skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Justin.tv is hiring Python Engineers [SF/SOMA]
Here’s what you need to know about JTV:

- We are by many measures the largest Rails site in existence.

- We are the also largest live video site in a rapidly growing market. If you want to check them out, some of our competitors in this space are ustream.tv, livevideo.com, stickam.com, mogulus.com, live.yahoo.com and kyte.tv – more spring up almost every day to keep us on our toes.

- We are growing very quickly. Here’s a graph of our daily pageviews since last October, when we opened up JTV to anyone who wanted to broadcast: http://abstractnonsense.com/justintv-daily-pageviews-october... Our Alexa graph shows a similar story over roughly the same period of time: http://abstractnonsense.com/justintv-alexa-2-september-2008.... We have over 1.5 million registered users, and our doubling period is roughly 2.5 months.

- Not all the hard problems are solved, and not all the equity is gone. In fact we are dealing with some of the most challenging problems any of us have come across. The scale and speed of our growth force us to experiment with techniques and technologies only the very biggest websites ever need to use. Sometimes we find something other people have pioneered, and adapt it to fit JTV. Other times we’re the pioneers, inventing new scaling solutions that we haven’t seen anyone else using yet.

- We treat ourselves well. Everyone sits down to a free catered lunch together on week-days. We have a great company health plan that includes dental-care. We subsidize gym memberships and commuting costs. Our office is comfortable, naturally well-lit, and one block from SF Caltrain. You can see it here: http://www.justin.tv/officecam

- Despite treating ourselves well, we’re frugal where it counts. We’re working our way towards profitability quite quickly.

- The people here are smart, friendly and driven. We have MIT dropouts, robot-builders, and PhDs. We come from a wide range of backgrounds and experiences. You’ll find us very welcoming, and you’ll definitely learn a lot from the people around you.

Here’s what we need to know about you:

- You know a bunch of different languages, and you’re comfortable learning new ones quickly. You have strong opinions on what makes a language good, but at the end of the day you’re a pragmatist and you’ll use whatever it takes to get the job done.

- You know Linux. You wouldn’t be uncomfortable if someone suggested you spend a few hours digging around /proc to see if you can squeeze a bit more performance out of the tcp stack.

- You know how the web works, at least from HTTP to HTML. You probably need to look up the details, but you know if you needed to, you could figure out everything from cache-control headers to why something isn’t rendering properly (in Firefox at least. Only masochists know why things aren’t rendering properly in IE6).

- You are available to work in San Francisco.

If you think you're a good fit, and you're excited about JTV, please contact us (jobs@justin.tv) with your answer to one of these problems: http://www.justin.tv/problems
Wake me when I can use Exchange or IMAP to connect to arbitrary mail providers without having to pipe everything through Gmail.
It would be crazy to assign unfiltered params to your model objects/DB and I would be astonished if anyone did it - except I suppose inexperienced programmers following simplified example code. But if you code web apps without knowing roughly what you're doing, you're going to fall into security traps whatever framework you use.
YC Startup Justin.tv hits Alexa 160
http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details/justin.tv
FWIW, Usenet is a collection of posts answering the same questions again and again and again and again. Maybe tagging will help people find existing answers more quickly.

The good thing about Usenet is the barrier to entry. Stack Overflow has already shown that it's wayyyy too easy to get and account and start incorrectly answering questions.
So just because things have been quiet on the Chrome front it's officially a dud? It hasn't even been out for a month yes!

The browser is awesome, infact I'm using it right now because on this slower work PC, I can't stand Firefox anymore for Google Reader, Gmail, etc.

