skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've used an earlier version of this - and unless things have changed since Spring 2008 - this isn't usable with a high volume of traffic: I benchmarked it by having multiple fork()'d processes load data from a "partitioned" MySQL database - at one point, memcachedb just gave up and quit reading from the UNIX domain socket.

A possible alternative is Tokyo Cabinet: Tokyo Cabinet is a DBM implementation (BDB - on which memcachedb is based - is another) that memory maps the entire hash bucket. Tokyo Cabinet also has an RPC layer built on top of it which specifically has a memcached compatibility mode. I haven't yet tried, but I'd be interested to see what results people have with it:

http://tokyocabinet.sourceforge.net/index.html
http://tokyocabinet.sourceforge.net/tyrantdoc/
Great info Ahoyhere. Thanks for posting. Like how you break them down. Also, writting the goals looks to be critical.
Zed is going to become important. It's easy to write, but it's not easy to look good on video, as well as have good video timing. He's not perfect, but he's good.

If he sticks to his rant-personality, he will sooner or later become on of the stars of the internet.
Although I'm still highly motivated and that doesn't feel like it's changed, at some point in my life I just sort of... ran out of the ability to grind through with a low standard of living. Not at exactly 27, more like 25, but close enough. I have friends who are the same age and can still do this, which is embarrassing and makes me feel like a horrible selfish person.

I might be able to do it in a genuine emergency, it's just that living a low lifestyle feels like a much larger imposition and a much huger mental drain than it did at say age 22.

I wonder if it's hardwired brain change, or was it something more cognitive - something I thought?

YCers beware, your ability to run on ramen may be an age-limited resource, use it while you're young.
The two-man rule?

First one who snitches on his coworker gets a bonus?
A number of users here are YC "alumni" and presumably know the Xobni guys in one way or another. Even non-YC people (myself included) enjoy reading stories like this. It's just nice to follow people's success stories, particularly when you can relate to those people, and in this case, when they're also Hacker News users.
2 things: help with enterprise sales to Fortune 500s plus Cisco are a potential acquirer.
possibly - I watched probably 80% of the presentation, so I might have missed some nuances. My brief experience with startups showed me the last thing you worry about are tech choices and if you are in blub or not, more along the lines of "holy shit holy shit they won't pay that bill". But that was sometime back, startups now seem like a whole lot more fun (maybe thats VC backed ones were you aren't focusing on cashflow up front??).
Okay, so I changed the year to 2039, started WindowsXP in VirtualBox. Nothing happend. Opened Excel, typed in some time-related functions (like NOW), worked fine. And just by the time I was going to post this message ending with "What is wrong with it, I want some blue screen people" I simply couldn't log in with my LiveJournal openID (not sure if this is HN's or LJ's fault), so seems like this time thing really works.
Exactly - salesmenship? (is that a word?).
So is zed proposing a world where there are no sales people?
I guess some people may point to things that "sell themselves" like apples consumer products where people camp out to get them.

Sure - but how did apple really get strong enough to survive this long? at least in this country it was steak and stripper sales to the education department to get them in all schools.
From the comments:

"Josh Walsh": TechCrunch hasn’t ever been comprised in some way?

Arrington: not like this. plus, we’re a BLOG.

well, if that's not an admission by Arrington that Twitter is a big deal...
the 25-year-old computers that are still actively being used nowadays are the ruggedized ones that aren't affected by things like radiation and the more extreme temperatures.

the disposability of the modern computer tends to be a byproduct of how fast the industry and technology moves.
5 changes newspapers will adopt in 2009,
>Climate-change denialists

Be careful of using emotionally-charged labels such as "denialists/deniers". You will be destroying your credibility regardless of your arguements.
I think that if albums were $5, 3 times the albums might be sold, but more dollars would not be spent. I don't see anything but punishment stopping illegal downloads.
Any admin user who uses a 3rd party app has to give their full credentials (username/password) to the service.

And they have to store them in plain text.

So if either: they are malicious, or they are attacked, the credentials are lost.

I'm also assuming (not blindly) that the twitter admins use/tryout many of the tools.
As an aside, my hosting company accidentally deleted my backup share on their off-site SAN. I was not amused.

First rule of backups: trust nobody!
Any time a Hacker News startup (YC or otherwise) kicks ass, it makes everyone feel like one of their own succeeded. It's awesome.
I (very occasionally) get asked for free copies of my software. Past reasons have included "I am a nun", "I live in a country where $25 is a lot of money", and "I teach at an inner city school district with no instructional aid budget".

I told the first person to ask this that I would make an exception just this once and "write off" one copy as a marketing expense. (Nota bene for US-based software writers: you cannot actually treat free licenses as a business expense.) This is also what I have told any subsequent people who were motivated enough to try to ask for it.

