skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Destined for a sharper image near you?

Don't want to come off too strong, as this device would have been awesome just a few years ago...but with how common smartphones are becoming, the market for people (without smartphones) willing to spend $99 on an electronic wikipedia device seems like it would be quite small.
Also a useful philosophy if you happen to become involved in a sea battle in the Gulf of Mexico.
I wonder how good the search is. Searching wikipedia from the site is terrible IMO.
The Internet still worked, however domain names didn't. You can use the IP addresses directly still, ja? Also, alternative DNS servers could be used still, no?
Can you explain why you think that? I disagree with you, for many (most?) products the "release early, release often" philosophy simply isn't appropriate.
Yeah I can see why that would be terrifying. You probably wouldn't have to completely change your process while you are working.

You might just be able to do a quick brain dump onto paper or software (maybe a mind mapping tool?) once you get to a good stopping point. It doesn't have to be everything - just enough to remind you where you left off.
Honest question: how are these products better than, for example redmine and MediaWiki, if using them for personal/small team purposes?
That loses a lot of the piece's poetry (or masturbatory prose, depending on how view you it). I resent this trend of twitterizing stuff. What's wrong with a bit of drama and posturing and exciting hats, anyway?
"Great news for Perl: mod_perlite lives"
There are still people on this planet not using auto-complete when writing E-Mail?

Those of us that use mail aliases? Youngsters these days....

Now if only someone would have a solution to me typing in the wrong IM window :-)
For an alternate (and more rigorous) view on the feedback between positive outlook and positive experience, see Martin Seligman's Learned Optimism.

In it, he describes a number of experiments to show that how optimistic we are depends on how we choose to interpret past events. He also shows that increased optimism has measurable positive effects in many occupations and that a person's seemingly inherent level of optimism can usually be changed through a set of behavioral exercises. (However, he also points out that optimism can be a detriment in some circumstances.)
Explaining Flow to non-geeks
This is like contextual advertising, such as Google Adsense.
If I'm understanding you correctly, how is this different from something like reddit or digg? You can read the discussion on reddit before reading the actual news.

Unless I'm misunderstanding.
Like most other social phenomena, the distribution of internet traffic has converged into a power law distribution. The author hints at it, but doesn't really underline the key driver of this change: serving vast amounts of flash and video content.

Not only do flash and video take up much more traffic than html+css, but the backend infrastructure necessary to serve large amounts of flash and video is something that only a very few well-capitalized companies can do on a large scale. So larger files/streams + fewer capable companies = heavily skewed distribution of traffic.
"Even back in the 18th century the question about freedom of speech and the citizen’s right to know what was happening in the halls of its parliament was fought and won by journalist and MP John Wilkes. The end result of all that was the 1688 Bill of Rights."

Oh dear.
ICFP workshops videos
Yes, keeping the model up to date is definitely an important issue. Don't forget that this also involves capturing new aerial imagery periodically.

Another approach that may have more potential than automatically extracting 3D structure from aerial imagery is using aerial depth maps from something like LIDAR. There's a research group at USC doing this, and you can see a video describing the process here:

http://graphics.usc.edu/~qianyizh/miscs/cvpr09_streaming_ful...
Exactly. What task at Amazon requires big software for just that task? You've got lots of tasks, so write lots of software. Lots of software != big software. I have well over 2000 packages installed on my Ubuntu Linux machine, but somehow all the developers manage to keep on working without getting bogged down in what the other 2000 packages are doing.
By Rands, I think.
The subscription is only for them to mail you a microsd card.
You can download the updates for free and load it yourself.

