skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I went to Georgia Tech because I lived in Georgia and if was going to college at all it had to be in state at a public school. I think cost factors trump most other considerations for the bulk of people making college decisions.

When I was at GT (late 80s) we were on the quarter system, they've since changed to semesters. If you wanted to finish a BSEE in 4 years, you needed to take 7 or 8 classes a quarter. 6 was a common load and hence the average time to graduate was 5 years. There were no "crib" courses. Every class made you work for your grade; every one. If you had a bad week, your grades would suffer as there were tests and graded assignments every single week. I was told when I was there that there had not been an EE student in anyone's memory that finished with a 4.0 GPA. Even the most gifted student with perfect study skills would eventually get taken down a notch.

Most all classes were graded on a bell curve. Even in your junior or senior year, you were reminded by professors that 40% of the class would repeat the course.

Schools like GT have a social obligation to take on more than they can handle. That means doing more (more students) with less (less faculty, less support structure). That said, I think they do a great job.

If they had more funds to provide students with more tutors and more private scholarship money to allow students forgiveness if they needed to take a quarter off to rest, the graduation rates might improve. Keep in mind that most students at a school like GT are at least half operating off state and federal support funds. These systems do what they can, but are unforgiving if you need to take a break or require some other support like a tutor.

I'm a proud alum. I support my school scholarship funds through alumni channels. I think if people want to see things improve, look at schools that are working hard and doing things right and throw more money at them; they always need it.
There's a difference between the pseudo-BS link farming, social media game, and using correct markup their crawler can understand.
Favoring Scoop: Stone on a plant
Surely my argument is more general than that? I.e. it applies to more things than just limiting the number of taxis.

A regulated taxi system will differ in some ways from an unregulated system. (If it doesn't then the regulation is so light-touch as to be virtually non-existant.) For example the regulated taxis might have safer drivers, or be less likely to rip off customers, etc.

Because regualted and unregulated are different, people will have preferences one way or the other. If an unregulated system is allowed to operate side by side with a regulated system, then each customer will be able to choose which one they buy from, like choosing which supermarket they shop at. (Obviously for this to work it must be easy to tell which is regulated and which unregulated).

So if people prefer a regulated service to an unregulated one, they'll continue to choose the regulated one even when there's a choice, won't they?

Perhaps you'd like to elaborate on why you think I'm making a gross oversimplification, because I think my argument applies to any differences between regulated and unregulated taxis.
"...even in the absence of robust broadband competition, network owners are likely to find deviations from the end-to-end principle unprofitable."

As a counter example to this, a very popular cable company where I live offers VoIP phone services, and lowers the packet priority of competing VoIP vendors.
First off: Google bought Jaiku, Twitter's competitor. If anything, they'll be focusing on making Jaiku competitive.

Second off: Google indexes some sites every minute. That's pretty close to instantaneous: with the exception of real news obsessives, it's at the very least adequate.

Third off: the fact that people write articles like this about Google shows that Google is still relevant. And until somebody creates search that isn't better but revolutionarily better than Google, it will remain that way.
I'd be very cynical and evaluate low. Facebook has a lot of buzz and a killer userbase, but that's a sign of intrinsic value, not monetary.
Forbes: Listen to entrepreneurs. Your pages are the most horribly cluttered on the web.
And what was the point of your saying that? Were you trying to copy the story's point in a comment?

