skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My point was really just that the level of public investment in technology (as a proportion of any measure like GDP) in those countries is nowhere near what the US spent on the Space Race. And the US isn't spending money on technology like that anymore either.
wrpme is similar to memcachedb.

We believe it's better because it's faster. It's also using a binary protocol for reduced bandwidth usage. Many caches uses text or xml to transmit data.

The design is highly asynchronous and designed to work on a 64-bit multiprocessor computer.

wrpme is actually a collection of mini daemons (we call them nanodaemons) that execute simple tasks and communicate via messages. It's been inspired by microkernel operating systems.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanguard_%28microkernel%29#V_me...
Sure, but that assumes that you have:

1) As much time as you need, within reason.
2) Privacy complete the attack.

Physical access should not mean getting close with a wire, it should mean opening the case and messing with the internals.
Along the same lines, here's why I skip Photoshop when working on designs at 37signals: http://37signals.com/svn/posts/1061-why-we-skip-photoshop
Very interesting! I've worked with people who did their design in PowerPoint for many of the same reasons.
Also, a large percentage of that was secondary, meaning it went to existing shareholders. So the actual primary funding was much less.

Edit:
Hypothetical numbers for illustration purposes only:

A invests $100M in company.
B purchases half of A's shares for $200M.
C purchases half of B's shares for $300M.
D purchases remaining A shares for $400M.

So although they have "raised" $1B, the only amount that has been invested in the company is $100M.
Coding is necessary but not sufficient. You may have the most stunning Crush Notifier implementation out there, but what have you done in terms of marketing? I suspect not too much. In the case of "crush notifier", the developer is surfing a wave he himself created through the huge splash that "breakup notifier" made.
How Can You Hurt Some One Even If You Don't Mean It
> Actually, we've assessed its potential to be a lot higher than even the primary project; and hence the indecision.

If you have assessed the potential to be higher than your primary project, why the indecision? Does your primary project already have customers that you don't want to lose?
you're discussing damage that comes about from primitive forms of cryonic preservation that haven't been used in decades.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18321197
yeah, there are many complex ways of talking people into things
And you see it in the Quora design. It is centered on the content, and not on fancy graphics that distract from what the user came to find on the site.
What you are ignoring is that while the individual is definitely the catalyst for the innovation, the environment is equally important.

Considered another way, there are countless people around the world with the intelligence and drive of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, but they live in impoverished villages in India and Africa and struggle just to stay alive. They may do better than their neighbors, but without the support of a technologically and financially advanced society, what they can accomplish is severely limited.
marketing, marketing, marketing!
Balsamiq is for designing low fidelity mockups (wireframes) whereas jMockups is for designing high fidelity (pixel perfect) mockups. It makes more sense to compare jMockups to Photoshop than Balsamiq.

That being said, I can pretty effortlessly pivot from focusing on high fidelity to low fidelity. Right now I'm considering adding a toggle button that lets you switch back and forth, but am not sure if I want to go down that path yet. Do one thing well, right?
Firefox 4 Beta 12 Released, with more than 650 Bugs Fixed [DOWNLOAD NOW]
Frankly, I for one and probably many other people still don't care about it, or about Crush Notifier.
> building a dirty bomb out of it won't really work (as a matter a fact, neither making one out of Pu-239).

Plutonium is chemically extremely toxic. Even throwing some powdered plutonium in air somewhere would cause serious harm.

Edit : In fact it's not :)
As far as I know, they haven't developed any significant new features (does it need any?) in a long long time, so in that sense it's not an "active" project. But they're usually quick to port their patchset to each new Python version.
What Is a Tree Worth?
Very cool.

I figured there must be some Chrome extensions that make use of this, and it looks like there are. One adds some WYSIWYG-type tools to the current page: http://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/claldafnnhbflndjb...
There are some EXCELLENT and FREE lecture videos from Stanford, MIT, Berkley, and other universities available on iTunes U about Operating Systems, Algorithms, and Data Structures. Each sessions is about 1 to 2 hours. So if you do things step by step, it should be possible to watch 2 lectures per week, 1 course per 2 or 3 months.

Here are the links:

Operating Systems and System Programming:
http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcas...

Introduction to Algorithms:
http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcas...

Data Structures:
http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcas...

There are other series available on iTunes U as well, but don't worry, relax, do it step by step and then you might want to have a look at the rest of the series too.
While a lot of what he does is admirable, I find it reprehensible that he pays himself so little (assuming he's not compensated in some other way). Either he is actually worth that little, or he's pretending to be worth less to make people feel better.

If it's the former, the airline should hire a new CEO.

