skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Forget the sidebar part of Genius - where it does seem Apple's just out to promote their back-catalog - and focus on the Genius playlist feature (which doesn't try to push music on to you).

The Genius playlist feature works really well. I've been surprised how good it does, even with semi-obscure music - it's opened my eyes to a lot of music in my library that I've forgotten about, and about 80% of the time, the combinations are really good.

Now, it doesn't work so well on my girlfriend's 4GB library, and perhaps it's just because my library is 60GB and filled with lots of CDs from my youth from almost every genre, but the algorithm is good - it's not entirely some sort of scheme to get you buying more music.
"...imagine a boot stamping on a human face--forever."
Wait. Why would an enterprise want to make an only internally used application a web application? It both takes longer to write and usually is slower to use (very mouse-oriented, unless designed really smartly) than a good desktop application. Of course I'm not talking about those kind of desktop applications where someone pulls a database table onto a form in Delphi or Visual Studio - those aren't better or written faster than web applications.

No, what I mean is that most enterprises have an ERP system which comes with it's own, quite efficient domain-specific language and development environment, so when they figure out that f.e. they need a system to reserve projectors for presentations, the easiest way is to develop it right inside the ERP system. Or use something similar to these efficient ERP development environments, such as FoxPro.

Why would you put your application on the web when the point isn't to be able to use it from a netcafe, but it is used only by people sitting in an office and keying in data all day long?
Is this why the US under Reagan brought the USSR to its knees? So that the West could team up with China on tracing dissent?

I'm saddened, I really am.
Yes, in the cold light of day, it perhaps was a bit over-the-top. Give me this though: she's been smeared as no other candidate in my lifetime has been (I'm 53). This link (from a site backed by a group that once gave Obama a bunch of money, ironically) clears up some of the worst smears.

http://www.factcheck.org/elections-2008/sliming_palin.html

I appreciate the civility of your reply and have upmodded you.
Wow, did you wake up on the wrong side of the bed today? For the record lots of politicians have been caught using personal email accounts for business and I think the same for all of them. The entire reason her email account was hacked was that she was caught using it for state business. If she hadn't skirted the law the email address wouldn't have been known and it wouldn't have been hacked. I do not know the politics of the hacker, but evading public scrutiny by using private email for public matters is not a political issue--it's wrong no matter the party.

The Washington Post has a piece about Palin's email policies, which include CCing her husband on state business:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09...

Employees of major corporations would be fired for the same behavior (Sarbanes-Oxley has 'em all shit scared--destroying evidence like she did is major jail time).

Time agrees that using this un-archived email system is indeed a crime:

http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1842097,00....

> The Alaska Governor could also face charges for conducting official state business using her personal, unarchived e-mail account (a crime), with some critics accusing her of skirting freedom-of- information laws in doing so.
The funniest thing for me was that campfire and huddlechat didn't really have any features or layout. It's a chatroom!

Google lost so much credibility taking huddlechat down IMHO.
Taking in to account the unpleasant working conditions and hours they face, it does seem like union pressure could be pushing that up high.

Ultimately any cost savings could be passed back to the taxpayers.
I take it you didn't click on the the next slide...

"In America, starting a successful business is the surest, most controllable path available to you for making a million dollars in less than 42 years."

Maybe you get your million dollars in two years, but only after thirty years of practice?
Amazon Launching New Content Delivery Network: No Threat To Major CDNs, Yet
If you disagree with someone's statement provide counter evidence of such things. Otherwise your attacking the person and not the argument.

PS: The stance that both sides of a debate always deserve equal time pervasive and wrong. When someone says the acceleration due to gravity of an object is always 100km/s^2 they are wrong and there is little point in giving them identical amounts of time. Think about the coverage given to the anti global worming / evolution / science crowd and ask your self is this reasonable?
It's too bad those bags are so ugly. Maybe the last one I might consider carrying around. And, of course, it's the most expensive. Great.
she's been smeared as no other candidate in my lifetime has been

Obviously you were in a coma during the 2000 and 2004 election cycles.

//$22 Million in debt over 5 years as mayor...
Yeah. 61 days ago, and no replies yet.

Add a footer to the comments page.
Justification : When I page down and hit the end of a page of comments, there is no visual cue in the page telling me that I'm at the bottom. Since I think I've gone down a full page, I lose track of where I was reading; which is annoying.
Aside from the "robots could do it cheaper", it is a misallocation of resources, and that makes all of us poorer.

The job is worth minimum wage ($12,000 / yr or so) at best. In a free market, you could find folks who would work this job at that price.

Some of these folks have so few skills that they would still work this job.

Other of these folks have higher skills, and isntead of using them in some productive role (manager at a pharmacy, etc.), they're wasting their skills sitting on a stool making change.

