skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Anybody got more details about Google's percolator?
I've read the article in the register.co.uk which leaves my engineering brain unsatisfied. I see that people registered for USENIX OSDI can access the full text of the paper here : http://www.usenix.org/events/osdi10/tech/ but i'm not registered.

Is there anybody in the HN community who has read this paper, or is familiar with google percolator that could provide a more technical overview of how it works and how it compares to map-reduce?

Impatient minds want to know!
How about a public Google Docs form that sticks its data into a private Google Docs spreadsheet?

http://docs.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answe...
I'd love to see a detailed breakdown of the types of accidents too. I know that I have slammed on my brakes when a light turns yellow, or the person in front of me does, and we narrowly avoid a collision.

I think it'd also be interesting to know the geography of the area leading up to the light. One in my hometown is at the top of a steep hill, so you pretty much have to be accelerating rather hard to even get to the light. There's an area where you can be in when it switches to yellow where you HAVE to go or destroy your brakes, but it puts you pretty solidly in the middle of the intersection.
That's a very encouraging article... far more realistic to most of us than the get-big-quick, vc-investment, big-buyout, $$$-in-the-bath stories that sometimes appear on HN. That long-term struggle is a familiar story that's not often told.

It's also encouraging because it's in a similar domain to my own side-business.
The asymmetrical upper case T annoys me.
I am, but it hasn't been particularly great. There are some hardware issues, mostly surrounding audio and multiple monitors, that I haven't experienced when running Ubuntu on other machines.
No plan B? Hah! Let's face it already: there will be no IPv6 transition.

Eight years ago, I was in the "more effort needed" school of thought about IPv6. I figured we'd slowly update our programs and toolkits and libraries and reference material and college textbooks and switches, etc., and by 2005 it'd be about the right time to switch over. It will be painful, I thought, but necessary and ultimately a very good thing. So I waited and watched, much as I'm sure many of the HN readers have been doing. I figured that those people who are smarter and more connected than me would form the leadership of the IPv6 migration and show the rest of us the way to 128-bit Internet addressing bliss.

Realistically, though, we're no closer to a workable migration to IPv6 today then we were in 2002. Since then, we've managed to switch from analog to digital TV (at least in the US), migrate most software from ISO-8859-1 to some flavor of Unicode, settle the Blueray/HD-DVD format war, increment the USB protocol twice, formalize HTML into HTML 4.0 and XHTML and HTML 5, and virtualize or emulate every major operating system onto every major hardware platform. But nothing of any substance has happened on the IPv6 front.

The reasons for the lack of progress have been clearly laid out by others, but the unspoken sad reality is that we're wasting our time with IPv6. Even to say "IPv6 migration" implies that it will happen and thus IPv6 is the only solution to IPv4's woes. We're torturing ourselves with IPv6 by going on like this and it's not bringing us any closer to a solution! At this point, there's no reason not to start looking for workable extensions to IPv4 (and TCP/IP in general) to address the issues we're having.

I'd bet that a small group of dedicated engineers could come up with an compatible extension to IPv4 (that expands the address space) and could develop a workable migration strategy, example code, socket library modifications, and a compatible version of Ubuntu all within a year. Imagine the excitement if IPv6 could be sent to the circular file and a clear alternative was not only proposed, but downloadable.

So, in short, that's my solution: cast off IPv6 as the death march project that it is and get excited about a minimum viable product (see what I did there?) alternative to IPv4.

Oh, and since this is HN: I'm sure that there's just no way to make money from an extension to IPv4. No consumer going to need a converter box, to sit between their modem and LAN, right? I mean, the government would have to offer rebates. Madness! No businesses are going to need consulting services or contracted coding work. Nope. It certainly won't be like Y2K, but even it it was I'm sure no one made any money from that transition...
Apple TV is Ripe For Hacking: A Secret Plan to Bring Apps to Your TV
The thought of going running with one of the newest gen android phones in my pocket makes me cringe. My first thoughts when I saw this thing was that if it could replace my nano+armband+wired headphones it would be fantastic.
Key phrase: "reading creates pathways in the brain, strengthening different mental processes."

I've read a boat load of business books and I don't remember a lot of the specifics in the books but because the books often reenforced a lot of the same thoughts from different angles, I've got well formed mental pathways in my head, which help me in all kinds of situations. Same thing happens if you're a regular consumer of mixergy videos.

When faced with a decision, instead of thinking "Peter Drucker said to do this", I think "The right approach is probably... " because that is how my brain is now "wired" to think. It's kind of like self-brain-washing or creating marcos for your brain. You are what you read.
My friend made this:
Compare: Ubuntu font overlaid on Verdana and LiberationSans:

http://i.imgur.com/51jao.png
On a somewhat related note to this story, there's a section of Route 50 on your way westbound into Washington DC where there is a speed camera set to 35mph about a mile after the road switches from being 65mph. It's pretty hilarious to still be driving around 50mph, and then simultaneously have everyone slam their breaks on, go 35 for about 200ft, and then speed back up to 50.

