skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This amounts to "good will" on the part of the potential customers to keep Twitter alive. I doubt we'll see any ROI calculations.

Twitter is just a feature of an information system and that feature can be implemented easily on a company by company basis and incorporated as an RSS feed or whatever.

Any other use would only be considered advertising and that is difficult to quantify and internet advertising isn't doing so well at the moment...
It might be more accurate to describe it as a rut for you. I don't mean that as an insult, it's okay if you just don't like what you hear.

If you're looking for "the cool new things" that are happening, I definitely wouldn't look at the Top 10 in concert attendance.

Given, we're not going to invent distorted electric guitar or precision audio editing again. But really, do we define great music as having a "sound" that's obviously jarring? Great music has been produced for centuries with the same old orchestral instruments--to the uninitiated, it all sounds pretty much the same.
If you don't care about connection dropping, indeed just set up key authentication and run ssh in a loop as described above, instead of a complicated VPN, which will only really partially mitigate dropping of -forwarded- connections.

Secondly, you should be able to set scripts to trigger when a network interface comes up in most linux distros, but how to do it varies, for example /etc/network/ifup.d/ in ubuntu.
"rock solid" is "very reliable"
"one-in-a-million-or-better tests" is "tests which fail less than one in a million times".

Our Internet-Explorer-based tests are very reliable; they fail less than once per million executions.
Ah yes, Dreamhost, that web host who is famous for exceptional uptime.
I won't go so far as to say OO sucks, but I have noticed in my own code, that I have tended to use OO concepts a little bit and functional concepts a lot.

Over time, I'm using less and less OO and more and more functional, so... that tells me OO wasn't all it was cracked up to be.

The biggest problem I see with OO is that it doesn't map well to relational models and OO databases aren't that popular.
Note that the company didn't survive, in part due to this episode.

Also, taking big risks can be very profitable... for a while. It sounds like they were running seat of the pants, and it caught up with them.
You really aren't listening to the right hip hop artists, then. There are a myriad of highly talented rappers who's songs are rooted in meaningful, thought provoking subjects. And the same goes for any genre.

Musicians themselves are exploring various niches and the audiences that await them in every corner of the music world. And as a result, have a smaller fanbase. The reason why you still hear the same garbage on KROQ and why the top 10 acts are ancient is because those are the musicians that have been proven to appeal to the widest audience. And with the top 10 acts, I'm going to guess that a big part of their fanbase is composed of 30+ year old individuals who are going to stick around for a while with their static tastes in music. Basing the state of the music world on who the top 10 performing acts are is a bit foolish. There's a whole lot happening.

My iTunes library is filled with music of recent artists who's music is of high quality. You can't just turn on the radio now to find good music, even via Pandora or Rhapsody. Don't fool yourself by thinking that Pandora is really giving you an in depth look to the various genres of music. It really isn't. You have to work a bit harder than that.
Craig Newmark's Keynote Unlocks the Secrets to Building a Community
ZUIs are really exciting. I'm actually working on a project that uses ZUIs to help people visualize large amounts of data.
Oh - OO is pretty vaguely defined; I'm talking specifically about C++/Java-style class-based OO. (I haven't ever used CLOS-style OO, and prototype-based OO is probably vulnerable to the same pitfalls as class-based.)

Also, while this article by Clay Shirky (http://www.shirky.com/writings/ontology_overrated.html) is more about categorizing information, it demonstrates very nicely why trying to pigeonhole everything into a hierarchy of classes doesn't always work in practice. (I posted it to the front page, since it hasn't been yet...)
This is one of those things that I didn't realize had a name until now.

I've been wanting to get banks to implement this kind of thing forever. For instance, it'd be nice if I could log into my bank and set a url that they post to every time a transaction happens. Then I could set up a service at that url to take their message and do something with it (email myself, send an sms, automatically enter the transaction in buxfer, etc).

Same for statements. Instead of sending me an email, just let me specify a url. When my statement is ready, it's posted (in json or xml format) to a url I specify. Then I can slice and dice my own financial data and update my long term cashflow graph, or something.

Since the url is specified by me, while logged into my account (which should be secure), I have total control over who has my data (assuming DNS is secure and I provide an https url). If I wanted to use a service like Mint or Buxfer, I could add their callback urls to my account. When I decided to stop using their service, I simply remove the urls from the account. There is no need for Mint/Buxfer to know my login credentials or even what bank I use.
The problem with script.js?v={timestamp} is that it's ignored by some browsers while script_{timestamp}.js isn't. And with script.js?v={timestamp} you can't set good cache headers.

Also, if you ever move to a CDN, then you are forced to use real versioning (at least with Amazon Cloudfront).

