skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Implement the algorithms in C/C++ and use ctypes with Python, then CPython wins :D

I've been using Pyjamas a lot actually. It works out good because of caching, but it's pretty heavy handed otherwise. The nice thing is being able to program everything in Python, pyjamas on the client and python stuff with mod_wsgi or mod_python on the server side (or Django, or whatever)
Libya's domain "morality" crackdown worries URL shorteners
Everyone on our team carries a Macbook; I need "click this to start the app up" levels of simplicity, or nobody will use it.

I wasn't reading you carefully enough before; I don't care at all about RAM size. I care how big the distro is to download.
well, nitpick comments usually tend to get downvoted but this is one of those examples where I thought people would be genuinely interested in the background. It's not intended to be a putdown, more of a 'did you know...'

I could fill a whole website with mis-attributed, mistranslated and misrepresented popular quotes. Poor old Einstein has got a lot floating around that he never said.
it is open source, so I believe support could be put into mono etc.
Bummer. It's really amazing how 1 seemingly simple (but quite important and engagement driving) feature like instant gratification badges can drive your architecture decisions and keep you guys up at night.
No, arbitrarily many doesn't automatically mean a huge amount :) This definition covers permanent partitions, but also encompasses temporary partitions which are effectively one dropped message or more. There exist protocols which will be broken by the loss of a single message. Paxos may not be one of them, but there is also a pattern of loss which will break that as well.

The theory behind all this really does hold this point up. I have another blog post with much more detail on the theory here: http://the-paper-trail.org/blog/?p=49, but I warn you it may be heavy going.
already submitted earlier today:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1767830
How to upload/embed flash swf to Facebook
This tutorial is a step-by-step guide that will lead you to upload and embed flash swf to your facebook profile. I will make a flash photo gallery and upload flash swf to Facebook profile.
"the fact that it requires windows and visual studio"

Isn't that what .NET is all about?
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In the supposedly benighted music business, a lot of things are making money
He has also made some significant contributions to computer science — linda/tuple spaces in particular have been extremely influential in distributed computing. Not to mention his sci-fi works.
this looks quite helpful, works on Chrome, but not on IE9 when I used the published url
I don't really follow Mono, but I've been seeing tweets tonight regarding support in NuPack for mono being worked on and changes being pushed to CodePlex throughout the day.

http://nupack.codeplex.com/SourceControl/list/changesets
I disagree. Microsoft derives a bulk of its revenues and profits from packaged software (Windows and Office). These products are on the verge of being disrupted. Computing is shifting away from the desktop to "thin devices" (tablets, smartphones, etc), cloud computing, and online media. Microsoft is performing relatively poorly in all three of these new computing areas.
I was curious about a similar question to yours: if they had 66GB of RAM, why did going just slightly over the threshold cause such drastic paging for them - surely queries aren't touching all parts of their dataset equally?

harryh's answer above about querying the user's entire history for each checkin answers this question though: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1769909
maybe they're just doing it to get in the good graces of those carriers, so that they'll bundle (or at least promote the availability of) skype on their next android phones like verizon did.
Slitaz <http://www.slitaz.org/en/>; is also well worth taking a look at.
"The next version of HTML doesn't have a name yet. In fact, it may never have a name, because the working group is switching to an unversioned development model. Various parts of the specification will be at varying degrees of stability, as noted in each section. But if all goes according to plan, there will never be One Big Cutoff that is frozen in time and dubbed "HTML6." HTML is an unbroken line stretching back almost two decades, and version numbers are a vestige of an older development model for standards that never really matched reality very well anyway. HTML5 is so last week."

http://blog.whatwg.org/whats-next-in-html-episode-1
we locked in a 4.5% fixed interest rate on a 30-year mortgage

Here in the UK, I'd seriously give up one of my gonads for a deal like that. There are almost no fixed deals over 10 years and the only 30 year one I heard of requires 30% down and is about 6%. Instead, we're trudging on with 2 year fixes combined with prayer the interest rates don't skyrocket ;-)
Please take the time to capitalize your sentences, your otherwise great comment deserves it.
Actually, I came up with the name, and only found out later that it had already been a product. Woops, stuff happens when you build and launch in a day.
> how did the developers come up with 66 gigabytes of ram to use for these instances in the first place?

