skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How many people who are capable of writing a viable app but can't afford $20/month or less also lack friends who would give them some server space?

I'm serious about this. If someone is so painfully shy or otherwise socially incompetent that they know no one who would give them an account then how are are they going to deal with cultivating customers or buyers?

If their issue is that they just don't have the right friends, then I'd think the right answer is to start cultivating geeky & entrepreneurial friends for the sake of just connecting with some like minded people. Helping facilitate that sort of thing sounds like a fine thing to experiment with, being able to offer them some free server space would just be gravy.
Lisp Could Rule the World if...
You would be referring to the book written by Toby Sagaran would you? If it is I second your notion, an excellent book btw. Really got me into algorithms and the like.
How Pinball Ate itself: The Economics of Pinball
Doesn't look like it. They even took the tumblr word & functionality of "reblogging"
no problem, good luck with that.

Actually I just checked out and www.com appears to be a domain squatter(although he sells www.com email addresses, but there is no site), maybe you could even convince him to change www.com to ww.com
I used the default ones. This software has a free trial btw.
The fault of hypocrisy? No.
Free music is infeasible? Tell that to people jamming with their friends

Yes, absolutely. Would be nice if more people made their own music.
Those two sentences aren't mutually exclusive. In 2006-2007 when Tiger was on a 7 tournament win streak, golf ratings were up because a lot of people wanted to see Tiger extend his win streak. Complementary to that, a lot of people also tuned in to root for whoever was in contention to upset that streak.
Squeezing out performance is pretty much the job description of system programmers. Can you give a compelling reason to change that?

Achieving a higher degree of abstraction, more straightforward availability of system resources to programmers, higher levels of code reuse.

BeOS/Haiku already achieves this with C++. I think we can improve on this with something like Go.
How is EC2 a "lock-in" platform, particularly when compared to space on a shared server?
What is an IPSP?
I tried buying the domain of that guy years ago, he's not selling.

[envy]
It is probably the best ROI anybody ever made. I wouldn't be selling if I were in his shoes either, he gets 150K uniques daily on that domain without lifting a finger.
[/envy]
I think that in the end, you will only have to do the latter, and not the former.

I won't dispute that C is useful. But I think that there is a future in systems programming in concurrency oriented languages.
AFAIK, Google Voice does not allow commercial use. But one could definitely use Skype, ribbit, Twilio, etc for the same purpose. Its a pretty good idea.
Coming from having done a Bioinformatics PhD and Post-Doc, I reckon getting in touch speculatively with people in Bioinformatics should work. You might get a lot of knock-backs but there's definitely a need for people with IT skills and a genuine interest in Biology. I'd also say that a strong grounding in statistics would be the biggest selling point - probably greater than a knowledge of biology. Good luck, I hope it works out for you.
That's exactly what happened to me, but I have to say that it was more of an accident than a planned move.

I was looking for a job where they'd hire people with Python skills and that could provide sponsorship for a H1B. The intersection of these requirements proved to be quite small, but I was fortunate to find a research lab affiliated to Harvard Medical that did just that.

My first project has less to do with bioinformatics and more with secure manipulation of patients' EMR. It's funded by the CDC and all of the code is GPL.

I think the other project I'm getting involved is more according to what you are looking for: Galaxy (http://galaxy.psu.edu/) is a really cool system where you can process and share huge amounts of data. It's also an open source project(http://bitbucket.org/galaxy/galaxy-central/wiki/Home), and Penn State is hiring.
Internet Payment Service Provider

A company that registers your merchant account with a company such as paysquare, they will take care of scrubbing and fraud control (for a nominal fee per charge) and will deposit your money in your bank account, usually on a weekly basis.

I should probably do a post on how all the items in an e-commerce transaction go together.
Achieving a higher degree of abstraction, more straightforward availability of system resources to programmers, higher levels of code reuse.

Present-day system programmers seem to be able to build decent enough operating systems and the like at the level of abstraction C provides, and I suspect that most would consider straightforward management of system resources to be higher priority than straightforward availability of them.

I will concede the possibility that some unambiguously-better system could be written in a higher-level language. However, until evidence demonstrates that it actually can be done, that remains just a possibility, and one with very real and significant costs. Those costs are not, in the view of many system programmers, worth it.
Has anybody here used Avro?
The Buyout Of America -- How PE will cause the next great credit crisis
Performance Tuning with Library Interposers
Okay, but that’s true for any game that isn’t completely deterministic, for instance, Yahtzee or Guess Who. Poker and settlers are worlds apart in any reasonable comparison though: one is a light-hearted family game in which any player has a reasonable chance of success, and the rules are set up to keep games relatively close feeling, and the other is a ruthless betting game, in which superior players quickly and consistently trounce less experienced opponents (and take all their money), with chance generally only entering substantially in games between players of similar skill.
Erotische Girls zum ersten ...
Yea but they charge $1.99, ShopSavvy is free.
The overhead of a hypervisor is pretty low. VPS hosts will divide a 16GB 4-8 core machine into 40 pieces with Xen and each slice performs pretty well (provided that not all of them are running CPU intensive jobs at once.

