skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Like not having a massive downtime that gives their users a reason to try out some massive social network's offering that has already started eating their lunch? Oh wait no they didn't prioritize that.

My point is, and perhaps the down vote indicates I didn't make it well, that monitoring and alerts are extremely important for any startup. They admit as much in the article, had they known sooner there wouldn't have been any down time. It isn't an excuse to say it got lost in the crush (not that they are trying to use it as an excuse, they're being very upfront and admitting fault).

We have neither the load or the team they do and we have comprehensive monitoring and alerts across our infrastructure as part of the SOE that each server gets. Perhaps we prioritized monitoring higher than them as we are a small team?

And I bet they have prioritized monitoring now. Now where did I put the key to that barn door?
HOLY FUCKING SHIT WHAT A CRAZY NAME
I think is funny enough to deserve a non-negative score :) (+1)
I think Don Draper's "wheel" pitch nicely summarizes my counterpoints to this article:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2bLNkCqpuY
This post is fucking retarded
From the article, "Those relatively comfortable “problems” of modern life have already been solved to death, beginning with Alexander Bell and ending (sort of, for now) with Mark Zuckerberg, Sergey Brin and Larry Page.

Many of the apps we have nowadays — the successful ones, at least — revolve around game mechanics, addiction, self-reference, and narcissism. Even apps I use and actually like quite a lot fall into this category."

A more charitable reading would take it to mean that the problem of social connection is important, but it's been adequately addressed by Facebook, and /new/ startups shouldn't focus on it.
"Many Americans can’t afford a decent education"

Baloney. I worked in the CA community college system. It's $26 per unit. TWENTY SIX dollars. Oh, and if you're poor, it's nothing.

A college education is accessible to just about everyone in the US who wants it.
I live here and would love this for my own purposes.
Honestly, the main reason for the action that has taken place over the past 5 years or so is due primarily to the authors of this list. More specifically, it is due to their getting into positions where they have unusually wide breadths of power.

I agree with you that reform movements like what is currently building in education can have disastrous effects. However, in this instance, most of the reforms being proposed are a product of observing what has worked in charter schools, rather than a product of running in the opposite direction of what doesn't work.

I see the current reform movement as an overwhelmingly positive force in education. As long as they stick to the ideal of spreading successful charter school practices to the broader public school community I'll be happy.

PS: All you genius hackers with backgrounds in machine learning, AI, social networking, (god knows what else might be applicable). Don't like the way teacher performance is being quantified? There's a multi-billion dollar industry that could use some disruption.
Recover Deleted Photos from Mac after Emptying Trash Bin 
Accidentally deleted important photos after emptying trash bin? You can still recover your photos from Mac after emptying trash bin. This article explains why and how to recover deleted photos from Mac after emptying trash bin.
If it is anything like any start up I have ever heard of :P

My point is that it is stupidly important to have good monitoring in place and I am surprised that one of the best known startups had a gaping hole in theirs.
Not at all. Dbingham identified a possible root cause that is more specific and actionable than the originally stated problem. You took a qualified hypothesis and claimed it was stated as the totality of the situation.

More importantly, the possible root cause could conceivably be mitigated by a variety of solutions we know how to build - webapps for improved meal planning, recipes, health information, and so on.
This is pretty clearly just emergency prep food; no sane person would eat it on a routine basis, unless you had extremely limited logistics. It's cheaper to just buy normal bags of rice, etc. than to get the canned form, plus, it would be a difficult decision between suicide and homicide if stuck eating this for an extended period by choice.

It's great to see mass-market retailers get into food security like this, but buying a pack of (IMO barely edible) food like this is probably not the most efficient way to solve the problem.

Generally what people do in places which are often subject to 1-4 week natural disasters (big snowstorms, usually) is to maintain an extra stock of storage-compatible foods that you eat on a daily basis. i.e. if you eat rice, buy a 50 pound bag. If you eat meat, buy a quarter cow and put it in a separate chest freezer (which can last through a few weeks if not opened, even without electricity). If you eat a lot of veggies, go for #10 cans, or ideally, grow and can your own.

