skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Asserting that the system is not "working as well as it used to ..."

I said

"The "flag and wait for a moderator" tactic doesn't seem to be working as well as it used to."

there is a subtle difference between what I said and what you claimed I said.
Or like radiation (Cosmic/Gamma Rays, radioactive spiders, etc.) in the works of Stan Lee.
>> "FriendFeed, Facebook, etc. None of these have succeeded"

Umm. Sorry? Come again? None of these have succeeded? By exactly which metric are you measuring success here?

Please explain exactly how twitter is even as successful as friendfeed let alone facebook.

edit: -1 points for questioning how you're measuring friendfeed and facebook as failures? My how times have changed.
Kind of a silly conversation. You wouldn't leave your laptop on a table unguarded in either place.
The last paragraph of the article addresses this specifically:

"Imagine my father’s hospital had to present the bill for his “care” not to a government bureaucracy, but to my grieving mother. Do you really believe that the hospital—forced to face the victim of its poor-quality service, forced to collect the bill from the real customer—wouldn’t have figured out how to make its doctors wash their hands?"
Ask HN: Review our website
We've just recently finished a proof-of-concept site called 'isitopen'. It is designed to allow users submit and review consumer devices regarding how 'open' they are (i.e. available source-code, documentation, standardized plugs, etc.)

We've hit a point where we don't know where to go from here, whether the idea is even a good one, or how to market it.

Comments?
That represents the less commitment from companies to hire people permanently
If the stamps are anything like certificates, I think this is just going to become an inconvenience and not really be THAT effective (though I'm sure it will be put a significant dent in the problem, at least initially).
Eigenvectors are "important" directions with respect to some linear transform (operator). The eigenvalues are constant scaling factors that relate input vectors (inputs to the operator) to output vectors.

Knowing that an operator merely scales (but doesn't rotate) certain input vectors is an important property to characterize it.

Imagine some matrix describing the stresses (strains?) in a continuous medium of material, about a certain point. If you can find special directions from that point where the forces are just scaling, then you know you're just dealing with tension/compression in those directions, not bending.

Same thing applies for fluid flows, it can be useful to find out where the flow is just speeding up / slowing down, but not twisting.

... helpful?
"Twitter has exactly two things going for it:

* the number of registered users on Twitter and the network between those users,"

That's not exactly accurate. There's a reason Twitter has users. You don't attract all those users in the first place without some kind of feature people want.
I believe only Y Combinator-affiliated companies can post jobs there. Many of the companies in these comments are not affiliated.
We've just recently finished a proof-of-concept site called 'isitopen'. It is designed to allow users submit and review consumer devices regarding how 'open' they are (i.e. available source-code, documentation, standardized plugs, etc.)

We've hit a point where we don't know where to go from here, whether the idea is even a good one, or how to market it.

Comments?
People come to India for their vacations for couple of weeks; they see India and then comment without understanding the complexity of India. They Compare India with US, UK etc. Every such writer point out problems (Easiest task in the world) but no one try to give single solution. They even don't understand India is having such a diversified culture with such a large population. If I replace population and diversity of India with US, i don't think even US can survive
Yes, I flagged that.

If you had any idea about the complex mix of nationalities that are my daily life you'd realize that I couldn't give a damn about the country being discussed. I'm not interested in discussions of that country's internal politics. The article about Indian education was flagged for a different reason, it seemed irrelevant to HN how the Indian general education system worked. Really interesting topic for an article in The Economist, but I came here for code and related subjects.
That's why this year, my 13 month journey in the eastern hemisphere is being done with a single carry on bag. Nothing owned, nothing owning me :)
Because there are far more terrorists than originally estimated, of course! And many more children to be thought of.
One in six young Britons jobless as unemployment hits 14-year high
There's a local HN meetup group for DC. Send out word for when you'll be in DC and maybe the meetup organizer will setup something.

Plus, you might be able to find a nice couch to crash on.
Cisco Eos
Really liked this.

