skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I noticed a third of the photos are from Durham, NC.

I grew up there, and used to work for a startup there. In many ways I didn't like Durham so much -- way too suburban and sprawling for me, most of my friends lived in cookie-cutter apartments, the sense of local character was kind of faint. But it definitely does have a lot of things going for it, in particular a critical mass of talented, energetic people.

It's the kind of place where if you want to try out X, you will find a surprisingly large and dedicated group of people doing X -- for just about any value of X.

And, to add to that, I've noticed that the center city has been rejuvenated a lot since 2004 when I left.
Still won't do partial word searches.

I use Gmail's backend but I can't use something that won't find “client” in “mynewclient”.

Amazing that a company known for search can't provide this simple and essential feature.
You are correct.

Fortunately, the format if question is an open
specification[1], so you can use a[2] number[3] of[4] tools[5] to convert the OVF to an interim format.

That is, obviously, a pretty ugly workaround.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Virtualization_Format

[2] http://www.vmware.com/support/developer/ovf/

[3] http://www.citrix.com/english/ss/downloads/details.asp?downl...

[4] http://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch01.html#ovf

[5] http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/server-cloud/system-center/vi...
Though I worry about how much power Google wields, I think this is a bad example. EE and its ilk are designed to rank as high as possible on Google specifically. Their whole product was (more or less) SCO - if they could have ranked higher without content, their pages would be empty aside from ads. Their only purpose is to draw eyeballs to ads - if they didn't appear on Google, no one would use them.

Ranking aggregation lower than original sources is a reasonable optimization and the huge traffic impact was caused by the unusual entanglement with Google's specific algorithmic implementation.
Many of the responses to other petitions are the same. A whole lot of words, nothing actually said.
That is exactly what a good politician does, talk a lot while saying nothing. Of course, when its written down rather than being delivered in person by a smooth talker, its pretty obvious whats going on.
Matt Blaze on "Key Escrow from a Safe Distance" [pdf]
Great point.

Concept videos are for people who don't get - as in grok - the concept already. These people should not be in positions of power.

Contrast this with the recent thread about "for a successful presentation to Jeff Bezos, delete every third paragraph - he'll fill in the gaps and still figure out on the spot what you missed and how your bleeding-edge new idea can be improved." Bezos and his kind don't need concept videos.
Sure,

I implemented the paper "How to squeeze a lexicon" http://www.n3labs.com/pdf/lexicon-squeeze.pdf with a few tweaks a while back. It uses a simple fixed format for all nodes, which works very well for datasets which contains many common prefixes and suffixes. For example, a polish dictionary containing 1.3 million strings is compressed down to 726KB. One of the thing I'm using it for is in a database for geopip stuff. It uses less than 1 byte per IP and can answer queries such as "find all values for the given IP-range" in O(k).

Dawid Weiss has a talk about how fine state machines are used in lucene at http://vimeo.com/26517310

The two approaches I've seen used to store key-value pairs in lexicons are:

1. Embed the value using a magic separator. E.g. (key0, value0), (key1, value1) becomes "key0.value1" and "key1.value1". The lexicon supports fast prefix lookups, which is used when looking up a key. As an added bonus, it supports multiple values per key out of the box, and you can easily find all key/values for a given prefix.

2. Add support for perfect minimal hashing to the lexicon. It will give you a unique ID for all keys, which can be used to do a direct lookup in another array containing the values. How to do this is not covered by the paper, but is an interesting exercise for the reader :-)

Now, back to the article. As cperciva mentioned, the dataset in the article isn't completely static and the usefulness for finite state machines drops fast if they need to be recompiled often. However, the key-value pairs are immutable, so it would be straightforward to implement a level-based scheme by using a simple structure for new items and move them into compressed lexicons periodically.
How did they do this?
Personally, I can't think of a situation which calls for one of these potentially ambiguous sliders over, say, a checkbox.

