skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
To access the site go here:

http://www2.sandbox.google.com
Rod Johnson has a blog post explaining the acquisition.

Homepage link -
http://blog.springsource.com/

Post link (appears to be down at the moment) -
http://blog.springsource.com/2009/08/10/springsource-chapter...

It's basically a move into cloud service offerings, so that they can move up the vertical chain - build, run and manage.

I thought it was a little strange at first, but it's quite exciting if they can bring simple hosting and scaling to Java apps, in the same way Spring has made enterprise development easy with Java.
I'm puzzled by this acquisition from FriendFeed founder & CEO Paul Buchheit's perspective. As employee #23 at Google, Paul was already independently wealthy when he started FriendFeed. Though getting richer seems a likely secondary motive, I always figured FriendFeed was primarily a way for Paul to have the excitement of running his own company. Now he will (presumably) become an employee at Facebook, in exchange for an amount of money that can't possibly represent the bulk of his net worth. That doesn't seem like a particularly good outcome to me. Does anyone know any different?
Maybe they are looking to monetize something else with this‽
When all is said and done, this might be a pretty interesting story about how to start a company - and make money running it - based on an open source model.
hmmm...my mistake. ;) thanks
I think the current value of your average newspaper column-inch is close to zero. (Note the difference between "close to zero" and "zero"... but probably not enough of a difference to matter much.)

What I think is the case is that when some papers face the task of generating value, a lot of them will fold, but some of them will find it in themselves to produce good content. Being more directly exposed to the market will almost certainly cull the herd, but I for one would trade the quantity we have now for quality any day.

The fact that we're even talking about this rather proves the point that most of them have nothing of value to offer (recalling that "the media" isn't actually one monolithic entity). If the content were truly that valuable, they already would have locked it behind pay walls and people would be paying for it, as evidenced by the valuable content that has survived exactly that process. The problem here isn't the sanctity of newspapers or our society's undebatable need for them, it's that the market has suddenly heated up and they don't want to have to compete. Sorry, no such luck. It's time for them to stop talking and start doing, if that's what they're going to do.
It seems like popular websites like Wikipedia and Flickr are ranked slightly higher in the new results compared to the old. Perhaps it's a more crowd-sourced version of pagerank that they have been training/testing. Since they have been HTTP re-directing results for the last 5 months, they could be using this clickflow data to adjust sites ranking according to users behavior on the search result page itself.
Yes - when I saw that details of the twitter hack I searched my gmail and found almost every password I've ever used somewhere deep in there. So simple.
So many letters. How about hkrtrkr?
Bigger than what? Facebook? The company that owns them?

Just close down Friendfeed now.
Gary Shilling: Recovery in '10, Slow Economic Growth to Follow
Sorry, its probably just my setup, but those tabs really distract me on a lot of websites. I am however glad they helped you... I just wish they didnt stand out so much, though that would probably defeat the purpose.
Macs Are Better (Because They Suck)
But all Google can really tell when someone searches on 'widget' is that the user wants to know more about widgets. Isn't Amazon's data, knowing who searches on 'widget', and then buys a widget, substantially more valuable?
Searching for my first name brought up my twitter page on the first page, where it never did before.
How the moving walkway nearly overtook the Metro
I contributed a lot of code to Caudium back in the early 00's even going to the Pike/Caudium conference in Paderborn, Germany in 2003 (which is quite an expensive proposition for someone from New Zealand).
My biggest open source project at the moment is a Pike library which reads in packets from libpcap and builds a table of active TCP and UDP flows, including all the metadata about the flows (and optionally the payload) with various callbacks so that you can easily build analysis, diagnostic, accounting or logging applications.
I would imagine that they could get the cost down and the speed up but I wouldn't imagine that the coverage would improve much if they continue to use short reads - i.e. small ~32 base bits of DNA.

