skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Inefficient doesn't begin to describe it.

The thing to remember is there's no money in OSS to first approximation - and you don't need money to write OSS. The problem is, you need a lot of money to do science, at least certain kinds of science.

So here is how it works in practice. Say you have an idea on how to make a breakthrough on topic X. You figure you need to pay a research assistant for a year, or buy a week on some instrument, or whatever. Either way, say you need 50K.

Case 1: You are the only person who wants 50K to do X, you need to convince the agency that X needs doing. This is an advantageous situation to you and depends on only you having the X idea, so you become very closed source about it. This is sub-optimal because it delays people looking into X. Also it is a turnoff to the kind of people who are interested in science and not skullduggery.

Case 2. X is in fact a compelling avenue of research, so three people apply to the funding agency for 50K. This is the situation I was describing upthread - now these people have to compete, and prove that they are the best positioned to get an an answer to X if only you give them the 50K. This is suboptimal because by definition 2 out of 3 applicants wasted their time applying for X. Think of the comparison with YC - the startups who get turned down by YC have other options for getting money; moreover they only have the one project they need to worry about getting funded. Whereas a research scientist typically only has one source of money, but many lines of inquiry. This is why scientific seniority often means the death of research time, with people spending large amounts of time on the scatter shot approach - apply to the funding agency for 8-9 projects in the hope that 1-2 will get funded, because if the agency doesn't fund you for something you get to lose your staff and then you are nowhere.

The situation becomes worse if what you need is not 50K but 50M, say to build a new instrument. Now your agency can't afford that at all, so the only way to get the money is to form an inter-agency (typically international) collaboration. Now the real inefficiency nightmare comes in; because what the other agencies buy with their money is the right of their people to work on the project. So not only the project becomes a sprawling nightmare, but the rules typically are than if Timbuktu brings 10M out of 50M to the table, they get to do 20% of the work on building the instrument - quite irrespective of whether they are the most qualified people to be doing so.

As I said, I do not know what the answer is. The reason the situation is like that is an honest attempt by the agencies to be responsible with taxpayer money; the money is not infinite; they have to decide who to give the money to; and they feel, for reasons that are obvious, that competition is the best way to make sure that the money goes to the best person. I don't think anybody working in science would claim the system is perfect, but other workable solutions are not forthcoming.
I would never interview with a company with a corporate culture like this, and neither would most of the hackers I've worked with. While I prefer to work with great people...

1. Not being at the bottom of the barrel, I have alternatives. Why would I leave a situation for one known for hiring just about anyone and spitting them out at heavy rates? There's a name for those types of gigs: contracting jobs, and they pay for the risk.

2. The corporate culture developed through such a system must be awful. Why start making acquaintanceship with a new co-worker when even odds say they'll be gone in a few months?

3. It makes for lazy management. Sometimes, the problem is the process doesn't fit the problem. But why go through that when you can just fire them?

Finally, this could only work in the major tech hubs. I'm a friend of a friend away from most non-DOD projects in my area, and that's not terribly uncommon. Unless you're hiring straight from university, you're probably going to have a difficult time filling positions fairly soon.
A trick for getting your app to rank highly in the iTunes store.
Do you think this is a reasonable thing to do? Would Apple get upset?
My limited experience with "official" support channels is that they're manned by people trained to be "tech support" rather than actual experts on the subject.
i wonder what dean edwards thinks about that name.
Record Amount of Supercomputer Time Means New Science
NB: They do now. They seem to begin doing that since 4.2. I had to assemble full iso image of 4.1 myself.
Artistic, high-resolution desktop wallpapers
Alternative to Rotten Tomatoes
You answered your own question. 30-40% > 3%.

But more deserves to be said. A site like Hotmail is a big, focused target for spammers. They face pain if a bot can beat their CAPTCHA even 10% of the time. Smaller sites get spam too, but they generally get it from dumber bots looking for unprotected sites. A 2 panel peoplesign CAPTCHA is probably all they need.

