skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's interesting that the Netherlands comes out particularly economical that way, because for a century Dutch schools have been funded on a per-capita enrollment basis, even if they are religious schools or schools with particular educational philosophies (e.g, Montessori or Waldorf). Parents choose what schools in which to enroll their children, and the funding follows the learner. The guess of Charles L. Glenn, author of Choice of Schools in Six Nations

http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/custom/portlets/recordD...

was that Dutch schools would be especially expensive because of that, but it seems they are actually more cost-effective than United States schools. Glenn liked the Dutch system for its freedom of choice--he didn't know that it provides better efficiency too.
For the small utilities that I sell, I go through a payment-processor: Regsoft. Regsoft adds the proper VAT to the shopping-cart total when the prospective buyer is in the process of paying for a license or licenses for the given program.
In principle I can't prove which I'm in. You're right. I left that out. But I see no reason to believe one over the other. But perpetual doubt is disempowering too.

And when I face an undecidable with equally plausible answers, I'm forced to test each view to see the results: what's life like with view x vs. view y. That result becomes the metric for a view's worth.

And honestly that could be solipsism. Although I know it as a similar concept some call "subjective reality". Again I don't believe in solipsism or SR, I'm just pointing out that either could be true and you could never know. I do believe in the multiverse though.

I always thought computers as conscious would prove consciousness was physical. I didn't realize my mistake till recently.
Wolfenstein 3D for iPhone engine code review
Sun and Oracle's culture is pretty much the opposite: ivory tower research vs. aggressive sales. However, the technology stack doesn't have much overlap and fits together well... I guess Oracle does hardware now.
I tried this kind of thing last November when I bought my G1, putting it on a GoPhone account instead of using t-mobile. The biggest problem I had was the lack of 3G (which is t-mobile only on the G1), since once in a while my phone would decide it needed to download, for example, an update, and there went all my bandwidth and all my minutes, too (and I was never allowed to get 100MB for $20; the most I could ever get was 10M for $15). So, last month, I broke down and went with a month-to-month plan at t-mobile, and since I can get unlimited data while paying the same as I was paying on a GoPhone account, I'm happy, and I don't have to nervously check my minutes every day and put my phone into airplane mode near the end of the month, etc.

If you really don't have the money, this could be worth it, but a similar thing was months of stress for very little savings, for me.
now if I could only find the Sequoia one...
Facebook Asks Users If They’ll Pay For Vanity URLs
I do flex development as well and I think flexbuilder is the only real choice
I heard about this guy who preached a "4 hour workweek" yet he probably worked >80 hours a week.
The problem Penny SMS solves is, without knowing the carrier, it is very hard to figure out where to route the messages to, since someone may have switched cell carriers, even multiple times, but retained the same cell number.
What I meant was that, as far as I have seen, the tools that try to replace SQL by some OO intermediary, give you poorer abstractions that limit what you can do. SQL seems clunky, but I think the core is quite well done considering when it comes from.

OTOH a relational relational database doesn't fit all needs. They scale pretty well, but when you get to gigantic data sets, they don't do so well and things like map reduce do a better job. Or cases where you are streaming massive amounts of data and you need performance, not ACID transaction reliability. Actually, we are more in agreement than disagreement.
Rigel (https://rigel.crhc.illinois.edu/) is one such project, though the silicon implementation is decidedly less far-along than AsAp. The goal there is 1024+ cores in 45nm. The targeted applications are more like "things that are massively parallel but don't run well on GPUs" than "DSP kernels that decompose into pipelines", but they are both accelerators nonetheless. A more detailed paper on the architecture itself can be found here: https://netfiles.uiuc.edu/jkelm2/www/papers/kelm-isca2009.pd... .

Full Disclosure: I am affiliated with this project. However, I am making no claims about the relative merits of AsAp and Rigel, just pointing out another manycore research project.

