skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
While this may come off as a GitHub ad, it's the site and DVCS I'm most qualified to discuss. The questions promiscuous forking raise are technology independent and we've been thinking about them since day one.
a logo design studio speaking out against design contests that drive down the price? I'm shocked. SHOCKED!
I love the footer: "Code is Poetry". Eugh.
With an app whose main feature is to track people in one way, it's not surprising that it would end up tracking people in other ways too.

In any case, please try to turn back and head back up the evil path, or at the very least, stop where you are :)
I've heard that MPI works (granted, at 1Gbps speed) on EC2 and it's only $0.20/core/hour. When EC2 is cheaper and strictly more flexible than Sun Grid, it's hard to argue why Sun Grid exists at all. Maybe that's why Sun shut it down.
Ten years of futility: COPA finally, truly dead
Obsurd. With an O.
To carry your movie analogy a bit further, video games can be categorized as commerical art as are movies. For games, like motion pictures, the ratio of art to commerce varies for each game. Some are designed to sell tickets/game tokens, while others attempt to tell us something about the human condition.
Bijan Sabet: Naming Your Product
lzw-compressing the data then base-64 to armor it might give you 1.5:1 on stuff over 1KB or so. I ran into trouble with Javascript getting clever about bytes and Unicode characters.

But, yeah, some efficient compressor and then an efficient url-safe encoding might do it.
It's a 3-minute video. Transcript: http://tinypaste.com/af823

Eric Schmidt
October 1, 2008
The Commonwealth Club of California
San Francisco, CA
I was commenting on the article, not your blog as a whole.
I'm holding out hope that those horrid things are just a passing fad. I can't stand them:-/
http://www.macinstruct.com/node/138

install the preference panel they link to, then select "mute". works perfectly on my mac pro, macbook pro, and macbook air :)
I'm not sure there's a reasonable compendium, but Paul's written a lot on such in his essays. There's some here:

http://www.paulgraham.com/start.html

For me it's pretty simple, though finding and verifying is the tricky part.

- You have to be able to put up with them. A lot of them. Really a lot of them. It's kind of like getting married there.

- They should be able to do something essential to the company's survival. And they should do that while "getting" what you're doing and thinking it's special.

- You trust their judgement. Enough to bet a few years of your life on it.

"Art of the Start" also has some decent info there.
c-ville c-logged
Thanks for the reply. However, I fail to see how you could have read the article, or even your own link to Wikipedia, before posting and submitting a reply.

This is not a request for proposal, by the definition on the page you linked to. This is a request for a finished artwork, thus a contest, and thus subject to laws of 50 states as well as international laws, as the article explains.

http://www.no-spec.com is another resource regarding such contests.
Thanks for the link but the download didn't work.

Mirror: http://www5e.biglobe.ne.jp/~arcana/StartupSound/download/Sta...
Open Source Projects Make the Cut As Rookies of the Year
There is a comment from a lawyer at the end that just laughs at the whole post. There are design competitions all over the place, just not on the web. My GF regularly enters painting competitions. All the laws were set up to protect consumers from unscrupulous marketers, "Buy my cereal and maybe you will win something."
I don't know Ruby, but the author's comments suggest that why_'s way is more brittle, longer, and slower.

How is it better then?
Firefox Plans Built-In Usability Platform
Code should not look like that. Such code is too difficult to understand - even in C I've rarely seen such a mess.

The style of programming that in any way values a lot of weird unreadable characters is a relic of the past, and it is not in any way related to skill level or intelligence, as a lot of people seem to think.

Code should always be made as clear as possible first, and should only be made more obscure when performance is critical, and there is no clear way of writing the same block.
Is Twitter Strangling its Famous API?
But are those laws actively enforced? There's plenty of laws for almost anything you can think of, but that doesn't mean they matter.
I tried to add a restaurant in my city, and I could either (a) add a new restaurant or (b) add a new location. It took me a while to come to the conclusion that adding a new location meant adding a new instance of a chain of restaurants, adding a new restaurant meant adding a new chain. (I think.)

