skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The choice to use VMWare was nothing personal to VirtualBox; we just happen to already be running VMWare on our dev boxes. (I'm actually downloading VirtualBox now to see if cross-compatibility is possible.)
Don't forget that this is written by a liberal, so not very surprising that he concludes that his liberal view is way better. Is there an analysis from a less biased source, possibly with fewer well detailed explanations of the basis and reasoning of all of the sub-arguments that lead up to the obviously not surprising conclusion? The fewer credentials they have, the easier it will be for me to follow along.
Pennsylvania Attorney General Tries to Unmask Twitter Critics
So then why not just replace the database and keep the rest? Were you using Linq to SQL and hence tied to SQL Server? As far as VS I'm sure it would not have been a problem for you to get free versions. However, I suppose if you were to change the database portion, probably a sizable chunk of the application, you may as well replace the whole thing...
Guy builds iron man suit
I knew you'd figure out my joke. Have an orange star.
No, apparently he does mean MP3, but don't ask me how a patent filed in 1997 covers a standard that was finalized in 1991. (Was there a delay between date of invention and date of application, maybe involving provisional patents? I do not know the details of these things.)

http://www.tunequest.org/a-big-list-of-mp3-patents/20070226/
Directed Edge, a promising YC startup, makes recommendation engines surprisingly easy:

http://www.directededge.com/

It's quite a bit higher-level than what Google is offering here, with all the benefits and drawbacks that entails.
You scratched the itch I procrastinated to scratch. Others (à la Postrank) tried, you just seem you have tried better! 1 Kudo :)
EDIT: Ah, you're the guy behind Raphaël Vector lib, have one more Kudo!
"An actual indictment on securities fraud would make it impossible for Zuckerberg to remain Facebook’s CEO if it were to go public."

How likely is that, really? Regardless of whatever anyone thinks of Zuckerberg, that's ridiculous.
Try going to the "Add more services" link.

It's on the main Google Apps domain management page, right next to the "Service Settings" header (the header of the sections which has things like mail, calendar, etc.).

Worked for me, and I'm on the Standard Edition.
Joel Franusic / Online-REPs-and-REPLs
Just curious: do you know why IE9 uses a codec whitelist? Why not just support any codec installed on the PC? Does Safari's QuickTime usage have such a whitelist?
hey Paolo,

There could be two things at work here, either a failure to estimate properly, or a failure to do the work in the allotted time, no matter how much time that is.

You should figure out which of the two you're suffering from before you try to remedy the problem.

The first you can combat with keeping detailed logs and adjusting your 'fudge' factor over time, the second is only to be dealt with through discipline.

Don't die from stress please, it's not worth it.
I used to think usability was about making your product easy for your users. Now I see that poor usability can accidentally lead to bad branding!
I couldn't find any, but here's an explanation of the input format, with some example snippets:

http://code.google.com/apis/predict/docs/developer-guide.htm...

It's pretty straightforward.
there is nothing out there which would scale to terabytes out-of-the-box
Live preview.

Am I missing your point?
For very specific problems, yes. The translation classification example is definitely a type of prediction problem that would be good for this service.

However, this is far from a silver bullet to ML problems. It can be quite dangerous, for example, to send off a bunch of data to google and immediately trust their analysis without knowing the underlying application of their algorithm. As a researcher in this area, what I would LOVE is if I could create my own algorithm, send it to Google, upload enormous amounts of data, and get back a result. Because right now it's difficult to scale complex algorithms to datasets in the GB-TB-PB range. Mahout is taking a valid stab at this problem though.
What is it about your database requirements that prevents you from using SQL server express?
C-- outside of Haskell (the GHC) is dead in the water, the group that was working on it has run out of money for it.
Yes, you're right. I didn't think of that.
> to me this absolutely proves beyond any reasonable doubt that the software patent threat from Microsoft is real and not just some abstract academic debate.

Honest question follows after the quote.

http://www.techflash.com/seattle/2010/05/microsoft_sues_sale...

