skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Second Reality, in particular, the Mandelbrot fractal zooming part. Realtime Mandelbrot zooming, in 1993, on a 486
- this really made me go "wow", if you know what I mean.
Then it was that Globe zooming thing in 3DMark, don't remember which one - it should impress casual observe more, but I was not so impresed - I know that modern 3D card and CPU should be able to handle it.
Afterwards, it was Google Earth that made me go this kind of "wow"
Hahaha, you could make a biginturl out of this.
If you made that the law people would simply sell it at $100 billion dollars.
In which ways is it better than EVE Online ?
I love the application idea but it'll only be possible on jailbroken phones because Apple doesn't allow direct access to the system preferences (the entire SCPreferences etc. is undocumented by Apple) and I expect that trying to accessing them would get your app. booted from the App Store.
I'm not so sure it'll work. It'll work for the AP, but the AP was never in trouble.
Update on Linux/Foxconn issue by Ubuntu dev. Matthew Garrett
It seems to me that a way to potentially creep up on google would be to make a specialist search engine. Some topic area that google is not so useful for searching on. Make a search system that 'understands' the domain in question, allowing it to index and search it really effectively.

As a random example, say, a movies search engine. If it could be consistently more useful than google for finding out information about movies, directors, actors, the movie industry etc., then it could become the 'go to' tool for movie search. Potentially, this success could then be leveraged to move into other areas of search.
Next: A Medical Wikipedia
Well, this happens with the sort of troll posts I mentioned too.
Now it's not responding at all. Don't sell your Google stock just yet.
Minda ICT: Simple interests; Great uses: Why a computer is slowwwww....
Too broad. What's the position? What's the stage of the company? I need more info before I could offer any advice. There's not one magic question for all situations.
Why do you consider "turning off push e-mail" and "not keeping 3G on when you're in patchy coverage" sensible? Push email shouldn't be much more expensive in terms of battery life than SMS. The phone should know enough about what you need to turn 3G on or off automatically.
I am not referring to a specific position.
Minda ICT: Simple interests; Great uses: Apa kebenda copy writing ni?
The publisher indeed stops publishing the old version. It would be cheaper for the students that can find an old copy, who knows if they will all be able to do so?

>So the department assigns a book, why do they have to assign it?

Do you want to buy a new book for calc 2 if you take it with somebody besides me? Or buy a new book if you switch sections?

Standardization makes sense, especially at the intro level. I'd prefer if they standardized on cheap calc books, but as I said, making that occur involves academic politics. Perhaps one day, when I've got clout...
Introducing ActivePresenter: The presenter library you already know.
Has been posted several times already.
As froo points out,
big chunks of this are copied from a CNet article,
paraphrased practically sentence by sentence.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=258744

People shouldn't be able to get away with things
like this, so I'm going to kill this one.
I know, it would probably be impossible to get it right. But with POD, it really sucks if publishers withhold some important works from the public.

Maybe the law could be that if the publisher doesn't make it available within a reasonable timeframe, it become legal to offer it as POD edition.
The comments are really interesting.
At the outset, I'm wary of any company whose primary claim is that they'll beat <current market leader>. If they're truly in a class apart, why would they need to rely on a stunt like that? "Look, we're related to <current market leader>: we'll be the ones to beat them. We'll do exactly what they do except better."

I think that's just a bad way to frame a company's mission. It looks arrogant and defensive. Show, don't tell.
what I find shady is that its against the law to spoof your competitors domain name, but google will allow you to display ads for when people search for your competitor.

thats a little underhanded if you ask me
I search for programming-related things, and all but two results (both videos) for "python gecko" are about Mozilla bindings for Python.

