skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I thought it was rather ironic that the same week Deval Patrick was heading to CA to entice some businesses to head east, the legislature was trying to implement a tax on businesses in other states. It's hard to believe, but if you get your tires changed in NH yet live in MA, MA thinks it deserves the sales tax.

Readers not familiar with this will probably think I am making this up. It's totally absurd.

If state A wants more sales tax revenue, they need to encourage businesses to open shop in state A. If it's to the business's benefit to set up shop across the border in state B, state A needs to rethink its policies.

My problem with MA is that raising taxes seems to be their first answer to every problem. And driving here STILL sucks.
Not much substance in this article - doesn't give any examples and just asks for feedback in the comments.
One effect of software patents is for people to say "wow that's a great idea! how can we invent around it?" In the prospecting theory, if one guy finds a gold mine, other people try digging around his "claims". But I don't know if that actually happened here.

PS: the patents, from 1986 and 87 would have expired by now - they're linked from the bottom of the wiki entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karplus-Strong_string_synthesis

BTW: I remember physical simulation synthesisers were available roughly 20 years ago (I don't know if they took off or not - one had a saxophone mouthpiece, and it sounded unbelievably realistic). There's usually more than one way to do it.
Install a DNS resolver on your laptop
Do any workplaces model themselves after university campuses? In essence, creating a wide variety of spaces to accommodate myriad working styles.

Lower floors of a library for solitude, campus coffee shops for more social or creative tasks. A myriad of rooms and open spaces for ad hoc collaboration. Outdoor areas with tables and benches. Lounges. Departmental enclaves with desks and storage when you need a more persistent environment.

It feels like my productivity plummeted once I graduated and landed in a cubicle.
> You didn't say what you were drinking

Yeah, well, part of the problem I was drinking anything I could get my hands on.
Dynamic ActiveRecord Optimization with Scrooge
After reflecting of my own experience with a failed B2C product, I definitely agree with the statement in your second paragraph. We spent a significant amount of time worrying about 'scaling' on a lot of fronts, not just technical, but the highest CCU we ever hit was a couple hundred users over the course of a year and a half.

From a design standpoint, I think its perfectly acceptable to keep said objectives a high priority... but from an execution standpoint, its more important to be as nimble and flexible as possible. Re-writes shouldn't be feared too much, they take less and less time if the team is applying what they've learned.
> This is a lifestyle thing

"Losing weight" is a lifestyle thing... people with healthy lifestyles aren't fat, no matter what. I believe this is one of those rules to which there aren't any exceptions.
Instead of using normal hashing you can use consistent hashing so you don't need to move that many users. Here's a post explaining it: http://www.spiteful.com/2008/03/17/programmers-toolbox-part-...
Interestingly, the design of "The Bench" takes into consideration that everyone is not physically there every day. They can be away due to holiday, sickness, or even because they are having meetings in a room round the corner. And when that happens, the "legless" nature of the desk means you feel that you've got more space that you really have got. It's like the architectural trick we use often to make a space feel more generous by increasing the floor-to-ceiling height. Here, we are trying to maximise the benefit of absences to make your perceived desk space more generous.

During our 9 months experiment, this is perhaps biggest benefit that we felt.
> Has anyone tried the Shangri-La Diet

No, but I've tried the Get Off Your Ass and Don't Eat More Than 2000 Calories Per Day diet, and it works really well.
Tom Siebel: Emerging Opportunities in a Post IT Marketplace
As someone who's been in healthcare and IT and is now in energy, Tom's right on the money. Is anyone here part of one of these two new ventures he talks about?
I think the gist of what he's saying is that no matter where you go (caveat: cities or suburbs), you can find a cell phone with reception, electricity, television and so on. The products may be made by a local company, but they're clearly identifiable and not limited to one particular civilization.
> but most of us in the real world have been trying that for years, and with little result

Oh please. If you followed all those points and didn't lose weight, you're defying the laws of physics.

Use fitday.com to actually count your calories. If you're doing all those things and STILL can't lose weight, the simple fact of the matter is you're eating TOO MANY CALORIES.

You're probably one of those people who has no idea that a small cheeseburger, fries, and a coke represent over HALF of the calories you're supposed to eat in a single day.
I use a tiered password scheme, and I don't agree with this article.

I think it's too much of a bother to be using a password manager all the time. Especially when using public computers. It's not just the effort that bothers me. I have a feeling that doing something as extravagant as using a different password for each service will somehow make it more probable for people to steal your passwords.

