skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well this is something I feel extremely qualified to comment on. Since I do a Magic the Gathering podcast/site at http://www.mananation.com

You're getting into a very cramped space. You're competing with the game maker who has a card search, card vendors have search, some better than others, and then there are the other outlets which provide card search.

Right now, your search is extremely limited and the results are underwhelming.

The UI needs a lot of work. It looks like the site fails to load with the search at the top and a banner under it. There's nothing on the default page. Secondly, aside from the domain, there's no Magic the gathering symbols or graphics.

Your search results need card images, and it needs information which makes me need to use your database. Why shouldn't I go to Gatherer.wizards.com or MagicCards.info?
If you are like me and you have forgotten all your passwords sometime, GMail is where all the "this is your password" or "reset your password" tend to go.

An email with your password is a sign of a bad security policy. Better put a unique password for that site. Use this for remember all those passwords:

http://www.clipperz.com/

And in the event of losing GMail access I download all my GMail emails to the local client.

That said, I trust more in Google than in my own ISP or domain registrar, I have lost my personal domain with my personal email address one time due their errors in the renovation.
Linkbait article title about an Apple product at wired.com? I'm guessing it's another Brian Chen troll.
I suspect (ok, I know from current experience) that it helps, when you have just a small team (or a lonely solo adventure, in my case) and you're living on ramen, to have at least one founder who is enthusiastic enough about the technology side to actually make progress even in a perfect storm of morale-killing events.
That's a good analysis, and an excellent explanation of why today's music sucks.

I sound like an old man.
I'm legitimately impressed - she's really between a rock and a hard place with how she communicates. Yahoo needs a "regime change" feel to it, and Yang was always very informal, no punctuation, etc. So she's got to be different - but, Yahoo can't weather bureaucracy, formality, nonsense right now. I think she's being different and professional while casual at the same time. That's got to be a hard line to walk. Feeling better for Yahoo's prospects for the future than at any time since I ditched Yahoo mail a couple years ago for Gmail.
He's right about the fixing versus managing. Although for sanity's sake you really should think of it as permanent lifestyle changes, not "management." And also you should try to optimize for overall health with your lifestyle changes, not weight loss (which comes with improved health anyway).

One place this approach falls down is that it doesn't distinguish the effects of various types of calories. Just pursuing "variety" isn't going to cut it. You can eat a ton of fiber (with high caloric content) but you'll actually absorb very little of it. If you eat a ton of sugar you'll crash your metabolism, your insulin will skyrocket, and you'll put on pounds even if you started out burning more than you consume (plus you may induce diabetes).

Really, a hacker approach will acknowledge that what you're really trying to reduce is fat, not weight alone (is anyone here trying to lose muscle?) And calories input do not go directly to fat. There is a sophisticated set of hormone feedback systems that govern whether fat is stored or broken down for energy, and until you hack your hormone system you may well be chasing your tail.
Sunlight Labs Looking For Volunteers To Scrape Legislation For All 50 States
Can you see yourself doing that for the next 30-40+ years?
Create 50,000 companies for $1B
I have the opposite impression, but maybe that's because when a Java library does this right I never have to dive into the code.
Who needs 37signals? flagged
"Accepting the article's assumption of such stupid and/or lazy programmers, and accepting the implicit assumption that it's possible to produce useful software with such programmers, I'm guessing it's some kind of web-based business software."

LOL

Actually the software I work on is web based business software. I sincerely hope that I don't cause the sort of problem alluded to in TFA.

The fact that checked exceptions make it harder to do the right thing I guess is exactly the point. An exception is a method for forcing an abnormal program flow, and the checked exceptions reduce this to an error return mechanism. You end up with the worst parts of exceptions and error returns -- way to go!
If you don't take the egg recommendation of my sibling, I have found that 1/3 of the flavor packet adds just as much flavor... and presumably 1/3 the sodium.
>The Etherpads, for example, had to literally prove theorems to get their real-time collaboration sw to work, and they hope eventually to use it in a whole range of applications.

Could you tell them to publish the papers or the notes please?
Web applications should generally have some sort of generalized handler around the entry point that sends back a web page saying "Something went wrong and we didn't know what else to do, so we're showing you this error page. HTTP status code 500." Production software should generally log a stack trace rather than simply crashing, but checked exceptions make it harder to do that.
My point is this - the barrier to entry and delivering a decent web product/service has come down a lot over the years. With frameworks such as RoR, countless online articles that literally spoon feed ready made solutions to common problems, stumbling blocks, and an above average intelligence, one can build a good enough web service these days.

Sure, building something state of the art requires true "hacking" skills and genuine creativity and intelligence - but how often do you really see such web companies these days? Most ideas are simple, some downright silly, and only a few that are products of intelligent hacking. Do you agree?
>College forced me to learn a lot of stuff I wouldn't have bothered to learn before. Stuff I had no idea would become useful and if I ever needed it may not have had an idea to look for it.

