skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's entirely for supercomputer bragging rights. Putting up a new record for pi gets attention by virtue of how much computational time it would take.

To think, if he had used this for bitcoin mining instead, he could be a hundredaire.
Well that's just wrong, unless you're definition of success is creating the next Facebook or YouTube, in which case I would agree.

But I have several friends who run their own businesses on a much smaller scale, still do quite well for themselves financially, and I don't see people running up to them for autographs.
Video: Algorithm is not a four letter word. RobyConf 2011
Remember that great presentation(http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3054509).

Here is the video.

Slides: http://www.jamisbuck.org/presentations/rubyconf2011/index.html
i started to make a reddit clone too to demo our mety db - http://vsetec.com/uncensor/ (dont click the spammy links, the site is sorta unattended now).
In other words, push those two unproductive hours onto your 9-5 job ;)
I think he was referencing to occasional YC job postings where comments are disabled (are they upvoted/downvoted? I can't remember).
I believe PG had a comment in which he explained the ads(usually job ads) which start at position 3 and work their way down but don't have any comment section. I am not sure if those are provided to YC companies only, but that was spoken of as providing ad revenue.

I am all for open and new sites and all that, but I do recognize the need to generate revenue to run something that we all enjoy and derive value, free of cost. So I have absolutely no problem with these barely noticeable ads(which still provide value to readers because they're about startups looking for people to give jobs to).

This way, it won't end up dying like code.google.com or other free services.

Coming to LN, I might be visiting the site but I am bit skeptical of "throw it on a VPS and github and lets see what happens". Something more concrete is appreciated.
Talk on Google's Redesign by Jon Wiley (Lead Designer for Google Search)
If you read one paper, make it Lamport's "Clocks" paper. It's a landmark in distributed systems, and a fine example of a deep paper in CS. Exellent homework for anyone!

http://www.cs.sfu.ca/~vaughan/teaching/431/papers/lamport78....
How database design fails us, and what to do about it
A company doesn't have a single conscience. It may have been a conscious choice by an engineer, or it may have been an unintended consequence of some other code change. Either way, I highly doubt it involved the check-off from a director-level employee.

If every decision had to get approval from the management team, then progress would grind to a halt, and Facebook would end up like Microsoft.
Microsoft YouTube Channel Hacked
Vlingo Is One of The Best Siri Alternatives for Your Android Phone
One country, two revolutions - Thomas friedman
" And if one result of the downsizing of Wall Street is that more of America’s best and brightest math and physics students decide to go into science and real engineering rather than financial engineering, the country will be a whole lot better off." - Thomas Friedman
Entrepreneurs Teach VCs to be VCs
Along with almost all of the greater NYC area outside of Manhattan as well.
I think distributed processing is another form of faster hardware. It is certainly more operations per unit time. Evolutionary algorithms are interesting because they are able to exploit parallel processing better than most. Evolution amounts to a type of heuristic tree search, where once an algorithm has found a solution to a problem, the knowledge is persisted and shared with other algorithms.

Later algorithms can be run on lesser hardware because they don't have to retread the same territory as their ancestors; they only have to search the space that hasn't already been examined. As the saying goes, they search "smarter, not harder".
Not exactly conclusive, but <meta name="date" content="2009-10-20" /> in the source seems to indicate otherwise.
Well as someone who has used quite a few VPS servers over the years from a plethora of providers I must say at this point in time Linode is probably the best bang for your buck with all the utilities and uptime it provides. The only thing about Linode is you must not order from the fremont datacenter and you have to subscribe to the status updates to realize what's going on.

The only thing that a more expensive provider will give you that linode does not is server management which can be useful but I don't really mind sysadmin at this point in time so I can't really review that.
A good broker is worth their exorbitant fee.

The way I see it a broker should be doing one of two things (or preferably both):

1. Saving you time in finding an apartment; and/or

2. Saving you money.

It took two afternoons (in January this year) to find this apartment. When I saw it was being renovated so I had no idea what it would look like but it was a decent size (~500 sqft), on a nice street off 8th Avenue and only up one flight on stairs so I took it on the spot and was happy with how it worked out.