My theory: software licenses cost me nothing to issue, I can say "Yes" faster than I can say "No", and I already am philosophically OK with giving out metric tonnes of free value to get a small percentage of visitors to pay because that is, after all, my entire business model. The fact that this practice creates rabidly vocal fans of my business is a bonus.
I've incorporated a number of companies in BC and the process has been simple enough to do on a self-serve basis. After a quick search, I found the following site for incorporation in Ontario, http://is.gd/eDJP - it looks the same as what I went through in BC. The big thing you'll have to deal with in Canada is the GST as you'll likely have to remit on a quarterly basis, so you'll need to watch your cashflow carefully.

Dealing with American customers is largely a matter of choosing whether to accept payments in US dollars directly or do a currency conversion with each payment before it hits your bank. I'd recommend caution with this one as some banks will hit you with a currency conversion fee and give you a crappy rate, so a good payment provider may help in this area.

PM me if you have any other questions.
So that's a good point. Even if their admin tools needed to be inband, it's messed up if people are using the same creds to administer Twitter as they are in using the service or messing with third-party apps. We don't have any evidence that this is the case, but it's a good lesson to keep in mind. Thanks.
Make sure you ask for a scanned studend id or something so that you get less "fake students", but this would be great.
TechCrunch runs WordPress. I feel like it's pretty safe to say that they've been compromised in ways Arrington isn't ready to think about yet.
I ask what their ultimate work situation would be (environment, tools, etc.) and what environment they would avoid like the the plague. Then I keep an eye out for them, offer support/assistance, and refer them to others that can help.
I've been using Django for a while and have two major complaints:

1) newforms sometimes takes some serious wrestling to make co-operative

2) The template system bites!

We plan to move to Jinja2 after we finally launch something. However, the biggest blocker for us is lack of auto-escaping.
Attackers can only find holes that are there to begin with.
I have been wanting to try GitHub for use in my new startup, but I cant justify paying for it out of my extremely shallow pockets. I know if I used it now I would upgrade in the future as funding allows
In an advertising sense or?
Zed Shaw discusses this in several parts within the presentation; it's somewhat of a recurring theme.

ACLs as they're implemented on most operating systems are wicked limited; tracking attributes and access to anything beyond simple boolean HAVE_ID or !HAVE_ID or HAVE_THIS+HAVE_THAT logic gets really ugly with an ACL. And the classic ACLs are not at all dynamic, as is pointed out in the presentation. You can't easily tie the access control processing directly into the LDAP directory for employment status or into the system time for time-based rules, for instance.

Having access to conditional statements and such to manage access control is infinitely more flexible. This is the "Turing Complete" part of the presentation.

This processing all reminded me of what you can do with D inside the DTrace environment, too. But I digress.

Watch the presentation. It's worth your time.
it would double the range of positive integers it can store. that would mean no more "cheating," and using negative values to represent times before 1970.

personally i think they should redefine time_t to be a signed 64-bit integer. a better solution, i think.
Step back a moment and ask yourself if the anecdote is really a case of a student not playing by implied rules. The teacher most likely had an idea of what they wanted to see students do but failed to make it clear. This was effectively a competition and, as is usual with competition, it's nice to have all competitors on the same ground.
I have them send me a resume and then I personally contact a handful of folks that I think would benefit from hiring someone like them, and that would be a good fit for them.

If they are visible online, I'll be sure to email that along, pass it along via IM, etc

I don't really do anything special, and if I happen to be in the right place at the right time to hook two people up in a mutually beneficial way, I do that.
The Art of Computational Science: Socratic dialogues on computational physics and Ruby
amen. kids are expensive, especially without that fat health insurance package from a real job.

i don't assume we shouldn't exclude the middle, except that's where a wealth of experience and wisdom comes from.
Set it up to be as easy to use as ourdoings...and you're on to something.
Picasa Arrives on the Mac
It's about time.
For this particular topic, there is a relevant classic philosophy essay by Thomas Nagel - "What Is it Like to Be a Bat?"

"To the extent that I could look and behave like a wasp or a bat without changing my fundamental structure, my experiences would not be anything like the experiences of those animals. On the other hand, it is doubtful that any meaning can be attached to the supposition that I should possess the internal neurophysiological constitution of a bat. Even if I could by gradual degrees be transformed into a bat, nothing in my present constitution enables me to imagine what the experiences of such a future stage of myself thus metamorphosed would be like."

http://instruct.westvalley.edu/lafave/nagel_nice.html
"... it was more about putting a person in an environment and state of mind where they felt like getting the product, even if they never really wanted it. ..."

Or by stimulating the neural cortex with sound to prime you to purchase. This is the idea behind pumping music into shops. Just another technique in the toolset to make you buy, "Why We Buy: the science of shopping" ~ http://www.abc.net.au/catalyst/stories/s1907307.htm
Why we buy: the science of shopping
Just keep an eye out for your friends telling you that they have so and so position available. Then let them know you have someone good who'd be a good fit. Also if you know a good recruiter pass their resume on.

