skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I find it hard to believe that the telcos will succeed on this issue in the United States. Especially because they're also morphing into content providers, it's hard to see this as anything but an antitrust issue.

I think what's more likely is that if the situation gets this dire, we'll see lawsuits and legislation. There are too many powerful content providers (especially in the US) with a vested interest in seeing that nothing like this ever happens.
It'll be a collection of essays. Most are already on my site. I may try to finish it this summer.
Slide Says It's Done Releasing New Facebook Apps
This made the news recently. Bell Canada, throttled traffic upstream of independent ISPs that resell their bandwidth.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080325-canadian-isps-...

In a case like that, there's no getting around Bell Canada. Either you're throttled or you're out of the DSL business.
Guys, this is one of Athene's works. (http://www.youtube.com/user/AtheneWins) He makes a good argument, and net neutrality is a real thing, but this, guys, is Athene, the "best paladin in the world." You shouldn't take it too seriously.

sigh
It's such bullshit to make up a specific year. This stuff is the most egregious propaganda.
I think the most ridiculous part is that the website doesn't look Web 2.0 itself!
$.map has an interesting quirk in its spec: it flattens returned arrays into the result. This was implemented by calling concat() with each result, but concat creates a new array for its return value. So each iteration was creating a new array and copying over the previous values, which makes for a quadratic runtime in most JS runtimes.

(Curiously, in the benchmarks folks did in the Reddit thread, it looked like Firefox was not quadratic - which implies that Firefox either has some clever optimizations going on or does crazy things with concat().)
Thats partly because bus fare (at least here in the north) has been going up just as fast as petrol prices.

As my current place pays overtime I would need the cost of petrol to go up to 5gbp/litre (~$40/gal) without an increase in the cost of the bus to make catching it worthwhile, factoring in the longer trip times.

Decent wifi and a nicer bus would certainly change my view on the tradeoff though. The sooner they make the top deck a first class, recliner seating, no child zone the better :)
CodeIgniter seconded. Makes PHP programming a lot easier. Also check out CodeIgniter fork Kohana. I use it to run an advertising network, works really well - ORM and tons of libraries (and of course, being open-source) makes it great.
Amazingly the nicest busses I have been on are in Mexico (Tampico/Monterrey). They have huge comfortable brand new Merc busses available, with fully reclining seats. No wifi yet but some busses have plane-style entertainment systems.

The contrast between those and Grehound McAllen-Houston was amazing, more Spanish was required on the US side of the border, and it was hard to immagine the bus was road legal.
Intel antitrust investigation officially launched by FTC
Google doesn't allow automated queries. An old soap api key might still work. (At least it works for the former company I worked for, but I think they also had a special deal with google)
Yeah, I thought for a minute I had skipped ahead a few pages by mistake. One minute it's all about thousands of processes or threads, and the next it talks about select/poll/epoll/kqueue without really introducing the idea properly (but other than that I thought it was great!).

Incidentally, the justin.tv chat server uses one thread per cpu, and epoll for its network io, and currently scales to a little over 10,000 connections per cpu (see http://irc.justin.tv/ for other numbers). It's the most scalable irc server that I'm aware of. I keep meaning to write something up about it...
Sure, I just expected the doc to go a little more like:

1 process per connection (bad) -> 1 thread per connection (better?) -> 1 process (bingo!)
Oil hits $139 as jobless figures stun US
This is a joke, right? You can't possibly be serious.
I understand why my mom used to tell me to "look it up"---it's a good habit to cultivate. But if someone's available and they won't mind, just asking is usually 10-100 times faster than looking it up.

If I didn't know much about what I was looking for (per this example), I could see myself spending a good hour trying to find an answer, vs. the few minutes it took to get one here.

That's what colleagues are for!
I say parachute them a small wood stove fired electrical generator along with satellite internet connectivity and a few dozen Macs.

