skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The higher up the food chain, the more concise you want to be and your article feels verbose to me. The line:

"Since I'm a big proponent of public clouds, my definition also includes the use of virtualization, but yours doesn't have to."

is a prime example of being verbose and has the added consequence of detracting the reader from your actual point.

Also, you say you'll cover the technologies more in depth in later columns so why bother beginning to go into depth about NoSQL now? More fat you can trim.

If I'm not mistaken the the point of this article is two pronged. First to introduce them to the idea that Big Deal is a set of tools and techniques. Second to get them to appreciate the fact that "This data screams to be mined for valuable insights." You introduced and developed the first idea enough but it feels like you only brushed over the 2nd idea. The google example was good, you just need to drive home the idea of valuable insight from large sets of data in as close to real time as possible.

Your opening is a little rough too. You essentially have two separate opening paragraphs.
The Impact of Social Media on User Engagement
An interesting, but technology-focused perspective. Another, glaringly obvious, difference is that Pinterest and Fab both appeal to a neglected market with a neglected content, namely, women and their "interests" (obvious stereotypes here, but the point still stands). Etsy has been killing it for the same reason.
I just signed up and starting exploring Ifttt, and WOW. This is EXTREMELY useful and practical (at least for me). My kind of site/app.

A few uses off the top of my head:

- When searching for a new apartment or house and using Craigslist as one of your sources, use Ifttt to get a text/email when a new, relevant Craigslist post appears matching your search criteria

- Automatically add a new Wordpress blog post to Buffer when published
One way would be to that the companies interview you in your countries. This usually happens with on-campus recruitment.

Other way is that you are on some other visa (other than B-1), that does allows you to solicit, give interviews, etc. For example at the end of F-1 study visa, you can go around and shop for some time to get a job, and the company will then sponsor for your H1B.
Link bait titles irk me. Nevertheless nice post on some of the MRI internals.
Go at Heroku for distributed systems
Unicode of course takes up more space and fills up your buffer sooner. Looks like the jump happens after 8 chars.

Benchmark.bm do |bench|
run("と", bench)
run("がと", bench)
run("りがと", bench)
run("ありがと", bench)
run("ありがとあ", bench)
run("ありがとあり", bench)
run("ありがとありが", bench)
run("ありがとありがと", bench)
run("ありがとありがとあ", bench)
run("ありがとありがとあり", bench)
run("ありがとありがとありと", bench)
run("ありがとありがとありがと", bench)
end

user system total real
2 chars 0.210000 0.000000 0.210000 ( 0.212420)
3 chars 0.200000 0.000000 0.200000 ( 0.199957)
4 chars 0.200000 0.000000 0.200000 ( 0.199356)
5 chars 0.200000 0.000000 0.200000 ( 0.199142)
6 chars 0.200000 0.000000 0.200000 ( 0.198047)
7 chars 0.190000 0.000000 0.190000 ( 0.198984)
8 chars 0.190000 0.000000 0.190000 ( 0.196917)
9 chars 0.250000 0.000000 0.250000 ( 0.245808)
10 chars 0.240000 0.000000 0.240000 ( 0.247153)
11 chars 0.250000 0.000000 0.250000 ( 0.248083)
12 chars 0.250000 0.000000 0.250000 ( 0.247753)
13 chars 0.240000 0.000000 0.240000 ( 0.250674)

Grabbed those unicode chars from http://blog.trydionel.com/2010/03/23/some-unicode-tips-for-r... no clue what that says.
You should end up grossing 30%-50% higher than FTE, because your cost structure is worse:

* You own both halves of payroll tax

* You're out probably $500/mo in benefits

* You have no paid vacations or sick days

* You need to smooth out income for dry months

On top of that, contractors offer companies a huge benefit: getting work done on (relatively) short notice (plan-hire-rampup for an FTE can take 6-9 months) with no commitment (you can't hire an FTE to build a simple CRUD app and fire them when they're done). Your prices should reflect not only the (probably superior) technical acumen you offer, but also the structural benefit of working with contractors and not FTEs.

