skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sorry, even there, you have sysadmins who just sit there and run through playbooks and never improve anything. This is how you have teams with 70 pages in a 9 hour daytime shift as a matter of course.

There are pure SAs around, and I don't just mean the caste system. The entire sysops organization was just one example. They may have been rolled up into another organization but the people still exist.
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dtrace.org is not affiliated with dtrace-the-project. It's just a bunch of ex-Sun guys who share the domain.
I'm very happy with Awesome running on top of arch linux. If you like the configurability of awesome, also check out luakit:

http://luakit.org/projects/luakit/

It's a lua binding to webkit that allows you to fully customize your web browser as well, with a configuration scheme similar to Awesome. By default it's configured with VIM bindings, imo better than the vimium or vimperator plugins.
Can you put an email address in your HN profile or in a comment here? I'm sure there are lots of great startups that can treat you much better and are interested in talking to you.
Deep model is progressing much more rapidly than the statistical card-trick algorithms, Boltzmann machines, and in specific Restricted Boltzmann machines already vastly outperform SVM (By which I mean to say both Structured and Support vector machines) in a number of hidden model discovery tasks related to CV and is taking a lot of the existing 'state of the art' backprop classifiers (classical Neural Net & k-means clustering) to town.

That said, traditional stochastic & markov driven approaches are more familiar and are cheaper to implement, which has hitherto driven the development of virtually all sciences.
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It is done my good sir!
1. Make sure it is not because of seasonality.

2. Access your site using a text browser like Lynx. Your first 5-15 links should be pointing to to content-rich pages which are unique.

3. Analyze the keywords. You said thin e-commerce sites are beating you. Are those keywords transactional or informational?

4. Continuing from point 3: Create silos. Separate your "information" and "commerce/transactions" neatly. Then, focus on the one which needs more attention. Add content/products and create more links.

5. Assuming you have analytics software installed: check your bounce rates, average duration/page, and pages/visit. See if something is amiss.
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Documentation and ease of use. The API should function at the highest level possible. I should be able to call the service with concise and powerful statements. The beauty of an API is the ability to quickly build further upon something that has already been done. If I have to go ten rounds with it to get it to work, you've missed the boat.

In that same vein the documentation should be clear and to the point. See Amazon Flexible Payments as an example of what NOT to do. Ambiguous docs with tons of circular linking etc. made me want to kill myself and did end up killing my project. Just my .02.
I do not know what experience you have with traditional publishing, but Charles Stross (cstross here on HN) wrote a series of blog posts[1] that explain rather in detail the benefits of publishing through a traditional publisher instead of doing it yourself. It isn't nearly so tangibly one-sided as you would suggest.

[1] http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/04/common-m...
An API for Siri makes me ponder the huge question: How will Apple assign sentences and queries in, shall we call it "Siri Space" to individual applications.

Siri – Check me in.

Does that go to Foursquare? American Airlines? The Ramada? Some Foursquare knockoff?

I can image a few solutions:

• Use a prefix or delegation clause to carve out a a realm of authority, but that is awkward. (the DNS works), but Siri have foursquare… sounds like you are talking to a finite state machine.

• Let developers say how confident they are that a sentence was for them based on current conditions and the winner gets it, but then the lying cheats would win.

• It could be thrown back in the user's face to disambiguate and then remember for future occurrences and good luck if you change your mind about priority at a later date.

• The invisible hand could be put to work and let developers rent concepts in Siri Space. That would likely provide a hitherto unseen form of grief and failure.

Remember it took a year to get native Apps after the iPhone came out. It will take no less time for the Siri masters to work out how or if developers can be mapped into Siri-space.
> How many milliseconds does it take to parse YAML, XML, or any other file format for which a parser written in C is widely available?

YAML and XML may be slower than this, but Python 2.6's built-in 'json' module averages less than 20 milliseconds to parse a simple 1000-element "object"/dict on my system.

This isn't even the highest-performance JSON parser for Python, and parsing into less dynamic C or C++ datastructures would probably be somewhat faster still.
It's not exactly 98% of the profits; but, it still seems egregious.

From what I've noticed, royalties are generally about 10% of gross against advances (if any), or $1 on a $10 soft-cover. The publisher spends money on the acquisition, editing, printing, and distribution; in brick-and-morter land, this isn't cheap. Remember that the store needs to make a couple of bucks, too.

Additionally, major retailers include a buyback clause—if the book doesn't sell, the retailer can sell up to something like 15% of the initial purchase order back to the publisher. The publisher often forwards your share of that burden into your royalty payment schedule.

