skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think you're a bit backward on Y2K; instead of being down on those who correctly said that the hypsters were full of it, you should be irritated at the hypsters who were effectively claiming that you and the other programmers who patched the problems before they became problems were too incompetent to do your jobs.
> I think it is slow because of disk latency.

And you even provided some supporting evidence. I don't think that it's conclusive, but until I'm willing to do the work....

> To actually seek to find all these gazillion small configuration files.

If that's the actual bottleneck, perhaps a different configuration system would be a better solution.
From what I've seen, if it doesn't say Microsoft on it, the contractors around here won't touch it.

We do have Digium though ;)
OK, I'll byte: what python platforms lack bytestrings? Is there an PDP-10 port I missed somewhere? :)
he didn't
Even the major shortening services are fly-by-night relative to other services one depends on. They're even fly-by-night relative to Twitter, for the most part, much less something like Wordpress, and infinitely less than something like Google or Apache.
A final method is different from a final variable
If you want to see a similar visualization of what this means on the level of single street, check out this poster:

http://img8.imageshack.us/img8/9346/espaciocoches.jpg

It shows how much space it takes to move the same number of people using cars, bus, and bicycle.
When there's scarcity, there's alway work. The only issue is what prices you are willing to accept or is allowed to accept for your labor.

If there are no scarcity, then there are no need for the existence of jobs and we all live happily in a utopian society.
This is good news for me, as I use Facebook and have been a long-distance admirer of FriendFeed with no time to actually investigate yet another new service.
"Costs continued to balloon, and a business model that required the start-up to spend 10 cents to earn a penny was never fully re-evaluated."

It's really inspiring to hear that someone with THIS business plan got funded. Makes you think, how hard could it be to get funding? ;)
http://www.quantcast.com/friendfeed.com
http://siteanalytics.compete.com/friendfeed.com/
I saw this post and decided to throw something together

http://slice.20oz.net/

It will lengthen your URL and create a short url at tinyurl, bit.ly, and is.gd for you.

So if you have some tr.im links to convert over you can just plug them into here.
Yeah, no kidding. Does it become a real acquisition when it's really a disguised signing bonus? :-)
Yes, saying it is for talent is like saying it isn't for tech.
I think the most interesting thing about this (other than the fact that Friendfeed sold so early) is that, I'd guess, about half the company is already set for life from Google.
The standard 18 months ago:

http://www.thestandard.com/predictions/facebook-acquires-fri...
Their tech is great, but look at who is running that place, it is like buying google at half price time.

Really good news, for both parties.
it depends. do you want to push for new skills or are you happy doing what you're doing?

if you want to learn some new stuff and you have the time to devote to the learning process, why not? your timetables will be inflated for whatever you're working on and you'll need to commit fully. but you'll definitely learn new stuff.

if you're happy with what you're doing and are doing well and aren't really interested in learning something new, then why would you?
I can't really say anything about the shoes, I never tried them, I am not a physician and I am not a medical professional.

That being said though, a good friend of mine is a runner on the track team at one of the University's here and he wears them for time to time(I don't think he runs in them all the time) and he says they are incredible.
Limousine Hire Manchester 
Limo Hire Manchester
>Happily married to PHP, should I get a divorce?

Replace PHP with your real wife's name and the silliness of the question is apparent.

Either you are happy and shouldn't be worrying about the 1500 other development areas that exist, or you aren't really happy.

Figure that out, and you have your answer. More importantly though you should keep in mind that all of these relationships are perfectly open. There's no reason to stop learning.
The only difference between Git and Mercurial at this level is that Mercurial does the equivalent of Git always storing changes in packs, instead of delaying delta compression until a garbage collect is issued. Both systems place the focus on full files, and neither is remotely close to darcs' storing of patches only, with inference of the resulting file based on patch algebra.
SOMA
Especially if you're the actual developer. 80% of the time it takes to write a third-party fuzzer goes into reconstructing the target's protocol or API from scratch.
General questions about "talent acquisitions" ... when it happens, what's to keep the talent from leaving? Is it generally a scenario where the talent wouldn't sell if they didn't want to stay on board–or are there also clauses in the acquisition that actually prevent them from leaving?
It still has to stat the file every time. And it's worse than you think. A path with four elements like http://example.com/one/two/three/four/thing.php requires that 5 directories be checked for an .htaccess file. Which means apache has to keep track of if there was .htaccess file in that directory the last time it looked for 5 directories, and for each of those whether the timestamp or the size has changed. I'd have to look at the code to see if it caches information about override files but I don't think it does.
you missed