The high-memory quadruple extra large (no, I'm not making that name up) instance offers 68.4GB of ram. Presumably they left the rest for the OS.
Perhaps that's a skill you have you could teach others (and perhaps make more doing that than something else!). My own experiences (and those of most I know) come down to most of those sorts of positions

A) aren't advertised around much - you have to have a strong network

B) Typically require you to be onsite for at least part of the time or at least periodic visits.

I've not yet found gigs that pay $150/hour for long extended periods (9-12 months) which didn't require any face to face or onsite time (where you could live in Thailand but charge US rates).

Not saying they don't exist at all, but I think they're rarer than your experiences might indicate.

Also, I don't think all clients tend to pay the rates where they are. There's a whole outsourcing trend, which many freelancers are exploring - taking on 'virtual assistants' based in other countries. They do this precisely because you can get reasonable professional-level assistance for $3-$5/hour - which is a good rate for where the worker lives, not where the freelancer is. If I wouldn't pay someone in Thailand $30/hour to do secretarial work for me, why should someonei n NYC pay me $150/hour if I'm living in Thailand? Because I'm a US-born white guy?
Tensile test
Your startup tanked, but at least you're not Toni Braxton
This will be more of a fallback in the event that Google Voice ever drops the ball for me. GVoice's seamless integration into the default calling process on Android devices makes it a much more attractive option than Skype.
I disagree they took over datadirect jdbc and support it for both linux and windows!
This stuff can be very counter intuitive. Locality may not be what you want.

For example, last I heard google's search index was sharded by document rather than by term.

That sounds odd, since if it was sharded by term, then a given search would only need to go to a handful of servers (one for each term) and then the intermediate result combined. But with it sharded by document, every query has to go to all the nodes in each replica/cluster.

It ends up that's not as bad as it seems. Since everything is in ram, they can answer "no matches" on a given node extremely quickly (using bloom filters mostly in on processor cache or the like). They also only send back truly matching results, rather than intermediates that might be discarded later, saving cluster bandwidth. Lastly it means their search processing is independent of the cluster communication, giving them a lot of flexibility to tweak the code without structural changes to their network, etc.

Does that mean everyone doing search should shard the same way? Probably not. You have to design this stuff carefully and mind the details. Using any given data store is not a silver bullet.
I could be wrong but I remember reading that the second MS bought them, all of Rare's talent left.
Poor Toni. My heart goes out to her. I'm sure she'll be just fine. But you guys stop complaining about the $6000 you owe!
Blogger: Create your free blog
tl;dr: Take a course!

Don't know about all these books recs. All good books, but reading books wont make you a better designer. Reading books about fine art wont make you a better painter; and reading books about soccer wont make you a better soccer player. You'll learn the rules, sure, but at the end of the day you need to develop the skills by training/being coached (if I can run with the metaphor), so I suggest taking a short course on graphic design fundamentals and learn by doing.

Getting drilled on the fundamentals will stay with you much longer than anything you read in a book about ux/design.
It would be cool to do the opposite as well, don't start checking the fancy vcs stuff until 1/2 second after the prompt is loaded.
Ask HN: Best Web Developer / Entrepreneur Resume 
Can you show example resume for these types of skills? Or Can you explain what do you expect from this types of resumes?
Notice it says Apple is going to appeal. Of course, they'll drag this out a while, and will likely settle for a much lower number in the end.
Can we clear up one issue? Sharding on userid -- bad or fine? I say fine. If your algorithm is "if userid between A and M then server0, else (N-Z) server1", then you could get unbalanced. But if your algorithm is "if random 50/50 hash of userid = 0 then server0, else (random 50/50 hash = 1) server1", then you are going to stay almost exactly balanced (law of large numbers). You would never, ever, get anywhere near a 60/40 imbalance. So the choice to use userid, if implemented correctly, is completely fine.
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Sorry, I thought you had to fly and meet the client once in a while.

