skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As far as I know, the device ID cannot be retrieved from code running in Safari.

The point is pretty moot anyway, since native applications can and are using the device ID to track you, and it is unique.

On my iPhone I have native apps installed for accessing ... Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Reader, Yahoo Messenger and Skype. I prefer native apps, even for Facebook which has a kickass web page optimized for mobiles, and I'm sure I'm not the only one.
Fitness Protects Men Working Long Hours From Early Death, Study Shows
So if you watch the Revision3 video where they talk about the stability issues Kevin throws Cassandra out there nothing really specific but when discussing downtime its the only technical factor he mentions.

He calls it "still beta software" and states they were fixing bugs in Cassandra during the days leading up to the release of v4.
These days, "startup" can mean pretty much anything smaller than a Fortune 500 company...
The reference is the sample used for the survey. Select a different sample and you get an entirely different result. It depends on not just what cost of living is but how much your friends and neighbors make. From this result alone you'd conclude that medieval people lived in utter despair, but I'm pretty sure that was not the case. So it's kind of pointless.
I've asked a few Japanese people to say "She sells sea shells by the sea shore..." and it comes out sounding a lot like that... Tricky because Japanese uses Shi and Chi sounds but not Si on its own.

Don't worry, they get plenty of revenge on me.
Virtual worlds, digital forensics, spaceship batteries, wireless power transmission, nano-satellites, tether materials suitable for space use, economic modelling tools for the small/medium business sector - I see plenty of tech-oriented, hacker-friendly challenges which would cost a lot of money if they were contracted out, and which would have quite legitimate uses in defense, security, space, or treasury - areas where most agree the government has legitimate functions, even if you disapprove of government involvement in social policy.
True, It can disorganize the team and make it counterproductive if it isn't in the 'agile' mindset (or hasn't adapted to it in a reasonable period of time).
No. people feel the need to be artificially connected and artificially communicating while sacrificing the REAL connection and communication which is actually taking place at the moment.
App Platform Stats Infographic
Blog platform Tumblr’s soaring traffic brings growing pains
A/B Testing: Why you shouldn't jump to conclusions
Living Efficiently
RFIs are completely different than RFPs. RFIs have much less stringent requirements, and are usually (gasp) awarded to whomever can convince the government that their bid is the most capable or complete.

RFPs are the scary ones, in which to even enter means you're competing with the likes of Boeing, Grumman, Halliburton, et al. Those are nigh impossible to win without serious inroads pre-existing.
Crisis Camp: another face of humanitarian relief (outsourcing relief)
Rails Creator's New Custom Hypercar
I know pg doesn't open all of the code, to prevent HN from being games by spammers or karma whores. It wouldn't surprise me if the YC-related post gets a bump - HN was created as part of YC's desire to be exposed to hackers, so that's probably 'fair'. Just one of many theories I suppose.
The article basically comes right out and says it. You just need to read between the lines a little bit.

From the article:
Quinn was the main champion of moving over to Cassandra, say our sources. Now the site is taking a huge hit, at least in the short term, because of that decision and/or how it was implemented, and Quinn is paying for it with his job.

It's always a toss up between whether it was implemented correctly or not. The correct course of action of course would have been to slowly move the site over to the new technology piece by piece rather than a wholesale switchover. The risk is in the migration strategy not the technology picked. They could have been equally stupid switching over to a new architecture with mysql.
Add a Facebook Like Button to Your Site in 2 Minutes
What was the pivot? Article makes it sound like site was always foe making lists?
I'm kind of confused. I simply pointed out that most people are already highly engaged in solving problems we have in this country, in response to your suggestion that engagement needs to be increased.

So let me be more precise in my question. To what level should we increase our engagement in solving the problems of the country? Should we all engage ourselves 12 hours a day instead of 10, or give up weekends? Or should we simply devote ourselves to poster contests rather than to (for example) making pizza for others to consume?
The problem is this is self-evidently political money, and it's allocation is always, pretty much by definition (well, outside of a war) going to be political. That was true for FDR and has been true for Obama.

