skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
His argument, though, isn't about the core technology or the viability of the 'cloud', it's about trust. He makes clear in the beginning that the primary reason he chose EMC was because he trusted them not to lose or do something stupid with his data - and they did just that.

A Customer Service fail, in this case, is identical to a technical fail - his data is Gone, Gone, Gone, and all he's got for it is platitudes.
IBM's using two racks of computers and a huge SAN. Maybe it couldn't compete with watson, but a decent setup could be cobbled together for 5,000. It wouldn't be as fast, or as comprehensive, but it could be done.

The harder part is the tens of thousands of man hours with very smart people.
Which jobs were made obsolete? If unemployment were technologically driven, you would expect IT to have less unemployment relative to other industries. But that's not the case. Paul Krugman had a pretty good post on the topic:

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/13/whos-unemployed/
craigslist looked about the same as well (pretty easy to do)

Amazon did surprise me though. Well done Amazon. Well Done.
Titles aren't meant to be a tl;dr
It's interesting to see that amazon's current site still looks similar to its launch version.
That is easy to say so long as your own job still falls above the cut-off line of what machines can reasonably do.

The scary part is that line will probably rise up to the point where it encompasses all jobs currently done by humans within my lifetime.
The actual number lines actually hovered around that until we sold. It was fork soup because we hardcoded everything for each event (I love git so much for making that so easy). For every event, we always seen it as just one more event for promotion so we didn't want to make everything configurable. Simple and easy to test basically.

Towards the very end we rewrote everything, made it configurable, integrated all past features, and made a UI designer for designing labels (instead of hardcoding the layouts) and then we sold.
By default Chrome does not allow plug-ins to run at all in incognito mode. You have to explicitly allow the setting highlighted in this screenshot (available from the URL "chrome://extensions")

http://img6.imagebanana.com/img/0om09caa/20110215_135721_Sel...
Which means you'll have to use NAT to control your teapot from the office.
Whats the name of this business?
When I was talking about XHTML, I estimated that IE8 might die in 5 years after IE9 release. I mention XHTML because it is an area where IE has been the weakest link for years.
Isn't 3k/month too much for a startup?

and (sort of related) what would be the cost of one full time customer support rep? It doesn't have to be the most technical person with a CS degree from MIT, mind you...
Simvastatin Side Effects - Treatment Side Effects
Thanks a lot for the suggestions, actually the first graph in every technology is automated, the rest of the graphs data is collected manually. Categories idea is good. Actually I am almost ready with the jobs along with the graphs, its permitted only if its done smartly :)
yeah that was a bug... if you revisit the site you should be able to tweet it now.
Unfortunately, Virb doesn't let you customize 404 pages very well.

http://help.virb.com/discussions/general/1970-custom-404-pag...

But I'll see what I can wrangle.
I asked because I'm seeing a good percentage of links to our site, but when I click through to them all I get is a salesy page about advertising on StumbleUpon.

On a related note, I read you can buy "stumbles" and readers from StumbleUpon and Reddit, but it sounds like DuckDuckGo and Whiteboard had mixed results: http://tinycomb.com/2010/07/19/our-reddit-ad-by-the-numbers-...
This cipher is just 4 rounds of Vigenere with progressively shorter keys...
What a great story! "This is what it's like to build a product someone wants."
As one of the early event organizers to use imhello just want to say we love you guys, and still want to have you back -- until I read this I thought you'd fallen off the face of the Earth. You guys helped us with badges at out City Hall event (where Tim O'Reilly spoke) and also with an event at Twilio HQ. I'm really happy to hear you're back, and my one piece of advice is that once you have that initial traction and buzz don't let it die.

As an event organizer, I felt like you guys were doing for free what I normally had to pay someone to do - manning the front door. It was very valuable, having you there and putting your logo on our badges felt like 100% win-win. Good luck with view.io
Or more generally, everything is mathematics.
But I'd suggest at least doing a IE 9.5.
what's the largest program you've proved correctness of?

