skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That one surprised me the most. Message at http://code.google.com/apis/language/translate/overview.html:

"The Google Translate API has been officially deprecated as of May 26, 2011. Due to the substantial economic burden caused by extensive abuse, the number of requests you may make per day will be limited and the API will be shut off completely on December 1, 2011. For website translations, we encourage you to use the Google Translate Element."

Surely "abuse" means they built something people want. Sad that they don't seem to think it would be worth their while to charge for it.
> presumably the US govt is better off making the sale

This is a remarkably large assumption. The actually quite small group of people who together have the authority to make the sale are, presumably, better off making it (or they wouldn't). But there's no reason to think that they are even trying to maximize the benefit of "the US govt" as an institution, over time.

> In the "unfair price" scenario, Exxon can't buy a govt that isn't for sale.

So now you've defended Exxon from being the charge of thievery. Great, the government officials who made the sale were the "real" thieves, and Exxon was "only" their associate in crime.
The President shouldn't take cellphones from strangers
Studying the Frequency of Redaction Failures in PACER
They probably could - Soichi has palm trees: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sochi#Climate

And, there are several species of cold-hardy bananas:
http://treesandshrubs.about.com/od/selection/tp/hardybanana....

So, growing bananas in Russia hardly seems like nonsense.
Ha ha. Seriously, clinical data entry is not quick or easy (outside a few limited special cases) regardless of how well you design that mythical app. Even perfect speech recognition would only get you part of the way there, and we aren't likely to get that any time soon.
Mouser, Users, TechCrunch, Bryan
It would seem pretty counterproductive for a web business that counts on repeat revenues--and even more so for a company with a monthly recurring revenue model--to not optimize CLV in favor of optimizing for short-term gains. Even if Patrick's work was a one-off deal, I'd hope FogCreek will be measuring lifetime value of these conversions vs. old customers.
Hey Patrick,

I'm really glad Fog Creek hired you so that the rest of us could all learn a little something.
Don't forget the p-p-p-POWER APARTMENT!
Pundits, like people, want easy answers, sometimes to questions that are based on pure perception.

Microsoft, based on all the facts, is doing just fine for a company of that size and diversity. They pulled a great Win 7 release, they are doing great in the Enterprise, doing great on the server, they missed out on the Mobile side but are on the right track now with Mango and Nokia partnership. Kinect/Xbox 360 stuff is also looking great.

Sure there is not enough glitterati and magic in that anywhere, nor is Ballmer charming but those are non-important things.

When Bill ran MSFT people hated them - it's easy to forget that. So if we are talking mind share, even then it doesn't make sense to have Bill come back and run it the way he did first time around.

So what do people want Microsoft to achieve - look and act like Apple? Have more mind share? Stop doing uncool things like the Enterprise stuff? Or just have $600 share value? Unless they define that, I think this is just pointless blabber.
Recursion, self-similar, mathematics, quantity, property, modern philosophy, philosophy

Assuming you don't include the links in the "lacks inline citations" box on the recursion page.
Evernote is a great product with some surprising UI deficiencies-- did you know you can't tag multiple documents at once without drag/drop? That was a dealbreaker for me.
Fighting blog spam with Common Lisp
Are there recommended books for web design? "Funnel" is a foreign concept to me.
But nobody uses frontpages for content discovery. The front page of a blog is good for just two questions:

a) For new users: is this site any good?

b) For existing users (who don't grok RSS, sigh): is there anything new?

You can try to do more. Lots of us have category pages[1]. But invariably they get browsed by initial visitors so they fall into category a above.

Perhaps what you're saying is that every website needs a channel to bring visitors back. And twitter may well be that channel. But bricestacey is right that the frontpage is all about user onboarding simply because nobody uses it for content discovery.

[1] Including myself: http://akkartik.name
Can't sue a computer.

Legally, someone has to be responsible for the healthcare provided to the patient. The patient shoulders some of it, true, assuming they're basically competent adults and not severely impaired. (That's why powers of attorney exist, and why physicians are empowered to 'fire' non-compliant patients.) However, the MD is the one who has had the training and who is legally authorized to exercise medical judgement (as opposed to nursing judgement, and no, I'm not going to even try to get into where the arbitrary line between them falls), so the MD is the one who ultimately decides the treatment strategy, which may involve referrals to other MDs, who also must be legally capable of exercising medical judgement.