You and I disagree on how it should be spent (I think "green infrastructure" is a mirage at best, unless you're also e.g. serious about nuclear power, broadband could use some money but really needs a different regulatory regime and the "spend more money on schools" approach has been tried for half a century with highly negative results) ... but I guarantee you neither of us would be happy with how it would actually be spent.

Heck, even if it's spent in a totally partisan pro-Democratic Party way, based on the last stimulus it would sure look like it would be a bad investment; then again, Dave Obey has decided to spend more time with his family after this Congress (he's the Chairman of the House Committee on Appropriations and writing the stimulus bill was delegated to him).
One of the most irritating things about the Kindle, apart from the overpriced books and lack of second-hand sales (which would apply some pricing pressure), is its lack of hyphenation.

The text looks absolutely hideous at large font sizes. I almost think it would be better non-justified.

I don't get jolted out of the flow of text with good hyphenation. It's more distracting to me to see irregular spacing in the line. The extra spaces when the justification is working very hard feels slower-paced, and the dense lines feel higher-paced, giving this weird rhythm, something like: "sooo tthheee mmmaaannn walkedacrossthe roooaaad".
It seems to me that if you replace "whom other" with "that" you end up with a similar meaning:

people that people bully bully people

I've found it fairly common to hear people drop the "that" when speaking - so in this case:

people people bully...

the first people refers to the people being bullied while the second people refers to the people doing the bullying. It's a bit clearer if you replace some of the nouns - for instance:

dogs people bully bully cats

which I believe is a perfectly legal English sentence.
Warren Buffet is an unlikely person to quote in a discussion about agile, but .....

"First come the innovators, who see opportunities that others don’t. Then come the imitators, who copy what the innovators have done. And then come the idiots, whose avarice undoes the very innovations they are trying to use to get rich."
Although, when the total weight of the bike is high, it is better to have weight up front too (front+rear panniers). Otherwise, steering feels flimsy.
Interview with the Author of "Being Geek"
Google Maps mashup for post earthquake services in NZ
Very possibly; one thing we do know is that culturally Yahoo simply doesn't care about the quality of its engineers or particularly respects them. As noted by PG, Yahoo has traditionally been a "media company" in which its engineers exist to implement the visions of others. Based on development, it would not appear that their new from Autocad CEO is fighting that.
Eric Schmidt is hard for me to figure out. On the one hand, some of the stuff he says is eye-popping, in or out of context.

On the other hand, I don't really feel like there's an actual "evilness" behind the words to match up with the "evil" sound of the words. Someone truly interested in leveraging the potential evil would hardly going around making gawk-inducing statements like this. It's almost cartoon villain-ish (and thus gets headlines).

I've tended to think that it's the "well-meaning but poorly-worded summary of what the engineers are saying that contains poorly glossed, uncomfortable truths" explanation that's behind these statements. But that seems a little weak; shouldn't the CEO be better at that than Schmidt is? (Or if he truly isn't, why is he still CEO?)

So it occurred to me reading this one, that what if it is that Schmidt is deliberately "bungling" to try to warn us to caution, in his positive-spin, pro-company, CEO kind of way? Maybe the "foot in mouth" is precise and intentional, designed to get press and shake people up on the topic?

To sidestep the (valid but long and out of scope) discussion of "well, why doesn't he fix the problem?", from a business perspective, he could hardly full-stop the company on data aggregation. Even if he did, Google isn't alone in its data aggregation and more companies are jumping in on the game all the time.

Maybe Schmidt is actually risking the flak to make the point. Maybe he's not as culturally different from "the Good Google" as many seem to think he is. Or maybe he really does have an anti-gravity ray with which he will steal the moon and Miss Penelope Pureheart, bwahaha.
Win-Seeking vs. Perceived Stupidity Avoidance
Very pretty, but doesn't do anything I find useful. And I cook, a lot.

