skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It was really mind-boggling when reading it - but then I did not have much chance to apply the techniques in my work. I've read a lot of positive reviews of this book and how it changed the way people programm - but what was exactly the technique that you picked up from it?

I once copied the crawler using iterators ( http://hop.perl.plover.com/Examples/ALL/ItRobot10.pl ) when we needed a quick script to check our links - and it worked nice for about a 1000 entries and then it suddenly started to be really slow. I tried to find out where that slow down happens and it was after the return statement in traverse - it seems like this code triggers some garbage collector problem. I did not have time to analyze that further - but it happened both in 5.10.1 and 5.12.1.

I've also send a simple bug report to mjd (for the line 'my $html = get($url); - it redeclares $html and so the value becomes invisible from outside of the loop and in particular for the return statement), but I never got any answer from him.
Don't you think they should be showing comments from "gold" users differently? Kind of like what PG did a while ago using different colors highlight distinguished users...
I wonder if this will make an appearance in the new Facebook movie. puke
Or maybe the AT&T network does not suck that much and the Iphone has always been the device terrible at making and keeping calls. AT&T has just gotten the bad rep from the apple fanboys all along.
Yes, RDBMSes already have the capability to tell you how to best optimize them. The problem—and it's a sociological problem, not a technological problem—is that people don't want to tune their databases. Instead, they want to install something that is already tuned 80% correctly (i.e. a NoSQL store), and then ignore the other 20% of possible optimization.

There's a big, unaddressed opportunity here: if you can just make your DB smart enough to tune itself 81% correctly (and that's not very hard—certainly not AI hard) then you can conquer the market for people who don't know how to EXPLAIN their way out of a paper bag. It's not like it would be inventing its schema on the fly; you'd still be feeding it a formal, completely-specified but unoptimized set of tables. It would just do things like:

* Notice when it gets a query with the same parameters 10000x in a row, and grind out an index for it;

* Notice when a large (>100000) set of rows in a table is identical save for their primary key, and only queried by COUNT(foo), and turn those rows into a single row with a foo_count field (and a log table in case a query ever does come in that cares about the IDs);

* Notice when two tables are only ever queried joined together, and morph the primary store for them into a denormalized table, turning the previous, separate tables into views on the denormalized table.

And so on. If you look at, say, Python's hashtable library, it has all sorts of these little "rules of thumb" for when to alter its internal representation, because of what it guesses the user is up to (storing unique pairs, creating mathematical sets, nesting hashes to mimic a complex data structure, etc.) Databases, on the other hand, much bigger systems purely for flexibly storing and querying data, just stubbornly sit there until the DBA (because there must always be a DBA, even if the DB is just being fed migrations written by Rails CRUD coders) comes along to tell them to do the things they already know would make them faster. It's just silly.
I wish they published some numbers though. The conversion rates for freeminum models (that I've seen) haven't been spectacular. Lets hope reddit breaks all rules here.
You can also get more links from Verlinde himself http://twitter.com/erikverlinde but as he twitts

Tomorrow I have to teach. Third year students. They also want to hear about emergent gravity. It is going to be tough to explain it to them...
US scientists create cloth that can listen
That would segment Reddit immediately into at least four communities among the gold/ungold and supports-highlighting/opposes-highlighting axes, and I suspect many members of those communities are going to be violently passionate that only their position is acceptable for True Reddit Supporters and that the heretics must burn.
That would be their undoing. The last thing egalitarian reddit needs is a class system.

Or maybe I am wrong, Slashdot has been starring their paid subscribes for ages, but I am not sure reddit wants to stoop to slashdot levels.
They mentioned 6000 supporters.
Haha, classic.
Episode 1: 2006 Melville Carrie's Estate Pinot Noir
reality can be inconvenient. Why not accept the challenge of guessing what the author will say (eg. by researching on wikipedia or Porter's competitive advantage)? It's one of the most effective learning strategies - get it right or wrong, you won't forget.

