skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thread Weaver: Testing Race Conditions in Java
NPD: Consumers Say They'll Spend Less on Video Games this Christmas
Good article.

Once upon a time, I wrote a series of opensource iSync plugins for the sidekick/hiptop platform, back when Danger first opened up their XML-RPC Service.

Then it came out that in order to run in "production" (e.g. on a phone without a developer provisioning loaded) your app had to have t-mobiles permission. We kept repeatedly getting told "no" on the iSync plugin, that they had no interest in supporting Mac. Then of course a commercial plugin appeared and I got fed up and stopped trying, getting the clear impression that commercial was what T-Mobile wanted.

Mostly however, it was the shock in realizing that you had no access to your own data as a standard user. You were completely and utterly locked in to that device, with no alternative.
The Gmail Problem
Taking 'information heavy' to mean large data size/ volume. File system can be seen as a basic database. When data access paths are not pre-defined e.g. URL, slug, tag, etc., a systematic way to organize and query is required. Three examples: (a) not knowing what user may query, text indexing today almost index every words. (b) given predefined access path, NNTP have used mostly files. (c) mail servers have both. IMO, in general, addressing domain specific requirements, database systems (relational, logical, network...) are not slower, harder to update/ backup. As pointed out in another comment, disk IO is slow. Both file and database systems feature various ways to speed that. Understanding requirements, then architect, design, and choose a solution stack carefully.
Squeak is pretty sweet. I was looking at the Kernel category and the Parser classes. Pretty clean stuff.
Negative externalities & Toll Booths
And naked domains...
And SSL on Google App based domains...
pg: the scribd link doesn't properly encode this URL and thus breaks. The correct URL is:

http://www.scribd.com/vacuum?url=http://wiki.freebsd.org/200...
I'm designing an information-heavy web site (static content, no user content), and have been wondering the best way to do it.

Look into Movable Type (http://movabletype.com/). It is written in Perl and it writes static html files.
I did the redesign of http://www.steves-digicams.com/ in Movable Type 4.23 and there are over 12,000 pages. Movable Type generates the static files at publish time in about as much time as Wordpress takes.

A big advantage of using static files on Steve's Digicams is that it is very easy to replicate across a load-balanced network of servers without the hassle of having to load-balance MySQL with a master-slave configuration.
The Book of Odds: Statistical encyclopedia launching tomorrow
The proportion would certainly be interesting. i.e. 90/5/3/2 wouldn't surprise me but if it was more like 40/30/20/10 I would definitely be interested in knowing that.
Chinese Are the New Kings of Bling
Banned by Beijing: Foreign Investment in Online Games
Major Blogs Can Lose 90% Of Their Value If Founders Go: Huffington, Techcrunch
Dialup users beware!
Totally, there was a line in the article about a "time bomb erasing everything including the tapes". Well...you leave all the tapes in you library, nothing gets offsited?

Or not even offsited, it's not like the building burned down. Just tapes not left in the library.

The theory that they might have the data but just don't know how to restore things because all the Danger people are gone, now that actually seems somewhat more credible to me.
Could the closing of Gourmet mark a bottom for the magazine business?
My strategy is to do my bitching and backstabbing via IM and use e-mail for legitimate work.
haha! Thanks! We recently switched from a hacked-version of sphinx to solr. We're using some custom solr features (including some that we're contributing back) but most of the speed comes from solr faceting. It wasn't trivial to setup though - Harish did a lot of work performance tuning solr.
I think we all knew that passwords were not optimal. Why isn't there more discussion of the alternatives? What are the alternatives?
Are you kidding? It's a terrible article that consists of nothing but speculation and conflicting segments that attribute the data loss to "dogfooding", and/or sabotage, and/or aggressive non-beneficial firmware updates, and/or incompetence.