Because if that's the case, only those of us who read the article got your comment.
One thing I really hate is "co-founder." I like "founders" better. Because before you know it, there's a "founder" and then there's "co-founders", and its all kind of bullshit over nothing (except money, and the sudden appearance of unwritten liquidation preferences, and the long slow road to self-destruction that those things breed). I don't really have a problem with equity being split asymmetrically, but I think everything else should be fair and proportional.
Come back once in a while? You know when the poker games are...
Are you being transferred?
Your 'unscientific' analogy between WAV/MP3 and GIF/JPG is actually really spot on, technically speaking. Except unlike GIF, WAV doesn't even attempt to be small.
I think startups are the wrong place for a gossip rag to be hanging out. Keep that garbage in Hollywood please.
I think you mean

if(strpos(strtolower($title.$body), 'lisp') !== false) ++$votes;

Oh wait, this is Hacker news. Apologies.
As I flex my finger muscles!
I loved valleywag and will miss it. My few appearances there have nothing to do with it. I just love the tabloid mentality, and my experiences living in Norcal screamed at me that it was ripe for that kind of approach. Oh well.
One account to rule them all
That data may be worth a huge sum of money, but not 4 billion.
You've obviously not spent much time hanging around with the "Web 2.0" crowd in SF. Ripe for ridicule.
AdaptiveBlue: "How and Why We Made Glue"
I looked into this one time and got scared away the the DIY part of the kit and the warnings that you could seriously injure yourself. :( This will require braver souls than I.
I've seen my share of gossip-worthy stories, but I'd rather hear about them in the dead pool.
Intel Slashes Sales Outlook As Demand Slows for PCs
Yeah, if you have more tests than actual code, that would seem to indicate something's gone wrong somewhere. And I'd agree that no amount of testing is going to turn an O(n) algorithm into an O(log n) one. There's no substitute for sitting down with a pen and paper and doing some old fashioned design sometimes.

I do think having a suite of repeatable test cases you can run against developing software is a useful thing to have, though. Not only can you test for correctness, but you can also run benchmarks against each modification to see if your performance or memory usage is going up or down.

It probably depends on what you're trying to do...
Should we use Persuasion Science on the Web?
Except "buzz" is part of what produces growth. And it's almost guaranteed that "buzz" is generally empty, shallow people interacting with other empty, shallow people (because that's 90% of the world's population). That produces gossip, and buzz, and more buzz, and tabloid journalism, and billions of dollars. "Hollywood" is the perfect paradigm for that.
A lot of people (at least at my current employer) would point you to the semantic web and RDF. One of the big focuses is model driven development - defining application state and behavior in an abstract data model (ontology). I think RDF is a pretty good standard for representing abstract data models because it is general (being based on graphs), simple (triple = (subject, predicate, object), and self describing. There is a lot of bleeding edge work in this area and most of it suffers from severe performance problems at the current state of the art.
close paren where appropriate...
We need to inject competition back into public transportation, but keep some of the regulation. I think that share-taxis are an important piece of the public transportation system that is missing in the USA and Canada:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Share_taxi
"Barack Obama is going to appoint the nation's first CTO. What are the top priorities?"

"I suggest the CTO... encourage adoption of Agile software development practices"

WTF?
This is a joke...
Southwest proves you wrong on "airlines." Still making profits.
Seems like an opportunity for some budding writer to take its place.
Stealing Your Library: The OCLC Powergrab
That's is what I meant when I said 33.33 does not seem like a stretch- seems low. I doubt they made the valuation based solely on how many users they have, meaning that they are really valuing their users at <33.33.

The thing is there are so many cool ways to exploit the data that it is tough for people not to give them a multi-billion dollar valuation. They are basically Google without a proven data mining strategy and business plan.

4 billion dollars seems high I admit. I think another thing you have to look at is how valuable fb could be in the "right" hands i.e. someone who is focused on revenue rather than growth. Then the multi-billion dollar valuation becomes more realistic when you think about what a Microsoft, Yahoo, or Google with do with that data.
We use it (and LOVE it) at AboutUs.org (Portland start-ups represent!).

Here's what our CTO said:
“I've waited 15 years for a computer program that out-performs index cards. Pivotal Tracker's smooth interface and network-native architecture supports my team's collaborative/distributed planning without giving up the simplicity and physicality of cards. This product had to come from a team that understands how I work. ”

- Ward Cunningham, CTO, AboutUs.org
I hope this catches on with US banks.
I use this too.

