skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This seems a clear case of management and the BOD not understanding the industry. I can't even imagine how much in branding AOL screwed up. I'm amazed they still retain the AOL front without having a serious play in the market. It seems like the competent fled. One expects a company the size of AOL to have competent people running the company. If you still own any AOL or work there, I would caution your future involvement.
What's worth reading then?
Simulating Neocortical Column Of Rat Brain - IBM Blue Gene/L Supercomputer
"Two years on, he has already developed a computer simulation of the neocortical column - the basic building block of the neocortex, the higher functioning part of our brains - of a two-week-old rat, and it behaves exactly like its biological counterpart. It's something quite beautiful when you watch it pulse on the giant 3D screens the researchers have constructed.

[...]

Although a neocortical column is only 2 millimetres long and half a millimetre in diameter, it contains 10,000 neurons and 30m synapses. The machine that simulates this column is an IBM Blue Gene/L supercomputer is capable of speeds of 18.7 trillion calculations per second. It has 8,000 processors and is one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world."
CPAN Perl modules as RPMs v/s PAR
Gosh. "Hide", please. Who gives a heck about Christmas?
"Markram believes that with the state of technology today, it is possible to build an entire rat's neocortex, which is the next phase of the Blue Brain project, due to begin next year. From there, it's cats, then monkeys and finally, a human brain."

Not in Kazakhstan...
Leo needs a better gui than Tk.
Yeah, Chuck Norris.
And even then, sometimes you still need Steve Jobs.
The Great Wall of China had one of those fire towers every some distance (to alert invasions I think), kind of like the set up in the LoTR: The Two Towers. I never thought people would use these signaling methods to actually transmit these kinds of information. Pretty cool.
My .emacs has been more or less the same for the past 10 years. The 4 most critical lines are these:

(global-set-key "\C-h" 'delete-backward-char)
(global-set-key "\M-^" 'query-replace-regexp)
(global-set-key "\C-x:" 'goto-line)
(global-set-key "\C-x\C-e" 'compile)
Ask YC: What tools are you using to monitor a site's load?
Freedom?

Oh oh, Million dollar idea: Time travel buddy movie with Einstein and William Wallace. Call it Brainheart.

(Million dollar, as in the revenue. I.e. a complete flop.)
Facebook is so last year - welcome to the hit websites of 2008
There is no One True Universal Startup (tm). There are startups that work with embedded micro controllers, and there are startups that create networking software, startups that work on the Windows Desktop and startups that work as server ware that is accessed via http.

Each one of those domains is going to have different requirements, and each one of those would be better served by one language as opposed to another.

It would be like asking people, "which human language is best for communicating". Well, if I had to describe many different kinds and varieties of snow, I'd probably choose an Eskimo dialect. If I had to describe many different levels of respect, honor and shame, I'd say Japanese. If I was to communicate in the business realm, I'd have to say English. And, if I had to talk about hunting tapirs in a rain forest, I'd probably use a dialect native to tribes in the Amazon.

With all due respect to PG, the idea of One True Language (tm) is a myth as far as I'm concerned. Langauges are tools. Different languages have different strengths and weaknesses. Familiarize yourself with enough different tools so you can make intelligent decisions, and then use the most powerful language/tool for the job at hand.
"If something like this were to happen today"

Whoops, you accidentally wrote that as if it were hypothetical.
Size Is The Enemy
8-year-olds should test my code
Cluster computing a Google talk
Lisp: love the language, hate the people
Ask YC:  Anyone using O'Reilly's Safari service?  
I've been using it for a few months, and I love the service, so I'm glad to pound the pulpit about it for a while.

My only issue with it, is that some times it's slow, and the search still needs work. But, for what it's worth, an excellent value no matter what level of programming you're at.
I'd like to know this too.

Rock Solid Arcade I suspect at many points is outgrowing my cacheless hit the database on every page setup. I started out with a cron job monitoring top every minute, and many times the usage hits 50% - I'm using Django, so the GIL means that's at full capacity, but I have no idea how instantaneous that figure is.

