skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
With technical matters it seems good to be relentless and focus on your needs. As you mentioned, the goal is to simplify code so that it's maintainable and satisfies you.

With social matters you usually need to be relentless and focus on other people's needs. The goal is to find out what's irking a friend or a customer and fix it to satisfy them.
There's a lot of tinyurl clones that basically do the same job, only focusing on providing redirects for long urls, but one that does more and that I've liked a lot recently is http://tr.im - it got me to switch after years of using tinyurl, mainly because it carries a history of links you've previously shortened and shows some cool traffic stats for each one. So I can see them adding even more features for a paid pro account.
Can someone please tell me the trick in this amazing magic video
Think: pulling that data into a techmeme.com style aggregator/ranking site for the most popular urls people are linking to. Imagine how dynamic it would be - things that got linked to the most would percolate up to the top. you could watch in near real time as news breaks and gains traction.

I've had a service like this in mind for a while and haven't pulled the trigger because I'm a chronic procrastinator.
Page Load Error
Is Citrix the Real Challenge to VMware?
When it comes to the competition, VMware should be worried about Microsoft, right? That’s what common sense tells us – but common sense also tricked people for centuries into thinking the world is flat. Sure, Hyper-V is an improvement over the downright awful Virtual Server, but it doesn’t match what VMware offers. In fact, Hyper-V’s most impressive trait is simply that it’s from Microsoft. Its feature set, though, is still lacking. That said, Microsoft’s playbook is well known. Throw a product out there just to be in the space. Improve it until it can’t be entirely dismissed as inferior. Improve it some more until it is “good enough.” Then, divide and conquer.
Continuous Deploymont of Downloadable Client Software
Hydroponic Systems for Sale
Most commercial hydroponic systems direct a continuous flow of nutrient solution over the plant roots. One continuous flow system uses polyvinyl chloride (PVC) pipe of the type commonly used for household waste plumbing.
is this a joke?

Reader Tom Broderick suggests the company could buy something easy and cheap, such as a development-stage search engine like Cuil. Or something big and complex, like Sun Microsystems (JAVA). (Not a new idea, I might add.) Or, he suggests, pry PayPal away from eBay (EBAY), and make a big move in electronic payments
simple. they dont have to make much money. They can run of a shared server as it just has redirects. Also, they get money from paid advertising on their website. DONE!
Slight hijack, but I last time I used it I thought Stack Overflow missed the value of simplicity.

On Stack Overflow, at its core, you have posts, and people reply to that post. That's fine. You can do that whether you're logged in or not (although you need an OpenID provider to sign up, which is a pain when it /could/ partner with a provider to seamlessly give you one on registering).

You can mod up and down the posts. And mod up and down the comments. But only if you have a certain amount of karma for each. But the selected answer by the author of the question is at the top, ignoring the karma completely.

You can have favourites. But only if you're logged in, despite the fact you can submit posts whether you are or aren't.

And then you have comments on each post. But you have to click to view the comments. And you can only add comments if you have a certain amount of karma. This kills a lot of conversation needlessly.

And you can edit other people's posts - if you have a certain amount of karma.

And you can flag posts, but only if you're logged in.

And then too often you view posts that make no sense until you see the context which is buried amongst the tags, rather than the site being naturally split into natural obvious 'sections' which will interest people who know about certain technologies.

It's all very confusing, and completely needless. Hide things or at least make it obvious what I can't use before clicking. Reduce the arbitrary karma limits to add more distinct classes so that the majority have equal abilities.
Tinyurl has ads, but I wonder how effective it is. People can avoid going there altogether since they provide an API. As do most other services. Simply making use of that API in your own services, software means that their number of page views doesn't increase.

