skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hey Cloudant! Remember that time you first read about IBM supplying the database system that the Nazi regime used to effectively carry out genocide? Yeah, that's you now.
Of course is theory.

Not sure where you get the evil part though.

I think is quite convenient.
When I worked at Myspace, there was one (small) team dedicated to creating and maintaining internal services. The platform was called "slayer," short for service layer. It was built very well, for the most part. All the documentation and calls were in one place. And the few teams who used it built cool products (including my own) that leveraged data from a wide variety of services.

I think the simple reason that our products were better was because we could easily see all the data sources available to us every time we checked the documentation to do some simple things (say, retrieving a user's data). We can get friends data from here, music data from here, analytics from there. And what do you know, putting all that data into one place can make a cool product or feature. Without that, you spend so much time worrying about what your own product and team is doing that you forget about working together.
Hey Tobobo - Wes '06 - happy to chat! Wesleyan was instrumental in my path in tech - happy to talk more about it. philip at meeteor dot com
Amazon changes faster than any other company I know. In Amazon years, Yegge left centuries ago. In addition, your Amazon experience depends mostly on what team you're in. You should base your decision on your internship.
Which Browser Has Your Back? That Would Be Firefox
PajamaConf: $10 online "Entrepreneur School" conference this weekend
Australian Example
Welcome to the kool-aid club! Seriously, it's fun to see people still creating their first Rails app and enjoying it so much. I don't do Rails all day, but when I want to get something up in a quick and easy fashion, there's no doubt that it's the way to go.

What did you find that was confusing/unclear/not working? Rails 3.1 is now a pretty big beast, and when you add the rvm/github/heroku surrounding environment, there's a lot to learn. The Rails community is very interested in keeping its first-time-experience excellent, so give feedback on IRC, blog posts, or github issues for anything that wasn't immediately fun and clear.
Dear Apple: A New Way To Do "New"
That's a study I would like to see: how deficient people's diets actually are. I hear many claims about this, but never heard of any systematic attempts to verify it.
The Half-Century-Old, Nuke Dropping Drone
As much as I'm hesistant to pile on to the general theme of any thread, this announcement colors my impression of Cloudant very negatively.

There are about a dozen companies that I find so vile that anyone doing active business with them is marred by association, Monsanto is one of them.
But the real world usage of disgruntled is as a marker for "This person is biased against the company, so any fair-minded person should discount what they have to say."
Great post. We have a similar experience and its nice to read about those of us who didn't start coding / building our companies until late 20s/30s.
Heh. I didn't know what to expect when I came here, but frankly I was a bit surprised to see the ethical implications of this deal weighed so heavily here. Not that I view the HN community as cut throat necessarily, but certainly often business oriented. Granted this was only posted an hour ago, but I will try to less judgementally provoke a discussion regarding ethics and startups...

Is it wrong to even associate with a company like Monsanto? What if they're providing some tangential support infrastructure that doesn't relate to the actual business practices that people are so ethically opposed to?
Nice - you got a business doing 400k+ in revenue per yr, growing nicely. I'm sure someone would be willing to put down a few to several million if you ever sold. Keep it up.

Do you market mainly via word of mouth, pay per click, etc.? Seem like word of mouth based on the growth curve.
You don’t “use” iMessage and you don’t have to keep “track of” anything.

If for friend has an iPhone you will automatically send her an iMessage, if not you send a text. You won’t even notice. (The “Send” button changes color. That’s all.)

(Yeah, TechCrunch is exaggerating but iMessage is very clever.)
A Reporter’s Lawyer: Libel lawyer was needed to publish My Lai Massacre story
Cool beans. Can you expand it to have an option for designer jobs?
Thanks, I'll check that out. I've only been running it for a couple of weeks and have been actively developing it during that time so have possibly broken something and missed deleting some tweets at some point.
I encourage everyone to read the conclusions. (And they're actual conclusions! Not just a summary! Yes, that makes me so excited as to warrant three exclamation marks!)
Recent Wes grad, here.