As I understand it, there's enough repetition and duplication in the genome that many of these little lengths are going to be identical: AAAA...AAAA or GGGAGGGA...GGGA etc. and that these little strips will match in many different places when placed alongside a fully assembled reference genome. They will also match and overlap a lot with each other. This means that you can't tell where they're supposed to go when you try to re-assemble your collection of little bits into a complete sequence. This means that you're always going to be left with a collection of bits left over that you have no way of placing into the sequence, hence less than 100% coverage.

I guess you would need to be using reads long enough to ensure that each of your fragments was unique to get 100% coverage.
Just for the record, I was spot on:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/08/10/the-cost-of-friendfeed-...
It seems like this really depends on the nature of the code... for gluey stuff slinging data this may be true. For most algorithmic tasks, the coarser module should be preferred.
They said that it was government data. For anyone who knows anything about China, that's a tip-off. Credulous reporting would leave that tidbit out and treat the statistic as fact.
True, but who's to say you can't use another language in the JVM - eg. JRuby, Jython or Clojure
Its a completely new backend they are using so ordering of results is different.

From searchengineland:
"Based on the blog post, we can guess that this new infrastructure may include ways of crawling the web more comprehensively, determining reputation and authority (possibly beyond the link graph and what’s typically thought of as PageRank), and returning more relevant results more quickly, although Google’s Matt Cutts told me that the changes are primarily in how we index.Google’s new search is only infrastructure related and includes no UI changes."

http://searchengineland.com/caffeine-googles-new-search-inde...
I understand the whole separation of concerns thing. This seems to take that ideal one step further. It makes me think of business logic being single apps that require a few arguments to run and that do one thing and does it damn well. The app can be written in whatever language, it can stay consistent, it is the environment that may change and how the app is being called in that environment. However, the app is like a little box and you give it args and it turns out whatever based on those args. Instantly makes me think of *nix's command-line functions.

Great read, thanks
That may or may not be true. Every search has a stimulus. Most people don't wake up with a craving for widgets and go straight to google. Something that they encounter offline or online leads them to believe that they need to buy widgets. The problem with traditional display advertising is that it takes a shotgun approach...the goal is to show people as many banner ads as possible in the hope that you can make an impression with one of them (and prompt someone to search for your product). Someone with the amount of data that amazon or facebook has could do a lot to improve the general quality of those ads.
Zivanna Letisha Masuk Rating Tertinggi Miss Universe 2009
Pada tanggal 23 Agustus 2009 nanti akan ada sebuah acara bertaraf internasional yaitu Miss Universe 2009 yang akan di adakan di di Nassau, Bahamas.

Dalam acara besar ini Putri Indonesia yang diwakili oleh Zivanna Letisha Siregar yang beberapa hari lalu Putri Indonesia tampil sexy dengan pakaian bikini yang dikenakannya, ia akan berjibaku dengan kontestan dari seluruh dunia untuk menunjukkan setiap kemampuan unik mereka di Miss Universe 2009.
VMware Acquires SpringSource to get Stickier
I'll do 5-mile runs through the city (on sidewalks, streets, grass, whatever) without injury. Sure, it took me a while to get to this distance, but running in these is a true pleasure.

I also do my gym workouts in them too.
Global float unboxing and some other optimizations
The Truth of Facebook's Acquisition of FriendFeed
PHP magic_quotes proved that doing that by default for every application is a bad idea. Plus, lots of developers weren't even aware of that...

In the case of our specific tools (with some limited user input), it worked great.
if you acquired my company for 50 mil, you can show up in swim trunks, a ninja costume, or whatever works for you.
In our case, we audited and were very careful with the data... Who knows what other sites are doing. A funny note is that since I published that article, the number of attempts increased :)
Look, we can get one thing clear here: "Communist China" is not some dark gulag where people are beaten while walking down the street for having vaguely pro-democracy thoughts or something.

