skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
First, you both are being annoying about the whole thing. From the sounds of it you are both in agreement. tptacek and you are just coming at the same solution from different directions. But it's clear that HN is full of brilliant people both in technology and business.

Second and OT. I'm interested in anything you can share regarding
"given a set of a large number of search terms with a lower cardinality bound of 1 million, how can we scan a set of strings against this search set without exhaustively scanning for every search term in the string set while preserving lemmas on the search set? How can we do this phonetically? How can we do this probabilistically in a weighted n-space?"

It sounds like this maps to a particular problem set I'm working on now. Any papers? We've looked into PLSs, numeric hash buckets, independent dispatch of search tests across large distributed systems, etc. All are either no better than a linear exhaustive search in the worst case, too network intensive, too memory intensive or too processor intensive for the applications we're interested in.
Lean startups aren’t Cheap Startups
The scenario descriptions are distinctly reminiscent of Berners-Lee's scenario descriptions for the 'semantic web' several years ago. Of course, that is now rather out of fashion, but not entirely justifiably. The 'semantic' angle was somewhat fanciful, but the core idea was the data web: It is one thing to put APIs on everything, but another for all the data types and formats to work together. That was more the aspect that RDF was addressing. It is neither thoroughly convincing nor completely apposite, but worth factoring in to the consideration anyway. (The essential RDF concept was elegant, whatever anyone says.)
Web browsers display CAPTCHAs every day with an API known as HTML.
>But Apple can't find the margins in the product line and the equation means that they have no offering for this huge hole in their lineup.

I don't think that satisfied tptacek. Which was how this went quickly down flamewar and troll territory.
I have to agree with the focus on one school. I thought originally that having a few key Michigan schools would be easy enough to manager, but as it turns out, it's really hard. Believe it or when I started this thing, I thought the hardest part would be getting data about schools. In hindsight, that's easy, I should have been more worried about how crappy this site looks from the get-go.
Also see VertexDB (http://github.com/stevedekorte/vertexdb).

It is a high performance persistent graph database with filesystem like semantics (will soon support FUSED). It presents an API for an atomic queue pop operation, which allows for synchronization of jobs.
End to Fight Over Skype May Be Near
Re: Jeff Eaton's Blog Rounding up whitehouse.gov Drupal Implementation coverage
OK, was I the only one who initially read the headline as "Excrement Fills New Chinese Exchange..." ?
Sorry for the link via Google, but I think that's the way to link to the NYT for those who don't have a sub.
(1) Because introducing a product at the netbook price point would cannibalize sales that would go to the lowest-cost Macbook, and torpedo their profitability.

(2) Because allowing clones forces Apple to compete with other hardware vendors, and Apple sells a unified hardware/software product, and there is nothing in law or standard business principle that allows us to dictate to Apple how they package their products.
A blog about surprise
Ask HN: Entrepreneurial Endeavors outside of the U.S + Europe
I would like to learn about startups outside of the U.S. and Europe. If you are an entrepreneur outside of the US and Europe, please share with us your startup, your country and your experience so far.
They're saying different things. The author's article looks at the US as a whole, and using the most recent statistics of enrollment, concludes that our school system is better now than it ever has been in the past.

The Higher Education paper uses current statistics on changing demographics in the country, and the number of workers in those demographics with a college degree, to project into the future. They predict that the educational gap between whites and minorities will increase.

These are not mutually exclusive conclusions.
How I Buy Petrol? FLASH - Play Free Games Online at Y8.com
Wasn't Steve's base salary $1? Shouldn't we compare base salary and total compensation when looking at this stuff?

Also, was he worth that bonus in 2001?
Steve Job's bonus may have been $43 million, but John Paulson made $3.7 billion in 2007 -- it's not an executive bonus, but I think that excessive compensation, regardless of structure, is what people get annoyed about.

These results are technically accurate, in that they cover "named executives for companies in the Russell 3000", but I think they're a bit misleading because (1) most hedge funds are not listed companies and (2) traders who get massive performance bonuses are typically not executives.

EDIT: "hedge funds are _not_ listed companies"
I guess my only response to this is "where do we draw the line?" If a company is doing better after 1 year? 5 years? 10 years?

And ultimately, that's for the board and investors to decide/influence.
People who drink Natty Ice are 35% more likely to live in a southern state and own a pickup truck, and people between the ages of 21 and 30 who drink Pabst Blue Ribbon are 125% more likely to be douchebags. These statistics are true 300% of the time.
Any code? You mean any code other than JavaScript?
"Why don’t you put magnetos in your cars?"

Because we are not likely to die because the car engine stopped.