Long story short, you should be making MUCH more --- on a "per project, projecting the rate over an entire year" basis --- as a freelancer than as an FTE.
Researchers have created silkworms that are GM to spin much stronger silk
Ask HN: What did you create in 2011?
What side projects, apps, hacks did you build in 2011?
One way to avoid these: say you are Jewish and leave work at sundown, Friday to observe the biblical day of rest. Christians can do this as well! Anyone can do this!

I actually am Jewish, so it works quite well! And I really enjoy my down time. I feel completely refreshed with a guaranteed day each week.
Why do we pay sales commissions?
I got the e-mail, but the only take-away I got from it was sad trombone.

From what you're saying, you did it as a service to me, the user, and not to yourselves to save resources, which is what the e-mail notification sounds like - which annoyed me a bit, I have to admit.

I'll give it a second shot and send you an e-mail when or if it happens again. :)
I really don't find Yelp as a place where people rant about their date before they go on to reviewing food. I find it to be indispensable when I am in new cities. Does it capture everything? No, but it doesn't have to. When I know nothing more in a city than the hotel I'm staying at, it makes finding a great meal easy.
It's not really feasible? It's eminently feasible, as is demonstrated by the fact that even with no kind of central coordination, people daily pirate most of the world's digital artifacts. To add insult to injury, it's often more convenient to pirate to stuff than to buy it, a big flashing sign that should indicate a business opportunity rather than a challenge.

The only thing preventing it is the content owner's attachment their obsolete business models. I'm sure many people in the media industry realize this, but they earn their bonuses in the present, not in the shiny future. But make no mistake: in the near future, we will have ubiquituous access to most cultural artifacts of the human race, regardless of the business model.
That's understood, I'm just asking why not doing phase shift analysis with multiple microhpones, as another idea.
http://joncom.be/experiments/markdown-editor/

This is from Sept 2010, so it seems a bit outdated.

For my site, I've been using the code [1] which powers the StackOverflow editor and it works great. It would be pretty easy to set that code up in a page like this one above and you'd get buttons for making things bold, which seems handy.

[1] http://code.google.com/p/pagedown/
I think you ignored mseebach's point.

The mechanics of how the search results are ranked (pagerank) is irrelevant. The system is "broken" when original source content is ranking below people merely linking to it from another site.
> "So you didn't really write vi in one weekend like everybody says?"

Whenever I hear that someone whipped up an impressive piece of code in a weekend or in an hour, I am skeptical.

Time passes quickly when you're doing work that you love. Since you're not tracking the time, what seemed like a brilliant 10-minute hack may have taken an hour.

My rule of thumb--based on personal observation--is to multiply by 5 to get a truer estimate of how long an impressive programming project must have taken. And when speaking to a lawyer or bureaucrat, I need to divide by 8.
This article should really have the word "stack" in it someplace.
How to install the Android Market and other applications to BlackBerry PlayBook
I wonder if the spam toolkits are incorporating heuristics to target the messages better, so they don't have to send as many.
Does it make a lot of sense to build a Riak cluster in a virtualized environment?

The clear win for Riak that I can see is being able to easily replicate some of the characteristics of AWS on in-house hardware.
200ms / 1million = 200 nanoseconds, yes, but that's 0.2 microseconds. If you really want it in picoseconds, it's 200000 of those.
Creating digital copies is not free. It requires computing resources, connectivity, and electricity, all of which we pay for.

I don't think the issue of digital copying is as revolutionary as we all like to think it is. I think we can look at it as another step on the long trek of using automation to reduce content production costs--a trek which began with the advent of the printing press. That was when the legal concept of copyright originated--which, for historical context, was the time of Newton.

If you had a printing press back then, the cost of reproduction was reduced essentially to the commodity costs of paper and ink, plus the time to configure the copying.

Fast forward to today. If you have a computer, the cost of reproduction has now been reduced to the commodity costs of electricity, fractional hard drive cost, and bandwidth, plus the time to configure the copy. Granted, those costs are way, way lower than a printing press 300 years ago. But to me at least that seems like a matter of degree than some fundamental difference.
So, what can be done about / learned from this?

Competitive advantage of secrets (standard anti-BSD argument)

The standard response is that maintaining a patchset is expensive. Do devices get frequent (and comprehensive) enough firmware updates for this to actually matter? I would assume this varies with the type of device.

