skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well even if its not procrastinating, its still not getting me anywhere. I am unable to concentrate.

I did something similar to what you said today. I made the list of 8 subjects which I have to prepare. Turns out there are 3 subjects for which I don't have to study at all (who the hell studies for Basics of C, Communication Skills and Basics of Sci)? 1 subject (Engineering Graphics) I don't will do with my friends.

That leaves me with only Elements of Electrical Engineering, Elements of Civil and Mechanical Engineering, Maths and Engineering Mechanics. Which I can prepare.

After that I felt good and took ledger123's advice and started studying maths without thinking about anything else. I have completed two topics out of 10 in an hour, so this is working fine for today I think.
Apple’s new record: the fastest product ramp to $1 billion
He should do a Stuart Smalley skit to get his point across.

I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, I have ten thousand friends, and doggone it, people like me!
you won't get overbid for it

... unless the people who bought reserved instances for disaster recovery decide to start using them. If one company's disaster recovery plans kick in, it's quite likely that many other companies' disaster recovery plans will kick in at the same time -- and spot instances will suddenly become very scarce as they are reallocated to the people who paid to reserve them.
has anyone got more information about this? I recently started using js2mode, its awesome but has way too many bugs.
Both? There is only one.
Definitely. I'd like to hear how that turns out.
Here are my thoughts and questions some of you may find helpful. I consider myself an above average facebook user. Meaning, between my 250ish friends and I, I know more about the features and settings than they do.

1) Why would I leave my friends for a competitive product?

2) The UI/UX design of facebook is above industry standard. They're innovators in this space

3) Privacy is meaningless because normal people don't share provocative and sensitive information to begin with. So really, the privacy concerns some of you have is a non-issue with me and my friends.

4) Facebook with one sweep can completely change their privacy act and make everyone happy. See 4.

4) You can't make everyone happy. Of all people, we startup fanatics should know that. You won't make everyone happy with your competing product either.

5) Facebook should be your strategy for growing an alternative. Harvest information, learn from their doing. Copy and mimic every move, but improve on their downfalls. Because facebook is the best example of a functioning network, brand, and organization. Learn from it.

6) To have even the slightest chance of survival, you need to focus on a niche market first (fb for college students). This last step is going to the most difficult in todays environment with linkedin, facebook, yearbook, twiter etc.

Those are my thoughts for now.
Crashes here (on 10.5) with:

Exception Type: EXC_BREAKPOINT (SIGTRAP)
Exception Codes: 0x0000000000000002, 0x0000000000000000
Crashed Thread: 0

Dyld Error Message:
unknown required load command 0x80000022

I guess it is for 10.6 only?
I very much hope this isn't true.

If it is then there will be a huge backlash. Even if it isn't the fall out of this could be substantial.

It smacks of disinformation by people with an agenda to me.

Time will tell.
This needs to be more widely publicized.
I just hope there could've been something like this in Ahmedabad, or that I could be in Delhi
Accidental downvote, sorry. Would have emailed you if you had contact info in your profile.
No no. It's in the process of being deleted, which will take 14 days.

BUT as if by magic, if you log in within these 14 days, everything will be restored as if nothing happened, and they'll forgive you.

I can't figure out if this is a really bad case of eventual consistency or just a cooling off period they hope to entice you back with.
I guess being half naked in the rubble of your house could be an interesting case then. Private or not?
I hate that google is so "text focused". Obviously, for 90% of the web, that's just fine, but I do web apps that "do things".

For example, if I have a web app that converts numbers between bases (just an example, OK?), Google would ignore me, since my home page is just a couple of text fields and a submit button. (If it's ajax, I don't even have a submit button)

So, I say, "OK, fine, Google, you want text, I'll give you text", and I add a blog, saying some stuff about converting numbers between bases. That works a bit, but really, I don't have that much to say about converting numbers between bases. I have this app, it works well, what's to say? So, I rapidly run out of things to say in this blog I was forced to write. Google sees my site as never having new content, and down I go.

Of course, if I had a bunch of incoming links, no worries, but I won't get them if nobody can find me in the first place.
Korean Liberation Day is more popular than Chinese New Year?
What's the point of the id? Coordinating this across multiple providers seems like a big headache.
"Most of the current demographic will not understand Facebook's privacy settings."

That's because they're intentionally byzantine.
Great source to find APIs or Developer SaaS Tools
Email is already distributed. And two people are linked together simply by knowing each other's email addresses. Might as well build on top of that.
Beacon was great because it showed that Facebook isn't scared to take risks. They later admitted it was a bad idea.

I'd rather a company like Facebook err on the side of innovation.
I have no affiliation with these guys. I just found some useful data there and though others might like it too.
Digital Enhancement Of Amateur Plane Crash Site Footage In Smolensk
What games do you buy that are still on a disc?
http://thesponty.com
What if the ID were similar to a domain name? They stay the same, but the IP address (in this case, the sha1 of the email address) can change.

