skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In my experience, the downside of BDB is simply the license. There is no way for me to use it in my program (and distribute my program) without opening up my source. I can't simply 'query' a BDB server - by using BDB at all I have to link to it and also open source my own code as part of the Sleepycat License (or so I've been told - IANAL).
"We think, for example, that it’s very important to use your brain, to keep challenging your mind, but all mental activities may not be equal. We’re seeing some evidence that a social component may be crucial."
Man-made star to unlock cosmic secrets
nice first web app. you will be contending with the myriad of "hot or not" type clones that largely cater to the unmonetizable idling office worker or bored-to-tears slacker.

cheers!
A camera might be in order for some sort of record keeping. Though if too much beer is involved then you might not want the record.
How to Fix Wall Street – Madoff’s Law
Shouldn't items posted in Hacker News be "news" - as opposed to recycling Gizmodo items from six months ago?
cross platform does not mean standards-compliant.
I personally use Things (http://culturedcode.com) with a simple "Projects" project created to dump them in. (at least, for directly recording)

However, I also use a whiteboard to scribble stuff on and these can be a great solution for presenting ideas, especially if you can add to them as you present.

I would suggest Balsamiq Mockups too, especially for drawing up interfaces, although you might find that using a "thinner" solution better for you. (Mostly related to the size of the elements in Balsamiq.
So, I think I agree. Business Apps should be either web apps (HTML/JS) or RIA (Flex|Air/Silverlight); I think that's a given nowadays.
I think OpenID is great for small sites because you probably can't afford to do password security correctly so using OpenID is probably easier and more secure.
I guess someone could tweak cdb to be >4GB, but these C libraries are always insanely convoluted.
if it is AGPL (notice the A), then you must provide source to to your users, whereas with GPL it's when you distribute the code (can't send precompiled webapp)
Very nice, good for brainstorming if you have a word or concept in mind. Good job.

(Second the 'went off and bought via my own registrar' though :P)
Something I've been advocating for a while to UX people fresh out of school is that the design bit of their job is really the easiest and least important part of what they do. UX is about process which means it's about navigating politics and procuring buy-in and being able to communicate across a broad range of cultures.

If you're the only one championing the message of usability & design, then you might get some limited short term success but you will inevitably leave and things will decay back into the ground state.

Instead, the correct goal for a UX person should be to instill a culture of usability within a company and act as a facilitator for the people who are building the products.

University HCI courses emphasize the technical skills almost exclusively because that's what they're good at but what they end up doing is graduating a bunch of bright, talented people who unfortunately don't have the temperament to play the office politics necessary.
From what I gather, the "secure" version isn't particularly good anyway (where by not particularly good, I mean not particularly good for copy-protected media, so actually terrible). Only people who irrationally want the "secure" form will have a problem with this, but these same people will probably irrationally want that part of the spec kept secret.
Blank piece of paper and a pen.
With Mozilla Weave, it (supposedly) will be integrated into the browser http://labs.mozilla.com/2009/05/identity-in-the-browser/
DB up to and including 1.86 are Berkeley license (basically 'do anything with this but include this notice' but without open source requirements), but DB up to and including 1.86 only allow < 2GB databases. :-(

I tried to upgrade it with 64-bit integers, but it's such convoluted C code I can't make head nor tail of it.

Also try buying BDB ($20,000). I emailed them asking for a discount, but Oracle (who owns them now) never replied. :-(
Trilogy hasn't set the world on fire (insurance subsidiary?): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trilogy_(company)

Epiphany got acquired: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epiphany,_Inc.

Byron Krug moved on: http://www.linkedin.com/ppl/webprofile?action=vmi&id=318...

