skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We went to Seedcamp, and spent three grueling days analysing our product.

Seems like we're in some kind of time warp here. I understand that with modern technology, things can happen faster, sometimes much faster. But how does spending 3 days determining that a business is not viable constitute a failure?

I really hate the whole "failure is OK" meme. Sure, we all understand that not everything goes perfectly all the time. But we also have those "Is this really worth it?" moments. For some of us, this happens all the time - the harder the project, the more often if happens. Sometimes all that separates real success from real failure is pushing through these moments, determined not to allow speed bumps to stop you.

I'm not suggesting that we will never fail or that we should never give up; sometimes that does make sense. I am suggesting that success is elusive until we adopt a personal policy of "failure is not an option".

OP was not a failure and not an example of this.

Failure is not OK.
Maybe you can give an example (hypothetical would be fine). Should bloggers disclose what they aren't writing about because of NDAs? Or are you talking about embargoes where some bloggers have been briefed ahead of time?
Looks like you and I had a similar thought at the same time Murkin, but jlees explained their decision making just as fast.
I know that it's popular to bash Java and .NET right now, and that it's popular to hype Erlang, Scala, Clojure and Hadoop, but I don't think that replacing Java or .NET (frameworks, both) with a great language and Hadoop (written in Java) is the silver bullet your're implying it is.

It's easy to bash the "enterprise consultant" with a wink, especially without having been in that consultant's shoes.

Let's try to avoid the whole Java/.NET/Enterprise BAD, Erlang/Hadoop GOOD mentality.
Let's have an honest debate of technology and how it applies to a specific application.
In my city a woman recently died in a collision with a bus. She was riding in a shared bus/bike lane. In other words, a lane that was supposed to permit buses to go extra fast AND (theoretically) allow cyclists to travel at their leisurely pace. Anyone see a problem with the road planning in our city?
What should or shouldnt I do to stop spam on my blog?
From reading all this I can only reach this conclusion: you guys should try Logaholic Web Analytics. It's waaaay simpler than Google and yields even more detailed results with less digging. You don't need to tag yoyr URLS, because Logaholic (also) works with logfiles, so all your KPI URLs will be automatically uploaded when you install the software on your server. The funnel reports and A/B split testing are way easier to do with Logaholic and you don't need to create a new profile for every single type of data that you want to run reports on. Also, with Logaholic you can upload old log files, so tracking back in the past is also possible! The free trial is here: http://www.logaholic.com/wp/trial-download/.
Failure is not an option, as in "Never give up, never surrender?" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bI5hi4c4y9k
Introducing Atlas: A Visual Development Tool for Creating Web Apps
Is anybody here using gwt? Is it really easier to use than any of the other widely used javascript libraries? The whole java to javascript translator/compiler sounds overly complex to me. Is there some other benefit to using it aside from ease of use? Is it more likely to generate code that is cross browser compatible than one of the other solutions?
Wow, now those Micrsoft ads for "cheaper laptops" can add a line that says, "Now you get an anti-virus processor included for FREE!"
You can also install a honeypot. Some text links that your human visitors don't see but that bots do, and that way trap malicious bots which do not respect your robots.txt file.

There is an outgoing project: Project HoneyPot, which uses honeypots installed among their members to detect bots to build a database of malicious bots which can be consulted by their API or their plugins. They even report if there is evidence of Spam being sent as a consucuence of the bot visit.

They have plugins for wordpress among others.

http://www.projecthoneypot.org
How to restrict access to web applications in Tomcat
Same here. I like to read technical and scientific books. DX is a must.
How much of a performance boost are you getting? And what tasks are you trying to compute?
Total failure is not ok, but smaller failures are good - they teach us what to try next.

