skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You missed the point. After you've agreed on XML, you still have to agree on how to represent a list. You can use existing libraries to parse the XML, but you still have to write a parser to transform the resulting DOM into a list.

Plus, given that the availability of good XML parsers is one of the primary advantages claimed for XML, can anyone name some XML parsers that aren't ridiculously slow? Maybe I haven't looked hard enough, but I always seem to find that my own code to parse ad-hoc formats goes 10x faster than, e.g., expat parsing XML.
Veering off-topic, but you do CEDA/NDT style debate too? (aka policy debate in high school) Nice, I don't know any other hacker debaters. Drop me a line (email in my profile), I'd be interested in bouncing some ideas about some debate-related projects off of you.
I would argue that there's very little value in standardizing that syntactic stuff. Whatever tiny amount of value there might be is probably destroyed by picking a convention as almost universally inappropriate as XML.
Be it sports, education, startups, or life, the pattern is similar.

Move fast. Develop iteratively. Fail quickly. Learn. Rinse. Repeat. Over time you will improve and be able to remove the fail quickly step. Since knowing when to quit is hard, removing this step based on non-achievement of realistic and measurable goals/milestones seems to work for most cases.
Whatever it is, what does it matter if we can't predict what's going to happen? As far as we know, the world's getting warmer and its time to start buying priuses wherever we can afford them ;)
And the thing about startups is that there's no reason to think that they would continue running the way they were indefinitely without charging membership fees, or plastering ads all over them, or somehow ruining the experience that their supporters value so much.

They sell for a reason, usually that their funding is running out, founders facing a down round, increasing pressure to become profitable. The fallacy is that the sweetness and light will continue indefinitely.
Tokyo Dystopia: a full-text search system
I know, I have a degree in it. :)
The depth/extent of the plan is surely debatable, but folks like Larry and Sergey and Eric Schmidt would not make the decision to pull the trigger for an acquisition unless they knew what they wanted out of it. They are smarter than that .

In the case of MeasureMap, for instance, they knew they wanted that technology integrated into Google Analytics. They may not have been able to answer the "how" part of "who, what, when, where, why, and how", but surely they knew the "who", "what", and "why".

I understand that the startup built the technology and the acquirer didn't. That's the beauty of how this system is set up - a company like Google with piles of cash and stock can has so much money it can buy anything it wants.

Well then how do they decide which startups to buy (MeasureMap, Feedburner, etc.) and which startups to pass on (Digg)? That's the "master plan"..
the blog seems a little light on details, have they discovered the root cause?
We just pulled the trigger for EY this week, should be migrating to our "slices" within 7-10 days.

Things like this make me nervous..
Cool stuff!

I wonder how many times Paul Graham saw this idea mentioned in applications before picking the right team to implement it?

Overall exciting to see these devices slowly becoming popular (Chumby). There is a ton of innovation to occur here.
Legal nitpick: You meant patents. Patents are for processes, copyright is for instances.
http://www.tutorial-reports.com/internet/seo-search-engine-o...
This is fascinating. I was aware of one half of what the article talks about: me and my co-author broke the anonymity of the netflix data (see http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~arvindn/ for paper/press links). Our main insight was that everyone's movie watching behavior is different. The quote "User tastes are infinite shades of grey" in the article just about sums it up perfectly.

What's funny is that I keep arguing for using more meta-data with my friends who are participating in the competition. I guess I didn't realize that data mining algorithms actually capture the nuances of user tastes.
What about a public key ssl server?

Webmaster Bob wants to add his key to the server. Bob goes to the server page and hits add key button, puts in an email address for the webmaster, his public key and submits. Then the public key server sometime in the next couple hours goes outs and checks the website itself. If the two match it adds it to the database.

You can have the server require a reverse DNS lookup and also have it use something along the lines of OpenDNS to help secure against fraud. Also if the server itself uses a CA cert to secure data on transit that would also help secure it. Require a revocation key to invalidate self signed keys on the database would also further security.

