skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Anyone else find that it needs a lot of micromanaging?
Top tech centers: Silicon Valley, Seattle, Boston, DC, LA
LuaJIT roadmap 2008 and how a trace compiler works
I'd like to hear more on this cost of development.

The cost of picking up a new platform to learn. The cost of hours spent kluding an iphone development environment on whatever his current desktop is. The cost of writing said app. The cost of submitting it to Apple and waiting for how ever long it takes for approval. The cost of time spent polishing the site so it fits with the glossy, round-cornered aesthetic of the iPhone (possibly learning a graphics package or hiring a designer.) The cost of waiting for the pennies to trickle in from the huge user base of gun-owning, bullet property measuring, badass iphone users who don't know of crackz sites.
Donald Knuth: Mathematical Ideas, or Algorithms, Should Not Be Patented
I tend to "git pull --rebase", so that local config changes "stay on top" and don't become a merge commit.

In general, I recommend against "git pull" unless you are intentionally trying to merge something. (Fast-forwards are a special case of merging.)
The difference is that you're the target demographic for those database archiving tools: people who know how to use a command line.

Most likely the potential customers buying the app he built are people who don't know what a command line is.
EFF Launches A 'Terms of Service' Tracker for Facebook, Google, eBay, Etc.
That's the sort of stuff technical folks want to be able to use (and script) from the command line. This guy has written an app for people who are into guns.
The Dot Coms Are Booming Again (Domain Registrations, That Is)
More Godin overhype.

Neat experiment, but most people would not consider this troupe on-par with any MBA program after hanging out for 6 months.

Maybe if this was an 18 month program, or maybe if Godin could better articulate how this is more "MBA" than "self-study" the "students" might have some merits.
I wonder how good their up vote fraud detection will be. Or if it even matters to them for ads.

Someone should (and probably will) start a service to buy up votes on ads. Pay out less then what your up vote discount from digg is and there is the business model.
I agree that it is sad how the Rails "team" handled this.

I have always felt that security issues should be treated like any other defect. It makes me sad that the Rails community tries to obscure its security problems and "shoot the messenger". The guy that reported the bug is trying to help you and trying to help the community. Getting mad at him isn't going to make the bug go away, it's just going to make you look like a childish moron. (Everyone writes buggy code; get over it.)

(The "we don't want hackers to know" argument is often repeated, but completely meaningless. If the security hole is worth exploiting, the black-hats found it a long time ago. Pretending that this one bug is somehow different so it should be treated specially is delusional. Deluding yourself can feel good, but it doesn't yield good software.)

Anyway, the advantage of full disclosure is that users can take mitigating actions before there is an official response. Sometimes taking your app down is better than waiting for some "core team" to make an "official fix". Letting the users know also lets one of the users contribute a fix -- which is the whole point of free software. "Many eyes" and all that.

Finally, if you are using un-audited code for important parts of your infrastructure, you get what you deserve. The Rails team is not to blame; you are.
www.qwikitodo.com
Bad form, perhaps, to keep responding to myself. But, where I used the word "shooters", consider also hunters. A real need to know trajectory under varying circumstances. Also a strong interest in location and orientation, where a smartphone GPS and onscreen mapping would be quite useful. Mapping of various sorts, including not just satellite and topo, but even property ownership; if you are hunting on private land or need to avoid straying onto same, it is useful -- perhaps critical -- to know the boundaries.

This isn't all in place, yet, in a convenient fashion. But I can imagine it falling into place.

You need your phone with you, anyway, if nothing else then for use in case of accident, injury, getting lost, vehicle failure, etc. If it can do all these other things for you, well, that's the cat's meow.

If my imagination bears any resemblance to what evolves, it would seem to me to be a pretty decent market to sell into.
Not an app, but buy a larger screen, or add a second if you don't. Keep them at head level.
The Importance of Executable Class Bodies
First off, it's Lua, not LUA. Not an acronym. :) It means "moon" in Portuguese. (Its predecessor was called 'Sol'.)

