skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not a bad idea, but i think the direction you are going will be a challenge. Having people select certain artists/tracks, and then trying to match them with other users of the same taste is quite a bit different than saying to a person 'what sort of music are you into?'.

However, check out the last.fm or pandora api's.
That might be a better way to go as you can match against an already existing dataset and a wide range of users.

Best of luck.
Yes, but you have to pick your battles. Unless you run an already ginormously successful site which can afford a substantial loss of traffic, then being dogmatic about web standards will only hurt you and do nothing to drive people away from non-standards compliant browsers.
Great idea about the API's - thanks
Moore's Law and Password Cracking: http://www.flickr.com/photos/changa_lion/3383711753/
OEMs bundle the ActiveX version of flash with Windows, so it works in IE by default for almost all users.

For Flash to work in any Windows browser not based on IE, somebody has to install the separate NSAPI flash plugin.
starting a tech company is easy. succeeding is hard.

almost all the failed tech stories are:

we didn't launch early enough so didn't start the conversation with our users fast enough. we built something people didn't want. we gave up.
Yes, there is a tautology, and I'm glad you understand it, but such understanding is not widespread I assure you.

You are right, no one says "time management". I don't think they said "memory management" as often either, until there was automatic memory management (GC). But one thing is certain, most OO languages don't yet offer automatic _____ management, whatever it is to be called.

People do say they have a "race condition" or a "deadlock", or simply "data corruption" often without connecting it at all to the unmanaged mutation of their objects. And before there was GC there was just "heap corruption", "double deletes" and "memory leaks". Management implies a manager, and there isn't one yet, so why would anyone say it? What I am advocating is that languages provide automatic management of "time". It's not a novel idea, yet it is still missing, and I think it is missing because there is no place to put it in OO strategies which conflate identity with state, with weak or missing notions of object values.

But the phrase "mutable state" is broken, in a way that keeps people from understanding the problem and especially the potential solution. As soon as you consider state the value of something at a point in time, then mutation isn't the correct term, succession is, and the connection to time becomes clearer.

FYI, I neither wrote nor uttered the title. The interview was a recording of a casual, no prep conversation following my keynote. It was not meant to be profound, nor an advertisement.
Why are papers in top conferences very boring?
Although he hasn't proposed a total replacement of human parts the hint is there, consider this:

- the inevitable happens and technology has progressed to the level where
everything in one's body has been replaced by 'cyborg parts'.

- You are now living past 500 years.

- After 500 years your brain has a total revamp and replaced by chips, it is now more powerful and would only need replacements every x years.

- eventually your total brain is replaced with new technology, ensuring all memories are kept etc.

- In 1000 years there is nothing original in your body except some old 'data'.

- Now that the 'original you' is totally replaced IMHO you have d i e d and a Cyborg took over your identity! As a corollary this Cyborg has now took over your consciousness also!

One consolation would be that if these events materialize at some point the Cyborg would try to use some of your Lisp stored 'data' and suffer infinite recursion and die too! :)
This is basically a CYA ("cover your ass") argument. It seems to be a correct one. Which explains the (mostly negative) attitude to certifications from the community.
It seems like the comments you posted from Apple explain pretty clearly why, but according to the App Store, it looks like it's for sale - or isn't it?
Just out of curiosity, are you referring to the big migration to CoreCLR?
Netflix Prize 2: (Privacy) Apocalypse Now?
No known reason, maybe.
Clearly GAE does not "suck". We've used it a lot, e.g. [1]. The principal advantages are:

- No sys admin. You can just focus on your app.

- The datastore (BigTable) is slick. Write and read times are independent of how much shizzle you stick in there.

- They're constantly making it better. E.g. the free quotas got more generous after a few months; and the new built in cron and off-line processing (taskqueue) support enables more complex apps.

Clearly not for everybody. We love it. Does not suck.

[1] http://news.priorsmart.com/
Offline gmail uses gears.
We have no references to "beta" or "demo" in our metadata, binary, or application. So I'm not sure what they are referring to there. The "feature limited" part is confusing to us--we're not actually sure if they are referring to the mobs functionality or not.

