skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Obviously Senators themselves aren't going to have a clue about data security, but one would expect them to have competent advisors. Yet these are the folks who are writing the legislation to govern how we build our data systems.
This is one of those real-worldish kinds of things that make Erlang quite practical for some applications.
Here is another option: Quit your fulltime job and get a part-time gig. Reduce your expenses so that you can scrape by on the part time salary. Crank out the code until you have customers/user base, then go for funding.

This is what we've opted to do to get Sponty rolling. YCombinator would be nice, but we're beyond the initial prototype and one of the cofounder cannot quit his day job just yet.
And as far as I remember they just had to input the statistical properties of the text you were typing and no information about the keyboard to train their algorithm.
I'm not sure if it's intentional, but the data center we use in Sheffield looks like an absolute tip from the outside. Just looks like your average inner city, run down, squatter filled mess. Inside it's another story though, so I think you can disguise a data center!
Very cool - does anyone know how they generated the image map?

By which I mean, was it loving crafted by hand or did they have a tool that could at least create the raw data?
Real IT Video Blog - Colin Talks About Using The Tech Center
Venture Capitalists Chart a New Course
With their core business in shambles, some venture capitalists are changing their stripes, styling themselves as investors in distressed assets and public companies... venture-capital firms such as CMEA Capital are dabbling in distressed assets. In one situation, CMEA purchased one of its portfolio companies from creditors and sold off its businesses and intellectual property to help minimize its losses.

These moves are extreme measures in trying times. Most venture-capital firms have little to no experience investing in distressed companies or public firms. And the work of dismantling a company is far different than what venture capitalists are hired to do: Nurture companies to life.
Don Norman on Design and Emotion - TED Talk
Big (and non-computable) Numbers
Good introduction. This is one of the tools that I first used on Solaris, and Solaris iostat is still a little bit better than linux iostat. I'd especially like to have the '-z' and '-M' options in linux.... Maybe it's time I looked at the source code.
Real IT Video Blog - Don Considers Big Projects
Literature Map -- author recommendations a la netflix
Both. I remember something from Snowcrash(?) where they had to simultaneously infiltrate the virtual security (the ICE) and physical security (the real-time camoflauge, tear-gas).
On the anecdotal side. A friend was born when her father was 75. Some people say she is a genius (clearly an exaggeration) but she s smart any way.
NVIDIA launchs GPU app developer venture program
FanSnap Is The New Kayak For Event Ticket Searches
RSS feed of stories i upvote.
This information (EM leakage from computers) is at least 20 years old.

It used to be they could pull up in a van full of radio gear outside your office and read both the keystrokes and the monitors.

The state of the art has advanced a long way since then.
This is all great and stuff and makes you wonder what is up next. Maybe support for different data-types, maybe putting relations between data. Heck maybe even aggregating stuff stored in there!

Colour me untrendy, but I simply don't see the fascination or the need for key-value databases and I fail to see how any of them are not reinventing wheels invented 30 years ago.

Here's a key-value database for all of you, which supports sorting, aggregation, transactions and not to mention replication out of the box:

CREATE TABLE KVDB (
key varchar(5000) PRIMARY KEY NOT NULL,
value varchar(MAX)
)

Feel free to use it.

Maybe I just don't get it, but deep inside I get the feeling this whole key-value database hype, just like sharding, is driven by MySQL developers refusing to give up on their sub-par database and move onto something proper.
I saw a talk by a woman who worked at a PKI auditing firm. She said they have a special hardware appliance that stores the keys, which of course costs an exorbitant amount, and has a redundant copy or three. I don't remember the details, but google away.

She mentioned that the machine wasn't even on a network, but I don't know why they would bother going that far.
Because the volume of tweets about Lost when it airs is so high that it trumps everything else. Here is perhaps a better example:

http://twist.flaptor.com/freq?gram=american&table=0

If you click on the peaks (caused by American Idol) you'll see the results for a query on the term "American" at that time. A significant number of those mention American Idol.

