skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, the third-world issue is interesting. Remember that "better sanitation and hygiene" is just speculation on what the instrumental causes might be, once vaccination has been cast into doubt. Someone with access to a research library could make a nice research project out of it, digging through footnotes and gathering up the available data.

For example, that paper I linked to, Incidence of infectious disease and the licensure of immunobiologics in the United States, probably includes a decent bibliography of relevant sources. Here's the conclusion again:

Historical data provide evidence of proof of efficacy of mass immunization for measles, polio, rubella, mumps, and pertussis, but not for diphtheria or tetanus.

That's fairly weak, actually. All they had to do there was establish a trend and then show some minimum degree of deviation. One suspects the data does not support a stronger conclusion. Why not? On first glance I'd guess it's because immunizations were introduced so late into the game, with the trend rapidly approaching zero, that you can't draw strong statistical conclusions.

But that's all conjecture on my part. How about other regions of the world? You take it on faith that "similar diseases...are on the brink of being wiped out in 3rd world countries with inadequate infrastructure and sanitation", but spend some time with the primary sources and you might come to a more nuanced position.
I use it.

At first I was in love with it and now I just like it. It is a good tool for some things but it is not a universal replacement for everything database-like.

I like :

* futon (yes, I said it, I like couch because of a pretty GUI). I can quickly look at the database and debug what the problem is. Visibility into the database, the serialization format and the protocol are important to me.

* HTTP interface. Access it with curl or any other tools that speak HTTP.

* Documents are json. I like json.

* Can attach binary blobs to documents + have mime content types markers. Can serve this data to a web browser.

* Durable -- when my request finished, I know the data is on the disk.

* Map/Reduce -- I just like it. It makes sense to me.

Don't like:

* Not very good for high rate updates. Need to compact it periodically

* Not that fast. I know I can tweak it here and there, but by default it is on the slow end of the NoSQL DB speed range. I can live with this.

* MVCC. For some people this is a GoodThing for me it is a "Meh". Sometimes I would like to just update the document in place and overwrite the old one. Perhaps Redis or Mongo would be a better tool here. Now I just do it by repeatedly reading (on failure), updating _rev and then writing back.

* Map/Reduce -- Am I the only one who likes this? It is hard to get others onboard and start thinking of this instead of traditional queries.

Things I don't care about but others like:

* Offline replication. Others rave about it. I used it only a couple of times. Always afraid to end up conflicts silently buried in the DB history.

* Javascript -- don't really like it that much. I use the Python view server to write views. It is actually faster! :

http://packages.python.org/CouchDB/views.html
You're welcome, and not alone. CouchDB is awesome but it is a matter of educating people about it's strengths. I think there are a lot of people using MongoDB when they would be better off using CouchDB for their data.
10 Questions VCs will always ask.
Out of 53 photographs, approximately 214 are pictures of carparks.
I've been to the M Casino. It's not entirely unique, because other casinos are adding the "in game" betting using the same system, which was rolled out initially at the M. This is very different from the normal sports betting because you can bet during the game. Traditional bookmaking will take bets before an event (sometimes even a long time before, for example, the winner of next year's Super Bowl is already a bet you can make in Vegas) but not during it.

I am not sure if a "in game" system ever existing before in Las Vegas casinos to the extent that the M is doing it. The gambling radio shows seem to think it's a novel thing.

I should add that this market (sports gambling) has long had "traders" (people looking to arbitrage games and do other technical actions), "brokers" (people who tell you what to bet on, similar to a stock broker) and "value" players (in the betting case this is guys who look for an imbalance in value, undervalued positions usually caused by too many people betting on one side of a game, similar to Buffet looking for undervalued companies). Recently, I've heard of one of these brokers advertising themselves as an investment group, particularly to the extent that insider trading isn't illegal in gambling (for example, if you have better information on the seriousness of a injury to a key player you have inside information, but instead of it being illegal as it would be in the stock market, it's actively encouraged).

This market is huge. I heard on the radio that Vegas did ~$85 million in bets on the Super Bowl alone.

As a final note, if you don't think you're gambling when you put money into the stock market, then I'm not sure what to tell you.
Due to some sort of internal Dec sales war you could buy the same hardware running VMS($$$$),Ultrix($$$),or NT($) - we bought NT and wiped the machines then installed Linux.

They gave you Sparc ultra performance for 1/2 the price.
and a complimentary folk song courtesy of Claire

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4mHHuc4NPc
>Take the full time job and go to school part-time and/or online

Eh, personally, I think this is the worst choice of all. You won't get the "normal" social life of college, you won't get as much academically out of college, and you won't get all you can out of your first job.

Unless you are some kind of superman, you will either have to take easy classes (and skip most of the social bits) or you will have to do your homework while you are at work, and probably both.