But I spoke to three brokers. One was useless and showed me things I could've found myself. This is particularly true of the larger buildings in, say, Midtown West, where you just inquire with the front desk about vacancies. But this apartment I found before it had shown up on the managing agent's website.

Looking in winter helps too (apparently).

The noise thing bothers me slightly. Like the codger below me likes to bang on the ceiling if he thinks I'm making too much noise (nevermind, you know, the stream of traffic and people walking by outside). This has including me having the "audacity" to put on a duvet cover at 11pm on a Tuesday. I'm not sure he realizes who has the power in this relationship since I live above him but anyway...

It would be nice to have an apartment where noise wasn't a factor and I've had a look around at to see what else my money could get me and, honestly, I think I'd need to spend $2700/month to get something that would obviously be better.

So I guess I'm staying put. :)
UX Week 2011 - Videos
Videos on Vimeo:

http://vimeo.com/adaptivepath/videos/search:ux%20week%202011...
More information about the setup: http://www.numberworld.org/misc_runs/pi-5t/details.html
Command-Return will reveal the selected file in Finder.

Spotlight (and pretty much all Apple software) is rarely explicit about advanced (?) functionality but quite often there is some depth.

My favorite example (also part of Spotlight) is the calculator. It seems simple but it is capable of quite complex calculations. Try using sin, pi, e or sqrt. (If math isn't central to all you do this calculator is the only one you ever need.) You can also copy results by pressing Command-C. None of this is obvious. I didn't know that you could copy results for years, despite always complaining about the lack of that feature whenever I talked about the Spotlight calculator. (I was finally corrected that you can indeed copy results here on HN. Thanks guy/girl!)

I don't know whether that's a good or bad thing. I personally like software that doesn't try to please advanced users at every turn, but that's more about aesthetics than usability and I wouldn't try to generalize it.

I think you can guess from this that I don't use Quicksilver. Spotlight serves me well.
It depends on your application. Every provider has their own stack running in the back, their own policies, and a unique set of existing users. This translates to unique environments that are more or less suitable for certain needs.

My experience with EC2 is that you get more RAM for the buck when compared to Rackspace and others, but IO to disk and CPU is sub-par. As a result, I tend to prefer Rackspace who are also big players in the open source space.

Keep in mind, regardless of any advertising, there is no such thing as guaranteed performance in the cloud. Ever. Every provider oversubscribes ... they do not expect and cannot handle 100% utilization by their subscriber base. Behind the scene, a VPS is sharing all of its resources, always. If your provider does its job right, you'll never experience a drop in performance. Everything will be consistent. But there is no way for that provider to guarantee that. They can experience an unexpected jump in resource usage at any time.

With dedicated hosting, that's not a possibility. It's your hardware. You're the only one using it.
I've just switched to xubuntu for similar reasons.

I'm finding it a big improvement on gnome 3 or unity so far, although I've only been using it for about a week, so I still count it as testing at the moment.
Many of us already are. :)

Will Miner spoke about web designer as a hybrid between designer and developer at Build: http://vimeo.com/7835308

I feel like I’ll probably be a designer at heart, but I still want to learn as much dev-stuff as possible. I’m going to use Django for my personal portfolio, simply for the sake of learning it. I’m really looking forward to it. :)

Generally people need people of other disciplines. Developers need designers as well, and we all need copywriters for instance.
Do you think, facebook should tell you about this forehand in simple words ?
Pg is implying that Yuri's LPs are no more questionable than the LPs of the top VC firms in the Valley. They've all taken dubious money.
Was there really a time when people only lived to 18 years of age on average?
"Why should a programmer that is twice as fast as his peers only get 10% or 20% more?" <-- Amdahl's law applies here.

