skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Note that you'll need to be running on WordPress trunk to get the Gears support. You can find the Subversion repository here:

http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/trunk/

And the Trac ticket for adding Gears support to WordPress here:

http://trac.wordpress.org/ticket/6965

The subject was also discussed on the wp-hackers mailing list in March:

http://comox.textdrive.com/pipermail/wp-hackers/2008-March/t...
Yes, but I dont think the blogging systems have this since every blogger would have to have his/her own TOS and could not be covered by a blanket wordpress or typepad TOS.
CollegeHumor crushes Gawker at beer pong
Coming Soon!

You seem to be accessing the Zattoo website from a country we do not yet serve. Please enter your country of residence below, and when our service is available there, we will contact you.

Damn. Looks like I won't be replacing my MythTV + DVB-S box anytime soon. Props for having a Linux version though!
http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2008-04/hp-discovers-p...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memristor
What's wrong with Italy?
Great visualization! I'm really enjoying the way people keep finding creative new ways to visualize various things that are usually quite abstract...
From http://zattoo.com/en/about-zattoo/what-is-zattoo

Is Zattoo really legal?

Yes. Zattoo acquires the rights to retransmit the channels separately for each country we launch in. It takes a lot of legwork (read: flight miles and sizzling phone lines) to collect the necessary rights to transmit the channels. Unlike the fast food world, the media world doesn’t operate on a global basis, so if we acquire the rights to carry a French TV channel in Switzerland, say, we don’t automatically get the right to carry it also in France or Germany.

All of this doesn’t deter us, of course. Chances actually are that we’re talking to a broadcaster somewhere right now, as you are reading this. So stay tuned for more channels in Z-countries and a launch in countries that haven’t been zattooed yet.

I guess it's possible that they're lying, but given that the channel lineup varies greatly between countries, I somewhat doubt it.
This piece is pretty similar to this http://blogs.concedere.net:8080/blog/discipline/web/?permali...
Check out sketchfu.com. Similar technology, but geared to a slightly different audience.
EmailLabs has all of the traditional email marketing features (like the tracking that you want), but has a good API to allow your application to interact with them. I chose EmailLabs at an ecommerce company that I used to work with.
Agreed. When I was in high school I wrote all the normal programs for the Apple ][ and it was fun. LoRes/HiRes graphics, toy calculations like interest, bubble sorts, etc.
Then our math teacher offered extra credit if we solved some puzzles. One was the "100 Lockers" puzzle. http://mathforum.org/library/drmath/view/56747.html
I immediately saw that I could write a program to solve it and so I did. Afterwards I was struck by how I could simulate physical processes in the computer. It was a real eyeopener for me because I had always been given assignments before and this was the first time I had applied programming to a problem that I had come across myself.
I was feeling pretty smug that I would be the only person to solve this puzzle. (It was a very small class in a small school and not very many people were even attempting the puzzles.) When the results were posted later in the week, I noticed that someone else had solved it also but his solution didn't have a printout attached. I couldn't see how he could have solved it by hand by simulating the opening and shutting like I did in my program so I asked him how he did it. "Easy" he said. "I just did the problem for 10 lockers and I saw the pattern of square numbers and added on the missing numbers."
That's when I learned that while brute force works and it sometimes the best approach, it doesn't have to be the only approach.
Almost everything I have done in programming since is somehow related to this incident. World building indeed.
Adventures in Twitterville
The Ultimate Yahoo! Pipes Creations List
I have to agree with goodgoblin: VC is not quite like patronage.

Patronage is gift culture; its message is: "Look how much I can afford to give away!" A patron patronizes something not merely with a risk of losing money -- losing money is the expectation and practically the goal. VCs, on the other hand, invest in something with the hope that they will eventually have more money than they started with.

You point out that ambitious VCs will invest in riskier propositions to increase their chances of a big hit. But their motivation for doing this is so that the big hit draws more money for the next round. This feedback loop (money -> fame -> more money -> more fame) is not present in patronage, because a patron's fame is not expected to lead to significantly more money.
Flash Exploit Shows the Dark Side of Web 2.0
The great thing about Gandhi is that he openly recorded his flaws - not many autobiographical writings do that.
Though I know it may not be a single biographical book, Founders at Work is a great series of short biographies/interviews. If you're more interested in any one of them, you can probably find a biography on them or even their personal blogs.
Does he talk about he effectively killed his wife by denying her medical treatment? Or his racism?
The Microsoft Case: The Second Browser War
Ask HN: coding challenges as part of interviews: yes or no?
just curious what the group thinks of coding quizzes / challenges that are often part of job interviews for programmers. how predictive are they of a coder's future performance? are they appropriate only for entry level positions (when someone has less industry experience), or are they suitable for any level? are they more likely to pique your interest or to come across as cliche?
Wow, OpenGL-accelerated h264 decoding? Has hey considered porting this to popular open source media players? Linux could really do with an efficient h264 decoder that can handle high-definition material on anything but the most high-end systems.
"you only get 3 discrete notes/pitches in each track in the Frequency remix mode"