I use it as my day to day scripting language, and also for parsing (with LPEG, which is awesome), general prototyping, etc. I tend to use Lua as a standalone language and as a nicer interface to C and its libraries, rather than embedded in mainly-C projects.

A couple personal projects I have going in Lua at the moment are 1) a language-independent tool for locating copy-and-pasted code that has been modified in place, and thus is hard to locate via simpler tools such as grep (which I hope to release this summer); this has involved research and a lot of dead ends trying various parsing-based techniques. It's a surprisingly tricky thing to do well. 2) a randomized testing framework (think QuickCheck) for Lua, which is usable, but needs more polish and documenting before I release it, 3) a profiler with different analysis than LuaProfiler, 4) an RSS library, and 5) a bunch of other wrapper libraries in various stages of polish. I have a wrapper for Redis (more idiomatic of Lua and a bit faster than the official one), a library for mpd, a wrapper for xosd, and other such odds and ends. There's probably stuff I'm forgetting. I start too many projects... All of the above will be released under one of the BSD/MIT-ish licenses, when/if I feel they're polished enough.

Overall, Lua has taken over the niches for which I used to use Python or Chicken Scheme. It's a really nice language, especially if you're comfortable with a bit of C now and then. It's not good for everything, but its design is refreshingly modest about just ducking out of the way and letting you use other tools when they're a better fit. (Its minimalism and prototype-based object system also appeal to me.)

There are a bunch of other little tools in my bin directory that I should clean up and share, but that's probably true for everyone here.
I found that with evening aerobic exercise (running, swimming) I naturally sleep less and awake as fresh or fresher than usual.

With exercise, 6-7 hours. Without, 7-8 hours.
Dorkbot isn't super useful for startups, but it's great if you just want to meet a bunch of interesting nerds.

If you want startups, join the Seattle Tech Startups mailing list (Google it), and you'll have more than enough events and information. There's a monthly meeting, a weekly breakfast, pub crawls, and tons more.
"Wolfram Alpha, the so-called "computational knowledge engine" that launched this week, claims to have access to a vast repository of information from trusted sources around the world: 10tn pieces of data filtered through 50,000 models and algorithms."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/may/21/1

> having multiple of orders of magnitude of data available changes the knowledge engine game.

Maybe machine learning as well...

"The cloud also makes possible our approach to machine translation in which thousands of computers process billions of words of monolingual and bilingual text to build statistical language and translation models."

http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2009/05/breaking-down-l...
Which airlines are you flying that seem to have ridiculously spacious cabins?
I was trying to say "shopped" without actually using that word.
Are they looking for just the latest version, or do they need history, too?
I think that's pretty highly dependent on the individual. There's an article about the surgeon Charlie Wilson who slept around five and the half hours a night and yet excelled at his craft.

Article is at http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1999/08/02/1999_08_02_057_T...

You can search for the phrase "He goes to bed somewhere around eleven at night and rises at 4:30 A.M".
[video] Introduction to Ethical Hacking, Penetration Testing and Countermeasures
3com Audrey take 2?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3Com_Audrey

The internet has changed greatly since then. I guess that is why the netbooks are taking off.
The Google – Youtube – Conundrum
Glad to see this idea launch, I had played around with something similar in college, I was going to track changes to TOS pages etc but school got busy and the idea fell off.

I think it's something that is dearly needed to protect consumers since most TOSs include some sort of "this is likely to change without notice" as a standard.
As a community that does a lot of work dealing with algorithms, I'm curious as to how others feel about this. I think it is important to protect trade secrets (and algorithms would certainly fall under "trade secrets" for some products), but I also believe that hindering anything mathematical or scientific is, for lack of a better phrase, negative.

If your company depends heavily on a huge body of code, are you in favor or against software patents?
Good documentation.

Sample Apps.