The current version in the App Store is 1.0, we've since posted 1.1 and are nearing a completion of 1.2 ;) Perhaps we just skip 1.1 by the time this gets approved.
Yes, if you really want the power of macros inside a browser ParenScript is the only real choice. I mentioned ParenScript at the end of the post. A ParenScript and Hunchentoot project is definitely on my TODO list for whenever I next have time off of school and work.

I'm sure Douglas Crockford would agree with you and say that JavaScript already has too many nasty and broken features (ie the DOM and "with") but I was just having some fun on my day off from work.

As others have pointed out, the expander can't even survive expansion, and using regexes for code parsing is a poor choice. Maybe, I haven't emphasized it enough, but I was just having some fun and imagining what it would be like to code with real macros in JS. I'm not advocating anyone actually use this code in any of their projects, nor that ECMAscript include simple template style macros in the spec.

That said, I wouldn't mind if someone built real lispy macros into a JavaScript implementation by forking Rhino or Spider Monkey. I'm convinced that this is possible despite the verbose syntax. Check this out: http://javascript.crockford.com/tdop/tdop.html
Unfortunately, this is just a special case of a much more troublesome problem: Although plain old laboratory mice do get cancer, they may well do so via very different mechanisms from humans.

A mouse weighs 20 grams. I weigh somewhere around 100kg. So I consist of approximately 5000 times more cells than a mouse does.

The longest-lived mouse in recorded history [1] lived just over 5 years. Most mice die of old age in a couple of years. The oldest humans live to be over 100. Thus, my cell lines will undergo somewhere between 20 and 50 more cell divisions than a cell in a living mouse. [2]

What this means is that human cells have to be much better designed to resist cancer than mouse cells. If humans were no more cancer-resistant than mice we'd all be getting cancer as infants. And evolution hasn't bothered to design mice that will resist cancer for fifty years, because no mouse has ever had a chance to live to be fifty.

So while many of the basic facts of cancer are similar in mice and in humans, eventually the details are bound to diverge. This is an uncomfortable fact for researchers.

This also means that, while it's great for the mole rats that they don't get cancer, that doesn't mean they're somehow more immune to cancer than the average human. Even though mole rats are legendary for their longevity -- they can live into their twenties [3] -- the average human has to be less cancer-prone than a mole rat just to get through puberty without needing chemotherapy.

--

[1] Google: "Methuselah Mouse Prize"

[2] This is a really simplistic calculation: Among other things, we're neglecting the fact that mice have a rather different metabolic rate from humans, and that different kinds of cells divide at different rates.

[3] Metabolism again: One reason that mole rats are thought to live so long is that they have very slow metabolic rates. Which probably also affects their susceptibility to cancer.
>He's not talking about drugs, the word 'drug' is not even mentioned in the (hype-filled 'article').

I think his nanobots would be regulated by the FDA as drugs.

>Even if he was basing his ideas on one or more drugs, what sort of stumbling block does 'government approval in the USA' matter if you're a multimillionaire with contacts in high-tech industries, looking to avoid death, present? Not much of one.

The same stumbling block that you would have getting an iphone if they were illegal. They would never have been made in the first place.

>His predictions are based on transformational technologies such as nanotechnology and/or AI, they wont follow on linearly from current ailing pharma, so that's not relevant.

Right - that's why I qualified my statement with "The only way this is going to happen is if human-level or better AI is finished, like, next week." It could happen, I just wouldn't bet that way.

>Ray Kurzweil has counted to infinity... twice

Sure, he's a smart guy. I could dig up other smart guys who work closer to the field who don't think immortality will ever be achieved. Smart guys can be right about one thing and wrong about another.
All of these things can be handled once, together, in a single e-mail.

Actually for app reviewing throughput purposes, disqualifying the app on the first major thing they catch is a good idea on Apple's part.
You would have to have a way to get rid of the carbon dioxide or you would die of respiratory acidosis.

