skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I would say that sailing has always been something that rich geeks get into.

There are numerous blogs and even sites (pre-blogging days) by programmers, etc. who made some money and then bought a boat and sailed away.

With the recent price spikes on oil, sailing starts to look cool, as it is one of the earliest forms of wind power.
Inside the Magic Kingdom - The Business of Fun
Amsterdam Creative Agency Nothing's Cardboard Office
no. since it is gzipped, there is no progressive download of the page and it is all downloaded at once and then executed. so startTime and endTime are measuring processor execution rather than download speed.

it is a flawed method. a better method would be to make an xmlhttprequest to an object of known size and compare the time to known times for known connection speeds. this method also has the advantage that you don't interrupt the page being loaded and don't interrupt the user experience since it is run in parallel.
More important than money are water and wind.
I'm pretty high on the leaderboard (~30) and don't think the order of the top 100 matter. I wouldn't mind being removed from the list. Submissions matter more than comments. Also, the age of your account will matter more as the site grows.
Your thesis is at odds with the experiences of others. For example, Marissa Mayer from Google once noted that a 500ms delay in search results directly resulted in a 20% drop in traffic. And Amazon's A/B testing indicated that even a slowdown of 100ms resulted in a measurable drop in sales.

Speed definitely matters.
ironic that the story is published by the nytimes
You may want to look into possibilities of securing even shorter domain name, i.e. ideally it would be http://time.in/London
This might be interesting for the reprap project, or?
Will There Be a Java 7?
I adore that customs clerk!
Where the world’s first transatlantic email was sent from
Werewolf/Mafia - a game of social hacking and experimentation
Interesting, but this trick makes a ton of assumptions about the browser's behavior. I doubt it's very accurate.

As mmj pointed out, the page is gzip encoded. Will (can?) the browser actually decode and render/execute part of the gzipped stream before it's completed? Even without gzipping, will it? I suspect not.

If not, this is relevant: http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Bulletproof-JavaScript-Detec...

Also, is 10KB (plus whatever came before) enough for the TCP connection to ramp up to full speed?

And, of course, JavaScript Dates are known to be pretty inaccurate in some browsers.
Great geek news :) Did you know where it was first sent from?
The guts of the article: give your DB lots of RAM for its cache, prepare your statements, normalize your tables.
Tick-Tock!
Hollywood Free Movie Download: Monsters vs Aliens 2009.TS.XViD
The blog is incredibly open. seeing it all go up with the notes around the creative process is quite fascinating even if you cant follow all the math [and I guess only 50 people in the world can].

Having the math inline works really well [wordpress renders latex formulas as pics with the latex as alt text] - you don't have to jump into a pdf viewer while parsing the main text. Its one way to get started with latex, ie. by example.

Terry and Timothy Gowers are experimenting with an approach to creating math with lots of small involvements by many contributors online - see http://gowers.wordpress.com/2009/03/24/can-polymath-be-scale...
Fast text replacement with canvas and VML - no Flash or images required.
> Feminism is: the advocacy of women's rights on the grounds of political, social, and economic equality to men

We had more than equal rights for a long time now. Affirmative action helped women for how long?

> As far as i'm aware, we still live in an unequal society. Men make more money than women.

You are confusing equal outcomes with equal opportunities. Let me give you a good example: in engineering there are plenty of bursaries available for women. Support for men in engineering pales into comparison with the support of women in engineering. Yet, a lot more men study engineering than women (and the gender gap is widening).

Can you say that there was not equal opportunity?

> Women are not anywhere close to being proportionally represented in government.

Again – they have equal voting rights. If they feel they have been mistreated they can vote for another party. There are several countries in the world (such as Germany) that have female presidents.
Thanks for the great post, however I still don't understand some concepts. I'll research more on that later.
Don't shoot please; maybe he will learn.
I'm no designer, but I actually like the clear forms and lush colors of this design, but immediately after this I reach for brightness control to tone id down (there isn't one; I'm typing this on an old laptop)
Coming Tuesday apparently http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7971673.stm
Its always nice to read about how startups succeed, but maybe more can be learned from these postmortems.

