skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Conversely, PHP has one several advantages over Rails. Most notably, immediacy. Deployment via SCP is very satisfying.

Though not as satisfying as using source control and having a one command "deploy" that's just as quick as SCPing a bunch of files.. I can deploy - to production - local builds of my Ruby projects in seconds.

There are no significant advantages to using PHP or disadvantages to using Ruby or Rails presented in that blog post, even though it tries to make it seem that way. (And on the library complaint, the Ruby libraries that came along for things like S3 and EC2 are better than the official ones by a long shot.)

Despite that, different strokes for different folks. Use what works for you and all that!
You can read every tweet from a single machine.

Sure, but the rate of tweets will determine how much processing you can do per tweet given a certain amount of computing power.
all mass production companies have products that fail now and then. But ok, what computer/brand would you recommend?
As the owner of a blog that's #1 in its niche in the range of those described (10k-50k subscribers), I'm not against getting unsolicited messages at all if they're relevant and my readers would find it interesting. Indeed, I don't receive enough mail like that.. :)
right now, making an x-y plotter tends to be an exercise in reinventing the wheel.

this is so utterly cool, it made my day...i love to see open source hardware projects! if makerbeam is successful as well it could really make OSH robotics come alive.
That seems to be the core of the argument of the article. In particular, it seems to drive at saying we need to be able to have more variation in teacher pay in order to attract the best talent, particularly in the STEM areas.
Wow, to say that Twitter owns the protocol is quite a statement at this early stage of the game for this space. Twitter just took the number one third-party feature and integrated it into their own platform, it’s called lists and if you don’t have it you will soon. What would protect me from the same?
“Fundamentally it’s a messaging protocol where you don’t specify the recipients." Let’s not be so shortsighted here. The opportunity is to innovate in the space and that just doesn’t mean on top of. Sounds like we just limited our options to those that can partner with instead of those that compete.
I wish Google would just hurry up and buy or copy dropbox.

I don't want to make online backups of my offline data, offline backups of my online data & all that mess. I just want my docs in my dropbox folder, edited with Google docs, Zoho, Word, OO or a hammer n chisel and still available to any of the others when I'm done. No uploading/downloading a mess of files and recording them on tape. If I want another backup, I just want to plug in Time Machine. That's how I do backups. Other people like to do them differently (why? Time Machine works great), they should be able to do their thing.

I don't want to upload/download files via the browser. I don't want files called G.Docs-old-new-good-partial.zip sitting around everywhere. I don't want to think about my files. I especially don't want to think about my files if some of them or on my machine, some of them or on Google, some of them some startup's servers. That last one is a real problem because I need to read Techrunch to hear about them going under in advance and transfer all the files to whatever new startup they're covering.

The cloud isn't replacing the desktop today. No one uses only Google docs or stores documents only in the cloud. People do both. They might always do both. I want a bridge.
If you manage to save them somehow (or distribute them to different machines), you can distribute the processing, I suppose.
Pan Am 747 Cabin Replicated In a Man's Garage
What if improvement is much harder to achieve in poor inner city schools? Wait. Take the "what if" out of that sentence. Replace the question mark with a period.

Incentive pay: good. Reason we don't have a good incentive pay system to argue with the teachers unions about: because incentive systems for teachers are hard.

Parent of two school-age kids speaking now: teach-the-test pressure is already bad enough without paying teachers to ratchet it up.
BlackBerry wristwatch available for pre-order
Yeah, if cleaning up were as simple as that, you wouldn't even need OS support, the drive could just trim itself as it went. But it's been 20 years since anybody designed disk geometry into a filesystem, and while TRIM may not be as complicated as all that, it still requires more bookkeeping than the OS usually does.

Optimally using TRIM, such that the OS will defragment the 512K blocks online instead of reusing them, is even more work, and I'm not sure that's what Windows is doing. They're just issuing TRIM opportunistically, AFAIK.
The key to Twitter is to think of it as a big old stream of data.

Of course you don't want to read it all. That's why you follow people. It pulls their information out of the stream, and makes a substream for you. The same goes with turning on people to mobile: it pulls them out of that stream, and into one even closer to you.
Latest gdb important milestone
all twitter needs now is a rabid steve ballmer and they're well on their way...

DEVELOPERS
Ask HN:  Dealing with controversy
I actually hate arguing with people, but I am constantly mired in controversy. The super short version: I have done something that is supposed to be "impossible", so I fairly often get personally attacked for trying to share information with other people with the intention of helping them.

