skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'd love to finally know how to tell if a startup will succeed! Please post the knowledge afterwards.
I think people moan too much. This is a reasonable compromise where most sites will continue to render in standards mode (which is a good thing for web standards) while older sites largely continue to work in IE8 (which is good for browser uptake, users and developers of older sites). You can't please everybody all of the time, but this is the best solution I can think of. Is the alternative that older sites are broken out of the box with IE8 and users actively avoiding it because many sites don't magically work in IE8 somehow better?

Rather than forcing every site to switch, only /a tiny minority/ of sites will be caught in the crossfire and be forced into IE7 mode incorrectly, and those who are can remedy this relatively easily whether via the HTML5 Doctype switch, a META tag, IE8 header tag or even contacting Microsoft to get it fixed. Instead of requiring /every site/ to it, we're talking about an utter minority of sites accidentally getting broken in exchange for it fixing a large proportion of problems.
I've got a site that runs on both http and https.

Is a protocol change enough of a difference to consider the identical content as a duplicate?
That's an interesting angle and I always thought, why is there a search.twitter.com and not just a little input at the top every page on twitter.com.
Looks like a great real-world opportunity to test Newcomb's Paradox in actual foreign policy.
There are no overnight successes; they are preceded by innumerable days and nights of mediocre progress and failures. These videos on Storytelling have (of course) been posted here before but I love Ira Glass talking about failing on the way to success:

"For the first couple years that you are making stuff. It's trying to be good, it has a mission to be good. But your taste, the thing that got you into that game is still killer, and your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you are making is still sort of a disappointment to you, that it's crappy. A lot of people never get past that phase, a lot of people at that point they quit. The thing I would just like to say with you with all my heart is that most everyone I know who does interesting creative work went through a phase of years"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hidvElQ0xE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qmtwa1yZRM

> The TV show Friends had a similar path. The first few episodes were awful in terms of writing and acting.

I remember watching the first episode (pilot) of Friends alone in my dorm room on a Friday, and it was basically a bunch of twenty-somethings loitering in a coffee shop called Central Perk. They never left the coffee shop. No plot, pretty bad, what do these people do for a living? you would never have guessed that they'd become one of the all-time most popular shows and exert a cultural impact.
Cure for the common cold? Not yet, but possible
I think the article is pretty much right about 2001: the book and film were both developed by both Clarke and Kubrick at the same time, though the book was released later [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001_(film)#Writing]
One thing we'll likely have no record of in the future are the emergent properties of complex multiplayer games. Servers can sometimes be configured to do full recordings of each match, but players cannot, because servers only send updates for players that you can see.
Good list. I'd add Oldboy (Korean) to that list.
First Shots of the UI for Google Chrome for the Mac.
The Worst Case Scenario
The fact that a "Twitter for Dummies" book is actually being written (or already written) brings me great sadness. Is it really that hard?
I have built a distributed key-value store on top of Tokyo Tyrant (which is a network interface on top of Tokyo Cabinet). I have also tried to use memcachedb (that's based on Berkley DB) and Tokyo Tyrant outperforms it - especially with large amounts of items. memcachedb has also problems with log (it grows furiously large and db checkpoints stalls the database for several seconds).

One can also script Tyrant via Lua (which is pretty amazing) and there's master-master replication. Here's how to implement incr via Lua: http://paste.pocoo.org/show/103848/ I have currently extended it with a fixed list and Mikio (the dev of Tokyo *) has implemented an inverted index for search.

Currently I have my key-value store in production (it has around 1 million key-values) and the performance is pretty good.