Chrome will come out with another release eventually and the news will come pouring in. Rinse and repeat this while it builds its own market share. It won't compete with Firefox in my opinion, but who knows what Googles goals are with it
nonsense you will realize, once you compare the size of the two devices and that the iPhone is also a phone since Skype is in no way a replacement for a GSM phone.

p.s. also I've an Asus EEE, but I did the reverse, I rarely use the eee now that I've almost-a-computer around, the iPhone.
Gary Vaynerchuk @ Web 2.0 Expo - a must watch
If this weren't so expensive: "Babble is the only voice privacy device currently on the market that offers voice confidentiality during a phone conversation. It camouflages conversations about rash decisions, or discussions about rashes. Babble accomplishes this by using a pre-recorded script of the user’s voice, which is “babbled” and emitted from proprietary speakers positioned outward from the user. The “babbled” voice provides cover, making a phone conversation unintelligible to individuals surrounding the user. “White noise” simply masks overall interior sound, Babble “babbles” the users voice keeping private phone conversations private."

http://www.thebecollection.com/catalog/product/5-babble-voic...
Justin.tv is hiring Rails Engineers [SF/SOMA]
Justin.tv is the biggest Flash live video site online. We serve hundreds of thousands of video streams a day, and have supported up to 115k live concurrent viewers. Our site is growing every week, and we just signed a contract for a 20gbps commit in our colo.

There are a lot of pieces that fit together to make Justin.tv work: our video cluster, IRC server, and our rails web app, to name a few. We’re looking for top notch rails hackers who want to develop the awesome front-end features that make Justin.tv fun to use. We love rails because it’s simple and fast, and we love pushing new features to our users every week. Are you like us?

Responsibilities

* Contribute to product design and implementation discussions
* Implement projects from the idea phase to production
* Test and iterate code before and after production release

Qualifications

* We like dynamic languages. You should too. A lot of the things we build are in Twisted or Rails.
* Experience building web applications.
* A strong desire to work on website with passionate users and ideas for how to improve it.
* Experience hacking rails, web stuff, Flash and JS all a plus.

While we’re growing rapidly, Justin.tv is still a small, technology focused company, built by hackers for hackers. Seven of our eleven person team are engineers or designers. We’re based in a beautiful office (see pics) in the SOMA district of SF, one block from the caltrain station. We treat ourselves well: catering lunch, multiple LCDs, subsidized gym memberships and public transportation. If you want a fun job hacking on code that will touch a lot of people, JTV is for you.

Note: You must be physically present in SF to work for JTV. Cheers!

To apply, please send an email to jobs at justin.tv, and include an answer to one of the following questions: www.justin.tv/problems
Who cares about DRM-free music? "People who steal music"
We're also hiring:

Ruby engineers: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=312684
Python engineers: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=312675
Download Gossip Girl Episodes
This week’s episode deals with the aftermath of the commoners trying to hang with the elite. Little J deals with the aftermath of her attempted power grab last year and has her bag dumped out in the middle of the hallway by Blair’s minions
Drip Marketing: Slow and Steady Wins the Customer
How I Met Your Mother Episodes
Did she say “yes”? That was the question on everyone’s mind when we last left Ted and Stella, mid-proposal, at Kiddie Funland. After four months of waiting, we finally get the answer in the Season 4 premiere opening — but not before FutureTed tells us (and FutureKids)
The article didn't say how I one can tell narcisists on facebook, but I guess the actual report does. Maybe I can write a facebook app that tells you if a user is a narcisist... What other personality disorders could we screen for?
SemanticProxy: Jump-Starting the Semantic Web
Before you criticize this article as simplistic or unnecessary (arguments about interest to this audience aside), consider that .NET 1.1 didn't have built-in serial port communication. Having spent many hours hacking serial comm in C#, I can say that this would have been a welcome resource, even given its brevity.
The point behind repackaging, as mentioned in the article, is that you point it at different people. Perhaps an individual contributor reads something on the web, sees that their boss might enjoy or learn from it, and buys the PDF for the boss in order to give them something to read while on the plane.

The conferences are probably second exposures for most people, but that's probably ok because the medium is so different -- people will get different things out of an interactive forum than a (relatively) static set of blog posts.
FYI, Android Market apparently will have no review process -- anyone can list an application without approval.