Loosing a few battles is fine, as long as you win the war. Loosing them teaches you how to win the war. :/

I agree though. 'thinking' about an idea for 3 days and deciding you don't want to do it != failure.
Scientists discover massive ring around Saturn
I find this really unsatisfactory, but I can't put my finger on why. After all, I would be trusting you in the same way if you did alter the software to put the username next to all killed stories, but something about this answer still doesn't sit right with me.
fail early, fail often ;-)

"[x] early, [x] often" is nice rule. Why not apply it to failure?
Cray - A Clojure Ray Tracer
Yeah, that's the 'special access' I was talking about. Apple tends to reject other people's apps for using private APIs, but they let Google get away with it.
Challegepost - some interesting challenges here
I'm at work, so I can't access your link. I don't know what you were getting at.

I do know that if you think that failure is an option, the probability that you use that option increases dramatically. I'm not trying to use some new age self-help B.S. (well maybe just a little), I'm just suggesting that "state of mind" is critical when taking on difficult projects. Almost everyone I know who has accomplished anything big (including myself) had many opportunities to quit. Failure would have been easy. In fact, for a lot of software projects, there are many times when the whole thing looks hopeless, often right before a great demo or big sale.

I didn't care for OP's easy embrace of "failure" and tried to describe why. I hope that's what came across.
While I think this is an interesting move, and that there's probably a problem worth addressing somewhere in there, I don't think the FTC has the right angle with this move.

Specifically, I think this regulation is intended to target the "little guys" who are getting big enough to get real attention.

I would rather the target were the "big guys" who are astroturfing (i.e. acting like little guys) for commercial purposes, if there's going to be any regulation at all. For one, this is going to be easier to enforce (since there are fewer big companies engaging in astroturfing) and it's more likely to cause legitimate harm to consumers.

I recognize, though, that this is a slippery slope, and that by regulating big-time astroturfers, you could well have unintended consequences for small-time bloggers.

I can imagine the current move as a slippery slope too, and it sounds ripe for abuse... As others have said, it's unenforceable, so it really is just selectively enforceable.

So, all told, it would be better to not regulate this at all.
Point taken. In the general case, though, (i.e. we're talking about more than Rack awesomeness) I think it's important that people keep this in the back of their minds. I was burned on this recently with the use of the Daemon Kit gem in a project.

It's definitely a "do-better" on my part to more closely examine the libs I'm working with, but as an author in a language wherein numerous OSes and implementations of the interpreter are used, it's something to keep in the back of your mind as well.
Maybe there are some very processor-intensive heuristics that are not being used because they don't want to impact CPU performance.
The biggest gating factor in making Kindle available internationally is having to partner with local wireless operator for connectivity. Availability of country-specific Amazon stores have little to do with it IMHO.
What I like about this is offloading the job to a processor that's generally not doing much. If you want to start taxing the gpu (playing a game, editing video, etc) you'll want anti-virus to stop running (or move into the background) at any rate.
The author says he spent two weeks setting up Eclipse to work with OCaml; he's a serious productivity maven. It would have taken less time to learn enough vi or Emacs to get by, their OCaml modes, and would have benefitted him in the long run in many other ways.
I'm a little confused by this title.

OP provides a nice description of FlightCaster's business issues and technical approach, but exactly where is this "prediction of the future of development"?
Google changes logo - traffic to our site spikes
Was wondering how our little app could see 100 fold increase in uniques just overnight. Simple reason: Google changing logo to depict an ITF bar code - tons of people going to wikipedia articles on bar codes. We have some referral links originating from wikipedia (mostly submitted images of EAN and UPC bar codes).

Too bad the bar code logo will go away - these are our Andy Warhol threw a "15 Minutes of Fame".

http://barcoderobot.com
Does he include the value of the significant increase in Google's status as a telco in that comment?
About the serialization, I understood he basically said "don't use that". Not that an explicit, manual translation layer would solve any problem. It just makes you aware of it. Translation layers are brittle even if they are automatic. The only solution is to have a protocol (or file format) that change as little as possible. An automatic marshalling facility doesn't encourage you to do so.

