skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That is a really good point. Google can survive without specific personal data. Facebook cannot, by definition. That is a major factor in Google's favor.
http://listen.googlelabs.com/

Listen from Google Labs brings podcasts and web audio to your Android-powered device.
Good article but could the site owner check their logic with using light grey text on a pure white background. The lack of contrast is killing my eyes... anyone else?
Dead link, use this instead: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarkes_Three_Laws
Well, he may be the exception but it lines up with my experience (also Braintree). I think I've spent a grand total of 1 day on our billing system. We do threshold billing, monthly subscription, and one time payments. We use the Braintree vault and everything just sort of works.

I've done some work with various authorize.net resellers in the past with similar results. Really, understanding the magic that is interchange rates is the most difficult piece of the whole equation:)
Heh, last line: "Our investigation leaves unresolved questions that raise serious questions [...]"
Counterexamples include SIDS, stroke, epilepsy, psychosis, and suicidal depression.
cant wait to buy a htc evo and use some of these apps
Uhh? Computers are houses of cards...everything in them is interdependent. Bodies, on the other hand, are like cities...a few major parts that, if they fail, kill the entire system, but lots of redundancy, and lots of things that aren't completely necessary.
The Science of Word of Mouth
Dallas Incubator Tech Wildcatters Announces Inaugural Class
The Social House of Cards
It's interesting how that one experience completely changed your perception of Opera even now. Definitely applicable to startup life - don't take the easy monetization, it may come back to haunt you.
Twilio Searching for "Superstar" Web Developer
there was this programming language i remember reading about a while ago that was basically about moving computation around to different nodes to bring the "function to the data" as opposed to the other way around -- which is the exact same thing that the white paper says clustrix is doing.

anyways, with any sort of non-trivially related data, it becomes a continuous graph optimization problem to minimize the number of nodes you hit on any given "query" (ie: keep data that tends to be accessed together on the same nodes or die), and can easily see how though it may seem like an elegant solution, that you can very quickly run into scary problems that really are just a giant tangled mess.

anyways, distributed joins aren't that hard. select and insert are solved by the key-value/consistent hashing dbs. even mysql cluster gives you all that stuff these days (the whitepaper mentions non-trivial multi-master joins)

holla
I'm underwhelmed. The reason we build our programs that way is that actually makes them less likely to crash. We actually have access to programs structured more like the E. Coli graph. They crash a lot. Because the fact that one error takes down the whole system has less to do with the organizational structure of the code, and more to do with the fact that we've deliberately built the system such that one error will crash the entire system... because the alternative is worse. There's no recovering from a segfault not because there aren't enough different implementations of core functionality, but because there is no sensible way to recover from a segfault.

Cells have a type of redundancy programs do not have, and may never have, and it actually hasn't got anything to do with the source code at all. They have numerous independent copies of things that mostly work, most of the time. They perform tasks that transform lots of things into lots of other things, most of the time. The whole system is built so that everything mostly works, most of the time, usually recovers, and it doesn't matter much whether this cell dies or that mitochondria malfunctions. It's an entirely different set of primitives brought on by massive parallelism. (And not the usual biological parallelism you hear about in the brain, but physically, everywhere.)

It's the difference in primitives that brings about the difference in result. Difference in optimal layout is an effect, not a cause. Cells don't have the option to work like programs, and programs really don't have the option to work like cells. (At least not without a lot more computational resources.)
That's because you consider yourself some sort of arbiter of taste. What you categorically dismiss is enjoyed by hundreds of millions of people who spend billions on it.

The ads bought by game makers are the reason Facebook is now profitable. They probably account for most of its revenue already and will probably be the vast majority of it going forward.
haha very true and well demonstrated.
Unlike in New York and London, - In India, female bankers rule
Adobe is Rebuilding its Wired Magazine App to Fit Apple’s Flash-Free Agenda
Kernel development tutorials
The palm pilots that never were . . .
My company might have bought this 6 months ago assuming it provably works as advertised. We ended up sharding (which I'd gladly pay $80k to have avoided) and going Cassandra for future apps.
Honestly to me it sends the opposite signal. Like I said, I see your site and think "what the f* is this joker gonna do with my CC info?". I see Google Checkout or Amazon and thing "big established company who already has my CC info anyway!".
If you want to optimize, you're spending too long.

Look into HIIT and machines that recruit higher percentage of muscle mass so your body can multitask. Versaclimber is a good one. So's Skier's Edge Big Mountain or Concept2 rower. ROM is overpriced and weird.

You can get peak results--any more time yields diminishing returns--in 7 to 10 minutes three to five times a week: 3 mins warmup, 3 - 5 mins at max†, 1 minute cool down. Then walk it off and try not to throw up. Protein and creatine juice 30 mins before and protein shake 10 mins after doesn't hurt.

