skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Right on. Happy to hire a more conventional developer/programmer but the PR exposure and endorsement of being YC funded is invaluable. YC funds hackers, so I am turning to the hacker community. I can always fallback to other roads, but I thought my idea would be appealing to this community. Selling tickets and music downloads as sourced straight from artists, now who's doing that? I've done the research and it has been on my mind for ages.
Am I the only one who's getting sick of the StackExchange sites? I like StackOverflow, but all of the StackExchange sites fall right into the uncanny valley for me.
I wonder how much of your resources will be bound long-term trying to keep up with ever-changing frontend code of the different shops and sites. It's something that keeps most of the teams doing javascript injecting browser plugins really busy.
Turns out a lot of people actually enjoy the process more than the outcome. It's like sex.
Oberon/0.

http://www-old.oberon.ethz.ch/WirthPubl/CBEAll.pdf

Did it for a stack-based VM, then x86 and IIRC SPIM Mips.
Or for that matter MongoDB?
-- I just have to say, many of my comments are getting downmodded, I am answering legitimate concerns to a legitimate posting. If someone has a deeper problem of more than just "I don't think this will work and I don't agree with what you're doing" kindly let me know.
Yes. Instant streaming (or high-quality, lossy compression) is more important than HD. HD is worthwhile on a subset of material (do you really need the simpsons in 1080p?) while lowering the hurdles for watching any video media is valuable for almost everything (TV, movies, etc.)

According to the intertrons, a total of $750 million was spent on blu-ray discs in 2008 in the US. Netflix's instant streaming service alone brings in at least a 10th of that revenue if not more, and the library is still relatively small. More importantly, streaming is growing much faster than blu-ray adoption, so it's easy to see where these trends are headed.
Probably, but he responded quite well. See Jim Fallows critique of his comments: http://jamesfallows.theatlantic.com/archives/2009/10/obamas_...
And still you initiate a meta-meta-discussion
Ho ho ho. Back in the day, people used to run httpd off of inetd. I was real smug back then when I replaced that at our site with NCSA httpd, which did indeed fork on demand. Think this was '93 or thenabouts.
No I mean, when the first version if gimp was created to copy photoshop was not a good idea. And actually is not natural at all to split an application into multiple windows. To just do the obvious (single window) was a better alternative even when they started :) but sometimes it's hard to follow your own ideas if you see that the absolute leader (photoshop) is doing something different.
Having to pay to pitch anyone is ridiculous. Why not VCs/angels have to pay to pitch us?

Bottom line is, if you pay to pitch an investor, you are are identifying yourself as a desperate, naive, uninformed person, and possibly greedy person (read on). You will be fleeced, some might say you deserve to be fleeced.

These "pay to pitch" scams work on the same kind of people as those Nigerian email scams (or other "get rich quick" scams). The reason both of them exist is because there are enough twits out there that click or pay or whatever. And, so, the rest have to hear about it and get spammed by it.
Yet another Dynamo/DHT. Now I've seen implementations in Java (Dynamo, Cassandra, Voldemort), Perl (Blekko) and now Erlang. I wonder if any of these has been used on >1000 node cluster? I haven't seen any mention of checksums (besides those in TCP) to ensure that switch/router would not corrupt data (including cluster states), like Amazon learned the hard way.

Of course, they don't support range scan efficiently either. A proper Bigtable implementation is much harder, I guess :)
The war in Afghanistan was a reaction on 9/11, an act to get a small group of people called Al-Qaeda - - attacking a whole country because of a group of people is a revenge act. The war on Iraq was based on false premises (weapons of mass destruction), was not with the support from U.N. Iraq ranks as the third in the world in oil supplies - - Iraq's oil is one of the first things that invasive army protected and one of the only things that will be protected in the future as the invasive army moves out.

One can say the US wanted to protect the "people" and it's classy, but there are other places that need a lot more help (like Congo, where over 5.4 million people have died in/because of war since 1998).
Ask HN: An ideea about a link checker
I've been thinking lately about building an application takes in an url and basically crawls that entire site.

It would be an easy way of finding problems with the a site (like 404, 500 ...etc).

I tried the webmaster tool from google - but I know I have a 404 link on my site , yet it didn't find it. I also tried some other sites that do crawl a website but they had a limit of 2-300 links and then it would stop. You would then have to buy an app that was a bit expensive.

I'm thinking a web app where you can point it at your site and just receive a report when it's done.

Would anyone need something like this ?
Would you please elaborate: which Thinkpad and dock models are those? I was not aware that there is such thing as dock with HDMI.
Not entirely sure what you're trying to say, but just because someone is unhappy doesn't make them unproductive - certainly and quite likely less productive - but not unproductive (and almost certainly productive enough to be worth more than their cost). While the Economist tries to point some of the blame on measurements on performance, I would make the argument that it's the wrong measures that are the problem. After all, churn/attrition obviously greatly affects productivity/performance as can happiness.

