skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I ask you : Is it good for us ? I feel a certain joy in the air when IT guys talk about how google is doing well and microsoft doing bad. Like if it is good for the rest of us. It´s not. We cant have just one company owning the market, specially the internet market. It´s bad for the users, we need more googles, mor companys winning the internet war. If the Microsoft still being the number one enemy of google, so we already lost as users.
Ah, I didn't know that. jQuery didn't have this support when Glow was started. You can read a full list of reasons at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/glow/docs/articles/what_is_glow.shtml
some people seem to have a problem with the idea that two different looking representations of something can represent the same thing.
MySQL DOES have support for foreign keys.

create table foo (blah, blah, blah) engine = innodb

Sorry, I'm not trying to start an argument. That sentence just struck me as a bit inflammatory.
Boiling Sounds
Sorry - I meant that it makes me use lambdas in Python (you're right, I don't use many lambdas in Haskell either).

I find myself using them in Python everywhere as a substitute for currying and/or laziness, e.g.:

def f(a,b):
... # do stuff
def g(a,b):
... # do other stuff
meths = {'use f':f, 'use g':g}
a = calculate_a()
m = pick_a_method()
x = do_cool_thing(data,lambda b: meths['m'](a,b))
Microsoft has been in the search business for many years now.
I would really like to be able to see all the articles that were submitted since I last visited ordered by their votes. That way when I don't visit HN over a holiday or a busy weekend then I know that I won't miss anything important.
But wouldn't he be seeing a change in his CPM rates?
This is very interesting. And very important.

Any big company will eventually "turn to the dark side", not because they want to but because that seems to be the dynamic of large corporations. After all they only have to answer to shareholders, and shareholders demand profits no matter what the cost.

Google has done a good job of resisting this with their Don't be evil motto and trying to retain control of the boardroom. But I fear that it's an oncoming tide that not even Larry and Sergey can stem.
Ruby 1.9 video by Matz himself
Wow... Biology: the ultimate hack... Anyone think that the singularity will be more about biology than computers?
Ask HN: How do you establish hosting for sites you build for clients?
I build a variety of small websites for clients. Sometimes these sites will require ongoing maintenance, but many times these are one-off creations that have no requirement for future enhancement. I've hosted some of these sites in my own shared hosting account ... but for these 'build-it-and-forget-it' sites with no prospect of future development I'd prefer to setup the site's hosting so that the web site owner is responsible for the hosting account and I don't need to maintain the relationship with the client. In other words, I don't want to have to go back to these clients a year from now, and ask them to pay the annual hosting charge that just hit my credit card for the hosting account I setup for their site. On the flip-side, I've found it difficult to have non-technical clients order the correct hosting since they usually don't know what they need, and it's not an ideal solution to be asking them for their credit card information so that I can place the order myself.

An alternate solution is to order the hosting myself, then transfer everything over to their name and credit card ... but that still feels like a less than elegant solution to what must be a very common problem .... and even with that solution, I've experienced cases where the hosting company still charges my card despite telling me they had switched everything to the client's name.

Without hosting these sites in your own accounts, how do you guys go about getting the hosting-angle of thigs setup for clients in these types of scenarios?
do you also block ads that pertain to other religions? Or are you a sectarian opposer of Scientology? :)
the overhead of the interpreted language is going to slow things down as compared to something compiled down to the metal

Welcome to the Java vs. C debate, previously the C vs. assembler debate, previously the assembler versus hand-coding machine code debate. Computers these days, even netbooks, are fast. Very, very breathtakingly fast.

There has also been a significant amount of work done in VMs, much related to Java, which has delivered tremendous performance boosts to interpreted languages. Google has a very talented VM team working on Chrome's JS execution engine (SpiderMonkey or something, can't remember off the top of my head).

But really, after you get past Wolfenstein done in Javascript (http://www.nihilogic.dk/labs/wolf/ ) how more does the typical user actually need? After that it isn't a matter of CPU cycles, its the programmers coming up with non-painful ways to develop software to use them.
Ugh!

I can't imagine a worse market for a small starup than consumer electronics. Margins are tiny, getting distribution is insanely hard and you need incredible amounts of cash to start up. And if your product is popular, it's a matter of weeks before the guy overseas building it for you copies your design and sells it himself for 1/5 the price.

Far better to find a small industrial niche and enter it with a simple product the "big guys" won't bother with. You can sell directly to your users, your margins can be much greater, with smaller volumes you can literally build the hardware in your basement and your investment is minimal.

