skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hey Keyframe- so, interestingly, one big difference between JTV and some of the others is we don't have a big producer-outreach department, which would normally respond to questions like these- so sorry we missed it!

You may have already invested time into getting set up w/ ustream etc.- np, but since you mentioned this in the other thread I thought I'd respond real quick (:

* There is no pricing, no cost, even if you have tens of thousands of concurrent viewers (we have several broadcasters in that category) at maximum quality.

* We have fewer ads than the others.

* We're mostly oriented around making it a social experience- this helps you because it means the viewers have ways of pulling in other viewers.

* With JTV your stream will be higher quality (measurably) than others.

Check out http://www.justin.tv/broadcast/advanced for options on getting set up- the forums tend to be pretty helpful as well. We can't really help with cameras etc. (a strategic choice)- but once you manage to get set up you'll be absolutely giving the best experience to your viewers.

Hope that helps (:
At 1440x900 the bar is annoyingly in my face. I'd prefer that it be at the top. Don't mind the small amount that shows on the 'other' side of the bar, just expect menus to be at top--- perhaps if it wasn't so thick it wouldn't be so bothersome? Good article even with the bar...
Even at 1680x1050, I find attached menu's really grating. I think it's the lost screen real estate because the larger they are, the more irritating I find them. On the other hand, Twitter went ahead and implemented a top attached menu, so maybe I'm in the minority.

Anyways, back on topic, do you (or any HNers) have any recommendations on how to get started with formal grammars and parsers? Is there a canonical introductory text?
Thank you! This is awesome and extremely useful. Seriously, thank you for this.
Just posted a comment to it (: Email may have fallen into a black hole or something. Good luck!
How to Create a Cannibal Pumpkin
Halloween is coming, so here is an amazing idea for your Halloween pumpkin.
HTML version: http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/10/10/20/apple_issues_r...
New-ish MSI and Asus laptops actually have a Turbo button. It basically performs automatic CPU overclocking (at the expense of battery life).
I agree - it's not, at the moment, an ideal end user situation. Even though the build process was reasonably easy, a fair few GUI programs won't run (though mostly every command line app seems to work fine). Most importantly for my test, Eclipse was OK.

The main point of the test was to see how close the system was to being even usable. Considering Apple have maintained the OS X Java for a decade, I expected there to be no alternative that was even vaguely close to running "Hello World", let alone running something as complex as Eclipse. Instead, it worked pretty damn well, and (modulo licensing), I suspect even I could package up the results into a DMG that 95% of people could use to, i.e., build Android apps. More than that, consider the worst case scenario for OS X Java...

1) Apple don't ship anything with 10.7; 2) Oracle don't ship anything, nor do IBM; 3) Getting old versions of Apple Java running is impossible

Then, the real community experts have a nearly whole year of lead time (until Summer 2011, the earliest Lion ships) to convert what already limps along quite well into a decent Java SE SDK and runtime experience. This seems well within the grasp of them. Of course, if the community doesn't step up because it's not interested, then that rather makes the point that Java on OS X just isn't relevant any more.
Maybe it's because they are so diversified. Google more of a one trick pony. Their arnings could very easily plummet... all that's required is for a very large number of people to start typing "bing" into their browser bar instead of "google". Look how quickly people moved from Myspace to Facebook.

But Amazon is entrenched not just in books, but in many other retail markets, digital music, movie rentals, and cloud computing. The likelihood that they'd get trounced in all of those markets simultaneously is slimmer, just because there are so many of them, and they don't have any single competitor who could wipe them out.
Ha true. There were some perks of it, since he worked for the mountain he got a free season pass which was about $500, and when your monthly expenses are barely $500 that is signficant.
I experienced something similar when I upgraded my semi-ancicent MacBook up to 4gb of RAM and a faster hard drive, which had amazing (positive) effects on its performance. I suspect that a lot of OSX's performance problems result from slow IO or limited RAM (leading to paging, and slow I/O again, etc.).
They were just happy to support a new project like this.
Amazing - I literally had this idea just before lunch. I've dropped you an email with the details.

For anyone else in the UK, I'm happy to order a courier to collect your box from you. Shipping (£6 I think) will be deducted from the proceeds of sale. For now drop me an email - me@alexmuir.com.

At this rate I'll have an IPO on Monday.
KeyMate
I think Amazon is worth it. Sun launched cloud computing (http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/02/02/1839225&tid=...) all the way back in early 2005, while Amazon didn't even start public beta testing until August 2006. The real appreciable difference is marketing and positioning. When Sun launched their service, nobody could tell why it was interesting, when Amazon launched they created an industry.

