skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
SEEKING WORK

Germany or remote.

Generalist with 20 years Unix/Linux experience, on the Internet as long. M.Sc. in computer science and linguistics. Particularly deep knowledge in security, crypto, dynamic routing.

I can handle pretty much any backend/infrastructure/architectural tasks, both programming and administration. I'm especially interested in Hadoop or high-scalability solutions in general.

Ping me for my resume: hn1.20.melitta@spamgourmet.com
It really illustrates a divide in understanding. Some people think being a business guy is all about having an elevator pitch when it's really about having a well-developed spec. Otherwise, you're looking for a technical cofounder who is also a product guy, which is very expensive indeed. Product development is the grass-roots of business, the "steak" from which "sizzle" is sold.
We operate under the assumption that our customers don't want to be "engaged" or talked to.

People use Ninite to get apps installed quickly and without any hassle.

That's it.

They don't use it because they need a new friend, or want to be marketed to, or don't get enough email, or want to see some ads, or want to create another account somewhere on the internet. So we don't have any of that.

Our pages/visit in Google Analytics is 2.00. The main page then the installer download page. We've got other pages, but they are literally a rounding error.
OpenID isn't the same as Facebook, Google and Twitter. It's a standard, not a company.
I'm guessing my other comments in the thread address this. If not, can you explain further?
It is very interesting to see a serious project that started as an IOCCC entry.

Too sad that the IOCCC got stuck in the last few years ...
I put together a very basic Kinect controlled lighting app for fun using ManagedNite:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CF4mzdYo3VY
Early Adopters and Inverted Social Proof
Don't forget the mascot ;) we're the travel search that's chipmunk without the "C."
Looking at the instruction set it doesn't even support subroutines. It would only need a way to get and set the current program counter (like ARM) and you could implement subroutine calls using push, pop, and jmp.
> That's why you don't use underscores in a URL. Of course, today nobody uses dashes either if they can help it.

Underscores aren't valid characters in a domain name by the way.
Most applications just exit when malloc() returns NULL, but in a more graceful way than crashing.

Only critical applications (not a toy vm) need to handle OOM errors, and that's something incredible hard to achieve.

BTW: All the code is a kind of crappy.
These are nice ideas, thanks for the feedback. The chemical element angle is one I definitely thought about when we first looked at the name.
Agreed. I appreciated both authors far more later on.
I've actually been trying to prove people like this guy wrong for years. My takeaway is that Haskell is not the problem. The real problem is that solving people's problems is hard. Designing and iterating on a product or service is hard. Finding and involving the ambitious folks with halfway well-baked ideas is hard.

Now I'm going to get a lot of flack here for saying this but I simply just don't feel that most of the stuff we make today is of particularly high craftsmanship. We need one of two things to happen.

The first is that the demand for thoroughly well-crafted software has to increase. But that much is out of our hands as it is conditional on the public at large. This will happen eventually. New tech starts life as a toy. At some point, people will want those toys to be reliable.

Going the other way, we could make it more rewarding for people to build scalable, maintainable systems in Haskell. But we are already well on the way to doing this. For example, Snap was much easier to use than Happstack (IMHO), and Happstack itself has already much improved over the years. The libraries for Couch and Mongo are as good as any other. Tools aside then, Haskell's main impediment is that can be a bit intimidating. But a friendly and openminded developer community can go a long way. We just have to keep this in mind, and keep fostering projects.
Not quite what HN worthy, but
It was a pretty piece, for sure.
The book that's referenced in the article is "The Dangerous Summer." It's not one of Hemingway's best works, but it's certainly worth the read if you like his style & can get the book from the library.

(I have a single copy that I'll send (for free) via media-mail to whomever wants it, provided it's in the U.S. Just shoot me an email at my user name @gmail.com.)
Website tracks seafood dinners back to fishermen
Looks like you and I have toyed with the same idea (Kinect controlled lighting). I was shocked by how easy it was to put together and how effective it was. Probably not an easy thing to commercialize though ("yeah, just embed these sensors in your walls and replace all of your light switches...").
Fatima Lopes Autumn/Winter 2011-12
> What would you call Ninite?

install-them-all

Or go with what people are already searching for :

install-multiple-programs
I agree. In addition, who else could feasibly compete with Facebook? At least now there's an alternative perspective on how a social network could function. I find that refreshing.
It looks like "_maxint" works as a search query?

http://www.google.com/search?q=%22_maxint%22
Google Helps Journalists Make Data More Informative, And Beautiful
On the just-out-of-reach thing - I notice also that this is another clever motherfucker whose site completely breaks with JavaScript turned off, even though all it has to do is display text. As far as I'm concerned, an idiotic web design decision like that makes everything he has to say about language design suspect.
Copa América: Messi habla sobre el gol boliviano
It's interesting to think about the sorts of technologies that are more about knowledge than supporting infrastructure. A perfect example would be the telegraph, which was only developed about a century ago but could have easily been built in cruder forms going back 2 or 3 thousand years. It makes one wonder what sort of fundamental innovations will be discovered in the future and what sorts of things we are missing out on today merely out of ignorance.
One month with Android
How do you address the scheduling and synchronization issues described in the paper to keep request latencies low?
Password Checker: Using Strong Passwords
It does make a difference for people: http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/archives/2007...

