skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Yes, Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government may buy as much as 125 billion Canadian dollars (about $100 billion) worth of mortgages, increasing banks’ capacity to lend. But this is small change compared with the scale of Washington’s bailout."

Well, considering we have 1/10th your population, that would translate proportionately into 1 trillion, not exactly small potatoes. And keep in mind, we are about 2 years behind the US in the housing bubble, so the domestic non-performing loan problem is just now starting to kick in here. So I think we Canadians should perhaps wait a while before we get too full of ourselves.
Yeah, but the whole point is you don't have a fixed length record. And in the example given you shouldn't be using strings at all - integers will suffice - that's the real problem with this benchmark.

You might as well be testing how quickly thrift / pb / json could serialize / deserialize pickled blobs. Your not giving thrift or pb the data it's designed to perform well with, so the fact that it fails isn't surprising.

I'm sure a tesla would suck compared to an ancient pickup at helping me pick up a couch from craigslist, but I wouldn't say that the pickup is a better car because of that.
Money As Debt (video)
The book specifically mentions making money, not earning it. The difference is that I can earn money by creating something that lacks value, and by having money change hands. If I create something of meaning, then by giving it to other people I lose nothing, and the money I earn is money made by the creation of value for reward.

"significantly nobler" is a means-nothing phrase. Nobility as a word is meaningless without backup. I would argue, to counter your point, that Steve Jobs has inspired more people to create beautiful, meaningful things than most teachers ever do. Teachers serve a purpose, but theirs is not the only noble trade in the world.
Again, I'm not suggesting it should be illegal...just that I'm rather stunned that the market for a "molest a child" game is large enough such that that is how they market this product.

Phrased like that, it seems more bizarre than it did when I first thought about it.

Really? I guess living in or near large cities all these years has warped my perspective of what "in America" means. None of these things seems particularly weird or taboo amongst my social set.

Possibly this is just youth speaking. Those things are absolutely viewed as freak attitudes in college.
"length" is a strange way to begin the conversation with your audience. i get it, length is critical to finding the right word, but that doesn't make sense until you understand what it does. i would think about this from a user experience perspective and see if maybe there's a better way to get this information from your User.
From the article: Google is earning enough from sponsored search to subsidize almost all of other businesses, including gmail, Google Office, Latitude, gDrive, and others.

I don't think Facebook is subsidizing other businesses with its profit. Actually it doesn't have any profit yet.
This is what LinkedIn did. It became such a valuable tool for recruiters that many are paying members.
cameras are getting smaller
That's a great quote, and it's got a wonderful ring to it, but she's erecting a straw man. "It is extremely unlikely that anything complex can be understood in any entirety" is essentially "There are no absolutes", and it's more absolutely true.
Francisco Tolmasky used to work at Apple.
That's true to an extent but.... (I apologise for the terminology)

There are already great examples of 'new media,' amateurs supported by new technologies & online communities doing things that would not have gotten done under a 100% old media regime. Exposing police brutality, war crimes, or other issues we associate with heavy duty press. That is, there are circumstances that involve more then a flood of commentary where new media does a better job then old media.

On the other hand, New Media is not going to fill all the wholes old media leaves behind. I think that's clear already.

But we don't really know what, how deep or how many these holes are going to be. Currently, reddit/youtube supplement exixsting media because existing media exists. If we take professional media out of the equation, it will evolve differently.

There might not be that much of a long term net loss from newspapers going out of business. There are some shocking videos going to be produced outside of conventional media. It's still not clear how many or what quality.
Lower than the chances that people have been influenced by him as the creator of one of the greatest modern companies. He has far more reach where he is.

As a side note, this approach made him richer, too.
uh... might be more interesting to know from which RMS you learned this. (lots of conceivable possibilities to choose from on the wikiped disambiguation page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RMS)
The idea that they want to keep growing as fast as possible, and they don't want to retard growth by monetizing makes a lot of sense to me. It especially makes sense because people are using the product in ways that the Twitter guys never even imagined. They don't even have to figure out new ways to use Twitter, their users are doing the creative stuff for them, they just have to pay attention. But if you monetize in the wrong way, it can have the unintended consequence of preventing some awesome-currently-unimagined use of Twitter. And that is much worse than a change to an abstract growth curve.

