skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
it is depressing how slowly we are learning the full implications of natural selection. political parties gain power not by being right, but by being more effective at spreading themselves. It is the same for feudalism as it is for democracy. "bringing democracy" to "less fortunate nations" is no different than the warring of the feudal lords for more land. All social systems must expand or be squeezed out of existence by those movements that do expand.
We don't have our current system because it was more justified and more right than others. it was simply good at spreading itself.
Capitalism started in the late 1600's and only faced serious opposition during the 20th century, but even that opposition was a trifle. Communism was never a threat because communism isn't competitive.

Now this isn't to say that capitalism and democracy suck and we should abolish them. Humans need competition to bring out the best in them. Capitalism is responsible for the increases in the standard of living over subsistence agriculture that much of the world still lives in. But they both have flaws that are potentially crippling if left undressed. Corn-pone opinions is a perfect example. Capitalism does concentrate power in the hands of the few and left unregulated has the potential for monopolies. These powerful few can then dictate the values that are advantageous to them to society. some would argue this has already happened.

bleh, enough ranting.
That indeed is amazing innovation. Who would have thought zukerbergs team would have been open about their innovations. They are usually quite secretive about their future plans. I think having this kind of conversation with their user/developer community is amazing. More companies need to do this and dirty with the technical stuff not just a high level talk.
Barriers to entry seem to be very important on the web.

Some believe building walled gardens is better (ebay, facebook´s social graph).
Others believe opening the platform is the way to go (free software).
While some others take a mixed approach (google, microsoft, amazon).
Time will tell, but it seems it´s tilting towards openness.
Charting Techmeme’s Top 100 Headline & Discussion Sources
I read this article because the headline made me think that Wired was outing the Air Force as a means of taking away my civil liberties. After reading the article, I realized that it was simply a job ad.

I think I am done with Wired. Two of the things I have vowed never to do are: (1) Work for the government; (2) Work on something that could be used in war. In my opinion, with this one simple article, Wired has crossed the line from being a place I get interesting tech news to being a puppet of the U.S. government.
The naive implementation of sending a notification to all friends whenever a user comes online or goes offline

Did I miss it, or does the note not mention how they actually implemented the notification?
What you need to do in response to the openssl fiasco
Comcast wants to play social,grabs plaxo
The only reason this is considered impressive is because so many other services have set the bar so low. This isn't rocket science, it just requires thinking ahead and designing for scale.
There appears to be a bug where every so often the app shows 'skip' with the same photos after submission, instead of moving on to the next pair.
Adobe releases Flash Player 10 beta
Amazon Kindle growth curve similar to iPods'
I correctly guessed at the use of Erlang for the web servers; persistent connections and pushing is a must and Apache is hardly designed for so many persistent processes. Thrift was also a pretty easy call considering it's a FB project; I still want to check that out, too.

The information wasn't incredibly in-depth but it's very cool and useful nonetheless to read about implementations like this on such a large scale. The chances of me ever creating something with the scale and resources that FB requires is pretty slim, but it's gratifying to know I've at least got a rough idea of some good ways to do it.

Now, if we could just get Twitter to do the same, perhaps someone could give them a few pointers... ;)

"Did I miss it, or does the note not mention how they actually implemented the notification?"

No, it doesn't go over that implementation, though it piqued my curiosity nonetheless. I would assume it's a time-based check on status rather than a real-time representation.
I honestly expected to click this link and see a ton of information any bozo could figure out after a Google search but this was worth it.
"All along, I had much luck with mentors."

Seems like this is an intangible in the successes of many.
What you would call rocket science? This is pretty impressive.

Erlang does a lot of the heavy lifting but even if it did everything out of the box (and it didn't), gluing it all together is no small feat.
William Morris Fund Makes First Investment: Social Networks Analytics Startup Sometrics
This development story is so awesome it saddens me that it's such a terrible idea for a product.

The world really doesn't need another proprietary chat standard, especially one that locks people into a website.
All Ebay's secret children
Ushering in Genomic Medicine: Will nature trump man-made molecules?
From my experience its the other way around. Your bad hairdo and greenish-white LCD tan are more than negated by the millions of dollars you make. That certainly seemed to be the case when I went anywhere nice.
http://developers.facebook.com/news.php?blog=1&story=110
Still no 64-bit Linux client? At this point there are probably more 64- than 32-bit Linux systems.
As previous news articles state, Facebook has some implementation of XMPP going on. XMPP was designed from the ground-up to deal with exactly the issues that he highlights, and is the ideal real-time implementation for any system where everyone is expected to be aware of the statuses of all others on the network (verses the traditional "poll the server every x seconds" methods).

Even if Facebook isn't using XMPP per-say, they have full access to its implementations and source code for internal use for sure.

