skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What a super idea. It's true that IRC is a little cold but the distinction is that if you want to ignore it for a bit you can, whereas if you set up 'office hours' you actually have to be there which only works if you have a reasonably regular life. I usually don't even know what time I'll have lunch on any given day (if at all) so it would be hard for me to join this but I really think it is a great initiative.
Simon Marlow on Multicore Programming in Haskell
I work at a large "enterprise" company (35,000+) and .NET is the primary tech for in-house custom application development. Much of the development is built around SOA, so there are very few "standalone" apps that is considered "enterprise" in size/scope (i have limited industry exposure, but i highly doubt many org's build anything truly resembling "enterprise" software -- they buy it).

Being familiar with .NET and Ruby/Rails, you would be hard-pressed to find .NET development in my org that couldn't be done as well as or better in Ruby/Rails.

The reality is .NET is a "safe" choice for large businesses. The people making these technology decisions do not understand (or care about) the technical aspect of the technology, but rather look for the status quo/known quantity (few large firms want to use 'unproven' technology), support contracts (if something breaks we can at least get the vendor to fix it), available/sustainable (and ultimately off-shoreable) labor, and a "unified platform" (Exchange email leads to active directory leads to MS product A leads to MS product B, etc.).

It comes down to the high-level IT governance, and what IT steering committees are comfortable with staking their reputation/jobs on.

"No one ever got fired for buying IBM (or MS)"

The only reason why .NET and Ruby/Rails developers solve different kinds of problems is because management are large companies are too scared/lazy to try out new solutions, thus Ruby (and many other lang devs) aren't even allowed to solve ".NET problems".

Anyhow - the article was just a nice little PR move anyhow.
Why dropbox did not implemented something like this? Any idea?
He's parsing queries to DDG to determine if they are the type that WolframAlpha has good results for. The objective is to cut down the number of queries sent to WolframAlpha.
$38.5 million for Squarespace
How is that ironic? Tough to deliver a 3D globe in a web page without Flash right now. And the rendering engine is only a small part of compiling and delivering geo data and imagery efficiently.
Microsoft's KIN: A Eulogy
Programming contests
Hey.

In doing some reading, I've seen various articles talking about programming contests as a way to weed out wheat/chaff.

So, we're wondering, what's the thought process on this. Given that we're in a recession, and we've got lots of replies for programming jobs, are people willing/up to going through programming contests?

Let the thoughts roll in!!

Thanks
Well, you want a majordomo - someone who will hire and supervise staff. Alas, the problem is recursive - how do you hire and supervise a majordomo?
Is crashing your USERS browser a good thing?
this is awesome. google chrome version please. :)

(if that isn't possible - how come?)
Pretty neat idea, but if you've been at it for a decade why would the next three months suddenly make a difference ?
Does the AP not do this? Anyhow, I appreciate speaking up as I would have never known. I'll be sure to only link the the originating sources out of respect for my peers here.
Twitter / Matt Mullenweg: Thesis WP theme violates WP license
This is what Noah Kagan <okdork.com> did when looking for his SF apartment.
Nothing about the HTML specifies this kind of menu styling.
fiverr.com has plenty of those.
Does anyone know how much a music DRM system actually costs to develop? The voice of the internets says that it costs at least a bajillion dollars, is a huge financial burden on the music industry and they're passing the costs on directly to the artists.

