skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"In China today, Bill Gates is Britney Spears. In American today, Britney Spears is Britney Spears and that is our problem"

Thomas Friedman talking about the waning interest in engineering & science in America's youth in his book "The World is Flat"
But is it really easier to read and write? Properly-indented S-expressions are just as readable. Generating XML and then gzip-ing it is a lot more work (and requires a lot more libraries) than generating S-expressions.

Case in point:

<table>
<tr>
<td>a</td>
<td>b</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>c</td>
<td>d</td>
</tr>
</table>

vs:

(table
(tr
(td a)
(td b))
(tr
(td c)
(td d)))

Perhaps the real problem is that too many people use terrible text editors. Paren-matching and auto-indentation makes writing S-expressions orders of magnitude easier, and at least a constant factor easier than writing XML.
I think you're reading too much into the word "typical". It might be better understood as "example" or "typical of what is often found in a datacenter". Notice that all of the actual measured data in that paper is normalized to a value between 0 and 1, not given in watts.
Authentication takes two forms:

Am I talking to this guy.

Am I talking to the same guy as yesterday. << Anonymous certificates handle this use case.
They should create an API and let outside developers innovate the search/add part, and let them stick to the core service.
PEBCAK

I've got 244 DVDs in my queue and I've rated 1496 so far. I don't seem to have any of the problems that the author seems to have.

Their recommendation system is far better than I've seen in any field and it is incredibly accurate in my experience. The UI hasn't updated much, but it has updated. It really doesn't need to. You find movies via the recommendations made on _every single page_ or you find movies by following a particular director or actor to their page. It is a very easy site to navigate and use. I have no idea why the author seems to have such a hard time with it.
Too Much Revenue, Not Enough Growth
Gmail users report yet another outage
Professional vs. Profitable
Dead people and pets vote all the time

Yeah, zombie granny and fluffy's backing of John Kerry basically cancelled out our household vote.
Android seems* to be attracting people who write apps for themselves, while the iPhone seems to be attracting people who write apps to sell.

It isn't yet known if having enough Type A developers will kickstart a pool of Type B developers. But if you are the kind of person who likes Type A applications (for example Firefox/mplayer rather than IE/iTunes - apps by developers for developers) then you are likley to be really happy with Android apps from the start.

*Based on an unscientific survey.
Yes, Erlang only got SMP support in 2006. Before then, you had to start one node per CPU to get a similar effect.

But regardless, I fail to see how this implies it's not a reliable platform.
They can get away by using fewer servers because those servers do less work. Microsoft's on-line operations are a fraction of the size of Google's.

It's unlikely any OS is significantly better on resource management than any other. OS design books are quite old by now. I remember reading Tannembaum's MINIX while on college, some more than 20 years ago. And, during those 20 something years, desktop computers and x86 servers evolved pretty little. Quite frankly, when compared to what RISC promised in the late 80s and early 90s, it's quite disappointing.
But is that really true? From what I hear, the great unwashed Chinese masses are just as capable of getting excited over dumb pop-culture ephemera as our own.

Ultimately it's the top few percent who produce technological innovation anyway.
this is part of why I do everything in the terminal

latency is acceptable, even when my workstation is on the other side of the globe, and I can buy a new workstation for 'change in the couch' money. (I currently have a $300 Everex CloudBook (via nanobook) I got at Wallmart for the bus rides. that and a usb 3g modem, and I'm good to go.)

Backups are easy. Granted, the box isn't entirely redundant. If the motherboard blows on it, I've got to run to the datacenter and fix it or restore from backup to another box (if I'm remote) and I have a problem if the datacenter goes up in smoke, but it's been a pretty reliable system so far. The disk I'm on is mirrored, so I've not actually had to restore from backup in a few years.

But yeah, it's nice because I can take a total 'it's disposable' attitude towards any laptop or desktop. If it gives me trouble, format and re install. If a client wants me to use one of her workstations, no problem (though I change the password from somewhere trusted when I'm done.)

