skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Interesting idea. Clay Shirky, Jay Rosen and others have speculated for long time now that journalists will all morph into editors rather than the creators of content, picking and choosing amongst both their own writing but also that of the audience in the form of their blog posts. David Pogue already does a form of this by cherrypicking the best comments from his massively popular blog posts and articles.

This will probably make more progress than one of the other newspaper-related HN posts today, the one about Newsday starting to charge for articles:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=497340
> I didn't tell myself I had done a favor

Trust me, if you weren't a delusional prick or egotist, nobody blames you personally for failure. Failure happens, it's a startup.

The problem is that a high percentage of people who actually have the balls to helm a startup are delusional egotists.
Original dialogue:

Q: "Will Nokia produce a mini-laptop of their own some day?"
A (Nokia-CEO Kallasvuo): "Never say never. Of course we are also actively looking into this business opportunity."

Source: http://areena.yle.fi/toista?id=1923984
(in Finnish)
Correct, you don't split shards across machines. Each machine hosts x number of shards.
I really have to ask, as a resident of California - have there been any massively successful startups to come out of NYC?

I'm being honest when I say I can't think of a single one. Maybe my memory has selection bias since I live in the bay area and LA.

Based on personal experience I would say that tech companies in NYC have a huge disadvantage because they're competing with hedge funds and investment banks for engineering talent.
If you get an error, but the error is within a closed subset of your program, you should not propagate the error upwards. Let's say you are sending data to another program on the same system. The other program could do many things, and could send answers you do know how to reply to. The error is in your function and in your function alone - you should simply exit the function without exiting the program. The range of errors are limited, and none of them are life threatening, but only your function knows that, the rest of the program is unaware of what the unknown error means.

Propagating errors upwards like you say breaks functionality encapsulation.
Twitbin: Firefox Add-ons
First time I came across this metaphor is not to long ago reading the "Getting Real" book by 37signals. http://gettingreal.37signals.com/
I added that qualification because I know not everyone may be able to afford to go to college, especially in poorer countries. I wouldn't presume to say precisely how much debt one could afford, and on what terms. I just didn't want to seem like I was assuming everyone had the option of going to college.
Yes (I bought the book, which is really just a lot of fluff around the central idea as you summarized), though I didn't stick with it long enough to make it stick, it definitely started a downward weight trend.

His original insight (discovered while traveling in France) was worthwhile, though, and confirmed through testing, and confirmed by thousands of people commenting on his blog: apparently, the body will somehow store calories more when it detects incoming things "it" likes, and won't otherwise (thus the sugar water/flavorless olive oil idea, which provides the calories without the "likes").
"I have an interest in programming languages and interpreters--college helped me find and cultivate this interest."

Wow. We never even came close to studying that kind of stuff at my college (Computer degree). We just learned some Java and linked lists and trees in the data structures course, a bit about computer hardware and not much else.

All the really cool stuff like interpreters, compilers, programming languages, unification, Rete, Common Lisp, etc. I had to learn on my own.

Did I simply attend a subpar college or you attended a great one?
Hash Table with Preemptive Bloom Filter
The main beef I have with his "hack your weight" approach is that he's strictly counting calories, and not the kind of calories.

Yes, it'll "work," but if you use McDonald's calories instead of Trader Joe's calories (you get the general idea), your body will be much worse off with the junk food, even if your weight is down.
Yes, they come dried with these little powder sauce packets. Dump them into a dish with water, microwave and eat. You can have a meal for about 20 cents.
Protip: Skip configuring BIND and use UUNet's original name servers (which are blazingly fast and still maintained) because you've been staring at DNS settings for so god damn long they've been burning into your brain for the past 15 years.

Protip #2: Also learn to configure your DHCP client so this is possible.
Watermark Learning Speaking Events - Business Requirements Analysis
Watermark Learning's Principals speak at a variety of industry events on topics including PMP Certification, Business Process Modeling training and business requirements analysis.
Nokia has already been in the PC business with Nokia Data until 1991.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fujitsu_Siemens_Computers
Excerpt:

"The origins of the company can be traced back to the merger of the PC-divisions of the Finnish Nokia and the Swedish Ericsson in the mid 1980s when Ericsson PCs were known for their ergonomics and bright colors.

In 1991 Nokia Data was sold to the British International Computers Limited (ICL). Later ICL merged with Fujitsu.

The Nokia MikroMikko line of compact desktop computers continued to be produced at the Kilo factories in Espoo, Finland.

Components, including motherboards and Ethernet network adapters were manufactured locally, until production was moved to Taiwan. Internationally the MikroMikko line was marketed by Fujitsu as the ErgoPro."

