skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One feature I've pondered is some kind of location based phone thing.

IE you tell it things like "I like to go down the pub with this group of people", and it'll automatically suggest that as an activity to you all if you're in a suitably small area and have the time free on your calendar.
If you would like access to a cray system check out http://www.cray-cyber.org . They maintain free access to a number of interesting old systems, including several crays.

EDIT: typo
According to Wikipedia, in 1976 Los Alamos got the first one ... with I'm sure much less polished documentation ^_^.
I have an issue with the description of such a fast and swift decline in stock prices as pointing out "that there is a structural flaw" or that this was something that was devestating.

The article closes with:

Around 3 p.m., the selling pressure abated. Just as swiftly as the market fell, it recovered ground. One factor behind the swift recovery, traders say, were funds that use computers and formulas to sniff out bargains in the market. These funds swooped in on hundreds of cheap stocks, helping push the market higher.

So at the end of the day, the market (investors, algorithms, traders, etc.) saw bargains in under-priced assets and took advantage, making prices rise back to something near the original level (but a few percentage points off).

In the end, the market still worked.
I once had Facebook suggest a former freelance client as "someone you may know". I found him over an online job board (Elance, I think), did a job, and hadn't heard from him in about 6 months. He lives on the other side of the continent and has no common connections.

How the devil did Facebook know I knew him? To this day I'm creeped out by that.
It seems like Facebook is a real-life implementation of the Six Degrees of Separation. Their graph algorithms must be running on insane hardware.
The error is the speech took approximately two minutes, not three. Thirty minutes is about 15 times longer.
It's all fine until you have to work with bad legacy code ;)

My last project at work was rewriting a 4k line monstrosity in Perl into 500 lines of Python which do exactly the same. I can't even blame the original authors (it was likely their first larger program), it's just that Perl makes it so easy to write horrible code.
I have to assume the name is homage to the Alan Parsons Project, and for that alone I give it a nod.
"Perl development is picking up and enthusiasm for Perl 5 is as strong as ever."

I will take your word for it, but I do have to say (speaking as someone with a lot of grey in his hair) that I haven't seen a young developer choose to work primarily in perl (over ruby or Python or Java or C#) in ages.
Most new projects/startups don't seem to choose perl as their primary language.

I readily concede that this is probably an artifact of my limited experience with perl. Just noting what I see, not looking for a flame war.

How many of YC companies use perl do you think?
I've been around here for a while.

I don't bother to look at who writes what until/unless someone defames me or argues with me. As I tend to scan the comments I skip over the points/names line anyway.
Two pieces of advice:

1) plan to never monetize via ads, if you don't want to turn evil.

2) plan to gain traction in universities.
Maybe operating systems are something governments need to worry about. I would be happy if the National Security Agency submitted security patches.
Gen. Keith Alexander confirmed to head cyber-command
Eerie.
much appreciated, grinich. didn't find that when i considered an edit - cheers
Serving different CSS presentation to different browsers, or having browsers download additional css they can't use only to end up with a presentation that differs between browsers or having to use a jQuery implementation anyway for browsers that do not support the webkit hacks would be an large additional investment of your time to write and maintain with little payout.

I control for my sites to degrade gracefully on the JavaScript enabled\disabled axis, why would someone want to invest additional resources in creating a CSS degradation axis that might conflict with JavaScript and be much harder to predict and control the display output due to browsers updates?
That's a rather twisted reasoning, with Perl 6 on the doorstep ;)
Oh, snarky, bitter Apple-bloggers, can you learn to write without subtly (or not so subtly) insulting everybody else? Is it any wonder that people still think of apple users as elitist?

It seems none of them can even begin to imagine people actually preferring another product over an iPhone. I was a happy iPhone user for close to 2 years until I got my Nexus One, and now I am a happy Android user.
Yes, NoScript is a problem. However, I was referring to other scenarios in general where a problem can be solved by just adding a <div> in HTML code. It seems more economical to me to add the <div> manually to the HTML code as in this Webkit example rather than writing a JavaScript routine to manipulate the HTML code at runtime on the client's machine as you suggested.
Get in touch with the guys who were working on imthere.com. Similar idea, the site was very nice. It seems to be on hiatus, though. You might want to find out why.
It reminds me of EVE from WALL-E :D
Well, that last one is provably wrong; there was an explanation of why right here a couple of weeks ago.

I hereby exercise my right not to agree with it :-)
Some Ideas for Your Globalization Essay
You were requested to write an essay on globalization. It is not an easy topic, since you should do some research first before you can actually start writing anything about it.
With due respect to the Indian government (I am Indian and quite a bit of work for the govt) producing a new operating system is a completely misguided effort. And anyway this sounds like a new distribution of linux (the article does say "Derived from debian"), not a new "operating system".