So okay, I'll start by adding the nearby Chick-Fil-A, because that chain is already in the system. I add a new location, including the street address and zip code, and... nothing. My city isn't in the drop-down menu. I guess it didn't get added?

Hmm, well, wait a minute, when I click on Chick-fil-A from the rating listing on the right, there are two locations, one in Austin, and one in... Cedar Rapids! There we go! So my entry did get added, but Cedar Rapids wasn't added to the drop-down menu of locations.

I found the whole experience fairly confusing.
Greedy Algorithms and Politics
I've pretty much decided that after the 20th century, the only correct answer to the question, "Is this art?" is, "Does someone think it is?"
The Putnam competition is a 6 hour, 12 question proof-based math test. Math majors, engineers, computer scientists, and physics majors are the ones who usually take it. The person with the highest score gets a scholarship to Harvard for graduate study in mathematics that covers tuition plus 12k.
Archives:http://www.unl.edu/amc/a-activities/a7-problems/putnamindex....

Sample question:
A1. Basketball star Shanille O'Keal's team statistician keeps track of the number, S(N), of successful free throws she has made in her first N attempts of the season. Early in the season, S(N) was less than 80% of N, but by the end of the season, S(N) was more than 80% of N. Was there necessarily a moment in between when S(N) was exactly 80% of N? (with proof)
168 out of the 196 top scorers got at least an 8/10 on this, so it was a relatively easy question for that year.
Their rate is amazing. Their DL speed isn't the highest, but there's no purpose of 10 mbps if your bandwidth is only ~50 gig.

I don't play online games very often and when I do they're more likely to be a MMORPG where I can just do my own thing 99% of the time.

Edit: Sorry, forgot to say thank you! It's currently cheaper for us to be with cogeco due to their offer, so I'll see how it works out but I'm likely to be moving in a couple of years so I'll definitely sign up with those guys. Unlimited bandwidth for $40 makes me want to drool, and it looks like you could host your own server as they offer a fixed IP.
When in doubt, use a real parser instead of regexes (but perhaps i am spoiled by Haskell).
Obama Promises Science-Centric, Eco-Friendly Presidency
Are you talking about this?: http://www.project10tothe100.com/faq.html

If so, note that they do not mention the word "contest". Also note that there are no "winning entrants", only "winning ideas" -- entrants receive nothing at all if their entries are chosen.
Why is their logo an M&M?
Open-sourcers get with the git
What Do Bill Gates And Karch Kiraly Have In Common? They Can Go Both Ways
Steve Jobs and Me: A layman's guide to islet-cell tumors in the pancreas.
There are some pretty interesting innovations coming down from deep packet inspection providers. In one case they're caching the data that users are serving via bittorrent and re-serving it to the second and future persons requesting it, basically giving users credit for sharing without saturating their upstreams and causing network problems.

It wouldn't surprise me if these products can do the same thing for downstream traffic as well.

Everything old is new again, it's like the 1990s proxy servers brought into the 2000s-2010s.
[ Don't know if I'll write another blog post about this subject, so in the meantime, I'll answer here ]

The network graph things look like cool technology, but I am not convinced - perhaps you're looking at things from too much of a github centric view? That's easy when you live and breathe something. "The Google" is where most of us still start looking.

> It may seem strange, and perhaps even like a lot of work.

It does seem like an awful lot of work!

> In the old model, actionwebservice wouldn’t have made it past 1.2.6. Welcome to distributed version control.

That's not necessarily true. DHH or whoever could add the datanoise people as committers on the RubyForge project, where they could happily continue to work on the 'canonical' version. There are plenty of projects where that has happened, with the torch being passed, and the code moving forward.
very clever.

Now give me an example of this being useful?
If you need a blog post explaining line-by-line how it works, it probably won't be very easy to maintain.

