skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Are you serious? I think the whole "profit doesn't matter, only users" mantra is as stupid as anyone else, but you're way off here.

That mantra is asinine not because YouTube (and Twitter, and Facebook a couple years ago) are actually worthless... it's asinine because they are crazy exceptions.

YouTube gets about 2 billion views a day. Assuming each one of those views lasts about a minute, that's 1.4 million people watching at any given moment, 24 hours a day. The major TV networks get in the neighborhood of 6 million viewers during prime time... if they're winning.

So YouTube has roughly the same daily attention on it as NBC does. Why aren't they profitable?

a) They've had skyrocketing costs as they deal with explosive growth

b) They've had to convince the world that this totally weird new thing is a viable advertising platform.

That they've more or less solved those problems in 4 years and are close to profitable is pretty amazing to me, both as a developer and an entrepreneur. And the fact that their costs are going to go down (cost of bandwidth is cut in half every 18 months) while their profits are rising (advertising is advertising, and they're selling more and more), along with their enormous audience, suggests to me that they are, in fact worth a lot of money.

Do you not think that you could easily sell YouTube today for 1.5b? To any of a number of media companies? I think it'd be an easier sell today than it was when Google bought them.
You might be able to do it at that price for everything but the toilet. Instead of going big, the design I would use (after only thinking about it for 2-3 minutes) would be to mimic an insect. Go really small and have it be able to adhere to the surface and clean as it went (tub, glass, floor, etc). Use a laser/camera to analyze the surface. The key would be to keep the center of gravity as close to the wall as possible.

On the large side, I would go with a pivoting telescopic arm with variable cleaning instruments. Use a counter weight to balance the robot.
Guide to CSS support in email clients - Articles & Tips - Campaign Monitor
You know what I don't get. Why is this NASA news?
I might be underestimating the sensitivity of our instruments, but if we're just now being able to detect planets based on their gravitional signatures on stars, how can we be sure we haven't peered through a telescope at intelligent life already? Our species was pretty damn interesting 300 years ago, but if the aliens were looking for was radio signals we didn't "exist" to them until about 1920. And our radio waves haven't even gone that far yet, 100 light years is nowhere. Maybe in a 1,000 years when they get somewhere and aliens notice, they'll dispatch their ship and another 1,000 years later land here.

I wouldn't expect to get found in the woods a millisecond after I lit the signal fire, and thats where we are today in universe terms.
ZFS imported into GRUB
> It would be one of those formally correct but practically useless definitions.

"Hi, my name is Aperiodic, and I'm... a mathematician."

"Hi Aperiodic."

"It all started out so easily; you know, a few lemmas with the boys in the evenings. But before I knew it, I was picking up Bourbaki as soon as I got home from work. I would wake up in the mornings, surrounded loose sheets of paper covered in commutative diagrams, without a clear idea of what I did last night..."
It would be nice to be able to zoom in and out to see more or less at a time. In general, this concept lands itself well for Google maps API where you model your board as a map and it handles scrolling and zooming for you.

Edit: something similar to this http://www.conwaylife.com/
Help me make a proposal for RailsConf 2011
Hi there, I am the author of Zena http://zenadmin.org (yes, I need to update the website: it's ugly).

Although the website does not really show it, it's one of the most advanced CMS tools out there. Since the Zena framework is so large, I'd like to know if I should propose a talk for RailsConf 2011 on one of the parts or just a presentation of the whole (like creating a web app from xhtml design). To give an idea, here are some of the topics that could be covered on their own:

- RubyLess (safe, typed ruby)

- Property (schema-less objects, powerful indexes, versioning)

- QueryBuilder (sql compiler with RubyLess/Property integration)

- Zafu (xhtml based functional templating language, uses RubyLess)

- VirtualClass/Roles (database defined ruby classes with inheritance and mix-in)

- Extending Zena / integrating Zena in an existing app

Thanks for any hint (especially if you've been to a RailsConf).
I'm sure DNA physical structure (angles, bends, etc.) with Arsenic instead of Phosphorous won't be exactly same. Arsenic has same tetrahedral structure as Phosphorous but the atom is sure bigger in size and at DNA scales, size would play a large role in determining shape of molecule. I'm sure you realize that physical interactions play a great role in a cell.
Kick Ass!. Plain and Simple.

