skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I can't decide whether I'm more amazed or amused at the brazenness of the company's use of the Twitter name & branding.

Kudos to TipJoy for their mention right at the end!
Residences are protected against overly broad search and seizure through the procedure of getting a warrant. A warrant is for a specific address. The police can't go and cordon off the whole block just because they want to make sure they get one house.

There needs to be some sort of analogous procedure for datacenters.
Adventures with ActiveRecord 'find'
But typical desktops only run a few user-mode processes at a time

No. Run ps -A goddamit. A "typical" desktop, especially a UNIX-derived variant, runs a lot of processes. And servers in the near future will do too.

and wouldn't be able to share much code

No, there are a ton of userspace code which is being shared between processes. The code that allocates memory, the code that draws lines and buttons on your screen, the code that sorts strings, the code that implements threading, the code that renders bitmaps out of TTF glyphs, reads files and opens sockets, each process needs megabytes of code you seem to have no idea about: it's not even about libraries, it's about everything not drivers, do you understand now? There are good reasons why JVM programs are memory pigs: they are, essentially, running their own OS in complete isolation.

Disruptive OS innovation will have to wait until someone comes up with a killer app that requires fundamental capabilities which current OS designs can't support.

The problem is that programmers are cheap. There is no market pressure to evolve and leave technology from the 70s in the past. Armies of incubated Java code monkeys cost less in the short run as opposed to going against the stream of mediocrity. This is why new platforms (iPhone) are so exciting and refreshing: they let us leave obsoleted/inherited junk behind: iPhone doesn't have JVM nor Flash/AIR for very good reasons: OS is your VM. Has always been. It's just the right thing to do.

The OS has largely ceased to be an obstacle and quietly faded into the background.

You have demonstrated enough ignorance regarding what OS actually is to allow me to safely ignore this comment. There are a few folks at Apple and Microsoft who are still capable of understanding these issues, this is why Java, despite of 10+ years of availability, with all its beautiful promises, still lives in the obscurity of server rooms.
helping with some open source stuff doesn't take as much time as you'd think.
Timezone seems like a really poor way to do this, given all the other methods Google has for tracking their users' activity.
I think it's mostly just that individuals were being properly credited for patches that they submitted, rather than them going through one of the commiters and the source control tool logging the committer as the patch author.
Unreasonable Effectiveness of
More or less...

http://xkcd.com/463/
Maybe that script should point out the browsers that don't require admin, eg chrome & portable firefox
> Are you seriously claiming something like "people shouldn't use 3D printers unless they've already made paper-mache models?"

nope.

i said "it's funny" how 3d printing and making 'scrappy' things often involve non-overlapping sets of people. i never said "should", though i would encourage both sides put the other sides's tools in their toolbox. that tone probably leaked out. eit.

ultimately though, i think it's funny they are two different markets is all. the goals are so similar! my team has literally brainstormed 'killer uses' for desktop 3d printing and then laughed: wait, you build that with <blah>.

(sculpture) artists are a good overlap in that they're often comfortable and creative process-wise when making sculptures. they're the only group i've talked to who get excited over both cornstarch, chicken wire and paper bags AND 3d printing. i have this optimism that they could really use a cheap desktop printer and do great things with it.

i don't know if that truly is a large or demanding market, but it's a thought. for now i'm just working on the printer for fun.

parts cost $70. medium is still the trickiest part.
Objects can validate themselves and object databases store the class as well as the instances. This allows a database to contain a mix of different versions of a particular class of objects. The invoice from yesterday might have 5 fields and validate under one set of rules while todays invoice has 7 fields and validates itself under a completely different set of rules.

Such polymorphism is trivial to implement with objects and very painful to implement withing a relational database. It's not a matter of whether a RDBMS can model something, it's a matter of how much effort is required.
Twitter's the new driving menace
3d printers are cool, and the machines themselves are surprisingly cheap. You can get one that does up to 12x12x12 models for about $15K.

However, what most people don't realize is the material, usually ABS plastic, is $25 per cubic inch. The machine has to print out scaffolding in addition to the actual parts, so the per-model price can be unexpectedly expensive. Also, since the machine prints by layering rows of plastic on top of each other, the end result is really only rough prototype quality due to the striation on the surface.

Often times old-school modeling and molding approaches can get better results for a much lower cost.
True, but Google wouldn't have even been launchable without his family's connections to Sun Microsystems founder Andy Bechtolsheim and his $100k angel investment.

Mark Zuckerberg is a more apt comparison. With all of the money and privilege he had growing up, he'd better be changing the world.
Emacs Shortcuts
It might also be a cultural thing. American society is very ambitious, and the environment BG grew up in appears to be on the extreme end of it.

