skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1554351 (http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-07-27/oil-from-bp-spill-i...):

"Oil from BP Plc’s record spill in the Gulf of Mexico is biodegrading quickly ... the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said.

Oil has been dissipating since BP stopped the flow from its Macondo well off the coast of Louisiana on July 15, NOAA Administrator Jane Lubchenco told reporters yesterday on a conference call. Crude that’s dispersed into the sea is being gobbled up by bacteria, she said."

Oil is to many people's surprise a natural substance and plenty of it naturally leaks into bodies of water like the Gulf so there's a lot of bacteria already evolved to feast on it.

Now this is not entirely good while it's happening since e.g. they consume oxygen to do it, but I gather that fish are smart enough to swim away from low oxygen concentrations.
This might be a fun weekend project, heh.
I'm both amused that I follow probably more than half of the that list, and saddened by the fact there is only one woman on the list.
100 Days Sober: Lessons Learned
Interesting theory. This might also be what gives the Tenderloin its' northern boundary somewhere around Post St, as Nob Hill starts rising more sharply north of there.
It's a choice that many people trivialize. The point of the post was, I think, a bit of a warning to think about startup life seriously before diving in.
Here is a contrarian perspective.

The performance characteristics of disk and RAM are so completely different that any program which swaps to disk is going to be effectively unusable. Therefore if you care about latency, turn VM off and provision a generous amount of RAM. Because VM only seems to work, until you actually use it, and only then do you discover how broken it is.
Artificially controlling water condensation leads to 'room-temperature ice'
Great list! I made it into a list on Twitter:

http://twitter.com/DHS/hacker-news
I would feel okay with that, knowing logically that the likelihood of you successfully blowing anything up is extremely low, in your back yard. But if you did, my distant relatives would sue the crap out of your distant relatives somehow :)

In any case, I'm more comfortable with these scary and unlikely exceptions than with the government arbitrarily trying to prevent criminal acts by criminalizing things they believe (without sound research) may potentially lead to some harmful side effects.

That is much scarier than a nuclear reactor built in a back yard.
Twitter list of users most followed by readers of HN
Not trashing this tablet in general, but the coming glut of cheap tablets is great news for the iPad.

The more commoditized, rushed out Android tablets there are, the more the Android brand suffers, and the more clearly differentiated the iPad becomes.
I can't be the only one who took one look at this and thought: Hey, that's SimCity!

http://imgur.com/V2Bvo.png
Squid is just a god-awful piece of development

This is nonsense. I was one of the developers on Squid for many years, which makes me more aware of its flaws than most folks, and it does have many flaws, even in current versions. But, to say it is god-awful development is pretty deeply ill-informed, and insulting to the small handful of dedicated volunteers who currently maintain Squid (which, I might add, is used by an order of magnitude more people on an order of magnitude more servers than Varnish; it is the most popular proxy cache in the world, serving about 80% of the market last time I saw research on the question).

Squid has different priorities and goals from Varnish. One of Squids priorities is to run on as many architectures and operating systems as possible. Another is to provide an extreme level of functionality, making it a swiss army knife of web proxy caching tasks. A third is being compatible with everything; and in the HTTP protocol world, this means dealing with thousands of edge cases and broken implementations. These things are not always consonant with being the fastest proxy, or with being the simplest design. Edge cases have a cost, which Squid pays because that's one of its goals.

Certainly, Squid has vestigial design decisions that cost it performance and efficiency on modern hardware (though the select/poll loop was the best we had until just a few short years ago, and the VM layer on many UNIXes is retarded; calling the way Squid does things 1975 technology is idiotic), but there have been improvements in a number of areas over the years.

Anyway, I would advise taking the flames of a developer on a dramatically less popular and less capable project with a grain of salt. There are interesting ideas to be found in Varnish and in its developers comments, but his knowledge of Squid is clearly limited, and his opinions are clearly motivated partly by a weird bit of anger toward the much more popular Squid.
>Actually I did read the article, but I must have missed or forgotten the details of that section.

