skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
True, but I was being a little ham fisted in my original reply. They did win out by executing better than their competitors in the competition of the moment, but what I was trying to suggest was that, in all probability, no-one could have succeeded in trying to do those things at an earlier time. You couldn't go back to 1996 and start YouTube.

With YouTube you couldn't have survived the storage costs at an earlier time, and also there needed to be ubiquitous playback, in the form of Flash. Flickr similarly would have been financially onerous due to storage costs ealier on.

In 1996 our bandwidth was so tiny that you really could not have done YouTube at that point.

Wikipedia is a slightly different point. It was launched in 2001, so in 1996 you obviously could have gotten a lead on it, but if you look at the growth curve it wasn't until 2005/2006 that it really took off. I just don't think that the community of editors/users was broad enough until that point.

You are totally right that good execution counts for most of the success and going back in time would allow you to do that much better with the hindsight gained. My thought is just that there are constraints over what is achievable at any given time and the common thread that I see in wildly successful companies is that they managed to jump on those turning points just before they are there, first mover advantage and all that gumph.
YouTube Testing Secret New Channels Beta
Most start-ups involve very little management work until much later.
I'm thinking Oracle/Sun will eventually end up in HP's hands.
Well, losing Sun as a backer would be bad for PostgreSQL, definitely, but as far as the future goes, for PostgreSQL the sky is still the limit, for MySQL the limit now seems to be Oracle.
That was indeed a pretty uninformative article
There are many issues that get articles from multiple sources. You want us to start categorizing everything according to content instead of by url? I don't think HN is set up that way.
MySQL not My_sql. As is pointed out on the other thread, Oracle already own InnoDB, which is used by MySQL as its transactional storage engine, so there's actually a synergy of sorts there.
I play 2 outdoor soccer games a week + 1 indoor game. That's about all I do these days. In the offseason, I try to go to the Gym once or twice a week.
Not to pile on, but I got the same 504.

Try again later!
Actually, it's annoying to get 5 URLs pointing to different articles about the same thing in the RSS feed - if I'm interested in reading the discussion about an event, I can open up the comments for a single URL and find other interesting URLs in there.

It also means that comments about an event don't get fragmented into multiple threads.

The only reason I can see to post in separate threads is to gather karma, which is a shame as it doesn't benefit the site as a whole.
I think it is time to look into PostgreSQL and Drizzle.
I thought Oracle used Jam, not Make.
Impoverished? Brazil is actually a middle-income country, with the South and Southeast rapidly approaching european income levels. Brazil has 190 million people and 150 million cellphones. Most of the population lives near the Atlantic coast in large metropolitan areas.
They should make the "title text" obscured by a flap of paper that automatically lifts when your finger hovers over it.
Monty already left Sun last month to start his own fork of MySQL.
Odd, I'm UK (London) based too. I encountered their salesy SSE people at FOWA London. Politely had to explain that I has no need for 256 concurrent threads on a single machine in any of my web apps at the present time.
I think I'd rather prevent an eight year war that's going nowhere and all the unnecessary death than comes with it, rather than elect an arbitrary minority who may not have been elected if his opponents weren't the worst possible option.
Overall it might be much better than the deal with IBM. With IBM it was a forgone conclusion that Solaris would have vanished, in case of Oracle there is a fair chance it will survive(look at Weblogic - Oracle is promoting Weblogic as their primary middleware). With this purchase, Oracle is in a position to provide(and own) the whole stack : hardware/os/app container(java)/app/database - look around the only other company which comes close to this is Microsoft(which does not have a big ERP portfolio). I think MySQL was just a small factor in this deal. I think this will be big loss to IBM(now that Oracle gets it). IT customers are gravitating towards utility and end-to-end solutions and applications usually drive push(guess who has the biggest business application portfolio).
Maybe this is exactly what they had in mind at Oracle when they first released their stuff or Linux...
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Taking on a full-time job is a way to earn "extra" money?
The PDF linked in the article claims that Fernandinho
Beira-Mar, then the biggest drug boss in Brazil, was
arrested after his location was found using triangulation.

