skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My answer, as someone who recently switched an AMQP backend to using redis for queues and pub/sub broadcast: AMQP is wrong the same way RDBMSes or Java are "wrong." It's too heavy, too slow, or too complex for a great-many use cases.

There's a long tradition that seems to be (mercifully) fading of ornately engineered solutions being developed for the most demanding of problem domains, and then subsequently being universally adopted for projects large and small because if "it's good enough for the enterprise, it's good enough for me". It's a variation of the "nobody ever got fired..." mentality.

The truth is that something with a radically reduced feature set, that's simpler to use and understand, is really all that's needed to meet a whole lot of "real world" use cases.

Read the AMQP-0.8 spec sometime. It's rather complex given that a _huge_ percentage of users just want a set of features something like:

1. A namespace to name queues
2. The ability to put things on and pull things off in FIFO order
3. The ability to persist those things on daemon start/stop (maybe)
4. Pub/sub style broadcast behavior with lossy messaging (maybe)

So redis, as an example: antirez (half-accidentally) got a lot of attention from weary queueing-system wanderers by implementing a majority of these capabilities with just a few redis commands--(l,r)push and (l,r)pop. Redis was so close to a simple, but full replacement for what they actually do with ActiveMQ, Rabbit, etc, that they begged for B(L,R)POP on many keys and PUB/SUB. And that pretty much covers it.

Of course, redis is just one of a number of other project/protocols are stealing attention from AMQP systems, like ZeroMQ, beanstalkd, etc.

But the larger trend is like Linux::"UNIX", Ruby::Java, MongoDB::Postgres, etc. Despite the hell-and-damnation warnings often bandied about by the enterprisey experts, you really can build a wide array of very useful things using these "toy" tools.
respect, man!
I wish google would do something original in the space where they have a competitive advantage, eg: online services, and especially search engines and advertising... rather than going after Apple.

They are leaving the vertical search engine space wide open in my opinion.
Since its got the hardware inside there's always the possibility that this functionality magically appears in iOS 4.3 or similar.

It happened with apps and the original iPhone, I think Apple would be happy to wait until they have a polished product for launch and then announce rather than pre-announce before it's ready.
As this is a global project, you might want to make grams an option.
This whole post perplexes me. I had no idea that there was such a thing as a StackOverflow 'community'. What's important to me is that Google (or whatever) gets to crawl the questions/answers (and tags, I guess, since I hadn't really noticed them either).

The problem with forking is that while in the past I would quickly go for the 'StackOverflow' google links (since I've seen that the brand really stands for knowledgeable & helpful), now I've got to recognize more brands?
Don't get me wrong : StackOverflow is an excellent resource, and I would definitely be a contributor if when one tries to 'up vote' something it didn't force you to log in with an unfriendly message... Perhaps the UI could track my mods (and meta-mod them) and pop up a box that says : 'you look like you know stuff - please Join Us!'
Yeah, but that's a self-selected group. People who are capable of moving their families to another country to pursue a career are more likely to be successful. Similarly people who grow up in poor, backwards communities (trailer parks and projects, meth and crack), tend to wind up poor and backwards. Maybe I'm a reactionary liberal but I have an easier time believing that than the inherent genetic superiority of the danes (oh and that's just SO close to certain ideologies I'm always wanting to accuse the Tea Party of harboring).

Wanna see something really cool? Look at a satellite image of Denmark. It's almost entirely farmland, with little spots of ultra-dense village or city every so often. No suburban wasteland. I'd be 20% happier just for that.
Write write write write write write.

You have to write one million words to throw away before you can write anything good. Yes, one million. Start now.

I recommend choosing something that lets you publish small bites of work as you finish them, and get them actually read and commented on by someone. Like a blog. Or posting chapters to a fanfiction site.

Write write write write write.
India's red rain may contain life not seen on Earth
I used Antares plugin back in 2000 - and usually would do it by hand for a final take. Occasionally I would use it in automatic mode but with limited parameters to not make it sound un-natural.

