skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Forgot to include it originally, but it would probably be good to study Map/Reduce as well:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MapReduce

http://labs.google.com/papers/mapreduce.html

Caching is huge too... IO is expensive, RAM access is cheap. The more you can pre-load, pre-calculate, and/or pre-sort stuff and store it in memory, the better (in terms of avoiding expensive IO anyway). Caching has it's own issues though: if you cache so aggressively that you exhaust physical ram and cause more swapping, you can actually hurt yourself. Also, you have to deal with the possibility of stale data in the cache, and determining when and how to expire and reload items in the cache. But still, caching is essential, it's just not necessarily easy.

Also, for perspective if nothing else, read the papers and stuff on SEDA (Staged Event Driven Architecture). There's still debate about how effective the SEDA approach is, but reading the discussion(s) will help you appreciate the issues involved. http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~mdw/proj/seda/
I'm not sure you need the whole package, but it sure helps and potentially saves time/cost down the road.

@moe I think branding is always important.
I've never had problems renting a place without a credit history.
What are code spit interviews? What was a poor approach? Just curious.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_G-20_Pittsburgh_summit

the Obama Administration announced a change of venue to Pittsburgh in order to highlight the city's economic recovery following the collapse of its manufacturing sector in the latter half of the 20th century.
Life Extension: Science or Pipe Dream?
Fact Sheet: Libyan Ship en Route to Gaza - The Israel Project
Unfortunately, he practiced the first kind in his blog post.
Here is what I didn't like:

- Bad domain name.
- Way too much color. My eyes have trouble focusing on anything because it is very distracting.
- There are a lot of background images that probably aren't needed that would make the design much cleaner.
- Is the breaking news really that import to new clients? I would imagine it isn't and it could be put somewhere else that is out of the way.
- Add a minute or two video explaining your service in place of the slide show.
Luckily I'll be able to crash with the aforementioned friend for about a week — any longer than that and I'll have to hit up acquaintances or dole out for a hotel or a place on Airbnb.

As for the Social Security card, hopefully that's not commonly a dealbreaker…

Thanks for the advice.
Are you looking at the "newest" questions? or the off-topic questions?
somewhere teachers could go to for inspiration.

Unfortunately, a lack of inspiration is only part of the problem. My middle school science teacher would do stuff like this all the time, and it was great. In high school I had a teacher try similar things, but after a while they were asked to stay in the classroom and teach from the book. Tragic, if you ask me.
To add to your point, I would say that the touchscreen might be the killer hardware part of iOS devices, while Safari would be the killer software app on the iOS devices. If the browsing experience was not very good, I'd be way more interested in Android's offerings.
I really don't understand the author's position.

And it's also a very loaded link, should have the libertarians out of the woodwork.

I'm not sure if it belongs in Hacker News though (I'd love to discuss it, but it doesn't seem the right forum for it).

Edit: I'd like to know why you disagree with me.

My take on the article:

It differenciates between

"Grinds" (I take them as the "enterpreneurs", the Randian Hank Reardens if you will)

and

"Princes" (which I take as the "cronies", "old-boys networks", etc)

He states that "princes" are more interesting to be around and other subjective stuff, but then goes on to the meat of the article IMO:

he realizes it's the enterpreneurs and small businesses that drive the economy - "For jobs to recover, the grinds have to recover"

and that it's largely the government's fault (and banks, etc): "it’s hard to see how that will happen so long as households are still so leveraged, government debt is still so unnerving and the business climate is still so terrible for entrepreneurs."

so he wants the "grinds" to redouble their efforts: "how we are going to light a fire under the country’s loners, its contrarians and its narrow, ambitious outsiders"

yet he doesn't seem to realize it's the gov't and the "princes" which hinder the "grinds"
Interesting but it's hard to see how schizophrenia would ever be genetically advantageous for an entire species.
SFBA (tech; a trader would be a lot less sexy than the founder of a tech startup even pre-fu money)

Tech startup founders are a dime a dozen around here. In fact, I've found the best way to get a girl interested is to say "Hi, I'm not a software engineer!"
You can host on Amazon EC2, selecting the Asia Pacific (Singapore) region (the same goes for S3, SimpleDB, etc). I'm not sure if the plan is to go global, but if you do, you can easily expand into US (East and West) as well as EU (Ireland).
Just to be perfectly clear (not that you made this mistake, but because I see so many others doing so when this topic comes up):

The terms "pro-business" and "free market" are often taken as synonymous, when nothing could be further from the truth. A real capitalist market is not "pro-business" any more than it is "pro-consumer": it provides a level playing field in which all comers can interact based on their own merits and needs.

The "pro-business" policies that we see so much of are not examples of evil capitalism. They are just as anti-capitalist as is socialism. These policies are more correctly called "corporatism".

