skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Bad example, as "simple PHP websites with a single database" often are pretty easy to adapt to simple PHP websites with multiple databases, and those scale quite well. Better than "PHP websites without databases", and probably better than Django too.

Scaling's really in the architecture, not the technology used. You're pretty well off as long as you don't do dumb things like store data in files on the webserver or use a singleton/global database connection.
Steam Hardware Survey: February 2009
I didn't mean to imply that this article was funny. Merely that it's pointless to argue with blatant satire.
Google says:

Small plane looked very unusual. Silver fuselage with Zadornov protruding propeller blades, the wheels of the chassis, almost invisible in tall grass, and ... the complete absence of wings! Because neither the language is not turned to name or pen to be raised on a strange chart «pribambase», literally wrapping the fuselage, a noble word «plane». Puny «body» plane is placed in a huge, slightly flatten the top metal «down» with the bottom and the lid!

More at http://translate.google.com/translate?prev=hp&hl=en&...
Sorry, by not be giving more details... It's just that it would take so much time to describe the whole situation. Chairman asked me the same, I just gave punctual facts, and proved them. Chairman acknowledged situation, and fired some of the proffesors.
Now this is called Idea : Train Search in GoogleTalk
Shortcovers (http://www.shortcovers.com/) is an interesting new entry in this space from huge Canadian bookseller Indigo - they released a week ago. Their software has its failings as an e-Reader but they have a lot of free content and the structure of the service nicely matches the kind of usage that seems likely on a device like the iPhone.
Ask HN - Where to host a blog for your startup?  With Wordpress or on our server?
We want to start a blog for our startup, but we not sure whether we should integrate it into our site (e.g. www.example.com/blog) or if we should just use Wordpress and then link to it from our site (e.g. www.example.wordpress.com).

My gut reaction is that the first option is far more professional. Plus, there are plenty of tutorials on the web about how to integrate a Wordpress blog into one's site, so I don't think that would be a problem. But I notice that the majority of startups seem to go with option #2. Why is this?
It wasn't same design exactly, the difference can be in the details, materials, etc ...
A wonderful read for anyone looking to learn about sharding. However, the Final Thoughts section is probably the most important: don't do it unless you have to. Sharding is a pain and will severely limit your ability to develop new features quickly and for many sites, sharding will never be needed (since they won't grow that big). Databases are efficient and hardware is fast. Sometimes your user-base is larger than what those great things can handle so it's good to know what sharding is, but it isn't fun to do so avoid it if you don't need it.
40m+ active users and I'd never even heard of them!
Why would you possibly think a PhD is a good idea if you find your current situation full of unnecessary work? Do you think a PhD program is going to be some huge difference (hint: it's not)

And depending on where you live (US?) just having an engineering degree doesn't let you call yourself "an engineer"... you need a PE for that (add more years).
Stick it out, if it's only 2 years.

Don't take refuge in the "I'm smarter than all of them, they just don't understand me" excuse. Take what is offered, and learn what you can, where you can.

It may not seem like it now, but 2 years is a really, really, short time in your life.

If you're bored, spend more time on interesting projects, but also spend enough time on your coursework to get decent (though maybe not top) grades.

I started University 3 years early (skipped 3 grades). I failed out in my last year. Generally, I really liked my uni experience, but I regret not finishing.

I've never had a problem getting a job. However, the lack of a degree has been an obstacle in getting US work permits for some sweet companies.

You know how older people will tell you that the years pass quicker and quicker? It's true. One or two years is just a minuscule amount of time in your life. Don't fail to do something because you're impatient, and it'll "take a year". In ten years, it still won't be done, and you'll have "wasted" at least a year in between doing other things.
Wow I would love to know what school "fired" professors because some failing student was complaining...

Got a link to back that up?
Guilty, but the genie is out of the bottle so punishing them won't achieve anything
No, just that there are other ways to solve scaling that can be as simple as changing framework/language/db/architecture etc

As I said though, more likely I'm just getting old...
I think Google will try to create a Twitter clone but in the same fashion as Youtube, will end up discontinuing it and buying out Twitter.

