skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Actually a useful idea. In the US, except for some government installations, you can take pictures in outdoor public spaces. Occasionally there are officious bozos that think you can't. However, the Homeland Security one probably is illegal and could get you charged with impersonating an officer.
The Rise Of Social Distribution Networks
I personally think that you're both right.

I find myself procrastinating at work because what I do for work isn't intellectually engaging, and with tasks that I want to work on for myself (like building my web site) I get hung up on details and make no progress.

Learning to set smaller milestones has helped with the latter, but the former is something I'm stuck with for the moment. My web site is a step to escaping from that grind, but it's going to take time... so I'm taking advantage of the fact that my job isn't sufficiently challenging to require much thought, and therefore saving my energy for things that actually matter, which is everything else.
:)
I can't stand this nimrod - ad hominem.

Dawkin's is both an asshole - ad hominem.

and a worshiper(sic) of evolutionary theory - strawman.

Honestly, what a load of rubbish. Dawkins doesn't worship anything. If you show him evidence that demonstrates a flaw in the current theory of evolution, he'll happily change his mind. That is the direct opposite of all that worship implies. He does not value the idea of evolution any more than any other idea on the planet - he is sceptical, and will reject it if that is where the evidence leads.

At any rate, opening up your objection with three fallacies is not likely to convince anyone of your position.
I thought the claim that they've created the 44th most powerful supercomputer to power their searches was rather interesting.
It's like going back to the days when ROM BASIC was built into every "microcomputer." Only this time they're going for a full OS instead of just BASIC.
Both recommendations are little too high for someone just coming out of SICP. I recommend Essentials of Programming Languages as a stepping stone. Pierce's book is probably irrelevant to someone just interested in Lisp; type theory is best approached through an ML angle. And Quinnec's book is not for the faint of heart; you will need to have been well versed in lisp, compiler/runtime implementation techniques and have brushed against denotational semantics (through the Nielson and Nielson book, perhaps.)

[edit: denotational, not operational, semantics; OS can be learned in a fun-filled weekend. The "small-step" variety should appeal to both language hackers and (virtual) machine enthusiasts.]
agreed. actually that's not NO overhead, but it's trivial and the right solution.

instead of just one flag link on an HN post, there should be

flag as inappropriate vs.

flag as stupid

*edit: make that "flag as waste of time"
Why go through all of the angst? Most people find it too hard to put pirated stuff on their iPhones, so why don't you just GPL and release your own source code? It's highly unlikely that you have some amazing new algorithms hiding in there that no-one else has thought of...

I've been thinking quite a bit about this myself, and for my current project, that's exactly what I'm going to do.
Core Memory: Photographs of Vintage Computers
Agreed, I've been doing that my entire life. I remember at 16 I'd saved up around $1000 by simply never buying anything with my allowance. I don't think my parents were too pleased when I had enough money saved up at 18 to fly to a different continent.
It really does not make any sense to me, given that @replies were not even a feature of twitter originally. Isn't the folk story that they only made @replies into a link when all people started marking replies in such a way?

The way it is now (from my understanding) is that for every reply they have to check if somebody is following the person that is being replied to. How can this be more efficient than simply sending the reply-tweets to all followers (which they have to do anyway with all the other tweets that are not replies)?
Agreed. I especially liked the use of "All the lovely graphical skins turned to so much bitwise detritus" I can visualize the 1's and 0's settling on the bottom.

Despite his discontent for "the wizards", he seems to realize their usefulness in his last sentence with "the tool as convenient information repository." Certainly, especially in their earlier incantations, the wizards can try to do too much, but a decade later I think they are hitting their intended mark as knowledge repositories.
I guess the question I have for this is very similar to the question Bill Gate's mom asked him when he said he was working on personal computers.

