skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: What sort of tweets annoy you?
I am working on a tool to analyze twitter followers tweets and give some statistics to decide if they should be unfollowed.

Here is a short list of things that I am thinking of including.

Percentage of Retweets (things like RT, PLS RT etc.)
Time span of tweets (too often, too fast)
Duplicate Links to same sites
#followfriday people

Twitter is many things to many different people, but what annoys you about some your followers that you would want to filter and see?

If you'd like to keep it private, my address is in my profile.
Extra branches are only a problem if the chip guesses wrong about the direction and has to undo a lot of speculative execution. So the default, fast case should be the one where memory is successfully allocated, in which case your total penalty is one compare to null instruction.
At a management level there are larger problems. SQL was a solution to the "letting programmers run the show" problem. I.e. a commoditized language that executives could mostly understand and budget for. See pretty well everything Philip Greenspun has written.
Dear Chris: Why so inane?
I actually meant the title on YC, where I think titles should have standards. I have no opinion about what to title it on facebook where I'm not familiar with the etiquette.
I could go with a variation of "Join this group to persuade Craigslist to raise a billion dollars for charity"
To me, Hacker News is a more relevant and civilized place than Slashdot. People are nicer here.
And have linguistics as a heavily involved uncle.
New source file policy on Vimeo
Well, it's that they gave up on picking a codec in the standard, not that they abandoned Ogg for something else
I don't agree that an online petition to put advertisements on a website is a "hell of a hack."

Also, I'd point out that although charity is a noble cause, advertising does not produce free money. Advertisements waste people's time and bandwidth and contribute to information overload.
Or use the Inside Vs. Outside view: http://lesswrong.com/lw/jg/planning_fallacy/
God hacked a lot more than fluid mechanics in perl. http://xkcd.com/224/
Look, at that kind of scale, you're going to have problems with any solution to any problem. Handling that kind of scale is going to be expensive no matter what solution you implement, whether it's map/reduce or flat files or some other solution.

It is not a point of whether or not it is expensive. Scaling (nearly) always has expense associated with it. The issue is how much expense, and with some applications it is significantly less with one of the "no-SQL" solutions.

But deciding to build a system from the beginning on something non-relational because someday you may have to accommodate that kind of scale is an example of premature optimization. The vast majority of features you get with SQL are going to outweigh the limitations of noSQL.

You are making it sound as though a relational database is the correct choice barring any scaling. Perhaps you have not yet thoroughly evaluated some of the alternatives out there, because in many applications, there would be no step back from *SQL.
It's not clear why Apple would refuse to support Ogg -- hardware support seems a silly reason from Apple, who manufacture their own hardware, and the "patent landscape" for the open-source Ogg seems even less likely. Do they still cling to a dream of Quicktime becoming the web standard, after the <video> tag kills Flash?

The only people who should be pleased with this announcement are Adobe. Moving away from Flash will be an uphill struggle, and this makes it just a little bit harder.
Remember, getting only 80% of the first version of an application is getting nothing!

I prefer to think of it as having already achieved 80% of version 1.2. (If you are happy with the first shipping version of software, you waited too long. Cut the scope, get something in the hands of paying customers, and start getting feedback. And money. But mostly feedback.)

Plus, if you do it inhouse, that 80% might actually work. (If I sound grumpy about outsourcing it is only because it is code review day at the day job...)
The Return of the Pay Wall: Newspapers declar free content the enemy
This just brings back memories of the video with the kid who's mom canceled his WOW account...
Irritating:
- inane tweets: I dont care what you had for lunch

- tweeting constantly: I don't want to scroll down to get through your most recent thicket of tweets.

- Constant retweeting: If you don't have anything of your own worth tweeting why are you on twitter?

- stupid #tweets (contests, followfriday, etc)
How does this work

Streaming.

Is the music legal?

The service is legal depending where you live. That's why right now it's only available in some European countries.
Though simple A/B tests are better than not doing any tests at all, the true power of testing is realized when you are doing targeted tests. In most of the solutions currently in the market, you can only do blanket tests: that is, all visitors see the same test. Much better approach would be to do tests for a segment of visitors because it is quite likely that your organic traffic would have different optima than your direct traffic. Similarly, repeat visitors would respond differently than first time visitors.

Also, websites usually have multiple goals. For example, while your A/B test may tell you that you have reached optima as far as clicks on the banner is concerned, you won't know if you have compromised on other goals such as visitor engagement, newsletter signups, etc. The point here is that you must measure performance on multiple goals to see the correct tradeoff.

