skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wouldn't miss Code search much if the regular Google search would understand regular expressions or terms with underscores. But it does not, and also increasingly annoys me by misinterpreting my search terms and searching for the things it believes I meant instead of the things I told it to search for.

And while DuckDuckGo has a much nicer search frontend, it's Bing-fed index sadly sucks, making it no universal replacement for Google's declining frontend.
I guess, I am just not using enough of wordpress.
Yes. But it doesn't justify his insulting replies ("I will not explain why: please actually read..."). Next time he will hopefully be more polite.
It would seem like some sort of cosmic justice if MS failed to make a perhaps fundamentally superior product* successful due to the inability to fight against the network effect of competing platforms.

* Not that I'm saying it is.
YouTube Traffic
microsoft is weaker in mobile patents than any other platform player. they could be a victime quicker than android.
I agree with you. Devs could be writing 2D WebGL based games with killer effects today. Getting into it, and then transition to 3D when the APIs are ready. But such is the state of the web.

There are other things WebGL is good for as well :)
Great use of SASS. I approve!
Burglar tips off police about a bigger crime.
I'm curious as to why you did it this way. I'm kinda surprised that you didn't tell your investors (and you got investment!) Most stealth companies let their investors know.

The thing I like about being "stealth" is that we can make changes without having external expectations to deal with. Probably the only time we'll be able to do this.
I was thinking something similar, maybe it was a common sequence like Supercalifragi___icexpialidocious or the alphabet (with a letter missing) where when asked, the user could fill in the part of the sequence, but would later forget the exact offset for.
Hi Mike,

I love the initiative and using the opportunity... what is your opinion about my recently launched project http://www.mindthebook.com and what would you change to make it a better user experience?

Cheers
Copyright czar cozied up to Big Content, e-mails show
Your logging example is invalid. A variadic macro must be invoked with at least one argument matching the ellipsis. GCC is forgiving here, but some other compilers are not.
8 bits per byte is the only convention that matters; I challenge any of you to prove otherwise.

throws down gloves
Is is true that teens are the ones that text the most? check out Adults numberts
1) I am not whining as an entrepreneur that I did not start the company in 2005: I did other things that I am quite proud of, and which frankly have probably been more interesting and successful than having worked on that code searching mechanism.

Instead, I am whining as a user of Google Code search that we have just lost six years of progress on searching source code. Having a company that starts today in this space, while they will have an easier time (due to advances) starting and getting up quickly, is drastically different than a company that started six years ago, and might have a large index, advanced algorithms, etc. at this point.

2) I don't think Google even tries to make things sustainable. During all of these "Google shuts down X" that have been happened recently, some posts here by ex-Google people indicated that Google internally didn't even have reporting on per-project costs... hopefully now that they see how much certain things cost they will cause less market-level problems going forward.

(edit: I forgot to add this point) I mean, seriously: Google, a company that makes all of its money on advertisements, and for whom ads permeate everything, doesn't have ads on Google Code Search, and AFAIR never did. If you do absolutely nothing else for such a service, as Google, you'd put some ads on it; even Gmail has ads, and that's a place where people find them creepy.

I therefore simply cannot believe that they actually are looking at this project as something that is worth their time to make sustainable: they are a giant company with a thousand things to do; this was cool one day, maybe useful to some engineers internally, and they kind of just did it, and dumped the result on the ecosystem, where it created a little vortex-of-free-and-good that eventually has collapsed into a singularity, and will be gone in the next couple months, leaving us with the "vacuum" that you mention.

Meanwhile, it might simply be because even if it was successful, the userbase would be tiny, and the revenue generated would be "not enough to justify the lack of focus" (Google is getting behind the whole "more wood, fewer arrows" thing lately); whereas, to a small company, it might have enough margins to sustain a few people, which is "enough to bother with" at that level.