The other thing I wonder about is if their monetization strategy involves some technical challenge. Remember, their product is relatively straightforward from a technical standpoint, not to trivialize what they've done at all, just to make the point that they have gotten here in a short period of time with a very small number of guys. What if their preferred method of monetization involves solving some technical problem that they just haven't resolved yet?
Consider killing dead links in the RSS feed.
Ya very cool. Pizza Hut will be all over this. I found this on triple pundit: http://www.triplepundit.com/pages/can-a-pizza-box.php
Remember that perhaps the most insidious things about HIV has been not its deadliness (which has been ameliorated by 20 years of research) but the fact that it can be contagious for a long time before it makes itself obvious: i.e., not its deadliness alone, but its delayed deadliness, giving it time to spread to other victims.
There's also no profit to be made, which discourages the talented people who are perfectionists but insist on compensation.

Everything has drawbacks.

(I'd point out that with iLife 09, Apple no longer uses serial numbers, meaning they don't attempt to prevent piracy. Payware doesn't necessarily mean Stupid.)
Homeowners seeking help have no realistic hope of paying off debts in their lifetime.
Business sectors that do well in a recession
As Italy's Banks Tighten Lending, Desperate Firms Call on the Mafia.
So the negative effect of Twitter not having a publicly announced business is felt primarily by other companies, companies that aren't able to think for themselves?

I'm not sure I buy that. There are plenty of companies, like your own, that understand what their business needs. And there are always going to be plenty of other companies that behave like sheep. If it wasn't Twitter, they'd find some other trend to misapply.
Where did my files go?
And look at how great the Baltimore Sun has made Baltimore.

My point: the idea that the old order has to be preserved because the new order is not up to the task carries a lot more water if the old order is functioning effectively.
There's no harm in applying. Several students in my PhD program took a year off after undergrad and worked in a university research lab as a paid assistant. Some said that they got into some grad programs after university, but they wanted to get a better research background that would help them get into a more prestigious school.

I suppose it's too late now, but to really distinguish yourself for some top-tier universities, you'll probably have to show evidence that you've pursued research or self-study (e.g. summer programs, indep study/research classes with a professor, personal projects, internships, etc.).
Nice demo. But unsurprisingly, if something is Turing complete, you can do rendering in it, too. The bigger question is - why did we get into this sad situation where "web" and "performance" are antonyms?

The standard answer would be that you need full control over the machine to get performance, and you really don't want to give full control over the web for security reasons. But this answer is false. We just need more advances in code validation, e.g. something that would prove a piece of code cannot do system calls.
How to halve a number in Coq (the theorem prover)
Not Quite Right: New Report says iPhone has a Commanding Lead in Mobile Browsing Share
They just better hope Steve stays healthy, otherwise they won't have anyone to copy off of.
Good point. Perhaps "Number of letters:" is better. Yeah, it does sound better.
Poor guy discovered multi-threading on SMP too late! I would fire such system administrator who does not undestand system in essence. Also the one who does not respect the history and does not understand the fact that old unix utilities are not (and in most cases cannot be!) multi-threaded.
Win 50,000 Highly Targeted Ad Impressions  For Your Start-up's  Marketing
Answer the following questions below and we will select winners by the end of this week

1)Few lines about your start-up ?

2)How do you advertise your start-up currently?

3)What is your monthly budget for marketing your start-up ?

4)Are you selling anything online if yes which mode of payment you use currently?

5)Your name,location,email?

We will contact winners by email
What makes a time travel story good isn't the machine or lack thereof, it's the consistency. A good time travel story sets up its rules for time travel, sticks to them, and makes a good plot out of it. This is what makes the story pass the "suspension of disbelief" test--not the believability of the machine or devices involved, but whether the story has a self-consistent set of rules and abides by it. Of course, it isn't a coincidence that the stories that don't try to fit hard science into the mix are the same ones that tend to violate their own rules.

A simple example of this being violated is the case of having a story that tries to use both the "many worlds" theory of time travel and the "paradox" theory of time travel. Obviously, they're mutually incompatible. Another common example is the concept of "San Dimas Time"--having a "race against the clock" situation in a time travel story, even though this makes absolutely no sense at all. To quote TVTropes:

"As a result, events in two different time periods are shown to happen concurrently, so that people two years in the past may only have X minutes to stop the villain from committing some terrible act in the present, even though they should technically have X minutes plus two years to sort it all out. This, of course, makes no sense at all."

The best time travel film I've seen recently is Primer. The story is quite convoluted--enjoy your multiple temporal paradoxes and the fact that most of the timelines are merely implied to exist, not shown--but it is still quite a good watch. And for when you're done, there are charts on the internet explaining the full extent of all the events involved, so you can figure out those last few loose ends for yourself.
As a few people have already pointed out, right now App Engine is missing functionality that a lot of apps need. Right now coding to App Engine means lock-in to a single hosting provider.

