skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was looking for an internship in Dallas and came across them. I was also confused as to why I had not heard of them since I follow tech news religiously and go to school in Dallas at SMU.

Apparently, their CEO sold his first company to Mark Cuban's Broadcast.com before it was sold to Yahoo. If they were based in Silicon Valley, I bet everyone would have already known about them, and the hype would be through the roof. I was really boggled by the way all the tech journalists overlooked Viewzi during that whole Cuil debacle.
This UI design is critical to search engine is just nonsense. All that matters in search engine is the result. You can have the crappiest interface and the best result, you will become billionaire. Simple as that. Design in search engine doesn't matter at all. All that matters is the result.
Does anyone on HN have any first-hand experience configuring and using Hadoop? If so, how was the process - was it straightfoward or complex, did it require lots of peeking into the source, any major pitfalls, etc - and, are you satisfied with how it's currently working and with your ability to add new boxes easily?
Yeah it is not well designed.

I think people confuse design with style. Just because something has style doesn't mean it is well designed.
Even if you've no plans to, be able to is a useful discipline and keeps your code clean. For years I worked on a Solaris project that we also maintained a build for that no-one used on NT. But when a customer wanted an AIX version, it took as long to produce one as it did to find an AIX box to compile it on.

Same is true of databases. There are things that people don't even think about if they've only ever used one database. What's your DB's lock escalation strategy? Are cursors cheap or expensive? What kinds of indexes don't you have, and could any of them ever be useful? And so on...
Are you kidding me? It does happen occasionally. I'm guessing you haven't been a developer for very long if you've never run into this. The fact that abstraction libraries and ORMs exist in the first place suggests that it's a real problem.

My comment was based on my own experience having to move a PHP app from SQL Server to Oracle. And it was just about the last app I'd ever expect to have to move from one database to another.

I'm not sure why my original comment was modded down because it's just plain common sense. With all the libraries out there for abstracting database access and ORMs you're just begging for trouble if you still use the database specific stuff. Unfortunately, in my case none of that stuff was available yet.
So will amazon.

http://twitter.com/amazonmp3/
Yes, there is such thing as infringement in software.

These are a few notable settlements in the software patent field:

1. $106 million to Acacia from various companies throughout all computer industries in the first nine months of 2007.

2. $100 million from Apple to Creative for the iPod’s user interface.

3. $133 million paid by Microsoft and Autodesk for their software registration systems.

4. $80 million from Vonage to Sprint-Nextel for the right to use Vonage’s own telecommunications software.

5. “At least” $80 million from Vonage to Verizon for same; perhaps as much as $117 million.

6. $612 million paid by Research in Motion to NTP for the Blackberry email system.

Also, I am not sure spending $250k to defend a patent lawsuit is a compliment. I agree that worrying now is premature optimization, but the $250k to defend doesn't cover your potential damages.

I am not sure RIM took NTP suing them as a compliment.
An Introduction to Thread Programming in Python
Yeah, that was a weird comment.
Billing systems are a black box. They're typically geared for one product / company and that's it.

Do us all a favor and open source your code!
> "Blackberry apps don't usually make the front page of TechCrunch."

That should not be the criterion for a successful app or product.
Ever looked at Apache OFBiz? It's backed by fairly detailed/complex models that might be able to do what you need. Even if it isn't, the community around it is full of people who 1) get code, and 2) get business uses of said code, so you might have some people willing to at least bounce ideas off of.
DEMO v. TechCrunch50 Takes A Nasty Turn With Charges Of Plagiarism
Reduce Java SE's Footprint - updated
I don't think the data changes all that fast assume 5billion cards at 10bytes a user it's ~500MB per station. Assuming 2million transactions an hour your talking about ~40megabytes of data an hour DSL would be fast enough. Now each station would keep a local copy the Database and transmit to the 30 or so other stations as long as they send data before you can reach the next station it should work just fine.

