skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's why it's cheaper than equivalent places, but my comparison was more with where the wealthy choose to live. In other words, if you had tons of money, would you choose to live in the middle of Indiana? I wouldn't. No mountains.
I could just as easily make the same point about newspapers, radio, television, email, pamphlets, letters, and any other form of communication.

Talking about action is not the same thing as action, but it often precipitates or supports action.
Mind if I ask how you got the data? Was it just screen scraping of the Metra site or do they actually have an API?
I tried to run photos from google street view tokyo through insight3d but they weren't high rez enough http://insight3d.sourceforge.net/
My personal favorite:

Why I (don't|switched)+ (use|to)+ X
Here is the video of this presentation. Excellent, actually. http://carsonified.com/blog/web-apps/now-is-the-time-to-cash...
Forget to read the rest of the paragraph?

"In fact, according to its sensors, peer-to-peer traffic still accounts for about 18 percent of all traffic. (That’s by looking at packets — by protocol, P2P fell to less than one percent of traffic, but file sharing applications mask themselves in order to evade technical blocks.)"

The graph is useless, but what is presented is that the traffic dropped from 40% (per-packet detection) of internet traffic to 18% (per-packet detection) of internet traffic. This actually highlights the fact that advancing techniques of masking traffic are either working exceedingly well or are not of importance with regards to the use of P2P software.
This looks fantastic. This could actually work well with a project I've had floating around in my head for a while.... I better get going on it!
I've been wondering for a while why we don't see more often systems with a huge amount of RAM and asynchronous persistent updates, with a more, how should I put it, computer science-ish architecture inside. MVC works ok, but does it really mean we _have_ to use it always? Is it so hard to make system with a TeraByte of RAM? Why even use memcache? Why not make a clear decision that stuff like user statuses will never even see the inside of a hard disk and make use of the simplification it brings? Is there a clear reason, or simply it's not fashionable?
Communication is hard. Neither voicemail nor E-Mail made it much easier. Nor will Wave. So far, so obvious.

What I don’t get is this author’s hatred for conference calls. I only experienced them as a very focused thing. Sort of like a meeting. Neither any more or less annoying. If you know what you want to do and what you can accomplish not really annoying.

Also: Telephone’s not dead and still useful, especially for time critical stuff. If you need something right now writing an E-Mail won’t help. Neither will Wave.
Ask HN: Advice on picking up the phone and selling my product.
I work in a small three person startup as the CTO/sole developer. We recently hired someone to take care of the marketing and sadly I have absolutely zero faith in their abilities or approach. It's come to the point where they've just out right said that me having a say in the marketing is making us lose focus. I'd let them go if I could, but the long story is they are a friend of the CEO who doesn't have the heart to just tell them what to do.

The CEO is away for two weeks during which time the marketing manager had a telesales person come in for two days last week. They prepared nothing for them, in terms of core message, goals etc. I had to actually cue this person and tell them what their message should be and how they should try presenting it. I can't describe how frustrated I've felt since then. Every moment they are working on the marketing feels like another moment the business feels like it's slipping away into nothingness.

So, I'm going to pick up the phone myself with the sole aim of getting meetings in-front of potential customers. We sent out a letting introducing ourselves to a list of potential clients and I'm going to follows those up myself. Problem is I've only done calling like this once and it felt like the most stressful thing I've ever done. The anxiousness and the fear of rejection.

My current thinking is I'll just be honest and say "We're trying to get the thoughts and opinions of people like yourself. Would you be open to meeting with us for only 5 minutes?".

But what can I do to make the process easier/better? Are they any simple approaches that I can use to secure meetings? How do I get over this anxiousness and stress that I feel, even when I just start to dial a number?
Henceforth... "icing the kicker"
Seeing things: Researchers teach computers to recognize objects
Anyone know how to get the paper for this? It sounds really interesting. Is it really new?