For anyone who has read Alain de Botton: Could you recommend some of his books? I'm really interested in checking out his work after watching this.
I agree... I think the problem for them is that morphing facebook into twitter is simple - you remove features and privacy settings. Morphing twitter into facebook however, is far harder and much more work. You have to build all the tons of features facebook have.

I'd be really surprised if Twitter win it out, facebook just look ridiculously clued in to how to beat them, whereas I haven't really seen any changes at twitter in terms of features. Have they added any? :/ Strike that... have they added back in the features they removed?

edit: yeah downmod me all you like... or you could reply with a coherent argument.
Ask HN: mod_proxy for Apache?
I'm looking in to a software proxy/cache/load balanace solution for my shop, which is primarily Apache-based and med-low traffic (avg peak is maybe 75 hits/min). nginx, lighttpd, haproxy, Varnish, Squid, etc. all look interesting/appealing/cool, but now that mod_proxy is baked as of Apache 2.2 it seemed like it may be a better choice given our existing support commitment and relatively low volume.

However, it's easy to find people raving about their nginx/lighttpd/Varnish/haproxy/etc. solution, not so much with the Apache one, and I'm trying to feel out some experiences with how successful and robust Apache's new-ish solution is.

So is anybody using Apache 2.2 mod_cache for proxy/cache/LB? How do you like it? If not, but you considered it, what turned you off?

Thanks! And sorry for the new account - long time lurker, first time poster.
But Patel said that while the owners might have the right to make a copy, companies "trafficking in products used to circumvent effective technological measures that prevent unauthorized access" don't.

Perhaps her honor would like to explain how consumers should go about making those legal back-up copies.
Arithmetic overflows and exceptions: humans and mathematics usually have a concept of numbers that can be arbitrarily big. Machines do not, they need to fit them into memory, usually into 32 or 64 bits worth of storage. Machines also generate exceptions when you attempt to do things that are undefined like dividing by zero. In the OS, such exceptions would typically crash the machine. This does not occur in seL4.

Er, 2038? You'll get a nice overflow at that point on a 32-bit machine.
I don't know if it's less expensive to build it yourself but I think Makerbot sells parts for repraps also.

http://reprap.org
http://reprap.org/bin/view/Main/PartsSupplies
Joseph Telushkin on Who is Wise?
You can run IE6 and IE7/8 in parallel if you use the stand-alone version of IE6:

http://browsers.evolt.org/?ie/win32/standalone

I find this very useful. I use it in all of my testing VMs.
It is designed to allow users...

Put that on the front page, not hidden in a FAQ on the about page.
If truth is so valuable, why is there so much BS?
Teaching programming, RUR-PLE, and Rurple NG (Python syntax for kids)
I can understand the natural scepticism and the 'no free lunch' viewpoint. But I know Neil and Simon and can happily vouch for them as people. In Red Gate they have bootstrapped (completely without any external investors) a profitable company that is turning over tens of millions of dollar a year. They are the slightly unusual (at least by valley standards) entrepreneurs who have little or no desire to take their company public. I am sure some commercial opportunities will come of this for them, but I very much doubt that is their primary motivation.

Really pleased to see this is a happening and wish them all the best with it.
Yes, there's clearly an ambiguity in section 2 with regards to internal properties.

Looking at "Internal Properties and Methods" section (8.6.2), you can see that specification makes it pretty clear that, for example, host objects' behavior is completely implementation-dependent: host objects are allowed to "spoof" [[Class]] values (which they, in fact, do in real life); that [[DefaultValue]] can go as far as throwing an error; that [[Get]], [[Put]] and [[HasProperty]] do not have to necessarily match; and that they don't have to implement any or all of the internal methods at all.

But that's host objects, and we are talking about built-ins, so there's no proof there.

I guess my point is that specs usually tend to state important things explicitly (using somewhat unambiguous keywords like "must" or "should"). You can see it in that same 8.6.2 section:

| Every object (including host objects) must implement the
| [[Prototype]] and [[Class]] properties and the [[Get]],
| [[Put]], [[CanPut]], [[HasProperty]], [[Delete]], and
| [[DefaultValue]] methods.