I'd love to see some hidden no-penalty speed cameras before/after marked ones to record how effective they are at traffic calming, rather than simply causing people to slow down specifically where they know the camera is.
This guy has some defect of memory. I remember plot, character, lines, ideas from books. Not all of it, but all the good bits.
You bet right:

http://vtrc.virginiadot.org/PubDetails.aspx?PubNo=05-R21
What version did you try? I found that 10.04 was the first version with fonts that actually look good.
In a way this also applies to creating things in your spare time. Many side projects I worked on ended in a dusty archive. Just because I wondered to much about possible problems.
This is my first post here and I would like to add that it's quite interesting how just reading HN slowly changed my approach to actually try and create something.
Thanks.
You raise a good point -- when I was writing reasonably small programs, it was gvim all the way for me. However, the minute you have to interface with a library like wxWidgets, for example, the IDE really shines through with auto-completion. To answer previous posters, it just replaces an alt-tab to firefox and a couple of API lookups, and saves you about 5 seconds per obscure, unfamiliar API call.
I understand almost everyone here is US-centric, but what happens outside of US (both if startup is outside of US and market is not US-only)? I was advised to register for a madrid system trademark recently, but cost of that is just not an option, yet.
Entrepr Design4Extreme Affordability class launched several int known start-ups
Two reasons:

Reading is (or can be) a form of entertainment, so it doesn't matter.

Recall and recognition are two different things. For example, you can learn to recognize a face and still be terrible at describing it. The same applies to other forms of learning I'm sure. I guess that is what the fuzzy remarks about "reading changes you" and "recalling the gestalt" refer to.
China iPhone 4 Maps looming Controversy
The Google AdWord Keyword Tool doesn’t show you how many people search Google for this term each month
They really spent $2.5M on 32 cameras?
Interesting article, I am just stunned to see the design/UX of the landing page (http://www.stormpulse.com/ ) and the product page (https://secure.www.stormpulse.com/products) !

I am really impressed by your courage and your determination but you worked 3years on your product and never tought that a slight redesign/optimization by a professional can be beneficial to your business ?

Your website is dark and not very beautiful, it feels creepy. To access to StormPulse Pro from the landing page, I have to click on "More" and select "Stormpulse pro" on the menu. No direct access, no button.

Great story, nice ending hopefully but seriously! I know that on HN marketing/business/design guys have bad reputation but sometimes YOU HAVE TO ask some help...

Thank you for sharing this story. This is of course only my POV, I'm ready to be downvote if needed :)
That would almost work but I'd need a way for the parents to view the spreadsheet without exposing it to the internet or requiring them to have gmail accounts.
Microsoft Needs iPhone Apps
Two Tasks in Ten Minutes: Dave the Developer Gets Interrupted
You Have to Break It.
Care to give us an example of your last point? I'm not sure what you're getting at.
So you know my whole shtick is engineering marketing outcomes, right? I'm working for a client right now, doing SEO/conversion optimization/metrics/etc. It is quite reasonable to expect that I will increase their business by 5%. (I quoted a much, much higher number than that.) I could do that for myself, too, no problem.

Step #1 to making myself a million doing it: grow a business to where it gets $20 million in sales annual. Step #2: Successful A/B test.

Or, alternatively, make $CLIENT a million and get paid handsomely, without the "build a business for a decade" step.
Anchoring involves defining the value of something where it was previously undefined. What you describe is simply an extreme initial offer. You're right that it isn't necessarily sinister.
All the government is asking for here is a continuation of the status quo. it's always had the ability to...

No, this is not the case. Telephones are the exception.

Mail is legally protected every which-way. Obviously I'm free to encode something on a piece of paper and hand it to someone, or through a messenger.

But this proposal, at least as it's been reported, would force all communications to have a back door. No more passing encrypted notes.

do we in the IT world really want to be providing an untraceable means of communication

This is a straw man. Traceability doesn't enter into it. The gov't is asking for much more than a log of traffic. It's asking to see the content of the traffic.

It's also hyperbole. Until you can show that something as important as you're saying has actually used encryption, and that the inability to see inside the message would have averted the act, then you're just spinning FUD. There is currently no evidence that law enforcement is failing due to crypto.

Even if it were so, you'd still have to prove that the cost of those things that might be averted exceeds the costs to society from the loss of security.
I'm not sure about the tablet analogy, but regardless this is great advice. It's not enough to just read something. It helps tremendously to be engaged while reading -- to take notes, and discuss ideas with your friends. Then, after you've finished, come back in a few days, and again in a few weeks to reflect on things. The amount of text and information contained in books (and on blogs, on HN, in emails, etc) is overwhelming, and it's asking too much to try and remember it without reflection or repetition.

