skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Layering stateful and stateless protocols minimises abstraction leakiness ( http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/LeakyAbstractions.htm... ) while maximising future re-use.

Unfortunately, I cannot recommend any books on the subject. People who write successful protocols spend their time maintaining successful implementations. People who write books about protocols have typically implemented protocols which are used within small niches, if at all.

If you want to learn by example then the best suggestion I can give is to read RFC821 (email delivery) ( http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc821.html ), RFC822 (email headers) ( http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc822.html ), RFC1094 (NFSv1) ( http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1094.html ), RFC1813 (NFSv3) ( http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1813.html ), RFC3010 (NFSv4) ( http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc3010.html ), RFC1436 (Gopher protocol) ( http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1436.html ), RFC1459 (IRC protocol) ( http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1459.html ), RFC1945 (HTTP/1.0) ( http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1945.html ), RFC2616 (HTTP/1.1) ( http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2616.html ) and supporting documents for a mix of text and binary protocol specifications, reasonings and evolutions.

If you're not accustomed to reading RFCs then they may seem quite terse. Persevere and it will get easier after the first five or so. At the very least, read RFC822 because it is the basis of web and email headers.
1) "During a break, when asked how she [Ann Winblad of Hummer Winblad] finds time to devote nearly an entire day to hearing student presentations, she says, 'I love this. This is such a great day. It's all part of a great food chain.'"

2) "Anyone could have said to me, 'Wait, this isn't academic work,'" Clark [of SGI, Netscape, Healtheon] says. "They don't get all huffy about the purity of academia."
DISCLAIMER: I work for the Yahoo Developer Network

Yahoo recently released an updated version of the Where On Earth (WOE) API for Where 2.0 (more info at http://developer.yahoo.com/geo/).

It's pretty cool, I especially like the way that WOE deals with hierarchy in places. So a street address is normally part of neighbourhood or area of a city, which is part of a state, etc.

One of my other favourite projects at Y! at the moment is also about LBS. Fireagle is one of the Brickhouse projects, so those guys are actually based in San Francisco. http://fireeagle.yahoo.net is still invite only, but that's mostly to hide it from consumers until it's ready to go. Fireeagle acts as middlewear, allowing users to update their location in lots of ways through an API (Text string, GPS units, Cell phone via services like Navizon, etc) and then share is with apps of their choice. This means that the user only has to update Fireeagle to update all their apps.

It also means app developers don't need to provide lots of ways to specify location. They can just use Fireeagle and forget about the rest.

I have some invites so if you have a good idea let me know and I'll hook you up.
JSON or FJSON (a JSON object wrapped in a function) would be my preferred solution. Either via script hacks or XHR. The Y! APIs mostly support FJSON.

An important thing to avoid with AHAH for example is not having sites that progressively enhance. If you get used to throwing whole chunks of markup into the page it's easy to forget people who aren't able to use your dynamic page loading solution.

Some kind of JSON will also allow you to get a status on the information that you got back from the server. While you could do this HTTP status codes it would be a lot harder to do x-browser especially if you are using a library to do your AJAX/script inclusion.

If you have status codes it allows you to do more complex operations, such as highlighting in red the parts of a form field that weren't completed. If you have to replace the whole form is would be pretty inefficient.

DISCLAIMER: I work for Y!
you have to pay for receiving calls/sms in the USA? wow !!!

Fwiw, here in India, in the initial days of cell phone adoption, some phone cell service providers tried providing plans with "receiving charges", but no one used those plans so they (mostly) faded away.

I assumed something like that happened in the United States as well.

Another interesting phenomenon here is that (most) cell phones are not locked to a particular vendor. The cell phone manufacturers (Nokia , Samsung et al) compete (fiercely) on phones (almost every week a new phone launches) and the service providers (Airtel, Vodaphone et al) compete on service (bazillion plans with different mixes of features. You can shift a plan to another one i a few hours by sending a free sms to the service provider)

You get a sim card from the carrier you subscribe to and buy a phone from wherever you want, insert the card and you are good to go. You can change or upgrade the phone and/or service provider independently of each other.
Sure, if messages were evenly distributed over the day. I think it's the bursty nature of the traffic that causes the scaling issues. A better estimate would probably assume that half that daily traffic is within 1 hour - i.e. 1.5 million/(60*60) = 417 messages/second.
Google Seattle Conference on Scalability 2008 -- notes
India’s richest man is shaping his country via capitalism, with echoes of Mohandas Gandhi
Test Driven Design in Medicine
Does anyone know how these would compare in efficiency versus dedicated adapters? Seems to me like it would have to be lower, no?
You should try working from China. I'm currently based out of Beijing working US hours (8pm-5am). All you need is broadband and a bed.
#1 isn't any different from hiring an employee who leaves. #2 isn't any different from hiring an incompetent employee who leaves.

