skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Reminds me of Jude Law in A.I.:

Patricia in mirrored room: I'm afraid.

Gigolo Joe: Of me?

Patricia in mirrored room: Yes.

Gigolo Joe: That I will hurt you?

Patricia in mirrored room: Yes.

Gigolo Joe: I think... you're afraid of letting go. I think you're afraid of happiness. And this is starting to excite me. Are you afraid of seeing the stars... Patricia? I can show you how to reach them.

Patricia in mirrored room: I'm afraid of what you've got under there. May I see what it looks like first?

Gigolo Joe: Is this your first time... with something like me?

Patricia in mirrored room: I've never been with Mecha.

Gigolo Joe: That makes two of us.

Patricia in mirrored room: I'm afraid it will hurt.

Gigolo Joe: Patricia... once you've had a lover-robot you'll never want a real man again. Are these the wounds of passion?

Patricia in mirrored room: Do you hear that music?

Gigolo Joe: You... are a goddess, Patricia. You wind me up inside. But you deserve so much better in your life. You deserve... me.
Switching to Disqus has been a "life-transforming experience"
And someone to figure out how to make it in volume for less than the GDP of Brazil.
The Sky Is Falling: Google Shares Below $300
Promote your video with YouTube Sponsored Videos
Monetizing social networks: The good, bad and ugly
yes, once HN used to excite me with so much of information, but now its more of news than exciting stuff, nyways i hang around here cos its HN. lol.
No, you don't have to protect people from their own bad judgment. There's an argument for better parenting, not for cartels protecting themselves through regulation.

Don't tread on me.
Wait, I thought SEO was dead and BS!
This is John Baez. I am pretty sure he has read GEB.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Baez
Is there a general consensus on disqus vs. intensedebate??
I can concur; maybe this will get your dopamine pumping.
http://upload.gaiatools.com/files/googlesuggest_1.png
While the guy is clearly in the right here, as we were joking about this at my class reunion, suing that company might be like trying to squeeze blood from a stone. Financially they're running on fumes these days.
Yahoo Almost To $10. Referee, Please Call This Fight.
alright that was a little to reddit for HN but since your joke had tech in it and i LOL ... well done!
It's a ray of Hope in a world of Darkness.
Not around here, but ymmv.
Timelapse of Twitter Election
It was merely a joke, I completely got your point. You on the other-hand did manage to miss my entire point.
I don't say this very often, but: Are you insane?! First of all, any argument that starts with "Once you have kids" isn't an argument at all; I knew I should have stopped there and saved myself money on blood pressure medication.

Secondly, why is it the Government's job (or anyone's job) to "protect vulnerable people who might--" okay, I can't even do this. That phrase means the same thing as "protect them from themselves" -- the individual makes a poor decision which affects the individual. Since it falls to a parent to make responsible decisions for an ignorant child, you've once again failed to make a point. "Once" I have kids (I like your finality), I will probably make sure to avoid having them raped to save $10. I could be wrong.

As for smoking, it is once again an individual choice. Were there no smokers, I'm sure there would be others ready and willing to use tax dollars to pay their medical expenses (which I have never done, and since I've given years of service to this country everyone can fuck off anyway). If a private establishment decides they wish, for whatever reason, to permit smoking on their property, that is a right the company rationally deserves and in no way warrants regulation by the Government or any other regulatory body.

If you prefer non-smoking establishments, show it with your wallet. If such a time came when it was detrimental to a business to afford said luxury to smokers, they would stop. What you feel is "kinda nice" should not warrant a law. It's called personal preference and we all have it. If all of my personal preferences were turned into law, there would be many changes to the world, most of which many people would conservatively call "cruel and unusual."
Apple's Leopard Garbage Collector Now Open Source
Makes you wonder how they feel about not being a facebook although they basically had all the pieces in place already. Might have been to hard for them to stop spamming users.
This is such an insightful comment. Applause.

The Raganwald article:
http://weblog.raganwald.com/2007/01/what-ive-learned-from-sa...

