skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
answer here: http://code.google.com/p/redis/wiki/FAQ

The most important part for the lazy guys: So what is Redis really about? The User interface with the programmer. Redis aims to export to the programmer the right tools needed to model a wide range of problems. Sets, Lists with O(1) push operation, lrange and ltrim, server-side fast intersection between sets, are primitives that allow to model complex problems with a key value database.

As a proof try to play and download the source of our small twitter clone at http://retwis.antirez.com and imagine to write it with a plain key-value DB: it's much harder, and slower.
Best business advice I've been given: always make sure there are an odd number of founders so you can always get a resolution to any disagreements.
Hosting In The Cloud with ServePath and F5
Siemens elevators have a (~n unsurprising) default code of "0000". But this is nothing new.

http://www.cs.virginia.edu/cs588/safecracker.pdf
A report from the March 10 Web Innovators Group bash
I've been told a good rule of thumb for producing reasonable estimates is to make an estimate for how long you think it should take, then double the answer and add 10%. I never want to follow the advice when making estimates, as it feels like saying it'll take so much longer than I actually think it will might make it seem I'm inefficient, but in reality it turns out to be about right.

Perhaps also worth mentioning Hofstadter's Law:

"It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take Hofstadter's Law into account."
It's implied from the tour. I mean, if you don't use their headphone, you cannot control anything on it. I have their in-ear headphone and it sounds great so it's not a bad thing.
they moved the play controls to the headphone cable and removed them from the ipod itself. if you don't use their crappy earbuds, you have no way of skipping songs or pausing.
I'm surprised that revenue is only $2k/day. I know that HITs don't cost very much but I was under the impression that the volume was considerably higher than this figure suggests.

Does anyone know why posting HITs is still US only? Expanding it internationally seems like a fairly straightforward way to increase volume.
The fact that this question keeps coming up without a solid, convincing answer seems to indicate that there is no simple answer. It is most likely a huge combination of factors.This also means that simply copying one aspect of another country's solution is likely to be a disaster.
Real IT Inteview - Joe Talks VMs
It's not just that foreign governments have done "better" things. It's that the US is a much harder place to provide broadband (or any service to). The population density of the US is 31 people per square KM. Compare that to the UK at 246 or South Korea at 498 or the Netherlands at 398 or even Ireland (the least dense European country) at 59 - and, of course, Ireland has crappy internet.

The cost to lay cable in the US is higher by several orders of magnitude. 10 miles of fiber cabling will cost 10x the cost of 1 mile of fiber cabling when both are bought in bulk. The US has inherent higher costs. The answer cannot be, "just do what other countries do".

Since someone will ask: why then can't New Jersey and Massachusetts which have high population densities have better cheap internet? Because companies price things nationally and not relative to the actual cost of providing the service to the customer. Customers revolt when you try to explain to them that they cost more to service and so you're going to charge them more money.

The US will have higher costs for anything that has costs per mile because we have more miles to cover. I'm actually shocked that the US is so competitive in areas like broadband and wireless coverage given that those business have to build a ton more infrastructure to cover the same number of people.
> They also still pay a fair amount of more regressive taxes like social security

Social security for low-income folks isn't so much a tax as a forced savings plan. For low-income folks, the return is pretty good. For higher-income folks, the return is lousy. For the rich, it's simply not a factor.

Note that the "regression" comes from capping the amount taxed, but the benefits are capped too. If you uncap the amount taxed and uncap the benefits, Ross Perot will be getting >$100k benefits and the system will have even more economic trouble. If you uncap the amount taxed and keep the benefits cap, it becomes yet another welfare program and folks are going to start caring about the 15%.

In the past, SS advocates have argued vehemently against turning it into yet another welfare program and have also opposed uncapped benefits. They argue that both will lead to decreased support for SS.