I was thinking you almost want a dedicated site for these...
but could that be achieved by just having tags and filtering by tag on HN ?

Tags would help with a range of scenarios, such as if I'm only interested in Erlang posts by squid-farming bodybuilders, for example.
Social media course defended on Twitter
I'll see your ouch and raise you one Gary Kildall.
Lots of possibilities there: querytime.in, gettime.in, localtime.in, thetime.in. Godaddy actually offers .in domains. If I were OP I'd just register then all, and let the ones die that friends and family don't like.
Good luck. The problem may be NP complete in general.
Actually, RepRap is moving towards (literally) printing their circuit boards using both conductive and insulative materials.
Microsoft's Mobile Misfortune
Skype for iPhone to Launch
DRAM glut turning to shortage by year end
Olbermann damns Twitter for hosting fake Olbermann site...run by MSNBC
http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSTRE52T0H620090330
Better to switch to a captcha. Banning might provoke DoS attacks.
I don't understand why they'd throw up everything in the air just because they screwed up the syntax. Wouldn't it have been easy to make a proper s-expression front-end to the environment and keep the rest of the good stuff?
Exponential Lower Bound for 2-Query Locally Decodable Codes via a Quantum Argument (2003)
Discovered. Not invented.
He has an MBA
either go super short or go memorable. I think whatsthetime.in works because its literally what you'd ask.
Totally awesome! Too bad if the city ever find out, he'll be in trouble - sometimes government is a little too rule oriented.

And this makes we want to put one in my basement - I get water in there anyway, and the concrete floor is all cracked.
Skype for iPhone: It's official
SysCon attacks prominent blogger
http://hackerspaces.org/wiki/New_Delhi
I would say users are the biggest winner. Things are pretty good for users right now!
There was an article on getting a US merchant account recently:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=530055

P.S. I'm from St.-Petersburg, Russia
I guess network operators will do whatever it takes to block the app since it eats their revenue from SMS and calls.
the math is pretty transparent, once you've gotten a wee bit of combinatorics, measure theory, real & complex analysis, plus group theory under your belt.

.... though i guess that makes it pretty nontransparent by normal standards
Freeman thinking
I played this game for the first time at Barcamp London 6 (www.barcamplondon.org) and absolutely adored it. Thought it would appeal to other hackers.
Funky cool astrophysics ads (Year of Astronomy 2009)
I adore the design of this site. Very clean!
Recipe: Bearable Emacs
40 fresh websites for daily visual inspiration
Well I guess that shows which is easier: Investment banking or doing a startup.

;-)
Very interesting. I need to add that to my list for a possible Volume 2 of The Geek Atlas.
Well, for the cases on planarity.net, it seems O(n) to me. Or maybe something like O(n log n)
This would have been a perfect fit for "sell before you build". If he would have secured a large order from a retailer and then put it in production, he would have been successful. Not securing a large order would have told him it just wasn't worth doing. I don't think the "sell before you build" method it is a good fit for all businesses though.
UPDATE: It gets better and better. Olbermann was actually running a Twitter feed.

http://www.redstate.com/absentee/2009/03/29/new-revelations-...
5 ways to optimize mysql inserts
People need to grow up. Real world relationships are nothing like forced symmetry. It's the wrong model for a large application.

So you're saying Facebook should not worry about pleasing its users, but model the real world and tell its users to "grow up" if they don't like it? That doesn't seem like a growth strategy.
I don't think you've read the rest of his comments. He absolutely meant what he said, and he meant "pretty much universally" as a universal. Sad, I know.
There are another great tutorial about performance tuning from IBM - Informix Dynamic Server Performance Guide - all those ideas are discussed in that volume.

By the way, Informix Dynamic Server itself is an advanced and very stable product. From version 7.30 which was released almost a decade ago it offers advanced functionality with low resource consumption. (No bloated java stuff and other buzzwords).

It was a collection of multithreaded apps written in portable c++ which were purchased by IBM for $1bn.

I personally had run several big installations for some chain of retail stores in 2000, when all those magazines were never mention linux and informix as enterprice solution.

