skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Arguments for the importance of privacy seem to invoke either corruption (eg. 1984, or the Cardinal Richelieu quote) or the risk of error (eg. misidentifying a suspect because they share attributes). These remind me of the arguments used against artificial intelligence research. I see them as problems that can be worked around, not as a basis for more privacy measures.

Instinctively I feel that privacy is important, but I can't find any solid justification for the instinct. It bothers me slightly to know that I can be tracked by cell phone signals or a public-transit swipe-card, but I couldn't win an argument for the importance of privacy.
...and move to Silicon Valley whether or not it succeeds.
Ask HN: Rate my Russian Roulette iPhone App
I'd really appreciate it if you guys could critique my Russian Roulette app by checking out this video: http://vimeo.com/3391683 (app store link here: http://tinyurl.com/silverrevolver )
That sounds suspiciously like P3P. http://www.w3.org/P3P/Overview.html

Why did P3P fail and how can those problems be avoided in the future?
Correo Yahoo (karlangaz104)
Thanks! That's great advice!
Looks good. One suggestion is to maybe add a couple different types of guns.

Clickable link to video: http://vimeo.com/3391683
Also check out Raphaël http://raphaeljs.com/ - looks easy enough to build quite advanced charts.
From Novices with NDAs to Firefox's Stateful Memorability of Modular Innovation
The ugly truth about your favorite social networks
And the evidence you have for this is what? 2008 was not a great year in the history of BIND security.
Coding Horror: Paying Down Your Technical Debt
Comparable performance over time, slightly greater reliability, no reliance on a third party or exposure to whatever they do to monetize their service, and slightly less courtesy to the root server maintainers who would otherwise be shielded from your traffic.
Quality is quality, no matter how many people work at the company. Often it is preferable to do business with a one man shop versus Megacorp, because the guy/girl you are dealing with will do what it takes to keep your business.
You'll laugh at me, but I think that one of the most critical aspects of a graphing library is whether it can anti-alias or not.

I interned with a company a few years ago and we tested graphing packages; we found that although A was superior technically to B, B was preferred by the users because it anti-aliased the graphs that it rendered. Technically it made things much more complicated, but looking better goes a very long way.
"I don't particularly enjoy programming - certainly not to the extent that I could have orgasms doing it"

How many people do you know who get orgasms from programming? This kind of subtle condescension ensures that no halfway decent hacker would want to work with you.

As someone asked earlier, if we can have ideas and execute, why do we need (someone like) you, who (with due respect) have no credentials (in terms of having built succesful businesses/ have non technical demonstrated skills) but do have "ideas"?

If you think non hackers (like you) can create a successful technical product company, by all means do show us - build such a company , and then tell us how you did it so we can all learn from your experience and benefit from it.
Bananas are also delicious and cheap. Probably not as cheap as oatmeal or eggs, though. I have no idea how much cottage cheese costs, because I can't stand the stuff.)
A Producer of Superheroes
> You pick it once, when you first shard and then you're looking at downtime to adjust it?

Yes, but you say that like it's a bad thing, it's not. If you're ever forced to reshard, that means you grew beyond what you ever hoped... hurray, awesome, nice problem to have. The reality is however, 99% chance that'll never happen.

Like 1 in a 1000 people ever run into a scaling problem of this magnitude but if you read the blogs you'd come away thinking scaling issues that require sharding are common and everyone needs this stuff, but they aren't, and they don't.
Yeah, sorry about that -- working to fix some of the criticisms here and caused errors for a while. Should be ok now.

Also, I think I'll need to move the help to the front page. Something to work on this weekend. Thanks again for taking a look.
Sorry, in the future we'll have ads going back further, but we didn't start crawling CraigsList until the 20th.

Each day the bot runs is another day we have stored.
(1) have a really cool product that makes them say wow, for instance: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/fusioinio-iodrive-flash,...

(2) pay 'em
Step 1: Sell the espresso machine you brag about on your blog.
Yes - why not? Delivery from Amazon only takes two days, and then I have DRM free MP3s and the CD.
Thanks for the link -- I'll take a look. It'll be much more useful when I have dedicated card pages.
Technical Debt is a very good new metaphor. This article looks like a quick blogspam/linkbait/younameit.

