skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I signed up and posted a couple of links but I'm not really convinced why I should use your site. I think I understand the problem you are trying to solve because I use Tumblr and Twitter to do (what I understand to be) the same thing.

Here's my use case in case you're interested. I wanted a place to post links to articles related to startup info that I found interesting. It would be something I could look back on to find old articles, and a way to share links with friends who may have a similar interest. It took me less than 5 minutes to set up the Tumblr blog. And everytime I want to post a link, I open a new browser tab to Tumblr, click on the "post link" (once in a while i post a video) button, paste in the link, type in a title and hit publish. I think it's easy and I'm happy with the process.

In addition I also use Twitter in a similar manner. I only follow around 30 people. And the reason I follow them is that they post interesting links that I want look at. So my only use for Twitter is to share links.

So all that being said, I have two systems that I use solely for sharing links. I don't know if I would want to sign up for a third network that doesn't (seem to) offer much differentiation, which would also require me to build a new social graph.

I guess if you can offer some more differentiation, I might reconsider, because I do like sharing links. If you already offer differentiation, I didn't get that impression from your main web page and you should try to emphasize it more.
All You Need to Know About Encodings and Ruby 1.9
There's two kinds of apps going on here, and I think it's pretty anecdotal for why this probably wont be as transformative as fb's social graph (it's an apples vs. oranges comparison anyway). Google always builds the engineering app not the social app like they did with wave/buzz. This WILL be useful for people who are building the examples google talks about here http://googlemobile.blogspot.com/2010/05/do-more-with-google... like turning off and on your lights when you get close to house etc.

but as usual, google only understands the engineer and focuses too much on utility and not enough on people.

There are somethings people do in fact WANT to check into (ignore the privacy issue entirely for now, just from a visceral product level), not just have automatically imported because the act of checking in is in and of itself an act of projecting identity. People who want to show what bar they are at because they are showing that they are cool want to press a button and get the reward right there of "I'm cool." Knowing that your phone is projecting that automatically wont give people the same rush as showing up at the bar and checking in.
Under what category ?

Maybe some parts are dead and others are not. How long did it take to accept the submission and post it?
Did anyone else notice that in the introductory docs for developers, the last example shows a Y combinator branded app?
http://code.google.com/chrome/apps/images/tabstrip-apps.png
Awesome :) I don't think you're the only one who has been tempted ;) Check up on my progress and start learning too if you like the look of it! Looking forward to chatting in the comments.
"Upload your data to Google Storage for Developers, then use the Prediction API to make real-time decisions in your applications."

I can understand the necessity of this, but that'll be some serious lock-in.
Open to BOTH men and women, this is an after-hours rapid-prototyping program. Meet your future founders and moonlight on your venture with Women 2.0 Labs.

This is a new 5-week program for engineers, developers, biz dev folks, and marketing mavens to develop high-growth technology ventures in San Francisco, CA.

This Women 2.0 program is open to both women and men.
Does Latitude run in the background, or do users need to launch the app or otherwise "check in" to record their location?

From what I can tell you have to hit the Latitude website on an iPhone for it to capture your location (which severely limits its usefulness), but I was curious about other phones.
submitted a site some months ago in the italian section, got added in 2 days
Gnome.

Last time I used AIX, I used CDE. I assume I could install Gnome (I did it on an SGI, long ago) but I never got to.
From the very little information that I see available so far, it appears that Google will first stab at discrete predictions. That is, I don't see probabilistic output yet.

Also, from http://code.google.com/apis/predict/docs/developer-guide.htm..., it is clear that they perform accuracy analysis using the training data. That is, there is no "testing" vs "training" dataset distinction at this point; there is just cross-validation of the training set.
Google should write a FAQ on what happens when their prediction API becomes self-aware
Have you tried Autopager? It automatically loads the next/previous pages and shows them in line. It's pretty good in my experience with it.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4925/
SQL Server licenses will get you there pretty quickly.
Fairlight and CNCD never cease to amaze me. I watched this demo at least a dozen times after it was released and every single time, I sat with my jaw on the floor. I'm really happy they put this out for the final BP; couldn't have gone out on a better note.
SQL Server license: $7171 per processor - we have a single quad machine... which we'll likely need to split into two machines, incurring extra licensing fees. Our servers were hosted at MaximumASP and they gave us a bandwidth quote with additional servers that was 4 figures (remember, this is 3 years out).

