skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Doesn't need to be a site, just a service running on a machine. How can you ensure that machine is always connected to the Interjob? Well,
I am planning to go for it next summer. Are you?
The reality of being a woman online
To some degrees, U.S. administrations after 9/11 act closer to administrations in India and China on issues on governance and immigrations. Besides, when a person grew up in an environment that stresses making money fast and first, ignoring and exploiting government corruptions, those advantages of U.S. democracy doesn't matter much to them.

Most of the Chinese and Indians "brains" in U.S are from families with privileges. Although paychecks are fatter in U.S for them, they have better social networks/relationships inherited from parents to exploit opportunities in booming China and India economies.

Globalization has been enabling higher growth in GDP in India/China than U.S. Let's imagine that you are in an economy that grows at 10% per year and you are born in the class with privileges, power and social network. It means the chance to double your assets in 3 to 5 years is very possible as long as you know whom to make deals.
Why not? India is obviously growing, China is growing, while US.. You know.
Am I the only person who mentally prepends "pre-" when I hear the name of this company?
This looks great - perfect for the site that doesn't need 1-minute monitoring. Montastic has been ok for this purpose but I'm happy to try something else.

My feature request - 140-character SMS messages when you're down.
This is an answer to Russian gas shortage year ago. =)
I have been using Server Density (which is also free for one host - and more comprehensive in what it does) but this is much easier.

Good stuff!
http://www.macresearch.org/
I think it's a reference to Qt which is pronounced "cutie."
Maybe debt firewalls (i.e. limited companies) should be two-way, i.e. if a limited compan doesn't have to pay its debts, nor do its debtors.

I don't see how anyone could disagree with this on fairness grounds. I'm not sure whether it would have good or bad economic effects.
Wow. That's really out of date. Trying to use that guide these days will do more harm than good.
Time to start selling shovels.
Future scale: ~10^6 to 10^7 machines, ~10^13 directories,
~10^18 bytes of storage, spread at 100s to 1000s of
locations around the world
That second link looks totally awesome; thanks!
It's a quick summary of her discontinued blog (1), and, even though it's obvious in hindsight, it was fresh when it was first published and these principles are still ignored by a lot of companies. Go read it for a more exhaustive read.

The blog was discontinued because of death threats proffered against her, I'm glad she's still preaching the same message :-).

1. Creating Passionate Users (http://headrush.typepad.com/ )
Thanks for the feedback. I just pushed a change which ups the limit to 10 monitorings per email address. I'm a bit hesitant to having no limit at all due to the ease of abuse. After all, I do have to pay for the BW out of my own pocket.
The web page puts more emphasis on a different paradigm than the programming language, in fact it says you can use a version of Wt with Java, Ruby or Clojure.
My Tools of the Trade – 2009
The statistic of people moving into senior management on moving 'home' suggests that companies in developing economies feel that they need American trained executives to compete with American companies.

So all this might mean is that middle managers in US companies are being automatically promoted into senior jobs in foreign companies because those companies feel insecure. This is great for the bank balance of those people but doesn't necessarily mean a great deal for the company.

It's also not a new phenomena - having a 'BtA' (Been to America) used to be almost a requirement for promotion in UK academia or medicine. It didn't lead to a huge amount of innovation in the NHS.
In light of the recent articles criticizing C++, it is actually nice to see a framework which uses C++ without being ugly or scary.
Perhaps Wt is a good example of people using a "Subset" of C++ to good effect.

The framework, code and the website itself look very nice. If I ever have to use C++ to develop web apps, I will definitely evaluate this framework.

+1
> you couldn’t just take those designs and build them in anywhere in the US.

This is the challenge of passive environmental design. Climate and topology make a huge difference in what works where. It's a built-in level of indirection: you can't take an effective design from Germany, and expect it to work well in Phoenix. You can take the design principles and (re)discover new pattens, but that's an order of magnitude more difficult.
Looks great, I love the simplicity. Although you chose an interesting color scheme.

