skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Look at all that comment spam. How lovely.
I do my own hosting, but I agree with this completely. Downtime at any scale is inevitable, but with Google's massive infrastructure you're far better off.
I agree. Mr LaRusso confirmed so himself. The current ill-conceived system deserves more attention than Jobs.
I thought people would resent that as shameless self-promotion. Is it really acceptable to post my own blog articles, if they're relevant? Or should I let other people post them (rudimentary peer-review?).
I'm so tired of reading about web servers/services going down.
Great analogy. I would rather have all the big Brains at Google working to solve the problem instead of my puny brain working trying to restart my server
At least their communication is good: http://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine-downtime-not...
Just because you weren't interested in those subjects doesn't mean you can't become interested in them. There are already enough external motivators, such as being forced to be on time and in class or face detention and I believe even eventually jail time.

Basically, the students are already forced to be there.

Stop worrying about how everyone is measuring up against each other and the rest of the world. If you leave out the measuring stick and just focus on teaching and learning, yes there will be people who still don't learn but, imo, its an overall win and not by a small margin.
As usual, Jeff mixes different concepts, does some hand-waving and comes to a stunningly weird conclusion. What Microsoft did with artificial memory limitation is ridiculous, unless someone comes up to offer a reasonable technical explanation. However, I find it equally ridiculous to jump from there to a conclusion that open source is better because it does no market segmentation.

Let's keep one thing clear, if you're not selling your product then you won't do any market segmentation for it. You might, however, do market segmentation when it comes to offering support for that product. Does that make you as evil as Microsoft? Are 37 Signals evil because they offer different plans whose prices probably don't scale linearly with the costs behind them (in other words, they don't get the same profit across plans)?

Of course, Jeff didn't actually use the word "evil", but the implication of moral inferiority is almost palpable. Open source has many advantages (and disadvantages, too), but not segmenting the market is not one of those; rather, it's a consequence of not selling the software itself.
Gatehouse settlement with NYTimes
Gatehouse Media doesn't want NYTimes linking to it. Isn't linking to each other what the web is all about?
Maybe the awesome foundation will give Jeff an awesome grant to upgrade his windows server to awesome edition. Isn't it an awesome day on HN?
It's pretty difficult to steal something that the medical industry doesn't consider you to own. At best he stole the medical industries' liver as they seem to have the most rights to organs.
The cloud is just an enormous SPOF. I like having my own kit somewhere in the loop if only to throw a proper error message.
hmm... My appengine site is running just fine

Update: Actually, my app is in the "read only mode" they described... the moment I tried to update anything it went to hell :)
>This decoupling is likely to cause a decrease in the overall amount of work put in by the students.

I'm American but I live in a post-Communist country, and what I've seen in terms of the generations who have had their ambition destroyed is heart-rending. Yet I feel I'm seeing the same in the U.S. as these newer generations have their ambitions stoked and their work ethic demolished.

Just this morning I went to Disney.com with my 3-year-old and there was a "kite-flying" game. All you had to do was hit the enter key to make the kite do tricks. And the voice over was: "You're amazing!", "You're very good at kite tricks." and "I've never seen such incredible tricks." She was hitting the enter key randomly.

And I thought, "This is so American," and I turned it off. I want her to know that she is talented, but that if she wants to be good at anything she'll have to work her ass off. The cure for the low-self-esteem disease is not mindless, superfluous praise; it's recognizing each step in the journey and encouraging the next one.
> This is worse than the 8-hr outage of S3 sometime ago

I don't think so. Javascript files hosted os s3 would hang the page loading and without css/images the app would be useless too.
My friend was telling me there was a Jean Baudrillard book with that same idea, but I don't remember what it was called.
Thanks. I am somewhat familiar with those systems, so I was mostly curious about how the Chyrp is unique (from those other mentioned).
You are of course correct, I have been working in a multi-threaded environment for long enough to have let that slip my mind.
XHTML 2 Working Group Expected to Stop Work End of 2009
1) Not all those are official editions.
2) None have features deliberately turned off.
3) Most , if not all, differ only in what optional components are installed by default, If you change your mind you can simply add whatever your missing - you can install Ubuntu, then add the bits that make it Kubuntu, then add Xubuntu etc.
A lot of sites get 99.99% uptime easily. It's not difficult when you know what you're doing and have plenty redundancy. When you depend on any cloud stuff you can't do any kind of graceful degradation. Google goes down, you go down. Google goes bankrupt, you go bankrupt.