"This is the first part of “What I’ve Learned From Sales.” In this part, “Don’t Feed the Trolls,” I present my explanation for why people act like “trolls,” raising objection after objection to new ideas, and I suggest how to side-step this behaviour and deal directly with their concerns."
A raindrop does not have that much information in it. A raindrop only has some simple function that completely describes it, and this function likely has only some bytes. You can't take any information out of a raindrop, because the particles within it are random.

A raindrop is made up of a certain number of atoms, but these atoms are all the same, and cannot store any information. To store information, you need items that are dissimilar to each other. So the comparisons he makes are not correct.
This is the Internet! Everything is serious, dammit!

P.S. I didn't down-vote you so I've got that going for me, right :P
Unpaid internships are a ripoff
Nice Bulverism Logical Fallacy:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulverism
Licensing is independent of rationing. Since the main purpose of licensing is to protect the consumer - in terms of money and safety - I think we're better off with it.
GE Wins FDIC Insurance for Up to $139 Billion in Debt
Tipjoy...
I've been using TouchSQL but may convert to the SQLLitePersistentObjects.
i'm just worried that once they find out there are other browsers it wont be long until they discover adblock. then it'll be bye, bye internet :)
I've given up on the downvote thing and just flag everything now.

The Dashboard story is especially annoying because it's already been closed; a number of irrefutable arguments have been made discounting any justification regarding the incident. There is no longer a reason to attempt to justify it. Yet, they won't stop. Or they attempt a half justification, half apology, and we all know which of those is the "real" one.

I have probably raged more today on HN than any previous day.
Google answers some questions about Chrome
made me laugh:
"why is everyone" suggests "why is everyone saying why so serious"
Now that's a user testimonial!

What's been every else's experiences? We're contemplating doing the same...
How on earth does this company even plan to pay somebody market salary? Four people... three w/o salary with no outside investment. Doh.
Depends on your needs. TCMalloc trades space for speed.
Then C is not what you're looking for. I'm not arguing against garbage collected languages, but for the necessity of non-GC languages to exist.
Google's Plop is implemented in Lisp
Well, seing how disqus is YC-funded and intensedebate is techstars-funded (a competing seed fund), you'll probably find HN's sentiment toward the former.
The Importance of Good Presentation and Schindler’s List Lessons
There is a conversation in a movie called “Schindler List” (The movie is certainly a master-piece), in which Schindler talks with his future Jewish Plant Manager and Accountant, Itzhak Stern, asking him to run his company and also to find Jew investors for supplying capital for the factory. Itzhak wonders and he asks Schindler what he would do then; Schindler responds “Presentation”. The movie proves most of Schindler’s success was due to his presentation skills (in terms of execution and not considering the strength of his primary evil idea) apart from WAR which he take the most out of it and personally confess to his wife as the reason of his success.
In OCaml, you're required to do something with the return from any non-void function. You can just say "ignore (f x)" to discard the result, so it's not hugely inconvenient, but causes suspect code to accumulate warning signs.

It seems like a good compromise.
True. But still developers still can expect salary to increase (double?) between year 1 & year 10.

He's probably nearer year 1.
I agree I've worked on a number of high volume systems (million+ client interactions/minute), and you don't want a conventional database. Either use a custom data-structure to keep it in memory (even if it's across multiple machines) or if you really want to use a database use one thats designed for that kind of usage (think tickerplant databases, kx, etc.)

Figure out how to partition your data/algorithms so you can split it across multiple machines, don't concentrate on maximizing the performance of one machine, but rather of the "cloud" of machines.
This is just the tip of the iceberg.

As Apple evolved their music player into a phone and their music store into a media/software store, they have an astronomical opportunity to adapt iTunes into a generalized payment platform for real world goods.

You could buy stuff on the spot with your iPhone/iTouch or browse and pay ahead of time and pick it up later. Brick and mortar shops would be quick to support "iPay" to bring in the iPhone clientele (for the same reason they currently accept credit cards), and the timing is right: Apple could kick the banks/credit card companies in the nuts when they're down (look at AmEx...), charging a lower rate and alleviating some of the hassles of synchronous transactions. All a shop would need is the computer they already own and some merchant software.