Indeed, it's increasingly not accurate to call China a communist state any more. Communism is about collectivism, planned economic policies, and egalitarianism. China began abandoning these policies nearly immediately after the death of Chairman Mao in 1976. Granted, there are still warehouses full of grain and pork, and only the government can officially "own" land, but the reality at street level is that it's a pretty thriving capitalist state with 100 year leases on land, increasing dismantling of state-owned enterprises (SOEs), and a vibrant mercantilism I've not seen anywhere else in the world.

What China is, though, is an autocratic state with a single party central government that maintains tight control over the press. Look closer, however, and it exercises the tight control over a few key topics with which most Westerners are familiar (and porn - porn is bad). If you are a reporter, then these controls can be frustrating, if not downright aggravating, but otherwise, life here is pretty relaxed and open.

The reality on the street? The locals engage in vibrant discussions and arguments about Taiwan, Tibet, or whatever online on a daily basis. Sometimes they use encoded keywords to keep the noise level down, but they talk about it all the time. What the government really cares about is people organising - that is verboten. I've tried to avoid talking about all these "sensitive" subjects in my years here in China (largely because politics stresses me out), and I am constantly approached by locals who want talk about it and give me their opinions.

The Great Firewall isn't nearly as big of a deal as you'd think either. No Twitter? Facebook? Livejournal? Guess what? The locals weren't using it anyway (not in appreciable numbers). They were (are) using local Chinese equivalents, which are far better at catering to their needs and desires. I don't know a single foreigner who hasn't found a way around the firewall to use Twitter on a daily basis either.

So, to summarize: China is an autocratic state, it has some definite problems with various values and things that many Westerners take for granted as important, but to just sit on the sidelines saying "Boo, China" isn't going to change a thing. China will gradually change by engaging with them and by working to move forward with them. Indeed, by not coming here to visit and or spend a bit of time, you're denying yourself experiencing one of the more vibrant and fascinating places on earth.
I'm not seeing that at all. Normal page refreshes, no anchor in the URL.
Are you a passive technology consumer?
"It's still a very important step for third generation sequencing machines."

It's a very important step for the PR department of Helicos.

Unless they can dramatically increase the read length or reduce the error rate, this technology isn't going to be very useful. The genome is not randomly distributed, and there are lots of repeated elements that make assembly impossible with such short fragments of sequence. Even shotgun sequencing -- which has read lengths of hundreds of bases -- isn't good enough for the human genome.

That said, the technology might be useful for something like large-scale SNP analysis, where (even though they've got error rates >1%), they could sequence the same genome dozens of times, and get an idea of the interesting variations. Maybe. But the current technology isn't very useful for genome sequencing and assembly.
I'd summarize thusly: A powerful type-system provides tools to concisely express business/logic constraints and automatically enforce those constraints across the entirety of your codebase, significantly reducing the testing required to ensure proper operation of your code.
Jeremy Tanner is a somewhat nonsensical dude.
Exactly. I can naturally read very quickly without subvocalizing words, but it's only useful when I have to quickly read something with a very low content-to-words ratio. Or when I need to awe lesser beings, of course.
> If you accept that there is no shoe that will make your running healthier on grass, then there is no shoe that will do it for pavement

...total non-sequitur.
Sometime the only way to beat the machine is to join them.

So that mean becoming a cyborg and improving our brain with mechanical brain cells and exploiting our natural parallel computing capacity.

We just need a programming language and interface/translation machinery and firmware to take advantage of these natural CPUs.
Nambu wants 80-100k for Tr.im, Considers shutting down its twitter client
Amazon Product Ads already lets advertisers buy space in Amazon.com search results (as well as product pages):

