skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think you're absolutely right about fortran's legacy advantage (that, and it's really not a terrible language for numerical work) but the distinction between 'supercomputer' and cluster of commodity PC's is all but history. Virtually all current supercomputers are clusters made up of the exact same chips you can get in desktop machines. The vector processing optimizations you mention are merely SSE or AltiVec or a GPU, technologies we all have access to. The only thing that makes a supercomputer super is the number of processors and the interconnect.
NASA today is involved in all kinds of things. Dozens, if not hundreds of projects and programs.

As opposed to NASA in its heyday, which had only a few major items in it's queue.

Which validates my point: mission creep is what is killing NASA.
What about those of us who are attempting to develop for mobile web?

Although that can be as device specific as a native app.
Facebook and Twitter (and their like) have yet to turn a profit or even come up with a plan to make one. Meanwhile, Blizzard's World of Warcraft continues to rack up millions a month from loyal and paying users. If you want to make money on the internet you need to take a good long look at what Blizzard is doing.
Ah, you're right, he doesn't give them E. However, my point remains the same. He gives them C and D. The audience comes up with E, which is totally natural for a _major scale_! Then McFerrin gives them the A (with the big jump). At that point the audience is either forced to go with A minor or a pentatonic scale. Considering the fact that he has established two jump sizes (minor third vs major second), it's pretty much impossible for them to choose A minor.
I am "the guy". I have a Yahoo account (currently inactive) and an MSN account.

The biggest issue I have with the two "competitors" to Google, and I use that term loosely, is that they don't have nearly enough inventory to sell me to make it worth my time. Example: I have bought approximately 65,000 clicks in from Google in this calendar year. Over the same period, Microsoft (which plain lacks a display network, where I get most of my clicks) has managed to find less than 1,000.

Yahoo was similarly terrible back when I used them, and in addition to charging me too much for not enough, they routinely borked their conversion counting, causing me to believe my spending on them was profitable when it was, in fact, not. After I audited their numbers and discovered their lack of facility with math, I stopped advertising with them.
I'm assuming that you are assuming (it gets tedious) that that computer you use to dump your data with to the HD will have network access.

Have a look at this (I just took a peek at it this morning, it's built by another HN poster):

https://beta.tarsnap.com/
Of course they have to pay the customer refunds.

The developers accepted a contract agreeing to refund money in certain circumstances, the circumstance have occurred, it is time for them to uphold their end of the contract.

The sales have been rolled back, the customers' money is in the developers account (as sympathetic as "pocket" sounds, if they can carry the money in their pocket then this is about very little money at all), the customers get their money back.

I think perhaps everyone that learns this lesson does it the hard way. Understand the contracts you enter into.

(I learned mine at the hands of Digital Equipment Corporation. For "good will" reasons I agreed to supply a specific key person for a specific nearly completed project until it was finished for a specific sum. All good, until it became in Digital's best interests to not complete the project on time and get more money from the customer for another year's work. I'm sure the Digital managers had many a good laugh that year.)
There are more ways to skin a cat. By your account the owners of icq never made money either. Until they were bought out that is...

Not every strategy is based on making money operating a service, some people aim for the big exit and are well willing to operate under a loss as long as they hold on to the service. It's a risky strategy, if your timing is off then you usually fail big time. But if the timing is right and you can find a partner that perceives an upside to having access to your users you just might score the jackpot.
New image search engine
...that can provide substantiations with just a little curiosity and work?

I think the answer is: People don't want to work. People are lazy. The very field of computer science was developed to help people do less work and still accomplish more.

The internet does this as well.

There's a scene in Waking Life that asks what the most essential human characteristic is: Fear or Laziness.

I think it's Laziness.
Singer warns not to consider moral positions as "rules" as stated in this essay, but guidelines. You can't be 100% perfect at all times (as Franklin discovered).

In addidition, moral views are mutable. My friend has been vegetarian for 10 years and on account of some book about a farm in Virginia he thinks maybe eating meat is all right. My argument against his decision may have some weight, but ultimately virtue and ethics are an individual's business.
NIH in the WSGI World
I went to a free iPhone Developer Tech Talk where they specifically addressed this policy. Not too many developers in the audience seemed thrilled about it, but it was laid out in front of them. If a customer comes to you for whatever reason asking for a refund, Apple's official policy is that it is your problem to deal with. I specifically made a note about it because I caught the Apple representative's very lawyer-esque response which was to minimize what he said at all about the issue, except to really say "it's your problem".

I might add that I don't think this policy is due to maliciousness on Apple's part. The reality is that trying to handle refunds has a number of logistical nightmares associated with it, namely:

1. Refund standards and laws within contiguous regions that the store serves are inconsistent. For instance, just because you have Apple Store USA, doesn't mean that there can be one consistent refund policy. Now multiply this problem by the number of countries that the store is present in.