~3) The point here isn't that people who care about sustainability should be using Pinboard.in instead of del.icio.us (although they should, and those that didn't got burned at the last minute): it is that society is worse off because there are people in the ecosystem who are operating unsustainably.
So, you'd say, "Just grab any Mac in the Apple Store."? or any iPhone?

I just recently advised a friend very carefully on whether she should get a Macbook Air or a Macbook Pro. It was a tough decision with a lot of considerations.

There are now 3 iPhones available at different price points with substantial differences in speed and capability.

This really doesn't seem like a line of reasoning worth advocating.
When I worked at Sega in the console era, I found out that every console game was open to inspection by other developers in this way. Because they were all in assembly, if you were ever curious about how a character moved or how a graphics trick was done, well, you would just find out.

After all, our development consoles (which the PC debugger connected to) worked just as well on a cartridge from the store as on the code we uploaded to it. So if you were impressed by an effect in a game like Ranger-X, you just plugged it in and explored it in the debugger for a while. You'd end up with a new technique and (quite possibly) a snippet of code you could try out on your project. Happened all the time.

Now, I don't think anyone really undertook an effort such as this to lovingly decompile a game with comments on this level, but there were decompilers too. I was always suspicious that our studio's highly sophisticated platformer engine was based on lots of, uh, best practices. If you know what I mean. But that wasn't a big deal.

It's interesting because when I later heard about the tech behind the Halo engine, I realized I'd never seen their architecture before — because things had moved on and gentlemen of game development didn't decompile each other's games. They licensed their engines instead. If this had been the cartridge age, lots of people would have totally lifted their approach.

By the way, the talk I heard, a detailed overview of how the Halo 2 engine works, is available at the page below. Yeah, it's from seven years ago but it was a ten-year-old engine already. Good code design lasts. If you like game guts, this page is a little-known treasure.

http://www.game-tech.com/Talks/Talks.htm
can I email you? I'm actually interested in discussing your work with seo.
L.A. Biohackers. http://www.biohackers.la/
Great people
People want to express themselves with the device they use. Branding is extremely important. Even well after a few cycles of the iPhone, people held onto their Blackberries, because of what it meant to have one (even when people would consider their software miles behind everything else in the market).

Windows and RIM could easily come back into the game if they focused on the whole corporate-I-like-to-look-busier-than-I-am crowd, but instead, everybody's playing catch up with Apple in a demographic they no longer have much of a footing in.
Would #3 above not anger investors for wasting their time? I cannot see someone being happy after taking the time to talk to you, especially if they are busy, and you don't want to talk and ask them for money.

Here is a test to see if your idea is or isn't pursuing: ask yourself if I tell everyone then would I have no competitive advantage? If the answer is 'yes' then don't build it. Here is why: you know when you tell everyone what you're doing? On the day of your launch. So if you have no advantage over anyone after launching, then why do it? You must bring something to the table. Maybe you should think harder about what you are doing at that point.
You, sir, are evil! That's awesome!
It's really a matter of deciding when is the start of the Little Ice Age. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ice_Age Some put it at the end of the medieval warn period, others hundreds of years later. I favor 1315, because over the period of a few years the climate of Europe tanked for hundreds of years. Of course a 1315 date argues for the cause being a long solar minimum and not reforestation.

My opinion was greatly influenced by Brian Fagan: The Little Ice Age, http://www.amazon.com/Little-Ice-Age-Climate-1300-1850/dp/04....
We also post heaps more at http://groups.google.com/group/biocurious
The Q-Drum, a circular jerry can, holds 20 gallons, and it rolls smoothly enough for a child to tow it on a rope.

Until the child arrives at a downhill slope....
There is an element to the Microsoft brand which not only lacks "coolness" but is also actively "uncool". I'd trace this phenomenon back to the antitrust lawsuits and the overall craptastic experience of Windows prior to XP.