The intelligence factor is harder to measure, but I'm not sure if business savvy and entrepreneurial drive are things you're born with, or traits you pick up as you grow.

All that aside, there are stories where the down and out Joe bootstraps himself to riches through hard work/ambition/etc. so it's hard to say what is causing what. In fact I feel that I'm very ambitious/entrepreneurial, even though my parents were an engineer and chemist for a very large corporation.
Hmm, maybe I'm too retro for this guy, but 16 bytes for an element in a linked list does sound excessive. :)
I love Andrew's interviews and it's nice to hear more about his story.

I love the J Crew story.

I've returned Christmas gifts (electronics) to fund my startup, but I may have to look through the closet now, too... LOL
I've met the Fun Club folk, primarily Mike Winter. They've done some very cool stuff. Will be interesting to see what comes of it.
Craftcentral Articles : An Introduction to Inuit Sculpture
Yeah. When I was a kid. Everyone played it and enjoyed it. So what? Donkey.bas on the other hand...
Is Silicon Valley a Systemic Risk?
Up until fairly recently, the only way you could get any reasonably useful feed of the AP wire was via NNTP. I think in my case their RSS feeds went public several weeks after our site launched, but all of my discussions with their technical people left me with the impression that there isn't really much innovation going on at AP.
Nice was meant to be an improvement upon java when it did not have generics. Java 1.5 introduced generics that worked different from Nice's, so Nice became a dead end.

Nice also supported a more functional programming style. For example there is syntax for blocks/closures:
http://nice.sourceforge.net/manual.html#blockCall
Neither had family connections to Bechtolsheim that I know of. Where did you hear that?
And Murdoch has the gall to complain about Google...
Ask HN: Day Zero Valuation
We're at stage of getting another cofounder for our startup ( yes, we did applied to YC and did not get accepted ). The potential cofounder is interested to work for equity but wants to know what our zero day valuation is.

Since we have not launched but have various pieces of software coded, site design, web app's interface designed and coded. How would you come out with a valuation at this point?
I charge what I need to cover paying for a family in Silicon Valley. So my rates now start at $175/hour for version control (Subversion, CVS, Mercurial), build systems (SCons mainly), bug trackers (JIRA) and anything else by Atlassian.
Business ranges from steady to brisk. And it's certainly varied.
Lessons here are about a) change control b) backups and c) never trust anyone who calls themselves a "guru".
Trust me, you don't want to know.
Reality Trek: Tech from Star Trek that's here today...or on the way
I haven't really found a good way to support myself while doing what I want, yet. Right now I live frugally and work part-time as a programmer. One reason that I hang out at news.yc is that I'm hoping to turn some of my ideas into some sort of startup, even though I don't really fit the profile of a startup founder (I'm not very driven or passionate, at least not when it comes to business.)
We only work on projects that result in the construction of features that we were going to build anyway for our web apps.
There's a lot of room for improvement in your site's SEO. For example, the urls- instead of having URLs like http://www.tripntale.com/trip/4820, get some text in your URL, even something like http://www.tripntale.com/trip/mai-chau-vietnam/4820 would be better. Also, get some text on your pages! How can you rank in search without any text? If you do SEO
If you have any more detailed questions, feel free to contact me at the email in my profile.
That is highly unlikely. However, if you find nothing he writes inspiring/thought-provoking, then I think you are prejudiced against him based on reading a few things you didn't find worthy. People rarely become famous by being complete hacks: this guy has sensible and valuable things to say. Now I don't read his stuff anymore because there isn't enough of value in it for me, but YMMV.
Having a business plan may not mean much to VCs, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't have one. If you have no idea how you're going to make money, you have bigger problems than getting VC funding.
Can't wait to see Web 2.0 be the next regulated industry. Imagine the government trying to pull off a definition of that!
Classified Ads Booming Online
Unfortunately, here in Greece the situation is so ugly that not even those warnings have any change of convincing people to upgrade. I can imagine most of them simply closing the window.
Among the reasons for this is that we've got a huge pirated windows xp installation base, uneducated users that ignore anything non-microsoftic and think that taking the ECDL makes you a computer scientist, and there is a large amount of amazingly badly written IE-only web apps. Open source is much less known here than in other countries.
Our only hope is for people to upgrade to Vista, in order to receive IE7 automatically (hey, did I just say that?)
Canon HR-10 DVD Camcorder at buyelect.com
The name Canon has always meant photographic and broadcast television cameras with optical excellence, advanced image processing, superb performance, and the latest in technological advancements.
The secret, social lives of bacteria
I'm enjoying my master's degree quite a bit. My peers are brilliant and my class work is interesting. Also, I am quite impressed by the kinds of companies that came to our career fair and that are giving me a call back. It would be even sweeter if I weren't paying for it.