http://thewikireader.com/update.html
You're doing the exact thing Steve Yegge and Ola Bini warn against. You're assuming that you need a "massive technology infrastructure" and then deciding how to go about building one. Well of course it's going to be massive; you're planning to make it massive. Let's try another thought experiment. Assume you had to run Amazon.com but were only allowed to write 50k lines of code. What would you do? What percent of Amazon's problems could you solve with this code?
I understand what you're saying Facebook is massively complex compared to digg and twitter - which is likely why it chews up the majority of the article. But I'm not sure why you can't have a top level discussion about scaling (which seems to be the point of the article) that is relevant to all three.
Why does the author think flow is a hard concept to grasp or something restricted to geeks? Basic rule of getting people to understand you: Don't assume they're too stupid to do so.
I wonder what the chances are of using one of these and coming across a wiki page that has been defaced and / or is somehow incorrect. With the online version you have the benefit of time tempering validity of most articles. With something like this, aren't you at the mercy of whenever the snapshot was taken?
Peerset Says Forget Demographics, Advertise by Interest
This just links to an article that was already posted.
Kraken Becomes First Academic Machine To Achieve Petaflop
That's my experience too. We have a few databases of about 500MB-1000MB each. They are running on MyISAM and don't use transactions, foreign keys, constraints or really any kind of database feature other than indexes.

I spent some time optimising it, not a lot of time, maybe a few hours over the course of a year. And even then mostly due to changing machines. It was quite easy to do, reading the manual page and increasing some buffers and so on. Nothing too complex.

We were running into problems in terms of server capacity. On the advise of a friend and just about every comparison on the Internet (notable exception there is the MySQL manual, BTW), we thought we'd give InnoDB a try. I read up on some of the configuration parameters, set some things to values that seemed sane and did a conversion.

Converting from MyISAM to InnoDB took over one hour for one database of about 800M. The server nearly died from that experiment. (Even though only one/tenth of the databases were switched over to InnoDB. The rest was still on MyISAM.) After a few hours to make sure it wasn't an accident, we switched back to MyISAM.

The most concise summary of the performance difference is probably given by comparing the conversion times. From MyISAM to InnoDB took over one hour (1 hour, 8 minutes, 10.74 seconds to be exact). From InnoDB to MyISAM took 2 minutes and 15.35 seconds.

The results were pretty terrible. Ever since I'm convinced InnoDB does not work well with our environment and application.
Computers Faster Only for 75 More Years
I had never heard that Camus quote. Thanks.
It's about being respectful. This guy should have been more self-aware regarding his job and the company he represents. Making remarks like this may be fine on your own time, or in private company, but to publicly make a sweeping negative statement like this is in bad taste given this guy's responsibilities and public position.
And here's another video from USC that just shows textured 3D models a few cities, captured using LIDAR and aerial imagery:

http://graphics.usc.edu/~luwang/videos/cvpr.avi
Test of relativistic gravity for propulsion (hyperdrive) at the LHC
Want good health in your golden years? Keep working
No default. On my computer it was Ctl-F8, Ctl-L which was setup using the built-in Keyboard short configuration tool. Most of the time I just used hot corners though. That said, I no longer work in an environment where I need that kind of functionality so that combination no longer works.
I had the same exact thought, not in a disparaging way, but if there's better stuff available, it'd be nice to know about it.
Several of the big voltage-regulator manufacturers (National, Linear, ST come to mind) have software along these lines already, some of which is fairly good. A unified and less cumbersome application would be great, especially if it could pick out passives (caps, as you suggest, but also inductors and freewheel diodes for switchers). National's Webench already does this, but its library of passives is very limited compared to Octopart and many of the parts it suggests are either expensive or hard to find in low quantities.
You obviously haven't run JIRA and Confluence before. They take up a lot of memory and resources, certainly more than a low end VPS can handle.
Ask HN: Do you know Ruby/Sinatra? Interested in a little competition?
Hey,<p>I thought I might organize a little app competition for those who like ruby/sinatra. Let me know if you're interested so I can start planning it or something.<p>Cheers!
He seems to mention that his wife paints. So does mine, and she understands the idea of flow because it happens when painting. Or writing. Or playing the violin. Or designing.

In fact, flow happens in loads of places, and isn't unique to geeks or programming.

