skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think Wikipedia is the only site that makes some real money from donations
Not really a new idea to use a VCS as a document database, other folks have back-ended Wikis and document management systems with SVN, for example. But a nice story regardless, and another nudge for me to really take a closer look at git.

First distributed VCS I heard of was darcs. I have not used it either, but from what I've read about the two, git has some real advantages in speed and robust-ness.
NewsCorp already controls the "Tom account." He has stated so publicly several times.
Simulated brain closer to thought
http://vimeo.com/3177481

something similar to this iphone app, perchance?
This says enough:

* The Conferencing system is compatible only with the Microsoft Internet Explorer browser only. Other browsers are not compatible

There will always be a market for non-technical people that don't know enough about sharding, replication, etc. and want to have someone else handle this for them.
I think it needs to be something for the entire Europe to get some real traction. If you keep it UK only, it'll continue being small and you won't get as much exposure.
anyone here using tipjoy? had any success with it?
So many things are converging at once on the AI front. I think it's probably likely we will have human-level AI in my lifetime (I'm 32).

Of course, AI, like nuclear fusion, is perpetually 50 years away, but this time I believe it's different.
Please be careful to THOROUGHLY vet any logic like this prior to internationalizing. (Though, truth be known, I'd be hesitant to employ it in America these days for anything important.) You might think names are reasonably unique identifiers. You'd be pretty catastrophically wrong in much of Asia, for example.

Our Japanese university customers use the following to test identities for equality:

1) Same first name

2) Same last name

3) Same high school

4) Same birthday

5) Same high school major

6) Same high school GPA

7) Human review

Human review exists because if after all those checks we still merge two students and then someone fails the entrance examination as a result, someone at our company and someone at the university will pretty much have to resign in disgrace.
Typically RIAs take longer to build and polish than the slightly more lightweight HTML/AJAX combos (which some have argued are killer apps too.) If you want to create something big and you see relatively simple web apps dominating with RIAs often becoming bottom feeders (twitter clients are a great example) then what technology would you choose to build the next big idea?

Many RIAs do not run as smoothly as they could because they are jam packed with graphics and effects or there is just too much information flowing between client and server to run smoothly. This does not allow you to churn out many quick prototypes to try and hook users. Also, for many users standard internet applications are rich enough. I have seen plenty of really cool RIAs but none with a chance to play int he mainstream (save for maybe the Twitter clients.)
Git retains its change history, and if I remember correctly, uses the sha hash to verify that no one changed the history. Couchdb retains the change history until someone compresses the db (garbage collect). Its revision history is only used as a means of merging out of sync documents.

In addition, Git makes individual merges in a document, and when there's a conflict, it resorts to human intervention. Couchdb does not make merges inside a document, and will not do conflict resolution. Instead, using a brief set of rules, it picks one version of the document over another.
http://hotwitter.com it's been up since september
Mundie sees rise of tablets, 'room computer'
And the lower court found that the clickwrap agreement was fully enforceable. So: lower court found it enforceable, higher court declined to address it, that's it.

The higher court is essentially being lazy here.
Twitter OAuth “Temporarily Disabled”, Developers Left Hanging
Twitter is a sign that I am getting old, because I just don't get it at all, and I doubt I ever will. Oh well.
It is my opinion that the limit forces those who would be verbose to get to the point. It's nearly mandating conciseness. I tend to be very 'wordy', so I think it's a good thing for me (or, for those who would follow me). Far from horrible, it's actually a plus for Twitter, I think.
Taking Advantage Of The DOJ Settlement, Redfin Lists More Data: Tiptoes Into New York
I'm curious. If you don't mind me asking, what do you like to read (not necessarily blogs, books)? Your writing is easy on the mind.
Thanks for that, but couldn't you theoretically very easily script git to automatically choose based on prior requirements?
Fuzzy logic that usually requires "tricks of the trade". Good suggestions here.

