skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Luddite.

In all seriousness, the dangers brought up in the article can only come from a person lacking significant knowledge of bacteria.

Unimaginable numbers of bacteria permeate every part of the world, including miles within the earth, deep sea volcanic vents, radioactive waste, the rain drops falling on our heads, and us, up our noses, in our skin pores, our guts, etc.

Those simple bacteria evolve at staggering rates, and swap genes like DJ Danger Mouse mixing tracks.

Any new synthetic, or extraterrestrial, or magical, life form would have to compete. And unless you believe in magic it is unlikely to out-compete in a pre-existing niche.

The grey goo danger often thrown at nano-tech, is possible only if we violate one or more of the basic laws of thermodynamics.

And when it comes to antibiotic resistant bacteria, well we are already doing a great job of breeding those within ourselves.

But if you grew a barrel full of MRSA and then poured it down your toilet, the SA wold quickly lose its metabolically expensive MR. Because there is no Methicillin in the sewer, the resistance to Methicillin is a disadvantage. And the only way the Staphylococcus aureus could survive is if it dumped this feature.

But luckily you're probably taking antibiotics so you are a niche where MRSA can out-compete and thrive.
This sounds almost exactly like the "Why Desktop Linux (Still) Sucks. And What We Can Do To Fix It." video http://blip.tv/file/3538476/

I think if developers just followed jmillikin's post there could be a big step forward in Linux developement.
Hi Scott, thanks a lot for the reply, great points. I think our link spider is a lot better than Tumblrs, and will show better, more accurate posts through a vary of URLs.

As for differentiation, we think comments will be a big difference on our site as compared to Tumblr. We plan on using two types of comments, Direct and Global. Direct are comments on your post from friends. Global is an aggregate discussion page across the network for the same URL (if a bunch of people post the same URL, they can discuss in the global page). Any other suggestions? Thanks for your thoughts
Thanks for weighing in - I am a somewhat frequent visitor to your blog and websites. This type of discussion (eg, using uncommon or less well-known languages to be more productive or reason about an approach to a problem domain) comes up here on Hacker News frequently.

I have been searching for new work opportunities that would involve more freedom in programming language choice (specifically allowing me, as the developer, to explore tools like Prolog, Lisp, and Ruby as appropriate). Sadly, this has been somewhat fruitless in my geographic region. There is a (probably well-founded) desire on the part of companies to use what we can refer to as "lowest common denominator" tools (Java, C#, Oracle, MS SQL Server) with the occasional upstart using Ruby/Rails. When I say LCD tools, I don't mean to denigrate those languages/platforms, merely point out that companies seem more comfortable knowing that there is a large pool of potential programmers available with those skills.

PG has weighed in on the side of starting your own company and using more powerful languages as a competitive advantage (the whole blub/magic of Lisp set of essays). It seems that few companies see programming language as competitive advantage or (based on your comment) be interested in hiring consultants such as yourself to implement higher level software that leverages these uncommon languages.

I'm curious - have you had projects where you felt that Prolog or Lisp represented a "better" choice than Java or Ruby but had customer requirements that specified language choice upfront? Have you "pitched" Prolog or Lisp to customers, maybe saying something like "ah, using Prolog here would require only 20 hours of my dev/consultant time, but using Java will require an 80 hour solution"?

I'm quite interested in using Prolog, Scheme, or Lisp at the "day job" so hearing any of your thoughts might help better prepare my own internal pitches . . .
Actually the real money quote is:
"the pre-release beta we have, according to Adobe, lacks hardware acceleration"

You really can't judge the power/heat of a version w/o HW acceleration.
It's fairly likely that every life-form that currently exists in this planet has a common ancestor that self-assembled billions of years ago. Your genetic code is the result of a huge amount of cycles of copies (and mutations) of that common ancestor's DNA.

The life form that Venter created is separate from that lineage - its genetic code was synthesized from basic building blocks, not copied from an ancestor (at least in a biochemical sense; the information content was indeed copied, but that's another hurdle).

