skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm in Austin and could not participate directly, but I think it is a good idea and you should try to do it.

My advice would be to not spend money on servers and computers. Hackers can find their own computers, and set up a cast-off as a server, etc. Internet, electricity, and space will be enough.

There are a lot of potential drawbacks to this, and you should be aware of them so that you can handle them appropriately. It can be a distraction from your main, more important money-making activities. People you don't know can start wandering in and out at all hours and stuff might start to disappear. People with unpleasant personalities can start camping there and drive all the good apples away.

Be on the lookout for things like that. Maybe have a paid membership with laminated cards to give them a sense of ownership and have them keep up the environment; there could be a free "candidate" level, because high school students won't have much money.

A lot of projects such as this are awesome for a time while one core person, or maybe two or three people, are fanatical about it and they are also doing all the work. At some point the person who does 90 percent of the effort burns out, and the project collapses. Perhaps you should guard against this by making a strict time-and-money budget of what you will put into it, and accept the fact that it might not be as big and as cool as it could be, but be sure to preserve your own effort for a longer time.
Banks stopped giving me un-subsidized loans cause I don't have a decent cosigner. Luckily I work for a company and I could pay the rest out of pocket(if I worked 8 hours a week more).

Otherwise very little.
No the point is backing up a 500G database is difficult, but not unpossible. Sorry if that wasn't clear.
Who will stop the pain?
how is your tool better than siege, which is in my opinion the best tool available
Why You Can’t Make Money Blogging
the way you learn from testing is by looking at resource use, throughput, paging, io etc on your box. i'm not how a remote service enables this. man vmstat hackers
Actually this idea has come up a lot in threads lately, and I've been thinking of adding features of this type. E.g. to help people find jobs.

What features do users want?
Interesting on the topic as well is Huxley's Brave New World Revisited. As I recall he postured that democratic systems would come under significant strain if the world population reached 2 billion. :-)
As long as you normalize for socioeconomic variables.
No one's shutting down the conversation. If you wanted to continue the conversation, there was already a reply waiting for you:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=489006
Yea the registration process was very confusing. Few thoughts:

- I had to scroll down on the plan selection page to even see there was a form to fill out. This is on a 1680x1050 screen btw.

- I expected to be taken somewhere when I clicked on the plan I wanted, instead it was highlighted and with the previous issue in mind, I was left confused about what to do next.

- The most confusing part for me was after I fill the form out, hit submit, and the page scrolls to the top. It took me a few moments to realize that a "Registration email has been sent" box had appeared. I would recommend going to another page after you submit the form.

That's all so far, I'm just starting to use the service so I may have more comments, but already I can see it being a very useful service for the small startup I work on.
SEO vs. Web Site Architecture
it is silly to have a strong opinion about race at this point. we don't have enough data either way.

I will say that the blank slaters are pretty anxious to maintain the status quo. socialism isn't defensible without assuming neurological uniformity.
It's worth pointing out that the UK already has these kinds of incentives, via the EIS "Enterprise Investment Scheme" that makes it so that investments in EIS-eligible companies (generally those developing new products or doing research) are deducted from one's taxable income for that year.
They have a good system and strong potential.
True. I suppose I am conditioned to expect, on downloaded apps, a little dialog box asking if I'm OK with sharing anonymous usage information.

I think the standard is slightly different with desktop apps (with the spectre of 'spyware' to be avoided)
'they just sat on the sidelines'... is kind of not really correct either though... but if you want to keep the sports theme going, TapInko seemed to be playing for another team.
The reason I think git is complicated isn't because it's complicated conceptually. It's because the commands are intentionally different from other SCMs, which is highly annoying when you know what you want to do but can't figure it out.

For example, how do you revert a file in your working directory?

Oh, git checkout HEAD file -- obviously!
also: you can do a statistical regression by cross referencing between the IQ results and socio-economic census data. this minimizes the effects of other variables. Many separated twin studies have been done as well and the results are consistent. try to give researchers a little more credit.
Job losses in recessions visualized
The point at the end is worth highlighting:

Of course, when one tells one story, one leaves out other stories. This graphic doesn't show that the starting points of the recessions were different:

1990: 109 million

2001: 132 million

2008: 138 million
I wanted to check out tapinko.com, but they block Chrome browsers. Is that what they meant by taking on Google?
I'm simply using dollars as a universally understood metric for wealth (where wealth is the 'value' of actual goods and services).

Obvious data that supports my claim (that life is better for the average person today than it was 100 years ago) is that the average worldwide life expectancy has increased from 31 years in 1900 to over 65 years in 2006 (http://www.who.int/global_health_histories/seminars/presenta...). If memory serves, child mortality rates, homicide rates, and per capita energy production all paint a similar picture.

