skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: If you had access to a large-scale system with a JMS and OTA interface
What would you do with it?

Consider you had a distributed software system that provided services like reliable and persistent data storage and message ordering and scheduling.

The system has two end points - a JMS and HTTP interface and the other end capable of sending and receiving data over-the-air via satellite, terrestrial, and Wi-Fi networks. There is a generic API to pull and push data and messages into such a system.

What would you do with it? What applications/products could benefit from such a system?

At my company, we have built such a system that has been in operation for over two decades. This middleware software is used for a set of products currently. Given the massive software infrastructure we have built, I keep wondering if it is somewhat under-utilized.

The system we have built runs 24/7 and currently processes over 200 million database IO operations every day and at least a third that many messages flow through the system. I don't have a number for how much data this constitutes but it's huge.

Could I pick some of your brains?
If you start by marketing your product as an "X-Killer", you've just shot yourself in the foot.
When delegating any work, it's more productive to focus on the problems you want to address rather than the solutions you had in mind. Solving problems is fun. Don't steal their thunder.
One of the most powerful features of Smalltalk Blocks is the ability to reference everything in the parent context. This gives one the ability to Don't Repeat Yourself in even the stickiest of situations. A lot of tricks for not repeating yourself involve passing a Block from the current context into a function, where it is executed, possibly inside an exception handling block. 99% of everything you'd be hard pressed to avoid repeating yourself with can be taken care of using tricks based on this idea.

EDIT: Come to think of it, this is just a good-enough substitute for a fraction of the stuff you can do in Lisp with Macros.
I remember Kaylon's PowerMarks from years ago. I still miss the speed and ease of their tagging. I think search results, a page at a time, is a bit of a different paradigm. You might want to take a look at PowerMarks and see whether any aspects make sense to you, perhaps as an adjunct.

Best wishes! Giving your site a go, myself.
Like Ivan said, we don't know exactly yet. But we are leaning towards a monthly fee and not a % of sales.
Probably just enjoying life.
Large Corporations/Associations ect.

Every time I have a problem with a large corporation it never gets resolved until it is convenient for them, and follows their screwed up procedure.

They deter innovation and could care less about their customers. Take a look at the cable, internet, automobiles, music industries. Anything new happen lately? Nope.
Doing the Math on Android vs. Apple
I'm currently wrapping up work on an image processing module with a client. If you want I could build a dedicated service for you.

If you are running your own site, and using nginx, there's an image processing module for it that is a match for your requirement: http://wiki.nginx.org/NginxHttpImageFilterModule
I'm not convinced that parallelism is something that needs support at the language level. The only languages that do this are Go and Erlang (off the top of my head).

Others like Clojure and Scala have more support at the standard library level.
>The point of the article is that the privileged ones got their computers early just because there parents could afford it.

And this point is wrong. The kids who got computers in the 80's had both interest and parents who could afford it.

Anyway, as someone else pointed out already, this is moot - today's freshman was 8 in 2000, not 1985.
And for a less conventional overview, see Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality: http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5782108/1/Harry_Potter_and_the_M...
Exactly, because if you just injure instead of kill, you've failed.
You know, I generally am sympathetic to the article's point, but today? There are perfectly workable computers available for under $400. Compilers, both on the MS and linux side, are free. Internet connections at public libraries are free. Good books on learning to program are free or easily pirated.
a custodian who actually cares to improve it, along with the insight and ability to say "no" to enough features that it has sharp unified direction and doesn't become a typical example of open source feature creep.

Sun, in its ownership of Java, has always had the second part down pat - they've flat out rejected many of these features in the past, as well as many other popular requests for improvements both in the VM and in Java the language.

It's the first part, the "cares to improve it" bit, where they really fell down. Honestly, I think we could do with a little bit of "open source feature creep" to make up for the stagnation over the past several years...