The imitation that the author is critiquing is poorly designed in my eyes, but even the iOS original is a bit ambiguous to me. Is the label on the button that of the current state, or of the state that the switch would attain if pressed? It's the former in the iOS control, but I could definitely see people getting confused over that.

On a different note, here's a screenshot of the same iOS slider in a different locale (posted in the comments on the article): http://d.pr/VHZF. Maybe it's the fact that "|" and "O" aren't often used to mean "on" and "off" in my English locale, but that just looks unpleasing to me.
In my opinion, if you can't figure out what a function does by its name and its parameter names, it is a poorly named and thus poorly documented function.

I think function and variable naming is the one of the most important aspects of programming. Without good naming, you can easy double the amount of time it takes to edit and extend functionality.
This is true. I know someone who has bluntly me told me they don't want to think at their job.
What I found most ludicrous? Ballmer relying on Gates' taste to select one device or another.

I know right? Why ask arguably the most successful businessman in history for his opinion? Stupid Ballmer.

But then how can a project go so bad (I am remembering the Kin) and nobody notices until there are 130 people working on it for a year? Here, when we have a stupid idea, it's usually killed at the 5-people-involved stage.

That happens quite easily. The story I've heard about the Kin (with no verifiable sources) is that they built the phone they planned on designing for the most part. And had the phone shipped as a feature phone it may have been a blockbuster. But Verizon changed their tune due to it being so late and made it a smartphone. But it was a great idea, up until it was a really bad idea -- with contractual obligations for marketing and delivery.

Oddly, the neutered Kin is one of Verizon's top selling feature phones now.
I am using a HTC ChaCha. Before this I was using the Milestone. It is a huge problem.

To the down-voters, pay a visit to the App Store and see the reviews.
Project Moonshot? What's wrong, "Project Vaporware" was taken?
Aren’t you a bit too sensitive? It seems to me like they are pretty clearly suggesting that a few MB don’t matter if you have a 2GB plan but also that things might be different if you have a different plan. All in all they seem to pretty clearly say that Siri doesn’t use much data. I can’t see what’s linkbait about that.
Hi Ryan, I don't understand what this is. Is it a autoresponder with some articles from famous people that we receive regularly?

How does the progress tracking work?
Lots of people have listed the BSDs and said which task each was meant for. Lots of people have also been completely wrong. There's a whole internet of misinformation out there if you're really interested.
Googlebots Go Smart
For every old user that hates the change, there are a million people who have never used gmail before and will like it when they switch. Why should progress be held back because you can't adapt?

(I don't really like Google's new style either, but it doesn't really upset me or damage my experience in any way.)
Movie download sites
1. Go to a video.

2. Click subtitles.

3. Click the subtitle widget.

4. Click "subtitle homepage".

5. Hover over "download subtitles".

6. Click txt to download a plain-text transcript.

I'm pretty sure most of the Khan Academy videos have subtitles (at least English ones).

Disclaimer: I work for universalsubtitles.org, the site that handles all the Khan Academy subtitles.
Google Can Now Execute AJAX & JavaScript For Indexing
As a data point: At SpiderOak, 50% of customers purchase paid storage within the first 4 days of opening an account. Of course there's still a long tail of events after.
The big issue I see is one that Apple and many companies overlook. One reason that apple is where Apple is at as far a success goes is due to the fact that an overwhelming demographic of creators use Macs, From Audio, to Video all the way down to Development many times the Mac is the choice of the creator. People see this, and people fashion themselves of the same mold as the creators, I think this is overlooked and I think it is one of the core reasons that Apple is wildly successful, people perceive whether right on wrong that the creators use Mac's. I don't know if some of those creators in specialized fields like video production, will be so willing to move to laptops that do not compare to the Mac Pro line. So the question becomes, what happens with the Mac as a platform looses those creators, what happens if those creators find a new platform and that platform becomes known as the platform the creative use. I don't know if it means anything at all, but not knowing the answer sure seems like a huge bet to me, when all that hangs in the balance is a product line that does not have as great of sales as other lines. If it where me I would find out the answer to that question before I killed the line. Because those that need that kind of horse power will be moving to a different platform, and not moving to the Mac Book Pro.
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As it becomes easier for people to find work, folks who could have done some work but were never given an opportunity to do so will get those opportunities. Basically the talent pool will expand.