Also, you may be interested in commercial chips from Cavium (http://www.cavium.com/OCTEON_MIPS64.html) and Azul Systems (http://www.azulsystems.com/products/compute_appliance.htm). Of course, modern GPUs and Intel's forthcoming Larrabee are manycore chips as well, though GPUs have some restrictions and special-purpose hardware that makes them slightly less general than others.
I still feel that selling a crippled os like xp vs xp pro is just plain ol evil... Vista is worse

And that's another reason why this is a bad move: Microsoft has a history of this sort of thing -- their confusing product lineup has been the butt of jokes for years -- so the negative stories just write themselves.

Yes, I believe I was hinting that Microsoft should have released the netbook version of Win7 under another name. But then there's a different problem: It may be a bit late to introduce Windows Netbook 1.0, because they've already shipped thousands of netbooks with full-blown XP running on them. It's not a secret that you can run XP on a netbook. Are people going to trade "up" to Netbook 1.0 from XP? Only if it's actually better -- it's not enough just to change the name.

Once again, we see that one of Microsoft's most serious competitors is itself from ten years ago. I guess there are worse problems to have in the short run, but it's a serious problem when you're trying to move forward.
Fun human computation games to produce high quality language translations.
Although automated language translations are often sufficient to get a rough understanding, it would be better to use high quality translations to localize your site/app.

So the question is whether you can get high quality translations as the output of fun human computation games.

As an example, one can have a two-player ESP Game-like service where each player is shown a web page and a specific sentence to translate. The game would check that all words used are indeed words from the target language. The score obtained would be based on the similarity between the translations submitted by the two players.

A variant on this idea only requires players to know the target language. The idea is to use Google Translate say as a first step to produce a rough translation. The two players would be shown an automatically translated web page with a sentence whose translation is to be improved. The game would check that each player submits a translation that is sufficiently different from what Google Translate produced. Again, scoring would be based on the similarity of the translations submitted by the players.
I generally use Xcode + IB if I'm doing anything complex with ObjC. Though, If I'm just doing a one-off command line app with ObjC alone for whatever reason or need to make a quick edit to a file, I'll use TextMate instead.
Yes, smells bs, thats what the comment says:

This article is a HOAX, the messenger, Frank Engelsman is a NON existing Dutch Private Investigator from a NON existing company called 'Ultrascan' in Amsterdam, this company is NOT registired at the Dutch Chamber of Commerce. Mr Engelsman uses the Internet for his investigations.
I always thought that he is just one of the development team.

What does his role involve that makes it so important to the success of the whole company?
Unless I'm reading their demo wrong, their technique makes the page load slower (for me anyway):
http://demos.digg.com/stream/streamDemo.html

Normal is consistently under 100ms and MXHR is around 400ms (using Safari 4 beta, OS X)
netbooks are basic, entry-level products, much of what the banks did was basically a scam. An equivalent would be the Chinese knockoffs like this one: http://www.ubergizmo.com/15/archives/2009/04/cect_m188_iphon...
"It's pretty amazing that some stranger can exchange [email] with one of the gods of programming."

I think that sums up the whole Wolfenstein 3D for iPhone creation - nostalgia cool, geeky cool, and transparently cool.
Because a relation is a function that maps tuples to logical values (true, false, null, etc). We just happen to define these function as table lookups so duplicate rows are indeed not a problem. Thinking of tables as sets instead of as functions causes the confusion.
Does your service work for European cell phones?
"There was a European version whose provisions were very similar to the Broadcast Flag -- I was allowed to attend these, but only by promising nondisclosure. No problem: I stumped up and down Europe, saying, "There's a crazy, evil DRM thing coming that's really bad and it's so bad they won't even let me tell you about it!" That was a lot simpler than explaining what was wrong with it."
In 1996, he says:

> And most importantly, the laws regulating copyright and technology were almost entirely designed by the entertainment industry. They could write anydamnfoolthing and get it passed in Congress, by the UN, in the EU.

But:

> 1996 is gone, and good riddance.

