skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think they spent too much time rebuilding the wheel(there own gis engine) and not enough on what services could make money. They could have easily used MongoDB or PostGIS as there engine and built there services on that.
Know your warm-up
Wikipedia has some rumour:

>Bill Gates saw the success of Turbo Pascal "in very personal terms, and 'couldn't understand why [Microsoft's] stuff was so slow. He would bring in poor Greg Whitten [programming director of Microsoft languages] and yell at him for half an hour.' He couldn't understand why Kahn had been able to beat an established competitor like Microsoft."

It's certainly possible that someone was using TurboPascal (discontinued mid 90s) at same time as VisualC or the early version of MS C.
I was just looking into the geolocation issue myself recently. Looked at simplegeo but decided against it. The question really is what is your app going to do. The difficulty really with geolocation these days isnt the lack of data points rather its figuring out the needs of your application and whether or not these services will fit into that. In reality even with these services location based apps are still a pain to develop.
It probably sounds more exciting than it is, but I don't know! It's just as interesting for me to know what it's like for others. How do you internally visualise time? If you had to think about planning a trip to see family at Christmas, how would you hold this concept mentally?
You could say that about any database, though - nothing special about mongo's journaling that makes it "for free" wit h an SSD.
Kottke called Stallman's rider (the whole thing) "crazy and amazing". Then he quoted the parrot thing, probably because it tickled his fancy. I don't agree that that constitutes "ridicule", in Winer's words.
While it would require me setting up a blog, it would probably be worth it.

It could almost be a business venture, given the fact that an off the shelf media product is upwards of $100 here in aus, if you could create a decent linux media center experience for the device, and a nice case, you could flog it for waves hand about $80 per unit and be ahead (provided the mark-up took into consideration all your costs).

Would fly in the face of the educational/not-for-profit Raspberry Inc though.

I'll find somewhere to write about it though.
This is why it is tragic that we only start teaching programming after childhood's neuroplasticity is almost over :(
A good layman's guide for computer science is Danny "Connection Machine" Hillis' "The Pattern On The Stone: The Simple Ideas That Make Computers Work". He builds up from Boolean logic to Turing machines to quantum computing in fewer than 200 pages.
Yeah, I guess I should make the point that if you don't put the journal on SSD (and you only need a few gigs of SSD to journal terabytes of spinning disk storage), you will see significant slowdown.
Postgis is far from perfect and in actuality is more geared towards geographical survey types of applications then location based. They used cassandra at least for some of their architecture which personally i think was the right way to go. The problem is that theres really not enough demand for these types of applications yet plus they really didnt offer a strong enough platform.
Having just downloaded the windows version, it works very nicely - much better than the original released version built from source two weeks ago.
That's actually pretty similar for me, too. If I 'zoom in' to a day, it's harder to see details of the future than if I'm out at a 'year' level.
Good article, though the whole premise of people being forced to manage passwords is screwed. We are working hard at Mepin - www.mepin.com - to get rid of passwords one by one. Our premise is that people are much more capable of managing a key - a physical key like a phone or a USB key. Care to agree?
Report: French Nuclear Company Areva Hit by Virus
Urban Airship acquires SimpleGeo
Pretty much the coolest database fact-checking I've ever done
RMS is not a "weird guy", he's an obnoxious dickhead. If you disagree, you haven't been in a room with him for longer than 5 minutes. Sure, he's made very important contributions to FOSS, but -- I invoke Godwin's Law! -- Hitler made many important contributions as well, but I don't see many people standing up for him.
Some folks miss the point. We only make fun of Stallman in an attempt to change his behaviour in a way that benefits both him and others. For instance, rms smells bad. If he could be persuaded to smell less bad, then everybody would benefit.

Ridicule is a valuable social mechanism for giving negative feedback to those who behave inappropriately. For those who say "but can't we give this feedback in a non-hurtful way?", the answer is no, for the same reason that your brain can't make pain non-painful -- some people are too damn stubborn to listen to non-painful feedback.

