skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
classic problem. xmpp was designed for this, but we've found it non-trivial (not rocket science either, but non-trivial) to setup/use. ejabberd is solid once it's up and running, but it's a black box once it's going (with exception of some logging).

IM is one of those things that once you start, you'll be endlessly piling on features. sure you can bootstrap IM with what you've got, but think about adding presence, file transfer, status/away messages, rostering, roster add/remove permissions/confirmation/approval.

I helped define the product spec for me.dium's sidebar and associated IM client/roster. massive time-sink, but, IM was core to the experience.

challenge is everyone's expectations around IM these days are defined by Adium, and AOL IM clients, and those are very feature rich products that have taken years to build/get right. that's what you're up against if you start building your own. xmpp tries to bridge that gap.

I'd make very sure you want to walk down this path at all. After doing that, if the answer is yes, then I think you should leverage xmpp and bit the bullets that it winds up firing at you; rather those then reinventing the wheel. you might want to look at openfire as well, and cisco/jabber.com can sell you hardened clustering solutions if/when you need them.

I'm now at http://gnipcentral.com and we do xmpp for message routing (not IM). we've been using ejabberd for awhile (in a very limited manner).

haven't looked at meebo's community IM thing, but that sounds like it might be spot on.
And you're confusing necessary and sufficient.
Its interesting that there's no mention of SixApart. My theory would be that SA bought them to kill them.
I just downloaded Randall's code and modified it to match my analysis, which is: there are only 3 states that matter (FL, OH, CO) and if McCain wins all 3 then McCain wins but if Obama wins any one of them then Obama wins.

Here's what I got: Obama 94.6%, McCain 5.4%

Assuming my analysis is right, am I doing anything wrong mathematically?
Ok maybe just a little more substance.
You sound like Henry Ford's customers, who thought they would be happy with a faster horse.
btw I recall an interview with Mark Cuban saying he answers about 5% of cold emails containing businesses/business ideas. Give him a try...
I'm curious: what do architects think of Christopher Alexander? I like what he says, but I'm not an architect, and they say no man is a prophet in his own country...
I've never played intrade's markets, so I don't know how liquid the contracts are... but there is an arb play here if you can time it properly.
"Script# brings productivity to Ajax and JavaScript development."

The biggest lever in bringing productivity to Ajax and Javascript development would be for Microsoft to follow standards closer. IE8 is progress, but it's really too late to offset the losses developers have had in dealing with previously versions.

"Script# empowers you with a development methodology that brings software engineering and long term maintainability of your Ajax applications and frameworks."