I've also gotten the sense that most of the "no"s were borne of lack of resources to devote to these things rather than a desire to avoid feature creep, though, and I don't know if Oracle is in any better position to devote developers to any of this stuff...
Heh. No, but the statement does have broad applicability, doesn't it?

But not to you or me, of course.

Cheers,

Carson
on freenode: #android-dev #webos-internals
i agree that you definitely have to work hard to put yourself in a position to "get lucky" but there is an element of chance to life that you simply can't ignore. a lot of times i attribute good things that happen to me as "luck" because there's a dozen people i could point to who would deserve it more than myself. attributing my good fortune to luck gives me an explanation for why i got something when other people were smarter, faster & harder working than myself.
Why Flipboard Won't Help Publishing's Smoldering Model
Open Data needs Open Source Tools
Ask HN:  Best CMS and host for a nonprofit?
I'm helping a friend's organization get a website up, and they have no tech staff and a low budget. They need several CMS features:

* private pages and document repository for staff only

* public pages and document repository

* event calendar

* ability to manage it without coding

* low-cost (preferably free) hosting (cloud-based or otherwise)

Site traffic will be relatively low, highest expected load is when they run their yearly conference of several hundred people.

The first thing that comes to my mind is a Django-based CMS on GAE, but anyone have any other/better recommendations for such a stack? Any technology is fine. Thanks!
Sadly this is true. Canvas is still very much in its infancy. I see two main issues with Canvas for games right now.

First, canvas really needs to be hardware accelerated (someone already does this, Microsoft?). Having a few objects move around should barely take any CPU but with Canvas today it can be anywhere from 10%-20%.

Second, their needs to be game engines/abstractions on top of Canvas. Most developers don't want to have to write there own render/clear loop with all the utility functions to do movement, render shapes, texture elements, and keep object state. I know their are a few out there now but they are no where near the quality needed. This second step will not happen until my first point (HW acceleration) is in place.
The Python example in parent printed an /etc/passwd full of nobody-accounts. From my error message, I only know that the first line in the compilation environment is a nobody-account. In all /etc/passwds I remember having dealt with (mostly the distribution-maintained ones of Linux distributions), the first line was the root account. This is by no means a proof that the compilation environment is guarded, but a strong hint.
> they're going to rush it out prematurely and embarass themselves.

like they did with Vista?

Seriously: they have ample capacity to embarrass themselves even without rushing things.
In the Safari settings, you can turn on a reminder email for soon-to-expire tokens. Does that not work? (I'd better check, I've received no reminder email and I must have some close to expiring.)

I signed up when they had a promotion: The unlimited account, normally $40-something a month, at $30/month for the first year.

Today, I find I need to learn/abuse some Joomla (not my choice). A Safari book will, I think, more quickly give me a coherent overview.

EDIT: Just checked -- my tokens are valid for 6 months from the date of issue.
"This sentence no verb!" --Douglas Hofstadter
I agree with that the consumption of knowledge helps us learn. But I am not sure just taking notes does the trick. I think in aiding us learn more the knowledge has to be work and thought out. I believe learning is hard and you have to do something more on the lines or writing articles on the subject or course work to really force your brain to absorb it all.
Phone screens are too small to do useful work on, and laptops are too inconvenient to carry around.
"Ballmer: Catching Up Is Real Hard"

FTFY. :)
I am annoyed at how much the hacker/startup scene sucks here in India. All the cool people and projects are in the USA and the people who don't emigrate end up working on the outsourced Java/RoR enterprise program from hell simply because there aren't any technically interesting jobs. Beng teh greta outsourcing destination for crap legacy code creates an ecosystem of substandard "programmers" who all get certified in J2Ee (or whatever the latest crap is) and then move on to become "managers" asap.

I've found my niche in Machine Learning, and have escaped this fate somewhat, but damn, it is a small and lonely niche. It would be great to go out and have a beer with engineers working on technically challenging projects, like you can in San Fransisco. (I'd love to hang out with the Data Drinking group for e.g.). The amount of talent wasted on legacy enterpriseware maintenance is unimaginable.