Visual Studio is $1200 a pop - this is for two people.

I'm already at 5 figures and I didn't include Expression/Media Encoder and so on.

http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2008/en/us/pricing.aspx
http://www.microsoftstore.com/s/visualstudio
In fairness (and as the person who made the decision that forces Sam above to use .Net technology) there are reasons to use Microsoft technology even when it isn’t the best fit.

Let’s be honest about technology for a second: Things go wrong. No matter what solution you use things go wrong and for the most part non-technical management doesn’t understand that. When something goes wrong they want someone to blame.

If you decide to go with something like Ruby on Rails you have to contend with the fact that management doesn’t understand open source (or trust it) and have never heard of 37Signals. So the blame falls to you for having gone with a small “experimental” company rather than a “trusted” one like Microsoft (and yes those words in quotes are actual quotes from my attempt at using such technology)

Where as when something goes wrong with Microsoft technology it’s written of as inevitable (that’s where the saying “no one ever got fired for using Microsoft” came from)

It’s a sad reality but sometimes you can’t pick the best technical solutions. Sometimes the extra time it takes to use proprietary Microsoft technology is worth the political capital you save by going with Microsoft. That fact doesn’t make me happy but it’s true.
A newer Gnome, mostly.
Just came here to check for that reference :)

I'm not sure how much hacking he actually does these days though; the last interview I heard from him (a few years ago) he said that he doesn't any more but still could, and even his investment focus is on renewable and alternative energy technologies (using the luxury yacht he was building at the time as a test bed!)
Nope.
FTA:
RB: If the platform was holding up fine, what prompted the change of architecture?

RC: Money.
Symantec to Buys VeriSign
Here's the "law" on domains: http://www.icann.org/en/udrp/udrp-policy-24oct99.htm

Basically a domain name can only be taken away if it infringes a trademark, which TPB does not.
But I don't see anything here that blocks the "check in" approach, if anything, it makes it easier to implement. Instead of needing to develop your own app for each mobile platform and using their location API, you just make a web page that asks for confirmation to access the user's Google Latitude location, and all you need to do is develop the interface for whatever human provided info you want. The location pick up is taken care of. (Of course, I don't know how this compares to just using HTML5 location APIs... perhaps that provides a better approach for check ins.)

The only problem I see with this is that, in my experience, Google Latitude 95% of the time tracks location by cell tower, which doesn't even narrow down which block you are on, much less which bar you are in.
Why it's futile to resist new military technology
Chrome, Firefox and Safari all render beautifully on my machine, with Safari experiencing some rendering errors; Firefox even does ligatures correctly, which is something I've had trouble with before with fontsquirrel and the like. Whereas on my Ubuntu box everything is sharp and jagged and ugly as sin, particularly in text sizes like 14 and 12 pt. I'm inclined to think that this may be a font rendering issue, like the known tendency for ClearType to cram everything to a pixel grid.
He also says this:

> VP8 is definitely better compression-wise than Theora and Dirac, so if its claim to being patent-free does stand up, it’s an upgrade with regard to patent-free video formats.

Sounds to me like he has no clue yet, and how could he if it's just been released?
Thanks! I did check the mail headers, and it actually came from discokenny.com.

By the way, this is what I get:

$ host discokenny.com
discokenny.com has address 38.106.76.52
discokenny.com mail is handled by 10 namednsservers.com.
Both would eventually stop the flow of uncaptured oil, but would they both stop the flow in the same amount of time?

