skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Facebook Growth By Country and the Slowdown in App Usage
Yesbutters and Whynotters
Beautiful Code: False Optimizations
i debated on keeping the zoom feature or not. yes. you can really strip that sucker down and have an iphone-like interface (i.e. touch w/o real buttons).
This article slipped through the cracks a few days ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=249387
It's a bit slow from Australia to.

It's a really excellent idea and a very simple implementation, like others though I think it needs some more explanation. Good luck.
Amazon’s S3 Web Service, our #1 cause of failure
I love globals, or Google Core Dump
Let's try: "At this point, anyone proposing to write their software in Lisp should be prepared to explain what they know about programming that Google, Yahoo and Amazon don't."

How does it sound?
History Tables in a Database
Nokia vs Apple in The Internet Mobile Device Market
LinkedIn says they're working on an API, but I haven't heard anything other than "part of it is OpenSocial"
Most Of Consumers Find Advertising On Online Videos Reasonable
"At least three in four digital video consumers said they would find it 'reasonable' for advertising to appear in the free digital distribution of full-length TV shows and movies."
S3 outage - Why Smugmug wasn't affected
Many thanks for this badly needed whack on the side of the head. I'd lately gotten so involved in stuff like reducing the number of SQL queries that I'd lost sight of one of the basics: push the benefits, not the features. Now completely rethinking how to get the message across.
Picking and remembering strong passwords isn't really a pain. There are several systems that are easy to use and easy to remember.

I've been using Diceware (hand-rolled for really secure, PRNG-based for most web apps) for a while and have no trouble remembering the handful I need regularly. Others go in a password safe where they belong.
Supporting Your Applications During the Profile Transition
For the last few months I've been part of a distributed team of 4-5 members. First time for me--all my client work has been remote, but It's usually just me and at most one other person.

I haven't had much trouble working with one other person, like the first poster modern communication tech does it fine for me. People complain that physically meeting only scales to as many people as can fit comfortably in a small conference room, but I'd say meeting electronically doesn't really scale past 2 or 3.

Even with just a 4-5 member team, all hands meetings are indeed phone calls that drag on (we're getting a bit better at keeping them brief).

And "software design debates rapidly turn into a game of telephone"--oh yes. I may be wrong, but I fancy I have an excellent memory for the points and outcomes of such discussions, and it's endlessly frustrating to me to recap over and over when the same thing comes up next week, and the week after, etc.. Actually I don't know if that would be improved by being closer--besides this, the largest software team I've been on was 3 in person, years ago.

On the other hand, the other four or so members of the team all are on the west coast and have met--I'm the only one on the east coast. That's a problem for scheduling meetings sometimes, but I don't feel out of the loop or insecure. Part of that, no doubt, is that I'm not a founder--just a contractor. I care about the product as something I've put substantial work into, but it's not my baby and I'm not worried about someone stealing my baby away. There are four of us contractors building the product for the two not-very-technical founders. I guess that's another hot topic.
So of the increasingly fragmented population, one Chinese University has slightly more phD candidates than any other university.

Can't say that it really surprises me. What does surprise me is that the economist picked this up; generally their more 'internationally neutral' than blatantly pro-US.
Here's one I'd like to see:

Why not have a simple geolocation service that matched where you're going with people in cars that will be going your direction soon? Twitter that you want to go cross-town and in seconds you get a half dozen dynamically updated commuters that are going your way. Combine this with point-by-point gps instructions from point A to B, the commuter you select gets routing information that allows them to stop at an intersection and honk to let you know your ride is here. The service consists of three parts: (1) where you're going (and where you are via GPS) (2) a back end database that can figure out from all the real-time information who matches up (3) let you choose from the options - maybe based on the kind of car, their reputation/reliability, etc. Not too hard - in fact either Twitter or FriendFeed could be a big hunk of this business.

If geolocation and routing allowed people with cars to pick up people with minimum inconvenience, and if enough people with iPhone 3G-type phones could get streamed updated directions, and if there was a simple way to establish reputation, this could change how people commute and travel in cities, saving a tremendous amount of energy.

Posted on this at http://www.cartwrightreed.com/2008/07/off-topic.html
Code review - The meaningless ritual
Common misconceptions in web application development
Ask HN: Books on Firefox Extension Development
I come from a background of PHP/MySQL programming and am looking to create a FireFox extension. I am not happy with the resources I found online and want to buy some good books on the topic. Anyone have any suggestions? (I've been searching Amazon but many of the books look either outdated or have bad reviews).
The other side of Paul Graham's Coin: Ideas on the kind of VC we'd like to get funded by
a full copy/paste of http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/cab-finder-application/ ?
The Microsoft conundrum
S3 Failure Raises Questions About Cloud Design
Presumably people who like taking upskirt shots won't use the new iPhone and less nefarious iPhone users will all have to suffer the obnoxious shutter sound. This is nothing more than tokenism and hence I won't be dispensing any brownie points.
Explaining Lisp to my father
But I have to wonder: is there a better way?