Today Informix was resurected by IBM which once decided to discontinue it in favour to support its DB/2 monster.
http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/

And spokenword.org (more than 80K podcasts)
Instead of trying to reinvent the Nile, why not focus on the features that make it ripe for farming? Fertile soil and easy transport of goods. Can that be done artificially? If so can it be done virtually? It could take a never ending supply of money to sustain another Silicon Valley. Look at Dubai Internet City.
Madonna's Daughter Lourdes and son David photo
There is noting cheap about 20 cents per page.
Good find :-)
Top 10 Reasons Twitter May Become Most Valuable Internet Property Ever
How much traffic can you expect when you launch?
This blog entry contains some basic statistics about the traffic that came to Diddit from the various press and blog articles that were written about our launch. It's the kind of data we were seeking during our capacity planning, but weren't able to easily find. Hopefully it'll be helpful to other folks as they make plans to launch their own sites in the future.
The thrill of a new technology: CouchDB
localized versions? Are there any domains like .in which mean "in" in other languages?
DHH: Doing a Start Up in the Real World [video]
This is even cooler than the guy that built a Lamborghini in his basement!

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=350019
Less is more at Web 2.0 Expo in S.F. this week
I work only with relational db...but this is a great tech!
Short UK cultural digression:

The "blue plaque" mentioned is normally emplaced by National Heritage. They commemorate individuals rather than events, and the individual must have been dead for 20 years so that their significance can be judged with rather more objectivity than is likely to be gauged by their contemporaries: http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/server/show/nav.1498

Of course there's nothing to prevent an individual or organization (the local council in the pictured plaque from the BBC's erstwhile "Radiolympia" building) from putting up their own blue plaque to historic events or living persons, but it's the exception rather than the norm and it's not a "tradition" as such.
I like how some people go the extra length, using "12345678" instead of "123456".
The Ugly American Programmer
"Whatever country you live in, whatever language you speak, you have the same access to the accumulated knowledge of the world as every other citizen of the planet Earth. I believe the rules are different for programmers. So much so that I'm going to ask the unthinkable: shouldn't every software developer understand English?"
Academy Awards | Facts, History and Winners | Academyawards.com.mx - And The Winner Is…
Lights, Camera, Action, there are a lot of things that go into making a movie. The Academy Awards those every here who make fantastic movies from actors and actresses to the music composers. Come and learn all about the academy awards and their categories.
I don't think it's a reference to anything, simply that you're saying to the computer "let me in!"
> I won't dispute that the regulatory environment encouraged or discouraged certain actions, but that is very different from forcing anything. I can encourage you to smoke (say, by subsidizing tobacco), but that's hardly the same as forcing you to do so.

As I said, you don't understand/are misstating how regulated industries work.

A regulated company that makes its regulators mad ceases to exist. A regulated company that doesn't keep its regulators very happy has a hard time.

I can walk away from the free cigarettes being given away by Joe Camel with no downside. Regulated companies take a hit when they do the same.
FirePython 0.4 with "profiling graphs"
The Real World: A video of David's talk at FOWA Dublin
Hm, flat files will rule the world? No more messy SQL, just iterate over the file's entries with a for loop - even Java programmers can understand that.

Sorry, but I am not convinced yet.
Tesla Introduces 7-Passenger Electric Car
Have you looked at the Sun Cloud API?

http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2009/03/16/Sun-Cloud
>>perceived it to be a bash on MBA degrees
How do you know????
That's the among the most naive bits of work I've ever seen.

