skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Gondor has caching (has for a while) and background jobs will be available this week. Gondor is not a sideshow to the consulting; if anything, it's the other way around :-)
Those estimates are generally very accurate.
Microsoft did something here: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/farsite/
Walletbra == ForkKnife
its done. Thanks
It's not about aggregate behavior with millions of others at all. It's about profiling.

Consider the case of clicking a link in an email someone sent me for a joke. My google account thereafter managed to associate me with bestality [1]. Fun eh?

Now ironically, over a year later, I was still getting rather awful targeted Google Ads advertising and SPAM to a supposedly unrelated email account (on Windows Live with no associated Google account). The persistent google cookie from hell dragged that information and my three static IP addresses across multiple sites and managed to basically bombard me with shit.

Something somewhere managed to make the associations and send directed advertising. They had me profiled.

That in my mind is unacceptable, which is why I don't want to sign up for another profiling account.

It's not paranoia or conspiracy crap - it's fact.

Regarding usenet: there's no reliable way to profile people on it due to its architecture.

[1] I accept some responsibility for clicking a link in an email of course.
Your right, I confused the ability to run metro with the ability to run win8 on a smartphone. But according to the BBC clip the KT Spiderphone apparently runs a dual core 1.5ghz processor although I assume that is arm and not atom.

So perhaps not seamless all in one package yet.

Although the phone and tablet could work together fine, the notebook would need its own hardware but could still utilise the tablet for screen & graphics card. I still think there's a compelling case for such a combination.
What should I read to learn more about history?

I used to consider my knowledge of history better than at least 95% of the population, but while reading The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire I realized how sketchy my view of history really was. So at the ripe old age of 35 I set off on a course of study centered on two series of books, The Story of Civilization, by Will and Ariel Durant, and Timeframe, a Time-Life series focusing on a timeframe in human history and what was going on in all parts of the world inhabited by man: lots of pictures and of course superficial, but it painted in a lot of gaps I othewise would have never covered. The Timeframe series starts much earlier than the Durant's, but once both series were in sync I would read the books in both series for an epoch, as well as at least two other books, either written in the era or about the era, drawing mostly from science, culture, and biography. For instance I read all the books of Euclid, Newton's Optiks and Principia (I slogged through the Motte transaltion before the first modern English translation became available), The Wealth of Nations, Shelby Foote's 3-volume history of the Civil War, and The Origen of Species. (It's real easy for me to spot folks who spoot-off about Wealth or Origen who have not actually read the books.) My program culminated with Tragedy and Hope, which being such an inflammatory work, I did not trust to read without the full background of history. The process was like watching Western Civilization unfolding.

Now for the unintended consequences: I became a bore at cocktail parties. I wanted to talk about the ideas in the fascinating book I was reading. I used to love arguing politics. Even with my prior knowledge it was hard enough finding opponents who would engage in rational discourse, now it is impossible. It's been so long my debating skills have totally gone down the tubes. The sad thing is I believe my problem is really society's. Political correctness (among other problems) in academia, has produced a generation of intellectually crippled intellectuals; and the entertainment industry, including the 24-hour news cycle as entertainment, has just stupefied people. I fear for democracy and republican government.
It has taken me considerably longer than a year. But I might not be smart. And I've tried to do it on my own, rather than taking a job (see prior sentence).

Caveat: I'm not a developer, so my comments about learning how to program should be taken with considerable skepticism. But I have some opinions based my effort to learn.

For me, programming syntax is less a problem for me than poorly organized code, poor grasp of problems and poorly thought out solutions. Design is a subtle and important topic that does not lend itself to the shorter coverage typical of internet material. Book-length immersion in the concepts is only a beginning to an understanding. So I think your "internet only" restriction is a severe constraint.

But it isn't as if there are many design books for beginners. These generally target people who've mastered some languages and know the design-problem space. "Pragmatic Programmer" was a big help.