> "Although Microsoft has been a frequent target of patent-infringement claims itself, it's only the fourth time in its history that the Redmond company has filed a patent-infringement suit against a competitor, and the company has said in the past that it views such actions as a last resort when it has been unable to negotiate a licensing deal."

Do you use technology provided by (just throwing out names) Google, Apple, HTC, Oracle, etc.? Have they proven to be less litigious?

If you do use technology provided by other companies, are you also planning on scaling back their use?
IE has the biggest installed base by far.
How could anyone write an analysis only a few hours after such a complicated technology is released? It's also full of IANAL and yet still FUDing about how it's probably full of patents (as if google was dumb enough not to check patents). It looks to me like he had his opinion already formed on his previous use of VP8 and just published it today on time to make a big splash.

Edit: it looks like this article was released a few minutes after Google announcement...

Edit2: it looks like he had access to the spec a few days ago. I still think that Google is not putting their money blindly into VP8 though, they have the money to pay hundreds of analysis like this one and they sure did a lot of them, so it's either good enough or they have plans to make it good soon enough. Still better than x264 for people involved in free/open source like me.
Computers/Internet/Chat/Video and it took a couple weeks.

I submitted another site to a different category (forget which, but something related to sharing internet videos) a couple weeks ago and it hasn't been posted.
I'm absolutely amazed at your dedication to this, and how confident you guys are that you're not helping some competitor.

That goes to prove that closed source is really a dead end, once you have a sufficient head-start you can even afford to give away a turn-key copy of your software and still sleep at night.

Impressive!
I totally agree, they went out of a high note, lots of good stuff all round.

Loved your demo a week BTW
Q: Will web apps replace native apps?

PG: I hope so. I'm afraid of a world where we're all Steve Job's slaves.
> Not to mention offloading QA onto your customers, which may work for a free webservice holding nothing of particular value but hardly works for everybody.

Funny, when I worked at ESPN.com this is exactly what we did. When I first started, I was horrified.

But you know what? Traffic and revenue still grew, and users didn't seem to mind.

Deploying quickly gave us an incredible speed advantage that allowed us to change and respond to problems and new opportunities.
overtime it will integrate with other google stuff. We already see it with their other announcements building on top of this.
Ok, so it really looks like dmoz.org itself is alive and kicking but there are sections where the editors have gone AWOL.

That would explain some of what I'm seeing. Thanks for the answer!

Update: at the bottom of every dmoz.org page there is a 'last updated' timestamp, some are days old, others months or even multiple years. They ought to 'expire' editors that have not touched their pages in more than some cut-off.
We know that our code is not our key advantage -- it is our community.
What did a full license of VS give you over just using the Express versions of the tools? From what I've seen unless you have a huge team and need the team features you could probably get by using the express versions.

I do agree with that the SQL server licensing is a huge PITA and in your case you really didn't need all its ancillary features and instead just needed a simple, fast data store.

The article was a great read.
Like many a member here, I am building something. In my case in PHP.

I have lovingly crafted ( wasted ) a system which is still in its infancy to handle a form of automated test driven development and from what I can see so far, the times I break it or discover a bug ( logic bug ) in my code later it is usually due to week tests.

Clearly I am not a large site like wordpress.com, a part of me thinks its the right thing to do. It certainly makes deploying a breeze and gives a little more "confidence" that the system didn't just fall over.

The sad part, at least in the PHP world, there are no libraries with an explanation on how best to use it with your site / application structure.

The database part is the biggest hiccup.
My solution is a duplicate database with no data.
First it confirms that the "fake db" matches the "real db" and warns if the table structure is different.

Then with my blank "fake db" using functions in my tests to "setup" and "destroy" I purposly build data to test with.

Once my site is operational, I will look to using live data in the "fake db" to simulate with real data. But so far it has been an interesting journey.

Clearly, TDD would become a bigger issue if you have to test sphinx/couchdb/mongodb etc setups but like with all creations its starts with a blank.php. ( in my case )

Not that this covers "Optimise for security".

But my test suite, after the first "test time" the test has been run, will warn if the "library","model", "controller" it is linked to has been altered without the "test" file changing, which at least warns me to the idea that maybe I need to refine my test.

