skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hackers wanted: Scholarships available to coders to save journalism and democracy
I don't think crawling and querying are mutually exclusive ideas.
Google Tech Talk: Erlang (2007)
Not necessarily true. Asians eat tons more than Americans. their meal portions are at least 40% more and full of carbs (rice). However, Asian meals are have more nutrients, often mixed in with a lot of vegetables. Compare that to slabs of meat and potatoes that Americans like to consume.
You can also quote an article by using asterisks:

From the help http://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc :

Text surrounded by asterisks is italicized, if the character after the first asterisk isn't whitespace.
> When will society ask the new starlets and Oscar winners how often they help out in the community

Society doesn't ask (much), but these folks often do such things, and not necessarily for publicity reasons.

But, it is fair to ask whether their efforts actually do any good. (They talk about "bringing attention" to problems but they're usually bringing attention to proposed solutions, which are often a disaster.)
Why silent [browser] updates boost security
If you read the PDF linked from that site, you'll see an amazing amount of work for such a young man. Seriously, this guy has put a ton of effort into this, addressing everything from materials, to construction, government, food, cost breakdown, to even a timeline for how long it will take. It may not be feasible and I'm sure there is a lot he hasn't thought of, but this man should be commended for what he's done. I'm impressed!
And your mother's maiden name. You know, in case they have trouble contacting her.
(Canadian) Venture Capital Breakdown
Canada's challenged system forcing entrepreneurs to turn to the U.S. for cash.
This is my favorite comment here, ever. :)
Surely the optimum case is to have all your machines pegged at 100% CPU

True, but given the typical difference between average load and peak load, you wouldn't want to have your systems at 100% most of the time anyway. Of course, what you really ought to do is scale down during non-peak periods and scale up when traffic increases so that your utilization is always high, but before EC2/etc. that wasn't feasible for most people to do.
http://www.djangoproject.com/

edit:
http://twistedmatrix.com
The line that says "Answer is: PHP5" was presumably added later.
Upgrading Hardware is of course one way to scale. I think the most benefit could occur from implementing a smart TCP congestion avoidance solution. Quite a while ago I stumbled over an interesting article or paper (can't quite remember, RFC??). Bascially it provides a easy solution for trottling and active feedback if a router is overwhelmed, which allows more intelligent routing. The theoretical speed improvement was significant.
very interesting article, thanks
What of people using those 4 letters who have no affiliation with the university, or who may have never heard of it?
I hope this goes nowhere. It could open a pandora's box of lawsuits that might never be closed.
Make sure you understand the business plan, as much as they're willing to explain to you. Don't get sold on the "in the future" make sure you're sold on the here and now because at a startup the future may not come.
A RESTful API to generate video by writing XML
Looks like an interesting language for scientific/engineering applications. It's designed to be heavily parallel (for-loops are parallel by default), it uses math-type notation (although I'm dubious about the whole "2 x" being the same as "2*x" thing).

Over at se-radio in Nov. 2006, they did an interesting interview with Guy Steele about Fortress: http://www.se-radio.net/podcast/2006-11/episode-36-interview...
OpenJDK Governance Board Dissolved?
OpenJDK Governance Board dissolved and replaced by... OpenJDK governance board. Huh?
Microsoft Open Sources .NET Micro framework Code
Microsoft open sources some of the code behind its micro controllers and embedded software.
All the code on http://norvig.com/ is a pleasure to read.

This is one of my favorites: http://norvig.com/spell-correct.html
I had an in-depth reply to this, but I accidentally closed the browser tab in the middle of composing it. So I'll leave it at this for now: historical accounts of the duration of sword duels do not distribute themselves qualitatively differently from modern fencing, and even less so from the fencing of 100 years ago.
interesting...I wonder if there is a similar law for Internet traffic. Is the overall network congestion is determined by the amount of "sluggishess" (appropriately defined) that the average user experiences?
If the take-away point of his book is that current practice in schools where "whole language" is the label for what is being done is bad practice, then he is helping along education reform, but if the take-away point of his book is that "whole language" (whatever the heck that means) is better than "phonics" (whatever the heck that means), he isn't helping improve reading instruction.