Granted, Facebook _does_ have the "slight" challenge of having 70 million active users; in light of which near everyone else's IM/XMPP networks are a mere pittance; but the core framework and algorithms are wholly addressed and implemented in XMPP standard.

It's one thing to make a more-efficient implementation of an already-existing standard that scales damn decently verses _designing_ a whole new system to serve their needs.

Note that the article doesn't once mention XMPP though.
Are you sacrificing your childhood if it sucks in the first place? Sure, there are dangers to rushing along. But it sure sounds more interesting to rush along than not to do so. I may be wrong, but I envy those who had the opportunity.
Advice to the Not Bright and Not Young: College is... erm, not for everyone.
Party Of One: Surviving A Hobby Open-Source Project
IDK. Sam Adams is $7 for a 6 pack. I once bought 30 of the Beast for less than that. Was a long time ago though.
I think there's a middle ground between your parents and his.
Frugality makes you creative. If you think you have abundant resources then you will always throw money at the problem. Whereas if you feel your resources are limited then it will force you to come up with creative solutions to make the most out of what you have.
Why Arc is bad for exploratory programming
> Capitalism does concentrate power in the hands of the few and left unregulated has the potential for monopolies.

Except that monopolies tend to be created and maintained by regulation.

In what universe does govt constrain the politically powerful more than it constrains others?
I don't think anyone believes that college is for everyone. The problem is that everybody believes that college is for them. As usual, the people who are least able are the worst at recognizing their (dis)ability level.

Sometimes I think that the greatest value of competitive post-secondary entrance processes is not so much that it allows institutions to get the best possible students as it is that is is provides less able students with some gentle encouragement to find a less academic course for their lives -- saving students from their own stupidity, so to speak. It seems almost cruel -- but isn't it far crueler to confront students with the irrefutable evidence of their idiocy?
Good point. Using a good language with great libraries is like prototyping at TechShop. http://techshop.ws/

There's a place for great languages with less-comprehensive libraries, no doubt. But if you want to make something that works today...
PHP, not rails
Flash Player 10 - Beta release
issue has been resolved. Thanks for the heads up.
What's the status of Arc?

Interest on arclanguage.org seems to be fading.
I haven't seen anything that says that's the library they use for Gmail - I got the impression it was a brand new library produced as part of the Doctype project (partly for educational purposes). Got a link to back that statement up?
Stating my beliefs in educational opportunities usually results in someone wanting to punch me in the face. I'll risk upsetting a few people because I believe my opinion is valid.

I believe that the bottom ten percent of every class (I define class as the collective whole of a grade) should be kicked out of school and immediately placed into the workforce. There should be no second chances. In the end, only those with the drive and the ability for advanced study (I stress that both are needed) will be in a position to pursue a university education.
That site has one of the most misleading names on the Web - it has nothing to do with the W3C.
i figured that much, but criticism is always good ..... in moderation :(
That feature has been in Dojo for years - in fact I'd be very surprised if Google's implementation wasn't directly inspired by Dojo's.
we're working on that.
You should spend a few minutes learning about the OPV experimental vaccinations in the later 50s which is the leading candidate for causing AIDS.

http://www.documentary-film.net/search/video-listings.php?e=...
Seems to me that kind of thing can happen to you in any culture. It's not like business deals in the western world never go awry.
Flash 3D engines like Sandy, Papervision, and Away3D should see significant performance improvements, according to the material released by Adobe Labs. I'm excited for better online 3D applications, and looking forward to the day when online apps have full access to the GPU. In the meantime, 3D applications will need to be on the desktop.
I don't doubt that there is a middle ground. I was simply commenting on the parent post. I was on the opposite side of the spectrum as this kid. I had the ability but not the opportunity. It is a cause of much of my bitterness. It is largely the reason why I don't speak to my mother much.

For those who may think that such bitterness is unwarranted or inappropriate for such a situation, I accept that I am bitter about it and I relish in the fact that I am no longer in such a situation.
A chat server? Yawn. And it's not for 70 million people at once, that's user base, not simultaneous logins.

AIM, Bonjour, Gadu-Gadu, Google Talk, GroupWise, ICQ, IRC, MSN, QQ, SILC, SIMPLE, SameTime, XMPP, Yahoo, this is a solved problem.
Too bad Flash 10 is still using the old Netscape Plugin Interface (npi). This is one of the biggest perf killers on a Mac. Safari supports new plugin interface that is a lot more flexible and allows a lot better refresh updates and less polling.
it does look a lot like dojo, thanks.
As far as I can tell, the problem here is to some degree one of conflicting generalisations. The article is trying to explore a different space to the space for which Arc was designed to be used for exploring.

Just like flippers, scuba gear, and a diving mask might be suboptimal for exploring a jungle or the moon, but great for exploring underwater, choosing an appropriate environment for the space you want to explore is something worth thinking about.
What about Euro-NCAP crash safety? The Nano looks to use the driver's knees as the front crumple zone...