No tool or language is a silverbullet for software engineering and maintainability problems. These only come with diligence, foresight, and experience.
Andy Grove
This post misses the main reason LiveJournal is a niche site today: they were invite-only for years. LJ had severe performance issues during the first couple of years, and to keep the system usable during that period new accounts could only be created if you procured an invite from an existing user. By the time they fixed the problems and removed the invite system, LiveJournal had been eclipsed by the growth of other social-networking sites.
Harnessing Entrepreneurial Manic-Depression: Making the Rollercoaster Work for You
Early Visibility Program for new multithreading tool (Cilk++)
It's time to start using something _now_? The time to start using source/version control is before you start. It doesn't matter which, just pick one. Other than getting used to the command interface, it should be pretty easy to migrate to a different one, either by doing a total conversion porting all the history over, or if that's not possible (which it may not be if you go with a distributed system and you want to move to a centralized setup) then just keeping the old one around as reference and just start doing all new work in the new one.
Nokia 6600 Fold
Nokia will raise the curtain shortly from its sensuously designed mobile handset of Nokia 6600 in the upcoming months. This lightweight presentation of 110g will be launched in two magnificent shades of Mysterious Black and Sophisticated Purple.
Foldl - functional mnemonic
His accomplishments aside, I agree. Just because you've had some success doesn't mean you actually have anything to say to the world.
I seem to recall that Google Talk had an embeddable IM product as well, aside from their Google Apps for Domains Gtalk service offering.
They opened up to the public in 2003, which is when I signed on. They had memcached by then. My analysis is about the last 5 years. Other social networking sites did exist, but they didn't let you blog or read feeds. LJ had something unique.
Speaking of Adium, they will bend over backwards to support a proprietary chat system from a huge site like Facebook, but they are not going to add support for arbitrary startup's creations. Using XMPP allows your users flexibility in how they access your service. If Adium is how they choose to stay connected, then great. Sites like Identi.ca have XMPP interfaces for precisely this reason, and it didn't take long for Twhirl and others to add support for Identi.ca since it was well documented (via XMPP standard) and easy to do.
The Macbook "Brick"
Possible over simplification, but powerfully relevant statement right there. SA bought LiveJournal and the site somehow managed to get worse. There's no need to implement an ad infrastructure to the site yet that's exactly what happened.
Does that really make any sense? Once they owned LJ any success it had was theirs. "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity."
Companies are made up as individuals, and the actions of a large company are often not just the actions of the top management. And I didn't mean to suggest malice rather than stupidity, because it could have been entirely due to "institutional" stupidity.
Unfortunately, MySpace started up about six months before LiveJournal removed the invite system, and clobbered LJ by seeding themselves with 20 million accounts on the first day. At that time the demographics for MySpace and LJ were roughly the same, and most people simply followed their friends onto MySpace. The coup de grace came a month after the invite system was removed, when Facebook was launched.

I'm not saying that the invite system was the only mistake they made, but it cost a year or two of lead time and allowed competitors with much deeper pockets to make up the gap.
(please forgive if this post seems incoherant, it's been a long night and I didnt get much sleep)

Well the way I look at it is like this, not everyone can single handedly save the world like Al Gore, there are many different ways you can change the world (for the better) and there are many small skirmishes I think need to be won in many areas.

For example, in this case, the thing that I believe is fundamentally wrong was a large organisation like MTV is dictating to the world what it's tastes should be (rather than asking them) by what they believe constitutes the best musical act ever, with a clear disregard for acts that are widely regarded as the greats (The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix).

Tokio Hotel is the obvious example here, I hadn't even heard of them until I saw the campaign to get Rick Astley nominated on reddit.

It's been happening with companies for years, not just related to media organisations (hey guys, buy Windows ME - it's the best thing ever!) and so in this case, a large organisation left themselves open to get egg on their face... in a very public way that goes completely against their standard operating procedure.

It's not just a fight against one company, it's an example to all organisations that people should decide what is good for them, not the other way around.

That being said, you can also look at it in a sarcastic/dark humorous manner.

"If Rick wins over Tokio Hotel, imagine all the emo kids that will suicide in disgust, thus making the world a better place"

Either would be an acceptable outcome.
From what I understand (I'm no architect either) they largely ignore him or dismiss him as a quack. I wonder if Fred Gibson (architect and Lisp hacker who hangs out here) would have a comment on this.

I like Alexander quite a bit, except for his tendency to intellectual cultishness. The 4-volume set he recently came out with (after 30 years) has a lot of good stuff in it, but it's marred by gobs of insufferable nonsense about being the greatest this-or-that of the last 1600 years. Like most gurus, the man doesn't need an entourage of epigones. What he needs is an editor.

Edit: there's another thing that bugs me about Alexander (though I really am a fan). It's that the photos of his actual buildings I've seen don't seem to live up to the genius of the things he says about how to make buildings. That incongruity gives me pause. Of course, one wouldn't expect him to make grand or immodest buildings in any way (that would be even more incongruous). Perhaps one has to experience them in person.
For me, it's not an attempt to rickroll the world, it's an attempt at making a bit of a statement.

