skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Love the UI, but was hoping for some info in 'How it was built'... technology stack, implementation process, etc.
This is just for England but you should get the picture: http://www.nhs.uk/NHSEngland/AboutNHSservices/Pages/NHSServi...
I understood what he said as:

Solving the problems of distributed systems is incredibly hard and not necessary if all you need is scalability and high availability. Better think of your problems in terms of engineering trade-offs and not distributed theory and understand what you are giving up and what this gains you.

When you decide to give up consistency, your application can no longer assume consistency ever. Giving up availability in case of network partition means few extra minutes of downtime a year.

I don't think he completely misunderstood distributed systems - I think he decided to completely side-step the entire field.
Maybe the differences are not big enough to justify increasing the probability of mistakes.
Magit for everyday use because buffers are split into expandable/collapsible sections which makes navigation a breeze (e.g. for adding hunks)

vc-annotate is a great interface for git-blame (Magit doesn't have this). vc-annotate-next/prev-revision are seriously handy.

Magit's interface for interactive rebase (bound to E in magit-status window - this is not in the latest docs) is not so handy. I tend to drop down into shell.

Make sure you have git core editor set to emacsclient -c of course.
Mobile Apps Showdown 2010
You almost seem to be proposing that, had this loophole not been available, you would have Google government funded for the same amount because the services Google provides are better than those provided by the government.
I have used Mechanical Turk quite extensively the last few months. But I have always used it via Crowdflower. They offer a more sensible API and interface. And they keep scores on all workers, and calculate how well they perform. This influcences the weight of their job submissions. It takes a bit getting used to their terms, but I'm quite happy with the end results.
You are laboring under the notion that people want to travel to and live on other planets because there is not enough habitable land on Earth.

That's not the case. People want to go, that's all that matters. Eventually technologically and economically it'll be feasible for that want to be met, and it will be.
tech guys have server naming schemes, lawyers have offshore tax-minimization entity naming schemes.

(personally if I ever got that big, I would name them all after characters from The Wire - just so I could say thing like 'lets shift all that to prop joe corp'. Hearing it all told back to you in court would be even more amusing.)
Ask HN: strategies to design?
One of the things I'm bad at is design, so I tend to just keep it really simple most of the time. Sometimes I look at the templates that are out there, and some of them look great, but I don't know, it doesn't feel totally right to use them.

What do you use when you have a new project that you want some design elements, some nice look for, if you're not a good designer? What strategies do you use? I don't particularly want to spend a lot of time on it. One strategy I've used is to just reuse the basic shell of a previous project.

Is there no other way to get it right than to spend a lot of time on it?

Any designers that can do good work?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/sci/tech/401227.stm

"The physical composition of asteroids is varied and in most cases poorly understood" - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid#Composition
For me most useful would be subscription to some EasyList or whatever it's called to block 90% of the ads.
Chrome triples its framerate, GWTQuake running at 90 fps
That's what I've heard from my professors. Bachelor level gets you working in the lower levels with the possibility to move up fairly small. Masters get working making more money and are the ones considered for promotions over any others barring PhDs.
The point of this comment is to provide perspective. Of course GMail has contributed to an improvement in life but compared to these other things the improvement is small. We are also assuming that had GMail not been created another company couldn't do it.
I seem to remember from one article that is was the same amount of transistors as the older ARM cores (not the A8 or A9). This is a pretty big anchor to overcome.

previous on HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1037051
The majority of Earth's history was spent in a state that contained simple single-celled organisms but no eukaryotes. Once eukaryotes showed up, everything changed rather abruptly. This is strong evidence against the idea that other alternatives would have arisen had we not been here to compete.
Less than 10% of the transistors dedicated to cache.
I'm not a web developer but somewhat curious, so please excuse this potentially inane question: How much can I actually do with one Micro Instance? Is it comparable to, say, a VPS in terms of handling and capabilities?

Or is it an entirely different animal?
Great article. As an example, it's fairly obvious Apple is building up it's internal CPU engineering abilities to inevitably put an ARM in a Macbook. But I don't think it will be in the near future due to breaking compatibility with current software, especially those who use SSE instructions. But who knows, maybe they'll create an x86 emulator for the transition like Rosetta. OS XI maybe?
Considering half of their taxes goes to the US military, I don't feel particularly bad about large companies paying less taxes. Even though it's not perhaps the best of all possible worlds, it's the name of the game, they'd be stupid not to.
I live in Toronto, and as the author suggests, I feel the pain. I really hope Nenshi succeeds and delivers some unequivocal, sweet results, then takes his record and runs federally. It would be awesome to have someone like Nenshi as prime minister, and what a great example this would set for all levels of Canadian government.
I suspect Google would argue that the benefit of living within the GAE constraints is that your app will scale-out without you worrying about the number of boxes required, the schemes employed for cache clustering, etc.
The theme for the contest was "Building a Business on Twilio" and the description was posted here:
http://contests.twilio.com/2010/09/build-your-business-with-...