But only do it, if you are 100% sure it won't come to bite you in the ass later.

3 stories:

1-Guy went into an interview. Told me he knew a language, when he didn't. I got a friend to get him an interview at his company...turned out he couldn't write a simple select statement. He knew the theory, but he didn't practice writing the actual code.

2-Guy went into an interview, got tired of interviewing after 4 different people, and walked out. And on the way out he called his last interviewer a bitch under his breath...which she heard.

3-Guy went into an interview...got an offer. Accepted it. Then 1 week later got fired for incompetence. Apparently he was a very slow coder.

In each case, the person I asked to help out got in trouble. And I got an earful for putting them in hot water.
"It gets hard when you want to do something such as getting the comments for an article. You can't say, get me the comments for article 450. You have to actually store a list of the comment ids in the article, get the article, and then request the comments based on that list in the article object. Worse, lets say two people comment on an article at the same time. You'd better make sure you start a transaction before reading the object, modify the list, and save it. If you don't, you'll hit race conditions that can see a comment's association lost (something you don't have to worry about with foreign-key associations)."

----------

I'm glad you brought this up. I've been working on a project that "solves" this issue. It's basically a distributed memory hash-table like memcached, but the values are array that can be modified in a CRUD manner. I call Alchemy (http://github.com/teej/alchemy/tree/master)

So in your example you would have:

alchemy[ article_450_comment_ids ] = [17, 39, 158]

Where you could then look up your three article comments out of Memcache, MySQL, or whatever else. At the moment, it's mostly just a proof of concept, though I am using it in a small live app. I feel like a true distributed, super-fast, relational, in-memory database is close, there are just a few more pieces of the puzzle to work out. For me, Alchemy is one of those pieces.
Two universities I no longer attend, both of which I haven't been a student of for at least three years, let me log into my student accounts just the same as I did when I was a student.

I don't think this is a surefire way of proving studentship.
i suspect that windows' low-level timekeeping is not based on time_t, the way unix is. windows has a bunch of stuff like the SYSTEMTIME struct that does not exist on unix-like operating systems and doesn't have the same vulnerabilities. so windows-only software is less likely to exhibit this problem. macosx/linux/unix is much more severely affected.

however, microsoft's c/c++ compiler does indeed recognize time_t and related functions. any software that uses them will be subject to the 2038 problem.
Both sides have a point. I think a good teacher would have indeed separated this unusual entry from the main competition, because the other kids would have reasonably felt cheated by competing against something that's more a ball than an airplane. On the other hand, it's a clever hack, and deserves some acknowledgement. The appropriate acknowledgement depends on the kid; I know that if I did something like that, I'd probably either have some mischief up my sleeve or just want to disengage from the task as quickly as possible. The best way to have dealt with me, then, would be to acknowledge that I've got a clever trick, but that with all my spare time I should really construct something that has wings and flies, in the (implicit) spirit of the event.
And showing every single score on the planet within the header. Now it's roughly half.

The individual sports pages are also much improved.
I'm good at writing resumes. But lousy at interviewing - which I discovered the hard way while running for office this past November.

At the moment, only one friend is looking for something (more stable than his current gig), so when I see something, I let him know. This guy writes better resumes than I do, and he is extremely good at interviewing. He's been a contractor for the past 25 years.

If you're going to help out your friends, then you need lots of contacts in the industry. Effectively, you'll become a recruiter/headhunter/go-between yourself.

Figure out where they would fit in and call your friends at those places?
Yes. Exactly that.
Price vs demand relationships are complex and usually not liner.

Over a small range you can work out a price elasticity of demand. For something like bread it might be near zero (as price goes up, demand stays nearly constant) while for something like chocolate covered dwarf hookers it might approach infinity (as price goes up, demand drops to zero really fast).

With a PED of less than one, cutting prices will lower revenue. With a PED of greater than one cutting prices will increase revenue.

Music PED varies by band more than you might expect. For unknown bands it is huge, for established bands with large fan bases it is very, very low. If you are a U2 fanatic then there are no effective substitutes for your purchase so price is not relevant, whilst for X IN INTERESTING_INDY_BANDS there will be many other possibilities so you my as well pick the cheapest.

(Right now if you have a product with a negative PED you should be working hard on it. Anything (like VOIP, or rice, or medical care) where demand goes up as real price goes up (due to deflation/drop in income levels) is a good bet in a recession.)
I wouldn't feel bad. I'm only 24 but this is the way I feel about certain types of travel. I've spent the last 6 years going at the drop of a hat to everywhere from Syria to Uganda to where ever to work on projects and am getting close to the edge, for sure. Its very natural
I love the way it integrates with my Logitech Keyboard Multimedia keys.
And it's very fast, even though I'm in South-East Europe.
I'll admit to being one of the clueless ones, but I would have gladly paid for it despite knowing it available for free, had I known (a) how awesome it was and (b) how quick the download worked.
interesting model (sarcasm) - reminds me of the mophun platform from the early part of the century! They had the ludicrious model of writing only paid apps using their platform.

