skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
- debt fueled consumption is over

- american wages will slowly revert to global standards where there is global competition...i.e. start getting used to hiring managers talk about the "bangalore price" just as people in manufacturing have been beaten about with the "china price".

- stock markets will be continuously pummeled by volatility and mandated selling (boomer 401k liquidation)

- the big "IF" - can the dollar survive. we've basically entered a zimbabwe-like state of fabricating huge volumes of new currency to prop up fiscal fractures that were themselves caused by excessive abuse of currency in the 90s. one must ask, at what point does the dollar break? my guess: US debt of 25 trillion
I think people are doing it, they are just not slicing it up in a pay-as-you-go format for end users.

The best talk I ever saw in this area was by Paul Strong from eBay (they obviously have a very strong requirement for both scalability and consistency). He talked about how they eventually ripped out all transactions and stored procedures from the RDBMS layers and built their own giant, cross cluster, consistent system to make the zillion customer/auction problem finally managable.

For the less giant problems, I think Amazon could charge a premium for an API-managed RDBMS solution, they have all the tools for making one in place (as opposed to requiring you go build it yourself with EBS and EC2 nodes).

add-slave-node() ...
Futile? Look around, they're happening. Now.

Don't look on CNN, though. It gave up science coverage.

There's been a lot of progress made in the fields of "things journalists don't really understand", which encompasses an ever-wider range of stuff, including robotics, materials science, biology in general, private space research, and several other things.

Oh, your really fanciful stuff might be impossible, but the merely possible is happening. Just... slower than you'd like, but still, happening.
Microsoft to open retail stores
I've been thinking about this one for awhile now. Here's the quote I think we're talking about:

>That said, Portland Ten is a unique model which combines incubation/investment theory, along with the extreme bootstrapping methods and GTD approach I’ve been developing via Hundred Dollar Business.

While I'm not entirely sure what Carolynn means by incubation/investment theory, I do understand that she is not implying direct investment. I do not see any contradiction, but can understand why you'd be confused.

That said, I would be interested to learn what she means by taking an investment theory approach..
Certainly, though I've never heard of any documented. I'll do some research, thanks.
one of the main problems with the blogosphere is that people just cite each other as evidence of legitimacy. When I said that this story was linkbait crap someone linked me to a different site that was using the exact same video for justification.
I don't want democracy to infect the web like it has infected science and everything else. A lot of people agreeing with you means nothing. It might have meant something in the ancestral environment, when convincing everyone made you more powerful within the tribe. But we don't live in tribes anymore.
an aside about mars plans. what is the deal with all these inflatable habitat and self constructing memory metal ideas? why would you build on the surface when one of the main concerns is radiation?
there are lots of cracks int he surface of mars. with much less material you can simply roof off one of these and carve rooms into the walls of the fissure. Build down dummies.
It's a case where being worse in the "obvious" technical architecture allows you to be better in things that actually matter: ease of access, simplicity of use, lack of installing things and wide support.

Well, ubiquity != adequacy. I understood the original author's article as a technical recommendation. He basically suggests to use HTTP for everything because he thinks "it's technically good for everything".

He made broad claims about how any HTTP based protocol will magically scale by leveraging proxies, loadbalancers and other existing infrastructure, completely ignoring the fact that many applications just don't fit into the request/response paradigm in first place.

RSS is a great example for the power of the internet that enables us to "build on what we have" without waiting for some standards body or greater authority to get moving. But it is also a text-book counterexample to his scalability and "one size fits all" claims. Polling just doesn't scale for these things and technically it's a step back from Usenet, that had these problems sorted out already. We went back to square 1 with RSS and are now locked up there until we get a true WebSocket and worthwhile persistent storage in browsers.
It is a very difficult problem. I worked for a short time for a company that was trying to solve consistency, distributed redundancy, and scalability. It succeded consistency and redundancy, but failed because transaction chatter caused it to fail at scaling. I think that within an application or enterprise schemas will be partitioned among types of database by whether the data must always be consistent(RDB's), are mostly readonly and can be updated leisurely (contact-lists, personnel records), and those that can afford to be inconsistent (archives, web chatter).
In addition to a cloud-hosted solution, packaged software (along the lines of Hadoop) would be great too. Not everyone wants their corporate data out in the cloud, but I suspect they would all be happy to skip writing one-off "fix RDBMS scalability" layers.
ATMs in the USA almost never give out $100 bills (it's never personally happened to me in my life). The highest I've seen is $20.
I see this as an area where Microsoft could pull out a big win. Imagine if, instead of their half-baked BigTable clone that they just released, they had instead put 1000 or so brains on the problem of distributing a single SQL Server database across N machines.