Might be worth bringing this up on es-discuss/es5-discuss mailing lists.
When I was involved in a project that had a similar requirement, haproxy is what I used. It was a simple, lightweight, flexible daemon that could run on a mid-grade box quite happily. I looked at mod_proxy at the time,but this was almost 2 years ago, so a lot has changed since then, I'm sure.
My mistake. I assumed that your revelation that you are British was intended to suggest that you did care about the country being discussed and that you would find it more interesting if it was, perhaps, Great Britain.
It sounds like a lot of this advice would work well for non-games software too. I would imagine that it will be harder to get testers initially, but once you do, the rest of the advice sounds very cogent.
Learning Python: Child's Play with RUR-PLE
UMCP is no more the definitive "University of Maryland" than UMUC. While they may be the "flagship" university in the system, according to their site, they are still UMCP, not simply UM.
They have actually halfway implemented this...

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/internet-explorer/features/...

IE8 has an IE7 'Compatability View' built-in. Likely that would render most IE6 pages fairly well.
A Lesson In Timing Attacks (or, Don't use MessageDigest.isEquals)
Following your first sentence, now I can.

Easier than z=0?

Just because I had a senior moment doesn't mean you need to go hyperbolic on me (nasty pun intended). Yes hypercubes and what not turn my brain inside out, like trying to catch Gas in a coarse net - surely you can never actually visualise them.

As a note of personal history I've often found the simplest problems to be extremely difficult to grasp whilst still having the highest school exam results in my town as a child. FWIW, as an insight to how a broken brain works, I made the mistake of mentally choosing simple points (-1,-1,2), etc., and then connecting those points into a closed shape; in my minds eye excluding the region outside of the shape .. hence the problem.
Sony dumping proprietary eBook formats
It's interesting, but it's a huge amount of work for the reliability: a 7,500 line C program required 200,000 lines of proof.
Ordering diet cokes at happy hour: 7 habits of highly spiritual employees
TorchMobile.com is hiring, get to hack on WebKit (c++)
Ahh. The Internet: teaching me what school failed to teach
Crazy. I just read that book about a month ago, but certainly didn't expect to see it mentioned here. Fantastic book
In-vitro meat: Would lab-burgers be better for us and the planet?
So there is no merit to pointing out the problems in the first place?

And by all means, explain the complexities to us.
Thanks to you and Jabavu, the "normal (1,1,1) vector through the origin" is the best description for me.
I agree with you. India's education system is too complex to be quantified by the traveling westerner - however often he/she has visited India.

I think the mushrooming of such vast numbers of Management and Tech Institutes reflects the aspirations of the generation. Considering India's population , its apt that we have such large number of tech / mgmt learning centers. Yes even though they are not of worthy "ivy league" quality.
Imagine if we had large numbers of "Institute of philosophy & history " - what would we do with so many philosophy/history majors? I am sure we currently have sufficient number of such graduates.

The real challenge for India is to step these private "Bob" Institutes to something which is not just world class but world beating !
The actual technical paper that will at the 2009 ACM Symposium on Operating System Principles: http://www.sigops.org/sosp/sosp09/papers/klein-sosp09.pdf
Depends on the religion.
Exactly. Or psi powers in SF published during John W. Campbell's tenure at Amazing/Analog in the 1950s-1970, or cyberspace in 1980s SF, or ...

The problem is lazy authors who don't think things through, not the reseach they've built cloud castles atop.
Pedestrian and Vehicle Alerts, Motion-Detector and Security Products
Pedestrian and Vehicle Alerts, Motion-Detector and Security Products from Chamberlain.
Is Dean Kamen turning into a Bond villain, or what?
I think defining easy and hard for these two sites solely in terms of software development costs is too narrow. It would be extremely hard for Facebook to remove features from a customer relations standpoint. Likewise, it would actually be pretty easy for Twitter to add a feature like photos into the existing feature set without alienating their users.