I got some helpful advice on the Django chat room to monitor Apache, but really what I'd like is for some warning to be dumped to a log if a connection queue backs up for more than a second (i.e. the server is at full capacity). That'll be time to cache/upgrade. :)
Directory of university lectures in computer science
A Star Is Born! Google + Facebook For Health 2.0
The first community-powered health search engine, launched after a year in development. The Israeli web 2.0 iMedix allows consumers to benefit from the online research conducted by thousands of others with similar health conditions or interests and allows users to enhance that information through real-time patient-to-patient interaction. By combining advanced search with community features, The project empowers people to find and share health information in order to make better health-related decisions.
I invented this in my head a few years ago. Figured that if I was sent back to the 17th century or so, I'd get rich by building towers to send messages long-distance with light. No surprise that someone already did it.
I've just started testing nagios http://www.nagios.org/.

It looks like complete overkill for a single server and I don't know how useful it is but it does look promising. It certainly looks like it would scale to tens if not hundreds of machines easily.

It includes an alert structure so different events triggers different actions. For example if the database stops responding email the DBA, if it's a router email the network admin etc.

Again I can't vouch for it over the long term as it's only been a week or so of testing but I can't complain atm.

It's a PITA field to research and I'm trying to avoid the 'roll my own' urges as I'd quite like to write it ;)

Anyone else got any ideas? There is a python based monitoring application out there somewhere that I stumbled upon about 6 months ago with a great plugin API and neato graphs but I can't find it again :( I blame google and not my incompetence :)
Actually, there was a link about this a little while back: http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&sid=ayjI....

I am fascinated no end that a group of nerds is able to game the system to such an astounding degree. In this century, it isn't by gaming the casino that loads of cash can be made.

These guys run a hedge fund that is so successful it no longer accepts money from the public, and only manages the assets of its own employees. Using different secret strategies and to an extent human-supervised automatic trading. Its annualized return since its birth in the eighties has been on the order of 37%.
Yes, for at least a few years now. Very handy when you want to look up a quick answer, or reference a book that you have sitting at home while you're at work.
Wow, the screenshots for Nagios are in Netscape 4.7.

Ahh, the days.
YC startup Socialpicks partners with Reuters
Great result for SFP startup!
4G inches closer with Nokia Siemens tests
These guys seem to be kicking some major ass. Go socialpicks!
So when do we get to ask it "How can the net amount of entropy of the universe be massively decreased?"

And read its beautiful answer:
INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR MEANINGFUL ANSWER
"It's also a sure-fire way to fail."

7 million small business owners may disagree with you.

I do agree with the rest of your post. Nothing like having the many resources of well connected investors on your side.

Still, given the choice of having an investor or a customer on my side, I'd choose the customer every time.

I stand by my original post: Want control? Borrow. Want growth? Share.
Cacti with SNMP is a very good single app solution to keeping an eye on server health trends.

http://cacti.net/screenshots.php

Smokeping is quite useful for monitoring network and basic http request response times.

http://oss.oetiker.ch/smokeping/

Nagios is good for actively monitoring services and alerting you when things go wrong.

I generally use those and create tons of additional monitoring tools that generate reports/charts.
The chairman has been dually notified of your post.
Says more about Hoover than Einstein, wouldn't you say?
Yes, agree that it's great to use as a reference, but reading entire books sucks. Too much stuff going on in the page and can't read things offline.
> Norenzayan can only speculate about the significance:
> "We need that common denominator that works for
> everyone.

When I was first reading this, I thought it would be cool to give the other person 6 and thereby give them warm fuzzies about the anonymous other person. And I still think this is cool.

But I'm reading _Atlas Shrugged_ at the moment and have changed my decision to considering any outcome to be equally valid on the part of the person making the decision. Why? Because - if someone has $10, why should they be induced to leave any for someone else?