It really depends on the industry. Take finance. Having a programmer who can spit out code ten tiems as fast as his compatriots doesn't result in a ten-fold improvement of returns. There's some economic benefit (because there is real value to having better programmers) but don't expect it to be proportional to skill in an industry for which the software isn't the final product/service (or where other aspects, like legal, really drive the business)
I think a chunk of HN consists of Apple and Google aficionados(nothing wrong with that, we're all technology guys with strong opinions here), so I notice that anything critical of them either tends to neglected even if it's newsworthy or tends to get heavily flagged(so you see a story with 50 points posted 3 hours ago at the bottom of the page and stories with less points posted more than 3 hours ago on top). People (mis?)use the flagging as a way to get things off the front page rather than only as a way to vote down spam and unrelated content.

Same with the comment section, people get a little sensitive and trigger happy with the moderating. Does not happen with every story obviously, but the trend is definitely there.

I believe this explains his frustration more than some hidden agenda by mods to censor things. It's still a democracy, even if a little skewed with the community biases.

BTW sure fire way of getting karma is to pile on MS :)

PS: PG, can we get some stats on OSes/Broswers used on HN? There's a couple of stats compiled by sites that were linked that show ~40% OS X usage, so just curious. And if those can be correlated with karma(respecting privacy, of course), we could get even more insight into the community.
Are you sure that's the right move to make? Do you no longer need the resources of even a single dedicated server? At even 2-4GB RAM requirement, you would not be saving money buying a VPS over renting a server.

A Linode 4096, where you're sharing CPU and disk IO with all the other users on the physical server, is $159.95/mo.

For $159/mo you could rent a Xeon 3230 quad core, 4GB RAM, 2x250GB HD server from Softlayer with more than 4x the bandwidth allotment and a better data center with a larger support staff.
I used ASO's shared web hosting for a long time. Their support at that level was amazing and I really enjoyed them.

I'm sure their VPS support would be just as great.
>I think this is an interesting point in our history. We can pick up anything nowadays without having a clue as to how it works. We lose sight of what it takes to bring something from idea to reality. More people need to become aware of how things work.

100% with you on that. But it's not just a recent development. Robert M. Pirsig's book "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" from 1974 deals with exactly that "problem" or attitude many people have nowadays. The book is in some parts kinda slow and hard to read, but I still recommend it to everyone.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen_and_the_Art_of_Motorcycle_M...
A lot of people in this thread seem to think that being in school until 5 or 6 PM would mean being in the classroom for ten hours a day or more.

That additional time would be fantastic if used for athletics, self-study, club activities (with a lot of personal freedom for the students), and so on.
and i have been switched to a fedora with xfce4, gnome3 and unity is a problem
Interesting hearing your positive experience with the broker. I had a lot of trouble using brokers when I first arrived. I ended up finding my rennovated Greenwich Village 1BR on Craigslist for $2,500 which was $500-$1,000 less than similar quality apartments that the brokers were showing me (On top of their 15% fee!)

Noise is a huge problem as well. Lots of NYU kids in this neighborhood who are out at all hours on Friday and Saturday evenings. But the far West Village is like 50% more so I'm going to be staying put for the time being :)
I'm enjoying it. No downtime since I started with them. I'm at the Atlanta datacenter, with the low plan (20 usd or something).

root@linode:~# uptime
13:50:03 up 118 days, 5:10, 1 user, load average: 0.09, 0.10, 0.13

I'm very happy with them, but I cannot confirm with a 100% certainty that the experience will be the same for you.

May I ask what you are running in those servers?
Are your services bound to CPU, bandwidth or memory? All three?

I've had good times with 100tb.com, but the price is prohibitive for me (The dollar is not my "native" currency and I have to work my day job very hard to reach the 200usd it costs)
The 24 Hour Challenge
I agree. I wouldn't completely write off those smaller servers and I think it serves as a very good entry point for learning Linux and server administration. If you're just starting out with Node or Rails its great.

I would recommend someone a Low End Box over a free Amazon Micro Instance any day, just because the CPU they limit you at is just bad. You start Apache or Nginx on those things or do a big yum install/apt-get and the terminal slows to a crawl.