Scaling out to a dozen DB servers that master/slave their way to scalability is no fun, but it's solved. The problem is that you're currently required to do it yourself. It would rock to be able to outsource that to the cloud.

I want to toss my ASP.NET application up into the Microsoft Cloud, where it will figure out how many webservers it needs to spread itself across and how many database servers it needs to fire up to handle the load it's seeing. And I want it to pretend like it's a single webserver talking to a single DB instance on a single box.

Say what you will about Microsoft, but they have the skills to pull that off. I sure hope they're working on it.
> What makes this happen?

I'll answer the, perhaps rhetorical question, by defining a new law: "Any online community that doesn't actively encourage its users to be nice, and civil, to each other is bound to become a cesspool.".
ATMs in Vegas give $100 bills.
Agilism vs. Complexity
Is this why you're not getting funded?
That interview is from May 2006.[1] We don't know if it's one of the cashiers and we don't know how this specific scheme played out.

Yes, you can often hire a cashier. Typically, this guy has some plastic and an encoder, but he doesn't have a steady supply of data to encode the cards. He's working with you because you have data to cards with a high limit and you can verify that they're valid. Most of the time, he's not even on the street. He'll encode them in the car and have someone else run up to the ATMs.

[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20061115154615/http://smallworldp...
University of Waterloo: Concurrency in C++ - Google Code University - Google Code
(Black hat on) This might be very interesting for some types of injection attacks. Instead of simply getting backlinks you could steal the pagerank of your victims without leaving a visible mark. Limited to subdomains, though.
I don't think he sold them with a time limit. For a simple reason: the cards had to be refreshed after they had hit their withdrawal limit. This, coupled with the fact that they all happened at the same time, strongly points to realtime complicity on both sides of the transaction, anonymous or not. What compels this guy to refresh these cards? I mean from a game theory point of view it doesn't benefit him at all...assuming both parties are indeed anon.
he wrote a web service to send formal you're fired letters. To me.

You're fired, for dragging down the average amount of awesome in any room Evan is in.
I've been fascinated with Key-value databases for almost as long as my career. Interestingly enough, I first came across the concept when I did a little work with Lotus Notes, way back in 2001. My memory is a little rusty on the full capabilities of Lotus databases, so I don't know if it applies to their format, but what I miss most from other HashMaps in the cloud are aggregate functions.

As a developer, I'd prefer one of two innovations: relational databases that scale better across machines or k/v databases that provide a familiar mechanism for ad-hoc querying and aggregation across keys.
Yes, I wasn't trying to claim that it was one of the cashiers in this particular scheme; I said "one of these" rather than "one of the." However, given the content of the interview and how similarly the aspects of this particular scam match up with the cashier's description, it seems likely that this scam was pulled off in a similar manner.
It's because M is the roman numeral for a thousand and a million is a thousand thousand. (Although it wouldn't actually be expressed that way with the real roman numeral system; MM would be two thousand).
Well, technically it's an abomination no matter from what angle you look at it (and I am looking at the orbited sourcecode in another window right now).

To me comet is a testament to our collective failure to demand proper tools from the "big guys" (Mozilla, Opera, Microsoft). The term "web 2.0" was coined roughly 7 years ago and even long before that it has been clear that some sort of WebSocket would be incredibly useful to have in a browser.

Yet no single browser vendor (to my knowledge) has impemented it today.

Imagine where we could stand if only Firefox had a true, non-standard Socket class already. People would be using it (socket for the fox, comet-hacks for the rest) and IE market share would probably be dropping faster than ever because all the fancy new apps work better elsewhere.

But I digress, this is mostly whining. You have a point; the comet hack, as ugly as it is, is justified by the lack of proper alternatives. But still, an abomination on so many levels...
I realize this is probably a joke, but the relative infrequency of rating, the fact that this rating algorithm only requires information from the local context[1], and the existence of caching means that this is very, very unlikely to be the bottleneck for any site.

[1] i.e. to calculate Harry Potter's rating you only need to know about Harry Potter, not every other book ever printed
That's true, but the AP Stylebook says $...M means million; I too have only seen this used among the MBA types.
What's the largest amount you've withdrawn? It seems like if you withdrew your daily limit (~$500+?), you'd get something larger than a $20.
Um, I have a question
Mr. Bain's article would be more worthwhile if he were to elaborate on what it means for a knowledge representation system to be "doomed".