Please do not view the economic evils we see today, and use that to tar the ideas of capitalism.
An interesting thought from that discussion:

"I agree with you, the resources in the Valley can't be beat.
Fortunately there is a way to leverage both - we are trying to pave the way for development in Pittsburgh and business in SV. There are many upsides to this approach - incredible team, dedication, outside the bubble, lower costs, better office space, local recruiting, etc. We are testing this all out at the moment - so far so good!"
"I’d even argue that the main reason kernel code tends to be efficient is not because it’s written in C but because it’s written with parallelism and reentrancy in mind, by people who understand those issues."

It's used to build kernels because it doesn't require multiples of the needed RAM in order for the memory management to be timely.
"- cache like a hoarder"

This isn't necessarily true. If the data is likely to be very volatile, it will probably be better just to ping the database than to bother trying to cache it.
I really dislike articles that use the amorphous notional "we."

In this case, maybe "we" refers to newspaper writers "mired in debates over macroeconomic models" but I doubt newspaper writers are going to "to light a fire under the country’s loners, its contrarians and its narrow, ambitious outsiders."
>People who search in "how can i ..." type of questions are probably not a representative sample of the whole population. My guess is that they are less tech-savvy users on average.

Hmm... I dunno. I search this way all the time. Mainly because I assume a lot of other people do as well and, more importantly, it works. Am I the only one?
>With help from iPad

Does apple actually pay them to print things like this?
Part of the attraction to ORMs is that you just define your classes and essentially freeze-dry and thaw objects with a couple of lines of code.

The problem here is that you stop thinking about your data as an independent thing that must be designed for long-term persistence.

Code itself should be mutable, easily changed and modified. The on-disk data is the opposite of this -- it must be iterated on carefully, and its requirements must be clearly defined as to be supported in the long-term.

I'm very wary of tools that do not make it easy to explicitly and rigorously define the data model entirely separately from the object model that will be used to represent it in a specific version of one application.

I think tools like LINQ are valuable because they make working with relational algebra and projections cleaner, but do not abstract the fact that you are working with a long-term persistent data store that is not the same thing as your comparatively short-lived object graph.
120 Hz is ambiguous. Are you referring to the display refresh speed? Was the discussion in the context of a specific physical display technology?
Thanks a ton. Do you find that two externals really help?
High Frequency Trading changing the math underlying the markets
hm. I wonder if this is public data, and how many people would sue me if I went through the effort to dig it up and publish it? many price quotes in the co-location industry are protected by NDA... I wonder if fiber locations are too?
I've been using SQL heavily for 12 years and mostly agree. The problem with SQL though is that it lacks abstractions. Any time you're forced to use dynamic SQL, the language has failed.

For example: suppose you want to write a SQL script that populates a database with dummy data. There's no way to do it without dynamic sql, since SQL doesn't let you parameterize table and column names.
Ask HN: Does anyone use the Amazon Mechanical Turk API?
I'm working on a project that relies on a human workforce to perform some simple image identification tasks. AWS Turk seemed to fit the requirements pretty well, and I have the basics working with externally-hosted tasks.

Does anyone here actually use Turk, though? The forum seems nearly abandoned (http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/forum.jspa?forumID=11), and no Amazon employees have responded to any questions. The API has not had any updates in years. Is the Mechanical Turk now a walking corpse?

Read on for a description of the problem I've run into. Maybe a fellow enterprising HN reader dealt with something similar and found a solution. :)

I need to enforce that the same worker does not look at closely-related images. I can enforce that in my app, and basically show a task that says "please return this task and try some of our other tasks in a couple of hours". This is annoying, and drives up the "returned tasks" statistic for the workers. I would very much like to make Amazon filter out tasks for users who have run out of valid work in my system.

At first, it seemed that Turk qualifications fit the bill. Unfortunately, the Turk system does not support "negative" qualification, e.g., it cannot only assign tasks to workers who do not have a particular qualification. Amazon employees have not addressed this question from a year ago: http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/thread.jspa?threadID=32744&tstart=0

Then, I tried blocking workers once they run of tasks, and unblocking them once work shows up. This does not affect task filtering, and instead tells the user about a block. Additionally, blocking may or may not have really bad side effects for workers, another question Amazon employees have ignored: http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/thread.jspa?threadID=48851&tstart=0

Advice and suggestions welcome.
You could also try any of the sites listed here:

http://www.moreofit.com/get_matches.php?url=http%3A%2F%2Fpat...
If you have a referer from Google they will serve you pages. Google for the article's headline + inurl:pagewanted=all or fake the referer. You can also use an account from bugmenot.com.
A better title (IMHO) to the article would be "Compare results, not approaches.", as stated in the last sentence.
Former mortgage company office in down-on-luck building with 50% occupancy. Bargained landlord down to $700/mo. Already network-wired because of all those mortgage officer desks. Manager's office turned into conf room, nice perk.

