skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think that is extremely likely, and autoconf is an excellent example. autoconf hate is almost nonsensical when you realize what it replaced (though, I kinda hate it, too, because it's very confusing, but definitely not more than what it replaced...). In a world of people only building for Linux (and where Linux has mostly standardized to the point where building for one is the same as building for any other), it seems needlessly complex, but in the world of Solaris, AIX, SCO, Irix, Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, and a bunch of others, it was simply necessary. If you didn't let autoconf handle some of it, you simply had to write your own crazy shell scripts to figure things out.

I think it comes down to younger folks not having experienced the pre-Linux world of the server-side (or at least the pre-Linux domination). There was a time when there were dramatic differences between the various UNIXen, and only something like autoconf could make an Open Source project build on anything approaching a majority of them.

I think a good example of a weird characteristic of Squid is its cache_dir directory layout. By default, it'll distribute files into a directory/subdirectory/ hierarchy. This doesn't really serve a useful purpose on modern systems (it doesn't really hurt anything, either, it just looks weird to modern users), but on some UNIXes back when Squid was being built there were dramatic performance effects from having huge directories full of thousands of files.

Likewise, the whole virtual memory argument that the original article talks about is complaining about something that was intentionally added to the Squid design in order to address the horrible characteristics of several major UNIX VM implementations (even now, having a good VM layer is not something you can just assume).

I feel a little bit of unease when I see projects that do choose the "we develop for this" model. I'm not sure it is a useful feeling, but I think we probably should keep our options open. I've made cross-platform a religion for most of my developer life, and it is perhaps less important now...but I don't think it's wise to just say, "OK, it runs on the latest Linux kernel. Fuck it, let's ship it. Screw everybody using anything else."
Really? For how long do you hold off updates that fix zero-day remote exploits?
But it'll take just one easily hackable $99 Android tablet with just the right mix of "good enough" features to take the world by storm.
I'm not necessarily sure this is a good thing for startups. I see this as having the potential to create a dotcom bubble part II.

Once you grant this kind of tax break, you're encouraging a lot of people who aren't really interested in or know a lot about startups to pour money in.
The fraction of good drug targets in the human genome compared to the total number of genes is probably astronomical, but to think that a single gene is going to give you much information is laughable. The number of proteins involved in any given disorder or disease is far too large.

Which, incidentally, is why you shouldn't be able to patent testing for single genes, since that is the most rudimentary example of what genetic testing has to offer.
Do You Know Where Your Data Is In The Cloud?
Looks neat. Have only skimmed the paper but I'm surprised they didn't cite Zheng et al.'s Route Panorama work: http://www.cs.iupui.edu/~jzheng/RP/
$130 is a really compelling price point. The NY Times charges $20/month to access their Kindle edition ($240/year). What they should do is offer a 2-year contract and throw a Kindle in for free.

I personally hate this model, but it's been proven effective (at least in the U.S.) for cell phones sales.
Making a mobile web CMS
As little as possible. And again, in a high-availability infrastructure I can patch each machine without downtime. I was contending your point that the downtime was mandatory and unscheduled. Windows never forces you to update at any time. It strongly suggests, sure. By default, the option is auto-update, but that's configurable and not required.
iSuppli estimates that 3G radio adds about $25 to the cost of iPad (http://www.isuppli.com/teardowns-manufacturing-and-pricing/n...) so at $50, I'd imagine that Amazon's probably recouping the cost of baseband hardware + development time and effort, and not much else.

It's amazing to think that they can throw in the free 3G access on top on the hardware for just $50 extra. I guess they're counting on low browser and web usage due to the e-ink screen...
Announcing Ext JS 3.3 Beta – PivotGrids, Calendars and More
My vote for encoding a key in a document goes as follows:

Make 3 spelling errors. Anywhere.