Master's (MS, MA, M.Arch, MBA, etc...)
Professional Doctorate (JD, MD, etc...)
I'm of two minds on this... I've been doing pretty much what you are doing, about since PHP came out, maybe a bit shorter, but not by much.

I have a love/hate relationship with the platform, I still get bitten every now and then by obscure language 'features' (others would call them bugs).

PHP is a bit of a dog in many ways (including said bugs), but it's a dog that I know and apart from the occasional scratch it's been pretty good to me. It kept me alive for about a decade so I really have no reason to complain.

But still, the grass on the other side of the street is looking greener and greener. Now, I never married my dog, but I'm loyal to it, I wonder though if I shouldn't get one of those other puppies, they're fresh, young and seem to have plenty of potential to grow in to big sturdy and dependable dogs as well.

Mind you, I'm not going to go into the back 50 tomorrow to shoot PHP but django or something like that is really interesting.
"Yeah, stupid users. They only saw Word crashing... but wait, Word was crashing. Sounds like there's a bug in the plugin system - just as applications shouldn't crash the OS, plugins shouldn't crash an application."

Let's suppose that, for reasons of performance and plugin developer convenience, you really want plugins to run in-process. How do you propose to prevent them from crashing the application?
Binary plugins have the ability to crash the host application regardless of platform. Sometimes they can be contained in a separate process (I think Apple does this with 10.5's QuickLook plugins to prevent them from crashing Finder), but that's not always an option due to interprocess communication overhead or shared state that can't be easily distributed (e.g. windows on OS X).
My understanding is that usually a significant part of the payout is in stock, which will vest over a couple years.
This doesn't make me happy. FriendFeed is an amazing product, and though I'm glad that they are getting their payday for it, I hope the service doesn't get killed off or abandoned. I'm not so much a fan of Facebook, so potentially being forced to use it so that I can continue to use the features I love from FriendFeed is more or less going to cause me to look somewhere else for those features, which unfortunately is not something I'm likely to find elsewhere.
Nobody has said it, so I guess I'll go ahead -- I don't like to hear this.

I use Facebook a lot, but I think Friendfeed is such a great product and that Facebook is such a mature site that nothing good can come of the acquisition.

The absolute best case would be that the Friendfeed talent supremely cleans up the code at Facebook to make it a much faster site, but even that would be at the cost of Friendfeed's development.
Unfortunately, it isn't my site. I just thought it would be cool if more people submitted their locations there.
I don't actually think the two are exactly the same. Tim's blog talks about how to read faster by increasing various parameters of conventional reading. On the other hand, the article (mainly the video) talks about how to turn off one particular mechanism (vocal cord) and utilize another (visual perception). Both seems very nice techniques to try :D
Regarding number #9, it refers to the very real danger those involved in the drug trade face if they are perceived to be even in the same vicinity as officers of the law. If you are seen to be an informant, your competitors (or even partners in your supply chain or organization) may take preventative retaliatory action without worrying about getting all the facts.

I think this is actually one of the most fitting of the 10 points. You have to be very careful about appearances, both with respect to potential dealmaking, as well as more generally staying out in front of the curve in managing your brand image. Its easy for people to jump to conclusions, and it's generally less stressful to keep the message clean from the beginning than to have to backtrack and explain that you weren't in fact trying to block all traffic to 4chan.