This reminds me of something my Latin teacher, who was an ancient history buff, used to always claim -- that many Roman citizens could go listen to a speech for an hour, then recite almost the whole thing from memory. Enviable to be sure, but remember that the vast majority was illiterate, and even for those who weren't, chiseling letters into stone tablets was no easy task.
The google is strong with me today. http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2002/12/21/17846/757

One of my favorite sci-fi short story trilogies.
"market based allocation" - this means further deaggregation of the existing prefixes.

Which translates into eventual serious capital expenditures for the carriers to hold the large tables. Worldwide.

In addition to the money required to pay for carrier grade translators. Though my employer produces them (amongst other stuff) - I do not think that architecturally they are a good thing.

All this money will need to come from somewhere. As the profit from a "prefix sold" goes into one pocket, but the expenditures are spread around the world, it means this profit would not come from IP addresses. It will come from the subscribers' monthly payments and quotas.

Translating: bye bye unmetered access on the cheap. Not so long ago in .be the ISPs were charging after you go over 10Gb on the DSL line.

About squeezing out the /8s from the current owner: that would help but not for long. It's like getting the additional credit line from the bank on the credit card.

For some info on the exhaustion and the models used you can take a look here: http://www.potaroo.net/tools/ipv4/

Of course, NATs are "convenient", so I would not necessarily exclude that some will decide to go with the scenario you describe - cascaded NATs.
Wiretapping - analog or digital - requires a judge's approval in this country. Sure, it can be abused. But do we in the IT world really want to be providing an untraceable means of communication for the next 9/11 bombers? Or, for that matter, white collar criminals, bank robbers, etc.?

The obvious answer is no, but it is the wrong question.

The question is: Are we willing to provide them untraceable, secure communications to them when that is the price to provide it to people yearning for free speech in totalitarian countries? And are we willing to provide it to them when not doing so means all of our communications have exploits that can and will be used by non-governmental agencies as well?
Being a sometime embedded man myself, I was nodding sagely at your comment until this bit: "Java itself is far from the fastest thing possible, and the speed of Java is itself a strict upper bound on Clojure's speed"

Clojure doesn't compile to Java, it compiles to JVM bytecode, and I think (although I don't know) that that's supposed to be very fast.

In this post:

http://www.learningclojure.com/2010/09/clojure-faster-than-m...

I compiled a (lookup into a map (potentially constructed at run time)) into a series of nested if statements, which then ran very fast indeed.

I shouldn't think I've achieved anything like the holy grail here, it all goes wrong at the end anyway, and I think that clojure 1.3 might actually have broken the optimization techniques I used.

But I think there's a case for saying that an immutable lisp on the JVM might one day be the fastest language in the world, because you can do those sorts of tricks in lisp in a way that you can't feasibly do in assembler, and the JVM does optimization dependent on run-time behaviour, as well as on static analysis.

I don't have the data. I'm not asserting this.

But I am asserting that Java speed is not a strict upper bound on JVM language speed, (unless every JVM bytecode program is also a Java program, which I can't imagine is the case!).
If you are a woman and you keep your phone in your purse this might be nice (of course, you'd have to make it a fashion accessory for it to catch on if that were the case.. the Sony Ericsson Android watch by Gucci). Or if you are driving and you have the phone in a pocket or the console. (I can't easily access a phone in my pocket if I'm seated).

I hate rummaging my pockets while i'm in a meeting to figure out if that phone call is something important or someone who can leave a message (or standing up and rummaging, which is way worse). I keep more than just my phone in my pocket, wallet, keys, change, at a minimum the wallet and phone are similar enough in shape that I have to think about which is which.

I am not a particularly orderly person, but I lose my phone in my (not terribly large) apartment quite regularly. I always know the general area I left it, but it is always under something or my eyes aren't noticing it. Perhaps if you have a cavernous mansion, the 10m range would make 'find my phone' not terribly useful, but for the rest of us it doesn't seem bad.

That said, I don't have a smartphone mostly because $30/month for a data plan (in addition to the phone) seems kind of steep. But this seems cool.

Chances are if I were working out I would keep the phone nearby and wear the watch. I see a lot of people on treadmills and stuff on their smartphones via Bluetooth (the lifters less so). If you were actually running outdoors it still might be OK. (Strap the watch to your wrist and the phone to your upper arm? I can't see my upper arm as well as my wrist). Then I can tweet stuff from my wrist 'lol i'm on a treadmill', 'now im getting some water'.

Anyway, I think you may have not thought through how awesome this is.
Dr Hawking's bright idea has turned up in an unexpected place
you worked 3years on your product and never tought that a slight redesign/optimization by a professional can be beneficial to your business?