Heck with a sufficiently advanced cellphone I can console in.
Amusingly, this policy blocks several US Dept of Defense public facing websites.
Thanks, all. I went w/ WP :)
While I obviously agree that in the age of the internet, what OS you run becomes less important, this article is simply too biased to be readable.

I'm sure the Linux fanboys will love it though. I could almost hear the author cheering "Linux! Linux!" in the background while I was trying to get trough it.
S-expressions are nice but not superior to XML for all use cases. S-expression syntax are optimized for lists of names and numbers. XML-syntax is optimized for structured documents. Since XML is used just as much for data as for documents these days, s-expressions would perhaps be just as good as XML for a common data exchange meta format. But that train left the station a decade ago.

I suspect a reason XML catched on and s-expressions didn't (outside of the Lisp-niche) is that XML tackled difficult internationalization issues like different encodings and character sets head on.
thank god couchsurfing is back and better than before---i would be dead in europe and south america without it
I would like something like a splashtop and lets me run emacs+whatever language I'm using to run via the browser.

Distributed emacs, business idea?
Functional programming and looping
This is because users are being trained to use sites "with the yellow bar at the top" to do personal things (e.g logging in, credit card details, etc). Making users have to jump through a couple hoops of hoops if the certificate is self-signed is a good way to protect users that don't understand the technology.

While I understand you want to be very egalitarian about it most users would value their personal information's safety over the principle of a completely open web.

In the spirit of the open web you are free to a) not use Firefox b) fork the Firefox project c) file a bug with Firefox d) contribute to Firefox and argue for this feature to be removed
I cannot dispute that metadata can be useful. But it appears, at least for prediction tasks similar to the prize, that an ounce of weak or strong explicit user input is worth a ton of rich implicit data (including item metadata).
Well it will make a good case study for how not to do social marketing.
I'm pretty sure they can't because NBC owns the rights to everything and won't let anyone else touch them.
More info from the source.
http://www.couchsurfing.com/crash_page.html
That's interesting. If I ever met any kind of scientist I'd be like "Wow, that's so cool," and ask questions about what you're researching, etc.

A part of me always wanted to be a scientist. Hopefully I'll start a (programming) project to help in scientific research one day.
Thanks for the Friedman quote, I always love the opportunity to repost this review of the World is Flat:

He has an anti-ear, and it's absolutely infallible; he is a Joyce or a Flaubert in reverse, incapable of rendering even the smallest details without genius.

http://www.nypress.com/18/16/news&columns/taibbi.cfm
I'd like to know where I can buy a cert this way. Pretty please.
Some of these facts are misleading. He refers to a Java implementation of MapReduce developed by Google. I believe that Google's implementation is in C/C++ and has never been released to the public. The Java implementation is released by the Hadoop project and is mostly sponsored by Yahoo.

While that doesn't really take away from the article that much, it adds to the rushed feeling and my impression that this guy is not much of an authority on the topic.
Google search share grows to 71%
You are right about text-editors. XML was designed to be reasonable easy to write and edit by humans without specialized software. The redundant end-tag helps to catch errors and make structure more explicit.

Sure everyone could just use a fancy specialized editor with paren-matching auto-indentation. But one of the goals of XML was precisely that it should not rely on specialized software to be able to read and write.

Your example with the table is a lot clearer with sexpr syntax because you don't actually have any content in the table. Try again with a few sentences of mixed content, some bolded words, a link, and so on, and you will get my point.

Note that you would also need to gzip your s-expressions if you are concerned about size.
Any sufficiently advanced cellphone will have SSH.

(Yes, it's a riff on Arthur C. Clarke.)
Ask HN: Estimating ad revenue for a business plan?
Does anyone know of good resources to use when writing a business plan to estimate revenue from advertising? I'm looking for updated information on how to go about estimating a CPM, what kind of revenue you can earn as you increase visitors, what a beginning CPM would be, that sort of thing. I'm in the "can this work?" phase, so I'm very interested in what a new site (not a blog) can charge, and what kind of revenue is possible based on visitor estimates. Revenue for feeds would be helpful too.
The New York Times looks to B2B for better CPMs
What's not important here is the amount of radiation coming from the sun.