The section you chose to comment on!?
I'm not sure how .NET's reflection works, but it does have reflection, where you can say stuff like "tell me all of String's methods" and for each of those you can find out public vs private vs protected, final vs not, etc.

See http://download-llnw.oracle.com/javase/1.3/docs/api/java/lan...
I made CrimeDeskSF (http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/crimedesksf/id339706696?mt=8) to visualize some of this data on the iPhone, including a mostly-gimmicky-but-kinda-fun augmented reality view (drug bust 100ft away!). I'm using the datasf.org datasets for mine (not sure how they compare to the crimespotting ones, or if they're the same).
Is this normalized by the population density or foot traffic in an area? If not, it's going to be hard to use to estimate personal risk.
Bedbug Crisis Sparks Offensive in New York
>Why? Many things in daily use do carry the name of their creator on them.

Indeed and I often come across fantastic inspiring sites via footer credits.
I like it.. it looks great man! although I have to agree with others here.. please show more of what the beta can do before I sign up to try it!
Ask HN: Web 2.0 Interface, how to?
There are super pretty web 2.0 interfaces such as:

http://chartbeat.com/demo/#

https://indinero.com/dashboard?ajaxpopup=livedemo

among others...

How do they do it? I'm not a designer but I always wanted to know what's the web 2.0 "secret".

BR
I used to do this a year or two ago but nowadays 90% of sites dont work properly without javascript. Is your whitelist so big that you dont notice it anymore?
Sure, I'll email it to you.
Yeah, it's fine for our software but not their music
Oracle's rebranding of Java breaks Eclipse
Considering the history, don't you mean "Does .NET have something similar to Java's reflection?"
rounded corners.
Life Beyond Distributed Transactions: an Apostate's Opinion
'In barely two years of bootstrap operation, the startup has gone from nowhere to averaging more than 10,000 visitors a month'.

Isn't that still nowhere? I guess we shouldn't consider the palm beach post as a viable source for tech news.
you the man! I'll tell him Pclark sent me!
Ask HN: Developer's e-commerce platform of choice? What works, what doesn't?
Note: I am currently developing an e-commerce platform, so this is both helpful to me and good for discussion.

Ever since developing my first e-commerce site 10 years ago, it's been the focus of my attention and programming dreams (what, you don't dream about programming?)

As important as this category of software is to business, and the tremendous market value it can generate, there is nothing out there I would use. We all know of Paul Graham's success story with Viaweb, and we also know where it ended up (Yahoo).

Why hasn't there been more significant innovation in the e-commerce software space?

The "cream of the crop" that I would refer to for discussion is: Magento, Shopify, Spree, BigCommerce, Volusion. I do not actually use any of these, and have always preferred to develop our software from the ground up due to the rather inflexible nature of each of these solutions.

In your opinion, what is the best solution for web developers, other than "building it from scratch"? What features do you think are missing? What features do you think are well executed?
This has got to be the greatest thing MSFT has done for the web since Ajax. I don't know; maybe I'm missing something. Assuming they aren't going to patent it or something similarly insane. And assuming it works in a normal browser. There is hope though the video shows a demo on an iphone.

I've known a number of really smart people at Microsoft Research. And I've always wondered why they seem to produce so little. A secondary curiosity - how do they manage to hire such great researchers with their tarnished reputation over the last decade.
New Stackexchange like site for Ubuntu Q&A
3 ways to sound credible:
1. don't use "your" when you mean "you're"

I stopped reading after that.
This is supported by some people at Canonical such as http://www.fabianrodriguez.com/blog/2010/07/19/an-invitation...

Shapado has the advantage of being localized in many languages so that not only English speakers can ask and answer questions. Also just like Ubuntu, Shapado is 100% free and open source.
It has a resistive touchscreen which makes much of the touch functionality frustrating, to say the least.

It also seems to be running a very hacky version of Android. Note the "EDGE roaming" icon in the status bar, despite the device not having any cell radio in it.

