skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Considering the number of keys I've bent which didn't have big gaping holes there, I suspect this would need to be hardened to work right, which would make grinding obnoxious.

Still, not an inherently terrible idea.
" If you want to display your culture to strangers on the subway, go out to some website and make yourself a custom T-Shirt with an obscure quote."

Wait; so I can't just parade around in my faded PiL logo T-shirt anymore?
I agree with you in the sense that most people at the kind of events this guy talks about are doing web-apps/social media of some sort.

He needs to go to some of the more tech-based events where people are genuinely innovating.
This doesn't work because there's nowhere to grip when you're trying to turn the key.
I wonder if putting brainfuck on my resume would get me in the door, or thrown out the door.
As I discussed in an earlier thread, our custom mailer uses Gmail on a custom domain for storage; fetchmail connects via IMAP and then pipes to procmail which pipes to a Python script.

Lamson looks like it can offer a lot of great features, but I'll have to run my own SMTP server and I'm worried about downtime. If I let Gmail store the messages, I don't need to worry (much) about messages going missing. If my server crashes, fetchmail will just pick up the missed messages in the next fetch, only a few minutes late.

For others who run mail servers: how do you handle downtime?
"Web browsing is one of my primary computer activities, so an OS that boots up quickly and uses the fastest browser would be greatly welcomed."

This precisely characterizes the intended market for Chrome OS.
"Behind the Wheel French" is excellent:

http://www.amazon.com/Behind-Wheel-French-CD-Course/dp/18935...
GeoCommons open-sourced their geocoder
This looks like an evolutionary relative of Charles Simonyi's intentional programming efforts.
Schuyler Erle, who wrote the venerable Geo::Coder::US in Perl, updates it for Ruby, SQLite, and with a more modular design. Announced by Andrew Turner at the State of the Map conference in Amsterdam.
On the surface, your argument has intuitive merit. However, you don't sue a business unit (Youtube), you sue a company (Google). Google is profitable.
I think Facebook really could make a crap-ton in any number of ways, just from all the user data they have available for mining. Advertisers would (and already do) pay through the nose for that. I think ad revenue is generally an awful money source for a web app, but Facebook is big and addictive enough to command some crazy rates.

And that makes me scratch my head when they talk about "building the userbase" and "not focusing on revenue yet" Maybe I'm just short sighted, but I think it's time for FB to start cashing in. Just like anything else, it's best to launch your revenue model early and iterate, rather than waiting until the timing is perfect.
Isn't large scale software actually where most of the automation and offshoring take place?

The "judgments calls and architectural decisions" can be made just as well by software architects in India or China or Brazil.

>The interesting part of a software project is all the stuff you have to do after the rote parts have been automated

Absolutely. For example: 6502 Assembly -> C -> Java -> Python. Each step is exactly about that: Letting you focus on the interesting parts, and thus produce more value with less human effort. This is automation, we just call it abstraction or whatever. We didn't see a drop in the job market as result, since the demand for software had been rising even faster. The question is whether this will remain the case.
Do one thing well. What happens when I break the ring? I have to get a new key. Also, a keyring of keyrings is going to be quite a pocketfull.
Oh great. Thanks Dick.
for all we know the clicks are translating into sales. I mean why else would they slowly optimize it for more boobs?

I imagine it worked something like this:

"check out this civilization like game" = 20 clicks, 1 signup

"BOOOOOOOBS!" = 500 clicks, 2 signups

It may not be targeted advertising, but if it gets them twice as many signups, you can't say it doesn't work.
Speech Synthesis on iPhone 3GS
My general calculation on YouTube is this:

-At Google Search, you do a search and get a text ad. Each text ad is about 400 bytes, each search page (with your results) is around 5k. Serving up the webpage is done from another site.

-At Google YouTube, you do a video search and get a text ad alongside it. Each text ad is 400 bytes, each search result you look at (eg, video) is about 2MB.

