skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No, I actually did not use the visitor location code for Bookflavor because it involved an expensive commercial database of IP addresses that cost several hundred dollars a year. Additionally, 95% of the visitors were US, so the amount of money gained via the database was less than the amount of money spent.

Perhaps with thousands of visits a day it will make sense, but for now I'm trying to keep expenses low.
IndexTank Holiday Hacks Contest Results
Here are some places I would immediately look--you most likely have come across some or all of these. I suspect some of the smaller proprietary products teams may be more accessible in interviewing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_computer_algebra_...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_numerical_analysis_soft...
Don't mix A Players with B Players
Good point -- I will try that, thanks. I'll link to the code as well.
I assure you that that anyone who has used any kind of SQL database can do the same stuff you did on Mongo in the same time or less. Development speed is much faster on the SQL database once you have some more data and you can start using joins and searches and all the other nice RDBMS features.
I love how the instructions are presented one at a time each time you start a new Silk. It's subtle and it's great as I can immediately get started and each time I do it again I have a new feature to play with.
I can't speak to everyone there, but Peter is an exceptional engineer. Their head of affiliates is exceptional. Andrew is clearly exceptional. Their copy is exceptional.

Go work at Groupon.
One difference is that you get a small amount of points for a large amount of things, rather than just the final.
If you want more musicians and artists, then view student portfolios and listen to student demo tapes. The idea that MIT making decisions based on parental legacy (tantamount to aristocracy--extremely scary for a publicly funded school in a democracy but unfortunately the norm) is justified by the broader mix of interests, etc. is absurd on its face; just select for those interests within the admissions process itself, or, failing that, institute a random lottery that lowers the admissions threshold by some amount.
Does it include the QR generator?
Surviving (abuse by) Jeffrey Dahmer (related: Bill Zeller discussion)
Goo.gl Opens API Access
We're talking about data durability. When my SQL server crashes due to hardware failure I know that when I eventually get it back up and running the data will be consistent with at worst the last couple of transactions being rolled back.
We're hiring a lead Rails dev, if anyone there is interested.
Abusing Amazon’s Elastic MapReduce Hadoop service… easily, from R
Yep. I certainly don't think that this is as large of a problem now, and I'm unsure if it'd be a large value add. I think that Rocco's presentation over RDoc/YARD is a much, much larger step forward.
Best Practices for Hiring and Firing at a Startup
Do you have any arguments why exams would be pointless and dated out? From meeting lots of students, I found out that their understanding of the subject correlated much better with exam than assignment grades. The way I see it, there are two main proofs that you've really grokked something:

1. You can recall and use it under pressure, without the luxury of consulting books and friends.

2. You can use it in a creative manner, to solve new problems.

Only exams can furnish such proofs. The exam system is not perfect, but the best we have (and incomparably less corrupt than the assignment system). The proper way to see things is that assignments are rehearsals for the exam; and the student who never turns in a homework but aces the exam well deserves his/her A-.
I use mongodb to record fine grained log for performance tests, where it works like a charm. It is fragile (in that I have lost full databases when VM were full, for example)

I don't know about riak, but we are forced to use couchdb at work, for the wrong reasons I think, and I was not impressed. First, its performances are pretty bad: document insertion is slow unless you batch them, but even though it is slower than in mysql, even though the guarantees about durability are certainly not the same (couchdb was not configured to fsync at each write). Building views is excruciatingly slow, and the view engine does not use all the CPU available (even when IO wait is low, so not a simple IO issue). There are bug reports about this issue (cannot find it at the moment). Replication is not very reliable either for large data (where large against means a few GB, so actually not that large).

I am sure we are using couchdb the wrong way at work (out of my hands), and for the wrong application, but its design choices as well as my limited experience does seem to imply couchdb is not adapted for large amount of data, especially one which are written often (there was an interview last summer with D. Katz who said that there were not yet much optimization for large data).
Hip vs. Useful
This link popped up on Reddit today, and it might be interesting to the people who were commenting on the Bill Zeller suicide article the other day. Particularly:

Billy suffered severe posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms for 24 years even though he had extensive treatment including medication and psychotherapy. In September, 2004, I began a different therapy with Billy with remarkable results. He is now free of nightmares, flashbacks, panic attacks, constant pain, and extreme anxiety, and he no longer feels emotionally numb. He is enjoying life. He asked me to tell his story and particularly his course of therapy as a way of giving hope and encouragement to others who have suffered sexual and physical abuse.
OpenCourseWare
A city could be destroyed by a nuclear bomb at any time - that doesn't mean components of a system shouldn't be reasonably durable. Often it's impractical or unnecessary to have multiple servers for a proof-of-concept, a staging/test server, etc., yet it would be nice to not have to start from scratch, or to deal with backups, just because the database is so fragile. Basically, having a non-durable system forces you to take unnecessary precautions on non-critical systems because of the higher likelihood of failure and lost time investment.
They do have their own store for games: Games for Windows - LIVE
Ask HN: What are best ways to determine a pricing strategy?
Our startup is starting to look at various pricing strategies. We're debating the merits of having one pricing plan vs. multiple, and are considering ways of determining a fair monthly price for our service.