This guy writes books on UML.
Y Combinator’s FathomDB Takes The Hassle Out Of Managing Your Database
Congratulations Justin! Great job, looks super slick.
States do a delicate dance with gamers
I assume he took a leave of absence, then.
Well if you are an Internet user out side US and you are visiting CDN powered sites via OpenDNS, you will be redirected to US servers, which is much more slower if you use your ISP's DNS
4.2.2.1, 4.2.2.2
Your evidence is that most of the startups you've heard a lot about are mass market consumer startups? Would you expect to have heard as much about the ones working on infrastructure?
Nice! if you can take the guesswork out of backups and slaves, you'll save me (and a lot of others) a ton of work!
This is a really great idea. I'm excited to try it out. Congratulations!
This is a serious issue to consider, but one way we're not going to solve it is by trying to restrict data collection, or simply trying to hide our own digital footprints. The latest facebook ToS episode tells us as much. To continue Schneier's automobile analogy, we're not solving pollution by un-inventing cars, but by coming up with even better clean technology. Similarly, reducing data collection doesn't seem to be a viable option; instead, we're going to have to come up with better technologies for access control & data anonymization.
UK operators O2 and Orange are reportedly "furious" with Nokia (NYSE: NOK - News) over
the Finnish handset makers plans to pre-load Skype, the VoiP provider that lets
consumers make free calls, on to its upcoming flagship device, the N97

And I can see Nokia execs answering: "Well, you betrayed us to first just to catch on the iPhone fad making it now our biggest threat. You forced us into this new era. Live with it."
I agree completely - what a great idea! - I will definitely give these guys a try. Rightscale is in the same space, but they charge an arm and a leg.
how much did it cost you to sponsor that roundtable thing?
Great story and great PR for the Pirate Bay.
The original article was better. It's a few links lower on the front page right now:

http://martinfowler.com/bliki/TechnicalDebt.html

Much much better. To the point where this feels narcissistic.
Paul, I really hope you don't decide to shut down or limit access to HN. While I'm not at the programming skill level that HN is targeting, I'm learning a great deal from the articles I find here and I think I'm becoming a much better programmer as a result. HN is my first read every day and I appreciate being able to access it. Thank you very much.
Because the band sees an incredibly small fraction of the price you pay for a CD.
I'm not sold that a new "better" player/browser is needed. People need to be able to move songs onto their player/browser of choice, MPUI, itunes, ipod, car stereo, zillion dollar sound system etc.

I like Zed, but seems less than knowledgeable of copyright and music rights/ownership.

The not knowing .99 itune is Apple enforced and not the Industries doing(which hates it btw)

Not understanding/admitting difference between public performance (what ascap collects royalties for) and downloding/playing music.

"That’s right, as long as you don’t edit the content, when you provide hosting and search for an artist, and they pirate music, then you are safe."

Worked awesome for Napster!

prev article "The problem is gatekeepers in general." I didn't read all of this but I don't think Zed sees/said what I think is obviously(debatable I guess(like ID is debatable)) the main problem with music in general and esp online music and double esp independent music is The Music Industry. Destroy them and it will be all rainbows and kittens.
There's more, 4.2.2.[1-6], these are level3's

I have no idea how they're actually load balanced but everyone always says 1 and 2 so I use the other ones.
If I didn't know anything else about the industry, then probably not. But that's kind of the point -- that's the list of successes that everyone knows about; the list that every CS undergrad wants to found.
Based on personal experience I would say that tech companies in NYC have a huge disadvantage because they're competing with hedge funds and investment banks for engineering talent.

First, I think absolutes are silly. Except for the previous statement. And the recursion that follows.

Second... there's plenty of technical supply available in NYC. I don't think there's going to be hedgie/i-bank demand for talent anytime soon.
Congrats Justin. Looks really impressive
Screw Art (Or, Passion & Indie Game Dev)
The language I use doesn't prohibit display/logging of full stack trace if you catch exceptions. Or, trivially, catch/log in production catch/rethrow in dev.

What about daemons? large batch programs? I, personally, would rather have them catch and alert(email, sms) unknown/unexpected exceptions continuing on with what they can rather than simply die.
I think P3P never gained traction in part because it was too early. I don't remember in 2000-2002 people getting in huffs over privacy policies. They weren't common then. Terms of use were -- deep linking policies. Heh.

