skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Switching to your left hand will likely give some temporary relief, but it's not exactly a fix or 'prevention'. You're then just damaging a previously undamaged wrist. It'd be like "solving" global warming by just moving to another identical planet.
Men are more likely than women to crave alcohol when they feel negative emotions
booyah. lets do this.
Next generation of business software could get more fun
There were a lot of people at SocialDevCampEast who are working on changing that; there were lots of people there who are doing impressive things.
Smoking the cloud: What is really cloud computing?
Nudge: Helping you make rational daily decisions
Which "value" is he referring to? It seems more like they charge this much because consumers lack better options than to put up with it.
Vista as insecure as Windows 2000
Not sure I understand how to integrate what you are saying with what I read in the post. If RoR is dog-slow--let's pick 100x slower than something you would code in the weekend--but scales, then what they can serve with 100 servers = what you serve with one server. To double capacity, you add one server and they go from 100 to 200. And so it goes.

Scalability is a second-order issue: if you go from 1 server to 2, but they need to go from 100 servers to 400 servers to handle the same load, then not only are they slower than you are, but they can't scale as well as you can.

I get why using a framework for the UI and business logic could make them 100x slower than something custom-coded. And from the original post, I get why a conventional database+read cache may not be appropriate for a messaging application.

But what I don't get is the connection between RoR and scalability. Unless you are speaking of its default configuration, namely RoR+ActiveRecord+MySQL. Which speaks more to the architecture choice (tables, rows) than to the framework choice (views, models, controllers).

or am I missing something?????
I have several questions, because I feel there should be a better system approach to this twitter problem

is there any publicly available documentation for twitter's architecture?

did they use consultant help, did they contact SUN, IBM, Oracle or any other respected consultant when they started facing those problems?

i recommend you watch this video: http://www.infoq.com/presentations/qcon-voca-architecture-sp...

really ... we need to have a look at twitter architecture before we discuss this further
> use XML Notepad

If the format gets unwieldly that you require special software then the benefit of it being a human-readable text format is lost.
Duncan Riley (TechCrunch) has a new site
I realized that after responding, my bad.
> SUN, IBM, Oracle or any other respected consultant

Are you implying that Sun, IBM, and Oracle are respected for the prowess of their consulting organizations? I'm sure they have some Fine People working there, however the view that "writing a seven-figure cheque to these companies guarantees a positive outcome" is not universally held.
we use this for work, it's a pretty solid system. The old pricing scheme was quite poorly planned. Nice to see them working to improve it.
New top-of-the-line BlackBerry doubles screen resolution
A walk through the hard drive recovery process
Only suckers pay to get into conferences...
They're not. You can get custom machines from www.powernotebooks.com, and their prices do beat both Apple's and Dells.

I also recall the press release when Asustek won the contract for Apple's MacBook... though I don't remember whether it was Acer or Crown that won the contract for the MacBook Pro.
Technology Blog and more
NC Town First to Experience Analog TV Shutdown | Tech Jaws
It's not that rare in Seattle -- a renter here is paying something like 30-50% less per month than an owner of an equivalent space.

This is one of the principal arguments that the local housing market is overinflated. You can't take out a mortgage to pay rent, so it tends to be better reflect economic fundamentals.
SSHControl: Hosting for Git, Mercurial, and Subversion Repositories
If he can't scale a simple message passing system, what can he scale then? It's not that they are doing rocket science at twitter. He probably was the wrong person for the job.

In the good old days, every message over ICQ was sent over their servers, and they probably had more messages to handle than twitter does nowadays. And there wasn't a single problem then.
Why I Love Full Text Search
Look at Ruby. The guy who came up with it is a researcher at Osaka university; English is definitely not his native language.

Computers tend to use English for a number of reasons, some practical, but mostly historical. In this particular case, the practical reason involves the lack of a good, concise, 'if-then-else' structure in the Japanese language. Sure, the idea can be expressed, but it isn't really a common construct in everyday life.
Common usage of word "scale" is that things continue to work well as you add load. Whether that's done by having the software fast enough to handle everything one computer, adding servers or adding pet monkeys is not important to the user.

