skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That sounds fantastic.

I wish more cloud services realized that they can have a pretty generous policy re: killing user's data.

It's like timeouts in Redis/memcached: doubling the TTL won't generally double memory usage, or anything close to it, for most types of data. The more important issue is having timeouts vs. unbounded waste; the length of the timeout is so much less important that you could afford to be pretty generous.
He plans to have Blog, Pictures, Slides.
Can you do that on Git?!
I'd go for a simple static site (on a VPS) containing a brief introduction -- a main profile if you will -- and then let your actions on other services (github, bitbucket, facebook, twitter, flickr, tumblr, posterous etc) describe you.

You'd remove all the must-dos and still be able to learn a lot by administrating your own server. You can, for example, simplify deployment of your static site (fabric, capistrano, git-hooks etc), tweak performance (try different web servers, different settings and benchmark), increase security (keep up-to-date with best practices, patch software), set up ssh tunnels, a backup server, a closed version control repository and a lot more.
In the PC world, it's a mistake to argue whether or not Apple can beat Windows because it doesn't try to. Apple competes with Dell, HP, etc., not Microsoft. Apple can't beat them all combined but it can definitely beat many, maybe all, of them individually in terms of profits.

It's the exact same with phones. Apple doesn't need to sell 95% of the smart phones out there. It can and will make a bundle just selling 10%.
Sure, but ask any consumer what they think the best brand of tv is and it will probably fall between two or three brands that they can think of. I'm not saying a particular category can't be big enough to support a lot of brands. I'm saying in the consumers mind there are usually just 2 or three they think of.
And here is the google cache http://tinyurl.com/346nd6u
This winner-takes-all view of the market, perpetuated by the cliché of referring to an upstart as a "[market-leading product]-killer" is pervasive as it is unhealthy. No one's product has to kill anyone else's product for a market to evolve.
Pythagorean comma
I appreciate the constructive feedback. I agree it isn't going to be a walk in the part. This was one of those launch-early type things, so I can't honestly come up with a compelling argument (unless you're dying for WP7 support...).

I think if you want something simple/straighforward, or you are particularly keen on the open source nature of the drivers (which has its pros and cons) we offer a solid solution.

At the very least, I'd ask that you look us up again for your next game and see what's changed :)
The types of arguments made in this nytimes article make me angry- They are intellectually dishonest.

It is irrelevant if there is "income inequality". The rational question to ask is "what is the quality of life of low income workers?" Who cares if some wealthy person is making a lot of money.. Why begrudge them their wealth? Where is the logic in that?

It is mostly accepted among economists that poor people are better off today than they were in the 1970s. Do you believe these economists are wrong? Good: That is an argument I'm happy to have with you- It is a relevant and rational argument. I suspect the economists are right, but I'm not 100% sure on this, either.

On the other hand, it's possible there are rich people that acquired their wealth through underhanded means. Again, if you think this is the case I'm happy to have a discussion on that topic. I think there are many cases where this has proven to be true. However, it isn't relevant in a discussion on the situation faced by low income people, because the welfare of the poor and rich are separate issues. They are not linked in any simple-minded fashion.

In summary, I think the recent fad of discussing "income inequality" is a shell game that mixes together several unrelated issues and clouds attempts at rational conversation. It is a tool people use to make dishonest ideological arguments.
Map Reduce and Stream Processing
High Cost + Low Margins = No disruption any time soon.

The ubercab for parcel delivery service could work. But only if the margins get better doing it that way

You'd also need to get over the trust issues involved. I 'trust' that Royal Mail won't open my shit when they deliver it to me (when it actually comes).
By the way, this is about the millionth blog post I have seen like this. They could be machine generated for all I know.

"Android will take over because they sell more phones, therefore one should code for an Android app store and platform."

Something to ponder: Are the people who get Android phones (with the exception of a few Java or Linux geeks), because they are cheaper or "free" with the contract, the kind of people you want to target as your customer? Cheap people aren't flashing their cash.

Another point to ponder: Oracle is targeting Google's Java (ok Dalvik, but it if quacks like a duck...) that has been thrown onto every iPhone and iPad clone out there. And Oracle will win their lawsuit, because a jury will simply say, if it walks like a duck...

Is this a safe platform to code for? Maybe, but it is a gamble. Apple is facing a whole horde of jackals and vultures who want a scrap of meat, but they are much more vertically integrated and this includes the development environment, the language, the processor cores, you name it.
Regarding Cheezburger(LOLcats) network 
Some of their sites are built entirely on other people's creative work. In few minutes browsing one of their site I found couple of images from flickr that are copyright reserved.

But I'm curious how could they build a million dollar business with this model? How do they deal with issues arising from these?
Not short enough for a shirt probably, but still good:

Three mathematicians and three accountants are traveling by train to a conference. At the station, the three accountants each buy tickets and watch as the three mathematicians buy only a single ticket.