I thought this was really pretty funny; I would have been concerned if there was NO stretching of the interpretations. These guys do seem to have found some pretty innovative ways of looking at business intelligence...
Huh! I must admit I was secretly hoping that would happen. I hope that's more than a recruitment round, and that Facebook will now gain all the functionality from FriendFeed.
Quite all right. :) I think a lot of people locked into Git or Mercurial have a distorted view of how different the two systems are. Especially these days, the differences are ultimately minor, which is why projects like hg-git, which allows transparently working with a Git repositories from Mercurial, are possible in the first place. Yes, Mercurial's revlogs versus Git's blobs have performance implications for both systems, but that difference is not meaningfully user-visible 99% of the time--and the rest really just ends up being differences in terminology and commands, more than anything.
The verdict that idiomatic Scala is unreadable is questionable. One could say the same about most any language, save Python.

I wouldn't let this piece color your perceptions of Scala. It's evolved a ton since early 2008, and it's too deep a language to fully appreciate in a few hours of experimenting.
Fundamentally, the problem I see with the URL-shortening "market" is that there's almost no entry-cost, it's cheap to run, and the margins are very small.

How much code is a URL-shortening service? Like 50 lines of code + a mysql table? It's like a day's work, maybe two, to handle 90% of the features people need. And it's like a few MB of database and almost no processing power for each request.

And there's like no lock-in. I have no reason to use bit.ly over TinyURL or =>.ws, because they're all nearly the same, and it's not like they'll retro-actively break the links if I use another service.

As a result, they're competing with almost zero differentiating features in a market with no entry costs, no lock-in, and no obvious way to monetize. There's no way most of these services are going to stick around when they realize this.
The IT Crowd wins again:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6rNgCnY1lPg&feature=fvst
That's not the sense I get in most discussions like this, although I hadn't thought of it that way before so it's possible that I'm letting my own biases come into play here.

The sense I get is that the Y2K bug was a non-issue to begin with -- the usual evidence for this being that there were very few problems following January 1 -- which I think really marginalizes the huge amount of extra effort that a lot of people put into making sure that it would be a non-issue.

_If_ legions of programmers hadn't done their jobs, and done them very well, then the hypsters probably wouldn't have been very far off the mark.
Product planning is just a waste of time.
Facebook has acquired FriendFeed
I own a pair of these, and I can attest to what the author wrote: when you run in Vibrams (I own the KSOs), you can run faster and longer than in anything else.

He doesn't mention, though, that your muscles will (initially) hate you for it the day after a run. I'm in my early 20s, and for the couple of days following my first "long" run in my Vibrams, I was walking like I was in my late 60s or 70s.

That said, the pain is worth it -- I'm now walking with a better posture and with more natural-feeling movements, even in my socially accepted shoes.
Any guestimates on the acquisition price?

It'll be fun to point back here if we ever find out.
It's a joke man, laugh a little.
It must be. There's not much interesting about Friendfeed that isn't done easier on Facebook.
Press Release @ facebook.com: http://www.facebook.com/press/releases.php?p=116581
Dogs as Smart as 2-year-old Kids
as a 27-year old with incredibly flat & wide feet, relatively good shape (170 lbs at 5'10" and pretty strong), I always had some flab cause I couldn't really run due to my bad knees/feet/ankles.

While these shoes aren't saviours, they are easily worth it IMO. First couple of weeks made my ankles and calves hate me, but afterwards I've always felt great.
The latter. Always. Usually with extra incentive to ensure that you are productive over the period you are there.
No, but they do, typically, operate at lower speeds. In really, really bad storms (like on 8/8/2007), the subway can shut down. On 8/8/07, 3 inches of rain fell in one hour, and a tornado hit Brooklyn, causing most subway lines to be severely delayed or completely shut down.
I disagree that nothing good can come of it. Friendfeed has mastered real-time whereas Facebook still hasn't. Friendfeed can step in and clean up Facebook's news feed and make it a lot better, which I'm sure they're going to be tasked with doing.
One simple way is to make that a condition of the sale.

The second is to defer part of the payment until that condition is met.