Yes, but has the legislative climate changed that much? Are we or are we not still in an era when "They could write anydamnfoolthing and get it passed in Congress, by the UN, in the EU"? I think the article offers pretty good evidence that we are still in such a legislative climate.

It looks like 1996 is very much not gone in a very important way.
DreamIt Ventures Speaker List Includes Josh Kopelman, Mark Hughes, Duck Duck Go Guy
I found this interesting tidbit on the HAProxy page:

Keep-alive was invented to reduce CPU usage on servers when CPUs were 100 times slower. But what is not said is that persistent connections consume a lot of memory while not being usable by anybody except the client who openned them. Today in 2009, CPUs are very cheap and memory is still limited to a few gigabytes by the architecture or the price. If a site needs keep-alive, there is a real problem. Highly loaded sites often disable keep-alive to support the maximum number of simultaneous clients. The real downside of not having keep-alive is a slightly increased latency to fetch objects. Browsers double the number of concurrent connections on non-keepalive sites to compensate for this.

Don't know if it's true or not, but it doesn't take much thought to realize if someone wanted to DDOS a server they would use persistent connections.
Ask HN: What are your experiences using AirBnB?
Have you rented out rooms to guests? Stayed in others' places? Did it work out okay? Any horror stories?
Bagel recipe! Score!

It is astonishing how easy it is to make bread from scratch. I've been making sourdough from Mark Bittman's recipe. It is so, so worthwhile. No two loaves have turned out quite alike, yet, but it appears to be hard to actually screw them up, because they're all delicious. Just remember to feed the starter...
At a recent stag night I attended, the $450 bottle of wine (which was, alas, about $445 above our budget) included 'Bacon' in its list of flavours.

We spent the night wondering if that was kosher?
The people who propose a designer simply haven't learned how to think properly. It's as simply as that. They don't understand logic even though they pretend to.
I generally try to avoid competing with large capital-intensive factories manned by Chinese peasants to see if I can beat their food production while fumbling around inexpertly in my understocked kitchen and losing about $1.50 of imputed income a minute.

(A long way to say "I do not roll my own ramen". I kind of feel a little lazy that I barely even cook my own ramen anymore, but I know the business case for it is pretty solid, on the same logic. Preparation and cleanup time is so wasteful...)
Sen Rockefeller and Bill 773/778 - Cyber Czar and ability to shutdown the internet
'You know what would probably get something done? If the record industry proposed a law through the front door, with public hearings, to find an equitable, simple way to get paid for the use of its material online. A blanket license, say, that users or ISPs could opt into in exchange for access to all the music that's already online, wherever and however they can find it.

Sure, some of the hardcore copyfighters would hate it -- it'd feel too much like a "music tax" for their taste, and they won't rest until the music companies have been killed in vengeance for all the bad stuff they've done since 1996 -- but it'd make the entertainment giants seem reasonable, and it would make anyone who disagreed with them seem unreasonable. They'd have the easy sell: "We want to stop suing your kids, but these crazy infohippies won't let us!" '

I was surprised by this. Is a blanket license really something the activists are wiling to live with? It seems like a terrible compromise to me. It seems like an admission that the record companies deserve a business model.

Seriously, I think that we seriously need to consider letting copyright, or parts of it, die. At least lets speculate about the consequences. Music seems like a good place to experiment. (A)The sky will not fall if music is not made. (B) Music will almost definitely still be made.

The losers are the components of the recording industry. But we are under no moral obligation to keep them in business.
People who get hot and bothered about that are almost invariably cranks, in my experience.

Honestly I think you, being a database expert, don't fully appreciate how bad the situation really is. Relational databases are almost universally not understood by programmers. Why? I think it might have something to do with the fact that programmers can't actually use the relational database as a relational database.

They have to programmatically construct a string (seriously, wtf?) to do some relational processing "over there" in the scary database and then serialize the result and import it into a data structure in their language--the complete destruction of the relational idea.

