skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My understanding was that a lot of research clusers actually have pretty low utilization. I believe the cloud computing whitepaper David Patterson put out in the spring had I data on that.
I'm surprised he hasn't been accepting options at Google either.
Another similar thread that's been killed but has more comments: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=746701
A large number of people would like to make money on their own. Just look at the number of apps in the app store for example.
True, but putting out an app or two or doing a little consulting on the side is a far cry from starting a starting or being able to support yourself that way. I suspect that the number of people who do support themselves without a traditional employer will grow, but that will remain a small percentage (though slightly larger) for a very long time if not forever.

Why would you say that? The brain is sufficiently developed at that point to create interesting products/services -- especially with gifted students.

I agree, in fact I said something similar in my other response. But, again that is a far cry from starting a start up. There are two main reasons I think starting a startup during high school is a bad idea for most people:
1. Your inability to enter into a legally binding contract will limit your dealings with investors or any type of customer that require an ongoing relationship.
2. While I know some exceptions exist, most people have neither the technical nor people skills to start a company as a teenager. Even those that will wind up being mostly self taught require time to do it, and they simply have not had it yet. Again, I know there are exceptions, but they are few.

After high school, those start to change. 1 changes instantly for legal reasons when you hit 18. 2 falls on more of a bell curve, but it will gradually start moving towards the tipping point sometime around then for a lot of people.
http://domainsite.com/ works really well. Simple UI and full domain control is what I look for. It also has a simple 1 click integration with google apps.
The classic "Unix is many small tools and Emacs is one big tool" argument is well known, but rarely substantiated.

Emacs tools are not any more tightly coupled because they're written in Emacs Lisp than your tools are because they're written in C.

In fact, just as all your tools run in a terminal, all my Emacs tools run in buffers (in Emacs). Speaking loosely, Emacs is the embodiment of Unix: it has many tools written by the community, some of which are installed by default, and you can choose which you want to run that best suit your needs. "Integration" doesn't really fit into the picture.

For example, Emacs has both ERC and rcirc. I use ERC, but my point is that there are choices. Emacs has several mail readers (Wanderlust, GNUs, mew, etc) and several terminal emulators. Eshell provides one type of feel, treating your shell as a buffer. Term provides a more classic terminal emulator feel, when you don't want to treat your term like a text editing session.

As to your "! is text in, text out", try M-! in Emacs. I daresay Emacs has fairly robust system integration as well. I have run irssi from term buffers for fun. Even more ironic is running vi in a term buffer. In short, it may be more useful for you to think of Emacs as a replacement for your terminal emulator than as a replacement for vi.
He spent an hour trying to quit? Did it ever occur to him to use C-z? That's pretty standard in Unix, and would have dropped him back to the terminal so he could kill it easily. He's acting like C-x C-c is somehow WAY more arcane than :q!. To each his own, I suppose.
I always wondered if Bill got nostalgic and decided to spare Apple specially when it was lying on the ground nearly dead. Maybe he decided to give a chance to is old foe? (Maybe I am just crazy)
http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/ is a useful tool too.
Anyone know what specs are needed to run Crysis at the performance as in the video? My impression is that you still can't do it with mainstream hardware.

I was thinking pedantically that there are more powerful "computers" available than a high-end PC and they would be able to do even better than this example, but then it occurred me that it's also possible that game engines are the most sophisticated physics/graphics engines... worldwide, they probably have more attention and money focussed on them than even the US military could afford (guessing).
Hey, look at that! Tried it and it works. Thanks for the correction.
If you jailbreak your iPhone, you're obviously a terrorist interrupting critical systems like e911 -- this will set off a small explosive charge that will fragment the metal casing and internal components to disable the enemy combatant.
no, you are definitely not at fault for those things. however, you are at fault for re-contextualizing this particular comment thread. the original comment spoke of alternative interfaces, not of outdated software, cheapening the discussion with snarky remarks about anachronistic technology. though, plenty of people still use telnet. and physical help desks.
Homework: readable URLs.

(concatenate 'string url-prefix
(substitute #\- #\Space (or subject-line (first-ten-words body))))

Also, wrap up all those CRUD operations into methods that dispatch on the content type; once you have comments, comment creation, update, reading and deletion will be mostly identical to the posting. A lot of code duplication. Instead, abstract out the common code (and save yourself from database backend dependency by writing CREATE, VIEW, UPDATE and DELETE methods.
I clicked the link because I was interested in the topic. Then I saw Dvorak wrote it and I had to close it with extreme prejudice. Dvorak is one of those writers that I consider hostile to intelligent discourse. He is a master troll who knows how to get page views by making people who understand the things he's talking about waste thousands of man hours formulating pointless rebuttals. If he could be banned from Hacker News it would be in everyone's best interest.
Pardon me if I'm just being dumb here, but the notion that DNS servers are two "lonely servers" seems totally wrong. They might be two IP addresses, but you can be damn sure DynDNS doesn't have two klunky duct taped together linux boxes on those IPs as the article would lead you to believe. To me their objectivity went out the window when they started that train of FUD.

