skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's fascinating what happens when an entire culture adopts the standpoint of a jealous husband who doesn't let his wife even socialize with other people.
1. For this to take off, other providers would have to implement the Wave API/protocol. Other providers like Microsoft, Yahoo, Facebook, etc. Just as today everybody is running SMTP servers.

2. What does open-sourcing mean? Is Google open-sourcing their server-side code? Probably not, since it's tied to the Google architecture anyways. Implementing these APIs/protocols would be a significant expence for the other providers. Also, open-source or not, this would still be a Google-technology (controled by Google), and large corporations don't like to invest in other's technology.

3. Presumably Google would allow Gmail users to upgrade with a click, so they'd have a good amount of seed users. But still, most of my contacts are not @gmail.com, so the experience would be limited.

4. This probably includes email as a special case, eg. your Wave provider is still running SMTP servers and receiving email messages coming to your address (Wave address = email address) and placing them in your Wave inbox, and sending out emails per SMTP if the other side is not Wave enabled. This means painless upgrades in terms of "compatibility" for the user.

Correct me if I'm wrong, I've only skimmed the docs!
Bing It Is: Microsoft Rolls Out Its New Search Engine
Uh, I'm not sure how you draw a correlation between the "right" decision and "fashion" here. People make dumb but fashionable choices all the time. Hell, most "fashionable" clothes are as inexpensive to manufacture and procure resources for as the Kirkland Selects brand from Costco, but people spend huge sums of money on that clothing, sometimes just for the bragging rights of a brand name. In other words, "fashionable" can be "dumb", so you've made a point that doesn't damage my case at all.

I do not think lisp "makes you smarter" in the sense that it's going to kick your IQ up notches. But I think Lisp's approach to software systems is a "still-clear pond" approach where you can see all the way down to the guts of the system, whereas a system like a Java runtime is more of a "murky lake."

And, like I said, linguistically-oriented programming is something everyone should learn. It is a fascinating approach to programming that will frequently produce new insights into what existing language designers did and why (because a huge number of them know Lisp or Smalltalk, which are very close to each other on the power and syntactic flexibility spectrum).
Google Code Page: http://code.google.com/apis/wave
One of their possible reasons:

Faculty members like to do research. "Research could be a
consumption good for faculty. If faculty enjoy engaging
in research, then, faculty could be paid partially ‘in
kind’ with research opportunities. Such in-kind payments
are consistent with the observed compensating
differential -- lower pay in academia compared to the
private sector for similar skills," the authors write.

You don't say! I would be tempted to dismiss this as academic navel-gazing, but the abstract for the paper <http://papers.nber.org/papers/w14974>; seems quite genuine:

Some worry that faculty devoting more time to research
harms teaching and thus harms students' human capital
accumulation. ... Research is needed, particularly to
address what employers seek from higher education
graduates and to assess the validity of current measures
of teaching quality.

On the one hand, a candid look at university life is always a good thing. Using the metrics like "human capital accumulation" may not be. Has anyone done a comparative study of college and university mission statements?

Edited: to fix formatting of quotes.
The ones interested in home automation do. Blinds are probably the least common, but the fact that you can get IR controls for your blinds on products you buy at Home Depot gives you some indication that there ARE people buying these things.

The problem comes from trying to integrate the 3 things you mentioned, as an example.

If I am going to watch a movie on TV, I probably want to control the blinds and turn the lights down or off. If your blinds are IR controlled, instead of a keypad and/or RF control, you have a decent probability of being able to turn on the TV and close the blinds, as long as the IR target for the blinds is close enough to the TV so that the user holding the remote control doesn't have to wave it around the room.

But, there really aren't any lighting controls with direct IR interfaces, and very very few multi-remotes have IR libraries for automation devices. So, you need to install the room lighting, setup an IR interface, most likely either program the remote or the IR interface so that one can interact with the other, and then setup a macro on the TV remote.