The third is 'golden handcuffs' though I doubt that would be very effective with this crowd.
They already have - the first public wave server was PyGoWave, which was made from the open spec by third party developers.
Submitting Apps to the Java Warehouse
Off the clock? Hyperconnected workers sue employers
I concur entirely, it's a risky bargain especially considering the temptation to fight rent-seeking with more regulation with the attendant second- and third-order effects.

Well said.
Thank you for the explanation, that makes perfect sense.
I wasn't offended :P Sorry, I probably have came off as a bit tight-laced
For anyone who want's to do this with svn, I wrote a blog post a while ago that includes a post-commit script to do it with a description to set it up: http://www.madebysofa.com/#blog/appengine_hosting
Just as a user running an X server initiates the clients to display on it.
That's not astro-turfing, it's traditional journalism. Sources generally give more details to reporters who they like. Astro-turfing would be if Gruber actually worked for Apple while writing this stuff. It's generally true that the result is sources controlling journalists more than they should, but at worst, Gruber's as ethically shady as WashPost journalists.

Further, Gruber's not been afraid to come down on Apple for things, like when Apple announced the iPhone tethering and MMS and in fine print said "Not in the US", or many of the App Store shenanigans prior to this one, and for the iPhone developer's NDA, just to name ones off the top of my head.
Quite a few:

http://slashdot.org

http://serverfault.com

http://securityfocus.com

http://sucuri.net

http://matasano.com/log (well, while it was up and I hope it comes back)..

http://taosecurity.blogspot.com

http://linux.com
Google Adds “Prices From The Page” Search Option
Retention bonuses.
I empathise with the love/hate relationship w/ php. It is the most deployment friendly option out there (seriously). But as a programming language it can sometimes feel like like you are attempting to knit chainmail from steel wool; if you squint it looks sort of right, but you know it's not as sturdy as the real thing.

My general rule of thumb is that if you find yourself using more than a few classes that aren't directly producing output, you should reconsider your application and move the heavy lifting into some piece of middleware that the php talks to.
Being the defacto windowing system for a platform that has very little desktop market share isn't a great success.
Master's (MS, MA, M.Arch, MBA, etc...)
Professional Doctorate (JD, MD, etc...)
added them, thanks!
Further, astroturfing by definition involves employment or contracting. If you aren't directly or indirectly paid for it, it's not astroturfing, it's misrepresentation.
After the boom, is Wikipedia heading for bust?
I certainly sympathize with employees who are normally horuly and called up extensively outside of hours, however they certainly have an obligation on their part not to check their e-mail or do other work related activities when they are not on the clock and most companies require hourly employees to receive approval before working overtime hours.

For salaried employees, this seems a nonissue in most cases. Unless they are specifically told otherwise, they can normally expect to work more than 40 hours, and they are also normally in either management or creative roles both of which can face deadlines requiring far more than 40 hours to finish the necessary work.
$25-50 million
HN, OvercomingBias.com, LessWrong.com, Bruce Schneier's blog (schneier.com/blog/), Megan McArdles's blog (http://meganmcardle.theatlantic.com/), Steve Sailer (isteve.blogspot.com), and I probably spend as much time browsing Amazon and reading reviews there as any one of the others. I spend less time at (only because they write less) Freedom-to-Tinker.com, Armed and Dangerous (http://esr.ibiblio.org/), One Small Voice (Peter Saint-Andre, https://stpeter.im/), and DavidDFriedman.blogspot.com.
Anybody else having (regular) troubles accessing articles at The Daring Fireball? For me it usually takes very long time till they appear, sometimes it just times out.

It's weird that with such revenue he doesn't use some better hosting and/or CMS.
DejaNews helped with sooo many tech support issues. I really resented what Google did to it.
Google had tried this previously in Froogle, and failed. Now they have done it pretty nicely. I had been expecting this since they introduced Google Squared, which solves a much more general problem than this.

Would this wipe out number of players in "price comparison" space ?
my biggest issue is the number of projects that I have that are already running PHP and the decade that I invested in to getting to know the environment. That's going to be hard to let go...