My hunch is that it also makes a difference for products, but I don't have any data on that...
No, the government really does not have the freedom to wiretap our phones... or rather, they didn't during Hemingway's era.
Very interesting. Whatever link I initially grabbed to test in another browser gave me a page that said a Google+ account was needed.

But just now I looked at the post and noticed a dropdown-arrow next to it which revealed an option to get a link. That link is indeed publicly visible. Also insanely long and ugly, but whatever, it works.
I work in a related area, which is why the idea occurred to me. To combine the two would be awesome, but is a long-term prospect.

One more point. You mentioned BOINC. I believe BOINC sends all input data to the client with each request. In other words, it's only good for computationally intensive tasks (lots of computation per unit of data). The same is true of GPGPU. That's why I brought up "average" as an example: it's a commonplace function that is not computionally intensive at all. The work is almost entirely in finding the data and accessing it.

What I really want to know, though, is who else has thought about using BitTorrent for this kind of thing, and what they think.
I assume since no-one has mentioned Google+ in connection with Google App Engine, that is not built on top of it.

Sure Google+ probably shares infrastructure with GAE, but you would think that if Google were really serious about GAE they would use it for their own external products. It sends a mixed message to the market when they tell app developers to use a technology for mission critical apps that they are not using themselves.
>So you could say that IO isn't well explained by computer science yet

I don't think I could ever be sold on using a language where IO is an unsolved problem. Computer Science has defined it quite well for me in Python
We are however making economic decisions on what sort of people we let control our information and the future of our great human enterprise of the Internet.

Facebook consistently disregards user privacy issues and doesn't work in a fashion many people believe to be ethical in any sense. Google, if by a superior PR strategy or their true drive to expand and 'Use Technology for Good' appeals to many people in the tech space and outside. Although Google is certainly a corporate giant, they are a giant we can trust is run by "People Like Us"(TM), and if for the good or the bad, I tend to trust Engineers and Scientists (Notice my bias in associating Google with Engineers and Scientists) a lot more than Businessmen and Politicians (And likewise for associating Facebook with the latter). Although I think the ideal Social Network would be run by some sort of neutral party, I recognize that the money is simply too great for that to be a realistic expectation - So in the interim I'm happy to have an alternative from Google, even if the implications for information dominance are daunting - I'm putting all my faith in their resolution.
Making Google+ liquid and responsive for big screens
Thanks! Curious, do you carry your notebook around with you all the time? and do you ever need to / how do you access pivotal tracker on the go? Thanks!
Introduction to Computer Science with Python [pdf]
This is, as I understand it, not an emulator but a VM core for running bytecode. A better comparison would be the JVM, or LLVM, or any of the VMs used by popular languages such as Ruby and Python.
Have you thought about defining an (optional) Integrator ID that would be dispensed by the central authority? There are a couple use cases here:

1- Some services that are prone to abuse may require the Integrator ID to rate limit or prevent spam. The central authority could rely on a system that makes it difficult to obtain multiple IDs.

2- Some services may wish to provide a revenue share to integrators as an incentive -- we can imagine that Picnik is the service, and it collects revenue from usage through ads and premium upgrades, and opts to share that revenue with integrators.
Facebook has superior 'Circles'
As the creator of both Sprockets, which underlies Rails 3.1's asset pipeline, and Stitch, which the poster of this article ported beautifully from Node.js to Ruby, I feel obligated to reply here :)

While CommonJS modules are undeniably elegant, they carry with them a high conceptual overhead. It would be unreasonable to expect Rails developers to rewrite all their existing JavaScript in order to take advantage of the asset pipeline. Most people do not want to manually import every dependency into every source file (and in fact Rails goes to great lengths to make use of Ruby's "require" method largely unnecessary).

Sprockets solves this with the "require_tree" directive that automatically pulls in all source files in a given directory. If you've been keeping your JavaScript source files in public/javascripts, it's trivial to upgrade your app to 3.1 and take advantage of the asset pipeline — just move your source files into app/assets/javascripts. Then when you do need more specific control over source file ordering, the "require" and "include" directives are there for you. Combine this with the implicit closure around each CoffeeScript source file and Sprockets gives you 80% of the benefit of CommonJS modules with 20% of the complexity.

