skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The "thread dump" feature should be an absolute requirement for any language runtime environment. Java has perfected this with the SIGQUIT signal. Thread dumps give you readable stacks of all threads with a simple user command (kill -3 on Linux/Unix, although a bit more difficult on Windows), without having to install symbol files, install additional software, run "scary" commands (for end users), etc.

This is a textbook example of taking a few thread dumps, a few minutes apart, immediately showing what is going on. IBM has one of these as their Performance or Hang "MustGather" script:

http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21115785...

.NET thread dumps suck -- you have to use adplus to attach and they're not easy to read. Native programs (e.g. C/C++) work better with symbols and are just too scary for end users. DTrace on Solaris with Ruby/Python/PHP extensions is nice, but too cumbersome to install, and again too scary for end users.

I'm not aware of built-in thread dumps-by-signal in other non-Java languages (please note in a comment if there is), but this feature is so basic and needs to be baked in to every runtime environment and easy enough for end users to use.

Firefox, being a native program, is in a bad problem determination position here and the haphazard nature of the problem determination process in the forum and bug report shows that. I suggest Firefox create something like IBM's MustGather scripts (starting with a performance one such as IBM's hang MustGather -- http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21115785 [click "Show Details" for the steps]). A hang MustGather should go through the process of installing symbol files, getting the thread stacks, submitting the information, etc. This will allow users to at least feel like they can do something valuable to help the developers fix the problem.
I wonder how well their SQL scaled?

What? Too soon? ;)
That is particularly arbitrary considering how many HBS grads were discovered to have been involved in finance scams recently.
I'd liken it more to a hot dog eating competition for hackers.
Totally agree, and it's a pity he only talks about London. Up here in Edinburgh we have http://www.techmeetup.co.uk/ held within the local Uni, but all are invited and there are some clever folks there.

This meet used to be packed with techies and social media types, but recently the latter have seemed to tailed off - a few are left but seem to have a few genuinely good ideas.

I have noticed however the angel investor types aren't showing up as much but certainly there also seems to be plenty innovation funding going around within the Uni and organisations like NESTA, 4IP and EPIS.
Slashdot thread: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/03/08/2341213&tid=...
"Instead of students studying Literature, Art, History, and Science they would be going through the motions of a scholar while occupying their minds with things that formerly had been learned at a desk as an apprentice in a dreary Victorian counting house."

Wow, that may be the best description of the concerns of the MBA I've ever read.

I have my MBA and, to this day, I still don't know how I feel about it. Sure, it covered a lot of valuable theory and it's opened doors, but then again I often wonder if the time would have been better spent in industry, honing my skills in the trenches.

The #1 quote I remember from one of my professors, "A degree in business is a degree in nothing."
The ratio of books on my wish list to books available for Kindle is about 10:1. If this is typical, perhaps Bezos simply doesn't want to offer a feature that could only serve to get people frustrated.
There is no such thing as "shortages". There may not be enough of something at a price YOU are willing to pay, but that doesn't make it a shortage.
Why Switch to Yahoo Search?
Scala Lifting Off
Article definitely did not live up to its title. Author definitely got some eyeballs though....and eyeballs == money?
What do you get when you cross Excel and Photoshop?
I think we fundamentally agree, but we've been a bit loose with terminology along the way, and have been arguing with misreadings of each others' points.

Have a nice weekend.
The students were denied admission to Harvard. MIT came up because the author supervised MIT students creating an application with similar requirements.
Oh, I see I think I misunderstood your question. HN has points, and it's more of a two way "discussion." Maybe you should, rather than have comments have discussions (I know this is probably the same thing given a different name)

As for the second problem, I guess (personally) I see a huge textbox where you ask for my name, email and an optional website, and I just don't feel motivated. I think you could have a small, anonymous comment spot that felt more like a tweet rather than a post.

Oh and as an aside, I didn't realize that you had the comment overlay button when I viewed a site. Maybe add some words to the icon to make it OBVIOUS for unobservant people like me?
Bounce it where? The return address is always fake and sometimes it's that of an innocent bystander.
I wonder how ApplyYourself found out which students took a peek? Were they dumb enough not to implement access at the Gatekeeper level but smart enough to some how keep a track, if someone did?
Note, this article is from March 2005.
With redundancy, basically. But there's not much "downtime" with mail servers, it's not like web servers where they're always being updated with the latest code and the app server needs restarting. Any admin worth his salt should be able to guarantee very good uptime (barring HW/power/network failure) for mail under normal/medium load conditions; high load has its own challenges but that's a separate issue. Of course, real 100% uptime means multiple machines at multiple sites, cue standard cost/benefit analysis.

And it's also important to bear in mind that it's an SMTP server; unless it's actually your users trying to connect directly it will be other mail servers talking to it. If you're down for a while, they will queue at their end and retry periodically. You'd have to be down for days to lose mail, although your users might get warning notices, which might look unprofessional.