I've been using the internet since the mid 90s, and I remember only one time when my password was compromised. (Granted, it is possible there were more cases that I just never found out about.) It was about 3.5 years ago, and I logged on to ICQ in a sleazy internet cafe. Some kid had a keylogger installed there and he later stole my ICQ account. I changed this password in all the places I used it.
The New York Times Expected To Launch Local Blog Network On Monday
(Representative) Republics use hierarchical voting: citizens elect representatives, representatives vote on issues and elect representatives from their own pool for higher bodies. Democracies give one vote to every citizen on all issues. Examples are Washington (the state) voter initiative system and Senatorial elections post-1913 (they were originally elected by state legislature. see http://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/common/briefing/...).
This site seems a bit too "pyramid-y" to have a long lasting appeal. However, I think the model is at least worth experimenting with -- at this point, just about ANY model in music sales is worth experimenting with.
Hmmm, does an ordered dictionary actually solve this problem? It seems like you want to retrieve based on player id, but get the top N based on score. An ordered dictionary would be ideal if you wanted to retrieve and get the top N based on the same key.

I guess you could use two data structures, with one of them being an ordered dictionary. But then the ordered dictionary doesn't actually have to support lookup; you could just use a heap.
Just to pose the counter argument, is it that hard to move data between hashes and lists? In reasonable languages it is at most a single function call.

Javascript has eliminated many differences between arrays and hashes (objects) but this leads to many bugs. For example, you have a third-party library that adds a .toString function on every object. But you also have code that iterates over the keys in an array, and now that iteration code hits a "toString" key instead of just the array indices you expect. Admittedly you could blame this on the object-hash identification rather than the array-hash identification....
The article states that stored passwords are in the cache. I use Safari on Mac which stores passwords in your Keychain. It doesn't delete without your permission, backed up on Time Machine, and moves with a standard restore or system migration. His suggestion of a third-party app really just needs to be changed to better handling of stored passwords in Firefox.

And that goes without saying things like OpenID or equavalents. Ideally you just have one Very Trusted person to give a password to. (Of course OpenID has its own share of problems. )
LG KF240 Unlocked
LG KF 240 has come up with one of the most stylish invention it has come out with till now. It will definitely add up to the popularity and reputation of the company. One of the most important reasons is that this phone features fine front panel decoration.
> terrible generalizations

An American news article with terrible and inaccurate generalizations about Asian people? I'm shocked.

Apple products are immensely popular in all of Asia, because they're fucking awesome and appeal to Asians for the same reasons they appeal to Americans, for the most part. But there's no news story in that - Apple products are popular everywhere, so what.

Write a story about how Apple is being rejected using some half-cocked cultural stereotypes about Japanese people that ignorant head-nodders will use to reaffirm their own prejudices - that'll get clicks.
Here’s an actual question: If I sell my music on Amazon or iTunes can I sell it for $0.10 or $20.00? Do I have to charge $0.99? Just like the labels?

If it’s true that I can’t set the price to compete with the labels, then the labels are guilty of collusion and price fixing. Someone should look into that.

The music labels? Guilty of collusion? Price fixing? Never! It's just that all music is equally worthy.
Well, a business model that pays 50 cent a page view sounds nice for sure - I fear most of us don't share that luxury.

I figured that most sites who would be interested in such a database either fall into the retail (recommendation) or the community (social graph) category. Both operate mostly on volume and the last thing you want is a hard bottleneck just when you're at the verge of becoming successful.

But well, if your business model doesn't require scalability on the web-tier then yes, these concerns ofcourse don't apply.
It's not as robust? Do you have a source for that? You're doubtless right about it not being as widely used.

I've always preferred the fact that Postgres tried to do things correctly. Most recently, I bumped into this with Mysql, and it reminded me why I get irritated when I use it:

http://journal.dedasys.com/2008/11/11/another-mysql-doesnt-d...

I've often bumped into things like that that just irk me.
> Technology seems to make cultural borders disappear, but sometimes these borders are very strong.

That's because the media insists on redrawing the borders to make foreigners (especially ones with slanty eyes) appear as different from you as humanly possible.
Luckily nobody is targeting his account specifically. The original point, that your low-value passwords can be harvested, is I guess well-taken. But you're pushing it.
Newsday to charge for website, online cable service
Already posted... http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=497202
This article presents a new idea for optimizing dense work environments. A person might find this idea interesting if his business is managing low-productivity workers. In my opinion, the money saved by this scheme will be negligible for employees who create even a modest amount of wealth.
I use the same pseudonym for several sites, some of which have my email address in my profile. If I was using the same password for all of them, access to any would mean I was compromised.

I certainly wouldn't consider "they may know my password, but they'll never guess my email address" to be reasonable security.
Things Every Software Architect Should Know
The printed book for the project 97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know has been released and is now available. This project was a community wide effort to articulate the keys points of software architecture.
It's kind of hard to take a security article seriously when it says that GMail is a low-value account. GMail is your highest-value account.