† Footnote: Max means near your max heart rate. When you do HIIT right, you're going to feel like you want to die. Best to use Polar chest strap or other real time heart monitoring to track your zones so you can mentally coach yourself to stay in the peak zone. If you can't hit peak heart rate after just a couple cycles of 20s max 10s rest, your machine isn't recruiting enough or you're not exerting enough.
Interesting, but I don’t think the question raised in the title was actually answered — he just retold the history.
I like pips and chips. I had no idea what forex was, but now that I know, it kinda makes sense.
Chips like coins/money, pips, I have no idea why they use that word.

tradebook doesn't have as memorable a name.

pips and chips also has a somewhat british ring to it, and with the right design can really play across the line of old-school established english financial system (king and country and all that), and a more modern playful perspective.

I like it!
accidental upvote. Actually meant to give it to something interesting... http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1316643
I've been using GNU/Linux for so long, I didn't realize until recently that Windows doesn't come with a virtual PDF printer. After a little searching I told some Windows using friends to install doPDF and they seem happy with it.
I totally agree. I love the beauty of your blog, folks, but when I actually want to read your blog, I use readability.

I wish there was a way to track the use of readability on a site actually. Would be good feedback for web designers.
Being a crank doesn't just mean somebody's inexperienced, it means their thought processes are unusually flawed. Sit a normal person down in front of a computer and tell them to write code, and you'll end up with a typical spaghetti-code swamp. But it's a common kind of swamp -- it'll have global variables, no error handling, lots of redundant code, but fundamentally some logical structure will be present.

In contrast, tell a crank to write code, and you'll end up with the programming equivalent of Finnegan's Wake (or, if you're unlucky, Timecube). Execution paths meander and ultimately lead nowhere; comments which are not just wrong, but bear no relation to any nearby code; often, remarks that the compiler is wrong and only the crank is aware.

Crank code can be amusing to read, but I can't imagine dealing with it in a professional environment.
Don't you love that you need a second FB account to check whether your privacy settings are actually in effect? It's indicative of how difficult it is to understand the privacy settings that are offered.

Part of the reason Facebook is able to get away with so much of this is that when you are logged into Facebook, it never occurs to you how much of your information is being shown to other people; it's like a crowd of people with funny stickynotes attached to their forehead, everybody sees and is entertained by what they can see on other people's foreheads but they can't easily tell what is on their own.
Very William S. Burroughs.
Oracle RAC allows multiple machines to synchronize access to a shared disk. Each node in a RAC cluster locks individual disk pages and brings the data to the node for processing. Only one node is working on a query a time, while synchronizing access to resources at a physical level.

Clustrix is fundamentally different. We compile the query down into query fragments and evaluate relevant portions of the query at the node which holds the relevant data. We bring the query to the data.

You can find more specifics on our architecture in our white paper:

http://www.clustrix.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/clustrix-...

Clustrix is all about concurrency and parallelism. While we didn't specifically focus on OLAP, our model allows us to do very well for these types of workloads because we break the query apart and let individual nodes work on their portion of the query.

While we deliver our product as an appliance, it's all based on commodity hardware.

If you had an infinitely scalable database, would you still want to put a caching layer in front of it? Most people would rather not deal with the added complexity.

In a typical sharding scheme, one would choose a partition key (typically some primary key, e.g. user id) and use that as a distribution strategy. At such granularity, hot spots are a common problem. In Clustrix, we have independent distribution/partitioning for each table/index, down to the row level. To get hot spots is if you contend on a single row -- but that's really an indication of something going terribly wrong in the data model.

ACID (transactional properties) and KV (data model) are orthogonal concepts. Our systems scales exceptionally well and supports a wide range of data models.
My favorite is the third, because it's true:

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
Look out Kayak, Rough Waters Ahead
Do you guys list a series of illegal activities as public interests on Facebook or something? Google's lack of privacy boundaries are much more disconcerting than this -- "Orwellian" seems to imply one being watched, which Facebook is not doing; you are publishing it yourself, to the Internet. This is just an example of poor UI design.
Nice to see Woz, but Cavuto asks some really stupid questions.
I wonder if you can add a "Readability Button" (instead of Print button) to your site, so that if people wants a nicely formatted version to read they can just click a button.

Should be easy? I have to look in to it.
It's available in the svn repo.
I always picture scenes from Minority Report when I read about Facebook and where it's headed. There was an uproar over beacon in part because it was blatant. It seems that Facebook has learned their lesson and is trying to rebuild beacon much more slowly and more visibly. Look at the types of things that you can't opt out of sharing now for example, or the amount of information that app developers or users of the "open" graph can pull.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ITjsb22-EwQ&feature=relat...
I recently read 'Physics for Future Presidents', and recommend it.

