skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There are a lot of hints about how the Zones work, spread through both books.

The overall picture seems to be this:

* What we think of as the "laws of physics" in any given Zone are actually a kind of VM layer, running on top of some (unknown) physics.

* The implementation is done through extraordinarily tiny machines. What we see as quarks, leptons etc (and the laws they follow) are in reality complex machines made of far smaller constituents.

* The implementation was probably done by some power-beyond-the-powers that lives in the center of the galaxy. It uses the Zones as a protective device - civilizations in the Slow Zone, the Beyond and the Transcend have only relatively limited abilities, unless they can break through the virtualization layer. (That, incidentally, is why the Blight is such a threat in AFUTD, and why the Zones change so much in response.)

If you read both books with this set of ideas in mind, a whole lot of otherwise puzzling scenes and one-off observations in the books make a great deal more sense. There's no reason to call the Zones unscientific.
Official: Murdoch Reveals News Corp.'s iPad Publication
Indeed.

$25/mo for 'unlimited' data + 300minutes is outstanding, compared to every other option I am aware of in the US.

I currently pay that much for the required "data plan for smart phone".
1. They did an experiment to see how well modern subjects can estimate the position of the sun (answer: very badly)

2. They measured the polarization patterns under similar conditions to check whether there could be sufficient information there to do this better. They think there is.

3. they didn't yet ask subjects to estimate the position of the sun from the 'sky through a polarization filter'.

Guessing at the results of #3: I think that humans will do slightly better looking through sunglasses, and expert users could use that in navigation.

In the end, I expect that the Vikings used as many cues as they could find to navigate, just like carrier pigeons do (for carrier pigeons, the tricks mentioned in the literature include detecting the magnetic North, using polarization cues to detect the location of the clouded sun, and olfactory cues. They also have a good map of their surroundings that helps them home in on the last 30 miles or so. Because of that, a flight from say 100 miles away need not be dead-accurate in direction to hit that 30-mile radius circle where they know how to get home.
Agreed. In addition I tend to frequent blogs/sites specializing in things I care about (HN for startup and tech, calculatedriskblog.com for economic indicators, edhat.com for local news etc).
His last article was intensely ignorant of MongoDB. I appreciate his attempt to promote his product, but the last one showed that he'd spent about 10 minutes on the Wiki and that's it. Or perhaps he's more informed and conveniently left out a number of things that would have made MongoDB look better. I don't want to cast aspersions, but it wasn't a good argument.

This one does seem to be more informed (and I agree with a lot his criticism of MongoDB here), but it's almost like comparing apples to oranges. Things are done in MongoDB a certain way for a number of reasons (e.g., the query interface doesn't allow certain things in a distributed context that you could probably do with a SQL database). But I think anyone who's done large-scale MongoDB deployments can (or at least should) attest that it works well, but perhaps not as well as other solutions (or as well as it could/will work eventually/whatever).
I thought the zones being unknowable was part of the story.

The Magellanic Cloud aliens created (or at least can manipulate) the zones to stop transcendental "things" like The Blight from destroying all sentience (and then becoming a problem for the Cloudies?).

The zones are two things: a few layers of "play nice, you guys" and a cheap way of avoiding singularity issues muddling up the plot.
Yeah probably. Seems it was mostly BASIC + asm for that age range. Rock on GWBasic! It's probably where you learnt to use your first GOTO like a billion times :)
Bluefin Labs Introduces First-Ever Analysis of Social Media Commentary to TV Ads
> You never actually delete rows from your tables. You mark them as deleted, sure, but the data needs to be able to come back. Space is cheap, there are simply very few cases where outright deletion from a DB table is warranted.

This comes with a cost, and it's not a small one. Every single query that ever touches this table, in every single piece of code owned by the company, written or maintained by every single developer (consultant or transient or offshore, none of which ever got training sessions on this requirement) needs to be enhanced to respect "where isDeleted <> true".

It's well understandable if the expected cost to recover after the fact from an occasional issue is smaller than the cost of implementing and maintaining that in the first place.
Yes it's time for pot legalization, Mr. President.
Just today OkCupid got bought by IAC which also owns match.com which they are critical of in that post.
Live from Google's February 2nd Android Event
I think you could write a whole other blog post about the last paragraph. To me, the most interesting part about getting started on a new side project is what I end up learning as a result.

New methods and skills always come out of trying to solve new problems. And hopefully that will lead you to pursue something even harder/more interesting.

