skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The writing is atrocious (even by Register standards) but it is a good example of pivotal technology integrations.

As a systems guy I like this story because it shows something which is often characteristic of successful disruptive systems, they get extra-ordinary gains from a modest tweak in the existing eco-system.

The eco-system at the point these were introduced was ships to trucks and trains, with burly long shoremen lifting and carrying things from point to point [1]. So the tweaks were this box, a crane to load/unload them, and a way to attach them to trains or trucks. Originally, and this is important, they simply used flat-bed rail cars or flat-bed trucks. The container was held down by straps. Also some of the original containers had gunnels where they could be hoisted with existing cargo cranes using inexpensive straps. So the 'one' benefit of containers (which got them into shipw) was that they stacked easily and could be secured. Building truck trailers and train cars that could take a container using its latching system came a bit later. But small evolutionary changes in the eco system and it got large jumps in efficiency (time to load, time to secure, etc etc).

If you are going to replace an out of date or inefficient system with a new one, you will do very well if you can change it from within. Nothing worse than a system which makes all the existing investment instantly worthless.

[1] "On the waterfront" is a movie which gives an interesting 'feel' to the way shipping worked back before containers. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0047296/
I don't think he was defending reference counting as much as trying to explain that garbage collection is probably never going to work satisfactorily with an unmanaged language like Objective-C. Automatic Reference Counting is probably as good as we're going to get without a managed version of Objective-C.
Baltimore Catechism
That's exactly what I'm trying to convey. The concept of patriotism is just as abstract as the concept of love.

People who talk about it otherwise just have something to sell.
SAP leveraging tablets in the enterprise.
Maybe it's just me but this looks like major link bait no offense.
So, you like your diesels large? Check this one out then:

http://gcaptain.com/emma-maersk-engine

I hope 109,000 HP is enough for you.
Show HN:  Task Ranger
Baby Girl Costume
I think Gruber would elaborate by mentioning that garbage collection has a real and measurable cost in terms of performance and Apple would rather have a development environment that allows devs to produce the smoothest UI performance over one like Java or C# that is novice friendly but harder to get the highest level of performance out of.

Personally I really enjoy working in Objective-C and Cocoa/Cocoa Touch. I think they both hit sweet spots in language/framework design and give you just enough high level abstractions to make developing easier without getting in the way. But then again, I program in C for fun :-)
Yes, it's (approximately) true that the only way to make money is by providing something that people find valuable.

It doesn't follow, however, that if you make money then you must be providing something that is valuable overall.

Hypothetical example: I find a completely undetectable way to steal money from poor people and transfer it to rich people, except that 25% of it vanishes on the way. I offer my services to someone rich and unscrupulous. Although poor people don't have much money, there are a lot of them, and I am able to get my client $10M/year. She pays me $1M/year. (For some reason my method is only capable of enriching people who are already rich, which is why I don't just take the $10M myself directly.)

In this situation, I have provided something that someone finds valuable. It is unlikely, however, that I have made the world a better place (because of the diminishing marginal utility of money, etc., etc.), my actions would generally be considered unethical, and I wouldn't want to argue that I deserve all the money I'm getting that way.

(Some people would say that what I just described is the standard operating procedure of the financial industry. That may or may not have some truth to it, but all that matters for the point I'm making is that that general kind of thing can happen -- some jobs can be negative-sum but provide some people with enough benefit to make them well paid.)
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As the original creator of this resume template, I must say it looks rather nice! :-)

This is the .tex file I started with: http://matthewm.boedicker.org/doc/resume/resume.pdf

then I took my Word resume (that had the shading, and some other things) and converted it into this:
http://www.davidgrant.ca/latex_resume_template

I made it because I loved my Word resume and I didn't like any of the LaTeX resumes out there on the Web. I also hated Word and loved using LaTeX.

It made it into CTAN as a .sty file thanks to the efforts of George Louthan:
http://georgerloutha.nthefourth.com/projects/tucv
http://tug.ctan.org/pkg/tucv

Example using tucv package: http://mirror.its.dal.ca/ctan/macros/latex/contrib/tucv/tucv...