To the author: get a life, and learn other stuff. Flow is common, even if not always understood or appreciated.
Which means that tweeting is a golden opportunity to shine. Tweet something positive as you get off the plane, and maybe those you are about to meet will have read it and will associate you with positivity and optimism before they ever even meet you.
Well, in this case the author seemed to have some personal evidence that his plight was not being understood.

One thing I have recently noticed is how disrespectful people are to kids in flow. I'll see a little kid really engrossed in an activity, completely in the zone, and the parent will go "Okay time to go!" and yank them right out. And then people complain about short concentration spans...
New Music Software Predicts The Hits
"nd there's been such a push for new stuff that there hasn't been time for refactoring."

This is a management failure, and you haven't been practicing Agile.
That's the point of his article. He says open source works because you 'release early, release often' to a group of insiders, not the public. Hence why we have multiple release channels: trunk nightlies, branch nightlies, closed betas, public betas, and official releases.

His point is not to 'release early, release often' to the unwashed masses, but to 'release late, release rarely' to the public so they get a polished, finished product.
There's a vast difference between being spammy and being criminal. Calacanis would be wise to stick to the facts and advise people not to do business with people that do shady business, instead of throwing mud and demonizing specific firms. The tack he is currently on could land him in a costly defamation suit, netting some sleazy VC his Tesla.
You can read about facebook's architecture at highscalability and other sites of that ilk.
Not necessarily. There is a lot of talk about Trafigura that's not just retweets. Check out our charts:

http://trendistic.com/trafigura/carter-ruck/_24-hours
I find Confluence a lot nicer than MediaWiki. It's much better organized (organizing pages in Confluence seems built in, MediaWiki's "category" feature seems like an afterthought). Confluence also has useful features for collaboration with things like status updates. I'd give the free trial a go, and compare to see which one works best for you.
Actually, if you look at my first email I suggested that we would do an "open angel forum" if they didn't drop the fees.

So, I'm fairly down with the concept of creating something competitive! I mean, that's what I did when I got upset about the DEMO conference charing startups $20k for six minutes on stage!
Anyone have an idea as to how hackable this thing is? A friend of mine and I are looking for a good platform upon which to build a programmable and pocket-sized RPN calculator.
okay fair point.
This comic strip makes a point about Kindle: http://xkcd.com/548/
As the comments on the post show, this article is another example of Techcrunch not researching before publishing. There is nothing surprising about Wave working on an iPhone given that it uses standard HTML/CSS/JS. Being formatted differently for the iPhone is expected given that it would have made little sense to not consider mobile clients from the onset of Wave.

The other discovering, a website which strips Safari chrome when added to your home screen is a known feature. Just add:

<meta name="apple-mobile-web-app-capable" content="yes" />

to your site to make it launch sans chrome once added to the home screen.
Here is an artical my Malcolm Gladwell that talks about predicting movie/music hits
http://www.gladwell.com/2006/2006_10_16_a_formula.html
I just parsed that as "a hazard of social networkers", similar to a pride of lions or pod of dolphins.

(Sorry, it's not really relevant to your comment)
I agree as well on that definition. Which is what brought me to start reading the article since I was really curious to know how Microsoft engineers using Sidekicks could have caused any issue.
My 2008 thoughts on this are here: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/howtolaunch
That would be fine IF there was any semblance of an open/neutral forum and Calacanis hadn't already used blanketing statements. What sane set of founders would voluntarily violate agreements to "come out" publicly FOR their experiences in this context? It's a rigged trial.

As I've already stated, from what's been published, I disagree with these practices, but we're only hearing "leaked documents" from ONE SOURCE. There's ZERO discourse here--just fear mongering and name-calling. It all comes across as extremely pandering and childish. Hopefully, that will change.

It would be one thing if Calacanis had some semblance of independence, but as a partner in Sequioa, he is, quite literally, a fiduciary in a competing firm.

How would you like to have your business's private contractual affairs paraded in front of a bully pulpit?
A hazard of socializing at all is people will read, listen to, or otherwise consume what you say and do.

