skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm the architect for Fuzed. I thought I'd explain how powerset uses it production for the main site.

Fuzed sits in front of processes that run Ruby, and are bound to PARC's parsing and grammar analysis libraries. These self-identify to the system and each report their own unique API (the services are heterogenous in both function and version).

Every time you fire a query at powerset, it is sent via JSON-RPC to the frontend of our internal fuzed instance, which then does query analysis before forwarding it to the part of the system that actually does search retrieval. For every one query fired at the powerset frontend, our fuzed cluster takes 2-3 hits, so it has to scale pretty well. So far it's performed admirably even under load. The Erlang runtime is proving to be extremely stable.
Ask YC: Where to order business cards?
Hi, I'd like to pick up some simple, but good looking business cards for meetings. Does anyone have suggestions? (Note: I don't care for Moo cards)
That's what I've been doing so far. I'm trying not to fall into the trap of premature-scalingitis. But the original article points out that the need for scaling up does not always come at a time of one's choosing. And that's kind of scary.
I wonder what this means for Adpinion. If this works for Facebook, will ad-voting become more mainstream? If so, Adpinion is in a pretty good position.

Or do they feel like Facebook is stealing their idea?
http://www.avibryant.com/2008/06/maglev-recap.html
http://chadfowler.com/2008/6/5/maglev
There are probably computer misuse laws which make it illegal to use someone else's identity to gain access to a secured account, just like laws against using someone else's credit card details. Certainly against the TOS of those web sites.
Well, for one, 280 Slides is free. PowerPoint is far from it. More importantly, its really nice to use software that you don't have to install or download, and that gets automatically updated to the newest version. Plus, neither PowerPoint or Keynote lets you search the web for media directly.
Vista Print. And 'splurge' for the thick or glossy stock. Also, google 'Vista Print Coupon' before - you can always get 20-25% off.
Absolutely, and, as soon as its ready :)
37s is not to blame. They are shoving anything anywhere (as Jason says on this thread). Nor are they saying that their "system" works for all businesses/problems. They're just delivering a very compelling message to a hungry audience. It's like the 4 Hour Work Week... Or Christianity (all you have to do is ASK for forgiveness... and viola!).

It's a great story, but not a very repeatable one.

1) Step 1 - Build an enormous and rabidly loyal audience with a great blog (SvN) and a great framework (RoR). JoelonSoftware proved that you can do this without the framework. :-)

2) Release products that serves the core of that audience. Watch in amazement as profits pour in. Customer acquisition costs are near zero. No marketing required other than public speaking engagements (which often net a speaking fee) and the occasional blog post.

No doubt that these guys are really talented... But I don't think they owe their success to working less or giving their customers less. They owe it to an evangelical following and (to a much lesser degree) building an app that does a solid job of serving that audience.
PASAT, a working memory test: add up the last n digits presented to you sequentially
Venture Capital StarterPak
I didn't know Linda Gottfredson posted here.

IQ is a useful (if not especially real) measure, but less so than other measures, it is culture-specific, and it is hardly "highly heritable"; Devlin et al. showed a while back that its narrow-sense heritability is about 35% at best, and most studies of IQ's heritability grossly overestimate it by failing to control for a multitude of environmental effects. And psychometricians don't seem to get how factor analysis renders their beloved general intelligence measure a tautology, so it's understandable why someone would regard their work as BS.

[Edit to add some of the "cold hard facts about IQ" that IQ pushers like the parent comment don't tell you: IQ's heritability varies with socioeconomic status from about 80% to virtually zero, and also increases with age, which makes any claim about IQ having a high heritability across the board extremely suspect.

Note also that despite the name, heritability isn't a measure of 'how genetic' a trait like IQ is; IQ pushers often take advantage of that misunderstanding. Heritability is merely a rough estimate of the ratio of a trait's variance explainable by genetics to the trait's total variance in a population; as such heritability varies between groups, between environments, and between times. It is neither necessary nor sufficient to demonstrate that a trait is 'genetic'.]
I am interested in fellow readers's performance, as I would assume everybody here is fairly above average in terms of WM capacity and math ability. It turns out this test is surprisingly hard. Nobody seems to have made it beyond n = 4.

A warning, this test is flash-based. A disclaimer, I am the site creator.
Though you do have a completely valid point, it's also true that a lot of people should take some lessons from their example.

Until people realize that working a lot of overtime tends to generate a lot of technical debt, they'll keep doing it. And even though a 4-day week might be a bit short, you have to admit that it's working.
Plainview: chromeless browser for presentations
There is obviously demand to write 'tweets' and always will be. So long as FriendFeeder and similar sites can role that functionality into it, then Twitter doesn't have much of a competitive advantage, that's all I am saying. That's my point.