The relational model proposed by Codd[1] was formulated so that applications which adhere to it would continue to work and be free of inconsistencies when the underlying data is updated or reorganized. That may not sound like much but it's surprisingly useful when the data is important or valuable and needs to always be correct. This is also the whole point of all those irritating normal forms.

The relational model has a lot of shortcomings but it's not likely to be replaced by anything that doesn't address these issues.

That said, for some kinds of data it is definitely overkill. Religiously following the relational model for short lived stuff with little significance makes about as much sense as filling out your shopping lists in triplicate, storing permanent copies in a safe deposit box and requiring two signatures for every alteration the same way you might if you changing your will or a deed to your property.

[1] - "Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks" , http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~zives/03f/cis550/codd.pdf
I have tried many of the PHP IDEs. I always find myself going back to zend studio 5.5. The eclipse based zend studio is slow and bloated and a downgraded from the standalone version. It's unfortunate they didnt continue the development.

I also played with Aptana on 4 or 5 occasions. I have followed the project for years and just cant make the switch. I always find little annoying bugs or inconsistency. Intellisense is still pretty new for PHP in Aptana, which was another deterrent.

PhpED also fell flat for me. If you are going to use an IDE go with Zend 5.5, otherwise VIM or notepad++ is your best bet.
It wasn't meant to be rhetorical nor calling proggit out by name. The very same thing happens within development teams when people "flip the bozo bit" on team mates for the most trivial errors and are biased against anything they say or do forever afterwards.

It can be a very serious problem when this happens within a team, IMO.
Ask HN: When do I impose caps?
I've been working on an application where each user on the system would, of course, incur some processing and some storage cost on my end. I would like, at some point, to have different levels (read: prices) of accounts based on usage. The majority of accounts would fall into the free category, while the larger ones would help pay to keep the system running.

Ideally, I'd like come out of the gates with an entirely free application, and let the community help shape the direction of the product. However, if I impose caps after the fact, I'm in a position similar to Zoto where I've burned the people who have helped build my product.

If I do a closed beta, or come up with an arbitrary hierarchy of caps and prices up front, I'm afraid it'll hinder adoption.

Any insight into the best way to impose caps? Feel it out after getting some users? Sooner rather than later?
casino atms give out 100s
Could it be that the business requirement for the ranking system is actually that users be given the illusion of participating in a social site? because ultimately the rankings have very little impact on overall sales?

While over there, the "Users who bought X also bought Y" feature has a very strong impact on sales, so the engineers spend all of their time tweaking its algorithm?
When they purchased DMarc Broadcasting few years back for something like $100M, it was a pretty big deal. Some were calling for anti-trust investigations even then.

But like some other Google acquisitions, this one didn't work out that well.
Regarding the question of whether Google is a monopoly or not: non-monopolies cannot easily cause a new Internet standard to spring into being simply by announcing that a program of theirs will now apply specified behavior to a previously undefined syntactical element.

This line has a whole lot of chutzpah:

"This standard can be adopted by any search engine when crawling and indexing your site."

[Edit: Incidentally, I will have this implemented on my site by the end of the day. Because I'd be an idiot not to. Google is, I think, probably the only company who can create "drop what you are doing, now, this is your new priority" work for me besides my actual employer.]
Um, I have a question (about programmer productivity)
I do when I can. City sidewalks wreak havok on the knees etc.
Here's another way around it: http://coderrr.wordpress.com/2009/02/13/preventing-frame-bus...
Forgive my ignorance, but what are some good sources to read about stuff like this?
If you look in a periodic table, you will find that Boron, Carbon, and Nitrogen have 5, 6, and 7 electrons altogether. Any element with fewer valence electrons will be ineffective in forming latices with covalent bonds (as they have too few valence electrons). O and F are ineffective because they have too many valence electrons to effectively form a lattice as they can only form 1 or 2 valence bonds. Ne is a noble gas so its out of the running. All the rest can form nice valence bonds but the extra electron shells and increased atomic radius means that these valnce bonds are not as strong as the ones for B, N, and C.

Note: That the best explanation that I could come up with with my very basic knowledge of chemistry. I am sure a chem prof. will be able to give a much better answer.
...a bit unconventional
Google Pulls The Plug On Its Radio Ads
As this thread mentions cryptic code, Perl, regexps, and primes, I'm compelled to paste the cryptic Perl regexp to determine primes:

/^1?$|^(11+?)\1+$/
If you can't find where to draw the line now, you can put the cap later but don't charge the existing free users.

Example: I have a very old cellphone plan. It's not available for new carrier costumers. But the carrier never asked me to change to one of their new plans. I'm just using the old one.