FTFY. I fail to see why people are freaking out about social networks all the time. If I walked into my office and said "OMG I GOT DRUNK AND PUKED ON DEBRA'S DESK LAST NIGHT LULLLLZ," people would get just as annoyed and offended (and Debra just as repulsed) as if I'd said it on Twitter. It's not hard: if you're going to say it, expect it to be heard. Period.
This is nothing new...I've been doing this since 1998.
How is he necessarily 'tearing them down' so to speak? He's providing the community with information about these groups. He's obviously interjecting his opinion into it all, but I don't see him being particularly vague about where his opinions end and where the facts begin.

Rephrasing this all another way, how can it be a bad thing for him to provide for information (even publishing testimonials) about these groups so that someone considering using such a group can make an informed decision? From the sounds of it, these groups seem to be rather slim on the details (other than price) when it comes to communicating with potential entrepreneurs. If these businesses are operating on the premise that they are going to somehow 'hide' what happens inside so that no one can know the inner workings until they pay the entrance fee, then they already have a failing business model.

Did you even read some of the personal stories? The one about paying $18k just to pitch to a room lacking all of the 'big names' that are touted out when it's time to convince you to pay the fee really irks me. If that is even true, how can someone even justify this kind of behavior?
I don't think that is what the OP is saying, but maybe I misunderstood too.

It's kind of like a forum where at the end somebody writes an article describing the pertinent information in the thread. It's an interesting suggestion - not sure what the practicalities are, but you know those forum threads where entry #1 is a question ("How do I do X in Y"), #2-5 are requests for clarification, #6 is an answer, #7 points out the answer is wrong, #8 is another answer, #9 is a caveat on the answer, #10-#12 are ofshoots about whether #6 is wrong, #13-#15 are about somebody's avatar, and so on.

So I think the OP is postulating an "article" that says "In order to do X in Y, and as long as #9, then #8." where this "article" was caused by the forum thread.
My favorite feature:

Forget daily charging, two standard AAA batteries (included)
will power WikiReader for about 12 months of normal usage.
Or put in those unused rechargeable batteries lying around
in the house. Those will work, too.

Sure, you can get an iPod touch or some smart device du jour, but that defeats the point. I'm sure reading text on that crisp b&w screen is far easier and with less distractions than on an iPod. But this is something you can throw in your bag just to have, or give to your niece or nephew or create a homebrew community around. Maybe its the nostalgia talking, but I have a fondness of these 'one use' devices that have just as much computing power as you need, don't need a wireless connection and don't need an power umbilical chord nightly.

If I didn't have a Kindle, I'd consider playing with one.
That's what came to mind for me as well, though I've never heard the term "dogfooding" before, just "eating our own dogfood" or something along those lines.
Exit Strategies for Angel Investors - Video in full 720p High Def
Wow, how many hands is that? That's really cool.

I suppose you could possibly control for play style, thinks like what Poker Tracker tracks. VPIP, etc., and of course buy-ins if you do some technomagic to figure them out. (I'm assuming someone who short stacks all the time plays differently than a normal player who just lost half their stack.) Not sure how good your findings would be though.
Love the spots: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVnCZI9h46Y&feature=playe...
I think you're demonstrating part of one of the exact systems of repression that he's talking about, perhaps without knowing it.

From another one of his posts:

"There's some sort of misplaced humility that is injected into us by our educational system. Or maybe it is some sort social stigma attached to the braggart or overacheiver. "

Having experienced a lot of the misplaced humility injected by the educational system, I've been all too happy (and dramatically better off) the more of it I am able to get rid of.
Is there any guarantee on the accuracy of this information? I've run into wrong technical info numerous times, even on datasheets themselves.

Is this info scraped from datasheets or is it just entered into the database by hand?
Does he?

The author says:

"I realised the main problem was that she just didn’t understand why the little distractions matter."

