skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Best IP geolocation service?
What is the best IP geolocation service you have used, and why do you prefer it?
I love how you casually mention "Half a billion requests per day"..
Competitive zeal of Ballmer key element in Yahoo chase
Yahoo CEO on hot seat after rebuffing Microsoft's $47.5B bid
Note: when I say "Austrians" I'm talking about guys who wrote books between 1910 and 1960, not the nutjobs at mises.org and lewrockwell.com.
Class libraries. Usually, to do anything impressive with Flash either requires lots of multimedia assets or lots of class libraries. JavaScript has the ability to piggyback off the browser's HTML/CSS rendering engines.

A lot also has to do with their respective cultures - as a JavaScript dev, you learn to do more with less because doing more with more is so exquisitely painful. That's why Flash UIs are often visually more attractive - it's easier for them to be visually attractive.

And JavaScript compresses really well - it's not unusual for GZipped + minified JavaScript to be less than 20% the size of the uncompressed source code.
I don't have crashing problems, but I do have the same disappointing memory and CPU usage problems that many others have reported. I'm not running much on my Firefox -- just ABP and Firebug, which is usually disabled until I need it.

Based on what I've read, Firefox's memory trouble is not just about memory leaking, but also about a less-than-stellar memory allocator which causes it to fragment its heap badly, which in turn forces it to continue to grow its heap ever outward. In FF3 the Mozilla team spliced in FreeBSD's jemalloc and that seems to work better.
Large Hadron Collider Could Create Wormholes: a Gateway for Time Travelers?
Oh, shoot. Too true. Gerry definitely recounted this story to me, although I can't recall now whether he claimed he was involved or not.

I am Aston's total lack of geektitude.
Ah, yes, that most excellent justification for crappy software:

Developer: "It's OK if our program runs slow, processors are getting faster all the time."
User: "Your program runs slow..."
Developer: "Then get a new computer! More RAM! Faster processor! They're cheap!"

(The user does so. 6 months later, a new version of the software is about to be released...)

Developer: "It's OK if our program runs even slower, processors are getting faster all the time." ...
1) Copy-past works just fine, at least with flex 3 text or textarea controls
2) Saving the swf is easy, and you can view it any time
3) Images are usually embedded, and you can get them with a resource viewer
4) Copy image location - this is not necessary, as images are usually embedded
5) flash supports url fragments for navigate (path after #), so as long as the flash site uses fragments, it is bookmarkable
6) open in new tab works

I'm curious where you got this misinformation, anyway.
Have you taken a look at Clojure yet?
http://clojure.org/
i was recommended maxmind: http://www.maxmind.com/app/geoip_country
Depends on how you plan to use it...
'Death Star' Galaxy Black Hole Fires at Neighboring Galaxy
"... i was thinking about writing one of those in a weekend on google app engine ..."

Don't let it stop you just choose a different framework or set of modules, show the code. More examples the merrier.
I'm not sure about what a masters will do for your prospects, but I'm getting one and I LOVE it. So I say do it if you think you'll enjoy it.
"Gerry definitely recounted this story to me"

- so your geek card is lifetime membership eh ?? ;)
Redesigning the TechCrunch Web Site Footer
The story of Mel, a Real Programmer
One of my favorite pieces of classic computing folklore.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=136091
http://www.velocix.com/compare.php -- I saw these guys come across my feeds earlier in the week. They're a CDN offering up to 500gb (per mo?) of caching on their edge network for free.

I have no clue as to the size of their map, or quality of service, but since it's free it may be an attractive option for bootstrapped startups who don't want to pay the traditional monthly commits of Akamai, L3, LL, etc.
Placement of the arguments. I sometimes group them logically, but more often than not, I just want the call to occur on a single line.

The reason fewer lines is better is that you can see more of the code at the same time. That's why flipping a monitor vertically is a good idea.
Scientific conference to be held in World of Warcraft
Does anyone know what that's supposed to be a map of?
ah, thanks. sorry for the repost...
Are you fluent in French?
Ask YC: Is PnPTechcenter incubator worth it ?
I saw a note at the bottom that says the free stuff is in private beta. Has that changed?
Ask YC:  Do software companies (especially large ones) hate Web 2.0 because it encourages creativity and independence?
Software companies look for employees who will simply implement what they are told to implement. They are not looking for creative or independent people.