The main overhead is that each virtual machine has its own kernel memory, file cache, etc. There are other virtualization approaches that use a shared kernel, and which may be able to use a single copy of common shared libraries across partitions (not sure about this last part though). FreeBSD jails or OpenVZ on Linux fall into this category.
I'll second the "strong grounding in statistics" point. Most computational bioinformatics ultimately boils down to statistics in some form or another...
You're right about that, EC2 has it's own 'instance storage', which would take the place of the shared hard disk here.

I was thinking about integrating S3 when you use EC2, but of course you don't have to use S3.
We started using Galaxy a couple of months ago in my company. I'm not involved in the projects using it but I've seen a demo and it seemed like a cool software, although it has its glitches, according to my colleagues :)
I have seen several of these recurring billing services posted lately, but no one has mentioned BillingCircle. http://www.billingcircle.com/ I use it for my startup and love it to death. Great API, ok-ish pricing, and the reporting dashboard is insane (in a good way).
The difficulty of rational decisions, even when evidence supports the call
Good points. I think that the answer to the first question is probably almost everybody in the third world for starters, and probably a fair number of people in the former eastblock countries, especially students.

In the 'developed' world probably fewer but it would not surprise me if there are thousands of people in a situation where a free server would just give them the leg up they need to get to 'ramen profitable'.
Murdoch Warns That Without eTablets, Newspapers Will Go Out Of Business.
I was thinking of desktops. Embedded devices are a different story.
Goldman, Buffett Establish $500 Million Small-Business Program
3 Million Dollars in Iphones Stolen in Belgium
that doesn't mean that Intel (who is firmly cemented in the WiMax camp) won't use its influence with Apple to get an WiMax-powered iPhone...
The viability of bootstrapping a business
I've been unsuccessfully trying to download a password-protected phpBB forum for ages. That's actually what I was trying to do when this was posted. (I'm a member of the forum and have the password, but both wget and the commercial offline browswers I've tried always fail.) Anyone have any ideas?
> Against this background, projects like Chrome don't have to achieve market dominance to be successful, they just have to achieve broad influence.

Good point. After all, GMail's most immediate and important result was that every other mail provider dramatically increased their storage space. At the time yahoo offered only 4 mb for free - in a matter of weeks it jumped almost thousand-fold. Same with Chrome and javascript speed in Firefox.
I do have quite a bit of experience with purchasing/monetizing internet advertising, having gotten into the affiliate CPC marketing game in the very early days, but none for a b&m establishment yet. Something I'd actually like to try at some point as I feel there's a lot left to be done there.
Law is not software. Remember that and you'll be fine. They are both precise, but in extremely different ways.
I will concede the possibility that some unambiguously-better system could be written in a higher-level language. However, until evidence demonstrates that it actually can be done, that remains just a possibility

Already happened: Symbolics Lisp Machines. (Modulo a few decades of programming practice not available to inform the Lisp Machines.)

I suspect that Go could get us there. Interfaces would allow for a higher degree of abstraction. The language would offer much cleaner concurrency. All the memory management cruft would be gone. In such an environment, many things that are now esoteric would become the realm of ordinary programming. I think there is much to be gained.
To clarify, I have an iPhone 3G. Excluding the problems with events I described and the truly atrocious service I had before the 2.0.1 upgrade (or 2.1? I don't remember), I've never been unable to make a call from anywhere in Austin. I just have to try again if the call fails or is dropped, which is common but not an everyday occurrence. It's a tolerable level of service, but still irksome enough to bias me toward Verizon for my next phone.
Who on earth downvoted this and why?
Cloud Computing Ecosystem Map
Me and Belle de Jour (and a search engine honeypot)
Anyone have benchmarks on implementations of this in other languages? It seems sufficiently non-trivial to be an effective benchmark.
A Compendium of A/B Test Results
I was under the impression that Palm’s comeback had already lost its steam.
Now is the perfect time for some enterprising programmer to come up with a better solution.
Deep Tracing of Internet Explorer
Now that is customer service! Yet I'm surprised that they just directed him to a store where he could buy parts rather than trying to sell him a new one.
The only obstacle they mention to realizing 5-10µs latency per se is that networking infrastructure can't yet support it.

The paper also talks about other issues that will need to be resolved (Section 4.1): software overheads like context switching and polling network devices, and protocol issues (e.g. TCP's minimum retransmission timeout is currently 200 milliseconds, which would make even a single dropped packet catastrophic for latency).