The answer is a language that can use a unified syntax for both generating markup and server-side functionality at the same time. There's probably only one candidate at the moment, and that's Lisp with a special set of macros that translate to HTML tags on output. The beauty of it is that S-expressions nicely map to markup and can execute stuff on the server. This macro library does exist and I think I saw it here at YCnews. It was a video and unfortunately I can't find it now.

There's one bit missing in this solution though: the client side. Can Lisp be translated to JavaScript? Something suggests that's perfectly possible.
According to Google: Gmail is not the top option for mail. No more
Until last week, typing mail and then I am Feeling Lucky brought you straight to GMail.

For over than a week, it redirect to Yahoo! mail.

(I found out this by using goosh.org "l mail" command)
A while ago I thought about the same idea, but I found out Google is already working on it http://labs.google.com/ridefinder
Hmm. At the moment there seems to be a pattern creeping in of some of the majors allowing people to do non-deliverable trades against metal prices on futures exchanges (and for that matter NDFs on currencies which aren't liquid, I think it's the same trick underneath). I think this is very cool and wonder whether it could be slowly expanded further. For example - people could instead take holdings into funds linked to diversified investments in specific investments or currency pairs in online games.

But always using the FX approach to trading: Buy/sell, base/terms, three-letter-code currencies, spot/fwd and swap.

If liquidity emerged for more markets from user requests on the site, you could add them later. To be honest, it's such an obvious idea that there's either something wrong with it, or someone is doing it already, or both.
If upskirts are so endemic to Japan that the manufacturers are taking proactive measures with iPhones, its safe to assume they will be doing likewise with other camera phones as well.
Jerry,

I totally agree that things could always be better and that incentives are the key to this. There is a business concept from the 80s called 'open book management' where everyone in the company sees where all the money goes. This is more transparency than even public companies have.

I think it could be a technique that would get everyone from accounting to IT more involved in the business. I also think there needs to be much shorter expectations of how long someone will work for a company. Hollywood is on to something with the way they bring together small teams to make a film that then disband and reform in a new configuration for the next film. I wonder what would happen if every person in the company had to choose each year whether they want to continue with the company. They would in effect have a one year job. This might make their sense of urgency and priority for the 52 weeks within that year much more focused. It might also form a company with much more dedicated people who really want to be there.
Should be called "6 Signs you don't care about your HR workers".
Yahoo Announces Settlement with Carl Icahn
Can Lisp be translated to JavaScript?

Check out ParenScript (http://common-lisp.net/project/parenscript/).
Why Japan is at once one of the most hilarious and one of the most disgusting places on earth:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDSdcxzz6uE

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enjo_k%C5%8Dsai
From the article:

OpenDNS also uses their community to drive new features and tag new malware sites. Users submit ideas and vote on them in a Digg-like interface. And when a user blacklists a site and tags it with a category, other users are asked to verify. If they do, the site is added to the general category blacklist as well.

Sounds exploitable...
i was using a greylisting approach which filtered a lot of spam, but was annoying for customers who had to wait an hour to receive an initial e-mail from a new contact.

i've since switched back to postini. i haven't seen any changes on way or the other since their google acquisition, but their filtering is very accurate and they offer a webmail-like interface for checking/forwarding spam and adjusting settings.
That code sample is either really old or a good example of why you should read up on the framework your using
"Economist.com blogs are lightly moderated debates in which journalists from The Economist Newspaper, Economist.com and the Economist Intelligence Unit post their thoughts and observations, and which are open to comment and argument from anybody who cares to intervene."

It's commentary.

No soup for you.
Nice work Nirmal, just sent you an email..
This is built in to the Maps functionality on the iPhone. Typing in "taxi" will show me the details of the nearest cab companies and touching the phone number that appears will let me call them.

Getting the nearest free cab to drive to me would take a little bit more than an iPhone app - you'd need a whole new business model built around it.
"Startup Ideas We'd Like to Fund" and the ensuing pandemonium
PG,

When does an entrepreneur stop being and entrepreneur and become an employee? A passive, unassuming employee willfully blinded by the facade of calling oneself an entrepreneur.

After reading your post "Startup Ideas We'd Like to Fund" along with 200-some comments, everything just seems watered down. It seems all too "Model T". Its as if people are willing to build these products just to build products. Wheres the passion?

Myself and fellow CS buddies have been seriously evaluating the option of applying to ycombinator with something we've have been working on. But something just doesn't feel right.

I would also argue that with ~$25,000, its not the ideas your funding Paul, its really the people.

Does anyone else feel the way i do, or is it just me ...