Why would anyone want this?
Yes. I infer that you are a little on the introverted side and need an extrovert. But you don't want someone perceived as pushy as in car salesman type. You said "guy", but I highly recommend thinking female. If you need CEO chest thumping, maybe a guy. For mid-level decision makers, I think women do better. In any case technical savvy is a must.
Link Building from A to Z
I've said it before but that's the part of the SDK3.0 that I think could get very interesting.

I thought about using the iPhone as a universal remote control since it doesn't have an IR emitter, there would need to be something in between, most likely a computer. The SDK3.0, the way I understand the third-party accessory part at least, could open up many possibilities on that side.
That solution doesn't address my question. Caching @reply subscribers only addresses the 3% of users who have opted-in to receiving all @replies. For the remaining 97% whether they receive @replies from someone they are following or not is a function of which user the reply is directed to and whether that user is also their friend. You can't cache that, at best you can optimize how you calculate who should receive replies.

In fact, what you've pointed out is that building an implementation to address the 3% case is straightforward which was the point of my post.

PS: My blog does have a commenting feature. In fact there are 3 comments in response to the post.
Specially on Freenode. Dunno about "fun" networks.
Is anyone else getting sick of all the "Ask HN: [complaining]" threads?

I understand the situation. People need to chill out. If you've got some beef with another user, just contact them personally.

I, like you, just want to read interesting things. Maybe there should be a sticky thing like in other forums for personal conduct expectations.
But not about the author of the OODB system, which is who was discussing it.

His point was that for -his- purposes CouchDB is not a convincing option for the backend object store to KiokuDB, with detailed explanations as to why.

I don't really understand why "this tool doesn't work for me and here's why" makes you a bad person - if he was saying why RDBMSes didn't work for his problem space and thus why he was using an OODB at all, I'm sure the comments would be very different.
It's about more than excessive spending:

"The new building telegraphed to our employees, “We’ve arrived. We’re no longer a small struggling startup. You can stop working like a startup and start working like a big company."
We started to believe that the new building was a reflection of the company’s (and our own) success. We took our eye off the business. We thought that since we in such a fine building, we were geniuses, and the business would take care of itself."

Even if you had a modest new building and didn't give every engineer his or her own office you still might observe this.

But I think probably by making a serious effort to preserve the culture and values of the company that existed pre-new-building you could avoid the "damned if you do" piece.
I recommend the Kleinberg/Tardos textbook:
http://www.amazon.com/Algorithm-Design-Jon-Kleinberg/dp/0321...

It is a really enjoyable read and has a nice narrative that I think other algorithm books are lacking. CLR, for instance, just reads like a handbook to me. The goal Kleinberg/Tardos book, OTOH, is to teach you how to design and analyze algorithms. They will actually follow false starts on certain problems and uncover where they break.

Kleinberg is the rebel king!
The barrier to entry for programming is just so low. Oaths and certifications for the general programming population will not prevent bad people from learning to program and expressing malice algorithmically; but it may hinder good programmers from releasing new software.

I agree there are problems when a company which should be trustworthy, such as Sony (cited in the post), will act maliciously towards their customers. But at some point consumers must take responsibility for their choices and consider their rights and personal safety ahead of their wants. If you know that Sony installs a rootkit, then don't buy Sony media. Instead, write a letter or even a blog explaining why you won't buy their product. If you're just too weak and really want that DVD, then live with your decision and don't try to pawn off the consequences on "those shady programmers".
I dont get what walpha has to do with ankos. Is it just for the hype? I doubt walpha uses cellular automata to create the answers.
30 Female Internet Entrepreneurs
those comments are very well hidden! Why not just display them by default they way the other 99% of blogs do?

Or if you're going to hide them, at least put the view comments link at the bottom of the post where I'd expect the comments to be.
She beautifully explained what draws people like myself to GNU/Linux. I have tried to convey some of these ideas to colleagues who are serious about Windows programming, to no avail.

It's not about Microsoft either. In my industry (flight simulation) there are some machines and systems where you can go deep and acquire design-level knowledge, and other systems where you're dealing with black boxes.