But that's the point. With security code, while you may not prove the correctness of it, there's a black hat that's trying to find a counterexample to your "proof".

Whereas for 99% of proofs that are published in the literature no one is trying to prove that there are flaws in the proof. As someone who reviewed CS papers I would always try to really read at least one proof in the paper. Not skim, but really scrutinize it. Probably 75% of the time I could find a problem with the proof. Usually one that was easily corrected, but it was still wrong. But it took substantial effort to do this (which is why I only did one per paper and just read the other proofs).

Some recommended reading:
http://www1.cs.columbia.edu/~angelos/Misc/p271-de_millo.pdf
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/lamport/pubs/l...
The daily double is equally likely to be under any unrevealed spot, so jumping between categories has no effect on the probability of hitting it.
>when it comes to performance, IE has been getting better with every version while Firefox has been getting worse

Fast speed-up happens in developmental builds. There's more to improve than in a finely-tuned end-product that you can't change significantly. And apparently you haven't compared FF 4 to 3 on the same machine. Page-rendering and especially JavaScript are significantly faster on 4. Start-up seems to be slower though, yes; I gather that's partly because they don't intend to optimize it much until the release version.

I'll take moving targets that net-improve with backwards compatibility over years and years of non-change, though I'll admit a) I'm not running a business on this opinion, and b) others may disagree. Web development is extremely highly paced right now, being stuck for years is complete and utter death.

Out of curiosity: what's the "right direction" you think IE is taking? Stability over incremental updates? Or something else?
Because HN used to be above that linkbait BS.

The story is interesting and useful and stands up on its own without having to resort to "in only 300 lines!!!".
Eat As Much As You Want And Still Lose Weight
Rockstars earn millions of dollars... are they paying those kind of wages?

C'mon guys, don't use such a trendy, silly adjective to describe people you want to hire. It's incredibly over-used.
Am I the only one who find w3schools more annoying than expertsexchange? Maybe it's just the searches I perform, but I usually want to see w3.org results, not the often misleading webbed CF results.
Hong Kong gets 1 Gbps broadband service for $26 a month
"Make sure you click the link above instead of typing it through the browser, so we can know you were referred from Hacker News and can give priority access." (even if I think this point is bullshit):
There is a clickable link to View : http://view.io
I reached the end of this story and thought, "These guys have not fully learned the lesson of product failure. Nor have they learned to recognize product success."

You made a product no one wanted, and in order to market it, you stumbled onto a product that lots of people wanted in a market where billions of dollars are spent each year (we spend about 10 grand a year on conferences, and we're a tiny company with a tiny marketing budget). You've now ditched the product people wanted, presumably selling it for a pittance, and went right back to a similar mobile app to the one you couldn't convince anyone to use, despite excellent marketing savvy.

It sounds like you guys are a great team, and I bet you'll make many great products in the years to come. I hope you'll also figure out that when the market speaks that loudly, it's a good idea to listen. I had the same problem for many years; it took me three years, from the time we first wrote the code, to realize that Virtualmin could be a great business.
I didn't detect the irony but then I also didn't RTFA. Then again, should I have to in this case?
I don't really see a problem here. I think your are on a great path.

Well, talk to them. Just don't do something you don't feel like doing. If you want to open-source your stuff do it. Put it under a business-friendly license and there should be no worries.

I guess, they just saw a lot of potential in your abilities. They're probably interested in powering up their work force a bit.

If you get a bad feeling about what they propose: don't do it. And don't make any decisions on right the spot. Don't let the pressure get to you.