That's an important point. There are people out there who are able to do work, but who can't find a job where they live. This is the case in the Philippines, where there are highly-educated people (I personally know people with engineering degrees who literally cannot find jobs). Giving these people the opportunity to do a few hours of work here and there, especially at competitive rates offered by a global marketplace, will definitely expand the talent pool.
The post said that people who get bent out of shape about racism are backwards.

Imagine the company not hiring a non-white interviewee, and that person doing thorough research.

That comment is findable in search engines.

k33n has left himself open to accusations of racism, and put his company at risk of lawsuits.
I signed up and quickly went through the tour, but now I realize I went too quickly. I don't know how to redo the tour (or if it's even possible), and can't find anything with a similar explanation.

Then again, it's mostly self-explanatory: just click on a Play Now button. :)

(EDIT: Hah! This is kind of cool. I'm playing slots, except not spending any money. (Au contraire, the more I save the more I can play.)
> The Khan Academy's exercise framework is an important step in this direction, and I hope they continue to improve it.

They certainly are: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_EU6w8iIGQ&feature=chann...

If you want to help, it's on github: https://github.com/Khan/khan-exercises/

It's super easy to write new exercises.
I wonder why can't interface design be more granular, taking many little steps to transform from one look to another over months and years?

We don't know when someone is aging from day to day, but if we see them year to year then we can see the change.
I think the whole point of the involvement of computers and the internet as fair godmother in their scenario was to handwave away problem 2 through someone else's very hard work at making a very, very good process for automatically vetting potential employees.
Another advantage to OpenBSD - For at least the last 10 years, configuring a network interface has been done through ifconfig.

I'm willing to wager that 10 years from now - configuring an interface will still be done through ifconfig.
Seagate kills 5900rpm drives
Real-World Kinect Interaction From Microsoft Research
I see a concept video as something that would serve as the unifying vision for a company. Something that delineates something along the lines of this kind of template:

We are going to work on creating a set of products X, which will enable these ways of living and working Y, which in turn will spawn these associated needs Z, and here is a scenario acted out where we can make a case that this is a vision that we should go for. When designing our products, this video is the high level reference point for the product world we are moving towards.
I can think of at least one potentially valuable use of concept videos: customer validation. Dropbox used this to great effect, as I recall. I could be wrong, but I thought that the video Drew launched (here on HN) was of a product that didn't fully exist yet. But I could be mistaken.

Either way, I think there's tremendous value in being able to sell (or get a verbal commitment of a sale) a product before you have to build it. Just make sure you can build it.

EDIT: Here's the thread where Drew showed Dropbox to HN. Video is long gone though... http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863
That isn't because they were so big that they could say programmer, it is because that is what it used to be called before self-promotion inflated all job titles to the point of hyperbole.
(http://news.locr.co)

(http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3183553)

(http://arxiv.org/)
When I read it in my head, I read it as "let". As in "x = 5" -> "let x be 5".
2009 version of responsive layout?
When I was an intern at Microsoft, they let us walk around the Future Home.

One of the features was a countertop screen that displayed information like the time and date. I asked the tour guide about how the countertop screen worked, since it didn't look or feel like an LCD - the images were much too dim and the surface felt like acrylic. She laughed and said that they hadn't known what to do, so the night before it was supposed to be finished, someone ran out to the department store and bought some translucent plastic, and then installed a video projector underneath the counter, pointing up. Sure enough, the cabinet was glued shut, so as not to ruin the illusion.