I see one case where automatic serialization is harmless, though: when you have the guarantee that the program producing the data and the program receiving it are of the same version and don't talk to the outside world. Temporary files used to recover crashed sessions are a good example.
Colon cleanse
We provide the best method of colon cleanse and make sure to be healthy.
It's not possible to police millions of bloggers, but IIUC if some company with deep pockets enlists thousands of bloggers in a stealth "social marketing" campaign, and the ruse is discovered, the company can now be fined for deceptive trading practices.
"4. Stop spam trackbacks.."
Don't forget to consider using rel="nofollow" (which most weblog software marks reader-submitted links by default)...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spam_in_blogs#nofollow
Is the resolution of a master lock down to the actual number? Perhaps the exploit relies on close combinations also working?
The "nice gesture" idea is way off. By default, you need to assume they haven't opted into any sort of promotion for facebook or for your site. Treat it like private information, since their comments should be assumed to be private. Since the comments are tied to an identity, all the more reason to keep it private.

I don't know; maybe you're friends with everyone in the screencaps and you are pretty sure they're okay with you reposting their comments and names publicly. ...but, for whatever reason, I wouldn't be down with that.

Blank that stuff out. You know the eye dropper tool? Make rectangles of a non-intrusive color, if you don't want to screw up the design.

Terrible blurring, terrible privacy, and with regard to the comment about leaving names in plain sight, terrible advice.
I can't seeing this be effective in any other situation. My understanding is that the bandwidth to and from the GPU is the big bottleneck. Once its on the card, the processing is fast, but getting things into the GPU memory is the bottleneck.

If, on the other hand, they have some sort of complex heuristics that is heavily process intensive, this may be very successful. As it stands, I don't think (although IANASecurity Expert) a definition based solution will work do to the memory limitations.
So, what exactly is escape analysis? Neither the article nor the comments here even touch on it.
Cartographer.js - simple thematic mapping library for Google Maps. (Alpha)
BMW Lovo Concept, Is this what you want to drive ?
Where's the next boom? Maybe in `cleantech'
Are honeypot strategies still effective? They talk about using hidden form fields here:
http://www.rustylime.com/show_article.php?id=676

...but they add a disclaimer: "We are no longer using this method as it, after more than a year of successful use, seems to be beaten regularly now."
Because failure is not the purpose?
It is a bit straining. If you're on mac cmd+opt+ctrl+8 helps a little.
Ask HN: Good ways to become a professional data miner?
HN,

First of all, I'm astonished by the overall level of intelligence and tech saavy here. I am in the company of truly brilliant people, which is why I have come here with my questions.

I am probably among the least of you: I have a B.S. in Management Information Systems. It's sort of a mcCompsci degree. I have been out of school and working as a programmer (web front-end, proprietary middle-tier backend for our application, using the ANSI SQL 92 standard for Oracle, SQL and DB2) for two years.

My biggest accomplishment at this company has been writing an advanced search function that requires very dynamic and robust SQL that is generated on the fly. In the process, I have learned that I am exceptional at querying, manipulating, and otherwise shaping data into something usable. I also have a natural knack for statistics -- I played online poker to make about $7 an hour in college, and have been able to coast through probability classes and make straight As on pure intuition, without memorizing formulas.

Because of these two talents I have, I am seriously considering trying to build a long-term career as a data miner. My company has a data mining group that I might be able to move into if I can build the credentials and establish the cred.

I would very much like to go back to school and receive a master's degree in something. Appealling options are computer science, statistics, and psychology. I would also like to learn new, valuable skills, and perhaps earn certifications, but I'm not sure what.