Are they wrong?
What Web Frameworks Are Missing - Credit Card Payment Out of the Box
This points to a much broader security problem: Default admin passwords. They are everywhere, from elevators to routers, and it seems like 90% of devices are just left out in the open with the default admin password.

Instead of having a default password there should be a step in the setup where you are prompted for an admin password. Yes, there will be a lot of easily guessable passwords, but surely it's better than a factory default.
Probably cookies, I think the Google cookie lives for a really long time. And anytime Google sends you something, they can send and check for cookies. That includes Google Analytics, too, I suppose.
I was hired in 1997 at Secure Networks by Alfred Huger, who I had known online since I was in high school. We were friends outside the company, but nobody in the world would say the work relationship was friendly. Al was like Matthew Broderick's character in "Glory"; whatever terms you were on with him before the company --- and Al and I were peers --- at SNI, Al was in charge. I got yelled at a lot. I have to stop to consider whether he was the best boss I've had, or just in the top 2.

I started Sonicity in '99 with two friends, which didn't work out for some of the same reasons here, but also for other reasons, like fairness concerns, no clear lines of communication, lots of overlap, and (of course) a cratering market. We might not have ended so badly had we not taken money, but whatever flimsy rapport we had before the startup didn't survive the strain of having a board and several new vectors of company politics (a CEO, a competing management faction, etc).

(I'm on good terms with both my cofounders there, and almost went to work with one of them at Bloomberg years later --- he's since started and sold a digital music player company).

Incidentally, the "working with friends" problem also occurs outside the founders team. We hired lots of our friends at Sonicity, and that was a problem too. If you aren't totally clear about your expectations (and we never were), friends expect a particular kind of management that is hard to maintain. Ironically, the best performer we hired at Sonicity is someone I almost got in a bar fight with the year before we started the company.

I started Matasano with Jeremy in 2005; Jeremy and I go back to 1995. One of the things I think we did right, right off the bat, was to bring on a third person (also a good friend) as our boss. Neither Jeremy nor I have little thought bubbles coming out of our head saying "I'm the CEO". I'm Karl Rove, Jeremy is Condoleeza Rice, and neither of us want to be the Commander in Chief.

We've had conflicts, but the simple tactic of surrendering final say in the company has defused them; I'd be fired before drama I started wrecked the company, which is actually a really comforting thought.
Great advice. A few years back a couple of friends and I decided to start a new company. Both were (and continue to be) really good friends to me, but just before we formally created the company, I decided to back down. The reason -- and I told both of them that -- was that I was afraid that the company would eventually destroy the friendship.

We all decided to go our own ways and thus the friendship survived. I often wonder if we could have pulled it out, but I really don't regret the decision.
That only really works if your application crashes very rarely to begin with. Unfortunately, that excludes the stuff I'm working on.

I really like the "dead tab" icon, but if it showed up 5 times per day, I'd grow to loathe it in a week.
I've always wondered what would happen if local/state governments owned last-mile fiber/copper lines and auctioned off the usage rights to service providers.
I would disagree - end users being lazy/unknowledgeable is something foreseeable, so the company could do something like starting with a random admin password or requiring that the admin password be changed before use. Home router manufacturers seem to be doing increasingly better at this.
Constitutional amendment would enshrine the right to vote
About the homeless with mental illness...

These days we have advanced medication which can cure I'd say 95% of all mental illnesses. So these people would only be in hospital a few weeks to get onto the right medication.

Then get them into temporary housing - not a shelter where they have to beg/pray to eat, but just a normal house.

They should ideally be on social security while ill, but work if they are able.
Innovation at Apple never ends. Bravo!
<incredulous>You can't even make an alarm clock app for the iPhone??</incredulous>
Seems interesting but where is the "why is this better than/different from LINQ to SQL" etc. FAQ section?