Now, it may get annoying, but having a "You are redirecting to http://somelongurl.com" sort of page, would not only be safer for all, but would also provide another spot for ads. (I know one of the services does this already, but I dont' remember which one)
there is also significantly less witty one liners / sarcastic replies / downright attacks, at least compared to most communities I have seen.

that suggests they are overutilized elsewhere and work pretty well here, I am not adverse to opposing viewpoints, I just dont want to see plainly dumb comments, if you overuse it, then it loses meaning.

(taking this thread as a test data, while I dont agree with a lot of what people have said, I wouldnt have downvoted any)
How does Facebook manage 1800 MySQL Servers with just 3 DBAs?
This is a different propopsal than the IETF draft by Donovon Preston, which is knows as "Reverse HTTP".

This is apparently "ReverseHTTP" and the specification looks about twenty times longer, needlessly. I'd love to hear any good reasons why I should use this "ReverseHTTP" instead of long-polling or Reverse HTTP... the IETF draft
> They didn't set out to build a platform that would please console geeks.

They could still have built it on a better technical basis. That's like saying MS is excused from having had a crappy security model for WinXP (and only slightly less crappy for WinVista) because they set to "build an operating system for everyone." In the end, if you build something on a better technical basis, everyone profits.
PIDA: the Python Integrated Development Application
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Let's use real languages for builds
"Of course, there are a few very good software engineers in Japan but they are ... self taught ..."

Unlike other places in the world, where, if you want to hire a decent software engineer, you'd look for someone who knows only what they've seen in college.
The demo speaks for itself.

http://www.reversehttp.net/demos/demo.html
Just F’ing Ship It
Russians & Chinese probably have a detailed copy of the plans. Just ask them.
Google uses more electricity than most countries on earth
Please post to Reddit
In safari, the loading spinner never stops. Not a good thing.

I don't really see what this is trying to solve either.
On the usability side, clarifying how to change the color of the button could be more intuitive.
I think I can answer this one, as I own the URL shortener Cligs ( http://cli.gs/ ).

There are two main approaches to running a URL shortener: a "basic" approach that simply does a redirect and a more advanced approach with value added services (like analytics).

A basic redirect comes in two types:

1. A proper HTTP redirect (a 30x code, of which only 301 is of proven SEO value).

2.a. A cloaked redirect in which you redirect to a page on the shortening service's website that displays two frames with one frame being the destination page and the other frame being a page you control.

2.b. An interstial redirect in which the initial landing is a page on the service's website that "refreshes" after a few seconds to the destination.

If you do option 1, then you can't make money off the redirects. You can try to make money off the people using your site. If you look at tinyurl.com, that's exactly what they do: find the AdSense block on the right hand side edge of the site.

Both of options 2 offer you a real chance to display advertising. Adjix does that and I have no idea about the kind of revenue they're seeing, but you can see their payout rates at http://web.adjix.com/AdjixLinkerInfo.html .

Option 2b is very interesting but the most annoying for the user IMHO. Linkbee allows you put interstial ads (see http://www.linkbee.com/create.php ).

The value add services on top of redirection are very valuable. There are two kinds:

a. Services that add value to the short URL creator (i.e. the service user). A great example is analytics which tells you a lot about who's clicking through. Competing on analytics is an effective business strategy ;) There are other kinds of value add services, some of which tie back to options 2a and 2b above (i.e. get the user to earn money from their links).

b. Services that are unrelated to URL shortening per se, but are valuable. I've seen a few comments in this thread about the value of the data gained from tracking traffic. I'll leave this one to your imagination - run wild!

There is a third way to make money: white-label services. I won't explain the business logic behind this, so I'll just point you to my recent announcement on the Cligs blog: http://cli.gs/MvDp1s . Cligs is offering for-pay fully branded short URLs with the analytics built right in. I know of at least one other service that will launch with a similar product soon (they're in testing!).

So how can you make money? It's a very competitive market, and the cost of entry is tiny, the user loyalty is almost non-existent, and the traffic can be huge requiring good service architecture. My point from the above is that you will be able to make money as there are ways to create value for your users you can charge for, but expect to get a few bruises on the way.