And, FWIW, I see some people suggesting merb, which is cool, but even the guy that wrote merb(ezmobius) uses this now.
Sweeping Changes At Live.com: It’s A Social Network
K700i Charging Station
charge, charging, k700, k700 charge, k700 charging ways, not, problem, sony ericsson, ways
Sleeping for less than seven and a half hours 'quadruples heart attack risk'
There's no need to build your own load simulator when good ones already exist:

http://tsung.erlang-projects.org/
Is your (website’s) underwear showing?
The Top 10 Greatest Geeks Of All Time
Doom-mongering: A 2009 Internet Media Plan
I humbly believe that evolution/capitalistic markets would wipe IE6 out for the haters, no banners necessary.

If IE6 actually succeeds on merit (which I agree with the crowd is very unlikely), then you know what? They earned it.

To that end, I say, let it try prove itself - if it can.
Flagged as triplicate
Do all of the rankings need the same precision? Maybe you can get away with perfect accuracy for the top 1,000 rankings and then provide an approximation for anything >1,000?

You could use a list for the first 1,000 and then store the rest in a tree. Then have another process that walks the tree in-order and updates the ranking of each node.
Soldering up a bunch of electrodes, hooking them up to a power source and strapping the whole lot to your head? What could possibly go wrong?

(I'd read this first though: http://openeeg.sourceforge.net/doc/WARNING.html)
Credit Reports and Repair | Free Credit Reports
incubators
The notation you'd use to represent the program/proof is very important.
For a Washington Job, Be Prepared to Tell All
How about by their income, like the rest of the world.
Consider using a fleet of front-end machines to accept TCP connections from clients. These machines can parse the HTTP envelope, forward the request to the database server, and generate the HTTP response.

There's a lot of useful advice on this topic in "On Designing and Deploying Internet-Scale Services" http://www.mvdirona.com/jrh/talksAndPapers/JamesRH_Lisa.pdf
the startup party is over. i really doubt HN will take off. but then again, most people here don't want that anyway.
Google Site Search lets you index pages faster
I really hate over-simplified platitudes. They only comfort the stupid or short-sighted. Kind of like reading a sound-bite on trickle-down economics and applying it to your life.
They have a good point, but seriously beating iTunes isn't exactly hard. QuickTime has been the most pain in the ass media player on the PC for a long time, it was even worse than Real for a long time. I mean Real is full of crap that slows down your computer, but QuickTime used to be outright slow.

Apple has certainly improved, but I don't see iTunes as much more than a well written library program with an MP3 player tacked on.

If I had the money I could easily build and design a better, sleeker MP3 player than Apple. It's just the fact that all the companies who are coming to compete in the MP3 player market don't have a history in it. I used to own a Sony MP3 player, and fuck did it butcher the iPod Shuffle in usability and play time, I mean it had 50 hours of playback! It was, and still is, the only MP3 player on the market that can actually play all the music on it before its battery dies. If I ever needed a small MP3 player again I'd either dig up the old Sony one or buy the newer model.

The iPod Classic sits in the multimedia market, not in the solely MP3 market. This is where the problem comes in. iPod's competition doesn't know how to make something that looks worthy of the money. Zune was a piece of plastic crap, plastic was flashy when the original Walkman came out, but if anyone from Microsoft cared to look out of their window on a highway they might see that plastic is trash.

I have a cheap motorola phone, no bells or whistles. My girlfriend has a more expensive phone with a camera and mp3 player and what not. It's the same phone, it even takes the identical battery, yet hers has a metal back plate and everything else and weighs 3 times as much. This, in peoples minds, equals value.

I could easily use the iPod's example and build a better MP3 player. It's quite simple; use a slightly wider LCD screen and display in widescreen, which should all blend together in a deep black so that you can't see the difference between the LCD and plain black when it's off (the mp3 player I had from Sony did this and people liked and commented on how cool it looked, because it was cool). The front plate should be a single piece of unbroken electrically conductive glass so that you can operate the controls (similar to how the iPod works) but without it ever, ever being able to get dirt stuck between the cracks. The back plate should obviously be scratch resistant aluminum.

