skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Maybe I am missing something, but I think thats a little extreme...

If I have some data structures that I am trying to send from my C# windows app to your java unix app, how would you propose we do that?

With XML, we can easily agree and collaborate on a format and both of our languages have builtin libraries to extract the data we need.

Its easy to build and easy to debug.
Umm - Wow! You have no idea how much we appreciate this: http://www.boygeniusreport.com/2008/08/14/ticketstumbler-put...

More (and better) traffic from you guys than Techcrunch yesterday. Thank you.
> if you start a startup to make a shitload of money and you do make a shitload of money, then, mission accomplished right

What about the user-base? Don't we have a responsibility to them also? Without them we can't be successful, and we should own them some responsibility to ensure that the tools/product/web-site they've been using remains useful for them.
if someone wants to fix the election its really not that hard under the current system either. Dead people and pets vote all the time. Same with absentee ballots.

And if its 1 address, 1 SSN, 1 password at least the person will need a little bit more info to fix it. If they steal your mail they'll still need to know your date of birth and the social security #. And sure thats possible for 1-2 people, but do you realize how hard it would be to do it on the massive scale?

I mean lets face it, voting is a pain in the ass, you usually end up voting when its rush hour, and you have to wait a long time to cast your vote. Something like 40% of the eligible voters even bother to vote. Shouldn't it be a priority to make voting easier?
Except that the problem is that precisely none of those features were invented by the REST people. This is the way sane network applications have worked since the beginning of time. What REST introduced is a dogma that said not only "this is good" (something no one agrees with) but "you must do it precisely this way", which is just ridiculous.

Flatly: there isn't that much innovation in REST. It's a good idea that can be expressed in a few short sentences. It doesn't deserve books, and it doesn't deserve the priesthood that has grown up around it. When sane ideas start to smell like heavyweight frameworks, they've outlived their usefulness.
RackSpace, India and a flagging IPO market
There's obviously a lot of potential in P2P. Bittorrent video sharing clearly shows this. I think that it could support independent media in the same way that the web supported sharing of information through HTML.

If you abandon the notion of timeslots, a protocol like Bittorrent is quite capable of supporting a weekly or daily TV show. Instead of timeslots, you just have channels which contain series. People subscribe to series, which show up in their app or TV appliance like they do in Tivo. This could be supported using RSS. The big issue is ease of use. If someone could put all of these technologies together, such that a "channel" or a "station" for video shows on the web was as easy to set up as a website, and easy to connect to for a user, you'd see an explosion of such sites, which happened with web sites and low quality video snippets (YouTube).

Web protocols which can support P2P live streaming as well as Bittorrent supports download would be the final ingredient of TV's demise.
Yes. The fact that XML parsers are pervasive is a good thing, and an advantage for XML as a technology. But it says absolutely nothing about XML as a metadata format. A standard parser suite for anything would have the same advantages.

Note also that there are other technologies with pervasively available parsers, like JSON, which don't share any of XML's warts.
> RH makes money providing support for their software. If the software is too easy to use, nobody will by the support. They have every incentive to keep a certain level of complexity.

That is basically incorrect in terms of their business model: in order to have Redhat Linux, you have to pay money for it, and pay it on a subscription basis, so it's not "call support when I need help", it's "pay for it on an ongoing basis and call support when I need it", so really it's in their interests to make it simpler and easier.

Also, OSX is built on top of a number of open source products, including GCC, created a number of years ago by one Mr. Stallman, back when he still wrote code.
I don't think the revenue from Visual Studio and SQL Server come anywhere close to Office and Windows. Keep in mind that pretty much every computer sold for the past decade has had Windows pre-installed and that everyone in a business or university environment is forced to have a copy of Office.
"Unscheduled downtime of more than a couple minutes is unacceptable any time."

Sounds like HA should be your #1 priority. DRBD + Heartbeat is a one solution but non-trivial to setup. There are some high-end hosting providers (BlueLock, Terremark) that offer VMWare HA configurations.