The idea is to get the benefits of bulk-purchasing what you actually eat (so, lower cost per unit all the time), plus having an emergency capacity.

Once you have a month or so of ready stores in your pantry, then maybe consider the long-term 10 year storage stuff. Reducing your daily costs by buying your daily foods in bulk gives you enough left over to start accumulating other supplies.
Navratri Garba Chaniya Choli Designs, Photos, Pictures
Navratri is a festival of Hindus celebrated with devotion, love and fervour all over India. It is also called as Navratras. Navaratri 2010 will start on Friday, the 8th of October and will continue for 9 days until Saturday, the 16th of October. They wear colourful dresses and mostly Indian traditional dresses are preferred. Young men and women are dressed at their best during this festive season.
Why would anyone feed their children TVP? Were your parents vegetarians, or cheap (and not very creative about food)?
Very entertaining. These type of prediction articles only get better with time. Truth is stranger than fiction and I bet when the MS/Adobe thing pans out, it will be a duesy.

Maybe Adobe's CEO will take the helm at MS? Maybe the MS board will use this as a reason to finally give Steve B the boot? Maybe this will force Apples hand?
Most of us would like to survive cancer so we can spend more time doing togetherness things with our friends and family. I've never seen an argument about whether various pursuits were worthwhile or not that was itself worthwhile. Its simply a topic that doesn't bear inspection, if it puts food on you and your families table then its worthwhile enough for me.
Maybe if she was pointing out facts, but this strikes me as an opinion piece and I have a hard time reading this particular opinion unless the author is actually practicing what she preaches.

FWIW I tend to agree with the opinion.

I don't know who roger ebert is so I can't comment on whether he is useless, but I guess he has no relevance to me.
I think there is always a high chance of 1-4 week regional disruptions (big storms, etc.).

There's also a pretty common fear that you may not have enough money to buy food in the future -- I think barely-middle-class people are not as familiar with the programs like food stamps, etc. which are going to usually prevent that as they decline in income. They may be homeless and out of work, but it's very unlikely that they will starve.
In Germany they first lie about it ("No, we have no idea whose unit it is") and one year later demand you give it to them.

German source: http://www.taz.de/1/nord/artikel/?dig=2008%2F04%2F22%2Fa0009...
You can't get to the root cause or find a cure without first finding the cause, can you?
Benefits Of Video Resume Over Traditional Resumes
Possible acquisition of Adobe by Microsoft is one of the options
"yet outside of Flash/Sliverlight battle they don't cross each other paths" - what about Microsoft's Expression Studio and similar Adobe products?
No, a police state has checkpoints and men with semiautomatic weapons clearly visible during most daily commutes. This is a very bad thing, but it is not a police state. Nothing was done.
The Starcraft 2 Tweak Guide - Improve your graphics performance
It occurs to me that my latest project actually gets me off the hook from this guy.

Problem: People in developing countries have to work for 3rd world wages, selling products and services to people who really can't afford to buy anything. Thus, they are doomed to remain poor by western standards.

Solution: Jason's website that lets them teach Spanish online to rich Americans, and doesn't let them pay themselves less than ten bucks an hour.

Dodged a bullet there!
That statement makes me think the FBI is going on fishing expeditions now. Or do they use metrics on how many cars they had to track to help justify more funding?
The high schools generate students that aren't even capable of doing community college, or have enough sense to "want" to do community college.
I'm 11 pages into the Design of Everyday things and loving it so far. Thank you for the recommendation.
1) That's kind of awesome!

2) "This guy" is actually a lady. =)
"But there are bright minds working on new antibiotics, energy efficient cars, cheaper building materials etc. Some of the best and brightest minds are also smashing atoms in particle accelerators, charting the cosmos, composing symphonies, educating new minds, and, yes, pushing the limits of computer connectedness to make many lives on this planet just that much nicer."

