skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Mainstream? The Big 6 have been dredging the self-pub field as a minor league for their majors. This is how desperate they've gotten -- well, that and lazy too. Their business model is unsustainable and will inevitably collapse.
Do I understand this right? Google (over a period of time)knowingly submitted info to Microsoft. When Microsoft used that data, Google accuses them of copying?

Does Google use the data I give them? Are they copying me?
Come on. $69 for a handheld touchscreen computer that you can program however you want? You'd have to be incredibly jaded to not reflect about how amazing this is. You'd have to be deliberately ignorant to not be able to imagine things you could do with this. iPhone killer no; but that's not the point.
YC startups seeking designers for Feb 2011 designer directory
On the homepage, the parallax effect that happens when you move the mouse isn't very smooth - I think you should get rid of it.
Registry Exhaustion Dates (chart)
Since the link is in a comment that begins, "MS is not a horrible stack to develop on," and ends, "I'm glad I went with .NET for my startup," a reader could get the impression that the link somehow provides support for your pro-MS position.
I read something once where someone (I think some business) made every effort to buy all lottery tickets for a particular payout once the payout amount went high enough to make that a viable (profitable) option. It turned out they actually failed to get every single ticket for some reason, but I think they did get the winning ticket.
Good point, I moved it above the Quora link.
If only there was some sort of Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation out there with a wide variety of CPU intensive benchmarks to evaluate architectures and compilers.

Not getting a SPEC license makes this strictly amateur hour. And yes, I know compilers are tuned for SPEC, but you'd at least get repeatable high-quality results on a wide range of different programs.

SPEC isn't necessarily representative of every program out there, but his weird (and small) collection of microbenchmarks and random fragments of code is even less interesting than SPEC.
Celery 2.2 released
Depends on typical user profile and the rates you're looking to charge - some micropayments are so low they're barely worth collecting the payment processing fees.

How do users obtain value from the service? Is it something where there's a quantifiable marginal benefit from each part of the content accessed (like a set of tutorials, or product/market/region specific data) or is it something more intangible (e.g. niche news, multimedia or a discussion platform) where customers might tend to underestimate the value of accessing that little bit more around their immediate area of interest.
Can they even gauge whether specific bits of the service are worth money to them, or is the choice to subscribe to everything (possibly with a limited trial first) actually easier?

Is this the same for all users? Are user groups differentiated (i.e. discrete group that would only contemplate subscribing or making one-off micropayments) or overlapping (i.e. most would be happy with either payment option, and would go with the cheapest to them given a choice). If it's the former, is it possible to offer both payment options? If not, maybe it's feasible to segment parts of the service as chargeable extras. Is the value to the end user fairly uniform or are some likely to derive so much benefit from occasional use of one small part of the site that they'd happily pay subscription costs at the same rate as people using most of your content?

As a general rule smaller numbers of people make more use of resources made available on a subscription basis whilst larger numbers of people make substantially less use of resources billed individually. Which is easier to budget for will depend on your customer acquisition and support costs (vary by user) vs bandwidth costs (vary by usage)
Except, of course, "legitimate trade" is roughly as much a "social network" - and would be far larger.
Why do people think there's anything wrong here? Here's a (hypothetical) similar example:

In the 1990s, it probably look a lot of iterations, user studies, and market research to decide that copy/paste, undo, etc were the "right" set of features to include in a word processor. Do you think Google Docs re-did all that research? No, of course not. They probably just looked at Word and said, "we need to support these features". And there's nothing wrong with that. This is the exact same thing.

If you have a product out in the market, it's fair game for your competitors to look at and analyze its strengths and weaknesses, and use those to improve it's own product.
What do you mean by runway?
You can access the GPS information with Javascript. http://diveintohtml5.org/geolocation.html
This comment reminded me of the epiphany I had my sophomore year in college: that code is a literal (and physical in a sense) representation of an idea or system.

I know it seems trite.

But I had been programming for years, and I had grokked recursion and pointers, but up to that point I was always sort of thinking of programming as a means to an end, and somehow distinct from the task it was accomplishing. At this point I take it for granted that I can translate my thoughts into this or that programming language, but when I first realized the direct correlation it was like a bolt of lighting.
Users Unable to Update Mac App Store Purchases
As a customer I prefer an application that works on whichever device I feel like using this week.
Do programming language designers look for repetetive questions on SO and improve their languages so those questions wont come up in future?
> "some backend script which a) runs sql deletes on an account ID and all tables and b) fires off scripts that physically deletes all photos across all servers."

Neither should happen. 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.

