skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not talking about MapReduce but rather the back end presupposed by things like MapReduce. Let me try an example. Imagine some large dataset. All the stock trades ever, say. Or all the temperature readings ever. (Maybe these particular datasets don't exist, but some do.) Suppose some Saturday afternoon a question pops into your head. Wouldn't it be great to know, say, the average, max, and min temperatures in that dataset, maybe broken down across geographical buckets. How would you go about it? The hard part isn't computing averages - the difference between computing "average" and computing "identity" is practically negligible. The hard part is obtaining the data, arranging it in a suitable form, and then being able to get at it. You want the data to already exist in zillions of morsels on lots of different computers, have a fast way of discovering which morsels your computation needs, and a fast way of accessing those morsels. Ideally there would be many copies of each morsel, giving you a lot of choices about whom to talk to.

In other words, you want a decentralized, redundant morsel discoverer-replicator. To me this sounds like what BitTorrent already does with, say, movies. Any popular movie is already split into morsels and replicated a zillion times, so any particular download (computation, in our case) can immediately start running. Of course that's only true for files that are already well-seeded. But it's easy for anyone to come along with a new movie (dataset, in our case) and plug it in, making it easy for anyone else to download (compute with), and getting faster the more popular it becomes.

(MapReduce can do the computation easily... if you've first arranged all the data appropriately. But that "if" is what, in Carmack's words, "precludes most computation of opportunity.")

The reason I wonder if BitTorrent would be suitable for solving the hard part of this problem (discovering and transferring big data) is that it already has solved it, massively. What else would you need to get true ad hoc computation on arbitrary data? A query language, an evaluator for that language that knows how to compute with morsels and assemble the results (there's your MapReduce)... and what else?
There is nothing science fiction about continued improvement of modern medicine. The lives of the elderly today are dramatically different from those 2 or 3 decades ago. In another 3 or so decades it will be different still.
I've had similar experiences with games.

Yes, it's important to make the code clear. Shipping is so much more important than code reusability though. When the lifetime is small, rewriting it to be more modular isn't quite as justifiable as in a long-term project where you actually have the time to get it right.
Cost of lawyers: $40,000, Cost of photocopying: $10,000, Seeing mastercard found guilty: priceless.
Shrug. Other industries seem to manage just fine with professional certifications.
What Hemingway Would Think of the Internet
Notice how people are starting to use Google+ as blog posts? It even looks like a blog post. If only the URL's looked a little bit better, it would be perfect.

And I agree with him. So far I love Google's unifying strategy, not only through deeper integration but through having similar, more streamlined design as well. And I feel this is just the beginning. I think we'll see a lot more of it this year.
Surely Visa and Mastercard have the right to to business with whomever they like?
Add Google+ anti-discrimination mode without profile photos or video chat?
Wouldn't we better off if people were to not discriminate subconsciously all the time on social networks?
Being pursued by the feds didn't make it any easier but his family history had multiple case of depression followed by suicide. Four different generations of Hemingway's family had suicides. Hemingway's father killed himself and it continues through Hemingway's granddaughter, the late actress Margaux.
I'm not saying it's "bad" to rip off, just that it's not newsworthy.
Now why is it that we want the NSA and FBI (Hi there, Rights-abridging Feds!) to snoop on all our email, commentary and network transmissions?

Sure, J. Edgar Hoover was a special case. Or was he?
here is a good study on that [pdf] http://www.cramton.umd.edu/papers2000-2004/00jre-collusive-b...

Essentially people try and convey information to the other bidders through the amounts of their bid. Like putting an area code at the end of a large bid to indicate that is the market you want.
I was thinking something similar to this last night. Google+ unifies the product set. Even the new Google mobile web is unified and easier to get around now. I can see it pulling me into products that I don't really use much just because it's more convenient.
Didn't Ryan Dahl say he wish he used something else for packaging Node modules?