So all you needed were a few people to guide you in the right direction. You can get that from the Internet or from other people you may know who are into the same thing or have a certain level of expertise. We don't absolutely need colleges for that anymore.
Nokia's Skype-based end run around its operator partners
It's so refreshing to see a CEO of a large organization avoid the professional correctness nonsense that plagues big companies.

Even if she fails, at least (so far) she's been straightforward about everything Yahoo is doing.
i can understand her optimism, but how are they going to take market share away from google?

according to google finance, google has about 20k employees bringing in 5.7B each quarter, and yahoo has about 14k employees bringing in 1.8B/quarter.

i think the yahoo plan is to get microsoft to buy the search platform and then make a advertising deal with google. this will not only get yahoo more money than they are worth now, but it will also make regulatory agencies happy.
9.2% tax ? where do I sign ? I'm in a 40%+ tax bracket where I live and sales tax here is 19%...
No, but the principle of the hackers diet is to keep doing it.

I'm hoping that something I read recently about people likely having two different weight equilibriums (can't find a link) holds true.
Ask HN: Vesting Schedule on Founders Shares?
Hi, I was wondering if anyone knows what vesting schedule is 'typical' for founders shares. I know that for employee options, 4 year vesting schedule with a 1 year cliff is standard. Is it the same for founders shares?
Scaling in the web space usually means both; many reads/writes and large volumes of data.

Yes, mirroring may work to a point but falls down eventually in write-heavy applications. Ideally you want something that you can just add machines to and it will scale near lineary. I'm not sure if that's entirely achievable for a graph search, but that's where my question was heading.
Thoroughly agree!
Yes. In the simple modulo scheme, the number of shards is fixed. Unless you want to re-shard the entire thing. (AFAIK)
Unlocked Sony Ericsson T280 Copper/Silver 
Sony Ericsson announcing Sony Ericsson T280, with enormous look and dissimilar functions with marvelous sustaining network. Sony grandeur presentation of the session with its dashing look is one of its greatest features.
The 4 reasons applets continue to fail, and why they still matter
> More polite

No, this intuition is incorrect.

By using one of UUNet's (or someone else's) public caching name servers, you're increasing the cache diversity in a very widely used public cache and reducing the overall load on the global root name servers AND domain-level authority servers by reducing cache misses and reducing query traffic in a cumulative manner.

Think about it in terms of extremes/limits. If everyone on the internet ran their own server, would the root infrastructure slow down or speed up?

Personally I think it's somewhat insane and counterproductive to setup a DNS server on your laptop - not only are you wasting your own CPU cycles, you're wasting the CPU cycles of the root name servers and CPU cycles of the domain-level authority servers. Why do that when there are numerous public cache servers setup specifically for this very purpose?!

There's a reason those massive cache servers are accessible by the public internet. They help it work.
He's wrong. The semantic web is about to hit a critical mass, and then amazing stuff is going to happen.
1) As others have pointed out, creating an ordered hash out of an array and unordered hashed takes doing. Conversion between (ordered) arrays and unordered hashes doesn't solve this problem.
2) By my previous reasoning, I think identifying objects and hashes is also the-way-to-go, once you can figure out for to do it correctly. Javascript clearly has some problems. One possible solution is having different functions to iterate different types of keys, so objects/members could be added without being seen by data iterators.

Of course, I don't claim to have put all this is into the codified form it needs in order to form the basis of a language. I'll do that if and when I ever create a new language.
Scale enough in which way? Read traffic? Write traffic? Locking? If you use MySQL as a btree it is pretty fast and consistent. I gather from this post that a lot of companies started in the last 18 months are doing this. It's a hack but a remarkably useful one. Good luck! I will keep my eye on redis.
Same here (in gvim). I also like pylint's default behavior of issuing warnings where it finds these and penalizing the code's final score in the report -- it's a proxy for code problems that have been silenced or worked around, but still need some attention later. Integrating this info with a bug tracker seems like a good idea too for sufficiently complex projects.
> I'm not so sure of your policework on mmap() vs. read()

Scott's conclusions agree with my experiences very well: if you design around mmap(), and let the system handle the caching, you can end up with something several times faster than the traditional alternatives. This isn't to say that your criticisms are completely wrong, just that they don't match up with the actual testing.

* "extra copies" [are cheap]

True, but the real cost is the greater memory footprint. Less application buffering means more room for cached pages. And this cache is transparent across multiple processes.

* extra page faults

I think the opposite turns out to be true. Letting the system handle the buffering results in more cache hits, since the memory is used more efficiently.

* blow your TLB

Theoretically a problem, but in practice one doesn't linearly access the entire file. The beauty of mmap() is that it allows for brilliantly efficient non-sequential access.

