skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You can use SlimDX if you need DirectX bindings, but currently the only supported method provided by Microsoft is with XNA.
A/B testing. Is Khan doing it wrong?
Amazing. Way back in 2007 I taught myself how to code by making small Facebook apps. I started out by editing live PHP files on a shared server from A Small Orange ($3.33 a month!). After a few months I a few apps with traffic around 30k DAU. A Small Orange would automatically shutdown the apps every couple hours. I'd email them and complain about their shoddy hosting service. They'd always respond instantly apologizing and putting the apps back online. After a couple weeks I realized that I had a scaling problem and began learning how to setup a dedicated server. Over the next two years I spent about 80% of my time wrestling with hardware, setting up load balancers, configuring cache and db servers, and other operational nightmares. I had little time or energy to work on improving my apps or building new products.

Then I discovered Heroku. I would have done anything to have this when I started out. The platform teaches (forces) you how to build a scalable architecture. You can try out new ideas for apps for essentially nothing (1 dyno is zero dollars). Since moving to Heroku I spend about 5% of my time working ops. The craziest thing is I've actually saved money since switching from dedicated hardware to Heroku. I was really bad at configuring servers and the stuff I built was inefficient and expensive. Heroku's cloud stacks are optimized better than my old hardware environment.

Heroku's architecture is great for wild traffic swings common with Facebook apps. Well except for their database services. They don't seem reliable or scalable. I prefer RDS.

In sum, Facebook and Heroku is a great starting place for learning to build web apps. I would have done anything to have this tech four yeas ago.
What you CAN do is take someone's idea and focus it very heavily in a single market or vertical. Provide options that that the original innovator can't/won't do.

For example, for all of the great web-based services that exist, very few of them are actually prepared to adequately serve highly regulated/restricted markets like medical/legal/nat.security/etc.

If you made a Gitub that does a great job of dealing with compliance in any of those one fields, you just might have a niche. And it might be a niche that Github didn't want anyway. (this is just an example, for all I know, github does a great job in these areas).

The best part is that you have an opportunity to innovate....yay YOU!
My point is that when you hear stories of other people doing incredible things and feel that you can relate to them - it inspires you to be better, to act differently and to make changes in your life - in a natural and emergent way.

Books like Born to Run, talks like The Last Lecture and movies like Miracle and Hoosiers are inspirational and that's not at all a bad thing.

"Inspirational talks have often convinced me of an idea, but have never inspired me. Which is weird, because I have heard many speeches or talks that weren't inspirational talks, and yet they were inspirational!"

I think we are splitting hairs. A talk that inspires is an "inspirational talk". Some talks inspire certain people and not others, just as some foods don't taste good to me and some web apps don't do what I need them to.

Maybe you've just gone to the wrong inspirational talks.
cool project guys - keep it up
There's little financial difference between having children and buying Lambourghinis. The cultural difference is that only one of these is blameworthy if you get into financial trouble later. Perhaps both of them should be.
RESTful API from Google?
It's part of the grieving process, a process that takes a long, long time. Let people grieve as they will.
GoAccess - An open source real-time Apache log analyzer
Airport Services in New Haven CT
Ask HN: What issue tracker do you use?
This comes up periodically, but it's usually centered around a review of a new tool, or a particular tool.

I have to admit to being a jira lover inspired by http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3000200. With so many people posting polar opposite experiences, I wonder:

What issue tracker(s) are you using?

For what sort(s) of projects?

How default/custom is your installation?

How many other issue trackers did you try, if any?

As always, the "and why" information is nice, too.
Certainly moreso than Javascript is like assembly language.

