skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It automatically gets your friends from the various networks and the replies go back to those networks in the same way twitter clients work - though for multiple networks.

I.e. it's not a social network like FriendFeed is - it's a client.
Microvision has been touting those projectors for at least most of a decade now. They're so incredibly awesome, if they work and don't have major drawbacks, that I conclude they don't really work. :(
It's slightly comforting to be reminded that even the "big boys" sometimes have tech problems too
Still down!@2:09PM PDT
Basically if you've ever worked in the affiliate business, either as a publisher or an advertiser, you pick up on specific terms which are used when talking about not-so-nice activities in "nice" conversations. There were lots of those terms said in this interview.

It's not a reflection on this guy in particular (although he did openly admit to spamming search engines - "doorway pages" is one of those key terms), its the affiliate business as a whole. As he says in the video - it's about the leads, not the product. I get you customers - it's your problem what to do with them. Your product doesn't work as advertised? Not my problem - I just lead the person to your doorstep - it's your responsibility what you do with them.

Read a few discussions on WickedFire.com (a popular affiliate forum) and you will quickly understand what I mean...
Sketchy industry does not equal sketchy guy.

Irony is, for those that watched the video, this guy turned the sketchiness of the industry to his advantage and made a whole business out of certifying these online casinos.

I really enjoyed it. In future, please ask him(or other folks you interview!) about how they scale the salesforce for the businesses that have one. I am at a point where I am able to launch something, may be even make some money from it, but find it challenging to scale.
Fair enough. Not everyone thinks Hicks is funny. I've watched some number of clips and videos of Hicks, and there are certainly low spots and repetition. Over all, though, I find him pretty entertaining. But the "Fuck! I'm angry!" tone can get grating in large doses.

Some of this reminds me of watching a George Carlin HBO special near the end of his life. There was one point where it seemed he was just ranting, just livid. He wasn't trying to be funny; it was like he just slipped out of the comedian role and into some raging maniac role. I have to figure that's just how he worked. It was personal, and deeply heart-felt, and sometimes that gets wild.
At the risk of being too much of a smart-arse maybe some self-referencing could work in the comic.

"Hey dude I hear you're appearing in a comic today.."
This is a paper by an eminent researcher in the discipline (I have read one of his books and have another at hand) that I Googled up:

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi...
Does anyone know how often other major e-mail service goes down? or do we only hear about it when gmail goes down?

I don't remember yahoo mail going down or hotmail going down, at least, in the last couple of year.

I think this is the third time gmail went down this year.
US date order always makes me laugh - it's like people looked at date order and thought if the day comes before the month that will be the European way, lets flip it. Then they realised that would be YYYY-mm-dd and so be ISO standard order, dang can't have that, hey lets have a mixture.

I know it didn't happen this way but some sort of logical order would be good.
I think that would be a helpful factor in theory, but in practice would be too inconsistent to rely on. Using Reddit as an example (because I have no familiarity with HN's source) there is client-side javascript that intercepts clicks on links and appends story IDs to one of the Reddit cookies. Next time a request goes to Reddit, they get a list of recent clicks.

This can fail in a lot of ways, most obviously if Javascript or cookies are turned off. Also, the cookie isn't sent to Reddit until I load another page, so if I read an entire page of links and then close the browser without refreshing the page, the cookie doesn't get sent. Plus, the script clips the list around 20 elements, so even if I did refresh Reddit, it wouldn't know I'd clicked on more than 20.

My point is not the numerous weaknesses of Reddit's approach. Instead, it's self-reported information that must necessarily be suspect and incomplete. If an article on an obscure programming language pops up here, and every single person who reads it uses Lynx with cookies turned off for security, there might be no opportunity to record any views.
said it in the other thread, just want to spread the info:

gmail still works via the igoogle widget for those who need to use it.
Or you could try using 2 other cards to draw a horizontal line across the 2 lines for comparison. One card is used to form the right angle and the other is used to slide up to see which line end it reaches first.