It is surprising that this stuff is only recently (ish) in mainstream attention - the technology has been around for a long time and was used to good effect occasionally.
1. I "trust" that WalMart and McDonald's at least aren't willingly making money from sex-trafficking. If a representative of one of those companies were asked the same question, I'd have zero problem with them saying something like "we do whatever we can to stop it". CL gets paid for these ads and claims to police them. It's a different standard.

3. Head on over to CL and tell me how hard it is for you to find a similar ad that's clearly for prostitution. It's a completely fair question, even if it does have a surface similarity to unfair gotcha-style questions.

4. I addressed this in a cousin comment.
It's not good for the Internet, but it'll be good for the writer. Depends on how selfish you are.
> You keep working on explaining there's no God

Not exactly. Actually I'm wondering what's the difference. As far as I know, God ceased to mess with our world a long, long time ago. And if God created the universe, what created God?

So we're left with either the universe that explain itself (it just is), or a God that explain itself, and created the universe (and then left it alone). God is a bit like the Dragon in my Garage: everything happens as if it wasn't there.

So, my preference simply goes to the simplest explanation: that there is no God. I don't expect you to have the same preference. But I do expect you to either acknowledge that there is no difference, or to eventually identify those differences.

So, do you think there is a difference between "God exists" and "God does not exist"? Do you think his (non) existence would change your life? Do you think you would observe different things in either case? This is the question I think everyone on this planet should think about for 5 minutes. Once you answered it, you basically have defined your God, whose existence is now either refutable or unimportant. In one case, science will likely find out (eventually), and on the other, well, I don't care what one believes.
> Let's say you have horrible grammar, bad ideas, and poor planning. Is it a good idea to plaster your blog posts on the internet? No.

Why not? The internet is full of pedants who will gleefully correct you.
Thanks, that's useful!

Favorite notifier:

echo "${@:2}" | growlnotify -t Reminder -s -m -
A non-negligible percentage will, no? 70-75% of downloaders paid $1 before or after downloading Stephen King's "free" book The Plant. Radiohead had success with In Rainbows too.

There's a large group who consider paying for things to be a moral issue, paying even when they're not being monitored and the content is easily copied.
Why do I see only 3 Kent options in my drop-down?

Screencap: http://i.imgur.com/mBKi9.jpg
>Moving information around is how you can use your Idaho bank card in Bangalore. It doesn't make your bank worth less than Juanito the beet farmer in Brazil.

Thank you for proving my point. Without Juanito the beet farmer, and the stereotypical mid-western farmer or Texan oil-man being efficient and extracting a profit from their activities, there is no surplus. Without the beets (and wheat,and beef, etc) none of us get fed. Without piles of invested long-term capital from capital markets you don't have trans-ocean cables, and without that you don't have any way of talking from Bangalore to Idaho. Without the mines to dig up the minerals you don't have planes, and without oil wells you don't have fuel, without pilots and baggage handlers you don't get to go to Bangalore. So you wouldn't need your bankcard.

The whole reason we can actually get to Bangalore to use our bank card is because those in primary production do it efficiently enough that not all of us are involved in doing it. That's the surplus production (and thus, wealth) that allows us to do these things.

Look, I'm not anti-tech in the slightest - this is how I make my living. I'm just imploring tech people not to lose touch with that the industry really is, not to let your fee lose touch with the ground and the real economy that we're all here to support and improve.
There are a number of things you can do:

1. Legal: pursue copyright violators, possible DMCA claims against those who circumvent your protection scheme (if you have one)

2. Technical: build in DRM. If not, at least add forensic marking to allow you to track the source of your piracy to know if it's hurting actual sales or not

3. Social: stop propagating the meme that copying commercial data is ok because you are knowledgable enough to do so and it doesn't hurt anyone.

The RIAA has an uphill battle because of no option #2. (CDs have no DRM, despite efforts to retrofit it). They are trying #1 and #3.