Also interesting that they are using StackOverflow as their support base.
Would you mind giving me a clue on what your decision theory is about? Newcomblike problems don't seem very interesting to me--if you anticipate such a problem, you could do things that make it appear as though you don't understand causality, and if you are participating in multiple consecutive rounds, you could one-box on all but the last one.
why would you have repetitive stress problems from using the fingers that seem most natural and comfortable to you? Doesn't make sense to me.
I'm confused - are you being sarcastic in agreement?
Apple Announces Incredible New iPod shuffle

iPod shuffle is based on Apple’s incredibly popular shuffle feature

Pod shuffle is the smallest music player in the world and is incredibly easy to clip to almost anything

This all sounds pretty credible to me. Basically, now it can use playlists and it can use text-to-speech to tell you what song is playing.
This is amazing! I am reading Omnivore's Dilemma (great read BTW) and it explains how the US food industry causes 1/3 of the carbon emissions, mostly in shipping and farm equipment usage. They call this the hidden cost that we all ignore.

A site like foodoro can connect local producers and consumers.

A example of a farm that sells only locally and never ships their produce ( to reduce carbon foot print ) is http://www.polyfacefarms.com/

Congratulations guys!
Except if you want to go jogging. I agree that their headphones are great, but they don't attach securely enough for a good workout.
Having been involved in new products ranging from consumer electronics to security devices, the problem with this is that people will get too creative with their passwords, forget them, and then get mad when a factory default loses all settings.

In my experience, it's a losing battle no matter how you approach it. Make people specify a password, but then often times one person stages it and another installs it, so do you make an easy password for staging it? Do you add the overhead of making a device that enforces strong passwords? And so on...

The closest thing to a best solution I've seen is a 2-factor system, a passcode along with some kind of hardware dongle to default or get admin access.
Tunneling traffic through DNS, a.k.a free internet in cafes/airports
I heard something similar, but with a slight twist - when any decision is to be made, make sure you have a prime number of deciders, otherwise there is the possibility of deadlock. I think that's from the founder of Sony? He had a lot of cool ideas like that.

Not too many companies have 9 founders, though, so I guess your version works well enough for startups.
I would guess that 80% of shuffle owners (maybe even all iPod owners) use the default earbuds.

For the ones that don't, I'd also wager that the aftermarket community will offer an in-line adapter that adds the buttons capability to any set of standard headphones/earphones.
Norton broke their silence.
http://community.norton.com/t5/Norton-Protection-Blog/Symant...

Apparently it was just part of the update but it went out unsigned so it tripped the firewall. Some users were causing trouble so they just nuked all forum posts and accounts with the word PIFTS. It looks like maybe a bit more then that was going on, but other then some fighting with customers there's nothing special going on.
Yeah. Especially when you consider that the shuffle is (was) probably the ipod best suited for workouts. Oh well, good thing my old shuffle works fine. :)
The first music player that talks to you? You don't even have to look outside of Apple's own product line up to see that's not true, the Nano has it.

http://www.apple.com/ipodnano/specs.html

"Spoken menus allow listeners to hear many of the names of menus, song titles, and artists without viewing the screen."
Transparency Begets Trust.
Sophus - Consultas de Informações
Already done so :)
Great advice. I wish I had some of this prior to going in on a business venture with a good friend of mine. The biggest problem we faced was that my partner had just gotten into a relationship which requires almost as much time as a new venture. So while I was envisioning 10 hour work days, he was envisioning days filled with several breaks to catch up with his girlfriend and/or his work hours were based around her schedule. This made it extremely hard for me to focus and set time for us to work together.

With that said, I would add to the list of questions - What other outside relationships will you need to spend significant time on and how will this affect our work days/schedule?
Great article, and the "friend" part is superfluous. All of Daniel's lessons apply whether you're starting something with a friend you've known for two decades (my previous startup) or with someone you met at the partner pitch (my current startup).
Except... didn't the nano have text-to-speech? And I've been using this feature with rockbox for at least 2 years...
I actually blogged about that specific argument a little while ago here: http://felixcrux.com/posts/mind-gap/

I am curious about some of the statements you made, because I am not aware of the data supporting them, and yet they could change my analysis completely. Specifically, why do you say that "the cost to lay cable in the US is higher by several orders of magnitude?" Is there a valid reason for why US prices are so much higher, and are they really?