Considering how cheap dedicated servers are moving a service to the cloud makes little sense (exceptions notwithstanding).
Like StreetFighter, without the action.
I feel there are three other value-reward systems in effect:

1) If I post links that I think people will find interesting, they will feel more inclined to share links they feel interesting: most of us have an innate sense of quid pro quo.

2) If I post links and they are voted up, others will recognize that as an interesting subject and post other links on the same subject, providing me with information I wouldn't see otherwise

3) If I post a link, people will comment on the story and provide valuable insights/feedback, helping me to determine the value of the link.
Unlocked: the secrets of schizophrenia
Encrypting the Internet
completely ignoring the side issues, I think its a shame that we will apparently never be able to use the thousands of xml tools on html sites.

goes off to write a html parser for my favourite language(its not ruby or python)
For someone who started computing on his father's Osborne 1, hearing people casually mention that they upgraded their server to 48GB induces something like vertigo.

A 768,000 fold increase in main memory. Christ we've come a long way.
Judge to reverse conviction in MySpace hoax
Summary: No.
Criticism for Nashville on lips of techie leaving town
Love it. The only thing I wish is that completed tasks would be shown somewhere in strike-through. Half the fun of using a to-do list is basking in the feeling of accomplishment when tasks are complete.
But didn't his values from his earlier stint kind of set the culture?
Jobs still built the corporate machine and culture. It takes a while for that kind of thing to wear off or evolve.
I like the idea a lot. The font however, hurts my eyes.
Getting Pretty Lonely (an anti-GPL essay)
RDBMs are perfectly consistent with cloud computing.
I don't agree with this essay, but I thought it was worth posting here for discussion.

For my part, I recognize that the requirements of the GPL may drive some developers away, but that's a small price to pay for making sure the code stays free.
Rupert Murdoch: Facebook is Just a Directory
Just Launched: Pushing Beyond: Weekly Interviews with Entrepreneurs
And to think, hard drive seek latency has only improved by 2x or 3x.
Craigslist Search mashup: Yahoo Pipes + Google Maps
Search Mashup for Craigslist.
Searches all craigslist sites, or only sites within city / Zip code. Picture previews
Yo, the author here. Thanks for the feedback. I totally meant idempotency, drat. (In fact, on Hadoop, thanks to speculative execution of reduce tasks, you also have to worry a bit about reentrancy, but what I was talking about was, in fact, idempotency).

Shutting down the pipeline: I hear you on prod/non-prod. For our setup, the pipeline ends up writing to a datastore, so if we kill the pipeline, the datastore is still up, it just stops updating. Which is working so far. May end up flagging suspect data as you suggest, instead of the full stop (or only full stop if more than a very small percentage of the data is suspect).
FriendFeed Makes Its Search Results Real-Time Too
The bad thing is we can do nothing but wait. The good thing is we don't have to do anything but wait ;-)
A Router So Complete, and Vexing
How Much Of Life Are You Actually Living?
But you could quickly recover by hosting those JS files yourself and relinking them.
If your app is coupled tightly with AppEngine APIs, then there is nowhere else you can host your app.
XHTML 2 is being dropped in favor of XHTML 5, which is being developed in sync with HTML 5. XHTML itself will remain as (un-)popular as always.
Tips for New iPhone Developers
You don't really need a special wireless adapter I know plenty of people around the college campus that can do this with a laptop with no modifications and a live backtrack cd

The speed depends on how many people are on the network all you really need is one person surfing the web and the network is cracked within a couple minutes otherwise it might take a bit longer
When the huge color bar appears in the top nav bar, I want to click anywhere in the color bar, but to my annoyance I have to click on the text itself. If you're going to use the color bars as navigation indicators, they should show up only when the mouse pointer is at somewhere where you can actually navigate.
Why wouldn’t an exam culture favor discriminated-against minorities?
A new friend of mine in Atlanta just launched his newest company, Pushing Beyond. He's traveling around the country to interview entrepreneurs and business leaders and will be posting a new video every week.