And so making fun of Web 2.0 makes sense as a way to focus their employees' attention on producing high quality implementation rather than attempting novelty at the application level.

In fact, computer science departments probably do this as well as a way to try to maintain their students numbers given the current focus of computer science.
Ha, the old chop the relevant half of the sentence out and argue against the remainder technique. Always a classic in internet debate. How many votes that comment has shows the bias here.

The "in that short of a time" part was the qualifier. Microsoft knew going in that they weren't going to take the lead. It's called an investment, and it's the same thing they did with the Zune. Unlike the Zune though, they've captured an impressive amount of market share quickly with the Xbox 360. Even the original console fared well.
Is Murdoch Still Looking To Deal MySpace?
Please, Pretty Please, Lets Keep This Place Quasi-Quiet
I have ditched pretty much every feed I had, but despite the intense volume of Hacker News threads, I still subscribe because no other place has quite as good links.

But many more, and it'll get overwhelming!

So I ask: can we keep this place quiet from the sort of self-promoting clowns that ruin other link sites? You know, the kind of people that call it "Social Media".

I am sure that is selfish, against the spirit of the web, elitist, makes me {INSERT INSULT HERE] but, you know what? I don't care! I just can't imagine more submitters making hacker news better, and I figure if you are really keen on this topic, you'll find the place eventually.
That's a big part of the answer. Flash is not indexable, and is one of the biggest problems that Flash has.

Flash has its uses, and Google does use Flash where it makes sense, e.g. the charts on Google Analytics.
That is in fact much closer to what I was thinking. The cultural context is important when it comes to understanding the less formal common grammar we humans tend to use more frequently and which is littered throughout the Internet.

We can understand 400, 800, etc year old text, but one of the first things you'll notice is the language has terminology and informal phrases that may die off, live on, or evolve over the years. Toss in ambiguity, metaphores, double entendres, etc and it's not as simple. Perfect example would be Shakespeare. His style is rife with creative linguistic twists.
German Friendfeed ripoff
Ask YC: I have to iron. Where can I quickly find interesting non-fiction video besides ted.com
what I've found so far:
http://ted.com
http://www.catonmat.net/blog/videos-from-defcon-15-hacker-conference/
http://content.nejm.org/misc/videos.shtml

Where's more stuff like that? Interestingness and learning.
Clotaire Rapaille's (he is mentioned in the article) book "The Culture Code" is a pretty insightful read. It is hard to come up with a gist of what is in there, but if I were to attempt summarizing it, I would say that the thesis is that cultural has a surprisingly sizable impact on most decisions, and consumers are never accurate when supposedly describing their feelings.
Why Facebook apps are focused on fun, not utility
http://documentaries.videosift.com/
I've used nagios and before that, ganglia for some monitoring. I've been looking into cacti lately for monitoring qmail message status and an asterisk installation for the number of active channels.

Many of these systems use rrdtool and even though I've used that tool directly before, with Cacti at least its a bit tricky to get familiar with the way the gui and the different templates are interconnected. The look and feel sure does seem polished though.
He leaves out that 3 of the top 5 cars (all of which are absent from his chart) in terms of fewest deaths per million are SUVs. The one I drive (Lexus RX) has only about half of the fatalities that the Avalon does.

Also in terms of handling, it's grossly unfair to compare a Traiblazer (built for shlepping kids and groceries around) to a Boxster. I'd be interested in knowing how a Cayenne ran the course. Or how much better than a Traiblazer a similarly priced GM sedan would.
I don't understand that industry although I've been a C&D subscriber forever. I picked up this month issue, and again: every single new car they previewed gained inches and pounds. Every freaking time, every month, every new car. How many more inches of wheelbase and cubic inches of trunk space do we need?

Sure, SUV sales are down, but overall the total mass that today's consumers demand to be riding on, keeps increasing. Look at a freaking "mid-size" Camry or Accord parked next to 10 year old Explorer or 4Runner - they're nearly equal in size. 4-cylinder engines have all surpassed 2L displacement mark, and anything less than 220hp is considered "inadequate".