So, are you going to make as much, after paying for bandwidth, with a factor of 400 (2,000,000 / 5000) difference in bandwidth?
These are supposed to be a several hundred dollars as opposed to the several thousand that a Sick LIDAR will set you back.

If you can find the videos that are embedded in the Flash header thing they are worth a watch.
Market pricing could help restaurants improve profitability
You mean people might associate with other people within their race/class, thereby creating a network effect that tends to draw members of that specific racial/class group to a single social network?

Getouttatown!

In other news, there is a race/class divide between many of the bars in my city... also, the sun will pass over the horizon tonight, bringing darkness. Story at 11!
"the creative cost of living in an echo chamber"

I've never heard anyone who used this expression offer any evidence or argument to back it up, and this post is no exception.

Till a few months ago I used to live half the time in the Valley and half the time in Boston. I never noticed Boston startups getting any creative boost from not being in the Valley. If anything, it was the opposite: they tended to be constrained by lack of confidence, and by the conservatism of the local investors.
Holy hell. How many vending machines do you have to have to save $20K by turning of the lights?
I believe Wal-Mart practices their preaching even at the higher levels. For example, I know a number of management consultants who work for the big brand name consultancies. They travel each week to work at their client's site, and usually stay at classy hotels: the Ritz, Four Seasons, etc., and the clients don't care because they already spend $X million on consultants, so who cares if they're spending $500 a night per person for hotel costs? Besides, they're advising the board, or the president and C-suite, so there's no point in worrying about costs.

But Wal-Mart cared. The consultants had to stay at cheap hotels. (For these people, that was traumatizing.) Their receipts were reviewed and per diem spending caps enforced. (Very uncommon. These people like to rack up $1,000 bar tabs and charge it to the client.) Most of the team did not even fly down there, to save costs. (Seems obvious, but that's not usually done.) That made them an unpopular client among the jet set, but they sure saved a lot of money.
I think you have to find the right type of people to write full reviews without incentive. Maybe people would be more apt to review sites if it wasn't so much work. Maybe you could use a system where people type a couple of words in review of the site, rather than a huge amazon.com style product review.

You could just put a small textarea up in your top launchly info frame where people can leave small page specific comments about sites.

Speaking from personal experience, I went to your site clicked around, looked at a couple of the sites. I did find a few things that I could suggest about them, but didn't have the motivation to write a dissertation about the problems.

Hope this helps.
Although I agree with the conclusion, I disagree with the premise.

Being "super awesome" to people "pays", not just on the internet, but in everyday life. Yes, this applies to high school too.
Samsung A436 Unlocked
Samsung A436 Unlocked has given such incredible features and amazing look that no other phone are providing. weight of just 82 grams and can be fit to any pocket and you will not going to feel any gracelessness of hauling it and so is screen size of 128 x 160 pixels.
Maybe not "offensive," but it does seem unnecessary. To me, Google represents everything on the web, all of the odd links and connections between people who want to communicate, be heard, get feedback about their ideas, etc. It actually did make a lot of sense for it to release a web browser.

So even though its basic mission is something like "To organize the world's information, digitally," I don't know if that should really extend into the private sphere.
There is a lot of private data that people want/need to keep offline. Separating its over-arching "www" mission from its hyper-aware "blanket snapshot" of all the live pages on the web would be really tough.

It'd be heading in the direction of Microsoft, where when you go buy a new PC at the store, and they include all those stupid-annoying icons glued to the desktop.

I'm probably a bit biased because to me, an OS [http://oss.zentu.net/?q=forum/1] should be like the local agent, there to help me have more control over what the Internet and its many ports have access to, on my local machines, at any particular time.

This lack of divide (the Microsoft OSes and IE browsers) and the lack of separation of control by one business to so many facets of a person's private data is one of the primary reasons MS was targeted for anti-trust issues.

Anyway, if Google does end up releasing a truly open-source OS, I might possibly link to it in the directory. . . (the Chrome web browser is already linked). But taking into consideration the number of OSes already out there (37 in my directory alone w/a few more in queue), it doesn't seem like the wisest choice or business move.