If you think that it's a good thing for unskilled labor to be paid - because of union monopolization of labor - far far above it's productive level, then why not make the minimum wage $70k/yr for everyone?

Or better yet, $120k/yr ?
Digg Database Architecture
Sometimes I feel that all the productivity web sites are just rehashes of that entire blog post, over and over again.
HN getting the back story from Michelle Malkin?

Tea and crumpets what's next!
the easiest way to set this up would be to use some third-party service, like one of google's custom search engine things.
You can say what you want but they can limit when and where you can say it: wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_speech_zones

I say ban all political ads or ban wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_speech_zones but am not willing to live with both at the same time.
Well in that case you setup another identical email-loved-ones-when-i-die service to send a PGP key and passphrase.
That is what I've done in the past with non-Python projects using ANTLR or other parser generator tools. I haven't done that yet because:

* I want to release the software that contains this validator and I want to limit the external build-time and (especially) run-time dependencies. So far, the application requires nothing except Python 2.4.

* The RE code is easier to unit test. When you use a parser generator you usually have to nominate start productions in your grammar. In order to unit test you have to add lots of extra start productions. That tends to substantially impact the readability, performance, and/or size of the generated code.

* I keep hearing that people are getting by with regular expressions to do complex stuff but traditionally I've always jumped directly to ANTLR and other similar systems. I wanted to try doing this just using regular expressions to get a good grasp of what those tools are buying me and to find out why so many people just end up using regular expressions. I found that, because this tool is just a simple validator/recognizer, those advanced tools don't really buy me much here. As you can see, the Python+RE code I posted directly mirrors the RFC 3987 grammar. If I switched to PLY or something similar, I wouldn't save anything in terms of LoC and readability wouldn't be that much improved.

* I've heard many times that it is best to minimize the amount of Python code that executes in the critical paths of a program; instead, we will get better performance by using native libraries (like the re module). Sometime I will probably try out a code generator as an experiment so that I can measure the performance of the re module vs. a bunch of generated Python code.
The mouse works amazing for 2 weeks or so, then the scroll dies and becomes harder and harder to fix.

I have had the most success with logitech mice over the years.
"i recommend dividend-paying stocks"

See if your dividend-paying stock provides a DRIP.
That helps out too with the whole autopilot investing.
It would be easier to have custom-made a padded sleeve with lots of velcro on the side, and a big bag with the corresponding velcro inside.

I only buy bags at chain stores so i can check out the padding first (Apple, best buy, circuit city), I need burly laptop bags (like Brenthaven, Patagonia or Chrome bag). I found this out after nearly smashing in DVI port on my poor powerbook

There's this one they claim you can check in to airline(?):

http://www.brenthaven.com/catalog-checkable-case.html
I'm having difficulty telling if you are being sarcastic here.

Small to medium businesses are a huge market, Intuit, Dell and Microsoft have all done very well selling in to it.
It's come to this. Laptop bags created specifically to adhere to asinine TSA regulations in an attempt to make your flying experience 1% less annoying. I'm having a hard time finding a better definition of "treating the symptom, not the disease."

Regardless, with the recent addition of checked-baggage fees and the ever-preposterous liquid volume/container restrictions for carry-ons, having to take my laptop out of its case is the least of my gripes. The contradiction just occurred to me, too: Dissuade people from carrying on most items while simultaneously charging them not to. It makes so little sense I'm kind of impressed by the idiocy of it all.
To make it more logical, title it "How to lose a million dollars with one click".
The universities are indeed gate keepers.
Your degree signals that you're either a non-legacy who got in thanks to talent/brains/what ever.

Or you are a legacy and have the IQ of a pumpkin. But even as a pumpkin brain, you probably have connections which guarantee your pumpkin brain will stay upper class.

Further, a real college campus gets lots of young ambitious people together in one place and gives them common problems.

This combined with a lot of free time and some but not too much responsibility, creates an environment where you will have more fun and make more friend, then at virtually any other time and place.

You can also make friends with a lot of old money pumpkin brain legacies.

None of the above has anything to do with education, or knowledge.

You gain knowledge at university almost by accident, more osmosis then design.
Top 10 Freelance Markeplaces For Hiring Web Designers and Developers
Reviews the top freelance marketplace sites, the benefits for using such services, and the need for using services like these to enforce accountability for poor performance and poor business practices.
That $70K figure is probably dramatically understating the real present value of their compensation. State employee pensions and retirement health benefits are ridiculous.
yeah,visually and aesthetically necessary !
Sadly the NSA and China are NOT strange bed fellows, and you don't need a lot imagination to see what's gone wrong with world.