In 5 years they'll all be developers and demanding $200 an hour for their services.
The Economy: Why It’s Worse Than You Think
Three Rules for Startup Success
Don't worry about "Extensive support of libraries and frameworks", you don't need it. All web sites I built, large and small, required only two additional components: the DB glue (typically mysql) and UTF support (mbstring). There may be specific situations when you might want to send https requests or use compression, but that's ok, even that is not called "extensive libraries and frameworks". The bottom line is, a good web site has a clean, simple source that doesn't depend on third-party code that much.
http://www.norvig.com/spell-correct.html

A simple Python based spell checker along with some discussion of probability and the pitfalls of doing things the naive way.
The Right Answer: How to Talk to a User
Basically an approach I take on all points. Thanks.
I thought that was going to be about Arnold Schwarzenegger but I was wrong.
Would someone who supports the view of him being innocent care to comment? :)
Commodore 64 Mod -- MIDI Synthesizer
Neil deGrasse Tyson gives you an answer in a talk at http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6473201666872695446

He sums it up by saying an Islamic leader declared mathematics to be the work of the devil, so all discourse and innovation stopped.
While I generally don't give much credibility to anything I read in the gardian this story is easy to verify.
Oil prices: Is there an oil bubble? What will the future price of oil be?
I know you probably wrote that as a joke RL but I currently use a kid from equador to do some of my design work. He is absolutely brilliant at CSS and I don't have to pay him anywhere close to $200 an hour.
"OK, the DA is saying that. Not Hans. Hans is not saying he will tell them where he hid the body. The DA is trying to get the public on board with the sentence and so holding bogus announcements that he is negotiating for a reduced sentence in return for body location.

This is a publicity stunt by the DA to fool the public with spin."

http://www.crazyontap.com/topic.php?TopicId=36938#465360
Facebook Changes Killing App Virality?
3G iPhone to get $200 subsidy from AT&T?
Qwaq developing new fast Smalltalk VM
Well, they are trying to compete with a British bus line that started the same low cost service in the US two years ago...
I love Red Arrow. I just wish it hit Lethbridge as well.
Facebook: Applications No Longer Allowed to Pre-Select Message Recipients
Wow. Some people have way too much invested in their own personal theories about events which have nothing to do with them personally.
Thanks for that, Dani. For an astrophysics geek like me this is a huge deal and that post was beautifully clear and eloquent. I imagine there are some very excited cosmologists right now.
Norvig's code solves an even more difficult problem, spell correcting. But yeah, good read nonetheless.
One step closer to The Singularity? Maybe Ray Kurzweil is right with his predictions on the growth of technology and knowledge.
Amtrak is a pleasant, viable alternative to flying as long as you are traveling between Washington, Philadelphia, New York and Boston. The Cascades services between Seattle and Vancouver has some nice scenery as well.
It's been a while since I've checked, but I think he's mistaken that Apache is one process per connection. I think it fires up multiple processes just because that's best if you take a bit to serve each request. He doesn't really cover that aspect of things much. Serving static files quick is, if not quite a solved problem, not terribly hard. Doing applications, with significant processing overhead, is a bit more difficult.
Twitter prepares for Apple's Worldwide Developer's Conference
it s 200$ in next year
At least this guy is willing to admit that he was wrong once before.

But I'm afraid that he's wrong once again.

New crude is still constantly being discovered it's just that it's being discovered at higher and higher break even prices.

Alberta tar sands are coming in at $15 per barrel of crude equivalent break even.

Rocky Mountain Oil Shale is now being reported by Shell to come in at $30 per barrel of crude equivalent break even.

There are still massive reserves in northern Alaska and off the pacific and atlantic coasts. China is exploring in the Sudan and that african nation is now cranking out half million barrels a day.