The study is founded on the flawed assumption that it's a good thing for people to give their money away.
Remember playing the game "Post Office" in elementary school? The first person would whisper "The quick brown fox jumped over the spoon," to the second person. This would go around the room until the last person revealed the message, "My mother bakes brownies on Tuesday." And it happened like this every time!

What did these systems do to avoid that translation problem? Probably nothing, leaving me to believe that they weren't that effective and were quickly replaced by the next available technology.
WTF is a truffle oil article doing on ycnews? Take it to Reddit or something.
I used nagios at the last place I worked with a number of servers, and I was pretty happy with it, although I could very easily imagine something better.
nagios scales, and is eazy. You can also write scripts so that if you daemon/application dies, it will be restarted.
It's useful sometimes, but probably not worth spending your own money on. Mainly useful for referencing something you already know is in a particular book. As others have noted, it's not good for reading a full book, and for looking up an answer Google is usually at least as good and easier to get to.
Consider collectd (http://collectd.org/). Unlike a lot of the usual suspects, collectd is a daemon that records the usual server health stats every 10 seconds into rrd files. After running it for two years on a few dozen systems, it's never failed or caused undue load on its own. We often see events that would have gone completely unnoticed in a 5-minute monitoring window.
Timeless tips every aspiring college entrepreneur should know about
Valleywag's 3 biggest goofs of 2007
Are you talking about site load or server load?

If you want to measure the load on a server, look into the sar utility, which is included in Linux and all other Unix'es. It will take snapshots of data at 10 minute intervals and store them. Other tools will take that data and turn it into a bar graph or other visualization.
You said it. I know Mark was looking into wxPython at one point, but there was something he could not get to work properly. I believe it was something in the tree widget - maybe the little box next to the name of the node.
Condensed version:

- In the past year or two, email service providers have all gotten significantly more aggressive at filtering spam.

- Even a legitimate company sending a lot of user-requested email risks being flagged as a spammer, for reasons as simple as a high send rate.

- There are a multitude of different whitelists and policies that control email delivery at ISPs. There is no standard bounce message format.

- Despite that, you have to act on bounce messages. Dogster collects all bounces into a database, presumably to help employees find and act upon the most critical email blocks. These bounces might also be used to trigger automated responses, such as a temporary slowdown in email to a particular mailhost.

- Some companies are appearing to serve this niche. One service is delivery-testing: a company gets email accounts at a bunch of ISPs and lets you know which ones are rejecting your emails. Others offer a mail-sending API, where you use their (presumably ubiquitously whitelisted) servers to give your emails that extra smidge of legitimacy. These services appear to be expensive and nonstandardized so expect to do a lot of work either way.
Rails and Django, by contrast, are like precocious eleven-year-olds who are really good at gymnastics.

Django is the shy one. Rails is already wearing the skirt and carrying the pompoms, but the high school girls rebuff her by claiming that she's not tall enough.

(Rails is, of course, also being secretly employed by the Enterprise at this very moment. The metaphor kind of breaks down here, although Ender's Game does come to mind.)

Arc, of course, is entirely free from sin, but that's partly because she hasn't been born yet.
Twitter is on their list? I guess it shows the validity of that list.
There are certainly plenty of firms that use AI-based investing techniques, but my understanding is that after being fashionable in the late 90s, they've fallen out of favor. After a couple AI-based systems "blew up," people realized that they're essentially opaque: you can't look at a neural network or a genetic algorithm and realize precisely what went wrong and fix it for next time. There's nowhere to place the blame -- not even on the programmer, since he didn't directly create the trading rules.
I spent a few months trying to go from "wow!" numbers in papers to something that I thought could be used for risking my own hard-earned money, and I failed. I think it's tilting at windmills unless you have the resources of Goldman Sachs or someone like that behind you.

I know for a fact that some investment banks use these techniques; they just aren't using them to make a mechanical "trade/no-trade" decision.

