skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes it certainly would. I have to admit that it's crossed my mind more than once. The set capabilities could lend itself very well to some high performance faceting functionality, so you might end up with something between Lucene and Solr. There is definitely a use case for something like that - Sphinx does excel on large data sets, but there are a lot of people who know that they'll only ever need to be searching a few hundred megabytes of text anyway. You wouldn't want to use that for a scaling startup perhaps, but the world is larger than that...
Not really. Everyone on this site has worked in software development at one point, right? So everyone here has written a bug before. Its reasonable to expect every piece of software (short of the stuff on the space shuttle) to have bugs. It simply isn't feasible for most software companies to find and fix all of the problems with their products.

Facebook, like all other software, is bound to have bugs. If you don't want your personal information/conversations to be exposed by a potential bug I'd suggest not using the service.
I've gone through all sorts of seating options (Aeron, exercise ball, kneeling chairs, etc.). None of them worked for me (I'm the type that loves to stand/walk), so I made a $14 standing desk mod: http://yfrog.com/fviw2j (basically four cinder blocks and caps).

This has made a huge difference, I can actually concentrate better and there were some unexpected benefits:

* it's much easier to demo stuff (everyone is at the right height)

* taking breaks is a very low friction task (amazing how something as simple as not having to get up/sit down helps)
Thank you for using a lobster instead of a frog, because I went to see if lobsters were mentioned on the wikipedia page for boiling frogs, and there was a reference there to another entry for "creeping normalcy". I like that phrase.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creeping_normalcy
Liquid Blade: Immersion Cooling for Blade Servers
appealing to a cynical belief that everyone is irrational and intent on restricting freedom

I don't see that in the GP. It looks to me that he's working from the observation that personal liberty is decreasing, presumably revealing that the decisions being made are not rational. In particular, there's no reason to read into this anything about scope ("everyone"), nor their intent (to restrict freedom).

Clearly it would be incorrect to impute this to everyone when the restricted liberty can only be caused by the few in power.

Also, it may not be their intent to restrict freedom. Indeed, their intent may be to save our freedom, but due to the observed lack of rationality, their efforts carry the (assumedly unintended) side effect of restricting freedom.
A spring metamorphosis — Google’s new look
I would quickly joint a facebook clone if I thought it trustworthy, then shrink my facebook presence as more of my friends migrated to the new platform. Hell, people would probably use facebook to advertise such an alternative service. Once my core group of friends migrated I would destroy my facebook account.
I've also been in a somewhat similar situation a few times at startups that were circling the drain, waiting to die.

Some people goofed off. Some drove themselves crazy with stress about the future. Others went off and learned new things.

After the doors closed, guess who found new work most easily?
More than just preparing people for getting hired, these companies also seem to make their hiring pipeline resemble the admissions pipeline for the Ivy Leagues themselves. Despite the fact that it's a hard grueling selection process, that can still make it the path of least resistance for people who went through that process once already. It's not only familiar, it feeds your expectations of what the "next step" is supposed to look like.
Point 6 is inaccurate. As far as I know it's not a "Connection" in way they are claiming. It's a search on recent posts that appear in the "related posts" boxes. The "FBI" example is nice and scary, but the same holds true for Puppies and Rainbows.

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Puppies/108139455886477
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Rainbows/110404012323116

(disclaimer: I work for Facebook)
You could always read the post, ya know.
Peter was doing her a favor the entire time. It's like an M. Night Shyamalan movie with the paradigm shift at the end. She was over-qualified, so he didn't want her to be stuck at a go no-where company. While it does say "She could do Peter's job in a snap." this doesn't mean that he is afraid she will, but that she should be working somewhere more challenging.

He wants to get rid of her to save her.

This is what I thought for a minute after reading the featured comment and justifying his actions. But then I re-read it and realized that Peter is just an asshole and is 90% of the reason Corporate America is a piece of shit that deserves to burn in hell.
After reading this I am extremely angry. What the hell are we foolish humans doing to the planet?
I couldn't disagree more. The Times Square bomb was reported by a bystander who was on guard (certainly in part) because the media has effectively kept the terrorist threat fresh in our minds.

While terrorist attacks may be rare, the ones that are attempted are often thwarted by people simply being aware of their surroundings. Terrorism and the threat of terrorism are not just a media creation. They are real, with real people wanting to kill real people. While we shouldn't surrender our fundamental ideals and liberties on the altar of security, pretending like the problem doesn't exist hardly seems like the answer either.
used to communicate on a network built upon freedom

Actually, it was built by the Department of Defense, aka The War Department. The freedom aspect was purely unintentional.

Indeed, I suppose that the reason that the best way to make the network robust results in making it free, creates an interesting analogy to the original point. At the very least, it proves that it's possible to be both more free and more secure, simultaneously.
Statistics or references? None are offered.