I do agree that it is a bit suspect for the authors to go advocate at length for low-latency RPCs, but not volunteer to step up to the plate to do the innovation in switches and network hardware that this will require.

What specifically are the common strategies for backup to disk?

Well, most schemes follow some variant of write-ahead logging to a "stable" location: either local disk or to the RAM of a remote network node (and then assuming that the local and remote nodes won't fail simultaneously).
Cool, he knows Eugene Jarvis!

I wondered what happened to him.
Also, there is a lot of cold data out there. Storing all of it in RAM just doesn't make sense right now, given upfront + ongoing expense (energy).
You may not have luck finding work in the field without knowledge of biology or chemistry or statistics or maths. There are many graduate programs that focus on retraining software developers as bioinformatics researchers. Also consider cheminformatics.

Please send me an email [1] if you want to learn more. The lab I work in is always looking for eager new students.

[1] http://mailhide.recaptcha.net/d?k=01kUsXu40I09lRKAR_qd4ZFQ==...
As I understand things, a technical inability to keep up with growth in the userbase is what caused Friendster to fall behind while Myspace took over its market.

Being sales-oriented works poorly[0] unless you actually have a product people want. To win, you have to make something people want, and make sure they know they want it.

[0]I suspect this may not hold up for big corporate and government sales.
oh yeah def a smart move on his part, kinda like that secretary who registered citigroup
"Guts" by Chuck Palahniuk

That one is probably way, way too graphic, but if your intent is to subvert...you might even go with something from Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing perhaps?
Although I do all of my deployments on Linux, so MacRuby is not so useful to me, I still think that this is an exciting project: LVM compiler technology, potential for good runtime performance compared to other Ruby implementations, and a really nice interface for writing native Mac applications.

If I had to write a Mac app, MacRuby and HotCocoa look great.
The Methuselah Manifesto
Probably my suspicious nature, but any chance this is a planted viral ?
That is pretty incredible. I thought that the "Develop" menu and JavaScript profiler in Safari were great, but this deep tracing tool looks even better.
AT&T is another monopolistic relic. They don't move fast on anything and there's a huge amount of management overhead for even the smallest task. They may very well invest a huge amount of capital into infrastructure upgrades but how much of that actually translates to real world improvements is unknown. I'm not sure Verizon is all that much better off in this respect but they happened to deploy a more scalable technology better suited for data long before the demand was a reality. Going forward with their LTE upgrade we could very well see the same situation AT&T is in.
This has amazing potential. It would be interesting if someday you could ask Google if something were legal or not, and it could give you an exactly correct answer, with an interpretation on par with or better than a professional lawyer.

Google needs to do this with the entire United States Tax code, Federal Statutes, and work with States and Counties to get their legal texts online and into their index.
Want to cross the border illegally? There's an app for that
I think its awesome that Verizon rubbed this dirty little secrete in AT&T's face. Hopefully this snub motivates AT&T to properly invest in its network.
(Full Disclosure: I work at Rackspace)

Dan I am going to take a look at this personally and make sure we address this. This is not acceptable and we owe you more than just saying its not our fault. I will follow up by email.
You can get into bioinformatics without a background in biology, but you'll need some math. Assuming you have basic calculus & some statistics, I'd recommend looking at the Univeristy of Illinois at Chicago's online certificate in bioinformatics (http://proteomics.bioengr.uic.edu/online/). You take an intro course and then choose two more from among computational genomics, molecular modeling and biostatistics. It's a great program. They also have a masters of engineering degree with a bioinformatics specialization, again completely online.

If you're looking for something more immediate, get a hold of a couple books and familiarize yourself with the basics. Mount's Bioinformatics is great, and it's the text for the intro class at UIC. Other good ones are Bioinformatics Algorithms, Python for Bioinformatics, and the O'Reilly books on Perl for Bioinformatics.

Finally, hook up with a bio professor who needs some tech help and volunteer. You'll learn a ton.
The Frugality Movement Takes On Healthcare: Essential Reading
"Being sales-oriented works poorly unless you actually have a product people want."

That's completely correct, however you're still missing the hidden disjunction. The point is that you should have a product people want AND be sales oriented.

Are there times when it's rational to start a business that's not sales oriented? Absolutely. But you better have a damn good reason.

For example, let's say your product is a search engine that returns results structured in the way people learn. And what's more, it's so obvious that your search engine is better that a huge percentage of people who use it instantly switch their default homepage. Now this is a good example of when you might want to start a business without a sales plan. But starting a business like this is like planning a breech birth, so you better have a good reason.
Perhaps it could be, but if it were a viral I suspect they would try to make Apple's tech support seem particularly impressive. For example, the customer service reps could have figured out the particular problem and helped him order the necessary parts.

