skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There is a whole entire book about this concept, and it was written in 1971, so you won't have to endure Ron Paul to learn the ideas in it. It's "Rules for Radicals" by Saul Alinsky. Alinsky is a famous leftist, but he was also a South Side community organizer in Chicago, 15 years before Obama was.

The book is unabashedly leftist in ways that are almost quaint, but it's also front-to-back pragmatic and filled with advice. It's my favorite marketing book ever.
hey jaanix is great... reminds me of old radio & TV tunig !! :)
Disclaimer: My company's an EngineYard customer.

1) In our experience, EngineYard has provided amazing customer service 100% of the time. They helped us debug some very nasty problems with connections, server set-ups, proxies (not EY proxies, proxies that our customers had installed), IE download header craptasticness, etc. It's like having a team of 24/7, very knowledgeable Rails sys admins.

2) The infrastructure they provide is top notch. The database is blazing fast, so's the SAN. Bandwidth is rock-solid. Putting together a similarly performant setup would take weeks of our time - which we'd much rather spend on developing our product.

3) Downtime is inevitable on any host. Anyone who tells you that their data centre will never go down is lying. Whole data centres do go down. UPS's fail. Software issues develop. It's part of the job. If you can't deal with it, don't get into web start-ups. Get this into your head: shit happens. The real question is not whether there is downtime, but how quickly they get things back up.

In this case, they figured out the cause of the failure within an hour and started bringing customer slices back up 20 minutes later. All customers were back up within about 4 hours. I think that's pretty good.

4) If you really can't afford to have any downtime at all, then you set up your site in two separate data centres, with a failover between the two. If you did that, then this issue won't have affected you, except for increasing load a little.

I'm not saying EngineYard are perfect, but for that price, I believe they're the best damn rails host you can find anywhere.
That's probably a compliment to the picwing guys :) An idea that seems obvious in retrospect is probably a good idea. But I'm betting it wasn't obvious to a lot of people before the TC article. If you said, four months ago, that you wanted to "view your photostream across any medium", you'd get plenty of blank stares :)
Hey, interesting view...Did not think of it that way.

FYI, This article has been quoted intensively: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_failures_serious...
A useful flex regex tool
We're hosted with EY for one reason: When the shit hits the fan (which it will) - I want an army of rocket scientists at my back figuring out what's up. I have just that and I'm as happy as can be.
Software I can't work without
It is by logic we prove, it is by intuition that we invent.
— Henri Poincare

It's very encouraging to hear that proving theorems is difficult for real mathematicians too.
YooPlace Ranks Popular Twitter Items With Replies, Mirroring Hacker News
One great point about this system is that they also offer an audio CAPTCHA by default. This makes it one of the easiest ways to get an accessible (as much as is possible) CAPTCHA.
For $249 you could just buy a mini laptop :/
It's sort of funny seeing this, after CO2Stats.

Surely electronic picture frames are sort of bad in terms of using energy needlessly? Is there technology yet that only uses power when the display changes, and not all the time?
There is still at attitude among many self-professed geeks that people who can't write their own software should take whatever they're given and like it. After all, it's free, right? Such ingratitude!

I think if there's hope for the Linux desktop it will come from Google, because they have a data-driven culture (and a pile of money). If they set up a usability lab and the statistics show that 79% of users completed their tasks 62% faster when the interface was like this then that's what they'll do, no-one will argue, they'll just get on with it.
What you have done in you example is reinvent XML with round parenthesis instead of pointy brackets. Why is this better? The only difference is that you leave out the redundant end tags, which are there for good reason.

Yes, XML requires a library to parse - so does s-expressions! The reason XML seem more complex than sexprs is that it defines a higher-level syntax e.g. with element/attribute-distinctions. You have reinvented that yourself in you example, so you need a spec for it and you need the parser to support it. Also the rules of encodings and character sets have to be specified (e.g. how do you detect the encoding of a file? Which characters count as whitespace?). You will end up with a spec much like XML, except with round parentheses. (OK, XML is also complex because of DTD's but that is a optional part. If you want something like DTD's for sexprs, again, you have to specify it, and you get something like XML.)