Now click near the right of the chart. Almost no results mention the show.
on time, yeah, I'm undervaluing my time some. But one of my skills is that I'm good at picking good people. I've been able to consistently get really good helpers for around $15/hr. Sometimes customers, sometimes friends, always people who either have little paid experience (I will take someone with no paid experience and lots of hobby experience over the other way around any day) or someone who has been underemployed for a while. (a few years after the .com crash I met a sysadmin who worked with me during the bubble years making sandwiches, and hired him for about a year before he got a real job)

so if I can get $50-70/hr people (judging from what they get hired away from me for) for $15/hr, I can afford to undervalue time a bit. Key here is automating abuse, though. I will write more about the snort bits.
The most valuable cards are the supervisor modules, which are the ones which actually run the IOS. But I wouldn't be surprised if the Cisco licensing agreements apply to all their cards.

All the cards have some pretty clever distributed forwarding smartness in them.
Keep Me Out, interesting anti-procrastination device
the one thing that I don't get is how they managed the camera in the room to capture the safe lock and the fire extinguisher? i could visualize the whole drama except for this part
my capital right now comes from my consulting gig... if you can spell Linux, you get huge amounts of money for sitting in an overpriced chair in the bay area, and between interviewing well, and having some impressive experience, it will be a while before the hosting revenue passes the contracting revenue. (the real problem here is burn-out, which needs to be carefully managed. But right now, good cheap people are easy to find, so it makes sense for me to work for the client and then hire several other people to work on what I care about.)
Considering the rest of the website, this is probably social commentary, not a real experiment...
Wow, that's one of the first JavaScript games that played just like a normal game, and it didn't feel cheesy like pong. No speed or control issues to report. Bright, clear, 3D rendering.

Of course, I, like many others, am biased for Tetris.

Oh, and I realized that you got to skip the conditions for turning at the walls, since it wraps around instead. Still hard, I bet.
> It's true, Eisner was doing the initial pixar deal but negotiations fell through several times.

The "initial pixar deal" was all Eisner, which got Toy Story and so on, happened before 95, which was before Disney purchased ABC (which is how Iger got to Disney).

Eisner did flub the final pixar deal, but that happened at the end of his time.

Eisner saved disney animation at the beginning of his time. Yes, it slid at the end (although it was still better than when he started).

Notice the pattern.

> Anyway, Eisner did nearly kill disney animation

The movie output (which I provided) doesn't support the "kill" hypothesis. Disney animation was on life-support when Eisner arrived. It got significantly better after he'd been around for long enough to have an impact and improved steadily for quite a while before tailing off at the end of his time. (Animation movies take three years.)

> Also the later cel animated Disney films that people loved (beauty and the beast onwards) were helped in part by software that Pixar created

Yup, but that's part of how Eisner re-animated disney animation.

2005 Eisner was arguably a disaster. However, 1985 Eisner was a savior and 1995 eisner was a genius.
It took me a while to realize that my default browser, Safari 3.2.1, doesn't support HTML 5 Canvas. I'm seeing a bowl and a logo. Graceful degradation, not so much.
I'm running 3.3.1 on all new servers. 3.1/3.0.3 (CentOS 5.2) on the old servers. I need to update the kernel compatability.

I agree that auto-provisioning is going to be really important. right now, people usually wait a good 12 hours.

my current plan is to set it up so that from the PVGRUB menu you can choose the net-install kernels of several different distros. that way, you set it up how you want. (of course, I'll need to setup local mirrors for all of them.)
Agreed. I also had a similar revelation and blogged about it.

http://www.dangoldin.com/2009/03/08/power-of-twitter/
Real IT Video Blog - Jason Reflects On GTM Topology
Because if that little bit of secret gibberish (the private key for the root cert) were known to the wrong people it incurs liability in the billions of dollars. And an air gap is cheap and effective protection.
I find it hilarious that Steve has this reputation for long blog posts... indeed, the vast majority are extremely long... and yet every time one is posted there are half a dozen complaints about how long they are.