Why would they beat PayPal or Amazon Payments (TextPayMe)? Because those guys just provide an abstraction above a bank account or credit card. With iTunes, you pay upfront, in cash, at the gas station down the street. No bills. It's not like this would apply to all purchases, obviously, but certainly stuff <$100... And Apple has a popular UI that really doesn't have to be constrained to music, movies, and software. Just because I can't download a pizza on iTunes doesn't mean I couldn't select and purchase one.

Now, given regulatory issues they'd almost certainly have to partner with an established player (like their deal with AT&T), but, again, they've got a golden opportunity with the state of banks right now.

Am I missing some obvious reason this wouldn't work? This seems to me right now about as likely as the iPhone did in 2006...
What I find amusing is that Google's P/E is roughly the same as that of the S&P 500 at today's close (around 18).

Microsoft's is around 11. Apple's is around 17.
(on point #3) you may be right, I just it was just a bit weird not to offer an "other" just in case ... sods law if you don't there'll be a ton of mystery companies
:)
Audio oscilloscopes for iPhone
Threaded commenting is coming to Wordpress 2.7:

http://trac.wordpress.org/ticket/7635
Ask HN: API/Affiliate Network for Financial Products (Credit Cards, Brokerages..)?
Hey,<p>I posted about this earlier today but I think my phrasing in the title was a little too vague to grab any attention - sorry for the second attempt.<p>I'm looking for a comprehensive API/affiliate network for all sorts of financial products. Sort of like Amazon or Commission Junction but for items like credit cards, brokerage accounts, savings accounts, loans, mortgages, etc.<p>Does anyone know of any good ones?<p>Thanks
30 Different Ways to Put A Roof Over Your Head
It all depends on how "lean and mean" your app and the data is. If you do everything in javascript up-front and use AJAX to move data back and forth, then you reduce the pure bandwidth except for the initial javascript load (which you could cache on Akamai or something).

Some math: Sustained (theoretical maximums) with a 1Gbps link gives you 1M hits per minute at 8053 bytes per hit max. However, you're going to get less than this in reality. Figure 80% of this (6442 bytes) is what you can expect on average. A Gigabit pipe is also big bucks.

You'll need > 1 web server to handle the CPU load to handle 1M hits per minute, so you'll need a load-balancer that can handle Gigabit (Major $$$ already - we're talking in the $50k-$100k just for a single load-balancer that can handle this kind of traffic and most enterprise load-balancers max-out at one million 'sessions' (open connections)), so you may need to address multiple load-balancers running in an active/active configuration and > 1Gbps pipe if you are moving > 8k per 'hit'. Keep in mind that there is connection time/bandwidth overhead and http packet overhead as well. If you could get away from the browser/http model and move to more of a client/server application, you could optimize better and make better use of your bandwidth. Just a thought. Switching to a UDP protocol could save you bandwidth and make things a little faster network-wise also.

To be speedy, your app will have to live without a traditional DB. Put the data in memory (easy to do with memcache across several machines) and make sure that your app is quick and avoid using anything else that would be sub-optimal. Use a lightweight web server, or just get your app to take the http requests itself. C is a good choice for squeezing as much as you can out of your CPU. Write key/value pairs to memcache as your DB, and you should end up with a 10ms turnaround with your app if there is not too much calculation to be done (no sorts, no big/nested loops, ...). Perhaps an apache module for your app would be in order here? Get a few machines maxxed-out with this configuration (need 6+ just as an initial guess, depending on the load-balancer and network latency to serve all of those requests in a second), and it's do-able. Buy reliable machines (DELL or the like) and reliable network equipment since you'll be pushing the hardware to their limit and they'll be running hot.

Instead of writing to a conventional database, you can write to a log file or syslog to another machine (1M writes a minutes shouldn't be that bad) and reconstruct the data to a database when the heavy usage slows down (process the log files offline or something on a different machine).

