skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Network latency as data storage
Any transmission channel with a delay between the time a packet leaves the sender and reaches the receiver, is effectively storing the information contained in the packet during the time of travel.

So one could store information in that packet, in such a way that it does not need to be stored in the end nodes of the network.

Has anyone looked at this in theory (or in practice)?
Even if it was a good idea, considering the pace of technological development today do you see more benefit in one generation of practiced eugenics versus the advances in technology during that generation?

Also, which of your arguments still apply to the world's most populous country?
The health risks can't just be quantified by the overall radiation dose. It depends on how that dose is deposited in the subject. The letter raises the concern that the since almost all the radiation is absorbed by the skin, the dose to your first centimeter or two of epidermal tissue may be fairly high. If the calculations that concluded the devices were safe assumed that the radiation was evenly distributed throughout the body, then the safety of the devices could be suspect.
For the Heroku deal, is that for new paying user or just new users? I've had a free account for a while, but I may buy the appsumo deal just for the Heroku credit.
InnoDB was initially designed as a KVS. MySQL only added the SQL frontend to it.

Initially, MySQL also supported BerkeleyDB, another KVS, but as for now they dropped the support.

From InnoDB's point of view, MySQL is just a client, as is HandlerSocket the author is using.

PostgreSQL's storage engine is much more closely integrated into the system and has no low-level API easily available from the outside.
Learning the Craft: Coding Dojo
I am not usually one to bitch about a lack of social media integration, but this definitely should be something integrating into my facebook/twitter streams.
Who are the polite Indians?
There's a post over on Reddit about the large number of polite Indians who seem to pop up when interesting programs are posted asking for help (often, really basic or odd help).

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/e39xr/the_posting_of_an_open_source_payroll_app_with_a/

I've experienced exactly this on my own blog (see, for example, comments on this post: http://blog.jgc.org/2008/02/tonight-im-going-to-write-myself-aston.html)

Does anyone have insight into who these folks are? Are they students? This seems like an interesting cultural phenomenon. These folks are universally polite, but seem to have little clue. Often asking the most basic questions which seem to indicate that they have little knowledge. Given their low level of knowledge it's striking that they are often trying to download and understand quite complex programs. Many times they seem to not even be able to locate the download link for source code.

In almost all cases it appears that these folks are from India.
It's so easy to get caught up in the halo/horn effect and try to make every fact about backscatter machines bad. But the truth is complicated. It requires weighing all evidence, not just looking at evidence that agrees with your current views.

89,000 times lower than the annual limit.

I'm not a fan of the TSA or backscatter machines, but facts are not up for debate. If backscatter machines cause cancer, it would be very surprising and it would tell us something new about physics and/or biology.

Also, if you worried about every risk that was as low as backscatter machines, you simply wouldn't be able to function in society. 5 minutes in a car is a 1 in 5 million chance of death.
Godwin Law, you loose the argument!!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law
I recently tried to switch to using non-fullsize browser windows, which is pretty much the reason for windows I think, but so many sites force huge page widths that it becomes unusable.
OS X is using ssh-agent itself, via a launchd monitored socket. Apple's version of ssh-agent is customised to automatically get passphrases for keys from the keychain.
So... do I get this right? Learning Haskell is bad, because writing Haskell in C# looks worse than writing C# in C#? Sorry, but that is nothing new.

I mean, yes. I can write shorter and more expressive solutions to a problem in Python, and I dislike writing code in Java especially if I can see how this would be easier in python or in haskell... but if I just write idiomatic, good Java/C# code in the respective language, the code will look pretty well.

So.. I don't buy this at all.
Our new app is designed fluid with a min-width of 728px, which means it will fit inside iPad, while stretch out on desktop. With "Responsive Design"¹ you could also show/hide features depending on the screen estate.

¹ http://www.alistapart.com/articles/responsive-web-design/
The latest release of PosgreSQL includes hstore:

http://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/hstore.html
Seems like a great way to generate yourself hundreds of dollars worth of recurring costs, most of which will be for services you don't really need.

In other words, I don't get this bundle. Seems like selling you a pack of costly solutions and asking you to figure out the problem they might solve for you. I'm always very cautious about signing up to new recurring expenses, both personally and as a business.

This could be called the "increase your monthly costs randomly" bundle...
I don't think the Nazis ever claimed to be liberating France. It was actually the Brits who wanted to "liberate" France but General de Gaulle kind of interfered with that by talking on the radio. But I know what you mean.
Not that I'm against referral links all the time, but is it right to submit Hacker news links when they're referral links? I don't see it in the rules, just curious...

The submitter gets $10/purchase I think.
A lot of the services offer credit, which seems like a good way to go. Some of them offer a couple of months of subscription, however. New Relic in particular has a little note that says you "can down / upgrade afterwards". Which sounds like you'll be signing up for a recurring billing scheme with some of these services. Can anyone confirm if this is/isn't the case?