Speaking as one of those people who took a nice little detour from the world of money to live on the edge of technology, let me assure you that it wasn't a smart financial choice. Most of the people who are smashing atoms and charting the cosmos are economic martyrs. Most of the ones who aren't martyrs come from places where an advanced degree at a US school will catapult them into higher social classes. That doesn't really happen in the US anymore -- people think it's more sensible to drop out of college to make websites, and I can't really argue with them.

Irrational or not, my opinion is that the world would be 1000% better if we could somehow create an economy that rewarded young people for doing research into antibiotics half as well as it rewards them for creating social-networking widgets.
Tarsnap also does encryption and compression. Now you might be able to implement something like that better then cperciva, but I know I sure as hell am not capable of implementing any system as secure as reliable as him. Does this knowledge cost money? Yes. Is it worth it? Well, that depends on you.
By setting an arbitrary floor of ten bucks you've also cut off that opportunity for many though.
I'm not a design genius-- but when I saw Gap's new logo I think I knew what they were going for, and imho I doubt it was created haphazardly. The new logo is exemplary of the transition of "best practice" design principles from print to electronic media.

They unabashedly violated two rules of logo and print media design, and it's so blatant that I can't believe it was an accident. Their logo features a gradient (print-media epic fail), and two low-contrast overlapping colors, the P and the background square (also a print-media epic fail).

I hope that the executives do not knee-jerk a reaction and demand a logo redesign, but instead play out the campaign and see how it pans out. I'm not convinced it was a mistake.

Perhaps the real redesign wasn't the logo, but their website and online presence?
I hear their ads all the time on my local NPR member station.
While Reach and ODST were MS published, they were both made by Bungie post spin off.
let's just say a little bit of both. I ate a lot of tofu and rice plus nutritional yeast, too. My parents had me and then left the commune shortly thereafter (oh shit, we have a kid! we have to move out and get real jobs now!) with no real career experience, so they were raising a kid on 'entry level' state employee wages, which isn't much. (now, state employee retirement pensions, on the other hand? pretty nice. All my younger siblings got as much college as they wanted paid for.)

as far as health goes, TVP, as far as I can tell, is pretty okay. It's one of the few (single source) vegetarian sources of complete protein.
Possibly, but hopefully it'll stop the thing from turning into rentacoder, where everybody competes on price to the point where it's essentially free.

A site where people who normally make less than $1/hr can sell their services online for less than $1/hr doesn't really help anybody.

On the other hand, requiring people to charge the fair market value for their service forces them to compete on quality rather than price, which has the added benefit of making the service better, as well as getting people paid a fair wage.
roger ebert - the most famous and celebrated movie critic in america - he's never made a movie, but writes opinions about movies all day long and is still highly respected
SpellDialer.com -- call me at dial.owrange
In Germany we can deduct all sorts of business expenses. It sounds like a sweet deal, but employees get 1000€ as "default business costs" automatically. Since programming does not require that many resources, I find it is not necessarily so easy to get far above 1000€ in business expenses. If you buy something expensive like a computer, you have to split it across several years, so it doesn't help that much either.
Coming from someone who lived in one, trust me when I say - you have no idea what you're talking about.
His motivations are irrelevant.

The problem is with the patent system that allows getting monopoly for minor (however useful they might be) ideas and awards mind-boggling damages after long and costly trials.

Blaming actors in that system is not helpful because it changes focus from relevant (the patent system is broken) to irrelevant (motivations of people or companies that take advantage of the system).
Female Viagra deal signed
My sentiments.

I think that anybody who says "URL popularity data mining is valuable" is just repeating what somebody else said. There are probably 100 services right now that could tell you the hottest 1,000 URLs. Delicious, Google/Yahoo Buzz, any of the dozens of popular bookmarking and social media sites, AddThis.com and their ilk, Quantcast and their ilk, Twitter, any URL shortening service, your ISP, etc. URLs have been currency for a long time now.

