skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I see many of the most famous, successful people in business, politics, law, entertainment, education, and other fields have been arrested, done drugs, or both. In fact, I'm having trouble thinking of highly successful people who have never been in either category.

How are you going to take the necessary business risks to be the next Bill Gates or Richard Branson or Steve Jobs (or U.S. President or genre-creating musician or ...), if you can't take a small personal risk? There may be a benefit to "staying clean", but it appears to be dwarfed by the ability to take calculated risks.

If you want to abstain for the sake of abstention and staying out of jail, then by all means do so. But if you think smoking cannabis is going to sink your career when you start becoming successful, I see no indication of that.
I'm not saying it's slow. I'm saying, "an order of magnitude faster than XML" isn't saying much. They've chosen the wrong benchmark. How does it compare to Pickle, Marshal, XDR, DCE, and Thrift?

For that matter, how does it compare to JSON?

I'm not really making a point about how fast Protocol Buffers are. I'm making a point about how the article was written.
I've never used an illegal drug, but the plural of anecdote is not data.
edw hit a nerve, didn't he?
"Granted, I was testing on the campus of Virginia Tech, which has a fire-breathingly fast Net connection. But I’ve often checked out Web page load time while standing in an Apple store – and you know that’s optimized for speed – and it still wasn’t as fast."

Here I stopped reading.
B-trees are basically the only sane option if you ever need to do range queries. Hash tables tend to outperform them a bit on all other operations.
The Gordon rule is not nearly that restrictive. Gordon rule courses re structured so that students will have a lot of writing assignments. No one is getting flunked for writing 5,999 words. The idea is to force students to take courses that require a lot of writing.

The rule is actually not a terrible idea in the first place. Its basically a response to a larger than you'd expect number of florida university graduates not being able to pass the CLAST (a re-hashing of the SAT). There's a similar requirement that all students must take a certain number of math classses.
He who thinks twitter is acquiring summize for the technology is foolish.
No one is getting flunked for writing 5,999 words.

I graduated from the University of Florida. YMMV, but my instructors in Gordon Rule courses were quite diligent/paranoid about making sure students met the word quota. I never heard of a student actually getting flunked for being slightly under, but that's because the instructors made sure that they didn't turn in an under-quota paper in the first place -- even if it meant just padding the extra space with repetition of "Gordon Rule sucks." (Ok, so you couldn't be quite that blatant, but not far off)

Edit: UF was in the middle of a reaccreditation audit while I was there. Maybe the situation is less bad the rest of the time.
Is this something like modern day ASN.1?
What's the incentive for a professor to offer a high-wordcount course?
The Primal Element
Amateur stuff. Learn how to say nothing in 70,000 words, and you've got yourself a PhD.
This should be cross-referenced to the earlier-posted article "How To Say Nothing In 500 Words"
To me, Click Fraud implies something more competitive, like clicking the ads for a competitor or clicking the ads on your own web site. In this case, the clicking is straight anti-capitalist and is done purely out of spite.
I searched and clicked a few. That's a few hundies charged.
Administrative fiat, I assume. IIRC all courses that offered Gordon Rule credit were part of the statewide curriculum, not invented by an individual professor. In fact, for that reason I had to double-check my schedule to make sure I was satisfying the Gordon Rule math requirement, despite being a math major. It was never actually a problem, but it's rather broken that it was even a close call.
Why bother purchasing a search layer when they can't even scale right...they're not prioritizing
>I challenged the appropriateness of a #1 hn post from a student who uses drugs to get by and then brags about it.

It would have been more meaningful if he was a physics or science PhD. A pot smoking liberal arts PhD is... eh. Not news.
So many startups these days have a hard time convincing themselves they need even one revenue stream in the early days.
A Software Developer's Guide To Stock Options
http://www.balsamiq.com/images/bmeeting.gif

The happy face on this mockup is made of win.
Damn it, I want my Kratom.
Probably not. Summize is probably using the Twitter "fire hose" API, which, I believe, uses ejabberd. Therefore, it (hopefully!) doesn't take much for Twitter to provide this information. Summize had to solve the problem of scaling up its indices by itself.
the 7-hydroxymitragynine precursors are ok but I don't have the capital to set up an industrial synthesis... for any intrigued chemical engineers there is a lot of money to be made here.
Think of all the really interesting and important things that this pool of brainpower could be addressing.