I think also that this idea that Twitter and Facebook are in a head to head battle is mostly media generated. Twitter's strength is its public nature, and Facebook's is its private nature. To say that one will beat the other is to say that either there is no need for private conversation or no need for public.
I got excited by the name, but the details are disappointing.

"In their opinion, iterative rapid prototyping is like trial-and-error design and may never lead to an optimal solution if too many stakeholders are involved and too many opinions influence the design process. Instead, their usage-centered design approach is based upon abstract models to describe users, tasks and content."

Yikes! Supposing that rapid prototyping fails because of too many "stakeholders" and "opinions" misses the point. The role of a designer is to manage the process which leads to a design. If a designer doesn't sufficiently manage input, ANY process will fail.

Abstracting the user, tasks, etc, is all well and good for providing a stable platform for design, but it turns the iterative design process into a waterfall process. It smacks of designer equivalent of "Why does the spec keep changing?"

It also says that this allows the designer to design for tasks, not expectation. However how can you be sure your design fits the task without trialling it?
I really enjoyed reading The Consolations of Philosophy by him:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Consolations_of_Philosophy
Shunning SEO - company is baking 7,000 lb cupcake for buzz
Defense contractors and other high-critical systems (think airplanes, space shuttles, missile command) would gladly pay for and accept that level of complexity.
http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=M91dv1_QuuA&client=mv-googl... makes the onion less ludicrous, or makes this more... I dunno
Sarah Palin: Surprisingly Coherent
I could make some up in German. But that's not fundamentally different from placing adjectives in front of your words in English.
Chromium dev builds are working great on my older laptop. Plugins aren't that stable but you'd probably want to avoid them anyway. The Arora browser (also WebKit) is worth a look too.
Most any product that was aiming for the old NCSC/TCSEC Class A1 security rating would have inherently received the formal verification Class A1 required.
Facebook and Friendfeed's public realtime stuff hasn't been a massive "viral" success in quite the same way as Twitter has been.
Microsoft bought Natal. It was developed by 3DV systems.

And personally, I'm unconvinced that they've grasped what has made the Wii successful.

Case in point: the Wii remote, custom designed to be non-threatening, modelled after the familiar tv remote, allowing you to control the Wii with a few simple gestures and an on screen pointer. Natal, a mysterious camera that allows you to page through onscreen lists using some kind of semaphore system.

Microsoft thinks (or at least talks) like it's out Nintendo'd Nintendo with Natal but it all looks like cargo cult style mimicry to me. No different from offering family friendly card games that you need to control with something designed for Halo, just on the other side of the spectrum. Like goldilocks' and the three bears' porridge you can have both too much, and too little controller. The Wii seems to have got it just right.
My significant other, who wrote The Twitter Book and so gets asked these sorts of questions a lot, has a pretty effective answer. Twitter as a business may stay or die, but Twitter as a type of communication (short, public asynchronous messaging) has proven popular and is here to stay.
I can recommend this too, it's big in places like Portland
Monk: Sinatra + Redis web development toolkit
Measuring your own time, you can get across the Galaxy as fast as you want to --- if you have enough energy. Of course you always stay below c, but the distance seems to shrink.
"That's why he advises fliers to buy a generous travel-insurance policy, which can actually make baggage problems financially rewarding. He has one himself." - isn't this just a form of gambling?
Twitter will never be killed, the same way Wordpress will never be killed. Right now twitter has an advantage that will reduce over time as more and more blogging services embrace micro blogging and define a way to share in real time their content with their subscribers from other providers.

If I were google I'd be revamping jaiku with a cooler name and start pushing distributed microbbloging as the new platform (perhaps joining it with blogger). The same for Wordpress and other blogging platforms.

