skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm interested in why he's so against the "custom solution". Almost everything a DB will try and add in for key-value lookup is predicated on the idea that the requests aren't randomly distributed. The DB index will probably be based around b-trees, which will do a logarithmic-time search for the top few levels cached in RAM, but will fall over fairly miserably with multiple seeks as it has to page in leaf nodes and likely the nodes a level above those: I don't see it as realistic to expect a DB to do it all in a single seek.

On the other hand, if you have a perfect hash function for the keyspace into a hash addressing space (you'll want something a bit larger than 2^32), you could simply choose the device with the first few bits, then do a single seek into a (large) file on disk with the position indicated by the remaining bits of the hash addressing space, shifted over appropriately for the 128-byte stride of values. You don't even need a perfect hash: with a merely good hash function, you can cheaply read in more than 128 bytes from disk (OS will probably be reading in 4K anyhow), and use open addressing with linear probing.

You'll need enough devices to spread the load to get good latency for random seeks; probably a combination of mirroring and what amounts to sharding, using a portion of the key hash to select the device. But that's a relatively cheap numbers game.

But I'm not really seeing what a DB buys you here, in this specific scenario.

EDIT: Further investigation of tc and cdb (as linked in the article) suggests that tc (Tokyo Cabinet) may work in its hash form, but I'd rule out cdb for using two seeks, which I would expect to double the number of devices required.
what is the best way to get whitelisted for more than 360/hour API calls? I'm trying to do some network analysis and data mining and am held up by the API limit. I've applied about 4-5 times and have been denied each time.
I would vote Python, simply for the PythonWin environment.
Carly Fiorina's troubling telecom past
That seems like a particularly relevant time to talk about it, though. When someone from the tech industry is being proposed for some position with greater power, isn't that a good time to review the existing information as a basis on which to make decisions? I'd say the same of positive reviews: if someone thought Fiorina was a great CEO, now, when people are about to make decisions about whether she should be a Senator or not, is a great time to write that piece and tell us why. I guess it'll still be relevant for the history books to write it in 10 years, but it's more practically useful to write it when people can actually use the information.
It sounds interesting but storage has no real relationship with bandwidth.

That imgur site has 11 gigabytes of images - $1,100 per month - and it's serving 10 terabytes a day of traffic.

What happens if the next imgur signs up?
You are right. That's what we had initially set out to do, but I think what happened is we went in and rather than coming up with our own numbers, we were trying to make heads and tails of theirs.

But perhaps we should have gone in, and used a clean slate to start analyzing everything - for a month say.

Then go from there.

Thanks for talking this through with me. It really helped.

Out of curiosity, what do you do? Have you run a bakery/restaurant before? Where'd your experience come from?
“The idea is you need to make it easy for copyright owners to locate who you send infringement notices to,” he says. “They shouldn’t have to go hunting around.”"

It seems to me that including a "DMCA takedown request" link in your footer should be good enough, but IANAL..

Also, since I'm quoting this article, perhaps HN should have one ;)
Offer HN: Help with Adobe Flex internals
I've done a lot work looking at the internals of Flex and the Actionscript VM. Feel free to email me any questions or problems you may have. I can help especially with memory management, blazeds, how events are triggered and propagate, and optimization.

offerhnflex@gmail.com, or post here: I'll check both and answer anything I can.
Wrong community.
Google is Closed Just Like Apple
Thanks, malbiniak! I agree that, as interesting as Offer HN could be, the real opportunities to help others will be in continuing to read Ask HN posts and offering your services there, where there's a good match.

As someone mentioned already, you can give your services away to a lot of people, and possibly only 1 will really need it, be grateful, and pay it forward. So why not save your free services for that 1 'special' HNer who asks for help? Just a thought...
Thanks. Cool tool by the way, there's a big need out there for this kind of functionality.
The few writers in Hollywood that I know will write 50 stories for every one that gets made into a movie/short/etc. Many stories are written down just as experiments or to get an idea out of the system... very similar to how I work as a code hacker.

There are, of course, uncreative money-grubbing people in Hollywood... just like in the tech world.
Is this something you can do after being sued?
On the take a tour page:

#2 should be for YOUR page layout, not for you page layout

#3 should be customize your images, not customize the your images

On about us page:

Sentence reads as: These tabs can contain anything and can be completely custom, so what is the catch.

Should be: These tabs can contain anything and can be completely custom, so what is the catch?

question mark should be at end.

Sentence reads as: Well, you have to learn FHTML and figure out how to get it onto you Facebook Fan Page. This can be tricky, so we decided to call oursleves Tab Trick.

Should be: Well, you have to learn FHTML and figure out how to get it onto your Facebook Fan Page. This can be tricky, so we decided to call ourselves Tab Trick.

