skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is a really cool initiative. And I see users have already started commenting on sections of the book pointing out the corrections. Way faster than normal ways of type proofing. I have just started to read the book - will do it over the weekend.
And Peyton Manning 28. There's nothing to it. The author pulled out an anecdote based on limited information (using the anecdote to support a theory instead of the inverse) by Gladwell, which surprise, is postured as fact.
Twitter kind of seems to be one of those you "get it" or you don't things right now. Some people are wild fans, other people think it's a worst-of hybrid of IRC and SMS.

I've been using Twitter, and I find it mildly entertaining. The business uses somewhat elude me, as the more people you follow the harder it is to see the nuggets of useful info in between updates of the weather and what people are eating for lunch.

The marketing types obviously love Twitter, but they seem to consume any new mechanism for connecting with "eyeballs" at rapidly increasing alarming rates.

So, I'm not tired of the Twitter apps. Some of them have been useful or interesting to me (there was one today, whoshouldifollow.com), and others that seem completely useless (won't name names).
Reading articles and watching videos from the engineering teams of big sites is interesting, though not always easily applicable.

For example, the Facebook Engineering Blog (http://www.facebook.com/eblog) or Google Tech Talks (http://au.youtube.com/results?search_query=google+tech+talk+...).
use xul + xpcom

(powers firefox, songbird, miro, thunderbird, activestate commodo ....)
You aren't the only one thinking it's a waste of resources. However I learned a little bit from the argument I received when I submitted about this recently.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=417522

In my post I was speaking to the "I did this in X hours" kinds of projects I was seeing. I said there ought to be better problems to hunt down and solve. Some railed against me saying I didn't talk about big enough problems. Some said beginners ought to do things that are "quick and easy" as to gain feedback and see a project through.

I don't buy any of that. I'm going on my 10th year of software development and almost everyday I find myself feeling like a beginner. And I still see Twitter based apps finding "oops" in tweets to be a pretty big waste when our school systems can't properly share data. However I obviously haven't found a way to articulate my feelings in the best way yet.

I learned that not everyone cares about "good problems". They care about "cool problems". The good problems are the ones that are hard and may take more than 4 hours to really even understand. And probably quite longer to solve. The cool problems are much different. They aren't problems really and are mostly made up features looking for an audience.

There are many people smarter than I that will call Twitter a protocol and liken it to the next sliced bread. I look at the schools my daughters will be attending and I wonder why they can't get their crap together.
I did a similar thing. I put my personal git repo inside dropbox. It's like github for free private 2GB repositories.
Salesforce.com outage exposes cloud's dark linings
Can someone with experience processing payments themselves or with a similar service comment on the pricing? Thank you.

https://payments-sandbox.amazon.com/sdui/sdui/business?sn=pa...
Well, except that Twitter is a private company and its API is proprietary in that sense, unlike http or email. (Maybe a better analogy would be people building MS Outlook plugins, way back when.)

I'm just not convinced that it's more than a fad within the development community, and I'm even less convinced that if it is indeed something more than a fad, it will remain confined to a single company's API.

But I've been wrong plenty of times before and I doubt anyone will notice if I'm wrong again. :)
Right. And this is a false correlation. You might as well say "knowledge of C is highly correlated with who you know." It is undoubtedly true. If you know C, you're likely to know many others who know C. If you don't, you might struggle to name even one other person who does.

But this is obviously not because you need to know the right people to know C. It's because a programmer is born not knowing C and must struggle to learn it. In the course of her struggles, she interacts with, works with, and in other ways self-selects for many people who have shared this same struggle.

Business is the same. Its goal (at least in capitalist society) is to create wealth. No one is born knowing how to make profit. A person must struggle to learn this skill, and in doing so often associates with many others doing the same.