Most people would rather just do things manually.
Looks great for more social people. But, like Knuth, I prefer to stay on the bottom of things, not on top of them.
It's a trade-off. It's not very useful for real-time applications like games.
However, web applications are becoming more and more popular, even on the
desktop with applications like AIR. Whatsmore, people know HTML/CSS/JS tech
(particularly compared to Objective-C), and that makes it easy for them to
encourage people to develop applications on their platform, even if it
remains a niche.

Geez, iPhone criticism has now officially come full circle. Apple originally intended the iPhone to only support web apps, using a subset of HTML, et al, derived from their work with OS X's Dashboard. (Remember the Steve Note where his announcement of this was met with a stone silent crowd?) Apple was forced to relent and make the Cocoa API available after developer uproar and complaints about web app development being too limiting.

And now this is considered a developer attraction point of the Pre? I've worked with development languages from C to VB to Scheme, and compared to the current stack related to web development, Obj-C and Interface Builder is cake, cake, compared with the amalgamated hodgepodge that is HTML/DOM/CSS/JS...
A lot of the stuff presented here is mainstream practice in Tcl (e.g., new constructs, dbg evaluation). Tcl is seriously underappreciated language.

In my programming whenever I see myself writing blubber (I like that word), I just factor it out into a separate procedure and give it a descriptive name.

So when I'm reading the code of the calling routine, I rarely see blubber; it's contained in simple routines that are easy to read/verify.

Most of the examples here amount to thoughtful library development. With a good library, C++ and macro processor can also many of these things.

Here's a version of aif that works for most cases (I'm not claiming that C has the expressive power of Lisp):

#define aif(expr, val, code...) \
{ if ((expr) != (val)) { \
code ; \
} \
}

IMHO, this is good enough for blubber reduction.
Economist: Has the Luxury Bubble Popped?
According to the lead developer, Lars Rasmussen, Google plans to open source the lion's share of their code. In addition, corporations can host their Wave servers. These will be interoperable with any other Wave service provider.
I don't know if I understand this. The Library is HUGE(Yes, I know you can compile your own package), the minified version is over 100KB. Thats 100KB to have JavaScript functions using PHP syntax, many of which duplicate functions that already exist as part of JavaScript.

I'm not down on PHP or anything, but much of this seems redundant and a waste of time.
Zimplit, easiest CMS ever (no db required)
Well, it's not that bad. Intel, it's true, is way ahead on process technology right now (disclosure: my wife is a process engineer there, and I'm unashamedly biased). But let's be honest: AMD, IBM, TSMC et. al. are behind Intel, but they're maybe 1-2 years behind. An Intel catastrophe might be a disaster of lost science, but I think society as a whole could survive if it had to subsist on Phenoms and ARM11s.
See more on what their goals are with the screen products here: http://pixelqi.com/mission

Also, the founder is Mary Lou Jepsen, previously at OPLC: http://pixelqi.com/about_us
Ultimately, do what your team is most comfortable with. And how valuable they are to your startup's success.

Read the equity equation: http://www.paulgraham.com/equity.html

What about a vesting schedule after they get equity? That's a good way to figure out who is in it for the longer run, too.

Best of luck!
What's your anti-RIAA (read copywritten material) story? Seems like a good idea (I'm about to try it out), but seems like a slipperly legal slope.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=350262
I hope they start using it on MSDN. Until they can get their shit together with regard to search on their own properties, I don't have a lot of hope for them indexing the web.
This is an excellent tool to get things up and running on the client side for the large number of people who are fluent and proficient in PHP.

Even if you are concerned about efficiency, it is still excellent as a fast prototyping method, where you get something up and running so you can interact with it, test new ideas, and so on.
Moo have an api if you wanted to automate the entire process. Sometimes however going all manual is faster.

For example, I wanted to print all my unread instapaper articles into a book. Writing a script to do it would have taken a while so I kept putting it off. In the end I copy&pasted manually into a word processor and it only took an hour.

