skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No, you miss my point in two distinct ways. $20k per server is middle of the road for a MS SQL in a big enterprise. It's on the low side for Oracle. It happens all the time; I've seen it (and argued against it.)

The other point, though, is that it's not the $2k or $20k in software costs. Really, to a big enterprise, $20k is nothing. The real problem is that it ties you down to making architectural decisions because of the cost of the software. Say you're right and you can license MS SQL for only $2k. What happens when you start partitioning your data and end up with 50 servers? Suddenly that $2k is $100k... or if you're on the enterprise plan it's $20k * 50 = $1,000,000. And I'm not speculating. I've lived thorough this scenario more than once.

Also, I object to the phrase "skimped on a LAMP stack." It's not skimping. Cost factors aside, the LAMP stack is better.
I thought his point was that people who like it tend to be newbies to web development who are not able to make an informed critical judgment about its merits because they don't know enough of HTML to begin with - they learn HAML by seeing its output without understanding the HTML that underlies it. But I agree that this seems like a weak argument. I can't imagine working in web development without understanding HTML.
Agreed. The only reason we associate life with self-replicating is because living things don't last long without it, but it doesn't mean you need self-replication to be alive.
For a less TOS breaking solution, you could set up a dropbox client on your server and let it refresh your web content automatically. You're hosting it yourself, but you still get the benefit of no file transferring necessary.
There have already been threats against Huffington Post from the AP.
1. So far I have tested it with 2000 agents and was not pushing the limit of the broker, rabbitmq is know to handle a lot more connections then this. my goals/estimations will be around probably 5k agents per rabbit cluster with a need to federate/shard nanite systems after they grow that big.

2. This works on LAN or across the net transparently, so it can be used across data centers easily.
I've been happily using Proggy Clean for a while. It's even surprisingly readable printed at low point size.
James is right on about where HAML falls short; but thats not HAML's problem, its more of a preference. I will be the first to say that HAML is no appropriate for everything. Here is how I apply various templating engines in my Rails projects:

HAML - Great for application markup (as opposed to document markup... see ERB below) for a number of reasons. (1) application markup tends to be heavy in javascript where you need a clean DOM. HAML reduces the chance of screwing up the DOM and makes it easier to look at during development. (2) Lots of conditionals in the view and I'm too lazy to factor them out into partials or helpers. Sometimes its just easier to express if/then and loops in HAML than it is in ERB... slightly less markup.

ERB - Document/content markup. If I have big docs with lots of links and paragraphs, but nothing to heavy going on thats dynamic/conditional, ERB is the easiest way to go.

Mix 'n' match! Then you can have the best of both worlds!
Come on Paul. IM is hardly ancient geek history.
Rabbiter: Federated Pub/Sub from the RabbitMQ People
Pray tell us why it "isn't working", Dave. (btw society != clique)
The point I'm trying to make is that converting cars over to electric right now is not a green solution. I believe there is less pollution by running an efficient combustion engine than running an electric card that's powered off a coal plant. There's a lot of efficiency lossed from starting with the coal, to converting to electricity, to charging the batteries. With a gas powered car, the bulk of the efficiency is in the last stage. Wish I had some more numbers to back this claim but I've read it before...
Echelon to launch twitter killer Web N.0 app
>I believe there is less pollution by running an efficient combustion engine than running an electric card that's powered off a coal plant.

I'm pretty sure the numbers go the other way. Current voting on comments would put the burden of proof on you to change the minds of the rest. Here is one I googled up very quickly from an industry source. http://www.pluginamerica.org/images/EmissionsSummary.pdf I didn't read it, so I am by no means trying to hold it up as definitive and without any fallacy.
Not seeing that behavior. History remains intact and back works fine.
An explanation similar to this was what made Bayes' theorem really click for me when I took probability. Thanks Prof. Terpstra!

http://www.ndsu.nodak.edu/ndsu/normann/statistics/faculty/te...
Ask HN: Anyone Use Affiliate Networks to Acquire Customers?
Hey,

At the very early stages of a commercial webapp in development. I've been very interested in leveraging affiliate networks like CJ to acquire customers easily. Being that the app will be subscription-based, I wouldn't mind paying 1.5-2 months generated revenue based on their leads.

