skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It sounds kind of scary when you put it like that, but generally I've no principled objection to a server policing its hosted content for contract compliance as long as it's not the only hosting game in town. If I'm looking for a server, I get to choose whether I trust or want Rackspace. If I'm looking to provide a service, I get to choose whether I want to provide it to crazy dangerous guy. If the guy doesn't think he broke the contract (I don't know what he actually had on the site) let him complain. Otherwise, he can a) find another server that doesn't care about how nuts he is, b) set up his own server, c) exercise his free hate speech from his personal pulpit, or d) join the presumably already established subreddit for Bookburners against Censorship.
The author ignores one of the key requirements for a bubble, in the definition he provided: that the asset in question 'may be freely exchanged'. A year of college (or a diploma, for that matter) cannot be freely exhanged, and consequently there can be no bubble. There is no market for an education as an asset.

There is a market for education as a service, and it can be argued that while demand is high for the service now (leading to higher prices), that demand will drop in the future. But there won't be any secondary effects like the housing bust, where people depended directly on the value of the asset. Not sure why people are promoting this fallacious 'education bubble' meme as some kind of scare tactic, but there must be an angle for them somehow, I see a lot of it.
I'm pretty busy right now with web programming, but I'd like to design some games in the future. I've been planning on writing for Android, but seeing ther awesome stuff people are doing with JS/HTML5 is making me more interested in going that route.
Rate my app (FB+iPhone/iPad): Tutti Friendi: Doodle match your Facebook friends
http://gist.github.com/572548
UK job scene and tech companies
How is the tech scene in the UK at the moment? Are there any tech companies working with interesting technologies and looking for developers?
If I were running a hosting company, I'd be wary of permitting religious content of any sort

This makes no sense whatsoever. Obviously, you haven't thought this through, since your refusal to host (for example) an online Koran would result in death threats, protests, outrage from online teenaged suburban UMC liberal retards, etc, etc.
But there's 6 former classmates who are waiting to contact you.
Zombie highway review for iphone
Making the product definitely requires investment. Manufacturing equipment, salaries for a couple of people who will do the actual work, etc. It doesn't need a huge sum, but it isn't bootstrappable.
I just wanted to offer a suggestion regarding the colour scheme - I personally found the blue menu bar on a blue background (with a blue search box) to be quite hard on the eyes; I think it would be worth spending a little time experimenting with different colours there. Maybe invert the menu bar, so it's mainly white with black text and a blue highlight for the current page? You could probably leave the search box as it is in that case.

Anyway, best of luck with the site :-)
I wonder how many people cheering this are in favor of net neutrality.
This is used for everything in his environment, and has been for 20 years or so. The Odb. Local hash variables, stack frames. Both speed and size wewe important when this was created. Why it's coming up now, I have no idea.
They also don't like software that looks like some feature should work, but just pops up a "buy me" dialog. Lites are OK as long as they are internally consistant.
To be fair, we don't know the number of objects -- most of these 125k accesses could be lookups. But then again, if the number of objects is that small, then a hashtable strikes me as overkill. Otherwise yes, he should notch it up to a reasonable load factor.

But there's no denying how atrocious the hash function is. To quote:

> first and last characters of the name of the object, adds them together and mods the result by the number of buckets, which is 11

I don't know much about the name representation, but I'm guessing it's human readable ASCII. Which means your keys are confined to a very narrow range, and they'll be distributed along the same lines as the language itself (English or whatever). That means collisions up the wazoo.
You are hopping between two arguments to avoid having to deal with the weaknesses of either of them.

On the one hand, you point out that Apple has a 100% monopoly on iOS applications. Of course, Twitter also has a 100% monopoly on Twitter apps. Surely nobody thinks Twitter has a monopoly.