"How are three people going to travel on only one ticket?" asks an accountant. "Watch and you'll see," answers an mathematician. They all board the train. The accountants take their respective seats but all three mathematicians cram into a restroom and close the door behind them.

Shortly after the train has departed, the conductor comes around collecting tickets. He knocks on the restroom door and says, "Ticket, please." The door opens just a crack and a single arm emerges with a ticket in hand. The conductor takes it and moves on.

The accountants saw this and agreed it was quite a clever idea. So after the conference, the accountants decide to copy the mathematicians on the return trip and save some money (being clever with money, and all). When they get to the station they buy a single ticket for the return trip.

To their astonishment, the mathematicians don't buy a ticket at all. "How are you going to travel without a ticket?" asked one perplexed accountant.

"Watch and you'll see," answered an mathematician. When they board the train the three accountants cram into a restroom and the three mathematicians cram into another one nearby. The train departs.

Shortly afterward, one of the mathematicians leaves his restroom and walks over to the restroom where the accountants are hiding. He knocks on the door and says, "Ticket, please."
Yeah, actually. If you statically generate everything and use JS. Kind of a cool idea IMHO.

Of course for blogging, I love posterous.
While we're at jokes not suitable for t-shirts:

A mathematician, an engineer and a physicist were travelling through Scotland when they saw a black sheep through the window of the train.

"Aha", says the engineer, "I see that Scottish sheep are black."

"Hmm", says the physician, "You mean that some Scottish sheep are black".

"Nonono", says the mathematician, "All we know is that there is at least one sheep in Scotland, and that at least one side of that one sheep is black."
Github also seem to have removed the requirement to be a paid user to serve up your username.github.com repo via your own domain name.

Thus a free no-nonsense static site host. Yay!
Yes you can! It runs on Jekyll.

https://github.com/mojombo/jekyll
I would like to see a comparison of Free Trials vs. Free Plans. And upgrades from each.
Riak MapReduce: A Story In Three Acts
This Rocking Lead Singer is a 3D Hologram
The point is that why should I care?

Really, who wins over whom is something that I can not control. Neither do I have any say in the matter. So, what's the big deal? I haven't invested in Apple stock and neither have I bought a large share of Google. Why should I get so worked up about it?

Yes, I'm fascinated by this epic battle between 2 different philosophies, but I really don't care. People, books and my projects just matter more.

I would rather stand aside, read and chuckle than get heated up about something like this. That's what I was trying to say.
Disrupting online payments
Okay, will come from bbommarito@gmail.com
Agreed! And, I'm disappointed at where he didn't go, namely he didn't mention that during Jobs' exile, Apple's strategy was to make more and more money off fewer and fewer customers, by selling weak products at high prices.

Jobs has brought back an emphasis on building strong products and expanding their market share, in part by relentlessly driving prices down even when anyone with a spreadsheet can see that they could capture more revenue today by keeping prices high and selling fewer units.

The OP really didn't address the fact that while Android will be ubiquitous, hardware manufacturers will not get a free pass to compete with Apple on price as PC manufacturers did during the exile.

Also, the author missed the biggest point of comparison: Mac market share is still insignificant. But Apple's share of the profit is reputed to be larger than the top three PC manufacturers combined.

Will this play out again in the handset business?
There is a cage match, and it is for developer mindshare. Google's java clone environment vs. Apple's Obj-c solution.

This was the whole thrust of his article. Code for Android because pretty soon they will be dropping them from blimps for free.

The crucial bit for a developer is how do you make any money on a platform where cheap is the prime consideration. There are more Android units out there than iOS devices, yet iOS devices yield something like 92% of the dollar sales of applications. This is the most important figure to a developer who wants to eat, and yet in his analysis it is strangely absent.
Setting up carrierwave file uploads using remote GridFS on Rails 3 and mongoid
When I wrote 'What would a startup do that they couldn't?' I wasn't asking 'What services would a startup provide for end-customers that aren't provided by existing couriers?' I was asking 'How would a startup make a profit in this hard-to-enter market when Amazon, with all its advantages, has apparently decided it can't?'

Do you think Amazon couldn't provide realtime tracking or SMS notification? Those things are frills. They'd be nice. Maybe a few end-customers would pay slightly more for them. But they don't help you with the real problem, which is setting up a hub-and-spoke delivery network that's fine-grained enough to get a package from a central warehouse to any individual house in the country within three days for less than five bucks.

You, the person waiting for your package at home, are not the customer. The customer is Amazon. What the customer wants is delivery that's sufficiently reliable that it doesn't cost them business, and sufficiently cheap that it doesn't interfere with their efforts to undersell traditional retailers. Can you make them a viable offer on those grounds? If not, SMS notifications aren't going to change their mind.
Careful. What you say is somewhat true. But that side project/job doing what you really love is going to be increasingly starved for time. You may want to have a family or friends or hike or read or learn to play piano at some point. You'll be stuck with a somewhat non-enjoyable day job where much of the focus is on Oracle's tool stack.