* B-trees vs C++ containers

While it's true that you have to think closely about the memory layout of your containers, if you do so the access patterns can be even better than a B-Tree. If the container has been designed for efficient memory-access with regard to cache-lines and cache-sizes, it tends to have great disk-access as well.

What's really beautiful about the mmap() approach is the simplicity it offers. In this model, RAM can be viewed as a 16 Gig L4 cache, and disk as a multi-Terabyte L5. Just as one currently writes code that doesn't distinguish between a fetch from L1 and a fetch from main memory, mmap() allows extending this syntax all the way to a fetch from disk.

Now, this doesn't mean that one can just substitute mmap() for fread() and get any significant improvement. One needs to re-optimize the data structures as well. But the nice part is that these techniques are the same techniques used to optimize existing cache accesses, and certain 'cache-oblivious' algorithms already work out of the box.

Anyway, thanks to Scott for the writeup!
I tried something like this before but thought it was a "naive way to do things".

I love the advice that sometimes doing what may seem like a naive thing is good enough.
What? The company does quite well financially and Joel Spolsky (like him or not) is Internet Famous.
This author obviously lives in the corporate world, where SOAP sells (and WS-* protocols as well).

Way too complex for mortals...
I find myself engaging and disengaging from various services and individuals on social media. I think that's fine.

There are people who I'll talk with intensely on Twitter for a few hours... I'll talk with somebody else intensely the week after that.

The circle of people that I engage with a certain day will be small, but the circle gets wider the longer time scale that you look at it.

There are times I put a lot of energy into Flickr, there times when I'm doing something else. I like services like FriendFeed and the Twitter Facebook Application that bring these things together.
Inkling's using Tipjoy
"What I usually do is cheat by catching the checked exception within the method, and then throw it again by using exception chaining to wrap it into an unchecked exception (RuntimeException). But it's hard to see that as a good solution."

By throwing RuntimeException you're saying "don't catch this," which I agree is a bad thing, but any other kind of unchecked exception would be just as bad. You implement a third-party interface so other people's code can call methods on your object. If you throw exceptions they don't expect, then they have no chance of catching them anyway, so what's the difference?

Checked exceptions are just another way of specifying the behavior of an object so it can be handled predictably without knowing its precise type. If a method doesn't let you throw an exception indicating failure, then the method isn't supposed to fail, or it's supposed to report failure another way. If that isn't reasonable for your implementation, then the library isn't suitable for your needs. It isn't much different from the case where a method lacks arguments that you need, or has a return type that is too restrictive for your needs. If you can't adapt your code to fit the interface, you can't use it.
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Assuming a simple system a single box could be averaging around 5k requests per second. That's 18 million pages per hour, and just under 1/2 a billion pages per day. That's around 2.5 pages per month to every person on the planet but let's say you get 100 million people that's 150 pages per month. Now if you think you are going to get to that point in the next year feel then it's an issue but IMO 99% of people are far from that point.

Granted the real question becomes storing data not handling that number of requests, but a database that knows where a bunch of dumb files scales really well. (If you look into things this is Facebook's basic approach.)
"What Every Programmer Should Know About Memory"
http://people.redhat.com/drepper/cpumemory.pdf

(more good stuff at: http://people.redhat.com/~drepper/)
Of course you'll be in poorer health. You're losing weight, and if you keep it up you'll eventually starve. The process of "losing weight" has to be temporary. However, if you could determine the calorie count that would keep you stable at your desired weight, you will never be able to reach that weight on that calorie count (all else equal: no extra exercise, etc), because your body will lower metabolism enough that you'll level off above that.

I have lost weight in a sustained fashion to accomplish a goal just once in my life so far (~310 to 187 at my lowest; let's agree that I wasn't fatter at 187, eh?), and it would have taken years to drop it had I just started eating 2000 kcal a day. Even 2500 kcal is probably enough to maintain 300 lbs if you don't exercise and don't actively try to build muscle.
As somewhat of a sidenote:

The currently most hyped diet in Sweden (and possibly other parts of the world too?) is LCHF - Low Carb High Fat (a variation on the Atkins and GI theme if I've understood it correctly) claims to be different from other diets.

From what I've understood the idea is to eat practically no carbs, which will trigger something called ketosis in the body, which in turn supposed to be good.

Read all about it at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-carbohydrate_diet

Whatever you do, don't start a diet debate with LCHF fans, they tend to be fairly fanatic :) (although in a curteous way, they'll overwhelm you with references to various studies, papers and whatnot).
> if you don't exercise and don't actively try to build muscle.