Besides, with all of the new offerings and "stuff" it is working on, doesn't it already have enough on its plate? For such a relatively young company, it seems like they might be attempting to take on a little too much. Healthy growth life cycles and all.
Business schools redefine hacking to “stuff that a 7-year-old could do” (2005)
On the surface, your argument has intuitive merit. However, youtube isn't a business unit. it's a subsidiary.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/01/look-ahead-at-google-...
http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-6153267-7.html

edit: sorry, that was sorta snarky. and things may have changed since the viacom lawsuit. (it was a subsidiary in late 2008)
From http://themachinelearningforum.org/index.php/component/conte..., users have to send you an email after they upload photos. I suggest fixing this clunkiness, to give your site the best chance to attract users.
I disagree with slides 20 - 30 (calling "entity-attribute-value" tables an antipattern). Variable attributes table not only gives you a lot of application flexibility but also helps performance in that you're not polluting your primary table with extraneous metadata columns that are hardly ever referenced. It doesn't surprise me that DB programmer would look at that and be offended that it's not purely referential -- not everything that happens in a database has to be referential to everything else. Sometimes databases are just dumb data stores. Not all problems are solved by "referential integrity"
I would think that selling access to the user data would alienate a large portion of users.
The Science article is only about 40% longer than this summary, and just as readable: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/325/5937/151
the only catch is that hardening has a tendency to make materials brittle. Steel is good because it bends.
Can Michael Arrington Raise Enough Money To Make The CrunchPad?
You use a database that supports CTE or at the very least, recursive querying options, then you format your schema like so:

Comments:
/-----------------------------\
| ID | ParentID | etc |
|-----------------------------|
| 1 | Null | etc |
| 2 | Null | etc |
| 3 | 1 | etc |
| 4 | 1 | etc |
| 5 | 4 | etc |
\-----------------------------/

You then use a Common Table Expressions query, like this:

WITH CommentTree (ParentID, ID, Level)
AS
(
SELECT ParentID, ID, 0 as [Level],
FROM Comments
WHERE ParentID = [ROOT COMMENT ID] OR ParentID IS NULL
UNION ALL
SELECT c.ParentID, c.ID, ct.Level + 1
FROM Comments c
JOIN CommentTree ct ON ct.ID = c.ParentID
)
-- Now actually query the data from the CTE Expression
SELECT ParentID, ID, Level FROM CommentTree
ORDER BY ParentID, Level, ID

This returns a table with a calculated column called Level.

/---------------------------\
| ParentID | Level | ID |
|---------------------------|
| Null | 0 | 1 |
| Null | 0 | 2 |
| 1 | 1 | 3 |
| 1 | 1 | 4 |
| 4 | 2 | 5 |
\---------------------------/

Which of course, would represent this tree:

Root
/ \
2 1
/ \
3 4
\
5
Sort of reminds me of Apple's Cocoa (no, not the Objective-C toolkit). It allowed you to create games by demonstrating what you wanted to happen in certain situations; it came with an icon editor for graphics, basic variable support, and triggers for keyboard presses or when certain conditions were met - it was a pretty neat system to play around with.

http://homepage.mac.com/senorwences/Cocoa_Projects.html
I think it's brilliant. The concerns raised here are valid, perhaps only half of it is open and the front half would be solid to give it more strength and support, but as it stands now I think it's a brilliant idea.
That's not my site :P

The poster is Yoav Freund: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoav_Freund
I don’t think that you are short sighted.

I think Facebook et al. think they are “long sighted”, when in fact they are overly optimistic as to their longterm success. All this talking about how they will worry about making money later presupposes that they will be around later. I think there are more and more signs (e.g. myspace) that this will not be the case for a large percentage of these “successful” startups.
It means it needs to use a JNI library, which operates outside the JVM sandbox, so it could theoretically do anything.
you can set them in your code pass them in as options, only that won't have any effect yet on blackberry.
I provide feedback because I think I have a unique perspective and can provide insights that the creators and others may not have thought of.
The link your provided requires registration.
That's a non answer. I could understand Ireland being a center for high-tech but not all of the UK and there are dozens of other global high-tech centers to boot.