One of the major P3P criticisms is the lack of enforceability. While say a Creative Commons license is applied to a work, if a P3P "contract" was applied to a site, how does one enforce it?

I think with the oversight a community provides (Facebook ToS is a recent example), a community or communities could keep companies' policy _more_ honest. I'm currently formulating my thoughts on this; I'm not completely versed in privacy nor previous attempts to clarify, add trust, understanding and accountability, like P3P.
Bloom filters in a nutshell
Background and Pattern Resources for Designers
Computing the Cost
How the Mind Works by Steven Pinker

The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins

On Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins

The Undercover Economist by Tim Hartford
A conversation with Jeff Bezos, Amazon.com
Three Worlds Collide: (~100 pages, freely available online under copyright.) http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/01/three-worlds-collide.h...

PG has a list on his personal website: http://www.bugbear.com/bestbooks.html
Not only that, but if you use Emacs, then I highly suggest learning to use Tramp. Ever since I discovered it, I've stopped using vim in terminals to edit remote files.
That's actually what I do. I just put in 1/3 - 1/2 of the packet. It actually tastes better this way, I think - the recommended amount is way too salty. But even 1/3 is like 60% of your RDA for sodium.
They should start by offering IMAP to all the paying customers of Yahoo Mail. It's amazing that they can do this for iPhone, but not for desktop especially for customers who are paying for this service. Google gives us all this for free.
Why You Should Deploy Your Next Application on Ruby 1.9
Wow. This is now my new console editor. I've always used nano (after pico) for nix editing. Never been worth the trouble to get comfortable on emacs or vi (all my coding is mostly on Windows or MacOS)

Having syntax coloring and the simplicity of good old of ctrl-c, ctrl-v, and ctrl-z is perfect.
My decidedly non-tech company (trucking) just did an across the board 2 percent pay reduction, and saved a couple people from layoffs. Bad day for most, but we are glad to have a job that is stable going forward. The company has in the past increased the 401k match in good times, and raises are regularly given, but as Jason says runway is crucial and you must conserve the cash you actually have- not receivables you think are good (but not paid yet.) btw Great letter,Jason. Thanks for articulating your appraoch so clearly.
Project Alpha and the Resulting Crash of the Parapsychology Field
Amazon Kindle 2 gets iPod treatment. Will it sell?
Making TDD Work: Integrating 3rd Party Services
ToysRUs Buys Toys.com At Auction For $5.1 Million
+1 for Pinker, though I'd pick The Language Instinct first, by a nose.

+1 for Dawkins. Also: Daniel Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea.
Warning: Includes Known Bugs
Nice and simple.

Question: Is it theoretically possible to build a cloud hash-database that uses mysql on the front-end? Any joins would automatically be handled for you and the system would watch what queries you are running to dynamically balance/distribute/reindex data as needed. SimpleDB/Couch/etc work, but they require a steep learning curve for people used to working with relational databases.

At the end of the day you are just saving/getting data, I don't understand why the database service can't deal with the pain.
即时新闻_资讯_凤凰网
Easier Cross Browser Testing
IDEO’s Ten Tips For Creating a 21st–Century Classroom Experience
Emacs + Vim + Haskell = Yi
I work for Agilent. One day back in December, everyone gets an email from the CEO saying that all American employees would get a 10% pay cut. All European employees would get unpaid time off every other Friday.

The Europeans got a better deal because they have much stricter labor laws in Europe. It makes me want to move to Europe.
Great work Justin!
Ask HN: computing in 2014 : your predictions?
How many cores will a typical personal computer have?

Will Clojure or Scala replace Java (if so, which)?

Will the most popular languages feel like CUDA or Haskell or C#/LINQ?
Funny you should mention that.

I think the thing I miss the most about attending a well-known, old-school Ivy campus (long, long ago) was the nearly infinite amount of "available space" for study/just plain getting away by one's self, or hanging out with friends.