My question for you is -- what are my best options, if I want to move into a data mining / data shaping role?
While this would be a good use for the guidelines, http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2009/10/endortest.shtm seems to imply that the onus is on the blogger to declare material connections. So while it might help with astroturfing, I don't see it really stopping a company with deep pockets from sending out cash and items to review to bloggers.I also would not see the guidelines increasing liability for the company if the ftc is holding bloggers responsible for declaring endorsements.
It's not a "failure is OK meme", it's a "realism is OK" meme.
I liked the OPs reply to this message:

>Thanks for your reply. It was quite interesting, though I get the feeling
you used my question solely as a trigger to share with us a long-held
dissatisfaction with the current state of affairs concerning the use of
databases, regardless of whether it actually applies to my particular problem.
JavaScript memory profiler from Mozilla Labs
Word of mouth has always been considered among the best and most valuable forms of advertising. Thus it is no wonder that if you're used to finding new web services from word of mouth, then seeing an anonymous advertisement will not be nearly as good.
I believe it has do with lawyers and book licensing and not the telcos this time.
When trying to decide how a policy will affect a population, you can't reason out from a single anecdote. Remember, the plural of "anecdote" is not "data".
I'm not trying to insult, but on re-reading I guess one can see it that way, what with the troll remark and all. You have to admit your post had most of the effects your typical internet troll's would.

But on topic; your original post suggests that there are "simpler ways of starting a new process" and that using threads "seems far more useful with a lot less complications."

I think this is wrong on both counts. There is no simpler way to start a process, and using threads leads people towards manually reproducing many of the things fork provides for free, leading to more complicated and difficult to understand code.

I understand when the average programmer misunderstands fork, but systems programmers should know better. Since your experience is on the hardware level, and not operating systems, it makes more sense that you're not aware of the advantages of fork. But I still can not fathom what you consider to be more simple than fork. Perhaps your definition of process creation differs from mine, and most others? I'd like to understand more, in any case.
What you learn by teaching calculus
Most Common Hotmail Password
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escape_analysis

In a nutshell, figuring out whether a variable or object is going to be entirely confined to a single thread and scope and using that information to perform optimizations (like sticking things into registers) or avoid unnecessary locking.
Pyjamas - port of Google Web Toolkit to Python
No, read carefully, he did spend 2 weeks setting up Visual Studio for F#, not for the Eclipse setup. One can reasonably think he did spend less time for the Eclipse setup.

Besides, I don't think you can be as productive with Vim or Emacs in 2 weeks as he is or would be with Eclipse, if he is really not into this kind of tool. This is just a personal statement, I can't backup this claim with any data obviously.
I think I remember reading somewhere that the Google Wave team gave up on supporting ie6 so this suggests that GWT doesn't eliminate all cross browser issues.

I don't use it though. I have looked at it and I don't see the point of compiling java to javascript. I like the output it produces but I don't like the workflow. I am not fond of java's verbosity and I would have preferred an approach similar to the one taken by YUI in implementing rich widgets in javascript.
Perl's lightweight threading is provided by Coro.
Planning killed the software star.
It kinda reminds me of how my Amiga used to work. You used to be able to drag full-screens by their title bar up and down and switch between them using an icon at the top right.
What if the list on my phone is out of date?
Stolen Hotmail data reveals widespread use of weak passwords
Believe me, I had my fair share of enterprise consultancy in my 20's. It's easy to get sucked into the mentality that there are some technologies that are suitable for "enterprise development" and even that there is such a thing as an "enterprise application". There is no such division. There are approaches and technologies that are more or less productive and more or less easily applied to the problem at hand. The choice of technology in a consultancy bears more relation to covering exits and the possibility of blaming a vendor that can protect you from your client if the project fails than ensuring it doesn't.

I mentioned Hadoop as a counterpart to the Oracle RDBMS that quite probably what persists the data the application is using.
This is a promising project. I would much prefer to write my apps in python than java! However I don't think it's ready for prime time. The last time I tried it I couldn't get version 0.6 to work and there were some issues with some of the widgets with version 0.5.
Ask HN: Why duckduckgo API only search for Techcrunch?
Duckduckgo API replies with an empty page every search string I tried other than "techcrunch", their example on api page [http://duckduckgo.com/api.html].

http://duckduckgo.com/?q=hackernews&o=x
I've been here ~5 years - summer, this summer included, is preferable to what's about to happen until May.
These licensing restrictions are just plain stupid. I wrote a (provocative) blog post about this recently (http://jan.rychter.com/enblog/2009/9/17/why-i-will-steal-mus...).