All very padantic, but reading from the side lines of patio11, I can't help but see logic in "automating" things to make your life easier, more efficent and less likely to add human error into the equation.

I leave with what I consider a valid point.

Once upon a time, people looked at the "MVC" approach as time consuming and wasteful. At least from my understanding of watching the web evolve from the earlier days.
agreed! I've been using pdb to debug and I didn't know there was a pdb gui!
Booyah Partners With Google, First To Access Places Web Service
And that Android brought Linux to the mobile masses.

I suppose you can just think of Chrome OS and Android as just another couple of distros among the thousands already available. Same kernel, customized UI & apps.

Fundamentally, that's what Linux is about - a FOSS platform that anyone can modify and redistribute.
uhm.... I just don't think the physical size of the iPad makes it useful as a camera and I can see some accidents.
Thanks very much. I've failed pretty miserably at the "a week" part; things are crazy with my startup at the moment, so I have a new engine, simple synthesizer, a packer, etc... and no actual content. Hoping to fix that soon.
EVenues Wins Contested Founder ShowCase
Betamax offered some technical advantages to VHS, but look who won that war. The main reason they won is because JVC allowed other people to use their designs for a reasonable scale. Keep in mind in this debate that H.264 isn't free to use, and VP8 is. Are the technical merits of H.264 enough to outweigh the cost? In my opinion, no.
Energy conservation “nudges” and environmentalist ideology
And after 3 years if they need to spend 10k on licensing for a very successful site that will be peanuts compared to their own time spent. Or do they value that at nothing?

I think this is a bad article/interview because it gives the impression that you can't do websites in asp.net MVC on the cheap.
No sense of timing or rhythm. Even an algorithm that adds a random delay to notes would make it sound more natural. I listened to previews of the album on iTunes and it sounds like crap.
"Audiences have been moved to tears by melodies created by algorithms."

This can be read two ways...
Google and SpringSource joins hands in the heavens
This is one of those stories where I cannot feel sympathy for either side.
Poor Man's Explanation of Kalman Filtering [pdf]
Raphaël was written by Dmitry Baranovskiy. I only made very minor contributions to the library (animation easing, which are pretty ubiquitous in the examples now) and presented the library at the SVG Open 2009 at Google.

I made Protopub to scratch the itch I think a LOT of us have. I am about a month away from a v1.0, and that's when I'll announce it on HN. Until then, I'm tweaking AI algorithms, fixing UI bugs, and making sure the back-end can handle the more than moderate traffic that HN will send. The few users I get from posts like this are enough to do some basic testing.
Feature Flipping with Rails
Comments on RavenDB licensing
I recently used Weka to create a simple rules-based fraud model for Kongregate. It worked very well, and had a lot of options for algorithms. The UI is a little weird, but it's worth checking out.
Thanks.

We really hope this will help us more than hurt us in the end. Part of the problem with releasing something like reddit as open source is that it isn't designed around installation. For the most part, the pieces have been built in place organically as needed. This means that even though the source is out there, it's been really hard to get developer contributions as many get stuck before they get reddit up and running locally.

This should effectively lower the barrier to entry there and let devs actually think about the code and adding features rather than about whether or not rabbit-mq or cassandra are properly configured.
I read your original post and flagged it rather than responding. You were obnoxious for no good reason and you didn't argue coherently. Maybe if you structure your thoughts logically and clearly you'll get some traction.
You don't need to do that. All you need to do is define your styles initially and reapply them as needed.
No it isn't. What an absolutely ridiculous claim. The two "Bach-like" pieces are rubbish, full of strange discontinuities and random meanderings, not to mention the rhythm just hammering away in a very set pattern. Reminds me of terrible beginning piano workbook pieces, only less musical.

On the next page, the other "fugue" does bizarre things that I don't think a human composer would. The beginning is entirely discontinuous, and doesn't really sound like a beginning. A real fugue isn't just something being played repeatedly in different intervals.