A typical problem in education reform discussion is ambiguous terms for broad, ill-defined movements or programs.
I recently discovered etherpad: http://etherpad.com/

Which has been helpful in collaborative grocery list creation among other things.
Interesting article about the business of marriage, written from an emotional point of view.

To further her metaphor of being "in or out", the day she married the guy, she said she bought 100% of him. She's not a stakeholder in his business, she's a stakeholder in him. Her decision to break her nest egg to bail him out isn't an investment in a business she doesn't believe in, it's an investment in a person she believes in.

And this, is faith. Her faith is not based on projected certainties, securities, money, profit, and success. Rather, her faith is placed in a person, and in a relationship you can personally vouch for, for better or worse, for richer or poorer. Having faith doesn't mean things will be good; it means that no matter how bad things get, and they are likely to get very bad, the relationship will still be there.
Tim Ferriss video from RailsConf 09
I am talking about point-sized bodies, or at least bodies small enough so their size can be neglected.

You say "the problem cannot be solved in classical electrodynamics".

Firstly, I'm not sure I agree. Secondly, can it be solved at all? Can you give me an algorithm that will solve this problem?
>>which a jury would find intolerable.

My point in the other comment was that in the case this legislation is named after, the jury DID find it introlerable, and found the defendant not guilty. However, she was still convicted by a judge, due to arguments that directly contradict the Bill of Rights.

I agree that there's a big difference between true harassment / slander and your average blog, but they're taking way too much power with this legislation. If you think that problems like this don't backfire, I'd refer you to the legal history behind the Gun-Free School Zones Act of 1990. The Commerce Clause of the constitution was used to argue that Congress couldn't make it illegal to take a gun into a public school. Yes, practically everybody agrees kids shouldn't take guns to school. So doesn't it scare you that lawyers and judges took such a broad interpretation to contradict the obvious, and it worked?
Launching Free web directory - Web Design & SEO Company
Great to see a story about an entrepreneur killing it time after time.
Zero Defect Hiring
The power of video
It’s not the infographics on the page that interest me...
As a practitioner, I find this hard to argue with and somewhat obvious, since the preceding 10 years have largely been about how hard it is to get critical patches adopted in opt-in schemes.
Ugh. I had one tech-staffing company recruiter call all my references, pepper them with questions regarding their experience, ask for their resumes and references as well.

I really had hoped to have a better experience with tech staffing companies, but they have been a major fail for me. This is in spite of the fact that at one of the staffing companies I had a solid personal connection within the company.

Scores in late 2008/early 2009:

Recruiting companies - four interviews with technical staff recruiters for "open jobs", zero interviews with hiring companies

Personal job search (on boards and craigslist) and resume submissions - four interviews, three job offers
Just think what could have been done with client SSL certificates if they had a better interface and sites accepted them for authentication.
I hope "the last web surfer" is never accredited to anybody.
I really like the interface, it's very simple and snappy. What was it made with?
Puzzles such as those produced by ThinkFun seem to be doing just fine. Those are a little easier than Rubik's Cube, but IMO this is a good thing - I've known very few people who were actually able to noodle out the cube from scratch. Speaking for myself, who admittedly isn't the target demographic of your question, I still love physical puzzles, and don't play any other solo games (neither computer nor complex realistic physical games).
That might very well be true, but then there should be a small number of slightly (but not all that much) more expensive restaurants, that will rather focus on a bit of upscale food.
DevCentral Weekly Roundup Episode 85 – That’s a Wrap
how do they plan on growing your team? do they have a management strategy? may seem mundane, but it will end up affecting your job directly, and if they don't know what they are going to do, you may end up having to deal with a lot of the fallout of disorganization.
Even if I try to see their point of view, there are some logical flaws here.