Then user Joe can add "Self-sign Pub key extension" to Firefox to automate the checking of public keys.

This allows for a relatively cheap self-signing check. Does a minimal amount of is this the real website I'm using but still not quite the level of a paid CA cert that say a bank should have.

(Apologies about the ramblyness of this post)
This article is complete bullshit.

I'm an academic. I do math and science for a living. I'm also an immigrant. I lived most of my life in India. I also have a lot of European friends, and actually just got back from a Europe trip hanging out with a number of European academics. Finally, I've also looked at the statistics on this subject.

Every way you look at it, the U.S actually kicks ass in math an science, whether you look at top research or the averages. Take SAT math. Think of a country that has a reputation for excellence in high school math. Eastern Europe immediately comes to mind. Shall we say Romania? Guess what, cynics? U.S scores are on average 30 points higher than Romania's. Or take Nobel prizes. No other country even comes close to the U.S. If we're so bad at science and math, why do we have Silicon Valley and no one else has anything remotely as good?

For several years I've been trying to understand where this self-loathing perception comes from. My friend (also an academic) says that academics spread the "sky is falling" perception in order to get more funding dollars from the NSF/NIH/DARPA, and the media picks it up and runs with it because they always love a scare story. That's the best explanation I have so far. Anyone got a better one?
Sasquatch or no Sasquatch? | TechJaws
They're called wiki vandals. Nothing has been hacked. Interesting thing could be that maybe now wiki vandals are automated, but "hacked"?! seriously?
Also, there's the famous Quake inverse square root hack.

http://www.beyond3d.com/content/articles/8/
I'm surprised it took that long for someone to post goatse.
This is totally true, but IMDB has some serious network effects that you'd need to overcome. Their biggest asset is the huge database they've already built up; any competitor would need to recreate that. And they build it from user contributions: users already go to IMDB, so for a startup to rebuild it, they'd need to attract those users, which requires offering better content than IMDB. Catch-22.

It's much like E-bay: everybody knows they suck, everyone wants a competitor, but the network effects are so huge that a frontal assault is doomed to fail.
I’m a Perl developer and a big fan of Lisp. However, it should be well known by now that Common Lisp is the only dynamic language that beats C in performance. It also defeats Python and Ruby in productivity and joy. And the code is beautiful and clear to read. It used to be that there weren’t any good routes to using Lisp for the web, and it didn’t used to be fast either, but now both of those obstacles have been overcome. Ruby is unstable and keeps changing, making previous code unusable. Anyway Ruby is just a lame hack impersonation of a Lisp. Everyone should skip the trends and use Lisp. If for whatever reason Lisp is not an option, Perl is the alternative that’s been around a long time and is going to keep growing. It has CPAN. End of story!
BTrace is DTrace aimed at Java apps.
Cassandra data store at Facebook
+1 for Capistrano here. I use it with SVN but Git's nice too. Whichever way you go, I can't recommend Capistrano enough.
But their data is freely available:

http://www.imdb.com/interfaces

It probably wouldn't be a good idea, without massive amounts of resources (i.e Jason-Calacanis-mahalo-style), to try to recreate the data. Creating mashups with their data seems more reasonable. But can you build a startup out of it?
Now, hold on. That was a great movie and deserved its place :)
A great product in this space will have no problem spreading like wildfire.

EDIT: And I do not think you need better content in the beginning. A better UI will do.
The comments about REST being religious seem to miss the point. It seems Damien is simply saying, "REST isn't the answer for EVERYTHING". That's a pretty straight-forward and safe statement to make.

REST seems to work well for most web applications because they are typically document-oriented. Sites like Youtube, Flickr, Wikipedia, Gmail, Amazon, etc. are dealing with some form of hypermedia documents. It only makes sense to apply CRUD design concepts to documents.

Unfortunately a lot of people have taken REST design concepts too far and try to apply it to everything, which simply won't work. But does this surprise anybody? Its pretty damn hard to saw a 2x4 in half with a hammer.

