skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Wanders a bit and is fluffy in parts but many good points, particularly:

This may be hard to hear, but: many artists who claim they just want to eat and pay rent are lying (perhaps to themselves). Most artists don't want a living wage — they want to win the lottery. Suggest to most filmmakers and musicians that "success" is about $75,000 a year, and they'll turn up their noses. You call that a jackpot? They're only in it for the millions, baby. If that means working a day job and remaining obscure, so be it. Millions need to be poor so that one can be rich; they're willing to do their time being poor, so that one day they can be rich at the expense of others. Their turn will come, they think.

I suggest playing a different game entirely, because the lottery is a tax on people who are bad at math. But those kinds of artists want to play the lottery more than they want their art to reach people.

I've had similar thoughts about startup culture. Do people want to run some obscure online business for the rest of their lives and make a decent wage or do they want to make a big splash and retire at 25? You can make similar arguments about decisions to work on open source or proprietary systems, do you want a living wage or a lottery ticket?
The People’s Republic of Google
Does it come with Minuet?
I take it you haven't seen the U.K. tabloid press then?
Nepal Human Hair Solar Panel Hoax (CraigHyatt)
Google targets elderly?
Google increased font size on search box? Why?
Mortgage net branch
Flagship financial group your Mortgage Loan Specialist, home equity loans, VA loans, home equity line of credit, refinance mortgage. Flagship financial group partners division provides a turn-key solution for operating your own mortgage branch.
Simply the most down-to-earth and pragmatic article of the last few months here.
The existence of bad newspapers to do not make all newspapers bad. When all is said and done I still hold that there is not a blog or web site around that can measure up to the best print media when it comes quality journalism and writing.
http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?edit=NintyNineWebFrameworkProblem...
A survey of the many jit projects. Parrot using llvm instead of own jit.
Yeah. Read here as well:

http://community.discovery.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/9701967776...

The Museum of Hoaxes is lagging a little:

http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/hoax/weblog/permalink/solar_pa...
1. Language / Framework
* your php programmers should use php: python is a great language but it takes time to learn it, plus a new framework, and to get efficient and stable takes even more. also, php is not a bad language and zend is not a bad framework. it's neither pretty nor cool or exciting but it works, is fairly efficient and will give you results the fastest with your team.
* you should use python: for many other tasks (automation, backup, integration, sysadmin, boto for AWS if you use it) you already know one of the best and fun languages.

2. Cloud or own servers
* you can delay this decision (most likely), and try not to start buying stuff :)
* this is actually two questions: (i) how much does cloud vs own cost - this is easier, e.g. the AWS calculator can help http://bit.ly/RU8T (ii) what kind of usage patterns will your site have - this is very important, as in case of wildly fluctuating demand or unpredictable scaling requirements you may have to go with the cloud.
How Do MP3 Players Work?
Discover how mp3 players work.
Download Latest Hubble Telescope Images to HDD with JSON API Hack
Yeah, but why would you waste it for stack space, when you can do an event-driven design, and allocate the resources only when needed?

Anyways, I was talking about C, where the stack is allocated when the thread is created and you cannot resize it later, nor it will grow automatically.

With dynamic languages it is different, but don't expect handling that much connections with them either.
Yes, it's a hoax. See here:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=817099
This is a follow up on this submission:

"Teenager invents solar panel made from human hair (dailymail.co.uk)"

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=813103
I wish I could upvote this more than once :)
Excellent advice about graduate school life
Bah... EA tried doing this with Godfather: The Game. The PC version, when pirated would not allow the player to exit out of a vehicle. However, a new patch was made which addressed the issue and allowed pirates to play as they wanted.
Wow. That's got to be a record for cynicism. I see where you're coming from, but don't you think that it might actually be helping people that are discriminated against for their sexuality, race, gender or whatever people use to identify others by some irrelevant characteristic in order to prosecute them ?