If it's the latter, it's a petty pretense aimed at petty people. And a self-respecting "ordinary" person who has a sense of the value of her time would consider it a slap in her face if her boss doesn't see fit to apply the same sorts of standards to his time.
Very clear explanation, and agreed on doing one thing well. It'll be a lot easier to to leadership in the high-fidelity mockup segment, and then use that as a base to expand if it makes business sense.
In fact much revolutionary technologies come from small incremental improvements, and often were invented by several people at the same time : the telephone, the radio, the steam engine, television...
I was about to say that.
Crush notifier just about valentines day, and social media developed as it is now, it is another thing;
Has anyone written a good book on Japanese corporate/management/business culture? I hear a lot of tidbits about it, both good and bad, mentioned in recurring news articles like this one. They're intriguing enough that I'd like to read something deeper and well-researched, but I can't seem to find anything that looks like a good overview book.

The only books I can find seem to either be of the "teach Westerners how to do business in Japan" variety (not my interest), or very specialist academic books and paper anthologies on narrow aspects.
I would put architectural moldings that hide easily accessible duct where can run Ethernet for now.

On house time scale, not sure Ethernet is future-proof, might want to run fiber or who knows what in 20 years. Twisted pair is only mass market for last 20 years.

Or you might even want to run speaker wire or who knows what.
This is begging the question in a way, though. Why didn't the Romans have the printing press? Like the hot-air balloon, the concept of printing is clear and simple, and the technological prerequisites are minimal - you just need metallurgy, which the Romans had in abundance.

The printing press ended up being developed in a culture that was in many ways less technically sophisticated than the Romans'.
I posted this a week ago and it never got looked at.. fuck you HN
That's all very good and well, but since you gave your opinion freely and without compensation, it is therefore worth nothing.
Ask HN: Looking for New York Magazine article about "self shots"
There was a lifestyle article posted to HN from, I think, New York magazine about people taking "self shots." I need this for some research. (There was a photo by an artist who hires models to reenact random self-shots as photographic art.)

EDIT: Found it!

http://nymag.com/news/features/70977/
I've stopped designing with code for all but the most trivial elements because I realized it's too easy to get sucked into the details too early on in the process. Designing via coded prototype means that mockups are high fidelity, and there were a lot of things going on at the same time: trying to write good copy, getting each element to align correctly, finding the perfect icon, and coding good HTML/CSS/JS. Iterations then starting feeling pretty expensive.

For the same reason people use lorem ipsum, I would recommend lower resolution tools (paper, whiteboard, wireframes, etc.) to keep details out of focus until it's time. I try to avoid Photoshop when doing early design work, but it's valuable for creating proofs for clients or as a spec for engineers.
"Drinks are on the house!"
I expected to read this as another '$1 a year salary' story, wherein the CEO was still _actually_ rich, but only brought in a meager 'salary', owing the rest to dividends.

What I got instead was a story about what seems to be a brilliant boss. He lowered his own salary along with everybody else's. He's accessible. He actually rides his planes and lets people know he's the CEO of the airline.

In short, he is accessible to both his customers and employees. In the startup world this probably isn't that uncommon -- when you have a staff of four or twenty, accessibility is easy to get. Wikipedia lists Japan Air as having over 30,000 employees.

This is impressive to me, however, it's worth pointing out that despite this practicality and accessibility, the article linked was written in 2009, and Japan Air filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy last year.
He's also going against a basic economic motivator:

"The ugly truth is that your boss is probably overpaid--and it's for your benefit, not his. Why? It might be because he isn't being paid for the work he does but, rather, to inspire you. In other words, we work our socks off in underpaying jobs in the hope that one day we'll win the rat race and become overpaid fat cats ourselves. Economists call this 'tournament theory.'"

http://www.forbes.com/2006/05/20/executive-compensation-tour...
>From what I've been told, there is a finite amount in Bitcoin which means there is a limit on how much one can theoretically amass.

You are not going to eat bitcoins. So while nobody will ever get more than x bitcoin, the exchange rate between bitcoins and bread can easily change, and likely will (this will also make the hidden cost of inflation public, which is likely where the biggest threat to bitcoins are).
Sure, I'm just comparing the methods. I think its interesting that as software systems become more complex that scientific methods become more and more useful.
If you have a hard time reading this, disable JavaScript.
Japan Air's profits haven't been amazing, and in fact, they filed for Chapter 11 in January 2010. I presume (with no actual knowledge) that if the airline were doing very well, he would pay himself significantly more. However, in a world where banks in America have to be bailed out while their CEOs give themselves raises, this is, I think, the preferred way to go.
Suppose you have a graph with edge weights.

Query: find all the nodes a distance < D from some reference node.

With SQL92 or earlier, this will require an unbounded number of queries. Proof: A SQL92 query can only traverse a finite number of edges, since it has only a finite number of joins (say K). Consider the graph 1->2->3->...->N with edge weights 1/N. This will require N/K queries to traverse. N is arbitrary.

It's probably doable in SQL99 and various vendor specific extensions (I think it's Turing Complete), but it is unlikely to be fast.