I scoured Craigslist locally and most of them are looking for "Web developer, contract, MUST BE LOCAL".

Was wondering how was it out there.
>Everyone on our team carries a Macbook

I work on a macbook too.

> I need "click this to start the app up" levels of simplicity, or nobody will use it.

Is that a political issue or have there been questionable hiring decisions by someone?

When I'm talking about gift-wrapping it with RVM, literally all they'll have to run is a well-made shell script to fire it up.

http://macosx.com/forums/howto-faqs/41816-howto-open-termina...

Should do the trick, although you'll want to test it in Finder yourself.

I can't come up with anything easier than double-clicking on a shell script.
CloudKick ( http://cloudkick.com ) - Configurable server monitoring with SMS alerts. Love this service.

CoTweet ( http://cotweet.com ) - Shared Twitter account management. Great for support and guerrilla marketing.

Uservoice ( http://uservoice.com ) - User feedback and support management.

Dropbox ( http://dropbox.com ) - File sharing - we share the business dropbox with our individual dropboxes to share files.

Droplr ( http://droplr.com ) - Screenshot capture and sharing. Also allows for file sharing.

As mentioned by others:

GitHub ( http://github.com ) - VCS

Google Apps ( http://www.google.com/a ) - Email and documents.

Pivotal Tracker ( http://www.pivotaltracker.com ) - Project management and issue tracking.

Wordpress ( http://wordpress.com ) - Blog.

These are very specific to Rails, but extremely useful:

New Relic RPM ( http://newrelic.com ) - Deeply integrated Ruby on Rails app monitoring and performance measurement. Immensely helpful for troubleshooting and analysis, including slow query detection/explanation, etc.

Hoptoad ( http://www.hoptoadapp.com ) - Rails exception monitoring and alerting.
I would have thought that the antitrust concerns would go the other way this time - the combined company using the dominance of Photoshop to prop up Windows (by cancelling the Mac version), or the dominance of Flash to prop up Windows Mobile (by killing Flash for Android).
Would love to see the HN hive mind take on both, fire away.
"Preview" is part of Mac OS X and works well enough that third party viewers aren't popular.
if you bounce them across the screen from the top left it's just like after you win a game in windows solitaire
The duration of the downtime seems to have been dependent on not just disk throughput, but also network and CPU throughput. Eliot did mention that a large portion of the downtime was partly caused by the slowness of EBS. Making a rough estimate, I think the downtime would probably be about 2/3 of how long it was if it had been on an SSD RAID. However, then you run into the issue of having to maintain your own servers; which, judging by the fact that they are using EC2 and EBS so heavily, Foursquare does not have any desire whatsoever to manage their own infrastructure.
http://clc-wiki.net/wiki/K%26R2_solutions for more updated solutions
Ask HN: Where can one find good screencasters?
Just as the title asks - where can one find an individual or team that is awesome at creating screencasts? As a software guy, I typically have a plethora of designers I can access when I need for a project that I'm writing code for, and when I can't, there's a myriad of sites available with ready to go templates/logos and stuff I can typically modify myself. I'm finding it very difficult to find those with talent in creating quality screencasts to showcase a product I have built that I think would be best explained via an animated video.

The following screencasts are examples of the caliber of work I am looking and willing to pay for:

Dropbox: https://www.dropbox.com/screencast

Things for iPad: http://culturedcode.com/things/ipad/

Google TV: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/05/announcing-google-tv-tv-meets-web-web.html

Evernote: http://www.evernote.com/about/video/#OlOLXWvaIy0
Yes and no I suppose. When it's unrelenting, ubiquitous (politicians and waiters) and in everything he ever composes, I'd consider it a weakness.

Of course you don't expect anyone to talk exactly as people do, with umms and ahs and all that. But Steinbeck and Hemingway (and in film, most of the people I mentioned in my original post) prove that you can write great drama and dialogue with a good degree of realism.

