skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Most modern electronics have been using lead-free solder for the past few years (to allow them to be sold in Europe and California). From my experience in manufacturing, I'd say that the long-term reliability of lead-free solders is still rather poor. I don't have much confidence that electronic devices made after about 2005 will last 25 years. Maybe in a few years time, the reliability of lead-free soldering will return to the levels of lead based solders just before RoHS came out.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restriction_of_Hazardous_Substa...

When circuit boards heat up and cool down, they expand and contract. Ideally, a designer tries to match the coefficients (as much as is practical) so that all the components expand and contract at similar rates. Because they don't, the solder joints get stressed, and over time can become brittle and fracture. Then, they'll be intermittant connections that, depending on where they are located, may or may not cause intermittant operation, or a computer that shuts off/reboots when it is hot. A motherboard has on the order of 10^5 solder joints.

Because of the speed of changing products, and the ease of doing so, and the very thin margins for distribution, there is no money left in the system to make repairing computers affordable or profitable. It has been cheaper for more than the last decade to discard computers than to repair them. And to change that would mean severely restricting models of computers and the parts that go in them.

I used to work in the automotive industry, and keeping parts on the shelf to repair 10-15 year old products was rather common.
sorry with (40 do you mean games are typically "wants" and not "needs" instead of the other way around??

also willingness to pay is i think a result of comparisons... you see "another" app (regardless of its purpose or category) for a much lower price and subconsciously users get a twitch for a mild spike in the price, without even stopping to think about the possible value... ie costs are often thought about instead of the benefits..
or simply too many competitors resulting in over supply ....
GRE Scores By Discipline
Not if you're bootstrapping
10 Interesting and useful CAD blogs to watch in 2009
Disclaimer: Putting on my Yahoo! Developer Network hat

We'd love to hear more feedback like this. If we don't know that something isn't quite right we can't fix it. If there are things we can improve for you unless you tell us we can't do them.

I've emailed you hopefully we can work through this list and get them all fixed :)
Actually, I think a slightly different process will appear each time. Different enough that people will not recognize it for what it is except in hindsight. Since regulation is most effective as a reaction to a problem, perhaps we should accept that there is very little we can do to stop these sorts of things and concentrate on preparing ourselves to weather the storms when they appear.
Last I heard there was a kind of cartel of professionals determining what gets popular and what doesn't. Last I heard was a year ago, though.
Datapocalypso (RE: Eviction, or the Coming Datapocalypse)
To me, it seems to be a matter of convenience. The intersection of people who use iTunes and use torrent trackers is probably quite small. Is the cost of $0.99 worth the hassle of drastically increasing your computer literacy level to avoid? Probably not.

It's easy to forget on Hacker News that most of the population are not hackers.

Empirically, convenience seems to be a valuable good to sell. Why buy a shitty cheeseburger at a higher price than it would cost to make at home? Because its convenient. And so the world runs.
How to become a pseudo-philosopher
I believe this violates Apple's TOS. They forbid interpreters and VM's. (I can't find a reference but I remember reading this).

Otherwise someone would write a Python interpreter, or a flash player.
Linked In is a great place to start.

Ask a question on Linked In about who has jobs and send it to all of your contacts. That way you can funnel the right jobs to the right people.

Not only will it help your friends but also if you land any successful candidates the person who hired will probably be pretty happy too.

I set up a number of people I know with jobs this way.

The other thing I did was have a party. It was purely co-incidental, but given my circle of friends maybe 5 people were hiring and there were about the same who wanted a new job. I'm not sure if anyone has been hired because of it, but I'm sure it didn't hurt. Just make sure you don't invite someone because they are hiring. That's kinda lame and inconsiderate to them as a person.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capability-based_security
This post is a great step, tell us more.
You can do it in an even easier way.

For example:

article450 = {'title': 'This Awesome Thread!', 'text': 'Blargh!', 'comment_ids': [17, 18, 19]}

So, you can embed it right in the object just as easily as setting up another object in the store just for the ids.

That helps with foreign-key type situations, but it doesn't help for a lot of other things.

I guess my perspective on it is that the restrictions are fine for small apps with few features, but for small (size of data) apps you don't need 20,000 operations per second. MySQL handles it easily. Likewise, if you're dealing with a bigger app, you're going to want to be able to query data in more ways. MemcacheDB is great for what it is: a key-value store. It's not a replacement for a RDBMS.

In fact, you really can't create such a database as you propose. The issue is that there are problems in computer science that grow at certain rates. For example, sorting is an n * log(n) problem. You simply can't do better than that. That's how indexes work (very simplistically). If you limit yourself to operations that you can do in constant time, you have hash tables. You can't query a hash table except by key. Distributed hash tables are decently well known systems, but they don't replace databases in most applications and you can't make them more database like unless you eliminate the property that makes them scale so well.
This may not be the intention of the "hotel" being discussed in the article, but it seems to be there are people who would like to setup sweatshop style outfits and dub them "incubators" or "entrepreneur hotels" - but in reality, they'd like to push motivated (but young and naive) kids to work long hours, for little pay and (unlike a true start-up) for no equity (which would turn to a lump-sum payment in case of a liquidity event or a dividend being issued).

