skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Excellent article and thanks for the link.

"PR people fear bloggers for the same reason readers like them. And that means there may be a struggle ahead. As this new kind of writing draws readers away from traditional media, we should be prepared for whatever PR mutates into to compensate. When I think how hard PR firms work to score press hits in the traditional media, I can't imagine they'll work any less hard to feed stories to bloggers, if they can figure out how."

That is why TC and Google (who both rely on the traditional PR/Media relationship) are so quick to bash concepts like PayPerPost which is basically what Paul is describing above, PPP provides direct access to the bloggers (no smoke and mirrors)
(His name is Antonio, not Anthony, just as your name is ... well, you have no name or contact or anything in your profile, so we'll say your name is 'icey', and not 'ghiacciato')
The CNET article, and the linked reference: http://www.siliconvalley.com/latestheadlines/ci_9486529?ncli... really don't provide any meat.
For prototyping, you might want to try something more focused on vector drawings than just pixels, i.e. Illustrator vs. Photoshop. I've not found any great open source vector image editors yet though. In the market for one though.
Ah, point well made. If I could still edit my other post, I would.
Announcing PoolParty, An Open Source tool for managing EC2 clusters
PoolParty is an open source tool that automates deployment, monitoring, and load balancing of EC2 instances.
before downmodding, did you actually read the article?
This is a fluff "intro to 37Signals" piece. Meh.
Assuming that linked chart is accurate (which I don't automatically grant), pointing out that the average IQ for a janitor is lower than the average IQ for a doctor isn't the same thing as predicting someone's success as a doctor based on their IQ. There's a lot of overlap between those ranges.
Developerlife - The Blog » JavaFX goodies - WebKit for Java and much much more!
"And THANK YOU!!! for not using Flash."

The whole "Objective-J" thing is fascinating. From this, looks like they have ported at least some of AppKit to compile into Javascript webapps:

http://280slides.com/Editor/1212695713/DocumentController.j

Looks like they have brought the Mac development experience to the web in a far more literal way than I expected.
It sounds like they just quoted the weekly project meeting, which anyone can dial into. In that context, everyone knows Beltzner meant blocking bugs. So yeah, just sensationalism.
37Signals: We do it this way. People who do things differently are wrong.
Chatbot Game widget:  Amusing bot widget whose responses come from people playing the Chatbot Game.
Boston Web 2.0 Event
Interesting conference for anyone involved in how companies are using web 2.0 features like social networking, cloud computing, etc..
Note that you can customize the content of the chat for your site/blog using the chat_focus and/or targeted_rules parameters:

http://chatbotgame.com/?cmd=chat_ecw
Dupe:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=210058
check out links at http://sound.condorow.net/dsp.html
So what? A tautology is not a bad argument.

If the "objective metrics" are useless discriminators, then the only effect of using them is to make us feel as though we have control over a situation that we don't understand. In that scenario, it makes far more sense to restructure the game to allow more initial participants, and to cull the best players.

You seem to be arguing that we must have "objective" filtering mechanisms, even if they're random. Gladwell is saying that the whole paradigm is wrong.
Broadcom co-founder allegedly spiked tech execs' drinks, had "warehouse" of coke and meth
Best TV stands and LCD Stands
View all Stands - Specialist UK supplier of Plasma and TV Stands, Order from our secure website today.
WWDC development sessions to be about 33% iPhone-related
One of my favorite stories was about a women who frantically wrote to Bertrand Russel (of Principia Mathematica fame) claiming: "I'm a solipsist and, I have to say, I'm surprised there aren't more of us."
'Duke Nukem Forever' Gameplay Video
To each his own I suppose. The reason I was drawn to friendfeed was it's look n feel. Can't think of too many that I like more. Probably why none of the desktop or other versions have had any appeal
Where mathematics and astrophysics meet
ah hell yeah! bout time someone made EC2 autoscale. thanks!
The Numbers Are In, Live Video Online Is Blowing Up
“I know I’m a better candidate because I ran against her,” Says Obama
We have a room there for life scientists that's ended up being one of the best sources of info out there. None of us have ever found any use for Digg (and to a lesser extent Reddit). The best part, people really not into Twitter, etc have joined up. It's like a hybrid between a newsgroup and IRC but with a slicker, easier interface.