Three months later I'm still waiting for the book to be delivered by LuLu, who also don't reply to customer support emails.
Why hasn't the market produced a VC variant that's content with this, and willing to earn back its investment over the course of long term dividends?

That would make the VC investment an inferior asset class compared to common stock in your favorite publicly traded company -- which is also designed to pay back over the long term, have steady growth, and by the way does not charge you two and twenty for the privilege of owning it. (2% of investment principal per year plus 20% of investment returns, which is what the money men for VCs get socked with.)

If providing the capital in venture capital doesn't have the chance for return on investment far in excess of both the market and the fee structure, there is no reason to engage in it.

cough It probably doesn't on average. cough
Bing - A better way to search from Microsoft (video)
I'm taking the Songza approach: all the music is directly from YouTube or iMeem...I'm not hosting anything.
combined Chat and Wiki and then threw some API for mashing up. Made it pretty and Ajaxy.

Don't fall in the trap of using word choice to make something sound insignificant. Having several people edit the same document in real-time without problems, clearly see when and who updated what, and quickly look at the document's history (honestly, sites like Wikipedia's history feature is just ugly and clunky) can't really be called a wiki.

The interface looks really busy from the screenshot and generally doesn't look like products Google usually makes (Chrome, Gmail have pretty clean interfaces, but maybe that's because I'm accustomed to them). If anything, I'm more interested in using the protocol and building a stripped-down version of it.
Start breaking? This is still no change.
Can anyone with real experience using PHP.js tell us what size file is generated when you COMPILE your own package?

I am wondering how far the code dependencies spread out when you use, say a dozen of your favourite PHP functions, ... Does that force the inclusion of dozens more sub-functions within PHP? Does your compiled file climb towards the all-inclusive 100 KB?
I was, and still am, in a similar situation.

I picked up the requisite non-tech hobby that I'm now quite passionate about: in my case, it was automotive modification and racing. I have a veritable performance shop in my garage now: I taught myself welding and metal fabrication, aerodynamics, fluid dynamics, engine performance, fuel delivery, and a host of other skills. I even came back around to the tech side of things by getting involved in electronic engine management (reflashing and reprogramming OEM ECUs, logging, performance tuning, etc). It's exciting stuff, and introduced me to a very different community of people than I'd previously known.

Echoing some of the other comments here: I married a woman who is possibly the perfect companion for me, something I try very hard to be for her. We also have two dogs, another item I saw mentioned, and they've been a joy.

After all that, I still spend 8 hours (minimum) each day doing work that has lost it's lustre. When I started my career, there was exciting work to do: in 1994, my cohorts and I started an ISP. I did work in that vein for about six years, and it was some of the best years of my career (my personal life was a shambles, but the work was incredible). Today, that's reversed: I have a rich private life, but the work is dull.

So, my long and winding road to a point: the suggestions to get a "significant other", pet, and non-tech hobby, while well-intentioned, won't actually fix your problem. Certainly, take a bit of time off and decompress to make sure you're not just in need of a vacation, but that's essentially what you've already done. And the fact that you have neck pain is significant: you should certainly get that addressed before making substantial changes that might not be necessary afterward.

But, at the end of the day, you'll still have a problem with being bored of the work you're doing, and you can only fix that by finding new work to do: either new problems/niches in your current field that you haven't tackled before, or start looking in the direction of fields that you can get passionate about.
Do Fandoms Need Awfulness? (by Eliezer Yudkowsky)
Is Google open-sourcing their server-side code?

From http://www.waveprotocol.org/:
our plan is to release an open source, production-quality, reference implementation of the Google Wave client and server

So it looks like they will release an example of server code, thought it probably won't be exactly what Google uses. Still, this should allow other people to copy that implementation and make their own servers relatively easily.
It's different and I like the thesis behind it: "decision engine". A good way to understand search is to see how people make the decisions to go about what they're searching for. Keyword they start out with, its variants, the final answer/result, and what form of search they should be using. travel? local? image? etc. It's all going to come down to execution though (Cliche, but relevant here more than ever). If it sucks, then 80 mil in advertising wont work well. BUT if it is something that people have to say "yo, you NEED to try this", then things could get interesting.
Less is more. Microsoft just doesn't seem to get that. This interface looks like a convoluted piece of crap that changes based on what I search on. No thanks.
Pardon my ignorance, but why is it that Deep Blue can't be recreated on a reasonably fast modern PC in software? In fact, why is it that this sort of program would be considered difficult at all?