The nomination was a bit of a practical joke, but when you consider who else was nominated it transcended the prank for me into what it is now.
http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/notes.html#tract... cites an advertisement from 1921:

``Keep The Boy In School

The pressure of urgent spring work is often the cause of keeping the boy out of school for several months. It may seem necessary - but it isn't fair to the boy! You are placing a life handicap in his path if you deprive him of education. In this age, education is becoming more and more essential for success and prestige in all walks of life, including farming.

Should you feel that your own education was neg- lected, through no fault of yours, then you naturally will want your children to enjoy the benefits of a real education - to have some things you may have missed.

With the help of a Case Kerosene Tractor it is possible for one man to do more work in a given time, than a good man and an industrious boy, together, working with horses. By investing in a Case Tractor and Oxxx Detour Plow and Harrow outfit now, your boy can get his schooling without interruption, and the Spring work will not suffer by his absence.

Keep the boy in school - and let a Case Kerosene Tractor take his place in the field. You'll never regret either investment.''
That was interesting, somewhat over the top in it's literary pretensions, but I think the point is correct. Shakespeare loved the mediums of his time, worked within them and expanded them. If he was around, he'd be blogging, and we'd all be intimidated by how prolific he is.
Did it really change our lives? (It's easier to argue for eBay changing lives I guess.)
Keep The Boy In School [historic ad, 1921]
He doesn't recommend CDs for 401(k)s though. He recommends it because he believes it is important to have quick access to cash in order to take advantage of opportunities.
The point was that Katz (allegedly) took the source code of arczip, improved it, and called it pkzip. This was in violation of the license agreement.

If you then have to start a lawsuit against the person who has stolen your code (to protect your business), and get hate mail instead of fanmail motivation to keep fighting vanishes. This is what happened to the arc people. Coding was fun, fighting legal battles... not so much.

Phil gave something away that wasn't his. He made a lot of money by selling the same thing to businesses. He destroyed a family business in the process.

It's not about PR. It's not about which product is better. It's about right and wrong. If the video is accurate then what Phil did was pretty despicable.
Neat - I'm guessing it's using some wireless channel for communication/display update?

And if you flip forward a few pics, you also see a neat self-balancing mini robo-nurse on a unicycle.
It did that with every query that I tried.
The upcoming MacBook 'Brick' is a new manufacturing process
Agreed. There seems to be a lot of frustration with the ACM in general. It's comforting knowing that I'm not a lone-raving-lunatic. I really think there's an opportunity for someone to get an alternative organization going.
The MacBook Brick
They picked Brin because he is famous, but he's meant to represent all winning "players" (those who play in economic tournaments with winner-take-most outcomes), not just those who become billionaires.
No, he suggested a system which if implemented would eliminate spam in 2 years' time. Nobody implemented that system, so we still have spam. I'm not going to summarize the system here, you can Google that.
This isn't actually a FSF project, but they do however provide assistance and hardware. Obviously, they are very interested in it, given it's stance on the no "non-free" software issue.
Just looking at the design of RAC, you're still just increasing the n at which it stops scaling. Anything with a bottleneck (in this case, the shared disk image and the concurrent modification algorithms) is going to wedge for some n.
Ideas are worthless [snip] without execution. There, fixed that for you.
That article is a little garbled. What it seems to be saying is that Apple is going to CNC machine MacBook cases from a solid block instead of stamping (or maybe even hydroforming) them. This seems like an incomplete part of the story, since it would be near-impossible to CNC machine aluminum to the very thin dimensions they currently have with their stamped cases. It would also be very difficult to machine a block with the dimensions of a MacBook so that the innards are hollow, reducing the number of seams and fasteners. A great deal of scrap would be produced in the form of aluminum chips, which do not recycle well because the high surface area means there is a lot of aluminum oxide to deal with.