https://www.amazon.com/gp/seller-account/mm-product-page.htm...
Dude, this is good stuff. Don't stop.
Amartya Sen on justice: How to do it better
Ambiguous reporting would also fail to specify which government's data.
What other tools can show you how a link spreads through a social network? That's why it is valuable - it is like analytics that Twitter / facebook etc have but don't expose
odd, the regular google.com has done this for me for quite some time. i thought it affected everyone until now. i just loaded a different browser with no cookies on it and it does searches the old non-ajax way. even though i'm logged out of any google services, my long-lasting google cookie must have this ajax option enabled on the main google.com site.
If I wanted to speed up SSL transactions, I'd just buy a full cryptographic accelerator, which usually include a hardware random number generator. Like, say, the IBM 4764, which does various ciphers, has a hRNG, and is hilariously expensive, being made by IBM.
That is some seriously excellent work on dynamic path finding right there. I'm glad that AI is still chugging along slowly.
What kind of operations can we perform effectively with compressed texts?
That's why we like him.
You Deleted Your Cookies? Think Again
HaCkeD bY thErOck
I have the same thing with my toes. It's genetic -- my father and grandmother both have fused 2nd and 3rd toes.

I've been told that it's not uncommon in Ireland.
Early adopters stand in awe as Friendfeed grabs the money | My Philly Network
Why no one should be a passive technology consumer
They know intent when people are shopping for things on Amazon. For them to threaten Google's dominance in advertising, they need to be able to predict the intent of (and, in doing so, effectively target ads ad) people who are not shopping for things on Amazon. Google can predict intent for people using the Internet because Google has become, essentially, synonymous with online usage in most markets they care about.

Yes, Amazon knows when you type in "Wii" at Amazon, you personally are interested in Wiis more than PS3s. This article says that because Amazon knows their customers, in aggregate, prefer Wiis over PS3s, then some magic happens and now Amazon can effectively deliver advertising at people who did not search for anything on Amazon.

When browsing happens off of Amazon.com, Amazon gets to know that Americans prefer Wiis to PS3s, and Google gets to know that Bob Smith just typed "buy ps3 online". Which party is more effective at predicting Bob Smith's intent to sell Bob Smith's attention to the appropriate advertiser?
Web Content Optimization Guidelines
When it comes to the web and SEO content is king! Having well optimized content will help your website obtain organic rankings as well as provide beneficial information to visitors.
Joe Budden Wants Revenge on Raekwon - Square Dance Style | Hip Hop MVP
It was just a guess, thanks for bringing the comment back to 1 (even) - I now see that TC has it at 50mm, that is really high in my head... and now twitter has one less exit option.

It did say 15mm was cash. Guess that is still 50% off...
For anyone who knows anything about China, that's a tip-off. It appears to me that the writer does not know anything about China then, because they make a non-obvious positive claim and then back it with government statistics.

[T]he Chinese economy is more hospitable for both entrepreneurs and job seekers, with [government lie]. Unemployment in urban areas is [government lie].

Absent the statistics, the "more hospitable" claim is the reporter pulling something totally out of their hindquarters to make the story work.
Maybe it's indexing the semantic web now :P
Does anyone see how the new one is different? I haven't seen a description yet.
And people come to amazon just to buy products. Its not facebook or something. This is going to be seriously exciting.
Should make integrating the userbases pretty easy then.
After a lot of practice I ultimately came to the conclusion that it doesn't really work. I could 'read' the pages really fast, but it's not what I'd call reading. It's skimming.

I believe this was shown in a study where experimenters gave reading selections to self-proclaimed speed-readers without telling them that the text was actually two separate texts mixed together (i.e. so that line 1 was from book A, line 2 was from book B, line 3 from book A, and so on). The idea being, of course, to see if they could really comprehend what they were reading, since the fact that this was a jumbled mess would be apparent to any careful reader within seconds.

Of course, the punchline is that none of the speed-readers even noticed it, which should give some indication as to the level of comprehension that can be achieved via speed-reading.
you're not thinking this through...
Tell HN: SearchYC.com should be given a link or search box on the HN homepage
It would save new readers a few days/weeks/months of typing site:news.ycombinator.com (or of helpless flailing around).
The same thing happens with old google.
It was tested with speakers of five languages, and even dyslexics were conditioned to read technical material at more than 3,000 words-per-minute (wpm), or 10 pages per minute. One page every 6 seconds

Do we even need to officially call "bullshit" when Tim Ferriss posts something, or is it just assumed now?

