skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"search engine that cared about doing search well"

That quote is not a quote, is it?

Thomas, I'm done with this thread. I'm sure you mean well (at least, I'll give you the benefit of the doubt), but I've noticed before that arguing with you is exactly like arguing with a troll. The defining quality of both being finding oneself always saying "No, what I said was...."
also checkout - startup.com http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0256408/
It's definitely a lot more fun to code security tools on Unix than on Windows --- though I'm having a lot of luck with Ruby on Windows for debugging and anti-reversing work.

You're right, it is odd. But it's not a testament to Windows security. If security is what counted, we'd be using Linux or FreeBSD. We're not; we're using an OS that ships with SUIDs that run commands as root for you. We use it because we like it.
More often than not it is not the language that decides the performance of a system, but the ability of the programmer to come up with sensible designs.

This becomes even more important as parallel and computing becomes more important. Designing and implementing systems that run on a single CPU isn't all that hard given all the tools, libraries and abundance of literature developers have access to at little or no cost. Writing software that spans CPUs and even computers is a different matter.

Writing an application like Twitter isn't hard. Making it scale shouldn't be, but apparently still is. Doing twitter in C++ might offset the problems they experience somewhat, but not meaningfully so.
I was interested in using them on my site at one point but decided that the changing font sizes would clash with my urge the keep things on a grid.
Is the lady portrayed in this article supposed to be the average American or an extreme case of cluelessness? I don't know anybody who is in such a hole (or at least admits to).
Love the metaphor. But people said the same thing about learning assembly, and assembly is inessential.
another good documentary, like startup.com, is e-dreams, the story of kozmo.com

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0262021/
I live in Norway. Most people here drive stick-shifts. I can guarantee you that the vast majority of people driving stick-shifts have no idea what synchro rings are, nor would they be able to point them out if you cracked a gearbox open and told them to point them out. So yes, the simile is flawed.

As for the usefulness of learning C or C++, I do think it is useful as a learning exercise. As would assembly programming be.
I have met developers who considered themselves "experienced" who are unable to estimate memory requirements for simple data structures. I've had people tell me that pointers are "about one byte" and people who insist that the most compact way to store a boolean value is as an int value.
I'm using that now. I'm interested to hear why you became disenchanted with it.
I did wonder why the Panoramio site they use for Google Maps photos was playing up. That explains it.
You said "they struck oil with a new approach to search." I believe nobody, not even other search companies cared about the algorithm. The search engines did not want to buy PageRank (outright, not just license), not even for $1M. Not even during the Dot Com craze. Nobody wanted to improve search, in other words. That's what PG is writing about.

Had Larry and Sergey received $1M, then I would agree that they would have struck it rich, and probably continued their doctorate studies. But instead they decided to build a company around it even though no other company believed they had anything worthwhile to, in the order of increasing significance, 1) purchase, 2) invest in, 3) license, or, most insulting of all, 4) not even pay their own employees to copy (at least not until 4-6 years later.) And yet, they decided to drop out of the best Graduate Computer Science program and try to start a great company because existing portals were not doing search well, and nor did they care. Only a long time later did Yahoo! decide to license Google search (nobody else did) and, only even later did Microsoft and Yahoo! started paying their own employees to clone Google's search tactics (as well as look and feel.)
A Startup Entrepreneur's Philosophy
As always, history will judge whether these ideas are good or bad. Reading about it on a blog is not going to change my mind.

Worse, if it DOES change my mind, what have I gained? Nothing. I'd rather discover it was a bad idea because I tried it and failed, not because someone "told me so".
There was an entertaining documentary made a few years ago about a Finnish mobile game startup called Riot-E. It had little in the way of your actual product, but burned through hundreds of millions in bigco funding with a whole host of extravagances before, you guessed it, crashing spectacularly.