I believe it's almost like a hazing ritual or proving ground. Twitter has enormous potential to integrate Google's Adsense (or more recently, FriendSense) or become another distributive voice for their products.

The question though is, does Twitter want to be bought? Is Google too big now to let Twitter remain truly innovative (I know the catch to this argument is that Twitter has not been very innovative at all actually)?

I have a feeling some big things will be rolling out the door. The founders have been smart enough to let the user base define the product, and I certainly believe that when the time is right, Twitter will be a killer.

Hopefully they don't wait too long though.
Expensify -- simplifies your reimbursement process
What most computer people don't get about TV is that there are millions upon millions of intellectual lazy and/or socially malleable people who would rather follow the tube. It's a demographic, and it's not going away.
apple "locked" everyone into its drm for itunes songs and ended up removing it.

perhaps amazon is trying to do the same thing. promote the drm to get the publishers on-board, then once they have the market (though i think they do already), use their weight to convince publishers to ditch the drm.
How important are the grades in getting those "doors" open, or getting into a Ph.D program?

I don't know what doors you refer to. I've never had a problem getting a job, and I never attended a university (I went to a handful of community colleges for various fun topics, but never got a degree...but having a degree from a good university would certainly help me if I wanted to work at Google or Microsoft or similar). A Ph.D program? Why would you want to go the Ph.D route if you hate academia? This doesn't even make a little bit of sense to me.

Can't I get into a Ph.D program just by demonstrating my competence, and not having to comply with the "system"(and subsequently wasting my time)?

I'm still not getting this. It's sounding like your dream in life is to be a Ph.D working in academia for all of your days. And, yet, you've stated that you hate college. This doesn't make sense.

Why do you want to get into a Ph.D program? I'm not saying you shouldn't do a Ph.D, I'm just having a real hard time wrapping my head around the idea of someone who hates college seemingly dreaming of being in college for 6 to 8 years to obtain a Ph.D.

I think you've gotta do some soul-searching here. What is it you want out of life? If a life of research and academia and publishing is what you want, then yes, you need to go to college. You need to go to college for many more years. That is the price of admission to that life. But, given that that life is kinda just continuing the college experience (only you answer to deans and the board of directors and students rather than answering to professors), I don't see how that could possibly be your real goal.

So, what is your real goal? You tell us that, and we (being a pretty diverse set of hackers and nerds) can probably lend you reasonably good advice on how to get there.
Two Twitter Games That Help Make Your Day Less Boring: @TwitBrain And @BeatMyTweet
WiFi or no WiFi, beverage or no beverage, a coffee house lets you hang out until the manager decides to throw you out. Likewise, NYTimes.com can revamp its site such that nonsubscribers are limited to 1 hour at the site with 24 hours in between, like HN's noprocrast.
His speculation on Google 160 character limit is curious. Twitter made it 140 to allow for usernames and the colon prefix. There is a real reason for it, not a sacred "140 characters is arbitrary and magical" feeling Twitter is holding on to.

http://www.140characters.com/2009/01/30/how-twitter-was-born...

Since 160 characters is/was the common limit to SMS -- which I think carriers themselves define, it feels like the author is missing a pretty key element in Twitter's implementation. The reserved 20 characters _is for_ metadata. I don't know the SMS protocol at all, but I suspect if Twitter could have dropped metadata into a header or somesuch, they would have.
Python: You spend 10 minutes building a plane, and feel very satisfied with yourself, until you notice that location.teleport() is in the standard library...
Yes, the idea that there is any extra room in the SMS protocol for metadata that Twitter is somehow missing is completely retarded.

(Source: I spent 2 years building SMS-based applications for a mobile content company. I can format my SMS in binary, and trust me, there's no space in there.)
"Why is Amazon's text-to-speech system so bad?"