Btw. there is no heuristics for recovery in XML. XML parsers must fail when encountering malformed syntax. This is one of the major (and controversial) differences between XML and HTML.

I appreciate s-expressions as a syntax for a programming language. But code is a very different use case than documents. I wouldn't like to program in XML syntax either! E.g. programs (hopefully) don't have deeply nested structures covering several pages. That is common in documents, hence the importance of the redundant end tag.

I like sexprs for code and data, but for documents they are only simpler if you ignore a lot of real-world issues.
I've noticed that a lot of really smart people are just complete idiots when it comes to security.
The actual title of the article is "Has the cloud failed?", can we please not put our own editorial spin on things when submitting articles? We'll read them and make up our own minds.
When your server fails, you know how to fix it. When the cloud fails, you hope that somebody will be able to fix it soon.

Well, not really. If your application is in a datacentre somewhere, whether that's a hosting provider or somewhere within your organization, then it might be a physical box, or a VM, or a running in a cluster or a cloud, it doesn't matter. What does matter is that there are capable infrastructure specialists on-hand to deal with any issues. That hasn't changed and won't ever change.
"Electronic paper" is designed this way.
Apple worth more than Google, but so what?
Junk. Based on stats being for w3schools.com, ie web devs, not the general population.
This is definately a sign that Apple is preparing to flex it's financial muscles to control the emerging market of portable computing devices.

If they can bring these techniques to market, their competitors just won't be able to compete - no-one else has the vertical integration from chip design through to application software. I can't see how companies like Nokia can respond to Apple gainng, for example, 25% extra battery life through using the techniques described in these patents. They risk getting shut out of the market for 10 years, allowing Apple to install an empire in the portable market similar to that owned by Microsoft in the desktop world.

Personally, I'm not so sure that that is a good thing, and I say that as a complete and utter Apple devotee (iPod shuffle, iPhone 3G, iBook, Macbook and iMac 20" at home).
I'm confused as well. XML is fantastic for providing an easy way to roll customized data storage and interchange documents.

The article is pointing to technologies like JSON as a "backlash" to XML. I only use JSON when sending PHP objects directly to javascript to manipulate. Why create a data interchange format if you don't need to?
hey i also grew up with GW and QuickBasic ;)
According to the email I got from them:

At 12:15 PDT today, we experienced a failure of our switching infrastructure on cluster EY02. We are incredibly sorry about this issue and wish to convey all of the information we presently possess.

The result of this failure was blocked IO from some slices to the SAN shelves. Based on the logs and diagnostic output available to engineers, it seems likely a software issue with one of the modules in the switches is at fault. We have captured the necessary log entries from the switches, and we are working with the vendor to identify the cause of the errors. (In case you are curious - our switching infrastructure utilizes 4 stacked switches, all interconnected for full redundancy.)
Four Offbeat Open Source Browsers
In production and cheap yet?
http://www.picwing.com/about

Just like jobsyndicate and startuply, nice copy. Perhaps PG looks for hackers, who are also writers :)
CouchSurfing International Inc was registered as a non-profit and is now a charity.

Knowing a bit about it (having been a volunteer for the org) I think the crash was extremely badly handled. For better or worse, many people were relying on the service to find places to stay, connect with people in foreign cities, and so on. Leaving those people high and dry is bad karma. Likewise, users should be encouraged to make "backups" in the form of phone nos, email addresses, etc if the reliability of the site can't be guaranteed.

I think the problem is a classic one in technology. The geeks at the helm are over confident. Their self belief clouds their judgement with regards to backups, failure planning, and so on.
IMDB definitely sucks - actually I was sure that the herd had already moved on to something better, and was only too lazy too look around for it yet.

