skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is from my experience of trying to build a news feed (we are about to launch one for our site which gets about a million unique visitors a month).

The approach you suggested is the first approach that i tried. And frankly it worked great when i am testing the feature on my dev macbook with just a couple of 1000's of users. But when i started testing it on our server loading entire legacy data redis ended up taking more than 6GB of RAM for abt half a million users.

i told myself to just plan for 2 times our current traffic and then later on think of a better solution(best thing wud be to plan for 5-10 times your current traffic) and told my CEO that we might have to bump up RAM on the redis machine to 32 or 64 GB in the future(the easiest way but not an elegant way to solve the problem is throw more resources). Also mind that you need atleast 2 such machines to provide failover. i just hoped salvatore(a great guy BTW) would release a cluster solution for redis and will save me.

While testing the feed we came to know we needed to add more such actions from the user and every time you add a new type of action for every user you are looking at increasing the memory of Redis process by substancial amount. you will run out of memory faster than you have planned. i thought VM is the solution to all of this as user feeds typically use only latest data and the entire feed doesn't need to be in the memory. But quite frankly VM has it's own set of problems -- http://groups.google.com/group/redis-db/browse_thread/thread....

Not telling that your solution isn't good. Just wanted to warn you about some potential problems from experience of trying out your solution. Finally i am using cassandra for news feed. Working great as of now. At least much better than my experience with implementing the same with redis. The major problem with cassandra as of now is implementing pagination and counting. distributed counters are coming in 0.8 . pagination is still a major problem though. But for news feed you might not need pagination. providing a load more button as facebook and twitter does should be good enough.

Hope it helps.
Interesting - Conservapedia throws me a 403 Forbidden when I try to access that link, and any other of their pages.

Anyone else having trouble? (Win 7, FF4, UK based ISP)
Pivotrly
Music industry will force licenses on Amazon Cloud Player - or else
After which you will upload your whole collection? Keep in mind that the free version has a 5GB limit and the "I bought an album from Amazon" version is 20GB.

I'm not sure what is going on, but I suspect this is a lawsuit honeypot of some sorts. Clearly the cloud player has very little practical value, that over time will diminish even further as storage costs keep dropping.
Google +1, Facebook Like and Places are the New Targeting Opt-In’s
The new marketing opportunities for website owners are the new social tools that everyone is using. Thanks to Google +1, Facebook Like, Check-ins from Google, Facebook, Gowalla and Foursquare can all be equally strong as an opt-in for a newsletter. So it seems leaving the market self regulation is taking a natural course and national interference is not needed.<p>Most people outside the tech space do not realize that with a simple Facebook Like or Check-in your giving access to you public profile and all settings your sharing. Website owners can use this information by taking a peek in Facebook Graph API http://developers.facebook.com/docs/api and search specific status update (or keywords) or check-ins for example. It is a very interesting way to build tools on top of these API’s given by Facebook, the several places/check-in apps and hopefully Google +1 API.

For example check out what you’re sharing on Facebook by going to <a href="http://zesty.ca/facebook/">http://zesty.ca/facebook/</a>, you can use your Facebook id or email to find how open you are. Most of use in the tech-space is more informed then the other 550 million users of Facebook so it’s a very interesting opportunity to connect tools like ours to Facebook for example.

Imagine that you could actually start some sort of drip marketing based on nothing more than the Facebook Like your page or App received. It would not be wise to start posting on someone’s wall or push a tweet. But a more subtle as checking if a person check-in in the past, define the sex, age-group, mentions of your product in status updates or location of the person and storing that users profile in a specific segment in Reedge. You could then target these people with a more personal drip-approach every time they come back.

For example Visitor A, checks-in at 9 PM, using Foursquare and the day after clicks the Facebook Like button on you restaurant page or mobile app (Facebook Graph API tell us she is female 30-35 years old). This makes her fall into the segment of “Clients Female Check-in & Facebook Like”. You did not get her email yet, but this should be enough to start targeting when she comes back to one of your sites her using a more personal homepage targeted on returning female clients.