(I don't know what he had in mind other than CommonJS and I don't remember where I heard it so this is pretty hazy...)
I thought of using it as a blog, but the fact that the "posts" are in the same stream as the "tweets" and generally everything else makes it less useful than a dedicated blog. It could definitely replace tumblr, though.
Every change they make you're forced to use. And that's pretty much the nature of web applications, until someone starts seriously focusing on discretely versioned web apps.

Google forced me to stop using Notebook, by taking it away. They seemingly forced previews on my search results, so that when I hover there's a bunch of big graphics that now pop up. Possibly I can opt out of it, but why do that? People bitch up a storm about "opt out" email newsletters, but "opt out" Google UI changes (assuming you can opt out) are met with near universal cheer and slavish devotion.

I deal with it because pretty much all other players are the same - Google's really no better or worse than anyone else, as far as I can see.
Thus far, I've only heard industry insiders and participants praise Google+.

In technical fields, like medicine, or even computer science research, I'd pay close attention to such commenters.

But a product like Google+ was made for the masses. Just like Google.com was. Just like Facebook was.

So until my non-tech friends start praising Google+ as if it's a must-see movie, or a song I have to hear, or a restaurant I have to try, I'm discounting these views.

I'm not saying Google+ won't be successful. I'm just saying that the people who are saying it's going to be The Next Big Thing aren't the people who make The Next Big Thing, The Next Big Thing.
Yes, and tap and hold to get the magnifier for a very cool effect.
Tarring all of postmodern theory with the Sokal hoax brush is like claiming that all of medicine is a fraud because of the Thalidomide disaster. Not saying you're necessarily wrong, just that your reasoning here is at least as lazy and flawed as you're implying post modern theory to be.
The word on the streets (of Seoul), Samsung dropped the lawsuit as soon as the auction for Nortel Network's wireless patents ended. Soon after Samsung realized it was on (more) shaky grounds. Apple took part in the winning consortium.

And, where Samsung pleads its case of copying=competing, they have no shame. I hope this will justify 'innocent copying' from their competitors locally and abroad, namely emerging Chinese brands. Knowing how Samsung behaves/operates, they would seek the death penalty for those who challenge them with true innovation. As in, behind the scene guerilla tactics by 1) using closely-affiliated media powerhouses to spread official misinformation 2) or, influencing articles by buying advertising from trade news magazines, 3) cut the head off all revenue streams of the challenger by threatening its customers/backers. Samsung tried all of the above in late 2009, when Apple launched the iPhone 3G/3GS in Korea. 1) & 2) Spread misinformation using mainstream TV and newspaper media 3) Threatened the then-sole-iPhone carrier, KT by awarding its rival (SKT) with exclusivity to Galaxy-line products. Should note, SKT began offering the iPhone in March '11 which proved moot to Samsung playing favorites.
Chromebook, in its default configuration, can do limited SSH, but it's designed essentially as a browser.
There are 3 main tools that are critical to keeping me organized:

1. For everyday stuff like tasks and reminders, 2Do on my iPhone is what I count on.

2. For brainstorming ideas and sketches, I still keep an old-fashioned notebook that I can go back and flip through.

3. For keeping my coding tasks organized, I can't imagine going back to a world without Pivotal Tracker (www.pivotaltracker.com)
Not only that, but it says right in the terms and conditions they can change the terms at any time without notice. It also clearly states if they feel like a party is using their services for illegal activity, they can block any payments or transfers to their accounts.

Most of the stuff they do is borderline criminal activity, and it won't take a judge long to side with the credit card companies.
The bidding groups had names like "Rockstar" (Apple and friends) and "Ranger" (Google). Are the actual parties behind the names secret during bidding?
He talks about a lot of stuff and offers his opinion, which I guess you should take with a grain of salt. His actual field of expertise is in Ideology, and there I believe he can offer quite a lot. Regarding him "sounding profound", I guess it must be because of the way continental philosophers construct sentences, and us not being able to relate to their terms.