Copying all the text from my AgileW/Rails book comes out to 1392025 characters (wc -c). Comes out to being able to make 2,697,367,802,211,997,800 unique copies by location alone[1]. Significantly less data than a SHA key, but far more than necessary. Heck, making two unique errors gives you almost 2 trillion unique copies. Most books have a fair amount of errors already, what's a couple intentional ones? And note that it can be hidden in metadata too, so there's even more room.

[1]: (1392025 * 1392024 * 1392023)
What if TV Networks Aired All Their Pilots?
10 years to get a PhD!! Ten years is about 1/4 of your "working" life....
Should be available here:
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1807184
I just followed several people on that list that i wasn't previously. A great list - thanks for putting it together!
Fair enough,but from my POV, street view has a hardly-usable UI. The way you have to click, render, click, render, click, render, Street View works the way MapQuest worked before Google Maps was built.

Street Slide is to Street View what Google Maps was to MapQuest.
Yes, I believe this, too. He killed his company and his software not focusing on the VistaDB strength being an excellent website database, Xcopy deployable and first of all running in Medium Trust on shared hosting servers.
But he wanted simply to high subscription fees and concentrated on implementing his paranoid licensing system to enforce it. No wonder that, as he writes himself, the revenues decreased constantly. Many developers would be ready to pay yearly about $100 without problems but not the amounts he wanted. So his company collapsing is his doing and not caused by wrong behavior of other people (software developer in this case).
Geo
For a second I was actually hoping someone leaked Google's internal stack and all of it was GPL.
Web browsing on the kindle is painful enough that I'd only use it for emergencies.
The four-day work week
I haven't enabled 3G on my iPad because I'm usually near wifi these days. I can't imagine that a 3G Kindle is necessary for too many people. The extra cost is your first 4 books.
Brilliant. I find I spend an awful lot of my time in street view trying to do exactly this.
Mode B is work! Personally, I carry a moleskin notebook and mostly think and jot down notes as I go. When I'm back at my desk, I can switch into mode A and be far more productive. All the planning, design has been done.

If you are into bulk writing, then I'd pick a twiddler and text to speech rather than a heads-up-display.
I was excited when I followed the link, not so much when I saw "Microsoft researchers have developed" as the lead in sentence.

CNET confirms: "MSFT has not announced if and when it will be making it to the Bing Maps, or any other map-embedded Microsoft products or services"

http://news.cnet.com/8301-27076_3-20011994-248.html

Hope they prove me wrong and just ship.
> If the language isn't enforcing the encapsulation, how is it encapsulated?

What do you mean by "enforce"? Java's private modifier doesn't enforce encapsulation. Javascript's objects do not have a private modifier, but still provides encapsulation via closures. It's hard to have a meaningful discussion when loose terms like "enforce" are thrown around.
About as invasive as the visualization of the connectedness of Americans on FB was[1]. And FB made a super-huge deal out of that. I'm curious to see how this goes down.

[1]: http://petewarden.typepad.com/searchbrowser/2010/02/how-to-s...
"I've known a number of really smart people at Microsoft Research. And I've always wondered why they seem to produce so little."

Taking something from research into a full-fledged product at a company like Microsoft is like turning an aircraft carrier - it has a lot of expensive hardware on deck that has to be kept safe and has to be down slowly given that the seas are shifting constantly.
That is absolutely true, of course.

The thing is that I very rarely actually want to scroll right along a street, I usually only want to get a visual of the place that I am going.

Now, there have been times where I was interested in going exploring, but not as a matter of utility - just because the street view ui begged me to and I was interested in how it worked.

Having said that, I believe that there is a definite place for something that lets me zoom along in 3d land to explore the entire street - because I would love to be able to explore Paris for example - but that really requires a free form of movement that this solution still doesn't speak to.
I just double-checked my profile page, and there is no blank for a Twitter account. How did you scrub the profile field to detect such accounts? (Mine’s the same username between HN, Twitter, and Reddit, among others.)
It's not really necessary for anyone, but it is quite a nice luxury. I was at the beach last week and a friend (a highschool English teacher) recommended a novel that she teaches her students ("The Sparrow" by Mary Doria Russell; it's great so far). I was so intrigued by her explanation of it that I bought it then and there, sitting on the beach, and started reading it 30 seconds later. So I expect that those who can afford it will.