Chris Ostroot appears to still be recruiting for Trilogy and 'successfully
tapped 33 students from Carnegie Mellon's Class of 1998 -- more than any other technical employer
recruited from that university this year. In August, at Trilogy's annual awards banquet (which Trilogians
call "prom"), she was named the company's "Superstar" and was awarded a 1999 Saab convertible.' from http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/21/insanity.html?page=0%...
I use paper and a pen. But anything that I don't plan on using right away goes on http://folist.com -- It's simple, but works.
This is the site:

http://www.excycle.com/index.html

Front page gives me three options, all of equal "weight". A bad thing for an online store. Front page should dump me in a product catalog, and the "labs" and "forum" links should be in the menu-bar above, along with "About Us", "Blog", "News" and the rest of the flat pages. IOW, I shouldn't have to click "Enter". "Enter" landing pages should be used to serve disclaimers and get user agreement; i.e. what lies behind it might offend one's sensibilities. That's why flash intro applets suck.

"Register" is also figured in there prominently. Replace it with a sticky-note on the side inviting me to use the site "Look around, you will register when you're ready to order :-)"

Over and above that, the one thing I advice you to do is GIVE YOUR SITE TO A COMMUNITY. Had to yell that out, sorry. You're a workout nut, so you're probably a member of one or more forums. How about you contact the forum owners, introduce yourself politely, offer them affiliate IDs (done transparently as readable URLs; site.com/products/list/REFID instead of the embarrassing site.com/referer.cgi?id=workoutnut.com; the first is more discreet and you would cost the forum owners face, plus they get to make a chunk of money.)

Once they have their affiliate IDs and you too are sweet, don't hesitate to make a public announcement say "Hey guys, I launched a site" .. BUT, use the site owner's affiliate ID.

Don't be a dick, alright? You have to break bread and you have to work with people.

After that make the site open and update the forum members on any changes and news. Invite them into the circle. For a site with more than 10k users you can pretty much count on explosive growth. They're all members in multiple sites. Throw in the occasional rare product, ebook, video, even offer prizes to success stories.

Cheers!
Actually, the core CDB data structure only limits keys and values to 4GB each, not in total:

http://www.unixuser.org/~euske/doc/cdbinternals/index.html

The hash algorithm used also only produces a 32-bit key, meaning you'll be limited to 2^32 total records. Again, though, unless your data is of trivial size, that gives you considerably more room to work with than a hard 4GB limit.

Edit: doh! can't use double-asterisk for exponent on HN
I am a bit confused by the table. "bdb_btree 14.3/s " means 14.3 records per second? Is that the correct interpretation?
There are no business constraints. None. That expression is an illusion, a way peopel have of rationalizing their inability to make change.

There are no business constraints forcing peopel to make poor decisions. There are just people making poor decisions. In a big company making a collectively poor decision you have a larger aggregate of people making poor decisions. But they are still people making poor decisions, and there are no inviolable constraints, no laws of physics that prevent the company from making good decisions in aggregate.

The UX designer says wait 12-18 months for a redesign. Why didn't they redesign the site 12 months ago so we could see it today? One or more poor decisions twelve months ago, that's why.

Other companies like ING and Apple get it, which tells me that There are no constraints, no laws, just people who zigged when they should have zagged.

If Dustin wants to shout that the emperor has no clothes, I'm happy with your ad hominem suggestion that he's a six-year old boy. Maybe that's what companies like AA need, a little boy to say "You could have everything, happy customers, an understandable web site, AND 3,459,798,345 in profits instead of losses."
I started growing a garden and only afterward realized that the reason I did it was to work with my hands. I honestly believe that there's a fundamental (perhaps evolutionary) drive to build things and which originates from these meaty paws. We may see and hear the world, but through touch we shape it.
It seems almost pointless to review a video of software, rather than the software itself.
I code all day. I highly recommend chopping wood and demolition work.
I'm not sure I agree with you. I don't deny OpenID's problems. But to me the issue is whether OpenID is completely unredeemable. Which I think it's far from being.

If nothing else it already has two things going for it. The first is positive press and the second is a legion of fans (some of which border on sycophants) So the question is wouldn't it be better to fix the problems in this spec rather than make another. I think so. In fact I think trying to create a new spec can be a disaster.