The fact that there is 'no cost' is great, that means that it got done. The church took 400 years in some cases to recognize their wrongs, the British Government (at the prodding of John Graham-Cumming) took 'only' 50 years and change.

I'm all for pressing governments to admit their wrongdoings, and I'm all for shortening the time it takes them. The great news here is IT WORKED. They took notice, and within a fairly short time.

They stopped short of what was asked, but they didn't exactly do nothing either, that's the prime minister speaking in person there, not some two bit flunky.

Gordon Brown personifies the British government, in this case that could have gone only one step higher (the Queen) but apparently she couldn't be bothered, or Brown decided that it might help his re-election chances if he did it himself.

Whatever the truth of it is a cause for rejoicing.

Now let's hope some of this rubs off on his underlings, some of who are in a perfect position to show that they too understand that discrimination is wrong.
GDP per capita visualization of Mainland China, Taiwan, S Korea and Japan
Brown is a very smooth operator, and for sure he would try to do everything to spin this to his own benefit.

That does not mean that nothing was achieved however.

In my opinion, now it is time to press on and demand a formal pardon in light of this apology I don't see how it could be refused. He's pretty much admitted they got it wrong, a pardon is the next logical step.
Their technology is being used. Maybe not to its full extent yet, but it's a start, and they're able to use the technology to impact many more people than they would have been able to as a standalone company trying to compete against a large number of search engines.
every render of a users homepage has a list of "following" names, so the client shouldn't need to go to the server for auto-completion?
How can you throw away your product like that?

Huge wads of cash? Even if they had kept hacking on their own and even if they'd managed to come up with something better than the current search engines, there is no guarantee they would have made much more money.

When faced with the choice between lots of money today or to gamble that money on uncertain odds for an unknown quantity of money tomorrow, I can't really blame people who take the first option. Especially if they get to keep working on the project after having been handed the huge pile of money.

Edit: Another point of course is that actually setting up and running your own search engine requires you actually run a business and do all kinds of business things which have no relation to hacking on cool algorithms. A lot of startup founders that I know care a lot more about cool algorithms than running profitable companies, seeing the latter as a necessary evil that allows them to do the former. Those sort of people would no doubt jump at the chance of being offered a lot of of money to never have to think about the profitable company bit, and focus all their energy on the cool algorithm bits.
10 Outstanding White & Minimal Wordpress Themes
See http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/09/now-s-u-p-e-r-sized.h...

A little (maybe) inside story here

Believe it or not, I guess Google globally adjusted it's box height after Google China added 6px to its search box height.

On 13th April this year there's a post on a extremely popular & influential IT commentary news site in China

http://www.cnbeta.com/articles/81765.htm

saying that Google.cn failed to match Baidu.com because their search box is so small that people need exta time to move the mouse to focus the correct text box

6 days later Google.cn improved one of their page(specifically http://www.google.cn/hp?sp=china) accordingly

http://www.cnbeta.com/articles/82222.htm

Next on 6th October Google.cn switched to bigger search box on all of their pages, including the google.cn home page

http://google.org.cn/posts/google-china-bigger-search-box.ht...

Finally on 10th September Google globally adopted this design change

http://cnbeta.com/articles/93034.htm

Coincidences?
Yeah, but does it run Crysis?
Everyone wants to be twitter.
i used math notations <for intro> when i applied to grad school

something like ... there exist <my-name> such that bla <insert math mumbo-jumbo describing me as a unique subset of engineers>

result? i got in and studied there
I've worked as an ER/Trauma/Critical Care nurse for 15 years, and, the first thing I teach young ER nurses is this: The first pulse that you check when you walk into a Code Blue is your own pulse.

Translation: You can't do shit for a patient when you're panic stricken. Panic is normal in life/death situations, but when you need to routinely function in those situations, you have to learn to deal with the stress and adrenalin.

