxpayers' money it turns out. Their rights are determined by us and not nature.
This is just silly.

I expect Apple would hate it, but not because it would spell their quick demise.

For one thing, even if such a thing were available today, the iPhone/iPad would almost certainly be the best platform for apps developed for, well, the iPhone/iPad platform. Yes, more developers might port their existing iApp to Android, etc, but if its viable for them, then its also viable for people who creating new apps who might have bet it all on Android if they didn't have an easy way to hedge with the iPhone too.

If this idea were real, and it caught on, the bigger issue for Apple is that developers might be slower to adopt new features of the platform. Right now, if Apple releases a new OS feature, they can put it on new devices and move the installed base to it pretty quickly, which means developers have incentive to take advantage of the new functionality. If those developers depend on a translation layer to reach a significant portion of their audience, then they have less incentive to move quickly, because the translation layer needs to be updated, and that could take a while if the underlying platform doesn't provide the required functionality yet.

Not that I think it would ever get that far. It's a lot of work already, and its going to be magnified by the fact that both iPhoneOS and Android are evolving quickly. Even if this hypothetical were real, its going to be lagging the capabilities of both platforms which means that its only really attractive for apps that don't get much benefit from the new capabilities.

Look at WINE. It's been under development for over a decade. I think its impressive that it is as useful as it is, but when it comes down to it, its still pretty niche.
Searing does not prevent any moisture loss.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Searing
The problem with your theory is that we now work fewer hours than we did in the past. As of 1964, we worked on average 38.7 hours/week, as of 1999 we work only 34.5. Additionally, domestic labor has almost certainly decreased, thanks to modern conveniences like washing machines and dishwashers. Not sure where to get stats on that, however.

http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2000/07/art3full.pdf
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WebOS is actually pretty nice to develop for, it just needs faster hardware with better battery life. Oh, and a way for developers to make money. It's a little rough that anyone can just shell into their phone and view all of your source code.
minor, but I object to your "Non-funded startups typically don't have employees" statement. Or perhaps profitable startups don't qualify as startups anymore?
True enough, I guess, but this seems like a bunch of complaining. It doesn't really provide any measures to improve the situation.

Also, I don't understand the part about said kids having had "adult responsibilities" - wouldn't that create the opposite kind of person, one who can take failure? Perhaps it was ironic.
The Sun is not a reliable news source. They're running a picture of what looks like trees with no explanation of what it actually is.

http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/week290.html (scroll down to the bottom)

"It would be great if there were trees on Mars, but it's not true. In fact what you're seeing are steep slopes with dark stuff slowly sliding down them! Here's a description written by Candy Hansen, a member of NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter team at the University of Arizona:

There is a vast region of sand dunes at high northern latitudes on Mars. In the winter, a layer of carbon dioxide ice covers the dunes, and in the spring as the sun warms the ice it evaporates. This is a very active process, and sand dislodged from the crests of the dunes cascades down, forming dark streaks."
I disagree - if the hoppers are hopping because they are not getting the professional growth they need, or that they think they're being taken advantage of, then that's highly predictable for you as an employer.

Are you treating your employees fairly? Do they feel like they're contributing, or are they writing dead-end code?

You know when they will leave for a new job - when you start treating them like trash.
Survey: Developers love .NET, hate Rails
Cool. I am pretty excited about this idea: https://www.cloudkick.com/hybrid-cloudkick
Too risky to phone ET? Too late -- NASA's tried it
Given he would only admit to something like that "off the record" tells me that Zuckerberg certainly believes in privacy - just not other peoples privacy.
I sometimes use Neo4j but I don't know much about its implementation. Assuming that there was a lot of disk I/O involved in this benchmark, does anyone know how graph data is stored on disk, indexed, etc.? This is a very different problem than in-memory graph operations.
A site like "Clearmy.name" would be useless unless Google brings that site up at the top or unless readers bothered to fact-check every allegation against that site.

If you've ever gotten a chain letter by email, you know that people can't even be bothered to check Snopes.com before sending a dubious letter to hundreds of "friends", so I sadly doubt that a lot of people would check Clearmy.name.
Who are preferable, today's "helicopter parents" or the "because I say so" parents of the previous generation?

Or the "Beat you till you cry" parents of the generation before.