How are you determining when a website is down?
What are you using to create the error message on the right?
What's your website running, if you dont mind me asking. Python? Ruby?

On a side note, your blog is just as beautiful as your app. Kudos.
The problem with push notifications and firewalls
I use Ubuntu here, but still, I can see a certain elegance in building everything from source.
They already do, at least whenever I hear business types say that X or Y should be really easy I always wonder if they're ever to be in hospital to get surgery if they're going to tell the surgeon as well what should be easy or hard.
The point is that there are fixed rules in Maths for what happens when you multiply 3x3 matrix by a 3x1 matrix and if this is even possible. Those should be enforced by the person writing the library's overloaded features not be left to the programmer to know which is the appropriate function to call.

Multiplying matrices is no more weird than multiplying a float by an int or a positive and negative number.
she received death threats for preaching how to create passionate users? that's....ironic.
Love it.

Minor suggestion - in the email, change the text in the email from "To unsubscribe from this service, go to:" to something like "To manage all your monitorings, or unsubscribe, go to:". It isn't clear this link does more, and I wouldn't have thought to click on it as it may unsubscribe me without confirmation (until i read your comment above about a link showing you a full listing).

From that listing page, would be nice to be able to add another service, or at least a link back to the homepage to add another.
Actually, as of now the site itself (HTTP) is not redundant. It could be by using DNS for failover to a slave host or some kind of heartbeat setup. The data is replicated, so the problem is just sending you to the right host when you type in http://wasitup.com in your browser.

The monitoring backend on the other hand is redundant (or as redundant as I feel is needed for a free service).
I was initially very hesitant about a female Starbuck, if only because he was my favorite character in the original. After a few episodes, I became a fan of the character and the acting.

The retelling of BSG required a big adjustment for fans who grew up watching the original series. You may disagree with some of their plot directions, and perhaps the ending, but unless you haven't grown up yet you have to admit the series as a whole was at least an A-, if not the best SF show ever.

It's like the recently revamped Dr Who: the companions are more empowered and involved, rather than being one dimensional plot tag alongs/eye candy.
I use Ubuntu on my web servers, and archlinux on my general purpose servers... Ubuntu is just so easy to get apache setup right for multi-hosting and general web app setups, the converse is that archlinux is surprisingly difficult to get apache working right (how I want, anyway) on. But that's mostly a function of apache being a pain, and the arch apache setup being largely 'whatever upstream distributes'.

Personally tho, I go with binary packages for the most part, I have no real need for compiling everything from source.

I did try to install gentoo once, it was annoying and difficult, the installer was hideously out of date compared to the things being installed, and the whole thing fell apart from dependancy problems long before I got a working desktop... And to think I went with a LFS setup a few years ago, and was happy with it for ages (about 2-3 years on my primary desktop).
the problem with offshore wind in Germany is that it has to be far away from the coast in deeper water. The local conditions (islands and the Wattenmeer) enforce this. Investment in offshore wind farms is under theseGerman conditions much higher and also the technical hurdles are much higher (wind, waves, corrosion, ...). These offshore wind farms are built for very rough conditions. Still several are under being built now. So the delay has technical reasons and also the investment is quite high.

But the new government has made clear that the investment in renewable energy will go on.

That the nuclear reactors may not phased out as soon as planned before, is a victory of the large energy companies, who want to make the most money out of their investment. Still they are at best seen as a transition technology.
Flagged. It's mostly gossip.
That could be a possible feature for paying customers. I'm not shelling out lots of money for a good international SMS broker before I know that it can break even.

For now you can use your mobile provider's Email-to-SMS gateway (if such are provided).
You make my resume look like a small shivering Chihuahua.
Copying and Plagiarism
I work in python at my day-to-day but I have to say that python is far more guilty of announcing a library that does X, web or no, than any other language.
Anecdotal evidence for sure, but a lot of my friends, especially those with kids are thinking about heading back. In the past they felt that they would be giving too much career-wise if they did so, but with that barrier going away all the other advantages of heading back become very tempting (family, lifestyle, culture, etc)
When you do make one, send another my way. I could so something like that around here.

