skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If its Google we're talking about even if the youtube portion of the company is losing money, does it matter? I think its pretty safe to assume that youtube will survive.

I mean, I'd assume that the idea of a loss leader somewhat applies here as well. Youtube is the leading brand for video on the internet, and that's worth something to the bigger Google brand.

Don't get me wrong, I think the debate about "free" is a debate worth having, I just don't like the misleading/sensational headline.
Realtors in the US/Canada make far too much money on the transactions.
Sure they'll hide it. However, Linux has pretty good hardware support, and it will get better with Google's backing.
Ladakh tour packages
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They'll survive as long as google is footing the bill. Note that they've started to be more aggressive with their advertising on youtube lately, especially ads overlaying the video in the beginning.

I'm pretty sure they'll find a way sooner or later. It took them a while to come up with adsense as well.
Two good purposes that they might serve are providing search results you may like that you didn't actually search for (obviously this can be automated to some degree, since Pandora and Netflix try to do it), and reducing transaction costs by vouching for one side or both.
How the author managed to bang two pages out of this is a mystery to me.
While it is cool, I wonder if that really was less work than simply storing things in a db. Presumably with a good ORM mapper, caching the data in memory transparently should only be a small configuration setting.

It just seems to me there is so much to worry about when working with the FS directly. Like what happens when the app crashes in the middle of a write? Maybe it is not an issue anymore with modern, journaling file systems, but there are probably some issues left?
Interesting read, but I am doubtful about some aspects. For example "SQL Blobs are the wrong choice for binary data" - wouldn't that depend entirely on how the SQL Blobs are implemented? Sure, maybe apache can serve faster from the file system than from an SQL Blob (if you read the SQL Blob in the middle layer and stream it). But that is just one possible implementation. In theory, the web server could be part of the database and stream the SQL Blobs directly. SQL Blobs could be implemented as files in the file system. And so on...
Will this reoccurring pattern of people reimplementing bash utilities for the web ever end?
This room is also reachable through a fifth-floor ledge (as long as you don't get run over by one of the shopping cart races up there).
Obama: 'My Cousin In Kenya Can't Get a Job Without Paying a Bribe'
What sort of defensiveness do you think will work to effectively prevent -- to make up an example -- an application from popping up a fake login screen that asks them to enter the details, then mails the login info to the attacker and the program to all the victim's friends, without making the system unusable? Signed binaries where the signature describes the level of access might work if you don't allow it to be subverted by the user, but at the cost of essentially losing control over what you can run.i

I can't think of an especially usable uber-paranoid defensive system, although I'd definitely love to be proven wrong. Essentially, the problem isn't a totally technological one. The core of the problem is that the user can effectively be convinced to be their own attacker.
Transactions are actually incredibly tricky to get right, particularly in a portable manner. Not exactly the sort of thing one can implement in a weekend.

For example: http://sqlite.org/atomiccommit.html

Also, it will slow down the database a bit (particularly if added to the db as an afterthought!), which seems to really irritate people who would rather have potentially corrupt information as soon as possible rather than automatic guarantees of internal consistency.
I suppose much of it depends on your background, but in both colleges I attended (one for undergrad, other for master's) there were classes offered on Database theory that did cover at least the basics of actual SQL use. I know that's a minuscule sample size, but I can say I would be surprised by any CS department that didn't at least touch on it in electives at a minimum.

I also remember when I first started with sql that I could read and understand (most of) it quite easily. Writing it was of course another story, especially if optimization mattered, but it wasn't hard to read and not too hard to learn at least the basics. At this point the market is filled with books like "SQL for Dummies" and "The Manga Guide to Databases" that provide very gentle introductions for complete beginners as well as numerous classes at practical trade schools.

Mastering SQL and RDBMS is definitely a work for years and creates dedicated specialists just like any deep field, but picking up the basics is relatively easy compared to many other tasks in this field.
Heh, ok, life cycle up to maturity perhaps?
I am surprised that no one has mentioned Amazon S3. You will definitely plunk down a few bucks to store 40TB there, but it's a ready-made solution to your problem.

Edit: OK, now I see that S3 was suggested but vetoed. Unwise decision, in my opinion. If you need data security, encrypt your data.
Actually, it wouldn't even need an ORM, it's just a graph built out of sexps.

I agree that a real database would still be useful, though at that size it would just be for ACID transactions. OTOH, writing everything using native data structures makes prototyping a lot easier. Lisp sexps, Lua tables, Python dicts, etc. are fantastic for prototyping.
A GOOD real estate agent performs various professional tasks requiring expertise that save you time and money, protect your interests, and keep you out of trouble, at a cost that is less than doing it yourself. Kind of like a GOOD lawyer (I noticed your JD) or a good accountant. You can do it yourself...just like you can fix your own car or plumbing, but the results may not always be what you intended. It may SEEM like a super simple task until you're knee deep in shit and then you start to appreciate why there are professionals with training who stay up-to-date and have E&O insurance for the field, etc. Specialization is a good thing.

