skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Microsoft Azure announced. Should Amazon worry?
This article is the typical scare-mongering from fascist mindset.

This article lacks a social expert and gets just a shallow analysis by an unqualified person who (to me) clearly has no clue for the reasons why a kid would turn into vandalism or scamming (not necessarily hacking.)

Those kids probably feel excluded and most likely have parents who don't dedicate any time to them. Be it by indifference or because of modern times work schedules. TV is the worst possible option for a tutor/nanny.
Ask HN: volunteering/giving back?
I'm wondering what other HN folks are doing in terms of volunteering and giving back to the community at large, and how technology is affecting your choices? Generally, how do you approach the issue of helping the less fortunate?

Myself, for example:

* Made some microloans through kiva.org

* Looking into volunteering as a math tutor, found through volunteer-match.org

* Joined a "random acts of kindness" Meetup group
Hyman Roth always makes money for his partners. One by one, our old friends are gone. Death, natural or not, prison, deported. Hyman Roth is the only one left, because he always made money for his partners.

Godfather II
Great article, keep the series coming!
The NLP videos only offer silverlight. Oh well VMWARE to the rescue.
So if all you can do to improve 'SEO' is spam backlinks...
A windows stack in the cloud makes my head hurt. Is this just my anti-microsoft bias? Would anyone seriously consider developing their startup using a C#/azure stack?
> working full-time doing A/B split tests and careful traffic analysis on a daily basis.

If I did that kind of thing - actual work, I think I'd find a different thing to call myself to differentiate myself from the snake oil salesmen.

Still though, even that kind of thing strikes me as kind of "zero-sum"-ish... not really adding a lot of value to the world at large. Tournaments (search engine rankings in this case) are zero-sum, aren't they? Not that that's a reason it's "bullshit", but not high on my list of "people making the world a better place" either.
precisely what i meant by "gaining traction".

of course it's a growth strategy. i would never suggest otherwise. but this IS the technology age. and i would even go out on a limb to suggest, if you're not growing and/or innovating, you're dying.

and that's doubly true when financial systems collapse
please do. i always welcome criticism. it builds character :D
Remember girls, you too can be empowered to be the daughter of one of the richest men in the world. Grrlpower!
Wow. The lowest burn rate means spending more in two months than we've spent on Stormpulse in 2 years.

Either I'm way out of my league and everyone else has amazingly-capitally-expensive ideas, or we're the cockroach on the cockroach's back.
Yeah, I instinctively disagree with the rape issue too. In fact, I wrote that, thought about it, and deleted it.
Kathy Sierra: How to grow and nurture your community
do they not understand that the internet has the eyeballs of more people in the world than any other medium ever?

Fun fact: There are not enough eyeballs in the world to support the CPM goals of the newspaper industry.
It sounds like you're describing the illegal hiding of money, which I'm sure does happen. But I would think that most wealthy people would rather not risk going to jail, and I do know that you cannot just move overseas to get out of taxes. You can renounce your US citizenship, but they can actually deny that if they think you're doing it to save taxes.

But beyond that vague, general knowledge I certainly don't know much about ways the ultra-wealthy evade taxes. I do know that they didn't have the gaping capital gains loophole until now, and as far as I know they didn't all move to other countries.
Wow, I was expecting a loading screen.

Imagine my WTF at when it loaded instantly.
Tony, please correct me if I'm wrong - but I think he was just advocating some simple best practices that improve SERP rankings NOT paying SEO consultants.
i am VERY surprised the solution isn't here yet

Not to go all DHH on you, but you could create content people are willing to pay for.
O'Reilly are doing a freely licensed book on CouchDB
I think part of the problem is how many sites can you name that make money solely off ads? Google certainly does and I think MySpace is barely profitable. However, facebook is still not (according to wikipedia), and neither youtube or digg are profitable either.
If you don't reason properly, no amount of testing will save you. It is only part (an important one, surely) of what you need to create reliable software.

