skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Motorola V195 Unlocked T-Mobile M box
This update to the V190 adds Bluetooth and streamlines the design with updated styling and an internal antenna. Features are otherwise similar, including quad-band GSM, an external display, speakerphone, Java 2.0, and MP3 ringtones.
I love the site, HATE the pricing. I'd really like to pay for the service, but what I REALLY need is:

1) Run several low user tests (200-300) to tweak server settings, app code, etc.
2) Then run one or two big tests (1000+) just once to see the results.

I MIGHT need this at most once a month. That just isn't worth $200 per month. I'd much prefer a subscription for the lower levels of consistent use, and then be able to purchase an additional once-off very large test for maybe $10-20 each.
The Sky Is Falling?
Sure:
Example one:
I have friends that works in one of the major social sites (not saying the name), and they tried ruby on rail, but failed to scale with it, both feature wise (modilarity), and sheer performance.

They tested side by side, and they had to add almost x2 the amount of servers for the same funcionality.

The mantra of Ror, is computers are cheap, developers/getting into marked is more important. When you are serving millions of users, that mantra quickly becomes expensive and hard to maintain.

They tried this in 2007, and still use ROR in limited capabilities (for some tools).

Example two:
Encoding video for potentially hundreds type of formats, for thousands of users at the same time. This is on demand video serving to customers where they have to scale in a two dimensional way (both users, and video formats). Even not trendy among many people in here, Java has one of the best and most advanced multi threading capabilities out there, especially with Java 6. So, they stuck with java for this part of functionality, and actually using Ror only for the wap front end.

Example 3:
Any custom search engine, api engine, anything that doesn't fit the CRUD mantra.

Sure you can modify Rails and get it to work for all the above examples, but it will be probably a poor fit for it. A different technology/framework, or just build your own web app without a full blown framework are better choices.

I hate it, when many people equate Web Apps with CRUD Apps, which I think it is a mistake.
Just on the YouTube example, it was more an that its time had come, and YouTube just happened to be the one who got popular.

The factors included: multimedia-capable PCs, broadband and cell-phone cameras. All driven by Moore's Law.

A great deal of compsci seems to be like this (even including new ways of multiplying numbers) - not surprising, since Moore's Law dwarfs all other forces. No other industry has anything anywhere near comparable.

This can be used predictively: what obviously great but ridiculously infeasible idea will Moore's Law soon make feasible?

Examples: spherical TV (you sit inside); golf-swing analysis by brute-force matching with 3D recordings of every possible swing (to arbitrary resolution); literal recording and playback of 3D cerebral cortex activity (to arbitrary precision).
Would it help to be entirely open about it? What would happen if you published every small piece of research that journals would accept, and blogged or self published the rest?

You might not be the first one to publish results, but you could reasonably claim that anybody that scooped you would be basing their experiment almost entirely off of yours, so it would be somewhat of a derivative work. And if you released a details on your experimental plan, I think that a scientist would have to design a new experiment if he wanted to say that he wasn't just testing your hypothesis.

And I think that even if someone did try to scoop you, you would have claim to enough original research to get a phd.

This strategy might cause you to change your thesis some. But if you are worried about getting scooped, it might be beneficial to release as quickly as possible to lay claim to as much research as possible.

I'm just comparing it to the patent system. Companies don't want their ip infringed, so they file as many patents as possible to get legal rights to their ip.
Once I've been using free wireless in the JFK airport. But my laptop ran out of the power. I found power socket in the floor near the phone booth, and plugged in my laptop. After some time security guy came and told me that I shouldn't do that.
So when I was passing to the plain, they looked through all stuff from my luggage. Then they apologized "for the mess"
I'd wait for that updated CSS version. The one they showcase on the site looks like Nigerian Spam to me. Not a good way to promote FFX or Chrome.
So how do you use research to differentiate between users not understanding a product feature, and users not needing that feature?
Using javascript to show the Ackermann function substitution
Looks like you are right - I am having trouble tracking when this changed (old news I suppose) but I am pretty sure that when I last purchased a DVD player all those on offer in the UK were multi-region by design or had been adapted before being offered for sale.
How to scale an asset server on a limited budget ?
> That potent duo has collectively bet $25 million on the still-private company.