Though, ultimately, while authors might get screwed financially in a lot of ways, publishing does, as a consumer, keep a lot of crap out of your purchasing decisions. Publishers (on the whole) do provide a lot of value to you: are you going to buy Gruen's AWESOME guide to Ruby or The Ruby Programming Language from O'Reilly Publishing with its venerable woodcut cover treatment?

If you're trying to get your work out there (which is why people write in the first place) you're probably willing to take the traditional publishing deal.
I think the ratio is still magical. Watch Sal's video on this here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zosU6XTgSY&feature=playe...
Actually, you never stop needing a middleman. The problem in most industries is that positions become traditional. People fill them out of habits, because that's always how it's been. Since most organizations just usually adopt the status quo, nobody questions the veracity of the setup.

We end up with obsolete layers that end up just inflating costs. As long as these old timers have a way to make a buck and don't feel threatened, they don't see the need to optimize or redefine their industry.

It's good to have the likes of Apple, Google and Amazon rattling some cages from time to time.

As I said, you always need a middleman, but you need to identify what that middle is and redefine your business around it. To stay at the top you also need to monitor your industry to know when that middle shifts to something else. Currently, I believe that editing and reviewing would be a key service in the publishing industry. It's all nice to make books cheaper, but I think I value my time more than I value my money in this instance. I'm willing to pay for my books, but I'd still like for someone to vet them.
Leave as soon as possible. You don't like it. You could easily be employed elsewhere you would like.

It also sounds like an unhealthy situation: imbalanced team, sketchy uncertain compensation (cash/equity), low respect, nothing to help you with where you need to grow (which includes both technical peers and having the confidence to interview elsewhere).

No point in trying to rush something to 'complete' and only then leave. Software is never done. They'll need to get more engineers in any case, those new engineers should do it the way they'll need to.

Respect anything you've signed so far; don't sign anything new; don't directly compete or take anything you wrote for the current unpaid project with you.

Though you say the CEO is nice, it also sounds like you're being a little bullied, and expect to get more 'temper' from people when you leave. Brush it off; it's their situation and emotional reactions, not an objective analysis of things. Don't get into a long discussion, don't accept a 'counter-offer' or promise of change. Go elsewhere definitively.
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The annoying thing about being charged for returns is that you have no control over how many are ordered. When my book Ruby in Practice went to stores, I felt like there were FAR too many copies going out. Lo and behold, tons of them came back and now I'm eternally on the hook for the cost of those even though I had zero input into how many were actually produced and distributed.

Publishers are helpful, but the game is inextricably rigged in their favor, which sucks.
So... should nobody use ec2? Or any host for that matter? Sooner or later you're going to have to trust some third-party.
That's very clever. Their "reverse hammer" is reminiscent of the climbing world's funkness device:

http://books.google.com/books?id=vNyk_tSE2mUC&lpg=PP1...
Having bought 10's of thousands of dollars of sound equipment over the years, much of which was from Peavey...this is pretty cool.
Number of ingredients in a major company's sub sandwich: 87
By calling them middlemen, you're implying that publishers add no value to the end product. That's a misconception: an author writes a manuscript, a publisher makes it into a book. Often, it takes as much time and effort to turn a manuscript into a book as it took the author to write the manuscript.

As more writers choose to self publish ebooks, it's becoming quite clear how crucial the role of a publisher is. Most of those self produced 'books' are completely unreadable.

Charlie Stross explained it well: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/02/cmap-2-h...

Also, Amazon isn't taking publishers out of the equation. It's becoming one.
If you contribute to an open-source project, your code is already released. What GPL prevents is a competitor using your code released as open-source and turning it into a competing proprietary product. Apache licenses allow that. if you fear your competitors may use your code, contributing to an Apache-licensed project is infinitely worse because then your competitors are allowed to derive their work from your contributions and never share back, something GPL would prevent.
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Nodejs dev needed by Techcrunch Disrupt Hackathon award winner
We recently won the Social Commerce award at the Techcrunch Disrupt Hackathon and sponsored a booth at the X.commerce ebay / paypal / magento event last week and got a ton of interest and customers and are now looking to roll the complete product in production and pilot it this November.

I'd like to see if we can build the whole thing out using nodejs, expressjs and mongodb on the server and with backbonejs & jquery on the client.

If you are good with javascript and nodejs I'd like to talk to you and yes we are seed funded and can pay you!