Either way, still a great deal, but be sure you keep track of all your subscriptions and remember to cancel the ones you don't want when the bundle credit expires.
Reminded me of: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delay_line_memory
Will The IT Guy learn to Love Apple?
There are 2 ways to do it, one is called anycast and the other is using DNS and GeoIP to split responses depending on where the request is coming from (e.g. request from USA - return DNS entry for a US-based VPS).
The fact that the new article and section elements can now have their own header hierarchy doesn't mean we should "use only one heading element (h1...)". The beauty isn't that we don't have to think about the hierarchy anymore but that now each distinct "document" on the page can have it's own h1-hn hierarchy.
The Innovator's Dilemma is full of inspirational stories of markets discovered retrospectively. An example off the top of my head is honda motorcycles being used as off-road recreational vehicles - this market was discovered by a sales rep observing customers doing it. This could only be apparent some time after the product was created, and sold.

Another is Xerography being rejected by IBM after careful (and accurate) market assessments. The market significance only appeared after Xerography was actually in use. (from The Billions that Nobody Wanted.)

So when pundits (not cdixon) tell you it's impossible to discover a market retrospectively, they are simply wrong. But they're right that it's risky; and that it's much safer to launch with buyers waiting (of course!). I think the key take-home is that: a business needs customers. (Sounds obvious? Yet it's a perennial downfall of engineer-lead startups.) Finding customers (aka marketing) is at least as much work as creating the product in the first place. To put it in perspective: if creating the product takes a few prototypes over a few months or years, it's probably reasonable to put comparable effort into marketing: a few markets and 4 P's over a few months or years. The danger is when you exhaust yourself engineering it, and collapse at the finish line - just when the second marathon starts, of marketing it. (of course it's even better to run both marathons simultaneously... to torture the metaphor).
The PR video/slideshow at the last checkpoint I went through said that the dose was safe because it was equivalent to being in the airplane for 3 hours. This presumably was meant to be comforting, but in my mind I was computing a 3hours:3sec ratio and trying to remember if time-dose averaging was appropriate (I work in MR, and it's been a while since my ionizing radiation course). I was not asked to go through the machine, but I would have refused simply because of the flippant tone of the 3hrs in the air claim.
Also it's been recently updated after its first initial public showing. I'd definitely recommend giving it a try.
Opera Mini is a HTML/Image viewer, not a real browser, it's too crippled to be called a web browser.

Comparing Opera's cache to Google's cache is not a good idea, they work differently.
> What the heck does he consider "enduring"

Our pretty fragile species. As a ball of rock going through the solar system, the earth itself will keep going until the sun blows up, and so will life itself more than likely. But we don't live in the whole planet, the biosphere (and even more so the section of it we can in) is a fragile shell and its destruction will translate in ours.
Wow, didn't notice.

A moderator should edit this out. Flagged in the meantime.
If enough of the right people complain, people in authority start losing their jobs. That's why the authorities care.
I'm going to make something better:

I will take some standard (t-shirts, shorts) clothing and metalize them, them I will sell them in airports, as a signal of protest. With your clothes metalized x-rays can't pass thought.
I agree with the basic principle of a liquidation preference, but his argument sounds like a bit of a strawman.

If he invests 20% for $1 million - he's validating the idea at $5 million dollars. Presumably, the investor has to due enough due diligence to say, "you know, this idea is really worth $5 million". If that's the case, if they sell for $2.5 million later on, the founders take a loss too - just because they don't have that much cash invested doesn't mean that they lost out as well.
Can you provide a reference for this study please?
We currently have two Zones in Manchester, UK - we plan to launch additional regions in separate geographical locations throughout Europe and the US in due course. http://beta.brightbox.com/beta#faqs
Yeah, let's stick to 1.68 metre wide books.
Ask HN: Getting product feedback on Hacker News... is there a better way?
Hi all

I'm putting this out there because I think that HN is probably the most important forum for getting feedback for new web products and interacting with like-minded folks who can help.

So, recently I launched a pre-beta of my all-important web app. My first web app, and I was salivating at the prospect of putting it up on HN, getting feedback, and generally leveraging all the power that HN as a community has to offer to improve upon it and make new connections.

I put months of work into the application, and HN was a large part of my launch plan. It would be the moment when all my hard work would pay off and I could show it to my contemporaries around the world, to gain some really valuable knowledge about my own product, and make new connections. Slightly romantic notion, I know. But I must admit to being an idealist.

So, when I finally did post, it got one upvote, and quickly disappeared. My disappointment was significant.

I've been thinking about it more recently, and have come to the conclusion that there must be a better way of using HN for this purpose. Perhaps it's possible to establish a new list for those asking for feedback for their products ?

