skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I honestly don't think 37Signals is changing the world in a big way. You're not inventing the transistor, you're making one of many online to-do lists and chats. I'm not saying the products aren't nice, they are. But they aren't gamechanging in any way.

You're great at marketing though.
5 ideas for the new ebook landscape
AMD will never seriously threaten Intel. Intel can throw a billion dollars at anything AMD does and come out with a better solution. Some facts...

Intel's research budget last year: $5.7 billion

AMD's Revenue last year: $5.81 billion

Intel needs AMD to exist so that they can avoid anti-trust lawsuits. If AMD fails then Intel will face a lot of legal problems.

Disclosure: My dad works for Intel.
HTC MAX 4G Unlocked (5MP)
HTC MAX 4G was created to take full advantage of high speed Mobile Wi-max network without compromising style or ease of use. The device is sleek and elegant and includes a vibrant, It has 5 MP Camera superb and great picture quality.
Iris, concurrency library for C (NSOperation, Twisted deffereds, and CCR in one)
How do you manage to provide such a low rate?

I also can't seem to find the TechCrunch mention that's claimed at the bottom of the front page. Can you provide a link?
How will you prevent API key spoofing? Capture that XML-RPC request, and voila, security breached until customer complaint.
Twat offends the constitution of the weak.

Yeah, they do look a little bit like shotgun wounds, don't they?
I'm also curious about Python, Objective C and C#.
1 penny still sounds expensive for 140 bytes of data.
'Bacontrepreneurs' Building Bacon Empire
It works as a essayist generalization. It's like saying most people get average results. It acknowledges the Gaussian inevitable.
Heh, this was an assigned reading in my Computing Languages class. Coincidentally, my professor is also one of the interviewers.
A rose by any other name still smells like a rose.
SQL was invented in the 70s for business analysts to write reports without having to go bug the programmers.

So what? Unix was invented in the 70s because Ken Thompson wanted to play Space Travel. [1]

Queries are not composable.

Per your example, you want to throw out SQL because using AND and OR doesn't feel right. I'd love to see you compose a 10-line SQL query. Also, views ARE query composition.

PL/SQL is primitive by today's standards, yet it's the only game in town for certain classes of features, like stored procedures and triggers.

Untrue. Oracle, the creators of PL/SQL, now let you write stored procedures in any JVM or .NET language (so Jython, Clojure, etc.). MS SQL supports .NET stored procedures. PostgreSQL supports Tcl, Perl and Python. Also, your alternative suggestion of a simple and stupid data store DOES involve fetching all the data from the database into RAM and operating on it in your application. You can already do that with SQL.

It's not obvious which queries are slow.

Untrue. MySQL can log slow queries and help you analyze them in real time using tools like mytop. I assume similar tools are available for all databases. When you write code it's not always obvious if it will be slow, either.

No back door for map, filter, reduce

Isn't the WHERE clause filter? Isn't GROUP BY very similar to reduce? SELECT UPPER(firstname) is map? With the ability to define custom functions in different languages that's a fairly powerful tool. Also, comparisons between MapReduce and SQL are misguided, because MapReduce does not operate on tabular data.

Finally, your solution is based entirely on the idea that people will prefer Lisp to SQL.

SQL is not perfect for everything, but if you want to suggest a better alternative, start with a solid argument.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix#History
Any plans for receiving SMS messages?
There are many people on HN capable of making pattern-recognizing neural nets. Neural nets are loosely (very) modeled on human neurons.

To create a neural net, a framework is created that sets up layers of neurons and sets their weightings (often randomly). The framework runs the net against batches of data, measures the level of success, and changes the weightings. Eventually this process produces a "brain" that can, for example, recognize letters.

The framework's creator can't explain how the generated neural net functions because no one designed it. To someone not familiar with the process, the neural net would trigger their intuition for recognizing intelligent design.
Penny SMS is the API from a site I built a few years ago, www.ohdontforget.com.

TC mentioned it here:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/05/27/mobaganda-a-dead-simple...