Riot On!: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0427783/
I'm mildly disappointed that the article mentions nothing of the precursor to 4chan, or futaba, and its cousin 2ch, which holds much more influence, albeit not in Western internet culture.
I did some tests on XP a few years ago, to see how bad it was. I ran no anti-virus, no firewall, no anti-spyware, nothing. Used the system carefully for over 4 months with no problems. Web browsing, web development and bittorrent. Normal stuff.

So I can safely say, while windows has its downfalls, I think 90% of the time the problem is down to the end user.

(though obviously its a nice extra layer of protection)
Love the tool, but hate the name. Can't they just call it 'aria' instead. Typing that 2c part annoys the hell out of me. It's just wrong.
>is an objective way to measure anger

Number of incidents where John McCain has been on camera/near reporters and been angry: many.

Number of incidents where Barack Obama has been on camera/near reporters and been angry: none.

It's objective enough for these purposes.
don't you mean they can't be overstated?
In freshman science labs, students often repeat classic experiments from the past. Even if the experiments are outdated, the idea is to learn techniques and methodologies that are relevant even today.

I grant you the simile is imperfect, but I'm a firm believer that learning C/C++ can make you better.
Can't say a bad word about 4Chan, only about people that say bad words about 4Chan.
A bonus people don't realize is that you're not necessarily competing with big companies. You're solving problems where they get the credit and you get money. I'm not in that boat yet, but that's exactly what Paul's been writing about for the past 8 years.

The advantage of being small in a field where 3-5 big companies try to create a web suite is that they have to focus on each other, not on little startups. While they're busy trying to match each other feature for feature in the way that a big company is supposed to do, you can develop a solution and traction, that they would love to buy and release to show the users and media how "smart" and "cutting edge" they are, even though they did not themselves commission the creation of the technology. It also helps them self-affirm and brag that they hire "the best and the brightest."
>In Nairobi’s highest-profile validation, Google opened a development office here last September. “Africa is a huge long-term market for us,” Eric E. Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, said by e-mail. “We have to start by helping people get online, and the creativity of the people will take care of the rest.”
If it's just an API term then why don't they just call it a "user thread"? Microsoft calls other wise standard things by different names to make people who don't know any better think that their skill only applys to Microsoft products.

ie: Microsoft calls their implementation of a LDAP server "Active Directory" even though they are essentially the same thing.

It's not a question of fairness it's a question of facts. You're the one reading it with a negative connotation that implies unfairness.
As for Java on mobile: there are projects that are going that route. I'd wait and see before I postulated whether this is a good idea or not.

I'm sure you've seen "Java: Please Wait..." on tiny mobile screens with famous Java logo (cup of coffee). I am yet to run into "Please Wait: Objective-C..." screen on the iPhone.
Note that he said well. Yes, you can drive a stick to work and the grocery store without learning anything significant about it at all, just like you can write "Hello World" programs in C++ without really knowing anything about pointers, dynamic mem allocation, etc. But in both cases, to be able to do anything significant, you'd need to learn more than the absolute basics.
27.7% interest rates. Holy shit :-)

But that's america I guess. The richer get richer by exploiting the poor. There should be laws on the maximal interest rate!
C yes, C++ definitely not. C will help because it will introduce people to how things are actually stored in memory and because quite a few high level tools are implemented in C. C++ will just confuse the learner with excessive syntax.
I like how techcrunch is yet to make a post about this
Are you familiar with techniques used in avionics software? The methods just ooze with pain for the developer. Examples include no dynamic memory allocation and always running network operations at full tilt so there is no notion of average & peak network usage. For the latter, let's say you want to make a messaging system where module 1 periodically sends a message to module 2.

Rather than just sending a message when it is needed, you determine the maximum frequency you want to send a message, and send the latest message again and again. More deterministic, more verifiable correct, but 100% pain.
It is much more interesting to know the performance model of a given language than comparing languages. If you know the performance model, you know what costs, so you begin writing programs that avoid doing expensive things.