Nothing like being woken up at 3am to two cats duking it out. Or having you garden ruined because the neighborhood cats like to poop there.

Very irritating.
Ask HN: Perfect budget PC for software developers
Its that time of the year. I need to buy a new PC for my programming needs. And the same questions pop up again, what is the perfect setup.

Trying to push it all into 500$, what would you suggest ?

Quad CPU / Dual ?
SSD for caching ?
SSD for system volume ?
Amount of RAM ?
etc'
How about moving to the edge in the center? Then he'll capture the whole side until someone else claims his place, rinse and repeat.
Shedding?
Thanks for pointing out that post; it leaves me with some egg on my face, but I'm glad to see yet more proof that he's a pretty awesome dude.
Spud, potato powered web server
Yes, and it does suck. "Every year millions of people who are greater than you get together in secret to discuss secret awesome things which you aren't good enough to know about. This has never been shared before now. These are the TED talks. Sponsored by BMW and REALLY SCREECHY LOUD MUSIC".
I wrote a similar tool for monitoring my own servers. Besides being "up", I find that it's important to track slow responses (>10 secs) and to differentiate between DNS problems and web server problems.

(I also find that it's useful to check for load, disk space, mysqld is responsive, etc. but that's would take away from the elegance and simplicity of this tool.)
I think it's fair to call it a reverse brain drain in that post-World-War-II the US has benefited from a steady stream of above-the-curve immigration. It's not a temporary thing that's switching gears -- it's been a constant ebb for the last 60 years that helped establish the US as the dominant world economy. When you remove that from the equation, there is something core to American society that goes with it.

The only real problem, however, with this essay, is that it doesn't compare to some historical baseline other than an anecdote. It's not possible just from reading this to tell how big of a change this really is.
> "The sad fact is that any woman with a sizable online following who posts any photo of herself is going to receive degrading and abusive responses, and anyone who is surprised by it is astonishingly disconnected from the reality of how women are treated, in public and in private, online and off, every single day."

so true. when i stop to think about it--and i rarely do because who has the time or emotional energy to combat so much bullshit--i feel immense frustration at the inequalities and insulting attitudes that i see, both first hand and against others. just because this is potentially "not a big deal" doesn't mean it isn't terrible and wrong. (it just means maybe it's better to be a good role model and not argue with everyone over small things.)

one thing that i find curious is that the notion of equality across genders, races and ethnicity is relatively new in developed countries, and is spotty at best. perhaps i should feel lucky to have the right to vote (first granted in New Zealand in 1893; international law via UN in 1948, which is about when my mother was born), to say nothing of the opportunity to make a career myself, voice opinions and not be physical intimidated. certainly i feel lucky to expect not to be beaten or raped (though i may still be accused of wanting or inciting it).

at any rate, i often marvel at how spotty and recent our cultural notion of equality is. we've only be living like this for a few generations!! i struggle myself to be mindful of others...will this become easier, broader and more wide-spread one day? how soon before a world-wise crisis reverts us to a more primitive state? is equality and respect across humanity a random blip of our species' existence?
Magnatune (http://magnatune.com) CC-licenses all of their music. It's free for non-commercial use. They also do royalty-free licenses for commercial use, as for example Braid which used some of their music.
It was given to the wrong group, it should have been given to a collaboration of people working toward a common goal.
I first read this headline as "The book that contains all books that do not contain themselves."
I close the socket of the connection after 5 seconds. That should identify problems with slow responses. In the notifications that are sent I differentiate between responses that are not 200 OK or matches your criteria, problems with getting to the server (DNS), and problems with parsing the response. Within these three categories I also give additional info (HTTP status code returned etc). Thanks for the feedback,
Canvas Planetarium
For certain domain of problems SQL is the 100 year language. You have to define tables and indexes but you don't get to chose how joins are performed - query optimizer knows about your high-level request to chose optimal execution strategy most of the time. It's a small leap from there (in historical terms) to make the indexes built automatically via profile-guided-optimization.