If you should bring people or not depends on what kind of meeting it really is and what they want. Can you find out more about them? Well, they are talking about collaborating, so I'm fairly sure you don't need to bring a lawyer IMHO. I'd go alone.
The disadvantage of IE's tab handling is that it frequently takes a second or two for a tab to come up. That makes IE unusable for me, as every few minutes I'm doing a search with 'ctrl-t tab <keywords>'
Speed limits on roads are almost always political decisions, not engineering ones. How else do you explain the straight as an arrow, flat as a pane of glass, brand-spanking-new, 60mph limit roads crisscrossing the american midwest?
I'm glad someone else noticed it! I read, "The V-word should never be applied to any human, but that point aside, think very carefully about this story" and basically tuned out from there. The person even misses the point of political correctness (not offending people), because people in a vegetative state cannot be offended. They are dead, animated husks. It's one of the most horrible examples of technology getting ahead of culture and ethics that I can think of.
I thought porn stars where the new ninjas? http://www.pseudocoder.com/archives/the-type-of-employee-you...
they aren't always, no, but this one's wording definitely sounds like a summary, and is at least somewhat misleading.
Blogspam. Just links to http://www.patiastephens.com/2010/12/05/ayn-rand-received-so...
Question: how do we "click the above link?"
It shows up as text for me, which I cut and pasted into the address bar (you won't know I came from HN)
Am I missing something?
I'd argue there is a certain notion of fuzzing with proofs. Say I have a proof claiming that a certain function is monotonic. Fuzzing, in this case, is throwing a bunch of numbers at the function and checking to see if it's actually monotonic with regards to your inputs.

Obviously not all math proofs are regarding functions and definable numbers, but there's a similar concept of fuzzing for each different proof type -- it just might not be easy to automate, or state in a programming language.
Really? I tried DT out not too long ago and found it to be horrendously slow in doing...everything. I have a Galaxy S, which might not be the number one phone in speed at the moment, but it's up there. And even then, videos had some clear framerate issues, and the desktop application took two hours to copy over music, whereas the native OS copy function took about 30 minutes.

Good for them though, I suppose.

I'll stick with Winamp for audio.
Apple doesn't charge me (or Valve) anything to buy something from Steam for Mac.

Likewise, they don't charge me when Netflix streams a movie on my Macbook.

It's their _market_ that they impose fees on. Amazon charges their Marketplace sellers up to 25% "referral fee" for all sales. Kindle market is 30% as well, I believe. Valve also takes a cut on both "retail" versions and DLC packs released through Steam. There were companies (like Introversion, who makes the awesome Darwinia and Multiwinia RTS games) that almost went bankrupt if it wasn't for Steams mighty distribution service and marketing (dare I say) genius.

What I don't get is, if NYT and other publishers are so ginned up about Apple's cut, why don't they just say "Hey, iPad users, go to NYTimes.com and subscribe. You'll receive the same hard-hitting journalism and insightful commentary in the Safari-optimized nytimes.com edition as you would from our iPad App. Subscribe today!" Problem solved.
HTC unveils Flyer tablet with digital pen, 4G compatibility
Actually reminds me more of trying to split the vote in politics (or maybe just The Wire)

But I get your point on the decoy. Although that's an awful big game to play with a few months worth of Coke sales if they knew it in advance.
this is the one place you might have a shot - if google, amazon, facebook, etc - were just like you straight can't use IE or our sites - then maybe, but no chance the big dogs do something like that
Weight Loss And Regular Exercises
The problem is, that except a tiny fraction of developers no consumer cares about their browser as long as it just works. There is no reason to switch. A browser is simply a browser no matter what its name is. All seem to do the same. The most common reason people activly change their browser is, as far as I noticed, because it's a new trend (firefox and now chrome).

And noone can blame business, that it doesn't dare to loose a significant amount of customers by not supporting IE with their website.
Never has the measure of 'lines of code' been less relevant to anything though.
Yeah, StumbleUpon do that with their links, it confused me too at first.