Also many people did speak similar to Shakespeare's characters, though of course with less rhyming since they weren't poets and Shakespeare was. There's a good explanation of that here "http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Did_people_really_speak_the_way_th...
I love monospace fonts when I'm coding... but writing regular English text in monospace sound excruciatingly tedious.
I really don't understand how shortening URLs is a viable business model? $10 million dollars is an enourmous sum of money to invest for something that provides almost no substantive value. That money would be better invested in software that allows (forces would be better) to design sane and usable URI schemes.
Original post is here: http://www.chubbybrain.com/blog/2010/10/startup-failure-post...
What exactly is the rate like for transferring data across MongoDB instances on EBS? Was the overhead of going across EBS volumes the major factor in the length of the downtime?

The 60%/40% sharding distribution doesn't seem too bad in the big picture; are there any plans to be evening that out?
Sorry Kareemm, this is the book I was talking about:

http://www.amazon.com/Human-Factor-Revolutionizing-People-Te...
Can you comment on your ability to successfully restore from backup?

I know of organisations that diligently back up their data, but fail to regularly check that they can restore from backups.
I did that too....
Multiple times...

I feel so ashamed.
PaintbrushJS: A browser-based image processing library
I was in a similar situation, it was 46/46/8.

46 and 46 were "married" due to their mutual investment.

I was the 8. It's what I negotiated to come on board. No vesting.

There was casual mention of a purchase.

I controlled a third of the company because 46 + 8 could sell.

It was a paranoia fest.

I had to go in order to save the "marriage."

They are still "married" today.

And at the time, I would have cashed out on the sale in a New York minute.
Business idea: Have people in the US proxy 4.5% mortgages to UK residents at 4.75%.
If you add up the total energy of a flat universe, the result is precisely zero
See also: http://www.pixastic.com/ http://github.com/jseidelin/pixastic
The problem isn't the page granularity, which is just a convenient size for the general case and works pretty well in most cases. The problem is to not keep excessive data in memory; in this case, they are keeping ALL data in memory due to some architectural decisions.

OS caching and paging have work pretty well in keeping the frequently used data in memory and leave the rest on disk, and thus utilize the system resource more efficiently.
argh and it's a crappy analogy honestly.
There's no real deadlocks as far as cycles of dependencies on critical resources.

It's basically saying the stock market is a giant distributed system with a bunch of independent agents, which erm it is...

this analogy to threading just doesn't add anything, it's just the author's model for agents acting concurrently, threading is a low level OS thing not the fundamentals of concurrent action.
My gut reaction to this blog post is that the author is underestimating the competition in the TV market. Apple's products are at the high end of the price range, and I see Pioneer's exit as a sign that its very difficult to compete at this point. Pioneer's Kuro line of Plasma televisions produced the highest quality picture (at a high price), but they decided to exit the market and sell their technology to a competitor. Apple also lacks of technology in this space. Unlike computers, high end television manufacturers (not Vizio) are not simply assembly commodity parts in a nice case but are actively developing new hardware technology for next years products.
Apple wouldn't do this for the same reason that MS doesn't do this with Office: $$$$$$. There's too much money in the PC market to ignore it.
Here's a breakdown of how much of one dollar goes to what http://www.nationalpriorities.org/taxday2010

26.5 cents/military, 20.1c/health, 13.6c/debt, 3.5c/vets, 2c/edu
Pre-Chicken Nugget Meat Paste, AKA Mechanically Separated Poultry [Updated]
bitbucket (http://bitbucket.org) - mercurial vss, similar to github
Exactly. How the hell does a fast growing well funded 24 employee startup NOT have load monitoring on their database servers! Pay the 10c the hour for a micro EC2 instance and run Zabbix or one of the half dozen other awesome monitoring packages out there.
I thought YouTube had closed captioning now?
Python Ternary Search Trie Implemetation
I'm not trying to be snarky or anything. I'm honestly curious as to how Facebook threatens Google?
It's an interesting angle if that's the reason they are using EC2. Dedicated hosting might be more expensive, but hardware managed is pretty efficient at this point.