[in Portuguese]

http://www.py2adn.com/artigos/Satelite-Bolinha.pdf

[translation below]

http://translate.google.com/translate?prev=hp&hl=en&...

But don't expect Brazilian police to bother looking for
random truck drivers (unless they can bribe them).
But multiple authors can have a different take on the same event. I don't want a 10-page thread with multiple links spread throughout. It's nothing to do with karma, which I could give a rat's ass about. In this case, I ignored the first story when I saw sun.com as the URL because I figured it was a bullshit press release, but read the one that said nytimes.com even though it turned out to be not much better. Over the next few months additional stories are likely to revisit the same topic with additional analysis. Lumping them all into the same thread would mean we would need to re-scan the discussion to figure out which comments we have read and which ones we haven't. By keeping the discussions fragmented we avoid that problem.
Click 'Oracle Buys Sun' and scroll down.

http://www.oracle.com/sun/sun-faq.pdf

"Will the ownership of Solaris change Oracle’s position on Linux?

No. This transaction enhances our commitment to open standards and choice. Oracle is as committed as ever to Linux and other platforms and will continue to support and enhance our strong industry partnerships."
On one hand I'm happy that people are more enthusiastic about programming. On the other, I'm angry that I never jumped on this bandwagon - what a great way to make some income. Then again, I would probably have to own an iPhone first :)
They'd own the copyrights and trademarks, yes. JDK 1.7 is however OSS.
Many good UK startups will be around. Mike (@mikebutcher) did a great job here!

See you all tomorrow.

Bastian - Zensify
The other article is a press release from Sun, and this one is a story on theregister.co.uk.

Not a dupe, though I'd suggest reading this then going over to the other for discussion.
It depends on what you're paying for insurance. When I went solo (with a wife and two kids, btw), the cost of private insurance wasn't much more than my corporate plan, so it wasn't a factor.

Getting private insurance is pretty much impossible if you're not healthy, though, I'll give you that.
"Now, just like MS, they control the Operating System (Oracle's Linux is no match for Solaris), "

Really? The telco and finance industries that were all Sun based in the mid 90s have dumped most of their Solaris for Linux. Startups are still predominantly Linux.

Where's Solaris growing?
Ruby on Rails - Security Guide
Genetic Algorithms: Evolving Human Faces
Definitely not as big as MySQL/Oracle, but one that I'm wondering most about is their open-source app server Glassfish. A big part of Oracle's BEA acquisition was bolstering their middleware suite (with WebLogic, et al.). Will Glassfish development continue? I hope so...
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Totally agree.

The most intimidating thing to non-technical business people (not that you should aim for intimidating people, but sometimes it helps to have an edge in a competitive environment) are people close at the top of the "value-chain" and actually know how to build what they are selling.

Even better if you're the one with control over both what you're selling and how you sell it.
Oprah ads 1 million+ users to Twitter.
Seems like going to the afterparty is the best option in terms of value for money.
Underbelly: What haughty startup bloggers don't tell you
Why Sun Should Matter to You
Navigators To Truth
The best news that could come out of this deal would be better Linux support for T1/2/2+ and Thumper hardware. Awesome hardware but I can hardly justify building expertise and support infrastructure for Solaris just to run it.
Debit cards (and cash) are much the norm in offline shopping in Germany. Credit cards seem to have taken off somewhat recently, but that may be just my perception. Credit cards also seem to be more common in corporate settings rather than in private hands.

Even for online shopping, one can often get a bill and pay via bank transfer (SWIFT/IBAN or more commonly the national system).
Of the companies, Oracle is the only one who has ever made really LARGE acquisitions and made them work. It will be interesting to see what Oracle does when they need to start spinning off the different tools that duplicate their functionality. Oracle has been dev friendly with free tools and development environments. You can download their enterprise Oracle database from their website. IBM always seems to charge for their tools.
I think "an eight year war that's going nowhere and all the unnecessary death" is not an overall assessment of the effect 9/11 has had.