Actually, though unsexy, making the global economy a little bit more efficient probably does more to make people's lives better than dramatic things done specifically to make people's lives better.
I usually love your comments. It's hard to get through changing diapers and managing toddlerhood and stay sane and sharp, and you have, and, you know, respect, yo.

But this right here? Sounds like you just snapped. What do you care if people smoke up in their spare time? Why is it bad if it helps them cope with stress? I'm sure exercise would be better, but doing nothing about stress is probably worse.

Agree: whining about how hard being a student is does make you a pussy. Adding pot doesn't change the equation. =)
In both cases, the clicking is done destructively. Don't be a dick.
It may not be information, but it is most certainly data.
A lot of times, buying a company is just a fancy way to hire a bunch of good people. In this case, it would be people with good product development skills who are thinking a lot about the same problems Twitter is. Sounds like a good fit to me.
I just love it that the baylor.edu webserver is Netscape-Enterprise 4.1. Don't mess with a classic.
Microsoft Open to Yahoo Deal if Board is Replaced
Pools of brainpower directed towards any task imply centralized planning. The market's probably better at pricing what must be done.

P.J. O'Rourke has put this in more memorable words.
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-op-orourke4-2008may04...
Do think like a marketer: Fairness, idealism and other atrocities
What about books - am I not allowed to read books anymore if the characters in the book are not of the appropriate age? Or music - am I not allowed to listen to a song if the singer of the song is 10 years younger than I am?

Excellent ideas comrade, I'll contact the Ministry of Truth and see what we can arrange.

Seriously, the thing that bothers me about all of this is that the relationship is automatically cast as creepy and then justifications are sought to make it seem not so. This should be the other way around, no? I think we've all seen one to many episodes of "To catch a predator" for our own good.
A decent read, but I much prefer his "Personal Observations on the reliability of the Shuttle" http://www.ranum.com/security/computer_security/editorials/d....

It's of a lot of interest beyond simply the direct information about the space shuttle, mainly because of its discussion of reasonable risk taking, how to measure very remote probabilities, and the potential for a large disconnect between engineering and management with regards to safety measurement. And then of course it's about the space shuttle, so that's awesome.
And by inspired, you mean "a complete rip-off of".

I talked with some of the guys who did Thrift, and while they didn't steal code, the concept and config files are close to identical.
So..... we'll make software simpler by having to pay for each component we use?

Forgive me if this is leaving out some details, but this article seems a bit like, well, every other Brooks was wrong article.
5 digit figures? How are you getting that? How many full-time engineer "months" do you think Twitter would need to pay to get something as scalable as Summize? Who will test that it's ready to go live before the patience-thin Twitter user base?

How much money would be spent on the scalability testing to see if the service can handle an Apple WWDC without crippling the rest of Twitter?

I think you're greatly underestimating what they did with Summize. It's not rocket science, but there's real (and tried-by-fire) value there for Twitter. Summize didn't get $750k in angel funding to sell to someone in low 5 digits.

We're talking about live search over a medium completely made up of small, frequent text messages. Real-time searching increases Twitter's value as the instantaneous information source it has become. They don't have a lot of strengths to build on, but that's definitely one of the most valuable things Twitter has to offer and Summize augments that.

No brainer: buy Summize for a 2-4 million, add their search tools, get some of their engineers helping in the scalability problems, improve the API based on their feedback, have some of them continue working on their lab prototypes, and keep growing.
Hans Reiser leads police to body, believed to be his wife
It's off-topic newbie question but I haven't find the right place to ask: does anybody know if HAProxy work with ASP.NET websites?
Yep, in encoding part it's quite similar to PER -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Packed_Encoding_Rules
80+ Hours a Week: The Follow-Up
Whoa-- so untrue.