Whether or not this makes it "artificial life" depends on your definition of "life", and there's a surprising amount of controversy there.
> Applications can now request installation on the shared external storage (such as an SD card).

Finally! Maybe now some of the devices stuck at 1.5 and 1.6 will be able to get an official upgrade.
No, you don't need a general-purpose solution for this kind of problem, so you don't need to implement an inference engine - so you wouldn't have an implementation of Prolog.

Most of these kinds of problems are only about 100 lines of code even in fairly verbose languages, depending on how complicated the set you need to permute / select from is, and how complicated your clauses are.

I speak from experience here, solving packing problems in programming competition questions. Pretty much any high school / college programming competition includes one of these kinds of problems, and the time budget is rarely a lot more than an hour, as it's usually one of the simpler questions.
Plugging your computer to your TV is not an option unless you have a dedicated computer plugged to your TV. Then you want the computer to be quiet, small and not FUGLY.

You want the computer to be operated by a small keyboard and a remote rather than a mouse.

And you want your computer to have digial out, handle 7.1 surround and have appropriate software to handle GPU encoding etc. When you add that up, the cost goes high.

Hence, something like the logitech box or the boxee box (appropriately priced)will do the job without another computer. (I own an apple tv)

AppleTv got it right - other than the closed / crippled part.
There are some tasks, such as asynchronously-generated web content, where a message queue is the obvious solution. But there are a class of problems where either a message queue or batch processing system (e.g., Hadoop) could be used. Consider the summation of user mention counts from the Twitter streaming API for an example; either a job is put on a queue for each tweet containing a mention, or each of the mentioning tweets are thrown into a bucket that is used as the source for a batch job that recurrently executes.

From what's mentioned in the article, it sounds like some of the tasks that Beanstalk is being used for at PostRank are the same type of tasks that other companies, such as FlightCaster, are doing with Hadoop/Cascading.

The trade-off seems to be that message queues are more flexible and can offer lower latency of job completion but batch processing systems provide better support for admin concerns like adding worker nodes, debugging, and reporting.
I use:

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="http://yui.yahooapis.com/2.8.1/build/reset/reset-min.css>
I get what you're saying but in this case I'm not sure I agree. I think Google's looking to extend Android to any embedded device that will run it. I think this is much more an extension of android then a whole new product direction.
Did Google Just Quietly Launch A Web-Based iTunes Competitor? Yep.
I call it needless overhead. Seriously, is it that difficult to reset padding and margins only when you need that? Do you really want to have extra HTTP request for some dumb CSS file you can do just fine without?
And it has nothing to do with code reuse. Setting a margin, whoa, rocket surgery, no less.
That just might be a reason they put out to avoid the controversy of arguing why his ideas are faulty. And like I said, his faulty ideas are a hint to possible flees reasoning abilities. It questions his ability to make sound judgements.
There seems to be a very important detail missing from the story. How good was the CEO and how vital was he in getting the company public and the making the founders and ton of cash? Sometimes those hired CEOs actually do work hard and more than earn their paycheck.
Yes, no change. It's the way people have managed their public persona for tens of thousands of years, and it has always worked fine: If you don't want other people to know things about you, don't tell them.

I don't see any reason why technology should affect it at all.
"Consumer" is a role. Roles are not exclusive. A role makes sense in a particular context, e.g. where there is a producer of a particular thing and a consumer.

I am absolutely a Consumer. And I am a Producer, or a Creator, which provides my income for my consumer lifestyle.
Baha! It'll be built INTO the TV.. Or the cable box, or the blu-ray player.

You get your TV home and connect it to your network, and have Hulu (because it has a fully featured browser with flash) working out of the box.

Making your own TV channel is now pretty much as simple as writing an android app.
Advancements like this make it feel exciting to be young and have so much time ahead of you. The future is bright. Science is key.
Maybe you should give Windows 7 a chance. I use a Mac at home, and I really like Windows 7 at work.
I've been using Wave for startup product collaboration (a development project with 2 people on one location and the 3rd person on another location). The way Wave has been used is roughly like a digital shared whiteboard for product ideas and requirements.