I'm working from Beijing with some seriously cool Rails hackers. They read all the English blogs, articles, books and produce good code. When you hire an "offshore" team, approach it as you would an employee. The teams that compete solely on price, well, you get what you pay for.
ISO puts off standardisation of Microsoft's Open Office XML format
Why not? I old you it could.
Just try to get the right change whenever the cash register is down.

That's what happens when you have technology replace fundamentals too soon.

Honestly, this is what happens when rich people try to decide what's best for poor children. Problem is they just don't get it. They're stuck at Maslow's Level 6 when the rest of the world is still stuggling at Levels 1 and 2. How can someone who has never missed a meal (or a tennis lesson) understand what those born without really need?

These children need 3 healthy meals per day. (Even one or two would do.) They need sunshine, fresh air, and clean water. They need good teachers and doctors. They need books and medical supplies and a world where they don't have to work full time before they reach puberty. They need a mother who won't beat them and a father who won't rape them. Computers? They don't even make the Top 25.

These are just "feel good" programs for people who have never wanted for anything. If they really wanted to help, let them pitch in and solve the real problems of the world. Hopefully, that won't interrupt their tee times.
Of course, giving kids unsupervised access to computers they don't know how to utilise is going to provide little educational value. But the article distracts from the fact that with the slightest bit of guidance, computer access can be a tremendous asset.

I remember being taught Qbasic as a kid - before then, computers were mysterious gaming devices to me. But with just a few weeks of of guidance by an interested teacher, a whole new world was opened up.

It sickens me that even now, many kids here in Sydney don't have computer access in schools until they're in their teens, and even then it's at atrocious student-to-computer ratios and with little guidance.

Part of the problem is that Luddites in the community misrepresent articles like these, thereby diminishing the public interest towards computers in education.
I'm fairly sure the twisted framework for python was also developed here... If not created, then it certainly has major players at ITA.
FUTURE GENERATIONS:What We're All About
I'll make you a deal. You leave the physics to me, and I'll leave the drugs to you.
I think Louis is right to point out that Disqus' approach to customer service and their generally well-functioning product will lead to serious market dominance, but I can't for the life of me figure out how they'd convert market dominance into positive revenue.

Does anyone have a confident suggestion as to how they'd monetise?
Retrain Your Brain
Maybe URLs with empty query strings should be stripped of '?' before posted.
"""It appears that the biggest difference between Twitter and GupShup is 3-tier versus 2-tier. RoR is fantastic for turning out applications quickly, but the way Rails works, the out-of-the-box approach leads to a two-tier architecture (webserver talking directly to database). We all learned back in the 90's that this is an unscalable model, yet it is the model for most Rails applications."""

I remember having a discussion with DHH about RoR on IRC a long time ago. Probably somwhere in 2004 when RoR was still very young and not so much known. Coming from a Java/Spring/J2EE background I asked him about abstracting database access in a third tier. He said he had never heard of that and did not know and understand why people were doing that.
"""In what way is storing your users in different databases by username any better than calling your disk drives by letter?"""

Probably the fact that those drives are local while sharded databases are physically seperate (clusters) of independent machines?

Some apps totally suck at this model. Others are perfectly suited. I doubt Twitter needs complex joins, so it should be easy to partition their data.

S.
I can only talk from my own personal experience. When i was a kid my parents noticed that i was interested in computers. We couldn't afford a computer(that was 98 i think) So they sent me to computer courses once a week. I had a lot of fun. I played games, i played with paint and made cool word documents with weird fonts and colors and stuff like that. I also played a lot of duke nukem. There was a cheap internet club near my home and me and my friends went there to play. It was all really fun. We didn't learn allot, but it was fun. 2004 we could afford a decent machine and i spent my days just mesing around with XP. Exploring C:/windows/win32 exploring all the cool programs my friends gave me like winamp. It was so exiting. A year later i got internet and that was like a super charger. I learned to type really fast so i can chat and i learned to google effectively. Then i found this game Lock On: Modern Air Combat(its a flight sim). I was interested in jet plains and i started playing all day long. I used my computer only for games, or at least thats what my parents thought. The game stored allot of it's settings in configuration files and Lua scripts and xml files and you could modify those and change the gameplay drastically(the most weird thing i have seen was a flying aircraft carrier). Many of the textures were in files, so you could photoshop templates and have custom skins and i learned how to use photoshop that way, i learned how to search for other mods for the game and study them, there were allot of tools to mess around with the game and yet everybody around me thought i was wasting time. To play the game i learned allot about planes, physics and combat tactics(the game is a hardcore sim so you have to know these stuff) I started moding my hardware too. I made myself a throttle out of an old joystick and a control panel.
So the moral of my story is you can give 1000 people a computer and even if only 4 people start doing great stuff with it, its better than no people. I think PG wrote in one of his essays about that. Something about stick gatherers and the difference in productivity if you give people a tool like a computer.
"He said he had never heard of that and did not know and understand why people were doing that."