Here is a video of Richard Stallman, in the middle of a talk, eating something he's just picked off his foot: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I25UeVXrEHQ
9 Rules for Clear and Intuitive Icons
rofl I was talking about Bill Gates.
I stand against Stallman. I'm no bully. I don't personally know or insult him. But I do disagree with his position on software (I agree with some of what he says, but I think we end up falling in opposing corners nevertheless).

But standing against someone and pointing out why you disagree I think is quite in the spirit of Stallman himself.

With that said, I don't know the extent of the abuse that Stallman has received from others, but its not obvious to an outsider what the abuse is. Some mocking over a rider? You should hear the abuse I've gotten over some of my haircuts.

I will say that while I disagree with RMS I do think his influence has been large and positive for most of his career. I don't think he's a particularly good spokesperson, but he makes up for it in other ways. I've even listed RMS as one I think is on the short list of potential Turing Award winners (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2305496).

I stand against Stallman, but I'm glad he's there to stand against.
There used to be a "Winer number", which was the number of times Winer had gone apeshit on you, typically in response to an innocuous comment.
So you have spent $14,700. You could have reduced that to $4,000 by outsourcing at a high $20/hr and got it done sooner. You might have been collecting revenue by now. Your project would have been further along and you'd have more time to enjoy life, move the project even further along or do another project.
Neat idea, although I think you need to make it a bit clearer what the product is on that page. I had to click a few times to get the executive summary. That being said, I'm a bit grumpy I didn't try to develop a similar idea I had a while ago.
The idea is great, but it's not "in media res" which means "INTO the midst of things" not "IN the midst of things".

She might not have had Latin, so may not have known it
was a literary technique in Latin, and perhaps Greek, a way to start a story with no intro, just by jumping right into the action.
I was being diplomatic.
When 10gen finally push out the lock per collection changes, it will improve mongodb significantly. We have a couple of collections that are heavy write, and a couple of others that are heavy read, and we can't run them on the same instance due to lock contention - we have to run two separate mongod processes, because the global lock kills performance.

As long as you understand that issue, you can work around it, and there are future changes coming that will address it so that will be fantastic
The way your comment was going, I seriously thought you were going to say that people had a closet desire to publicly eat toejam.
tl;dr summary

1) I was a popular guy in school. Ridiculously popular.

2) Although I was popular (even if I didn't hang out with the other kids), I am still a good guy because I hung around the weird kid in school. He still acted weird, but I was a good guy so I stuck it out.

3) Did I mention he never stopped being weird? Did I mention I was popular even though I didn't hang out with all the other people?

4) I was popular in high school so I fully expected to be popular on the Internet. I blazed a path and these people didn't even care, or like me! Editors note: Note the lack of introspection. Perhaps they don't like you despite the path you blazed (or claim to have blazed)?

5) I released my life's work under the GPL and the internet ganged up on me for it. Even strangers in real life picked on me. Why aren't I still popular?

6) Kottle highlighted a single odd entry in RMS's rider which made me ill. I'll defend RMS by saying "YEAH, so he's weird!"

errata: Winer went to a high school which had recess.
How to lock a Gmail account for more than 5 days
This happend to me, its pretty easy to lock any gmail account for more than 5 days (and counting...). This is what I did:

- Search for some useless mails, for example do a search of @somedomain.com [I got 100k results]
- Select ALL those mails and send them to trash
- Go to your trash folder and try to empty that folder
- voila! you dont have access to your mail account anymore!

You will get a Temporary Error (500) Numeric Code: 93

If someone sends a mail to you it will bounce!

It looks like gmail server is still trying to delete those 100k emails from my trash folder.