If you thought he was bad, you should listen to someone like Derrida (he's dead btw).
That's awesome. What's the story on this commercial? Description says spoof and comedy but it looks very official.
TinyVM: A lightweight, fast virtual machine in < 500 lines of ANSI C
The definition is obviously about potential: the last healthy Tasmanian Tiger could mate with another healthy Tasmanian Tiger and have baby Tasmanian Tigers.

A healthy mule can't mate with another healthy mule and have baby mules.

People who happen to be sterile or decided not to have kids can remain a part of the human species...
[video] Haskell Platform Setup - Ubuntu
Takeaway: parallel programming is hard even for Googlers.
Quoting myself: "an end user can perfectly avoid using ALL of its [Apple] products with absolutely zero strength"

Maybe it is just me, but in a scale of 1 to 10, how hard it is to voluntarily stop buying/using products from Google, Apple, Microsoft and Facebook?
I think Tom is pretty mature about MS being outcompeted by the other social networking sites. That's quite pleasing to see.

I feel that inevitably, I will somehow end up using Google+, despite my lack of need (or want) for it at the moment, though.
Well, considering that even if you were invited within a few hours of the product launch, you've still never been able to actually log on to Google+ and use it, I'm afraid it's not really possible for the unwashed masses to chime in at this point. Unless you want them to talk about how great the screenshots look.
"It's really easy to switch to an alternative if you don't like what Google does, and Google even promotes this ease because they think people will be more willing to try out their services".

From a search standpoint, there aren't many viable search players that can deliver good quality results. That's the fault of the competition 10 years ago not paying enough attention, but the moat is so great that it's going to be a gargantuan task for anyone to truly "take on" Google at any meaningful level for a long time to come.

From a "I browse the web" standpoint, the average person will be encountering googleness all over the place in the form of ads and analytics. It's not easy for the average person to opt out of being tracked by the Google machine (yes, possible, but not easy for most people). So, most people are part of the Google universe in one sense or another. Even if many people stopped going to Google's search properties, their grip on display advertising is enormous, and that area of business alone could keep them going for years to come without any serious competitor in sight.

"Google would quickly be out of business if they piss consumers off."

MS fanboys said the same thing about MS 10-15 years ago. It hasn't happened. MS seriously pissed off a lot of people (antitrust suit, etc) but they're still in business. Just like MS, Google could make serious strategic blunders multiple times for years, and they won't suffer any serious long term damage. They're too entrenched with no viable competitor, and who's going to try to 'take on' google? Where would you start? Mail? Search? Maps? Documents? News? Blogger?

"If they piss consumers off"

How would we know if they did something we disagreed with? Considering for most people, Google is their internet front door, finding info on Google's bad behaviour could quickly become a very difficult task (delete a few key records from the search index, and who will know?) How do we know they're so "honest" with our personal data? "Better than facebook" is a pretty lame answer, and I'm not sure one could set the bar much lower with a straight face.

TLDR: Even if you're not using Google, Google's using you.
Just not interested in Google+. It was enough of a struggle to coax me onto Twitter and Facebook. I don't hear non-techies talking about Google+--it's all dedicated bloggers and people in the "Twittersphere" (ugh).

Not to mention that I heard all sorts of revolutionary praise for Wave when it was released.
Submit SMS with predefined network operator code 
Nexmo SMS API has introduced a new feature in our REST & SMPP APIs that will let you force the mobile network of a number. This article shows how to do it for SMPP.
I think it's more that HN commenters skew younger, so you see a peak in mid-20's.

But anyway, I disagree with lemonade stands/mowing lawns not counting. You can learn a lot from the simplest business. And that knowledge (hopefully) causes you to avoid making the same mistakes later when there's much more at stake. That, and remember that most startups aren't financially successful anyway.
BitTorrent fascinates me because it was a thought problem. The technology to support BitTorrent had been in place for years--the requisite bandwidth, processing power, and storage space--but nobody had conceived of a clear-enough implementation to execute the high concept of piecemeal transmission before Bram.

