skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The difference between letting an exception bubble up and seeing a system call fail and aborting is pretty small. Either way, you need a higher level way of dealing with it.

One of the most interesting papers I read was "Why computers fail and what we can do about it" by Jim Gray while he was at Tandem. Transactions are essential, and most failures are transient. This can be applied at many levels, and can deal with many failures without the developer of the mainline code having to decide what to do for each given failure.
I'll look it up in a couple hours when I go to the library. Basically my claim comes from Alfie Kohn's book The Schools Our Children Deserve, but I'll try to find the footnote with the primary source document.
Of course, the best way to make extra income on the web is by telling others how to make extra income on the web.
From 2004, which is also the last time anyone used Xbox on it's own to refer to the Xbox 1 rather than 360.
500 Exabytes per Raindrop
That's a lot of traffic. To handle that dynamically would probably cost you a pretty penny, even with really fast code (Apache/nginx/whatever modules in C, for instance). What are you trying to do, exactly?

My laptop can pump out a static page at about 4000 requests per second. A million requests per minute is on the order of 16,000 requests per second, so you'd probably need multiple servers running really fast code. Since you don't explain what you want to do with the data, it's hard to really say anything meaningful about how you want to handle it dynamically.

Do you really need to start off handling that much traffic?
Since there's nowhere to do that here, I guess I have to start my blog. I promised alaskamiller that I would start one last April, but I've been busy coding almost every day since (shame on me). I always thought if I had something to write, it should be compilable, but I now realize that I have to make the time to blog as well.

I'll take a break this weekend and figure out this wordpress thing. Stay tuned...
Web Directory, Entertainment, Education, Real Estate, Business News
BasicCentral.com offers links to browse for websites related to business, advertising, import & export, manufacturing, sports & recreation, arts & crafts, education, real estate, society, travel & transportation.
Australian Net-Filtering Plan, is the USA Next?
Yes. Warren Buffett has gone on record saying that if he only had a million dollars to invest (as opposed to umpty billion dollars), he was sure he could double it in a year. His problem is that there just aren't that many multi-billion dollar investments around, and those that are, are well known, and therefore accurately priced. Maybe also, for the same reason, it's hard for a massive company to keep growing (a smaller co has more room to grow).

With a million or less, he could assess the small companies that aren't covered by analysts and so on, to find one that was (1) great (2) cheap

The lack of money is not the deficit that stops you (and me). Mostly, it's effort, and self-confidence in your own considered opinion when it is contrary to everybody else. To buy when others sell - because you've done the research, and trust your judgment. It's mostly an emotional or moral quality. If your judgment is wrong, you have a lovely learning experience that cannot be obtained in any other way (and Warren Buffett has had that experience).
As much as I hate IE6, this goes against everything I believe in businesswise.

Willie Sutton robbed banks because "that's where the money is".

I support IE6 because that's where the users are.

Sometimes in business, the predator does what he has to do to eat and the prey whines about the state of the world. This is a perfect example. If you're not nimble and capable enough to meet your customers on their terms, maybe you are prey.
Good point.

I'd (personally) still rather tentatively support IE6. I know for a fact that most of my work clients are running IE6 though, so I have little choice in the matter.
Using Paypal with Django
Dupe.

4th in main page.

Official Google Blog: Talk face-to-face right from within Gmail (googleblog.blogspot.com)
51 points by Anon84 15 hours ago | 50 comments
Ask HN: SAAS distribution network & face-to-face support.
We have a B2B SAAS product and are ready to build a distribution and support network around it as we expand internationally as it's exceeded our capacity alone. We have been approached by a few companies and some individuals who want to do the sales/support, but we were wondering:

1. What is best practice for setting up a distributor? Any war stories from other members would be much appreciated.

2. Businesses often want face-to-face support & training, which they will gladly pay for. Is there an easy way to set this up without having to setup offices around the world? How have others done it? There must be companies who specialize in providing support & training.
Should be formed into a bronze plaque and put at the entry of every cs/engineering campus building.