I saw too many developers in a cycle like this:

test->bang keyboard->test again (not working)->bang keyboard (now a hack) ->test again(still not working - let's try one more thing)->bang keyboard->test again (it works - Don't touch it!)

which is why early focus on testing doesn't seem very sound advice. The original post is about "Career Advice For Young Developers" - and for a young developer, focusing on careful thinking is better than focusing on testing.
... and that's why I'm a t. entrepreneur instead.
I'm just not seeing the ad dollars add up. I know of sites doing millions of uniques per month that can barely earn enough in Adsense (not the best model) to pay the cost of servers and rent. At all of the sites that I've run (Go BIG Network, Swapalease.com, GotCast.com, etc.) the ad revenues are always an afterthought. If we had to survive on those $$ alone we would be screwed.
> you've never heard of

We've heard about her alright. Just as much as we've heard about the CEOs of Asus, Hynix, Toyota, Lenovo, and Haier. Cultural, perhaps?
Interesting, but isn't this more "marketing" than "case study"?
Revision3 Removes Epic-Fu and Wine Library TV; Scoble Ponders a Restructuring
This applies in a boom or a bust.

What's an extremepreneur?
Obama is Google while McCain is AOL (Candidates as well know brands)
Certainly, but some insights are "duh" insights and not particularly worth sharing with the rest of the world.

"Spending less money and having more money in your bank account improve your chances of survival" should be, from a VC's point of view, roundabout on the same level as "water makes you wet".
It is one thing to have access to large resources, but quite another to be able to use large resources effectively. Wang has proven herself capable in her own right. Headstart or not, she deserves much respect and inspires many.

Her (late) father has quite an amazing story himself. If you count Cher as continuing his legacy, it is the result of two generations of rags-to-riches hard work.
Microsoft Announces Windows Azure Cloud Services Platform
Too bad, I was going to submit my video podcast to their Revision3 Beta site but I guess that's not worth it anymore given my niche market.
i wonder what scoble can cut - isn't he the only one?
But he's using 8 cores, which are all parallely addressing memory. Which of the items being processed gets stored in this cache? When one processor takes control over the memory bus, it's going to be needing memory data from a completely different part of memory, no?
Perhaps my son's CS education won't cost $400,000/yr after all (he's 8 mos old).

Yes, of course he'll be interested in programming.
I wish the NY times wouldn't make me login so I wouldn't have to use BugMeNot every single time. At least there's an ff plugin.
Unfortunately, Schneier is not a security expert, just a layman. He's a mathematician who somehow believes he's qualified to talk about a wide range of security topics. He's not.
Maybe User experience > SEO, but your users have to find you first right?
if you're not growing and/or innovating, you're dying.

If you are traveling without focus on your direction, you will eventually fall off a cliff.

People start really worrying about their eventual cliff drops (real or imagined) during a recession. All businesses will need to react to that perception change if they want to survive.
Did you bother reading the article? The US Army flew B-36 bombers with live, running, and fully-functional nuclear reactors on board that produced enegry and proved beyond the shadow of the doubt that it's both doable and feasible - albeit the fact that they the B-36 bombers themselves were powered by kerosene despite the availablility of nuclear power since it wasn't intended to be anything more than a proof-of-concept flight.
It's not the amount of eyeballs, it's the amount of money these eyeballs represent. So far, that amount is too low.
Name anyone else who is similarly (or more) qualified that started writing about complicated security issues that laymen and management can understand.
Jason Calacanis on "The Death Spiral"
Technically the reactors could be encased in materials proven to be unbreakable at these lower altitudes.... then the only danger would be high-altitude crashes in which case the reactor parachuting would be an answer... except you can't guaranteed the parachutes would be in working condition after a _________ miles up in the air. A normal engine failure could be rescued from, but, say, a mid-air collision at high-altitudes between two planes (regardless of how unlikely it may be) may leave the reactor rescue and parachuting systems in no condition to guarantee a safe ejection.
Web form name fields: how to lose business & annoy customers
I'll definitely add that as a blog-post topic in the future.

