skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think this works without all those extras, providing a real service without having to turn it into a game to keep people interested. Seems to be a lot of cross advertising potential, kind of like "You frequent x, you might be interested in y close by, get your first .... free"
Thanks for following up. Your feedback is very helpful.
A contradiction implies all falsehoods are true.
So if Google blurs referrers by default, instead of just people who opt for HTTPS search, but then more webmasters become more tightly bound to Google Webmaster Tools for necessary analytics, is that a net win for consumers and search engine diversity?

I doubt most webmasters will endeavor to learn N different webmaster control panels, so this recommendation further advantages the leader.

Google might very well respond to the pressure of this campaign by saying, "OK, you got us, we'll change", then laugh all the way to the even-stronger-monopoly bank.
I am glad you enjoyed it but I don't think you should stop. Try facebook.com/puzzlemaster instead. The questions are slightly similar. The community there is quite helpful and they have been doing it for 2 years. The Puzzle Master (whoever that maybe in Facebook) is quite responsive when it comes to telling the users of errors.
Cloud Business Trends: $1.6 Billion Cloud Market in 2011
Yes. See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2063961
To be clear, Disco is a full replacement for Hadoop (including MapReduce, HDFS, etc). I've heard good things, but you also leave the (rather large) Hadoop ecosystem.

As a Python developer I've found Dumbo / mrjob to be easy to use.
My similar bad experience with Eclipse took me to IntelliJ with the Scala plugin and it has been a markedly better experience these last few months. The refactoring abilities in IntelliJ are pretty good so far.
Flexible schedules a boon for workers, saving for firms
Native Scrolling of Slippy Maps
For anyone that just wants to see what the billboard looks like and isn't interested in the article:

http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/epicenter/2011/01/ddg_bill...
That's incredible. I would expect OS X to be a bit neglected, but I'm surprised that the Linux version has more complaints than the Windows version. You would expect that to be a popular platform for people who would develop Firefox.

Then again, perhaps Linux and OS X users are just more picky than Windows users.
I'm all for a good story, and the one-man DDG going up against Google is certainly a great one. However, considering the number of armchair business analysts on HN I'm shocked that nobody seems to call out Gabriel for appearing to fall into a cliched trap: "we don't track you" isn't a product, it's a feature.

I genuinely wonder what DDG would do if Google simply addressed all of their referrer privacy issues. Then what, exactly? Would DDG simply pack up and go home?

It's a fair question.
I don't think this guy can afford the millions the rights to the franchise are worth. Blizzard is being completely reasonable here, and I think they've gone out of their way to encourage fan participation and usage of their material.
Sorry Google, but "open" is a crock
At one point we used Dumbo for a lot of stuff at Yelp, but we finally ended up writing our own framework:

http://engineeringblog.yelp.com/2010/10/mrjob-distributed-co...

It's open source and easy to use, and makes hadoop on EMR exceptionally clean. Check it out.
There is that.

For those curious Disco has an Erlang/Python base. It does seem to be getting better too. I also found it easier to set up a Map/Reduce cluster in it then Hadoop.
Why is being a "simple" management layer atop AWS limiting? Bear in mind that Heroku is, in your terms, simply a management layer atop AWS. Using it as a technical yardstick and considering Amazon's strong financial position and commitment, it stands to reason that there is a long runway for Beanstalk's innovation.
Couldn't those people just click on the link, look at the picture of the billboard and then close the window?

Not being sarcastic... that's what I did.
That doesn't mean Google couldn't or shouldn't prevent the browser from doing it.

When this all started, no one envisioned ad networks and data companies aggregating all this personal information, or even that search terms would be a central part of the Internet.

So now that we know what is going on, why allow this personal information to leak? As far as I can tell, the only reason is so Webmasters can do better at Google SEO. And that reason can be wholly mitigated through the use of Google's Webmaster Tools.
>one response in the readers mind might be "If all the ones I heard of do X, maybe it isn't bad"

Somehow I doubt a reader can frame what donttrack.us says in a good light if you also include Bing and Yahoo. It talks about shady employees, getting hacked, people finding out you have herpes, etc.