Yeah...see that pretty much breaks the idea for me. If I can't possibly hit a "wrong" note, then I might as well not play any note. (I have a pretty heavily jazz-tinged musical education. There are some things that rub me the wrong way. I'm even a little suspicious of diatonic harmonicas.)
Of course. That's the first thing on most checklists. Domainkeys and SPF records are also valid.
Trick questions, or questions with some kind of gottcha have no place in interviews, However, simple, straightforward programming exercises are essential. I've seen people who claim to have X years of industry experience who can talk a good game, but literally can't write a switch statement without reference to the internet.

I also like to ask people to peer review some code with both obvious and more subtle errors in it. That's a pretty important skill to me too. Anyway, ask them to code some fairly simple algorithm and then critique their own work. If there are several ways to solve the same problem, some more efficient than others, all the better.
If you truely want a really great, small, book, purchase Peter J. Eccle's An Introduction to Mathematical Reasoning.

http://books.google.com/books?id=ImCSX_gm40oC&dq=an+intr...
Y Combinator Ad
Summary: Fake it till you make it.

But it's true. Great brands often do involve a great story. Southwest Airlines is one of my favorites...I've read a couple of books about the company...crap books, but still a great story and a great brand.

Apple Stores are little theaters where you can go to receive highly focused advertising designed to make you feel good and well above average (for example, the people who help you fix the stupid problems you have with your Mac or iPod are "geniuses"...obviously, only a genius would know how to do the stuff you can't figure out for yourself). Likewise Louis Vitton stores and Mercedes dealerships. The luxury experience is now probably more important than the actual goods being sold.
Copyright ownership is one thing... I think that means that reproducing the comment elsewhere (in the "Best Disqus Comments EVAR Book of 2009" for example) would require permissin from the commenter.

But while you have rights to the creative work of the comment, I think the UGC site in question (whether it's Digg or Reddit) has the right to remove it or futz with it at will.

If I put a whiteboard outside and you draw a picture on it, it seems pretty ridiculous to think that you have the right to get upset if I erase it or even change it (or allow other people to erase it or change it). Of course, if I copied it, framed it, and sold it in a gallery...
Just a note: you cannot usefully compare load averages between different Unix OSes. For instance, running the same workload on a Solaris system and a Linux system, then using load average as a measure of performance between the two, is not going to give you any useful information.
Twoorl is broken in IE and FF3 I believe.

I hope such blog posts start appearing. It means Twoorl will have hit prime time :)
Is this Hacker News?
We've sent our own mailings out on a couple of occasions (to 4000 and 8000 users, respectively). And I've done it more often in the past, though for smaller numbers. I haven't had a bad experience doing it myself. A number of our customers are doing it regularly with phpList or poMMo.

There are a few things you have to get right (DNS including a PTR for your IP, SPF and now DKIM, RFC compliance in your server and configuration), but once that's done, bounce rate will be nearly as low as the quality of your list allows. Hitting the spam filters isn't all that bad either--assuming your message isn't spammy on other counts.

One other thing to be wary of: Sending to the same domain many times in rapid succession. Be sure you're not sending more than one or two messages at a time to Gmail or Yahoo or Hotmail (or any single server). So, randomize the list, and sleep for a second or two between each send, or something, to insure that there are pauses.

Oh, and at least Google's spam filters are reputation-based (and probably many others are, as well). The looser you play with the "opt in" requirement, the more likely you are to be flagged as spam by your recipients. It only takes a few to get your future mailings dumped into the spam folder. At that point your server itself is poisoned from sending to that destination for a while. So, make sure your recipients actually want what you're sending them.
"The lesson? Shut up and code."

The author's full of it. Though I agree with the idea that not having cool features doesn't make a language suck (though it can certainly make programming in that language less fun), the rest of his stuff is why we have so much terrible code out there.

If you just "shut up and code" you'll rarely get what you wanted as far as functionality goes.

Also highly complex code is usually a sign of a bad programmer, not a good one. Complex code is very rarely necessary to get the job done, and it leads to very high maintenance systems.

Good programmers take great pride in producing things that are simple, as is the case with most artists. The best photographs usually aren't the ones that have everything in them, but rather the ones that have exactly what the photographer needed to say what he/she wanted to say.

Not to place photography on a pedestal, IMO this applies to all of the arts. Sometimes complex is good, but usually it's just clutter.
> "The government is too incompetent to manage such a system" which are cop-outs, imo.