I find that harsh. From the sample from "The Da Vinci Code", I think it's pretty good. It sounds a little bit like an old radio recording but it could be mistaken for a human voice if it were not for the flat intonations.

In any case, it sounds way better than the current text-to-speech on a Mac, which, even though has improved since 1984, doesn't sound that much different from the original Macintosh. (still have the synthesized sound to it)

So, no it's not perfect and sounds odd especially for dialogs but I was expecting something more like on Macs and was pleasantly surprised.
The interesting story is how mobile operators manage to charge more for sending 160bytes of data than they do for a call. And who was the genius that created the $Bn SMS business out of some spare capacity left in the GSM spec as a debugging feature.
I could not understand why they placed yahoo under ‘Telcom’ industry. In my opinion 'Technology' is the most closely fitting category.
I know that twitter started as an SMS app, and it may still be popular as such (I always use it on the web), but as internet-on-your-phone becomes more ubiquitous, sticking to the limitations of SMS becomes unnecessary. I'm not sure how far we are from that SMS to internet swapover, but my guess is not very far.
Hi kashif. You might find the following useful:

Jack Moffit's blog: http://metajack.im/
Twisted words (python) http://twistedmatrix.com/trac/wiki/TwistedWords
Host it with Wordpress or Typepad but do the subdomain hosting option, eg blog.example.com.

This will simplify your life and also give you a place to communicate when (not if) your site goes down. I would also use a dedicated DNS hosting provider (we use worldwidedns.net) with a short TTL on blog.example.com in case you need to switch the IP in a hurry.
See, I agreed with you that Google would try to clone or buy out Twitter. That's what I thought they were trying to do when they bought Jaiku -- but then they sat on it for two years and then killed it completely, throwing the source overboard to save it at the last minute, like Netscape did.

So that leaves a buyout -- in which case, what are they waiting for? Google is not known for hanging around debating acquisitions. It gets in early (with the notable exceptions of YouTube and DoubleClick). So is it waiting for Twitter to prove itself? With CNN constantly plugging Twitter and even members of congress getting in on the act, how much more does it have to prove?

I think the time for Google to get involved has passed. They will partner with Twitter as an independent company, if anything.
I hate to make a me too post, but... Me Too.

This is by far the best advice. You get the SEO value of having the blog be on your domain instead of someone elses, and you get the resiliency value of having the blog be on someone elses server(s) instead of your own.
I am astounded that in response to proposals to add closures to Java, many Java programmers protested that Java didn't need no stinkin' closures.
Paper Airplane Designs: The Ring
The limit is 140 octets. That can mean 160 7-bit characters, 140 8-bit (1 byte) characters, etc.
May I ask what company/product you worked for?

I am launching my own SMS content service very soon, just curious.
Also remember that the 5Bn pageviews is not the reason to shard -- it's the total size and mutation rate ("read/write ratio") of your data. If your DB fits in memory, or if your reads are 10X your writes, don't just shard because it's cool.
Well, SMS is win-win from that perspective really. Sure, the 160 bytes of data costs 10 cents, which is a little crazy, but 160 characters replace a conversation that might last two minutes or more, with greetings and small-talk and such. Text is more efficient than speech for conveying information, and the social conventions around SMS make it even more so.

So consumers save money by sending a 10-cent SMS instead of making a 20-cent phone call.
Portugese gov. says no to FOSS
I think most people need to be in "passive mode" at times. There is no substitute for sitting on a couch and doing nothing while a device shows a mix of recorded and live content continuously. Having limited choices is good in that context, because it removes the need to think. You flip through the channels and stick with one that seems interesting for the time being.

I believe the current "passive" mode of TV won't go away. It will coexist with the Youtube mode of actively finding, watching, following recommendations, etc.
The place I'm working now is incorporated right here in WA. It's one of the things that I love about them: they say what they mean.

Incorporating somewhere across the country we've never been strikes me as almost premature optimization. You're already trying to be too-clever-by-half (what does your source code look like?). It also suggests a disconnect with the community (what else are you willing to do to us to save a buck?).