What I think makes Amazon worth the money is their ability to enter a market that is incidental to online retail, and dominating it so thoroughly so quickly. If I heard Google was entering my market, I would be nervous, if I heard Amazon was entering my market, I would run.
I'll take it if you're in the UK. You don't have to send it - I'll arrange a courier to collect it. Drop me an email: me@alexmuir.com
[citation needed]

Seriously, is there a central index of janitors somewhere listing their highest level of educational achievement from which a precise number like 5057 can be read out? Did they interview twenty janitors, find one who claimed to have a PhD, and extrapolate? Did they derive the number completely ex anum? Because I'm finding it difficult to believe.
While a lot of people associate this company with info tech, Amazon shares more characteristics with companies like Costco and Walmart. These types of firms are focused on effective use of cash-flows in order to expand.

The PEs of superstores do not reflect the fact that they use much more debt than pure-tech firms. This debt contributes to cash-flows, which contributes to expanding operations. While Amazon may not be able to add new big-box stores with this cash, it can add more ads. Take a look at Amazon's return on equity (of which LT debt is a component) and you will see a brighter picture than depicted in this article.

PE is just one measure, and it is easily distorted in the short-run. Look at the business as it relates to the market price, and then compare it to other like businesses.
PHP really just isn't that bad. It's quirky but it's also quite capable.
Yes, becuase the person with the bachelors degree is obviously going to leave at the first oppurtunity and be unhappy about their salary and responsiblity the entire time. Filling a position costs money so best to do it less often.
Europe Gays Chat Room
Not so fast. One could also contend that phalluses are shaped that way because of evolutionary biology responding to underlying physics and geometry. Einstein's formulation of Occam's Razor was, "simple as possible, but no simpler." You haven't established your either-or choice as the only possibilities. (In other words, there is an underlying causation to both!)
Minority Report Interface Is Real, Hitting Mainstream Soon
The line peeking out below the navigation bar is distracting at best. It's better than a diagonal bar, though.
First look at HP's Slate 500 Tablet PC (photos)
If you're interested in developing Qt mobile apps, there's the $10M app challenge for North America at http://www.callingallinnovators.com/10m/
I don't like rails. When I do web development, I do it in PHP, and I avoid PHP rails-like frameworks as well. I prefer more control and most of projects don't fit into a nice box for rails.
Watch out Chrome
This analysis would be much more useful if (a) lifetime earnings were factored in as a data point, and (b) schools were reported separately (a PhD from MIT is a lot different from one from University of Phoenix, but the referenced study seems to treat them as equal).
What percentage of those janitors earned their degrees in the US? Are many of them immigrants?

If you are calling out the US education system, the questions above have to be answered.
Who cares what it's about so long as it funds development of rocketplane technology?
How to secure iPads for corporate use
Apple sells computers, Google sells online advertising. Amazon sells _everything_.
Somehow hackers are pirating iPhone apps right now (you can find pirated apps for free to install on jailbroken iphones). I don't know how they are doing it, but if the Mac App Store will work the same way, they've already solved it.

if i'm not mistaken, on the iphone they've just disabled the kernel checks that require binaries to be signed before running.

http://www.saurik.com/id/8

i'm not sure how apple is doing it on osx because it has to run lots of binaries that will never be signed.
I think the path to learning about parsers is different for everyone. Personally I started by reading docs for parser generators like YACC and Bison, then just started messing around until I felt I understood what was going on.

Picking a grammar that is fairly small is a definite help at the early stages which is why I chose S-Expressions for this post.

EDIT: getting started with lexers first may actually be an easier way to start. PEGs like in the article combine a lexer and parser, but understanding each separately is important.
Yeah, PHP is slow. It's just that the speed of your language doesn't really matter. What is, in my opinion, an advantage with PHP (but not exclusive to it) is the whole share-nothing design philosophy and mod_php.
Analysis done by an old friend of mine - he uses R to crunch campaign contributions and other indicators in order to understand the US political landscape. Pretty cool stuff if you are a geek and enjoy reading about politics.
Sure. So draft a spec and submit it to a standards committee!
The guy who received that response from Jobs is apparently one of them. I doubt he's alone.
Moving from PHP to C saved my web startup.
A few months ago I took the journey into startup land. I quit my job and decided to finish the project I had been thinking about finishing for a long time. A penny auction app where users are linked to facebook identities.

One major worry right from the start with this project was that it required a real time accurately synchronized countdown across multiple browsers. I was using ajax to call back to the server for an update every 1 second to accomplish this. I knew it was going to get interesting if a lot of users joined up because they would all be calling the server once every second.

Initially I thought we would run into trouble with bandwidth, but I was wrong. After 4 days we had about 150 users up and bidding when the server decided to crash (right in the middle of an ipad auction just because my luck is that good). Being on slicehost they had us upgraded within 20 minutes, but still we were working the server hard. The timer was skipping, we were getting all kinds of strange errors in the logs and things were looking pretty bad. It wasn't bandwidth, but memory and processor usage that were the problem.