That is the real problem here: the question of which option to pursue should be driven by getting the leak stopped ASAP. I fear someone has their mind on revenue.
They might lose it in a forfeiture though. Assuming someone can figure out who owns it in the first place :)
well, all you are saving vs. disks that are always active is what, 10 or 15 watts per disk? (we are talking low-power disks, I imagine) I mean, a watt-month isn't free, but even at my scale, you are looking at about $0.19 per watt for just power, $0.27 per watt month for power and rack space inclusive. I'm still small enough that I rent racks from other people, so that number is for the watt of power my equipment uses /and/ the watts the cooling system needs to burn to get rid of the waste heat from that watt.)

I wonder if simply using the backblaze type setup with 'green' drives that are set to 'power down' when not in use
would be the best solution? In that case, you'd want to minimize writes as much as reads, but it would make some sense to offer a discount for data that 'just sits there'

On the other hand, I bet that when you buy power 'at scale' you can get your watt-month prices quite a bit below $0.27 (note, you must roll in the cost of both the watt your equipment uses /and/ the watts the a/c system uses to deal with the watt of heat. At the low end, the provider bundles those two, but if you build your own data centre, you need to be careful to build that into your cost assumptions.)

The other problem with doing this at the low end is that where I am, I pay full price for a circuit, no matter how much power I pull off it (the circuit just blows if I get too carried away) and even places that do rent you metered power usually have high costs for rackspace that are not metered, so really, you are only potentially saving two or three bucks a month per disk, even if they were idle all month.

Now, also, 'green' disks are usually really slow. 5900rpm rather than 7200rpm. But they are also really cheap, so if your customers want to accept slow, you can save quite a lot on your CapEx. Like probably half, if you use consumer-grade 'green' drives rather than the 'enterprise sata' I use. Using consumer grade drives has a bunch of other problems that your software will need to account for, too... but that's a place where you potentially could have pretty big savings.
> "Net Worth $1.0 billion Source Technology, Self made"

Didn't he make his $billion at Microsoft? If so, how is that "self made"?
I seem to remember a while ago there was a program featured on - maybe Slate - that had a much more impressive output, but I think it was actually played by a human and just written by a computer.
True, except I think there was much more of a divide there. Roughly half were hippies, the other half were ...well whatever the opposite is.

Whereas with the Internet, entire generations are involved. There's no ~50/50 divide b/t web-surfing hippies and non-internet-using reactionaries. Everyone is online.

The main problem is getting the majority of people in the net generations to understand their rights, how certain things affect them, and to care enough to log of Facebook for a few minutes to do something about it when they're threatened.
This article is pretty short on costing details. Silverlight encoding aside (because that's competely unrelated to asp.net mvc deployment) you can deploy web sites really cheap on the microsoft stack.

Windows Web Server: $400
SQL Server Express: Free (Databases have a 4 GB maximum size)

I can't image how it would cost them 5 figures to use asp.net mvc. I find the productivity of the MS development stack to be well worth the meager cost.

Take stackoverflow.com - a hugely successful site that I believe runs off 3 servers (originally 1). Jeff and Joel put this together on a pretty tight budget and I bet their site handles a bigger workload than the OP's site.
Didn't look at Windows Azure as an option? http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/
What I think lots of people outside the scene don't realize is that something like this has to run in real-time. As in, dozens of frames per second.

Take that Adobe!
Hacking is easy
but they don't charge in a way that maximizes short-term profits. they charge in a way that maximizes long-term viability. They only charge for listings /if/ the poster makes money off the listing /and/ the section is so full that thinning it a bit might be beneficial to the readers.
Don't forget that this is written by a x264 dev, so not very surprising that he concludes that his codec is way better. Is there an analysis from a less biased source?
To be fair, Jeff and Joel are still on Bizspark. StackOverflow is ~2 years old.
Reddit releases fully functional VM with their source code
Rob, I've always enjoyed reading your posts as I've personally been straddling the gap between the two worlds (MS and OSS) for a long time now. Primarily this is due to our local job market - there simply aren't any OSS jobs where I live, and Microsoft is very deeply embedded in the New Zealand marketplace.

