skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I know that this is old but traffic on this article has increased since Google Earth has been released and the information in the article is still valid.
A lot of users probably didn't even know there was a Google Update Deamon running on their System and are now wondering about it.

"Don't be evil" ;)
Porn Site Feud Spawns New DNS Attack
Native Windows overlapped I/O can give you a callback without needing to use an event: WriteFileEx (or WSASend) accepts a callback routine, etc. Also, the OVERLAPPED structure requires you to provide the event handle, and it's optional, so you don't need to use that kernel resource if you don't want to.

The "poll" function you speak of - I presume you mean Socket.Poll - is spelled "select" in native code, and is equivalent to the BSD sockets version.
I say svn+ssh is perfect for working solo.

It can also work great for a team (multiple ssh keys, one per user, single 'svn' account on the server). That is, until you want to add some authorization/access control--that's a job for Apache + mod_dav + authz.
Bravo! claps An exceedingly well written response with a superb analogy.

I'll just chip in that it's the same for pretty much all advice about how to do stuff... Another example is project management "best practices". The truth is, no practice is "best", they're only appropriate in certain conditions, and you have to use your brains to figure out which ones apply to your project at this particular stage.

The same is true for testing practices - you have to adapt to the situation.

Etc... Advice is like design patterns. You can't, and shouldn't, try to use them all at the same time.
I read this hoping for some deep insight into the development of web-based applications and I learnt nothing. Comparing Axl Rose and Frank Sinatra's recording styles seems to offer no useful parallels with web-based development.

For example, how exactly would you do what Sinatra did in software development? You'd have to write perfect, bug free, code that didn't need any new features the first time you sat down.

And Axl Rose's work on Chinese Democracy is the antithesis of release early and often.

So, neither of them provide a useful comparison point.
But the difference is we have (hopefully) learned from our y2k experience.

Also commodity hardware/software is much more common nowdays than before 2000. Back then you were reluctant to get rid of something you paid millions for because it was custom hardware running a custom OS with custom Cobol on it.

Nowdays you have commodity hardware running continuously updated OSes with custom Java on it. Thankfully Sun can update the JVM and MySQL and hopefully your date problems are solved.
I can't tell how serious your comment is seeing how the Balsamiq website bears an uncanny resemblance to the 37signals website. So what you are saying is that we shouldn't copy 37signals but we should instead learn from a guy who copied 37signals?
Google Earth updater now quietly updates all the Google apps
This graph, shown at 12:50, shows how good four different factors are at predicting whether a teacher will raise the test scores of her students, and they are:

1) Past Performance (presumably, whether the teacher raised his students' test scores the year before, although it's not defined)

2) Whether or not the teacher majored in math

3) Whether or not the teacher participated in TFA

4) Whether or not the teacher has a Master's in Education

The best predictor is #1, which just means that the best predictor of whether a teacher is good at raising test scores is to see if they were good at that last year too. That doesn't seem very surprising to me.
Enlightening talk.

On teachers, Gates says that after 3 years, a teachers' performance generally doesn't change.

He put up a graph of what influences teachers' performance. By far the greatest effect came from 'past performance,' distantly followed by a having a math degree (for math teachers), and Teach for America experience. Almost negligible came the last item, 'having a masters degree.'

Next, Gates looked at the incentive structure within schools -- it's primarily seniority based, with a bonus if someone has a master's degree.

He noted that good teachers leave the system at a rate slightly higher than that of bad teachers.

He contrasted charter schools such as KIPP (http://www.kipp.org/), where the school evaluates teachers on their performance -- with the traditional model.

The traditional model contractually limits how schools can evaluate their teachers, for example, a principal is contractually not permitted to sit in on a teacher's class more than a few times a year (sometimes even once per year), and even those times, the principal must provide advance notice. Gates compared this to running a factory with some workers "making crap" but the management being banned from observing them without prior notice, so that the workers "might actually try and fool you into thinking we're doing a good job in that one brief moment."

Gates next noted that even a teacher wanted to improve -- can't. New York, for example, passed a law banning schools using teacher improvement data to determine tenure.

Gates closed noting his optimism, praising the testing data for revealing something. He posited the idea of using digital video to record all public school classrooms to give teachers the opportunity to review their work and consult with each other to improve. Gates said: "By thinking of this as a personnel system we can do it much better."

He mentioned _Work Hard, Be Nice_, a book about KIPP: http://www.amazon.com/Work-Hard-Be-Nice-Promising/dp/1565125... Gates said he sent everyone at the TED talk a free copy.