This isn't too dissimilar with what big companies do with "college hires" (which is sometimes reasonable, as all they have to work with are college transcripts and a general idea of intelligence), except (much like MLM schemes) such an outfit would be able to attach a bunch of feel-good self-help messages around it ("you're being an entrepreneur, you're changing the world, you're taking a risk and not working for a Big Dumb Ugly Corporation").
How would you rank people based on their "web 2.0 sophistication"?
The bottleneck in web 2.0 today is generally the sophistication of the average web surfer.

But suppose there were a site that ranked people in terms of web 2.0 sophistication as determined from their contributions to web 2.0 sites.

For example, someone contributing effectively to wikipedia might rank higher than someone posting a video to YouTube.

Perhaps such a ranking would motivate people to become more sophisticated in this regard -- and hence allow developers to build more sophisticated web 2.0 services.
Discovering the Link Between Effort and Reward: What I've Learned Freelancing
A lot of great ideas on here. Since you are the only one here who really knows your product, you are the one that would have to choose. I work for an ad agency. We are very much into asking questions. Our goal is to interrogate the product or service before we recommend anything. Once you do a soft release to us at hacker news and we know more about the product, you will start to see even better responses to your question about where to spend your thousand dollars.

One word of advice though, find out how you can quickly and easily explain your product to your target market. When you target market understands your product after tagline or sentence, they can easily explain it to their friends. This will help you in all marketing efforts, but particularly on small budgets.

The startups that users understand are going to do better than the ones that users need to spend forever explaining to their friends.
You can improve your speed a great deal just by reading the introductory tips in most speed reading courses. Most of it comes down to observing how your eyes work mechanically and trying to make the input process more efficient. Probably the biggest detriment to speed is the regression. Whenever you stumble on a word or phrase and back up, you loose a tremendous amount of time relative to the overall process. If you can just minimize or eliminate regressions, you will notice a good improvement in speed--without any reduction in comprehension. It just takes a little discipline to develop the habit.
From the article: "I am not a compiler guy."

It shows. Queryset performance is completely divorced from the performance of the template engine as querysets are coded natively in python and just called from the AST evaluator. Also, code generation is incredibly complex (at least compared to an AST evaluator) so unless you convert to something much much faster like machine-code, it's usually not worth the effort (which considering Django's speed relative to other frameworks seems to be the case).

Sorry. Some myths about AST compilers grate at me sometimes.
Bob killed.
Cross-posting:

Of relevance, Pownce had a similar shutdown recently. Pownce was bought and users were given 2 weeks to export their data before the service was shutdown and the data gone forever.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/12/01/pownce-deadpooled-team-...
The good part is at the very end where he actually proposes some kind of solution.
Yeah, but paying $7/month is super-easy for those with credit cards and income. The point's to get people paying for it - for those who would anyway, a simple nudge and slight incentive is probably all you need. And for those who wouldn't pay for it anyway, you keep them using GitHub.
A lot of students really are that poor. I went to a state school, where tuition was 1500 a semester, my apartment cost 104/month, and I spent 100 on food a month. I wasn't atypical among my friends. I never went to the bars. Spending 2-4 days worth of food money on a source code repository would not have even crossed my mind as possible. There are a lot of people at public schools, and they have very different resources than those at private. 7 dollars a month does seem small compared to 30,000 a year.
That's close for physics and mathematics: 790 quant, 590 verbal for me.
I knew the album was free and still purchased it, although not from Amazon, from the site NIN set up. I definitely still purchase albums of bands I like, why wouldn't you?
The real point of confusion is that people don't realize that BG/GB are two separate states. Like many of the recent blog articles, this one also doesn't clearly explain why you need to consider both BG and GB. Consider:

"A person has two kids, and his first-born is a boy. What is the probability the other is a boy?"

There are two possibilities, each equally likely -- (first-born, second-born): (B,B) and (B,G). Hence, 1/2.

"A person has two kids, and one is a boy. What is the probability the other is a boy?"

In other words:
"The first-born is a boy AND/OR the second-born is a boy."

There are three possibilities, each equally likely -- (first-born, second-born): (B,B), (B,G), and (G,B). Hence, 1/3.
yeah it sounded like a compromise - obviously an acceptable one, but it was brushed over.
Some architectures are more resistant than others. I suppose you could break into some air gapped military computers -- if you had a nuke.

why are we even discussing this?
Interesting that Math and Science graduates barely scored lower on the verbal sections. I've always felt that the so called verbal section is really more of a discreet math/type theory test plus vocab.
no. subscribers to their blog, connections on LinkedIn, friends on Facebook, followers on twitter....just sum it all up !
800 quantitative and 660 verbal and I'm an EE.
At last, although I can only hope it doesn't emulate the bloated crap that is Picasa 3 on PC.

