skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I beg to differ. It is appropriate only in certain, special circumstances. It is misapplied and misunderstood, and though I respect the work of those you cite, but it does NOT yield the growth optimal fraction in trading unless two specific criteria occur (aside from a positive expectation). Peculiarly, it has not been illuminated for what it is and when it is applicable -- an absence of critical thinking on the part of its proponents have promulgated an enormous degree of disinformation out there. Regularly, I would get called in by hedge funds and witness this firsthand. Sorry I cannot be more specific about this at this time -- I will be in the coming months, suffice to say for the time being that one must be extremely careful if they think that the Kelly Criterion is giving them the optimal fractin to risk in trading. More often than not, it is giving them something different and very dangerous.
I've managed to do this via Opera. It's not a solution I like -- I much prefer the built-in web browser -- but it seems to work.
FCC Investigating Google Voice
Well, take a copy of your original, their letter and send it in. There are lots of oddities like this.
Wow, this looks way easier to use than gnucash. Thanks!
Right now it's free during the beta. (I setup a stackexchange for startup questions: www.ExplainBusiness.com).

It took about 2 hours and you don't need to provide a credit card yet. It will be interesting to see what % of these trials convert to paying customers though.
He claims to use neuro-linguistic programming, subliminal messages etc. There are some videos in which he tries to explain what he does.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZyQjr1YL0zg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=befugtgikMg
Good stuff. Just finished Dawkins' new book: The Greatest Show on Earth - should be introductory biology reading for high school students.

However, still prefer his The Selfish Gene for raising my consciousness the most.
Right, but it is being handled by processes and not threads, which the argument was about the other day.
Is the Universe a Computer? by Steven Weinberg (2002)
Obama Says He’s ‘Surprised’ and ‘Humbled’ by Nobel Prize
Yeah, no school spirit, and how does U of T lose marks on international students? I don't really see how the student population could be more diverse.
I'm no computer scientist, hope I can comment anyway...

Maybe add some graphics capability a la Logo? That way, you can see the turtle and the program going at the same time.

Also, some kind of labelling/commenting of the different "areas" of the program -- that can then be translated to comments to the code.
Has any mainstream web server ever been pure demand-forked? Apache has been connection pooled since the '90s; the second edition of Unix Network Programming used it as a case study.
You run "touch #{RAILS_ROOT}/tmp/restart.txt".

That will restart the rails processes. No connections are dropped, and I've not seen any downtime.
That they purchased his product makes sense, because that's how he heard about it. His product acts like a funnel for such stories.

However, I agree it's a little too conveniently self-serving. Although an appealingly elegant coincidence, it's important to not only be neutral, but also to appear to be neutral.
Danger, danger, illusionist alert! Derren Brown is a 'mentalist', that is he performs illusions under the guise of mental tricks, psychology, the power of the mind etc. In reality this is just a guise, and when for example his professed method is hypnosis, it probably isn't, and instead misderection, slight of hand, gimmicks etc are involved. It's just another way to wow the public, and the public loves to believe it.
Read '13 Steps to Mentalism' by Corrinda, it is one of the classic texts on mentalism and will get you wise to a lot of this stuff.
That said, Derren is one of the masters in this field...
I have a very young non web-app startup that I am working on with my mom.

And its delicious!

http://twofoolsfudge.com is the only web component.
They are and I agree it takes forever .. but that is mastering, maybe not 10 years but +- 10 000 lines of code before you master it.

Java is not a beautiful language! I find the language libraries quite verbose and difficult to memorize. Brevity is a virtue. If one is to master a language the first thing you should do (I know it might sound heretical!) is to start a small collection of wrappers and generic routines with shorter names that are easier to memorize.

A good example of such a 'wrapper', but from JavaScript is jQuery, which to a great extend is a wrapper around the DOM. At the expense of the code John Resig managed to minimize the API.

$().css()

not document.getElementById() etc...

It does take time though!
Methodic approach to CSS coding: Four Bubbles Model
just take the big things right now...

OpenTables features for restaurant sites ..

a version of opentable (modified) for mechanic websites

(VIN in lieu of seat preference)
Do not assume that "scared away by compiler errors" means the same thing as stupid or not intellectually curious.

I know at least one would-be programmer who is not scared away by complier errors, but he is almost comically infuriated by them: not their presence, but their customary vagueness and unhelpfulness. Such a tool as this might provide an intellectually curious sort like him to learn proper syntax for common programming concepts without having to dig through man pages or web pages, and without lots of trial and error.
Hulu Has A Desktop Client For Linux
I'm slightly surprised that there's no device class for video output.

