skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Vapor.js
Via Thomas Fuchs...
I'm glad you asked :) Right now I'm offering a 200MB cache. The goal is to be able to 'burst' it. Hosting your own memcached is nice, and easy as you said, but then you are using your RAM and this can be a problem for some low cost linodes that are full of apps.

If this trial works, I can relatively say that we won't be talking about 200MB, but GB of "burstable" cache. And you won't get it for free on Linode.

Also, this is an experiment.
Did Facebook license the Google patent?
> 750,000 teen pregnancies annually

These days, getting pregnant is one of the nicest things that can happen. At least it's neither fatal nor contagious...
I think it's a pretty awesome idea, although I found myself wanting a bit of inertial scrolling happening with my mouse (not a touch pad, an actual mouse).
Pardon me, memcached is designed to be run in a LAN. Right now I have my box on Linode. Sorry to ask, what do you mean by "as a service" ? If you are on EC2 or Slicehost, I'm not trying on these networks right now, but as said on the page I linked, if the experiment is a success on Linode, I will surely make it to other VPS providers.

Hope I could answer your question..
Sure. [2] talks about reprap's philosophy and is a good a place as any to start. Not many are talking about this yet but this is the new revolution. It has to be!

[1] http://reprap.org/wiki/Main_Page

[2] http://vimeo.com/5202148

[3] http://www.makerbot.com/

[4] http://www.boingboing.net/2010/09/06/cheap-portable-perso.ht...

[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_printing#Comparison_of_3D_pr...

[6] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=350708

[7] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1061260

[8] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=760466
I find it disturbing that a supposedly perfectly functioning piece of hardware was replaced without reason. Yes, it's just $80 and he's a geek. But he never explained what was wrong with it other than it gave him the jeebies because the hardware was 3 years old and the firmware one year old. Looks like a geek status symbol thing to me.
Thanks for the quote! I'll keep it in mind if I ever write a better (and longer!) version of that article
He is the archetype.
Wow, that sounds amazing. How on earth do you get started with something like that?
When I've been at business events where I don't know anyone, I don't even bother trying to introduce myself to the "important" folks. I seem to have enjoyed such events the most when I've looked around for people in the same boat as I; introduced myself; and asked them about themselves. I'll interject bits of my own story when appropriate, but I try to keep the conversation focused mostly on the other person.

Some open-ended questions I've found useful: How did you end up at X company? What got you into X field? What challenges do you see ahead for X field?

After a few minutes, I'll smile and say, "hey, it's been great talking to you," maybe swap business cards, and move on - rinse, repeat. If I can play matchmaker and help get multiple new acquaintances talking to each other, so much the better.

I figure life isn't a snapshot, it's a movie; if I keep going to these events, and keep focusing on making others feel welcome and included (even if only by me), in due course I'll end up getting to know the movers and shakers.
Enterprises don't need social solutions. ... It seems like every enterprise I work at has almost every gadget imaginable on their intranet: policies and procedures in a wiki, tips and tricks in another wiki, special domain knowledge in yet another wiki, an HR portal, project management apps, help desk apps, integration with email, integration with Office, integration with smart phones, etc., etc., etc. And how much difference does it make? Not much, I would guess.

In my experience, the problems are social (training, culture), but they are attempted to be solved by technical means (installing software). No matter what the tool, it's going to be useless if people don't take the time to learn it or spend time actually using it. An empty wiki is useless, a wiki that only one person has put information into and uses is less than useless, as it wasted the time of that one person, time that could have been better spent using some other, more effective form of communication.

This is why every possible gadget ends up on the intranet: the old method wasn't "working", so a new one is tried. But the reason the old one wasn't working wasn't because of any technical reasons that can be "fixed" with different software. The reason it wasn't working is more often because it was just installed and thrown at the employees figuring they'll know how to use it and will. It's not the tool that matters that much, it's the content, and finding, generating and curating the content is actual work, that isn't tied to the bottom line in an obvious way.
Does anyone know how the Gigabyte mobo outputs 5 volts? Is that a custom hardware module or part of the mobo?
Why dont you go one step further and offer shared NoSQL instances - for instance, Redis - which can pretty much double up for what memcached does.. but also so much more.

One step even further would be, people can spin up on-demand instances of whichever NoSQL server they need - Cassandra, Voldemort, Redis, Riak... you name it.
This is the first Startup School I won't be able to attend. Just wanted to recommend it to anyone who is on the fence - I've learned a lot every time I've been, had a great time, and met some amazing people.

I'll be watching the archives on jtv the day after, and wishing I could have been there!
Oh, thank you. We have the same word in italian, and we can use it with this meaning. Sometimes I make the mistake to assume that meta-meanings apply cross language as well.
You're just offering indirect evidence, I'm giving you the concrete fact that the US is one of the most innovative software producers.