So, legally, there has to be someone to sanction (threaten with malpractice lawsuits and loss of licensure, among other things) and it's probably better for everyone involved if that person has personal contact with the patient.
Have you looked at http://swombat.com ? It's definitely not a simple collection of essays. There's a clear blog feel to it, and I want all the advantages of the blog format. I'm simply trying to make up for its shortcomings.
Most of what was "Soviet" was taken from individual owners in the first place. My family fled Estonia from invading Soviets, giving up several businesses. I visited a couple years ago and 4 families now live on the plot of land that was once rightfully ours. It's part of life, deal with it, we did. The making public of private land was also theft in the first place so I guess I don't quite get your point, he rightfully bought the land according to the laws at that point in time, he doesn't deserve to go to prison.
We're using both. Vertica is amazingly fast. Hadoop helps us analyze some very big data sets. I wouldn't want to lose either one.
Don't hold your breath. This has been an area of active work by many of us for decades. We have some systems that work reasonably well for a few limited cases but the general case of clinical data entry won't be solved any time soon. It's a genuinely hard problem that those without experience in the domain tend to underestimate.

Doctors have only a few minutes for most patient encounters. They simply have no extra time to do data entry. You can delegate some of that work to clerical staff or allied health but there are limits to what they can do, and they don't work for free either.
One can tell the difference between spam and non-spam on twitter. It's grossly obvious. We've probably all followed someone and found out a couple days later that they are just a robot spamming machine and un-followed.

I checked out @swombat, and it's clear he's real, and not a bot, so having a bot sneak in a post back to past blog posts of value would hardly, if at all, be considered spam.

Some people get confused, particularly our friends who are just looking out for us, but a little blatant self-promotion is not always spam, and it's often times understood that it's a necessary evil so we can stay in business and keep doing the good we do.
From the prior inhabitants through the ancient and acceptable right of force-of-arms...

The Russian state first started with a small group of Viking princes in the area of Kiev and expanded to rule an area that used to be home to a wide variety of empires, states, kingdoms, and tribes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_russia#Kievan_Rus.27
I should of phrased the question better - I was thinking backend languages - my list is Python, C, and ? Was thinking of another language to learn ...
The "abuse" is easily organized charging for the service and including a TOS. I hope they realize that there is a business adding APIs and offering a self service console like adwords.

I call it: "Google NoAPIs". And I even wrote an article about it at: http://blog.databigbang.com/google-search-no-api/
>> Someday, even things like boarding passes, tickets, ID and keys could be stored in Google Wallet.

I think it's called a "single point of failure". Always a "good" thing to have.
Nobody uses front pages for content discovery because the front pages rarely present the right interface or content for that. Maybe that can change...

I think that merely serving current/new users in this way is selling your content short. It's the written equivalent of a news channel, instead of being the evolution of the book. I'm hoping we can do better.
FTC: 11 year old "Dot Com Disclosures" need revising: please help us
"Sushi" leads to a loop, too:

sushi
japanese_cuisine
japan
japanese_language
arabic_numerals
symbol
numeral_system
mathematical_notation
uh oh... found a loop
So there are at least two separate use cases that get shoved into blogging.

The first (and probably most useful) treats the blog as something like a diary: commentary on current events at some scale, e.g. personal, professional, news, et cetera. In this case, older content really does have much less relevance because the events themselves now live in the past. Your friends /might/ care about what you drank last night, but they almost certainly don't care about 5 months 12 days ago. You might want to comment on Linus' latest mailing list screed, but it might not matter for kernel-dabbling four years down the road.

The second use case seems to be where Daniel Tenner really is chewing on something. If you're writing new stuff that doesn't necessarily live in the moment - musings on philosophy or cool data structures or life advice or Paul Graham's articles - then the blog model doesn't fit as well. Newer posts don't matter more than older posts, and in fact might matter less.

Thinking on this, we also have the issue of serendipity. The writer has probably created other stuff that you might like reading even if it's not directly about the exact same topic. Seems like the sort of thing attacked by collaborative filtering and other methods. Combine that with a CMS-style knowledge architecture (e.g. structure by something other than chronology if chronology doesn't make sense), and you're getting somewhere.
"I think that merely serving current/new users in this way is selling your content short."

I'm not convinced that's true. The big limitation of the frontpage is that there's no way to remind people to return to it. Without that you'll only get current/new users.

I totally agree we need a solution for content discovery. Like many others I took my stab at building one (http://readwarp.com) I'm just not convinced that the frontpage is the place for it.
Ah, trickier than I thought. I posted an EDIT to the blog post.
I sure hope so! Time will tell. I think one thing I was lucky to foresee right is that I knew I would eventually want Twitter integration, so I saved each of the original tweets along with the article. So when an article gets reposted on Twitter, it's the original tweet that it went out with when it went up - which should help make it feel even less spammy.
Tools for finding privacy problems in PDFs
Eh? I thought we were talking about corrupt government officials?
is it ok to ask where are they selling it ? lol
It's a great technique. I'm sure your PyGame code benefitted in a big way :-)
Facebook: Man suing Zuckerberg for partial ownership is a fraud
Good advice and well spoken :-) That being said, composing a number of object classes also involves some measure of cooperation, caller/callee ordination, and some plan for calling the methods in the correct order.