Some people prefer the latter; when things go wrong, you cycle the power switch and then contact the manufacturer if the problem still exists. I think some people take comfort in the notion that they are not ultimately responsible for whether the machines work or not. Sorry if that sounds terribly arrogant.
I just bought this book and have been reading it for a few days and it really is pretty good. The best thing about it are the numerous practical examples and the "War Stories" that show you how real people determined they really needed to use algorithm xyz.
Just get the world to accept base 24 for common use.
Person X member of 97%

Person Y member of 97%

Person Z member of 3%

Person W member of 3%

________________________

Person_A_@_List: X, Y, Z

Person_B_@_List: X, W

________________________

Person_A writes: @Person_B you be cool!

Received by X and Z...not Y or W
It's an article about the need for paying attention to what is going on with your customers and competitors, especially in the middle of a startup. In the past, I have made all of these errors at the same time, which may explain why I am a thousandaire not a millionaire.
I think the reference to gaming in the article threw me off a bit -- looking over the NaCl API docs, I don't see any references to accelerated 3D of any sort[1]. Basically, it can handle Quake, because it works with a software-only rendering pipeline, but Crysis is going to be out of reach for some time to come.

As I understand it now, NaCl is really just a way to offload CPU-bound tasks to native code with minimal overhead. It's interesting, but I'm not sure I like the trade-offs vs. a platform actually designed from the start to insure confinement of untrusted code (i.e., Java).

[1] -- Does anyone know of good literature on confinement of GPU-intensive code? I've read up x86 and Java security issues, but don't know of any good work on the security profile of code using OpenGL or DirectX...
I didn't see it, and if I saw it I wouldn't have done it. No time for kitchen experiments, I'm no longer curious about the physical properties of china or silverware.

Cheers!
ah! According to the Wikipedia page, the BASIC interpreter was written from scratch and quite rapidly. It was apparently much faster than the contemporary MS Basic. Wouldn't be surprising if it was buggy, although my dad did a lot of programming on it and without to much trouble as far I remember.
The author is a fool. He is a fool who does not understand the free market. Users are cows. They should be treated as such. Cows do not know what they want. It is our job as programmers to give the cows what they need whether they like it or not. We the programmers know better than the cows who are the users. A programmer who does not understand that is a fool who should be weeded out of the free market. In a free market the cows can choose the software they want - if they don't like it, they are free to not buy it. But the programmer must do his best to save the cow (or the lemming) from himself. Users are fools who don't know what is best for them. Only we the programmers do. If they don't like our software they don't have to buy it. Such is the nature of the free market. Programmers should continue to write good software even if the user doesn't like it. Fools did not understand the buildings of Howard Roarke, nor do they understand the intricacies of software. So be it. The cows can go on mooing. The architects and programmers of the world will go on moving civilization forward.
Instead of having a fake license, it's much better to know your rights and be able to defend them to those who accuse you.

I'd recommend reading these:
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/columnist/andrewkantor/2006-08-...

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/columnist/andrewkantor/2005-12-...
Lawyer in Pirate Bay case facing real-life 'DDo$' hack
Not a computer system but a Holographic Modulator looks pretty nice: http://bayimg.com/CaPEMAAbL
Great hearing directly from you Owen, too bad the interview style was kind of distracting. The interviewer seemed to want to tell the story more than letting you narrate and kept beating the dead horse on certain points :)
http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/department/laws-policy/irpa.asp

"Canada currently has a large backlog of applicants in the skilled worker immigration category, which translates into wait times of as long as six years for people to find out if they can come to Canada. "
So who'll be the first to port the Java VM itself to NaCl for a "belt and suspenders" approach to dynamically-downloadable-code security?
I don't believe in torture, except for car-warranty robocall companies.
Those are only 'fallacies' if his post is meant to rebut Dawkins claims and he's using those statements as support for an opposing position. Instead, he says he agrees with Dawkins but finds him to be kind of an asshole. I agree.
"If conservative parents have been having more children than liberal parents for the past few decades, then why hasn't the voting population become more conservative since Reagan was president?"

