skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Every few months, when MS or Yahoo or Ask claim to have improved their results, or some little guy claims to have better (or more useful) results than Google, I actually go try them out. Google consistently has more-relevant results, closer to the top than anyone else I've tried. Their new "SearchWiki" lets me fix the dozen or so cases where Google doesn't have the exact result I was looking for.
In theory I agree with you. Censorship is not good. What I guess we disagreeing over is the 'level' of bad. Torture or murder is evil, censorship, in this case, is just silly and clearly a mistake. (As they've now reversed their stance)

Even so, Censorship is a tool, it isn't inherently evil just as guns or knives aren't inherently evil. But they can easily be put to an 'evil' use. Apple's approval process isn't evil, it's just frustrating. Take it from someone who's dealt with MUCH worse from AT&T and Verizon.
I have long wished for for a portrait-layout Macbook: Let it be only as wide as the keyboard, but as tall (screen) as form factor (15" or 17") allows. Would suit the way I work (guess that makes only 2 of us).
If their revenue projections are accurate, then $10bb is not that crazy. They also have 200 million users and each user has some value - though I have no idea what it is.

And I know people will say "but they're not accurate with their projections." If you were projecting revenue or growth for your start up you'd be saying the same things Facebook says to their investors, showing the numbers that make your case. You cannot blame them for the valuation when investors seem to agree. No one is forcing them to invest.
I disagree with your statement. Momentum and hype are good for attracting those who choose a language based on its momentum and hype. If you are choosing a language to perform a task based on any objective criteria, momentum and hype interfere with your ability to choose and are therefore repulsive.
Does the auction keep all of your money if you lose the item?

As in...if you bid $10, then $12, then $14, are you actually spending $36 + bidding fees?

Because if you're only paying for the item once you win it, that is NOT a gamble.

Yes, there are fees involved. This is customary for EVERY auction. (I don't know about ebay, but visit a real-world auction sometime).
Really consider your case. Stuff like web user sessions is easy to put into a key value storage (memcache or tokyo cabinet for persistance). If you need more look into tokyo cabinet table type. The master-to-master replication looks like a win.
More meat here (from New Mogul):

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601100&sid=aMBk...

I'm still a bit confused as to what caused the takeover to fail. The Bloomberg article makes it seem that it was mostly a regulatory problem. Or is it more that Porsche doesn't have the cash to exercise its options in VW?

Edit: the Economist article posted by anigbrowl explains it better.

Three things thwarted Porsche. In January the firm increased its stake in VW to its present 50.8%, almost tripling its net debt to €9 billion in the process, just as sales at Porsche’s car business were tumbling—leaving less cash to pay the interest on the debt. Second, conditions in the credit markets made it harder to go on borrowing more. On March 24th Porsche was able to roll over its existing loan only by pledging its VW shares to the banks and promising to pay back €3.3 billion within six months.

Third, Porsche was counting on the repeal of the so-called Volkswagen Law that restricts individual shareholders to 20% of the voting rights, regardless of the number of shares they own, and gives the state of Lower Saxony a veto on major decisions. The law’s abolition would have allowed Porsche to use its anticipated 75% stake in VW to get its hands on the bigger company’s cash reserves, which stood at €10.7 billion at the end of the last quarter.

But despite a recent amendment by the German federal government, the law still guarantees Lower Saxony’s veto. The state’s premier, Christian Wulff, sees Porsche as an opportunistic would-be plunderer. With his support and that of Bernd Osterloh, the head of the powerful VW works council, Mr Piëch feels he is in a position to dictate terms to Porsche.
James Burnham and the Managerial Revolution (1946)
Ask HN: What is the best way to protect your website from hackers?
I have a website which was on godaddy servers and got hacked. A warning message used to show up whenever anyone visited the site. I moved the servers to mosso (forwarded from godaddy) and after about a month the website is hacked again and the same warning message has started showing up. I am willing to pay a minimal amount on monthly basis to deal with hacking permanently or do whatever is necessary. Any comments, suggestions, experience will be appreciated. Thanks
Redis 0.100 was released 2 hours ago. You may want to take a look (http://code.google.com/p/redis). If the new features we implemented are still not enough, we could love to know what are the things you don't like, this is very valuable for us! Thanks
And Linda Greenlaw is probably the best fisherman anywhere.
Very cool. George Moschovitis, who created Nitro (an elegant MVC-ish Web framework for Ruby that came out at the same time as Rails, but always struck me as cleaner and more 'Rubyish' than Rails) is now developing it in JavaScript.