From a "religious" point-of-view; I do find RESTful websites easier to test & diagnose since problems (application state) can typically be isolated to specific URLs. You gotta love it when you can refer to curl as "the truth"!

As Paul and many others point out, the web has gotten along fine with just the POST and GET verbs; but a good web application is built upon sensible and addressable URLs.
It's frightening how bland this is. History is absolutely full of tales where heroes, having given up on one path through life, find themselves blazing another. Redemption is one of the greatest emotional force we have. I hoped for a lot out of this article, and all I find is... a correlation with C-reactive protein?!
Er, I don't think so. If I understand that right, it assumes that the universe uses finite bits to represent numbers. I see no reason to assume that.
Here's a personal favorite of mine that I wrote a while back; I like it because it does what seems to be a slightly complicated problem to SIMD (count the number of nonzero elements in a 16-element array of 16-bit values) and does it in a really small number of instructions:

static inline int array_non_zero_count_mmx( int16_t *v )
{
int count;
asm(
"pxor %%mm7, %%mm7 \n"
"movq (%1), %%mm0 \n"
"movq 8(%1), %%mm1 \n"
"packsswb 16(%1), %%mm0 \n"
"packsswb 24(%1), %%mm1 \n"
"pcmpeqb %%mm7, %%mm0 \n"
"pcmpeqb %%mm7, %%mm1 \n"
"paddb %%mm0, %%mm1 \n"
"psadbw %%mm7, %%mm1 \n"
"movd %%mm1, %0 \n"
:"=r"(count)
:"r"(v)
);
return (count+0x10)&0xff;
}

It is, not surprisingly, an order of magnitude faster than the C equivalent. Bonus points for understanding what the "0x10" is for at the end.
when i arrived at a chicago airport recently, there was a poster thingie saying

"home to 90 nobel prize winners..."

i thought holy shit that's a lot O_O i remember China only having a handful. we have here in just one shitty city an order of magnitude more. factor in per capita and it's really a huge difference

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_laureates_by_country
Although the data is available for download, it says in several places that it's not free. Apparently you need to negotiate a license.
My grandma doesn't have a dialup ISP, a broadband connection, or even a computer, and I suspect that many folks are in that boat.

Maybe something like this would be cool:
http://www.usbackbone.net/wholesale_dial.htm

and then you'd have to add the modem hardware to the frame... or maybe just sell a slightly more expensive model with an internal modem.
This is the second major infrastructure component opensourced by Facebook. What's next? Search?

How is Google going to respond to it? Should we expect BigTable opensourced any time soon?
"That does not seem to be to be typical XML, and if it is, it's really being stretched to do something it's not intended to do, IMO. XML's strength is in representing tree-based structures, but that appears to be an attempt to represent an associative structure. "

It's fairly typical of the XML I've used, and well within what XML was intended to do. That some (many?) people end up with needlessly verbose markup is not the fault of XML. Some people write verbose Scheme. Go figure.

A major point of XML is just simply tree data, but meta-data. You first showed a basic, non-annotated list; I showed a list with meta-data. Seems that you didn't like how the s-exp version of that XML looked, so you changed that use case.

"But in doing that, the structure really looks off, even though it's almost exactly mirroring the XML. I think this is a clue that the XML is a bit of a stretch. "

Or just maybe it's an example where XML differs from s-exps.

"Part of the problem with XML is that it causes these huge debates about how to structure and name the data."

Not really. I mean, some people like that stuff (I see it as a bike shed thing; it's a chance to show off how complex people can make something), but many other folks find a sparse, good-enough structure and move on. Quite honestly, the way you exaggerated the initial example is pure strawman. And you can have the same arguments about representation using s-expressions.

Don't blame a syntax because it allows people to be dopey.

I can see how nicely s-exp can work for markup, but I'm still curious how name-spaces, schema, ID + IDREF, transclusion, and other XML features are handled in s-expressions.