One approach is to not expect to have customer-based competitive advantage at the start, but have a plan of how to get there. Eg. a product that has network effects + a plan for how to get there.

I think the idea of enduring or sustainable competitive advantage is a bit misleading, because things always change, so competitive advantage is dynamic. It can be more helpful to in terms of the duration of a competitive advantage. For example, when you start off with an easy-to-copy product that is in demand, you do have a competitive advantage - it's just that it doesn't last long. But you can use that brief period to build the next competitive advantage. (in rock climbing, a dynamic move is when you are not statically supported, but rely on your momentum to reach a stable point).
My favorite line here: "If you don't want to move to the cloud, we're not your folks"

Other gems from Ballmer:

"Google's not a real company. It's a house of cards."

"Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches."

My personal favorite: "Vista is faster than XP"
Can you expand on that and tell us why this is so? Are we on the brink of sanitizing nuclear waste?
10 years too late
Is this effort based on same winning strategy as Kin?
I guess people _will_ pay to keep something they love alive. Great to see humanity at work.
Out-dated version of wordpress.
I think it's a fair critique despite the inflammatory title. He's not really opposed to 3-D, as long as it doesn't come at the expense of good filmmaking.

There's a goldrush going on right now in Hollywood to cash in on the premium for 3-D ticket sales before the novelty wears off, which means we'll have a lot of fake or lower quality 3-D films. The 3-D craze really only kicked into high gear last year when Avatar was released. I imagine that a lot of the titles currently being released were intended to be 2D.

I'm looking forward to what the future will bring. I'm sure the technology will continue to improve and the filmmakers will continue to become more effective at using the third D.
I find that I, as a worker, overlap quadrant numbers 2 and 1.

This is from the post entitled "Shafuu 101–Choosing a company for the new generation".

"Learning Japanese business culture is always a hot topic for those looking to deal on this side of the Pacific, but little do many know that Japanese young adults are almost just as confused by the the traditions and hype surrounding the complex world of Japanese shafuu."[1]

[1] http://www.japansubculture.com/2010/05/shafuu-101-choosing-a...
Congrats to reddit team, despite some frequent "this is not reddit" remarks here on HN I still love that community.

Out of curiosity I just checked compete.com and was disappointed to learn that Digg is approximately 8 times as big, lets hope that's the measurement error.
Since when does HN need mathematical rigor for hypotheses? I have never seen this standard applied to blog posts about how to be a leader, pitching your ideas, how to program, etc. All of which usually don't come with the statistical proof with which they should come if they want to make a scientific claim... It's all just insights and thoughts.
Chrome gave me a malware warning. I'm not sure if it's legit, but just FYI.
There was a time when FUD like that would scare people off. That time is long gone.
To be fair, I don't trust people willing to use Wordpress to be diligent about keeping it up to date to begin with.

Frankly if you're going to use Wordpress, just use their hosted service.

Please
"we decided that individually-branded sites felt more authentic and trustworthy."

Doesn't Craigslist fly in the face of this theory?
What's an example of a useful thing you can write?
Ask HN: hardware startups, where to begin?
Every once in a while I get an idea for a cool little gadget paired with a web service. I'm pretty good at web services but have no idea how to approach the task of building a hardware prototype on the cheap... Any blogs/sites you guys can recommend?
Okay, Mr. HilbertSpace, would you please name a few such books? I think you're getting a bad rap in this thread. Feel free to email me if you want, my address is zackster [@] gmail [.] com
4) The experience sucks. After my second 3d movie, I've vowed never to pay for a 3D ticket again. The experience is actually worse than 2D, it makes it harder to focus on certain parts of the screen etc. Even in Avatar the 3D wasn't very good. And his point about 48fps rings true, although I've never seen it.
Coal power plants release a LOT of radioactive material into the atmosphere, much more than the couple of barrels of nicely storable waste a nuclear plant produces.
Exactly the same here. It's evil marketing ploy at its worst, a lot worse than, say, the camera's industry focus on selling megapixels.
Let's see how many Google products with massive social components I can come up with:

Gmail obviously
Youtube obviously
Earth has a huge community building layers
Maps is used and embedded by every other social service out there
Blogger of course
Groups of course
Knol, though I guess you can call it a failure
Orkut is massive in Brazil
Picasa photo sharing
Reader has sharing
Talk obviously
Nope. Not real; I'm currently floating.