XBox was brilliant because it avoided associations with the uncool Microsoft and Windows brands. Sure you knew deep down it was a Microsoft product, but you never said to your friends "Come over and play Halo with me on my Microsoft Xbox". Wouldn't you feel almost apologetic about showing off your Windows Phone 7 Phone?
In the spirit of your comment, perhaps it would be better to say 'spent', rather than 'wasted'? As you are saying, this is an important distinction.
http://www.cringely.com/2011/06/have-you-heard-the-one-about...
Well github's code search is a pretty good replacement, although it's limited to github.
LacZ is definitely Hello World in microbiology. From there you typically scale up with inducible/repressible promoters. Ara comes to mind.

GFP is a fun product to learn hydrophobic column chromatography. I still think it's best to start with nucleic acid separation before protein separation, though.

Aside from yeasts, there's no way you can do Eukaryotic stuff easily. You'd need a laminar flow hood and very sterile incubators.
Yesterday I was working on getting redis setup on a windows box. First time I have ever used it. There was a service config error on my part but before I figured it out I posted to twitter with a little passive aggressive spot asking "redis, why can't we just be friends?" Almost immediately after posting the tweet I figured out what was going on, and made the correction. Less than 12 min later I get a reply on twitter from some guy named @antirez asking if he could help.

I mentioned to him that I already figured out what was up but thanked him regardless. A few min later he replied that if I needed anything else to let him know.

I have asked for and received help on topics before on twitter, but never really had anyone contact me after I was just kinda being an ass.

http://twitter.theinfo.org/124568006838845440

last night I looked up @antirez and found he is (one of?) the authors of redis. I can see confirmation here with his notes on this post. Now that I know it was a day before a release his offer makes me smile even more. Kudos to he (and his team?). The overt gesture stuck with me since and made me much more willing to help out other people. Congrats on release and just being an all around nice guy yesterday to some guy whom you had never met and who was being a bit snarky.
If you are a complete newbie, I'd recommend "Cartoon Guide To Genetics". Sadly, it is over a decade old at this point. If anyone has a more contemporary reading list, I would also be interested.
> We don't need the specific organization to survive thousands of years in its original form, we just need cryonics patients to be passed ahead peacefully to another organization in the event of failure.

And how do you believe you'll accomplish this? The second, third, etc. companies are not going to sign up for this responsibility for free. Nor is there any guarantee that they won't also fail, or be merged into one conglomerate that fails.

> We haven't yet had a chance to experiment with things under conditions of universal literacy, the absence of much armed conflict, and other amenities of the modern world. Certain things (fashions, cultural memes) seem to get replaced quickly under such conditions, but that doesn't seem likely to extend to something like a trust fund.

I don't understand how this is at all relevant. I see no compelling reason to believe that the US will not experience natural disasters, wars, failed companies, or any number of other incidents that could cause cryo-failure. The fact that the population is fairly educated is almost completely irrelevant.

> Cryonicists certainly have more motive than the average person to promote stability, literacy, and nonviolence.

Frozen people are not in a position to promote anything. And the people keeping them frozen don't have an incentive to do anything except collect paychecks.
I don't know what the deal is on Linux, but in professional code, I disagree: don't both checking malloc, just rig malloc to blow up when it fails.

You'll do more harm trying to use something like xmalloc and failing to use it consistently (obviously you need to "x" more than just "malloc") than you will by taking steps to guarantee a swift failure to make sure any malloc failure ends the program.

Obviously, in any code where "malloc(3)" is the way you get more memory, I think it's pretty silly to check malloc's return value. You aren't going to get recovery right.
Very saddened to see 'University Research Program for Google Search' go. Google's index offers an exciting corpus for linguistics and AI study.

The current search API's just don't cut it for proper research (for example: just 64 results per query and 1000 queries a day [1] and the "estimatedResultCount" being off by a factor of 10-100 [2]).

I believe spammers were abusing the Google translate API to spin articles in different languages. This contributed to it being closed down. I don't hope that Google's search API is crippled to thwart the bad apples. Because then those that follow the TOS (don't crawl Google's results) have little recourse, but to halt their research (Yahoo Boss and Bing Api give little solace).