Upon seeing that article I was like "Oh yeah, I get the two confused all the time WTF?!"
Trelolololo, lololo, lololo, lololololooooooo...
Jorge Cham, the author of PhD Comics, did a nice writeup summarizing what he learned from visiting the M. D. Anderson Cancer Center: that "cancer" isn't just one disease, and so there will never be "a cure"- it just doesn't work that way.

http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1162
In your situation you must first build up a small financial cushion before you attempt to spend the time learning code 16 hours a day. I’m not sure what you mean by "I'm a business guy" ...and "I have no clue how I should make money"? That's a strong contradiction I think is best to stay away from.
It's fun to think that while foursquare may seem fairly trivial today, 100 years from now, it's historical record.
Smearing power with wheat paste: Robbie Conal's aggressive, grotesque portraits
Out of curiosity, what makes you think our data services aren't reliable or scalable?
Dinosaur feathers found preserved in amber reinforce evolution theories
Improving Performance by 1000x
Lean Startup Machine: Splash Page to 7 Figure Bookings in 3 Years
For the majority of people who aren't in tech or early adapters, we've reached the point of 'good enough'. Upgrading to 'marginally better' has little to no (perceived) utility.

As an aside, that's one of the most beneficial aspects of Chrome and Firefox's CI/incremental update models - normal users don't have to think about upgrading anymore, it just gets done in background. As long as it doesn't kill any addons/extensions (which normal users aren't power users of anyway), it's a great way to keep the web up to date. I don't know if MS, Apple, and Opera are going that way too, but hopefully they will.
Awesome promo vid
This is a funny promotional video we put together for our startup, hope you guys enjoy it and leave your comments below.
The thing is, while it is a lot of data in the grand scheme of things it is a fairly trivial amount of data. Terrabye hard drives can be had for less than $100 today.
Anyone see a list of what framework is being used for each language? I created a Ruby app, and it's using Sinatra.

Edit: here's links to all the app templates, for anyone interested:

Python: https://github.com/heroku/facebook-template-python

Ruby: https://github.com/heroku/facebook-template-ruby

Node.js: https://github.com/heroku/facebook-template-nodejs

PHP: https://github.com/heroku/facebook-template-php
Rather than 100 automated cars, just use one daily commuter.

If you commute along a stretch of highway every day, then you know exactly where the "stop waves" tend to appear. That's the place where you stop driving like a Wolf, and instead drive like a Shepherd: stop speeding and tailgating, and instead open up a large buffer.

I've found that this works well in some places. The other drivers seem to know what you're doing, and sometimes you'll even see others using the same technique. But in other spots everyone seems clueless, and they'll race to fill up the tiniest hole.

Also, as with the Koshima monkeys washing potatos or Blue Tits & milk bottles, in the last ten years the trick seems to be spreading. Some of our "clueless" regions have experienced a state change, and the daily jams seem to appear less often.

I wonder if the articles below have a simple cause:

http://blog.tstc.org/2010/09/23/u-s-traffic-fatalities-plumm...

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/27/2009-traffic-de...

http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2010-09-09-1Aroaddeaths0...
This makes me appreciate the fact that I work exclusively on webapps, where this pain doesn't exist.
PeixeUrbano Keeps Beating Groupon and Holds Leadership of the Brazilian Market
Heroku is killing it. It's great to see them adding features and functionality at such a brisk pace.
It seems like the conflict between #1 and #2 is the big challenge (and opportunity) here.

#2 posits that people (and thus their companies) get great benefit from being close to each other and able to exchange ideas rapidly as the mood/need/opportunity strikes.

#1 posits that telecommuting will take over the world because people tend to prefer flexibility and simplicity over artificially synchronized schedules and forced face-to-face appearances.

Hacker spaces (and the collection-of-lean-startup-labs type places) are great for small scale things, but could "telecommuting centers" work out just as well as commuter/carpool parking lots in the DC area? Combine Internet access, power, and (maybe?) mid-scale video conference + smart whiteboard facilities. Large companies can spread their workforce out around the country and pay into these spaces based on the employee-hours worked there.
> On the project side, I hand approve every post. Spam/recruiter junk/etc. gets deleted and the email address blacklisted.