While we can only commit to covering the travel costs for one developer, the contest was open to everyone - including existing startups.

"The partners at Union Square Ventures will serve as our judges for this round, and they will select one awesome Twilio-powered company to meet with them in New York City, all expenses paid. Three runners up will each receive $250 in Twilio credit to help get their businesses off the ground."
that's futile in the commodity business
It's worth pointing out (as the linked page does) that the survey was announced prominently on GitHub (and wasn't on some other Git hosting sites), so those results might be skewed.

(Either way though, they clearly do have a ton of very well-deserved mindshare. GitHub one of the very few services I find to be worth paying for. I wouldn't be nearly as attached to Git as I am if GitHub didn't exist.)
It might go better for ARM given that most of the more tightly controlled software that is delivered on ARMs (app store or custom embedded).
I can indeed understand your sentiment also. Hence my description of my behavior bordering on something close to OCD. I think I get that "feeling of clutter" a lot more easily than many people :P

For whatever reason though, I guess I don't really reinstall apps very often. Once I decide to remove something, it's almost always after pondering the issue for a little while and making a decision that I very rarely go back on. The only time I can remember reinstalling something on my Mac was Filezilla. I got myself a new FTP client, removed Filezilla as I didn't think I'd be using it anymore and then found out that my new FTP client had a bug that prevented proper connectivity via FTPS. So I went back to Filezilla and as luck would have it, Filezilla's preferences are stored in ~/.filezilla and they were all still there (because I didn't know about this directory). That was a small time saver.

I suspect a great deal of my attitude towards being (likely overly) careful about what I install/uninstall and what's left behind afterwards comes from my many years as a Windows user. I remember it even took me a while to figure out that you can usually just drag stuff to the Applications folder to install on a Mac, I kept thinking to myself "I'm missing something, it can't be this simple..."
Gearman is especially handy if you expose your application to it. I've got a wrapper that allows the app to push any function call out to the workers for async handling. So your image processing (or whatever heavy/blocking task) can be dispatched from within your standard libraries without having to maintain a separate set of code.
Barack Obama and Steve Jobs Meeting Today to Discuss Economy and Technology
Perhaps Amazon would argue that they're giving you some free units of SimpleDB, but access to a small MySQL environment would certainly allow a huge number of open source apps to be deployed without modification.
You, my friend, clearly share my vision. Would love to chat! Please email me: mh [/@t\] kodu.co :)

Working on a startup, actually, covering a lot of the topics you provided. I even applied for YCombinator. Really looking forward :) Hope to hear from you!
I love him! He's brilliant!!
The world's biggest charity owns IKEA - and is dedicated to interior design
I Love the Food in Kobe Japan
Hire a good designer, that's the main thing.

If you don't actually need good design, but just want something to not look god awful, the basic idea is to use colors that complement each other. I like to use http://colorschemedesigner.com/
So basically you toured the world, met awesome people, ran some wicked classes on doing cool stuff with Databases and came back with an extra $10k in your back burner... I reckon that counts as awesome.
And the post here sounds very NIH for not even mentioning Gearman in its survey of options.
I do wonder, for some of these higher performance devices could Intel / AMD build a version of their chip that was 64-bit only and removed a lot of the legacy instructions / vector attempts? Its not like a recompile / endian shift wouldn't be necessary going from ARM to x86, so it shouldn't add any time to the conversion. You have to account for all the variations of the x86 in a compiler anyway.
Making your software hard to interface with is making it less open. It's the same sort of move as making your word processor use an incompletely documented binary format.
Some of the free services are available to existing customers. We use SQS and welcome the free tier added there.
The Living Art Project
People like physical books. They're less enthusiastic about physical music or movies, which are the subjects in most discussions about piracy.
I like the general idea of putting more focus on good UX Engineers. But, this guy seems to think that making the back-end support a bunch of Ajax calls is easier than.

In fact, you start needing more work to make it efficient since you have to break down everything into exactly what needs to be in that call with appropriate permissions etc.
MOG CEO David Hyman Responds To imeem’s Dalton Caldwell
Very cool. The tool tips are amazing. The snippets are making me think whether an online version of Visual Studio might be possible.
While I agree with the central theme ("UI/UX Designers and developers are going to get harder to find") I don't agree with a lot of his reasons.

He's obviously not an engineer and doesn't really understand AJAX, jQuery or HTML5.