However, I am not interested in pursuing a PHD. Working on one problem for three years sounds... tedious. Also, I've noticed that my dating market value and social life have declined quite a bit since I left my job. Two years of that ain't bad, but five would be tough.
If it takes twice the work.

Anyway I would just add a small notices on the top of the page saying something like you have an old browser, so this page may not render correctly.
Sony Ericsson unveils new strategy
BARCELONA--Sony Ericsson has been hit hard by the global recession, but the company says it has a new strategy focused on services and entertainment that it hopes will get it back on track.
AMD's Meyer talks spinoff, Intel, Netbooks
AMD's CEO Dirk Meyer talks about the company's competitiveness, Intel, and a new focus on processors for smaller, lighter laptops.
#9 is not great advice. Sitemaps will not affect your ranking for any term ever. If you are looking at Sitemaps as a tool for better ranking, then you are doing it wrong. Sitemaps help is discovery. If some of your pages are not crawled or just poorly crawled sitemaps can help in that regard. If those pages have good content then you may rank well. The ranking benefit of Sitemap is just a side effect.
It's only two words! You need two 64 bit pointers on a 64-bit machine.

A fuckton of people have come up with the idea that "hey, since a 4gb address space is really plenty, why don't we try using an n/2 address space and have a whole cons fit in one word?" I'm sure the same thing has come up plenty of times before.

It turns out to be not so hot to avoid directly using the OS' VM and the hardware's MMU.
Nice to see something admit that, yes, div hell does exist and div/css based layout isn't intrinsically better -- you have to actuallyactually bother to do it right to get worthwhile results. Also nice to see it written out that there is indeed more to semantic markup than replacing your tables with divs and a stylesheet.
This is not Google's project. It is simply being hosted on Google Code.
A year ago I was a huge raving fan of Jeff Jarvis and his theories about what "the new news" will look like.

Then I just spent the last year actually creating a metro news site and watching carefully to see what other folks are doing.

I still admire the guy's verve, but he's dead wrong about "write what you do best and link to the rest."

News organizations that take this advice will be at an immediate disadvantage against the Huffington Post's, Gothamists and Gawkers of the world. While the Jarvis-ites are linking to stuff, these other sites are copy and pasting 1-2 paragraphs from the original story, tossing a few sentences before and after the quote and the passing it off to Google as an original article.

Google eats it up and sends them traffic.

Meanwhile, when it looks at your links, it classifies them as just links and sends you no traffic.

In today's online news environment, you must steal to get ahead or even to just stay in the game.

Jarvis needs to take a year off and try to actually start a news site. Let him see how it really works.
A PhD is an apprenticeship to become an academic. If you aren't planning to take your career in that direction it's hard to see a reason to do one. It's a negative in the non-academic job market.
Spies 'infiltrate US power grid'
Cheap histogram as of 4 hours after posting:

<10:-------
10-25:-
26-50:------------
51-75:----------------------------------
76-100:----------------------------------------------
101-125:-----------------------------------------------
126-150:---------------------------
150+:------------------------------

Sample Size: 230
My experience/understanding has been that XHTML bears little relation to the real world though - iframe is an invalid XHTML element?
Did you ever notice how flickr prevents you from seeing multiple high-res images at once? You can't even see links to other photos when viewing a higher res! The highest resolution you can see on a navigable page is 500px on a side.

Flickr is fucking atrocious for actually viewing someone's photos. It's about as shitty as they could possibly get away with.

On the other hand, it has absolutely terrific support for communities, with all sorts of little touches to encourage their formation. It also manages to simultaneously appeal to US Grandmas, Arab twentysomethings, and the requisite "self facilitating media nodes" that fuel WEB 2.0 hype.
Teaching the Startup Mentality
Knuth, goto, Python, and OOP
I don't quite understand why that sort of methods should belong to array-class. Should array also have product-method? Average? Standard-deviation? Concatenating strings? Where should you draw the line?
This reads like an onion article in the beginning.
What Google Trends hides from not signed in users
Actually a canny data-center operator might be able to offer a limited free service to something like a hospital, allowing them to argue that a wholesale shutdown might threaten lives. Done just right, the hospital gets a free service and the data-center gets protection.
Not true in hardware. Look at any job board. All the cool jobs require PhDs or many years of experience. It is very hard to get that experience because not many companies want to take a risk on someone with just a bachelors.

I knew I wanted to go back to grad school during my senior year, but got a job first to rack up some money and experience. There is so much depth to electrical engineering that sometimes even senior level classes feel like they are barely scratching the surface.
One can always stamp out risk by reducing return.
I'm sick of this shit (on the state of the art in Metaprogramming)
The question's basically meaningless - startup valuation is fuzzy enough when VCs invest after launch, revenue, sometimes profits. How could you come up with a number before you've even launched?