>If the market is more even, mentioning others might be OK

>it would be OK for them to name the Toyota RAV4 and Subaru Forester in their ads, because all three companies are well known to most readers

Google, Bing, and Yahoo are known by basically everyone, so I think there is some inconsistency with your argument. That, or you're conflating market-share and mind-share.
Coca-cola formula revealed
Watch the video http://www.youtube.com/cocacolaco

OR

1. Sugar
2. Caramel
3. Caffeine
4. Phosphoric Acid
5. Coca leaf extract (with cocaine content removed)and a small amount of cola-nut﻿ extract
6. Citrac acid and sodium citrate
7X. Lemon, orange, lime, cassia (a type of cinnamon), nutmeg oils, and probably others
8. Glycerine
9. Vanilla

Interesting revelation from Coca-Cola co.
Privacy is just but one aspect of DuckDuckGo: http://duckduckgo.com/about.html http://duckduckgo.com/goodies.html

I spend the vast majority of my time improving the search experience. I would welcome you trying it for a week and giving me your feedback!

I would love it if Google reacted to this by stopping this search leakage.
So if I port my real cell number over to Google Voice and my cell plan gets canceled, then isn't Google Voice basically useless because I wouldn't have a cell to forward it to? It'd be nice if they could work with carriers to assign you a new number and transfer your existing to GV in one transaction.
The details:

The cost of porting is $20 (payable through Google Checkout).

Your mobile phone service plan will be terminated when you port your number to Google Voice and your carrier may charge you an early termination fee.

Once porting is complete, you will not be able to receive calls to your mobile phone until you complete the following steps:

Google Voice is not a mobile phone service provider, so you must setup a new mobile phone service plan (with your existing carrier or a new carrier) and request a new number.

Once you've secured a new mobile service plan and a new number, you will need to add this new number to your Google Voice account as a forwarding phone.

You may be unable to receive text messages for up to 3 business days after the porting process is complete.

Your Google Voice number will be replaced by the number you are porting. It will remain on your account for 90 days.
Hello, actually its: Infrastructure As A Service. :) Yes, we are aware of the other competitors.
Which do you prefer using, Dumbo or mrjob?
love this and really want to sign-up for it but didn't see a privacy policy anywhere.
redis-node-client - Redis client for Node.js
A lens.
Developers would rather spend two months building their own than spending a dollar on yours.

This is a true, and somewhat unfortunate side-effect of the open source movement. The expectation that all tools be free, makes it completely unprofitable to build quality tools. And thus, makes it harder to build quality software.
Here is the official blog post: http://pivotallabs.com/users/dan/blog/articles/1537-introduc...
Terrific piece.
Nice list. You could also add

Scalatra https://github.com/scalatra/scalatra

a Sinatra-like (ruby) framework.
Pivotal Tracker will no longer be free in 6 months
I'm not a gambling person. In such cases there is one thing I know for sure: You won't throw away your personal money, so for every $ I win you will need to earn one $ (at least).

Another problem: How do I know, that your program is anything like playing fair? You could set up chances in program from anything like 1/100, 1/100,000 or no win at all. How do you want to built up a really great reputation for your customers to trust you on this?

The puzzle would even complicate matters. It would need to generate a new problem for every customer, otherwise you'll soon find the solution on the web and everybody will win. Or people will write bots to cheat about it.
That was the killer for me. I was quite excited about SproutCore, specially after reading in one of the docs (which, apparently, are severely outdated) that "you could bring it down to something around 300kb uncompressed". Heck, even iPhone users can load 100kb compressed data. But then the generated application was always megabytes big, even when compressed. It's still manageable if you have a heavy application, but kind of overkill for what I need.
That would be a fine outcome from my perspective.
Your product is off to a great start. How do you plan to scale?
Pivotal Tracker will not be free for much longer
The idea is that you then get new service, with a new number you can use as your primary number with the old one still forwarding. Basically the equivalent of a forwarding address.