I can summarize a few lessons I learned here though:

1) just because people like using something for free, doesn't mean even 1% of them will be willing to pay anything for it. High traffic/member numbers don't mean much unless you can monetize them, mostly they just cost you.

2) selling to a few large companies is often a much easier path than selling to thousands of individuals.

3) there are a million services that are provided almost exclusively by very large companies. Quite often they do a horrible job. There's a million opportunities there.

4) don't count your chickens before they hatch. Getting a 1/4 million dollar contract in a month, does NOT mean you'll get one every month.

5) if you start to make money, get an accountant/tax person. If you have contracts with fish that bigger than you, get an attorney.

6) don't rely on free/cheap stuff from so-and-so's friend. They could vanish and take your servers with them.
I'm sorry, i've never been inspired by anyone that turned some millions into billions. Her story is no different than that of Donald Trump.

edit: Donald Trump, sans the outsize hyperbolic attitude.
Cool tool. Just so you know, though, "power top" has another meaning (http://www.google.com/search?q=%22power+top%22)
For that matter, name anyone else who expects the Spanish Inquisition.
But some of the processor's cache is devoted to storing code. The original loop constantly switched the feature being compared. Since the different features (presumably) used significantly different code, the processor would end up with unnecessarily large number of cache flushes for code. By aggregating the features one by one, he reduced code-cache flow significantly which makes a big difference in performance. Much bigger than some people realize.
>but you could create content people are willing to pay for.

I'm sure he/she can try, but not sure / could achieve this goal. Out of the thousands of web/online services, I only pay money to 4:

1password,
paypal,
skype, and
itunes.

While in theory one could get at least one dude to pay for a service, I doubt a randomly selected poster on Hacker News can get enough cash this way to buy a taco on a regular basis (i.e. often enough to survive on the calories). At least in the current situation.
MTV launches a Hulu for music videos
Is there any method of releasing dopamine that isn't subject to physiological tolerance?
twitter is on CNN everyday - if that's not mainstream I don't know what is
Wall Street exports boomed with 'fools' born to buy debt
I think one of the guys from Tandem hangs out on HN.....
Read the second part.

And they have to come back.
Ask HN: I am delivering mediocre work and feel awful about it. Should I commit seppuku?
When I started working for my company, I was ploughing through code at a good rate. A few months in, I was given a project that I never liked.

I don't know what an acceptable level of programming productivity is; I just feel as if I am 5-6 times slower than when I started.

Should I commit seppuku (this feels like the most honorable thing)? Should I renegotiate to take long unpaid breaks (this should revitalize me)? Am I panicking too much (I always panic too much)?
Where's the link to the original research? This article was extremely light on details. Reblogging does suck a lot of the time.

Personally, I'm always amazed at how my plus email addresses (eg joesmith+somecompany@gmail.com) end up on extremely dodgy spam sites. Some companies are definitely taking the low road with some easy money.
Most airports are already out in the boonies, (having something to do with runways taking up space.) especially international ones, which would be for what these planes are used. I don't think is would be that big of a deal. Now if a plane crashed in an area with some kind of population, now that might be a concern.
Hulu through XBMC is awesome.

Supplemented with Easynews and basically you can get anything you like on-demand.
Looking forward to hearing Gary's rant about Wine Library being dropped!
I am actually (on accident, not on purpose) mirroring Company B. Having the side income with no overhead or investors in your ear is nice.
It is hard to believe that developers will make enough to justify taking half a mil in investment. The app store is so crowded now (especially in games) that it is not worth the time for many devs.
Is Amazon Ready For The Enterprise?
the title sounded more fun than the article was.