CO2 + H2O -> H2CO3 -> H+ + HCO3-
I wouldn't consider IE6 the "main problem." In fact, IE -- at large -- or the Microsoft, IE team should be considered the main problem. Even IE8 is horribly far behind in CSS, HTML5, JS, et al implementations -- the very thing this plugin seeks to circumvent, in more than JUST IE6.

I agree with the notion that it is still useless to those IE users that don't have privileges to install addons/plugins. However, perhaps in those IT shops where administrators are required to keep around legacy browsers for legacy plugins / software, this is a attainable middle-ground for the administrators to give their users a better foot to stand on.
I disagree on the orthogonality of being ingratiating and discovering things.

Sometimes discovery must be done collaboratively. When this is the case, it can be more effective to mind one's social graces. Otherwise, productivity relies on other people ignoring negative social cues. I wouldn't take that bet.
How to ace a product demo, or at least avoid flopping.
Clojure promotes Integer's to Long's and BigInteger's, if needed. Compare
(type 5)
(type 555555555555)
(type 55555555555555555555555555555555555555555555555555555555555)

The difference is thus visible to the programmer and can be controlled with type hints.
It depends on what your load test is attempting to prove.

Are you attempting to prove you can handle a /.,digg,fark,reddit, etc without a single 500 error in a 10min window?

Or are you attempting to prove that you can handle 2million "transactions" an hour, but have the luxury to ramp up in the real world slowly? (Twitter didn't go from nothing to everything in a day)

I'd say the second case is more likely to be the case 90% of sites would care about.
"Companies succeed with single founders all the time. Just look at Digg, Craigslist, eBay, Netflix, Wordpress, Wikipedia, Amazon, TechMeme, PBWiki, TechCrunch, TechMeme, and Etsy."

Again repetition in short published list. Am I going insane? Do you also see this?
I am more concerned about the 13(?)-app limit.
>> "It's sad Microsoft hasn't taken this kind of thing seriously yet."

I'm sort of pleased. Look what happened when they took Netscape seriously. We got years of crappy IE dominance.

The longer they flap around all confused while the rest of us move forward, the better.

Pretty soon the advantage of silverlight/flash over HTML5/js will be 0. It's pretty slim as it is IMHO.
I agree with you on the general principle about TechCrunch having far too low standards, but that article you linked was incredibly useful. It gave significant insight on how to game a system that can be very lucrative, from someone who has done it. It highlights the flaws in YouTubes counts and display methods that can be taken advantage of.

That's actually the sort of thing I want to see on a blog or in a tech-focused newspaper. I could totally see that being a Wired Article (though copy-edited to be less like a how-to and more like a story).
Does anyone care to keep their movie preferences private?

(Let alone the fact that this groups people broadly into demographic clusters and "preferences" are defined vaguely as a rating between 1 and 5.)
You know what Doctor Vinnie Boombatz would say about that one right?
Game Changing Idea: Go on the Cyber-Offensive
YouTube is slow to realize it... You don't know statistics to show that 5 star ratings are innaccurate.
It’s About the Platform
I like Michael Arrington because he's pro-Israel and sees the evil in Holocaust deniers, and calls them out on it. That takes balls and brains, especially if you're not Jewish.

-discovery version

edit: I'd better tack on my favourite quote from the essay:

"I'd rather offend people needlessly than use needless words"
> Thus, my cell lines will undergo somewhere between 20 and 50 more cell divisions than a cell in a living mouse.

Just curious - is cell division time period same for humans and mice?
I agree and http://sunlightlabs.com has been doing a great job, I see them at many tech conferences hosting their hackathons
We marketed to groups and organizations. Hence, they all had connections when they signed up.
Use hunchentoot, it's got a simpler api and documentation too. I used to use UCW, then I abandoned it in favor of hunchentoot.

http://weitz.de/hunchentoot/
A Formally Correct Operating System Kernel
Ohio Inmate Says One Failed Execution Is Enough
Amazon also had two founders, Bezos and Shel Kaphan.
Malaysia Looking To Copyright Food?
Some people would be embarrassed to admit that they watched certain movies. Also, maybe Netflix can tell if you're gay.
I think his nanobots would be regulated by the FDA as drugs.

