skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I definitely agree with you that some topics that I come across, I forgo the search engine and just do "w John Politician" (w is my wikipedia search Firefox keywod.) This works for notable people, math concepts and generally topics which can be easily quantized.

However, I tend to rely more and more on the search engine when I need to find something specific that I sort of remember stumbling across in the past but can't put my finger on. For instance, queries like "site:nytimes.com friedman middle east" saved me more times than I can count.

Yes, the internet is generally much more organized today than it was circa ~1998, but I just see it as a cleaner input to Google. Knowing how to Google correctly (not as common or obvious as I once thought) is one of the most powerful tools you can have for looking up information.
If that is how the sale is arranged, then yes, but trivial is subjective.
Where are you in grad school that pays 60-70% of industry? I'm at a top 4 prog (one of Stanford / MIT / Berkeley / CMU), and it doesn't pay nearly as well (unless you have a very different meaning of industry).
Yahoo's First Implementation of OpenSocial Support
When it comes to helping people exercise their right to vote, multiple redundant data channels are good. Also, SMS is mobile and works on all sorts of "ancient" handsets.
The new AOL.com: Another Yahoo Copy
The gist of the article is that linkedin isn't entertaining enough. And I think it misses the point of linkedin.

It's a professional network, not a playground.

Their customers (the paying ones..) don't care about tagwalls, feeds and whathaveyou. They care about serious business contacts. And the site caters to that pretty well. I'm not saying that it is perfect, just that it looks and feels boring because it isn't meant to be facebook.
I like the idea, but some simple CSS changes would certainly improve it. I'd consider an offwhite background color, and a subtle border for your form fields.
Methinks you ignore the fact that the easiest way to look something up on, say, Amazon or Wikipedia is: CMD-Tab to browser, CMD-T for new tab, CMD-OPT-F (or CMD-L Tab) to the Google field in the browser toolbar, type what you're looking for, then click on the obvious Amazon or Wikipedia link on the resulting Google page.

Search hasn't gotten less frequent. It's just so fast that it's faded into ubiquity. I find it faster than typing "wikipedia.org" directly into the address field, even with autocomplete. (The problem is that, once wikipedia loads, you have to navigate to its own search widget and enter a term, then click on the resulting page. And that ignores the very real possibility that Google is better than Wikipedia's own search function. Meanwhile, I could solve all of this by setting up a Firefox keyword, but that only works in the browsers where I've set it up, and it only works for those who know what they are and remember to use them.)
Former JDSU CEO Pops Up at Avaya
AOL Redesigns and Opens Up a Little Bit More
I guess it's time to null-route pluraprocessing.com.

In other words I really really really don't like hidden or undisclosed functionality in whatever the software I am running. Especially if it is explicitly designed to utilize my otherwise idle resources.

Few years back my friends and I were talking about putting a DES brute-forcing client into a flash applet and then sticking it on a high-traffic site. It never went anywhere beyond a discussion though exactly because of the ethical issues involved.
> The last time I received a cheque from the U.S in germany, it was one of the most annoying payment methods I've ever used. First of all, there was this massive fee, then they froze the cash for 6 weeks while the check was verified.

Umm, that's a problem with your "advanced" bank....
These moves by the big players are of major interest (some would suggest worry but I don't think so yet) at the moment - because my startup (:D) is actually along the same lines.

To be honest I think OpenID is less a standard now and more a Buzz word. Everyone is doing it subtly differently.

Also of course you have the problem where some ID's will be "worth" more than others - just because of the provider.

The original concept of OpenID was awesome: everyone could have a page/url identified as theirs and theirs alone. And they could use that identity in all sorts of places.

The trouble is the execution was bad and so these larger companies are now jumping on it to twist it into their idea of a single sign on.

I think FB Connect is a much better system personally. But not the best.