Also, without claiming that password managers are a bad idea, I can confidently say that the thing you can do that is worse than having a "tiered password scheme" is not having a "tiered password scheme". I just watched someone in the security industry go through this:

Blog SQLI -> Blog Password -> Yahoo Mail Password -> GoDaddy Password, Bank Password.
150 year old Rocky Mountain News shuts doors
Actually it's well understood how to scale a RDBMS horizontally (sharding and partitioning). I simply asked whether there is a comparable strategy for this graph db.

Also most websites probably don't need a graph database. But the few who do will likely also need the scalability - at least I cannot imagine many interesting web-applications where your one beefy box could possibly scale to a significant userbase (unless you're talking the z-series category of beefy).

Ofcourse there are still many interesting applications outside the public interweb.
Rich Karlgaard on 'The Coming Blue State Collapse'
You would also have to consider the likelihood that taxes will increase, given that the state is practically bankrupt as it is.

California is a beautiful place (at least some of it is), but I wouldn't want to live there because of the state government.
The story I'm quoting happened years ago. I think he slept OK before he wrote that.
Large companies aren't required to give any notice of termination in at-will states.
Microsoft Vista voted tech world's top "Fiasco"
Twitter : The New “Browser” War?
This makes me wonder: what are the most popular phones (especially "hip" smartphones) in Japan?
Oh, certainly not. If you google around, you'll find more than a few floating cruise ship ventures that have made it to various stages. =)
If you want to sell your music online, why not just build a simple e-commerce site?

Zed's answer to this has to do with the feed reader.

So he actually has two problems: a "checkout" problem (how to actually accept money for the music) and an "awareness" problem.

An already famous artist could set up the simplest e-commerce store and sell copies of a long-anticipated album through it.

But Zed needs to get the word out. He has a hunch, like any entrepreneur, that there is a market for his music if only more people were exposed to it.

Sure he could pay Google lots of money for click-throughs to his e-commerce site, but that wouldn't be any fun.

So in comes the idea of using RSS. I admit, I've noticed that a lot of companies have a business model like:

1) Idea
2) RSS
3) ?
4) Profit

Zed is reinventing the wheel... the traditional music industry exists not because it is evil but because it helps match musicians with consumers who happily buy the music.

Consider all the music fandom lore about waiting in line to buy an album, etc. People love making the purchase, they love the cover art, they love the unauthorized leak of a track before the album's official release date, etc. These things are part of the larger entertainment and social value of music.

So Zed wants to reinvent the wheel, with the help of RSS, to get all the clueless people, clods, and scammers out of the way so that people will discover his own music and the music of other tortured artists.

The real question to ask is to the consumer: "Do you have a music problem?" I personally do not. There is a lot of great stuff on iTunes, Pandora, etc., and I have maxed out the amount of leisure time and money I want to spend on music enjoyment.

In economic terms, the marginal cost of discovering another great artist is extremely low, effectively nil. I know where to go, I can afford the price of the album, etc. The reason I don't buy more music is because I don't care to. There is tremendous abundance and quality.

So to make a persuasive argument from the perspective of a consumer, Zed would have to argue that there are lots of artists who (if discovered) would make music listeners significantly happier, or would save them significant amounts of money, or both.

Zed's music-themed rants sort of remind me of an infomercial.
I've been going to Hackers and Founders off and on for the last six months and always enjoyed myself. Jonathan does a great job of making it a welcoming and friendly environment. Bring your side project, or help give feedback to other people about their side project. It's a great way to get an outside perspective on technology (that is, apart from the people you normally work/socialize with).
It's interesting, actually. The idea is that you should be able to set the price of your music, but there's quite a bit of weirdness and technical issues. For example, I'm selling an album I recorded on Amazon. It's a full-length, so you'd expect something like ~$9.99 to be the final price, but since it's only one track (21 minutes long), it ended up going for 99 cents at Amazon. I have no doubt that somewhere on the internet exists a form where I can edit the price, but it'd be a real pain to deal with. I'm glad selling music on Amazon/iTunes is a hobby of mine and not a business.
That's essentially how we do snapshots now. You can look backwards until you find something that clears the screen or loads a new page, and save some work by just drawing from there. So yeah, jumping to a frame isn't too hard. You just run the risk of melting something if you try using that technique to reverse the playback.
Well, other major papers have talked about doing this for a while. Makes sense for the Times to try it out. The Boston Globe has something like this already and WickedLocal.com has been doing pretty well in the Boston area as well.

The equation: NYTimes Brand + 1 Nytimes editor + free copy from CUNY j-school + user-generated content.

Interesting stuff.
Kindle Student Edition Coming Soon
I started using SuperGenPass a few months ago from a recommendation here and have been really happy with it.

http://supergenpass.com/about/

It's a bookmarklet so you can review the code behind it and use it on any computer. You only have to remember your master password and it converts to a new password for each site. Usability-wise it's usually only 1 extra click - you put your master password into the web form's password field and the bookmarklet writes the generated password for that site over it.