My sales are low (less than $10,000 last year), but by targetting industry, I get >$100 for essentially the same product that is marketed to hobbyists for $20.
Jeff Atwood wants a pile of tests without understanding -- Rich Hickey wants total understanding without tests... Where is the middle ground?
Most of the anti-Scientology crusade is motivated by other sects who simply don't like competition. It's pretty ironic that they make fun of Zenu, etc., when their own beliefs do no better in the absurdity department!
But the web is worldwide, how many readers of BBC news are from outside the UK? And not every UK citizen has to purchase a license.

They've recently been trying to encourage everyone to make the switch to digitial TVs. I'm sure it's a lot easier to get people to upgrade their browser than buy a new television.
Pure CSS Timeline
Why bother ? Seriously, digg is just about the worst place to promote anything serious.

You're much better of finding niche sites that are really looking for your stuff than to try to make the homepage on a site that everybody and their little brother is trying to game.
Does Yahoo! not have a robots.txt file?

http://yahoo.com/robots.txt
Sorry, the page you requested was not found.
Any Hint for 28?
"rock star" annoys the hell out of me
Just under "Assuming the demo won't end up in production"
As long as Google doesn't do anything to limit my access to competitors or otherwise punish me for opting out of a Google service then I am not concerned at all.
Why don't you give your customers both the options? If you host and manage charge them a little more than what the hosting company takes in yearly fee, for maintaining it and don't order it using your credit card. If they rather buy hosting and manage it on their it is still good for you since you don't have to spend time on maintenance.
When I browse the comments of people I follow, sometimes I find totally great discussions that I missed as I was doing something else and didn't check HN for 12 hours. So I wish I could browse front pages by date. Everything that hit the front page and with over 5 points should be listed for each day. I used to run a crude cron job that did this. I let it die. May be I should set it up again.
The danger is and always has been centralized control (and not just in software). No one should own the web OS — the web is ours.

Stallman & Co. foresaw this (at least) a decade ago. He's right to be worried. The real issue is: what are rights in the digital age? Who has control of what?

I might not back everything he's done. And he sometimes dismisses technical issues as trivial over political ones unnecessarily. But he is having the conversation at the right level of abstraction.

We'll keep facing the pitfalls of centralized power until we collectively decide to kill that beast permanently.
The BBC has a specific mandate to the British people. If they are not serving them then they are not doing their job.
The GP's point is that the default engine, and hence the one used by probably 90+% of people using MySQL doesn't support FKs and other "standard" data integrity features that you wouldn't even know to ask about, since every other major db supports them by default.

Plus if you try to create an FK on a myisam backed table it happily runs the SQL, without errors, and you think you have a working FK.
I have a single box for 'friends', if they can support it themselves they're welcome to use it, if it costs me too much time or if they do something commercial I ask them to take it to a party they pay for that.

Another thing I did was to set up a free hosting environment using 'drupal' in order to get them to be as self-supporting as possible.

I understand that you're in the business of building the sites themselves, maybe you could partner with a company that does hosting and get a referral fee ?
MySQL may or may not quietly ignore transactions and foreign keys and invalid values (substituting incorrect values that happen to be valid), depending on how it's configured, and the defaults are mostly wrong (unsafe). And as far as I know there is still no option for "make my transaction fail if I try to use a table that doesn't support transactions".
BS. There are never enough cycles.

First, SpiderMonkey is the next-gen JS engine for FireFox. V8 is the Google JS engine.

Second, Flash Player 10 is as good or better than any JS engine (with the possible exception of V8), and many Flash games bog on my netbook.

Just one example, but, as more capable web apps come online, the bar will rise, and more cycles will be called for.

You're right that this is similar to the Java vs. C (or C++) debate. And, as with that debate, the answer is that, for many application domains, native code has a significant performance advantage.
JQuery plugin, Converts tables to charts & graphs using the HTML 5
I am less a fan of "top N _whatevers_ done by _whomever_" lists--seems like an outline looking for content.

But he does link to the "egoless programming". I remember when that kind of chatter came out--probably concurrent with "The Psychology of Computer Programming". I remember thinking then, and still wondering, why there aren't similar essays about "egoless management" or "Becoming an Egoless Executive".

Just wondering.

And on that topic, I think that separating criticism of the work from the criticism of the programmer/author/poet is a dicey thing indeed. I wonder if doing so is just pretending.
> The growing dominance of Ubuntu (at least on the desktop, the server room seems to have been won by Red Hat)

Not my server room, for certain. Debian is doing very nicely there.

Desktop yes (along with Win XP and OS X), but I could go to Debian there, if I wanted to.
You mean having proper tests is better than having just a few simple ones? Groundbreaking.
the assertion that eating more meat reduces heart disease is absurd and you've shown nothing to back it up.
Be that as it may, the objective thing to do is still to report differences between voting populations based upon race and sex, because those differences do actually exist.
According to Robert Scoble, this may be a preemtive strike by Google since Microsoft has something to announce on Monday.

http://ff.im/4WvjM
Or if you have a server that is very important you can take steps to mitigate the problem until the issue is resolved. In that case I would make it so that the ssh is only accessible behind a firewall on the local network. If it is a front facing server with no backend network I would change the open port(though this should be done already) and/or enable port knocking. You could also set iptables to only allow access from your remote network.
Wow. This whole article is intensely fascinating.