I suspect that the prospective cofounder is trying to figure out how much of the startup he will end up owning. He knows how much he is worth in dollar terms; divide that by the present value of the startup and you get the percentage of ownership that vests per month/year/whatever. So if his present salary is worth $100k/year, and the startup is currently valued at $1M, and his shares vest over 4 years, and the startup's value remains constant over those 4 years (unlikely, but for the sake of calculation...), he's thinking he'll get 40% of the company.

This is an incredibly awkward way to think about valuation and equity splits. If this is really his concern, I'd say just make him an offer for the proportion of equity you're going to give him. It should be based on how much he'll improve the startup's chances in the future, not on some made-up numbers for present salary & valuation (which is basically meaningless). So if you think he'll contribute as much as you guys will, and he's crucial to the startup's success, give him shares that are nearly equal to yours. If you don't think that, I'd suggest not bringing him on as a cofounder at all rather than trying to work out some lower equity number. Don't worry too much about what you've already done: trust me, the vast majority of work is ahead of you...
Their company might seem more stable and earn more clients if they were charging something now, however. Data management is definitely a field where the appearance of permanence adds values. Revenue is one such indicator.
still, this is sad. 36k a year.
Just open a coffee shop, and you will make a lot more.
In GNOME 2.24:
"Keyboard Preferences" > "Layouts" > "Layout Options" > "Ctrl key position" > "Make CapsLock an additional Ctrl" OR "Swap Ctrl and CapsLock"

You can use the same utility to swap Esc and CapsLock.
Why is it a stupid move? It looks to me exactly like when a successful musician gets his own label, which in a sense it is since EA owns half of it. Now he gets even more freedom to play around and, in the end, to get more money out of it. I see no stupid in there.
The main thing, IMHO, was the way it used flash/flv for video presentation and had a way to let users upload fairly arbitrary video formats and convert to flv on the back-end. I don't remember if I encountered flv video independently before I encountered youtube, but it was around the same time.

Remember the days before flash video? Remember having to use quicktime and realplayer? Those days sucked.
I wonder how much longer it is before the looters discover the angel investors and seed-stage investors.
I run a small service business, providing custom db programming/minor website design on the side. Expanded the service business a little too far back in early 2000's, which means my slow times are still thankfully good and the busy times get hairy.

Slowing a little, now keeping one guy busy part-time, and I and my wife work part-time (work together). Feeling VERY lucky.

If it slows more, I may finally get back to my last web-app idea I haven't finished :)
DuraGrip Tires - Outstanding Choice For Urban Driving
And you have to work a lot more, consider this, invest ~40 hours in a simple application and get $100 a day for it. Sounds better than juggling with coffeebeans and latte macchiato's every day.
He's an incredibly effective pulp manufacturer. Before his MBA-junk streak, he produced novelizations of NES games!
search-pdf-books.com vs. pdf-search-engine.com
I think wins the first...
20 Excellent Mootools Techniques for Rich User Interface
Although the FBI have shown themselves to be quite capable of shutting down 911 service, which might threaten lives.
Why not make $100+/hour as a contractor writing iPhone apps for people with "a really good idea"?
In Warrantless Wiretapping Case, Obama DOJ's New Arguments Are Worse Than Bush's
I don't know much about this sort of compression, but there are some pretty long urls out there. Reducing a four-line Google Maps url to one line would be an amazing achievement, but it doesn't seem like it's quite enough for what people do with reduced urls today.

But, I'd be happy to be proven wrong.
Is that what grad students do? I'm doing that right now! Dang.

Note to self: don't go to grad school. You're likely to fail.
As nostrademons suggests, 'valuation' is likely the wrong question, and you should just skip to what is probably the real motivation for the question, relative equity splits.

But if valuation really is the question: be careful about setting it high before you formalize and restricted/time-vested stock shares. For certain tax purposes (83b election), it's helpful if the shares are handed out at a moment when they are really cheap. Then the founders can buy them at fair value, do the 83b election, and all subsequent appreciation/vesting triggers no tax liability until the shares are eventually sold.

(A good reference on 83b elections: http://www.startupcompanylawyer.com/2008/02/15/what-is-an-83...)
I'm happy if it is sustainable for him, but it relies on a) continued downloads and b) advertisers continuing to be willing to pay $0.70 CPMs for advertising in joke apps to iPhone users who are demonstrably unwilling to pay $0.99 for things.

But yeah, there is no magic like having already written code. All additional work you do (marketing, new versions, SEO, etc) acts as a force multiplier for all the work you've already done. It's capitalism at its finest (since you're leveraging intellectual capital).

Plus you can always play the "Hey, if I can write one application and make $100 a day, and the application doesn't take the majority of my time to maintain or support... couldn't I write two applications and make $200 a day?" game.