While the page was loading I imagined a discussion on the current paradigm of entertainment focused on individualism (think mp3-players and computer games where you basically lock yourself out of the world).
Traditionally, the living room has been about socialising, spending time with the family etc. Here is where a lot of improvement is just waiting to be done. I was hoping he wasn't going to talk about TVs and movies though. The real question is: What will kill the TV in the living room?
VC performance dips but stays strong through Q2
Popcap to shut down site for its latest game
THANK you. I went to a CC because I dropped out of high school a couple years early with my GED (would have gone completely nuts if I didn't), and there was no way I would get accepted to the top tier universities I wanted to go to in that way. I've also taken classes at both 2 and 4 year universities throughout my middle/high school years.

All I can say is that there are some awful teachers like the one above saying DOS is Unix and such complete nonsense, but I've also come across some of the most amazing teachers that even my now-in-4-year-universities friends from high school wish they had for some of the classes we share. Yes, the level of education is not the same, but for the general classes, it's not so different, and sometimes can be a unique and nice experience. Plus, you can transfer, and those classes can count towards your degree. Not everyone is in a CC to get a better job, a lot of people end up transferring to such "top" universities like UCLA, UC Berkeley, Stanford, USC and the like (is it obvious I live in California? :) )

Lastly, none of this is stopping me from supplementing my education on my own. There are some topics that are rarely taught in many places (like, say, Mac/iPhone programming) I'm interested in. I would hope that's the case with anyone and everyone, not just people involved in top universities and Y Combinator :p
Am I panicking too much (I always panic too much)?

If you are asking this all seriously, then yes, you are panicking too much. Calm down.

Talk with a superior candidly about the situation. Taking breaks is not going to solve things if it is the project you don't like. Something about what you are working on/with is what needs to change.
Definitely interesting! From what I see at first glance, there's a queue/MQ-like service, a scalable database (is it SQL or key/value?), a workflow service, and the whole thing works whether you want to use .NET or not.
This is fascinating. It helps explain why the savings rate in the US has gone down so much since the 1980s. People didn't suddenly become financially irresponsible. There was demand for debt, because it was the raw material debt-backed securities were made of. So companies were working much harder to convince consumers to get into it.

Incidentally, though no doubt debt-backed securities will be demonized for a while, I suspect they're useful with proper regulation. Market crashes often turn out to be due to the appearance of some new economic phenomenon that people get over-excited about initially, causing a boom-bust wave, but which in the long term turns out to be good.
I think you should ask the question, "Hey, should I know where my money is and will I get sued?"

If those two points are relatively important to you, I would imagine spending a little time understanding them.

1. You should at least know the basics, how accounts work and how to balance the books. Quarterly and fiscal reports are good to know so you can tell where your business is at. Wikipedia.

2. You will probably need to know about contract and IP law most in the tech business world these days. Wikipedia.

3. Yes, I use quickbooks. It's so easy to use that it has somewhat dumbed down my understanding of accounting that I formally studied last year. Learn accounting first.

Law is a huge deal. Maybe start off at Jurisprudence? :] I have formally and vocationally studied many topics of law (I hope I don't switch from IT/Coder to lawyer >.<) and it's a relatively abstract and complex subject. Basically, learn the basics about contract and IP law, then just work in good faith. The courts like people and businesses that work in good faith.
why is it a big deal? he still has distribution deals with ustream and hulu. on top of which he pushes his content to a variety of other places. rev3 probably dropped him because they couldn't come to an agreement on an exclusive. it's more reflective of how badly rev3 is being run than the quality of the content -- okay actually internet superstar sucks -- being dropped.
One sure-fire way to keep getting projects you don't like is to accept them, let them wear you down, and do nothing to improve your situation.
I didn't think it'd be possible to have this many responses to a question where not a single one even attempts to answer the question :-)

We've had some interest from a few investors (which is somewhat difficult being a web-based company in the Midwest), but we are still unsure about actually accepting any investment, since we are on the verge of profitability having so far been boot-strapped.
Jacking into the Brain: Is it the Ultimate Computer Interface?
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=190467

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=57298
Do you really know that many people who hook a Windows Media Center to their main TV? I can count the number I know of on one hand.