This is not a small task and will require some tight code and big $$$ up-front, but it's doable. Your Co-location bill will be large.
The Man Who Sold Hot Dogs
Given that I copied and pasted it, there's a bug in HN.
Hey, if you need help setting up Disqus, feel free to email me. Email address is in my profile.
AutoZone? What a terrible name for a piece of software.

http://maps.google.com/maps?hl=en&um=1&ie=UTF-8&...
Ask YC: do you think there is a market for a "polish" web consultancy?
No I don't mean polish as in people from Poland!
I mean the attention to detail that is sometimes missed when you have your head in code.

For a flat fee you submit your website and a team of designers give you a document that outlines potential bits of the website that'll need a bit of fine tuning.

It may be 404 pages, missing content, badly aligned text, bad usability choices ...

Stuff that when is broken makes the reader of the site go "ugh" but when it works and everything is nice and shiny the viewer goes "i love this".

I recently rolled a new site for a client, and found that i had to leave the site for a few hours and go back to it to get a clear head.
Cisco AXP Contest
Want Some Government Money? Apply Now
Washington's $5 Trillion Tab
I get 25 mturks to do this for me. Costs me about $5. IMHO 25 different people playing with your site can find a lot, compared to one "expert".
I defineately agree. This is the part of AI and robotics that I just find creepy and really don't want.

I want a dumb piece of metal that I feel no attachment to to go around and fix the boring stuff in my house. Clean, make sure there is toiletpaper etc...
The Development and Evolution of Fairway (iPhone app)
Two words: Linear algebra. Or if you wish, Differential Equations.
True - removing the commute by living near work or working from home can also help you exercise.
IBM to help build broadband network in power lines
Based on personal client experience, the ones most likely to need the service will have the least desire to pay anything for it. If they are willing to spend the kind of money to get things done at a high level, they will have already paid someone more qualified the first time around and avoided such problems from the start.
I think that headline is missing a "could".
I guess it's a good idea to screen out exclamation points in general, but this is obviously an edge case that should get through.
I misread that as "cloud" and thought you were saying something about buzzwords. But yeah, you're right.
lots of hardware

there are a few best practices to scaling, you can find those archived at places like highscalability etc...but in the end you just need hardware. hardware buys you fault tolerance, test environments, sharding, blah blah blah. if you are looking to meet this traffic on your own box or on a vm-hoster, forget it
Man times people are really just thirsty but cannot differentiate the difference.
First, relax.

Look, you've got ~4 GHz processors available, and you're worried about a million hits a minute. That's nearly 240k clock cycles per hit.

Next, you've got 60 +/- 10ms of latency between you and your clients (unless there are details here you aren't covering, but no matter). You don't really have to respond to users terribly fast, as lots of your responsiveness would be lost over jitter/lag.

A single dell box could handle your load, if you wrote the whole thing in C on a modern quad-core desktop.

Ignore all the standard Apache/SQL/networking stuff until later until you know what you need. Get the core requirements up first, then add on the load of the side-stuff secondly.

E.g. doing all the heavy lifting in a private set of cpu cores and then providing a shared-mem plugin to apache may be enough for you. Save a CPU core to snapshot your data.

So, for advice:

1. Ignore database bullshit. You don't need it, it won't help. If you want a DB for other purposes, fine. A snapshot process writing to your DB is fine, just don't put it in the critical path.

2. Build a load simulator. A raw mode that just sends over the handful of bytes, and a cooked mode that bothers to printf' a GET request.

3. Start with a reasonable prototype, and work your way to something performant. Hell, you can probably do it in java if you don't mind buying a few more CPU cores.

4. Integrate as you need for the rest of your requirements. For example, have another box serve the rest of your webapp, and dedicate a stripped down apache box with a custom module for this stuff.