I would imagine the simpler explanation is that a few "scientists" at CDAC need to justify their existence and have convinced programming illiterate politicians/bureaucrats they are doing something useful fo a change.
Even that bugs me out. It's like in school where you'd do anything to get Cute Cassie's phone number, including asking her best friend what it was because you'll be damned if Cassie gave it to your herself, and then running around to all your buddies telling them you finally got the golden nugget.
SELinux was an extraordinary contribution by the NSA, and is now pervasive in Linux distributions.
Ya I used to be a BarCamp regular, but the last BarCamp was a year ago. Hackday was again was a year and half ago. But it would be nice if there were more hackdays. There are startup conf like Proto.in and HeadStart and StartupSaturdays etc, but they are mostly invite-only and the topics sound boring. I would vote for anything that's sort hacker-ish :)

(tried to find your email address on your profile). My email is on my profile. Mail me if you are interested in starting a hacker meetup in Bangalore or if you are attending one.
Just one thing about the email you send out. It has a fairly boiler-plate message about "how's the gardening going?" Then you sign off. After this is the list of what I should be planting. If you put the list into the main body of the email, it wouldn't seem so form letter like. Also, maybe as a later feature, put the planting list, or actions list into a downloadable attachment, I may not want to take my laptop into the garden to read the list, and Grandma's may not know that email can be printed, plus, they could get confused by all the email-headers that may get printed.

Plus, if you give a separate text file to be printed, maybe you could format it nicely so that they could save it in a gardening diary. Just like the old cooking magazines that let you compile a recipe book.

Great idea and best of luck.
If you browse the internet while logged into facebook, some sites automatically trigger opening that site's fb fan page in another window.

At least that's what I assume that's about. It's really annoying.
Scale and Scalability in the Cloud Era: Rethinking Assumptions
It may also be that the new Android phones kick butt. A friend of mine just got the HTC Incredible, which runs on Verizon, and it's smoking fast.
Thunderbird allows both threading and archival.
Same was what everyone else said: the trick here is trust, and half the battle is going to be design. Also needs a clearer explanation of what it does - you haven't really demystified privacy at all, and it's not really clear what I'm getting from the service beyond generalizations (which leave a lot of room for misunderstanding).

I like the idea of thinking of social network spying as malware.
17.2% (does not work in Opera)
The author makes a fair enough point that Android is basically the operating system vendors and carriers have been forced to choose if they have any hope of competing against Apple and AT&T.

But think back 25 years ago when PC vendors were in a similar quandary. The could come up with their own hardware/software stack; they could partner with Microsoft and install DOS (and later Windows); or they could sit out and watch Apple eat up the personal computer market.

This is playing out exactly like the personal computer saga of the 80s and 90s. Apple wanted to go it alone with a closed, arguably superior ecosystem while the hardware partners and Microsoft (then) / Google (now) are left pushing the open environment.

We all know how this story ends...
I agree, re-inventing the wheel is misguided -- and I've never known a government to produce technology (sure wouldn't trust government-made technology).
Although true, this is seemingly biased as Android usage spans a plethora of phones whereas the iPhone is a Cingular phone on a Cingular carrier.

FTFY
The ideal mobile computer interface
I'll second the support for vimcasts.org.

Also, PeepCode released "Smash Into VIM" yesterday: http://peepcode.com/products/smash-into-vim-i
Forgetting the Internet? How about all the stuff NASA made? How about crypto contributions from NSA? How about GPS from the US Navy?
I know facebook tracks how users browse their site and which profiles they look at, how often and how long (from articles facebook staff were interviewed in). I wonder if they have starting using that data to recommend friends? If someone is searching for a particular person frequently enough, or regularly visiting the public parts of their profile, they probably know each other.

I'm not saying it's appropriate.
This is a guy that always gets my money no matter what book he puts out. Treating your readers decently and going against Big Corp(TM) in terms of DRM and customers freedom has something to do with it.
Maybe they should make it a 'labs' feature then?
I used to think this way. After living without CPAN for 3 years using different languages, I appreciate the lack of dependency additions my projects get.

The problem with CPAN is the same things as RPM hell or DLL hell, only worse and more fragile. On a large project, you really don't want to randomly upgrade your DBI module, or some other small perl package that may bring your whole project down. But then one day you need to use Net::SSH and it wants to upgrade DBI::Search for some bizarre reason, which requires you to compile a beta version of the GZIP library because it's using some new interface that's not included with your CentOS 5 install. Then you find out DBI::Search requires DBI 1.41 and you're only using 1.40. There's a backwards incompatible behavior that affects your code in 1.41, which is why you haven't upgraded yet. You go through all 100k lines of your project and make sure all the DBI code handles this new case.

Then you have to try and install the changes on all 75 of your servers. You may have some sort of capistrano script to make this simpler, or you may have used RPM versions of your CPAN packages. Neither solution is less painful than the other. CPAN wasn't really designed to work with your sysadmin's workflow, so neither solution is particularly useful.