However, this may be preparation for the other shoe to drop. The other shoe would be some kind of data-only plan for Android phones where your actual phone service is simply VoIP with your Google Voice number, over the data plan.
I can vouch for them. Great results and support!
Who is ESR? ;)
HBase is, from my experience, a solid, performant software. Congrats for the release, way to 1.0.0!
Interesting - I wonder if it's due to the user personalities associated with those platforms or if it's due to increased issues on those platforms.
That's a fun idea, but we'd destroy your battery polling the gps. The best we can do is put up some fancy posters so you remember when you're standing in line :)
They're pretty similar, it's hard to make map reduce very complex in Python.

What mrjob has going for it is that it's very easy to run a job on Amazon's EMR (Elastic Map Reduce) so you don't have to do any Hadoop setup. You can run Dumbo on EMR, too, it's just more manual (last I checked).

That said, Dumbo has been around longer and seems to be smarter about input/output formats. It seems that by default it can ready just about any type of Hadoop format (look up SequenceFiles, for example) and by default it'll output compressed SequenceFiles, too, which help save space and I/O.
Business Math
> safely pull over to the side of the road

I hope it can detect when the 'side of the road' is the edge of a cliff with no barrier.
A good news for the freedom of information.
This seems like quite a bit of hassle for what it provides. It'll be interesting to see how many users actually go through with this. On a somewhat related note, anyone know what happened with the 333 US area code that google purchased a while back? I know they offered numbers under that for a while, but stopped offering them due to issues with carriers.
Just missed you, I was working in Arlington but recently moved to Seattle.
Speaking pedantically, P is in NP also. I suspect that NP is being used as shorthand for NP-complete, not just NP. As for actual deterministic factorization Wikipedia says that

'It is suspected to be outside of all three of the complexity classes P, NP-complete, and co-NP-complete'

So even if this showed 'P = NP-complete' it may not imply imply factorization is in P. I'm at the limits of my rusty complexity knowledge here so if any knows better please correct me.
The thing is that patents really only serve patent trolls and BigCos with giant legal departments (and the latter probably wouldn't file many if not for the former). For everyone else, software patents effectively don't exist and haven't existed for a long time.
Android Trojan Soundminer can “hear” credit card numbers
And wasn't there just a posting the other day for GitHub's new easy-to-setup wiki software?

I have to agree that Google Docs is not the appropriate means to getting your point across and allowing people to edit your ideas. It just never seems to work out well. Love the idea though!
bummer. oh well. I'm hoping to set something up really informal..just so we have a place to work that is not home. maybe just a group of hackers at a library or quiet place where we can build. nothing fancy.
http://www.sarcasmsociety.com/irony/howtorecognizeirony
Octocat Wallpapers for All - GitHub
You know, ECDSA would be equally "broken" (if P=NP)...
This site is linked from DuckDuckGo.com:
http://donttrack.us/
Not if you use Opera.
I'd love to see this integrated with blippy or Mint, this way the only thing I have to remember to do is use my credit/debit card and I'll automatically get 'punchd' for the transaction.
I've never seen so many typos in a mainstream web media article. Wired should be ashamed.
Could just have a "does this place support punchd" button to do this, too.
In 10 years they'll be common but not in the USA. Too many legal obstacles to overcome for just one decade.
ThreeWords.me Acquired by Domain Name Czar
thx karma whore.
Just the current search, but the problem is millions of pages run third-party ads, and most are run by very few networks. These ad networks can aggregate the terms and then they have previous searches as well.
I'm guessing your experience with Flash on the desktop is on Windows? I've never had significant problems with it there. On the other hand, my experience is that on a Mac (or worse, Linux), Flash is slow, crash-prone, a major CPU and RAM hog, tends to steal keyboard and/or mouse focus in weird ways when you least expect it, and just generally does not provide a very nice user experience.

This has nothing to do with Apple "crippling" Flash or anything like that either; if anything, Adobe has been improving the Mac version of Flash since before Apple started publicly ragging on it. They've still got quite a ways to go though.
Could you just put the one frame you want at the beginning of the clip or does youtube randomly grab a frame from the middle?
Best optical illusion of all 2010 [video]
California lawmaker pushes to tax online sales
I've asked about this on HN before (whether others feel the same way). It makes me feel safer to use pivotal knowing they're going to charge for it.
>Then again, perhaps Linux and OS X users are just more picky than Windows users.