Silly bogus comment aside: I hate paywalls.
And that's where the global warming theory came from : opposition to coal plants, in favor of Nuclear plants. Since then it has been picked up an run with by everyone as a reason to use their product / not use a competitors.

The resulting water is so muddy nobody can see through.

I would have thought that the non-greenhouse pollution from coal, plus the deaths caused from mining put Nuclear in front. Even in the extremely rare events of Nuclear accidents the total deaths are lower than the ongoing toll from coal mining and shipping. But nobody wants to discuss that, all we get now is OMG NUCLEAR WASTE and OMG GREENHOUSE GASES!

The worst outcome of it all is the obsession with wind power over all else, despite all the drawbacks as mentioned in this paper : land use, siting issues with regards to transmission to demand areas, wildlife impact, noise pollution and what happens when the wind stops. The greenhouse gas debate started as a support to transition from coal/oil to nuclear, and we ended up talking about going from coal to wind power because the wrong interest groups got control of the dialogue.
Out of 8 million active users. So 0.075% donated. About one donation per thousand users.
I just got an xperia x10 and I don't care for no htc phone no more
We (http://gameplanapp.com) work from a spare room in @andycroll's apartment. It's very functional, we do pair programming so it's great for focus, and we launched our MVP in 3 months so I guess it's been going great so far.

P.S. Shameless plug - you can read more about us at NakedStartup http://nakedstartup.com
Filipino singer Ogie Alcasid to file a case
I need to go to sleep, but I'll give you the tl;dr version of how you sanitize waste from most of the reactors currently in operation.

First, let it cool off for a while. We're doing this. Since the volume of the waste is so small, and it's so well contained, there's really no rush to process it right away.

Second, chemically separate it into its parts. Deal with them in different ways:

Uranium and plutonium can be recycled and used as fuel again. Hooray for recycling! France does this; other countries are just storing the waste for later, since non-recycled uranium is cheap these days.

Short-lived isotopes can be left to decay. They are short-lived, after all. This is happening as we speak.

Medium-lived isotopes are the really troublesome ones. Hit them with some spare neutrons to transmute them into something shorter-lived.

Put the remaining, much-diminished waste in storage. It should become harmless after a few hundred years, rather than a few hundred thousand.

Fun fact: it's a lot easier with something like a liquid fluoride thorium reactor, which makes the chemistry really easy and prevents a lot of the nasty isotopes from forming in the first place. You can skip most of the rigmarole.

(Huh. I guess that was longer than I thought. Oh well; who needs sleep, anyway?)
Summer: The dining room table in a condo provided by my summer job boss. Otherwise, dorm room.
Not every person agrees on every aspect of the relational model, or of the SQL implementations.

There is a rigorous notion of .net object.
Give it time. The tech is still pretty new.

I've only seen one move in 3d: avatar. I thought it was pretty amazing to look at.

With any new technology, there are trade offs. This goes for movie from b+w to color, color to digital, etc. For the move to 3d, some parts of the screen are not in focus. Don't try and look at them directly. Let your eyes be drawn to the parts in focus and you won't have a problem. That's how the director wanted it any way (this goes for 2d movies too, it's just used less frequently).
Brands are aimed at demographics, which is why Unilever has the Dove brand and the Lynx brand for basically the same product for example. People identify with a brand, have a perception and make purchasing decisions based on it.

What Joel's point is, I believe, is that generic umbrella series/brands are bad for user/customer perception (such as his "For Dummies" example). And as the entire Stack Exchange ecosystem is going to cover a massive range of topics it makes more sense to separate them as the good perception of a Stack Exchange cooking site isn't going to help the perception of a Stack Exchange mechanics site.
Why are you being upvoted?