Back when 2-year-olds with $25M raised could reasonably be guessed to be public. Different times...
It's not the analog that makes it sound better, it's the loudness war that makes the digital sound worse:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war

The most sickening thing about the "loudness war" is that it has become so utterly pervasive that even completely amateur-produced and indie CDs are overamplified and covered in clipping in the exact same way the latest Britney Spears album is. While for older music (~80s and earlier) there usually exists previous albums without too much clipping, newer music--even good music--is usually only available in a single overamplified release.
In my corner of Europe, all the providers (both cable and DSL) are now into triple-play: TV+net+phone package deals (or even 4-play, with mobile too). I had some doubts about the TV-over-phonelines thing, but it seems to work OK.

For about 60 euro/month I get unlimited landline calls, uncapped 8Mb/s net, a DVR box and ~100 TV channels (including some kid stuff and movies, no premium sports). Just the net would be a little less than half the price.

I buy from a cable provider, but people with similarly priced packages from the DSL providers aren't complaining and seem to also have adequate performance.
MogileFS
I believe that PLSA is generally preferred over LSA, and LDA is preferred over PLSA. PLSA is equivalent to LDA when you assume the prior is a uniform Dirichlet distribution. I guess LSA is probably the easiest to implement since it just involves a singular value decomposition, but I don't know how often it's actually used in practice anymore.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLSA

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latent_Dirichlet_allocation
I didn't have to go that down. The third sentence reads 'Two-year-old Google'.
Not on a mac though, as far as I know. When I had a Powerbook, I couldn't find any way to make it region free. Has that changed?
Why do people keep posting these types of articles, which amount to self-congratulatory masturbations about technology choices.

Let me summarise the article for you:

I choose Django fap fap because PHP developers are dumb fap fap and I don't want to be perceived as dumb fap fap so I'm going to write a blog article fap FAP about how smart FAP FAP I am for choosing FAP FAP django. GRUNT MUMBLE GRUNT Ahh blog ejaculate!
I very much doubt whether the author had to swallow her own words a few years later. Google’s business model was awfully hazy about the time the article was written. The founders were clueless just as much as the author was about how they were going to scale the monetization. The two Stanford alums certainly did not foresee Google as what it evolved into a few years later.
"A 30% return (the minimum needed to give LPs a return commensurate with venture risk after the GPs have taken a 20% performance cut) on $1 million is $300,000. A 30% return on $1 billion is $300 million. Basically, unless you land a Google-like winner, it is very, very hard to get a $300 million return."

The writer has no idea how a fund works or how to calculate returns. That statement assumes the lifespan of the fund is one year, which it isn't. The lifespan of a fund is usually 5-9 years. When you hear about Sequoia returning 140% on their 2001 fund, that is per annum over the life of the fund.

So going by the $1B example. If you have $1B to invest, and have set a target of a 30% return, you need to return $300M each year to your investors. That is almost impossible in years one and two (and even three) so its usually a curved path of returns (that dies down towards the end as the last investments are either killed off or sold for scrap).

As for fee's:

"Ahem, 2% of $1 billion is $20 million, which should be enough for a coupla Partner Ferraris. "

The 2% fee is also per annum. Most funds are not $1B, but they are $150M - $500M, so the fees can really build up. The better funds wont charge fees in years where there were no returns or heavy losses, or in the later years of a fund.

As for the actual interview - not much substance there either.
Completely wrong. Most DVD players in the UK are locked.

Luckily most can be unlocked with a quick Google for the relevant 'secret code' but nonetheless.
Why 3D printers won't go mainstream
I agree that it's not just the money; it's just that the money was what was on my mind all the time, because I was losing/borrowing money rather regularly for 2/3 of that seven years. :) I also plan to try it again, fairly soon, even. It's one reason why I'm working contracts now instead of full-time.
When using bcrypt to encrypt the password in the database and allowing the users to have very short (3-4 letters) passwords, how much easier is it to crack the password? And wouldn't increasing bcrypt's cost counter the problem?
DIY Bird Trackers Cost $30, Help Science
But. If they were successful and made money without having to use pissy yellow color, did they truly need to switch to it to cater to the lowest common denominator ? Are the dumbasses who clicked more when the color was of piss worth it ? do you truly need users that act like animals, more on impulses than on thought ?

Should you cater to the lowest common denominator and be the Microsoft of the web, or try to do the Best Thing and have a smaller market share but of much higher taste and disposable income, aka the Apple ?
Why music sounds right - the hidden tones in our own speech
Mod me down but don't argue my points? Nice.