It’s all a big theory; we have not made this yet. Buts it’s an intriguing idea to use the Facebook Like and other social API’s to build an opt-in profile of a person that travels along with them across you sites. Maybe not everything is possible and I would have to check all terms of the API… but my best guess is that building an opt-in profile using the social buttons on your site is something that is very close to reality.

Would you do this as a company to increase your conversion? Leave a comment below.
Of course, the mother of all cross-language naming errors was when Chevrolet tried to sell the Nova in Mexico. In Spanish, "no va" means "it doesn't go".
Is this really needed when you can simply use http://searchyc.com and find all the posts and even relevant job descriptions from previous posts?
Why not just take applications and accept participants without charging? Preload the endorsements and use your own judgement.

If you want to help founders, this is what you should do. If you're trying to make money from conference fees, you're doing it wrong: no one reading this thread will apply.
Besides the obvious successes of companies generating huge distribution on other channels, I would still say that having a great domain name will help a startup get on its way. It isn't nearly as important as providing great value, but if no one finds that value, well, then you will fail.
'So, what was the problem that the solution addressed? Well, there wasn’t any problem, and that’s exactly the point. '

Actually, there was a problem. Customers loose socks, leaving mismatched, or socks get holes, leaving only one, etc. etc. etc.

They recognized a problem. They just came up with a creative way of dealing with the problem which was to re-frame it as not being a problem at all.

The impressive thing is that you can disrupt a market through nothing but marketing. You don't have to create a new product, find a new market, etc. etc. It is possible to create a viable business through nothing but marketing.
Well, the results have yet to be verified. Maybe it still will lead to FTL travel, and someone will solve this problem last year.
This is a really old cartoon, but it's finally coming true. In many ways, this is the showdown a lot of us have been waiting for since Lars Ulrich went up on the stand:

http://www.caglecartoons.com/images/preview/%7Bac7d2177-a870...
Other way round, GR says time slows down in areas of HIGH gravity. You live longer in the basement than the penthouse
Agreed that physics would hugely benefit from exposure to modern techniques in computer science, "software carpentry," and statistics. How can that be encouraged, though? It's not in the curricula, and those are ossified and hard to shift. Individual researchers forging out on their own can't move the field much themselves. Summer schools, maybe, which could create ad-hoc communities carrying skills back to their home institutions?

As to the temporal bias in literature awareness: it's sort of unavoidable in any research area of decent size. The scope of the literature is simply too enormous. Certain key papers get codified as canon and others are lost in the fog. The situation isn't helped by the various journal publishers, whose various paywalls prevent an effective biobliometric universe which could be used as a discovery engine for old but relevant papers.
Study: Identical Twins Do Not Have Identical Genes
Twitter removing the #dickbar from the iPhone app
I should have phrased it better. Thank you for making me go look.

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikibooks:Copyrights#Contributo...

Your submissions are automatically and irrevocably licensed GFDL and CC-BY-SA. Copyright isn't transferred, but since you cannot revoke the licensing you have (in effect) given up ownership.
I would say, choose something that you feel comfortable with first, and then wonder if your customer/user would feel comfortable with it too. That matters too. Don't try to satisfy the entire world. That won't work ;-)
How to Succeed in Business Writing: Don't Be Dickens
Design, Coffee, and Code: How We're Building a Company Half a World Away.
What?? This patently frivolous litigation went on for TWO YEARS and cost over a HUNDRED THOUSAND DOLLARS and you think this is proof that the legal system is reasonable?
I think it's just mistake. More people would check the job board if there were more jobs there. YC company jobs could just be sorted to the top automatically to give them a leg up.
Steve Kraske just finished interviewing Kansas City, KS Mayor Joe Reardon, Googler Kevin Lo, KCK School Superintendent Dr. Cynthia Lane about the Google Fiber project in KCK.