Also, I have a counter-example to Felten's claims that DRM never prevented piracy. With BD+ (Blu-ray), we have had some discs survive 60 days before they were cracked. In that time period, there were no high-def rips available on Bittorrent of those movies.

While there are still no large studies showing how many potential pirates purchased a disc due to the delay in availability, I wholeheartedly disagree with "There's nothing I can do about piracy".
Anyone got a clip? I'm kind of doubting auto tune is being used but wouldn't be surprised if they were using something like a flange or a phase shift effect.

Both kind of get looped in with the "auto-tune" sound.
8.4 Million New Yorkers Suddenly Realize New York City A Horrible Place To Live
What you said is common sense, but if you want a citation look at http://www.rand.org/pubs/research_briefs/RB9543/index1.html for the results of a RAND study on this question.
Funny enough, back in college my roommates and I once received a pack of weed that smelled like Pine. It was hard to burn, so in his paranoia, one friend suggested it was spiked with Pine Sol. He rationed that it was sprayed in order to weigh down the weed. He refused to continue smoking it and called us naive for not believing someone would spray it to weigh it down.

After some arguing and googling "weed smells like pine", he came down from his paranoia perch and relaxed.
A quick google search points to mkv being used by anime fansubbing groups due to ease of putting multiple streams in one container, and the ease of using any audio and video codec you choose. Then it spread. That and and the fact mp4 doesn't support the ac3 codec and that tools used to make mkv files tend to be better and don't suffer from audio being out of sync with the video problems as much.
How the way you deploy code can ruin performance
That is the EXACT calculation I keep making:

> As a result, for a 2-year contract, we’ve just spent at least [$2150]. And for what? ... but when I step back and really examine the situation, I’m entirely unconvinced that it’s worth the money.

Now, I take this a bit further towards the extreme in that I've never considered a cell phone a worthwhile purchase, so I've never spent the money. I can't even remember a situation where I've missed having one. I'm either at the office, (who provide me a desk phone), at home with my wife and kids, or out and about with them.
In unschooling circles, acquiring interesting books and materials and leaving them laying about for kids to find or ignore is called "strewing".
I hope those guys aren't still VCs. I've never heard of something so stupid.

VCs aren't in the business of holding onto IP.
The geoIP detection isn't perfect unfortunately, we use your IP and try to show the best guesses with the database we have. If you could tell me your location it would help in trying to improve it.

Thanks
I think that Ars has done a good job of explaining something that I really didn't think about. Music was an easier sale to content distributors.

However, in my mind, the big hurdle that neither Apple nor any of it's competitors have overcome is user interface.

It's still not easy for me to say that I'd like to watch all of the new episodes of each show that I watch, have those shows automatically downloaded and presented in an easy (1 click) informative way to view on one of the 3 TV's in my house. Also, I want an easy, free way to preview new shows to see if I'd like to add them to my monthly rental subscription price and purchase an entire box set after each season ends in case I really like it.

That's it... it's not rocket science but no one has it right yet. The closest I've come is TED and Boxee.
Marko Gargenta, Marakana, at AndroidDevLA Video
Used Stationary Bikes
Sireesha Chilakamarri at Android Dev LA
Big business is a huge influencer of both major US parties. With Dems, you get unions and Hollywood. With Reps, you get oil and industrial agriculture.
Yes, exactly!

With no content storage and 100% streaming, there's no reason this couldn't work from any iDevice to any AppleTV. What I mean is: Say you have the MLB app on your iPhone, but your friend doesn't but he has an AppleTV and giant screen. You go over there with your iPhone, tap a single button, and you can both enjoy the game on the big screen. There's no syncing or sharing of iTunes accounts necessary. The same for sharing and enjoying movies and TV shows with friends. This is exactly the element that's missing in almost all current online content delivery schemes.
But does it stream video as well?
There is an incentive to lace it with anything that will increase weight and not be obvious to the user.