Twitter has a developer community writing to its API, but those innovations come from outsiders.
Check out the sidebar of this guy's blog. Wonder what his agenda is. Wonder what he could mean by presenting this data, ripped out of context in this way?
We don't use quantcast, but here's how we stack up on alexa, fwiw:

http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details/justin.tv?...
Starbucks to give 2 hrs free wifi per day (if you use their card).
"Sneak" Photos of WWDC Show iPhone, Leopard Banners
I've used both vistaprint.com and overnightprints.com.

Overnightprints has better paper stock and printing options (e.g. rounded corners), but I wasn't super-thrilled with their print quality. Vistaprint may have been better at printing, but their card stock was flimsy.

That said, they were both okay, and pretty cheap, too (vistaprint is the cheapest, once you factor in minimum order sizes).
> at least one of two long-held physical principles is untenable: Distant events do not affect one other, and properties we wish to observe exist before our measurements. One of these, locality or realism, must be fundamentally incorrect.

I'm pretty sure it's the second one. If, say, 2 spinwise-anticorrelated particles had x-spin values prior to measuring their respective x-spins, you wouldn't get Bell's inequalities. Isn't that why they were a big deal?
No one said anything about releasing it! By now they've probably gone through what, five different engines and rewrites? Just because they have something playable doesn't mean they won't keep rewriting it...

I also can't see ANY way the final product can possibly live up to the expectations. I know I can't judge from 20 seconds of random gameplay, but it didn't really look like anything special...
Google App Engine Bittorrent tracker...is it legal?
Thanks for the information. It is interesting, but perhaps not as interesting as some of the other problems Powerset is working on.

The nagging voice at the back of my head asks if this is a case of scaling your architecture before you need to?
A link to http://duke.a-13.net/ seems appropriate.

"Things that have taken less time than Duke Nukem Forever's Development: [...] World War II and the entire Manhattan Project. Yes, even the complete development of the atomic bomb took less time."
Oil: Key players and movements
Entrepreneurial? Enjoy online video? CastTV Video Search is looking for a Web Application Engineer.
Well, Powerset's current frontend manages over 2^9's cores, which is even more processes to monitor and route traffic to. Fuzed manages about a 3rd of these and ensures that they are up and traffic is rerouted in the event that the C code that constitutes our NL analysis crashes or consumes too much memory (it can), or a machine drops, or a nic crashes.

Fuzed is cool for this, and a big win for Powerset, because you can scale as you go, you can very nearly just drop more hardware in with practically no global configuration. Search Engines are a special case of websites because they have to scale very broad, very early.

But Fuzed is useful and usable from one box to hundreds, and it's idea for dynamic environments like EC2 where you need to stay very light on your feet to minimize cost. That's originally why I wrote it.
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Mobaganda - Propaganda For Your Friends
Recently launched Mobaganda, and have been featured on TechCrunch, Lifehacker, etc... Just found out it will be included in TIME's 50 best sites of 2008.

Have the opportunity to take on some VC money to build it out a bit, a few hundred thousand, but am not sure if I should or not.

Thoughts? How would you monetize assuming great traction and viral growth?

-Stirman
www.stirman.net
What are the advantages of fuzed over other load balancing options already available? That you can have more complicated logic in the frontend to backend mapping?
Oops, should have left the url out of the submission, meant for discussion... my apologies.
Lisp's IDE problem - and a proposed solution
WSJ's Walt Mossberg: "Firefox is the best"
This is one. Unlike a lot of existing systems that are "implicit" clusters (e.g., nginx+mongrels, HW load balancer over nginxs over mongrels, etc in that vein), Fuzed is an "explicit" cluster.

So it does things that normal routing doesn't do very well:

1. Fuzed restarts rack processes that become unresponsive or die suddenly as part of its normal operation.

2. Fuzed's dispatcher actually knows when your rack instances are busy and when they aren't. It won't route requests to a busy instance. This ends up being a very good scheduling algorithm for things like rails because of the variable return times.

3. Fuzed clusters reqire almost 0 configuration, they need to be able to do a DNS lookup to a master node, and that's pretty much it.

4. Fuzed can simultaneously host multiple versions of a site and monitor all of them individually OR in groups. Powerset uses the api-mode to host multiple versions of software as we roll out or do performance testing on new hardware or software.

5. Fuzed natively supports multiple frontends that serve out over the same hardware. Usually traditional approaches don't scale horizontally over this dimension without cloning configurations.

I could name some other features that normal clustering approaches need a lot of secondary software to achieve, but I've got a blog post coming up soon that should go over it in more detail.
OpenOffice Impress is free. And it automatically downloads my updates for me, too.
Hey. I started playing with Fuzed after the Railsconf presentation and I have to say that I'm impressed. I got a 10 node instance running in no time and it was nicely balanced. I'll be submitting some patches in the future before I fork it on Github. Major kudos to you guys for releasing it! Now with Fuzed and PoolPartyRb, there's no more excuses for not being able to scale easily.