What's the long-term vision here?

Also: couldn't hate the name more.
Schmidt's point in his speech is that Google can use what they know about web surfers to provide better service to them. By cutting the phrase down to just the headline, it makes Google's motives sound more questionable.

It is like the difference between Netflix announcing "We track everything you watch" versus "We can recommend movies you might like, because we track everything you watch".
I'm generally not a fan of non-competes, but if you get a $40m golden parachute, I think it's fair to ask that you not immediately jump to a competitor.
Digg v4 has added back the features I liked after taking them away - mostly the Upcoming section, which tends to have interesting things that never make it to the front page, and the setting that allows you to default to Top Mews, instead of things I have already read ('My News').

For most users, change in features is what drove them away, not necessarily the spotty QOS (though that was pretty bad for a while).
I found it curious to put these two side by side:

Eric Schmidt: "A near-term future in which you don’t forget anything, because the computer remembers. You’re never lost."

Evernote.com: "Capture anything. Access anywhere. Find things fast".

Both paint close to the same thing, but with different colors. A great illustration of how much the good perception matters. And being an underdog maybe too.
Big aftershocks still causing damage this morning:
http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/canterbury-earthquake/410573...

The map isn't really groundbreaking but I was surprised to see it, I still have low expectations of technology and our media here.
Your first point is raised in some form nearly every time this comes up. But what is forgotten is the value of living in these more expensive places. $75k in NYC/SF may buy you less, but you get more free things of value, in the form of quality peers, access to eduction/investment, etc.

It's only an anecdote, but: My income would be the same regardless of where I live, and I'm pretty sure my choice to live in NYC provides me more happiness than most other possible choices.
I couldn't agree more. Pictures of food are really not very useful. If the pages contained actual information, maybe the recipe (some pages do) then this might be useful. Also, I think some type of search is absolutely necessary.
That depends on how you define your terms. I'm not sure a company that has been around 6 years and has ~100 staff can be called a startup any more. On the other hand, I'm not sure a company that still survives more on the wishful thinking of investors than on the money it brings in after 6 years can be called a business, either, and certainly I wouldn't call it either big or mature. I'm honestly not sure what I would call that sort of organisation, though if I were an investor, I suspect the word "liability" would feature somewhere.
Ask HN: How do you most effectively promote your product?
So together with a friend we built:

http://www.Awesome.FM/Client/

It's a cool, free multi-OS desktop client written in Adobe AIR, that makes it easier and more fun to explore youtube's enormous music (video) collection.

But now comes the next big question after it's finished (1.0):

How do I promote our program most effectively to the right audiences?

Do note:

- We have a low budget

- We don't have additional financing

- We don't have friends at major websites to help

Any advice on this difficult matter is extremely welcome. Thanks in advance. :)
But... but... but... they're not a startup! They're just a... a... small business!

Must be all that crazy blog money they have pouring in. I'd have a car built by spacemen too if I had an award-winning blog!
Not sure if its the UI. But the auto-complete is actually more obtrusive than what I would expect from a text editor. If its gonna pop a suggestion box for every keystroke, it hinders my writing flow. It would be better if the editor could suggest better phrases (than the one I already wrote), or better words to make the text more formal.
Supercomputing on a cell phone
Note also ExifTool:

http://owl.phy.queensu.ca/~phil/exiftool/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exiftool

One of its many options is to wipe all metadata. It can also write individual items into metadata, e.g. a copyright notice.
You are in stealth mode, yet willing to pitch the idea to hundreds of random strangers?
per month maybe
Well, more VC firms than > $100 million exits over the last 10 or whatever years.

I agree there's plenty wrong (as you'll find with any industry or its institutions), but I'm not entirely sure you can blame VCs as a whole for their terrible recent results. Not only does it include two nasty recessions (the one early in the last decade was particularity focused in the areas VCs invest(ed) in), but the important of the IPO exit slamming shut cannot be overemphasized.