At least in the US, you can't create a start up and just create a knock-off of an existing product: you are forced to innovate because of software patent laws. This is probably why the US is striving while countries that don't have such laws such as Chine hardly innovate at all.
I'd like to add that I strongly recommend that kids read only with sufficient lighting. I'm no opthalmologist, but I do believe the primary (sole?) reason my eyeglass prescription is as strong as it is is because, as a youth, I read with poor lighting at night.
In case you're interested, OpenStreeMap (http://www.openstreetmap.org/) is a free wiki map of the world. As an option instead of Google Maps.
Are you talking about the same multi-processing technique as the article?
I think we need a radical break with the past to solve the horrible dependency nightmare we're looking at today. These would be my initial principles:

There should be _one_ unified Linux OS that only includes the bare minimum set of applications. It should be very clear what belongs to the OS and what doesn't. The root directory should contain exactly three sub directories: os, app and home.

There should be no dependencies on any non OS software. Each application should live in its own subdirectory of /app. Libraries that are not part of the OS should not be shared across applications. The only external dependency an application should have is the OS.

Whatever the new solution is, it should not include package mangers or package maintainers. Their existence is a symptom of an overly complicated system.

I realise that having a central registry of all installed software components does have advantages like being able to fix some security issues in one place. However, I think the idea has failed. It creates too many intractable dependencies, it is too complicated and hence ultimately insecure and unproductive.
How do you suggest getting involved in Bio-Engineering. I'm a programmer, I've applied to a few opportunities but no one has replied :-(
Memcache as a service will defeat the whole purpose of having cache in memory. Latencies will kill you.

Memcache will only make sense if it is hosted in the private LAN.
Actually, they sometimes are. We solve hard consulting problems for competitors quite frequently. And those are then the cases with most need for an agreement like this...

(By the by, I'm a fan of the laws allowing people to build their own stuff in their spare time without using company resources).
Internal Strife at Wikileaks
I always found Chaitin's books very enjoyable. The guy does not exactly curb his enthusiasm for algorithmic information theory, often with erotic allusions - it's porn for discrete mathematicians :)
~80% of teenage pregnancies are 'unwanted'.
Too late, you can't get rid of the kids now :-)
I used it for a little client project a while back that had to post form data to 6 different servers, some of which took an age to respond with success/fail. Worked very well.
Am I the only one who looked at the diagram and imagined it as a great party planning tool?

Couldn't something like this be quickly built with a school-wide hot-or-not website? People publish far worse stuff on Facebook.

Hmm... Orkut has a network like this, in the form of crush-lists. In fact, I know two couples who were "aided" by this feature.
Cloud9 IDE - The Javascript IDE, by Javascripters for Javascripters
How do you define a freelancer losing a job? How do you define unemployment for a freelancer?
Has anyone benchmarked/stress tested dd-wrt? I worked at a place that had sometimes >50 wireless users actively using the net.
No one outside of a small group of geeks cares what your hn karma level is, so just relax about getting downvoted.
Hi, well, that's a nice idea that I thought also. But the thing is, I'm full time somewhere ! Lets see if this Linode limited one works, and if there is a demand I will surely think seriously about it.

edit: just to be clear, I'm not offering one instance of memcached per person. It's only one instance for all.
Start pushing forward yourself. You've spent 30 years consuming the knowledge of others, now it's time to start giving back. Identify the real source of your disillusionment and dedicate yourself to fixing it.
http://www.clickatell.com has worked fine for us. Not sure if they offer SLAs, just a datapoint.
Can I Lose Weight Without Dieting?
I once rescued an N64 from a Coca-Cola related incident using the process you describe but isopropyl alcohol instead of distilled water. The alcohol worked much better on the sticky soda, didn't seem to harm the electronics and dried very quickly because it evaporates so fast.

YMMV.
Dated, but simple, and more importantly, concrete, using almost no abstractions (like lex and yacc), so there's no magic. Since the compiler described is for a subset of Pascal, and the compiler is itself written in Pascal, even the magic of the compiler itself is explained away.

This series is a large part of how I got started in the compiler business; and today I help maintain probably the most used Pascal compiler, in Delphi.

If anyone is interested in actually following along, TP 5.5 is freely available, though you'll need DosBox or similar if you're not running a 32-bit install of Windows:

http://edn.embarcadero.com/article/20803
As I read around, the JVM seems to be the state of the art for language runtimes. Can you elaborate why you hope it will not be the unified one in the future? Just curious.
He said he was sorry that you feel we did x. So he is apologizing for for the fact that Anthony feels a certain way, not the same as saying "I am sorry.".
This speaks really, really good of Rackspace.
Isn't the real question: Does he get results? That's all HN cares about, right? Not the outer trimmings?
(0 unread) Yahoo7 Mail, sdahv
I bet 100% of the STDs are unwanted too.