I mostly get the feeling that the only real gripe about XML is the duplication in the closing tags. (The W3C has explained why they dropped the short-form of XML and went with explicit end tags.)
That Old Time Software
Summary: A private college math head considers the existential, professional and communication problems peculiar to mathematicians.
This is normally good enough for me: (most ppl?)

http://www.google.ca/movies/reviews?cid=b1bbc12bd62930eb&...

Anything specific you're really dying for?
Wow thats a great suggestion! We wanted to (someday) let people customize the actual frame, but the engraving takes its to a whole new level!

The way Apple allows you to do it with iPods is really nice. We'll definitely look into this feature.
> Having done three 37signals-style consulting-bootstrapped ventures,

I liked the article, especially the point you make about playing to people's differing strengths, but I'm curious about the above remark. To "properly" do three 37S style companies, I think you'd have to spend some significant time on each one to see where it turns out. They didn't get big until years after they started. You spent three or four years on three different projects?

Also, I'll second the recommendation for 'Crossing the Chasm', it's pretty good.
If I were to try to imagine the worst bug possible for a virtualization product, this would probably be it. Though I suppose data corruption would be worse.
Hey Aaron!

Never knew you were here too. Btw, SEOBook training program+forum access costs 100$/pm, but is worth every penny. (We are a small bootstrapped firm, for which 100$ is not exactly peanuts, but what I learnt from this 100$ has had teremedus ROI)
you probably don't need perl for that. afaics from the snippet, it fits into nginx mod_rewrite. maybe something like this:

if ($http_cookie ~* "auth=1" ) {
proxy_pass http://backend ;
break ;
}

if (!-f $request_filename) {
proxy_pass http://backend ;
break ;
}
how do you backup and recover your stuff ?

I can't find any prepackaged thing on the web. I'd like to address 2 needs : disaster recovery and point in time recovery.

For now I only dump the database from time to time, but it's far from a real solution, if I loose my whole server it would take quite some time to get its configuration back on track.
The cloud has failed.
I was thinking about this, is the premise of ‘the cloud’ as an infrastructure failed even before it got well out of the gate?
It seems to me that this has nothing to do with Google. Facebook is not a Google competitor...and Google would see no benefit from open sourcing their infrastructure. Google is an infrastructure company--the value of Google is in the strength of their search and related technology. The value of Facebook is the network of people--technically, it's simply not a difficult problem. Take away the user community and Facebook has almost zero value. Facebook happened to hire a lot of smart people who wanted to work on interesting things, and so NIH has led to lots of new technologies being created.

Their solutions may be optimal for Facebook, and they may even be generally useful to folks building large scale websites. But, their Open Source tools are no threat to Google, and would have no impact on Google's decisions about what to Open Source.

Hadoop/HBase has already been offering BigTable like capabilities in an Open Source project. This is merely another option--and frankly, one that sounds a bit half-baked at the moment. But I could be wrong about that. And, of course, Thrift is yet another RPC system. It makes pretty bold claims about being uniquely lightweight and cross-language, but the RPC and data interchange problem has been solved many times in the past in many ways. I don't think the world has been set on fire by Thrift.
I'm a believer in stubbornness and shelving projects. I never actually quit something; Nearing the point of burnout and/or boredom with a hobby or project, I just put it on the back burner and let it simmer and resume it later.
Three ways you can develop a Ron Paul-type movement in your own company
Ask YC: Is hacking scene/culture/the underground dead?
Ever since 2007 I have witnessed nothing but decline of interest and old excitement in the hacking scene(related to computer security). Is it that most of them have started hacking for profit? Or, is it that the interest of group of people at large has shifted from "finding flaws and profit" to "create something, learn, and profit" ??
Signed up with EY last month. Frankly, our experience has been disappointing so far. We haven't gone live yet on our EY slices yet-this makes me nervous as well.
Funny concept: frightening blandness. Trying to imagine something both frightening and bland the only thing that comes to mind is our current president.
What haven't you liked?
Those tales sound interesting. Can you give an or some examples please?
Debian is probably more complex in some ways, but in the end, it's all Linux, so I would more or less reject that line of reasoning as inaccurate. People pay for the Redhat licensing because they want an official, supported system that comes with some guarantees and the promise that problems will be looked after.
Adding search to a Django site in a snap
"when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at and repair."