So, with some experience, training, and conscious effort to push back the panic, an ER nurse can channel the rush of adrenalin into a zen/flow experience. Time slows to a crawl, you notice anything and everything, and you move like the wind.

But, you can't exist in those panic/flow states all the time. You have to learn how to come down and burn up the extra adrenalin. When people don't learn how to deal with those situations they end up with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

The stress of building startups feels very similar. As PG says, the default for a startup is to die. As a founder, I fight for the life of my startup each day. And, I'm still learning how to channel all that adrenalin effectively.
Yeah, for instance they could apologize for aerially bombing various colonial cities. They could apologize to China for the Opium War. You have to wonder what contemporary issues they were trying to distract people from, with this.
Toner Cartridges for Printers
Sure. Success ultimately is subject to feedback. They can't succeed without creating value. But they can start without it. They may get funded without it. You may not know if you've been doing anything useful for a long time.
This is in USD. Curious what the anomalous little island of wealth is in extreme NW Xinjiang, as well as north central China.

It would be instructive to superimpose this with a population density map.
Of course but with Powerset it's way to early. It's as if YouTube would have been sold before they actually have published the first video. Most startups sell too early. Also selling in a bad economy means a much lower price as well.

Powerset would have been 10 times as much in 2 years or even 100 times.

I see that happening all over the place. projects sold before they reach critical mass or long before have reached their peek. In most cases the lose steam afterwards.
Ever tried doing SEX on a bridge??  
No? Well, there are some people who can say - yes. Check out the photos.
I'd like to see somebody one-up this and say ``and lambda!''. What I mean is restricting explicit recursion/loops to combinators which respect algebraic laws (i.e. Backus's FP/FL) in order to get a better grip on program transformation to reach efficient implementation. Guy already hints at this by stressing the importance of MapReduce.
Yeah, now they're buried somewhere in advanced features or the invisibly being used. In the same amount of time they probably would have created some real product by now. Huge corporations stifle innovation.
IT Myths and Legends: Sharing Servers
Concatenative / point-free style? Guy already suggests this on p.68. Paraphrased, if data can be chopped in pieces, maybe code can too?
The 'I want to make it before my 30th' crowd is definitely an issue with things like this. Plenty of people see the examples of a few reasonably lucky ones (Hurley & Chen, Brin & Page, Zuckerberg and so on), and do not realize the numbers.

It really is more like a lottery. Sure, Brin & Page had talent. But they also had the power of a major university behind them, and they were able to hire a virtual army of brainpower.

People that want to get rich before they turn 30 are, for the most part misguided.

But some of them will make it.

And because to some extent you are in control of your destiny in this respect the feeling of achievement is a powerful drive. I know it drives me (even if I don't hope to make it before I'm 30, I'm well past that anyway ;) ).

So, we plod away on our little schemes to dominate the world, scoff at Gates and Jobs while admiring them. Read the advice from those who have already 'made it' as though it would somehow rub off on us. And for some it will...
Congratulations to all of us who bravely rallied around the cause of a dead man, persuading the British government to do something that has no real meaning to it and then celebrating our common victory over, er, something-or-another. I'm not sure what we defeated or cause we moved forward, but it sure felt great!

Let's keep up the good work! We have a long list of horrible deeds done in the past to dead people by other dead people, and there's no limit to the amount of patting ourselves on the back we can achieve. After all, we are so morally superior to all of those folk, and it's time we told ourselves that.

Never mind that slavery still exists in the world, or imprisonment for gays, or genocide, or female genital mutilation. No point in addressing or doing something about actual, real evils that we can make an impact on. Nope! When you can score easy symbolic points, all of that real action seems kind of silly. Let's hear it for symbolism over substance! </sarcasm>

As a person of European descent, I would like to take this opportunity to request that the Italian government apologize for the Romans keeping so many of our ancestors as slaves. This is a wrong that's gone on way too long, and something superficial and symbolic must immediately be done so that I can feel better about it.
Apparently you read a different article because I got the wandering part but I didn't get the 'many good points' part.