Also I just finished reading "On Intelligence" by Hawkins. This really reminds me of how he thinks the brain works: looking at things in a sequence and predicting what comes next.
The counterpart is that they killed the personal licenses, but $10 for that kind of software is very cheap anyway.
I agree. "Geek" has become, to me, anyway, a synonym for "enthusiast". One can be a computer geek, or a business geek, or an artisan bread geek. One characteristic trait of any kind of geekdom is using jargon with an inappropriate audience.

You'll have to pardon me, I've got a batard that needs to proof.
Apple owns up to odd—but serious—Snow Leopard data-loss bug
Ask HN: User/lead acquisition for young singles?
How would you go about reaching out to young singles in a single city?
I've looked at facebook, but the CPC rates seem really high (~$0.50 cents).
Initially we want to reach people in Seattle
You're smarter than this site looks. Good luck.

Allow anonymous poll response but keep separate results tables for anon / logged in / everyone.

How are the follow-up steps created? If it's just some googly thing it won't be that compelling.

Homepage is extremely cluttered in a bad way for first-timers; this isn't always a big deal but it's good to be aware of.

Consider organizing it s.t. eg Olympia Snowe could have an official "polls" channel for polling her constituents; impact of poll results is more credible that way.

Have a "clone this poll" feature and follow-up / "poll response"; if some user dislikes a poll's phrasing or options they ought to be easily able to clone a poll and tweak it....keeping around that metadata so that people taking either poll can see other related polls. Similarly with response polls -- some way to post a counter-poll. Good for user engagement.

Settle on if your sideboxes have rounded or square corners plz.
A version of this idea where the paper is printed at home: http://www.niemanlab.org/2009/03/back-to-the-future-medianew...
i second the comment about allow anonymous responses.
Kudos to Jason Calacanis.

I'll be spreading the world through my channels.
All the more heartbreaking that it was forced to don the hideous mantel of the Win32 API (itself further scarred from numerous assaults such as C2 compliance!)
The reason bloggers give their posts these kinds of titles is because they get more readers. I don't like doing this on my blog, but on the other hand it really sucks when you spend eight hours writing something and it only gets twenty readers and no comments. (When you could get 20,000 reads by saying the same thing but with a more provocative title.)
And all this time I thought The Jesus Lizard was just a band!
A Simple Survival Guide for your Inner Child
He didn't say "I couldn't live here", he said "I would die if I had to live here!" which I don't think can be considered a neutral statement.

Regarding the squirming, He'd likely be better off by apologizing for making a stupid statement.
I just realized that I have the hand histories for all cash No Limit hands played on PokerStars from Dec 1, 2007 to Mar 12, 2008. I've got all the tools built to do the analysis, so I can pick apart the results from the lower and higher stakes as well. Any recommendations on how to do it?

Not PTBB/100, just BB/100. PokerTracker couldn't handle all the data.
Murray Gell-Mann talks about MIT
not a scot, and not from the area, but still interested!
OnStartups Answers, A Stack Overflow Clone for Startups
I don't buy from Shell (Myanmar) or from Nestle (baby-milk) ... I don't know about the CIA. Sometimes I don't have a choice, I'm not militant about it - also I can't be as ethical as I'd like with my shopping as we're poor; but money talks.
But seriously, wow. That is bad advice.
Mark your calendars for Google I/O 2010
I have to say this part of the passage made me laugh out loud, it's funny and captures what it probably sounds like to non-techies...
Except for Clover...the one I care about.
> Releasing means showing it to the world.

It does if you're Apple, but it doesn't if you're me. You tell me how I can get the entire world to check out my little startup (http://shoptalkapp.com ;) ) and then I'll take your advice and polish the heck out of it before I release it.