Edit: typo.
Scrum at Formspring
DreamPlug puts a 1.2GHz ARM PC in a power outlet
Really? Browser usage metrics after 24 hours? While this might have been interesting if they did it, say, a week from now, this kind of data is practically worthless.
What I thought was extremely interesting was the way the way the some focused were used... as components behaving as the intelligence behind computational tasks. The creator of Mechanical Turk undoubtedly read this book... I sure thought about creating something like that after I read it.
Time to enter the online dating space, I guess.
Hahaha -- The actual article is about how researchers were investigating if the navigation technique was possible. They concluded that it is a reasonable possiblility, based on experimental evidence. Their conclusion was: if they had these crystals they could utilize them. Further they mention that there were lots of other techniques that could be used equally well. That is not jumping to unnecessary conclusions.

Instead of me chilling out, you should consider repeating the third grade and working on your basic reading comprehension skills.
Looks like it could be a good service, like a blog / newspaper version of http://800ceoread.com/.

Posting a list of recently-posted summaries (blog-style) to the front page — especially with an RSS feed — would be a good way to generate traffic / views / traction.
Joined the meetup group - looks really interesting!
I know there are some viable models that depend on ad revenue. It sounds like you've found some of them. That's very commendable.

In my experience, I wasn't very good at balancing my desire to serve the user's needs while also increasing ad revenue. The two goals seemed to be at odds. Either litter the page with ads and annoy the users, or make no money. Not to say it's not possible, just that I didn't like worrying about it or working on it.

I found that the subscription route was much easier. It aligned me perfectly with the users. All I had to do was please them and they would continue paying. No need to test optimal placement, worry about ad fatigue, ad blockers, etc, etc.

Not to say there aren't problems. Finding the right freemium feature balance, dealing with churn, and the horrible beast that is credit card processing are all pain points. But by and large, I have found it much easier to run a business based on subscriptions than ads.
Speaking of, does HN know of a cheap android phone available internationally?
Making $60 per hour per user isn't scalable. You can only service one user at a time. So it's apples + oranges comparison there.
From what I gather writing yet another news aggregator is al laughable endeavor -- I think I read some piece on HN that said, basically, "give up, you're not the first person to try this."

I've been working on a personal news aggregator for over a year now, trying everything and anything new and different with an open mind, and yet I've still yet to find a good news experience to beat what I've come up with.

All of this is to say "be patient." Based on what I've been working on, I think with new technologies like IndexedDB and Web Workers people are going to blow away what's out there today.
Simple social networks in less than 90 seconds (video: Fridge & Grumo Media)
That's silly. There are far more linux desktops than there are servers, and this is growing, not dwindling. Just because you don't like it as a desktop, doesn't mean reality isn't real.
I love everything I've read of Vinge and can't stand Stross, so that theory sounds reasonable.
Rockdale’s New Apple Dock Links Directly To Your TV
We're trying (http://www.facecash.com). It's hard to raise funding to do something serious, and the government regulations presently in place require a lot of funding to comply with.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/aaron-greenspan/a-public-comme...
Is it really stealing though, if they explicitly mention the source of each review, and link the user to the primary site?

AFAIK, the issue with Bing was that it wasn't attributing it's modified results as being aggregated from other sources.
They deduct minutes to every call to voice mail. Google Voice and Skype seem to take out from the 300 too. You really can't talk with this plan. This is for data-centric use.
Google already knows about them. And has bet the future on WebM anyway. I trust Google's legal counsel more than I trust you.

What if H.264 infringes on some of Google's patents? Google could countersue and go after members of MPEG-LA, or even end-users of H.264. Google's patent license only covers Google's WebM implementation.
OKCupid deserves some big congratulations. They built arguably the best dating site out there, at last the one that provides the most value for your dollar, without question.

Sure there's a potential that Match just won't get it, and will muddy the user experience. I'd like to think that instead Match is going to understand how awesome OKCupid's function set and design philosophy is, and apply that to their user base, and at worst case maybe just building a network of classifieds sites sort of how the Village Voice/Salon Personals works.
hey, i'm all for selling out but im not into rewriting history. either leave the post or write a new one saying why it was wrong or what has changed. dont go rewriting history by trying to delete it.
Since there is no moderation for now, I didn't feel like it was a good idea, but thanks for the input, I'll be thinking about it!
Plus, PostgreSQL built in master-slave streaming replication in release 9, so scaling out reads is even less of an issue.
I visited - didn't know what to do.

Definitely need to show a listing of submissions and summaries. As per the example you provided, looks great. Would love to use a service like this.

Categorize/tag them so I can browse startup-related articles (or whatever category I want)

Auto-fill url's as people are typing.

If the story I'm interested in has already been summarized, take me to it.

Just a few of my ideas. Could definitely build a mini-newspaper/ezine type of thing around this.

Good job! Keep the iterations coming.