Client Libraries for popular languages (e.g. Python, Ruby, .Net, etc.)
HTML Pattern Matching (for scraping) in Python
I always dreamed a sort of pattern matching for HTML: I want to be able to get "this kind of tag sequence" inside a page. So I created a library based on BeautifulSoup to do that, and it's effective and easy to use :)
U.S. patent 1,048,576 1970 January 1. "A method for distributed editing of publications with micropayment incentives", Knuth D. E.
I did have to moderate my caffeine intake to avoid lying awake at night. I still drink several strong cups of coffee before noon, but after that I limit myself to three diet sodas. If I drink the last before 6pm, I don't have any problem going to sleep.

When I was younger I'd drink caffeine all day and then be too wired to sleep, but when I finally went to sleep, I'd sleep as long as I needed to. My biggest problem was that if I drank coffee I would stay up late and then sleep through my alarm in the morning. Now my problem is not sleeping long enough even when I have the chance.
Thanks, at first glance this looks like a good set of notes to skim over. I wouldn't spend a tremendous amount of time trying to deeply understand the query optimization details. My experience has been that being able to grab out low hanging fruit (ie, are the right indexes being used by the query optimizer, check the plan your RDBMS generates) is more helpful. Most people will never need to think about query optimization as in the notes.

Understanding indexing and index selectivity is probably a bigger deal for most apps these days. At least, it seems that I come across many more read intensive apps than high transaction rate apps. But I'm a data warehouse app guy usually.

I'd also strongly recommend the Joe Celko books for really building up your SQL chops. Once you have a intermediate understanding of your RDBMS backend and SQL, you'll have all the knowledge you'll need for 90% of db development and know how to investigate the other 10%.

I have typically joined projects after the db has been designed. I need to work on being able to quickly refactor table designs to cleanup and enforce constraints. My gut feel is that the best way to do this is to first define a data access layer via some type of procedural API to the other devs on a project and then cleanup the backend design on the side while the project goes forward.

Now, if only SQL had the ability to define and dynamically build first class functions as well . . . I could do some snazzy stuff much quicker . . .
Now the phrase "a little bird told me" will become literal.
As soon as my laptop weighs 2 pounds and runs for 8 hours, or my smartphone does vnc/nomachine without a zoom&scroll-a-thon, I'll be inclined to agree.

As it is now, my eeePC does things that my laptop and smart phone could never hope to. I suppose it you're used to dedicating an entire 2ghz core and 1 gig of ram just to run your freaking "virus scanner", a netbook might not seem to fill much of a need, but in the right hands, the netbook is a very important niche application that's just not being filled by other platforms.
Well, the idea is that you'll be tired enough that you'll almost always pay it back pretty promptly. So your body doesn't have to remember for a really long time because you don't keep a balance for that long.

For example, after you turned in the papers/took the exams from the all-nighters in college, you probably crashed and took a long nap or slept 12 hours that night or something.

It's not exact, obviously. I have found that you kinda get a "discount" when you get enough into sleep-debt. I slept about 15 hours over 6 nights once, and after basically sleeping for 24 hours straight, I was totally fine. So that was only like 16 hours of extra sleep (because 8 of the 24 have to count towards that night), which means with that the initial sleep + the paid back sleep was only ~31 hours for 6 nights, which is still only 5 hrs/night.
We spent a couple days on accounting and finance, but not much. I think the general feeling is that while these skills are important to have, it's also possible to learn them from a book in a few days. Whereas there are lots of other skills that are really important but that no one has ever written a book about.

(Also, I took corporate finance as an undergrad so I don't feel too left out.)

I'll write a post on what I got out of the program at one point, but my website actually just launched today so I'm busy working on that. If you want to see the project I'm doing check out swagapalooza.com. I don't know of any traditional MBA programs that don't let their students graduate until their own business is up and running, so that in and of itself is pretty cool.
To be an application, you certainly don't need to meet the levels of interactivity, responsiveness, or robustness as Textmate or Photoshop. Maybe to you that's what an application is, but under a more standard definition all a piece of software needs to do to be considered an application is to interact with a user to do a specific task. It has nothing to do with value judgements. A crappy cgi guestbook is technically a web application. It doesn't matter that it's slow and only does one thing.
ZenDesk is awesome. If I didn't have it, I'd probably have to hire someone to handle support for me. But now I can handle more requests and satisfy more customers than I normally would be able to with just an email account
On the last startup weekend in SF, somebody pitched an idea on some sort of a Yelp for EULAs/TOS. Unfortunately, it never launched.
How hard would it be to capture this, hack it, and recode it to send a signal to the other, formerly spied-on, side?