Sounds like VCS should be #2 - checkout cvsdude.com (no affiliation but we've used them and they're good)

Cheers
Uh... a tad too eager? Dude, we crossed that threshold with Ant or JSP. By the time XSLT and XQuery rolled around, we were looking at a full-on stampede of developer group-think.

XSLT happens to be my pet peeve. I simply can't understand how anyone would have ever looked at that problem ("how to turn a source data document into a presentation format" -- something that has been solved sanely a thousand times by obscure technologies like "scripts", or "PHP") and decided that the best way to handle it was a turing-complete pattern matching language written in XML itself! I mean, it looks more like a torture device than a programming language...
In my opinion, he's measuring against the wrong product line. I don't think people say that iMacs and Macbooks are overly pricey. I think those statements come into play when you start talking about MacPros and Macbook Pros.
Amazon: Lack of Redundancy
OK, I'm going to send you a list using XML.

Now how do you propose we do that?

This is entirely the problem. The XML didn't solve anything. We still have to negotiate the terms of the transfer. We've agreed to use XML, true, but we are still at square one.
ASP.Net MVC resolves _some_ of these problems.
The earth is a tremendous heat sink. The oceans especially will buffer huge amounts of change in temperature.
"Snooping a connection (i.e. on a wireless link) is much easier than any of the impersonation attacks that SSL authentication prevents."

I wouldn't be so sure about that.
Hierarchical Logic and Multi-threaded Game AI
is Diebold open to the public? Hell in today's society I wouldn't even trust a human, because no matter who the person is, if they volunteered to run elections in their district, they are a political person. And right now the political climate is very charged "NEOCON WARMONGER!" "LIBERAL DIMOCRAT!". And given the opportunity they can easily make votes disappear, or state different results, which get confirmed by another political person.

I mean I could understand the point, if the current system was infallible. But its not, so why not make the whole process easier on your average voter?

More importantly, ME! I'm not going to go vote, because I don't feel like standing for an hour in line, just to cast a ballot in a state where the result is already pre-determined because of demographics. I mean if you think about it, your vote only matters if you live in the 4-5 swing states, all others will go Democrat/Republican no matter what you do.
What do you propose instead of a markup language for the things HTML is used for?
The sun is actually a very good insulator. All the heat is generated in the middle and takes millennia to reach the top.

So anything that basically "mixes" the sun will cause more heat to be emitted. No sun spots=no mixing, and all the heat remains trapped.

I think that after trapping heat for so long, the sun gets hotter and generates more sun spots because of all the extra energy. The sun spots bleed it out, and the cycle continues.
ReQall: A Neat Free iPhone Application | TechJaws
Innovation and practicality are not the same things . Placing innovation before freedom is just as much a philosophical decision as the reverse.

Innovation is great for delivering new and better products, but it doesn't help much for allowing you to fix problems in the code you're using, avoid vendor lockin,or any of the other problems that free software can help solve.

I agree that it is important to keep practicality in mind, but I think it is also important to keep in mind that pretty much any philosophy you choose will have different tradeoffs involved.
Of course you have to negotiate the terms of the transfer. You have to do that using any format (custom binary, XML, JSON, s-expressions, whatever). XML just defines a lot of common syntactic stuff which you would have to define anyway in any format you decide on.
A Look at Google Ad Planner Data Vs. Comscore
Web servers such as lighttpd and Apache are blazingly fast at serving static pages. Reading a file from disk and sending its contents back to the browser is as simple as it gets.

Except that it's not. One of the reason the classic web servers are so amazingly fast with static files is that they, along with the operating systems they run on, have spend significant time trying to optimize this process. For linux, for example, look at the sendfile(2) system call, or the TCP_CORK socket option. These were expressly designed to permit a userspace program to get a file through the kernel and onto the wire with as few CPU cycles and memory copies as possible.