If that's the best that the program has to offer, then I'm not sure what it's accomplished. Just because it can combine complicated things doesn't mean its composed anything, because it doesn't understand the parts. If someone copied and pasted parts of great books, and then tried to weave the parts together, would the result be any good? Or even great books by the same author. Maybe that's a weak analogy though.

I feel sorry for the Slate writer if he can't tell the difference between the Bach and this noise, he's seriously missing out.
Adobe CSS Animation Editor demo (HTML5)
According to what they wrote, there is no separate testing set, so they estimate accuracy based on the training set. They use cross-validation to reduce their overfitting bias. (I could be wrong since I haven't actually used their service, but this is the take-home message of the wording of their explanation. If they intended to convey otherwise, they used the wrong language.)
> Yes, but then it is duckduckgo.com doing the query.

Oh, yes, good catch.
I agree, the stance appears weak - I'm not a lawyer nor am I fully aware of the whole thing but it just sounds like a timed temper tantrum to take advantage of Facebook's negative press about privacy settings &c.
There are no accounts and these settings can be set without cookies as well.
Great link. I love the part at 4:30 where it says "Apparently this is possible."
On Android, Latitude is built in to the Maps app and runs in the background.
Anyone know where I could find more kernel instructions / calls?
If you need GC make sure that LLVM's current story there is something you're comfortable with. Or like the GHC (I gather) do your GC on top of its primitives.
The point is they based the stock off the valuation of preferred stock, but then they actually "received" common stock. It takes a while to get the ball rolling to accuse Facebook that they got a raw deal.

Here, Facebook tried to pull over a "well at least its stock" deal even though they agreed to $65million.

I wouldn't feel bad for ConnectU as $35million is still fantastic, but wouldn't you go back to court if another 35 was on the table? You'd be an idiot not too.

All that said, this is perfectly in-line with Zucker's character as its been painted as of late.
Can you please try our news recommendation service and let me know how it stacks up against your site in terms of (perceived) accuracy? The site is http://www.euraeka.com
I can provide more info if you need it. Email me haidut (at) gmail (dot) com.
I just need some feedback from someone who has built something similar/related.
Doesn'y YC kinda have guidelines against complaining about getting downmodded and flagged? Gotta structure things at least decently and try to not be obnoxious. If other people think you are being obnoxious here, then you probably are being obnoxious.
"Lisp" ^_^.

Check out PreScheme in the Scheme48 distribution for a not-quite Lisp that might be worth your while.

Compiling to Scheme in general can be a good solution, and there are plenty of high performance and well supported Common Lisps out there like SBCL.

If you want ultimate preformance and compile times of days or a week plus are tolerable, the Stalin optimizing Scheme compiler is supposed to be rather special.
Who could forget FastTracker 2! I was about 13 or 14 when I discovered it. There is something intoxicating about composing with the computer in that way. Granted, there was and are a ton of corny .mod files out there but I feel like mod tracking is where I fell in love with the aesthetics of editors and code.

Thanks so much for bringing this to attention! :)
I feel sorry for the ConnectU guys only because it looks like they'd rather spend time suing than building something else. Sure, it sucks to get ripped off, but it sucks worse to drag out that kind of response to having that happen.
Judging by the comments echoing throughout the blog-sphere, it seems like encodings (and a reluctance to move to Rails 3 because it is new) is the main thing preventing people from moving to Ruby 1.9. But I can't wait for folks to move over so we can finally put to rest all the complaints about ruby being so slow. http://www.rubychan.de/share/yarv_speedups.html (Link contains comparison of speed of ruby 1.8.6 to 1.9.2).
Does anyone who writes words (or code) for a living know anyone who would ever consider using such a tool in the first place?!

Please. The best writing tools are a good text editor, a simple meta/mark-up ontology, and a focused mind.
I would have exactly that problem if I released code to any of my sites (not that they're worth looking at :) ), and for much the same reason.

You build stuff because you have to when it hits, especially if you experience 'unexpected growth', and things like installation documentation and so on will suffer, if they exist at all.

So releasing a working VM is a great way to do this, it's about as user-friendly as you can get.