CrunchBase Profile for ODF:
http://www.crunchbase.com/company/ohdontforget

My CrunchBase Profile:
http://www.crunchbase.com/person/jason-stirman

I wanted to use the press mentions for ODF, since it's the exact same technology, which is why I mentioned "The PENNY SMS technology has been featured on"

Does it come off as bad form?
StumbleUpon should fix this quick and easy by changing the user agent string (overridable in the registry). The last thing the world needs is inflated IE6 stats.

The whole "companies need their internal applications" is bullshit. Firefox and Chrome do not break an installed IE6 on a computer. People can continue to use IE6 for internal sites, and a real browser for other sites.

Any IT department that forbids installation of Firefox needs to be brought outside and proverbially shot.
anyone else can help me with this?
You can view replies to the outgoing messages, see the 'from' field description here: http://www.pennysms.com/docs

As for routing them back through SMS, we could do that, but thought being able to field replies via email would be more convenient.
Time Warner and Embarq can't compete with city-owned ISP, trying to outlaw it
I'd love to hear the recession doom-and-gloomers explain this one.
Getting Your Feet Wet in SDL, Part 2: The Pong Clone
sometimes carrier in my country have good deal for sending sms, like 0.1c per message for gsm. $1 unlimited for cdma, etc (caveat: only within-carrier, far more expensive across-carrier)

the thing is i can't have 4 or 5 digits short sms number; however, that didn't stop me either :d

for gsm, i use gnokii, iterating on a list of number with corresponding message is all needed

for cdma, it's a bit harder since no open source program is ready-to-use-out-of-box ... basically it boils down to sending `proprietary` at commands to /dev/bla (whatever dmesg spits) or port comm (if the cdma modem only has windows driver, forcing you to)

my only gripe with sms is it's 'serial' in the sense i can't 'broadcast' -- that's it, i can only send 1 sms per say 6-10 seconds (depends on how busy the network is)

there's no handshake? so there's no way for me to know if the recipient gets it ... and sometimes they get 'empty' sms ... maybe the carriers' mechanism to block spam shrug

that's all i know about sms, i don't know about sms-center, maybe if one has access to it, s/he can broadcasts sms just like email

if someone knows more / better, please enlighten me thx
No. All I need for C is my emacs, compiler, and terminal, and I'm good to go.
1. CS != SE
2. Graduates with engineering degrees are sought-after and very employable in many areas, because engineering is hard and the people who do it are smart.
What venture capital can learn from private equity
I wonder if this could fly.

Because the other approach very-many-cores processor design that I know of, was by Intellasys (http://www.intellasys.net/), the latest company of Forth's inventor Chuck Moore. And it seemed to have gone nowhere: http://www.colorforth.com/S40.htm

The problem with this design, as I could see it, is that tiny cores can be too small to do anything practically useful on their own; inter-processor communication and I/O eats cycles. In Intellasys' case I guess the problems were multiplied by the fact that it would be harder to get traction for the chip was designed to be programmed in Forth , and Chuck Moore would settle for nothing less.

Maybe University of California will have better chance of success, i.e. if it has more runway to tweak their design.

Does anyone know of other very-many-cores processor chips?
They do plenty to cache images (including the digg dude). This is about the first load. Yahoo has some report showing that data is uncached quite a bit of the time, even when sending the appropriate headers.
if I may defend myself, I find price is often a poor indicator of quality. (not to say prgmr.com is high-end; our interface does, well, kindof suck. )
This isn't actually a VPN - you can't send non-TCP traffic over it, and it doesn't even work for all TCP traffic unless you use the SOCKS proxy (ssh -D).

What CAN be used to construct a true VPN is ssh -w. But I don't think that works in putty.
Any blackhats have any clues as to what this is about? I'm too impatient to wait 7.5 hours :P
I've never understood this argument. If an INTELLIGENT being produced the conscious entity, who or what was responsible for creating this intelligent being?