What are most people using these days? Steve Jobs showed "rotten tomatoes" in his iTunes-Video presentation, maybe that is where everybody is heading these days?
Why? That just seems like a way to accumulate baggage. It seems more efficient to admit failure and move on.
Frontier Daze: When it comes to the Internet we still have to defend ourselves.
The article was about police who were suspicious of science and scientists doing experiments in home labs.

My question about whether felideon (the commenter who said he/she would like say "wow that's so cool" upon meeting a scientist was a cop or not was a serious question. We could use more police with a science-friendly attitude.
Biotechnology and Interaction Design
Some really inspiring thoughts on biotechnology and its relationship with programming and interaction design.
I thought REST was just a synonym for CDR :)
I once bought a broadband router that was marked down ridiculously cheap. It had all the features I wanted, and it was half the price of any of the others. When I got it home, everything was running slowly. After poking around, I discovered that my machines' DNS servers had changed from Time Warner Cable's to IP addresses in China!

If self signed certificates were indistinguishable, I may have been making connections through man in the middle machine located there without any way of knowing.
Yes, you can get Ubuntu Server Edition from http://www.ubuntu.com/products/whatisubuntu/serveredition

We have been using it on our servers and haven't had any problems.
I really want lynx for my iPhone! Sometimes what I want is accessible that way, the connection is poor, and the page would load much faster that way!
Uh, what? Sun spots come from the magnetic flux tubes from the inner layers becoming unstable and rising to the surface, forming loops. If anything, I'd guess that sunspots inhibit the flow. The mixing happens mostly because of the persistent convection cells in the sun and of course the turbulence.

I don't know offhand the answer to the parent's question, but in my experience, the above doesn't make sense.
It's the stuff that is used in the Kindle and Sony Reader displays (also in that upcoming Esquire magazine cover http://www.hackaday.com/2008/07/30/esquires-hackable-e-paper... ). I know the refresh rates are still very "1st generation", but have no idea about how far along color displays are though.
I guess you can use the skype outage of last year (I think??) as an example of this, as skype is still somewhat p2p. And it wasn't a short outage, not compared to EC2 etc.
The magnetic activity doesn't come from the fusion reaction directly. The sun has a differential rotation profile. Some layers rotate faster than others. This stretches the magnetic flux tubes as they pass through these layers, increasing their strength. If you drop some oil in a river which is not moving at a uniform speed, the oil spot will get deformed and stretched.

(it sounds like voodoo magic, I hate that explanation, but it's the textbook version as far as I can remember)
This means we'll see more blogging for the sake of blogging
Yeah, because Edison gave up after a couple hundred failures. That's why it's so dark in here.
Agreed. My former advisor was as good as anyone in that field. He has a very good introduction (... for a grad course in physics) to the dynamo problem (aka.: the solar cycle) at http://solarphysics.livingreviews.org/Articles/lrsp-2005-2/

It is fair to say that solar dynamo modelling has not yet recovered from this four-way punch, in that nothing remotely resembling concensus currently exists as to the mode of operation of the solar dynamo

From the Brief historical survey, which is at least partly readable.
SproutCore Presentation
Higher Education - Dangerously Close to Becoming Irrelevant
Imagine your bank's certificate says that they run their web site. If one day the certificate changes to a self-signed one, you have clear evidence of a man in the middle attack.

What should the browser do in this situation? Someone pointed out that an HTTPS connection with an unknown self-signed certificate identifies the site just as well as a plain HTTP connection, suggesting that we should treat both connections as equally insecure: so simply hide the yellow bar.

please, don't try to tell me that users look at the yellow bar

Lets imagine a user who never expects the yellow bar. In the example above, when there is strong evidence of a man in the middle attack, the only warning the user gets is that a UI element which they don't notice is unexpectedly hidden.