On the other hand, you point to profit share in the wider market of smartphone apps. But of course the problem there is that Apple has less than 30% of the market for smart phones, and so clearly can't monopolize the market for smartphone apps.
The understanding of the 1st amendment is your straw man. By refuting it you believe you successfully refute the argument that this is, in effect, a disturbing form of limitation of free speech by a private corporation who happens to own the machines used to manifest the speech they disagree with.
Matt Cutts' videos: http://www.youtube.com/user/GoogleWebmasterHelp

Edit: I knew there was more to that account than just Matt, but didn't realize he had his own playlist for questions. I think the link you want is for "Matt's Grab Bag:" http://www.youtube.com/user/GoogleWebmasterHelp#grid/user/84...
The death of Objective-C as far as iOS development goes?
People shouldn't get too angry over the burning. Sure it's a rallying cry for some of the more violent minded clerics, but it's not like they need much of an excuse to incite violence.

Sometimes sacred cows need to be eaten before people realize that religious bullshit is the root of many of the world's problems.
@teej

Very thought provoking. What a great conversation.

I wish I had a clearer vision on the next step for social games. I honestly do. Sadly I think it'll be a long, iterative process before that industry sorts out exactly how to make a genuinely compelling experience that fits into the very real confines and perceptions you described. Bits and pieces will shake out as true fun but it'll take time to see it cobbled together into a comprehensively non-crappy game.

My lack of imagination doesn't stop me thinking there's a better way, though.

It sounds like you really took a whack at this. I hope you find a way to do something with everything you learned. It's a tough problem that can touch a lot of people.
Well, you don't need the EBS volume on other instance sizes, because they have instance storage.
GeoIP is fast and there's free versions of the database.

http://www.maxmind.com/app/benchmark

http://www.maxmind.com/app/geolitecity
cool. yeah, most people tell me my ideas suck, and then they tell me "it's a good idea" once they get adoption.
If we look at sites like Facebook or Linked-in or any company building social websites/applications chances of finding number 2 is less. I haven't heard any Linked-In or Facebook competitor.

We do see number 2 like Bing, Yahoo etc because they are not startups. Bing is funded by Microsoft and Yahoo was number 1 sometime in the past and has enough money to self-sustain for a while. How long Yahoo will survive?
Why is that? Seems like a software problem Google could fix if they wanted to. Can’t they?
You have to update your extension's manifest every time a new version of Firefox is out. It is possible that your extension's maintainers haven't included Firefox 4 in their list of whitelisted versions even though it may work. Provided you are sufficiently technical and wouldn't mind dealing with crashes, install Nightly Tester Tools (now renamed to something more officially iirc, but searching for Nightly Tester Tools should get you there) and try to disable the compatibility check and see if it works. Back up your profile first so you can just copy it over again if something breaks horrifically.
Instead Universities should also help the student become full rounded

Full roundedness is a financial luxury, of concern only to those who are financial at least relatively well off.

If universities are serious about the love of knowledge, learning for learning's sake, and all that jazz, then they should offer 100% free degrees.

If you have your own place to live, and can do the work, you should be able to get a degree full of well roundedness for absolutely no money.
Solar Beats the Bank – 1BOG Group Solar Power Discounts
Any IO bound process (that remains IO bound on a slower CPU) is a strong candidate for servers based on the A15. Couple it with simple network coprocessors and you are set.

I would still love to have an ARM-based netbook.
Why Google doesn't want to use ARM servers (yet): http://research.google.com/pubs/archive/36448.pdf
A year in mp3s: Creating a piece of music every day, for an entire year.
Yes, in peer-reviews journals. As for independent duplication, I gather that it's been painful to convince anyone to even try.
I thought he was being sarcastic when he said it looked random. Isn't that why he is asking for input?
> And I don't believe that pederasty of any vintage is a
> "popular pastime".

Ask someone who's been there awhile about "man love Thursday."
While I haven't tried them out myself, GeoIP should be a good bet (you can check if they meet your needs rather quickly by hitting their API) http://www.maxmind.com/app/api
US court suspends ban on embryonic stem cell research
No, it was the only option for most PC OEMs, because Microsoft adopted anticompetitive licensing practices that explicitly punished OEMs financially for distributing anything but Windows with prominently-placed IE.