Manufacturer is using binaries that they don't have source for

This could be recursive, or it could be that the binaries were obtained by questionable means. Are there other reasons (if so, those would probably apply to the final device manufacturer as well and so still be recursive)? I didn't see anything about (perceived) patent liability in the article, maybe companies fear that releasing source would invite suits from patent trolls? Are there more reasons?

Non-repeatable build process

If a proper process is actually cheaper, shouldn't companies that don't have one die out? Is this happening or not? Why?
I was born in Russia. Where they still have vans like this next to the US embassy, the UK embassy, the Canadian embassy, the French/German/Spanish/Swedish embassies, heck, all the "western" countries' embassies. We're used to it.

This "business plan" is 60 years old. When the WW2 was over and the world was (stupidly) divided into two parts. Visas are PITA. You, Americans, just not very used to it... Fortunately.
A simple HTML sanitiser/sanitizer for NodeJS
Another tip I would add is that messages sent to observeValueForKeyPath:ofObject:change:context: may not occur on the main thread.

For example, if you have multiple operations in an NSOperationQueue (like web service requests), and one of those operations updates a property on the object being observed, the observing method is called on that operation's thread. This can cause issues if the observing method needs to update the GUI. In this case, you'd need to use GCD to make sure the contents of the listening method execute on main thread (or alternatively, make sure the object's property is updated on the main thread).
I created my first xbox 360 game, piniq.
http://marketplace.xbox.com/en-US/Product/piniq/66acd000-77f...
What you say is true, but "faster than Eclipse" is awfully faint praise.
I've never seen this at either the British or the Canadian embassies in Moscow...
I thought NIV was usually used with application for EB2 Green card. Is there a NIV category in H1B too?
reddit makes me hate teenagers; this story has nothing to do with atheism.
Is this Yahoo Pipes 2.0?
I don't have a mouse. How do I hover on a touch screen?

Tapping various parts does show and hide numbers, but I have no way of telling if those are the numbers that hovering gives.
I created a really cool Back-end-as-a-Service called iKnode. http://iknode.com
I should've written "VISA Application Centers" not embassies (they're not the same place)
I've always been a big fan of demonstrating practical utility/applications when trying to explain a (new) concept.

From this perspective, the article shines via the Google-flu-prediction-capability sub-story.

I'd say more such citations would grab more attention and drive your point home. A good piece and a good read on the whole.
Drives me crazy that they do this. Take Pay-Per-View for example. Why is it that on demand services like Vudu don't have the ENTIRE library of movies? Why not? Why would a movie not be on there? Because greed. Because Vudu won't charge $5 for a classic movie but the studio wants to charge more than a bargain bin for a 24-hour rental for some reason. Or maybe it's some lame reason like pride.
After slashing R&D and giving Microsoft the keys to the kingdom (search) you want to give her more time to gut Yahoo? No way.

And I don't take being a consensus builder means lacking vision, it means you get the team on board as opposed to charging ahead regardless of what people think. A consensus builder sells their team on the vision, then executes.
Refresh and reset your PC - Building Windows 8
The problem is when it doesn't pay off. I'm sure the guys at Heroku think it was a great idea. But look at the 100 other companies that didn't make it.

After your failure, you may be financially behind your peers who did 9 to 6 jobs at traditional tech companies. So you do another and another startup. What was two years of sprinting is now 8 years of it, and at the end the only thing you'll likely have to show is cynicism.

A friend of mine did the expected value math for working at Google vs a startup at typical salaries and bonuses for the two. And for NON-founders you would need to see something like a 75% chance of your employer being acquired or going public in 5 years (there's more to the math, but that was a high level general takeaway).
AFIK, there's no way to do that.
Not exactly the same, but worth mentioning:

Acoustic tablets have a long technological history, as seen from this 1971 patent...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_tablet
Interesting.