The reasons why I use Wave is because it works relatively good (except that it gets somewhat less responsive on very long threads) and that it needs zero maintenance from our side.
Well, they didn't try very hard to make things right. Users revolted, so they caved. That's all there is to it. The "unfortunately these people are most vocal" misses the mark completely -- had they been NOT vocal they would've faced enormous bills or they would have to spend 50 hours trying to migrate to a new system. That's if the data can be exported and imported freely, which is rarely the case.

So the customers spent hours comparing the offers of the competition, all the time being frustrated because this jumped on them from nowhere. And then, 2 days later, they hear "Whoops, my bad!". That just doesn't fix the damage, now does it?

If a thousand customers each spend 3 hours worrying about what to do, and these numbers are conservative, then you've created 3000 hours of unnecessary frustration. So the damage will exceed $300.000. Just with one ill considered move!

Whoops, sorry!
They definitely had to port the parts that generate x86 bytecode to generate ARM bytecode instead, but they almost certainly used the Android NDK (http://developer.android.com/sdk/ndk/index.html) since V8 is written in C++.

It seems a JavaScript VM is the very definition of "perfomance-critical".
Combined Facebook, Twitter & RSS Social Stats with jQuery, PHP & YQL
At a talk, someone (might have been Eric Evans) said something along the lines of when he was modeling a domain with a group, he wouldn't let them leave until they had three different ways of doing it. Even if the first was perfect and the last two ended up being stupid, forcing them to brainstorm other ways of doing it often came up with hidden gems.
That was the warning. The pricing change doesn't go into effect until July 1st, I believe.
Biggest no-no in a startup: Fear
July?
At least a few given the number of times stuff from here gets posted on facebook by various infosec friends.
I think OkCupid is NYC based and they do web-dev in C++
NewRelic.com Pricing Usability Big Fail - Updates
Google May Finally Disclose AdSense Split, If You’re An Italian Newspaper
>Depth depends on connections formed with other areas of knowledge

Agreed. I believe this is the most important part of education.
Yeah, I keep hoping that solutions to life problems are but an effortless realization gleaned from reading a page or two on the internet away, as well. :/

http://dirtsimple.org/2010/02/ending-my-insight-addiction.ht...
"...some code simply doesn't need an excellent design..."

If that is the case then the question really is what value is that specific feature to the product.
Can you provide a link to the demo?
> We have bug databases for a reason, we should also have progress databases.

They're called project management systems, there are plenty of vendors.
This has been a pet peeve of mine for a very long time.

Creating a free-form address parser might be a fun project. Validating the addresses might get expensive though. Are there any low cost/free alternatives to a service like Experian's QAS?
I use OpenBSD for Email, Music Daemon, FTP server, VPN, irc and of course as a firewall.

The best thing about it other than its vaunted security is the absolutely fantastic documentation and predictability. Once you get something, anything working its quite easy to get other pieces to work as well. They all follow the same pattern.
The player has had major changes in terms of memory use, frame/execution timing, and how it is suspended or not. You're taking one phrase from a non-tech person and judging from that.
So far, gomockingbird seems to be accomplishing this, but I feel they're missing a few of the template items that I enjoy so much in Balsamiq.
> And unless you believe in magic it is unlikely to out-compete in a pre-existing niche.

Cars are faster than land animals. Planes are faster than birds. Not being constrained by needing to have come from slow gradual iteration might open some possibilities, some terrifying. Biology doesn't produce the wheel.

To consider this as a possibility is not to believe in magic.
For anyone interested in an earlier failed attempt of Microsoft (China) into the living room

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Venus
No, definitely not, I just wanted to point that out.

I knew about this for years, having stared at a bug for a whole day before I realized it was the header that was misspelled. It never even crossed my mind until I was away from the keyboard for a few hours.
> How do you get more sincere than, "We failed. We let you down. And we apologize."?