For the clueless or tragically optimistic:

Fascism came out on top. Communism failed spectacularly, socialism and capitalism slowly give way to fascism.
Yes. I have a bridge in London that you might be interested. Apparently it will be worth $9.8M in 3 yrs time.
fugly. the only one not bad is the tom bihn and i wouldn carry around a bag that big every day.
This seemed more like a crazy wish list than a "what to expect."
Which begs the question - if you're sure, why not wait 3 years?
He's just listing stuff he wants... and HD webcam? that is not happening, come on people. GPS? What other laptops have that now, that are aimed at the general consumer? OLED keys like the optimus?
https://www.pwccomperio.com

(go there in any browser except IE). This is pretty much the case for all PwC webapps. PwC = >25,000 U.S. employees.
Ordinarily I wouldn't approve of postings coming from a political site such as michellemalkin, but the message she quotes actually probably contains the best summary I've seen of what actually happened.
On the link, there's a section titled "Why am I selling it?"... I'm guessing reading that section would answer your question.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=307829
No self-repsecting hacker would carry any of these, except the last one. Their designs are all geared toward "business" travelers--you know, the ones wearing a suit and using WindowsOS.
Reminds me of the Alaska bridge :(.
http://www.safuto.com/2008/09/the-real-story-of-the-bridge-t...
You can already do this through a CNAME.
I like that last quote quite a lot. Quite an epigram.

I think that it's POSSIBLE that what you say is true. However, I don't believe that it's very LIKELY. The fact that Microsoft only put out two Seinfeld ads is a sign that things may not be working out well for them, after all. However, I won't roundly mark it a failure yet.
And this factoid is on the front page of HN why, exactly?

They could all learn programming and then they would earn closer to $130K/year, I suppose, but does that make it relevant to HN?
It's tricky, though, because Apple so thoroughly DOMINATES this mindset. Microsoft is playing against one of the strongest marketing teams out there, and thus far they seem to be doing a pretty poor job.
Okay, yes. Agreed.
It seems like fascism is the default emergent state of people living together in large numbers. Democracy and liberty can be added to the system via careful thought and dedicated action on that insight. We seem to be in short supply of both.
I think it would be nice to have a footer for consistency, too. Sometimes when I'm reading comments I try to scroll down to the bottom to click on one of the links, but realize I have to go back to another page for that.
This was not surprising considering many startups were using Amazon's S3 storage services as a CDN. A couple of companies were using amazon's web services to build a CDN on top of it, so it was a complete no-brainer for amazon to launch one.

A CDN is a different beast when compared to running the other Amazon Web services. Werner Vogels says Using a global network of edge locations this new service can deliver popular data stored in Amazon S3 to customers around the globe through local access. (http://tinyurl.com/5xxuxe)

It will be interesting to see Amazon's definition of an edge location, and the network + geographic spread of servers.
Yeah. I think it helps that she didn't actually WRITE this. She put it up without commentary. The result is that we actually get the story directly from a reliable source, without any coloring.
Social Media ABC's - G is for Glocalisation
Ask HN: advise on starting up a web-development company
I've been thinking on an idea of starting up a web-development company. The main area would be providing websites development, design and support services for a reasonable cost (e.g. 10-15 $ per hour).

I saved up some money that can cover 2-3 developer-month work and am currently saving up more to cover other expenses (buying or renting server hardware, running ad campaigns).

Where do I find customers that are interested in our services on a regular basis? Sites like elance/odesk are overwhelmed with crappy "clone a facebook in 3 days for 500$" projects, so they're not a good place :(
How can I make customers interested in long-term relationships?

As the company doesn't have a portfolio of finished projects in the beginning, does it make sense to offer a special low-cost program to make us more attractive than competitors? It looks pretty much like the first time I have a job interview when I have no experience and when I can attract employers only by being smart and asking for little money.

Where can I find out more on topics concerning these issues? Any books/resources/advise you can give to a wanna-be entrepreneur?

Thanks!
The state is wasting its money

Hmmm.

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/12/96983232_d80801a108.jpg
Plants in forest emit aspirin chemical to deal with stress
mean or median?
Amazon's CDN won't kill Akamai, Limelight
Building a Cloudburwsting Capable Infrastructure
The job is worth minimum wage ($12,000 / yr or so) at best. In a free market, you could find folks who would work this job at that price.

A labor-market with a minimum wage is not a free market. In a free market, you could find folks who would work this job at one dollar per hour. But how could they afford to live? "Basic income" (unconditional trickle-capital) and deregulated construction and real-estate (e.g. $60/month apartments in major markets).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income
Web 3.0: Object Orienting The Web
I think there is something going on here that our society is having a hard time coming to terms with.

We continue to find ways to increase productivity and increase wealth.

But, there is increasingly little correlation between that and increases in wages. Or, perhaps, an inverse correlation.