The versioning scheme we use is `md5 hash of name + file contents + file extension` (and not timestamp).
Oh, I'm not saying I didn't like it :)

As I said, fantastic people, especially in the rural areas.

I've lived on St. Josephs Island ON for two and a half years and in Toronto for two and a half years, I clocked well over 200,000 km while in Canada on roadtrips taking me from the far east (Cap Chat in Quebec, and Halifax) all the way to Vancouver BC, and I spent quite a bit of time just talking to people and getting to know the country.

I still have an 80 acre farm in Northern Ontario.
Seems like a straw man to me. I know of no Darwinists who fetishize Darwin.
The Persistence of Ideology (Educated+Unhappy=Ideological)
Chcek your SSH configuration. By default SSH using some kind of ping system where, if the client loses contact with the server, the server closes the session. However, you can turn this off, or you can adjust the timing parameters to handle unreliable connections. I did that when I had a horrible connection (from the other side of the world) and it always worked fine.
Free Grant Secrets News
If you have children and a hard time paying the rent, here is are a few free grant secrets to help you. Did you know that you may be able to get the government to help you in this regard? If you apply to the department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) you may be able to get a grant from the government to pay for part of your rent.
It's interesting that this has come up because I've been thinking along these lines recently. Specifically, I'd like to build a service (probably using RoR) that acts as an aggregator for these webhooks.

Imagine that I sign up as jgrahamc on http://somethingmoved.org/ (that was my idea for the name) and a look at http://somethingmoved.org/jgrahamc would give me a 'twitter' style feed of posts that have been made to me.

Then I'd be able to assign endpoints that I could use for specific services, so suppose I decide to use github I might define http://somethingmoved.org/jgrahamc/github and give that URL to github for the post-receive URL.

On my page I can define how that gets added to my feed (perhaps part of the XML document is extracted and added as a simple line of text, and of course for common services there could be ready made templates of what to do).

If standard service endpoints were done right then you can imagine going to a FedEx tracking page and finding a 'SomethingMoved' button where you are asked to enter just the main part of your URL (e.g. http://somethingmoved.org/jgrahamc) and FedEx could automatically tack on /fedex which would then have a standard handling.

Then I also say that this github message should be passed on to other services (perhaps many, perhaps just RunCodeRun). Clearly I could do some transformation before passing things on. For example, I might pass on to RunCodeRun unchanged, but extract part and pass to Twitter.

Anyone got time to work on hacking this together with me in RoR? (I really need someone who's good with web UI hacking since I'm an application guts kind of guy).
1. OO has no precise and universally accepted definition.
http://www.paulgraham.com/reesoo.html

2. Parameterized modules in Erlang can be seen as a form of lightweight functional OOP.

http://www.lshift.net/blog/2008/05/18/late-binding-with-erla...
http://www.erlang.se/workshop/2003/paper/p29-carlsson.pdf
Can you give an example of what you mean by a regional bank?

I only know of the big 6 national banks and the credit unions.
This is great stuff, thanks.
I love that step 3 learn objective-c is supposedly no more difficult than step 2 download the SDK.
> 2. They are always adjustable.

What do you mean here? I may just not be up on mortgage terminology but my mortgage is a 5 year fixed. How is it adjustable?
Foto | Melna roze | Smuki Ziedi pie Mājas Durvīm
High sugar is bad. But one of it's effects this article didn't mention is inflammation. That's something we've studied for a while but have only relatively recently linked to diet:

https://www.health.harvard.edu/fhg/updates/What-you-eat-can-...

High inflammation is also linked to heart disease, stroke, diabetes, alzheimer, some cancers, parkinson's and more.

Note: I don't agree with a few recommendations in the article.
please do this

and please use the features category :)
Location-based services are a business, but the consumer holding the mobile isn't who you should expect to pay. Instead, get off your lazy programmer ass and start pounding the pavement, getting local businesses to sign up and pay for access to your awesome location-aware ad network, and then give the consumers the amazing value of being able to ask not just "Where can I go to grab coffee?", but "What restaurant has open seats right now?", "Who's offering discounts to get rid of their pastries instead of tossing them at the end of the day?", "I need to buy a box of Cheerios, any local grocery stores want to bid on my business?", etc.

Location-based is the future of business. I wonder if this guy sees it and is trying to drive away the competition, or if he took his one flawed pass at a business model and gave up. Either way, he's full of shit.
There is lots of research on zoomable user interfaces. A variation is detail-in-context interfaces where the points of interest are magnified while the rest is compressed. The OS X icon bar is a good example. Check out
http://pages.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/~sheelagh/wiki/pmwiki.php?n=Ma...
(contains many references to ZUI research as well) It's been suggested to use a trackball with your left hand to zoom in and out while keeping the mouse in your right hand (vice versa for left-handed people). I'd like to see that happen.
I'm seeing a trend here:

1. X used to be regarded highly but turns out to be imperfect or suboptimal for certain problem domains.

2. Write "why X sucks" blog post.

3. Profit!
Mousewheel zoom doesn't work with my Microsoft IntelliMouse. Mabye it's because I use it with a Mac...
"Although much fuss has been raised about high-fructose corn syrup, when it comes to calories and weight gain, it makes no difference if the sweetener was derived from corn, sugar cane, beets or fruit juice concentrate."