I think we have a plot (or a device) for the next spy movie...
I use git on development machines and have an rsync script to push updates to the server.
We use puppet for managing packages and configuration on our systems. At some point I'd like to take a look at Chef, too -- having Ruby as the configuration language seems like it'd be nicer than puppet's config file format. It took some work to get set up, but it's so nice being able to keep track of what's on each machine in version controlled source files.

For actually deploying our code, we use Capistrano, which we also use to run one-off tasks across machines. This pulls from our code repsitory, and each of our dev/staging/production environments know which version control branch to pull and deploy in that environment.
Dare's blog is still up and reachable:

http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/

but the particular link provided by the parent is rerouting to the obnoxious front page at rotten.com, which some may consider NSFW. The same behavior is observed when trying to access the post from the link on the front page of Dare's blog.

Because of this, I'm flagging this submission. Maybe Dare can get his blog straightened out; but in the meantime, the link is not directly useful or appropriate.
Intel Set To Acquire Wind River Systems For Approximately $884 Million
Why not switch to decaf?
Ask HN: How are your eyes?
First submission here on HN, but longtime reader.

Just curious to know, since most of us are hackers by trade, how your eyes feel/work before/during/after hacking sessions...

After 10 hours, I rarely (but enough to bring up) get very short, sharp pains.

In addition, do you have bags under your eyes?

I've read about computer glasses, do they work, and what are some other solutions?
My point exactly. The majority of them are probably learning to program purely as a means to an end. They don't really care about the tech, they just know that if you're smart enough to be a good-enough programmer, it's the easiest way into the industry. (there is often a certain mystique associated with breaking into the game industry. As a decent C or C++ programmer it's really not very hard at all)
About 5 hours. I fall asleep at ~2, I get up at 7 to get the kids to school. I sleep in on Saturday and doze Sunday morning until the kids force me to make the weekly pancakes at around 11a.
It would be neat to combine this with some sort of consumer advocacy reporting service whereby violations of the TOS could be reported.
Ask HN: Is Bing running on a non-MS stack?
I'll preface this by saying that I make my living as ASP.NET programmer so I'm not trying to slight MS. I'm just curious.

http://toolbar.netcraft.com/site_report?url=http://www.bing.com

Sample microsoft.com HTTP Response Header:

Cache-Control: public
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8Content-Encoding: gzip
Expires: Thu, 04 Jun 2009 16:56:47 GMT
Last-Modified: Thu, 04 Jun 2009 15:24:31 GMT
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Server: Microsoft-IIS/7.0
X-AspNet-Version: 2.0.50727
X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
Date: Thu, 04 Jun 2009 16:46:47 GMT
Content-Length: 20017

Sample bing.com HTTP Response Header:

Cache-Control: private, max-age=0
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Content-Encoding: gzip
Date: Thu, 04 Jun 2009 16:49:51 GMT
Content-Length: 9295
Connection: keep-alive
I can't even remember how I managed my life before Google Calendar. Texting reminders to myself, settings tasks that need to be checked off, having a simple interface to see how my week/month is laid out... it's a lifesaver.
pcAnywhere's market share has plummeted, from well a dominate position of the SMB remote access market to a fractional, minority share.

What word would you use?
"This guy has written an app for people who are into guns."

How many gun owners do you know? I know a bunch. They're an odd group, insomuch as they are not as simple to peg as some might think.

Sure, some are Dukes of Hazzard beer swilln' hicks, but others are top-grade software developers, teachers, and engineers.

I'm skeptical about selling CLI apps in general, but I don't think it's made any better or worse when targeting gun owners.

(To the original poster: go grab JRuby and Monkeybars and bang out a cross-platform GUI version!)
Very infrequent YouTube video poster, but watch a few videos a day.