All of the above design is off the shelf or, in the case of the LCD, easily designable. However, the cost of such an MP3 player would be too high that you can't guarantee people will buy it, which is exactly why Microsoft or Sony hasn't made something like this. Apple has a keen following, it's risks aren't going to bankrupt it or a division, so it's free to experiment; other companies can't experiment in the market, that's reserved for the lab only because if they fuck up slightly then no one will pay the money.
YouTube - Intelligence in Wikipedia
I think his point was that this has been a year of exceptional events. The fact that even one fund broke the buck is big news; under-performing VC funds are a footnote in comparison.
Can you elaborate why you'd feel better if they assured you your data are hosted separately and maybe give you ssh to the machine? They would still be able to access/control all your data.

I really wish I understood how business people percieve security.
Some VCs make profits too, it was referring to the industry as a whole. Airlines as a whole don't make money.
Jason Fried on Out-Teaching the Competition [video]
So, I guess what you are saying is that everyone who downvotes me is agreeing with the comment they downvoted?
We've got that beat covered:

http://www.justin.tv/officecam
Practical Artificial Intelligence with Java (Creative Commons)
Chopping the Long Tail down to size
Here is the author's web page:

http://markwatson.com/opencontent/
Reply article
http://gigaom.com/2008/11/11/once-again-the-long-tail-refuse...
Coding is very physical. Your brain burns through tons of calories as it is, and is in overdrive when you code.

I had a teacher who said he'd lose several pounds per game in competitive chess play.

It burns between 15 and 30% of your caloric intake, depending on which source you find the most accurate and the size and level of activity of your brain.
Ask HN: How to I process one million hits a minute?
My email address is owkaye at gmail dot com for anyone who needs it. This thread takes over for the previous thread located here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=361730

I'll post each issue separately in this new thread so people can reply in the appropriate sub-thread. This should (I hope) keep things better organized and easier to follow.

I have new information since I started the last thread so I'll begin this one with an updated and a simplified explanation of this project.

---------

Update: It seems this forum lists comments in the opposite order in which they are posted -- a surprise to me of course or I would have posted them last-one-first. The result is that you'll get the information in the opposite order I intended it unless you read my posts from the bottom up.
>If you’re going to be an iPod killer — and not just a great new music player — you have to first out-Apple Apple at all the things that makes the iPod special. That means superior industrial design, an iTMS-beating catalogue of content, and a better desktop experience than iTunes.

My understanding is Apple makes $100 dollars' margin on every Ipod. You could gain some market share in the mp3-player space by undercutting Apple.

Just make the design work (this might mean hiring a renowned UI designer from outside, or hell, poach Jon Ive for 30M), make it cost half as much as an iPod, but avoid making it out of plastic. Make a case out of exotic metals or hardwoods or marble, or acquire 1000 songs for Microsoft's catalogue to add to every ipod so it is useful from the get-go.[1]

[1] I have no idea how feasible this stuff would be, but I think it is appealing.
Business Detail #1: IT'S A LIVE ONLINE AUCTION

I'm not at liberty to discuss the industries or specific applications in which this platform will be used so please don't ask. But I can tell you that the platform is structured like a live online auction with some unusual / unique requirements:

Each auction will run for about an hour, beginning and ending at a pre-specified time. In the specific industry where we will launch this platform we can absolutely limit the number of bidders in every auction to 200,000 concurrent bidders, and we expect only about 100,000 or so bidders to be concurrently logged in and bidding.
Business Detail #2 - LIMITED NUMBER OF BIDS

Every bidder gets the same limited number of bids in a particular auction, for example 200 bids each. This means the server software must "count the bids" for each bidder and disable bidding for every person who uses all his/her bids prior to the end of the auction.
Business Detail #3: ONE MILLION HITS A MINUTE MAX

Each bidder who remains online and participates during the auction may submit as many as 5 new bids per minute, thus requiring the server to "deal with" as many as one million hits a minute.