So of all the world's high-tech centers, why these four?
And a vampire! He is probably reading this! :-D
Here's a comment someone made on reddit:
http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/901i7/please_tel...

In programming, this would be an example of bad design.

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

In combining the key and ring into one object you make it so that the key+ring doesn't act the same as another key. You can't remove the key+ring or you leave the other keys without a ring. You have to make sure you have a single key+ring (unless you want to make them into a chain), if you get rid of one key+ring you have to convert one of your other keys into a key+ring to take its place.
That does help but I'm still not understanding why you WOULD write up a review/feedback here but not there.

A bit off the primary topic of but you mentioned a system where people could type a couple of words in review of the site. Was there something about launchly that made you feel like you had to write a lengthy review? Feedback can be any length so you could write something as simple as "Your logo is crappy and I don't see any market for your service." I mean more in-depth is obviously more helpful but there's no minimum amount of helpfulness :-)

Can you think of what would have motivated you to provide feedback (of the non-dissertation variety of course)?
is that a challenge ?
the key should be rotated 90 degrees to fit in with the keys i put on the ring.
Excellent reason and that's why I typically do it too (well I have another reason in launchly now but before that...). Why do you provide feedback here though and not other places (not launchly specifically)?
Where do you guys sell your old stuff online? E.g., old laptop you don't need, old GPS navigation when you get a new one, etc?

Ebay is too much hassle, and afaik Craigslist is only local. Any ideas?
Ask HN: Most Useful Undergraduate CS Courses
Through fortuitous scheduling and some transfer luck, I've managed to take care of all of my course requirements before the end of my fourth year (both gen-ed and CS-specific). This means that I have almost a full semester of credits that I need to take yet (to satisfy the total-credits requirement), with no restrictions on what classes they need to be, other than that they must be applicable towards a Letters and Sciences bachelor's degree (not very restrictive at all).

I'm curious as to which (if any) undergraduate CS courses you found most functionally useful (ie, they made you a better programmer in some way) in your programming careers.
ACID transactions have nothing to do with RDBMS, non relational db's can be and are ACID compliant as well. Look at any object database, you'll generally find MVCC and ACID compliance.

The issue is whether your data fits well into tables and rows, or not, and whether it's worth cramming it into tables and rows and continually reconstructing it to get the benefits relational db's generally provide over the alternatives... which are enforced data integrity, language neutrality, and a generic fixed structure capable of allowing flexible querying. To get those, you trade speed and ease of development.
Makes sense. The huge amount of backscatter ain't helping anyone
Scribd Streamlines Embedded Docs With iPaper 2
Adobe Wave: Lets publishers “wave” hi to users directly from the desktop
I give feedback out of a sense of community. I like the people who come to HN, and I emphasize them.

When someone asks for feedback on their site, I'll usually check their post history and how long they've been around. If they're contributing and being helpful, I'm happy to help them in return.
Fred Cohen's 1986 Ph.D. thesis where he proved that it was impossible to create a virus-checking program that was perfect

What about white listing? All programs on a list run, everything else does not.
Financial Sector Suicides On The Rise
I don't think I've ever broken a keyring. I've replaced the ones I've had due to it being too small, or I've lost my keys, but I've never broken one yet.
Misleading headline, particularly the quotes. In this article no school said any such thing, only the author in creating an analogy.