That said, I completely poked my head-up after grad school, saw that there was some demand for skills that started with the "Oracle" adjective, and have found reasonably stable and lucrative work in those spaces.

I've also been able to move to a more open shop, where I've been able to sneak in some RoR and am currently hacking some Lisp to do, of all things, some ETL/data transformation stuff to make my life a little easier.

My bigger issue is that if you position yourself as the Oracle stack expert is that you may windup stuck in that professionally. I laughed when I read it, but I remember PG saying something about never being worried about competitors to Viaweb who advertised for Oracle programmers. It's a bit of an exaggeration, but the hackers I respect the most have been somewhat disappointed in their corporate "big IT" careers.
Over at http://www.zxbada.bbk.org/badaloc_fpga/index.htm there's a Xilinx Spartan FPGA project. It should be possible to shoehorn this into a laptop case too.
Ask HN: How do founders end up broke?
I've recently read stories of startups that became successful and were bought out for large sums, but the founders received little from the transaction.

How does this happen?

Also, how do cases like Steve Jobs and Harry Osborn occur where they are removed from their own company? Do VC's and Investors really take that much of the company? How much influence do they hold over a company they invest in?

Why would a founder continue if they lost their ownership? Why would a founder give up ownership of their company in the first place? Isn't one of the prominent appealing aspects of the start-up world to own your own company?

Yes, i know i used the green goblin as an example. On an unrelated sidethought, it would be fairly interesting to see the corporate dynamics of LexCorp and Wayne Enterprises interact with one another ... surely they would have corporate take-overs etc.

Sorry for all the questions ..... any thoughts would be great.
@rodp, I'm the author of the article, can you tell me more about your startup, what you're working on, what technology do you use? Pls email me at julia.krysztofiak (at) gmail.com Thanks!
Really "win" just means "able to sell lots of stuff and make a profit". Nintendo realized this a few years ago and actually was profitable with the gamecube even though it didn't come close to outselling the PS2.
As a student at a university, I totally agree. i hear more and more students complaining about the education, and more people (such as myself) starting to look elseware. A group of us have formed a "class" around some of the open courseware so that we are still in the class-like atmosphere. we want to learn. the university just refuses to teach us what we want and how we want to learn it.
What English Sounds Like to Foreigners
It was nagging to hear the song and feel like you should be able to understand it, but you don't.
Why? For the same reason that people cut flowers and put them in a vase in the middle of the table. Or that people shine their shoes, wash their cars, cut the lawn, trim their hair. Hint: it's not because they have to.

You don't have to render _everything_ as an image or flash to get the most eye-catching element on your landing page to look perfect.
Ah, indeed.

In the cloud usually means to me something like EC2 or Rackspace...etc.
I think the Rocks Avalanche Installer ( http://www.rocksclusters.org/rocks-doc/papers/two-pager/pape... ) is worthy of mention.

Any time there is a power outage in our HPC cluster, we have 1000 machines all downloading their new image using bittorrent via Avalanche. We are a small HPC shop. Places like LLNL or TACC have much bigger clusters probably have 10s of thousands of nodes that use Avalanche.
I always end up using my private server as a second development sandbox, so, if it were me, I'd pick something that's different from the stacks you have elsewhere.

Of the servers I have that aren't attached to any actual projects, I have one Solaris box, two Ubuntu Linodes, Github, an EC2 Micro with Ubuntu and a Fedora Slicehost. Oh, and a couple apps on AppEngine.

I rarely have to look far for an environment to 'test things out on' quickly without having to stand up a whole new VM or anything crazy.

That's just me though, and I don't know of anybody else that does it this way, so I wouldn't call it optimal.

The point though, was that if you've never played with the quirks of setting up something to run on EC2, do that. It's fun knowledge to have. Never coded against AppEngine? Do that. It's worth learning. Stick something up on Heroku if you want. Build a blog there.
That's awesome.

Does anyone know if they partner with distribution centres?

Basically I'm looking for 3 pieces of a puzzle:
1) A shopping cart solution that ties into distribution.
2) Distribution centres that take my stock and manage dispatching it.
3) Delivery services that will remove the pain for the customer (Shutl looks good).

The middle bit seems important as it needs to work with both the shopping cart and stock control system as well as the delivery service.
Having helped build tmedweb.tulane.edu as a student, I was intrigued to read:

> As Tulane University President Scott S. Cowen put it, the conference offered the potential for a “group therapy session,”

I agree with nl, the resistance to change is overwhelming, and it's bizarre to hear the fat cats can go to conferences for group therapy.