That said, I keep the 3G off when I'm not using it, because it tears through the battery, even when the Kindle's off(!) so that it can always receive new subscriptions.
Exactly -- this one from KMart was on my list for a long time, and all the reviews agree on how crappy it is... What a disappointment.
At that price, I'd be tempted to get one for situations where I would worry about my iPad. I'd consider taking a $139 kindle to the beach. I'm terrified of taking my iPad.
Encapsulation can be achieved quite efficiently if you have closures ... you can have good encapsulation (i.e. preventing access to the implementation details of an object) even in Javascript.

Many dynamic languages also have tools you can use to make your life easier ... with Python I'm using pylint/pychecker to keep me honest. My Emacs instance screams at me whenever I access a protected field of some object.

Also ... private/protected fields or final classes have caused much trouble for me. Overriding the behavior of a class is the easiest way to workaround various bugs without modifying the original source ... which in some cases is a PITA, while in other cases is impossible.

I once worked on a Java project that used a commercial library with no source-code ... to fix a stupid bug I had to manipulate the bytecode at runtime. Which shows again that private/protected/final access modifiers are pretty useless as guarantees ... a determined developer can get passed them.

It's just that you begin to hate life a little bit more.
Very interesting. I would love to see someone build something similar for other cities, perhaps overlaid with Points of Interest and mass transit lines. I think it could be made to be useful for tourists and people who are new to an area.

However even if it can't be made into a usable product it'd be very interesting to see.
The world of reading is about to change. $139 is not quite Seth Godin's suggestion for a "paperback" device, but it's still very affordable. At this price point, I think that many relatively tech savvy readers will end up buying one simply because they can.

Seth Godin's reaction: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2010/07/here-comes-t...
> I know better than to expect to converse about our MS technology with the HN crowd, though.

I'm not sure why. People talk about Clojure and Haskell and I'd bet good money that those are even less common for startups — heck, probably fewer people here can even read them. I don't personally like the Microsoft stack overall, but I do think some of the stuff they make is pretty compelling and it would be interesting to hear how it's used outside of a BigCo.

That could just be me, though.
> you'll still need to keep track of which data is on the
disk and which data isn't

I'm not following this. As I see it, all you have to do is keep insure that no more than 3GB are mapped for your process at a given time. You still let the kernel decide what's faulted in and when things are written out.

Maybe my perspective is skewed: I'm viewing it from the perspective of real-time search, with large posting lists being frequently read and updated, and lazily written out to disk. Is there a different situation that is harder?

> In short, i386 is not dead. And suggesting that it cannot handle "gigabytes of data" is absurd

I didn't mean to imply it couldn't, or that it wasn't in common use. Rather I was wondering why I as a open source software author (http://wiki.apache.org/incubator/LucyProposal) would choose to make my life more complicated by targeting new software at a 32-bit platform at the expense of code simplicity.

Our current plan is to optimize for 64-bit systems, and allow 32-bit compatibility for smaller data sets (tens of GB) by sprinkling in mmap()/munmap() calls as necessary:
http://www.mail-archive.com/lucy-dev@lucene.apache.org/msg00...

Edit to add: I'm not trying to claim I'm definitively right. Rather, my point is that I care about the answers to these questions in practice as well as in theory. I worry about taking the wrong approach.
I lived near there - at Clayton and Ashbury - for a year. Not once did I see any homeless people. There is no way of getting up to that location without hitting at least a block of 15% grade. But the hill did not demarcate the homeless population - it appeared to be Frederick, which is a block further south than Beulah away from Haight.