I think that would be like the FDA trying to classify a programming language as good or bad.

The same stumbling block that you would have getting an iphone if they were illegal. They would never have been made in the first place.

They will be made so they can be used on inanimate objects and used or tested on animals. They will be made so they can be tested for FDA approval. Therefore will be available on the black market for the right people with enough money.

Right - that's why I qualified my statement with "The only way this is going to happen is if human-level or better AI is finished, like, next week." It could happen, I just wouldn't bet that way.

That isn't the only way it will happen. Specifically mentioned are artificial organs used to replace failing organs. That is starting to happen right now and could extend life expectancy.

Sure, he's a smart guy. I could dig up other smart guys who work closer to the field who don't think immortality will ever be achieved. Smart guys can be right about one thing and wrong about another.

Whether he's right or wrong isn't the issue, your dismissive comment as if he had just thought of it yesterday and his ideas were obviously meritless and unsupported is part of the issue (it's unfairly misrepresentative) and your personal attack that he's just an old man grasping at straws is just bad form.
Does anyone care about them anymore? Except for Hadoop and BOSS, there isn't anything worth mention. And 100m USD is insane it just shows how desperate they are to market themselves to people who don't know what a browser is.
Improved Seam Carving for Video Retargeting
Funny, my "price" would probably be an integer ;).

Maybe it comes down to documentation. If I were to use some sort of function where I wasn't sure what the argument was, I'd look in the docs to see first.
I dislike Arrington primarily because of his attitude and verbal tactics I've heard when he's been on various podcasts - largely Gillmor Gang, IIRC.

He reminded me strongly of a salesman, in that he used simple yet insidious verbal tricks to "wind people up", as we say in these parts, though less self-serving - more in an idly sadistic and demeaning way. He was a negative and arrogant force in the conversations, and they improved when he left.

Techcrunch just seals the deal - it's not a site I have in my reader, I just see it occasionally here or other links.
I wasn't lost. In fact, original article was initially written in English, and then translated to Russian. It was intentionally corrected according to the taste of the place where it was published in Russian (to reduce "trolling").
I'd still object to his publishing of the stolen Twitter memos under the pretense, contradicted by Ev, that he had permission, no matter how ingratiating he were about it. Other conduct, such as his baseless attack on Last.FM and his recent T-shirt gaffe, simply could not be formulated or carried out by the personality that you describe.
Seems like this is only for HTML5 sites. IE 8 actually renders very well. I've yet to have something render in FF/Safari differently than IE 8. It's IE 7 and 6 that are the bane of my existence, and it's probably easier to get those users to upgrade to 8 than install a plugin.
On Data Storage Efficiency
The trend is not a reflection on Coders at Work but on the industry as a whole. No need for apologies.
Doesn't make much difference to me.
The Pomodoro technique is phenomenal. I actually end up doing ~50 and 10 rather than ~25 and 5. The trick is, when the buzzer goes off, I hit save, mash make && make test and go grab a cigarette. Chat about the weather, video games, anything really with other folks (non-smokers are encouraged to take "smoke breaks" outside, get some much needed sunlight and just relax out of the cubicles). Come back in, look at compiler output or test results and there's a list of things to start working on. If it all ran fine, continue working.

Amazing how something so simple as "get up and away from your desk" does more than any "agile", "extreme" or "You're kicked from a plane, you must write a driver that interfaces the rip cord to the parachute release mechanism in order to deploy your chute" methodology.
I would suggest looking at this implementation:
http://appengine-cookbook.appspot.com/recipe/high-concurrenc...

My current counter system uses a single datastore entity per counter and uses the new CapabilitySet API to check if memcache will go offline in near future.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pair_programming#Scientific_stu...
This is very convincing. Why did Netflix do it?
Dell Optimizes Its Email And Sales Increase 7X
Would it be possible to add an alternative to OpenID login ?
I don't like OpenID logins, don't want to use it, and boycott (as in don't register) to websites where it is the only solution.