Everything else felt similar. Standard (and awesome) futuristic concepts, but executed cheaply, and not really usable beyond the staged usage scenario. It was like showing off a flying car that can only fly a foot off the ground and by the way you're not allowed to look underneath.
The resurrection of SciRuby is great news, but the use of the GPL was one of the first things I noticed, and I strongly recommend using a more permissive license. The MIT license would be a good choice. In addition to avoiding the fears associated with the viral nature of the GPL, using the MIT license would be more in line with the culture of the Ruby community. Most Ruby software I know of (though not, strangely enough, Ruby itself) is MIT-licensed, and people will be more comfortable with SciRuby if it conforms to this expectation.
Secure Languages and Frameworks
Exactly. That is the weakness in your business model to which I referred. I'm not saying that it's a failing in your business model. Clearly you're doing fine despite it. But it is a relative weakness against Apple's integrated model.
You improve the comment system at the cost of all the other features.
Strangely, he has a video that describes just that, but it's on vimeo: http://vimeo.com/28743348
I never said I was. You can run a private EC2 infrastructure and it is sometimes more handy than having your own hypervisor server.
When I first watched the BMW video, I thought you had a good point, but then I watched the Microsoft video. The difference is that BMW is innovating on an actual product they can make now and learn from. Microsoft's video envisions translucent, credit card size touchscreen phones and people interacting with holograms.

There's some value in Microsoft's video, but given the unnecessary production costs, acting, etc., all of which is divorced from the engineering team[1], it sounds like their time would be better spent taking an approach more like BMW's.
Exactly. And it is WAY cheaper. $100/month gets you more users and one less thing you have to worry about backing up and keeping up and running.
I don't like fixed position UI and scrolling within a small section. I prefer the whole page to scroll.

I am staying on the old version.
It seems that BMW actually built a prototype, which lets the company test out specific ideas about how to change something (in this case the surface of the car). That's very different from asking people to imagine how things will be 10 years from now.

BMW Page on the GINA: http://www.bmwusa.com/Standard/Content/AllBMWs/ConceptVehicl...
Introducing Immutant - a true, enterprise-grade application server for Clojure
"How did we lose sight of the fact that this is the entire purpose of stylesheets? To separate the display of information for various devices/platforms/needs. So yea, they should provide a "netbook style", and any other. That's really the point of it all."

Seems to me, "a couple of years ago". That's when any real innovation in CSS seemed to cease.*

* I can hear people arguing already. By "innovation in CSS", I don't mean "cool, awesome tricks" like "being able to render strange bullets in pure CSS by bastardizing four divs, a span, and a dozen lines of stylesheet", or "a bargraph library that outputs pure CSS".

Those are cool, awesome tricks, to be sure, hacks, but the very definition of "solving the wrong problem".
Behavior/discipline will necessarily be noisier in a conscripted organization than in a self-selected volunteer organization. I don't think you can generalize that away.
does it get any more self-serving?
Startup Lesson - Why a vacation is not just good for you
(Seattle + H1B OK)
My team at Amazon.com (Customer Service Technology) is hiring SDEs!

We are a small team of 7 engineers, but we each develop systems from the ground up, straight from DB design to front-end UI. We deploy new features almost every day.

As the team is moving into exciting new projects (machine learning, schedule optimization etc), I encourage you to come join us and be a part of the next generation of Customer Service Technology.

Here is the official posting and how to apply: http://www.amazon.com/gp/jobs/129914/ref=j_sr_2_t?ie=UTF8...
Wait, I'm not arguing that. I agree, Google hasn't done anything to warrant being bothered by the government. Perhaps I wasn't clear, but when I said the government has a blanket policy on trusts, I meant they catch Google without real justification based on incredible flexibility in how they qualify something as a monopoly. If a company is a de facto monopoly that's a good thing, it's superlative and, realistically, not abusive.
I agree with you javert, that increased efficiency and productivity are good things. But I do so for a fairly uncommon reason: I think that we have very little idea of the capacity of one person.

