skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> For our geo-search API, we used PostgreSQL for many months, but once our Media entries were sharded, moved over to using Apache Solr. It has a simple JSON interface, so as far as our application is concerned, it’s just another API to consume.

Does anyone have particular insight to share on this? Last I checked, Solr's geospatial searching methods are rather inefficient -- haversine across all documents, bounding boxes that rely on haversine and Solr4 was looking into geohashes (better but have some serious edge-case problems where they fall apart).

Meanwhile PostgreSQL offers r-tree indexing for spatial queries and is blazing fast.

Am I missing some hidden power about Solr's geospatial lookups that make it faster/better than an r-tree implementation?
We rolled our own physics to get the layout in the node view to a point that felt right.
It's possible that some disagreements between Republicans and Democrats will prevent IPAA from coming up in today's markup, reports seemed to indicate as of last night.
5-Part Video Series on the History & Culture of Silicon Valley
This is great! hopefully it can deliver on the promise that XBox Live Indie Games never quite delivered on ... which is to say giving indies a channel to the same marketplace, on the same terms, as everyone else. The problem with XBLIG was always that the indie games were always in a different menu and never quite given the same opportunities as other titles (ie. XBLA had achievements, etc.).
The comparison with the Unreal UDK and Unreal Engine was simply to help people understand how different parts of the Turbulenz platform compared to things they already knew about.

As a collection of tools and technology that we've worked on for the past 3 years we obviously don't have as wider range of features when compared to everything Epic has included in Unreal.

Different developers need different tools, and we will be adding more features as needs arise.

But I appreciate your feedback and will work it into the white paper when we next update it.
What would the Higgs boson-like particle sound like?
For now. They will no doubt try again tomorrow.

On a personal note, shit like this is why I hate society.
Really, it's not that big of a deal...

Chrome: Zoomy (http://goo.gl/40hiR)
Firefox: Zoom Page (http://goo.gl/80Pa9)
Etc.
We were thinking about working on a bookmarklet to make the Safari > Wikiweb (or another Wikipedia app that has a url scheme) transition easier.
I think the linked article answers that question well: the ONLY obligation is to be honest, not dissemble about the truth.
Installing Rails and most everything else was simple for me. Getting mysql hooked up proved to be much more troublesome. Especially with MAMP installed already. I wish it would install in a contained package and not mess with anything else.
Brief history of the iPad: prologue
Hypersonic? Innovation in airplanes has been rather high, just not in making them go faster.

This is similar to complaining we don't have 10ghz processors. Yes this is true, but as it turns out thats a hard problem and we can work around it elsewhere.

Hypersonic presents a completely different set of problems in things like materials, design, shockwave management, etc.... That and it likely isn't profitable. Better to design fuel efficient jets that fly closer to the speed of sound than another concorde.
Oracle Acquires Involver
Using GNU Make as a Frontend Build Tool
I may be bias but the konami code is pretty awesome :) Unicorns and Fireworks
I realise that this may sound like I'm descending into fanboyism, but this is actually something that annoys me about iOS- it's far, far too app-centric.

Take Windows Phone for example: tap a contact in WP and you see their tweets, Facebook messages, your SMS and e-mail history with them. The messages app integrates SMS and Live chat seamlessly. Ideally this system would open up to allow any third party to plug into these hubs (and from the early signs of WP8, it will), but it's still already lightyears ahead of Apple's offering. Even Android, with it's system of intents and actions, provides more integration than iOS. I'm baffled as to why they've not tried to do anything about this.
I don't think I would want that. It sounds great in theory but in practice, there is a reason why I am on all those different channels. They reason is that they are different, even if that difference is subtle.
Did you seriously complain about someone else saying "holy shit" and then follow it up by calling my comment "retarded"?

And no, it's not "retarded" to question someone's expertise when they're presenting themselves as an expert and making critical errors. Your opinions on fonts are at best suspect if you use Comic Sans for the content of your blog. Likewise, your opinions on interaction design are at best suspect if your blog is rendered as pixelated jpgs, fades in slowly, breaks middle click, and is laid out more like an Apple product page than a page intended to convey meaningful information.
More people moving.

Car is not the goal. There are other means to move people way more efficient.
My first thought: "Wow".
My second thought: "How do I give these people access to my wallet?"
The Mind of the Prodigy
Reasons Not to Buy a Windows Phone 7
I'm not sure I understand what you mean by "a cross-app indicator of new email," but you can actually have voicemails and SMS forwarded to your email from Google Voice, creating a sort of "universal inbox."
For anyone who is interested, I've written a parallelized Wikipedia spidering tool in Go: https://github.com/taliesinb/wikispider

It's for when you want to grab a small portion of the full Wikipedia graph without cutting yourself on the 30-odd gigabytes of XML the dumps provide.
I guess you didn't RTP where it said "if you're a developer[...]"?