I knew from reading articles on HN regularly that PHP is terrible, but I build the app in PHP anyways along with the 1 second callback. It was the fastest way to get things up and running for me.

That night I had an idea, if I built the 1 second call back portion of the app in C the server wouldn't have to load apache with all its extensions every 1 second. So I built a very simple fork server to send updates back for the real time update.

Result: Processor 99% idle even during heavy use and memory usage basically stays exactly the same whether or not more people are watching the auctions.

We now have a few thousand users and things have not changed at all, still running great. Of course this system will have its limits but so far we have not even dented it.

If you want to see it in action you can go to http://apps.facebook.com/bucktobid

Edit: For those who want a little more detail I have a lighttpd server listening on port 80 that redirects to apache for php calls. If the call comes in for .btb (a made up extension) lighttpd redirects to the C app which listens on another port locally and serves the needed info to the browser. The updater is 100% C/C++ not an apache module.
I'm torn here - the branding person in me loves unpackage [though sadly the .com isn't available]. The businessman says box2cash is going to appeal to the mass market and be memorable.

Copy - simply brilliant.
That happened to my co-founders and I on our previous product (the one visible at the website in my profile). The only thing our payment provider ended up being serious about was getting acquired.

We had to change providers about a year after we launched, and it ended up costing us nearly half of our early customers.
But being a leading retailer doesn't make you great. Zappos I believe had razor thin margins that really left little room for error.
JRR Tolkien worked this way as well. He wrote out all the days for the books and where everyone was, even down to what phase of the lunar cycle the day was. There was actually an exhibit of Tolkien's notes that toured around for a bit, and they looked not entirely unlike what Rowling created. For reference, the collection was from Marquette University. (http://www.marquette.edu/library/archives/tolkien.shtml)
If you want to work for a game company as a game developer you are right. I know some ridiculously bright people working for comparatively low wages in the industry.

If, however, you want to be a SysAdmin, or otherwise work on boring back end bullshit, my experience has been that if you don't mind being part of a department nobody listens to or cares about, game companies are good places to break into the industry (or to earn more than you would be worth elsewhere.) It's frustrating because you clearly have little autonomy or power, and management knows just about jack about ops work, and god help you if you interfere with a game's release schedule, but eh, the pay is good relative to the skill expected, and they are willing to hire people who are worse or less experienced than average, mostly because they don't know any better.
Professional degrees are degrees that are designed to prepare you for a specific profession. Those professions typically involve government regulation, with said regulation commonly requiring the degree in question. It's often used to indicate M.D. and J.D. degrees, although it also includes a slew of others, e.g., nursing, accounting, education.
A parking lot attendant is more likely to have a college degree than an electrician? As if I needed more cynicism about my life.
Portico's stuff requires java 1.3 and is still AWT and based on 1.1. WTF do they care about java 1.6+
If that really isn't an option, pay them more if the code runs faster.

The problem with this, is that any benchmark can be gamed. However, if your software runs daily batch processes, you can keep track of processing time and take the average time per transaction. Measuring actual performance in the production environment would be much harder to game.
Thanks. I was thinking giving them the weekend.
He is speaking from their perspective, where the important market is the iphone App Store. Essentially Apple is the publisher.
Somewhat of an aside, but because Apple jumped to x86 late in the game, they can make more assumptions about their CPU than Windows can (for example, all Intel processors on Macs have SSE2 or higher).

64-bit processors allow similar assumptions on Windows, too.
True, I should rephrase what I meant there: there is less motivation, other than the sheer challenge, to break their media DRM. With the possibility that apps will be only available through the store, there is some economic/first release motivation as well, so I'd expect the DRM breaking on that to be more agressive.
one page: http://www.itworld.com/print/124541
I talked w/ them in 06 or 07 about a job, back when "Rapleaf's goal is to make it more profitable to be ethical." (they're not indexed in archive.org so this was the closest I could find: http://www.squidoo.com/rapleaf)

Funny how their pivot has arguably taken them in the opposite direction from their initial stated goal.
You have a good point there. But I respectfully suggest that you haven't learned everything there is to learn from a set of photos.
To questions 1 and 2 the answer is yes. The only real way for most people to fight back is to report them to google: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/paidlinks?pli=1
Well, this is definitely worst than long sentence URLs. I can't imagine why (other than incompetence) a programmer would think that these URLs with ridiculously long parameter values are, shall we say, sensible.
You might want to check out http://railskits.com/saas/. Yes it actually costs money, but consider what your time is worth.
The ads on that site are absolutely horrendous, playing sound without warning and covering the main content. Flagged this link for that reason.
Reminds me of the story of the discus the Americans brought to the first modern Olympics.