He finished by saying he thought "education is the most important thing to get right for the country to have as strong a future as it should have." He mentioned the House-version of stimulus bill had funding for "these data systems," but the Senate version took that out, because "there are people threatened by these things." He reiterated his optimism, however, saying that people were beginning to recognize the importance of education.
Minor nit-pick: Amazon does cost-plus... Jeff Bezos doesn't seem that poor to me.

Also, letting what costs you money drive your prices is not quite the same as doing "cost-plus". We're not saying "We need a margin of X% on our cost per gigabyte". We're saying "Gigabytes are what costs us, so, since we want to charge as little as possible, we'll charge for gigabytes used (since they cost us), to maximise adoption. Now, how valuable is a Gigabyte to our customers?" The result is a price that is quite detached from our actual cost.
ESPN to ISPs: Pay for Your Customers to Play Video
He might have learned from them but he's doing it himself, applying what he's learned and telling us about what works for him.
Huh, we have very different experiences.

1. There are things you get in college that make life better outside of salary. If you're too reductionist to understand that, don't respond to me to debate, you already have my pity.

2. Tuition for a good state engineering school: $4500/sem. Average salary (2007, last time I checked) for a graduating computer scientist from the same school: $75k. If you want a good career, college is a great way to get it -- just think for 100 milliseconds past "should I go to college?" and ask "which degree program?"

3. The NY Times front page has a nice little unemployment stat graph today on unemployment rates by degree level.

4. I have friends who spent over $100k to get degrees in fields that barely pay $35k/year. They're brilliant and they love what they're doing -- some studies just don't pay well. For the larger decision, beyond income, enjoying life is pretty relevant. I doubt you'd understand, as you seem to look at school purely as a financial instrument. See point #1.
http://mathworld.wolfram.com/BayesianAnalysis.html

It wouldn't be that difficult to implement this. Run your RSS feeds through a program that will look in the articles for words you are already familiar with.

If you read an article, you can rate it good or bad and it can look at which terms are /in/ the article. If you rated it good, then the new terms are added to a list of terms to look for, terms that the algorithm will think are part of articles that will interest you.

If you rate it bad, it'll look at terms in common with other articles you've rated bad and see know what to look for in articles it should not bring to your attention.

It would be nice if such an algorithm would allow you to rate the articles on different scales for entertainment, technology, philosophy, etc, so when you are in one of those moods, you just click on the category and it'll hunt for things that may interest you.

I think an algorithm like this would be much more suited to an individual than a social group type filtering system like most groups use. At some point, the individual wants to break off from the group and explore independently and to do that effectively, they need a teacher.

In a way, this algorithm would be a teacher constantly showing you new things in the world and keeping your interest up.

The problem with social sites now is that there are many large communities who all at once look for a new venue for their point seeking. It promotes a king of the hill mentality where individuals within the group compete with others for points rather than personal excellence, education, and betterment.
This seems unrelated but I think it actually is a very good counterpoint so go with me for a sec. When Hitler was invading Europe at the beginning of World War II Ghandi gave the citizens of Europe this advice...

I want you to lay down the arms you have as being useless for saving you or humanity. You will invite Herr Hitler and Signor Mussolini to take what they want of the countries you call your possessions. Let them take possession of your beautiful island with your many beautiful buildings... If these gentlemen choose to occupy your homes, you will vacate them. If they do not give you free passage out, you will allow yourself, man, woman and child to be slaughtered
Now, I'm not as famous as Ghandi. But I think I'm qualified enough to say the above was stupid advice.

Mahatma Ghandi did a great thing for the world in that he popularized a very powerful tool: Non-violent resistance. But where he failed was in realizing his one tool didn't apply universally (in this case it only works if the person you are resisting is decent enough not to throw you in a gas chamber and kill you en masse)

The same thing is true with the author of this blog.

If I have any advice for him it's to see each "startup success story" as a tool that can create success in some situations. The responsibility of someone wanting to use that tool is to determine which situations that tool applies to.

So when contradictory advice comes along he should ask himself "why did that tool work for company X and not for company Y?" Then decide whether you are closer to company X or company Y.
Teachers vs. Quarterbacks

Here is a very good article by Gladwell comparing the difficulty in finding good teachers to that of choosing NFL quarterbacks:

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/12/15/081215fa_fact_...
This is why I appreciate YHacker News: Don't know when I would have run across this otherwise.

Futher comment shall wait until after my first hand dabbling in a new approach: In my next non-mission-critical PHP web hobbyist app.
Those that refuse to believe x can not even imagine the astounding effects of y.

Einstein nailed it by stating the following:
"Imagination is more important than knowledge." AND
"God does not care about our mathematical difficulties. He integrates empirically."
TO ENABLE: Enable Google Labs for your account, enable "Multiple Inboxes." Then go to the same-named settings panel in gmail prefs.