So, as is the normal situation, you can do whatever you want in SQL. But the performance is likely to suck.

(That said, I agree with you that many people are using NoSQL because it's the hip new thing, when they should just use SQL. "Schemaless flexibility" is BS - SQL is very flexible if you use an ORM + migration tool. The only flexibility you lose is the flexibility to screw up the data in application logic.)
After using one of these I don't even know how other toilet manufacturers stay in business. It's the gift to your private parts that just keeps on giving.
There was an old Peter Drucker adage that the top executive should only be at a 20-to-1 compensation ratio from top executives to entry level positions. In the U.S., this is now around 260-to-1. (http://thedx.org/2011/02/turning-up-the-heat-on-ceo-pay/)

In short, there's a limit to most people's tolerance for inequality in pay, especially in the face of it being mostly decoupled from performance. The question is whether there that matters, and what the consequence is.
The main trick is to remember is, to get utf-8, you have to encode, not decode. When I didn't know how unicode works that well, I mistakenly assumed unicode is coded, so I have to decode it. Internally, unicode is of course coded (that is represented by some coding), but you don't have to know it. As the slides say, just encode to utf8 when you print text out, or display it in a web browser etc; and you will be fine.

One other unicode library I can recommend is icu, Python bindings to IBM's ICU. It solved some Turkish specific problems I have. (Turkish alphabet has I,İ, ı, i which makes upper-lower case conversions tricky. For example, mayıs becomes MAYIS when capitalized while ENGLISH becomes englısh when lowercased.)

Read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_dotted_and_dotless_I , http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html and http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2008/03/whats-wrong-with-tu... for more info.

Another issue, if you are doing web dev is, how to represent non-ascii characters in urls. One choice is url encoding, the other is slugifying the url, that is, choosing an ascii equivalent for the non-ascii character. For example, Django has a slugify function that helps with this. It converts, for example, über to uber.
Keep in mind that JAL is under chapter 11 bankruptcy, so it's not like JAL is full of cash.

I like his attitude more than those bank executives that got bailed out and paid themselves multi millions at the same time.
You're right. I was a student at the time and had no idea how to begin marketing. Nor enough time. In addition, the FB notifications API was deprecated shortly after I release it - so it didn't work for much longer than a month. It still made a chunk of change whilst in operation though.
I know it's back of the napkin accounting, but lets not forget all the other operational costs?

- Credit card processing on all transactions (3%?)
- Office space for 4000 employees
- Taxes
- etc

Would take another huge chunk out of that 80mm
It's pretty cool that this guy has an autonomous iPhone that films stuff for him.
Problem is, Photoshop is the default for many designers. They start with image-rich websites and scale them down if necessary. I think good design should be scaled up from simple to more complex - with each instance of complexity being justified.

Do I really need to watch that video when I go to gm.com? Do I really need to figure out custom Flash-based navigation scheme when I go to a movie or game website?
> Each story of humans' invention seems to just as much be a story of the individual who led its discovery, rather than the environment surrounding him/her, and when the environment is taking into account, it seems it does more to stifle innovation than to foster it.

We can argue that the WWII may not have taken place without Hitler, however the personal computer revolution would have occurred with Commodore instead of Apple, and CP/M instead of MS-DOS, because most inventions essentially "are breathed with air" when their time's arrived.
The second is actually much less painful than people generally think. Jruby -e 'some code' only takes half a second on my machine, which is fast enough to not be a problem. The main slowness people experience has to do with loading gems, usually via rubygems. That is painfully slow, but does not have anything to do with JVM startup time.
"A Primer for Japanese Business Success" by Masami Atarashi is probably meant to be the former type of book, but it was refreshingly free of stereotypes and "it's a Japanese thing--you won't understand" attitude.
If you get snow, the next renovation I'm looking into is a heated driveway. It's MUCH cheaper to put in if you're already replacing / repairing the driveway vs. tearing it up for the fun of it.
That makes it even more remarkable, really, because the investment required to avoid automation is incredible. You need schools to prepare slaves as teachers (taught by slaves, of course) to teach child slaves to read and write and whatever specialist skills required by scribes. You need schools to teach the kids to read and you need slaves to produce sufficient excess food to support all the other slaves. And at the end of the day, you end up with a highly literate population of slaves in the middle of Rome, posing a significant risk to stability. Either that or they were massively efficient in their reliance on written material, which in itself would be remarkable in light of how successful they were in exporting their culture throughout the empire.

This is a great example of where the mindset of the ancient civilization is just so dramatically different than our own that it's difficult to understand their motivations.
The Montgolfier balloons could reach altitudes of 2000 meters, which would have been impossible to hit with 18th century muskets or cannon. Landing would have been dangerous, of course.
I don't know why people keep saying it got banned for no reason. I can think of a very good reason, mind you, I don't think it is a fair reason...