The Xbox is already pretty good for watching paid movies/TV shows, and will be pretty cool for watching Netflix stuff in a month or so. I'm guessing it's more that no one wants to surf the web on their TV.
I was once involved in an SEO/PPC pitch for a major pizza company (by major I mean one of the top 3 players). One of the issues they wanted addressed was their ranking for the term 'pizza'. This is not something you'd think would be an issue for a company like this, but they weren't showing up on the first page of results.

We suggested that they might want to include the word 'pizza' somewhere on their homepage. That's right. The word pizza wasn't in the title, the meta-tags, the alt-tags, the body copy- it wasn't anywhere on the page. Apparently, that little tidbit had gotten lost among all the priorities of Branding, Marketing, Messaging, Promotions, etc., etc.

As soon as they added the word pizza into their title tag, they rocketed to the top of the results. Was that value worth paying for? Of course. Was the solution totally obvious? It should have been, but in case after case we find that, especially with larger/older companies, it's not.

IMO, SEO is completely natural at the one-man-sized-business level. Like most things, it gets increasingly complicated as you scale up.
Is there a PoC out there? I'm guessing the hacking community might use this to hack around the phone internals...
Greenpeace: Enery [R]evolution
Honestly, I'm not sure what you're getting at. So I'll try to explain what I think might not be clear.

Hardware caches are stupid. They are a way to avoid hitting main memory every time a load is issued; the idea is that if you use a bit of memory once, you're likely to use it and memory close it again. Cache lines are usually replaced on a Least Recently Used basis. I say they're "stupid" because they have no knowledge of the algorithm being executed, and can't be told "keep this in the cache." They only react to memory access patterns. If you want something to stay in the cache, use it, and don't use anything else until you're done with it.

And just to be clear, at the hardware level abstractions like "items" don't exist. It's all just bytes - and if you're dealing with caches, then it's going to be cache lines, which are often something like 64 or 128 bytes. If I access a memory location, the entire cache line it's on, gets pulled into the cache with it.

Looking at the article, his iteration order was face1, face2, features. This means that he was fixing the faces being compared, and changing which features he was looking at. So face1 and face2 were (probably) staying in the cache, while the features were not.

In his case, the features are stored in a tree - which means feature n and feature n+1 are not contiguous in memory. Going from one node in the tree to another node will almost certainly result in cache misses. The first algorithm he presented iterated over the entire tree for each face pair.

The second algorithm fixed the feature being looked at, and iterated over the faces. So, for every node in the tree, the algorithm stopped and did all of its work before moving on. So you have one tree traversal instead of N * M, and significantly less cache misses.

Note that his solution doesn't necessarily generalize; the most cache friendly approach depends on the relative sizes of the data. If the faces were significantly larger, then it might be less expensive to navigate through the tree every time, keeping the faces in the cache. Optimizing algorithms for good cache usage requires knowing how your data is laid out in memory, how much of it you're dealing with, and how you're accessing it.
:( I thought that was a succint evaluation....

There are plenty of bad SEO firms out there who have no clue about what they are doing (and often do more harm than good to a site). Also SEO is seen as a fix-all solution - which it really isn't.

But SEO practices are an essential part of any website design, refresh or update.

At the end of the day it's just a buzzword that creates a market for selling their knowledge (knowt wrong with that of course!)
Why Doesn't Google Remove Malware Pages?
Ask YC Startups: How is the economy treating you?
I'm curious what the ecosystem looks like from the YC folks. Are you getting hit hard? Do you agree with PG's sentiment that it's a fine time to start?
Most Major Papers Continue Circulation Decline
It is important to get yourself out of this situation as soon as possible. It's depressing, you're not learning as much as you could, you're (probably) learning bad habits. Seppuku is not the right answer.

How about a new project, a new job or find a way to make this project interesting (i.e. use a new approach, a new language, switch tasks with someone else working on the same project). Anything!