And then there is us :D we're creating a single sign on & social networking site that is designed on a trust basis. The one thing I dislike about OpenID is how decentralised it is. I dont see the issue (personally) with having 4 or 5, trusted, ID providers who manage all the ID's. This gives consumers the choice of who to trust their "ID" with. But it also means the 5 providers collaborate together in a way that can't be "trust poisoned".I'm hoping that's where we come in....
Agreed, it's not like this is the first time Apple has denied a "competing" application.

I can't wait for Android to be released on a decent handset. Then I can give my iPhone to my wife.
I would be very careful of this "everything is negotiable" model. Maintaining trust and a reputation for fair dealing inside your firm and with other firms is crucial to getting through an extended downturn.
There's this thing called PayPal, check into it.
I love his innovative use of github. It's clever, and it works surprisingly well!
I have to reluctantly agree with this statement. It shouldn't be that when I upgrade to 8.10 from 8.04 I am stuck fixing all of the issues that the upgrade itself broke (for example wireless is working poorly and is non-functional after suspends). While these issues are marginal and will only suck up a few minutes of my time, there are plenty of positives. Notably, GIMP, GNOME, and various other upgrades are quite nice.

I always felt guilty complaining about the stability of an Ubuntu distro. If I wanted stability I would stick with Debian or BSD. For free software of such quality, what I am gaining is certainly worth the time ensuring it works on my system.
UMass Researcher's start up looking for $20M to use new microbe to convert sugar to ethanol in one step
This is just all around good.
Netflix on TiVo? Cool--But Not Cool Enough
i wikipedia so much that i should make it my startpage :(
Absolutely; the data is there. Businesses and governments are willing to pay for a better way to dissect it too. And people who create these new companies will be helping governments become more transparent so that we the people can take back power that has been systematically stolen (or just lazily handed over) throughout the last several decades.
Portable Ubuntu 8.10 - An Ubuntuist's perfect stocking filler
If you want a managed PostgreSQL instance CommandPrompt offers that as a service http://commandprompt.com/services/dedicatedhosting/

The issues with running a database in a shared environment are that you need dedicated hardware for performance, you do not want to be telling customers that you don't know why it takes 10 seconds to update inventory quantities only to discover it's someone else sucking up your disk bandwidth.

And as Thomas points out the security considerations alone should kill the idea; it's possible for someone with administrative access to dump the contents of memory on a VM (how VM migration works) and at that point any private keys you are using to provide "transparent encryption", or any inflight customer business data is fair game.
Interesting Idea for a Quicktime Developer/Hacker
I have a potential client with a rather interesting idea, that centers around the Quicktime platform. I need to find someone who is familiar with Quicktime Authoring, not on the video/production side, but more on the interactive/code side.

Without giving away too much, the idea is to use the QT platform to author high quality interactive environments and deliver them via the web as a download (possibly using a BT like transport service)

Any ideas?

I'm based on the East Coast/Boston area.
Well I'm not a huge Ubuntu fan but I run Linux on a pen drive as my (main) personal OS now and couldn't recommend it more.

Anyone else (programmers?) use a portable USB OS? How long before this is the norm?
WTF are you talking about?

From wikipedia:

"In several technical fields, in particular computer science, mathematics and physics, TeX has become a de facto standard. Many thousands of books have been published using TeX, including books published by Addison-Wesley, Cambridge University Press, Elsevier, Oxford University Press and Springer. Numerous journals in these fields are produced using TeX or LaTeX, allowing authors to submit their raw manuscript written in TeX."

In my field, Tex (used with macro packages) is the standard. We format book chapters and papers for publication using these macros. We communicate with other scientists using the product of these tools. We could easily produce journals and/or books ourselves using these tools, and many people do.

They are excellent for that purpose. They are free. They work. They work better than anything else I know.

Am I missing something?
I have talked to some iphone contractors an they were charging 150-200$ upwards so it's a fairly lucrative market...
how economical is it to be making $5 credit charges for several thousand users ever month? I would think that visa/mc would eat your revenue for lunch there. Is there anyone out there aggregating these sites' little charges for them?
I know of one exception. He explained his system: he does the research, then he gets grants for his research. This gives him time to do new research and he writes new grants based on that. He delivers because he only proposes to do what he has already more or less done!

