skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The data input bottleneck is small. If you're going to do something in n*log(n), you should be fine. If you're going something in n^2, you're fucked anyway. Map Reduce is your friend. On that note, I only learned about Hive since coming to facebook. They made and open sourced it. Check it out: http://wiki.apache.org/hadoop/Hive
Fear of Improvisation (and Clunkers)
This is the most provocative comment I've read on my post. Reading it, I find myself thinking I will never be good because I have some sort of emotional disability that gives me shaking hands compared to some other people that are imbued with the magic gift of curiosity and fearlessness.

Logically, I consider the possibility that such things can be learned or cultivated, and that perhaps I can one day be fearless and curious. But emotionally, there is something pessimistic inside me that believes I will always be this way.

It's quite a disturbing thing to contemplate.
While I agree with everything you say, I think one has to accept that not only are many programmers tradesmen, but many of them are happy being tradesmen. I know people who won't consider any programming job where they won't be working on php based web sites, because that's all they know and they have no real interest in learning anything else. Those people are "php programmers" and can be slotted into great number of projects with minimal investment.

What is needed is not to get annoyed at these peoples existence or their approach to programming, but to find a way to differentiate between them and other types of programmers.
Google has a cache:

http://74.125.77.132/search?hl=en&safe=off&rls=en-us...
Simple Graph: Needles and haystacks and such.
Only if you're attractive.
It is GMP, but the programmer doesn't know that. It is simply a good implementation choice (for speed, anyway), which is what the benchmark measures.
I get it, but I think there needs to be a more clearly defined portal in Facebook that is specifically for business and commerce. While its current state is great for connecting with the public (consumers), I think as more businesses continue to sign up for facebook, they need a portal to talk directly to one another.
The difference however is that SMB, for example, was implemented by Microsoft but can run on any machine. Twitter is tied to twitter machines.
Because those of us that know how to implement that sort of system have no need for it. There are thousands of things I want to implement; making something I'll never use is not one of those.
I concur; we're developing our site for a Korean audience. Hangul (Korean Language) users even stick with XP os and older versions of IE to avoid the hassle of upgrading.
If your load has predictable peaks it may make a lot of sense to spin up 1 quadruple extra large server rather than the equivalent number of large instances, particularly if you're talking about something like a memcached server.
Isn't the problem rather that e-mail (or rather smtp) is dead (or should be). It seems to me the only solution to this problem is a web-based BBS or replace e-mail with something else. Or is there a mailling list server that requires users to authenticate before accepting a post?
Also known as segmentation and targeting.
NO QA.

5yrs ago I bought a 15" LCD. got home, 5 dead pixels. back to the store, asked to open the box there, had to attach to their POS to do testing. 3 dead pixel... after opening the 3rd box i was satisfied.

now, last year, got a samsung 22" wide screen LCD. Got home, the border gloss finish (talking about 7in of black shiny plastic) was hideously scratched. back to the store. opened 1, 2, 3 box. no more in stock. took only the receipt to a store in another part of town, opened 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. ok, got one with no scratch. probably some thing scratching them on the assembly line. because the protective foil plastic was OK above the scratches.

But i will buy samsung again :) at least, when i opened the LG and then the samsung, the samsung one had little round QA stickers on the LCD panel :)

now, i've also have plenty of anecdotes about LG cdrom and cdram and recently a dvdram driver, if you care. they are all about the laser life being like 40h of work instead of the some-thousand they claim.
"Are you conscientious?"
Reminds me of Esher. Very cool.
I'm the editor of an online magazine (volunteer-based, no ads) that allows comments. On a few occasions when we've posted reports on deaths, those reports have attracted comments from people who knew the deceased and wanted to leave a message somewhere.

It's strange and touching that a site intended to discuss urban issues might also serve as a de facto online memorial, but there you have it: people will find their own uses for any reasonably open system.
Please do repost, it's a good read. What are you going to switch to?
This advice is applicable to so much more than Go or programming. For any endeavor, you have to be willing to fail for a while before ever gaining any kind of competence. Writing, sports, picking up women.
How a physics rebel is shaking up the video game world, literally
Not really a problem with email. It's more a series of critical errors on the part of the Google Groups system. If they were to implement Gmail-quality spam filtering then most of my concerns would be moot (since I never would have had to turn on moderation and these sketchy spoofers would've been caught right at the gate).
With the proliferation of wireless internet solutions(at least in Canada), working from some remote location never being easier than now. The land up north is cheap , wind turbine is less than 1000$ so enough to power light and computers.I keep coming to that idea over and over again :)
The only thing that stops me are mosquitoes ....
I wanted to know beforehand how to delete a Facebook account permanently

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=16929680703

http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/1522294/how_to_quit...

and shared log-in information with immediate family members, so that we can decide what stays up and what gets deleted if one of us dies.