With 2 panels at 6 labels each, a random guess has a 1/36 chance to pass. Fortunately, a large number of incorrect guesses is behavior that can be detected and blacklisted.

Futhermore, peoplesign can be customized to offer more security. Number of panels (and soon number of menu labels) and other characteristics can be modified. Check out a customization demo at http://peoplesign.com/main/pickTheLabelDemo.html
This is definitely nice on the usability end. I wonder how much they've improved the semantics on their search, though. Just testing out "Paris Hilton" and "Hilton," it seems that they are still matching exact string patterns. This is useful for checking to see if the rumbling in my office is an earthquake (we just had a mild one in North California this afternoon), but not for much else. There's simply too much noise on Twitter; the average tweet isn't very useful.

I am eagerly looking forward to the benefits of the Summize acquisition.
Actually, I've talked with quite a few techs in Microsoft Professional Support that know what they are talking about. But you do have to pay a few hundred dollars per incident for that.

It's nice to know they are there when you're doing a hairy Exchange migration...
Looks easier to read than most CAPTCHAS, though I suppose that you have to speak english to get past it. Could be a good way to learn a language :)

Has this stood up to any bot attacks yet? What's the significance of the image discoloration?
That's actually an excellent idea. It solves a clear problem that everyone sees, but noone can do amything about due to company politics, plausible deniability, and career moves.

If you're not working on it you should :-)
I disagree. And when I say 'the People' I mean the overwhelming majority of consumers. They don't want a keyboard, they want a revolutionary user interface that actually suits a mobile device. The iPhone's OS is the best attempt at it so far.

A netbook is not a mobile device. Its the wrong model.
agreed on css reset, i use "Reset Reloaded" http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2007/05/01/reset-reloaded/
This is nice but too big for most forms that use captcha (comments, feedback, etc...).
Is there a YC equivalent in Canada, China, India, Israel or UK?
I'm curious b/c I want to find a way to reach out to entrepreneurs in these countries to drive participation in a survey of startup executive compensation (http://www.compstudy.com/) which has been going for 9 years in the US but is launching for the first time in 5 new countries.
Botnet uses Twitter for Drive-by-Download Attacks
Isn't this the angle that Redhat, IBM, and now Oracle are taking? I.E. the software is free, but the support contract is gonna cost you.
Good call, in fact I'm working on this. I force numPanels >=2 because 1 panel currently causes layout issues.
Advice To Graduates On Getting Into Aerospace
Iwata details Wii video service, confirms DSi transfer
Hey guys, this is some research that some guys in my lab have been doing.

Pretty cool stuff, they "took over" the Torpig botnet. Lots of interesting stuff, the paper on the link gives a good overview of some of the things they discovered.

Love to hear your thoughts!
Answering the Drumbeat - How CIOs can say YES to the iPhone
@thehigherlife - I was thinking about the same thing recently (an announcement about FB becoming the biggest photo app on the planet). I found two great sources of information on this..

- http://highscalability.com/flickr-architecture

Very deep analysis of Flickr's arch from a couple of years ago - including a link to a presentation to Cal Henderson's slides. I'm surprised he got canned from Y! yesterday though!
I only ask this question because newsnews mentioned that they released new "anti-flamewar" features recently:

I am generally familiar with CentOS / RHEL, and mostly like the way of doing things on there. I am particularly grateful for the package manager, and being able to add repositories to lots of software as needed, including cutting-edge up to date stuff.

How does NetBSD compare to something like CentOS? I realize they are different kernels, but that's about where my understanding seems to end. Why would I want to use one or the other?
Make Friends with BuddyPress
"but Erlang and Haskell are really hard to teach to mere mortals like myself."

No, just Haskell. Learning Erlang is roughly on par with learning Javascript well; it may involve a couple of new paradigms (like Javascript imposes event-oriented programming and prototypes, which may be new to you), but the language itself is straightforward. Different, but straightforward. The concurrency may blow your mind, but the syntax and basic mode of operation is unlikely to do so, in contrast to Haskell.