It is disappointing that one of the fastest and most stable photo applications out there (probably its biggest two differentiators) has followed the path of all previous photo applications.

It's not just me either. http://groups.google.com/groups/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8...
It certainly helps to have marketing skills and lots of friends. But that's only part of web 2.0 sophistication.

What I'm interested in is the ability of the user to understand new concepts -- which would allow you to build more novel web 2.0 apps.
Book digitizing howto
IIRC 64-bit Linux does this. As 64-bit becomes more prevalent, this may become a non-issue (Windows 7 was supposedly going to be 64-bit only, and one of the next releases may make this true).

16-bit Windows only lasted 10 years. There is 30 years until the problem.

The biggest issue will be embedded code, but much of that may have failed/been replaced when 2038 rolls around.
What's the analytic scale mean? I have an analytical writing score but it's on a 0-6 scale.

800 quant, 710 verbal. And 46 years old when I took it. ;-)
This explains why the 'you act like an employee, just easier to fire' in-person contracting gigs usually only pay 25%-50% more than the same gig as a salaried employee, while my experience has been that off-site, work-when-you-can freelance work more often commands two to four times the hourly rate you'd expect as a salaried employee.
To be more clear: When hearing this problem, some people imagine -- (one-kid, other-kid): (B,G) and (B,B), hence 1/2.

Others imagine -- (first-born, second-born): (B,B), (B,G), (G,B), hence 1/3.

Someone needs to write a blog post explaining why the latter method is superior, not just a blog post that automatically enumerates the four states.

People need a REASON for not combining BG/GB, and considering the children as (first-born, second-born) provides much of that reason, since it is a logical way of ordering children. A (one-child, other-child) ordering appears a bit absurd, even to the layperson.
It was not a trade off being made. The point and click UI could no longer meet the requirements. That's what he was getting at saying the legalese was turing complete. The requirements the law now mandated required an actual language to to implement because the old system with ACL's can't do the job anymore.

That the new system doesn't have a point and click UI isn't a trade off, it's just a consequence. He wasn't trading a complex system for a simpler system, he was replacing a complex system that could no longer work with a simpler one that could.

And while not being a programmer doesn't mean you're an idiot, not being able to learn some simple scripting to modify rules does make you an idiot. If your job requires you to modify the rules, and you can't learn to do it, you're dumb. All intelligent people are capable of learning some simple scripting.
I'm more interested in the lexing/parsing problems and how they apply to writing custom tags. It is also nice to have a more complete expression language. I don't really buy into the strict logic separation argument, but then again my team is composed entirely of Python programmers.
It depends on what you mean by "computer". A lot of the older calculators still work. I think many portable TRS-80's still work?

VIC-20, C64... the display is the weakest point. The above devices use VFDs or 7-segment LCDs.

RS-232-level 7&8-bit ASCII serial communications are probably the lingua franca of computers and will continue to be, so if your devices can send text across the serial port you should be able to find devices far into the future to communicate with your old computer.
I finally got around to adding that. You can now prefill the configuration and set a "next" url so that FriendFeed can be easily integrated into a configuration flow on your own site.

For example, http://friendfeed.com/settings/services/blog?url=http://mybl... will add the blog http://myblogurl.com/ and redirect the user to http://myservice.com/afteradd afterwords. There is also a "nextcancel" parameter which can be used to distinguish between success and cancel.
I was considering working for the CSCI department at my school to update the cobwebbed CVS repository hosted in our lab that some teachers actually expected students to use to turn in code. Funding/grant hurdles and my graduation got in the way, but I was thinking what would be awesome is some kind of sub–github: maybe a walled–off version of the entire site restricted to students at a particular school and their professors and TAs. In whatever case, some kind of github.edu site, where CSCI departments sign up and encourage student use would be a lot cooler than just giving students free accounts.

I paid for an account for about 7 or so months while I was a student, but after a few of my private collaborative projects slowed down or ended I was paying for nothing and have now cancelled.
The "blog" service only asks for the blog url and does not even mention RSS (we look for the appropriate link tag on the page). I've also just added the feature that Bruce requested, so you should be able to add a "Add this blog to FriendFeed" link to all of your blogs which prefills the url box and directs them back to your site after it is added on FriendFeed. Let me know if you encounter any problems.
I've played with this and I like the idea a lot. but I found that BDB sucks still and gets corrupted too easily.