Basically facebook makes money of eye-balls. A lot of people may be checking profiles of there stalkerish-intent on a regular basis to see if they are still in a relationship. More stalking, more eyeballs. Dan basically took that away from fb. With Break-up Notifier people did not have to log-on anymore. They would be informed automatically when the objects of their affection changed that relationship status. That is a whole different beast. You have just attacked fb's main monetization strategy. Expect swift retribution.

Now on the other hand if you develop a wildly successful game which gets people to log-on again and again to water their plants, expect fb's full support.

That is the reason why break-up notifier got banned.
A buddy did a top-of-the-line instant-on gas water heater, I'm sure it saves money but it does take a minute or more for water temperature to stabilize and get to the 2nd floor and actually be able to take a shower. YMMV.
Make sure the wiring conduits are large because a small conduit can screw up the rating of the cable if you really have to force it through.

You should use talcum powder on the cables to easily pull them through the conduits and reduce stress on them.

For example, in my house the conduits are tiny and routed at extreme 90 degree angles in places. There's no chance that I'll ever be able to route any decent cable without degrading its performance. The last time I routed cable it was extremely difficult to do.
You user account says that you didn't.
MacRuby 0.9 release notes
My logic was definitely relying on the premise that how much someone is worth to a company isn't or at least shouldn't be unrelated salary.

As other other people have already said, it may be the case that this was actually the boss's value to the company (given its low profits and eventual bankruptcy). This would make it a lot better, but it's not how the motive comes across in the article.
As I mentioned in a reply below, Japanese business culture (the good side of it, anyway) was heavily influenced by Peter Drucker in the 60s, and carried it forward decades, long after he became a sort of side show in the U.S.-business-mogul ratrace. For example: http://www.economist.com/node/16481583

A book like "The Toyota Way" or "Product Development for the Lean Enterprise" I'd recommend to understand Lean (which isn't pervasive in Japan, but of course is known to have originated in a couple of automakers).
Every airline is always under chap11 - it's standard operating procedure. It's like Hollywood claiming all the blockbusters make a loss
I have heard similar arguments before. There is no need to invoke supernatural causes. Maybe the authorities at the time made a mistake. Current authorities & governments make mistakes all the time.
Berkshire Hathaway Shareholder Letters 2010 [pdf]
I think there is an alternative to using Photoshop - especially if you use a Linux based OS.

I've often heard of people stating that GIMP is a valid alternative - I'd argue it isn't. GIMP is fine for performing a lot of everyday editing functions - but it's lacking in quite a few key areas (most notably CMYK support).

I think as an alternative, rather than having Photoshop - which could be conceptually viewed as an 'image IDE' - it's possible to choose to use a number of different command line utilities, plugins, scripts and applications to achieve the feature-set that Photoshop traditionally provides.

Creating and modifying imagery in this way, is arguably less intuitive, as workflows aren't so clearly defined - but there's the chance of matching (or possibly exceeding) what Photoshop makes possible.
There's a somewhat negative cast towards the end of this article where the author discusses "the fundamental inability of most humans to handle such technology responsibly" and how "psychosocial factors" retard progress. And then you have some dire, terminal outlook for humanity. This reads like correspondence bias to me. At first, it seemed contradictory to the first paragraphs of the article, which seemed to be leading up to, "this is another engineering problem and we must analyze it for a solution before we can continue to progress technologically." So I reread the whole thing... and it seems that was just my own bias inserting itself between the lines.

And I still don't understand why the political components of the dynamics of social and technological progress cannot be approached as an engineering problem.
All of the radio output is freely available world wide - either for 7days after broadcast in their iPlayer app or for some programs - like 'in our time' - the entire archive is available as MP3s
In a connected graph, you don't want to cache this [1]. It will take up O(N^2) space. If you have 100k nodes, that would require 10^10 cached edges.

Further, insertion time becomes worst case O(N^2). Consider a graph with two connected components (each having O(N/2) nodes). Once you add an edge that connects them, updating the view will require O(N^2/4) operations - you need to connect every node in the first component to every node in the second.

A graph database is more specialized than SQL, so they can perform a very simple optimization. You don't scan the database, you just follow links. Links are typically stored with the node, so it's O(1) time.

[1] In a connected graph, there is a constant time algorithm - return True. But that won't work if you also want edge distance.
It looks good, and solid. Ignoring the salesy-ness of your posts, it sounds like you've got a feature-set worth charging for.

That said, if you have trouble getting initial traction, you might consider giving it away and charging for support / services. This will allow customers to try it out freely, get used to it, and if they like it, become hooked. This tactic has worked for 10gen and crack dealers everywhere.

You can always charge for the software later, of course; but I think the general opinion of memcache is that it's "good enough", so supplanting it may prove non-trivial.

Oh, and your logo really is quite nice indeed.
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