I've lived in the USA and I love the place, but I don't want to choose between doing good work and living "at home".

Meanwhile, HN keeps me sane. I don't have great engineers to talk to and learn from in the Real World, but online is a different matter.
kingcub, would like to speak to you briefly over email. Do you have a preferred address for me to contact you? You could also email me at prog123hn@gmail.com
Well... According to this

http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2010/07/30/steve-ballmer-on-the-...

theirs will even print. I can't imagine how Apple will be able to compete with something so revolutionary.
Either MS makes a tablet that's actually cool, or they make a tablet I can install Ubuntu on, or I have another chance to laugh at MS. Any way you slice it, I win!

EDIT: Microsoft has XBox. They should be able to murder Apple with their resources and an installed base like that. They could make sure that putting Apple and "Digital Hub" in the same sentence implies a joke. The fact that this isn't imminent is a sign of massive internal disfunction.
Ask HN: New VC Event in Canada
I am hosting an event in Toronto on October 20th, 2010. I was hoping for some feedback from the community on the site and the concept. We are pretty far along in the planning but we can change the concept or structure of the event if enough people feel strongly about it.

Here is my elevator pitch (feedback would be great on it too):

I am looking for startups in any market that will be seeking financing within 6 months. This is restricted to companies in Canada.

The Investment industry in Canada is at an all-time low. Great startups in Canada have to reach out to the Valley to get investments. I think that there is enough money in Canada and people are willing to take the risk. I am organizing an event bringing together the biggest investors in Canada. The goal of the event is to get a commitment from Investors within 30 minutes after the startup pitches. Funding will range from $50k to $5 million, preferably Series A funding.

If you think your company has what it takes and is ready for a pitch of a lifetime let me know and we will go from there.

Apply here http://www.fundation.org/apply/
STILL use IRC? IRC is in heavier use today than ever before! Not only has the amount of networks (and servers per network) exploded the past 10 years, but so has also the global amount of users per network and IRC as a whole.
I'd suggest wordpress. I would also suggest paying for hosting. Good shared plans can be had very cheaply.
Maybe its because I've contributed to Mobile Colloquy (Rooms' competition), but, I can't bring myself to be pissed off here. The guy actively ignored his app for periods at a time. That his certs expired at some point isn't surprising. And then he proceeds to abuse APIs in a way that Apple has specifically said not to do. And acts surprised at rejection?

You know what? We had the exact same issues when working on Mobile Colloquy. We managed to figure out a way to not get removed from the app store. And we're BSD! All he had to do was copy what we did (yet again; Rooms' core is based on Colloquy's Chat Core)!
Canonical Contributes Only 1% To GNOME; Red Hat Contributes 16%
At GUADEC, Dave Neary presented the results of the GNOME Census. The results reveal some very interesting findings. Around 70% of the developers identify themselves as volunteer and 70% of the commits made in the GNOME releases are made by paid developers.

Now, here is the part that has started out something like a war – Canonical’s contribution to GNOME is only a mere 1%, while Red Hat contributes 16%.
Ron Conway And Paul Graham Talk About Investing
Isn't there an app for printing?
_But_ the addition would be useless in practice because this problem almost never arises in real code. Its only purpose would be to answer Lisp and Ruby advocates who want to say that Python doesn't really have closures.

A great example of the Blub paradox in action ;)
Crowdsourcing - good for the designer or not?
I run irssi on screen all the time
Seconding Wordpress. Wordpress.com offers free hosting, and premium options (hosting it on your own domain, no ads, etc.)
Completely agree. After meaning to do it for a while, I started doing a personal blog at this start of this month, at least once a day now. The big thing for me is I blog whatever observations I have that are quick, even if they're just okay. Then I keep a list of things that'd take me longer to write.

