skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
SimpleCDN Attacks Consultants
A message on this board points out that SimpleCDN did not answer their phones. I had the same experience and gave up. I'm glad somebody exposed them.

SimpleCDN's representative (Robyn) said that the poster who exposed them owed them money, used phoney credit cards and was reported to authorities by SimpleCDN -- but she never provided a bit of evidence.

I believe Robyn's posts were completely fabricated. They are gone now, wonder why?

One reason I don't believe SimpleCDN -- the publisher of StreamingMedia Magazine (most respected authority in the online media industry, also top trade show promoter) said that SimpleCDN gets a majority of the complaints by people who contact him, and another party claimed that SimpleCDN slandered a consultant that actually told him to try SimpleCDN.

My question is -- why is SimpleCDN still in business? Aren't criminal slander, defamation and false police reports serious crimes? Shouldn't the founder of SimpleCDN be put in jail under the Enron law that holds corporate executives responsible for crimes perpetrated by their employees (such as the infamous Robyn)? What a bunch of scum bags.
Different link, same article: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=625182
Amazon's effort to transform the book business with Kindle
Bespin: Code in the Cloud
Twollars: An Innovative Approach to Fundraising on Twitter
Totally agree and hence now avoid PayPal at all costs.

It seems they have this policy as it is cheaper to deal with an unhappy seller who has little/no protection legal or otherwise (especially if they have used thier PayPal balance for payment) and who will generally not chase them through the court system (in which case PayPal will argue it is a case between the buyer and seller, not PayPal and the seller), than an unhappy buyer who often has the backing of thier credit card company (or bank) to fight chargebacks on thier behalf and in most cases win.

As a vendor/retailer, especially if you have your own ecommerce store or sell high value items, be VERY wary of PayPal and only ever complete transactions if all buyer details match and protections are in place (buyers are verified and items sent only to card billing address).

Posted something similar a while back, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=361361, and it is sad to see little has changed.
That's the most ridiculous ad hominem attack I've ever heard. "Your friend" should be ashamed.

No one goes to pick up a new Mac Book because they feel Steve Jobs has punished them in some way. They do it because the machine has great design, a nice operating system, a failure rate that is less than its competitors, a user experience widely considered to be superior to other offerings, because it's consistently rated best in class by Consumer Reports, because it runs commercial software on a UNIX core, because it "just works"... Not because Steve beats them.

If Apple screws up once an a while (granted: it's hard to see this constant inappropriate rejecting of apps followed by a 180 change of heart as anything but a screw up) and continues to be popular with users, it's because users appreciate Apple's overall value in spite of some obvious policy shortcomings.
Modern womankind has, over the past decades, increasingly rebelled against the natural order of things as instituted by the God many claim doesn't exist and now, faced with the results of that decision they appear to want sympathy.

It occurs to me that 'seek ye first the kingdom of God and His righteousness and all these things will be added unto you' would be a response that gets to the nub of the problems demonstrated here.
I've long been a fan of going out into the woods with minimal tools (decent belt knife, axe, tarp, blanket, billy can and a box of matches) - you'd be surprised at the hack value you can find out there. Finding the most elegant way to turn a couple of bits of tree into a chair can be far more rewarding than a few hours spent twiddling your .emacs file, I can tell you!

Sadly, it's not immediately apparent how to turn any of this into a paying 'career' - unless your name's Ray Mears, of course, or you're prepared to do it full-time and become a hermit (tempting, sometimes, I know...).

One of my ideal visions for an outdoors-ish job would be making and installing energy producing wind-turbines from scrap, which is something I've been interested in for a good while now. You'd likely never get rich doing it but there's an increasing market for off-grid energy that may soon be enough to support a person.
Love the "about the author" box:

"XXX as been designing on paper, wood, plastic, metal and that ‘ol web thing for around 15 years, most recently as principal at Wishingline, working with clients such as PayPal, Masterfile, and Toronto Life Magazine while somehow still finding time to write, take pictures, perform and release records and actually have a life away from the internet. "
I only browse using the keyboard with firefox+mouseless browsing. It's got to a point where its faster than the mouse in 80% of the situations, and acceptable in other 15% of the situations. In 5% of the situations I still have to grab the mouse, which is annoying.