Some other things we have used over the years to remove dups:

SOUNDEX (last name, first name, street name)
Zip Code (1st 2 digits, 1st 3 digits, all 5 digits)
Street Name only (discard numerics)
First letter of First name only (watch out, Joe and Jerry may be reduced to one record)
For mailing lists, are 2 people with the same last name at the same address really 2 people? (Sometimes yes, sometimes no)
Link not working for me. Is it working for anyone else?
From the guidestone text: "Maintain humanity under 500 million in perpetual balance with nature" ...

OK, there are 6 billion humans on the planet now. What plan do these do-gooders intend for the 5.5 B "surplus population"?
I've seen on some sites where one can give 10c - but that may be more like a pledge.
Saturn pictures by Nasa's Cassini spacecraft
"Killer apps" was a term originally coined to describe apps that drove hardware purchases - 123 for the PC, Pagemaker for the Mac. It seems to me we live in an era of ubiquitous hardware, so perhaps the concept is obsolete.
The definitive gameboy timeline(PIC)
There were quite a few non-UKers at this conference. I met one guy who'd flown in from Estonia, though to be fair he was also there for business.
The lower TCO claim is frequently used when enterprise apps compare themselves to open source options. Oracle clearly has better tooling than MySQL which could make sense for a large corporation, but a small business or startup would find it difficult to justify the cost of an Oracle backend from the outset.

Wonder if the IE-only conference link is probably due to a third-party recommendation. Now that Oracle owns Java, they will probably switch to some Java conferencing software like Eluminate.
I might be slow about screen, but how is it different from running several tabs in Terminal on Mac OS X for example ?

I can see it being useful in ssh through : you can have it emulate tabs through a single ssh connection.
New york linux user group(NYlug) . Good place to meet community hackers and listen to some interesting discussions.
When A Key Man Leaves The Firm
Is there a way to make Git choose one over the other rather than merging? --mine or --yours or something?
We Drive the Aptera, and It's a Real Car
That's quite hard to answer... When I was younger, I read almost exclusively fiction - pretty much anything ranging from classics to science fiction. For the last fifteen years or so, the proportion of non-fiction has increased, largely because I read a lot less for pleasure. If you counted blogs and other online writings as well, I'd say that most of what I read today is non-fiction. But I've always preferred a good novel to any factual book.
Patience. Patience. I'm working as fast as I can.
The understatement of the applications by the scientists makes me suspect that (a) they are being politically wise keeping it on the down low or (b) that the article's claims are exaggerated. If (a) is the case though, the potential consequences just blow my mind.. I mean, Robin Hanson has been talking about emulated minds on chips for a while, but I didn't think we were so close to real results. What this would do to arguments about religion, bioethics, irreducibles will make for very interesting discussion.
Of course you could. I guess one of the more important points that are made somewhat subtly by this hack is that you can easily fiddle with the functionality of a simple yet flexible piece of software (git) - that's what the Unix philosophy preaches. You start by taking lots of simple components, that are flexible and do not make assumptions about their use, glue them up together into bigger pieces.

Large homogeneous systems that only provide one functionality are hard if not impossible to extend to make them do just what you want. Unless you want what they do in the first place, which makes the whole customization thing pointless ;-)

But that is self evident, or at least should be.
Sounds strangely familiar:
http://www.simulation-argument.com/simulation.html
The green IT leaders of 2009
Mike tweeted me saying when he has recovered :)
Tech companies celebrate Earth Day in cool ways
There's a git merge strategy called "ours" which - as you might guess - does a quasimerge which always results in whatever you have in your HEAD.
Copy, paste, and modify is one of the ways I managed to learn web development in the first place. Sometimes, understanding doesn't come from reading alone. You need to feel the clay in your hands to mold it into the pot you want to make.
No, it bounces between www.thestandard... and m.thestandard... shrug
A quick look at MySQL 5.4
If HH tents takes off, beware of hippy drum circles cultivating in your backyard..:-)
Finite-dimensional Feynman Diagrams
This quickly becomes apparent when you actually start following a substantial number of people: keeping up is difficult enough with the character limit. Without a limit, the verbal overload would make the service unusable. The terseness gives it a chance of keeping the information density high.
Stormpulse.com received a few $k in donations in September '08 (during Gustav, Ike, and co). We slapped up a "Donate Now" PayPal button in the top-right-hand corner and it worked. The benefit of PayPal over others is the fact that PayPal is an actual payment, not just a pledge to pay (which can be the case with other donation widgets).