Responding to reasonable complaints by using a different definition of word "scale," makes for a weak argument.
People find rationalizations for doing unethical things.

I'm sure oil executives talk with each other about, literally, powering America.
Actually he has explicitly listed it as being necessary to make the language popular in his essay "The Next Big Language" which you can find at http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/02/next-big-language.ht...

"Rule #2" for what NBL requires is "Dynamic typing with optional static types."
How did this turn out. Did you actually get to building anything?
Scaling a Microblogging Service - Part I
Powerset Launches.  Verdict: Meh.
Summary: It's an expectations game and the combination of all the pre-launch hype and the execution of this launch did them in. A classic case of over-promising and under-delivering.

Try searching for "Who was the tenth President of the US?" on both Powerset and Google to see the power of "natural language search" in action.
I understand the difference between cash and profit, but to survive 39 years without making a profit must be some kind of record! Those are patient investors.
Ask YC: Writing an open source software or using one (to write an application)?
Recently I got lucky to be in a situation where I got my salary raised by 25% while required to be at the office less days per week.

The free time I got now seems to be a great opportunity to start a new project.

I was wondering whether I should start a project that targets software developers or a project that targets end users.

While I am convinced that the big money lays in applications, I know that it would be much more fun to cook for the chefs (that is developing for developers).

Have you ever been in such dilemma?
Ask tzury: where do you work and are they hiring?
Why not talk about how, for most short messages, sending an SMS is cheaper than making a phone call to transmit the same information?

The real question is: who says that the cost of transmitting information should be linear with the amount of data? If you want to transmit a hundred bytes then SMS is a good way to do it. If you want to transmit five gigs, then some other way would be better.
Although there is some rumour that some, most or all of their web development is handled by a team in Toronto, am no longer "you guys" :-)

That being said, there are some places where you can type in a date and it accepts a wide variety of formats, including the format it displays on its own pages. Rumour has it that some team-lead-type-guy proposed that as a bug fix, was shot down, coded it himself, and it waited in queue for a month or two before there were QA resources available to make sure it worked.
I was following his twitter (http://twitter.com/theinquisitr) - the current tweet is "Jennifer Aniston Finally Has a Man!"

I'm not sure how long I'm going to keep following =)
RescueTime.com is my current startup (YCO8). Previous startup (which sold in 2006) was an SEO play, so I've done it both ways.

Again, the point I was making (with 10 years of professional SEO experience under my belt) was that for some companies, search isn't how their products are found... If that's the case, an early focus on SEO (the time consuming part-- not the "low hanging fruit") is distracting from more effective distribution channels.

The degree to which you focus on SEO should be proportional to how much your customers are searching for what you offer (you should also roll into the equation the KEI/competitiveness of the target keywords).

There are plenty of businesses whose target customers do NOT USE GOOGLE as a tool find the product. 37Signals is a great mom-and-pop example. Building the next great search engine is another example (people wouldn't search for "search engine"). There are countless others. In addition, any business that's diving into mature verticals where Google is claiming the "2nd click" (weather, images, etc) ought to seriously consider eschewing SEO as an early strategy in favor of other distribution efforts.
As a customer, I hate getting gouged by text messaging.

As an entrepreneur, it gives me hope that there are useful services which people are willing to pay for directly. The social/viral distribution of sms is impressive: it costs me to send a message to my friends, and I'm encouraging them to spend money with their provider in order to respond.
As of now, it looks like the only thing they're offering is a fresh new redesign of Wikipedia, from a user's point of view. I'm sure there's a lot going on in the background, but none of that technology really shines through, especially after asking it several questions, to which the results were pretty average.