Some refinements - Mac, 10.6.5, Firefox 3.6.12, Creating a new note only happens in the lower right corner. I have to drag it more to be able to use the note.

I would pay to use this on my small biz intranet. i.e license it.
Ive read it takes about 6 months. To be honest a lot of it is about deliberate practice rather than just 'getting in the hours'
Management doesn't call it "training" unless it's organized and restricted in some way. One developer going to another and saying, "Hey, I need help with this," and the two of them going through it with a terminal or a whiteboard is not "training" unless it done on management's schedule or recorded in some training web site. From management's point of view, if they can't track and report it, it doesn't exist. So if you want informal training run by developers, you tell management you don't need any training at all.
When the death of a citizen benefits the government, the citizen should seek the death of the government.

The government is supposed to be for the benefit of the citizen not the other way around.
… but still retain server based storage

… and resolving my offline updates with the server

… even the provably incompatible ones

We are users! We want everything! Especially the impossible. And keep it free.
I'm sorry, I didn't mean to be accusatory. Best of luck :)
It would be REALLY awesome if it also scraped the text of each tweet (sans link) and converted it into comments on each thread. Identical tweets would translated into 'upvotes' on the comments.

This is great.
It's a proof-of-concept for radical new ideas of where/how life can form.

For instance, Titan has a thick atmosphere and lakes of liquid ethane/methane. If Arsenic-based life exists, could there be Methane-based life in those depths?
BBC goes global with iPlayer subscription, launching on iPad first
Extraordinary Memory Through Ordinary Means
IIRC Google now values YouTube at ~5Bn, and at that price I feel that there are plenty of companies who would bite Google's hand off.
As previously discussed, this is less impressive than it initially appears since the researchers were just undoing the age-related damage that they had artificially inflicted. But I'm glad they're getting attention; once enough people come to understand that aging can in principle be cured, we should see much more effort in that direction.
I launched my MVP, Photosherpa. If you take too many photos and don't have time to go through them, you'd like it. You send all your photos to it, you get back only the good ones (so you can put them online right away).

http://www.photosherpa.com

Since I couldn't figure out Paypal integration yet, it is completely free :) Within December I'll try to integrate it with Paypal and Flickr/Facebook (so processed photos could get uploaded with one click).
It looks like Amazon has an API for their fulfillment service: http://www.amazon.com/gp/seller/fba/fulfillment-by-amazon.ht... and http://aws.amazon.com/fws/ could work as the foundation for your application. Your API could sit on top of Amazon's the way Crowdflower sits on top of Amazon Mechanical Turk.
Launched an iPhone app for young ones to learn alphabet by popping balloons :)

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/popn-learn-abc/id400222528?mt...
creating a new note by double clicking would be nice, since the rate of notes created by mistake would be lower :)
plus the image url feature doesn't work with any of my browsers (Mac OSX 10.6.5 Safari 5, Chrome 8, Firefox 4)
Any chance there is a transcript or write up of the talk?
Death tax is a term introduced by Republicans wishing to change the public perception of estate taxes. Obviously an effective move. Apparently it is hard to get people to vote against an estate tax.

It is scary how effectively Republicans are able to manipulate language and steer political discussion. The Democrats suck pretty badly at this.
Ask HN: I have systems OCD, do you?
I have an OCD where I am constantly debating what is the best use of the equipment I have.

Here is what I struggle with today.

I have a new Mac Mini, 8gb RAM and running 10.6 Server. I am planning on using this to launch a simple HTML5 video site as proof of concept and maybe start something from it if it seems viable.

I have 10.6 Server on it and I just don't get the performance I think I should. The system seems slow, or slower than I would expect.