I'm sorry but the section you quoted is utterly fatuous, without any kind of figures to back it up. I could quite as easily say that the vast number of painters, poets, authors, actors, musicians and sculptors that I personally know would be estatic to be earning $75,000 a year (or equivalent depending on location). Especially since most of them are currently struggling on a minicule percentage of that amount year after year after year without any certainty that they will eventually be able to use the skills they've honed to pay their way in society.

As far as I can tell her entire argument seems to boil down to 'Art is special and people should give money to artists because it's special'. I'm not entirely sure how that can be taken as any kind of argument.

Art of any kind is a skill, it takes years of hard work and dedication to hone that skill. Her intimation that 'Art' is the domain of the muse and inspiration utterly ignores the enormous amounts of effort every single artist commits to honing their craft.

This kind of idiotic talk just makes me so damn furious. Segregating artists as some kind of 'special needs cases' that should rely on the goodwill of others in order to do normal things like want to raise a family or buy a house or pay for dinner out is a disgusting suggestion, not worthy of consideration.
If they thought TC was a joke, they'd ignore them, not spend time and effort, planning and executing a prank.
the evidence for is vastly better than the evidence against

This is simply not true.

There are many scientific books against the evolution theory. I know that I'm not saying something popular when I claim that to me the evolution theory is simply silly. But I don't care to be popular -- instead I care to accept the most reasonable opinion.
24v electric cars
Looking for 24v electric cars ? Then toy electirc cars would be the best choice to buy them
Exactly. Whenever you read 'did not return message seeking comment' or 'could not be reached for comment' you really should read 'we try to make it seem like we tried but they didn't care in order to make ourselves more important'.

And it puts the pressure on the parties of who they 'request comment' to replay, knowing that if they don't that that dreaded sentence will be in the article, effectively a small component in the trial by media arena.

There are other examples of such code phrases but this one is particularly annoying.

As though everybody in the world should be at the beck and call of the media, and doing nothing is already a strike against you.

Sure, if a politician stonewalls on a subject call them out for it. But don't use that phrase every second article in order to make it seem that the media are something you ignore at your peril. Plenty of people are loathe to talk to reporters simply out of - justified - fear of being misquoted.
Was the ABC the 1st Computer?
Online Fabric Store
Uzbekalive is an online store offering Ikat Fabrics, Silk Ikat Scarves, Unique Hair Barrettes, Decorative Jewelry Boxes and many more by just one click at www.uzbekalive.com
Hi, when I return from Unconventional Computing 2009 I will post some more tutorial material. This is a new paradigm, and it was fascinating to see workshop participants turning the EAC board over, trying to find something REALLY doing the computing. They found it hard to belive that a piece of conductive foam was performing complex computations. Thank you all for viewing the PPT. Sincerely, Jonathan
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pardon#United_Kingdom

Today the monarch may only grant a pardon on the advice
of the Justice Secretary (previously the Home Secretary)
or the First Minister of Scotland (or the Defence
Secretary in military justice cases), and the policy of
the Ministry of Justice and Scottish Executive is only to
grant pardons to those who are "morally" innocent of the
offence (as opposed to those who may have been wrongly
convicted by misapplication of the law)
HTML 5 is a mess
Powerset would have been 10 times as much in 2 years or even 100 times.

Powerset could have been... There are no guarantees in business. Turning down the money would have been a gamble no matter how you look at it, and not all people are gamblers.
Both of those are resource-extraction economies: Karamay (oil) and Ordos (coal+natural gas).
Irrational By Design
Why isn't most server software (that can expect lots of simultaneous users) non-blocking yet? Are there any significant disadvantages with this method?

