skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I somewhat disagree about this not being very "Googley." Although Lively is very different than the Google homepage in terms of presentation; both share the same ends of organizing the world's information and making it accessible. Google's press release blog post about Lively suggests, "In our user research, we’ve been amazed at how much more poignant it is to receive an animated hug than seeing the text [[hug]]" [1]. Perhaps in some abstract sense, Lively allows users to store and present information that is difficult to disseminate via text or other currently available methods. On the other hand, maybe it's just Google's way of making money on a perceived market that is the intersection between video gamers and Facebookers.

[1] http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/07/be-who-you-want-on-we...
I think he was saying use the curly braces instead of the dict() constructor.
Why?!

A few years ago Google was doing awesome new cool stuff... significantly better search, advertising products, cutting edge JavaScript stuff like Google Maps and Gmail, etc.

Now they just seem to be copying things others have done first, like Open Social, Android, App Engine, and now Lively.
You're the one who has it wrong. You're just having trouble finding people willing to sacrifice their lives for their jobs, and those aren't the people you want working for you anyway.
No.

Intelligence is synthesis - taking old data and creating something new. This method can only give you old data, and maybe new ways of looking at the old data, but it can never create anything new.
We're trying out a splash page.
I run a homepage manager with my friend and we look at 2 very concrete statistics: signups and clicks (on the homepages). We wanted to see if we could increase our adoption rate, so we revamped our splash page.

We pushed it live just earlier today, so I don't have much data to share with you quite yet, but I'm curious to hear what the rest of you think about splash pages. Particularly ones that have a style that's different from the rest of the site. Have you seen any changes in your number of signups? Did you attract a different sort of user that wouldn't normally sign up?
I guess, to me, if those lookup keystrokes resulted from saving a few keystrokes in a function name, and developers might look it up many times, it doesn't seem like you come out ahead. But, as you say, to each their own.
When I visited Russia in 2002 on the four hour flight back I was sitting next to a girl who was 22, bright, attractive, had just dropped out of her senior year of college studying French and German literature ... and was a mail order bride on the way to be with her new husband. We talked almost the whole way and it took me some time to put together the pieces since she didn't just come out and say it. It was her way out. The logic was that even if things really went to shit that she could put up with it for three years until she had permanent residence and could get divorced if she needed to. It certainly changed my view on the stereotype.
Which makes it even worse.
Also, stressing about money for a few years will keep you happier with whatever job you have next, if it has a steady paycheck. :D I'm working at a job with a steady paycheck for the first time since early 2001, and it's awesome.
Bit.ly launches today
bit.ly: the incredible professional’s URL-shortener
Sorry, you're right, "protection domain crossing" probably isn't common jargon. It's a holdover from my time as a processor architect on IA-64. It means privilege escalation.

Anyway, in any common parlance of the term "context switch" I've ever seen, the amount of state switched to take a system call is much less (edit: oops, originally said 'greater' ;) than the amount of state switched in a context switch. At the very least, a context switch should mean the save and restore of user-level register state, which isn't necessary for a system call. You certainly wouldn't want to do that just to make a system call on a typical RISC architecture with 30-something registers! After all, from the perspective of the caller, it's just a special procedure call. The compiler and system call entry point can even use the same argument-passing convention.

I wrote at least part of (maybe most, can't remember anymore :) the "recommended" context switch handler for IA-64. It was significantly more expensive than the system call handler. IA-64 dedicated quite a bit of hardware to making system calls cheap. If I recall correctly, besides a few privileged registers, the only thing we changed was the location of the register stack engine's backing store. That's just a single user-level register. (You don't want to spill registers with potentially privileged state into user space.)

Anyway, this is way off-topic now and I don't think anybody's interested other than the three of us, so that's the last I'll say about it.
It's pretty clear that our 'personal' information just isn't so personal anymore, so I think that it's a good idea for companies that use verification questions to be very careful to determine that the verification questions that they use for password reset or identification purposes contain truly 'private' information. It's scary when I call up a bank and I can get full access to my account by just giving my account number and my mother's maiden name. Isn't that information in a database somewhere? If I'm on facebook and my mom is on facebook, how hard is it to figure that out? Genealogy websites would probably also be a great help to dig up this info.

My other favorite verification questions are "Where were you born?" and "What's your birthday?". Hm... these are also Facebook profile questions, and they're also not so hard to dig up.

I thought that my social security number was private at least, but last week (no joke) I got a letter in the mail from UPenn saying that a university researcher's laptop containing my social security number had gone missing. fun fun.