What do you think it costs to hire a good engineer? How about a good engineer who is already pretty intimately familiar with your offering's API? What about a collection of good engineers that are already used to working together?
I'm not sure why making things easier on one's self should be seen as a bad thing. I mean, I like using high level languages to write software rather than using assmebly for everything. Why wouldn't I use something similar for my mind?

I think this is an intersting prologue to how debates regarding mind-enhancing drugs will take place.

I also note that your reaction was highly...emotional? Your reasoning seems specious. Using marijuana doesn't mean that this person lives in a cocoon or is incapible of hard work or creating value somewhere.
Yes there is, but that isn't what myths are about. Being able to calculate the terminal velocity of a penny didn't prevent MythBusters from doing a show on that. Busting myths is about revealing a truth in non-scientific ways so that the average person understands the absurdity of the myth.
There are lots of factories in Mexico.

The industrial sector as a whole has benefited from trade liberalization; in 2000 it accounted for almost 90% of all export earnings.

25.7% of total GDP (...vs about 40 percent for China.)

I think there might be some differences, though, as the success of Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, and Hong Kong seems to be predictably repeating itself. Something about the Asian character doesn't seem typical,

http://www.motherjones.com/news/exposure/2005/07/exposure_58...

[I haven't done the above since the 3rd grade. Lining up for a bathroom break. Geez.]
Topspin gets investment from Foundry Group
Yeah, really, I can do 500 words in 15 minutes with 4 internet citations and a book. Any topic... You don't make it as far in college while doing as little work as I have if you write for meaning.

Except my tour de force Persecution of Atheists in America paper (10 pages); that's the only thing good thing I've written in college.
The Tyranny of Free
FriendFeed’s Top 250 Most Followed Users
Marty Pichinson: Silicon Valley’s “Undertaker”
If your schema is simple, you might want to check out SimpleDB. No need to setup tunnels (queries are handled over HTTP), and latency is super low when querying from an EC2 instance with both end points being inside AWS networks. You are also not charged for traffic between EC2/SimpleDB.
Pickle, Marshal, and JSON are all ways of describing the kind of data structures used by Perl, Python, Javascript, and so on. They are way more flexible than Protocol Buffers -- you can have arbitrarily nested structures of arbitrary length. The format of the messages are basically self-describing. By which I mean that if they want to put an array there, they just put a '[' in and away we go.

I think XDR describes fixed-format structures. I don't know anything about DCE.

As described above, Thrift is a clone of Protocol Buffers.

Thrift and PB are a lot like XDR or god forbid, CORBA, but with a few twists. They define message templates for how to parse and emit relatively simple binary structures, which are then compiled into RPC clients and servers. PBs are cross-platform, at least by Google standards: they work with both C++ and Java very well. So you get the speed and convenience of making RPC calls with binary data structures in a mixed C++/Java environment.

But the best thing about PBs is that the message structure can evolve. If a message suddenly has a new field the receiver can't use, the receiver doesn't panic or read in garbage, unlike many other binary formats. So you can upgrade clients and servers in a gradual manner, without any downtime. This is what makes PBs especially suited to cloud computing.
Follow Hacker News from the Console
Identical config files aside, the concept itself is rather simple and it has been around for ages in a form of ASN.1 and its encodings. It also routinely used in custom network protocols, e.g. IPC or RPC ones. Anyone outside of the XML fanboy club is aware of these things :-)

File format wise, it's hardly a rocket science too. When developers re-implement something, it's only natural to recycle an established implementation element. Changing it just for the sake of being different from another vendor is frankly quite dumb.

So I'd be careful with bold "rip-off" statements. In the end "Everything new is a well-forgotten old".
Very interesting post.