Also, given the vast number of EC2 instances they could afford, it seems counter intuitive to be running only two mongrel shards. If you are that stingy about spreading data around, you might as well be using dedicated.
There is a particular database system used by newspapers that encodes the date in base64 in a query parameter. You could search and find the dates, but you needed a subscription to access the links. It was setup so if you had the link you could link others to it free of charge.

Well, the guy at the local library with subscription started to get irritated with me after the third or fourth link so I built my own search engine to use their search engine. I was a research assistant at the time.
Interesting, but it is not true, unless you meant:

http://store.apple.com/us/browse/home/shop_ipod/family/apple...

If Apple made an entry into the T.V. business, it would be listed as one of the greatest failures ever.

They have great monitors, but the T.V. business has so many other major players in it already handling the high-quality niche market that Apple would want to enter.

Sure there would be some Apple fanatics that would buy dogs--t if it was styled in aqua or in an aluminum case on display in an Apple store. But, a large Apple T.V. with a $6000 price tag might only sell to Toni Braxton, if she could still afford it. To the majority of us- no way.

What I expected was that Google TV, Apple TV, and similar might get integrated into existing brand televisions as an add on, upgradable component where the TV just supplied a standard power and video connector. But that hasn't happened yet.
Good point on the competition and the example of Pioneer. As a counterpoint, commentators also suggested Apple would fail in smartphones due to the competition and the technology.
Any restaurant that takes credit cards.
Transactions: The Next Big Data Category
Baroness vs. CEO, and your chance to join the Great Brain Debate
In her research Baroness Greenfield argued that Social Technology is moulding children’s brains so they are unable to think for themselves or empathise with others.

And Peter Williams, CEO of Deloitte Digital said "I am not a neuroscientist but someone who has encouraged my kids to use the web since it emerged in 1993. I have also always been interested in how my kids have used technology in a positive way to learn, make and maintain connections, solve problems and have fun. Baroness Greenfield says she is yet to meet a parent who is not worried about the consequences of the amount of time children spend in front of computer screens. The good news is I will be the first parent she has met that isn’t worried."
I've restored a couple times and done some tests, the transfer speed seemed a little slow but I don't know if it was on tarsnaps end or mine.

The server that I've done and tested restores for is only about 1.5 gb of information/configs.
What's the difference between coding and writing a careful solid consistent text?
If Apple TV is integrated into existing brand televisions, then how does Apple drive revenues and profits? From selling the software and taking a small cut on media?
We renamed after we discovered another framework named Step. The new name has the advantage of being easier to search for, but I do sincerely apologize for the name of the scalatra-scalate module. Glad you enjoy the framework!
Also, if you're dealing with DOM, you might want to avoid anonymous functions and closures as IE tends to not do proper garbage collection within closures and leak an awful lot of memory that doesn't get freed even after you visited another page.

To the best of my knowledge this was fixed in IE 7. Therefore I consider having such leaks on the general internet to be an underhanded service. Anything that leaves IE 6 usable but less pleasant encourages people to migrate to something better. ;-)
I'll put a vote in for Zabbix as a good option, it has saved us more times than I can count.
yeah, i mean it's The Gap. really, is this a brand we're actually getting worked up about?
In asynchronous networks it is surprisingly hard to detect failures, even of yourself.

The reason failures are hard to detect in asynchronous networks is that permissible message transit times are unbounded; ie they refuse to acknowledge the presence of any partition. If you acknowledge the possibility of partitions, then your system is by definition not asynchronous.

Reporting an error condition counts as an availability violation.

This is bullshit. Per the definition quoted in the linked article, availability only means that "...every request must terminate.". It is not required that it terminate successfully.
You'd have to pay too much to hedge the currency risk, no doubt.
A typical way to deal with uneven distribution in sharding is to do Hash(key) Mod P, where Hash is a cryptographic hash and P is the number of partitions. This way the hash function would randomize the distribution of key.