Do you have a plan for scaling that up? ("I'm gonna hire more warm bodies" is an acceptable answer, imo.)
The fact that the boilerplate app includes working examples of using the various Facebook APIs is the icing on the cake, as far as I'm concerned. I wrote a couple of apps back in the relatively early days of the API, and I remember being very frustrated by the state of the documentation and the lack of useful examples[1], and something like this would have saved me an absurd amount of time.

1: It's been a few years since I last had to do this, so the situation might have improved since then.
Cybersecurity: Grim outlook but proactive approaches
We use it. We love it. Confluence / Jira / Fisheye really work together very well for our needs. I don't understand people being negative about this toolset... I haven't hit any real limitations yet with it. Mind you, our software teams are small teams (7 people or less), but it's work splendidly for us.

We are a manufacturing / media / distribution company with billions in revenue.
What if it compiles language X to language Y, where Y is the union of all the valid programs in X with a set of possible descriptive error strings?
Ask HN: Possible to bypass Amazon's One Click patent using only hovers?
I imagine you'd have a small hover pattern to prevent accidental purchases. Maybe have the user hover around a small circle - this is perhaps even less effort for the user and requires no clicks.

Has this been discussed here before? It seems like an obvious idea but I haven't come across it yet.
Of course, I don't mean to say it is a difficult amount of data to store.
We are using the github issue tracker. It's not powerful but is easy to use and free ( if you already using github for git hosting )
Wilderness program for troubled youth
LTG  Disrupt: Quixey
Google Starts to Release G+ API
This just showed up in my inbox:

------

Greetings developers,

Thank you for showing your interest in the Google+ platform on our developer interest form. We promised to let you know when we had more details to share. Well, that time has come...

Today, we’re launching the first of the Google+ APIs. This initial API release is focused on public data only -- it lets you read information that people have shared publicly on Google+. Read our blog post for more details.

Also, we’re happy to introduce a new Google+ developers site. This will be the place to go for our policies, terms, and discussions with other developers, access to documentation, tools that make development on the Googl+ platform easier and more fun, and of course, the place where announcements concerning new releases will be
made.

We’re looking forward to seeing what you build with the API. Today is just the beginning, and your work will affect what comes next, so go ahead and get started.

Happy coding!

- The Google+ platform team
I'm developing an app for surveillance that talks to multiple IP cameras and microphones. We made the unfortunate choice of C# early on.

- no normal RTSP support. Ok, I used libav (working hard to wrap it, cause it's a well written C library, but not trivial to use from C#)

- I get h264 frames that I need to look at before decoding. No way to give compressed h264 frames to WPF to decode. (So I use libav again). SilverLight actually does have MediaStreamSource -- but this is not a SilverLight app.

- Ok, so let's try to use the hardware decoder when it's there. libav supports it, yay! What about WPF? Well, no. You have to use Direct3D (?) to get a surface to draw on. With no way to do this from C# (Interop fails badly according to a DirectShow+Direct3D MVP I consulted). I give up, and use libav's software decoder.

- Ok, I have a bitmap, I want to blit it quickly to the screen - WTF? The only way to do it is use a Shared Memory section (interop again) to create a bitmapsource; then update the underlying memory.

- Except memory runs out after about 20 seconds (~400 frames) of .Invalidate() calls. WTF? Turns out it's a known bug introduced in v4 (wasn't there in v3.5). No fix yet. Just call GC.Collect() after every invalidate. Yay for "automatic" garbage collection!

- Ok, so now we have got a reasonable video. What about sound? Everyone with experience I know says "use NSound" (which is interop again). I opt for interopping with winmm, which I have experience from the C++ side.

- Now, to wrap it all together, I need a millisecond-precision timer. Sorry, no go in .net; Winmm's "timeBeginPeriod" to the rescue! but .net's Dispatcher still triggers my code every 15ms. WTF? I would be happier with a 100us timer, which windows doesn't even provide, but I can't get less than 15000us!