I still wouldn't use it for banking or my email, but for most other things it's worked well.
Yeah, Firefox has a somewhat undeserved reputation for being fast. They may have a fast javascript engine, but it's more than made up for by their amazingly slow rendering engine. I might simply sniff on the browser and turn those notes off for FF.
Better to say would be that Scripps closes Rocky Mountain's doors. They put it up for sale for 1 month before deciding to close it down.
This is a great article, and I don't doubt you have a stupidly fast graph database, and I am jealous that you get to spend all day working on graph-theoretic problems. That said:

I'm not so sure of your policework on mmap() vs. read():

* The "extra copies" you make with read happen in the L1/L2 cache, making them comparable to register spills. Buffer copying just isn't expensive.

* (and here I start paraphrasing Matt Dillon) On the other hand, you are absolutely going to take extra page faults and blow your TLB if you address a huge file using mmap, which is not only going to slow down I/O but also hurt performance elsewhere.

It seems to me like you did mmap() so you could easily externalize vectors and maps. Which actually leads me to a second question:

Isn't the reason people use things like B-Trees that they are optimized to touch the disk a minimal number of times? Isn't that kind of not the case with a C++ container "ported" to the disk?
The code behind (some) CDS pricing - revealed.
According to this commentary: http://zerohedge.blogspot.com/2009/02/isda-open-sources-cds-model-challenge.html the released code is straight out of JP Morgan's Quantitative Research Group.
If I am reading the article correctly, they are predicting the death of "bad" not because different English-speakers pronounce it differently, but because there are few other languages using a word with the same meaning derived from the same root:

For example, "dirty" is a rapidly changing word; currently there are 46 different ways of saying it in the Indo-European languages, all words that are unrelated to each other.
Yes. New technology is invented in response to problems with the older technology, and if you haven't capitalized on the old technology's potential, you'll likely just be reinventing the old solutions instead of coming up with new, better ones.
if the algorithm is something like:

password = sha1(masterpw1 + sitename + masterpw2)

I'm not sure you can deduce masterpw1/2 from a few passwords.
Thought provoking TDD exercise at the Software Craftsmanship conference
> Use finally to stabilize program state when exceptions are thrown
> Catch and handle exceptions locally when the effects of the error are local and completely understood
> Wrap independent units of work in try-catch blocks to handle errors that have global impact

... isn't this what everybody does?
Well, I have being using starling for a private project on my own and it is quite a good piece of software. Somewhere, I think perphaps in the project page it was repported to be able to cope with >=4000 msg/sec.

It seems Twitter has gone over 4000msg/s now :-)
Only catch errors that you know how to handle. If you don't know how to handle it, it should propagate higher up the stack, even if it kills the execution of the program.

This implies that having a catch-all around your entire program is a bad idea. Doing so loses the stack trace; you no longer know where the exception was thrown from. I've had to debug programs that did this, and the first thing I did was comment out the catch all so a simple stack trace could tell me where to start looking.

In the compiler I'm writing right now, I do wrap the entire execution in a try-catch block, but the only errors I catch are ones I call "user_error". That represents an error in the input; I don't handle that kind of input on purpose, and providing it is user error, not compiler error. I don't catch the other kinds of exceptions I throw, which indicate what gcc calls "internal compiler error." It's much easier for me to figure out what I did wrong that way.
> engineers and technical people whose jobs you don't understand

If you're CEO and you don't understand what your engineers do, you're in trouble.

I imagine you're being facetious.
Companies should try to use the downturn as an opportunity for transformation
You have to take scale in consideration.

The Facebook team's accomplishment may be much smaller than putting people on the moon, but the size of their team (and partners) and their budget isn't comparable either.

I say an accomplishment of X value by spending Y resources is equivalent to one of 100X value by spending 100Y resources (numbers and proportions unrelated to facebook VS moon example).
Ask HN: hacker culture and ramen
Could someone describe what is meant by US people when they talk about ramen as the proverbial cheap food for struggling entrepreneurs? I'm from the UK and I'm familiar with ramen as the tasty noodle soup you can get in Japanese restaurants. However I suspect people are usually referring to something else: is it simply dried noodles? Or something akin to the rather disgusting 'Pot Noodle' available in the UK and probably elsewhere, where you add boiling water to a plastic container holding noodles and unidentifiable chemical flavourings?
Terrible idea. And not just for the usual reactionary "information wants to be free" reasons, but because paying for general news online doesn't work, it's why the washington post, nytimes and even the wall street journal have opened their archives to varying degrees.

I still like Dave Winer's idea: open up your archives completely, take away the spinning Flash ads and plaster contextual adsense strips next to each article instead.