Could you explain the advantage of having a middle man between the server and db? Does the middle man caches the requests?
From what I can read up it seems too be just a logical layer that executes the request depending on some rules...
This is mostly likely garbage.

There are innumerable companies with prototype systems that claim theirs will be cheaper than all others. There's no evidence that this turbine will be particularly cheap, and there's plenty of evidence (the kW / kWh confusion, the mention of "surface-wind energy") that the author is unfamiliar with renewable energy and likely unable to determine whether a new wind turbine is better or worse than existing turbines.
I'm a little tired of pointless Java rants so I won't comment on the thing. I did find one thing in the article that I think is good advice to anyone using any random platform or language:

"If the language doesn't have the particular feature, there is nothing preventing you from using a combination of general purpose languages in your architecture."

S.
Why do people think Twitter's problems are due to a lack of good technical design?

Twitter's real problem is that they've had a pittance of hardware until very recently. It's not my place to go into why this is (and I'm sure the version of the story I know is a bit biased by the teller), but suffice it to say that a lot of Twitter's problems were, until recently, more business-oriented that technology oriented.
Thanks. I'm not exactly accustomed to reading RFCs (I am accustomed to reading terse specs), but those look like exactly what I'm looking for.
Can someone please explain to me why is this product worth creating a company (and its subsequent fundings)? I mean... every major blogging platform has the features Disqus offers. Even if this was not the case, creating a company to fill a void that could be filled with a minor software release, why?
What's the big deal? What's the advantage in using it?
I feel like I'm missing something.
Silence is a virtue
I'm also working on a rhino/javascript web framework...I am about 15% to where I want to be but the concept is there. With all this talk of "programmer's insecurity" and release often and early (this might be too early) I thought i should put this out and solicit feedback. Any would be appreciated, thanks.

(lacks documentation and tests, but if you look in the contexts folder I think hackers should be able to grasp whats going on)

http://code.google.com/p/env-framework/

http://code.google.com/p/env-framework/source/browse/trunk/e...
Why is it so hard to find good developers?
Some Facebook Applications Thrive, Others Flop
Out With the Old; In With the New!
Ask HN: Code Reuse or Just Plain Well-written Code?
Someone said (or maybe it's not attributed to anyone) "great programmers reuse code". Even if you change that to great programmers "write reusable code" it's still hard to see how it is true in practice, since both great and non-great programmers write reusable code. But I guess it takes a great programmer to do it well, so maybe that was the gist of the saying.

In my experience the only kind of reusable code that is immediately helpful is a library of functions. Beyond that it seems like the effort required to integrate say, a pre-made javascript widget into an application you are creating, and then understand the widget code well enough to make it work perfectly with the application, is about the same amount of time it would take to write it yourself.

That is not to say I have no interest in a pre-made widget, and in fact not being as good of a widget-maker (in the time I have available for the project) as the widget developer apparently is, it seems like a very appealing idea to reuse their code. But reusing it will often result in something less than optimal.

So it seems to me that something approaching an ideal solution in cases like these is that code should be quasi-reusable, or perhaps it should break into discrete parts that could be reused. More importantly, it should be possible to readily understand the code so that some part of it or all of it, could be integrated into the application you are creating, making changes to it that are not klugey but make sense with how the code is intended to be used.

This is of course an old topic, but I'm curious to hear what people think is currently the best way to approach this ages-old problem.
I think it's a big deal for all the wrong reasons. Why would anybody want a replacement for Microsoft Project? I thought the whole point of Microsoft Project was to act as a warning to others!
Change the algorithm, not the dataset.
Ask HN: Freelance graphic design
Greetings fellow hackers...

I have a fair bit of design work I would like to have done in the near future. It includes....

1. Aesthetic-only redesign of our website (just some templates really, not the actual finished product. we can handle content and the HTML drudgery),

2. Some print media brochures of our products,

3. some tradeshow displays and business cards.

We already have a great logo but unfortunately our designer has moved on to bigger and better things.

There's two avenues I want to explore:

1. I know there are some sites where you can post freelance design work like this for people to bid on. I have forgotten what the good ones are; does anybody recommend a site and/or person who has done work for them in this fashion.

2. If you know a freelance designer (preferably a person and not a firm) who can do most or all of above described things in the 4-7k range (depending on the quality of their portfolio) whom you recommend, I am all ears. We are on a budget as you might expect and I can't really afford to pay more than this.