Indeed stop it and you could well kill more people (no by atroscities but by the butterfly effect etc.) - do you then go back and stop those deaths? Where does it stop? Do you go back to influence the decisions that affect every innocent life, do you constantly tweak history to ensure the maximum people "survive"?

The fact that 9/11 HAS happened means that if anyone has invented a time machine at some point in the future (or whenever) they either took the correct decision not to change history dramatically. Or they did and that was a potential consequence.

As I said below. Tampering with History itself is an unbelievably dangerous game.
Less clear-cut than the future plans for the database servers are those for Sun's ZFS and Oracle's BtrFS. Are they likely to continue development in parallel, or might the licence on ZFS be changed and development merged?
yeah, absolutely. In my experience it's often a team-based incentive program to encourage cooperation with other tech sales people.
Have you considered consulting? By that i don't mean "charge hourly to do development" but true consulting.

I worked for the technical consulting branch of one of the "Big Four" accounting firms as an Oracle DBA for a few years and found that I used my soft skills much more than my technical stuff. Most of the projects I was brought in for where very troubled and usually had a political AND technical problem. The usual method to solve these involved a lot of creativity to implement the best technical solution given the political climate of our clients. It can be very rewarding solving these kinds of issues.
Founding a company would be the wrong way to go about exploiting this time hack. Too much relies on execution, so the possibility for failure is substantial. There is a much easier way to make money if you can time-travel.

What I'd do: ask for 30 minutes before I go, and log into Yahoo finance. Find a 2% gainer for each day on the stock market. Each day, move half of my net worth into the gainer (only half as a measure of caution; I might inadvertently alter the future and screw myself). The reason to aim for +2 is to avoid insider trading suspicion; putting my money into a +10 or -20 (shorting) every day would land me in jail; no one would believe I could tell the future because of time travel. Each day, I'd earn a 1% profit.

Starting from $10000, I'd get to $10 million within 720 trading days, or about 3 years. At this point, I'd limit my profits to $100k per day because otherwise I'd be at the level where I could actually change the future, eroding my gains. So I'd gain "only" $25m/year for the next decade, cashing out at $250m.
Why? Using that logic, Haskell should be in a easy set-relation with C, too, since compilers often translate Haskell to C.
This is not a genetic algorithm; this is a steady-state-ish (MU, LAMBDA) evolution strategies algorithm. Genetic algorithms imply crossover, not simply mutation.

People have gotta stop referring to population-based methods of stochastic search as "genetic algorithms".
indeed, profit is the bottom line
Ask HN: What are you doing to counter the recession?
What measure you took to counter recession (save bottom line) and to keep your project/startup floating? I am particularly interested to know measure you took before you decide to go ahead with staff reduction.
Why not just make "risky" stock trades? It's work to actually build stuff. Seriously though, I think the OP meant something a bit different than the literal interpretation of future knowledge that I'm taking.
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There will be a conference call today to discuss the transaction at 5:30 a.m. Pacific time. Investors can listen to the conference call by dialing (719) 234-7870, passcode 923645. A replay will be available for 24 hours after the call ends at (719) 884-8882, passcode: 923645. A live audio webcast of the call will be made available at www.oracle.com/investor and a replay will be available for seven days after the call ends.
MySQL is a low-end complement to Oracle, but Oracle already had a whole range of products in the Oracle range, including a free version of Oracle (Oracle XE). If Oracle really wanted to give away a free database, they would raise the limits on Oracle XE to something practical.

It is silly to spend resources developing MySQL in parallel to Oracle. I expect that MySQL will slow MySQL development (it is already glacial), and provide migration tools from MySQL to Oracle. Perhaps they will develop a MySQL front-end to Oracle and/or enhance MySQL's front-end to be more compatible with Oracle's syntax. Either way, MySQL has always been an inferior good and Oracle will ensure it always will be. Oracle just needs to keep MySQL alive enough that nobody else can start a viable business around a fork of it.