Apple cannot control 99.4% of the mobile app market, regardless of what their current revenue share is, because they still control less than 30% of the market for app platforms. If Apple attempted to abuse their position in the market to the detriment of customers, customers would switch to other phones, which is easy because there are multiple vendors with approximately the same or greater market penetration.

There is just no way to get around the fact that Apple does not control the mobile app market (yet). Coming up with the market model that maximizes revenue and one random Gartner stat does not make them a monopoly. Read the document I posted earlier; it's written for laypeople.

Think of it this way: imagine Apple invented 3D animated wallpaper technology, and allowed people to create and sell wallpapers in a special wallpaper store. A year later, Samsung releases a phone that also has a 3D animated wallpaper store. By your logic, Apple would have nearly 100% share of the 3D animated wallpaper market, and would be subject to antitrust regulation.
people normally kick off a background job to update the cache and not wait for it to expire. It still isn't instantly consistent, but it's usually close.
We are confident our method does not violate any current and enforceable patents.
Dissecting a Job Description
I really do believe the next big disruptor (on the scale of something like space travel or the internet) is going to be in our ability to harness brain power to directly manipulate our world.

Can't we already do that? I mean, you might have to work a huge machine using a joystick or something, but would eliminating the joystick be that much better?

I see it more as way to prevent carpal tunnel syndrome for programmers.

What's much more interesting for me is the ability to take a full image of someone's brain. It would be an interesting type of backup...
I've had many friends in many colleges, some of whom went into the sciences, and others into arts... beyond a limited demographic there were few people who were solely there to party. It's a tired stereotype perpetuated by shitty movies.

My experience has been that arts students tend to be more aware of, well, life in general - politics, the arts, social issues, etc, whereas engineering students were more or less of the "oh, I've heard OF it..."

There are two beneficiaries to post-secondary education: the student, and society (particularly, democracy) at large. The problem here is that the way things are structured, the degree programs that will most benefit a free, democratic society will make you broke, forcing people to choose one that will most benefit themselves only.

We risk creating an entire generation of mindless, uncultured automatons hyper-obsessed with material wealth, wading knee-deep through a pool of educated but broke people.

It wasn't always this way - there was a time when getting an engineering degree also meant a breadth of education in indirectly related subject areas. Where engineers took music, sociology, and fine arts... I've noticed a rapid decline in breadth in engineering programs, though, and IMHO this is a silent problem that has yet to rear its ugly head in the papers.
I'd run a terrible hosting company, so let's get that out of the way completely. :)

Under Danilo's Fictional Hosting, I'm not saying I would refuse religious content outright, I'm saying I'd be much more cautious about religious content than Marjorie's Baking Blog because religion, as a result of the all too common "I'm better than the rest of you" rule, is just a troublesome topic.

Porn is a troublesome topic too -- many hosts don't permit it. Too much exposure to Dawkins leaves me with only the most feeble of arguments against giving the same treatment to religion.
Grado SR60/SR80 are extremely cheaply built, mine had plastic pieces come off and one of the ear pieces sometimes snaps off from the head band. Really unacceptable. On top of that low frequency response is less than ideal. Old similarly priced Panasonics that I use as heavily are still in one piece and work reliably.
I'm using Sennheisers now, I'm not sure how it's going to hold on in long term, but for now it seems that they have higher build quality than Grados.
When things are going bad is not easy to change. It is easy to spend money, to borrow and to forget to pay taxes. But the other way round is another story, one to be written and not a gay one.
Twitter, Google, and everyone else could do a much better job at handling link spam.

They need a mixture of having users flag requests as spam (which many do), analyzing all requests looking for trends in spamming (not just requests from same route/IP, but that would be part of it), looking at users with similar posts/tweets, etc. and then block the spammers. Easy enough, right? ;) Sounds like whoever they outsource to needs to get on the ball though.
Agreed. DDoS attacks (in our experience) do not originate from the religious right.
It's pretty clear that this church's site was inciting or had the potential to incite violence.