Realistically I'd guess it costs more like a couple of million at the very most which, spread over every product sold for a period of several years, is actually peanuts.
Do I get bonus METs if my legs never, ever, ever stop bouncing the entire time I'm at my desk?
Hans Rosling on global population growth
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC_97
Since it entails serious changes at the hardware level firmware upgrades would not be enough.
Rupert Murdoch's Big Brother management style
I've commented this in another thread: I had this idea a while ago for real events on campuses, themed "Quit Facebook Party". People would get together and delete their accounts, the process being projected on the wall for others to see. With the social validation people would find it easier to make the step and realize how few consequences it has, apart from freeing up a lot of time.
I've been working on one in my spare time, I'm working on a big update for this week. Is this what you're looking for? https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/aflgiainmfefihhn...
We've been using CouchDB in production for at least six months with our web-based content management system and our mobile advertising platform. We also use it to store scores for a couple of mobile games, and to store posts for PicBored, an anonymous image-based forum for Android. I am a bit worried about how well the replication will work with dozens or hundreds of servers, but it's working great with only a handful.
(Please don't take the following as something disparaging about your position. It's not. Rather, it is some general observations about markets.)

The previous comment would seem to be implying that there's "a real fundamental value buried in the noise" for investment instruments, but none for models. I would say that there's always real fundamental value in people, models included, and that this value is in some sense more real than anything in any market.

The momentum is the only source of value.

The momentum is the only source of value modulo the market. There is indeed "a real fundamental value" to all personnel assets, but it isn't even "buried in the noise." The problem is that the market is almost totally disconnected from this underlying reality. (The question seems too complex, to ever be fully connected.)

There is a sort of fear and insecurity that overtakes tastemakers faced with overabundant choices with no good analytical tools to help them. I'm not sure what the solution is. An "indy" market is no solution -- these seem to merely become the "bush leagues" for their preexisting mainstream. After awhile in cultural markets, the noise machine takes over the market and disconnects it from the human and cultural perceptual machinery which gave rise to it. (Which I will call "true taste.") Subcultural 'scenes' arise with a renewed connection to true taste, but these scenes eventually get swept up into the same disconnected market.

I suspect that Buddhism talks about this. I suspect that this is just a part of the human condition. Things like Rotten Tomatoes can help, in that rogue tastemakers who are simply succumbing to bribes and other simple manipulations can be left out in the cold. Maybe the 4chan folks have got it right, and informational/social anarchy is the ultimate solution.

In the meantime, a dispassionate analysis of such markets might yield opportunities to make money through trading.
a DVCS that can handle enterprise requirements, very interesting. But let's see how it compares to git/hg/bzr in a week :) The pluggable storage layers sounds like something I would use in my company.
Why Software Estimation is so Painful and How It Doesn’t Have To Be
BOMBA Botnet Crimeware
Features do not simply exist by virtue of their possibility.
Whenever I see this "We're inside a black hole" idea, two things always come to mind:

1. Wouldn't this invalidate the laws of thermodynamics, with energy pouring into the universe out of "nowhere"?

2. Conversely, shouldn't the universe be evaporating?
Describing SquareSpace as making blogging software is really misleading. They support it, but they are trying to be a user friendly website company with a lot of functionality.

"Wouldn't it be cool if they were launching a competitor to Twitter and/or Facebook, from a NY base?" - no, not really. What would be cool if they use the money to continue to expand their already great capabilities and add new services that clients can add to their own websites.
There's no contradiction there--it's entirely possible there will be one album sale for every 20 pirate downloads, but that doesn't rule out the possibility that each album is capable of selling 20 times more than it does. It's implausible, but not logically ruled out.

More to the point, maybe for those 20 free downloads, 5-6 would have actually bought the album but didn't, and 5-6 (possibly overlapping set) will be convinced to see a show or buy a t-shirt, so the actual financial situation for the band isn't so much different as they think it is.
I do remember reading that being twitchy can help you stay healthier, and lose weight. It all burns calories.
I don't think he'd shy away from the description of having a big ego. His posts are full of teasing, gatekeeper'esque
type antics.