I also don't think that Oracle will want to keep supporting both Linux and Solaris in the long run. Now Oracle has ZFS and BTFS; they don't need both. It will be interesting to see what they do with Solaris and its key technologies.
This reminds me about the story where Feynman is being interviewed by a psychologist. He answers each question in a way that is both perfectly reasonable yet would cause the psychologist to become increasingly concerned.
It gives them the key vote in the JCP which means they own not only the copyright to the JVM code, but also the rights for the Java specification.

There's been some arguments in the JCP about Java 7, with Sun usually the last hold out. So this move is likely to resolve many issues within the JCP.

Or at least we can hope.
Why? Oracle has a larger market capitalization than HP: ~90 billion vs. 84.
Interesting commentary on cultural differences regarding plagiarism in academic papers:

http://www.voanews.com/specialenglish/2009-04-15-voa1.cfm
The original C++ compiler, Cfront, was also a preprocessor/compiler down to C.
How will that work? Oracle's market cap is higher than HP's.
"Everybody kills Hitler on their first trip." http://www.abyssandapex.com/200710-wikihistory.html
> I'm not sure how things work in the US, but in some parts of the world the governments actually use the income from taxes to provide valuable services to their population.

Are those services valuable enough that the folks that use them would pay what it costs to provide them?

I like it when other folks buy things for me as much as the next person. However, doing that on a large scale ends up being a way for middlemen to take from everyone and much of the "free stuff" is a mistake.
i'm pretty sure a computer could rock this job. just wire up a natural language generator, make it jabber incessantly about stuffed crust pizza, throw in some 70s surfer slang (radical!), good to go.
Irrationality is the real invisible hand
Every once in a while we are lucky enough to have a good friend recommend we pay attention to some notable find they discovered. In this case the path was a perfect example of navigators to truth. The short collection of individuals helped steer me to something that I found incredibly valuable. My hope from this post is that it serves as a reminder for you to share your pearl discoveries with all of us.
Do only twits tweet?
It's actually worse than that.

No corporation pays taxes of any form because they all get the money from customers, owners, and employees (via higher prices and lower payments).

Corporations just collect taxes.
Because of different shared memory optimizations in Solaris (especially Solaris 10+) and Linux, there's a non-trivial amount of work involved. I doubt it was anything close to "just type make".
What measure you took to counter recession (save bottom line)

In general, the thing to do in all economic conditions is to spend as little as possible, as infrequently as possible. Fortunately, my start-up has no employees yet, only contractors. So we haven't had a staff reduction issue, but we have been annoyed at not being able to build up as rapidly as we desired.

(P.S. Flagged to suggest to curators that something along the lines of the quoted phrase above should be added to the thread title.)
Then there were also the regulatory issues that the IBM+Sun deal would have faced. IBM and Sun are the main competitors in a few areas (large scale tape storage, for example). This would have made the deal more expensive for IBM than just the $7 billion price tag.

Oracle and Sun have very few overlapping markets (I can't think of any off hand, aside from the Oracle Red Hat clone and Solaris). As such, this deal will be much smoother for both parties.
that's not a bad idea, but as far as Wikipedia knows, there isn't a windows version of Drizzle available. this could eventually be a problem for some users.
H-1B visa use cuts U.S. programmer, software engineer wages by up to 6%
> no reasons why you couldnt track down Osama

But to stop 9/11, you would have to track down Cheney.
Is there an intermediate step between using an ad network and hiring a sales force? Could ad brokerages fill this space?
What? They did not sell its own ads?? Wow, what a sweet deal MSN had.
> no reasons why you couldnt track down Osama - for example - then jump back in time to tell the US forces where he will be at XYZ date to pick him up

The US knew where to get Osama many times. They didn't because they didn't think that he wasn't interesting.

That's the Cassandra problem. How do you convince the US to do something about Osama before 9/11? Lots of people claim to know the future.
or an iPod touch...
Deja vu. It reminds me of Visual Basic and Access, but with a bigger market. Back then, there was this same idea that "anyone can be a programmer", but the pool of interested amateurs was smaller and it was a bit harder to reach the market.