I prefer CentOS 5 and I have 3 other boxes here in my apartment running that.

Should I load CentOS 5 instead? It can do everything I am using OS X Server for.

You might say is it slow because of your bandwidth? I have a 22/5 Comcast connection, static IP's an Untangle Box front-ending the whole operation and Gigabit NICS and a switch.

Can anyone provide insight? I am literally sitting here going over it in my mind.

Does anyone else go through this?

EDIT: Another example. I have to max out the ram in all of my systems. I HAVE TO. I always have. Anything less and it bothers me.
This is very true. He also read voraciously from the library and was a huge momma's boy.
Or, maybe not. You see, this year, you not only get to avoid the death tax but you also miss out on the step-up in tax basis. So, you can pass assets down to your heirs tax free but they then have a much larger tax bill if they ever realize the gains on those assets.
Phil Plait on Bad Astronomy has a really good write-up about it, and why it matters to exobiology: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2010/12/02/na...
The system seems slow, or slower than I would expect.

Can you be more specific? What's slow?
Steve had one competitive advantage: best friending Steve fucking Wozniak.

You know how that happened? They shared common interests, including knowledge of electronics, pulling pranks and passion for computers (yes, Jobs was technically competent enough).

And if I know one thing about %99.9999 of would-be entrepreneurs: they aren't best friends with someone like Wozniak.
You need a templating + biz logic language, and a database. The usual starters for non-purists are PHP and MySQL. Also, most front-ends use JavaScript these days, often with a helper JavaScript library like JQuery.

Myself, I'm more of a Python (language) + PostgreSQL (database) person, but they may take a little longer to get up to speed with.
As of now, this is what exactly I am planning, One-time fee for setting up the server, hardening for security, installing/configuring software etc. I think the price should have a bearing on the complexity of the setup.
Is there a shortage of engineers or a glut?
If I were to pick a word for what is generic, I think I would choose "platform". As I see it, the distinction is not really about either a particular device or a particular app, it's about whether the combination of hardware and software is dedicated to a specific purpose, or whether it provides a foundation with a range of specific capabilities but relying on another layer of software on top to provide end user functionality, which is where things like Web or mobile apps come in.

In terms of handheld/mobile devices, I suspect you're being a little optimistic with your list of dedicated tools that can be replaced effectively by building on the more general platform.

For example, digital photo frames are great, but you probably have several of them around your home if you use them. Those devices don't each need to come with an accelerometer, a GPS system, and audio connectors, and all those useless (in this context) extras push up the cost.

Books are an interesting case, where I can see technology improving and converging to the point where tablets really do take over, but I expect it will be quite some time before this becomes the norm. I wouldn't be surprised to see a passive, full colour, high resolution screen inside the next five years, but there is much more to this issue than just the technology. I personally believe that reconciling the various commercial, social, logistical and ethical issues is going to be the hard part, and a lot of these probably won't even enter popular debate until the tech is ready to do the job.

Perhaps the underlying theme here is that even if the technology in a mobile device is capable of replacing many other tools, whether it can do so effectively is a different question, and one that has to take into account factors like cost-effectiveness as well as techhnical capability.
Easy — just make it a CouchApp.
This seems silly. Phosphorous not being required for life seems obvious to me: ok, maybe it's believed to be used in all Earth-originated, carbon-based life, but why would we believe a priori that it's an absolutely necessary component of any biological life anywhere (which seems to be what's implied by NASA and the relation of this to exobiology)? If we develop silicon-based artificial intelligence (how do you define life, anyway? That matters when you're talking about astrobiology), would we run a headline, "Researchers prove carbon not required for life"?

I've always thought the scientific community stated that alien life may use a totally different biochemistry from us?

Edit: so, in some senses this is like P!=NP being proven, except less important, since it's only one component (phosphorus). It's scientifically a big deal but doesn't change the world because it's largely what we've always expected (the metaphor breaks down that this doesn't have the major secondary consequences like N=NP would).
TSA frisks groom children to cooperate with sex predators, abuse expert says
Thanks Jason! I thinking about ways of monetizing this. Send me your email or twitter handle and we can talk about getting you in as beta users (to tim [at] timothyjcoulter.com, free/low cost in exchange for feedback).