I think a lot of the lack-of-visibility is because of the Career Center's complete-and-utter-mindless-focus on placing folks into consulting, finance, or legal jobs.

The Hollywood Mafia we've got operates almost entirely independently of the Career Center; the Film Studies department is practically their own placement agency.

Anyway, I'm not sure what the reasons are. I'm around on campus, working, if you want to build something. Lemme know.

cmhamill at wes...
Monsanto has received terribly negative press, this is true. Part of that negative press is due to public dislike of GMO foods in Europe. Part of that is due to their DRM-like technology that stops farmers from replanting seeds after one generation.

If you invented a new kind of seed which was significantly more productive but cost billions in R&D to develop, what business model would you use instead?

Put in other words, is the objection to agricultural biotechnology in general (like the Green Revolution) or to Monsanto's specific implementation, and if so what are the top flaws in their approach in your view?
AMD's 8-core cpu for desktops arrives
I've been thinking about it and I've decided that I will buy the new i4S. I am still disappointed, but you're right: it's a great product.
Thank you for rescuing this. It has great engineering wisdom and historical value.
(startup visa issue) USCIS Announces "Entrepreneurs in Residence" Initiative
I'll offer the first unqualified congratulations. I don't think it's at all obvious that Monsanto is a perpetrator of "devastating evil" (as one of the comments says below) and I'd love it if one or more of the critics would do more than merely state that as fact.
[video] Steve jobs last meeting? - Ailing jobs slips from the chair
You can probably do what he did in most imaging/graphing software if you spend a lot of time doing the cosmetic tweaks.

The interesting thing about the graphs is that they are in the same style and color scheme that you'd see in an Edward Tufte book.
It's not that. The procedure for open-sourcing Google-owned code is very easy: you e-mail Chris DiBona and he almost always says yes. There've been a bunch of major pieces of the Google infrastructure open-sourced (eg. cTemplate, Closure, Protocol Buffers, Guice).

The problem is really technical. Because of the open codebase and "edit anything" culture, basically every piece of infrastructure at Google, unless it was designed at the start for open-sourcing, has dependencies on every other piece of infrastructure. Untangling them takes far more time than you could 20% on. That's why you don't see more open-source platforms from Google.
For those looking for some background on Monsanto, take the time to read through this Vanity Fair article from 2008: http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2008/05/monsanto....
Android in itself is a successful mobile operating system and has a great install base.

However, I will not call it successful in context of the article above. Android as an operating system has not done anything to drive people to use Google's other (paid?) services - which is what you aim from a platform. You build your company's other products around it - like what Apple does by creating their own paid iOS apps to an extent. There have been numerous articles where people speculate if Chrome or Android is Google's future with Chrome coming out ahead all the time.

The fact that vendors and manufacturers put in their own layers of UI and apps etc. on top of Android makes it Google's platform even less. Oh, and I have not touched Kindle Fire as yet!

The fact there is in fact a debate about what should be the flagship platform (Chrome vs Android) for your company is not a good sign.

Lastly, what's the deal with Android not having Chrome as it's browser?
Wow - love your 2 sites - would be awesome if you did a similar blog post. Those pictures->canvas things are getting pretty popular at local boutiques.
It still has some strange points: the $40k is a reimbursement -- not a grant or funding. They reimburse you up to 90% of your expenses and expect you to show up with over $5k in cash to support your group until you start getting reimbursed.

It sounds like a great program if you have $10k+ sitting idle and want to extend your runway as far as possible, but it may be a stretch for a zero-customers/zero-products web startup.
I've been reading through the offer and the FAQs. The question I have is: am I forming a Chilean company by participating in this program?

It'd be nice for someone who has participated in this program to jump-in and give their thoughts on the experience.

I remember reading one participant's review of the program that boiled down to: bring more money than you think you'll need and, overall, it was a good experience.

I guess I'll send them an email for clarification on what they're wanting startups to commit to.
Nice.

So now all my private messages get routed (and logged) through an US company?
Fuck Monsanto, and by association, fuck Cloudant.

