skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The marketing angle is that your data is stored in "the cloud", where sometimes the cloud is a data center and sometimes it's P2P. People won't fear what they don't know.
they certainly didn't work fine when I tried to use them... after they'd gone into production releases of perl, the canonical demo/example scripts that were out there all crashed the perl runtime in a fiery horrible death.

I can only hope that it has improved since then, but I've moved on to greener pastures.
I'm just wondering, coz scaling is nice, but speed is more important to me. On Amazon, I can just dedicate more server power to get more speed, on Google I can't.
No.

Where are the plethora of libraries for Erlang that Java enjoy?

Java is great because you can stand of shoulders of people releasing brilliant libraries.

Who cares about Availability, Performance, Scalability ... if you can't ship?
yes... and they're great. Esp for situations like the OP was describing. Fire off a ton of incredibly lightweight threads and they'll quietly sit waiting for IO... perfect.
Sorry. I don't want to review your startup badly enough to deal with this overhead.
probably amiestreet
You can always opt out. Call up your carrier and say you never want to receive a text message and you never will receive a text message.
I agree with you that a law-firm-like structure would not work in tech, but I'll disagree on one point.

People are willing to suffer as the low status and long hours as employees in law firms and accountancies because of the guaranteed payoff when making partner, tech is a lot riskier.

Most "white shoe" law firm ("biglaw") associates aren't set on making partner. First, the odds are pretty miserable; about 5-10% make it, and it takes almost a decade. Second, junior partners are ridden a lot harder than senior associates, because they have more to lose. Partner firings, while not common, occur often enough that there is no "guaranteed payoff", because a junior partner might be axed before becoming senior. As for the "low status" of a law firm associate, this is true in some ways and not in others. For example, a first-year law associate is going to be expected to do a lot of grunt work, and work 55-65 hours per week. On the other hand, he's likely to have staff, if not a personal assistant, and a salary over $150k... not bad for a 25-year-old without work experience. The grunt work exists not because the associate has "low status" but because, frankly, so much of the law-in-practice is bureaucratic, precise, and uninteresting. This is especially true at high levels in corporate law, because clients would prefer to pursue the low-risk, precise, and boring routes (settlements) over the "fun" and unpredictable part of law, litigation.

The reason young attorneys are willing to endure years of pain in biglaw is that, in law and banking, reputation matters a lot more than technical skills, and the only way a young person can distinguish himself in these industries is to grind out years at a prestigious firm. They suffer because the name on their resume is often perceived to be worth the upfront pain. Of course, another reason for people to put up with 4-7 years of biglaw is that there's also a huge stigma against quitting or being fired; unlike in tech, it's not okay to say you left a law firm job because you weren't learning anything from the work and wanted to try something new; you're expected to have the social skills to handle this internally, without resorting to leaving the firm. This stigma is less pronounced in finance during bad economic conditions, because it's known to be a volatile industry. However, law firms never admit they are laying people off for economic reasons, always claiming their layoffs are performance-based firings, saving face at the expense of let-go employees. Goldman Sachs, the "creme de la creme" investment bank, did the same in 2007-08 (scumbags).

In technology, people evaluate a job based on what they will learn rather than the reputation of the firm. There's also much less of a stigma inherent to leaving a job for more interesting projects. For these reasons, and many more, a biglaw model (thankfully) will never work in tech.
dbserver swf # ps auxw | grep crawl

root 6984 3.0 0.5 215832 5168 pts/5 Sl+ 12:59 0:00 ./crawl

I'm using a linked-list in C to store all of the queued-up URLs so all of the threads can mark them as being worked on or whatever. Also, the app and curl lib takes a few megs too. I'm sure that the heap and multi-threadding libs are responsible for some of the resident memory usage. :) the on-disk binary is only 12k if that make a difference. ;)

The struct:

typedef struct my_url {
char * url;
int retcode;
double old_size;
double new_size;
status status;
struct my_url * next;
char * filename;
int flashurl_id;
int depth;
} my_url;

I also like keeping them in memory as opposed to a BDB because of access speed - 25+ threads don't have to wait when it's all in memory, but 25+ threads hitting a BDB would be much nastier on the OS.
No, but I tried it for a couple hours and found it less than blindly fast. When it gets the word right, it's great, but I found that the extra time it took to correct errors (not my errors, but the software's bad guesses) and to enter proper nouns etc. was high enough to cancel out the benefits.
Even better:
<noscript>NOPE.</noscript>

turns off javascript
Enterprises move slowly. 2 years is no time in the enterprise world. How many Erlang programmers are there? I love learning new languages, but there are a lot of crusty programmers out there who refuse to update their skill set - and they're often entrenched in enterprise settings.