2. A great number of customers would use refunds as a way to "try before you buy". The numbers would be significantly high enough to cause a problem.

Now, there's that old saying that you should never attribute to malice that which can be attributed to ignorance. I strongly suspect Apple's approach to this specific case is a simple case of bureaucratic ignorance. I bet that you have a middle-management type implementing a policy that was designed for him/her based upon very specific legal advice. The situation has probably been flagged for attention by the legal department and upper management, but until a policy is designed, they have to address the current situation using known protocols.

If you were at the Tech Talk that I was, Apple apologized for a lot of the iTunes Store stupidity that developers were complaining about online. They also explained why things were the way they were and it wasn't due to Apple being malicious.
Did I overlook something in the article?

Well, it could have been the bug in my Rails code. I find that unlikely, because the numerical impact would not push this campaign out of its historical norms. It could have been a bug in Google's code (like their automated diagnostic reporting "Your account has no credit card associated with it", which is contrary to the truth and scares me because if the right hand of their system is as borked as the left hand then that very well could be my problem). It could have been a concerted effort by a group of bored Dutch housewives to simultaneously monopolize 99.999% of the entire advertising inventory on teaching bingo sites.

If Google were interested in talking to me, there would be a little less wild speculation above. Heck, "I checked your account. Everything is fine on our end. Best of luck to you." would be an improvement on the answer I got.
Color Scheming for Designers (and Developers)
Ask HN: A simple tcp monitor ?
Is anybody aware of the existence of what is probably easiest described as 'nagios light', a simple to use and robust program that fires off a script on a machine if a local port becomes unreachable, hangs or times out?

I'm sure I can whip up something simple but my experience is that such simple things tend to get more complicated than you expect once you start building.

The intended platform is linux.
Right, and that's the entire point of the "expense questions" the reps are talking about. They now not only have to vet Firefox, they also have to find a 3rd party tool to vet & buy.

Plus the cost of training IT people to install Firefox across thousands of computers (you didn't think they'd install it one-by-one did you?).

Etc, etc.
Why not just use FTP?

Set up your camera to save the photos to in different folders based on date, then just get some web space, go to ftp://yoursite/ and drag&drop the photos.

It's low tech, but it's almost guaranteed to work from anywhere, and you're less likely to get kicked out for "hacking" when you don't have a cygwin terminal open.
This post is much more public than TechCrunch. Now that it has been updated by a response from AT&T, that is surely true. AT&T says it does not APPROVE applications. Does that mean it only rejects them? Really, you must look at the entire response to realize it could all just be word trickery.
Isn't BoingBoing basically an entertainment site? I think the standards are different for a site like TechCrunch that represents itself as a legitimate competitor to mainstream journalism. Isn't BoingBoing more of an entertainment site? As soon as I see stories about Spiderman, World of Warcraft, jetpacks, and Cheezy Poofs mixed in with something that kind of looks like journalism I immediately know how to judge it.
Ask HN: Can you Monetize Celebrity Gossip Sites?
So I've got this blog that I've been writing in for over four years.

As part of that, a few of my pages have pictures of celebrities. What can I say? Seemed like a fun topic at the time.

These pages, for whatever reason, have become very popular -- so popular that they take up a considerable amount of bandwidth off my server. I'm probably spending 20 bucks a month to pay for people to come by and gawk at celebrity pictures.

I'm at a loss at how to continue. While traffic is nice, quite frankly these people are visiting for reasons unrelated to technology, humor, agile, or any of the other things I like talking about. They come once, see the pictures, then never come again. Hardly any ever stay. And they're not providing anything except a bill.

What to do? Delete those pages? Re-write them as landing pages for some kind of product? How do these celebrity sites work, anyway?

People say to get traffic first and then worry about the money, but what happens when the traffic you get isn't what you expected? Change the site over to something like "Naked Famous People" ?? <- Not happening.
and if they allow both, they have to increase development costs for all web apps because we all know supporting multiple browsers costs more.
You can't install tarsnap on library computers / internet cafes, and so on.
you need to add the ability to add a max length to the word
The first point is absolutely correct. Nearly every other visual layout system uses grids or stacks. Novices love using Excel for layout. Nevermind computers, look around and you'll find plenty of examples of space organized with grids.

Say what you will about semantic purity yada yada but grids (aka tables) are damn intuitive.
Small thing - I think it should be "natural" instead if "naturally".
I can understand your frustration, but this is how it works almost anywhere. Like if someone joins an IRC channel about a programming language and says something like "I'm getting build error X when including library Y" people will just say "working fine here" or "did you check the wiki?" or something like that. Someone will have to surrender time to help you and you'll have to give more information and run through options with them.