You really want to warn the user in this situation, so Firefox gives them a big error message and makes them take positive action (adding the unverified, possibly malicious, certificate to their list of fully trusted root certificates) before they can get past it. That is fair enough.

But then there is the kicker. The browser can only tell that a certificate has changed if it has already recorded the old one. It can't distinguish between a site which has always had a self-signed certificate and one which just happens to have one today, unless it recorded the certificate yesterday. So it treats both as man in the middle attacks, which explains why Firefox will always give you a warning about unverified certificates until you verify them yourself.
Wow, clever way to bootstrap your user-generated news system.
Yeah, let's factor in per capita:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_laureates_per_capita
The Logistic Map, Chaos and Bifurcation Diagrams
I do not know what is about his videos that give this profound feeling not of sadness or joy, but of beauty.
No, there's no good way to check for a dupe besides watching all the incoming stories. So don't get offended if your submission gets killed; it's not a mark against you.
One can draw a bifurcation diagram with nothing but a pencil and a pocket calculator, trying different values of r and finding the fixed points / orbits. I think it's the coolest thing one can do with high school arithmetics.
7 Reasons Why You Should Pursue Your Own Projects
Pricey but I bought one. Mom's birthday is right around the corner and I love supporting a small and new startup.
Creating Social Networks Few Want
Megginson's essay "All markup ends up looking like XML" compares XML, JSON and s-exp

http://www.megginson.com/blogs/quoderat/2007/01/03/all-marku...
I still use IMDB but only for "who was that guy in that movie" situations. Don't really use anything for movie recommendations. Blockbuster.com gives horrible recs (I use their total access service) and I haven't found anything else worth mentioning. Seems like an accessible space if there are a lot of marketing dollars at hand.
Instruction, esp. in trivial skills, is one of the Web’s great giveaways (brief YC mention).
Court says copyrights apply even for free software
I'm so sick of these arguments. The answer is the same as it is to questions like "what college should I attend?", "what's the best city to live in?" or "who's the smartest person in the world?". It _depends_.

Although I do enjoy hearing someone's individual story or line of thinking, bashing one method over the other is ridiculous.

From my understanding of the capital expenditures/computing power involved, a Company like Heroku pretty much has to take investment of some sort (unless the founders are rich) or risk providing users with sub par performance. Companies like Wufoo not so much. There is no "better" method only a "better fit" for the type of business you have and are trying to run.
Lessons From Netflix’s Fail Week
P2P vs. the Cloud
Don't be afraid to delete code
Ask HN: What do you use for HTML sanitization?
There's some established HTML sanitization solutions like HTML Purifier in PHP, but I can't seem to find their counterparts in either Java or .Net. Code samples in C# and Java are floating around, but I haven't seen anything like a project that's undergone serious testing and is being updated for new security threats on an ongoing basis.

Heck, I'd pay for a commercial component if it was well maintained. Any suggestions? Or, this being Hacker News - would someone want to create such a component as a mini-ISV startup?
Yeah it was a 2ndary idea we mentioned in sept 2007 application. Like do you have any other ideas we may find of interest.

Though we were not looking at it from a hardware standpoint, but social photo software.

Either way its great to see these devices start catching on and congrats to these guys!
That's a nice article-- it's good to see that there are folks who a) recognize the coolness of a hack like this, and b) take the time to try to find out who to credit.
I don't do HTML sanitization. I escape everything except [A-Za-z0-9,. ].