Venture capital had a great run from the end of the '50s to the beginning of the last decade, but rules of the game have changed and so will the industry. And as you note, most everyone is betting on a significant shrink as one of the changes.
Glut and Deflation in the used academic book market
People have pointed out some of the unspoken underlying assumptions here.

Another one is an assumption which seems to be remarkably common: the assumption that everyone knows when they're happy and when they're not.
> IIS is believe it or not a very good webserver, fewer exploits than Apache and just as extensible. And you can extend it with .NET-code. No need for that icky C to do that.

Which is why its the most popular web server on the interwebs right? Oh wait .. http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2010/08/11/august-2010-web...
What about the fact that you need to pay a pretty penny for the operating system you want to run IIS on?

IIS can also not run Django or Ruby On Rails (2 major programming frameworks) reliably last I checked, While Apache can handle pretty much anything and even .NET using mono. Simply put IIS isn't at the forefront of any innovation when it comes to web development, which is pretty much the hot thing right now.

> .NET is a very good development platform with lots of stuff happening.

I guess that's why they came out with ASP.NET MVC which unabashedly copies Ruby on Rails/Django right?
PHP is maturing and while people might cast aspersions on it, It go out on a limb and say its still a vastly more popular web programming language than anything we've seen from Microsoft. Throw in a couple of really good development frameworks like CakePHP, CodeIgniter, Zend etc, and I'm not sure who should be laughing at who here (Visual Basic .NET anyone?).

> You mean those languages which also runs on .NET

Did you hear about the IronRuby debacle? http://blog.jimmy.schementi.com/2010/08/start-spreading-news...
And how many serious Python/Ruby programmers run .NET to program in their favorite languages.

> plus it has tooling support which makes using PostgreSQL seem like the dark ages.

This has been addressed ... but just take a look at the MS SQL server price list http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2008/en/us/pricing.aspx, and tell me if 'tooling support' is worth that much. To most startups and developers out there, the answer is no.

> Microsoft does really have a lot of good stuff on the table.

Sure. but thats not the point.
The point is that, there are several strong alternatives to Microsoft products everywhere you look, and as time goes along, Microsoft stuff will become more and more marginalized.

Like the creator of Rails says here, http://bigthink.com/ideas/21601
I can go through my day without really thinking about Microsoft now, just a few years ago that was simply not the case (IE, Hotmail, Windows, .NET).
This is such a joke. I hear about crap like this all the time from my gf who is studying at Hunter College in NYC to become a teacher. The ease with which some people can marginalize the ambitions of others amazes me.

Here is a quote from a poster in one of her class rooms: "behind every great fortune is a crime".
Damn it, somebody mod this up
to make up for my accidental downmod button press.
!Γ
Android Tablets Holiday 2010
Perhaps, it just looks awesome and inspired when you are still drunk/stoned. Then, if you dare looking again during the hang over, you will see the full monstrosity that you have spawned.

In my opinion, this is an urban legend.
Justin Bieber Has Dedicated Servers at Twitter
I hate when people say this.

I am a bartender and a hacker. I go out at night. I have tons of friends. I can have an engaging conversation on the train with a complete stranger. I think I'm fairly social, moreover everyone else says I'm really social.

But at the same time I love Facebook. I'm on it all the time. I talk to people about their facebook comments, face to face. I talk to people telling them to expect a cool link on some new HTML 5.

Its not artificial, its just "the new hotness". I honestly think I can be hyper-social now, both through the net and the real world.
IMO mobile browsers are way behind in any sort of privacy options compared to desktop browsers (and they arent very good in general).

Hopefully, people will start realizing this and start clamoring for better privacy which would be even more relevant given the geolocation implications.

Right now, I can see that Palm sends every app start/stop event along with a whole slew of other events back to a Palm website and I'm sure Apple does the same.