It never ceases to amaze me how we can be so certain that we have the best of something (Neural networks) for a particular job (simulating neural activity) and then something completely different comes along and blows it away (Memristors).

These are the sorts of things that give me hope for our future...
On communication...

I'm not so sure that programmers are bad communicators, as much as they just don't communicate in the same way those they're communicating with do.

I know that I have absolutely NO problem whatsoever communicating abstract and/or complex technical concepts to and with my my peer group; I also have a hell of a time trying to figure out what some of my users are trying to tell me.

I think too many people are quick to jump on the

"Programmers (or just tech people in general) are JERKS! They're unhelpful and they always push back! They're arrogant!"

While these traits might describe some programmers. They also describe some accountants, and some architects, and some mechanics, and some janitors, and some widget makers.

It's frustrating sometimes that the burden falls on the programmer (or tech) to try and find a metaphor that the user understands, rather than the user trying to have a basic understanding of their computer.

I'm currently working on a project that involves processing some really big datasets (okay, probably not that big for some people around here...but bear with me..). It starts as some text files with ~260 million rows of data. We're just in the beginning/test/planning phase, and this will eventually grow to >1 billion. People (non-tech) people in our group keep INSISTING that we use this database engine, or THIS hardware configuration (raid 0...which as already failed). They refuse to listen to those of us that know what we're doing. They insist that all of this data should live in one huge table (rather than our suggestion of either scaling it our horizontally, or using a directory tree and supplementing it with an index that lives in a database).

Does this mean that we're bad communicators? I think not. I think that there is SOME burden to make sure that everyone understands everything that falls on us, but certainly not all of it. We need to be met halfway.

The same goes for the ego. Do I have a huge ego? No, but I know for 100% certain that I'm more knowledgeable about these things than some of my colleagues. I also know that I am no expert on it. I'm open to suggestions, just not those that aren't based in any sort of basic understanding.
What's in a Cloud Anyway?
I think the turnover rate is fine.
Biology was the first singularity. Something sophisticated enough to reproduce itself, and then improve itself.
Is this any different than someone else taking Ubuntu/Firefox and calling that the Firefox OS? Chrome isn't an operating system, linux is. This is a distribution and pre-installed browser. How is this anything different that what we currently have in the netbook market.

The real player in the future of netbooks is very likely Apple, not Google, because any netbook running OSX will also be able to not only run all the usual OSX apps but Chrome too...
I'd bet 90%+ of companies using MySQL for anything serious are using InnoDB.
I'd like to see some filtering so that I can clear out posts I've seen, or not show anything from particular domains.
Second Life data offers window into how trends spread
I'm not in favor of these devices, but if I was, I'd counter that argument by suggesting they be tuned to 5mph over the posted speed limit, and allow a burst of ungoverned speed up to one minute if the accelerator is fully depressed.
Last year's news, but still has to sink in. Read it, but beware exaggerations like "electronics had no rigorous mathematical foundation", which would set quite a few physicists and engineers spinning in their graves.

What Leon Chua rightly noted, and described, was a missing fourth passive electrical (not electronic) two-terminal component. The difference is that electronic is usually associated with so-called active devices. Those have three or more terminals (e.g. vacuum valves or semiconductor transistors), and the third terminal controls the electron flow between the others.

Given enough active devices, you can mock up practically anything. For example, with capacitors and transistors (and a power supply), you can make an imitation inductor - with a limited range, but good enough for an integrated circuit when the real thing was hard to build.

The great novelty with memristors is finding a real physical basis to provide the desired behavior in a simple, manufacturable two-terminal device.

P.S. The A.I./neural-network angle seems to originate with the device's creator (Stan Williams). With all due respect, I doubt that it will have all that much impact from that side.
The explanation of the inductive thought process behind the conclusion that such a device 'should' exist is fascinating.
An Apprentice of Your Very Own
I'll rather have some fearmongering (if you really want to call it that, there's another better term though "devil's advocate") from people to have a certain balance of opinion rather than just have people who go gaga over every google/apple announcement. I dislike MS as much as the next guy but those are genuine concerns.
Note, his comment is not like "sky is falling" but more like "beware, the sky may fall if we're not careful". I'll rather be cautious then stick my head in sand with my behind exposed.
Joint Pain Treatment Info - jointpaintreatmentinfo.com - Yahoo Buzz
tough to be you when you're trying to get to hospital with a wounded person and the governor kicks in.