I had two theories: leaving Golden Gate Park, you end up on Frederick street; going north gets you to Haight St which is a wonderful place to panhandle, going south gets you nowhere. The other theory is that it would have gone further south (maybe a few more blocks to Parnassus), but the Cole/Carl intersection was nice enough, and full of enough families, to push people south the second they get off of the N-Judah.
Fortunately, that assumption is false: junior researchers can start their own projects. I joined Microsoft Research a year ago. In that time, I've been encouraged to come up with new projects where I can lead, as well as make contributions to existing projects. As you point out, this degree of independence is rare in industry, so it makes MSR a competitive place to work.
> It's amazing to think that they can throw in the free 3G access on top on the hardware for just $50 extra. I guess they're counting on low browser and web usage due to the e-ink screen...

I think that's subsidized by the increased amount of books people buy when they can buy them anytime anywhere but only through Amazon.
Ha! YES! That little snapping feeling. I still remember getting my first lock, :). I was on the phone with a friend and just raking the crap out of it until finally POP.

She did not understand my excitement.
Ya but the major point of the article was to point out that certain things Squid does ostensibly to improve performance actually end up being counterproductive. Do you disagree with that?

According to your logic, since more people use Windows, it is clearly a better engineered piece of software than Linux, right?
Does that work with passwords?
The problem is with the scanning of the bar codes. I think that the checkout clerks develop a technique for passing the items over the scanner quickly yet in such a way that the barcode is read on the first pass. In the self-checkout lane I often have to move the item back and forth, turn it a various angles, before it finally scans. I'm about 10x slower than an experienced checkout operator.

Then, if you're buying alcohol or anything in an aerosol can you have to have your ID checked which is another slowdown. If I'm buying more than about 5 items I will get in the regular checkout or "express" line rather than self services, even if there's no waiting.
How To Meet Deadlines: Passing The Holy Milestone
This is the first time I saw a Shapado site. In fact, I just learned its existence. Yet, in 3 minutes browsing the site I found may issues that raised a red flag.

They made some very primary design mistakes. Observe the schema of question URLs, for example. They don't contain any numeric identifier, only the normalized contents of the title of the question. This means that:

1. Sooner than later the database indexing of questions from URL contents will become a bottleneck. In the best case, the whole URL has to be hashed and the (non-unique) hash looked up in the database. If it had a unique number, the application can just snap that part of the URL to uniquely retrieve a single entry. Also, if load balancing becomes important in the future, having a short unique identifier easily accessible in the URL is very important.

2. If the title of a question changes, either the URL changes too (which is not good (http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI) and causes problems) or the URL has to stay unchanged with the old contents of the title.

Another issue:

Country flags are displayed along usernames. I can't find the reference here, but this is a touchy subject in some cultures. Some cultures don't like to see flags for other countries, or don't want their flags to appear in a computer screen.
>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

Not to poke at Squid (I'm far from qualified), but that's a horrible argument. There are plenty of extremely-highly-motivated people working on god-awful projects, believing they're being brilliant and revolutionary, when they're in fact re-doing something solved a decade earlier, built into the operating system they're using, and theirs runs 100x slower than the average naive implementation found by Googling.

Insulting it may be, but wrong it may be not.
Seems a lot like Yahoo! Answers
Oracle shuts down PostgreSQL test servers
GNU sort is now multicore aware
The ubiquitous sort utility used on Linux, FreeBSD and OS X etc. now automatically takes advantage of available processors.

The code: http://git.savannah.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=coreutils.git;a=commit;h=9face836

A performance plot: http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-coreutils/2010-07/msg00144.html
your #1 seems like bullshit, too small sample size or inaccurate demographics.
Wired Study: iPad owner are most likey D-bags
Wired has posted the results of a report from MyType on the kind of people iPad owners are. MyType’s surveyed some 20,000 people between March and May 2010, the results showed iPad owners were likely to be “selfish elites,” Wired broke down the psychology behind the iPad wielding “selfish elites”.
This is really the point I think: companies need to give front-line customer service reps more authority to resolve problems, deviate from scripts, etc. Of course this requires hiring people who are creative and can think on their feet, and probably paying them enough so they are motivated to be helpful. Which is why most customer service is staffed by low-paid scripted drones.
Finally back and forward buttons on both sides. And I've always been rather satisfied with the page turning speed, especially compared to the nook, so if that got even faster… I'm tempted to sell my old one now.