HN gets hundreds (or more) of new submissions per day, but the most interesting and significant (IMHO) are from those on the coalface launching their products. Surely they deserve a little bit more recognition (via their own list), because they've put months of work into their submission ?

I know we use the tag 'Ask HN' and 'Show HN' for our posts of this nature, but these tags aren't always related to new products. Perhaps there's another solution ?, for example, a different tag for these posts, e.g. 'Review HN', or whatever works - this is merely a suggestion (but a good one I hope).

I would love to know other people's thoughts on this. And if it's a question of putting some work into it, I would gladly volunteer a few hours to help make this happen, in whatever shape or form people think is best. I believe that HN is an amazing service and community, but even with that in mind, it's open to improvement and change for the better.

Thanks for reading

Paul
Google could also block any facebook links from appearing as google search results if things become more tenuous. I highly doubt this would ever happen since they might face a heavy duty backlashing, but the thought is intriguing.
You can get the exact same experience of a small screen desktop browser by shrinking your browser window, which it handles quite nicely.

The headline is misleading. The point of this layout is that we can go ahead and take advantage of large screen sizes without leaving behind smaller screens.
...usually.
These "must haves" will be challenged by the rise of super angels, who typically don't demand board seats, nor the same types of liquidation preferences.

I think the board seat requirement, in particular, will be rendered obsolete soon. But then again, the whole VC industry might be obsolete soon.
With these reader macros, can the code in the blog example be rewritten as below, so it still directly maps to the Lisp tree-like semantics, but be more readable?

defun diff(expr, x){
if(expr == x) 1
else if(car(expr) == 'plus') ['plus', diff(cadr(expr), x), caddr(expr), x]
else if(car(expr) == 'times')[
'plus',
['times', cadr(expr), diff(caddr(expr), x)],
['times', diff(cadr(expr), x), caddr(expr)]
]else 0
}
I'm 99% certain that this is a Mac-only option for now. It might make it's way into the other OS builds, but I don't think it is currently set up for them.
I think most would rather the use of these devices be banned on principles of their invasiveness rather than on safety concerns. Otherwise, you just get a "safer" version of the same thing in a few years.
You Get out of my Industry
HAML + SASS version: https://github.com/himmel/html5-boilerplate
This is a good point. A search engine like duckduckgo can choose to make much less by not tracking so much user data...and its still "enough". There are other vectors to bootstrap a friends/family sharing system that values privacy. Such a system can make a lot less than FB and still be "enough".
But isn't that the point of a social news website that the community (whose members should of course have similar preferences as you have) does the filtering for you by upvoting interesting articles. Otherwise I could run such a filter over a collections of rss feed aggregators, couldn't I? By using a social news website, users IMHO implicitely claim that community-based filtering works better than any algorithm could, don't they?
This is how I do it and exactly as you say, I rarely end up doing the unintended action.
Hacked Knitting Machine Can 'Print' Designs from Photoshop
This is a single-value KVS within a field, not a replacement for SQL. You still need to write an SQL statement to access it.
Thanks for the details.

I could not find the energy of the X-Rays used for these scans, but they would likely be low-energy (high energy rays don't scatter much), hence absorbed mostly superficially, as you said.
Stack Overflow Homepage Changes
Yeah, I know (hence "kinda"), didn't seem like the time or place to go on about Perl's quirks, though ;)
Yes, the harder I work, the luckier I get. I think of a startup as a game with a 1-in-10 chance - but you can play as often as you like. The odds of failing n times in a row is .9^n - so the odds improve fast. And of course hopefully you'll learn something general along the way to improve your odds, and leverage specific money/tech/contacts/market presence too. If you're persistent, failing begins to look extremely unlikely.

What can stop you (apart from giving up) is if you can't (or won't) learn some key thing, or can't (or won't) do some key thing. Which is why having mentors/colleagues is very helpful (for learning); and having co-founders and being able to employ/outsource/team-work is very helpful (for doing).
So, if you're bypassing most of the bits of an RDBMS, what do you actually gain? Is the InnoDB storage engine that much superior compared to other products? Or is it about the management and admin features, e.g. sharding, replication?
The TSA begs to differ:

http://blog.tsa.gov/2009_03_01_archive.html
So, if you're bypassing most of the bits of an RDBMS, what do you actually gain?

Speed.

Is the InnoDB storage engine that much superior compared to other products?

InnoDB is faster than MySQL over InnoDB.
Wrong title. Points to Cheap or Clean? The Energy Dilemma from the energy and environment blog
Great video. I find it depressing that they couldn't think of anything better to do with that fertile land than to put a highway along the middle of it.

From Luxor onwards the fertile band is substantially wider, more like 20km, as can be seen on Google Maps.

http://maps.google.fr/?ie=UTF8&ll=29.61167,31.330261&...

