skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The leaders in the space are Sandvine and Cisco, and Arbor (my old employer) just bought their way in by nabbing Ellacoya.

The answer in the general case is, "stuff that looks substantially like libpcap". It's all written in C, surprise!

On the very high end, or in very specialized cases, you'll find:

* FPGA regexers, OEM'd from a couple common vendors, that compile DFAs into gates.

* Multicore "network processors" with MIPS cores and fast custom memory busses.

* Blades that connect into the backplanes of (ubiquitous) Cat6k switches to intercept traffic.

By and large, this is a systems design problem, not an algorithms challenge. To appreciate that, you have to get the context for this WaPo story, which includes the fact that the story is totally overblown and ISPs are not reading your email or web traffic, but rather trying to figure out how to commercialize a "fast-path" network product for bulk P2P/streaming media customers.
Ah, you're saying he's a Hanoi Jane.

I did not realize that about Ezra Pound. Now I see why people like GK Chesterton and CS Lewis disliked TS Elliot (protege of Pound) so much.
This is not a battle between cipherpunks and the NSA. It's a battle between BitTorrent and cable Internet providers.

I assert without evidence or significant analysis, but with some past experience: the products WaPo is talking about are used almost exclusively for two purposes:

* To enable ISPs to build "fast-path" offerings for "premium" Internet access for streaming media.

* To ratchet down the incredibly painful impact that BitTorrent and other "always-on" file sharing applications are having on ISP networks.

The irony is, the high-end products WaPo is talking about are the least applicable to NSA-style spying. The code handling the packets that AT&T shunted to NSA is crappy vanilla pcap; any of us could write it.
> To be selected to participate in Beilock and her colleagues’ first study of mathematical performance, for example, women had to perform baseline tasks with greater than 75 percent accuracy, and they had to agree with the statements “I am good at math” and “It is important to me that I am good at math.” Why do these things matter?

So people give up a little when others tell them that they are bad at what they've worked so hard to do well at, or do a little extra if superiority appears to be within reach. Seems like a whole lot of fluff for such a simple observation.
That's what I tell music stores when they catch me shoplifting.
Blizzard has learned 11 lessons on innovation that can help almost any business
It's a beautiful idea that what we most love to do is what we most morally should do.
No, I didn't say that at all.
What happened to changing the world?
Can a spam filter play chess?
Confessions of a layoff coach
The guy who stood up to those tanks in tiananmen square.
I voted you up not because I necessarily agree with you, but because you make a good point. We do ignore the basis of stereotypes when we shouldn't. We need to realize there is such a thing as natural and good elitism. This is an important "thing that is not said."

That being said, while stereotypes do have some kind of basis in reality (something has to perpetuate them) the problem comes when we say certain people are inherently inferior and do not have a free, moral accountable will.
A quick disclaimer: I'm really a Lisp / Scheme noob, but I'm learning them both for academic purposes.

That being said, at first the parens bugged me a little bit, but as I got to developing more applications, the more I really grew to LOVE the parens. To me, they introduce a certain purity to the programs that I write; it's like every s-expr is a single thought and every function is a train of thinking. Beyond that, an additional benefit that I've found is that I can hold MUCH more of a program in my head when they're organized this way. I think it has to do with the chunking theory of memory - I don't have to remember the particulars of each chunk; just what each chunk did.

Anyways, it's a big enough attraction to me now that I regret not having them available in my day-to-day languages.
I thought you meant he was hated by the Brits because he misrepresented the Nazis and how they treated their POWs, like Jane Fonda did with the American POWs.

However, I just read pg's link and now understand what you were saying.
My point was more along the reactive lines to a price increase of energy. Regardless of the positive environmental result, which I applaud, if middle America sees it's utility bill increase by a significant percentage, whoever has their name attached to the legislation that caused it is at serious risk of being voted out.

Note also that an increase in the price of energy causes prices across the board for every manufactured item to increase. Classic inflation, 1970s style. This is not the best economic environment to cause inflation in.
As stated in the release, if the YHOO board does not accept within 3 weeks, MSFT is going hostile and will try to take over the YHOO board. A corporation does not make such public statements if it does not intend to follow through. YHOO is in trouble.
The face of Leonardo (Video)
As in my response to the other guy above, "isn't all that special" really was referring to being able to compete as enterprise software against the set in distribution channel.