Stitch (and CommonJS in general) does not address the problem of CSS preprocessing or concatenation, and does not provide a mechanism for managing other assets like images and sounds. Sprockets supports Sass and SCSS, and provides a global load path which lets you depend on JS, CSS and images from a single logical package — even a Ruby gem — with essentially no configuration.

I hope this clarifies why we chose to go with the Sprockets approach rather than CommonJS for Rails 3.1.
I dislike the old technique of making an article multiple pages to get more pageviews.
Technically yes, but not really.

The judge suggested that it would be more efficient judicially if Samsung were to drop the separate suit it filed against Apple shortly after Apple sued Samsung, and instead bring its claims as counterclaims in Apple's suit.

That is what they are doing.
Met the founder in DC last month - remember you had the idea when a bolt of lightning came from sky and turned your hair white. remember it - and use it! best of luck
I'd like to hack on the mercurial codebase. Is there a git repo somewhere that I can clone?
Sounds like a splendid idea.

https://plus.google.com/106651712615283153604/posts
From the description it seems like exactly what OpenStack provides (even regarding architecture, access to own network, etc.). The only place where it's explicitly mentioned is the blog (http://nebula.nasa.gov/blog/2011/may/nebula-team-releases-ne...) They might be running something more recent than Bexar though, since that one's rather old and doesn't provide many features required for large-scale operation.
If you're just doing freelance work, I find direct deposit works best. Many clients don't use credit card for large amounts because of fees, which you'll also incur for most online payment systems
Yes, that's very odd. At least they could have used a case statement, which a C compiler will be able to optimize into an efficient jump table.

I remember reading about a VM (I remember it as being Google's V8, but that one compiles directly to machine code so probably I'm misremembering; maybe it was Strongtalk?) which basically ditched the classic bytecode loop (grab next instruction, check what it is, evaluate it, repeat) and instead implemented each bytecode type as a function and somehow munged the instruction pointer or modified the VM's machine code itself so that the CPU would move directly to the next instruction's function without jumping. Damn, I wish I could remember the idea. Anyone know what I'm talking about?
Kinda - it's openstack (and probably loads of their custom proprietary code).
You are probably talking about threaded code which is described in "The Structure and Performance of Efficient Interpreters"
http://www.jilp.org/vol5/v5paper12.pdf

With real code examples
I think that's a pretty obvious one, isn't it?
Uh, not true.

I am not inside of Google, and multiple people in my social network who are also not in Google have been using Google+ in the last few days. The product has been very usable.
I don't understand how these things keep coming up. You can delete your account on Facebook. This is fact. You can export your data from Facebook. That is fact. What was once true is not necessarily true today.

Google operates with 30x more engineers than Facebook does. Their bandwidth is exceedingly larger, and this is why features secondary to the user-experience, like data-portability, have historically been lower prioritized at Facebook.
Thanks. I don't understand how people constantly forget this. What was once true is not necessarily true today.
As food prices rise, I have a feeling that local food will become less a lifestyle statement, and more of an economic necessity. A natural progression from political statement -> lifestyle statement -> sustainability -> local economic choice -> health choice -> personal economic choice. I believe we're at the point between sustainability and local economic choice. As local food becomes more competitive with big supermarkets and big agribusiness, I think there is a huge market/margins for start-ups, logistics, and added value.
Imagine 3 there are 3 restaurants/grocery stores in the world that control the dissemination of 90% of the food in the world. The other food disseminators that control the remaining 10% all exist on top of various mountains.

Now imagine that the 3 restaurants/grocers are run by the KKK, refuse to serve blacks, and you are black. Are they within their rights as private companies to make you climb to the top of a mountain to not starve to death?

To me the treatment of Wikileaks amounts to about the same thing. The few companies that control nearly the whole international infrastructure for payment processing has come out against this organization, effectively making it nearly impossible for them to exist. If this is within their rights their rights need to be drastically curtailed.
Thanks, that's an interesting paper. I have never heard of that paper, I'm thinking specifically of a VM that implemented the feature. Not sure if we are talking about the same algorithm, either, although it sounds similar.
We can actually download and run a beta of Espresso 2—very different from the mythical TextMate 2. MacRabbit appears to be ready for Mac OS X 10.7 “Lion”—TextMate, not so much.
Python doesn't really have the equivalent power of Iteratees.

Iteratees let you compose chains of highly-efficient producers, transformers and consumers.

As a relatively trivial example, how would you write something in Python that performs this:

for word in open("really_big_file", "rb").read().split(","):
socket.send(word[::-1])

but does so with acceptable performance and memory use?
gmail is the fastest webmail from my place
People often seem to confuse "different" with "worse." I wonder why this is. Circles are also "simple to reason about" – i.e., everyone in the circle gets the post. It's just different from Facebook in that circles are asynchronous, so it feels a bit foreign. Different, not worse. It's arguably better since it also supports Twitter-style following with a single, unified mechanism.
To beat Facebook, you also need data centers.
> Are there examples of products where an awesome name made them into successes? Or even had a significant impact?