In fact, some of the claims in the article are so ludicrous I can't take them seriously at all. For example:

"... so an entire generation of high-school graduates went to college and learned to loathe industry" and

"so innovation [in the USA] died, and perhaps nine tenths of the brilliant minds that would have otherwise gone into industry and innovated the hell out of their field, that nine tenths went into the legal profession or the medical field or investment banking.".

I just can't take those remarks at face value. I must say though, that the author's claims of disdain for the industry by academia match my experience. The author's complaints about low salaries (relative to law/medicine) in technical fields also match my experience. Where I live (Europe) professors don't have startups on the side, even at the top universities. Different worlds, I suppose.
Youngstown,OH is attempting to reinvent itself as a technology center
IE9 Preview with hardware acceleration
Probably metrics for a ecomm site would be helpful or a fin model?
Bungie and Activision working together?
When I was wrapping up my Master's and various professors were trying to convince me to stay for a PhD (CS), I definitely sensed them having this point of view.

I don't necessarily think that profs will see someone going to industry as a failure, but it is a loss. If someone a prof supervises goes on to a tenure track position, they become a long-term colleague and demonstrates the influence they have on Academia. A portfolio of grad students who went on to be captains of industry isn't as academically sexy as ones who all have long publication lists.
Good luck and congratulations. That said, I think they should have stuck to StackOverflow itself. Being THE site that programmers use for Q&A could eventually make millions per year in profit, with high quality sponsorship. It's also a site they can genuinely be in to. I don't see them being passionate about fashion or car Q&A sites.

Now they're stuck on the VC train without a repeatable formula. They had the power to get thousands of programmers coming to one site, and just as importantly, linking to it from hundreds of high pagerank sites. That's why they've done so well with SEO. It's a picture perfect SEO-driven site.

Now they're going to struggle hard to build up a single new site as successful as SO, let alone dozens.

Not that I think it's a mistake from Fred's perspective. The VCs can afford to roll the dice, and it's not risky compared with many startups. They're betting that Joel/Jeff can figure out a repeatable formula, maybe they can.
Ubuntu puts its weight behind H.264, is Theora out for the count?
Looks like Ubuntu will be on the H.264 bandwagon as well. Is this bad news for Ogg Theora?
Actually, you can avoid or accidentally miss the mushroom. The game design simply makes it less likely, but it's not impossible.
Best Practices for Contributing to Your Fave Linux Distro
It's possibly just not true.

I tried Googling for USB royalty fees. There's some info about paying to get vendor IDs and use the logo, but I also found several saying that USB 2.0 was specifically created to be royalty free, including e.g. this quote:

"Frustrated by Apples royalty fees on firewire devices, in April 2000, seven industry-leading companies, consisting of Compaq, Hewlett Packard, Intel, Lucent, Microsoft, NEC, and Philips published the specifications for USB2.0."

All the main Google results for "Bluetooth royalty" actually found things saying royalty-free, including this about Wireless USB:

"The final abandoning of WiMedia may have come down to licensing battles. Foley said in the interview that the SIG asked WiMedia stakeholders to make their technology available on the same royalty-free basis as Bluetooth, so that it could be certified and licensed in the same way as the older standard. "Some WiMedia members weren't amenable to that," said Foley, wanting to hold on to their existing royalties, even in a market of "zero units", as he put it."
I don't regard this idiom as being at all obfuscating. I agree that people who aren't comfortable in the language will find it jarring at first, and will slow them down, but I don't see this as a problematic example.

There is a balance to achieve. This is one example, and arguing the specifics of this one example is not as useful as being able to make judgement calls in the wild, for real, and get most of the close enough to right. It's not exact.

But idioms, per se, should not be rejected out of hand purely because they're unknown to you.
And to avoid a confusion between a US billion (10^9) and a UK billion (10^12).

Errors of 3 orders of magnitude used to worry bankers once upon a time.
Snooze and lose. Sleeping makes you skinny (2004)
Nice collection of papers on collaborative filtering
Diaspora Project: Building the Anti-Facebook
Like some others I assume that anything I put online is public information, but not everyone has this view. For the naive user a site like Facebook appears to be just about you and your small circle of friends. Especially for people who are younger and perhaps not so worldly it would be incredibly easy to post things on Facebook which you might come to regret a few years later - especially if future employers and insurance companies are trawling through your data and looking at your connections.

I don't think it's good enough for the folks at Facebook just to say "Privacy is dead. Get over it". In the real world those people who are not rampant exhibitionists do want and expect to have some level of privacy - some degree of control over what information they give to who. Ultimately it's about the dignity and integrity of the individual.
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=588930
And thus ends Pink and Danger (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danger_%28company%29)?
I don't see the point of your remark. Are you saying I am not qualified to have an opinion on web design? No, we should let the "experts" decide, never think for ourselves. The experts are always right.