Or if you could get a good shadow you may be able to do it with just one other card with the 2 comparison cards aligned and the shadow card tilting down.

Edit: Or just use table corner. 2 cards along edge and line drawing card on other edge.
I believe in the law of conservation of messes...

If you mess up frequently, each mess will be small. However, if you do it once in a blue moon, each will be catastrophic! Of course there is also a size dependent scaling factor... the higher you are, the harder you fall!

;)
I don't mean to insult you or your idea but, at least to me, this is terrible...

There are a number of problems with it.

You can't read the text without enlarging the comic.

It takes more than 2 seconds to read...you probably aren't going to get that much investment from anybody unless they already know what this is, and care (they likely have an active desire NOT to see this).

It is CONFUSING...I get that this has something to do with running SQL queries from within excel, but I have no idea what is going on in the comic. Is this the guys boss? Is this some vendor? Who is this person and why does he look so radically different than the guy behind the laptop?

I'm still not even entirely sure what your product does...doesn't excel have the capability of doing this natively?

I think if you wanted to do an ad...big bold letters that say "RUN SQL FROM WITHIN EXCEL" would be MUCH more effective than this...
Ruby Gem Packaging: Best Practices
Brazil is down
Nice, I still take a few minutes (and a few more on bad mornings.)
amix here from Plurk. Our plan isn't really to compete against StackExchange. StackExchange seems to be targeted at a more enterprise crew and I am sure they will be successful at their market penetration (given the success of StackOverflow and FogBugz).

Our plan is to create a solution that we (our you) have 100% control over and that supports over 30 languages. Support is such a pain and Solace is mainly created to solve the issue surrounding support. Solace also offers an API that lets you integrate Solace deeply into your product.

Anyhow, the bottom line is that Solace is more targeted at startups and open-source projects - - while StackExchange is targeted at small business / enterprise market. That's at least how we look at it.
Subway Overload
Hey, eBay Actually Did Ok With Skype
NowPublic acquired
Smart pointers are overused (C++)
"My take away: easier to make money off rich firms than poor individuals."

A worthy insight IMO, one of those 'I know it but it helps to be reminded' comments.
Gmail is back.
"We will provide an update by September 1, 2009 5:16:00"

Hit refresh at 5:16 and it's back up. That was pretty impressive.
Back up here in Portland, OR.
Fair enough points blhack.

I guess your issues with the comic itself are why I want help to improve it, but I can see what you're saying about it taking a while for anyone to really understand it.

Maybe it was a bad idea to submit this :)
Just tried. It's back up for me in Washington, DC, USA
They've shown actual products working, most notably at e.g. CES. Wonder why they haven't brought them to market yet? I'm thinking they're still rather expensive to produce.
Buwahaha
[Tell HN] Apocalypse Averted: GMAIL is back
I've just gotten mine back!
I made a submission...

I think that, if you're going to go for something like this, it's important that people understand what is going on right away...(which is what you'll see if you look at my suggestion).
Recent Contributions to Cryptographic Hash Functions
As if such a move by AAPL is anywhere near surprising
It's 99% correlated (in line with) the longer test method. OK. Then you learn that there were 77 in the study. So they got the result wrong 1% of the time, for 0.8 of a child?

Shenanigans.

"the two tests have a 99% correlation"

"they recruited 77 gifted children through"

[yes, it could be a rounding error]
Do you know of a good comparison of / introduction to the various object databases?

A quick google search shows a wiki page that has a table listing various features, but I'd be interested in a discussion of the pros/cons of the various options.
They settled.
John,

You're right that our servers are outside China. Also that businesses that need to bill in RMB are more complex to setup and it's a good idea to do things by the book. The process isn't clear cut and starting a WOFE is much more expensive than starting a business abroad.

