skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wonder HOW/IF they'll ever release this particular dataset:

web08-bst.v1

* Description: A 25 terabyte dataset of about 1 billion web pages crawled in November, 2008.
The crawl order was best-first search, using the OPIC metric. The crawl was started from about
25 million URLs that either i) had high OPIC values in a web graph produced from an earlier 200
million page crawl, or ii) were ranked highly by a commercial search engine for one of 16,000
sample queries in one of 10 languages. This dataset covers web content in English, Chinese, Spanish,
Japanese, French, German, Arabic, Portuguese, Korean, and Italian.
* Creators: J. Callan, M. Hoy, C. Yoo, and L. Zhao.
* Status: In progress. Expected to be available to other researchers by March, 2009.

I know of several research groups and start-ups that wouldn't mind playing with it.
I guess I was more looking for stories. Always nice to read about someone else's problems.

Edit: Also interested in how people handle this. I'm not so good at saying no as I love the challenge and the extra work. I'm getting better though.
What's communist at all about the modern Chinese economic system?
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.

Unfortunately brains don't scale, so you're better off using one huge brain, like Michael Stonebraker.

http://db.cs.yale.edu/hstore/
I'm still learning to say no. Here's the reply I just sent:

> From my simple understanding of programming I thought it shouldn't be too difficult.

It's not difficult, but it does take time. I think it's a good idea, but I would rather concentrate on getting the core of the programme done initially. I think once we have all the core functionality done and working well (and correctly, of course) we can then look at the available budget and think about where best to spend it.
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I think the reason finding good measures of productivity is because of some inherent properties of math. If a programmer sits and thinks for a bit, they may find a more (time/speed/memory) efficient way to implement something in fewer lines of code. The complement to that is that they might just implement something really fast in a brain dead way. Because these are mathematical algorithms, the various rules about provability apply.

Really, the only way to measure programmer productivity is how fast they can implement a perfectly detailed spec. If you have some unknowns in there, your measurements will tell you nothing.

Therefore, I might suggest a test whereby two programmers are told to implement a program with a spec that is completely known, in the same language, and with the same set of libraries, in their perfered (or an independently chosen ) working environment. What this comes down to is just a race, and some people have good days, and some have bad days.

If you run this test several times with different specs, you might be able to objectively tell whom is better given those environmental characteristics. Of course, these measurements will be nearly useless in a real project environment for the reasons cited in the first paragraph.
A few little things:

- don't capitalize by username in my URL (i.e. http://www.thesponty.com/Tlrobinson_94). Also, do you really need the "_94", can't it just be the username?

- clear the placeholder text from textfield when it's clicked
A great many "pro" gamblers believe $50s to be bad luck. Try going to a craps or blackjack table with some of the seasoned vets, and lay down a couple $50s. Several of the other players will leave.
You guessed it... the promise of more money in the future. You could walk away with just one fistful of cash, or you could return it to me, and I'd give you another re-upped card. You win, I win.

Think about the math, as well. They took $9m from ATMs.. how many people could they possibly have been using? Even with 1,000 "cashers" (highly unlikely), thats $9,000 each... far more than just 1 run to the ATM.

What they most likely did, or at least what I would do, is get a map of ATMs, find the points which yield the least weighted distance to the most ATMs (an NP problem, but very much worth it in this case), and set-up a "re-up" station there. Instruct your cashers to return their used card to these stations, along with the bundle of cash (or maybe x% of it), and you'll give them another card. Good worker ants.

However, something seems off here. $9m from 130 ATMs, that's $70,000 per ATM. With a max of at most $1,000 per transaction, thats 70 hits per ATM. In 30 minutes. So you mean to tell me each of 130 ATMs was hit for $1000 every 30 seconds?

Something is off about that. I think they're underreporting the number of ATMs or inflating the amount stolen.
He (or his close cohorts) probably did the same thing. You would just be an additional distraction, to make it harder to narrow down the main culprit.
It's a "casher"
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The future is here already, and has been for decades.

These non-relational database structures are not a new or revolutionary idea. The same concepts have long been implemented in systems like LDAP, X.500, and document-oriented databases like Lotus Domino.