Has anyone used such networks to acquire customers, and if so, what do you think about it? Was it successful? Paying for guaranteed paying clients seems like it could lead to any business being profitable - as long as you have a product that people will pay for.

Thanks..
This was me until about the 3rd time I played around with Haml. Then it occurred to me how much noise I got rid of by using it, after which I was hooked.

Jquery + Haml is a very close impedance match and a real pleasure to use for development.
Cleverly done. This is much better implementation than many of the more popular to-do sites out there.
is there a way to "correct" a marker?
the marker for a lake near my house is about 7 blocks away from the actual lake =P

also...I can't find a way to add content...
Please, give some opinions in the subject, if you have any :D
In my experience, that which kills "snappyness" for commercial sites is primary annoyingly slow industry standard ad- and traffic-tracking-systems, and secondary layout rendering issues due to complex css or silly number of images.

(Lesson learned: make sure you can serve pages without ad and tracking scripts to show the customer that you are fast as hell, that it is their "money-maker dependencies" that kill snappiness)

Javascript can often be hidden behind some user-initiated click, where it "feels" okay to have 1 or 2 sec of delay given that some feedback is given directly, such as changing the mouse pointer or the color of the button pressed.

I wish github would let me be the initiator of more of their page updates, because those pages can be really slow to finish using my weaker machines.
Hmm. The article says it's not really an algorithm, because one of the steps requires checking if an expression is equivalent to zero, a problem that isn't today known to be decidable. Anyone here knowledgeable enough to supply details?

Edit: found the details in amichail's link. Yes, it's true; the algorithm isn't complete as of today.
Mekmitasdigoat ?

http://www.sigmasoft.com/~openbsd/archives/html/openbsd-misc...
~9 months after Friendfeed raises a Series B? Maybe Google will drop the billion to buy both Friendfeed and Twitter so we can get Twitter with the superior Friendfeed interface.
Gaming-Solutions Review
Gaming-Solutions is a professional hosting provider offering professional services for gamers, clans or communities. The company dropped onto the internet in early 2009 and are working and aiming to provide a quality of service unmatched in this industry. There highest priority is to provide the highest quality servers for the lowest costs.They are UK Based company with one of the fastest networks in the UK.

Services

The company offers a wide range of services including :

* Web Hosting
* Game Servers
* Voice Servers
* Dedicated Servers
A thoughtful essay as usual, but I did chuckle a bit at the self-referential 3rd person in this particular headline. :P
I'm sure I had this problem before, but maybe it was with an older server or browser? In any case, thanks for the correction.
Blogaholic Blogging Blog
DevCentral Top5 05/01/2009
The Brazilians will just take it from us again :)
The silent point I was getting at was not to stay in dead end jobs. Keeping your skills up to date doesn't mean learning new tech in your spare time while pounding out COBOL at your workplace : it means making sure the projects and technologies you're working on are current and on trend with the future. If this means moving jobs every couple of years, then do it. If it means leaving the cube farm and starting out on your own, even better.
Not asking permission or evening linking to a source for your information is, at least, a discoverable faux pas which can easily lead to some nasty public backlash. If the internet had no memory whatsoever (caches, search engines, archive.org, etc.) then I can only imagine the insane plagiarism that would follow.
No, but it is extremely difficult to guarantee that you can hermetically seal nuclear waste from groundwater indefinitely, which is the standard Yucca Mountain has been held to. They've poured billions of dollars into engineering Yucca, but they'll never be able to eliminate the possibility of failure.
it works fine on my browser.
I hate that Apple is turning me into a hypocrite. I keep condoning their acts of bullying just because I like their shiny products. Any other company and I would have stopped funding it by now.
Not really. The .01% generally have vastly greater power and effective rights within society - ensuring that that doesn't go overboard isn't so crazy.
Not to mention about a 20-30% reduction in memory usage (from our recently ported, non-rails app)
Actually Jessica does a lot more than "administrative duties" for YC. Of the four YC partners, she is the best judge of people, and that's the main thing we're judging at this early stage. It would not be too far from the truth to say that interviews consist of me and Rtm and Trevor asking founders a lot of questions, and then as soon as they walk out, turning to Jessica and asking "ok, should we fund them?"
Attention NoScript users
I'd argue that it matters whether the replacement is gradual or immediate.

