skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
* It's slow
* It's proprietory
* It's not supported on several platforms (iPhone, wii, etc etc)

Javascript works just fine thanks. With HTML5 and the video capabilities flash/silverlight will become even less relevant IMHO
"The switch had two positions... ‘magic' and ‘more magic'. "
Purdue set for supercomputer 'barn-raising'
To some extent, you can ameliorate these concerns, but using Flash for a website generally leads to usability issues.

Here's an article from me explaining why, if you're interested.

http://informationrain.com/2007/07/25/why-i-dont-make-flash-...

In my opinion, flash should mainly be used for what it's great at....making games, some types of interactive tools, and a decent quality cross-platform video solution.
My thoughts on the New Digital Divide - Building Web Services for the Mainstream
>Where this technique is useful is cases where the method being called is impossible to know until runtime, such as in Ruby or Groovy. Scala, like Java, is not like this and the compiler can be guaranteed to have enough information to generate the right bytecode for the call inline.

What about polymorphic method calls? Statically typed or not, which method implementation to invoke is impossible to know until runtime.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymorphism_in_object-oriented...
Why would compressed bytecode (Flash) be larger than source code (JavaScript)? AMF is also generally smaller than JSON or XML.
"... Feedvalidator tells me that the date does not follow RFC-3339 ..."

I've got the same bug on my todo list. For some reason the date string format works ok but doesn't render "T" & "Z"'s. Also liked the disqus integration which I have yet to work out. Have you got any idea how much more data per post the discussion adds?
Why I follow thousands of friends on Facebook, Twitter, Friendfeed and Seesmic
Robobug goes to war: Troops to use electronic insects to spot enemy 'by end of the year'
Actually it's not always better for users. There are usually tradeoffs when choosing technologies and this is no exception. There are two (maybe three) fundamental issues with Flash.

The vast majority of internet content is conveyed with text, links, and images. Even a with a site like YouTube, there's a host of information related to each video that is best conveyed using text, links, and images. And apart from the rendering part images are essentially just links. Flash has a whole lot of overhead and does not perform basic text and linking tasks very well.

The second is that it has limited access to the underlying operating system.

The third is that it's a proprietary environment controlled by Adobe.
"... Anyone here have feeds to share? ..."

found that friends of people I follow are just as interesting ~ http://friendfeed.com/bootload
Because Softlayer (as much as they rock) don't have failover for those load balancers. You may not need it, but after we had our site downed due to hardware failure of one of their load balancers, we moved to a redundant software based setup.

We used HAProxy and Heartbeat2 to provide fully redundant load balancers. On our smaller sites, we actually run the HAProxy and Heartbeat2 on two of the web servers for that cluster, so you don't need dedicated hardware if you don't want it. If you do this, and you're on softlayer, I'd recommend sending the back-channel traffic along the internal network to avoid using 2X your real bandwidth.

You can read about how to set it up here:

http://www.digitalsanctuary.com/tech-blog/debian/13-steps-to...
I use Monit on my server to make sure my services are running. It also restarts them if they fail.

I use a free uptime service to make sure that my servers are reachable: http://uptime.openacs.org/uptime/
Because when you display all that extra site stuff with flash you take away tons of simple but important functionality.

copy/paste

save as...

view image

copy image location

Bookmark this

Open in new tab

etc. you get the idea.
Hilarious story. And Gerry Sussman swears it's completely true.

edit: GLS = Gerry Sussman, creator of Scheme, co-author of SICP, and MIT professor.
I think the basis of progress in any field of study is the degree and precision of inquiry. This is what Socrates recognized as the way to know. It’s what scientists use with physical reality. I’m guessing it’s how Paul Graham finds start-ups to invest in. Where you have genuine inquiry, you have new knowledge being unfolded and developed. Where you don’t have inquiry, or have insincere inquiry, or have taboos against inquiry, you have stagnation, dogma, and useless speculation. It’s as simple as that.