My team has been developing a powerful testing solution called Wingify (http://www.wingify.com/). We have limited number of private beta accounts available. If anyone is interested, mail me at paras@wingify.com

Oh, and BTW, there is a screencast of using Wingify for setting up an experiment as well. You might find it helpful for an introduction to A/B testing - http://www.wingify.com/video-demos/create_experiment/
Review of O'Reilly Google App Engine Book
"...that the plural of anecdote is data..."

Thank you for this most excellent quote. I got a good laugh out of that quip.
Or a hypertext version:

http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2009/08/aig20090...
CompuServe has gone to live on a farm, Timmy.
Better Torrenting Experience
45+ Useful Resources For Better Torrenting Experience :)
Okay, but how is it related?
Interesting, especially if you could set that PIN yourself. So if you were the victim of identity theft (or suspected you would be) you could change the PIN on your SSN.

Of course, they'd have to have some kind of retrieval mechanism for your PIN if you forgot it, and it would probably ask your mother's maiden name...
I like the idea that anyone who has any hardware capability, or even significant hardware capability, can just whip up an Ogg chipset and roll it out to millions of installed devices. Hey, why doesn't Centrino 2 support Ogg? Intel must be clinging to some krazy dreams.
Simply Scheme is now available online
Bingo.

Ads work. I work in advertising now and I see how the current economic climate has impacted the industry: ad spend always is one of the first expenses to be cut, and the trends I see in cutting today suggest to me that what we are seeing is not a long-term, secular trend.

And I do not understand why people keep talking about AdBlock. Statistically, few people use it. Most people see ads and react to them.

Generally, people are much more susceptible to non-rational psychological impact campaigns than they realize or admit. But it is true that advertising is slowly adapting to new mechanisms.
From 0 to 0day on Symbian [pdf]
And what do we mean by meat? I'm sure toxin filled fish effects you differently from fresh. Or grass-fed (natural diet) chicken is different nutritionally than industrial chicken.

zngtk4 is basically saying that nutrition science is sampling at too low at resolution to make definitive claims, I buy that.

How many times can you flip-flop on eggs until we stop listening? Obviously they're something else going on. The argument that they're generally "bad" is too low rez. Not to mention how we were told to eat margarine over butter for 50+ years, and it turned out to be one of the worse things to consume.
Spend years going after the world’s most prominent pirate site, only to find that when you get it, it dematerializes and by the magic of copy-and-paste, reappears elsewhere in a different guise.

Reminds me of something a Jedi once said to a Sith during a battle on a station that wasn't a moon...
Maybe I am getting old, but I no longer find arguments over semantics as interesting as I once did.
Death of the whiz kid: Robert Strange McNamara, 1916-2009.
Yah, just try telling people to use the launch of launchly on launchly to give you feedback. It's fun in a twisted sort of way.
I fail to imagine why the SSN is such a big deal. (Obviously, I'm not american.)

Here in my country we do have a unique number for each person, but knowing it is pretty useless by itself.
Can't say I've ever been a huge Opera fan but I just made the big switch to Mac, so I just might check out the beta and experience the not entirely painful appearance :P. Thanks.
Escort Brescia
The thing that i don't like about outsourcing is that it loses that brainstorming-creativity of the team.

From experience, outsourcing is good for work that don't require innovation (populating content etc). If you're startup though, you're pretty much unknown problem looking for unknown solution and that's when u want to keep the team close together and everyone cares about "doing the hard thinking".
I agree that cynics sometimes bring us to earth. But you have to question their motives too. Here's a good post on that: http://lesswrong.com/lw/ym/cynical_about_cynicism/

I'm especially on guard against cynicism because it seems to be a standard corruption of rationality in particular. If many people are optimists, then true rationalists will occasionally have to say things that sound pessimistic by contrast.

EDIT: I don't mean to imply anyone here is a cynic or that I know their motives whether they are or not. But I wanted to make the general point.
not necessarily, they can use your driver license official address to send you a letter with a temporary pin #
Hiring Evan is one of the best decisions Twitter has made. I hope he continues writing posts in this fashion.
And with that breed pediculosis mysteriously turned inheritable.
Anyone in Atlanta interested in forming a team? If so I'll be at ATLRUG Wednesday, let's chat.
I'm the primary author of said nonsense. I didn't do TDD on this project, for the record.