I remember looking at the bottom of a coffee lid and thinking about whether it should be face-up or face-down, so I took two pictures of it and posted it here - http://www.sebastianmarshall.com/?p=38 - it's just sort of junk, but it helped get into the rhythym of writing every single day, no matter what. A lot of my entries are pretty mundane, but a couple of them have been quite popular and gotten spread around my friends and a couple other people I've met.

I think the biggest thing is that you're going to bad when you start. If you want encouragement, go look at the early works of prolific bloggers - often poorly written, tentative, scared, making mistakes, and writing for no audience. But doing it makes you improve. The biggest pieces of encouragement I got were reading the early works of Stephen King and the first Sherlock Holmes book. The Sign of Four (first Sherlock book) wasn't all that great of a piece of writing and was a commercial flop, but Sir Arthur Conan Doyle kept going until his short stories caught on. Being a lover of Sherlock Holmes, I'm glad he did it. Also, it's encouraging towards getting started.
No, payback period is a silly metric, and my 6 years do account for opportunity cost :)

Actually I tried to make a product out of this. The website is still up on http://www.solar-profit.info/. It's in Dutch but the screenshots speak for themselves. I never sold a single copy, for one because my market is about 500 customers big, and second because I didn't manage to explain the concept of time value of money to my leads (installation companies for PV panels).

So yeah that's the answer to your comment. Payback period everybody understands, and that's the only thing it has going for it, but unfortunately it's such a big advantage that you still need to use it if you want to convince some markets.
I think the term "luck" is too overloaded. Tons of people do actually use the term "luck" as a clutch, as in it's bad luck that a pot of gold did not fall onto their lap. In that sense, I agree with the article. However, it probably swings too far in the other direction.

For me, it's understanding the probabilities, persist, and "luck" is everything that is out of your control. Even something as "simple" or at least fundamentally human as finding someone you happen to love is subjected to these outside forces that I call "luck", but who's to judge?

Dismissing this concept of "luck" makes it too hard for empathy -- it's almost saying that people are poor because they don't work hard.

I'm a relatively lucky guy myself, and I'm constantly surrounded by people who are smarter and harder working, but sometimes things just don't swing their way, just a little bit. Maybe I'm selling myself short, and while I put in my share of hard work, I can't honestly say I attribute everything to luck. I took advantage of my luck, but it's too easy to attribute everything to skill.

It might be easier to motivate yourself to work hard with the assumption that luck doesn't exist, and to persist, and to give all you got, but I feel you don't need to discard the concept to do it.
Happy Sysadmin Appreciation Day: The Website is Down Ep #4
Thanks, I was checking out Wordpress yesterday but didn't see any obvious way to secure parts of the site to members-only. Is that an addon, or something that comes with their premium version?
and an "export to html" option that exports all of your passwords into a single encrypted javascript/html file that you can put on a server. it acts as a self-contained web application that lets you browse and search through your passwords on-demand. i've been using such an exported file for months after i migrated away from mac os and frequently access the file from my android phone and other browsers.
Conway: During The Bubble, 77% Entrepreneurs Failed. Now, It’s Around 40%
Even if you blog to an app running on localhost that no one will ever see, you're going to be better for it. One of the best ways to fully understand anything (idea, argument, problem, feature, goal, failure, whatever) is to have to wrap words around it. Writing forces you to think things through.