I suspect employers have and do get better at managing people as it's always the best ones who are able to (and often do try to) find work elsewhere in good times and bad. For the employers who don't change, they're left with the results of adverse selection.
"Subscriptions are just not effective when there are free (legal or illegal) alternatives to be had."

Sky would argue with that, the decline of old broadcast mediums has little to do subscriptions, most of the most successful web applications around use a saas subscription model, I dont see whats 20th century about it, at all.

beats the hell out of trying get people to click on adverts.
"The war in Afghanistan was a reaction on 9/11, an act to get a small group of people called Al-Qaeda - " who were sheltered by the Taliban, then the ruling government in Afghanistan.
i was at the nyc nosql conference where mongodb, couchdb and riak were all discussed by core contributors. google nyc nosql for more details and possibly slide links. i know slides, video are floating around somewhere.

anyway, mongodb and couchdb are more closely related to each other than they are to riak. a closer comparison to riak would be cassandra (also based off dynamo).

riak is based off the amazon dynamo paper and it is a pretty faithful adaptation at that. circular hashing, node chit chat protocol, eventual consistency. CAP theorem. uses n,w,r paradigm where n=number of replicas, w=number of replicas that must be available in cluster to write and r=number of replicas that must be available in cluster to read. so in this mechanism the balance of CAP is up to you, the programmer. disconnected writes written to two separate nodes due to a network flap are both returned to the client for conflict resolution. interestingly riak is written in erlang and uses rest heavily. because they do they were able to demo access libraries in virtually every language.

regarding mongo v couch:

mongo (written in c++) has sharding/replication and rebalancing (via addition to cluster) in production now. rebalancing via removal is on the drawing board. mongo also supports dynamic querying. mongo also supports bson (binary json). i also believe there is a 4MB max row limitation. multiple daemons for different functions. limited creature comforts like web gui, efforts underway to rectify.

couch is more complete in its restful implementation and general overall approach. i feel it is an easier setup and administration. one daemon pretty much handles everything i believe. couch is a never-delete database in that it always appends writes and internally versions them. this allows for very interesting replication topologies like master-master-master due to their unique versioning scheme. this will also lead to and "offline" couch version that you can run on your desktop. couch also has "fouton" which is their admin web gui.

the teams behind each of them are committed and talented.
I found these immensely useful a) PPK on JavaScript b)JavaScript the good parts c) JavaScript: the definitive guide.
Though i agree, "IT IS QUARTER TO EIGHT" is perfectly cromulent. But thats not a justified explanation. Reason:
5,450,000 results for "it is a quarter to" against 226,000 for "IT IS QUARTER TO EIGHT"!!! :)
They serve different purposes. Riak is a DHT (for key sharding) layer intended to run on top of different backends, just like Dynamo. CouchDB has an integrated storage engine. Riak doesn't support range queries (nature of DHT). I'm pretty sure CouchDB does, which is easy for a single node. CouchDB doesn't scale in the sense that it doesn't do any automatic sharding yet. It's quite possible to use CouchDB as a backend of Riak, though it implies crippling some interesting features in CouchDB.

Technically, I found CouchDB more interesting as it's more "different" from other approaches.
this is on the list of things I have wanted to do at some point.

I believe a wget -spider should help you find any 404's, but I wanted to have each link validated as well, and itd be nice to have as a simple web service
Google's engineers aren't getting their money's worth
Most of the fun with Derren Brown stems from wondering what is a real effect and what is just elaborate trickery. He's taken that to a new level by often explaining in detail how the manipulation works--but then the explanation itself might as well be a misdirection.
It is wrong to divide the numbers and get the average usage , you have picks of 20k request, what are you going to do then , you have to be prepared for the worst.
Douglas Hartree - built a computer using meccano
I wonder what do you use your computer for that you can switch so easily?
How does the rating system in HN works ?
I am trying to give points but it doesn't applied I mean I see the number been changed but after page refresh it turns back to the original. Is it a technical problem or I am missing something , I have read all the welcome pages , not a single word there about a rating system.
paleontology need to get help from CSI people :)

what they do currently is no more than a educated guess,
this might also apply to evolution theory in general,
until we have a time machine there is no way we can prove they are/were right.
Yea, it could validate the html on the page, could show some statistics - like linkcount, time it took to download the html ( it could then check for the links of the img tags )

I was thinking that there could be a plan wher you would have a scan a month to see if any problems appeared in the meantime.
I think PG said something about he is experimenting something with the ranking system.
IDriver - remote controlled car via iPhone
the actual stagnation that an expectation of mutual loyalty causes

So you're basically advocating that employers and employees should not be loyal to each other, so there won't be any feelings or expectations of loyalty that can negatively impact productivity. That completely ignores the positive effects of loyalty, which are well documented.