Personally, I believe the shortage is going to get worse because there is going to be an increase in demand and there are VERY few paths through traditional educational outlets that will produce a good UI/UX designer/engineer. HCI at Stanford is the closest I've seen recently while interviewing candidates, and even then it has less to do with web technologies than interaction principles.
Nothing. I submitted "foobar" and was then privvy to an endless stream of email addresses. A spammer's dream :)
Tangent: the Drake Equation seems to be the template for a class of "Google interview" questions: estimate something you can't really know, at least off the top of your head, in which you then start to identify factors, and start to guess at upper and lower bounds, to come back with a plausible answer, or at least a range. I suppose a lot of research is like that, but the Drake just happens to deal with factors that are harder to measure.
Build mobile applications with SproutCore
Builds. sbcl in particular is insanely verbose and is often limited by slow terminals. The readme for bootstrapping it even specifically suggests using xterm over gnome-teriminal/konsole.
Hey, Entrepreneurs: The $250 Million Poem
By "endless", you mean the 5-6 concurrent users likely on at the same time as you. Also, there's an extremely high chance that all the email addresses are throwaway accounts. It's not nearly as big of a deal as many have mentioned.
Maybe it would be better not to waste time on this and instead work on educating the public. How about a comic ("Facebook UIDs and You")? :D

Actually the problem is how Facebook is working its way into all parts of the internet with its widgets and Facebook logins.
So basically anything that would make it easier for developers to ship stuff that end users aren't allowed to hack is bad.

But if end users are hacking stuff, then they are also developers. Replace "end users" with "developers" and it gets interesting:

"So basically anything that would make it easier for developers to ship stuff that developers aren't allowed to hack is bad."

So making it hard to hack X for people trying to make Y hard to hack is okay. Seems a bit weird.
Adobe's down the Memory Hole - Flash memory? We love flash memory.
That's an interesting question that I don't think anyone would be able to quantify, just because performance is so subjective to the applications that are run. In an interview, Alan Kay remarked that bad processor architectures degrade performance by three orders of magnitude [1]. If he's right, that's a pretty hefty tax. But I don't see anyone being able to prove or disprove his hypothesis. Maybe most of the tax is an inevitable byproduct of increasingly complex chipsets.

[1] http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1039523 around 1/3 of the way in
Leadership of IronRuby and IronPython
TinySrc takes care of scaling your images for mobile screens
What does this controller do? Did you delete the code that used to be there?

http://github.com/holman/facelette/blob/master/app/controlle...
Jim Hugunin leaves Microsoft and IronPython
GAE has an advantage because it can put an app to sleep and wake it up on demand. So, Amazon's marginal cost of services is higher given that they must model the behavior of a physical box in terms of responsiveness. At a minimum, Amazon must maintain RAM allocation for the server, right?
I've used Magit for a while. Eventually I went back to the command line. The command line is still much faster than Magit
I would probably start a parallel system starting with 13 year olds and teach them the basics (reading, writing, math, science, history) through a program focusing on a trade or craft (limited selection obviously). Something where they can apply their knowledge in real world items but be taught the lessons through a focus they were interested in. Then setup the college years to broaden there knowledge and go into more traditional college subjects.

I guess if I ever get "really rich" I will try it privately.
Right after Iran :D
In twenty years vote for the progressive presidential candidate who was a naval nuclear engineer and has several science degrees.
With Google TV, I May Never Leave The Sofa Again
ApplicationController is sort of the general controller Rails generates that all your other controllers inherit from. Facelette is so simplistic I didn't need to dig into it at all.
Neat! It's obvious from the outside that they've put a helluva lot of thought into how to package this, but it's even more obvious from the inside.

I wonder what the next-generation Mac Mini will look like. Take out the batteries and the remaining components would be truly tiny. What I'd kinda like is to unplug my computer from its desktop keyboard and screen at the end of the day, take it home in my pocket, and plug it into my keyboard and screen at home.
Having dealt with GAE for a while, I can say that EC2 and GAE don't create much competition for each other. Granted that user-facing result is the same - applications, yet both are a completely different model of doing applications. To that extent, I imagine developers choosing their respective platform out of these two will have different mindsets or requirements.

In GAE, you have the privilege of bypassing the administrative stuff - creating/deleting/configuring instances, choosing software, amongst other things. Quite useful for some app categories, like web-apps/web-services for verticals, where you want to concentrate on the business logic and the rest doesn't matter as long as the app works.

EC2 is great too, and attracts developers who require more freedom in terms of software architecture, and choice of components, but comes with a the non-trivial administrative costs. (I do imagine EC2 consultants being in-demand, sooner or later.)

I think both models have potential to succeed, and should be able to nicely co-exist. This free-to-jumpstart approach is perhaps targeted just to stir up AWS demand.
If I could stream all titles available for rent, I would never receive a DvD in the mail anymore.

For a full stream access to all titles I would even pay around $20/month.