The auto industry needs their own Steve Jobs, someone who's capable of telling these fat idiots what to like, as opposed to blindly following their reptilian instincts.
http://www.theautochannel.com/news/2005/03/15/sr4003.pdf

Looks like SUVs are actually a little safer than typical 4 dr or 2 dr sedans.
Nope, been there, done that, doesn't change my point at all. Automation is automation whether it's at build time or run time, it's still better than doing it by hand. Having been down the path of code generation, I'll take runtime reflection every time, or better yet, switch to a language that doesn't prevent abstraction. The need for tools like CodeSmith just screams how bad .Net languages are, and I know, I'm a full time .Net programmer. I've managed to rewrite one of our main products in Smalltalk where the language just works and you never run into the need to generate masses of code.
++

awesome dance, no homo.
google the "Long Now Foundation."

If you're really hardcore try MIT Open Courseware. If you can iron while watching SICP and not burn your house down, you are the real thing.

For a lighter version of MIT Open Courseware, Stanford on iTunes has some decent audio lectures. Not sure if there's any video, though.
The analogy you note between the Zune and the Xbox is maybe more similar than you think. People forget the Xbox first came out 2001. It takes years for an investment in a new market like that to get big, even if executed perfectly. I'm interested in seeing how the Zune looks 3-5 years from now. Mostly because I think J. Allard's a genius.
I guess I'm a sucker for these programmers of yore stories. Yes, Mel would be an unsuitable candidate for most modern, team-oriented programming positions. But, heck, to be truly one with the machine in understanding all of its nuances is extraordinary. (Yes, the machines were smaller and simpler then, but still...)

It's disappointing that a great majority of software developers (read: corporate programmer drones) have little understanding of what's really going on under the covers of the layers upon layer of abstractions.

Perhaps, if they truly did know, it might make them wonder if their code will run at all?
check out google talks: http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=engedu&sitesearch=

also at:

http://www.youtube.com/profile_videos?user=AtGoogleTalks

For more general topics, I like

http://bestdocumentaries.blogspot.com/
You don't say what your interests are, but the googletechtalks channel on YouTube has lots of interesting stuff, not all Computer Science related.
That's quite pedestrian and bottom-line oriented approach to life. Good luck crossing the finish line.
I've turned several TED lovers onto Radiolab (not video, but great content sure to open your eyes, covers the intersection between science and culture with very well thought out themed episodes). When I listen to an episode I'm almost guaranteed a major WTF moment.

http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/
Iam not a flash fan. But off late it has amazed me with the functionality and features that can built so fast. If u have flash IDE, man building web sites are lot faster and easier. Iam sure it has is own drawbacks. I don’t agree with folks that say flash is not available in all browsers. Flash penetration is around 80-90 % of global market. Wake up guys.

Cheers,
omfut
I wasted 2 years of my life working heavily with the Mozilla/XULRunner/FF codebase. The code base is huge and is organized in a manner that makes tracing memory issues very difficult. Unfortunately there are also cultural reasons why things are unlikely to improve in the future. There are simply too many cooks in the kitchen at mozilla, it is very bureaucratic and the engineering team as a whole gets sidetracked by details that don't solve the serious issues in the "platform."

The webkit team is small and agile and was chosen as the web rendering platform for Android, Adobe AIR and the iPhone. For better or worse, WebKit is going to eat Mozilla's lunch.

In a past essay PG suggests that a few people working on a new browser would be a cool project. I completely agree. A tri-platform browser based on WebKit with a wrapper for media (video, audio) and a clean plugin API would be amazing.
Gmail Team is Hiring
Buffett to investors: Think small
Seems like this would be more appropriate a few years ago

It was written in 2004, so that would make sense.
Despite the author's assertion "There will be none of the nostalgia, melodrama, black hat rhetoric or white hat over-analysis" the article is just that. Don't read too much into it.
On top of that, I can't imagine what you have done to your Firefox 2-install,

I can:

I am now using more extensions than I was using and life is even easier, no problem with this.
According to the studies that keep track of such details, the size of car owners also keeps increasing. Perhaps the auto manufacturers are simply trying to ensure their vehicles can comfortably accommodate such trends.
Yes. This wasn't an either-or question, right?
Interesting. The evidence doesn't seem to support his claim that small and agile is better than big and bulky:

Important characteristics of vehicles that influence their
driver death rates are type, body style, size, and weight.
Within virtually every group of vehicles, the smaller and
lighter models have the higher rates...