Yes, asterisk is great. Its probably even better now than it was a few years ago. Their mailing lists were AWESOME, and just like Linux, if I was resourceful enough, I could figure out what I needed to and if I couldn't, help was just an email away. That doesn't mean that most businesses won't just call Avaya and pull out their check book. Enterprise level software has a way of being completely bogus. Go into any medium to large (and all too often, sadly, even small) companies, and look at the garbage they use, then look how much they pay for that garbage. Then look at how they actually believe in that garbage as being the right choice.

Asterisk could certainly improve its lot in the future by changing its ease of use, and making more of an effort at being in the distribution channel.
I would say much of the processes are useful, but don't take any of them too far. Unit testing, continious integration, version control, regression testing, and building your software in iterations are all things that are important for building good software.

If it's just two people in a garage than some things aren't as necessary as others, but as you build a team you'll need all of these.

For a startup other things like UML diagrams, pair programming and etc aren't necessary.
Doesn't the ISP open themselves up to more lawsuits from the RIAA and the like when they start inspecting traffic because they are no longer just pipe?
1-7: eerily familiar... Good though to see them backed up by a company outside the web.

8 is interesting. So instead of just building upon the best aspect of the games, they do a lot to improve the worst. Guess that makes sense though given that games generally have a more restricted flow than apps.

9, Another good datapoint in the ongoing debate over "release early to customers" vs "release high quality." Then again, they do use somewhat of a hybrid as I'm sure they have testers before they do the full scale release. Or do they?

10, There are "new" types of games coming out of the console gaming industry? I'm hardly convinced...
It was amazing when they showed a shot of the audience. A quick count revealed 17 macs, and 1 machine that I don't think was a mac, although it may have been a black macbook.

I didn't realize macbooks had become so pervasive in the ruby world.
Discussed here at another thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=105144
Coming soon to another country near you. US, you pirates destroying our legacy profit streams, please continue to enjoy your rate-limited internet experience.
This PG essay should help:

http://www.paulgraham.com/mit.html
Not bad, but is loopt going anywhere as a company? Just wondering, as I don't know anybody using it.
Might do good as a free service, but having people pay for it might hamper their adoption. And critical mass is what is needed for this kind of applicaiton. Unless your friends are in there too, the service is not useful by itself.
I think you missed the point. It's not that "people give up a little when others tell them that they are bad..." The effect is self-afflicted, you just have to think that there is a negative stereotype that affects you, and your performance will suffer. Moreover, the effect is actually stronger if you think that you are pretty good at whatever the stereotype says you should be bad at.

The point is that, regardless of whether the stereotype is true or not, this is a scientifically established psychological reaction that causes people to perform below their capacity, and it only affects those that are from a stereotyped group. This means that, in your example above, women will constantly be at a disadvantage compared to men in math performance.

Does it matter? If you were a member of such a group, I'd wager you would think it unfair, and doubly so since you are already trying to break a negative stereotype.
Doesn't it seem like there are no people that are ambitious or passionate enough to believe (and do) something "big"? At least in my age group (20 year olds).
"Stereotypes may contribute slightly to group differences, but they are not the primary cause of them."

No, they are probably not the primary cause. The proximate cause is probably bigotry, imho, with societal structure as the ultimate cause. It's definitely not genetic or something innate to the afflicted persons.

In any case, an individual belonging to a group with a negative stereotype attached should not be punished merely for being a member of the group. In this case, yes, truth really can hurt you, and I don't think that's fair.
in another news, adblock destroys online advertising business.
One of the greatest that often get overlooked is Doug Engelbart. Everyone connects him with inventing the mouse.

What he did in the 60 aka punchcard times in one demo revolutionizing the computer: http://sloan.stanford.edu/mousesite/1968Demo.html

For the first time real time connection to a computer using a monitor. Introducing the concept of files, documents, ...
Primitive graphical UI. Video conferencing between Menlo Park and Fort Mason in San Francisco. That was done wirelessly by parking transmitter trucks on skyline ...

When he was young he set the principle for his life:

Let me design a professional goal which will maximize the contribution my career can have to mankind!

Weeks later his lifetime goal emerged:

As much as possible, to boost mankind's collective capability for coping with complex, urgent problems.

He is in his 90s and still at it: http://www.futuresalon.org/2004/11/future_salon_do.html

Truly amazing, Mark.
I always cringe reading articles about technology that were clearly written by people who know nothing about it.