The auction structure is atypical because the the highest unique bid at auction's end wins, and the bidding range is limited to 0-10% of the item's true market value.
Business Detail #4: CLOSED BIDDING WITH LIVE STATUS REPORTS

Every bid is a "closed bid" which means no other bidders know its actual value. Bidders are given the "status" or "position" of their bids in relation to the current unique high bid, but they never see the values of other people's bids.

I must send the answers to these two questions to each bidder every time he posts a new bid:

-- Is his new bid unique or has someone else posted the same bid value previously?

-- Is his new bid > = < the currently unique high bid?

If his last bid = the currently unique high bid, the bidder is in an enviable position because he is currently winning the auction. Other bidders must bid the same exact amount (to the penny) in order to cause him to lose his position as the unique high bidder. When this happens the unique high bid value must be determined by the software again, and with 100,000+ bidders is is likely that someone else will become the new unique high bidder.

If his last bid is not unique or if it is > or < the currently unique high bid, the bidder must post another bid which he hopes will become the new unique high bid. But he does not know the value of other people's bids, all he knows is the value of his own bids and their position relative to the current unique high bid. He must therefore use intelligence, strategy, and quick thinking (game theory?) to determine the value of his next bid, and the one after that, etc., until he succeeds in becoming the new unique high bidder.
Tech Issue #1 -- WRITING DATA TO DISK

I've always used a database to accomplish tasks like these before, but it seems that what I really need is a faster (RAM-based) way to receive and store every bid value received during the hour-long auction -- along with the bidder's unique ID so I know who made each bid.

Once the auction has ended I can write this data to disk, but there's no need to write to disk during the auction itself -- because if the system screws up I'll have to re-run the auction anyways, and in this case the old bids can be deleted.
Weird .. people actually LIKE using iTunes?
I mean its pretty decent .. but nothing special.
Tech Issue #2 - CAN JAVASCRIPT SPEEDS THINGS UP?

If I understand correctly, some have said Javascript in the browser can reduce or eliminate the HTTP overhead and dramatically reduce both data transfer and bandwidth requirements. Is this true?

I don't know how to do this but I welcome a simple explanation that illustrates how it might work. Right now I'm thinking that HTTP headers still need to be sent upon each request and they will use much more bandwidth than the data itself.

Is the ultimate solution to find a way to transfer data without constantly opening and closing HTTP connections?
Tech Issue #3 - KEEP-ALIVE OR BROWSER PLUG-INS?

If a connection can be opened and remain open for the entire hour-long auction this might dramatically reduce the overhead of individual HTTP connections. Is something like this possible with as many as 200,000 bidders? If so, how many (and what kind) of HTTP servers might I need to maintain this many open connections?

If this might require a FireFox plugin on the client end it is theoretically possible to make this a requirement. Obviously I prefer to avoid this requirement but if nothing else works this may be a functional alternative.
The whole concept of interviewing someone and deciding to be an active co-founder with them seems odd to me. Almost like asking a girl to marry you after dating for a month.

I guess it can work out if you cover the right bases. From my experience, my co-founder relationship is great because we've been friends since high-school and we complement each other well.

The only time we took on a 3rd co-founder/partner turned out bad. So, maybe I'm just gun-shy.
Tech Issue #4 - BATCH PROCESSING?

I've never done batch processing before, but some have suggested it, and I don't understand how it works just yet. My current concept is that I would receive (for example) 15,000 bids during a one-second period and I would store them in RAM as they are received. Then at the end of this one-second period I would have the software process the batch -- which probably means updating the position of the current unique high bid, determining the status of each of the 15,000 bids in relation to this new position, and creating and delivering 15,000 unique HTTP responses. Is this description totally wrong, or is this somewhat close to the way "batch processing" might work for me?