The nice thing about the Orwell review for me is that by explicitly talking about the atomic bomb and spelling it out for me in that context, it led me to an understanding of a lot of other cultural output (especially film) over the next few decades. Star Trek IV? Oh, that space probe that's out to destroy the world is a symbol for the atomic bomb. (I had some help from the boombox quip about how "we'll all be crispy critters after WORLD WAR III.") Blade Runner? Is about living with the expectation your life could end tomorrow. Aliens? Is about the destruction of civilization. And it's not just hardcore sci-fi. Why did the film adaptation of Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH into The Secret of NIMH rewrite the end plot with that stupid mystical jewel-locket-thing? Besides the fact that it's more cinematic, perhaps the director was pondering the promise and perils of science, especially atomic weapons and atomic energy. Flippin' Rock-a-doodle? I'm thinking 'nuclear winter'.

You just don't get that same flavor with things produced after the mid-eighties.
In Flop of H.P. TouchPad, an Object Lesson for the Tech Sector
Why Is this site so wrong with iphone safary?( stuck page, difficult to scroll down, unable to go back to HN...). I always promise myself I'll not touch again this web with a 5' pole( and always forget :/)
Would Einstein have glanced at his Hacker News Karma?
In many cases, I find the HN comments just as insightful as the articles and at least the HN comments link to the article (doesn't usually work the other way around).

Perhaps the best situation would be if sites such as HN and + didn't take up their own slot but were listed subordinate to the original article (underneath it as an icon or a single-lined link).
Ok sounds good. Perhaps we need to revisit the tone in that email, it IS intended as a service to you. If something isn't working as expected we wanted to make sure you knew about it. Its on us to make sure to get you more precise information about what is going wrong. Thanks for the feedback!
ありがとう -> thanks, note you are missing the う on the end.
I have this sinking feeling reading that article took more time than I'll ever save by knowing this.

Computers go unimaginably fast now. Really. Humans can't intuitively comprehend how fast it is. I doubt that this fact will save perceptible time for more than a dozen of its readers.
How do you "know" that Orwell was antisemitic? Did you know the man? Whether you have first-hand knowledge or not, please do share your information.

I suggest reading his essay about anti-semitism if you wish to learn more about his opinion based on his writings. http://www.george-orwell.org/AntiSemitism_In_Britian/0.html
> WoW has made more money than any movie ever will.

I'm not sure that's a very fair comparison, since WoW made it over nearly a decade now.

The top-grossing movie (Avatar) made $2,7 billion in theaters alone. 2011 alone has seen 3 different movies beyond a billion gross, and that's excluding home video, broadcast and merch.

And movies have the advantage of hollywood accounting.
Coffee & Power, From Linden Labs Founder, Gives New Jolt to Crowdsourcing
I agree, great service. I use it to monitor posts to the support forum for the product I work on. People at work think I am constantly monitoring the forums to respond so quickly for questions I can answer, but no, I just follow links from SMS messages that ifttt sends to me.
Learn about this vote-rigger at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GeggPSL3gQs
Cool dip into Ruby internals.

If you roll your own ruby, instead of redoing all your strings, you could just change RSTRING_EMBED_LEN_MAX. This would cause more wasted memory if you have a lot of short strings (0 < len << RSTRING_EMBED_LEN_MAX), and probably isn't worth it since there isn't much performance improvement.

The most confusing part of this article was the actual RString struct implementation. Are the anonymous unions and structs used to control structure padding and alignment?
Nor did the title of this post or the actual article state that it was about atheism. It is about atheists and their response in the atheism sub-reddit.
I couldn't agree more. The moment I heard my wife, sister-in-law, and brother's girlfriend talking about Pinterest in separate "real life" conversations, I knew this site was something to pay attention to.

Wrote a post with my thoughts on this recently: http://www.entrepreneursunpluggd.com/blog/pinterest
It's a good example of a sweet spot between simplicity and power. Really IFTTT is a subset of pipes, but it's still "powerful enough" and the mental model is way simpler.

You could say it's 80% the power/usefulness of Pipes for most users, but 20% the complexity/learning curve.

Some of this is also down to the interaction design and polish too.
This was posted almost a year ago (the article is from April 2011), or was linked in a discussion about Doozer.

