skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Great Teams Can Do Anything versus Great Surfers Need Great Waves.

I always felt as though the discussion was missing something -- and I think that this is it. Competition is different from most startups' vision of success. Growing to compete with the titans of your industry is always harder, so maybe you do need to ride a wave to do it.

I'll be the methods are the same, at least at the start:

make something people want

That's what facebook did, and they've now got some pretty cool infrastructure running in-house.

I wouldn't say -- particularly after reading that article, yikes -- that anyone is really in a position to compete directly with google via frontal assault.

But if you really want to take on Google instead of be bought by them, the starting point is probably the same as it would be for an upstart in manufacturing back in the day: make something people want, a killer product; become the leader in that product, that thing, and you'll probably be more competitive than when you started, even if you don't have the economies of scale of your competition.

Google does move really fast, and their moat is massive.

I personally have neither the desire nor the ability to pole-vault that moat. Still, the trend against them is the iron-clad rule that small teams are always more productive than large teams (they manage it incredibly well, still -- somewhere, somehow, this is a drag on them), small organizations can move faster than big ones, etc.

Small organizations will be able to make things people want, the first step towards competitiveness. And as for infrastructure advantage the trend is in their favor:

cloud-on-demand; or, DIY big storage (backblaze guys)
crawling-on-demand (8legs et al)
pbx-on-demand (twilio etc)
... lots more ...

That ecosystem empowers tiny companies to do a lot more before they have to think about in-housing difficult infrastructure -- possibly, enough to fund it!

( This is all just a thought exercise; I don't know why someone would want to wade the moat and take down google as opposed to sell to them. There are more pleasant things to do with your life. )
And Verizon has the best network.
I"m guessing you likely won't get any suggestions and that this is one of those cases where, if someone wants to act on it, this might be a good business idea because the solution probably doesn't already exist.
A Big Week for the Mobile Web
Most screenshots here are from first pages. Most good looking sites have distinctively looking first pages and much cleaner internal pages with more text, less clutter and unrelated images. Therefore it might be biased.
Pay for What You Get: Putting Performance-based Contracting to the Test
I was thinking about starting a site like this (perhaps based on this source code). The only issue I thought of was that people would just have to accept that I was going to be the dictator in what goes in and what doesn't. With topics like politics that can cause a problem and also if I don't know enough about a given topic (say local US politics) to know if it's a recycled story or not.

I still might do this though so if anybody wants to help out or has any ideas please chime in.
Man, the narrator seems really interested.
what use are generic and meta programming without a sane range of 'regular' programming capabilities?

C++ contains C. How can it not contain a sane range of 'regular' programming capabilities?

(Of course in this context, 'regular programming capabilities' does not refer to web apps so let's just avoid that whole argument and take for granted that C is a useful language.)

This is a great instance of two (maybe 3) arguments against C++ canceling each other out: On the one hand, C++ sucks because it's wed to C and inherits all it's legacy warts. Anyway, C is a better C++ because it's simpler. And yet, as you claim, C++ offer's no useful core of functionality on which layer all the generic templately goodness.
I used OS X for about 7 years, but finally decided to give up on the Apple Tax. I bought the first refurbished laptop that met my specs (cheap, lots of ram) and installed Mandriva (as I'd read that it would enable me to use my Windows Mobile phone as my network connection).

I hadn't used Mandriva for many years (although I'd used Fedora, CentOS, Suse, Ubuntu in those years). I've been very impressed by Mandriva laptop in the last 3 months or so.

And to buy an Apple laptop with the same screen size and ram would have cost as much as 6 of these el cheapo laptops.

I can't think of anything I've missed from my powerbook in the last few months. And I could always install OS X inside a VM if I really needed it.

Can't see myself ever going back to Apple now (although I've still got 4 macs around the house, it's just that I don't use them any more).
Confessions of a Gartner Analyst at Symposium
Average Credit Score By Email Domain
So is this how "appeal to authority" works in language pissing contests? The "authority" is money? "I make money using this language so blah blah blah QED."
Then in this case I think the discussion has become one where we use the same term to refer to different things: I've always thought of SEO as "use meta tags, use headlines, use short URLs, etc" - pure optimization of existing contact to help engines better parse your contact.