EDIT: Don't force me to use my twitter account to do a submission - please!
Backupify allows you to download the data you backup to their cloud servers onto your local PC, and the base level of the service (2GB online backup) is free.
Building atop your competitors. Nice tactic.
They're heavily implied to have been created by an ancient civilisation, either as an weapon, or as a nature-reserve for less advanced species.
Considering OKCupid's slogan for a while was "always free", I highly doubt that they will switch to a pay-to-use model.
Goodness, your comment seems to imply you have an issue with Apple products, their policies, and/or Steve Jobs. Yeah, the guy writes about OS X and Apple, but he's been a tech consultant for nearly two decades. He's worked with various technologies, from various companies. A quick Google search (heh) would have revealed this. Or, what? Did you believe he was some 20-something year old blogger regurgitating the same "FUD" you believe all Apple fanboys are spewing regarding their "Android jealousy"?
I am disappointed that about this acquisition, but I don't see what's so frightening about that statement. It makes business sense to me.
How to get new ideas
Does anyone know of a website or means with which I can reliably determine whether there's good coverage from a service (in this case Virgin) in my area? I'd love to switch, these AT&T rates are killing me.
"The same could be said for 'paid subscribers'.
If you have a product you're selling for $10/mo you'll need 1,667 subscribers to make $200k/yr not taking into account churn, customer support overhead, etc"

1667 customers isn't that difficult if you have a good product that works well. Free services still have all the same customer support costs (not to mention the order of magnitude amount of traffic you will have to support).

"The question is whether you think getting millions/billions of impressions is easier than getting thousands of paid subscribers or not."

In almost all cases, paid subscribers are easier. Most sites that are ad-supported (unless it's a blog) eventually move to a paid plan (or have both paid and free accounts).
Trend Micro says this page is dangerous.
I believe the article implicitly says they are not likely to become neurotic, or at least not neurotic in a manner that rises to the level of "not fine":

"I strongly suspect that Chua's daughters will turn out just fine. Indeed, they'll excel. That's what the children of two Yale professors usually do, however their parents raise them."
VideoLAN launches new website
I am definitely not advocating more regulation, only pointing out that laws and ethics are not the same thing. The parent of the above post is the one suggesting to "change that" (implying more regulation) and I am answering that comment.

I agree that this kind of "malfeasance" is not really worth any more attention from regulators.
Just for curiosity sake, what is now the younger generation (I'm 23 and hadn't quite realized I've already left the younger generation).
"If Netflix hasn't put DRM on their stream..."

Um, ever tried to stream Netflix video from anything that wasn't running the latest Silverlight? Or diverting/capturing the video from the stream, even on an authorized client?

That's why there's still no Netflix client for Android or Linux, and why Netflix probably doesn't have to worry too much about content sniffing.
Learning simple logic gates in LOGO making the turtle go around a path... do kids still do that today or is it much fancier?
That service exists: http://www.backupify.com/
Ah, I get it now: this is just a repost of a comment from the actual OKC story (where there exists plenty of context, pace Mr. Aldridge):

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2169974
If that were true, there would be no need for force. We could make SS/medicare an opt-in scheme.

No, you couldn't. For game-theoretic reasons, it has to be mandatory to work.

If the poor will use violence unless they receive tribute, they are evil.

Again, I'm not making a moral argument at all. It's your own moral judgment to tar hungry people as "evil" for rising up against a wealthy ruling class--and expressing sentiments like that, quite frankly, reveals far more about you than about me.

If the poor truly are dangerously violent, lets wall them off from the rest of us. A fence is pretty easy to police.
Oppression is only necessary if you need the labor output of the poor, which we manage to survive just fine without (in the US, the vast majority of the poor don't work at all).

The poor aren't "dangerously violent" unless they starve or otherwise slip into absolute destitution, at which point they will try and take what they can get from the rich. The entire history of violent revolution bears this out.

And I think you're misunderstanding this. I'm talking about the distinction between the richest 5% of society and the other 95%. Because that's roughly how the original problem--progressive taxation--is meant to break down anyway. And if you add up things like Medicare, Social Security benefits, and unemployment insurance--frankly, there's a lot of legitimate need for those things, even among working and middle class populations.
The other big limitation compared to a traditional plan is that nights and weekends are full price. So it is hard to compare a 450 minute AT&T plan to this 300 minute one.

But the texting rates are much, much better than a traditional carrier.
Google is not creating the association. Users are creating the associations, Google is discovering them and presenting them back to other users, and subsequent users are confirming the associations. In this case Google engineers, masquerading as users, created associations, then Google presented those associations back to the user, and Bing noticed the association between the term and the page.

The relationship between a term and a page was not created by Google, it was created by users. Google just indexes everything and makes note of these associations, but its does not create the link in the first place.
I appreciate the feedback. That is where a lot of our energy is going right now, fostering the intrinsic motivation and making it as easy (and fun) as possible to answer. I think there's enough precedent (e.g. Stack Overflow, Quora, Aardvark, etc.) to be confident this can work.
Remembering that the account owner is not himself a fraudster is not the same thing as verifying that the account hasn't been compromised and is now being used fraudulently.