How do you know the designs given appeal to the majority of people? And not just appeal as in "I'd like to frame it and stick it to my wall" but as in "I'd like to use this".
I've been planning to get a ball for a chair for a while now. My major worry has been an overly sweaty ass.
In Sphinx you don't store meta data - you just store an inverted index going from words to ids. And I bet that setting up Sphinx would have been much easier than rolling out your own solution ;-)

Btw. like I mentioned Sphinx does support fuzzy search (and boolean search), so I don't really know what you win by rolling your own solution in Redis, other than worse scalability and a crippled full-text search.
And how do you decide what job? I've changed jobs and fields so often, there is no way you can prepare for that. Yet all the education I got has been instrumental in being able to adjust, evolve and assimilate new knowledge.
Graham's Number
What? There exists a "top 5" for any ranked list with 5 or more entries.

Anyways... I am sure he was referring to those 4 + either UIUC or Cornell.
People even end marriages, given enough reason.
By analogy, there are two solutions to spam: to filter it out, or to stop gving spammers a reason to send it. In this instance, it's almost impossible to do the former—requiring every human to add an additional step of waryness to their already-complex urban model—while the latter is easy, and only requires O(n = news editors) instead of O(m = humans) effort.
What does that even mean? HTML5 is still at the draft stage, isn't it?

Mozilla said they wouldn't add WebSockets until the API supports binary messages; does having “full support” mean “full support of the current draft”, which changes every few days?
Redis rocks, but using it as a search engine does not rock at all IMO. For one thing - if the item changes then you have to update all the keys that hold references to that item.

EDIT: it's fine if your items are very small or do not change often
That's very interesting. Do you find any difficulty typing while standing up?
Competition is a good thing. It's only a problem for Ubuntu.

And it's not even that much of a problem for Ubuntu's end users, since Ubuntu's biggest problem is making meaningful contributions upstream.
Red Hot Chili Peppers Will Be Getting Their Own Guitar Hero Video Game
This is late and nobody will see this, but what the heck...

You are wrong for two reasons:
1. If you want more than 2%, than you need to start the company yourself. The only way anyone can over come your screwed factor is if they are a founder.

2. 2% of a successful company should make you relatively wealthy, thus negating your screwed factor.
For the three (maybe four) hackers who haven't already seen it, please watch Terry Gilliam's brilliant dark satire Brazil.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088846/
If people want to work long hours then fine, I've no objections to them doing that. But in my experience most people - outside of a very small number of vocational jobs such as farming or being a doctor - don't want to work long hours and have other interests in their lives that they wish to attend to.
I haven't experienced that yet. One thing tough is that if you have to fart, you'll probably get noticed.
> Worst case for the oil spill? Extinction of all life on Earth. (truthout.org)

Seriously? Seeing as life on earth survived the impact of a six mile in diameter comet 65 million years ago, I'm reasonably certain one leaking oil well (even a very large one) is not going to cause an extinction event.
Because stockbrokers are salesmen, and posh Harvard kids sound posh and make great salesmen.
I completely agree about using floor() for readability.

That said, could we fix the negative value issue as follows and still see performance benefits (don't have the time to test at the moment)?

x = x < 0 ? (0|x) - 1 : 0|x;

---or maybe---

x |= 0;

x = x < 0 ? x-1 : x;

---or possibly---

x |= 0;

x = ((x ^ (x >> 31)) - (x >> 31)) - 1;

If the above bitwise operation were wrapped in a helper function, would we still see any performance gain?
You are correct. I should have been clearer. Has there been a marked reduction in (US) terrorist-type activity after 9/11? It doesn't seem that's the case.
I agree 100 percent. The reason one gets an education is because you want to find out what interesting things there are. If everyone had the same education there would be no job competition.
The problem with most of today's education systems is that everyone gets treated the same. I have found this out first hand, but i was lucky enough to have a high school computer and robotics teacher that let me explore things i found interesting for credit. To make this possible we had to pretend that it was a regularly scheduled class, otherwise the administration of the school would have never let me build robots, program IRC clients or play with rapid prototyping. I learned more about research and the way things worked in the two semesters i was with this teacher than i did in all of my other schooling.
The crux of the argument seems to hang on this statement (linked to from the article):

If we can't cap that hole that oil is going to
destroy the oceans of the world. It only takes
one quart of motor oil to make 250,000 gallons
of ocean water toxic to wildlife. Are you starting
to get the magnitude of this?