You're being an armchair economist, that has identified a single relationship that he uses to explain everything.
I do get the added-value of having it as a webapp for some but as a developer, I'd rather use Tarantula in my test suite. Hunts down 404s, 500s but can also do HTML validation, check against common attacks (CSRF, XSS, etc.)

http://github.com/relevance/tarantula
I hope it doesn't !
GeoCities Product Manager
Took him an awful long time to say natural selection.
nice, didn't know about that one.
This experiment was not performed in the US.
I wondered about that as well, but humans really like music. They will play the same tunes regularly for years on end, because they love them so much. It wouldn't surprise me if the change in use is permanent.
Who ruined it? Certainly not humans, who haven't been genetically engineering anything until recently. So who created these predators / parasites / diseases designed to kill and maim?
Will Filters Kill Spam? (2002)
I agree. My personal example: google contacts. I updated all my contacts to have a photo. However in Gmail-Chat some of those photos do not appear. If I click on the empty photo in the chat I'm taken to the contact details and there is the photo I uploaded. Not world class!
What a plague! So now there are a bunch of sites with horribly oversized text and numbers?
I call B.S on this article. This is so easy..

In other news:

Nobody is perfect.

There are no silver bullets.

Fix it yourself if it's open source.

Why don't you use something better then.

It's free so you can't complain.
Nice, thanks for sharing. Do you any similar Python software?
I don't fully agree with the article's point, and I certainly don't like the tone: to me, it sounds like a useless rant and it seems as if the poster is using symptoms of a sloppy QA as proof of a lack of expertise of the Google engineers. These are two different things.

Having "the world's best engineers" should mean that you are able to solve problems that no one else can. That your engineers recognize possibilities and see solutions where no one else can. I can actually argue that because they (supposedly) hire engineers with such great expertise, the QA department suffers. A common symptom of smart people is that they don't want to be bothered with dumb, repetitive tasks (read: testing, QA, etc) but rather want to solve interesting problems.

Besides, it would be a bit weird to expect smart people to not make any mistakes. People always make mistakes, no matter how smart they are. If mistakes are noticeable to the end user, in the end it's due to an error in the business processes, not a human error.
I do not feel overly compelled to enter YC

Then I suspect you have failed before you have even begun :) (pg does read the site here btw).

Incidentally I suspect I can explain all the downvotes; your language is something in the style of "corporate exec" (maximizing, optimizing, relevant learning). The kind of people you will find here already have experience of guys who talk like that (and often they are bad experiences for a developer). Certainly if anyone pitched a project to me with that language I would reject it - I know already it is never going to complete comfortably.
The article picks a few atomic issues and uses them to suggest that Google aren't hiring the best people.

I'm sure Google have people who can fix these issues, I'd be surprised if Google have any engineers incapable of fixing them, the only thing this shows is that they aren't prioritizing those fixes.
Gmail - Inbox - sujitkmeher@gmail.com
> lead by really deep thinkers in Protestant beliefs.

Thanks, but when we're talking about the defining paradigm of biology, I prefer the views of biologists.
C style for loops in Scala with break and continue
Ten Teen Entrepreneurs To Watch
We use ramamia by Mark Bao and Jason Baptiste and are very happy. Glad to see you in OP, Mark. Keep up the great work!
Excellent feedback! Thank you for taking the time.
NASA’s Big Hit: LCROSS Impacts Moon
Err, isn't the title the opposite of what the article says? He's saying Google isn't getting their money's worth, not the engineers.
Only SpiderMonkey (Gecko) has that. And it will remain that way for the foreseeable future.
Would you feel the same if in unix the default for 'rm' was 'rm -rf *' ?
I'm glad to see the Economist raise this subject. I've known so many people who hate their jobs, it really does seem like it should be higher up on the political agenda than it is.

This article brings up two particularly interesting points for me.

Firstly, do performance measures increase productivity? Apparently, they actually decrease productivity, at least if productivity involves creative problem-solving: http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation.html

Secondly, can standard corporations genuinely recognize and implement the 'human side' of management, as the article says they should. I would argue not. The standard corporation is owned by a large number of shareholders with no personal connection to the corporation and no interest in anything other than profiting from their shares. Because of this arrangement, it is inevitable that profit is the only value that counts in corporate management. If management adopts a 'touchy-feely' approach it can only be justified if this is found to increase profits, and it would do nothing to prevent their being discarded as soon as it becomes profitable to do so. A genuine recognition of the 'human side' of management would be a recognition that humans are ends in themselves, not means to an end. But in a standard corporate structure, employees are inevitably just cogs in a profit-making machine.
Only a DOS is bad for those high profile sites that are listed on your 'look who is using product X' pages.