I will release it open-source, it's only Python now, but the code is around 200 lines + a consistent hash library implementation ( which I implemented in <50 lines of code http://amix.dk/blog/viewEntry/19367 ) so it should be possible to port it over.
Samsung SGH D900i pink Unlocked
Samsung D900i has presented its one of the best handset in market just for you that your phone searching can stop here with its stylish and attractive look. Expandable memory of the phone is up to 4 GB and 60 MB of internal memory.
no, we absolutely should not hold the developer responsible for the higher up questions -- the responsibility should fall on the shoulders of the person who made the decision. did the developer implement what he was asked? did he render solid feedback which was promptly ignored? if so, he bears no responsibility for the quality of the decision, only the quality of the implementation. if he made the decision, of course, that's a different matter. and in any case, the measurement of his 'productivity' is meaningless as a part of this metric.

comparing two programmers is possible. comparing a single programmer against a theoretical ideal is improbable. finding a remotely accurate formula for measuring developer productivity and yielding data that's actionable in the business space is really, really unlikely.
Actually, editing very large (hundred-megabyte) text files is hard. (Example of real world use: mysqldump files.)

Emacs thrashes. Vim thrashes. Eclipse? I laugh. However, the text-mode editor "joe" loads the file quickly and doesn't thrash.
Is your company testing on IE8 RC1?
After watching Le Jetée, I kinda want to watch 12 Monkeys again.
While I've not had significant successes in a large-scale public sense, on a smaller stage I've noticed that people will respond to a good idea that's been at least partially executed or proven. (Ideas alone aren't worth anything.) That seems to be what he's saying.
There's no way that Google is "threatened" by Twitter search. Google's search dominance is not maintained by providing the best car reviews or up-to-the-minute news. I'm not going to go to Twitter to search for research papers, or obscure little facts, or tech help on some issue I'm having with my OS. I can't use Twitter search to find all of the news.yc threads regarding Twitter, but Google can: http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+t...

Additionally, for a lot of people, Google's not just a source of information, but a gateway to the Internet. Twitter, I think, can't do that. I think that this whole real-time news & Twitter search thing might prove interesting and fruitful, but it's not a threat to Google.
Not too long ago I discovered http://www.twitscoop.com/, and I realized that there's no better place to go if I ever want to partake in the droning about pop-culture 'now'.

Also, news summaries (i.e. one liners) seem to be better done when they're done by people rather than search engines/newspapers.
Facebook appraisal pegs company's value at $3.7 billion
Ultimately a folder (or a tag) is just another piece of metadata, like the ones you listed-- project, contributor, date, revision, etc.

The core issues are input (how do I get this metadata attached to the content? dragging to a folder, document analysis, filesystem metadata, tag autocomplete) and retrieval (how can I quickly sort and filter to find the document(s) I need, based on some set of metadata criteria?)

Whether or not that metadata has a hierarchical structure (a taxonomy/vocabulary), and whether that structure is controlled (e.g. only privileged users can create new terms) is secondary to the question of speedy, usable input and retrieval.
So people who live in the US nearby (Bay area?) can visit easily.
Canonical urls, rails plugin.
> The companies actually run a scam, they hire people who aren't certified electricians, which is perfectly acceptable and legal. However they'll never train them to be certified, they just use already-certified electricians to certify everyone's work is done correctly. Again this is unfair on the certified electricians because if anyone screws up and he doesn't catch it, he's liable and that can include a prison sentence if someone dies from shoddy work.

You may not like the choice that those certified electricians are making, but they clearly prefer it to their alternatives (such as running a two person shop).

Me - I see a significant cost savings. I don't care about certificates. I care about output and cost.

Note that regulatory capture actually isn't specific to big biz. It's often implemented by mobs of small biz trying to reduce competition. In the US you can see this in hair cutting and interior design. It sounds like electricians have done the same in the UK.
What's this doing on the frontpage?

Am I missing something obvious?
Oh please, Twitter couldn't threaten Google if all the founders lives depended on it. The twitter hype is just silly, they haven't even figured out how to make money yet, c'mon.
Native JSON Support in Firefox 3.1
Yeah, I am sorry. Read it too fast.
Already posted:

Here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=478358

Here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=479897

Here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=478115

... and probably more. Do a search for ConnectU and Facebook to see others:

http://searchyc.com/facebook+connectu?sort=by_date
The big question is whether this event is for accredited investors only or not?