Can we expect a lot more non-blocking servers within a few years?
The title is misleading. The link shows an albeit spectacular short movie from a vulcano outburst seen from space.
If (renamed) Turing had lived. (SF)
I added to it, it seemed pretty obvious that that was the idea. I really like the concept, to ask a group of people to create a set of problems.
Maybe you did read a different article because if I had to sum it up I'd say "people shouldn't give money to artists because [they|it] are special".

If your friends were buggy whip makers in the age of motor cars you'd tell them to give it up. If they responded "but buggy whips are my life" then you'd be well within your right to say suck it up. Just like if someone wanted to work 2 or 3 days a week to spend more time with their kids, or take 6 month holidays every year to wander in the Andes. Everybody makes career and life choices, everybody gets to live with the consequences.
Windows autorun may autoinfect
Definitely contains interesting ideas.

But the problem with the lottery ticket mentality is that I think it mostly stems from the fact that the 'greedy and seedy suits' exert so much control over other peoples art on top of collecting all/most of the profits (even more so in the past).

Examples are ample:
musicians not owning the actual music (in the past not even owning the actual recording masters), not able to decide how/when to (re)release albums, directors/creators of movies not owning 'video rights' and as such not in charge of how crappy a DVD is put together, comic book artists/writers not even having control over a character they invented from scratch...

The only reason you would ever put up with such ...ahem... 'fascism' is that you get compensated beyond a 'living wage'.

Also: I don't equate control/copyright over your own art/work with being able to control weather someone can get a hold of your art without paying for it.

That kind of thinking is completely obsolete this day and age and again only serves one purpose: maximize profits by ripping of (cfr. Nine In Nails album pricing in certain countries) or pestering consumers (cfr. DRM & unskippable 'do not steal' intros on DVD's you just bought)

Once the control problem goes away, new and equally profitable means of monetization can and should be created without feeling cheated (cfr. Radiohead In Rainbows)

We all know how it feels to work a job that has a crappy commute or crappy hours/people but
happily put up with it if you're compensated more than enough.

When it comes to losing control over your art, only billions are 'more than enough' it seems ;-)
how much traffic will it take to reach google's free limits though?
Agile is dead, long live Agile
This reminds me of Never underestimate the throughput of a car filled with HD's racing down the freeway at 120 kph

I don't remember where I first read it though..
Why is there no mention of the artificially restricted supply of doctors? This fact plainly accounts for a large portion (if not the majority) of US health care costs.
It seems to me that in making this into some sort of drama filled, "wow - didn't expect that" story, the simple facts and inherent drama got lost. For me, a simple, straight-forward account of the insanity of the situation would've been more effective.

Simple story telling - a lost art?
Please give examples of the "many scientific books". Also what, in your opinion, is the most reasonable opinion?
> doctors have peoples lives in their hands

And so do bus drivers.
This was not actual Microsoft strategy; until the Windows team destroyed OS/2 Microsoft had every intention of making OS/2 the future. Windows was really just a project that refused to be killed until it won.
Colorillo: real-time action painting
As someone working from Portland, Maine (for a company back in SF), it's cool to see start ups out here. Best of luck to the folks at AccelGolf in Portland!
He's pretty much admitted they got it wrong

The language is ambiguous: If by "he" and "they" you are referring to the same entity, then no, no such admission has been made. And it's not clear that it should be.

More like "thousands of other gay men who were convicted under homophobic laws were treated terribly ... I am proud that those days are gone ... " In other words "they got it wrong in the 1950s. We're better."
You're discounting the output buffer that you will need on a per thread basis (unless you are serving from cache, in which case you can serve the data directly from the cache memory).

Typically an output buffer should be able to hold the complete production for a client, if you limit it to say 4K you will be unable to process a request in one go.
here's my drawing: http://colorillo.com/aaen
hmm interesting links guys, thanks! reading up now.
A little side project by nader and me. People can simultaneously draw on the same page.

The Comet part was built using http://orbited.org/ and http://www.rabbitmq.com/
Indian telecom market booming with more boom to come
Communism FAIL.