Personally, I hate using .sty or .cls for a resume. I think using a .tex file as it allows full customization/tweaking of the entire file, easily. A resume isn't something that can be easily generalized to a .sty or .cls IMO.
Paying taxes is patriotic in one sense.

But not feeding the monster is also patriotic.

Fundamentally, if I knew tax dollars were were being spent efficiently, I wouldn't have a problem paying 'higher' taxes.

Corruption, inefficiency make it impossible to support tax increases.
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Nice writeup of a decent simple app. Didn't know about pre-compiling jQuery templates.
Visa made a blog post confirming support:

http://blog.visa.com/2011/09/19/google-licenses-visa%E2%80%9...
Please, do nit pick.

To answer why I do the opposite, I am (still!) working in France, and unfortunately academic achievement and diplomas are more rated than experience, when you are under 30 (which is my case).

When I do a resume that targets the USA, I usually remove the picture and invert those parts.
You forgot the advantage of not having to take the credit card out of your wallet and swipe it. I think I broke a sweat yesterday doing that.
Squeegee Men Return to NYC As Jobs Fade
Mozilla Glow
This is my current project. Feedback would be appreciated.
Oh, wow, I missed those comments completely since I was using the arrow keys to navigate in Chrome. Thanks for pointing this out.
Google Wallet is here and it looks awesome | Front Side Bus
Groupon Co-founders Purchase The Historic Wrigley Building
You have it correct. ZeroMQ is used for message passing between components, and Zookeeper is used for node discovery and coordination.

Realtime processing is fundamentally different than batch processing, so you can't maintain the same semantics of Cascalog on top of Storm. Storm has a small DSL for writing topologies in pure Clojure, but it's not a higher level abstraction like Cascalog is. I've started thinking about what a great higher level abstraction would look like, but what that should look like is still an open question.
Good list, and I've read nearly all of them.

Getting past the first chapter of Pandoras Star is well worth it - Morninglightmountain is one of the most original, minblowingly awesome all time alien baddies, and the trepidation and sense of impending doom in that book and its's sequel Judas Unchained are superb. Would also recommend the Void Trilogy by Peter F Hamilton too - strong mix of scifi and an alternate fantasy world.

Missing in my view would be:
Greg Bear - Eon (as people have mentioned, but also:
M John Harrison - Light
James Blish - Cities in Flight
Battlefield Earth (awesome book, hopeless film)
Brave New World for my ultimate "classic"
If you have just one or two cards, I doubt you'd ever see the benefit. However I'm dying for a replacement for my bevy of cards:

- my personal amex

- my business amex

- my debit cards (multiple banks)

- my store cards (multiple)

- all my other ID-like and reward cards (ex: Costco, Avis, etc.).
3d PhotoGraphy
For a notification-heavy app, I'm surprised at the lack of consideration given to Queue/Topic Messaging servers. 5B notifications/month isn't quite 2k/s, which really isn't all that onerous. Routing within messaging apps would seem like a natural fit.

Or perhaps I'm missing something?
this is an awesome point I didn't even consider. I use AndroidLost and am able to remote wipe my phone at anytime from a browser. Now that I think about it, I would much rather be able to use my phone for payments with this ability, than to carry a physical card and risk losing it or leaving it somewhere. Yes I make backups of my phone using custom recovery ( clockworkMod Recovery).
Any chance you will post the code on github?
Richard Dawkins: A Knack for Bashing Orthodoxy
NetCracker to Acquire Subex’s Activation Business
Use an actual device. You don't develop for Xbox 360's or PS3's in an emulator, why would you for mobiles?
There are a few assumptions in blog post but one in particular that I really do not like. And that is that 'making money' automatically equates to improvement of society.

For most businesses this is the case. If you manufacture something or provide a service then you are adding to the overall wealth of the nation. Making a lot of money from something that does not provide a valuable service to society actually detracts from the wealth of the nation because you are extracting resources (people, natural resources, time, etc) that could be assigned to more productive uses.