The real mystery is the recent trend towards completely reinventing the wheel. For instance, LDAP (the protocol) is incredibly efficient, standardized, and well supported on most development platforms. It provides a standard query / filter language, facilities for scoping, and data updates. There are standardized exchange formats, wide availability of OSS and commercial management tools, and multiple server implementations.

Yet, there seems to be a great interest in developing from scratch highly proprietary and non-portable alternatives that do exactly the same thing (or less). These systems ignore decades of research and lessons learned through practical implementation.

The real issue though is that direct comparison of the two models is inherently flawed. They each have their own strengths and weaknesses, each excelling in situations that the other falls short. Looking at them as complementary models is perhaps a better approach.
My question is, even with a max of $1000 per transaction, each ATM had to be hit more than twice per minute, for 30 minutes straight.

They must have choses extremely busy ATMs, or whoever got the scoop on this story got something wrong.
I was just wondering the other night what it would take to come up with a js/canvas-based windowing toolkit. This looks pretty sweet.
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You're correct that India accounts for most of the H1B visas, but my comment was actually referring to the companies that bring in H1B workers, not the nationality of the H1B workers themselves. Here's a link to an article on msnbc:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17048048/

"data for the fiscal year 2006, which ended last September, show that 7 of the top 10 applicants for H-1B visas are Indian companies. Giants Infosys Technologies and Wipro took the top two spots, with 22,600 and 19,400 applications, respectively. The company with the third most applications is Cognizant Technology Solutions, which is based in Teaneck, N.J., but has most of its operations in India. All three companies provide services to U.S. companies from India, including technology support and back-office processing."

This article raises the point that H1B visas may actually facilitate and accelerate the trend toward moving jobs offshore. Some people think this is a worthy goal - source the labor where it can be provided most economically. But then we should be honest about it, and agree that our national policy will be to assist foreign corporations in moving development jobs offshore. Then our own young people can take that into consideration, along with our government's decision to protect sectors like law from foreign competition, when choosing a graduate degree and career.

I also disagree with you that the writer of the article is opposed to immigration, and he definitely makes a strong case against the claim of "playing a race card". Here's the quote from his article:

"What's more, the H-1B issue is separate from the debate concerning an overhaul of sadly confused and outdated immigration framework as a whole. Friedman's hardworking Indian immigrants would still have an opportunity to come to the United States and make their contributions as citizens-to-be if H-1B were suspended, using the regular immigration framework."

So this writer is clearly not opposed to Indians (among others) immigrating to the US.

The question is: should there be a special visa program designed specifically to bring more engineers to the United States than we'd get through the normal process of immigration?

It's a reasonable question, but it really is separate from the more general question of whether people should be allowed to pursue a better life through immigration to the US, or even whether we should try to bring more "educated people" here in a general sense.

The H1B is used specifically to increase the number of engineers, and it seems pretty obvious to me that if you do that to engineering but not to other fields, you'll deter young Americans from entering engineering relative to other fields that are not targeted by work visas.
I've always wondered: just how hard are diamonds?

What would happen if I hammered one? Are they so strong as to become lodged into the head of the hammer, or the surface beneath the diamond? Are they that hard?
Make sure you're an American though, or else you might end up at Guantánamo- well, pre-Obama you might have.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/02/us/nationalspecial3/02gitm...
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If dying means taking money from paying customers then may my business die every day for forever.

The CEO's LinkedIn profile shows him as doing the photo company and being an evangelist for some company which apparently does search engines.

http://www.linkedin.com/in/geekceo

So the principal carved himself out a lifestyle which he probably enjoys: he has a trusted position at one company, gets invited to speak at conferences, and makes some amount of money for keeping software from breaking. Software does a lot of things well: one is not decay after it has been written.

Sure, he won't get bought out my Google next month, so that's not successful for one particular pattern of success. But, on the other hand, he has more paying users than Twitter and probably gets a stupidly high amount of money on a per-hour-invested basis.