Based on other Internet businesses I have dealt with over the years, I think it is a lot more likely that my Facebook info will be permanently lost than that I will die while Facebook is still a going business, but I could be wrong.
I personally believe that a lot of the issues that Men in general face has come from the changing definition of what a Man should in the face of our growing reliance on complex, possibly automated, electrical and mechanical systems.

I think a good indicator of this is the reduced standing of skilled trades within most people's minds. Not so long ago being a carpenter or a plumber was considered a great job that paid well, nowadays many people perceive working in a trade as a last option for those that don't have better prospects. Canada is suffering a serious shortage of skilled trade workers and I feel this directly reflects the change in attitude toward those jobs.

While this transition is not so bad for those that are more intellectually minded, I have to question whether this change is badly warping what society feels a Man should be...

Traditionally I would say that a Man was perceived as someone that could be relied upon in nearly any situation, his working knowledge of the systems around him (mechanical or otherwise, and simpler than they are now) was fairly good and could be brought to bear whenever there was a problem. These days I think it is harder and harder to find people (in my generation at least) that match this description.

I think that one of the effects of this is that the stereotypical unthinking, unimaginative young man doesn't see the number of options for his future that he would have 30 or more years ago. Rather than being respected and happy in his job in a trade he feels that he is being marginalized by society. This clearly has the possibility to lead to resentment of and violence toward the world that put him where he is...
You can dick around with all the abstractions, frameworks, and meta-programming you want but often that's just more complicated and a waste of time.

PHP is itself an abstraction. CPU instructions don't generate HTML, after all...

It is interesting that you assume PHP is the perfect level of abstraction. I think that is called "blub". You should try deeper abstractions some time.

Today I wrote a complicated database query joining by saying "$securities_rs->find({ security => 'USD', month => DateTime->new( year => 2009, month => 1 )})->messages->users->count" to see how many users looked up data on the USD for 2009/1. It is one SQL query, and there is no speed hit for writing it this way. A bit of abstraction made my app infinitely flexible; any query I can imagine is just a line of Perl. Abstraction is good.

Don't think that pounding on your keys as fast as possible makes your productive -- it doesn't. Thinking about your application's needs and designing your code to be easily tweaked to fit those needs is what you really want to do. When you have a mess of SQL, HTML, and PHP all in one file, you are stuck with what you wrote forever. When you abstract things, big changes only involve a small amount of code.
Image Retargeting (Content Aware Image Resizing)
Vimprobable, vim(perator)-like WebKit-Browser
Scareware launched from tech blog
So I just read Vaynerchuk's book, what a waste of money.
I'd say I want my money back, but I got it for free.

First of all the book is short. Really short. I read the entire thing in 28 minutes. And it's mostly recycled content. If you watched his videos, you already "read" 90%-95% of the book.

Anyways if you know Gary's style, you know that he acts like a ferret on crack in his videos. And you can probably figure out that it doesn't translate well into the written word. For the entire 28 minutes I felt like he was yelling at me from across the room. I'm guessing that was supposed to represent his "passion" or whatever.

It's funny, he always makes it a point to say that he started a video blog because he sucked at writing, and then turns around and writes a book.

Advice wise, it's the same old idea that he's been preaching, go start a blog, you'll get rich eventually. Which is obviously bullshit. However, if you read Amazon comments, you can see Vaynerchuks fanboys out in force.

The thing that caught my eye, was his claim that he'd have even more success now, here is a quote:

if I started the blog today, now that more
people have iPhones and are watching online
videos, it would take me even less time to get
on everyone’s radar.

Apparently he never heard of signal to noise.

Basically to me the whole book, just boiled down to "I did it and so can you" commercials you see on CNBC. The only difference is that you already bought the book. Throw in a "comes with a FREE!!! installed blog" and the difference is pretty much gone.

Frankly I find the ideas more or less bullshit. Sure the overall, work your ass off message is a good one, but doing it through blogs is retarded.

Actually I'd like him to prove his assertions.

If blogs are so great and so easy, here is a challenge, get a fake name and repeat your success. I dunno a blog about Jets or something. Only caveat is that you can't use your current status to drive traffic, so no garyvee twits about this awesome jets blog that you happened to find. Think of what an exciting opportunity/publicity stunt that'd be for your brand, coming out a year from now, to reveal that the most successful Jets Blog was actually you running an experiment to show everyone that yes this stuff works.

So to summarize. Nothing new. Heard it all before. Short as hell. More hype, no real advice beyond generics. Waste of money. If you really need to read it, just read it in the store, it's so short you can read the entire thing in one sitting.
Talk about being in front of a massive opportunity--to be positioned helping people save money just as the disaster hits.
Recovery.gov Augmented Reality Mashup
400 tweets/sec + metadata comes out to less than 0.5 mbit/sec or approx 4.5 GB/day. That's less than a dollar daily in traffic costs at the Amazon rates, lowest tier.