PS: The headline of this post is a bit misleading since Fuzed is tied to Rails as well (Chassis binding)... not just Erlang.
Well, it is and it isn't. Powerset doesn't use the rails functionality at all right now.

P.S., we want more language and framework bindings. I have about half a mzscheme erlang binding done (Erlenmeyer on my github) because I'd love to see arc bindings.
What Newspapers Still Don’t Understand About The Web
And then as if the gods of scaling were taunting me, right as I posted this, my front-end web server ran out of memory and started thrashing. I had to hard-reboot it to recover.
Maybe you should read the Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous. It's so much clearer.

Like you, I studied philosophy in college, and then ended up in the tech industry. I've tried really hard to repress my philosophical urges because when I express their questions, I get into trouble.

I've had managers in the tech industry tell me to quit it with the philosophy, and I used to think there was something wrong with me for being philosophical.

If you look at Socrates, he was killed for his philosophizing. If philosophy is really as you, and the early Wittgenstein say it is, then why do people get so upset about philosophy?

I think (like Plato and Socrates) it's because the questioning in philosophy puts people face to face with their ignorance. And most people if they've had some success in life, like to believe it's because they know.

You wrote: "The real lesson here is that the concepts we use in everyday life are fuzzy, and break down if pushed too hard."

You've clearly identified the source of upset people have at philosophy. But what if the concept is really broken and doesn't fit the world it was born into? Ptolemaic physics is pretty fuzzy. Many have pushed it too hard. Does that mean we should kill someone?

You might be disillusioned in philosophy, but I find it liberating. What makes me fear for the future, especially since now, the study of philosophy in terms of student enrollments has doubled, is that people will suppress it.
Furniture from Giant Lego Bricks : LunaBlocks
People have been known to do much worse things with strangers to save money for gas ;)
Let me clarify. I don't think psychometrics are BS; I think they are real measures of certain skills. However, the results of IQ tests have certain, significant limitations that people often don't appreciate. In practice, the tests are overused and the results are over-generalized. This article is a prime example of my criticisms.
That sounds a lot like the Boston-area startup culture. Maybe it's an east-coast vs. west-coast thing.
Er.js: Erlang-in-JavaScript
The paranoia and distrust and bitterness that comes with the disease is just as bad as the memory loss itself.

I've known three people so far with Alzheimer's: My grandmother, my grandfather, and my mother-in-law.

My observation is that Alzheimer's definitely shifts your personality, but which direction it goes in is not obvious. My grandma ended up paranoid and distrustful. My grandfather remained cheerful and smiling right up to the end. (Neither of them actually died of Alzheimer's.) My mother-in-law is also fairly far over toward the good-cheer side.

It is tempting to observe that Alzheimer's tends to exaggerate an existing aspect of your personality: My grandmother was always paranoid and became more so; my grandfather was always fairly cheerful and outgoing. But some of that may be due to environmental factors: an Alzheimer's patient surrounded by familiar, friendly people and things is naturally likely to be happier. When you've got Alzheimer's, the influence of environment gets larger and larger, since it's your only possible source of continuity. That's what this awesome bus stop hack is exploiting.
Good stuff. Google endorsed.
The world is ending...
Calling all First-Time Entrepeneurs for Startup2Startup
Ah... designers vs. coders link bait.
Registration required. Meh.
... except that Microsoft doesn't ask questions like that for software engineering positions, at least not when I interviewed there. I found the interview questions to be reasonably similar to Google's.
Social Gaming Pwns The Industry
Broadcom Billionaire Henry Nicholas Indicted on Cocaine and Stock Back-Dating Charges
Tens of thousands of highly skilled workers turned away
Finally a useful digital pen
Finally the computer reaching their full potential: a TV
An Alternative to Advertising for Web 2.0
You can put Firefox into full-screen mode with <F11>; if you also turn off the toolbars and refrain from using multiple tabs, it's a very similar effect. (There are also add-ons for a full, locked kiosk mode, which is something else Plainview offers.)
Or give your customers more and succeed like Microsoft, Google, Adobe, Apple, IBM, etc, etc, etc, and so on throughout the whole of the NYSE and Nasdaq listings.
Radiohead Gadget Remix: Old Printers, Scanners and Hard Drives Used to Perform Radiohead's 'Nude'
720 dollars a month for 10 instances running consistently for a month on scalr. Why pay monthly for the setup.
sup stirman!

i take back what i said about mobaganda at YH btw... it was a stupid, uneducated first impression, without actually exploring or using the service.
Entertainment industry accuses campus laser printers of downloading Indiana Jones
Very happy with our cards from overnightprints.com, the price was very reasonable and we always get compliments on the cards (I think they look a lot more expensive than they actually were).
As an employee in a state tech position, I find 37Signals' philosophy refreshing. I can't speak to its appeal as a business leader, but as someone who wants to just do the work that gets the results without the fluff and exhaustion, it sounds great.
PSPrint.com is good, cheap, and local if you're in the bay area.
Totally agreed.