Our economy is still marked by massive disruption: technological innovation isn't just limited to services. Process engineering, chemical engineering, astronomy, physics, linguistics, archeology, ... they're all experiencing disruption at an increasing pace. They all increase GDP.

To me, this is an indication that as we provide people with powerful tools, their minds expand to use those tools. The exponential feedback may become much more smooth (less "disruptive") but I think we're a long way from a local maximum.

The current economy still "feels" like an idling 2-stroke leaf blower to me. It sputters and races because its carburetor and ignition are, well, inefficient.

What would it take to get a jet engine-like economy?
Astonishingly, people have been known to disagree about what the Supreme Court's holdings mean. You keep bringing up the same set of cases, but I don't agree with your analysis. Why? Because it seems to me that some of the time you're relying on the SC's dicta rather than its holding, and only the holding really counts; and furthermore, you seem oblivious to questions about standards of review and so forth.

If the circuit courts were flouting the judgment of the Supreme Court as blatantly as you allege, how come the Supreme Court hasn't granted certiorari on a suitably iconic case and reiterated its judgment in even clearer terms? It's not like there is any rule that prevents that, a grant of certiorari only requires 4 justices to sign on.
Has any online petition every accomplished anything? Serious question.
46% of consumers preferring Windows = 46% of consumers who are clueless to what a tablet really is.

I've had a touchscreen LCD hooked up to my Windows 7 machine for about a year and a half. Beyond scrolling through web pages it is unusable. The Windows UI is designed for a keyboard and mouse. Now take this 22" touch screen I have and bring it down to 7". Good luck doing anything.

Obviously Microsoft's answer to this is the new Metro overlay (or whatever they are calling it for Windows 8.) If consumers are swiping through two different versions with a Windows 8 tablet, and one of them is barely usable on a touch screen, its going to flop.

I use Windows on my iPad -- by remoting in to my desktops. The only app that I have found usable is LogMeIn because of how the mouse cursor is controlled. Its not a pleasant experience but I can get minor work done at able 1/4th speed or less. You can't release a device that does that out of the box and put your brand on it.

Microsoft appears at a loss on how to move from the keyboard & mouse world to the touchscreen & voice one. Windows has tons of software for it, none of which was designed for touchscreen & voice world. I never have used this phrase before, but Microsoft is trying to have their cake and eat it too. Instead they will get nothing.
The previous story on this provided the perfect response: "If millions of people carried machine shops around in their backpacks, mechanical engineering would be incompatible with the patent system too." (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3182882)
That reminds me, have you removed the blocking function or does it only work in Chrome?

I tried to find a manual for a particular dishwasher today. Holy crap was the search results useless. With the exception of a site which didn't load and one which was a list of people who wanted to know if anybody else had the manual all other results of the three first pages where made for adsense sites or sites designed to harvest email address.

Which would have been one thing, but not one of them had the damn manual (one tried to suggest the manual for a Macbook air!?).

So it seems you still have a long way to go with Panda.

But the reason I ask is that I couldn't figure out how to ban those sites (I was using my iPad at the time).
btw, I wrote this PlusFeed bookmarklet to open the appropriate PlusFeed2 URL for the Google+ user page you are looking:

javascript:void(open("http://plusfeed2.appspot.com/"+location.href.match(/^https?:\/\/plus\.google\.com\/(\d{21})\/?.*$/)[1]));
So on a team I manage, we've used github::fi (github enterprise looks to be the next evolution) for the past year. If you don't have an option to put code out onto github.com, then it's great to essentially have github.com inhouse - minus of course all the public repos.

We find it's the developers go-to place, so using the wiki along with where the source is hosted, is fantastic. As a dev team manager, I love the browsing the codebase via the web browser, reviewing what's going on in the code base instead of pulling down code locally.

From a customer, if you've got the funds, and can't go with github.com hosted, then it's the next best thing. It's been rock solid.