I have found test-driven development an enormous help. It feels cumbersome, but you always know what problem you're trying to solve. "Test Driven JavaScript Development", Johansen, is an excellent overview of the approach. I'm also trying to work through Beck's "Test Driven Development By Example" doing the exercises in Ruby, but it's a side project that hasn't gotten much attention.

I repeat: I'm not a developer. Hopefully this is thought-provoking, but I'm no authority.
Nit-pick: it's actually spelled "Clojure" - wouldn't matter, except for the existence of Google's tool set called "Closure", which Clojure's browser hosted version uses, leading to lots of room for confusion.
The letter that started AMD's Open-Source Strategy
It's an 8-bit RISC chip, so it might be a little small. It's more of a micro-controller than a CPU, if you know what I mean.
And the meme you're executing that all religions are merely about influence, what makes it different from his meme?
Academic paper on convergent encryption:

http://www.ssrc.ucsc.edu/Papers/storer-storagess08.pdf

TL;DR version: take a chunk of data, encrypt it with its own sha1 hash as the key. Now you have an encrypted version that you can dedup. You can only decrypt if you already know the hash. Info about who owns any particular chunk is not kept on the server, so even if you break in to the server, all you can tell is which chunks correspond to data you already possess. Seems plausible.
This paper, Secure Data Deduplication, has an overview and a security analysis: http://www.ssrc.ucsc.edu/Papers/storer-storagess08.pdf
In my original title i had added for a small applicaiton but then i decided i was curious to see about using for something beyond just something simple. But you are right about the querying. I was thinking of it more in comparison to membase and memcache.
> Which brings to mind patio11's constant reminders, that running a successful software business has very very little to do with programming well

That may be appropriate for patio11. Not to demean the guy but let's be clear, he runs an online bingo service. It's my understanding that he makes much more money from consulting gigs leveraged from this modest endeavour.

Rest assured that if your ambition is to write the next Dropbox or, hell, any YC company, at least 50% of your founding team will need to be very good programmers indeed.
indeed, they won´t change more than +/- 1,5%
I disagree with pg about the use of philosophy. If nothing else, Plato should disabuse anyone of the notion that what's obvious to them isn't really that solid. Aristotle at least demonstrates your point about just how hard it is to think systematically about this stuff.

The humility gained from those encounters would do a great deal to open people's minds that "there's more on heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy". Maybe people would less adamant, and pay more attention to why they hold their opinions. If everyone did that, we'd have far more productive discussions.
Google preparing for U.S. Senate hearing
No. Redis is not a database, it's an in-memory key-value store. It's also called a [distributed] data structure server, which (at least to me) implies a tight coupling with your application: it's a way to offload shared state between multiple components, but the persistence of that shared state is not guaranteed.

In fact, Redis' persistence layer is best understood as a best-effort value-add. If the server shuts down for any reason, you have to simply hope the last disk flush was recent and successful. Otherwise, your data is lost. This is (again, to me) fundamentally at odds with the contracts that any database should provide. Also, Redis cluster is not yet released, which means running more than one Redis server requires you to manage keyspace sharding at the app layer.

Not that any of this is a knock against Redis. Even with those caveats, there are a huge class of problems that Redis is perfectly suited for. I love the software and use it daily. But Redis competes with memcached, not MongoDB; if you ever find yourself shoe-horning Redis into a role where total data loss is anything other than temporarily annoying, you're doing it wrong.

tl;dr: IMO, using Redis as a database is a really bad idea, for most common definitions of "database."
(I'm the author of enumerator)

I originally wrote/released the enumerator package because iteratees seemed really interesting, but I didn't like the function names or docs. That's it. The sole advantage enumerator has is that it's prettier.

