skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm glad you like it! All the interesting ways to monetize the site come after Amzini reaches a critical mass of users. The focus now is on usability and site improvement rather than CTRs and other Ad metrics.

If Amzini can get a large amount of traffic, we will be able to do things such as offering thorough sponsored reviews to give social networks/communities exposure, create industry reports and do other consulting-type work, offer premium plans for small business/marketers for additional features, and create interesting info-graphics or articles to help maintain high traffic.

The difficult part is getting to a 'critical mass' of users to establish Amzini in the market and allow more ways to monetize the site than Adsense.
I am (or was - much now forgotten) "expert" at Latex/Tex, but recently have taken to using restructured text instead (more exactly, as a precursor to - the RST is used to generate Latex and then PDF). I don't know how it would work for mathematical formulae, but when you're free to use your own layout (ie not writing for some journal) it's pretty sweet.

For anyone interested, here's the source - http://code.google.com/p/pytyp/source/browse/pytyp.rst#23 - for this paper - http://www.acooke.org/pytyp.pdf - and here's some notes on how it was generated - http://www.acooke.org/cute/HowToWrite1.html

Even though Latex itself is usually not that intrusive, I find this significantly easier to read and write (particularly lists!) - it also feels more natural to edit the source (with Latex I switch more to the formatted result).
Another SVG vs Canvas paper from SVGOPEN '09 that I found useful while working early this year - http://www.svgopen.org/2009/papers/54-SVG_vs_Canvas_on_Trivi...

I wrote a prototype fence drawing app for ipad. Initial svg-only prototype turned out to be extremely slow. While in a mixed approach, svg gave flexibility of programming interactions while canvas helped me quickly render alterations in polygons of the fences as one touched and dragged.

Bottomline - SVG performance degrades as number of objects, Canvas performance degrades as size of the canvas. Mix both to get the best.
Conan O'Brien's Guide To Creativity
Smaller is Faster (and Safer Too)
The site worked fine for me just now.
The point he is making is that the broker could not predict the (inflated) marked valuation of the slice once it reached the market because of the nature of the process. It does not matter who profits from it, their privileged clients or some other speculator.
Taliban leader Mullah Omar may be dead, Afghan official says
Seriously a SYN flood? How 90's.

Side affect of running on AWS, you can't use a "real" firewall.

Even then don't they use ha-proxy up front? I'm surprised this was an issue.
It's not clear to me, why you would need to swap boards in order to run another OS on the ChromiumPC.
At this point, the emphasis is definitely on improving rather than expanding. I realize it's much better to do one thing very well than do everything okay.

I've been thinking a lot about the recurring traffic issue lately, but I'd love to hear your ideas. Even if I have thought of it, another perspective is always useful. Thanks!
List Of Startups Launching At TechCrunch Disrupt New York
Clipboard copy injections needs to be added into that list.

Nothing more annoying than copying some text and seeing an ad when you paste it
I find this an appropriate, consumer-oriented summary right at the start of the article - you cannot expect the BBC News to dive too deeply into the matter and especially not during the first 2 paragraphs.

Also, consider they did add that touch you were missing at the end:

"Think of all the tremendous progress in silicon photonics," he said. "Nobody could have imagined 10 years ago that nowadays it would be so common to integrate relatively complicated optical circuits on to a silicon chip."

And since the scientist they interviewed was German, you should also factor in certain translation issues like a German scientist explaining Fourier transformation and splitting of light beams to a British news reporter.
Entrepreneur, the Magazine That Sues Entrepreneurs
If you assume a view in which syntax produces a predictable semantics, then yes. The number 123321 contains more information than 3. But natural languages do not have a semantics produced by a syntax in an easily predictable way. I think it isn't a novel result, but for different reasons.
So they went from selling to 3 corporations to 5? Meaningless stat...
Google is a lot better at maintenance than any school sysadmin will ever be.

Not necessarily. Even Premium (i.e. PAID) Google Apps users have had issues with feedback/error resolution with things like missing/corrupted docs, and there is nothing more they can do. When I worked in the IT Dept. of a Tertiary education institute, it was not unheard of for students/staff to contact the department manager if they were not satisfied, or even write to the Minister for the Education Department.

If they did the same thing under a Google/Netbook setup, there is nothing to say the IT department (which will _STILL_ be required, they will just have their hands tied behind their back in terms of what they can do) could do _ANYTHING_ about the problem.
Following ideas from both erlang and android, each gui screen within the application would be attached to a single process. When a new screen is opened the process is killed and a new process starts. If new code has been loaded the new process will switch.
I used MacFORTH back in 1985 because I wanted to get a leg up on Mac programming, and it was one of the few environments that worked on a 128K Mac with two floppy drives. It was awful; I'll note that MacFORTH sank pretty rapidly once even halfway decent IDEs became available.

http://www.dadhacker.com/blog/?p=1468

One of the reasons there is a FORTH interpreter for every platform is that it's so easy to port or bring up that it's /always/ an early arrival.