In terms of areas with higher population density having different prices -- I'm not sure that it's entirely true that they can't do that, since here in Canada it's fairly standard practice to vary prices for Internet service by postal code.
Free APIs for Developing Twitter Apps
No, there are earbuds from other companies compatible with Apple's remote stuff. There's also an extension cord with which you can make any earbuds remote-compatible (though you'll have to deal with the cable mess).

See this review for some examples: http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2009/02/13/replacement-ipho...
Slightly OT: I'd never seen the effect he has in his header. If anyone's interested, I found the docs & demos on it here: http://webdev.stephband.info/parallax.html
Interesting design choice in your favicon... where have I seen that before?
Did you have to create a working implementation and submit it to a contest, hoping to get paid after the fact?

More than anything, I'm amazed people are willing to devalue their own time by participating in these contests.

"If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys."
AFAIK, most (home/office) security systems are not set up by the end users. Mine has an "engineer" code which is more powerful than the normal user code, and in principle is not left as the default by the installer. He will in turn charge you to come round and enter it if it is ever required.
Christian Johansen - How To Turn Your CSS And JavaScripts Into Juice
As we all know, multiple CSS and JavaScript files in your head can slow your site way down and YSlow will more then likely tell you that. I recently learned about Juicer which offers us a ray of hope. With that I decided to hook up with Christian Johansen to learn more about the magic of Juicer.
But doesn't it require a live validation system anyway? Otherwise, your friend could reuse your code.

And, uh, redeeming an iTunes gift card ain't much use if the iTunes store is down. Also, I don't see why the system would have to be particularly low latency or high throughput.
And now I’m curious how Redis stacks up against Tokyo Cabinet (http://www.igvita.com/2009/02/13/tokyo-cabinet-beyond-key-va...)
"The reason 12-14 years olds seem immature is a social one, and NOT a brain one. I come from a rather different social culture and in my social circle a 12-14 year old was more or less an adult - and we acted that way.

If you assume someone under 18 is a kid - they will act like a kid, if you assume they are an adult, they will act like an adult."

That's idealistic, naive nonsense, for at least three reasons I can think of off the top of my head:

1) Take a six-year-old and start treating them as an adult and expecting them to act like one, and observe their behavior (my hypothesis: the child will behave like a slightly-more-mature-than-average six-year-old)

2) Do a survey of people who ran away or were kicked out of their houses at very early ages (let's say 15 or earlier) for traits and psychological health. (my hypothesis: you'll find significantly higher than average drug use, addiction, depression, and other psychological disorders than in a random population).

3) Take a forty-year-old male (who satisfies both of our criteria for maturity: my criterion that he has a fully-developed prefrontal cortex, and your criterion that society "assumes he is an adult" and treats him like one). Now remove his prefrontal cortex. Your argument hypothesizes that he will still be an adult, since the criterion that is important to you - society treating him like an adult - remains unchanged. However, this has actually happened many times. It's called a prefrontal lobotomy, and its effects are well-known - it basically turns an adult into a child. Therefore, the prefrontal cortex has much more to do with what we know as "maturity" than social treatment. (and if you want to be clever and say "well those who get a prefrontal lobotomy are usually severely retarded or mentally ill and thus not treated as adults before the operation," then just remember good old Phineas Gage. Treated as an adult right up until the railroad spike went through his head, and then basically became an impulsive child.)

"(And you got downvoted for saying kids don't have a pre-frontal cortex which is nonsense, if you had said less mature I would have let it go.)"

Wrong; it is a fact that children do not have a fully-developed prefrontal cortex. It can take as late as the mid-twenties to come online, and as late as the early thirties to fully myelinate.