Even though there are some limited basic resources (land, water, etc), we are always learning to use them more efficiently. Our yield for most crops, per acre, has increased over ten fold in the last 100 years. Look into Norman Borlaug's Dwarf Wheat and the Green Revolution for proof.
Hacker lays out his daily routine in code form
Well someday Facebook might sell your info to credit agencies, which they can do at will.

How will you feel when your credit rating gets lowered because of some off-hand comment you made on some blog?
population growth is what usually follows a country's increased economic output.

Epic fail.

Some graphs:

http://www.indexmundi.com/g/g.aspx?v=24&v=67&c=mx...
http://www.indexmundi.com/g/g.aspx?v=24&v=67&c=in...
http://www.indexmundi.com/g/g.aspx?v=24&v=67&c=ch...
You can't see the grid they're talking about in the article's pic, so here's a link to it in Google Maps.

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&...

It does look quite artificial compared to the surrounding ocean floor.
Making the user page more into a profile page would be a good start.
Untitled Document Syndrome
wow, completely unexpected. pop-ups not fun.
You seem to think that other version control systems don't have this problem.

Let's consider subversion. Let's say you want to revert commit 1234. You just say "svn revert 1234", right? No. svn revert does something completely unrelated.

In git, "git revert 1234" does revert changeset 1234.

So you see, you actually have to learn about the version control system, regardless of which you choose.

You can't just make stuff up and expect the computer to understand what you mean.
You can add value to natural resources by using labor. But that isn't what I was talking about. I was talking about the wealth added by trade.

As a simple example, let's say I have a large bag of peanuts - but I'm allergic to peanuts. And you have a copy of Smith's 'The Wealth of Nations' (which you clearly have no interest in reading ;-)). By trading my peanuts for your book, we both come out ahead and no one is worse off - the trade itself creates value.

Every time any trade/purchase takes place, value is created. Both parties are better off than they were before the trade - otherwise they wouldn't have chosen to be involved in the transaction.
For someone who doesn't have much experience with SCMs, is it worth learning Git or should I learn SVN? I get the general idea behind both - just not sure what I should dive into.
Good catch. My hardcore Unix-fu is still lacking in places... =\
Its striking, but Google now says no.

Here's Google's official denial:

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ukpress/article/ALeqM5h3fST...
oops sorry, I was remembering your talk from IT Conversations. If it was text I would have looked up the exact quote first. I'll fix it.

edit: "The Times front page is a list of articles written by the people who work for the NYT. Delicious is a list of articles that are interesting. And it's only now that you can see the two side-by-side that you can see how little overlap there is."

http://sic.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail657.html#
Let me translate for programming.reddit readers: There's a lot of hard-won, specialized human knowledge encoded in CPAN, but if you don't have a Perl hacker around you're doomed to reinvent it -- or, worse, to never even realize it was there.

(Okay, I confess that I've taken liberties with the original, which is not about computer languages at all, so you should all go read it. But I'm being serious: This really is the argument. And it's a pretty good argument, though it's a little stronger when applied to thousand-year-old human languages than to twenty-year-old computer languages.)

For a more poetic take on the same thing listen to Wade Davis: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/wade_davis_on_endangered_...
Ariba releases AribaWeb RIA development framework
Massive reduction of lines compared to Rails
(I know I'm going to get down ranked just because you disagree with me)

Sorry go to off topic, but what makes you think that? Comments at HN are generally only downvoted for being inappropriate, immature, or extremely insubstantial. Say something interesting and you'll probably get upvoted even by people who disagree with you.

Back on topic, I agree, the article dramatizes things quite a bit. Maybe the new ToS were first noticed/discussed on Twitter, but I don't think that mean Twitter "won" something against Facebook. Also, pet peeve: overuse of the word 'viral'. If 'went viral' just means 'got Dugg' then it's not a very meaningful term.
A distributed, open source Magnolia
learn both. get comfortable with both. i don't see SVN being abandoned, and a lot of companies/projects use it. i like GIT over SVN, but am glad i'm comfortable with both.
I'd like to see custom search by relevant fields, e.g. location, (computer) languages, areas of experience, positions held, interests

Business networking site XING also has user's list what they are currently looking for and offering
Litmus is more about functionality/compatibility testing, unless I'm mistaken, while our service is all about performance testing.

Soasta does essentially the same thing as we do although they are a lot more expensive and aim for larger clients.

Traditionally, load testing has been both difficult and expensive, which is why mostly larger organizations have been doing it. Soasta I think has therefore aimed for this segment while we're betting on a larger, but so far unproven, market among small- and medium sized companies.
yep, loading javascript libraries from CDN is more and more common. I'd suggest you add ajax.googleapis.com and yui.yahooapis.com
(there's probably more)

[Edit] you mentioned googleapis.com already.
Contrary to what seems like the prevailing view right now, Git is not strictly better than SVN. Some reasons to use SVN are at http://blog.red-bean.com/sussman/?p=90.