Don't want to minimize the seriousness of teen pregnancy - it's a really huge problem, but, at least, the baby doesn't kill its host and a couple friends ;-)

And that's why I am a very careful parent. I tell my kids I wish them an uneventful life and death from old age.
I'm closely watching these guys:
http://alwaysinnovating.com/
Indeed. We are the lucky ones.
A Conference Makes Learning Free - TEDx
From the article, the motherboard only requires one 12V input only, instead of the usual array of voltages (+-5, +-12, +3.3, etc). Having charging circuitry to keep the battery operational (trickle charge) and being able to provide power to the motherboard when mains power fails is mostly straightforward and cheaper in this case. Not much different from what you would find on a regular UPS, but removes a few conversion steps - (DC 12V) ->(110/220V AC)-> DC - improving efficiency and reliability.
The census site says there are almost 6 million small companies with employees http://www.census.gov/epcd/www/smallbus.html and this article says that QuickBooks has 3 million customers http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/05_36/b3949090_... . They would have a higher penetration if it was better software (it sucks to be a 20+ person company manufacturing with it, and don't even think about multiple warehouses) I think that 90% figure is a old wives tale, much like the nonsense quote that 90% of businesses fail in 5 years - see http://smallbiztrends.com/2008/04/startup-failure-rates.html . Sorry for the over zealous response, but this happens to be a sore subject for me.
I was wrong with my original assertion that he is a "poor guy." He is on top of the world right now. He's got a huge opportunity in front of him.

I was wrong, and the patience of HN people is amazing. Thanks.

I think there is always danger when you take an 8-5 job that you begin to lose your desire to "hack"; I don't think he will. I can't wait to see his work, and, as always, wish him the very best.
Setting Team Expectations and Evaluating Performance
Already some good advice here, so I'll just add a couple we used to use at a place I worked at that sold physical goods (of the kind that prove surprisingly popular to fraudsters).

- I don't think Paypal offers address verification other than under 'verified' accounts but it might be worth asking depending on which service you are using.

- We used to flag deliveries to "Suite XXX", "Apartment XXa" etc for further investigation as in the UK these types of address are usually no more than PO box services. Find out what kind of address the common mailbox services offer and if it's fairly uncommon, do something similar.

- Sounds a bit obvious, but large initial orders can also be a red flag. A first time visitor ordering £1100 worth of stuff is going to warrant more attention than a long-time customer.

- Wherever possible try to indentify frauds yourselves. Payment providers will just transfer the cost to you and law enforcment, in my experience, couldn't care less (we were actually told they have an unofficial policy of non-investigation for < £10,000). Basically, as I'm sure you understand, if you get burned - you've lost it for good.
Conclusion:

"Whom should the market be designed to serve: Short-term traders or long-term investors?"
Sync vs. Async I/O in 5 minutes [video]
Sorry, I've been recently investigating a couple of Memcached services that are used over a REST service and so it was on my mind when I first read your service description.

The reason I was slightly interested is because Windows Azure right now doesn't have good support for any sort of distributed cache system. So we've been shopping around.
That is really too bad all around.

The state of SMS is ridiculous. We go through a gateway. Certification was painfully slow, and the cost... OMFG the cost of a text. -It's as if the alphanumerals had to be mined, shipped, refined, and then placed into each message by hand.

I applaud Twilio for what they are trying to do. IMO, they are playing interference for an ugly beast.
"Fun" working environment?
I recently left a job at an advertising agency where there's a Wii, a dart board, and a big comfy chair in the office; there are lots of employee contests; and basically, people are encouraged to screw around when they feel like it. The job posting described what a fun place to work it would be and how cool everyone was, and listed Wii skills as a job requirement (should've been a warning sign I guess.) Employees other than higher up management work in one big, open room with little division or personal space to encourage chatting and "blowing off steam."

Call me boring, but I'm a young guy just starting a family. I like to have fun, but I'd much rather spend my time at work getting work done so I can get home to my family, than play a spur of the moment 2 hour Mario Kart tournament. And in this kind of environment I felt like no one, including me, was getting anything done. People would pull 10-12 hour days and not have anything to show for it.

I know it's kind of a trend these days to have "toys" and relaxation at work - but what are your thoughts? It may make people happy but what does it do to productivity?
We want to avoid code duplication (so that a security update in a library package benefits all software that uses it)

The crux of the problem seems to be the Big Brother attitude distros take toward users and apps, specficially protecting users from unpatched vulnerabilities in upstream apps.

