skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I love all of pg's essay, but this one is a startlingly superficial, and naive, commentary on a topic that has been thought about for +20 years. Also, I think pg has become too focused on the types of companies he funds ("ramen consumer web 2.0 companies") and he thinks this is applicable to broader issues. it isn't.
App Engine isn't aimed at the "enterprise" market that Dare is talking about. It is aimed at the Python programmer who wants an easier solution. Dare says

Hobbyists either don't spend money or spend relatively little so I discounted them as a target audience of interest.

But App Engine is a free service... people who don't want to spend money are exactly the target audience.
You really need to explain what this is for.
For now, it helps Verizon every time they introduce FIOS to an area its often cheaper and better for existing cable customers.

Which is why I think eventually cable companies like Comcast and AT&T could easily take back Verizon customers with more aggressive pricing and upgrading their existing network, which costs a lot less than Verizon's fiber optic network.
I don't see what's wrong with Valleywag, I read it every day. It's hilarious, and interesting, and seems well-researched for a gossip site.
From what I've researched it seems universities are only interested in your undergrad or masters degree. High school and college stuff doesn't count (I'm in the UK).
Stuff that was Cool -- You Have Died of Dysentery: The Oregon Trail
I recall hearing in a documentary that only the un-mutated form of HIV is any good at slipping though the gap in human defenses it uses. So as a consequence, once it gets to mutating, those changed viruses only work inside the current victim. Sorry my memory is not more precise.

Consider, it already mutates a lot, and hasn't turned itself into something more deadly.
I tried to ford the river twice and didn't make it either time. Bankers just aren't cut out for making the trek, even with their wads of cash.
When will this be in the app store? I saw an article that said yesterday, but I've yet to see it.
bloopsaphone? chuck? (google for them for urls)
Newt Gingrich's entrepreneurial approach to remaking the GOP
That's a great use of crowdsourcing for your editing. I wonder how that could work in a more automated and scalable way. I'm thinking something similar to Etherpad, but with feedback rather than actual edits, like if people could leave comments and suggestions inline, with some kind of HN-style upvoting and troll-flagging. Then the originating author could cherrypick the best suggestions into being actual edits. Something like Wikipedia but more reader-friendly, without infinite levels of backwards revisions.

Or that could be stupid in practice, maybe a handful of close associates with honest feedback is way better than taking all comers.
Image A/B testing in under 5 minutes with Display Optimizer
A side note for HN users, we'd be happy to offer Mixpanel's (http://mixpanel.com) services to you, just email me directly: suhail [at] mixpanel [dot]com
Yes it was necessary. I don't know how to do design and CSS and there's no money made or invested into it. I tried putting together a design but it looked shit and never worked very well.
No, my comments were aimed at the operators, not Nokia. Nokia is stuck in the hard place where they understand the need and want to innovate, but their biggest direct customers (the operators) really dont want them to.
Damn it! That's what I hoped I wouldn't have to. Especially the example under the form.
The money question is critical. It's how we get food/shelter/consumer electronics to those people who do this task? Money's just* liquefied labor, after all.

* Yes, I'm really, really simplifying here.
| An individual who loves the material world more than the spiritual world (not god necessarily, maybe just the world inside his own head), is pitiable.

Then pity me, though I wish you wouldn't. I do not find that I can believe in any world other than the material world, at least enough to sacrifice my efforts in this world.

If I am going to make a difference, I want to make a difference in the material world, not a spiritual one. If I am going to become wealthy, I want to do so in the material world. If I am going to produce art, I would do so in the material world.

Any spirituality that I do have, exists in the material world. I work in this world, I trade in this world, I appreciate in this world, I love in this world.

So what's so wrong with that?

And if my goals in this world demand that I create money, and if I pursue that goal aggressively, why would you pity me?