Water jets and laser cutters are in common usage and one or other has probably been used to cut the blanks or trim the finished case parts since the titanium powerbook. They are also excellent for parts like the bezel on the front of the MBP screen. They are not generally used to carve 3D shapes - that is done by a CNC mill, which resembles a big drill bit that can move in three dimensions if you haven't seen one. To stamp a MBP case would take seconds - CNC machining one from solid might keep a 7-figure machine occupied for several minutes. Water jets and lasers generally blow a hole right through whatever they are pointed at, limiting their usage to cutting flat sheets or trimming the edges from stamped parts.

If this article is true, I think we are more likely to see more elaborate internal bracing or complex case designs from Apple. The innards of a MBP are fairly prosaic and complex machining could be used to improve airflow and allow components to be packed closer together. Aluminum could also be strategically placed in more complex shapes to help conduct heat out of the case. But when you manufacture parts by the million, casting the parts then finish-machining them may be more efficient, since the need to tie up expensive machines is reduced. Perhaps this is a strategy to get out of the 'just like every other laptop but with OSX' trap and maintain their competitive advantage in 'design' now that their competitors are starting to lift their game.

Also, aircraft-grade aluminum doesn't really mean anything. There are many different grades with different purposes, many of which are in common use in all kinds of relatively mundane applications. No doubt the current MacBook Pros are made from 'aircraft grade aluminum', but coke cans probably are too.

It sounds like some juicy info has unfortunately been filtered through one or two levels of people who aren't familiar with machine tool jargon. It would be very interesting to hear more details.

If you want to play with these machines yourself, check out emachineshop.com - a cool startup if ever there was one.
It amuses me that you have internalized the meaning of a technique called (without irony) "unsharp mask" but can't spend 20 minutes reading a tutorial to figure out how to do it in a different tool.

It's not for you. You have photoshop and like it, and apparently don't mind paying for it. Slamming competing software when it is blindingly obvious that you have no intention of using it is basically just knee-jerk jealousy.
The hiring process to become an Apple Store "Genius"
Most people never action their idea because they are scared of being wrong. Execution is like a rollercoaster of fail & adjust cycles, which transform your idea into money.

The original idea if not taken on the failcoaster is worthless.
In an ideal world, maybe. But it was illegal in this case as demonstrated by Thom Henderson's success in his lawsuit against Katz.
Ruby 1.9 and Lambda Calculus
I like 9to5Mac the best out of all the other rumor sites. They definitely have some good relationships with Apple employees since I've seen corp info (both real and fake) leak multiple times.
Can you name a few example ideas that changed the world, that would have been valuable without execution?
I use Google every day and so do millions (billions?) of people. It depends how you measure it, but Google has probably affected more people than Ebay.
As in I'm pretty sure YouTube is currently doing talks with other companies to figure out how to live stream it.
I don't know about you, but it changed mine.

Google is basically my first destination when I have a question on anything -- whether it's looking for a restaurant, or solution to a bug I can't fix. I can't imagine my life without Google anymore.

Don't you remember the days without Google? I used to have 4-5 search engines open when I need to search for something -- Yahoo, Infoseek, Altavista, Meta Crawler, Excite... Thank goodness for Google I don't have to waste hours looking for something!
Some famous physics experiments were thought of before it was possible to execute them. Worthless?

Also how do you execute Socrates' ideas in Euthyphro? Or are those worthless?
The economics of starting a website are still very attractive compared to those alternatives. You can start with a few thousand dollars. You can't sell a car without (random guess) a billion dollars. You can't sell solar panels without (random guess) a 100 million dollars.
My dream pitch is, perhaps obviously, "Digg, but with integrity." and I'm the living proof that it lacks that.
I definitely enjoyed the books. The thing about "quack" is that that often means "not of the world" - his genius is only apparent to the people not practicing the same craft at first, and it's only much much later, that the people who practice the same discipline realize his genius. Because they're caught up in the current fads, getting and spending, commerce, etc. Gaudi was considered a weirdo during his lifetime.