What is important is the systems at work within the sun. A blank sun is the calm before the storm.

Solar flare : Dec 21st, 2012.
I'm not entirely sure why Firefox is being specifically targeted here. The pages that Opera and IE8 throw for self-signed certs aren't much less scary.
I'm not a qualified expert, but it does somewhat depend on the market you are after, how integrated ads are in the site, etc.

For example (assuming standard banner ads), if you are talking about using adwords for content based ads, you are likely going to be looking at a $1-4CPM (is my understanding). However, if you are more of a social network tool, etc. it seems the CPM's are MUCH lower, in the 0.05 - 0.75 range.
If you provide a solid branding opportunity for advertisers (likely targeting a very specific market), you could be looking at a $7-9CPM.

This is what i have gathered from my limited research and discussions with friends in marketing.
Picwing Debuts Their Social Digital Picture Frame
Picwing (YC Summer 08) Debuts Their Social Digital Picture Frame
Ask HN: Best resources on SEO
Hello All,

I'm wondering what the best resources on Search Engine Optimization are? In terms of books, websites and even organizations that assess existing websites.

thanks!
adnan.
Yes, one of America's biggest exports is their pop culture. The whole Baywatch being the most watched TV show of all time. The fact that washed-up American C-list celebrities can have a second life in Asian markets (alluded to in Lost in Translation).

It's hard to prove that Chinese culture places a greater value on education than Americans. And you can argue that Chinese education is slanted towards perfection of memorization (tangent: is that why they can copy anything?) But consider that the elite Politburo is ruled by engineers - how many people on Bush's cabinet have engineering pedigree?

"For the first time ever, all the members of China's elite Politburo Standing Committee, the highest tier within the Communist Party, are card-carrying engineers."

http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/print/1231
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politburo_of_the_Communist_Part...
short summary: America, for its fear and litigious society, is neutering herself.

This does not nail it though on why the country is failing at Math & Science. Parental influence is the top correlation between children and success in school. It's not a surprise that 50% of STEM degrees are going to International students (who make up less than 10% of the general US student populous) -- their parents push them towards the most difficult degrees -- Sciences, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics.
Having a trusted third party is a pretty big deal in cryptography. Without it, many of the core assumptions of public-key cryptography are invalid. It's a huge part of making sure the other end is authentic. I'd place a lot more trust in Bank A's public key if it was signed by verisign, rather than an unverified third party. Having verisign's public key in my browser elimininates a large class of man-in-the-middle attacks.

If paying $20/year is too inconvenient for you to transfer your data securely, then perhaps the data isn't sensitive enough, and you shouldn't bother.
You describe religion as a set of beliefs based on some core principles which cannot be experimentally tested.

You suggest that based on the Wikipedia article it's hard to figure out what REST actually is.

Wikipedia defines REST as something adhering to some key design principles:
1)Application state and functionality abstracted into resources
2)Uniquely addressable resources using a universal syntax for use in hypermedia links
3)A uniform interface for resources for the transfer of state between the client and the resource.
4)A protocol which is client/server, stateless, cacheable and layered.

That seems like a pretty specific design criteria to me, and not at all dogmatic. Moreover, there have been a number of comparisons of REST Vs. Other architectural styles (see http://www.mnot.net/blog/2005/11/07/REST_vs). And a number of benefits of adhering to REST can be shown.

That said, obviously, like everything else it's not perfect, but it's easy for you to refer to people who advocate the architectural style as a working practice because you clearly don't fully understand it yet given quotes like, It is a nice convention for pretty urls, for example. As URL/URI style has not one iota to do with REST other than resources are uniquely addressable.
So open it to the public. After the election, publicly associate each password to a vote; also make people register for passwords and keep track of the number of people who register. Then after the election ask people to check that their password is associated with the vote that they made. Even if only a fraction of voters do so, it would be hard for any potential vote rigger to tamper significantly with the process.