The bar to get a real estate license is lower than getting most other professional licenses, though, so there are many more BAD agents than bad plumbers/accountants/mechanics. I think most real estate agents suck. Just like I think most lawyers suck. It doesn't mean that either shouldn't exist, though.

I've got to go to bed...I'll come back later.
Sounds like a very Buddhist perspective on motivation--mindfulness, awareness of the present, and all that. How do Buddhist companies generally compare to traditional capitalist companies? Which strategy prevails in, say, Japan or China?
Some Microsoft Thoughts on Chrome OS
Yes, the iPhone doesn't have an IR transmitter, for one.
Ask HN: Nikola Tesla, greatest inventor of all times?
On July 10th, Tesla was born and with him a whole life dedicated to play, hack, invent.

Is he the greatest inventor of all times?
This shows how Vaadin works with Scala. Powerful combination for RIA development.
NYT’s Jennifer Preston Rediscovers Twitter
One of the few men I admire, DaVinci, Newton and Tesla.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikola_Tesla

In memoriam.
CSS frameworks like this can be useful and harmful at the same time, depending on what your goals are. If you need to prototype something fast they can be invaluable. But they can also become a straight jacket and require littering your layout with what are in effect, as nopassrecover mentioned, almost table cells (especially with 960.gs). All these non-semantic divs with proprietary id's break down the concept of separating content from layout. So when you want to move away from the CSS framework in the future (to say, accommodate some specialized ad unit or something) you have to go through the pain of re-writing your layouts. You have to judge how extensible the layout needs to be in the future when deciding to use these or not.
PicWing: Give Your Pictures Wings (Useful tool review)
A master's in English isn't earned for nothing..
Well, it's his job. I haven't read VF much since my mother-in-law quit subscribing, but I don't recall having much difficulty distinguishing it from (say) Communications of the ACM.
I don't want to sound offensive, but do wonder what is the purpose of this exercise? Is there any problem this project is solving? Or is it 'just' for educational purpose?
I love how the author felt that he couldn't express his snobbish tastes on a train, so he wrote a whole article to name drop every esoteric book and play he wishes his audience to realize he's into.
One-time-use knocking patterns?
RTFA (or your comment's parent) - He describes Apple's web-apps fiasco with the iPhone as a shit sandwich (and links to his lengthy essay on said sandwich) in this very article, which is 90% about Chrome OS.
Big iPhone is watching you
OP doesn't even mention the most likely scenario: Google has something else up it's sleeve.

With their technical prowess, it could be anything. Perhaps embedding ad placements within existing videos. Or assembling sellable demographics about who watches what, a distinct possibility once Chrome reaches critical mass. Or acquiring copyrights. Who knows?

One thing's for sure, Google was always one step ahead of mainstream media. Probably still is.
That is the position I take as well. I for one, cannot function well mentally without a decent calorie intake throughout the day.
How to disable the splash screen of Firefox portable 3.5
Map out your zone defense
6% may have made sense when houses cost $25,000. Now that houses cost 10 times as much, do they have 10 times the work on one deal? I didn't think so.
I think it is quite an amazing feat to write in brainfuck at all (to me it means you have both too much time on your hands and that you grok turing machines), to write a self-hosted compiler (ok, a brainfuck to C translator) is a very neat hack.

If that doesn't work for you think of it as art. Not everything has to have a direct purpose.
I don't disagree that there's some value to having an agent. But as someone looking to buy in the Bay Area, the amount realtor's (particularly buyer's realtors) get paid relative to the work they put in, is all out of whack.

Finding houses is easy, that's what MLS listings do. So that leaves the hidden "gotchas" in the actual sale process, For a buyers agent to get 3% of an $800,000 home is ridiculous. I'd rather pay a lawyer $500/hr to do the 10-20 hours of work closing a deal.
In the Netherlands it's limited by law to 1.85% or so.
Exploring svchost.exe
Computer running slower than usual? Most probably an application taking up too many resources. Up goes the task manager to have a look under the hood – nothing strange located in the default list. You click on “Show processes from all users” > accept the UAC warning > and up comes a super long list of processes running on your system.
This makes sense. From the very start, Mono was intended to be used for creating desktop applications for GNOME. Java has been lousy for the desktop starting with the decision to use a least common denominator window kit. AWT specifically excluded widgets that were not natively available on every platform Java ran on. The idea was that they would blend in better this way. The result was a sub par window kit that was only as good as what was available on the worst platform. Sure, we got SWT later, but that still has problems of its own.