If you need proof of why this is ture look at all the people who continue to use RSS over Atom because of a standards fight that happened years ago.
"On the other end of the spectrum, languages like Chinese, Japanese, and Korean have thousands of characters."

This is not exactly true. Chinese has an iconic lexicon where each glyph is a single word. Both Cantonese and Mandarin speakers both use the same lexicon, but have different pronunciations. There are several lexicons (pinyin, big5, ancient) and thousands of glyphs in each.

Japanese has three lexicons; hiragana, katagana, and kanji. Kanji is the oldest and adapted from Chinese. Glyphs are iconic. Hiragana and katagana were developed in Japan and are phonetic. Together they form most of what you see as Japanese text today. I think katagana is used more for foreign, non-Chinese words. There is also romanji which is essentially English letters. Anyway, apart from kanji which is Chinese, there are less than 100 hiragana and katagana glyphs.

Korean is even simpler. They too borrowed from the Chinese and occasionally still use some Chinese glyphs, but the official lexicon is Hangul. Hangul is phonetic and has 24(?) basic glyphs. Some glyphs can be combined into compound glyphs called double consonants and double vowels making about 40 glyphs total. A Korean word can be written by breaking it down into syllables, combining glyphs to form a syllable super-glyph, then putting those together to form a word.

The explanation of unicode and python3 is great. I just wanted to clear up the misconception stated in the first paragraph. Nothing more to see here...
I used to ride my bike to class in the rain, and I would always get more wet than if I walked.
When I worked with that 1.8 trillion dollar company, the CTO of the USA group would blackberry me with suggestions after trying our test sites. He definitely used it and would show it to the CEO, then pass feedback directly to the team.

I can't imagine what would have happend if I'd replied Sorry, no can do your suggestion because group A and group B both need to be appeased as part of this project.
The title is a little off. From the article: "The work is sometimes frustrating . . . And it frequently requires complex thinking." Sound familiar?

What is really being discussed is the line where work becomes about craftsmanship. As software hackers, this is the space where I'll bet most of us prefer to operate. Not mindlessly churning out code to some spec, but rather building that piece of code that elegantly solves the problem presented to us by the user.

That preference is one of the reasons I think many hackers feel a lack of satisfaction from standard IT cubicle jobs. I'm not saying you can't find that challenge and reward (dare I say the flow of code) working as a corporate IT person, but surely corporate IT doesn't do much to encourage that experience.

I suspect that's why (at least in this forum), so many of us are interested in startups or extracting a living from software away from the cubicle (or, maybe I should say, from a cubicle not owned by us).
(Is that a Parenthesis in Your Pocket?)
Wolfram-it as it's meant to be: http://www51.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=trillion%2Fmillion
It would be nice if DJB would release CDB under the public domain like he has now done with most of his other software. However, there's a great public domain implementation by Michael Tokarev I'd recommend:
http://www.corpit.ru/mjt/tinycdb.html
What I think you're missing is just how difficult it is to organize that many people and interests.

With respect for your suggestion and with passion for my opinion, it isn't Dustin's job to organize that many people and interests, it's management's job. If they run a company that functions like warring city-states, there's little anybody else can do. If they have united all the teams to work together on a single goal, that's a different story.
It currently lets you choose between "turd" and "poo". Might want to add something to flag submissions.
Opera to me is similar to Chrome. They're both extremely nice at what they do, and just in general, yet I'm just too productive with Firefox to switch. I've grown used to Firefox's new tab behavior, having my bookmarks synced, having all the dev tools, etc. While I might be able to (at least eventually) recreate all the functionality in Opera or Chrome, it's just not worth the time or effort. Plus, one complaint I have with Opera is all the crap it has built in, torrent client and all that stuff I don't need or want in a browser.
I vote up this book - especially for sysadmins.
It's ok. They'll make it up in volume ;)
> ...these C libraries are always insanely convoluted...