And no, you can't side step this question. You can't say "well, it's god" because that's special pleading. I just don't understand how people can assume that evidence of complexity requires a designer, but never seem to have a problem inventing said designer out of thin-air as a magically preexisting entity.

What's more likely: that a natural process of change followed by selection essentially navigated through an infinite search space of possible configurations, some of which would create things like intelligent life, or that there was, magically, a pre-existent eternal intelligent being that decided to create other intelligent beings?
The CNet article claims the vulnerability involves "social engineering" attacks that will coerce users into giving up personal information. "Social engineering" in web apps is usually code for "landmine links", and the OAuth protocol itself doesn't communicate any user information of any sort (just an opaque token).
Your position is dangerously close to solipsism. You allude to Occam's razor but it also answers your question. If the simplest algorithm does not imply limiting the amount of 'stuff' (universes), why would it limit the amount of observers?
The SQL does have much the same syntax, IMHO:

SELECT * from X where P(x)
intersect
SELECT * from X where Q(x)
==
SELECT * from X where P(x) and Q(x)

I did enjoy the rant though. It seems like ORMs like Hibernate are moving to have as much complexity as the database they map...
Not as helpful as I'd want, but yeah, I recall one that was getting some traction as a signals-processing aide for tasks like, eg, radar or video analysis and possibly DPI.

Totally blanking on the name, it had a pretty similar kit: it seemed like you wrote the raw code in C or a C-like lang, then there was some software assist for laying out dataflow between cores.

Edit: I was thinking of Tilera.
How is your example SQL "not composable"?

Notice that this solution is composed of the first two queries, however composing in SQL kills your performance, and this is generally not the right way to structure the query.

It doesn't actually "kill" performance at all, as a typical SQL optimizer will rewrite the query to remove the subquery, or else to push the outer predicate down into the subquery (which for this query accomplishes basically the same thing).

I was thinking in terms of an entire query being a function that returns data.

A query returns a relation, and that relation can be used as the input relation to another query, either via a subquery or via views. That seems like pretty powerful composability to me.
YouCube:  Play six YouTube videos on a cube.
Keep alive maintains a persistent connection, you are still limited by the number of concurrent connections to the server and the latency that each one experiences.

MHXR bundles all your requests into one. This leads to savings the latency overhead on each request (& probably some server resources not having to deal with multiple connections too).

I tell you what; piping binary data into objects? Genius! I had no idea that was possible.
It is but the telcos don't operate in a free market. Additionally, the GSM standard puts SMS messages in a low-bandwidth channel, increasing scarcity. Of course, there are technical solutions to this problem but fixing the problem is tantamount to slaughtering a cash cow and it's not done.
It sounds like his ideal database already exists; AllegroCache. It's an object database, but you can easily restrict yourself to certain data types to make it "relational", if that's what you're after.

Some of the open source databases are almost as featureful; Elephant for CL and KiokuDB for Perl come to mind.
I've offered jails in the past (2004-2005) and currently offer Xen VPSs. Yes, Jails make more efficient use of ram and other hardware; however, Xen makes more efficient use of SysAdmin time. Now, the FreeBSD jail functionality is getting better all the time, and it's much better now than it was, but it just doesn't provide the same level of resource isolation that Xen provides.

On xen, I don't have to worry about runaway user processes. Xen deals with the problem for me. this was not the case with Jails.

So yeah. I like Jails for cooperative environments, but there is a reason why I'm selling Xen VPSs now, not FreeBSD jails, and it's not 'cause I like linux more than FreeBSD.
The problem is that if there is this cheaper version for netbooks that's good enough, OEMs will just buy that and put it on all their boxes.
Even better: HTTP pipelining - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_pipelining

Of course, that's controlled client-side and often doesn't request all that many resources at once. This is a server-side pipelining that lets them determine their own capacity (which makes sense).