My means don't allow me to invest much money at all (say $5K), and I am not accredited (I wish I was of course). So I'm like an amateur in the game but very interested. I can't tell if the event is for me or not.
his key point is that "twitter knows which of our blog post was most popular" - ...

So does Google (links coming in, perhaps even twitter links) also they use user click data; Google knows son, Google knows.
I need to correct a statement I made here. I wrote that India accounts for most of the H1B visas. What I meant to write is that the nation that receives the most H1B visas is India. However this is a plurality of the H1B total, not a majority as I implied earlier.
That's extremely helpful. Thanks. Sometimes it's a bit daunting to be very pragmatic up front.
A bit off topic, but what I'd really like is a "rich"-text editor, like TinyMCE that has language syntax features, that can be incorporated into web apps.
Would you please stop doing this? It's ok for there to be multiple stories about a topic.
Yes, I'll take a pass at sorting these into groups this afternoon or at least add more descriptive information. Some of the original link titles are a bit mysterious, like this one: "Voter registration data; or, HERE IS YOUR HOPE, YOU FOOLS! « The Edge of the American West"

I'm going to toss the ball into infochimps court for any deeper organization of the data, since they are already set up to handle it.
Is there something like CAS of memcached? It's fine to live without locking but low-level atomic functionality is essential.
OK, just re-read it. It is not-caring-what-people-think/humorous. It takes a certain amount of confidence to put yourself out there. I think that might be attractive to the attractive, poly-math chick he may be seeking.

Recall the story of a guy who saw his dream girl on the train in NYC:
http://abcnews.go.com/technology/Story?id=3828525&page=1

http://www.nygirlofmydreams.com/
I've heard theories that dogs started the domestication process because they were attracted to our garbage.

And since neanderthals were almost exclusively meat eaters, it might be the case that they attracted a lot more wild animals with their leftovers.

Another theory I've heard is that neanderthals are unique in having an inferior sense of balance.

Inferior not just when compared to us, but to almost every known hominid or great ape.

Apparently the inner ear organs responsible for balance and thus also for agility do fossilize and that's how we know.

So part of their extinction might have been our ability to outrun and out jump them.

Then again it could have just been our pernicious desire and ability to exterminate competition.
Haven't used it, but Erlang bindings: http://dukesoferl.blogspot.com/2008/06/tokyocabinet-and-mnes...
Could have been named, "Enterprise".

All time sequences reversed?

No short term memory?

Memento

What?
"The common notion about entertainment is that the better the quality, the bigger the audience. There's some truth to that."

I think we have drastically different definitions of quality.
Yes, that's Cambridge, 200K is not high there.
But what about nationally?

I'm in the exurbs of Boston, and 200K as median just feels bubbly.
Those erlang bindings are very immature. I wouldn't use them in production.
"This list updates automatically, and helps users who aren't web-savvy have a better experience with web sites that aren't yet IE8-ready."

What nonsense. It's IE8 that should be web-ready, not the other way around. That's pretty legendary arrogance right there.
Heh... That takes me back.

I remember a puzzle in an old demoscene document: Assuming EAX contains all zeros except for a byte value in AL, what is the shortest number of instructions needed to copy AL's value to the other three bytes in EAX?

The puzzle was hard not because the task was particularly difficult but because the audience had spent so long optimizing assembly for speed that the hopelessly inefficient one-instruction answer would not occur to them.

(Answer: http://home.sch.bme.hu/~ervin/codegems.html#17)
OK. I was trying to ensure that discussions remained in one place rather than getting fragmented, but if that's regarded as the lesser evil then I'm happy to stop.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

I've just noticed that you've been down-modded - it wasn't me!
An analysis of the Buffalo air crash
BOOKS HELP TO CREATE ICONS
Since this is fast turning into a list of good mind-bending movies, I'm going to put a shout out for eXistenZ, as it always seems to be slightly overlooked.