There was the third-floor applied engineering library where no one ever went (where I often studied), the grad student "pen" in the basement of the computing center (this was a long time ago, when PDP-10's roamed the earth), the endless open classrooms in the science center, the mini-lounges on many floors of the chemistry building, to say nothing of the dozen-plus houses (dorms, though I was an off-campus student for the last 3 years), etc.

I'd make a wild guess there might be on the order of magnitude of a million square feet of usually unoccupied, interesting, pleasant space on campus (which stretched for a over mile in some dimensions).

(To say nothing of the many unlocked facilities like the small pipe organ in one of the dozens of performance halls, etc.)

In some sense, access to that kind of space is the ultimate luxury, whether for work or play.
Mitter: Friendfeed For Online Videos (And Other Media)
Q: What one quality do you think has most contributed to your success?

A: Willingness to be misunderstood, willingness to fail and willingness to be long-term-oriented.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4056722386095778405...
How many cores will a typical personal computer have?

Either 8 or 16, assuming you're counting general-purpose cores. Don't be surprised if CPUs come with separate vector computing cores (basically like GPUs have now).

Will Clojure or Scala replace Java (if so, which)?

No.

Will the most popular languages feel like CUDA or Haskell or C#/LINQ?

No. The most popular languages will be new innovations which are popular solely because they throw out existing paradigms and, in so doing, restrict themselves to a small number of developers (who therefore trumpet their use of this language in order to demonstrate their superiority over everybody else).

The most widely used languages will be imperative structured single-address-space languages with extensive feature sets provided via libraries -- i.e., C and C-like languages.
Yup, although I personally have had better luck with sshfs. Then you can interact with the remote files with all your favorite shell utilities, as well.
Sorry, but sending men to the Moon to drive around in a little car is a better example of wasteful entertainment than any of the three web companies you named.
I just realized people are hung up on the resolving part of that link and not the "on laptop cache" part.

I don't think there's any compelling reason to run an actual resolver (as opposed to a local cache that recurses to a reliable, non-monetizing public cache).
Both emacs and vim run on MacOS and Windows. Emacs even supports the CUA keybindings, although if you're going to use those bindings, you might as well not bother with emacs.
It seems http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom_filter also have a pretty good take.
Maybe they will go to someone else's town?
You get unpoisoned DNS, that's actually 'Open' and 'faster than your ISP'.

OpenDNS is neither. What's so funny about it is that it's the shit that Slashdotters rail against, successfuly marketed back to them.
It depends on what you mean by grouping - it's not exactly as easy as it sounds at first blush, as outlined by Twitter's Jason Goldman at Getsatisfaction:

http://getsatisfaction.com/twitter/topics/when_is_twitter_go...
Ask HN: Best encryption solution for personal stuff (images, videos etc)?
Looking for a tool or a script or a set of script that use popular but safe encryption standards to encrypt personal images and videos. What do you use?
This is a repost of one of my old comments:

I highly recommend reading: http://www.balsamiq.com/blog/?p=198

Peldi's advice and the links he give are dead on. I pitched bloggers before reading this and got a zero response rate.

Then I adjusted tactics. I added a phone number to my website and a mediakit. Some of the articles Peldi links to talk about having a media kit.

I also added the ability to give out codes for people to try the service for free. This is important as it takes replying to me out of the equation. The blogger can try things out (if they choose) at their leisure. The code also makes it easy to tell who is looking.

I started looking for bloggers via Google Alerts, Technorati, etc.). I then sent tailored messages to a few and included the "try it" code. I also tried to say something to show my site added to the dialog of something they already wrote.

Overall I kept my pitch short (unlike this reply :))

I mentioned nothing about writing a review or any such thing. I merely asked for their opinion. Some folks reviewed my service, others sent me their opinion. Still, I had responses :)

My mediakit is at: http://www.feedbackarmy.com/about.slp

And my welcome page for people with a code is: http://www.feedbackarmy.com/tryit.slp?code=theircodehere

Good luck!
The publicity around your 'leak' didn't help much :)
I've tried using Tramp several times over the past few years on multiple operating systems and environments. However, it has always been unbearably slow for me, even with persistent SSH connections via ControlMaster/ControlPath. Any pointers?
Amazon retreats on Kindle's text-to-speech issue
The advantage to her its that probably Yahoo was the worst driven company of the last decade, it was like having a Ferrari and drive it at 10 mph

They need to humble down and understand they are just a brokerage ad firm for the internet, billons of dollars worth do.
What's wrong with having a positive attitude? Cynicism is so . . . uber-lame.
Will the most popular languages feel like CUDA or Haskell or C#/LINQ?