I've noticed with hacker news there is always a few people (different people, not the same ones) that are not satisfied with the apology of the day.

I'm not sure why this is. My initial theory is that the apology didn't address a highly specific issue in the exact manner that person wanted. Apologies like this are (necessarily) non-specific because they address everyone.

Then again, if I want to be cynical, it's possible that that person (not specific to jimboyoungblood) just won't except any apology as adequate.
Stop Building the Following Websites...
Yeah, but in all reality they had 4,000 people trying to use bluetooth (which only has 79 channels). Perhaps it was dumb of them to not use a WIRED keyboard. I didn't see many problems besides the keyboard issue.
Digital Boarding Passes
And I quote, "O my god that guy just got on the plane with his phone"
The difference is humans can see the visual spectrum but not the radio spectrum. This means that people tend to ensure their own privacy in the visual spectrum (by wearing clothes, etc), but don't in the radio spectrum (by transferring sensitive data unencrypted).

You could argue that people are being irresponsible by not paying more attention to their "radio privacy" (and you'd be right), however the lawmakers apparently felt that the advantages of making it illegal outweighed the disadvantages.
It's interesting how Apple's real, live products constantly have to compete against demos.
Thanks, Imma take a look at this after work.
Delivering Cheese With The Greatest of Ease: Details of PBworks release process
Depending on your needs, you may want to try the 'Gala' beta instead:
http://blog.kaourantin.net/?p=89

It's Flash 10.0, but with the hooks for hardware decoding in Mac OSX (that Apple only added very recently to the plugin API). It's supposed to perform much, much better on Mac OSX for video playback.
I took that as a paraphrased quote from a tech journalist.

I hope you are right though.

I know from my experience with Flash on Linux that it is insane, Flash eventually consumes 4gb of memory and slows my computer to a halt. I finally just removed the plugin and browse without flash.
The whole point of a Reset is to have a clean slate to start from. Do you really know, and want to know, every case where IE6/Safari3/ObscureBrowser300 adds a default padding/margin, and how that is different from Opera/Firefox/etc? Same for font families, sizes and styles?

In my opinion, working without a reset of some kind is quite similar to writing C++ classes where data members are not initialized to meaningful values... you just can't trust what you'll end up with.
Long term sustained production capacity and knowledge are types of wealth. How could they not be? They are valuable.

In the long run, they are the most valuable types of wealth. If you think people are too short sighted, you may be right, but that isn't a fault of wealth itself.

Actually, increased knowledge reduces shortsightedness. And BTW so does increased material wealth: people take a more long term view when they aren't starving.
I reviewed Daniel Goleman's book "Emotional Intelligence" on my blog last month, and the psychological framework he uncovers does a good job of accounting for/predicting these kinds of observed results

http://www.zacharyburt.com/2010/04/understanding-human-behav...
For the lack of a better answer, it sets off my spidey sense. Everything is too nicely worded- there is nothing spontaneous or "real" about it. Imagine if you were hearing those words spoken in person. I don't think they'd ring true.

The photo really is the kicker. Nobody has a photo like that just sitting around on their computer. Obviously a lot of effort, from a number of people, went into producing and editing this blog post. Do you believe the same, obviously skilled, team that produced this finely crafted apology could have unintentionally introduced a pricing structure that jacked up the bill for many of their customers?

I'm honestly surprised that so many people fell for it.
I see; what about cases where transactions involve objects at multiple servers? I guess I am confusing server specific locks vs client specific locks.
Do you embed google docs into your wave for requirements...etc?
While it's not his purpose, Mr. Blank is doing what he can to to keep this VC from making "tons of cash" by steering entrepreneurs away from the him.
Flash is an application platform. If it runs out of memory, it's an application that is responsible, and Flash naturally has to compensate.
Oddly enough this makes me feel a bit impotent. Here I am playing with my 1's and 0's... like a caveman. :-p
How perfect does the code need to be that sends people forgotten password links?
Menu subheaders (such as "Rails Plugins" or "Ruby Gems") appear clickable (because of the hand cursor) but do nothing when clicked.