Social expectations have very little to do with capacity for long-term decision-making. It's biological - you either have the equipment or you don't. My argument is based on what we know about the brain and on experiments already performed or whose results will be pretty damn obvious; yours is an argument by assertion based on blank-slate idealism and one article in Scientific American Mind which you can't find.

I know which way I'm betting, personally.
Well, if they're actually random, that would be impossible beyond, perhaps, brute forcing the validation server.
Perhaps some weird law about money laundering?
No, no, and no. Wealth could end up being destroyed as a result of rapidly falling prices-- for example, if a company that goes bankrupt then shuts down, and lets its machines sit and rust-- but they are not identical.
Really? That seems to be a lose-lose proposition to me.
How I make 15K a month at AdSense
Complex workflows on Hadoop clusters
Apple’s Snow Leopard may be delayed
I posted it because I think some of his methods can be used by any site.
I had always heard that 1 page (one side) of plain text was about 1KB. Unfortunately I can't find any resources to back that up. The closest I could find was this article which indicates 2KB per "typewritten page":
http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/sDefinition/0,,sid5_gci9...
Humans No Match for Go Bot Overlords
Sixth Sense Technology May Change How We Look at the World Forever
What you have just said is exactly egotism. From wikipedia: "Egotism is the motivation to maintain and enhance favorable views of self."

and also:

"Various forms of "empirical egoism" can be consistent with egotism, as long as the value of one's own self-benefit is entirely individual."

It just comes out in the difficult situations like doing a startup (in a war, etc).

That particular thread shows how people fight to remain egotists. Seems like me alone do not care about favorable view of myself (think karma)
I'd consider the Bay Area to be like Greenwich Village - a luxury area. In most parts of the country, median house divided by median income is running about 4-6. In those 2 areas, I've seen ratios in the ballpark of 40 and 75.

I live in Denver, and within walking distance of my apartment I see homes ranging from $175k to $15M.

Should we subsidize the lifestyle to which you'd like to become accustomed - because you want to live in a nice area? I don't think so.
I suspect it has more to do with the limitations of point of sale systems.
Completely agree, there's so much more ground to cover in order to provide the services the that amortization is so long resulting in the high prices.
I'd take a OTL amp + a good turn table any day.
I'm in a rural area with monopoly DSL from Frontier. These days they use repeaters to service people that are more than 18k feet from the CO:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/paul_houle/3340856649/

If you're far from the CO they use an ordinary DSL line card that communicates to the repeater, which itself contains both a DSL modem and a line card that talks to your DSL modem.

This strategy is good in the short term, but they'd be better off running a fiber bundle to the repeater farm in the long term.

Cable service terminates about 1.5 miles from my house: everyone who wants TV gets it by satellite, so Time Warner doesn't think it could get enough customers to justify further build-out.

The main trouble w/ Frontier is reliability: the ATM network that hooks up DSL line cards to the network goes down regularly, particularly on the weekends. They've been making noises about a preposterously low 5 GB cap, but haven't enforced it. I wouldn't mind having some reasonable way to pay $1 a GB or so past a certain point, but there's been no talk about that.

Perhaps white space would help, but I've got no faith in wireless broadband systems above 1 GHz. Our area is subdivided into narrow and long valleys that don't get cellphone coverage -- there's an independent ISP that offers tolerable WiMax service around the city of Ithaca, but they're having trouble getting a stable upstream connection and trouble getting high-performance DSL lines to support their infrastructure.
ATM's have default admin passwords; from there, you can reconfigure the value it assigns to each of the bill caddies.

http://www.matasano.com/log/506/atm-backdoor-why-is-no-one-t...

If ATMs aren't going to get this right, what hope is there for all the other random security locks?

Keyless entry systems have been a target for decades; read old Phrack issues for stories, and even listings of the (very small) complete sets of combinations. Obviously, conventional tumbler locks have been a target for as long as there's been an MIT.