(if someone at G reads this my email is ericgil (at) gmail)
thanks for the great insights into the chinese entrepreneur landscape.

i am definitely interested in learning more about the details when and how the government becomes involved in the startup process. the reasons why companies like google and facebook have been denied entry to china (and why the chinese government supports its own versions, baidu and renren) are attributed to the fact that china does not want a US company to have access to the immense trove of data about its citizens (though other countries are ok with that). it is interesting to speculate how the internet and mobile startup culture in china will evolve as the rest of the world continues to innovate also.
Using an iPhone 4S without iTunes – ever
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This is what we call an "Ad Hominem Tu Quoque.” How does it validate or invalidate his words?
IBM answering to Oracle NoSQL database
Nevertheless, Winer's point about Stallman is valid and I personally agree with him.

I don't care who you are, or where you're from. Even if "I disapprove of what you say, ... I will defend to the death your right to say it" (- Voltaire? no primary source)

The internet would be a lot smaller and less interesting if we only let "normal" people in!
That's how I read it, too. This whole thing is overblown and Kottke is being used as an excuse for some drama.
So, here's the problem I have: I agree with you. But I also had the same reaction the parent did. It's an irrational, unfair response, but I am so tired of reading Winer's writing that I find I'm not capable of considering his points. I even know this about myself, yet I still read the comments here, then I still read his post.

Short version: yes it's unfair, but yes, in this case, I'm unable to separate the message from the messenger.
Your summary has a very sarcastic tone, just saying.
Uncharted 3 Comes Out Tomorrow Here's the Launch Trailer
Cordon multi-target photo-radar system leaves no car untagged (video)
I was actually heartened by the fact that most of the posts I read on HN about Stallman's rider had the same reaction I did: hey, all that sounds pretty reasonable.
Spot on. I feel quite sure people do think in something like this way. I've thought about it in the past as well and have been working on some similar ideas for mapping: http://danieljmaxwell.tumblr.com/post/12074739965/a-better-k...
I meant: "did not entice researches to have a 2nd look"
The idea isn't a new one, there are other companies doing this (geckoboard is the most popular one that I can recall) -- ducksboard are just doing it differently.
A good posting showing the effect of setting thread affinity for version 1.0 of the Disruptor.

http://java.dzone.com/articles/java-threads-steroids
I don't know if the European privacy laws would apply to freely offered public information such as the stuff a person has on their public twitter profile. I always assumed it was for things like personally identifiable data that you gather through other means (e.g. a user signs up on your site directly).

The idea of people having an expectation of privacy in a broadcast medium feels preposterous to me.
And on behalf of Australia, I'd like to say a big "well screw you too" to whoever designed that glassware.
It's not fair to tie all criticism of rms to bullying. This whole dust-up appears to have been started by a reaction to a post by kottke in which it's not at all clear to me that rms is even being mocked.

I'm not denying rms gets unfairly criticized, or that bullying is bad (and the part about your son was poignant). But all criticism of rms is not bullying. In fact, since his position is so important, it would be wrong _not_ to hold him to a higher standard.
actually RMS is an excellent spokesperson which is why the movement is so successful.
Anyway, much later in life, I was treated like Sam

I had a hard time taking his post seriously after this. As someone who was the "weird kid" growing up this sentence is so insulting, and so far past egotistical, that I'm not even sure there's a word capable of describing it. It's like someone trying to sympathize with a famine victim by complaining that they missed lunch yesterday.
Same reason you can't be a mechanical engineer without having taken a shop class.

You can sit in front a CAD and FEM package all day - but if you don't appreciate how the things will actually be built you aren't going to be a really good engineer.
Blogpost (now pulled from Urban Airship blog):

Today I’m excited to the acquisition of SimpleGeo. You can read Jay Adelson’s post here. [Dead link]

Both Urban Airship and SimpleGeo started two and a half years ago and I’ll never forget when Crash Corp Inc. (the original SimpleGeo) launched as we both went live with our new sites on the same day with the same font; Museo. We’ve known each other over that entire time and shared lots of discussions and even did a partnership deal in the last couple of months. As we continued to talk and engage we realized that putting our two companies together would make for a really interesting offering for our combined customers.