We are probably misunderestimating the impact this is going to have on our society.
They could all learn programming and then they would earn closer to $130K/year

How do you figure? Do high-IQ people normally become toll-collectors?
Fascism came out on top. Communism failed spectacularly, socialism and capitalism slowly give way to fascism.

Don't be quite so certain... the last chapter has yet to be written. Sometimes things change quickly and dramatically.
Increased productivity means more goods and services per unit of input. So unless inflation matches or exceeds productivity growth, we would expect wages and other prices to decline. I'm not too upset by this -- as a member of the lower middle class, I'm probably not making what I would have made if I'd been born 20 years earlier. On the other hand, to get the same amount of music as my iPod nano, I'd probably have to buy a crate or two of walkmen.
I really don't see how these bags are different than any normal laptop bag except there is some airport/security reference in the name, the price is inflated and they are made with cheap plastic zippers. I've traveled all over the world with my laptop and electronic gadgets and never once had an issue an airport because I used a simple laptop backpack bag.
I like it because it's one less sales person I need to talk to.
Not to discredit the work that YouNoodle engineers had put into, but I just don't quite agree with their valuation model.
with online video / rich media exploding CDN are killing it right now. smart move by AWS.
1. Production
2. Distribution
3. Consumption

I think monopoly arises when (2) is vendor locked.
Intel: Hot, Dusty Servers Perform Reliably
"far far above it's productive level, then why not make the minimum wage $70k/yr for everyone?"

I'm intrigued with the idea of the government just delivering a bucket of money to every household once a year.

An advantage is that you place some sort of floor under everyone's income, that would mitigate against basic poverty issues like homelessness, no money for food or health care, etc. Another advantage is that everyone still has the same incentives to work, because they can get ahead without worrying about losing their assistance from being too successful. And (bringing back to HN) having certain necessities taken care of could enable risk taking and entrepeneurship. Basically, the government paying for you ramen noodles, instead of pg :).

I know there are lots of potential problems with this idea, but I've seen it proposed before, and think it makes a good starting point for a discussion of thinking of things like poverty, minimum wage, health care, etc. in a different way.
Amazon CDN A Threat to New Players, Not Akamai
Because I have time to audit and re-audit dovecot's source code at every release? We host our own mail right now, on qmail, but there's no workable IMAP or POP solution I would trust out of the box. Hence, I'd pay money for someone else to do this.
You're happy with the trade off of getting higher capacity in your ipod, versus skyrocketing costs for basics like food and energy against flat incomes?

It's no longer as clear as it once seemed that steady increases in the standard of living for the common man can be taken as a given.
Hmm facebook hasn't yet beaten myspace. I think MS vs lotus also works, though the network effects arent' as strong. I wonder whether all the examples are from microsoft.
A perfect example of the smears I was talking about.
Wasilla has this for its money:

"It could seat up to 5,000 people and would include an ice rink and a cushioned hard-surface court where people could play basketball, volleyball and soccer, said Jim Blair, with GDM Inc., an Anchorage firm hired by the city to create a conceptual design for the center.

In addition to sports, the center could be set up to host conventions, trade fairs, theater productions, graduations and even motorcoss competitions.."

http://www.adn.com/sarah-palin/background/story/517370.html

Evidently no other mayors in America have ever purchased city buildings using debt instruments. </sarcasm>

Meanwhile, Obama was chairman of the board of an organization that spent $109,200,000. Want to know what they have to show for it?

"The project appears to have failed to achieve any of its stated, measurable educational goals. For example, a comprehensive study by the Consortium on Chicago School Research concludes:

"Results suggest that among the schools it supported, the Challenge had little impact on school improvement and student outcomes, with no statistically significant differences between Annenberg and non-Annenberg schools in rates of achievement gain, classroom behavior, student self-efficacy, and social competence."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Annenberg_Challenge

(Yeah, it's Wikipedia. But follow the good links.)

>> Obviously you were in a coma during the 2000 and 2004 election cycles.

Apparently trashing Sarah Palin wasn't enough. You had to insult me as well.
A reasonably-designed top-load or slot-load bag works just as well.

There's no reason to presume TSA won't change its individual or collective minds on even permitting any bags with this feature to "speed" through the security theater, too. You could well end up taking longer to untangle your laptop if they do.
I Know Your Password | TechJaws
Leading Widget Platform Widgetbox Launches Blog Network
It's surprising how many people (in the comments) are outraged over what is basically a way for someone who is not a big company to outsource the inevitable legal wrangling of commercializing their invention.

What most people miss about rackets like this is that even after you pay off vultures like these they almost never offer you indemnity. That means some one else can sue you for exactly the same technology with a similar vague patent claim. In fact, they probably will, since you seem willing to pay.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/alexandria-dev/
What, servers only on three continents?

Amateurs.