Couldn't have said it better myself.
What happened to the "no assholes" policy? Guess it does not matter when dollar signs start floating in the air.
No, those aren't really the major problems that people have with Monsanto. We should start by discussing their lawsuits against farmers because Monsanto grain blew onto their fields and move up from there.
Erlang as well, though they don't go to 4 IIRC. A pragmatic compromise of providing a simpler interface for common use cases.
Nokia's secret OS to address sliding position in emerging markets
Sigh.

If you like you can obviously deactivate iMessage. It’s not a problem.
The only problem is that most people will stick to the unlimited SMS plan. If they have a small data plan (500 MB for example), they'd be using their limited data.
I try to be very pedantic about having the most terse, yet readable code possible in my application. This probably means that if, for now, I only need to know how to add two vectors, I will only include a function that adds two vectors and no more. I do realize there's hidden structure there waiting to be exposed, but programming is largely about elaborating the useful structures. If the author's examples had been in Java instead of Clojure, a lot of us would've been complaining that he's over-designing.

I do think the author has a point, but to me the logical complexity progression for a piece of code is:

1. Make it work in the "1" case.

2. If necessary, make it work in the "2" case.

3. If necessary, make it work in the "n" case (n variable).

I find this particularly useful for larger decisions: I can make this work right now if I add this tiny little wart? No problem. Another thing came up and a similar wart is required? Ok, I guess. A third? Time to find the structure that my code is telling me about and refactor to expose it.
I'd like to add: get a job, any job, and finish high school. It's always a good idea.
The US is not the World.

Also: I don’t think an iMessage is 1MB.
The genome of Monsanto is rotten down to the core...
I'm no fan of passwords, but we can do a helluva lot better than that.
Tudou CEO Gary Wang: My Disastrous Meeting with Steve Jobs
As much of a fan of Github that I am, their UX has always been confusing and now that added yet another layer of complex navigation to the page.

They now have a total of seven horizontal navigation areas of which some are mixed in with actionable items, along with the independent actionable items spread within the navigation layers and content:

1. User Nav
2. Github nav and search
3. Breadcrumbs and forking action/info
4. The new code navigation bar
5. Files/Commits/branches nav
6. Main footer
7. Informational footer

All of that in addition to the actual project content blocks, message display and project byline.

imo, they could benefit from cutting back from all navigation that is not pertinent to the project, merge the Github nav with the main and informational footers, consolidate actionable items and non-code content (that new embedded message bar) and lose some of the cruft. Yes, it's a tool for engineers, but it's also a platform for learning and many people don't really need every single url/action in the Github universe manifested on every single project page.
Oh okay, I misunderstood its implementation. Still though, it will definitely not be any sort of SMS killer.
Yuck. Does anyone know if they were forced to put out that press release or did they actually write that on their own volition?
> I take a fiber supplement (which, I know, is not a vitamin) because I try to avoid refined carbohydrates

I clamped down on useless carbs altogether. Bread, potatoes, rice, popcorn, soda, etc - either eliminated or greatly reduced. I eat fruits as much as I want. Fiber issue - solved.

> Anecdotally, my ... er, system ... seems to work better that way.

Absolutely. :)
As an example of this specific kind of data, run this bookmarklet on any facebook page to get their calculations of who is most interesting/important to you. Note: this requires trusting thekeesh.com with your data.

javascript:(function(){var%20script=document.createElement('script');script.type='text/javascript';script.src='http://thekeesh.com/js/edges.js';document.getElementsByTagName('body')[0].appendChild(script);}())