Also, most of Lynch's non-Dune stuff would fit in this category.
EFF requests not to consider iPhone jailbreaking illegal
As part of the 2009 DMCA rulemaking, EFF has asked the Copyright Office to recognize an exemption to the DMCA to permit jailbreaking in order to allow iPhone owners to use their phones with applications that are not available from Apple's store
Stuff that was cool: Candy Hearts
If a browser had been tested and found lacking in some type, I'd hope they'd state the feature that they were relying on that was missing or buggy. The verbiage made it sound like Chrome wasn't tested (or they're pretty arrogant in their dismissal), but something like this would be preferable:

"This probably isn't going to work. What do you want to do?"

[Let me try anyway] [Get me a tested browser] [oh, nevermind]

I understand the behavior as it stands for things like banking or medical websites, where real life things of value are at stake and non-experts may use it, but this is demonstrating an experimental widget on a "labs" site, where the whole point is to try out weird new stuff in browsers.

This wouldn't have been so noteworthy, except that Netscape/Mozilla/FF just spent a decades fighting "browser-ism" and even have a bugzilla category for it: (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=407187 as an example)
There's global locking and key locking. I currently use key-locking when updating.

You should be able to implement CAS in Lua I guess, but it isn't supported from the start.
Definitely exciting, though it will be interesting to see whether or not going entirely canvas pays off. We've thought about it and thus far rejected it in our framework.
I've added static tags to each link which should help a bit, If I can find a way to quickly cluster them together into logical groups, I'll so that as well.
I also found this:
http://www.python.org/doc/2.3.5/whatsnew/section-slices.html

These are "extended slices" and the third argument is the step. This link also explores deletion and the __getitem__ method:

One can also now pass slice objects to the __getitem__ methods of the built-in sequences:

>>> range(10).__getitem__(slice(0, 5, 2))

[0, 2, 4]

Or use slice objects directly in subscripts:

>>> range(10)[slice(0, 5, 2)]

[0, 2, 4]
http://www.amazon.com/Palm-1047NA-TX-Handheld/dp/B000BI7NHY/...

http://www.amazon.com/Acer-Aspire-8-9-inch-Laptop-Processor/...
"Google Devalues Everything It Touches" - Wall Street Journal Chief
"Well, they were probably a bit surprised, because they never thought about these things in these terms. But now I'm in touch with somebody who has converted one youth club to use free software, and he's now talking with the people who run the other youth clubs in his region, trying to convert them. So something's finally getting done."

Notice the religious terminology. The Church of Emacs, eh.

edit: Is it possible to use bold here?
For Tokyo Tyrant there's a Python library:
http://code.google.com/p/pytyrant/

It uses the binary protocol and it's written in a very simple and very clean way - and it should be production ready.

I would not recommend using the memcached protocol with Tyrant (it offers less operations and it isn't binary).
Sex Positions That Double as Exercise
Hence the qoutes in my post.
haha, I read the headline and my first thought was "Twitter? Oh please..."
People love to exaggerate. It's an interesting idea but, no, it's not happening.
This is a brilliant idea for YC. Having gone thru the YC experience and demo day, I would say that the scarcest resource for YC companies is that bridge between "just launched" and Series-A-fundable or profitable.

A lot of companies can be lean enough to survive this phase on their own, but a lot teams/projects are capital intensive (or slow to get revenue) amd need seed-stage help. There are precious few VCs that focus on this stage (True Ventures, First Round, USV, SoftTech, etc).
It's a memorable line from a monologue delivered by the Alec Baldwin character in the movie 'Glengarry Glen Ross'.

[scene] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-AXTx4PcKI

[transcript] http://www.whysanity.net/monos/ggr2.html

(Language is NSFW... unless of course your workplace is like the one in the movie.)
CollabFinder: Find Designer & Developer Collaborators
Do you love reading or do you love owning books?
If you love reading, the kindle is great.
If you to to own books, the kindle is horrible.
If you love both, well you have a real tough decision to make.
I find it strangely fascinating that someone wrote a book about how to write 140 characters.
Privately run prisons have plenty of incentives to be monstrous, and only feel-good ones to do the right thing. Unfortunately, the private prisons cat is out of the bag and over the horizon.