Granted 10 years ago storing value on each card would have been more useful but the turn styles should easily be able to handle the full database.
Benefits of Single-User Source Control (from a product announcement)
China's BYD to sell electric cars in Israel next year, Europe in 2010
First, there's more to it than simply whether the context switching and stack reserves are going to kill you when you have 700 blocking threads (and note that 700 is not a crazy high number, especially for async). Leaving aside correctness, multithreading also incurs synchronization overhead; set aside the "GIL" stuff and you're still left with the fact that in the real world, you will still wind up serializing your program on one of your own data structures.

Second, the "don't use threads for I/O" notion comes from the fact that no matter how much compute you burn on I/O, the data isn't coming any faster, and in I/O bound programs, it's more efficient to use the I/O scheduler (kqueue and epoll in crazy programs, select in everything else) than the context scheduler.

Third, you're about 10 years behind the times yourself if you think that the CPU is going to strangle itself checking 700 file descriptors. Although I don't even think a 1997 async network program is going to lose to a 2008 threaded network program over 700 connections, it isn't even a contest in 2008 vs. 2008.

I am happy to race you. =)

Regardless, I wrote an async MySQL driver because you can't demand-thread per-packet network code, and I wanted to dump stuff to a database. Some of us will thread when threading makes a program cleaner and simpler, and run everything async when threading becomes an obstacle course.
Wonderful world of MySQL Storage Engines
The problem with moving to a different database when you've used the database specific functions in PHP is that you have to use completely different functions for the new database. Moving from MySQL to PostgreSQL isn't so bad because those functions are fairly consistent. I think in most cases you just change mysql_ to pg_.

Moving to something like Oracle or ODBC is a major task. You end up having to rewrite quite a bit of code even if you've isolated your queries. I had to learn this the hard way through experience and thought I'd share so someone else could avoid the hassle. The app that I had to move was very small and about the last thing I thought I'd have to spend much time maintaining. Six months later I was wasting half a day rewriting database code. Not sure why I would get modded down for this.
I'm assuming you can't beat Google with 'style' alone, so my use of 'design' pertains more toward the UX and process by which you finally get to the results. Viewzi is pretty innovative by allowing the user to choose where the results are to be pulled from and how they are to be displayed.

I think Viewzi's UX is quite brilliant, but the look on the other hand is too heavy and flashy for my minimalistic taste.

From a design standpoint, Google is so successful because they match their clean and simple look with their basic and straightforward UX.
Virtualization support would be great for 3rd party apps. You could have two tiers of apps. 2nd tiered apps would run sandboxed and virtualized, while 1st tier apps would run native with access to background processes. Certifying the 1st tier would be a lot harder, however.
My Startup(engineyard.com) has just finishing building our phone system in adhearsion. This handles our global support line with tons of features:

Provides a complete IVR written in Ruby, with helpers for menus, multiple dialing, etc.
Provides a complete user interface written using Ruby on Rails, for an easy to use configuration tool for both users and administrators.
Supports PSTN numbers as extensions, providing a completely virtual PBX.
Supports automatic creation of workgroups, including insertion into the dial plan, right from the Ruby GUI.
Supports workgroup scheduling from the user interface, so you extension only rings when you tell it to.
Supports dialing multiple phones and employees to answer an inbound call.
Forwards voice mails to everyone in the workgroup
Supports click to dial, call history, etc. from the GUI

The cool part is we're going to open source this thing in the next few weeks. It's probably the biggest adhearsion app out there yet and will serve as a great example for folks looking to do cool stuff with adhearsion.
An introduction I've found helpful: http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/~matloff/Python/PyThreads.pdf
Amazon Payments & Billing Services might be useful
Early versions suck. Whether in technology, ideas or anything. This issue isn't exclusive to anything or anyone.
Because of the nature of the e-ink display, (it pushes physical ink blobs to and from the surface of the screen), the unit does not use any power if you are not turning pages and not using the wireless connection.
I wish they would release it in the UK :(
I've been saying it all along. Outsourcing your product development is a deadly mistake. Maybe once in a while it might work - but that's really a rare event.
Whether you are listed on the App store or Handango, promoting your product always consumes time and money.