One, "_SRJC" could mean anything, and they can't claim a right to every imaginable use of the acronym.

Two, they seem to think that E-mail is a heck of a lot more secure than it is. They're worried that a sender's address could "look like" something from their University. The reality, apparently not known to them, is that an entire E-mail can be forged, up to the point of appearing to originate from one of their own "legitimate" addresses. So if true E-mail security is their problem, they should first consider not doing important things through E-mail, before filing lawsuits.
Most certainly. That thing is still "reinvented" these days. Different shapes, difficulties, lights, all kind of variations. If the Computer-age would have made it uninteresting why are still so many of Rubik cubes produced these days?

e.g. see here

http://www.toytalk.co.uk/2006/03/eye_on_the_past.html

- Huge sales in Books and other related materials

- IPhone cheating application e.g. downloaded 30k+
http://efaller.com/blog/2009/02/13/15-minutes-of-fame/

aso.
These laws cover yard sales because there are people who obtain mass amounts of recalled goods and try to sell them to the public through these venues. Some people find them in the trash or on the curb, others are employees of companies that are supposed to dispose of the items, but instead give them to family members to sell. So be wary next time you go to a yard sale and see someone selling 45 brand-new strollers..
Richard Garriott Sues NC Soft Over Millions in Stock Options
although I'm dubious about the whole "2 x" being the same as "2.x" thing (the * isn't printing. meh)

It might not make much sense from a programming perspective, but it's very natural for a mathematician. The same way that mathematicians are happy with one-letter variable names, they're happy with juxtaposition as their one operator notation. They just redefine everything whenever they start a new problem.

If you think about it, matrix multiplication is a totally different operation from multiplication in the reals. We just happen to use the same notation for it because it follows some of the same rules (associativity, distributivity) that we're in the habit of using to manipulate equations.

This can get pretty extreme. There's a branch of math called functional analysis, which identifies functions with infinite-dimensional vectors, and then does calculus on those "vectors" like they were points in any other space. In their notation,

v = Tu

is like matrix multiplication

y = Ax

except that u and v are functions, and T is some kind of integral.

I think this is one reason the Lisp crowd gets cranky about the parenthesis thing -- the infix operators we all know and love are a lot less well-defined than we think they are.
Another E71 fan here. I don't like the Nokia Music Player either - I use Symbian OggPlay (which despite its name can play most audio formats) from http://symbianoggplay.sourceforge.net/.

I wonder how many of those "other" responses (the most popular choice as I write this!) are E71 owners.
We're discussing this in the context of public health.
Cool. I'll take a note of that using Snipd, upload it to Scribd, then post it to Reddit, then tell my friends to upvote me using Heysan or maybe Chatterous. It depends on whether I'll have enough time, since I'm always playing on DraftMix.

Anyway, good luck with Scoopler. :P
Thanks for the link! Please join us on oftc #urwid or use the mailing list if you have any questions.

Ian Ward
s/[nationality redacted]/frenchie/
My understanding is that, while you are technically correct about some details, the larger point is that the law presumes your goods to be dangerous until you do testing to prove those goods to NOT have the characteristics described above. Hence, for a yard sale, it would be infeasible to sell old toys as the testing would cost more than any conceivable gains.

I'm assuming that the author of the linked stub was going to address this in the full article he mentioned.

Like all the members of Congress who voted on this though, I'll admit to not having actually read the full 63-page bill and the thousands of pages of existing law that it references, extends, and amends. So if I'm categorically wrong, and you've fully read and understood the consequences of the law, please set me straight.

I am clear on the fact that this law has been a serious concern for small manufacturers, though I presume they could fall under more onerous regulation than yard sales.
> To the best of my knowledge, there was no changes to function parameters order. It's nearly all object-model stuff.

Now that I think about it, I'm wanting to say the parameter-order hoopla was centered around one of the point releases to 5.x, but I could be wrong.

