skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think I have Safari Books access through either my ACM or IEEE CS membership, along with the other perks that come with (lots of things to read like magazines and journals, elearning materials). Although, if I remember correctly it's a lot limited (selection-wise as well as ability to print/download) than the paid subscription, but if your university/college doesn't have access to Safari it's definitely still better than paying upwards of $25/month. I think when I had a student membership for both it was ~$50/year.

(Okay, instead of being a lazy butt, I actually looked into it. I'm not sure what benefit you'd get from IEEE book-wise, but my ACM membership comes with limited Safari Books Online and Books24x7 access. Not sure if you get them as a student.)

But it's worth pointing out that there are some free online resources and certain books worth buying that may be worth more than paying for any of those. All depends on what kind of stuff you're looking for.
bear in mind that most rich people are not like Steve Jobs. most of them the Bushes or people behind Enron.
Reducing Weight through Laparoscopy
This week was a very interesting week at Laparoscopy Hospital as we had a lecture and workshop on bariatric surgery through laparoscopic technique. Everyone in the class was attentive to know about different method of weight reducing procedure including gastric banding, gastric bypass and sleeve gastrectomy
Everybody is getting fatter.
Verizon Isn't The Only One | My Philly Network
But the regulation is a double-edged sword. The simple act of regulating makes it harder for new competitors to enter the game.

Let's say someone wants to compete with WOW and Time Warner (the two cable broadband providers in my area), so they get a reasonably-fast connection (but much lower than their competitors, since they have few customers) and get as many new customers as possible. They advertise that they are just as fast as the competition most of the time (not during peak hours), but the price is $10 cheaper per month.

This new company starts doing well, and then the BT users start to increase in proportion as the tech-savvy individuals migrate to this newer service. Speeds go down as a result, and it turns out that something like 50-60% of the traffic is long-running BitTorrent transfers. Customers start complaining of slow speeds and other occasional issues. This new competitor has a few options:

1. Upgrade the infrastructure
2. Repackage the service
3. Throttle BT traffic

Option 1 is a no-go because the company has just started to turn a positive revenue, and by the time money is found and spent on upgrades (which will also take a significant amount of time), a large part of the customer base will have left, and the company's reputation will be poor as well.

Option 2 also has the danger of losing customers. In order to have the intended effect, existing customers will have to make the choice of paying more for the same speed (Why'd I switch, anyways?) or paying the same/less for a lower "guaranteed" speed. Again, this choice is a net lose, although if the company is lucky and can do 1 and 2 at the same time, they might stay in business, at the cost of killing their momentum/reputation.

Option 3 is clearly the simplest solution with the least backlash, except that because of FCC regulations, it's illegal. Instead of being allowed to (hopefully) temporarily throttle BitTorrent bandwidth as the company increases its customer base and its infrastructure, it is quite possibly forced out of business.

Bandwidth throttling is arguably fair anyways. Consider your OS: if there is a long-running process which will saturate bandwidth, any good OS will put it at a low priority, so that bursty activity (browsing, small downloads, SSH sessions) have a reasonable response time. So we are perfectly happy to throttle our own bandwidth when it benefits us, but it is not okay for the ISP to do the same exact thing, only on a larger scale?

This is not what Net Neutrality is about. Net Neutrality is about preventing content providers from creating deals with ISPs that lock out smaller content providers. It is not about protecting users' "rights" to saturate the network at full speed and kill everyone's bandwidth, especially when the reality is that a substantial amount of that traffic is illegal.
What annoys me the MOST about the smartbar is that it doesn't always work. Example: I type in maps.google.com and hit enter. Nothing happens. I click the little green arrow. Nothing happens. I edit to include the http:// and still nothing happens. I have to search for google maps in the search box to get to the site. wtf?
I'm quite fond of http://www.amazon.com/Ruby-Way-Second-Addison-Wesley-Profess... while there are some people who love the pickaxe book (first edition is free on http://www.ruby-doc.org/docs/ProgrammingRuby)..and others.

As for free guides, I love pointing people to http://poignantguide.net/ruby/
I bet that named & logo killed them. They were both really bad.
Ah thanks

I actually read the wiki right after you mentioned dumpster diving lol

shows a lot about my culture as a teen in this day and age... x.x
It's this guy's fault. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earl_Butz And every Secretary of Agriculture after him didn't help.
The iPhone, Take it or...no Just Take It
Oh dear. "the flight of our first stage, with the new Merlin 1C engine that will be used in Falcon 9, was picture perfect. Unfortunately, a problem occurred with stage separation, causing the stages to be held together. This is under investigation and I will send out a note as soon as we understand exactly what happened. "

Video here: http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewnews.html?id=1299
>> Coding before design. Software tends to be much more usable if it
>> is, at least roughly, designed before the code is written.