So you have two groups. One whose goal it is to create efficient, innovative, elegant code and another whose goal it is to create wealth. One group tends to end up with awesome software and the other tends to end up with awesome resources. It is perfectly reasonable that it should be so. And yet the developers look at the business people and say "I guess it must be who you know?" Aren't we smarter than that?
Firebug 1.3.0 Final Released
Your sending letters critiquing a company you are trying to get a job from? And more than one?! You will not get that job, no matter how 'open minded' the owner is. Right now the owner is hoping someone else applies, and is mulling over how disruptive you would be to the office.

It's like critiquing someone about their online matchmaking profile on your first date with them. It's our first date, and I'm quite a catch, but you keep talking about how my online profile is flawed? Is that really the most important thing to be discussing right now?

There is a fine line between 'sucking up' and 'being polite'.

The owner doesn't want to hire someone who is going to send him letters every week about how his company isn't doing things right. That's being judgmental and condescending.

If you get hired, bring it up the next time they are looking to hire someone. If you don't get hired, then why do you care?
Where GUI toolkits are concerned, simplicity and C are mutually exclusive, because C just isn't a good language for them.
PostgreSQL was designed "correct" from the start. However, MySQL does many of the same things today.

You start by saying you'll have 5,000 people who want 1,000 different pages with some updates, some selects, etc. Well, once you have more queries than cores, the benefit of splitting work over multiple cores is gone since none of the queries can logically use even a whole single core given the level of concurrency.

You go on to say that PostgreSQL was designed to eliminate unnecessary locking so that selects wouldn't be blocked. MySQL's MyISAM database doesn't support this, that is correct. However, InnoDB does support the same MVCC model that PostgreSQL uses and likewise eliminates the locking issue.

Your argument rests on MySQL locking an entire table to do a write: "When you have 500 reads and 1 write, and you lock the entire table for that write, it's not a big deal. . . But when you have an array of hundreds of simultaneous reads and writes, it becomes a mess if you don't have fine-grained locking capabilities." A great article on this problem is here: http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2001/05/25/postgresql_mvc.... It's great that PostgreSQL supports that, but MySQL supports it too today (http://wiki.oracle.com/page/InnoDB?t=anon).

There are plenty of things that one can say are issues between the two. MySQL's inferior query planner. The fact that PostgreSQL can suggest indexes based on query history. PostgreSQL's weak replication (Slony-I's communication costs grow quadratically, yuck!). MySQL's acceptance of February 31st as a real date. MySQL's poor subquery optimization. PostgreSQL's more limited data partitioning.

They aren't equal in all ways and PostgreSQL is a wonderful database, but saying that MySQL needs to lock a table to do a write is just wrong in a very partisan manner. I've never really understood such partisanship. Knowing the strengths and weaknesses of multiple products makes you aware of what is good for a project and what isn't. Even better, once you're using one of them, you know what to do and what to avoid with it. Not confronting the reality of how alternative systems work just means that the chance of picking the best system is more luck than information. For what it's worth, I use PostgreSQL in my personal projects. It's great. However, it's also important to understand that MySQL of 2008 is not MySQL of 2001. It's come a long way in the "correctness" camp and the old arguments about Multi-Version Concurrency Control don't apply anymore.

Oh, and from Power PostgreSQL, Disks > RAM > CPU (http://www.powerpostgresql.com/PerfList).
http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596102357/

Building Scalable Websites by the Flickr guy.
Awesome. Didn't think of that one. Thanks :)
Which, of course, begs a link to jerf's critique of this idea: http://www.jerf.org/resources/xblinjs/whyNotMozilla/index.ht... . Have things changed since then, or are his complaints still valid?