Please email Kris at rudeegraap@gmail.com for more info.
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Very happy using oneiric ocelot with the bodhi repositories and their E17!
Ask HN: What data structure/db should I use for storing the file tree structure?
I am trying to write an application(I am using python) to have a copy of a remote machines directory structure in my local machine (not the actual content of the files in the remote machine).

Once I store it in my local machine, I want to be be able to perform the following operations on my local copy of the tree structure

"ls"

"ls /etc"

"ls /etc/bin/yahoo"

and see the listing. Also if I change/add a dir/file name in the remote machine, I want to have the ability to easily update it in my local data structure.
I'm just curious -- why would you agree to "work" at a startup that is not compensating you? Not even vesting equity?

My feeling is the reason they don't have any other engineers is because they couldn't sucker anyone else into this...
I think he's implying that LibreOffice and OpenOffice will not merge for reasons of politics and ideology, rather than any technical reason.

Strangely, choosing Democrats and Republicans to illustrate that point was probably a poor choice, considering.
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I hate to single you out, but it's become really hard for me to listen to any Ruby developers decry "magic" as a bad thing in RVM. RVM is an excellent tool that was taken down a notch by a hit job needlessly perpetrated by the author of rbenv.

RVM is no more magic than rbenv, and to listen to Ruby developers (who treasure "magic") talk about it as if RVM commits some cardial sin by overriding `cd` tops out my nerd-rage-meter. Ruby, home of the monkey patchers, has no place calling out RVM for overriding `cd`.

RVM and rbenv serve similar purposes. RVM gives you gemsets as well. You may not need them today, but they're there if you do. I use Ruby for a lot of system administrative tasks. These tasks run inside cron jobs and other places where a bundle really doesn't make sense. Despite the fact that they're no longer in vogue, gemsets are still very useful.

Should you check out rbenv? Yes. But the "little less magic" is a really poor basis by which you should evaluate it as a tool.
I saw an episode of "Good Eats" that Alton Brown discussed this. He stated that an 8:1 ration of fresh - sea water could be used to extend water supplies as well as make your body retain the water longer so less is needed vs pure water. I would be curious to know if this is a good ratio, should I ever become shipwrecked :)
If this is the case I am sure they will have someone look into the possibility of integrating this card system in their wallet.

If the card indeed does make sense, it won't be too late to do both NFC and the card. The fundamental core of the wallet is not the NFC technology but the ecosystem that it is trying to build.
Author contracts are the worst. Agents can help, but unless you're at scale, their cost/benefit is a wash.

We should compare notes.
http://ting.com/ seems to work.
Especially living in a city. You also need to travel there (it's almost certainly not accessible by public transport). Paint is the main cost, I do own my on equipment, and most places require field paint. Also, I love walk on paintball with 50-100 people in a giant game. You're going semi-auto and burning a lot of paint, that's part of the game play.
Thank you.

As I was scanning the comments on this post, I was a bit surprised by the all the "This post was too basic. You are clearly an amateur and wasting my time" comments. Well, to those authors, not everyone on HN is an l337 hax0r such as yourselves.

Yes, the author still has some work to do. Maybe if he spent another couple weeks just on this, he could get response times down. Maybe he should use a reverse proxy or maybe he shouldn't. As with most problems of this type, the answer is, it depends.

To a young programmer with a few years experience who may be working on his/her first high traffice website, I thought the blog post was fantastically written. It was clear, concise, explained well the low-hanging fruit of optimization, explained the difference between performance and throughput, and decisions-making/tradeoffs made when preparing for a traffic spike. Well done.
What third party traffic measurements do you refer to?
I just don't see adding a special matrix infix operator to Python happening. It is too specialized, and yet matrix is not special enough that it must have its own operator. Isn't this what operator overloading is for?

I suspect the real problem is NumPy's type system implementation, since data-types are not visible as different Python types.
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I grew up in Mississippi playing Peavey gear dreaming of designing it. Now, I have a PhD in electrical and computer engineering. I don't do audio electronics, but I might not have even considered EE if not for this man.
Ask HN: As a physicist, how do I get a job in AI?
Dear HN,