And yes, Twitter is a totally different beast and that's a good thing
Pittsburgh as a tech hub?
Summary: "Yay Perl! <throws up pom-poms and kicks up one leg>"
Very cool idea. I would add an ebay like trust rating to account for punctuality, safe driving, etc.
I've worked with many at various design and ad shops. However, they design for other media as well and aren't expected to know HTML/CSS. I've been handed "web" layouts in Quark before. It surprises me that the same would happen in dedicated web shops. Sound like bad hires to me.
hehe i never thought id see the day.
It's a different kind of "tech" that goes on in Pittsburgh (spoken from a 22-year-old lifetime resident). You just don't hear about young guys hacking away to solve new problems, and the InformationWeek article echos that. Look at the videos... everyone's 30, 40+ in some cases.

Older heads out of the area's #1 uni (CMU) are the ones who get the attention of big money. Under 30 need not apply, and God help you if you graduated from Pitt, Duquesne...

Not saying any of this is inherently a bad thing. It's different (from Silicon Valley, Boston). But I'm not convinced it's a net positive as far as innovation and entrepreneurship go. And it's almost certainly the wrong climate for young hackers of a non-prestigious pedigree.
> People who do things differently are wrong.

They are just stating why they are doing what they are doing. Good information if you want to make use of it.
We have a bus system that I love, so "Yes".

The company that runs them tries a sort of service like you've described, but I have anecdotal evidence that the trick is no one wants to drive. Part of it is that they will provide a vehicle and so they want a sole person to be responsible for it, which isn't applicable to y'all. The other thing is that a lot of people are like me: traffic makes me an angry person and I'd much rather play around on my laptop or read than drive.

I don't want to sound like a nay-sayer. I definitely think that there's a market for this. However, I'd expect some strong regional trending (which is to say poor adoption in some cities and awesome adoption in others).
Yes -- what else did you think I was paraphrasing?
TechCrunch's Mike Arrington shows his primary colors
That's what discredits Arrington for you? How about the way he pimps the startups he invests in a la Seesmic video comments? All the same, I still read and enjoy his site.
This is probably the biggest disappointment EC2 brought: this kind of stuff should be built into the service :-/

So, thumbs down for Amazon for not providing this basic piece of functionality, and kudos for the developers who are behind this.
Eureka! Science News just launched!
Cell phone services with voice interface
Damn, I need to try some Coke next time I'm in Mexico then.
Pissing people off garners attention, sure. I'm not sure it's good business in the long run, though.
It is fun to see both camps fight it out and thereby share their combined knowledge and experience with us. Without the battle, I don't think they'll put in so much effort to educate us.
A Few Thin Slices of Malcom Gladwell (Interview)
Startup2Startup: Dinners for new entrepreneurs, like what they did back in the old days
Four-way Win: How to Integrate Work, Home, Community and Self
Indeed this would be a challenge. If you have no predictability with time or even dates of travel, then http://www.ride4all.com wouldn't be very useful for you.

Also, if you have a short commute, say 5 miles or less, then you probably wouldn't bother.

But if your commute is 10-15+ miles, and as gas price increases (say to $6/gallon), would you reconsider?

I live in SF bay area, and I flinch whenever seeing tons of people in single-occupant cars stuck in traffic, day in and day out.
Not neccessarily true.

You are assuming that these additional people have an IQ lower than what the average used to be. More people can be graduating from college who have a higher IQ.

An example may be Harvard. Harvard just lowered the tuition for certain incomes, thus more kids can now go to Harvard that were not able to be before due to finances. These kids may have an IQ higher than the average Harvard graduate and they would have increased.
Adobe AIR: Extending the Web beyond the Browser
You are thinking of George Berkeley.
Is this Rails specific?
“The Annotated Turing” Hot Off the Presses!
I think you make a valid point. 98% of businesses simply can't apply the philosophy and business decisions that 37 Signals make.