This "split the difference" is what I tried to do, and I gave it up within months (choosing a SysAdmin career over college) because it became clear that I would only be able to do one or the other well.
I just tried it with my mac. I was surprised that chrome had access to the accelerometers. I thought they were only used to make sure the hard drive doesn't die in case of dropage.
Great "social internet" Engineering feat, eh maybe.
Compared with other real-time & data intensive platforms, not even close. Electronic finance assets exchange platforms are a order of magnitudes more complex.
Not an apples-to-apples comparison. UPS, Google and Facebook have much less concentrated product/service offerings (ie, they each have >1).
What they are offering is certainly a smart bet, but the concern is how expandable the idea is as education industry is varied geographically. Every country has there own education system which mean no standard format of the app would make it viable across all the countries. lets see how they proceed.
It would actually help Mailchimp to educate their users or potential users on how to get newsletter subscribers.
maybe even a youtube channel or video blog would do them good.
The negative consequence would be to have these teenagers free to go about town during the day raising hell.

Clearly not a problem for the school itself. But it suddenly reminds everyone else that these kids exist, and we can't have that, right?
I love it. There is nothing else that makes it so easy to replicate between various systems. And with its HTTP API, it's possible to write javascript apps that talk directly to the db, without a need for any server-side code.
> I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu)

http://www.thelinuxdaily.com/2010/04/the-first-linux-announc...
I'm doing this in the middle of Africa (Rwanda).

About six months in now and I think it is going to work. Even in the middle of nowhere you can find good talent, one of my local devs is amazing, he'll be fantastic in six months and absolutely bad ass in five years.

Do it, it's fun, it's not that expensive and there is a huge need in these countries for people to come in and show how its done.
State of the Web 2010
That client would then touch a lot of other people though, even if it was primarily the one guy. Changes that are rolled out on the platform would need to be considered in terms of this app along with the all other platform apps.

Sure when independent a single guy can sit there and create something like that solo, inside Twitter though there would be a lot more process and interaction to achieve the goals.
"Changing the core" isn't generally any more encouraged by either system, if it doesn't result in marketable features.

The idea of the "complete overhaul" is something engineers love to dream about, business managers hate to do and end users generally just don't care that much about. That's why they happen so seldom - and usually only if the existing package is a pile of unmaintainable crap.

The shrink-wrap model encourages chasing adding more bullet points to the outside of the new box over actually improving the day-to-day user experience. The service model encourages making your actual customers happy with their product AFTER the purchase, so they keep buying.

The whole concept of a large, up-front fee is driven by traditional mass-media marketing strategy: spend a bunch of money making something sound really great to buy, sell it for a bunch of money up front so you can get a return on your advertising spend. Don't worry about what happens after that.

"I don't understand, what is the problem with that?"

The problem with that is if there is some small feature change that would really improve the current product (say supporting an additional new file format on import) there is little reason for the maker to add it to the old release. Instead, they lump it in with the new version and hope it forces you to buy a whole new license. So a feature that might only add a small marginal cost but would make current users happy for longer doesn't get released to them.
To be more precise, the 80286 introduced the protected mode with support for using segmentation for memory management. The 386 added paging and extended the architecture to 32-bit, and added Virtual 8086 mode.
I always picture the submit-and-boom scenario as skeet shooting, which keeps me amused enough until someone pastes a cache link into a comment.

Pull! Pow
Yeah, good point about the scrolling - that choice had to be tablet-driven. Maybe some of my discomfort with the new design is because I'm not used to tablet-style scrolling on my laptop (ie. the content moves but I don't feel like I'm moving down the page).
I wonder how this page feels on iPad Safari?
Well you need 100-200 engineers just to try and make Cassandra scale. The rest do the production site with more proven technologies.
While I respect much of formal education, as I was reading this article it struck me again just how slow and expensive it is to go to something like Harvard Business School compared to just using your brain and taking advantage of all the amazing free stuff on the Internet. I've read tons of accounts of businesses, founders dilemmas, market studies, case studies, etc. all for free on the web. I don't even have to drive anywhere, fill out any forms, jump through any bureaucratic/academic hoops, etc. Not to say it's completely superior, because it isn't, but it makes traditional university education look increasingly antiquated.
That hasn't always held true for some of the major iPhone apps, at least - when there's a major version release, they sometimes require a new purchase.

Also, iPhone and Android apps have the potential for ongoing in-app purchases by users. So you buy the GPS app once for a very low price (or free) but you have to keep buying the data updates if you're using it. Or new levels for Angry Birds.
Meanwhile, 20 years in the future US...
It's all fun and games until your armchair decides it wants a more realistic set of arms for itself.
I was about to say 'how can he afford this?!' but then I pulled out my calculator.