As an OS X fan I've got to say that's probably true.
Is Apple Poised To Take Social Seriously With Media Stream And Find My Friends?
I agree that local and state governments are a problem, but only because these national corporations have so much power over them. I don't agree (or at least I'm not yet convinced) that the FCC or Congress adding some "light touch" neutrality regulation would be a terrible problem, or that it's an either/or situation. In other words, these national ISPs need to be fixed at a national level, while broken local regulations need to be handled at a local level. Fixing one may help fix the other.
Taking Hypertable for a ride (2009, but still applicable)
tl,dr version of his strategy (as far as I understood it)

1. For a fixed permutation construct a Viterbi-like search on the triplet assignments - if it fails it is not satisfiable. However, if it doesn't fail right away, there is still no guarantee there is an assignment. Call this structure compact triplet (CTF) or whatever.

2. Constuct a small set of permutation (at most m) for which
every clause in the original CNF failing to satisfy will mean that at least one of these permutations CTFs will fail to satisfy.

3. Efficiently? combine the structures.

I didn't really read it deeply but that from what I understood that seems to be the top level strategy. I'm not 100% certain about it.
Is there any hope of getting support from google if something goes wrong with your google voice number?

Google voice worked great for me for over a year but, now, there seems to be about a 1/20 chance that any particular text message will get dropped, and a 1/10 chance that any call will get a message that says "we're sorry, you've reached a number that's been disconnected or is no longer in service. . ." And if that weren't enough, voicemail stopped working for me a couple of weeks ago.

Cell phone companies are notorious for having poor customer service, but it's at least possible to navigate their phone tree to reach a human who can escalate things to another human, one who actually has the power to get things fixed. Now, I kinda regret giving out my google voice number, since I'm going to have to get everyone to switch to my 'real' cell number if google doesn't spontaneously decide to fix these bugs.
And innocent women aren't hounded from their tech jobs by the 'boys club' that is IT?

It's not a competition.
Could be just because I learned it first. It makes a lot of sense in its implementation, ease of use and seems to at least give me the impression of more control.
You have pointed out a few things I have been working with already. The first one I have covered, but that goes a lot more into the design.

To your second point, I am not sure. I obviously am not in the business to cheat people of their money, but I knew that could be a barrier initially. Any suggestions on building that trust? I believe I could be transparent with how the game is built without opening methods to cheat, but I would need to be sure and even then I think some would be skeptical.

The game itself is a shared real-time experience, so this would not be an issue.
I guess they've got to have something planned for that shiny new data center in North Carolina. You don't build that kind of facility on a whim.
Actually, cperciva is right here. Factoring is in NP, therefore if P=NP then there is a polynomial-time algorithm for factoring. Many problems harder than NP are NP-complete, so saying factoring is in NP-complete would not imply the conclusion.

Also, there are problems in NP that are neither in P, nor are they NP- or co-NP-complete.
This. Do the same thing, but with variations based on how badly I need to focus.

- First is a battered old internet-free linux box with a text editor and a few basic tools for focussed work / dev.

- Second is to sit somewhere unfamiliar in the office / home with grid paper and a pen

- Third, if something needs some proper, hardcore thought applied - hardcopy whatever I need, drive somewhere with a table (cafe, park, whatever), turn off all my devices and sit. Sit, read, think, write, repeat.
Textmate, Vi, and Ruby amongst other things
Just some random thoughts on Vi and the path to "righteousness" along with a hilarious post on the Haml forum.
So, that is how google is becoming a mobile phone company (among other things)...
"You do realise there's about 20 other companies doing the same thing at this point, right?"

The same thing was true when Google entered the market. ;-)
Ah, the Ning approach

Pricing starts at $7 for up to three collaborators, so does that mean individuals and up to two others? Looks like they'll stay free for public projects, but I don't see any mention of individual accounts save on the pricing page's "free for individual use (no collaborators), with up to 2 private projects."