IOW, if the decomposition of the classes is the same, then the solutions using composition or using multiple inheritance will have much in common.

Things should be as simple as possible, but no simpler :-)
i dont use mailchimp because there spam control is too tight- i have email lists of small business owners who i have permission to be email but since they are generic emails addresses like info@domain or support@domain they wont let me send- means i lose 15% of my list and often the ones who need the email the most
Very well analysed. And I definitely agree about serendipity. That's a huge concern for me, and one reason why I haven't categorised the Founder's Library section yet. Splitting it into categories like the excellent http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/startupswiki/Ask_YC_Archive makes a lot of sense, but it almost completely takes away the serendipitous aspect, which is essential for startup advice.

The article you really should read is often not the one you're looking for. A system that makes it too easy to find what you think you need might paradoxically make it harder to stumble onto what you actually needed.

I also think that almost every great blogger who starts with the first use case ends up posting numerous timeless gems that get lost in the diary format. DaringFireball is, again, the obvious example.
> If they refuse, they are written up as uncooperative and it could affect privileges, parole, etc.

Very interesting, I did not know about that aspect and in the back of my mind always wondered why do all these prisoners even work when it pays that little. Why not just do nothing?

Somehow I thought it was because of boredom and just something to do, be a part of something, but I guess a system that punishes the slaves (erm...I mean prisoners...) for not working is obviously a lot more effective.
Wow. I don't know what to make of this. Are you saying people should keep their heads down? That there's nothing wrong with oppression? Galileo's boldness probably accelerated the scientific revolution by decades if not more. The world owes him a giant favor.
There is a lot of buzz about open source queue systems. I have tried for example the RabbitMQ with very bad results. I'll rather explain... one interesting concept about queues is contention and this is where RabbitMQ and others are behind. The strange thing is that contention is an old concept from the old mainframes.

For example the last time I checked you can't block a produced in RabbitMQ based on the number of messages on the queue.
I remember being really confused over the chronological ordering for non-diaries when it first become common, and am still not that sure it's the right thing, though it does have benefits for technological convenience (blog software) and lower activation energy (just "write a blog post"). It used to be common to have websites, and then a website might have a "recent updates" or "new articles" page with a reverse-chronologically-ordered list of recent updates, often named new.html or updates.html or something. But it wasn't the main site; just something for frequent visitors to check.

But sometime around 2000-2003 or so, people just started throwing up everything on the equivalent of the "new articles" page! Seemed sort of a strange way to organize anything that wasn't a livejournal. Also seems to indicate a bit of a reduction in long-term ambition: people used to see building a website as an incremental endeavor, where you were slowly building up an edifice, so there was a clear separation between the long-term goal for the site (a resource w/ information presented logically) and the order in which you happened to add each piece (the recent-updates page).

Wikis still have that edifice-building angle (the "Recent Changes" page is clearly not the main page), so maybe it's just that they've taken over that role so completely that the only non-wiki things left are blogs and webapps, with no more "regular" websites?
Drive by traffic isn't a basis for a real business. For my business to pay for the servers and then some, I need the equivalent of frontpaging Hacker News every day. If I want to quit my day job, I need maybe 5-6 times that.

Hacker News, Reddit and all that look pretty big when you're just starting on the journey, but you really need to look beyond them for sustainable and profitable traffic.
http://pistolslut.com/
Has anyone (successfully) attempted a full paperless solution like this with Ubuntu (or other Linux)?
I'm sure most people wouldn't expect doctors to be replaceable. But look at the process to become an MD and think about the amount of pure memorization involved. Then it all makes sense.
Did you mean, https://github.com/maryrosecook/pistolslut?
Funnel refers to the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sales_process
Shutting down the Wave API seems to be the final nail in the coffin since they decided to discontinue Google Wave, in August of last year.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/08/update-on-google-wave...
MacVim most often, TextMate every so often.

Thanks a lot!
90% certain those are metaphorical bananas.
> What is your evidence in support of the idea that assembly cannot be faster?

I don't think that is the key, they key is the cost of that speed improvement. Say you spend a week to write the protobuf decoder in assembly so now it can decode in 30usec instead of 60usec. So you have an impressive 2x speed gain.