If you haven't actually looked at the code, you might want to avoid making such a overly-general statement. CDB is a very simple data structure (basically a two-stage hash table) serialized to disk in a format that makes lookup fast. You can check the link I posted above to see a simple explanation of the format, and this page to see examples for usage (from an API-compatible reimplementation):

http://www.corpit.ru/mjt/tinycdb.html

Since the core algorithm is so simple, creating a 64-bit version should be similarly easy, at least on a UNIX-like system (trying to run code designed by Dan Bernstein on a non-UNIX system would be...interesting).
Or an insurance company! But I don't discuss my former clients and/or employers in public. But since you mention ING Direct, despite being much larger than most of the US banks that are their competition, they somehow act like the nimble underdogs.
Adobe always seems to me like some sort of schizophrenic or multiple-personalities nice-guy + psychopath.

Welcome to Large Organization Inc. It's hard to synchronize the corporate message when there are too many contending departments, each being influenced by the segment of society they're most in contact with: the Community Relations department and its staff become more and more in tune with web users and developers, while sales department becomes more and more like the big-studio executives they hang out and correspond with all day.
>>"WTF is one supposed to glean from this gross generalization?"

It's a survey :/ Data...
What services are using Gnip?
Gnip (http://www.gnip.com) updated their API a couple days ago. I've played with Gnip months ago and am planning to use the professional account for an upcoming project. But I'm curious, what other services have people been working on that is using Gnip?
Hacker News? Seems like you are using it for that now.
Use of "oracles" in computational complexity.
Thanks! We've been trying to be selective about the apps we review, and only feature the cream of the crop-but I can see how it might be good to create some contrast in the ratings.
> Many people in history had to walk further than that to get to school or work before cars were invented

When nearly everyone has a car, being able to get to distant places on a strict time-table becomes expected.
Related: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetris_effect
Slap tipjoy on it, i'll give it a tip!
I'm not sure, honestly. I'm the writer for the site, so I handle reviewing apps and writing the entries. Not so much the arithmetic. Sorry about that!
Giant Bomb opens up a full video game API
Jeff Gerstmann's new site giantbomb.com provides all of it's relationally stored video game data in JSON and XML formats.
Sorry, yes, I didn't look at the code. I was thinking of early Berkeley DB code.
Tony Hoare's Turing Award Acceptance Lecture: The Emperor's Old Clothes
I heard Herb Kelleher talk last year. He said:

No matter what business you're in, you're in the business of customer service

I think that having a well designed website would go under that category. And whether Dustin's design is great or not is irrelevant; the fact is that their current website can be vastly improved.
The really aggravating thing about large companies (and I like Adobe) is that due to worries about IP and so on, it's virtually impossible to submit a feature idea and get a response. I know a great open-standard way they could improve the functionality of their video editing & compositing software (thus creating value and getting a further edge on their competitors), but short of ambushing a senior developer in the parking lot and shoving the use case and pseudocode into his/her hand, there's no easy way to do it :-)
Nope, I still don't understand you. One more try, then I'll give up.

You originally said:

In other words, running in the rain gets
you more wet, given that all running is
doing is reducing your exposure time.

The running is reducing your exposure time, and that reduce is enough to get you less wet. Hence your claim that it gets you more wet is nonsense.

What have I misunderstood?
Of course. That's the joke.
Working PDF Link: http://www.cs.ucsb.edu/~ravenben/papers/coreos/Hoa81.pdf

The lecture came to mind when reading the comments explaining how difficult it is to get anyone to do anything within the stifling bureaucracy of a large corporation. Maybe this is as much a business parable as it is a programming parable.
Thanks for the suggestion...I'll go in and fix that this weekend.
You're right that redesigning it from scratch will probably make it even more complicated. I guess that's a point against.