What if the DNS model were taken in order to find which social provider a given user was on? That combined with a trust metric (automatically gleaned?) between providers would go a long way, I think...
There is something inside you that you currently do not have control over. So 'double down' on it. Instead of planning to study, plan to not study. Instead of wasting time 'procrastinating' which usually means surfing the internet, plan outings and adventures.

Eventually your 'survival' instinct will kick in, and when it does you'll be well rested, relaxed, ready for the cram session you'll embark on, and not feeling bad for not studying as you filled the time with life experiences, not sitting at a desk not-studying.

Seriously. Take the 'inaction' that renders you useless into the still functional part of your brain. Once it knows your actually in control, you'll be able to translate that to anything you want, because you will stop feeling helpless against this unknown thing that isn't letting you study.
Yes, but the story of why Facebook is successful is more involved than that, and much more useful than you give it credit for.

Facebook started because Mark Zuckerberg was notorious for hacking yearbook pictures out of a sort of Harvard-official online phonebook (a "facebook") and setting a website to mash them up against each other in a hot-or-not style competition. Capitalizing on this notoriety, he was able to replace the original "facebook" directory, commenting to the Crimson something to the effect "I can do it better, and I can do it in two weeks".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook
http://scriptshadow.blogspot.com/2009/07/social-network-face... << fascinating, maybe not the best source

After that, yes, there is very probably some truth to the fact that it may have pandered to the elitism of ivy league schools, but the real lesson here is that Facebook had access to probably the best audience of any social networking site, ever -- a group of highly-social shakers and movers -- and was able to expand because there were similar needs in other similar schools. There have been probably hundreds of social networking sites that never failed to take off; this is, IMO, the key factor that separates them. The other thing is that, they were lucky about the network they were replacing; an online student directory translates very well into a MySpace alternative, as MySpace is arguably really a tool to interact in the world of MySpace. People were ready to be themselves online, they just needed good privacy control.

A startup like Diaspora does not have the luxury of a built-in user base like the Harvard student body. Nor does it replace a very extensible tool that everyone likes/needs. These are all very big disadvantages.
I wouldn't use flash game sites as an estimate of the number of linux gamers. Flash is probably the worst way to experience anything on linux. (Unfortunately, I don't have a better idea for how to measure it.)
A poor man's OAuth?
Erm.... this is all well and good, but is this really something you'd want to start a 14 year old out with?
And what about the people who lost a lifetime of money in 20 minutes?
They got most of it back in the next 40 minutes.
I'd recommend the little schemer: http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/matthias/BTLS/

I think if I'd seen this book when I was about that age, I'd have loved computer science.
When I first drafted this out, the id was provider-dependent. The more I think about it now, the id does seem kind of irrelevant. I'll remove it.
Why VCs Write the Way they Write
Sure, I'd love to see all of the companies that YC has funded, what they're doing now, if they folded, were acquired, or more in depth details than what Crunchbase gives about them.
Sure you can, if you have arbitrarily long but still finite time. (Think recursive versus recursively enumerable sets.)
Actually the people who bought at .01 got screwed; when the buy at .01 gets cancelled then you are suddenly in a short position if you've already sold the shares, and you'll have to cover.
60% seems pretty arbitrary. Any idea where this number comes from?
Selling my information to third parties without permission or prior notification is neither innovative nor brave.
How is 14 early to take courses on graph theory or combinatorics, or learn SML? He sounds like a bright kid, or else he wouldn't be asking his cousin how to study computer science. He might or might not actually be interested in these things, but if he's interested in them, then he should learn them.
I would recommend taking a week off but since you have finals in just 12 days try taking 2-3 days completely off. Don't feel guilty about it. Enjoy it. Limit mental stimulation as much as possible. Don't watch TV. Don't use the Internet. Just go for walks or hang out with friends.

I read a study once of a similar experiment tried on a classroom of young children. They told the children they could do whatever they wanted. So for a couple days they just ran around outside but by the third day they were so bored of having nothing to do, they were begging the teachers for work.

Good luck!
It could be a like a crunchbase, only a wiki. I like the idea.
This is becoming a FB blindspot. Zuckerburg (and FB in general) now just dismiss all criticism of any changes they make because -- hey! News Feed was criticised.