This next part will probably some change over time. Erlang is slower than Java - even with the HiPE JIT compiler. Erlang's performance is more akin to Python. Plus, as much as I protest, "enterprisey" people seem to have a love affair with static typing. They also have a love affair for nicely UML-diagrammed objects and Erlang is functional.

But the most important reason why this won't happen is that the majority of "enterprisey" systems I know of are a ton less reliable than consumer systems. "Enterprisey" has become the term I associate with needing to have a programmer on call for. This might sound stupid, but so many programmers I know worry about job security - mostly because they won't upgrade their skill set. Something that obsoletes the need for them to babysit applications eats at that security.

Erlang will get (more) popular. Lots love the functional paradigm. It's really well implemented, reliable, etc. It just won't displace Java quickly, if ever.
Someone posted this link over at Reddit. Gave me a chuckle.

http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/70q4l/live_lhc_w...

LHC Compact Muon Solenoid Experiment Webcams

http://www.cyriak.co.uk/lhc/lhc-webcams.html
Gmail Labs Adds More Features: Makes Working With Labels Easier
I've often wondered what blogging strategy is best for building readership and credibility. Publish:

1. Several times a day, like some of the "top" bloggers do. (This is not for me.)

2. One/day, like Seth does. Generally, Seth's articles are short.

3. One every week or two, but longer, better researched, and better written. (In the extreme, this would be Steve Yegge.)

My bias is towards #3 - fewer articles, but really high quality - but I wouldn't be surprised if #2 is a more effective strategy. My problem with #2 is that I think quality sometimes suffers. For example, some of Seth's posts are great, but I often feel like he's just putting a thought down in order to achieve his daily quota. For that reason, I don't bother to read Seth every day - I just read what I see here or what people pass on to me. But man, he has a lot of followers, shows up here a lot, and stays in peoples minds.
StackOverflow: A Teeming Beehive of Programming Q&A
What a classic linkbait submission title.
The 2 year aspect of the argument is a bit absurd. These changes just do not happen that fast, especially with sqillions of entrenched java developers in the enterprise.

He also argues that Erlang has "already penetrated the enterprise." Might seem that way if you work at Ericsson, but otherwise I can't imagine making this statement.
This is a standard tactic. This company, and a few others (possibly the same, with different names), regularly make this kind of claim. It is a more refined form of spam...similar to the letters that a few American registrars send out trying to get you to transfer your domains by warning you of impending expiration of your registration.

In short the letter you received is a marketing letter. They want to register those domains for you, and are using a very clever and underhanded tactic to do so. When we first got an email like this, I was able to dig up quite a bit of information with a few minutes of Googling. A couple of our users also received similar letters, about some of their domains and the response from one of our customers based in China (who I've known for several years, and would generally trust--his statements were backed up by a native of China, who I don't know as well) indicated that domain registration in China is an ugly business and fraught with fraud...he indicated that if you couldn't get an honest agent within China to represent you in the process, you'd almost certainly get screwed on the deal. I tend to believe that anyone that would send emails like the above probably are not honest agents who would represent you faithfully in the process. Though maybe just getting your money for the registration(s) would be enough motivation for them and they don't plan to do anything underhanded.

But, by expressing enough interest to spend money on the domains, you'd probably be merely notifying them that squatting on these domains is likely a profitable venture. I'm certain the two companies ("Repet Trading Co." and public-domain.net.cn) are related in some way.
This sets the bar for an elite programmer fairly low IMHO.
The obvious motive here is that text messages compete with (also absurdly overpriced) phone calls.
TC50: Gazopa Searches for Images Similar To Other Images
Automatic bill payment is a great thing, especially for people who are busy and would miss payments if it didn't exist. However, it unfortunately allows companies to get away with a lot of crap, given that the majority of customers are no longer reading monthly bills and don't notice the fluctuations.
TC50: Playce Lets You Play in Real Places
I am new here, don't know what protocol is for duplicate (or in this case highly related) threads...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=300026
You should give Zenoss(http://www.zenoss.com/) a try. I grew tired of Nagios and eventually moved over. I have since then settled on God (http://god.rubyforge.org/).

Do note that God is not like Nagios and Zenoss, it is more like a monitoring framework.
I think that this is an expression of a general business principle. Create income producing assets, maintain them, expand. This backlist and frontlist stuff is just the publishing domain version of real estate enterprise or any number of other ventures.
" they are the kind of people who read things in order to better themselves as programmers. And that's already, you know, 5-10% of practising programmers"

I find this hard to believe. I have at least 20 friends who also program and they all read online and own programming books.

I'd like to know where Joel gets his statistics.
Http://www.google.com/bot.html = this page no longer available
Crikey - I thought Google of all places wouldn't stuff up the user-agent bot webpage.

Google's user-agent is:
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html

I mean, everyone has heard of Google - but it's very bad mannered not to have a page up about your crawler.
Echo the Zeonoss comment. I mostly liked it when I tried it ~6 months ago. More "colorful" than Nagios, somewhere between Nagios and OpenView, IMO.
Has anyone ever figured out (or even estimated) how long it would actually take to destroy the world if we did succeed in creating a black hole on the surface?