This article applies very well to large companies who get lots of publicity. They need to be careful not to release junk, because everyone is watching them. For startups like mine, releasing means trying to show it to the world, but actually only showing it to a small group of people.
In the past people chuntered under their breath .. now they tweet: difference to political process, none.
Sure, if you're Apple and you make expensive hardware, you don't want your initial release to suck. It's just too hard to make changes after the fact. Software, on the other hand, is cheap to produce. You can afford to release early and often, because releasing fixes and improving features is quite doable.
If you release late and rarely, how are you going to improve your application? How are you going to know what users want? How are you going to know if your idea is headed in the right direction? Simple: you won't. You'll spend all your time, effort, and money building the wrong thing. At best you'll get a ton of users for a few weeks when you launch, and that'll be that.
I wonder how IBM keep inventing all these cool semiconductor stuff, and yet on the business side they cannot do anything other than be consultants or continue serving their legacy customers. Where are those huge dense memories and hard drives they have been talking about for years now?
Any good erlang communities?
or is there a big community here?
Its not an argument I've ever really understood.

If we're applying the argument to Perl, then sure.. I get it. With Perl, it's more a question of syntax. By supporting so many ways to accomplish the same thing, it can be very unwieldy when you have many programmers all exercising all of those options.

It's not a question of dynamic in that case. It's a question of a (in my opinion) fundamental shortcoming in the language.

However, languages like Python or Ruby both seem pretty well suited for large scale development. We've seen large scale projects written in both, and it works just fine.

So no, I don't agree with the fundamental premise that dynamic languages are bad for 'big' projects. If by 'big' we mean memory/processor intensive... well lets have THAT debate instead.
I love this - people are waking up and challenging the old guard which at least to me seems to be motivated by profit at any cost. We see this with corporations, government, and even web businesses at every level.

We have spawned a new generation of idealism where profit is a side effect of actually giving a shit about our customers. What a concept.
Believe me, they're getting more money by selling patent licenses to all sides in each of those market segments than they would trying to compete in the market.
I'm certainly guilty of "speaking techie" at times, even though I try not to.

The hardest part of not doing it is that I don't mind if other people speak in the jargon of their profession, since I'm always interested in learning more about anything, and I'd love to know wtf they're talking about.

Most people don't think like that, sadly.
If only he clicked while pushing the apple/command key down!
The 'old' guard in VC land definitely isn't in on it, I see it more as a bunch of highway robbers calling themselves VCs, making money of people that are somehow desperate.
Is "Because I'd never seen it and I found it interesting" an answer you'd accept? (I'm not the one who posted it btw)
I get the impression that public waves were a quick hack that Google created to give new users someone to interact with while the network is new & small. (If you just got onboard, it's likely that you only have one friend, and that could get boring very quickly. Furthermore, enabling mass public interaction would give theme some stress situations to test how their infrastructure scales, and how their GWT client scales in the browser.) The strange fake contact that one has to add as a wave participant is one indicator. Another is the fact that with:public is undocumented.

Once the service is completely open, it's unlikely that this hack will be needed any longer. I wouldn't be surprised to see the public@a.gwave.com user retired after a while, anyway.
The Lions book. http://www.amazon.com/Lions-Commentary-Unix-John/dp/15739801...
See also: http://searchyc.com/dyson?sort=by_date
Um...yeah. Not that I expect anything but pablum on business (let alone basic science) from BusinessWeek, but comparing direct adiabatic air conditioning cooling (direct air temperature change) to evaporative cooling (more air movement) is apples vs. oranges.

At "desk fan power levels", buffeting is a non-issue beyond a few fan-blade radii distances from the rotor.

Child-Safe "flexible" blades running off of de-torquing motors on non-burn-out electronic transmission feedback circuits have been around for 20+ years.

The key metric to examine is, across a variety of humidity gradients and temperatures, what the volumetric cooling efficiency is per watt of input power (i.e. delta-Temp/m^3/s/watt).

Unless it's MUCH better than a typical fan (unlikely), this product is just the Dyson name attached to an Coanda airfoil fed by a conventional ducted fan--most definitely not even worth $150 USD--let alone $300+.
You're making a marketing argument, not a technical one. Trying to build a new Photoshop competitor from scratch is probably a losing proposition for a variety of reasons, regardless of how you run the project or structure the code.