Beijing seems less accustomed to having large foreign-owned businesses and some of the rent-seeking strata I saw in Shanghai hasn't developed as fully here. The expat community also feels a bit more integrated into society, which widens and softens the support network. The administrative issues we've run into while starting up have mostly come at us from abroad.
Although I realize it is nothing more than a detail, I found it quite amusing when the drug dealer attempts to reassert his masculinity at the end by saying "I don't like small talk. I don't like having to ask them how their day was."
iGoogle has the chat feature enabled by default, IIRC. You can shut it off via Options (at the bottom of the widget) > Hide (I think, this is off the top of my head).
We've seen some pretty bad rejections – the whole "help, this app provides access to the web" dilemma and whatnot –, but this is (a) ridiculous, (b) random and (c) doesn't make a lot of sense.

I bet that the 40+ app approval people are actually rolling dice to determine whether to reject an app or not and what the rejection should be.
If they don't fail in some obvious way (low battery life; heavy or wearing on the ears and nose; risk of damage to the eye; can't produce true color; or something), I'd happily pay thousands of dollars for one, and I can imagine many, many other people would as well, which would help them drive costs down.

At first I thought they were holding out for a large contract from the DoD or something, but after this long I just assume there's something critically wrong with them (one of the above), or that the managers are idiots who can fail to profit from having warehouses of gold. :)
Funny I'd forgotten that that was possible. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/dc/Trisectsegment...
Gmail is up and running - got all my mails :)
Gmail is up and running - got all my mails :)
I know in a lot of Smalltalks _ was the assignment operator, because in an old prerelease version of ASCII the symbol in that position was ←. I suppose it's possible S had this confusion too, although it's pretty obscure.
Twitter Tracking Outbound Link Clicks
Google is a better sysadmin than I am. I assume most people are in the same boat.
Aren't the bubbles part of the SDK's UI toolkit?
Please correct me if I misunderstand, but I generally take "helps the argument" and "had supporting evidence" to be very close to the same thing. And this article does neither.
Same machine is up, 2:32pm PDT
Maybe I'm missing something but how is this different than Twitter's favorite system? Just more organized?

Edit: Plus they make you pay?
Ask HN: How do you name your startups or web apps?
The question is quite self-explanatory. But there's no clear answer. Even if one does find the perfect name, often the domain is just not available, often due to squatters. It seems like we all have to turn to domain hacks or something.

So how have you named your startup or web app?
I'm not sure how useful this will be for you, but http://vx.netlux.org/ has a decent collection that's somewhat dated.
The order is logical, it maps to the way many americans speak. E.g. July 4th, 2000, which is always spoken as ... er... the 4th of july, 2009. Well. uh. Bad example.
mmm... bacon.
If the guy at the top decides on a whim that things are going to be done differently, you can just keep doing what you're doing. If he doesn't like it, he can fire you, and then you're in exactly the same position as if you'd quit to pursue a startup. Except that you probably have a bit more savings, a bit more experience, and a bit more of a desire to prove him wrong.
Industry Group Wants Cellphone Tax Repealed
Alright, Who Broke The Internet? Dell.com Also Knocked Out.
This is reminiscent of the patents for the ever-increasing number of blades in face/leg shavers. We're up to 5 now.

These diagnostic ones are a couple generations behind ;)
Go for less text. More http://www.smbc-comics.com less http://www.qwantz.com/. The current template requires way too much.

I am pretty sure the technical term is 'excel ninja' and not 'excel kung fu' too. But I guess that was the punchline? I am just confused.

Maybe some work place humor? My 1 minute half baked attempt would be something like...

"With Query Cell, I've pumped up excel power user level to over 9000! It takes me half the time to run my daily extracts. Now if only I could figure out how to save on this new ribbon feature."

Okay, okay okay... I tried!
You'll regret it when it's hacked to display adverts.
they should have evolved before, or with, the curve. They're about 5 years late to the online game.