Word to the wise: be smart about minimums and maximums. If you ask for a dollar, you get a dollar. Ask for $20, or make it completely open, and you might get more. There's obviously a psychology to it worth studying.

That said, donations are not our revenue model, so we've taken the button down. :-)
Upside of a downturn: Dropouts drop back in
Real Hacker Definition of Pseudosuit
Good list of tools. All of those usually show up on any Linux developer's list of what's in their toolbox.
Capo: My new Mac app for helping musicians learn their music
The performance of this plugin destroys Flash in every way. It also does vsync (wow yay we're past 1998 now, unlike Flash) and you can put the scripts right in the page. Adobe's inability to make Flash not blow is stunning – they have an insanely huge install base and tons of money, but still can't make Flash perform even close to what might be called acceptable. Come on! You're getting the chance to run NATIVE CODE in just about every desktop computer out there, and you're blowing it!

Anyway, Adobe makes me angry. I hope this helps make them die off even faster.
I've been a full-time indie Mac developer since Feb 2008, and this is the third product in my Mac products lineup.

It's not the same kind of 'startup' that you folks tend to talk about (not a hosted service, in the cloud, etc), but it's what I do for a living.

Questions about the business, the tech, the features, etc.? I'll gladly answer them here.
I started posting public todo lists. I email posterous, which sends it to FriendFeed, Twitter, Facebook, and my Tumblr.

I'm not sure people need other tools.
screen is persistent over dropped connections. Lets say you are doing some long running operations on a remote server and your connection drops. With screen you can log back in and run 'screen -r' to resume the session.
Darcs is just different, also when this Git buzz started the Darcs people were wondering why they didn't just contribute to Darcs since their ideas are almost the same (except for some things like the merge algorithm)... they just realized that some people just don't program in Haskell :(
Understanding and improving the fast inverse square root hack
Donations won't work until we have a workable micropayment system. And I don't understand why we don't have it yet. The software is something to write in a weekend: deposit at most $50 in your account, pay by clicking a link and confirm by email. 1 cent per transaction should cover operating costs. Transfers from your account could cost a bit more, to cover bank fees and profit.

Why we don't have it yet? I'd guess regulations. The moment you write this software you're more or less a bank. If someone found a way to circumvent this would make the internet a huge favor.
i believe his name is Ronin.
Congrats, I saw a pretty solid mention of your app on Daring Fireball earlier this week.
looks like the posting acccount was created just before the post. wonder who would have incentive to do that?
Depends on the design. I think the glass jars do this really really well. The seal is obvious - and it can easily be checked if it's broken or not
They have to move out - to the moon or something.
The future of java
And just yesterday, too. I don't know why someone would downvote you for linking to the original. If nothing else, I find linking to the original is nice so that others can see the discussion that's already taken place.

Edit: His downvote has been removed, thus rendering this post useless. Oh well.
How would you say it needs to be redesigned?
Reading the copy text and testimonials I'm not sure this is meant to be serious
Is RewriteRails affected by the recent ParseTree EOL?
Given how easy it is to setup, giving Tipjoy a shot is a worthwhile experiment.
Google Maps Tools
Do you value your customers or do you just want their money?
Not really a new idea to use a VCS as a document database, other folks have back-ended Wikis and document management systems with SVN, for example.

It's not the same thing. Using SVN as a document database is equivalent to using the filesystem as a document database. The only thing extra you get with SVN is a revision history.

Git actually is a content database. Its version control capabilities are built on top of that.