So you can tweak the caps anytime you want. Start with free and very, very generous plan but also very, very expensive. Then take some statistics. If a lot of the free people are using 50% of their way into the expensive plan, create a middle-tier one, where you charge 60% of the price but it offers 50% of the features.

I know I haven't answered your question ;) Just wanted to say that you don't have to be perfect from the start.
I was all ready to hate on this article, because an article titled something like "How The Crash Will Reshape America" might as well be entitled "I, The Author, Tell You My Political Philosophy In Boring Essay Form"... that is, most people seem to basically be predicting that the ideas they espoused all along will suddenly win out. This is somewhat smarter than I was expecting, in that some honest thought was put into the future of various regions.

But there's still a pretty strong element of "My Political Philosophy Is Now Inevitable" in the piece; the biggest example I would cite is the statement that suburbs are over. Suburbs being over mostly depends on transportation getting monotonically more expensive and more difficult, which is a perfectly rational conclusion... assuming technological stagnation.

That's a whopper of an assumption.

(Yes, I'm aware some other things were cited. The stuff about the effect of home ownership on mobility were interesting, I thought, but you can still rent your way into a suburb.)

Even without energy breakthroughs, fission can provide cheap energy for a long time. Energy breakthroughs may yet occur, and I consider at least one of "cheap-enough solar panels to be brain-dead easy buys" and "alternate fusion proposal like Polywell" to be a reasonable probability. Combine that with what I think is a reasonable chance of robotic cars, and... suddenly the disadvantages of suburbs qua suburbs pretty much disappear.

Let me make myself clear: I'm not saying this is going to happen. I'm saying that in terms of future prognostication, it's as good a guess as the one in the article. (Yes, you can extract some of my technological beliefs from my point too. I'm willing to be fair that way.)

The simple truth is that this article is at least twenty years too early. You really can't know how this is going to go. I for one have been surprised about how this recession has accelerated some trends long foreseen, but always thought to be further in the indefinite future... anyone care to place odds on the New York Times not making it into 2010? Nobody would have even entertained that bet three years ago. It might still be long odds today but it's definitely into the "worth thinking about before fixing a number" range.

(Anyone wanna guess the odds on "The New York Times doesn't make into 2010 OR the only way they make it is by selling off more than half of their concrete assets"?)
Not "any string at all". Do it to a maximal-entropy string (e.g., a genuinely random one) and you won't see an increase.

You're using "information" in the colloquial sense, where random junk is not information. Norvig is using it in the information-theoretic sense, where random junk has more information than anything else of the same length. The information-theoretic sense is not "nonsense"; it's just not the same as the colloquial one.

(Motivation for the terminology: the "information" in a string is the minimal number of bits -- i.e., the minimal amount of information -- it takes you to tell me what the string is.)
Well, lets see:

1) Google, who has no incentive to do this because it disrupts one of their two core businesses. They're happy to let you put Google Search (TM) Powered By Google The Company That Owns Search In Case You Forgot on your site, but they have no reason to enable other competitors for searching. (Search engine "partners" who display Google results are just dupes who increase Google's reach marginally and will never challenge Google seriously because they're locked into being inferior clones of Google.)

2) Microsoft, which institutionally doesn't quite grok the whole "You can put this API on the Internet, and then people use it, and then you make a lot of money" thing yet.

3) Yahoo. Which did Boss.

4) Amazon, which has the technical chops to do computing at the scale they need to, but not the institutional knowledge to run a crawl-and-search operation.

5) Ask (or your favorite non-American leading search company), which are outside possibilities probably limited by their ability to scale the cloud.

Really, I think Yahoo is the best position to execute on this at the moment. If I were an exceptionally forward thinking person at Amazon, I would think of buying myself a startup with a working crawler and search engine, and then release OpenCrawl and OpenSearch to the community on the same day I announced AWSSearch, which uses Amazon's own, managed, infinitely scaling versions of OpenCrawl and OpenSearch (i.e. "we already did the crawling and index-building, you just consume the data!").

Of course, that would basically be like smacking Google in the face with a glove. The idea is that search is a lot like webmail: all services are essentially identical feature-wise, and you compete essentially on branding, user experience, and (most importantly) user habit.

Webmail has switching costs, yeah, I know. I honestly thing people switch mail more than they switch search engines. Case in point: how much would I have to offer any one of you to never Google again? Yeah, that's right.

So Amazon doesn't have any reason to want to run a search engine, which are commodities hoping to carve themselves a little branded niche. But they could make great money supporting an ecosystem of little one-off branded search engines. (Especially after they introduce AWSAds, their advertising contextual web service.)