Assuming it didn't evaporate and started out at rest, it'd presumably fall straight through the floor, picking up mass as it went, but I'm not sure exactly how much. Once it got to the core it would overshoot, hollowing out a bit more of the core, but some kind of drag would eventually slow it down, leaving it in some kind of oddly-shaped cavity near the core. I have no idea whether this would wind up stable, but I'm guessing that eventually the core would collapse towards it, and once it started losing its structure the whole planet would collapse in.

But I have no idea how long all this would take. Minutes? Hours? Years?
constantly blogging about the world ending

I think you'll find the same guys that constantly blog about the world ending are the same ones that believe the government* is trying to steal our thoughts, so the only way to prevent that is by wearing tin foil hats.

I've read this same doom and gloom argument before, during the Manhattan Project when a physicist named Edward Teller raised concerns that a nuclear reaction could ignite the atmosphere, which was later disproven.

The adding of the widget is more or less a joke as I found the site amusing.

(*Government may refer to many different organisations, US gov, illuminati etc...)
In one of my previous jobs we had this dude who had like 20+ books on his desk.

At best the guy was an average developer...

There is a difference between a read and a reference.
Why would you bring manliness into the discussion? Are you suggesting that Perl and Python are somehow manlier? Because I have no idea what that means.
They were clearly marked as experimental in the documentation all the way up to recent 5.8 releases. From what I hear they work fine now.
I found this an extremely approachable introduction, and I'd like to see further parts in the series -- "accounts payable" and "paying yourself" sound interesting.

How does one typically go about learning this stuff? Do most entrepreneurs just pick it up from various sources over time, or is there a book or academic course that is particularly helpful?
Yes, basically the more different your immune system, the better you smell. Except that the pill seems to flip that and women on the pill prefer genetically similar men. Perhaps because the pill mimics pregnancy and with it a "stay near kin" response.
You reveal the primary flaw in your thinking with the phrase "C folk." Languages are not enemy camps. Just learn them both and use the appropriate tool in the appropriate situation - python for glue, prototyping, business systems, web programming, etc. C for operating systems, networking layers, database engines, etc. Try not to attach your ego to either one.
10 Tips For Creating Website Mockups In Photoshop
I guess I'm not surprised. On a completely different topic, great blog, I've added http://www.thinkgene.com/ to my bookmarks.
The market forces work just fine. It's just that there isn't a free market. If every mom and pop could set up a cellular service with a reasonable investment, there'd be a bunch of community providers, and prices would go down - just as we've been seeing with internet connections.

But the spectrum is intensely regulated by authorities, frequencies are not just expensive, they are usually not available at all(:1) - because the authorities want to protect the investment of the early providers. Effectively, they made a deal that created a government sponsored monopoly, which, even if you can privately buy a share in it, is the opposite of free markets.

1: This is true for most of Europe, can't say for the US.
I think you're right that at best it is a dirty business practice and at worse it's a scam. I found a blog posting about an identical email that someone else had received (http://www.jamesmaurer.com/domain-registration-scam.asp).
Native JSON in IE8
And unless my knowledge of the Python standard library is way off, the Python standard library is written in Python, not C. That's what all those .py files are in the /lib folder. So python scripts spend most of their time calling into Python libraries. It's true that the interpreter is written in c (c++?,) maybe that's what you were thinking of.
I actually didn't realize that I was this misinformed about evolution. Even the first example they bring up about "theory" not meaning what Creationists purport it to mean was enlightening.
Three words: High entry cost.

As a libertarian, I blame regulation for that.
You don't have to totally like or hate a company. You can like Google's products, but hate the idea of them having too much control over the internet. You can like the way they run most of their company (for instance, how much they contribute to open source projects) but disagree with their choices in China, etc.

There's no intellectual dishonesty there, it's simply having a more complex thought process than a three year old. If you're Cory Doctorow, and you only use products from companies whose policies and actions you 100% agree with, you'd starve to death.
What I meant is that it's possible that Erlang will become a popular choice for startups in the next two years.
As Facebook rolls out new redesign, 2.5 million users are already protesting
>And that's already, you know, 5-10% of practising programmers. It's not the vast masses of Java monkeys who were formerly VB monkeys who were formerly COBOL monkeys who are just doing, you know, large swathes of extremely boring stuff internally somewhere. <

I'm certainly not above the occassional look down my nose at Java, but how do you suppose someone would move to Java from VB without reading a few books or manuals?
One of the most famous examples of course being the photoelectric effect, which kinda went dead for many decades until it started being applied in digital cameras.
It's around $0.11 for sending a text message in Finland.

There's no charge for receiving one, because that would be just silly.