The capital requirements for the iPhone are higher. $79-99 to be exact. Unless you need access to system or Crypto APIs ($20 for a key), developing for the Blackberry costs nothing.

Incidentally, I am a programmer sitting at home (in my spare time) and I look at my iPhone and because of Jobs' retarded politics I think "I can't do that". Then I look at the BB JDE/Simulator and get back to work using a decent API to write what'll hopefully be a neat little app.
Industrial Strength C++ - Free Ebook (PDF and Html)
Making waves in Beijing
Just make a twitter account for your business. Anyone following that expects to receive information about products. I don't see what the problem is.
I am still in doubt that we just use "brand" and "habits" to cover the core questions in our thinking.

In the case of Ebay, what a buyer and a seller wants in common is there is a large pools of users in the site. So they have better chance to find the other end of the transaction. So even though currently eBay can't satisfy its users in different aspects, but they have the most important element in auction: a lot of users. This is the same for dating sites.

So to build a new competitor against eBay, the most important thing is to figure out how to convert users in eBay to the new competitors. I guess anyone who figure this out will reap the reward.

I just think we use "brand" and "habits" too much without reallying understanding the reality. A successful product or service must satisfy a demand. Even in soft drink market, where there is no difference between them. But each one uses a "brand image" to resort to different customers' psychology. So the product actually fulfill the need of consumers' desire to define themselves. From this point of view, they create a product that is what people want.
Pretty senseless post. It's not really Apple's fault that he happens to have bad 3G reception in his area.

I'm not sure why I even finished reading this 2-page rant that was obviously not going to mention anything people don't already know by now. He didn't even bother making his rant interesting, funny, or concise.
That's rather short-sighted of you. The OLPC's goal has never been to enhance academic performance of illiterate children in poverty stricken countries, and its goal is most certainly not to enhance your academic success.

The internet is indeed a wonderful resource, one which a lot of us have utilized for personal enrichment. A great number of non-US countries have made very good use of computers as a learning aid. Just because it (in your opinion) failed to increase quality of education in America doesn't mean the technology is worthless or the goal of making the technology available to the poor "naive and stupid."

Semi-related article: when slum children in India get free internet access -- http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2000/oct/17/itforschools...
I opened the slides only expecting the analysis of the contents and security vulnerabilities of Charlie cards. As it's easy to exploit a broken fare collection system with little risk (perhaps even commercially), this design shows serious negligence on the part of the MBTA. Kudos to them for figuring out something every Boston hacker was casually wondering about.

However, these slides go beyond that, briefly covering many avenues that seem to be more aimless mischief than serious analysis. Most of the slides remind me more of the Anarchist Cookbook than a vulnerability disclosure. I wonder why they didn't include the "hop over the gate" and "pay with counterfeit money" exploits?
There's no binary here between ignoring luck and fatalism, and most people inherently realize that even though luck is a factor the best they can do is improve their average result rather than completely controlling things. The best people in any field will focus on what they can control and not worry about the rest.

To me the problem is that people generally want to explain luck away in hindsight: the team that won the game on a last-second shot won because they "wanted it more," the business that comes out on top "executed better," etc. It even comes into play in ethics, whereby the exact same action (say, driving drunk) often has different outcomes (hitting someone versus making it home safely) that cause us to judge people completely differently.

In other words, people hate the thought of luck determining things, and thus we over-ascribe outcomes to individual differences, overly glorifying the winners and shaming/demonizing the losers.
With writing (or anything), if you can't say something with a calm demeanor, it's probably not worth listening to.