And on further thought, it would be better to use public-key cryptography than plain passwords -- get people to encrypt their vote with their private key -- because then the public keys could be released before the election and it could be verified that there are the same number of keys and registered voters.

This would be dramatically more secure than the current system.
NetConcepts case studies page: http://www.netconcepts.com/tag/case-studies.
I've found it to be the best site out there to learn what needs to be done without coming across as an infomercial, which a lot of SEO sites annoying do.
Visual Studio is not profitable for Microsoft (from what I've heard from MS employees) but that is also not its purpose. It's there to guarantee the success of the Windows desktop and server platforms. Microsoft knows development and ease of development has been a large contributor to the success of Windows.
No problems here. But I'm on a server that's slow-to-update (I get new features 3 days after the early people) to maybe the bad SW version hasn't hit me yet.
"Quality of products is in relative terms an irrelevant parameter."

Sorry, but this is bullshit. Quality of products is ALWAYS relevant. And this is the problem with outsourcing - quality just doesn't come in as a factor. But hey, when you're charging by the hour, poor quality means more allocated time for bug fixes!
Million dollar gas hack.
Or you probably could trust Paul, who seemingly worked on Googles servers since just about near the beginning...
He's dead wrong. Apple's micromanagement of their platform makes it somewhat unappealing to developers. With Android, I'm not subject to some corporation's whims. If both phones had an equal install base, everyone would choose Android.

And with Android being available for any carrier in presumably all sorts of form factors (from cheap clamshell to blackberryish smartphone to full touchscreen iPhone-like) even just the base OS with a few killer apps (Google Maps, good browser, media player) will sell like hotcakes. Most of the iPhone's install base came before there were any sanctioned third party apps.
Math is easy to explain. The only place where a student can be exposed to real mathematics is in select universities. All the other places teach arithmetic which is most useful to a dumb calculator. The central problem with teaching arithmetic is that it is only suitable for the average calculator and so the average human gets bored and over time, we get the perception that mathematics is boring and "just a dumb tool," neither of which lend themselves to a high proficiency in mathematics.
YouTube - We've KILLED Fantasy Football
Thats even worse for us. China's top few percent is a lot larger than ours and considering the ratio of graduates in technical fields, is going to stay that way.
Sounds like you're misinterpreting people. Typical aspergers case maybe. People are probably either disbelieving you or are impressed enough to feel awkward.
Awesome historical lesson. You will know you have built something of value when it becomes much, much bigger than you.
I remember, and it couldn't have been more than 15 years ago, when you could buy compasses in stores. At that time any curious 10 year old could pick up Calculus and get cranking.

But today parents will get worried. Why isn't he out playing baseball or texting people? The police might even get involved. "Are you making vectors kid?"

Today everyone says they should just go to school and do multiplication tables like all the rest. That way they won't grow up weird.
145W is the heat generated by the box, including the work necessary to get the heat out of the box.

How much power does it take to get that heat out of the building?

I ask because the utility company numbers include both, while the "machine power" numbers only include the former.
Actually, no. For all practical intents and purposes encryption w/o authentication is as good as no encryption.

Unauthenticated encryption is 'better' than a plaintext in just one thing - it protects against passive snooping. Anyone willing to splice the connection will have full access to all your plaintext data and you won't even know about it. As such it's nothing more than an equivalent of reversible traffic obfuscation.

So if your "better" meant "obfuscated", then, yeah, it's better. But it's no more secure (in a conventional security sense) than a plaintext.
I guess I'm an anomaly, as I've opted not to buy an iPhone. I simply don't find closed platforms interesting. The PC industry has already shown us that open is dramatically better for consumers...why go backward?