[1] Too few for either deep analysis or learning queries like:

"X is a *" and "X, such as *,"

[2] Estimated results for "test". With API: 257.000.000 vs. manual search 2.750.000.000
I think most of us would love to give feedback, but at first glance it seems requires all the "friends" to use the same paid app is not something easy to tag along.

Besides, I am using Android now ;-) so...

Just a side note, for solutions that needs social networking to work, it would be extremely hard to charge people up front. You gonna have to give it away for free (first) to earn some viral effects to kick in.
- I would start out grassroots-style. Attend .NET meetups to talk about your work and your project while you network. Offer promotions to these groups if they'll have them.

- Sponsor .NET Hack-a-thons?

- Help feverishly in .NET forums and community sites like Stackoverflow. (Put the service in your profile...people really look!)

- Create programs that provide incentive for your customers to spread the word about a product they already love. Word of mouth is the best/cheapest/most-effective variety of advertising that I know of.

I'm not much of a marketing guy, but this is where I would start at first thought. :) BTW, the control really does look quite nice. If I were a .NET developer I'd be interested in using it.

Note: Tag line states "No Learning Needed", then in your advantages section you state "Minimum learning needed." Strive to be consistent.
CoffeeScript Classes: Under the Hood
I could answer 'proably not'. Then, if this were reddit, it would get upvoted.

But since it's not, it would most likely get downvoted.

Oh, the paradox...
> If you aren't completely selfish, you're better off investing your energy in preventing such a world

How is getting your head frozen investing in preventing such a world? If you want to improve the future, maybe you should invest your $25K in humanitarian efforts instead of a desperate attempt at personal life extension.
I'm running this on my TouchPad, it's a little rough around the edges but miles above WebOS in speed and usability.

Screenshot of my home screen http://i.minus.com/ix1hOWz4bdIsi.png
I run linux on my laptop full time, but that article doesn't really do desktop linux much justice. It's a softball article at best.
Is there a veterinary school near you (Turkmenistan)? If so, this is your best bet. They should have the equipment to do proper DNA isolation from blood. (Something like this will help: Qiagen DNeasy Blood and Tissue kit [1]) What you'll probably want to do is high-throughput DNA sequencing and then map the sequences to the Horse genome [2]. Then you'll be able to compare the variations from various breeds.

But this is a pretty large project.

[1] http://www.qiagen.com/products/genomicdnastabilizationpurifi...

[2] http://www.uky.edu/Ag/Horsemap/ (I think)
A company that I worked at did this:

Started as a consulting company. Made one-off web apps for businesses in a particular industry. Realized a pattern in what these businesses wanted. Built a generic web app product. Sold the product to (and migrated) the old customers. Flourished as a product business.
That's no problem.* (ha)
Haha yes, pardon me.
It so happens that x is not continuous in 0 - the result is different if you approach 0 from the right, i.e.

0 <-- x
Tansey wrote a good, solid reply, but I dislike worshipping at the altar of mysteriousness. When a human or better GAI finally gets built, it won't be entirely hand-coded (although the seed for it might be). But the better we understand how our AI works, the better we can make sure it's doing what we want it to; and not, say, crashing the stock market with millions of erroneous transactions carried out too fast for humans to correct.
I think that argument applies to cryonics. :) The people who invoke the wager are trying to defend their belief, not actually convert others. To anyone who doesn't believe in cryonics, the wager is pretty absurd.
What people think of the new Dart programming language on Twitter
So when he is taking the usual jerrycan he won't go by the downhill?
...which is when the fun begins. Yipeeeee!!
Redis has more than one contributors, but the founder and lead developer of Redis is Salvatore Sanfilippo aka @antirez. He is clearly a programming God.
(My other other favorite C programming trick is knowing Lua, which is excellent for scripting C. :) )

I especially love LuaJIT, whose ffi makes it even easier to interface with C than standard Lua does (and its awesomely fast too). Nevermind that Lua is just nice to work in anyway :)
Bed time is 9pm, and I try to be strict on it :)
I believe general biology genetics would be more than enough to get into the business. And for an average hacker, those concepts won't be hard to consume. Campbell-Reece Biology book(just the genetics part) might be the right choice.
Try to get to bed at 9pm :) +- 30 mins
I see your point. It's a good one, and I sort of agree with you, but I also think it's more complicated than that.