There was a news report in the UK a while ago about people adding glass (or something like), IIRC it was well substantiated.
Let's imagine that for some reason at YC11 a band shows up. In their pitch meeting PG and team feel suitably Rocked and Rolled so he decides to throw in the seed money for their studio time. The terms are that YC gets to keep 80% of the money from record sales (come to think of it, this happened on an episode of Dragon's Den UK).
You download the song. Go to the concert. What happens to the share owned by YC? Do they make money? Do they deserve money?

You're addressing a whole other issue here. First off, there is a movement among record labels to grab a portion of revenues beyond record sales (the 360-deal [1]).

Second, you raise the question of whether record labels are needed at all in the first place. Similar to bootstrapping a startup, a musician can take a very DIY approach to their careers. In fact, one could argue that a musician is virtually identical to an entrepreneur. They build their band/company by creating music/a product that fans/people want.

Startups are incredibly cheap to do today because of changes in technology--open source, cloud computing, etc etc. In that same regard, starting out as a musician does not require the millions of dollars from Warner Bros. execs that it once did either. Digital Audio Workstations (DAWs) can produce quality recordings, social networks allow for cheap marketing, CD pressing isn't required for distribution, and on and on and on.

As "founders", musicians deserve to be rewarded for their work. Not to be screwed over by record labels ("VCs")[2]#.

---

# I am in no way suggesting that VCs regularly screw over startup founders

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/360_deal

[2]http://www.negativland.com/albini.html
Ubuntu 10.10 Beta Released
Hm. That looks like quite a typing exercise. What's wrong with:

( sleep 1800 ; say "get the laundry" )&
This is much better than trying to put a 3G modem in everything you carry. Save the money, buy a portable hotspot and buy wifi devices.

now if only contractless, reasonable priced data plans were more common... and the mifis were unlocked....
i agree it makes sense for web apps.

but for apps installed in developer-untrusted environments, using app keys (and requiring their "protection"--good luck with that) is reminiscent of the dvd/bluray shenanigans.
Good writing – good anything, really – comes with practice. You'll also need inspiration, though, because there are many different flavors of good writing.

Find an author whose voice you respect and devour their work. Understand what it is you like about how they communicate, and experiment with it in your own work. Don't crib their style wholesale, obviously, but have a high water mark or two that can inspire you.

Grab a WordPress install, get out a post every n days, then see how you feel in a few months. Writing is important most of all for forcing you to understand and defend your ideas. Getting into the habit now is a good idea.
I can't live without:

- IDO

- Smex

- (Enhanced) project-root.el ( http://piranha.org.ua/project-root/ ) and its project-root-find-file function.

(and my modular configuration is here: http://github.com/lvillani/.emacs.d)
I guess they deserve each other.
The problem is there have not been big enough studies into the effects of piracy. It's very difficult to control for the various factors such as the overall economy, purchasing reasons, packaging and ease of use, etc.

Anecdotally, it appears to vary widely from person-to-person, year, type of content, etc. But I find it interesting that technology-minded people tend to emphasize the positive aspects without any real evidence that on the whole they outweigh the negative. You've never bought $1 DVDs on the corner, but it's very common for others.
Not so in the case of Holland.
His can be added to your .bashrc/.bash_profile, and then all you have to type is:

remind [minutes] [message]

Functions can be imported to your shell. =)
They don't think they're in that business either. That doesn't mean the founders get the company's IP when it fails, though.
Ask HN: Share Your Blog
It would be great to have a comprehensive list of startup/hacker blogs from HN members. Everyone knows about the top 5% most popular blogs, but I'm sure there are a lot more great hacker blogs I would read regularly if I knew about them.

Post your blog URL here, let's get a big list going!
I've often tried to point this out to US taxpayers I've met. While in my country the tax rates are about the same, or perhaps a bit lower, our defence force is miniscule in comparison and thus social spending takes place instead.