It's sure not modern. Unextendeded FORTH has nothing like a heap (just stack-like allocation). I could go on.

And yeah, you get yelled at by FORTH purists who see nothing wrong with the language. They can be an interesting crowd to deal with; the most incompetent ones seem to be the loudest and most arrogant about FORTH's universal applicability to everything (and if you can't see this, you're a moran). See earlier comment about projects running late, then killed.

[Back in the day, when I was working on database engines at a largish computer company, a manager of mine said, "I've got to go over to building 123 and evaluate a proposal by some people who want to sell us an O(N) sorting algorithm."

"Don't they know that's impossible?"

"No. They claim they've done it. They got some people in Marketing all excited. They think it could be really big."

"Huh."

"They've written it in FORTH."

(pause)

"They're stark raving loonies," I said.

Oh, and it was about as miserable and as confused and misguided and very nearly fraudulent as you can imagine. Go figure.]
You may want to check out this compilation of JavaScript micro-frameworks http://microjs.com/
By the way, when you post an old article, the convention is to append the year to the title, eg:

Why Python? (2000)
>>Oh of course, a student waiting a few seconds to logon to a server is clearly wasting too much of their time,

No, but setting up several hundred new freshman every year is a pain in the ass. One that took my school atleast a week to finish up when they did it by a (poorly written, im sure) batch script. Besides, one of the most important points of computers is automation. If adding a new system removes even 15 seconds from every new user, that can add up rather quickly in a large school.

>>and IT departments are just going to _love_ the loss of control over the devices they currently have.

What? What control do they loose are you referring to?

>Because the web apps that a netbook uses, are mythical beasts that have no licensing or maintenance requirements, and store data down gumdrop lane, because they're powered by the good thoughts of Google users, not physical servers?

have you been to a high school in the last ~5 years? Mine probably had ~90% uptime. Meaning it was down/unavailable for use 10% of the time. Multiple hours, almost every night. Godawful. Google is unarguably one of the most reliable web services there is, so, while the author was being a bit hyperbolic, it is almost certainly a stepup from any non-private middle/high school I've ever seen.

Seriously. its a good deal.
It seems to me that the update process is slightly more jarring on OS X than it is on Windows (though I haven't used the Windows version so I am just assuming). When I finish using Chrome on OS X I will close the last tab with Cmd + W, so Chrome is still open and therefore it won't be able to install the update next time I open a tab. On Windows I would close the last tab and the application exits completely – though it might take slightly longer to open Chrome each time, I will never really have to manually restart Chrome to get the update installed.
It seems as though Google is trying to eliminate this by supporting their own plugins. Flash has been shipping with Chrome for a while, and a PDF reader has been shipping for months.

Those two plugins have 90% of people's plugin needs covered.
That's Next for the Tablet
This also needs a demo page!
New incarnation of an old issue.

---

Movie Answer Man

Roger Ebert / February 7, 1999

Q. In your recent review of "Virus", you commented: "It didn't help that the print I saw was so underlit that often I could see hardly anything on the screen. Was that because the movie was filmed that way, or because the projector bulb was dimmed to extend its life span?"
A dirty secret is that movies are under-lit in most theaters. Films are produced with the intent that they be projected at the brightness of 16 foot-lamberts. Field research by Kodak found that they are often shown at 8-10 foot-lamberts, well under the SMPTE standard for brightness. To get theaters up to this and other standards, Kodak is introducing the Screencheck Experience program. The under-lighting of screens may be acceptable for a few movies--lest you see the entirety of their badness--but in general it unnecessarily degrades the theater experience. (Carl Donath, Rochester NY)

A. I've seen thousands of movies and I believe the Screencheck Experience program would only confirm that "Virus" was severely deprived of foot-lamberts when I saw it in a Chicago theater not a million miles from the Water Tower. Martin Scorsese, who travels with a light meter, once told me movies are projected at the correct brilliance in New York and Los Angeles, because that's where the filmmakers live, and they squawk. In a lot of other places, he said, the theaters turn down the juice to save on the replacement costs of expensive bulbs.
A programming language for news: $gimme and Newscoop
Yes but as you said earlier, it has taken up way too much screen real estate and it's not at all intuitive. Making it a plugin will retain the classic GIMP intact as well as one doesn't need to install a separate GIMP client.
The name OrionHub makes me wish that open-source companies were more litigious, just so that we could have some variety in naming.
Arclight is awesome. They are one of the few chains that actually truly care about the full "experience" of the theater. In addition to checking the sound and image (and actually knowing what they're checking for), they also don't run adverts before the film, which I appreciate.
I like reading Jessica Mah's blog, so I'm sorry to jump right into the nitpicking. But something in she wrote doesn't sit quite right with me...