http://github.com/gmosx/nitro/tree/master

It, too uses Jack.
Becoming a better developer in 30 days - day 1: read other people's code
Yeah, I'm not feeling it either.

Although it is funny when the flame baiters start calling each other "wannabe" in the thread.
Big brother: UK camera grid to track cars via license plates
Anyone seen Training Day?
The Raygun Gothic Rocketship
I'm not suggesting a side scroll. Side scroll definitely stinks.

However, part of my point is that for most content you wouldn't have to scroll sideways. The content itself is better suited to a tall screen than a wide one.

I would say that a tall screen allows you to scan and skim content more effectively.
And given/when is already part of Perl5 http://perldoc.perl.org/perlsyn.html#Switch-statements
It is a different market. One is public, another is private market.

Another is about making something people want.

There are less people uses Sparc, Solaris, Java than people wants a "platform" to write applet that let you water plants.

(How many people has to use java, sparc, solaris? less than 10 million globally, How many people has to use facebook to check their friends? 100 millon+)

The world is cruel. You can put your heart and soul in inventing some cool stuffs that worked behind tables and only few appreciate them. So if we wants to do cool stuffs, you have to forget claps from the audience.
I don't like your chances.
Start-up Cost Projections For First Time Entrepreneurs
Lets blow some bubbles.
you can select how frequently to save based both on time and number of updates, but if it's not enough this is where Redis replication comes into play. Just sync another server and you are sure the dataset is durable.

Note that Redis 0.100 adds non blocking replication, so you can connect a slave at runtime while the master continues to happily serve queries. Also we have a SLAVEOF command now that makes it possible to control replication at runtime: to maka a running server a replica of some other server, to stop the replication and turn a slave into a master, and so on.

Redis replication is trivial to setup.
Do you have statistics to back that theory up?
I hate stories like this. Given the topic and situation, I can't not read it. So then I do and the story is pointless. Ugh. Precious minutes I will not get again. kthxbye.
In medical professions, you go through a period of training (clinicals, internship, residency) where people with tons of experience point out that you never learned anything. This humbling experience is not really available in the CS world.
my day job is at McAfee, we sell the leading web security testing service (mcafeesecure.com). Its runs a daily scan on your full website infrastructure, finding the vulnerabilities hackers are exploiting to access your site and showing you how to fix them. It's a solid service, used my 75% of the webs top 500 retailers and thousands of business world wide. If you interested in the service contact me (email in profile).
On a related note, facial recognition works off a different set of regions in the brain compared to regular long-term memory. You can actually train yourself to memorize certain things using your brain's "facial recognition system".

Chess Grandmaster Susan Polgar learned (inadvertently, perhaps) from a very young age because of her father's training. She can easily recognize a board configuration just by glancing at it. Her brain recognizes various sub-configurations and she is able to duplicate the layout with very little effort. She can't perform the same task with a random configurations though, but chess at her level is rarely random.

http://www.tvthrong.co.uk/my-brilliant-brain/my-brilliant-br...
When Does Facebook Stop Being a Startup and Start Being A Government?
Ask PG: Could YC admissions be replaced with a very small shell script?
If you train CRM114 (or some other classifier) on all but the most recent batch of YC applications, how does it fare at distinguishing interview vs. no-interview applications in the most recent batch? How well would it have to do in order to be alarming? :-)

There's no particular reason that I'm asking this other than that I just finished retraining CRM to take advantage of the version upgrade and was pretty impressed with the training results.
Ask HN: Rails Searching Ferret or Sphinx?
I am implementing full text search in my web application and I can't decide between Ferret or Sphinx. Does anyone have feedback?
Computer Programmer.