Finally, a personal note: It's a great market to learn business skills in because it's so competitive and the popular services are run by some really smart people. Can you really value the lessons you learn from competing in this market? It beats any MBA you care to point to.

And yes, you should use Cligs as it's the best around: http://cli.gs/ :)
MetaHN: Spammers testing the waters?
Is it just me, or has there been a recent (anecdotal, I know) surge in new users just posting links to stuff like the google homepage?
Most of our hardcore data is in non-relational sources (including Hadoop).

Our global DB is Postgres - that holds everything which we haven't had a reason to move off it - it's a pair of Sun boxes with 128GB of RAM using Postgres warm standby (in this case the hardware is a lot cheaper than trying to shard it).

And we also have a ton of other MySQL and Postgres databases running other services.
A Time for Tontines
I believe Comet works around this by using iframes, though I could be wrong. Either way, ReverseHTTP is another way to not have to poll for resources, which might be useful for instance in real time chat.
Colleges Struggle to Figure Out Who Will Say Yes
I use MyYahoo, and have for what seems like forever. I have never understood the appeal of the blank Google page as I like to see the latest news feeds (NY Times, BBC, and such). I tried iGoogle, but still prefer the MyYahoo layout. I also have my normal daily sites (Techmeme, Hacker News, local news) setup in the Firefox bookmark toolbar.

On my work PC I've actually got Firefox setup with 4 tabs (work-related sites) that load when I start it, though MyYahoo is set as the homepage there as well.
There is a second useful meaning if you take a look at the french translation of the word 'relent'. =) Good sign.
Ask HN: Before you startup, count the cost - really!
Faustian Cloudonomics
I see your point, but when I hear "exceptions to every rule" I want to explore the boundaries of those exceptions. I think that presentations are creative performances, essentially, so it's likely that the number of exceptions are going to be large.
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Review: Boxee Media Center (or Going HD: Part 4)
Be a Better Blogger. Stop Reading Blogs.
Eric Schmidt reanimates el cheapo PC zombie
I stopped trying when I realized I needed a guide like this.
Neat, almost a bit magical. But what kind of common web development problems does this solve?

I'm sure there are a lot of contrived examples, but are there any good ones? Facebook and Twitter.

Ok, but are there any good and common ones?
Might also try "Beyond Bullet Points," which keeps you from unleashing PowerPoint hell on the audience.
Some physicist will correct me, but I think this is more of an accounting trick than a technological one: it serves to ask for more money.

I have no evidence, but my impression is, that aerogel is used to track the ageing of the decaying warheads, also providing data for the computed simulations to be more realistic. Such aerogel is readily available on the free (in the doublespeak sense) market.
Another thing worthy of mention is that if you only have upvotes the ranking of articles turn out to be considerably simpler. Ranking with both up and down votes is a lot harder.
Your cool technology is worthless if you can't get people to use it. Selling it is only one way to do that.
Such trade-offs are common but they're still trade-offs. You're still effectively dividing yourself into two halves, and only because you're lacking the trust that life will favor those who engage fully to its offerings.

I don't mean to preach here as only you can know what kind of life is good for you at the time. But I think there's a immensely deep question beyond; that's why realising what you want is so damn hard in practise!

The reason I'm insisting on this is that I'm slowly beginning to hit the hard wall myself. I don't fully trust life myself either, yet. Trust also means letting go of lots of things you've believed that are important but which you're only attached to. Still, I'm afraid I can't prolong the current state of affairs for too long.
Will Google Uphold its "Do No Evil" Motto With Muziic?
I'm not sure whether it possible to get them in Nigeria, but devices like Nokia N810 or Google G1 Dev. Phone can be very useful. They can stand by for almost a week. At least for me, here, in Nepal, these devices are very good solutions for electrisity outages. There are only 8 hours per day with power in Kathmandu (4 at morning and 4 at evening), but of course, mobile towers works 24/7. Some cheap netbooks with a 6-cell battaries is also reasonable. They could be used as linux-based test servers (without running X11.)
No more lolcats in tech presentation, plz
absolutely right...