My naive guess here is that twitter probably accidentally set really low TTLs on their root DNS entries on dyndns so some downtime on the dyndns servers due to a DDoS (the same kind of DDoS the article seems to say is not the root cause) caused the intermediate caches to all expire as well. DNS is designed to withstand these kind of outages if you configure it correctly since most DNS entries should be able to be cached for a damn long time. We use dyndns and set our public DNS entries to have a large TTL and internal dynamic IPs to be short TTL. EC2 elastic IPs make this really nice since we can swap out physical machines behind the elastic IPs without having to update any DNS at all.
Well, my best guess would be: Incompetence.

If your business is DNS and you fail at the basic task of distributing it for fault tolerance then what other explanation could there be?

To make this clear. The cost for running n DNS servers for your domain in n datacenters is equal to the cost of having one (possibly rented) pizza-box in each datacenter. You can list any number of nameservers for any domain. Domains like google.com and microsoft.com have up to 5, for example.

Synchronizing the nameservers is a non-issue. For tinydns it's a one-liner (rsync), for bind it's a few lines of axfer configuration. There is no administrative overhead. You don't even have to worry about host failures much because DNS is resilient by design (that's why you can have multiple NS records in first place).

So, in dollar terms, in most datacenters a rented pizza-box starts at around $30/month, often cheaper. Making your DNS 5-way redundant therefore costs roughly $150/month. You don't have to be google to afford that.

And a potential attacker will damn sure not even attempt to take out your 5 DNS locations. He will go directly for your application instead because that one, in most cases, can not be distributed over 5 locations for a measly 150 dollars/month.
Awesome. If you don't mind, do you have any music links of you playing I can listen to?
You won't be missed. There are far more potential customers who care about "protecting" their children from various kinds of content. They constitute a market that Apple wants to access, and the way to do that is to provide mechanisms for filtering information on their behalf.

If you're fundamentally opposed to doing business with companies that restrict the flow of information in order to access wider markets, you're going to have to stop using (among other things) Google, which censors itself in China.

Otherwise, you're going to have to accept that some people want their information filtered by a third-party.
Yeah I think undo/redo functionality would be super helpful. I believe it would be more intuitive to have it per user instead of shared.
Smart companies commoditize their complements. Google commoditizes software and builds moats around search and advertising.
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/StrategyLetterV.html

This isn't about altruism. This is smart business. I bet someone at Google figured out they could insert at least $106.5m worth of ads into video.
Firstly since when is upgrading any OS while skipping a version easy to do? It's even difficult in Linux from what I've seen and experienced.

Secondly there's a migration tool available on the install DVD which saves all of your documents and application settings, meaning that you don't have to spend a lot of time configuring your applications again.
guitar hero!
4chan a social website?
Question:

Greg Linden, who worked on Amazon.com's recommendation engine, has referred to what he calls the "harry potter problem". To quote from his blog:

'...this calculation would seem to suffer from what we used to call the "Harry Potter problem", so-called because everyone who buys any book, even books like Applied Cryptography, probably also has bought Harry Potter. Not compensating for that issue almost certainly would reduce the effectiveness of the recommendations, especially since the recommendations from the two clustering methods likely also would have a tendency toward popular items.'

How did you compensate for this problem? Do you simply ignore vertices in the graph that have a large degree?

Or, are you using non-linear weighting functions, such as a perceptron's sigmoid function?

With regard to Wikipedia, almost everyone who has edited an article has also edited the article on Bill Clinton. So, if you are using the edit-history metadata to compute recommendations, you would have to compensate for the "Bill Clinton problem".
You can play Crysis just fine on a at 1600 x 1200 on a 700$ gaming system today. 90% of what you see is done by the graphics card, and for $180 you can get a GTX 260 which plays crisis just fine. Leaving 500$ for the rest of the system which is still ok. (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814150...)

http://www.gamespot.com/pages/forums/show_msgs.php?topic_id=... for an actual gamers review w GTX 260.
It sounds like the author of the article is pining for NeXT/OSX App bundles, though he doesn't seem to know they exist. Anyway:

The Registry in windows was a /proc-alike database for twiddling system and driver settings, except slightly smarter in that it was automatically persisted to disk. Application-writers hijacked it to store their own applications' settings. At this point, if HKLM/Software and HKCU/Software were just transparently transformed into configuration files stored in the user's Profile folder, I don't think any harm would be done. The rest of the registry, though, is actually centralized by necessity (though you could argue that nodes for the kernel and the shell should probably live in separate hives.)
Thanks for the suggestions -- I agree with you completely.