When you do a checkout on a traditional VCS you're telling the VCS to apply patch set x to the file system. When you do a git checkout you're telling git to load content x from the database into the filesystem.
If you look at the links posted above, the w3schools.com numbers, 4% and 6%, are not even a binary order of magnitude apart, never mind the usually meant decimal (10x spread).

The w3counter.com numbers are 2% and 5%. Both single digits (hint).

There are whole companies out there doing engineering work on Linux, except for a few odd laptops. Actually, site http proxies may cause Unix web undercount (i.e. stats are dominated by home access, presumably with lower Unix use).
You took the words right out of my mouth. I had a bit different language history, but I'm right with you on Haskell. I have always found that it's quickest to just dive in. It's kind of like learning natural languages by immersion...nothing works as fast as dumping yourself in a foreign country where you have no choice but to learn to communicate in their language. Reading some choice books and tutorials can certainly help, but there's really no substitute to writing code.
Yes, and furthermore a much more serious problem is the lack of interest in AST manipulation/syntactic meta-programming in Ruby culture. For some strange reason languages like Groovy started way behind Ruby but their core teams have shown a lot more interest in meaningfully evolving their languages.

One of the reasons I write stuff like this is so that people realize that we do have an alternative to the current dominant monkey-patching culture. That way, instead of saying "If we had X, we might be able to do Y," we can now say, "If we don't support syntactic meta-programming, we will lose extension methods."

All that being said, I will be porting Rewrite to Ruby_parser. One of the reasons I switched from block-scoped rewriting to file-based rewriting was in anticipation that Ruby 1.9 would not support AST introspection, and sadly my fears were realized.
Pitch and speed adjustment are useful features for learning music from recordings, but Audacity has those for free. Are the features your program offers over Audacity (marking sections, drag-and-drop importing) there for convenience or do they allow you to do things that aren't possible in other audio programs?
Finding and Fixing Memory Leaks in Python
How did you do the iTunes-style scrollbars?
Oracle has been developing their products in Java since the 90s, if I'm not mistaken. I doubt acquiring the language itself will affect their use of Java products.

Other then that I agree with your comment.
If you learn better that way, sure, feel free to do what works best for you. I don't see how this applies to the article, which advocates inserting code with a GUID in a comment so that you can find it again later and copy/paste a new version in.
I agree, if by "causality" you mean "implication" and by "commutative" you mean "transitive".
Steve Pavlina (www.stevepavlina.com) and Leo Babauta (www.zenhabits.net) are the 2 who come to mind when talking about making money from donations. Leo actually makes enough to have quit his day job (last I heard).

According to them, you need 2 things to make this work -
1) steady regular audience
2) they have to really like you or at least what you have to say
If they're meant as instructions for a post-apocalypse society, presumably the other 5.5B would already have been wiped out.
Spammers Solving Difficult AI Problems With An Underground X Prize
Will there be killer RIA apps? The only way I can see it happening is

1) when they become light-weight enough that they become preferred apps on light-weight devices, i.e. cell phones, pdas, MIDs, etc.
As right now, they're more processor intensive (at least Silverlight and Flash/Flex/Air are) than apps written with more established technology. Causing battery life to be dismal.

2) Internet connection becomes truly widespread. (Only spelunking caves and Montana should be the places where you can't get internet connection.) And not only widespread, but fast, too. No point in having Rich Internet Applications if the Internet part is a part of the bottleneck.
The typography is also refreshing.
Morgan Friedman At Ultra Light Startups - Video
It's a direct response to your comment, not the article.

"Don't copy and paste code that you don't understand or couldn't write yourself."
No you're not; you're making pointless (albeit funny!) remarks on hacker news.

Get back to work! -- oh wait.... doh!
This has been on my mind for a while: Does anyone know if DropBox is developed on top of an existing source control system?
I-Xorcist: Exorcism has evolved...onto the iPhone
Say goodbye to crude technologies of old. Now your iPhone can even beat the devil!
Virtualization is 'the new mainframe'
> That's quite hard to answer.

