skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In terms of work impact: It depends of your pro-activeness to determine if your work will impact or not. Also sometimes it's not necessary to create a hot new feature sometimes improving something that has been already created and, for instance, make it faster or lighter will make people less frustrated, then your work will impact on their life anyway.

Good luck!
Alcatel-Lucent acquires OpenPlug
Looking through all the comparisons, Google Maps is also the only non-ugly one.
Everyone's too busy frantically implementing this, wanting to be the first :)
*waiting 6 months for all of the 'review my startup' threads
this should probably just get paired with an email parser, as in you setup a filter, and tell it what piece of data to look for, and that's the only data that's made available.

i dunno about others, but I wouldn't want some third party site to get the full email with my name/address for example.
Matthew Inman (who co-founded SEOmoz) did a web comic that neatly captures the design process when non-designers insist on micro-managing design decisions.

http://theoatmeal.com/comics/design_hell
That would also drop a lot of really nice stuff. Plenty of people start their lives on HN as the posters of an article.
IPhone App Piracy - a direct noticeable affect on niche market app sales
Except I think startups are collectively figuring out that creating a company solely around an API plugin isn't a very solid business plan.
Whenever someone asks me what I think of cloud computing, I just reply with this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UYa6gQC14o
Let me get this straight - the banks are predatory for agreeing to make loans to a supposedly thinking adults (they are thinking adults, right? - I mean, they're college material ...), but said adults are not the ones at fault for delaying their entry into productive society, and should not be held liable for taking such loans, but those who are productive members of society should have to fess up and pay these predatory bank loans off for these adults.
"For most degrees (non-engineering, IMO), you don't learn how to add value to the economy--you just learn to jump through academic hoops"

I don't buy this at all. One of the must important skills for any industry is the ability to effectively communicate, and almost everyone that goes through college gets better at this.

The people that just jump through hoops are doing it because they don't care about getting an education and just want the piece of paper called a degree. College is highly valuable to anyone that actually wants to learn.
... or train them.
Posterous new design
I could not understand several points made in this article:

1: He mentions infochimps, but according to my knowledge its more of an ebay for datasets rather than support/provider for Big Data Stack, also is it successful? I am unsure how infochimps is related to the Big Data stack.

2: From what I remember reading about 80legs, is that it uses distributed grid computing to run the crawlers (something like SETI @ Home), I doubt Hadoop was ever designed for such applications. So this is surely isn't a Hadoop use case.

3: Quoting:

While the standard big data stack has made huge strides in making big data more accessible to everyone, it will always fall short against our stack when it comes to the cost of collecting data. We actually don’t store that much data. Because 80legs users can filter their data on the nodes, they’re able to return the minimum amount of data in their result sets. The processing (or reduction, pardon the pun) is done on the nodes. Actual result sets are very small relative to the size of the input set.

Again I am unsure how it is different from Hadoop? First Hadoop uses same principle "to move computation closer to data" hence a crawler implemented using Hadoop (something Hadoop is not intended to do) will also store data locally and not on some other node.

Also he mentions """ We have about 50,000 computers using their excess bandwidth.""" 50,000?? The biggest Hadoop cluster That I know (Yahoo) has ~10-20k nodes, and Hadoop was never meant to be used at 50K scale for crawling. So they had no option other than building their own system, even if they had to build it today.

4: Quoting

One advantage is optimization — an “off-the-shelf” system is going to have some generalities built into it that can’t be optimized to fit your needs. The opportunity cost of going “standard” is a slew of competitive advantages.

The only issue I can think of regarding Hadoop is that its written in JAVA, otherwise its an extremely extensible piece of software. Unless you are designing a real time messaging system or distributed system for High Frequency Trading, Hadoop is good enough for most of the applications. Also what about cost of finding good enough programmers who are capable of building a system? Another advantage of Hadoop is that in case of a low load the remaining nodes can be used to do something else, maybe processing some data, with your own solution it would be harder to do it. Also your IP and your Secret Sauce isn't of much use, if you dont have solid Patents for them, otherwise they would mostly end up becoming a maintenance nightmare, after original engineers cash out. Also what if the the big company already has Hadoop cluster, it would be even difficult for them to integrate with your computing power.

While I seem to agree with Authors conclusion that a highly focused startup should make their proprietary solution, I cannot agree with his evidence behind that argument. A grid based crawler with 50K machines isn't something that Hadoop was ever designed to support.
We used our paid iPhone Apps to get to ramen profitability. Then raised money and made them free. They saved us for sure.

So yes it has happened and we are one such company.
Broke - and Building the Most Expensive School in U.S. History
Jesse Schell: Visions of the Gamepocalypse
I think we're in Diaspora territory again, where I want to own the data and allow access to you via my own criteria.

I've been baulking at Firefox 4's "sync" today because the data is on their server with their key. A bit 1990's me thinks.