Maybe the way I speak isn't natural enough.
Sure, but based on historical events with housing in "great" areas, this can and does happen. If you buy right before a bubble, it can even happen sooner -- in a couple years.

If you buy a good stock right before a bubble, you can double your money quickly, too (ask me about INTC or CSCO or AMZN in 1998). The point is, what's going to happen under likely circumstances? More importantly, what's going to happen in a rational market?

Home prices are coming down from the largest asset bubble in US history. If you've never thought about homeownership before 1995 or so, you might assume that home prices always increase by at least 5% per year. You'd be wrong, however. Homes in the US are historically an under-performing investment; over the long-term, their returns approximately match the rate of inflation.

There are exceptions to this rule, but I think that the parent comment is generally well-taken: it's not guaranteed that your home is going to double in value in five years. (In fact, in some parts of the country, there's a real chance that your home will be worth 50% less in five years' time.)
Exactly. And I know from an engineer's perspective this is tough. The stuff behind the scenes is really amazing, I'm sure, but the thing that truly matters is the product.

This offering just doesn't stack up versus Google, even when you use both solely to search Wikipedia.

My feeling isn't annoyance, but disappointment. Where's my revolutionary new search engine?!?
I have read some good definitions[1] of cloud computing from Joyent.

[1]http://www.joyeur.com/2008/05/08/cloud-nine-specification-fo...
this kind of gouging has to turn off consumers. I know when I heard a gallon of inkjet ink was $4,000 I immediately started looking for better solutions
Wait, I thought Apple products just work. Why would they need tech support?
Bingo!

Brad Feld has a good article about this phenomenon: http://tinyurl.com/2rwmty
The comment can be found here: http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/05/dynamic-languages-st...
I guess I have a little trouble understanding how the words "more fun" can come after "big money". Big money IS more fun.

The world doesn't need YAPT (Yet Another Programmers' Tool). It needs real solutions to real problems. Find an end user with an itch and scratch it.
Comparing now with something 8 years ago in computer world?

That's like comparing cars with horse buggies and saying cars are less safe because there are more accidents now.

What happened to growth in users, usage, connectivity, profitability of exploits, etc?
I searched for "President of France", and was not impressed. Ironically, google got the answer right!

http://www.powerset.com/explore/pset?q=president+of+france

http://www.google.com/search?&q=president+of+france
I think it is pretty cool, but the hype that surrounds powerset will lead to many people think that it is nothing special.
Good thoughts I agree with in general, but I think this only barely passes the smell-test for strongly-typed-dynamic-language snobbery (and the little table of language characteristics is suspect, I think).

Sometimes you just forget a semicolon, and it doesn't have some deeper meaning.
By comparison, in Ohio, a brand spanking new two bedroom detached condo (nobody builds 2 br homes in most parts of the country, so you couldn't find a newish one) in a great area would cost maybe $150-175k. But rent on a good one BR apartment is still $750/mo.

Where are you getting your numbers? I grew up in Columbus; most of my friends and family still live there. The cost of a condo there is anywhere from 30-50% more than what you cite, and the rent for a 1BR apartment is 20-30% less.
and you just couldn't resist saying it...
Xobni's Journey to the Right Product
Yeah, it can be deadly to generate too much hype before your product launches, especially if it's going to take over a year and a half.

They've marketed themselves into a corner -- now it's Google-killer or bust.
Oops I thought I was up to date. I'd make a sucky stalker :)
Yeah, it looks like Google might be trying to head off Powerset at the pass by providing inline answers to these simple trivia-like questions.

Powerset's been doing this for more than a year and Google is already better at it, at least when I compare the results side-by-side.
Google Friend Connect Tries to Strangle the Social
The Disagreement Hierarchy has now been included in Wikipedia. Please see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disagreement_Hierarchy .
But that only applies to landlords buying new properties now. A landlord who bought their property 5 or 10 years ago has VERY different cost structure than someone who bought last year. They can offer rents lower than a landlord with a new mortgage.