Synopsis: Business schools outsource their student application web app, said web app has bug that allows students to change GET parameters and see their acceptance status early. Exploit is posted to BusinessWeek forums, and at least some of those students who tried the hack were denied admission to Harvard.
first, if your server costs compete in any way with your own living expenses, get them down. Most people massively overpay for servers. what kind of server do you have that is costing you $30-$40 a day? for that kind of scratch you can get a full rack, two circuits and a nice big chunk of bandwidth. that's operating cost for 16 of my dual quad-core opterons with 32GiB ram.

but then $1200 a month isn't much, really. that's what, two, three days of contracting at bay area SysAdmin rates?

Get a dayjob. Yeah, it sucks. But if you bootstrap, that's what you've got to do. I do consulting 3 days a week, and you know what? if prgmr.com revenue stopped tomorrow, I'd go back up to 5 days a week, and I'd have no problem paying for my server space for as long as I cared to do so. (and I have done this... prgmr.com is doing ridiculously well at the moment, but if you look at my history, well, I've been doing this since 2005, and have made my expensive mistakes. All paid for by contracting income. It can be painful, I mean, in 2006, I got a little optimistic and locked myself into a year-long contract for almost two orders of magnitude more bandwidth than I ended up needing. a $15K mistake or so. But eh, it looks like we might have that much revenue this month alone, so I was right to stick with it.)

It sounds like your business is one with low capital requirements, and low monthly overhead. That is the best kind of business to bootstrap, I think; you just need to build your life so that you are OK with supporting the business until someone notices you and the business takes off.
That makes some sense. The key would fit more comfortably on the ring, but it would also probably make the construction even weaker and more likely to break off in a lock. I'm not sure which is better.
This article is pretty lacking in substance for a 15 pointer, and I would expect no better from tech news from CNBC.
It's a class-cession. People from the less educated lower classes have limited employment opportunities mostly involving physical labor. Men tend to be overrepresented in such jobs, like constructions. And we're in a housing bust.
I don't check my spam folder. If it's in there, it's not delivered.

Email providers should (optionally) bounce spam, rather than sending it to a spam folder. This would eliminate the problem of false-positives, since senders would be notified. It would reduce traffic, since spammers would know the message didn't get through to any inbox, and so would focus elsewhere. Finally, it would eliminate the temptation of a spam folder for people who don't want spam, but peek 'just to make sure', and thereafter go on to support spammers.

Perhaps someone here is running an email provider, or working on such software?
Great reason. So no direct benefit to you personally is necessary.
Harvard != MIT
Bezos, are you listening?
Top-tier schools already admit students based on a lot of fairly arbitrary criteria, so it doesn't seem like a very big deal to add "does not tinker with school-related web applications" onto the Harvard list.
If they are overly crass or stupid about it (like Beacon), then yes, users will get pissed. But, if they just got rid of those awful sidebar ads and replaced them with high quality, highly expensive ads for major brands, then I think users would be quite happy. Especially if the ads were highly targeted (based on user data) and the users found the ads useful or entertaining.

They really need to ditch those "click here to learn the secrets to being a billionaire" ads. They're just awful and they cheapen that ad space. The longer those ads run, the harder it will be for FB to get real advertisers to put anything worthwhile in there.
Amazon, if you close your eyes and ignore the egregious fees. You'll still probably get more money than Craigslist and less danger/hassle than Ebay.
I would have liked to have read this, but the site is horribly slow, which is probably not helped by the XHTML ads being loaded first. Don't bother.
I use tech forums, mainly HardOCP, Anandtech, and Xtremesystems. While most of the stuff bought/sold there are tech items, you can find some non-tech goods there. You might also have better luck buying/selling niche equipment on niche forums, e.g. headphones on head-fi, AV equipment on AVS forums.
Dealing with 500 clicks can be a lot more expensive than 20, especially at that conversion rate. Bandwidth, support, contact, etc.
Sure, but that assumes that all keys are equal. Mine aren't. If I could find my house key more easily because it was the ring itself, I'd be happy.
I've been working the SBA loan route for a while now, and I'm preparing to post a summary of my experiences to HN. If anyone out there has also tried to get SBA-backed loans for a startup, holler and maybe we'll co-write some tips for other entrepreneurs.