Among cars, for example, the smallest twodoor models had
the highest death rate at 190 per million vehicle years.
This rate is more than twice as high as the average for
all vehicles included in the study...

The vehicle group with the lowest driver death rate was
large luxury cars with 37 deaths per million vehicle years.
The next lowest rate was in large minivans and station
wagons with 42 deaths per million.
intruders.tv
first time i'd seen that statement suffix on this site.
Being the curious type, I don't think I would have let such an interesting switch sit idly by for a year like this guy did. Why didn't he investigate it further after first making the discovery?

Such a great story though.
Is it really that overwhelming? There have been 90 submissions in the last 17 hours - just over 5/hour. That doesn't seem like 'intense volume'.
Addblock and greasemonkey would be on my cannot-live-without list, also.
Unfortunately I think the soccer moms are not so far off the mark. Small contemporary 2 door economy vehicles get smushed and crumpled immediately upon impact with a larger, sturdier vehicle. I used to drive a grotesque, gigantic luxury vehicle from the 1980s and was rear ended twice. Both times the other cars (GEO metro, some sort of Hyundai) were totaled (from a fender bender!) and I merely ended up with additional dents on my bumper.
I wouldn't normally point out spelling mistakes BUT it's Porsche.
Pingdom and Alertra. Alertra has had a perfect record for us for three years, meaning no false reports over that time (as far as we can tell). A bit more expensive, we use a single Alertra alert and multiple Pingdom alerts.
Haven't tried simplecdn. This pricing seems at first glance to be too clever, but if they can do it, it's certainly less than any competitor I've seen.

We use Panther Express (http://pantherexpress.com). More expensive, but not nearly as much as Akamai and other big guys. No commits. Fantastic network.
Open in new tab only works to open the flash page in a new tab, subsequent browsing within the flash page does not allow one to open in a new tab.
When we evaluated cachefly last year, setting headers was not possible -- the files were just served with etags and whatever defaults cachefly servers had. You also had to upload files manually, no pulling files from origin servers automatically.

No custom headers was an absolute deal-breaker for static images, css, js. If you can't set an expires header, you've probably undone most of the good of distributing the content around the globe anyway.
New York Times: Xobni launches public beta
Almost all studios that I know of, embed Lua into there game engines.

http://www.lua.org/about.html
something about a Porsche made you point it out? :)

Thanks - corrected. I usually spell check with Google when FF fails me.

Buying a car (before the Tesla) was pretty low on my list of post-liquidity-event fantasies anyway. Starting riskier startups in comfort and owning a large working space are high on my list.
GroundWork (http://www.groundworkopensource.com/). It uses Nagios under the hood, but I wouldn't want to set up Nagios by hand (without the GroundWork config tools) at a largish site like ours.
very well-written and persuasive argument. the one thing i think a lot of people are glossing over, though (i've seen this same chart many times in various posts over the past few days) is that fun != useless. just think about sites like addictinggames.com...
Well as history dictates you first need to capture some market and then move on to grab new ones. I'm sure the cost will come down closer to 15k as time goes on and technological progress has been made.

Take a look at "The Innovator's Dilemma" for some examples of disruptive technologies.
Congrats, guys.

Matt, classy getting this to the NYT. Definitely a step up from Techcrunch.
that's just great. I don't make it into the picture, but bonforte's dog does. :<
Incorporating your business should be vastly simpler
Cayenne = FAIL
http://www.drive.com.au/Editorial/ArticleDetail.aspx?Article...

Well, not quite - but the cheap one does seem to diminish the Porche brand a bit..
I just can't resist...

I love how you happen to mention that you drive a Lexus.