Bug noted. Will def check it out!
"The day after Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab failed to blow up a Northwest jet with a bomb hidden in his underwear, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said "The system worked." I agreed. Plane lands safely, terrorist in custody, nobody injured except the terrorist. Seems like a working system to me."

If he got on the plane with the bomb in the first place, doesn't that imply the system doesn't work?
مسلسل غربة امراة الحلقة 75
Thanks, BDD looks like an interesting idea, I think I will look into that some more.

Anyway, I tend to build the happy path by any means necessary, verify that's what you want, then go for TQM style process improvement to add quality. I think of it like pulling a tiny string across the river before you build a rope bridge.

It’s not hard to add heaver gage rope to work your way up to a bridge. But, good luck crossing the chasm if you don’t know how to swim or where to find a boat. While that original string may have little to do with the finished bridge, but at least you have something to fall back on when you’re trying to get the GPU to do something etc.

PS: Ok, I think I took that analogy well past the breaking point.
http://wavylab.com < chinese version of pandora. it only plays chinese songs.

stats:
~350GB songs streamed in 64KB bitrate.
~13048 hours of songs played.

New UI is pending.
Hitting the site I am hosting from outside seems slow. I have been in touch with Comcast and they say there are no issue. Sometimes simple tasks in Server Admin are slow to accomplish. Starting/Stopping services, etc.

Using built in Apache, MySQL, Firewall. The site is created with some HTML5, PHP, MySQL, CSS, JS

From my experience my CentOS boxes have been significantly faster with less specs even, although a lot of RAM in the boxes. I am all Apple except for servers usually. I have a box running CentOS 5.4, Pentium-D with 8gb of RAM and it is faster with other sites I host that receive a lot more traffic and another video site i host for a friend.
Off topic as usual, but interesting from the developer and user point of view.

If you are going to give me a 10 char ID, please make it all lower case and without numbers, I hate hitting shift or having to move my eyes from the keyboard to the numpad and back.

So, aren't 26 lowercase chars enough?

26^10 = 141,167,095,653,376

A hundred and forty trillion options!

* Hey Tim, nice app btw.
I didn't do so great. My MVP works, but it needs more effort before it's ready for Beta (as a lot will change between now and Beta, but it's about a day or two's work). Minklinks actually works well and makes sharing links a one-click job.

In the end my day job got in the way, and while I was up for spending evenings and weekends on it my wife had arranged something on nearly every weekend that I couldn't back out of.

I have a large block of time booked off in December, a lot of which I'll be using on Minklinks so it's likely to be a 'launch december' app now. You can still sign up for the Beta at http://www.minklinks.com/.
Rambus files ITC complaint against nearly everyone
I decided to dive in to HTML5 and CSS3 in my last project and I'm really happy I did so. So much so, in fact, that I won't look back -- at least, not for my own projects.

Previously anything that came out of W3C was more akin to something a company that didn't listen to its customers would produce but it seems like they broke that habit with HTML5. There are some technical details that are still up in the air (i.e. video codec -- but I'm not really sure what the status of that is) but one certainly good quality of HTML5 is that you have to be almost stupid to write non-validating markup.

Also, there are a lot of little things that they implemented that are really valuable to rich apps. For instance, custom data attributes -- which I wrote about a few months ago (herp derp, self promotion: http://bradhe.wordpress.com/2010/08/31/custom-data-attribute...) -- finally fixes the coupling (or decoupling, actually) issue that has been present in HTML + JS apps until now!
Max Levchin: Greatest lessons learned as a young entrepreneur
Facebook causes one in five divorces in US
Ebay Acquires Milo For $75 Million
EBay buying Milo.com
http://lesswrong.com/lw/im/hindsight_devalues_science/
Hokay...