HN Community, how do you determine the best pricing strategy, in terms of the type of plan offered & how much you charge?

In advance, thanks for your time!
Personally, I try to write at the same level that I always would for code, with maybe a larger preamble at the beginning.

Then again, I'm still a student of the ways of the literate myself...
Read these once a week - http://www.daemonology.net/hn-daily/
If universities are the student newspaper, the radio station and the sports teams, a 1 in 9 chance of sharing a dorm room with an underachieving black guy and the opportunity to go to student protests, then as a taxpayer, I want to stop funding them. It sounds like a huge waste of money.
> Mr. Klabnik goes in depth into the argument that literate programming has to be tangled and weaved into a different order, in order to be considered "true" literate programming.

> Respectfully, I have to disagree.

If you're not re-ordering the code, there's no difference between a "literate program" and simple comments.

And I find code-reordering useful even in modern languages; most impose some structure like:

1. module-level documentation
2. exports
3. imports / includes
4. implementation (functions, procedures, etc)
4.1 return type (static languages only)
4.2 function/procedure documentation
4.3 code

With literate programming, you can add supporting text (like export entries, module imports, or documentation) wherever would make the most sense for a human reader, not to the compiler.

> At any point where you're tempted to pull out a block of code and interpolate it later, just make it a function with a descriptive name, and hey presto.

What if you've got a few dozen local variables? Do you want to pass them all as parameters, for every single logical block in your algorithm?

What sort of names do you give your extracted procedures? Literate programs can have block names like "Check for common post-traversal error conditions", which in a procedure name would likely be abbreviated to "traversed_errcheck()".
You just mesmerized my four year old — she sat still longer than I've seen in ages. If beautiful interactive visualization ever gets old I think you have a future in toddler mind control...
Multi-trillion dollar notes are all over eBay and seem pretty cheap.
org-mode in emacs with 'org-babel tangle' works well. But Docco looks great on the web.
I agree. Good for Groupon. Although just because (2) groups of people make the same mistake doesn't mean it wasn't a mistake. Of course we won't know until they either sink or swim and with this war chest it could be a while before we know anything.
> My point is just that in any modern language at a reasonable level of granularity, the order in which you write the code is 99% independent from the order in which you execute it.

I believe that in most dialects of lisp, macros must be defined before they can be called. [citation needed]

This is not to undermine your point, which I think is valid. Macros would just be an interesting exception because they're arguably the feature of lisp, and surely make up > 1% usage for that family of programming languages.
Hackers Give North Korean Heir Birthday Gift on Twitter, YouTube
Ask HN: How do you manage chores, bills, and guests with your roommates?
I live with several roommates and we're always complaining that we need a better system to manage chores, bills, and guests. I've been looking at several services, including easyroomin.com and billmonk.com, but neither stand out as particularly great solutions. Easyroomin looks way too complicated and Billmonk doesn't do everything we want.

How do you manage chores, bills, and guests with your roommates?
Some programmers really are 10x more productive
We're not based in the valley.
Why Caltech rocks:

"Its indifference to athletic performance is well reflected by the fact that its men's basketball team in recent years had a 207-game losing streak, its women's basketball team had a 50-game losing streak, and men's soccer team lost 201 games in a row."
That's nice. I've been using the following piece of sneaky ghetto code to take advantage of Google Toolbar's URL shortening API:

http://codepaste.net/48qfb7

But now I'll be able to shorten URL's with an official API rather than using a hack. I don't know why Google didn't make a public API from the start.
Thanks! That was exactly the idea.

It looks like I need to reposition the New link, though -- lots of people are simply refreshing and missing the hints.
Nice tool to make funny startup logos! :)
It seems that folding code to a natural language summary is what you really want.
+1 - Interesting - that's actually why I've switched over to Chrome as well. Basically, every time I started up Firefox on my System at work on XP, Firefox would Freeze with a "Hey, we're going to upgrade you now - why don't you just go grab some coffee!" - So, slowly but surely, my goto browser started to become Chrome. The downside of this, is that, over time, I started firefox even less frequently, and, as a result, it was _always_ waiting for an upgrade. making it even worse.

Chrome just starts for me. I'm happy with it.
College isn't an institution of knowledge. It's an institution of learning.

This is why you'll often take disadvantaged students over advantaged students, even when the disadvantaged have poorer numbers. Showing you're passionate about learning and have the capacity to learn is not simply reflected in the output. You also have to look at the input.