Similarly, Flex is the 100 year language for UI. It's almost entirely devoid of implementation details and you get to spend most of your time describing what you want to see. What Flex is for Flash, open OpenLaszlo is for HTML.
Great... I actually JUST got a popup from Firefox about this. This is why I don't use my old windows laptop for anything important.
Implemented both. Appreciate the suggestions. Gotta love one command deployment with fabric;-)
Really? I just read it and there's practically no gossip in it, just analysis (as superficial as you or anyone else may find it).
It's funny. All these abstractions build on top of each other to provide fault tolerant failover at google scale and we are coming full circle back to the file system metaphor.

Finally :-)
A/C can be done away with by using high-temp equipment.

http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2009/03/20/40C104FInTheData...
And when it gets cold, you can burn them for warmth.

Unfortunately, I realized this after renting my house to some freeloaders who burned my library of college books, encyclopedias, work books, car repair manuals, home remodeling books...

I was sick when I found out.
Hm, there are some interesting numbers in there.

"Map Reduce Usage at Google: 3.5m jobs/year averaging 488 machines each & taking ~8 min ...
Big Table Usage at Google: 500 clusters with largest having 70PB, 30+ GB/s I/O"

So to run 3.5 million jobs at 8 minutes each on 488 machines that means they would need at least 26,069 machines to complete those map reduce jobs in a year.

Similarly if you deduce that for their largest storage cluster they are using their previously described commodity hardware approach and at the moment the sweet spot for drives is at about 1TB with 1 or two drives per machine that is between 36,700 and 73,400 machines in their largest storage cluster. That seems like a lot.
It has always amazed me how in America we have this weird Puritanical streak that seems to be a huge double standard. People love sexually driven advertising and entertainment but if one individual is overtly sexual suddenly everyone puts on their funny Puritan hats and gets judgmental.
I'm trying it out. I love it so far.
Couple ideas for paid features:

- A chart showing uptime vs. downtime. I just like charts.
- Ability to display server details like host etc.
- Optional notifications via cell phone text
- Ability to auto-notify hosting service via email of the downtime.
Twitter's Assault on the English Language
This isn't a GMail feature. Most (but not all...) email servers allow this.
I was under the impression that some Southern States in the USA grows quite qiuckly. Is this true or not?
ORMs are a thing of the past
Not another library, but a solution to the problem you mention. Capture each command line, even one-offs, in scripts. Then later you can reuse that script without having to figure out the command line options again.

You could say this is just shifting the problem to a new place: you now have to relocate the old scripts you wrote. Well, that's a much easier problem.
Ack, I got this notice from Fx last night. Yikes!
Using Ripper - the s-expression based Ruby Parser that comes with Ruby 1.9
Man, that just hurts.

That should be a crime.
Someone has been way too busy with set theory lately.
Github has an apps platform
That is true for most programming related terms. I think Google trends ranks by the percentage within total queries from a country. If in India people use Google from every IT company but it is less widespread in all households than in the US, that alone explains this bias.
> I have not updated for each OS X release, but most things here are generic to any release since 10.2

When was that released ?

This is a specific instance of a more general problem though, my solution when searching for technical stuff is to append the current year to my query (and until march or so the previous year). That seems to take care of most of it.

Nothing worse than reading a whole 'how-to' only to realize near the end the thing is 4 years old.
Jeff Dean is well known as a superstar within Google, although not so much to the outside world. With the exception of PageRank he created or had a hand in almost all the technologies you've heard of as the major Google innovations.