Guy's a designer :|
The retina Macbook is going to be in a small minority for a while yet- don't expect people to be leaping out of their seats to accomodate you!
The trouble is, surely the most influential (especially in a small company) will influence people more through face-to-face contact than through corporate social networks?
I used Zenbe's webmail when it was free and it did just this. Now their site is off and I've learned they have been acquired by Facebook in 2010.
Can I use it to store files that aren't as social? Such as GPG encrypted tar files?
And yet all it took was a single AWS availability zone going away for a short while for them to have a major outage.
You might find it educational to compare the specs of the "real consoles" to your phones, and don't forget to account for the fact that the "real consoles" are running somewhat older CPUs and stuff so the GHz difference isn't necessarily reflected by straight-up division. Also the newer GPUs include quite a few newer tricks and capabilities that the current console gen don't have.

Remember, the XBox 360 is now coming up fast on seven years old. By the time this comes out, eight. It's a bit fuzzy when a phone/tablet gets released that completely beats the XBox 360/PS3 due to the inability to easily directly compare the stats, but if it hasn't already happened it'll certainly happen next year, no question.

Also, that video was of games, not just video. I mean, how much more concrete a proof do you need that games are possible than... games?
Indeed. I watched the video on the front page, and I couldn't work out how the application was actually helping the end user. I couldn't work out what the chap with the pins and string was actually trying to accomplish either.

Consequently my money remained in my pocket.
Look at the Concorde — new crazy fast airplane technology is great, but it's not affordable or attractive enough to make it worth an airline's time. Make it affordable and we'll all fly on your hypersonic jet liner tomorrow.
Time Magazine's Publisher Just Quit to Help Run a Blog Network
This isn't true.

You can use the technology for free and publish the game outside of Turbulenz. You can use other payment options and Turbulenz is not asking for anything from these revenues. This is the free part.

But Turbulenz wants the option to publish the game on turbulenz.com and take a share from the revenues on the site.
No TV, no netflix, no hulu, and a lot of late hours. I often work 50+ hours a week on my "paying" job, 8-6, go home, play with the dogs, hang out with the wife, then hop online from 9-1 or 2am to work on Loveopolis.com.

3 days a week i come straight home from work and go from 6-1ish. It's the only way i've been able to go all out at my paying job as well as trying to make something awesome on the side. Lot's of hours and dedication to believing in what you're doing will ultimately pay off.
>1. Editorialized headline

And we should care because?

The article is fine, the headline is correct (even if editorialized), and it can potentially save new users some time.
How will initiating a phone call through the same interface as writing an e-mail solve these problems?

You phone somebody and don't leave a message, so they get an empty voicemail. How can the interface on your device possibly solve that problem? (By the way, I have a $30 answering machine at home that's smart enough to not record empty messages, and for day-to-day use its interface is a button for "play" and a button for "delete". The interface is not the problem.)

Then you send an SMS and immediately turn around and send an e-mail as well. How will a user interface prevent the person from getting both the message and the e-mail?
Nest’s new promo video
You know, quitting doesn't mean washing your hands of the whole matter and walking off. You can do that, but that is not its intrinsic meaning.

In your example even the quitting is not the issue, it's how it would have been done that would be the ethical issue.
We've selected SVG over Canvas for many reasons.

I'll try to elaborate a few:

- With SVG we can easily draw very complex geometry, resulting in nice looking, configurable stencils, interactivity and many other features that would've required immense engineering efforts to achieve in pure Canvas backed up by heavy Javascript. This would've have reduced our creativity and ability to adapt fast moving forward. Creating new stencils and adapting to new UI trends is a breeze now. With Canvas, the situation would've been different and highly coupled in the back of the Javascript code.

- SVG is resolution independent. While we haven't optimized Moqups for a full mobile experience YET, if you look at some mockups on any Hi-DPI (Retina) display, the experience is simply gorgeous. Printing is also a great addition, because you can virtually print huge sheets without loss of quality, making face to face collaboration great.

- SVG is heavily used for precise visualizations and technical drawing in industrial engineering, outside its web roots. Not sure how to properly explain this - We just kind of wanted to pay some homage to these folks.

The learning curve for SVG was tremendous though, with many obstacles that made us cringe and almost and quit at points. This is mostly because SVG is such an underused technology nowadays and the documentation is still scarce. However, it was extremely fun and it's nice to see that SVG is becoming more and more relevant nowadays in the context of HTML5.