To the point that levels of complexity can be hidden by an external production pyramid:

Encapsulating complexity through a 'pyramid' of vendors is the evolutionary norm for all complicated systems. "I don't want to harvest vegetables, boil down some bone to make chicken stock, collect herbs & spices, throw it all in a pot and simmer for 4 hours - I'll just go to the store and buy some soup instead!"

This has always been the norm in software as well. From bits to file systems to grep and on and on, software is always built on building blocks that abstract complexities. We're starting to see this with software at levels that ease the burden of maintaining entire systems or networks(Amazon & Google,etc).

However, these abstractions away from complexities do not ease the burden of creating new software, just as lacquer and wood providers do not make it any simpler to create a warehouse that produces pencils. You can have all the supplies in the world but won't succeed until you know how to put them together, and in general putting them together in an efficient, useful manner is the hardest problem. There's no barrier to entry when it comes to providing a new web app - all the technology exists already, and is fairly well maitained! The barrier to entry is in combining the technology to create something new that is needed. Which brings me to my second point -

Regarding the articles conclusion: You had me till the 'out of the crisis'. If I follow correctly, the argument is that we should charge a fee for utilization of the utility that is software, not for the bits themselves. What this means is that I'm going to pay a cent every time I use my web browser. But this also means that my web browser creators, and, well, they're gonna pay .5 cents each time the browser is used for whoever provided the C++ libraries(or whatever it's built in). Who in turn is going to pay .2 cents for each use of....and so on. If the plan is to create a system that facilitates a broadening or evolution of the "roots" or building blocks of software, this will never work.

Here's why I'm not going to pay for the roots - we're already at a point in software where the 'roots' I really need are built, open-sourced and free. Or close to free. And for the components that aren't readily available - I simply refuse not to build them.

It's not that there's no incentive to provide more roots, it's that I don't want to pay for their use each time my software runs! Screw that. I'll spend an extra week implementing it myself, bugs be damned, and I'll collect all the revenue!

At least, that's the way the thinking usually goes.
Ask YC: Are talented web developers hard to find?
A quick glance at TechCrunch's Job Board shows lots of employers looking for talented web developers. Their requirements usually include all the latest web 2.0 technologies like JQuery, YUI, Dojo, Prototype, Rails, plus PHP, SQL, etc etc...

I don't work in the industry, and am not sure what its actually like out there: Is it hard to find people who possess all of these skills?
You know, forwards compatibility is a feature of a great many binary protocols, including DNS, RADIUS, SNMP, and DHCP (itself a forward-compatible hack on BOOTP). So, PB is just another TLV encoding?
I would say HN has maintained a remarkably high signal to noise ratio thus far.
That's interesting, I stand corrected - it is interesting how the trend has cycled between centralised and distributed compute resources over the decades, and IBM's been on the ride the whole time.

btw, when are you leaving Hursley ? ;-)
Hans Reiser's life will make a great movie someday. But who should play Hans? Steve Buscemi?
Units of a few thousand people are a lot higher res than central planning on a national scale.

But I get your point. We're working hard on version 2.
Summize Likely Acquired by Twitter
I didn't get married in the middle of college. I got married at 26, well after college.
Tips for Unit Testing
>>China needs to be knocked back a couple of pegs. We have been looking at nearly 1/6th of the population of the world controlled by an incredibly repressive regime

For this point to have any validity, you'll need to have a strong argument that a smaller rate of economic growth will lead to more political freedom. This is not at all clear as the present regime has held onto power through many crises.

On the other hand, an economic slowdown might very well mean that fewer people coming to the cities to look for a job will find one and an oil price price hike leading to an increase in the price of basic commodities might directly hit some of the poorest in a bad way. A significant humanitarian effect, without a political upheaval.
Wow. This looks great. How often does it poll the server?
The Greatest Bug of All
No more doubts, folks.
Yeah, I love movies about guys who commit murder, lie about it, come clean only to try to save their own ass, and leave their two kids without any parents in the process. I'll be first in line for a ticket, for sure.
That interlude was great.
And wrote a filesystem chose by several distros as the default. He was a seriously smart guy - and thats what make the story relative.