It sounds like you want to use SCM in a personal (not collaborative) capacity. I think both SVN and Git are suitable for this purpose, but maybe Git has the edge because its philosophy doesn't privilege a repository.
I think you're mixing up reality with our perception thereof. Reality is not dependent on what we think, except the part of reality concerned with our brain states.

That said, of course reality changes, if it didn't we kind of wouldn't have time. (I'm sure Stephen Hawking could put it more eloquently than that.)
Scribd Counts 50 Million Readers
Digg Finally Admits the Auto-Bury Exists
Siege is just another load testing software. The new thing here is that we offer load testing as an online service. No need to install, configure or maintain any special software or hardware. Test configurations and results are always accessible, on the web.

If you're interested in running your own load testing software I would recommend the Grinder - http://grinder.sourceforge.net - which is very nice and flexible. If you need to generate a lot of load, curl-loader might be of interest - http://curl-loader.sourceforge.net
i see this as a flaw in modern operating systems. the LifeStream OS concept dealt with this rather nicely, providing a document-centric, time-oriented file system, but also allowing for versatile meta-data to aid in classifying objects and navigating around.
Some people might, especially if the person looks black, but I'm sure a lot of people would also label that person white, or mixed. There might even be people (gasp) who don't go around labeling people.

* It's not that ethnic groups don't share common traits it's just the borders are so fuzzy it's going to be hard to narrow down specifics.*

There are plenty of less-mixed people than the example you give. I don't think a studies invovling ethnicity necessarily have to involve every single person in the US, so people without a clear ethnicity don't need to cloud things (though studying someone of mixed ethnicity might be illuminating in some contexts).
Applying game design principles to the real world - new Honda Insight
I believe Git is strictly better than SVN even for one-person-never-share style of development simply because of much, much, much better branching/merging.

Being able to maintain and merge multiple branches without any effort is a huge, in my opinion. I don't think you can get away without using at lest some branching features in any project: at the minimum you'd need to maintain tags for released versions and keep "latest stable" from "development/experimental" code separated. And this is where Git shines.

I'm not saying SVN can't do branches or tags, I'm saying it takes more effort, and tools in general are supposed to make hard things easy.
Best of luck to you, I think it's a good strategy. I'd be surprised to find any small business that would pay Soasta at those prices. $1k/hour is the kind of money where I would hire someone instead to build a in-house solution via EC2 etc.
second that. Maybe something similar to ySlow? http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow
I have never used CVS/SVN (beyond very, very basic checkin/checkout) so git was my first SCM, and looking back at the last one-and-a-half year, it has only done me good.
What I was really hoping to find here was a travel search site that let me find cheap fares without necessarily having firm dates in mind. To me, Tripeedo just puts the functionality of kayak in a slightly different UI, as opposed to offering a new way to interact with the data itself.
If you say no, that means you value political correctness more highly than science. I find that a hard position to swallow.
I don't believe I've seen an HN post before with so many upvotes (currently 63) and zero comments. I assume some people are bookmarking it for later review or use. Anyone got any plans in particular?

(Related: a small LLVM Scheme compiler: http://llvm.org/ProjectsWithLLVM/#scheme)
Out of curiosity, where / what do you do? Feel free to email in profile if you don't want it public. I'm always curious about what people are using R for professionally.
Welcome to my IP blacklist.

But, seriously, this should be strictly an opt-in service. Only if there is a loadimpact.txt on the server, you run your tests. Otherwise - refuse and explain that the server admin has not consented to the stress testing using your service.

I'm sure you have some DoS provisions in place, but in the end it really boils down to the fact that if you screw up, then it's my server that gets DoS'd.
Agreed! But I already know SVN, and Linus intentionally made git different than the other SCMs because he thinks they suck.

I think that's annoying.

And there's no way you can tell me that the git command set is more discoverable than, say, Mercruial's. Many common, every day commands in git are very difficult to figure out without a lot of searching and reading. This is not true with Mercurial.
Very disappointed that this article isn't about the band, which is awesome (but not great live!), but instead a Salon article rehashing a topic Dahlia Lithwick at Slate covered much better last week:

http://www.slate.com/id/2211169/

For whatever it's worth, Slate has totally and thoroughly trounced Salon.
Ok, you're supporting the claim that technology is winning the race. May I ask a hypothetical question: if all countries had social/economic systems identical to US, with full access to US technology, democracy, political stability, etc (kinda imagine them all being US states), do you honestly believe the whole world would enjoy the same standard of living we do?
You may want to exclude entire 127.0.0.1 - 127.255.255.255 range, all of which is reserved for the localhost.
My top 10 free Mac utilities
Please provide stories for how it has empirically improved things. It's always easy to write things like "a crisis is a terrible thing to waste", but it's not very interesting.
If you have a choice about what SCM to use, I would just learn Git or (my favorite) Mercurial because as others have pointed out, they are just better than Subversion, even for single user access.