Basically, I am not upset that Google profiles me. I would get upset when my profile is admissible as evidence against me in court, but that's not up to Google. Let's not make searching the web difficult because our legal system is fucked up. Let's fix the legal system.
They did just launch. I'm sure they still have a few bugs to work out.
They don't have to beat Google, they just have to be good enough to get picked up by Microsoft.
Verve Wireless believes it can save the dying local newspaper by making it mobile.
If they add ssl I am sold!
Exception notifier on steroids
It is better to explicitly list the fonts that best match the body text before "monospace". Plus, I'd throw in Consolas and Andale Mono before "monospace" too; usually the default monospace font is one of the worst the reader has available to him.

line-height:1.5? That is too much even for body text set in Verdana. Coders are used to code being set solid (line-height: normal or tighter). Too much leading hurts the legibility of the code. In particular, since you have padding:1em, a blank line in the code will have considerably more spacing than there is between the code block and the prose.
It's funny how people compare "total results found".

If cuil want to succeed, maybe they should just lie about that number. It's not like anyone ever goes through more than maybe a couple of pages of results.

The only thing that really matters is what results are on the first page IMHO
>Just because a company is sold before it's profitable doesn't mean that it couldn't ever earn money, or that it doesn't deliver value to the buyer.

I agree with that, but currently many companies are sold without even having an notion how to earn money (other than "ads"), and those that do have some revenues get GM-sized evaluations.

I don't mean to attack anyone - it's markets and currently building to sell is a reasonable choice. At a certain scale it's even sustainable, but currently I think we're in a bubble: the tractor company's customers use the product to increase their revenues. Has Conde Nast increased its revenues after buying Reddit? Will Bebo bring $850m of value to AOL?
Not So Cuil After All
Imagine the way a teenage daughter of yuppies would say the word "cool". Kind of like: [KYOO ill]. That helped me remember it, anyway.
Don't overgeneralize. Consider "Audi." While obvious to a German speaker, an English speaker who has never heard the word before will wonder if it should be "oh-DI," "OH-di," "OW-di," or "ow-DI?"

I think Cuil is a decent name, far better than Srchr or some other Web 2.0 contraction. If it overcomes its growing pains and solves all the hard problems involved in search, it'll do well.
I had seen this web-app covered on TechCrunch some months back. http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/04/16/myplaylist-combines-fli...
I had liked the site then mainly because of its functionality and simplicity. I personally think the cloud is too big and using too much real estate, use smaller fonts and red and white in the same row are strict no-no.
In addition to adding some more color ( I would use kuler and upload your logo then mess around with the colors) , I would removed the 'detele blank images' button you display on the playlist page.
Short rules of thumb:

1. Favor commenting why over how. It may be clear how your function works, but it's rarely self-evident why you chose to use a particular technique -- another will probably seem (perhaps correctly) like a better choice to someone else. Subtleties of design choices and lessons learned from mistakes are much harder to just infer while looking at code than surface details about how it works.

2. If you're about to write a comment, see if better names make it unnecessary, or if breaking a section of a function into a named subfunction clarifies things. (The corollary being that there's nothing keeping you from naming all your stuff "dude" and "heyHeyHey" besides bitter experience and the eternal scorn of your peers.)

3. Consider using asserts, tests, or the type system in place of some comments - they're like comments, but they're actually checked.

4. Consider datestamping any comments more than a few words. (Do it automatically, with an action in your editor.) It only takes a few characters, and sometimes it will be unexpectedly helpful. (A good VC system can help you track down when a given comment was added, of course.)
Linode offers slightly more in terms of specs, but they only recently switched to Xen virtualization (from User Mode Linux which is much slower). Their service is less mature.

Slicehost is really popular and with good reason. Linode might turn out to be just as good, but I know the wonderful service I have gotten at Slicehost and how many other sites in the web 2.0 community are there - heck, the Xen blog itself is on Slicehost and not any other Xen provider.
http://www.cuil.com/search?q=paul+graham

Somehow they managed to get a monkey and a basketball scene in the images for a paul graham search. That doesn't seem right to me...
Even among experienced developers, assuming for a moment that it is possible to write perfect code that doesn’t require comments...