Key points:

- Kevin Lo sees jobs created in the next few years to be massive, more than Google could ever hire.

- Mayor Reardon and Kevin Lo both agreed KCK represented a great opportunity in that many still lack access to technology and that KCK schools make tech a central part of school.

- Stories about Mayor Reardon's son, and KCK students, being excited about gaming speeds improving.
- Dr. Lane talks about possibility of still having school activities even on snow days.

- Great question about separating line between what Google will do and what local businesses can do.
- Kevin Lo points out that service will be symmetric -- 1gbps down and 1gbps down.

- Question from host Steve Kraske about what happens in 15 years -- will fiber optic be old-school by then. Kevin reiterate that Google believes it to be future-proof.

- Kevin Lo answered question about video and voice services. Google focused on providing fast Internet connections, others will provide other services.
The lunchtime variant loaded almost instantly for me here (on a relatively slow iPad 1).
Opinion: traditional databases suck and so do NoSQL ones, for the exact opposite reasons.

A better solution would be one that gives developers fine-grained control over "scalable and loose" vs "less-scalable and tight", rather than all-or-nothing in either direction.

That is to say: I want full ACID on my "financial transactions" collection and maximum scalability for my "chat messages" one -- but I want them in the same overall system, accessed via the same API, managed via the same tools, and with knobs that can be inexpensively modified on the running system.
On my home cable connection they load in < 1 second.
Blinders are incredible things. People like you remind me of the average North Korean citizen. Even when presented with proof of Dear Leader's abuses, they will deny it and continue to love him and defend his regime to the death.
Looks like a pile of shit in my opinion. Call it something else if you're not even going to try and include some semblance of the Photoshop toolbar.
The image of the coffee cup (the only one I can bring up) is only 46kb. That loads pretty quick.
Apple reportedly to absorb costs from Japan tragedies
You won't "come back and finish", or at least it's very unlikely. Your brain will never be more plastic than it is right now.

To echo the other comments here, what prevents you from working on your idea without dropping out? Is it the kind of project that requires 16 hour marathon hacking sessions every day for months on end?
If in the long term I end up needing the degree, I can always come back and finish.

Technically? Yes. Probably? No. If you ever "need" a degree, you probably failed at your startup and are looking for a job. It's going to be tough going back. Worse, you're going to be older and probably have greater financial obligations. I never dropped out of college, but I started working full-time halfway through and it's been very tough to keep myself motivated to finish. If I had left and hadn't had that momentum I doubt I would've gone back.
I don't know. I think more creativity gets crushed after people get out of school and go into jobs.
Marketing VP Allison Johnson Leaving Apple
The Debris From the Mobile Photo Explosion
> the mother of all cross-language urban legends

http://www.snopes.com/business/misxlate/nova.asp
There are quite a few on the Android market and there is at least one on the iTunes market.
Boston Companies Using Django
It's not a bad way to gauge your own knowledge and expertise. If others generally find your advice/tip/suggestion useful, you will know when they up vote you.

I agree karma isn't the end-all-be-all solution, but it may serve as a reality check for those who think they are hot stuff. It can be both a humbling tool as well as a confidence booster.
IPad generated nearly 100% of media tablet revenues in 2010
Then you're arguing that it did hurt you in the end.
>A developer can actually view the Android source code

So I should be able to download and view the source code to Honeycomb, right?
It's not so much the Javascript technique as the beautiful images that help conversions I think.
Yea, managing by treating people as dumb automatons is fundementally flawed.
Color IMO is a bad name as it's too generic.

That they paid a lot of cash for the domain name - well, if they have it, why not. Some startups are strapped for cash, others aren't. If the service becomes as popular as they think it will, $500k are irrelevant.

PinkelStar - oh, you funny Dutch people!
The complaint is that Google has a conflict of interest as it becomes a content provider as well as a search engine, and that it is exploiting this.