Can anyone point us to a well-written article about the this "superfast Internet"?
No, not strange at all. Plain text is the storage format for that markup language. The number of tools that can work with plain text may be "uncountable", but for something like rich text there's not as many. The idea is that even if the editor you originally used goes away, the format of the file itself will always be readable. If someone needs to open an MS Powerpoint presentation in 30 years, it may not be so easy.
We've already agreed not to sell your personal information:

http://ourdoings.com/tos.html
According to their site, they already are charging people:

How much does Loopt cost?

Free until Jan 2008. After that date, new accounts
get a 30-day Free Trial and then $2.99 a month.

Most of my friends and I don't use Loopt, but only because it's not offered for iPhone or AT&T yet. I think I would if I could.

I agree it needs to hit critical mass for it to really take off. I think the iPhone would definitely help with that.
The chair of my department at a research hospital is a big open source advocate (actually, it's more like a big hatred for Microsoft). Most of the staff does great, professors, programmers, but the admins struggle because they have to interact with so many institution-wide systems that aren't designed with cross-platform interoperability in mind. Thankfully, things are slowly getting better, but this is definitely a roadblock on the road to widespread adoption.
Yes this is amazing stuff. I always thought the newspaper world was much more stressful. You only have one chance to make things right whereas with a blog you can update things on the fly.
You know, I don't believe that people really do have all that many great ideas. If they did, wouldn't there be some aggregator for great-ideas-seeking-implementors? A sort of idea lost-and-found? I mean, I know of the Halfbakery[1], but it's mostly for "teehee, wouldn't it be silly if" ideas, instead of serious "if anyone does this it will change the world" ideas. At least as far as I can tell, idea demand still outweighs idea supply.

Or maybe the "everyone will steal it so I will tell no one" mentality is far more pervasive than it seems, perhaps even ingrained into the human psyche in general.

[1](http://www.halfbakery.com/)
Giving up is not self-afflicted?

No causality relationship was proven. Much less I have no idea what was actually established given a total lack of numbers. A 1% drop? A 15% drop? Big difference.
I'm surprised nobody else has responded here. Even if the traffic is miniscule and sucks, appearing as though your ad space is filled or partially filled can be a benefit, so its a good idea what you're doing.

My company is still in Alpha and doesn't fully work yet, but oh wells, I don't care. Didn't PG say to release a bare working version asap and "starting with a very crude version 1, then (f) iterating rapidly." I have a very early version of the app up on myspace.com/socialholdem -> check the app details for what I'm adding soon to make it competitive to the others. Right now its me and a friend is doing graphics. Or link to my blog if you want, because my app doesn't save the chips permanently to the database: outrunpoker.com/blog. Apps don't make crap for money, but its a way for me to get something going to be able to offer the service that I want, which is paid subscription based internet gambling, which is legal. From that approach, I can improve and grow from there. I know there is alot of room in the internet gambling field, especially with all the new changes in the web 2.0 world and cheaper bandwidth, etc. Someone can create a company that can compete with the big guys by changing the way it is advertised. Every new person I meet in the future, I will have a better story to tell than the one I am telling here. And so on...

Good luck to you.
Foldable, Stretchable Circuits
Latent Semantic Analysis . . . in Ruby! (apologies to nickb)
Ok, you're right. I'm a mathematician by training so these technical concerns don't escape me.

Still, I tried to keep my point constrained to those situations where you don't run into decisions not easily resolved in the manner I described.

Sure, if you're wading into a new market, old models or assumptions might be incorrect. Or if you need to make a decision now and don't have time to gather data your intuition and savvy are going to be instrumental.

But for most day-to-day, pedestrian decisions around software, web development, and business there's plenty of data that will tell you whether you should zig or zag.
On technology startups
Social Network Equity - The Social Economics of Twitter
And here it is:

http://omnisio.com/v/ale5jVXdjhG/loopt-on-nbc

Appologies, but we don't officially support MSN yet, so seeking is not enabled, but you can still watch in full quality and add your annotations.

Enjoy!
nickb ref: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=155921
I was browsing hacker news in Dana st coffee house in downtown Mountain View. A guy stopped by my side and said "oh you are reading ycombinator ... my name is Sam Altman." Sam is the loopt founder.

I really liked what he did - to seize an opportunity to meet a real person. He could just pass by and we will just meet each other in ycobminator as virtual beings, but he chose to meet me for real.