Well done AppleInsider, you managed to nail the problem simply by covering every possible base.
Beer pong: Could Spread H1N1
Have you checked out "The Mathematics of Poker" by Bill Chen and Jerrod Ankenman? This books does some neat game theory based analysis of poker and comes up with some surprising results. I've pondered what some sharp hacker type might do given that text and some time to grok on a bot.

I think the one result most applicable in this scenario is the section with jam or fold tables based on hand and stacksize. Basically, they show that there are completely defined hand ranges when you should jam or fold when stacked at a certain number of BB at no-limit.

I've pondered doing a neural network, but for limit rather than no-limit. I still may, mainly because I think working on a bunch of inputs that are hard to quantify on the fly when playing would be fun to experiment with via the neural net.

Thanks for your posts on poker bots - although I have to admit I've basically quit playing online over the last year because of the proliferation of HUDs, data mining automation, and bots.

Oh, and for anybody interested in game theory and/or poker, you simply have to grab the book. It's a bunch of fun and not scary on the math for those on this forum.
NASDAQ Plans To Launch New Exchange for "Lower-tier Listing Market"
While I'm certain that the software works, it's obvious that it can only work to a limited extent. It has probably been fed a seed sample of past hits from which a set of general inferences have been inductively extrapolated. It then applies those inferred rules to score new songs fed into the algorithm. Nothing especially exciting about that.

Where it will always fail is in assessing 'novelty.' By definition, something that is novel is unexpected, new, innovated, or otherwise disruptive to our established norms. An algorithm based on norming songs to a generalized set of standards will, by definition, never understand the appeal of something novel.

Now, 99% of novel things are probably going to be bad. This doesn't set them apart from the 99% of derivative things that are also bad. But the 1% novel hits will be overlooked, missed, denied, or remixed if this algorithm is given actual decision-making weight. Just like teaching-to-the-test is frowned upon, production-for-the-algorithm will become the new conformity-inducing straightjacket for human creativity.

Finally, it's unclear what assumptions the algorithm creators are operating on, given that public tastes change over time. Are they operating solely in the pop music era created during the 1960s through to the present? Are they taking an even more restricted data set of pop music since the advent of the synth? How many genres of music do they include in their seed, and are the inferences drawn from them generalizable across genres? Across cultures to the pop charts of other countries?

Hopefully this type of algorithmic norming is less disastrous to the recording-promotion-distribution industry than it was to finance industry...
Thawte Personal E-mail Certificates and Web of Trust to be discontinued
I don't know - it could backfire as well. Sometimes long lines in a new place could give the impression that place is better, especially for people not in line - people just driving through downtown. So, it might be an experiment worth trying, but by no means guarantees success.
You have to be careful to do major registrations quickly. I registered the twitter account (made a tweet), registered the facebook account (added only some very basic profile information), and then went to register the Google account only to find out it was already taken. My company name was (random two digit number)[no space](uncommon word). I did extensive searches in Google and other places before I decided to use it.

It was probably the tweet that got me into trouble. I'm kicking myself for not realizing that would happen before hand.

I should have registered everything (including the domains) as quickly as I could (in near immediate succession). Only after that should I have started tweeting or filling out any information beyond what was required to establish ownership over the accounts.

Now, I'm sure there's someone out there who hopes to either sell me the google account, or attempt to use the google account for financial fraud.
Nostalgia overload.
Forget Twitterizing it. Randallize it:

http://xkcd.com/610/
NewTeeVee’s Next Big Thing List for 2009
Based on another article on highscalability, Twitter has one master MySQL server that is used for backups only. If a node crashes, it reloads that status from MySQL. That MySQL server handles 300 tweets per second @ roughly 2400 qps.