I hear about this information being valuable all the time, yet I've never once read about any of these companies profiting from knowing the popularity of URLs. I might just be ignorant, so please HN, tell me who is paying for a list of popular URLs?
"Sometimes"? That's like saying that SOMETIMES rain is wet.
I'm using duplicity with s3 instead.
Microbe?
Just wanted to say thanks for the link to nev's homeless experiment. I rather enjoyed reading it (and keeping my mind off getting my wisdom teeth pulled in the AM)
For more visit- http://www.sareez.com/
http://www.sareez.com/Sarees-collection/
http://www.sareez.com/Salwar-collection/
http://www.sareez.com/Lehenga-collection/
Can students in the area come to listen, even if we aren't start up founders. Not sure how these things work.
I have had very acceptable performance for latency critical applications where the db have exceeded the available memory by a factor between 10 and 50.

So far I have never heard of any one running a commercial RDBMS reiterate the MySQL-mantra that you need the entire DB in RAM and I find it a very puzzling attitude to efficient database usage.
The one dollar foik wouldn't go for the sub dollar work so it's a nonissue.
There's nothing wrong with rentacoder, it's a great site creating efficiencies (it only worries you if you were one of the inefficiencies in the system before - american/european programmers/writers)
"A college education is accessible to just about everyone in the US who wants it."

Agreed. And even throughout the world thanks to small startups like Khan Academy.
We have this problem that Universities are GREAT at marketing.

Jane doesn't want to go to some stooooopid lowly community college, she wants to go to USC because ahem, it's better!
zabbix user here, and it works nicely. But man, it is painful to use.
Gap turns to crowdsourcing
Packers movers ludhiana,packers movers chandigarh
And all the cats: http://twitter.com/Mulder_Cat (random cat from search results).

I found it really funny when I discovered those animal subsets of Twitter.
Efficient secure Snapshotted backups. It says so in the 'Design' section. (maybe that ought to be on the front page as well)
http://www.tarsnap.com/design.html
This has one major implication that makes me want to root for the deal to close:

Photoshop & Flash would be covered by an MSDN subscription.

So, instead of dishing out $1000 for CS6, we need only enroll in BizSpark (or whatever Microsoft's next version of its ISV thing is called), and pay $400 for all our OS's, all our dev tools, and all our graphics stuff in one package. Now all they need to do is buy Codesmith, Red Gate and Jetbrains so that I never need to pay full price for software again.
Producttags : U
What is that, and why can i see it?
It's hard to help people if they don't want to help themselves first.
Coverflow wasn't even developed in-house at Apple, they acquired it. According to wikipedia "Cover Flow was conceived by artist Andrew Coulter Enright[1] and originally implemented by an independent Macintosh developer, Jonathan del Strother. Enright later named the interaction style fliptych to distinguish it from the particular Cover Flow implementation.[2]"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cover_Flow
100% agree. I look around my office sometimes and wonder, what are we doing?! The skill of juggling terabytes of data then slicing and dicing it to order is massively transferrable to almost any problem domain. As is the skill of getting thousands of processors to work together. And we are using for something that is ultimately frivolous.

Like you I am a hypocrite in that I know this and I do what I do anyway. But it's only partly for the money; the other part is there just aren't the jobs to do this out there. A lab or whatever would rather have a grad student hack something up on the side than hire professional developers (and fair play to them, they've discovered a way to get smart people to work for peanuts, but with the best will in the world, someone who got into this to be a biologist is going to see administering a database or whatever as a chore that gets in the way of their real work, and they're not going to do a fraction as well as a professional).
Sounds like Harold & Kumar wasn't too far off.
You're correct in a general sense, but for the specific case of designers working in fields where the standard computer is a Windows machine I've almost always seen an exception made for the design department to use Macs.
This is a common claim but easily debunked.