Look, there aren't that many careers that will pay you $100+/hr on a short-term contract. Take one of those for six months, then go hike the Pacific Crest Trail. Then ride your bike to Florida.

That's a full year plan, half of which is spent outdoors, at the end of which you'll still be about $50k ahead of where you would have been if you'd taken a job planting trees for the forest service.

We really do have it better than just about everybody else. Do yourself a favor and take advantage of it!
All this link says to me is that the people who hang in comp.lang.javascript are all a bunch of smug pricks.

David Mark comes across like a complete ass. And while his critique of jQuery might have some validity, his tone and attitude are such a turn off, and the consequence of him being "right" is not really all that important in the grand scheme of things.

People build cool shit with jQuery. That's all that is important. While "My Library" might be better, rate of adoption is sometimes more important than correctness. Specifically for something as trivial as javascript. If it's really important to him, why isn't he participating in making jQuery better since "My Library" is used by virtually nobody. From the read, it seems like his ego is getting in the way. And it's funny that, considering he hasn't done much noteworthy otherwise.
As asked, the question has no single answer. Security is a continual process, and a tradeoff with speed, usability, friendliness, bandwidth, etc.

The 100% secure website is one without an internet connection. The 99% secure website is one on a continually patched server, offering only static content, and accepting no user-supplied input other than the base url and clicks on links.

If you want to accept user input and serve dynamic content, it becomes a complicated process involving, at minimum, awareness of your own vulnerabilities and threats, and protection against the OWASP Top 10 and similar lists.

*1. http://www.owasp.org/index.php/Top_10_2007
The companies readily turn it over to the government.
Do you have drawings of the product? At such a small quantity, probably only vacuum forming or machining will be cost effective. eMachineShop might be worth looking into, or canvass the Web for a hobby machinist with a CNC mill that will do them for cheap.
Evolutionary ideas shape technological revolutions
We did try this once on startup school applications (after the fact) and it was a pretty bad predictor.

If we ran code like this on YC applications, I suspect the most useful way to use it would be to find groups we hadn't been planning to invite to interviews that deserved a second look.
Creative anti-debugger technique in Spotify for Windows
You are quoting the standard perl attitude: languages are not cool/uncool, they are only useful or un-useful. Meanwhile Perl is not 'cool,' most people have moved on from Perl, Perl 6 will never ship, and Perl is dying.

Perl has a marketing problem, and the first step towards fixing it is to accept that cool matters. There are very few young Perl programmers.
I'm not so sure... some people jump into Twitter without knowing much about it. If they "meet" the wrong people at the beginning, they may adopt behaviours that those noisy and spammy individuals think are ok, without actually being comfortable with them themselves.

Sometimes, you're a douche because you're a douche. Sometimes, you're a douche because you don't know better (yet).
Check out BerkeleyDB, either in its original incarnation or 'Java Edition'. On one machine, it would seem to fit your bill: uses RAM cache as much as possible, persists to disk as necessary, various tweakable options to try to either minimize IO/seeks or maximize consistency/safety.
It's burn-out if you don't realise that you need to sit back and relax for a few days to recharge, and keep ploughing on regardless. Once you learn how to manage this burnout cycle, it becomes a feature rather than a bug, as you describe. If you try to keep going, though, a couple of days of downtime can easily turn into weeks of morose can't-be-arsed-to-do-anything-ness.
If I follow somebody and they auto-DM me with some canned message, I immediately unfollow them. It really is a douchebag-indicator.
Thanks for the reference. I quickly skimmed it, and as far as I can tell the only thing it offers compared to a traditional switch/case statement, is the evaluation of expressions, as opposed to just accepting constants.