Everybody else will probably squeak by without harm.
What you're looking for is inria's HOP http://hop.inria.fr/ :)

See also: Parenscript, Scheme2js (part of HOP), biwascheme.
How's this for incredibly inefficient http://github.com/tlrobinson/wwwoosh/blob/master/wwwoosh.sh ;)
Tell HN: Simple Security tips
Simple things that you can do to increase your security without overhauling your whole system.
Aha, I didn't realise. So HN is already an example of a karma system that doesn't reward hyperactivity.
Do your research well. There are quite a number of such apps out there already.
Drop signatures from servers and packages used to build your applications.

The reason is that there are malicious crawlers that build up databases of version numbers and packages, then if a package exploit is announced you'll be visited very quickly by some joker to try to subvert your code.

There are those who do it 'blind', but by giving them an exact target you make it easier for them.

For instance, PHP puts a signature header in to Apaches headers by default, so does apache.

Most frameworks contain a default backlink to the maker of the frame work at the bottom of the templates and so on.

Removing these isn't going to make the vulnerabilities go away, but it might give you a little bit more time to plug the hole if one is found without being compromised.
Why would someone use this instead of sharing links and discussing items on IM/facebook or googlewave in the future?
I don't think they are necessarily problems.

Re: first problem: I think a large number of fairly good comments probably IS a more valuable contribution than a small number of very good comments.

The second problem is more, er, problematic, but you could argue that good comments are popular articles deserve more karma, since these are comments on topics which people are really interested in – i.e. valuable insights on hot topics benefit more people than valuable insights on obscure topics, and are therefore more valuable contributions.
who and why posts such useless stuff on HN !! ?
Well it doesn't seem to work all the way. I'm not sure what you meant when you said it has "_full_ javascript support" and is "very mature technology". I tried it out with amazon.com and none of the menus seem to be working...

Feel free to give it a run through: http://bit.ly/5WVsw

(this is cgiproxy 2.1beta19 running on mod_perl on a fresh lenny instance -- no ssl configured here)
Maybe in some sense it could be workable, but there so many implementation issues that it could collapse into worthlessness, or even create big problems within the company.
I hope noone in a management position reads this.
As a commenter on the site says:

You run the risk of creating an atmosphere of paranoia, where everyone is afraid of causing even the slightest insult to their coworkers for fear of anonymous reprisal. Of course, that fear depends on whether or not management acts on the anonymous tips, but if they do not, what's the point of the system?

And that really is the crucial part, if it works, people get paranoid, if it doesnt work... there is no point.

Edit: spelling
> So, to summarize, inertia.

No, not inertia. That seems to me a completely inappropriate "summary" of a well-structured reply.

I hate OpenID with a passion because it ties me to one way of working. I too have a well-managed workflow using different IDs and different passwords for nearly every site, ensuring that one leak doesn't destroy all my accounts. I don't need to invest a lot of time and effort learning about something that actually damages my current capabilities.

I would explain further, but since you don't seem to bother to read carefully, I won't take the time.
It would be great if you could give a couple of links, I did search but didn't find something that made me think : ok - they are doing this so great that it's next to pointless to even start.

The ones that I found , I didn't really like - which is I'm even asking here - If I can't find others doing this , maybe nobody wants something like this.
If management can't figure out what is going on without people deliberately reporting to them, they're not much good at their job.
Quite easily done is moving ssh to a non standard port. Similarly force it to use public key only authentication and/or only allow specific users/groups to login. Furthermore fail2ban or similar systems help prevent brute force attacks on ssh.

You can also use something like pound, which is surprisingly easy to configure, in front of your main webserver and let is sanitise everything as it comes in.

I would recommend having a firewall which allows only the bare minimum required, ie. http(s) and ssh, anything else you can set up to port forward through ssh without too much of an issue.
I think this is the third such site I've seen this week. Guess there's a need!
You might have missed the point. If you are the thing that is of value, then it'd be more important if you can show us your good idea. You'd have to, eventually, after we show our interest right? It'd be more important that you show how valuable you are than to show us that you, somehow by chance, stumbled upon a great idea. If it wasn't by chance, and you are just a smart person capable of great ideas, then you wouldn't fear telling everyone about it because you can refine the idea better than others. But if it was just by chance or you feel that you've already refined the idea (which I don't think is possible unless you've truly put it to practice and tested the startup), then you can give at least the general idea. But even then it's a hard sell if the idea is your only asset, since to have a developed idea probably requires having some developed prototype that's in production. Most would naturally still assume you have nothing but a general idea.
Something with a spell checker would be nice.

Edit: actually, no pun intended, even though there is a spelling error in the title.
once we get our selenium farm going, hopefully not much. it takes about 10-15 minutes to write a script for a specific site. We just need tests that will validate our scripts against each site every day.
Presumably you believe these groups to be mutually exclusive?