You end up knowing more about your subject than before you began. Guaranteed. When is that ever bad news?
I've always wanted somewhere that would serve a decent salad reliably for £5. I've yet to find that place. If they existed, they'd have me as a customer at least 3 times a week.
Open Source Misses the Point
Couldn't agree more. I discovered 89.3 when going to school in the cities. Now, even though I no longer live in the area, I stream them online almost every day.
Formatting Rules for APA Style Term Paper
APA writing style is widely used in academic writing. It has very rigid rules regarding the reference citations. In addition to a separate bibliography list quotations and in-text citations are used in APA style papers. Here, you can read and learn basics of APA Rules.
Ah, I'll take a look at that, but actually I was describing 0MQ not TCP. Did you mean I should describe what 0MQ is first?
Yeah, I agree that it's a nightmare in production, but it's absolutely indispensable in development situations where you can tolerate the occasional weirdness or failure. If you're developing a server app (or a thick-client app), avoiding a sever restart every time you change anything is a huge, huge win. And again, it's not like it's not implementable: there's already an implementation, for the JVM, that works.
It might not need language level support, but anything to make it easier to leverage is a plus in my book. If the programmer doesn't have to concern themselves with extra parallelism-specific library calls and is still able to write a binary that can take advantage of multiple cores, that seems like a good idea to me.
Wallpapers on the spotlight: Trine 2
Wordpress can be easily extended (for free), see for example this:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/ft-password-protect-chil...
You get the most value out of blogging if you publish it. Period. Writing drafts is great, but it just isn't the same as putting it out there. It's like practice vs. performance. No amount of practice can take the place of the experience gained by performance.
It's not embarrassing at all typically. Failing at applying to a single position does not instantly cause the depths of your ignorance in programming fundamentals to be broadcast to the world.

From my experience and observation it's generally very lucky if you get anything better than a 50:1 ratio from initial phone screen down to a hiring offer.
I was going to supply quotes here from the article, quotes that Ballmer made demonstrating his complete lack of competency in understanding the playing field, but then I realized that was all of them.
Tales of the F-14
Canonical Contributes Only 1% To GNOME; Red Hat Contributes 16%
?

Clojure has deep language support for concurrency - from syntactical constructs to it's core performant immutable data structures.
Analyzing the Wikileaks Afghanistan data with R
Erlang gets a lot of good mileage out of it, though. You start to really miss the OTP system when you try to write actually-important code in any other language. And there are some aspects that are hard to get right at a later time when it's not in the language from day one, cross-process messaging in particular, which is a primitive used to build a lot of other features. I do not know where Clojure or Scala have a generic cross-process messaging ability, and I'm not saying it's impossible by any means, but it's much easier if you start from scratch with that in mind.
I do electron microscopy on nervous tissue. I know what it takes to get good brain preservation at the fine scale, at the level of synaptic connectivity. I know how small problems in fixation and embedding can completely trash the anatomy at this fine scale. I am skeptical that current cryonics methods can preserve the brain at anything better than 'massive stroke' quality.
I was talking to my Mom about this - she'd been out of her old industry for 10 years, and was moving back to the East Coast from the Mountain states and got a pretty good job. She said she was really lucky.

I said, Mom, you weren't lucky, it was a longshot to get that job, but you hustle, and you're good to people, and you'd have kept going until you got something. And I listed all the friends she'd met and people she'd helped back East, and how eventually she'd get hired to work with one of them.

Any individual job opportunity had a low chance of working - but, in total, it was fairly inevitable. But that's the funny thing - no matter what job she got, it was going to feel "lucky" because it was a longshot. But getting a good job wasn't a longshot, my Mom is incredibly hard working and good to people, she'd have gotten something almost no matter what.
I wish I had your problem.

But seriously, change your goal. Income is obviously not a good motivator anymore. Looking for a way to do what you used to enjoy doing do competitively can be motivating, or perhaps doing it as a way of artistic expression.
I could see hardcore vi users mapping it to Escape rather than Ctrl.

Or maybe Menu, Windows, etc. keys, on keyboards that have them.
His blog post acknowledges probability. Probability is the measure of likelihood, i.e. the chance of something happening. Luck is defined as a chance occurrence.

If luck doesn't exist, there are no chance occurrences. If there are no chance occurrances, then probability is meaningless. If probability is meaningless, his blog post is ... crap?
Quote from the same guy who presided over the nixing the Courier. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Courier

sigh Has anything come out under this guy that wasn't always going to anyways by sheer force of market inertia?