"According to Bradsher, internal industry market research concluded that S.U.V.s tend to be bought by people who are insecure, vain, self-centered, and self-absorbed, who are frequently nervous about their marriages, and who lack confidence in their driving skills."
Ten (mostly) false ideas about emacs
If anyone has a story that you like, but doesn't fit Hacker News, tip it with Tipjoy. Our front page is becoming a good collection of content - good but not all for Hackers. There is a LOL-Cat at #1 right now, which is actually pretty surprising.
http://tipjoy.com/

We added comments with Disqus, and are adding features to make it more social. I'd love to hear any feedback on what could make it a better destination or feed site for those seeking good content:
http://tipjoy.com/feedback/

By the way, I've been reading this place for about around 300 days. I think the content had become more broad since I started, to the site's benefit, but runs the risk of getting out of hand. Luckily, there are tools to make things better, I hear.
Does anyone else have these gmail-crashing problems (e.g., when leaving gmail's site)? I looked at their FAQs and it suggests some problem with firebug, but even with it disabled I often get crashes.
The (Virtual) Global Office
The difference is that for flash websites, the developer has to actively be 'nice' to allow these things (default=not accessible), whereas with html+css+javascript, the developer has to actively be obnoxious to NOT allow these things (default=accessible).
fora.tv is very good, although the talks aren't too technical. videolectures.net is highly technical though, and also very good (lots of interesting machine learning talks).
There are quite a few techy/etc. videos from the NZ Webstock conference here: http://webstock.org.nz/past/recordings.php

I've been enjoying them. The latest videos are from the conference held at the beginning of '08, so they aren't too old. Nat Torkington's, Peter Morville's and Luke Wroblewski's are all good and (often) front-end focused talks.
That is no ordinary dog. That is Zoe our CGCIO - Chief Garbage Can Inspecting Officer
I did a PhD and I regret it in a lot of ways. It sucked up too much of my time and energy for something that wasn't worth a helluva lot. If you want to be in academia, GO FOR IT, can't recommend it enough. If you want to extend your education, do a master's.

Personally, I got a lot out of my thesis. It made me a more curious person, refined my research, questioning and reflection abilities, and improved my critical thinking skills. But it did not help my career...
It is a car that does 0-60 in under 4 seconds..

So I'm not sure that you can charge every km you drive on t against the drivers time.. (Granted - this doesn't apply if you're just driving to work..)
The Dangerous Games Startups Play
Monit! Highly recommended. You can easily set it up to monitor local daemons, watch disk space, memory, external systems and more. Monit can also restart failing daemons.

http://www.tildeslash.com/monit/
Mine would be firebug and vimperator.
Congratulations, great to see the NYT coverage!

I'm surprised they didn't mention Xobni for Yahoo! Mail: "And Web e-mail services like Gmail and Hotmail are growing much more rapidly than the desktop-based Outlook, where Xobni is planting its flag, for now"
I've always preferred the free prose version (http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html), although at the moment it seems to have been corrupted. Tsk, ESR!
This isnt video but: http://www.tvo.org/TVOsites/WebObjects/TvoMicrosite.woa?bigi...
bigthink.com
Social networks are first and foremost venues to interact with peers.

If I want to talk about an RFP with a client or an app. spec. with a developer, I hit them up on email, Skype, etc.

That's not to say sites like Facebook don't have business value, just that to be successful, applications should be relevant to the platform they're distributed through.

If you want to build an app. for business use and expect adoption, Salesforce.com is a much better prospect than Facebook. If you want to share LOLcats, Facebook's where it's at.
"for the vast majority of situations"

In my experience, balancing works better with smarts, thus my big long tirade about Squid (which is historically about the smartest option...though not necessarily the fastest...but fast enough).

LVS has its place, and I've used it when the situation is appropriate, it just isn't all that common that you really need to be able to saturate a Gb pipe, and the installation, maintenance, and configuration burden is much higher for a kernel level tool.

So, perhaps I should have been careful not to sound so dismissive of a tool that I like (and I'll note that you can find posts by me on the LVS mailing list from the first few months of the projects existence). My previous company even sponsored development of several related management tools.
It takes a long time for a change to happen quickly