I'm a physicist who will be getting a PhD in about a year. I've basically lost interest in pursuing a career in academia. I believe AI will be an enormous industry in the future, and I'm interested in somehow getting a job in that industry. I'm a pretty experienced programmer, but probably not really at the level of a professional, and other than that I don't really have any skills in AI. And I don't have any connections. Any ideas on how I can go about making this career change?
I like the way this article is written it's very concise.
This is, of course, the legal default (at least in any country that subscribes to the Berne Convention). Unless there is some alternate policy somewhere that I don't remember signing, that would be the policy here as well. (IANAL, TINLA)
How frequently should the conf file be read or written to? If it's once at the start of the session, then that time savings is meaningless.
I'm really passionate about the idea and the technology (that could be behind this), and apparently I'm young and dumb. Basically.
Your question is a little amorphous, so we need to distill it. Let's forget for a moment about your skillset. What industry would you like to be in? Do you want to apply AI to consumer products? Small business products? Huge enterprise products? How do you feel about a job at a hedge fund? Where do you live now? Where do you want to live?
You've nailed it. I disagree, however, with your labeling that as "conventional capitalism". That's crony capitalism, and always has been. As they say, capitalists hate capitalism.
rvm still has more traction in the community and the end result is going to be very similar to rbenv for the majority of users--except that rvm has a built-in rubies installer + gemsets, which can make things easier for beginners to dive in and access other projects. New users should probably stick to rvm.
Actually I mentioned "people living below the poverty line", not homeless. People living below the poverty line are certainly employable, they just make the worst money possible. Give them food or clothes and maybe they can make their rent payment this month.
Don't burn bridges - be polite, give at least two weeks' notice, don't get into arguments. Smile, thank them for the learning opportunity and wish them all the best.
It also prevents YOU from extending the product in some way, embedding it in your proprietary stuff, and then keeping the extensions you wrote secret from the rest of the world. Now, ME, I wouldn't be interested in keeping my extensions secret, because I don't really have anything to hide. But some folks, especially big companies, DO have something to hide. Perhaps, (not a real example) they mean to release a tablet with office software built in, but with a back-door built into the office software that allows it to secretly track all documents created and report back to the mother-ship. At least I HOPE that's not a real example.
You need to get out. "Are you hiring?" Everyone is hiring. Especially in SF. You have absolutely no reason to stay at a "job" that isn't both compensating you extremely well and respecting you, and this one is doing neither.

And don't worry about dooming the company. You owe them absolutely nothing. Zero. Well, negative, since they owe you a lot. If the company thinks it can get by with a single unpaid engineer, they're not going very far anyway, and this will be a good wake-up call that they need to re-evaluate their priorities.

If you really can't keep yourself from feeling bad about leaving them, offer to work for market rate (something like $100/hour as a consultant) for a little while so you can finish up the product and give them some time to find someone else, but don't work another day for them without knowing that you'll be immediately compensated. And set a hard deadline, like 30 days, for when you're out of there, because you shouldn't stay anywhere that doesn't respect you for too long even if they are paying you.

And yes, technical interviews around here are pretty tough, but the only way to see if you can make it through is to try a few. It sounds like you're smart enough to do very well at them.

Shameless plug time: I interned at Cloudera this summer. I had a great time and learned a ton. The people there are extremely smart. A huge proportion of the company are engineers, and pretty much all of the management is highly technical. They'd be very interested in talking to someone who hacks on NoSQL databases and is active in ML research. I could see you on the platform team, contributing to HBase and/or Mahout, and there are some Data Science and Solution Architect roles that could involve your ML experience.

Here's the careers page: http://www.cloudera.com/company/careers/
I think they are always around but just don't make it to the front page as the link bait articles get the attention.
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I read Charlie's posts too, this is an area I am really interested in, and I think he missed out on a number of things.

As with any business there are 'good' publishers and 'bad' publishers, and the Amazon move (and others like it) could lead to less friction in the publishing business which will certainly boost quantity but it may (as Charlie posits) negatively effect quality as well.

The future may end up being 'karmic gods' to coin a phrase, kind of like kingmakers of old but people or organizations which, by applying a seal of approval or blessing on a work can immediately levitate it above the sea of choices, which will replace what 'publishers' do today. These people may appear to be 'super - Agents' as I've heard them referred to or 'pressless publishers' (a take on fabless semiconductor companies which already have a model that works well for them).

We should see artisan printers arising. Its a new business where you work with an author/agent to have exclusive right to put into physical form a work, perhaps leather bound on acid free paper or glue bound onto newsprint.

Amazon has an excellent chance of continuing to disrupt here and kill publishers outright. Certainly the disruption in the market is going to move around where the money goes and it will affect the net total value of a given work. Much of that value may simply disappear (which is to say authors make more and consumers pay less but a giant middle-industry no longer exists so those folks don't get salaries and their suppliers don't sell product etc etc). The economics of information march relentlessly on.
What shocked me at the time was the "real" blood. I remember thinking "ew, he fell on those spikes and was impaled". It actually made me afraid to play the game.