My recommendation for web developers would be to rely on users having control of their email accounts and to not allow for "security questions." And if there is a problem with someone's email account being hacked, speak with the customer and use your common sense to resolve the situation. You can always just suspend the account pending the outcome of your 'investigation'. But please please don't outsource this 'investigation' task to people who lack communication skills and/or common sense. (e.g. PayPal, eTrade, Citibank & Dell)
What a great question! I just checked. Nope:

Breakpoint 1, 0x96210c44 in getpid ()

(gdb) disp/i $eip

2: x/i $eip 0x96210c44 <getpid>:	call 0x96210c49 <getpid+5>

(gdb) stepi

0x96210c49 in getpid ()

2: x/i $eip 0x96210c49 <getpid+5>:	pop %ecx

0x96210c4a in getpid ()

2: x/i $eip 0x96210c4a <getpid+6>:	lea
0xa6427a3(%ecx),%ecx

0x96210c50 in getpid ()

2: x/i $eip 0x96210c50 <getpid+12>:	mov (%ecx),%eax

0x96210c52 in getpid ()

2: x/i $eip 0x96210c52 <getpid+14>:	test %eax,%eax

0x96210c54 in getpid ()

2: x/i $eip 0x96210c54 <getpid+16>:	jle 0x96210c57 <getpid+19>

0x96210c57 in getpid ()
2: x/i $eip 0x96210c57 <getpid+19>:	mov $0x14,%eax

0x96210c5c in getpid ()

2: x/i $eip 0x96210c5c <getpid+24>:	call 0x961e8cf4 <_sysenter_trap>
google 2008 = microsoft 2004
These online virtual world/gaming technologies are actually fairly simple to implement. I am sure that someone as enlightened as Raph Koster probably realizes that there are lots of companies, not to mention college kids in dorms, putting these together right now. SOME of those projects are bound to be better than his, others worse. Believe me, they have probably already factored that in to their plan.

If not, I agree, this is bad news for them, because hundreds more are coming.
"TLB entries need to be faulted in?" You mean TLB entries which map kernel pages?

Typically kernel pages (and the TLB entries which cover them) are "pinned." You don't want to take a TLB exception in the middle of an interrupt service routine, let alone a page fault. Most architectures couldn't even handle the nested exception, and would panic.
What is your revenue formula?
Sugar, Inc. CFO provides guidance to entrepreneurs about how to think through their business models and identify the key metrics they should manage to grow revenues efficiently.
Semantic Shopping Monkeys
I spent about 15-20 seconds looking at the page, and had no idea what this service does. You need to make it more obvious, even for not-so-smart users like me.

But I like the design.
I have to ask, has there been much change in your personal life? Since meeting my soon to be wife I know that I have found it much more of a draw to spend time with her than to be coding all evening.

Also, I have found that it helps to be directed with your personal projects. Over the years (I've been working as a coder since 2000) I've started many things and not finished any. But now, as jnovek suggested, I am working with some friends and we are about to launch our commercial web project. All from a few months of evening work.

Like you, I lost some of the joy of personal coding and even though this recent project is not exactly something I have my heart in, my heart is in producing something I am proud of. That is spurring me on to finish so that I can get on with other personal projects on my own again.

Good luck.
That is true, I am 21 and I don't work near wall street, so all the people I come in contact with are more artsy than finance major.
You make a homepage (it's easy) with your bookmarks, and then you get notified on the homepage when a link has an update.
ICFP programming contest - decide the language of choice for discriminating hackers
Yes, definitely the best introductory book on the subject I've ever seen. Indeed, the Sipser book is a model for how to write a very readable, accessible CS theory textbook.

As far as how complexity theory on parallel computing, communication complexity is one related approach:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communication_complexity

which provides a rigorous way to characterize how much communication is inherently required to solve a particular problem.
Plus shortening programs should on the contrary make programs easier to read, all they have to do is choose reasonable names for their macros.
Michael Jordan's 10 Secrets To Reaching the Top
The thing is, any reasoning that assumes Silicon Valley is where it's at ignores all the TechCrunch articles about "the crisis in venture capital" and the inability of the VCs to find companies that need their money to lift off at all in the commodity-hardware/open-source-software era. It's very, very unlikely that the Valley-centric monoculture of the past will continue to characterize the startup scene. NY has a startup scene, Seattle, Portland, Phoenix, Pittsburgh, Los Angeles, Edinburugh, London, every place I've been to or met people from in the last ten years has a startup scene. Even Santa Fe, New Mexico, an isolated mountain city of only 60,000 people, counting daytime commuters, has a startup scene.

The radical reduction in startup cost for technology companies is THE technology-business event of the last twenty years. It absolutely decentralizes tech startups by making VCs much less important. Yes, the Valley still has an edge in terms of people, but if you're used to being the center of the universe, having an edge isn't the same.

This explains local startup scenes, and makes it obvious they'll become more important in future, not less. Paul Graham isn't just wrong for the obvious reasons - because anybody who says NY is about any one thing is smoking crack, for instance, or because of the Valley's echo chamber, or because there must be something in Boston's relative non-entity-ness despite its incredible programmer population, etc., etc., etc. - he's also wrong because he's ignoring the ginormous sea change in startup capital requirements that his own business revolves around, and which he himself first identified in one of his essays years before anyone in the Valley ever blogged about it.