Running a Production server off any low end box is definitely risky depending on who you're hosting with, but that goes without saying. I'd second BuyVM and Xen, I had a VPS with nordic and my cluster just died one day and was unrecoverable. They gave me a free small instance for half a year, but I opted to just switch instead.

My other recommendation is definitely Rackspace. Their low end service is only around 10 dollars a month, their chat support service is pretty good, and its fast and easy to scale. Database transactions on the cloud are still shit however. :( Really want a dedicated server if you're a larger or badly optimized site.
Learn how to fix ylod permanently with this easy guide
I've run all my personal services (email, web sites, screen sessions etc.) off two Bytemark[1] virtual machines with 500MB of RAM each and the only problems I've experienced have been one or two 'high up' problems such as two core routers going down at the same time - i.e. nothing to do with contention. If you need more RAM, you just pay the extra monthly/annual fee for the next plan up and reboot the machine.

I pay £15/month per VM, which is probably $15-30/month each depending on where the exchange rate is.

[1] http://www.bytemark.co.uk/
The Coding Zone
I totally understand him, I also felt the same way. But now I am on a good track in life so I would not call it a mistake. We all take different paths.
Direct Lenders
There's this http://www.reddit.com/r/redditbooks

Also see links on the right of http://www.reddit.com/r/books for more books related sub reddits.
Improve your PageRank with outbound links, yes, OUT-bound
He didn't say everyone does.
Touch Screens will tell u "What touched me"
Aside from the Android/iOs thing, the other really interesting thing in the article is that Jobs essentially is part of the reason why so many Google services are shutting down.

Not that I disagree with the sentiment behind it, i.e. focus.
There are some extended stay hotels that are cheaper. I'm not sure about SF but I know around where I live you can get a studio/kitchen/living space for $700 a month.

But then again you can live in a fancy apartment downtown in the heart of things for around $1.2k a month.
I don't understand cars, at all.

But to me, it seems car market is very different from consumer electronics. First, building a car is still a hard task, harder than putting transistors together. Second, risk of car failure is much higher than risk of computer failure.

In other words, I would be afraid to ride 120 kmph on a highway if I knew the probability of random failure is as high as on my computer. I can't just backup my life regularly.

edit: OK, I misread your post a little, but I am letting this comment here since I wrote it already
"For most of the world, I'm pretty sure jobs are about making money to survive."

That's the end. The means is to provide something somebody wants. This is, quite profoundly, the purpose of an economy and any economic model that neglects this is forever doomed to produce gibberish.

Why is the classic "paying 5 guys to dig holes and 5 guys to fill them in" not a great way to produce 10 jobs? After all, sometimes we want holes and sometimes we want them filled in. Answer: Because implicit in the formulation is that we aren't putting holes where people want them, or filling in holes people want filled in. It's a waste. On the other hand, put those 10 guys to work digging holes to run a highway through, and now we're talking.

Why is the Broken Window Fallacy a fallacy? Because between the beginning of the story and the end of the story, nobody has any more of what they want, except the glassmaker, who would have been just as happy to put the window pane anywhere else, and it's countered by the loss to the original window owner, which is pure loss, not an economic gain.

Why do third-world people dig through the trash piles? Is it because they're poor and that's just what poor people do? No, it's because it's the best way they seem to have of finding things that people want out of the trash, which they then can sell, because somebody, somewhere, wants it.

The economy doesn't fundamentally break until there no longer exists any needs that can be better filled by someone else rather than yourself, and that's actually a hard world to imagine, in which everybody is equally good at everything and there exist no relative advantages anywhere. The job situation, which is not the same as "the economy", does become dire if there is created some set of people who have no skills whatsoever that someone is willing to pay them for rather than do themselves (with robots, AI, etc). And if you really think about what that means, personally I think we're easily 10 years away from this really being the reason why jobs are disappearing.