From the perspective of 'am I going to get cancer from cellular signals', the book leans very strongly to the no.
According to the book, the average person has a 20% chance of getting cancer. when you start adding in factors such as being exposed to low levels of radiation from say a dirty bomb, that percentage goes up to 20.5%. It's a tiny number.

Apparently this is why it is so hard to define what is actually causing cancer and what isn't. Even if there is a 1% chance that using an iPad is going to give you cancer, that is only 1% on top of the 20% chance you already have.
So you COULD avoid using your iPad, but you've limited the minor portion of your chances.

We are bombarded by radiation all the time. You can't get away from it.
I'm not saying you should bathe in plutonium daily, but don't lock yourself in a bubble either.

Look at it another way. Of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, which one do you suspect lived the healthier lifestyle, and which one got cancer?
Take good care of yourself, eat your veggies, a low fat diet (but not too low) and most important get excercise (that goes for your kids too).
But I personally don't believe we need to fear the radio waves which surround us.
+1 to this comment.

PrimoPDF is another good alternative for enterprise users who just need print to PDF.
Thanks for the tip on TouchDown. I'm finally free from having to punch in my username and password every few minutes just to get to Outlook Web Access.
I remember when people said nobody needed another search engine. I also remember people saying they definitely needed a better webmail option. Listen to your market, but not too much.
Ask HN: Stealth mode average length?
Would anyone know the average time spent in stealth mode for startups?

(Clustrix from YC W06 made me think of this question)
We use PayPal Payments Pro. We do pretty solid volume with them, and have never had any holdbacks, or any problems at all. Our fraud is very low (if you steal a credit card, you aren't going to waste it on virtual coins in a Facebook game, you're going to buy things you can sell on eBay) which may be why.

The rate is a little high at our scale, but it's not quite to where it would be worth the developer man hours of switching yet, and I hear they'll give you a lower than published rate if you have enough volume and ask nicely.
I like your app! Unfortunately, it's something to just look at once/twice a month, but, nice work! Excited to checkout swype, thanks for the link. It's not pirated, just a closed beta?
Exadata does use SSDs now, in the form of Sun's flash memory cards (though they still are backed by rotational disk). You're right, however that this and Exadata look to attack the same problem in a similar way. If we believe Clustrix about the "100s of nodes" rather than the 20 they show data for, it would likely out-perform Exadata by a bit too.
A. Decide what the minimum viable product is. What is the smallest amount of work you have to do to make something that people want?

B. Build as quickly as possible and put your product in front of customers.

C. Iterate quickly based on feedback from your customers. Repeat as necessary.

When I read this I thought he was going to tell us that he would work out for a week, then go out to bars (topless?) and get feedback from girls, and then alter his training routine accordingly... ;)
My guess is the electronic compass sensor is precise enough that passing by a ferrous metal will change the reading for a moment. If you have a weird 'spike' in the sensor reading it would be easy to see, rather than the gradual change you'd get from a directional change.
It's really sad that Aldiko is such a good reader, but has no bookstore that sells current books for it.

I'm stuck with Kobo's old Shortcovers app, which even they admit is outdated.
True, but you probably want to wait for the official announcement. There's a decent amount of churn at the moment...
Ever since I learned about it, I've always thought epilepsy was a astounding example of the brain's ability to recover from cascading system failures. After an episode of epilepsy, not only can the brain resume its ordinary functioning, but it hasn't even rebooted — non-volatile storage (memories and learned skills) is not corrupted, and even higher-level state like personality is unscathed.

It's unfair to criticise a system for having a failure-state, because all systems have failure states. Different systems have different ways of handling failure-states, though, and the brain's ability to cope with failures is nigh amazing.
I list gay marriage and other socially liberal causes. I'm sure that some socially conservative HR managers that look at my pages will not choose me for a contracting gig. Is it foolish? Perhaps, but simultaneously they were signals that I wished to send out for other reasons.

Similarly, people who include the tea party should not be discriminated against in employment. Yet people will do this subconsciously.
Admitting that Functional Programming Can Be Awkward
Overall, I think it's a good idea, but presents a bit of a paradox. If you're someone who cares about the readability of your site, you'd probably already have a pretty easily read site/font/layout.
Did you read the three sentences on the top of that dialog? The third one reads, "Remember, your Pages are public". There is a more detailed explanation linked off of the "Learn more" link.

[I work for Facebook, but my opinions are my own].
Just get the APK from somewhere on the internet, rather than searching in the market. If that doesn't work, there are several really good stable roms out there you can flash onto your android device, which will get rid of any narrow-minded restrictions your carrier is pushing on you.
Windows 7 solves this quite elegantly by just showing you small previews which you tab through. It takes away the element of (unwanted) surprise.
Should be easy?