One of the most frustrating things about the Web 2.0 crowd (from the perspective of curmudgeons like me) is that they really don't have a clue about any of this complexity. They just figure that they'll stuff everything into a DJango/Rails/whatever request and scale up later. Then when they run into trouble, they end up turning to tools like Apache as black boxes and designing Rube Goldberg apparatii around them when they really should be looking at the problem more directly.

Really, folks: those low level APIs are your friends. They're not nearly as scary as they look. Even if you end up with an off-the-shelf solution, knowledge of this stuff can only be good for you.
<list><listitem>a</listitem><listitem>b</listitem><listitem>c</listitem></list> ?

The xml solved the problem of me having to write a parser from scratch for whatever terms of transfer you come up with.

And I don't really see the downside for most applications.
I think in many cases people just don't know that they care. They don't make the connection to more everyday objects like cars.

Cars are a good example. Lots of people can do basic maintenance on their car. They get frustrated when they have to go to a mechanic to find out what the "check engine" light is complaining about this time. They buy the Chilton's or Haynes' car repair manuals. On the more extreme end they do a complete engine rebuild, or even assemble a kit car from publicly available reference designs.

Cars are getting more complex and computerized though. I hear complaints about how much harder they are becoming to service. And the example given in the interview of the proprietary software in engine management chips is real. Racers will completely replace the ECU controlling fuel injection and engine timing with one which is programmable.

My parents' generation takes for granted that they can do these things with their cars. But with my generation we changed from the grease monkeys to the hackers, and the freedom to tinker has to come with us. For most people a car is just a tool to get from point A to point B. But we are all poorer when the hobbyists and amateurs don't have the freedom to tinker with, explore, and hack their own computers and cars.
This could have been written decades ago.

But, you know, people keep watching the crappy coverage, and Olympic officials are raking in the exclusive-contract bucks, and the athletes seem happy to perform for cheap, so it's hard to see how the Olympics will change.
SSL certificates for HTTPS are a big fat scam. Why do I need to pay money to get a certificate, just to provide encryption.

Encryption should be separate from identity verification.

Of course identity verification should be properly vetted and you should have to pay a fee, and have documents checked etc.

If however, you just want to provide security for your users by encrypting http, you should not have to jump through hoops and spend money.
Agreed. I'd really like to see an OS with capabilities based security with virtualized sandboxes (individual per app) for running legacy code. (You could expose specific objects or information channels between legacy apps, which would be controlled by the capability system.)

The author has a shallow understanding of OS and no clue about directions in research.
That's mostly like the power requirements for the datacenter as a whole, which would include things like HVAC, lighting, network equipment like switches and routers that don't appear in the "server" list, losses from power redundancy features (flywheels and batteries aren't free to operate) etc...
Segway Raising Millions More?
So you'd have to fill out eight ballot papers instead of our two or three. Or perhaps, you'd fill out a single perforated ballot paper and it would be ripped apart before counting.

I've seen Australian ballot papers which are about three feet by one foot, and list a few hundred candidates for the state upper house (later they changed the law to make it harder to get on the ballot sheet). Anyway, if we can cope with that, I'm sure you guys could cope with having multiple elections on one big perforated sheet.

The Scantron system actually sounds sensible enough though. If that were implemented nationwide it would be a good system. But I can't understand this district-by-district (or is it county-by-county?) disparity of voting schemes.
uncov/Ted Dziuba is leaking?
Johnathan Nightingale of Mozilla has a good blog post explaining the rationale behind this:

http://blog.johnath.com/2008/08/05/ssl-question-corner/

An especially pertinent point from his post:

"Several CAs accepted by all major browsers sell certificates for less than $20/yr, and StartSSL, in the Firefox 3 root store, offers them for free."
He said:
With XML, we can easily agree and collaborate on a format and both of our languages have builtin libraries to extract the data we need.

You replied:
OK, I'm going to send you a list using XML.

The only thing you have proved here is that your blind hatred for XML makes you unable to read and parse what is posted.