What did you expect? It's not like the guy is changing up his format all of a sudden.
Essential Oil products for aromatherapy
This company prides themselves on the quality of essential oil and customer service
Google launches personalized advertising
Miguel Helft at the New York Times writes in "Google to Offer Ads Based on Interests" that "Google will begin showing ads on Wednesday to people based on their previous online activities in a form of advertising known as behavioral targeting."
The web has endured all problems. All the challenges. The internet has made our lives easier. We are now connected. The internet is the best thing that has happened to man kind. And people who say we need to replace the internet. GO FLY A KITE. The internet is awesome. Not perfect, But awesome.
Actually, secret negotiations doesn't necessarily mean that the music industry has a special in. It could just as easily mean that govts/politicans are negotiating special deals for themselves. It could mean that large patent holders have an in. It could mean that movie/book publishers have an in.

It could even mean that smart folks representing "citizens" have an in and have figured out that secrecy is the best way to keep the loons from screwing things up.

My money is on govts/politicans.
right now it's $0.10/gb. (hopefully I'll lower that when I get to my new location later this month. My goal is to keep everything below half what ec2 charges.) - Nick finished up the new server and put ordering on last night, it's got 30GB still free. there are parts for two more 32GB servers in the UPS system as we speak, so hopefully there won't be a gap between when this one fills up and when I get the next one installed.

the key to cheap ram servers is twofold. 1. get motherboards with 16 ram slots. this is changing, but 4gb modules are still more expensive than 2gb modules. 2. get motherboards that support registered ecc ddr2 (not FBDIMM- they take a whole lot of power) I use the low-power quad-core opterons. then don't go crazy on the CPU. (most of mine are 1.9Ghz bartons. if you go that route, make sure you don't get a broken stepping. one of the new servers will be a 2.1Ghz low-power shanghai that just came out. they are cheap! Shanghais look really good.)
How to discourage your employees
Mobile Industry Review Blog goes subscription only, charges £12,000 per year
I'm not very familiar with either code base but the fundamental differences are that Jaiku is built to scale whilst Laconica is built for federation between different servers.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardware_Security_Module
IM server ejabberd 2.0.4 released
I was attracted to this viewpoint, especially as it makes serialization/deserialization easy. But there are good reasons behind using objects (and their dual, abstract data types). Because many times, you don't want some parts of your program to know about the internal fields your datatype has, as the implentation can keep changing all the time.

ML which uses ADTs solves this problem nicely. You can just write a module containing the map which implements two different signatures, one signature with the restricted set of fns, and another signature which will expose the map. Regular modules will import the restricted signature, while serialization or database interaction modules can import the map signature.

I like PLT scheme's unit system which comes from ML. It is better in two ways, units & signatures are first class values. And, you can use the powerful macro system to get rid of any repeated syntax pattern involved in exposing a map in two different ways.
What I find disturbing in this piece is the seemingly massive false equivalency being perpetrated. Donating a kidney is not like giving blood. This is a major operation and carries with it an assortment of long-term health risks to both the donor and recipient (though, obviously, the recipient has essentially nothing to lose; long-term followup studies of live donors are still pretty small and not that informative)...yet the entire article seems predicated on "you'd be a monster not to give up at least one of your kidneys!" Where's that attitude coming from, exactly? Why not just toss a lung into the mix as well?
How sad...I also have a sister I put down, and I can't help it.
Fair enough :-) I shan't do it again - hesitated to do it even this once!
You can examine several AppEngine code bases on github.com. There's something to be learned from all of them.

Shameless plug: not that it's at the same scale, but I put together the game of Go as an AppEngine app. You can play it at http://go.davepeck.org/ or read the AGPLv3 sources at http://github.com/davepeck/appengine-go/

(I wrote "Go" to share with the audience of a talk I gave about scaling with AppEngine; I do a lot of AppEngine and AWS work for my clients but alas can't share that work.)
More strong recovery signs
Mark Guzdial's Amazon Blog: A Call for a New Computing Education Organization
He attributes the failure of some cultures to explore to lack of curiosity or anti-intellectualism. But exploration of that scale in that era was incredibly dangerous. A sufficient explanation is that individual explorers didn't want to be killed by barbarians, drowned at sea, or eaten by cannibals.