What Joe Schmoe on the street reading these papers is interested in is the possibility of lucrative personal trading. The papers ostensibly claim to instead be examining market efficiency. Consequently reading these papers is kind of disappointing. But, the reason I submitted the paper was its unorthodox approach which differs from most of the other literature on applying evolutionary computation to mechanical trading.
The kinetic energy goes to infinity as the speed of a particle approaches the speed of light, so there's no upper bound on the kinetic energy a particle can have in special relativity. The formula you possibly had in mind, mv^2/2, is valid only for v much less than c; for relativistic velocities the energy of a particle is equal to mc^2/sqrt(1 - v^2/c^2).

BTW, it's any kinetic energy that contributes to the temperature, not necessarily vibrational.
This is as thorny a discussion as which language is the best one. And the ultimate answer is in the same vein: it depends, but the decision should always be driven by the customer. My company had revenue from month 2 and won a $100K business plan because of value we brought to customers. I still looked into raising money, but at the end of the day I reminded myself what I had always thought: I don't need to raise money, and changes that would make existing customers less pleased were on the way if I did. The company is growing fast and customers love it because we concentrated on them and ignored the startup hoopla when it conflicted with bringing value to customers. Ultimately, you should raise money if you think it is in your _customers'_ best interests.
Commence obligatory whining about xkcd submissions!
Guy Builds World's Smallest 4-Stroke V12 Engine, is Aircooled (+Vid)
No, one of you didn't go to bed early enough. ;-)
What you mean as "failed"? Even if you're bringing in stable (in sense of Sharpe ratio) returns above the standard interest rates, you've already succeed.

I don't think it makes sense to play with your money unless you're very rich. Returns like 50% per year are quite unlikely in the longer run, yet very risky. Instead, consider starting a fund.
Well, first of all, that's not strictly true. I've recently joined the Drupal community, but I really like Rails and wouldn't hesitate to recommend it to the right person.

But, more importantly, when a member of the Drupal community inevitably urges you to use Drupal, they might also give you specific bits of invaluable advice like "oh, that thing you're trying to do is just Drupal core, plus CCK, plus Views, plus Organic Groups, plus Imagefield/Imagecache. Oops, except that Imagecache assumes X and you want Y... you'll need a bit of custom code. This other thing you want to do is 100% custom code. And those fine-grained permissions you want will add an extra 100 queries per page for logged-in users -- they'll stop working as your paid userbase grows, so remember to hire a hacker to re-engineer them if your app is a success. And make sure to budget extra time for theming, because it's a bear."
The point is that even with simplest risk model, the padded estimate, the price for the risk, is lot larger than the work itself.

I am still quite can't imagine a rational customer agreeing to pay such premium. Perhaps this is my chance to make a fortune :)
Cheer YC:  Happy Holidays!
Wishing you and yours a very happy holidays and a great New Year.
Well here's a bit more detail about the project. The actual site and features of the site don't need to be that much more impressive than a basic social network.

We don't need very many features at all, we're just going to need to spend a bit of time trying to hack away at Organic Groups to turn it into what we need.

The nut of the site will be its content. Stylistically, we're going for Etsy without all of their fancy searches.

And in fact, the overall flow will in the end be very similar to Etsy, in that there will be users, some of whom create 'groups', or for sale pages. These owners have the option of making these pages public or private. The private for sale pages will act very, very similarly to traditional groups.

Instead of a PayPal module, however, we can get away with an email form for the time being. Sorry, I'd love to give you all more details but technologically speaking this product is very basic and I'd hate to see someone beat me to the punch :)
For 15 bucks a month it's worth it to be able to get instant access.
You karma whore... ;) (Yes, I upmoded you xD)

But happy holidays!
Buy and read Pro Drupal Development by VanDyk and Westgate. The theming chapter alone is worth the price of the book.

The book is very good, but it doesn't really cover CCK and Views, which are two very important modules that form the center of a lot of Drupal sites. Make sure to learn about those on your own.

Visit a user group, if you've got one nearby, and ask questions.