One can see why they don't want everyone and their mother pulling it, but it's hardly rocket-science, once the infrastructure is set up.
I'm 20, brilliant and totally lost
Speech by co-founder of Baidu, China's largest search engine [video]
Domain spoofing will be one major issue you can for example have 'google' with the two 'o' being greek omicrons, interesting times are coming:)
the free account only allows 5MB of storage. I can't do much of anything with that. From there it gets expensive fast if you run multiple sites. It might be a different equation for a single site.
Links to later parts of the speech:

Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90RIsIRIYE4

Part 3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6VtSbT6gc6A
Thank you. Good job. Good luck.
> Blaming the fact that staff used Linux operating systems
> on their production machines for "not noticing sooner",
> it advised concerned users to load some up-to-date
> antivirus software and "make sure your system is clean".

So running a secure/safe/immune system is a liability, because you may not notice problems that users, who run less secure/safe/immune systems, will have.

Hmm. Interesting observation. Good job I run three or four "typical" insecure setups on which to test things before deployment.
I really like the approach suggested by chris dixon:
http://www.cdixon.org/?p=164
Congrats and good luck on your next adventure.

Reddit is still my favorite site on the internet. I can't count the number of times I've laughed out loud while reading AskReddit and IAmA. My wife probably spends 2-3 hours a day on reddit. We both have reddit t-shirts. Yeah, I'm a fan.
Nice link! Thank you.
now that's a neat plugin. Wish i'd be for chrome too, though.
Nice anyway :)
Lucky you! I was 20, brilliant and totally lost. Now I'm 36...
Net Neutrality: When is Network Management "Reasonable"?
There's a little more to this than just being willing to fail. With Go, I don't even know that I'm failing as I play.

Writing is a good example. Go feels like trying to learn to write with the instruction to place letters on the board one at a time, but I don't know any words or why there are these funny squiggly marks and dots next to some of the words, or why some of the letters are bigger than others, or why there are blank spaces between some of the groups of groups of letters.

And that isn't the point either, because I'm not afraid of learning to write by myself. The fear is a social fear.
Astoundingly, twitter isn't anywhere on TechCrunch. Sign of the end of times, right?
One Reason Why Facebook Wins
Dan started on the same day I did. It's hilarious to see this kind of story in TechCrunch - on top of an already super funny vid.
You don't need to live out in the middle of nowhere by yourself to live a cheap lifestyle which affords lots of free time (to code, garden, design, etc). If you replace log cabin with Natural Building [1] and expensive air conditioning and heating with smart design [2], you can build a cheap, sustainable home for very cheap. A group of us is working on building a development of this style only a short bike ride away from Bloomington, IN - close enough to easily/cheaply get into town and alleviate boredom - all to the tune of less than $100/mo over 15-30 yrs or $10-20k down. btown cooperative living at gmail if you are interested.

</plug>

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_building

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_cooling
OTOH, being called "an emacs programmer" can be interpreted as a compliment ;-)
I'm extremely in favor of internationalizing the web as much as possible.

But this is a mistake. Just like air traffic control, there needs to be some minimal set of language standards web administrators should have. English had become the de facto standard, and while not optimal (maybe), at least it was working.

Do you know how many international characters look alike but aren't? How difficult it's going to be to debug domain names by sight? You'd be better going back to hex.

Maybe I'm not up to speed on the tooling, but I think this is going to be a mess in the long run.
Congrats! That's great. Thanks for sharing your success!
If anybody in San Francisco wants to play in person, I'm usually up for a game after work. I've only been playing seriously for a few months (current rating 25.5k), but I'll gladly play anybody, including teaching what I can to beginners. Send me an email if you're interested in playing.
I suspect most people would rather use an official thing directly from Amazon, rather than a marginally (or even significantly) better thing from someone they've never heard of.
In defense of ebook readers
If I were to believe in such a thing, it would not be because of a book. Things that are true by virtue of their truth are nonsensical.

I'm also not sure about answering this at all, because I think it's pretty far off topic for HN.
The Next App Store: Google Wave?
The change in action figure suggests to me that our innate drive towards physical violence is not getting a natural outlet elsewhere.

Traditional outlets include contact sport (ritualized warfare), litigation (ritualized warfare) and chess (ritualized warfare). That's because the purpose of physical violence is war: to defend the territory that the tribe and family depends on (and attack it).

We don't need that any more (...?), at least not in that form (...?), but we can't yet escape our own nature - and it might not be a good idea (consider "The Warriors", Larry Niven).