He realized. He didn't ask her. She didn't say, "I just don't get this flow thing." And he admits he was being a jerk. Maybe the main problem wasn't that she didn't understand flow. Maybe the real problem is that he was being a jerk.

I'm not saying it's one or the other. I'm saying we don't know. Even though we don't know, the author wants to assume that non-geeks just don't understand flow unless it's explain to them, even though it's a common phenomenon in all fields as the author alludes to by giving not one, but two analogies.
This would be pretty awesome if the screen were bigger, according to me.
"However even if Facebook's traffic were half of Twitter's"

Huh?
There's working and there's working. Doubt many people here will stop hacking the day they receive their first pension check. It would be interesting to see this research for groups that can't work without a job (eg. doctors) and people who can (eg. writers).
Everyone who is very deep in a single area with jargon and fads has a hard time sorting out what is a reasonable level of knowledge to expect.

In this sense, marketers & programmers are kin.
Ask HN:  Why do web frameworks always use database?
I'm designing an information-heavy web site (static content, no user content), and have been wondering the best way to do it. Drupal, django, RoR all get the information through a database. It seems to me like this has a number of problems:

* All those database lookups are going to be slow

* All your data is locked up in a binary file

* How do you update your site? It doesn't seem like you can easily merge two databases, or update just the change deltas.

Instead, if all the content lives in separate files with other files telling how to put it together, then you can use a compiler (of sorts) to generate the site as a bunch of static pages for the site. The advantages would seem to be:

* Fast to serve content

* Easy to redesign (edit files, re-run `make` on the static pages)

* Easy to update the server: cvs update -d -P; make

* If there is user content, CGI could add files (assuming availability of locking). Then a backup would be as simple as `cvs commit`.

* Rolling back after an update gone bad would be easy.

The drawbacks seem to be minimal:

* Requires extra disk space (cheap)

* CPU-intensive to change site layout (infrequent)

* CPU-intensive to add content (presumably rarer than reading content, which is fast)

So am I missing something? Why are databases so popular, given that they seem to be slower, and harder to update/backup?

[Edit: slightly better formatting]
Perhaps Chris (physcab) can clear up some of these issues for us?
this illustrates the biggest problem with the culture in the USA today. people are too god damn sensitive. people "get offended" by something as stupid as a twitter post. twitter, good god! what is next???
Which is only a true improvement if the other 19,980 readers necessarily contribute to ... whatever it is you're shooting for.

To quote the article:
You only get one chance to make a first impression; why have it be “junk”? Once that’s associated with your name or project, it’s tough to scrape off.
Actually, the keyboard shortcuts do work; I'm pretty comfortable saying that since I use the OS everyday. Also, your suspicions are wrong - every native application implements these shortcut keys.

Don't take this the wrong way, but Windows skills don't translate to other platforms. OS X will feel different, weird and limited if you're not familiar with it as it doesn't do things the way you're used to.

To be honest, I rarely use most of these shortcut keys because I define my own.

A basic example is that it's two keys to start a VPN session on my machine as that's something I do frequently.

A more complicated one is as at the moment I'm doing work on a site that includes screenshots of itself, I have a shortcut key defined that takes a series of screen grabs from different pages in Safari at the appropriate size, converts them to PNG and sticks them in the appropriate folder. Huge time saver.

In short, it seems to me OS X can do anything with a keyboard shortcut that you'd like it to.
Doesn't Google do the same thing, at least with a lot of its smaller acquisitions? Job #1 is rewriting the thing with Google's usual set of tools?

(Not to suggest that Google doing it makes it right or wrong.)
Wow, this reads less like freemium and more that they're using enterprise customers to bludgeon innovation out of the market. This new pricing is a pretty big step function, $10 for 10 users, $1,200 for 11 users.

While I like JIRA and have recommended it to many clients, this move is not just to feed the future sales funnel, but attempt to raze competition. Makes me sad for the cool startups (i.e. not Atlassian or Fog Creek) in this area.