Both git and hg are easier to set up, faster, and feature better merging.

If you have to work with people who are using Subversion already, you should understand how to use it effectively, too.
http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/episodes/2008/11/28
These graphs are showing you the results of population management. I never said we'll be growing in numbers like roaches, I was pointing out that advances in technology allow much higher population densities that would have been possible otherwise.

Look at nearly all European nations: they're much more populous now and have surplus of food, whereas they've been starving throughout mid-ages living off exact same lands.
Lost my job in the DC. Was able to get a new one about 3 weeks later, that pays about $5000 more per year. I don't really care for the job as of right now, but it's something to do while I keep hacking away at stuff, hopefully finding something interesting to do.

I don't know how I feel about the recession. If I had more money saved up, I'd be feeling a lot better about it. If I were to lose this job, I'd be back to square one.
There are widespread budget cuts at the BigCos. People are losing capex budgets, which depresses forecasts from enterprise technology companies, and they're losing headcount. I don't personally know anyone who's been laid off. But it could take a couple quarters for the F500 to fully react to Q4'08; the budgeting process alone in a normal year consumes months at most of these companies.
The tone of this article is "just let kids be kids, okay?"

I agree with the tone.

The nagging part is the fact that "kids being kids" never included making media of their naked selves doing sexual stuff before. Media which can easily be distributed to millions, including some very sick people. Media which can last a lifetime (or longer)

Sure, we smoked pot when we were kids, and we read Playboys too. But nobody has videos of us doing all of that on YouTube. The electronic records problem here is extremely disturbing.

With the current FB conflict, I'm sure that most adults don't realize what kind of electronic record they're leaving all over the place, much less their kids. As a society, we've generally tried to protect kids from doing things that could have lifelong consequences. Do we want to give that up?

The underlying philosophy is a tricky-wicket. We don't necessarily allow kids to do stuff simply because "kids will be kids", i.e., it's natural for them to do it. So while I'm all with the emotion of the article, the underlying issues are a lot trickier than I think the author lets on. You can't just skim over the fact that 30 years from now when you're applying to be Supreme Court Justice that videos of your 14-year-old self doing stupid people sex tricks could be out there circulating. Fair or not, people aren't going to understand.
Custom Made Invitations and Announcements
A great site for creating your own custom invitations and announcements. Perfect for baby showers, weddings, birthdays and graduations.
Single Google Query uses 1000 Machines in 0.2 seconds
Interesting idea, but would this not be relatively easy to crack, given that the problem would basically resume to mapping images to words (i.e. no OCR involved, just a histogram would suffice) ?
Marc Andreesen Launches VC Fund
Just extended my contract for another 10 months.

So far -- what recession?
De nada, I figured something like that was the case :)
Why is there drama about this? If pg had an auto-kill script for stories posted by me, would you care?
My point is people don't consider 25% black an edge case. Having two parents that where 40% black does not make you 100% black but Americans label people that way.

Take Halley Berry the "first black woman to be nominated for a Best Actress Academy Award." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halle_Berry) I would be shocked if she was more than 40% "black" at the genetic level.

It would be an interesting study, but I suspect 60+% of "African Americans" to be at least 25% white in the USA. I suspect if you compared the relative percentage vs (whatever) you would see little change, because social issues tend to swamp most other issues and they tend to identify with black. My first boss was darker than the average African American, but he graduated from Yale and acted more stereotypically "white" than I do.

Other classic examples would be trying to separate Arabs from Jews, Indian from white, Japanese from Chinese, etc. People like to identify with specific groups, but when you look at genetic studies anywhere up to 30% of children in married couples have a different father than they think they do. Culturally Incest is considered evil in part because genetic diversity is positively correlated with survival, but this also extends across cultural and ethic bounds.

PS: Not to mention war / rape and other issues. I heard that the "Black Irish" originated from the destruction of the Spanish armada in 1588. Plenty of people swam to shore and never made it back to Spain.
this is true. Their servers shouldn't test if they don't find a specified file, like Google does with Webmaster tools.
Best bit:

"That iTunes is a free-standing application and not contained inside a browser, as is the Amazon music store, is not accidental, and I reckon that its "outside the browser" design has played some role in its success. Consumers have been conditioned to think that content delivered by a browser is supposed to be free. They get annoyed when they encounter a pay wall on a browser but are more psychologically open to the nonbrowser Web interface."

Shafer argues that people are ok paying money for iTunes songs because it's not a browser app, which we've been conditioned to expect to be free.
Wow, that was annoying. Opening two dozen browser windows without warning, half of which contain errors? Not cool.