I have a hard time believing Flickr would make a mistake like this. I agree with you - odds are if they actually let an engineer loose on this problem it'll be licked with a DB backfill in 20 minutes.
It does look like Google thinks this is a PR win. With their comments in the search engine forum and Matt Cuttis' comments in the original HN thread, it is hard believe that this is a "rogue" faction of some sort.
Am I the only one who thinks that the NoSQL movement -- whatever else its aims may be or have been in the past -- is ending up doing A LOT of wheel reinvention? (With little demonstrated gain.)

I'm really open to being made aware that I don't get it. I WANT to get it, in fact. I like the idea of NoSQL in principle, and I understand at least some of the motivations behind a non-relational store. I just don't see many of those ideological benefits translating into practical ones. When you're talking about doing joins and 'primary_key in (X, Y, Z)' types of queries, that looks to me exactly like a relational database.

Do I just not get it?
They are known for selling to larger orgs, because MS partners can pull in local MS heavy hitters when necessary to convince targets to pull the trigger. I wouldn't say their whitepapers get them much in the way of sales.

In my view, the more status-conscious the sales target is, the more easily MS can sell to them. It's not really the tech that seals the deal.
This is great news. The company I am currently working at is using the Google Protocol buffers within Python as well, and any and all speedups we can get is absolutely fantastic.

As of right now we are just getting off the ground and I don't think the protocol buffers are going to be our primary concern for a while, either way it is nice to know that in the future we can look forward to using these 3rd party libraries.
The only thing I can possibly imagine that a server can do with 16GB of swap is leaking garbage like a sieve and then getting the garbage swapped out. On an incredibly local basis, yes, this might be a better idea than not having swap, but as a generalized reason for servers to have swap it's terrible. If that's not what's happening I am all ears as to what the situation really is, but I'm sure it'll be something very unusual; in general if your server has even the slightest need for performance it can't use swap.
WISC? I have a vewwy gweat fwiend in Wome called WISC.
Hmm...I would say my experience has been the opposite, and in Tokyo, 2kyuu is rather closer to the high end of the spectrum.

When I first came to Japan, I basically didn't speak any Japanese, but managed to get a job as a software developer in Tokyo. There are lots of companies (especially in the financial sector) that value English over Japanese here.
It's an engineering decision - Flikr has to host a large amount of data for very little cost, since most users aren't paying. Space isn't cheap by the Petabyte!

The design for a system where you had multiple redundant copies of all the data and could roll back any changes to the data set is different - and would cost a lot more.
regardless of the content, it feels like cheating. for whatever that's worth. "cringe" was admittedly an exaggeration.
How about ... RAID isn't backup.

RAID is there for system interruption protection. RAID is there to keep flickr cruising along without interruption.

If they delete content from a volume covered by RAID, then all the mirrored copies go poof simultaneously.

What you are suggesting is a higher level content management system. Apparently (from the drift of the comments) that is something flickr doesn't want to get involved with.
I wonder if Apple might use this as a way of phasing out BookShelf and making the Kindle app the standard reading software for the iPhone. If the Kindle app shipped on every new iPhone, that might be worth it to Amazon to give Apple a respectable cut of the action.
Ditto...but Seattle, and my toys have wings.

Yes, please, rational people: leave Seattle. Terrible, terrible place. No good at all. Wet, gray, the people are mean. Shoo!
favorite quote: "if you don't find noticing repeated patterns in code fun you're probably not a programmer."
AFrameJS Tutorial - A Response to "Backbone.js Tutorial - By noob for noobs"
Very curious to see if this something people are interested in.

I started building a platform like this for our own sites and am working on making it into a service app. Basically a hosted version of LaunchSoon with more modern features, but not focused on web apps and invites. Besides extreme ease of use, what are people looking for in a "coming soon" site provider?
The stealing a bike example goes to counter the parent's argument that they can't complain if they don't protect their content.

As to whether this is a crime or not would probably be a copyright issue. If Google had a valid legal claim I bet they'd make it in court.
He will have the original photos because any serious photographer will capture them in RAW - which Flikr doesn't store.

The issue though is the links, comments, viewer history and comments that you cannot backup or restore - but which have real value.
Google buys domain for search terms stolen by bing
hiybbprqag.com has been bought by google
If anybody has any suggestions, comments, ideas, bug fixes, please tell me, I want to make AFrameJS the strongest Javascript MVC library out!
>However, if they're knowingly selling losers, could that be construed as fraud?