I can see the rationale behind using a different name for the construct, but I still think it would have made more sense to stick to switch/case.
Granted, this hack relies on a bug in old borland library code which means it's not effective in all situations, but it's still pretty cool.
I can say that I've used both on a couple of projects and thus far sphinx with the thinking sphinx plugin has been the best option for me.
omg, there are two of these articles with the exact same title on the front page right now.
The New Résumé: Dumb and Dumber
yes, since we're on a tilt the two hemispheres get their summer and winter during opposite seasons when their respective hemisphere is 'facing' the sun while the equator pretty much always gets the same amount of sun
In the article they make it clear it's more than just the logo. They also use Google's page layout. That could help too. The colors are not the greatest, but it's quite clear.
I agree, the lesson from the post isn't multi-threaded==bad. Processes just make you think more about the data interactions.

However, if you are in a multi-process model and using shared memory, you'd better be getting a semaphore for both memcpy and reading. So, get semaphore, do memcpy, release semaphore (all readers should be blocked during that time).

Not really efficient, neither is constantly doing a memcpy on static data.
yes, but thats not going to happen, so this is the next best thing, ignoring the whole irrationality of "green" fuel
One thing's for sure, after this crisis we'll all be driving Japanese cars.
Twitter poses risks for papers
Ask HN: Is my corporation protected?
Honest question:

Suppose someone has created a product of value and would like to incorporate and sell it. How should he approach the incorporation process given he has personal debt and poor credit?

1. What type of corporation should he consider?

2. Can collections sue (or otherwise come after) his corporation? (does this depend on collector? (ie AIG vs. IRS))

3. Worst case, can he partner with me (or someone with exemplary credit) to protect the corporation?
your comment saved me those precious minutes - thanks
The actual task in Excel's case being running the query.
Google results are terrible for me. The same queries that used to work in 2001 no longer work. The only reason I don't switch is because of the layout.
The example in the article doesn't offer proof that meta-programming is bad. Rather, it is an example showing that you can sometimes implement something in a hacky, obfuscated way or in a clearer way.

If meta-programming obfuscates your code, then don't do it! Do it when it clarifies your code. In fact:

Does [X] obfuscate your code? Don't do it!

Does [X] clarify your code? Do it!

Doctor, it hurts when I do this! Don't do it! X can be unhelpful polymorphism, frivolous use of a pattern, ill-advised use of exceptions, or just about anything.

Another thing to note: when meta-programming looks arcane, it's more likely to be obscure. When meta-programming looks more like ordinary programming, it's more likely to clarify. So a programming language that aims to be powerful should make meta-programming as casual as possible. Python and Ruby do this better than Java. Smalltalk does that better than Python and Ruby. Lisp does that better than all of the above.
In Soviet Russia... oh, cripes, it's not even fun any more. I'm going home.
i've been scammed and exploited online. it's one of the hazards of being online. i run all these scripts because i want to try out a lot of new things. i am adding and taking off stuff all the time.
Thanks for the input. My website accepts user input (registration, feedback, forums, payment for buying products etc.) and serves dynamic content. I am not a developer myself but have hired someone for development. It seems I will need to hire/subscribe to a service which can provide me with the necessary expertise.
LG KF510D Black Unlocked
LG KF510D Black deliver a shine like no other, and its extremely slim size makes it easy to carry around. The Media Player organizes all your MP3 in order to make your music listening experience a streamlined
There was a minor mention about micropayments by the Russian investor and the way Zuckerberg changed subjects seems to give credence to such plans. If they have some kind of payment system in the works - it could be possibly interesting in so far as providing an alternative to paypal. More likely it would also strengthen the FB platform.
Serious comment:

I'd say $10b is redonkulous because that is a buy-out price, and I highly doubt anyone will buy them at that.

Their plan seems to go public and let everyone buy into them, instead. But I really don't think Facebook going public could in any way be good for the users, with fiduciary responsibility and all.