There is really no difference for other people if the copy is perfect, but there is a huge difference for me.

Let's say I am able to make a perfect digital copy of myself, and immediately after I die. Well, my identity as a person has not in the least bit been affected because I have a perfect digital copy of myself. But the copy of my identity that was destroyed will never experience anything ever again, and that to me is the same as death.

However if the process is gradual, and the original copy of my identity experiences the process, then I would not view that as death.

Compare my identity to a computer program that you want to be moved to another location. You can either make a copy, and then delete the original, or you could copy one small piece at a time and update the file locations so that the program can be running while file locations are being changed. The only difference for you is that the second is probably a lot more work. But I'd argue that no complete copy was deleted in the second case. And if the program is sentient, I see this as being drastically different for that program.
How to Avoid Phishing Scams | TechJaws: Internet Security and SEO
John Key (Prime Minister) and the National party have a history of selling out to business interests (especially overseas). Never the less the music and film industries here aren't as powerful as in the US (think of a NZ musician or movie other than LOTR).
The ISP's blocked the last copyright legislation they tried to get through, hopefully they will continue to have a backbone.
You should really grab someone off the street and seat them in front of your app, with a notebook or recorder in your hand.

You seem to have done a good deal of work, and have some neat stuff. However, after a couple of minutes digging, I can only surmise it's about hiking trips, and it should somehow be possible to see foot trails - if I could get the inscrutable markers to do something ...
Searching For a Sustainable Competitive Advantage
My team has been working on an idea for a start up for some time and we have a clear idea of how were going to make money but there is still the one looming question. What stops our bigger ape competitors from stomping us when our product has enough penetration in the market? Does anyone have good examples of sustainable competitive advantages that companies have implemented?
It doesn't surprise me the extent some people go to to generate revenue in what I must think is a small market.

I am an adblock plus user and I must say it enhances my browsing a noticeable amount that when I am using a different browser or no adblock I notice and although this is not ideal for websites that make money off of ads I really dislike them.

Same can't be said for noscript I've stopped installing it on firefoxs I use and don't think I have it installed on any of my computers it just stopped being functional for me with firebug and adblock.
There's no marker correction right now. We pull the data from geonames.org and USGS waypoints, and it's supposed to be pretty accurate. But I'll file a bug about doing something like that.

Also, to add data to the lake, simply click the lake. Then click Save Map. That will create a trip page with a "File A Report" link, and you can add a link or report or whatever.
It pains me as well (I'll be getting a nice, shiny 8-core system in two months) but rationalize it with my realization that pretty much every company is evil -- I give my hard-earned paycheck to the least evil company that provides what I'm looking for.
I really like his suggestion on differentiating praise and criticism.

I have already been depersonalizing criticism though. I basically started to believe that I am much more than the sum of my problems or difficulties. But while criticism isn't personal, nobody owes me help and I'm the only one who has the responsibility of dealing with it. Of course I can still take criticism personally, but I'm at least forcing myself to focus on finding things that I can do to solve the problem.
I do certainly do some "man-on-the-street" testing :), but, I'm always looking for more feedback just like yours.