For other content providers, more search engines indexing their stuff, means more traffic. There is only upside to letting more search engines in.

For Google, hobbling other search engines indexing their content is a great way to keep their search engine on top. It's a virtuous circle for them.

In a way it's hard to see how they aren't privileging Google search in some way. Does Google Search use a public API to scrape YouTube, or is there some backend integration? If there's integration, doesn't that support Microsoft's claim?
Better Have a Backup Plan. World Backup Day
From the end:

> There is not one example of a Government-sponsored tech cluster—anywhere in the world—that has worked. Yet our leaders talks about clusters as if they are the secret sauce for entrepreneurship.

Because startups are not real beneficiaries of tech cluster funding. These office parks end up filled with call centers and branch offices of large companies like IBM and Dell. They're effectively another subsidy for established firms with political influence.
> The Motorola Xoom is already out.. so how is Honeycomb an unfinished product if it's in consumers' hands?

It's unfinished because it doesn't ship with major features that it claims to support such as LTE and Adobe Flash. Every review has said that the Xoom feels like a beta at best and it is simply not ready for the masses, and a large part of that is due to Android 3.
Play by Play -- ruby problem solving with Francis Hwang
With 100 upvotes in the first hour, I would imagine a fairly large percentage of the Hacker News community thinks this is useful. Or (more likely) funny.
"Plots dots dot com"? It's cute, but I prefer Timestat.us. If you take it as "Time Stat" that isn't so far off the mark, and "Time Status" sounds spot on.
Groupon’s ‘Bait and Switch’ Search Ads
Wasn't there a time when Google bundled the toolbar with all PCs from Dell and maybe other companies? Isn't that almost like "forcing" me to use Google (I mean... I didn't mind, but those toolbars were annoying) as preinstalling IE "forced" me to use IE?
How the US is out-greeking the greeks
Contest time. Build an app with IndexTank + Factual
I once worked for Stagecast - easy enough right? But people kept calling us Stagecraft or other varieties...
What I appreciate about this is the straight-forward manner in which the story presents the case for always challenging your/the assumptions.

Speculation about a whole new aspect for theoretical models of the universe. Someone's grounded enough to go over the work and realize, 'Hey, you're doing the math wrong!'

I wish science education did a better job of teaching this.
It is hard to measure the potential damage. Did we lose users/customers? We don't know. We certainly didn't gain German devs on board. Did we lose investors? We got ourselves a great investment ( $500K), but it may hurt future rounds.
This is a "better be safe then sorry" decision in the end I think.
I stand corrected. http://www.f-secure.com/weblog/archives/00002133.html
The word is phonetically noted ['jʊərə], and j is indeed not quite a vowel!
I'd rather have a false alarm ... now and then, than something like this actually happening and kept under the radar.

I've heard the same kind of reasoning from people who forward on those "Microsoft will send a prize for the most emails sent!"-type emails.

The problem is: there has to be a minimum level of credibility, otherwise we'd be swamped with every man and his dog making claims like these.
John Gruber’s hypocritical and off-base Google attack
It would be nice if the article gave analogies to the varying effects of gravity depending on your location in the world (e.g. jumping up and down on the north pole would be like jumping up and down in North America with a 5 pound brick attached to your shoes.)

At least for humans, it would be fascinating to learn if evolutionary discrepancies among different people across the world can be attributed to differing gravitational effects.
http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=zhiQ

Hmm, perhaps this has something to do with it. Just another case of self-promotion of a crappy piece, it looks like.

I don't mind if people submit their own work. It's natural to want to share what you've written. But please, just share the very best, and not everything.
They named a folder SL.

Read the article - that's Microsoft's work, not Samsung's.
I have an original droid as well and you should seriously consider rooting it and putting something like cyanogen mod on it, it works well on my end. (Though I seriously doubt me buying another android phone that isn't something like a Nexus phone).
"Execution is everything" is not tautological. It's not saying "execution is necessary" — it's saying that how you execute makes an order of magnitude greater difference than what idea you pick. Good execution will save all but the worst ideas, but an amazing idea will still fail if not executed well.