Don't be scared away from Erlang.
Xobni Coming To The Blackberry
Depending on the situation, this might be something to discuss with the new company. If they have asked you to wait to start until July, they may not have a problem with you starting a few weeks later.
that was the biggest difference I noticed when I moved from linux(gentoo) to openbsd; the man pages.

They're actually....really really really useful.
Thanks JJ. You are right about English literacy being useful to pass. Soon, I will expose an option that uses picture labels instead of natural language phrases.

But don't throw the proverbial baby out with the metaphorical bath water! The literacy requirement may be an effective defense against the armies of human sweatshop CAPTCHA solvers that we hear about in the news.

Regarding attacks, would be attackers have more important targets for now. peoplesign isn't yet protecting any major sites.

peoplesign images have been recolored using a "secret sauce" algorithm. Recoloring one of two similar pictures reduces effectiveness of color histogram matching. It even reduces effectiveness of more sophisticated color profile matching techniques. In short, the recoloration is defense against a particular type of attack.
That's what I was thinking, but I'm unsure on how to raise this. I am getting a modest signing bonus, so suspect this won't go down well.
If you draw the labels onto the image (make them each one word) and make the user type them, it's still an easy captcha for a person, but much harder for a bot.

If this spreads, it will be worth making a bot for, so that you can spam any of the sites that use it -- right now that bot just needs a few hits on average, and a slightly smarter bot can space them out, so that they are conceivably like commenters.
Typical example, web developer with browser (or tool like CSSEdit) open and an editor open.

Or multiple editors open, one for each class.
"The fact that C produced faster code, was easier to master, was easier to use in groups, and ran well on less expensive hardware were not considerations that Gabriel found important. But others did. On those metrics, the dominance of C as a programming language was an example of better is better, not worse is better."

So, C is better than Lisp, depending on your metrics.

As for the ocean, it is no longer the machine on which you are typing your program. It is all of the information, data, and code available to you on Internet. That's a lot of ocean to boil. Any Lisp needs to work well with as much of it as possible to be considered a useful language today.
This implementation of blunt text search undermines the hash tag innovation on Twitter. They really should have some kind of two tiered search that recognizes that users are already self-organizing conversations...Twitter should be figuring out how to reinforce user-driven organization on the site.

They should also show search results from my followers/followings in some type of priority result...the results are pretty random right now.

Check out http://hashtags.org/ for a more interesting view of life on Twitter.
Way to go Tony!
Not that I'm aware of, but YEurope (unaffiliated with YC, despite the Y) in Austria may appeal to people in the UK.

In Canada, there's been a few murmurs about starting something (most notably here: http://www.startupnorth.ca/2009/04/13/incubators-accelerator...), but nothing solidly in the works as far as I know.
Students to modify the Atari 2600 to reflect CRT-level graphics
Because a lot of what I do when profiling systems involves parsing through, joining and filtering massive (constantly changing) log files. Rather than pumping it into sql why not just leverage the unix command line tools? Basically all aql does is create the awk command for you but with the veneer of sql instead of AWKward (haha) syntax where I refer to fields as numbers etc.

Also writing the sql "parser" was entirely trivial in that I just match keywords then split it into a hash and build the command accordingly. I dug that approach because it means the sql can be in any order, commas are white space and I can easily extend the syntax i.e. "fields, separator, columns (for setting widths)" etc. without much work.
Google A/B-tests everything. Up to and including the shade of blue they use on their webpage.
Again, you need to put nuclear in context of alternative energy generation mechanisms. People talk a lot about TMI, but not the integrated & far larger accidents from coal.
if some sort of accident rendered you unable to use your eyes/ears/etc. for the sensory purposes you describe, would you then cease to be a human being? the whole body certainly plays a role in thinking, but the threshold between consciousness and its absence is defined by what goes on inside the brain.