They now use Scala/JVM rather than rails for the backend, Rails for the frontend.

http://highscalability.com/scaling-twitter-making-twitter-10...
I second this. It's cool that the ideas behind some of the more simple things in the Quake game (such as the console, bindings, commands, etc.), are still being used as the back bone of other products (see: Valve). They are implemented very elegantly in the Q1 source.
50 Years of Space Travel In One Beautiful Solar System Map - Space travel map
Agree entirely. Just today I was staring at some code that I intuitively knew could be rearchitected to be simpler, more maintainable, etc., but I couldn't put my finger on just how to do it. So I'd stare at it for half an hour, and then take a break, repeat throughout the day. Now I'm pretty sure exactly what I need to do, and I think it's entirely because I took my attention away from it every so often.
Tablet, schmablet: What would it be good for?
I've never used one, but I would suspect the biggest value is just having someone confidential and with no conflict of interest that you can just talk to and put your thoughts in order.

See also:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging
YouTube - Did You Know?
Notes from MIT Startup Bootcamp
I've been led to understand that the OpenBSD source code is of amazing quality.
Wow, this was my #1 req, very happy.
That's amazing, thanks for linking to it. I was in North Korea in August for 5 days and I can confirm the costs reported here -- sending an email from the hotel would have cost me about 10 USD. Making a phone call to the US would have been more than 10 USD per minute. I guess that pays for the wiretap...

I have heard elsewhere that there are a few places with Internet connections, especially engineering universities. Our guides told us that they also have a wireless Web accessible from their cell phones, although I have no idea what kind of content could be on it.

Finally, a note: the article also confuses two fast-food places -- a couple of universities have had hamburgers on-campus for about 10 years now (ever since Kim Jong Il said that students should have "good, wholesome food" to help with studying) and a fast food place for the general public opened up last spring. I didn't get to go there, sadly.
Good gawd, y'all!

Why do I think of MTV when I see all that? Dire Straits!
Facebook also "has about 30,000 servers supporting its operations, hosts 80 billion photos, and serves up more than 600,000 photos to its users every second."

(check out http://www.facebook.com/Engineering?v=wall )
Does anybody know about these 2 ideas? 1) a site that lets people upload their bots and play bot vs. bot 24/7. The idea is to try and find the best algorithm.

2) A site that a human player plays at against the computer. The computer also tries to model the player using a NN and tell the player how "Big" of a NN was needed to model their play. Perhaps how quickly the computer was able to start predicting the player's play? The idea being that you want your play to be very hard to model with a NN so that you are more unpredictable in real life.
Thanks for the feedback. We'll definitely take that into consideration for our next deployment.
(Warning: deleted app names can never be reclaimed.)
From the post:

"Note that this only works if you're emailing more than two people at once."

If you're just e-mailing Bob (X|Y) it won't care (or help) at all.
> The CEO is away for two weeks during which time the marketing manager had a telesales person come in for two days last week.

If they're not taking care of this sort of thing, what are they doing?

> 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's job is to make sure that the company succeeds.

Perhaps you should fire both of them.
I don't know if this is good advice today, but back in the day I learned a lot both from STL and the Boost libraries, specifically Spirit, which I still think is an amazing feat: http://spirit.sourceforge.net/
Where can one find the full literate source code for LCC? I haven't been able to find it anwyhere, and god knows I searched.
Born with half a brain
Can You Be Shy and Still Succeed in Business?
Getting To Plan B
Jonah Lehrer: Information Craving
CouchDBX: Couch DB for MacOSX releases v0.10
Wal-Mart boosts ecommerce bid against Amazon, drugstore.com
Connect with wikipedia without an Internet connection
bad first impression > no first impression
Not a fucking chance, we've barely cleared the lip of the crater. Even a weekly can't stay current these days. Repeat after me: print media is doomed.
25% Of Jobs Are Offshoreable
Top 100 iPhone app dev posts sales (~200k sold to date)
"At most, an educated person needs help with only
a few small points of grammar."

Especially the difference between lie, lay, laid, lied, lain, layed, and lying !!
It's more nuanced than whether you release early or late. I've noticed a lot of startups that release early because "well, that's what you're supposed to do," but then the feedback comes in and they're ill-equipped to deal with it.