For example, Apple's Newton PDA: Great idea — it caught on like wildfire when Palm did the same thing a few years later. But it flopped when Apple did it, because Apple's execution was flawed.
Interview with Sanjukt Saha of Onebillionminds
Or try getting a new work...
S3 doesn't do de-duplication, but many platforms that work on top of it do. The pricing for Cloud Drive is lower than native S3, and they don't charge for transfers - so IMO they are doing dedupes. It'd be kind of crazy not to with a consumer service where the point is to hold a lot of duplicate data.
>On the bright side, Moore's law will give us tablets that will run stock Linux pretty soon, and then all we need is a BSD-licensed, community built touch layer.

Could you explain how Moore's Law is relevant here? How you get from "Number of transistors per IC will double in 18 months" to "Linux on a tablet pretty soon"? Tablet development isn't being limited by processing power as far as I know.
No, by the logic of my argument we should seek to ensure that anti-competitive behavior does not simply trump competitors who offer services of a nature which is just as good if not better "but for" the entrenchment that Google has in consumer web.

The problem is that Google have so effectively cross-marketed their products through their search engine that you have no reason to switch. They have all your data, everything about you and you actively now "refuse" to use alternative services EVEN IF better services exist. Bing returns results which are just as good - sometimes better - but no one actively uses it ? "Google is better" --> that's the 10 years entrenchment Google has over everyone.

Your suggestion - "That the problem with Bing, what's the point of it?" - is exactly why anti-trust cases begin in the first place. "Why bother with competition?" --> I think your statement has just answered itself.
Moebius strip computing to the rescue!
Especially the "thinking" type of people they desperately try to hire.
Related: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2389752
Twitter Kills The #Dickbar
The require('http') has an extra ; after it.
1) He was saying doc was a standard and that Microsoft was ensuring no one else could create doc files. The latter part is the monopoly.

2) This is totally not a one sided problem. You think Microsoft is emailing Google to work with them on the issues? Ha.

3) You can POP/IMAP into your Gmail and download all of your email.

4) You squashed this into the same paragraph as the email thing, but yeah, that sucks. I agree. Alternatively you can use them until you are big enough and then hire someone to get ads directly from people but that doesn't help the small guy. I don't know what a noble solution is to this is - maybe everyone should agree on a format for moving ad campaigns around?

But hell, even Chrome asks on first run what search provider you want to use in a SANE way that encourages people to pick, unlike the IE of today that makes you jump through 15 screens just to get to pick a search provider.

I'd hardly say they are being monopolistic (which is the actual illegal part of being a monopoly).
Hey, it's still a good story, and makes a good point.

Then again, PinkelStar is actually even better. I am a native German speaker: PinkelStar is just funny, and the Dutch are known for their strange humor anyway - all credibility for investing would be lost, even if I'd accept that it could still be a huge hit outside Germany.
If I worked at a place where I felt that reading HN would get me fired, there would be lots of other problems.
Coming from not-overly-sunny MSR Cambridge, but now sorta in the same division as the C# team, F#:

let rec y f x = f (y f) x

As a general note, C# tends to get very verbose very quickly if you choose to take up too much of a functional style with it.
> Try transfering your ad campaign from Google to Bing? It is incredibly poor fidelity.

Wat? This is the whole principle of an ad exchange.
Obviously if he wanted to "help out" he would have just donated the money to some good cause in the area, and this was all just a thinly veiled vacation. However, in certain areas of Africa (namely Zimbabwe and Botswana, I've spent time in both), they have more elephants than the ecosystem can really take. Hunting elephants in Botswana is all but encouraged (as long as it is done with proper permits of course), because they need help to control the population.

Elephants are not a threatened species everywhere, even though they struggle in some parts of Africa / the world.