On a side note, not all of the spots are filled yet. If you might be interested in talking about your successes, or know someone who would, either contact him through his site or let me know and I'll help you two get in touch.
6 hours later and debug mode still hasn't been turned off, even though you told him exactly how to, in his own thread. Unbelievable. Most of the web devs I know would have panicked, fixed the setting and redeployed within minutes of learning they'd screwed up in a visible and embarrassing way.

Inspire confidence this does not.
Again, it's not convenient for greenfield, but applications don't spend most of their time in that state. A good ORM is a compromise between holding onto that flexibility and being able to reconstruct your data objects easily.

I realize that there are a lot of applications where you will never need that flexibility and a simpler database would be the right choice. My attitude is based a response to the unbelievable hype surrounding these technologies among a certain class of tech blogger. Given how quick many people seem to be willing to chuck the relational model out the window without acknowledging any of its benefits, I predict there will be a lot of rude awakenings and failed projects in the next 10-20 years.
Why not just run that class and ask participants to pay? I would gladly pay for such a class.
After Two Centuries, a Cryptologist Cracks a Presidential Code
Looks interesting. Are results refreshed in the real time ?
Nice. I was told by an ex-Disney exec years ago that they implemented the exact same thing for high level meetings there. I can't imagine what a one hour meeting there costs.
It is like a real like National Treasure. I am impressed at the genius of hte individual who created the code and the individual who cracked it.
Nice analogy but like all analogies, it's too simplistic and flawed. You left out one important and critical part: the hypothetical passenger in your example is tied to a specific plane/airline. If you don't like your pilot or plane type, you cannot move to a different airline or request a different plane or a different pilot since you're chained to the specific plane.

Due to Google App Engine's API lock-in, you're stuck with them as a provider... quite possibly forever due to heavy BigTable dependency.

Even though I'm a huge fan of cloud computing, I'd rather use a strategy that uses platforms/planes that are built from reusable parts and allow you to switch your plane/airline provider as you please. Don't like Delta? Just go to AA counter and you don't have to change your luggage, clothing etc.

Until there's a second, GAE-compatible, ISV provider that offers full compatibility with GAE, I'd avoid GAE like a plague.
The hardware may be inexpensive, but "knowing what you're doing" and being able to pull 5 nines is definitely not cheap.
Mixed reviews for Rotten Tomatoes and other aggregate websites
I particularly liked "Search within radius"
I explicitly said that such copying is crooked and I don't endorse it. I wrote to analyze, not advocate.

I would rethink your remark about 'a stupid fashion statement'. I am not into fashion, but it has considerable utility. People make displays of wealth to attract a desirable mate and also to increase their social status. In many environments, dressing well and carrying the 'right' accessory conveys an impression of success which may be key to getting a promotion or closing a deal. Superficial it may be, but it works.

In this context, the features of the iPhone are no more than distracting toys. All that matters is the display, which can be effected by having a secretary or colleague call you in the middle of a meeting so you can pull out your expensive looking phone and say you're too important to talk right now. And yes, people do things like that. It's the exact same reason there are so many ads for teeth whiteners. They don't help you chew better, they help you look better and therefore better off.
Sixty Symbols - Videos about the symbols of Physics and Astronomy
Also, a danger to your productivity.
I noticed that the site linked to, thenextweb.com, is ripping off our comments here. What's up with that?
Seems like a nice development. I'm a bit confused by the specific example they give, in the sense that there are better ways to handle that particular problem.
99.99% is only 52 minutes of downtime a year... I don't think any of S3, Rackspace, Goole AppEngine, or even www.amazon.com have uptime that good this year.