While this is crucial on servers and mass deployments, it's entirely possible users find this more of an annoyance than a feature, and thus we may have to wait just a little while longer for the so-called Year-of-Linux-on-the-Desktop.
Tradeoffs of marriage.
Hi,

(I wanted to ask this question to hackers, and till now never found a proper place to do so. I hope this is not outside the scope of HN, if yes, my apologies.)

I am working on a PhD (one year to finish) in experimental physics and it is a great time with lots of opportunities. I have a background in electronic engineering and I have taught myself a good deal about computers.

I love to build things, and want to do great work. There are some big challenges that I will be trying to solve. I also get lots of ideas for instrumentation, processes in my work. These are enough to take almost all of my mental space and I try to work on these 12-13 hours each day, everyday. I love working and find it very satisfying (even though failure rate of my experiments is about 75 % or more).

I want help in deciding whether I should marry. I am worried if I will be able to give enough time to either my s.o. or to work. My work doesn't put too many demands on how I live (apart from some discipline and healthy living), while marriage does. Marriage will also restrict my choices in career and movement. With kids, my responsibilities outside work will increase further.

On the other side, marriage is supposed to bring some fulfillment (companion, kids). I do have a need for company, but it is not too strong, and I have now become habituated of my condition. I am writing this as a 30 yr old person who doesn't have a partner, is an immigrant and can have a partner if he desires so. It may also be good for old age. Choosing not to marry will also invoke very strong response from my family and relationships.

If I suffer due to not marrying I can blame myself and others will not face many consequences. With marriage, 2-3 lives will be related strongly to mine, and that is more than I am willing to risk.

I would like to have your viewpoints on this.
Thought the same thing too, but apparently there are companies that offer it and there are people buying it.
Look, what he's doing his apologizing for not making clear it was an unsupported service.

What he should have done is apologizing for closing the service without telling developers about it.

They can try to deflect this as they want but the fact remains, he should have sent a warning the service would be closed at date X, not closing the service and tell afterwards they're sorry for not making it clear...
Wikis are good for inter-tech communication, awful for collaborating with unwilling non-techies.

At a previous job, wikis made programmers management's markup bitch. We got bug reports like "Edit ${SALES/NOVEMBER} to reflect new figures from Marketing Marc" .. when Marc himself could edit the damn page.
This article is from several years ago. When I read it then the thing that stood out to me is that the graph doesn't display the timing of the sexual relationships. So to say that someone who had sex with just one person is exposed to everyone in the graph is silly, because that relationship might have happened when both were virgins, and hence no such exposure happened.

I sent an email to James Moody pointing out this obvious flaw in the conclusions, and he responded saying that he agreed. His original work was not intended to show the chronology, and the article draws conclusions that he didn't claim.
You tell the poor fellow to focus on his project, and then give him four ways to distract himself! Nevertheless...

Regarding #3 :

This is an excellent but intractable idea. The sheer number of languages in that region is too staggering to capture even a majority percentage in such a manner; and it would be of little use to any but the academics in linguistics or cultural anthropology.

Better would be a tool that completely encapsulates the vocabulary and grammar of the main languages in that region, so that they may be learned online. There are no sufficient tools that do so at present, either online or in bookstores - and the children of the diaspora, and their children and so forth, could/would make great use of such a thing.
AI (neural networks/fuzzy logic/genetic algorithms) were actually part of my focus at university, and something I felt pretty exited about back then. That never went anywhere afterwards though. The realities in the job market here are pretty much anti-innovation for the most part ("We can't do that - we'd be one of the first companies in germany to work with XXX" is something I've heard pretty much verbatim more than once).

Maybe I should read up on my differential equations and give Kohonens "Self-Organizing Maps" another whirl, just for kicks.
Interesting distinction, since the relationship between co-founders is often compared to marriage.
Wander hotel klosters
That's getting kind of sad if we have to flat-out stop using the internet on 4/1 from now on because we can't believe a single page that loads.
Thanking you
backupify - it's the new ronco showtime rotisserie - just set it and forget it.
After washing, put the logic board in a sealed container with five pounds of rice for a few days. I'd skip the hair dryer.
But where is your direct evidence that software patents have anything to do with the US being "one of the most innovative software producers"?

I'd also argue that it's mainly copyright law and trademarks that prevents the kind of product piracy that is prevalent in certain countries with a less developed legal system, at least with regard to software products.
Privacy zuckering is my main concern and why I deactivated my account. Every feature Facebook adds requires a visit to the privacy settings to specifically opt out. It doesn't matter that your preferences were set to yesterday's version of lockdown -- you never told Facebook it couldn't let Yelp see who you are, so you need to revisit your privacy settings to opt out of that.

Facebook forces feature adoption by ignoring ethical privacy practices.