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
Click on "Edit Now" on https://bespin.mozilla.com/ and it does nothing (presume the "coming soon" is meant to mean this button is disabled?).
Depends on the length and frequency of the steps, the length of the leaps and stumbles, and the recovery time between a stumble and the next leap.
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Point taken on the simile. It's like that like never existed.

As to the rest, I dunno. Let's consider the following scenario: every time you wrote something down on paper, there was a chance the paper would spontaneously burst into flame. There are strict, reproducible rules governing when the paper would and would not catch on fire. People go to school to learn these rules, which are varied and subtle.

In this world I've described, is the best writer a person who can write the most essays that don't spontaneously combust? I feel like as programmers we think that because we can easily quantify whether something works, we can also quantify whether it's good. Or worse, that everything which doesn't burn away is essentially the same: just words on paper.

It's simply not true. The fact that writing a program feels more practical than writing a novel doesn't change that.
Huh? I am linking to the blogger who fact checked this story. That was kinda my whole point. The Portfolio link is a blog post, dude.
True, I suppose I was thinking too narrowly. I guess you'd have the xbox in there with some games running. And Excel spreadsheets. People could really get a kick out of plugging some numbers into one of those! And Word. Nothing like throwing together a mail merge to liven your trip to the mall.

In all seriousness though, this is to compete with Apple for hearts and minds, is it not? I just don't see what their strategy is or how it is goning to work.

I guess I don't have a lot of confidence in MS. Remember the Jerry Seinfeld ads?
Note that many servers are required to support 52K players; a single server can handle ~1400 players. This page with a few technical details is probably more interesting than the Wikipedia entry:

http://myeve.eve-online.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&bid=584
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I'm not sure what you're getting at. I wasn't trying to imply that dead tree media is inherently better than online media. (And certainly not the NY Post)

One sentence in a tabloid apparently led to a youtube clip which led to a huge number of blog posts. Until, finally, one blogger took the time to fact check it.
No, "cashier" is the proper term used by fraudsters. It refers to people who receive and disburse cash, like someone in a retail store. "casher" is a word made-up by an English major.

Also, correcting people for minor mistakes on forums is very annoying.
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However, I also believe that is orthogonal to the question of whether productivity should be measured or not.

You're correct, as taking that to it's end conclusion would imply it's impossible to improve (which I'm sure most would disagree with).

Perhaps the question "How do you measure improvement?" is relevant. This might be a roundabout way to yield the former.
I disagree. The Portfolio piece has specific, verifiable facts that contradict the story that had been circulating.

Verifiable facts with citations always trump vague unsourced rumors.
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Comparing productivity between two methods or environments is easy. You have a programmer read and judge the quantity and quality of code produced one way, then read and judge the code produced the other way, and decide which you'd rather have.

Want a number, rather than a subjective judgement? Too bad. Want a manager to make the determination, rather than a programmer? Too bad. Want to compare two coders without showing both their code to the same judge? Too bad. Experienced programmers know what works for them, but don't expect any good studies.
This looks like it would make a nice front-end for CouchDB shareable apps. http://jchris.mfdz.com/posts/129
> Stay away from advertising, IMO, it looks cheap and turns people off. Personally I absolutely hate advertising and won't use any site with it.

I don't like ads either, but we (who actually care enough to e.g. install ad block+) are a minority.

You need money. Advertisement might help and it will only repulse a relatively small portion of the population.

</devil's advocate>
It's not as pixel-by-pixel as you might think; canvas has a fillText() method (that is presumably implemented in native code) to draw text.
Granted it's confusing for people unfamiliar with the site, but I'd argue the population here is ideally suited for unorthodox ideas.

An interesting example of a horizontal site is the Urban Outfitters Blog: http://blog.urbanoutfitters.com/
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It's a place run by it's own rules for completely utilitarian reasons. Without pretence of ideology. That's also a similarity with Dubai.
Very confusing. I have no idea what I'm supposed to do.
I've also used list() because I find it just generally more readable.
No, it couldn't have been the promise of more money. This scheme was a first, it'd be impossible to know the outcome of the next card. There were 49+ cities involved, you'd need a call center to coordinate that. This organization, which would cross multiple countries, timezones, and languages, would be much more elaborate than the mafia. It's very unlikely.