It might make a good output-only information HUD, though.
Kindle to Go 'Mass Market' ($139 WiFi Only Version)
Gradients. Misspelled titles (missing vowels is web 2.0's metal ümlaut). Whitespace. Styled form elements. Search fields with DHTML suggestions. Grids.
I would add to your list

c) they've done a great job with autofill on the question form, resulting in users getting answers to their questions without actually needing to post anything.

I've never posted a question because I've always found somebody else has already answered (or asked a better question).
> It would have been fine if they had settled for, "Hi Colin, the usual?" and left it at that, but they insisted on asking about my weekend, wishing me a good afternoon etc. That became annoying and I started avoiding the place.

This is why I keep going to a local coffee shop. It would be: "The usual?", except that I usually haven't decided on a drink and take 5 minutes. I've chatted with the owner and the different staff but there is no obligation to chat every time I go. If I need to get work done, I'm left alone without having to ask. :) (Now if only there was places open after 10pm!)
It isn't. My theory is that crime density by land area alone probably gives a decent estimate of how the area feels to live in. IE: if there's an assault or robbery every week in a one block area where you live, it's going to feel like a seedy place to live regardless of your personal risk of being involved in a crime.

I doubt there's an objectively right answer as to how to best normalize this - I think it just matters that it be understood by the user what it means. There are a number of ways to normalize it depending on what you care about.
I would think that the majority of startups aren't using MS products, but I understand that the ones that are might prefer not to talk about it for fear of ridicule by the hacker community.

I'm comfortable assuming that the YC startups are above the average, but that doesn't mean they aren't also affected by the demographic that would most benefit and be able to participate in the YC program. In no way am I implying that YC would select someone younger for admission over someone more qualified - just that the nature of the program self-selects.

In my case, I'm still young but having a toddler puts me in a similar situation to a typical older entrepreneur. It would be incredibly difficult for me to take an X month block away from my family or to uproot my family. And a $10K investment doesn't mean to me what it does to a college grad, because I can make that in a couple of bonuses or consulting gigs. The thing I miss most in a program like YC is the mentorship, but for me it's not worth the aforementioned hardship.

It's not that I'm not interested in new technologies, I do tinker, but it's just a matter of priorities. Given that, you're probably right that the "norm" would be lagging in terms of using the newest and coolest technology. I don't think that equates to generally worse companies, just less fashionable, to tie back to the original point.
This is great news, because it might be possible to put pressure (via K-mart) on the manufacturer to live up to their GPL obligations. See http://projectgus.com/2010/07/open-source-in-android-tablets...
That's true and I think Stack Overflow actually did a lot for making it more acceptable in startupland. And for good reason - if it's good enough for them...
http://www.quora.com/Given-the-lack-of-highly-successful-con... has some insights.
The standardish way is to use jQuery ajax calls to pull JSON data from the backend and then various jQuery plugins and animations to format the data in a visually appealing way.
All I took out of reading this article is that he should have been looking for higher level positions based on his qualifications. If he was so smart, he should've set his sights a little higher for a more rewarding and/or challenging position.
New Amazon Kindle announced: $139 WiFi-only, $189 3G, available August 27th
continued "fun" (read dangerous) redefines:

#define true false
#define false true

#define true 0
#define false !true

#define if while
#define continue break

:)
How to deal with an angry customer - Basic Instructions
That's very likely just a function of population density - this is raw crime density by land area.