I'm not saying it's inherently good or bad, but simply that there are a set of people like me (potential employees, maybe!) for whom it's a good sign if you never even considered being a Delaware (or Cayman Islands) company.
Car Makers collaborate on Linux for cars
>I think Google will try to create a Twitter clone but in the same fashion as Youtube, will end up discontinuing it and buying out Twitter.

They already did this: Jaiku

http://www.jaiku.com/

What's the point of trying to buy out Twitter when you've already bought out a Twitter-clone.
I disagree. I'm with PG on this one.

Those 'intellectually lazy' people watch tv becuase they grew up with it. The new generation is growing up with facebook/myspace/im/friendfeed/twitter.

Its the conversation about the tv show that counts, not the tv show. The main problem right now is that tv still makes up such a large part of peoples lives almost out of tradition, and also becuase TV on the net isn't there yet.

The only valid claim this article talks about is about producers/writers -- essentially production value. Thats whats lacking currently with most online-only things. But when there is money, the writers/producers will follow. And the money is coming, if it isnt already here.
On Martin Armstrong's 'It's Just Time'
As an aside, the official "compression" algorithm is just unbelievable. DJB's comment in dns_packet.c is quite apt:

/*
DNS should have used LZ77 instead of its own sophomoric compression algorithm.
*/
Thank you. Not truly what I was looking for but it it def nice.
Using statistic based on all internet users to determine which browsers are most important for a given site is not a good idea.
Loss leader laptops to subsidise online computing?
Add to it the spare time at an airport, in a supermarket, in an office waiting ...

Also disabled people come to mind, kids as well. So TV will definetely stay
PG might not have hit a home run, but the author's arguments here are generally either flawed or unfounded, and the ends with a giant piece of _spam_. I'm sure I could spend my time much more productively than arguing with this article, but it's hard not to comment when someone is wrong on the Internet.

1. "It is frankly amazing...that we pretend [communication] should cost dramatically less to obtain on a monthly basis than...other less valuable things."

There is no denying the fact that supply and demand have an impact on pricing, but let me be clear here: the price of Internet connectivity is going down. No company is going to decide that connectivity is really 'worth' more than they're charging and raises prices. It would be suicide. As for the technical side, wireless and wired solutions are being brought forth every day that reduce cost. There is no implicit 'value' being provided than shuttling some bits down a tube (or a series of them).

4."Every TV will soon have a unique IP address."

Excuse the ad hominem attack, but any person well enough acquainted with technology to say "Paul Graham is wrong." should understand how the Internet works well enough to avoid making incorrect statements like this. Even if he did mean that each TV would have a distinct IP address on networks, that really has no bearing at all on the discussion at hand.

3."To give you some Big TV math to work with: One hour of Prime Time TV is worth approximately .64 cents for every single viewer (32 :30 second ads * .02 cents per ad)."

Here it is again. That etherial substance called 'worth.' Even assuming these numbers are correct (the article cites no sources), the current going rate has almost no bearing on the future.

And then the kicker:

4. "Our new company, SaysMe TV has a new model, ... a new form of TV commercial, available for national 'local cable' campaigns meant to be 'Tivo-resistant.'"

This is as close as the author comes to simply admitting that this post is an ad.

In summary, this article is flamebait, linkbait, and spam.
Thats an awesome thought and observation.
They are called Boltblue (Boltblue.com). In terms of product offering they're very unexciting: just your bog-standard ringtone/wallpaper company. But I had to implement payment systems and an SMS gateway in Java, going all the way down to SMS binary format because (at the time) they sold black-and-white "service logos" for Nokias, a crazy hack which fitted 160x30 pixel binary images into multi-part SMS messages. (There are also a couple other mobile products where it's useful to be able to format your own SMS)

I learned a lot and the people who worked there were great, although it's not a company that's going places.
BREAKING: Spotify Hacked. If You Are a Member, Read This. - The Next Web
BB&T's John Allison - The Financial Crisis: Causes and Possible Cures
He needs to do a bit of proof reading. PG articles are a lot better read than Morgans...
Respectfully, I disagree. The "SMS isn't important" argument is why Pownce failed. 50% of twitter's content is sent in via SMS. It's not consumed via SMS so much, but it sure as hell is produced that way.