From your link: "The equivalent dose for 365 bananas (one per day for a year) is 3.6 millirems (36 μSv)."

500 bananas is 5 millirems. Try 500k.
hrmm...interesting. Thnx for the tip. Seems like MediaTemple has been infected. ARGH!!!!!!!!!
The real problem with 3D is that all (real, not CG) cameras have a depth of field - a certain range over which the image is in focus. This is great in a 2D film to focus the audience's attention on something, but the 3D setup just begs the user to focus on what they think is important, so you end up focusing on some fuzzy object instead of the subject. In other words, depth of field replicates the fuzziness of your peripheral vision, but 3D asks you to look into and around the scene. It's a view mechanics uncanny valley - and I don't think they can fix this as long as there are flat screens.
I like this a lot. My suggestion would be to write a nice distutils package, then put it into the python cheeseshop. I'd be willing to generate one for you if you want.

Looks great though, I will definitely be using this :)
For a hosted service in a mature market would an open source core be considered an advantage, disadvantage or irrelevant?
Actually, vim already comes with OSX. Just need to use a non-transparent background in Terminal.app and maximize it.

I used to use vi on vt52 terminals back at school to avoid the distraction of the GUI elements in Microsoft Word.
So you are defining 'social components' as within the user space of the Internet proper. The author seems to be defining the user space as a single branded site.

One difference is this: Google creates products that are designed to be shared via URLs. Other companies are really good at keeping their users logged in to their domains while users share with each other.
They could charge you for how much shipping would have cost if you weren't an Amazon Prime member.
Stoop to?

I love reddit dearly, but there are some days when you could run it through.

sed -e 's/narwal/Natalie Portman/'

and get something that was recognizably slashdot circa 2002.
No?

Source: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/microsoft_sues_salesfor...

It's not even typical Microsoft behavior. From the article above:

Although the frequent target of such suits, the Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft itself has only filed patent infringement suits four times in its history.

That makes me think that Microsoft is taking cloud computing very seriously, as Ballmer alludes to, and I would include going out of their way to seek injunctions against one of the largest players in cloud computing.
Moving to SF for a job, any hackers looking for a roomie?
Got a job at a (now somewhat established?) startup in Mountain View. I'm aiming to move by the end of the month, but I could flex that if I had to (trying to avoid it).

Details:

I do own a cat, so you'll have to take that into consideration.

I'd like to live in or near Mountain View, plan to travel by foot/bicycle ASAP initially. Open to other options if you're near public transport (detail what's available if this is the case).

I'll be in SF until Thursday, then I head back to NYC until I actually move, so if you're interested and want to meet me, now's the time I'm afraid.

If you think you'd like a programmer (I'm presently working in Django, js, Couchdb, and potentially Cassie) for a roommate, let me know!

Also, I'll be eyeballing the thread if anyone has any questions. I can provide character references, including the current roommates if you're interested.

Your responses: try to get any questions, caveats, etc out of the way in the initial comment for efficiency's sake. If you're not comfortable discussing $ in the thread, just drop contact details and we'll talk.

Thanks for your time and thanks PG + YC crew for providing this wonderful community!
Say, hypothetically, you discover a long, well-written, insightful and generally intellectual-curiosity-gratifying essay on the craft of programming, titled "10 Ways to Grow Your Penis". Would it be reasonable to editorialize?
yeah they'll just bundle a cloud with Windows and give it away for free. wait a minute...
Consider if we'd only ever seen one person jump from a building, but it was from 10,000 feet.

(Consider, also, that some might not find 'fall distance' a reasonable analog to radiation relative to other options like 'head trauma induced by soccer ball'.)
I making people think about their environmental impact when they are shopping online is not a popular option here.