I, for one, am too scared of the wicked complexity and large memory overhead to try developing a XUL-based app. But I've only done a Hello World.
Quarterbacks have about 3-4 seconds in which they need to throw the ball. What they do on the field has more to do with quick spatial intelligence and not something the Wonderlic tests.What the Wonderlic is supposed to gauge is how well the quarterback memorizes all the possible plays and arrangements before the game. So a quarterback needs to have that special ability to take in the situation in 3 seconds and narrow his predetermined options down to one. Is this what we commonly label "gut" thinking? I don't think so.
Bush's Final F.U.: Bush to screw America over for years to come
Up next:

How to Save Time by Removing Consonants from Your Vocabulary
Ahh yeah. The images can be fun to look at... there is also an image only viewer: http://enjoysthin.gs/explore/images
Eric Schmidt wishes Google could save newspapers
You are working way too hard. Let the OS figure out what needs to be in ram - it does it automatically anyway, and it does a better job that you an since it's caches what actually used, and not what you think should be used.

So why does memcached exist?
I'm tired of them, too. However, here are a few areas where I think building a Twitter app can be useful.

First, if you take advantage of the fact that a semi-interesting Twitter app can get lots of press right now, you can use it as a way to promote your real money-maker app. For hackers, it's probably way more fun (and cheap) to spend a day building an app than sending 50 Emails to bloggers begging for a post.

Second, if you truly do it on your downtime for your the pure joy of imagining something and seeing it come to life. Wasting time is relative, it's more productive than watching TV, playing WoW or Xbox, random web surfing, etc...
Microsoft All But Abandons Vista: Upgrades To 7 To Be Offered In July
why (the Lucky Stiff) was using XUL for Hackety Hack[1], but wasn't happy with Mozilla, so he started building Shoes[2], instead.

[1] http://hacketyhack.net
[2] http://shoooes.net
Yes, but this is not compsci.
I suspect the grandparent is referring to a "cross site request forgery" (XSRF) style attack.
And here I thought he was a Mac guy.
12 deaths blamed on snow and cold across Europe
I hesitate to call Eli a very good QB, and I'm a Giants fan
Nope. Its all just mass experimentation. 100 apps may come but 8 will stick. You can either participate in the mass testing or just kick back and watch for the sticky ones to surface in adoption.
The latter will probably generate considerably more interest?
celtx - www.celtx.com - a media making app, is built on top of FF (just about to be ported to the 3.* code base).
Yeah, it's definitely a trade off. I'm not sure I agree with the 37 signals way though.

A good example of my issue with them is their highrise product. It took over a year from launch [1] before they had any type of bulk editing [2] features. Simplicity is one thing, but that is a long time for a feature that really should have been there at launch... or close to it.

[1] http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/329-launch-highrise
[2] http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/908-tiny-projects-keep-it...
It looks cheaper than most of the payment gateway solutions offered by most banks (i.e. Chase Paymentech). And there doesn't seem to be a monthly fee.
Often a database is used to do simple message passing - campfire, twitter, pretty sure they both use a db to pass messages around.

>> "You should not use flat files for web apps - they don't handle concurrency very well."

That's a silly blanket statement. If I have a single thread that deals with something, of course it can use a flat file to store it. The problem is, that some people decide to use webservers that cause concurrency issues by having multiple threads doing similar things for different users.

It sounds like you're still thinking about standard accepted many threads, database, etc etc.
We see a lot of garbage Twitter App these days; mostly people don’t think trough before posting some crap online. Because Twitter idea and app look and feel so simple folks think they can just bring anything up and hit the jackpot.

This should apply to any App idea: Think the dam thing thru before making fun of yourself!!!
It's named in honor of Haskell Curry, the mathematician.
Both tiddlywiki and repos are great ideas. This got me thinking of other things which get updated frequently and will be useful to access from multiple locations. Hmm, probably chat logs and vim/other configs.
That's great if your data access is localized or infrequent enough that you aren't exceeding your disks' I/O limits, or if you have lots of I/O capacity by adding lots of spindles, but even adding spindles isn't going to be as good as adding RAM. Sharding just makes each shard's local RAM cache more efficient, and 37signals is choosing to have one 128GB server instead of 4 32GB shards, which is great as long as Moore's law keeps up with your growth.
Those type courses are listed under Comp Sci at our community college. But, I like your suggestion, so I moved those textbooks to the Business - Basic Skills category. It fits there much better!
Quick, rattle off 3 small Twitter applications that would improve a school system. I'll start: snow days. Homework announcements. A continuous discussion with teachers and parents about curricula. Volunteering.