But that's today, and I think the business will grow up fast. Hosting apps and databases rather than VMs and block devices (Amazon's current model) allow more granular control of resource allocation. At the same time the app hosting model lets you export problems such as geographic replication and failover to the hosting provider. The app hosting business can be accelerated by building on top of VM hosting infrastructure from companies like Amazon.

The way I see this playing out: VM hosting will continue to proliferate. App hosting will start to get popular and the frameworks will get fleshed out with the functionality 80% app developers need. App hosting companies will build their infrastructure on top of VM hosting infrastructure. Interoperability standards will get created (probably in the form of extensions to frameworks like Rails and Django). As there are more companies offering app hosting and the hosting environments get more feature-complete companies will start to switch for new development. In another 3-5 years we will see most new services being built on app hosting rather than dedicated/shared/VM hosting.

For legacy apps and apps that don't fit in the limitations of something like App Engine the VM hosting model works well. I've written one app on App Engine and I'm in the process of moving my company's legacy code base to EC2 hosting right now. VM hosting is always going to give you more control than app hosting just like running your own hardware will always give you more control than VM hosting. That said app hosting will give developers more pre-built infrastructure. How many devs actually want to patch servers or set up MySQL site-site replication? Negotiate bandwidth contracts? Rack servers? Not only is that stuff irritating to deal with, it costs money. App hosting is a pretty big win.

So is App Engine the wrong product? I don't think so, it's just not done yet.
Can I state the obvious first competitor: Web hosting. It's dirty cheap, has SQL, supports basic scripting python, perl, and some support even C cgi. Typical accounts have 20+GB and even more GB on daily transfers.

The main drawback is it doesn't scale, but you can move things to S3 or App Engine if you really need to. Use client-side processing with AJAX, CDN, etc.

Google's lock-in architecture isn't tempting for starters unless you plan to have a massive number of visitors.
Netflix customers up in arms over the new Netflix Silverlight player
It will take years for the DOJ to be done with Google. Give Facebook some time!

I agree with Facebook board member Marc Andreesen's assessment: Facebook could be profitable and make over a billion in annual revenue whenever they choose. Instead, they're forgoing that for bigger riches -- and even more entrenched market power -- down the road. Facebook understands the game they're playing.

Facebook users face higher switching costs than Google search users. And individual features in Facebook -- photo sharing, status streams, comment threads, group utilities, invitations/RSVPs, instant-messaging, etc. -- already compete against multiple other companies.

When Facebook turns on their revenue spigot -- whatever it turns out to be -- they will look a lot like Google, in the same ways the article highlights. They will be subsidizing a bunch of free services, to the detriment of potential competitors, to defend their master proprietary asset -- the social graph plus a critical mass of users -- and the massive revenue that flows from it.
OK, so maybe I'm exaggerating a bit for effect, but I still say it's fucking scary.
I don't think the greatness of Euclid (or more precisely, he and the many unnamed predecessors of whose work he was the compiler) was that he came up with especially user-friendly axioms. What other axioms would someone who was less skillful at coming up with user-friendly axioms have produced instead?
Does anyone know why they used Silverlight?
WebMynd (YC W08) Makes Your Search Engine Smarter With New Browser Plugin
MySpace.com Blogs - "EAT, CHEAT AND BE RICH" MySpace Blog
Any ideas as to why the YAML code is so slow?
This is the same faulty logic that's killed hundreds of web startups during both the web booms.

Massive user base does not autotmatically translate into profit. In fact, what a massive user base does do is to create so much cost in running the service that it's hard to find a way to make a profit.

Twitter's already $55 million dollars down which shows just how much it costs to run the service. So even if every one of Snoop Dogg's 25,000 followers were willing to pay a dollar (unlikely) and Twitter got all the profit from it the money wouldn't make a dent in the cost of running such a massive operation.
Excellent question. I made the site for the same reason a crossword solver solves a crossword: to see if I can pull it off.
I wrote an essay about this:

http://www.paulgraham.com/love.html

The relevant section is called "Two Routes."
Linus seems to have taken organic route, gradually
arranging his life so he could spend more time
on Linux. Startups are usually an instance
of the other strategy, the two-job route, of
which they are the most extreme form.

(For a few very lucky people, a startup can
also be one's life's work. But it's usually
all one can do to make a startup succeed without
also satisfying that constraint.)
But cops are getting bigger...
Can you post a source for that? The following blog states the opposite:

http://thurbersthoughts.blogspot.com/2009/02/chicago-tea-par...

"(Side note: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac had higher default rates than traditional lenders. I'm sure there's an entire blog post for the implications of this fact alone.)"