It's not efficiency, it's bad economic policy and the 30-year business cycle doing its thing. But the next bad economic business cycle may have this as a real effect.
IPhone accelerometers can log nearby keystrokes
This book was unreadably pretentious. Constantly capitalizing "Lean Startup Movement" (and for that matter, using the word "movement") makes it sound like some sort of religion.

Readers looking for something substantive or even thought provoking will be thoroughly disappointed.
Because if he left it would be even poorer.
"Having a programmer who can spit out code ten times as fast as his compatriots doesn't result in a ten-fold improvement of returns."

Or maybe it does. A programmer using a better algo might save CPU cycles, storage needed, time to complete, or may even do something which would be plainly impossible for an average programmer. So, in the real world, a programmer who is better by 10% actually yields far more than 10 fold improvement of returns. There is significant economic benefit, but they should be clever enough to point it out.
Exactly. My experience at work is that we "bootleg" in other browsers to do dev work on external facing sites, but the intranet stuff really only works on Internet Exploder, and thems the breaks.

While it's laughable, I understand the driving forces behind it, and have since stopped caring, so long as nobody insists that our public sites need only work on IE 6/7/8. I can usually end that discussion with one word: iPad.
So the map worker saves map results to its local disk, and eventually a reduce worker does an RPC call to copy that data over the network so it can perform the reduce. What is the advantage of doing this over having the map worker do the reduce part itself?
Funny Babies on Facebook
"ALWAYS make backups!"

To be fair, that applies to any hosting, cheap or expensive, virtual or dedicated. I've only once had to restore data due to the fault of the host, but I've lost track of the number of times that I've had to get things back because of a user error. :)
"this place is seriously getting as bad as reddit"

From the guidelines: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

"If your account is less than a year old, please don't submit comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. (It's a common semi-noob illusion.)"
The phone apps can have access to phonebook? OK, I didn't know that.

It seems that I am heavily downvoted, so... sorry for my comment.
I couldn't possibly imagine what people with billions of dollars of assets at their disposal feel like.

What are his motives? Beats me. He may be after a better high, better orgasm, fast cars, eternal life, global domination. Or he may just want to live a tranquil life with Jane Average and make babies and peacefully pass away.

Either way it certainly cannot be inferred from this article.

But comparing Yuri Milner to Perelman is interesting in an ingenious kind of way.

Perelman and Milner are from two completely different faces of Russia. And I'd wager that Perelman's disenchantment has a lot more to do with people like Milner than vice versa.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kq-N3_plNq8
Architectural Myopia: Designing for Industry, Not People
That's correct. I should have mentioned that. Do you know if the gerrit code review website is back? I haven't been able to find a working URL for it.
Windows 8: Cloud Computing Is Truly on the Way
>> My experience with EC2 is that you get more RAM for the buck when compared to Rackspace and others, but IO to disk and CPU is sub-par. As a result, I tend to prefer Rackspace who are also big players in the open source space.

Seconding this. And I'd recommend a hybrid solution if it's possible. Dedicated db server with some cloud webheads for your front end. I really think that's the best bang for your buck. Has anyone tried the Amazon RDS or the RackSpace R2 servers? I'd really like to know if they provide any advantages over just straight up hosting your database on another cloud instance.
We should ask Wozniak how much of the Apple2 he copied from other devices (or built based on what he learned from other devices). And thus how much of Apple's current value is based on copying ideas from other companies. (Xerox!)

If Jobs wasn't fantastically rich his attitude would plainly be hypocritical and antisocial.
This poll was clearly designed to canvas United States cities, even if it wasn't explicitly stated. Is that narrow-minded? I don't think so. If I happened upon a poll on a Russian tech site that mentioned Omsk and Moscow and St. Petersburg, I'd assume it was a national poll. And then I'd move on.

Perhaps it's narrow-minded to assume that a poll on a U.S.-based tech site should by default be global in scope?
Andrew "Weev" Auernheimer, hacker in AT&T iPad case, on Occupy Wall Street
what is the page/app?
You should really pay attention to the last two paragraphs.