10 years in, I'm near maxed out at what an EE can make in my geographic region. That salary happens to be about 75 percent of what the average law student in my area makes right after graduation.

I've said it before and I'll say it again, majoring in engineering is a BBB (Bad Bayesian Bet) from an economic and even intellectual stimulation point of view.
http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html

I think you've combined two meanings in the word hostility: one is to argue and debate, i.e. antagonistic or Socratic; the other is to be disrespectful and insulting - aggressive domination, to win by making the other lose. The same with nice as its opposite: one meaning is to approve of anything with no objectivity or truth; the other is to respect others. I agree that challenging people is a good thing (even though it can feel uncomfortable and "not nice"), provided it is done is in a respectful way.

I think the key is whether one's goal is to get to the truth and learn and build; or whether one's goal is humiliation to show your superiority. However, it's fraught with danger to evaluate what someone else's goal is, because your interpretation of their intention is necessarily a step distant from the truth about them. But I see many comments on HN that are clearly seem way or the other (the remainder I'm not sure of).

I really love being shown I'm wrong by someone who sees more than I do. For the supernatural sense of expanding one's world, it's second only to experience. :-)
How to sell your music online,photographs online
We will sell u r your music ,photographs online through our club .
5-8. 2+ hours of exercise a day enables better concentration for longer periods imho.
Looking for good artists
looking for singers, dancers, musicians, photographs many more details log on:http://club.mocazo.com/group/mocazokishaan
Organisms can subtly direct aspects of their own evolution
a lot of people don't like "blog spam" so it gets looked down on, not saying this is, but to many people the common idea is that if you see it on a blog, its just copy pasta from a legit source.
How long before IE6 dies of natural causes? Predictions?
I've been looking at something similar (not on that scale admittedly) recently.

Either I would go with a generic cloud service to host on (which should scale to handle your hits) such as EC2. Butthe cost could be astronomical.

Or you could go with something like 3tera & the custom cloud solutions and make your own server system: I'd say 4 or 5 servers behind a load balancer.

However w/o knowing more about how data will be stored I cant advise on how to keep the database under control. A million database writes per min is not going to be pretty - even a million reads per min is going to stress it... give us some info on your DB architecture and the process / requirements of those hits and someone will be able to advise more I am sure :)
(Edit: as a hint your probably after somethign like slave db's and memcached - have a look at how Wikipedia handles their data)
Well, if there is a demand for a "clever" get-a-freelancer site, where focus is on qualifications and portfolio, and not down-bidding, the market should be providing one. Capitalism isn't just about down bidding :)

I'm probably going to need a remote, freelance Django dev or two soon, but I'm not too sure how to go about it.
The only self-employed engineer I know is a mechanical engineer who's living on food stamps, trying to get enough interest in converting vehicles to passive cooling, which seems to be her personal calling, to pay the bills.
Index funds shouldn't be measured by the benchmark indexes as many companies come and go in the very long run. It's not the same performance if you put X money in year 1234 after Y years, some of that X money went to the toilet and the tracker index picked other stocks.

There are examples of even great and old big names falling to ashes right now: Lehman Brothers, AIG, and GM.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dow_Jones_Industrial_Average#Fo...

And you lose a lot of mobility on most index funds, I'm still fighting Fidelity to get my money out of one! Don't make my mistake, Dilbert should stick to cartoons.
Hacker Culture: Taking itself only seriously enough to look ridiculous.
Yes, as long as you make sure to slip in a plug for the services you're selling (see "Flip a Website")
I think that diabetes and HIV are big problems while we're at it.
I take a bit of issue with some of the reporting. Are the companies listed really "startups"? For the most part they were startups who have had some success and, after they've had some success, VCs started to put more money into them.
False. In languages with better type systems (e.g. ML and Haskell), you generally use the "Option" (OCaml) or "Maybe" (Haskell) type in situations like these.