I wonder how long this will last. All you need is one malicious app and the party will be over. If not Google, then the carriers themselves will demand the locking up of the store... all in the name of security.
I am using Disqus right now on my blog, it'll be interesting to see what WP does with this. The bad news for Disqus is the just added a feature to their plugin so that comments are now stored both locally as well as on disqus.com - meaning you could drop Disqus and you wouldn't lose any comments. If ID does become default on all WP.com blogs, I think it would probably snowball and convince me to go over to ID as well - the whole point of disqus was it was more prevalent on blogs I read, so I figured my readers would be more likely to have disqus accounts.

Of course, if you're on HN, you might have both =P
Start-up metrics for pirates (Seedcamp 2008)
Forex Trading Education
Amazon: from cloud computing to cloud forest
I hear that. I spent two weekends back in the day helping another department get through a backlog of envelope stuffing. That and the phone book ripping competition were two of the highlights in that office.
Ask HN: CSS framework for rapid prototyping?
Most of the CSS frameworks I know let you to set the grid, the typography and few other things. It frees your mind from browse compatibilty issues, but you still have to worry about the actual design of the page, what costs a lot of time in case of rapid prototyping for purely experimental purposes.

Is there a CSS framework that contains a set of CSS rules for commonly used UI elements, like forms, buttons, navigation, user navigation and such, so you can work on the actual interface immediately?
G1 fine print 1gb/month and then 50kbps or less
The Programmer and the Elves: a Fairy Tale
Agreed. It's a shitty name but I had the domain for a while and it was supposed to be used for something else. When I started looking for a domain to bring the site up, I couldn't find anything so I ended up using this. Oh well.
Wake up. Android has both an email and Gmail application. You can use IMAP without having to go through Google.
YouTube already won video. Omnisio fits in well as a part of the larger whole. I didn't mean to say competitors should universally celebrate when others get acquired.

I think comments are something special, a developing arena that are the heart of "the conversation".

But my comment is probably naive in that there are so many unknowns that we can't really predict all that much. Intuition is like that though: you get a gut feeling that is the integral over all your experience. I think that matters in personal decision making quite a bit, but clearly isn't respected in an 8 word comment :)
Yup, I can confirm, the blog isn't there as of 23 Sept 2008 21:10 GMT+1.
Lame indeed, but maybe next round.
A number of the 'heavier' (read: not barebones) frameworks have styles for elements like forms. It sounds like you might be more interested in a template of sorts, which would probably make more sense for RP.
Any comment on the nature of what looks like a very large recent traffic spike (at least, per Alexa's graph)? What's being watched, who's watching it, any triggering events?
I think the comparison Brian Hurt makes between "core" and "edge" languages (http://enfranchisedmind.com/blog/2008/09/20/programming-lang...) is pretty relevant here. "Edge" languages are often used as "glue" languages, because they're good at wrapping separate components and making them work together, while "core" languages are usually better for complicated systems that do most of their work internally, such as compilers. Lisp and OCaml are primarily core languages, while Python and Perl are primarily edge languages.
Same silly data collection based on NLP and/or meta-data. Reuters is not going to jump start anything until they pair this with a meaningful notion of user intent.
Could someone here (who likes it) give a pitch for it?
the real thing the iPhone loses is exclusivity

and thus has lost some of its luster -- its not the only player in the market anymore with an app store, touch screen, and all the other goodies
Thanks for this post/thread. I am extremely sensitive to (human) noise in my environment. For me, any degree of audibility can become very distracting and therefore frustrating. One exception is when there are so many voices that they become unintelligle; it seems my brain is then "willing to give up" and the distraction can be less. The presence of all that sound is still somewhat distracting and is tiring, but I stop being forced to perceive individual elements of conversation.

I'd run across chatterblocker or a similar item but had not tried it. This is a good reminder to give it a go, the next time I find myself in an appropriate circumstance.

I wonder, has anyone found quality recordings of crowds, e.g. of conversation in a busy coffee house or cafe? In lieu of a computer and program, I've wondered whether such a thing would be useful, but I do not have the recording equipment to make a professional-grade (and therefore, comfortable for long use) recording.