In some ways, I'm "sensitive". Yes, I'm "sensitive" in terms of "not liking getting attacked", but I think the other side of it is I am just very aware of even relatively small things that are actually a form of hostility that most people wouldn't notice. On the one hand, this is often a subjectively very un-fun awareness. On the other hand, it has allowed me to accomplish something most people couldn't accomplish, and that is making it possible to discuss new ideas that most people can't effectively introduce. This turns me into the lightening rod for such controversies, I think in part because it's clear to a lot of people that if they can shut ME up, they can close the uncomfortable topic altogether. But I think another part of it is that publicly it gives the appearance that I am the cause of the whole thing rather than that I open the door for latent demand/interest which has been suppressed.

This is relevant to my goals as far as websites and such because the only way there will be an audience is if it becomes possible to have such conversations. Otherwise, I am merely the Lunatic Fringe and all too easy to ignore.

Any thoughts?
I am not up to date on hardware at the moment, so I can't comment. Usually I check Dell first (but the notebooks tend to be too ugly, so I can't really recommend them. I don't know their current lineup).

For notebooks I tend to like Samsung, but at the moment unfortunately they use that awful shiny Klavierlack coating (as do many other hardware manufacturers). Hope that goes away soon, then they might be recommendable again.
Here's a good starting place:

http://www.alfiekohn.org/teaching/edweek/meritpay.htm

Also note that Kohn's ideas on extrinsic versus intrinsic motivation are hardly original. Most people who work at startups should find them collegial, since they're one of the key ideas in books like _Peopleware_.
True, at Dell you have to catch the right moment. But I suppose there is a system behind it, maybe if it is important one could figure it out (also, always CALL Dell - usually they can give you better prices).

Maybe if you need a monitor right now, it is a problem. But I had another one, and when I heard about the good price, I just upgraded at that moment. Could have been any other moment, too.
One of the things I really like about Concur.next, and Tim Bray in general, is the humility with which he approaches things. He's totally open to the idea that maybe he's going down the wrong road, and attempts to back up ideas with quantifiable results.

Too often, programming language discussions devolve into pointless argument about aesthetics and edge cases. Concur.next seems to cut away a lot of the wankery to try and see the true strengths and weaknesses of these tools.

For an excellent example, check out the "Wide Finder" series. It's eye-opening to see how these languages perform under real workhorse conditions.
Also in this post is a video demonstrating multiple people using the same surface table with different keyboards. I find most of the projects in Johnny Lee's posts to be innovating.
By fast, you mean 70 times slower than other dynamic languages?

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/benchmark.php?test=all...
When is there too much security?
I didn't get it at first (the bump seemed arbitrary), but the first answer on the FAQ made me realize bump is pretty cool (they definitely need to highlight that this isn't just wireless with an arbitrary motion sensor to start the transfer):

Q: How does BumpTM work?

A: There are two parts to BumpTM: the app running on your device and a smart matching algorithm running on our servers in the cloud. The app on your phone uses the phone's sensors to literally "feel" the bump, and it sends that info up to the cloud. The matching algorithm listens to the bumps from phones around the world and pairs up phones that felt the same bump. Then we just route the contact information between the two phones in each pair.
Amazon appeals rejection of 1-Click patent in Canada
It is not economical to have many dedicated research scientists trying to figure out these things. They are figured out by people as they do their job.

... it is not economical to have many scientists trying to figure out the cures for illnesses. They are figured out by people as they treat other people.

Is that what you really want to say? Basic science does not have any immediate economic pay-off, no. But it often pays in spades later on.

because he has tried ways that failed and tried ways that succeeded

These are ways that worked for PG - and we have no idea if luck is involved. See his latest article - luck plays a large role in all startups.

I'm not saying mentoring is bad. In fact, it's pretty much the only thing that produces any results right now. But creating a solid foundation for the engineering side of computer science doesn't strike me as a bad idea...
The problem there would be two-fold.

A smaller business probably wouldn't have GPS tracking already implemented so our startup would have to be involved with the capitol cost of equipping their vehicles with that hardware at $400-$500/vehicle plus the apps/infrastructure to aggregate and upload the data to us.

Also I think the coverage would be spotty/sporadic. Who orders take-out in the morning? There goes the morning commute customer base. FedEx, UPS have trucks on the road 24/7. Also the time involved in the bus dev working with 200-500 pizza|taco|Chinese restaurants would be huge.

Three data sources (FedEx, UPS, DHL?), a few tens of millions of consumers accessing the data via two or three methods is doable. I just can't figure out how to make make any money on it.

As to the make the world a safer place I do not accept the argument that more cameras = safer world. http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/may/06/ukcrime1
Mu.