We know that patent protection is not necessary for innovation. Patents are relatively new invention (1623 in UK per Wikipedia). And yet there were so many things invented before that, of much more fundamental nature than any software patent.

Second argument is an economic thought experiment. Let's say there is no word processing software yet and there's a million dollars to be made in word processing software. If we go by your "no innovation without monopoly" rule, no one will invent word processing out of fear that someone else will take part of the possible profits.

That's complete bollocks. If there's money in it, people will do it. Patents are more likely to be harmful because they limit competition and lack of competition hurts customers with higher prices for existing stuff and less possibility to build on stuff that has been done before. This case shows this well: the guy's idea might be swell, but do we really expect everyone to either not to anything similar in the future or pay him $625 million for the privilege? Does anyone really claims that given billions of educated people on the planet no one would come up with this idea independently even if this one guy kept it to himself?
I agree.

We built one as a proof-of-concept around our post-modern database engine. It costs orders of magnitude less than $ 10,000,000. I don't understand why they need that much money.

We could probably monetize it (advertisement on the main page) to the point of not having it costs us money to run it, but since it's more a promotional platform than a business...

(if you're curious: http://wrp.me/).
Google Does Not Get Social -- Yet
That depends really, does rentacoder exist on a never ending churn of cheap labour that competes at unsustainable prices or does it actually provide people with a decent wage over the long term.
Embedded gists? How do they work?
i am somewht responsible for the original idea, though others have done, well, all the work :)

Scalatra has a few rough edges but since it takes about 2 minutes to have somehing running it is worth trying it out yourself :)
Me & My Brand: Lively Entrepreneurs Ring Up Sales
Another blog heard from. Group A thinks group B doesn't do enough for society. Instead of describing a system to overcome of the selfish tendencies inherent in all humans, she chose to belittle an entire industry and the aspirations of entrepreneurs trying to learn to be productive.
The Finale of the Ultimate Meta Mega Crossover
You take as many classes as you can at community college then you transfer to a real university and technically graduate from there. Massive $avings.
There aren't people who don't want to help themselves - it's a basic instinct in every life form. There are people who "don't know how" to help themselves though.
The account's authenticity is confirmed by the BBC - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-11007825
HN readers liked Eliezer's Harry Potter fanfic (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1385932); I thought you might also appreciate this earlier one by him. I actually like it better than the Harry Potter.
I see I get down-voted on this. I agree. It was presumptuous of me to suggest that the blog post author maybe should look beyond her henhouse. Of course her generalization of web-app's and observation of lack of world changing startups is correct.
people used to get their hate on for Marc Andreesen

Now that you mention it I remember that too. How perceptive of you to note the similarity. In both cases, garden-variety schadenfreude was multiplied by their massive success.

Incidentally, not one of the successful people I've known thinks this way.
What is a decent wage? 2 dollars a day is pretty good to someone previously making 1 dollar a day.
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MacUpdate launches 64% off promotion of AnyBizSoft PDF Converter for Mac. It is a 6-in-1 application for Mac users to convert PDF to Microsoft Office formats, EPUB, Text and HTML.
If you post a tweet with a link to a Gist on the new Twitter interface, you can just click the tweet to see the Gist in the right pane. I imagine it would be nice to see a person's stream with the tweets on the left and a gist in the right. Especially if it was a daily code tip account.
Walked through and explained the code step by step: http://times.jayliew.com/2010/10/07/ie6-effect-how-it-works/

p.s. I know there's a lot of expert js hackers on HN far better than I am, this is just more for a beginner audience
Cool! I worked on implementing a Java impl of the Hub part of PuSH this summer. Haven't heard where it's gone yet...
Nupack isn't really a package management system as it stands... it's a very small part of one.

If you're interested in this space, you'd do well to check out @serialseb's OpenWrap: http://serialseb.blogspot.com/2010/07/intro-to-what-openwrap...

It's still in active development but, from demos I've seen if it, it looks very good. It seems to cover far more use cases than NuPack and has an elegant design.
Arbitrage in action