A bookmarklet is just a JavaScript link that you bookmark instead of click. You could copy and paste the bookmarklet's contents into a regular A tag on a Web page and it should work fine.
Display Ad Ecosystem Map from GCA Savvian's Terence Kawaja
>The whole system is built so that everything mostly works, most of the time, usually recovers, and it doesn't matter much whether this cell dies or that mitochondria malfunctions.

What makes you think we can't design reliable software systems that way? In fact, I think it has already proven to be a remarkably good idea: http://erlang.org/
This is a great article. In my personal opinion they should decrease security/airplane safety inspections until flying becomes as dangerous as driving in a bus.

I really don't see any mathematical or logical reason why flying in a plane should be safer than driving in a car (but if you do I am interested in what they are). The benefit of doing this would be huge savings in the cost of flying and the cost of the TSA. Additionally there would be a huge increase in the connivence of flying.
The internal magnetometer can measure local magnetic field changes due to ferrous metals.
Yeah.. no. Another commenter already pointed out the issues with llvm being too low-level.. regarding the cli and "open source"... mono is open source in every sense of the word (lib and runtime are mit.. c# compiler is lgpl).. the runtime spec is committee driven, true.. but so is the javascript language.

As for apples investment in llvm: and? Your speculation that it could be used in safari, presumably for squirrelfish, is about as unfounded as the assertion that ecma is plotting a coup by switching from is to ecma.. if you have links to the contrary, ill be happy to eat my hat, not to mention learn how llvm is useful in this space.

also, to understand just how much fun llvm can be, take a look at unladen swallow.. there are major RAM and binary size bloat issues without the corresponding speed increases, currently. Maybe it'll get better, I don't know.

Anyhow.. if the cli were a browser standard then MS could use .net in ie and everyone else could use mono .. wouldn't be perfect ill allow.. but its better than a bunch of incompatible, dialling javascript VMs. Perhaps.

Will never happen of course, but one can always dream.
Actual funding announcement: http://www.cmoney.com/NewsEvents/tabid/57/articleType/Articl...

How will this compare with something like https://venmo.com/ ?
The data seems to come from here: http://www.netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qpri... , which requires a subscription to see mobile statistics.
Hm, I’m not so sure whether Chen’s house was raided because he published information. After all, Engadget also posted photos of the prototype, even that same prototype, yet the police didn’t raid their editors’ homes.

Rather this seems to be a case of Gizmodo being clueless about how to do proper investigative reporting (i.e. don’t buy stolen stuff). Should journalists be allowed to buy things they know to be stolen? Sure, but not always. Memos which show government fraud? Hand over cash. Consumer electronic? Rather not.
I am in a logic class that sounds just like the Dynamic Logic one Spolsky describes.

I hate it.

The homework two weeks ago? Prove that p = !!p. I gave up.
You can choose to not display your interests on your Profile. They are still "public", but hidden on your Profile.
It's based on shipping write-ahead-logs around, so anything you can do inside a transaction (pretty much any DML or DDL statements except for ones that affect the entire cluster, like "CREATE USER" or "DROP DATABASE") can be replicated.
Does HN ever publish their browser stats? Would be interesting to see the breakdown.
Google Android and the CLI
Use Paypal & E-junkie for your first few months and sell folks lifetime subscriptions to your service. $5 a month for e-junkie (not strictly necessary but it will save you a few hours of integration work), ~3% for Paypal.

After you've got a better handle on your market, have traction, and have passionate paying customers singing your praises, switch to a subscription billing provider and grandfather in the old users at free for life.

This assumes that you have nearly zero marginal cost per account, or a growth curve which can absorb the early adopters as a cost of doing business.
Just to be pedantic, non-volatile storage is what survives a reboot on a computer. For the brain to have "not even rebooted" you'd have to come out of the seizure with your short-term working memory intact. I'm not an expert, but I strongly suspect it's not possible to start dialing a phone number, enter a petit mal seizure for five seconds, and then finish dialing without having lost your place.
Probably random mutation that happened to turn out beneficial for us.

Yes, but isn't that just restating the theory of evolution and natural selection?
Can pg or someone put a link to this in the header? It seems to be reposted every two weeks or so.

(It is awesome, though)
ITP Camp - Summer Camp for Adults
Agreed it's a huge risk, but FB users have been getting shafted for ages in terms of privacy, and have hardly blinked. Geeks and privacy-oriented people yes, but most just want to share pics, see what their friends are doing and play games. It's easier to tweak their privacy settings than move to a place where they can't as easily (or automatically) share pics, have to build up their friend network from scratch, and there aren't as many games.
As XP users upgrade to new hardware they will get Win7 and IE8. This is a another reason why IE6 is finally going down (the others being FF's adoption and the rise of Chrome and Safari + the Mobile web).