Your friend wants able means. Even if he doesn't know now what he would do with those means, it is enough for him to know that he wants them. He is already leagues ahead of the aimless majority that do not know at all what they want. If he wants money, then he should pursue that, and once he has it, he can decide what to do with it ... but at least he will have pursued and attained a goal, which is a claim shared by too few.

I think your pity is misplaced.
Bernard Shaw's dictum may seem a little trite but it's true nonetheless "Money is the most important thing in the world until you have enough of it". Yes! - 'enough' begs a slew of questions.
Information Technology, 50 Years Ago(written by Arrington's father)
@peterbe if you add http:// to your blog link in your profile, it becomes clickable.
> I have not heard of a case where the press was involved in corruption - honestly. And even if they were corrupt, they were corrupt with private money.

It's actually fairly commonplace for "the press" to be involved in public corruption. They'll even defend the corruption.

> I doubt a blogger will be able to take on complex and multi-faceted corruption cases while he is being sued from all sides.

And how many press organizations will do that?

More important, that's irrelevant because corruption investigations rarely involve lawsuits.
Get rid of the About page. Move that content to the left column of the front page.
Don't you think there's something of an opportunity cost, though? If someone like Linus had dedicated all his time to a startup (he did spend some time at Transmeta, but still had time for Linux), perhaps he would have never accomplished what he did. Perhaps similar arguments could be made about people like Guido van Rossum. Obviously there are various paths to success, but how many people made their cash, and then went on to do a seriously successful open source project? I'm sure there are one or two out there, but I think mostly it's a one or the other situation.
And when the DOJ is done with Google, Facebook will get similar scrutiny.
Turing's Euclidean Stroke of Genius
I choose not to.
I have been a bit imprecise in my comment. Yes, hacker and entrepreneur are different concepts. It's just that here there is a much greater density of people who are both then anywhere I know. Hacker culture is old, and I respect it. One of my dreams in high school has been to write open source software. But still, here you are more likely to find hackers interested in a startup then in OS. This is what my comment was about - this is a place I love _because_ it's one of the few where smart people openly want to make money (in the randian sense). And to see the highest modded comment praising spirituality over materialism - I really didn't like it.
You don't get it, to Google advertisers are the customers, the so called 'users' are product.
How we cache at CollegeHumor
Their "independence" doesn't mean that they'll investigate anything/everything. For example, while all of them are willing to quibble about specific aspects of specific govt programs, they're unwilling to go after govt programs in the large (with the small exception of military projects).
Externalities ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality ), positive or negative, don't seem to get much consideration throughout.
> Disaster strikes when the government steps in to cut ostensibly frivolous expenses,

Govt run biz can't resist the temptation to do "good things", no matter how economically dumb, and to make sure that no politican has an unemployed relative.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are prime examples. (Yes, I know that they were supposedly independent, but look at the political connections of the board and senior execs.)
There is nothing inherently wrong with the love of money, morally or otherwise. If you were to make an argument against money, perhaps the best you could do would be to criticize what a person _chooses to do_ with money. Do they choose to impoverish others, or do they choose to move society forward?

Besides, I do not think that religion has a pedestal to stand upon when criticizing the love of money. What clothes does the pope wear? Are cathedrals built for free by those who want them, and then donated to their community? Are statues, and relics, and other icons made and distributed for free?

There are very few religious centers -- either individual or geographical -- that do not bundle themselves up in the comforts of wealth.
It would help if you provided definitions for the returned words to aid matching an answer to the clue. Nice idea though.
It would not be so sad if he said that his goal was producing something of value, which often results in making money.

If one's goal is to maximize the value humanity creates, she should probably become an elementary school teacher. If one's goal is to make money, she should get an MBA or financial degree.

The former, to me, is significantly nobler.
Did you read the article? David Simon, the author, talks about such incidences.
> Third, App Engine doesn't have an SLA. That's a harsh sell for enterprise stuff.

How many SLAs actually pay for the incurred loss? Sure, a month of free hosting is nice, but does it really make up for the loss of a day?