One thing you could do to get the benefit of having your own server, while keeping the gmail redundancy, is simply set gmail to forward all those messages to you. If you went down, they'd just build up until you were back up, and that way you could avoid users ever getting those embarrassing failure notices.

I think Lamson looks awesome, btw. I started an SMTP server in Ruby before but gave up in horror when I started having to actually read those hideous RFCs. Shaw certainly has a knack for getting the dirty work done. A real mail server is a horrible job to write. He should be given a govt grant or something to do this shit.

(edited to sound less like an asshole, unfortunately not before OP had replied .. sorry >_<)
Well perhaps I phrased it poorly.

They get resolved in order as you explained, but
en from en.google.com will only be resolved at Google's host DNS.

I defacto own any weird combo of third, forth, etc order domains that live under my registered second level domain.

So there is no way to do as you suggest in your original post with out substantially altering the DNS system by inserting one more layer into the public side.

I could rent ars.danthewelder.com to you, but I don't think that's what you really meant in your original post.
The title was misleading, but what he talked about was interesting anyway. In this case, eyeballs don't equal money. This is a Harvard professor's blog with no ads.
In my experience it's much less than it used to be--people sharing their AIM screen names, for instance, have almost universally stopped doing so, and physical addresses have disappeared too. Most people even lie about their relationship status.
Right- The hard part in trying to replicate it is that I don't know the launchly community, so I don't have any particular incentive to help them.

I don't mean it coldly at all.. It's part of the whole idea of a monkeysphere- I want to help my friends because I like them, and we are close. When a blog writer launches a site, like Stack Overflow it is a step away from that- They're people I know, at least through their writing, but aren't friends with directly.

Hacker News is one step further- They're people I'm aware of, I read their comments, and I like their work for the most part. I want to help them collectively, even If I don't know the person individually.

Launchly.. Is just a bunch of folk. I don't really know them, so I don't have any reason to help write reviews for them.

It like Babysitting- I would be happy to watch my nephew for a few hours, but I'm not going to volunteer my time to a daycare.
"To be clear, these are real ads that were served on the internet."

And they were served by Google, I saw them a lot of TechCrunch.
Pets-only airline takes flight
Some victims deserve blame. It's the rare con job that plays on our virtues and wisdom rather than our stupidity and baser desires.
The problem is that the overwhelming majority of spam has a false return address, and the technologies to verify that mail came from the server it claims aren't yet widely enough used to be reliable. The bounces create an extremely large amount of traffic for servers unrelated to the spammers.

Besides, many servers do behave in the way you specify. Before I had the sense to disable catch-all email addresses on a few domains I owned, they were all being flooded with bounced spam, much of which my spam filters didn't catch.

Blah. Everything's a mess.
Discrete Mathematics courses
It baffles me that eBay is trying to kill its own core competency: connecting people with unusual stuff to sell with people who have unusual things that they want. Auction fees are ludicrously high, and the process is increasingly hostile (and expensive) to small time sellers.

I understand that they want to expand their market into new goods, but given that they have vast competition in that area, why hurt the revenue stream that they had a virtual lock on?
It's not about looks, but about behavior.

Fun Fact: In Safari since version 3, the <input> elements aren't actually native widgets anymore, as NSButton et. al. couldn't support a bunch of the CSS attributes. They are now rigorous behavior-level reimplementations!

A widget that looks native but behaves differently is terrible! At least when it looks alien you don't expect it to behave natively.
It would also prevent it from fitting into the normal key machining tools, meaning that you couldn't just take a blank to a locksmith and ask them to make you a copy of the key.
It seems probable that they just looked at the BusinessWeek forums on which the exploit was posted, and denied the applicants who they saw discussing it.
It probably doesn't hurt that they're also getting PR as a "case study of how to build a hit iPhone game" to keep interest up among those of us who, like me, hadn't heard of them before.
If thats the case, its very unreliable. Denying admission based on a post on a forum...gotta love the digital age.
I worked at Amazon until very recently. Some thoughts on the article:

"Amazon — where workers famously had desks made of wooden doors nailed to two-by-fours in the company’s earlier, money-losing days — remans in some ways as cheap as ever"

Everywhere I went, Amazon still used 'door desks' which are basically doors with legs. They are sturdy, come in various sizes, and are assembled and disassembled easily. There's an award named after them (the "Door Desk Award") that Amazon hands out fairly often, and there's a competition to see how quickly Amazon people can assemble one of them from parts (Jeff Bezos is pretty quick, IIRC).

"Amazon’s frugal ways reflect “more their culture than the immediate economic conditions.”"