However, there are a large class of problems out there which do require a huge chunk of software if you want to address them in any useful way. No matter what you do to reduce coupling between modules there is a certain level of irreducible complexity. For those cases you need to do a lot of up-front design work or you're going to end up with a huge mess. And no, refactoring is not the solution here.
Well called. Every time I see a story like this (and there have been quite a few of them recently) I always think about how irrelevant the actual specific platform is... The same thing would (and likely did) happen just simply via blogs, wikipedia etc...

I just hope that eventually people stop being so excitable...
i extracted all of the station information by screen scraping the website, and then all of the per-station stop times and routes by writing some code to parse the pdf2html output from the tables in each of the pdf files.
Missing New Mogul?
I noticed NewMogul was down. If you are missing it, I have something similar (but slightly different) in alpha testing now. Ping me an email azeem@azhar.co.uk I'll send you an invite.
I prefer http://gopollgo.com/ It has a super clean UI and tons of real-time features that kick ass.
I spent several years writing drivers for NT and I don't know which part of the NT kernel you were looking at. The parts I saw were an utter mess lacking any sort of elegance whatsoever. If there were two ways to implement something, one simple and the other one contrived, you can bet your MCSD certificate NT will be using the latter.

The overall impression was that it was hacked together in the worst sense of the word. Like there were several teams developing it that did not communicate with each other. Pieces of the kernel are forced together rather than fit snugly by design. I cannot stress enough how mind-boggingly repulsive it was to work with it. And that's not even touching NDIS, the networking module, which can be used for scaring some serious shit out of young programmers.

If you put BSD or Linux code side by side with NT, look me in the eye and tell me that NT kernel is "the most beautiful piece of code you've seen", you will need to see a head doctor.
yeah. Myspace is the bottom of the tree. Facebook middle. ASW absurdly high end.
If it isn't obvious, convenience to customers or end users is what is more important than that of developers.having less hassle for users is far more important than having more freedom for developers. That is how it works in all other industries and that is how it is supposed to work logically based on mere # of devs VS # of users. In that perspective, I think App store is just Great! It does eliminate a lot of hassles for the end user.

I mean, how many articles have we read when a user complains about the App store. Isn't it always some developer that has issues with it?
Sorry, but huh? There are still people on this planet not using auto-complete when writing E-Mail? Auto-complete is not a feature, it’s a must. No need to defend against. Who the hell writes whole E-Mail adresses?
I don't think it's fair to rule out the possibility of a simple screw-up. I've been responsible for important web services and I took a lot of precautions, but I can't say it was inconceivable that something could have gone wrong causing major permanent data loss. There are so many ways in which failures can cascade in a complex system there can be no absolute guarantees.

Can anyone quantify how much address book data there was? As an outside guess, 1,000,000 customers times 1000 addresses times 300 bytes each is only 300 GB. They could have kept an emergency backup on rsync.net for $300 / month. I keep secondary, well-encrypted backups of things I particularly care about (not nearly 300 GB worth) there, as well as on a USB disk under my bed, in addition to the regular complete backups.
Just like boring pop musicians dying ?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=674502
The problem with Randi and people like Michael Shermer is that they are overly skeptical. I find these people to be pseudoskeptics similar to the other ones with false beliefs the pseudoscientists. Both of them spit out a bit of truth, but a lot of garbage, so I don't care about neither groups. The pseudoskeptics want to believe their own nonsense as much as the pseudoscientists believe theirs. That being said, there's a lot more pseudoscientists than pseudoskeptics... i think.
Its sounds like you already have a list of prospects, which is great. I'd take a day or two to determine if you can secure warm introductions from friends, acquaintances, advisors, etc into any of these target companies (LinkedIn is a stelar resource for finding these types of intros). If you can, then you should have a more receptive target which should help you gain some confidence in your own abilities prior to jumping right into the "cold calls".