For myself, I don't have a problem paying for hosting. But I'm sure to use it when it's offered for free.

I'm interested in what Google/YouTube can do for customization, particularly in the chromeless/API arena. I'd definitely pay for HD chromeless at the right price.
Good find, but a man can change his mind. Also, given the existing patent system, you're practically forced to seek patents to avoid getting trolled.
I like the shopping but figuring out how to piece together a look that fits my style is hard on me. I'm curious to see what options I get from them so I can learn to do the same for myself some day.
I doubt that. It is not a webapp that the OP was asking about so the common pattern of usage would be download the software, use it, maybe come back and download an update. I don't think that adsense would be enough in this situation. I could be wrong though.
For the sake of your other body parts: lower back, neck, wrists

take breaks and do little exercises

http://www.slifelabs.com/

http://www.floydprice.com/2008/08/productivity-tip/

http://bc.tech.coop/blog/060131.html

http://www.workrave.org/

http://www.lcdf.org/~eddietwo/xwrits/

http://cameronyule.com/2008/11/taking-regular-breaks
>Surely nobody could apply mathematics if it were necessary to pay a license fee whenever the theorem of Pythagoras is employed.

I’ve seen this argument why algorithms and mathematics shouldn’t be patentable before. A fact that is always overlooked is that this hypothetical patent would have expired sometime in the 5th century BC. To make this argument one would have to find more recent examples. How about anything created within the last 20 years? In my view, the greatest things aren’t practical to be patentable and the practical ones aren’t anywhere close in magnitude to the Pythagorean Theorem. So, where is the problem? And by the way, comparing algorithms to "words" (in this context) is just silly, with all due respect to Knuth.
St. Louis Cardinals manager Tony La Russa sues Twitter over fake page
Once you patent something it ceases to be a trade secret. This is an important feature of the patent system; to ensure that what would otherwise stay as trade secrets (eventually) become available to the public.

My company depends heavily on a huge body of code, but copyright protects us more than enough. The ideas are cheap, the code to implement it is hard. I think it is fair game if somebody came along and implemented the same ideas we do. Patents stifle this kind of healthy competition.
Spending time in the classroom is bullshit. Merit comes from shipping.
That sounds fantastic. Is there a reason you choose BSD over MIT. I only ask as MIT seems more common for Lua projects because of course Lua itself is released under that license.
The biggest cost would be buying the developers license.

That and the small issue of having to get a Mac if not already owned...
There's about a 0.01% chance they would use a Linux architecture. If it came out that they didn't trust Windows to run Bing then it would be a big hit to their server market I think.

I imagine it's not a standard IIS setup though, so the response header is probably unique due to this.
I keep eye drops at my desk and usually around 3pm I'll stop and use them, otherwise my contacts get to be super dry and painful.
NASA & Google Join Forces to Research Singularity
VxWorks alone should be earning that much annually in license fees from government, defense and aero industry.

Linux must have cut into them hard.
I had previously missed the part at the end of the article where wolfram does suggest crowdsourcing as a way to tune, which is what google is all about, in some sense.

I am also intrigued with "50,000 models and algorithms". What would those be? Is this just something to impress the journalists?
I think what Seth did was great. I deeply regret not applying. I think real MBAs is a crock of S#$%&% and they are in any case sooo 90s.

The personal MBA has had more value for me personally that most of University (http://personalmba.com/)
Stick a dead-simple UI on it. Assume domain knowledge, not computer knowledge; this should be dead simple to an experienced handloader who barely knows how to use a computer. My dad would buy it, and probably shell out $50 if there's a reasonable demo so he can see what he's missing.
I just meant BSD-style, as opposed to GPL. (Clarified above.)
Good find?

[Edit: I just picked a computationally relevant number that approximates the patent counter circa the epoch.]
5-6 hours during the night, if the kids are sleeping well. If I have to get up in the night, I often take a 20-45 min nap the next afternoon. Even if no child wakes me up, I virtually never sleep more than 8 hours.
IPhone ad rates way below expectations