Compare:

mapStream :: (Monad m, ListLike (s el) el, ListLike (s el') el', NullPoint (s el), LooseMap s el el') => (el -> el') -> Enumeratee (s el) (s el') m a

Map the stream: another iteratee transformer Given the stream of elements of the
type el and the function (el->el'), build a nested stream of elements of the type
el' and apply the given iteratee to it.

with:

map :: Monad m => (ao -> ai) -> Enumeratee ao ai m b

map f applies f to each input element and feeds the
resulting outputs to the inner iteratee.

I figured a simplified package would be useful as sort of a tutorial before people upgraded to "full" iteratees. I never planned on it becoming heavily used as itself.
RefRef Source Code Released
In some Asian cities, it doesn't have to be a high end shopping mall. People with newer cars get approached by mall employees after they're parked, and are offered car wash service. You pay right there, and the car is clean by the time you get back.
This used to be Google's approach. Make a shit-ton of things, see which ones caught on, then expand them. 20% time, Google Labs etc were all expressions of this. Which they've been moving away from now - as Larry Page says, they're "putting more wood behind fewer arrows".
here is the graph that I saw linked, that I used: http://banana.mine.nu/daysdest.html

the scale appears to exceed 110,000,000 - I don't believe that it is a percentage.

I understand the desire to remove the noise of transfers that are not actual economic activity, but I think this is a poor way to go about it. With bitcoin it is almost as if you had the ability to record every time a dollar bill went into a pocket. Sure, some of that is economic activity but it can also just be someone changing their pants. Even if economists had that data available they'd likely still rely on the business and financial institution reports to gauge economic activity. In this way raw BTC volume is a bit of a red herring, at least until you can produce a good view of economic activity and see how it relates to BTC volume or BTCdd.

As BTC continues to have an unstable price, a large percentage of the real economic activity will include exchanges for other currencies or value stores. Since exchange volume is quite centralized, you'd only need to have the cooperation of a few exchanges (you'd want to filter out traders) to gain what would probably be a rather accurate picture of real economic activity in bitcoins.
Google rose to a prominence in an era of portal pages. Yahoo in particular had a home page without hundreds of links. Google presented you with a logo, a text box, two buttons and <50 words of text. What to do on such a page involves less decision making.
In the 90s there were lots of experiments with directories. Yahoo had one. Think about this: typing in a search involves one decision. Finding something in a directory involves one decision at each step.

Yep. Also consider the superior experience of reading a news article (like this one) in single-page mode instead of page by page. Clicking on a link feels a lot more like "a decision" than turning the page of a book, which flows naturally. The single-page option just "feels" a lot better.

One issue that comes up in web design is that reading a link (even a spurious one) taxes the reader's mind substantially more than reading regular text. If I recall correctly, the cognitive load of a link is about five times that of a regular word.

People tend to "block out" the clutter, but there's a subconscious mental energy expenditure in the "blocking out" process. People don't notice the effect day-to-day, but over time it leads to people preferring Google over Yahoo.

Apple is famous for making decisions for its customers. Many people rail against this lack of control. I personally appreciate it.

I agree. Windows, as far as I can see it, is the worst of both worlds. You have to do a lot of work (make a lot of decisions) to get a half-decent experience but if you want to control it at a low level, the way you can with Linux, you can't. Apple provides you with a B+/A- default experience, and Jobs's attitude is that if you want something "better", you should use something else. Which is the right approach because one person's "A+" experience is another's confusing horror.

The quickest way to enervate someone, in this regard, is to present that person with lots of decisions to make, and then ensure that the outcomes of those decisions are still somewhat unsatisfactory. That's the Windows experience, in a nutshell.

The second is on leadership. Leaders make decisions, obviating the need for followers to weigh up choices. Could this be part of why so many of us are so eager to follow? I remember a scene from an early Mad Men episode where Don was saying that what most people crave is to be told that whatever they're doing is OK.