There is no substitute for human judgment. If you can't play by the rules you should lose your license, everybody else should be in full control of their cars and be held fully responsible in case they abuse their power.

The only way I'd have peace with this is if it came with an 'override' button and all I'd have to do is give a valid explanation for the use of it (or pay a hefty fine).
Sounds to me like the whole Perl thing all over again where the BBC weren't happy with the standard version so decided to write their own - which meant they could't patch it with standard Perl.

Either that or some department needed to justify their budget or be cut. Typical BBC bureaucracy and a waste of us licence payers money.
The section on that page titled "How about contributing to a library?" is especially interesting.

> Perhaps we could have contributed code to an existing library to add support for the older browsers our users had? Many of the libraries had previously supported some of our "problem" browsers, and actively chosen to drop that support.

That's correct - jQuery use to have support for IE 5.5 and Safari 1.3 but support for both were dropped after 1) No significant number of users supported either of those browsers and 2) There were no longer any extra resources to dedicate to supporting them.

> We felt it was unlikely they would be enthused about bringing back old browsers they were probably glad to see the back of!

There would've only been one way to find out: To ask! The BBC was a big user of jQuery back in 2007 and we would've bent over backwards to make sure everyone was happy - especially if they were (apparently) willing to contribute code/patches to help solve existing problems.

Unfortunately we didn't find out until the Glow efforts had already been started - it's just water under the bridge at this point.

It's ok though. The BBC is happy with their set up (which is really all that any organization should look for in a library) and we've all learned a lot since then. C'est la vie.
I'm less concerned about jQuery's thunder and more concerned about the BBC's use of public money to fund developers' vanity projects.

How is the time and cost which of building and maintaining Glow outweighed by the level of page degradation that Safari 1.3 and other tiny niche users would have experienced (where it could not be mitigated by other page design considerations) using, for example, jQuery?
Well Im more talking about situations like, say, at a bus stop.

My comments aren't from personal experience but observation of such conversations. Often the initiator is very charismatic - and usually fails to notice the discomfort of the other person. A bus stop (sticking with this example) is not somewhere you expect to be talked to - so it comes as a surprise; and the majority of people don't recover quick enough from surprise to their "head" to overrule and "gut" reaction (I find this sort of thing fascinating btw).

It's a sub-concious "gut" reaction with it's roots in the "don't talk to strangers" thing we are ingrained with as children.

You make a great point about how one should approach a meeting though (and I wholly agree with it) - in my point I never made a distinction between that and what I was trying to analyse :)
Why isn't everyone using AdBlock? Isn't this pretty standard these days? I haven't seen a web ad for a long while and since I don't have TV the only ads I see are in Hulu and on the street.
Memristor minds: The future of artificial intelligence
800TFLOPS Multicore IC for Realtime Ray Tracing
also, google had no problem crawling groups when it was still called dejanews.
> don't mind being slightly inflammatory in saying that anybody with a little _wisdom_ treats all these corporations with suspicion. And you'd be a fool not to.

Im 100% in agreement with that statement.

But there is a vast difference between being careful/suspicious/analytical and saying "they probably sell my data". For the latter I want to see proof - otherwise I feel set against the idea because it smacks of anti-corporation fear.
Serious abuse of the moderation system in this thread, this is not a poll, it is a discussion, if you don't agree with somebody say why, don't mod down.
Suggest a hosting provider / plan for your clients. In some cases you may even insist on certain hosting or charge more for dealing with horrible hosting. If a potential client were to find purchasing a hosting plan based on my suggestions too challenging, then I'm not sure I would want to work with that client for a website.

DO NOT get into providing hosting for your clients. It's not worth it. It's great if you are making decent money from your clients in monthly hosting fees... and then something blows up and your client needs hosting support when you are in the middle of some other project with a short deadline. Sure, you can get whitelabel support but the client will still be beating down your door for help.

Hosting providers make a tiny profit on each client and only break into the black by having huge numbers of paying accounts. That's not a business model you want to be messing with. Instead, leave the hosting to the people who are best at it. Offering some sort of "maintenance" option is fine though.
Well, if you have total understanding you probably don't need tests, but most of us (Knuth excepted, apparently) don't get to that level.

So, the middle ground is: understand as much as you can, test as much as you have to.
Do not miss the third or so link:

http://diveintomark.org/archives/2009/07/06/this-is-the-hous...

Funny post, and good followup comments.
They provide pop3 access that lets you download all 18000 of those emails. You can then do whatever you want with them. Certainly set up your own webmail system on a server, say.

Oh store them locally in mail-client-of-your-choice. Or import them into any other webmail service that supports importing from pop3 (none come to mind, but it would be fairly trivial to implement.)