This was the first time I’ve ever heard of the merge block. It’s not even properly documented! But it’s a very simple and very powerful feature...

...doesn't inspire confidence. :)
The Create A Twitter Revenue Model Contest
Apple sells 2.52M Macs, 4.37M iPhones, 22.7M iPods
I think that there seem to be two schools of thought in the USA on what defines performance and competence. If you follow the money you’ll see exactly the same thing happening in China happening here.

You've got wall street on the east coast and investment banks then you have the west coast with VC funding smaller businesses. As the size of the businesses get bigger and they are no longer created to be sold in six years, the downside of failure becomes much much higher. It's easy to assess performance in a small company and it's easy to kill projects that don't work in a small company. When you're Ford and your Firestone tires kill some folks life is a bit different, funding projects is a bit different, cash flow necessary to stay in business when disaster strikes is different, the types of employees you need to stay in business are different. What does this have to do with education and credentials? In these large companies it's much harder to measure performance and you get back to the old world view of who knows and trusts who. You're looking for a minimum level of reliability and competence since the downside of a screw up is much larger and the consequences are very different. I think these small companies are funded by people in large companies eventually buying them and those people agreeing to make the purchase I suspect went to Harvard and Stanford as did many of the VC partners who organized the funding. At the beginning and end of the project, the money passed through the ibanking system.

Silicon valley creates tons of companies which are bought and produce nothing but cash for the VC and deliver no or very little incremental profit to the company which buys it. It can no doubt be produced faster with a small company driving the project, but if you step back and look at the quality of the investment, you have an entirely different way to measure performance.

That means that the VC founders got money from east coast investors and the executive authorizing the purchase came from the exact same social circle. Performance metrics at the project level Paul Graham refers to are clearly met by any qualified professional from any school, but that employee amounts to an assembly line worker. If you measure performance in profit

I would suspect that the people who funded the startup attended top universities as those who bought it. Access to this kind of sure thing bet is limited to a group of people who are trusted by the previous generation who were doing the exact same thing.

The USA is good at moving money around into investments that often have no value to the investor. The founders and VC are out of the investment and the executives that authorized it are out of it long before anyone knows if it delivers real value. To call this performance based rewards is a pretty narrow view of performance. I think Paul Graham is brilliant, but he lives in a west coast piece of the puzzle which exits the process long before the end result of the pieces he’s created is known.
More Github
"Set to surpass"? Market value is based on stock price, and stock price is, by definition, the point at which there is as much demand for buying a stock as for selling it. So it sounds like Cnet doesn't have an actual story until Red Hat goes up, or Sun goes down. They're just pushing a fairly cheesy, meaningless non-story to get in ahead of whoever is planning on writing the slightly less meaningless non-story about when Red Hat's market cap does surpass Sun's.
It's not better, it's _awesomer_. I'm so tired of all this scalable, readable, fully tested code (which of course is good), that I find these small, wicked snippets so entertaining for the hacker part of my brain; and after all, this is the true reason I code: for fun.
Typically they all submit their resignation effective at the end of the term. If the new president wants them to stay on, he'll ask them to do so ahead of time - I'm not sure if they have to be confirmed again, though... Since we haven't heard of that happening, I'm guessing not.
I should know what font to use, that is available in all operating systems. And how to properly scale and position the character.(should check how the size and position of the character depends on the size of the font)

Manually tried to align them: http://old.etoleto.com/c1/ (orange circles are of text, transparent blue ones of divs)
I'm not sure if i should use this instead of divs - being able to select them as text annoys
Why 99% of Entrepreneurs Fail:  Because they don't do anything
That seems like an interesting concept that I would some day like to dive into...how do you rate the book overall?
No, it would have sucked then too.
is the ScreenGrab! Firefox extension no good?
Wow, that's a cool site. I didn't find it in my initial research. Thanks!
<Why>
God
</Why>
So do creative professionals have a process similar to an RFP? I'd like to see a few options before I select a designer and pay for a full design...
The only "contest" that is regulated by law is legally called a "Sweepstake". A sweepstake is quite clearly defined as "free entries into drawings of chance". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweepstakes

Comparing a design contest to a sweepstake is incorrect. They are not the same thing.