1) "Use <?php and ?>"

This is silly advice. You can modify short_open_tag in the .htaccess for your site, and failing that, you can modify it at the head of your script with ini_set(). Sticking steadfastly to this advice leads to monstrosities like:

Some <?php echo $variable ?> here.

Instead of the more svelte and readable:

Some <?=$variable?> here.

2) That semi-hungarian system he recommends is pure nonsense, especially considering that PHP is dynamically typed. If you're going to use variable prefixes for hints, they should provide information about the MEANING of the variables, not the types. Things like:

- $idx_dogs // An index into the $dogs array
- $cnt_dogs // A count of dogs
- $conn_testing // A connection to the testing database

3) Start your boolean as whatever value makes your code cleaner. If starting your boolean as false means you have to add dozens of extra lines of code, don't do it. Never just slavishly follow "good advice" when it makes for bad code.

4) ACK! In that same booleans rule, he commits the cardinal sin of an if with out {}s. NEVER DO THIS. Some joker will come by after you and turn:

if ($i == 2)
$result = true;

Into:

if ($i == 2)
$cnt_dogs = 2;
$result = true;

And totally screw things up. Even if it's on one line, you are asking for trouble. Be explicit with your {}s.

5) In development, run PHP with explicit warnings on. Then things like:

$name = $names[marc];

Won't ever "magically" work - you'll get a big warning that PHP is converting marc to "marc" on you, and you can go in and clean that up.

6) Commas vs. periods? Test it yourself. Under different circumstances, different ones are faster. See here: http://www.phpbench.com/

7) Ternary operators ARE pretty sweet, yeah.

8) Why create a variable dump function when you can use FirePHP? http://www.firephp.org/HQ/Use.html

9) If your function has over 20 parameters, you are probably doing something WRONG. The solution is not just to move to objects, the solution is to take the time and figure out why your functions are so freaking unweildy.

10) Method chaining - like ternary operators - are awesome and should be used more oftion.

Apologies for the book, but so many PHP "tips" are so very misguided.
>>If he got on the plane with the bomb in the first place, doesn't that imply the system doesn't work?

I think that means part of the system had a failure, but that failure did not propogate catastrophically. If anything, this is reminiscent of a working AND resilient system.
That's the Great Filter, right there. Something which goes around killing off technological species, or something inherent to their development which prevents them from causing lasting change in the universe.
Looks really good. One small refinement: deleted notes could appear on a list in the corner say - maybe with a screwed up motif - so I can recover something I delete by accident :-)
I think it has to do with the author/editors.

Most journalism today is driven by profits, not principles. Sites like this are practicing textbook yellow journalism, trying to grab eyeballs to save the sinking ship of newspapers. Principles and integrity are now so foreign an idea for them that it comes out in the writing.

Julian Assange and Wikileaks are muckrakers, and that makes a lot of people uncomfortable. Directly, the exposed governments and corporations. But indirectly, also the titans of "journalism" and news.

Journalism is meant to push society, and right now Julian Assange is doing exactly that. WikiLeaks is like a new kid on the block, turning over rocks and standing up to bullies.
Entrepreneurs - so you think you can build a useful product?
beautifully written ... brings tears to my eyes.

"We can reopen the Washington Monument when we've defeated our fears, when we've come to accept that placing safety above all other virtues cedes too much power to government and that liberty is worth the risks, and that the price of freedom is accepting the possibility of crime."
I am from India , I would suggest you take the SAP certification and join in as a consultant . The market for SAP is ever green and it pays way better than testing
I'm not sure why either, but I also prefer Gowalla to Foursquare.

My guess is that it's in the design and more indie-ish feel of Gowalla. Foursquare just seems more corporate looking.
People are missing the point of this deal. Groupon is a scalable way to market Google ads to local business.

Google already sees how much Groupon spends on Google ads.

From that they realized that they can take that expense out of the equation, and Groupon becomes even more profitable.

The opportunity cost for Google of serving some junk ad vs a targeted Groupon is low. There is some risk involved, but there is a huge potential for reward.