She writes that finding talent in silicon valley is like trying to find water in the sahara, but then a few sentences later says "We had a lot of talented people apply for full-time jobs, but they either lacked culture fit, or cost too much money."

Unfortunately, there's a lot left unsaid here, and it would help to hear something more specific. For example, what was "too much money"? What attributes contributed to a candidate's "lack of culture fit?"
I like how they've already made up their minds about Global Warming and treat skeptics like crackpots. It pretty much proves their point in the article.

They even try to justify it with 'evidence' that the more educated a Republican is, the more they deny it because "one insidious aspect of motivated reasoning is that political sophisticates are prone to be more biased than those who know less about the issues."

It couldn't possibly be that the facts don't provide the proof required. No, it must be bias and their ability to create counter-arguments.

Counter-arguments are good science. Trying to disprove a theory is good science. Blindly accepting the word of 'scientists' is not good science.

Also, telling someone they aren't smart enough to understand the facts will never convince them, especially if they are college educated.

For anyone out there that doesn't already know it, here's the skeptic's stance on AGW:

The planet is warming. The planet has natural warming and cooling cycles.

There does seem to be some correlation between man's activities and increased warming. Causation has not been proved.

The ONLY data on this subject has been doctored by people who stand to gain from it. The original data was destroyed and nobody else can reproduce their work. Good science depends on peer review, which cannot be done now.

Any steps to 'fix' the planet could very well be pointless (if there's no causation) and are almost guaranteed to have side-effects. "We have to do SOMETHING" is foolish and dangerous. It's quite possible (maybe even probable) that doing nothing is less harmful to the planet than doing random things that might help.

There is nothing magical about a college education that makes someone able to do a job that a non-college-educated person could not. Telling someone they couldn't possibly understand the science involved is ridiculous and pointless.
And when things went missing or corrupted at the IT Dept, did you have a better success rate than Google at recovering the items?

Did you have a lower corruption/loss rate?

Google is huge, and a few problems are going to happen... And they'll be blown out of proportion. Without actual numbers to show the reliability, your guess is as good as mine about how reliable it is.

The fact that you can't get in touch with a Google engineer and hold them personally responsible doesn't mean anything. The document is just as lost either way.
Even though MS is a large money making behemoth, I don't necessarily think C# would be served any better by MS trying to support other platforms. A large part of .NET depends on a well supported class library. These class library can be very operating system sensitive. Backslashes vs forward slashes, directory separators, nonblocking IO, GUI stack etc. It is hard to do this well. Particularly on a platform that belongs to your competitors.

Microsoft has pushed Silverlight as a .NET vm that runs on Mac, with a smaller framework library. So far, this has met will little traction. I don't think it will encourage MS to push this further and wider.
You're the first hacker I've come across on HN who likes Dimmu(apart from me) :D
What Makes an Organization World-class: Narayana Murthy founder of infosys
On Learning and Teaching
Etherpad + small groups in Skype, a new way of doing P2PU meetings
I think it's possible only in IE, or using Flash.
That is pretty weird, yeah. At a guess, I'd say it has the OS as firmware to make the bootup really fast, and you'd be replacing that firmware board with a BIOS board.
It'd be pretty low, considering the cardinality of the set of attested "gods" ;)
No, but setting up several hundred new freshman every year is a pain in the ass. One that took my school atleast a week to finish up when they did it by a (poorly written, im sure) batch script. Besides, one of the most important points of computers is automation.

I worked in a department that had a statewide eDirectory (45+ campuses spread across across hundreds of KMs), with students created every night. At the beginning of semesters, it would be creating thousands of new accounts every night. It had a few hiccups, sure, but it was automated. How do you think the Google Apps accounts are going to be setup? Google isn't some magical beast that telepathically knows all the students in a school.

Just because the IT at the school you were at was run by idiots doesn't mean they all are.

* What? What control do they loose are you referring to? *

When you manage services locally - i.e. desktop/laptops with directory services, file&print, email handled internally, YOU (that is, IT) decides what users can do. They can stop users from installing random Apps, or visitng porn/non-educational sites, and do things like prevent students from printing war and peace fifty times just for giggles.

* have you been to a high school in the last ~5 years? Mine probably had ~90% uptime. *
again, one bad school doesn't mean the rest are the same. Multiple hours of downtime per night is not the norm - we didn't even have that kind of downtime when we migrated every single networked device in the state into a new Directory Services tree. Sounds like your school needs new IT staff, not an external provider. Incompetent staff will f*ck up anything they're given.
This is so true. Worst of all a company named Tynt has a patent pending for ctrl+c injection:

http://www.google.com/patents?id=4Qx6AQAAEBAJ&printsec=a...
HA Proxy isn't going to protect their pipe from congestion. Null routing the ip that's getting flooded will.
What are his running costs?
Online services I pay for
MagmaRails, a Ruby conference in Mexico is now accepting proposals
I thought I was the only person who noticed that.