In my experience, software and web development tends to fail when early work is made with specific UI assumptions in mind. The successful projects I have been a part of have concentrated on putting basic functionality first, and then iterating around the usability design and other features.
I disagree with the premise of the article. On average, Free software seems to have better usability proprietary applications.

Furthermore, usability is rapidly improving, since developers seem to be becoming more aware of usability issues in general. Sure, there are examples of horribly unusable apps, but I find the ones that suck the most are the proprietary windows apps, even the ones from big companies, and some of the most usable and consistent apps are open source.

Even so, there is always room for improvement, and the biggest issue is simply the lack of developer time to implement all the great usability ideas that pop up.
One of the interesting teaching methods I had the pleasure of seeing in action in a High School environment, was a teacher who would let his students learn organically when it came to physics.

Essentially what he did was find out what his students wanted to learn about, and then teach that. Eventually what was happening was the students became more involved in what he was teaching - even to the point where they were going out and learning about things on their own.

I'm not sure if this was an experiment in teaching, or an actual teaching method. This was a school for students who failed to achieve their goals in their last years of high school (yr 12 here) but still wanted to achieve university entry.
1. Since every address gets resolved into IP, the HTTP requests come to your server's IP address. Your web server decides which site to serve based on HOST header.

You'll have to add an entry in your webserver's settings for each CNAME address you want to handle. Alternatively you can add a default entry to handle any address by a middleware. The middleware will have all the logic (by looking up the DB or whatever) about domain mapping.

I did something similar in django i.e. allowed user subdomains on my site. You can read more about it here: http://sharjeel.2scomplement.com/2008/07/24/django-subdomain...

2. There is a good paper on DNS. Infact only one good paper has been written on DNS which is comprehensive and covers all aspects: http://www.cs.toronto.edu/syslab/courses/csc2231/05au/papers...
This is totally deflating the value of my blue books!

I will say tho, that there is still value in owning these books in paper. I swear it makes a difference in readability, comprehension, etc. I can vaguely remember something, open the book, and flip very close to it most of the time.

The blue book is one of the best computer books I own, hands down. I will always cherish it.
actual work conversation from last week...

me: "Yes, but will this new software reduce the time it takes folks to do their jobs."

them: "I don't know."

me: "Do you know how long it takes them to do it now?"

them: "umm... no."

you hit the nail on the head in that the people making the buy decisions don't consider usability.
Yeah, if Seattle has anything, it has an overabundance of independent coffee houses. Most towns have one or two independent places, and they're treasured gems. In Seattle, there's something like two per block.

(That's what happens when the weather is so depressing that you need a caffeine hit to justify getting out of bed in the morning. :-P)
I'm reasonably sure they did that elsewhere.
I don't know why you were modded down. The Bradley effect was a very powerful political force. I say "was" because it doesn't seem to be happening with Obama. The most plausible conjecture for why IMHO is robocalls.
__invoke

Now that should provide some entertaining debugging sessions.
An alpha of PHP doesn't belong anywhere near something like Dreamhost. Install it locally, hack around and report the bugs.
Thanks for your reasoned and thoughtful reply. I've voted you up.

However, I disagree with your central thesis. Programming is the stringing together of predefined constructs. However, like all matters of taste, the hard part is when things are appropriate. Reading the rest of your post as "GoF does not adequately teach when to use redirection, and other techniques of abstraction, leading to sophistry instead of sophistication," I completely agree with what you have to say.

The junior programmers that I know who have read GoF DP have been subject to my endless bashing over the head with the simplicity stick, and so I hope that they use indirection and abstract techniques only as appropriate.
Top 5 reasons tech execs fail
Will VCs reap the cleantech seed deals they sow?
I'm missing how the BT thing matters. An upstart could throttle indiscriminately. They just can't discriminate between different types of traffic.

They could easily just put a 10-20gb/mo download cap on their service as Comcast and the others probably will.
The only problem with EveryDNS is lack of API or way of making large-scale changes.
Guessing my comment was just misunderstood as racism somehow.

We can't say that the Bradley effect is gone for sure until Obama runs against a non-minority. I suspect that he will win, but not by the margin the polls indicate. Will be interesting to see.
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Oh, I'm glad the master of humor decided to chime in here, thanks for setting everything straight.

/me shrugs off bs

Your insulting comment doesn't have a thing to do with why it was killed off in the first place.

I'm also fairly surprised you aren't railing on about how nickb's post is pulling hackernews down into the terrible dredges of fark! We wouldn't want to minimalize our up mods now would we?
You can reduce the time it takes someone to do something, without knowing how long it takes them to do. That's what I'm working on right now.