> It doesn't even have a way to make a backup of the database in a dump file. That makes it an absolute no-go.

Why does the backup format matter?
Are you presenting Woodward and Bernstein's refusal to name Deep Throat as an example of journalistic corruption?
Interesting but all pretty straightforward. The more interesting question around caching is how to keep the cache fresh - do you just cache for short amounts of time and let them expire, or do something clever at the front end (such as tagging cache items) so that a set can be removed on batch when the database is updated. Further, what exactly is being cached? database result-sets, serialised objects or something else?
The implication of stating that it's rare for newspaper reporters to research these things now is that they don't have the resources to do so.
Ok. I'll certainly consider that.
That could definitely go into a version 2. I thought about it but decided I'll just this one released first.
That would add noise I think. Plus don't people expect an About link/page? Kinda similar to how people expect to find a link to the home page near the upper left corner.
It is less sexy and less popular, but the engineer that invents a more efficient manufacturing or distribution process that slightly reduces the resources used in products enjoyed by millions of people, perhaps becoming rich in the process, does far more good for the world than an elementary school teacher. Sam Walton did more good for humanity than any thousand average teachers combined.
I crashed! I'll need to review the setup and support that with proper stress tests that tests the actual search as well as the static media.
For all HTTP optimization junkies, check out the headers on all the static stuff. Pretty good caching, eh?
I think we'll see more and more Guest Posts with quality content in the future. To me at least, it looks like Arrington is setting up the company for a future sale, and since right now Techcrunch=Arrington, he has to distance himself from writing. So that leaves a lot of free space that they need to fill up.
If you are serious about getting into a PhD program then you should have a clear idea of your academic/research goals and some professors you have impressed with your work. Compile professor recommendations, the write up of your goals, and any supporting evidence you have of your abilities: i.e. particularly noteworthy papers, projects, etc.

If you do end up getting rejected, then look around for a project with which to prove yourself. You know what skills you have and how they could be useful. Find another student's project, or a start-up company, or a professor's research which you can contribute to in an important and impressive way. You can use such proofs of your abilities as a ticket into a PhD program next year.
| ...gossip site.

Well there's yer problem right there.
Information Wants to Be Expensive
Surely CSound runs on the mac?
Lockheed Unleashes 'HULC' Super-Strength Gear
We cache everything. Database queries, objects, rendered views. Anything that gets processed we try and cache. The length of time depends on what it is and where its presented. It's tough to put a rule on setting expiration time.

Objects (users, pictures, videos, articles, etc.) are cached for 24 hours. We cache the row of results and rebuild the object from that. They are busted if they are updated, otherwise the data usually doesn't change.

Database result lengths depend on what they are used for. Anywhere from 15 minutes to several hours or days. Data that is requested more frequently (homepage) usually busts more frequently then say the user profiles page which gets far less attention.

Every section on our site is rendered in different views. These also depend on the frequency of use. The comments section of a video is cached for a short period of time. A recently released video is busting comments every few seconds or minutes as users comment on it. Something like the physical contents of an article can be cached longer, because once its written it usually doesn't change. It's pretty subjective.

We experimented with "cache groups". Which were collections of cache keys that were related. From there we could bust tons of related keys. We found the extra work of tracking the keys to not be beneficial for our site. Most of our data isn't related or mission critical, If something is stale for a few minutes it usually doesn't make a difference. Tracking the extra keys became too complex.
> We also metered the users demands on the system -- they would typically issue commands (move, attack, chop trees) averaging about every 1.5 to 2 seconds

30 to 40 apm? That's extremely slow. I play warcraft 3 -- not very well, and definitely not very fast -- and my apm is more like 80 or 90. Starcraft pros play at 300apm.
Where do you (and others) get the idea that Rand is responding to the Bible? She's speaking to/of those who say that money is evil, love of money is evil, and related thoughts. This seems clear from the very first sentence of the speech: "So you think that money is the root of all evil?" Later, "But you say that money is made by the strong at the expense of the weak?", "Or did you say it's the love of money that's the root of all evil?", etc.