So Instead o've been using tokyo tyrant. It supports memcached protocol as well as HTTP and native client protocols.

http://tokyocabinet.sourceforge.net/tyrantdoc/

Much better then memcachedb and serves the same purpose.
I'm rather curious were you went to school, this sounds kinda nice. It's the direct opposite situation here (very little on campus housing, cook all my own food, don't do too may extracurricular activities because it's all rather expensive) but I come to the same conclusion. Except that our school servers don't let us host git repos, so I need an external place to store code.
FeedaNeed.org Update: Top Non-Profits Announced. Projects to Start Rumbling Soon.
I know a number of you here at HackerNews helped this become such a success -- let me personally say thanks. Thanks!
The Freebase Blog » 100,000 books
The Best Time to Ask a Stack Overflow Question?
Web Startup Group BYU This Thursday - Javascript & Intro to Startup Weekend
Yes, that makes perfect sense. Because you don't like the prices of WebEx, Xobni is going to start (somehow) charging you by the hour. And not just by the hour, but for almost $600 an hour.
In the past (around the turn of the century), the analytical section consisted of logic and reasoning problems. It was probably similar to some of the LSAT questions.

They converted it to a writing section relatively recently
"So, you can embed it right in the object just as easily as setting up another object in the store just for the ids."

That doesn't solve any of the issues for which I built Alchemy. The point was to create an array store that could be reliably modified without transactions. I built it after having real-life issues with race conditions in Memcache where transactions weren't an acceptable alternative.

In the end, I really would like to see cache solutions that can be easily dropped in for the different bottleneck situations, but keeping the standard RDBMS.
The Twitter Hack:  How it happened and what's being done
His comment about it turning into 500 lines of code isn't an exaggeration, most likely. The truth is that it's so simple that one can hardly understand why anyone uses ACLs after you've implemented something like this. You create a series of functions that define the attributes you are interested in, there's some lightweight context maintenance, then in the core of the system (the "500 lines") you simply tie all the pieces together in accordance with the business rules. It's so simple it almost boggles the mind. Bog-standard refactoring will get you there in nothing flat, and of course you have full Turing-complete language constructs at your disposal.

One hint: Write the code in a functional style, i.e., Haskell style. Pass in the full context to the permission function. For instance, if you have a time-sensitive function, don't have the time-sensitive function call the system clock; have it extract the time from the context your provided. If you call the system clock, you'll never be able to write the tests you're going to need to write. Similarly for many things, like direct LDAP access or whatnot. The internal permission code needs to be a pure function. Fortunately, that doesn't make it any harder to write, even in an OO-based language.

If you want to get really slick because your context has multiple expensive operations like direct LDAP access (although this is a bad idea if you're going to be calling this frequently), you can even create two context implementations, one for testing that simply returns provided values and one that lazily goes out and gets LDAP data or whatever if you need it. Best of all worlds that way.
Can you explain?

The verbal section consists of antonyms, analogies, sentence completion, and reading comprehension.

I don't know much about discreet math. How does it apply in this case?
The fact that every discipline uses the same test for admissions says more about the quality of academia than the scores.
Secrets of success from Google co-founder Larry Page
Create Server
In this tutorial we will see how to create an HTTP server. A web server is software installed on a computer that allows other computers to access specific files on that computer/server
So, writing without "is" restricts what you can say, and it happens that some of the things you can't say in E-prime are (potentially, sometimes) harmful.

Similarly, if you never eat anything, you won't get fat.

I'm unconvinced by some of the ways in which you claim my E-prime translations of opinion statements are improvements. For instance, "is overrated" --> "blah blah more highly blah blah": I don't think the E-prime version is any more explicit about what the open questions are; it's just more verbose.

As I said elsewhere in this thread: in so far as writing in E-prime helps to clarify your thoughts, it's not specifically avoiding copulas that does it, it's writing under a severe restriction so that you keep having to rethink what you're saying and what it really means. Anything that repeatedly forces you to stop writing automatically and find a new way of expressing yourself will do that. (Therefore: I conjecture that experienced E-prime writers and speakers, if any there be, get less benefit from using E-prime than those of us who have to do it laboriously from first principles.) Writing in Shakespearean sonnets, or without the letter "e", would do about as well. And, at least in the latter case as in E-prime, it would do harm as well as good, both because it would slow you down and because some things might just turn out to be too difficult to say in the restricted language despite being worth saying.
Thanks for the clarification. MemcacheDB does indeed look like App Engine Datastore/SimpleDB sans extra query machinery.

Which is still interesting, as this is anyway their most efficient use pattern (in terms of resource consumption, not ease of development).

Attribute-based queries on App Engine can hit restrictive CPU quotas quite easily, while key-based queries are very fast.
Are you Making Something that will become ‘Absolutely Irrelevant’?
There are eight additional subject specific tests related to specific discliplines. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graduate_Record_Examination#GRE...