Other than minor spelling mistakes, the site looks good. Very clean and easy to navigate. One thing I did notice is that it looks like there's 2 "Features" pages, one at http://tabtrick.com/take-the-tour and the other at http://tabtrick.com/features

Can these be combined? I like how the images are bigger on the features page. You're leaving a ton of white space on the take a tour page, so it should be reformatted to make the images larger so I dont need to click on every one to see what it is.

Since the whole thing is based on facebook, why do you have 3 login options? They need a facebook acct to use your product, so perhaps they can just login with their facebook login only. Also, should include directions on how to setup a facebook account. If you can automate that part, then you've basically done everything for them and made it even easier to use your product.
For anyone in Australia, it would be cheaper to pay them to put the data on a HDD, wrap it in bacon and hand deliver it - rather than download the torrent.
I was trying to make fun of the Wii controller... oh well, you can't win them all...
The first photograph of a Human
The form says this:

"Additional $30 per group of 10 or fewer."

on the field: "Alternative Name of Service Provider."
Hopefully your partner doesn't forward your emails.
http://www.toonboom.com/products/toon-boom-studio/
Does no-one in the legal system see the injustice of current copyright law?

Current? Are you crazy? It's alway been unjust and it is alway been driven by special interests.

Even their origin is cursed! It was originally used to censor views that the royalty doesn't like.

However, it is my interest for copyright to be unjust as possible. Why? Because it drive business. If companies are suing their customers for piracy of their software, that mean more business for me. Everybody lose in lawsuits, except lawyers and copyfree businessmen like me.

Those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat statement as if it were a new modern problem.
Don't Be A Digital Social Liability
We don't know any of the actual details, so it's pretty useless to speculate. It's entirely possible for undercover cops to gather this type of information without even close to being entrapment. Remember, you have to be induced to committing a crime that you would have committed otherwise for it to be entrapment.

Having an undercover contact you and go "you wanna help kill americans" and you go out of your way to confirm that they are legit, and then say "sure, let's scheme together" is not entrapment. Just like how if someone approaches you and says "wanna buy some weed", it ain't entrapment when you get busted.
Do your professors talk about the state of healthcare in the USA / share their opinions with you?

Could you estimate in rough percentages, if at all: Of your peers in medical school, how many of them are interested in becoming a doctor for purely altruistic reasons? How many defaulted to med school because it is something appropriate for intelligent people and pleases their parents?
An idea I've tried a bit in the past (and would like to try more, given the chance): ask a question that you don't know the answer to. This shifts the power balance of the interview - you don't automatically have the answer over the candidate. You also don't have your mind closed by your expected answer(s). Both of these make the resulting discussion more comparable to how you will work with a colleague, which is what you are trying to test the candidate for, after all.

Doing this requires more effort and guts from the interviewer, but it's still easier than being on the other side of the desk. Finding a supply of suitable questions is probably the trickiest part - you could try looking up some problems from competitions just prior to the interview, or you could perhaps take a real problem you are trying to solve at that point in time (abstracted as required).
Twitious: easily bookmark your tweeted links
Hah, I remember Andrey asking me this question in my Ning interviews :)
Yes; if there's something wrong with your application or the check doesn't clear you'll get a letter warning you to rectify the problem or see the registration canceled.

If you're not going to use an attorney, which you should, then at least write/email the SoS office to verify specifics like this. Don't forget you'll also need a city or county business license, will need to file a fictitious name statement and have it published in a newspaper of record, and so on. How much of your time will these tasks consume, and is that time worth more than the cost of having it done by a licensed professional?

IANAL btw but there are several California lawyers here on HN.
PHP die? Unlikely.

Among the people I know who are primarily Ruby devs I find some number who are looking at Haskell, Clojure, and JavaScript, and some may just move from Ruby to language X.

Among the PHP people I know, some have an interest in Ruby, but few seem inclined to make the switch. Same goes for ASP/.net devs I know.

And, overall, I get the sense there are more PHP developers than Rubyists (at least in my part of the world).

I gave an intro Ruby class at a recent CodeCamp, and attendance was much lower than similar presentations I've given in previous years. (My intro Haskell presentation had more people.)

All this is anecdotal, but PHP seems to work really well for solving enough problems for enough people. We can dismiss these people as lacking sophistication or 1337-ness but apparently they are quite happy, and there's something to be said for that.
The 360 has recently started making a profit, why? Because they released the 360 making a loss, and dropped the price rather quickly. They then dropped the price even more. And even more.

IIRC they've always made money off of the special edition elite consoles, they've been making a profit off of the elite as a whole for a while now, however these represent a small amount of their sales compared to the big sales of the arcade consoles they had.

PS3 made huge losses to try to stay competitive with 360, and never really dropped much in price and lost huge market share because of it.