This is subtly wrong, but I think it's important that people understand why. Yes, the calories from HFCS are the same calories from sucrose or fruit sugars. However, you body's reaction is different. See this paper for an idea of the kinds of differences that can be observed: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19064538?ordinalpos=2&...
That is so sad. Pandora? Rhapsody? Radio? Really? You won't find (much) art there or in any of the bands that are playing amphitheaters. Find the bands who are living out of their van. Find the frontman who is so mentally ill he can barely function. Find the group of kids from Cardif who can ROCK a glockenspiel. Find the girl from so cal who uses cassette tapes live to build ambient loops while singing about her dead baby.
A missing feature in most dynamic languages: take a random key from an hash table.
It took me a minute to realize that TweedHeads was an object and not a class.
Continuous deployment is good, but the comments are valid.

There is a certain non-zero probability for errors to occur during deployment. Binaries have to be reloaded, database connections have to be reconnected, sessions have to be restored, etc, so the more you deploy, the larger the coefficient before this probability in the "will something go wrong" equation.

So, what we do is break up our system into deployment groups where some handful of users gets updated a few times an hour sometimes. We test the deployment on this small set of users, usually they know the change is coming and are ready to test the change in real time.

Sometimes we repeat this process using different deployment groups. Test in this one, then test in that one, until we get a final small errorless deployment and then we roll out to the masses.

If it is successful, we roll it out to the masses.

Your site doesn't have to be /all/ beta or /all/ production. You can have batches of users in different groups.
Bonuses, Power and Inequality
Isn't it just a bit naive to just assume that every HTTP-based API call is going to work together?

What fields does it return? Do they post XML? JSON? These things are both important and hard to get right. Even if you settle on a technical format, you'd still need to agree on fields for every single different kind of content (otherwise it's "headline" and "body" on my blog system and "title" and "contents" on yours). That's why this hasn't happened yet.

I've dealt with some truly awful HTTP-based APIs before. The kind that use some homegrown XML that doesn't validate. It's not nearly enough to say "I've got an API, here's the URL, POST some data to it"
Interoperability between clouds requires more than just vm portability
Not quite what you are asking for but it would solve the problem:

1. Get an Android.

2. Hack it and install the debian subsystem.

3. see: http://brad.livejournal.com/2400054.html

So now instead of running an ssh to a remote server you are running an ssh to your android which then hosts all of the outward ssh sessions. Because of the androids 2g/3g you can't lose your connection (well not easily).
I admit I didn't thoroughly read the whole paper, but this stuff strikes me as something to help the bulk of average programmers (or with average experience) get through a project. I didn't see anything in the paper addressing ability and experience at all, so it comes across as process being more important than the people involved.

Look for a MSFT TDD MVP certification now.
Financial Markets and Freelance Strategy
The turmoil in financial markets has left everyone panicked. It’s hard not to look at your IRA statement without freaking out just a bit. Jobs are less secure and freelance work will likely be harder to come by as we dive deeper into 2009.
Some of these I would categorize as using tact. Lie may be a bit of a stretch. Still good, useful information though.
That would be pretty difficult -- the API message itself isn't getting passed around so there's no way to add a TTL.

If a blog post triggers a Tweet, and that Tweet triggers a blog post, which triggers another Tweet....
> Everything has to be an object

There are plenty of OOPLs where this is not the case. For example C++ or Python.

> Why is OOPS popular? Because it makes it easier and safer to get programmers working together as a group.

That's true. But the main reason why OOPL is popular is because it makes programming more productive, whether there's one programmer writing the code or lots of them.
I'm curious, what's your point, exactly? That we shouldn't do this at all because it might not be perfect out of the gate?

If it doesn't work, then it doesn't work, and you'll just whine at the person who broke it until its fixed, or use a different implementation that does work. Yay, loose coupling.
New Perspective On Patterns of Weight Gain and Loss
When you start a local shell, you can generate some session identifier (export DURABLE_SESSION=$RANDOM) and put it in your environment. Then have your ssh client send it to the server with "-o SendEnv DURABLE_SESSION".

One question is when does sshd know when to ditch interrupted sessions.
Matlab Topic Modeling Toolbox
My info my be stale, but I was under the impression that all mortgages offered were adjustable in some way.