I'd label what you are referring to as more of online marketing to build a site/brand's presence and reputation, which is something that then influences a search engine ranking.
On the whole there might be, but I'm not sure of that. In the current situation, yes, because there is a cost associated with having to support two kinds of driving styles.

I have both 'LHD' and 'RHD' cars and find that I can switch at will, but most people are uncomfortable in the 'wrong' kind of car because it messes up your overview when overtaking on 'b' roads (two laners).

If everybody would be driving the same kind of car on the same kind of road then that problem would go away.
On paper, it was always The Economist.
Just one language? Of course not that's selling yourself short. Surely, with great effort and many years, you can master many languages, and use them masterfully in concert like many do with C and Python. And if you can do that then you can master the many faces of C++. Maybe you just don't need to.
That depends on the area. I just got an iPhone and it has much better reception than my old Verizon phone at my parents.
Numbers Everyone Should Know (From Google Fellow Jeff Dean at LADIS09) [pdf]
And in my opinion the BBC World Service does the same thing on the radio.
Jeff Dean reveals that a Google web search touches 50+ separate services, 1000s machines.

Again, from Slide No. 24 from the LADIS09 talk:

Numbers Everyone Should Know

L1 cache reference 0.5 ns

Branch mispredict 5 ns

L2 cache reference 7 ns

Mutex lock/unlock 25 ns

Main memory reference 100 ns

Compress 1K bytes with Zippy 3,000 ns

Send 2K bytes over 1 Gbps network 20,000 ns

Read 1 MB sequentially from memory 250,000 ns

Round trip within same datacenter 500,000 ns

Disk seek 10,000,000 ns

Read 1 MB sequentially from disk 20,000,000 ns

Send packet CA->Netherlands->CA 150,000,000 ns
Quality = 1 / hype
The best reception in one fixed area is a landline.
You imply that Apple products have 0 quality, which is untrue.

People like to be told what to think. "Hype" exploits this for profit.
It reads a lot better than "Almost as good at Plug-n-Play as Windows 95" would have.
Fair points, I stand corrected. I didn't realize the manufacturing costs were so low.
The sad thing about this comment is I can't link to it directly anywhere, because it's only this funny right after you read the README.
Only partially. C with vectors, strings, references, maps and algorithms added would be "C++: The Good Parts"
The Economist and The New Yorker are both high-quality and put almost all of their content from the print magazines in their RSS feeds, and between the two of them it's nice getting a European / US and center-right / center-left perspective.

The biggest problem is that The Economist RSS feed is only updated once a week, so you've got this deluge of info. Still I find it my primary source for serious news. The New Yorker features some of the best investigative journalism and high-quality writing, but doesn't make an attempt to cover the full spectrum of ordinary news in any given week.
this is completely back of the envelope vaporware

Sure -- the linked-to paper is a position paper that basically just explains the problem they are trying to solve, not the specific details of their solution (the project is just beginning).

As for your particular example: presumably maximum throughput involves batching requests together, so the need to achieve that performance for small frames is reduced. You can also use Valient Load Balancing or similar techniques to avoid the need to achieve the necessary cross-sectional bandwidth with a single switch.

I think the latency number (5-10 microseconds) is actually more interesting: you can use batching and load balancing to improve throughput, but not latency. Given that 5-10 microseconds is typically significantly below the port-to-port forwarding time for a single switch, achieving that latency figure will require work at many different levels of the stack (network hardware, kernel <=> user space transitions, etc.)
Broadband Access, Yes, but Some Don’t Subscribe
Seems a lot like the way I develop in python. Why is this remarkable?
I keep track of The Economist online, but the problem is, it's not a general news service.