Why is the author talking under the assumption that "perfect" code wouldn't require comments? I would imagine perfect code to have consistent style, an intelligent and intuitive separation of concepts, etc. I don't see a good reason it should strive to be human readable. Quite the opposite, actually - I find good code will often use mathematical abstractions that simplify the problem greatly, but are nearly impossible to understand, and need extensive comments to explain.
Exactly, SJ knows he's "an arrogant [expletive] who thinks he’s above the law" and he definitely thinks some reporter is "a slime bucket who gets most of his facts wrong".

From pg: "The trouble with lying is that you have to remember everything you've said in the past to make sure you don't contradict yourself. If you tell the truth you don't have to remember anything"

http://www.paulgraham.com/good.html
I just got back from Shanghai last week. Curious urban planning-- whatever you want, there's a street for it. My personal favorites: the industrial supply street, dye street, and the outdoor (!) air-conditioner market.

One of the side effects of this policy (pointed out to me by an architect acquaintance) was that when you go to the new "residential" areas (post-1985 or so), there is literally nothing but residential nearby. No stores, no cafes, maybe a kede (chain convenience store) if you're lucky. This is in stark contrast to the older, more integrated shikumen/hutong style of living, where residential and commercial are well-integrated (see nick ourossof's article in the nytimes about the demise of the hutong in Beijing).
Google's ranking of Knol Articles
Knol, a relatively new Google property, is getting very high rankings. There are a couple of things to watch here. One is the "manual tweaking" claim that Google says it does not do. Another is Knol's practices with outgoing links, using the "nofollow" attribute, to boost its PageRank score.
The development of China is a fascinating subject, but this article isn't about that. It's shopping porn.
You don't have to store every page you generate.
http://ianab.com/trillion/658144902297.html
Has anyone considered the possibility that he was funded by the Israeli government? This would be one of the smartest ways to influence the US media, to finance a genuinely charismatic investor in media companies.
Let’s talk about DVCS
Elitism is not a dirty word
Sounds useful, but I'm not sure I'd pay for this service. The ExceptionNotifier plugin does a good enough job, and exceptions shouldn't really keep happening for days on end. In my app(s), when there's an unexpected Exception, it gets fixed within a few days at most, so I'm not quite sure how useful a historic view would be.
old-new story. I guess the same ending.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/november/5/...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Maxwell#Death
With regards to #25, this is what we are trying to do with OLX (www.olx.com). We are getting a fair amount of traction internationally.
Brandstreaming: What Is It & Who's Doing It?
I keep reading how pollution/smog is a major concern for the upcoming Olympics. Was it that bad?
I certainly did not notice any pollution.
Fans of L.E.D.’s Say This Bulb’s Time Has Come
The initial reactions to Cuil remind me a lot of the initial reactions to Google ~10 years ago.

Does anybody truly have a reasonable expectation that Cuil will match or better Google on their initial release?
Sed - An Introduction and Tutorial
This issue has always been about time. It doesn't matter how clean the code is, it can still get complex. If it takes someone less time to read your comment than to read code and finally know what the function does, this is a situation where a comment is valuable. Just do it and stop the philosophical debate when productivity is the issue.
The truth about Shanghai: I spent a few weeks there just mingling and trying to understand the people, and what I dislike about Shanghai is this elitism that seems to exist among the foreigners living there. I went to some clubs and it was ALL foreign people - and mostly young. Not even the chinese girlfriend on the hand.

For the young and foreign, Shanghai is a playground. A place to live 10 times better than back home for half as much.

The chinese people and the foreigners seem to be living in different worlds. Shanghai seemed to me a bit like how one would imagine it in the 20s - with a cream of English expatriates and large mass of locals, both of which do not mingle with each other.

It was so different in other parts of China. In Sichuan, there were very few foreigners, and those that were there would be in groups of chinese people. In Shenzhen, the foreigners would be clearly business men looking to buy electronics or strike some deals and go home. In Kunming, the foreigners would be tourists.

Shanghai reeked to me of old world colonialism. The people were less friendly, less open and more jaded.

Through my travels in China, Shanghai was very frankly the place I liked the least.