That is brilliant! It reminds me of two things.

One is Craig Larman's work on the history of the waterfall process. Larman posed the question: given how broken the waterfall process is, how was it possible for any project to succeed? (The failures of course are easy to explain.) So he went back and interviewed people who were on famous waterfall projects that succeeded. And they told him: "Of course we knew it would never work to do all the design up front. So we built the system and then went back and wrote the spec, handed it in and got it signed off, and later submitted the actual code."

The other thing it reminds me of is Andrew Wiles writing a stack of papers in advance so he would have ten years to work on Fermat's Last Theorem while still publishing regularly.
I would be really surprised if anyone, I repeat 'Anyone', in this forum has an aol.com ID! So this news is pointless - who cares what they change it to, its still 'lipstick on a pig'!
It's ham-handed typical Apple, but honestly, I'm glad. One of the main reasons I enjoy developing iPhone sites is that I don't have to support a bunch of random user agents.
I'm always confused by this. If Dell didn't allow Opera or Firefox or Linux to be installed on the computers they sell, or Microsoft didn't allow 3rd-party applications on Windows, people would be up in arms. But Apple is allowed to block anyone from installing any application on their own personal iPhone, and there aren't lawsuits flying?
see here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=152500
Here is what makes this new:

1) Seems to "eat" many plants including wood pulp, not just sugar cane and corn. Also eats leftovers of sugar cane and corn that microbes used in existing technologies leave behind.

2) Performs the conversion in a single "step" with its own enzymes, without requiring additional processes and treatments as other microbes, which currently take time and costly lab-created enzymes.

3) Carbon neutral or carbon negative.

From:

http://www.azonano.com/News.asp?NewsID=4968
This isn't Podcast Listener Pro or whatever; nobody will be surprised if Apple turns down Windows Media Player or Azureus either. One expects Opera did this largely as a publicity stunt.

You're going to be the one geek in the room with the Android phone and the Nomad MP3 player, you know. =)
don't cows eat plant matter and fart methanol? why didn't we start breeding fartier cows?

joking aside, i love all the new advances we're seeing in energy tech. i refuse to pay 4 bucks for gas ever again
Already my comment is lost among the many replies... I can't express how useful and motivating some of the advice is, so I'd really like to thank to all those who are taking the time to answer.
This Election: Carpool to Vote
I'd hapily pay $10-20 for a low volume plan and considerably more for high volume

How much more? The problem is that, while it's easy to run My/PostgreSQL, it's hard to keep them always on, perfect data integrity, etc. On the lowest end, it's going to cost you at the very minimum $50/month to offer this service. You need two slices starting at $20 a piece plus backups which I'm just fudging at $10/mo.

So, you say put multiple clients on a 256MB slice? At what point does that become unfair? I wouldn't want my database to have less than 64MB to its name. So, 4 clients per $50 even for small users? That won't hit a $10/mo price point.

Yes, you can get more beefy slices like the 15.5GB slice which could accommodate 248 people offering 64MB a piece (you could probably load this one more since the likelihood of users who under use is greater in greater numbers). Still, assuming you have 300 people on the box, that's a cost of $5.33 per user in equipment alone.

BUT, you're service is supposed to scale, so you can't really even put the 248 people on the box because you need excess capacity for when a customer says, well, I want more capacity. I mean, are you going to say, "yes, we scale, but we have to take your database offline for half an hour, find a new box for it and then put it back up. and it'll be that way every time you need more juice."

It also misses what makes databases tick: RAM and disk. EC2 and slices can do well on the RAM front, but again, once you give someone the RAM, the costs go up huge. In terms of disk, slices are just bad. No one would claim Xen should be used for a good database server because it's not great for disk i/o.