I think "edupunk" is at once too narrow and obviously a bit double-edged. More broadly, there is a profound resistance to consumers creating their own tools. Except in software. In software, it's celebrated. Developers have awesome tools for developing. But the students who want to develop a CMS for their school will be pushed around by "concerned" faculty until they graduate. Doctors who want to develop a better medical records system are locked out by pre-existing contracts and non-cooperation in the name of privacy and security.

A huge issue is that we aren't teaching everyone to write code. We don't need everyone to be a erlang systems programmer, but we need to give people the tools to become the innovators these university professors want. Why are we making every high school sophmore sit through geometry and learn binomial expansion when learning some basic python and sql would be a hell of a lot more applicable for anyone who actually wanted to do something done in today's economy?
Feedback on weblerr.com, any suggestions / ideas?
clickable: http://data.worldbank.org/developers
Daylight Savings Time and the non-neutrality of money
As the lion's share of phones are bought with a contract, this is a point that deafens my ear.

You buy your iPhone along with signing up for the contract. The networks throw in one of the Android iPhone clones for free with your contract. Very few people actually buy an Android phone, in the ultimate analysis, because there is no premium factor in having what amounts to a clunky, limited, and undesired iPhone lookalike with a slow GUI and hardly any apps.

Talk turkey to me.
There is a cage match, and it is for developer mindshare.

But that too is non-zero-sum. The number of hours spent on phone software development is increasing rapidly. If Apple continues to sell a substantial number of iPhones, and Android users start buying apps for their devices too, there's no reason there can't be two viable markets for phone-app developers. (I'm not saying it's inevitable that Android will become a viable platform—I'm just saying that, even if it does, its growth won't necessarily come out of Apple's hide.)
Of course, you should use ssize_t i and i <= INT_MAX...
Ask HN: What are your regrets?
I was asked the other day by a friend whether i regretted a few of the major decisions that I've made in life..
That got me wondering what kind of regrets people in a similar situation to me have.

So what are your regrets?
Very good points. I was thinking about the trust issue and it is tricky. Incentive for fencing the item(s) must be lower than incentive for delivery. Things like this comes to mind: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1848278

Might have to cap the cost of the items you can deliver to something like £200

Also if you knew what driver last had the package, and it was never delivered, then some sort of punishment happens. Works in theory but there is lots I am probably not thinking of :)
Gender equality stops wherever women want it to stop. It's called having your cake and eating it too.
One way to deal with the "stale data" problem is to prune old users from the system, but many people will be understandably dissatisfied with this, and it is not recommended.

I don't think you should worry too much about this. Someone who abandons a free service for an inordinate amount of time shouldn't expect to see their data. Especially when the cost of storing such data isn't nominal.

Send them one or two reminders and you should be fine.
assume: x = y
then: x^2 = y^2
I'm not using it yet but it's very interesting. Thanks for that!
I don't think so. In my experience, the only folks who pay for MySQL are big conservative companies who must have support contracts, and companies who bundle MySQL with their closed source products.

My gut feeling is that folks who will be directly impacted by Oracle price increases represent a tiny percentage of MySQL users.
assume: x = y
then: xx = xy
and then: xx - yy = xy - yy
factor: (x+y)(x-y) = y (x-y)
cancel: x+y = y
replace: x + x = x
simplify: 2 * x = x
therefore: 2 = 1
QED
From Mark's post:

"We’re confident we’ll be able to retain the ability to run X applications in a compatibility mode, so this is not a transition that needs to reset the world of desktop free software. Nor is it a transition everyone needs to make at the same time: for the same reason we’ll keep investing in the 2D experience on Ubuntu despite also believing that Unity, with all it’s GL dependencies, is the best interface for the desktop."

http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/551

I don't see this as much of a threat, as long as they keep the compatibility until they realize that all those graphics effects are about as useful as 3d movies.

Both the proprietary and free software worlds waste a lot of resources on that. Even minor GUI enhancements, such as the fact I can drag a window and it stays rendered instead of giving me a wire-frame TWM style, don't enhance useability much.
I am not optimistic about the success of droid phone store solutions. Much money can be had by individuals coding for app stores on their own, and most individuals will not target both platforms (in my opinion) so they go where the money is.

The fact of the matter is that droid users do NOT buy apps for the most part. Some do, but most do not.

There is also a desire to own the iPhone as a status symbol / fashion accessory. Nobody buys an iPhone clone running Android because it is cool, they get one thrown in for free with their contract.
Congratulations, you've just failed at science. Saying that a result is obvious and therefor the experiment is not worth performing is ... well, I'm having trouble coming up with how to describe it without insulting you. It's certainly not scientific, though.

Just because results are a forgone conclusion doesn't mean that it's not worth testing them. Just because you think that your hypothesis is very strong does not mean that you can skip testing it.
Even perfect numbers
Http://www.hide-the-ip.com/43-hide-my-ip.shtml