EDIT: answered my own question via wikipedia

"In a recent match, Deep Fritz vs. Vladimir Kramnik in November 2006, the program ran on a personal computer containing two Intel Core 2 Duo CPUs, capable of evaluating only 8 million positions per second, but searching to an average depth of 17 to 18 plies in the middlegame."
O'Reilly just blew up my buzzword-o-meter with "Federated Wave Clouds" and "a world in which messages no longer need to be sent from one place to another, but could become a conversation in the cloud."

So instead of sending messages to someone we just send it "in the cloud" and our federated waves generate a response?

Maybe O'Reilly intentionally reinforces vague and confusing terminology in order to publish more books explaining what should have been stated using simple terms in the first place.

Let's give it a try:
Google Wave adds structure and web functionality (think embedable widgets) to conversations in a more meaningful and semantic way than normal text-only threaded email and IM.
A Wave server uses an XMPP extension to allow peer-to-peer communications thereby removing reliance on sole providers for communications infrastructure.
Very cool... Xapian, Sphinx and Hyper Estraier support should be coming soon:
http://haystacksearch.org/docs/backend_support.html
The first page gives the impression that there is nothing there, but if you follow the links there is quite a bit, including an opportunity to play in the sandbox. It looks like it's the next generation beyond iGoogle and OpenSocial. The emphasis seems to be on social networking and collaboration, but I didnt dig deep enough to see whether it is a true collaboration tool or just a platform for managing tweets and multiplayer games. Since there are API's and bits and pieces can be embedded in a website or application, there are probably entrepreneurial opportunities.
Not to be the hater in this thread, but I bet this was made by a bitter JS developer who saw how jQuery undid most the evils of Javascript and felt that the "damage" had to be rectified.

To add something constructive to the debate, I'll just toss in that this goes right in the face of good API design, not as a cheap pun because it's PHP, but because it's a PHP API transliterated into a language not PHP.
I took a look at the source and demo apps, and it's a pretty minimal framework, providing only a few things and a series of conveniences that you won't get with pure SDL. Still, what it aims to do it does pretty well, you will just have to do lots of Model-side heavy lifting, as there's no collision code or other such handy things. I presume this is because many games could ask for many approaches to those problems.
I like it. One thing to add would be a way to share any of them on twitter with some hashtag at the end.
B.I.N.G.: But It's Not Google. That choice of name is either very clever or very not clever and I'm not sure which.
Two 8-bit cores != a 16-bit CPU.

By your math, every dual-core 64-bit Intel CPU would actually be a 128-bit processor, a quad-core would equate to a 256-bit system, and the Cell would be a very studly 1088-bit chip (64-bit PPE + 8x128-bit SPEs).

You appear to be confusing "linear" scaling with "exponential", which makes a serious difference.
Bing, like Wolfram Alpha, includes various web site functionality in the search engine itself.

I don't have much confidence in this approach.
Thankfully, it is just speculation. From their abstract:

Virtually no evidence exists to test these theories or
establish their relative magnitudes.

PhD programs work on the mentor/apprentice setup, though the apprenticeship usually teaches research methods, not engineering methods. To my mind, the mentor/apprentice setup is great when the apprentices are genuine and dedicated and the mentors are competent and equally dedicated. (And, of course, the numbers line up! Fifty "apprentices" and one mentor is just a class.)

I thoroughly agree with the relative value of your work and your school "work". Grades are a means turned into an end, and the sooner one realizes that the goal is understanding and not recognition the better. (It's convenient that the recognition tends to follow unasked!)
As always, hype followed by failure.