(Example code is OCaml)

type 'a checked = Pass of 'a | Fail

(* very much a toy example *)
let even x = (x mod 2 == 0)
let can_fail x = match x with
| 0 -> Fail
| x when (even x) -> Pass (x * 10)
| x -> Pass (x)

# can_fail 2;;
- : int checked = Pass 20
# can_fail 3;;
- : int checked = Pass 3
# can_fail 0;;
- : int checked = Fail
#

The languages infers where you're passing around option types (such as "int checked" above) and forces the calling function to account for any potential failures. Rather than just Pass 'a and Fail, it could be Pass, File_Not_Found, Access_Denied, etc., and (Unknown_Error string). OCaml also has exceptions, but the combination of union types and required exhaustive matching covers most cases.
http://djangogigs.com/developers/ ?
Uh, presuming the technology works and your data is good quality, how do you monetise this?
JavaFX is GPL'd?

Sun is a study in how to kill a product.

Build a business and be obliged to give your competitors your source code! What a feature!

Do they realize they are behind Flash and Silverlight?

WOW!
As class of 2005 grad (who incidentally goes to Olin), I have multiple offers w/ signing bonuses.

Whether this is a sign of a shortage, I am not sure.
He should have a little fun and set aside a million bucks to try to double each year. It's not like he can't make smaller investments just because he has billions of dollars.

Of course if he announced which stocks he picked at the time he purchases them the price would probably increase. Heisenberg and all that...

I often wonder if people like Jim Cramer end up manipulating the market just by talking publicly. And is it illegal? If Cramer says "I just bought such and such stock and think it's a great buy", and the price goes up because of it, and he sells his shares for a profit, is that illegal? He simply stated a fact and his opinion. Where is the line drawn?
The three wise men of making money online by telling people how to make money online are John Chow, Darren Rowse and Jeremy Schoemaker. There are others, but John Chow is probably the best example of using social media (Digg) as a launching pad for a successful money making blog.
I am very tired of people like you
The biggest issue, from what I can read, will be how well the data is partitioned. If every single write will affect every single subsequent read in a non-trivial manner, it's a really hard problem, and you're looking at really expensive hardware.

If you're able to partition the data, it's "just" a question of throwing enough servers at the problem.
How about start a local business? As a web designer/developer it's much easier to sell a website to a local biz than it is to win a project on Elance for peanuts all the while competing against 75 huge Indian firms.

I know that doesn't quite qualify as making money 'online' but it's pretty darn close.
Ermm, that is what most startups are intended to do.
Great for supplemental income, stay at home moms and folks who can't go the traditional job route.
Yeah, that's my best bet so far.
You are right - there are many similarities. In fact, our Dean of Faculty came from Harvey Mudd. I think that Olin has a bit more freedom to innovate, though, given it's young age (fourth graduating class this year). There is a joke around campus that no class has ever been the same for two years - in almost every case, there are significant overhauls that result from student feedback. While this makes things tumultuous (and of course there is no guarantee that change is good), it is clear that the profs are not willing to settle on something that is just "good" or "acceptable". Did you get this feeling at HMC?

I can't really make a more detailed comparison without more information about what aspects of Harvey Mudd you find similar.
If people post links to things they've taken the time to write themselves, I'm more than happy to see them. By all appearances, this is something he did himself.
Theoretically possible I guess. The current TPCC holder is 6million transactions per minute (mixed workload). But, that was on some, er, serious hardware: http://www.tpc.org/tpcc/results/tpcc_result_detail.asp?id=10...

I've personally seen 1000+ tps systems (60,000 tpm), but these were all big iron environments... I've seen commodity based (e.g. x86/Linux) environments up to about half that.

However - all of that is just guesswork - A lot of how your would go about this would depend on your data. Are there natural partitions in the data? (time, user, geography, category?).