I wonder if any of those other browsers would fix it for me. But conkeror's website, which seems to be my favorite since I'm an emacs user, looks offline right now.
I think there are some sour grapes or frustration there, given the guy's involvement with startups - maybe something hasn't been going well for him and/or he's run into lots of bureaucrats or obstacles, something which does happen in Europe. Hopefully he can get around those difficulties.

> last.fm is from Austria.

I went to Dornbirn and met one of the guys formerly involved with Last.fm, who is now doing some other kind of startup. Nice place.
Anyone that suggests this project is capable of being scaled up to produce useful amounts of energy is lying to you. Its goal is to explore how H bomb's work which might be useful but it's got little to do with civilian power.
NVidia founder talk about starting a company
Uninformed? Apparently. Ridiculous? Yes. But nonetheless, these ideas are dangerous because they may sound plausible to internet-printing politicians.

Also, a tax on email would mean that using an unlicensed mail server in a foreign country is tax evasion which must be banned.
I've found that hacking on my house provides a lot of needed physical labor/activity.

I do things like improve the lighting in my garage so I can work on various projects out there. I'm also thinking about taking up gardening.

I too have really felt the urge to get up and do real physical stuff lately. I wonder if it's part of the disillusionment of web 2.0. So much bad news about the economy,etc that I don't feel that working on the "next big website" is really going to pay off.
I find having a glossy screen on my laptop a bit of pain when doing that.
Ironic headline, given that Wired was the major cheerleader of the last "New Economy" during the 1990s dotcom bubble. They trumpeted technologies like hydrogen power as the Next Big Thing in their original New Economy articles. (Predictions are hard, especially about the future.)
At the financial markets, at last, i can grant you that the masses are aways right ...
Sell Your Knowledge on the Side
Wow, talk about missing the point... "A penny charge for every email would stop spam, and fill the empty public purse" Email is just a damn protocol, charge for it and people will use something else. Information is free, get used to it.
In the social sciences, it's usual to use an operational definition [1]. For many variables are constructs [2] and they cannot be observed directly.

The authors of the above paper seem to have used different operational definitions, and they all point in the same direction. So one can state with reasonable certainty that women's happiness declined in the last 30 years.

A discussion about potential explanations for the phenomenon can hardly be called pointless.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operational
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Construct_(philosophy_of_scienc...
Ask HN: best languages to learn as a newcomer
A friend with an astrophysics and maths background is looking to get out of her current gig in journalism and into software. She's got minimal programming experience (beyond BASIC in the 80s), but has a startlingly sharp mind, so I don't see lack of experience as a major barrier. She's asked me what language/s is/are worth learning.

I've suggested Ruby or Python just to get the fundamentals down, BUT (and this is where it differs from previous Ask HN threads similar to this), she wants to use her maths/physics knowledge towards creating industrial/scientific applications. With that last bit in mind, what language(s) are worth her investing time in?
As much as I love the qualities of the new map, the old one DOES convey useful extra information, especially now we've become sufficiently acquainted with the modern one. I would like to see an updated old-style map, it would be a nice (retrograde) evolution.
This is a really good article that does a great job of outlining burnout in the design and development industry, and reiterates why I got out of the service side of it in favor of: startups. Service-oriented design/programming just doesn't do it for me on that level as very few companies are setup for trickle down benefits if the service-agency produces a big win for XXXXX client.