The tough part of modifying the existing implementation will be the URLs-as-Usernames thing. They seem set on that and it just isn't flying.
I am addicted already! Great simple concept. Others' ideas about the plainness and being able to vote without going to the sub-page are spot-on though.
Apple never promised us it wouldn't be Evil
Ask HN: How can the changing industrial manufacturing world be applied to hacking?
I found this interesting study entitled

Industrial Policy: New Wine in Old Bottles (26 pgs):

http://c4ss.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/industrialpolicycarson0109.pdf

The study is a little lengthy, but it's well-researched and I think you'll find it interesting.
It essentially focuses on the fact that many people are able to manufacture items from the comfort of their own home which were previously manufactured solely in large plants. The study mentions the availability of cheap hand-tools as one of the reasons. Similar to cheap hand-tools, it mentions, the availability of a computer in everyone's home has permitted cheap video editing, sound editing, and almost priceless transfer of videos/music, but the study doesn't go into too much depth regarding other applications of cheap computers/internet. Obviously the existence of the internet and the many cheap businesses which have been started using it as a medium of distribution are testament to the applications of dispersed manufacturing (or hacking).

The study mentions that manufacturing will continue its trend of becoming available to even more people than it is now, but that centers for development such as a community manufacturing center would still most likely develop.

My questions are as follows:

In what ways do you think the internet will continue to disperse and converge?

Which technologies are still out of reach to most people in terms of price or required technological know-how?

What is the optimal size for hackers to be able to effectively collaborate but not be bogged down by excessive control?
Statistics is an effective tool for reinforcing stereotypes. Just because someone took the time to conduct a survey does not mean we should accept it blindly. This particular "survey" lacks the male control group :-)

The article references a second survey, conducted in 2006 which proves my point:

"The problem is likely not confined to women. A 2006 study in the United States found 6 percent of women have it so bad they are labeled compulsive buyers, but so are 5.5 percent of men."

0.5% difference between the compulsive shopping habits of men and women, smaller than any margin of error for a survey of this type. Yet women's "deviant" behavior merits a whole article.
Could you give some examples of contemporary matriarchal societies? Unless you're using a non-standard definition of "matriarchal", I believe you are either mistaken or misintepreting facts.
what he means is that running gets you more wet per time unit compared to walking
31 Fascinating Ruby on Rails Tutorials and Guides
It does seem very expensive but the things you can do with it seem awesome, for instance a GSM base station http://www.kestrelsp.com/FieldTest/index.html. I guess you could even use it to do some van eck phreaking.
Can anyone explain the point of this?
I'm curious: how do you propose to use Flash itself as vector for viruses and malware?
I am having trouble seeing what you're claiming. Are you saying that there are not thousands of characters in Japanese and Korean because they borrowed from the Chinese? If so, I'd say your correction is misplaced. These characters must still be taken into account for a charset to be used for these languages.

In any case, I found many of your comments to be irrelevant to the question of how many characters must be used in a language. For instance, the difference between Cantonese and Mandarin pronunciation doesn't have anything to do with this issue. Nor does Chinese origin.

edit: I just spent a little time researching Korean (which I know much less of than Chinese or Japanese), and now I understand more what you were saying about it. However, it seems to me that each "super-glyph" as you call them counts as a character, as far as any charset is concerned. The fact that they can be broken up into constituent glyphs is irrelevant.
Even better is to appeal to people's selfish interests as opposed to their idealistic instincts. The question is what are those interest in terms of a federal CIO?
Exhaustive comparison: Palm Pre vs. what might be the next iPhone
Cdb is a fast, reliable, simple package for creating and reading constant databases.
Nope, there is no point. But I like it anyways!
Good pictures, and not a bad summary of the most expensive kitchen operations in the world. See also
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiconductor_fabrication

The writer got a bit confused at the tail end of section 9.
You may get partly functional dies if, for instance, 3 out of 4 cores in a single die (=chip) work. And besides functional testing, you may also have performance 'binning' (some parts hit higher speeds, etc.)
We used this software when it was originally Pixid Whiteboard Photo to capture some complex whiteboards.

The whiteboard photo software cleans up the glare/angle to present the whiteboard as a 2-d flat drawing. You can download a free trial.

http://www.polyvision.com/ProductSolutions/WhiteboardPhotoSo...