About performance: Despite the many optimizations we have done, we still have quite a few technical debts that, once fixed, will make Moqups even faster and behave well with a lot of objects. Beside this, Chrome and others are about to introduce hardware acceleration for the SVG layers soon, so all in all, more good news.
<snark>

In my kitchen I have:

1. A fridge

2. A coffee machine

3. A stove

4. A microwave

5. A blender

6. Mixing bowls

7. Measuring cups

All I want to do is feed myself. Why on earth do I need to have so many different things to do it?

</snark>

To...most people, having a separate "app" for things that do wildly different things is a good. Skype and email fill completely different roles to me, and I suspect they fill completely different roles to other people as well.

You might want to send a message to somebody and not care how, but I do care how.

If it's late, I might send my friend an email instead of an SMS because I know that the SMS will probably wake her up, and the email won't.

Being able to control this is a good thing.

Did you notice the descention of immediacy in your example of phone->sms->email? You went from the most demanding contact method "stop what you are doing and talk to me!" to the middle "stop what you are doing and read these 160 characters!" to the least "eventually look at this piece of text".

If you didn't care as much about your message, you probably would have done this in a different order.

If something major in my life happened (I'm having a baby! I'm going back to school! I got into YC! Somebody is buying one of my projects!), I would call my best friends to tell them, I wouldn't SMS them.

So would you.

And this is good.
He's showing something, but I can't see it. Oh, unless it's just a Mac Book Air. I can see that.

I had to use the scroll wheel 5 times to actually see something that might be interesting.
Winning Is Better When Everyone Else Is Winning Too
Moqups is free while in Beta. Additionally, the main use cases will always be free (with some reasonable limitations).
The premium features will revolve around collaboration, feedback, annotations and other things. When these are launched, we'll definitely make the pricing clear and visible for everyone.
I don't know if I should laugh or cry.
Let's just say rock stars are not engineers.
"Simulated engine failures were performed in just about every conceivable situation, including take-off roll, before nose rotation, during rotation, after rotation, during the climb, during the landing and during both compensating and aggravating crosswinds. The result is an airplane that is as boring as possible to fly, even in emergencies."

I wonder how the system reacts when it gets false information about an engine failure. I mean, it's great when the computer is able to react to actual failures; but I'm also worried about how it reacts to bad sensor data. Sure, it's good engineering practice to defend in depth and eliminate single points of failure, but reading about the Air France crash, cascading errors don't seem to be properly dealt with.
Absolutely. Our Pro plan also allows you to password protect your boards or make them completely private - so share your information with who you want, how you want.
Electricity from Friction
Well done. It's fun to play with. I like the little earthquake a node does when it's about to expand.
Try this - https://github.com/kelsmj/macsetup
This isn't so much the symptom of a distributed architecture as it is one of a badly designed distributed architecture.

Distributed architectures are the only way to go once you reach a certain size both in terms of scale and in terms of team size. You can certainly make do without it (Wikipedia) but you'll have a much more robust product with it (Netflix).

The trick is always using the design appropriate for the current needs. It's good to think ahead, but it mustn't come at the expense of the present.

At the beginning—which is the case for most startups, since few make it to the later stages—it's often a good idea to go with a monolithic codebase based on a lean framework. As you grow, you're going to want to start adding components like a message queue for async work, rethinking your data store for scale, etc. As you grow even further, you're going to want to transition to a distributed architecture. I don't know what comes next… I haven't gotten there yet. But I'm sure as you grow even further, your needs are going to change yet again.
Yes, the 787 will have a max cabin altitude of 6000ft. Other airliners work to 8000ft. The upshot is denser, more refreshing, air which makes for a comfortable and less fatiguing journey.
Oracle Buys Involver
It reminds me a little of the Web Stalker, an experimental web browser from 1997: http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/project.cfm?id=7
1) those benchmarks are only useful if...

Any benchmark is only useful if...

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/dont-jump-to-conclusions.p...

2) "unfairly" targeted at low-level languages

Don't make "unfair" accusations -- say why you think that.

3) ~20 seconds vs ~20 minutes??

Did you mean vs ~20 hours?
FTC to revisit robocall menace
How about https://github.com/thoughtbot/laptop
>You are installing something that by it's nature requires a bit more understanding that just clicking on a .exe.

I don't think it inherently require anything like that for _installing_.

There is essential complexity (e.g the complexity of developing a RoR app), and accidental, inessential, complexity.

Installation not being a one click / command process is inessential complexity. It's just that the people involved (and the people NOT involved) have failed to make it any better.

For example, one can install Apache/PHP/MySQL on a Mac in a single package in 1 minute (via MAMP).
Ask HN: How to make Compete track our website?
Currently our website http://jackpotbuddy.com is tracked by Alexa but not Compete. Just wondering what do I have to do for them to pickup our site?
I believe the biggest complaint I keep hearing about GitHub:Enterprise is it's crappy search functionality. I think a lot of developers want to be able to search the code easily, and Github:E seems to be mediocre at it.
Did you read the article? The majority of the Clojure startup time is spent on initializing the Clojure runtime.