Same. I remember being promised USB monitors when the first iMac came out.
The real meat about how it was done is here:
http://highscalability.com/blog/2009/9/22/how-ravelry-scales...

and that info was taken from this interview:
http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2009/09/02/Ravelry

The linked article is just a summary.
The company I worked for up until a little over a year ago tried to do something like this. They had a generic site builder (built with hokey 1999-era tech) with industry-specific templates and a whole bunch of themes that could be applied more or less orthogonally to the templates.

It's not a bad way of doing it, but their execution was a little off and they weren't able to make it profitable over the nine years that I worked there.

To do it profitably probably means doing it on a very large scale and in a way that doesn't result in huge hardware/maintenance nightmares (i.e. as little dynamic content as your customers will tolerate).
Not really linkjacked since the info given seems to have been gathered from the interview and other sources. And also presented in a more technical way (vs. an interview).
Yes-in my mind that's what makes the marketing move great. Real, honest feedback from a user that had the exact problem this company's product is built to fix. The company believed in their product enough to send it to you and have you evaluate it in the public eye.
The argument encompassed two aspects of the model:

1) "Threads are out -- processes are better than threads."

2) Process-per-connection architectures.

The first is demonstrably false -- for instance, look at Erlang, which maps lightweight erlang processes to operating system threads, providing SMP scalability at a low cost without running into Github's issues with mongrel "thread-killing". More broadly used, look at Servlets and the Servlet 3.0 support for async comet-style event-based request handling. Each request is handled on a thread as necessary. Inter-thread communication (where necessary) is cheap, and this scales just fine.

If you use the fork() model and a long-running request blocks the entire process, comet is basically a non-starter. This is why people are interested (and implement) lightweight threads, coroutines, and restartable request implementations.

For a conceptual challenge, consider how you would implement a live web chat system that can scale up to a considerable number of clients, with extremely low resource usage, and instant message distribution (no polling). Locally, we implemented this with async servlet support and M:N scheduled scala actors -- a blocking HTTP request doesn't hold a thread or process hostage in the web server or the application, and we can scale up to enormous number of live clients on one machine.

The second was merely a lack of understanding of the model. In implementations where fork() is used as an alternative to threads and multiple connections are not handled per sub-process, you quickly run into scaling issues with subprocess memory utilization. In cases where subprocesses handle multiple connections via an event mechanism, you're just using fork() instead of threads.

I'm wondering how many servers github is using to keep up with load -- If each 8 core 16 gigabyte (!!!) server can actually only handle 16 concurrent requests via a pool of 16 workers, that's an incredibly poor (and expensive) scaling model.
Yahoo to promote home page apps during Open Hack Day
These seem to be mostly discussed here:

http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/?biz

I'm curious what the mathematical expectation of rewards per unit of effort put into various types of startups is. No one has probably tried to collect this sort of data.
Thanks for the suggestions. A comment system is on my list of features to work on.

I think I have been fleshing out an idea like what you are suggesting from the turtle cursor. I would like to add a step-by-step debugging to WizBang that allows the user to watch variable values and step through each Wizzy (with it being highlighted graphically). If I implemented that, I think it would be a great way to visualize different sorting algorithms.

Edit: I'm also not quite a computer scientist! College drop out! :)
Go for fewer words. "Share lists of real world stuff"
A Third of Dinosaur Species Never Existed?
Books you say?
Despite all the downmodding, jpwagner's suggestion is on the money. What would most benefit the development of a tool like this is extensive understanding of how the target audience reacts to and applies it.

Lest we forget that COBOL and SQL were originally designed to be accessible to non-developer business-y types. One wonders how much UX testing they underwent.
Nice, but I got bored after 7 levels
It always amazing to me to hear people fail in some business and then blame the market, and this seems to come up a lot with regards to the App Store on Hacker News. It's refreshing to see someone critique that sort of analysis.

There is always a new blog post talking about the mathematical impossibility of making money on the app store, dependence on Apple for exposure, unfairness of the App Store rules, etc. Some of these articles even have some credibility. It's fair to say that it is difficult to make money on the App Store (or any other market). It's fair to say you can get a boost from Apple. And it's true that the App Store is not transparent.

But before you write that next screed about the App Store being an impossible-to-win game with no real reward for success, remember that you don't understand everything. As this article points out, it could simply be a market misunderstanding, which will doom a product anywhere.

Before you complain that the game is fixed, remember a lot of normal people make money on the App Store. Instapaper makes money, I make a living of the App Store, as do two close friends of mine, and none of us has ever been featured by Apple. We make good products, don't have VC capital or money to market, and the sales rise over time. You can make money on any category (not just games). I do well in Navigation, my buddy Ish does well in Social Networking, and another buddy Dave does really well in utilities.

If you try and make a product for the App Store and it fails to sell, you have no one to blame but yourself. The App Store is the absolute easiest way for an indie developer to sell software on a mobile phone... heck, to SELL software at all.