If you read 10 pages of technical material per minute, you will not have anywhere near as good an understanding of it as someone who read it slowly and carefully. Reading dense technical material at this rate is almost completely worthless (perhaps even worse than worthless, because there is a non-zero probability of the reader fooling himself into thinking he actually does understand it)
50 million dollars for a web app? Is facebook even profitable yet? Call me a cynic but i don't think their "billion dollar company" will withstand the sands of time. Just wait for the next paradigm shift.
I completely agree. Reading faster without much comprehension is just that - reading faster. Not a whole lot else. I also can't believe that the Four Hour Work Week and this new blog are rehashing old info. This concept is at least several years old and there used to be a product you can buy from an infommercial using the same "eye speed training" principles.
I never got the test-driven-development craze until I broke from mostly writing C and C++ and spent some time writing Ruby. This article gets at the crux of that: you must have tests to ensure even the most minimal level of functioning in duck-typed languages. Static typing gives you much of that for free (at, I would argue, very little cost).

Additionally, while the size of my Ruby implementations of components is smaller than their C++ counterparts, the Ruby components plus their tests are larger. (This would be less true were I not to use Qt in most of my C++.)
Java's lack of traits does indeed suck, and I would definitely prefer Scala over Java, but the only copy-pasting you need to do is of delegation methods. It's duplicate boilerplate, but it's not duplication of logic.
It is a great book, with a very disciplined method of reading. It makes reading take too long though, and you'll get frustrated with how little books you've read and start skipping steps and adapt your own reading method.

Well, that's what I did.
"Just as Facebook announces internal search for public notes, Google counters with an effort to improve on its existing services. In today's blog post, the company unveiled its new Caffeine search infrastructure to web developers."

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/caffeine_google_tests_n...
A stock market approach to public policy decisions
A suggestion (also a request): please consider moving your articles/essays from Google Sites to a blogging service (with an RSS feed) like WordPress or BlogSpot. Google Sites may be viable for static sites, but it becomes difficult to follow it as a journal.
The hidden gem is about halfway down the press release: springsource owned hyperic already. Hyperic has an obvious slot in VMware's portfolio.

Some of SpringSource's other products are more confusing.
How in the hell did this make the front page? I mean really...
Here you go http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/50695
Switching Season
Duke Nukem 3D out for iPhone
whoosh

The author of this... thing... conveniently ignores the fact that people looking to get work done don't care about supporting every printer under the sun. They want a non-shit OS that doesn't explode on them every time they plug in a USB stick or download a new twitter client.

What a joke.
Citing papers that you’ve never read — or that were never written « IREvalEtAl
"Ever since Charles Darwin, a prevailing attitude among medical practitioners has been that evolution does not operate in humans because modern medicine and culture have greatly leveled the playing field by homogenizing survival rates."

I call baloney on this. Where's the citation of anyone saying that?
What troubles me is why VMWare would pay such a high valuation for a company whose software is highly dependent on Java infrastructure from one of their competitors, Oracle.

I do see VMWare wanting to put together a more robust cloud offering with an AppEngine type infrastructure, but I think they would be more credible just hosting VMWare machines. That would be a great cloud to have- more like an easier EC2 with local storage than a constrained environment like AppEngine.
The only thing I've noticed in the sandbox is that it seems to have a fresher index than what's live right now. A site of mine that you can't find in Google unless you search for the URL is all over the SERPs in the sandbox.
I don't want to search what my sister ate this morning, I find more important what peers are working on and what they have to say about new technologies or even tech trivia.

Twitter wins.
I need more karma
"Communist China" is not some dark gulag where people are beaten while walking down the street for having vaguely pro-democracy thoughts or something.

Correct. They're usually dragged into an alleyway first.