Getting that kind of uptime is much harder than it sounds and for a lot of websites not worth the extra cost. How much money would pay to go from 99.9% uptime (~9 hours /year) to 99.99% (52 minutes)?
The design could be better but I definitelly like the idea. Picture previews rock
Who said that? Certainly not me, and I doubt gaius has 30TB of RAM so not him either. How much RAM you need is a complex question and revolves to a certain extent around the DB caching the "hot points" but differs so radically app by app there's really no rules or general guidance you can point to. It comes down to measurement of your particular installation, as always.

And fyi I prefer PostgreSQL. But MySQL isn't THAT bad, c'mon.
Sorry. I didn't realise it had been posted before.
> The solutions for peak oil, global warming, etc are extremely costly.

Actually, the "solutions" aren't aimed at global warming, etc. Yes, AGW and the like are used to justify them, but look at what they actually do and ask "Is this an effective solution?" In the few cases where the proposal actually has some relevance to the problem, ask "Is this solution competitive with reasonable alternatives?"

When the peak oil, global warming, etc folk start proposing things that are actually rational solutions to the supposed problems instead of power-grabs, I'll take them seriously.

And no, "something is better than nothing" is not true. Something can easily be worse than nothing. And, if that's the standard, they can't object to my favorite something, virgin sacrifices.
I'm aware of this, a fix will be coming up. I didn't want to postpone release for something so minor though. I've added it to the Chyrp Site tracker.

Note: It's not really completely simple, because what's lighting up is the <li>, which contains both the header link and the nav link. But I'll figure something out, and probably end up having the area under the header clickable for the nav.
Dugg for fresh idea
You are supposed to say something clever like, "Too bad TechCrunch isn't hosted on App Engine..."
I have a neighbor trying to sell his Smart Car now.

$15K for a car that seats two, gets 38 MPG, and will vanish into a singularity in the event of a crash is anything but smart.
> but not segmenting the market is not one of those; rather, it's a consequence of not selling the software itself.

Consequence or not, how can it not be an advantage?
One word: software
FriendFeed gets real-time search.
Looks promising, -1 for design and styling
Cryonics advocates are by and large not very interested in trying to justify estimates that give a reasonable chance of success

Sounds simply wrong to me, and I know a lot of cryonics advocates. The ones I know try to explain why current vitrification technology ought to preserve neural microstructure. Others work on better vitrification technology. I really don't know where you're getting this from.
exactly, shit happens, if you host on your own, you are just as vulnerable to power outages etc. + at least when a cloud goes down, they have hundreds of pros trying to fix it
uhm, call me cynical but maybe he could have spent his time more profitably? Could he have launched this as a $2 app?
In New York City, Fewer Murders on Rainy Days
These things tend to be one or two hit wonders. Most professionals will see this as the Titter equivalent of chain letters and won't take part in the future.
Have you found a way to make firefox scroll more than one line per key down/up? I find page down/up too coarse and key down/up too fine.
Sticky Without Stickiness: Static Clings
You know I just don't understand why some people are so against XHTML.
Am I the only one who read the OP as sarcasm?
That's funny. You can watch all kinds of smart car crashes on YouTube, and while they tend to bounce and spin and roll, the inhabitants always seem fine. They have yet to post one where they vanish into a singularity.
> that's a small price to pay for making sure the code stays free

This isn't about the code staying free, it's more about who's in control.

The GPL is only popular with businesses because it is irrelevant when you're not distributing source-code (as in web servers), or when you're offering services not products.