I sympathize with him, but airworthy and street-legal are very, very different concepts. If he wants advanced electronic controls for airplane systems on non-experimental aircraft, then he should engineer them around the components that have been exhaustively certified and field-proven in a way they can provide adequate fall-back in case of a problem. Given time, they will end-up in commercial aviation.
Entrepreneurs: The New Celebrities
There's a good video about it here: http://vimeo.com/7326668
Dramatically less labor per ton hauled also - how many employees are on a freight train pulling 100 cars? vs. how many drivers in 100 semis?
Let me guess.

If you drink expensive imports you have: a higher education, a higher income, embrace socialist political philosophies, drive an expensive car, read more books, listen to public radio, and perhaps most characteristically, spend just a little too much time appreciating your alleged superiority over everyone else.
Ask HN: How do you recommend things to your friends?
If you want to recommend something, where do you go? Twitter? Facebook? Topic-specific networks like Yelp, Goodreads, thesixtyone, etc? Email/IM?

Similarly, if you're looking for a recommendation, do you use Vark? Google? Twitter?

Since I know someone's going to say it: Yes, I'm using HN for research. Is there something wrong with that?
Congratulations! You truly deserve it.
My company just published a book written for NaNoWriMo 2007: http://www.onyxneon.com/books/gigapolis/ .
Use a fractional system. Half a point spent for each point you are able to vote. Otherwise you will have deflation.

(And a little inflation should not hurt too much. We have a lot of inflation on HN right now.)
This sort of wide-eyed devotion is their PR. You're not going to replicate it in your own company by buying into it.

From the article: I don't use an alarm clock. Lately, I've been naturally waking up at 6:38 every morning. I used to wake up at 7:31 every morning, which is actually when I was born. So that was kind of creepy.

How self-indulgent must you be before you agree to a piece like this?
You could always put a <a href...></a> pair around the image, just like we do with <img ...> tags.
I agree with all of your points, but I think many of these costs are minimized by the other point mentioned in the OP: following the UNIX philosophy. The smaller and simpler your service is, the better. If you have a service that can't be accessed with a simple API, you probably have more than one service, and would benefit from splitting it into multiple APIs.

Another thing worth mentioning is the possibility of building your API first, and then building your service on top of it. If you are providing a web service, then it [usually] boils down to data access and management. Figure out what data you are managing for your users and what you need to do with it, then build your API around that. If you plan to have a public facing API from the start, this approach makes sense (in the same way that using javascript only for progressive enhancement of a working site makes sense).

Of course, because you are an "internal user" of the API, you can bend the rules a little more than the average client, but the less you do this, the more useful your API is.

Regarding points 2 and 4: if public APIs for data access become the norm, this will simply become the cost of doing business. Secure API's aren't that difficult, and updating an API while maintaining backwards compatibility can be done, especially if you transition these changes and notify all broken clients.
I'm pretty convinced you're just a troll at this point. The real Ptacek couldn't possibly be this pedantic.
Maybe I'm old fashioned, but I usually ask people I trust directly via email, phone, IM or face-to-face.

When I tweet asking for stuff, I tend to get people I do not know recommending things, usually things that they have some interest in pushing on me. Ick.
VeoProject connects project plans to Google Calendars
6/11 would be a majority
Ahem.

http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/books_vdqi

http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/books_ei

http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/books_visex

(edit: i realize you're probably being sarcastic, but i'll just leave these links here for the unenlightened)
IMHO though, rail passenger travel is going to see a resurgence in the USA in the coming years. Air travel is in shambles, costs are going through the roof and service level is dropping precipitously. For short to mid-range runs I think rail is going to take over again. This would involve un-screwing Amtrak somehow, but if the demand exists, someone will fulfill it.

I took the Amtrak train from Vancouver BC to Seattle WA last night - it was very nice. Price was reasonable (about 1/3 the cost of flying), seats huge, I got cell reception the whole way, power plug in the seats, and even a lounge car with snacks and drinks. There's really no better way to travel.
Musical masturbation
Where is china? I think democracy leads to more wealth, which creates better public education.
reliability even more than performance. KVM was not even close to production ready in '05. HVM mode under xen was also crap. I expect 3 year uptime; running some 'qemu with hardware support' (which really is what both xen hvm and quemu are) just could not deliver that at the time.

Also emulated devices leave a much larger attack surface from the domU -> dom0 host.

I am sure that KVM has improved a whole lot in the last few years, but most of the people using it seem to be using it for 'primarily use box as hardware, spin up a virtual to test something' (this, I think, is why the kernel guys like it so much... that is what they need, and KVM is much better than Xen if that is your use case.) I really need a 'dedicated virtualization server' - the hardware only exists to service virtuals.

If I had some time, I'd do some benchmarks; I'd be interested to see what the backends the kernelnewbies bench uses... for example using tap: or phy: is sometimes an order of magnitude less bad than using file:// (of course, sometimes you get caching going in the dom0, and file:/ looks faster, but it's still a really bad idea.)