Yes, it's also clearly immoral.
I've never really understood it either. RailsConf is $700. I don't know what the turn-out is but I would guess ~1,000 people maybe? That is $700,000. Maybe I am just unaware how much a conference costs to put on, but that seems like a ton of money. Plus most conferences have sponsors too.
If the privacy bit is properly reported in MSM, it should definitely raise some concerns. Think corporations with sensible data and all that.
My favorite line:

"I found it hard to believe that only this tic-tac-toe game was flawed. What were the odds that I just happened to stumble upon the only breakable game the very first time I played the lottery? Of course, I knew it was possible that every other scratch game was totally secure. I just didn’t think it was very likely."

Spoken like a true statistician.
In general I find myself writing short functions because modern programming languages and libraries are powerful and there is not a lot of busy work. That said, if there is a lot to do and little opportunity for re-use, I have no problem with long functions. The primary criteria for creating functions should be clear interfaces that minimize abstraction leakage.
No, I agree with you. Just wondering if I might be able to help you overcome an issue. If there's no issue you are working on, no big. We are in agreement.
Last week there was a discussion about Protocol Buffers for Python when Greplin released C++ wrappers. [http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2145534]

I mentioned that we were working on it too, so over the weekend I tried to make it usable by others.

Two main differences are:

1) Lazy decoding support: Message parts are decoded on the fly as they are accessed for first time.

2) No dependencies. C code is generated which compiles to Python module.
Google Goggles can already solve Sudoku using OCR--http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/shortsharpscience/2011/01/...

So what you are suggesting isn't that far fetched.
Well, while doing this they clearly knew that Google is by far the biggest search engine in the world, and naturally most of the data would be coming directly from Google. Right?
Firefox 4 Beta beats stock Android browser on V8, Kraken, SunSpider
I see it more as copying the toolbar item by item.
If you're going to implement anything like this, you're going to need to give teachers the prerogative to force the students off of them. Some students are self motivated and will use it for notes, and that's great, but it's still another potential distraction.
One of the things that we're looking at very seriously is integrating third party data providers such as RapLeaf to get an understanding of who is interested in you. If we can help people get a better grasp on who their product appeals to, I think that could provide tremendous value.
I think the open source stack alternative is getting a bad rap here mostly because of MySQL, which has historically not scaled well on multi-CPU systems.

C# is certainly faster than a Python or Ruby but you pay a price in development speed (or perhaps Joel would argue not - if you're a C# expert but Ruby newb you'll probably go faster with what you know).

But you could use Clojure or Java if that's a concern.
Once that's all done MS should stress test all the solutions and publish the results.

This is lose-lose for MS. If it turns out they do worse or the same then they lose. If they do better, even much better, people just say its MS funded, please ignore.

And for any non-trivial app there are 1000! different ways to build it. Even if they happened to find the optimal non-MS implementation, someone will say it isn't. And unless you implement all 1000! of them you'll simply have people saying, "No one would do it that way".
I've been wanting to do something like that for a while, this post just bumped that project up a little higher on my "TODO" list.
Does anyone have the TL;DR version of what PBs are or how they're used?
Nope, and neither did the photographer that is being written about.

What isn't backupable, and thus is lost forever is all of the comments he had on the various pictures, all of the groups his pictures belonged to, all of the embed's of pictures on various sites, all of the social aspect of Flickr (such as friends, family, all of those things).

I use Flickr to share my photos with the world, but I keep a local copy of all of my pictures on my local file server and on my laptop and all of the backups I have of that laptop...
The number-one point I take away from this isn't about ethics or what is "right".

It's that Microsoft has no confidence in Bing. They aren't willing to trust their algorithms to produce the best search results. They've decided that, some portion of the time, the single best search result they can return is whatever Google is returning.

They've given up on trying to be better than Google, and are settling for being a cheap, off-brand knockoff that rebrands stale Google search results.

That's rather shocking, and I frankly thought the Bing team were better than that.
Blackbored: Textmate's Blackboard theme for RubyMine
I Got bored with RubyMine's coloring.

It's not an exact clone...I matched the colors by eye.
I know it is fun to categorically dismiss posts with a wikipedia link to some arbitrary fallacy. (Hey. I can do it myself: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_fallacy)

But he does have a fraction of a point.
All your comments are coming from your assumption that Microsoft is trying to monopolize in something - in this case, search. Hence, your comments (although you will disagree) are biased and irrational. Microsoft isn't trying to monopolize in anything nowadays. In fact, they can't, so they aren't even trying.

From a search engine user's point of view, I believe this whole fiasco is ridiculous. First, it's ridiculous because Google is handling this situation very immaturely. Matt Cutts should not have confronted the VP of Bing in a way he did. Second, if I were the user of the Bing Toolbar, I gave permission to the Bing Toolbar to use my behaviors to polish my search results. I have no problem with that. Lastly, the experiments they did has more to do with "guessing what user wanted" than "what PageRank does".