Plus, scaling a database isn't usually an issue of knowing a database - it's about knowing queries. So, if you're putting a scaling guarantee in there, you're offering to write people's code for them.

The fact is that databases aren't headaches for people getting 10,000 hits per day unless their queries are grossly wrong (which this service wouldn't fix). If you're a big site, you probably want something better than they could offer.

*Oh, and for anyone who wants this service, it already exists with RightScale. Only problem is that it's way out of the quoted price range.
Sorry for promoting myself a little bit here.

I just implemented this new feature last night.
Good idea? Bad idea?

I know carpool is good, voting is good, so it's gotta be good.

I just wish I have done it earlier.
The Economist endorses Barack Obama
World's Best Rails Rails Hiring Process
The comments on the article are the best part.
I sympathise over the Wifi issue. Had many similar issues.

I always consider 8.10 of "cutting edge" quality and never bother to upgrade our day-to-day systems for a couple of months after release (sometimes we even wait till the next .04). As you say it's not worth the issue fixing headaches :P

Agreed though: the package updates are nice.
Is Apple preventing it from being installed in any way or just via Apple's app distribution mechanism? (I don't know either way, just asking.)
TWID with Harper Reed
Contact information should not be an identifier. It's like when a B&M store uses your phone number to ID you. I don't want them calling me and I don't want your website to email me.

The URL is simply a pointer to my identity, which is all I should have to give. The different formats the providers use is what makes it confusing (example.com, username.example.com, example.com/username, and now username@example.com)
A 10 hour project seems a -little- extreme for a hiring process, but I suppose if people really want to work there, then that's fine.

10-15 references? Now that IS extreme.
US Court Strikes down "Business Method" Patents (Like Amazon's 1-Click) for now
That was an April Fool's joke
references can/should be really fast. can get them all done in a couple hours... worth it, given all the good stuff you can discover. You are going to work and pay this person for months/years.
Its not that bad. On a $5 charge, you'll lose like 50 cents in credit card fees. Sure when you multiply it by the 2-3000 users, you end up losing a few thousand bucks...but hey cost of doing business.
JOINs are awesome. They're expensive operations, no doubt, but they make creating a web application a TON easier. If you're going to limit yourself to the way that Google or Amazon has to develop web applications, you're getting rid of your primary advantage.

Let's say you have a site with logins and comments. Comments are by one of the logins with a nice foreign key in a relational database or you have to add part of that person's info to each comment with something like SimpleDB (if you want to display the name next to the comment, you place the name there). So, then someone changes their name in the logins table - it happens. With the foreign key and a join, all the comments appropriately show the correct name. With SimpleDB, you have to go through and update every single comment that person has made to reflect the changes.

Take something like Facebook. Every single mail message, every single wall post, every single friend, every single Event, every single group, etc. would have to be updated to reflect your new name if it wasn't referential. Now, Facebook probably isn't referential. They're big. They probably spend a ton of time/money keeping that stuff in sync. In fact, they probably run those types of updates as low-priority background jobs (so while your new name shows up in your profile now, it is a while before it gets propagated). That's all guessing, btw, but you can see how much more difficult it is to keep non-relational data in sync.

Places like Facebook have to operate differently because JOINs do have cost. It's amazingly unlikely that a relational database won't suit your site due to scalability. If you're looking to make a cool site, do it the easy way first, then scale. Otherwise, someone else will build it faster than you.

Non-relational data seems easy and it is for simple things. It might be that your site fits very nicely in a non-relational model. Do be aware of the differences.
Ask HN: Startup-Friendly Bay Area-Based Accounting Service Recommendations?
I'm looking for accounting assistance for my startup -- ideally in SF, but elsewhere in the Bay Area is OK if the recommendation warrants it. Thanks in advance for your help.
Exactly. LinkedIn isn't going to do a killing this quarter because people want entertainment. They're going to do great because when you need a job, the first thing you're doing is updating your LinkedIn profile.
just via Apple's distribution mechanism. Which is the only way to install stuff on your iPhone, short of jailbreaking it.
Linux distribution releases are really about cat herding. With