Though, to be fair on countries like mine (and Denmark) we receive positive externalities from excessive US Defense Force spending, because we don't have to maintain a full sized force due to our treaties with the USA. As a negative, we're compelled to join in on such adventures as Iraq and Afghanistan as a result.

However, many of the smaller nations with similar tax bases and larger social benefits compared to the USA tend to forget about the effective subsidies paid by the US taxpayer for our national defense.

Additionally, there is definitely a component of the US Defense spending that is arguably social policy - even if it is part of the military-industrial complex. It does provide a lot of people with taxpayer-funded positions, and allows otherwise-jobless areas to enjoy employment opportunities with establishment of bases.

I clearly think there is a case for a reduced defense force in the USA - just one or two less Nimitz class carriers could build a lot of public hospitals, for one example, and removing bases from Europe and Japan would be another saving. But I don't think you can have an honest and full comparison with other countries until you start looking at the massive US defense force spending, and it's effects on other countries who effectively get to forgo that same spending.
More "live" records are post-produced than you'd think--recording over mistakes or looping choruses where the singer just left it for the audience to sing.
Not a crash, just a (poorly) scheduled server restart.
I agree, but that's precisely why the maitre'd has an interest in protecting his reputation: it may have repercussions on his relationship with the restaurant owner/employer. Do you think the guy accepting the tip wants diners going to the owner and complaining how they waited an hour to be seated while a tipper line-jumped?
The Era of Copyrighted Cocktails?
It was a great day for Chicago startups!
if anyone is waiting for the visible toolbar PageRank to increase or decrease, i seriously doubt their high level knowledge of SEO. Toolbar PageRank is simply a historical indicator. Many times it is weeks, if not months old. And if you do any kind of research, you'll see that PageRank does NOT equal rankings. It can help as a strength indicator of your site, but correlation does NOT equal causation.
That all seem incredibly expensive.

I'm in the UK and just bought an HTC Wildfire on an 18-month £25 (~$38) contract (no extra for the phone, which is mine at the end of the contract). That's with 3Gb 3G, 600mins, unlimited texts. I mostly use it on wireless so the 3G allowance is far more than I need.

I could have paid £20 (~$30) on a 24-month contract, same deal.

There's no way I'd pay the prices quoted in the article. That's extortion.
Toolbar PageRank updates are done on a rolling basis too now, they stopped doing massive updates every few months some time ago.

Patrick is right, PageRank is basically a completely worthless indicator. Monitoring your position in the SERPS for lots of keywords(including long tails) is the best way to see if SEO is paying off quickly.
The Inaugural Xen User Group Los Angeles
To be honest your point seems completely vacuous (far more ridiculous than the point you are responding to). It appears to reduce to "Danes are magical - I think". What makes Danes special? Is this not related to the sort of government they would create and support?
Or, in other words, in a 5 day week, Monday and Tuesday you work for the government. Wednesday through Friday is for yourself.
Autotune doesn't have to know the sheet music behind what the singer is singing, it's just trying to snap the pitch to any in-tune note - it's the audio equivalent to "Snap to Grid".
USPTO Guidelines for Determining Obviousness
Couldn't find anything to support it with 5 minutes of googling. Most like made up. Fun story though.
Could you give some examples, please?
I think they're trying to be very clear about how they view digital piracy. It's like Bush trumpeting "terrorists" or "axis of evil". You can apply a terrorist label broadly or narrowly to a person, but there is little doubt about how seriously the govt. might take action based on such a word. I think it's a similar thing here with the word "theft". If existing laws don't hold up to what they feel is fair and just, they may seek to craft new ones that do.
Google's Strategy
> What is the best type of legal entity to form for a person in my situation?

Is it remotely possible that what you're doing might result in legal action taken against you by one of your users? If so, I'd go with an LLC to separate your personal liability from your corporate liability. If not, you might be fine treating it as an S-Corp. I would suggest the LLC, though. [This is not legal advice. I am not a lawyer.]

> Is creating a successful startup without any goal for riches just a pipe dream?

Not at all. What would lead you to think it's unreasonable?