However, both have been ridiculous profit makers for their parent companies as the entire devision makes wheelbarrow loads of cash from selling games for ridiculous prices (again something Sony fucked up with by getting greedy in the beginning, although Xbox eventually followed).
A few questions:

1 - If I have a blog on Posterous, is it they who need to do this, or I?

2 - From the form: who is the "Service Provider"?

3 - From the form: who is the "Agent Designated to Receive Notification of Claimed Infringement"?

Some of these might be obvious, but I'd rather not screw up a legal form.
I'm not a therapist, but it seems to me that you should focus on what you're passionate about. It sounds like you're having a problem with other people (society, parents, etc.) telling you what's important in life and you're not buying into it. Good for you! It sounds like you're in the midst of a quarter-life crisis (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quarter-life_crisis).

Stop thinking that "what to do with your life" is a choice that you have to make. Just do stuff. When something doesn't make you happy, drop it. When something does make you happy, double-down on it. When it stops being fun and starts being work, find something else to do.

The one thing that jumped out to me is that your daily exercise routine energizes you and makes you feel good. Why not pursue that? Find a way to do more of what you love and less of what you don't. Instead of being paralyzed by feeling like you're being pressured to make choices, be excited that the world is open in front of you and you have the ability to do whatever you want, everyone else be damned.
OSX 10.7 (Lion) and beyond: How we should have sandboxed applications like iOS
That wasn't about building things for its own sake, though, that was about building things in order to hang out with some ghostly baseball players.

(Or something; I haven't actually seen the movie but I gather that's what it's about.)

Doing something for its own sake (also known as doing something for the hell of it) may be a realistic reason for doing things in the real world, but it doesn't make much of a story. Drama is all about motivation, and about characters striving after the things they want, and if your character does things for no other motivation than "Meh, I was bored and I kinda felt like it, and it was sorta fun" then it's a dull story.

I've got a story for you. Kevin Costner is a corn farmer, and one day he gets up and said "Y'know what? I think I'll build a baseball field in my cornfield". A few weeks later he's finished, and he says "Well, that was fun". Good story? I don't think so.
Some informative links, in case you haven't seen them already:

* http://www.quora.com/What-caused-Foursquares-downtime-on-Oct...

* http://blog.foursquare.com/2010/10/05/so-that-was-a-bummer/

* https://groups.google.com/group/mongodb-user/browse_thread/t...

Someone on this thread suggested that Foursquare's performance problem is related to the calculation of badges. I'm not sure where this idea came from. I haven't seen any mention of the issue being related to badges in first or secondhand sources.

That said, Mongo DB's map/reduce operation would not be a reasonable solution at this time. Mongo DB's map/reduce performance is, at present, somewhat lacking because it runs via the javascript engine which is currently single threaded. I know there are plans to improve performance of Mongo DB's javascript engine by switching to V8, but I don't know if V8 is multithreaded.

Often design decisions that look bad in hindsight get baked in early. By the time you realize that an alternate design would yield better performance, there may be too much data to migrate so you just have to live with it.
Or you could host all the blogs and charge each blogger $10 for "hosting fees." I don't really see how the idea is all that clever, either from a standpoint of getting rich or toying with the law. I'd assume the major blog-hosting companies are already safe-harbored up.
It may have begun as a revenge stunt, but somewhere between the $1 and $25,000,000,000 valuation points, it was no longer a revenge stunt.

MZ would have lost interest at about the $12 point if it were just about revenge, and I think the typical viewer will understand that.
I checked, my very first website is thus far not there. I'll wait until you're finished, and if it doesn't appear I can send the offline backup. I've been carting it around for 10 years, laughing at the animated graphics and frames.
No. how hard is for you to switch majors? US students do that frequently, it's not considered a bad thing.
This is from the Google stable of morals - if people don't know you're profiting from their copyright then it's OK.

Presumably you have no legal right to redistribute any of the Geocities stuff?

The fact you spent time and money on it is neither here nor there, that's not a moral|legal argument. Presumably there have been some exceptions (you intimate that), what sort of percentage does that amount to? If you calculate that as a true reflection of the whole population then how many people's copyright do you suppose you've infringed, knowingly, against their wishes?

If someone takes your published material and slaps ads on it and republishes without your knowledge is that all good with you? (I'm guessing you may say yes here!).

It's not just about economics, it's probably as much about moral rights. People believe that their Geocities content died and was buried.

Of course they are pretty minor "offences" (or at least appears so) across a large population - akin to being a spammer or somesuch. Actually scratch that this is simply like copying others blog posts on a massive scale.
I like the concept of "Digital Heritage" as they call it.