* Gnome
* KDE
* The kernel
* Openoffice
* Firefox
* Mysql
* Postgresql

You're almost bound to release just before or just after someone else's "big release" and so either miss it and be a bit out of date, or include something that is perhaps not 100% stable.
Best flat-out general CSS reference - http://w3schools.com/css/css_reference.asp
http://github.com/raganwald/homoiconic/tree/master/2008-10-3...
Wikipedia doesn't know everything, but Google does (like answers to some issues I may be having with Rails or mysql with some specific error mesg)! I respectfully disagree with you.
I thought politics was a no-no here?
Is America Becoming a 3rd World Nation? - Associated Content
I don't know about Kubuntu, but Ubuntu doesn't suck (at least the 8.04 version didn't).
Thanks for giving the shortcut to the search box - now is there another keyb shortcut to choose a specific search engine, like Amazon or eBay from the dropdown?
I'm in a similar boat, only I stopped taking funding and am borrowing the money for school now. I've blown years on working on others' research projects instead of focusing on my own topic.

One old little statistic keeps screaming in the back of my head: in any given software development project, the average difference in productivity between the least and most productive programmers is 3600% -- so you're not in an unusual situation. The ones pretending to be scientists in your group end up on the bottom rungs of the hierarchy later.

As for sanity & graduation, I guess the question isn't what your group's doing, but what's _your_ research on? If you haven't decided your topic yet, you have some good scheming to do. If you have, then you have some more underhanded scheming to do. It's not cynical, it's being focused. The reason the project looks like a giant failure, assuming the ones planning it aren't complete idiots, is that it's essentially a cover story for specific research interests by the primary stakeholders.

The goal is to figure out how to pull as much good research you can on nonprimary topics out of the body of research your group is doing as a whole. The primary topic is rarely as interesting or as scientifically fruitful as the stuff you find on the way.

From your discussion, it sounds like you can't find a direct way to pull good research out of your mess of a research project. Perhaps it's time to talk about an interesting subsystem? Some way of coercing a small part of the project into useful research for you? Feel free to be as devious as you need to be, it sounds like you're one of the only few who care. The rest don't, and so it won't matter to them.

If not, look for viable exit strategies. You're there to do research. If you can't do it, then you're wasting your time.

And seriously, where's your adviser in all this?

As for research, I'm going to industry in a few months, but I never plan to stop researching. Only now I have to pay for my own hardware, which isn't terribly expensive giving what industry pays for a good computer scientist these days. Screw publication, I'm gonna be a crackpot independent scientist!

There are a few companies out there that make enclosed racks which take care of heat & noise for you. They look good underneath a TV.
One expects Opera did this largely as a publicity stunt.

I think they were testing the waters to see how Apple would react to a larger and much better-known company putting a competing product into the app store. Unsurprisingly, Apple did the same thing they've always done.

You're going to be the one geek in the room with the Android phone and the Nomad MP3 player, you know. =)

That fine, as long as I have the choice to be that geek. That's what attracts me (and other geeks, I'm sure) to Android the most: I have choices. If I don't like the default media player, I can install another one (or, barring that, write my own) without fear that the Almighty Apple will lay the smackdown.
the appstore is by no means the only way to install things on your phone. as a developer you can install whatever you want on your phone including write applications that run in the background. apple will just refuse to publish said apps to the apple store.
I think a lot of what was said is right on - hiring the right people is hard and I've really stuggled with that at times.

But I think making people code for free is somewhat unethical unless it's for open source. As an applicant I would feel that I was being taken advantage of if you used my code, didn't open source it, and didn't give me the job.

I'm not a lawyer, so I could be totally wrong on this one - but I'd be a little worried that this could become grounds for a lawsuit. Perhaps not a serious one, but, for example, a lawsuit to obstruct an eventual IPO or investment.
How many of us haven't considered a small lair, a few minions, and a doomsday device before?