It's just like every other artform - the rules are there to give people a framework they can work from, but the best performers break the rules. Clifford Stoll is a great example of this.
The real measure of resolution is not megapixels but line-pairs/millimetre, and no matter how good your sensor is, a good quality lens can deliver about 90 lp/mm and you won't get that in practice without a good tripod. On a 36mm sensor that translates to about 6MP. That's why Foveon can deliver such great images even tho' their sensor is "only" 3MP - they are getting the most out of what the lens delivers. Shooting handheld, at 3MP you've got all the resolution you're going to get, the thing that matters more now is contrast, colour fidelity and saturation, sharpness.
That's a cool idea. However, it's still basically an advertising business unless you're charging for access to that site. And all of a sudden you have introduced a big incentive for people to spam/game your service.

I guess what I'm getting at is... some data is valuable, but doesn't, at least to ignorant me, seem to have a market for it.

(Edit: BTW, I'd be happy to be proven wrong... for instance, I have this site where the data might be worth something, and the ads aren't worth much:

http://shoplist.dedasys.com/ )
Any relevant links at all?
You're thinking of S-pixels and R-pixels in Fuji's 2006 sensors.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_CCD
Case breaks things; entering a sub-domain name with uppercase letters causes the local server to fail. DNS names are supposed to be case-insensitive.

http://www.rfc-archive.org/getrfc.php?rfc=4343
I expect this may be down to the terminology. Sybase always used to quote huge numbers for DBA:database ratio compared to Oracle. But what Sybase refers to as a "database", Oracle just refers to as a "schema", and there can be as many schemas as you want within an Oracle database.

And even if it is 1800 physical servers... If significant fractions of them are identical, they really should only be counted as one database cluster with so-many nodes.
Of course when you hire someone, you want someone who can learn by himself and learns new stuff outside of college... But from my experience, someone who has gone to a good university where they teach the equivalent of mit's sicp, combinatory logic, algorithms, compilation, os and so on (so not a java school that only just teach java or whatever flavor of the year) and is self taught tends to be better than the guy who is self-taught from high school. A lot (not all) of software engineers who are self taught without university education lack basic concepts of computer science and only taught themselves languages without really digging deeper in the concept.
That's why to have a lot of good programmers a country need good universities.
Maybe there are no "common" uses just yet because we do not have an easily implemented way to do it. When Ajax first " came out", many said the same things. "great but what do we use it for." now, can you imagine the present day web without it?
I wonder if you can shorten it down even further to just relentless.

When all of the employees quit, when rent is due, and when the ramen runs out, it takes a certain kind of person to continue working. And I think it's more than just being resourceful, although that's a big part. It takes relentless dedication to keep pushing forward and innovating, when all the tides are pulling the wrong way. Edison had it this drive. I think Einstein did as well. And if you look at the few dozen founders of successful startups, I think you'll find they have it too. They're relentless. They don't take weekends off and they don't quit at five. But they're not a workaholic, because it isn't work. It's their life.
is that the fault of DNS or the actual server sitting behind it, expecting the host header?
The salary is actually not that bad in game companies in japan at least from friends who worked in some. Working hours are tough though (a lot of my friends there used to finish at 9-10pm almost everyday) and overtime is usually unpaid (but that's the case for a lot of small companies in japan even though it's illegal and it's not as bad as, for example, architecture companies...)
I remember almost exactly the opposite about AJAX (when the paper came out, not when the XmlHttpRequest object was introduced) --- people went ape about what they could use it for. AJAX style genuinely made new things possible. This (supposedly) just makes them cleaner.
VC-s cut both ways: see Eric Brewer for the good and Ferguson (S.C.H. High Stakes, No Prisoners) for the ugly.
25 oldest domain names
> I will not shed a tear when the last major record label shuts down.