You don't find news in real-time (with the breaking bar, etc.) and it's more geared towards discovering the effect of a particular story rather than learning about the story itself for the first time.

e.g. You wouldn't find news about a shooting in a school in real-time on The Economist.. nor would you hear about foreign stories until they've had time to be analyzed and stripped down. It's pretty much The Economist paper edition in online form, and ergo it suffers much the same as traditional media on the front of news discovery.
What should the layperson read to learn more about the inner-workings of financial systems? Any good books?
http://books.nationalgeographic.com/map/map-day/index should be the link.
BTW, my fallback is global.NYTimes.com - it doesn't have as much "news" as CNN/BBC but it does update fairly quickly and with less Bull.
Analyzing Human Genomes With Hadoop
I agree. I get rid of that stuff, but only to conserve screen real estate.
Is there a permalink?
FitBit: Self-Tracking 2.0
This was pre-Photos app, which is what took off like a rocket and blew out their hosting and bandwidth costs. They were profitable before Photos.
Thumbs up to the New Yorker and the Economist. For daily news I find that the New York Times does an excellent job. You'll never see something like 'All-male college cracks down on cross-dressing' there (I pulled that from CNN's "latest news" just a second ago). The top-left column (to the left of the center image) contains the current top stories. This is always serious news. The Business, Science and Technology sections (among others) are always worth reading as well.

For offline news I really recommend The News Hour on PBS with Jim Lehrer. Excellent in depth coverage of important happenings worldwide. Each night they focus on 2-4 issues and speak on them for 10-20 minutes each. I learn a ton from that show. They gave that boy in a balloon story the other day about 10 seconds of coverage in the intro update before they moved on and started talking about real news.
Disconcerting that school shootings are now a recognized category of news. That was not true when I was growing up.

But I would argue that it's not a coincidence that the more serious news source is a weekly. News that happens suddenly seems more likely to be fluff. Plus if anything really important happened, friends would tell you.
Most of the time we're working somewhere between the legacy solutions and the ideal solutions. Only a few companies have devoted time to focusing on a specific technology to yield completely interesting tidbits.

What's most interesting is to think of this as an ideal solution to a class of problems and then think about how you might solve any one of those. For instance if access to large amounts of data is in essence "free" then the problem is RPC latency. It might take you a while to figure out where all the underlying bottlenecks are in your or the ideal RPC framework is.... That's really the point, to start thought and start investigation...
Foreign Companies Are a Key Part of U.S. Employment
Being told on what they can report, and it doesn't include this or anything else that they masters don't want the light of day on.
There's always a queue at Acme bread.
Control Multiple PCs With One Keyboard/Mouse
This article actually does a shockingly good job. I'm not an economist, but I understood everything that was happening there.

Speaking of economists, reading The Economist is a pretty good way to get your feet wet initially. It's a magazine, but its pretty in depth, but at the same time doesn't assume you're an expert on all parts of the system.
It's remarkable for two reasons:

a) Because Lisp is where this programming style was invented.

b) Because it is being compared to C and Java-like systems where this kind of development is largely impossible.
I normally recommend The Complete Guide to Capital Markets for Quantitative Professionals by Alex Kuznetsov (despite the title you don't have to be a mathmo to read it, anyone with a technical mindset should be fine).

I'd avoid relying upon articles like this one though, from my experience they're frequently wrong.

I've been a developer on the leading equities analytics software, was lead developer on the worlds largest credit derivative trade settlement platform, and now work in currency trading. I don't have a huge in-depth knowledge in these areas, but I know enough that I can tell most of these articles are written by people who are completely clueless.
I think it shows a rather interesting way of 'hacking the system' actually for a worldwide system- and getting away with it.
Am I the only one that finds "cute" things so often at the top of HN bothersome? This is basically the nerdy equivalent of lolcats.
What Powers YouTube
Really? Did photos set them under? Almost all FB photos are low resolution compared with the 10MP ones I throw on Flickr and get much less traffic in my estimate.

I believe you, but its amazing that bandwidth costs for photos could set them under for such a long time.
Ohh, and that is why the singularity doesn't exist.