At the end of the day, you would have spent less time just writing the damn code yourself to call out to the ssh binary.
they bought a site/piece of software a few months back that enables all of this.
We're looking for feedback on our new REST API.
Good advice. These two points are already in our startup plan.
Today, there's a story on the front page that ends with this paragraph:

"Around 3 p.m., the selling pressure abated. Just as swiftly as the market fell, it recovered ground. One factor behind the swift recovery, traders say, were funds that use computers and formulas to sniff out bargains in the market. These funds swooped in on hundreds of cheap stocks, helping push the market higher."

It really sounds to me like you have to have insider information, or something close, to have a good chance of getting something on the cheap, because otherwise the price is going to get pushed up again by people with better and faster research tools.
That's because Perl Python and Ruby offer essentially the same feature set. The only significant differences are syntax and CPAN.
The sad positive feedback loop of lotteries
Every company should have this. My day-to-day job is helping companies role out their brand guidelines and we have seen the benefits of having guidelines available. Putting aside the value of having a consistent brand, we have seen big increases in productivity and employee satisfaction just because a). they aren't starting from scratch each time and b). there are templates or assets available to help them out. Add the ability for employees to share their work and experience with each other and you can really get some work done.

Even if you are using vendors to help out with your design, it's a great way to lower their time spent (and your bill) by more rapidly getting them up to speed.
Except that Android is really open, something Microsoft still isn't.
You have a good point that Perl doesn't have great adoption with young'uns. I think we'd see more Perl usage if Ruby didn't exist; Ruby borrowed some of Perl's most attractive features and is rightly popular for it.

By the numbers, though, I still agree with the quoted statement. Perl development is picking up compared to the past few years, and enthusiasm for Perl 5 is the strongest it's been (at least since 5.0).
I had the same thing. And funnily enough it doesn't make me think "wow facebook is awesome, thanks for suggesting them". It makes me think about closing my account or using a throwaway email address for it at least.

I'm assuming the 'other party' imported contacts from their email, and facebook noticed that I have the same email address as one in their address book, and so suggests them to me. I don't like that.
You're right -- I mean consumer technology. Should've been more clear.
I'm not sure the openness of Android is important to customers.
Sounds interesting. I'm sure many of us here in HN would love a well built alternative where we are actually in control of our personal data.
Will they stop talking about it and do it already? I'm tired of hearing of this new look and not seeing it 100% live yet.
Think of email as bills, which need to be paid/responded to.
Have you looked at the newer generation of text-based clients? The main one thrown around is http://notmuchmail.org/
What We Know About the Pan European Bailout Thus Far
It would be lovely to see Yelp, Facebook, and Twitter all succumb in some kind of deadly embrace -- a grand implosion that would be. Like watching that implosion of Texas Stadium last month.

Oh well, on to other wishful thinking...
Yes. That's it.
Agreed with the pain of admin with CPAN. I ended up creating a custom build and distribution tool to manage this as the existing solutions are weak.
I'm glad it finally hit the front page. It deserves some attention.
Youth frequently use Facebook as a way to gauge a person's social "status" or popularity. Email me if you want to hear more about that aspect of it.
Why would you edit your photos online?
It is just an example to show how differently we can use CSS3 transition property ... I don't think it ruined the entire article..
The answer is simple. When someone creates a new account, Facebook offers to find friends that are in their contact list. If the user wants to do this, they can put in the userid and password of their (say) gmail address. Then Facebook downloads the contact list from that user's email account. If your previously-unknown-to-Facebook email address is in the user's contact list, Facebook now has it. No guessing needed. Note that the "user" I'm talking about in the above scenario is not you; it is someone else who has one of your email addresses in their contacts info.
This is very cool! Great idea, good luck on this. (ditto on the US centric approach but then a shoestring startup can't always go global from day 1. You will get there though.
Good question. I don't have a good answer, but my guess is that it refers to the cgi scripts that use to prevail before and also to all the scripts that every sys admins have written to make their job easier. At one point Perl was called "The duct tape of the internet", I guess referring to all the small scripts tying things together.
That article was a single thought that could have been expressed in a single sentence drawn out into a whole essay.
Yes, I'm sure Android's success is a result of consumers' response to all this tech-world inside baseball, and nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that Verizon's network is so much better than AT&T's.
Those numbers are relative. I think its more that non-programming queries have grown faster than programming queries.
Nothing New.

BOSS, the Debian-based Linux flavor mentioned in the article, has been available for quite some time (atleast 3 years). IMO, haven't seen anybody using it (including majority of people who developed it - NRCFOSS and C-DAC)
Personally, I think that git is hard to learn if you try to think of it in terms of your previous VCS. As you say, you have a lot of svn experience, so maybe that's the issue.