Don't assume everyone has a new mortgage at full market prices!
There is actually some incorrect information in there:

Vim already has built in syntax highlighting for python
but I have a small tweak to vim to give you notifications
of small syntax errors like forgetting a colon after a for
loop. Create a file called ~/.vim/syntax/python.vim and
add the following into it:

That will override the system's version of python.vim. Using ~/.vim/after/syntax/python.vim or even something like ~/.vim/after/syntax/python/custom_errors.vim will do the trick.
I think the main consideration when talking about renting or buying is the time involved. In Texas, I've found that if you're going to live somewhere for at least 2 years (or so, depending on the market), and you set out to find a particular standard of housing (i.e., fix the square footage, etc), it's cheaper to buy. Under three years, unless you find a good deal, it's probably cheaper to rent.
recent, pretty good discussion also here:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=168491
The real advantage to renting is it reduces the cost to move. Try running the numbers assuming you move every 3 to 7 years costing you 4% of the value of your home and see how the numbers look.
Why most startups are in Silicon Valley and Cambridge
Yes, but if they have significant equity they could make more money selling than renting in an overinflated market.
I concur. I see all these startups where I know I can do much better on the technical side, but I'm just not enthusiastic enough about the subject matter to actually put the time in to do it.

It seems like a lot of these start-ups are the founders' first tries at something big, so they make a lot of mistakes; but since it's new and exciting to them, motivation wins out and they actually accomplish something.

I really admire their enthusiasm and stick-to-it-iveness.
Why Doesn't Apple Face The Innovator's Dilemma?
My thesis supervisor always used to finish projects before submitting grant applications, as it was the only way to put together a reliable estimate on research projects.

The only trouble he had was when the application was bounced as being too large for the funding requested :)
> The point is, what's going to happen under likely circumstances?

In high-demand areas, it's likely housing prices will see another bubble.

> it's not guaranteed that your home is going to double in value in five years.

We're all in agreement on that.

The point I was making is that real estate bubbles recur and so there's always the possibility of a large, rapid gain, which doesn't happen with mutual funds (correct me if I'm wrong there).

> In fact, in some parts of the country, there's a real chance that your home will be worth 50% less in five years' time.

The article specifically stipulates a "great" area. So we're not talking about parts of the country that aren't in demand. :)
If this is a dilemma to you, then you don't need to be doing either. There's no point in making some software for the sake of making the software. The only point to making software is filling a need, so if you have none of those, then don't write any code. And if you have found a need, who cares who it's targeted to?
It also seems like he tries to deflect the argument by saying that people are saying Ruby (the language) doesn't scale, and then ridiculing them for that, when in fact people are saying Rails (the architecture) doesn't scale.
I read somewhere that Javascript was originally implemented in Lisp. Wouldn't it be so much better if they stuck with Lisp as the basis for extending Firefox (Netscape at the time)? Maybe in that alternate history it would have seemed obvious to use Lisp as a common data format instead of XML, it being the clearest and cleanest syntax for complex nested data/s-expressions. Easy to read and better than XML as a common format. As is, Javascript eventually matured into a pretty damn good language (though not as good as Common Lisp, not even as good as Emacs Lisp), but XML is pretty lousy.
I think the question for Powerset now is how quickly they can make their technology apply to other websites. My guess it they choose wikipedia because the html is fairly tame...it's much easier to semantically parse wikipedia than it is the wild wild west that is html formatting on the web.

If this is the case, then they might be in trouble. They built up too much hype to just be a search tool for wikipedia. If they can upgrade their technology and search much more of the web then we'll have a better idea. For right now? Meh.
I get the impression their plan is so grandiose that it probably won't ever reach a completed form... The context they've added to wikipedia is neat, but what would they do to present a site I made a week ago? Are they adding this extra context only to the popular sites? Framework based, perhaps?