Previous occupants split in the middle of the night, leaving mortgage records stuffed in filing cabinets(possible scammers?) and furniture! All ours for free. Not the records; those we shredded.
Here are some other related websites that might interest you:

http://www.moreofit.com/similar-to/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fdesigni...
http://makezine.com/projects/
Tevatron 'has found Higgs boson', say rumours
A key quote from the article: "a click-whoring headline about the Huffington Post."
Consciousness is a big tricky problem and questions on the origins only add to that confusion if they don't state which definition of consciousness it uses. There are many different definitions, the most important ones I've seen so far are the subjectiveness (the experiencing of thoughts, which is what Descartes referred to as 'thinking') and the idea of an executive control of thoughts and actions.

I'm not quite sure why you think that neurons could have a micro-consciousness. Do you think that consciousness is an irreducible force in this world like physical energy?
I am curious also, I was just guessing, I hope I didn't insult anyone. For topics where you can expect to find the exact same question on Q&A sites and forums this is a good approach. It seems though that people who are not familiar with how search engines work often type in questions, as if they are asking an oracle.
it was a deal breaker for me twice while I was out there and it takes a couple weeks lead time to get a replacement
I have been in NYC for the last two and a half months. Granted, that is not a long time, but I have met a lot of girls - even around the financial district - and I have not had similar experiences. No doubt these girls exist but I everywhere I have been there has always been plenty of sweet and genuine girls.
That doesn't sound like much of an explanation. All it has done is kicked the problem downstairs, from explaining how an entire brain can have consciousness to explaining how a single neuron can have a "micro-consciousness", which sounds like an even more difficult thing to explain.
How much does it cost to own a car in san fran? If it's $X/month for gas, insurance and the amortized value of a cheap decent used car, you should just factor that into the rent cost and see if it ends up better.
Here's the best photo, imho, courtesy of skitch.
http://skitch.com/aarond/dcjnd/kidspost-the-edge-of-the-eart...
What you want in PHP would be $array = range(0,10); I guess. I can't think of a time when I wanted to assign directly to a non-sequential number in a vector and have a (potentially huge) amount of space taken up "below" it; wouldn't that typically be a bug?
The IE6 Death Clock Keeps Ticking
I've never understood why programmers don't love SQL the language.

Many programmers do love SQL. It's not a perfect solution, but it's better than most of the via alternatives.

Anyone that "hates" SQL should be forced to read C.J. Date's Database in Depth, after which, if they still hate SQL, it will at least be for the right reasons.

http://www.amazon.com/Database-Depth-Relational-Theory-Pract...
private fiber maps are sometimes kept private (post 9-11) on vague "anti-terrorism" grounds.

however, the palo alto metro fiber map is public. I just don't happen to have a copy on my iPad, sorry.
Creating A #1 Rank in Google
Impossible, right? Not really worth the time, right? Wrong on both accounts.
Many times while entering phrases into Google, I find a lot of somewhat related sites, but hardly ever anything exact. So why bother on getting these supposedly un-searched terms?
HN does this to some extent:

* Only allow flagging if viewing the permalink causes less flagging

* No changing votes and small buttons causes people to think more about voting

* Little to no help keeps only the dedicated coming to the site
Yes , ordering that toothpaste alone is more energy wasteful , but:

1.amazon has a really strong incentive to prevent too many "single toothpaste" scenarios.

2.e-commerce delivery (from warehouse to home) takes 1/3 of the gas of driving to the store , and it's much more practical and realistic to convert a fleet of UPS trucks into clean energy , than household cars.

If this grows big, this looks like a thing that can be part of the lives of the whole population(not only environmentalists like us) and be a serious part in the fight for global warming.
Yeah, this is one of the most annoying things about PHP for me. Another similar one is that you can't use empty() on the result of a function call without assigning it to a variable first, and the error you get is something about an invalid write context, which is pretty opaque if you don't just happen to know what it means already.
Doesn't amazon tote use freelance shipping companies?
Thanks for clarifying calculations. Yet, would you please also include the calculation of eCPM of $18.00?
PR Experts: iPhone 4 Hardware Recall Is 'Inevitable'
T In The Park Tickets
It certainly is true that there is a possibility. However, I'd suspect that the impact a voting octopus has on players and the overall outcome of a game where millions of people are stakeholders is very slight to say the least.
looking at the on topic questions it seems more like a general QF FAQ than a specific Q and A type place.
See also:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1077521

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=750858

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=730346

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=716870

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=555971

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=555549
Yeah, I see what you mean now...