See also MikroMikko:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MikroMikko
Maybe with and .htaccess file you can do this

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^index.htm$ http://amazoncdnurl.com/xyz.html [L]

Edit: No, it doesn't work. It redirects you to the given URL. Sorry
Top Ramen is roughly equivalent to Pot Noodle.
Crazy, right?! We both did a little bit of real work (and I wrote the first version of the software for my current company), but we were definitely hired to fill some checkbox on a company growth map.
The link recommends dnscache. For my laptop, I like dnsmasq instead which is really easy to configure and serves the same purpose, but also serves answers from /etc/hosts and serves as a DHCPd.

Having a quick DHCP solution is handy because I often find myself piping my wireless net to another computer via ethernet cable. Also good for virtual machines.
I don't believe you'd put all of your information in this kind of custom db. The author remarks that they are running with memory-mapped disk back-end, which means a single machine should be able to take you pretty darn far.
How is redis different from TokyoTyrant?
This is really important, alas, you only know it when your ISP has really sucky DNS, and keeps timing out.

The other reason which you might or might not be aware of is that many CDN's use dns to map you to one of their servers, and using a resolver instead of open dns directly is the best way to go.
1.5 Million-Year-Old Fossil Humans Walked on Modern Feet
To be honest, that rationale was applied after the fact. One of the many backend iterations that I wrote, prior to the mmap backend, was using read() and friends and after porting the code to mmap-based I/O the output was faster on both warm and cold disk buffers.

I was planning a big blog entry just on the backend options that we used since I tried several combinations of I/O backends with different numbers of reader threads in our profiling dataset with different I/O elevator scheduling algorithms (switching the algorithms, disappointingly, had a negligible effect on performance and I/O throughput degraded when increasing the number of reader threads to more than twice the number of active cores) -- but that kind of slipped into the background as we started filling out the bits of the database to give it an acceptable level of robustness.

The hashing scheme that we're using is optimized for keeping a tight memory profile -- and hence disk profile. Again, much of the rationale was applied after the fact to try to explain the results of profiling. At first we tried things with B-trees and with the combination of the VM's paging and our access patterns the hashes were faster. It's possible that if we were using the direct I/O APIs that many databases use and doing all of our own caching internally that we'd be able to achieve higher throughput with B-trees.

In our case, letting the OS handle our caching and keeping identical C++ structures to our disk structures simplified the code enough to merit leaving things this way for the time being. At the end of the day, our product is a recommendation engine, not a database, so we'd like to keep the codebase relatively lean.

So, yeah, a lot of the explanations are applied after the fact from what I know of systems programming, but the results were validated through actual test runs through multiple competing backend implementations. The one we described gave the best overall results.
There's other stuff I want to see that should be even more
interesting. When it's replaying, I want to be able to see
characters that make it into the final version in one
color, and others in another. Then I'll be able to tell
when I'm writing well and when I'm writing badly.

How about coloring text based on their age in the work? That is, characters added in the last edit are bright blue (or green), and as they age without changing, they fade to black. That would be extremely cool to watch.
Excellent article.. I was wondering if you could help me understand why Franz's Allegrograph or Aduna's Sesame were not sufficient for you needs. Have you had the opportunity to perform any benchmarks against these graph DB's?
В Контакте | Герман Air
Most of the politicians that I know that describe themselves as "progressive" are controlling. I think that in politics, the two terms go hand in hand.

Perhaps your definition of "progressive" is different from the politicians definition?
Thanks for the explanations! All is now clear. Yep, having to eat that would certainly make you work hard on your startup :-)
i wish it was
Enterprise applications also have a smaller number of users, so the feedback pool is smaller: you don't get the same number of bug reports feeding back into your development cycle as you would with a widely-used web or shrink-wrap application.

End-users who happen to be employees don't get to choose the software - just like developers who are forced to use Java at work but code at home in Haskell or Python, they are forced to use a system decreed by management and therefore will often have a negative bias to start with - "the new system" being both a focus of complaints in the coffee room and a catch all excuse to tell customers.
So, assuming by "scaling" in the web space, you mean "be able to quickly respond to many reads and writes as my app generates" and not "handle large volumes of data", then you can do what LinkedIn does, which is to just copy the exact same graph to multiple machines, and rely on the fact that eventual consistency is good enough. You make things immediate for the user most concerned with immediate feedback (make them sticky to the graph their write updated) and for everybody else, a couple minutes of lag is no biggie. This is even more true in retail and other applications.
I use KeePassX ( http://www.keepassx.org/ ) and dropbox to keep my password database synced across computers.
And by 2000, I presume you mean 1500 or less. Most people's bodies can probably easily adjust to 2000 calories at something near their current weight. In fact, for most people who want to lose weight, it would probably be easier just to keep calories/day to "about 1000" rather than trying to hit a precise target like 1850 or whatever their height and build should require.
Absolutely. It'd work with any sort of distributed filestorage. It wouldn't be too hard to wrap the S3 methods so that the API is consistent (the MogileFS API is basically a dict), so app code wouldn't even have to change.