Would be great to have some secondary sources/opinions on this. Is that true? And if so, how much damage could this leak cause?
I use that as well but doesn't come close to Cornerstone or Versions for OS X.
It's just getting people ready for the mark of the beast.
If you have a large student loan balance hanging over your head, you do tend to be less interested in creating wealth than getting money. Sallie Mae doesn't care how much wealth you've created for society.

Med school students start their careers about $150,000 in debt (comparable to the average mortgage debt), but even that's reasonably preferable to being $50,000 in debt without a medical degree.
The bad thing about A/B testing is that you can’t really surprise your most devoted users with a new look :)
It depends on the state and the kind of gun you're buying. Purchasing a shotgun in Oklahoma, for instance, just requires a trip to Wal-Mart and $200 or so.
Try reading about Ixtoc I a little bit.

"[over 9 months] Approximately an average of ten thousand to thirty thousand barrels per day were discharged into the Gulf until it was finally capped on March 23, 1980"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ixtoc_I

And somehow, we are all still here.
This cited page provides further analysis.

http://pesn.com/2010/05/02/9501643_Mother_of_all_gushers_cou...
I don't think it's all together clear that startups should be trying to recruit bright young people just out of college.
Interestingly, Facebook are the ones who have the technology and critical mass to make micro-payments available. But I bet they wouldn't let you pay for stuff you like in private without announcing it to the world.
LOL HAHA!
The problem is "news." Without sensational news—without ephemera, in other words—the concept of "news" crumbles. We don't need to know the ongoing developments in stories that don't affect us personally, but we still crave to. If humans were stripped of this urge, this and every social news site would be reduced to magazines, publishing only after-the-fact analyses of completed narratives.
It reads quickly and is easily likeable in a third
person narrative is my best guess.
Unfortunately I don't have the statistics on hand, but one time I was looking at the average price of cars compared to the price index that had adjustments applied. During a given seven year period, the average price of cars had risen by about 25%. I looked at one specific model (a Corolla) and the price rose by about 15%. But the price index, with adjustments applied, had actually fallen by about 10%. The adjustments applied can make an enormous difference.

For example, the CPI is actually thought to overstate inflation.

That's not a meaningful statement. Whether CPI overstates or understates inflation depends on the question you are asking, depends on the goods involved, etc.

Tiny differences in inflation measures--and inflation has been, by any measure, pretty tiny for quite a while--cannot possibly be big enough to invalidate Silver's numbers. The changes are just too big.

Not true, a difference of one percentage point a year compounds, and thus makes a huge difference in long term measurements.
This is the kind of feature I would be very nervous of implementing as a developer (showing some data in the context of another user)... to the point of pushing back on it.

I imagine it cuts across whole swathes of code, requiring additional checks about the current user. It would be so easy to leave some of these checks out or mess them up. You would have to be very careful about validating your assumptions with this feature.
Illustrator CS5 is lovely but Adobe still needs competitors
Just to raise a counter-point, I would contend that the UK liquid terror plot was successful in the terrorist's scorebooks. I bet the operation achieved what the upper level terrorists expected (realistically). The "mules" thought they would make explosions in the sky and I'm sure the upper level wished for that, but overall it achieved its mission:

1) They got tremendous publicity.

2) They substantially disrupted air travel. Heathrow was shut down briefly. The cost to industry (all industry) was substantial. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_transatlantic_aircraft_plo...

3) The long term effects (carry-on restrictions and other added security hassles) lingered for a long time (even now).

By that criteria, the shoebomber and underwearbomber were fairly successful as well, albeit not nearly as successful as the UK liquid plot.
Co-Working: Please Build This Space...
If you mean on Facebook's part, no. If the user, then maybe.
What are these deep and systemic problems everyone keeps talking about? I've seen them mentioned in this thread a couple of times now, yet no one actually mentions what those problems are. I'm curious.
Efficient meaning near-perfect information dissemination -- that's not really possible in highly speculative areas where nobody knows what's going to happen.
It's going to cause pain. Much pain. But extinction? Oh all life? Come on! Earth has put up with some serious shit in its time.
Not necessarily. I just finished optimizing an AES implementation where some of the functions are called hundreds of thousands of times when decrypting a 300k payload. In cases like that, micro-optimization is not at all pointless unless you forget to benchmark the whole thing for each version and compare.
See What an Oil Spill Does to a Place
Charles Stross on Writing: Lifestyle or Job?
No. The vigorous response is the best recruiting tool they could possibly get.
Why TED just isn't "elitist"
IPhone, Gizmodo, and moral clarity about crime
Flight deals to Barbados
Does anyone know the firm that makes all the chrome ads? They're awesome.
Unless you are proposing that CS schools are not linearly rankable or that being "top" is not a unitary quantity, then the only way that I can see that the set of top US CS schools has a cardinality of four is if you are defining that axiomatically.
This is an awful article and title. Flagged.
Many thanks! I'm using it now.