And remember that the mobile Internet in the US is pretty good. In much of the rest of the world (the places where people have mobile phones but don't have computers) mobile Internet is still slow and poky. The switch-over from SMS to Internet hasn't happened even in the US yet, so it will be a long while before it becomes a good idea for Twitter to drop SMS, on the order of 5-10 years.
very gud use of IM
Mostly a hacker with enthusiasm for the project. Useful skills: php, mysql, html, javascript, linux admin, graphical design... This is a one man project not in the position to hire, the offer is to join as a co-founder.
Ask 37signals: How many hours should I work per week?
Android is coming where you least expect
I don't understand the sudden fad for professional companies to host their blogs on Wordpress, Tumblr, etc. It makes absolutely no sense to me. Keep your blog on your own domain as a subdomain or a subdirectory and NOT on example.tumblr.com or example.wordpress.com. Both are great services, but shouldn't be where you host your company's blog.
What Kindle on iPhone says about Amazon’s eBook strategy
Quantum paradox directly observed - a milestone in quantum mechanics
So a future is if I have a variable x in thread t, I can assign x to a future f, which is essentially a null pointer, and then in thread t when I need to use x, thread t will go off and calculate the value of f that x is pointing to, going into a wait state until it gets a value for f assigned so x actually is pointing to some value, so that it can use x for whatever it is and carry on? Is this is basic idea? I'd be interested in learning more. However, I wonder if one wants a pre-written lib for this, or if it is easy enough to implement oneself. Like if one is using the posix thread lib, would it be hard to throw some add-ons in there oneself to support "futures"?
Language E-Learning Startup Myngle Secures €1 Million
I know very well how you feel. I cannot give concrete advice, since I'm in a different part of the world and the context doesn't apply, but it sounds all too familiar.

What I can say is that a job and a PhD are completely different paths. Both have advantages and satisfactions, but they require different things. If you want a job, grades most likely don't matter. This I can safely say about any free market economy, especially in this field. But for a PhD... at least where I'm from, what matters most is having your personal professor guiding you. Whatever he says goes.
It looks like there's no way to purchase a book from within the app. Having to use my computer to go to Amazon to buy a book so that it will sync with my iPhone reminds me of when I had my old Handspring PDA.

This is a little disappointing from the company that brought us 1 click ordering.
Is it being intellectually lazy or socially malleable to enjoy the occasional piece of well-written, high-budget content?

I submit that HBO's "Rome" was better than anything youtube has ever produced, and more satisfying to me than many hours spent wandering facebook and social news sites.

I don't have an easy a time judging other people's tastes; I have a little humility.
Bebot, an impressive iphone music app
The article doesn't mention this, but a potential problem: The Da Vinci Code doesn't have <goodnews> tags. For a text-to-spech system to truly be able to read books naturally, it has to be able to parse emotion out of a text and figure out how to read the text based on the situation. We could have people annotate books, but that would give the TTS limited ability.
I bailed halfway through the first full paragraph: "From 30K feet, all video is becoming Internet video; it is digital and accessed via standard http (progressive download) protocols. However video being on the Internet doesn’t mean that it will be freely available."

I said to myself, "I don't recall Paul making that argument." And I looked back, and he didn't. Modern-day piracy is cited as being part of the reason internet video is winning (a simple observation), but he also says: "But iTunes shows that people will pay for stuff online, if you make it easy. A significant component of piracy is simply that it offers a better user experience." Clearly his argument is not that internet video will be or should be free.

With a strawman in sentence two, I'm not terribly impressed.
Dear Huffington Post:  Please, stop using "slams" for everything
I went to the HP to avoid inanities in news coverage. This is quickly adding them to the inane list.