There's no way I'm trusting my email, or anyone else's, to another third party.

I imagine I manage this like most folk, I forward gmail to my server and procmail from there. Works great.
Seems like a neat idea, but I'd rather that functionality be handled by gmail rather than a 3rd party.
intra-webapp communication : HTML :: inter-webapp communication : GMAIL ?
Not sure that applies here. Even if Gmail discountinued OAuth support, you could just fall back to IMAP.
Java development 2.0: Sharding with Hibernate Shards
colorforth is a lot like Tetris (2008)
"The cloud means replacing your ops team with a clip-art picture of a cloud--PROBLEM SOLVED." --Coda Hale
continuing: But the current economic disaster is the result of previous attempts to "create jobs" through stimulus.

So the choice is simple. More phony makework jobs now, with more economic instability and joblessness later. Or an admittedly painful end to the phony economy and a return to creating wealth by producing things people are willing to pay for, followed by greater stability.

Getting off many drugs involves painful withdrawal. But it is the only way to get straight.
If you don't have experience in setting up a server, wtf not? Learn it. It's kinda useful.
I also wonder how to deal this with problem with coworkers which are not designers.

I try to be open to suggestion and critic but usually it's quite hard to make even a small change without having to redesign everything else.

Another thing is that non-designers tend to want a justification for things that there is not one. Like it's impossible to justify how some things look or the choice of a some particular color except the "I think it works".
I like that idea, but A/B testing on the iPhone might be a little tricky with its slow release cycles :)
To me it means not being in control of my own data.
Yeah I've run into that quite a bit. "Tell me WHY you can't have 3 layers of tabs and a search bar across the top."
Html5witch: Python HTML5 generation library
That's a good rule. I had cards made but rarely use them. When I did, it felt awkward, as if I was a salesman. I'll apply your rule and only give them out when asked.
You can enjoy reading a blog post even if you've started thinking. I liked hearing his reasoning and comparing it to our own.
I think that might be part of the problem, I respect my clients enough to try to explain things to them in terms they'll understand, but some of them just look at me like I'm crazy or I don't know what I'm talking about when I'm explaining simple user interaction concepts. It gets frustrating.
Yes, but that does not mean it will be cleaner than, or even as clean as what we have now.
As the ecosystem around Twitter has discovered, the platform owners will sooner copy a good feature than buy it if it's cheap enough to build. It's not about OAuth or IMAP, it's about some GOOG PM copying the featureset and putting it in the MRD for the next release.

[edit: a famous bit of company-is-a-feature carnage for reference: STAC vs. Microsoft: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stac_Electronics ]

Which makes me wonder why Matt can't get this championed internally or for someone's 20% project?
I think the worry is more that Google will offer the same service, for free, built into GMail.
Hate to be contrarian, but I actually agree with the author. It's often a collection of little things like this that puts one site over another.
I think the main goal behind port knocking is to prevent someone from exploiting a pre-authentication vulnerability in the ssh daemon.
It is a shame the area is locked from most innovation due to lack of funding for anybody but the rich. It would be interesting to try so real alternatives to the current High School system.

I certainly agree with the second sentence, but lack of funding is generally not the problem: http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSN2438214220070524
What changed? It seems the same...
If you can't explain it you haven't understood it. It's not time wasted to get people on board and it's remarkable how much you learn about the thing you are explaining while explaining it.

It sounds to me like you want this to be a 'one way street' because you trump others in your superior knowledge of design. But the reality is that everybody - also non designers - will have to feel good and be on board about the stuff they build. So you'll have to do a better job at getting them on board with less effort. And if that can't be done wanting people to 'shut up and just do the job' isn't going to go very far.
Here's my take:

-> if time is more precious than money, go with Heroku.

-> if money is more precious than time, go with Linode/SliceHost etc.

You can change your mind later on (depending on scale increase cash etc), or even mix-and-match (eg: your workers on Linode, your front-ends on Heroku).

Last point: some software (eg: sphinx) are not available on Heroku, and some others (eg: websolr) are quite costly compared to a roll-your-own setup.
Techlens does not cover preprints!
The geopolitics are interesting, of course, but this was really interesting to me:

He now oversees a test project of driverless Komatsu trucks that cart out 300 tons at a time, moving 80,000 tons over two 12-hour shifts. When the drilling is good, he says, they can shift 120,000 tons in 24 hours. Without drivers, the trucks are more reliable, with radar sensors stopping them from crashing. They roll 24 hours a day.
Am I the only one who thinks this product could be a game changer? Maybe the tipping point that makes employers embrace hiring telecommuters?
Please review my app: Mobile HackerNews with themes, voting, and commenting
You're right, and I do enjoy the discussion process for those reasons. I think maybe what I'm struggling with is how to deal with having your years of experience dismissed with an "I disagree." Full stop.
Worth watching for those who have even a slight interest in GNU or Linux.