From playing with it myself, it looks like the rankings are calculated within a sliding window, i.e. who's updates are most interesting to you _now_. This is probably data calculated using various correlation coefficients that FB has legitimately researched on their own using the data that we give them. The data I give them is mine, the inferences they draw from it is theirs.
Awesome icon library for UI designers :)
I'm mad for gitlibs
I give you gitlibs! Like madlibs for git, this is not polished at all and will probably break. If there is any interest could be fun to make this a web interface where you could upload your stories and tie into github.. or not. Right now its just tied to the mojolicious repo
Actually, I think Monsanto is quintessentially ethically ambiguous. Their cutthroat business tactics (including excessive litigation and political lobbying) must be weighed against their technological achievements that have had an enormous role in the "green revolution" increases in agricultural productivity allowing the human population to grow while malnourishment rates shrank. They are also partially responsible for the advent of LED lighting and they have financed the research of a future Nobel laureate.
iMessage offers more: you can send photos and videos, and you see the other end typing if I understand correctly, so you can use it like a chat.
The most famous such case (and probably the one you're thinking of) is Monsanto Canada Inc. v. Schmeiser in which the farmer who was sued almost certainly saved and re-used seed, then lied about the accidental nature of the crop's presence on his farm.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto_Canada_Inc._v._Schmeis...
GitHub: Issues Dashboard for Organizations
The system wasn't designed with that consideration in mind, locking mechanisms can break when you do this and don't know that the folder is in use by another system (functionality varies per OS). If you are moving files to reorganize structure of a project, the .svn folders will cause conflicts, and you'll also loose the history of the move, (instead a continuous history of that structure, it'll appear as a new structure)

Lastly, when supporting my developer pool with SVN, resolving corrupted .svn folders because of moving folders in correctly is a time consuming procedure and usually ends with an export command to kill all the .svn files, and risking blowing away changes in with a commit that ignores history.
I'm curious what the typical texting plan and actual usage numbers are. I have the minimum (400, I think) and I never go over it, but I'm also past the whole social butterfly period in my life.
SASS @extend solves most of the code bloat - if you have lots of elements styled with border-radius: 5px, using @extend, the vendor prefixed code will only appear once in the compiled CSS.

http://sass-lang.com/docs/yardoc/file.SASS_REFERENCE.html#ex...
Steve and I overlapped at Google and I've always felt his missives were pretty clear and actionable. (unlike some which were simply 'this sucks') That this one made it outside the 'plex is probably a mistake, I hope he doesn't pay to high a price for that.

Of course there is the risk that he might get something changed inside of Google (I'm thinking unlikely) it would be a pretty amazing thing if the Google infrastructure was available as a platform (and no AppEngine does not count)
I love how it's spun at the end to make the client look stupid.

Josh should have been fired on the spot for such a ridiculous security oversight.
Unless you've been in the position to turn down a similar offer and did, you should probably not be criticizing.
Why not? All it would take is for Apple to standardize the spec and all of a sudden your BlackBerry/Android using friends are on board. My SMS usage is going to plummet with just iPhones on board, but add in the others and I'm down to reminders that are sent programmatically.
The final (varargs) add-vectors function in the OP is clearly (at least to me) more terse and readable than the original (2 arg) one. I've only written a couple thousand lines of Clojure to date, but code like that already just looks right. The varargs version has less possibilities for errors; the 2 arg version allows for several permutations of first/second to be written incorrectly, or the wrong va/vb used.
Disclaimer: Its running on a dev server that may go down. If there is any interest at all I can put it on a more durable system
The Annoyment Center in iOS 5
I have found the gamification of Hacker News to be detrimental to my experience. Insightful but unpopular comments end up getting buried by retreads of the status quo. It's the tragedy of the commons: if every single person can upvote, the most-upvoted comment will be the one which appeals to every single person.

I prefer the threaded discussion style of kuro5hin back in the day where comments might be upvoted, but they stayed in the same temporal order they were posted in.
While true, I suspect the reason is that it creates that dopamine release we all find so pleasing and addictive. It's why people also do drugs, have sex, play MMO's, etc. Our built-in carrot.

>And in its lack, it's the slow killer of large projects.

It's interesting that one reason for large project failure may be failure to stimulate dopamine release in its programmers.
IOS 5 packs text macros
Twitter CEO: Revenues Are Like Breathing. Necessary, But Not The Point
It's rare that you can find candid descriptions of what it's like to work somewhere.... since Steve felt free to be candid, I figured I'd share my experiences.