The fact that Java is not terribly useful for creating desktop applications is irrelevant. Its strength in server side applications has long been established. Not to mention, Java has kind of become a de facto standard for a lot of corporate development and those applications are very rarely distributed. Public distribution of applications written in a particular language says almost nothing about the level of usage. There are plenty of other good languages that are not commonly used for desktop applications so I don't understand why this is particularly newsworthy. It's not every day that you see desktop applications being developed in Python or Ruby either.
Selling security in a contracting economy
Up to a few years ago, vendors were united in a single battle cry: your business is at risk… unless…! Scaremongering worked to an extent but it soon became obvious to many organizations that vendors were crying ‘wolf’ far too often. The result has been a growing level of suspicion among SMBs and a tougher challenge for vendors and the channel to convince them otherwise.
Microsoft to release critical Windows fixes next Tuesday
Woman jailed after man complains about her cooking 
A southwest Florida woman was arrested after deputies said she assaulted her 71-year-old common-law husband after he complained about her cooking. A Lee County Sheriff\'s Office arrest report shows 66-year-old Meredith Hart Mulcahy was charged with battery on an elderly person Tuesday night.
It's kinda like mountain climbing for hackers I think.
There's not much standalone desktop Java anywhere; it's clunky for that purpose. But the article is claiming some sort of Mono/MonoDevelop ascendancy for Linux desktop apps, and that's not in evidence.

For example, I'd estimate the usership of Eclipse and LimeWire on Linux as larger than any two of the Mono apps mentioned in the article or this thread.
Silverlight 3 available now
Customer service. I have had the same real estate agent since 1997 and have done four transactions with her during that time. All have been in the same local area, which she knows extremely well. The in-depth knowledge of the community, how a house will resell after you bought it, the unwritten history of some of the homes comes into play. Additionally her helpful tenacity got a house sold under very difficult circumstances that I thought made the sale impossible.

Granted, this might be rare, but the lesson for the real estate agents is that customer service can give them an edge in competitive environments.

And while that commission might look rather large, the last time I bought a house we looked at something like 20 houses, so you need to figure that into the agent's cost.
But users still pay the runtime startup costs for not using the native libs.
Robot Teaches Itself to Smile 
A robot has taught itself to smile, frown, and make other human facial expressions using machine learning. To get the incredibly realistic Einstein robot.
SQL AntiPatterns Presentation from MySQLConf 2009
I just love these kind of things.

If it was fun developing or fun doeing something so strange, than this was the purpose.

I really don't like it if purpose is reduced to getting
richer, making career or impressing other people.

If people think that's the purpose, than they might
loose the purpose of life.
I'm writing up an email to this guy (since he asks for it at the end)... Of course, it all depends on your definition of dying. After all, we're all gonna die some day, the question is, how late can you push it back? :-)
EBay Losing Traffic To Amazon After Strategy Shift
Possibly, but that's something that shouldn't require "complete" access to the OS. Maybe it does, hence my question :)
For those of you who like this stuff, the "J Incunabulum" will probably be really interesting. It's an early draft of a J interpreter, written in J-styled C.

http://www.jsoftware.com/jwiki/Essays/Incunabulum

Also, unlike Brainfuck, unlambda, lolcode, malborge, etc., J and related languages are used for real work. They're just really dense, like regular expressions for vector/matrix math.
The Age of iPhone Games
I didn't know there was any question that Daring Fireball was an Apple advocacy site. A large focus of this article was the way in which Chrome OS couldn't be considered Linux because it won't use X. There are other non-X linux distributions so his argument seemed odd to me. Given OSX's relationship to BSD it seems to an argument born from rationalising the rebranding of BSD to OSX. I don't think Google is going to feel any need to distance itself from Linux because it is not planning on selling Chrome OS.

Having said all that for sake of clarity (if there is any in that paragraph) I'll try not to comment on future Apple stories on this site, it doesn't seem productive.
Making a Match: Job Sites Get Personal
That Credit Suisse report about how much it costs to run YouTube has been widely debunked.

Here's a newsflash: Google pays a lot less for bandwidth than you do. They've got peering agreements everywhere.
For the record, the present consensus amongst aging researchers is that there are strong evolutionary arguments for CR to have an effect of only a few years on human maximum lifespan.

http://fightaging.org/archives/2005/08/aubrey-de-grey-11.php
http://www.longevitymeme.org/news/view_news_item.cfm?news_id...

While of course the human studies (go Google "CALERIE", the study name) show that it has a massive positive effect on health and resistance to age-related disease.

http://www.longevitymeme.org/topics/calorie_restriction.cfm

Exercise appears to plausibly shift your life expectancy by a decade, so it's also good to do.

http://www.longevitymeme.org/news/view_news_item.cfm?news_id...
Not true. After reading through your past comments on this site as I have, you will see that the only times you have been downvoted are when you bring political views into conversations where it is almost entirely off-topic.