TC.
I use FFMPEG

<? exec("ffmpeg [check the ffmpeg man pages for proper use]") ?>

ffmpeg isn't limited to mp3s, it can encode/decode pretty much anything.
the only 3 things that will consistently bring users back:
1. utilitarian value
2. entertainment (fight the habituation battle or pace your users?!!)
3. community (and let's face it - "let's all sign up there instead!!!" is almost as easy as pie nowadays)
Everyone is treating this failure as if them managing a MogileFS system (or just sticking the content on network attached storage) would never see downtime. It's silly.

Maybe you could have done better. Maybe you would have lost all your data permanently. Let's not be so over-the-top that we think our infrastructures don't have vulnerabilities. That's what I like about Smugmug. They at least cop to the fact that their more expensive internal systems had problems too.
As far as I'm aware all manufactures of camera phones are required to produce a noise when taking a snap
Icahn Backs Down From Yahoo Proxy Fight In Return For Three Yahoo Board Seats
How To Make Your Users Hate You
I don't think it has anything to do with Google saying that Gmail isn't the best/top option. It depends on their ranking system. The "I am feeling lucky" button takes you to the first result in the search. So maybe Yahoo Mail has beaten Gmail in the Google ranking.

Besides, it's only in Gnoosh, the same takes place when I type "mail" and then do "I am feeling lucky" search. It still takes me to Yahoo Mail
some food for thought: for something that's still supposed growing in terms of raw numbers, the active usage seems to be going down??!
I love the last one: XML is not a database, so don't treat is as one... Major pet peeve for me...
A bit slow, but steadily I find I can find what songs I want and build up those playlists. Feels good - http://webpoet.wordpress.com/2008/07/21/mean-green/
yep. That's just precisely (and only) what it is.
F# and the WebDevelopment toolkit offers one language (OCaml) that can be used both client and server-side, including continuations and such across the client-server boundary. The OCaml code translates seamlessly into JavaScript.
Well, step it down several notches. Would you trust the Bush administration to choose what books are "ok"?
That's weird, as I just purchased a simple Dell machine for our office today and I had an additional cost of around $100 to downgrade to XP. It wasn't a special XP box, just the Vostro so perhaps that is why.
A friend who worked at a japanese phone manufacturer told me that they have to have this feature to be able to market it....
In the two years I have been there I never saw a phone that didn't make a shutter sound (and god how obnoscious my phone's shutter sound was)...
Possibly under the clever disguise of a “Singleton”. Not a bad thing after all, that moronic “design pattern”, because it ultimately allowed to counter cargo cult programmers’ accusations of “globals are evil” with equally powerful cargo cult argument of “it’s a design pattern”.

Beautiful.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RrAyXyqCXeY&NR=1 This is even funnier :D It would be cool to make my toilet like that, i could get my head up for some fresh air.
Because the concern is low-price and spec, not size.
Beware of social networking overload
Might be a good service, but the name is highly inappropriate. Censorship is the opposite of being open. Perhaps "CensorDNS" would have been more accurate.
Itching my programming nerve
Yes you start seeding, without uploading a single bit. People connect to your public/private tracker, and start downloading the data from you and from other downloaders who have already downloaded very small chunks of the file.

But you're right this solution is a bit simpler for the average user.
Garage Door Style Menu using jQuery
Presumably there are other digital cameras that do not make a sound when taking a picture and these are the ones that are used. My gripe isn't with Apple but the legislation which I imagine hasn't really amounted to much.
I use Linux at work, and I wish there were a Linux version that I could try out. Sadly, I imagine @webwright & co. would be insane to waste any time writing a desktop client for such a small market. Are there alternatives for Linux?
WebMonkey’s Five Best Firebug Extensions
Greylisting also brought me some relief for a while, but I don't think it is a longterm solution. Will check out postinit, thanks!
nah, it's not just you. "CS" would be? Counter-Strike?

I havent read those comments, btw. Knew something like that would happen.
UBF and VM opcocde design (and why it didn't spread like XML)
check out VideoEgg.com
IPhone Native Apps vs. iPhone Web Apps
computer science?
This relates to the February outage, and not the recent outage.
I had the same trouble trying to explain FP to my friend/programmer buddy. The best I could come up was FP lets you write efficient code and you can be as clever as you want.

Another technology that I was stumped trying to explain to laymen was IoC (Inversion of Control) containers. I used a lot of cliches like "holy grail of programming" etc., but only someone who has used IoC containers can appreciate how easily you can build loosely cooupled components.