I didn't know anything about loopt before this. So I looked at it today and I must say I would laugh at the idea if Sam didn't do what he did today.

To me, I would never use loopt for knowing where my friends are. They are already my friends so I would just call them if I want to meet them and so do they.

What I see loopt as an useful app is for the occasions such as today in that coffee house.

Sam talked to me because he saw me reading hacker news, and he likes meeting real person because that's what loopt is about. Combine these two aspects, an real useful application is to allow a virtual community, like the hacker news community, to meet each other in physical world. Instead of tracking your friends, loopt becomes really exciting if it can make you meet new friends.

Loopt can also show where potential friends often go to. Suppose I want to meet other hacker news users, I can check on the map where they often visit and I can go there to meet them. That will be really interesting too, meeting new friends that is.

Sam, I hope you are reading this.
see also: http://paulstamatiou.com/2008/03/20/review-macbook-air

:-)
I'm not saying an investor has to invest millions. $10k would be a significant angel investment. How many people can you think of who would be great advisors for a startup who couldn't invest $10k in it?
Unfortunately, yes. Binary InstallShield files continue to be a plague on this green earth, and they need to go away. Major chucks of business logic written in an excel spreadsheet or embedded in somebody's access database... I'm sure it goes on.
www.nanosolar.com/ has a similar approach. It is funded by the founders of google.
Is this the real web 3.0? ;-)
I am a little paranoid, but am I the only one who thinks that part of the Microsoft bid is that they can shut down Zimbra, which competes with Exchange?
RIM seems to have a good grip on the mobile enterprise sector. I would be surprised to see RIM's (Black|Crack)berry crushed in that respect -- not because RIM offers the best product, rather because of a general resistance to change of that magnitude from an infrastructure point of view.
Ask HN: it is acceptable to pitch to bloggers about your site?
It is acceptable to pitch to bloggers about your site? As a blogger, how do you view such behavior? As a webmaster, do you do it and if so, what has been the results? What is considered acceptable/unacceptable?
So does a free email service like Gmail qualify as SaaS?
To push this kind of data around, they'll be using Internet2 and ESnet when it hits the US and whatever the Internet2 equivalents are in Europe (Geant2 ?) to push it out.

http://www.internet2.edu/science/
Microsoft Joins MIT Kerberos Consortium
Trying to get to Stanford for Startup School
Do the most productive thing possible today
shouldn't narus-networks be up there somewhere ?

edit: also, packet classification is quite cool from research perspective. for example, check out the following : "packet classification on multiple fields, gupta, mckewon". also, network algorithmics devotes an entire chapter on various strategies for efficient packet-classfication.
Music services pay high price to labels
If its really inneficient, its like, whats the point? Its easier from a manufacturing standpoint to make something cheaper than more efficient. The efficiency often lies with the underlying physics and often hits a hard theoretical limit that can't be passed because it violates thermodynamics, or something like that. If you came up with an amazing system that was horribly expensive to produce but waaay more efficient than everybody else, you'd still get rich because some large technology company would buy it and figure out how to use scale and other techniques to bring the price down. Just like plasma TVs. They cost an order of magnitude less than they did 7 years ago, but their picture quality hasn't changed by an order of magnitude. (its hard to measure picture quality in quantitative terms, but you get the point).
Europe Is Searching For Its Silicon Valley
People afflicted by stereotype threat don't just give up. (If anything they try harder.) It's a physiologically measurable effect. Think of it as an added level of anxiety that non-afflicted people don't have to face. Studies have shown that it for examples results in lowered short-term memory capacity.

No-one is immune to this effect. A study was done on white male engineering students on a math test. The ones that were told that the purpose of the test was to figure out why "Asian students are better at math" systematically underperformed compared to those who were not.

Some people may want to brush this effect away and just claim that the disadvantaged groups don't "have it" or that everyone has advantages and disadvantages, but remember that this strikes disproportionately at members of some groups of people, through no fault of their own.

Regarding research results, it was a popular article. The numbers exist and are closer to 15% than 1%. If you want to learn more, check out http://www.reducingstereotypethreat.org/, it has an extensive bibliography.
actually, I've been told by friends that theres a mailing list used for that sort of thing by certain (relatively) subsets of the MIT undergrad community.

they also have a really cool mailing list called "reuse" that everyone on campus there subscribes to, thats sort of a craigslist of awesome deals on furniture as well as old lab equipment, gadgets and tech