Personally, I do the environment a favor by buying used cars and maintaining them until they die.
Startlogic Review
www.startlogicreview.org is startlogic review and startlogic coupon site. The real startlogic review hosted with startlogic hosting.
Anything specific?
Processing.js Aftermath
Isn't that a mouthwash?
On the Difference Between "Semantic" and "Semantic Web"
I am not very deep into it yet, but my impression is that it is often surprisingly simple to provide lacking libraries for LISP.

As an example, this is an interface to the Cairo graphics library for MzScheme: http://planet.plt-scheme.org/package-source/samth/cairo.plt/...

I haven't tried it out yet, but I sure had expected a lot more code. Now that is just a connector to an existing C library, but in other cases I was also surprised by the brevity of the code.

Actually I was surprised by the brevity of the code in "Programming Collective Intelligence", too. For the time being, I consider that kind of stuff part of my fun projects, so I decided to do them in Scheme. The upside is that if a library is missing, you get a chance to actually provide it yourself and make a name for yourself in the Open Source world.

Also, I like implementing those algorithms. With another language, there might not be an excuse for implementing the algorithms from the book by yourself, because libraries already exists. With Scheme, I have a justification to implement them myself.

Interfaces to web services might also not be so important, and easy to implement by yourself.
Wasn't the iPod Mac only back then? And wasn't Apple at it's lowest market share ever? When they made the iPod work with Windows, they broadened their market something like 20x. Kindle is already aimed at everyone.
Sure, it's in the video interview with Mark Pilgrim

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

At 5:28 Mark says:

"This is a big part of the encyclopedia and the guide. It is not just having a reference section but having a series of how-to articles and larger case studies. And those articles are primarily based around previously unreleased Google code that we are open sourcing as part of this project. We have a JavaScript library that handles a lot of cross browser compatibility issues which we use in properties like Gmail. If you ever viewed source you've seen the compiled version which isn't terrible readable. As part of this encyclopedia project, we are releasing the original uncompiled version that has the actual comments and real function names and description of things. So that is all open sourced under a OSI approved license."

This is so unbelievably cool, why aren't Google or other blogs playing this up more??
The dark launch idea is neat:

"The secret for going from zero to seventy million users overnight is to avoid doing it all in one fell swoop. We chose to simulate the impact of many real users hitting many machines by means of a "dark launch" period in which Facebook pages would make connections to the chat servers, query for presence information and simulate message sends without a single UI element drawn on the page. With the "dark launch" bugs fixed, we hope that you enjoy Facebook Chat now that the UI lights have been turned on"

Oh, they spilled the beans on using Erlang two weeks ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=179064
Delhi Daredevils v Deccan Chargers 37th Match Live
Delhi Daredevils v Deccan Chargers
37th Match, Indian Premier League
16:00 local, 20:00 local, 14:30 GMT, Thu 15 2008
Feroz Shah Kotla, Delhi (D/N)
Because there are so many other free Javascript libraries out there?
Mumbai Indians v Kolkata Knight Riders 38th Match Live
Mumbai Indians v Kolkata Knight Riders
38th Match, Indian Premier League
16:00 local, 20:00 local, 14:30 GMT, Fri 16 2008
Wankhede Stadium, Mumbai (D/N)
The Rise of Contextual User Interfaces
England v New Zealand 1st Test
Date : Thu 15 - Mon 19
Time : 11:00 local, 10:00 GMT
Match Type : 1st Test
Teams : England v New Zealand
Venue : Lord's, London
Let's add Alonzo Church to that list.
Honda robot conducts Detroit Symphony to warm response
I've think there are a couple of hidden factors which help explain the correlation between frugality and startup success - economic intuition, and the sense of entitlement.

Many startup founders don't have good economic intuition, and this expresses itself both in a lack of frugality, and an inability to come up with a realistic business model. In other words, similar skills and experience are needed to answer both these questions:

1. How long do we need our investment money to last, and what is the best way of spending it over that time?

2. What kind of products will people will pay for, and how much will they be willing to pay?

So you'll often see a startup which is spending money unnecessarily, and also finding it impossible to bring enough in.

On the second point, some startup founders have a sense of 'entitlement'. By this I mean a belief that the world owes them a good life without them having to earn it. Perhaps this is because investment is too easy to come by in the current environment.

Instead of feeling a heavy sense of responsibility and guardianship over their investors' money, and focusing on providing a return, these founders think they've been given a free ticket to go pursue their dreams. This will express itself both in a lack of frugality regarding money, and also an unwillingness to put in the long hours necessary to make their startup succeed.
I wouldn't worry too much about it. The title here on HN is misleading. The analyst isn't saying that the Kindle has the same adoption curve, but rather that IF it does turn out to have the same adoption curve, it'll be a big hit. Nahhhhh, really?
True laziness would be to have no ambition, or not to love anything enough to pursue it. To be in love with a stalemate would be laziness.
Not to mention many of those services do have 70 million people on at once.
While I think he's a really nice and smart kid (basically, like all of my friends from all those stupid programs), I don't think he's had much experience outside practicing/studying/fine tuning all these things he does at school and at his extracurricular activities.