Artists (programmers & designers) are very much alike in that we tend to get very obsessive-compulsive about our work. That being said, I switched over to startups realizing that if I'm going to work this hard then I want to be on the end that receives the big reward if we knock it out of the park (mental, personal growth, fiscal, etc). And unless deep down you feel very passionate about it, working at that intensity can be short-lived.
Another reading of the same results:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1456
Anecdote: several years ago, I had some pain in a rather delicate area. I did some research online before seeing my doctor, and noted several likely causes for my symptoms. There was one minor ailment which seemed the likeliest culprit (and was, as it turned out).

In the course of this research, I found that several medical sites based in the US (WebMD among them) mentioned corrective surgery as a possible remedy. The UK-based sites I came across made no mention of surgery, only lifestyle changes and other palliative measures.
C++

If she has a sharp mind she will pick it up easy enough and that is where she wants to be with the ultimate aim.

Alternatively Java might be an option: purely if she fancies looking at distributed apps. I hate Java like crazy but it has some good background in distributed computing.
I wouldn't call it an easter egg.

It's primary use is for layouts when you need some filler text.
Beyond Detroit: On the Road to Recovery, Let the Little Guys Drive
For the easy learning curve and everyday scripting, Ruby/Python would do well.

For the heavier stuff, C++, Erlang, Java...
Pidgin-WebKit: Use Adium Message Styles with Pidgin
We were discussing living outdoors -- and still get intellectual stimulus. (Preferably without people shooting at you, I assume.)

I don't know the subject, but a cruise ship seems like a more expensive variant of eating all meals at restaurants and going on a weekend trip every week? :-)
The first thing that comes to mind reading this is the emphasis Americans tend to place on skinny, Barbie like figures. We see it everywhere from the checkout counters at the grocery stores to the commercials on TV. Most women will never look like the covermodels, yet they're made to believe thats what it means to be beautiful. No wonder women are generally more unhappy now than they were a few decades ago.

(But as the author states, it's probably not so simple.)
ya, I wonder what will happen to society when the organization with the most money will be able to afford the most computing power for their AI bots and will be able to earn more money with them. a few ridiculously rich people, and ridiculously many poor people?
Ask HN: Outsourced SQL Providers?
Hi everyone,

I've been asked by my boss to explore the option of outsourcing part of our data to an external SQL provider. So I was wondering if anyone had any recommendations as far as companies they’ve worked with.

Our primary concern here is uptime and we’re willing to pay a decent amount for it (e.g. a $20 shared hosting solution is not what we’re looking for)

Any help you could provide would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance,

Sam

P.S. One thing I forgot to say. It has to be either MS-SQL or MySQL. We don't want to use something like Amazon SimpleDB because this experiment in outsourcing might fail and we want to be able to bring that data back to a local server.
Cheers, yeah, I've mentioned both already and agree re C++. I've also pointed out to her that the fundamental methodologies are probably more important than any particular language, but C++ seems to cover most bases and seems likely to be used in the area she's targetting...
My first (significant) paid programming job was writing FORTH for an industrial laundry control system. All the software was written in FORTH, regardless of the platform - the PIC CPUs that drove the counting systems were FORTH-based, as was the Windows application that managed everything.

Yes, windows apps in FORTH. It was amusing. If you needed access to more of the Win32 API, you updated a header file and recompiled the FORTH interpreter :) Good times.

Both the company and the FORTH supplier still exist today:

http://www.microssautomation.com/

http://www.mpeforth.com/
Memcpy() concurrency curiosities
Ask HN: article about travelling for programmers
a few months ago I found a link on HN to some travel advice that someone had written for programmers. In a nutshell, he was basically saying programmers should save for a few months each year and then spend the rest of the year on a tropical beach somewhere.

my google-fu must be weak because I can't find the original post. Does anyone have it bookmarked?
I note that Guy Steele's examples support a language which has a sufficient vocabulary. (Which can be easily expanded.) There is no example which argues for a large syntax.