Release early when you can release often, but not earlier. Often this requires some meta-thinking about the space your app is in, the alternatives you may need to switch to, and how easily you can turn on a dime. Good design, in other words.

Another thing you can benefit from is good infrastructure and processes for listening to users. As an extreme but perhaps strawman example, in some consumer-web spaces there's little point in releasing an app without being able to A/B test. Build that capability in before you launch.

"Release early, release often" helps evoke the right mindset around launching: save your A game for the time after launch, not the weeks before. Don't build up the launch. Don't set a deadline, round up the press, create an embargo, and work unsustainably late hours to meet the deadline. That way you'll be tired when launch happens. You'll have a celebration, folks will ease up for a day or week, some will even take vacation, until eventually someone notices that nothing happened. Instead, focus on the process. Be blase early on: "This ol' thang, yeah we develop in public, and release all the time." You aren't done when you launch, you're just getting started. Ramp up the velocity after you start getting noticed, because now you have less room for manoeuvre.

Whatever you do, don't focus on the first half of "Release early, release often," and ignore the second.
This.

I love how the author takes the fact that Microsoft/T-Mobile haven't issued an official statement on the cause of the outage, and decides that it therefore MUST have been caused by an elaborate and sophisticated act of sabotage by some ne'er-do-well engineer.

QED.
I've read The Mathematics of Poker; the binding is broken from keeping it propped open too much. That being said, it was not very helpful actually building a bot. They do a lot of nice little game theory examples, but most of it is not applicable to real life game play.

The push/fold tables are another story, and I'll write about that soon.
I'm guessing here: http://www.cs.princeton.edu/software/lcc/
This advice is good. Definitely listen to the part about reverse ordering the calls you make based on the value you place in the target accounts. Also expect to not get a sale or meeting most of the time on these types of things as people have a different agenda than you and are overly busy.

Don't sell features, sell solutions to problems. They will only buy something if they have a problem that your solution fills.

Good luck!

As an aside, how did the marketing guy get hired? Was it a consensus or a unilateral decision? Either way if the guy is not bringing enough to the table you need to measure the persons performance and hold them accountable. This is not being a bad guy, it is simply holding them to the same standards that you are held to. If you shipped out a product full of bugs or were late on every milestone your partner would hold you accountable so you should not feel bad about doing the reciprocal.
I always get a little nervous when third parties, whether it be the government or folks like Jason Calacanis, try and tell companies how they should price their products.

I don't want anyone telling me how to price my company's products.

Pay per pitch is sleazy. But it's not illegal.

(not talking about the deceptive pay per pitch, that's a different story)
Exit Strategies for Angel Investors Video
Microsoft's insistance on rebuilding with their own technologies must put them at a big competitive disadvantage. Google can buy up just about any small web company and have 100% code compatibility from day one.
It's unfortunate that once deleted, names can't be reused by someone else. I imagine this has something to do with their security model.
Big-Box Breach: The Inside Story of Wal-Mart’s Hacker Attack
It's a nice vid - although perhaps a little old now.. That being said - I found it more interesting than the Did You Know 4.0 that came out last month -- the new ones seems like a "new media rules, old media sucks" rah-rah video - than anything of much substance.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ILQrUrEWe8

(although - I've gotta give it full credit for having a list of sources at the end!)
Why is the name important? Won't you be connecting it to your own domain name anyway?
The Revolution Will Be Digitized (By Cheap Book Scanners)
Set a $10 fan near the floor blowing upwards onto a 45-degree surface. Quite similar, save $290.
Founderdating - Next event in SF October 28th
The first event was a huge success. The next event is Oct 28th in SF. Apply now. Because your day job sucks!!!
Re-read what I wrote.