It's reality. Wishes aren't horses.

UHC advocates claim that the US would spend 10% with UHC. Let's see what that would mean.

The US spends about 15% of GDP on healthcare. Of that 15%, about half is spent by govt while the other half is private. Curiously enough, the govt covers about the same number of people as private spending.

For argument's sake, let's say that the govt currently spends 7% of gdp on health care. If govt is only going to spend 10% to cover just the people who currently have health care, that means that it will only spend 3% to cover the folks that are currently in the private system. (Yes, I'm ignoring the uninsured, but they just make the numbers worse.)

I'll repeat that - UHC folk are promising that the govt will cover the people it doesn't cover now for less than half what it pays to cover the people it covers today.

If you want to argue that UNC can do health care for 10% of gdp, start by fixing govt health care so it only spends 5% of gdp to cover the people it covers today.

You can kill private health care by simply opening up govt health care at cost if it's actually cheaper and better. However, as long as it isn't.....

Until govt health care is actually cheaper than private, it's absurd to argue that it will be. Govt health care isn't cheaper or more effective than private in the US.
[London] Love live music and hacking? Join Songkick.
Songkick is looking for an amazing hacker. You'll become a core member of our small but extremely talented technical team.

Our goal is to make it easier and more fun to discover and experience live music. If you want to find out a bit more about what we do here's a short video of me blabbering about our launch in March at SxSW:
http://www.downloadsquad.com/2008/03/19/video-ian-hogarth-of...

We've received funding from some of the top investors in Europe and the US including Y Combinator, Saul Klein (The Accelerator Group), Jeff Clavier and Betaworks.

Some of the cool stuff we're working on are live music recommendations and an Alexa style ranking to show which bands are hottest on the web right now. Two of our team members have a background in Machine Learning and it has really influenced the way we approach these problems.

What we're looking for:

- Proven experience building awesome web apps

- Ability to work in a flexible manner, building prototypes fast and evolving these into massively scalable production-quality systems

- Ability to turn round solutions to problems incredibly quickly

- Ability to easily pick up new technologies and incorporate them into production software

- In depth knowledge of Unix systems, MySQL, Apache and standard development tools.

- Passion for music, particularly live music

- A good degree in Computer Science/Engineering/Physics/Math or a related subject

Also a big plus would be:

- Experience with Ruby on Rails

- Experience with large scale web scraping and/or data mining problems

To apply please send your resume, news.yc username, URLs of cool things you've built along with a short email introducing yourself to joinsongkick at our domain by 15th June 2007.
The Start-Up “Build Now, Add Revenue Later” Business Model
MIT researchers make predictions for next tech boom
Facebook Platform to go open source — but how open?
Programming challenges sort the wheat from the chaff - in particular those who cannot code at all, but beyond that I've rarely found them predictive of future performance. Much more important that you hire a good fit for your company. An unhappy or toxic coder can bring a startup to its knees - hire slow, fire fast and all that.
Clean your Rails app's config with configuration_manager
White supremacist imperialists and proto-fascists, but hey whatever floats your boat.
Hacking the Industrial Economy
To expand upon this, you also cannot usefully compare load between two applications of the same type. e.g. comparing the load averages of Apache vs. LigHTTPD vs. nginx, is not useful. Depending on the architecture of the application, such as threaded, forked, select/poll-based, or event-based, and configuration, you may find significantly different load numbers, even if all are performing identical tasks and with identical "performance".

For example Squid, in its aufs configuration (which uses threads for disk IO), can exhibit extremely high load averages (>5) on even a moderately loaded system. It'll still be performing fine, and you may still have significant headroom for handling requests. But it looks really high, on Linux systems. Even the filesystem on which a service is running can make a difference. Load looks higher on a ReiserFS-based system running Squid than an Ext3 filesystem...and yet the Reiser system would handle more load (I guess it just doesn't hide the evidence of its work very well).
Still $11 per month is not bad, eh?
Hmm... I know > 10 languages. I'm not sure I could remember the exact syntax in several of those languages on the spot. Is it case, is it switch, etc. If you do this, your test is on rote memorization.

Give them a novel problem and have them solve it with a real computer and in tact syntax lookup. Then see what and how they did it and go over their reasoning. I'll hire the guy with the wisdom over the guy who can spit out syntax trivia flawlessly. Those are different skill-sets that do not predict each other.
"Dell are the biggest low-end computer manufacturer which are, for the most part, significantly cheaper than their competitors. You sacrifice build quality and design to get that."

You do have to sacrifice SOMETHING, and you're right that it's usually build quality and design... but you can do better than Dell for the price:
www.powernotebooks.com

They have a 99% rating on Reseller Ratings, and I got a better price from them even though I can get a company discount buying from Dell (my employer buys a lot of stuff from Dell, but I don't work for Dell).