They've lost too much ground and don't have enough $$ to evolve now.
I think you just need a squirrel nibbling on the excel logo.
Thats actually where I got the current three from, went for the rather large bittorrent option. I've tried testing a lot of the worms from that collection, a lot of them don't seem to replicate under WinXP (with no service packs), I think, as you say, due to their age.
Thanks joez,

Of course! how did I miss adding a ninja reference :)

The links definitely make your point about the amount of text :)
I think the main problem is that there ISN'T a punchline.
Noted : Add one Squirrel.

Are you Scott Adams ?
Sure, but now there's a variant of C that will only work on Apple platforms...
Patent before Apple does!
I have trouble following the article, since it appears based on the premise that rail is dead, which it very much is not, especially for freight.

What am I missing?
To clarify, 'vacuous' was describing the way these people are portrayed, rather than how I think about them.

Additionally, there are so many similar replies, I can't be bothered replying to them all.
I've recently started running with a heart rate monitor, angry that it doesn't display bpm and a redline alert allá FPS
5 Things To Do When Gmail Goes Down
Thread Turns Facebook Friends into Dating Matchmakers
How Snow Leopard reports drive capacity
Disease: There's an App for That
Trace Compilation and Recursion, Part 1
800x600? Get a new computer and you'll be able to read a lot of websites!
Powershell's single, deal-breaking problem is that there is no integration with the rich Unix CLI environment, which means that it can hardly be used as the superglue that bash and zsh can be used for. Which means that it's basically a shell language on steroids, for which I'd much rather recommend and interactive Ruby or Python shell.
Powershell's problem is that it exists in an ecosystem that does not acknowledge the CLI, and it will not be useful until that situation is reversed. Since, to this day, mos windows apps don't have backends for CLI interaction, I doubt thethings will change for several years.
Yeah. I only ever use GMail through IMAP, and then didn’t find this until after it was back up. Never had a clue.
"Hunger Insurance"
Examining the Society of Mind (2003)
Ditto.

Messy code is difficult to maintain. You are incurring a penalty whenever someone needs to go in and make changes, a situation that is made all the worse when it is someone new. Perhaps my narrow programmer's mind can't appreciate the difference, but it sounds like technical debt to me.
Hangman + Arduino = Hangmanduino
> what do you expect to learn from speakers
> that you already haven't read on the web?

Are you kidding? Do you think the only thing to learn from someone is what they've written on the web?
I assume you work over there? I've heard nothing but good things; and getting support for SQL Compare has always been top notch ;)

(So you guys are allowed to have a tiny empire)
That's what I thought, too, but then I realized that what we were both missing is that the edges of the cutting surface are not the same as the edges of the shape.

The vertices really do trace out a right angled square, so if you just put cutting surfaces at the vertices and inside them, it really will cut a square.
This article begins with a false analogy in its comparison of the plights of railroads and newspapers. Newspapers are not in the "newsprint" business, as suggested here, but rather in the journalism business. The mechanism for distribution of the information is not especially relevant, nor does it impact the newspaper companies' core competencies as much as any of the sources of this article suggest.

I don't really think it's as much of a stretch to imagine newspaper companies expanding into other media as it is to imagine railroads expanding into airborne freight. The problem is that strictly online providers were able to provide comparable information in a more convenient medium years before anyone in newspapers saw the light.

Of course, that doesn't mean it's too late to embrace online as the medium of choice for journalism companies.
The date of the conference is October 17, 2009. Your screen resolution is vintage! I didn't realize folks were still using 800x600.
Didn't Apple change everything from "Metal" to "Plastic" a few years ago?

Anyway, I use 1px red borders as my window border. Why waste valuable screen real estate on something that you can't interact with?
Twitter really exemplifies this. They failed a lot and nobody (except programmers) cared since, hey, twitter's always down. Now they don't fail often, have a huge worldwide audience, and every failure is news event.
Get Ready for HTML 5
Yes, it's really warm database management, which is a smart tactic for established sales businesses experiencing a downturn.