There’s an author, A. H. Almaas, that has articulated a way of inquiry that is quite penetrating in its quality. He became a physics student because he wanted to know reality. At some point his love of knowing reality turned a corner towards the human condition, and a way of inquiring into human existence gradually became clear to him. So he uses this way of inquiry to help people investigate their experience. And this has the effect of revealing the nature of their existence.

So he and his students use inquiry for inner knowing, but it could also be used in any field of study. And he says as much in his book “Spacecruiser Inquiry” (page 372). Turns out inquiry is a general truth, broadly applicable like Paul’s examples of the controlled experiment and evolution. And when Almaas turned inquiry towards inquiry itself, the basic elements of inquiry became clear: ordinary knowledge, basic knowledge, not-knowing, dynamic questioning, loving the truth, the personal thread, and journey without a goal (chapters 5 through 11). When all these elements are in place, inquiry can be quite effective and efficient, no matter where used.

So to get back to Paul’s essay, I think he’s onto something when he suggests to start with something very specific and then to follow it to something more general. Following the thread of a small, specific experience or observation can lead with inquiry, persistence, and time to larger and more general truths. This is real philosophy. Starting with someone else’s large truths and commenting and speculating on them and adding a few of your own will not do much to add to our understanding of reality or to develop new, useful knowledge and things.
Either electricity or gas is a small fraction of the cost of driving.

Sporty tires: $800 / 20,000 miles = $0.04 mile

Depreciation: $100,000 / 200,000 miles = $0.50 / mile

Driver's time: $100/hr / 40miles/hr = $2.50 / mile
The number of batteries is an interesting number: 6831. That's 9 * 11 * 23, an unusual number of large prime factors.

One reference suggests that it's 11 groups of 9 series strings of 23 parallel cells. Somebody there likes prime numbers.
"... For example, breaking up arguments passed to a function across multiple lines, just because you break the 80 char rule, doesn't make sense ..."

A good argument for concise languages?
".... Why can't Flash be improved to make information accessible? ..."

Probably for the same reason the tech that google does use can. Openness.
Nagios and Pingdom
"Firefox 3.0b5 hasn't crashed once on my laptop (Ubuntu)"

Has for me and maybe it is because I have flash enabled for fox2... thanks for the tipoff.
Except that 9 is not prime.
At Amazon, Sun Coming Out From the Cloud
"... Honestly, I still think RSS is useless to normal people. ..."

Useless in the same way plumbing is to a house. I like to think of RSS & Atom as the plumbing of the Internet.
From the article, it sounds to me like Microsoft's biggest problem is that Ballmer's direct reports are tired of dealing with him, and want him to fail.

Gates got away with the temper tantrums because everyone at Microsoft had a deep and abiding respect for him and his accomplishments, but Ballmer doesn't have that. If they can't have a living legend, they need a CEO with a little more charisma.
- xbox vs. wii?

Microsoft is doing extremely well with the XBox. It has produced a leading product across multiple generations of the console market and ensured that commercial game development uses DirectX instead of migrating to OpenGL.
From mccoyn's Reddit comment:

"The isolated grounds was what I thought it was while reading the story.

I bet when this was installed, there was a problem with the sound buzzing. Isolating the grounds would make it go away, like magic. But reconnecting the grounds while the computer was on would create a sudden ground change that might crash the computer, more magic."
camino.
Nope. The article specifically states that Rosetta Stone violates most of the principles the learning research has shown.
Most PhD and MS programs are very different -- I wouldn't try to substitute one for the other. Many good schools (e.g. Berkeley, MIT) don't really even offer MS degrees, and many MS degrees are coursework-based (e.g. Stanford's), for which you have to pay tuition. You're basically there to continue your undergrad: take some more advanced classes and perhaps do a bit of research, but mostly it is like extending your undergrad degree. Whereas a PhD is entirely about learning how to do research. Which degree (if either) is the right one for you depends on what you're looking for, but they are definitely not substitutes.
It's remarkable that the company whose slogan was "the network is the computer" is now taking lessons on building cloud computing services from a web retailer. Shows both how impressive Amazon is, and how lame Sun has become. The old Sun would have already been AWS.
What's wrong with breaking up function arguments onto multiple lines?
The worst part about graduate school is that you have to
work on someone else's ideas instead of your own