Rants, raves, or a negative, cynical tone suggests an ill-conceived idea; it's likely an emotional reaction.
Focus on Core
Love that sheep site linked to at the end of the article, great idea.
Less is better (DHH interview)
...or as an old-school Mac developer once put it to me: Get in your time machine and go back to 1982. Now take a survey: How many people ask for bit-mapped graphics and a mouse?
From the post: The 3G has been very spotty, especially compared to the solid reception I am seeing on the Nokia E71-2, N95-3, and HTC Advantage.

From your comment: It's not really Apple's fault that he happens to have bad 3G reception in his area.

Cognitive dissonance on your part? He compares with other devices and says that Apple's iPhone is bad at 3G.
I would not say so (and the article itself presents several compelling arguments) - developers & management just need to change their attitude a bit. Getting defensive about one's code is as old as "hello world" itself and once that is brought under control and the developer starts seeing the code as a "user" would - good unit test plans usually result. The benefits of unit-testing are easy to understand but difficult to quantify which is why management in its TTM focus tends to overlook it - you need a believer in the ranks to champion that cause. Fortunately there are plenty of those around so the questions / calls are a little premature.
I think the idea was to be entertaining.
If you read my first post, I'm not objecting to the tone so much as the way that it's used to cover the emptiness of the article. I can appreciate a good angry rant -- I've written some myself, and I tend to enjoy Zed Shaw's rants -- but an angry rant that slams things without justification is simply childishness and poor journalism. Sorry.

Edit: Oops, I totally misread your post. Sorry about that. For some reason I thought you were justifying the tone of the article. I hear that learning to read can solve this sort of problem ;-)

I agree that a good writer can discuss something without an angry rant, but I disagree that an angry/cynical tone implies an ill-conceived idea. I'd suggest that bad writers will try to use the angry rant format to hide the poverty of their ideas, but just as often a good writer will use it well as a rhetorical device, making an otherwise dull article more amusing, and driving home the important points. But either way, the format of the writing is (or rather, should be) secondary to the content.

Edit: Clarified what I wrote a bit
For his last suggestion about coloring the terminal background, it might be easier to just color the name of the machine in the prompt

e.g.: http://i34.tinypic.com/5ecthx.jpg
I hope someday I manage to build something that people laugh at as much as they're laughing at Twitter.
Ah, changing the color of the prompt is a much better idea. Thanks.
No, I don't think it really does. We could make it slightly more relevant, though.

This is obviously an annoying situation that many of us have faced, and complaining to the companies appears to accomplish very little.

So, if you were going to start a company to fix this problem, across multiple industries, where would you start?
Chances are that with taxes, cost of an internet connection (especially if your bandwidth is capped), cost of a computer, etc, they're probably getting paid negative amounts.
I'm currently hoping the price will fall when they release a new version, and hoping they release a new version before I break down and buy it
Its not. Its a reflection of the hype that's currently in place. How much would a Blackberry developer have to pay to get the same exposure? (supposedly 850K TechCrunch RSS subscribers). You just don't see that sort of free promotion directed anywhere else.
bscofield ? Whats your take?
"...but rather as an act of mercy for his keyboard"

-Classic.
They're not higher, they're lower. Developing might be free, but replicating the advantages of the App Store will cost you money. How much? I don't know, but I know getting your app in front of that many customers in the way Apple does and making it that easy to buy is going to cost a lot more than $99. I was coming from an entrepreneurial perspective; building a business on the iPhone platform just seems easier.
a problem everywhere I've worked, especially in places where the rack is 'organically grown' is power cables getting accidentally pulled when other servers are added or removed.

on all servers that I have physical access to, I use zipties on both ends of the power cable. you need a knife to unplug anything. One problem, at least, solved.

Generally, I categorize mistakes as 'mistakes of knowledge' (that is, I did the wrong thing because I believed something that was incorrect.) and 'mistakes of inattention' (where I knew it was the wrong thing to do, but I wasn't paying attention and did it anyhow.)