Learn from Apple, hush followed by success.
I bet it was unintentional. But I think you just created a very sticky fakeponym.
You know we have these things called FPGAs. That's where you can have fun with hardware hacking nowdays.

You can design whatever piece of hardware you want and still have it execute at a decent speed (say 50 MHz, vs. 2 GHz for a Pentium). But I can put millions of gates of logic.

An 8-bit CPU is maybe 5,000 gates at most. A decent 32-bit RISC processor is below 100,000 gates.

My previous employer builds machines filled with such FPGAs (http://eve-usa.com). On those, you can map really crazy stuff like real, modern processors. It's the ultimate sandbox for the hardware designer.

The only problem is that they tend to be a little bit pricey for amateurs (but I hear you can get boxes real cheap through university programs - lucky students).
Forget Google Apps: Wave is the new epicenter of the Google-Microsoft war.
I'd like to think they were going for something recursive: Bing Is Not Google.
On "sorting students by using poor teachers" I have a couple of thoughts:

1) Teaching well involves communicating clearly to people who are outside of your field. It seems to me that having this skill would be an asset in securing funding.

2) I'm not convinced that the students who learn quickly are always the ones who will be the high performers once the material/skills are mastered.
This is definitely the case. Check out Rybka - it has been rated 3200+. No human being comes close.
Why RapidMind chose the LLVM code generation framework
Twitter for Outdoor Enthusiasts
+1 for bringing up the hard part. I've worked on several big data warehouse projects where it was tough to make business managers understand that even the simplest correlations between different fact types across dimensions (using those terms in the Kimball sense) provided ROI.

Forget visualization and deep statistics usage. You simply can't get there until you have executive commitment and belief in the value proposition. Personally, I wish I was a better evangelist for these skills.
Probably move Orkut over also...
looks like a portal type page is generated for each search. could be superior to google for shopping. though amazon already covers that base fairly well.
Exactly. I remember when 50nm was a big deal. Now its 28nm? That's absurd. How they make those interconnects is beyond me.
If you don't think the idea of merging private, public, synchronous, and asynchronous communication into a cohesive unit is exciting, then I don't know what you would find exciting.
I was definitely under the impression that your work is still protected even if the copyright is not registered. It is interesting to know that registration is necessary to bring a lawsuit. If you can't protect your copyright, does it really exist?
Perhaps Prolog isn't very relevant to the sort of problems Paul Graham works on? Much of Peter Norvig's _Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming_ is about Prolog (and logic programming in general); he ultimately implements a Prolog engine in Common Lisp, because it's a more appropriate tool for the sort of problems he's dissecting.

I only know the basics of Prolog from PAIP and CTM (one of many things I hope to get into deeper over the summer...), but it seems like it would be incredibly useful, albeit within a very specific niche. I wouldn't try to write an OS in make, but that doesn't mean it isn't handy sometimes.
I will never be able to 'Bing' and Decide.

There is only one Bing, Chandler Bing!

[ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chandler_Bing ]
Woah, that could be some pretty disruptive technology.
Say what you will about the big ball of mud that is the PHP function library, it is still useful. Sometimes just being able to call a simple function is refreshingly straight forward. "Good" API design these days seems to mean including the entire alphabet of OO design patterns.

I'm particularly interested in the PHP date() function myself, since the date handling in Javascript is seriously insufficient.
Yea, I definitely agree with you there.

My inner nerd just begins to rage whenever I any absolute statements about econ, especially with respect to policy. Gotta love seeing how ideas go from (hopefully) well meaning in theory to the distortionary, favor-ridden crap that gets passed into law sometimes.
I'd be curious to hear exactly what functionality is supposedly provided by the distracting background images and headers. I want to like bing (seriously, powerset FTW), but this is the same kind of pointless design-by-committee stuff that typifies this company's products.
Agility: Behavioral Traits of Successful Entrepreneurs
Don't want to wait for Google Wave? Try Browseology, see updates in real time