I have a Googler friend (genius coder in his own right) who sometimes wondered if he wouldn't be more productive by just devoting his workday to ensuring that Jeff Dean was properly caffeinated.

I find this kind of fascinating because Jeff Dean's academic background was in compiler optimization research. Not the obvious choice to build infrastructure for a large website. But perhaps compiler people know how every nanosecond counts, and can see the network as just another high latency part of a big computation.
we picked up Dell Poweredge 840 boxes earlier this year for around $600. we're running 2.4ghz quad core xeons, 4gb of ram, and two 150gb seagate drives. I think the only thing I would change is maybe drop in a SSD or a 15k drive to make the system a bit more snappy.
This is a very neat idea, but the lack of support for latex, or any other way to create mathematical expressions is a bit of a letdown.
How to Prevent Page Titles from being Truncated in SERPs | TechJaws.com
DejaVu is gonna be hard to beat.
What “on-demand” media really means and why your cable company should be scared
Laptops: you can find plastic case Macbooks for $600 or so on craiglist. Generally, we're talking 2G RAM, no option to purchase additional 2 years of appleCare.

I would try to get one that's expandable to 4G RAM and was purchased new last year, or this year. If i were going to buy a used laptop, I would insist that the seller be the original buyer and give you a copy of their purchase receipt, so you know it's legit.
The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak. I am the clumsiest person this side of the Magellanic cloud. You should see me fumble with paint - you wouldn't want me to mess with electrics :-)
What is the actual likelihood of someone still happily running IE6 to install Chrome Frame?

When forced to deal with frontend stuff, I have wasted more hours of my life than I care to count at least trying to get basic rendering in IE6. While it probably won't get most people to change it, at least making them aware of the fact that their browser is ancient might wake SOME up.
The Medical Benefits of Carbon Monoxide
Vinyl has a lot going for it when compared to MP3, but the latter format is so more practical and has such a low marginal cost that very few people stick with the former. Don't get me wrong, I love physical books, but I imagine what it would be like if I had been able to read any book in the world in a device like the Kindle when I was a kid, and the idea is just mind-boggling.

I live in Brazil, where books are relatively expensive and libraries aren't that great, so I understand that YMMV.
The Jazelle extension requires paying money to access on how to set it up. Also as others have pointed out using hardware supported java prohibits a lot of dynamic optimizations.

ARM seem to be mostly concentrating on the ThumbEE environment now, which is much better documented.
Adobe, Skype, and almost every client software developer automatically and silently adds plugins to Firefox and other browsers. I recommend looking at your list of Firefox add-ons now (especially the plugins tab) and see how many of them were never specifically added to Firefox by you.

This is the kind of situation where the software vendor is damned if they do and damned if they don't. Mozilla simultaneously complains when they aren't getting the same treatment as IE, and when they do. People hate multi-page installation wizards that ask them to check all kinds of boxes; people hate when the software decides automatically what to do in order to avoid those pages of checkboxes.
IBM Blue Gene is the World's Fastest Supercomputer
Nice UI. Seems similar to pingdom.com, so you could check them out for feature ideas, etc.
At the same time, when economy of China/India has enough domestic demands to sustain itself, the need for U.S. trained managers will decline. For those middle managers, betting the growth of domestic markets and starting to learn the market from now on also plays a factor.
> Throwing java.lang.Exception if a condition is not meat in your clojure functions? Don't do this either!!!

What's the proper way of doing that in clojure ?
Too clever is not determined by some property of the code, but rather the audience who reads it.
You should qualify, "Type safety is vastly overrated -- today." There was a time when type safety was very valuable to the performance and functionality of programming. Computers are so fast now that the performance hit is almost negligible, but this wasn't always the case and dynamic languages were very very slow compared to their strictly typed brethren.

Even within the same language, strict typing and dynamic typing had big gaps in performance.
That's all well and good, but who made the first horizontal rule 'rainbow' GIF, hmm?