In my opinion, this story doesn't seem to make Apple's support appear particularly good or bad.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=840244

Crawling "only" 120k pages can be done easily with a pure Python solution over a normal home / office internet connection. The packages urllib, urllib2, robotexclusionrulesparser and lxml are a good start.

Important: Don't forget to implement a crawl rate limit.
Yahoo’s Turnaround Efforts Are Straight from Steve Jobs’ Playbook
It could be viral for Tekserve (the company they directed him to). I doubt it though.
Kindle coming to Canada
I wonder why they weren't able to implement increasing levels of difficulty. They could have mechanically changed the playing field at certain thresholds, or even looked into using different sorts of balls (heavier, smaller, BOTH AT THE SAME TIME!!!). How about balls with uneven weight distribution? Most of this stuff I envision being unleashed as you advance, so it's similar to other video games where it gets progressively more difficult.

It just seems like they could have done something other than just make a static game that was harder than the last version.
The results of a search like that would make a great post. Please share what you find.
The balancing act between new and hardcore players is something that video game publishers have to deal with as well. They have an easier time of it, but it's by no means trivial. While video games are flexible with respect to skill required, as the article mentions, pinball is a more transferable skill than video games, which means that the balance has to be found on a game-by-game basis rather than across the industry. I've seen quite a few gamer communities that demand their games be more challenging and intricate. This article demonstrates the danger that pandering to that audience exclusively brings a danger of stagnation. It's difficult to provide a good challenge that doesn't have a noob-unfriendly learning curve.

There's lessons in here for any other sort of community. Barriers to entry and a community that only cares for its own needs lead to stagnation. This is especially relevant to communities based around technology, such as software applications or programming languages.
I just saw it today (wasn't there when I checked a few days ago) so I think they are rolling it out still
Way to avoid the probing sneak into your finances ;-)

That's straight out of 48 Laws of Power (crappy Pop-sych book with excellent chapter titles):

"Law 30:

Make Your Accomplishments Seem Effortless

Your actions must seem natural and executed with ease. All the toil and practice that go into them, and also all the clever tricks, must be concealed. When you act, act effortlessly, as if you could do much more. Avoid the temptation of revealing how hard you work— it only raises questions. Teach no one your tricks or they will be used against you."

In jest, of course :-P
Virals are getting trickier to figure out, that 'one night stand Danish girl with baby' from a while ago I called immediately and I got nothing but flak for it, that one turned out to be on the money, not having a clear beneficiary does not seem to be a hindrance.
Souke li Video by ~Suck it like u mean it~ - MySpace Video
This could have a completely rational explanation: If you find yourself overmatched, then it pays to take risks.

If I found myself playing golf against Tiger Woods, I'd try higher risk / higher reward shots, because if I stick to my typical game I'm surely going to lose. This would make my score worse on average, but who cares about that when once in a while the bet pays off and I win?
This article reminded me of this documentary - http://www.tilt-movie.com/
Spreedly updated their pricing recently: http://blog.spreedly.com/2009/11/12/improved-spreedly-pricin...
A world full of crippled devices that only allow you to use them in the specific ways that the manufacturer allows (or has thought of) does not give you more options - it gives you less options.

The reason I say crippled is that a general purpose TV (or other device) can encompass all the functionality of specialist device. It can even masquerade as a specialist device, only exposing its extra functionality to users who really want it. Often it is easier for the manufacturer of the device to use a general purpose operating system to build their specific functionality on. So the specialist device is actually just a crippled version of a more generally capable device.

Remember we are only talking about computation here, not hardware capabilities. A TV with a inbuilt toaster is a stupid idea because you are combining hardware capabilities without any real purpose. However if both the TV and the toaster are controlled by processor chips with networking capabilities then why not let them to talk to each other? Why not allow a toastcam app to run on the TV? Why not a allow an app that would allow to to draw a shape on the TV's touchcreeen and that shape would be burnt onto the toaster? We are obviously talking about a future with very cheap processing power here (and very precise heating in toasters) but that is the direction things are moving in.
Pick up a copy of "What color is your parachute?" Read up on the advice on informational interviews. Do your best to find some contacts in this field and see if they will agree to an informational interview. (Rule #1: You are NOT networking at this point. There can be no intent to finagle a job this way.)

Someone higher up than me at my company (not a bioinformatics thing) told me that I might qualify for some positions that it doesn't look like I would because I have a strong-ish math background and they basically look for that and do the other training in house because they simply can't find people who already do what they need done. So you might find that some jobs in bio-informatics follow a similar pattern. This information is unlikely to be public knowledge or advertised openly in job descriptions. You will need the inside scoop and that's where an informational interview would come in very handy.

Good luck with this.