And even if your page is tiny - say 10kb - That's, er - something like 1Gbps sustained (my math might be a bit off)? That's a lot of bandwidth.
As the other guys said it all depends from your situation and what you are trying to do.
One thing to maybe look at is Erlang and related technologies Mnesia, Yaws etc.
This is a comparison of Apache vs. Yaws under heavy load:
http://www.sics.se/~joe/apachevsyaws.html
There is easy money to be made online, just in small amounts. I made thousands with PayPerPost, hundreds with AdSense and hundreds more from a small collection of other services.

It's not money I'm going to retire on, but it helped pay the bills (my AdSense account pays my electricity bill every month) and for some people could mean the difference between keeping their homes and not.
Compensation for teachers is fantastic, as long as you compare it properly to compensation for other workers.

To begin with, multiply by (12 months worked by others)/(9 months worked by teachers).

Then add in the value of the state health plan, usually fantastic.

Then add in the real value of a defined benefit pension plan (chances are you only get a defined contribution plan) available in most states.

Then add in the value of tenure, which I'll tentatively estimate as effectively doubling the salary (1).

All that is actually pretty good for a group of people who tend to come from the bottom of the barrel cognitively (http://www.ncsu.edu/chass/philo/GRE%20Scores%20by%20Intended...).

The idea that teachers are underpaid is a myth propagated by teachers unions and their lackeys in the media.

(1) Many tenured professors could easily double their salary by quitting, but choose not to.
1) Read books.

2) The source you linked to supports my claim, if you actually read it.

3) They didn't release a statement condemning Obama, but they've been criticizing the AP curriculum since the 90s. (And Obama's plan is to increase the number of students taking the AP.) I'm sure they'd never actually criticize Obama himself, at least not yet, since they will depend on him for lots of other stuff.
Without much knowledge of the specifics it's hard to come up with a plausible solution, but here are some ideas:

* Push off as much of the processing as possible onto the client. Ideally, the browser has a javascript library that deals with all the rendering/updating/etc, and just passes stuff to the server as short commands for which it receives an affirmative or negative response, rather than rendering an entire page for each requrest. This might drastically reduce your cpu usage, depending on what else you do in that request.

* How live does the data have to be? Can it be a few seconds stale? If so, and if the data is similar for each user, cache the hell out of it as a bunch of static files served by nginx and the like, rather than dynamically serving any page at all.

* Is it possible to do any sharding so that each bunch of users gets its own db server? It's easier to serve 10x 100k hits a minute than 1x 1m hits a minute.

Without more specifics, it's hard to provide more specific advice though.
How to: Make a Hand-Drawn Font
egg works on windows
How much work can you do in the other 23 hours? Can you be asynchronously writing from an in-memory cache to a real database during that time? Or pre-computing anything? During that hour, how much (if any) data can you afford to lose in the event of a problem? How much data per transaction as we talking about? Do you need a relational database to generate your pages or could you live with a linked-list of structs (or a tree or whatever) until you can persist it off somewhere?

(FWIW I work on an RDBMS-based OLTP system that handles thousands of commits/sec without breaking a sweat, and a lot more at peak times)
How 10 Famous Technology Products Got Their Names
As much as I hate carriers who block services, they have a point here. Wireless calls typically use 8kbps. Next-generation codecs cut that to 4-5kbps. Skype, well, is wasteful. With most people's internet connections, this doesn't matter. What's 20-60kbps? However, if everyone decided to use Skype on their wireless, we'd hit capacity problems fast.

We'd also see the end of unlimited data. It would be metered in an official manner and it would come out to a rate more expensive than voice because it uses more network resources than voice. If a minute voice call uses 480kb and a minute Skype call uses 1200kb, you can bet that the Skype call will cost you double (or more).

The fact is that wireless networks are able to optimize their voice services when it's voice. When it's data, it's just wasteful of bandwidth. That doesn't matter over your cable modem. It matters on a shared wireless link that works because it pushes the max on efficiency.
Just do what the gaming industry has been doing for awhile (in various ways).... core libraries / engine in C/C++ with higher-level logic in a higher-level scripting language.