Wherever you go, people will casually mention that Amazon "tries to be frugal." The last time I heard this, it was during an office move where I did a lot of the moving myself (instead of relying on the facility staff to do it) after an executive assistant casually mentioned that "we value frugality" so I figured that staff may be put to better use elsewhere. I've been around VPs and never got the impression that they felt comfortable splashing out a lot of cash unless there was a clear need to do so. This culture extends to the very top.

"the company’s relatively modest record of charitable giving has drawn some unfavorable reviews"

Amazon became profitable after many unprofitable years not that long ago (2002). It's probably easier to give a lot to charity if you've been making billions in profits year after year.
Here you go. You can keep the patent. :)

http://imgur.com/nvohH.jpg
How to store it: don't.

Instead, reprocess it to new fuel and burn it in nuclear reactors again. Sticking "nuclear waste" into Yucca Mountain is like refusing to burn logs in a fireplace because they've been slightly charred on the edges.
It's kinda funny to follow what's going on with Tagged.

About 2 years ago I had just accepted an offer with Scribd, but already had an interview set up with Tagged, so I decided to go to the interview just for the experience. I had initially declined the Tagged interview after looking at their site (asking myself "Would I ever use this?" and the answer was "Hell no"), but Greg Tseng called me and convinced me to change my mind. Man, that guy can talk - he's very smart and very persuasive. He told me about how they were already very profitable and about his team's expertise with "viral marketing" <cough>. So I decided to go and see what it was like.

I arrived at the interview in a lovely loft office downtown SF and met with the engineers who asked me to solve some low level complex computer science brain teasers. Having spent all of my previous 8 years building web systems for major universities and billion dollar companies and no time practicing computer science brain teasers, I failed pretty miserably ;)

Anyway, it obviously wasn't going to be a match, but it was an interesting life experience nonetheless. Fortunately working at Scribd was great - super great team and really interesting problems to solve.
guys amazing job. i really like it. they are always naysayers. same people mocked at Tonido before opera unite come into the picture. Internet is big place. You will get your share.
500 clicks for a landing page costs pennies
title = troll, rtfa
Summary: buy a book. Flagged...
It's not much of a trick and it certainly isn't very complex.

fetchmailrc:

poll pop.gmail.com with
proto pop3
port 995
user "user@mydomain.com"
password "pa$$w0rd"
no rewrite
ssl
mda "procmail -f %F"

procmailrc:

LOGFILE=$HOME/log/procmail.log

# Process the mail and let the application do its own logging.
:0
| python2.5 $HOME/procmail.py

# Alert the admins of any failures and keep a copy of the failed message.
:0 c
| python2.5 $HOME/alertfailure.py

Then start fetchmail to run every 10 seconds or so:

fetchmail -d 10
Keeping track of what URLs people are hitting is trivial on any application server.
Are You an Inventor or an Entrepreneur?
Hacking :: stuff that a 7-year-old could do

Wow, Python makes it that easy! ( just a quick laugh )
Awesome, and they even exposed in the UI rather than burying it in about:config.

Their arrogance of baking into the browser what is essentially a bundled extension was ridiculously annoying. My favorite added misfeature: it blacklists URLs with the 'about' protocol handler.

I had been disabling / detuning it piecemeal with extensions + settings to make it less obnoxious. I've come to like most of the completion features most of the time, but the visual presentation and interactive behavior is just fucking awful.

At least it's not as bad as Epiphany: it sorts only in direct chronological order (oldest first!), and in true GNOME style is not customizable in any way. Why the fuck would you ever want that?
Auction fees are ludicrously high, and the process is increasingly hostile (and expensive) to small time sellers.

Indeed. Isn't it ironic that eBay used to be a community of people (many of which were buying and selling at the same time) and just as social media started ascending, eBay moved in exactly the opposite direction - towards a warehouse model that pissed off the little people who were selling things to clear out their attics.

I am so annoyed at them that I have literally given stuff away rather than sell it on eBay. Right now as a retail site, they are a dead man walking, no matter what their uniques and cash-flow is. I can't see Ebay lasting another 3 years in its current model.

On the plus site, etsy.com seems to have done a great job picking at least one niche of the old eBay market (handmade goods).
Yah, the feedback is threaded for each site just like HN posts are so it is a discussion back and forth between site owners and those that give feedback. You can also vote the comments up (with the Like link) similar to the points on HN but it's probably not as obvious.