Nevertheless, I think it's essentially the same phenomenon all over again. Sooner or later, people will run out of fresh, attractive ideas that can be done easily, without becoming a decent programmer.

On the whole, I think we'll see some good stuff and lots of mediocre stuff; we might see more people becoming interested in programming. But ultimately, I believe we're looking at something ephemeral.
Our algorithm is also not a "face detector". It's a feature-based machine-learned image classifier that was trained on faces and non-faces. However, when speaking to those presumably without a background in machine learning, I think "face detector" conveys more information.

Also, the title "Steady-state-ish (MU, LAMBDA) evolution strategies algorithm, and/or population-based stochastic search: Evolving Human Faces" is too long.
For those already in decent shape, here's a way to maximizing the use of those 20 minutes: high-intensity interval training (HIIT - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-intensity_interval_trainin...). The basic premise is to alternate between maximum effort (sprinting) and medium effort (jogging) at set intervals. The key is that the sprints are anaerobic rather than aerobic. This type of workout induces a state of excess post-exercise oxygen consumption, thereby raising your resting metabolic rate for about 24 hours.

Hop on a treadmill (or bike, elliptical, whatever), warm up for 5 minutes, then go all-out for 30 seconds. Jog for 60 seconds, then go all-out for another 30 seconds. Repeat the cycle 6-8 times. Cool down for 5 minutes.

Best bang for your 20 minutes. Do it just three times a week; add in lifting, normal cardio, etc. as desired.
Summary: first use a method to measure user counts that wrong, then apply voodoo to make the stats seem good, throw in compounding factors that most certainly affect the user count, forget about controlling/discussing other factors, and then publish on a high profile blog.
Don't worry. There will be another bandwagon along soon enough.
We had some interesting discussions about how to best do it - jedberg@reddit had one of the cooler ones that involved building your own decoder to pass over the obscured text. In the end, Randy suggested a discrete Copyright-esque position and font that was a simple, elegant solution.
Oh TechCrunch....
True, but how do you find out about it in time to take advantage of the opportunity before it becomes too popular?
This is some definition of "gotta" with which I was not previously acquainted. People will use technical terms in a manner that is not technically accurate. You can't stop them, it's part of the way language and communication works.

It's annoying, it's inaccurate, it's occasionally misleading, but it's inevitable.
This article never comes out and says it directly, but it sort of has this tone like this is some sort of unusual thing. Hardly. You'd be hard pressed to find a successful web comic running for several years that hasn't put out some sort of book, or some sort of tangible, purchasable artifact. It's a great way to support your favorite comic while getting something nice back, if donations are too hard (or in some cases, not accepted).

(No disrespect to xkcd, and kudos on getting the NY Times placement.)
I think the difference is that obj c is a superset in that it supports all of the functionality/sytnax of c and then adds more.
Yeah, this is basically just Newton's method of approximation, seeded with a random initial value. It will eventually converge on a local maximum defined by the facial recognition function.
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My apologies to people to checked it out before and got an error. I needed to restart the server after the last update.
Online Blogger 'Minerva' Found Not Guilty
That's pretty clever. I agree that sometimes though, the simple approach yields a better solution :)
I think tsally made a very good point, and I think you're reacting emotionally. His comment was not an attack against Brazil.

I don't think tsally's point was that Brazilians are impoverished. The point he was trying to make was that if someone in the Amazon can buy radio equipment for less than $500 and use it to hack the U.S. Navy's satellites, then there's a problem here. These guys are looking for freebies, and they are most likely harmless. But just imagine what would happen if the U.S. goes to war and the enemy deliberately carries out a DoS attack against the U.S. Navy satellites? That's not such an unlikely scenario...

On the other hand, after decades of misguided foreign policy that has fostered hatred towards the U.S. all over the world, I doubt the police forces abroad will be very eager to protect the interests of the U.S. Military.