I think humans (men especially) have an inbuilt tendency towards physical violence - just as we have innate curiosity, humour, aptitude for language, mathematics, trade, fairness, cooperation, kindness and a wish to understand. But nevertheless, one of them is violence (consider your experience of anger).

Better to harness this productively, or dissipate it harmlessly, than to ignore it blindly. Because there is a very convenient outlet for it readily available to all governments: actual war.
Or, try "don't be evil"

Edit: Yes, I am suggesting that the 48 Laws of Power are inherently evil.
Oh, that's a shame! I was looking forward to seeing a big page of specialized searches. Oh well.

Thanks for the link!
Gotta flag this.

HN tries to stay away from pointless arguments (cough cough) about religion and politics and such. It fails quite miserably at this, but anytime there's a post that seems obviously controversial that is not technology related everybody piles on and flags it.

Sorry about that.
I thought about doing those too (esp. uk is large) but never got around to it, so yes, if you have it I would be much obliged.

Can you send me an email on how to receive the data ?
The title of this thread and your post almost replicated the lyrics to Counting Crows' song, All My Friends (which is one of my favorite songs). Oh, HN.
Ask HN: Idea for an open source library
Is there an open-source library that you wanted but no one seems to have gotten around to doing it. I had some time, I thought might do some hacking. Suggestions welcome.

Target language is Python, Common Lisp, Clojure, Erlang or perhaps even Java.
How MIT Didn't Prepare Me For a Startup, Part 1
Lots of people create web pages for the deceased where visitors can add comments to. This seems like an obvious thing for Facebook to do.
digamber_kamat,

Where are you from?
"You cannot catch what you do not drop."

I'd never seen that before, what a great quote.
On one hand, I'm a little surprised. On the other, I'm not: http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/9clji/where_did_m...
Hacker News, after reading this thread. I think I'll become a regular.
Reminds me of Albert Barlett's Arithmetic, Population and Energy talk:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9znsuCphHUU
For over a thousand years the majority of the 'civilized world' believed that women had more ribs than men. Personally I remain agnostic about the beginning 'first word', but I have a strong opinion that the second one was uttered by a woman! (Evolutionary speaking this might be quite plausible).
Because you don't leave a company that is potentially going to hit it in very huge way in the nearby future. If you were CTO, wouldn't you want to be part of that?
I think it is still a cruel and competitive world out there. Since you mention chess: maybe it is not all solved on the physical level now, but other fights can be just as dangerous. We are competing for jobs, success, ultimately for food on the table and attractive women to marry.
Ask HN: An alternative to Horowitz and Hill?
Can anyone recommend an alternative text to Horowitz and Hill? Although I think it's a great reference text and is full of useful circuits, there are times when I wish H & H were more pedagogic. Is there a good 'learning' book that would complement H & H?
The biggest problem I've found is that the feedback loop is too long if you play a whole game and then go back to discuss it (especially when playing in person without a record). It often works better to stop the game and talk about why a sequence of moves was particularly good or bad, and play out a few variations immediately. Depending on how well the student is doing, either continue the game from the original position or the best alternative.
SEO: When you cut through all the BS, the entire goal here is to make a less good match come first.

That is not the entire purpose of SEO. There's good sites out there that don't provide their content in a way that can be indexed by spiders. SEO often solves that. There certainly are plenty of people making bad websites and trying to make them rank, it's Google's job to weed out the useless information.

People still collect links (shameless self promotion: http://internetmindmap.com ), they still have huge blogrolls, there are human powered search engines, a vast amount of directories for every imaginable niche...

Google doesn't need the perfect page of 100 links and I doubt it ever did.

Your mashed potatos example does not make sense. Google gave you generic info for your generic search query. How is that bad?

Now the fact that certain sites dominate a very wide range of search queries, is an interesting point. Personally, I would just add a sidebar or something similar, to be occupied by the "staple" sites, such as wikipedia, about.com etc.
Twitter is not a protocol, it is an API.
Are you assuming that Spotify is "going to hit it in very huge way in the nearby future" or that CTO knew that it won't happen or what?
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quarter-life_crisis
I'm happy that my article is causing some conversation, but I was NOT advocating that there is anything wrong with the nature of CS education, other than the fact that it happens to be poor preparation for a career as a programmer. Anyone who got to paragraph 4 of my article would realize that I think CS degrees should stay CS degrees. That said, a lot of CS students do go straight into programming careers, so a lot of good CS programs include capstone/senior projects on a team, and they're never time-managed very well, which is what I was writing about.
Google Wave as a Tool for Malware Delivery
Kind of ironic for someone from Reddit to nitpick over a typo...
what is 'pcm'?
I might be really retarded, but I have to admit, I didn't really understand a word in that article. Maybe there are a lot of CouchDB-specific words, maybe it's my lack of knowledge of map reduce, I don't know, I just didn't understand it. Sorry for a lame comment.