I really dont see how this adds value apart from allowing marketing departments to quickly release templated apps... also wouldnt a consulting approach be much more value adding (ironically)?
would one more of these friends be open to getting together to do a startup (atleast those interested in startups)?
Probability as Space
No, but he is saying that complex things require an actual language, not a point and click UI idiots can use, so changes to rules would require a programmer.

Seriously, the idea that a complex system can be built by non programmers is somewhat of a pipe dream, it always ends up being more complex than some simple code a programmer can understand.
Scientists Find Stress Reshapes the Brain
Getting into space by broomstick
Ask HN: Anyone interested in sharing a PnP (Sunnyvale) cubicle?
I recently went full-time on my startup. I'd like to join some sort of a co-working place so it's: (i) less distracting than home, and (ii) a little more social.

Looks like the best option in the South Bay area is PlugAndPlayTechCenter.com in Sunnyvale. It's $635/mo (including everything most hackers would need) for a cubicle that can accommodate 1-2 people. The place has the usual office stuff (conference rooms, cafeteria, free coffee), has startup-focused events, and even has Planet Granite next door with 50% off memberships (my favorite feature).

I'm hoping to find someone to share the cubicle with ($320 would leave money for ramen :)). If you're interested, please drop me an email or just comment away.
Reading DNA sequences from single molecules of polymerase using nanotechnology
won't a weekend inbetween be better.

we're based out of ~pune, will see if can make it to proto (hover.in was part of it's jan edition last yr).
Not all universities uses .edu emails for instance McGill uses .ca.
Thanks -- I did watch the presentation (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=420974) and I get how ACLs could be heavyweight and inflexible -- what I'm looking for are some concrete examples of how else people do it.

For example, does Ruby on Rails offer some framework for dealing with this? Or is it a 'just do it' kind of thing? Maybe it's not as complicated as I'm imagining it could be, and that's the point. But some example code would be good to look at.

I'll look into this further but thought I'd solicit here first.
I think the best thing to do is to introduce them to as many people as possible so that they can meet face-to-face. Obviously, it has to be a match for skill set, personality type, role, etc.

People simply relate better to direct meetings. They can put a face to a name and have a much better understanding of the person who is looking for a job.

Also, it is simply a lot harder to tell someone no to their face :-)
There are always holes.
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While I don't dispute the success of the album, I don't think this is as significant as it sounds. While the whole album was licensed for free distribution, only the first 9 of 36 tracks were available for free from the official source. For the rest, a person would have to either buy it or obtain it through file sharing networks where it would have been available anyway.
moving stuff over is super-easy with git. you make a new repo and push to it.
Models in the Recess PHP Framework
You could also take a mid-range approach. Give students one free year, no credit card information required.

The vast majority of student projects will be very short-lived. If a project actually gets speed and lasts for more than a year, the founders would probably be happy to pay to keep it going.
For posterity's sake, it should be noted that the Gelgamek vagina is typically 3 feet wide, not 4 feet.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fictional_South_Park_sp...
It isn't similar.

With App Engine and SimpleDB, you can query on any field in the model. With MemcacheDB you can only query on the key.

So, with App Engine and SimpleDB you can say "give me all the people records where their age is > 18". You can't do that with MemcacheDB. With MemcacheDB, you can only say, get me the records with the IDs x, y, and z.

What App Engine and SimpleDB eliminate is joins. MemcacheDB would be more scalable than either App Engine or SimpleDB, but it doesn't allow you to do much. That's what makes memcached a good cache. You have a strict limitation in how you can get data, but it scales. SimpleDB and App Engine are better than most RDBMSs in terms of scalability, but they still use index lookups when you query them.

To put it in SQL terms:

App Engine/SimpleDB: "SELECT * FROM people where age > 18"; "SELECT * from articles where comment_count > 10"; "SELECT * FROM articles where author_id = 28" These are all valid. Most queries that don't involve joins are valid.

MemcacheDB: "SELECT * FROM people where id = 8"; "SELECT * FROM people where id IN (8, 16, 27)" Those are the only types of queries that you can do with MemcacheDB. None of the queries above that work with App Engine and SimpleDB work with MemcacheDB.
I agree wholeheartedly with your last statement, but my point was that Zed got through the whole hour without once mentioning that this was a trade-off that was being made - and it is a pretty important one.

(Also, non-programmers != idiots)
Should startups be going to conferences?