On the other hand, this blog indicates the other way:

http://seekingalpha.com/article/82074-six-quotes-from-fannie...

I'm more inclined to believe a random HN comment than a random blog, but it would be nice to have a source either way.
this is kinda fishy :P
Like I have already stated I am interested in how the system will run in production. Generally, you will do lots of small updates and lots of small fetches with key-value databases. You won't do batch operations - which makes your benchmark pretty irrelevant.

Try to benchmark your relational database by doing this:
- create a new connection
- fetch one row
- close connection

And try to compare this to selecting multiple rows at once. The result will be MUCH different. And this basically outlines the difference between your benchmark and mine.

This said, you will only hit limitations with a relational databases if you are having lots of data. If you run a blog, a low traffic site or can keep all your data in memory, then you won't have any problems. And I do have experience in the world of relational databases and using MSSQL won't solve this problem for you (else you would see Facebook, Friendfeed, Twitter and Google etc. use MSSQL or Oracle).
How about a "Crosstips helps you figure out the answers to crossword puzzles, provide in a letter length and a few letters to get started."
Then we'll wait. Give it 20 to 30 years and the blogger generation will become the circuit court judges. Then the problem will be solved. Many of the generational disconnects which make bloggers less capable than old-media journalists can be resolved given time.
It would be even more obvious if you put the favicon next to the "Crosstips" header.
I'll second that. Rackspace ain't no $20/month, but as with most things, you get what you pay for.

The only recent downtime was an instance a few months back where I fat-fingered an iptables config. A tech was on the pulling up the console and cleaning up my mess while I was still typing out a support ticket.
My comparison isn't fair if you are a stickler for implementation. Users aren't.

I'd be happy to say X is better than Quake Live, regardless of underlying tech -- IF you show me something better.

I'm looking for net effect here.
Paying big time, too. And not just for premium memberships that allowed more InMail -- IIRC their recruiter-tailored service runs at $25K a year. I pitched hard for it when I was a recruiter, but we were stuck in the cold-calling age. I lasted about another 2 months.
Love some feedback on our search interface middlespot.com
We're hacking out a different kind of search interface, by applying the principles of online cartography to data points. We've built this in our part time and would like some feedback if people think its worth continuing to develop.

Thanks,
Scott
When was the last time you saw twitter down? Last time I remember seeing the fail whale is probably back in October or earlier. They did have major uptime issues but I think that's mostly in the past. I'm not on 100% of the time so it's quite possible I missed a few sightings but back in the summer and fall it would go down a lot whereas now it's a rare occurrence.
I find a good benchmark is to look and see if there's outcry from within the scientific community. These days if something really is off-the-wall-crazy somebody from that field is going to be ranting about it and it won't be too hard to find.

If that quick little test fails, then what you're worrying about is that if you sail too far west that you'll fall of the edge of the world.
You don't even need that. Your OS just needs a sane security model to enable sandboxing processes.
There are several reasons but one of the biggest is that Microsoft's DRM solution is/was the most acceptable to the studios.
Mac OS 7  installed and running on the iPhone
Agreed. I took a look for about 30 seconds, then came here to say the same thing.

EVERY site should have a single sentence (at the least) with a concise, non-jargony explanation of what it is. You can't just assume.

When I saw someone mention the Favicon I went back and got it :) I think the problem I really had was that I read your "example" but it made no sense since I couldn't see any of the character boxes until I typed in the number of characters.
To most mathematicians, valuing intuition is not a new idea. While one of the most distinguishing qualities of mathematics is its rigor, to focus on this quality misses the big picture. Henri Poincare, arguably the greatest 20th century mathematician, said it best: "It is by logic we prove, it is by intuition we invent." This theme is echoed in many of his writings about creativity in mathematics.

Turing's argument is beautiful and elegant, undoubtedly one of the gems of modern mathematics. However, the reason you don't see the intuition behind Turing's argument taught is that there is too much material to cover in a general theoretical computer science course. You need to be able to master the known material, to stand on the shoulders of giants, to make new advances in the discipline. This may not necessarily be the best way to encourage creativity and insight in computer science, but the hope is that interested students will delve deeper (like the author) and discover insights for themselves.

Lastly, at least among many mathematicians, Turing may be up there with Euclid among the demigods of mathematics, but there are those that lie still higher, people like Gauss and Euler who have yet to be matched in terms of mathematical output and impact.
1. time based animation (vs frame based)

2. content delivery network

3. scalable video formats from HD to mobile

4. media server licensing is cheap
See < http://www.google.com/search?q=cash+for+comment > for a notorious case of Australian journalists taking bribes.