Hate all you want, but sites much larger than anything this poseur is ever going to build are running PHP. This point alone - for this article, in particular, - makes the entire of his blog post ... moot.

- Flickr
- Facebook
- Yahoo
- Delicious
- Wikipedia
- Digg

One of his main points is that PHP is not good for large teams. I'm pretty sure the combined size of all those sites teams is nothing short of massive.

Really, it's 2009. Bragging about frameworks is like bragging about dick size. It's completely pointless if the chicks aren't digging it.
I'm getting "your browser is outdated..." on IE8 as well. Doesn't seem to be a good idea or at least it's a shoddy implementation.
If I go to an all-you-can-eat buffet and choose not to eat the crab meat, am I getting ripped off because I "paid for" the crab meat?

Not if you passed several restaurants where you could have ordered a la carte but chose not to on your way to the all-you-can-eat buffet.
Not that i don't agree with you, but being an ass on HN is not cool man.
"The competition for this application would seem to be the iPhone."

One is a device and an operating system, the other is a free application. The two are by definition complementary rather than mutually exclusive, so where is the competition?

Your comment seems to be based on a defensive kind of thinking where everything comes down to iPhone vs. the world -- "either you're with us or you're against us".

In this case I feel that it's entirely unjustified, and overall I believe the iPhone community might benefit from a more open attitude towards coexistence and collaboration with others in the mobile space. Everyone who doesn't support your preferred platform to the exclusion of others is not automatically an enemy to your goals.
Yeah, but he really knows his stuff...
I don't get this:

the Accounting and Auditing Act of 1950. The relevant section, 31 USC 714(b), dictated that congressional audits of the Federal Reserve may not include "deliberations, decisions and actions on monetary policy matters." The exemption, as Foss notes, "basically includes everything."

Does congress not have the power to change that act?

(please note that I'm not from the US)
Unfortunately I don't think any of the customers I do sites for would want that overlayed on their shop.

If google put it on their search page, we might get somewhere!
I've been able to play European DVDs on my (N. American) Mac using VLC.
Yes, this is my biggest tip as well. All the best intentions in the world won't help you change for good - in my experience. Though having said that, even something voluntary like going to the gym might not be enough...

The two things that worked best for me were:

Organise every meeting you possibly can to be in the morning, and don't allow yourself to cancel.

Go to bed with something unfinished, i.e. have something to do that really propels you out of bed. An example would be leaving a piece of code not quite done, but with a good idea of how to finish it (if you haven't got a clue, it's more likely to make you want to stay in bed and make it go away, no?). Thinking about the problem while dropping off and waking up makes me just want to leap up and fix it.

Other tips, potentially irrelevant to most commenters, but that worked for me:

Give up WoW. Or at least stop playing it late at night. Seriously. The difference in sleep quality, for me, is night and day.

Hack your nutrition. Eat low-GI. Cut out soda and junk food. Let caffeine be a treat, not a staple.

Have a flatmate or loved one poke you awake. Even if they're not geographically present, having someone you love call you or tuning yourself to wake up to the sound of an incoming IM can help you boot up faster in the morning.

Read in bed, but don't read anything too interesting. I still have this backfire when I open a new book at 11pm and don't sleep 'til it's finished. Others love to journal instead, which can be a great relaxer, but I end up making todo lists which has the opposite effect.
Disclaimer: I used to work at hitwise.

All of these analytics services have some bias.. Google only measures traffic to their site, whereas hitwise compares things in more relative terms.. I.e percentage of all searches (all search engines). Hitwise has an advantage because they collect data from ISP's, but the bias is that they don't collect data from all ISP's.

Anyway, I hope that helps to clarify.. And I still think techcrunch are full of shit. :P
No one ever asked you to stay up all night eight days a week trying to get filthy rich shorting what's left of the American auto industry or selling $600 billion in toxic, irredeemable mortgages to ex-strippers on work release and Taco Bell clerks.

Someone did ask for the latter: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_Reinvestment_Act
very interesting paper...

at point 2.2 "bulk guessing of passwords", he says "even a 6 digit PIN yields at most a 1% probability of success to 10 years of brute-force attack".

i hardly believe that can be true. it's just 1 mill. (10^6) different passwords. if a website does not protect the login site with time-delays or otherwise (let's say we can test 5 pins a second), all passwords can be tried in 138 days. if it's only 1 pin per second it will already take 694 days to test them all.

and of course there is a 50 % chance to find it in half the time. and 25 to find it in the first quarter, etc.

furthermore at the end of point 2.2, i read 10 million requests. why? 10⁶ is one million, and a 6 digit pin has 10⁶ possible states, right?
I think it's a demo that comes up for everything.
Subversion 1.6 released.
I accept Wikipedia's definition as a fine one and use Wikipedia specifically as something that represents a reasonably mainstream opinion on the matter.