Continuing to send manned missions to the moon after 1976 didn't seem that useful. Personally, I think I got more out of Star Wars than yet another moon landing.
Mapping a City's Rhythm
Live webcast from CERN: The 20th anniversary of the web
Yahoo's BrowserPlus has most Windows and OS X browsers covered and plugins can be written in Ruby or native. Writing a plugin in Ruby is very cool.

http://browserplus.yahoo.com/
Free Useful Tips about Money Blogging With Affiliate Marketing | Men Gadgets
Internet.

Serious business.
Here's my rebuttal based on refutable statements.

I'm a curious and intellectual person. I spend most of my time learning and exploring.

While I have traveled to various parts of the world, I would not spend months traveling by foot or horse risking barbarian attacks, disease, and hypothermia, in order to discover new land.

Therefore, it's possible that the Romans were curious and intellectual even though they didn't explore Scandinavia.
To me, the turning point in Internet history is when commercial use became allowed. Around 1989, I remember that I could only send e-mail to Apple employees (@apple.com) if the purpose of the e-mail was consistent with an educational objective and was non-commercial in nature.

That prevented any kind of serious growth. It was great for academics. Then, something happened. Somebody, somewhere, decided that it was ok to use those government-paid lines for business. Who made that decision and when? I don't know, but they deserve a lot of credit as well.
Videos of talks from the seattle alt.net meeting 09
All I know is that this story is begging for a movie to be based on (The Ocean series or The Italian Job). Hmmm... according to the article, Notarbartolo looks rather photogenic and he has the charm... maybe the real payout is Notarbartolo starring in a movie based on a heist he also starred in?
Nokia 2760 US Version Unlocked
The modern Nokia 2760 is an elegant natural looking mobile phone which comes complete with user friendly features to keep the user entertained at all times. The phone comes in a variety of colours which enhance the natural look of the handset & provide the handset with a modern feel.
I've been a critical care nurse for years. The hardest I've ever worked was on a 24 year old man, that tried to commit suicide by shooting himself in the head. His brain wasn't working so well, but the rest of his body was intact. And, the family was amazingly selfless and decided to donate his organs.

We couldn't get the study to prove his brain death until morning, and he was bleeding like a sieve. In 15 years of being a ER/ICU nurse, I've never given one single person more blood products. There was a team of 5 or 6 of us giving him massive transfusions, all to keep this young man's organs alive the rest of the night.

In this ICU, we also took care of patients that had just received kidney transplants. They are some of the most patient, long-suffering and most grateful people you'll ever meet. Why? Because for the previous three to five years, these people's lives have been consumed by having to go to dialysis three times a week for four hours a session. They can't live any other way, and a transplant gives them a new lease on life.

We were able to get the study to prove brain death the following morning, and the organ donation team harvested his organs.

Two weeks later, our ICU received a letter from the organ bank, giving us a brief update on each of the _24 people_ that received organs from this young man. It was one of the most rewarding experiences I've ever had as a nurse.

All that to say, when organ donation happens, it's a truly beautiful thing, and one of those things that renews my hope in humanity. I've had the donor box checked on my driver's license for years. I'd encourage people to do the same.
As usual, the economist is looking for its keys under the lamppost.

In their graph, "Ease of starting a business" is a measure of how long it takes to process incorporation and tax paperwork. That is not the hard part. The hard part is finding co-founders and investors willing to invest, and customers willing to buy from new companies. It's a function of optimism and risk taking, not on government procedures.
lol, gotta love those fat fingers of mine. :-)
In a way, it's not all that surprising that virus might have been around for longer than other living forms, being simpler and with less moving parts. It's the KISS principle of life, I guess.
Yeah, I've been through all this too. Sounds like you want something beyond "ec2-bundle-instance" which will bundle your running instance but won't snapshot the VM from "underneath" as it's running (EBS snapshots can do that though).