I'm sorry I dropped you on this page for your first go. You might find the experience of using the site less confusing if you go to the home page: http://www.trailbehind.com. There is a legend for the markers, and we display hiking trips. This page is just for adding data to the map.

In response to your bugs:

1) I should add the home page legend to this map, which is no problem, just an oversight

2) There are trails on the map, at zoom level 15 and above. We're working on showing them earlier, but browsers choke on our method of display right now. We have many ten thousands of GPX files indexed.
IM and IRC are fundamentally different from twitter and friendfeed, because twitter and friendfeed have home pages with content. Deciding what goes on the home page is key functionality that wasn't in IM or IRC.
Guys, stop downvoting posts just because you disagree with them. If you have something to add to the discussion, add it. Parent was not abusive or off-topic or otherwise deserving of downmodding.
Same here, I love both of those fonts (except for Inconsolata's quotes).
Regarding the Verizon and 'iPhone Lite' Rumors
My point is not that they are the same, but that details matter a lot, and that just because there are parallels between two things, it does not make them the same thing. My .plan example was not made up -- that was an actual criticism from the early days of blogging (according to Jason Shellen, who was part of Blogger).
How to Overhype Your Search Engine
Google Researches New Captcha Approach In Which Users Rotate Images Upward
My method for this madness may be useful to someone. I use two browsers:

A) Konqueror (aka Webkit/Chrome), with NO Java/Javascript/etc., for general reading and exploratory browsing. (Reads PDFs too, btw).

B) Firefox for the "usual suspects". No extensions. No Flash either, but that's me.

Problem solved. A surprising amount of the web works with A, some shops or social sites need B, I don't care about the rest.
Just to re-iterate the article, NoScript runs ads on their website to generate some revenue. Adblock Plus normally blocks these ads, but NoScript whitelists itself (along with a few other partner developer websites) in Adblock Plus "without" end-user permission, and without making a genuine effort to notify users it's doing this. It hacks Adblock Plus from working on its sites, basically.

You can disable NoScript's "modification" to Adblock Plus by doing the following in Firefox:

1) Tools -> Add-ons -> Adblock Plus -> Preferences

2) Collapse the "Filter subscription: EasyList (USA)" list.

3) Uncheck "Enabled" for the "Filter subscription: NoScript Developer Support Filterset" list.

Now when NoScript installs an update, and loads its webpage full of ads, Adblock Plus won't be blocked from doing its duty. Unless of course NoScript re-enables the filter...
For twittering, it might help to note that that "personal" and "permanent" can be thought of as different forms of "general"; and "impersonal" and "temporary" can be thought of as different forms of "specific".
I think the scenario described in the post might be deliberately contrived. JQuery uses window.eval ( http://dev.jquery.com/browser/trunk/jquery/src/ajax.js#L503 ) to parse JSON, not Douglas Crockford's json.js. So, merely swapping XML with JSON shouldn't result in as much of a slow down (if not a speedup) as the graph tends to indicate.
Here & There — a horizonless projection in Manhattan
(Just read Jason's piece the other day, actually. You can't leave comments on a .plan ...)

I agree that details matter a great deal. In any event, the comment specifically questioned the temporal aspects of the analogy. Wishing you success in your endeavors.
I don't believe any of these design once run on any platform frameworks will work without severe limitations, performance penalties. Maybe fine if you are implementing a relatively static app/site but then why not just implement a mobile webkit optimized page which all these newer phones support (if only blackberry added a webkit browser too)
Methane argument I wonder what company or organization is raking in the dough with that one? Who is living off the hog by preaching animals and people farts are killing the environment?

Being green is great and it's big business. I agree with most of it, but the fart argument is ridiculous.. though not to the people making a living from it!
Who: Henry Smolinski and Hal Blake

Deceased: 1973

Invention: Winged automobiles

Cause of Death: A suddenly wingless automobile
A Micro Framework for PHP
> Add your customer to your mailing list and periodically send updates on your business, new products, usage tips, etc.

Please don't.
This page is just for adding data to the map.