Or the "Off to the factory, brat" parents, etc.
The Official Verdict in the stolen iPhone Case (Calacanis)
I won't be impressed until it can dodge holes.
They can't just expect i{Phone,Pad} developers to walk barefoot over broken glass just for the privilege of creating an application for the platform.

Based on their recent policy changes that is exactly what they expect.
Maybe the were just a little bit nerdy... In any case, your old job sounds so horrible that I would try anything to quit. But there must be more than 2 jobs in the world?
I tend not to trust these kind of news until I read about them on the Bad Astronomer's blog.
I suppose that's the million dollar question ;)

No, I haven't. I launched last night, and turned on a $5 dollar a day AdWords campaign this morning (though I'm not getting any traffic from it yet). Basically all my traffic is coming from my personal blog and HN right now.

Anyone have any ideas on how to increase traffic and make a few initial sales?

I'm setting up an affiliate program, so that will be available shortly.
The market doesn't believe in privacy either, so Facebook is still OK.

Ad Eric Schmidt would say... if there's something you don't want Facebook to know about, don't tell Facebook!
That's a really interesting tradition, Joe — thanks for sharing. As an engineering student in the US, I was unaware of this, but I kind of wish we took part in such a sacrament too. Being an engineer is an honor and truly is something you must be called to do.

On a side note, I get really offended when people nonchalantly call themselves engineers. It's a title you have to earn, not one you just can decide to call yourself.
Yeah, but about the second time you realize you broke your promise to a new hire you should be changing what you promise (or fixing the real problem, if that mentoring and support is indeed needed).
I had hoped that HTC would discontinue making new Windows Mobile devices after Microsoft told them that Android stepped on their patents. Instead HTC is now 'licensing' these patents from MS. Still, it would have been funny if there were no major manufacturers for Windows Mobile.

http://www.androidcentral.com/htc-pay-royalties-microsoft-af...
Entrepreneurship May Be Genetic
Ahh Logo, my first true love. That Swastika -> Star of David animation was also really clever.

(Please don't invoke Godwin's Law against me!)
Been there, done that, and HP is not capable of developing a product from the ground up that will be competitive in the marketplace. For them the best option is definitely to buy. I hate to say it, but they're a company that's out of innovation and out of talent.
I think this was pretty obvious once Facebook totally revamped their privacy settings and set the defaults to be as public as possible.
Well, that wasn’t all that bad for The Sun. Here is Popular Science, writing about the same thing: http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2010-04/hunt-extraterr...

Seems to be a campaign by NASA to lobby for a Mars Sample Return mission and I would say it’s about damn time they get that wish granted. Took long enough.

(Putting “recent” together in a sentence with “Opportunity and Spirit” was actually funny.)
They are doing a webinar with live demo tomorrow: https://cc.readytalk.com/cc/schedule/display.do?udc=5qtmfxkb...
Err, he didn't admit it. An anonymous employee of Facebook alleged it, "off the record". Most people I know treat Facebook as if it were a public-facing website, anyway, and should be more upset that Facebook isn't making people's information readily available to the public.
Well, in my view, "desktop" computing has been stagnant for a couple decades.

Maybe that's too harsh. Web browsers helped move things along for a while, as did 3D gaming. But really, a UI with windows and a pointer that I interact with using a single mouse and keyboard is pretty played out.
> And then: "A 16-year-old girl from Oregon, a beautiful, intelligent young woman" ... When one uses such language to talk about kids.. sheesh.

Where I come from, people of that age can get married. There are current proposals, which will probably become law, allowing them to vote in elections. As others have pointed out, people of that age are generally fertile.

To call someone who can get married, vote and bear children a child is, quite simply, silly.
Ultimately the peak oil argument comes back to a visceral hatred of petroleum and a wish to see a world without it, but wishes aren't reality.

I don't think this is true, and your argument ignores how expensive many of the technologies you cite are, like coal gassification, which has been available for decades but isn't used because of the cost. The question isn't only about reserves, but about how expensive those reserves are to access (and what kinds of environmental damage access will cause).