When arguing against the evils of a standardised format which there are proper parsers for everywhere, failing to parse stuff yourself is probably not on the list of things you want to do.
Add keyboard shortcuts to Hacker News
About commercials:

I live in Canada, where the Olympics are broadcast by the CBC, which is a government-owned networks. I too was frustrated by there being commercials every two minutes. However, I got a stopwatch and timed how many commercials there were in an hour: there were 13 minutes, which is actually slightly less than "normal" television. My guess is that they have very frequent but short commercial breaks to better fit in between races, events, or whatever. Also, this makes sure that people who are just taking a few minutes to check in see atleast one commercial. Has anybody made any observations about NBC- do they really have more commercials than other TV?

Now I just wish Canada would win a medal: frankly, it is embarrassing that tiny little Georgia which is in the middle of a freaking war is currently beating us.
But what good is encrypted communication if you cant be sure who you are communication with?
By virtue of musical talent, or by virtue of payola?
Oh, it does sound like you have a good number of entries on your ballots. Sorry for making assumptions.

To be honest I've never voted in an election which didn't use Scantron ballots. I believe the voting devices are selected and allocated on a state-by-state basis though. The federal law mandates certain requirements the states must meet but leaves the implementation up to each individual one. I've lived in North Carolina, Wisconsin, Missouri, and Utah, and used Scantrons in each location. Maybe the computerized systems are used in more urban or wealthy districts?
Reflections and Notes from SciFoo ‘08
I disagree. REST created a framework, one implementation of which is HTTP.

You can implement HTTP in a more or less RESTful manner. Advocates of REST propose it as the most effective way to provide a Web Service.

Strangely, advocates of SOAP say something similar. This isn't about dogma. If you are insecure about people pointing out that some people claiming to adhere to REST aren't that's your hang up.

I am all about using technology in the most effective manner, this isn't about the religion of one system over another, it's about seeing the benefits of a RESTful architecture. Implementing in a partly RESTful way only gets you part of the benefits.
would that not lead to less innovation on the part of computer companies, software companies

Note that he avoided actually answering this. I don't think it's quite so cut-and-dry as current software fashions make it seem. Having law which protected user's freedom, as RMS wants, would affect a variety of variables in our very turbulent industry. SS curricula would be different, business models would be different, code methodologies would be different, languages would be different, software distribution would be different. Hell, our elections might come out differently.
> What REST introduced is a dogma that said not only "this is good" (something no one agrees with) but "you must do it precisely this way"

REST is just a description for one good way to build certain types of networked applications. I don't think anybody claims that Roy Fielding invented the concept, or that it's the only way to build anything.

If there are people that treat it as a dogma, I don't think you can blame REST; they're just the same loud and obnoxious people that treat everything as a dogma (and usually don't understand it very well).
http://podcast.radionz.co.nz/sat/sat-20080809-0845-Richard_S...
Secrets of Living with Cystic Fibrosis - Associated Content
Congratulations You are a moron
Television sucks; news at 11.
I see that we're deep into the backlash phase of the hype cycle.
I think that my favorite quip on the topic is:

“XML is a giant step in no direction at all.” (Erik Naggum)
I know that it's perverse, but XSLT's actually kind of fun if you're not doing anything terribly complex.
Also, you can see the "add an exception" in the screen shot. You can manually add an SSL certificate to a white list, it's just a little bit harder, with a few more steps, than the previous YES|NO dialogue.

I think this a good thing. 99% of user probably don't need to or shouldn't interact with pages with self-signed certificates. That's a good thing. Self-signed certs should really only be on development pages. I'm sure this is a good anti-phishing measure.
Y Combinator startup demo day Boston 2008
Heh, I wrote my own, too, at first. Here are others:

http://www.acunote.com/open-source/javascript-keyboard-short... (scroll down for news.yc/reddit/digg shortcuts)

http://livepipe.net/extra/hotkey (general)

http://code.google.com/p/js-hotkeys/ (general)
I don't whether you've read the post or not, but it's talking about preparing for a team's all nighter.
Sure, but I'm not talking about the actual attacks. I'm talking about the fact that Slate saw fit to post the fact that some guy is essentially loading a bunch of web pages and styling himself as some kind of hacking-vigilante.