Oil only becomes non-renewable when all the energy companies stop exploring. That is not happening.
What do you think of print on demand services such as Amazon's createspace.com?
Instalando o novo Passenger   Ruby Enterprise Edition
~1 process per core, that is (unless the daemon is completely I/O bound).
I have a feeling he'd be able to get a traditional publisher pretty easily.
Very lyrical but not very insightful.
Seconding simonw's Yahoo recommendation. The API is great and the results are often as good as Google's. If you scrape Google searches, they will eventually block you.
The latest lie-detector trial suggests the best way to detect liars may be to lie.
"The books in the Ender series are my favorite books[...]I can save myself the time reading Harry Potter"

Weird, I would never miss a chance to read a book that compares to another favorite book of mine.

I have noticed the similarity in themes, too, but I have enjoyed both Harry Potter and Enders Game. They are not similar in the sense of being clones. Also, the "flying game" is only a side plot in HP, and was for me the least interesting aspect of the books.
I was just saying that favicon is just very small part of an online company's identity and it’s definitely not a serious part.(If you still don't get my point then ask yourself: how many companies I know that make more money because of their favicon?)
Dumb.

First, the fact that cities beneath everything else are all comprised of ordinary people means nothing. It has always been the top that detemines the direction everyone else goes. It doesn't change anything PG wrote. How many in Padua, or say, Florence, were anything else but ordinary when the Renaissance unfolded? It has always been the top that makes history and changes things for everyone else.

Your comment is a little like saying there is no difference between Honda and Ford, since they are both composed largely of steel and aluminum and plastic. And this is the reason there is an enormous distance between Germany and America. In Germany there is no top, just droids coming and going. In America there is very decidely a top. About everyone else, PG was not making any remark.

America has a serious Middle Education problem, but American Universities are indeed, second to none.

Also, don't talk ecosystem. It means so much to so many people these days, it has come to have no meaning.

You are also incorrect in stating that most any city has the circle someone would want to belong to, that someone just needs to look for it. This is far from the truth. There are many cities in which you could not find certain circles in which to exchange ideas, if your life depended on it.
My personal gripe with Code Igniter is that it doesn't have a built-in templating language (this is by design).

I absolutely love Smarty (smarty.net) and highly recommend it and have used it in many projects so far.

There have been attempts to integrate Smarty into CI but I saw a benchmark that showed that combination was unacceptably slow and won't scale well.
Do you have Facebook?
A Live Promotion, at 14,000 Feet.
Heroku is also still an invite only beta service.
In fact, a "bad" language require significantly more skill to use successfully and securely.

You seem to be passing this off as an advantage, but that doesn't make sense. Let's say you make furniture for a living, and one day you intentionally slice your arm off. Now you brag that having one arm is better than having two, since you now "require significantly more skill" to do the same work you could do before.

That doesn't make you a better furniture maker. It makes you a cripple.

Using PHP is the programming equivalent of cutting off your arm. It makes work more difficult, more painful, and slower.

But to each his own.
I don't get what the big deal is. As long as the document you're checking fits in RAM, then you can just sort the words alphabetically and then check them in a single pass through the dictionary. If you really need random access, use a B+ tree.
Re: aerial photos. A civil engineering/surveyor friend of mine told me that he nicknamed the small aerial plane he tagged along on once to do these aerial surveys the vomit comet - because of the quick back-and-forth required to not miss coverage.
Voted up not because of the interesting content, but because of the interesting subject. I find it very hard to settle on healthy food for breakfast. Cereals and grains should be it, but somehow my feeling has always been that they don't agree with me very well. By now I also try to avoid dairy products, which makes "cereals" even less appealing.

So I am curious what everybody is eating?
Biofuel backlash: High prices, pollution worries hit consumers
Price prediction is a fool's errand, if only because the ability to do it would itself affect the dynamics of the market.

That said, it's also pretty difficult to predict prices of commodities that are caught up in a bubble. How does one model irrational behavior?
I think the term "Facebook apps" is an oxymoron since the FB API doesn't let you build any applications that might be of personal digital assistant-type value.
With a traditional publisher you usually get a royalty of about 10-15% versus 4-6 times that with print on demand. Announce publication on YC and let bloggers promote with amazon affiliate links. Everyone wins but Barnes and Noble.
Islam was not originally anti-science, as evidenced by the fact that the whole body of basic sciences builds upon Muslim scientific tradition (certainly true of medicine, chemistry, optics and astrology, most of basic math etc.).