Instead try using http://www.stumbleupon.com/url/www.yourwebsite.com/

You'll be able to see the review page that people are stumbling from. One one of my websites receives average 200 unique free stumbles per day and I have since become a paid advertiser, though their categories for targeting are very limited, imho.
If they used pure isolated ingredients then yes. But they don't - they use plant extracts which contain hundreds if not thousands of molecules.
>(+ the old IE bugs with XHTML)

Yea, more precisely the lack of support, which was exactly what I was referring to in the OP. Particularly how it lasted for 11 years after XHTML 1.0 became a recommendation.
Both the release version and the Canary version. Allows me a profile for client work and a profile for personal logins.
Those mbed things are completely brilliant.

"ARM Cortex-M3 Core running at 96MHz, 512KB FLASH, 64KB RAM and lots of interfaces including Ethernet, USB Device and Host, CAN, SPI, I2C and other I/O."

<200mA, $59

I want one, but I already have an arduino thats been laying around unused and unloved for some time :(
What should I use for my startups GeoDNS provider?
I run a startup that is starting to really scale and we're looking to distribute our infrastructure internationally. I'd like users to be routed to the closest servers to them geographically, and I'm thinking that DNS is the best way to do this.

I had Zerigo recommended to me for their DNS service - but I wanted to see what else is out there that can provide this sort of service.

What do all the rest of you use for your DNS service? Does anyone have experience with GeoDNS?
Are you sure that's a syntax error? I'd probably catch that during typechecking...

:)
Cletus' Wave blog post: http://www.cforcoding.com/2010/08/google-wave-microsoft-and-...
I couldn't agree more. I think what your parent post meant to convey was the need for a standard format for ebook files. I think MOBI or EPUB could both fill that role.
signups to an invite list. I don't want people to think i'm using this post to generate traffic, but check my submissions for a URL if you're curious.
Criterion library now available on Hulu
I thought most badges are simply printed from the event registration data and I would have certainly expected the events you listed to have had badges already upon arrival, so I'm curious as to why they didn't have the badges printed already. But it's certainly a great story of how something they developed in order to promote what they thought was their main product ended up becoming the main product.
The only time I approach sidewalk rage is with those side-by-side walkers. Nothing sets me off like a group of 3 people approaching me in the opposite direction on a sidewalk that is exactly wide enough for 3 people to walk side-by-side, and all 3 clearly see me and none of them give me a path to walk by them.

ONE OF YOU JACKASSES IS GOING TO HAVE TO MOVE OR GET WALKED INTO.... IT IS SIMPLE PHYSICS HERE!

ehm... sorry about that. It is one of my few real rager pet peeves.
Google CEO 'Very Proud' of Ghonim
It's funny because back in the 80's we had a language that was already at where c++ and java were going. It's called Ada. Back in 83 it had built in concurrency, generics, etc.

The problem was, back in 83 the compiler was the size and complexity of a C++ or java compiler from 1995. Couple that with some horrible implementations and Ada never took off much beyond Avionics/security/life critical applications.

Which is a shame, because comparing ada to C++ or java today and imnsho Ada wins hands down. The compilers are faster, the code very nearly as fast (In Ada you get things like runtime array checking which slows you down). Unfortunately the programming language wars aren't about technical merit (Java would never have been popular otherwise) and more about social popularity contests/network effects.

EDIT: I might add that at this point ada is /far/ simpler than both c++ anda java. Jean Ichbiah thought carefully about what was needed for large, long lived projects (millions of lines, 30+ years life) and it shows. They got pointers right the first time - access types. verifiability - testing your code is all the rage now, 27 years late. etc.
Best yet, the ecosystem around the language is mature. That is unlike c++ you don't have a dozen different approaches taken (template hell), and unlike Java you don't have bureaucratic overload.
Does it? "High Hundreds of Millions"/250 could be greater than or equal to $10M-$15M/7 employees.
I would have upvoted it if it wasn't for the hyperbole. It was a good story, with a crappy title. So I didn't upvote.