Plenty of your comments in other threads have been upvoted, so laying the blame for your treatment on the rest of the community here is disingenuous.
Simplicity is the art of maximizing the amount of work not done!
Given my last experience with a realtor, and hearing similar stories from others, I can't say I'm surprised that a website is doing a better job than a good number of them.

I'm not going to blanket stereotype, but when certain realtors are basically just setting up MLS feeds, and then forwarding matching listings to a client, how do they assume that someone couldn't program a site to do the same thing?
Eclipse, OpenOffice.
I have done by-owner transactions twice--it was lots of fun. The lawyer time in each case was not more than two or at most three hours. If it is more than that, there is something unexpected.
Looks quite a bit like this: http://favrd.textism.com/
But seems that you have more features though.
Stop reading them and you'll get hours of your life back with certainty.
The reason I don't test webkit is that it is not clear what
improvements in webkit land up in Safari. Unlike chrome or safari where a release is just a tagged nightly, wbkit nightlies never directly become Safari.
> As pointed out in the extensive literature by Paul Graham [CITATION NEEDED], the often used COND Lisp form is too verbose by two parentheses per case (Θ(2n)^8).

I wish I could wake up to something like this essay every morning.

(Summary: lisp rocks partially because it has not tried to contort to the latestFadsInProgramming. It seems an immediate target of this satire would be Clojure.)
Impressing people might have something to this :)

At least I'm impressed.
The title presents a contradiction in terms, but it's a fantastic paper nonetheless.
How can you trust an article with glaring factual inaccuracies underlying the primary argument?

"Eclipse 3.1 lacks features that MonoDevelop has, including code completion, integrated debugging, refactoring, and unit testing capabilities, Hargett claimed."

Are you kidding me?

And then the great "apps" they site for Mono are Gnome Do & Tomboy notes. Sorry but we're working on visual programming language plugins on top of Eclipse at my company, and the two Mono apps they site are to-do lists?

I'm all for Mono, I'm all for a discussion on how Sun screwed the Linux community over, but this article is not worth reading or talking about. Shoddy reporting all around.
Or the fact that mum gets to see any pictures the daughter is tagged in, no matter who uploaded them. So even if she doesn't post pictures of her drunken faces, someone else does and they make it back to her mum regardless..
It's more common in a server environment. I'd expect to see more Java installs as the popularity of JVM-based language implementations rise, such as JRuby, Clojure, and Scala. I am, for instance, working on putting together a JRuby stack for my company's web applications.
I found it quite entertaining, but that's because I'm a culture-snob too :p
This is a pretty good website with a lot of information about him, if you're interested:

http://www.reformation.org/nikola-tesla.html

(NOTE: I said 'pretty good' because some of the writing has a bit of a conspiracy-theory feel to it. Other than that though...)
Bandwidth costs would probably kill us TBH. Ultimately we will have 20,000 clients connecting at least 3 times a week and uploading once a fortnight. It adds up to about 500TB of new data a year.

S3 is great for us atm but the work to encrypt it is too much because the cost doesnt scale for us long term. Potentially within a couple of years we will be spending 1/2 a million on bandwith and 1/2 a million on storage - which will continue upwards :)

Were facing the Google model: commodity hardware on a cheap T1 connection :)
Why VCs Take Dividends
Geo.js, Building location-aware mobile websites with Javascript
I figure they pay $2.50 / M / month or less, the best deals that I can find when I go shop for high volume is about $4 / Meg, that's when you're committing to 10G or thereabouts.
wicked that makes me feel better about it. I was worried a lot about one server being the focus of such a lot of activity. I know it should handle a lot of traffic but it's always best to sanity check thoughts like that (when a crashed server ultimately = lost revnue :P)
Tahoe does all I want - and I based my implementation around their methodology.

But like you I have also failed to get it to work on anything with any degree of success.
Successfully Backing up and Restoring your websites on IIS 6.0
Writing a brainfuck interpreter in a language is a good way to size it up. Unlike "hello world", it actually gives you a meaningful impression of how string handling, data structures, etc. work. It's not hard, but it's just enough to work up a sweat -- like a web-programmer writing a blogging engine or a wiki to try out a web framework. (If it is hard in the language, that should also tell you something.)

See also:

* Project Euler (http://projecteuler.net/), for math problems

* Programming Praxis (http://programmingpraxis.com/)
Agreed. (Prepare to be downvoted for making a rational statement contrary to the prevailing fads.)
Because they can, you can't, and you will never understand it even given all the source code.

Also nice ascii art.

Its not educational, its b0w b3f0r3 m4h sk1llz!

I must also agree with one of the posts here... It is art. Its geek art but it really is art. Judges who say source code is not art should also admit michalengelo was just some asshole who put grafitti on some holy buildings.
Someone ought to port it to Ook! (http://www.dangermouse.net/esoteric/ook.html)

That would be something to read.