Here's the link to enable:

http://mail.google.com/mail/?ui=2&fs=1&view=pu&s...
>> "Now that it's tough to raise money, "copying" 37 Signals and charging for your products on a monthly recurring basis is spot on for most new web services."

I just don't understand the recent backlash against ad supported. Some people seem to think it's not real money, or doesn't count as much... Fact is there's insane amounts of money to be made from advertising income.
This is absolutely right: Strategies are situational as well as species-dependent. There are times when the ant colony's strategy breaks down, such as when it invades my back porch and I call the exterminator.

As humans our overriding goal is to use our big brains to switch strategies when needed -- but not to switch too often lest we go insane trying to follow all the good advice on the Internet at once. Nobody said it was easy.
I think Cherrypeel (my startup) is well positioned to help bands and fans connect. I wrote a response to this post here: http://cherrypeel.com/#p=/b/blog
right but we aren't fitness maximizers. we're adaptation executors.
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/11/adaptation-exec.html

for instance: we adapted to an environment of scarcity. now that we live in an environment of plenty a lot of people get fat. they can't turn off the adaptation to favor fatty sugary foods just because the environment has changed.
similarly when encountering aliens adaptations that evolved to help us socialize with our own species may lead us to having strong opinions about the moral systems of said aliens. strong enough to take significant action.
I know the feeling. I keep a running jargon.txt file that I use to capture marketing junk I hear at meetings, e.g.

liase with
leverage
common voice
knowledge base
proliferate

I was half thinking to make a website so other people trapped in meetings could contribute their own jargon. Sort of a social bored at meetings spot.
Was it written by Carol Thatcher?
FWIW, it's not obvious that the one-thread one-connection blocking I/O design is terrible. How terrible it is is a function of address-space starvation from too many threads (a non-issue in 64-bit code), and the overhead of the OS thread scheduler. In a green threading model, I/O can be implemented behind the scenes as non-blocking I/O, but still give user code the ease of use of blocking I/O.

Back to Windows: overlapped I/O is not equivalent to poll, it's much better than that. It is edge-triggered, but Windows manages the threads itself, and tries to ensure 100% CPU utilization in user code, rather than in thread switching logic.

Windows overlapped I/O is effectively a way to write efficient I/O intensive applications in continuation-passing style. You don't need to manage the threads or dispatch loop yourself.

As to why use threads rather than processes, the issue is largely the awkwardness of duplicating the connection handle for a child thread. In Posix land, there's the fork function that makes handing off the handle fairly easy. WSADuplicateHandle can create a new handle that can be used by a child process, but you need to know the child process's ID first, so you need to perform IPC to just to send off the handle.

On the other hand, shared memory concurrency has its advantages too.
It was Lorax-style thinking that got ddt banned throughout much of the world, resulting in millions of deaths.
These results, at least so far (ath=16, dei=4, the=5), are encouraging. I know you'd expect to see less religion in a science and tech community, but I've never seen anything beyond my group of friends, even in the scientific community, where atheists outnumber theists. I'm sometimes split between the views that religion is harmless and comforting for those who believe and should just be left alone, versus every service implicitly building the legitimacy of extremists. If church (or islamic services, or temple) didn't happen normally, extremists would just be obviously crazy with arcane rituals from the past thousand years; but, since it's all so ingrained in our cultural experience, less of a leap is need to understand extremists, which builds this low-level legitimacy for many people, even if we believe that they're criminals.

Just by everything I've ever learned about reason and the scientific method, and everything I've ever read, while I can completely understand why people would _want_ to believe, it's completely mystifying as to why the vast majority of the world's population (well, in the free, information-rich societies) could make themselves believe. It just doesn't make sense to me, given all evidence is so clearly, hugely against it. (Which, I guess, is kind of the point -- which also doesn't make any sense.)
As long as Pandora's Box comes in the form of a poll and defined carefully within some scope of intelligence, this case it's HN, then I say go ahead and open it; the people of the community are always the ones that make-up whatever it's contents are, which are always interesting nonetheless.
This is a good point, but I would expect (the more evolved) human beings in the future to be closer to being fitness maximizers.
Espresso is the ideal stimulant for the creative mind
Omega 3 Fatty Acids Prevent Clogged Arteries In Mice
Connect The Dots - Creativity Examined
See first post on this reddit thread:

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/7vbai/game_of_l...

Please don't encourage HN's convergence to reddit-style discussions.
Great, just tried it - thanks a lot!
Interesting discussion.

Unfortunately, there's no one-size-fits-all solution.
I saw one comment (#16) saying that SaaS vendors have the ability to charge by usage and should do so because companies wants to see the link between what they pay and what they use/get.