Sort of. What I'd really like is a ec2-bundle-instance that works near instantly. As I understand it amazon copies our AMIs around their clusters anyways - but insists on mounting them read-only.

I'd like a flag to my ec2-run-instances that causes the AMI image to be mounted as read/write. Make the i/o dog slow if you must (it already is, anyways) but let me work directly on the image and make sure my changes persist across reboots for this particular instance. That requires them to make a copy my AMI-file on their server for that particular instance - so bill me extra, thanks.

With those mechanics in place I'd imagine an equivalent to ec2-bundle-instance that works near instantly on such r/w-AMIs would be possible. It'd only have to copy the modified image back to s3.

The take-home would be that we get a way to perform and test (hence the reboot) AMI-changes much more quickly than is possible now.
All the talk about Google Voice
It's an additive function including optimism, risk-taking, and government procedures, not an either-or situation.

We focus on the latter part because as startup junkies we're interested in that. But there are lots of low risk businesses which do not require partners and such. Running a hot-dog stand at the park, starting a small-engine repair service, doing horse-grooming, running an ice-cream truck. Sure, these things require optimism and capital (to some small degree), but you can get ramen-profitable with a bubble-gum vending company without partners or investors or any of the other stuff we talk about for technology startups.

What you can't get away from, however, is dealing with government at all of its levels.
Information Infrastructure and Technology Act of 1992. This created the open Internet as we know it today.
All time high for JavaScript, all time low for Perl
This article is just stating a truism. Of course not all startups are destined to succeed. In fact most are obviously destined to fail.

It sort of seems like the OA is trying to rebut Graham's assertion that the reason startups fail is because people stop working, and the subtle implication that no startup has to fail. However if that's the case, more exploration is needed to tease apart the case of the bad idea and the case of bad entrepreneur. Just saying "maybe your idea sucks" is not helpful. Maybe it's a problem for some entrepreneurs that they are willing to tweak everything except the core idea, but that's certainly not the case with the entrepreneurs I know.
tl;dr version:

Sometimes entrepreneurs get it wrong, and their product/idea isn't viable. In that case, keep at it for a while, then give up and move onto something else.

There, saved you a couple of minutes.
Ayahuasca: Hacking into your subsconscious mind
Done by an hn hacker ?
Improving Running Components at Twitter
It's unbelievably hard to unseat them. I knew the Yahoo Auctions team well back in 1998-2001, and they had a better product for free. Sellers and buyers preferred it. But there weren't many buyers because the sellers weren't there, and there weren't many sellers because the buyers weren't there. So even with Yahoo's network and brand they didn't win. (They did win big in Japan where eBay was slow to localize.)

Auctions have worse lock-in than you'd expect. You might think, if there's a marketplace with X buyers and another with X/10 buyers, most sellers would make the effort to list in the X/10 marketplace because they can increase their sales 10%. But with auctions, the sales price is a strong function of excess demand. Those extra 10% sales would be at significantly lower prices, and eBay merchandise tends to have low margins. When sellers lost money they quickly left.
Building and Developing an A++ Team
If you're testing against IE6 XP that's the worst test you can do.

We test against IE6 + 7 on XP, Firefox on XP, OS X, Safari XP, OS X minimum. With checking Opera and Chrome to make sure. A complicated design can easily render significantly differently and break very easily.

IE 6 is possibly the worst browser you can develop for. Get it working for Firefox and most phones can render it just fine.
ThreadScope: live visualisation of threads and sparks for Haskell
One of the reasons why I ditched Reddit for HN is because every time (yes, every single time) a Yegge article was posted, the comment thread was inevitably 90% whining or wisecracking about the length. I think it's a good measure of how much a community has degraded.
Twitter via IM. It isn't just about the track.