Most unsolved problems today are probably thought problems, not technical problems (excepting battery life and blanketed super-fast wireless).
But non-tech people can't do that yet, they don't have invites. Or-in the rare case that they do have one-their friends don't so they can't still comment.
ElasticFox-ec2tag 0.2.8 out. Supports FF5 & Standalone App to manage EC2
Good point.

But I think that only confirms my point. Google should put it in the hands of the masses, and not industry insiders (though perhaps a closed network of the masses, such as a core group of Oprah's followers).

It needs to be careful not to make Google+ an engineering project for employees, and instead a great consumer product.

For what it's worth, I've been using it for the last couple of days, and I don't particularly like it.

I wrote a few reasons why I don't here (see the update part at the end): http://www.chipsandguac.com/thoughts/googlesocial.html
I don't get it. Isn't anyone else as creeped-out by the idea of a Google social network as I am?

For the most part, only social networking techies are praising this thing. The last thing I want to do is give Google even more of my information, my friend's information, and so on.
That's speculative, and not really that true. My dad (born 1927) has high blood pressure, and he's on the same no-salt diet his father was on.

Some things don't progress. Sometimes technology gets to a local maximum and the next breakthrough is perpetually about 50 years away (i.e. energy production). We won't be the first generation to die of cancer despite spending our youths convinced that they would have cured cancer by then.
Notice how people are starting to use Google+ as blog posts? It even looks like a blog post. If only the URL's looked a little bit better, it would be perfect.

I just did that, then found that "public" didn't really mean public; the post was still only visible to people with Google+ accounts. Oh well. I then copied over to my actual blog. But I would like to have a true public option even if it only meant read-only of such posts.
It will be interesting to see whether Google googleizes social networking (changing the entire genre to be more privacy respectful) or whether social networking facebookizes Google (changing Google to be less privacy respectful, just like Facebook).

Note that I don't believe Google is actually very much better than Facebook in privacy terms. Google keeps everything you do, forever; while Facebook tends to share everything you do, right now. Google does less immediate privacy damage but perhaps more in the long term? What happens when Google gets hacked and it's not just your username and password released, it's everything you've ever searched for and every website you ever visited that had a Doubleclick ad on it? Privacy tsunami, that's what.
The thing that is hooking me in Google+ is that it's just my google account. I don't really have to think about going there unlike the other services. And what killed Facebook for me was the UI. When it became too cluttered I just got tired of it. I hate battling with a website. Google+ UI seems more polished already that what Facebook has/had(I haven't used it seriously in the last 2 years. I sporadically log in and feel like I'm going through my email thrash. )
What I meant was that we haven't been replied; do we still have a chance of getting in?. I'd really like an answer from
someone in YC.
Weight is a non issue if you working on intranet sites. Or os applications.

And as others have pointed out, you can compress this file down to under 1k.

I like what I see. I'd love to have an icon set that didn't rely on images or "font-face" statements.
> If you can prevent other people who had the same idea as you from making products based on them just by describing the idea on a piece of paper and getting government's stamp that you were the first one to come to them with it, then the society is worse off.

So? Every law has cases where it comes to the "wrong" result.

More to the point, the overwhelming number of "non-practicing" inventors just want to get paid. You seem to think that they shouldn't get paid.

Note that inventors sell to trolls because trolls are better able to get paid. If you weren't so opposed to inventors getting paid, we could look at ways for inventors to get paid without getting trolls involved.
tinyrb - The smallest Ruby VM ever
I like the new dark bar at the top. It feels like an application now ;p I don't know why it just feels more integrated to me just for that. It's not much different then the previous bar they had but whatever I guess it makes me think of the windows start bar.
It's been a few days. Today I showed it to a semi-techie female friend and she loved it. Couldn't wait to send her an invite.

But the thing about "normal" people is that they just don't get that excited about joining any new site in general. They usually join them through peer pressure and after they start hearing about it on TV, or in other such common places.