I think I'd want context for all sites, or not at all. I prefer consistency over occasional glitz.
Ask YC: Open-Source User Management System
I've been scouring the web for an open-source user management system to integrate into a web application. There seems to be limited support for a simple system that can handle user login, signup, and maybe emails...and yet almost every web app needs it! How can this be?

Any solutions that anyone knows of that aren't full-fledged CMS systems? PHP preferred...
Depending on the company and the projects maintaining the status quo may be the best decision you can take.

Right now we have 20 years worth of legacy code in ADA. We have a legal obligation to maintain a large percentage of that code to 2075. Our demand for programmers in this location is such that essentially we run training schools to meet demand and would have to do the same in any language.

What _possible_ advantage would there be in moving to a new language for new projects? Before the life cycle is up any new toy would be old and rusty. We have to train programmers anyway. Supporting two languages would double the overhead. Our existing skill base is productive in ADA. Real Software Engineering is only 5% programming at most.

This is of course a bit of an extreme example - but it serves to illustrate the point that in the continuum there will be plenty of companies on the 'don't move' side of the equation, where it is far more profitable to stay with what they already know, at least for now.
hahaha uber fail.

(posting this b/c your comment doesn't make it clear that google wins that search)
The Bipolar Lisp Programmer
The problem is, they've been indexing Wikipedia for a long time now -- at least a year.

Is this the best they have to offer after all that time? I hope not.
By volume, inkjet ink is more expensive than vintage champagne. By volume, SMS is more expensive than hand delivered postcards. There's no excuse for such gouging.
There is no connection. The fact that they're using RoR to build what is really a very, very simple web site suggests their problem is not knowing which tools to use, which is a problem you can not solve by throwing more hardware at it. Talk about scalability is a red herring in this case. The real issues are elsewhere.
Heh. Proper conclusions left as an exercise for the reader.
It's not a problem to have a grandiose plan. You have to aim for the stars in the startup game.

But you have to be extra-careful about publishing those aims two years before a product launches. It will force you to deliver at 100%.

Risky risky.
Okay...if you're arguing that the majority of landlords bought a long time ago, and therefore are profitable, I can't really dispute that point (don't know one way or the other).

That said, I don't see that as being the most important metric. Today, in Seattle, it's cheaper to rent than to buy. It might be cheaper to buy ten years ago than to rent today, but that doesn't have much bearing on a rent/buy decision tomorrow.
HP close to $12-13 billion deal to buy EDS
http://www.powerset.com/explore/pset?q=who+president+of+fran... gives the right answer.
From what I've read, it may be true that "sleep is for optimizing the structure of memories," but we don't know enough yet to know for sure. Also, I see no reason why sleep can't be for both.
Redundant Disk Storage Across Multiple EC2
Hmm... point taken. Maybe this deserves an Ask YC, but what is the general opinion of naming companies in an quasi-arrogant fasion. Powerset seems like a cocky name compared to Google, which is even mispeled making me think they're humble.
The meat in the comments of Blaine Cook's blog entry:

http://romeda.org/blog/2008/05/scalability.html#140141155247...

"Scaling Twitter as a messaging platform is pretty easy. See Mickaël Rémond's post on the subject. Scaling the archival, and massive infrastructure concerns (think billions of authenticated polling requests per month) are not, no matter what platform you're on. Particularly when you need to take complex privacy concerns into account."

Sounds like they are having the kinds of problems that Friendster had years back.

How come sites like MySpace don't have these issues? They also seem to have a pretty complex social graph.
I am pretty certain it was mentioned in a blog post recently (I cannot find it now) that Ruby on Rails is only used for a small part of what Twitter is doing - ie the front end, and there is a lot of non Rails or Ruby code in the background.
It doesn't just cost consumers either. If you're a developer who wants to implement SMS in an app, you're looking at probably $.05 per message, maybe shaving a bit off with a volume buy.

I had a fun app that I have largely given up on once I realized it was just too cost prohibitive to offer the service for free and allow SMS messaging.

(This was using Clickatell btw.)