And it will always be the case that the clever algorithm or data structure is much better at getting some cycles back than switching language.

Part of the article is also wrong. A dynamic lookup can often be avoided if you have a dataflow analysis phase in the compiler for instance. It is almost "the" optimization for OO languages like Java.
Trolling is a lost art. It used to be quite funny. The original sense of the word meant baiting USENET newcomers along with incorrect nonsense. Sort of like how Australians try to trick tourists with lore about "drop bears" or a goofy uncle would go on about snipe hunting or cow tipping. Now it simply means name calling and general offensive behavior, which isn't nearly as clever or fun.
I think that article only goes so support my assertion. He is basically saying that the reason there is none is because people that use MACs don't put up with it. Well eventually when MAC starts making in-roads in the lower end of the market it's like a bunch of criminals moving into the neighborhood.

Maybe it's a little harder to write malware for the MAC maybe not but there will be a point when the additional difficulty doesn't out weigh the profit that could be gained and at that point people will focus more effort on it. It's just like the energy problem people didn't get really serious about it until oil got really expensive.

Not to mention that there is all sorts of stuff in the /Library folder and it might as well be as good a place to hide as the registry.
I see what you are saying, but I work for a startup in NYC, and there are a lot of places I would go (Boston, Boulder), but I would never move to silicon valley, so you have to be able to search by location.
1)Monster sucks so hard it is ripe for taking down

2)Our startup is small (15 people at the moment) but we are funded, we go through a lot of people for short contractual stuff so and we always have job listings. In the past we put the listings on our own site and hoped for the best, but this will get people that might not otherwise hear of us.
Good post.

The value of failing is not just the experience but the connections you make along the way. If you gain bad connections, you may have actually set yourself back a bit.
Seth Godin's twitter stream is a set of links to his blog posts. He most certainly does some things just for the traffic. How couldn't he? He's a marketing guy.
I have to side with PG design. Most of Google's properties have a mediocre user experience at best. I'm not so sure it's their Achilles heel (at least for search) but it's definitely an area where a startup could crush them.
Thank you. I couldn't agree more when you say "If you gain bad connections, you may have actually set yourself back a bit."

Especially failing with a Web 2.0 startup, which is linked to factors of timing and luck that are often out of your control.
data center = electricity for startups. why is this analogy funny?

Instead of running their own generator (server and storage), for those startups who don't need to, they can use Amazon's power, AWS.

am I missing something here?
Does your shell don't have command-completion? zsh does have a programmable completion and it is great. There was an gtk 1.2 aria1 that used to be the most useful application besides Mozilla in my Gnome desktop, it remains the best graphical download manager that I used so far.
there were a couple working builds of this at georgia tech while i was there. they had one that was, in fact, a marionette. and one of the other fuzzwich guys (devin) built a similar thing using computer vision and hand puppets. both were hooked up to control characters in the unreal engine (primarily for machinima, but you could sorta play the game with it too).
it's fun, fast, and kids adore it. so yea, definitely work being done in this area, and what has been made thus far is certainly compelling. nothing commercial that i know of, though.
I agree. Regardless of its content, Mein Kampf is historically significant. For that reason alone, it should be published and kept in libraries so that historians, students and history buffs have access to it.

At the time he wrote it, if I ran a publishing house, I wouldn't have printed it. However, if I were a politician, I wouldn't have blocked it from being published.

Words on a page don't hurt people, people do. By all means, punish the people for their actions, but silencing them does nobody any good. They'll find a way to be heard anyways, and then all you've done is give them notoriety.