Much of the code can be refactored in some way, and parts of it can be significantly abstracted. I wanted to get something up quickly, so the end result is certainly flawed.

But the nice thing about Clojure is that these kinds of changes can be made rather painlessly -- at least, in comparison to other languages.
Response to The World's Economic Problems are Like 2 Cross-Wired Thermostats
I've been happy with pairNIC.
So you think you can dance finale 2009 video
Well in a more recent update Microsoft enabled the addon's uninstallation, so now you can remove it without registry hacking.
It's easier to obtain a million email addresses than 10,000 computers. A non-distributed DoS is easy to stop.
Why was it killed? Hopefully not because TS is perceived YC competition?

These incubators are great for all hackers and entrepreneurs who are the readers and contributors of HN.
Dude, parental controls are there for keeping words away from children. You are not the target audience, even if you like them.
You're the guys behind meetcast right? meetcast.com is 404'ing right now. You should probably do a 301.
The Cross-Platform Enterprise Lore
Yes, your hyperbole aside, I do think people should take care in how they speak. 'Urban slang' is pretty clearly associated with a particular socio-economic group (regardless of if you wish to acknowledge that or not), and saying that it, in particular, is the language that needs to be censored is not A Good Thing.

But that doesn't mean this is a grievous sin, or that it's worth getting worked up over. I didn't and am not excoriating him for it. It just struck me as I was reading the article, and I thought it was worth pointing out.

Do you honestly believe that Schiller was referring to race?

No, I don't think Schiller is a racist. But I am a little concerned that it might point to a deeper, socially embedded racism, that the terms that were deemed too offensive may actually have been inner-city slang that has equivalent terms in the accepted dictionary. If the same idea can be expressed in two different ways, one of which is considered vulgar, what, exactly is driving that categorization?

If not, do you honestly believe that a substantial portion of other readers would have interpreted it that way?

I would hope they wouldn't read it and decide that he was a racist, no, but I do think a lot of eyebrows were raised by it, yes.

If not, do you honestly belive that it was unreasonable to use the term?

Yes, I think it was a bad choice of words. Even if you ignore that there are racial connotations in the phrase, it still doesn't express what he means. Who cares about 'city' slang? Suburban or rural slang can't be extremely vulgar?

Anyways, I think it's a little ironic that we're talking about whether he should have to take care in the words he chooses to use, when the issue at hand is that his company is censoring a dictionary.
Previous lengthy HN discussion:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=743277
About people willing and able to contribute something : Yes Ubuntu has attacted such people. Maybe not everyone is contributing in code but many people contribute to Ubuntu through user forums and other such community avenues. Many many times I have searched for something not working on linux (for example some wifi card) and most of the times I have ended up finding the answer on the ubuntu forums. Similarly Ubuntu has also garnered a dedicated following of people who love to just tell other people about it.

Basically I wanted to say that Ubuntu may or may not have succeeded in getting a large developer following, but it surely has developed a healthy and active community and not just a passive userbase.
Of course Google Voice is a threat to AT&T. But in terms of the Google Voice app being rejected on the iPhone, even if AT&T applied pressure, in the end Apple should bear a lot of the blame for this. The final decision was Apple's.
Google doesn't try and impose themselves between me and the information I'm looking for, nor does it prevent me from dealing with any third parties that I want to do business with. I may not like what they're doing in China but I recognize that they have a gun to their heads and that they are being forced into the role of censor. Apple, on the other hand, seems to delight in meddling in my business.
Thank you, I had a great laugh starting at 2:23.

The audience reaction is just priceless. "Since we believe in choice"...
It's a Firefox extension, and so can be disabled like any other Firefox extension.
Practicing Product Minimalism
Play piano and guitar; try to sing too as I write music and someone needs to sing it.
This is absolutely amazing and comprehensive! I can't think of anything he really left out.

I've seen articles like this before, but they're usually super-parochial, and I've never seen one that offered 'remedies' (much less the hilarious 'alternative careers' in the last section).
Yes they do that. Additionally I think in a codified process it's probably more important to write down why the process is there and what problem it attempts to mitigate/solve. Then when the problem has been solved in some other way the process should be removed.

(Written) Processes seem to be the same sort of thing as code commenting.
There is a thermometer in there already.

http://heyinternet.com/imgdump/hot-iphone-20090130-175515.jp...
thanks, but most of those gamers are noting low frame rates, less than 50 fps... while still playable, it's not as smooth as the '07 demo.
Seems to be a good source for creating interview questions.
Then, NameCheap still is a reseller for Enom (Divvyshot appear to be registered with them).