But that doesn't work for all products. Charging per usage can mean these two things:
1. The final cost might be hard to evaluate and can get out of hand. Some companies don't want that and want to be able to know in advance exactly how much it will cost.
2. It might tend to limit the usage of the software because you don't want to upgrade if you can get by with what you have.

But I'm not saying charging per usage is not good! I'm trying to point out that you need to look at the problem from different points of view (value you bring, your costs, etc.) and see what works best in your case.

Not everybody can charge depending on what costs them either. Many web-apps don't cost much to operate (if it's mostly displaying pages), so bandwidth costs wouldn't be enough.

Is it easy to give a price to the value you give to your customers? If you can say "it saves you that much time vs. what you have right now", it's easier than for "make your customers happier thanks to a better service".
Is there a metric that would make sense to charge for? Is that metric easy to grasp by your customers? I'm thinking of how Apple markets the sizes for iPod: by songs. 8GB might be obscure but 2000 songs is much easier: I know what a song is (about 3 minutes) and I can easily know how many I already have.
What more would it accomplish? It would just be emotional ranting. Often that kind of thing adds more adversarial elements to the problem and improves nothing.
Great response! You know, there's nothing wrong with 37 Signals' advice, but they imply that their advice is for everyone, and I am not sure it is. It's good advice, excellent advice, especially if your business intentions are similar to theirs. But we have to beware of any advice that's supposed to be universal. As in all things, your mileage may vary.
Thanks for the ups, I appreciate them. I will write something better and submit to wikileaks and/or the EFF. If anyone has some other suggestion I am all ears.
Ugh, one step closer to the nightmare illustrated in http://www.boingboing.net/2007/09/22/how-a-nonneutral-isp.ht...
Here we all were watching the ISPs closely to avoid this from happening, and it turns out that it's the service providers who would take the first step.
Ask HN: Think Obama would approve a wireless network cloud owned by the people?
I'm talking about storage space, wireless receivers in every home. Wireless receivers for every individual. Data centers in every community for local storage of bit torrents.

With a $700 Billion stimulus package, we could hire 1,000 of the best engineers in the world. We could open source the software. We could spend lots on hardware prototypes.

We could wirelessly enable nearly 50,000 miles of railroad, 20,000 miles of interstate. Build out a local CDN for every community of 10,000 or more. All wirelessly. The wired infrastructure could be used for Fiber, there's lots of fiber.

Why should we leave something so important as knowledge in the hands of a few gate keepers?

Imagine how much we could learn if all the public research in the world, funded by public dollars was in the hands of the public? All that data. All those aggregates.

We could do a /lot/ of work and I can't help but think our productivity would improve and we'd innovate more just because we have more knowledge available to us.

We wouldn't even need $700 Billion. Imagine what you could do with just $10 Million.

With $10 million you could find enough people to design a robotic rail system that would exchange spent servers or disks. You could build remote monitoring stations. It could all be automated.

The people own the network, so they could maintain a relay in their homes or their communities. How many people would /volunteer/ for something like this if the funds were there to complete the project?

Something like this is bigger than any one country. It's for all of us here on the Internet and all of those who aren't on it yet. It should integrate with televisions and emergency broadcast systems.

It could be really really good and it would be a real /investment/ in our country and our world.
Polticians are a self-selected groups, but even if they weren't, they'd never could really represent the "interests of the electorate". It's naive to think they could.
I am agnostic, so I can't vote, apparently.
If the Church simply advocated monogamy, then the analogy would hold. But it advocates monogamy and prohibits condom use. It even prohibits condom use between two married people, even if one of them has HIV. The closest equivalent in your analogy would be if the "meat is murder" people said "You shouldn't eat meat. But if you do, make sure the animal suffers first."
Exactly. Even though lately there has been a lot of new users and a lot of meta discussion, there are still interesting posts like this one. Personally I have moved away from PHP and to Django, but I am looking forward to PHP 5.3.
Good analogy, but 37s and Joel would probably be mutant half lion half ants.
So following their advice may or may not be useful - interesting to know how a lion-ant lives, but may not be totally applicable if you're a horse.

I agree though - If you know what species you are, it's better to follow advice of similar companies...
F-Script: Command-line Cocoa shell goes beta
That would be awesome. If only those with the dough felt the same way...

Granted, there are hurdles -- concern for theft, infrastructure for loss/repair/upgrades, etc. But it would be incredibly exciting nonetheless.
One way to see the current Unix time:

perl -e 'print time() . "\n";'
Your first traceroute should be to webnlbcopilot.fogcreek.com not webnlb.fogcreek.com
offtopic, speaking of ants and their expanding colonies - have you seen this?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQERRbU23bU

very interesting.
The difference between 'without knowing' and 'without a god' is marginal (given the context of the poll/thread), so do the math. . .cast your ballot.