I think you'll be setting an example here that will be followed many times.
In the second sentence, before he even addresses the attention deficient, "Fortunately, it seems I was able to acquire access to the VP8 spec, software, and source a good few days before the official release and so was able to perform a detailed technical analysis in time for the official release."

In the comments here, where you might find people discussing e.g., validity, you can find the author commenting on this "issue" further: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1361739

Not to mention an x264 developer is a lot more interested in VP8 succeeding than H264...

If you have any actual concerns, rather than the cargo cult concerns that seem similar to those more intelligent people may voice in situations when they're actually informed on a topic, please mention them.
Oh no My cell phone's going to kill me (The revenge)
In the past few years, the vast majority of commits to core browser code is by Mozilla paid staff. They mostly ignore outside contributors at that level.
Another very important advantage is that the browser can cache the stylesheet and the font, and can reuse them across multiple websites.

So if your website uses a font that is used by another website which the user has already visited, the browser doesn't need to download the font again. It doesn't even need to check the modification date on Googles server.

As many fonts add ~100 KB to the download size for a page, this really makes a difference.
Have you RTFA? He states:

"Fortunately, it seems I was able to acquire access to the VP8 spec, software, and source a good few days before the official release"
The author had access to a release candidate version but was under NDA until the official announcement.
stickybits has raised $1.6m and is seeking NYC & Bay Area engineers
Once again, bad defaults == class A bug.

Well exposed.
Previous submission with lots of upvotes and comments:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1354731
When I first read the headline, I assumed the story was going to be something like Zuckerberg looks at Facebook user's private messages and makes trades based on the private information in those messages. Obviously that's not the case, but it wouldn't have surprised me with the way he treated user data, especially early on in Facebook's history.
We didn't seriously look at Azure for a couple reasons:

1) It's expensive compared to other hosting platforms.
2) I hate lock-in to a particular platform. If we coded against Azure tables we would be locked in to Azure. If we used their SQL platform we would be space constrained.
3) I have used Azure and deployment, updates, and troubleshooting are all slow and cumbersome. It is still a very immature platform.
Using SQL Server Express is just trading one time-bomb for another time-bomb. Now instead of a 3 year bizspark timebomb we have a size time-bomb, once we cross that point we are springing for SQL Server. Why use a stunted Express product when you can use MySQL or Postgres for free?
Cool, I'll look forward to the next release
I believe the noun is "failure".
Ask HN:  Good, enthusiastic intro to Scala?
I had been designing a hypothetical programming language in my head, and I was surprised to discover that Scala has a lot of the features that would have gone into that language. For instance, "call by name", and the "lazy" keyword.

Does anyone have a recommendation for a good introduction/overview of Scala? I'm looking for something that is also entertaining to read, like a Scala version of "_why's Poignant Guide to Ruby" (I don't expect anything to be quite like that, but maybe closer to that side of the spectrum than the other).
Blog comment spam taken to the next level?
hmm, maybe it is in your DNS cache or utterly firewalled from the UK

% whois discokenny.com
... snip ...
NS1.NAMEDNSSERVERS.COM 38.106.76.52
NS2.NAMEDNSSERVERS.COM 38.106.76.53

% traceroute 38.106.76.52
...snip...
4 vlan128.10ge.lon3.uk.griffin.com (217.79.112.98) 21.697 ms 19.927 ms 19.757 ms
5 vl423.mpd01.lon01.atlas.cogentco.com (149.6.2.177) 28.760
...snip...
9 te4-2.mpd01.ewr03.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.1.30) 219.641 ms
10 38.104.188.146 (38.104.188.146) 97.547 ms 109.962 ms 96.691 ms
11 38.106.76.52 (38.106.76.52) 100.634 ms 99.136 ms 99.728 ms

% host discokenny.com 38.106.76.52
;; connection timed out; no servers could be reached
% host discokenny.com 38.106.76.53
;; connection timed out; no servers could be reached

# nmap -PN 38.106.76.52
All 1715 scanned ports on 38.106.76.52 are filtered