Heck, he chose the Kanye song "I've Got a Big Ego," as the BG track for one of his recent videos.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__TR86PLiHw

He's made it so easy for jailbreakers, they don't respect how much time & work goes into doing what he does. It's that sense of entitlement that lends to him not feeling appreciated and shutting it down (for now).
Open Hardware Summit 2010
Paul Graham also used to be 80% programming and 20% business.
I completely agree... I would also add that it allows you to get feedback on your ideas. I wrote about this a couple months ago: http://techneur.com/post/524363996/the-best-exercise-any-ent... I truly believe it's the best thing for a business that every entrepreneur should do.
I think oral and written communication is probably the most overlooked skill for engineers. Write. It gets easier with practice. As you get better at it, it will come more naturally and you will be more confident. Quality, fluency, and confidence all make people much more likely to believe what you are saying and act favorably towards your suggestions.

At a practical level, you can write your way into jobs (or investment), and if you do it right writing does not rot, so you can continue to reap benefits from things you've written long before. That lets you store time in a bottle, which has really nice implications for time-strapped entrepreneurs.

(This also implies that you'd probably be better doing public writing than writing which winds up in the email archives of BigCorp or behind a logistical and cultural wall almost nobody will pierce at your institution of higher learning.)
Well paid jobs that require you to be physically active?
I have been working as a software developer for about ten years, and it has always been my passion. I often took my work home and worked 13 hours each day for years. I earn relatively well and I am the highest paid developer in our firm.

In the past one two years however, my motivation has been on a steady decline. I have largely lost my interest in IT, partly because it no longer feels challenging, but also because I feel inactive.

I would love to do something else, optimally something that requires my being physically active. I am more athletic than 99% of my peers, doing at least 12 hours of sports every week, and I would love to expand on that.

However, throwing away all that I know feels wrong, it is the capital that I have built on, and I don't want to take a large cut on my salary. Perhaps more importantly, I need the prospect of advancing my career.

Any idea for jobs that are both well paid and require a lot of physical work? Of course, the right mix of physical work and science would be perfect, but I am guessing that such a thing does not exist?
I'm fairly sure that 90% of those wacky "exercise" ideas - like the hip-swivel chair - were created on a whim, or as a bet between two businessmen.

"Alright, we each have a month to come up with, manufacture, and advertise the most retarded exercise tool we can come up with. After six months of sales, we'll determine the winner by units shipped. Loser has to do a line of blow off the winner's genitals."
I down-voted you just now because you complained about being down-voted, which isn't good etiquette.
I'd suggest the author of this tool also test against generic installs of common web applications (and extensions). Trac, Joomla, Redmine, Mediawiki, Bugzilla, Wordpress, phbBB, etc. He also might get more responses if he asked others to download the code to test themselves instead.
GitHub: Yesterday's Outage
I bought trekdesk (http://www.trekdesk.com) and I use it walking about 1.3 mph.
OExchange: an open protocol for sharing any URL with any service on the web
Sure, they'd do it. But when 85% of your friend network wasn't at this party, and they start complaining about you not being on, and you stop getting invited to things (because people assume their FB friends list really is their entire friend base), would you really have the willpower to stay off?

Not you personally, really I should phrase that, "what percentage would stay off"? The social pressure has lifted, suddenly it doesn't seem worth the trouble. It and certainly doesn't seem worth the meta-trouble of a continued checkup process to make sure nobody defects.

I think the point of this article is that people don't care as much as they think they should. They just try to convince themselves they do. Not pretty (kind of scary), but a fact we'll have to come to terms with.
Risk Averse or Cutting Edge? Both at Once.
I have to be honest, that doesn't sound like all that fun of a party.
Yeah, I would definitely consider using the $25 plan with Heroku. The only other real option is to run Redis on its own EC2 instance, which costs $62 minimum (well, once you're sure the thing's sticking around, you could make it a reserved instance I guess). Now, that's a lot more powerful, but if I'm using something that doesn't even need the 100MB of RAM, I might as well save some money and use Redis to Go.

Plus you get the added bonus of still not having to worry about any piece of your infrastructure.
With all GitHub's server tech and architecture (described in fair detail in past blog posts), I'm usually surprised (and relieved a bit, I must admit) to see them fail at something.
What facebook enemies need is a headline.