We used Mogile over S3 mostly because I didn't realize there was no minimum monthly fee for S3.
Tried Sesame, it was one of the graph DBs that I mentioned not being up to snuff. Also looked at Franz's DB, but based on the benchmarks they publish on their site (they've also imported a smaller Wikipedia dumb) it looked like it's about 5x slower than ours.
If Boston has an inferiority complex because of Silicon Valley, where does that leave me out on the Cape looking in (enviously) on all the activity 2 hours away in Boston?

Suck it up, launch your startup, and work your butt off to make it work.
What you said does not contradict my statement: only catch errors you know how to handle. You presented a situation in which you did know how to handle the error.

But if you don't know how to handle it, you should still throw it up, even if it breaks functionality encapsulation. This will likely crash the application, but the source of the error will be easily traceable, and the underlying problem can be fixed.
From Mark Cuban Open Source Funding: Grow Traffic Using "the Elevator, not the Stairs"
it's higher level. Not a plain key value stuff. For instance as value you can have a list or a set, push/pop elements, ask the server for all the keys matching a given glob style pattern and so on. Most of this operations are atomic in order to make sure there are no race conditions.

You can read more about the difference between Redis and other key-value stores here: http://code.google.com/p/redis/wiki/FAQ

Basically the long term goal is to have something between a relational DB and a key-value DB. Not all the higher level features must be killed in order to be scalable.
Doubleclick.
I haven't even heard of that one -- I'll check it out. I'm almost done with The Power of Babel, which covers a lot of the same ground as his TTC lectures.
Not to be a naysayer, but I don't know that there's a lot you can do except run it yourself on a large, popular site that people have heard of. Companies like FriendFeed will use memcached cause LiveJournal/Facebook use it, they'll use MySQL because just about every web startup uses it, but no matter how awesome a project is, they're not going to use something complex that a few developers or some other startup wrote that hasn't been battle-tested on a large, well-known site. It's too risky compared to writing another one yourself that you understand.
What I didn't discuss in this blog post: the validity of Mark Cuban's idea. As a big proponent of entrepreneurs, I think it was a great idea even if Mark never writes any check.

At a minimum, he managed to get many people to question themselves and think for a second: "what if I started my own venture?". That in itself is a major achievement in these times of economic gloom.
Making me hungry ... this thread should really die.
The person they seem to be quoting (Tero Kuittinen) is Finnish. He seems to be legit.

"Tero Kuittinen is managing director and senior analyst for Avian Securities, a brokerage firm specializing in technology companies. He has also served as senior product specialist for Nordic Partners, Inc. and in the telecom equity research groups of Sanford C. Bernstein (NYC) and Opstock (Helsinki), as well as a strategist for various Finnish mobile content start-ups. He currently resides in New York."
http://www.thestreet.com/author/638472/all.html

This link might provide valuable insight (anonymous: "IMO he has a pro-Nokia, anti-Apple bias"):
http://www.investorvillage.com/smbd.asp?mb=445&mn=155280...
I don't think they're all that bad. Terribly unhealthy though. One packet is like 170% of your RDA for sodium.

I usually get the Chinese brands though (Nissin, Mama), which I think are a lot tastier than Ramen itself.
Yeah, I tried it two years back and lost about 15-20 pounds over the course of 8 months. Regardless of whether the reduced hunger is a real effect of the oil or just a placebo effect, it did work, albeit slowly. If you're going to try it, I suggest the oil route, since it also had a noticible positive effect on my skin and complexion.

But like any regimen, once I stopped taking the oil, I regained the lost weight. You'd have to keep taking the oil forever or gain some self-control without that crutch.
My DSL provider is pretty good in some ways, but the DNS service has some drawbacks:

(i) It used to be ~slow~, slow enough that my broadband connection felt worse than dialup,
(ii) Failed DNS queries get pointed to a server that serves up contextual ads.

The second is obnoxious when you're browsing the web, but it's completely unacceptable when you're doing projects where you expect certain DNS queries to fail.

djb's dnscache is a sweet answer to the problem.
it's known as Instant Noodle for most asians
I blogged about this once in more detail (like you care), but I think workplaces would benefit greatly if they had zones that were analogous to those found in houses.

House Office
Bedroom/office/study Private Office
Dining Room Small team collaboration spaces
Living Room Common lounge
Backyard/family room Whole company meeting room/auditorium

People stay in their bedroom/study when they want privacy and the ability to concentrate. They hang out in living rooms and dining rooms when they want to see other people. When you have all your friends over, you most likely spend your time in the kitchen/family room/backyard. I don't see why your workplace should only have semi-private personal zones (bedrooms) or a single huge room (family room). No family would like a house with only bedrooms or only a family room, so why should employees like a workplace with only one type of room?
The biggest problem we have dealing with checked exceptions in Java is that it complicates interface inheritance when working with third-party class libraries. What do you do if you have to write a concrete class to implement an interface, but the interface's methods don't declare the exceptions you need? The interface isn't under your control, and the interface method signatures can't be changed anyway due to backward compatibility concerns.