EDIT: There's a crime density cutoff below which areas are blank. Within the bounds of SF, blank means very low crime density.
Why who you hire is important :)
I totally agree. Someone needs to make a high-quality android tablet that is on par with the iPad. That was the problem with android originally, when the G1 was vastly inferior to the iPhone. It wasn't until high quality phones like the droid came out did android really take off.
The San Francisco Police link to http://www.crimemapping.com/map/ca/sanfrancisco from their page at http://sf-police.org/index.aspx?page=1618 which has some discussion of their data policies.
This gets even more fun in languages which allow unicode names. Did you know there are dozens of identical-looking ways to spell "true"?
If you are running any modern program, there will be a proportion of its functionality and data you never use. That ends up paged to disk, freeing up RAM for what you do use. That's what VM is for, really. Using it as "memory" is very 1970s. It's more of a "forgettory".
Ask HN: Don't want to be a doctor - What should I do with my MD?
About me:
I am entering my fourth year of medical school. I have come to realize that I do not want to continue on with my medical education to become a practicing physician. Upon graduation in May, I will be looking for new career opportunities. Currently, I have been working on a couple projects in the radiology department related to computer programming (and have been loving it). My two favorite sites are HN and techcrunch. I am open/excited to try out new options. Speaking generally, I believe I would be happy working for a company/startup with even a remote connection to the healthcare industry (so I can leverage my knowledge base). Ideally, I would be a part of a smart team focused on rapidly iterating solutions to problems.

Questions (because HN has the best advice):

What other career paths are available to MDs?

Do you know of any companies that need MDs?

Do you have any experience working with MDs?

Do you have any other advice for me?
More info from the K-Mart page:

http://blogs.mykmart.com/2010/07/augen-7-inch-android-tablet...
Your view differs from some of the OO language designers. For example, Stroustrup defines encapsulation as "the enforcement of abstraction by mechanisms that prevent access to implementation details of an object or a group of objects except through a well-defined interface. C++ enforces encapsulation of private and proteced members of a class..."

http://www2.research.att.com/~bs/glossary.html#Gencapsulatio...

Since this idea is not obvious, would someone mind explaining?
start ups that use MS products probably don't spend a lot of time promoting themselves on HN.

tjoos.com was a start up that used a MS web stack.

saasu.com is sticking with their MS based web stack.

http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark/ is aimed directly at start up software/web companies.
Seven security experts get the key to reboot the internet
Not really. I run Opera (or as my co-workers pronounce it, Oprah), so it's F12 and a click to turn JS or cookies on if a site doesn't seem quite right.
(though I might be biased as I picked out the colors)
A week before Stack Exchange launches their version: http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/7716/ubuntu

It would be great if one of these ended up superseding (at least some parts of) the current Ubuntu forums. Too often the "winning" replies are buried a few pages into the thread, and the information isn't updated as Ubuntu evolves.

Edit: I'm not saying Stack Exchange is better, just that there's going to be a fight!
Another big reasons that databases with to circumvent this caching is that they really, really need to make sure that when a transaction is committed, that they know what is on disk. Having the OS pretend stuff is written to disk is great for performance, but not so great when you're trying to recover after someone pulled the power.
@plc you mean :) no worries though, zee has really great insights on startups, and TNW has great coverage. Very keen to beat techcrunch to first articles too (usually do)
--It would be cool to track over time.

--It would be cool to list which ones are on HN and put their username on there.

--Would you list the whole set of usernames/twitter accounts?
Wishpot ( http://www.wishpot.com/ ) is ASP.NET/C#-based.

It's quite a good platform (performance and tooling in particular, LINQ is also an impressive technology). But truthfully I wouldn't recommend it. Other platforms excel in other areas, and the Microsoft community culture is nowhere near as "sharing friendly" as the open source communities. Finding good developers is harder (it doesn't have the geek cred to attract hackers). Your deployment options are more limited (can't just get a cheap shared host to get started). Writing C# is about as enjoyable as writing in Java. (Take that as you will... but to me that's a slight negative).

If you were starting from scratch, the reasons to choose a Microsoft platform are not very compelling. You can still create great, fast, performant products - but you can do that on any of the major platforms.
The Risky Hire
OK I was going to delete my response just so I didn't have to do this but here we go. Let me first just say I did .NET since 2001 first beta and for 8+ years after that. I bailed mentally to other frameworks around 2005 while in SOAP hell. I do primarily Python frameworks, Ruby or PHP but still do some .NET mainly Mono. I really like C# but disagree with the direction of most Microsoft culture decisions. I was MCSD in C++, C# (first 5000) and was an advocate of the platform from 2001-2005. So this is coming from a .NET dev.