Good article regardless.
Why is HN talking about snarky reddit crap?
"RIM likely agreeing to license Blackberry 10 to Samsung, HTC etc"- analyst
Movon MB80 Bluetooth Handsfree Wristband | Bluetooth Gadgets
That's a great point (and probably something Pinterest should devote effort to encouraging down the road).

Pinterest seems to connect a lot with "real people", not just the techies. Every mention I've heard of it from the former group is relating to some portion of their regular daily lives.
E-mail is the Universal Platform
Yahoo Appoints Scott Thompson Chief Executive Officer
There are lots of posts on here disparaging content curation and ways of doing it that don't invite original content. I don't see the problem - Pinterest and other similar sites wouldn't exist without original content to be shared in the first place. The people that create original content aren't going anywhere, and I don't think it's imperative that every person or every site needs to contribute original content. Is it bad that the web is enabling new ways of organizing and sharing what's out there and helping people find it? If you are a content creator, wouldn't you like to see your work reach audiences on Pinterest and other similar sites, copyright concerns aside?
Cool! Thanks for taking the time to test this - while the idea of testing with unicode chars occurred to me while writing the post, I didn't have time to get to it...
Pentagon-backed "time cloak" stops the clock
Yes, hiragana are from an unicode range that encodes to 3 UTF-8 characters each, so ruby appears to use UTF-8. ありがと is "arigato".
It's not just atheism. The whole of Reddit is pretty much like that.
The "dumbing down" argument almost seems to assume that a web of curated/unoriginal content can not coexist with a web of content creators.

Creating new ways to interact with content on the web doesn't seem to me to be a bad thing, especially when it's usable enough for anyone to participate.

Creating and leeching are not mutually exclusive.
You're welcome.

That's what I get for checking up on my limited unicode knowledge before posting, and then just C&Ping.

Thanks.
4sq really suffers outside of the UK because of the lack of engagement from venues. We tried to set up a 4sq Special for an event, and the owner didn't see the point.

For me, the solution/pivot would be to provide a real-time customer database for venue owners. This then can be leveraged to create "real-time social networks"

For example, if I ran a coffee shop I'd want to know my customers as much as possible so they become regulars. Now anything than can create a faster/more informed way to create loyalty and offers seems like a great way in.

Throw in Square/NFC payments etc, and now we start to see a world whereby I turn up sit down, my regular order is brought to me, my 15% discount is applied and I pay without doing a single thing.

The owner has metrics to track the effectiveness of campaigns, it could be the google analytics of retail which is EXACTLY what we need.

Add in some smart POS software and I see some massive wins.
Personally I would reply that I'm an application developer and none of those questions are related to my job. 'this' refers to the object, I don't give a shit how it works. From their questions, I would say they're searching for a low-level library developer with a strong background in mathematics.
We have very high unemployment. Also, the national identity and cohesion is swamped by a far too large influx of foreigners. There should be an immigration moratorium. Essentially zero people should be let in until there is robust job growth.

There should be a much longer moratorium on granting foreigners citizenship. Immigration rates are far too high and on a course to create serious overpopulation problems in north america. https://www.numbersusa.com/content/
> And it hit me: True Believers of the Holy + might see this re-shared Google+ post of an almost-unattributed rip of my story instead of the original. Google+ hates the Internet!

Stopped reading here. This is a waste-of-time troll article.
Poetry: Manuel Bandeira
Interesting deep dive; but remember that calling :+ to append to strings is a pessimization (in both Ruby and Python); :join'ing a list of 2 strings is about as fast as :+'ing them together, but :join'ing 3 strings is about twice as fast.
quidquid Latine dictum sit altum videtur

"anything said in Latin sounds profound". A recent
ironic Latin phrase to poke fun at people who seem to
use Latin phrases and quotations only to make themselves
sound more important or "educated".

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Latin_phrases_%28full%2...]
In case anyone is afraid of clicking on random bit.ly links, the above link expands to:

http://brunosan.eu/2012/01/04/being-recruited-in-the-usa/
There are some rarer instruments where you almost have to, for instance a bass sax. You aren't going to find one for under several thousand even in bad condition, and if you buy new it's hard to find somewhere to try one model, let alone compare more than one of the half dozen new models.
To save people who haven't read it the trouble, here's the wiki article on it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Semite_and_Jew