Maybe we could pay them based on the recidivism rate?
The article is mostly about the Ruby bindings, but Tokyo Cabinet is written in C99 and has bindings for most of the usual suspects. English language specifications are here:
http://tokyocabinet.sourceforge.net/spex-en.html
You know, I intended to chart blue = new, red = (old - new), so the red bar would be the comparison, the total bar width would be the old value, and the blue would be the new bar (compare in a single line), but I didn't check my data, thus making me guilty of exactly the same sin that spawned the article. :) Updated below.

Bahhhhh! Thanks for the catch!

http://ii.gs/fin-inst-caps-2007-2009-fix1.png
> In the US you can see this in hair cutting and interior design.

On a tangent, the story behind SuperCuts is quite fascinating. A 6'8" former truck driver who had a mid-life crisis and enrolled in beautician school. Page 182/250

http://www.scribd.com/doc/4870487/Conversations-withMilliona...

http://www.fundinguniverse.com/company-histories/Supercuts-I...
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If you aren't accredited and you are investing in a company, a lot of times you are doing them a disservice. Have you read up on the consequences of taking on non-accredited investors?

I'd love to be an angel investor, too-- but if you can't pass that particular test, you really shouldn't be in the game.

And, honestly-- $5k isn't worth the cost of the legal paperwork necessary to take you on as an investor.

If you want to be in the game, try to get an advisor role with a tiny sliver of stock.
The day twitter causes google execs to quake in their boots is the day that cows will fly and hell will freeze over.

Please. Twitter is large, but still a niche. I've played around with it, it's nice but it is also something that I can easily live without.

The twitter crowd (as well as most other social networking sites and their denizens) remind me of locusts, they swarm in untold hordes from one 'hot' new thing to another, initially a few harbingers, then the main crowd until the fascination with the new medium is over and then it goes away again.

Right now twitter is roughly 1% the size of google, and plenty of people have already tried it and have moved on. Google is the #2 website in the world, with above it only yahoo.com, the example given (the new audi) is maybe relevant to the 'buzz' scene (which really is what twitter is all about) but the rest of us may not care that much.

Blogging is only a small fraction of search, you have to do everything well, if not then you're a niche player, and niche players are not a threat.
Sounds impressive and cool. I wonder about Table engine performance though.

My experiences with Berkeley DB (using the native C API) were positive, from a performance point of view, largely because BDB has no built-in query support. When I wanted to look something up, and I had no index on the desired value (BDB calls indices "secondary databases"), I always knew I was doing a linear table scan, because I had to write the loop myself. No SQL meant that inefficient queries could not hide in plain sight.

Berkeley DB trades off the flexibility of SQL queries for (1) excellent lookup performance in simpler cases, and (2) the ability to mix relational and object-based data storage, reducing the famous impedance mismatch of relational data modeling. For some applications, this trade-off works beautifully. I daresay that it holds true for most web apps which really don't need a relational data store, and either outgrew pure in-memory storage or just sensibly want to persist their state to disk. (Hint: if you use an ORM, then you probably don't want a relational data store.)

For some other apps, the lack of SQL queries hurts. I once worked on a trading system implemented on top of a proprietary engine which did not support arbitrary queries. It made writing even trivial reports ("list all transactions done two days ago by trader X using instrument Y") unnecessarily painful. (Of course, on a typical RDB with a non-trivial schema and a large dataset, these arbitrary queries would take 20 minutes to run, so catch-22.)

The Table engine for Tokyo Cabinet seems to do everything implicitly. Fast and arbitrary queries. If it works on the kind of schema-less free-form data the author refers to, and has working master-master replication, that sounds almost too good to be true.
Codd's paper is instructive from a historical perspective as well. When you read it, you realize that people were grappling with all these same issues before the relational database came on the scene. His description of hierarchical data storage systems describes some of the issues with things like XML databases and XQuery pretty well.