No. I think the most popular languages will be the cobols of the future: java and visual basic.
I think you skipped a sentence:

Apparently, the operators are "venting their anger" at
high-level executive meetings with Nokia, whom they
believe are trying to wrest away control of their
customers and offering easy access to an app that could
potentially hurt call revenues.

Nokia is trying to control the platform and therefore the customers' user experience TO THE CUSTOMERS' BENEFIT and yet, you act like that is a bad thing. Clearly, Nokia does not believe the service provider's intentions have the customers' interest at heart, so they are trying to OWN the customer, rather than the service provider so that they can provide them with what they (the customers') want (ie. Skype). Nokia is trying to do what few other companies are and you are calling their attitude to their customers as "stifling innovation"? Wow.
Our experiments with Javascript in Google Earth 5.0
If his MacBook can handle the entire database so I don't see the need for a SAN (yet). I don't know how much benefit there would be to increasing his systems RAM, but if the database fit's on a laptops HDD, then you can probably get most of it into ram which would make things insanely faster. My guess is upgrading to a 10,000$ box with 64Gb of ram and a 1 + 0 RAID of SSD he could probably get 50x increase in speed which would be ~5k operations per second. Granted he might develop issues with network bandwidth or some other bottleneck, but even just averaging 1k/second represents huge revenue potential relative to the cost of that system. And a back of the envelope calculation should give him a rough estimate of it's value.

PS: Upgrading 10gb Ethernet is not really that expensive now days if he is only linking a few web servers to two databases.

EDIT: To give you some idea what flash can do http://advancedstorage.micronblogs.com/2008/11/iops-like-you... (Granted, it's a stupid video, but 150,000 Read IO's and 80,000 write IO's and 800MB/second of bandwidth on two PCie Cards in 09 / 10 with fusion IO doing the same type of thing today).
Oh my. It seems what you call college I'd call university (I live in Quebec).
I think you're missing what I'm saying. If you look at San Francisco/East Bay/Albany:El Cerrito on craigslist there are 30 listings for 2/27. If I look in that area on your map I see only 2 listings.
Can You Buy a Silicon Valley?  Maybe.
Express Parallelism, Don't Manage It
A2 hosting coupon for 20% discount
During this february 2009, and the valentine month, a2 hosting is giving you 20% discount on your hosting purchase. Use these a2 hosting coupon and save 20% off your hosting bill.
Adolescence is from antiquity, but the meaning has diluted to become the same thing as 'teenagerhood' recently, if I recall correctly. It was more like being a 'young man' prior to that.
Beyond Fear - Schneier

Sources of Power - Klein. This guy did research on how experts made decisions under stressful situations.

Normal Accidents - Perrow

Emergence - Johnson
How to Survive with Temporary Jobs
Find out at this website how to get a temporary job. Lots of really good information obout it.
Landing a customer early is like catching the elevator and exiting at the next floor: a missed opportunity.

But using that first customer to immediately get a second one, and then close another one... that's a ride.
The Secret to Slumdog's Success
I've used this set of servers for years, they're the fastest I know of, period. I'll back that up with some data:

DNS Server | Comcast in Seattle | The Planet Colo in Dallas
Level3 4.2.2.X | 11ms ± 1.5ms 5hops | 1ms ± 0.2ms
OpenDNS 208.67.222.222 | 35ms - 150ms 11hops | 24.9ms ± 0.1ms
Comcast 68.87.68.162 | 90ms - 250ms 12hops | 23.4ms ± 0.1ms

Hilariously, neither OpenDNS nor Comcast are so variable in ther sluggishness when accessed directly -- The Planet is peered directly with Level3, NTT (OpenDNS's host), and Comcast. On top of that, Comcast is marginally faster than OpenDNS outside their own shitty network! The relative slowness has nothing to do with the servers themselves.
Something tells me that bug was going to get some publicity regardless of what happened the week before Black Hat.
Yes, but...I should have seen it.