In my struggles to get away from work environment noise, I've run across these resources:

Direct Sound Extreme Isolation® Headphones

http://www.extremeheadphones.com/

Ear Plug Superstore

http://earplugstore.stores.yahoo.net/
watch illegal sporting events, tv shows, etc. -- free & live
Our traffic is spiky, but not as much as the Alexa graph suggests. In reality our growth is much more steady; every now and then Alexa seems to "catch up". It's weird, and we're not sure what would cause that effect.
Comparison of Hash Table Libraries
It's not hard to guess some other invite codes
DHS: 'Pre-crime' detector shows promise
Yes, it does - it says that people who have dozens or hundreds of friends ("numerous yet shallow relationships") and whose primary profile pictures are glamor shots rather than candid shots (i.e., are intended to give an self-promoting representation rather than a personal one) probably lean towards narcissism.
Hi Justin, could you comment on why you use both Python and Ruby? It seems odd for a small company to use two languages that are very similar.
Altair Semiconductor raises $22 million for cell phone WiMax processors
1 - PHP does not require Apache. There is a command-line PHP interpreter: `apt-get install php5-cli` allows you to do `php <filename>` and such just fine.

Sure, but there is no "./server" that I can run in a directory of PHP files to bring up a testing server. You can run tests from the command-line, which is good, but you can't see web pages without a web server. What a pain.
My understanding is that Android apps are sandboxed (a la Java or Flash applets) and need to request permissions for sensitive operations. This may help prevent obvious abuses and allow carriers to restrict problematic operations post-launch.

And Blackberry, Windows Mobile, and Palm devices (and PCs) allow users to install arbitrary applications that they get off the internet, and their world has not collapsed yet. The Android Market might even be considered an improvement over these software ecosystems because it provides a de facto central location for flagging problem apps.
Palm just released the Treo Pro, which lets you run any WinMO app you want and connect to any GSM network you want. They have PalmOS and Windows Phones that connect to any network.

I feel they do nothing but demonstrate why a tightly integrated solution is better than a highly flexible one.
This is the official announcement.

Changes: http://code.google.com/android/migrating/0.9-1.0/changes-ove...

Updated Roadmap: http://code.google.com/android/roadmap.html
Many athletes are willing to put their life's at risk. That pressures the other athletes to do the same. Banned substances are meant to protect them.
I think number theory might help. I don't know much about it, but the way most number generators work (as I understand it) is that they are a representation of a big number which is the internal state, and that internal state completely traverses some large space (2 to some large power) where it hits everything once, and you are only observing a few bits at a time of the value of the internal state.

That leads me to think that if you used a small state space (close to size x - maybe the next prime greater than x) you could walk the whole space and hit every number once.

Example: take two primes p and q (I think they might only have to be relatively prime), where q >= x. I'll use x=6, p=19 and q=7.

Observe multiples of p:
0,19,38,57,76,95,114

Mod them by q:
0,5,3,1,6,4,2,0...

Take the first q results, but drop the ones >= x:
0,5,3,1,4,2

If you want a different series, just use a different p. You can skip any number of initial results if you want to start somewhere later in the state space.

I guess it's worth noting that selection of p and q makes a difference to how "random" it looks -- if p and q are only 1 apart, it will just count up from 0, etc. I don't have a good intuition for what values produce "random"-looking results.

And yeah, this method is definitely not cryptographically secure in any way.

(Any number theorists around to tell me this is a stupid idea?)

Edit: this isn't that great, because the pattern is obvious (19 == -2 mod 7) so it's equivalent to subtracting 2 each time. Maybe if you pick a q three times the size of your x (15) and still drop the ones greater than x, you could get it to look more "random". Hmm.
Food is not as simple as it seems.
Python for back-end (see: Twisted) and Ruby for front-end (see: Rails), I imagine.
How close are Alexa traffic estimates to the actual traffic volumes? I've heard from numerous people that Alexa is almost always wrong and wrong by several orders of magnitude. It could be better for big sites, not sure. Just wondering what you guys see..
Alexa's totally crazy way of data collection?
Ah, I interpreted "luster" as "surface polish", not "appeal". Sorry.
Exactly. We use languages more for the libraries they offer, than for any other consideration.
I had the 1st generation EEE. It was great for checking email, web browsing, and skype. Amazing for travel - it fit into a jacket pocket.