It is not that the Muslims invented these disciplines, but they preserved and expanded upon works from earlier nations such as those of Hellenistic Greece, which would be unknown today if they had not been preserved by the Muslims and later translated to European languages.

There was not the same schism between religion and science as there was in the West. In fact most of the eminent Muslim scholars were as prolific in theology as in temporal studies. Consider f.ex. Avicenna, father of modern medicine, who was also a big theologist and had memorized the entire Quran.

There are many such examples, f.ex. try reading about Averroes who basically revolutionized European philosophical thought and at the same time was one of the world's leading experts on Islamic law.
upcoming.org was coded in PHP. That being said, anyone can code a website but creating a website of value that attracts users...
So is anyone interested in an essay about that? I've got a few topics on the hook. I used to run a search engine that served 600 million queries per month.
The headline is a bit sensationalist. We're talking about mitochondrial DNA coming from a cytoplasm donor. This is not the nuclear DNA generally associated with the idea of parenthood.
Where do you plan to store the dictionary for reference?
Ask YC: Looking for a new UI designer/programmer (YouIntern.com) (NYC)
Stop me if you've heard this one before.

We've got a product and we think it's good (www.YouIntern.com). It's been live for five months or and has received very positive responses from its two core customer bases and from industry press. We've got a growing user base and a team member who is an exceedingly savvy marketer.

But we're seeking a keen, creative, Wusthof-sharp mind to re-build our user interface and be our lead programmer/designer. (And before you go off thinking I'm smarter than you because I know who Wusthof is, don't bother. He's a knifemaker).

If you're up late, like me, you might have that restless edge that pushes people. Young, ambitious people. PSD's (http://www.thestandard.com/news/2008/04/10/bear-stearns-and-psd-spirit). People who want to work with other bright people, driven people, working late hours on something they want to see become wonderful.

People who live in NYC and want to meet up for a drink some night. Those kind of people. Shoot me an email and we'll chat about the project: twelvedigits [at] gmail [dot] com

If you're not in NYC and still interested, send me a note please and we'll have a chat.
Krugman: "In the long run, we are all the Grateful Dead"
I don't like the low quality of the physical books these services produce.
FTR, I think he's guilty (and have from nearly the beginning) but parent is right. These offices are often little hotbeds of spin and manipulation. Public opinion counts in a big way. People get elected, careers advance and names are made by the trials and their outcomes.

I wouldn't take anything heard in the news about this case very seriously until the body actually shows up.
I remember bloom filters (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom_filter) been good for this sort of thing.
Kevin Kelly in The Next Fifty Years of Science (http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6119231548215342323) has one answer: the Chinese never developed the leverage of the scientific method, and corollary, all such civilizations are stuck at the level of clever technology, never able to make knowledge multiples.
Unbelievable hardware: 1TB SSD
The misleading title of this blog entry reminds me of another gem of a recent useless blog article: http://gigaom.com/2008/06/06/why-amazon-went-down-and-what-i...

Are publishers pushing page views over actual content?
Answering that question is exactly where I found the article interesting, especially with regard to the glycemic index and cognitive functioning. It's one reason I've almost entirely cut juice and sugar from my morning intake because it nicely explains the mid-morning crash. Even lightly processed cereals are not very good for you. It seems to be much better (physically and mentally) to get complex carbs (look for more fiber and less sugar) with fresh fruit (for fiber and sweetness) and perhaps a bit of protein/fat (nuts are really, really good). But all that's much easier said when full than hungry!

My wife and I have been trying (and failing) to push our diets closer to Michael Pollan's latest mantra:

"Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."

http://www.michaelpollan.com/indefense.php

Magazine treatment here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/28/magazine/28nutritionism.t....
Hey I sent an email, did you receive it?
You should specify if you're looking for a graphic designer, HTML coder or a software developer. "Programmer/designer" doesn't mean anything.
Executive summary: "programming was harder when there was less abstraction".