It's funny how you can be happy with something for so long and then...BOOM! You see it in a completely different way. HN is definitely good for that :)
Creating Shazam in Java
The Internet Has Replaced the Consultant
"amazing startup vibe (literally buzzing)"

Either they have an electrical problem or you misused the word "literally".
I would have assumed that, being the New York Times, he referring to readers of the newspaper (Americans).

Quit intentionally being daft :P
When I was younger I would have agreed wholeheartedly with this article because he seems more knowledgeable. After a few years experience I would have disagreed with him. Now I'm experienced enough to realize I have no idea if he's right or wrong but he seems to make reasonable points.

I've only worked in I/O bound, memory bound, and CPU bound code before (but never at the same time.) My hats off to anyone or group that has to work in these types of situations. Guess that's why I'm not a kernel level developer.
There are funnier examples - like WriteRoom (simple notepad for $25) or a To-Do list for $50.

This list is just how mac users troll themselves.
Hi Jeff, can you say something why Cluster Compute Instances use HVM instead of paravirtualization?
Cloud Computing with Homomorphic Encryption
Richard Stallman recently posed an interesting problem for encrypted computing in which the computer never has access to the data it processes in unencrypted form. This would resolve a lot of criticisms about the security of utility computing. That is, who monitors the administrators (quis custodiet ipsos custodes)?
Ask NH: Would you hire a person from overseas to work for your start-up?
It seems that the most of product development (not all of it, that's for certain), that involved ruby / python web development is going on in US, UK, and EU.
The rest of Eurasia seems to be more involved in outsourcing / support or enterprise development. Rare Public web cases (comparing to the counties stated above).

Question is as simple as follows: would you agree to hire a person, who can speak your language (even though it's not native for him), for remote job? Or will it stop you, so you'd rather find someone closer to your area for that matter?

Thanks in advance
I went through 4 domain changes already...haha, got any ideas? :)

A more simplistic homepage sounds necessary. Thanks for the feedback!
What really concerns me about this theory is what it implies for the 90% of the human race that isn't European. Since various human groups separated about 50,000+ years ago and consciousness is only 3,000 years old, when did they acquire consciousness? Were Native Americans and Australian Aborigines unconscious until taught to read and write? Are they still unconscious?

I suppose this is probably dealt with somewhere in the book.
> That's weird, and does seem like a wart. But is this really a problem in practice that leads to performance difficulties in real code?

Here's some code I wrote in 2005 that ran into this issue: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Code/MediaWiki/10549

> It seems to me that if I'm using a PHP dictionary as an array, I'd know the length, and thus I'd be guaranteed that any access exists.

The use case is the common idiom of populating a hash, and then iterating other hashes and checking if their keys exist in the original.

In the example above I was loading ~50 files with 1000 key hashes each to check if there were any leftover translation strings in the translated files that weren't in the English original.

Because the values could never be NULL I could get away with not using array_key_exists() which reduced the runtime from 60 to 2 seconds. But it's pretty silly that the core datastructures of the language have pitfalls like these.

>> This is actually a major problem [...]

> Agreed, and it is a huge pain when you want to do something after a request but yet you don't want to tie up the user in the mean time.

> I'm not sure I'd want PHP to be a language that makes it easy to have a persistent execution model though; that simplicity (and restriction) is one of the things that has made the language so popular and scalable. PHP's model usually works fine for the kind of web-based problems it's intended for.

In some ways, especially the built-in template language. But overall I think PHP as a isn't simple or newbie friendly at all. Its main advantage was that it offered a really simple execution model + Apache module. Which ISPs and others could easily offer along with MySQL, with little administration time compared to offering equivalent shell services.

It was also was one of the first to have friendly online documentation with lots of syntax highlighted example code, and comments where people could submit more examples.

But as a language it was never very competitive, and due to some of the tradeoffs made PHP never acquired a real community of module writers and re-usability. Thus most large PHP code bases end up being big balls of mud compared to equivalent code written with Catalyst, Django or even Rails.

These days it seems to be mostly heading for being a worse Java with more bugs. Unless you have existing code in PHP other languages are probably a better fit for web applications these days.
Not sure where you're coming from... I just do. Remember, I can read my own thoughts, and I know which meaning my thoughts are referring to.
Same here - just my first honest impression. Spammy words: 123, affiliate marketing, free, make MORE money, affiliate program.
Here are the tips on how to write a literature review
Writing a literature review for a research paper is must for students at some period of their Educational career. Literature review is a discussion about the particular subject or area. The good literature review gives much credit to the author of the research paper.
While this is a fun book, I'm pretty sure several parts of it were proven false in the early 80's.

Worth reading for the fun of it though.
Great graph, a simplified one to see the summarized view quickly. But to see the true insanity and complexity of the Linux family tree, see below.

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:GNU-Linux_distro_time...

http://www.club-admiralty.com/main/history/diagrams/osdiagra...
oops, my mistake. it was the same process.