Of course, I'm not really sure how they're going to do this in IE, since it doesn't support decoding base64 content to image data on the page. Something tells me this is going to hit a bit of a brick wall.
Philly Startups - Entrepreneurs Unplugged streaming now
Apple has been smart and conservative in its investments, financial dealings, and product development. They won't put out a netbook just because analysts want them too and they won't cut prices just to increase market share.

The recession was caused by all those doing, pretty much, the exact opposite.
you can have 160 chars of 7 bit instead which costs you $0.0000625 / char instead of $0.00007143

12.5% saving
Current databases don't give the developer a way to bypass the optimizer.

Sure they do. Oracle and other commercial DBs provide "planner hints", which essentially force the optimizer to use a particular access method / join method for a given part of the plan.

why does SQL decide that declarative style is the One True Way to get access to your data

Well, part of the reason for a query optimizer is that if the physical representation of the data changes, the queries don't need to change. So that if you add or remove an index, you don't need to adjust all the queries on the table, for example. Obviously the query planner is imperfect, but planner hints are fairly common in practice. The further you stray from declarative queries, the more application changes are needed when physical database properties change.

Datatypes don't match your PL

If you want a strongly-typed database system that can be accessed from any language, you need the DB's type system to be distinct from any of the client language's type systems. This isn't always the right tradeoff, of course.
I meant to ask, how much network traffic (bytes) do you see?
I guess your hosting provider counts it, if you don't.

And, while we're at it, what hosting provider do you use?
This is exactly right... MS is marketing it as windows 7 srtarter.. Should be windows notebook 1.0, hey 2.0 will come out at same time as windows 8. Cool. Even nicer if they changed the interface so the "netbook" feels like a netbook with a different ui and so on. This way nobody feels like they got the crummy windows and ms is milking em, they just got something different... And ms gets to sell dumbed down oses. Windows 7 just aint compatable with your pos notebook. Ok get windows notebook 1.0.

I still feel that selling a crippled os like xp vs xp pro is just plain ol evil... Vista is worse and no lessob learned
Addressed in http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=509808
The superficial similarity is deceptive.

C++, the elegance of a subset is replaced with a grab-bag of features when you zoom out.

Scala, the grab bag of features are replaced with an elegant unified language when you zoom out.

Scala gives average programmers an upgrade path and rewards them for following it. C++ gives average programmers a headache. In Java the average programmer thinks he knows the language, but that won't do him any good if all the important patterns are above the language at library level or higher.
And then they would be sued. That's what contracts are for.
OLC Memos Define Official Waterboarding Procedure
FWIW, both Scheme and JavaScript have the same behavior as Python 2.5
Simple Online Collaboration
Also, curious about people who do Flex development.
BTW, the math in this case is really easy. Kinetic energy is 1/2mv^2. 1000 MPH is 444m/s. So to accelerate a one metric ton vehicle to 1000 MPH requires 1/21000 444^2 = ~100MJ, which is less than the energy in one gallon of gasoline.
Using your logic, the one with the biggest wallet will always win. Which is not true! (Of course the one with the biggest wallet already won the big wallet award!)

We have seen many giants fall or fail, Microsoft never came up with an answer to the iPod, you may argue that MS didnt really try that hard, but still I think its a good example.

And finally, there is always a place for No. 2, AMD can be a player, it doesn't have to be No. 1 to remain a player.
Wilson Sonsini Term Sheet Generator
This is a pretty amazing new development on the road towards open source law.
They are going to make up for it in volume?
My only regret is their focus on "fair-weather" states, if they ever come to Wisconsin, I'll be the first in line.

That and I'm waiting for the plug-in hybrid model. Actually, what I'd really like is a direct-drive diesel version, like their very first prototype. It got 230 mpg. Still, the hybrid gas-electric prototype supposedly gets 120 mpg starting with an empty battery. The battery in the hybrid will be smaller, holding a 40-mile charge.
In some ways it has happened a little with smalltalk: Gemstones MagLev for ruby work demonstrates that it is possible.