And links to sites with a clear, stated, and extreme bias doesn't help you convince me "design contests are bad". It only drives home the points "designers -think- design contests are bad".

Welcome to the free market.
I don't really want to be one of those people who insists on derailing perfectly good jokes by taking them seriously. But in this case I have to tell you: The answer to your question is "John Resig and the rest of the jQuery team".

In my experience JS is the least of my problems with IE6, because jQuery just works.
Blog hack: Add a table of contents post & widget
Decent review of Git's history, but I don't care for the blanket statements, such as "Git is gaining traction because given all other source control systems out there, git is the superior technology." and "Developers will almost always select the best technology".
The bulk of Cuban's point here is simply that online video currently has a lower ad load (2 minutes) than network TV (8 minutes), which is a huge reduction in volume. But it doesn't acknowledge that those 2 minutes:

* can be targeted much better than existing TV ads

* have a drastically lower cost of entry for advertisers, and can potentially support a much larger ecosystem of advertisers

* support fine-grained stats and analytics about viewership and popularity, rather than TV's archaic system of up-fronts, sweeps weeks, and Nielsons.

It seems likely that Internet video is going to seriously fuck up the existing networks. But the question is whether it's going to be creative destruction. There are lots of credible models that don't require middlemen to sell us air.
No, multicast cannot work on the Internet if the ISPs invest more effort. There remain fundamentally unresolved problems in Deering-model (IP-level) multicast.

The future of one-to-many content delivery is in edge delivery networks like Akamai. Maybe they'll use a (drastically simplified) multicast model internally, but that's an implementation detail.
> Say, a connection fee of $10/mo plus $0.30/GB? That seems reasonable

Do you realize this is three times the current cost of storage ? Metering could work if there was some actual competition. But if there was competition, we probably wouldn't be too worried about what methods specific ISPs were using.

The cities and towns (by virtue of owning the right-of-ways and not wanting ten copies of fiber) should mandate that companies laying wires provide only bulk access in terms of committed/burstable bit rate, which the actual ISPs would then use to provide consumer internet access.
You have a webpage open in firefox, safari, IE (via parallels). You grab all three in one go and reposition them on top of each other to get pixel accurate offsets?
I could be wrong, but I'm inclined to think it's only helpful for SaaS apps serving geeks/hackers.

If you're serving Joe Consumer or a specific industry/niche market, I'm not sure it matters.

I do like it when my service providers have a "system status" page, so maybe that's an option.
Red Hat have a luxury Sun have denied themselves: breaking stuff between versions.

Between major versions. RHEL4 is still supported, and will be for several more years, and never breaks compatibility. RHEL has a seven year security update cycle (and a five year full support life cycle). It's not Solaris style backwards compatibility, but it's more than long enough for any server I've ever managed. The average server life in the web services business is right at three years. That leaves four years of wiggle room.

Sun has occasional done major breaks in the past. Not as frequently as Red Hat, but I have dealt with issues in the past.

Do you know they won't support you if you upgrade RHEL4 to 5 in-place?

I actually didn't know that. I've done such upgrades numerous times (hundreds, at least) in the past and never had any problems. On the other hand, I've attempted Solaris upgrades in-place, and been damn near beaten to death by the machine in the process. I think I'd prefer to not have support and have it work, than to have support and need a helluva lot of it.

Solaris is not like it is because Sun doesn't know how to get new versions of their userland. Rather, they've chosen not to.