Even java starts to look pretty good compared to PHP these days and I can hardly believe that I'm writing this. Not so long ago java was spelled s-l-o-w now it's only drawback seems to be that it takes about 4 times as many lines to do the same job. But at least the end result is somewhat maintainable, which is always a difficult thing to achieve with PHP. It's possible, but it will cost you a lot of extra time.
I assume by "college" you mean a bachelor's degree. Of course, many of us may be in progress towards additional degrees, so general education "completed" may not be the greatest statistic. (I plan to receive a PhD).
The Tarahumara tribe runs on rocky terrain, not cushy grass.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/moslive/article-1170253/The-...
So that Apps don't cause the OS to crash? 'OSX' on the iPhone must be pretty flakey then... The only time I can ever remember OS crashes on OSX were from the smbfs driver (and sometimes the nfs driver) which would regularly cause kernel panics on earlier versions of OSX.
There is always scarcity of time and aesthetics.
Mixing Java and Scala is almost seamless.

We use WebWork/Struts2 (Java), and all our new Actions are written in Scala.

We use Guice(Java) to inject objects into Scala.

Thrift also plays nicely with Scala.

Two things that are a bit weird is that we can't use constructor injection w/ Guice, so we have to resort to the following ugly hack:

@Inject var authenticationService: AuthenticationService = null;

We haven't figured out how to construct a Tuple in Java. So if you have a Scala trait and want to implement it in Java, make sure you don't have use a Tuple return type.
"parse the code on check in and refuse the check in if a parameter is modified"

This would be know as really-really-late-binding.
Did friendfeed have a viable revenue model so far?
True, but it allows for a single poll metric, which is why I chose it. Not everybody in high school right now will complete their highschool and not everybody in college right now will complete it either.

So by adding the 'completed' you make it a single issue, otherwise you'd have to 'but plan to complete x,y,z' to every entry.
Perfect. I managed to put off signing up for FriendFeed long enough.
Facebook Agrees to Acquire Sharing Service FriendFeed
Frankly I'm not sure it's just the 'kids'. I'm 39 and whilst I like the Spotify service, I also like the knowledge that I've got my own music stored. I'd hate to think I'd built up a series of playlists with an online service only for them to disappear overnight for a variety of reasons
Yes. I have contributed patches to FFMpeg, was the OS X AzSMRC dev for a while, and I have a very large patch in progress for QEMU.
Partially, but Friendfeed has a lot of technology that Facebook would want. They have a good grasp of real-time and search, they have the full firehose to Twitter (which is not something Twitter would have given to Facebook otherwise -- Google is desperate for such access), and the team of course. I don't think Frienfeed is at the top of its category either, which means that it probably was affordable.
Yes, and Facebook's history in dealing with its users is prompting me to remove my FriendFeed account now.
Honestly, what does someone buying Tr.im get? A tiny uptick in their market share of shortened links? There's certainly no technology involved, and there are no locked-in customers involved.

Further, it seems like most url-shortened links are real-time, and probably useless after a few months. I wonder how many shortened links are still visited months later. And given that shortening-service use is accelerating, what slice of the pie is the 2009 links from a smaller player in the market going to be worth in 2010?

Can someone explain to me how it's worth more than pocket money?
I used to live around there until I moved out (way, way out) to Cumberland MD in 2001.
Yes, assuming they could possibly have use for others. :)
Http-https transitions and relative URLs
I completely adore these shoes, which allowed me to take my barefoot running off of the rubber track and onto any surface I desired. Fantastic sensitivity, forced my running technique into shape, and they disturbed anyone who saw them.

Unfortunately, they also provide little to no toe protection, so when I smacked my 2nd toe against a wooden ridge, the nifty independent-toe design happily allowed that one toe to hyperflex, which chipped my metatarsal and ruined the joint space permanently.

Great shoes, but make sure to have a little more vigilance than usual. To be honest, I can't wait to get back into them once my surgeried joint heals up.
Facebook Just Bought FriendFeed