We’ve learned that our customers (brands, retailers, etailers, media, social networking sites, games and others) want more than just generic tools. Instead of building blocks they want a complete solution that can be used by the entire company to help engage, monetize, locate and understand their mobile user base. Urban Airship will fold in the SimpleGeo product suite to offer a complete set of solutions for our ever growing customer base. Urban Airship is now the leading platform for mobile cloud services in the market. This is a fantastic win for both Urban Airship and SimpleGeo customers and investors.

Obviously there are many things that we need to work out while we make this transition and we’ll be working closely with existing customers from both companies to make sure they are up to speed on our future plans for the combined roadmap.

We’re excited to be continuing to build the business, excited that the SG team is joining Urban Airship, excited about having an office in San Francisco and most of all excited about the next phase of PaaS that we’re going to dominate in years to come.

You can still read it through Google Reader: http://cl.ly/3j0T36272H2r3J0r1N0Q

Original URL: http://urbanairship.com/blog/2011/10/31/urban-airship-acquir...
Exactly. Where I used to work, anyone without a quant background would be urged to buy a copy of Grinold and Kahn the bible you suggested above or "Quantitative Equity Portfolio Management" by Chincarini and Kim.
Your argument reminds me—painfully—of arguments in favour of physical bullying. “Hey, a few clouts to the head and he’ll get the idea.”

I don’t hit my children, no matter how stubborn they are.
Lector 3M MD6000
How does "my ideas should be considered on their merits" jibe with major self-promotion?
Bottom line:
In SV people who make stuff are respected.
In NYC people who make money are respected.

Obviously this is not true 100% across the board, but anyone who has experienced both cities will immediately grok what I'm talking about.
First Android device certified for secure DoD communications
He didn't say it was 'ridiculous'. He said it was 'crazy and amazing'. Not quite the same thing; even 'crazy' can be a compliment in some contexts. ("Here's to the crazy ones...")
One reason the blob on the CPU is so different is the way it interfaces with your code. In that regard, it is almost never flexible enough and the exposed interface surface is generally enormous. Your kernel version is supported only at the mercy of nvidia or whoever.

Firmware chunks have a very simple interface: load. Anybody with the firmware file and some basic documentation can make it happen.
I'm sure the idea that there are no jobs out there is exaggerated. A MFE graduate can still find a position somewhere in a bank doing something vaguely related to finance. But the days when anyone vaguely familiar with PDEs could waltz into a bank and quickly start earning $300K may be drawing to a close.

There will, however, always be lucrative jobs for those who are truly brilliant and willing to work on stuff which is kinda boring.
Couchbase now includes the GeoCouch R-tree indexer by default: http://blog.couchbase.com/new-release-geocouch-extension

This is the same indexer that is powering open gov't projects around the world: http://maxogden.com/#blog/diy-open-data-catalog
If people were following stallman arounnd when he was trying to do his shopping or whatever and jeering at him or threatening him or making malicious comments about his weight or his beard or something then that would be bullying him.

He makes public comment as the leader of a large software organisation, many people strongly disagree with his statements and post their reasons for this on technology related forums.

I don't really see an issue with 99% of what is posted here on HN, juvenile or downright nasty comments usually get downvoted pretty hard.
This is so over the top that I can't decide if it's a deliberate troll or not. But if you really think this kind of ridicule and lashing out is an appropriate response to a blog post about needless ridicule then... well, I don't know. Shame on you I guess. This is just sad.
I empathize with you. While I read Dave’s words without trouble, I confess that I struggle with Eric Raymond’s words for reasons unrelated to the words themselves.