YouTube. What differentiated YouTube from all the other video sharing sites? A good name and logo.
In my opinion it's more likely that cash would be outsourced so that the governments could control who has access to it by using corporations' "rights" as excuses to circumvent the pesky checks and balances the constitution and bill of rights afford us with regards to the government.
Ask HN: Digitizing Books That Aren't Available Electronically
I am the new owner of an ereader, and while there are lots of books to buy, some of my favorites are still not available electronically. Because of this, I am considering taking some of my old paperbacks and converting them myself, using a scanner and OCR.

Considering the fact that I would be doing this for myself, and will never share them with anyone else, does anyone see anything unethical in doing this?
Wait so how could you have Children?
As human population on earth increases to 10b, 20b, 40b on the surface of Earth we will need better tracking software of how many fish to catch to maximize the number of fish to be caught. Catch too few, and you miss out, catch too many and you decrease the reproducing population. That number needs to be calculated.

Real time tracking like this could be used to monitor the fluctuations in the rates of fish populations, entered into databases, so we can figure out the exact number of fish we can catch sustainably.

Opensource this data, and let the open market process it, someone will write an algorithm to maximize the number of fish the Earth can produce in a given year. Then the government will "absorb" that system, and we can build a sustainable Earthwide fish management process. all the oceans are linked, and multiple governments will have to coordinate. It is the "Tragedy of the commons".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
After feedback, Dropbox clarified language on licensing
Thinking about it, that sounds like inline threading

http://blog.mozilla.com/dmandelin/2008/08/27/inline-threadin...
Only cynical bastards still browse the net with JS disabled.
How Do You Protect Yourself From Hacking
You should do better analytics; combine server access logs with analytics script to determine your script and non-script audience.
For freelance billing of clients the best tool is probably WePay.

You can send a bill (including recurring bills) to clients, and have a full list of all invoices and whether they've been paid or not. They can pay with a credit card or bank account, and then you can either direct deposit the money into your bank account, or send yourself a check for the money.
I laugh when people put a "make sure" in their entrepreneurial advice. Yours in particular.
How to add value to your customers not your product
I do it all the time. I take the poor book to work, slice it's spine off with the hydraulic cutter and then feed it through my Fujitsu Scansnap. The whole process take about 15 minutes for a reasonable sized book. The software that came with the scanner makes it into a searchable PDF automatically. It's a bit ..ahh.. destructive for some people's taste but I figure by sacrificing the paper copy, I can keep the electronic one with me for a lot longer.
> 'Social' is the new 'cloud' buzzword.

New? What rock have you been hiding under?
https://plus.google.com/101691699586696356555/posts
Sublime Edit should be the new "standard" to keep up with (not Textmate, that's turned into a joke)

http://www.sublimetext.com/2
keep the sheaf and slather it with rubber cement and a folded strip of 80lb paper. instant new binding on that stack o papers.

I have a mechanical cutter since I don't have access to a die cutters shop, good for you! They can be had for around 120 the last time I looked.
Interesting. I wonder if they are rewriting the codebase from scratch into JS, or compiling parts of it from C++.
You are absolved of your sins my son. Digitize away. If we don't do it, the books will rot and be lost for ever. It is your life and your brain AND your books. So feed your brain, don't ask for permission.
Lays potato chips are doing that too, between the potatoes and seafood a lot of it may lead back here to this region of farmers and fishermen.

It may be an incentive to make sure the food is fresh, it could be great publicity when it goes well or bad when someone has something against an area due to pollution or politics.
Meet the Best-Connected 21-Year-Old in the World
this goes completely against the spirit of the web and the main reason why it was a success. I hate API keys. you have more then enough information about clients in each layer of the network stack to be able to block or throttle bad behaviour, we do not need to setup gatekeepers or control proxies throughout the web and butcher it
Content is the fuel that will tip Google+
You should at least give a larger IP-oriented firm like Morrison Foerster or Squire Sanders a call and see what they have to say. They know this stuff backwards and forwards and it may not be as bad as you think.
Step-wise evaluation of simple Haskell code to hpaste
Please see this earlier article...many of us have got together already http://hackerne.ws/item?id=2722742
I've had they same issue with Ninite, actually.

I'm agnostic on whether it needs a different name. For a use-once-in-a-blue-moon product which fixes an immediate need, it probably needs better SEO. The simplest baby step is to write ten or twenty pages about pain points and how Ninite fixes them.
I cant quite see whats so special about sublime edit. Care to share?
Andy Greenberg: Federal Wiretaps Nearly Doubled Last Year
I'm just glad they're actually actively looking at the feedback and took the time to respond to it, not once but twice. Most companies wouldn't give it a second thought.