Thanks in advance all.
or... n-back memory tests

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=176264

web-version: http://cognitivefun.net/test/4
Well, he said he types 120 wpm, he was transcribing a presentation he already gave, and it has been a month since he wrote anything. Not that hard.
The problem with your approach is you are judging what is valuable for the next reader. Your judgment might be good most of the time but it does not imply an all-round more efficient system. I'm sure digg and reddit were conceived in this spirit. And when you have a large number of people thinking like this, you automatically adjust the majority of stories to the majority view.

This is quite a debatable flaw in your argument. Worth a downmod? Hardly. I am pointing out the obvious to some (or many), but to others, and those who share your viewpoint, this might be a blind spot, or simply preposterous.

I think a community like this (HN, that is) is better off just getting into the habit of good discussion, such that it becomes implicit in the culture (which kind of is already). Just make sure the SNR is naturally high. That's quite a feat.
i hope this helps - good luck

http://99designs.com/

http://www.crowdspring.com/
You are an innovator if there ever was one. Kudos. Good luck with you enterprises, though I'll doubt you'll need it.
That would be a very unfortunate loss of information. A better scenario is if you reply with the correct statement, and try to make it upmodded more than its parent.

If you sink the incorrect comment that previously had a high score, those who walked away with the misinformation have a higher chance of having their misconceptions persist.
All the comments for posts are aggregated in one place across a number of blogs. IF comments are interesting, then this aggregation may also be interesting.

For people running home brew blog software or people running their own wordpress installs, etc, it may offer a nice decentralized way to avoid spam as well.

I'm not saying it's worth millions, but it doesn't seem entirely useless.
It's quite an extraordinary achievement, but a lot of articles I've read on the Internet reporting these extraordinary break throughs in tech/medicine/health/etc, they never seems to materialize. The ground breaking changes just fades. I've lost faith. I will only believe it when I see it.
That is an excellent requirement. No wonder this place is a lot better than digg.
We are aliens?
Are you working for a corporation, or are you working for yourself? Also, for the position you are in, do you need to speak Mandarin or Cantonese?
Feedback needed on Rhino/javascript web framework.
Sound advice. I recommend 4 books: Black's ruby for Rails and Matz's first edition in English Ruby in a Nutshell. Black's book is a great intro to exactly the techniques of method_missing, mixins, class_eval, #included, etc, you need to understand the world of rails source and plugins/gems. 1st edition Ruby in Nutshell covers ruby 1.6, is small enough that you can read the whole thing carefully several times. The 2nd edition, by Flanagan and Matz, is also a must-have reference, but not something you read straight through.

Also recommended: the ruby/metaprogramming chapters in Ediger's "Advanced Rails" (oreilly) and Rappin's "Professional Rails" (Wrox). All excellent resources

Also, for javascript/ ajax: Flanagan's JS reference, and Crockford's "JS, the Good parts"
The fact that the company claims

"if LS9 used Brazilian sugar cane as its feedstock, its fuel would probably cost about $50 a barrel. "

it appears they are relying on long-term extremely high gas prices. Isn't sugar cane the most energy rich of the ethanol inputs? If so, then using agricultural waste (as they say they plan on doing), will likely cost a lot more than $50/barrel.
Will Microsoft Search use Mahalo techniques to change the game?
Dubai Tower generating 10x more energy than required to power it
Maybe I will need to repost this on Monday... So far no answers...
Plus web apps will soon be big business in India as it allows them to compete in international markets with stronger currencies (i.e. USD/GBP is greater then Indian Rupee) without the associated export/manufacturing costs, and the benefit of their own homes/area/country.

Hence instead of working for $10k~20k (USD) on average in a multinational/call-centre, they will form tech/consulting startups. This is already been demonstrated in the macro-scale with names like InfoSys/TCS/MindTree/HCL and now will happen in the micro-scale too, especially after media coverage of people like the Scrabulous founders etc (who many media sources claim earn about $20k~$30k a month in just facebook advertising).

Only a matter of time till we see a web superhit from India, imho.
They need sunshine, fresh air, and clean water. They need good teachers and doctors. They need books and medical supplies and a world where they don't have to work full time before they reach puberty

You seem to be dealing with received wisdom here. From what I've seen, the children targeted by the program have not been in situations reflective of life-threatening destitution, nor is the correlation between poverty and rapist-fathers particularily strong.

The vast bulk of charity goes to exactly the sort of things you mention, with Gates and Buffet being the obvious current examples. This kind of charity has generally failed as just giving people food (etc) is a temporary fix of a long-term problem. And so OLPC is trying to improve kids' future productivity. It's a reasonable goal, even if it will probably fail.
App Engine is good and everything but at present still has too many restrictions e.g. limited python/django implementations.

Without being able to use many of the python/django libraries, it makes life much harder.
Vulnerabilities in Fully Patched Vim 7.1