The question is unasked.
College students in their final year have about 16 years of experience doing short projects and leaving everything until the last minute.

interesting deficit of mainstream educational systems; I wonder what an educational system based on long-term projects would look like + what its effects would be on the students
Ask HN: Most efficient practice schedule for learning?
I surprisingly couldn't find much information about this online. Say you're trying to learn a new skill, whether it's guitar, a new language, coding, or even a sport like golf. Are there general guidelines to follow for the most efficient practice schedule? Is it "x" hours a day of deliberate practice? Is it daily with breaks every few days, or basically just get as much practice in as possible? How do you best optimize your practice to improvement ratio?
Rice Water For Healthy Skin
NASA's Nebula Cloud Computing Platform
Maybe going beyond simple wordcount to determining statistical probabilities of certain words / phrases being mentioned together & at "high" frequencies would taper down the number of words you need a baseline for (because I also don't assume the baseline will be static or even near stable - changing trends of discussion topics)

This idea also ties into the "new news" idea a bit. What we've seen from events like #iranelection is that twitter is a good (but could be great) tool for detecting news at the onset of events (before big stations pick up on it), but really starts to get bogged down with "spam" or RT's once a topic gets picked up. I'd like to see news that integrates these abnormal spikes in tweets that hint at a bigger underlying story w/some sort of follow-up with more context about the event.
Iceland Loses McDonald’s: New Rule?
Ask HN: We want to find a Adobe Air Co-founder/Advisor
There was a recent post on HN about a good business idea and we have a formed a small advisory chat for the idea on campfire. We are ideally looking for someone that is not only a AIR programmer, but has multiple programming disciplines to add some value to the discussion.

This is by no means a job posting or a for hire post, just a casual discussion on the possibilities and opportunities with the idea. The idea is definitely in infancy...

If you are interested or know someone who is, please send an email to bryan and then the @ sign schindyguy.com OR leave your email in here and I will invite you to the campfire discussion.

Thanks for your help. Please forward this link to anyone you might think would be interested. We would really appreciate it.
What did you do that was supposed to be "impossible"?

What do you mean by "attacked"? (Phyiscally?)

"Controversies"?

The whole thing is very vague. :-)
How to Find and Hire Amazing People, Part 1
Does morality -- like chess -- require significant computation in the brain?
One could argue that moral behavior is a result of deep lookahead using a powerful brain. That's because for someone to appreciate the consequences of his/her actions in complex and varied contexts, massive heuristic search is required -- much like chess.
watches that needs to be recharged each 4 days? no way!
I don't know. I am a weight lifter like you but I don't keep much of a log. I tried one for the iphone but I got sick of substituting different lifts for others because they weren't in the database. I think you have to differentiate between casual workout-ers and more serious ones, because they will both accept different things.
How to Get Free Government Financial Assistance for Your Small Business
Will Facebook End Up Like Netscape?
Twitter is not a protocol, any more than Windows or Myspace or Symbian are protocols. Twitter is a proprietary platform under the control of a single company, and treating it as a protocol is dangerous to both companies and their users.
that all depends on your budget
ok so here's my idea:

you take the data out of the hose and run a bunch of "machine learning" over it to figure out what twitterverse is saying about apple. or rather, apple stock.

if you can guess the opening direction the next day better than 50% of the time i'd say you would have some money on your hands.

i kid, i kid...
"Many Latino families don't view themselves as their children's first teachers, assigning that role to schools, said study co-author Alice Kuo, a UCLA assistant professor of pediatrics."

Depending on schools would be a downfall, especially in some parts of the country observed in the reported national study. It would definitely be helpful to let more parents know how they can encourage their children's learning in early childhood.
That's a good point. Perhpaps it could be a very indirect effect then. For example I heard some antibiotics lower the effectiveness of birth control, so perhaps a mutation that makes you get strep throat more often? Just a hypothetical example..

But that makes me wonder, whatever mechanism antibiotics use to lessen the effectiveness, couldn't a small mutation use the same mechanism?
Exactly -- thus the question of how many machines would be needed to perform a certain amount of processing per tweet, which ultimately comes down to my original question of how many tweets there are.
But most people, IMO, do not think deeply about morality, they just mimic others around them.

I guess that would still apply to what you said though - it would take a very complex algorithm to come up with the optimal set of beliefs to minimize resistance you'd meet from others in the society you live in (I believe such an algorithm would not be unlike what goes on in the minds of many people).
I'd guess that using signup codes is not about merely creating the illusion of exclusivity. I think the real reason behind using signup codes is so you can track your marketing efforts: where did I spend time/money and how effective was it? Without it you are flying blind.
Do you plan to host reocities indefinitely, or is this just a stopgap measure before you can donate the collection to another organization?
This should get you started, the primary research source for many of the current ideas on deliberate practice:

http://projects.ict.usc.edu/itw/gel/EricssonDeliberatePracti...
To paraphrase Clinton's winning phrase from his first election, "It's the product, stupid."