1. Yes it does. It defaults all models, views, routes to capitalized names like CustomerProduct rather than customer-product which is much better for urls and keywords. You even have many lower level .NET dude with /Member in all their urls because they can't abstract away from the physical folder hierarchy.

2. Everything should be ashx or handler based like a good framework, if you need a view you call in the view or template handler like every other framework. Microsoft wires it to aspx pages by default which the Page model is bulky if not needed such as for a REST endpoint.

3. Yes I can. Everyone else if you have worked on a multi-year project in .NET of any scale you will know this configuration hell I am talking about. It is the one that Java has been in for some time. btw I agree on JSON.NET there should be more simplified frameworks like it. I use it in my .NET MVC.

4. All I am saying is typical MS developers dont' venture out, you may. Try pushing JSON or YAML before MS blessed it with a big arse WCF framework and you will see. Even try pushing anything not pushed by microsoft to see what I mean. Heck try this today by pushing a better MVC than ASP MVC to your MS platform developers and see what happens.

5. VB.NET, what is wrong with it? Everything is backwards, it is overly verbose, it mangles the idea of indexors with methods (i.e. [] vs. ()), you have to write 'End Function' (but their tool does that for you) Ok no need to go on here... I do like the behind the scenes compilation and way back in 2001 this was a competitive benefit. Other than that VB.NET is horrible for anyone looking to code ANY other language.

6. Every poorly written .NET project has Datasets that make it all the way to the presentation layer to bind to some default GridView. Laziness and not good software engineering. MS made it too easy there.

7. Try doing any of those things manually or customized. The tools are sugary goodness that hide the complexities of the operation. Most likely there will be a default fail somewhere along the lines on any application of scale. And it is keeping most from learning key elements of deployment on a larger scale.

8. Java and .NET are the biggest platforms, by mere probability they attract more mediocre devs looking for a safe harbor of a job security. There are plenty of good .NET devs but they get lost and lose the ASP MVC, Sharepoint, MS SQL only battles and move on.

9. We can agree, it is an abomination.

I like Microsoft, but they are killing their platform by trying for developer lock in in all the wrong ways.
I can't tell if that's sarcasm or not. I hope it it is. I thought downvoting was reserved for the most egregious of comments. For me, that one by mikeryan doesn't count.
Programmers may routinely be judged by peers, but the entire team is then judged by results. A team that can't ship gets the axe or goes under. The closest counter-examples to this I can think of, doing government contracts, have also been some of the worst software shops that I've encountered.

So what's the analogous mechanism going to be? Are you ok closing entire schools if they have lower than average test scores in their class (whatever this means)? Otherwise, how do prevent the whole system from devolving into politics and cronyism?
There are many fields (for example media, PR, some civil service positions) where communication is the primary skill being assessed - written in the CV & spoken in the interview. If you have a non-maths written component to your interview, you're being judged on your communication skills/literacy.

I agree there is often something else required too - but not always in a 'first' or 'graduate' position.
Facebook Questions Released
Shapado works like a charm, it's free, opensource, supports l10n and has many other great features. What else can we ask for? There's no possible comparison with a closed, for only english speakers application.
Shapado is the way!
Very few facebook groups which touch the mainstream (and even some fairly specific ones have a much lower quality of discussion than what I've seen from Quora. Problem is that as Quora grows it will come up against the same issue, being a niche website doesn't seem like the Quora vision.
I like it, but making fun of Java (and Java's "thought leaders") is just too easy. It's like shooting fish in a barrel. With a grenade launcher.

Eclipse is another matter: far more ridicule is called for. Far, far more.
If that works for you, then you obviously aren't trying to consistently hit a low latency SLA. Which brings me back to my point.
So what if the functionality is the same? It's the community and the khutzba that differentiates.