(Hong Kong was great though, it has more foreigners than Shanghai probably, but people seem to have more of the attitude of do-your-thing-I-do-mine)
Yes, absolutely. Although in the extreme of complexity, comments actually stop helping. A straightforward implementation of, say, RSA or an FFT can actually be done in small, simple, well-organized code whose structure is "obvious" to someone who understands the problem. But no amount of comments is going to help the reader understand the algorithm to begin with. In those circumstances it's much better just to document what you're doing and let the reader go to their textbooks.
Well, you're pretty much describing "vertical" search engines. There are a lot of those these days, and I think they have good chances of being successful, too.

It's like what we're doing over at bug.gd-- building up an error-based search engine. Our upcoming version (we hope to announce in the next month or so) will have a variety of techniques optimized for searching for errors on the web. (E.g. filtering of user-specific "noise" in error messages, better integration into software, etc.) With the added bonus of capturing feedback from users that can be used for future users and for software writers.

We've been seeing some great uptake lately, so I'm bullish on the vertical search space.

We've been debating on a two-column search results page for our redesign, so we're watching cuil's success closely to see how people like that kind of presentation.
I'm with you on 1-3, but #4 seems wrong. What purpose is there to knowing when the comment was added if you don't know when the code was written[1]. This just looks like a trick you've developed to try to figure out when a comment is lying to you. But if you have so many comments that you doubt their veracity, you have too many comments. Read the code for truth.

[1] Without, as you mention, using your SCM system. But I'd argue strongly that if you can't do the equivalent of "cvs annotate" from memory, you're using the wrong system or you don't understand it well enough.
'Blocks' are not necessarily an improvement. Some would argue that their time has come and gone. I certainly prefer simple designs with as few quasi-separate units as possible.

(That is, if you mean something in the direction of http://gamer.nl when you say 'blocks'.)
Vanity searches can work well for a test but I do not think the index is big enough yet for a real comparison. I would say wait to see what happens once they are 1 week, 1 month, etc... out of the launch gates.
Unless the blog author builds software that never crashes -- even when it get millions of hits on its first day, then he should cut them some slack. I'll put money on the fact that Google didn't have the same kind of traffic on their first day that Cuil did. And Google has had 10 years to get it write. Yet he expects perfection on the first day.
why does it matter which result is #1 if you can find what you are looking for on the first page in the first row or first column?
Cuil seems to be a company of hackers. Just have a look at the founders page: Anna Patterson? wrote 2 search engines (Xift and Recall.archive.org) before the GOOG. Louis Monier? major contributor to at least one search engine (Alta Vista), and also said to have helped eBay.
I was there during a period of unseasonably clear weather-- from the top of the Grand Hyatt we could see clearly for miles and miles (which gives you a good idea as to how HUGE the city is.. and I live in NYC. ).

The air is much worse in Beijing, though.
What a strange story. It seems like it has to be a hoax, but there's a lot of news mentions about the guy after 2007 or so.

The guy seems like a James Bond villain -- doesn't every briefing by M start with "nobody knows how he makes his money, but he's taken the world of $X by storm"?. He even looks like a movie star, is engaged to a movie star, and dresses in mostly in black.
>Since the next president will put in place a cap-and-trade system for greenhouse gases

He will? Since when? I mean even if it's a good idea, who said that will happen?

But other then that it's a pretty good article, but not great.
No mention of the pervasive nepotism at work in knol authorship. It looks like Google employees and family members have been given the first mover advantage for owning many of the lucrative knol topics.
What are you doing in Lisp, right now? (in 2004)
Yeah, there was definitely a surplus of snotty expat i-bankers (even compared to NYC). Shanghai is the ultimate party city.
Why Apple Must Tell Its Story (Apple after Jobs)
I recently looked at the bandwidth costs of S3 vs. traditional hosting, and found them less than compelling; in particular, they seemed much higher than those of shared hosting providers. EC2 has the same bandwidth pricing structure as S3, so I bet you can do better, especially since 500 isn't that large of a number.