If I wanted a sub par movie experience I would have stayed home.
http://i.imgur.com/RSNqg.png (a power user knows what to do)
Video: Erlang Gives You Superpowers
Maybe right now, but it's very early in the web-based IDE game to write anyone off.
An Idea is Shared: Pitchie is announced
MySQL in .NET: Native or ODBC
> I wonder why Linux distributions such as Ubuntu still download the entire new packages on an upgrade. A lot of upgrade time and bandwidth could be saved by only sending the differences. And it would reduce load on the mirror sites.

Speaking as someone who has worked on this problem for my own projects [1], I think I can answer this.

Fedora/Yum already supports downloading a binary diff between rpm packages to reduce download size, but this also requires keeping a cache of previous rpm's to run the patch against. There are multiple reasons why you can't rely on binary diffs against the files actually stored on the system, most namely for files like /etc/* that are more than likely modified since installation.

But the real problem with binary diffs is that unless you're doing what Google does to ensure that people stay up to date, the number of binaries you need to diff against grows very quickly, and there are a lot of edge cases to take care of.

For example, let's assume some package A has been released as version 1, 2, and 3. When A has a new release 4, you obviously want to build a diff against release 3, but then you also most likely need or want to build a diff against 2 and maybe even 1 to take care of people who haven't already upgraded to 3. And even if you build a diff against every single version ever released, you will still always need to provide a full version of the package as well for two cases:

1. New installations, or reinstallations, of the package.

2. When the user has cleared their package cache to save room.

And even beyond that, creating diffs involves a lot more effort and knowledge on the part of the packaging team because they not only need to know how to build those diffs, but they also need to keep track of old package versions to build those diffs against.

The end result is that you trade download bandwidth and time on part of the server and end users for a lot of effort, time, and storage space on part of the packagers and distro mirrors. For mirrors that are already encroaching on 50GB for a single release of Ubuntu and/or Fedora, adding a whole bunch of binary diff packages will most likely grow the repository size by at least 30-50%, if not more, depending on how many old versions you diff against.

The question then becomes: does this trade off actually make sense, or does it present further roadblocks for contribution from packagers and donated mirrors?

[1]: If you would like to see how I handled this sort of task, I have a Python library I wrote to handle the client side updating. I know it's not the entire piece of the puzzle because it doesn't cover generating the updates, but it might be useful for someone else. http://github.com/overwatchmod/combine
To the BBC: I’m sorry about Cloud Reliability
also: blindsight by peter watts. free online and amazing.
http://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm
http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/http://www.adaptableg...

:(

Anyone got a cache or mirror ?
Informed design decision towards the aesthetics or usability greatly inspires the experience. Design and redesign is subjective to the process.
Redesign is a process to undo the mistakes of past and create a better experience.
Relative focus on present designs is greatly influenced. And for a community, has its subjective sense too. Design standards another plus.
And when things went missing or corrupted at the IT Dept, did you have a better success rate than Google at recovering the items?

Well we could tell the person, right then and there that we are working on it, so they know their problem is being looked at, and we knew the details of our backup schedule, because we controlled it.

Hell, for a simple "i deleted this by accident" problem, we could often retrieve it with a rightclick before the disk was purged, and if it was already purged or the document corrupted, we just went to the tape backups.

Can you tell me what Google's backup plan is? Do they even have backups for the stuff in Google Docs/Gmail? Are those backups available to free users? How long are old backups kept? What is the response time for a file retrieval request?

* The fact that you can't get in touch with a Google engineer and hold them personally responsible doesn't mean anything*

it's not about holding an engineer personally responsible, it's about transparency of the service. if you ask a (decent) IT department about their backup schedule, they will probably tell you, happily, when files are backed up and how long for, and how long it takes to retrieve them and how often they're checked for consistency.
You are heavily under-estimating just how much more grammar there is in German compared to English and once you know how to correctly apply that grammar, there are quite a few exceptions to those rules which would all mean different things. And also we have those three "genders" and "the little girl" is NOT considered female, for example.
I've long heard Steve say he doesn't like corporate sales because he didn't like to deal with IT managers and people who didn't use the products they bought. I wonder if that's changed, or if they have a corporate sales division now.
It sounds like ESR was writing that old-fashioned single-script non-OO stuff, relying on big nested data structures which were indeed often messy and confusing. OO changed all that.
It varies by region and dialect, also - very popular example is the soda pop "Cola".

In Austria Cola is neuter "it", in Germany it is female, which for me as a native speaker from Austria always "feels" like they are referring to the can (which is female in Germany and Austria).
Would they really stop at Chrome infinity ?
I'm pretty sure they would make a version aleph one next. And so on.