I would challenge you to cite the part of the speech or anything else Rand ever wrote arguing that money should be the most important thing in one's life. The statement "Money will not give you the unearned, neither in matter nor in spirit," indicates what's more explicit elsewhere in the book, namely Rand's conviction that the material and (secular) spiritual are both of great importance in life and that neither trumps the other. Rather, one should seek to integrate them.

Having read Rand extensively when I was younger, I can't imagine she'd consider your friend's approach to life, as described, anything but sad as well.
Aargh. Trackpad + itty-bitty arrows = unintentional upmod. :-( I guess I'm forced to post an actual rebuttal now.

The only thing that really distinguishes news.yc from something like Reddit at this point is the high signal-to-noise ratio. No amount of flagging would be able to compensate for not banning any sites.
I just hope that the success of Apple, Amazon, Google and maybe Palm-in-the-future will teach executives in other companies to build up bigger and better software research.
I read this last time 20 years ago as an undergraduate student in India, and I still find it inspiring after all these years.

I find it particularly relevant today, when the Federal Reserve and the government are intent on destroying the moral foundation of money. I expand on it at: http://blogs.zoho.com/general/money-as-a-moral-institution
Had Sam Walton been a teacher, teaching thousands of children throughout his life, what are the chances he would have inspired some them to be great engineers?
Best argument for the inheritance tax I've seen lately.
Which part - that making money is not equivalent to creating value, or the specific example of teachers creating more value than MBA's?
Twitter VC Laughs at the Idea that Twitter Has No Business Model
The Privacy and Civil Liberties Consequences & Comments on Responsible Innovation
I just cross my fingers hoping this ain't gonna happen to our customer's site (Cluster #: 1 Storage #: 4). Maybe they will become a better hosting after all.
Sigh...another "kids these days" rant? Really? Every generation thinks that the generation after them is going down the tubes. It's bullshit, just like it was when the people from the generation before yours whined about people your age. Generations change and adapt to the social conditions of their era...kids these days have problems, sure, but so does every generation.

Some of what you're talking about just comes with maturity. You were probably a lot more annoying and immature at 15 than you remember.
Not sure if it's what you're looking for, but take a look:

http://seattle.craigslist.org/see/vol/1053791733.html

It's unpaid, but also totally remote work so no relocating. It's a start-up company, but they've been around for three years so it's also an established team. If you're wanting to learn a lot about start up companies, it could be a great opportunity.
It is not clear to me what concepts in this video are. There's lots of touch-screen-y stuff and shared screens.

But given that tablet technology has not proved its usefulness where it is available, I'm not sure if making more common would make it more useful.

Sure, it's nice to see a video of programs responding to a gesture according to what the person apparently wants. No one has yet created an environment where that happens (the iPhone GUI is a perhaps closest).
Reddit.com: se connecter ou s'inscrire
What I find interesting was that ERMA was totally obsolete when delivered. By the end of 1959 IBM had delivered the 1401 and the 7090 both transistorized. The 1401 was the mainstay of the business world until the advent of the 360 in 1965. The 1401 and 7090 were q dynamite combination where the 1401 served as an offline peripheral controller for the 7090. The 7094 was my first computer. Baseball was my first computer game, played on the console switches and displayed on the accumulator and index register displays. (My first video game was Space Wars on a PDP 1.)
I bought one of those as well, however to my dismay any VOIP calls made through Skype still get charged to my normal call time with them not going through my data access.

Seems like Skype bowed down to the phone companies in this respect.
"None of these systems is better than the others."

Not if your standard of value is your life, lived as well and for as long as possible.