Your compiler is an interesting topic though, and it seems similar to the "upgrade" scripts available for the Python 3 jump. Do you make the compiler publicly available, or no? Would be really nifty to see what all you handle in it.
Palm Treo 500v Unlocked (Windows Mobile 6.0)
Palm Treo 500v runs Windows Mobile 6 Standard and that's the version of the operating system designed to be controlled solely by the keyboard. 500v certainly feels like a more consumer-friendly device. It still feels well-made though.
"The possibility exists that it could happen" is justification for many stupid things.
Source code of Mercurial:

http://selenic.com/repo/index.cgi/hg-stable/file/
How often is ActionResponse.body a String? It's not really clear to me without digging deeper, but I could see this easily being an edge case related to certain caching and rendering methods. In any case, suggesting that any performance testing of Rails would have magically found this problem is unfair. Many many many Rails app instances are serving orders of magnitude more than 10reqs/sec, so clearly this is not a universal problem.

My guess as to the reasoning here is so that large files can be served without blocking while the whole thing is written to the socket. Granted, that's just my gut instinct looking at that code, maybe it is just careless...
I tried the demo at http://www.polishmywriting.com/ and it found some mistakes I missed in my writing. I am impressed with it's suggestions although it suggested many technical words as spelling errors. Check it out on your writing.
welfare moms are not... solving... their own problems!

Possibly you and they differ on what their problems are.
Sounds like a great OEM play: license your technology so it becomes widespread.
While the laws may have that effect, I doubt that's why we have the laws that we do. There are a ton of examples like speeding, gambling, and recreational drug use where laws are not uniformly enforced. I think the cause is a combination of a slow-moving bureaucratic system and a mentality of trusting the discretion of judges and law enforcement in knowing where to draw the line.

I'm not saying that broad laws with selective enforcement is the right way to go, just that the cause is probably not a conspiracy or even an uncoordinated effort to give the government more power.
nope.

on the first substantive page, in big bold text, it says

"You are not required to test your products for safety."
As a user, I find this pretty easy to argue with, since the preceding 10 years have largely been about how software companies can't be trusted with silent update capability.
Tu Chez!
Yes it is very impressive, conceptually and technically.

But the finance section is WAY off... Which makes me doubt the rest of the material in which I have less experience.

Considering that colony/station should be created mainly from resources on the moon (very smart), the cost for 10,000 construction workers over 27 years would be according to him:

"10 000 x $34 130 x 27 =$9 215 100 000"

Try negotiating that low salary with someone that is supposed to work on the moon/in space and not get a pay that is inflation adjusted or never get a pay raise EVER for that matter...

I would hate to be one of the guys working at that project...

Otherwise good stuff, although the habitat cells should be square shaped to fully utilize the living space, I mean who needs 6+ meter in room height...
Innovator's Dilemma?
I've never seen the advantages of programming put so succinctly! Also, you can say "shit" on HN.

Mark Bao: earmuffs!
It makes me want to cry that people are still writing things in technologies that require you to drop little timing statements into your code to profile them.

Profilers have been around for what? 30 years? I think the first time I hooked Ants Profiler up to an ASP.NET site was 2002. Are these other web technologies really that far behind the state of the art?
(Darkly) amusing to note that it was originally sold to a very skeptical public with the promise that it would never ever be used as an individual identification number. It was merely your account number in the Social Security program.
Yeah. I'm curious if they developed something similar to Twitter's search functionality or they are using Twitter's Trends feed.

In its current form, most of the results are from Twitter which doesn't really differentiate it much from Twitter Search.
Phusion is also available for Nginx.
There is an interesting article in one of Canada's national newspapers that has caused quite a stir among the Canadian VC and startup community.

Also, a rebuttal by Rick Segal, a partner with JLA Ventures: http://ricksegal.typepad.com/pmv/2009/05/never-let-facts-get...

and a response by Andrew Lai, an entrepreneur interviewed in the original article: http://simplyalbert.blogspot.com/2009/05/venture-capital-bre...