Don Draper: banned on Google+. :)

I remember that scene (in Mad Men) quite well and I think it's insightful. It reminds me of On Killing, an excellent book on the psychological effects of war. One proposed candidate for the increasing prevalence of PTSD is the way soldiers are treated when they return from war. War has always been terrible, but the change is in how soldiers are seen on return. In 1945, they were received as heroes for defeating the Nazis, which helped them feel "OK" about what they'd had to do. After Vietnam, they were called "baby killers" and generally treated quite poorly. For that reason, a lot of the Vietnam vets never recovered.
>I never had to manage anyone in our startup, even though I was the president. The other hackers were my peers, and would have given me the raspberry if I'd tried to "manage" them. We operated by consensus. And the rest of the company reported to our experienced COO, who was also more of a peer.

Operating by consensus and not valuing the role of "manager" only goes so far. It may work when you're a few people living together, but I think it ultimately leads to cultures like Google's, where every decision requires a room full of engineers to agree.
Free Online Storage in the Cloud
Video Manchester United Vs Chelsea 3-1 | MU Vs Chelsea Premier League
Video Manchester United Vs Chelsea 3-1 | MU Vs Chelsea Premier League. Jam 22.00 WIB ini stasiun MNC akan menayangkan pertandingan MU melawan Chelsea. Pertandingan dua klub besar ini tentunya akan menjadi tontonan yang menarik. Pertandingan kali ini akan diadakan di kandang MU, Old Trafford.
as written above, exit polls are quite accurate and won´t change much
I have a few startups brewing right now. For one I'm working with technical co-founders, and another I'm not. Trying to "rent a coder" for the latter has proven to be much more difficult both short term and long term than having partners who code.

First, I had to come up with cash to pay someone. A painful thing to do when you're bootstrapping with no real income.

Second, I had to spend copious amounts of time not only writing a technical spec for someone who didn't grok the app but also carefully crafting a contract that would assure that I kept the IP.

Third, maintenance has been a bitch. Iterations take weeks instead of days, and I'm never a contractor's top priority.

In contrast, my partners are (like me) working for equity, have a deep, intuitive grasp of the product and what it does, and are engaged enough to not only turn around changes quickly, but also suggest improvements themselves.

Obviously, there are situations where renting a coder will be one's only option. My experience has been that it's an awkward, painful process.

In the future, I would choose to cobble together a non-functional prototype (I'm a UX designer who writes display layer markup) to help me attract a technical co-founder or an investor rather than hire another contractor.
Note that this usage of pirate goes back several centuries, e.g. see these entries from the OED:

1668 J. Hancock Brooks' String of Pearls (Notice at end), Some dishonest Booksellers, called Land-Pirats, who make it their practise to steal Impressions of other mens Copies.

1703 D. Defoe True-born Englishman in True Collect. I. Explan. Pref. sig. B3v, Its being Printed again and again, by Pyrates.

The term is metaphorical in origin, and in that regard I don't think it's particularly outrageous. If you say that he's "a lion of a man" you're not arguing that the person in question has got large teeth, a mane, or hunts antelope.
I don't think the odds are that great (though I think it's what I'd do in the same situation). I figure Netflix still thinks they have the right strategy and they've already taken the hit for the customer loss. So why not ride it out and see where it takes them.

Truth is they've probably earned a little arrogance in this arena. People questioned their streaming strategy at first and we all know how that worked out.
I completely agree. I would also recommend reading books and watching films about philosophers, novels and plays written by philosophers that is intended to be read as a narrative , and especially conversations with philosophers. You get a feel about how they came about their conclusions - what I am interested in is how a certain idea was arrived at, and philosophy can really give you some great analytical tools.
Piracy has been a term for unauthorized copying of works for over 400 years [1][2]. It's not an analogy; it's just one of the meanings of the word.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_infringement#.22Pirac...