"Little girl brutally murdered after FB's privacy controls reveal her to a crazy stalker"

People just don't respond to rational argument, data, and talk the way they do to fear. Obviously for the little girl's sake I hope this never happens, but honestly I don't see Facebook going down any other way anytime soon.
This is a novel idea; a great way to utilize willingness to meet, talk and collaborate. I may have to steal this idea from you some time, Kent... or I may just give you a call! :-)
This is a really useful tool!
Some points-

1. I laughed when the gentleman said that $3mm would be enough money for him. Anyone who says $3mm is enough will realize that whatever number they say is "enough" is not enough once they reach it.

2. Money doesn't make you happy. But if you're already happy and you have money, it can make you happier.

3. Money makes people pay more attention to you- especially people who didn't pay attention to you before. People will say, "well Barack Obama would never have shown up to your wedding before you sold your company for $1bb". Well no sh!t. Why would he? Charities will call you. "Well the University never paid attention to you back when you were poor". Universities and Charities are in the business of raising money from individuals.. Why would they? This will be tough for people without money to understand.

4. Those who have sold their companies find that money is sometimes harder to hold onto than it was to make in the first place. If you don't have enough money (to never work again), become complacent due to your original ability to make money (particularly those in tech world), you could find yourself broke.

5. Speaking of broke. Minimize your borrowing. The majority of very rich people who suddenly file for bankruptcy are over-leveraged and/or not diversified in their investments. An example: Let's say I have $20mm. I could go to a bank today and get a $40mm house. However, my taxes, upkeep, mortgage, and other lifestyle expenses would likely cause me to deplete my original 20mm within a few years.

6. When you're rich, its very difficult to deviate from an expected lifestyle. Once you spend 60k on a car, 90% of the time your next car will be more. This is true of houses and everything else you purchase. My advice is pace yourself.
Congratulations.. You're Hired!
Cisco courts Consumers at home and at work
My local computer shop sells passive DVI over CAT5 adapters that claim to work up to 50 feet. Seeing this really drove home how overpriced digital video cables really are.
So they didn't take time spent sitting in an office into account at all? Seems odd. I spend at least two hours sitting at a desk for every hour I spend sitting on a couch or in a car seat.
I think you owe me an hour or so :)

Still can't decide if the ad is for real, but I do recall somewhere in the late 80's an ad for speakers 'designed for CD music only'.
1 on 1 conversations or mentoring is the absolute best. Last year, I taught a guy a little bit of EE in exchange for him looking at the Java I was teaching myself and adding comments, but it was all on IRC. I have to admit, I really like the idea of doing this on Skype.

Does anyone else have major lightbulbs coming on at a really rapid clip because of this post?
The Other End of the Telescope
Maybe you can outsource that task to odesk. ;P
Agreed. From the description, it sounds like it would be best marketed to enterprise and bigger businesses. Kind of like how they encourage SourceSafe users to migrate to Vault, they could work on migrating TFS/ClearCase users to Veracity.

I think if they aimed it at a git/hg/bzr replacement for OSS projects, they'd fail mightily.

Either way, they have their work cut out for them.
I personally use MongoDB for small, one-off projects. The good thing about schemaless databases is that you can just start shoving data into them without caring about its structure.

That said, document-based databases suck at complex queries and reporting tasks.
I really wish he had never released his ps3 hack. It made the lives of those who actually use otheros much harder.
According to the response headers, it's about 50/50 Apache and CouchDB depending on the resource.
It is cheaper, but I don't think you are running an OS that will only use 12 MB of memory. This also doesn't include backups or system monitoring. And if you are EC2, well this just isn't an option if you are concerned about network latency.
for apartment hunting or for other types of things.
One surprise, the Twitter account @bc_l will run 'bc -l' on anything you direct message to it. I wonder how many such Twitter accounts there are.
Cheap Presentation Folders Save Marketing Costs 
When used for the marketing purposes, cheap presentation folders can help minimize the costs. They can be customized easily. They are also cost effective if produced in bulk.
>Does TransFS work outside of the United States?