I have yet to hear about a BSD project that went under because of some company that refused to contribute back. I do however know of a couple of projects that thrived because of more liberal licenses.
Could use some work but still very interesting

Picture previews is something that I've been really missing on Craigslist. "Search All sites" is OK. Zip search is definitelly more convenient than searching one site at a time.
if you put this in .vimperatorrc it makes switching tabs much easier

map J <C-PageDown>
map K <C-PageUp>
html5 has xml serialization if you need that.
OK if you need picture previews or want to search all craigslist sites at a time
The Osborne 1 didn't even have an HDD! You think HDs are slow, try 5 1/4" floppies for latency.

Anyway, SSDs soon. I will not be sorry to see the back of spinning magnetic media of any stripe.
So why is Jeff Atwood using Windows instead of Linux to run his database server? Not complaining, but presumably it delivers something that the open-source alternative doesn't.
While the idea is not-so-original, I still like and spend a lot of time on sites like these.

Mashups are great thing and they seem to be successful in many areas where the original site fails (craigslist)
+1 for the link
I'm sorry sir, but if my pilot is stuck in a thunderstorm and I don't think he knows what he's doing, I can't "request a different plane."
At least we got a detailed explanation from AWS as to what happened and what was put in place to prevent it from happening again.
Tag Clouds For Every App Store Category
But then how do we define species in non-XY sex systems? I know that in such a system, the simplest test is do members of the group procreate with one another.

For example, there are two species of crickets that live amongst each other, are capable of producing viable offspring with each other, and behave identically except for the frequency of their mating calls. When we tweak the mating calls in a lab, we can get crickets from the different groups to mate. But since they don't mix in the wild, we call them two different species.
If you want to do something like this in a non US/European country a micro nation unfortunately is not the solution. I believe a large country like China, Russia or Brazil who isn't too worried about the OECD sanctioning them are the only options.

I worked on a payment startup in Panama for a couple of years and know people who have attempted the same in various other offshore jurisdictions. The problem with financial innovation in these places is that you their own regulators are really scared of international sanctions.

Unfortunately in the end I think the best thing to do is to innovate from a grassroots level in the US or Europe. I would never have said so 10 years ago. But the OECD have been very effective in their campaign to scare previously innovative regimes.
This should be required reading for anyone trying to push a new language in a Java/C# shop. Don't fight the platform, instead, leverage it to your advantage.
I see this stupid article pop up every couple months. There are a few things wrong with it:

1) Map/Reduce is an algorithm, not a datastore.

2) Map/Reduce is geared towards problems that SQL does not work well for.

3) They are not talking about Map/Reduce for most of the article. They are talking about schema-less document based data stores, like BigTable or CouchDB.

4) This is FUD published by a bunch of RDBMS consultants. They have a vested interest in shooting down competing technologies. This is pretty obvious from their _complete_ misunderstanding of the technology that they are attacking.

5) I dont understand why the poster specifically tagged (NoSQL) in the header since this predates the NoSQL "movement", and has nothing to do with the experimental RDBMS.

tl;dr : move along folks, nothing worthwhile here.
Now fixed again, as per my own app and as per http://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine-downtime-not...
Feel the cache size: a definitive experiment
This is not a big problem, because the fix can be forsed through its update system, like microsoft doing it.

Similiar vulnerability for Symbian OS is a big thing, because almost no one updates their phone's firmware. =)
they missed the news category..
yup. and myspace has a more beautiful design, too ;)
But they would have better infrastructure to deal with it than any other cell provider. (iTunes, retail stores, etc.)
Perhaps because many have come to realize that it is a pipe dream that browsers would fully support it.
He uses SQL Server, of course. The root cause is that Joel used to work for Microsoft. Awesome.
Every time I search on Craigslist I can't figure why the hell there are no picture previews and why the hell it's only 1 site at a time !

Thanks for the link, way to go !
Couldn't figure out how to use it
The implications of this are huge! The judge basically said that the TOS' of websites are unenforceable.
which means that a lot more people are mad and it gets fixed sooner. Have you ever had a problem with cable tv or phone service that just effects your home? It can take weeks. If it effects a whole city, it is fixed within hours.