If you live in a big city, and travel to work, you would have ample opportunity to buy stuff on the way and back. This is what I do, but then I bike and actually give a shit about stuff like this.
How a Tourist Can Help you with Your Startup
the whole premise of microsoft cloud technologies is windows, windows virtualization, and .net. from what i understand things like lamp, ruby on rails, and so forth reign supreme in this industry. is ballmer on crack?
Buzz and Wave both still have potential though. For me, if they would just roll out a standalone Buzz site that lets me view Buzz's and post without going into my GMail inbox, I'd use it a lot more. But having to go through GMail just feels incredibly clunk.

Wave also has tons of potential, but they need to do a better job of explaining to people what it's useful for.
And as somebody else pointed out, a better UI would be nice as well. Using Wave is still confusing to people who are used to different metaphors.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Book_of_Communism
There is physical/virtual room, however, the professors may not have the ability to handle all the students. This does not differ from the 200 student classes at a regular university, but many on-line professors do all the work them selves- no student aides.

I have heard mixed reviews from many academics on the subject of online instruction. Some think it "spoils the crop", while others think it helps those in difficult situations- where going to a university is not an option.

I feel that education is education, in that person will only get back what they put in. Hybrid, IMO, provide a nice middle ground. There types of programs allow a student to do readings, tests, and other assignments online, but at some point require them to meet with the professor to go over- in more depth- some of the subject content. Again, a person will only get out of this what they put in, so if they meet with the professor and ask no questions they will get little in return.
Probably a web server which stores data in a distributed (and fault tolerant) way in all these clients. There will be no central point of failure. This will be really worthy of being called "cloud" as opposed to a bunch of servers put together in a farm.

In addition to the advantage of being fault tolerant, a system like this will be able to balance the load in such a way that the website never goes down in case of a traffic surge.

Another benefit (or not, depending on how you see it) will be that a website hosted in a torrent cloud will be difficult to take down by anyone.
Pick an embedded platform (SDK) suited to your problem (in terms of price versus computational power needed), and learn how to think about code and write C in terms of the limitations of an embedded environment. (HAHA filesystems. what's that?)

Prototype, make it efficient, make it cheap (fewer components), make the spec, find someone who can do a test-market batch, and if it catches...SCALE.
Just like they are the leaders in operating systems, mobile devices, search engines, development environments and browsers sigh
For what it's worth, Cingular (which became AT&T Wireless) was awful in most of the areas I used it, even when I had a phone that was just a phone. I then got a normal phone on Verizon, and it was a night and day difference. I can count the number of dropped calls with that phone on one hand.

That's not to say that the iPhone's antenna has ever been exemplary or even one of the top priorities for Apple, but it's not at all a stretch to think it's mostly AT&T's fault. Don't blame fanboys for what can be explained by AT&T just sucking.
When was the last time you used it? Wave is not slow currently.
Http://www.addthis.com/bookmark.php?v=250&eidy=mxa4250
Charlie Cheever's comment "Python data structures map well to JavaScript data structures" resonates with me. I'm building something in Erlang right now and having come from Python, it's just plain grating.
Haven't you previously argued that founding is consistently undervalued?
I think their argument about series domains vs standalone names is actually backward. If people like the StackOverflow format you want to easily attract those people to the other sites that use the same engine. You want cross-polination of visitors, and you probably want to get some PageRank momentum of the established base domain name.
I'd give anything for a friendly narwhal right now.
Those would have also seemed much more odd then, for several reasons.
domains with dashes tend to be easier to read, imo
I can kinda see Joel's point, but it runs counter to the whole notion of branding. Cooking may seem to have little to do with mechanics, but a QA website about cooking vs. a QA website about mechanics has, well, the QA website part in common.

That's not to say I'd put up with crap on a mechanic's QA site even if the cooking QA site was good, but previous experience with Google search absolutely helped sell the Gmail switch.
Windows Phone 7 Developer Tools Beta Released
Good points. Text also allows for version control; although AppInventor is targeted towards newbies, a graphical-based IDE is going to be challenging when you're trying to diff between two seemingly-identical versions.
what's the size of the market that they are targeting?