As a caveat, if you choose to play in the Games category, I suggest you be a good game programmer with a good idea, and not some two-bit hack with a get rich quick scheme. The competition is steepest in games. But, you can still win.
Online Shop Till You Drop With Your Friends On Plurchase
I meant that it's doing so well precisely because he's still there, and that's why I'm surprised (that he's still there). He really cares!
New Spy Earpiece Wants To Help Students, Gamblers Cheat Successfully
The AT&T vs Google Voice War Erupts Over Sex Lines
This result was mentioned previously on HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=783912

Apparently, not only are some new drugs failing to pass a test showing that they are more effective than placebos, but old drugs that previously passed a placebo test might fail if they were tested today.

They give a number of possible reasons in the article why this might occur. One hypothesis was that suitable trial patients are not as sick as they used to be, since the really bad cases today would be on drugs that didn't exist back then (which makes them ineligible for the trial). Another hypothesis was that trials today are performed in more third-world locations, where the quality-of-life difference between standard medical care and a drug trial is more pronounced, amplifying the placebo effect. But no one knows for sure why it's happening.
Does this mean we don't have to pay for ssl certs anymore? If ie, firefox, and safari support this company's free certs - what's the problem?
I assume it's because HN sends the Set-Cookie header as part of an HTTP 302 redirect and expects the cookie to appear in the redirected request. Apparently this is against the HTTP spec, and won't work in certain browsers:

http://www.persistall.com/archive/2008/01/25/cookies--redire...
It's hard to say. I'd probably ask your general practice physician for a referral to a therapist that specializes in adult ADHD. And I say therapist rather than psychiatrist intentionally: A therapist is usually someone with a PhD in psychology or counseling, and is less likely to take a purely "better living through science" approach than a psychiatrist, who is usually an MD specializing in psychological health, and is more likely to simply prescribe drugs and send you on your way. If you see a therapist, and they recommend medicine (they usually will), they will write up a recommendation to your primary physician to prescribe you that medicine.
>What are the key features for an site that would allow you to come in an build website for your niche (donut shops, tow trucks, dentists)?

As a previous submission (from Steve Blank's blog) said, you need to "get out of the building" and find out what donut shop owners, tow truck operators and dentists want.

One site that allows makers of hand-crafted goods to set up "shop" is Etsy (http://www.etsy.com). One thing they have are the tools for crafters to communicate with each other and teach each other how to build a shop. Note that in this case, sellers have something more like an eBay store than their own site. Maybe that's all some niches need.

Dentists wouldn't want that. At all. Real estate agents have their own needs. You will have to do the classic build and iterate to find what they want. Do you have experience in a niche that can help you get started?
did you read the article?

Granted Firefox and Safari has supported many of the certificate authorities issuing free certificates for some time, Microsoft has not, until now.
Another possibility is that people simply trust medicine more than they used to, which seems as though it would directly affect magnitude of the placebo effect.
Such a great list. Priceless! Thanks for the link. (upvoted)
Visual programming is probably more appropriate for teaching.

See this system I've built for teaching binary search tree algorithms. You can use it to teach not just basic binary search tree algorithms but also AVL and red-black tree algorithms.

http://opsis.sourceforge.net
Well... it was a shitshow. We were just told by a livid CEO that a major university (the bio world is surprisingly small and it's pretty easy to get a terrible rep) had a major data loss, etc. We were on the phone with them while simultaneously overnighting the computer to data recovery trying to figure out what happened. It took two frantic days before I figured out what the problem is, patched it, and started the emergency release process for all the other customers.

But yeah, I initially took responsibility for the mess, since it was most likely my code that did it. After figuring out precisely what happened, and having to demonstrate to my boss that the old code did not delete stuff out of directories, that responsibility got walked back a bit. Still... I got "laid off" within 5 months of that.

Basically, there was blame to go around: the university should have had a comprehensive backup solution in place, particularly given the expense involved in creating the data; I should have been more careful to not needlessly call this directory touch operation while creating cached bits in the data files (the "data file" that the user thought of was actually a directory because we were running into fat16 and fat32 file size limits), but at the end of the day, my boss took code that used to work and turned it into code that not only didn't work but was broken in the worst way possible for no other reason than to fuck about with posix idiocy. In a giant win32/mfc app.
To clarify, my understanding is that while rails is restarting, Passenger will queue all the requests that come in and begin processing them as soon as rails is ready. But yeah, zero downtime, it's pretty awesome.
Bad Actors Exposed: McColo, ZlKon, HostFresh and the Damage Done
yeah I'll just wait for a $29.99 script that does the same thing
Very interesting data thanks. I wonder how come, according to this articale, RIM's sales are growing outside of North America yet I fail to find Blackberries in shops, whereas iPhones are everywhere.
It seems like Obama just got a nobel prize for the potential impact he can have on the global community.