EDIT: I would also need to add that a language that wants to be widely popular needs a large enough syntax. Even though it results in a less elegant design, enough cultural expectations need to be respected so that programmers are immediately comfortable. Python is close to this ideal. (But definitely errs on the side of being too large.) Operator precedence is so deeply ingrained in engineering and technical culture, that it is a non-negotiable for many programmers.

To put it another way, algebras are a pattern most expect to be a feature of a language. (This is written by a Smalltalker, who is perfectly comfortable working in a language with its own, much simpler, rules of precedence.)

EDIT: Languages should be designed so that it is easy to implement Algebras and easy to use Algebras!
With a background in physics and math, she might do well in a functional language, or in a language which supports functional development well. Python is a good choice due to its math libraries and ease of learning. I was also going to suggest Clojure but that basically requires knowing an amount of Java.
Yeah, Clojure seems a bit deep-end for her right off the bat, but did strike me as something she'd probably dig with more exposure under her belt. Cheers.
Seconding this.

Besides CPUs & RAM constantly getting faster, since when was handling in-memory data fast in any way impressive?
Laundry control? I remember a line from a Forth tutorial which introduced what the colon does.

: WASHING-MACHINE (drawn picture of a washing machine) ;

So that wasn't just an illustration after all!
Haskell will be a perfect fit for these math/physics kind of projects. Writing these programs in a functional language is very close to how the theory in math/physics is explained so that is a nice fit.
Microsoft Kumo (Live Search) to be Renamed "Bing"
Here is one kind of outdoor geek activity: http://mcsquaredholdings.com/Pictures.htm
Women instinctively want to date and marry up. The recent economic equality discussed in the article has made that mathematically impossible. Just a thought.
No surprise there. Being 19 and male is miserable, except for the few who are lucky enough to find a soulmate that early, and the low-quality sort of man who tends to be more generally successful at that age, but I'd much rather be a single 40-year-old man than a single woman at that age.

I wonder how these findings play out for people who are in long-term stable relationships. I'd bet that there isn't a huge gender disparity or "cross-over" for them, since their happiness depends largely on the health of the relationship, and the number of alternatives isn't really relevant.
Can I Set Up An LLC To Avoid Personal Liability In A Lawsuit?
Obama Set to Create A Cybersecurity Czar With Broad Mandate
Yeah, Haskell was also something I mentioned -- tho I have a question about how prevalent jobs using Haskell, Erlang, Clojure etc are compared to C++ etc. My orbits don't inlcude maths/physics-heavy development, so I have no idea
If you want to create industrial/scientific applications, libraries are going to be pretty important. For that reason, I'd recommend Python (see SciPy and NumPy).

I'd also recommend learning R if you're at all interested in scientific data analysis.
That reminds me of a cheese farm I worked on in France. The farmer had slowly hacked together his cheese making equipment from an assortment of other food processing machinery. It ended up saving him something like 10k euro over a commercially produced device.

My favorite hack of his was out of necessity. He started getting shoulder problems from stirring milk for hours every day, so he found an old motor and attached it to the top of his vessel with a large paddle and voila no more shoulder problems.
Yet they don't support nokogiri. And it's impossible to compile it yourself on their instance.
I personally think Python would be best. Python will allow her to understand conditionals, loops, variable assignment, etc. really simply and quickly.

Once you have that down, it's a lot easier to start dealing with things like static types, memory management, pointers, null bytes, and so on.

I learned the other way around (with C being my introductory language), but that was a useless way to learn. When you don't know exactly how to use a conditional, there's no reason to throw in things that can trip you up and have nothing to do with your understanding of a conditional.