I don't know that betting your business against growing storms of criticism on nothing more than a reverse gambler's fallacy is the best plan, tbh.
I think it's pretty much a dead technology now, except for legacy uses like in big XML-heavy Java frameworks that were early adopters. I've tried using it for document transformation purposes several times but never found a use where it wasn't easier to just write a DOM-manipulating script. As a templating system I don't see any advantages either - conceptually it's nice to force the separation of programming logic and templating functionality, but then again, you soon need similar constructs (if, loops, includes, ...) anyway and then you have to switch to xslt extension libraries... When it comes to templating, I still much prefer showing programmer constraint is a better way to go than technical barriers. That tradeoff may be different in a context where you have dozens of programmers/designers/content producers work on a site. But for a site of that size performance would presumably exclude XSLT.

In general, I get the impression that the 'XML everywhere' fad has passed and that technologies like XSLT, xsl:fo and the myriad of xml replacements for DTD's have passed their peak a few years ago.
Another ebook I recently came across is: http://inventwithpython.com/

It teaches python through building basic computer games. A fun way to learn.
I'm Prosumer Bitch | Leave Zuckerberg's Bunkbook for Good
I don't think the problem is fundamentally about centralization, it's about ownership. At FB, the customer is the advertiser; the product is your personal information. Unless that equation is changed, you'll just get the same thing all over again.

To some extent, a distributed system helps solve the ownership issue -- there can be for-pay services and ad supported services coexisiting. But this space needs a business visionary (like Mathowie with Metafilter) or some new cooperative ownership model more than it needs technology.
The flaw in your proposal is that the problem here really isn't a technical one. Your argument seems to be "once you can export your connections that solves all other problems because companies will have to listen to you". But that's not true.

Right now you could easily create an export system using the e-mail addresses of your connections. But once you do that you can't interact with Facebook members.

That's the problem with Facebook and it's root is in a business reality not a technical issue. Facebook and other social networks realize they lose their greatest (and maybe only) customer retaining mechanism if they become inter-operable. Once that happens they become a cheap commodity (much like e-mail servers are today).

So becoming inter-operable means the end of companies like Facebook being major players in the industry and they aren't going to do that willingly. THAT is the problem.
Agree. I'm currently not working and mainly focusing on building some products but my runway is about 10 months. Even with that I have been putting some effort into marketing myself and getting some interviews for work. With building a business, there is a much longer lag time between building the product and earning revenue compared to working for somebody else.

If you're down to $200, you need money now. Take up freelancing for the minimum number of hours that will cover your expenses. You should still have plenty of time left over to work on your ideas.
Larry Page and Sergey Brin were heading off to Burning Man

I didn't know they were hippies. That's awesome!
Settling the startup ecosystem debate by asking Cui Bono
Nice to see that CEDET is now included.
Eat The Whistle
Interesting but doesn't really change the fact that Flash is quickly becoming viewed as obsolete tech whether it's true or not.

Skillswise I have to admit when I evaluate a designer for our company I usually skip portfolios that are too Flash heavy. I need compitence in HTML and css layout - not Flash. Bonus if the know some JavaScript and/or jquery.
Cobol is still being written.

There is a future, but the real question is: is it a future worth going into?

I wonder if there's any attempt to fork Symphony onto a different templating system.
Going one step further, it would be very nice to be able to supply information to different users based on their group. This is another thing which is lacking in Facebook. In fact it is something which is currently lacking from every social network (that I'm aware of at least). Everyone scrambling to build the next Facebook in the wake of the recent debacle may want to take some of these ideas.

For example, in your "About Me" section, with your co-workers you may want to say that you enjoy programming and playing around with server configuration whereas with your old college pals, you may want to say that you miss the days of binge drinking and getting laid. You would not want either group to see the other explanation of who "you" are.

Specifically related to this idea, you may want to have enable your college pals to see that you are attending "Remembering the good ole days kegger reunion party" while you may want your co-workers to see that you are attending a conference on some technology. You probably do not want them both to see the events that the other sees.

On a basic level, I like how Google Voice handles this. You can specify a certain voicemail message to be heard by people who are not in your phone book, and different voicemail messages for any groups you have created. This allows me to have a silly message played only for my friends and not worry that an important call will come in from an unknown number and get my silly message. This concept expanded to any and all properties of a social network seems crucial as far as I am concerned.
There's one thing that's missing from these kinds of posts. Usually, they describe a set of characteristics of great software engineers. However, you have to be careful not to confuse that with the set of characteristics of a great programmer.
I started this off: http://www.startupwiki.co.uk/investor/ycombinator

Never really took off though.
Maybe, but I can't buy it. They've stuck to the Lucida-esque Myriad Pro For their display advertising and Web graphics, for the most part and Jobs could have easily changed that stuff. That aside, can you imagine Helvetica replacing Lucida on OS X generally? It'd look hideous :-( (And I'm a big Helvetica fan - but it sucks for clarity at small point sizes.)
I like the protocol-agnostic (and locally-stored) connection information, but I don't like the fact that I (I'm assuming) have to manually synchronize them between my devices -- if I understand right, if I friended someone on my phone, I'd have to somehow synchronize that information to my laptop if I wanted to use it there. Probably the provider would keep that information locally, and then prompt my browser to accept a new copy -- I know I wouldn't want to deal with anything much more fiddly than that. Is there a compelling reason to have that (edit: where "that" is the connection information stored in the browser, as suggested in the article when I wrote this) instead of a defined-in-the-protocol way of on-demand data export?