But it sounds like I'm wrong!
A specific example of a more general pitfall ...

If you're going to use a metaphor to "protect" your users against a morass of petty details, you can't afford to do a half-assed implementation. You have to do a thorough analysis of your use cases, you have to know what you're provoking them into believing, and you have to anticipate (nearly) everything they might do as a result of that belief.

Metaphors assist enormously in usability. Users can become productive very quickly if something looks and behaves in a familiar fashion, but if it's not complete, the users will get confused.

And angry.
How would you do that? The point here is, the webhook call can't really know what it's POST'ing to; all it takes to set up a loop is another web app that will itself formulate an arbitrary POST.
Slashdot.org Self-Slashdotted
MALLET: Machine Learning for Language Toolkit
This would be killer on the iphone because with the accelerometer you could physically move the phone around the surface of your virtual desktop to reveal different areas of it.
Should we hire this intern? You decide.
Given record sales and concert attendance, it would be more accurate to say that music isn't in a rut for you.
At least for the second point, that's because IDH is Creationism. It purports that somethings are irreducibly complex and must have been designed by a creator. Which is basically the same thing (scientifically) as Creationism.
For port forwarding, I use autossh (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autossh) to keep my IMAP and SMTP tunnels alive.
I feel like I'm reading a tabloid.
Basic http caching and rate limiting should cover this.
Both Pandora and Rhapsody have tremendous variety and aren't limited to major label music at all.

But still, just because there are a few schizophrenic glockenspielers out there doesn't mean the industry as a whole is doing well. As I pointed out originally, just like with the economy, the presence of some good stuff doesn't mean that the overall direction is a good one.
I believe the author is referring more so to the people that tend to think that one person came up with, and wrote it since its attached to a persons name. It also makes for a good (read good in their heads) excuse why not to believe it. I know I have experienced that poor logic in conversation before.
It's not just arguing about god though. ID makes statements of fact which it is unable to back up with experimental evidence. Evolution makes statement of fact which it can back up with experimental evidence. So the two should not be conflated (at least in the scientific realm).

Outside of science (philosophy?) they are nowhere near the most "out-there" of theories.
Unless it's hard to make new accounts, the best that rate limiting can do is disable the whole webhook service.
No, certainly the world would be better if everything had an API.

But without standards, things are never going to "just work" together. We may as well just encourage people to use semantic HTML and microformat and scrape data off the pages when we want it.
According to this anecdotal radio report cultural spending in Europe is trending up (live performances, exhibitions) while other forms of discretionary spending (especially eating out) is dropping. The claim was this was expected and in line with previous downturns. The only U.S. discussion was during the intro with the old standby of the rise of movie houses and Hollywood during the depression. There was no discussion of sporting events.

[piece begins at 15:25] http://podcast.cbc.ca/mp3/twtw_20090208_11769.mp3
Maybe delaying subsequent POSTs from the same server, unless it's whitelisted, and Bayesing out fishy requests. That should reduce the load.
IT groups that understand SOA may be able to take better advantage of the cloud
Windows 7: Is it so hard to say "we're sorry"?
The case for unintelligent machines
Here's an idea, a firefox extension that let's you turn on a 'broadcast' feature that causes your browser actions to be posted to a remote server; where subscribers can 'follow' your clickstream in near real-time.

Web as television.
Sun's JavaFX fights Flash
You Can’t Sell News by the Slice
Intel to invest $7 billion in U.S. plants
You can always manually interrupt an SSH (or Telnet) session using the following key sequence:

<Enter><Tilde><Period>

This sequence is caught by the SSH client to force a session disconnect.
Freeing Up Stem-Cell Research
So the book's authors argue that it is the responsibility of politicians to help people make the right "default" choice.

Jeez, can you say "slippery slope"?
I don't understand why this comment and mattmaroon's are being downmodded. Perhaps music is one of the topics with which people identify too much? Like religion and politics.
PowerShell ABC's - A To Z
To solve your problem just use ssh -o TCPKeepAlive=no restOfYourCommandGoesHere

From the ssh_config manpage:

"TCPKeepAlive

Specifies whether the system should send TCP keepalive messages to the other side. If they are sent, death of
the connection or crash of one of the machines will be properly noticed. However, this means that connections
will die if the route is down temporarily, and some people find it annoying.

The default is ``yes'' (to send TCP keepalive messages), and the client will notice if the network goes down or
the remote host dies. This is important in scripts, and many users want it too.

To disable TCP keepalive messages, the value should be set to ``no''."
As opposed to say HSBC which is a global bank.
Where did you get the "no employee" rule? If I understood correctly the whole point of this was to create jobs, but that everyone hired needs to work, not organized into layers of management.