I'm not an architect either.
The most valuable lesson here is: persevere in doing what you like and you will succeed.
http://emachineshop.com looks seriously cool. One of those ideas that you just assumed someone else had already done.
You're right, I wish I could correct the headline.
So, given that Fedora (and RHEL, for that matter) has always had a policy of no non-free components, and it's easier than trivial to install a Debian system with no non-free components (just don't enable the non-free repositories)...what is this for?
I can see where you are coming from..but between my ACM and IEEE CS student memberships costing only like $50/year combined (give or take a few for the variety of add-ons) and giving me access to MSDNAA (lots and lots of MS software my school doesn't even come close to providing), Safari Books Online, Books24x7 and other resources, I can still see a reason why I still pay for both.

The original writer does have a point about what's showing up in publications like CACM, but there are alternatives for publication (i.e. arXiv) and an organization would have to provide more than just that to be a significant alternative to either one.
I just updated some of the content on the site to try to make the flow a little more natural. Again, we'd be super interested in feedback and if you feel like this clarifies things.
"There is also another factor at work. A trend is underway in America for marriage to be increasingly “assortative.” That means children of well-educated parents tend to marry one another and the children of less educated parents tend to marry one another. This was less the case a few generations ago. For example, sociologists Christine Schwartz of the University of Wisconsin and Robert Mare of UCLA found that beginning in the early 1970s there was a striking “decline in the odds that those with very low levels of education marry up."

I'd be curious to see if someone has connected this to the rise of the Neo-cons. They're all about classism.
I love Valleywag. They printed my daft Getty Images shots of Google's Marissa Mayer, so maximoso respect.
I'm actually another example of an immigrant founding a tech company (though I've moved and traveled so much I have a hard time thinking of myself as an immigrant as opposed to a "world citizen"). I'm an immigrant to Canada, and eventually (and temporarily) an immigrant to the US. My non-immigrant partners decided to push me out and have since demonstrated their complete lack of creativity and drive. Though they're great at manipulation.
I too kept a membership as long as was a student. The fact that the ACM sent dozens of spam messages after I was no longer a student and didn't want to pay the $200 fee also burned me on them.

I'd still pay $50 a year. I'd even pay $20 a month for the months where I'm doing research intensive stuff. I'd pay $2 for a paper probably. But given the fact that I can find nearly every paper that I need elsewhere it's often hard to justify $200 a year for an organization that I'm not terribly fond of.

Other major annoyance -- even if you get a paper accepted at an ACM conference, you have to pay the several hundred dollar registration fees.

I think if there were an alternative organization with backing from a handful of notable computer scientists, that made membership more ubiquitous, built a community around computing research and streamlined things like the peer review process, it could be pretty powerful.
I'd be curious to know which version of Gimp between windows and linux gets more downloads .
This is interesting. From life experience (over-educated liberal parents, 4 years in Cambridge, MA, 1 year in Berkeley), the "left-wing" is as class oriented as the neo-cons (that is, if you can define "class" via degrees granted). I've been on the hook to marry someone with at least a master's degree since I turned 25.
A master's degree is slightly different from a master's degree from a "good school." I've also been pushed to associate with well-educated people, but not necessarily from schools with high tuitions.
Check out http://www.igniterealtime.org/projects/openfire/index.jsp.

Its not exactly what you're looking for, but it might help.

We use this at my office. It is meant for collaboration, but who knows, maybe you'll get some use out of it.

OpenFire has a great config front-end if you don't really feel like tweaking stuff around. The only thing I don't really like about it is that it uses Java, but we've got great speed and uptime with it anyway.
Microsoft uses Europe as base for search market battle
Alpha-Alpha Release In the Works For ParanoidLinux
Empirical results from digg.com (so far, based on public reports on techcrunch.com and from Sarah Lacy's book):

Idea (Kevin Rose): $3 million

Connections (especially VCs) (Jay Adelson): $2 million

Implementation (me): 0

But hey, as far as Kevin and Jay were concerned, I should have been happy to have a job.