While Facebook may or may not be "on the outs," the fact is that if people begin to really suspect Facebook is doing something heinous with their data, they will leave.

And that is pretty much the inevitable result, because what kind of company (which pretends to be so large) will be able to convince all its shareholders that doing heinous things with the data - to make money now for this quarter - is a terrible idea?

Right now, a user on Facebook represents no value to them, unless they buy digital goods.
Business Intelligence Rap Video
Two startup co-founders (full disclosure: I'm one of them) bust rhymes about why so many startups are doomed.
IME 'you're overqualified' = authoritarian management. A classic book worth reading is 'On the psychology of military incompetence' by Norman F. Dixon, if you don't mind extrapolating the observations to other contexts.
California Supreme Court upholds same-sex marriage ban; lets stand ...
Yes. A problem of regulation and family feuds.
Mozilla Takes Cloud Coding For a Spin
this suggests the security flaw is with your site code not the hosting provider :)

What tech/code does your site run on?
How to design fast websites (video presentation)
hate to say it but bing does have that nice noun usage that google does, bing it, let me bing that for you

live search and msn never enjoyed that
One of the things that happens in the film clip, is that a professorial gentleman gives the "orbit is closer" answer, then is asked what season it is in the Southern hemisphere when it's Summer in the Northern one.
I strongly prefer ethnic food and crave spicy food all the time, and so eating in Paris was more an exploratory exercise than a pilgrimage to the culinary city of my dreams.

The best bakeries I found were in Cassis on the ocean in southern France. There were 4 shops within about 100 feet of each other and they were all amazing. I attribute this mostly to intense competition, which is, I think, the same reason that SF restaurants are so good. If they're not good people walk a few steps further to the neighboring place.
From the article: "Disclosure: we use OpenX to power part of the ad serving here on the TechCrunch website"
jQuery has a pretty uniform programmer interface. I guess just that one is the killing feature than other library. The dom method is much difficult to be remember.

So just wait until John Resig to improve the code. He helped to start an movement. When Linux came out in 91, my friend said why did not I use other unix on pc but that crap. But almost 20 years later, Linux is alive and kicking...

Worst is better. As long as it propagates and more users bases, the improvement will come one day.

Don't forget technology is also an human activity. So social aspect of the technology acceptance is part of the equation.
> All this link says to me is that the people who hang in comp.lang.javascript are all a bunch of smug pricks.

From my experience, that can be said of comp.lang.*

I haven't been to any of the comp.lang groups in a while though, but it doesn't look like I've missed much.

I'll give the regulars there this much: most of them really know what they're talking about. If I were John Resig, I'd take that message to head, not heart.
“We’ve worked hard to bring more than 200 million people – 70 percent outside of the U.S. – onto Facebook to share with friends, family and co-workers."

70% outside the U.S? Yikes. So that means 70% of it's users cannot be monetized. Good show Zuckerberg...what do you have up your sleeves...
Particularly disturbing, since the only good way I know of to learn programming and system architecture is through mentoring. Basically, our mentoring system is haphazard. There's even a lot of anti-mentoring happening out there.
Just a great big yawn. Use it or don't. Next.
There might also be another effect. Both Microsoft's search (under the MSN name) and Yahoo's existed before Google's. Google came along and really beat all the search engines that exited in terms of result quality. Microsoft and Yahoo have since upgraded their algorithms and gotten a lot better. However, people still associate the two as being the poor engines compared to Google's that they used to be. People's subjective evaluation of quality isn't just based on current results, but experiences they've had which might no longer apply due to changes in the product. There's no reason to include Yahoo search capabilities from 6 years ago in one's evaluation of Yahoo's results, but that's how people's minds operate.

I think that's why Microsoft desperately wants to rebrand their engine (over and over) so that people will think it's something new that they should evaluate for the first time rather than the pre-Google product that they found inferior to Google.
I just hadn't thought of it. I'll give it a look. Thanks!