I think we were still fumbling in the dark until now with regards to segmentation/pricing. In one sense I'm glad we didn't share our Pro offering with the entire market in the last 18 months. We've learned a lot. However, coincidentally we're about to partner with a real optimization firm, so you're spot-on in that sense.

Your website is dark and not very beautiful, it feels creepy.

Like when it's stormy outside?
Well, actually, I do think that being your own ISP is very important, maybe even crucial. Alas, it's currently difficult, as more and more network providers don't want to peer with the small players.

I know nothing about overlay networks. I need to dig further before I update my beliefs.
Red light cameras are in the same category as software patents: possibly a good idea in theory, but doomed to failure and abuse when implemented by actual humans.
So kitesurfers, sailors, windsurfers will pay for accurate wind data. I kitesurf and have paid for wind data in the past from ikitesurf.com .

One thing that would be useful w.r.t storms is a storm warning if a storm is going to hit my area. Or an email containing wind info when a storm is about to hit.

Today is actually a good example. Huge winds and no percipitation - I should be out on the water but have a damn release tonite. Arrghhh!!

Surfers also would love a wave info due to incoming storms.

What about an API which collects all other data from weather resources and collates it nad makes it easy to use? I'd actually be interested in that for another project I have going.
Okay, great -- thanks again for the feedback! We've incorporated a lot of it already, including providing a demo. We're working on a video (that shit ain't easy as it turns out).
That's a valid rationale in terms of an offensive filing. But you should think defensively as well. Does the perceived priority change if your name is similar to that of another company who has obtained a registration? What happens if they sue you? Will the cost of just responding to the suit be more than the registration would have been in the first place?

Just some more factors to think about =D
"This is a popular idea on HN. You're only a customer if you pay."

It's also a popular idea in the wider world of business, which predates FB by several thousand years. If you are interested in an abstract theory of wealth, that's great. But the rest of the world transacts in money, which is brought in as revenue and paid out as expenses. At the risk of oversimplifying, when you subtract the latter from the former and the number is greater than 0, then you can make a claim of profitability. Users donating data and attention might be good for your business model and help increase profits indirectly. But they are fundamentally different from customers who pay money (a means of transferring wealth) to use your product or service (a form of wealth).

Counter-example: Barnes and Noble does not consider users who visit their stores to read books and magazines without paying for them as customers. They provide B&N with incredibly valuable data (e.g. which books and magazines people want to read) and eyeballs, but they aren't customers. And neither are Facebook users.
That's a particularly meaty blog post, for which I (a mobile developer) have used several of the configurations or very close to them when working with things, and he's spot on.
"Did you really think we want those laws observed?" said Dr. Ferris. "We want them to be broken. You'd better get it straight that it's not a bunch of boy scouts you're up against... We're after power and we mean it... There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What's there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced or objectively interpreted – and you create a nation of law-breakers – and then you cash in on guilt. Now that's the system, Mr. Reardon, that's the game, and once you understand it, you'll be
much easier to deal with."
Android apps found to be sharing data
Ask HN: Google-Is this a step toward evil or not?
So one of the supposed core values of Google is to not mess with search results.

If you see the below link, it reports that the new Android phone database doesn't list the Samsung Galaxy for Verizon because it uses Bing by default.

If you google "android phone database" your top result links point to this phone database page on Google, at google.com/phone.

Should the average consumer who visits this database page expect that all the Android phones will be listed there and they can trust google to list results without filtering out competitors? Or should google just have headlined the page, Does not include phones that have competitors search engines pre-installed... They included an mouseover on the "with Google" text on the side nav, but the way they explain things makes it pretty clear that they were choosing to obfuscate the point.

Blame Bing: Why The Google Phone Gallery Doesn’t List Verizon’s Best Android Phone
http://searchengineland.com/why-google-phone-gallery-doesnt-list-51931?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+searchengineland+%28Search+Engine+Land%29&utm_content=Google+Reader
From the end of the article:

PS If you need a bit more beautiful simplicity go and read about NAND logic and realize that they are all you're ever going to need.

A wonderful demonstration of how this can be done can be found in the "The Elements of Computing Systems". Homepage: http://www1.idc.ac.il/tecs/

This course will show you how to build a simple but modern computer stack starting with nothing but simple NAND gates. Make sure to do the exercises and be prepared to invest a lot of time if you buy this book, otherwise you'll just waste your time.

I consider TECS and Charles Petzold's "Code" to be the most approachable books for those who want to understand what's really happening "under the hood" of your computer and can't recommend them highly enough.
I was happier when reading books. I understand that there might not be a causal effect here, but I believe that having something extended to occupy the mind is beneficial. Blogs, Twitter and online articles don't seem to have the same effect. Time to start reading again, even if I don't remember any of it.