I think the tricky issue here is "hate speech". There are varying standards, and what metric will/do Rackspace and other hosting providers adhere to?

For example, what if a Rackspace-hosted site contained all or portions of the text of the Catechism of the Catholic Church?

Certainly the Catechism does not promote or incite physical violence. However, it contains unambiguous language regarding the immorality of homosexual acts: http://bit.ly/ccc2357

I'm not attempting to "stir the pot" and initiate an argument over this point in the teaching of the Catholic Church. But I wonder, could/would Rackspace and other hosting companies take down a site which cited this material or posted it verbatim? If not at present, are we headed toward such a day?

In general ...

At what point does a strongly stated religious or moral principle which is at complete odds with the beliefs or lifestyle of another person or group constitute hate speech? And who decides that with respect to something like web hosting, as opposed to someone preaching on a street corner out in public?

Please, no flames, I think this is a serious topic that deserves sincere and balanced treatment.
A fun bookmarklet to change the web you see
"I know it's all subjective and Rackspace basically can choose to label anything hate speech."

That's a key issue. Applying their AUP consistently whether they personally agree or disagree with the content in question. (Although as a private entity they do have discretion.)
Citrix and Cisco join forces to deliver Desktop Virtualization
Awesome iPod Nano watch mod
great idea -- just looking forward to seeing transaction data, being able to include mins and maxes for donations, as well as split my donations to different causes!
This seems really cool and I'm always glad to see entrepreneurs making progress. The only thing that seems kind of odd is that it's a service meant to help you lose weight, yet it directly benefits if you don't lose weight. Though, I'm sure that's what the tips are meant to offset.
Obviously it's not about "exploiting their friends". You can block Farmville or Mafia Wars if you don't want to see updates about them. There's a cooperative element that a lot of people enjoy there; they enjoy bartering with friends for items and sharing the wealth when they have it.

Farmville is The Sims: Farm Life pared down to work in Flash on old computers. It is popular for the same reasons The Sims was popular and it appeals to the same demographic, but it is even more popular because Facebook has become a vector to involve _real-life_ friends and to allow people to get sucked into the game and play for a few minutes at a time.

It's a pretty simple formula, nothing really ground-breaking there. Some classic RPG elements + interior decoration + cooperation with friends + negligible chunks of time commitment to accomplish things = high appeal to certain groups. I find Farmville really annoying and don't play it (or any other Facebook games) but almost all females I spend time around do play it. It's more hit-and-miss with guys.

But is there something inherently immoral or wrong about this pattern? I don't see what it is. It's just a silly game; you might not find it fun to arrange animals and barns on virtual farmland, but that doesn't mean that there's something nefarious or bad about it.
How's Virgin mobile's coverage, for those of you that actually have it? If these sort of activities continue, I may very well have to transfer over to an entirely different carrier. Pitty, too. I really liked being on Verizon. I thought they didn't do odd things like this...
> Allegations that certain speech is 'harassing' or 'hate speech' can be made strategically to censor disfavored speech.

Legally, some judges are wary of this. They call this the "heckler's veto."
This is nonsense. The idea that the whole world shrugged their shoulders and gave up is nonsense. Facebook won the first round of social media... but it's all shifting.

FB has poor architecture, it's a dinosaur and bulky,

the network isn't real http://www.hrabaconsulting.com/blog/2010/06/21/hidden-stream...

people don't want to interact with brands... the narcissism prevents community. It's about the "ME", when it's really about all the other nodes in the network.
http://www.hrabaconsulting.com/blog/2010/09/01/facebook-bran...

With 1000 friends I do market research all the time.. no one likes it, it's broken for most everyone in some way at some point, they've burnt their bridges endlessly... and the business model of saying

We are #1, because we are #1 is ridiculous.