It's silly, and makes me sad for how far the quality on Slate has declined.
I love reading about ridiculously large-scale engineering. Here's another, along similar lines: http://jwz.livejournal.com/94645.html
There are always wacko's saying the end is near but most of them are far from credible. Unfortunately it can be hard to tell who is full of it when they extrapolate past reason. Anyway, particulate matter does lower global temperatures but unlike CO2 it does not stay up for vary long.
There's a lisp logo?
REST doesn't demand a noun. If they all have the same code backing them, there's no functional difference between:

POST /actions/subscribe

and

POST /subscriptions

and

POST /abcdef1234567890

The shape of a URL has nothing to do with REST. However, if a lot of your URLs contain verbs it suggests that you aren't doing REST. It's a design odor.
I've noticed a marked dearth of "!HN" comments on this site recently. I really think we need more of them.

Therefore, I'm gonna point out that this is !HN.

Some guy whining aggressively about sports on TV -- this seems about as far from HN as you can actually get.
Hi Peter,

> this system has a looong way to go

yes it does... Natural language interfaces are a very hard area. Lots of failed attempts (e.g. MS EnglishQuery). This in fact is what attracted me to the area. If as a researcher I can help make NLIs more robust/usable, then that would be a 'result'.

> Has this really taken 18k lines of code?

Actually that is an approximate figure and includes test routines, comments, etc. Plus what is a line of lisp code?
A large amount of code is to support non-linguist authoring of the interface. So in fact I was able to patch the system for "shortest river" and "mean" in a jiffy.

> Stay put and knock this thing into shape

Yes that's what I will probably do. I toned down Anaphoric's web-site and will work with this system from more of a research perspective. I will try my best to avoid open sourcing it, but in the end circumstances may compel that move...
BIG FOOT DISCOVERED??
The Beginning Of The End Of The Videogame Disc?
Wow. Amazing work -- congratulations :)
It is good because that way you know that nobody in between can see your traffic. And more often than not it is enough to know that you are talking to the same site you talked to the last time (just like with SSH).
The idea of "no lock icon" in case of a self signed/unknown CA certificate is a really good idea IMHO. The traffic is encrypted, but it does not give the user a false sense of security.
I'm most pissed that some of the earlier events are still linked on the site, but have no video attached to them. I'm trying to get the qualifing day of women's gymnastics to show someone a routine with very little significance other than the song in the background.

And NBC seems to have removed it. sigh

I'm amazed how spoiled the internet has made us.

(And yes... !hn)
Its times like this I am glad we have a tax paid network of channels in the UK - the BBC. No commercials, and they have very little reason to keep you watching for their own gain, so you just end up with quality journalism (Olympic coverage is journalism...isn't it?) with no over the top graphics.

Whats BBC America like? Does that have any Olympic stuff?
Agreed "this seems about as far from HN as you can actually get.", but nbc's implementation of silverlight pisses me off too, plus this was a funny read.
YC latest Batch. Which is your favorite startup?
I think we can all agree that this YC batch is quite different from the previous one.

We are presented with more fully developed applications with business models.

What are your favorite products/services?

Mine:

PopCuts because it has the potential to disturb the music industry.

Polleverywhere: Because it is well needed and super simple. Think how many people voted for American Idol by SMS and you can see how Polleverywhere has a potential to take it mainstream. I see it a the PollDaddy or SMS.

JObAlchemist because recruiting is a "frea.." pain point and anything that makes it easier will generate cash. I would not be surprise if this one gets acquired super fast.

PicWing. Because my people love to capture the best moments and hang them on the wall.