The grand-parent post suggests improved auto-complete, but that is invalid because there is no additional information when entering the first of many names. Google implemented this feature outside of auto-complete because it only makes logical sense in the context of two or more recipients.
Nice UI and features, but I have basic problem - what does Qwanz mean? I'm not able to correlate to its idea. Its very hard to remember...so very unlikely to come back... Just my $0.02!
Top under-25 entrepreneurs: what they’re doing is fundamentally worthless
a tomcat web app with database will choke and die on 256megs of ram
I (and a few others) posted a reply to this question in a similar thread from a few days ago. Here's the link.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=867439
Examples of times science have been wrong: Almost all scientists once thought the Earth was flat... WRONG. Scientists once thought the sun revolved around the Earth... WRONG. Scientists once thought that illness was caused by possession by demons... WRONG. After that was the humoral theory... WRONG. Body-Mind Dualism, anatomical theory, cellular theory, germ theory... ALL WRONG. What about Pluto?! Can you think of any more?
That's not true in the slightest, unless that "small web company" is using App Engine.

Microsoft has a hardon for dev-managed directly-addressed OS instances running on x86 machines, so you could at the very least migrate to their extant hosting infrastructure. Even if you have to rewrite your app in C# + SQL Server, it's still going to be a direct gloss for most traditional webapps.

Google does no such thing -- everything is massively distributed at every level, where blocks of infrastructure are managed as ideal services independently from any application, and addressed at the datacenter level. You are not going to get to manage your own machines, access a traditional filesystem, use relational databases, a direct socket to the client, direct access to internet hosts, basically anything you take for granted.
One of the most pleasant things about a conventional bladed fan is the soothing white noise. I can't sleep without it.

I guess something like this is good for a novelty maybe? Or maybe some fancy CPU cooling getup?
I just don't get the article. Would somebody care to explain it?

Rarely do I get exactly what I want by "just being myself." Being socially adept is a learned behavior, often requiring one to modify one's own behavior to fit in. I speak of this anecdotally. Maybe I'm missing the point?
There are still a few details, such as not being able to do https through your own domain (and apparently even for this new feature your app can only receive e-mail at your appspot domain) that may still make having a good appspot name important.
Based on personal experiece, I feel like (2) would not work very well (nor would using a similar idea to test your bot). When real money is on the line, my entire state of play changes. There is a large psychological difference between playing a bot for fun, and playing a bot for money. Playing for fun, I am more likely to place large bets, bluff, test its logic, and in general play loosely. For real money? No thanks.

Note that this is all based on personal experiece, and may not be the common case, but I feel like the average hacker will play to test the bot, not to win.
Young singles is a really broad demographic. Are you talking about college? Post-college? High School? Thinking of my single friends: There are those that like to go out and those that like to stay in (gamers, otaku). Social networkers and hard workers. Foodies, etc.

Segment your market and then try targeting them at where they spend their time. See which one is the most lucrative or cost effective. i.e. Sure most of them are on Facebook but from a CPC perspective and conversion rate, Facebook might not be the best. Facebook might be too competitive for whatever you are trying to do (i.e. singles matching) A booth at the anime/comic convention might do better when you look at paid subscriptions/cost.
I left the day-to-day operations in 2002, and had been living in California and London (while the business is in Portland Oregon). So it had been running without me for 6 years.

Yeah I might have made more if I promised to stay with the company, but that was completely out of the question for me.

There were no super key employees. (Some great people, but everything quite documented so someone new could step into any role at any time.) It was just a working system.

The two main techies were probably the most key in explaining the system to the new techies.

I set it all up this way to give myself personal freedom, but it definitely helped for handing over the keys to the new owner.
Don't Blame 'The Cloud' or SaaS for Microsoft and Sidekick Stupidity
Cracking open a window without using a fan at all uses 100% less power than AC. That doesn't mean it's as effective at cooling.
Trillian for iPhone: Two months later, still no response from Apple…
"When it's done" doesn't tell the whole story for Blizzard. They continue to patch and support Starcraft, and they are currently working on a sizable content patch for Diablo II. WoW has been constantly receiving additional content and balance updates. Blizzard goes a little bit beyond all that, a remarkable trait in such a 'now' focused games industry.