If the increased speed of the e-ink translates to a better browser, the 3G model might finally be a good HHGTTG replacement for travelers (Con against the iPad: roaming charges). Even better if the developer program would finally take off and someone would make a dedicated Wikipedia app.
I haven't actually seen those commercials. The name is a pun of "Ruby on Rails".

I intended the name to draw a contrast, not to suggest a similarity! The metaphor of 'rails' is that ruby development is sped up by being kept on a particular track ('convention over configuration') - there is also a connotation of industrial strength, power, etc. A person on a horse calls to mind the opposite characteristics: exploratory, unconstrained, human.
In Perfect 10 v. Google, Round 3 Goes to Google: No Sloppy DMCA Notices
Youtube "star" calls out all startups
Thank you, this is an excellent explanation of the goals of the project.
Shifd = Evernote Lite
I had been looking for some way to just sync simple notes across multiple computers and online. I tried evernote since that's the one everyone is raving about, but honestly it just seems so bloated and I just want a little synced notepad, so I found Shifd (which I honestly think was made by the New York Times..weird) which does exactly what I want, including sending notes by sms. I'm sure there's other options out there but honestly I don't need more, just this.
We used to ask on the application what technology people planned to use, but we took that question out. So we wouldn't know in the application stage. At the interview stage it probably wouldn't come up, but if it did the answer would be far outweighed by what we thought of the people and what they'd built.

So it might influence us a bit, but we never know till we know other things that influence us a lot more.
Writely (now "Google Docs") used C#: "The reason for choosing C# was the integrated debugging of browser and server components." ( http://radar.oreilly.com/2005/10/the-secret-sauce-of-writely... )
Frankly, I don't know why someone would choose this over reading on your smart phone. (Assuming you have a smart phone.)

I bought a nook, but then returned it after discovering that its pdf support sucked, and that I could read much more easily using Aldiko on my nexus. I find e-ink screens to actually be much worse for reading compared with white text on a black background on a hi-res LCD/OLED. The page turning time is a deal-breaker compared with a smart phone. That e-ink KACHUNKA every time gives me a headache for some reason.

To me, battery life seems like the only selling point.
"and turns all fields without getters/setters into public fields."

Why not all fields perid. Even those with getters,setter?
Naysayer alert!

Just my opinion (or perhaps I've misunderstood) - but this solves a problem that is better solved by a paper and pencil. Or a whiteboard.

On my mac I have a few different tools that I could use to make these sorts of diagrams.

I never use them.

I always revert to a paper, pencil and frantic scribbles - that's what works best as an individual and collaboratively, I've found. It's unintuitive and adds hurdles to the design process when you have to keep clicking "edit" "save" etc - I just want to rub things out and scribble.

The only time I think this would be useful is when doing UX brainstorming with a remote team, but I think that is a very niche market - too niche to make it worthwhile building this MVP. Unless you're aiming at enterprise where you only need a few customers to make it worthwhile ;)
You mention downgrading/canceling... this is the ONE thing you cannot do on any customer service site I've been too. Verizon .. ATT .. Comcast... try to find a "cancel my service" button. You can order new services all day long, but to cancel you've got to call the customer service phone number.
One of my rails apps was hijacked via xss injection last week. I wish I had read this guide sooner. I highly recommend for any rails admin.
Filter questions by Tag and Minimum Asker Reputation (StackOverflow)
The presidio is actually a government property, so any crime within the presidio is actually a federal crime and is reported differently. Beware of committing any crime there, the consequences are far more drastic.