It’s not easy for me to walk my talk, so I am loathe to criticize you for being just like me.
Canonical to Expand Ubuntu for Smartphones, Tablets
Congrats jdavis and team! These guys are awesome.
I'd really hate to live in a world where everyone was bland, unoriginal, or even-worse so completely dishonest that they pretend that there is nothing that makes them the least bit unique.
Indeed – Kottke didn't indicate shunning-disapproval or even necessarily 'ridicule' (as both Winer and others downthread summarize Kottke).

Kottke's chosen words aren't always meant negatively. ("Here's to the crazy ones...")

In Kottke's context, he's given a fair description: the rider is, objectively, quite peculiar and illuminating about Stallman's intense priorities. But whether a reader takes that as a reason to shun and ostracize Stallman, as with disrespectful 'ridicule', is up to the reader.

Do we think Kottke would counsel Stallman, if we were in some bizarro universe where Stallman sought others' advice, not to include those two paragraphs, because they're too ridiculous?

I think it's equally likely Kottke would chuckle and say, "the bit about the parrots is crazy and brilliant, better even than the Van Halen thing... move it up higher!"

Read Stallman charitably. Read Kottke charitably. Read everyone charitably.
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*Perch� possiamo non dirci jobsiani. And move on - Luca De Biase
I published notificon (an ender compatible library) to the npm registry, but it does not appear on the toolbox. How do I go about submitting packages to the toolbox?
> many people strongly disagree with his statements and post their reasons for this on technology related forums

I’m 100% ok with this. In my essay a few years ago about optimism (there’s a link in the post), I suggest we we try hard to praise people and criticize behaviours. That’s where I try to go. I think it’s perfectly ok to criticize words and choices. I try to avoid criticizing people. It may seem like a meaningless distinction, but to me there’s a world of difference between:

So-and-so is a dick, and:

So-and-so wrote some dickish words.
Oh, absolutely.

I'm not sure I'm actually prepared to endorse school myself as the solution to the passion "problem". (I was being literal when I said that I expected the article to do so; however, I'm not convinced that I agree with the article ;). But if I were to do so I'm counting the hard sciences as part of any well-rounded education.
Facebooks Trims Reliance on Generators at Swedish Server Farm
One Way to Automate Your Online Marketing Efforts
Thanks for everyone's thoughts on how each participant here can help all participants enjoy a more useful, thoughtful, and informative online community on Hacker News. I find it interesting that despite the thrust of the original questions, many suggestions in replies are suggestions that can only be implemented by forum management. Forum management may or may not make future changes in the forum software or forum rules, but I was especially curious about what everyday users of the forum (like me) can today and every day to make the online community better, one user at a time, all for one and one for all.
Dave Winer's feeling butthurt about the bad press he got in 2004 over abruptly taking 3,000 blogs offline at his free hosting site Weblogs.Com without giving those users any notice:

http://lawmeme.research.yale.edu/modules.php?name=News&f...

A year later he sold Weblogs.Com without all those freeloaders to VeriSign for $2.3 million, so you'd think he'd feel pretty good regardless.

But nobody nurses a grudge like him. Except maybe me.
Edit: And for Haskell, achieving needed performance can be quite tricky with regard to its laziness.

But Snap is driven by enumerators/iteratees (via the enumerator package), which make it much easier to do fast near-constant space IO.

I have built a web application that uses Snap to query large (parse) treebanks, and it was easy to make it performant.
An Interview With Kurt Gödel
How to Become a Spy
could someone explain to me why it's relevant for ny startups to have billboards? i just don't understand that point at all.
Prolog is great for being a really early logic programming language but compared to modern languages it just isn’t very clever or powerful. If you’re interested in logic programming have a look at Mercury: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2959167
How is selectively quoting something from a larger document in order to call it "crazy" not ridicule? That sounds like the very definition of "ridicule", no? If Kottke wanted to go into a discussion about whether or not this kind of rider is helpful or hurtful to RMS's cause, that would be productive. But this is a full-on put down, done in public.

If this isn't ridicule, then what is?
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