I did start with FreeBSD jails, but switched to xen after I found just what a bad idea sharing pagecache is.
One man's obfuscation is another man's expressiveness.
Actually you can. That's part of the deadweight loss of taxation: you are forced to spend money on stuff you don't want and are unable to spend on stuff you do want.

(...)

Now, in a democracy, people in the situation of person X may only make up 50% - 1 of the population, but that doesn't change the fact that they lose.

That is all true of course. What I was pointing out is that the democratic group decision to spend more on healthcare is also a spending decision. The counterpoint is what you mentioned, that 50% - 1 could be against it. In Scandinavia however you will find that support for the welfare state is very high. Another important consideration is that the public healthcare in these countries tends to be much more efficient per person than the one you get for you private dollars otherwise. You could of course argue that that is just the market currently being inefficient.
http://searchyc.com/lean+cheap+startup

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=917285

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=917370

and

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=917290

which is where all the comment are.
Agreed. I can't justify a use case for CAPTCHAs outside the browser, I was just pointing out that such an API is very conceivable. As silentbicycle said, a CAPTCHA is for preventing scripting, so you would (hopefully) still need a human somewhere in the process.
Mossad Hacked Syrian Official’s Computer Before Bombing Mysterious Facility
In the post I am claiming simplicity as something that users will appreciate, not the producer. Your is an argument which assumes that "segmentation" is better than a unique price, which is the very assumption of classical texts, and which I doubt - its one of the points I make in the post.

Of course, I may be wrong...
Clojure N00b Tips from Tim Bray
FBI Says ‘Money Mule’ Scams Now Top $100 Million
Which is kind of strange as the service is running on Linode itself. I'm currently working on redundancy across data centers/providers.
Thinking Functionally In Ruby – A Great Presentation by Tom Stuart
Yeahhhhh, no. We've been talking about personal pod-based mass transit for decades and it has yet to materialize, even without the sci-fi billion-dollar mag-lev thing.

Rail will be the de facto standard for mass transit for years to come. Why? Because it goes really, really fast, we have had literally hundreds of years of experience running trains of all sorts, and experience, know-how, and resources are available cheaply.

Honestly, I don't even think mag-lev will take over as the primary form of rail transport. It's still too expensive, and the gains not sufficient to justify the additional cost. We have high speed trains running impossibly fast on existing rail infrastructure - unless you can double that speed and break the sound barrier or something, there's no incentive to spend ludicrous cash on that sort of system. Even Shanghai, a city that seemingly has unlimited funds for infrastructure, has shied away from mag-lev after building the airport line.
Re: grand piano, I'd guess this is hard to understand for someone who doesn't play piano. It might be that of 200 engineers, there's a high chance that about a dozen of them will love playing on a grand piano enough to make it worthwhile for them to come in on weekends every once in awhile, just to be able to "get away" and play a bit.

Re: marketing, I'd imagine a lot of the time, marketing happiness verus engineer happiness is a tradeoff. Either you stick to very concrete business deadlines imposed by perceived market, making lots of engineering sacrifices along the way, or you build things at the pace set by engineering. You can certainly over-do it in either direction, but there's also a lot of workable gray area.
James Fallows wrote an interesting book a decade ago called Free Flight. Part of the book covered the dismal state of general aviation, resulting from a death spiral in which product liability suits played a prominent role. The rest of the book is about attempts to revive the industry.

So, yes, this is about a stagnant industry that has invested little in engineering over the last 50 years or so. Most general aviation aircraft have a lot in common with cars in Cuba. With that context, I took some of the comments in the article as being directed not at the conservatism not of manufacturers, but of owners doing retrofits and experimental plane builders.
In my opinion, the best of the many, many monad tutorials I've seen. I'm lucky enough to work with the author.
Beam particles re-enter the LHC
That's my point. Not everything <should> have an API since there are so many things we put captchas around.
Sent a patch to Rich, so we'll hopefully see it in the official implementation.
When the dollar devalues and gas goes to $5-$10+ per gallon, we will be reminded once again why he is the Oracle of Omaha.

If he thinks that's going to happen, he should buy OIL ETFs, not railroads...
I want a build system with an external API.
Not so fast. You wrote "It does then compare retail consumption which shouldn't include any of these things and thus be more objective." You otherwise assumed that health care is largely private in the US. It's not - it's about half public. Moreover, the public spending is concentrated on the poor. So, they're getting govt healthcare and buying big screen TVs.

What I assumed and is true is that healthcare is more private in the US than in Scandinavia, which it is. So the argument still holds that if you are comparing private spending in the US that will include more healthcare than in Scandinavia. Retail spending however will not as you don't buy healthcare as a retail good.

>As someone else has posted, the "not get cancer" stuff, which isn't due to health care, overmatches what happens when you get cancer, which is when health care matters.