In essence, I'm telling you to treat it as a very smallish HPC problem, instead of some sort of nightmare webapp problem. It fits better, and suddenly you have lots of people/knowledge/COTS equipment available to you.
Also, if you're doing something game-ish, talk to me privately. Scalability of video games is my phd topic...
An extremely poor article (in the typical mainstream science journalism style). I guess this is a 60 Ghz chip which means its range is very short.
While we may be biased, I've never noticed any sites I visit using IntenseDebate. Perhaps it's less branded than Disqus and I just don't recognize it? Or maybe the circles I run in just tend to favor Disqus?
Look into Evolution and Thunderbird; both are written in C and are being maintained.
So what's it do?

I see a bunch of AI buzzwords.
In my experience, wrapping all data manipulation operations in a set of stored procedures usually provides abstraction layer powerful enough to address the issues raised by the author.

In this approach, no application can change data in the underlying tables directly. Change can only be done by calling appropriate stored procedures. This rule is not optional but mandatory and is enforced by database permissions given to the database account used by each application: grant access to stored procedures, deny DML access to the tables.

As an example, if customer name needs to be updated, client applications will call procedure called update_customer_phone (customer_id, new_phone) instead of issuing a direct SQL statement like

update customers set phone = new_phone where customer_id = XXX

There is no need for the application to know that table named customers even exists.

Read access should be provided through views and not to tables directly. Views provide abstraction layer that will insulate applications from underlying table changes.

While this might seem like a lot work, this approach ends up saving a lot of headache in the long run, especially when one database is used by multiple applications.

The main problem with this approach is unfortunately company politics. In many organizations, the only people who can change stored procedures are DBAs or a group of "database developers". The applications themselves are maintained by "application developers". Usually these are separate groups, reporting to different people with different priorities and getting them to work together is often times challenging.
Yeah. Also, fucking stop signs.
Wouldn't it be pretty odd to see a Lisp framework implemented in some other way?
http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2008/11/plop-probabilisti...
Linux Kernel Module Programming guide
Plop appears to be part of a Google-summer-of-code project.

I don't think that makes it a Google product/project. It just means Google paid a student to work on an open source project.

That student appears to have written some of that code in Lisp. Why is that interesting?
Looks like Disqus is winning:

http://siteanalytics.compete.com/disqus.com+intensedebate.co...
12 Principles For Keeping Your Code Clean
Open Source Food
The thing about Disqus that bugs me is its branding. It puts its name on every page thrice and its url twice. Because registration is so front-and-center on its comment form, I feel disinclined to use it to post. Furthermore, despite claims that it can be really well integrated, every time I see it it stands out - not really terribly, but I hate being able to instantly differentiate it from other comment systems.

Also, something about the up-and-down buttons piss me off. They look too grubby. And since they look the same on every blog, that quickly gets annoying.
To be fair, it seems to have had a year's head start.
Recession-Proof Yourself: Four Tips For Twentysomethings
How do you word your HITs? "Try this service and let me know what you think?"
I have some questions about garbage collectors...

If you decided to make a whole OS in say, Lisp, with a garbage collector, wouldn't that mean you couldn't make games because of the garbage collection pauses incurred by the OS, even if the game process itself uses manual memory management?

And is it possible to make a garbage collector that can somehow run "continually" (it would detect garbage at fairly regular intervals), so that you get lots of micro-GC-pauses that are unnoticeable to the user instead of a few ones that break the gameplay?

edit: One last question: is it feasible to make some kind of funky Lisp dialect with manual memory management or Lisp fundamentally requires a GC? Sorry for sounding like a CS professor asking rhetorical questions again ;P
Greasemetal - Google Chrome Greasemonkey
Executive Scuttlebutt
if (submission.title.indexOf("lisp")!=-1) submission.voteUp();

surely...
For whatever reason, this has been an incredibly frustrating week! There've been several incidents that really set me on edge, and they're all happening at once. I don't know what's caused it, either, seeing as a lot of these incidents are coming from people who've been here for a while.
Green investing is tops in Silicon Valley
Wow, I wouldn't have expected a US-based company could get away with this for any lengthy period.

And Hurricane Electric was one of their ISPs? They're very reputable, from what I've heard.
Specifically, HTML and CSS. The article is very specific to web development.