I am a Canadian entrepreneur with some pretty fresh and relevant thoughts of my own as we are in the process of raising capital (in CleanTech, not webapps) but before I share my perspective I would like to hear what others think.
It seems in this case you can just break them down into sets of phonemes and do a frequency analysis to get the most common usages.

That would take care of the "Eye have"
Yeah, I think this is a lame point. Covert Action was a collection of mini games inside a larger game and it wasn't hard to follow at all. It just wasn't a great game because some of the mini games were not really that exciting.

We have an overload of advice from a small number of experienced game developers who have been saying lots of really obvious things for years. The consumer should have fun and not the designer or programmer. Duh!
> We’re pretty obsessed with performance at Gilt Groupe

Not wishing to troll, but I'm not sure that Ruby/Rails is you're looking for if you're obsessed with performance...
I like [1] the subtle touch of adding Graham-essay type footnotes to the section featuring Graham and arc.

[1] I suspect a large part of this like is due to the old trick of throwing in a reference only a subgroup of the readership will appreciate, thus forming a special bond with the author.
Affordable health insurance
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I wish we built Tipjoy's API first, and our widgets on top of it.
I use pseudocode every time I program in FORTRAN 77
>> with the intent to ... cause substantial emotional distress...

That's almost every satire ever written.

We already have laws that prevent libel. What changes just because it's published on a website rather than a newspaper or in, say, the collected works of Moliere?
This is a very insightful comment.

What are the biggest server-side bottlenecks with respect to user experience, and what practical steps can be taken to remedy them?
It might be kind of obscure, but it emphasizes how far we'll go to find good information in a bad enconomy. It's like when people ask you if you know somebody at a party and say "sure, the place belongs to my girlfriend's 2nd best friend's 3rd cousin twice removed" Nobody knows what a 3rd cousin twice removed is, but they know its a long way from being relevant.

Not that this isn't relevant, but it's not an improvement in employment percentage, which is what people who don't need to speculate about the economy really care about.
Stn
Reporter to NY Times Publisher: You Erased My Career
This is actually pretty sweet. When I was freelancing there were times when I was presented with pieces of a project that I didn't feel like doing, wasn't efficient enough at to warrant it, or didn't quite feel qualified to do. I thought, "How nice it would be to be able to just pawn this off on a capable fellow freelancer and have them bill me." But I didn't really personally know any better than me and I wasn't about to trust it to something like Elance -- it was my name at risk, after all.

I don't know if this is meant to be a thing you do manually, e.g. you already know other freelancers, but if it is a discovery process I hope it supports ratings and reviews from other freelancers and stuff so people can be vetted. There are lots of other features that would be cool, but I won't comment on it as I'm not sure what has and hasn't been implemented/planned already.
This is a really weak argument, since vendors can undertake the same illicit actions you're averring using opt-in updates. Updates that aren't what they say they are remain a problem regardless of opt-in/opt-out.
United States Patent Application 20090119148
What makes Reason's case even weaker is that their evidence is a very readable guidebook aimed at laypeople, not some subtle clause buried in a 200-page bill.
colin (at) breakie (dot) net

sorry I'm not on the same time zone as you guys I think
Vaguely, but not quite the same level of glory, but I basically dropped out of high school when I was 15, but they gave us a quiz to do in the holidays around that time, with a £25 prize.

Me and a friend won the quiz (there was no Web in those days!).

I became briefly popular when they announced the quiz results in assembly [a gathering of students and the headteacher], except I was absent (ironically). I got girls asking me to buy everyone a drink.

Ah, such glory!

I even bought a Spectrum +3 with some of the money.

[postscript: The kid in my class who later went to Cambridge came second in the quiz, something I feel proud of, even if it's a hollow victory]
I've venture a guess that "no, it's not publicly available", primarily since he mentioned that it's a very profitable part of his company.
Have we invented psychohistory yet?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychohistory_(fictional)