A lot of smart people have mental illness.

Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
-Hemmingway
I just upmodded him for you.
State of the Web - Summer 2008
This sure made me think of the recent "Don't talk to police" thread. I'm not saying he's innocent or anything, and clearly murder is a bad thing (which sounds trite and insensitive), but it just seems like a really bad move on his part. Maybe it got sold to him as saving his own ass, but it seems like it did the opposite. Being convicted is only part of the process - there's appeals, and appeals, and more appeals.

And again, apologies if I sound insensitive. I don't know any of the individuals belonged, and murders are so often in the news that it's easy to discuss them without any real emotion.
It polls the server once per 30 seconds (it's the default). The polling interval can be changed via '-i' command line option.
"It’s not about being smart. It’s about being around long enough." -- perfectly true, exactly what pg said in 'how not to die'.
I still haven't gone fully TDD. I do find myself using it on many of the little pieces of code I write before I ever try to integrate it into the full app. It is just a lot faster to verify each little piece separately does exactly what you want and then connect all the pieces together, than just manually starting from the beginning of integration and seeing how far it makes it before a bug takes halts the progress. Working this way when you integrate the pieces it is awesome to find that most of the time it works all the way through the first time.
Ever tried to make an interesting movie about guys who love their wives, are great fathers, and never do anything bad?
Cool, but

lynx "http://news.ycombinator.com"

is almost identical.

A little shell script magic gets you auto-refreshing:

#!/bin/sh

while true; do
sh -c "sleep 90; pkill lynx" &
lynx "http://news.ycombinator.com"
done

(there's probably a better way that won't kill all your lynx sessions)
Doteasy review
http://www.doteasyreview.org is doteasy review and doteasy coupon site.
That's a bit fast. And uselessly so, because the frontpage is only regenerated every 90 seconds. How about putting your email in your profile so we can continue this by email?
Well, I don't believe calling it a rip-off was necessarily criticism. As they say: mediocrity borrows, genius steals.

Also, I must plead ignorance. I've never worked with ASN.1 or these other formats. From my cursory examination, ASN.1 seems to be far more complex.
On the contrary. I think arguably the advances that have made people's lives better over the last century have been collective, more centrally planned efforts, not driven by profit, and done in spite of the attitudes of big business and the market.

I am thinking specifically of public sanitation, public health works, winning World War II (what a boost to the economy that was), public education; most, if not all, beneficial scientific advances. Most technology "developed" by business has been largely offshoots of collective efforts (eg NASA).

But come to think of it, most that was pretty damned unsexy too :).
It's not hard to find people who claim to possess those skills. It is hard to find people who are proficient in them, and exceedingly difficult to find people who are very good at them.

If you're hiring, and you live in a metro area, and you don't know any hackers yourself; then I would suggest frequenting some user groups in your area to get to know some of the people there. People who go to user groups are far more likely to be good developers. In fact, anyone who does programming related stuff in their free time is likely going to be much stronger than someone who just does it for the check.

If you're not hiring and are instead thinking about getting into the industry, then there's a corollary somewhere in my second paragraph for you.
Protocol Buffers: Google's Data Interchange Format
[I haven't done the above since the 3rd grade. Lining up for a bathroom break. Geez.]

You obviously don't go to the same bars I do, then.
Convicted murderer Hans Reiser leads police to Nina's remains
For those who don't know:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Reiser
Thanks, guys, I really don't care that much. I've got enough karma to change my top bar from ugly orange to pretty blue, what else do I need?
Called CompTIA today - at first they said I was mistaken... Then I sent links to my flickr account and to the various tech/certification sites making the "maybe they should increase their Security+" crack. I was called back this afternoon and told that their tech dept is working with Google (?) to resolve the issues...
Cloud computing hype overload
Done. (it's peter at catonmat dot net)
The sarcasm is because the body isn't even in the morgue and we're talking about entertainment value.