And really, as much as that article says his parents didn't want to push him, I get the impression that they do, and maybe to extremes...at the least, they imply so.

I want him to be a kid! I've had MANY friends go this route at various ages (but all still earlier than usual), and some of them regret slaving away at classwork only to end up like everyone else except a couple years faster..which ends up meaning almost nothing most of the time. It really depends on the person..but almost all of them follow the same pattern. Study, study, study, do lots of extracurriculars..get into college, go to grad school a bit early, and end up in the same place as half their intellectual peers. Do employers care? Not really. Do schools care? Maybe for the teeny bit of publicity, but not really. In fact, if you do skip that much that early you probably end up running into issues with school administration.

Honestly, is there something bad about taking ones time? I used to take classes at the CC when I was 11-12ish, and I felt insanely out of place in most of them because everyone was several years older than me and while it was easy to get acquainted with others (it can be an interesting introduction), it's just not the same. My parents liked the idea but they would babysit me the whole way through (well, not the classwork) because they weren't comfortable with me beling alone on campus.

Essentially, the behavior of any preteen just won't be the same as anybody over 18.
Also they did stage the launch over a few weeks. I noticed it appear on my facebook page (because I'm in the Stanford network) well before it appeared on most of my friends'
I don't know. The thing is, I got into the highly gifted magnet program at lausd (the group for kids with IQs>=145) thanks to my parents. But my parents were completely oblivious as to what all of that nonsense from the school principal was and just signed all the papers without really reading anything. They actually thought I caused some trouble at school when they got a call from my teacher who wanted to talk about me..except it was cause I was in the 99th percentile in everything and finished classwork in 5 minutes what would take everyone else an hour (and played games on the Macs we had in class :D).

So I mean, this stuff happens with or without parents. I think it's cause I really enjoyed all these things..my parents sat me down with the Sunday comics to get me to read when I was a baby not because they wanted me to be some genius, but because apparently it looked like I had an interest in the colorful stuff on the paper. (On a sidenote, some parents think they can make their kids into "genius"es and their kids overwork themselves to get into these programs to get their approval and man it ends up being a waste of time!)

I believe Moshe is a very cute kid who has brains. I think that his parents realized that early on and got him to do all these things. My ultimate problem with this situation is that he's too young and inexperienced in every other way..he's only known that life he has now and nothing else, and there's probably no way in hell his parents will backtrack and just leave him alone (probably blame it on him eventually reaching puberty? who knows). I don't know if he'll end up regretting it, or if he'll end up thanking his parents for what they've done. But I think it's a damn shame regardless.

And you do have a really valid point that not a lot of people are realizing. I can count a LOT of people my age and older that I know were just as gifted as this kid..but what did they end up doing? Um, nothing that someone will remember 10 years later, usually. That doesn't mean they're not gifted..they're pretty intelligent. But it's not something that really stands out..it's usually what they want to do and they just do it.
What is this troll doing on the front page?
That is also true. But sometimes you need a mentor of sorts to help you when you need it, and some professors can do that well.
Considering they have 10,000 servers+, I don't think "scaling" is that big a feat.

So say they have every active user on at the same time (70million), and say they have 10,000 servers. That's only 7k users per server??? Not great IMHO

Maybe if they only had 1,000 servers, then it'd be a little more impressive.
Deutschlands grosse Dienstleistungs Bewertungs Website » Lycos Webhosting Kleiner Au Reviews
I don't think so. Resources, yes. But not necessarily parent-talk. And I think if he was this smart (which I do), that he'd be able to do this on his own..not this early, but eventually, somehow.

Also, some parents do the opposite, some don't. Some misunderstand the purpose of the internet, which I think is the real problem. My parents attempted to and eventually stopped trying to filter what I did on the computer after I circumvented everything they tried and turned the tables on them (I was a complete brat :D), but they also spent a fortune of their then-pitiful earnings on books and toys and hardware I wanted. They felt that was more important than indulging their own desires (typical asian parents).

Now I'm paying that back in various ways, and I thank them for all of that. I don't think I would have been the big geek I am now if it wasn't for them putting up with me tearing apart half the electronics they owned.

I wonder what he'll turn out to be like 10 years later.
I am WAY surprised to see that you have not only read it, but liked it . . . I agree that it is a great book . . . one of the Japanese tanks destroyed in combat is still on that very spot, with the crew's remains still inside it, at least according to an American veteran who went back for a visit a couple of years ago . . .