The signature on the about page is a nice touch. =)
I'm betting that that can be circumvented by changing the browser's user agent.
Security engineering: broken promises
Top Amazing Places To Visit In Ukraine | Top Lists (Ayzor.com)
http://blog.jgc.org/2009/10/damn-torpedoes.html (Can't find HN link for it)

http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/12/rules-are-no-obstac... "Rules are no obstacles for committed people"
and I quote, "o my god that man just got on the plane with his phone"
I doubt their credibility because they call Hong Kong a "nation?"
Why New Zealand is a lifestyle superpower
Prolog in effect supplies the recursion into search trees, but for these kinds of problems, it doesn't give you much more than that. Recursion in imperative languages, on the other hand, is not exactly difficult, so long as you're not using an 80s era BASIC interpreter or similar. The clauses largely turn into predicates, Boolean expressions in if-statements. For this kind of static problem, you might have 3x more code in an imperative language, but most of it would be bookkeeping for recursion and backtrack, and syntactic cruft with holes in the middle for your constraints and satisfaction criteria predicates. For most static problems with a fixed set of rules, you really won't be looking at much extra code.

This kind of algorithm is normally expected to be written, tested, debugged and presented in one hour in programming competitions with fifteen year-old contestants. And it's only the algorithm that Prolog would help you with in this case; it's the whole application on the exterior where all the real polish goes, where the testing is more subtle. Writing the core algorithm of a packing problem, or a routing problem, is completely trivial compared to the work that goes into the interface for entering the data. Programming competitions work with a text input file to get rid of this complexity. I speak as one who has competed in and won such competitions.

And FWIW, I don't think GC is a productivity win because managing dynamic memory is not trivial. Managing dynamic memory is trivial, but it's tedious, and it warps your program design, forcing it to be more imperative, more mutable and less functional. The cost of manual management isn't in managing the memory per se, but in managing the complexity of an application that can't rely on GC to manage the memory.

IMO GC's productivity win comes from the lowered bookkeeping costs of more modular and expressive programming styles - most notably in the ability to return newly allocated structures as return values from functions without having to negotiate away the ambiguity as to who owns them. It lets you built data structures that may share substructure, and write transformations over them which may or may not rewrite parts of the substructure, and the transformation may or may not be memoized etc. Doing this with GC is straight-forward; handling all these options with manual memory management requires ownership handoff protocols, shared ownership hacks (e.g. reference counts), inflexible conventions, a preference to mutate rather than return new, etc., greatly increasing code complexity.

And I speak of GC as someone who these days normally writes in a non-GC language, but have implemented garbage collectors, both on the compiler (metadata) and runtime (the marking and sweeping) sides.
This proposal supports using email addresses as identities.
Seems like it would be pretty straightforward. Just update the AppleTV OS with an App Store and BlueTooth+expanded IR capabilities, and let the 3rd party developers bring the internet stuff and advanced input options to it. It seems that Google TV doesn't leverage my local media, so my iTunes/media library is still isolated from my living room, unless I'm missing something and it turns out to be an Android OS variant (supports native 3rd party app development) and developers can implement that sort of functionality with it.
like I always say "If it ain't got a theme song it ain't NoSQL." But maybe more important is the fact that we've got CouchDB (or compatible) databases running on most of the major smart-phone platforms now. W00t!
So an Apple site repeats something that Apples wants us to believe... uhmm, no, i won't believe that just because they said so.

Apples takes 30% of an apps price? Charges for SDK/license (whatever you call it) per year? Has Billions of downloads? And they doon't make much money? Never ever will i believe that.

An interesting read on that, by the way: http://techcrunch.com/2009/05/14/about-those-iphone-app-stor...
GFischer, if you're interested in helping me playtest my trading card game GeekStack (think Magic but where you're a scientist instead of a wizard), email me at peter @ geekstack . com