This gives you the advantages of a high level language where the extra overhead and consequences for coding a little poorly aren't as detrimental.
I don't agree that difficulty is the reason for high dropout rates. Olin has long been lauded for it's almost zero dropout rate, but I will not use that to make my point since we have a very small sample size (300 people) and we are relatively selective, and therefore not representative of the average US engineering student.

Instead, lets look at ASU in this study:
http://www.foundationcoalition.org/publications/journalpaper...

The study found that the top 5 reasons (as summarized on page 3) are:

1) reasons for choice of SME [Science, Math, Engineering] proved inappropriate

2) poor teaching by SME faculty

3) inadequate advising or help with academic problems

4) non-SME major offers better education/more interest

5) lack/loss of interest in SME ("turned off science")

Reasons 2, 3, 4 and 5 are directly related to failures of the institution. Sure, there are students who cannot comprehend the coursework, but those are few and far between compared to the numbers who simply do not receive the support necessary for them to succeed.

This study, along with many others, points to a common trend: we blame the student for being incompetent or unmotivated, instead of blaming the institution for not providing them the necessary help (that they are paying tens of thousands for).
AAPL and YHOO

Both are cheap, both will double in a year.

Mark my words.
That chart is pretty misleading - it's basically comparing OS threads to event-based processing, which is really likely to be a win for the event-based system. It's also several years old at this point. Erlang is neat, but to be really, really fast, he probably wants to be working in C. Who knows though... the 'specs' are awfully vague. Erlang might be an interesting choice for some kinds of apps of this kind.
Disney will buy Yahoo, Ballmer will keep his job and other tech predictions
And yet, cold water doesn't boil faster than hot water. Weird.
I'd try to build a microsharding system. Depending on the amount of data you want to store, go for 256 or 65k virtual shards and allocate a few shards on each DB server. A hash of the key will give you its shard and it's easy to keep a shard map in memory.

I'd advise going with BDB or whatever key-value store is fastest those days instead of MySQL. And an application-server layer to take care of the microsharding.

Also, try to put most of the work on application servers (things like joins, sorting, calculations etc), because those are much easier to scale than database nodes.

If possible, use in-memory logs instead of writing to the disk during the 1 hour and write the log to disk after the rush hour is over. Consider using a RAM-only database + UPSes, if your data is not that much.
Yes, we are doing something similar currently. A combination of C & Ruby is working out quite well. (The product is for the Ruby domain so the high level language choice was very straightforward.)
Oh the market does spike. Just look at the recent month. You just don't know in which direction and whether a further leg down is in the cards. At the end of the day market timing is a game that makes the end of your day come so much quicker, and I'm asking myself, what have I achieved in terms of innovation?

Unless you do it algorithmically, it's incredibly boring, but once you have started it's hard to stop. Market timing is an addiction :-|
google's search cookie seems to be separate from the account cookie. Same forgetting happens with "safe" search preferences.
Yes, lots of bad code fast is half the reason I use Scheme almost exclusively now after 12 years of C. The other half is converting bad code to good code fast.
I think the SEC has rules about when people like Jim Cramer are allowed to buy and sell stocks that they talk about publicly. He wouldn't be able to buy a bunch of shares of Company A, then go on TV the next day and say what a great buy it is, then sell it when it goes up the next day.
Let me guess, you'll be capturing data about where people are browsing in real time?
Discussing the Global Brain and the Future of the Web with Peter Norvig et al (Video)
People who run IE6 are like people who drive SUVs. They don't really care what anybody else has to put up with (gas prices, environmental impact, physical danger... or development costs, code quality, and spyware).
The other issue is that many corporates/educational simply don't support or let you install another browser.

This is the single biggest issue, methinks. Even at my company (> 100 people), the majority of non-technical employees do not have the ability to install software on their machines. Our IT department allows technical users to do whatever we need to do, with the caveat that we have to clean up our own messes.

That said, the base Windoze installation here includes IE7.
Just out of curiosity, what does "implemented" mean in this case?