And oil prices have, in real terms, gone steadily upwards through a boom and bust cycle: prices rise stratospherically, then crash, then find a new trading point higher than the previous trading point. For more on that, see Christopher Steiner's $20 Per Gallon: How the Inevitable Rise in the Price of Gasoline will Change Our Lives for the Better: http://jseliger.com/2009/08/21/20-per-gallon . Note that I don't believe the provocative claim in the title, but he provides a lot of useful historical data.

And this argument mostly ignores the environmental cost of oil, both in terms of extraction and in terms of consumption. And in terms of the massive wealthy transfers from the West to charming places like Saudi Arabia that do a great job of churning out people who become terrorists and ideologies that are repressive. If the price of oil goes up—and it almost certainly will—the latter dynamic will only get stronger.

People who cite peak oil aren't doing it because they have "a visceral hated of petroleum," especially if visceral refers to inward feelings rather than the intellect: they have rational concerns about the world in which we live. Those concerns might be misguided, but they might not be, and time will, as usual, be the judge.
Heroku Node.js Support (experimental)
Huh? How much has Apple ever banked on AutoDesk's tools on the Mac?
I hope HP gets WebOS to be a big enough player to mean great things for innovation in the mobile device space going forward. Gotta love competition as a consumer!
When I was still a wage-slave, I hopped jobs because most start-ups are run by people who have never done this before, and they create lousy work environments.

I also like to leave other peoples' companies every year because I'm a systems engineer, and most of my work is front-loaded. After I've been at a company for a year, my systems are automated well enough that I have little to do but maintain or grow, and I want to be more in life than a systems janitor.

Plus, start-up compensation sucks. If I took a job tomorrow, I would make roughly $200k doing SRE or equivalent at an established company .. or $100k and 15 basis points of stock options vested over 4 years at some me-too start-up whose business model looks a lot like that south park underwear gnomes episode.

Not to mention that most companies do their best to over-hire because they really feel that their problems are incredibly complex and unique, just like all the 6 other companies who got funded in the same marketplace that year.

And, it's just a good investment strategy. Leave a start-up every year as soon as you've gotten your first 25% worth of stock options vested. In a decade you might see $100k for your trouble.
At my last job it took me 3 months to find out that the strike price my options received was 3x what my offer letter hinted it would be. That gradually affected my motivation until I left, and I never exercised my options. Not intentional, but misleading.
Millenials, those born between '78 and '95

That's shifted a good five or ten years back from what I thought. I was born in '82; my parents are Boomers. I thought that made me Generation X.

I. . . I don't want to be a Millenial.
So, stop using Facebook if that bothers you. Same comment, re: privacy, goes for GMail, Google documents, Twitter, Yahoo, etc.

The sci-fi author David Brin (a cool guy, BTW, I once went to his house and had a long talk with him) has a good take on privacy (pardon my paraphrasing, but could not find a direct quote): lack of privacy can be tolerated if it is an even playing field. That is, if politician, corporations, etc. all have the same lack of privacy as people.
Twelve absolute must-have Google Chrome plugins
Ry has some Nginx / Node comparison in his JSConf slides http://nodejs.org/jsconf2010.pdf

Summary: Node isn't quite as fast as NginX but it's close, and it's programable, and he's still tuning it.
<joke>I guess HP figured out that when print media dies, it can't sell as many cartridges and figured it would tow along a sinking boat to its tanker ship. </joke>

Whatever the case may be, HP needs to put blinders on Palm. Palm needs to ultra focus on one good phone. How did they forget that they used to focus so well on the Treos that Blackberry seemed pale in comparison.
Augmented Driving on your iPhone 3GS
Acquiring another Company
It's time to start thinking about alternative presentations of literature in applications.

Books are books and are loved and read and enjoyed in their own right.

The Alice in Wonderland application he references is not a book; it is an interactive experience that involves reading. Which is great, but certainly not a book. (Not even an app, either.)
EDIT: After looking at this http://nodejs.org/jsconf2010.pdf from sh1mmer's post, it looks like I need to be using a Buffer object to serve data over 64kb due to v8's garbage collector making a performance mess when using strings.

EDIT2: After looking at the code again, file reads come in as strings, so I don't actually see that Buffers would help, at least until the node file API starts passing around buffers instead of strings.

I can't speak to performance wrt to proxying, but I benchmarked its performance serving files recently[1].