So yeah give it time to grow naturally, the same way Facebook or Twitter grew. Don't expect all your non-techie friends to be on Google+ a month after it launched. Some will join, others won't (for now).
IE8 does not support canvas. Raphaël.js is there for a reason, and one of them is to abstract developers from implementation details and let them just say "I want this graphics here".
Maybe that's because the service itself is not public yet. It's still in private mode.
Oh, I agree with you. Google will pose no problems to other big players or end users. But the bigger they are, the worse it is for everyone.

Mr. Timr, the poster above me, put it much better than I ever could, so I'll just quote him:

"When giants fight, I can't summon up any other feeling than fear that the rest of us are going to get squashed."
"License to use as required" is similar enough to ownership that I do not think that the distinction between the two matters. I think that this is especially true because Dropbox are the final arbiters of what is "required".
Clever Names Aren’t Always a Good Thing
In Praise of Vagueness
> Sounds more like the judge has a particular conclusion he wants to reach, and interprets the law accordingly.

Which is how judges often work....
Regarding Derrida, I think a lot of what he was writing about was the fundamental biases inherent in language and how people use it. To coax these out he had to write in a way as to not get stuck inside these biases and to reflect them back on themselves. Christian mystics and George Bataille wrote in this way.

Not that Derrida is necessarily a mystic, but I think when talking about the limits and inherent biases of language, straight, rational writing gets stuck in the same traps the writer is seeking to extricate himself from, both the post-modernists and mystical writers throughout history have dealt with this.

The bit of Derrida I read had a structural element to it, that added to the content.
It's pretty cool that his HTML is simply

<li class="someIcon"><a href="...">label</a></li>

Not saying this particular approach is practical, but if we really could arrive at a practical solution for icons that left the HTML that clean, it'd be great.
Did non-techies hear about Facebook in the first 2 years of its existence? Techies know about it first because they are up to date to such things. Once people on radio and TV start talking about it, they'll know about it, too. That's how the mainstream works, otherwise it wouldn't be called mainstream anymore.
Note that "penisland.net" (what you probably meant, since "penisland.com" redirects to something else) is a joke site making fun of the ambiguity in the name. And I personally don't find them harder to read, and they're easier to explain by mouth. I don't remember the last time I've seen dashes in a multi-word domain.
I've always thought Facebook's UI was mediocre at best, and slow. Google+ is beautiful and super fast. It's simply better in every way than Facebook.
Except that _wasn't_ the new TOS at the time the articles went up. They changed it _after_ the world exploded. See the bottom of their blog entry: http://blog.dropbox.com/?p=846
auf Deutsch
With CoffeeScript's destructuring assignment, you can even simulate Python's "from" clause:

foo = require 'foo'
{Bar} = require 'bar'
{X, f} = require 'abc'

Compiles to:

var Bar, X, f, foo, _ref;
foo = require('foo');
Bar = require('bar').Bar;
_ref = require('abc'), X = _ref.X, f = _ref.f;
Yes, it's in this interview:

http://bostinnovation.com/2011/01/31/node-js-interview-4-que...

BostInno: Is there anything you wish you had done differently with node?

Dahl: Yes – many things. For example, I wish I had not used the CommonJS module system. It’s far too complex and wildly different from how the browser works.

In another interview (which I can't find), I recall him worrying a bit that CommonJS is not async, though admitting that a few lapses in async purity might be fine. In any case, I'm not aware that Node actually has any plans to move away from CommonJS. At this point, a whole hell of a lot of code relies on that style of require. Perhaps it could be swapped out in some backward compatible way, but it seems like a lot of work. (Also from the point of view of someone who just uses CommonJS style rather than implements it in something like Node, I have to say, it's dead easy and intuitive. Why fix what isn't broken?)

Wow, wtf? I got voted down for finding someone a reference? I'm not making an anti- (or pro-) CommonJS argument here. I just found the reference.
Can someone explain how performing or preparing derivative works from my content helps them provide their service? I thought they were in the storage business.