What makes you think "not get cancer" has nothing to do with healthcare? Two very large healthcare factors come to mind. If you die sooner from another illness you won't get cancer and if you get continuous preventive medicine you won't get as much cancer. Diet and other unrelated factors will be important as well but "not getting cancer" has a lot to do with health care.

The other flaw in the whole "cancer survival is higher so healthcare must be better" argument is that although cancer is a very important illness it is far from the only important one and not even the major cause of death. Having very good cancer survival rates could just mean that the US healthcare spends an irrational amount of resources on it, neglecting other diseases. But I don't really know.
I'd also like to add in 3) no stop and go traffic. That, by far, is one of the worst contributors to poor fuel economy in cars. If we could all go directly to our destinations in our cars without stopping for traffic/stop signs/stop lights, our fuel economy would look a whole lot better.
The United States does not have electrified freight service. Yes, our trains are worse than many third world countries.
Why is Weddingjojo better than TheKnot (which my wife and I used in 2006)? If you don't have a clear, simple and convincing answer to that, I'd worry.
If it spreads by word of mouth, you can use your friend's white list. If you see everything you can pick the best of a dozen posts and then use the authors white list. Once you have a human written white list to start from you can manage the volume by controlling the depth that you descend the search tree, and start adding authors you like to your direct list. Every time you add an author to your direct list you chose a number to set a search depth with him as the tree root and his direct list as the first level, so I think you quickly take control and adjust the list to your taste.

I'm more worried about how a new author gets read. Nobody sees his comments because he is on nobodies white list. I guess there has to be a slush pile. When people get bored they can turn to the slush pile and maybe find a gem. Alternatively one may wish to see all the replies to ones own posts, not just those from the authors on ones white list. If that is common practice it gives a new author an audience of one simply by replying.
Good luck making your own SWF creator or player without stepping on an Adobe patent.
Five ways that cloud storage will change the way we work
And ultimately, that's for the board and investors to decide/influence.

Yes and no. The problem is, the executive is doing the work now, not in 5 or 10 years, and they're probably going to expect something for their efforts. If you delay too much of their compensation into the future, they'll get fed up and go work for another company that doesn't do it that way.

You could pay them up front with a clause that, if the company falters in some time frame, the executive (whether currently employed or not) owes some portion of the money back to the company--but there's no guarantee that you'll be able to collect from them. The executive could be dead, bankrupt, or have left the country.

And what if the economy blows up for some unrelated reason in five years, or some other external disaster strikes? Suddenly the company is doing terribly through no real fault of the executive, who is now stuck with not only having to find work in bad conditions but suddenly not getting paid for work he did over the last five years. What sensible executive is going to want to take that risk?

In general, there tends to be an incentive to push executive rewards closer to the short term, despite how much sense it seems to make that it should be the long-term view that matters, and regardless of how the shareholders may personally feel about it.
Out here the homeless are just all over downtown. Without being a city planner I'm not really qualified to say why, but I have some pet theories:

- Seattle's transit sucks. It's one of the worst in any city I've ever lived in. This plus the lack of any natural borders around the city (mountains, large bodies of water, etc) has resulted in massive suburban sprawl, leaving downtown to rot. Unlike most cities, downtown is not a hub nor a destination.

- As a result of this, there's very little in the way of commercial development that you would see in most cities. Where you would see the hip shopping district in most cities, bustling with people day and night, downtown Seattle is mainly office buildings, and thus completely deserted at night. There is no such thing as the restaurant/hangout district that I've seen in just about every other city I've been to.

- Lack of social programs and policing have resulted in major arterial streets being taken over by aggressive panhandlers and drug dealers/users at night. People stay home as a result - I know many people who admit to staying home at night because of sketchy characters milling about. This adds to the desertedness, which further harms potential commercial development.

Seattle as a city is perhaps 30 years behind in its civic development. Even with the new light rail system there is still no effective way for most people to get downtown - the entire city reeks of crime, poverty, and dirtiness. Walking downtown you don't get the impression of a bustling, growing city - you see a city in slow decay, desperately trying to hold onto the image of better times.
The article you linked to does only look at static data. That’s to simplistic. What if you factor some dynamic data into that equation?

For example Germany: this country exports about 20% more of value than it imports per year, while the US imports about 60% more of value than it exports.
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/...

Doesn’t look so bad for Germany anymore if you consider there will be a tomorrow, does it?

I know, this is a simplification to, but it’s up to you to investigate further using a little more trustworthy source than something like “Loans & Debt Consolidation - Get Cash NOW!”
For the UNIX philosophy I like the idea of small, useful tools loosely coupled. A big part of UNIX is that there are a lot of little tools that do one thing well. The smaller the tool is, less attack surface there will be, and each tool can interact with a common authentication/authorization interface to further simplify things.