And, to be honest, Python will do nicely for lots of applications. If she's going to be joining a company, she'll have to use what they want her to use, but if she's independent, Python will be fine unless the calculations are so complex that they are time constrained. Even then, Java isn't so hard to pick up if you know Python

It's a lot easier to add on CS concepts little by little than to have to deal with everything all at once.
That sounds more like an issue with the software subscription being automatic, not some evilness on PayPal's part?
The reason I posted this is that recently I've been seeing some complaints about clojure performance and this seems like a great way to get close to the metal when you really need to.
How MIT Accelerates Clean Energy Entrepreneurship
The "SnapMap" of London shows the actual routes of the lines and the locations of the stations on a simplistic, but accurate enough, map of London. I use mine all the time.
Somebody mentioned Clojure, which is a great language but has some baggage.

If she's coming from a rigorous background, I highly suggest Scheme and the book Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (SICP: http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/.) For some people using a language with more batteries (and thus instant gratification) is better to learn programming, I think, but for learning to think about computation I think Scheme is pretty hard to beat.

Scientific programming might mean C/C++ (that's where the fast math libs are, to be sure), but it might mean Matlab or Forth or lots of R, who knows.
More tech IPOs in 1st half of 2009 than in all of 2008
I loved the paper - it took me a couple pages before I figured out what he was doing. Very clever.
Python + SciPy (which uses NumPy)

http://docs.scipy.org/doc/

http://numpy.scipy.org/

Many operations are fast, being implemented in C, an the facilities include all sorts of numerical operations, as well as graphing/plotting and other visual interactions.
Not much to discuss - just good solid general advice.
Java is pretty prevalent and has an awfully large set of nice libraries. Once you write some utility classes to deal with reflection and some of the other annoyances - including tweaking eclipse to speed workflow - it's a great language to work in.
The thing worth noting about Java vs C++ is that C++ need be compiled to each arch and the open source IDEs are not as fun.
Any of the "academic" languages (Haskell, ML, Lispen, etc) are probably more likely to be found in math/physics-heavy development than in general development shops, but C/C++ is probably the standard (for fast-math libraries and realtime work) - you may see old fortran for some numeric stuff, and forth for some embedded work. Java is pretty rare, AFAIK.

I think HN is not the best place to ask about "languages to learn to get a job", though.
Kindle Notes And Highlights Now Accessible On the Web
Scotland On Rails Presentations Now Online: 27 Videos
Nothing could be faster today than nginx for static content. =) As for backends, even php in fastcgi mode along with eaccelerator would be faster, let alone memcached-balanced storages.

People at facebook not so stupid as people used to think.
Judging by the URL I'm going to guess this is an instance of bespin running on couchdb?
Looking at the man page for memcpy, it states that it is explicitly for non-overlapping memory areas. Depending on implementation, then, it might even be "correct" behavior to leave the array in an inconsistent state (if the results are not well-defined).
The fastest math libs are in Fortran. You can get close in C/C++, but the everything-is-a-pointer philosophy of C gets in the way of some compiler optimizations that are available in Fortran. (Wasn't there something posted to HN about this in the last couple of weeks?)

The penalty is that you must use Fortran, though. If the app does anything besides crunching numbers, most people would choose a more comfortable language, or just write the crunchy bits in Fortran and use a FFI if they're ambitious.
Sony VAIO VGN-AW220J/B 18.4-Inch Laptop

Totally unrelated but I have one of those and it's a wonderful laptop if your back can handle carrying it.
Video game industry sales down 17 percent--again
Microsoft hopes Bing's the thing to revive Live Search
Ruby or Python, leaning toward Python only because it's used more widely in physics applications and, as a result, has more developed libraries for scientific computation.
There was an article in the NYT (I think it may be mentioned above) that discussed this. It appeared on slashdot, and I remember being quite aggravated at comments akin to 'Maybe they just don't want to', as the article explicitly dealth with this.

Also, I believe their metric may have been students, but I am not sure.
Hopefully, liability never becomes an issue in your startup, but hope is not an acceptable plan :-)

So it's good to debunk the myth of the fake LLC. I just think the article goes a bit far (but the author is a lawyer and I'm not).

Either way, it matches my experience: in the US, you can get sued pretty much no matter what steps you have taken not to get sued...