C# is a fine language, and ASP.Net MVC is a great framework, but I can't help but feel like the 'other kids' are ransacking the candy store while I'm out on the curb. In terms of testing frameworks and tools, the Ruby/Rails platform is lightyears ahead. I know there are attempts to bring some of the core concepts in RSpec and Cucumber to the .Net platform, but we're not there yet, and probably never will be. The goalposts are always shifting - the OSS platform can respond to change and new ideas much more quickly than the MS platform.

We have an MVC framework for web development now, but it has taken 10 years (Java Struts was released roughly around the same time as Webforms iirc)! Testing is only one element of this - in the OSS world we're also seeing an explosion of asynchronous queuing/messaging frameworks, object/document datastores, serverside js and other innovations.

I also share your frustration with the coupling of the framework releases to a new IDE. I use Vim for everything other than .Net development, and like the fact that the rug isn't going to be pulled out from under me every two years.

As a Microsoft developer it is hard not to feel envious of the OSS community. The Alt.Net community if anything appears to be shrinking, and it is presumably because those developers have come to a similar conclusion as yourself - the cost simply does not justify what the MS platform can offer.
Google Admits to WiFi Snooping
How is that any different from a union taking stands that you don't agree with?

If I have a right of free speech and you have a right of free speech, how is it that together we don't have a right of free speech?

In other words, I'm not referring to the "corporation as person" doctrine but the "corporation as voluntary association of people" reality.
This article summarizes the problems posed by encoding issues and the approach Ruby takes to solving them better than any of the many other articles on the subject I've read. Worth a read, particularly for anybody planning on deploying Rails 3.0/Ruby 1.9 apps.
15 Gorgeous and Effective HTML Emails
Yup... Onenote is basically the new version of Word for me and the 2010 version is slicker than the last one.

Also, you should have a look at Canvas for Onenote if you like a higher level view of your notebooks. http://www.officelabs.com/projects/canvasforonenote/Pages/de...
That would at least get away from the 'player piano' sound, but it wouldn't fix the problems with the composition.

In Amsterdam there is a small, and relatively unknown museum full of pianolas (player pianos) run by Kasper Janse. I know the guy because I once found a pianola somewhere and it ended up in his museum. When I delivered it there he took me through the rooms and showed me his machines, one by one and I told him I could close my eyes and pick out any pianola compared to the 'real' thing (a person playing).

So he showed me his 'piece the resistance'. A one-off, a machine constructed to be the 'state-of-the-art' in modern recording technology. It featured a roll played by Rachmaninoff himself, with as many parameters captured as possible, including stroke velocity, pedals, the works, and at a ridiculously high sample rate (for the day, at least).

The effect was amazing, it was as though the ghost of Rachmaninoff had come to life and even while writing this I still get gooseflesh. It was the most amazing thing I've ever seen in music, and it was lightyears ahead of the compact discs of today in terms of delivery. What an amazing sound. And, if you've never seen a 'player piano' at work, the keys move as though invisible fingers press them down. The reason there is only one of those machines (and very very few rolls, they had to be 'recorded' by virtuoso players instead of 'punched') is that the phonograph happened.

If you're ever in Amsterdam, well worth a visit:

http://www.pianola.nl/Pianola_Museum/Homepage.html
Obviously I don't expect them to do a point by point comparison of the signature, but they are supposed to at least make sure it's there. Writing 'Check ID' should get them to check my ID every time, but so few even look at the card.

This is a funny prank where a guy went out trying to get people to actually look at the back of the card :)

http://www.zug.com/pranks/credit_card/index2.html
Penn State’s Football Stadium: Now 50% Louder
> I've heard Mono supports (most of?) ASP.NET and you don't have to use SQL server either.