Using a relational database should be similar to using jQuery in javascript programming. The anti-"relational database" backlash is huge right now. And since most of the people involved don't understand what a relational database is they don't understand that it isn't relational databases that they have a problem with.

Have you seen this new thing called Redis? It's "like a key-value store except values can be sets." Wait, it's a "structure server." Pretty soon someone is going to have the brilliant idea of letting the keys be sets also.

I predict that within 3 years the anti-relational people are going to invent the relational database, without realizing it, and be amazed at how awesome it is. Because for the first time in their lives they'll be able to actually use an actual relational database.

That's my database rant.

P.S. As for the SQL != Relational people like Chris Date and Hugh Darwen I don't see how they could be considered cranks. Bitter old men? Maybe. But cranks? No.
Kosher bacon salt?
Apple’s Tim Cook: Why don’t we make netbooks? Because they suck
Quote: This could theoretically be a huge business in that URLs could go through a bidding process. Want to get the URL http://www.facebook.com/shoes? You better be willing to bid against companies like Zappos, who I’m sure would be willing to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars.

shoes.com, sure, several hundred thousand dollars... but how would you EVER justify that for a URL on Facebook? Is there some hithertofore unknown population of users who are breaking up with their boyfriend one day and then say "You know, I want to console myself with a shoe purchase. I wonder what happens if I highlight the last portion of that thingee in the box thingee, and then type shoes and hit enter. Hmm, Zappos, haven't ever heard of them before or else I would have just Googled but hey, I'm so going to buy a shoe from them."
Chumby Goes Global
Tiered pricing is not seen as bad as it once was. Bill Gates is currently promoting it as an international development tool. I'm not sure what the laws are (or will be), but I think there could be work-arounds.
Careful though - All the time spent researching / cooking / perfecting this food may eat into your ramen profitability.

I recently took up cooking and if you get serious, it gets expensive, specifically in the following ways:

1) Stocking up - Initially buying spices ($4 each), pots, pans, trays (a decent set will run you $400), a good knife($80) which you will eventually need, other staples ($a bunch)

2) Experimenting - You'll get stuff wrong a lot. You'll ruin food. You'll buy more food. Sometimes it's expensive food like steak.

3) Showing Off - When you figure out you can cook something that is noticeably better than rubber, you'll want to cook for your friends. They will like the food and thank you, but they won't always remember to leave cash behind.

4) No more junk food - Cooking the good stuff makes you appreciate good food, and by appreciate I mean spend more money on.

I find cooking to be a lot like programming. There are tons of options and methodologies and evangelists and opinions, but when it comes down it, the thrill of creating something (even something palatable only to you) is unbeatable.
Some friends of mine (and myself) had a different approach. 5 of us all have iPhones sharing 1400 minutes, unlimited data and texts for $62/month/person. It's 5 guys who aren't big talkers and with rollover we never come close to running out of minutes (we could probably step down in minutes but we keep them just in case).
Did you actually RTFA? Or, even the article you posted? From your link: "The unlocking process is still a bit complicated and requires SSH on your iPhone"

So you still have to jailbreak your phone. And really, this article is only tangentially related to jailbreaking. It's about using the iPhone with Skype and a GoPhone plan.
SF Revolution Cafe HN Meetup
Most of us don't have business cards, so post your contact info and maybe some identifying information.
I have HUGE respect for you and what you've accomplished; your posts on HN detailing your experiences as a micro-ISV are some of my favorites.

That said, I think you're making the same mistake that 37signals does, which is assuming that your isolated experience is representative of the population as a whole. Your business has some unique aspects that do not necessarily apply to every business type, particularly the high margins. Competition isn't necessarily the death-knell of your business, but what if your market became very crowded with companies who charged less, offered better customer service, marketed more effectively, etc. How long would you be able to survive? Now imagine that you have a bunch of salaries and overhead and everything else that a growing business usually needs. Not saying that you can't win, but it's not like the market for bingo card creation software is so big that it can support thousands of companies :)
I'm Thomas, and I work at New Relic. I wore a green jacket.
New Relic is looking for Rails engineers, so give me a ping if you're interested.
Dude, noblethrasher, what you just said does not make sense. I have no idea what it means or how to parse it.
At least Mark Penn's article didn't make it into the print edition of the Wall Street Journal.