I've had a number of "we haven't seen you lately" letters and emails over the past 12 months. None from my dealer though.
Maybe there is some monetization plan in the works that would use that data
Hype Springs Eternal: PE-Backed IPOs Are Not Always Happy Events
This looks great for trivial code, but what about more complex code?

destructuring-bind([a b &rest c] some-list lambda([x] +(a b x)))

or

loop(for i from 1 to 10 collect 1+(i))

or

with-current-buffer(get-buffer-create("foo")
save-excursion(
insert(text)
buffer-substring-no-properties(point-min() point-max())))

This looks horrible. There is an advantage in using the same syntax for both lists and function application.
It was a very simple, unscientific test: ran a MySQL query with the old drives, then ran it on the new drive. Old drives took 5 minutes, new drive took less than 2 minutes.
Exactly. Whom among us hasn't written down every useful thought we've ever had and blogged it? If all of our friends blogged, would we even want hang out?
How many is "lots"? How introverted are they (on any scale)? How active are they within these circles, and how big are the circles?

My point is: intensity introversion introversion inherently limits the the size of any useful social circle by requiring excessive emotional energy to grow beyond that. For me, that size is probably on the order of a couple dozen people, though that's well beyond the comfortable level of emotional expenditure, which is closer to only one dozen.

Filtering by technical aptitude (notwithstanding a disproportionately high ratio) and startup compatibility, reduces the number to zero.
IBM's Kappos Approved as U.S. Patent Chief
Although, intuitively, I don't disagree, do you have evidence?

What about introverted co-founders?
Seriously, how much work did it take roughly (@amix)? After all the fuss about "weekend job" issue one wonders.
Swimming without goggles is difficult when wearing contacts. The lenses tend to wash out of the eye (at least for me).
There is definitely merit to the notion of using persistent memory to address state management. But neither this (nor "noSQL") in any way addresses the other fundamental utility of a database: querying for data.

The need for a (form of) structured querying language (such as SQL) remains regardless of how state is managed. If you are not convinced, simply pretend that your heap is in fact a persistent store (and don't worry about process life cycle) and think through the problem of writing code to extract sub-sets of your object graphs. By the time you are finished with your enhanced collection/graph interface you have reinvented a form of query api.

Its not just about state.
Local newspapers won't make any more money by generating better journalism. They are already read by the vast majority of their target audiences. Newspapers are in the business of selling as many ads for as much money as possible, using journalism to attract an audience. The audience isn't the problem. The ads are.
That's not at all how correlation is measured.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation
I guess that's a show-stopping problem for this guy, eh?
I know google hires some people who are better than me, but that doesn't mean the gmail system is better than something I could engineer.... For one thing, google needs to have a much lower cost per user than I do, forcing them to make some choices that I don't have to. I have no problem paying $50 a month for email service, and that level of cost per user would be untenable on a free email service.
(I host most of my email myself, and I'm trading a free co-lo to mark perkel of junkemailfilter.com to do my filtering. between that and my time, I'd guess $50/month)
Out for approx 40 minutes.

Last quarter Dell did $12.76 B in sales, which is $140.22 M/day, $5.84 M / Hr, or $3.89 million dollars for every 40 minute increment.

It's crazy to extrapolate math that far (it doesn't take into account the fact that 5-5.40pm might usually be the slowest time of day, or the busiest; or the fact that many customers will come back tomorrow and make the purchase anyway), but it's still a great example of how investing in resources to prevent this kind of thing is well worth it.

Your start-up may not be doing $12B in sales just yet, but are you investing in prevention?
I thought they were called computers, not aestheticsers.
My experience is different. (I mostly use DBIx::Class.)

I am not good at remembering SQL's syntactic quirks, which means I can't sit down and write a query for exactly what I want. But with DBIx::Class, I can walk my objects to get the data I want, and it "compiles down" to one database query.

So that's not leaky -- I don't know SQL, I do know OO, and DBIx::Class lets me use my knowledge of one to extract data with the other.
I'm impressed by their App Status Dashboard (http://www.google.com/appsstatus), which I hadn't seen before today. It's a very helpful tool for when this kind of outage happens. I wish Twitter would follow suit.