From http://www.uh.edu/engines/epi1137.htm:

"Robert Garrett, from Princeton, competed in several events. The discus was unknown in America so he had a blacksmith fashion one like those in Greek art. It weighed 20 pounds -- much too heavy to throw. Once in Greece, he found that a modern discus only weighed five pounds. He practiced with one for a few days. Then he dethroned the Greek champion. Garret came home with four gold medals."
This data is pretty useless without data from other time periods.

And it seems like bashing high education is the cool thing to do nowadays. We use stories of the "I'm $200,000 in debt from my Ivy league B.A. in English and no one wants to hire me!" nature to justify that higher education is becoming irrelevant.

But I think we're all missing several pieces of the puzzle. One piece is that forget that what we're trying to optimize is happiness, and if those 13.4% of waiters are happy, then who cares if they have a BA or MA? OK, maybe we've wasted government money on their education, but can we call it a waste just because they didn't use that BA in English to do Englishy stuff? No. They're probably a more refined person because of those four years.

I do agree that higher education is broken. But higher education is broken in every single freaking country. The French spend less time in college, but they have a higher unemployment rate than us. Kenya's universities are based on entrance exams that encourages memorization and discourages critical thinking and imagination. Asia's universities are based on elite entrance exams where students to spend up to a year studying for.

Yes, higher education is broken. But so is everything else in this world.
Nice tracks. I had never heard of soundcloud before.

I did not mean to imply that we should settle for current technology, nor that the Core 2 Duo processor was the most totally awesomest thing ever. I just meant to posit that it was perfectly adequate for more than the most trivial of computing tasks, and, implicitly, many MBA users will probably be fine with it.
This is a good point: although it does depend on the interviewer, I know I personally am horrible at not showing what I think when I'm talking to someone (esp. as I'll usually ask a follow-up question to an answer I don't like, just to make sure they really are saying what I think they're saying). And if someone can't figure it out from there where they got it wrong, maybe they don't have the interpersonal skills we'd want in the first place...
>the cynical part in my brain now compels me to write something along the lines of "so this is the only thing you took away from that posting?".

The trollish part of my brain compels me to tell you that, while I didn't read what you wrote, you should capitalize the first letter of sentences.

But I did read it and I don't care too much about proper grammar ;-)
We have a well-established apprenticeship system for electricians and other skilled trades here in the States. Not all formal learning happens in colleges.
I think there is a net positive effect on society of more people having decent educations and committing to learn past the compulsory levels, even if these skills aren't put to good use in a direct way with a job.

What would be their solution, you can't retroactively decide that certain people shouldn't have attended college when down the track they either can't or decide not to take up a job in their field.
Rate my startup: Qwerly, people search for the social web
http://qwerly.com/

I'm resubmitting this because I'd really, really like some comments from the HN community. This is not "promotional": I'm wondering where to take it next, I'm wondering whether people think there is a business model here, I'm wondering whether I can get people to collaborate on it with me.

API currently disabled but ping me for access.
Sometimes it is more useful to look at companies on a yield perspective, that way you can compare them to "safe" assets and see how compelling a company really is.

In this case, Amazon features an earnings yield of:
1.4% and a Free Cash Flow yield of: 2.1%

10 Year US Treasuries are yielding 2.57%

Amazon, like Netflix, is run by a great operator. Both companies are trading at sky high valuations and it leaves little room for error. I could see both companies coming out on top, but I don't see much safety in either stock.
Foursquare Labs seems to have an excessive number of employees.
I'm surprised I haven't seen more parallels being drawn to Linux style package managers, or the Ubuntu Software Center.

The app store does the same thing. Linux distros get to say what apps are put in their repos based on arbitrary rules. I think a lot of the FUD and anti-Apple rhetoric is just that (and this is coming from a guy who doesn't like Apple!)

The more important issue, and one I think SOME pundits are getting right: Let Apple have their App Store, as long as they allow people to run arbitrary (read: any) programs on their Mac. If they start locking down the Mac computers like they do the iPhones, THEN will be the time to attack Jobs' character with more vitriol than even Zuckerberg has been getting.
Yes, hence the quotes around "evidence."
This is correct, I offer PCI complaince tools and advice, for recurring billing, you will need to have pci scanning on your servers, if your hosted and not doing sys admin yourselves or if you dont have sys admin skills it's going to cost you dearly. Basic advice, use a linode, get a sys admin who knows about pci compliance, set up pci compliant approved server, check with scanning software, we offer it for 200 GBP which includes the SAQ wizard which will save you days. pcicompliance.org.uk, nightmare process. Best advice, just starting, use Paypal...
I'd say for. A fully loaded Be desktop could easily weigh in at under 300MB. That would count as a "lightweight" Linux distro. BeOS was a lean machine.
I think the effort would be better spent refactoring the PHP code over time than migrating to a new language.
Weird. All three have the same item id. Note: their comment counts are now all zero.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/142733/dupes.png