I've been planning to make the move back to Pittsburgh and can't find anything remotely interesting and 'startup'-like (looking for a front-end engineering position).

I think AlphaLabs is doing a great thing and I will definitely apply for the next round (considering I'll be living in Pgh by then).

But for now... I'm a bit lost.
I've been playing with this for a couple of days now on EC2 - I was able to spin up a minimal stack in a few hours from nothing and just keep adding nodes to make it keep being able to take more traffic - it's pretty sweet.

I've packaged a couple of EC2 AMIs (32 and 64 bit versions) that I'll make public in a day or two and a script that uses Net::SSH to automate most of the spinning process. I just finished the video for a screencast on this and I went from zero to a 9 node cluster that could serve 300 req/sec on a non-cached Rails app in development mode, all in about 12 minutes.

It really is fun to play with - now to find a reason to use it...
I just don't understand the 37Signals hate. Lots of entities on the internet share their experiences and opinions in a definitive voice, but 37Signals is the one that gets the flak for that approach.
Thanks evdawg, no need to take it back... I bet many people shared your initial impression. Criticism help me grow these things :)
When I landed on that page there was a popup asking to press OK if I wanted to tell them what I think about the site. I'd say I think having a lame javascript popup appear like that to nag me into submitting my opinion on a random site I just landed on is pointless and rude.
If you have a Costco membership, they'll occasionally carry Mexican Coca-Cola in the 12 ounce glass bottles. That's the stuff with the cane sugar (and why it will usually be displayed away from the soda).
Optimal Rubik's Cube Algorithm Down to 23 Moves
"Actually Vertebra is not tied to Ruby on Rails at all."

Interesting. I just assumed because of the connection to Engine Yard, and you know what happens when one assumes.

"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."

Will do. While we have our own implementation for solving quite a few of the common cloud infrastructure problems, we're also agnostic and configure dozens of other tools without feeling the least bit guilty about having multiple ways to do things (must be our Perlmonger background), and it sounds like you're addressing things that aren't in our current scope. (For example, we support Xen, VServers, Zones, and EC2, and S3 and ZFS...we're loco like that. We don't even care.)
The Customer Doesn't Care Whose Fault It Is
Q. How many ADD kids does it take to write good code?

A. Let's go ride bikes!
The main problem I've had has been distribution. To distribute a lisp program I need to either:

1) Create an executable image that is HUGE, even for small/simple applications

2) Distribute a loadable image and force the users to make sure it's version matches their runtime (if they even have one, which isn't likely).

Perhaps there is a third option... and if there is I'd love to hear it. But if you can't distribute the program, whats the point in writing it?
Matt Mullenweg Talks Wordpress
LinkedIn Architecture
and one more here:
http://www.slideshare.net/linkedin/linked-in-javaone-2008-tech-session-comm
Don't take any pill after you turn 70. You'd regret it.
I have to admit, I right-clicked looking for the "About Adobe Flash Player 9" thing
I was thinking about that the other day -- it's an anti-inflammatory drug that seems to work immediately on many patients diagnosed with Alzheimer's. Why?

Apparently it's difficult to tell the difference between Alzheimer's and vascular dementia while the patient is still alive -- examining a sample of brain tissue is the definitive test. I think I heard that the misdiagnosis rate is something like 50% (unreliable number, don't take my word for it). It doesn't make much sense for an anti-inflammatory drug to clear the protein plaques or undo neurological damage in the case of Alzheimer's disease, but it does make sense for the drug to improve blood flow to the brain for patients who actually have vascular dementia instead. So, perhaps there was a mix of patients in the (small) initial trials we've seen for etanercept as an Alzheimer's treatment that accounts for the surprising result.
I overheard PG talking about this at Startup School and I have been looking forward to it since. I'm excited to hear they will be open sourcing their framework in the future..
I would have used it. I used to ride with a van pool. Links:

http://www.vanpool.com/ (sponsored by Enterprise rent-a-car)

http://www.vanpoolusa.com/ (sponsored by VPSI Inc.)

This was in Southern California, where public transportation has been endangered or extinct for decades. The arrangement sucked, and my current commute sucks enough that I'd carpool again if the meetup time wasn't 5:45 a.m.

Edit: I poked at it a little, and noticed that it doesn't ask for a radius when saving a new commute (no matches). Is the matching algorithm fuzzy enough to figure out when I'm "close enough" to someone else's route? Does it match along the whole route, so I could pick someone up midway?