So was my mistake in actually writing these tests or was it just advertising them? ;-)
Yes it is :)
But unfortunately it won't put a stop to all the flames.
Many people just like being anti-something.
Right. Plus as a matter of style, assertions are traditionally distinguished from error handling. Assertions are used to catch programmer errors; error handling is for when something happens that is nevertheless within the contract of the library (malloc can return NULL, fopen can return NULL, etc).
If both Mozilla and Google (alongside H.264, but still) are willing to support Ogg, why didn't they just go with Ogg? Since Firefox has the largest market share of the <video>-supporting browsers and Google is running YouTube, there should be enough Ogg support for it to win. Why is Apple's opinion even relevant? Safari's market share certainly isn't large enough to make a big difference.

Moreover, the efficiency concerns regarding Ogg will be solved in the future, so that shouldn't be a concern in the long run (which is what this standard is for).
It is clear: They are worried about "Submarine patents" popping up in the theora codec and being sued once they implement it.
California’s Nightmare Will Kill Obamanomics, by Kevin Hassett
Why Google Is a Fair-Weather Friend
"It's not clear why Apple would refuse to support Ogg"

So, I don't necessarily agree with this reasoning, but I'd suspect it goes like this:

The hardware point is quite valid; Apple doesn't manufacture all the hardware in, say, an iPhone (they buy lots of stuff off the shelf and assemble overseas), and would probably like to avoid the expense involved in not only finding and/or designing a Theora decoder but also integrating it into a space- and power-constrained device. And they've invested too much in H.264 to just drop it, so they'd have to make both work, which is even tougher.

The patent concerns, meanwhile, are probably less about minimizing exposure to possible patent claims and more about ensuring that Apple doesn't have significantly more exposure than any other major player. They have that situation right now with H.264: everybody's on a level playing field with respect to the known licensing, and if submarine claims pop up, Apple's not the only company vulnerable, so they wouldn't suddenly be at a huge disadvantage.

With Theora that situation doesn't exist yet; nobody's yet taken the big plunge into wide-scale deployment of Theora in the market, and Apple (and others, including Nokia) are skittish about being the first to do so, since first to market may end up being first to get sued, and then nobody else will want to use Theora, leaving them all alone exposed to patent claims. I suspect that if somebody else steps up and does Theora in a big way first, Apple will feel more comfortable following, since then they'll once again be maintaining rough parity of exposure.
It will stop working very soon. Spotify checks your location constantly and not only when you download. It allows you to use it outside your original download country for 14 days. After a few days a bar will appear to notify you and after the two weeks it’ll stop working. The only option is to use a real UK proxy or TOR once after 14 days to give you another period of two weeks.
Many people just like being anti-something.

People weren't anti-Microsoft without reasons.
BSD For Linux Users
"Safari's market share certainly isn't large enough to make a big difference."

Sigh.

Please read this:

http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2006/05/13/cluster...

If you're too busy to read it, a good summary applied to this situation would be that small-market browsers do indeed matter if they're being used by the sorts of critical early-adopter/well-connected people who make or break your service through their social connections. And remember that Safari is on every single iPhone out there, and so is the mobile browser used by lots and lots of those people.
This is strange:

"Q: What if I don’t implement the entire specification? Will I still get the protections under the CP?
A: The CP applies only if the implementation conforms fully to required portions of the specification. Partial implementations are not covered."
FreeBSD Release Engineering
Using Cacti to monitor a large scale infrastructure in Amazon’s EC2
note this isn't for everything, but only some parts.
3,000 #moonfruit tweets in a row.

Tweets about how many followers you have (i.e. just reached 8,000 followers)
As others have pointed out, the "no SQL" crowd are invariably MySQL users who have run into the limitations of MySQL but for ideological reasons can't state that the problems they encounter are specific to MySQL.

DB2, Teradata and Oracle users regularly tackle problems 100x larger than MySQL can handle.
I don't dispute your logical points, but I think there is still a rather strong case for eating a plant-based diet.

Clearly, humans can eat meat (during most of human evolution calories were scarce and eating meat conferred a selection advantage)...

But why would you reason that all foods are equally beneficial and harmful? To me, broad epidemiological studies can offer clues on classes of foods and some of the costs/benefits that they confer.
Pardon my (likely striking) ignorance of hardware, but I remember a discussion from way back in college about pipelines and branches. The gist of it was, you may as well guess at branches, since if you're wrong (and careful), you don't waste any more time than if you hadn't guessed. The discussion went from there into what constituted effective methods for guessing, and I remember a comment to the effect that "do what you did last time" was one of the best strategies.

I was left with the impression that hardware did this, though it's possible I misunderstood. Google seems to back me up a bit, but I admit I'm out of my depth on this topic.