If you make everyone's computer 100% faster, you know that you're delivering a net benefit, even if you're unable to quantify it (it's certainly not 100%).
The Gillmor Gang.
How technical does the CEO need to be?
Thanks, there's a surprisingly high number of design-related conversations on HN and I'm glad there's a good home for them. It reminds me of what 37signal's blog comments used to be like while they were still a design firm and making a name for themselves - now the discussions after each post are almost Youtube-level bad.
Every modern browser maintains a single user session that accesses multiple sites simultaneously. This allows a lot of information with security and privacy implications to flow between sites:

* Cookies set in one browser window are delivered with requests made in another browser window

* On site A, click a link to site C, and the same link on site B will change color.

* Files cached for one browser window are available instantaneously in another window

* Site A can use timing to determine if the browser currently has an open HTTP connection to site B

* The browser has a per-browser limitation on the number of concurrent connections to a particular web server. A malicious website could use this to find out when you're browsing another website.

Browsers also provide detailed version info to web servers, including plugin versions, allowing malicious sites to deliver the right exploits.

ECMA Script implementations do not implement proper resource controls. For example, bad JavaScript on one page can cause other pages to have slow responses.

Third-party cookies allow wholesale tracking

Browsers don't complain when the user enters a password into a form that submits to an HTTP url.

Browsers keep many cookies literally forever.

Even if the user turns off cookies, the cache provides equivalent functionality for tracking.

ECMA Script and Flash can pop up modal dialogs that allow one webpage to prevent the user from using others.

Browsers don't provide any good UI tools for checking signatures of non-signed certificates. Many users are conditioned to just click 'Accept Permanently.'

Browsers will recall passwords for pages that are shown in i-frames.

Browsers should provide stronger anti-phishing mechanisms. For example, a way to designate a bookmark as the only allowed way to enter that domain.
It could be because Reddit has a subreddit specifically for XKCD (http://www.reddit.com/r/xkcd), and many HN readers are already familiar with it.
Not imaginary.
The Flickr image is actually just a photo of the latest issue of Mad Magazine. http://macenstein.com/default/archives/1547
also the same people who were 18 and 20 in 99 are about 30 in 08. and married, driving minivans, easting home cooked, chasing less/no tail
Ehh, you really think so? I mean XKCD stuff lingers up on hackernews all the time. My said post was nixed in ~40 minutes.
I captured some thoughts about my involvement in this project in a post: http://www.neverreadpassively.com/2008/08/my-experiences-on-...
My experiences on a one month startup
In Europe inter-bank transfers are free (unless there is a currency change) which can make them a better option than checks as they are quicker.
Ruby Fibers Vs Ruby Threads
Java 7 Prediction Update
The guys at Process one are writing a book on Erlang, you might want to wait for that.
Ask HN: profiling memory - what should we use
Trying to profile the memory on our application.
Using Python, have yet to find the winning profiler.

What are you using to test memory leaks?

Any help would be much appreciated.
Thank Heavens
The most misunderstood book in CS is R.L. Stine's Goosebumps
Computer people put a high value on precision because a single semicolon is the difference between a working Linux kernel and a jumble of compile-time errors.
Ask PG: Firefox addon - Search HN?
Someone posted a link last week about asking PG to add Search to HN.
I was thinking it would incredibly more helpful to have a YC search available in firefox search engines, easier also to integrate.
"a expressions"?

Anyway, yay for Lisp: http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/SimpleEmacsSpreadsheet
What business opportunities will emerge due to increased shipping costs?

I suppose there will be a surge in on-demand media production. Book and magazine producers will save shipping money by printing and binding the materials near to their consumers. When shipping prices really start to go up, electronic books and downloaded movies will be a big win.

The increase in shipping costs from on-demand factories in Asia will affect the cost of laptops.

More importantly: There will be growth in the market for software to support factories in the USA and Mexico.

There will also be a lot more to gain from inventory control techniques that prevent shipping unwanted products. How about making software to help Fortune 5,000,000 companies cut down on shipping unwanted inventory?

How about an electronic market for extra space in trucks?

How about software and services that help truckers get the best gas mileage? Since engines operate more efficiently with cooler and drier air, weather information could help truckers to schedule their trips through cooler air. Real-time wind speeds and directions can help them avoid headwinds. A real-time database of gas prices at particular stations can help truckers shave off a few cents per gallon. Traffic info can help trucks avoid idling in traffic jams. A database of road inclination can help truckers take the level road instead of wasting gas going up hills. An online database of fuel efficiency for various routes and times could help them take advantage of unknown factors. A service could provide all of this functionality to small businesses that operate shipping fleets.
First C++ and now PHP. What will be the next language to get functional closures?

Visual Basic?
The Top Source for College-Related Stories
X Games Starts Today - Sk8prk
Top Source for College-Related Stories
One of my favorite quotes; it's so true.
Anyone know why it's redirecting to reddit?
Have a look at AppFuse:
http://www.appfuse.org/display/APF/Home

IMHO a great Java Web App "Framework"...
thanks. I'm here in the valley now and I've signed up to get event mails from those groups.
IMO you should offer free subscriptions to people for creating decks - this free content will attract more people to the site and make you stand out and differentiate yourself from competitors like Supermemo or Mnemosyne.