I was hoping for a discussion of some algorithms, but instead I just got a long winded "wow, progress is amazing" rant.

This post has inspired me to start a new blog where I state the obvious and then submit it to every social news site. My first article will be "the sky is blue" except I will explain that in 1000 words or more. With ads.
Sure. More than anything, we're looking for a developer. We can pull graphic design from elsewhere, plus we're a few steps along that process, given we more want to modify our design now. But my hope is that someone is looking for a project and wants to spearhead developmental changes on the site, and join on with some very motivated thinkers.
Thanks for this link. Much more interesting than the article.
A great way to prepare the world for your upcoming site collapse... hysterical.
I'd say that this is 100% correct. Be wary.
You haven't read too many then.
Gzip compression will achieve around 6x compression on a sorted wordlist. So even the 2008 wordlist of 240K words would reduce to about 400K. Cut the list in half or more, use a compression better suited for a sorted wordlist, and you could have a useful wordlist that would fit temporarily in RAM even in 256K machines.
http://www.kegel.com/c10k.html is more concise and it has a better coverage of available options. It is the canonical reference for anyone asking "how to handle 10000 clients".
Executive summary of the first 53 pages: epoll is great, the other solutions range from not-so-good to terrible.
Now that sounds interesting. Why did you quit or did you sell your search engine? I'm doing some search stuff myself (I haven't launched so far) and it would be nice to be able to get some tips.

However I do not expect to reach 600 million queries per month, at least not in the first month ;)
They forgot "if the image is facing you from a rack in a supermarket checkout line, its a strong indicator of a faked photo."
It still is I think. Nothing seems to compare to Google's spell check.
You've really got a bad taste in your mouth regarding PHP. I'm sorry to hear that because it's just yet another tool. It only has to be as painful and slow as you make it when you use it. I hope you have a chance to revisit it sometime with a modern framework like Code Igniter or CakePHP. I used to have a shade of the type of biases you show now, but after we've made half a dozen MVC web apps using Code Igniter (and Django) I've had to change my tune.

Best of luck to you.
Best Strategy Is Speed (Startup2Startup May 2008)
We can hope.

Any recommended twitter feeds for the conference?
Language isn't as important as the framework you will use for developing the web app. Have you looked at Django vs. Simfony, etc? Why not consider Ruby and Ruby on Rails?

I tend to choose Python and more specifically Django.
Incremental Development Environments
So the message here is:

A guy who's associated with a company who made an investment in Facebook, is formerly associated with the National Venture Capial Association (most VCs are), is associated with another obscure character who's associated with a VC firm which itself is associated with the CIA...

...did I get that right?

This is typical conspiracy theory bunk. Because every character in this case -- persons and firms -- has itself 10's of thousands of contacts, the possible stories you can create by virtue of who each knows is exponential. So the meaning of any single association -- CIA + Facebook here -- becomes less and less compelling the further you move through the already-fragile associations.

As an aside consider this: should you be judged for knowing someone who has at one time herself known a murderer, a rapist, a prostitue, or a drug dealer? What if you know someone who knows someone like that? The curious statistical thing is, it's almost certainly the case that you do.

I don't mean to trivialize the importance of privacy of information. I just mean to make the case that if there is a decent case against FB and the threat it poses to users' privacy, this isn't it.
Apache buys you two things: rock-solid, time-tested stability, and millions of words of writing both online and in print about administration and tuning.

Lighty and Nginx are both (like thttpd) leaner, potentially faster, and "sexier." Neither has the proven stability or community that Apache does, and neither is going to help much if your bottlenecks are at the application layer, rather than just shooting raw bits over a network cable.
Excuse me? The Chinese had their own proof of the Pythagorean theorem a long time before Pythagoras did. You cannot accuse them of a lack of mathematical intuition.

http://www.visual-euclid.org/chinese/