The folks at Lullabot offer tutorials on Drupal site setup,
theming, and advanced programming. They're a fun crew and I suspect their classes are pretty good, if you have the tuition and travel budget for them. Their podcast is fun also, and much less expensive. It's not tightly edited -- the individual episodes are kind of long and rambling, and you might want to listen to them with a beer in one hand, to get into the proper spirit.

I keep meaning to watch the screencasts at http://drupaldojo.com/, but somehow I never get around to it.

The non-negotiable hard part of Drupal is the theming. If you're not a programmer, but you have strong power-user point-and-click skills, there's some chance that you'll be able to assemble an ugly, jumbled version of your site. This, I think, is one of the reasons why Drupal sells so well. But then you'll want to change the order of the fields on the Comment Preview page... and you will have to spend two days or more learning the Form API and the theming system. Be sure to budget the time or hire someone who can help.
I've an account via the university where I study. It's a good reference source, but really I seldom use it.
still - if you have a 2.x project that you care about (and still cared about) once the 3.0 transition was complete (say 3-4 years from now); what are you going to do, a complete rewrite when you want new features or just stay out of date forever? to me it just makes more sense to wait on starting new python projects until 2008 (or start writing it in 3000 now)
"The biggest road-hog remains spam (unsolicited e-mail), which accounts for 90% of traffic on the internet."

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21376597/

"Peer-to-peer applications account for between 50 percent and 90 percent of overall Internet traffic, according to a survey this year by ipoque GmbH, a German vendor of traffic-management equipment."

In other news, 90% of internet traffic was found to be dissemination of agenda.
The Economist is never wrong. But who is "pmarca".
You're just jealous because you didn't think of it first... I upmoded you, too though. :)

Regardless, it's still a nice thing to do, don't you think?
pmarca "is" Marc Andreessen, co-author of Mosaic / Netscape and co-founder of Netscape Communications.
What magazines? What Economist pieces? What news sources on technology?

Pick a question and I can attempt an answer. :)
A focused family business
Absolute one!
Nice, but since the holiday in question is Christmas you might as well say it.
Hands on with Mozilla Weave: Personalize your own cloud
Beautiful images of new open source movie
...and co-founder of Ning.
Australia to enforce a "ratings system" on web, track users
and opsware
Bear in mind they are not using an extracted 3D model of a cortical column, but "merely" a mush up of known neurons and known statistical properties of cortical columns.

In other words, we are far from simulating the brain.
Google Analytics

I believe using anything relatively more intensive is not worth the cycles. Even 'top' is taxing at times.
Fake Steve Jobs gets takedown letters from Apple. Or not?
A Web Troll's Toll on the Clinton Campaign
Where did the intranets go?
Top 10 Startups Worth Watching in 2008
Top 10 Javascripts for Image Manipulation
Small software companies: you need developers, not programmers
Facebook challenged by ad-free rival, Badoo
There's a converter for 2.x to 3.x. Or you can transition code by hand -- there are some differences in some places. Breaking backward compatibility just means not everything is guaranteed to work the same -- it does NOT mean that now everything is different. It's still Python.

Being "out of date" doesn't make any sense -- today's libraries aren't suddenly going to become less functional later. The stuff that works today will still work 5 years from now.

You change versions IF the new version gives you something you need. You don't change just because it's new.

And, always, the paper tiger is better than the real one. Not doing something today because it'll be outdated in a few years would mean never doing anything in the computer industry.
Simple Javascript slideshows for Flickr
merry christmas don't work to hard over the holiday period.
VCs and startups get real across Europe
Plan B: Why "What Got Us Here, Can't Take Us There."
Working on Christmas is just another edge you can get over your competitors.
Have a great one guys! Hope 2008 is prosperous for all!
Looking Back: The Year in Web 2.0
Nifty! These scripts work by going through the document's img elements, and turning any that are flagged with certain CSS classes into canvas elements. The image is then loaded into the canvas and manipulated with the proper effects using javascript on the canvas object.

Good for hackers who want nice visual effects but hate Flash. Unfortunately, not free (commercial use restricted).