The "content is king" meme exists for a reason.
Almost certainly Java 7.
What are you using to test memory leaks?

I'm not suggesting that this is a good approach or that anyone else should use it, but... I run with ktrace and with MALLOC_OPTIONS=U set in the environment. This logs every single call to malloc(), realloc(), and free(); I then throw the log files at a perl script which matches up allocations with frees and gives me a list of every time memory was allocated without being subsequently freed.

Of course, this is only feasible because I'm working in C; and I'm sure there are better tools available if I could be bothered to learn how to use them.
that is good advice, we really do need a lot more content to get users.

Hard-core users seem to obsess about making their own decks, thus the available content is there as a hook or gateway to becoming a more involved user.
Just created one via the search capability at searchyc.com and the plugin builder utility at searchplugins.net. See:

http://www.searchplugins.net/pluginlist.aspx?q=news.yc&m...

Click the little 'I' to the left of the listing to install. (I have no affiliation with either site.)
check it out here, it's great http://plugin.searchyc.com/
I love the idea of building a team and then coming up with different products. Your project mayhem is almost as cool as the one in fight club.

I think the idea behind Spicy Elephant might be a bit abstract for most consumers, but the site came out well. The name doesn't help people to understand what it is...but I like it any way =)

I wish you guys the best of luck with your future projects and I can't wait to see what you come up with next.
advertising is a clear and big monetization strategy. A lot of startups use it effectively.
Actually the one thing that has put me off using one of these applications is the lack of availability of a library of decks and is probably the main advantage of a web-based approach. I'm not a fan of the over-proliferation of social network-based sites (Halo's law: "Every site expands until it becomes a social network, those that don't are replaced by those that do"), but I think this is the key case where it could really work to both your and your users advantage.

The hardcore users will be more likely to already have bought Supermemo, have lots of Supermemo decks and be unlikely to switch over. I think you could end up with a larger, broader market than that. But I think the concept is good.
Consider building a tool to let users import decks they created on other sites/with other tools (and thus probably retain rights on) to your platform
Darcs: a study in communication failure
Great stuff!

I think you need a clear pitch of what you're offering users. Something that can leverage word of mouth: short, easy to grasp, exciting. (Of course, maybe through following supermemo's seeding the geek market, you don't need it for us)

The offer is to "help them to learn stuff, by ... ", how? The first part is clear (cute: elephant=memory), but "how" it helps is not clear.

"2. We intelligently organize when to study"

That doesn't give me a sense of it (sounds like "in the morning"?, "after exercise"?, "at night"?) It's cute having your info as the first scheduled training, but maybe more effective to also have that info available before trial. :-) It's probably just me, but (though cute), I found scheduling that a bit pushy.

I'd also feel more comfortable having a clearer sense of when training will occur: what's the scheduling for this deck? I don't think it's needed for the learning task; but it would make the user feel more informed and in control; and not at the whim of a machine (users don't like that).

But I think you could have something really successful going there.
As an opposing datapoint my experience is the exact opposite.
paying for hosted SVN is a pain...
I found a godsend when in a similar situation- www.assembla.com - free project management, svn, git, trac- just name it.
Just curious - why beanstalk and not github?
I think the "elephant" part does, esp with the graphic. Though I don't get the "spicy" part... for me, it actually brings to mind an elephant that has eaten too much spicy indian food...

But sometimes, memorability is more important than meaningfulness... (eg. all the weird IT names we've gotten used to, Red hat, Apache, Mozilla).

it would be really cool to have a cute/humorous story to explain the name (and the business), so that someone mentioning the name would be asked to explain it, and get to pass on an interesting story. eg. Ycombinator. Easy for me to suggest - but coming up with such a story is harder. :-)
Prevent Duplicate Tabs in Firefox
Raving Techno Rant: How to Delay First Impressions of Google App Engine
That looks cool. You should definitely try that out!
Knol: content w/out context, collaboration, capital, or coruscation
Microsoft Calls Firefox Competitor To Windows
Firefox Closer to Supporting Open-source Video Codec
HTML Validation and Search Engine Optimization
Yeah. It's boring. Here's really all that you need to say about it: It's a vocabulary trainer.

That's mostly what reading Design Patterns is good for. You learn names for things that you'll see over and over again that you can refer to them as when talking to other programmers and you learn to implement them more or less the standard way not because that's novel, but just because it then makes it easier for other people to understand what you've done.

On the other hand, it's easy to read -- like one day, and at that it's definitely worth it.
MYOB Indonesia - Halaman Muka
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Thanks for teaching me how not to be a social outcast. Great post.

(Irony sensor would be off the chart about now.)