Another technique that I've used with some success is to determine the target individual is within a company and try to find their preferred communication channel. For example, I've gotten some really great contacts by connecting with people first through Twitter or their blogs. I think this can sometimes cut through the noise of the 100 unsolicited calls they get in a day.

You may also want to try sorting your target list by those you think have the most strategic importance. Then, start calling from the bottom of that list (i.e. the folks who you believe have the least strategic importance) and work your way up. This will give you the opportunity to work out your pitch/confidence with some lower priority targets. I've seen some startups try to pitch their most important potential partners right out of the gate and have a bad experience because they haven't had a chance to refine their pitch yet.

As far as the message, being straight forward about what you want out of a meeting is definitely the way to go. Make sure that you also figure out what the benefit is for the potential target. For example, can you offer them some discount or free trial of your product in exchange for some feedback at this early stage. The actual benefit you can provide to them will obviously vary greatly depending on the type of product you are selling and the type of company you are selling to.

Hope this is helpful- good luck!
Yeah, after hacking with perl for a while, i got interested in how it worked under the hood, and had some trouble following.

Check out the regex compilation module:
http://cpansearch.perl.org/src/GBARR/perl5.005_03/regcomp.c

And execution:
http://cpansearch.perl.org/src/GBARR/perl5.005_03/regexec.c
Easier? Well, just do it and get over the first few rejections. Things I kept in mind to make me feel better when I started in sales engineering are:-
a) every "no" gets you closer to your next "yes"
b) some customers are out there waiting for someone to come along and solve the problem you application solves
c) Expect low conversion rates, e.g. of 100 calls you make less than 10 may accept a short meeting.

To make it better,
a) prepare an elevator pitch to get you started
b) make sure you have quality leads - e.g. if your customer is the marketing manager, don't pitch to HR or the secretary - make sure you have the right telephone numbers
c) be relevant.
d) You are less likely to get an audience when you get introduced through a "friend" so use social networking sites. LinkedIn was particularly useful

Good luck
Sadly, they require a host with J2EE, since it is written using JSP.

It doesn't matter if you have a company, but for a hobby project that kind of kills it.
So you mean all these versions of OS X I bought is just Apple doling out software it already had in the can?
Prize game – win a license for the Handy Backup Professional
Any recommendations for good objective-C code?
Yeah, I came in here to say that in my world "dogfooding" means using your own application during development. To eat your own dog food.
What ShoutEm learned at Seedcamp
Dear Internet, please make a tool to help me remember useful HN threads
Is there a tool to help discover and remember useful HN threads? All HN threads are useful, but some go off the scale. Like this recent thread asking "What source code is worth studying?"

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=879101

Bookmarks are not the complete solution, because I'd like to discover stuff I've missed, too.

If such a site does not already exist, and until it does, how about if we start a tag on delicious.com for this purpose? Maybe just hackernews, with the useful being implied. Or can anyone suggest a better tag, or better interim solution?
I'd vote it down if I could, it's far too fluffy and short for my tastes. The only reason I could think of using MyISAM is if you need features that only it supports, like compression, MRG_MyISAM tables, or full text search.

Having said that, the newer InnoDB plugins support compression, with partitioning you don't need MRG_MyISAM, and you can use something like Sphinx for full text searching, which integrates nicely into MySQL.
Twitter was forced to morph an architecture built to solve a different problem into a working solution.

BINGO! Twitter's initial implementation was a "my first blog" in Rails -- when you're starting from an impedance mismatch that massive, and you have to rearchitect it live, jesus.
In Mammals, a Complex Journey to the Middle Ear
I'm waiting to see what next big advancement in web development the angled beta graphic changes into.
Oracle OpenWorld - Pre-Show Preparations With The F5 Team
Changing Horses in the Cloud
Right, but the article seems to describe a culture that uses dogfooding to an extreme and rewriting/replacing software systems of acquired companies to use MS technologies.
Have you tried www.seattlechamber.com/ypn ?
Think about NGOs, clubs, and public/private college mailing lists...