Am I the only one in this situation ?
How about a program to re-write for persuasion once you have written for discovery. I bet it wouldn't be to hard to program one that could make an essay sound more timid and nice. That is a fairly simple process that I usually go through before communicating electronically. However, as you stated you would still have to add the extra content.
Gelato: The FriendFeed of Dating
I don't know for sure. I suspect it is not, in general. I also suspect that it varies more from cell type to cell type within a creature than from species to species within the mammals.
Funny, I just started a new repo for doing euler problems with clojure. I'm only on the first couple problems, but am generally pretty impressed. For the seconed problem (sum of fibonaccis), my commit message is this:
confirmed, timed at: "Elapsed time: 0.41989 msecs" -- original c solution will no longer run.

My old 32 bit machine died and the original (crappy) C solution now segfaults immediately, and was much slower.

Anyway, calculating and summing all the fibonacci numbers in less than half a millisecond is pretty cool.
Maybe it saves time on the reviewer's part, but increases developer frustration. Which is more valuable to Apple?
This just came out today:

http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2009/09/agile-paddling-w...

"All in all, we saw over 1,000,000 page views from 93 countries around the world, and experienced incredible stability and scalability from Google App Engine even when we were spiking 350 requests per second during the finals."

Dave Westwood of BuddyPoke shared a few slides on his performance:

http://files.meetup.com/1135107/BuddyPoke_AppEngine_Stats.pd...

It's a little hard to parse w/o more description, but basically he's done well serving what seems to be a large % of Brazil with a low error rate.

IMHO, the best ways to use app engine rely on (1) memcache to iron out any timeouts or datastore issues, and (2) a relatively rich client front-end so any problems on back-end can also be handled in a user-friendly way (like Gmail).
Ask HN: Is HN slow in US alone?
I use HN from India and USA and feel that it's slower in US (where I get 54 Mbps) than in India (I am on 2 Mbps).

Anyone else feel the same?
well, they haven't actually started the new contest yet, so the netflix legal dept likely has not put their final stamp of approval.
It's a shame that being gay is embarrassing.
I suspect many people would still have no idea what Arrington's personality is in person, and thus continue to judge him entirely based upon the behavior of TechCrunch. How he greets people in person probably has no real impact.

This can extend even further--from everything I've gathered, George W. Bush is a very easy person to like once you know him in person. Yet he was very recently one of the most widely despised people in the world. Your actual personality doesn't seem to matter once you start doing things people don't like, or otherwise become famous outside people who know you in person.
FDA: drugs = "articles intended for use in the diagnosis, cure, mitigation, treatment, or prevention of disease." That would include nanobots.

>That isn't the only way it will happen. Specifically mentioned are artificial organs used to replace failing organs. That is starting to happen right now and could extend life expectancy.

What happens when (not if) your brain fails? This would just buy us a few more years before we became senile. Worthwhile, but not immortality.

>your personal attack that he's just an old man grasping at straws is just bad form.

Maybe. It's also true.
Pixar: The real toon army
Brick-o-lage; Silicon Valley company rethinks the humble brick
On the other hand, there's usually a (small-ish, but relatively loyal) market for companies that promote and affirm the political and/or religious beliefs of their customers.

The trick there is to present yourself as "on their side" without taking too many concrete positions on issues, so as to avoid alienating sub-groups. e.g., companies that want to be "green" or "eco-friendly" should avoid saying anything about nuclear power.

In this case, if one is promoting a company as open source-oriented, it's best to avoid: 1) Partisan US politics: one side angers the socialists, the other upsets the libertarians. 2) Anything that might provoke the Free Software vs. Open Source feud, including proxy issues like GPL vs. BSD. 3) Negative remarks about Apple, lots of people in the open source crowd like their products even though they're a very non-open company.

On the other hand, making fun of Microsoft would be fairly safe as long as it's kept professional (gentle satire and such) and doesn't sink to slashdot levels.
I have a lot of praise for SQLite the product, but wouldn't extend it to using the source as a learning aid.