Also, cashing out ATMs is very hard work. You need to use a skimmer to capture someone else's card then copy it to your blank plastic. It won't work if there's an electronic chip in it, like many countries (mostly in Europe) already have. Then you have to work within the usual transaction/account limits. You'd be lucky to get $2,000 off of one card. Basically, the next card seems like nothing when you have a fist worth $70,000.

I think the key to all of this is in the payroll card. It might not be bound to the traditional credit/debit card limits. Perhaps it's throttled at a central point and the guy who already has access to the RBS WorldPay systems was able to lift it.
I generally agree with that approach, but Google gives an example of pages with query strings that need to have different URLs because they are subtly different, but not in a way that search engines need to care about.

OTOH, Google's wiki example is bogus; people have been telling MediaWiki that they should be using 301s for years but they just won't. This workaround just encourages them to never fix it.
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We don't know what the limit was or even if there was one. I'm sure that's why payroll cards were picked for this particular scheme. I think people are too caught in thinking about how their cards work. The same rules that apply to credit/debit may not apply here.
Normally I lay off with correcting minor mistakes, but in this case they are similar words, both having to do with money.

The article calls them "cashers."
Amazon's Alexa subsidiary once offered a service much like you describe, called "Alexa Web Search". But: "The Alexa Web Search web service has been deprecated and is no longer available for new subscriptions." [1] Also, I think (but am not sure) the Alexa Web Information Service originally offered hosted read access to the full content of Alexa's recent crawls, but it no longer does. [2]

It also seemed like Amazon was building up web-scale search expertise in A9, but the only apparent results are work in metasearch/aggregation. (They already have a technology called 'OpenSearch' [3], so might have a hard time repurposing that name for something else.)

So it's almost as if Amazon was deeply considering your proposed strategy, then backed away.

[1] http://aws.amazon.com/alexawebsearch/

[2] http://aws.amazon.com/awis/

[3] http://a9.com/-/company/opensearch.jsp
What would happen if I hammered one?

AFAIK it would shatter because diamond is very brittle. Hardness != strength.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardness

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compressive_strength
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Congrats on the launch. Most entrepreneurs know the feeling of missing deadlines badly ;)

It's such a good concept, honestly, I would pay for a private one for my friends and family. The site didn't make it clear if privacy was possible.
Whether you commit your code once in one batch at the end of the day or 50 times in 50 smaller chunks, you have the same amount of complexity about which to be careful. In fact it's more complex in the former case, because in the latter, for each push, you know that all the previous pushes are working.
I think this is a very promising idea.

I think the idea of an embeddable widget that flips through all your photos (like the videos you describe that inspired the site) would be really cool. I think if a widget like this is done right you could get some good viral growth from MySpace.

I'd think about capitalizing as much as possible on the timelapse concept and stray away from being just another photo sharing site. Right now, users profiles are just a feed of images, which doesn't seem that compelling..
D'oh, thanks!
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Why don’t free sites appeal to younger or lower income users the way paid sites do?
It sounds to me like what you're saying is that it's easy to measure productivity, all we have to do is measure quality. :)
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One little issue I found. On the user pages if you click 'daily booth' you get sent to /dashboard (even though I have not created an account or logged in): http://ul.mikeyur.com/public/sk/Fullscreen-20090212-232617.p...

And when you get sent to /dashboard while not logged in you get a little error: http://ul.mikeyur.com/public/sk/Minefield-20090212-232757.pn...
Its true they're doing this because they see the success of the Apple store, and its true this is scary, but I do hope for the sake of Microsoft that they succeed :P

I say this because I'm not an Apple fan, and seeing people pay so much money for Apple's stuff makes me a tad angry, but hey kudos to Apple for their success. What I want to see is some competition to the Apple store and this is also a good opportunity for Microsoft show its true colours, which I don't think its doing presently.
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Awesome story, well done, and great execution. Site looks good. Don't listen to all the naysayers about monetization. It is important (the most important thing), but if you are living/breathing/eating your business, you will come up with proper revenue channels. I'm sure of it. Good luck.
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