Seems like it could be more pressure on an already pressured administration.
As a citizen of a foreign country (not US) I think I can understand the logic that went into the Nobel Prize Committee's decision.

Prior to Obama, some people in the international community had grown disenfranchised, resentful, bitter and distant with the US. I'd like to say it was a great number or a majority of people, but I don't have a study or link to back this up. This is just from my experience.

The accomplishment that Obama did, which for US citizens might seem inconsequential, is that they made us (the international community) look at the US with fondness. Changing people's mind is a powerful accomplishment.

Obama's administration made people have faith in US leadership and that once again the international community's voice would be heard by the lone reigning super power in the world.

This isn't a "concrete" accomplishment like publishing a paper, stopping a war or ending an oppressive regime. But it is nonetheless a relevant and important event in the course of international politics. By positively changing the political climate Obama has achieved something that the US had failed to do for many years.

Honestly, I don't understand all of the hate. Peace itself is an ideal, a goal we should aim for but most likely will never achieve (at least not on a global scale), and Obama's intentions and steps in that direction have spoken louder than many others this year.
Cool, did you have to go to the fda for any business reason?
You can use it on Amazon too. Just type 'amazon' into the search/go-to box.
Grats guys!

There are so many times when I try pasting a shopping link to friends in chat, and when they click thru, it breaks because either

(1) GTalk / chat client garbles the URL
(2) something in the query string was unique to my account
(3) some kind of cookie / session interplay made the link fail.

I know Plurchase is solving a lot more than this problem, but there is no doubt a more integrated collaborative shopping experience beats the ad hoc solutions we have today.
I'm just really tired that NYTimes always blocks access to their articles from iPhones. I don't want to register for their "free account", I just want to read the story and maybe click on an ad if it's interesting.
hey nice, in the comments i saw you invited people, i'd like to test that tool to dev some applications for it !

Reallllly looking forward to test that !!!
louis.bonnel@gmail.com
actually this story was not submitted by me or anyone from Eldarion
If you like not getting paid work for realtors. Or lawyers for that matter.
Will Obama pay taxes on his Nobel?
You're asking the wrong crowd. People who are quite familiar with text-based programming tools just won't get it. You'll get stupid questions like "what does this give me that X doesn't already?" rather than people seeing the potential there for visual programming.

As I understand it, the visual programming in LabView and MatLab work quite well. These, I believe, will be your primary points of comparison.
According to a couple of experienced mobile Java game developers that learned their tricks pre-iPhone, a name and a icon of a game make or break sales. Names for mobile games had to be short and very descriptive , even if boring ("NY Shooter" instead of Max Payne or Halo), because there was no PR channels. It was all about teens looking for games on distribution channels.

Of course this has changed somewhat nowadays, there is much sites covering mobile games/apps. But I think those tricks are still valid, as for mainstream iPhone users browsing App Store is the dominant way to learn about apps.
> Of course Obama's real wealth is in those two beautiful girls.

Oh dear, I'm afraid this sentence could be interpreted in many ways. :(
The summary: An surprisingly large investment in a complex platform development and extensive hardware purchases.

Let's be really, really generous and say peak load on 10 million requests is 5 hours, and pack all 10 million requests into 5 hours. That's 2 million requests/hour, 33,333 requests/minute, 555 requests/second.

You can easily handle 5-10k requests a second with a few ms response time -- including dynamic templating and hitting a backend database -- on a 2.66 GHz 4 core Xeon 5150 with a couple gigabytes of RAM, using a servlet runtime and a JVM-based language.

Basically, you could take that entire solution stack and compress it down to a few items with far fewer moving parts, and spend half as much on engineering and capital expenditures.

My hope is that efforts like MacRuby bring this level of free performance to the Ruby world, and that languages like Scala and Clojure make the JVM more attractive, too.
I made my first site bulder product in 1999, went up against the biggies of the day in massive corporations (Vignette was a favourite one to beat) and won most pitches. Only we called it a 'Content Management System'

The first dot-com crash wiped out the product/company.

The big difference I see now vs then is that then you were selling site builders, now you have to sell complete marketing solutions. A product that makes a good site is not enough, you need to deliver the entire value chain. Right from SEO/SEM to the being the primary directory of the industry to having custom sites for each merchant better be available thru your platform.

This is what etsy and opentable do, this is what you have to do.

And doing this across industries is HARD. Though many of the components in the industry vertical products may be common, there are enough unique business processes in each vertical that doing a category leading job in multiple verticals is just not possible.

If you want to build a real-estate site builder, you need to compete with realtor.com, for restaurants with opentable, i'm sure there is (or will be) an equivalent for lawyers. Competing with one of these behemoths is challenge enough, now imagine fighting against all simultaneously.
Also it doubles as documentation for the members of our team who aren't familiar with this part of the system :)