"animals and even insects don't think based on algorithms" i think one could bring in some studies of insect behavior that suggest the opposite of this.
"The language is being promoted as the long-awaited, Messiah-like successor to Common Lisp."

sigh

Rich Hickey explains what he thinks are the good parts of his language, but I would hardly say he has a messianic complex about it. A lot of people (myself included) like it because it combines interesting ideas with the pragmatism of fitting into the popular Java ecosystem. Perhaps a desire to have everything converted to a single language is more indicative of messianic thinking?

Common Lisp is a wonderful language, certainly worth learning. But it somehow seems to induce a bunker mentality in its users.
It's also that AFAIK, it's the first major lisp in a while to be completely redesigned without regard to compatibility with CL. There's a ton of stuff that was just waiting to be done, but couldn't because people kept using car and cdr instead of first and rest.
A "digital machine" can have eyes, ears, mouth, nose and skin.

Besides that, flesh animals do rules-based calculations--physics.
FunAdvice/MyYearBook acquisition emails (TechCrunch BCC'ed)
Its true that a 2 panel peoplesign is slightly larger than most text-based CAPTCHAs. However, there will soon be an option to use only 1 panel, which will hopefully make it small enough even for space conscious sites.
Dave Winer had an interesting take on this issue: your blog, he said, is an advertisement for yourself, so that you can more easily get work doing, well, whatever you do. Why on earth would you dilute your own advertisement by sticking on somebody else's advertisement?
In tandem with the entire "Buying a $BigCompany database never hurt anyone" and "software vs support" debate, a couple of specific points I'd like to make..

- Security

Securing data in a database is pretty important if you're dealing with any kind of sensitive data. Levels of sensitivity may depend on what you do and may vary over SSNs to sales numbers for next quarter. AFAIK (correct me if I'm wrong) - PGSql/MySQL don't really offer concrete solutions to protect data - apart from common sense like patches, secure passwords, et al. Now look at offerings from the big co's. Companies of any kind will feel more comfortable with these.

- Auditing/Compliance

Are you a public corporation? Semi-large? Do you have payroll or other info in a database? Enter Sarbanes Oxley! Easier to have solutions built by the db vendors rather than deploy 3rd party stuff.
Song of the day: Yo Leary! 
Sporto Kantes is a French electronic band, founded in 1990.

Hope it's cool to post music sometimes :p
A Sneak Preview of Wolfram Alpha [actual video demo]
I think it's more a matter of control than performance. Web programming is cheap and you don't need to marry with a tools provider.
I found a misspelling in a label for a plane image. (The correct selection was 'striped plan' or something like that.)

Also, what turned out to be a hydrant looked to me like the leg of a moon lander. (I stared at that thing for a really long time, but I still saw the leg of a moon lander.)
Why bother putting the haystack in a filesystem? Just use a raw partition.

Haystack effectively IS a filesystem - a log structured filesystem.
Muzi4ka.com
Новият сайт за музика, клипове, текстове на песни и албуми. Мото: Музикален рай, където купона няма край!
Practically, it means there is a lot wrong with programming as a career choice -- for a large number of students, it will have been a poor investment. I don't see much reason to sympathize with the employers, either.
No, a language is a way of communicating ideas, and hence, of thinking about them. (I wouldn't call English or kuchi shoga or tensor diagram notation "tools", even though they can be incredibly useful.) A programming language implementation can be used as a tool.

I think this is the core of our differences. Lisp has traditionally been used mostly as a language -- as Dijkstra put it, it "has assisted a number of our most gifted fellow humans in thinking previously impossible thoughts". Most other programming languages have been used as tools.

Clojure looks like a perfectly competent Lisp-on-JVM (with immutability!), but I don't see it changing how I think about anything. It's thoroughly on the "tool" side of things, which understandably leads to people in the "language" camp being miffed that anybody thinks it's comparable to classic Lisps from the "language" camp.

The Lisp engine in Abuse was a tool, too, and highly productive for its uses, but at least nobody claimed it was a successor to the Lisp line.
Hi Paul,

I agree advice varies greatly in value. Bad advice is worth less than zero because it obscures the good.