It would be interesting to measure how much battery life increases when smartphones are not forced to report large amounts of usage information back to the manufacturer.
Why we don't need more women in tech... yet
I couldn't agree more. I recently started using Fedora and often had to dive into the depths of Linux to get simple things done/working.

This is going to be unpopular, but the majority of open-source software is not near the polish needed for the non-tech public to use.
$250/month is less than I'm paying for a small bedroom in Columbus. How did you find that deal? Or is there a catch?
I was actually at my happiest when I made about $75K in the bay area. I lived in a house in SF with all my friends and I was a lower level startup grunt and didn't care too much about my job. I just figured that I could always get another stupid $75K programming job. So I did my best at work but also spent a lot of time goofing off, hanging out with my bros, going snowboarding on weekends, riding my bike around, etc.

When I started making about twice that I realized I was in a unique position and better buckle down and be more serious about my job, which was far less fun and often quite stressful.

Once you get beyond that it's still not as fun but at least one is banking a lot of money so when the gravy train ends you can just retire to somewhere cheap for a few years.
Considering the completely different backends of v3 and v4, I think, this would have been incredibly hard to implement. At least if changes in one system should end up in the other.

In this case you would not just have to write scrips to one-time migrate all needed data from v3 mysql to v4 Cassandra.

No. You would have to build a mechanism that doesn't just do it in both directions, it would also have to work at near-realtime speed.

If you then need consistency of the transferred data, this quickly gets impossible. Try finding a way to ensure consistency between these two completely different architectures.

In the end, most of v3 would have needed to be rewritten for a parallel use to be possible, at which point you don't really gain much.

"not hard to implement" - sigh

Disclaimer: I don't work at digg and I don't know more about their backend than the rest of the public. I did however just get around doing something like what you describe and there it wad "just" a different schema on the same database backend and even just that would have been hell
The Czar's Lost Gold
Role or company?
Hi guys, long time listener, first time caller here. So my question boils down to this: what is better, a great position at a not-so-great company or a not-so-great position at a great company? I realize there's probably not a general answer to this so here are some more details in my case:

- Both A and B are high profile names in their respective domain and have a strong online presence (Alexa top-500 global traffic rank); A serves mostly static content, B mostly dynamic.

- Great position at company A: greenfield project, potentially high visibility, small agile team, significant autonomy to choose and build the whole stack.

- Not-so-great company A: Primarily a media company, software is just a tool. High level decisions are taken by journalists and suits, often not the most internet and tech savvy individuals. Poor, unstable management (requirements changed drastically midway, we had to dump more than half of the code written up to that point...). With a few exceptions, the overall tech level is mediocre (e.g. ad-hoc version control).

- Great company B: Built from the ground up as a software company; follows latest technologies and best practices. Challenging, stimulating environment.

- Not-so-great position at company B: Ok that's a bit subjective but I mean something less "sexy" that a lead developer tackling huge scalability problems and playing with the latest toys. Think of non public facing roles, e.g. internal apps, tools support, automated testing, etc.

For the sake of discussion, the question implies "all else being equal"; i.e. location, salary, perks, vacation days, double screen monitors, playroom and whatnot are assumed to be comparable or unimportant.
Actually, I think they may have the order right, as I think you naturally see the right side of a page before the left, similar to why magazine ads cost more for right page vs. left.
Any site around pictures of food gets my vote :) However, the tag line "beautiful food photos" isn't right: the pictures aren't all that pretty.

- When you "zoom" into a photo, ie. go to the photo detail page, the actual picture is not much larger than the thumbnail. If this is about photos of food, the photo should be larger.

- All the emphasis on "beautiful photos": I think you have the wrong angle here. Amateur food photos are not pretty, making good food photos is one of the hardest things to do, even for professional photographers.

-
"Buffalo buffalo" is supposed to indicate "buffalo from Buffalo", the place.

And "people people bully bully people" makes sense to me if I think about it, although it doesn't sound natural due to the word repetition.

Maybe "people others bully bully others"?