This may be true in biology, but AFAIK it is rarely the case in computer science, especially at a strong research university.
I did the co-term at Stanford about 6 years ago, though my goal at the time wasn't to go start a company or freelance right away. I'm personally glad I did it, and not because of any resume-padding or salary-boosting (I already had a job at a startup where I worked part-time while I did the co-term) but simply because it was a great opportunity to learn a lot of stuff. I knew that if I didn't do it right away, I'd probably never really want to go back, and I'd also never have another chance to do it in just one year.

There are just a lot of things that are harder to learn on your own. Want to learn SQL, OpenGL, TCP programming? Read some web pages or some books; you don't need a class for that stuff. Want to learn how to write your own database, rendering engine, network stack, compiler, or filesystem? Take a class. Especially if your goal is write enterprise software, which inherently involves building large, complex systems, some of those things will come in handy, if only by exposing you to new ways of thinking. My experience has always been that the practical stuff is easy enough to pick up on your own, but the theory is always harder. It can be done, you'll just learn it better and faster from a good professor.

If you've already taken all the 200 or 300-level courses in CS at Stanford that you want to take, I don't think you'll get much out of the MS. If there are a lot of those courses that you haven't taken and that still interest you, it's worth doing. If it's just a pure business play it's not worth it.
actually flash may "suck", but the flex (and air) sdk is not half bad... even I could learn it in about half a day and managed to put together some pretty sophisticated tools at work (game development stuff)..

the real reason i would say google would not want to use flash is due to its not-so-openness and thereby prepping itself for more uncertainity in the future.
Is there a way to configure Nagios to send MSM text alerts when your site is down? I haven't fully dove into the documentation yet.
The one thing going for taking time off and going back is that you are amazingly focused because you know why you are there, but then if you are graduating from Stanford and considering a MS, then I don't think that is really a problem for you.

The OP is the author of a book called "How to Succeed As A Lazy Student" :)
Hand in your geek black belt when you leave.

This GLS is Guy L. Steele (also a creator of Scheme). Gery Sussman is Gerald J. Sussman.

You may keep the geek card.
Seems like this would be more appropriate a few years ago. Sales of the Trailblazer are down 73% (last year this month to current year) and sales of other SUV lines have dropped similarly.

Source: http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2008%5C05%5C03...

The lesson for startups out of this are (1) don't chase fads, and (2) consumers really do care about total cost of ownership.
rackspace provides support for verifying our sites are operating properly.

in addition we use monit and then finally we use wormly as a catchall
Failed Microsoft/Yahoo! Deal -- Google Comes Out Even Stronger?
Ruby/rails boolean
So I've come around to the ruby standard that everything is true except for nil and false, e.g., the integer 0 is true, etc. At first I didn't like it but now I think it makes a lot of sense.

A few things to think about --

Do people rely on database fields always being nil or do you initialize new objects to something else?

I find myself using the isblank? method (added to rails but is not present in ruby) to test for boolean a lot in my code. Do others make extensive use of this?

Is it a good working assumption to design around the idea that ruby/rails most always returns nil as the result of a method call resulting in nothing? (Obviously taking note of what actually occurs but starting from that general idea)

What other philosphies, tricks ideas do folks employ regarding booleans in ruby/rails?

My holy grail is a simple/clear/short best practices for boolean in ruby/rails. My current cheat sheet is more of a manifesto than a ten commandments.
Only evil empires use armies made of robotic insects against plucky insurgents, isn't this in everyone else's copy of the manual?
The implementations are oddly inconsistent.

Perl (not inside a function, newline printed)

print "Hello, world.\n";

PHP (not inside a function, no newline printed:

echo "Hello, world."

Lisp (inside a function, no newline printed, no comma, exclamation mark):

(defun helloworld ()
(print "Hello World!")
) ; <-- STYLE-WARNING: what the fuck is this?