Why not make the same content available worldwide? I mean, it's just bits for money, and my money isn't worth less than somebody else's money.
What issues did you have with 0.6? You simply couldn't get it running on your machine?
Twitter is killing the newsletter
We've used gwt extensively and eagerly await 2.0.

GWT is basically built for building webapps like gmail. If you are building a website then I wouldn't bother with it personally, I find jquery much easier in that sense. It's really built for highly interactive, gmail/google docs/wave like applications which are a single page with dynamic content.

Take a look at the following project, which is a nice example of what gwt can do outside of google health, wave etc:
http://code.google.com/p/gwt-cal/

There are huge benefits with 2.0 over other libraries for building these types of applications:

http://www.infoq.com/news/2009/10/gwt-2-m1

http://fredsa.allen-sauer.com/2009/09/gwt-for-enterprise-dev...

In terms of cross browser, we have only ever had a single issue which was a drag and drop, google map like component. Workarounds were not that hard.

Oh, and styling your interface is very easy if you use firebug well. We have a 37-signals-esque single page interface which is pretty slick.
Well this is an article about life stories so tough luck. The study had some conclusions which could be drawn out without understanding the life stories, but they're nothing you haven't heard before. The point of this article really was the life stories themselves.
For that matter, the Harvard Book Store is not part of Harvard University. It is an independent bookstore.
Just thought I'd throw this out there, I'm a Kindle 1 owner, and have brought/read over 80 books on mine in the past 2 years. The only regret I have is buying a technical manual for it. It made sense in my head, but the inability to use the index correctly (You can't jump to page numbers) makes it hard to use as a reference.

I have other tech books as PDF's that I've brought (Not from the amazon store) which work well on the machine I'm coding on, just doesn't translate well when viewing on the Kindle. So if you are thinking of trying it out, don't buy from the Amazon store, as you will want to view them on your local machine.
Yes, I use it a lot. It is perfectly possible to make close-to-native web frontends in GWT.

There are very many other benefits which depend entirely on how you work as a coder

GWT suits if you work with Java, code in Eclipse, build with ant, use servlets and web development is just the GUI aspect to you.

There are some very sophisticated widget sets like GXT which are written in GWT and compile small to a single JS file :: http://www.extjs.com/products/gxt/
Required reading: askthevc.com

the middle column, scroll down a bit for the categories list. A goldmine.

Jason and Brad have done a huge service to the community with this site.
An emotional response: Using computers to analyse sentiments
They should have called it clay (you know, model stuff, like with clay ;); the first thing I thought of was http://www.cray.com supercomputers. Maybe that was intentional.

After browsing the source, it seems they are using Java2D primitives, specifically BufferedImage to do textures and shaders. I wonder if this project could use JOGL bindings...

EDIT: btw, I meant to say that this looks pretty badass
JavaScript console bookmarklet for any web page
Erlang and the Great Computer Language Shootout (2002)
Perl has cooperative threads mapped to a single posix thread with Coro.

Python and Ruby both have preemptive threads on top of posix threads. A mutex ensures only one posix thread is actually running at any given point in time.

Ruby versions before 1.9 also used a single posix thread, requiring memcpy to swap the stack. Coro suffers from a similar problem (the contents of the PADLISTs of every sub found on the context stack has to be swapped in and back out).

Preemptivity for Coro can be implemented very similarly to Ruby and Python (e.g. using Async::Interrupt).

The "lightweight" that unifies all implementations is that only a single thread runs at any given point in time, even when SMP is available. This means that even though it's not a shared nothing model (like ithreads), there's no need to take a mutex or spinlock for every variable access.