'There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.'
I guess that the answer to your first question relates to how much faith shareholders have in those contracts as a way to keep the average cost of Windows high. Milking a cash cow is not a win-lose, binary process. It is a matter of how much & how long. Tiered pricing would make me edgy.

The answer to your second question is lack of competitive pressure. Windows isn't ideal for netbooks. When they came out first, Linux looked like it might win. But it didn't. They kept netbooks windows. They did this without a fight, without a netbook strategy.

At this point, there are no new competitors & no problematic trend. They now have a netbook strategy. Flawed or not, this is better then no strategy. Why should shareholders be worried.
Discuss with HN: salary confidentiality
Hi,

Is it me or do all the non-disclosure of salary agreements seem a bit out there? I mean, anyone else recalls monopolies, which push out their high prices and block competition? Does anyone else see this as an attempt to prevent free discussion of rates, as well as healthy workings of supply/demand, similar to close-sourced software? Isn't it similar to blocking unions? Or firing people for being in relationships inside of a company?

And mainly: should we do anything about it?
That was dumb. Now people have more reason to choose Linux-based Laptops.
I've got "Amazing Slow Downer". Recommended to me several years ago by Bill Evans.

ASD costs $30 and was a truly awesome app in its day. And it does seem to have all of Capo's functions, except for the nifty waveform display. But the UI is cluttered, overcomplicated, and ugly cross-platform stuff. If I didn't already own ASD I would just buy Capo. As one who does already own ASD I am still considering buying Capo.
"Culture of aggression permeates the company."

Sounds like a fun place to work.
I'm pretty sure Rails was game changing.
> The old Bell System used to arrange cables in a ring around a city, so that a cut in any one location could be routed around. It's not clear how much modern telephone companies have continued that practice.

I remember being fascinated in one otherwise boring computer networking class by the self-healing concept of SONET fiber optic networks. I didn't know it was pre-dated by copper wire.

On a piece of scrap paper, draw two concentric rings. Draw bridge points (a line bisecting both of the two rings) at ten or twelve points along the rings. Draw CW-direction arrows on the inner ring and CCW-direction on the outer. Simulate a cable cut by erasing part of the two rings. SONET will automatically heal itself by detecting the cut and bridging its traffic at the closest bridge point and going the opposite direction until it goes all the way around and hits the cable cut from the other direction (and auto-bridges and forms a new closed comm loop)

SONET would not have helped, as it is too expensive to be deployed outside a metro area (redundancy).

"Self-Healing Ring Architectures for SONET Network Applications"
http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~nd/surprise_96/journal/vol2/dm9/art...
If I were doing this, first I would profile the code. It is hard to know if it is significant or not.
How Room Designs Affect Your Work and Mood
The Best DB2 Ever
Would this have an effect on SEO? Would http://facebook.com/shoes be more likely to rank well for a search for "shoes"?
it probably would. watch has hundreds of 5-letter words are horded by SEO marketing firms.
In addition to being cheaper (usually) and tasting better (very often), the food prepared at home gives the chef or baker a certain sense of satisfaction. I feel like I've really accomplished something when I make something delicious from scratch.

I always find it a bit magical when I bake something: I mix stuff together and put it in the oven. Out comes a food that's gone through an amazing transformation.

Incidentally, I think that the Food Network show "Good Eats" would appeal to the hacker mind.
Depends whether your looking for large amounts of money or enjoyable work environments.

This culture seems to work well in the enterprise market - Oracle relentlessly beat is competitors and acquired them when they couldn't (Siebel).

Startupers crave freedom and create the opposite culture of their previously unenjoyable jobs.
Side Businesses You Can Start on Your Own
Sony Ericsson Xperia Complaint