I think preserving digital heritage may become an important issue in the next few years. As the world begins to recognize the historic legacy of the web, it may someday become as important as preserving physical historical landmarks.

Its time to accept that the internet may be the greatest legacy 21st century civilization leaves behind. It likely isn't going anywhere, and is the most complete archive of our lives, that may live on for generations after we're dead.

For all we know, the things we type here could be preserved longer than the pyramids of giza should someone make sure to back it up regularly. I hope that someone does.
HN members pls comment on this homepage - User experience
I built this site [www.adclays.com]. I think most people do not understand what we do. What do you think about it and how can i improve it.
Ah, you're right. I was reading too quickly. :) The general point stands, but yeah. Not a good example.
It would be awesome if you could start from an existing web-page and work from there.
Yeah, Sha's pinboard are awesome. We're in invite-only, not "stealth".

We're excited to open up very soon though.
Content manufactured for HN is way more annoying than offers could possibly be.

Not just this either.... people who shift their insight or opinion from the comment box to their blog as well.
It's going to be tough on you and your family, but tradition be damned, follow your own path, not the one set out for you.

If this major doesn't interest you, if you can switch to one that does. To have these thoughts at your age is strange to me, you sound like someone imprisoned rather than a young person with their life ahead of them.

Look after yourself first, then worry about looking after others, and don't take social pressure created in different days than the current ones as limiting your ability to choose your own life.

The days of arranged marriages and career paths laid out by family are over. As an Indian person you will have to probably over come a significant amount of resistance in order to even be allowed to attempt to chart your own path, but even that permission is not theirs to give.

When I dropped out of highschool my family lamented that that was the end of my chances on a life worth living. I didn't hear my mom complaining when I put her on the payroll of my company to tide her over after she got ill (stroke) and was not able to work a normal job for a while.

Your life, your choices. There is nothing wrong with you.

best of luck!
Perhaps you could register DMCAcontact and be the sole DMCA contact for anyone in your "network" (those who pay you $10). Why would domain name or even physical server be relevant.

You could literally make millions off this.
Placeholder images - really, stretchable white boxes with borders would be fine - or the ability to upload an image would be helpful. having to put in a URL means I have to stop my workflow to create and FTP or whatever an image.
Nicely done Ilya!

Those of you who think marketing can be postponed until you are ready for launch - I seriously urge you to reconsider. You should be thinking of marketing strategy before you start writing code.
This site was built by Joel Moss in about 2 weeks, using Rails 3 and Ruby 1.9.2.

The project is hosted on Codaset (also built by Joel) at http://codaset.com/joelmoss/twitious
I mention Codaset because, although the source code is private, you can raise bug or feature tickets there and help Joel improve the site.
To quote the exact law: "The limitations on liability established in this subsection apply to a service provider only if the service provider has designated an agent to receive notifications of claimed infringement described in paragraph (3), by making available through its service, including on its website in a location accessible to the public, and by providing to the Copyright Office, substantially the following information"

IANAL, but it looks like it is not enough to put it in the footer if you don't also give the information to the Copyright office.
I have no idea if anything exists to do that. I've never found it if it does. I have no idea how to do that, either. But I'll certainly keep it in mind. Maybe once I've whittled down the todo list I'll come back to it and see if I can solve it.
Ask Hn:  Is The English Language Evolving?
With text messaging dominating younger generations... is the English language changing? Similar to what happened with 'Old English' writing, will language of today evolve as well?
What amount of liquid capital would you deem appropriate to have before beginning to "invest" and not play with stocks? I have heard that it is not worth the risk for anything below $18,000.

Same question, only for options.

What percentages of capital should someone in their 20s split investment between bonds/index funds/stocks?

What do you think about ishares vs. ETFs for 8 months to 2 year investments into emerging markets?
Why did you get denied? If you don't know, ask @episod/Taylor to tell you.
3 Years In Stealth, $20 Million Raised, Aro Mobile Shows Android Skin - Invites.
Somewhat related, how is proof of authorship demonstrated if the author decides to dedicate it to the public domain or something less restrictive than copyright? Is, for instance, archive.org considered legitimate evidence that "on day X you had published Y"? Any similar options?
It is digital archeology. The content was as good as gone, just someone dug it up and put a big banner ad over it and selling lemonade on the side.
Not when there's so many major open source projects written in PHP (Joomla, Drupal, Wordpress, etc), and PHP support comes standard in every shared hosting environment out there.

The install density is way too high, the language has been improved to the point where most of the issues people have with it are aesthetic, and there are a good amount of solid development frameworks out there to fill in any gaps.

I think anyone who says PHP will die anytime soon is engaging in simple wishful thinking.
... not an issue if the questions are relevant to the job. On the other hand, recruiting is hard and it's easy to let a great candidate slip by for any number of reasons.