Really, at its core, git is incredibly simple. That's one of the reasons that it's hard. It's just a DAG of changesets, and every command lets you manipulate that graph, or give points on the graph names.

Anyway, I'd echo several people's sentiments here: http://progit.org is a really good explanation, and also fairly short.
From the thread:

"I was trying to figure this out earlier last week. You see, Facebook recommended six people that I should become friends with, six people who I have no other friends in common with. Six people I have never worked with. One guy is a guy I play TF2 with who lives in Alaska, and another guy is a guy I rented an apartment from.
It was the apartment guy that clued me into how Facebook made those recommendations. It got them from gmail. Which baffled me, I never authorized Facebook to look at my gmail for friends I might want to add, not once. Turns out, I wasn't the only person who had their contacts list scraped by Facebook.
I deactivated and started the pending process for account deletion immediately."

Uggg, sounds like Buzz all over again.
I don't think most of these vendors have any interest in mobile Linux in general beating Apple or anyone else. The vendors are interested in selling devices or software. HP/Palm is competing with Android as much as it is with Apple.
Great going by Fox News to put the squeeze on wikipedias corporate donors, that will really help.

The world could do fine without Fox, I wonder what it would be like without wikipedia. I use it only about 10 times per day or so :(
How Sales Complexity Impacts Your Startup’s Viability
Does any body remember when Larry Wall and others were rewriting all the Unix commands in Perl? I thought that was cool but I never heard of it again, and haven't been able to find references to it.
I have to point out that the author's essay was from 2001. (About 7 months after wikipedia registered its domain name) So on the one hand, the author's insights are a little outdated. On the other hand, sad to say, most of what he points out is almost timeless. People are lazy and liars. Some people (spammers) are industrious and liars.

I think his point about 'There's more than one way to describe something' is the real crux of the issue. I call it art, you call it crap, where does it fit into the SW?

My opinion is that we are at the beginnings of even trying to figure out what it is we want. Semantic web seems to shine a light on a possible better way, but I think we are just starting out. I think SW will be one part of the internet just like the web is just one part.
Thanks for the update. I stopped using perl around the same time 5.8 was slated to be the last version of perl 5, since perl 6 was coming Real Soon Now.

I learned perl in 1996 in order to cobble together a system that collected reports from all sorts of weird text files and formats (anyone remember Framemaker?) and merge them into one nice big postscript file with custom watermarks and page numbers. This program ran for at least 8 years after that. I had to learn perl in the dead of night because I had been instructed to find a "technology solution" and perl was "unsupportable".

Another totally different program was developed to prototype a large orchestration of securities valuation and hedging. It even had numerical optimization in it. It was taken wholesale into production.

Many other programs, some fairly long, were written in order to run successfully only once, and then they were retired.

I loved perl.

Then I learned python and could read the code that I wrote a few months ago and more importantly, read other peoples' code more easily. Consistent white space helps a lot. It had many of the same advantages of perl, with slightly clunkier regexes, plus a nice system for introspection. It could almost replace matlab--almost.

I built a complicated optimization system that orchestrated
multiple processors and called C++ library code so I didn't have to learn C++.

I forgot about perl. I loved python now.

Then I learned haskell and forgot about python but that's enough for today.
How Amazon successfully serves tens of millions customers (Dynamo)
You only have to pay the $10 if you bought the game used. If you bought the game used, you are paying a fair bit less than $60.
The way it's marketed, and has been for a long while, is that they're selling only one product: The Game, and possession of The Game entitles you to use their online servers.

With this move, they're trying to split it up into two products: The Game, and Online Access, but they don't make the distinction when you buy the game new, only when you buy it used. This borders on violating the first sale doctrine, because the product becomes crippled or partly used-up when you purchase it, for no good reason.

I can understand EA perfectly, they wish very strongly that they were in the business of selling services on a per-month basis, but they are in the commodities business where they sell stuff, and their rights to dictate what can and can't be done with said stuff expires when it's sold.

There are a few companies (Autodesk?) that try to maintain that their commercial software licenses are non-transferable, but they usually get told to stuff it when they try to stop people from buying old licenses. I am slightly worried and curious as to why you seem to think that non-transferable commercial licenses are a good idea?
Developing an OS is lame. First, the Govt OS is not going to be usable (compared to the modern OSs). Second, not everyone (even in the Govt) is not going to use it. The variety of apps deployed and being used in the Indian offices is mind-blowing. There is no way the Govt can convince all these offices to switch to a different platform without spending a huge amount as switching costs.

[Tangential: I want the Indian Government to come up with its own cryptographic protocols/algorithms like the NIST in the US does. Even if it is a variant of the prevalent crypto systems, it is better than nothing, at least for the top secret documents.

Anybody know what crypto algorithms/protocols the Govts other than US use for their classified information?]