I get tired of everything ;)
Exactly. It's a very flawed cipher which I invented when I was young and naive.
This is what Apple should be doing with a slimmed down version of their iPod Nano.
Woah, am I the only one who loves the work that has been done with IE9? Their new rendering engine is sick, Microsoft must have stolen personal from their DirectX team to work on it. Everything is hardware accelerated, the anti-aliased fonts look great, Flash video playback of 1080p uses just a few percents of CPU, something that max out a whole core for me in FF or Chrome. Same thing with moving / fading / modifying elements with JQuery.animate(), super smooth and uses almost no CPU.

I'm still a die-hard fan of Firefox because of all the plugins, but damn I wish everyone were using rendering engines as good as the one in IE9. I hope FF and Chrome will close this gap soon.
I've read recently that it was cover for the switch from sucrose to high-fructose corn syrup as a sweetener - when they switched "back" to HFCS, most people never noticed they hadn't actually switched back to the same thing. It's plausible, but as I'm not sure of the timing (I never looked at ingredients back then) I don't know if it's true.
What happens if Watson wins?
The IE team has made many changes to improve the tab opening and closing speed. These operations are snappy on my machines. Could you confirm that you see this slow behavior in the IE9 RC?
Post the STL file for us 3D printing enthusiasts - Apple posts blue prints for us case hackers ;-)

http://developer.apple.com/resources/cases/
Valve is also in the business of selling virtual hats.

http://www.joystiq.com/2010/10/21/user-created-tf2-items-bri...

Judging by how much they pay out, TF2 virtual goods are a profitable side business for Valve.
Very interesting; thanks for the clarification. I was fooled.
"the lack of a subscription API didn't stop the mentioned services from creating iPad apps to begin with."

But, Android does not allow _any_ subscription services, especially self-developed ones:

"Please note that collecting payments through your application is not allowed under the Android Market Developer Distribution Agreement."
Will the SHA-1s match up and will it be easy to pull from one into the other?
Blogspam with a hilariously inflammatory title, which is at least as worthwhile as the content.
MongoDB Monitoring Dashboard
I love stories like these! Thanks for sharing!
Thanks so much for this! Really helpful.
Hi Chris,
I have added my story after reading yours, its here
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2222501
Why is it every community ever is awesome until that third person joins? Then suddenly it's all about how things "used to be".

Are linkbait BS titles the cancer that is killing /HN?
A bunch of events were like that. We proved that our name badge system could verify tickets, print badges, and handle name errors and changes faster than someone using pre-made badges. It almost ran it self (one person could manage 3 kiosks at the bigger events). After the first run, it always proves its worth.
This is what I always try to explain to people. Objective-C is a slightly above-average core language (it's a minimal set of extensions to ISO C) with no standard library to speak of. Cocoa is an awesome library written in Objective-C. Any enjoyment you get from Objective-C programming (and pretty much anything you accomplish) is probably thanks to Cocoa, not Objective-C itself.

To illustrate how minimal Objective-C is: There isn't even a standard root class. It includes an Object class, but using it is not mandatory, and only one class used in any Cocoa app is derived from it. There also isn't a "root class" protocol. Due to the lack of a standard root class, outside the safety of Cocoa, there isn't even a standard way to ask an object what class it is or what selectors is responds to.
You mean, what's with people smart enough to get into Harvard, studying one of the fields most conducive to tech entrepreneurship, who then see a business opportunity with so much potential that they are willing to leave Harvard for it, being successful?
Poll: Number of stories read per day on HN?
On average how many stories do you read each day on HN? I started wondering about this after several people recently asked for a daily version of my Hacker Newsletter (which is a weekly email curated by me). After asking them how many stories they read per day I was surprised with the results (less than 5 for most of them).
11 - 25
6 - 10
it's ironic because the phrase is "generally frowned upon"
It didn't actually start out like that. That's just a fairly recent screenshot.

Here's a similar article with an older one: http://rosshill.com.au/big-websites-start-small/ (second from the top).
It's been live, working, and providing awesomeness in Chrome for ages.