The comment system currently uses Disqus because many people already have an account with them so they don't need another one on launchly. That form you mentioned is their version of an anonymous comment but maybe it is too invasive with the name/email/website stuff? I've been considering ditching Disqus but they bring a lot to the table... I will make the comment overlay button more obvious, thanks.
In an age when many employers seem happy to deny employment based on social networking profile posts and pictures, I suggest that it might teach them an important lesson about the presence of foolish people in positions of power.
> "A part of being awesome is being honest. If you don’t like something, you can say so, just don’t be rude about it."

mos def. i wish more developers, in particular, took the attitude that we're all learning and improving. at best we can each enable and help one another; at minimum we can respect different perspectives.

i find so many tech talks, especially from the insecure startup crowd, are initially aggressive and secretive. it makes me uncomfortable, even as i struggle with my own insecurities and attempts to be gentler and less defensive or snobby.

after a little more time talking with someone we almost always find common ground and lose our egos in the excitement of the actual content and information exchange. that's good. it's hard to get that personableness on the internet, tho. be honest, but not rude +1
Odd choice for the headline. I think the much more choice quote from Greenspun is this:

All the smart young Americans have gone to law, business, and medical school. Companies don’t like to hire old people (> 30 years) to write computer programs because it saddens them to see old folks doing something so degrading.

(he's attributing this mentality to the HBS lot)

I'm seeing this a lot now that I've gotten into development in the financial industry.

I think for some people developers will always be inseparably tied to the stereotypical unkempt and petulant tech-support guy who troubleshoots Windows boxes all day.

It's not a particularly well-respected profession unless you're doing the start-up thing in which case you're only respected because of the business aspect (and your potential to become a millionaire by 30), not the cool/hard things you may doing on the technology side.
Thanks for the additional explanation! I see what you mean and the babysitting analogy is pretty good haha. So what brings you into a community? You didn't know people at HN when you started I assume...

Maybe not requiring local launchly accounts (by using Disqus for comments) is actually going to work against me on the community building side of things?
I believe you would be much better off with a DSL that mapped to a set of fast operations on a k/v store. SQL databases are heavily heavily optimized, and far more performant than k/v stores for most non-trivial queries. k/v stores don't somehow give magical performance. What they do is limit you to a small set of primitives that helps with scalability and maps more naturally for applications that are document-oriented and don't slice and dice data as much.
The big three IMNSHO are OS Design, Compiler Design, and Computer Graphics, in that order of precedence.

OS Design teaches you about trade-offs. In many academic CS courses, the answers are cut-and-dried: here's how you write a binary search, here's how you implement a hashtable, etc. In OS design, every decision has a cost, because you have to balance time spent in the kernel vs. memory cost vs. speed of user programs, and the user programs will often have wildly different usage patterns. Should you copy-on-write pages? Which scheduling algorithm should you use? There are no right answers to these questions, but there're options, there are costs, there're benefits, and these depend a lot on how your OS gets used. Much like real software.

It'll also help you understand how to write performant programs, eg. if you know that the OS uses spare memory to cache file buffers but will page out memory (at the cost of millions of CPU cycles) if physical RAM is exceeded, you might look differently on rolling your own caching layer for file contents. I'm talking to you, Squid folks. ;-)

Compiler design is essential if you want to learn how to write code that writes code, which is essential if you don't want your job to be outsourced. It teaches you about complex data structures and how they're transformed into other complex data structures, which is useful for a lot more than just general-purpose programming languages. Chances are, you'll end up writing a "little language" - even if it's just the configuration system for a large product - at some point in your career, and you're stuck with a bunch of ad-hoc hacks if you've never taken compilers.

Computer graphics I included partially because it's cool and partially because it's one of the most mathematical courses you can take in college. You learn about fast matrix transformations, computational geometry, derivatives, and how to implement abstract mathematical operations on a computer. This ends up being useful in a lot of high-paying subfields (eg. finance, search, data-mining, operations research) and a few relatively low-paying ones (eg. computer games).

Honorable mentions: AI, theory of computation, concurrency, crypto. These will probably not be directly useful in your job (except concurrency, but you can pick up a lot of the important ideas of that on your own), but they're very cool and nifty to know.
You can add Kindle books to your wishlist with the universal wishlist bookmarklet: http://www.amazon.com/wishlist/universal
The side bar pretty much said as much:

"RAND researchers... recommended a permanent commitment to monitoring the USA's science and technology performance, but said the slow growth of U.S.-born technical workers "will change when the earnings and attractiveness of S&E (science and engineering) careers improve."
You'd need to use NX memory for everything, and not allow any binaries that contain interpreters to have access to user or network data.

You couldn't have anything resembling a shell!
Oops, sorry, I actually removed that bit since I thought I sounded like a douchebag. Serves me right for using "edit" to change my "drafts".

Thanks for the explanation, that's simpler than I imagined. But you had said IMAP, which is way more fiddly than pop3, since you'd be holding open connections and all that stuff, so I was envisaging having to run long-running processes, etc, which can be a headache in itself. Is gmail really happy with you polling a POP server every 10 seconds all day every day?
Well, there are a lot of people who use Tomboy and F-Spot. I don't know whether Mono is less clunky than the JVM in practice.