Attempting to build a business in the same manner is a false panacea; almost everyone else has some form of constraint that directs their decisions.
Any hackers have deployed hadoop themselves? How much of a pain is it?
I'd rather use Keynote. Sounds like the site was put together by people that don't actually do presentations. Are they aware just how crappy hotel/convention room Internet tends to be? The very last thing I want to do when standing in front of an audience is rely on resources that are not on my laptop.

The Obj-C to JS stuff is a neat gimmick though. It's cool and impresses the geek in me, but unless there is some bigger strategy to it (e.g., making the framework into a true Cocoa clone so desktop apps can be repurposed for the web) then I'm not sure if it's any better than just using existing frameworks (although I'm sure the programmers who did the site are much more proficient in Obj-C so it helps their efficiencies there).
I know! It's a bit surprising that this has only gotten a few votes. I think it's been so long that nobody in this forum knows why this is monumental....I feel old.

(update: okay, it has more votes now, but I still feel old.)
Gmail Labs: A Public Stage for Googlers’ 20% Time
Watch out for a sneaky blackmailing virus that encrypts your data
When "can't be done" is not an option
It's worth keeping an eye on this as well:

"Vertebra: A Next Generation Cloud Computing/Automation Framework"

http://brainspl.at/articles/2008/06/02/introducing-vertebra
You've uncovered our secret sauce :)
Read
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Lemaître
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_Jaki
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Lonergan
and you might understand more about "lies"
I see two levels in the hierarchy: first there's "desktop" vs "web", then within "web" there's "client-side" vs. "server-side" (or more commonly, some combination of the two).

Straight up HTML and CSS pages powered by your favorite server-side technology (PHP, Rails, J2EE...) are clearly server-side web apps. I'd say page-based web apps that add some dynamism via JavaScript (like Hacker News, Reddit, etc) are still mostly server-side with a little bit of client-side stuff.

280 Slides is still a web-app, but it's almost entirely client-side.

However, the lines are blurring with things like Google Gears (err... "Gears") and Adobe AIR.
Please don't get to work scaling your architecture yet. Work on making your app awesome and wanted by lots of people.

Trust me, I've been bitten by this problem myself. It's so easy to get really worried about the number of hits you're going to take. It's also so easy to get really excited about the scaling challenges.

But, quite frankly, the chances of you getting featured on yahoo.com are miniscule! First focus on getting there by creating something cool. Then focus on scaling.
Google to let users test new Gmail features
I'm probably not your target demographic:

I'd rather miss rush hour, and I'm currently lucky enough to be in a position where gas prices don't matter much to me (~10mi commute, occasional telecommute, hybrid car, good income, low expenses).
Comcast rolls out 'bandwidth blacklists'
I've been wanting to post my thanks to news.YC for a while now, because if it weren't for an article back in the beginning of the year about Innovation Works Alphalab incubator, I wouldn't have submitted an application, got to the interviews, won one of the 6 spots, and be sitting here in the Southside Alphalab offices as I type this right now.

Thanks for the Pittsburgh love YC, I have a startup because of you.
Be careful you don't run afoul of taxi laws. Cars are only inefficient means of transport because they're usually 3/4 empty. The taxicab companies would like to keep them that way, and municipalities are depressingly complicit. (Google for "taxi medallion" to see what I mean.) If you start getting successful, expect to hear from their lawyers.
I can handle him saying this...He is a features guy, he likes a lot of features.

I will begin to lose respect for him when a company he invest his money in goes on stage at TechCrunch 50.

I will definitely lose all respect for him if one of the start ups he invests in wins TechCrunch50. At some Point he needs to decide if he is his own PR firm or a third party commentator.
Surreal numbers and chess
Giving thanks to Bill Gates
casual carpool

http://www.ridenow.org/carpool/
Billionaire Drug Bust
Handling Flash Crowds from your Garage (PDF)
No, it adheres to the principles of AWS very well.
So you get:
- distro-agnostic
- language-agnostic
- framework-agnostic
There hasn't yet been a "first generation cloud computing automation framework", so it's kind of impossible to be building the "next generation". That first generation is pretty much what everybody in the field is working on (including my company).