@rubyrescue: agree with you 100%
Dead As A Dodo
The biggest unpreventable hazard is probably deer.
Concurrency is easy
I'm curious if it's possible to write a Firefox plugin that would block the HTTP-REFERRER header for certain sites.
Yes it has become negligible. Google themselves have a nice talk about it. The major overhead is in the initial handshake. Google themselves have published how the major issues were in browser behavior (caching mostly) and not connection speed or cpu cost.
An amoeba who raises bacteria crops is the world's tiniest farmer
We do have a list of nearby venues. Nearby is defined as ~10 mile radius.
Can you also port a GV number to somewhere else?
oh boy,

Have been a very loyal user of pivotal tracker, I have 11 projects with 12 collaborators. The smallest plan I could choose is $50 per month. That was shocking me a bit, before I knew I can archive my old projects :P
Brainwave Entrainment ("music")
DuckDuckGo does have a very annoying default color scheme. Fortunately you can turn it off in the settings page: http://duckduckgo.com/settings.html.
Anyone know which of the listed ways of processor emulation that bsnes uses?
Chinese Social Media Lessons from a Japanese Porn Star
Why do you think that? I don't believe there is any legal precedent surrounding autonomous vehicles.
My read was that it's just a conversation about a previous post that made it to the homepage, and not an attempt to game the system.
From the perspective of one liver or one jurisdiction, he didn't "cut in line;" he was just one more person on the waitlist and they followed their standard procedures for deciding who gets that one liver in that one jurisdiction. If he happened to live in Tennessee, he would have gotten that liver even if it wasn't wealthy.

He just increased his chances across the board by putting himself on waitlists everywhere. Of course, that is still "gaming the system," and I can see why it would bother people, but there's no victim.
You can customize a fair amount DuckDuckGo's UI using the settings page[1], most notably hover highlighting, color scheme, and header placement (fixed vs scrolling).

[1]: http://duckduckgo.com/settings.html
Hypertable vs. HBase Performance Evaluation
Self-serve banner ad design tool Canned Banners exits beta
After launching in January 2010, Canned Banners (www.cannedbanners.com) has left beta. Our self-serve app lets anyone quickly create Flash banner ads using pre-designed templates. We're a 3-person, self-funded startup based in San Francisco. Our full press release is here: http://bit.ly/eCrXcq
>Both Yahoo and Google have a proven history spying on people on behalf of government.

[citation needed]
Android Trojan that uses speech recognition to steal Credit Card number
That's a horrible argument. That's like justifying nukes to defend against nukes. In an arms race where the other side will have nukes independent of what you want to do, you have no choice. That's why the Cold War was so dangerous. The overall governing laws of science could not be overturned such that making nukes was impossible, so nukes were made to increase power in war and politics.

Patents are not like nukes in that patents are a legal construct regulated by governments and the legal process. Laws can be abolished and overturned, though not easily. The difference is that laws of nature are impossible to overturn, whereas laws of government are only difficult.
formatted version of the article with photos:

http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/152/the-socialist-networ...
...but sadly not http://duckgo.com/
The research is part of the European Union-backed SARTRE project (Safe Road Trains for the Environment) and it's the first time that "vehicle platooning" technology has been demonstrated outside of a simulator.

Uh, the PATH Project at Berkeley demonstrated platooning over a decade ago:

http://www.path.berkeley.edu/nahsc/
Zaphod - JavaScript written in JavaScript
I'm surprised he's only paying $7000 to put up a massive billboard next to a major consumer route for a month. I'm sure billboard advertising doesn't have great conversion rates, but I still imagined that would cost more.

Anyone care to comment on their experiences with billboard ads?
I don't know how Facebook is re profanity, but maybe it was also the "FUCK U" banner?
Timed perfectly before the launch of the Verizon iPhone.

I wonder how long Google has been keeping this one up its sleeve?
The USA has very strict liability laws. Any mistake is likely to mean massive lawsuits in the USA even if the system is significantly safer than human drivers. All these tests are happening in the EU, and the EU is already getting ready to implement these systems.
Er... why wouldn't it?