Concrete carries essentially no bending or tension loads. I'm amazed it's stood up to this amount of additional pressure.
Kodak EasyShare M893 IS Digital Camera (Purple) 
The Kodak EasyShare M893 IS Digital Camera provides great image quality and advanced features in an ultra-compact and affordable package.
I think this game won John "One of the Most Interesting People In Cleveland" when he wrote this sophomore year at CWRU. I'm happy to see that his project is still being enjoyed!
I've been sailing for years and, as the others have written, it is awesome. I've found geek and non-geek alike find enjoyment in it.
I'm in Portugal so I can't comment on your experience. In here one can get it at any 'mom&pop' hardware store, which are more common than 'Home Depot' style stores.
Tichy, give it a spin. The ease of execution (and the sheer speed, even over giant amounts of data) is impressive.
Apache CouchDB: Technical Overview
US asks GM chief to step aside
What other serious platforms is Skype not available for? I know WinMo has had it for years. I just assumed it was available on most other devices.
Buy Handicraft Gifts, Online Buy Sell Handmade Gifts, Vintage Items, Art
Handdmadeselling Online Store offering all handicraft items, online handmade gifts crafts products. Buy and Sell Handmade or vintage items like Crafts, Jewelry, Art and supplies on handmadeselling.com
in is a fairly global word. If you play around in Google translate you will see that in is in in German and Dutch.
>As counterpoints, first consider that blame for the current situation and the proper next steps are two separate issues.

Knowing how you got to where you are is relevant to knowing what to do. If you prefer, insanity is doing the same thing and expecting a different result.

I'm not interested in punishing anyone, so "blame" has the wrong connotations. It's actually credit assignment. Do more of what works, do less of what doesn't.
Supposedly, you can substitute ferric chloride with hydrogen peroxide and muriatic acid: http://www.instructables.com/id/Stop-using-Ferric-Chloride-e...
timezonal.com
Testy.rb - a minimalist Ruby BDD testing framework
timezo.ne is available.
World's Best Programmer is... [w/ Inclusion]
WinMo and Nokia's Linux platform are the only mobile platforms they have released clients for. The Nokia N97 (S60 5th Edition) will have a native Skype client as well. I hope they release a S60 3rd Edition version as well.
What do you mean by impressive "ease of execution"?

How terse the code is?
How easy the code is to read?
How likely the code is to be correct?
How flexible the data model is to new requirements?
How simply you can reason about what the code does?
Not many stories actually make me laugh-out-loud, this one was an exception. I think it was the picture of his four daughters smiling in the picture that took me over the top!

I thought I was doing good with creating a square-foot-garden with my kids (http://www.toddalewis.com/square-foot-gardening.aspx)... hard to compete with an "indoor" swimming pool.
A document based DB is not like a flat file. They do index for fast retrieval.

It is just that the indexes are added based on what queries are made. You can be explicit about what indexes you want maintaned, but it is often good-enough to just perform a query and have the db figure out how to index to make that query faster.

It's pretty much dynamic-typing vs static-typing for databases (plus the document-entries instead of row-column-entries).
Highly addictive... Got to 1500 odd, had a sneak peak at level 30 then gracefully bowed out.

Used a combination of heuristics - move a vertex to the centroid of its neighbors, and move randomly to reduce edge intersections.

eyes burning.
This is the second-most-awesome comment on HN.
If I were him, I would look very carefully every day for 45 degree cracks in the concrete below the pool. 45 degree cracks in the concrete indicate that a structural condition may exist (e.g. the load bearing of the concrete is significantly compromised) (other angles than 45 are ok).
That's what my XP hint did, and my password contains an accented character (áéíóú/ÁÉÍÓÚ) as I noticed password breakers tend not to use these characters by default, but a lot of programs and services accept them. To say just hitting 'Alt Gr' can prevent any password breaker, I thought it was a pretty good safety measure.
Not really :)

http://searchyc.com/condom
Actually, once we got started I was essentially left out of the planning process (which was fine by me). So I guess I'm exceptionally lucky that I metaphorically gave my wife a limitless credit card and she spent less than I expected.
The code is easy to read, and the data model is as flexible as you want it to be, since it's schemaless.

Reasoning about what the code does is simple once you shift your paradigm to document from relational.
Spoke with English Heritage and found out that they only do plaques inside London, outside it is done by the local council.

And this would be under the exceptional circumstance of an important historical event.
Americans' Mobile Connectivity - Pew Internet Survey
Cool project. Much like Ruby, Python seems easy to match to JSON.