Ah, mystery explained. I usually read the URL, but it's late here ...

P.S. Have you thought of mining a series of pics with geo data ? With the newfangled kit out there, should make the 'upload' pretty easy for anyone.
really he couldn't think of anything better to do with 24M?
Of course, real time is a better form of communication.

But then, why don't we just stop using emails, just do video conference, or better yet face-to-face meetings?

Because there are other limiting factors. For example, no one has the time to have real-time conversation all the time. Real-time also limits the amount of people you can effectively communicate with.

That's why we have email/forum/tweet, because they serve different functionality.

Thus, real-time communication will never replace static communication as long as such intrinsic logistic limits exist.
It probably has more to do with what is used as a measure of status in the field. If your field uses money or prestige, then you are probably less likely to think you know everything about other fields. However, in fields like tech where intelligence is how the nerds establish the pecking order, they are likely to carry over the same sorts of social norms to dealing with those outside the field.
The transcription is slightly crazy in parts: "Prologue", "girdle numbers" (my favourite), "picks my curiosity" … .

Unfortunately, McCarthy seems to misunderstand Kent Pitman's question about dynamic vs. static typing as having to do with dynamic vs. static (lexical) variable scoping.

The most interesting thing, for me, was the idea that it was because McCarthy never tried to be the 'boss' of Lisp that there has always been so much diversity and innovation in Lisp(s).
It's fairly amusing to me that this essay can explain away the vast majority of my existential angst. As much as I hate to admit it, I had an 'aha' moment while reading this.

What I really enjoyed about this post was that it talked about using research to come to an explicit algorithm to learn optimism. I could never swallow the advice of many optimistic people in my life since they [through no fault of their own, mind you ;)] were not usually hackers. As such, they would explain in broad and nebulous terms how they achieved said happiness, which makes sense, since--according to the essay--they see positives as general and permanent. I would always focus on their seemingly obvious contradictions, without really noticing my own. I guess I'm just glad someone finally pointed that out to me.
Yes! I am working on a feature that merges a GPX track with a Flickr set based on timestamps. One of the sites we index to our map actually does something similar: www.everytrail.com. They merge tracks with photos, but don't use Flickr.

Also, we already show Flickr photos for places on the map via the Photos tab. We are typically be able to show photos of places based on that alone.
GS: Do you think there is anything peculiar or special about the design of Lisp that encouraged that experimentation or made it easier?

JM: Sure. There was no boss. I never attempted to be the boss.
You should try flashblock, if you don't already know about it. Instead of loading flash you get a play button where the flash would have been and you can choose to turn it on if you want. It also supports whitelists, although annoyingly enough on the host of the flash, not on the website displaying the flash.
Well, hey. That's a coincidence. I just transcribed that part about not attempting to be the boss. It's too bad they didn't continue that discussion a bit further. (It's not clear whether JM heard the question or just was interested in talking about it.)
"the more difficult it is to grasp the subject matter of a paper, the less likely it is that peer reviewers are actually reviewing it any better than a common reader."

Sorry, but no.

Papers are reviewed by researchers who are intimately familiar with the subject and techniques used in the paper under review. Journal editors don't give papers to people who are incapable of reviewing them. That would be dumb.

"...evidenced by the multitude of papers in the recent past that have been discredited as academically dishonest to fraud, and the hilarious meta-studies slipping computer generated gibberish through journal review processes."

You're exaggerating. Out of the thousands and thousands of peer-reviewed articles that are published each year, a small handful are later shown to be fraudulent. Overall, peer review has a pretty great track record.
I think it is significant that all of the professions you mentioned are science based. I feel exactly the way you do about engineering and science jobs, but less rigorous fields do not have the same effect on me.

I think this might be why we are all willing to judge the efforts of politicians, managers, etc - what they do seems to simply require having an opinion and acting on it. In the sciences, though, we know that you have to be really knowledgeable to be successful.