I'm so sorry we chose .NET; it seems to cater well to CRUD type applications, but it is so inadequate for everything I tried to do with it, that it's not even funny.
A very sad story; and I'm sure she's not a unique case in her behaviors around her husband's death. I cannot imagine how I would cope with losing my wife (and frankly, I don't want to)--but I suspect I might spend time looking at old chats and emails as well.

While I know it's not the focus of the article, I hope the article also serves as a reminder to HN readers like myself who "carry the ginger gene" to pay attention to your skin, and get screened by a dermatologist regularly. Melanoma, like most forms of cancer, is easiest to beat when caught early.
Windows 8 to come with built-in Malware Protection
The quality of the article is not the issue. It's just that if everyone behaved the way you did, HN would merely be a contest of who can call in the most favors/have the most accounts under their control.
Valid point! What I meant by those two statements: I don't know what technical skills give me the best ROI.
And here's their template: https://github.com/heroku/facebook-template-python
Young Me's book is definitely worth a read. I am really sad that we are not able to share that video at her own request. I did take some notes and grab some pictures which give a short summary of some of her arguments.

http://thebln.com/2010/10/professor-youngme-moon-business-of...
RT from Best Practical.
Yeah good point.

Surely this will be unavoidable for Google - they'll need to open up write access for third party apps, and they'll be wanting those for sure.
Google+ API launched
Operational Challenges Erode Netflix subscribers
I use several plugins for development and research that were not working in 4 or 6 and I also really needed the statusbar.

Fortunately I found alternatives and fixes and workaround to get it all back to where I wanted, but it took a whole weekend of searching and fine-tuning (and still some things aren't quite right).

If I had jumped onto 4.0 it would have been a nightmare.

I've also never re-formated and re-installed Windows XP since day one (even upgrading from Windows2000 only after XP was EOL'ed). I have better things to do with my time and I have it running/tuned to my specific desired. Some people reformat like every other month and start from scratch which would be a massive waste of my time and energy.

Many times older is better because it's better documented, as long as it's not buggy.
Les Beatles - Anthology Volume 2
Google "wasapi c# example", go on, google it.
There's an older spelling with double lambda. Also, trello is the neuter gender.
Yes, if you're trying to create something new, like a car or an iPad, then both Henry Ford and Steve Jobs are right - most people don't know what they want until you build it and show it to them. And to succeed you need people with some mix of vision, taste, and demanding standards making something they want to use for it to succeed. If it passes their test, it will most likely pass the test for the general public as well.
See my comment above - the image is using fixed-positioning and has a default z-index above that of the links. They can fix it by setting the image's z-index to -1.

Edit: looks like they fixed it.
He doesn't at all but if you have ever been an entrepreneur, you will probably know that firing people is usually the worst thing that you can have to do but at the same time, the results of firing someone in terms of the impact on other people in a team can often be very positive.
Have you looked at how ruby puts stuff on a web page? 1.8 or 1.9 or ee or jruby? rails or merb or sinatra? mongrel or thin or unicorn or passenger? riak or cassandra or memcache or redis or couch?
Heh, honestly that's probably what I'll do. We (Forrst) can certainly share the load if/when it becomes necessary.
It's interesting to hear that it's actually a user experience, rather than a technical problem. I was assuming there was some dodgy database code to blame! I will install the 3rd party plugin and see how it works for us though.

Our branches probably put us in the hundreds of millions of LoC category. It's unfortunate that for a long time we were prepared to allow each of our customers a separate branch for each release - each of which potentially has active development on it (not a real branch I know as we don't intend to ever re-merge them). As such we have a lot of code that potentially needs supporting. I'm not actually sure how often they are searched on as I'm lucky enough to work on newer parts of our software but the idea of dropping them from FishEye didn't go down too well.

I believe the guy who did the setup spent some time messing around with performance - I have no idea if he did everything right but he's a pretty smart guy.

I'll definitely take a look at the most recent release though, thanks for the tip.

Oh and thanks for taking the time to reply to my unsolicited feedback!
Elon Musk on starting small, blowing up education and reaching the stars
Actually he may be forcing the lanes-full optimal mode to arise.