FWIW, I believe this is the exact kind of thing that glassdoor.com wants to hear.
> Also, certain browsers (IE?)

chrome frame?
Someone already posted this: http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2008/05/monsanto...

But seriously, if even the politically correct & good natured commenters on HN are unanimous in their hatred for Monsanto, you can be pretty sure it's a pretty despicable company.

So yes, fuck Monsanto, and fuck Cloudant too. Supporting Monsanto in any way is disgusting. You should be ashamed of yourselves.
I could give a fuck how much less electricity my lightbulbs use if it's weighed against actively making it impossible for people to make food.

Also, there's a very good reason you put "green revolution" in quotes, and "agricultural productivity" deserved them in that context also.
I actually see this as a good thing. The people who revolutionize education probably aren't going to be people from the old system. Because people from the old school tend to think of it as "using technology to emulate the current classroom experience"

The real innovators are going to be the people who come to the system from the outside and find a new way of teaching. And it will be much easier for those innovators to gain people's attention if the existing system isn't muddying the water with weak online offerings.
Since the time you made this post, more than one people near you got hired for a minimum wage job.

More importantly, in the next few hours, some more people are going to be hired. One of them can be you.
Photostream... taking pics on the iPhone and watching them appear nearly instant in iPhoto is amazing tech.
That works to level out the playing field so to speak, but falls victim to countless spam and useless comments clogging up the comments page.
Akamai caches weren't pre warmed. It should get better soon.
List of things Apple is releasing today (perhaps incomplete?):

iOS 5 (iPhone, iPad)
Mac OS X 10.7.2 (and maybe 10.6.9?)
Apple TV 4.4 Update
updates to Pages, Numbers, and Keynote for iOS
iPhoto 9.2
Aperture 3.2
Safari 5.1.1 (Mac, Windows)
iCloud Control Panel for Windows
the iCloud web apps
Cards (and associated print/delivery service)
Lion Recovery Update
iTunes Movie Trailers app
Find my Friends app
AirPort Setup utility app
updated iOS Remote app
updated iOS iMovie app
updated Find my iPhone app
store for text message/alert tones
iPhone Configuration Utility 3.4 for Mac OS X
...and of course the iCloud (and iMessage, etc) service itself, including migration tools for MobileMe, etc.

Oh, and the new phone is shipping this week [thanks, smackfu], including its Siri service that relies on a server-side component. And iTunes 10.5 yesterday. And the white iPod touch. OK, I'll stop now.

Just might be a stressful time to be an Apple employee.

I remember it being reported that in the Jobs-Makes-Everybody-Cry-After-MobileMe-Launch-Disaster meeting that he said that one of the major mistakes they made was releasing too much at once - that they should've let MobileMe simmer a while more instead of tying it to the iPhone 3GS launch. Guess we'll see what happens this time. Hard to transition your whole software stack to being integrated with a new cloud service without doing most of these updates at once, I suppose, but they could have shipped the software then waited a month and shipped the phone. Would've been contrary to the "integrated" hardware/software messages that Apple usually has, though.

edit: All in the shadow of a homepage that has nothing but a memorial to Jobs. Classy. And, if they pull it off, should give a nice confidence boost that such feats can be done even in the new era.
"Their technological achievements that have had an enormous role in the 'green revolution' increases in agricultural productivity allowing the human population to grow while malnourishment rates shrank."

The problem is we now have a food system that is:

- reliant on genetic monocultures

- quickly depleting our non-renewable water supplies

- heavily reliant on oil

- causing massive algal blooms and hypoxic zones

- destroying the thickness of the soil

- depleting the soil of micronutrients

- killing the mycorrhizae

The way we're going there is a very real possibility of 1 billion plus people dying in the next fifty years as part of a massive human dieback because of our current Monsanto-style food production.

Not to mention the fact that even today our food is largely devoid of any taste or real nutritional content, and is causing epidemic levels of obesity, diabetes, cancer, etc.