I mean, it could be a lot of different things causing it.

The bogus error is bad, though. Also, as a paying customer, you would think they would have a better response. Damn :[

Maybe someone ran some numbers and found out it was a better idea to just hit everyone with form letters first, to dissuade the people who will never get adwords working anyway.
Gaia In The Light Of Modern Science
I've been considering an iPhone-native app for a web app I'm creating. But honestly, I've never been enamored with the App Store. Submit for approval? Gimme a break. Instead, I plan on developing a targeted UI for Safari on the iPhone. If that's not sufficient, I may begrudgingly go with a native iPhone app.
What about measuring the speed of light? or measuring the distance from the earth to sun? Where do these fall in your neat divisions between subject and objective?

Is there a certain class of proposition that is too complicated to be called objectively true? Are all medical theories, for example, simply subjective and have no real meaning in terms of predicting likely future outcomes?

Any statement or theory that does not have predictive power is meaningless. Predictive implies probability. Probability implies odds. Put up or shut up up.
I would go for other than paying to be member. Maybe it's OK to have some paying members (like LinkedIn) for vanity or extra (non essential) functionality.
Letting 195 million users to go away is suicide.

Ads are OK, but it's really for Google type of business - a social site want people to stay.

Collateral revenue ideas:

- Geni could have a "Get your family tree poster" printing service

- Facebook could do the same with friends

- Twitter: I like Twitter, but I have no idea

- SecondLife: virtual stuff for real money

- dating site: organize real life parties

- A product review community could become Amazon
Are they real page views or picture embeds ?

How much of it is bot traffic ?

Slap some google ads on them, $20 / month is < $1 / day, that shouldn't be too hard to do.

Naked famous people is a lot better business model than some of the ones I read about, but at the same time it may involve a lawyer or two.

Celebrity sites usually are bottom feeders, I don't think you want to be associated with them in any way shape or form.
Weird things said in job interviews
I agree, contracts are legally binding. However, there are judgments against contracts in civil court cases merely because the contract is ludicrous. E.g. Apple approved the application, then breached the values of the contract (despite it not being written in the contract) by rejecting the application although the application did not drastically change during it's life-cycle. (The argument may fall better under lacking competency to manage the App Store.) With this FCC ruling, I think an application developer would be insane not to sue for breach of contract by Apple.
Excellent graphic! Would make Tufte proud.

I clicked on the different demographic buttons and also moved the mouse around and read the tool tip. Was able to come up with quite a few of my own hypotheses doing this. Amazing what you can do with an organic app over one that just sits there.

I need to find a way to put this kind of thinking into my own apps. My users would love it.
Start by changing the anti aging ads on your blog to something your target readership would be interested in.
What I would like to see is a widespread developer boycott of the iPhone platform. This would bring Apple back to the days where they used to cajole developers into writing software for the Mac.
Lots of interesting stuff in here. Computer usage seems way too low though. Who are these people?
I've never set up Cygwin on a USB drive, and then tried to transport it between computers, but that's the first thing I'd try.

Then you could write a simple script to do an rsync-over-ssh to your server, and just run it directly from the USB drive.

It would probably be best to test it on at least both Vista and XP systems, to make sure it works.

I'd use ssh keys, so that you don't have to worry about keystroke logging. You could also make a user for it on your server side, and lock it down to just allow the rsync in.

Look into the '--link-dest' option to rsync, this allows you to really easily do incremental backups, each time you backup your new backup directory has all the files in it, but any files that haven't changed are hardlinked to the previous version, so you don't take up much disk space. Really, really cool.
It's not just about the refunds. The real issue is that they deny developers apps and give them no more than an up or down vote. And when you try and talk to somebody, they don't even give you the courtesy of a real conversation. Apple is nothing without its legions of fans. Those fans start with a kernel of developers and tech enthusiasts. You think my mom would have bought an iPhone if her geeky son didn't harass her for months that it's the only phone worth having? You think my sister-in-law wouldn't have bought a Mac if I hadn't convinced her that it isn't this scary OS that's so different from Windows?

I understand Apple has business contracts. I understand they are out to make money. All we're asking is that they stop being such profound douchebags in the process. All we're asking is that they stop shitting on the very people who helped build their success. All we're asking is they stop FREAKING people out with their man-behind-the-curtain/NDA-siging/cyborg-talking dev program.
Justification by faith, not works, right?
Shark Week at TechJaws | TechJaws: Internet Security and SEO
They're real page views. In the logs I get referrals from Google, usually people doing image searches.

I've got Google ads at the top of every page, but I'm not converting much of anything from the gawkers.

I was wondering if there was some magic -- perhaps making those pages static and rewriting them targeted just at celebrity peepers -- that would help recoup expenses? I figure these sites that just do celebrity gossip and pictures and such must be making money somehow.