I guess the hash is just to fool spammers? It seems to add a fair amount of complication to the protocol to address just that one use case.

How do you define privacy? How does your protocol protect it?

edit: clarify clumsy wording
Filed! ('back' works elsewhere, was broken on Chrome 4, winxp) You might want to use something that will capture the user agent from the browser itself as well as asking the user about what browser they are using. AFAIK, Google docs does not let you do this.

The sticky toolbar looks like spam seen on other sites, esp because of the Readcast FB/Twitter share bubble that pops-up. (Not quite as obnoxious as the double-green line underline, but still.) In addition, the header that you do see when you first load the page draws attention away from the bottom navigation.
"That value you see is not reversible"

Strictly speaking, that is true. But with a brute force dictionary attack all you do is generate likely email addresses (and these are often very easy to predict) and apply the same hashing process (which has to be public) and look it up in your local copy of the database.
I can't wait for the law suits over this, at lot of money has been lost and it is (assuming no faul play on the parts of investers) clearly because of the exchanges.
That seems like building an internet within the internet, which sounds like a lot of redundant work.
Sounds like a pretty interesting idea...can you elaborate a bit more?
The thing is, this doesn't even make sense for FB to do. I've removed my interests and activities from my profile. Before the ads I got shown were basically relevant - they were mainly for products and services connected to those sports I listed, for example. Now the ads I get shown are fairly random. So Facebook have reduced my value to them as a set of eyeballs to show ads to. How can anyone at FB have thought this was a good idea?
True, but why would a spammer do that if he already had the address to begin with?
Not if they had set stop-loss triggers to protect against a large loss. That works well for a slow falling stock, but it doesn't work for a plunging stock. The stop-loss for Accenture might have been $15, but by the time the market order sale was executed, it could have gotten down to $1. Unless the stop-loss was immediately followed by a limit order, all the value stored in that stock would have been wiped out.
One of the figures that always floored me was regarding sexual abuse of children generally. I can't remember it now, but it was in the 1 in 10 to 1 in 20 zone. When you extrapolate that to the number of people you know, it's a tad depressing.
My thinking would be to have the email/hash be the id, which enables people to have multiple profile's accessible from one account, use one email for friends, one for business, one for all those shady black hat things people do in their spare time...
Well, yeah, people are getting kind of twitchy about Facebook privacy issues. It's like Water Torture -- the individual drops of water are basically harmless but they just keep falling and you have no idea when the next one's coming. Most people aren't wired to deal with that very well.

I've already had to deal with two stupid surprises in the last week: the expansion of their ability to track your use of other sites, and their mandatory conversion of your likes/interests/employer/etc. information into "likes" on an automatically-generated community page. The former is genuinely intrusive, and while the latter is arguably trivial it creates another entire layer of crap I have to manage. (I also lost most of my likes & interests in the conversion because it wasn't clear that disallowing the "like" would actually delete the entry. Pricks.)

When I first joined I was kind of amused at my friends who had registered under pseudonyms -- but the benefits are becoming apparent.
It's about matching an possible email to an actual email. But I don't think it would really make a difference as the same thing applies to email addresses in general.
This graph is very confusing. On the X-axis are dates, and on the Y-axis are some unspecified numbers, perhaps price.
That is true, but I'm pretty sure back in the old days there were multiple proprietary email systems that didn't interoperate and they eventually all did end up supporting SMTP eventually.
A year after killing, Craigslist adult ad postings revenue up
There’s also Scaling your Python application on EC2 from PyCon 2010: http://pycon.blip.tv/file/3257303/
Knowing XSLT for a while --

I wouldn't use it for a web framework, it just seems to be the wrong place.
I use xslt for simple document transformation. Say you often have to deal with ridiculously complicated xml files and want to adapt them quickly and in batch to something, then using xslt is a nice way to go.

You should know functional programming to get anything more done than just throwing out some nodes, though. And the hard part about xslt ist actually xpath, which I still have problems with even after years to get the syntax right..

(I'm not a daily user, but it's my usual tool for that matter)
Regarding your first point, yes, I agree it doesn't make much sense to manually synchronize between devices. Providers would probably need to store that information to begin with, and you would have the option to export that information at your leisure.

Yeah, that's the primary use of the hash. It does add a bit of complication, but I think it's necessary for widespread adoption.

Privacy is provider-specific, therefore it's not up to the protocol to say what and what shouldn't be private. It's up to the provider.