Twitter will adapt or die. But will no longer have the strict control over the ecosystem it has today.
Try The Art of Travel.
That's because you're looking for natural evidence to prove the supernatural. If such evidence existed, it wouldn't be supernatural.
Of course, "ninja" is a negative word itself. It means the people that have no honour and will disguise itself in woman clothes,hide in the night, attack when the victim can't defend herself, kill someone, and then run away.

They are the antithesis of "samurai" in Japan culture.

They represent with pirates a life free from remorse of doing whatever you want without restrictions. People fantasies with having sex with everybody, raping, stealing, traveling all world and killing their enemies, this doesn't mean they do.
Fair points, but I thought his predictions on intellectual property issues changing the music industry were pretty astonishing for 1996.
Catch Me If You Can seems like a good movie to learn about business. This guy managed become "successful" talking his way to success.

I quote successful cause he basically scammed a lot of people.
No, they are not successful. Facebook is successful for different reasons (not real-time updates; this, if anything, has damaged their success). FriendFeed and Identi.ca are not wildly popular.

Have you seen either of these on CNN or heard them on the radio? No. They were latecomers that offer little to their users past a service they're already using (likely Twitter or something else).
If gold is so valuable, why are there so many rocks?
An Insider On the Apple Tablet
And it gets easier. Linear Algebra is no more complicated than calculus --- rather less so. But it tends to be more abstract.
We were doing a Business Intelligence app as a service, mixing it with social stuff. Was (and is) cool. Tried to originally pitch it as ~ $50/user/month, but it never really sank in to a customer's mind. When we starting describing it as an appliance for $X flat fee, we got eyes opening. When we then said we'd sell it just like Business Objects, multiple $100k / per site installation, it was like we started speaking English.
Facebook has already moved toward twitter, and has gained users because of it. They can easily make it easy for people to use the service like they would twitter, whilst making it clear that posts will be public etc. No issues with PR there.

If you look back at the last year or so, facebook has moved massively... Yes Twitter could add all the features, and remove things like the 140 char limit, but they don't seem to have moved all that much in the same time. Facebook clearly has the momentum and opportunity.

I do think the battle is pretty real, I don't want to go to 2 sites to share stuff, I just want one. And I can - I just post stuff to facebook, and say [Family] or [Friends] or [everyone]. It's pretty much already there.
"(short, public asynchronous messaging) has proven popular and is here to stay."

Exactly my thoughts. There is a real need for that, just add "distributed" to the equation, where nobody controls the ecosystem.
"they have bootstrapped (completely without any external investors) a profitable company that is turning over tens of millions of dollar a year."

They would like to see their success emulated by others. This goodwill incubator can allow it to happen: might even start a trend.
I don't think it will end up where one wins out over the other. I see Facebook primarly as a networking tool, where as I see twitter as a messaging framework. Yes facebook can pare down services to allow real-time messaging and they certainly will, but I think it'll be difficult to start building a place for developers to play and create.

Whereas Twitter intially things open and encourages others to create their features. They are focusing on making their service as reliable and simple as possible. Want more features, well there is an web app for that.
OK so you're measuring success based on short term PR 'buzz'. Thankyou. Personally, I use different metrics.
That's the cool thing about getting someone else to ghost write for you: it usually comes out better.

;)
Social Skydiving Day 50: Checking In
For the whole article on a single page: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/print/200909/health-care
What about the days when large-scale free hosting provides ruled the internet? Geocities?

An infrastructure disruption at a large colocation provider would probably cause just as much inconvenience to users. Attacks against root name servers can (and have) cause huge amounts of disruption.

I understand your point is about people building upon single points of failure, but my point is that there have always been single points of failure within the internet. I don't think conceptualising facebook as a single point of failure is particularly accurate either, given the distributed nature of its implementation. You're more likely to get localised failures of facebook than a complete outage, which would appear to be exactly the same amount of risk as any other situation which I've described.

As for URL shorteners, it seems apparent that there might be a business opportunity in client-side hashing with a server-side implementation for those without client support. That way you remove the point of failure, which I agree is a good thing, even if we disagree about how important that point of failure is.