Remember is money is not wealth.
You're surprised that Gruber is defending Apple?
In the intro video, the guy did not tip the cab driver! He would have taken longer otherwise...
tl;dr: "PostgreSQL is still my weapon of choice — it doesn’t keep us up at night."

I agree with the guy. PostgreSQL (and SQL server ironically) have kept me up less than any other piece of software out there.

I'm watching a turd occuring with MongoDB at the minute. Every time something breaks, I hear the team saying "it'll be fixed in the next version" or "feature X works around it for now". Grr. Too much marketing, not enough reliability study.
Lucky designers those who have heard about Bundlehunt, it's simply a "treasure".
Top 20 Most Expensive Cities in The World
The problem here is not implementation and smartphone support, but adoption by merchants. There're still shops that do not accept regular credit cards out there, and this is a new type of technology that they must somehow accomodate. So, yeah, 2-5 years to iron out the kinks, but about 10 to make it a real mainstream thing. And god help us if there will be competing standards.

Speaking of competing standards. I have this Visa "blink" card from Chase. The supermarket where I shop, has terminals that accept "blink". Guess how often can I use my card there? The thing works maybe once in ten times I actually am trying to pass my card over the sensor. It's just easier to swipe it in the first place.
Two easy steps to catch cheating schools
I live in Tokyo, and have been wanting this for years. Finally!
Warren Buffett made a comment to the effect of, even though he's intelligent and worked hard for his money, he still has to consider it luck that he happened to be born in the right circumstances because if he were born in a primitive hunter/gatherer society, he would be at the bottom no matter how smart he was because of his lack of physical strength. We all owe our success and the ability of be successful on the merits of our intelligence and hard work alone to the current structure of society to some extent.
Tell HN: the speed of HN
7 Hours ago I wrote that 'snailflix.com' is still free. Now it's taken by one Mark Sutz.

Interesting. So, if you ever have an idea for a domain keep it to yourself, don't mention it on HN. (Not that I was planning to register it, but it serves as a good reminder that the walls sometimes do have ears).
Because it's much, much easier and quicker to run most builds in the simulator, especially when you're not dealing with something that has a tricky performance point to balance. At least with the iOS simulator, it makes debugging low memory warnings and secondary screens much easier as well.
I think I'm missing something from the presentation slides. Why would an API call result in 5 Millions writes? I think he is trying to give a scenario of an API call that creates a rich push for 5M devices. Even queuing the writes is not going to solve the problem.

Fundamentally, I wouldn't have designed the messaging model that would require a write for each client device for each message.
I just don't understand this argument. In what real, actual ways is Netflix plausibly "held back" by shipping DVDs to folks? And in what ways is this fixed by spinning that business off in such a way that the exact same people will now run that company?

Because it seems to me that this is a lose-lose proposition, for the reasons stated by the commenters above.
> I love learning content management systems and by implication Blackboard despite its many egregious flaws.

Your obliviousness is obvious in your writing. So let me offer what you can hopefully take as a Penn-and-Teller-esque response.

Student and former independent LMS developer here. No offense, sir, but profs like you are a major part of the problem. Any interest you have in LMSes is unnatural. You're a professor. Your students did not sign up to be your test subjects. Do you have any idea how much time is wasted by your students in the byzantine hell of your personal online frolicking? 3 sections x 20 x 1 - 2 hours a day makes ... we might be better off skipping your class and deriving Black-Scholes from first principles.

Your university quite possibly has rewarded you for your LMS geekery by making you some sort of educational tech committee member, maybe even the chairman. Your students blow sunshine up your ass because you hold their futures in your hands, but I'm sure you ignore all that. Blackboard will blow what ever you want up your derriere, so long as you or your committee keeps telling the deans that Blackboard is making progress, or has new feature "x". In fact, Blackboard will blow harder if you question their utility.

> Universities love to feel they are on the cutting edge of "technology" and clearly have deep pockets for this stuff

Sir, you are one of them -- the people at the university -- that the author wouldn't mind actually taking what he has to say to heart.
batman -> coffeescript -> javascript. I don't get it.