If he is a contractor and claims all travel, meals and hotels as business expenses, then he basically pays no income tax. As Paul says, he also pays no council taxes/property taxes/etc.

So if he averages one flight a week costing $200 (it's 4x more than this to fly across the Atlantic, but 4x less than this to fly inside Europe), then that's only $10,400/year.

If he takes red eye flights long haul, then that saves money too because he doesn't need a hotel room for that night.

Out of a $100,000 income, that leaves $245 per night for hotel rooms and food and drink.

Out of a $60,000 income, that leaves $135 per night for hotel rooms and food and drink.

Life is pretty sweet when you don't pay income tax. I wonder whether the tax authorities will consider all of his travel as genuine business expenses and not tax free holidays. This isn't a jibe at him - I hope it's totally legitimate so I can do it too!
Unprecedented, except is it really unprecedented or are we just looking at it from the sexy social startup whatever must say graph and also disrupt angle, where everything is new and super hard and nobody has problems that have ever been solved before.

RSS strikes me as an almost identical process other than the time subscribers wait to check for new content, and there are feeds with millions of subscribers. So now the problem is reduced to doing it in a timely fashion.

This is why I wonder if they're really that immensely complicated - isn't Google doing much the same thing, and possibly even at a bigger scale at one point, with their reader and FeedBurner?
Many people would muddle there way through things trying to work stuff out that would be easily explained to them. If no one has engaged the person to explain it to them, they will assume that they should just know it and be afraid to ask. This ensures everyone gets up to speed early, probably looks like a lot of time spent at the time but probably saves a lot of time down the track.
Or for people who want to share binary files, or for people who like drag-and-drop interfaces, or for people who don't want to spend a bunch of time learning about secure shared repo setup. In other words, for people who Just Want To Share A Damn Folder. Like my thesis advisor, my artist friends, and me, a loyal git user.
Yup, Loren Brichter, who wrote Tweetie. Twitter bought his company, Atebits, and hired Loren to continue working on the iOS Twitter client.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tweetie
The competence of the firms intelligence gathering ability is unrelated to the security of their computer systems. Whether the intelligence gathering was any good is hard to say, unless you take the released documents at face value. Taking something released by Anonymous at face value does not seem like a good strategy.
Couchdb is awesome, and you are not alone.

Really, my only complaint is the inability to query and update in one command for quick document updates. SQL has the leg up here.

> UPDATE blah WHERE blah = blah;

Please, if someone from couchone is reading this, a similar feature would be killer.
Meditate, work out, eat well, read, journal, say hi to strangers, take photos, learn a new sport, is that a good start?
The accelerometer interaction hooks into javascript via browser events.

Here's the basic usage for chrome: (for firefox the event is MozOrientation, and values are radians rather than degrees)

window.addEventListener('deviceorientation', function(evt) {
var x = evt.gamma, y = evt.beta;
}, false);
American Research and Development, the grand-daddy of Venture Capital in the United States, invested $77,000 for 77% of DEC in 1957 (that's roughly $598K in 2010 dollars). When it went public in 1971, ARD's shares were valued at $355 million (about $1.9 billion in 2010 dollars). This one investment was responsible for over half the lifetime performance of ARD's portfolio over the decades before it was sold to Textron.

See: http://books.google.com/books?id=tDOVY3ek-UEC&lpg=PA20&#...
We know about this and we also want it. We had some preliminary planning last week on how, exactly, we want to approach this.

We can't commit to when we'd be able to deliver it just yet, but it's definitely high up on our lists.
My first job was at DEC (software engineer in Germany).
I remember we were a team of 20 (or so) time sharing single VAX, each of us on 40x25 DEC terminal using LSE (language sensitive editor).

In retrospect it is amazing how far ahead of its time DEC often was: The first 64 bit processor (DEC alpha), the first search engine (Altavista), etc; and how little came of it in the end.

That all is now over 20 years ago, and I still look fondly back to that time, and I am still in contact with my former colleagues.
People don't speak up because "well, they're torrent sites", but the rationale applied here is so wide that nobody is really safe.
HTC invests $40M in OnLive
Isn't this one of the promises of Lift, the scala framework?
"The elephant in the room was race. I'd bet 90% of the problems were caused by kids of a particular race. Unfortunately many public discussions involving it devolve into demonization of the messenger or blame gaming."

When 90% of a specific race statistically have a broken family with no father figure around, it's no wonder that the kids turn out the way they do. It's a vicious cycle.

Another problem is that because the kids are getting nothing at home, they would need tons extra attention in school. How can a teacher possibly fill the role of parent when she has many other students that also need the same kind of attention?

Until we can come to terms with things like this, the problems will never go away.

"The harder solution, though it is better in the long term, is to do something that ensures that the parents take more responsibility and make better life choices and set a better example both for their own kids and their neighborhoods."