[2] http://www.luminarium.org/renascence-editions/yeare.html
I agree with the logic of your statement but I'm not sure it will work out that way. I've never understood why the studios didn't do more to help iTunes competitors.
The list of "who owns which hashes" must be stored on their servers, even if it's not the "same" server. Otherwise I would have to manually transfer my hashes from one computer to another.
I didn't like the name at first, but you can get used to it. Also I think in former times pirates were actually often endorsed agents of some empires (supporting their war efforts, at the very least). And they are famous for being early democrats.
True, however there are lots of 'Briefwähler' (absentee voters) in Berlin who voted weeks ago and the Piratenpartei just got a lot of traction in the last few weeks. Additionally there's a rather weird 5% clause in Berlin that differs from the rest of Germany. Parties have to get 5% of all votes cast, not just 5% of the valid ones. (http://blog.zeit.de/zweitstimme/2011/09/16/aus-der-kategorie...)

However they will probably still be in Parliament, I'm not really sure if they will get as many seats as predicted right now.
Tenzing - A SQL Implementation on the MapReduce Framework
Dear Google Marketing (Re: Your kids policy)
Dear Google,

i watched this video:

http://www.youtube.com/user/googlechrome?v=R4vkVHijdQk

You know, the "dear.sophie.lee" ad, where a proud father sends email to his little daughters Gmail account for her to read later. What a great idea.

Like Mr. Lee, we created a Gmail account for our 5 months old daughter a few days ago. We already sent her a few emails.

Now this account is locked and will be deleted in 30 days because i clicked on a Google+ link and honestly entered her birthday. :(

There is no way for me to unlock it, as your highly automated process only accepts legal docs that show that she indeed is 13+. Well, i hope she will be someday.

I can understand that you don't want kids - your future customers - in your system (well, maybe not).

But why do you advertise with such a video?
Only to let your customers down who try this. As a long time private and business Google customer i ask you to rethink your actions on this.

Either publicly say: "Parents, go away to other platforms with your little kids - our legal team does not want this kids hassle". And delete such a misleading video.

Or change your policy on this - it would probably give you a lot of positive publicity to openly support kids when their parents agree.

Producing excellent marketing videos that will only let your customers down that try exactly what you advertised and have their memories deleted within 30 days is quite a let down.

You know, i would be glad if i could store my memories within a Gmail account. Because honestly i can't think of many companies that i would trust to be around in 20 years from now and keep my data safe.
I think the major problem here is that the studios are routinely forgetting that thye've never successfully managed full distribution. Never. There's always been another party which aggregated, whether it was movie theaters or stores.

Possibly, they think they can replicate television. But television was either free or 24 hour nichey-ness if it was really popular.
Let me point out how wrong you are.

Amazon started off selling books. What do you think their margin for each was?

Then they took over a large part of the market. Then they moved into selling other things like electronics.

Then they made the Kindle and controlled the device people read on and the starting point and the buying point.

Now they are getting into publishing and self-publishing.

They are taking over everything starting with taking over the online selling point for books.

That's what a fashion startup earning only 10% can do.

Use the 10% (which is mostly profit) to power an engine that slows takes over all of fashion.
Move into parallel areas like shoes and accessories.
Then starts making their own stuff.

I appreciate your trying to defend the poster of the original short-sighted article.

However, if you look at building a real business that has the power and control to completely take over an entire industry then starting online is much better than starting in the backend.

If you want to provide services to publishers who publish books (which is what back end would be for books) - well and good.

But there's nothing transformative about it.

The real transformation is to replace Publishers.

that's why the poster of the original article is so wrong.
She thinks she's thinking big by talking about tackling the back end instead of doing online sites.

However, the real prize is to replace the entire pipeline and then, if the company so chooses, to replace labels and the entire fashion industry.
This somewhat counter-intuitive definition is a result of the need for backward compatibility with existing latitude data, taken long before people had any idea of the Earth's oblation.

Originally, sextants were used to measure latitude based on solar elevation. This definition of latitude is easily measured by sextant: 90 degrees minus the maximum (i.e. noon) solar altitude on the equinox.