The same also goes for football and chess players. If someone excel's at something deemed "valuable" (and people will argue over this), that goes into the equation of passion for learning and produced output.
Why you should Join a Business Plan Competition
My app: http://helpshelf.com

Built in about 3 days. Most of the work was handling the PDF uploads and parsing. It uses the amazing tool transloadit.com for uploading, and resque for managing the parsing of the pdfs. It then posts each page to indextank as a document so it can be full text searched.

Indextank was insanely easy to use. I'd never used the service before this, but I'll be using it in many apps of my apps in the future. This is future of cloud services. Removes up front costs for launching some really complex app infrastructures. And then pay hosting over the long term. It's a tradeoff I'll take any day.

The design was hacked together using some shelf PSD assets a designer friend built for me. As you can see, there's not to many components there, but I think it turned out pretty decent.

UI was built using Backbone.js and Coffeescript. Sass/Compass provides the style, and HAML provides the basic structure.

I got just enough done where search worked well, however the app is woofully underfinished. It really needs better "My Shelf" management. I also really want to hook it into the dropbox api so it can automatically index all your PDFs.

Hoping to flesh it out a bit this month, and hopefully should have a proper launch in Feb. Would love any suggestions / feedback on the current version so far (no bug reports, there's too many of them! :)
Several nice bits of design inspiration on this site.
Reminded me of this:

http://www.escapemotions.com/experiments/flame/index.html#to...
Type to Shoot - My HTML5 Game for Mozilla's Game On
hiring 100 developers or more by September

11 new devs per month? So no development this year, only training?

shameless plug: Groupon is an awesome place to be a dev [...] crucial to the company

Honestly, I'd be very wary of this statement in combination with the above.
Intel and nvidia sign $1.5B cross-licensing agreement
Between iTunes and Netflix, why are people still using physical media?

* Cost? (Not all of Netflix is streaming and non-streaming iTunes content is between $0.99 and $4.99 on an AppleTV that's $99)

* Convenience? (I can't imagine anything being more convenient than the AppleTV setup, especially now that 1mil+ devices have been sold)
"The weather is awesome! We’ve got a humid subtropical climate."

These two sentences seem contradictory to me.
You can also use fsync to guarantee that a transaction was written to disk at a severe hit to performance.
As the presentation explains: market features, not versions.
Twitter.app vs. Twitter.com
I think affirmative action does mean what he thinks it means. Data is hard to come by, but here are a two data points:

The University of Michigan would give you +1.0 on GPA if you were black (e.g., 2.8 GPA -> 3.8 GPA):

http://www.cir-usa.org/Images/mich_index.gif

Medical schools have similar practices - the average black student accepted into medical school has GPA/MCAT a full standard deviation below the average white student. (I.e., 50% of black medical students are in the bottom 20% of medical students.)

http://web.archive.org/web/20080801022539/http://www.aamc.or...
It ranks highly because the content farms target long-tail searches where it's easy for marginal content to dominate the results. They are in a sense arbitrageurs. They use software to located search terms where the revenue from ads outweighs the cost of commissioning and ranking a low-quality page.
Just to pick a nit or two on graduation rates: Harvard 97%,MIT 93%, CalTech 86%. That's not really indicative of a high drop out rate because they feel the school is too hard. Gates dropped out to become an entrepreneur, hurting the graduation rate. From personal experience at Harvard, they are really dedicated at keeping you there. If you are having trouble with a class they arrange help, tutoring, whatever is needed to get you through. If you need a year off, you can come back. If you need to take a makeup class, you can without extra tuition or extra semesters.
7 Exciting Web Development Trends for 2011
I also attended CMU (SCS). I'm not sure how many other schools do this, but when applying to CMU you apply to specific departments and the acceptance decision is handled at the department level. This causes there to be a great variance in the paper qualifications of attending students across the school.

http://my.cmu.edu/portal/site/admission/adm_statistics/

You can see that compared to the other departments that the College of Fine Arts lags "significantly" behind the other "academically rigorous" departments. Yet even that being the case, we have one of the strongest fine arts programs in the country with many of the programs being considered top 10.

My reason for bringing this up is that college admissions are (and should be) based on something more meaningful than paper qualifications. The point of a well rounded University is to foster a place of learning across a varied set of fields. Who is to say that athletics is any more or less worthwhile than Fine Arts, Drama, or Computer Science? Athletics contribute a lot to a school's experience. Who cares if their grades are slightly lower and didn't get perfect SAT scores. They are recruited because they have astounding talent in their respective fields just like a geek might have a talent for numbers or a music major has talent for playing the piano.

(I am not and never was an athlete)
Do You Wanna Go Faster? (Gabrielle Giffords and the race to have an opinion)
What if you've got a few dozen local variables?
Do you want to pass them all as parameters,
for every single logical block in your algorithm?