He's ignored his own discoveries.
Tech meetup is full of entrepreneur-wannabes, FAIL.

Someone I met was throwing around the idea of a language agnostic hacker meetup with a simple programming/logic puzzle as the barrier to entry. Much better idea than tech-meetup!

PS. See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=240529 for our new ruby meetup :) Sorry about the self-promotion...
dammit, I misspelled Edinburgh.
Dude, quit your job, work at a coffee shop

This is bad advice.
I mean self-starting, self-organizing out of the box thinkers that can deal with the chaos of an early stage start-up.

My experience is that a lot of agency people have a lot of problems coping in environments without a lot of process, nor are they inclined to feel ownership.

There is no sense of equal quality when comparing the lifestyle of a startup to that of working at an agency (of which I have 10+ years experience working in). At an agency, there are people above you and people below you and despite whatever flaws in the process that the agency has, it at least has one.

Figure that most early stages are typically 3-4 people. Process isn't as important as this stage as getting stuff done and getting stuff out. In fact, an intricate involved process at this point would do more damage than good.

At 5-10 people, process starts becoming important, but that process must be devised amongst the people in the company. Most agency people we've had come work at Massify during this period had a hard time adjusting as we attempt to soothe the chaos. It takes a fairly rare blend of ambition and drive to succeed in a startup at this point.

And, btw, if you're handing out equity, they sure as shit better love it or they should really move on. They needn't love it as much as I do, nor do I expect that from them, but they better have some affection for it or they should hit the road. When things get grim, it's this certain love or passion for the product that carries you through.
well, they're overdue. the man's gotten very lazy preaching to the converted.
TLB misses don't cause exceptions on X86. The TLB is part of the microarchitecture.
NYC: Ruby Happy Hour - Beer and Pizza - 7/9
best comment on techcrunch:

google has just "jumped the shark."
One more vote for the confused user... I had to read the "Get to the sites you always visit, and see when they are updated" several times to even guess what your site does.

Are you talking about a bookmark repository (ok, "homepage") that somehow tells you when there is new stuff on your bookmark?

If that is the case, shouldn't you put a sample image on this screen that shows how the homepage looks like, including the one that tells you a site has been updated?

Ok, but your questions was about a splash screen :-) ... It looks good, but don;t call it a splashscreen. The word brings up awful memories of sites that forced you to wait a minute or two over dial-up just to display some image that told you nothing except to click to get to where you really wanted to go. Your screen has a lot more than that, it is actually useful.

As far as homepages that look very different than the rest of the site, this is a good thing. Lots of entertainment-related sites use them, and they are overall a good thing. The homepage engages the visitor, makes a good impression, and the rest of the site is actually the useful part. Yours is pretty good, it's just the wording I had an issue with.
Loan Pains Turned Site Into a Hit
As a nice aside, when I was at a (British) college in about 1995, years before I got on the internet, I read about Robert Morris and the internet worm, and now I'm posting on a forum created by a good friend of his!

I find it interesting that I spent the first half of my life lusting after communications technology, and the second half getting to grips with it all and even contributing a little.
Given all the recent enthusiasm for NYC and startups, I figured I'd post this here as well.

We had about 20 people show up for the last one, and are making this a monthly affair, especially given the number of cool startups in DUMBO.

This is not a Ruby meetup and there is no pressure to present, the first one was just a bunch of folks dissing solr, ferret and lucene and throwing mud at RSpec while getting drunk.

I work at outside.in, so I may be biased, but we had a great time!
Countries which are surprisingly green: Venezuela (some kind of crazy government subsidy scheme, perhaps?) and Thailand.

Countries which are surprisingly yellow: Japan, as mentioned earlier.

Countries which are surprisingly orange: Argentina. I don't know much about it, but I was under the impression it was relatively prosperous by South American standards, and had lots of agriculture.

No big surprises in the red ones, for me.
Social Networks at Work: If You Can't Beat 'Em, Join 'Em
Why would you flush the cache on a system call?? The only case I can think of where a cache flush is needed at all is if you have a virtually-addressed (or -indexed) cache and you're switching address spaces. Some ARM implementations may do this, if I recall correctly. But entering the kernel doesn't require an address space switch because the kernel is mapped into every process's address space, at the same virtual address.

Also, as I pointed out below, typically you don't even need to change any TLB entries on kernel entry, because the address space doesn't change and the kernel TLB mappings are usually pinned. In other words, any load from or store to a kernel page will always hit the TLB.

On most architectures, you probably don't even need to swap registers; not the general-purpose ones, anyway.