VM instructions vs. CPU instructions is not irrelevant when the VM can only execute instructions one-by-one and the CPU can execute instructions on multiple cores at once (ignoring vector operations for simplicity).

But what's more is that that distinction between VM and CPU instructions is irrelevant, because in common use (on EVE Online, the people who pretty much keep Stackless going), tasklets are not pre-empted at all, but are instead cooperative, handing off control flow only when they explicitly do so (such as sending or receiving on a channel, sleeping, or terminating). Tasklets can be preempted after a time, and if you're using them that way, then okay, I accept that it's as concurrent as anything on one CPython VM is, but you lose a lot of the benefits of not dealing with locking (as well as a few other things) when you do this, so it's my understanding that it's not the preferred way to use Stackless.

So, yes, you can use threadlets preemptively and then I agree that you can kinda call them "concurrent" and be correct, but by correcting people when they say it's not concurrent, you're bringing more heat than light, as in general use, it's not concurrent, and if you use the preemption capabilities in Stackless, then you're not following the Stackless best practices and you're still not going to get any more use out of your CPU's extra cores, which is what most people are looking for in Stackless (and which sadly they won't find).
The arguments presented are really off-base. The idea of a 3d printer is to find a model on the internet for free (or $) press print and use the "thing". Very, very simple.

Sewing machines were completely different. First, you had to get a pattern. Patterns weren't cheap and weren't easily available. There was no decent distribution mechanism for patterns, which is half the problem. Then you had to learn how to sew. Then you must collect the materials. For each garment, you would input time.

Tell me how these two models are anything alike? And how could a person from a 3d printing company not get it?
Just FYI, This post was a continuation of a "3D Printing Smackdown" between the Replicator Blog (http://is.gd/ojHl) and the always entertaining SolidSmack Blog (http://is.gd/ojHB) on the likelihood of 3D printing reaching the mainstream consumer.
Nokia 5800 Freeware: WF Virtual Key
I applaud the effort, but it should give visitors the option to download Firefox, Safari, Chrome and Opera as well, and explain them why they are considered better options.
I disagree, for some the thought with 3D printers is simply to download a model and hit print, but many others see it as a path to "democratized" innovation. e.g. people can improve designs of physical object just as they can work on OS code. For this to be a reality it will require people to develop a strong sense of mechanical design and fluency with CAD software.

Even if you just wanted to hit print, you can currently only print plastics. To make an object of any complexity you would need to gather electronic components, perform assembly, which may require secondary skills like soldering. Given the state of the art and development roadmap homegrown manufacturers would need to sand and paint the output of the 3D printer to achieve a "commercial" finish and tht requires time and training.

At a high level I think the comparison is apt. It is fairly easy to learn to sew (as easy as learning HTML, for instance) but we still do not have a movement of homegrown tailors on the scale of amateur web designers.
I'm already visualising Tom Hanks in the feature role. What a vivid story. We just need a happy ending, no? :)
It is okay to use POST
Roy Fielding on the usage of POST within REST, prompted by Tim Bray's recent article
At a high level I think the comparison is apt. It is fairly easy to learn to sew (as easy as learning HTML, for instance) but we still do not have a movement of homegrown tailors on the scale of amateur web designers.

Surely this is better explained by the (current) lack of overlap between the community of tailors and the community of people who are savvy about the possibilities of web-based collaboration. There are, e.g. pattern-exchange sites out there for people who like making their own clothes.
This is why I came back here VLC, the free software media player can play region encoded DVDs. I can make sure it DID that sometimes back. Never wanted to check it recently for some reason.

For those who are lazy to google: http://www.videolan.org/vlc/
Anybody have a good .vimrc file for Python, or thoughts on customizing vim for Python?
Most frameworks are obviously not bound to a particular OS but almost all of them are developed on a Unix and more or less assume a POSIX platform.

Yes, many do have a section in the docs for "Installation under windows" but that's normally intended for a development environment, at most and comes with many little strings attached such as "not tested on windows"-markers in the docs and raised eyebrows on the mailing list.