I'm not in love with Twitter, but the value is apparent to me: it's a social networking tool that just gets out of the way.
I got my Ph.D. in CS from Georgia Tech (I think it's #9 according to the joke that is US News), and I'm a prof at the University of Utah. Here are my three points of advice:

1. PUBLISH!
2. PUBLISH!!
3. PUBLISH!!!

When I'm reviewing applicants for admission, I look at three things: (1) prior research, (2) letters of recommendation and (3) personal statement. I look at them in that order.

I don't care whether you came from MIT or Bumblefark State U. I don't care whether your GPA was a 2.0 or a 4.0. I don't care whether your Math GRE is an 800 or a 600. I won't look at your transcript either.

I care only about your potential to do research with me. (Keep this in mind when you're choosing which areas and which professors you'd like to work with on the application; it will determine who sees your application.)

My last piece of advice would be to consider a broad range of schools. The rankings put out by US News are completely off base. Many "lowly ranked" schools have deep strengths in particular areas.

Northeastern University, for instance, has an outstanding programming languages faculty, but they get no credit for it in the rankings.

I'll also plug the University of Utah as a great place to come for programming languages/compilers, formal methods, graphics and scientific computing.
Firefox seems like an obvious option for desktop apps. Yet it hasn't caught on, and I'm not sure why.

Isn't it obvious? XUL is slow as molasses compared to GTK (or anything else.) There are desktop apps written on top of Mozilla. Miro is one that I use every day. I know the pain.

The perceived speed of Firefox itself depends mostly on the speed of web-page rendering, and not so much the chrome. So I guess Mozilla's focus has been to improve rendering speed, whereas Firefox's preferences dialog still reminds of me of trying to use Netscape 6 on a machine with 32 megs of memory back in 2001. Oh, the horror.
> So why does memcached exist?

To cache the results of complicated joins (or queries without indexes).

It's pretty much pointless if all you are doing is caching the result of a simple query using an index.
I do this pretty often when listening to books on tape, I thin it's a natural to do this when listening to long-form video.
You can refactor pianos. Nice.

I think the most important thing he brings is the personal attention. Something like a piano is going to have a lot of variance in mass production, especially with cheap parts. Just having an expert look it over and set it up is worth his price. Adding higher quality parts is just a nice bonus.
Ask HN: How to make something awesome out of Motion Detection
My friends have been working on motion detection using matlab and have done a really nice work! I wonder what could be a superawesome application for this kind of technology. We got a team of people into robotics, electronics, programming desktop apps and web developers...

sugar spice and everything nice... any ideas for what could be chemical X (a nice application) for motion detection ?
Interesting site, it's fun to explore. It might be nice to display content inside the cell itself once clicked, or in a lightbox, as the back/forward through history is quite jarring.
The last sentence of the article:

"He said he'd never even heard of Twitter until he saw someone mention it on YouTube. "
Hey, what about Adobe AIR?!

You get two toolkits for free -- standard HTML and you also get Flash/Flex.

(BTW, if you want to hack apps that look like true client-side app in HTML, check out the ExtJS kit. Amazing stuff. Well thought-out JS.)
This is my complaint about Komodo Edit. It has a lot of really nice features, but it's just slow compared to other editors (and even compared to Eclipse).
You put your finger on what I liked about this article, but couldn't quite articulate. It's so much more subtle than what's usually written about these things by either side (including on the sides of buses).