I have not yet come across an ethical dilemma that would trouble an Objectivist that really knew and understood the philosophy. I can't count the number of times I've heard questions about whether or not you should try to rescue people drowning in a river during your trip to visit your dying parent(s) in the hospital, should you come across them. If that's the kind of thing that's dissuaded you from Objectivism, you didn't have a very good command of it in the first place.

What the average person feels is right is just a grab bag of altruistic junk handed down to them over the millenia. It's not necessarily true, and it's only important to understand because it's an obstacle to the betterment of man.
"but absolute truth shall ever elude humans in this complex world."

“There are no absolutes,” they chatter, blanking out the fact that they are uttering an absolute. - Galt's Speech
My old dentist had plain old PC's spread through the office, Many were touch screen but they used Outlook with custom modifications and generally used a keyboard.

It worked pretty well for them. Moreover, I can see them going with that setup for twenty years or more. There weren't any more efficiencies to squeeze out of their system. No one needed web access, remote access wouldn't be worth the trouble, etc.

Outlook may indeed suck but once the consumer actually knows how to use it, it is good enough. Indeed, given that most people dislike computers and dislike learning about computers, the UI which people have learned will be even harder to displace than no UI at all.
User generated content. Users classify links as ads after getting fooled, preventing other users from seeing it.

You could also scan all outbound links and check to see if content (actual content) is the same without the parameters (e.g. my.affiliate.com/?affid=134 == my.affiliate.com or aff123.affiliate.com == www.affiliate.com) simply based on a few heuristics.

I am thinking something like a combination of opendns + adblock + digg would work in a nice slick package so that grandmas can use it.
The revenue sharing is quite surprising to me:
"As publisher, you will receive 35% of the list price when someone buys your content from the Kindle Store."

http://forums.digitaltextplatform.com/dtpforums/entry.jspa?e...

Probably they need to cover wireless download expenses?
Moving to new Zealand is a pretty big deal.
<standardeply>

Google IECanvas and include the one line of script needed to make this cross browser. It continually baffles me why people don't do this.

</standardreply>
Jason Calacanis: What To Do If Your Startup Is About To Fail
Criticism of Google App Engine for lack of backwards compatibility with status quo web stacks misses the point. GAE's use case is interoperable small pieces that scale, not traditional monolithic web apps.

As a platform for startups, rather than the enterprise, GAE makes a lot of sense.
> To each their own :)

yeah, of course! And if it works, then, by definition, it's good for your customers and thus for you! Also, your approach is probably more flexible (no fixed schema for the recursive list structure), which makes it easier and faster for you to iterate and react to customer feedback.

If at some time you want to have a more fixed structure or let the database do some of the server-side validation work of your tree-like structure, here is a good writeup by Phil Greenspun showing how to model and query tree-like datastructures with an RDBMS:
http://philip.greenspun.com/sql/trees.html
(the rest of the document 'SQL for Web Nerds' is also quite good stuff:
http://philip.greenspun.com/sql
)

he uses 'connect by', which is a non-standard Oracle extension, the same thing can be achieved with 'with recursive'-queries, which is standard SQL (1999) and part of PostgreSQL 8.4
Also, Joe Celko's Book 'SQL for Smarties' has a good chapter covering hierarchical data structures in SQL (he also has a separate book about 'trees and hierarchies' in SQL).

Oh, and good luck and much success with your startup!
Nalgene doesn't use BPA's. They've been focused on a few times specifically because of this. See http://www.nalgene-outdoor.com/technical/bpaInfo.html
On a VPS you should be able to install some kind of control panel that would give all the advantages of shared hosting but the flexibility (if you need it) and performance isolation of a VPS.
The list price, not the sale price. They can discount it 30% and still get half.

Why would you want to do this? Valve, recently, discounted a game by 50% and got a 30x increase in sales.
the police only "need to be watched" because the police have no incentive structure to serve the people. their paycheck does not rely on how well they serve your community. It relies on how well they comply with federal regulators.