Does anyone know why the desert of North Africa is so... desert? - In Australia, even the deserts, which are supposed to be some of the driest in the world, in terms of rainfall, have far more vegetation. See here for an example:

http://maps.google.fr/?ie=UTF8&ll=-21.002351,124.804816&...
I have Opera/Linux without Flash plugin, and I could read everything just fine. Strange.
Google FeedBurner Beta Interface | Tricks Window
Directed acyclic word graph
Cars, Breasts and Homes: Why America Likes Big
A Faster Scrabble Move Generation Algorithm
I think he covers this in his last paragraph: If you are betting on emerging trends it is better to keep your burn low and runway long.
It seems that the debate in the comments here is on whether to give the TSA employees a hard time (with suggestions) or to try to pressure the politicians who let this happen (with no concrete suggestions).

I wonder if the pressure really should be applied to the airlines. Obviously they are in a tough spot, but once they start to really lose profits, they would be sure to run to DC screaming. Just a thought.
Its not just ucla that has a crappy course directory. I was looking at grad schools in the beginning of the year and was suprised at how many schools have really awful websites. Some of which are almost impossible to navigate. I actually started brainstorming an idea similiar to this but got caught up with other things. So good luck with it!
Last used in 89 for shooting "I Shrunk the Kids Honey".
A lot of what people write about "agile" processes tend to be written keeping in mind teams/people at traditional companies. Very few of these are helpful in a "startup" environment.

So a pro tip to make sense of such articles - imagine being part of a big team at a big company while reading. They will start making a lot more sense.;)
I learned that many professors had favorite books where they got their test questions. I would go to professors' offices and check out what books they might have on their desks or book shelves, then take a quick trip to the library.
Is Linux FOSS or open source?
Chrome could preload pages for 'wicked-fast' Web
Sure, but why would you still want to use the other hn elements? The only reason I see is for subheadings within a hgroup, but I'm not a big fan of that tag.
If you're willing to say anything to make the other side look bad, why should anyone give you credence?
I always use a ~1024w browser window on a 1920w screen and have no problems.

For MS Windows users, I think "Maximise Everything" is ingrained at this point, which gets increasingly ridiculous on high res screens since we don't have resolution independence.
"What are the best Steve Jobs quotations?"
Five Reasons for Setting Startup Strategy Early
"We learned something interesting, and now we're going to go find out if its easily practically useful or currently just a curiosity."

I don't see how that's "wishful thinking" or "faith-based" or anything like that.
While I agree on the whole, the WWII is a very poor example. It proved that "trying to do their job" may not be a good excuse in some limited circumstance. On top of that, the whole things was on a shaky legal (although maybe not moral IMHO) ground: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_trials#Criticism
I think this is the link that goes with that title:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/210046/wear_pixel_art_on_your...
They mention that the original layout has served them well up til now, I wonder whether this new layout would have been as good, if it had been used from the start (it wasn't needed, but still).
i think the important point, as discussed in the comments at the top, is that they had a genuine knowledge breakthrough. for those of us wishing for immediate technological change, it may not sound like a lot, but for the scientists who have been working on this issue for decades, it is huge. & yes, we don't know yet, but hopefully it will lead to something more soon.
ARM developer "gift guide"
Any limits depend on the particular JVM that you are using. In practice one needs to experiment.

A few years back I did some comparisons between Java and Erlang with respect to the number of threads the system could handle. Somewhere around a thousand threads was sufficient to make the JVM go very slowly.
How to make an iPhone App – Part 6: Saving Data
It might not look like so, but your iPhone does have a file system, the thing is that is not the kind of file system that we are used to. To save your data you will only have a directory and you won’t be able to choose it.
Sorry about the awkwardly worded question. What I meant is, what do you actually get from using MySQL? I can understand that a lot of people aren't willing to make a switch to some dedicated KVS, but going through all that effort would seem to require the same amount of time, if not more. So there has to be something about using MySQL that makes it worth using even in this stripped down configuration.
Kindle needs backup/restore for collections
Contrary to what hardcore "coders" tell you, notepad is
not your ideal development environment.

I don't want to bring up this debate again, but I do want to point out that this is a strawman. No one codes in Notepad or TextEdit. So for me, the tutorial starts off on a rotten note.
I don't have much experience with mysql, but I can think of at least of few reasons why it would make sense to me. First, you get a relatively solid, well known storage backend, with > decade of bug fixes. Writing things reliably to disk is surprisingly hard. Then, everybody knows mysql, it is packaged and tested in any OS you would use for production. Finally, there are a huge number of tools, wrappers, etc... the chance of using a language without mysql is near 0, for example, whereas you often need to roll your own, or use a very new one (untested) for nosql solutions.
Day to day only 20 people on average and net come to Cairo? That would be just 7300 a year and nothing to write home about. (I guess it's more than that. By comparison, Istanbul grew by around a million people a year for a very short time in the 90s.)