"spends 95% of the startup-time loading the clojure.core namespace (the clojure.lang.RT class in particular) and filling out all the metadata/docstrings etc for the methods. This process stresses the GC quite a bit, some 130k objects are allocated and 90k free-d during multiple invokes of the GC (3-6 times), the building up of meta data is one big source of this massive object churn."
What if you paint a 1px line?
There is no text in the HTML! It is all images. I think that was the point of the complaint.
Sounds incredible. Would you really be happy if I, for example, uploaded a 1 GB home directory encrypted backup after I finish work each day? Keeping each backup around indefinitely?
Awesome tool. Had been looking for something like this
Is Microsoft trying to capitalize on RIM's recent stumblings? It seems rather obvious that they should be beating down the door of these enterprise customers to push WP devices into the mix.

I'm hazarding a guess, but a great many enterprises must be running Exchange. Vertical integration or what?
Came here to say this. Unlimited is never good. People get really pissed off when it's not really unlimited. And you immediately will have some people trying it and blogging about it.
Need help with a Social Network P2P
Hi everyone - my name is Alin, I am currently a Computer Science student and I'm in my final year of study! For my Bachelors degree project I choosed to create a Social Network P2P - because I think this is a very interesting project and because I think there needs to be a way (other than Facebook) which can help you stay connected with your friend (and do almost all the same things that you can do on FB) but without any worry your privacy could be violated!

That's why I need some guidance from you - some hackers with some experience in this types of projects - what resources could you point out for me to read or use for building this project!
Any help is much appreciated and I'm really looking forward to hear your suggestions!
Cheers!
Not only that, but the over-wide pages can't be scrolled sideways.
GroupMe, a Messaging Start-Up, Rolls Out Group Event Service
Washington DC politicians are exposed as corrupt public figureheads representing a government-protected cartel of incumbent corporations? And this is news to some people?
Because they'd rather have you using the hosted platform instead of having to support enterprise customers. There's a very steep support side when you sell something as "enterprise."
Tl;dr: WD claims: Higher-perf than its "green" line of hard drives (but not as good as "black"), greater MTBF, lower power consumption than comparable drives, rated for 10°F hotter conditions than previous WD offerings.
When Developers Are Afraid to Try Something New
Anecdotal article about someone trying to get their team to use Scala, and ways to help your team learn about new technologies.
New Dropbox Pro plans
>Salesforce.com won't disclose exactly how the Influencer algorithm works.

So the article proposes to use an obscure, undisclosed karma value for key personnel decisions. If this catches on, the next management bestseller may well be "Leadership secrets of the ancients: how to base important decisions on birds' flight [1] and animal entrails [2]".

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augur

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haruspex
Tutorspree is Hiring Sales Associates
Tutorspree's (http://www.tutorspree.com) mission is to make sure that all students find their perfect tutors. We are based out of TriBeCa, NYC and are hiring motivated, friendly, and confident Sales Associates (we call them Education Consultants) to help execute our goals and power our growth.

With over 7,000 tutors located across the country, we are developing amazing technology to ensure students get matched with an amazing tutors. Education Consultants are the driving force behind our business, working with students and parents. They make matches between students and tutors, book the initial hours, and manage the relationship to ensure a wonderful overall experience.

If you have the drive and skill needed and are comfortable developing new relationships, managing them, and selling then we should talk.

Responsibilities
- Speak with prospective students and parents from all across the country to understand their needs
- Use Tutorspree's proprietary matching systems to identify and source the perfect tutor
- Manage the entire matching and sales cycle to hit monthly targets
- Work with our engineering team to continually improve every interaction that clients have with our site

Requirements
- You are organized, reliable, friendly and motivated.
- You enjoy listening to people, talking to them, and helping them figure out what they actually need
- You've always wanted to sell. It's in your blood and it makes you happier than anything else
- You think fast and adapt to rapidly changing circumstances. You never stop thinking about ways to make things better and you always find your way around even the most extreme obstacles

Why work with us?
- A mission you can believe in: We're changing the face of a huge and hugely broken piece of education
- Competitive base + uncapped commission
- Full Medical coverage
- We're in the heart of TriBeCa, next to the best coffee in the city, and have views of the Freedom Tower

Resumes to salesjobs@tutorspree.com.
Yeah, even webOS made a creditable stab in this direction. And that was what, three years ago?
I don't want to turn this into a (mobile) OS war. And my favorite is dead anyway..

That said, did you ever see the way WebOS handle[sd] this cases? The 'synergy' thingy was solving a lot of the friction points you're complaining about - and yet it obviously wasn't good enough to save the platform.