The mobile industry is already atrocious, with regard to how it handles contracts and services and how it treats consumers, due to its close ties to the old telcos--the only way they know how to do business is abusively. Why make it even worse by choosing a device that enforces even more restrictions and costs?

I'm looking forward to a pay-as-you-go smart phone with Android (or Symbian, since it's now open source). That'll be my next phone.

I'm not an Open Source fanatic...but even Windows Mobile is more open than iPhone, which is pretty tragic.
Besides the tragic (or incompetent?) tech failures, what do folks here think about the founder initially just calling it quits on the community?

Having followed this particular crash-recovery saga unfold and being involved with web 2.0 otherwise, it would be interesting to hear a few thoughts over this: what's the responsibility of the platform provider towards their possibly very engaged community - or is there any?
An Anthropological Introduction to YouTube
Gotta love that Mayan calendar Voodoo.
Unbelievable. I've been poking about here for like 6 months now. You are all very smart people. Why is this so hard to understand?

If you do not have a valid certificate signed by a CA, SSL is not providing any security.

Yes, the warning you get when you visit a site with an invalid cert is much scarier than what you see if you visit an unencrypted site. But it's the sites that use encryption that users care about, because those are the sites that get their passwords and credit card numbers.

Perhaps you think the browser should make an exception for self-signed certs. After all, there's nothing "wrong" with their signatures. Nothing's expired. No signature fails to validate. Why not just make the URL bar orange or something? Because anyone can create a self-signed cert and sub it into a Bank of America SSL connection.

It sure is annoying that you have to pay $20 every year to keep an SSL cert. I totally agree that this a problem. But right now, without that $20, you have a connection that provides cryptographically zero security. Short of coming up with a way to create a trustworthy CA that runs for less than $20 a year, there is no great solution to this problem.
It's not even that complicated.

The problem with not having a valid certificate is this: if both sides can't tie every packet in the SSL handshake back to Verisign or Thawte's pubkey, attackers can inject their own handshake passwords and set the session key.
This is a neurosis that scientists hold, not really what people are thinking. Most people have no idea how much money a scientist is or isn't making.

It is a valid neurosis, though. Even 20-25 years ago, a scientist wasn't that bad off, economically. My uncle made enough money to buy a house in the Bay Area as a microbiologist at a government lab. Nowadays there is no way someone in the same position could buy a house in the same area. Even renting your own apartment would be painful. The salary has remained the same, whereas life has gotten much more expensive.
The warning says, "Here is a site that claims to be secure. Maybe you thought it was secure, maybe you didn't. Either way, the site is not secure. DO NOT ENTER YOUR PASSWORDS AND CREDIT CARD NUMBERS HERE."

The warning is vibrant because the condition it reports on can be created by an attacker on any SSL connection. That stupid warning might be among the top five security mechanisms on the Internet.
Today, at over half a million members with CS2.0, they're more stable, and doing things like using AWS for static picture serving needs. And there are many more people working on keeping it up and running these days :)
There is some serious smack-down in that NASA article.

"In the early 20th century there were periods of quiet lasting almost twice as long as the current spell."

"In summary, "the current minimum is not abnormally low or long.""

"Hathaway anticipates more spotless days, maybe even hundreds, followed by a return to Solar Max conditions in the years around 2012."

Along with some interesting graphs, it looks like everything is business as usual for the sun.

A google search on the author, Rebecca Sato, shows that she typically writes lots of "what if" and other fluff pieces.

Sounds like fear mongering to me.
You are correct.

There is a pdf released about it from Google here:
http://labs.google.com/papers/mapreduce.html
How can your browser tell the difference between:

(1)

A connection to onlinebanking.bankofamerica.com in which an attacker has hijacked the SSL handshake and subbed in a self-signed certificate, and

(2)

A connection to https://login.ratemykitten.com?

You appear to be arguing that the warning for this situation should be tuned to (2).
Nicely played. :)
No good at all. Which is why you can't buy an SSL certificate that claims to be onlinebanking.bankofamerica.com.