Yes, I know. That's why it's so damned frustrating. Sun has smart people working for them. They could be building a leading edge operating system, but they aren't. They're building an operating system that would have been embarrassing for a Linux distribution ten years ago. Package management has been a solved problem for years...and yet, Sun still ships a retarded bunch of crusty old pkg tools and they recently added a clunky GUI to sit on top of it so they can pretend they've improved their package manager. No matter how good a few pieces of the tech are, or how good backward compatibility is, if the user experience sucks, I'm not going to use it for the majority of my systems. And, right now, the user experience on Solaris sucks. Really, deeply, truly, and with enthusiasm, sucks. I figured Ian Murdock being on board would at least get package management fixed (since Debian was the first Linux distro to have reasonably modern package management in apt-get), but that hasn't happened.

I guess we'll see if OpenSolaris can solve these problems...but, we're, what, two or three years into the OpenSolaris experiment, and you still can't just download an installable CD for the damned thing. You have to run it in a VirtualBox, or jump through really complex hoops and be extremely selective about hardware.

Sorry, I actually jumped into the conversation to say nice things about Sun. But, you dragged me back through my years of dealing with Solaris boxes, and trying to support OpenSolaris and Solaris in our products, and it brought out Angry Joe.
<!-- SQUARE function -->
<xsp:variable name="square" type="node">
<xsp:processing-instruction>
<xsp:text value="{node() * node()}"/>
</xsp:processing-instruction>
</xsp:variable>

This is a one-liner in python and you can guess what it does without knowing python.
5% is not a ridiculous amount.

You have to think about the expected valuation of the startup. What are the odds that this particular startup is going to exit. As a lifestreaming service, I'd say the odds are around .01% (sorry, lets be realistic, web 2.0 doesn't have that many exits).

Given an exit of about $1M, we're talking about an expected valuation of the company at about $1,000 at its current state.

Then the question is, will giving up 5% of the website at its current state increase the expected valuation by more than 5%. I think that with a "kick-ass design" we can raise the success rate to 0.05%. Which increases the overall valuation by more than 5% of the stock given up, which increases the overall expected exit price, ergo 5% is worthwhile.
And a week and a half after release, it's up to 150 units. I guess that's more or less what I would expect of a niche app that was thrown in the App Store without any marketing.
Apple sold 4.4 million iPhones this last quarter
"ATM and point-of-sale skimming devices that could be hooked up to legitimate machines to steal information"

This week a friend twittered that her credit card information was stolen from a RedBox DVD dispenser. Her bank informed her about it, but they didn't say how it was accomplished. Now I know how.
I can agree this is why 99% of "someone with an idea" does not convert the idea into a meaningful business. However, I prefer to qualify the term "entrepreneur" as someone that fully accepts the "1% inspiration, 99% perspiration" rule.
Think about this for a second.

IP addresses (which we're running out of) address hosts. There are hundreds of millions of active full-time hosts.

Multicast addresses address content. How much more content is there than hosts? Do you really think it's feasible to give an IP address to every popular piece of content? YouTube allegedly gets almost 100,000 new videos per day.

The fact is, multicast hasn't been a success because it's simply not a good fit for the routing layer of the Internet. But edge overlay networks can build arbitrarily complex and interesting multicast service models on top of the Unicast Internet, and those overlays have been huge successes.
What makes me feel old is seeing people using github as a blog :/

I know this is off-topic, but isn't there a way to just link to the content? When I click on this, I can see a screen full of random bits and pieces which are completely irrelevant, then just at the bottom of the page, I can see one line of the post...

Guess I'm just getting old also...
Akamai --- or, more likely, Comcast and AT&T --- could accomplish the same thing without detonating your routing tables, just by adding servers and indirecting content with a traffic manager. Cringely is nuts.
If you check out myself you can see that I do much more than screencasts with CamStudio. I use it as a full video editing program. (mixergy.com) Email me if you want direct questions answers about video (mail at awarner.com).
Starbucks Drinks Explained
pretty much just remember that there is no overnight success, and stick with your idea through thick and thin, no matter what.

Granted...you need to put in some basic goals, i.e. if your startup grows at 1 user a month for a year..its probably time to quit.