(Granted that the OP's questions seemed to focus on the former, rather than the latter)
"with a team of mediocre developers, you're doing well to get acceptable results at an acceptable pace."

I totally agree. It's just not any fun. I also agree that shared ownership can bring up the overall level of the team, but I think it brings down the quality of work getting built by the "one great developer".

My experiences weren't bad, just boring. It seems like a good process for getting reasonably predictable outputs out of a variety of inputs (where the inputs are programmers).

I prefer to work in environments where there's a bit more specialization, more individual ownership (of components, certainly shared ownership of the 'whole'), and where developers are crafts(wo)men.

To me, the worst part about the growth of Agile is that I think fewer mediocre developers are becoming great ones.. because Agile ensures that no one learns to build something on their own. A quality that's in disappointingly short supply in certain areas (like my hometown of San Diego) where software development is rarely treated as a craft, and instead treated as an engineering effort.
Upvote for "poor taste."
> It's hardly sensible for criticizing them for not moving more quickly on the issue.

I'm not criticizing Google. I realize there was a time where WebM was VP8.

When I say WebM needed to be here 5 years ago, that's all I'm saying. No one company, standards body, org. is to blame.

> There is no threat of patent licensing hovering over people who use Flash. That is not the case with H.264 encoding.

Agreed. The individual user is not effected. The browser, and those who encode en masse for profit are exposed to potential pitfalls of the licensing. I'm not saying these royalties are debilitating or that the web will cripple into a video-less nothingness.

What I am saying is: If we can replace something proprietary with something more open, that is a good thing.

> Please stop spreading FUD.

It really seems as though you're spreading FUD by ascertaining my opinions as allegiance to one camp or another.

I'll admit I have a slight distaste for those who insist that H.264's penetration is reason alone to continue using it. Especially when I, up until a few years ago, was a lead Flash developer. Mainly due to Apple's insistence that Flash was the devil. I want you to see the ignorant, double-standard here. Flash and H.264 both have high penetration rates. Both are used extensively on the web and beyond. Yet only Flash must die? See how this is completely asinine?

Instead of pointing a finger at Apple and declare them the enemy of my camp, I examined the situation for benefits instead of fear.

Many thousand Flash developers will eventually hang up their tried-and-true tools in search for a better way. A more open, standards-abiding, creative community.

If we (Flash developers) can do it, I'm sure H,264 blowhards can do the same.
How's their service in the US (specifically CA)? My contract with T-Mobile is up in April and I'm paying $70 for 300minutes + 5 unlimited contacts + unlimited web and 400 incl. text messages.
> Sergei compares Clustrix to MongoDB because their target markets are very similar

Looking at a coarse, "they want money from people" granularity, the target market (people who need a database) may be similar. If we look closer, however, the target market has, more or less, two segments:

One is at the product-for-free pricepoint, where you make your money either by selling additional services (e.g. 10gen with MongoDB, Basho with Riak, MontyProgram with MariaDB and MySQL) or upselling them to an enterprise version (e.g. IBM's DB2 Express-C, whose 2GB limitation makes it perfect to hook people on a workload they would use MySQL for, Franz' AllegroStore, OpenLink's Virtuoso open source edition).

The try-our-product-for-free method means that all the cheap-and-dirty-folks have something in their grubby fingers to build the next blog, mom-and-pop online store, or whatever. The folks with actual money to spend can lower their initial risk by trying out a couple of different databases to see which one fits best, without even having to ask. Only when they're actually happy with what they've got they're going to fork over the cash.

The next tier is the "we'll have to qualify you before we send our sales engineer" tier where you play with Oracle and IBM, or Greenplum and Vertica, because your prospective customers already know that your product is good enough.

There's no real space in-between. Either you have an engineer with good knowledge but no discretionary budget (whose chooses something appropriate for the task, after testing on a real workload, and makes the DB a non-topic for everyone else), in which case a comparison that people cannot replicate is not going to help you, or you have a high-level decision taker with budget power but no time to try things out or risk a couple thousand on a startup that may have gone bancrupt when he most cares about it. This latter category will be thoroughly unimpressed by any benchmark that is not the TPC-C or similar. No lottery whatsoever involved, these are the rules of enterprise spending.

BTW, calling ColdFusion and PHP (which were a far superior alternative to writing Perl CGI scripts without templating or any kind of library support) shitty and Clustrix "the right approach" is something for which people in 2024 will just laugh at you, even if Clustrix manages to do extremely well end ends up as the second-shittiest solution to a common problem.
Supplier Due Diligence
Every supplier due diligence begins with comprehensive planning followed by in-depth analysis and assessment of the supplier in question.