I don't think text-based ads, like adwords, are going be effective for people who are primarily searching for visual stimulus. Perhaps some kind of landing page for a paid celebrity site that gives referral fees? I don't know. I'm not crazy about this entire business, and if it weren't for the bandwidth cost, I'd just ignore it. But I'm increasingly uncomfortable with paying out so much each month and getting nothing from it.
Amazing app. I've already found a few domains worth buying!

You should partner with GoDaddy to send domain purchasers there.
>> "people will abandon them for greener pastures."

Developers, maybe some. Customers? not until there is a comparable phone on the market. Which there isn't.
Defense Deparment eyes hacker con for new recruits
The thing about the App Store is that it allows small developers to reach huge audiences without a lot of logistical headaches. Little things to brick and mortar stores, like charging the right amount of tax to a customer, are huge problems on the web when you're trying to reach customers across the world. On the other hand, there are definite risks associated with using the App Store and this is one of them. You're absolutely right that people will abandon the App Store for greener pastures. Let's just wait to see where those greener pastures are.

Also, as you said, nothing has changed. Developers trying to make money are businesses first and foremost. They should leave their fanboy-ism at home when they set up shop. The people that are complaining the most about getting screwed by the App Store, as jws points out in another comment in this thread, are the ones that probably didn't even bother reading the contract between Apple and them, let alone getting a lawyer to give them specific legal advice about it for them.

I know that the barrier of entry for starting a business is quite low these days, but that doesn't mean that standards for professionalism should drop correspondingly. Part of being a professional is understanding what your obligations are. These obligations are outlined in contracts. Contracts are the emergency manuals that get pulled out in case something goes wrong. They dictate what you agreed to do in those situations. You wouldn't haphazardly sign an emergency evacuation plan. You'd probably read it over and try to understand if it all made sense. Treat your contracts the same way. They're all about corner cases, so they're a big deal.
I think the fact that the "worldwide publishing medium" doesn't have any of the filters that a traditional publishing medium has is a big factor. From the dawn of time up until fairly recently, it took a fair amount of effort to spout one's nonsense, unfiltered, to more than a relatively small number of people.

It seems to me that this can be viewed as a "culture" of a sort, tied to the notion of writing and publication, where there an implied responsibility to some basic notions-- Derrida, in an interview, for example, says "it should be possible to invoke rules of competence, criteria of discussion and of consensus, good faith, lucidity, rigor, criticism, and pedagogy."
Call your Adwords account manager on the phone (They answer the phone quickly). At least in the UK.

Email for this sort of thing simply doesn't work well.
Excellent Downloadable eBooks To Teach Yourself Linux
One thing that is puzzling me for some time is why
vegetarians think it's more moral/nice/whatever to eat
plants and not animals

If you acknowledge that animals are sentient (and it's not hard if you've had pets), then it's interesting to look at the meat on your plate and them compare it to the animal that's your friend that's lying down next to you. If you're eating pig there's a good chance that the animal you're eating had potential to be even smarter than the dog. That's weird. That we choose some animals to slaughter for what is really a minor convenience (being able to eat meat) yet we make equivalent animals a close friend. It's similar to this idea that we can at the same time be good neighbours yet be happily gassing/bombing/napalming populations a little further off just because we don't know them.

A problem with meat in the modern world is that it's all packaged when you get it and this makes the relationship impersonal. It's good to ask before every meal involving meat, "if I had to make the decision to kill this in order to eat it, would I do it?"

It becomes a sliding scale thing and you pick a position. Does it ruin my day if I step on an ant on the way to work in the morning? Do I write poems to the death of flies? No. At the same time, I've cut the majority of meat out of my diet.

It's a human fabrication.

True, but you're papering over something. I doubt you live a life comparable to the guy in _A Clockwork Orange_. I doubt that you walk away from restaurants when you're in a foreign city and have zero change of being caught. Your own conduct is evidence that you agree that not all fabrications are equivalent. Obviously you have principles yourself. You can break the cycle you criticise of ethos being pack oriented by choosing to live by a value system that extends beyond the human pack.

try to do as much good as you possibly can

The circumstances in which meat is created is a horror. Cutting down on the amount of meat you eat is a fast way to reduce your footprint. I think pigs, chickens, lamb and cage eggs are the worst, and have found no impact on my life by eliminating these altogether apart from inadvertently eating things with those eggs in.
You mean a "x c" term (the graph is of a percentage rate).
The author is going to have to go back to the basic question of "What is good?" before he can answer the questions he's asking in the article.

He's making assumptions on the answer to that question based on his circumstances, which are totally different than a sweat shop worker in another country. Sweat shop working might be "better" than the alternative for that person.

My wife says, "You just have to do everything with love."