But Vertebra sounds like an interesting approach for the applications where it fits. And repurposing an existing protocol for RPC is always interesting, they've chosen the surprising, and novel, XMPP (we use a light-weight RPC mechanism that runs over HTTPS that was already part of Webmin, with a fallback to SSH on instances that don't have Webmin or Virtualmin). And they're addressing a niche that no one else is addressing, which is Ruby on Rails in a cloud environment...it could be done with Amazon using SQS to detect rising "pressure" and ramping up new instances as the pressure rises and shutting them down as the pressure decreases. But, Vertebra being focused on RoR probably means that if you're building a RoR app, you'll need to spend a couple of days less time developing that aspect of your deployment. You still have to solve the database scaling issue, and the data sharing and state problems, just like any other large scale deployment...but one less thing to worry about is one less thing to worry about. (And nobody is going to solve all of those other problems automatically.)
For me it's not about finding the information by typing in a URL. It's more about scanning and having a clue what I'm going to see by the url I'm clicking on. A giant random number really has no meaning or value in this context.
Inkscape's the big one.
For the record, we don't believe our way is the only way and we've never made that suggestion. There are a lot of ways to do a lot of things. There are lots of ways to be successful. We just share our way.

No one is shoving anything down anyones throat. There's a lot of information available. A lot of different points of view. It's entirely your choice what you pay attention to, who you listen to, and what you care about.

Absorb a lot from a lot of sources. Take whatever value you find and leave the rest behind. Your mileage will vary. We hope everyone finds their own success.
There is tiny blip of video at 4:15, ff to save yourself time.
Powerset's Erlang-based clustering technology is now open source
Our graphic designer -- correction, art director -- does visual design and hands it off to production artists who turn it into HTML using Dreamweaver, or break it into Flash chunks. Want to know how big our art department is, including her? Three people.
You are exactly incorrect. Amazon is providing the raw materials on which an innumerable combination of strategies and implementations can seek to fulfill these ends. the fact that they are not pigeonholing you into just one is great. it is taking more time to develop open source workable solutions, but will result in a much richer ecosystem overall.
at least one company already has (rightscale.)
What enterprise level CMS or KM are you aware of that generates semantic URLs?
Ironically, when I tried to view this link, firefox crashed.
For me, it's pretty irrelevant because I'm a developer using a development knowledge base (MSDN) and have been for over a decade.

By your argument, HN is a fail too, yet you still click on the links.
Why doesn't facebook just ask what people want a price break on? To hell with all the machine learning, etc. Just ask. Put out a form for asking what people intend on buying, and have advertisers bid on keywords and offer price break coupons through facebook. Not that hard to do.
I agree, but...maybe it is good in the long term. I can conceive of that being the case.
That's really awesome. Kudos!!

Where are you from? And why AlphaLab over YC?
But, but, if they release it, how will we say FAIL in this particular way? It has become a valuable idiom for a certain kind of fail, especially in the start up world.

Plus, how many running jokes are a decade old? I'm gonna miss it!
Funny how people need reminding to be good and not to be evil, as though falling to temptation and nastiness are the status quo.
Here's a nice example of equating AGW skeptics to creationists, one that I vaguely remembered, but had trouble digging up: http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2007/11/hello_stan_palmer... .

As I said, the controversy long ago became uncivil.

Besides illustrating the creationist comparison, I think it illustrates my point about AGW advocacy resembling eugenics advocacy. If a lazy screenwriter wanted rhetoric for a 1920s eugenicist scorning a prominent critic, he could do worse than "the myopic little nitpickers, people who scurry about seeking little bits of garbage in the fabric of science (and of course, there are such flaws everywhere), and when they find some scrap of rot, they squeak triumphantly and hold it high and declare that the science everywhere is similarly corrupt." But wouldn't those words sound out of place in a defense of a successful theory like quantum mechanics or of the germ theory of disease?