I think YC's advice is generally quite good. The thrust of my argument was that advice and connections are more commodities than most investors believe.

Naval Ravikant, a YC speaker, says to assume investors are mostly money, as does Marc Andreesen:

http://venturehacks.com/articles/dumb-money

http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/06/the_truth_about_1.html

"Odds are, nothing your VC does, no matter how helpful or well-intentioned, is going to tip the balance between success and failure."

Ironically, because you distribute a lot of advice freely in essays and events, and because YC's connections are high-profile enough to work outside YC, it's less necessary to join YC for them.

To me, the other entrepreneurs in YC are the biggest value-add and worth a premium. I don't argue YC should match angel terms, just come closer to them than 1/10th.

I mention all this because I'm a fan of YC and want to see it succeed. The #1 criticism I hear about YC is the terms.* Investing a bit more is a good way to address that and one that now seems feasible. Otherwise it remains an obstacle to some high-quality founders and a way the increasing number of incubators can compete with you.

To use a mixed metaphor, I know I'm preaching against the choir in the lion's den, so I expect skepticism. I intend it as a friendly perspective.

-Mark

* #2 is that YC ideas aren't "big" enough, but that's mainly a VC complaint and one I mostly disagree with, anyway.
Jeremy Goodrich will create lot's of traffic with this one.
Rather than egocentricity, isn't it really measuring skepticism? I would expect rubing is a skeptic.

I noticed on the only 'tabloid' news site I ever look at that swine flu stories are now 'below the masthead'. They've decided for the time being at least that the story is running out of legs.

While I would consider myself a skeptic too it did at least prompt me to go and get my flu shot.
Y Combinator is the Canadian, Indian, Israel, and UK Y Combinator. I don't think they've had any Chinese founders, but they've certainly had a number of companies from all of the others in your list.

What makes you think Y Combinator is a local business rather than an international one? (Also, this has been discussed many times.)
Misspellings are deliberate and enhance security. Note that you still knew to pick the misspelled "striped plan" and passed. Another label for that picture might be "stryped plain".

Also, you correctly identified hydrant because "moon lander" fortunately was not one of the choices:)
Nice, Techcrunch got a leaked picture from one of their secret sources. Xobni would obviously want to keep it hidden and out of the press - that's why they showed it off at the mobile conference?
That's where a professional and well-trained workforce is important, with indepenent and very strong regulations. I'm a former US Navy submarine officer, and the US Navy has been operating nuclear reactors in some of the harshest environments imaginable for 40+ years without any accidents whatsoever.

It works because Navy sailors are incredibly well-trained and well-drilled. But also because there is a virtually independent bureaucracy in the US Navy that can literally "take away your keys" to run the plant. (And I do mean literally.) Regular inspections that scare the st out of everyone because of their intensity and thoroughness.

But it works, and with no accidents.
The Depth of a B-tree
Yes. My instinct is that for companies that need that "warm fuzzy" of support their contracts make sense.
So Michael Arrington was cc'ed on a sensitive acquisition e-mail where, presumably, only one of the parties has agreed that the information should be public. And not even explicitly so. And he chooses to publish it directly on Techcrunch....

That's despicable, and not exactly good for his reputation.
Indeed - I'm not a Java or C++ programmer, but I was finding this conversation rather interesting to follow along.
I wonder if they have some mechanism for rebuilding the raid array periodically to handle the inevitable undetected read errors. With raid6 you can actually do this, by comparing both parity blocks with the actual data.

Hard disks typically have undetected read error rates of 1 bit in 1E15, so assuming they transfer 1PB per day that's about 9 errors per day. Which isn't much I guess, but I wonder if they do anything about it.
For as long as I've been using OpenBSD (3.6), they've provided bootable installer ISO images. Or are you talking about ISO images that contain all the packages?
The downside of that is that, "Dude, stop bugging us without reading the manual first, it's right there." is a common response to newbie questions.

It is, though.