Is this a joke? We just finished one of the most pronounced conservative swings in American history, with all 3 branches of federal government and many local governments all under Republican control. How much more conservative did it have to get to convince you?

The Republicans really had to do massive amounts of damage to get Obama elected and break the trend. His election does not, in and of itself, prove that the U.S. has decisively shifted away from conservatism. If he is perceived to have some success, it might, but it is still to early to say for sure.
A multitude of specific reasons mostly related to physical things. Of course I was referring to the standard fantasy of being able to be younger while still retaining all the things I've learned along the way. And my salary.
I'm pretty sure I'll ignore E. Andrews' economics columns from now on.
RIM is probably right. Netbooks are underpowered and clunky. I think the missing ingredient in phones is voice recognition. With it you have a portable device that can do text pretty conveniently. (Yes, I recognize that 95% accuracy is pretty crappy, but it is usable.)

Link to a rumor about the iPhone: http://www.xchangemag.com/articles/voice-recognition-could-c...
Good article, but oh God, when she described the Visual C++ wizard I had these awful MFC flashbacks.

//TODO: Shower.
Yet another smug boomer with an overinflated sense of entitlement.
The thing you're missing is that everyone at Twitter slept through CS 101.
Google, Microsoft, GE, Salesforce.com, etc all have excellent sales and marketing executives who have driven their success and play a key part in relaying customer feedback to the organization. So, yes, you need the rainmaker if you feel you and your partner do not qualify.
In my mind the technologist & rainmaker comprise the left & right hands of any company.......you need them both and one only suffers if their counterpart is not supremely talented.

Questions:

What stage is your product? Enterprise or consumer? Are you at $0 Gross Sales or $1+ and building? Are you building TNBT or seek to exit early? Are you bootstrapped, how do you compensate this individual?
> * write my iPhone game (not releasing it's source)

> * when run, my iPhone game contacts the debian (or source forge) servers; downloads the corresponding .tar.gz or .deb

...

> is this clearly legal or clearly against the GPL

It is clearly against the spirit of the GPL. Do you really want the negative publicity of being a parasite, even within the letter of the law?
If the problems of the poor are about obesity, because all they can afford to eat is HFCS-laden industrially processed food that's just cheap calories, that definitely does not mean we are doing really well.
I think that's what he meant too, but it's not a very good metric since it's only sampling from the maxima. Immigrants are typically either at the extreme high or low end of social strata. The bulk of people in the middle are neither desperate nor socially mobile enough to immigrate.
Easier E-Mail for the Older Generation
If you're interested in wild speculation (I have no idea how Twitter's database works), here's how I interpreted Biz's explanation:

With the new system, say user Foo writes "@Bar lol me too!". Then Twitter can take Foo's follower list, join it with Bar's follower list, and send the message to everyone in the resulting list. Relational databases are very good at joins.

On the other hand, with the old system, they'd have to do a deep inspection of the record for each of Foo's followers to know if they should send the message to that follower. Relational databases are much less good at this.

But, as you and others have pointed out, if the number of users that use the "all @-replies" feature is really so small, it would be fairly inexpensive to cache the list of all of Foo's followers who use that feature, and join them in as well. I don't know why they don't do that -- maybe it adds up (like, if only 3% of users use the feature, but those users follow a lot of other users, they'll each end up in a lot of other users' caches).
I don't know if this is satire. I hope so, but either way it's emblematic of a common but absurd worldview.