Create a great product, provide value, and people will come. Case in point, you come to news.ycombinator.com. Not the best domain name out there, is it?
Suppose you're bootstrapping and have little cash.
Studies have been done (Kohn cites one in "The Folly Of Merit Pay") that show more teachers are driven out of teaching by the unintended negative consequences of performance-based pay than are attracted to it by the prospect of more money.

It's not hard to see why. Every performance measurement scheme we have today, from federal, state, and municipal school grading to "value-added" schemes, has produced a nightmare of standardized testing and teach-the-test regimes that have crowded out experiments from curricula.

You don't have to agree with Alfie Kohn to recognize the problem. Saying "we need to compensate the best teachers to incentivize them" is like saying "we need cars that consume far less gasoline". It's the "how" that's the question.
I hope there is somebody besides Alfie Kohn writing about this.

http://www.britannica.com/blogs/2009/02/alfie-kohn-is-bad-fo...

But what about the point in the originally submitted link that in most states NOTHING in particular is done to evaluate teachers?
My web presence is getting drawn more and more to live video, and my current solution works...sort of, and I'm always looking for better alternatives-- but it's good to see other alternatives that aren't just out of the box.

I know the justin.tv guys are on here, would love to ping some ideas off you and make some connections.
Nice cherry picking.

I can cherry pick: http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/benchmark.php?test=all...

too: http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/benchmark.php?test=all...

My favourite chart is still this one though: http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/benchmark.php?test=all...

If that doesn't show how optimized Erlang is for certain use cases, nothing does.
you're idea reminded me of this blog post:

http://blog.directededge.com/2009/10/23/facebooks-news-feed-...

i certainly agree that increasingly, software fortunes will be made by applying ever more intelligent and adaptive criteria to the information that actually makes it to an eyeball.
it looks like someone already pointed it out, but you should def talk to the archive team on irc http://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=IRC_Channel

They helped me out with an idea I had a while back on shortened urls. The same thing needs to happen with shortened urls cause once that shortened url service goes down, all the links are lost...
Modern CSS Layouts: The Essential Characteristics
I remember the very early prototypes of what became Asimo. The difference between then and the ones that were released a couple years ago was quite startling. Seeing this video specifically reminds me of the same thing. I'm envisioning how this technology will look in 5 years. I think we're a hell of a lot closer to life-like android/robots than we are away.
The mimicking could be viewed as copying heuristics from others. These moral heuristics would correspond to evaluation functions in chess.

But one could argue that good heuristics are insufficient for moral behavior in general -- sometimes massive heuristic search is required in novel contexts.
Amen!

This has been one of my rallying points for years: in school, you are not taught how to collaborate on a team, or even basic software engineering practices like source control. This is ridiculous because every software developer needs to know this. Even if you become an academic, you should be using source control at the very least!

As it is, you're thrust into the thick of it with your first job.

My only experience during my CS degree with working on a team was interesting because of what it got right and wrong.

It was a project to develop control software for a simulated hardware device. We had a team of 4 collaborating with another team of 4 (working on a different part of the system).

So it was good because it was collaborative and you had to depend on another team. We also had to produce documentation.

But we weren't taught how to collaborate with CVS or anything like that. We sent around compiled binaries by email.

So I support any effort to teach collaboration and common tools as part of the curriculum.
But are you saying that the reform proposed in the originally submitted link would make things WORSE for children in poor inner city schools? Right now their teachers are, for the most part, not evaluated for effectiveness by any standard. And we all know that the kids in the suburbs are better off (not least, because they live in suburban homes in suburban neighborhoods, but also because of schooling quality) than the kids in poor inner city schools. I haven't seen a proof here yet in your kind replies and Alex's that the reform proposed in the submitted link would schools worse for any kind of student. I'm a parent of four school-age children, and living in a whole neighborhood full of children, and I do hope the next generation sees some improvement in education.

After edit (and your initial reply to this post): My apologies, I forgot that the submitted link here was a news source, rather than the full report

http://www.policy2.org:85/images/stories/documents/policy2.0...

of the organization advocating this change in policy. The stakeholders consulted in preparing the report may not all enthusiastically support student testing programs (some of them surely do not), but the report claims that the trade-offs of linking teacher evaluation to student achievement are better than the trade-offs of not linking teacher evaluation to any criteria in particular. I think that is a reasonable view.
Cell towers already have this info -- and the volume should make up for the imprecision, as by now an overwhelming majority of vehicles in motion must have an active cell phone inside. So video is overkill for traffic monitoring.

See also Dash Navigation:

http://www.dash.net
I don't buy the assumption that the biggest problem is teacher quality. Hasn't it been repeatedly shown that, statistically, the factors that most strongly predict a child's academic success are far and away related to their family, not their school?

Of course, getting up in public to say "these kids are failing school--and it's their parents' fault" doesn't really advance anyone's political agenda.