Hm? How does that follow from your first statement?
Great. Next thing you know people will be judging my finances by my email address.
Facebook has more users than Flickr; its users upload more photos than Flickr's.

http://www.insidefacebook.com/2009/02/23/facebook-increases-...

They get more than twice the photo traffic Flickr does. It's also interesting, looking at that second graph and realizing that Facebook hasn't peaked yet. Did you know that according to Compete Facebook is visited nearly as much as Yahoo and Google? Or that it's got 250% the traffic of MySpace?
They also have a state map. I think we already do some judging of people based on place though.
I would never have the ambition of creating a tool for Lisp programmers, they say communication with target users is a key thing for success. I still want to solve real world problems and I coul use a lisp <i> programmer </> or two.
Really nice, I love how I stumbled in the spreadsheet case study, that's one of my use cases! Thank you so much for the link.
> I start to wonder if we ... are really the smart ones.

You could join in their game by building companies on VC and flipping them. I hear thats popular with the kids.

> Too bad I have morals.

With morals you will never be truly rich.
7 Free Tweakers For Faster Windows 7
There's a full-size version of the image on Flickr here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/adamcrowe/4002050596/sizes/o/
Original artwork: http://books.nationalgeographic.com/map/map-day/2008/10/sola...

Someone extracted the image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/adamcrowe/4002050596/

I wonder what the original credits are though.
I use dwm and experience the same benefits. One great advantage is that it's absolutely free.
grumble grumble Very, very funny situational humor derailed by my inability to fork a repository using Vista in under 45 minutes...
That's a very small slice of programs. Most systems software doesn't have a DBMS-like workload, e.g. network servers are I/O bound but not memory bound.
Adobe - Adobe Reader download
I had a subscription for a while but was really surprised by how slanted many of the stories seemed.

That doesn't mean their bias didn't match some pet bias of my own, it's just that I was expecting more factual analysis and less opinion than I perceived. It was a little disappointing because they're usually so favorably reviewed.

Relating this to some of the other comments, maybe the solution is to get closer to the sources of information (disintermediate) so we can make our own decisions instead of relying on opinion-makers to make up our minds for us.
What has been your experience with customizing Google News? Google will never have the fastest coverage of a breaking story like the balloon boy, because it is aggregating other people's content with a time lag, but I have tweaked my preferences a lot on Google News to where I can rely on it for a lot of international news and very little news that shows up on local TV. (I do have a Google News customization that shows me local news from my town, but not most of the silly stuff.)

I agree with the endorsements of The Economist (especially), BBC, and the New Yorker already posted, but what I like about Google News is the even broader reach of sources and stories.
The banks are borrowing short and lending long. There is a significant principle risk. If treasury yields spike up, the banks will take a bath.
I figured Tim Berners-Lee is in an excellent position to criticize not only his own work, but also the more general case of the domain name system.

And I agree, being the person who asked the question, and thank you for pointing out what he has said on the issue.
It's been awhile since my wife & I lived in Portland, but if it's still there try the Heathman Pub downtown. Really good pizzas!
Paper tigers certainly are frightening.
Optimal Dynamic Network Paths, why current wireless Internet frameworks fail
Not really. I find that almost all the "fluff" stories on HN are fluff depending on how you look at them.

You could view this as a lesson waiting to be learned, an experiment pending its results... If FOSS were marketed in this manner, who's to say it wouldn't have a more "human" feel?
Interesting. I'd imagine Comcast and BellSouth win because older, less tech-savvy people are more likely to use their ISP account, and credit scores correlate with age. AOL probably doesn't have the same benefit because you can sign up for a free @aol.com address, and kids are a large part of AOL's demographic.
Polaroid cameras to be produced once again
"Now, Droid's ad is taking cheap shots at Apple, and that's a bad start. If your ad campaign is based solely on dissing your competitor, chances are you don't have anything revolutionary."

I used to agree with this thinking, however, Apple's very successful marketing campaigns (Mac guy vs PC guy) are entirely based upon this.