I'd like to find out who actually makes the laptops for Dell. I'd guess that Dell uses several of the major laptop ODM's.
I agree wholeheartedly with the above. Gotcha questions are nice if you value having a sense of superiority over your candidates. Seeing how someone approaches a simple coding exercise tells you a lot about their techniques.

Two examples stand out:

1) A guy who had more Java certifications than had eaten hot dinners couldn't complete the simple exercise after three or four hours of effort.

2) Guy initially attempted to hit Google up for examples (why not!), and on finding that the net connection was disabled for that user account, wrote the best solution to the exercise I've received.

Overall, my interviewing process has had two stages. First, talk to the candidate and get a sense of what kind of person they are, and if they'll fit in with the culture. Second, if they seem reasonable, give them the test and see what their code is like. It's not foolproof, but it does weed out most of the weaker candidates.
"brutal application of free market supply and demand. If having Feature X really would make my web application development significantly easier, somebody would have already written a language or environment that used it."

I see this kind of thinking applied to a multitude of subjects and it never makes any sense. The market isn't some static thing that has already rendered its final judgement - the competitive landscape is constantly changing and (in this particular example) python or ruby programmers extolling the virtues of their language to PHP programmers and convincing them that it is better is a vital component of python/ruby gaining greater market share.

This type of thinking can be used to discourage absolutely anything that is new - "if its so good, why hasn't someone already done it? If it is not already done, it must therefore suck".

In fact, it reminds of a joke about the conservatism of Canadian VCs: The entrepreneur goes to the VC and pitches his business. Being somewhat conservative, the VC asks him "Well, if your idea is great, why hasn't someone from the Valley already invested in it?"
Earlier discussion with pg's comments : http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=75776
If that's the case, we can't save his company. If he's being blindsided by a significantly different way of doing business, and one that undercuts his already razor thin margins by a large amount, then his company is already dead and just doesn't know it yet.

That could be the case, of course. So, you're right, we are just taking a different view of the provided data.
Serl- Sexp-based ERLang
Can't get enough of Erlang news items?

Here's your chance to learn /both/ Erlang and Lisp ;). Compared to LFE, which is like Scheme, Serl is more like Common-Lisp. I tried to throw out the pieces of onion.

Features:

-support for aribtrary namespaces.
--import/export of macros and special forms.
--special forms are just macros that takes the compiling environment
as an extra argument. Serl defines itself with special forms.

-avoids unintentional capturing in similar way as common-lisp's
package.

-Syntax objects.
--Quotation and quasiquotation are used only to build syntax objects.
-macroexpansion in pattern.
--so named patterns are possible.
-syntax objects are pattern matchable.

-fancy lambda-list as in common-lisp.
--&option, &rest, and &key don't interfere with each other.

-syntatically consistent reader macro based on heredoc.

This is release 1. So it's for the brave and dangerously curious only.
User retention: Why depending on notification-driven retention sucks
How do you protect your reputation online?
With the democratization of the web, average folks can use blogs, wikis, and forums to make their thoughts known, while Google captures them for all eternity. And a major problem is created for your company.
Sadly Twitter is now staffed by Scala guys who's enthusiasm for Scala gets in the way of their ability to consider Erlang.
Agree with jamess, but additionally, I think interviewers that don't ask coding questions might be an indication of something negative at the company. Basic coding ability has to be one of those checkbox questions that determines your eligibility for the position, and if the interviewer doesn't ask anything technocal, it makes me wonder what kind of dumbasses I might end up working with.
Immaturity? Erlang is far more mature and tested than most language runtimes we use.

Why do people keep assuming Erlang is "new"?
Any hackers in Phoenix, AZ?
Any hackers in AZ? I am interested in sharing thoughts and networking all in the name of entrepreneurship.
Huh? I just read Blood and Oil by Michael Klare. The number given there was 67% for transportation, with 40% of that for individual automobiles (much of the rest is for trucking - aviation is a relatively small component). That also seems to square with various online sources:

http://www.ucsusa.org/clean_energy/fossil_fuels/offmen-how-o...
http://cadlab6.mit.edu/2.009.wiki/anchor/index.php?title=Per...
http://www.oildepletionprotocol.org/getinformed/oilandtransp...
Some questions do let you guage how the person responds to stress and unknown environments - that may be helpful.
Agreed. My first job they gave me a copy of Deitel & Deitel's "C How to program" along with the test. You actually lost points if you didn't open it!
And others think that painting with their own blood adds to the work because it's so painful. (Speaking from experience, slicing open your arm is much less painful than writing PHP. As for reading the average PHP app, let's just say I'd rather die painfully.)