Without empathy for your users, you will always make poor software. Users may not be able to perfectly articulate what they need, but neither are programmers able to infer what they need from first principles. If you treat your users like cows, what you create will not be fit for human consumption.
What if they have a fast way to get the intersect between followers of 2 different users? In this case, if a message is a @reply they could ignore the follower lists of each users and use the intersect list only (which can be cached). Supporting the 'get all replies' option means that they also need to consider the full follower lists and then deduplicate. .. just guessing here
First, I sympathize with the Twitter engineers who have had to build a scaling system improvisationally under incredible growth and time constraints. I doubt they have time to reevaluate early limiting decisions except when things are on fire, and even then they probably only have enough time to go for the quick fix.

Ultimately, though, I'm sure they'll figure out a way for this to work -- especially as it only requires "3%" of users to get @unacquiantanted-replies the same way they get broadcast messages.

One approach: split accounts into two inner accounts, for example, aplusk and aplusk(all). Only the original name is ever publicly shown -- though the account's public page shows the all tweets, as now. However, which one people actually 'follow' depends on their 'show all @unacquianted replies' setting. Thus every aplusk(all) tweet is handled as a broadcast, because all those followers -- only 3% of the total -- prefer it that way.
Be Accessible (and other positive traits of successful VCs and entrepreneurs)
Art photos of vintage computing equipment from Mark Richards' book "Core Memory"
http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=kubrick
This reminds me to Oracle's behaviour of treating empty VARCHAR fields as NULL. I think it's a bit confusing since an empty jar is not the same as a non-existing jar.
Fake license seems easier, less confrontational, and probably comes with a higher success rate.
Software hipsters are the ones using CouchDB. The relational model has been refined over decades to accommodate the requirements of generic information systems and eliminate a lot of the problems that mapreduce-based databases ignore.

CouchDB solves a subset of information problems. The relational model can solve a vastly greater amount of problems.
This is absurd:

"Now every engineer can have their own office."

NOT INEVITABLE--EXCESSIVE SPENDING

"The new building needs to reflect that we’re a successful and established company. Lets “do it right” and have a lobby and reception area that projects a professional image."

NOT INEVITABLE AND IMPLIES EXCESSIVE SPENDING

"Lets get comfortable chairs and great new desks for everyone. None of this used stuff."

NOT INEVITABLE, BLATANTLY EXCESSIVE SPENDING

"Now we can pick out carpets that look good and feel good and we can have clean walls with great artwork and murals. "

ETC

"Lets make sure that we have plenty of conference rooms.
We need our own cafeteria so employees don’t have to leave the building."

ETC
That's my guess as well (although there's always the possibility of human/software error).

It just seems... eerie, and a bit sad. I understand how effective a "transparent" ban can be for spammers, it just seems strange to see people comment for weeks in this mode. Never replied to, never voted up or down, seen by few. Like digital ghosts who may or may not even know they're ghosts.
I don't suppose you have a copy of "Algorithms, a functonal approach" you want to sell huh? The used price is more than the brand new price! Lame.
Too bad he came up with "lions eating zebras" and "polar bears eating seals" (if he really did, maybe author just made it up). These are the pictures that are misleading about evolution - when really it is not always physical strength that makes for "fitness".
Carying any false ID would be a very very bad idea. They give prison sentences for stuff like that. Fake id on a kid looking to buy beer is one thing, that's probably just going to get taken away, but up against the wrong judge could be a significant issue.
The Flexible Work Year by Ben Graham
The remarks you complain about in eleventh-grade Debate Club format are expressed more eloquently in the article itself:

And here, one feels, lies the paradox about Richard Dawkins. For a committed atheist, he can also be fervently evangelical about the causes he believes in and sometimes seems as driven as a preacher who wants to pass on The Word.

It is an analogy that goes down badly, needless to say. The difference between science – where every statement has to be tested and proved – and religion, where basic tenets go unchallenged, is too vast to justify such comparisons, he says.

Nevertheless, there is no disguising the chilly exasperation he exudes when confronted by the godly, whose extreme adherents, the creationists, he has described as "pig-ignorant and thick". Such remarks infuriate believers and have earned Dawkins a fearsome reputation for arrogance.