Finally I found something that's cheaper here than in America! Sure compensates for the cars you get at 1/3 of the price over here..

Out of curiosity, are we talking about text messages because of the iPhone 3G? :)
I think they're hoping to get it working by November and fully operational sometime next year.
You can run out of stack even if your recursion is guaranteed to terminate. The stack is not infinite.

That's why when dealing with very large data sets you might want to prefer iteration over recursion.

Lastly, unless you're allocating (on the stack) in your loop, the loop all by itself will not overflow the stack, even if it never terminates.
Good information, but you might want to read the article.
What needs to happen is labels creating a department specifically for startups. Maybe a technology music startup incubator of sorts in each label, that facilitates and promotes new music technologies. Such new tech is the only way the industry will survive!

Right now it seems build an audience and then the industry will talk with you, but it's not about how each can benefit each one another... rather pay X, agree to crazy X or die!

That is so backwards - litigation as a business, maybe good for ambulance chasers, but not for companies promoting the arts!
8 Startup Insights Inspired By The Mega Mind of Seth Godin
What market forces? Telecoms in the US comes in just behind medicine as the most heavily regulated and protected business.
s/Programming/Windows Programming/
- From Peopleware, Productive Projects and Teams by Tom De Marco and Timothy Lister (2nd Ed, page 12)
thanks - I ended up using something like this
If you read coding horror you are a programming GOD!

Alternatively, unless you instantly grok the crufties code only to instantly transform it into the best code ever, and then go home and do some more programming on the side, and then you're also a social butterfly who is never ever on the market and never has to stoop so low as to send out resumes to get a job - well then you're just a VB drone loser.

I myself don't know where I fit in, because while I read lots of programming and cs related stuff, I can not do the 8+2 hrs thing, and I got my last job by sending out resumes. So I must be somewhere between god and total loser.
Shhh, don't tell anyone :-D

On a more serious note yes, but again that's a cultural thing. Languages like Erlang (and OCaml, and Haskell, and...), you spend more time thinking than typing. You don't (need to) write much code, and if you think of a better way you might completely overwrite yesterday's work. You might deliver a huge chunk of functionality in a couple of pages of code that took weeks of thought, but that looks like it was typed in a day (I have been in that situation). Functional languages don't fit big-company management comfortably. They don't look like "work" in the sense that most IT organizations are used to. Java will be with us for a long time.
Ask: HN Experience with GoGrid.com
I was looking into Gogrid.com and was wondering if anyone has had any experience with them.

Advantages
- Use of the F5 loadbalancer at no additional cost
- Flexibility in only paying for what you use.

Disadvantages:
- Bandwidth costs seemed pretty expensive per/gb
- Didn't seem to have a solution for getting more storage space without spinning up another instance where you pay a premium for the RAM/CPU time. (Maybe pair with S3 or have some local SAN storage for a different cost)

Any other thoughts?
Hadron Collider: we are still alive
Cern scientists expect to find answers to many important subjects of physics such as the origin of universe, up to now explained with the big bang theory. Since the boson seems tied to the very origin of the universe, hence to the beginning of life, boson is also known as god particle.
Hoku Scientific, Inc. (NASDAQ: HOKU)
This is often a difficult statistic for programmers who do read to grasp because the only programmers you likely know are more people like you. The thing is, there aren't as many of us as we think there are.

None of the programmers I know don't read. I am told that these people exist; they work in cubicles and so forth. However, I don't know any of them. So, personally, it takes a lot of concentrated effort on my part to not take that 5-10% and bump it to, say, 50%. Because in the world I live in, that statistic is crazy low.
Beyond a certain error rate, you will definitely end up with bad data. The point is, with error detecting or correcting codes, you're introducing redundancy by encoding the information into more bits than minimally required to represent that information.

The simplest form is adding a parity bit, which allows you to detect (not correct) up to one bad bit. (so, say 1/8 bits or 12.5% if you store a byte of information in 9 bits)

Using R-S codes you can crank up the number of bits used for encoding, which also drives up your error tolerance. Plus, in addition to detecting errors, you can even correct them. So it doesn't matter if some bits come up bad (or missing) - the redundancy is spread equally across all of the transmitted/stored bits, so it's irrelevant which bits suffer from the failure. There aren't any "old" or "new" bits.
Perhaps you could develop a sort of system where users can text in their results as they work out or post-workout and the site takes the data and charts it?

i.e.: "db bench 160, db fly 50, s press 140, l press 650" translates into 'dumbbell bench press 160lbs., dumbbell fly 50lbs., etc. etc.

I know most people at the very least lug around their cell phones with them in the gym, so it could prove to be very useful.
Fotonauts Is a Gorgeous Photopedia
The name StackOverflow refers to an infinite loop or recursion in the programming languages C or C++...

I did read the article, the above is what I'm responding to.