However, without rented titles you just don't get a lot of good stuff.
Goodbye to optical drives in future MacBooks and MacBook Pros
This bit is interesting: "In the 2,900 cubic kms of Eros, there is more aluminium, gold, silver, zinc and other base and precious metals than have ever been excavated in history or indeed, could ever be excavated from the upper layers of the Earth's crust.

That is just in one asteroid and not a very large one at that. There are thousands of asteroids out there."
Actually, you are wrong, we have one of the highest corporate tax rates in the world when you also take into account the state tax: http://www.taxfoundation.org/research/show/22917.html
The distinction is much stronger in Columbia. There you are part of an entirely different school (School of Graduate Studies), which shows up on your diploma and transcripts and which you are supposed to put on your resume. While you may take the same classes and get a degree that sounds the same as the ordinary undergrad schools (Columbia College and Barnard College) you have technically got that degree from a different school.

And they say that transferring out of that school into Columbia college is not easy at all.
I think the point is to run the worker outside of a web request and using a cron job
This is pretty comparable to a Linode 512 slice, but with a little more memory. The configuration is VASTLY different however. EC2 instances are basically writable CD images -- which is to say, whatever you 'imprint' it with as the image is what it will be every time it's rebooted. You can store /tmp and /dev/null content on the instance just fine, so long as you know they won't be there when you reboot. You are free to take 'snapshots' of important changes (like, I just deployed my new app, let's create a new image).

To supplement this, they're also offering Elastic Block, which is an on-demand, resizable static partition. This is your long-term disk, but it's sold seperately, and has different usage / pricing metrics.

Generally speaking, you allocate your storage, then build your EC2 image, then create a mount, set up your application / server configuration / etc, then take a snapshot. That snapshot is the image you'll boot in the future.
Why is that "shenanigans"? I've asked to be put on promotional pricing many times as an existing user of other companies and you know what... they often give it to me. Why? Because I'm free to give my money to someone else.

It's a way of showing appreciation and that they don't take you for granted. Period. (sorry, I had to)

If you aren't negotiating better terms for recurring services, then you are giving money away. Promotions are just a nice bit of leverage in negotiations.
Try scrolling large amounts of text in MacVim, where the whole screen is refreshed, and then try the same in xterm+vim. MacVim is painfull to watch doing this, feel like working over a 300 baud modem. xterm/X11+vim are VERY fast combination for pure text editing, and that matters to me greatly.
Same applies to Terminal.app (and it refuses to work in 256 colors, unlike xterm)
I've been very satisfied with Qt on the mac. I've ported a couple of linux applications I use. They are not as good as truely native ports (MacVim is clearly more of a "mac" app then any Qt built application), but it gets basic things like menu bar at the top and shortcuts using command instead of ctl right.
Why not?

Hosting your own Git repository is not an overly complicated affair, and even if GitHub did not exist, what would be the lure of an alternate content repository mechanism?
Where YouTube Live Will Live
I don’t think it should scare you if you are careful about your online activity
Gosh, people must be bad at interviewing...turning up in business attire (no matter the company culture), turning your mobile off and arriving (reasonably) early are fundamentals.

I've never had a problem once getting to the interview stage and have been quite proud that I tend to be seen as valuable, but if thats the competition, I'm less impressed with myself...
The Mars trilogy[1] (Red Mars, Green Mars and Blue Mars) by Kim Stanley Robinson is a great tutorial on how we could approach such an endeavor.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_trilogy
The broader question is whether that fiduciary duty is best served by maximizing short-term profits or long-term reliability (including abstractions such as goodwill and a stable regulatory environment).
I take my cell phone and iPod, and ask the waitstaff to please keep an eye on the laptop (which I've locked to the login screen). I figure that's good enough.
I think of Unix as more of a local-maxima than a fundamental item like the wheel. It's more like the internal combustion engine: there's been lots of technologies proposed that fix problems with it, but it's managed to improve faster than those technologies can gain traction.
That whole prestige thing is BUNK.

For the record, I'm a graduate of the Harvard Extension program (undergrad) and I'm also a member of the Harvard Club of NY.

If you're in your 20's and have no other accomplishments to speak of then the signaling effect of having an Ivy League degree is probably going to do something for you.

But if you're in your 30s or 40s, you're going to be judged on what you've done outside of an academic environment by almost every single person you meet.

In fact, trying to game the prestige game in your 30s or 40s by touting your Ivy League degree is likely to have a NEGATIVE effect on your prospects. Just ask anyone from Harvard about the "dropping the H-bomb."

Personally, I think the whole prestige thing is just so much hot air. I've met plenty of dolts with Harvard degrees and plenty of supremely intelligent people who have only a year or two of college.

Keep this in mind: I have tons of friends who did an undergrad and a graduate degree at Harvard; not a single one has ever held that over my head or compared my degree with theirs.
Downloading Encrypted and Compressed Files with Python