(I'm not using a sock puppet to post this -- if someone takes this the wrong way it's their own damned fault)
True enough, but companies are generally a lot more willing to shell out money than consumers are, so long as you can convince them that your product will save them money.
yes. i've come to the conclusion not that learning c is helpful but that writing malloc is helpful. i'm eternally grateful that was assigned as a project my sophomore year.
I disagree that there is no good place to hide malware on Mac (or other UNIX-based) systems. For example, what if I replace the C library's printf call with a routine that checks if some condition is met, and if so, launches an ad popup. It would make the calling program look like it is the malware, and it would be difficult to remove.
Maybe I should set up a blog called 'FreeBSD Haters', the first post could be on why getting a printer to work is so hard, and the second on why Firefox doesn't work properly...
"However, if I were a politician, I wouldn't have blocked it from being published." Tell that to the 50 Million people that died as a result.

You couldn't have been a politician to block it unless you were a part of the Nazi party, or an opposition party who I think were outlawed anyway.

Thoughts lead to words lead to actions. If you sanction the words then you sanction the action to a great degree - especially when the this flow on effect is rapid. If you feel the strong should survive, then give them free reign, but to stand there in smug glee saying, "I let them publish Mein Kamp, but didn't do so myself" to me resembles the same evil as doing nothing in front of the cattle trucks as they were being loaded.

The difficulty is that at the time, you couldn't really speak out.. and if you did, you might join the rank and file of those destined for death. In this environment, people's souls are silenced and one can become spineless.

History is reoccuring, Iran is building nukes to take out Israel and eventually other non-Muslim countries who don't cower to Islamic ideals. Hiding this latter reality is what assists Iranian nuclear development. This freedom-for-all line of thinking says "Everything's hunky dory, as long as Israel has anti-ballistics, then it's fair game. As long as I can throw abuse back at you then great." But it is not the case that freedom is always 'good' and restriction is not, because evil must be ruthlessly exposed and curtailed for there to be any evolution, and for higher states of hapiness to be experienced.
While users might be able to authenticate as root, the accounts dont run as root.

zs-macbook-pro:~ Zach$ touch foo.bar
zs-macbook-pro:~ Zach$ ls -la foo.bar
-rw-r--r-- 1 Zee staff 0 Jul 20 18:32 foo.bar

vs

zs-macbook-pro:~ Zach$ sudo touch bar.foo
# normally it asks for password here. I used sudo earlier to rm -rf
# something in /usr/local so it didn't ask this time.>
zs-macbook-pro:~ Zach$ ls -la bar.foo
-rw-r--r-- 1 root staff 0 Jul 20 18:36 bar.foo
The real story is not the influence of 4chan, but rather it's business model. I read kind of the same article in Time. It seems, the 4chan founder is on a PR tour (PG's Submarine PR- http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html) because of problems making money.

At the end of the story, he talks about the uphill battle to get ad revenue and in Time he mentioned wanting to sell to Rupert Murdoch. I think he's finding himself more like p0rn than digg, what's an obscene site to do?
No, they're just in ALL=(ALL) sudoers. You're right; it's not NOPASSWD by default. Until very recently, that was trivially evadable with InputManagers.

Not that it matters. I don't want to perpetuate the myth that root really helps you against malware. If you can bind a socket, you can propagate. If you can read a file I own, you can get my bank account and mail. Game over.

It is just very hard to secure a desktop OS against its own users.
I Turned My Blackberry in for an iPhone 3G - Here's What I think.
I think you nailed it. Tom's character tells us Landshark sells internet strategy advice to ad agencies.

"Pure E. Not E commerce. Not E business. Not click and mortar [...] We help big, greedy advertising agencies sell the useless products of massive, morally corrupt multinational corporations. We advise them on how to aggregate eyeballs."
Yeah, definitely. I'm working for one right now and I can say I'm basically continuing with it because I want to see exactly how certain decisions will affect the outcome. I don't even care if it succeeds.

Good luck!
I have.

They are the same people who read The Secret (power of wishful thinking) (http://www.thesecret.tv/), believe in astrology and faith healing, but don't believe in the moon landing. They are out there, and there are more of them than you think.
Fascinating, thanks. Here's a link I tracked down, in case anyone else is interested:
http://synlab.gatech.edu/data/papers/mazalek_ace2007_tui3d.p...
I really hope that doesn't happen and I don't think it will for more than a few years. People react harshly to news - they think there is more significance than is really there.