If one or a few drivers in the empty lane start pacing the cars in the full lane, cars will build up behind them. When they arrive at the end of their lane, the drivers in the full lane won't be so ready to block merges (since nobody was cheating by racing down to the end.) Perhaps this could trigger an outbreak of zipper-merging.
document everything and install nagios, i would say
I'm dubious. How is it possible to separate the demand generated by marketing/brand from the demand generated from non-marketing/brand characteristics of products? In many cases, the brand IS the product.
Windows 8/Internet Explorer 10 blame websites for IE crashes
Netflix uses AWS just for data and analytics. Here they talk about their move from their own data centers for that http://blip.tv/silicon-valley-cloud-computing-group/netflix-...

Netflix uses LimeLight, Level3, and Akamai for streaming, and you probably need a bigger footprint then you think for that. Building out a usable global streaming network is going to take more then a handful of EC2 instances.
Well, in most cases the GUI stack will be different anyways. There is no "official" Android or iOS support from Nokia / QT for instance.

I've deployed ASP.NET MVC apps on Linux / Mono and it was a relatively painless experience. The desktop and RIA guys in .NET land are doing their own thing with WPF and Silverlight (google MVVM / Caliburn-Micro), and frankly, it's freaking me out a bit. There's a tendency to overengineer and abstract everything. It might not be as bad as with Java but the tendency is still there.

For instance, the .NET community has been arguing for years about domain driven design and how you should abstract away (or not!) database access. Hundreds of blog posts about which application layer should be concerned with this and that, about generic data access repositories, enhanced query objects and so on. What was "the way to go" one day was suddenly "the new singleton". Some guys eventually came up with the glorious "CQRS" approach (inspired by Betrand Meyer's command query separation) and built entire frameworks such as NCQRS with separate read/write stores, event sourcing and audit trails. The problem is that a lot of people start to use these enterprise models in very simple applications.

I'd also say that the 3 mentioned languages are, in their current incarnations, very different from each other. Java itself looks rather stagnant to me? I don't know, the last time I checked I saw former high school / college friend of mine starting a serious open source effort for easier database querying because he was so fed up with hibernate - it's basically one gigantic DSL / fluent interface that generates sql. Me: "Why don't you use lambda expressions.. oh wait, ...".
this tools is awesome!
A great weakness of Get Lamp was not actually sharing what text adventures / interactive fiction are like. There was no content about the experience of actually playing. I showed the documentary to several people with no history with text adventures / IF and afterward they were quite puzzled by the documentary. Almost all of the screen time was dedicated to nostalgia.
And 'trell' means slave in norwegian.

I don't think you can avoid this kind of thing if you want a short and pronounceable name.
Nice article.

I wonder if it would make sense to add a similar kind of support to redis. Maybe if a sorted set's read/write ration goes above some fixed threshold then it could substitute an implementation based on a sorted array instead of a balanced tree.

I guess the other problem is probably due to however redis was storing the actual data under the covers (stringified ints? is binary an option). This probably is one of the major contributors to the massive memory usage.

Still for something this specific (and intensive) a custom application makes a lot of sense. I wonder what exactly their IPC mechanism was, they said that they had the downloading process 'signal' the intersecting service when new data was available. i wonder if they just sent a SIGUSR?
I don't know about that. People keep home movies, pictures, etc. Likely over-time she may check them less and less, probably does so already. Maybe only checking on certain days or holidays. I don't think it's that strange, plenty of people keep reminders of loved one's lost without crippling themselves.
Amazon really is that much more expensive. Even among "cloud" providers, they are expensive. Their competitive advantage is extreme flexibility with large amounts of servers (spin up a few hundred instances in a few hours, spin them down again a few hours later).

If you do it yourself, you don't just have to worry about money, but also how to hire good operations people, and what effect all those extra people are going to have on your organizational structure, internal culture, etc.
That's pretty despicable behavior. I hope they change this before release.