The downsides were - the small SSD made it useless for storing photos. I find I use my laptop a lot for offloading photos from my camera when I'm traveling. The screen was too small. The keyboard was small but I eventually got used to it.

I got a new macbook and never used the EEE again. However, I do miss the portability, and the new versions of the EEE solve many of the problems I had with the machine. Slightly bigger screen, more storage, etc.
The Perplexed Guide For the Dumb story is one of the weirder things I've ever read.
It's kidney failure, not liver failure. I've seen several cases of it as an ER nurse. It's fairly common for people running marathons to go in to Rhabdo afterwards, but they usually just orally rehydrate and they're fine. (Flush the system out). When people run in to problems is when they don't hydrate enough.
Ten Years Later, A Third Google "Founder" Comes Out Of The Woodwork
I think you are misunderstanding me. Not every hour in the day is worth $30/hr. In fact, I am paid a salary and thus the more I work the less my hourly wage!

What I'm saying is that on the weekends for example, it is unlikely I would be able to make $30/hour. I might be able to do contract work... but then I'd have to hunt for work, so its difficult to really assign a dollar value to that.
Y Combinator Challenge #27 - Hardware/software hybrids
Yelp founders early decisions lead to plenty of awful user generated content
Apple are doing this to a lot of people. Surely this is anti-competitive?
I have an Openmoko Neo FreeRunner: it has GPS, accelerometers, WiFi G, high resolution 640x480px touch screen, Micro SD card slot, good quality speakers/headphone jack, and good battery life; it works with any GSM carrier; it can run just about any operating system compiled for its ARM CPU; you can run and compile programs on it in any language supported by GCC or an ARM-compiled interpreter; it can connect to the internet via GPRS, WiFi, or USB with a PC, to update it's software, install software packages, accept/initiate SSH sessions; it allows software to run that uses any windowing toolkit, including Gtk, Qt, and E.

It costs $399 direct from Openmoko and is available through multiple worldwide resellers ( http://openmoko.com/distributors.html ).

Any questions?
How about we pretend for a moment that Knol is actually publicly visible. Now what are the ways that you would find a Knol article? I imagine you find pages via searching on Google or on the site.

Searching on Google probably is just the regular searching, so it works the same as any other site.

Searching on Knol seems to allow duplicates, so there is a rating system.

Wow, that thought experiment actually worked better than I thought it would!
14 Things to consider when starting a website
done: http://www.ubuntu.com/ (ok not really)

and done: http://www.hasbro.com/mylittlepony/
Great! Now when someone feels that a submission here is not Hacker News, they can submit it to nonhackernews and reply to the submission here with the link.
Amazing job guys, congrats
well said.

A comment I read somewhere about Rocketboom often comes back to me. It was something like this:

"They made a halfway decent video show....and then got it played everywhere. The everywhere was the real value."

The blog post linked about is not about making a video show, it's about the everywhere part of the equation.
I can't get a lot of the stations to work either.
No I wasn't lucky. I briefly considered various alternatives and settled for the correct one. What made me select it was the thought "wait a minute, there already is a random function in my programming language, why not use it". I actually find it hard to think of a suitable alternative for that algorithm.

Also, I don't think the question was for an inductive proof.

To me the question seems exactly right, not too easy and not too hard.
I've always found quantcast to be much more accurate, although their number for justin.tv looks low: http://www.quantcast.com/justin.tv
Don't be a sharecropper. Never base your primary business on a platform that's not completely open because if you do, you will suffer and you will be governed by someone else's whims. Think of all these proprietary platforms as marketing venues or ways to monetize portions of your revenue. But never base your core around them.
Is.. this just a big shoutcast wrapper with a little flash player or something?
Google Usability Research on Federated Login (OpenID)
Whats the big effen deal -- Concrete UI programming with jQuery