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.
ok this sounds like I can have this goals:

1) Take Redis simple enough so that a single developer can understand the implementation in little time.

2) Run Redis on my own large sites. The problem is that while this sites are really large they are famous only in Italy. One example is http://oknotizie.alice.it

3) In the future when Redis will be stable and some little startup will start using it for real work try to collect success stories and write it in the front page of the project.
New Yahoo CEO's Open Letter to Fans, Analysts, and Employees
Continuous Integration and Software Release Management for Accurev
That's one thing I'm hoping to get out of this recession. The archaic notion that everyone must commute large distances, at great expense to themselves only to cram like fish in a can into a small expensive space called an "office" should get a rethink.

The central office should, hopefully, stop being the defacto standard for all employees and instead be used carefully for those who need the collaborative environment most, when they need it most. It should be set up explicitly to serve this purpose. At a certain population/productivity density, everyone going to the office every day might be economically unsustainable.

Unfortunately, the places I've worked have taught me that some older folks are going to need to retire before we can get past the notion that any time spent not physically at the office is vacation.
No, those numbers are way off. If you eat 1000 calories a day and are male, you will almost definitely be in poorer health. You will lose muscle and gain fat %, and while you may be "lighter", you will almost definitely be fatter.

Use fitday.com or something to ACTUALLY TRACK (yes, actually, as in EVERY DAY) the calories you eat. You can't "guess" something like this. Furthermore, google for 'daily caloric expenditure calculator' and find out exactly how much someone of your height and build is burning, and eat accordingly.

Stop guessing! It obviously doesn't work.
I wrote a post a few weeks about about ESPN doing the same for their basketball coverage. I really think this is the direction things are headed:

http://www.newmediacampaigns.com/page/espn-launches-a-blog-n...
I wonder what policies MA could actually change that would make a difference. These might be surprisingly far afield. For example, I think Wade is onto something with his suggestions about improving mass transit. Having a good quality of life in a town may attract startup founders more effectively than high-profile boondoggles like "innovation centers."

Of course the real weakness in Boston is not a lack of founders, but a lack of investors. I can't think of any policies that would solve that problem. Tax law changes, wouldn't, for example.
I don't think you could work out the algorithm, because it's not mathematic. It's a handful of quirky arbitrary rules.

But hey, give it a shot; here are three random passwords (calculated using a slightly different algorithm than the one i actually use):

hotmail: 3m4m349
facebook: w45c033
aol: t41m325

Now, tell me what my Gmail password is.
To each his own, but in my case I can calculate mine in my head without any assistance of any tool of any kind.
Here are details about one company, but no mention on rollout dates:

http://www.google.com/hostednews/canadianpress/article/ALeqM...
A man implemented wind mill in his home for daily needs
visit abttech.com for more details
Gary Vaynerchuk FOWA Keynote
Yes, I'm sure he does that in his head.
"On running the installer ..."

If it has an installer, it doesn't count as an online tool, as far as I'm concerned.
The diet isn't really too complicated, it just puts the emphasis in the wrong areas. What you eat is actually slightly more important that how much you eat.

Your recommendations are a good start, but you should add that 50-70% of each meal should be protein. Protein is the fuel for your metabolic fire (long term), and will cause your calorie burning to outrun your caloric intake in general terms.

Part of why the veggies are such a good idea is that they can be mostly fiber, which are calories that are not absorbed at all, but help you absorb the other, more important nutrients (protein, minerals, vitamins).

And to maintain this you must view it as a lifestyle and the goal is overall health, not a certain weight. The right weight will happen as the result of being healthy.
The trick for submitting articles from the Economist (which are usually well worth reading) is learning how to find the canonical URL and to submit that.
A review of the Shortcovers ebook reader for the iPhone
I would never try and second guess somebody who describes himself as "Devil's Advocate Extraordinaire."
I use OpenDNS and it works well for me most of the time. I may give this a shot though in the future.
Computer Shopper, once 1000+ a month, has gone to the great newsstand in the sky
Who needs a board of advisors?
Yup, I do the same. I tried PWSafe too, but I like KeePass better -- it works on OS X and Windows
If you want to sell your music online, why not just build a simple e-commerce site?

Allow me to plug my favorite e-commerce provider: e-junkie makes this so easy even a coked-out rockstar can do it. Upload MP3s, set price, copy/paste cart code for page. Done.

To the extent that it is a take money, give music problem, they solve it pretty well. (The build an audience willing to pay you money problem... well, there is a reason the labels don't charge BritStreetBoys $5 a month.)