Too many layers of abstraction.

I'm having serious trouble with even jQuery (with IE7,8 for example) on some of the stuff I'm working on, particularly on older machines.
Why would we expect anything less than this sort of chatter from Gruber?

He can quibble a bit with the author, but there is no hiding the fact that Objective C is a (well done) antique language and that XCode is not horrible, but a far cry from Visual Studio when it comes to ease of use.
Where is it saving the data? If I return on a different machine, or different browser, will the data be there?
I think there's an argument to be made that even the industries you mention improve the lives of people in society. Assuming (1) all gambling/cigarette/fast food transactions are voluntary on both sides, and (2) people act rationally, then any money that you spend is done because you perceive the good you receive to be worth more than the money you spend on it.

One counterargument in the case of addictive drugs or "vices" is that transactions aren't completely voluntary, since you are acting under the influence. In gambling you might also not act rationally. Nevertheless these are still a subset of all transactions, and taking your argument to the extreme of outlawing these industries would prevent a decent number of society-bettering transactions from taking place.
One month of EC2 XL with 15GB of memory is roughly $500 a month.

A 90 GB database fits in a single $150 SSD. You can get 1 TB of SSD storage for $3,000.

"One EC2 Compute Unit provides the equivalent CPU capacity of a 1.0-1.2 GHz 2007 Opteron or 2007 Xeon processor. This is also the equivalent to an early-2006 1.7 GHz Xeon processor referenced in our original documentation. " [1]

You can get a 6 core AMD Phenom II which runs at 3.2Ghz. for $180.

16GB of RAM will set you back $400.

From the sounds of what they went through, spending $10k on decent hardware might have saved them a man year or two of developer time.

Granted that's not nearly as fun or sexy as trying to use MongoDB, Cassandra or HBase in production. And, saying that you're going to use actual hardware is soooo old school.

ref:
[1] http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/faqs/#What_is_an_EC2_Compute_Unit_...
I believe Captain America does an excellent job on explaining what it means to be a true patriot:
http://imgur.com/a/TEvWk
It's fascinating to read another company having evaluated NoSQL and come to an identical conclusion as we did internally.

I love the idea of NoSQL, but Cassandra was horrible (just look their source code or Thrift) and Mongo lost data. I guess 40 years of relational databases isn't so easy to replace.
Maybe we could stop asserting that patriotism is in any way, shape or form a positive attribute. It's not.
What jQuery fixes
Personal development. $5k won't last you long with a startup, but if you can use the money to obtain a better job it might make it easier to work around.
I don't think I'm enough of an expert in the technique to give that kind of guidance.

If somebody that was paying me asked that question, I'd try to figure out which of these "social cues" would work best for a sites demographic/customer base.

Then, define test cases. Think them through. Make them meaningful because if your site isn't VERY popular, you have to run these tests for a while to gather statistically meaningful data.

Then, TEST the heck out of these implementations. Use a service like BrowserShots. Make sure that whatever social mixins you've created work flawlessly. This will take more hardening than I'd usually do, past what I'd normally call "production ready." Remember, if there's a bug here, your site is just down for that user.

Finally, just test, test, test. And only trust the data.
Nah, it's just localStorage for now. I'll add a backend at some point, but I want to keep things simple for the prototype.
You wanted change?
Here it is your change...
At least in some cases considering you can use a Google Prepaid Card.
One thing that I ran into in addition to the above was that while the database and driver for my language of choice (Node.js) were fine, I ran into all sorts of ORM issues that weren't being fixed and were very odd. Mixing a not so stable community project around Mongo with far from stable project (Node) was a bad idea...
IBM: New heat-dissipating glue will allow 1000x processor speedup via stacking
Yes, once I thought about it I had a greater appreciation for the "This isn't class warfare, it's math" Obama quote that's being tossed around.
So if I close the browser and then re-open it later then the data are gone? It works as long as I keep the browser open?