I'll be positively ecstatic!
One of my college professors used to say that there has been no net increase in productivity due to computers. Rather productivity has been simply shuffled around. You need fewer accountants and secretaries (jobs that existed before computers) but you need lots of computer people, doing jobs that didn't exist before. But viewed as a whole, organizations generate no more value per person employed.
The time to invent transactions in filesystem?

fd=open("...");

transaction_begin(fd);

write(fd, ...);
close(fd);

rename(fd);

transaction_end(fd);
If you're looking for a new camera I've found the following sites to be useful..
http://www.dpreview.com/
http://www.dcresource.com/
http://www.cameralabs.com/
http://www.imaging-resource.com/
http://www.photographyblog.com/
If your startup's core competence is online 419 scams then I wish you guys were a bit less resourceful ;-))

(sorry dude, but I couldn't help it... though distasteful this joke might seem)
What really annoys me is that pg took away the ability to downvote a comment after a day or two. Given I use RSS to visit news.yc every few days, that means I can't fully participate; I can upvote people's comments, but not downvote them.

And all because someone went around downvoting all the comments for a particular user they fell out with. It's a sledgehammer, pg! Come up with something better.
In addition to always previewing it unless you opt out? We could, but we were hoping to avoid extra steps to preview things.
Akamai CEO sees "huge" broadband growth continuing in U.S.
You have a point. But I have to say that I didn't need any imagination to think of ways to use Ajax to enhance parts of my web app interfaces.

The only reason I hadn't use xmlhttprequests extensively before it became popular (and renamed Ajax) was because it was too much work, too error prone. The popularization of Ajax lead to solid frameworks and libraries, which fixed that.
Wish I could down vote you
Tech Investing In The Downturn
> Do a Good Thing today: convince a friend never to pay for recorded music again.

I do that already. My argument is that when the record companies are bribing governments into enacting bad laws. This harms others and is therefore immoral. When you buy a CD, you give moeny to the recrod companies, which helps them do this. Therefore buying CDs makes you complicit in immoral behaviour.

So it's not only in your self-interest to fileshare instead of buying CDs, it's the moral thing to do.
JSON Meets Tokyo Cabinet: CloudKit 0.11.0 Released
The Next Generation in Human Computer Interfaces -  Videos
> Recorded music takes huge time and effort on the part of a wide range of individuals, all specialized on different aspects of the production. From songwriting through arranging, recording and mic placement and the myriad expertises that this requires, through mixing, mastering, etc.. You're telling me that all of this has no value?

It has the value, in the market sense, of the amount of money someone is prepared to pay for it. If people aren't prepared to pay enough money for some musicians to make a living as musicians, they should get another job instead. The world doesn't owe musicians a living.
News for hackers doesn't mean news about hackers.
It sounded like a broad-spectrum communications monitor.

If you want to know who's broadcasting anywhere in the range from 1MHz to 10GHz (example only -- I don't know the real range for this device), that's a bandwidth of 9.999 GHz.

You could scan freqencies sequentially, but it's slow and you might miss something. You can't afford to build a 20 GHz A-to-D converter, and even if you could, you don't want to build a computer big enough to process the resulting 80 GB/s data stream (assuming a 40 GHz sample rate with 16-bit samples).

The compressive sampling process is what allows you to sample at a lower rate (as long as you can assume that the signal you're looking for doesn't use too much of the total bandwidth). The convex optimization is apparently used to decide how to do the sampling in a way that's guaranteed to recover your signal.
It's all in fuzzy definitions, but this is using 'comet'.

Comet is generally used to refer to any method that can emulate a raw socket - iframes, xhr, inserting script tags, etc etc

All this is doing is proxying http from the server, to the browser and back. It's an interesting thing to try, but I can't see any real life use for it.