Admittedly, those words are here in the mouth of a defender of the successful theory of natural selection. But he seems to be a sadly devolved specimen of the breed. Some years ago I read Darwin's reaction to Lord Kelvin's criticisms (in some webbed version of Origin of Species). Darwin just didn't declare victory because Darwin had assembled a "rational synthesis" and Kelvin had not: Darwin reacted as though addressing criticism on the details was important in and of itself.

(I myself tend to dismiss modern creationists, but certainly not because I think that details are unimportant compared to one's "coherent picture on a scientific issue." Details are very important, and one of my beefs with creationists is that they tend to be stubbornly spectacularly wrong on the details. E.g., ICR continues to misstate the second law of thermodynamics http://www.icr.org/article/456/ . It is easy for evolution to be consistent with the second law, because so much entropy is carried by food and O2 and CO2, or by sunlight and IR. In that particular article, the main sleight of hand seems to be ignoring the outgoing IR.)
They export to powerpoint so you can have your local copy as well as being able to give access to your attendees when they are on the net. I know google does this too but I am just saying it's not like they are trying to tie you into only having access to your presentation via their website.
What's the point of using 280Slides if you're just going to save it to disk as a PPT presentation? Why not just make it in PPT in the first place?
Animated Gifs the Missing Link?
Why make an animated gif? Babies and Dogs.
To the contrary, I found the WSJ report showed the direct correlations between the times when Ballmer began to pick up the majority of the work and the decline in the _innovation_ coming out of Microsoft's camp. Their report makes the Gates/Ballmer division of how MS plays ball quite clear.

As they explain, Gates is all about MS innovating and building their own tech. Ballmer is about finding a compromise and playing it slightly more safe (because he's a businessman first and foremost while Gates is a hacker). Sure, it's a huge risk to gamble with one of the world's biggest companies, but Gates knew how to play that game.

Just take a look at the "innovations" that have come from MS post-2001 and compare them to their work prior to that. There's a clear distinction in the aim/position MS took on in the market. Of course correlation isn't causation, but it's still food for thought.
RailsConf 2008 - Brazil Rails Podcast Special Edition
The Art of Unintended Uses
Actually Vertebra is not tied to Ruby on Rails at all. Since the main communication is all XMPP based, any language that can speak XMPP that implements our protocol can become part of the XMPP cloud. Our first implementation of the agent framework is written in Ruby but I expect many more languages to be supported.We will be releasing at least python and erlang based agents along with our ruby agents. We will be releasing the whole thing open source once we have locked down the protocol and made it a XEP standard, so keep an eye on my blog if you are interested.

Also Vertebra is not just for server automation, it is a framework for distributed computation of many kinds as well as a real time application platform.

The discovery mechanism and Resource based dispatch will allow for applications to get a request, discover via a Vertebra call which backend is least loaded and offers the request processing you need and then dispatching said request to the proper backend. Also allowing for map/reduce and scatter/gather style programming.

I have many ideas of where to take this thing and I cannot wait to get it out in the open so I can see what other folks do with it.
Sure it makes sense to them, they don't know what they are doing.

What I find hard to believe is that the ones that complain about these kinds of mechanisms don't understand that themselves are not part of the target of said mechanism.

These mechanisms are prominently shown to all users of the web site who want to import contacts, whether they are technical or not. There isn't a banner above them which says, "this feature is aimed only at people who don't understand the security implications."

Making money by teaching someone to compromise their security is a morally bad thing to do, whether that person knows they are being taught to put themselves at risk or not.
i don't want to be the mean guy and although I realise the technical challenge, it feels very slow and unresponsive (i tried it on IE 7, AMD Turion 64 which should be more than enough)
There isn't any pain. Best of all it's easy to setup hadoop on a single machine, or two machines here and there and then them into a large cluster:

Here's a good tutorial that may help:
http://www.michael-noll.com/wiki/Running_Hadoop_On_Ubuntu_Li...

(If you're using a Linux machine just follow that; otherwise get VMWare running Ubuntu and set it up there).