Whilst for many things I like the VM "platform" idea, I still think of lower level compile-to-the-metal languages are more real to me, and always necessary for some things, but perhaps thats my age and experience, and in time VMs will be the norm and native compilation will be like asm code... who knows..
i don't use those languages and i use vim

i still believe touch typing (10 fingers + cartoon characters) is often taken for granted

how many of your bugs stem from typo?
Can't disagree with economy. But AMD did manage to really rock in 2005-2006, didn't it?

EDIT: According to the article, AMD bagan to rock with server processors in 2003
that's called a sprite, that giant jquery ui file with multiple images, in case you want to find more info.
I guess this is USA only?
Interesting, signing up for a key.

I don't understand how your per-month & after-the-fact billing model is feasible if you factor in per-transaction costs?
Please quote with '>', not by indenting.
What Windows 7 Starter Edition is is good old-fashioned trialware.
Pipelining does not work in most browsers (& is disabled in FF by default). When it does work it can be flaky. A JS solution works on current technologies.
'mustache twirling villains' = Gold
The Latest Version of Free iSMS is Available
OK, and so what does that conclusion have to do anything?

You just went in a big circle to tell me that my intuition about the neural network was correct -- that there was a designer (the framework's creator) outside of the neural network who set the boundaries and then let that unique neural network run its course.

It doesn't matter if we know how the neural network works (and so forth), because this argument becomes logically invalid the moment you inject a designer (The framework's creator) into an argument to prove the lack of one.

Edit: Even if your comment was trying to show how an intuition for recognizing design can be "fooled", it still fails out because the intuition was correct.
The $23/month iPhone
But it was never the number of "open programs" that brought people's windows systems to a crawl -- it was always horribly written services: virus scanners, preloaders, viruses, etc.

Windows 7 Starter Edition does not in any way limit the number of Windows Services you can have running!
History is littered with the wrecks of car companies who tried to do something different. We all admire radical car designs, some of us even like them. If there is one thing we can learn, though, conservatism in car design is the way to riches. Just ask Toyota.

The only caveat is if the design truly fits the times. BMW built it's post-war balance sheet by selling Isettas to cash-strapped Germans. However, since the Aptera was conceived and planned, energy efficiency has fallen a distant second to cash efficiency. And this will ultimately prove to make it a historical oddity, fodder for motor curiosity collections and little else.
Not a book, google.

CSS is such an evolving art - browser inconsistencies and their related hacks are constantly changing, and best practises are continually being developed.

It seems ironic to me that you would revert to using dead-tree media for instruction on how to style the cutting edge. If you simply need an introduction to css then w3schools can't be beat.

Oh, and I also own zen of css design, which is pretty good if you must have a physical book.
I hope that never happens here.

I also hope that part of the culture here on HN is to check facts.

After edit: one link from the comments to the submitted article is a humorous take on this issue:

http://www.dilbert.com/strips/comic/2008-05-08/?CmtOrder=Rat...
HTML with CSS and XHTML by Elisabeth Freeman & Eric Freeman seemed like a breeze to get through, and very easy to understand. I recommend starting here. But who am I!
yeah, my understanding was that the overhead of a request is significantly less than the overhead of establishing a connection. So by using keepalive/persistent connections, you get the majority of the savings. All the headers and data for each file still have to get sent over the wire in the digg solution anyway, and the concurrent connections limit is the same in both cases.

But thanks for explaining, I see the latency particularly is an issue.
> It seems like ORMs like Hibernate are moving to have as much complexity as the database they map.

this seems to be a result of the desire to support the increasingly sophisticated concepts provided by the underlying databases, creating an environment in which the ORM's complexity is a function of the complexity of the databases it supports. i'm not sure this is such a bad thing as long as the additions are thoughtfully made.

i do wonder how long it will be until we start seeing the next generation of tools that make hibernate and spring look as crusty as j2ee did when they came out.
To be honest with you, the only difference w/ SE and CS at my school is that you take a few more science courses, maybe an extra math course, a DSP course and thats about it. And it's a significant amount more of stress. And I think you have to take less theory courses.