Did the story get killed? I don't see any indication of that.
Top Underhyped Open Platforms
I agree. I think that it's more a question of naivete. I always remember the saying 'Never get the memo' which means that when someone works hard and thinks carefully, but ignores the received knowledge about how things are done, it can sometimes give them an advantage over the majority who can anticipate each others motives and intentions due to certain codified or unspoken rules. Unorthodox approaches are underestimated at one's peril.
Why even have windows? (Especially at 5 inches thick.) A video camera and some monitors might do the trick.
Uh what?

If you have just a single thread of course you don't have to worry about concurrency. Isn't that what I just said?

And you are seriously making a webserver that serves just one request at a time?

There is a good reason it's "standard accepted" to use many threads, and a database. I guess you could have just one thread, with a queue, and do just one thing at a time without a database. Don't know why you would want that though.
Hardy har har.
Agreed. I'm probably not going to do a lightbox, but I need a much smoother way of going from one thing to the next.
ACLs (and RBAC, and most capability security models) are limited for a reason -- they allow you to prove that certain security properties will hold for your application. Without a solution to the halting problem, no such assertion can be made about security mechanisms expressed using Turing-complete languages.

That's not to say that ACLs are the last word -- they were defined and analyzed in depth in the 60s and 70s, and work in security theory marches on. Models such as information flow analysis, object capabilities, etc., allow for much richer policy definition while still making stronger guarantees about the security of the finished system.

While I actually like most of what Zed has to say in this talk, I think he's doing a grave disservice to the security theory community by dismissing out of hand everything they've done in the last 40 years.
He isn't confusing anything. You're just taking that sentence woefully out of context.

It's pretty obvious from the rest of the post that he's just saying, "Don't look for all the reasons to not do something." He's not saying you shouldn't use your brain once you've started doing it.
Yeah, maybe. Invalid or not, HN is the only social news site that I know of that works well in emacs-w3m and on my phone. It also works better in Conkeror than Reddit.

So while it may be un-accessible, it works better than the sites that are accessible.
Please make an app that will aim and fire my usb missile launcher at my cat when it jumps up on my desk to have a nice stomp across my keyboard in my absence.

I'm tired of retuning to find a wtf message from a random contact because I apparently IM'ed "zdever yr tn mnyuk,lo" while I was in the shower.

Oh.. you meant a commercial application. Sorry, can't help you there. :)
Girard was at Stanford when I was there, and I took one of his courses. He was charming and engaging. I remember once at some learned, oh-so-politically-correct talk he got up and made a comment to the effect that "it isn't allowed to criticize any culture at all, unless of course it's Western culture, and that you can only mention in order to [and here he stood up and kicked the air vigorously] KICK IT DOWN!" It was very refreshing - nobody except a star professor with the equivalent of fuck-you money in academic reputation could have gotten away with it.

That being said, with all the respect I have for Girard, I could never escape the feeling that his analyses of Christianity were to a large extent thrice-removed expressions of his own Catholicism. This doesn't invalidate everything he says, but it made me skeptical of his grand theory.
I'm guessing it's because without windows it would look like a tank too. I can think of at least a couple reasons why having the President rolling around in a tank isn't a good idea, and they obviously don't think it's a good idea either since they've gone through so much trouble to make the President's vehicle look like a regular car.
Try cloure-html. It turns invalid HTML into valid XHTML SAX events (which can be made into a DOM with cxml-dom or cxml-stp).

The architecture of closure-html and cxml are really nice, even if you don't use Lisp. You should take a look.
In about 1990, when I was very young I had a great idea. I had just read a book 'How Things Work', which was a huge hardcover book with great pictures showing how many things work. I came across the generator page and since my father was a mechanic I figured it would be a good idea to put one on the axle of a car.
So, I took this idea to my father and we made a quick little proof of concept model, but he explained to me that generators create resistance and it would result in a net energy loss. But, being a bright young kid I figured it could be used just during braking so it would help slow the car down AND produce power!

I never made any money on the idea, and regenerative braking is being used by most hybrids now.