Emacs lisp (all lowercase, inside a function):

(defun hello-world()
"Display the string hello world."
(interactive)
(message "hello world"))

Why a docstring and "interactive" declaration? (message "Hello, world.") would be just as valid.

Anyway, I'd rewrite these to be more consistent:

Perl: say 'Hello, world.';
Lisp: (format t "Hello, world.~%")
Emacs: (message "Hello, world.") ; newline is unnecessary
PHP: I don't know it.
The quiet disruption
Being fun
Regardless of how this has gone thus far, Yahoo will sell to MS at a lower price than $33/share. And even if it doesn't, Steve will order some restructuring to advanced their search ambitions. Steve is safe. And worst come worst, he'll be left with his hundreds of millions. So sad!? Right!
Memory is cheap, guys. 1 gb ram costs ~$30 at newegg.
Actually Flash is open source now. You can even make your own player: http://www.adobe.com/openscreenproject/
I combined it with heartbeat and it works as advertised
Sun has a cloud all built, but they won't let people sign up for it. Maybe that will be the announcement this week.
"consumers really do care about total cost of ownership"

...eventually ;-)
Nice advice.

Implicit in all the Q & A, of course, is being yourself and really caring. You don't want to ask a question because it's on your "to do list"; you ask because you really are interested. Coming off as a phony is worse than doing nothing at all.
Thank you for the thoughtful reply. I only recently started reading about Scala, and haven't actually done anything with it yet (I have done some experimentation w/ Groovy and Grails). I'm pretty sure I understand your explanation - thanks a bunch!
But making your own player doesn't give you any say over the future of Flash, so if you do that you're getting on a treadmill controlled by Adobe.
366 languages and a do nothing program? Bah!
http://99-bottles-of-beer.net/ for 1200 languages and a real program. (For a certain definition of real.)

The bottles of beer is also inconsistent. Not everyone handles the zero, singular, plural issues correctly. This may not be a defect. Perhaps it tells you something about the sort of people that use a language. (Although I am slightly shamed to notice I missed a capitalization issue in the Dylan sample. I should have made a capitalize() function.)
Smarter electric grid could be key to saving power
That's good to know. Thanks.
microsoft thinks yahoo is worth $33 with msft execs, yahoo thinks they're worth $37 with their own execs, the general public thinks they're worth... uh... well before the msft news broke, around $19. either yahoo execs have huge egos and think they're worth 2x as much, or the rest of the world is dumber than the yahoo execs. there's a lot of smart people out there (i.e. all the analysts) and there is no way the yahoo execs are 2x as smart as everybody else.

maybe yahoo has something up their sleeves. like a new social network or something. but then again, they've had very little innovation come out of there in the last few years, so i'd put my bets at $20-22 / share when the market closes on monday.
Is Mythbusters science or entertainment?
I agree with the other post here that it's important to genuinely care, so this Startup School, I visited justin.tv and scribd; incidentally, I danced at the hotel afterwards (coincidentally to a french song) because I was genuinely happy just to be in the area with smart people interested in new technology.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=OWVdoZDsjqo

Your article is great because many young entrepreneurs aren't very social unless one is an alumni of the same college as the other, or have experience with the same technology. On the other hand, it is also a very efficient way of finding people who are exactly like oneself, in the case that a startup's business plan requires all members to look and act like clones of one another in order for it to succeed.
Dancing in a Hotel For Fun After Startup School 2008
"... Mythbusters is not an American television show. For all its massive international popularity, its devoted audience of many millions across all continents, its American hosts, locations, themes, its spin-off books, DVDs and t-shirts, Mythbusters is in fact an Australian television show made by Australians, largely in Australia ... "

read by clicking the (stupid) "Show Transcript" link...
Where do you want to work? If you want to work in the USA, an academic visa is easier to acquire than an "entrepreneur" visa. While in grad school, you can then lay the groundwork for your startup and meet potential cofounders. This is a relatively tried-and-true method of starting a technology company. If your startup takes off you can just drop out and you get a Master's degree as a consolation prize.
While the actual implementation method that will be invoked is unknown, in a statically typed language the base class/interface and the method signature are known. In Java/Scala classes the types of the arguments are baked into the method names used by the bytecode so this is important information from a performance point-of-view.