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. When p2p fails you're probably out of luck for a long time.
Grandmas have wifi? You are out of touch with ordinary people.
Chili's (the restaurant chain) comes to mind.
Too expensive. For $50 you'll have me, till then, no deal.
This is by the same author as HyperEstraier (and Estraier before it)... yet the page doesn't mention the connection or make a comparison. Anyone know how this is different?
You need to define 'widget'. Then you need to ask Google's AdSense help/support resources.
My experiences on digg make me cringe at upvoting anything that says "Ron Paul", but this really isn't bad.
I really doubt America is worse off than anywhere else in the world. The difference is that America is generally very self-critical.
I use Thrift and it is underhyped. I looked at Cassandra, and it offers more than HBase with a lot cleaner and smaller codebase. That's not just NIH, that's some really important thing happening here: standard tools like relational databases do not work for companies like google or facebook. Suddenly to process these volumes of data you do not have to worry about the back-end. That lets small startups compete on the same terms with big guys.

For example JS-Kit.com generates 10G-100G worth of data a day. They had to create an equivalent of Amazon's Dynamo to handle it. Easily half of their resources are dedicated to maintaining and extending this infrastructure. Now imagine if they could just use Cassandra and focus on their core? I do not know what Disqus or FriendFeed are using (probably mysql?), but they can benefit from it too once they grow.

That could affect Google too, there will be more competition from smaller startups like webmynd or cuil because of it. And if startups adopt Facebook's tools instead of Google's, that would make them less attractive to Google as an acquisition target.
People are always citing p2p and bit torrent as the magic answer to stuff. But p2p requires mutual self-interest.

if you've ever been on a torrent with no seeds and a hundred leeches you'll know what I mean.
I was waiting on the front lawn for a UPS delivery to show up while surfing on my laptop one day since it was a nice day. I occasionally took a look at the online tracking page and flipped out when it went from "out for delivery" to a failed delivery notice because the recipient wasn't there. Since I saw no UPS truck driving past my house, and the front door is the only way to make a delivery short of climbing over walls of other houses, you can probably understand why. Called up UPS customer support, asked them to please redeliver the next day because I would be leaving home soon and I didn't want to wait for the delivery, wherever the guy was, so he could save himself some time and effort.

The UPS delivery guy actually came over 4 hours later when I was definitely away from home to put up a delivery attempt notice saying I wasn't there. After I explicitly told two separate customer support folks NOT to deliver the package after I talked to them because I will not be there to pick up - and those two were separate from the initial call I made. This guy seemed to have an absurd sense of humor, because he marked the one and only notice I received that I didn't want as a second delivery attempt.

Your idea will only make sense if UPS actually did their job. They failed catastrophically for me in that incident. Since I seem to get delivery attempt notices quite often, I wonder just how many times they actually stopped by (unfortunately I usually take the car out when I'm going, and that's a different exit..).
There are about a billion music playing websites that have sprung up in the last few months.

Video games, I've not been a PC gamer for a long time, so a wii makes sense for that, although there are a few good games being written for the browser.

Google apps works well enough...

Sure you can watch DVDs online... I watch TV shows etc in my browser.

Seriously, for most people there is no need for desktop apps anymore.
Store music? huh?
* go to one of a billion music playing websites
* Search for the track you want
* Click play

It depends what you mean by DVD. If you're talking about a physical DVD, then obviously no you can't. If you mean play the movie/tv show, then yes obviously you can.
UPS trucks in particular would be in a position (at least in the United States, where we drive on the right side of the road) to make less lane changes since stopping for a delivery usually means stopping on the right side of the road. Possibly safer as a result of that as well.
It is alive and well in Russia, but even FidoNet is still active there :)