For example, it's hard to say whether the six years of code search we got from google was better or worse than what a sustainable startup could have provided. And if was better, how do you measure that against its sudden disappearance until there's some viable replacement (if there will ever be one). It's also hard to say whether it was ever possible to run it sustainably.

I think for every code search, there's an equally unsustainable (at first) Google product that provides a lot of value for free to users.

Yes, sometimes it means that they kill opportunities for others who could possible make sustainable businesses, but it also means that they can run something unsustainably for some period of time to see whether it's worth it to even make sustainable.

It's hard to say whether overall for society there have been more cons than pros. Anecdotally, my experience is that Google has provided me a lot of value for free.
I dislike the term 'trick' here. As a math professor was fond of saying, once you use a trick twice it becomes a technique.
Seems like a site with lots of heavily rated products could do a bit better -- you might be able to use your database of known distributions to inform your prior.
The Video Played At Steve Jobs' 30th Birthday Party - Awesome
NDA? With investors, at least?
I kind of only truly pitched to one investor. He invested luckily.

Probably because he's almost family more than anything else.
http://cloudhead.io/toto (Ruby)

http://github.com/may/yabe (Scheme. Barely started.)
If it's successful enough at seeming smart, in a large range of different circumstances, how is that different from actually being smart?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GSM_03.38

"Support of the GSM 7-bit alphabet is mandatory for GSM handsets and network elements..."
Mine was 6Mb. I had to build my own interface card and I/O driver for it (for my Heathkit H11).

And it was still enormously useful over those floppies.
Making bacteria glow at the BioCurious meetup last month was one of the most fun things I've done, because, well, IT'S SCIENCE!, but also for the curiosity of the participants, the patience and knowledge of the instructors, and the slightly strange feeling I got where, on that particular Saturday afternoon, I doubted you could find another group of people engaged in quite the same pastime on planet Earth!
Paul Bourke has some notes on (static, not video) stereoscopic 360° panoramas, in his treasure-trove of stereoscopic resources:

http://paulbourke.net/miscellaneous/stereographics/stereopan...
Living With a Database Nerd
The solution is good, and this intelligent design is needed. The other obstacle is scaling. Production and distribution are two issues. This one billion might not have enough money to afford this cheap solutions; and the average person has the money, scale distribution is still an issue.

A needed (and obviously better) design is how to make these people help themselves. Access to education, and improved culture to motivate them to work. The designs are good to get them starting with cheap solutions that just works.
I for one welcome our new overlord = HN effect :P
Code Academy: Learning to code just became easy, fun and slightly addicting
The Elephant in Apple’s iCloud
I guess I'm comparing it to what it was like in the early 2000s and 1990s. If someone asked me what computer they should get, I'd have to think about the quality of the manufacturer, the processor speed, the memory, the hard drive space and the type of removable storage (floppy, cd, dvd).

These days you can go into an Apple Store and buy the cheapest Mac Mini they make and know you'll walk out with a good computer. You simply can't buy a severely compromised Mac anymore. Computer hardware just isn't getting better at fast enough pace to worry about it.

I think we're reaching that point with phones as well. The 3GS may be a tougher sell, but I still have one and it's snappy with IOS5 and does everything I need it to do. There are very few reasons someone would "need" an iPhone 4 or 4S. The same can't be said for something like the iPhone 1 or 3G, those both became dog slow.
At a high level, CQRS is simply separating your reads from your writes. It follows the observation that most web-related DB queries are in the form of reads and much fewer writes. I don't know about solving the CAP theorem, but it does a very nice job of scaling horizontally.