Anyway, it seems to me that if my recollection were accurate, a single branch which went the same way virtually every time could have a lower cost in a heavily pipelined system than a more distrubted error checking scheme.
"small-market browsers do indeed matter if they're being used by the sorts of critical early-adopter/well-connected people who make or break your service through their social connections. And remember that Safari is on every single iPhone out there, and so is the mobile browser used by lots and lots of those people."

I still don't feel that this even comes close to matching the massive impact that Firefox has. It is also popular among early adopters, and were Ogg to be made the standard and implemented on YouTube as the sole <video> codec, I think it would be possible to force Apple's hand on the issue.
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YES! are the #spymaster ones done yet, haven't seen that many floating around
I can think of plenty of reasons to not use C#. I cannot, however think of good reasons not to use or distribute applications written in C# with this promise in place.
And remember, that Apple can use chips for decoding h.264 on iPhone and iPod Touch. That matters a lot.
Seems the best solution is to just throw an exception . . .

. . . er, crap. This is C, isn't it?
Antitrust Administration to go after Operators
Mr. Wiggins would have us think in terms of "true scalability" which conflates the following concerns: more servers creates more capacity (the classic definition of scalability), the business logic of the app is separated from concerns of scaling server resources (this is not possible past whatever limit you set and so has no classic definition) and no single point of failure (more classically formalized as availability).

Companies such as Teradata have long offered SQL systems which meet the classic definitions of scalability and availability.

I think TimothyFitz's reply above was accurate. Mr. Wiggins article would be better titled something like "ACID databases have scalability problems, especially cheap ones startups use" but then, like http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=690653 , it wouldn't get much response.
RAID setups can be outfitted with redundant controllers, in which case it does meet his definition of 'scalable'.
There are two instances of link

http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~bh/ssch0/match.html

which does not resolve. Examining the link construction on that page, it is apparent that the link should instead be the following, which does resolve

http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~bh/ssch16/match.html
In America, knowing someone's SSN, date of birth, address, and a few other pieces of information (mother's maiden name?) are enough to get credit in their name, break into their bank accounts, and perform other forms of malfeasance. It's a really bad system.
Odd. I hadn't heard of this one. It looks like it was supposed to happen this summer, but it doesn't seem to have.
Bwhahahahahaha.

You want to trust Microsoft to keep their words? Really? When has that ever happened in the past, ever.

You can trust them to do everything in their power to screw you over and nothing short.

This isn't a fanboy hate post either. From a purely business perspective aligning with Microsoft is toxic.
Because photographing infants is not an especially good ID technique.

You can get a US Passport or state driver's license, and that usually has its own ID number on it and a photo, but that doesn't help your SSN.
I would have thought that having a 100% tested framework should be a good advertising point. Where is the nonsense in that?
But it does need to be treated as secret information - that's the problem. Your SSN is can cause you a great deal of frustration and expense if it is abused. It would be nice if that were not the case.
Which is particularly bad given that the 0.1% figure was for getting the SSN right within ten attempts.
Bloomberg: Goldman May Lose Millions From Ex-Worker’s Code Theft
So while sharding is a form of horizontal scaling, it fails point #2: it is not transparent to the business logic of the application.

I do not believe this is usually true, for two reasons. One may be nitpicking, but 'where to get the data' is not part of the business logic: it's pure application logic, dependent on your solution of the problem. In that sense, his argument is wrong. The other reason definitely isn't nitpicking: you can solve the problem by adding a layer between your DAO's and the databases, that handles the 'where to get the data' question. So yes, it requires some programming, but it is still transparant to the business logic. It does not require an invasive change in your application and I think he is grossly exagerating this point.
And I would recommend his another book "The Seven-Day weekend" even more. It was written later and ideas are better tested ant crystalized there. If "Maverick" leaves someone doubtful that this can be true then "The Seven-Day weekend" may convince those :)
But anyway it takes some guts to run business this way.
The firm in Chicago he was going to was Teza Technologies LLC, founded by a former Citadel trader. That firm suspended Sergey after his arrest.
Actually 4 digits give 10,000 possibilities (0000-9999).
Ask YC: YC clones
It didn't float the previous time. So here is a question. What do people think of YC clones, Betaspring.com in particular. Does it look like something worthwhile or a rip-off -- ~1% equity for no investment, with mentoring and some legal advise, access to online incorporation documents? It obviously doesn't have the highly successful entrepreneurs YC has. There seem to be a lot of hand-holding firms for startups. Are they really necessary or a created necessity?
I have respect for McNamara after seeing the excellent documentry fog of war.

Many despise him for the things he had done during vietnam, but I have great respect for the wisdom he decided to share later in life. We need more people sharing the wisdom of their errors.
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