I think the most likely result is that mortgage loans are going to see stratification in price - borrowers with high salaries and good credit histories are going to see little to no negative change with possible positive change; borrowers with low salaries and poor to mediocre credit will see loans they can't afford.

Partially, this came about because we (and by "we" I guess I mean US politicians) wanted to extend home ownership to more people - specifically historically disadvantaged people who didn't have access to the loan terms that those brought up as upper-middle class have access to. It's a laudable goal and one that we should try again in the future (albeit in a different way).

Since someone will probably ask what other way: One example of that would be to allow double deductability of mortgage interest to a certain mortgage value. So, let's say median home value is 300,000. If you allow a double deduction up to 150,000 in value, people with the median home see no change. People buying lower-valued homes see a positive increase in their ability to purchase that home - and that positive increase is paid for by the rich people in million dollar homes who can't deduct all their mortgage interest anymore.

Macroeconomics is complicated. My best advice is to be prudent yourself, live within your means, and not get caught up in the trends of people who think the economy is collapsing or that golden ages will never end.
Just make an alias. If you find yourself passing the same parameters, this could be doubly useful
Monetary success is great but the experience, knowledge and people you meet on the way are far more valuable. I am working at the moment on my own startup, I'm only a month in but it's been an amazing experience already.
nice post j. good find.
all are fairly useless. once your e-mail address gets out (and it will) obfuscating it is pretty pointless and just makes it harder for legitimate people to contact you. if you post to mailing lists, your address is surely out there in plain sight anyway. use a plain mailto: link and block spam at the smtp/mua level.

i've been using the same email address for almost a decade which is now in many mailing list archives, surely a bunch of spammers lists, and on every page of my website as a regular mailto: link with no obfuscation. my mail is filtered with sufficient smtp-level protection and maybe 1 junk message a day actually gets to my inbox.
Saw this yesterday and, unfortunately, it's not very good.
My Son, the Blogger: An M.D. Trades Medicine for Apple Rumors
Ticino 360° - Double track spiral loop tunnels
Compression Fire Arts Festival “Controlled Burn”
Also, Code Rush is a pretty good documentary about Netscape's open sourcing of Mozilla back in '98

http://www.viddler.com/explore/coderush/videos/1/
Does FreeBSD try to be a desktop replacement for the everyman?
umm, for stop and copy and compact memory management, heap allocation is just a pointer increment
Watching startup.com and e-dreams made me wonder if any of this generation of startups have invited a film crew to watch.
Yes you are missing the part where the eletricity cuts off, you don't know why, you can't do anything about it, and because you relied so heavily on your electricity provider you didn't set up a plan to make your own.

If your site is your personal blog or something not important, then downtime might not be a big deal. If you don't have the money for a backup electricity provider then you have to take your chances also.
What is so wrong about the asp.net?
Although I agree that "www" isn't really needed, this is one of those conventions that should have been corrected on day 1 or not at all. To change it now only invites people to encounter more errors than necessary.

There's no way 100% of web sites will change to this. So maybe half the time I'll get an error if I get in the habit of writing web page links to use "xyz.com" instead of "www.xyz.com", or typing them as such in my browser.

Conversely, no business in its right mind would accept only "mybusiness.com", scaring customers away by returning an error for "www.mybusiness.com". Of course they'll accept both, so why not use the one that's sure to work?
"Write what you believe, not what sells."

Godin doesn't do this at all. His books are filled with vapor and words that don't need to be coined.

The most frustrating part about Godin is this: even though 90-95% of his posts are either mediocre or trash, the remaining 5-10% are gold.
It's back for us (~7:15 pm Eastern).

Any estimates on total time of the outage?