Which is why I said "Get Off Your Ass".
Dude, he runs a small business on the internet. I'm talking about companies like YouTube, Google, and yes, Doubleclick like the person above you said.
Our post to Mark Cuban's Open Source Funding Stimulas Plan
hoodiepeople.com - fresh hoodies for everyone

hoodiepeople.com is an online retailer focused exclusively on hooded sweatshirts from leading Action Sport, Urban, Solid, Couture, and Team apparel brands. hoodiepeople.com will be for hoodies what zappos.com is to shoes and what amazon is to books.

We launched the site on a shoestring budget in late October and have seen strong increases in traffic and sales, and have been adding new brands each month.

We compete with many of the largest retailers in each retail lifestyle niche, for example karmaloop.com in the urban market, and pacsun.com in the surf/skate market.

Here is a traffic graph from compete.com of the major competitor sites: http://siteanalytics.compete.com/pacsun.com+urbanoutfitters.com+drjays.com+karmaloop.com+dogfunk.com/?pid=29261&metric=uv

We have a unique advantage of 100% focus on one popular product category and broad horizontal category growth.

We have been extremely successful in SEO and are seeking funds to expand the business and grab some of the larger apparel companies such as LRG, Billabong, Volcom, as well as many smaller niche brands.

We are currently cash flow profitable on a month to month basis but need additional funds to grow.

Why would anyone invest in retail in this economy you ask?
With some many store closings, the large retailers are in retreat, we can use this downturn to establish hoodiepeople.com as the go to site for hoodies and eat their lunch. We will be well positioned when the economy rebounds in 12-18 months and will be profitable along the way.

We are seeking $150,000 in equity financing to continue expanding the product selection, team, and brand.

Please contact me to learn more about this opportunity.
Hasan Luongo co-founder / ceo
hasan {@} hoodiepeople.com / 707 477 3990

Also please see a recent article about hoodiepeople on examiner.com: http://tinyurl.com/arqlfp
I guess it all depends on how you measure success.
based on feedback I read in Founders at Work - I believe Jessica and many others suggest setting it at 2 years. thats what we use at our startup.
Smarter phones mean dumber pipes
Ask HN: How would you teach Python?
If you had the chance to teach a sequence of Python courses (intro, inter, advanced) to a reasonably savvy audience (PHP/Java devs) in a business setting and one non-technical geared towards business folk what topics would you cover in each category?

What modules from the standard library would you cover and what external libraries? Would you cover web frameworks like Django and Pylons?

What Python code would you pass out as good examples of idiomatic python?
I parsed that as a modifier to the bit that followed, rather than a separate prescription. :)
A 500 error is a complete outage for every affected page. Most web app pages contain a lot of boilerplate -- headers, graphics, navigation elements, footers, and so forth, so a single error in a trivial component can cause an outage for an entire application unless it is localized properly.
Jessica suggests 4 years.
why this ridiculous idea that to be an Internet entrepreneur, you should love programming

Empirical evidence.
I don't think you're in the same ballpark as the standard bearers.

There's WOTC themselves: http://ww2.wizards.com/gatherer/index.aspx?

And these guys have a pretty good search too: http://magiccards.info/query/cards/3529389.html

No need for another wheel, especially a square one.
Seeking Success - Google in Asia
We created a site called Fantasy Congress back in college and we are in the middle of transitioning it to a new home. We became good friends with the Sunlight folks while we were in DC before we made JamLegend.

This is an important undertaking (we had talked about this a long time ago) and we'd be happy to talk to anyone interested in our experiences with scraping the federal government, the future of Fantasy Congress, any tips, etc.
I define success by a market capitalization of one billion dollars or more.

Is that cut and dry enough for you?
Well, it's a little better than PG's description of Submarine PR: http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
Ask HN: Can anyone here make sense of this Craigslist posting?
I was looking for work on Craigslist when I came across this:

"The last programmer I hired told me I accidentally deleted all the java googles in my script folder. He was charging me an arm and a leg to fix it.
Apparently it all needs to be converted to a Norton Anti-Virus file so it can be searchable with a SEO blog widget, so i have to reprogram the flash or upsize it with PHP.

I just can't afford to keep paying him to fix this problem.
This may lead to other opportunities for the right person."

Has anyone else seen a posting like this? I'm trying to figure out if it's some kind of a joke, or something malicious, or just stupid.
This is great, and the article itself is excellent. Regarding "going back to eliminate unnecessary language", as Stephen King said, "2nd Draft = 1st Draft – 10%".
What's the advantage of running your own resolver over just setting your DNS servers to something like OpenDNS?
Yes, angels are the weakest point. Though Boston VCs seem to be much slower off the mark than SV ones too.

I think the weather in CA has a lot to do with it. That and the fact that for so long it's been the new, nice place to move that it has affected the composition of the people here. The Bay Area, in particular, is a place a lot of people have moved to in search of a better life. So it ends up being full of the kind of people who'd move for a better life, and people like that are optimistic.
Nation's 10th Largest Paper, Rocky Mountain News, Folds