Looking up this information at run-time (via reflection) is slow, but dynamic languages on the JVM have have been forced to do that when calling into Java classes from the dynamic language - which is the starting point of the original article.

Scala is not affected by this because it is not a dynamic language and the Scala compiler has the exact same information that the Java compiler does when it compiles a call from Scala to Java.
"there's something very weird about someone who stands around and doesn't introduce themselves."

A master networker once explained to me that if you don't commit yourself to meeting someone (e.g. introducing yourself with energy/smile) the other person feels awkward because they have to invest energy in figuring out who you are. While if you act outgoing, then the other person doesn't feel as put upon.. If you are shy, it requires the other person to put in effort while if you act outgoing/take initiative, the other person can relax because they can see who you are (at least in the public realm)
Like Tetris?

http://halogen.note.amherst.edu/~jdtang/tetris/

FWIW, I'm using mixed Flash & JavaScript for my startup (Flash for embedding, JavaScript for the site itself). I've got Asteroids, Pong, and Brickbats all working in pure JavaScript. And I'm just hooking up code right now that lets you edit the games in real-time, no need to reload anything. That ranges from very-difficult to impossible with Flash.
Why would an indexing company promote non indexable content?
u mean SMS text (not sure what's MSM as you put it). If SMS, yup, we're doing it with Nagios.
One option: assume that there is no one book that can serve as an intro to economics (I haven't found one yet) and start learning the subject be reading the 3 great classical economists: Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and Karl Marx. All 3 were geniuses who had many brilliant insights. And all 3 were wrong in a similar fundemental way because they didn't fully grasp the concept of value.

Personally I've found overviews (ie "The Wordly Philosophers") to be useless for real learning.

What I've found instead is that when really smart people are wrong, their wrongness (how and why they are wrong) is just as instructive as when they are right. If not more so.

Once you understand classical economics then learn about the marginal revolution. Follow that by reading Keynes and Von Mises simultaneously.

Almost every notable economist of the last 50 years is, in some form, an intellectual descendent of either Keynes or the Austrians (Von Mises and Hayek). Perhaps directly or one of Keynes -> Galbraith or Austrians -> Chicago School (Milton Friedman).

There are also lots of intellectual descendents of Marx (Thomas Sowell for example) but they tend to just write about economics rather than being actual working economists.

Notable Keynesians: Paul Krugman is an excellent writer and wrote several great popular books in the 90's, I escpecially like The Accidental Theorist. Brad DeLong worked for the Clinton administration and has a blog.

Notable Austrians: The Marginal Revolution blog (directly inspired by "Austrians"), Greg Mankiw (worked for the Bush administration a few years ago, not directly inspired by "Austrians").
If you'd want to eventually work abroad, I'd go for it. I don't know about Italy, but many countries have points-based immigration systems and having a master's degree from Stanford gives you a significant amount of extra points.
Twitter Emergency Backup
haha, i love justice, looking forward to their new album. and although i was born in france, both of my parents are american, which makes me american... funny how the nationality rules work
Do you ever print your code? The chars per line rule helps.
"How to behave as if you do not have Asperger's"
| Why would compressed bytecode (Flash) be larger than source code (JavaScript)?

I read the original question as asking why Google didn't add Flash onto its interface. I suppose it might be possible to replace their current JavaScript functions with Flash bytecode, but given the lengths they go to already to compress their JavaScript, I'd be surprised if the benefits there would be worth the trouble, not to mention any possible costs they might end up with due to migrating to Flash. (Browser support, version changes...?)

| AMF is also generally smaller than JSON or XML.

I kinda recalled Gmail (for instance) not using XML, but I dumped a session through Firebug to make sure. They're using their own (very simple) data format, and I doubt that AMF, or SOAP, or anything else could beat it, short of using actual data compression on both server and client side (and, again, probably not worth it).

Crawling through the Gmail code and data only reinforces my guess that their services are designed with low bandwidth usage among their top priorities.