My notes on the subject:

http://www.mlsite.net/blog/?p=3
Agreed, references in code ought to be encouraged - no need to copy-paste an entire paper (or chapter of a textbook).
"It is better to explicitly list the fonts that best match the body text before monospace."

What does that even mean? And I chose monospace only as not everyone has Consolas or Andale Mono installed.

As for the line-height: I went for a balance between easy legibility and still getting lots of text in the space. But I guess it's up to the OP to fiddle with the spacing issues.
From: http://mjg59.livejournal.com/94905.html

"Anyway. Accusing companies of conspiring against us when the most likely explanation is simply that they don't care is a fucking ridiculous thing to do and does nothing to get rid of the impression that Linux users are a bunch of whining childish hatemongers. Next time, try talking to someone who actually understands this stuff first?"

Thank you, Matt.

Now all you downmodders, please upmod me :-)

Seriously, you guys should not downmod just because a post disagrees with you.
Wow. Whenever Israel comes up, it's always "Never attribute to your own ignorance what can be explained by the involvement of Mossad."

In Maxwell's case, he was working with too many different countries to be totally loyal to one in particular. He was semi-famous for publishing translations of awful hagiographies of communist dictators in the 80's (and of censoring other books as a favor to friends).
"Marketer Needs to Lay Out Succession Plan"

To AdAge, Apple is a "marketer?" Do they not even have a word for a company that builds things?
"i am sort of liking the design / layout of the search"

Did it strike anyone else that this is one of the ideas that Y-combinator said it would like to fund? (beating Google at design in the search space)
Finally, someone agrees with me:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=256636
Yeah.... my rule of thumb is that if I'm checking more than the first five pages or so, I need to improve my query.
A narcissist always enjoys a good mirror.
Syntax is a smell
"The loudest one in the room is usually the weakest". Noone is hearing Nevo. There are very well connected players, like Nevo, who do not like to be in the public eye. Nevo shows that social skills matter even more than we think (to bad for an introvert like me).

EDIT: Read "How To Win Friends and Influence People" by D. Carnegie. (Pick an old-less-edited version from your local library).
Calacanis on Google, Knol: Of course Google is a content creator. Now what?
Doesn't it seem entirely wrong that the BIOS has any idea about O/S's to start with?

Completely the wrong way around.
Very nice looking. This could be a easier way to find which bugs bubble up to the top most frequently. Swombat does make a good point though. We use ExceptionNotifier and the policy is to fix anything that triggers it, so we normally have zero exceptions occurring.

If you could maybe have it tap into your logger so you could log weird states or other issues that don't cause exceptions, but you don't want occurring often perhaps it would help a little more (recoverable problems).
http://code.google.com/p/syntaxhighlighter/
These guys were interviewed on Geoffrey Grosenbach's Ruby on Rails podcast recently. They sound very young, early 20s.
Can Cuil, Built for the Long-Term, Win the "Instant Analysis" Battle?
Most people couldn't tell you what DRM is, or what, exactly, an operating system does. The author said Apple presents an image of being open, not the actuality of it. And to most people, that's probably what they see.
They're new, so I don't want to dismiss them, but if their selling point is their larger-than-Google index, I'm not buying. On my sample query, I got a web proxy in both the first and second pages of results. It's easy to have a large index if you are showing the same thing in triplicate. Google does a great job of narrowing their large index to what the user needs to know. Nothing wrong with some healthy competition, but Google was right to stop (publicly) counting pages.
you have an info button in the upper left hand corner. it seems to provide a help dialog, however it doesn't work if I have javascript disabled.

<noscript> html tags will render if a browser doesn't support (or has disabled) javascript. Personally I would put help on a page all by itself, it's less slick but it ensures people can use it.
"There's no such thing as bad publicity" - but there is such a thing as going public before your technology is ready, and thus turning off all the early adopters.

Most of the geek/connected crowd has now heard of Cuil. And most have now tried it.

And, sadly for Cuil, most will never try it again. That's one hell of a wasted PR shot. Rookie mistake, huh.