It is however very left wing, and fails to mention any flavor of BSD but you can't have it all.
Selling starts at 'no'.
Hi - as an aside - I think it would be worth adding some 'tour' pages to your status dashboard site. I like the design but I'm not sure how the site works etc.
Being expected to explain and justify your decisions is pretty reasonable, IMO.
I don't buy this at all. One of the must important skills for any industry is the ability to effectively communicate, and almost everyone that goes through college gets better at this.

Sure, but is it really necessary to take on tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt to develop those skills?
I can't buy that "hosted apps" qualify as "cloud" - that means Hotmail, Yahoo mail and every single rich application on the internet, ever, qualifies as "cloud". We have a word for that - Internet.

I think a much more apt - and something more applicable to SFDC, is anything which exposes "architectural resources" - such as Platform, Storage, or Compute as a service/hosted system is a much better, and cleaner a term then throwing applications built on cloud technology into the mix. The cloud is the dynamic, elastic, "on demand" of resources, not the utilization of those resources.
This is a valid definition... but it's not most people's definition. For example, if you are running on ec2, well, you've still gotta install the OS (granted, there are tools that make it easier, but you still have to do it, and you still have to keep up with security patches, etc..) you've still gotta deal with failure, deal with upgrades, etc...

Granted, you could say that ec2 isn't cloud... you could say that ec2 is a VPS system with a decent and fast provisioning API. Your definition would say that hiroku and google app engine are 'cloud' - something few people would argue with... it's just that most people call ec2 'cloud' as well.

This, I think, is why most technical people find the term 'cloud' to be useless... there isn't a strong and generally accepted definition that isn't so nebulous as to be not very useful.
can't disagree with the idea that Americans work more than Europeans, but surely this whole concept of 'work life' balance is exclusive to western cultures. Does it exist in the same way in China or India?
Wow, I wasn't aware something like this even existed.

With that amazing price point ($22 on Amazon) I'd almost buy one right now as I've been wanting to move away from cell phones on the whole, but the inability to wire contacts in and the horrific SMS capabilities are making me hesitate.
When I worked a summer in a management consultancy we produced powerpoints for the BBC showing that it was a waste of money.

but don't let that trouble you.
Why not restrict submissions to users with over, say, 10 karma? Only a tiny subset of spammers would write comments to get over that hurdle (though it would only take a couple of reasonable ones). Has this been discussed extensively before?
I see another benefit of using fail to ban. That is, it helps a little to keep the log files (a little) shorter.
Re #2, it'd only take even needing 4 or 5 karma to dissuade the majority of spammers. And hard? The majority of my > 10k karma comes from comments - possibly even over 90%.

It's not far fetched to expect people to have posted one or two comments a couple of people vote up before being able to submit and it'd decimate this problem.
I'm old. I live in a country that until fairly recently universally funded tertiary education. (What Americans call college, most other places call university, but we can all accept it as tertiary education, I believe.)

I was 28 when I started my degree, but it was "state funded", both university fees and a maintenance allowance were paid. I had a mortgage and a car, so I had to work during the summer to make ends meet, but without the mortgage it would have been decent subsistence living. Regular students survived, many did part time work improve their lot.

This was a great and workable system. It pretty much leveled the playing field and allowed anyone who wanted to go to university to do so, if they satisfied the requirements of the university.

I maintain that it is a fundamental right that anyone who so desires, and who meets the requirements of the university, should be state-funded through their first degree (not failed years, of course).

It is hugely beneficial to everyone in a nation state to have the most educated workforce it can afford and support.

You cannot over-educate a nation.
The VWO creator is the only one apart from yourself that is not criticising the writeup (except perhaps wishing they'd given it more depth as any creator would) - he seems in fact pretty glad to get it.
If China is indeed a bubble (at least in the medium-term) Australia is going to experience a world of hurt.

Yes, but...

Australian is a commodity exporter. If China is a bubble, then yes, Australia will be hurt unless another country (US/India/Japan/Korea) picks up demand.

Also, it's not a property bubble when there are less houses than people who want them. Because the population growth rate in Australia is (comparatively) high for a developed country we have high intrinsic demand for new housing.
I gave up on a non-standard port because I kept having to figure out configuration for programs that implicitly run ssh (darcs, git, I think there were others..)
Depends, if you have to justify every little thing there's a problem, it can go beyond the reasonable. Either they don't like your work, or they don't trust you, or both.
Answer: You hired me to design this, either trust me and get out of the way, or hire someone else.

You can explain a few things at first, but at some point they just have to trust you.
the advantage of port knocking is that it's a separate line of defence from your ssh server. It'd be damn useful in the case of a remote SSH exploit.
The original title is best. It conveys the point that China is literally and physically getting Australia.