But then say, you are writing the data do a disk. Well maybe it doesn't really matter how fast you are decoding the protobuf if next you are sitting there for ages waiting for that data to be written out. That 30usec gain is nothing on top of that 10msec wait time that is coming next, so was that week a good investment f you just did for pure speed improvement? (well you might have done as a learning exercise, then speed doesn't really matter).
After reading about Altly this morning, I thought carefully about Mr. Shaprio's argument for a competing social / network site. And while I am inclined to give Mr. Shapiro the benefit of my doubts, believing that he likely has several cards secretly tucked up his sleeves, the argument that every great brand needs an alternative brand has never really been a great way to grow a product or service. In fact I often use the Coke/Pepsi argument as exactly the opposite argument. Relying only on brand differentiation as Pepsi has tried, will always result in massive marketing / advertising costs, and little product or service differentiation. Instead of being a Pepsi to Coke, I believe that new products or services need to create a new consumer opportunity instead of simply a new package. So instead of thinking about Coke v. Pepsi, Mr. Shapiro would do well to aspire to be either Red Bull, or Snapple, or Odwalla, or any number of successful market changing adventures. Either way, even persistent incremental improvements over a competitor is better than simply ceding the space. Here's wishing him good luck.
Nitpick but its "CORBA": Common Object Request Broker Architecture -- from someone who suffered with Orbix and Visibroker back in '99.
Blogging is stupid
My coworker and I spent the last several months building an iPad app on top of the News Search API. And now all that work is for naught! That is a serious bummer.
Setting up a landing page on my blog (http://mkronline.wordpress.com/) was the best thing I ever did. It gives people an introduction to the place rather than tossing them into a list of posts.
Well, it is Wikipedia. The program _could_ go to Wikipedia, edit a page in the loop, save, and continue :-)
I think the reason that blogging gets a bit misused as a kind of catchall for content is that it has the lowest barrier of entry to publish. Thus, what used to be a traditional site or magazine or whatever is now just another "blog" running wordpress or tumblr or posterous. Point being, the line gets blurry when you are using a blogging system to deliver both long and short form content on the same site.
Abstinence-only eduction v.s education and protection. Right. Good policy.
Plivo - an MPL licensed alternative to Twilio
Or at /least/ allowing people to cache the resulting data... it was downright stupid that the Translate API's terms of service demanded that, even if a hundred thousand people all wanted a single sentence translated, you could not save the result of the single call and reuse it: you had to have all hundred thousand of those people make their own request.
There will be a Google wallet app only if Apple allows it, which is unlikely. A more likely path is that Apple will partner with someone like Intuit (whose former CEO and current board chairman sits on Apple's board) and merge NFC in with Intuit's GoPay system. If Apple wants to do to the mobile payment industry what it did to the music industry it will partner with Intuit and offer merchants a "business ready" iPad 3 that will act as a POS terminal and hook in to something like an iOS version of quickbooks. Give away the hardware as a loss-leader for the payment service and cut a lot of middlemen out of the system.

Since Apple is already on the path to testing out iPad POS services in the Apple store they can refine the hardware/software and then roll out something that works well for both the user and the merchant.
I have no intention of ever owning a smart phone. When I buy a cell, I look for the phone with the best battery and highest call quality. That's it. I don't need to surf the web, watch videos, listen to music, or send text messages. I'm not against the idea of using my phone as a payment device, but I'm not going to get a data plan or a new phone for it.

Further, I'm not going to use a company for my money transactions that doesn't seem to have any way to reach a human being to get help when something of theirs that you use goes wrong.

If Amazon did this, I'd be all over it. When I have a problem with Amazon, I can call them directly with little or no hold time. Or I can email them and get a reply within hours.
Well, that's it. I no longer have to read science fiction.
I think they need to make some more drastic changes that that.

They need to break up the company, and have several new CEO's. All their cash cows are tied to the personal computing industry, and it is coming to an end faster than they can turn the ship around with all the Windows and Enterprise baggage.
I first learned to disable Apache KeepAlives in 1998. Yes, 1998. It's disheartening that Apache still ships with it enabled by default. It has always allowed a relatively small number of lingering clients to completely DoS your server.
So maybe we as bloggers need to think more about curating our content. Organizing past posts into relevant series, maybe: if I've written several times about reverse engineering malware in a blog that ranges widely over the topic of incident response, then readers who like one post would probably like pointers to other posts. Having one or two "possibly related posts" doesn't seem to really cover the need here. So I'm not quite sure how to go about fixing the issue.
I can see Watson being very helpful to Sergey in his pet project - http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/12/business/12gene.html
Lockheed Martin Suffering Major Network Disruption
I've always thought that the standard wisdom is that most developers can't beat the compiler by hand-writing most of their code in ASM, but in things like game development, things start higher level Lua, C++, C and work their way down to increase performance as bottlenecks are found.

Compilers are like Google or Wikipedia, 99% of the time they know more than 99% of developers.
Have a look at the blog posts at one of the programming language aggregators, and see how many of the article's criticisms apply. Examples:

http://planet.haskell.org/

http://planet.python.org/

Blogs can be very useful.
The Federal Government would love to implement this... shudder.