Regarding some of the other things you brought up, I've been seeing some real [anecdotal] evidence of cracks in the iPhone love from people with it. This may be ATT's fault in some ways but I've been hearing some outright dissatisfaction, which has been surprising. These people (not all developers!) may not be ready to jump ship any time soon but I've been hearing a lot of "meh" coming from them, mostly unprompted by myself - just from hearing iPhone users talking to each other. There's some opportunity there for someone to compete seriously with Apple.
Then why does the python repl still "print" errors and return you to the prompt, instead of a debugger? The python shell has no concept of restarts: it prints errors as a side-effect and stops further processing. Lisps pause evaluation at the point of error and give you options to proceed.
Java development 2.0: Hello Google App Engine
Yet Some More Excellent JavaScript Libraries And Tools
ProBlogger gives Apture some love. You should too.
Someone tell the poor fella about bootstrapping compilers and T-diagrams.
Try the English version of Al Jazeera - http://english.aljazeera.net
I'm sure it won't be your primary source but it's usually worth a look.
The value of knowledge and what we should learn
RkTaggy - example Google Wave robot
Framework Comparison (Benchmark)
Who ignites Google's inspiration for infrastructure innovation? This man certainly should be Urs Hoelzle. All the star work, done by Jeff Dean and other at Google, is from his thoughtful planning ...
How blocks are implemented (in Clang/LLVM)
I'll believe it when I see it...

Though after owning a HTC Hero for four days (had 2 both headphone jacks broke) I liked you could customize the device (though took hours to do so), multiple screens with widgets (Twitter, Facebook, Mail, Pandora & last.fm all controlled via widgets on phone's desktop) and the ability to run background apps, which allowed for real time updates of widgets mentioned.

Ultimately I returned both Hero's cause of issue with headphone jack and the thing ran so slow; booted up even slower. If this Droid fixes those issues I might take back iPhone (30 day trial now).
Systemtap has an open files tap which has similar advantages over lsof FYI.
Consistently excellent posts from a serial-entrepreneur-turned-VC who gives sound practical advice for early-stage companies weighing a broad variety of company strategies and funding options (not just VC). Highly informative for founders.
I think you miss the author's point. 80's Starbuck (and Apollo for much the same reasons) is the kind vapid empty character you end up with in male oriented sci-fi. The character is a fun placeholder for the id and ego of young males. He's a proxy for them in that fictional universe. A universe that just happens to be populated with thinking machines, cool looking star fighters, laser blasters, alien planets and giant flagships the size of a city.

Starbuck is the eyes and hands of the juvenile male that desperately wants that kind of kinetic adventure. Being an incomplete and uninteresting character is the important part, it makes the character more accessible and adaptable to the myriad of young male fantasies. In general, any kind of generic archetype is supposed to be available only a virtual "selection of shoes" that the viewer/reader can look at, best identify with, and slip on for the duration of the fantasy.

Densely fleshed out character profiles with tangled relationships are not (generally) the kind of sci-fi boys are terribly interested in. Especially when you can have, more or less, the exact same story in any particular setting, sci-fi or not. That's what the turn off of the kind of relationship drama/sci-fi the author is talking about is. The setting (sci-fi) is immaterial to the actual story.

That being said, the better sci-fi out there is chock full of relationship drama. But when it's well crafted, it's inseparable from setting because the drama is a result of the setting, not just stage dressing. The recent Battlestar Galactica series is large inseparable from setting and that's what made it so appealing. That, and it struck a decent balance with "OMG That's AWESOME" space battles.
No, this is how refutations to "he doesn't know anything" work.
Gnote.
I use os x as a desktop, but use ubuntu in a vm as macports is ghetto.
In fact, as I've written here before, Android is a lot like Microsoft's Windows OS. It was a copy of Apple's operating system in many ways, but it was open and it could run on many devices.

what a savage nonsense..
Rails_on_pg: PostgreSQL views, functions, triggers, FKs for rails migrations