The country of Australia is an object decreasing in size and mass, due to the super-barge-2mile-long-train-robo-dumpster IV China has paid to stick in it.
"If you can't explain it you haven't understood it." That's not true.

You can understand lots of things without being to explain them. It's called instinct, sometimes, taste, other times, experience by yet others.

Do you think the experienced cook can necessarily explain exactly why some things work and others don't?
Completely agreed; which is why "private cloud" isn't as an insane a term as you might initially suspect (as I did when I first heard it).

If you have a global company, such as GE running it's own "private cloud" where CPU, Storage and platforms can be spun up by departments, users and others "on demand" and destroyed just as quickly, and it's distributed, fault-tolerant and modular in architecture - why should that not qualify as "cloud"?
Treat the customers with respect. Assumptions are there to be challenged. If you had experienced where a particular feature failed, use it to back you up. Otherwise, acknowledge their request, list it down as a point where the two of you disagree. Then suggest that it would be interesting to challenge your own assumptions and experience in some areas, to see if some of these have changed. But to run good tests, it's best to limit the number of changes, or to limit the risks to the customer.
President / Co-Founder for soon-to-launch Tcrunch mentioned startup
An interesting way to look at writing novels, but I far prefer the novels that have the plot worked out before the writing starts. I can always tell these because everything integrates so well with everything else and it feels whole.

Novels that 'start on page 1 and slog through to the end' usually read the same way. They ramble and they get lost and eventually find some kind of ending.

Novels that start somewhere, then work out different pieces until there's a whole novel would seem to be in the same category for the reader, but probably more fun for the writer.
Start with Heroku. It's actually quite cheap for low traffic.

At the same time, buy a $20/month Linode. Start playing around with it by setting up toy web sites and web apps. If you don't have experience setting up a server, then it's important to be experimenting with one for a long time because it takes a while to learn things. For example, you not only have to install and configure all of the necessary software, you have to think about security and resource utilization (memory, CPU, disk). You also are going to want to set up some server monitoring software such as serverdensity.com. And you're going to want to get used to managing web traffic (reading Apache logs, tuning Apache for performance, etc.). All of this takes time. But if you do this then if the time comes for you to switch away from Heroku, you will have experience setting up and managing your own web server.
Good point - that would be like the VGA adapter. It'd be like having a DS where the top screen could be 30 inches or more.. :-)
I don't think the need to consider maintenance and scalability removes something from the definition of "the cloud" - consider the fact that on modern VPSes and EC2 I can spin up new resources within a heartbeat - sure, I still have to think about stuff, but instance on for elastic resources is what I think caused the "cloud" term to come into being.
Sadly I noticed that only later ;-) Though at least the cache could speed things up for the window shoppers.
If money is more precious than time but you have a need for reasonably beefy servers, go with Hetzner:

http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver-pr...
The silence in response to your question speaks volumes.
On Mac/Linux, setting a different default port for your host in ~/.ssh/config will allow git and other applications to automatically use the new port binding on the server.

My ~/.ssh/config basically looks like https://gist.github.com/78ec014f31c8a06f656b

…which allows me to just use "ssh server1.example.com" and "git clone foo@server1.example.com:blah/project" to access those resources without explicitly defining the port number.

---

Edit: The standard msysgit installer for Windows may look in the same place too — I haven't tried.
I took on zero debt. I went to community college in ca which was $11 a unit, now I believe it is about $25 per unit. Then I went to a state school which was about 8 grand a year. I worked the whole time I was in school and paid for it myself.
Most people couldn't put their finger on exactly what Cloud is, but they don't realize they fail because they don't understand the True Nature of Cloud.

A cloud is not Azure. It is not AWS. It is not Rackspace.

A cloud is not definable by what it is, but by what it is not.

Asking for a definition of a cloud, is like asking for the definitive IP Address of www.amazon.com.

A cloud is a hand-wavy indirection, and abstraction of a compute or storage infrastructure.

Each of the products you mentioned are not Cloud. They are manifestations of a cloud. But they are not the Cloud, as they are no longer abstract.
Setting up your own server gives you full flexibility as to your application architecture/tech stack. Want to go with Redis? Tokyo Cabinet? MogileFS? S3? A pile of files in a zillion small directories? something else? Your choice.

If your startup has any challenging technical elements, I think having 100% full control over your app architecture is quite important. You can live without it, but it's a potentially costly trade-off.
So they gouge on the RAM but they generally give everything else at a very respectable price? Sounds reasonable to me. It's not too shocking actually .. If you're renting a $99/month server with 512MB of memory and 80gb of disk space, you're losing money on it unless it's an old, already amortized server. That RAM upsell might become all of the profit of that server.. also, limited ram and disk space means you can do less with your server, like use less power or less bandwidth.