Now, I didn't benchmark nginx, but as you can see, its pretty slow at that task, averaging ~10 MiB/s on fairly decent hardware, across a single gigabit switch.

One problem node has, is that it sucks dealing with strings containing non UTF-8 data:

From the node docs:

Node supports 3 string encodings. UTF-8 ('utf8'), ASCII ('ascii'), and Binary ('binary'). 'ascii' and 'binary' only look at the first 8 bits of the 16bit JavaScript string characters.

1. http://blog.andrewvc.com/nodejs-can-really-scale
I've used the Pre (I have an iPhone) - it is incredibly solidly designed. Its main problems are twofold:

- It's slow. Really slow. If they can get a 2-3x performance improvement overall throughout webOS, they can actually compete with Apple. So far it's just not snappy enough to be a pleasant experience.

- The marketing sucked. Seriously, what the hell. It's almost as if they went out of the way to convince you to not buy this device.
Good for them! WebOS, as I understand it, is the nicest OS of the bunch from an elegance and openness perspective, so it's good to see it getting a fair shot at market dominance.

Exciting stuff -- let's just hope the additional fragmentation is worth it.
PalmOS was hardly a failure. It was far and away the most popular mobile OS for the better part of a decade.
All I want is a good implementation of footnotes. Then I can read Infinite Jest without three bookmarks and a reclining lounger.

While I'm at it, I also want embeddable fonts.

What I do not want is animation or interactivity, at least not in my novels.
20 Websites For Logo Inspiration
I believe some schools in the states are starting to do a similar tradition.
My intuition is that Apple is beginning to follow a 90-9-1 rule with its offerings, probably not by design but just because that's how the market is actually structured.

http://www.90-9-1.com/

The 90-9-1 rule says that 90% of people are going to be consumers/audience, 9% will interact/edit/participate, while only 1% will be doing the actual creation of content for people to interact with or consume.

The desktop Macs are for that 1%. In fact, most computers have been designed to cater to that 1% of coders and creative professionals. Very few computers have been explicitly designed and made for the other 99%. The iPad seems to me to be targeting that 90% that want to be an audience/consumer of content, but are not creators. It's a computing device/appliance finally made specifically with them in mind, rather than with hackers/creators/coders/geeks in mind as the target market.

So, it makes sense that Macs will remain the only way to develop for iPhone OS. Making iPhone OS capable of becoming a development platform would be counter to the entire idea/market of iPhone OS.

Macs may dwindle to 1% of Apple's sales some day, but they'll still sit at the top, trickling down all the content to the rest of the ecosystem.
Three Ways to Hack Your Commute
I don't think that HP has a clear purpose for making this purchase. They held a conference call on the acquisition, which is available on their webpage, along with a transcript:

http://www.hp.com/investor/webcast

The first questioner wanted to know why HP didn't just build Android devices. HP didn't have a compelling response. They just mumbled something about "early stage market" and making webOS "more compelling". Oddly, HP then mentioned that they are still a strategic partner with Microsoft.
All of you developers, does this excite you as a potential development platform now? Watching past Palm/webOS postings here not gain any traction made me wonder why. Was it the dismal outlook? Was there something wrong with the dev suite Palm offered? Does the hp acquisition change all that for you?
That's really cool. I think node.js is one of the most exciting new projects out there, and getting support for it into the cloud means uptake can be that much faster.
Amazing fractal-inspired animation done with HTML5 and Canvas
One point of feedback, first glance at your page does not give my brain an initial impression that you're selling anything. I think at least a shopping cart icon on the checkout "tab" would be a normal indicator of "ecommerce". In fact the tabs in general make the whole thing just look like a blog for some reason.
http://www.upenn.edu/gazette/1109/expert.html by Andrew Newburg was on here sometimes ago.
I think a related problem is that college professors are usually soft. I have been in a number of classes where a group of students take control and demand a curve, or an extension of a project, and in their defense, why not? Many if not most professors will cave.

The best classes were usually taught by strict professors with the confidence to stick up for their original lesson plan.
It seems like there are a decent amount of misconceptions people have about sous vide cooking. Everyone should have a look at the sous vide primer here http://www.cookingissues.com/primers/
Thank god that we have government regulated credit ranking agencies to protect us from this mess and having to use our own judgment when investing. Oh wait... hmmm...
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