I wrote a medium-sized online game for a guy who wanted to do it in Mono/MySQL. True, Mono does implement a lot of ASP.NET, and a lot of things work fine, but there are still rough edges that drove us crazy to the point that I finally convinced him to switch over to a Windows server (from Linux/Apache). Some examples:

* Deployment: Mono was very touchy about deploying changes. If you drop in app_offline.htm and then replace every part of the site with new files, it usually worked. When it didn't, it would hang Apache and/or just start returning 500 errors until the web server was restarted. (Whereas with ASP.NET, you can drop in individual files and/or updated DLLs and the site will smoothly recompile as needed.) This was somewhat okay on dev, but got very old very fast in production.

* Strange memory errors: I'm still not sure what was going on, but we had some strange behavior going on where the application would get itself into states that should not have been possible. In one instance I was able to track it down to a particular variable assignment that simply would not happen, despite the code clearly being executed. (E.g., "int x = 42; x++; Trace.Write(x);" would write 42. More complex than that, but that type of thing.) My wild guess is some kind of memory allocation in Mono, but I don't know. Could have been my code somehow, but I have never seen the problem since switching to a Windows server.

* Feature lag: By its very nature, Mono lags behind .NET and it got old being able to use cool 3.5 features (such as LINQ) on other projects and be stuck with 2.0 in Mono.

I think Mono's an impressive project, and my hat's off to the folks to have worked so hard on it, but after some experience with it I decided that if I'm going to write stuff in C# I'm doing it on the Microsoft stack.
What’s Coming in Firefox 4.0
They just launched, in 2010, and it's IE only? Plus a link to a pdf of the DMCA in the bottom corner for no apparent reason. Wow, just wow.
I just love how dissent is not tolerated.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1359924

Isn't it wonderful playing in the manicured garden of our Dear Leader? It's rainbow ponies for everyone!

Never-mind that others have come to similar conclusions about the usability of Lisp in the real world (http://www.dwheeler.com/readable/retort-lisp-can-be-readable.html).
> That is, there is no "testing" vs "training" dataset distinction at this point; there is just cross-validation of the training set.

If they just create a test set from the training set, and omit that from the training, what's the difference? The main thing is that you don't want to include the test set in the training step, and I assume they're doing that.
My guess would be that it is the body of information that google indexes and ranks that has skewed over time, and not that google is skewing the results.

It is also likely that google's ranking algorithms reflect the fact that sensational articles about health concerns get more links than serious scientific articles.

Edit: At one point the author does say "Google may not be driving the trend here so much as reflecting it."
If that separate domain can be used in the Chrome URL bar, count me in. Thought it would be even better if it could be done using the main URL in the Chrome URL bar somehow...
DB Servers are irrelevant when you are talking ASP.NET, so long as you use NHibernate.
This looks weak. They knew what they were getting. They agreed to take it. And now they've changed their minds. The secondary value of that stock is higher than the value at the time of the Microsoft deal (http://www.sharespost.com/companies/facebook), so they're basically suing because Zuckerberg accidentally gave them a bargain.

If FB can buy back that stock at the original valuation, they'll get a good deal.
FTA:

The audio is converted from MIDI files, hence the tinny sound of the piano.

It's not the sound itself that is the main point here. It's the composition. MIDI files describe only notes and additional attributes assigned to them - ways of accenting and going from one to the other. You could turn it back into a standard score and play it yourself really.
Brad Feld: I'm completely allergic to MBAs that outsource their coding to a consulting company.
compare it to Dice or monster. or, hell, realtor.com I think it's really, really easy to make your product /worse/ by adding features.

That said, I personally have a few projects on the back burner that directly compete with craigslist in a very limited way. it /can/ be improved. I'm just saying, for most of the space, by resisting the urge to 'make it better' craigslist has ended up being the dominant player because craigslist is the best. being light on features has kept them from screwing it up too badly.
Yes, I said that.

I realize the 'delivery' is the midi, but even if the compositions were played by a human, so we'd rule that part out, they would still be boring.

A real Bach piece played on a midi synth sounds lightyears ahead of this.