Generally, you don't make the same mistake of knowledge twice, so I don't worry about them much. They happen, but they only happen once. Learning, we call it.

Mistakes of inattention are much worse, in my opinion. without further action, I will almost certainly repeat a mistake of inattention.

The idea is that every time you make a 'mistake of inattention' you put in place a procedure that will prevent the mistake.
My mistake. I don't know why I read over that part. I guess I was biased since I haven't had any problems with 3G reception on the iPhone.

Edit: And I do acknowledge some of the flaws he mentions, but overall it just seems he exaggerated the gravity of the issues.
I was making a general comment. Not attacking the article, or your comment in particular.

Does anyone disagree that an angry rant, as a rule of thumb, probably means an ill-conceived idea?

EDIT: If you misread my comment, that's my fault. I should have written better.
I don't think that's the case at all. The problem is exactly the same in any language - which is why we've seen a multitude of Java / Perl / Python / Ruby / C drivers developed to do the exact same thing.

As someone has already pointed out, it's not about the threading, it's about turning a blocking request, into an asynchronous one. (Deferring work until you have the data to perform meaningful actions with it).
You should also look into software such as Puppet to reduce the amount of manual administration you have to do.
We can presuppose that these are sunk costs. One example is the man who does this instead of playing online poker. He'd be online doing something anyway.
Before you can have a successful business, you need other people to back you.

Nice. First sentence, and I'm already in full disagreement with this article.

Perhaps it would be better phrased the other way around:

If you have a successful business, other people will back you.

While I don't dismiss the use of getting other people to join you in your business venture, and certainly a single-person start-up might always appear a bit dubious, there is no need for "backing" in a funding sense, which is what this article implies. Certainly, it can help, but it's by no means necessary.
This reminds me of one of my favorite Paul Buchheit quotes:

"The internet is about harnessing the power of the bored for the benefit of the lazy."
mtw, haven't deployed it in production, but playing with it. The nice thing about DBSlayer is it provides the round-robin balancing as well! (Read from multiple slaves, transparently)
Erm, just don't download/update apps on the phone. Worked for me...
In search of Western civilisation's lost classics: a library buried in AD79 is slowly revealing its secrets
I disagree. It is often the result of a frustrating experience.
I'm not saying it's not doable, I'm just saying it's more complicated (and probably much more expensive) than the alternative. It also makes individual turnstile failures more difficult to handle. Suppose the network died on one of the turnstiles. Then you'd have to have build a caching system that it resorts to in case of network failures to prevent giving people free rides, and a way to merge state with the rest of the network once it rejoined. Of course you can do it, but I hope you're starting to see how complexity could grow faster than one might expect.

I imagine that there are better ways to solve the problem at hand (security) that don't involve adding thousands of lines of code, miles of fiber, and hundreds of thousands of dollars.
GWEI - Google Will Eat Itself
Gmail down
Looks down for some accounts. First time I have seen gmail have downtime like this.
Has anyone here used the Turk for getting people to test their webapps yet? Or better yet, for apps which need lots of raw data which is tricky to collect automatically?
yeah I'm locked out.

"but don’t worry, your account data and messages are safe. Our engineers are working to resolve this issue."
The most interesting part of this is the explosive response on Twitter.
I think the single biggest factor is fear of failure. And it's mostly because of society (but other factors too). If you start something in India and fail, you are forever termed as a failure. No one moves on - anywhere you go, your failure follows you. The stigma is unbearable to live with.

Given this scenario, getting a 'safe' job and earn money working for someone else is the better option for most.
Second time this has happened to me in the last month. Last time it was a very brief outage (like 10 minutes).
I'd be willing to bet that a class of problems caught by unit testing in Ruby/Python simply don't exist in Java due to its strong typing.

Of course the flipside of that is that Java's design patterns aren't nearly as important in Ruby/Python as they have functional programming capabilities out-of-the box. Swings and roundabouts.