Sorry, but you're confusing switching processes with switching privilege, and greatly overestimating the cost of a system call.
Sneak Peek at the iPhone 2.0 OS
Did anyone else feel slightly nauseous from the wavy boxes around the normally aligned text? Or is it just me? :)
Good find, but as usual 37Signals don't know what they're talking about when it comes to "creatives."

Disney has had Disney University for many years (http://thedisneyblog.com/2006/01/30/pixar_universit/). And the results are clear: the most creative thing Disney has done in years is buy Pixar.

Pixar was damn creative well before they ever started the University. They didn't start mundane and become brilliant. They started off brilliant thanks to brilliant people at the top (and middle and bottom too).
Interesting. We thought it was very self-explanatory, but maybe we have just been too immersed in it. It's a homepage (in the sense of your browser's starting page) which holds links to the sites you always visit.

It auto discovers the RSS feed and periodically checks them, but we never refer to it as "RSS feeds" on the site. We tried to abstract that process as much as possible, so it becomes like any other toggle button.

That's exactly what we were going for, to hook them and pull them to step two (which will hopefully pull them to step three, and so on). Now that we have the format, we plan on continuing to tweak the copy until we find something that works.
"... It does, however, have the advantage for iPhone owners that starting July 11, they'll be able to use it to record their deductible (or reimbursable) trip mileage. ..."

Go ugly, fast.

You might not win any design awards but you might be in business long enough to correct the problems. I'd seen this on flickr this week. Mac zealots tend to be a pretty mean bunch. Wonder how they go with this tone of criticism?
I don't understand why they didn't create the app using Flash 9. There are some really impressive 3-D apps using Flash 9 and if they used Flash, it would work on Macs and Linux also. does_not_make_sense . I honestly expected that if anything, google would come up with some cool tricks to make it work without requiring any plugins at all, even Flash.

Check out this amazing app called AlternativaPlatform (Disclaimer: They not friends of mine and I don't have any connection.) if you want to see what's possible for 3D using just regular Flash 9. It's the most impressive example that I've seen so far. The link goes to their blog, which contains a bunch of demos:

http://blog.alternativaplatform.com/en/

This is another really cool Flash 9 - based 3D app:
http://ecodazoo.com/ (Disclaimer: No personal or financial connections here either.)

Maybe there are some technical requirements that I'm not aware of the necessitated using a custom plugin. Assuming that there was a good reason for it, why didn't they integrate it into an update for their Google Toolbar product or the Google Earth browser plugin? I'd be curious to hear any ideas on the subject.
yeah! agencies are the other source of stupid 'web developers', and there are a LOT of agencies in New York being the ad capital and what not.
I've worked in such environments, and as much as I enjoyed the work when I was able to do it, the reality was that we wound up wasting a lot of time spinning our wheels because we accidentally stepped on each other toes. As a result, I wasn't able to do the work I wanted to do, and was hired to do, most of the time that I was there. So the affection wore off, and I gave up and left once I saw the writing on the wall.

I've also worked in companies of 3-4 people (including me) that had basic processes (source control, requirements management, etc), and the results were FAR better. We ended up spending MORE time doing our job, not less. We also spent a LOT less time cleaning up messes and wondering why we acquired 15 build errors every time we synced the code from source control.

Though I agree that a small group doesn't require a lot of process, chaos is counter productive.
Disagreement is not refutation.
Yeah, also on IA-64 (optionally). I was generalizing. Still, on IA-64 at least, you would typically pin kernel mappings by putting them in translation registers instead of translation cache registers (i.e., the TLB).

I haven't kept up with x86 on Linux; does Linux enable the global page extensions? I would assume it does for kernel mappings.
Paul Who?
A strange rant. Most of it is based on why you don't have to start in the Valley and almost nothing on "shouldn't". His core criticism of Valley companies is that it's too easy to caught up with traction instead of figuring out monetization.

Ironically, his About Me description plays the same tune: "We are building a free, open reviews network that anyone can participate in and anyone can build on top of."

Good try. Valley rules y'all. Like, totally.
The examples show circumstances separated by a matter of degrees regarding application of trust.

>It's a simple case of the system working as planned to protect innocent victims.

I'm not going to be a yahoo about this, but that's just plain naive. I'm not getting the point across, which is that when a government asks you to act as an agent for their benefit, that government appeals to your assumption of trust without providing any evidence for that trust.

A warrant may be enough insurance in return for consulting, but would I go on a raid? Absolutely not. What if your consulting involved providing private information on citizens just because someone in the government assured you that what you were doing was legal. Would you still do it? If you would only with a warrant, then what if they told you that this was some kind of FISA thing that didn't require a warrant?

I cited Hatfill and Convertino because they're examples of one-sided trust relationships with the government that went terribly wrong.
Lilvely uses facebook accounts?

Google uses facebook accounts?

http://www.lively.com/help/bin/answer.py?answer=98532&sr...

wtf??