I'm not disagreeing with you, but it's interesting to note that in a stack-oriented language like Forth, PostScript or Factor this isn't a problem.
I attended Caltech in the 70's, and the article is accurate. I was told by older students that there had been efforts by outsiders to get the students to stage protests, but that the students had ignored them with "but I've got to get to class!"

My SAT scores were lower than those cited in the article, but were average for my freshman class (750/640). I understand that there has been inflation in the SAT scoring system since.

One thing not mentioned was Caltech's attitude towards students who were accepted. Once they were in, they were in. You could flunk and fail repeatedly, and Caltech was always ready to let you have another go, even a decade later. I know students who dropped out and were welcomed back a decade later to finish.

I lucked out in going to Caltech. The way the college was run fit my attitudes completely. The administration always treated the students like sentient, responsible adults (even when we behaved badly) and by and large the students responded by acting like adults. For example, professors were not allowed to take attendance at lecture. The students could show up or not, their choice. Grades were determined by the midterm and final, which of course were given on the honor system.

The students liked the system, and if you broke the honor system you were ostracized. Nobody cheated that I knew of the entire 4 years I was there.
Sure I'll be glad :)

Tim really tried hard to find a good schedule but it was impossible at the time as I had two trips to do when he was in Italy, so we were not able to find any match. But next time we'll be more lucky!
Actually that doesn't add any additional durability guarantees in the general case. The only way to use MongoDB durably with a single server is to use the new --dur flag coming in 1.8. I assure you there is no other way.
10x productivity between the average and best professional developers in an organization's software engineering organization is trivially demonstrable in almost all software development environments that I've been in.

Indeed, there are, in some scenarios, systems and software that have been developed by the best of breed developers in a matter of weeks, that would have taken the _lower performing_ (as opposed to average), years to develop to the same level of quality and efficiency.

I don't think it would be that much of a stretch to demonstrate on the order of 75-100x more efficiency between the best developers and the worst developers in most large software organizations - particularly in very specialized area's like PHY or MAC development.
Ridiculously Impressive HTML5 Canvas Experiments
Your Next Project
tell that to the guy that made from thesis (wordpress templates).
Good followup, thanks.
Fascinating! He quotes a description of something I've seen before in NW Washington, but could never explain:

>". . . ice-excrescences of soft, brilliant, asbestine appearance, and uncommonly delicate to the touch. . . ."

Saw it on a hike, growing from logs. Very soft to the touch. I would compare it to cotton candy, but the strands in cotton candy are more heterogeneous and less organized.
I agree that it's important to distinguish between the different types of content everyone is registering grievances against...

Scraped content and empty directory pages (that washing machine reviews page that has nothing more than an H1 and some crummy auto-generated sentences)
vs...
Mediocre human written content from sites like e-How and other Demand media properties.

The first kind of content is pretty clearly spam, and doesn't deserve a place in the index. Everyone can agree on that, and I'm perplexed as to why Google hasn't taken more action against these types of sites. I have a hard time believing they can't do it algorithmically.

The second type isn't as clear cut. Most of the readers here and on the cited tech/search blogs know what this content is and where it comes from, and are probably a bit more critical of it than the average user for that very reason. I agree that these article directory pages are usually painfully mediocre, but I wonder if they aren't "good enough" from the point of view of someone who doesn't know better. After all, I havent seen much of an outcry about search quality coming from the mainstream; it seems limited to HN and other tech circles.
What's with the aversion to replicas?

I have an app I'm working on launching right now, it's in what you might call 'private beta': real people accessing the app is <10. It's been in this state for a little less than 2 months and there's been a replica-set and backups happening since even before that.

What I'm saying is that you don't need to grow before adding a second box. My project currently runs on ec2 micro instances and the second box will probably cost you less than your GitHub code hosting costs! Just seems to me that (in ec2 terms, as an example) going from $9/month burn to $18/month is hardly a show stopper.
1980 Cadillac Sedan DeVille, base price $13,292.
2011 Cadillac DTS, base (very base) price $46,280.

Difference: 3.5 times .

--

Assuming this page is accurate (http://www.thepeoplehistory.com/80sfood.html),

Prices look about 4-8 times as much (look at the Pennsylvania 1981 prices) ... butter is $4/lb, bread is $2/loaf or more , etc.
I especially like the part where Dave mentions you can substitute employer for employee -- we all have a choice!
I agree, I think it's a waste of money. My brother however collects DVDs and Blu-rays. He's got a huge library of movies that can be watched any time (and probably cost a fortune). I think it's on the decline but I also think we'll be paying more for bandwidth due to excessive streaming.
1080p for BR, and the ability to rip DVDs and access them anywhere?
It's true that, at least in the engineering department, Caltech isn't that hands-on. But I learned the hands on at work at Boeing, and it was backed up by solid theoretical knowledge, which was lacking in a lot of the other engineers. So I think it's the better approach.