I've used Bing fairly often past 6 months because of too many spams Google search results were giving back. Now that Google has fixed (or still working on) the spam problem, I'm starting to use Google again. However, what I noticed from the past 6 months is that Google search isn't so much better than Bing. This Bing Toolbar fiasco only applies to synthetic queries that I would never make.

Is Bing cheating? I don't think so. To me, they are just using another signal from user's permission. However, the definition of cheating will be different for everyone else.
The thing is, Google monitors which search results you click, too. Bing's toolbar just does it via browser integration.

Google can and does track clicks from Bing via Google Analytics. Every time you click a result on Bing and land on a page using Google Analytics, Google knows about it, and they record your Bing search terms from the referrer. The same is probably true for pages with Google ads.
You sell out cheap.
Bottom 5% of Americans are still wealthier than 68% of world population
Here is what I don't understand. They have multiple redundant copies in case of unlikely scenario of disaster, but they have no copies or protection in case of quite likely scenario of operator error. This seems backward to me.

EDIT: I don't believe that Yahoo! Flickr does not have a way to recover these things. Or I'm completely wrong.
If there's one thing that YC companies are always looking for, it's a designer.

If you're a designer, this is a pretty sweet opportunity to work with, or even join, a YC co.
Presumably at some point they will offer a cloud-based service. It particularly makes sense given the fundamental design of their product.

Since they only launched their product quite recently, it is understandable that they would want to test it with several customers before offering it as a service.

In fact, if the product scales well enough, it would be perfect for deploying as a cloud-based service and could be very successful as such.
This is getting out of control. Why do people insist on using on using every framework under the sun because it's the "cool" thing to do?
I'm a bit confused - see this image, from Google Analytics on my blog.
http://i.imgur.com/oWK8q.png

Google Analytics knows that the search term 'autodesk revit devlopers guide' on Bing lead someone to my blog. I take it this information is in the HTTP header on the request to my site which the Google analytics code reads.

If Google were to use Google analytics information in their search results, how would that be any different to what Bing is doing? Or is the distinction that Google claims not to do this?
First human-routed search engine. 
Qwhispr was developed by Stanford Ph.D. students. Qwhispr is currently in beta test. We'll only allow public signups until February 15. After this, signups will be limited only to relay recipients.
i don't want to pay someone else to host a copy of my data when i have perfectly good encrypted backup mechanisms in place. i want offline copies of it to store, look at, modify, copy, etc. whenever i want, and the fewer companies that have access to my private data, the better.

also, many of the reasons backupify.com cites for needing backups would also apply to their own s3-backed service. "hackers", storage failure, human error, TOS violations, accidental account lapse/termination, etc.
If I were starting out now (in startup land), I would clone threewords.me
<quote>But, seriously, returning wikipedia as the top result for something with low levenshtein distance to a rare word is not exactly rocket science...</quote>

Actually, that is Google's core business, and from the amount of revenue it's generated most likely harder than rocket science. The generation between keyword and website content/results is what a search engine is all about, and what Google does (arguably) well.

I believe why Google is crying foul is because it is the only reference to generate the mapping between the keywords they made up and the website results. Bing did not have these mappings until they evaluated user clickthroughs that went through Google's results, with their browsing history going something like :
1/ http://www.google.com/search?q=keyword
2/ http://website.com

Now Bing is using the users click history to generate the mapping from keyword<=>http://website.com ; this is the shady part: if google did not generate its results, that mapping would never have taken place: the user would never have been able to tell Bing that there is relevance between the two unless Google existed.
I really don't understand what the issue is. Beside implementing things like server-side and client-side validation will be a tad repetitive all the other issues are solved by proper OO design.

I built a service which follows the MVC model and use OO to have base classes to do anything that any of the controller classes have in common.
Then you can have classes for the different output formats such as JSON/XML or HTML. By having proper sub classes you really don't have to worry about where the request is coming from. There is no code repetition beside tailoring the JSON data for whatever the client needs.

I guess it's about blurring the line between client/server the way PHP blurred the line between HTML and code. I'm not particularly fond of that.
Free Market Economoy 101: things are worth whatever people are willing to pay for them. Prices aren't based on cost, they're based on value.
I don't think there are enough worthy start ups to make this a viable plan.
'Eat less,' U.S. says as fast-food chains super-size offerings
1. utf8_general_ci is fine. Make sure your html pages are also utf-8 encoded, and you should be good to go. Copy and paste this arrow → in your forms to test if it displays ok. (Or any other unicode char.)

2. Let it play out for a while. Then run with it: ask the English speaking foreign users what's most important to them (translated UI? Separate section?) and implement it.

Good luck!