Also, check out JsonML : http://jsonml.org/ . The focus lies more on the client side templating (where it's all JS anyway), but it has additional goodies like XML-to-JsonML XSLT transformation.
Making Super Juice With Juicer
Yesterday I finally started to give Juicer a go. Christian has a nice write up on his blog but I stumbled into some problems and decided to put this article together. Following is a run down of how I got my CSS and JavaScript files through the Juicer.
What's the real world analogue of twitter and facebook
I thought this might offer sort of a market survey for many entrepreneurs designing a startup. But I didn't bother reading beyond this abstract [there's link to a full report in html or pdf]... once I read that this March 25, 2009 report used data from a survey that was completed in December 2007 !

Seriously: That sort of lag between data collection and analytical report cripples its value to all but historians. I find that Pew often address important issues. But "timing is everything".
Out of interest does anyone attempt to warn their users when they attempt to use a common/easily guessed password?

At the moment all I do is insist on a minimum length but it doesn't seem as though it would be all that difficult to add checks for common passwords.
Do your research. "document-based" DBs already "ruled the world" right until relational databases were invented, which quickly obsoleted them.

The only advantage of disk-backed hash table is ease of scalability, this is why they're useful for hm.... top 0.005% of web sites, who handle thousands of updates per second.
Yes, damn those governments and their insistence on rationality and safety and all that nonsense.
Thanks, the curious thing that I saw that post and even bookmarked it, but somehow forgot to read it ;)
No, graph databases will rule the world. Couch only supports trees, which is annoying if you want to have relationships between "documents".

Also, Couch's implementation of map/reduce arbitrarily limits the kinds of queries you can run.

If you actually want to ditch your relational database, take a look at things like KiokuDB, Elephant, AllegroCache, and so on. They may not have exciting web 2.0 screencasts, but the technology is much better. (I am biased towards KiokuDB, since I helped write it, but it has been very easy to use KiokuDB instead of a relational database; there has been significantly less code in our apps, tests have been much easier to write, and I don't think we've lost any runtime speed either. I really need to write a long blog post about this, but I haven't had time.)

It is good that the world is gradually working their way up to object/graph databases, though. Last week it was "OMG KEY VALUE STORES SOLVE EVERY PROBLEM", this week it is "DOCUMENT DATABASES WILL RULE THE WORLD", so hopefully the blogosphere is only a few weeks away from enlightenment ;)
The total weight of the pool is effectively meaningless. The load per square inch = weight of water at that depth. Thus the pressure at the top of the pool is effectively zero. At the bottom it's around .42psi/foot * 3feet = 1.3psi which is not all that bad. Anyway, I suspect the load is actually less than the average basement wall which often holds back 6 feet or more of soil.
I simply don't believe that this model scales "over giant amounts of data", at least in any sort of real-world usage scenario. Can you back up this claim with benchmarks?
The REAL problem with skydiving
My Muses for Brainstorming Startup Ideas
The overwhelming majority of programming languages use English keywords

Can anyone tell me any programming language which doesn't use english keywords!?!

English is the common language of communication throughout the world, and consequentially the effect has percolated into the hacker world too I guess !
Take the vertex whose vertices cross the biggest number of other vertices and move it. Repeat until nothing crosses. I remember this problem in maths ages ago, there is a way to know if you can't untangle something- look up the water gas electricity problem
before 3.0 with the notification system or some other way to keep applications running in the background, this, like all the other IM applications on the iPhone/touch, won't be of practical use.

Talking in Skype and recieving a traditional phone call? Skype call drops. Skype quits.

Talking in Skype while surfing the web. Nope. It's either Safari or Skype.

Tapping on a link in a Skype chat? Sure, but you'll go offline doing that (Skype closes before Safari opens).

Waiting for a call at a scheduled time? Sure, but don't think about browsing the web or even just browsing your music library to play something as all these actions will quit Skype.

Nah. IM and even more so VoIP are totally unpractical on the iPhone.

3.0 will bring some alleviation with the background notification service as you'll at least know when someone tries to call you, but it's still nowhere near usable. At least for me.

And that's this "changes the game"? There are already a bunch of - even Skype compatible - VoIP applications out there for the iPhone. They just didn't take off due to the reasons stated above.