Facebook has lost it's "plot" in the story of social networking. They are doing it wrong, and people will laugh at it deeper and harder than myspace ever got. http://www.geeksaresexy.net/2010/09/04/have-we-lost-the-plot...

It's going to die, for sure.

But now that I see your update... well okay then. I won't.

=)
Yes, Gruber did.
> When your obvious hate speech has been denounced by both the Commander of US Forces in Afghanistan and the President of the United States as dangerous to troops and civilians overseas, I sympathize that someone might say "I want no part of this. I'm out."

The Pope denounced it, too.
In user studies, people quickly found a new way to interact with Google: type until the gray text matches your intention and then move your eyes to the results. We were actually surprised at how well this worked—most people in our studies didn’t even notice that anything had changed. Google was just faster.

If this is the case, then what's the point of showing the search results as the user types? It seems that just having predictions is sufficient.
Buzzed to drunk off wine or liquor actually helps me focus, especially after a long day. Turn on the classical music too and I'm golden for a few hours.

Past drunk (eg wasted), I can't do it, and beer usually just saps my motivation completely.
When you muse about using "race-specific bioweapons" to wipe out a billion people, you can expect a few downvotes.
It's my understanding that the indices would be sharded as well, so wouldn't you be able to just fire up more instances if the indices started to approach some kind of 80% figure?
We've got a series of free PDF guides to different aspects of SEO at http://www.pluginseo.com/paint-by-numbers-seo.

They're aimed at people with little or no SEO experience, and intended to be useful to everyone whatever tools they choose to use. Feedback is very welcome.
Unfortunately, the mathematics points to "you need good judgement": http://www.idiom.com/~zilla/Work/Softestim/softestim.html

At the very least, large limits exist as to how accurately one can estimate this sort of thing.
You wouldn't know what transactions occurred, and 1% of a company's revenue is not a reasonable payment for doing nothing but saving time copying-and-pasting implementation scripts from the individual payment sites.

If you meant that this site should somehow provide a payment button for all those providers without even opening an account with them, that's not a problem you can solve with technology. Know-your-customer banking laws and factoring clauses in merchant agreements mean you can never create that service.
Quran burning called off
These instances are different though, they are able to burst CPU usage, just like Linode. AFAIK, none of the other EC2 instance sizes are able to do this.
I took a few minutes to google a few terms, like "cassandra EC2" and so forth.

I get the general impression that doing anything architecture-y or deployment-y requires amazon-specific steps, steps that I don't have to take on a barebones ubuntu install. (of the 'Do this to get Thrift working on EC2' variety)

That sucks some activation energy away.

The ease/hurdles of VMs on my dev machine, even if performance is a bit of a bear, is still more attractive to me than doing anything Amazon-specific, because it's still all just unix.

I don't want to learn "Amazon", I want to learn [puppet, Cassandra, et al].
Classic Video: The Origins of APL
Does anyone have a link to statistical documentation of the efficacy of these "SEO" guys? And further, distinguishing the results of their black magic from simply improving the inherent meaningfulness of the site in question and letting the search engines do the work of finding relevant pages? Every "SEO" guy I've ever met felt to me like a used car salesman whose methodology has all the rigor of reading chicken bones and goat entrails.
Falldown Game in less than 1K of Javascript
Anyone else curious how long those 50 person stand-up meetings took?
More efficient such as..?
The business problem of open source 3D drivers lies not so much in secret know-how in the drivers but in this: http://steveblank.com/2009/04/16/supermac-war-story-7-buildi... High-end graphics cards tend to be exactly same as consumer level cards, save for few bits in some configuration memory that is used by driver to disable more advanced features/reduce performance.
None of this prevents you from using the Google website. It's my homepage on my Android phone, so search is one tap from the home screen, no apps necessary.
It mentions it in the article, extend HTML5 with a Windows API.

They did it before with HTML, was it HTAs? You could make controls that did crazy stuff. I can't remember the name now, my old work had a few from the days when there was no browser but IE.