>No, unfortunately TransFS is only able to help business in the United States. (Puerto Rico, US Virgin Islands, Guam and US Commonwealths are also excluded)

And that's where you lost me.
This makes me think of an idea, I think it would be awesome if Duck Duck Go offered me the ability to make a "plugin" for their site. In much the same way you can pay for key words on google, i'd love to pay for a topic. For example, I've been working on a side project which gives you recipe ideas for ingredients you have. I built the technology in a very modular way, which would make the construction of a plugin pretty easy. I would like to purchase the idea of ingredients so say for example someone does a search for "celery carrots peas" the zero click box would show my results.

In addition, I've noticed many people use Google for anything they want. My mom found her email by googling for "email" if the search terms ever change... she wouldn't know how to get to it. I would love to have it so if my mom already has an account on my site (which has a record of her kitchens inventory) she could search for "recipes" and in the zero click box would be a listing, but customized just for her.
Why do these studies always avoid to talk about the intensity of the excercise for each subject. There's plenty of people at my gym that I've never seen sweating.
Oh cool, I missed that even though I'm on HN a lot.

You do awesome stuff, so I'm excited to see this when it launches.
Artist Behind Mysterious Stone BMW Z4 in China Is Identified
How dare you make a joke on hackernews. I would downmod you if I could. Maybe you should post on facebook..ouch!
I wouldn't say we are designed to want more heroin, but that heroin is designed to make us want more...

If you think about it, we crave love even when we've never had it and don't understand it all that well. Nobody craves heroin until they've tried it.
I agree that logo is the bomb. I remember when Damien held the contest and my friend @atduskgreg entered. When I saw the logo that one I knew Greg's didn't stand a chance. Thanks Bryant!
Certainly fun. I love improv and Improv Everywhere. No question.

However, this should be on Reddit, not here.
Don't waste my time with that bargain basement junk. If you want professional results, you have to start as you mean to go on.

http://www.6moons.com/audioreviews/furutech7/powerflux.html

I highly recommend browsing this site to get an understanding of what quality really means. I have met several people who 'get it' and have installed quality products like this: they have all been very happy with the results. *

* which appear to involve competitive shopping as a proxy for income
Def.js - Ruby-style inheritance for JavaScript
Thanks! :) I need to drink more mvp kool aid asap! :)
I'd love to do plug-ins. The trouble is this initial filter step, i.e. I can't be sending all queries to all plugins for many reasons (privacy, resources, speed, etc.). But I'm very open to integrating vertical engine APIs where it makes sense, or linking to them directly. For example, last night I added links at the top based on this type of routing, e.g. http://duckduckgo.com/?q=php+date+function

So if any one has any implementation ideas, I'm ready!
brilliant logo
Was the power to weight ratio of the gas turbine the most important thing? I always understood that it was the ridiculous simplicity of the gas turbine that was so great.
I've been waiting for someone stepping into the database schema versioning space for years now. Would be very interesting to see how this would work in Veracity after rolling/maintaining my own solution for years.

And who's this "Vera"? (-:
The "competitor" is staying with Verizon and getting whatever the salesperson at the Verizon store recommends when your contract is up for renewal.

It's a very popular choice.
Greener pastures? A tale of the Minnesota startup that was
acting? modelling? a serious (for once) personal trainer?
I think the thing is that Facebook is learning from this. If there was actually a viable competitor at the time, the whole hype surrounding the incident might be enough to push and bootstrap enough users onto its competitor. We saw this to a limited extent with Diaspora, but given that there wasn't anything to actually sign up for, its hype has mostly fizzled by now.

Right now, Facebook is practically the only game in town, they don't have to worry about these mass migrations. But if Google manages comes up with an even comparably good clone of Facebook, it may become an issue.
This could perhaps be an issue with your browser (or something due to load). Can you email hosting@couch.io with details? Thanks!