Attempts to sanitize HTML (or SQL...) by eliminating a set of "dangerous" inputs inevitably end up as whack-a-mole processes as people keep discovering new evil things to throw at you. The only secure solution is to escape everything except a small set of "safe" inputs -- this is analogous to the situation with packet filtering firewalls, where "default deny all" is widely accepted as the right way to do things.
I'd love to get people's thoughts on this as well. What are the best ways to automatically back up your DB.
here's some more

http://www.fileformat.info/tool/regex.htm

http://www.rexv.org/

http://www.txt2re.com/
(this one's particularly good for your next acid session)

http://brosinski.com/regex/ for eclipse

http://www.weitz.de/regex-coach/

http://regex.larsolavtorvik.com/

http://www.regexbuddy.com/

(this one costs a few $)

http://www.regextester.com/

(... and the one in activestate Komodo. i don't use any o these, i have my Friedl book and i try to understand the edge and cornder cases, build a test suite)
Chinese software firm challenges Microsoft
One more --

Also see chapter 22 in Shriram Krishanamurthi's _Programming Languages: Application and Interpretation_.
(http://www.cs.brown.edu/~sk/Publications/Books/ProgLangs/200...)

The goal of the chapter is essentially, "Now that we've built our own small programming language on top of Scheme, how can we reduce the number of Scheme elements that it relies on directly?" Among other things, he shows how to use the Y combinator to allow recursive function definitions without having to use Scheme's define.
Glad you have got great ROI Shabda and I wish you the best of success with your start up.
When I see something like this, my first thought is, "I wonder how easily this could be hacked so I could display whatever picture I wanted on random people's photo frames?"
When a buzzword looks like it may fail, add on another buzzword!!

Cloud computing = out.

P2P cloud computing = in! yey
How much you wanna bet some disgruntled eng snuck that bug in?
Well, cloud computing is definitely a buzzword, but it's far from being out - check out some SIGMOD 2008 papers.
People are jumping in and getting press as we speak: http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/08/16/great-review-site-for-i...

:)
BTW. the HTML is not valid XML so your example is a bit misleading. The P-elements contain the paragraphs rather than delimit them. The XML would be more verbose since it needs end-tags for P:

<p>Note that you would also need to gzip your
s-expressions if you are concerned about size.</p>

The s-expr OTOH would be more confusing, because there isn't a clear distinction between element-name and content:

(p Note that you would also need to gzip your
s-expressions if you are concerned about size.)

You might want to choose a different syntax to make the distinction clearer:

(p "Note that you would also need to gzip your
s-expressions if you are concerned about size.")

or:

((p) Note that you would also need to gzip your
s-expressions if you are concerned about size.)

In the end, you have to make some of the same trade-off decisions that the designers of SGML and XML did. Just saying that s-expressions are simpler than XML is like saying ASCII is simpler than s-expressions: True, but kind of missing the point.
Quickly put data from MySQL to the Web with DrasticGrid
At my local polls, the semiannual elections contain ballots for 5 or six different districts (federal, state, county, town, school district, fire district, police district) as well as referendums on several tax proposals and even things like road improvement projects.

The reason that doesn't happen in Australia is because state and federal elections cannot be held on the same day.
Make music special again: 1 album per day
Please, no politics. If I wanted to read a forum where every thread was used as an excuse for off-topic Bush-bashing I'd read.... well, pretty much any other forum in existence.
Our group has already submitted something like that... let's see...
5 minutes per frame
Why The MMORPG Subscription-Based Business Model Is Broken
Where's this paranoia coming from? Do you really live in a world where the police are the thing that stops ten-year-olds from reading Calculus textbooks?
LeadVine: Targeted Business Networking
Wisdomap: Simple Mind Maps
Reformat the Planet: documentary about the Chiptune scene
The Priorities of a Venture Capitalist
I agree with the vast majority of your statement, but it could just as easily be 5% of $100M vs. 47% of 50M. The amount of dilution that occurs with these startups who receive multiple rounds of funding is borderline unbelievable.
The Risk in Using Twitter as a Public Utility
I downloaded FreeMind per a comment posted on HN a few days ago, and so, am liking it. Its pretty comprehensive, and although I have only used it for minimal mind-maps, the fact that there are keyboard shortcuts for most of the important functionality definitely makes it very useful.

And its Java, so I can run it across my Windows and mac boxes.
I was reminded of this quote:

"If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. Then quit. There's no use being a damn fool about it."
--W.C. Fields