This is the problem right here. It's the parents at home, but you can't force parents to do anything...and you probably won't ever be able to, unless we were under some sort of totalitarian dictatorship.
Free to use in a freeform manner, but companies will pay to set policies etc.
Also well worth watching, both for the hip hop history and a study of New York showing its best and worst:

"NY77: The Coolest Year in Hell"
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1080761/

When I first heard about this project I was positive it would be a VH1 suckfest, but when I saw it was stunned. It's really good, quite accurate. Those were wild times in New York.
Came here just to chime in about Season 4 of The Wire. For those who haven't seen it, a large portion of it focuses on a new school initiative where disruptive students are removed from their classes and isolated in a smaller, more focused setting to work out their issues (if at all possible). The controversy is the perception it gives of putting the troubled kids through a lesser education, which is ironic considering the sort of education they could get would be qualitatively different and better for them overall.
Amazon pretty much provides that service for you. You just gotta turn it on.
Couchbase
Membase blog
http://blog.membase.com/membase-couchone-merger
and
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZ_JOnU8tkI
There isn't, even the stuff that is out there is highly relevant to some clients and highly not relevant to other clients.

Example: Duplicate content is bad.
Truth: If you're copying wikipedia it probably is, if you're optimizing a local company that serves multiple areas, it's probably best to duplicate that page and change the location name. If that company serves a thousand areas it might be bad.

eg. areas-served/mission-district is better than the dup content penalty because you get your keywords in the URL.

SEO is like Kenny Rogers in the gambler, every hands a winner and every hands a loser. It's all in how and when. Sometimes putting a sales pitch in your description is better than putting the keywords in. Sometimes jamming your description with keywords is better. And it varies from page to page even on the same site.

I'd actually say that you have a better chance not knowing anything, take ideas, try them out, see how they do. You'll do better figuring out your own stuff because you'll be optimizing in ways that others aren't. When Google changes their algorithms to defeat what everyone else who reads SEOmoz is doing then you may get better rankings. Also, you'll have the edge for 12 months while SEOmoz figures out what Google did.

If you want to learn SEO, find a bunch of terms, use a difficulty ranking to find the easy ones, and then try to rank on it. If you figure it out, put AdSense on the page. Also, don't try to rank on it with just one page, use multiple domains, etc. And it's not just ranking, use the tools to optimize your AdSense revenue. Also, don't confuse optimizing AdSense with conversions for a product you're selling. It's a different approach.

SEO is a little bit zen, it's not something you learn, it's something you practice.
Yeah, the number I had was for total API calls (6 billion a day), not just updates. http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/17/twitter-seeing-6-billion-ap...
Never tried http://blog.isnoop.net/2006/05/20/macsaber-turn-your-mac-int... ?
Get well soon bro. Family frist before the HN and internet peeps.
On the flip side, the Nexus updates just fine. You don't even need a computer to do it. Plus, syncing is automatic over the network. No need for itunes.

Finally, you dont' have to void your warranty and risk bricking it just to get functionality like wireless hotspots, non-market app installation, carrier unlocks, and new system components and UIs.
I agree on most of your points, but I use Node.js so the Javascript stuff is just great. I also like Couchapps so in any case, CouchDB is just fantastic for those.

I think people are tainted on Map/Reduce because they see how it is done with other NoSQL DBs like MongoDB where it doesn't store the indexes. The fact that CouchDB stores the views like it does, makes complex queries fast, and easy to use. Maybe there is a little initial overhead in writing the views, but after that it is efficient and leaves a lot of code out of the program, so you are getting the data you want in the way you want it.
Rent a storage unit or sell things you don't need anymore?
HTC to invest $40 million into OnLive to help with games on smartphones
Looking For Online Gay and Lesbian Community in Ottawa?
Ha! Chapel. What a serendipitous meaning.

Yeah, thanks for introducing me to CouchDB.
I'm glad to hear you'll be supporting both interfaces. And I'm looking forward to hearing details about how the two engines will be integrated going forward.
Huzzah for Whale Sharks[1]! Funky critters. The "Google" at the bottom is a nice touch, too.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whale_shark
Groupon responds to superbowl ad criticism
Loggly has been using Membase for a good while now. We're seriously excited about this merger - CouchDB is a great choice for the persistant data store side of things...and fast as hell.
(from Jan's mail to the Apache dev@ list)

It is simple, really: at CouchOne we were 100% committed on the Open Source side of things and at Couchbase we will continue to do so at the same degree. In terms of organisation, Couchbase will be it's own independent Open Source project that has Apache CouchDB and memcached as dependencies, but adds a few things of its own that warrant being its own project. Our combined engineering team, led by Damien, will continue to contribute to Apache CouchDB in the same way as we've been to date, only more.