There must be better ways of explaining FP to laymen or may be not at all...
still searching after 2 minutes...
Lisp is hardly the only answer. Smalltalk does this just fine in the Seaside framework, which threw out templates to get rid of this exact mess. We write our html, server side code, and client side ajax code pretty much entirely in Smalltalk.

renderContentOn: html
50 timesRepeat:
[ html div
class: #SomeStyle;
onClick: (html element hide);
with: 'Who needs HTML?' ]
This awesome! I've been meaning to do this myself (not as a business, just for my own docs) for about . . . 10 years or so, but it sounded so boring. I'm pretty sure I'll send off some of those green envelopes!
Trading Water
I was going to post that this new design change will cause a massive user backlash (ala News Feed), but then I realized they're doing it during the summer when many people are on vacation/busy and have less time to actively complain to their friends.

I think we'll see some serious complaining, but not as much as the News Feed changes which caused a "Face-stalker" uproar.
Freedom Downtime (complete movie) on Google Video
I liked this comment from/on the post:

Cory on July 21st, 2008 3:16 am

My Father is a carpenter and a hobby mechanic. My best shot and explaining how Lisp is different would be something like:
Programming languages are collections of tools to make products. “Language A vs. Language B” is usually similar to “Saws and Hammers vs. Wrenches and Screwdrivers”. Lisp, however, is a collection of solid and useful tools that are amazingly made entirely out of Lego bricks. If you need a new tool, you can easily make one on the fly. You can even build configurable Lego machines that spit out custom Lego creations on demand. But, you have to be careful that you don’t end up with a shop full of oddities that even you don’t understand anymore.
i don't disagree with what you're saying, but its interesting that this article about what they want to fund totally shifted what you saw.

to put money down on what is essentially nothing more than an idea, you have to be investing in the people as just as much as you're investing in the idea. a good idea backed by a team of monkeys on keyboards will surely eventually produce and launch the startup, as per the infinite monkey theorem. what you're investing in is the people backing the idea, trusting that they're quality enough to do a good job to create a good company and product.
I can view it in a browser just fine.
The credit card minimum payment trap
The C Book [free book]
I would have a hard time explaining bit torrent to my parents.
I'm curious, how does the cost of bandwidth in Sweden compare to the US?
"But what we had never considered is that our "anti-normalization" design principle also relates to stability of design."

You might not have thought of it. But Werner Vogels did.

http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2007/12/eventually_consi...
If you think that Google has a minimalist UI, you should check http://www.trazhi.com :)
Countadown keishi!

The two sweetest words in the Japanese language!
You broke my sarcasm meter. :) But I plan to take a different approach. You can read my first post here: http://belifesavvy.com/2008/07/21/the-credit-card-minimum-pa...
Luckily for the founders of YouTube they were bought by Google. And given the current fight with Viacom I don't know if I would ever want to be in a similar situation.
what happens when your recipient is on a faster connection and "catches up" with your upload?
How To Song Write
Simple key tools on How To Song Write
Cool post.

It is very easy, as engineers, to forget how incredibly important it is to articulate what we work on. Not only to explain to our families, but to bridge the gap between the technical and the non-technical people.

Engineers, specially really good ones, a lot of times feel proud of understanding something no one else does. Proud to the point of not caring whether the audience understand even though you might be in a setting where it is to your advantage to have your audience understand (for example, when you are trying to tell people why your product is better than the competition's).

More people in the technical world should strive to bridge the gap rather than widen it to show their "superior intelligence." (Which isn't all that superior, it's far smarter to be able to communicate, which makes you useful. Inability to communicate makes you merely a curiosity)
7 iPhone Apps to Boost Your Productivity
A similar goal in mantra form: Make Google-fu obsolete.
Rate / Review our startup - samfind - we make websites handy
My spiel goes something like it means programming without side effects, which are changes in the state of the world caused by performing computation. Such as opening a gateway to the Hell Dimension. People generally agree then that functional programming is a good thing.
Strategy: Front S3 with a Caching Proxy
Can I get some funding?
I have a information security site http://secgeeks.com i have some ideas.it is popular site with thousands of visitors daily.to implement those ideas i would like to have some funding.what you think?is it possible to get some funding based on this site?if not then what will you suggest?i am open to your suggestions.
Facebook's apps have annoyed me into not using them. Typically I get invites for apps that look like:

Test your movie knowledge with this quiz ...

You take the quiz, and then it won't give you the results unless you spam all your friends with an invite to the same quiz. With the amount of spammy stuff on there I am not surprised if the app usage tails off ...
Nice post, but rather inconsequential: Who needs who more, after all? VCs get to choose, right? They are the ones with the money. Companies go after the VCs not the other way around. VCs are the ones with their staff filtering phone calls, not the other way around.

This post strikes me as "in a perfect world, [...]". Rather inconsequential.

Here's mine: In a perfect world, Ferraris would cost $3000 USD, but only I'd be able to buy one. Yeah, whatever.
You probably get blocked until your browser times out. Then the question is if your browser can resume (tools like wget can easily resume, for example).