However I like Namecheap too (and prefer dealing with them than Enom).
The key to understanding net neutrality: anonymity = good, egalitarianism = bad
This guy is a loon.
Anyone else notice that a few of the captions were cut off at apostrophes in the strings?

A curious detail for a security-focused article....
Yeah, I think so.

I'm one of those people that really doesn't make a very good employee. Although I was considered talented and was prized for my technical abilities and interdisciplinary knowledge (and I say that not out of immodesty, but simply because I was told so in no uncertain terms numerous times), and was cut some slack in situations where a less able person might've been sent packing because they just can't get their shit together, I had - and have - the problem of it being damn near impossible to get me to do something I'm not interested in. Just impossible. I'll do it, somehow, but in a time frame and workflow that emits kicking and screaming in all the nonauditory ways.

It's not really a conscious protestation. I'm just mentally spoiled because I grew up developing whimsically, and for fun. Put me in situations where getting it done and accomplishing the objective is a thousand times more important than what it actually is and how it works, and I just don't thrive. I'll do well enough to not be fired, but nothing stellar. I have enormous productivity potential when I apply myself in enormous marathon spurts toward something I am motivated to do for one reason or another, but whereas some people have a consistent base line of performance even in things they don't care about, mine is pretty disappointingly low.

I want to emphasise how unconscious this sabotage of the task is; it's not because I'm whining inside my head. I'll just unconsciously structure my priorities in such a way that something I don't care much for will be extremely starved for timeslices, and that's that.

I think a lot of "creative" folks are that way.

Anyway, point is, I think there's a corollary to this tendency that expresses itself in the more general fact of unconscious sabotage. As I progressed through the employment world, it came to be more and more the case that if I just didn't want to be somewhere, I'd mentally sabotage it so as to get closer and closer to being fired or, at the very least, given a very stern talking-to. The last two jobs before the ultimate one weren't very pretty, either, it's just that the employers were a lot more progressive and tolerant of my work habits and lack of punctuality in exchange for getting what they considered to be a very high caliber of output. If they were as demanding as my last employer, I would've been fired even sooner.
Why? Compatibility.
This is spot on:

5. Lisp is opaque to you
Decent article, but I think that Joel should have worked in a reference to Neal Stephenson's "In the Beginning Was the Command Line" as well.
Written in 2003, and its age shows. It is clear that the people working at Ubuntu and other distros only care about making their product easier to use by non-programmers.

'Raymond does attempt to compare and contrast Unix to other operating systems, and this is really the weakest part of an otherwise excellent book, because he really doesn't know what he's talking about. Whenever he opens his mouth about Windows he tends to show that his knowledge of Windows programming comes mostly from reading newspapers, not from actual Windows programming. That's OK; he's not a Windows programmer; we'll forgive that.'

Joel is not a Unix programmer; we'll forgive that.
It sounds like he wants something like Automator (http://www.macosxautomation.com/automator/) where you can just create sequences from very high level blocks of functionality. That has it's uses, of course, but it's not even on the same level as "real" programming, IMO.
I'm skeptical of these lists because people can work through things. For example, the stuff listed under "Inability to determine the order of program execution" is something that many people will get jammed on eary on as they try to take their brains (which is honed on the syntax of school level maths) into the programing world (where equals is an instruction rather than an assumptions). Another one is "Lisp is opaque to you". It's very sweet for MIT types to make these declarations from mount olympus, but lisp is something that can take time to acquire. If someone isn't a natural programmer but is happy to work at it to overcome hurdles then there's nothing wrong with that.

One of the examples of bad technique is:

Homebrew "Business Rule Engines"

Can anyone give examples of the sorts of things the author means by this? What sort of systems have people seen, and why is it necessarily a bad thing?
He's missing the third part, signs your a decent programmer, to differentiate the good from the great.
Thats what we thought at first too, (as a b2b startup) - except that if they as a company haven't moved on past IE6 they are not very likely to adopt new technology in general - including the startups products.

I wouldn't push for banning IE6 if you are selling a non-tech product, but if you are a tech company and have a feature IE6 holds you back from implementing or are losing time to supporting it, dump it.
This is a very good article, and hits lots of very good points.

However, it seems that there is a little bit of a self-diagnosis problem. For example, if you write "voodo code" (great description), unless there is some one to tell you, how do you know? And if you write voodo code, do you know what idempotent means? There is maybe a bit of the "Blub" effect here.

Perhaps between "Symptoms" and "Remedies" there needs to be "Diagnosis" or some hints at self-evaluation or tools for self-assessment.