Suggestion: a simple export/import option would help to cover this point.

I should discipline myself to use something like this for a week or so to see if (a) I can make it a habit, and (b) whether or not it really does help.

I might do that.
This in electrical engineering at least is SNR (signal to noise ratio). Noise is filtered, however the intent is to recover the signal cleanly.

Anything which is self-detrimental is likely to be part of the signal, not the noise.
Brazil: The 'Happiest' Emerging Nation 
The reputation of Brazilians as cheerful, happy-go-lucky people is starting to be reflected in the cold reality of statistics. A study has put numbers to that state of well-being by quantifying the significant reduction in social inequality in the last few years, an area in which South America's giant has outdone other emerging nations.
It's all about the unfamiliar. I've spend countless hours in Xcode, and firing up Eclipse is a nightmare. Same with switching from Xcode 3 to Xcode 4... the unfamiliar seems "wrong"

Until you get beyond the unfamiliarity, you're not qualified to judge if it's wrong or right.

(That said, the 2 hours I've spent in Visual Studio was remarkably pleasant, considering)
I like the Cocoa API and can cope with a C-based language, but I'd have to agree that Visual Studio and Eclipse offer more IDE features for their respective environments.

Having said that, they all have pretty crappy editors.
Depends on what you're developing. Frequently you develop in parallel for the desktop and your console of choice, when you're doing non-performance-intensive stuff. This is especially true of XNA and the like, where your code is identical.
You might have done this with good intentions in mind, but I don't think this is a good idea. A pyramid scheme is NOT something positive. Only less than half the people that get informed about some product will actually have access to it if this method is used to pass the word. That's not a good strategy, and will push reasonable people off. You know, those who understand pyramid schemes. If I get informed about something that tells me that I have to share it with three more people (or accomplish any kind of assignment for that matter) in order to actually access it, I will immediately press ctrl+w and forever forget about it.
I believe this was one of the talks at Postgres Open - I came across the slides from most of the others earlier at
http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Postgres_Open_Talks_2011, and they have some good tips on scaling with Postgres.

There was one interesting tidbit in one of the Heroku presentations : they apparently run over 150,000 databases ( https://wal-e-pgopen2011.herokuapp.com/#6 ) which is incredible.
The data is saved to your hard-drive. So if you reopen the browser the data will still be there -- as long as you're using the same computer.

And yeah, import/export is on the todo list.

I'm thinking of adding some nag features. Like I can send an email if you don't access the tool for 24 hours. And I can make a ding noise if you don't update the task outline every 5 minutes or so. Once people start using the tool, I think they'll find it useful -- but the hard part is getting over that initial hump.
I used PGSQL on such a performance-intensive project as well as nothing came close while retaining reliability.
Had PGSQL devs help me to fine tune some aspects, they're extremely helpful and knowledgeable. And that is NOT something I have found even in commercial companies. I mean by that: i've never had such good help for highly technical issues, ever. And this one was free and fast.
Google Wallet in Action (Video)
The convenience of mobile payments will make visiting cash-only countries like Austria and Netherlands (credit cards work, but only in some places so you always have to carry cash) even more awkward. Suddenly you have to think where to put that weird "paper money", or "plastic money" when you're used to only carrying your phone.

I wonder how people used to M-Pesa cope when outside of Kenya and the other countries where it works.
In the example you have given, yes, 2-3 examples would suffice. However, I usually design websites with carefully crafted text and design (that is, with a lot of content that won't change much and won't come from CMS), so in most cases, I ask for all copy.
Ballmer’s Last Stand
With all the 1000x time speedups that IBM releases I'm amazed that we have to wait for computers at all, no matter what the task.

I really wished that these announcements would be at least accompanied by working prototypes showing the main claims in a realistic setting.

Since these are all things that may (or may not) be realized in the distant future when those reading the article will have long forgotten about it or will be safely deceased I suspect they are more of a marketing ploy than a true announcement of a breakthrough.
Mutually Assured Destruction vs Mutually Assured Respect
Live the problem