Good answer. Thanks. I tend to shy away from the '10 ways to X' blogs, and I could surf from Techmeme for hours if I'm bored at home. I like stumbling upon random people talking about their lives, sharing their experiences.

For example, I don't know the methodology for selection but each of the Blogs of Note all seem to be interesting in their own way.

http://blogsofnote.blogspot.com/
You subclass NSScroller, and get an awesome interface designer to draw the required art for the active/inactive states. :)

You can pick apart iPhoto '09 to get an idea of what bits you need, but I wouldn't advise stealing the art.
Yep, put mine on TweetSnap. Made a few dollars, but probably would have made more with PayPal.
I haven't been around other projects when someone threatened to fork it 'until the day I die', so I don't know how the tone comes across then.

The context was general discussion of architectural / license issues. It seemed at the time like Mark went for the Nuclear [fork] option very, very early on in the discussion. I can only imagine what it felt like for the lead devs, but it cannot have been good. Unreasonable - borderline; rude, counterproductive - yes.

This is all from my memory in 2005, without list logs to refresh.
We've been in business for 6 years - can I still be a "startup"?
Funny that this should appear this morning.

Last night I was thinking about how much I hate existing file managers. How the metaphor was great when
you had 2 meg hard drives and a few folders and maybe a couple hundred files tops, but how now it
falls apart. There was a project called lifestreams at Yale ( http://cs-www.cs.yale.edu/homes/freeman/lifestreams.html
) that had some interesting ideas about allowing you to see your documents as a versioned timeline.
Using a dcvs type system as a backend would get you a lot of that plus more, you could explore different
ideas for files on different branches. I do however want more...

I want usable metadata like the BeFS had. Where any arbitrary metadata key/value paris could
be attached to a 'file', For example, contacts in the BeFS were basically empty files with metadata
attached. That metadata included name, address etc. Any application could uses the data, augment it etc.
The file manager ( tracker ) could query the data to create live 'searches' that looked just like folders.
You could add new types and what not. Very powerful when the filesystem is a database. BeOS
( and now haiku ) kept the traditional file manager around as well. Others have approached this idea,
but haven't really gone after it.

What I thought of that I really wanted to see was something like a document-centric database like couchdb
that is backed with dcvs like features that operates just like a regular filesystem, i mount it, i can drag and
drop content into it, save into it, make it look like a 'normal' fs to existing applications, but all that path
info etc is just saved searches on metadata that group information together and you can tag those
searches with metadata themselves.
Hard to tell if that name will be a good choice or a flop.
BootUp NYC
This analogy goes a long way in explaining what we do to those not steeped in the creative aspects of programming.
[EDIT: My comment refers to the original title of the link. This has since been changed]

> A quick look at MySQL 5.4 - 60% performance gain over MySQL 5.1

Sorry, but this is just plain wrong. The actual article does a better time explaining and disclosing this small, specific speedup. MySQL InnoDB in 5.4 is faster on >4 multicore servers because it properly accounts for the extra CPUs. Calling it a "60% performance gain" is really misleading.

> One of the primary fixes in MySQL 5.4 is that the InnoDB storage engine can now address more than 4 CPU's/cores
I think this comes down to really "living with the app for a while" to make that decision.

I've used other apps, including other 'slow-downers', and I really just couldn't find my footing in them. Some are horrid cross-platform apps with unfortunately chosen keystrokes, and pretty much all of them had terrible UIs.

After using them, I decided to write Capo. It was a need that, in my opinion, just wasn't being met.

I wrote an app that can run on your laptop, with your guitar on your lap, and you can control it very quickly and figure out a song with no fuss. I take guitar lessons weekly, and this app scratches my itch beautifully.

You don't have to visit deep menus, fancy settings panels, or anything out of the way to accomplish the main task which Capo does very well.

I hope this answers your question (albeit in a very wordy, roundabout way).
And I can imagine the content owners to also want it to be discoverable, as it can only lead to more sales.